The David Bowie estate is going back toward the beginning of the late singer’s career, focusing on his early days as a blues interpreter with a famous British producer. The Shel Talmy Recordings collects 22 recordings the then-unknown musician recorded with producer Talmy during 1965, when he was a member of bands The Manish Boys and The Lower Third. Only four of these tracks were released at the time as singles, with another seven alternate and outtake versions turning up on compilations over the years; that of course makes 10 tracks debuting here on this package – including lead track “I Want Your Love.”
Still a year from changing his stage name to “Bowie” – “Davy Jones,” of course, would be well spoken for by The Monkees in 1966, and that…
Category: pop
…The digital deluxe edition includes four new bonus tracks.
Such is the diversity of David Byrne’s projects since Talking Heads’ split in 1991, it can feel like no possible new endeavour is too far-fetched. Now that American Utopia and Here Lies Love have finished their runs, maybe it’s time for a Broadway musical about the turbulent childhood of Tristan Tzara? Or else an art photography book of textile factories in South Carolina? And surely there’s an album of New Orleans bounce to be made with Diplo and Big Freedia, and possibly a weekly column of recipes for the New York Times?
The fact that none of these options seem particularly outlandish makes the relatively straightforward nature of his latest…
The journey to Sylvan Esso’s fifth studio album was a cross-country trip, with a storm on either side. Quite literally — Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn left their longtime home in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of Hurricane Helene in late 2024; shortly after they settled in Los Angeles, they found themselves surrounded by the January 2025 wildfires. The duo was already mourning the loss of their close friend Jessica, who died of sudden liver failure in 2023.
If there is a single throughline on Ow ∞ (pronounced “Ow Infinity”), it’s grief. It’s not an album about death, per se, but about living in the wake of unimaginable loss, overcoming the pain that keeps piling up — “the suffering of suffering,” as Meath calls it on “Flood Season.”
“I have something to say,” the opening line of Paris Paloma’s raw, visceral, and powerful sophomore album The Fatal Flaw, is a colossal understatement. It’s unfortunate that portraying a world through the female gaze, glaring down on misogyny, superficiality, and capitalism, is considered radical. Paloma knows that the only way to crumble power structures is to face them head-on, and if that’s radical, then she welcomes the label with open arms.
The Fatal Flaw celebrates art, stuffed to the brim with allusions that cement Paloma’s role at the intersection of pop, intellect, and humanity. The songwriting is adeptly concise and eloquent, often reading more like a short story collection than an LP. It’s resoundingly successful in…
Within Haruomi Hosono’s decades-spanning career, 2006’s “Walking Vibration” isn’t particularly notable. The celebrated Japanese musician made this flute-accented instrumental for a TV show aired that same year about people seeking clarity in life via a famous pilgrimage around the country’s Shikoku region. It’s a minor entry in a sprawling songbook that changed the course of his home country’s music scene and influenced creators around the world, preserved only on a 2008 “archive” collection.
Yet on his treasure box of an album Yours Sincerely, the 79-year-old Hosono revisits what was once just background music for a four-episode drama. He keeps the traditional percussive touches of the original intact but adds…
Guava Girl Summer is so 2025. The era of the “Chaotic Princess” is now. So reads the gospel according to Marci, whose rhinestone-crusted new album Mask Lady and Late Night Girl flicks through the glossy pages of power pop and soft rock with quips about getting baked at sunrise, chatting on the landline, falling on your knees, and making the devil cry. Co-written and produced with her TOPS bandmate David Carriere, Marta Cikojevic’s second LP reprises the disco-speckled all-or-nothingness of 2022’s eponymous debut, serving up a platter of glittery hooks and golden grooves styled with unashamedly retro trimmings.
Marci sounds like the name of the hot next-door neighbor in a John Candy film, but on this semi-autobiographical record, the Montreal…
While Asher White‘s musical output is a little difficult to catalog after a decade as a prolific Bandcamp releaser, Love Aggregates is the follow-up — not counting her cover of Jessica Pratt‘s eponymous debut — to her critical breakthrough and Joyful Noise label debut, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living. (It’s her 18th album by most counts.) A breakup album by someone with an aversion to cliché, it’s a surprisingly (bitter)sweet, optimistic-sounding one, especially given that White, 25 at the time of its announcement, has confessed that it was her first time writing an album while deeply upset. One of the conspicuous effects of this circumstance, however, is toned-down production compared to the mercurial 8 Tips. Having said that, only the acoustic…
Described as “a luminous collection of scenes and reckonings”, Love, the 7th and possibly final album from Dexys Midnight Runners if Kevin Rowland is to be believed, continues to display the regained spirit Rowland has shown since 2012’s One Day I’m Going to Soar. If 2023’s The Feminine Divine was all about sex (and without doubt Rowland’s autobiography Bless Me Father was full of it); Love is, well, unsurprisingly, about love.
The Feminine Divine was raw and redemptive, and Love is largely a smiling coda. Broadly working with largely the same set up as the last album, with Sean Read and Mike Timothy (Jim Paterson has three co-writes, also), Love reveals itself gradually. Horns and strings are used sympathetically and sparingly; the attack…
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…
In the decades leading up to its release there had been loads and more loads of excellent collections of girl group and related music that originated in the U.K., but Strawberry Records’ 2026 collection Really Into Somethin’: Brit Girl Sounds & Styles 1962-1970 is one of the best. It gathers up a few names familiar to semi-casual music fans like Dusty Springfield and Lulu and a handful of artists that medium speed collectors of the style might know and love like P.P. Arnold, Sharon Tandy, Barbara Ruskin, and Julie Driscoll, but most of the three discs are made up of singers and groups that were more or less lost to the sands of time unless you were super devoted to digging up the rarest of the rare. Luckily for those who don’t want to spend hours searching and many…
The Riot Squad only released seven singles on the U.K.’s Pye label between 1965 and 1967. But thanks to the discovery of Joe Meek’s Tea Chest Tapes, the story of the band that might be best known for a short-lived collaboration with David Bowie can now be told in full. I Take It That We’re Through: Anthology 1965-1967 arrives from Cherry Red’s Strawberry imprint, with 3 CDs and 83 tracks (40 of which are previously unreleased and another 14 of which are new to CD).
Ron Ryan (guitar), Graham Bonney (vocals), Bob Evans (saxophone), Mark Stevens (keyboards), Mike Martin (bass), and future member of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Mitch Mitchell (drums), formed The Riot Squad in late 1964. The group’s lineup was notoriously fluid; the band’s…
Cherry Red previously anthologized shoegaze and dream pop with the expansive multi-disc sets Still in a Dream: A Story of Shoegaze 1988-1995 and Cherry Stars Collide: Dream Pop, Shoegaze & Ethereal Rock 1986-1995, neither of which included anything by My Bloody Valentine, presumably due to licensing restrictions.
In both cases, the compilations started near the beginning of when the genres were beginning to crystallize, then firmly stopped in the mid-’90s, after the music press stopped giving shoegaze attention, and most of the genre’s big names either disappeared or changed their sound. With We Are the Beautiful: Two Decades of Shoegaze 1991-2011, the compilers start right when shoegaze’s definitive releases were…
4CD sequel to Heaven Sent: The Rise of New Pop 1979-1983, documenting the influence of jazz and ’50s/’60s black American music (including retro soul) on modern pop in the UK between 1982 and 1987. Featuring Everything But the Girl, Robert Wyatt, Working Week, Joe Jackson, Blue Rondo A La Turk, Matt Bianco, Carmel, Fine Young Cannibals, The Blow Monkeys, The Style Council and Swing Out Sister.
…In 1982 a new jazz era was dawning and Soho, a hotbed since the ’50s, was where the renaissance began. Blue Rondo A La Turk, who had the first ‘New Jazz’ hit, were led by Chris Sullivan who opened The Wag Club in Wardour Street in April 1982, a vital catalyst for the ‘New Jazz’ scene.
Vic Godard, singer with Subway Sect,…
Emerging from Baltimore’s incredibly energetic hardcore scene, TURNSTILE have always displayed a penchant for eclecticism. Last year’s album NEVER ENOUGH epitomised their magpie-like eye for glittering sonics, exploding their hardcore palette into something that could be blissfully melodic and crushingly intense all within the same song. Very much an international breakout moment, the band toast 12 months of NEVER ENOUGH with VERSIONS, a staggering broad selection of re-workings which serves to illustrate the ongoing impact of the parent record.
As a collection, VERSIONS is led by the highs: Porches re-crafts the title song into a spectral slice of after-hours introspection; Blood Orange transforms ‘LIGHT DESIGN’ into a zero…
In his excellent Rough Guide to Country Music, Kurt Wolff devotes a chapter to the Nashville Sound. In his introduction, he charts its emergence back in the late 1950s as: “Goodbye fiddle leads, hayseed routines and nasal voices; hello string sections, background choruses and smooth sophisticated singing. This country-pop blend – or countrypolitan, as it came to be known – worked like a charm, as far as record sales and radio listenership were concerned”.
And he goes on to point out that, despite the scorn from some purists, this gave rise to many beautiful recordings from the likes of Don Gibson and Patsy Cline, and later, Charlie Rich, and even George Jones and Merle Haggard.
It is not an insult, therefore, to see the latest…
…includes 9 bonus tracks of ‘Midnight Versions’ and rarities.
Marius Lauber’s debut album is in itself a feat of many surprises. The Cologne, Germany-based artist, who records and produces under the moniker Roosevelt, takes measures to make sure that this initial self-titled offering feels far from conventional, yet remains accessible to those who crave new sounds.
Upon first listen of the self-titled debut, Roosevelt’s origin should not surprise many diehards of electronic music, as the genre is very much rooted in the land of the Rhine, with forerunners of synthpop such as Kraftwerk and Neu! both hailing from the country. Roosevelt takes what made those early electro artists special and…