There are albums that demand your attention and others that seem to invite you to fall into them. Kingfisher, the new album from Northumbrian folk duo The Brothers Gillespie, belongs firmly in the latter category.
Brothers James and Sam Gillespie have created a collection of songs built around acoustic instruments, close harmonies and recurring images of rivers, woods, birds and changing seasons. The result is music that often feels almost meditative: less a collection of individual songs than a place to spend some time.
That atmosphere is established immediately on ‘The Worlds Unfold’. Rolling, plucked guitar sits beneath slightly ethereal harmonies before fiddle and the soft crash of a cymbal gradually…
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Scary movies usually end. Whatever has appeared at the window or risen from the grave is gone by the credits. The viewer always has the option to leave. Life offers no such sympathetic division. In her memoir Blue Light of the Screen, Claire Cronin wrote about the frightening images that follow us out of the cinema, finding their way into ordinary life. On 
Jonathan Personne is the solo alias of Jonathan Robert, a Montreal-based singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and frontman for Sub Pop band Corridor. His fifth album under the alias is a lovely sweet of dreamy psych-pop with Jonathan largely singing in French atop his warm, lush, welcoming arrangements.
Several months after 
The last time that ominous waves of synth, the sharp clack and echo of gate reverbed drums and a pervading sense of unease like this dominated the airwaves, the 1980s had just dawned. Joy Division had come to its unfortunate end, but New Order was just getting going. The more playful, but still doomy, Depeche Mode offered up a dance beat under the sounds of annihilation. And Margeret Thatcher has just begun her project of cutting the floor out from under working people’s feet, launching a brutal austerity campaign that made life desolate for ordinary Brits.
If I Let It Quiet is the fourth album by the Salt Lake City-based singer-songwriter 
Of all the parts that make up the creative process, time and effort seem most devalued today. This applies to many expressive outlets beyond music, whether the visual arts or written journalism; even furniture making and design put little stock in the learned skill of executing a refined style of carving or decorative embellishment in an age when speedy self-assembly is force-fed to anyone looking for new homeware. And it has absolutely impacted music, with the technology of the day facilitating quick recording and release far above any thought of the subtleties that can lift a record or sequence of songs to another level of deep listening experience. And it is this very same disease of quickfire disposability that 
Being cynical, feeling a bit jaded: it’s a common condition when it comes to a genre as well established as rock. So when someone tells you about a new band doing interesting things in a grungy, punk-pop vein, it can be all too easy to roll your eyes and assume that it’s all been done before, and better. But sometimes curiosity wins out, you press play, and a song like “GirlVsHeart” hits you full in the face with crashing drums and gleefully thrashing guitar. Instantly you’re hooked and lock into a record that turns out to be a stomping joyride of youthful angst and, along the way, offers up a few surprises.
Sometimes, a new album’s opening track shows you a band picking up right where they left off. In 2024, Philly indie rockers 
Somewhere in the middle of the Bone Bame touring cycle, 10LEC6 stopped being able to work. Nicole, the singer whose voice is the entire centre of the group, was served an OQTF, the French administrative order requiring a person to leave the country. The practical result was that the band could not honour festival bookings outside France. A Paris collective built almost entirely on movement, on diaspora, on rhythms carried between continents, was pinned to one territory by paperwork. It was Nicole who then told the others the legend of 
Future modal jazz dub, heard thru a Y2K lens by legendary blowers Pharaoh Sanders & Graham Haynes, and diffused in Bill Laswell’s illbient dub style & pattern. A slept-on, cross-generational ace sure to pique interest FFO Jon Hassell to Talvin Singh, Lászlo Hortobágyi to Material.
To some extent, a person is an entity made up of the things they have experienced. The same could be said of a band, and few bands embody this idea as succinctly as Good Habits. The core songwriting duo of Bonnie Schwarz (cello, vocals) and Pete Shaw (accordion, synths) first began recording together while stranded in New Zealand during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Given that 
Have you ever watched a band perform and known, without a doubt, that they were on the cusp of becoming far, far bigger than they are in the moment you’re seeing them? If you’re a regular concertgoer, you’ve known the feeling of watching bands perform that will never outgrow their enclosures, and you’ve also known what it feels like when one is about to have a growth spurt. In 2025, a year and a half after the release of We’re Starting to Look Like Each Other, the debut album of Atlanta emo-folk duo hey, nothing, they performed at Salt Lake City’s Kilby Block Party. Despite sharing a time slot with indie-rock legends Built to Spill, the teenage duo Tyler Mabry and Harlow Philips delivered a performance that put the minds of anyone who skipped out…
Martin Zeichnete is working as a sound editor in the DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft) animation department in Dresden but his mind is elsewhere. Like many young East Germans of the time he listens furtively to West German radio at night and becomes infatuated with the ‘Kosmische Musik’ drifting across the divide from his neighbouring country. Martin, a keen runner, hits upon the idea of using the repetitive, motorik beat of this new music as a training aid for athletes. He believes these pulsing, hypnotic rhythms will have a positive mental as well as physical effect if used correctly.