There is something especially impressive about a band from Sheffield making a record that sounds like it was born somewhere between a honky-tonk bar, a faded interstate map and a dashboard full of memories. But that is the thing with Fargo Railroad Co. They do not just borrow the sounds of classic country rock and southern rock, they inhabit them. On IV, their fourth studio album, they sound warm, wise and utterly convincing.
IV is an album which deals with themes of being stuck, nostalgia, regret and also provides a wry social commentary. Opener, ‘Skin in the Game’, deals with someone who is on the edge and is scared to move on, as he has too much to lose. “Maybe I could change but I don’t know where to start” captures that sense of ambiguity…
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Following the release of their debut, The Haunted Youth return with their second studio album, Boys Cry Too via Play It Again Sam. Beginning as the solo project of artist Joachim Liebens, the band today reveal the first single to be lifted from the record, deathwish, featuring fellow collaborator and Orlando-based singer-songwriter, Max Fry.
On Boys Cry Too, Joachim Liebens abandons the fragile, bedroom-pop innocence of Dawn Of The Freak – a debut that has since earned cult status back home – in favour of something far more confrontational and emotionally charged. From the towering eight-minute opener in my head to the closing track ghost girl, the album lets go of restraint in favour of something more raw, blending fragile melodies…
Behold, the first new Young Sinclairs LP since 2019’s ‘Out Of The Box’. After a lengthy period of inactivity and time spent focusing on other projects, the band reunited and resumed performing live in October, 2023 featuring a freshly revamped lineup. Momentum gathered, creative wellsprings began flowing again, and new songs slowly emerged. Core members Samuel Jones Lunsford, Daniel Cundiff, and Seanmichael Poff found themselves invigorated by the addition of newcomers Ben Hudson and John Pence – longtime friends and bandmates within kindred musical endeavors. The genesis of Cycles Turning began in 2025 when Samuel recorded a handful of songs in his attic on a newly purchased Tascam 488 8-track cassette Portastudio.
What is so captivating about a pitch-shifted vocal sample? Is it just good old existing IP, scratching the same itch for the trillionth time? Is it the thrill of hearing a sound you thought was fixed respawn somewhere totally new? Loukeman’s eggs are in the latter basket. The Toronto-based producer’s wistful, anemoic dance tracks trawl for vocals across pop, folk, R&B, and hip-hop of the past decade, a net that dredges up Bryson Tiller and Lomelda with equal gusto. But it’s his rendering, like sonic sfumato, that’s the crux of his music. Using an Analog Rytm saturator and a few choice plug-ins, Luke Fenton approaches sung snippets like wet clay, endlessly moldable with a little osmosis. As he put it in an interview last year, he aims to “glue everything together…
Consistency may be disparaged as staid, or celebrated as style. “Art is the place where liking what we like, over and over, is not only allowed but is the essential skill,” writes George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, asking, “How emphatically can you like what you like? How long are you willing to work on something, to ensure that every bit of it gets infused with some trace of your radical preference?”
For a house-music producer, it seems around a decade of emphatic consistency really gets the goods. It’s been 13 years since Maya Bouldry-Morrison’s first album as Octo Octa and 10 since she came out as trans — or, as she puts it in the closing poem of her fourth and latest LP, Sigils for Survival, started “finally living life.”
Led by two lifelong friends from Newcastle, bassist Stan Woodward and drummer King David Ike Elechi, Knats are not the easiest band to pin down to a single genre. So they created their own: “Geordie Jazz,” or as they sometimes call it, “Geordie Noir.” Drawing on their Tyneside roots (a “Geordie” being a person from the Tyneside area in the North East of England), the name captures their edgy fusion of soaring melody, driving danceable rhythms, rock energy, and spoken-word poetry.
The result is contemporary and deeply rooted in place — a homage to their hometown. Through evocative instrumental passages and hard-hitting regional accents, Knats channel the mining heritage, sporting culture and present-day realities of the North East, crafting music…
Blood Sucking Maniacs, the Allen family band, helmed by patriarch and matriarch Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen, spans five generations and 121 years, including (among others) their sons Bukka and Bale Allen; grandsons Kru, Sled, and Calder Allen; Panhandle Mystery Band mainstays Charlie Sexton, Lloyd Maines, and Richard Bowden, and frequent collaborator Will Sexton.
…Giving themselves the collective name Blood Sucking Maniacs, the songs are free, wild, tender, and gloriously unruly. Put all the contributions together, and we find a mash-up of heart-punch ballads, familial rib-prods, and everything in between, shifting from the sublime to the unabashedly sentimental with maximum integrity.
The name was inspired by their son Bale,…
Chicago’s The Arrivals — well, singer/guitarist Isaac Thotz now lives in L.A., while fellow singer/guitarist Little Dave Merriman, bassist Paddy Costello and drummer Ronnie DiCola have stayed local — uh, have arrived with Payload, their first record in 16 damn years. That gap apparently wasn’t caused by anything other than life getting in the way, but we welcome this return regardless.
Recorded by Meat Wave’s Joe Gac, Payload is essentially hit after hit; it’s punk rock with undeniably ultra-catchy melodies that expertly balances the personal with the political. Thotz’s “Just Like My Brother” begins with quiet guitar strum before kicking in with resounding “whoa-ho-ho-ho” chants; it’s a platonic love song that’s soaring, anthemic and insistent.
Stopped A Freight Train With A Grain Of Sand is the latest instalment from the Let’s Go Dancing series – an epic (and still unfolding) 100-song living tribute to Drivin N Cryin singer/guitarist and celebrated songwriter / solo artist Kevn Kinney.
This new set sharpens its focus on the harder, faster and louder edges of Kinney’s songbook. If earlier chapters leaned into folk-born introspection, Stopped A Freight Train With A Grain Of Sand roars, spotlighting the grit and voltage coursing beneath Kinney’s writing, whether delivered solo or at the helm of Drivin N Cryin.
Deer Tick set the tone straight away with a rugged, heartfelt Let’s Go Dancing, leaning into the song’s weather-beaten melody with the kind of loose charm that keeps Kinney’s music evergreen.
Keith Forsey is often remembered for writing Don’t You (Forget About Me) for Simple Minds, and – ironically – for little else. That hit song from a memorable 1985 movie (The Breakfast Club) is by no means something you’d want others to forget, and yet there are many other blockbuster moments of note in a blistering career.
Survey the producer, songwriter and drummer’s many credits – running into several thousand contributions over half a century – and you will discover a Zelig-like figure who was present and often instrumental in the creation of assorted epoch-defining music. If his name is rarely mentioned, then you suspect he likes it that way.
You’ll not find interviews with him should you go searching on the internet.
Paul Weller may be something of a cult artist in the United States, but in his native UK and across Europe, he’s a well-deserved living legend. As a founding member of the Jam in the 1970s and the Style Council in the 1980s, he has taken listeners on a journey through punk, soul, jazz, folk, and whatever other styles he likes to try. Live settings are a great way to experience Weller’s music, usually because they put his electrifying on-stage presence on full display, allow him to cherry-pick some of the best songs from his long and varied career, and give him a chance to test out unique and surprising covers. Weller at the BBC, Vol. 2 accomplishes all of this in spades.
While Weller at the BBC was released in 2008 and covered the years 1990 to 2008…
Releasing as a 2CD set, this edition includes the original album, newly remastered from the original master tapes, alongside a bonus disc of rare, previously unreleased alternate versions and outtakes from their early recording sessions.
It sold poorly (around 11,000 copies) and the band never cut anything like it again, but Little Feat‘s eponymous debut isn’t just one of their finest records, it’s one of the great lost rock & roll albums. Even dedicated fans tend to overlook the album, largely because it’s the polar opposite of the subtly intricate, funky rhythm & roll that made their reputation during the mid-’70s. Little Feat is a raw, hard-driving, funny and affectionate celebration of American weirdness, equal parts garage rock, roadhouse blues…
Of all the artists that emerged from the freak folk/New Weird America boom of the early noughties, Colorado-born Josephine Foster is one of the most enduring, and certainly one of the most interesting. Besides the obvious – her startling voice, opera trained but as wild as the hills – constant reinvention and inspired collaboration have been the hallmarks of her continued success.
She has tackled folk, country, desert psych, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and 19th-century German Lieder, and has teamed up with David Pajo and Andy Bar (as The Children’s Hour) and Jason Ajemian (as Born Heller). In recent years, her most fruitful collaboration has been with guitarist Victor Herrero, with whom she formed the band Mendrugo.
…includes live recordings from the Orchestral FM4 Radio Session, Radio Eins Session and three new remixes; ‘Patterns’ (BOKKA Remix), ‘City Walls’ (Last Chance Remix) and ‘Wake Up Strange’ (Four Horsemen Remix).
For more than 30 years, cult British collective Archive have been ploughing their own furrow – joining the dots between ’90s trip-hop, various shades of alt rock and electronica. With Glass Minds, their 13th studio effort, the band continues to break new ground.
…A stark contrast exists between Glass Minds and its brooding and intense predecessor Call to Arms & Angels. For guitarist and co-vocalist Dave Pen, this originates from the differing circumstances in which the two projects were conceived.
…include a bonus disc with songs from the December 12, 1973 concert at Omni Coliseum in Atlanta.
From Dick’s Picks Volume 1 to Dave’s Picks Volume 58, Curtis Hixon Hall is front and center once again as we shed a little lovelight on the complete, unreleased show from December 18, 1973. On this one, you’ll find the band coastin’ off that Europe ’72 sound (“Tennessee Jed,” “Brown-Eyed Women,” a not-to-be-missed mix of “China>Rider”), testing the tempo of the newly debuted (12/12/73) pretty little “Peggy-O,” and morphing Wake of the Flood tracks (“Weather Report Suite,” “Row Jimmy,” and “Eyes of the World”) into live form. “Dark Star,”…
Despite its somewhat generic name, jazz trio The Setting have created something striking and quietly astounding on their self-titled debut album. The band, consisting of bassist and composer Eivind Opsvik, keyboard player Elias Stemeseder, and guitarist Will Graefe, have brought to fruition Opsvik‘s love of 1970s and 1980s synthesizer music, ECM solo guitar albums, and experimental art pop. But as the saying goes, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
While there are certainly touchstones of previous subgenres and legendary artists – ranging from Brian Eno to Joe Zawinul to Ryuichi Sakamoto – all over this beguiling record, the result is a sound that is unlike anything else most ears have heard. The overall experience is decidedly…
Pekka Kuusisto, from Finland, is not your typical classical violinist. He’s been known to swallow tiny microphones in concert, and he might just break into a homegrown folk tune, strumming his fiddle like a mandolin.
Kuusisto has capably recorded the standard repertoire — including Mozart and Vivaldi — but on his new album, Willows, where he plays his violin and leads the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, he’s making some typically unexpected choices.
At the heart of the album is a performance of The Lark Ascending that’s guaranteed to ruffle feathers. The soothing, pastoral work for violin and orchestra, by British composer by Ralph Vaughan Williams, was written as World War I loomed. Over the past century, the piece has…
Kristen Gallerneaux’s Life Day unfolds as a sonic study in recurrence. Not repetition in any formal or minimalist sense, but more a return to a condition: a pulse, a signal, a state of suspended awareness that doesn’t fully resolve into stable time. The album’s six tracks don’t so much sit alongside as flow into each other, like unstable signals rather than discrete transmissions. They feel less composed than remembered, as though surfacing from within a foggy haze.
Across the album, rhythms persist with a curious insistence. They suggest a heartbeat, but just as readily the automated continuity of machines. Life here is never singular. It is doubled, distributed across bodies and systems, signals and supports. What emerges is music that is…
In Greek mythology, when the gods grant King Midas the power to turn everything he touches into gold, what first seems like a wish come true slowly becomes a curse.
In the case of L.A.-based producer Zhu’s fifth studio album Black Midas, however, the tables are turned, and what seems like a curse is musically transmogrified into a blessing.
Created in the wake of the Palisades Fire which saw Zhu’s charred Topanga home left uninhabitable for a year, the stripped-down 14-track melodic techno LP explores the luxurious spaces between sounds. It’s as much about its subtlety as it is the tribal percussion and shadowy basslines, turning darkness itself into a main character with all-black moods and low-register explorations.
Stephen Becker loves to find poetry and eloquence in the inane activities of everyday life. “Bad Idea”, the first song on his new album, Gravity Blanket, begins: “Had a bad idea again / So I remain uncertain for a while / Took some time to breathe again / And thrift a collared shirt to find my style.” In the lazy, midtempo “Emergency”, he asks a practical question: “Why’d you get a car in New York City? / The train goes far enough.” A fascinating bedroom-pop songwriter and musician, his musical approach may come off as occasionally naïve and “normcore”, but there is deep sophistication and unique textures in every song.
Becker is an in-demand New York sideman, working with artists as diverse as Rubblebucket, Vagabon, Katie Von Schleicher,…