We’re some way past the peak of the neo-kosmische eruption, but there’s hardly a shortage of bands in 2026 who swear by Neu!, Can, and their less widely celebrated brethren, bundled together under the questionable banner of Krautrock. It’s fair to say, then, that Yoo Doo Right aren’t lacking for contemporaries, but this fourth LP is the Montréal experimental rock group’s most decisive action in this arena yet. True to their band name, which doubles as the title of an epic inner-space flight from Can’s 1969 debut Monster Movie, Yoo Doo Right’s allegiance is made clear from the outset. Fans of the propulsive, future-forward aesthetic that defined the most fruitfully freaky scenes of 1970s Germany will find a lot to love here on Build and Rest by…
Category: post-rock
A classical dimension has always been part of Raphael Weinroth-Browne‘s music, be it in the formal rigour of the compositional writing or the finesse of the Canadian cellist’s playing. It’s even more pronounced on his latest release, however, given that Empyrean is an album-length treatment of material created in 2024 for the James Wilton Dance company’s BACH Reimagined project. After touring his commissioned cello score with James and Sarah Wilton, Weinroth-Browne decided to shape it into what’s now the nine-part suite Empyrean. He’s not far wrong in pitching it as “a dialogue with Bach across the centuries.”
Don’t get the wrong idea: the album isn’t some mid-career pivot into classical, full stop; instead, it’s another of his…
Can Caspian really be 21 years old? You Are the Conductor was released in 2005, instantly launching the Beverly, MA post-rock band into the upper ranks. These past two decades have been kind to the quintet, although six years have passed since the release of On Circles, whose title ironically fits this release; the band has gone back to its roots. The cover art, depicting the Great Boston Fire of 1872, is a depiction of “the way something recognizable could be transformed without losing its underlying identity;” the same principle can be applied to Caspian.
We’re especially enamored with the increased use of strings, hearkening all the way back to the early days of GY!BE. When the full ensemble plays, the quintet becomes a dectet. This is…
There are live albums that document a band at a particular moment, and then there are those that feel like the closing statement of an entire era. Newly Sentient Being belongs firmly to the latter category. Capturing the final concert of Swans’ “Big Sound” era, this monumental release brings together more than two and a half hours of music that sound less like a farewell than the last transmission from another dimension.
For fifteen years, Swans developed an increasingly immense musical language built on repetition, volume, tension and transcendence. Newly Sentient Being brings that journey to a powerful conclusion. The performance constantly shifts between passages of almost heavenly beauty and brutally physical eruptions of sound…
Six solo albums into a career that also includes numerous collaborations, her work as a member of Red Sparowes, Marriages and more, Emma Ruth Rundle has amassed one of the most impressive back catalogues of any current musician.
These Killing Times is another beguiling set of songs that run the gamut from dark to delicate, crushing to sombre, and feel far more dynamic than the raw minimalism of 2021’s Engine Of Hell. This may partially be due to the subject matter, with Emma looking more broadly at the current state of the world, rather than reflecting on her own personal journey.
Opener Powerless muses on her fears and disdain of those who govern us and is gorgeously melodic, but the deep, distorted guitars…
Heptaméron is an unusually assured debut, one that embraces the vocabulary of progressive rock while refusing to remain within its boundaries. Built around a fantasy narrative structured by the symbolic recurrence of the number seven, the album unfolds like a journey across an imagined landscape of dungeons, mansions, abysses and forgotten kingdoms, each track functioning as a distinct location within a larger world. Rather than simply borrowing fantasy imagery, Acid Brain use it to organise the album’s musical architecture, allowing motifs and textures to recur, mutate and reappear as the story progresses.
The opening “…noise (Heptaméron)” eases the listener into this universe with an unexpectedly gentle flute melody recalling classic…
In early 2025, experimental trio Black Duck went on a tour of Spain with their Thrill Jockey labelmate, the Copenhagen-based singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién. The two acts found common ground through improvisation, and developed a nightly habit of sitting in on each other’s sets. Once the tour wrapped, they decided to continue their collaboration in the studio and met up with Chicago engineer Nick Broste a few months later.
Although its three members — Douglas McCombs (Tortoise, Eleventh Dream Day), Bill MacKay (Ryley Walker, Nathan Bowles), and Charles Rumback (Colorist) — combine decades of experience within the Midwestern indie, jazz, and folk worlds, this joint effort with Setién is only their…
Mystique has become a commodity in contemporary music. These pseudo-intellectuals, hidden behind vague social media posts and complicated album rollouts, seem more concerned with the aesthetic around their music than the songs themselves, resulting in a slew of impressive-looking albums with little substance.
Psychedelic West Coast four-piece Allah-Las, made up of former record store employees who combined forces in 2008, toy with mystique without falling into its modern trappings. The quartet of Matt Correia, Spencer Dunham, Miles Michaud, and Pedrum Siadatian doesn’t hide behind masks or try to be mysterious. Still, they do draw inspiration from these concepts on their sixth studio album, Sirenas.
Roy Montgomery and Martha Skye Murphy extend their thing on Nebular, penning a suite of widescreen dreampop epics that harness all their separate strengths into a fizzing artmelt – tipped FFO Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd, Flying Saucer Attack, Jessamine and lovesliescrushing.
It didn’t take much for Montgomery and Murphy to connect. All Murphy did was include one of Mongomery’s songs on a mixtape and the conversations that followed led them to spot harmonies in their approaches to music: they both recorded to a Tascam multitrack recorder, for one. And if you’ve been following either artist, you’ll have noticed their collaborations bubbling up through the cracks in the last few years. Murphy appeared on Montgomery’s…
All India Radio’s sixth studio album and the first to be released on vinyl back in 2010. The new vinyl and digital version features gorgeous new artwork from Ryan T Hancock. This repress uses the original 2010 vinyl master by Tony Mantz which was flawless.
The Silent Surf features the voice of Professor Don Gurnett, famous for his NASA ‘space sounds’ (also used by the Kronos Quartet on their famous Sun Ring recordings) and a cameo (on ‘The Bomb’) by The Church’s Steve Kilbey (Under The Milky Way). “Since the turn of the 21st century, All India Radio has mashed the ambient-hop signatures of DJ Shadow, Tortoise and Thievery Corporation with the instantly recognizable guitar soundtracking of Ennio Morricone and Angelo Badalamenti.
If not for Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark — Alvin Schwartz’s infamous anthology series of folk stories that have haunted grade school book fairs for decades — The Garden as we know them might not exist. Ever since twin brothers Fletcher and Wyatt Shears began releasing their brand of sun-bleached, goofball punk rock in the early 2010s, they’ve cited the book’s influence on their work with Biblical reverence and referenced its nightmare-inducing illustrations in the cover art of side projects. The true parallel, however, is structural: Where Schwartz’s writing was succinct and vernacular, so too is the twins’ output across The Garden’s six studio albums and various EPs (and sprawling network of alter egos).
In recent years, the typical Shears song has…
Most labels find their artists in the most banal ways — at showcase festivals, on TikTok, through friends, etc. Juergen Vonbank travelled halfway around the world to discover an artist who lived on yet another side of the world: During a tour stop in Ecuador, the DJ and Night Defined owner was introduced to the music of Mongolian artist Ts Bayandalai, and immediately fell in love. It took a while to overcome geographic borders and language barriers, but now Wind of Oirat underscores that all the effort was worth it: Following up on 2020’s Kimel EP, the artist’s first album is a fully-formed statement of intent.
Bayandalai takes some cues from Mongolian folklore, but as track titles such as ‘404 Not Found’ and ‘Bedwetting’ prove, he doesn’t…
There’s something delightfully uncomplicated about the music of Unwed Sailor.
Founding member and bassist Johnathon Ford (Pedro the Lion, Roadside Monument) infuses the instrumental tracks with his distinct, melodic bass lines while drummer Matt Putman and guitarist David Swatzell fill in the blanks with a sound that embraces the basic framework of so many different styles: new wave, post-rock, krautrock, you name it. Floating above it all is a sense of nostalgia that’s bittersweet and somehow never condescending or derivative.
Their latest album, High Remembrance, follows last year’s Cruel Entertainment and continues a prolific streak that began in 2019 after a decade-long hiatus. This album, their 11th,…
Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE recorded in grief or in hope at producer Seth Manchester’s Machines with Magnets studio, with touring bassist Liam Andrews contributing to the group’s recording sessions for the first time. The result is the most texturally detailed, sonically overwhelming BIG|BRAVE record to date. Nearly every moment is bristling with blown-out distortion, yet it’s shaped so that there’s enough space for all the elements to breathe instead of cancel each other out.
On opener “what may be the kindest way to leave,” waves of doom-laden noise set in, with Robin Wattie’s manipulated vocals floating in the center, and when the bass pierces through towards the end, the impact is felt deeply. Then, “a shape of shame” gently rocks back and…
Working with guitars, drum machine, sampler, self-built electronics, and all manner of percussion, BASIC, the trio of Chris Forsyth, Mikel Patrick Avery, and Douglas McCombs, synthesize the vast influences and distinct histories of each member, producing a boundary-less, rhythm-forward amalgam of art rock, trance jazz, collective improvisation, and humming electronics on their new eponymous full-length for No Quarter.
Philadelphia’s Chris Forsyth, known for his lyrical guitar compositions and mercurial improvisations as leader of the Solar Motel Band, founded BASIC in 2022 naming the project in homage to the 1984 Robert Quine/Fred Maher album “Basic,” yes, but also to indicate a desire to get down to fundamentals rhythmically and musically.
When MONO recorded their previous album, OATH, with longtime production partner and friend, Steve Albini in 2023, they never fathomed that it would be the final studio album they made together. Albini tragically died the following year, and that loss left an incalculable void in the lives of not just everyone who ever knew Steve, but everyone with an attachment to any of the thousands of records he helped bring into world over the past four decades. He brought a clarity to the chaos, and a selfless sense of service to art and artists that was unrivaled. On both a personal and practical level, the loss left MONO faced with profound grief and uncertainty. Albini had become a fundamental part of MONO’s unmistakable sound, and the thought of replacing him was daunting…
Often, a single sentence can say more than a manifesto spanning several pages. Especially when it is repeated, rewritten, and allowed to take on a life of its own. A phrase written two centuries ago can suddenly sound like a commentary on the present. A handful of words can become a refrain, an axis around which entirely new meanings begin to accumulate.
Horse Lords’ new album begins with such a phrase. Drawn from the nineteenth-century hymn, published in The Sacred Harp – one of the most enduring traditions of American sacred music – the line “We seek a city yet to come” becomes the album’s conceptual and sonic centre of gravity. Sung by Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor, it is looped, stretched, fragmented, and subjected…
When considering the title, one might imagine the answer as “sound,” as the post-rock collective Hanry, as the album, or all three. Defined as a “meditation on emergence,” What Came From Silence is a celebration of music and a coming-out party for the French band, who has released a series of EPs and singles leading up to this full-length debut.
The core trio becomes a quintet for this release, the typical post-rock setup enhanced by piano, cello and electronics. In deference to the title, the set starts with “Noise Drowns Out,” which rises from silence rather than attacking; this smooth entry allows the theme of emergence to take hold. The background sheen is like a drone upon which the percussion – both organic and…