Pop music is a game where reinvention is a vital part of the process in the 21st century, and Orville Peck knows that as well as anyone. Transforming himself from a talented but unknown Canadian indie rocker to a bigger-than-life gay cowboy icon with a voice and a swagger as big as all outdoors was no small accomplishment, and as strong as his work has been (especially 2019’s Pony and 2022’s Bronco), the albums were about a character he created as much as the man who actually created them. 2026’s Mule represents a significant change for Peck, as he’s opted to give us a look at the man literally and figuratively behind the mask. He was hardly the first artist to discover fame is harder work than expected, and he found himself struggling with drug and alcohol…
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…features early recordings, demos and previously unheard material from the original album era, alongside the new “Let Me Heal You (demo)” and alternate versions of songs including “Running with the Wolves” and “Runaway.”
There’s a strand of magic realism that’s typically European, focusing on the metaphysical and a sort of estrangement from the world. You’ll find it in the novels of Franz Kafka and Angela Carter – approached from entirely different worldviews, of course – an irreducible quality which can’t be explained by the general laws of nature, redefining the everyday via the fantastical.
Nineteen year old Norwegian and native of Bergen Aurora Aksnes, AURORA to the pop music world, lives in this world. In portraits and…
…The expanded collection features 13 extra tracks, consisting of 7 brand-new original Daphni productions — including the lead single “Catch 23” — alongside remixes from artists like Kelbin, Aasthma, Peder Mannerfelt, and BRUX.
Dan Snaith’s evolving relationship with dance music has been fascinating to watch over the years. As Manitoba — renamed Caribou after a legal snafu in 2004 — he incorporated all manner of experimental electronics alongside dreamy, band-based psychedelia. Sometimes those aspects were woven together, which loosely aligned him with the folktronica movement at the time; but more frequently, as on early anthem “If Assholes Could Fly This Place Would Be an Airport” or his remix of Seelenluft’s “Manila,” he would make…
Radiator Hospital has taken many forms since it began as a home-recorded solo project for the emotionally driven songs of Sam Cook-Parrott. The sound moved from heartbroken bedroom punk poured directly out of Cook-Parrott’s heart into his four-track on his earliest releases into the tightly wound full-band experience that toured often and collectively tracked some of his most memorable songs. There have even been dips back into solo material and expansions on the full band sound along the way, such as the Eno-esque synths and cantankerous drum machines of 2023’s Can’t Make Any Promises.
With Distorting Time, Cook-Parrott is on his own again, back at home with the four-track, but he also brings some new ideas in as he…
As Jawdropped tell it, Los Angeles isn’t such a bad home for aspiring musicians. Practice spaces are generally easy to come by. Transporting gear to the gig is no problem — you’re already used to sitting in your car all the time. For every DIY venue that shutters, there’s a new one ready to pop in another neighborhood just a touch less gentrified. And most importantly, cutting your teeth in such a sprawling creative hotbed means there’s a good chance of crossing paths with likeminded people who each have their own complicated feelings about what it means to “make it.”
That creative hotbed is where Jawdropped met, anyway, and its characters serve as the nexus for the quartet’s debut album, Secret to Spare. Vocalist Kyra Morling, vocalist/guitarist…
On their sophomore effort, Ontario-based trio Among Legends keep the punk rock tradition alive for another generation. Drawing influence from classic American bands like Bad Religion and Alkaline Trio, Lose My Grip is steeped in blistering tempos and melodic vocals.
The opening track and first single, “H/A/C/K,” kicks off with a steady bass line and rapid-fire drumming before the aggressive chants of “Make it hurt, make it ache, make it burn, lacerate” make it clear that the fuse has been lit within the record’s opening seconds. Clocking in at under two minutes, the song delivers a concentrated burst of adrenaline, propelled by surprisingly strong vocal harmonies. “Sound the Alarm” maintains that relentless pace with circle-pit rhythms and…
Following a four-year hiatus as a solo artist, Todd Rundgren relocated from the US East Coast to California to record and release the album ‘Nearly Human’ in 1989. The album was the result of live studio sessions involving a host of musicians. To promote the album Todd embarked on an extensive US tour with one of the early highlights being a memorable performance at The Ritz in New York City in August 1989.
The concert was Todd’s first performance in New York for two years and featured a ten-piece backing band. The live set featured classic tracks such as ‘Love In Action’, ‘Real Man’, ‘Can We Still Be Friends’ and ‘Hello It’s Me’ along with contemporary material from ‘Nearly Human’. The concert on the 6th of August…
“After a highly successful string of 7 albums in 16 years – including two with prominent UK sax player Andy Sheppard – Almost There is yet another melodic masterclass from pianist and composer Espen Eriksen. Captivating and lyrical, always melodic and often melancholic and uplifting at the same time, these are all real tunes, whether instantly catchy or needing a couple of spins to grow.
“Music with a rich sense of melody coupled with a poignant lyricism that is infectious”.All About Jazz “A wonderfully plaintive jazz record, abandoned to the lost art of melodic minimalism, stripped back and beautifully near bare. No smoke and mirrors, just the graceful chemistry of superb musicians at the top of their game”.
Better Living Through Chemistry wasn’t just Fatboy Slim’s breakthrough – it helped redefine what electronic music could be in the mainstream. Released in 1996, the album arrived at a pivotal moment in UK club culture, fusing big beat, acid house energy and sample-heavy experimentation into something irreverent, accessible and unmistakably British. Tracks like “Everybody Needs a 303,” “Going Out of My Head,” and “The Weekend Starts Here” captured the anarchic spirit of the era while laying the foundation for a sound that would dominate late-’90s pop culture.
Three decades later, Norman Cook remains one of dance music’s most enduring and influential figures. From the Brighton Beach Boutique…
Originally released in September 1996, ‘Coming Up’ represented the creative and commercial peak for a rejuvenated Suede… some debut indeed for new band members guitarist Richard Oakes and keyboardist Neil Codling. A UK No. 1 album which spent just shy of an entire year in the album chart, the vivid, electrifying ‘Coming Up’ spawned five UK Top 10 singles – ‘Trash’, ‘Beautiful Ones’, ‘Saturday Night’, ‘Lazy’ and ‘Filmstar’. Elsewhere, grimy glam stompers met elegiac ballads and stadium anthems… and 30 years on, ‘Coming Up’ still packs all its original punch.
For the anniversary, Coming Up has been expanded into an all-encompassing 5CD edition, in Deluxe 7”X 7” packaging. On CD1 ‘Coming Up’ has been newly mastered from the original…
Following his acclaimed 2020 album The Red Planet, Rick Wakeman makes a triumphant and inevitable return to Mars with Return to The Red Planet, a sweeping new progressive work that fuses science, imagination and musical virtuosity into one of the most ambitious recordings of his career.
At a time when space exploration has moved back to the forefront of human endeavour – with missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond once again capturing the world’s imagination – Return To The Red Planet feels both timely and visionary, rekindling the cosmic spirit that helped define progressive rock’s golden age.
Where its predecessor opened the story, this album explores the planet’s ancient lakes, vast canyon systems, shifting dust storms…
For more than four decades, Antietam have occupied a singular place in American underground rock. Formed in New York City in the mid-’80s by guitarist and vocalist Tara Key and bassist Tim Harris, and joined in 1990 by drummer Josh Madell, the trio have built a body of work that spans punk, indie rock, experimental music, and guitar-driven improvisation while remaining fiercely independent and unmistakably their own.
…Antietam has continued more or less ever since, making 14 records over a 40 year run. This latest missive, the Counting Game, is less wild and more melodic, tinged with folk and alt.country, but still forceful. It veers much further into indie rock and even pop than Antietam’s early recordings did, and incorporates Americana sounds…
On the cover of Furlongs is an illustration of a young man with not a whisper of a beard on his smooth chin. The hair is a W H Auden-era short back and sides with an unruly cowlick fringe. He is dressed neatly, in a shirt and tie, waistcoat or possibly sweater vest, a sketch pad and pencil in his hand. The man is framed by a pebble-dash wall and a slated windowpane from which he peers out at the world. Reflected on the glass are the green downland hills and the white chalk figure of the Long Man of Wilmington. Though that chalk has since the 1960s been augmented by concrete kerbstones to help prevent its outline from fading away, and long before had assistance from mortar and brick. Just as Avebury’s ancient stones are propped up on b-road bollard-like plinths.
Countless young men in the 1980s and ’90s doubtless dreamed of what it would be like to go out with Susanna Hoffs, the lead singer with paisley underground charmers turned multi-platinum hitmakers The Bangles. Since Hoffs has been happily married for over three decades, the window of opportunity to make that happen has passed, but Hoffs gives us a faint insight into what it could have been like on her 2026 album The List. The LP’s inspiration came when Hoffs was looking through an old notebook and happened upon a list she’d made of all the men she’d dated since her first high school boyfriend. Most of the songs on The List are memories of moments in relationships, some happy, some wistful, some bittersweet. Anyone hoping Hoffs will offer…
There is a particular kind of light that only exists after rain has finished falling but before the sun has arrived – a grey-gold hour where the wet ground holds more colour than the sky. Space Afrika has always made records that live inside that hour. Honest Labour, the pair’s breakout 2021 statement, was full of it: shortwave murmur, tower-block wind, the feeling of being simultaneously inside a crowd and entirely alone. Five years on, Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang return with Quiet Storm, a record that doesn’t so much follow Honest Labour as walk out of its shadow into wide open air. Theirs has always been a music of texture and grit – ambient hiss, trip-hop’s slow pulse, techno’s drive, classical’s structure – folded into dubscapes built from wherever they happen to be living.
Affection, issued in 2024, trailed the first proper Bullion LP by eight years, making the 2026 follow-up Nearly rather unexpected. Its arrival was likely closer to a shock for those who track Nathan Jenkins’ behind-the-scenes activities. During the two-year interim, Katy J Pearson, Meg Mac, and Avalon Emerson released albums co-written and/or produced by Jenkins, who concurrently had a hand in songs by Oliver Sim and “Rare” duet partner Carly Rae Jepsen, and also mixed an album by Orlando Weeks. All of this outside work perhaps inspired Jenkins’ more openly collaborative approach – akin to that of a production job – yet Nearly comes out sounding just like a Bullion project. While bearing some strong resemblances to Jenkins’ most commercially successful productions…
Leeds, England’s Adult DVD reignite the ’90s rave bonfire on their 2026 eponymous debut. The group, lead by singer Harry Hanson and keyboardist Greg Lonsdale, has garnered buzz for their swaggeringly irreverent, throwback style of indie dance music. It’s a vibe that fits nicely next to more contemporaries like LCD Soundsystem and Soulwax (the band have intimated as much), but which cannily evokes the brash, Dayglo aesthetic of classic ’90s acts like 808 State, Happy Mondays, and Prodigy. Much of this is due to Hanson’s thick Yorkshire-accent and brash, rap-like delivery. He’s the perfect conduit for the kind of cocky, Madchester-esque, British two-finger salute energy Adult DVD bring in spades. It also doesn’t hurt that Lonsdale and the rest…
Los Angeles-based pianist, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Kiefer Shackleford has appeared on the Blue Note label twice in 2026. In July, he was part of the eponymous debut by FATHERS, a jazz quartet that also includes drummer Nate Smith, bassist CARRTOONS, and producer Kenneth Blume (aka Kenny Beats). Memory Bomb is his 13-track leader debut for the label. It presents a sound he calls “Over the Breaks,” after a J Dilla concept balancing modern jazz warmth with the rhythmic pull of hip-hop, improvisation, and neo-soul. Memory Bomb showcases many collaborators, but there isn’t a moment where Kiefer doesn’t shine through and hold everything together. He shares production duties with best friends and creative partners CARRTOONS…