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…A lot has happened to Sweet Pill since they first exploded onto the scene with their 2022 debut, Where the Heart Is. The 10-song project launched this quintet into the contemporary rock pantheon, balancing punk, indie, and emo to create an emotionally charged, cathartic rock that was undeniable from the jump.
The band’s debut, though, is not a reference point for their sophomore effort, as Sweet Pill evolves before our very eyes. Their first release written fully as a group, Still There’s a Glow glimmers beneath that innate chemistry and a fresh lease on collaboration. These 13 songs prove to be the band’s most focused and cohesive to date, a surface-level examination, but the band’s maturity is much more deeply rooted.

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The Outfit present a career defining new album, Preservers of the Pearl, asserting themselves as messengers of the new wave of underground rock and roll, pushing the movement forward alongside fellow trailblazers Mystery Lights, Sheer Mag, Shadow Show, Uni Boys…
Everything has been leading here. Daniel Romano shifts from his position as sole writer, opening the floor to Outfit stalwarts Ian Romano and Carson McHone, and welcoming into the fold longtime friend and legendary Canadian rock-n-roller, Tommy Major. The band is functioning as a true collective – multiple voices and perspectives – all serving one creative pulse. The result is both a new beginning and a homecoming, a complete and fearless statement.

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Anjimile (ann-JIM-uh-lee) Chithambo has forged a distinctive musical path characterised by unflinching introspection and deep honesty. Emerging from Boston’s vibrant indie scene while studying at Northeastern University, Anjimile captivated audiences with earnest songwriting, delicate sonic textures, and performances that felt like prayer and celebration.
Critical acclaim quickly followed; 2020’s Giver Taker, hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the year’s best albums, positioned him as a compelling voice exploring enduring themes of spirituality, identity, and liberation. With The King (2023), Anjimile intensified his examination of Black and trans existence amid personal and societal turbulence, reaffirming his courageous…

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Kim Gordon’s third album, PLAY ME, is distilled and immediate, expanding Gordon’s sonic palette to include more melodic beats and the motorik drive of krautrock. “We wanted the songs to be short,” Gordon says. “We wanted to do it really fast. It’s more focused, and maybe more confident.”
The follow-up to 2024’s Justin Raisen-produced, two-time Grammy-nominated ‘The Collective’ processes, in her inimitable way, the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times fascism, the A.I.-fueled chill-vibes flattening of culture – where dark humor voices the absurdity of modern life.
Despite its frequent outward gaze, ‘PLAY ME’ is an interior record, one in which a heightened emotionality pulses through physical…

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Blending indie pop, rock, post-punk and elements of other genres, Halifax’s The Orielles have built a dedicated fanbase since releasing their debut LP Silver Dollar Moment in 2018. The eclectic trio now returns with their fifth studio album, another beguiling blend that is hard to categorise.
Opener ‘Three Halves’ encapsulates this melange with a swaggering opening that quietens down with Esmé Dee Hand-Halford’s vocals softly shining through. There are elements of shoegaze to it. There is a thunderous outro that makes it a fascinating track, with several pieces in one.
‘Shadow of You’ also packs plenty of oomph, Henry Carlyle Wade’s guitar licks jostling with Halford’s basslines and Sidonie B. Hand-Halford’s percussive, drumbeats providing fearsome…

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The Vancouver-based musician Ora Cogan exists in liminal spaces, or, rather, her music does. It transcends anodyne signifiers — folk-gaze and psych rock — to reach an indeterminate realm, where her prayer-like songs float like mist. Ephemerality prolongs. Her songs are the stuff of dreams until they morph into a nightmare: the nymph-like Cogan will lure you to a river for ablutions before drowning you like Omie Wise, or something like that. Yet you’re happy to bear witness — in fact, ecstatic.
Yes, Cogan has a similar folksy gothic aesthetic to PJ Harvey‘s White Chalk era. You know, full of witchy incantations, where ghosts linger in the shadows. Spirits in the ether — all that normal stuff. Yet being a mystic will only…

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Transmitter is the latest addition to the Cut Worms universe, but this is a very different artist from the one we’re used to. Led by singer/songwriter/musician Max Clarke and started as a solo home-recording project, Cut Worms was once a lo-fi outing with daring tendencies to stretch their limited recording equipment into universal moments of unifying rock.
…Produced by Jeff Tweedy at Wilco’s famous Loft Studio in Chicago, Clarke’s latest outing as Cut Worms is some of his most poignant work to date. The new, professional-level digs allowed the musician to put his lyrics and voice first, zeroing in on his range and current mindset to unlock new levels of honesty, almost as if Clarke is learning to trust the listener for the first time.

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…feature the original album remastered by Sean Magee at Abbey Road Studios, a new mix by the band’s longtime collaborator Terry Brown, and remixed and expanded edition of the live album and video Grace Under Pressure Tour.
Following the release of Signals in 1982, Rush’s 10th album would find them continuing to experiment with electronic sounds, even incorporating elements of ska in their progressive melange. For the first time since their debut, the Canadian trio elected to work with another producer/engineer than longtime collaborator Terry Brown, though they parted amicably; Peter Henderson, best known for his work on Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, produced Grace alongside the band. The group spent…

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A band founded sixty years ago during the same emergent British psychedelic art-rock scene that brought the world Pink Floyd is still putting out new music. Soft Machine’s Thirteen refers to this being their 13th studio release, the third since they resumed making records under the Soft Machine moniker after a thirty-seven year lull.
Soft Machine’s last new release arrived three years earlier; the Other Doors quartet still boasted two members from the mid-70s lineup and a third from that era appearing on two tracks. In the interim, long-time drummer John Marshall passed and bassist Roy Babbington’s phase-out became complete. Guitarist John Etheridge remains the last link to the classic era while keyboardist/saxophonist/flautist Theo Travis…

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Five years on, Mark Turner returns to the studio with his pianoless quartet to record the follow up to the hugely impressive Return from the Stars and see how much further they can collectively take the music forward.
As with the earlier recording, Turner once again draws his influence from his love of science fiction with the Patternmaster novel by Octavia E. Butler published in 1976, and which in the distant future humans are sub-divided with the dominant Patternists ruled by a powerful telepath known as the Patternmaster.
With a similar fascination with science fiction, Turner likens Wayne Shorter to the Pattermaster of Butler’s novel to the extent that the title track is a cleverly disguised contrafact of…

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… and the boisterous brothers are back. No, not that pair from Manchester, but Chris and Rich Robinson, with a follow-up to 2024’s Happiness Bastards. Labelled “The Most Rock ‘n’ Roll Rock ‘n’ Roll Band in the World” by the Melody Maker, it’s not difficult to guess what’s on offer with this latest release, A Pound Of Feathers.
Profane Prophecy starts off with a transplanted Rolling Stones groove and cowbell. There’s lots of energy, handclaps and foot stomping aplenty and even a dog imitation at one point. Exhilaratingly fun and a good opening choice. Cruel Streak, which follows, keeps up the pace. It’s an up-tempo rocking blues (what else?) with nicely juddering staccato drums and a key shift which gives it extra bite.

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The Long Ryders were once the shit, to use the appropriate slang expression from back in the day. Their albums from the mid-1980s (Native Son, State of Our Union, Two-Fisted Tales) were part of the onslaught of New Wave Cowpunk bands such as Jason and the Scorchers, Green on Red, Rank and File, and the Beat Farmers, that generated excitement among college-age audiences who were turned off by mainstream country acts.
The band took a long hiatus, although they sporadically got together for brief reunions. They released a new studio album in 2019, 32 years after their previous effort. Bassist Tom Stevens died in 2021. The group released their fifth album in 2023 and have been semi-active performing live.
The Long Ryders’ latest record,…

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After nearly four decades together, German experimental icons The Notwist have just released their most mature album to date. This isn’t a sneaky way of implying they’re starting, nor a suggestion that they hadn’t already reached full artistic maturity long ago, only recognition that, in a vast catalog spanning growling grunge to synth-splashed pop, News from Planet Zombie contains the most reflective material they’ve ever recorded. Their original sound, developed in the early ’90s, represented the Teutonic equivalent of Seattle grunge. With brothers Markus and Micha Acher still at the helm, News from Planet Zombie is a far cry from those days, but this is no random mutation, merely the natural end result of an evolution that’s unfolded organically,…

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Every once in a while, you get the chance to hear an album that refuses to meet your expectations of what music should sound like, not because the band or artist is pushing boundaries, but because the culture that informed the record is completely different from the one you were born into.
Hoggar, the tenth studio record from the Tuareg band, Tinariwen, is just such an album. It’s hard to imagine a culture more different from the United States than that of the Tuareg, a nomadic people group that inhabits parts of the Sahara Desert in Mali, Algeria, Libya, and Niger. Tinariwen came of age musically amid rebellions and political unrest.
But for over three decades, Tinariwen has been active on the world music scene with a successful career playing a style of music that…

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Modular synthesizers aren’t just instruments. They can be a way of life, with practitioners getting deeper into the circuits, erecting walls of patch bays and cords, and transforming them anew each time they plug another module into the rack.
Thomas Ankersmit plays a Serge, which was originally devised in the early 1970s by CalArts professor Serge Tcherepnin. It’s the way to go if you want to make music out of imagination and electricity.
But for Ankersmit, a Dutchman who lives in Berlin, the gear is never an end in itself. When he first came on the scene a quarter century ago as a young associate of Phill Niblock and Kevin Drumm, he toted a saxophone, which he used to blast long notes at the walls. The sound of…

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Just weeks before unveiling their highly anticipated third studio album, Getting Killed, New York City’s Geese take the stage at The Blue Room at Third Man Records in Nashville to debut the record in full. Recorded live, direct-to-acetate, the performance captures the band’s raw intensity and the electricity of a sold-out crowd hanging on every note, bottling the urgency and excitement surrounding one of the most talked-about bands of the moment.
What makes Geese compelling live is their ability to simultaneously feel tight and sprawling. Songs move with the precision of a disciplined ensemble, yet there’s always room for chaos and spontaneity—moments that suggest the band is discovering themselves as much as the audience is discovering them. It’s a paradoxical energy…

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It took some time before Motorpsycho and Theo Buhara found each other again.
The Italian director first collaborated with the Hans Magnus “Snah” Ryan/Bent Sæther nucleus to score neo-Western “The Tussler” back in ’94. Why he chased young bucks notorious for feral stalkers with bass quakes dense enough to kill elephants from the inside (that “How Was I to Know,” son, yow) is anyone’s guess.
But it worked. The assignment seemed to center them. Off went the fuzzbox for a C&W kick some yonks before the Supersuckers or Ween’s attempts.
Thirty years later, the band’s still around, older, seasoned, refined. Buhara’s with us, too: at 74, a fistful of hourglass dust examining his legacy in countdown. Of course, he’s achieved more…

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In 1974, Phaedra redefined the landscape of electronic music. What began as an experimental session at Richard Branson’s Manor Studios in Oxfordshire became a seismic event in modern sound.
Using the Moog sequencer for the first time, Tangerine Dream – then comprised of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann – crafted an album brimming with innovation, mystery and discovery.
Half a century later, Tangerine Dream performed the landmark album at London’s Barbican, reimagining it for a new era.
50 Years of Phaedra: At The Barbican captures a transcendent live performance, in which the current line-up – Thorsten Quaeschning…

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