As if cosmically enacted, every handful of years Neko Case breaks to the surface with a new album and reminds listeners that she is one of our greatest living songwriters – perpetually becoming more fearless and adventurous. This has been true throughout her more than twenty-five-year career, during which her ferocious indie-rock and country-noir sound has swelled and shrunk to fit the mood, but the walloping impact of the universes she creates has never wavered. Listening to Case’s music will teach you about this world-human nature’s cruelty, perseverance and terrifying beauty, but the natural world as well – the moon and the stars, bees, lions and magpies. Should you encounter a wayward soul who has never heard her music, you might respond…
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“We believe in some pretty strict rules,” says Pink Stones frontman Hunter Pinkston. “We also believe in breaking them. This band was built on reimagining tradition, on honoring the old ways while pushing them someplace new.” On their intoxicating new album, Thank the Lord… it’s The Pink Stones, Pinkston and his bandmates do precisely that, offering up a joyful, adventurous take on ’60s twang that blurs the lines between cosmic country, folk, bluegrass, soul, and psychedelic rock. Recorded once again with co-producer/engineer Henry Barbe (Drive-By Truckers, Deerhunter) in the band’s hometown of Athens, GA, the collection showcases a more deliberate, mature side of The Pink Stones’ sound, one that reflects all the personal and sonic growth…
To celebrate its 60th anniversary, Immediate Records proudly presents the reissue of Nice, the groundbreaking third album by British progressive rock pioneers The Nice – an adventurous blend of prog, symphonic, and psychedelic rock that captures the free spirit of the late ’60s.
Newly remastered for the best possible audio fidelity, this iconic release is pressed on limited edition translucent red, black marbled, and white splatter vinyl – a visually striking and sonically rich collector’s item for longtime fans and new listeners alike.
Nice finds the band at the peak of their creativity in a bold half-studio, half-live format that showcases both the precision of their compositions and the raw power of their stage performances.
This CD is about quality not quantity – less than thirty minutes in total, but absolutely some of the most incredible music Zorn has ever composed. Dramatic, intense, mercurial, challenging, and endlessly virtuosic, Zorn’s writing for strings is amongst the most exciting ever achieved in the classical world.
Here he expands the fabulous Jack Quartet to a quintet and sextet with the addition of two of the most accomplished musicians in the New York scene: Yura Lee and Michael Nicolas. Composed in 2020, during the initial months of the Covid-19 lockdown, these are two of Zorn’s greatest masterpieces, beautifully recorded at Oktaven by Ryan Streber, and passionately performed by six members of Zorn’s inner circle.
A deluxe 4-CD box set bringing together the seminal Columbia recordings of Terry Riley. A landmark reissue from one of the most pivotal figures in 20th-century music. The Columbia Recordings brings together the four seminal albums that Terry Riley created for Columbia Masterworks between 1968 and 1980-a body of work that redefined the possibilities of minimalism, electronic music, and compositional freedom. The deluxe 4CD box set includes In C (1968), A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), Church of Anthrax (1971, with John Cale), and Shri Camel (1980). Each title marks a critical moment not only in Riley’s evolution but in the wider cultural shift of American music: where avant-garde practice collided with high-fidelity production, and radical sonic ideas…
On their last two albums, Acopia perfected their recipe for dreamy, downtempo electronic pop.
The Naarm (Melbourne) trio, made up of Kate Durman, Lachlan McGeehan, and Morgan Wright, centres around Durman’s vocals, tame whispers exuding the quiet elegance of a young Romy Madley Croft. With sorrowful, self-reproachful lyrics, the band is no stranger to melancholy; yet Acopia tempers their brooding with a deftly crafted lightness. Patiently weaving in layers of dazed reverb and raw-edged drums, Acopia produce lingering beats you can’t help but sway to, as if caught in a hypnotist’s trance.
For better or worse, the contrast between Acopia’s easygoing delivery and downtrodden lyrics makes their music come off as winkingly…
Lumen is the deeply personal and introspective new solo album by pianist and composer Bill Laurance. Recorded in the stillness of night inside an empty church, the album captures a rare and intimate moment of communion between artist, instrument, and space. Though not religious, Laurance describes the experience as almost spiritual—guided more by the music itself than by his own intention, as if he were merely a vessel.
At its heart, Lumen explores the delicate balance between composition and improvisation. Some pieces follow meticulously crafted scores, while others are entirely spontaneous, born in the moment. It’s in the space between these two worlds, Bill Laurance suggests, that the true magic of music lies.
Sometimes at night, when mark william lewis is feeling overwhelmed, he visits the banks of the Thames River and skips rocks across its surface. “Each stone,” he says, “is another thought sent spinning into the water.” It’s a potent ritual, one you can almost hear in the songwriter’s opaque, introspective guitar ballads. In a dusky baritone, he offers meditations on heartbreak, connection, and the heavy burden of living. Half-thoughts and fractured images flit through his delicate songs; elusive truths flash out for a moment, then disappear into the black.
On his self-titled new album — the first non-film-related release on tastemaking movie studio A24’s music imprint — he largely continues in this mode. The record’s 12 tracks are…
Named for a street in Birmingham, the site of Swordfish Records and where the teenage Jon Wilks would busk, while not rooted in his hometown, Needless Alley is formed from his musical influences of the time, among them Paul Simon, Pentangle, Nick Drake and Bob Dylan, whose Highway 61 Revisited sparked the idea of what might happen on the titular thoroughfare. Described as a patchwork of memories and marking a more autobiographical approach to his writing after previous trad folk-inclined material, he’s backed by his regular Grizzly Folk cohort of Jon Nice (keyboards, guitars), Rich Davies (bass) and Laurence Hunt (drums) with Albert Hansell on melodeon.
Jackie Oates and Joe Sartin on backing vocals,…
Nashville-by-way-of-Arkansas musician Drew Pulliam hinted at his potential with his 2023 EP.
With Back of My Mind, his debut full-length, he makes good on that early promise, offering a record that feels both assured and expansive.
At only 20 years old, he writes with a confidence and maturity that you wouldn’t expect from someone so young.
The album was produced by Grammy-winning artist Steve Azar, who has been mentoring and working with Pulliam since 2022. It’s also being released on Azar’s own Ride Records.
The opening title track is musically solid, but the intermittent falsetto is distracting and keeps it from being one of the record’s strongest moments. The rest of the album, however,…
This is Octoberman’s seventh full-length long player. It was recorded live in the studio on analogue equipment, direct to two-inch tape, without the aid of click tracks or screens.
The result is a stripped-down and laid-back album. It also has fresh instrumental touches, such as accordion, banjo, and vibraphone, which haven’t previously appeared on Octoberman releases. Half of the tracks stem from rediscovered demos on an old hard drive, while the remainder are more recent compositions.
The album artwork makes reference to the title via the parachutes which are depicted within the letter which make up the record’s name. However, chutes are also used to move things from a higher place to a lower one, so the title could…
Like most country artists, the Louisiana-born, Arkansas-honed Dylan Earl reveres the outlaw era, its sainted names of Johnny, Waylon, and Merle. As a student of both their music and their anti-authoritarian temperaments, he’s rightly mystified at how far the genre has strayed from their light in the long, paradigm-warping aftermath of 9/11. “I’d rather be a bootlegger than a bootlicker,” Earl sings on “Outlaw Country,” his fiery ode to an alternate vision of the good old days — a time when you couldn’t listen to “Folsom Prison Blues” in a Blue Lives Matter-stickered truck without catching some well-deserved hell. With its “Subterranean Homesick Blues”-referencing video and refreshingly blunt political opprobrium, “Outlaw Country” has brought Earl some viral attention.
For over 20 years, Hayden Desser has been making music on his own terms and on his own schedule. The three-time JUNO nominee has produced, engineered and mixed most of his records at home, creating a world of his own, exploring themes ranging from love lost and found to bear maulings and home invasions.
Elk-Lake Serenade was originally released in 2004, so I’m a few months late putting out this 20th Anniversary edition. In early 2002, I had just completed a few tours supporting my Skyscraper National Park record, culminating with Toronto’s Convocation Hall performance which was released as a live record that year. I settled back at home and began writing and recording what would slowly become my 4th full length studio album.
One for the Road is the title of a new album by the artist Passenger (Mike Rosenberg), featuring songs from the musical The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Adapted by Rachel Joyce from her best-selling novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry features music and lyrics by Passenger (aka Mike Rosenberg), whose chart-topping hit Let Her Go became a global sensation. The production is directed by Katy Rudd.
Passenger said: “I am so so happy to announce that my brand new album – ‘One For The Road – songs from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry musical’. “We’ve been beavering away on this for the last year or so and I have to say I’m absolutely thrilled with how it turned out. This album is a selection of my favourite songs from the show…
Not to be confused with the Scottish twee pop outfit with the same name, this Camera Obscura hailed from San Diego and augmented their hardcore influences and propulsive rhythms with synthesizers and other electronics.
The band formed in the late ’90s and featured keyboardist Michelle Maskovich, guitarist Duane Pitre, drummer William Lamb, and vocalist Russell White. They released their debut 7″, Writing Kodak/We Talked MIDI, in 1998 and followed it up with touring, recording, and their full-length debut, To Change the Shape of an Envelope, in 2000.
The group disbanded, and White and Maskovich went on to form Champagne Kiss, who released their self-titled debut album on Troubleman Records later that year.
Does it annoy you that people today find electronic voices ugly?” Björk asks Mikä Vainio, hanging out in his studio in the 1997 BBC TV documentary Modern Minimalists. “It’s a pity that many people just cannot in a way relate with them,” ponders the Finnish musician. “Some of them are ugly for me as well, but quite many are interesting and beautiful as well.”
Much of Vainio’s work, including his recordings with Pan Sonic and as Ø, explores the tension between beauty and ugliness. Across his life and career there are many tantalising appeals to the power of the binary. “Mika Vainio was the most dualistic person of all. On one hand he had an extreme sense of beauty, and on the other, demonic shadows and death”…
…Known as Zambia’s first pop star – he’s even got a road named after him in the country’s capital of Lusaka – vocalist and guitarist Alick Nkhata cut his teeth playing in the Lusaka Radio Band (later called the Big Gold Six Band), writing wry, socially motivated sing-along songs in mostly Bemba and Nyanja.
Nkhata’s secret weapon was his worldliness and education; he’d traveled outside Africa during World War II when he served in Myanmar, and when he returned home in the 1940s, he connected with British ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey and began to archive the traditional music he’d grown up with. But he was fascinated with everything the world was offering at the time, and began to figure out ways to blend global pop sounds with Zambian folk.
The Boomtown Rats were one of the most successful bands of the 1970s in the UK, as central to the decade’s dying embers as Chic, Abba, The Clash, The Specials and The Jam. Their grown-up new wave and real time stories captured the imagination of a mass audience in a way that many of their peers did not.
Before Band Aid Bob, Live Aid Bob and Global Treasure Bob, there was, and always will be, Bobby Boomtown. As the leader of The Rats, Bob Geldof led his band of Dublin post-punkers right to the very top of the UK charts. The First 50 Years: Songs of Boomtown Glory is a 24 track 2LP, and 27-track 2CD that celebrates the highlights of the group’s storied career.
2025 marks their fiftieth anniversary – Geldof…