…Remastered from the original master tapes by longtime Sparks engineer Bill Inglot, expanded edition includes the 9 original tracks alongside 17 bonus tracks featuring rare remixes, alternate versions, and previously unreleased demos.
The third and mercifully last of Sparks’ mid-’80s dance pop albums, the frankly disappointing Music That You Can Dance To delivered just two standouts: a remake of Russell Mael’s European “Modesty Blaise” 45 and the epic 1985 single “Change” (replaced on British pressings by “Armies of the Night”). Indeed, “Change” isn’t merely the album’s most provocative number; it ranks among the duo’s finest performances of all time, a shifting soundscape of sonics and moods through which Russell Mael’s ruminations on…
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Few musicians can name a chiptuned guitar sketch “Artrock” and be taken seriously. One of them is Leo Fincham, a precocious Londoner whose songs evoke irony-tinged earnestness and referential irreverence, the sorts of tensions terms like “art rock” were invented to resolve. Along with Rowan Please of the Femcels, he helms the madcap duo Worldpeace DMT, whose debut, The Velvet Underground & Rowan (2025), stuffed a thrift store’s worth of sounds — Glockenspiels! 8-bit consoles! Broadcast footage! — into mechanically precise music, as if childhood memories could be exported as sample packs. The resulting RAM space is evident on Stick Around for Tea, a slighter record with the ragtag splendor of a low-budget musical. More remarkably, its metaphorical…
Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Lucy enters Narnia through the back of a wardrobe, and Dorothy gets whisked away in a tornado to the Land of Oz. Literary theorist Joseph Campbell would define each of those moments as a “call to adventure,” the first step of the hero’s journey that underlies all storytelling.
“Creative inspiration is often like vapor, appearing and dissipating quickly” says Vicky Mettler, aka 
Several months after 
The 2020s have been a decade marked by loss. We’ve lost faith and trust in institutions that were already slowly collapsing. A whole generation lost out on formative experiences without the turbulent disruption of the pandemic. And in the music world, we’ve largely lost the kind of artists who could emerge organically without the noxious influence of algorithms or million-dollar spends. It’s a miracle, then, whenever a legitimate gain comes along, and for the music industry in particular, someone who could both draw from the traditions of American rock and bring them to newer, deeper, unexpected places. Although his success was partly engineered by a digital marketing agency, Cameron Winter has proven to be a vital addition to this increasingly endangered species of performers…
At what point does a song stop being a song? Strip away the beat, harmony and narrative; leave behind a voice, a melody, a few repeated words, the hiss of a phone recording. 
Even at her most austere and experimental, 
The idea that an album could be made piecemeal, in different countries, via the internet, would have been inconceivable forty years ago. Such technology would have seemed strange; stranger still might have been the idea that the traditional method – that is, recording a series of songs in one place during a set period of time – is far less viable these days. The logistical demands of creative practice in 2026 mean a piecemeal approach is an all-too necessary solution for many artists. Studios and practice spaces are expensive to rent. It’s difficult to organise a group of busy people (who may not have made music their full-time profession) into one place to record. 
For music that is so unashamedly beautiful, there is something distinctly unnerving about The Meaning of Flowers, the fifth studio album from Danish singer-songwriter, instrumentalist, and producer Agnes Obel. The record, Obel’s first since 2020’s Myopia, reflects her experience of pregnancy and motherhood, with influences including Hannah Arendt, Danish pop music from the 1980s, and the soundtrack to Don’t Look Down.
…The digital deluxe edition includes four new bonus tracks.
The journey to 
Within 
While 
Communication often has multiple angles: at the beginning of Is affect real?, the third song on 
“My Lost One”, Materia’s second track, is remarkable. Exemplifying the Julia Holter ethos to the max, it begins wispily with interweaving rippling electric piano figures, a whispered, echoey vocal and slippery acoustic bass. Gradually, grandeur is assumed: a sonic architecture soaring into and beyond the clouds, and outwards into the wider cosmos.
Released via Transgressive Records, Sparks Live On the Moon, the band’s first full live album, captures Sparks at the very peak of their live powers. The 20-track album recorded at the end of their 2025 tour, in the moon’s Taruntius Crater, comes complete with an introduction and closing narration by Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett.