Over a two-decade career, Robyn has made some of pop’s most propulsive, bulletproof bangers – not least ‘Dancing On My Own’, an eternal, iconic anthem about forging your own path out of heartbreak. On her ninth album Sexistential, though, we find her unmoored and questioning, the end of a long-term relationship having catalysed the explosion of everything she thought she knew about love, life, sexuality, motherhood and more besides. Robyn invites us to journey with her through the unravelling. With a deceptively purposeful strut that evokes the bionic pop of ‘Body Talk’, opening track ‘Really Real’ marches us into an ambivalent sex scene – “You’re mid-performance, I’m planning my escape… I want to swallow but it ain’t the same” – that…
Category: pop
1. The Black Crowes – Cruel Streak
2. Snail Mail – My Maker
3. Andrew Wasylyk – Private Symphony #2
4. Courtney Barnett – Mantis
5. Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection – Rowan Tree
6. Flea – Traffic Lights (feat. Thom Yorke)
7. Bruce Hornsby – Indigo Park
8. Tinariwen – Imidiwan Takyadam
9. Ellie O’Neill – Anna with the Silver Arrow
10. The Long Ryders – Stand a Little Further in…
11. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Hey Little
12. Memorials – Dropped Down the Well
13. Charlotte Cornfield – Lost Leader
14. Billy Fuller – Rummer
15. The New Pornographers – Ballad of the Last Payphone
1. The Studio 68! & Dani Turner – Funky People
2. The Delines – The Meter Keeps Ticking
3. Altin Gun – Öldürme Beni
4. Bill Callahan – Stepping Out for Air
5. Marielle V Jakobsons – Everything Lost Remains
6. Ulrika Spacek – Picto
7. Iron & Wine – In Your Ocean
8. Cardinals – I Like You
9. Crooked Fingers – Haunted (feat. Sharon Van Etten)
10. KMRU – With Trees Where We Can See
11. Hen Ogledd – Clara
12. The Wave Pictures – The House Painted Blue
13. Buck Meek – Ring of Fire
14. Clémentine March – Lucie
15. Isabel Pine – Fables
One of the clearest examples of an album that crafts a strange and beautiful world not quite like any other is Rocketship’s 1996 full-length debut A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness. Even upon arrival, this was an experience unto itself, and 30 years later, these eight songs of bittersweet bliss still feel new.
Rocketship spiked their deliciously melodic indiepop with buzzing organs, spacey interstitials and motorik repetition, aligning them with mid-90s peers like Stereolab and Unrest. “A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness” is an album of unrepentantly vulnerable melodies, unusual seventh chords, lingering ambient interludes, and soft sentiments released at a time when unfriendly, self-conscious punk rock was the order of the day…
Kiss Facility is the duo of Emirati-Egyptian singer and songwriter Mayah Alkhateri and producer Salvador Navarrete, aka Sega Bodega, close collaborator of Shygirl and Oklou. Together, they make spellbinding Arabic alt-pop that bridges elements of shoegaze, trip-hop, post-punk, and deconstructed club. The result? A gothic romance with all the poetic gravity of Arabic songcraft and none of the hang-ups of tradition. KHAZNA, meaning “treasure” or “vault” in Arabic, contains passages of unerring devotion and romantic mysticism alongside vows of mutual destruction such that Kiss Facility’s khazna begins to more resemble an impassioned prison.
The springy synths and chugging guitar riffs that open “Lynch” are promptly assuaged by…
St. Vincent has released Live In London!, a new digital album capturing her acclaimed orchestral performance at Royal Albert Hall.
Recorded during last year’s BBC Proms, the album documents a unique collaboration between Annie Clark and conductor Jules Buckley, backed by a 60-piece orchestra. The performance saw St. Vincent reimagine material from across her career, transforming fan favourites and deeper cuts into sweeping, cinematic arrangements.
Spanning 19 tracks, Live In London! draws from a catalogue that stretches from her 2007 debut Marry Me through to 2024’s All Born Screaming, showcasing the evolution of one of modern music’s most inventive artists. Songs including Digital Witness, Los Ageless and Slow Disco are given…
Following no floor, a remarkable instrumental collaboration with claire rousay that focused on pastoral electro-acoustic soundscapes, more eaze remained with Thrill Jockey for her vocal-based solo effort sentence structure in the country. The album’s lyrics, often delivered through Auto-Tune but occasionally left unaltered, explore intimate moments and frustrating situations, reflecting on jealousy, apathy, and the difficulties of trying to succeed as a musician.
Fragile vocals and bubbling, twinkling synthesizers adorn the patient opener “leave (again),” while ambient pop gem “bad friend” is propelled by a gently blipping pulse and softly crying steel guitar. Another of the record’s more accessible tunes, “the producer,” also contains…
Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats — the nursery rhyme, the ringtone, the 9 to 5 — into a repertoire of oblique pop standards so well-crafted they belie the personal chaos inside them.
She trades in stories of glamorous disarray, all bruised egos and Irish exits and rambling thoughts. By Ives’ own estimation, she spent the three years after the release of her 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star, crashing out: drinking too much, pushing people away, falling down, etc. Eventually, she ditched booze, made for Los Angeles, and learned to drive, soundtracking her rides with Peter Gabriel, Mitski, and her personal top-ranked song of all time, Kesha’s “Die Young.”
It tracks that Girlfriend, her resplendent and…
Vacate the ice baths, people, Ladytron have gone all warm and gooey. The trio are best known for sleek and bleak synth-pop. And they’re masters at it. But for their eighth album, Paradises, Helen Marnie, Mira Aroyo and Daniel Hunt are sounding, well, happy. Two years on from Time’s Arrow, the Liverpool-formed group have headed for the disco. One probably where everyone one is wearing black, but still, there’s dancing.
The group’s new found fun kicks off with ‘I Believe in You’, a banger that uses the hypnotic Roland sound of A Guy Called Gerald’s 80s acid house classic ‘Voodoo Ray’. The sound is used again on ‘A Death in London’, ‘Free, Free’ and to great effect on album closer ‘For a Life in London’, a spoken word song with Pet Shop Boys DNA.
When the London jazz festival ran online only in 2020, an enthralling livestreamed performance by Swiss harpist Julie Campiche’s avant-jazz ensemble was a startling highlight, introducing UK audiences to a virtuoso instrumentalist and composer who was already turning heads in Europe. Campiche plucked guitar, zither and east Asian-style sounds from the harp, mingled with vocal loops, classical music, Nordic ambient jazz and more. You might call her soundscape magical or otherworldly if it didn’t coexist with a campaigner’s political urgency on environmental and social issues. But Campiche is too much of a visionary to overwhelm the eloquence of pure sound with polemic, as her new album, the unaccompanied Unspoken, confirms more than ever.
James Blake sometimes feels like pop music’s arch, ultra-serious older brother, floating above the scene with warbly torch songs that never quite come down to earth. He’s left his ghostly prints on artists ranging from Beyoncé to Rosalía to Lil Yachty, and it’s a testament to his influence how widespread his once novel, weightless style of production has become.
There was a time when it wasn’t common for mainstream artists to sing over instrumentals that sound like they would crumble against a gentle caress, or pitch vocals up and down to inhuman extremes. All of that experimentation, coupled with his heart-on-sleeve, midtempo songwriting, has lent Blake a somewhat dowdy image, like a Tory councillor who liked dubstep before…
Compiled by Jonny Slut of the influential mid-week London club night Nag Nag Nag, When the 2000s Clashed: Machine Music for a New Millennium anthologizes the hipster club scene of the decade, starting with the electroclash movement and moving through dance-punk revival on to blog-house. Electroclash stapes like Peaches, ADULT., Fischerspooner, and Ladytron all appear on the first two discs, which also feature neo-electro classics like Vitalic’s vampire-rave bloodcurdler “Poney Pt. I” and Legowelt’s sublime “Disco Rout.” The haunting vibes continue with a remix of Golden Boy and Miss Kittin’s “Rippin Kittin” and Pet Shop Boys’ remix of Atomizer’s “Hooked on Radiation,” while the likes of Detroit Grand Pubahs’ “Sandwiches” and Avenue D’s “Do I Look Like a Slut?” revel…
All Are Welcome In: A Return to Maraqopa is a redux album by Damien Jurado, released on March 16, 2026. The record features reworked versions of songs originally from his “Maraqopa” trilogy — Maraqopa (2012), Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Sun (2014), and Visions of Us on the Land (2016) — a series of concept albums produced in collaboration with the late Richard Swift.
The project was co-produced and engineered by Lacey Brown at J&B Studios in Edmonds, WA. According to Jurado, the release fulfills a vision he and Swift had discussed years ago — revisiting and reshaping songs from the trilogy after its completion. Many of the tracks featured on this release were performed live during Jurado’s “All Are Welcome In” tour in the autumn of 2025.
Gloom, glorious gloom, permeates the musical catalogue of singer-songwriter Fågelle (Klara Andersson), and new album Bränn min jord overflows with it. There are screams, cries, and field recordings. There is a sense throughout that we are swinging between mourning and desperation. Most importantly, there is Fågelle, coolly confident and unpredictable as a composer and performer. Even in the record’s most sedate moments, there is always something simmering within her. As Bränn min jord moves from start to finish, it’s thrilling to find out what those somethings are and how they burst forth from the depths of Fågelle’s mind to the sonic surface.
As the album begins, it is slow, stark. Beneath a sparse piano line and Fågelle’s tense…
Nate Mendelsohn’s skills in the studio are legendary in New York’s indie music world. The multi-instrumentalist, producer and engineer has collaborated with the likes of Yaeji, Frankie Cosmos, Phony Ppl, Dougie Poole, Office Culture, Adeline Hotel, and many more. For more than a decade, he’s also been releasing his own music under the moniker Market. His style is eclectic and often beautifully bizarre, but always seems anchored, sometimes tenuously, to sophisticated pop structures. As idiosyncratic as his latest Market project can get, Cleanliness 2: Gorgeous Technologies has something to offer everyone, even as it travels along its own unique path.
The press materials for Market explain that Mendelsohn was influenced by hip-hop…
Being a composer in a modern sense of the term has gone way past a singular artist sitting down (or standing up) next to their main composing instrument and music staff paper, writing down the notes. The creative process is, these days, enriched by so many other tools available to music creators that enable them to go beyond what was possible in previous centuries, decades, even days. At the same time, the composing process doesn’t limit itself to what is considered classical music as such, but moves into other musical genres, as far as the imagination of the author can take them.
Take the example we have here – Claire Dickson and her third album Balance. A Metropolis Ensemble commissioned composer, Dickson is working mainly as a vocalist and…
Taracá is the 15th album by 17-time Latin Grammy winner, Uruguayan singer/songwriter Jorge Drexler. His first in four years, it marks his first time recording at home in two decades. Its contents offer a return to root sounds, in particular candombe. Candombe is a drum-based musical style that originated among the enslaved African population of capital Montevideo, and is based on Bantu African drumming. The musical style was racially marginalized and even banned over its existence (as were Brazilian samba and American blues) but survived, evolved, and in the 21st century, thrived. Like the aforementioned styles, candombe is at an ascendant moment in 21st century popular culture. Drexler plays homage to his recently deceased father here; to that end…
The lyrics for Diagonale des Yeux’s debut album were written in the style of an exquisite corpse game, with members Laurène Exposito and Théo Delaunay taking it in turns to patch together ephemeral thoughts and themes in a mix of French, German, English and Spanish. The bizarre, multilingual stories that emerged match the French duo’s ramshackle, home-recorded sound, which features everything from toybox percussion to farmyard sound effects.
Their whimsical approach is anchored in the outsider pop and post-punk of ’80s Europe, which embraced discordant instrumentation and disaffected vocals. These 12 tracks are charmingly lo-fi, built around rudimentary synth and guitar melodies that often careen into…
Mary Ocher’s leftist politics have always been baked into her art. Her first record was called War Songs, and she has continuously interrogated militarism, capitalism, and nationalism across subsequent works, including her 2017 breakthrough, The West Against the People.
Recently, she’s even taken to performing karaoke-style renditions of some of her new repertoire live to avoid using backing tracks or laptops on stage, something she has described as “a wonderful icebreaker” and a “really, really great opportunity to talk about broader political subjects with the audience.”
In short, Ocher is a multi-hyphenate outsider artist who wraps sharp geopolitical reflections in peerless avant-pop packaging, as her latest…
Everyone who proselytises will eventually tell you that the truth sets you free. On her debut album Buck Wild, Indian (Pune-based) artist Karshni splits herself open: sometimes with a surgeon’s meticulousness, sometimes like a violent, rabid cannibal, utterly disinterested in suturing herself back shut, intent on ravaging the person she once was – all in the service of ‘getting real’, both with herself and her listeners.
In the last eight-odd years that she has been making music, Karshni has developed an indie-darling, melancholia laden sound-bed, then abandoned it, floated across collaborations with her peers, lending her voice to records that span the distance between avant-garde hiphop and shoegaze, and now brought herself…