…Across western Algeria, the gasba, a reed flute central to Bedouin folk traditions and ceremonial music, continues to appear in new forms. Once associated primarily with saint festivals and trance rituals, its distinctive hypnotic sound now sits alongside the drum machines, synths and electronic textures of contemporary raï.
The recordings collected here come from Oran, the port city of Western Algeria widely regarded as the birthplace of raï. Before raï became an international pop phenomenon, its foundations were rooted in older Bedouin musical traditions from the surrounding countryside: gasba flute melodies, guellal drum rhythms, improvised folk poetry and songs performed at weddings, zerdas and informal gatherings. Many of the musical…
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Porchlight is Paige Anderson’s first release since becoming the sole frontperson of Two Runner, a folk duo which began life in 2020 when she met her former bandmate Emilie Rose. The duo toured extensively, both nationally and internationally, releasing their debut album, Modern Cowboy, in 2023. While Emilie stepped away from life on the road in 2025, she makes an appearance on Porchlight. The release also follows the end of a long-term romantic relationship and, so perhaps not surprisingly, the song themes encompass transition, loss, and journeys – both literal and personal – while also embracing the potential of a future as yet unknown. Despite dealing with the ambiguity of a new start, this is a fully assured sophomore release, built on songs…
…featuring two previously unreleased tracks recorded live in Nashville.
For 36 years and 14 albums, Texas songwriter James McMurtry has, in a sense, followed in his father’s footsteps, presenting his brand of country noir music as Larry McMurtry embraced literature in novels like “Lonesome Dove.” The Black Dog and the Wandering Boy is McMurtry’s second release on New West Records, coming four years after he pushed at the framework and notions of roots music with The Horse and the Hounds.
The new album features appearances by Sarah Jarosz, Charlie Sexton, Bonnie Whitmore, Bukka Allen, and others, as well as his familiar backing band with BettySoo on accordion & backing vocals, Cornbread on bass, Tim Holt on…
Lex Walton operates on the extremes of hope and despair; from the outside, it just seems like irony. She will reference cult director Vincent Gallo (as “Vinny Gallo”) and Owl City’s childlike 2009 hit “Fireflies” on the same EP. Her song titles, like “In This House, We Don’t Call the Cops; We Call Chosen Family” and “Preteen on Omegle Blues,” can be off-putting. Walton is prolific and, among a certain Brooklyn trans scene, ubiquitous — aside from appearing in lo-fi trans anthology series Castration Movie, she’s the bassist in Prairie Princess, and this summer, aided the band’s lead singer Emerson Borakove in staging Airy Foist at a Geese set. Her solo songs are anything from keyboard demos to 12-minute blown-out opuses. For Car Seat Headrest fans who…
The Tunnel of Love Express tour is marked by changes: the addition of a horn section for the first time on E Street since 1976 (save for a few dates in 1984 including August 19 and 20); the billing of Bruce Springsteen featuring the E Street Band; and where those seven musicians were positioned on stage. In retrospect, none seem material in terms of lasting impact.
Perhaps the most significant change in 1988 was Springsteen’s public embrace of adulthood and its inherent and often private complexities, explored so movingly on the tour’s namesake album, Tunnel of Love. Much of the yearning and pining romanticism found on Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and The River gave way to starker realizations (“When you’re alone…
Melbourne-born, Berlin-based singer-songwriter Ned Collette collaborated with some notable names on his last release, 2024’s Our Other History, including Dirty Three’s Jim White and Mick Turner, Leah Senior and The Necks’ Chris Abrahams. The collaborations continue on his new album, Mixed Light, with Senior and Abrahams once again, plus long-term band members Joe Talia (drums) and Ben Bourke (bass).
Collette is back on Melbourne label It Records, who put out 2018’s masterful Old Chestnut, after releasing Our Other History on Ryan Davis’s Sophomore Lounge. Mixed Light feels decidedly more coherent than its predecessor, moving adroitly between musical styles and coalescing into a deeply satisfying album.
…Lily Seabird’s third full-length, Lightspheres On Their Way, defies simple categorization. It’s the kind of record that breathes and moves to a rhythm all its own. It adopts a unique mythology (the idea of “lightspheres”), allows its songs to pick their own pain, and wonders and reckons in its own language and time about the deeply personal in a way that feels strikingly universal.
A warm, humming harmonium blows through opener “The Pulley,” soft-strummed guitars and Seabird’s searching voice are all that tether the skies to the ground. “Am I still allowed to pray / Even if I don’t believe anymore?” she asks on high. It’s the type of wonder that makes us poke at the stars as children; as adults, the questions have a way of following us back down…
Since Chapter Music’s inauspicious start as the musical spinoff of a Syd Barrett fanzine, the Australian label has had a knack for curating quirky, eclectic compilations. Their Can’t Stop It! series, initially released on CD during the ‘00s, is probably the most essential various artists project, tracing the roots of their label’s rugged, Antipodean sound back to the heyday of post-punk.
Cropping up concurrently with the abstract, splatter-y stylings of New York City’s mutant disco movement and England’s Factory Records, Melbourne’s Little Band Scene was carving out a new path for Australian art music. As its name suggests, the scene operated as a collective of loosely constructed bands that…
Thanks to Olivia Rodrigo’s wildly successful Daisy Chain Fields Music Festival last week, a new generation of fans is discovering Gen X alt-rock staples like The Breeders, Garbage, and Bikini Kill. On a much smaller scale (at least for now), Nashville’s Hannah Cole may be responsible for introducing Gen Z to the beauty of shoegaze bands like Ride and Lush.
On her debut LP, Switchbacks, she melds the swirling, fuzzed-out guitars of shoegaze and ’90s alt rock with sophisticated pop melodies that act as a Trojan horse for some powerful lyrics. The title track opens the album with screeching guitars and solid drumming, with Cole’s soft, measured voice fighting to be heard above the dissonance. The distorted, reverb-heavy guitar…
After releasing Ax Ox, an album born out of COVID-19 pandemic isolation as well as ongoing political struggle, stargazers Gnoomes downshifted to just the married duo of Sasha Piankov and Masha Piankova, and fled their native Russia for Slovenia. They recorded their next album, Losey, primarily at their new home, though former bandmate Pasha Fedoseev recorded some drum parts back in Perm, Russia. Perhaps it isn’t much of a surprise that Losey is the most electronic album they’ve made to date, as the duo incorporate more electro influences into their already heavily rhythmic and danceable sound.
“Foreign Agent” starts out hazily enough, with a steady beat and lush, trippy guitars, then plunges into a mind-fryingly distorted heavy…
The last few years have been a whirlwind for Glasgow’s corto.alto, aka Liam Shortall. From jamming with friends in his flat to a Mercury Prize nomination and worldwide tours, his rise as an artist in the UK jazz scene has been mesmeric.
Alongside long-term bandmates Graham Costello and Fergus McCreadie, corto.alto peaked with a few of these aforementioned accolades after releasing 2023’s Bad with Names. Now signed to the revered indie label Ninja Tune, their follow-up, SOME SMALL FORTUNE, faces more pressure than ever to meet expectations. Thankfully, Shortall lets the music do the talking.
Leading visually with its artwork collated from images from Shortall’s childhood, this collage-like approach is what binds together…
The Mystery is an album by Australian guitarist Tommy Emmanuel that was released in 2006. The album includes the track Gameshow Rag/Cannonball Rag which was nominated for Best Country Instrumental Performance at the 49th Annual Grammy Awards. The song won Instrumental of the Year at the 2007 Country Music Awards of Australia. This album has a peace and a gentleness that emanates throughout the compositions. The song titles offer some insight: Cowboy’s Dream, The Mystery, That’s the Spirit, Footprints, Keep it Simple. The record also features one of Emmanuel’s most popular original songs Lewis & Clark, and a very beautiful instrumental arrangement of the Billy Joel classic And So It Goes. In honor of the 20th Anniversary…
Jennifer Herrema’s Black Bananas return with Bad Bunch, the group’s first album since 2014’s Electric Brick Wall and Herrema’s first release since Royal Trux’s White Stuff (2019). Arriving via Fire Records, the album marks the long-awaited return of Herrema’s iconic vocals alongside longtime collaborators Brian McKinley and Kurt Midness.
From Royal Trux to RTX to Black Bananas, Jennifer Herrema’s work has never divided into separate phases so much as continued in motion. As Pitchfork observed, Black Bananas are an “alternate-universe RTX”, absorbing influences from synth-pop, hip-hop, French-touch house and dancehall into their own singular sound.
Originally formed over 20 years ago under the name RTX, Herrema, McKinley and Midness…
Three years on from the last Hollow Hand album, Max Kinghorn-Mills delivers a fully harmonious union of folk and indie pop on Wish Road South, his best to date. On 2023’s Your Own Adventure, Kinghorn-Mills described the process of creating and recording as an archetype of the virtues of the DIY ethic: “About just doing everything yourself and not needing to rely on anyone. That’s the one thing I love about doing this: no one has any answers for you, you are your own boss, and it’s Your Own Adventure”.
On Wish Road South, the fourth Hollow Hand album, Kinghorn-Mills has clearly been invigorated by witnessing the creative powers of his peers, whilst collaborating with the likes of Aoife Nessa Frances, serving as the house…
Led by songwriter Willem Smit, Amsterdam’s Personal Trainer established a versatile, visceral sound that draws from styles including introspective indie rock, piano pop, arty post-punk, Britpop, slacker rock, and more with their first two albums. For their third long-player, Smit and his band took a different approach to writing and recording, initially penning the songs on just an acoustic guitar, then later recording them live together in the studio, a first for the band. They titled the resulting 15-track album (12 songs and three short instrumentals) Human Assholes. Prior collaborator Casper van der Lans (the Homesick, Pip Blom) returned to produce.
The record opens with the horn fanfare “Marvin’s Curtain Up” before launching into…
Guava Girl Summer is so 2025. The era of the “Chaotic Princess” is now. So reads the gospel according to Marci, whose rhinestone-crusted new album Mask Lady and Late Night Girl flicks through the glossy pages of power pop and soft rock with quips about getting baked at sunrise, chatting on the landline, falling on your knees, and making the devil cry. Co-written and produced with her TOPS bandmate David Carriere, Marta Cikojevic’s second LP reprises the disco-speckled all-or-nothingness of 2022’s eponymous debut, serving up a platter of glittery hooks and golden grooves styled with unashamedly retro trimmings.
Marci sounds like the name of the hot next-door neighbor in a John Candy film, but on this semi-autobiographical record, the Montreal…
…Deluxe 2CD with additional 11 tracks.
God Bless the Band feels like an unexpected encounter with your younger self. Compiling tracks from across Courteeners’ career, the collection revisits a period when British indie was less a musical category than a social world, sticky floors, packed festivals, late trains home and the optimism of believing the next weekend might be the best one yet. The nostalgia here is not simply for the music, but for the atmosphere that surrounded it. That sense of time passing gives the collection its weight. Early favourites sit alongside later material, charting how Courteeners have gradually moved from the rawer energy of their beginnings towards something broader and more polished. “Modern Love” still has that…
If there ever was a name ambient/drone artists fans hold dear to their hearts, then it would be long-standing duo that goes under the name of Windy & Carl.
The reasons for that is that the ambient/drone musical sphere has rarely had a band/artist (in this case a duo) that tries to make distinct connections to the natural world while investing a hefty dose of emotional content along the way.
Not with an official release since 2020 (Allegiance & Conviction), here the duo combine with another duo that go under the name of Optigan Conservatory, making the title of this collaborative album Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory a bit of a misnomer – the four musicians have been longtime friends. At the same time, ‘the meet’…