“Creative inspiration is often like vapor, appearing and dissipating quickly” says Vicky Mettler, aka Kee Avil, an artist who has already made waves with her first two albums (Crease from 2022 and Spine from 2024), and whose two-year release tempo seems to continue with this year’s Vapor.
The idea of inspiration as vapour might be the reason Mettler decided to originally release her new album song by song, as a form of a sonic diary – essentially, capture the moment the idea appears and recorded; it disappears. Yet, instead of making this album a collection of disparate ideas that came at the spur of the moment, there is a backbone here, a basic concept/idea that becomes audible when Vapor got its release as a collection of songs/compositions.
Category: pop
The Art of Space Disco (1977-1978) presents Space’s most iconic tracks and sums up two fruitful intense years of musical innovation.
The French synth-pop band Space had international hits with their 1977 dance numbers “Carry on Turn Me On” and “Magic Fly,” leading to a deal with Casablanca Records and gold records for the band’s songwriter and leader Didier Marouani. The dance group was formed by keyboardist Marouani in 1977. The group’s biggest international success came later that year with the previously mentioned singles, both appearing on charts in a number of countries. Space toured and recorded for the next few years and continued to make well-received records, although no singles duplicated the success of “Magic Fly.”
Beirut City Pop brings together ten tracks from Lebanon’s private press cassette scene of the late 1970s and 1980s, when short-lived bands and studio projects moved freely between disco, pop, soul, jazz, bossa, rock and AOR.
Many of the musicians belonged to the same extended circle around Ziad Rahbani and his Bypass Studio, rehearsing, recording and contributing to one another’s projects. Often copied at home and circulated among friends and musicians, many of these recordings remained within small local circles. This limited distribution was closely tied to the fragmentation of Lebanon during the civil war, when movement between neighbourhoods and different parts of the country was often difficult. Some tapes existed in…
Hootie & the Blowfish mark the 30th anniversary of their multi-platinum sophomore album, Fairweather Johnson, with a digital deluxe edition via Rhino/Atlantic Records. The release includes the band’s MTV Unplugged concert.
Released in 1996, multi-platinum Fairweather Johnson was Hootie & the Blowfish’s second studio album. The album, which followed Cracked Rear View, the best-selling debut album in U.S. history and one of the top 10 best-selling albums of all time, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and featured fan favorites including “Old Man & Me,” “Tucker’s Town” and “Sad Caper.”
The digital deluxe edition expands the album with rare archival material. A centerpiece of the release is the band’s April 19, 1996…
With a gap of 16 years between their first two records, it seems like The Avalanches have almost become prolific these days. Now expanded to a trio (new member Andy Szekeres joined Robbie Chater and Tony Di Blasi earlier this year), the group’s fourth album, No Bad Memories, follows a mere six years after We Will Always Love You was released at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
At first glance, it seems like No Bad Memories could be quite an intimidating prospect. There are no fewer than 31 tracks on the record, framed around a loose concept exploring nostalgia, childhood imagery, and the hypnotic power of modern advertising. However, ultimately it’s what you’d expect from an Avalanches record – meticulously crafted production, full of samples…
Several months after more eaze released the intimate art-pop album sentence structure in the country, the artist issued a related but much different effort, valley and structure. The album is based on live performances, and it focuses on repetition and harmonization, with the artist remarking that she’s been fascinated with ostinato since childhood. It might be easy to label this her post-minimalist album, but some of her pop influences are still present.
While the album as a whole isn’t more eaze’s most lyrical work, “i’m in the structure” is essentially an alternate version of the previous record’s “the producer,” replacing the original’s intimacy and ticking drum machine with shadowy reverb burying the vocals, distorted drum…
Married couple and self-described “satantic doo-wop” duo Twin Temple have become quite the polarizing act in the months leading up to their 3rd full-length LP. After being dropped from opening slots on Charley Crockett’s tour, they landed gigs opening for Jack White after a whirlwind of opinions about the situation that spread across the internet, and Alexandra & Zachary James have since skyrocketed past their peers in terms of attention. Individuality-wise, one could argue the duo never really had peers to begin with. Twin Temple’s sound lands somewhere between naturally nostalgic and intentionally eerie, using the crackling tension of analog-recording techniques to echo vampiric melodies that flow like honey.
On Doomed Lovers, the James’ double down…
Singer, songwriter, humanitarian, activist, poet, philosopher, artist… as the music legend Labi Siffre prepares to release his first album of new music in 28 years, Demon are making his stellar catalogue available again as vinyl reissues and 3CD sets.
1972-1973 brings together Labi’s third and fourth studio albums – ‘Crying Laughing Loving Lying’, the follow-up ‘For The Children’ plus a bonus disc of B-sides and rarities originally featured on the now-deleted ’My Song’ box set from 2020. It comes in Deluxe 7”-sized packaging with a reversable front sleeve. ‘Crying Laughing Loving Lying’ from 1972 is traditionally seen as the album that propelled Labi into the limelight with the UK Top 20 hit ‘It Must Be Love’ – covered to memorable effect by Madness in 1982 where it reached No. 4 in the singles chart.
Paul McCartney’s internationally acclaimed album The Boys of Dungeon Lane receives a Special Edition this October, featuring four additional recordings, including a new version of “Home To Us,” his celebrated duet with Ringo Starr, alongside three brand-new songs.
The Special Edition announcement arrives at a landmark moment for The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Released in May 2026, Paul McCartney’s first new solo album in over five years tops the global charts, with Top 5 debuts in more than a dozen countries. It also marks Paul’s 24th UK #1 album across his extraordinary career as a solo artist, with Wings, and as a member of The Beatles.
The album has also received widespread international critical…
…Originally self-released in 2023 as an ultra-limited cassette run of about 50 copies, the album received a wider official reissue on vinyl, CD, and digital formats on September 4, 2026 via Perennial and K Records.
Sharp Pins‘ Mod Mayday 23 is a cute concept; the band’s Kai Slater picks his favorite tracks from the Mods Mayday ’79 collection, which was recorded in at a live 1979 concert featuring the cream of the U.K mod revival crop. Bands like Squire, Secret Affair, the Merton Parkas, and Small Hours were all formed in the wake of the Jam’s ascendance and followed a similar path of pairing the hopped-up R&B sounds of the original mod scene with the feisty aggression of punk. Slater captures the intensity and hookiness of…
A quiet celebration. A legendary return. Paul Simon brings his critically acclaimed and GRAMMY-nominated Seven Psalms to life in this first-ever live performance of the complete piece for his Quiet Celebration, an intimate evening spanning his vast career and celebrating new arrangements of timeless classics, deep cuts, and new musical discoveries. Inspired to perform again, Simon began work rehearsing and figuring out how he could bring ‘Seven Psalms’ to the stage. His transformation of the movements for live performance gave way to all-new renditions of some of his most cherished songs and a deep desire to bring these contemplative and intricate pieces to audiences. A Quiet Celebration toured the US in small venues…
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…
A man from the future is an audio/musical biography of computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing written by Pet Shop Boys with Turing biographer Professor Andrew Hodges.
…The duo originally wrote the songs with Hodges around 2012–2013, later performing it with the BBC Concert Orchestra at a BBC Prom in July 2014. They later decided to revise the piece to “give it more of an electronic emphasis”, and Sven Helbig, the original orchestrator, suggested reworking his orchestrations in a more intimate arrangement for eight string players. The band said about the album, “Our motive in creating this work was to make a musical memorial to Alan Turing who gave so much to his country and the world and was rewarded for it by being prosecuted…
On her previous album, 2024’s Evolution, Sheryl Crow set out to make a 21st-century statement about her career and the state of the world for her first album since turning 60 in 2022. It was also her first release since COVID-19 and the announcement that 2019’s country-rock Threads would be her final album. It became her first album not to chart on the Billboard 200.
Rebounding with her 12th LP, Pick You Up, Crow returns to a more comfortable environment. Originally intended to be a six-song EP, the project expanded to album length with an additional track, “Freedom Bus,” that continues the discussion about the U.S. and its relation to the rest of the world in 2026: “If all you can come up with is hate / Then turn around and march…
How to persuade men to open up about their feelings has long been an issue that has perplexed mental health professionals, an intractable problem leading to a range of outside-the-box solutions: men’s sheds, cycling groups, even, you suspect, the repeated commissioning of Mortimer and Whitehouse’s Gone Fishing. After hearing Do Not Dare To Dream, however, any future campaigns should think about signing up Teenage Fanclub as musical figureheads. Their thirteenth album might have been recorded in an isolated environment – the current quintet of Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley, Euros Childs, Francis Macdonald and David McGowan gathering on the Scottish island of Great Bernera – but it’s far from remote, its songs of sadness, alienation and creeping…
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. Merryn Jeann’s Fear of the Beauty Parlour seems fascinated by precisely that threshold.
Jeann has never been particularly interested in conventional singer-songwriting. In the Australian artist’s music, the voice can transform into an instrument, a simple melody can suddenly break off, and an intimate story can give way to a field recording, a strange synth sound or a seemingly random noise. On Dog Beach, producer Rob Ellis helped her organise these eccentric ideas; on her second album, Jeann takes control of the production herself.
Son Lux — the trio of keyboardist Ryan Lott, guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, and drummer Ian Chang — were already known for a sound that is simultaneously apocalyptic and rhythmic, melancholy and rousing, and warped and intricate by the time they completed their Tomorrows trilogy (their sixth, seventh, and eighth albums) in 2021. The trio went on to compose the scores for three films, including the boundary-defying Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Marvel blockbuster Thunderbolts. These ambitious film projects, which took Son Lux’s music out of the clubs and headphones and into other dimensions, narratively speaking, seem to have influenced the trippy and sometimes dazzling Out Into, their first album of original songs in five years.
Joy Oladokun’s newest release, Hope Is a Heavy Thing, is one of those rare albums that, from its first moments, makes you realize you’ve found something acutely special. The only thing that diminishes the elation of guzzling the tracks one by one is the sorrow of knowing you will never again experience them in that pure, virginal bliss of the initial listen.
In this album, Oladokun confronts the conundrum many artists skirt around: the impossibility of progress without first addressing the failings of one’s environment and, inevitably, oneself. The singer is working through some heavy things, but she presents them in a way that resonates deeply with the listener rather than weighing them down. Having any hope for the future…