Good Flying Birds‘ debut album Talulah’s Tape is the work of youngsters deeply in love with the sounds of indie pop. Their devoted infatuation dates back to C-86 and gathers up every twist and turn in the story as they bop along to the present day. They add elements of jangle pop, shoegaze, lo-fi, dream pop, indie rock, and noise pop, gleefully taking bits and bobs from each and welding them into a glorious creation of their very own. It helps that they only borrow and steal from the best aspects of each style, injecting plenty of joyous energy into the arrangements and performances while making every melody as sweet as ice cold lemonade on a sweltering summer day. The production is perfect as well, coming across happily mid-fi and home cooked.
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In a musical landscape often chasing the ephemeral, Smote’s sound is unapologetically terrestrial. For principal architect Daniel Foggin, music serves as a direct channel for his daily life as a landscape gardener — a world of soil, stone, and seasons. His latest offering, Songs from the Free House is the most profound expression of this connection yet, an album that feels as if it were excavated from the Northumberland ground itself.
Building on the megalithic drone of previous work, this fifth release for Rocket Recordings sees Smote’s sonic palette significantly expanded. While the mantric, hypnotic heaviness reminiscent of Earth or Om remains the foundation, new textures are woven throughout. Foggin cites the influence of heavy electronic artists like…
Far from Nowhere is Josienne Clarke’s sixth album. She started in 2019 with In All Weather and her last album was 2024’s Parenthesis, I. Far from Nowhere was recorded in a week in a cabin in the remote Scottish Highlands using just a few instruments and analogue recording equipment. Murray Collier aided and abetted the process as co-producer. Clarke says that the record is a “defiant response to the logistical and emotional tolls of trying to eke out a living in the music industry”. She continues, “The structure of the industry slowly suffocates the spirit of artists, starving them of the self-esteem that comes from remuneration for a job well done, so retreating to a cabin in the woods to make my album made sense”.
Clarke is a folk artist, although her 2021…
It seems difficult to believe that this is Rianne Downey’s debut album. Having stepped into some formidable shoes as Paul Heaton’s vocal foil at arenas and festivals across the country, Downey is now establishing herself as a singular vocalist in her own right. That talent is showcased across ten tracks which wear their heart on their sleeve and have an unmistakeably Scottish flavour.
It’s a polished album, though the lush strings never get in the way of Downey’s soaring vocals. Standout track ‘The Consequence of Love’ deals with difficult subject matter, without straying into self-pity. It has a clear echo of New Slang by noughties indie favourites The Shins, and like them you can imagine Downey’s music featuring in a pivotal scene of a heartfelt Hollywood flick.
After an eight-year pause, The Barr Brothers return with their latest release, Let It Hiss, an album arising from a period of personal and professional challenges that temporarily derailed them. As the band notes, the album’s title is a reference to their approach to writing and recording the album in the aftermath, “To leave the hiss in. The discomfort, the imperfection, the struggle, and allow the music to breathe again”. The album features ten songs of emotionally charged songwriting that make a stylistic leap from previous recordings, while still retaining the core elements of their trademark sound. Thematically, the songs reflect the band’s experiences and shifts in their lives over the past few years with lyrics that revel in the messiness of everyday life.
Six years after 2019’s Fever Dream, Of Monsters and Men returned with their fourth full-length, All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade. Hitting on the highs and lows of life, the Icelandic quintet stick close to their established sound: touching and tender indie folk anthems that play on earnestness and innocence. The vocal interplay between Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar “Raggi” Þórhallsson remains the primary draw, with the band — Brynjar Leifsson, Kristján Páll Kristjánsson, and Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson — wrapping listeners in the warm sonic hug that the group is known for. These are intimate peeks into life, both the good and bad, or the love and the pain from the album’s title. The simplicity helps focus the effort, which dials back the bombast of…
The Smashing Pumpkins are revisiting the material that initially marked their final bow with a sprawling, unusual box set.
…a new box set, Machina (Aranea Alba Editio), offer a remixed and resequenced, 48-track quintuple-album drawing from Machina, its sequel Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music and assorted B-sides, plus a further three LPs of 32 rarities and outtakes, with more than 30 tracks entirely unreleased.
It’s an unusual release plan for an unusual series of albums, which brought the Smashing Pumpkins back to their roots and then closed the book on them entirely a quarter-century ago. Machina/The Machines of God was a back-to-basics, grunge-adjacent guitar album that…
Early Recordings 1994-95 marks the first time that material from Kreidler‘s early cassette Riva and 12″ EP Sport have been compiled onto an album since they initially surfaced. On these releases, the newly formed Düsseldorf-based group established a very casual-sounding form of groove-based jamming, usually setting up strong but fluid rhythms and augmenting them with dubby echoes, shimmering keyboards, or other instrumental shadings. The Motorik style of earlier acts from the city like Neu! and La Düsseldorf clearly informs the band’s approach, but there’s other textures and influences that put the music more in the realm of the original wave of what journalists first referred to as post-rock during the ’90s. Though there are some studio-mixed overdubs, it…
They Are Gutting a Body of Water originally began as the solo project of Doug Dulgarian, who established a digitally enhanced version of shoegaze which frequently detoured into electronic noise interludes and drum’n’bass breakbeats. Eventually, he embraced a full-band format, and became known for shows where the musicians face each other on the floor instead of playing on-stage. LOTTO is the group’s attempt to create a raw, live-to-tape album rather than something engineered and assembled on a computer. The record’s dark, crushing shoegaze songs feature cryptic, fragmented lyrics which offer perspectives on an uncertain life that feels like it’s on the brink of disaster. Many of the songs seem to address drug addiction and other coping…
While Living Hour have always operated at a stylistic crossroads, mixing dream pop with psychedelia and shoegaze with angular indie rock, they expand their boundaries even further on Internal Drone Infinity, the Winnipeg group’s fourth album. It ventures into straight-up noise on the brief first track, “Stainless Steel Dream,” whose electro-staticky opening transforms into a languid lo-fi alt-rock before finally cranking up the amps and stomping on the distortion pedals — a little appetizer of the broad indie spectrum to come. It’s an unexpected crash-boom-bang introduction to their Keeled Scales label debut, an imprint known at this point for its artful indie folk clientele. Having said that, one of the highlights here is the ambling, nearly six-minute “Texting,” a drawling,…
Faten Kanaan‘s music has a transporting quality that is hard to define. The manual repetition of her approach — performing looped keyboard parts entirely by hand — lends her electronic compositions a human feel, as does her choice of organic-leaning sounds and tones. But there is always something otherworldly about them, an abstraction that suggests a natural world shimmering just out of reach.
Diary of a Candle, Kanaan’s sixth album and third for U.K. indie Fire Records, may be her most enigmatic release yet. Its mystique is undeniable — each piece unfolds like a chapter in a dark fairytale that goes nowhere and everywhere. Tracks like “Afternoon” and “Celadon” have a curious, questing nature, though it’s unclear…
Ruen Brothers strip their sound down to its twangy, haunted core on 2025’s Awooo. The duo’s fourth album and first since moving from their native England to their adopted home of Louisville, Kentucky, Awooo finds the brothers (singer, guitarist Henry Stansall and guitarist, multi-instrumentalist Rupert Stansall) pared down to their essentials. Consequently, the album shares little with its predecessor, 2023’s Ten Paces. Where that album found them blending their vintage ’50s- and ’60s-inspired rock with hooky pop elements, Awooo is all spare folk and country; a shadowy evocation of the long winter in which it was recorded. What connects all the duo’s work is a sharp self-awareness and wry, post-modern sense of humor. It’s an arch sensibility…
British rocker Miles Kane joins forces with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach for his bluesy and bombastic sixth album, 2025’s Sunlight in the Shadows. A gleefully obvious case of what you see is what you get, the album (which follows 2023’s One Man Band) finds Kane and producer / instrumentalist Auerbach essentially playing out their idol worship of Marc Bolan’s T. Rex, crafting psych-soaked glitter stomp anthems drenched in fuzztone guitars. It’s a throwback, vinyl-era aesthetic both artists have explored on previous albums and one which has been a creative touchstone for Kane going as far back as his Last Shadow Puppets albums.
Here, they recorded live in studio, backed by a potent cadre of instrumentalists, including…
Not only had the Bats been making records for over forty years when 2025’s Corner Coming Up was released, but their quality had never dipped even a little. Every record has featured intricate guitar interplay, chugging rhythms, melodic bass lines, Robert Scott’s wistful lead and Kaye Woodward’s supportive harmony vocals, and songs that don’t go for big gestures, instead zeroing in on the tiny moments that meld together to make or break a heart, or build a life.
This record has exactly the same amount of those things that all their previous records have, though now the specter of age has started to creep in around the edges. Not that they sound old in any way, but more that the weight of their catalog have grown to the point where they…
Holly Golightly took a long break after her 2018 record Do the Get Along and when she returned in 2025 with Look Like Trouble, she did she with the same crack band backing her up, the same mix of songs that swung easily from low-down blues to waltzing country and all points in between, and most importantly, the same attitude and charm she has always displayed. By the time the record came out she’d been doing this for a fair spell, but one would never know it. Both she and the band sound fully committed, playing with tightly wound restraint, and the guitars have some serious bite especially during the solos that threaten to blow out speaker cones. Golightly sings of revenge, putting people in their place, sorting out romantic ills, and the ups and downs of…
…includes the original 11 tracks from ‘Radio Waves’, along with additional material like demos, alternate versions, B-sides, and live recordings.
Jonathon Linaberry grew up obsessed by the radio. Like many of a certain vintage, he recalls waiting by the radio, finger poised, ready to record onto that good old, hopelessly flawed yet memorable, nonetheless, cassette tape. On his 6th album under the guise of The Bones of J.R. Jones, the aptly titled Radio Waves, Linaberry draws on that fondly remembered era for inspiration with songs steeped in the sounds and stories of his own coming of age.
Linaberry explains, “A lot of these songs started on a drum machine, which was very intentional. I wanted to focus on simplicity, on stripping tracks back to their most essential elements…
In May, Dua Lipa introduced a special guest at her Sydney gig: Kevin Parker, who duetted with her on a version of ‘The Less I Know the Better’, the biggest hit Parker has ever released under the name Tame Impala. The pair have a longstanding creative relationship – Parker co-produced and co-wrote most of Dua Lipa’s last album, Radical Optimism – but nevertheless made for quite the study in contrasts. She was resplendent in a glittering lace catsuit, stiletto-heeled boots, a fake fur stole draped over her shoulder.
Lank-haired, clad in a baggy multicoloured cardigan and a string of wooden beads, Parker looked not unlike a man who had arrived onstage direct from a very long night up at Glastonbury’s stone circle.
The fourth CD in Zorn’s remarkable series of piano trio recordings exploring classical forms, Nocturnes is an absolute delight.
Preceded by Suite for Piano (2022), Ballades (2024), and the Impromptus (2025), Nocturnes is Zorn’s personal take on the beautiful tradition of night music. Touching on Chopin, Scriabin, Debussy, Berg, and more, the music is a wonderland of subtlety — dreamy, drifting, and utterly compelling. Brian, Jorge, and Ches, three of Zorn’s closest and most trusted collaborators perform with their trademark telepathic interplay, and an uncanny sense of surprise and creativity.
With a stunning virtuosity that is always at the service of the music, the trio opens up new doors with each successive recording.