It’s unfair to say that Fleetwood Mac had no pop pretensions prior to the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks to the lineup in 1975. When they were led by Bob Welch they often flirted with pop, even recording the first version of the unabashedly smooth and sappy “Sentimental Lady,” which would later be one of the defining soft rock hits of the late ’70s. Still, there’s no denying that 1975’s Fleetwood Mac represents not just the rebirth of the band, but in effect a second debut for the group — the introduction of a band that would dominate the sound of American and British mainstream pop for the next seven years. In fact, in retrospect, it’s rather stunning how thoroughly Buckingham and Nicks, who had previously recorded as a duo and were…
Category: pop
The Outfit present a career defining new album, Preservers of the Pearl, asserting themselves as messengers of the new wave of underground rock and roll, pushing the movement forward alongside fellow trailblazers Mystery Lights, Sheer Mag, Shadow Show, Uni Boys…
Everything has been leading here. Daniel Romano shifts from his position as sole writer, opening the floor to Outfit stalwarts Ian Romano and Carson McHone, and welcoming into the fold longtime friend and legendary Canadian rock-n-roller, Tommy Major. The band is functioning as a true collective – multiple voices and perspectives – all serving one creative pulse. The result is both a new beginning and a homecoming, a complete and fearless statement.
Anjimile (ann-JIM-uh-lee) Chithambo has forged a distinctive musical path characterised by unflinching introspection and deep honesty. Emerging from Boston’s vibrant indie scene while studying at Northeastern University, Anjimile captivated audiences with earnest songwriting, delicate sonic textures, and performances that felt like prayer and celebration.
Critical acclaim quickly followed; 2020’s Giver Taker, hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the year’s best albums, positioned him as a compelling voice exploring enduring themes of spirituality, identity, and liberation. With The King (2023), Anjimile intensified his examination of Black and trans existence amid personal and societal turbulence, reaffirming his courageous…
London-based, Wrexham-raised artist Art School Girlfriend releases her third studio album Lean In, via Fiction Records. Armed with the freedom and space to experiment, Lean In was self-produced in her own East London studio and sees Art School Girlfriend set to move from cult bedroom artist to one of the UK’s most vital artist/producers operating at the moment, tackling alternative rock, electronic pop and experimental ambient sounds in her most cohesive work to date.
Starting off with a looped beat, followed by some ambient sounding synthesiser, Doing Laps is an interesting track to start the album. It feels almost dreamlike with Art School Girlfriend’s whispery sounding vocals, with a backdrop of ambient synths, almost new age…
Jenn Grant is a multi-award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter with eight albums to date. Queen of the Strait is, however, by far the most personal. It covers many deeply private subjects, including escaping from a dark physical attack when she was 18 and living briefly in London, to the heartbreak of going on a local TV show when she was a child to give her dog away as her mother was unable to pay for needed heart surgery.
‘Daddy and his Shotgun’ reveals her memories of being taken Goose hunting by her father and how she would become somehow attached and name the birds before they were shot down. She is now a vegetarian. The bravery she has shown to write about these and other events that have shaped her life and beliefs is quite extraordinary.
Now 20 years since the start of the project, The Winter Sounds has an international sensibility and a distinct global vision. Formed by Patrick Keenan in Athens, GA, the group now includes a few European members and has Prague as its home base. The group hasn’t necessarily adopted a world music sound, but instead maintains its roots in indie pop and new wave. Despite this, the band has articulated a global outlook, drawing specifically on the ideas of the solarpunk literary movement, with a focus on grassroots movement toward a sustainable future. With The Winter Sounds’ seventh album, Jupiter, the band puts forth a positive and encouraging message supported by bright and optimistic sounds.
With single “Kaleidoscope,” the album opens…
Camouflage are one of the few German bands to have been making music successfully at home and abroad for the last couple of decades. “The Great Commandment” (1987) and “Love Is A Shield” (1989) were actually worldwide hits. After four albums, Camouflage felt it was time to experiment. This phase reached its zenith with the album Spice Crackers in 1995 – the most daring, most interesting work they ever released. Electropop tracks sit side by side with hypnotic, repetetive, spheric tracks. Now, 30 years later, “Spice Crackers” will finally be released on vinyl for the first time!
Heiko Maile, Camouflage founder member and producer of “Spice Crackers”, has this to say about working on the album: On our previous productions, we started out with just a few…
Mercury Falling was released in March 1996. It reached number four in Sting’s native UK and number five in the US, becoming his fifth straight studio album to make the top 5 in both countries. The album features the UK top 40 hits ‘Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot’, ‘You Still Touch Me’ and ‘I Was Brought To My Senses’ and was Sting’s last album to feature the production talents of Hugh Padgham, which underlines the feeling that this record was the end of a certain phase in Sting’s solo career. Supporting musicians on the album include frequent collaborators Dominic Miller on guitar, Kenny Kirkland on keyboards, Vinnie Colaiuta on drums, and Branford Marsalis on tenor and soprano saxophone.
…Mercury Falling (Expanded Edition) adds 19…
“Hypnosis Tapes” opens with a vacuum cleaner played in reverse — an inside joke, apparently — before the fuzzy guitars and humming synths layer in, stacking blips and pockets of sound until you realize you’ve stopped paying attention to anything else. Mute Swan named the opening track appropriately. It immediately puts you into a trance.
That pull defines Skin Slip, the Tucson band’s sophomore album and the final recorded work of founding guitarist Thom Sloane, who passed in 2024. Frontman Mike Barnett has said these are their best songs, Sloane’s best playing. He’s not overselling it. The album was recorded before Sloane’s death, and it sounds like a band locked in — joyfully testing how far their sound can stretch and change shape without losing their identity.
“Power pop” can be a troubling genre label for musicians. Though Elliott Smith, who earned the label in the ‘90s, was celebrated early on in his career, and ‘70s Big Star, in retrospect, have gotten more than their fair share of flowers, there were — and still are — many that, after their brief flicker in the spotlight, have largely been forgotten. Despite this, we now seem to be in another renaissance of the genre, and acts like Bory represent the upper echelon. The project name of Portland’s Brenden Ramirez, with one LP (Who’s a Good Boy) and an EP (Sidelined) to his name, has released his sophomore follow-up, Never Turns to Night. The 10-track album is a significant step up from his previous output.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that 2023’s…
When Crimson Whisper emerged out of the ether in 2024, it was with an EP of synthy, metallic textures, muscular live drums, and gossamer vocals, making for a giddy version of shoegaze that incorporated some dream pop and post-punk vibes. As intangible as their sound was the lack of background on the project. That EP, Flutter, was followed the next year by a mini-album and another EP. The Shelflife label stepped in to give the band their first label release, Flutter & Beautify, a track-for-track compilation of their two EPs. Meanwhile, it was revealed that Crimson Whisper consists of San Francisco-based singer Na Lim and an unnamed member of an “established shoegaze band.” The mysteriousness extended to Beautify, which on occasion incorporated…
Bliss is the kind of record AI would make if it were actually what its most delusional adherents say it is: Not a pathetic, thought-terminating, and uncanny imitation of human creation but a beguiling alien intelligence capable of wringing new forms out of a near-bottomless archive.
Listening to it, it’s easy to imagine its maker (Alice Gerlach, erstwhile cellist for claire rousay and Tomberlin) as a strange cyborg locked inside a spacious chamber, worming their way through clusters of instruments with preternatural curiosity and mathematical precision. Across four tracks, each clocking in at exactly ten minutes, Gerlach assembles soundscapes from witchy ambient tones, buzzy drones, field recordings of birds chirping and muffled conversations, and…
“Hypnagogic” is a word that refers to the unique space between sleeping and dreaming, and it’s not surprising that the term has been used to describe the music of Greg Jamie. Hailing from Portland, Maine, Jamie’s music is often an odd, woozy, and unsettling place, but his songs also contain warmth and comfort, as if he’s your guide through a dark place just before dawn. His debut album, Crazy Time, was a seductive, lo-fi gem, and the follow-up, Across a Violet Pasture, covers much of the same territory, but with a broader scope and greater ambition.
Jamie, who sings and plays guitar and synth, is joined primarily by Colby Nathan, who produced the album and also contributes bass, synth, guitar, and vocals (and was also a crucial….
Annie Hogan is something of a quiet icon of goth and post-punk. A longtime friend of Marc Almond, she put on early Soft Cell shows and played with his dark cabaret side-project Marc and the Mambas. She appears on Barry Adamson’s seminal Moss Side Story and has worked with Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and several members of Einstürzende Neubauten. She’s also been releasing evocative solo music since the late 1980s, the latest of which, the six track album Tongues in My Head, strikes an elegant balance of light and shade.
Opening track ‘Alles Ist Verloren’ is measured but bleak, a taxonomy of a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled with faith healers, wilting trees and “shaking bones of the dead”. The bones of the track are also bare – a simple chord…
“If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward / If I’m so strong, why am I broken?” asks Self Esteem, aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor, on ‘I Do and I Don’t Care’, the opening track on her third album A Complicated Woman. Hopeless though the outspoken pop diva may sound, these contradictions are an invitation into the spectacularly more interesting grey area where two things can be true at once.
Paradoxical thinking is nothing new to Taylor, who cut a choppy path to liberation on her widely acclaimed second album Prioritise Pleasure, having gone solo from indie duo Slow Club in 2017. Lamenting cycles of misogyny, feminist anxieties and societal pressures, it was a brave, bolshy portrayal of all her knotty complexities,…
The Michigan power pop trio’s fourth album Lost at Sea is their first to be written together and this sense of camaraderie and togetherness has led to their most consistent sounding record yet, their simmering outrage at the state of the world also led to a little bit more angst in the lyrics and noise in the guitars. A couple of the songs here really tilt the scales toward the power side of the power pop equation, and that’s a good thing. “It Doesn’t Matter” is a fiery blast of hard rocking guitar pop that bursts out of the speakers in the might verses, “The Message” unspools in a haze of blazing overdriven guitar, and a couple of other tracks quietly seethe. Surrounding these moments are plenty of harmony-heavy pop songs that show off their skills as writers of the kind of warm…
In January 1984, The Colourfield released their eponymous debut single. It stalled just outside the Top 40, a better fate than that awaiting its follow-up, ‘Take’, a few months later, which barely made the Top 75 at all. It was a markedly different reception to that afforded frontman Terry Hall’s previous enterprises, both of which had been successful from the get-go: The Specials’ debut single ‘Gangsters’ was a Top 10 smash, while The Fun Boy Three debuted in the Top 20, the British public having chosen to ignore the fact that ‘The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum’ was wildly uncommercial.
But the fans that were happy to send that gloomy stew of lumbering percussion, needling organ and lyrics about famine, nuclear war and…
Jackie West has a feathery soft voice, the kind of instrument that might not wake you up fully if you heard it in your while asleep but rather inclines to infiltrate your dreams. This second full-length, the second also to be released on her husband Dan Kniskowy’s Ruination record, makes an impact without excessive volume or drama. It sheathes cool-toned melodies in delicate layers of vocal and instrumental sound.
West says she wrote and recorded Silent Century as a mostly solitary effort, one that allowed her to examine and incorporate the dialogues that played out in her head. It is populated by many voices, then, but also the same voice, or perhaps the same person in many different ways. Thus, the heady country holler of “Overlooking…
Joseph Oxley has long made music that feels like tuning in to a pirate radio station broadcasting from the 1990s. As TVAM, his go-to staples are saturated guitar, acid keys, dreamy shoegaze-frayed vocals, and beats like the stamp of a thousand Doc Martens.
Ruins, however, flicks the dial towards something far more personal, its once-bright palette now refracted to near-monochrome.
The emotional shift is immediately obvious. “Comfort Collar” opens with a heavy-footed pulse and a smear of synth like blue neon through rain-streaked glass. It’s oddly comforting in that slightly seamy way a goth disco can be. From there, the record moves through titles like “The Gloom,” “In Memory” and “The Haunted,”…
Pet Shop Boys release a Blu-ray/CD of their concert film Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live at the Royal Arena Copenhagen. The film captures the spectacular stage show of the Pet Shop Boys tour with dazzling visuals and a bumper set list packed with classic hits, including “West End Girls,” “Suburbia,” “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots Of Money),” “Left To My Own Devices,” “Rent,” “Domino Dancing,” “Love Comes Quickly,” “Always On My Mind,” and “It’s A Sin.”
The film was recorded at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen in July 2023 as part of Pet Shop Boys’ critically acclaimed Dreamworld: The Greatest Hits Live Tour. Directed by the renowned David Barnard, the film was captured using a 14-camera 4K shoot to ensure an immersive experience for viewers.