Engraving of Armor is the solo debut of Beck Zegans, an established member of New York’s indie scene with years of experience by this point both as a live sound engineer and guitarist. She’d been writing her own songs for some time but noticed her material taking on a heavier, more confrontational demeanor while holed up during COVID-19 shutdowns. When it came time to record some of these songs for her first album, she worked collaboratively with her band – synth player/bassist Alex MacKay (Nation of Language) and drummer Julian Fader (Remember Sports, Ava Luna) – who took turns building upon Zegans’ demos (guitar and drum loops) in their individual home studios. A fourth contributor on a couple tracks was guitarist El Kempner…
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Mirror Ball is a 1995 collaboration between Neil Young and members of Pearl Jam, released through Reprise Records during the height of the grunge era. Recorded largely live in the studio over a handful of sessions in Seattle, the album captures a loose, raw sound that blends Young’s songwriting with Pearl Jam’s dense guitar interplay and rhythm section.
The project grew out of Young’s friendship with the band following several live performances together in the early 1990s. Songs like “Song X,” “Downtown,” “I’m the Ocean,” and “Throw Your Hatred Down” reflect themes of conflict, idealism, and social tension, while the recordings retain an unpolished, spontaneous feel with audible studio chatter and extended jams throughout.
At some point over the more than 20 years that she has been performing and recording, Alela Diane quietly became an American treasure. Every time she releases a record, it feels like a gift, something tangible you can hold in your hands whenever you need a reminder that powerful music comes from actual humans playing real instruments. With the release of her new record, Who’s Keeping Time?, that gift is more poignant than ever.
Conceived in the wake of losing her friend and mentor, the legendary folk singer Michael Hurley, Diane nurtured this new set of songs from ideas to live recordings in the attic of her Victorian home in Portland, Oregon. Coinciding with that was her deepening need to reconnect with the town’s music community. She took guitar lessons…
Introducing a brand new series of ultra rare, vintage concert recordings from notorious NY rowdy punk rockers, Dead Boys, performing their best songs before a homegrown crowd! 2 shows, both recorded at the historic CBGBs club, both capturing one of the rowdiest, raucous musical acts to ever set foot on stage – and digitally remastered to capture all the gory, gruesome glory!
50 years ago this year, the placid seas of British and American rock were disturbed… if not destroyed… by a tsunami of sound arising from the streets of New York City and London. It wasn’t called punk rock yet… just a bunch of bands, disparate in nature and unique in sound, but seemingly bound together by a single common cause. Something must change. Everything must change.
Radhika Dade’s debut album is a dreamy delight that balances her lovely vocals against varied musical backing that’s exceedingly poppy, but not afraid to gently paint outside the lines. Cine-pop is a fine title for the album; she seeks to make each song a different mood and each could fit a different scene in a film. The lilting ballad “Feline Bandits” would be perfect for a melancholy seaside walk on a rainy day, “Starry Eyes” is a fine soundtrack for a swirling party scene, the jangling girl group inspired “Cocoa Butter Eyes” feels like a falling in and out (and back in) of love montage, and “Sleep” is just right for a scene where the lonely protagonist can’t sleep thanks to a nocturnal obsession. Dade’s voice is a fine vessel for the songs, coming across sweet…
Simon Joyner’s 2024 album Coyote Butterfly ranks among the most simultaneously beautiful and devastating documents of its kind, a painfully raw and autobiographical account of the untimely death of Joyner’s son Owen. Since the early ‘90s, Joyner has been one of independent music’s most authentically independent artists, and while his poetic songs have never shied away from difficult emotions, the depths of vulnerability and sorrow he found on Coyote Butterfly were even more searingly real than anything he’d made before. Even though the album focused on collecting the finite feelings of grief, it represented a place to honor these feelings rather than a capstone in Joyner’s life of work. Tough Love, Joyner’s 19th solo effort and his first since Coyote Butterfly…
“He has an energy to him like he’s floating,” Fratti said about Orcutt when she chucked his self-titled 2017 album, his first solo electric studio jaunt, on her Baker’s Dozen list for the Quietus. She’d stumbled over the record via a blog and immediately set about following the breadcrumb trail, picking through his blues deconstructions, free jazz side-quests and his early, formative work with Adris Hoyos as Harry Pussy, one of the USA’s greatest noise duos. What happened next isn’t completely clear, but Fratti and Orcutt began communicating and, at some point, Orcutt shuttled over a pack of improvised guitar solos that lit the touch paper for the next stage. At home in Mexico City, Fratti (alongside her partner and Titanic cohort I. La Católica) retreated…
The Deslondes are a five-piece group from New Orleans, Louisiana. The band splits up songwriting and lead vocal duties among its five members, continuing its democratic ethos and musical versatility.
Now, with their latest record, Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1, the band continues to build on their inventive take on New Orleans country and R&B by covering some of their favorite songs that have inspired their sound and love of music. Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1 finds the band covering select songs from artist such as Swamp Dogg, Johnny Cash, Pat Reedy and Hurricane Smith but Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1 is the sound of a band that understands the history of American music, while embracing their own contemporary approach.
Bruce Springsteen took the high road during his Sunday concert at Austin, Texas’ Moody Center, praying for President Trump in the wake of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting and exhorting fans to uphold American ideals such as honesty, compassion and humility after they went home. Then the Boss rocked the packed arena with such soul-stirring fervor that it would have been nearly impossible not to heed his call.
When Springsteen surprise-announced his current Land of Hopes and Dreams Tour in February, he made it clear he considers this trek nothing less than a battle for the soul of America. He threw himself into the charge on Sunday with the gusto that’s made him one of rock’s most gargantuan stars for the past half-century.
While their instrumentation and aesthetic may evoke parts of Appalachia and the rural South, North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband (MTS) are anything but a traditional folk group. Theirs is a different kind of rootedness, one indebted to the landscape they call home, but as attuned to its ecology and environmental contours as to its social history. Since making their label debut on Thrill Jockey in 2024, the duo of Courtney Werner (fiddle) and Evan Morgan (guitar/organ) has expanded to a trio, welcoming banjoist/bassist Mike DeVito into the band. There are no vocals, yet they manage to convey complex emotions through their strange, discordant music. Heavy Water, MTS’s second release for the label, is an emotional map of a place that was lost.
Mexican Institute of Sound’s Camilo Lara and Meridian Brothers’ Eblis Alvarez are two musicians who know how to take traditions and twist them up in modern ways, ending up with music that joyfully lives in a time and place of its own. A collaboration between the two looks on paper to be something of a dream and on record – 2026’s Ruido Tovar – it comes true in thrilling fashion.
The record is a tribute to – and deconstruction – of the Mexican cumbia stylings of legendary singer and band leader Rigo Tovar. In the 1970’s, he was the first to bring modern touches like Moog synths and electric guitars to the style and he became an outsized figure on the Mexican music scene. Lara and Alvarez pay homage to him the only way they know how, by turning…
PIG is Raymond Watts, a British musician whose brand of electronic rock is danceable and deadly serious in turn. Watts’s words spring from the well of gallows humour in a world of corruscating cruelty and truth. Pig climbs peaks and mines troughs, and musical genres slide and collide like tectonic plates.
In his past lives, Pig warlord Watts was known variously as Raymond Scaballero in Foetus, an icy addition to Psychic TV, a savage PA destroyer in Einsturzende Neubauten, and a founding catalyst of KMFDM. Watts began his arrest record in London, where he was most likely pissed off about something and doing sound manipulations, loops and live sound for Psychic TV. He soon crashed into Einsturzende Neubauten…
After two intense albums with freewheeling drummer Malcom Catto on board, Little Barrie turn down the heat on 2026’s Gravity Freeze. The pairing with Catto seemed to bring out something extra in guitarist Barry Cadogan and bassist Lewis Wharton, pushing them to the extremes of their sound. The funk got funkier, the edges got sharper, and the needle was continually buried in the red. Now with Catto pursuing other avenues and his replacement Tony Coote in place, the band pull back from the extremes to settle into a more contemplative, restrained sound. The trio spend most of the album dug deeply into low slung grooves that strut and swagger with well-earned confidence. Coote and Wharton sound so locked together it’s like they…
Paradessence spotlights the innate surrealism of Visible Cloaks shimmering, digital-powered exotica. Since 2014 the duo, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have forged a borderless space where echoes of globally dispersed music converge in a glimmering zone and the periphery between synthetic and otherwise is porous. Their albums bring to mind Yves Tanguy paintings, filled with impressions of familiar forms contained in unusual contours and doused in hyperreal sheen.
Visible Cloaks’ first full length since 2017’s Lex, Paradessence amplifies the portals and colourful intrusions generated by their crossing of streams. Opener ‘Apsis’ begins with slithers of synth that mutate between elegant brush strokes and serrated sequences. ‘Skylight’ begins in…
Between their 2021 debut full-length In This Town and 2025’s Whispers in the Speed Machine, Ohio band The Laughing Chimes moved from a shiny, jangly type of pop into slightly darker waters by adding a post-punk edge to their sound. Between these two albums, however, the band was working on new material that was a little closer to the sunny pop of their earlier work, demo’ing song ideas on cassette four-track.
Behind Your Blue Fields collects some of these lo-fi sketches from this in-between period, offering documentation of their development from the vantage point of insulated home recordings and exploring what it might have been like if these happier songs had been worked through to completion for their second album.
A band formed in London in the mid-2000s, The Early Years have garnered critical acclaim as well as a devoted fan base despite a release schedule that has brought albums in only 2006, 2016, and now in 2026. This acclaim can be explained not only by an intangible coolness but by their artful, experimental approach to music that has navigated and combined everything from raw proto-punk and Krautrock to space rock and the sophisticated artistry of post-1986 Talk Talk.
For their third album, Modern Moonlight, the four-piece looked to inspirations including John Cage and Steve Reich, Conny Plank and Georgio Moroder, David Byrne, Radiohead, and Brian Eno and David Bowie. The influence of the latter two is immediately apparent on opening track…
Since his last record, Ben Chapman got married and had a kid, so his perspective as a songwriter has naturally pivoted to his new role in the world. And while his music is still rooted in an inspired mix of country guitar picking and honky-tonk funk, lyrically, Feet On Fire travels into new territory for Chapman as he searches for stability after a life lived on the road. That new direction is laid out on the opening track, “Everything’s Different,” with an organ leading the way before Chapman’s deep, distinctive Southern drawl kicks in.
“Out in the Country” is a laid-back, delicately strummed ode to carefree living outside the city that would have fit nicely alongside any of the tracks on his first two records. Lyrically, it’s not treading any new ground,…
Thomas Dollbaum is a songwriter who values atmosphere above all else. His voice is loamy and deep, the dissipating smoke in a room right after you’ve blown out a candle, and it will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time with the road-trip elegies of Damien Jurado or the art-folk incantations of Richard Buckner. On his second album, Birds of Paradise, the Florida-born, Louisiana-based songwriter is accompanied by MJ Lenderman on drums, occasional guitar, and backing vocals, which helps Dollbaum’s rootsy, heartland rock feel part of a larger conversation in modern indie music, and his lyrics about “rambling through the pines” and “driving through the early morning” help it fit squarely into our most immediate associations with Americana as a genre and aesthetic.
Americans are increasingly finding themselves stuck behind slamming doors separating them from other cultures and ideas. Guitarist Marisa Anderson’s efforts to counter our current sociopolitical paradigm are all about underlining the crucial, often ignored difference between un-American and anti-American. The latter defines a hostile outsider or inside agitator, but the former simply identifies whatever lies outside our national experience. And as this project makes clear, that’s something to be sought after.
In 1952, Folkways Records released quirky artistic polymath Harry Smith’s incalculably influential Anthology of American Folk Music. The collection’s rare folk, gospel, blues, and country recordings revealed to America…
Bruce Springsteen brought his “Land of Hope and Dreams” rock and resistance tour to President Donald Trump’s backyard on April 23 with a plea to unite in “choosing hope over fear.”
In a preamble to the three-hour concert, held a day before Trump is to arrive in Palm Beach for his 26th visit this term, Springsteen asked attendees to pray for U.S. military personnel in harm’s way.
“The Boss” then launched into a scathing indictment of the president, who just this month called the Hall of Fame rocker and music legend a “total loser” and “not a talented guy.”
Springsteen blistered the second Trump administration as “corrupt, incompetent, racist, reckless” as the sold-out crowd drowned him out with boisterous cheers.