To record their fourth album Krok, the members of Soyuz went to Brazil to record at the invitation of like-minded musician Sessa, taking full advantage of the atmosphere in one of the countries whose music influenced their sound to such a large degree. They finished the record back in their adopted home of Poland and the result is a magical version of the jazz-meets-MPB-meets soundtrack music style they had been working on for years. This time around they dig more deeply into the smooth side of the equation with several songs powered by soft strings, bubbling electric piano, and wordless vocal choruses. A track like “P7 Blues” is a prefect encapsulation of their approach. bopping along like incidental music in a very stylish film while also captivating thanks…
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Mon Laferte is one of Latin music’s great shape- shifters. The 14 tracks on FEMME FATALE, her followup to the experimental rhythm collision of 2023’s Autopoiética, take on the male myth of the femme fatale (Laferte has often been referred to as “the femme fatale of Latin Music”) and her own relationship to the term, and valiantly redeems it as feminist manifesto reflecting her intelligence, style, self-determined sexuality, and fiery heart. Her songs journey through introspection and darkness before cultural history loses authority to her self-determination, using metaphor, symbolism, and even mysticism in her lyrics. In late 2024 and in July 2025, Laferte played the femme fatale Sally Bowles in a Teatro Insurgentes production of Cabaret in Mexico City. For this recording…
Among its various claims to noteworthiness, Würzburg in northern Bavaria has a historic association with Richard Wagner: he was appointed chorusmaster of the municipal theatre in 1833 and wrote his first performed opera, Die Feen (‘the Fairies’) while living there. The city of 130,000 on the banks of the Main is also the birthplace of Dallas Mavericks power forward Dirk Nowitzki, heralded by many as the great European basketball player of all time.
Yet to students of ambient spookiness suffused in Teutonic foreboding, Würzburg has an altogether different distinction. It is the base of operations of composer Christian Schoppik, who has moved through a series of drone-adjacent, loop-based projects across his career and…
Spiritual Cramp have tapped into something special on their sophomore album Rude, a nod to the budding UK punk, ska, and reggae scene of the 1970s.
While these genres have persisted with new artists popping up daily, few bands have captured the right combination to truly emulate that period. Spiritual Cramp manage to do it five decades later, channeling London grit through San Francisco fog. It’s a sound they’ve been chasing since day one — those first EPs were all snarl and speed, but you could already hear the tug toward something catchier. Their debut flirted with that punk-meets-dub swagger, but Rude is the real arrival: confident, danceable, and steeped in the kind of attitude that made this genre of music exciting in the first place.
‘Miss America’, the centrepiece of Jennifer Walton’s stylish, painful debut record, sits us down in a hotel room near JFK airport, watching on as Walton learns that her father has been diagnosed with cancer. The Sunderland-born musician had been touring the US for the first time, drumming with indie band Kero Kero Bonito, and now grief greys everything out. Faltering piano and hushed strings accompany gothic dispatches from the tour van: “Cattle farm and broke down shack / Strip-mall, drug deal, panic attacks.”
Walton’s gentle vocals are deadpan, with the record’s tension brought by her penmanship (encompassing fiction, folksy sayings and blunt diary entries) and her sharp, surprising maximalism. Few songs this year have…
Unfolding is Jessica Moss’s most meditative and plaintive solo album, and perhaps the first in the Montréal violinist/composer’s decade-spanning discography that could properly be called ambient. The ex-Silver Mt Zion member and Black Ox Orkestar co-founder draws from post-classical, drone, minimalism, industrial/metal, power electronics, Klezmer and other folkways: this is not abstract ambient music. Layers of violin melody, electroacoustic processing, intermittent voice, and percussion from The Necks drummer Tony Buck, yield deeply emotive genre-defying compositions, guided by a spirit of searching and summoning that unfolds in a prevailing atmosphere of incantation and mournful restraint.
Unfolding is dedicated to “a free Palestine in…
Anyone stumbling across the utopian cerulean vistas of Cahl Sel’s Blue EP earlier this year could have been forgiven for wondering if the record was a forgotten gem from 3 decades past, rather than a brand-new production from a young upstart.
For one thing, the label that put it out, Reflective, is itself a vestige of leftfield electronic music’s golden age, having lain largely dormant since 1997. Reflective was resurrected in 2022 to release Cahl Sel’s debut EP, Every Moment; in its prime, the imprint had been responsible for a wealth of mid-’90s classics — records from bright-eyed mischief-makers like label founder Spacetime Continuum and IDM pioneer µ-Ziq, recording as Kid Spatula, who lured curious ravers in stranger, squirrelier directions.
Home Counties’ flirtation with provincial-pivoting alt anthems alongside lyrics mapping tongue-in-cheek suburban excursions – by way of socially-charged takes on contemporary life – found feet on last year’s funk-flecked debut LP Exactly As It Seems. Tracking from rural to urban since their formation five years ago, the East London-via-Buckinghamshire six-piece intersect space and time in equal sonic measure. Their first two EPs came leaning on the skewiff yet nimble post-punk footwork of acts such as Yard Act and Squid to evermore synth scored dabbling that has seen the band flaunt twitchy electronic segues adjacent to straight-up indie-pop panache.
Finding voice through dual vocalists Will Harrison and Lois Kelly, Humdrum pins its focus…
Kiss’ third album Dressed to Kill – the edge of their commercial breakthrough – is getting done up to the nines for its 50th anniversary.
…The 1975 release, featuring “C’mon and Love Me” and, arguably the group’s signature song “Rock and Roll All Nite,” has been newly remastered by Bernie Grundman. Bonus audio material includes 23 unreleased demos and outtakes, including the unissued songs “Mistake” and “Burning Up with Fever,” and the debut release of two concerts recorded in 1975 and utilized for the group’s breakthrough Alive! Here, they’ve newly mixed by Alive! engineer Eddie Kramer – and, crucially, stripped of any studio overdubs utilized on that “concert” LP.
…Though the New York quartet had a taste for…
With Minnesota, guitarist and composer Trond Kallevåg deepens his image-rich sound – a warm, wistful universe where the atmosphere of Norway’s rugged west coast drifts seamlessly into the wide horizons of the American Midwest.
Drawing inspiration from traditional music, jazz, ambient folk, emigration stories, and rare photographs unearthed during an artist residency on the unique and remote island of Træna in Northern Norway , Kallevåg weaves a sound world rooted in the Norwegian Coast – yet forever gazing westward.
Minnesota marks Kallevåg’s fourth album on the acclaimed Hubro label, following Bedehus & Hawaii (2019), Fengselsfugl (2021), and Amerikabåten (2023). As on his previous…
Bassist Melvin Gibbs‘ sprawling, multi-genre résumé covers so much ground that it’s almost impossible to find common factors between everything he’s touched. He’s led groups with Bill Frisell, Elliott Sharp, and Vernon Reid; played in Defunkt and Rollins Band; recorded with Dead Prez, Caetano Veloso, Eddie Palmieri, and Femi Kuti; and somehow has credits on both Vitamin C albums. This is all apart from his solo works, which have included a hip-hop/funk album in the late ’80s, a vastly different 2021 hip-hop EP featuring Kokayi, and a minimal drone record on Editions Mego, 2022’s Anamibia Sessions 1: The Wave. While that album fit in with the type of austere experimentation that seems more at home on the Viennese label, the second volume of…
The heady mix of styles Yazmin Lacey served with Voice Notes earned the singer and songwriter a 2023 MOBO nomination for Best Jazz Act. Ezra Collective won the award, which Lacey evidently took in stride, as she then co-wrote and fronted the quartet’s “God Gave Me Feet for Dancing” — it fast became her most popular song and then an ecstatic highlight of Glastonbury 2025. Lacey didn’t perform at the festival — the former youth worker’s role was appropriately filled by a member of North London’s Jubilee Youth Club — but she maintained the celebratory spirit the next night in Paris, where she previewed material from Teal Dreams with backing from BadBadNotGood. While neither that band nor most of the crew that assisted on Voice Notes was involved in its making,…
Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan spent a decade developing her chops as an improviser and composer with John Hollenbeck, Michael Formanek, Matt Mitchell, and Tomas Fujiwara. After her acclaimed 2021 solo album Maquishti she released 2022’s More Touch with drummer Marcus Gilmore, bassist Kim Cass, and percussionist Mauricio Herrera. Brennan had joined Mary Halvorson’s band and also worked with drummer Dan Weiss. 2024’s Breaking Stretch employed the quartet and trumpeter/electronicist Adam O’Farrill, revealing intricate compositions and deft collective improvisation. Of the Near and Far‘s lineup offers a sextet and string quartet. The band is made up of Cass, who plays alongside drummer Hollenbeck, pianist Sylvie Courvoisier…
First, we need to note that Tortoise releasing a record with anyone other than Thrill Jockey after a 30-plus-year relationship is a shocker for a group not known for dramatic changes. It’s akin to Autechre abandoning Warp! Anyway, the important thing about Tortoise is that their last two albums before the International Anthem/Nonesuch-reared Touch — 2009’s Beacons of Ancestorship and 2016’s The Catastrophist — have been among their most vital and inventive, an unusual trajectory for a group well into their fourth decade.
For all of their cred as post-rock pioneers, Tortoise at this point seems like a casual, part-time project — either that or they spend many meticulous years honing material for their records. But the truth is, all five members stay busy in…
While drummer Jim White‘s 2024 album All Hits: Memories was technically his first solo outing, it came decades into a career so storied that White’s playing style had already been speaking for itself for years. Compartmentalizing the output of a player like White is difficult. He’s possibly best known for his loose, nautical expressionism as one-third of the Dirty Three, a band where his woozy, free playing is more an additional melodic tangent than an anchor. Add that to hundreds of performances as a session player or in collaborative projects, and it becomes hard to know where to put White’s solo work in his astronomically large body of work. Inner Day is less drums-centric than All Hits: Memories was. Here, White wanders playfully through synthesizer…
…remastered from the original tapes.
Tom Jenkinson’s first release appeared in a limited edition of 1,000 vinyl copies in 1994, issued by Spymania sublabel Nothings Clear (which didn’t put out anything else). Preceding his earliest releases as Squarepusher or under his own name, the initially self-titled Stereotype remained one of the artist’s rarest recordings until Warp finally gave it a proper reissue as a Squarepusher album more than 30 years later.
The album has none of the jazzy bass guitar or blitzkrieg drill’n’bass that Squarepusher is best known for, instead exploring acid hardcore. The first two of the album’s six tracks each pass the ten-minute mark, with “Whooshki” looping a cerebral synth sequence for 16 minutes,…
Although Unfold in the Sky may be the first album by the solo project of Penelope Isles‘ Jack Wolter, it’s worth noting that Cubzoa (derived from “Cubozoa,” a class of box jellyfish) actually pre-dates the band and served as its launching point in the mid-2010s. He returned to Cubzoa while staying at his family’s home in Cornwall during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, then completed work on the project’s full-length debut after returning to his longtime base of Brighton. That affectionate return to the coast inspired the album’s recurring water theme, one of several components of a highly trippy, immersive set of electro-acoustic art rock that ultimately exceeds the “side project” status. Also inspired by COVID isolation and bands such as…
Enthusiastic followers of modern R&B/Soul remember only a few months back when Cautious Clay unleashed The Hours: Morning. The quick yet potent, 8-song LP found the singer/songwriter/producer exploring a bright, pop terrain with his emphatic songwriting and natural knack for infectious melodies. The Hours: Morning was a daring genre leap compared to Clay’s more R&B-oriented discography, but with significant risk comes great rewards, as the artist’s pop-tinted project resulted in critical acclaim, with Clay’s concept being executed beautifully. A typical artist would frolic in these successes, but Clay is far from the average.
Rather than bask in the shining light of his successful LP, Clay returns with…