The Pacific north-west of the USA has been called home by many giants of the blues, rock, and grunge scenes, but alongside these, there’s long been a fertile seam of indie folk and alt-country music. Fleet Foxes and Brandi Carlile hail from Seattle, and from Portland, there’s The Delines, The Decemberists and The Dandy Warhols, while in recent years you might spot Jerry Joseph or Patterson Hood in the local deli. Vegans and cyclists are welcome in this city, proud of its reputation for being weird. Some twenty years ago, this attracted several musicians from Anchorage, Alaska, who each separately found their way to Oregon before coming together as The Builders and The Butchers in 2005.
With the ramshackle acoustic folk-rock sound…
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There’s often a fine line between homage and pastiche, between influence and theft. And all too often, bands fall on the wrong side of that line. Not, however Middleman. The London-based four-piece, who formed just a few years ago, certainly don’t hide who and what their influences are, but rather than crafting a watered-down version of them, they use those influences as a foundation and stepping stone to bring them into now with youthful exuberance and energy.
Caught between power-pop and punk rock, Following the Ghost is the band’s debut LP, and comes off the back of two acclaimed EPs, December 2022’s ‘Cut Out the Middleman’, and 2024’s ‘John Dillinger Died for You’. Raucously unhinged yet simultaneously full of catchy hooks,…
It’s been seven years since we last had a solo album from Joseph Arthur. But it’s not as if the singer/songwriter, perhaps most famously known for his single “In the Sun” (featured prominently in the satirical teen comedy, Saved, about Christian fundamentalism starring Mandy Moore and Macaulay Culkin) hasn’t been busy. Quite the contrary, as Arthur gets set to release an ambitious three album project created and honed over a six year period.
You’re Not a Ghost Anymore will come out in three separate musical movements: Faith, Heart and Fight. Arthur describes the records as “states of being” written across “collapse, recovery and return”, as opposed to three separate musical genres.
Khruangbin did not know if they were actually making an album. All they knew in the first frigid days of 2025, as they shivered in the Central Texas barn where they’ve recorded almost all of their music, was that the 10th anniversary of their debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was steadily approaching. Months earlier, they’d bandied about ways to mark the occasion, debating orchestral arrangements or compendiums of bonus materials and alternate takes. Thing was, back before Khruangbin helped establish a new modern idiom of semi-instrumental and gently psychedelic American music, there had been no bonus material, no unused songs. And how interesting would alternate takes or symphonic extravagance really be for a band whose aesthetic-essential vibes…
Drummer Gregory Hutchinson, who consistently uses timbre and cymbal color to his advantage, embarks on an enjoyable and occasionally surprising program of tunes connected to and paying homage to the groundbreaking jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Hutchinson — known for his collaborations with Roy Hargrove, Joe Henderson, Joshua Redman, Ray Brown, and Kurt Rosenwinkel — blends tradition and modernity in his approach, assembling a group of contemporary jazz players whose quality and flexibility fully serve his vision.
Charlie Parker’s hard-bop strut “Ah-Leu-Cha”—a brilliant contrafact of “Honeysuckle Rose” and “I Got Rhythm”—wastes no time drawing listeners in. The initial symbiotic interplay around the theme allows ample space for bassist…
The Lars Danielsson Liberetto ensemble has assembled a distinctive body of work over its four previous albums. That development and continuity derive from his core partners for over 15 years, drummer Magnus Ostrom (Esbjorn Svensson Trio) and UK guitarist John Parricelli. They were joined in 2017 by Martinican pianist Grégory Privat, who replaced original member Tigran Hamasyan).
With Echomyr, bassist Danielsson continues to carve out a singular musical path, drawing on his classical roots and folk-influenced melodic ideas as a platform for jazz explorations. His consummate use of space allows him to make a complex melody feel effortless and inevitable. Across 10 tracks, his compositions show his focus on melody and his attention to detail. He explains,…
Stevie Nicks had much to prove when she stepped out on her own for the first time and crafted Bella Donna. Despite attaining superstar success with Fleetwood Mac, the singer often took a back seat to the band’s other members — and, due to the group’s approach, faced limitations in getting her songs on an album. Along with Nicks’ status as a significant artistic force in her own right, that all changed with the timeless Bella Donna.
Sourced from the original analog master tapes, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of the 1981 benchmark plays with superb transparency, dynamics, and detail. Benefitting from extraordinary clarity, openness, and separation, it captures what went down in the studio with tremendous realism…
“Learn to hate in the light of day,” is the refrain from the first track of Station Model Violence’s totemic, self-titled punk record. Right off the bat, the band parlays the stakes and tone of their work, grinning their teeth through a quarter smile, but not the gums; not all of their fleshy parts displayed at once.
Whether a subconscious or overt homage to the patriarchs of post-punk, a twelve string guitar intones unceasingly, familiarly, on “Learn to Hate.” Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” — with its clanging opening 12-string and prophetic ’80s punk production — lures the listener for only so long before the synth hook snags on. The twelve string and driving beat on “Learn to Hate,” by contrast, announces that the melodic shifts…
This rather beautiful, unhurried recording is the work of guitarist and composer Chaz Prymek (aka Lake Mary) and musician and intermedia artist Matthew Sage, who also works with Chaz on their Fuubutsushi project with Patrick Shiroishi and Chris Jussell. Although the jazz stylings of Fuutbutsushi are absent here, the lightness of touch and delicacy of playing is present across the five songs.
Shelter began life back in 2022, as both Chaz and Matthew settled back into the rural mountainous landscapes of Utah and Colorado, where each resides. The skeletons of these songs are the live improvisations played by Chaz and Matthew in the pole barn studio Matthew set up, with Chaz on electric guitar and Matthew on piano. Over time, the duo very delicately adorned…
The latest album from Spencer Doran, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Visible Cloaks, bills itself as an ensemble work — but what a strangely nebulous and numerous group it is. On the album opener, “Block,” we hear three prepared pianos and a chamber ensemble; on another track, the credits list four guitars, five cellos, a clarinet, an oboe, and a bowed piano. Moreover, these performances seem to possess the super-charged cadence of a computer: the trilling piano flurries of “Block” accelerate with non-human speed; the notes have a pointillist quality, like scattershot dots across a DAW — until serene woodwind breathes calm into the composition. The point is that no human ensemble could ever play this music, not even one comprised of virtuosos. But that…
…deluxe anniversary reissue features 11 new tracks, including unreleased demos and remixes with artists Cody Votolato (The Blood Brothers), Youth Code and Kerry McCoy (Deafheaven).
On the second track of Touché Amoré‘s emotional and complicated fourth effort Stage Four, vocalist Jeremy Bolm addresses his late mother — as he does throughout the album, written out of grief, guilt and regret over her passing due to cancer two years ago — and tells her, “I haven’t found the courage to listen to your last message to me.”
The album is a passionately written and deeply moving meditation on loss, and Touché Amoré have never been better as a band. Bolm’s throat-shredding yell tears through most of these lines, reminding us that although…
On their first two albums Uni Boys shoehorned together New York Dolls-y swagger, punky attitude, glam rock glitter, and power pop hooks. The fit was close to being right on, but it felt like maybe the band hadn’t quite figured out what they wanted to be and the group’s two songwriters, Reza Matin and guitarist Noah Nash, maybe had different ideas where they wanted to go.
On their third album, usefully self-titled like many an album where the band undertakes a revamp, Matin and Nash are on the same page, the band have landed on a unified approach, and sound better than ever. This time around they’ve jettisoned almost all of the punk and Dolls-y hard rock in favor of a sprightly brand of power pop that’s reminiscent of the tight…
Straddling the fringe of melancholy and optimism, Irish singer-songwriter A.S. Fanning’s fourth and latest record Take Me Back to Nowhere is awash with an abundance of solemn introspection, journeys into fractured belief systems and ever-evolving, conflicting realities.
Born from traditional Irish literary works and folk tales, Fanning’s sonic playground both swings skyward into interstellar textures and frolics between pillars of grounded, wistful lyricism. Bearing witness to a battalion of contradictions, he toils between conflicting concepts, questions solutions to the modern world, and grapples with the turmoil and tenderness of love.
Take Me Back to Nowhere is a raw, unfiltered foray into creative freedom and an ode to…
After decades spent shaping the sound of southern Madagascar, Damily returns with Fanjiry, his most intimate and focused record to date. Recorded and mixed in just three days at Studio Black Box with analog sound engineer Peter Deimel, Fanjiry reduces tsapiky to its essence: a single guitar and a single heartbeat.
…At a time when truth and authenticity in music seem more elusive than ever, this album feels like a gift. Long considered a central figure in southwest Madagascar’s tsapiky tradition, Damily here retreats from the hurtling speed and intoxicating trance of the sound he helped create – and popularise both within the Indian Ocean island and beyond – and, like a sonic alchemist, distils it into something that offers solace to all within earshot.
Since she started making music with a Buchla synthesizer in 1968 — an obsession that landed her a job actually manufacturing the machines, soldering iron in hand, until she saved up enough money to buy her own — Suzanne Ciani has embodied electronic music’s spirit of limitless possibility. Instead of imitating other instruments and conforming to conventional musical ideas, Buchla (and Ciani) set out to create a paradigm based on harnessing the flow of electricity itself. Ciani’s method with the Buchla is a way of taming electrical currents and shaping them into pathways, rather than composing music traditionally. She would later become known as a prominent new-age artist and a composer of commercial music for brands like Coca-Cola, but in…
There was a time when Djax-Up-Beats was spoken of in the same breath as Tresor, R&S, Soma and Peacefrog: a cohort of labels that shaped the sound of European techno. Founded in 1989 by Saskia Slegers, AKA Miss Djax, the Eindhoven label operated as a vital transatlantic conduit, connecting sounds from Chicago and Detroit with a rapidly expanding rave infrastructure in Europe. The cultural exchange went both ways, as US producers found eager audiences while Dutch and Belgian artists pushed that raw machine funk into harder and faster territories.
This storied legacy isn’t at risk of erasure — Dekmantel reissued Djax-Up-Beats material as recently as 2019, after all. But a new retrospective compilation series from another…
On his fourth album as Broken Chanter, Glaswegian singer-songwriter David MacGregor takes the title and thematic inspiration from Arpita Singh’s striking turquoise-blue etching of the same name, exploring and comparing an idealised world view (depicted by Singh) against the looming shadow of our increasingly dystopian reality.
On album opener ‘This Future Is Bright and I Don’t Want It’, grumbling bass, punchy drums, and drilling, intertwining guitars (from regular collaborators Charlotte Printer, Martin Johnstone, and Bartholemew Owl) create a mid-tempo post-punk backdrop for MacGregor’s emotive Scottish brogue – a must-listen for fans of Frightened Rabbit.
Across the rest of the record, the collective…
There are debut albums that arrive with intent, and there are debut albums that arrive like a pneumatic drill through drywall. GNAT, the first full-length from Manchester’s drummer-fronted psych-punk quartet Wax Head – recorded with long-term collaborator Borja Regueira at Manchester’s GLUE Studio and mastered by Melbourne’s Joe Carra – is emphatically the latter: sub-thirty minutes and zero patience for anything resembling restraint.
The title track opens as both decree and detonation: a blitzing, subterranean riff-storm whose fretboard acrobatics would make Dillinger Escape Plan’s Ben Weinman raise an eyebrow. At 90 seconds, it doesn’t so much announce the album as ambush it. ‘Bug Doctor’ follows with equal ferocity, the rhythmic convulsions and…
…What makes ‘Rare & Deadly’ truly unprecedented is that every format tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital editions each feature their own unique tracklisting, a fractured release strategy that is almost unheard of. No single version contains the “complete” album.
A Place to Bury Strangers return with Rare and Deadly, a collection of ‘B-sides, abandoned experiments and forgotten fragments’, pulled from front man Oliver Ackerman’s “personal archive of late night recordings, blown out tapes and half finished sessions”.
It is their first full-length release since 2024’s Synthesizer, and given the consistency of the sound and the fluency of the songwriting on the digital version, it is easy to listen to it as…
Ferdinand Schwarz studied jazz trumpet in Cologne before his compositional interests took off during the pandemic, when he became “obsessed with the music of John Cage, Éliane Radigue and Morton Feldman, but also Jon Gibson and Arthur Russell.” He was drawn to “music that allowed me to dissolve in it, whether listening or playing… a sort of creative perceiving, as a tool to grow, transcend, to lose ego.” During his free master studies in Oslo, he became “more specifically fascinated with the act of listening and its creative potential,” engaging with sound art, instrument building, intonation systems, and listening-based music territories.
Listening Time is a 45-minute work developed collaboratively with AREPO – Madara Eleonora Mežale (clarinet), Marco Slaviero…