In 2023, London’s Far Out label issued Grupo Um‘s previously unreleased Starting Point (1975) to the delight of Brazilian jazz fans. Two years later they’re back with another. Nineteen Seventy Seven was completed with no hope of being released because, like its predecessor, it was suppressed by Brazil’s ruling military junta who controlled all forms of publicly distributed artistic expression. Grupo Um cut these six tracks in two days at Rogério Duprat’s Vice-Versa Studios in São Paulo. It was recorded sans overdubs. The tapes sat in keyboardist Lelo Nazario’s private vault for nearly 50 years. The trio — Nazario, bassist Zeca Assumpção, and drummer Zé Eduardo Nazario — enlisted saxophonist Roberto Sion and percussionist Carlinhos Gonçalves.
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Indigo is the third outing from groundbreaking Belgian trombonist, composer, and arranger Nabou Claerhout’s quartet, N∆BOU. It follows 2019’s Hubert EP, 2021’s You Know, and her time as artist in residence at the 2023 Brussels Jazz Festival. Here she unveils a new lineup with only one returning member, double bassist Trui Amerlinck. The new members are drummer Daniel Jonkers and electric guitarist Gijs Idema. The music, while indelibly yoked to her earlier works, is an evolution from her other recordings. Indigo showcases the composer as intuitively creative and vulnerable while her band forms a gauzy chrysalis around her. Unabashedly emotional, the album’s unique atmospheres offer nuanced and graceful beauty framed in improvisation and emotional honesty.
Vibraphonist Joel Ross imbues his jazz with spiritual passion on his heady fifth album, 2026’s Gospel Music. The follow-up to 2024’s Nublues, Gospel Music finds Ross drawing inspiration from his Christian faith; he grew up playing in a Baptist church where his father was choir director. Here, he crafts songs that explore Biblical themes of creation, the fall, and salvation, but with a focus on loving God and goodwill toward others. Lending him warm support is his Good Vibes sextet, featuring Josh Johnson on alto saxophone, Maria Grand on tenor saxophone, Jeremy Corren on piano, Kanoa Mendenhall on bass, and Jeremy Dutton on drums. While there are certainly actual gospel sounds at play in Ross’ music, he doesn’t abandon the atmospheric…
A common theme through The Soft Pink Truth’s records of the 2020s is music’s ability to build sanctuaries. As the world’s got harsher, SPT’s albums have got lusher.
2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, recorded during the first Trump presidency, saw the project, led by Matmos’s Drew Daniel, blur propulsive deep house into velvety minimal composition. 2022’s Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?, made during pandemic lockdown, is a glimmering electro-orchestral record played by a ‘fourteen-piece virtual disco band’. Latest album Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? meanwhile, is a suite of largely drum-less chamber music played on harps, pianos, acoustic guitar and strings.
Pop iconoclast A. G. Cook has been the spearhead of a shift in mainstream music throughout the past decade. His (now defunct) label, the seminal PC Music, disrupted the DNA of pop music, the first domino to fall in the emergence of dozens of internet micro-genres. The Moment (The Score) marks Cook’s first solo effort since 2024’s Britpop, a post-PC Music triple disc of shiny digitised, almost indie, tracks. That record came with a multiverse of characters, timelines, even online games and bonus downloads. Like with his time at the helm of PC, Cook is surgical and intrinsic, managing to construct and curate worlds even with the most dizzying or abrasive of material.
Scoring a film is the natural step forward for someone like Cook. It’s also a surgical and…
Ben Cook, the pilot behind the controls for Young Guv, now known as GUV, has never shied away from trying his hand at a musical style. Previous works found him digging into new wave, country rock, glam, chillwave, and most impressively power pop. No matter the style his unerring way with a melody, his note-prefect production skills, and overall way with a song has mean that every record he’s made has been well worth hearing, and even sometimes bordering on brilliant.
For 2026’s Warmer Than Gold Cook swerves into the sound of the U.K. guitar rock scene of the first half of the 1990s. Taking inspiration from the Stone Roses — most notably “Fool’s Gold” — along with My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, and other paragons of baggy, shoegaze,…
…Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime is Beck’s first compilation since 2000’s B-sides set Stray Cat Blues and features two previously unreleased recordings – solo acoustic covers of Hank Willams’ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and Daniel Johnston’s ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’.
The rest of the album is made up of covers, with the exception of a Beck original, the swoonsome ‘Ramona’ (from the soundtrack of Edgar Wright’s 2010 film Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). The title track – his take on The Korgis’ 1980 hit – was first released on the soundtrack of the 2004 Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has gone on to become among Beck’s most popular songs. The cover of Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’ originally featured…
“You put words to the song/I’ll keep singing after you’re gone” is a phrase that acknowledges the ephemeral fragility of life and art, while also tracing a continuing thread that links generation after generation of creativity. Songwriters may pass, musicians may lay down their instruments, but the force of human connection through music flows onward, disheveled and lovely through the years and decades and centuries.
A band of Irish brothers threads the needle between spare, contemporary songwriting and reeling traditional stomps. The two, Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn, alternate ruminative confessionals and Celtic barn-raisers, their songs etched with melancholy but also lit up from inside with the joy of communal music making.
Veteran troubadour Steve Poltz is the epitome of one who doesn’t take himself too seriously. It’s so refreshing. He describes his approach to making a record as “chaos, caffeine, and accidental poetry – art colliding with microphones and commerce in a glorious mess.” Inevitably, the resulting music makes us laugh, and, oddly, raises a few serious thoughts. Poltz has one of the happiest demeanors of any songwriter. Yet, Poltz is not to be underestimated. His observations on life’s details ring with sarcasm and underlying truth.
We find those qualities on his 14th solo album, JoyRide, recorded in East Nashville, and featuring co-writing with greats such as Gary Nicholson and Jim Lauderdale. Many of the tracks had the backing of Emmylou Harris’s Red Dirt Boys,…
Uncut readers may already be familiar with Barry Walker through his association with Ripley Johnson, for whom he serves as pedal steel guitarist in Rose City Band. Or perhaps his collaborative work alongside Patrick McDermott as country-folk duo North Americans, or else heading up experimental trio Mouth Painter, whose broad palette encompasses acid country, weird exotica and the odd freakout.
In 2021, extended solo piece “Shoulda Zenith” (from the album of the same name) fetched up on Uncut’s Sounds of The New West: Ambient Americana CD, placing Walker in roughly the same territory as Steve Gunn, Andrew Tuttle and Luke Schneider. And it’s here where Paleo Sol, the latest in a series of inquisitive solo…
The follow-up to Terrapath, the band’s debut album, Flare finds prog-, math, and jazz-rock-injected indie rockers Plantoid pushing their shape-shifting sound in even more directions. It was again produced by sometimes live member Nathan Ridley, who helped them both stretch their stylistic palette and settle down their tendency toward abrupt changes, instead staying with moods for a little while longer.
This has resulted in some lengthier track times, with four of the nine songs here passing the six-minute mark. It has also contributed to spacey, atmospheric entries like the daydreamy “Slow Moving,” whose elongated, sustain-suffused design doesn’t feel the need to burst into a more uptempo jam. A song like “The Weaver” is…
The ’90s revival is in full swing, and it’s in no small part thanks to Oasis. The Gallaghers’ long awaited reunion last summer was a huge success, and it was notable that their songs seemed to appeal across the generations. It was a regular sight at those gigs to see children born long after the group’s initial split, singing along word-perfect with their parents.
The gigs also served to introduce this new generation to Cast, who acted as support on the UK and Ireland leg of the Oasis tour. For those of us who remember the tail-end of Britpop, it’s curious to see John Power’s band undergoing a revival; while they had some decent songs such as ‘Fine Time’ and ‘Walkaway’, they never really seemed to seize the public imagination as…
British indie pop musician Lande Hekt dug deep into personal experiences for her first two efforts — 2021’s Going to Hell and 2022’s House Without a View — singing about childhood trauma, sobriety, and exploring her queer identity.
Working alongside producer Matthew Simms (Wire, It Hugs Back), she continues that mix of confessional songwriting and ethereal singing on Lucky Now, wrapped in swirling guitars and occasional distortion. The result is another powerful collection of songs, this time boasting a growing sense of comfort and confidence.
Press kit bios often namecheck bands that sound aspirational at best, but citing such disparate musical touchstones as The Sundays and The Replacements comes across as…
Between Whitelands‘ first and second albums, it evolved from an unfocused alt/indie solo project into a Slowdive-inspired shoegaze four-piece that landed on the Sonic Cathedral label. That second album, Night-Bound Eyes Are Blind to the Day, made new fans including Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, who toured with the group in 2024. Whitelands singer/guitarist Etienne Quartey-Papafio and band further develop their sound on third album Sunlight Echoes, which finds them taking their audioscapes in brighter, dream poppier directions on occasion while also expanding their swirling, hazier atmospheres. Quartey-Papafio’s lyrics remain sociopolitical in nature, as he bears witness to the genocide in Gaza on the buzzy, clattering, and angsty “Dark Horse,” and…
Some records are so forthright, so direct in their intent, that they become a challenge — maybe even a dare — to discuss in critical terms.
In the case of low clouds hang, this land is on fire, Bhutan-born Tashi Dorji‘s latest work for Drag City, this challenge becomes less about pinning down some sonic intangible, and more about the mere listening experience.
The LP is not concerned with subtlety; it’s presented as a meditation on openness and humanity in trying times. That intentionality is evident in Dorji’s freeform guitar improvisation, notable here for its absence of both textural sturm und drang and dissonance. Focus lies instead on tonal interplay, with special mention to “burn the throne” as a center point.
The A’s, The B’s and The Monkees, at long last, brings together on 2 CDs all of the band’s commercial singles originally released between 1966 and 1970, from “Last Train to Clarksville” b/w “Take a Giant Step” through “Oh My My” b/w “I Love You Better.”
The A’s from Messrs. Jones, Dolenz, Nesmith, and Tork include songs from Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Neil Diamond, John Stewart, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller: the chart-topping “Last Train to Clarksville,” “I’m a Believer,” and “Daydream Believer,” along with the hits “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” (No. 2), “Pleasant Valley Sunday” (No. 3), “Valleri” (No. 3), and “D.W. Washburn” (No. 19).
The B’s are no less filled with fan favorites…
One Moment in Time: Live in the USA is the logical extension of the process of refinement that Robin Trower has undertaken with his studio albums of recent years. Running roughly 77 minutes in duration on compact disc and a double LP vinyl set, fourteen tracks taken from two shows on a 2025 American tour allow the British guitar hero to do justice to a solo career begun in 1971 upon his departure from Procol Harum.
It is utterly pragmatic that Trower collaborates with some of the same individuals with whom he’s fashioned such finely-honed expressions of contemporary blues like last year’s Come and Find Me and No More Worlds to Conquer from three years prior. The recordings were mixed for maximum detail by Sam Winfield…
Canadian duo Softcult’s gorgeous debut album takes its title from the famous Alexander Den Heijer quote: “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” The idea of fearless change in pursuit of something better is a mission statement Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn know well. The twins spent more than a decade playing in pop–rock group Courage My Love, but walked away in 2020 after life on a major label got too stifling to continue.
Softcult arrived shortly after in 2021 with Another Bish, a spiky dream-pop anthem that saw the pair refusing to be tamed. Four grungy, Riot Grrl-influenced EPs followed alongside handmade zines, a close-knit online community and tours supporting Muse and Incubus.