…“Embers Edition” features instrumental versions of all album tracks.
“I knew a girl who wrote ‘Silent All These Years’,” spits Tori Amos with startling venom, as ‘Shush’, the stentorian opener to her 18th album grinds to a close. “Where is she?” It’s a good question, since the Tori Amos who wrote ‘Silent All These Years’ all those years ago is in her sixties now and there are those who still favour its parent album, 1992’s magical Little Earthquakes.
So, yes, a good question, but not an entirely fair one and Amos is clearly irked by it. She’s moved on of course, but by the closing ’23 Peaks’, she’s admitting, “I need your help to change me back/Back into the woman I want to be”.
She remains a woman with a distinctive voice…
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Arcade Fire’s Open Your Heart or Die Trying, released for Record Store Day 2026, is a cinematic and ambient reimagining of their 2025 studio album Pink Elephant. Produced as a “score to an unmade film,” this experimental project strips away the band’s traditional indie-rock anthems in favor of meditative, synth-heavy soundscapes.
The centerpiece is the sprawling 8-minute “Director’s Cut” of the title track, which sets a vaporous tone for a record focused on atmosphere and hypnotic loops. While critics remain divided on its necessity, the album serves as a deep-dive companion piece for fans, leaning fully into the quiet, restrained creative direction the band established during their collaborations with Daniel Lanois.
Ana Roxanne‘s second Kranky release is far more personal and emotionally direct than her previous recordings. While her earlier records could easily be categorized as ambient or perhaps new age, and had a certain element of playfulness along with their meditative qualities, Poem 1 is stark and unobscured, doing nothing to disguise Roxanne’s heartbreak and vulnerability. Nevertheless, her music is still highly hypnotic, and the arrangements draw the listener in and make it easier to focus on her lyrics.
On brief opener “The Age of Innocence,” she expresses the desire to travel and find home over glacial synths and mournful strings. The piano-based “Berceuse in A-flat Minor, Op. 45” is so intimate that it sounds like…
After releasing two albums of eclectic and textured lo-fi indie rock under the solo project handle youbet, Nick Llobet found a musical kindred spirit in fellow Brooklynite Micah Prussack (Trace Mountains) and invited her into the lineup.
Produced by prior youbet collaborator Katie von Schleicher (Frankie Cosmos, Market), their first album as a duo, youbet, is even more heterogeneous, adding disgruntled punk, damaged folk-rock, and more to the project’s shape-shifting palette. Although there are no direct tributes to these on the album, the band even namechecked influences as far-flung as flamenco and Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo. They open the record with the buzzy, laid-back slacker rock of “Ground Kiss,” a distortion-punctuated…
Although the band have experienced a complete turnover in backing personnel since their 2018 debut, San Franciso’s Cindy have stayed remarkably loyal to their distinctive sound thanks to leader Karina Gill’s devotion to a haunted, melancholy vibe constructed around simple guitar progressions, detached vocals, and a slowcore sensibility. Featuring a lineup that’s been steady since 2024 and that includes members of Now, Violent Change, and Children Maybe Later, the project’s fifth album, Another Country, adds to this legacy, where, more specifically, emotionally numbing neglect, dingy reverb, tragedy, and slightly out-of-tune guitars evoke the incorporeal ghosts of girl groups, sad teen idols, and Nico.
With a title that seems to revel in these…
…includes the original 13 tracks plus four brand-new songs and three remixes.
Tremor, the latest album from producer and songwriter Daniel Avery, shakes you up in the best way possible. You don’t so much listen to it as enter it — a slow-motion descent into a room where shoegaze guitars shimmer against industrial reverb and the ghosts of warehouse nights still twitch in the corners. It’s music for the afterglow: that hour when the club’s over, the street’s quiet, and you’re walking home with the bass still vibrating in your bones.
“Rapture in Blue” hovers somewhere between the club and the clouds. LA-based artist Cecile Believe breathes through the haze — her voice registers more temperature than lyric — while…
Yu Su’s spidery path across the globe has shaped her work at every step. First there was the humid downtempo she started making in the mid-2010s in Vancouver, inspired by the house music of that city’s legion of stoners and terminal chillers. As the fog lifted over the next few years, you could hear hints of her Chinese upbringing in tracks like “Little Birds, Moonbath,” with its shimmering textures and pentatonic melodies. Su’s debut album, Yellow River Blue, made the connection explicit, inspired by a tour across her home country playing the music she first discovered and developed in Canada. A breakthrough in popularity led to bigger rooms and bigger tunes, Ibiza gigs (and cooking residencies), and an eventual move to London; her DJ sets gradually took a slightly…
Blarf is the name actor/comedian Eric Andre sometimes uses when making music, and his absurdist and confrontational style of comedy can’t help but work its way into his sounds. Blarf has taken many forms over the years, beginning as a Zappa-inspired band with Andre and some college friends, but eventually turning into the disorienting samples and beats of the 2019 album Cease & Deist. Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist is disorienting in a different, more subtle way. The eight tracks here are exactly what the title suggests; cinematic scores tracked with a full orchestra and mostly very much in the tradition of theatrical soundtracks. Andre worked with esteemed soundtrack artist Prateek Rajagopal on these recordings, tracked in…
Guy Clark’s debut, Old No. 1, did not sell many records upon its original release in 1975. However, over time the album has earned a reputation as a masterpiece that has inspired a zillion songwriters since. The list of notables influenced by Clark and this LP includes a host of prominent singer-songwriters, including Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, and Vince Gill. They have all proudly paid tribute to Clark in song and story. Fifty years later, Truly Handmade Records, an independent record label and imprint established by Guy Clark LLC, has released Old No. 1: Revisited. It’s a track-by-track tribute to the original, featuring some of the best young(er) musicians working in the Americana and alternative country fields today, such as Margo Price,…
Throughout their career, Halsey has been lots of different things to different people.
She was the blue-haired 19-year-old singing about her Brooklyn boyfriend and lilac skies (‘Badlands’); the 23-year-old offering an elaborately stylised ‘Romeo and Juliet’ concept album (‘Hopeless Fountain Kingdom’); the 25-year-old navigating the blurring lines between Halsey, the art, and Ashley, the artist (Manic); then the 27-year-old delving into a Westwood-clad, Nine Inch Nails-produced world of rock and childbirth (‘If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power’).
Her fifth record, The Great Impersonator, carries the imprint of those versions of her. Perhaps because it also took a step closer to ‘Ashley’, there are several links to ‘Manic’ in particular:…
They Came Like Swallows – Seven Requiems for the Children of Gaza is the first significant collaboration from two luminaries of alternative music; Thurston Moore, best known for his time at the helm of noise rock legends Sonic Youth and Bonner Kramer (known for many years simply as Kramer), whose reverb-heavy production served as an additional instrument on pivotal albums from Galaxie 500, Low, Daniel Johnston, and many, many more. Both musicians have long histories of collaboration and prolific output tied to no single style of expression, so the possibilities for an album of sounds conjured up by Moore and Kramer are limitless, and They Came Like Swallows takes on tones of mourning, outrage, and hope with its seven expansive pieces.
The poet and artist Barbara Guest, an original member of the New York school of poetry, ended her final collection, The Red Gaze (2005), with the following words by Theodor Adorno: ‘In each genuine art work something appears that did not exist before.’ It’s a quote so pertinent to how we view human creativity today that it seems almost like a manifesto in miniature. Of course, when he wrote those words, Adorno wasn’t thinking of artificial intelligence, at least not in the way we know it, but nonetheless, it seems like a succinct argument for the human over the machine. When a human being makes a work of art, they put something new into the world, something that may draw from a wealth of influences but, at its best, ignites those influences with a creative spark.
For her fourth album, Maya Hawke regathered key members of her steady writing/recording crew – Christian Lee Hudson, Benjamin Lazer Davis, Will Graefe – who continue to take chances and gradually broaden her sound instead of opting for the warm comfort of a default sweetly melodic, charmingly confessional songwriter sensibility (although there’s some of that here, too). Joining them in the studio was another prior collaborator, producer/engineer Jonathan Low (Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, Caroline Shaw). Hawke’s most ambitious album to date, the 13-song Maitreya Corso is both her wordiest and most assertive-sounding yet, with some of its tracks employing tricks like layered and manipulated vocals in a way that suggests modern…
The Eagles’ 1975 studio album, One of These Nights, was a milestone album for the band, earning them their first GRAMMY® Award and becoming the first of four consecutive #1 albums. One Of These Nights (Deluxe Edition) featuring a new mix of the original album, an unreleased, 16-song 1975 concert at Anaheim Stadium.
Produced by Don Henley, the CD and vinyl editions include a new mix of the album by Rob Jacobs. Originally produced by Bill Szymczyk and recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami and the Record Plant in Los Angeles, One Of These Nights achieved quadruple Platinum certification and the single “Lyin’ Eyes” won the GRAMMY® Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.
The unreleased live recording captures…
The legendary Slovenian group’s first original studio album since 2014’s Spectre, Musick – intensely pop, yet intensely Laibach. Available via Mute on limited edition neon pink vinyl and CD.
This record simultaneously celebrates and critiques the current era of warped reality and AI imitation. The title reflects a duality: an oversaturation, being “sick of music” in an age where over 100,000 new tracks, many AI-generated, are uploaded daily, making us question reality; and a “pathological devotion” that continues to drive the band.
The maximalist creation process in their Ljubljana studio involved analogue synths, toys, computers with sound apps, and collaborators like Donna Marina Mårtensson and Richard X. They drew influences from K-pop…
Since breaking out with their fantastic eponymous debut album, which featured the smash hits “Cough Syrup” and “My Body,” Young The Giant has proved time and time again that they are one of the premier indie rock bands working today. Their sixth full-length album and Fearless Records debut, Victory Garden, is no exception and is one of their best albums to date.
Eric Cannata says: “We sonically wanted to capture the energy of all five of us together,” he shares. “A lot of tracks were recorded live. We worked with a producer named Brendan O’Brien, who is just this incredible producer, especially with bands in the way that he captures the energy of multiple people playing at once in a room… It is a little bit of a return to our roots because…
Deluxe double LP reissue of The Head And The Heart’s debut album. Featuring the original album remastered on the first LP, plus seven bonus tracks on the second LP. The bonus tracks are a combination of previously unreleased demos and live tracks, plus one live track available for the first time physically, and one previously unreleased studio track. The Head and the Heart is the self-titled debut album from Seattle folk-rock band The Head and the Heart, originally self-released in 2010 before being picked up and re-issued by Sub Pop in 2011. Built around harmonious vocals, piano, violin, and folk-rock instrumentation, the album captures themes of connection, wanderlust, and introspection across tracks like “Lost in My Mind,” “Down in the Valley,” and “Rivers and Roads.”
British electronic collective Seefeel reappeared after a 13-year hiatus with two mini-albums in 2024 and now present Sol.hz, their first full-length release since the 2011 self-titled LP. The group’s claim to notoriety is as one of the first guitar-based groups signed to the fabled British electronic label Warp, with their 1995 sophomore album Succour. Rock listeners may first have encountered them on the 1993 debut Quique, where the band pushed dream pop beyond guitar rock conventions by dismantling structures that Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine had just about held in place. Instead, Seefeel built their sound around extended tracks of hypnotically recurring motifs, rewiring traditional instrumentation such as strummed guitars and a full drum kit into…
Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow is the second album from funk innovators Funkadelic. Arriving in 1970 mere months after their trailblazing debut, the record saw the band honing their songcraft, while still allowing plenty of space for mind-bending exploratory jams. The album’s origin story famously involved a single marathon session on LSD. It marked the official introduction of legendary keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and would go on to chart at No. 92 on Billboard’s Pop chart.
Factoring George Clinton’s surprise at hearing the voice of Martha Reeves during a retrospective playback of the ten-minute title track, there’s reason to doubt the Parliament-Funkadelic leader’s memory in his claim that Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow was recorded in a day.
GarciaLive Volume 22: September 25th, 1971 captures almost every note played across the early and late shows at San Anselmo’s intimate Lion’s Share, a tiny Quonset hut on the edge of town. The performances were originally recorded to 1/4″ analog reels by Betty Cantor-Jackson and Bob Matthews.
Jerry Garcia’s partnership with Merl Saunders carved out a parallel musical life in small Bay Area clubs. Joined by rhythmic anchor John Kahn, Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, and Tom Fogerty on rhythm guitar, who recently departed from Creedence Clearwater Revival. This quintet specialized in power pockets and strong grooves, giving Garcia space to elaborate and extend his musical knowledge…