Zac Brown Band returns with Love & Fear, a sweeping 13-track album that marks a bold new chapter for the GRAMMY-winning group. Released in tandem with the launch of their landmark Sphere residency in Las Vegas, the record arrives at a pivotal moment—one that sees the band leaning fully into emotional honesty, adventurous production, and the genre-blending instincts that have defined their legacy. With a slate of high-profile collaborations, including Dolly Parton, Snoop Dogg, and Marcus King, the project immediately positions itself as one of the band’s most ambitious and expansive bodies of work to date.
Built around themes of resilience, duality, and introspection, ‘Love & Fear’ explores the push and pull between life’s light and shadow…
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As Theo Bleak, Glasgow-based musician Katie Lynch makes delicately woven folk songs and plush bedroom pop, fashioned with shivering vocals. She released her debut EP Fragments in 2022, quickly followed by a run of EPs — For Seasons, Illiad, Pain — and demo collection Heaven.Wav. Most recently, she released Bad Luck Is Two Yellow Flowers in May. With that prolific momentum, Lynch had planned on making her debut album this year. That didn’t happen. Grief had other plans. Instead, she made Bargaining: a collection of 14 haunted, unpolished tracks that snapshot her reckoning with loss and mental isolation.
On Bargaining, songs zoom in and out of focus like a camera lens trying to discern emotional clarity. Lynch described it as “a chronological…
There is so much noise coming at you all the time these days. The constant bombardment of stuff you aren’t interested in while you try to get things done, it’s exhausting. Greet Death, Michigan shoegazers, are taking on the constant noise of life with their own noise. Their newest album, Die in Love, out via Deathwish Inc., is their answer to two of life’s biggest noisemakers, love and death. Greet Death offer their perspectives on these age-old topics in ways that are both all too familiar and yet uniquely their own.
Die in Love opens with its eponymous track, which contains immediate, MBV-esque noise. This is an often cited touch point for any shoegaze album, but it’s always a welcome influence. “Same but Different Now” is about a feeling most…
Forgotten and supposedly ‘lost’ albums rarely remain forgotten for long in the digital age, as they eventually find their way back into the present through some wormhole in the World Wide Web. Inzovu Y’imirindi by Bizimungu Dieudonne, a Rwandan civil servant with a passion for music, was discovered by musicologist Matthew Lavoie almost by chance during research.
In the late 1980s, Dieudonne self-released the tape, achieving a degree of local popularity. He plays guitar and sings together with his wife Agnes Umbibizi, while friends and family members provide the accompanying instrumentation.
The songs are deeply shaped by traditional African rhythms and melodies, even though the musicians make use of Western instruments.
Four years ago, violinist Nancy Dahn and pianist Timothy Steeves received the JUNO award in the classical composition category for their Duo Concertante recording of R. Murray Schafer’s Duo for Violin & Piano (Wild Bird, Marquis). With Dark Tales, the Canadian ensemble now presents another release featuring material by a Canadian composer, this time the highly regarded Alice Ping Yee Ho. Dahn and Steeves are comfortable performing material from the standard repertoire — a three-CD set of Beethoven’s complete sonatas for violin and piano attests to that — but are as committed to bringing new works into the world.
Active for two decades under the Duo Concertante name, Dahn and Steeves have delivered more than 700 concerts in North America,…
In an era when athleticism, blatant egotism, and cacophony are all too common elements of jazz performance, it is refreshing to hear a record populated by players who exhibit give-and-take, musicality, and a willingness to listen and share sonic space.
Six-string electric bassist Steve Millhouse’s Looking Back to Today is a sterling example of a bass, saxophone, and drums trio in which each musician expresses himself to the fullest without overreaching or making a mess of things.
While Millhouse, tenor saxophonist Rich Perry, and drummer Eric Halvorson each merit close attention, the record’s strong suit is how they coexist during a program primarily comprised of compositions written by jazz giants in…
Music for Roads is a cross-cultural collaboration between Nordic jazz and indie folk/americana players, including Finnish trumpet player Verneri Pohjola, Finnish americana/folk band Tuomo & Markus, Finnish drummer Jaska Lukkarinen, French saxophonist Sylvain Rifflet and American guitarist and multi-collaborator Marc Ribot. The album is, for us at least, best described as ambient-americana, a term that seems to translate as music for unmade movies that would require an americana-ish soundtrack. What kind of roads, though – and what genre of film – are two very valid questions. Certainly on the opening piece ‘Appalachian Landscape‘ there’s a sudden journey into a wide-open landscape, with folky guitar quickly brightened by expansive…
The artists on this edition are Council of Nine, Northumbria, Alphaxone, Atrium Carceri, Skrika, RNGMNN, Ruptured World, Neizvestija, Planet Supreme, Keosz, Dronny Darko, ProtoU, Gydja, Ugasanie, Burma Project, Primal Era Worship, Sjellos, SiJ, and Kristof Bathory.
…Thematically based on beings from the H.P. Lovecraft universe, these experimental ambient albums typically run roughly two hours as continuous mixes by the label’s artists. It is impossible to know where the work of one musician starts or ends, even as each recording is comprised of several distinct passages.
Ithaqua begins with chamber music accompanied by a sparse rhythm. Soon, however, it turns to slow, pulsing darkness, and segments that…
…featuring the original 8 tracks plus 8 bonus tracks, including demos and alternate mixes.
Before the exalted techno collective Sandwell District reconvened to make their first album in over a decade, the group’s backbone, John Juan Mendez, AKA Silent Servant, had already left a distinct imprint on underground music. In the Los Angeles techno scene, Mendez’s fingerprints were everywhere. He was the label boss of Jealous God, a co-founder of the darkwave band Tropic of Cancer, a visual artist, a DJ and a visionary producer. He helped mould the icy, psychedelic identity of Sandwell District, whose steely techno tendrils transformed dance floors across the Atlantic by melding the precise ferocity of Berlin and Birmingham techno with the grit…
Australian EDM star Alison Wonderland followed her third album, 2022’s Loner, with a fourth which seems to carry the same stylistic themes. She made Loner after COVID-19 forced her to pause her busy touring schedule, which made her feel lonely and vulnerable, yet she created music as a way to heal and empower herself.
Ghost World is so titled because she often feels lost and wandering, both artistically and personally, and the album is intended as a point of refuge. Ghost World exuberantly jumps between several different styles of electronic music and covers a range of emotional ground, but still feels like a focused effort. The opening title track is Alison in familiar hybrid trap mode, with sprinkling synth sequences, flickering vocals, and…
Born in early 1959 on the Venetian mainland to Italian and half-Austrian parents, Alessandro Pizzin (a.k.a Alieno deBootes) has always had a close relationship with music thanks to the passion shared between parents and siblings.
Starting with the situational improvisations in the second half of the 70s with the collective Fungus, followed by the foundations of the Ruins band, up to the complex multimedia realizations of the end of the 90s, his research path has always evolved in the awareness of the infinite combinations that sounds noises and images can organize to tell in turn new and ever changing creative illusions.
The Unconventional Residents project was actually conceived back in 1982 but due to different professional priority has been paused…
Imaginary Reflections is the third album by the fittingly named U.K. duo dreamcoaster, although, at the time of its release, the handle will be unfamiliar to most. Jane and Andrew Craig started making home-recorded jangly, reverb-heavy indie pop together in the late 2010s, then later leaned into murkier shoegaze on their COVID-informed second album, all under the moniker Dreams of Empire. Without changing their musical intent or resetting their release counters to zero, they debuted their new name on the eponymous Dreamcoaster E.P. in 2022. Further, the Craigs played together in the ’90s band Luminous, which delved into some of these textures while centering on a “modern rock” sound. So, while this is their first album as dreamcoaster, they bring a well-earned…
Akashaplexia is the culmination of Merzbow and John Wiese’s decades-long partnership, offering over three hours of new music across four CDs. Recorded together in Tokyo, the album balances Merzbow’s psychedelic intensity and Wiese’s meticulous sonic architecture, presenting a vast and intricately detailed landscape of noise, improvisation, and unpredictable dynamic shifts.
Akashaplexia stands as the first full-length studio collaboration between Merzbow and John Wiese, captured in December 2024 at Sound Studio Noah, Tokyo. This box set – designed by John Wiese and elegantly housed in a casewrap slipcase – is remarkable in both ambition and presentation, packing more than three hours of newly forged material on four separate discs.
The Maccabees are celebrating the 10th anniversary of their fourth and final album, Marks To Prove It, with a new reissue.
All but the single vinyl features the addition of B-sides, acoustic tracks, and a new version of the title track recorded during a session for BBC Radio 6 DJ Steve Lamacq. The 3-CD and digital formats also feature The Maccabees’ career-spanning set from Glastonbury 2015, which included a guest appearance from friend and fellow indie rock artist Jamie T on “Marks To Prove It.” The single-vinyl is crafted as a zoetrope disc (designed by Drew Tetz), while artwork for the double-vinyl and 3-CD formats was created by the band’s long-term designer, Matt De Jong, who also designed the original release. The album cover displays…
Amir ElSaffar has been having a good year. After launching his label, Maqam Records (named after the Middle Eastern musical language that employs a microtonal tuning system), the trumpeter released an album by legendary Iraqi Maqam vocalist Hamid Al-Saadi, and, for the imprint’s second album, ElSaffar teamed up with three other musicians for a stunning new live album that places Maqam in a modern jazz setting.
New Quartet Live at Pierre Boulez Saal features ElSaffar, drummer Tomas Fujiwara, saxophonist Ole Mathisen, and pianist Tania Giannouli, performing as part of a mini-residency of two rehearsal days, a concert, and an all-day recording session at the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. What ended up on the record is not the studio…
Konrad Ciesielski looks like a man of contradictions: an extreme-metal drummer who also plays some Southern stoner rock on the side, loud and powerful yet fluidly graceful, finally making a solo debut and titling it Koniec (The End). In a somewhat sideways step from his past history, this is a sweeping musical panorama that feels downright vast in scale. Yet by the end of this virtual movie-for-the-ears, all those things do not even feel like contradictions. The picture is simply big and expansive enough to have space for some of everything.
Without focusing on any particular genre, Ciesielski keeps his central focus on rhythm and relishes plugging into an array of futuristic electronics. Often-minimal melodic patterns…
Chris Brokaw’s latest is a murky, moody affair, written quickly, according to the artist, on a 1960s Teisco Del Ray guitar. It’s far more solitary than Puritan, his last solo full-length, sheathed in echo and overtone, his voice shrouded in eerie, cloudy atmospherics. The guitar tone is more like what we heard in 2023’s all-instrumental Live at the Decommissioned Power Station than the clear, song-structured reveries in Puritan.
Brokaw describes his set-up with specificity, as designed by “Belgian luthier Flip Scipio with heavy gauge flat wound strings and an .80 gauge low E string tuned down to a low A, which reframes how you play the instrument.” But whatever the alignment of gear, the sound envelops the ear like a grey fog rolling in from the ocean,…
For a band with such a cheekily good name, Michael Cera Palin had comically bad timing. The first emo revival was dying down right as these upstarts arrived on Atlanta’s overlooked DIY scene in 2015. After a pair of promising EPs, the trio took a premature hiatus, only to return during a global pandemic. But now, finally, a decade after they started, Michael Cera Palin are back, this time with their debut album. And while there is still some growing pains, it was well worth the wait. We Could Be Brave shows not only how far this band, but the entire genre, have come.
Michael Cera Palin haven’t forgotten their roots in Midwest emo. We Could Be Brave opens with a familiar twinkle, but those wistful arpeggios are the closest this album comes to the night sky…
Laments presents four pieces of griefwork that sing connection. Delivered through solo voice and fiddle and rooted in the functional music of lamentation, these wailing songs of few words are not themselves live grief ritual work, but prepared compositions that echo sounds found by the maker performing such rites on herself.
…Following Golden Loam (2021), Laurel Premo’s third solo release bears further evolution of her singular voice in experimental roots, bringing American and Nordic lineages through her own compositions with phenomenal intonation sculpture, her hands and body crafting resonance that physically shakes.
Independent vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and somatic healer Laurel Premo offers a quietly…
Welcome to life in a rambling house in Oslo where Gabba hangs out, parties, barbecues or just jams in the backyard. Their vibe is driven by the voice of John André Eira who sits in a corner while his søringa ‘southerners’, as he calls them, join in on percussion, guitars, trumpet or harmonium. The music’s spirit, though, comes from over a thousand miles further north, where John was born in the village of Mazé, into a family where Sámi traditions go back several generations.
John is one of many young Sámi musicians passionate about their heritage and the different Sámi languages. His voice is rich with the resonance and ornamentation of the wide-ranging joik vocal traditions, here expressing grief, the life of a newborn, or the realisation…