Memento Mori: Mexico City is the counterpart to Fernando Frias’s Depeche Mode: M, an artistic endeavour of a film that explores the music of Depeche Mode and the profound appreciation of death that permeates Mexican culture. Interspersed with poetry, Mexican legends and stirring sequences that ruminate on mortality and impermanence, Depeche Mode: M documented Dave Gahan and Martin Gore’s series of concerts at Mexico’s enormous Foro Sol Stadium in 2023.
This release packages up the Depeche Mode: M film with a complete Foro Sol concert, containing 23 masterful live versions of Depeche classics like ‘Enjoy the Silence’, ‘Everything Counts’, ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ and ‘I Feel You’, as well as tracks taken from their most recent album,…
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There’s a rare acoustic alchemy at play in Time Is a Blind Guide. Personnel changes have guided and co-shaped the musical character of Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen’s ensemble and on the group’s third recording we once again experience a slight shift in the line-up, with Leo Svensson Sander replacing Lucy Railton on cello.
The new voice blends seamlessly into the quietly breathing ensemble sound, with a sparse but most precise Ayumi Tanaka navigating her way empathetically across the keyboard, responsive to Strønen’s percussive layers, Ole Morten Vågan’s bending double bass work and Håkon Aase’s lyrical violin accounts. At times the group’s three string instruments make up a firm trio-unit that enters into thoughtful dialogue with…
On her fourth album, Unclouded, Melody’s Echo Chamber embarks on a life-affirming new chapter with an album that celebrates the present moment, whatever state we find ourselves in. There’s a continuity that runs through Melody’s Echo Chamber’s brand of psychedelic pop going back to 2012’s self-titled debut but now comes a perfectly executed shaking up of personnel.
Unclouded’s impressive cast includes Swedish maestro Sven Wunder, who co-produced the record and contributed to the writing, bringing his unique sonic palette to the richly-textured canvas; Josefin Runsteen on strings, who brings her avant-garde smarts to the tableau; Dina Ögon’s Daniel Ögen on guitar and Love Orsan on bass who Melody describes as “masters of…
ira glass know that novelty is a dead end. “The half-life of a musical trend is getting shorter and shorter,” said drummer Landon Kerouac in a recent interview. “There aren’t real scenes, just friend groups,” added Lise Ivanova, ira glass’ frontwoman. The Chicago post-hardcore band holds fast to these truths, uninterested in snobbishness or modish songwriting; they’re technically a four-piece, but they have a rotating cast of collaborators that they bring on stage and in the studio to assist in their expansive noise rock.
joy is no knocking nation, their blistering second EP, clarifies that their goal isn’t subversion or invention, but collective study as they blaze through post-hardcore’s past half century in a dense 19 minutes.
Salt Collective is a power pop band with a deep rolodex. This second full-length from the Paris-based trio features contributions from many of melodic rock’s best-known artists, including 1980s college rock icons Chris Stamey (who also produced), Mitch Easter (whose North Carolina studio birthed this album) and Let’s Active’s Lynn Blakely who sings lead or back-up on nearly half the tracks. Other bold-faced contributors include Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws, Lemonjelly’s Jason Falkner, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, Pat Sansone, Aimee Mann, and Andy Partridge.
The main songwriter, Stéphane Schück seems to be living the dream, building out his own songs with musicians he’s admired for decades. One previous Salt Collective album, Life, was…
…a fully remastered digital version. The digital release include the bonus track “St. Charlene,” a tune from the ‘Rabbit Songs’ era that previously was found only on a hard-to-find EP.
Quoted as wanting to make a record “we could love the rest of our lives,” Hem spent a year on this collection. The idea was to combine their love of traditional American music with the lushness of the occasional 18-piece orchestra, a good choice considering the sweet, crystalline quality of the vocal work by lead singer Sally Ellyson. Ellyson had never sung professionally before, but answered an ad in The Village Voice with a cassette of lullabies she’d recorded for a friend’s child, and the set begins with a snippet of what was on that tape — a few lines unaccompanied…
While group names can often be random, Nusantara Beat has chosen one that encapsulates its ethos. Nusantara means all the islands that make up Indonesia and dates back to when kings wanted to unite the whole archipelago.
Today, it means unity, many cultures coming together as one. Accordingly, Nusantara Beat mix the rhythms and music of the Indonesian archipelago into one sound.
The Dutch group are well-placed to explore these sounds on their self-titled debut. Bassist Michael Joshua was born in the Indonesian province of West Java and moved to the Netherlands aged 15 while the other five members are of Indonesian heritage. Their musical starting point is Sunda Pop, which in the 1960s blended traditional…
British singer-songwriter Lucy Kitt unveils her highly anticipated second album, Telling Me, a deeply personal collection that shifts focus from introspection to storytelling, capturing the lives and struggles of those closest to her.
…She mixes Laurel Canyon with ’90s acoustic indie, a voice not a million miles away from The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler, and chiming guitars borrowed from Robin Guthrie, she builds as personal as her often introspective lyrics. Opening song ‘Blink’ veers towards the indie, while the more strident ‘Waiting Game’ adds a country tinge to a song Stevie Nicks would have been more than happy with. That song also points the way to the direction her lyrics have taken, being penned during lockdown for friends struggling…
Fans and critics have compared singer-songwriter Amy Speace to folk legend Judy Collins for good reason. Collins discovered the Nashville-based via-Baltimore musician early in Speace‘s career and became one of her biggest champions. Collins has brought Speace on tour and recorded her songs. Beyond their personal connections, Speace’s smooth, aching vocals recall Collins’ mid-career tone, and both artists share a rare quality: an earnest, poetic approach to music that comes straight from the heart.
While Collins is best known for interpreting other writers’ material, her own catalog, songs like “Since You’ve Asked” and “My Father” have been covered by everyone from Speace to Dolly Parton and Leonard Cohen. The writers…
Belarus is not a place necessarily known for its transparency, which is why Krope feels like such an unexpected and extraordinary psychogeographic ramble around a country largely estranged from the rest of Europe.
Anton Anishchanka, field recordist and composer, was pleasantly surprised when he went along to the Institute of Art History, Ethnography and Folklore in Minsk around the time of the pandemic and found he was able to access an archive of field recordings from roughly 1960 to 2005. Thanks to the ethnographer and researcher Iryna Vasilyeva, who works at the institute, Anishchanka managed to retrieve Belarusian folklore songs from various regions, forming the basis of this strangely betwitching album.
…What can, after all, be said about Masami Akita’s ultra-strident tessellations of sound — where total control masquerades as abject chaos, where extreme volume is a dare to lean in a little closer — that hasn’t already been uttered? Across the last half-century, he has become the metonym of harsh noise while also existing far beyond it, with frequent forays into grindcore bedlam and doom marches, ambient hum and free jazz eruptions. Box sets of 35 and 50 CDs, multiple series of albums that run for years, a collaborative zeal that seems boundless: Merzbow is so prolific that browsing his discography is like autoscrolling an abyss, revealing a catalogue so daunting that many people understandably stand only near its edges. Depending on how you tally them,…
Foetuses can hear sounds in the womb at the 16-week mark, around the time their hearing starts to develop, studies show. Music is believed to help stimulate their developing brains. Research also suggests that pregnant people are more sensitive to music, which figures since hormonal changes are known to trigger heightened senses.
Parenthood has long been fertile ground for artistry, inspiring names like Björk (Medúlla), Madonna (Ray of Light), Logic1000 (Mother) and Oklou (Choke Enough). Fever AM cofounder Mor Elian wrote her debut album during the ninth month of her pregnancy to see what carrying a being inside her would sound like. Solid Space largely came together in one stretch at her Berlin home so it’s no surprise that much…
…features the remastered original stereo mix, along with an extended introduction version of ‘Rubycon’ mixed by Steven Wilson. The set also features the complete concert recorded at The Rainbow in London in October 1974 over 2 CDs and the complete concert at The Royal Albert Hall in April 1975 (which featured Michael Hoening replacing Peter Baumann) also over 2CDs.
The members of Tangerine Dream continued to hone their craft as pioneers of the early days of electronica, and the mid-’70s proved to be a time of prosperity and musical growth for the trio of Chris Franke, early member Peter Baumann, and permanent frontman Edgar Froese. The three of them had been delivering mysterious space records on a regular basis, and their…
Nine years have passed since Paul Jebanasam‘s last album, and mātr is only his third. But as the new album demonstrates, Jebanasam has a different view of time. mātr (Sanskrit for mother and a permutation of matter) places humanity in the context of geologic time and asks questions of scale and responsibility. The cover photograph of hands extended to the sky suggests prayer, although the recipient of said prayer is not revealed: Mother Earth, an unnamed divine source, or a grand void that nonetheless captures the spiritual imagination. The word “custodianship,” appearing in the liner notes, points toward a Judeo-Christian understanding, referencing the first chapter of Genesis, but custodianship implies preservation, a concept far…
It takes all of two seconds of Space Junk to realize what Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives are up to. That alternate-picked run is straight out of the surf rock playbook; Dick Dale would be proud. Stuart has played a little bit of everything over the years, and while he’s more known for country, bluegrass, and rockabilly, the turn to surf rock isn’t out of character (and has been part of his repertoire for years).
For Space Junk, Stuart and the band decided to do a throwback instrumental record. They explicitly took the Ventures as an inspiration, and that’s a good starting point for what this album sounds like. Given Stuart’s natural adventurousness, though, it’s also only a jumping off point for describing this sweeping set of 20 instrumentals.
…remastered from the original analog tapes by Pete Lyman at Nashville’s Infrasonic Sound, the first time those tapes have been touched in 40 years, and restored and digitized by Dan Johnson at Audio Archiving Services.
In 1983, Golden Shower of Hits caught the Circle Jerks right on the cusp of growing out of — or at least struggling with the limits of — hardcore, but with nowhere special to go. It’s a malaise common to pretty much every hardcore band that lasted for more than a couple of albums, and in its way Golden Shower is just as typical of a particular kind of album as the Jerks’ classic debut Group Sex was. A combination of classic melodic hardcore, more considered rock/metal crossover material and obnoxious comedy covers,…
The album features the film’s original songs by the post-punk band Idles, as well as the movie’s original score composed by Rob Simonsen (Deadpool & Wolverine, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, The Way Back, It Ends with Us, The Age of Adaline, (500) Days of Summer, Nerve, Foxcatcher) and performed by Idles. The soundtrack will released digitally by Pertoza/Partisan Records. As previously reported, a first song (Rabbit Run) has already been released as a digital single last month.
Aronofsky enlisted Idles to capture the energy of the 1990s New York punk scene that colors Caught Stealing. “I built Caught Stealing to be a roller coaster of fun and wanted to supercharge the film by main lining a punk sensibility,” the director said in a press statement.
The Paris show from June 1976 had never been officially released in full before, so having a polished, band-sanctioned video of it, from the heyday of the band’s European 1976 tour, is a major archival win.
As part of the 2025 Black and Blue reissue, audio (both studio and live) comes with a new mix and remaster, making old material feel more immediate. Even live material reportedly benefits from improved clarity and better balance.
The concert captures the band in a transitional but energetic phase. Tracks like live versions of “Hand of Fate,” “Fool to Cry,” and “Hot Stuff” benefit from raw but spirited playing. One reviewer notes that the live concert “will thrill you even if you own the previously released live album.”
After two decades fronting Editors and releasing two albums with Smith & Burrows, Tom Smith is finally stepping into solo territory with There Is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light. Motivated by a desire to reconnect with the raw, acoustic beginnings of his songwriting, Smith set out to create something more intimate and personal, away from the collaborative nature of his band projects.
Enlisting producer Iain Archer, together, they crafted a record built around emotional honesty, acoustic textures, and themes of connection, memory, and resilience. The opening track, ‘Deep Dive’, became the album’s emotional anchor, setting a tone of gentle hope in the face of loneliness.
Emerging German saxophonist Julius Gawlik, a member of the prestigious NDR Big Band, has been developing his voice through several groups, including Jim Black & The Shrimps, Evi Filippou’s inEvitable, and the Jochen Ruckert Trio. Having already made a mark on the Berlin scene with these projects, it was more than time for Gawlik to release his debut album as a leader — fronting a tight yet open-minded quartet with Filippou on vibraphone, Phil Donkin on bass, and Black on drums. These bandmates help him sharpen the breadth of his stylistic palette.
“There Are No Ugly Dogs” begins in a quiet, nearly whispered mode, with saxophone and vibraphone fused in heady melodicism over an understated bass–drums pulse. The sound…