Released at a pivotal moment in their career, Tensongs remains one of the most fascinating chapters in the catalog of Hubert Kah. Arriving in 1986, the album marked the band’s full transition into English-language material, an ambitious attempt to carry the success of the Neue Deutsche Welle movement into the broader international synthpop market. Forty years later, Tensongs stands not only as a time capsule of mid-80s electronic pop, but also as an underrated artistic reinvention.
Produced by Michael Cretu and Armand Volker, the album wrapped Hubert Kah’s melancholic songwriting in sleek, atmospheric production that clearly aimed beyond Germany’s borders. The influence of sophisticated…
Category: pop
Think about music, all the music that is available to hear, all the music that’s been made, especially in the past 80 years of popular styles. Where does it all go in your mind? How do you get from one thing to another?
These questions matter for this album, because Haruhi Kobayashi started off in the public eye as a J-Pop singer, putting out the 2017 album Inside Out on Sony. To be frank, it’s an undistinguished derivation of American soul and soft rock, the kind of imitation of styles that young musicians work through to find their own voice.
Well, Kobayashi has found that voice, and it’s not just orders of magnitude distant from the earlier album, but a remarkable journey from the universe of pop music into the kind of…
Country boy-in-the-Big Apple, Arthur Russell does folk fusion with his own, peerless verve on a remastered edition of his evergreen 2008 retrospective.
One of the most fascinating, multifaceted, greatest artists of the late C.20th, Arthur Russell is variously known as a disco auteur, virtuoso avant-pop cellist-composer, and bard of the highest order, but maybe less so as a country crooner. Compiled and issued in 2008, Love Is Overtaking Me most ideally framed this lesser-covered aspect of his work with 21 songs recorded under his own name and as part of The Flying Hearts (with Peter Zummo, Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson, a.o.), plus in duo with Steven Hall as Turbo Sporty, The Flying Hearts, and Bright & Early.
Radhika Dade’s debut album is a dreamy delight that balances her lovely vocals against varied musical backing that’s exceedingly poppy, but not afraid to gently paint outside the lines. Cine-pop is a fine title for the album; she seeks to make each song a different mood and each could fit a different scene in a film. The lilting ballad “Feline Bandits” would be perfect for a melancholy seaside walk on a rainy day, “Starry Eyes” is a fine soundtrack for a swirling party scene, the jangling girl group inspired “Cocoa Butter Eyes” feels like a falling in and out (and back in) of love montage, and “Sleep” is just right for a scene where the lonely protagonist can’t sleep thanks to a nocturnal obsession. Dade’s voice is a fine vessel for the songs, coming across sweet…
…features five bonus tracks.
On their third LP, Down in Heaven, Twin Peaks hang on to their rough-and-raw disposition while drawing sonic inspiration from favorite albums of 1968, including, per press materials, works by the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Beatles.
Bolstered throughout the album by the addition of Wild Onion co-producer Colin Croom to the lineup on keyboards (notably organ), the era, if not a specific year, is resurrected from the moment the needle hits vinyl with the sassy, T. Rex-grooving opener “Walk to the One You Love.” Parts of the record capture the more reflective tone associated with the late ’60s, such as the regretful, even-tempered “Holding Roses” and the brass-embellished “Lolisa,” which could…
Future Islands are an emotionally charged synth pop group, known for their dexterous melodic touch, stately momentum and impassioned delivery. Over the past twenty years they have travelled a rare arc, from promising newcomers to best-kept secret, from cult favourites to heroes of the genre. As they reach this remarkable milestone, they resist the obvious move.
Instead of a ‘best-of’ compilation victory lap, Future Islands present From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth – an immediate and accessible collection – half of which has never appeared on streaming services – comprising alternate hits, rarities, and fan favourites that showcase the band’s palette and bring further colour to their uniquely universal appeal.
Sometimes you might hear an artist described as a force of nature. It’s a figure of speech usually reserved for big or eccentric personalities, people whose artistic vision is put forward so confidently and with such power that it brooks no argument. This could be applied to the Swedish singer and musician Sara Parkman, whose fourth solo album Aster, atlas tackles the biggest themes: life, death, faith, grief, and the passage of time. But Parkman is a force of nature in another way. Her music has an inherent intensity that seems to be drawn from elemental sources. Listening to her singing and her highly original arrangements, we are constantly reminded of wild and unknown landscapes, and of our smallness within them, but also of our gardens, the things we cultivate,…
Looking back on her career in the early 90s, Stevie Nicks described the first track of Rock a Little as “the most exciting song that I had ever heard.” This coming from a superstar who was already closely affiliated with several bajillion-selling Fleetwood Mac albums – to say nothing of her own benchmark solo debut. Her remarks attest to the enthusiasm and effort she invested in her third record, a 1985 work that quickly furthered Nicks’ profile and cemented itself as a piece of 80s pop lore.
Mastered at MoFi’s California studio, strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, and housed in mini-LP-style gatefold packaging, Mobile Fidelity’s hybrid SACD presents Rock a Little in audiophile sound for its 40th anniversary. Helmed by a cadre of producers and engineers, and recorded…
The band, made up of Delphine Lucy Lam and Vlad Swann, are originally from France and are now based outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The album follows the single ‘Surrender,’ with ‘Qui manque dans ce pays’ as the focus track. Across 11 songs, Fleur Bleu·e move into a more direct sound. The vocals are clearer and more upfront, the reverb is reduced, and the guitars have a rougher edge, while the band’s dream-pop and new-wave melodies remain in place.
The album was written across France, Bulgaria, Mauritius, and the US, during a period of movement between countries and emotional states. After years in cities such as Paris and Los Angeles, the duo moved to a wooded part of Pennsylvania, where the album’s themes of displacement…
As a follow-up for their Live feat. Annie Golden album Brooklyn’s power pop meets New Wave band The Shirts look back at their first act again with another rambunctious in concert release. Live at Paradise 1979. The show was recorded for a radio broadcast by local station WBCN at Boston’s Paradise Rock Club on August 27, 1979, shortly after their second album Street Light Shine. The tapes were digitized by Wout de Kruif (Dutch Tape Transfers) and demixed/remastered by retired sound engineer Prof Stoned.
It was a weird time for the band. Lead singer Annie Golden had a part in the movie adaptation of Hair and was under pressure to leave the band and become a full-time actress. She turned it down, but in hindsight this period…
Mia Rocha writes music for herself. Releasing songs under the moniker Mia Joy, the Chicago-based artist is the daughter of a poet and a musician, and since a young age, she was encouraged by her father to channel her feelings into music as a way of understanding them.
Taking the advice, she wrote her debut ethereal dream-pop album Spirit Tamer over the course of several emotionally tumultuous years. It captures Rocha’s inner loneliness, cultivates healing, and creates a safe space where she can work through her darkest moments.
“The beginning of writing this album was an incredibly low, dark period and it was also a period where things were just pouring out of me,” she said in a recent episode of Jessica Risker’s…
Taking the title to musical heart (the album cover pointedly having him sporting different looks), after two albums mining country, reunited with producer David Mansfield who contributes, among other things, guitars, pedal steel, lap steel, celesta and Ondes martenot, alongside drummer Charley Drayton, bassist Tony Scherr and keyboard player Andy Burton, Teddy Thompson’s latest album, Never Be the Same, digs back into rockier seams for his first album of original material since 2020 and, with influences ranging from Crowded House and The Beatles to his father Richard Thompson, songs exploring love, change and the passage of time.
With John Grant on synthesizers, there are, though, still country ballad traces to album opener ‘Come Back’ with its major chords and…
As humans, we have an inherent desire to connect with those around us. These relationships shape our social interactions and influence us in ways we may not realize, each moment subconsciously ingrained in our decision-making. The people we decide to keep in our lives come with the weight of influence, but unfortunately, these wildly important relationships never hold the staying power they promise. We are all made up of the mistakes, triumphs, and losses that come with building a connection with someone, and how these lessons linger in future relationships. When someone decides to exit your life entirely, their presence takes on a ghostly aesthetic, leaving a void they once filled, and a rush to fill it ensues.
That moment of panic after your support…
Sixty years after Pet Sounds changed the language of pop music forever, The Pet Sounds Sessions (Deluxe Edition) arrives less as a simple reissue and more as a museum-quality excavation of Brian Wilson’s masterpiece. Originally released as a landmark archival box set in 1997, the newly 2026 edition finally makes this enormous body of session material widely accessible again through streaming platforms and updated physical editions. The result is both overwhelming and fascinating: a deep dive into one of the most carefully constructed albums in popular music history.
For longtime Beach Boys fans, this release is almost mythical. The original Pet Sounds Sessions box had become increasingly difficult to find, often circulating through collectors, bootlegs…
The Asteroid No.4 return in 2026 with In Praise of Shadows, their thirteenth full length album and a statement release that reaffirms the band’s enduring place within the modern psychedelic underground.
In Praise of Shadows captures The Asteroid No.4 at their most focused and assured, leaning fully into the shoegaze sound for which they are best known. Swathed in multi layered guitars, dense reverb, and hypnotic melodic drift, the record reflects decades of refinement while retaining the immediacy and emotional pull that has defined the band since their earliest releases.
Formed in Philadelphia in the late 1990s and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Asteroid No.4 have built a reputation…
It’s become fashionable of late for bands to release powerful new albums after extended absences. My Bloody Valentine did it, Slowdive did it and Boards of Canada will be doing it later this year. The fallow period falls somewhere in the middle for Christopher Barnes’ project Gem Club.
They last released an album 12 years ago, but Emerald Press picks up where they left off, albeit with an improved sense of how to use empty space and minimalist arrangements to fill out bedroom pop songs to massive proportions. There are no left turns here, only the same rainy day recordings writ larger.
Barnes has noted in the lead-up to the release of the album that even though Emerald Press is the first Gem Club record since 2014’s…
Alive & Alright a double live album recorded in front of a small gathering of about 50 fans on February 4th, 2000, performing all of the Between The Bridges album plus one b-side,” also filmed for video in an attempt to find a workaround to the emerging problem of music videos costing more than the budget for entire albums, thinking Canada’s music video channel might possibly play various live recordings in lieu of music videos, which they did not.
When attempting to provide an overview of a big story – one that encompasses both the myriad achievements of its subjects over a span of several decades and the impacts of those achievements – you can take two routes. There’s the “just the facts” approach, where you list off…
Somewhere along the lines of their history, MUNA started calling themselves “the best band in the world.” Not the best synthpop band, or the past queer band, but the best, period. It’s a tall order for three people who make excellent pop music, a genre that, for most people, doesn’t hold a lot of weight or seriousness. But MUNA makes pop music, and even though they’ve done it for almost a decade now, it was surprising to hear the synths and pulsing beat that kicks off Dancing On The Wall, the title track for their ecstatic, buoyant fourth album, as if they’d grow up and get real. But of course MUNA would still make pop music. What else would they do?
Atop one of their stickiest melodies, MUNA-Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson…
Midge Ure released A Man of Two Worlds, a new double album. His first album of new material in 12 years sees the former Ultravox frontman divide the offering into two parts. The first half, World One: Music, consists of eight instrumental pieces, while the second half, World Two: Songs, features eight ‘proper’ songs (with vocals).
This concept is said to be partly inspired by the time Midge spent during lockdown listening to instrumental music, and some of the work he heard whilst presenting THE SPACE on Scala Radio. He began writing what became a selection of instrumental pieces — “music shaped by reflection, uncertainty, and a strange kind of quiet”.
The eight vocal songs which form the second part of the album, are described as…
Look for Your Mind! is the 6th album from brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario, aka The Lemon Twigs, following on from their career highs of 2023’s Everything Harmony and 2024’s A Dream Is All We Know, both of which had elevated their music to a new finessed, sophisticated level. On this latest outing the formula hasn’t really changed in that the songs still have their roots in the 1960s and ’70s and arrive with a refreshed vibrancy, although there are moments where the brothers tread a fine line between authenticity and pastiche.
The first half of the album features several standout moments, some of the best of their career to date. The title track comes out of the blocks fast, the sound of 1965 guitar-pop distilled into the finest of essences. The motifs may be familiar…