Joachim Kühn has no interest in looking back. At over 80, he is more driven, productive, and fearless than ever—composing and improvising daily in a restless pursuit of freedom, growth, and renewal. On Joachim Kühn & Young Lions, this lifelong refusal to stagnate takes vibrant new form as Kühn surrounds himself with a new generation of outstanding musicians, writing fresh material specifically to challenge and inspire them. The result is music of striking intensity and openness, where experience meets youthful fire, structure dissolves into risk, and individuality fuels collective power. Young Lions is not a celebration of legacy, but a statement of the present: jazz as a living, forward-moving force, and Joachim Kühn as one of its most uncompromising voices.
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Since 2019, The Reds, Pinks & Purples has served as Glenn Donaldson’s primary outlet for mulling over fears and insecurities to the tune of ’80s college rock. It’s the most personal and renowned of the thirty-odd aliases and bands he’s worked on in his prolific career, initially envisioned as a means of turning his long, ambling walks around San Francisco into songs, with trains of thought sharpening into angsty, deadpan verses.
His tenth album under the moniker is Acknowledge Kindness (2026), and he puts extra emphasis on the instrumentals: It’s the most atmospheric and detailed Reds, Pinks & Purples record to date, weaving influences from alt-country and 4AD goth rock.
…It’s hard to believe just how much music…
Electronic dance music and the church might seem like unlikely bedfellows, when in fact they are not. Both share a sense of reaching the divine, of collective worship, of mantra and sacred rites. DJs, like the clergy, aren’t the focal point but the messengers, bringing the congregations The Word from on high. You’ll hear “take me higher” on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Diamond Cutter, the new album from Eve Maret, doesn’t interrogate faith in an overt way, but the trappings of faith offer a framework for understanding why it is electronic music of the highest order.
Maret, an electronic musician based out of Nashville, was raised as Christian, went to Mass three times a week, and has spoken of the “feeling of transcendence” she got from…
Fans of the darker side of modern musical forms, particularly Swans, have Jarboe somewhere in their minds and surely in their music collections. As a solo artist, Jarboe has made a series of career-defining recordings, 15 in all, before Sightings, her latest. Yet, it took her some eight years between The Cut of the Warrior (2018) and her latest offering, so what is there to expect?
Well, the musical direction is the one Jarboe followed from the beginning of her career, and in that respect, there’s nothing new to report. Yet, what did change is that the quality of her songwriting and performance has grown for the better as time passes. There is a sort of assurance that comes along with experience that exudes here, with practically no lapses in…
The music of Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński and Slovenian multi-instrumentalist Iztok Koren (Širom) finds its fullest expression as a practice of attentive, high-resolution listening. In a world of overstimulation, Nocturnal Consolations operates through a logic of reduction. Intensification emerges at the point of sharpening. Every gesture, every vibration of a string, every resonant surface exists in suspension. Meanings arise only through the relations between sounds.
The idiom developed by Rogiński reaches an almost crystalline form here, best exemplified in ‘The Spirit Is Becoming a Desert’. His playing has long oscillated between reconstruction and erosion, drawing on traditions (Jewish nigunim, Middle Eastern music, and broadly…
Any contemporary composer would thrill at the prospect of having pianist Emily Manzo as an interpreter. She’s performed as an ensemble member in the Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner and other forward-thinking companies but is also a composer who’s written film scores and operas. As a new music advocate, she’s premiered works by John Luther Adams and Angélica Negrón and also played pieces by Anton Webern and Chopin. As a singer and pianist, Manzo’s recordings have appeared on Tzadik, New Amsterdam Records, Klangbad, and other labels.
Time in Water presents solo piano works composed by her long-time collaborators Mary Halvorson and Aaron Siegel. Halvorson, with whom Manzo has worked in various capacities…
It’s simple enough to account for the cutthroat kind of gravitas at the forefront of Consuelo, the sophomore release from experimental Catalan duo Los Sara Fontán. Like most of us, violinist Sara Fontán and percussionist Edi Pou are fed up with many of the phenomena that shape our small world: rising authoritarianism, the worsening climate crisis, the slow and fast violence borne of technocapitalism, war, genocide, and the rest. Accordingly, they have a lot to say about Consuelo, an album remarkable for the messages it conveys through the aural construction of intensely evocative soundscapes that feature not a single spoken word.
The sonic does not stand alone on Consuelo, to be sure. Fontán and Pou make their…
Caleb Wheeler Curtis, the insightful saxophonist and composer who impressed with Heat Map (2022) and The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery (2024), returns with Ritual, a new album of originals performed with a strong collective spirit and pronounced individuality. Focusing primarily on the stritch — a straight alto saxophone associated with Rahsaan Roland Kirk — Curtis is joined by rising guitarist Emmanuel Michael, bassist Vicente Archer, and drummer Michael Sarin. Cuban saxophonist and flutist Hery Paz contributes compelling lines on six tracks, while pianist Orrin Evans appears on four.
The powerful emotional arc of “Fantasmas”, a searching invocation of ancestry, opens the album with an open-ended bass-and-drums…
Sylvie Courvoisier has never been easy to pin down, which is exactly the point. The Lausanne-born pianist moved to New York City in 1998 and spent the next two-plus decades making herself indispensable to the downtown avant-garde, working alongside John Zorn, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, and Mark Feldman, among others. She received the Swiss Grand Prix Music and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award in 2025, recognition that felt overdue rather than surprising. Her long-running piano trio with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen has been one of jazz’s most formidable units for years. Éclats: Live in Europe, recorded during a February 2025 tour, makes a strong case that the group has never sounded better.
Los Angeles power-pop specialists The Pretty Flowers are back with a grand return, and there is a reinforced edge to the melodic pop sound that marks Never Felt Bitter as the group’s transition into exceptional new territory.
The opening salvo of “Thief of Time” and “To Be So Cool” set the picture out for what this group are all about, both tracks are a complete bolt from the blue, endless ringing guitar and the drumming from Sean Johnson is absolute perfection, who keeps the entire album searing forward in a relentless pace. Never Felt Bitter marks the group’s debut on Forge Again Records and was written in the aftermath of guitarist and vocalist Noah Green’s change of surroundings, making the switch from the bright lights of Los Angeles to…
Doing This for Love is an album blessed with one of those artfully considered covers that visually informs the precise experience from which these songs have risen. What at first glance looks like an indistinct melange of colours reveals, after a lingering glare, to be the sight of over-congested traffic, headlights on before sunrise, rain hitting the windscreen as the working masses advance on another long, exhausting day.
As Kris Drever himself has stated ahead of the record’s release. “These ten songs are mediations on the unglamourous 4am alarm clocks, ungrateful shifts, the quiet sacrifices made for love.” That alone should illustrate the extent to which Kris has evolved artistically over the years, no more limited to the inherited, traditional…
…DIX describe themselves as a roots band with a folky heart and a generous dose of melancholic americana. The band was formed by childhood friends from the Dutch region of Land van Maas en Waal: Erik van Oijen (vocals, guitar, mandolin), Johnny Ariëns (bass), Bart Versteegh (drums, accordion), and guitar virtuoso Ray van Haalen (guitar, banjo). Having been formed around 25 years ago, it took a while before their debut album, Sayonara (2010), appeared. This was followed by For Love (2013).
The foundations for this, their third album, were recorded back in 2019. However, circumstances, including the COVID pandemic and the passing of producer and close band friend Louis Bos, delayed its completion. The band states…
Bluesman? Americana singer/songwriter? Soulful roots-rocker? Check, check, and check. Peter Karp ticks all those boxes, and a few more, in a career that started over a quarter century ago (his self-released debut was in 2000) and has recently revved up substantially. Jersey Town, his 12th, is the fifth since 2017.
The disc’s title (he was born in the smaller city of Leonia) indicates how he was exposed to a wide variety of music through his formative years in New Jersey. He later acquired an affiliation for deep blues after moving to Enterprise, Alabama.
Those life experiences, and more, lend authenticity to his potpourri of styles effortlessly combined in this collection’s eleven songs. As the cover notes declare, “The sound is real,…
As listeners began to connect with her 2025 album Do It Afraid, Yaya Bey fell into a state of distress. She contemplated the commodification of Black grief, hers included, as well as the shorter lifespans of Black artists and the way their work receives overdue recognition after death. Her mind also remained freighted with anger and frustration over losses to Black communality, whether caused by gentrification or exacerbated by online infighting, aka diaspora wars (with white-owned social media platforms as the battlefields). While Bey might have been spiraling, her creative upswing continues with this close companion to Do It Afraid. Every bit as sure-footed and stimulating, the purposefully titled Fidelity is another invigorating modern synthesis of Black musical innovations.
Active as a DJ since 2015, Colombian-raised, Mexican-based DJ Rosa Pistola has big credits to her name — performances at MoMA PS1, Glastonbury, Sonar, and Primavera Sound, among others, along with credits as an executive producer for music documentaries for NTS and Resident Advisor. A key figure in bringing the rhythms of Latin America’s underground to global stages, she has yet to make a bad record.
Perhaps aided by her background in experimental and noise music, Rosa Pistola often pushes the boundaries of club music, incorporating niche genres and fostering collaborations with underground musicians, resulting in fantastic hybrids like the reggaeton-meets-Mobb-Deep Tributo a la Mulata, the cumbia…
Gamelan has long been a fascination for the headier end of the electronic world, whether it’s Plaid asking a 26-person Balinese ensemble to open for them at Le Poisson Rouge, Aphex Twin emulating the genre in his more acoustic experiments, or Björk using it as a template to create her own customized instruments. The two forms make a surprisingly logical pair: Both dance music and the ancient Indonesian style are based around repetition, exploring the gradually evolving frictions in rhythm and melody that can suck the listener into a state of hypnosis. It’s not that it’s a brand new concept for the Russian producer Hoavi to incorporate gamelan into his music, as he does on his latest album; rather, it’s the way he subsumes the style into his very logic that feels…
Cosmic American Music is the debut of Tabasco Birds, an eight-piece from North Texas. Six of the eight members attended Dallas Art High School, and all are now students at the University of North Texas. They say that they “channel the Cosmic American sound of Gram Parsons”, and you can see what they mean, but actually their music is livelier, more varied and rougher around the edges than Parsons’. This is a good thing, as the contributions from the eight members on different instruments mean that there is originality and freshness to their work.
They are closer to the rural, almost hillbilly country of Noahjohn. As you listen, you can imagine the songs being played to an appreciative audience, having great fun dancing in a barn…
Being a singer-songwriter from Los Angeles will always draw comparisons with the early to mid-’70s, when the so-called golden age of California Sound ruled, well, the airwaves then. In the days of streaming the newer generations, one might not be sure what that means, but with his second album Cherry Picker, L.A. singer-songwriter Spencer Hoffman just might give them a very good hint what that sound can offer when it is both thoughtfully and carefully done.
What that would mean is have an individual, but at the same time a diversified sound that doesn’t simply stick to possible set formulas, even if there is inspiration from greats of the sound that are well-known (Jackson Browne) or not so well known (David Ackles).
Country music used to be full of formulas that begged to be broken, and for a while now Americana and alternative country artists did a great job in doing so. Joining those ranks is Edmonton-based Métis artist, Kaeley Jade, who already made a mark with her debut album Turpentine, for which she won a Canadian Folk Music Award back in 2024 for Indigenous Songwriter of the Year.
Now Jade is back with The Great Unknown, confirming that she just might be the alt country artist to watch out for. As with her debut, two things set Jade apart here – her incredible vocal talent and some good to excellent songwriting which shine throughout the album. At the same time, Jade and her production…
Even on the first 30 seconds of Prism Shores’s debut EP the Montreal quartet’s preternatural gift for great guitar jangle is apparent. It’s all there: Crisply arpeggiated chords played with hints of echo and distortion, plus a heaping helping of melancholy — catchy, comforting, a cozy jacket with its collar upturned on an overcast day.
Thirty seconds does not a catalog make, of course, and Prism Shores have been gently pushing their sound outward ever since. Their debut full-length, 2022’s Inside My Diving Bell, added a bit of post-punk heft by turning up the rhythm section, while last year’s excellent Out from Underneath found the band building a sturdier wall of sound by bringing in additional voices, synths, and strings for texture, and some crunchy shoegaze swirl.