It’s probably no accident that Weird Nightmare is releasing its sophomore album, Hoopla, on May 1st via Sub Pop. If ever there was a record primed and ready to inhabit the experiences of a carefree summer (ideally the one after your senior year of high school), it’s this one. Even if your summer is full of life’s painful realities, like funerals or the consequences of tax evasion, Hoopla may yet be the album on repeat wherever you listen to it.
Weird Nightmare is the solo project of Canadian musician Alex Edkins, guitarist and singer of the noise rock trio Metz, which is on an indefinite hiatus. Drop in on almost any point of any of the five studio albums Metz has released on the Sub Pop label since 2012, and you will hear a nearly exact antithesis of what…
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White Flowers, the long-running collaboration between Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, exists within what they call “the realm” – a shared creative space, wherein time, rather than being a restrictive force, is fluid and boundless, and music exists as an endless conversation with their past and present selves. Adopting what the band describe as a “sketchbook” approach to writing, White Flowers is the product of a decade’s worth of recordings – snippets nestled away on hard drives, only to truly make sense years later.
On Dreams For Somebody Else, the Preston duo expand upon the dark-hued dream pop of their debut, channelling the catharsis of dance music via repetitive structures and “sad, euphoric sounds”. Working alongside…
…Since reuniting in 2014 after a decade-plus dormancy, American Football hasn’t simply returned to its past. It has moved forward in parallel with its audience, writing music that reflects the disorientation, compromise, grief and hard-won perspective of middle age.
Its fourth self-titled album (LP4) is the clearest and most satisfying expression of that evolution yet. It’s simultaneously the band’s darkest and most playful, its most complex and — paradoxically — its most generous. Throughout, LP4 stares matter-of-factly at despair while refusing the comforts of melodrama or easy resolution.
…Their biggest swings are front-loaded on LP4, and they are also the biggest wins. The first two tracks channel the grand melancholy of…
Fans of the Black Keys in their earliest incarnation shook their heads in wonder as the flailing, wild-eyed garage-blues duo they’d come to adore became one of the biggest bands of the 2010s. 2011’s El Camino and 2012’s Brothers offered an unexpectedly streamlined, irresistibly catchy update on their blues-rock template, with smash singles ‘Lonely Boy’, ‘Gold On the Ceiling’ and ‘Tighten Up’ proving that modern, chart-friendly R&B was a game that could be played with guitars.
But staying on the pop radar is never easy. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Pat Carney looked uncomfortable in the glare, and the effort of maintaining popularity appeared to impact on the records – as on 2019’s airless Let’s Rock. The slick title track of 2025’s No Rain, No Flowers…
Hiss Golden Messenger’s I’m People is the aural equivalent of comfort food. It’s warm, goes down easy, is simple at the core, and hits many of the right spots. The title alone suggests a universality, the common rhythms of life, the pendulum of emotions, and connection. As you likely know, Hiss Golden Messenger is the moniker for North Carolina singer-songwriter MC Taylor. Taylor penned these songs in a farmhouse on the edge of a bay in California, at his home in the North Carolina Piedmont, and in a motel room in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Taylor was searching for inspiration, an elusive kind of magic, but instead found himself writing about running toward and away from things, about realistic expectations and slivers of hope in these trying times,…
The octogenarian roots master and national treasure, Taj Mahal, is still going strong. He has a 22-date tour planned for the Spring and Summer, backed by his three-decade collaborators, The Phantom Blues Band (PBB). Surprisingly, they have a ‘new’ record to tour behind. Most of us thought this partnership reached its peak with the back-to-back Grammy wins for 1997’s Senor Blues and 2000’s Shoutin’ in Key. Since then, The Phantom Blues Band has released their own records, but not with Taj, the most recent being 2020’s Still Cookin’. So, we have a resurrection of this partnership, apparently by unearthing the 2010 recording, unreleased until now, Time. Given that some of the music on the record was composed seventy or eighty years ago, as has been…
It was clear from the opening moments of Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams” concert that the Boss had a few things to say about President Donald Trump and the state of the nation. In a dramatic flash of patriotic red light, he strode onto the stage in his best proletariat preacher mode and addressed his flock.
“The mighty E Street Band is here tonight to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll in dangerous times,” he proclaimed during a tour stop at San Francisco’s Chase Center on Monday, April 13. “The America that I love — the America I have written about for 50 years that has been a beacon of hope and liberty around the world — is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless and…
California sounds revival? Not called as such yet, but that line leading from The Beach Boys and Buffalo Springfield through the ‘70s scene seems to be being revived and modernized by the likes of The Lemon Twigs and a number of other artists. Judging by Entropy, its new album, San Diego trio Foxtide should definitely be included in any such revival list. You can add to that revived term modernized one, as Elijah Gibbins-Croft, Oey James, and Ian Robles, who comprise Foxtide have that modern touch to songwriting and production, as they filtered their digest of all sounds California through current concepts of pop/rock music. The key lies in an excellent songwriting that relies on that well-proven concept ‘let’s write and sing something that sounds like…
Make your first listen to Seismo a naive one. Don’t think about its makers, and the many excellent projects they have worked on. Don’t think about how exciting it is to hear a bold percussionist like Valentina Magaletti collaborate with a producer who can match her inventiveness and unrestricted approach to form and genre. Try not to think about PAN, the storied label backing it. If you can, forget Moin, Midori Takada, Steve Reich, Nicolas Jaar, Miles Davis, Shackleton, or any other past collaborator or influence you might hear flashes of within its eight songs. Don’t think of its backstory: how it formed out of a commission by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and what that setting might say about the music.
Just listen. It’s a record full of life, texture and…
Despite describing the piano in liner notes as a “non-malleable instrument” (something specialists in prepared techniques would presumably challenge) and “an instrument [he’s] been avoiding throughout [his] compositional career,” Ivan Vukosavljevic, a Serbian composer based in The Hague, has nevertheless created a mind in the heart, a solo piano collection produced in collaboration with Portuguese pianist Joana Gama. She’s issued recordings on a number of labels, including Room40 and Pianola, and presented music by Satie and, on Travels in My Homeland: Portuguese Piano Music (Grand Piano, 2019), composers from her homeland.
Inspirations came from three primary sources for a mind in the heart, the music from…
New York-based Japanese composer Miho Hazama, who has garnered accolades with her contemporary large ensemble m_unit, displays a maturity far beyond her years.
On Frames, the Grammy-nominated composer honors the legacy of the influential Danish Radio Big Band, crafting a new suite inspired by its musical directors, including Bob Brookmeyer, Thad Jones, Ray Pitts, Palle Mikkelborg, and the recently departed pianist Jim McNeely, to whom the album is dedicated.
The album opens with a sense of optimism and devotion to the music. “And The Door Unsealed” unveils cascading sonic layers in succession before settling into a mid-tempo, soulful flow. Driven by a warm swinging energy, the piece…
Jazz has long operated with something like an open-door policy, absorbing influences from classical, folk, rock, and beyond. Turkish-American composer Mehmet Ali Sanlikol extends that tradition in a particularly personal way on The Electric Oud Man Speaks and You Listen…, a five-track project that brings Turkish makam, jazz improvisation, and rock energy into a shared musical language.
Sanlıkol’s musical background reflects that synthesis. Raised in Istanbul by a classical pianist mother, he grew up surrounded by Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin before discovering jazz — a turning point that led him to study the music more deeply and eventually attend Berklee College of Music. Boston is now his home…
Adam Kyriakou’s Department is a one-man band in the style of Neil Hannon’s Divine Comedy and Matt Johnson’s The The; others may pass in and out, but Kyriakou steers the ship.
Audacity Files proves to be the maiden voyage for what should be an interesting and impressive career in sonic development. “Shadow Play” embodies the freneticism of the Lennon-McCartney opus “A Day in the Life”: brass, loops, and percussion lunging at the unsuspecting listener. Incidentally, “Shadow Play” is the longest tune on the record: despite pushing the boundaries of pop, Department wisely keeps the runtime to a palatable two-minute average.
Purportedly inspired by a voyage to his ancestral Macedonia, Department incorporates…
There’s just something timeless about Montreal. It carries a deep European history into a future rife with possibility, clear-eyed concern, and ever-expanding cultural diversity. These elements are among the building blocks used by the many recondite and stylistically adventurous artists the city produces — much like Atsuko Chiba, who present a sure-footed path through the perpetually shifting terrain they choose to walk through Montreal’s geography.
On their eponymous fourth full-length, the band immediately introduce their complications with “Retention,” a song that dares you to define genre, swapping new style elements in and out of its slow, twilight creep. Vocalist Karim Lakhdar’s rap-accented lyrics trace the boundaries…
To truly listen is not a passive gesture but a radical, embodied act of attention. Christina Vantzou’s The Reintegration of the Ear offers a slower presence: one rooted in care, intimacy, and reflection. Composed by the Greek-American composer between 2023 and 2025 after being commissioned by INA GRM as a multi-channel acousmatic work, The Reintegration of the Ear unfolds as a durational electroacoustic suite, meticulously arranged by Vantzou and performed with Irene Kurka (voice), John Also Bennett (flutes, synthesizers), Roman Hiele (double bass), and Oliver Coates (cello).
…Their play is fluid and instinctive, requiring each performer to listen to each other for small cues and inspired turns. Glissandos rise as waves crash against shores; the tides reflect…
Annea Lockwood was sitting on the shore of Flathead Lake in Montana with her partner, the composer Ruth Anderson. It was the summer of 1975, and it’d been a couple years since the two fell in love.
Lockwood was, among other things, enamored with the way Anderson’s music could make her feel “so at peace and so part of everything.” A similar phenomenon was happening here — she was soaking in the sounds around her, like the jet skis and motorboats in the distance. She was fascinated by the difference in speed between human activity and, say, a stone striking water, rippling outwards. “What if we could hear all those rhythms,” she wondered, “as one huge rhythm?”
At the heart of her sentiment is a certain…
nagoyaka na kaze / 和やかな風 – (quiet wind): a collection of forward-thinking electronic experiments sourced from central Japan – co-curated by Nagoya artist abentis for Facta & K-LONE’s Wisdom Teeth imprint. The project profiles a close-knit community of music makers operating in and around the Japanese city of Nagoya: one of the country’s most populous and industrial cities, but one all too often overlooked in terms of its cultural significance.
Curated in close collaboration with local scene organiser Yuya Abe – aka abentis – the record seeks to capture the creative energy of a community of artists making hard-to-define, future-facing electronic music away from the clamour of the bigger cities.
1. Caroline Polachek – Look at Me Now
2. Mike Polizze – Cheewawa
3. Royal Trux – Waterpark
4. King Kong – Scooba Dooba Diver
5. Steve Gunn – The Handshake
6. Red Red Meat – Gorshin
7. Oneohtrix Point Never – Krumville
8. The Halo Benders – Virginia Reel Around the Fountain
9. Jessica Pratt – World On a String
10. Kim Gordon – Dirty Tech
11. Viktor Vaughn – Vaudeville Villain
12. Stress Eater – Giving Back to the Universe
13. Sun Ra – Trying to Put the Blame On Me (Live)
14. Sunburned Hand of the Man – Nimbus
15. Kurt Vile – Constant Repeat
Having previously cast themselves as 19th-century American vagrants, Anglo-American duo Ben Parker and David Berkeley, aka Sons of Town Hall (named for a ’90s “junk raft” built by octogenarian nomad Poppa Neutrino to cross the Atlantic), present a new concept and fictional world on Of Ghosts and Gods. Here, Victorian-era explorers Josiah Chester Jones (Berkeley) and George Ulysses Brown (Parker) travel the world on a self-built, mythical raft. They are joined, musically at least, by Jordan Katz, variously on trumpet, flugelhorn, trombone and tuba, David Felberg, Elizabeth Young, Kimberly Fredenburgh and Dana Winogradhorns on strings, percussionist Mathias Kunzli, woodwinds by Elizabeth VanArsdel, Kevin Vigneau and Jesse Tatum, with Will Robertson…
“When I was faced with the challenge of writing and recording a new album, I had the choice to stay where I was comfortable, under the sage guidance of a producer or to step out into the dark and produce it myself. It became clear that if I was going to grow in the craft, I needed to become my own lighthouse. So I made the commitment to take on the Producer role. There were a lot of sleepless nights.
Writing Long Wave Home, though no less daunting, became a refuge for me—a place to explore interpersonal connections and the rise and fall of emotions that come with relationships. Writing an album can be very agitating, but it’s a discomfort I am comfortable with. What a gift it is to spend my time examining my inner world…