After Black Midi called it quits in 2023, bassist/co-vocalist Cameron Picton eventually started making music on his own. Although he was drawn to a more spacious, acoustic sound than that of his former band, his approach was still dramatic and unpredictable in nature. Not quite sure if he wanted to be in another band, he ultimately did bring in collaborators for his debut album, among them members of experimental London group caroline, singer/songwriter/composer Kiran Leonard, and veteran percussionist Steve Noble. Featuring shifting, often trippy narratives (he cited King Crimson as an influence), he named the project and the album My New Band Believe. Without offering much in the way of a through line other than the concept of “dream logic,”…
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Nowhere Faster, the 11th studio album by post-rock duo El Ten Eleven, is a bit of something old and something new. The most notable change to the group’s sound is the addition of piano and strings for the first time on any of their recordings, which make the album easily the most cinematic-sounding project they’ve ever released. The duo also decided to bring back the delay pedal which was central to their early sound.
Opener “Uncanny Valley Girl,” meant as a commentary about AI taking over the world, is El Ten Eleven at their best. It starts with an angular but funky bassline which ping-pongs through the speakers as the delay dices it up, and the pianos and strings refreshingly add textural depth. Then the rhythm comes together as…
After Oylam (2010), Judith Berkson, mezzo-soprano, pianist, composer and improviser, returns with another unclassifiable, and strangely compelling, artistic statement. On Thee They Thy, she leads a trio with Trevor Dunn and Gerald Cleaver through a radically changing programme addressing new settings for prayer (Berkson is also a cantor), original songs, vocal experimentation, improvised piano and more. “I view the pieces on this recording as a natural extension of my solo work,” says Judith Berkson. “This idea of songs that are quite intimate and personal, informed by jazz with pockets of improvisation but also drawing from song and avant-garde traditions in their harmonic and melodic material, embracing elements of minimalism…
The lapping water that burnishes the edges of this collaboration between multidisciplinary artists Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou – friends for over 15 years, kindred spirits for eternity possibly – holds the multitudes of humanity’s draw to the sea. These Water Poems sit in a lineage with the trireme of Ancient Greece, sickly Victorians at the coast for healing, writers beckoned to Tangier, and point-and-shoot film photos in a box in your family home, sunbleached and filled with bright swimsuits. Atkinson and Vantzou channel their own oceanside dwellings into ambient sounds tinged with nostalgia, joy and hidden depths.
It manifests in compositions that subvert the usual calm of water-based field recordings. The repeated piano chords and chanted mantras…
In 2016 and 2025, Washington alt-rock innovators The Melvins toured as co-headliners with UK grindcore veterans Napalm Death under the banner Savage Imperial Death March. The tours showcased contrasting heavy styles. The Melvins, pioneers of the grunge and sludge metal movements, bring intricate riffing at various tempos and odd time signatures, while Napalm Death, pioneers of the grindcore scene, favor an abrasive, ultra-fast mixture of punk and metal with harsh vocals. Now the bands join forces for their first collaborative album, Savage Imperial Death March, and the result is wild, messy fun.
The album features The Melvins’ Buzz Osborne on vocals, guitar, and bass, and Dale Crover on drums. From Napalm Death are singer…
You don’t have to hail from the Southeast to have heard of, or appreciated, the music of Drivin N Cryin… but it helps. While they have toured nationally, their slightly off-kilter Southern approach has been, not surprisingly, most popular in red clay states.
No need wondering how long they have been active either, since the answer (1985) is on the back cover, as large as the DNC type font.
The Atlanta based outfit – usually a four-piece, sometimes a trio – has been at it for forty years, although there have been decade-long waits between releases. Frontman/singer/songwriter Kevn Kinney has also crafted a solo career simultaneously with DNC, often with his side project band, the slightly more…
Although Brown Horse are soaked up to their collective armpits in various signifiers of a very recognisably American musical lexicon (pedal steels and the lure of the road leading out of town feature prominently here), the Norwich quartet (accompanied by drummer Ben Rodwell and backing singer Neve Cariad) achieve an identifiably British take on various alt. country/Americana staples on the startlingly assured, often viscerally raw Total Dive.
With all four members sharing the songwriting duties equally, the ten songs on Total Dive venture from grizzled, petrol-fumed bar room boogie (the title track, with the track’s energised gallop deliciously at odds with the downbeat dead-end vibes of the lyrics) to desolate…
On the first two Fantastic Cat records, the quartet of singer-songwriters (Anthony D’Amato, Brian Dunne, Don DiLego, and Mike Montali) brought their own styles successfully into a band setting. However, on their third album, the cheekily titled Cat Out of Hell, Fantastic Cat feels like a long-running, well-oiled, veteran outfit.
Things are more fluid as individual contributions have melded, crafting an overall, interlocking sound. The extremely well-produced album adds sonic touches like strings, harpsichord, and tambourines to spruce up the group’s solid base of indie/folk rock tunes, all delivered with pristine harmonies and evocative lyrics.
Opening exuberantly with “Donnie Takes the Bus”, Fantastic Cat drops into a cheery,…
Born in Tehran in 1983 as son of the world renowned tar and setar virtuoso Hossein Alizadeh, Saba Alizadeh established himself not only as a true master on the Iranian spike fiddle kamancheh but one of the groundbreaking voices in contemporary Iranian music.
After the critically acclaimed releases Scattered Memories (his international debut, released on Karlrecords in 2019), I May Never See You Again (2021) and last year’s Temple of Hope, his new album Rituals of the Last Dawn unfolds as a deeply meditative dialogue between tradition, experimentation, and the present moment. The Iranian composer and kamancheh virtuoso — widely recognised for bridging classical Persian heritage with avant-garde sound — crafts…
If you’ve recently listened to Okkyung Lee’s just like any other day, take a minute to collect yourself and reset expectations before diving into the South Korean cellist’s new record. While Lee’s 2025 collection of charming and bright-eyed, keyboard-focused ambient miniatures wouldn’t feel out of place in pastoral passages of a JRPG soundtrack, Signals, a commission by London’s Explore Ensemble, is stark, grave, and sharply abstract from first note to last.
The first sounds we hear, in fact, on the opener ‘Siwan’ (named for pianist Siwan Rhys) are the echoes of a resounding yet dangerously unstable piano stab. The sonic shape feels at once awfully close and impossibly distant, as if we were peering into the instrument’s guts…
On Alkebulan, the second recording by his Washington, DC-area Jazz Orchestra, composer, arranger and trombonist Javier Nero pays loving tribute to his African heritage, as he did on the orchestra’s earlier album for Outside In Music, emet (The Black Land). As before, Nero uses his considerable skills as a writer and orchestrator to share and amplify his vision of a once-thriving civilization whose framework and particulars have been swept away in the historical narrative but whose impact on the human race was and is pivotal and decisive.
Alkebulan, Nero writes, “is one of the oldest native words to describe the continent of Africa,” bearing the connotation of “‘Mother of Mankind’ and ‘Garden of Eden.'” In Nero’s capable…
Long before Caterina Barbieri’s Eurorack met Bendik Giske’s tenor saxophone, the two artists were already on the same wavelength. The Italian modular savant and the Norwegian reed player have both situated their sounds to the left of center, thriving at the edges of their respective instruments and conservatory educations. Giske uses his classical training to translate his experiences on Berlin’s queer techno circuit into gymnastic transmutations of breath. Barbieri, recently named artistic director of Venice Biennale’s music department, once got booted from a church venue because a priest found her music “satanic.” Their first joint EP, At Source, gathers four hypnotic improvisations that move like drill bits, spiraling towards a creative core that’s…
You don’t essentially need to be an innovator that breaks boundaries to come up with good music that could reach quite a number of listeners.
As a solo artist, you do need a hefty dose of musical talent, an excellent voice (and/or instrumental ability), good songwriting skills, and a taste in arrangements and collaborators you use for your recordings.
Born in Alaska and now based in Cape Cod, singer-songwriter Kim Moberg presents all of the above in abundance on her new album All That Really Matters. Sure, there’s nothing overly fancy or drastically new here — yet Moberg has a strong songwriting sense that includes good lyrics too, possesses an excellent singing voice, and she exhibits an impeccable taste…
A flicker of light was the namesake of Lia Pappas-Kemps‘s first EP, 2024’s Gleam, but the Toronto singer-songwriter’s full-length debut Winged proves that she’s more than just a flash in the pan. The idea of depicting a new indie rock-adjacent local artist often conjures one blurry-edged, vague cipher with a pretty generic sound profile. While Pappas-Kemps is adamantly a deviation from the norm, depending on where you start with her already-chameleonic œuvre, that may or may not be immediately apparent.
The second half of Winged opens a portal that makes it undeniable. On a twisted, knotty tree trunk of a song called “Wound Up and Coiling,” Pappas-Kemps kicks the project’s mouth agape as the titular tension becomes too much…
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.
Martín Schellekens and Martín Espinosa have never been shy about their fondness for Sonic Youth. They started out calling themselves Hey Joni, after all. But that alias didn’t last; eventually they hit on Land Whales, a name with no associations attached. Subtly surrealistic, “Land Whales” conveys a blurry constellation of ideas: brute force and sheer impossibility; weightless grace and its gravity-bound opposite.
All those potential connotations take on greater significance when you consider that the group came together in Cuba and recorded its music — a fusion of grunge, post-hardcore, and shoegaze — in a Havana apartment, against all odds.
Land Whales’ sound is uncannily familiar. Their second album, How to Make a Breakfast,…
Remember when Matmos’ Drew Daniel posted about “hit em,” an imaginary electronic genre at 212 bpm and in 5/4 time? Seoul-based producer Guinneissik was one of many across the world who submitted an interpretation: “London Hammer,” a noisy techno belter with screamo vocals, later included on the resulting Machinedrum-curated compilation. But 2024 was already shaping up to be Guinneissik’s breakout year, with his slow-building trance single “Farewell Two Shell” nominated for Best Electronic Song at the Korean Music Awards. Daniel’s infamous tweet might have sparked Guinneissik’s entry into an international story, but the kindling had been accumulating for years.
Learning the ropes of Ableton from Korean electro-house pioneer KIRARA, Guinneissik…
Montreal-based Chadian producer, singer and guitarist Caleb Rimtobaye, aka Afrotronix, fuses ancestral African tradition with future-facing electronics. KÖD expands his exploration of the sounds of his homeland – weaving tama and other hand percussion, sampled Chadian call-and-response singing, and more, into his ear-grabbing electronic compositions. The album balances the familiar, from desert blues guitar licks to Sahelian polyrhythms, with outlandish and experimental programmed elements.
Opener ‘Incertitude’ kicks things off in fine fashion with treated vocal samples, hand percussion and squelchy synth refrains. The addition of a clutch of guest vocalists mixes things up and adds even more colour to proceedings.