“I never will stop grieving.” When Leith Ross sings the first line of their sophomore album I Can See the Future, it isn’t angry or defeated or pleading. Instead, it’s calm, quietly accepting grief as an unavoidable part of the human condition that sticks itself to all corners of life and never gets unstuck. On “Grieving,” the Winnipeg-based indie singer-songwriter puts a country-folk spirit to a common feeling that is often difficult to describe; to mourn things that haven’t happened yet alongside the things that have: “I think I’ll love after I’m dead / And I’ll grieve while I’m alive.”
Joined by in-demand producer Rostam on the follow-up to their 2023 debut album To Learn, Ross doesn’t always place the past, present and future into three separate categories…
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Running with Scissors immediately cuts through the gauzy chiffon of the glossed-over sound that Afternoon Bike Ride have become known for. Opening with the languid, back-pocket bass groove and key flourishes of the sparse, soul-indebted “20 Seasons,” frontwoman Lia Kurihara laments the end of an era of her life, while simultaneously beginning another for both herself and the shapeshifting Montreal-based trio.
Kurihara has been through a lot. She started writing the band’s sophomore album, 2022’s Glossover, after becoming the primary caregiver for her father amid his Alzheimer’s diagnosis — a five-year endeavour ahead of his death in recent months. Everything she and co-conspirators David Tanton and Éloi LeBlanc-Riguette have…
When Milo Goes to College landed in 1982, it didn’t just mark the debut of the Descendents, it redrew the lines of American punk. While the hardcore scene of the time often leaned into aggression, nihilism, and politics, the Descendents broke the mold by writing songs about coffee, boredom, awkward crushes, and suburban frustration. The album’s title alone, a nod to singer Milo Aukerman leaving the band to study biochemistry, set the tone: here was punk that was funny, self-aware, and profoundly human. After decades of having their early discography being held by their original label, SST Records, Descendents have regained the rights to their first four albums. The band is now reissuing remastered versions on ORG Music, starting with their seminal debut.
Wonderful Aspiration of the Source is a solo ambient guitar project from the Nashville Ambient Ensemble’s Michael Hix. It celebrates long, shape-shifting tones and languid atmospherics, moving slowly through spectral washes of sound with clear, assured melodic purpose.
For this first solo album, Hix experimented with a B-Bender, a mechanical adaptation to the guitar that shifts the B-string up by a whole tone through a pulley mechanism activated by pulling on the guitar strap. The B-Bender was invented by the Byrds’ Clarence White and Gram Parsons in the late 1960s, intended to replicate the waving tones of pedal steel on a conventional guitar, usually in the live setting. You can hear B-Bender’s characteristic twang on any number of classic…
Trapper Schoepp’s seventh LP Osborne borrows its name from a unit at the Betty Ford clinic – a place where the Wisconsin musician ended up after a decade of dependence on prescription pain meds. Just one month after being released from the legendary treatment facility, a clean and revived Schoepp was in the basement of a California church recording this record.
To call it personal almost feels like an under- statement. Though the music is often upbeat, the lyrics reveal a much darker narrative. He confronts his addiction head-on with the opening track, “Loaded.” This mid-tempo indie-pop song, with its infectious chorus, traces the roots of his struggle: a pain management doctor who not only prescribed the pills but even provided advance…
One of the most successful independent albums of all time, Comfort in Sound is the fourth studio album by Welsh rock band Feeder, released originally on 21 October 2002. It spent 121 weeks in the Top 50 UK Independent Albums chart, with 47 of those being in the top 10. A pioneering Alternative Rock album of the early 2000s, it was also the first to be released by the band after the suicide of drummer Jon Lee earlier in the year. The album was recorded at RAK Studios in London during most of 2002, and was produced by Gil Norton.
As Feeder’s biggest commercially successful album, we are reissuing this exciting expanded edition with exclusive new versions of tracks. The album has been fully remastered for 2025.
Sarah McLachlan’s first album of original material in over a decade, Better Broken is a warm hug from a cherished friend. Confident and heartfelt, this comeback effort brims with emotion. McLachlan’s vocals remain in fine form after all these years, while the songs are refreshingly vibrant and immediate, standing strong next to her best ’90s output. Along with producers Tony Berg and Will Maclellan (both from the boygenius orbit), she is joined by a team that includes Wendy Melvoin (Prince), Benny Bock (Lucy Dacus, beabadoobee), and Matt Chamberlain (Dylan, Bowie, Tori Amos). With such strong backing, she navigates timely struggles, both personal (her family, past loves) and big picture (women’s rights, state of the world), finding the bright spots in the brokenness.
Boundary-pushing electronic duo and technological pioneers the Future Sound of London have charted a magnificent, unpredictable course throughout their multi-decade career, ranging from early rave staples to ambitious excursions into ambient soundscapes, psychedelic rock, modern classical, and more. Prodigiously releasing club records under various pseudonyms since the late ’80s, Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans launched FSOL with the breakbeat house classic “Papua New Guinea” in 1991, following suit with the Accelerator full-length. After signing with Virgin Records in 1992, the duo began releasing more experimental, atmospheric material, including the highly regarded 1994 double album Lifeforms. They also sidestepped traditional methods of touring…
There’s a thought that it’s simple enough (relatively speaking) to write your first album – you’ve got a lifetime’s worth of experiences to hone into ten or so songs. The second album, though – that’s tougher. Unless you’re the duo of singer-songwriters that compose Texas band Briscoe. Philip Lupton and Truett Heintzelman released their first album, West Of It All, in 2023. Between now and then, they finished college, started their first large-scale tour, AND married their long-time partners. All of that change and travel informed their new record, Heat of July. It finds the pair using a larger sonic paint box to help explore all they’ve seen in the past two years.
The deepest wells in that paint box comes via producer Brad Cook, who seemingly…
Born in Peru but currently based in Buenos Aires, Jorge Espinal has spent more than a decade touring and collaborating, participating in projects such as Ricarda Cometa and Calato, developing a musical approach in which body and instrument function as a single unit. With his debut solo album, Bombos y Cencerros, he uses prepared electric guitar, bass drum, cowbell, pedals, and a laptop to trigger samples, build loops, and freeze sounds. As his official bio states, “the guitar becomes a source of rhythm rather than harmony.”
The album, which took shape after a 16-date European tour in 2023, was recorded in a single session in December 2023, simultaneously played using hands and feet, but comprised a series of pieces that condensed years of…
Newton Faulkner’s eighth studio album, Octopus, marks a bold new chapter for the multi platinum selling singer-songwriter – his most authentic and adventurous to date. Over five years in the making, the album sees Faulkner stepping into a new era with a refreshed sense of artistic freedom, blending unexpected influences from funk and R&B to soul and Latin grooves. Swapping his trademark acoustic guitar for a distortion-charged Hofner Violin Bass, he unlocks a fresh songwriting approach that fuels standout tracks like the anthemic lead single “Alright, Alright, Alright.”
Rich in collaboration,Octopus features contributions from Lissie, Los Bitchos and Bloom Twins, bringing new textures to his sound. It’s a record that celebrates creative reinvention…
As a member of the hardcore outfit the Armed and the atmospheric jazz collective Fuubutsushi, Patrick Shiroishi has proven that he can handle both aggressive thrash and evocative ambience with finesse. For his latest solo project, he balances both, and creates something fraught and angry, yet strangely serene.
Forgetting Is Violent begins with a voice speaking in Japanese. Other voices join the speaker, forming an overlapping chorus. “To protect our family names,” at first reflective, grows more urgent and insistent, one narrative turning into a litany of laments. Shiroishi enters with a rapid-fire series of chromatic high notes, all texture and tension, highlighting the rising tide of distress. Shiroishi’s sax increases with the number of voices, his…
Being best known as the ghostly melodic heart of Dean Blunt’s tales of wounded masculinity has often overshadowed Joanne Robertson’s brilliant, similarly idiosyncratic solo work. On Blurrr, her strongest and most focused work to date, she continues to build a gorgeous world of solitary melancholia. Sonically, it’s largely as sparse and haunted as Robertson’s previous work; simply recorded acoustic songs that seem gently smudged, words difficult to make out, all elements drifting into something that seems to ache through the fog. There’s something of early Cat Power about how unadorned and downcast it all is, but, perhaps owing to the simplicity of its recording, its atmosphere feels more domestic, less constructed, as if it’s something private overheard…
Warsaw 480km is the debut LP from Irish/Portuguese quintet pôt-pot, who infuse the propulsive grooves of krautrock with a phosphorescent psych-rock radiance, all underscored by harmonium drones, hypnotic male-female vocal harmonies, and deep layers of rough-hewn texture. Evolved primarily from demos by multi-instrumentalist and lead vocalist Mark Waldron-Hyden during a period of grief and personal upheaval, the album came to life through a series of live, full-band studio sessions that document an exceptional array of talents, unified in an embrace of raw catharsis with a sweetly sinister edge.
“22° Halo” opens the record at a driving pace, elevated by searing amplifier tone…
Deacon Blue release a limited tour edition of The Great Western Road. The album include 5 bonus tracks, an expanded booklet with alternative artwork and new liner notes written by Ricky Ross. This was to be the last album that, founder member, James Prime was to record, followed by his sudden passing in June this year. The band have dedicated this release to him, Ricky Ross: “None of us knows what tomorrow will bring but we celebrate that we got to do it together one last, glorious time.”
2025 marks 40 years since Ricky Ross met Dougie Vipond and they started to form Deacon Blue, the songs on ‘The Great Western Road’ reflect the journey the band has taken and remain honest to the age and experience they all share.
New Yorkers Native Sun deliver debut album Concrete Language, a keenly anticipated release via new label tastemaker label TODO. Comprising Colombian-born Danny Gomez (vox/guitar), Justin Barry (bass/vox), Jack Hiltabidle (guitar), and Argentine-born Nicolas Espinosa (drums), the quartet have produced an album oozing garage rock and roll at various speeds and styles.
Opener ‘Down My Line’ sets out the albums stall. It careers out the gates at pace with a vocal full of gritty rock and roll, it never lets up. With a mid-track drum roll to die for and guitars packed with feedback, things get deliciously spikey towards the end. ‘Down My Line’ is allowed to slowly peter out, the instrumentation coming to its own glorious natural conclusion.
Peter Stampfel is a name that should mean something to you, that is, if you are into folk music. Robert Christgau wrote, “Next to Bob Dylan, Stampfel is the closest thing to a genius that [the folk scene] produced.” First moving from Wisconsin to New York City in 1959, at age 20, Stampfel, along with Steve Weber, established the psychedelic and puckish folk group the Holy Modal Rounders, progenitors of freak-folk and psych-folk.
Their debut self-titled LP (1964) was produced by Samuel Charters, who, the year before the publication of his pioneering 1959 book, The Country Blues, had started the Orange Blossom Jug Five with the folk hero Dave Van Ronk. Moreover, the Holy Modal Rounders’ first album includes a rewrite of the traditional…
Singer/songwriting rocker Bones Owens likes to take control. From riding his motorcycle to each gig to playing nearly all the instruments on this, his third album, and producing it (for the first time), Owens grabs the reins of his own success on this collection. For Best Western, he wraps some glam (“In the Wind” could be a T. Rex B-side), harder-edged garage rock (“Talkin’ Loud”), blues (“Silver Spoon Blues”) and psychedelic folk (“Here Is Not My Home”), with convincing, soulful but never over-sung vocals for 50 minutes of gutsy, plugged-in Americana.
Owens doesn’t believe in excess; only one of these 15 tracks breaks the four-minute mark as he sticks with rugged guitar/drums/bass instrumentation and a few unobtrusive keyboards.