Joe Pernice has been playing an uncompromising brand of indie music for more than three decades now. He dug into alternative country with the Boston-based Scud Mountain Boys before switching to a more indie rock/pop sound with the Pernice Brothers. But it’s his latest — and first — solo studio effort, where he strips it all down for a mellower, often somber vibe that is as beautiful as it is thoughtful.
The album opens with the pristine and surprisingly sardonic “Peace in Our Home,” with Pernice gently singing the title over light acoustic guitar and immaculate harmonizing backup vocals before adding the stinging “…when you’re gone” to punctuate the song. “Deep into the Dawn,” the following track, is just as mellow,…
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U2’s second surprise six-track EP of 2026, Easter Lily arrives six weeks after 
Poetry and song are related, but they’re not kissin’ cousins, more first cousins at one remove. Composers of art song in the 19th and 20th centuries turned to poets for their song cycles, and rock-era lyrics have often been hailed as poetry, but what happens when a poet – a page poet, albeit adept at performance – combines with musicians and lyricists and adds his own voice to the mix; his reading voice, not a singing one.
Offering up more of her perceptive, increasingly world-wise songs, Responsible Friend is Elizabeth Ziman’s sixth 
Charley Crockett has always been a prolific artist, stretching the limits of his imaginative approach to country, which toes the line between tradition and the lofty. Recently, though, the long-standing troubadour has been releasing distinct, genre-altering releases, starting with 2025’s Lonesome Drifter and Dollar a Day, which arrived a few short months later. These two subsequent releases, both co-produced by the iconic Shooter Jennings, build the story Crockett is calling “The Sagebrush Trilogy.” Now, the time has arrived for Crockett to close this chapter of his storied career with Age of the Ram, the third and final installment of his Jennings-assisted trilogy.
If you could distill the guiding philosophy of Robber Robber’s second album down to a single word, it would be the one that appears about a minute into “Avalanche Sound Effect”: “upend.”
Jed Bindeman’s ears hurt. As a co-founder of reissue label Freedom to Spend, he acquired some 1,200 cassettes from the archive of ND, an influential Austin-based magazine from the ‘80s and ‘90s, and began systematically working through the stacks of tapes. What he found made all the effort worthwhile: a home-recorded, self-illustrated cassette by someone called 
Six years to the date of his last LP, Thundercat release his fifth studio album, 
After a five-year run of musically intrepid and critically acclaimed studio LPs – Absolute Zero, Non-Secure Connection, ‘Flicted, Deep Sea Vents – as well as entire albums’ worth of still-unreleased material, the virtuoso pianist suddenly found himself “creatively fried.”
When Dave Grohl and Nate Mendel took over the curation for the May 2026 issue of MOJO, they didn’t just pick a few favorite songs—they built a bridge between the Foo Fighters’ legendary past and their 12th studio album, Your Favorite Toy.
Emerging out of semi-nowhere — well, Northwich — the Charlatans were saddled with a name that lent itself to jibes about their quality and the early burden of being a one-hit wonder with “The Only One I Know.” That all changed when Some Friendly, the group’s debut, planted itself at the top of the UK charts in 1990. Drawing on Martin Blunt’s background in mod and psych outfits, Rob Collins’ outrageously funky keyboards and Tim Burgess’ unexpected star quality, Some Friendly combines the joyous bounce of baggy with the good natured immediacy of indie pop, then wraps it up in state of the art production. Some of the lyrics betray Burgess’ sharp-tongued punk background — “You’re Not Very Well,” the opener, expresses anything but sunny sentiments…
…Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt met while studying at the University of Hull in 1981. Thorn had already formed the DIY post-punk group Marine Girls and recorded their beloved debut album Beach Party. Meanwhile, experimental singer-songwriter Watt’s debut single – ‘Cant’, produced by Kevin Coyne – was released that year on Cherry Red. The pair started a side project, Everything But the Girl, and released their first EP, Night and Day (led by a cover of the Cole Porter standard) in 1982.
Following so closely on the heels of the January 2026 concert piece