Alan Bishop’s latest album seems at first like a showcase of his music at its most rocking. But it’s also steeped in psych, folk, and desert blues, making good on Sun City Girls’ exploratory rep.
The long career of Arizona’s trio Sun City Girls went in every direction you could imagine, and many you probably couldn’t. Starting with a blast of hardcore-adjacent DIY cassettes, the band expanded its palette quickly, planting big, muddy footprints all over tons of styles and genres, some inherited and some invented. Mixing cross-cultural influences, sharp instrumental chops, and pranksterish jokes, Sun City Girls’ music (and insanely prolific release schedule) could make you wonder not only how they did it, but what exactly “it” was—and whether even they knew.
Category: psychedelic rock
…features a brand new remaster of the original album an additional CD of rare live recordings from 1970 from Dave Brock’s archives along with with seven bonus tracks drawn from a 1969 demo session, both sides of the ‘Hurry On Sundown’ single and a studio out-take and new stereo mixes of the album by Stephen W Tayler.
Produced by former Pretty Things guitarist Dick Taylor, Hawkwind‘s first album was rightfully compared to Pink Floyd’s early sound: an appealing conglomeration of hippie rock grooves and inter- planetary guitar trips set to the phosphorescent wandering of Dik Mik’s electronics and Nik Turner’s cool sax playing. Hawkwind may not have been their most lucrative album, but it’s where it all began. Hawkwind’s initial…
There’s an affectation that courses through certain parts of the musical fringe, where an artist or group’s oft-used descriptors perfectly capture what the listener might be in for. In that, they mirror the best of kitschy B-movies. There’s little doubt what films with titles like Attack of the Crab Monsters or The Blob might give you. So it goes for Houston, Texas duo Ak’chamel, Giver of Illness. The group, who have never revealed their identity, have spent years building out one of the most singular catalogues in experimental music, a strange and enthralling fusion of found sound, psychedelia, neo-folk and the deepest, eeriest recesses of the avant-garde. And their tagline of “Fourth World post-colonial cultural cannibalism” is about as faithful as an indicator can get…
Featuring new member Simon House on synths and violin, and following the departure of Robert Calvert and electronic effects man Dik Mik, Hall of the Mountain Grill feels like something of an interim album for Hawkwind. Despite their cosmic pretensions, they were wary of the commercial success they had enjoyed with 1973’s Space Ritual and pondering which direction to go in next.
The album was named after a restaurant in London’s Portabello Road in which the group used to convene, a self-effacing title at odds with the grandeur of the cover, depicting a derelict spaceship in the mists of an alien lagoon; in 1974 we were two years into the post-space age. Tracks like The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke) are quintessential Hawkwind space…
Khruangbin did not know if they were actually making an album. All they knew in the first frigid days of 2025, as they shivered in the Central Texas barn where they’ve recorded almost all of their music, was that the 10th anniversary of their debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was steadily approaching. Months earlier, they’d bandied about ways to mark the occasion, debating orchestral arrangements or compendiums of bonus materials and alternate takes. Thing was, back before Khruangbin helped establish a new modern idiom of semi-instrumental and gently psychedelic American music, there had been no bonus material, no unused songs. And how interesting would alternate takes or symphonic extravagance really be for a band whose aesthetic-essential vibes…
For the vast majority of the recorded output under his Plankton Wat pseudonym across well over two decades, Dewey Mahood has operated as a solitary sculptor. Yet, in more recent years, guest accomplices have been drafted-in to subtly contribute sonic parts or to help technically refine the end products, most notably on 2021’s tremendous wider-screen Future Times and 2024’s mesmerically minimised Corridors.
With The Vanishing World, Mahood goes a far fuller hog, in reconfiguring the project as a pan-dimensional quartet, drawing from the energy of largely undocumented Plankton Wat live line-ups; his past ensemble work with Eternal Tapestry, Galaxy Research and others; and embracing a more kaleidoscopic studio-enabled scope.
In the 1990s, during Japan’s second psychedelic revolution, three players with an insatiable appetite for epic aural freakouts were working overtime together in two simultaneous supergroup trios. When they weren’t busy with their regular bands, High Rise bassist Nanjo Asahito, Acid Mothers Temple guitarist Makoto Kawabata, and Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida constituted both Musica Transonic and Mainliner.
In theory, these offshoots had somewhat distinct aims. Mainliner was all about kicking the monstrously heavy fuzz-fests of High Rise and Acid Mothers Temple up to another level. Musica Transonic was more about improv, imagining a world where the jazz element of free jazz was replaced by apocalyptic noise.
During the late ’70s, the beginnings of a wave of music heavily inspired by the garage rock and psychedelia of the 1960s began to swell. Chalk it up to many factors — the availability of a number of reissues, especially the Pebbles series, a disillusionment with the restrictive rules of punk rock, the passage of enough time so that the era seemed glamorous, the chance to get cheap vintage gear — but the result was an underground that evolved in many interesting directions and even went quite overground at different times. Cherry Red’s 2026 collection This Can’t Be Today: American Psychedelia & the Paisley Underground 1977-1988 looks to document the scene, gathering together the many strands and sounds of the time to present a comprehensive view.
Hopes and Dreams is the title of the brand new compilation series from Tramp Records. This new series draws on the music selection of ‘Praise Poems’, not only in terms of obscurity, but also in terms of genius. Similar, but anything but a poor copy, the focus is on rare grooves from the 1970s. The album contains genuine rarities that definitely deserve more attention. Take, for example, the opener by Guamanian Frankie & the Karter’s Peanut Organization. The protagonist comes from Guam, a tiny island in the western Pacific, a good 5000km north of Australia. The previously unreleased ‘Back In Time’ comes from an acetate pressing. As far as we know, it is the only existing copy. Easy and Carrie Chaplin & Mark Perron delight us with light folk soul, and fans of Terry Callier will…
When Iggy Pop sang “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” on The Stooges’ 1973 swan song Raw Power, he anticipated the anti-romantic punk era nihilism that was to see future Brexit fan John Lydon describe love as “two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squelching noises.”
Fifty three years later Bristol’s immortal space-garage psychonauts The Heads may still be sculpting their sonic monuments with some of the same flint axes initially fashioned by The Stooges, but rather than being petty and personal, their disgust is profound and existential. For The Heads, on what they claim is their final album, our whole pretty place is going to Hell.
Housed in a sleeve depicting an oil rig that is tempest-tossed by exactly the sort of…
Bright Spirit marks the third instalment in a trilogy that began with The Universe Also Collapses (2019) and continued with Unending Ascending (2023). Recorded with long-time collaborator Frank Byng in his South London studio, Bright Spirit sees Gong at their experimental best, more adventurous and more open to the dream than ever.
And dreams are central here. Not just as lyrical imagery, but as a way of thinking – where psychedelia, love, and the thin membrane between worlds feed into the music. The opener, ‘Dream Of Mine’, unfurls like a transmission from the in-between, its mid-section blooming into harmonies and an angular melody that feels like a key turning in a long-awaited lock. Frontman Kavus Torabi describes it as a moment everything…
A companion piece to the album, Right Now!, this collection contains additional recordings from those sessions, as well as Tchad Blake remixes and reworkings of songs from Right Now! All recordings, except for “Reap What You Sow,” have never been released. The psychedelic supergroup featuring Dave Alvin, Victor Krummenacher, David Immerglück, Michael Jerome, and Jesse Sykes continues to defy expectations and genre.
The album opens with an instrumental reinterpretation of Spellbinder inspired by Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo, whose work has long influenced guitarist David Immerglück. “I’ve been a huge fan of Gabor Szabo my whole life,” Immerglück says. “When the idea came up to record Spellbinder, it felt like a no-brainer.”
“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.
The newest offering from the Fremantle, Australia-based GUM is a swirling collection of psych-pop as Jay Watson (Pond, Tame Impala) lets layers of synths and effect-laden guitars wash over the listener throughout Blue Gum Way.
Watson’s last offering as GUM found him partnering with Amborse-Smith Kenny (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Murlocs) for the more swaggering, glam-laden Ill Times. On Blue Gum Way, Watson has reigned in a bit of those funky dance-laden efforts in favor of more restrained, nuanced tunes. However, the first single, “Celluloid,” is the closest to that Ill Times sound as the pulsing tension builds winningly before cracking open and dripping out a warbling, effect-laden guitar solo that cooks.
France’s near-revolution of May ’68 kicked the country’s small but vibrant counter-culture into overdrive and birthed a local underground music scene. The bands it spawned made music with far less rock purity than groups from the UK and US – their influences foregrounded improvisation, disjunction and genre-blending: Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, free jazz and radical politics. The introduction of the synthesiser in the early 1970s added fuel to the fire.
This six-track compilation inaugurates a series to accompany Ian Thompson’s Synths, Sax & Situationists – the first English-language book to investigate this extraordinary and still largely unknown movement. It focuses on the second wave of bands that emerged in 1972/3, when…
When Hey Colossus released their debut album Hey Colossus Hates You in 2004, they turned heads, as one of the few bands experimenting with a sound that was both psychedelic and hardcore. Planting themselves at the heart of the noise rock scene, the group made it known that they were a product of roaring guitars and hellish screams. Their sound was raw, completely authentic and oozing with pure passion. Now over two decades into their craft, Hey Colossus has shifted a fair bit into the alternative space, leaving behind the helter-skelter punk that was once ingrained in their early work. After a two-year break, on Christmas Day last year, the psychedelic six-piece announced a brand new record Heaven Was Wild alongside a mini documentary.
Motorpsycho has always been of the opinion that the most interesting stuff happens in any art form before it is formatted and settled. In rock music, this phenomenon peaked in and around 1970, and it is in this period that the best heavy music was made, simply because the rules weren’t set, there were no tropes yet, and there were no clichés to fall back on. The Gaia II Space Corps is an album of tunes that don’t quite sound like heavy metal or hard rock, but clearly is reaching for some of the same qualities. It is post-psychedelic, pre-metal music, and is probably as close to making a true blue ‘classic hard rock’ album Motorpsycho ever will come.
The Gaia II Space Corps is a short, concise, catchy and exciting album, continuing…
This latest salvo from the PDX cosmic outfit is a continuous rush, its multi-guitar onslaught striving towards anthemic, psychedelic motion, its giant drum (a marching band’s bass drum turned onto its side) pounding in ritual, magic exultation. You can still experience the spreading, unbound serenity of past releases — “Walker’s Dead Birds” is, at its center, full of stillness and awe — but, in general, these cuts move. “New Imposition of Light,” is a stirring vortex of 1960s gnostic rock.
…So yes, exciting, excessive, over-the-top and wildly entertaining , all that applies to Abronia’s latest album. There are, as before, nods to the Americana tradition, most particularly in the pedal steel that opens “Mirrored Ends of Light.” However, this music is way more…
Berlin’s experimental trio Zahn returns with their most electrifying work yet. A lush fusion of heaviness, electronics, and hallucinatory color. Monolithic grooves meet synthetic shimmer. Purpur breathes tension and danger, pulsing with depth and density.
Known for their intense, driving sound that echoes the relentless march of a world on the edge, the trio Zahn Chris Breuer, Nic Stockmann and Felix Gebhard are deepening their sonic exploration with a record that is simultaneously more electronic and more rock-infused than their acclaimed predecessors.
Recorded once again in Gyhum with recording engineer Peter Voigtmann (ex–The Ocean, Death By Gong, Heads.), Purpur follows in the footsteps…
Welcome to the Civilised World drags the dusty 1960s desert sound into the modern age- a hazy, sun-cracked journey through Americana and psych. Ghostwoman prove that guitar bands still have plenty of noise left to make.
A title to take with a pinch of salt, Ghostwoman make music that does not sound like music made by a band from the 21st century world. Their sound has echoes of the American frontier, the sort of sound you could only imagine coming from a desert state. Despite this, Canadian born Evan Uschenko and Belgian Ille van Dessel have paired together on the back of an Antwerp jam session and have released a number of gorgeous psyche albums fit for the modern urban cowboy. Previous releases have had a garage-rock feel, an obvious…