This is Independent Project Records’ own take on digging deep and unearthing revelatory treasures from its 45-year history. A trip through the past, present and future of a label that since 1980 has made the most prominent part of its name, that resounding “Independent”, not a trendy epithet but a mission. This two-album compilation is an invite to join the dots and find out what makes Afterimage – the early ’80s band the Los Angeles Times once called “LA’s own Joy Division” – and Alison Clancy – the artist making ethereal ambient dream pop in the basement of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, where she works as a dancer – kindred spirits. You’re invited to find similarities in the way The Ophelias reclaimed San Francisco’s unfettered psychedelic rock roots…
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The Smith Street Band, release their seventh studio album, Once I Was Wild, out via Pool House Records and Remote Control Records.
Recorded at the band’s own solar-powered Bush House Studios in regional Victoria, ‘Once I Was Wild’ sees The Smith Street Band in-studio with long-time live sound engineer Joel Taylor. The album was mixed by Anton Hagop (Silverchair, Powderfinger) and mastered by George Georgiadis (Gang of Youths, Alex Lahey).
Following singles This Is It and Star Child, today’s focus track Constellation captures the emotional shift that inspired much of lead singer Wil Wagner’s writing across the album.
“Constellation is a song about a lot of things. It started with the line about sleeping…
The Raspberries blazed briefly but brightly.
When Eric Carmen and Wally Bryson of Cyrus Eyrie teamed up with Jim Bonfanti and Dave Smalley of The Choir, the result was pure bliss. The Raspberries emerged from the ashes from the two bands, and over the course of four albums originally released between 1972 and 1974 – three with the original line-up, and one with just Carmen and Bryson joined by new members Michael McBride and Scott McCarl – they came to define power pop. Despite placing just one Top 5 single in the U.S. and two more Top 20s, The Raspberries’ influence has happily endured for decades, inspiring countless other groups and setting a joyful standard for impeccably crafted rock with big melodies, crisp guitars, youthful…
Self-described “indie groove” outfit Goose employs a dynamic, genre-blending sound rooted in American traditional rock, jazz, funk, folk, and progressive rock. Drawing inspiration from jam band legends like Phish, Grateful Dead, and Umphrey’s McGee, the band quickly rose through the ranks of the scene, maintaining a prolific live performance schedule and releasing a steady stream of concert albums (2024’s Live at the Greek Theater) and studio efforts (Shenanigans Nite Club (2021), Dripfield (2022), and Chain Yer Dragon (2025).
On June 28, 2025, Goose made their debut at the world’s most famous arena, Madison Square Garden, with a sold-out performance exceeding four hours. This limited-edition box set…
…Following last year’s set 1976 – chronicling the breakthrough albums Jailbreak and Johnny the Fox – the Irish band release ’74-’75, a deep dive into Nightlife and Fighting. The 7CD box set chronicles the making of those two seminal albums which were the first to feature the “classic” quartet line-up with guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson joining frontman/bassist Phil Lynott and drummer Brian Downey.
Nightlife came first in 1974, produced by Lynott and Ron Nevison, whose credits would grow to encompass albums by Ozzy Osbourne, Jefferson Starship, Survivor, Heart, Chicago, KISS, and other marquee artists with a big sound. Nevison helped the band bring out the innate soul in its hard-rocking songs, finding the subtleties…
Loula Yorke’s Hydrology is an effortlessly flowing universe of modular synthesis. Deeply rooted in the essence of water as a starting point, the six pieces on the album explore fluidity in different forms and atmospheres, always true to Yorke’s unique and personal live expressive canvas.
From the circular mantra of the opener “SICL,” we are smoothly and progressively spiraling from the outer limits of the album towards the denser compositional artery of “Gleam” where whispering and at times manipulated voices form a backdrop for the tonal fluctuations of the repetitive synthesizers that zoom in and out like watery particles gleaming in the dark.
The reverberant and spacious production of the album allows for a clean and transparent…
The opening track ‘Invisible’ begins with a dramatic 25-second slice of a cappella, as a cavalcade of voices croon ‘hello out there, can you see me… I hope it’s not right, but I feel that I might be turning invisible’. Cheekily, it’s not actually a taster of what’s to come, although Spock’s Beard will do it again with even more vocal pyrotechnics, on ‘Afourthoughts’. As we ought to know after 33 years and, now, 14 albums, it’s hard to predict what they’re going to do in the next minute, let alone over a whole album.
Some of the basics remain on their first album since 2018’s relatively tentative Noise Floor. The Californians are still as complex as Yes – Going for the One era mostly, oddly enough – and they scatter harmonies like…
Nick Quan’s song “Heavensafe,” which runs big feelings through a bigger pedalboard, features a funny declaration: “I’ve turned to slop again.”
This past August, when the extraordinary guitarist released Warbrained, shoegaze might have been saying so, too. By then, its latest — and most puzzling — progeny was “cloud rock,” a budding vanguard that subverted its central extremes: numbness first, and noise, if at all, second. On record, Quan, a digi-rock savant who has toured with Slowdive, sounds groggy yet ridiculously technical, like a sleep-deprived Berklee student on a bender.
When a simplistic song, “life imitates life,” blew up on TikTok in 2023, they responded with a complex album, that year’s Stepdream,…
…includes four previously unreleased tracks.
Irish indie-folk outfit Kingfishr have really been making a mark for themselves since their formation in 2022. With a blend of traditional Irish folk and a more contemporary indie sound, the Limerick band have really marked themselves apart from the competition. Their debut LP – Halcyon – now releases to a sense of feverish anticipation. Does it live up to the hype of their previous releases? The answer is an emphatic yes.
‘Man On the Moon’, one of the group’s most recognisable tracks, packs a mighty punch with a soaring chorus. It’s sure to be a live favourite with its infectious energy and sets the tone for the album. ’21’ leans more into traditional Irish sounds, showing a softer side to Eddie Keogh’s…
Trinity, the third collaborative album between Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello, continues the pair’s patient, pliable musical explorations while marrying them with a unique collaborator — one per track — to map new territories.
Trinity presents five collaborations with acclaimed artists who work at the edges of sound and genre: Chris Abrahams (The Necks), improvising turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Brendan Canty (Fugazi, The Messthetics), multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late contemporary artist and lowercase musician Steve Roden. The results deepen the music’s immediacy and directness, while pushing it in directions neither English nor Vitiello could have foreseen.
…In English’s words, “this record’s surprise…
Narrated by Suzanne Vega and performed by Belgian orchestra ICTUS and vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale Gent, ‘Einstein on the Beach’ re-imagines Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s influential (and divisive) 1976 opera as a 200-minute “minimalistic sound-bath”.
“We had no idea it was an opera,” explained Glass in 2013 to The Guardian when Einstein on the Beach was revived for a run in Melbourne. “You could call the piece anything you wanted to, but the only place we could perform it was an opera house. People began to talk about it as an opera. It was a discovery for us as it was for everybody else.” The truth is that it was an experiment – a long-form collaboration that attempted to skewer perceptions of narrative, instrumentation…
Across a 40-minute drum-based suite, drummer and composer Sarathy Korwar reveals the transcendental nature of repetition as a thing of awe and beauty. Combining tablas, Southern Indian clay pot ghatams, drum kit, bells, xylophones, vocal drones and a Buchla Music Easel, Korwar unveils a morphing and organic investigation into rhythm itself. With previous work exploring identity, migration and futurism, Korwar is going back to basics on his latest release, There Is Beauty, There Already, showcasing the depths to which the drums can reach as instruments for ascension.
Korwar’s rhythmic layering is of particular note. With a clear debt to minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Korwar’s use of dense counterpoint is masterful, undulating…
Kim Wilson maintains two careers. He has been the one constant in the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the quartet that stormed out of Austin in the late ‘70s with Wilson as singer, harmonica player, and main songwriter and Jimmie Vaughan on guitar, and helped bring new energy to the blues.
The T-Birds’ start and their ascent through their “Tuff Enough” commercial apotheosis are chronicled in the excellent new eight-CD box set, The Jimmie Vaughan Years: Complete Studio Recordings 1978-89.
Wilson also keeps up a solo career, and that’s where he really seems to indulge his love of the blues. The new Slow Burn, the follow-up to 2020’s Grammy-nominated Take Me Back: The Bigtone Sessions, displays all the traits…
The 1980s were not a great time for Wreckless Eric. He had gained a certain recognition as part of Stiff Records’ roster of genial eccentrics on the basis of 1978’s Wreckless Eric and 1979’s The Wonderful World of Wreckless Eric. But after his third album, 1980’s Big Smash!, failed to bring him a larger audience, he parted ways with Stiff, and Eric was saddled with an image he felt was doing him more harm than good. At loose ends, he formed a group, Captains of Industry, which featured Mickey Gallagher and Norman Watt-Roy of Ian Dury’s Blockheads, and he was credited by his given name, Eric Goulden. They cut an album, 1985’s A Roomful of Monkeys, that was poorly received by the few people who heard it, and its failure put Eric’s career in neutral, as he relocated..
Implosion is a purely instrumental, collaborative album of cinematic, dystopian sounds from dubstepper and extreme electronica experimentalist the Bug and his pal Ghost Dubs. However, rather than working on the same tracks together, as could be implied, they have each applied their production know-how to alternate tunes on the two discs that make up this recording.
That isn’t to say that the sounds on Implosion swing from one flavour to another and back again. This is an album with a singular vision that is consistently eerie and sinister and has much in common with early 1990s ambient techno heads Sun Electric and the Sabres of Paradise, as well as Kevin Richard Martin’s (the Bug’s given name) alternative film soundtrack…
Strings swirl. A flute drifts like a bird floating on warm air. The melody is subdued, its tonality evoking The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please, Let me Get What I Want.” A wistful, French-accented voice sings “I’ve always been so cruel, Hard on myself, You say I’m just a fool, Trying to be somebody else.” Mood set with opening track “Bluer Than Blue,” How and Why subsequently showcases nine more similarly moody, acoustic-centred songs.
The dreamy, slightly husky, voice is recognisable. Since 2003, Mélanie Pain has been a main vocalist with France’s Nouvelle Vague, Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux’s endeavour dedicated to recording and performing archly bossa nova-esque, acoustic-framed versions of songs from the new-wave and new-pop eras.
Los Angeles electronic duo The Hellp are often characterized as “indie sleaze,” but Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have said they’d prefer for you to think of their music as “American” — not in the sense of jingoistic nationalism or dudebro country rock, but in the sense of “America” as a place of constant reinvention. You can spot this appetite for remix in the band’s no-holds-barred approach to genre looting: a smattering of crunchy Justice electronica here, a sing-along pop-rock Phoenix chorus there; throw in some dark and droning Salem production, glitchy Crystal Castles beats, and, hell, why not some Strokes-y guitar riffs while we’re at it.
On last year’s LL and the 2021 compilation Vol. 1, this reappropriation of post-punk,…
Kai Slater is obsessed with the past. For those of us who share his interests, that’s working out splendidly. Slater, a 21-year-old Chicago singer-songwriter, first gained renown as a member of Lifeguard, a trio whose noisy, melodic post-punk songs turn ’70s and ’80s classics into rocket fuel. He dresses like a mod dandy and publishes a handmade zine titled for NEU!’s krautrock classic “Hallogallo.” It’s not just that he devours the stylistic palette of the 20th century underground; he’s also keeping the flame for its DIY ethos, gritty and grounded in community.
Some of the leading figures from that world have taken notice. Lifeguard signed to Matador Records, one of the current indie landscape’s most direct links back to the years before…