The David Bowie estate is going back toward the beginning of the late singer’s career, focusing on his early days as a blues interpreter with a famous British producer. The Shel Talmy Recordings collects 22 recordings the then-unknown musician recorded with producer Talmy during 1965, when he was a member of bands The Manish Boys and The Lower Third. Only four of these tracks were released at the time as singles, with another seven alternate and outtake versions turning up on compilations over the years; that of course makes 10 tracks debuting here on this package – including lead track “I Want Your Love.”
Still a year from changing his stage name to “Bowie” – “Davy Jones,” of course, would be well spoken for by The Monkees in 1966, and that…
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All those reinventions, genre-clashes, breakdancing and Gen X irony can take it out of a person. So it’s little surprise that every twelve years Beck returns to a safe place, a familiar terrain, where he can work through difficult emotions with trusted musicians. There’s no pressure to show off, innovate or get crazy with a processed cheese spread.
Sea Change, Beck’s eighth album, established this more sombre space in 2002. It was folky like 1994’s One Foot in the Grave and ’98’s Mutations, but different too: a dead serious, dead slow, dead melancholy mix of acoustic guitars, strings and a Gallic-funk rhythm section, it found a bruised Beck channelling his heartache over the end of a nine-year relationship. Sea Change confused…
Hope Is the Thing With Feathers is a sort of homecoming for Rhiannon Giddens. The folk singer and string musician first gained acclaim for her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a group dedicated to preserving traditional string band music of North Carolina. Since 2015, her solo career has taken her far afield, exploring the tributaries that flow from the folk music of the Carolinas: discovering austere, arty branches through her work with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi and adding enough polish to her essential sound on 2023’s You’re the One so it resembled a crossover.
A slight echo of You’re the One’s smooth assurance surfaces on her new record via “Carolina Rain.” The tune is broad and insistent enough…
At the start of 2026, MOJO enlisted the help of our readers to compile a guide to the best new Neil Young albums of the 21st century. It had proved, thus far, a hectic and complicated 26 years: by our count there had been 20 studio albums, six live albums, two memoirs, approximately 30 Archives releases, at least seven movies, innumerable tours, a revolutionary car and a Toblerone-shaped rival to the iPod.
Young’s 21st new album of the 21st Century, however, is strong evidence that the Top 10 we constructed needs revision. Second Song is comfortably his best since the molten sprawl of 2012’s Psychedelic Pill, the last hurrah of Poncho Sampedro-era Crazy Horse. And while Young’s current backing band, The Chrome Hearts,…
…The digital deluxe edition includes four new bonus tracks.
Such is the diversity of David Byrne’s projects since Talking Heads’ split in 1991, it can feel like no possible new endeavour is too far-fetched. Now that American Utopia and Here Lies Love have finished their runs, maybe it’s time for a Broadway musical about the turbulent childhood of Tristan Tzara? Or else an art photography book of textile factories in South Carolina? And surely there’s an album of New Orleans bounce to be made with Diplo and Big Freedia, and possibly a weekly column of recipes for the New York Times?
The fact that none of these options seem particularly outlandish makes the relatively straightforward nature of his latest…
People like to say that artists who have little left to lose, either by virtue or lack of past success, have “zero fucks to give.” Usually, this means that an artist has either reached a point at which they no longer care what kind of impression their work makes on the general public, or, taking a more wide-angle perspective, they see no appeal in anything the world and future have to offer, and wash their hands of the whole thing. Colin Newman and Malka Spigel, formerly of post-punk legends Wire and Minimal Compact, respectively, have certainly earned the right to rest on their laurels, cruise on autopilot, follow their fancies, or indulge in score-settling. They owe the world nothing, but the world owes them plenty. Yet their latest album as Immersion is a work of craft…
Laurie Osborne (Appleblim) describes Liminal Tides with a series of antinomies: awake / asleep, self / no self, and conscious / unconscious mind / no-mind. To these, one could add Bristol / Berlin.
It’s no secret that Osborne has spent much of his career as Appleblim between these two cities. While he picked up the mantle Appleblim in London, DJing early dubstep at the foundational FWD>> clubnights, he began producing the stuff upon moving to Bristol in 2006. Bristol is also where his two record labels got their start: Skull Disco (2005-2008) which he ran with Sam Shackelton, and the solo imprint Apple Pips (2008-present, though largely inactive since 2013). At the same time Appleblim got big in Berlin, Ricardo Villalobos and the rest of the minimal techno…
It would be easy to describe Santur & Kamancheh for Electronics as an encounter between Iranian classical instruments and electroacoustic music. Fortunately, that is not what this album is about. Rather than treating tradition and experimentation as opposing worlds, Maryam Rahmani & David Esser allow them to coexist within the same acoustic space. The santur and kamancheh are never presented as historical artefacts awaiting electronic transformation. Instead, electronics become another way of listening to them.
From the opening “Glass Tower,” one has the impression that the listener has been placed inside the instruments themselves. Contact microphones, geophones and live processing reveal vibrations that normally remain hidden:…
…features two further recordings that complement the original album’s ultimate collection of Arvo Pärt’s music for solo piano.
Arvo Pärt is the world’s most often heard classical composer; he trades that position numerically with John Williams, but does not, as Williams does, exist on the border between classical and another genre. His 90th birthday in 2025 has stimulated the release of some interesting albums, and this one made classical best-seller lists in the late summer of that year. One might not associate the percussive piano with the delicate shades of Pärt’s minimalist ensemble music, but pianist Georijs Osokins here (or the good marketing folks at Deutsche Grammophon) asserts that he wants to explore “the hidden relations between different…
…features previously unreleased tracks, B-sides and remixes from The Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack, Jagz Kooner, and Two Lone Swordsmen.
Whenever indie music seems lost in its own self-righteous, unchallenging, inoffensive fundament, Primal Scream rides in to try and save it all. So just as Screamadelica tried to encapsulate the importance of ecstasy culture, or Vanishing Point tried to exorcise their own insanity, here XTRMNTR is a nasty, fierce realization of an entire world that has also lost the plot. The album starts with a gloriously vindictive sample of a kid commanding “Kill All Hippies,” and this roughly states the album’s modus operandi. There are songs shouting with furious, feedback-splayed anger (“Blood Money,” “Exterminator”), songs…
The journey to Sylvan Esso’s fifth studio album was a cross-country trip, with a storm on either side. Quite literally — Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn left their longtime home in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of Hurricane Helene in late 2024; shortly after they settled in Los Angeles, they found themselves surrounded by the January 2025 wildfires. The duo was already mourning the loss of their close friend Jessica, who died of sudden liver failure in 2023.
If there is a single throughline on Ow ∞ (pronounced “Ow Infinity”), it’s grief. It’s not an album about death, per se, but about living in the wake of unimaginable loss, overcoming the pain that keeps piling up — “the suffering of suffering,” as Meath calls it on “Flood Season.”
“I have something to say,” the opening line of Paris Paloma’s raw, visceral, and powerful sophomore album The Fatal Flaw, is a colossal understatement. It’s unfortunate that portraying a world through the female gaze, glaring down on misogyny, superficiality, and capitalism, is considered radical. Paloma knows that the only way to crumble power structures is to face them head-on, and if that’s radical, then she welcomes the label with open arms.
The Fatal Flaw celebrates art, stuffed to the brim with allusions that cement Paloma’s role at the intersection of pop, intellect, and humanity. The songwriting is adeptly concise and eloquent, often reading more like a short story collection than an LP. It’s resoundingly successful in…
Twilark’s Canon Pence sees the beauty in everything falling apart. In a wavery tenor balanced precariously between country confessionals and indie rock self-examination, he mourns the changes in life, in relationships, in bucolic plots of land swallowed by development. And yet, he also finds solace, even revelation in the cycle. The best song on the disc, “Prettiest Way to Die” tracks the slow, visually striking death of a tree strangled by wisteria. It’s a disaster for the tree, clearly, but also an indelible image of weathered bark wreathed in murderous purple flowers.
This is Pence’s second album as Twilark, following 2025’s The Taming Ties Create, a sparer, more inward-looking collection of songs, which nonetheless foreshadowed…
Crescent City jump blues pianist Mitch Woods does it all by himself on his latest release, A Night in New Orleans, recorded live at the Snug Harbor club during the 2026 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. He sings, tells stories, and, most importantly, plays boogie-woogie piano to entertain the crowd.
You can hear their enthusiastic response as he hits the keys, but they never throw him off his stride. Indeed, the opposite is true. They inspire him to play faster and harder. As he notes during his rendition of Louis Jordan’s “Choo Choo Ch’boogie”, he doesn’t have a drummer. His audience must supply the rhythm for his energetic melodies.
Singing and playing solo allows Woods the flexibility to cover a wide swath of the Big…
The configuration of bass, drums, and piano is an all-too common one in the world of jazz music, but when those instruments are somewhat turned on their heads, the results can be unique and often stunning. That’s certainly the case with Enneads. Their self-titled debut features Zach Layton on an unusual 17-string electric bass and pianist Phyllis Chen using nodal points inside the lid of an amplified piano, run through a distortion pedal. Hamir Atwal’s drumming setup is fairly standard, but the way he works subtly around his bandmates creates an ambience that adds to the otherworldliness of this startling, moody record.
Released on the forward-thinking Birdwatcher label (responsible for experimental releases by artists like GADADU, Jessica Pavone, and…
Hearing Gretchen Parlato’s spellbinding version of the Herbie Hancock song ‘Butterfly’ was unforgettable when the eloquent LA-born singer’s star glimmered into view in the 2000s.
The unique qualities she revealed soon brought her worldwide acclaim. ‘Butterfly’ would open in an onstage silence only broken by Parlato’s soft handclap on a Brazilian groove, eventually turned into a wordless vocal hook, and then the awestruck natural-world homage of the lyrics written by Hancock’s sister Jean. She would time phrases between deliberately emphatic in-breaths like cymbal hits, and arrestingly morph words in and out of abstract sound.
The Wise Ones arrives as her third album since 2021, when she returned from six years…
…The digital deluxe version features 3 exclusive bonus demo tracks that are not available on the physical standard vinyl or CD pressings.
Where in the past Bloc Party have dealt in emotional ambiguity, on this seventh effort all metaphors are discarded. Described by Kele Okereke as the most personal work of his career, Anatomy of a Brief Romance is a chronological account of a relationship from first glance to final goodbye, operating as a memoir over 14 songs.
Given the autobiographical content, it’s a surprise that Okereke chose to release this under the Bloc Party name rather than as a solo record. Yet the presence of guitarist Russell Lissack, drummer Louise Bartle and new bassist Harry Deacon — making his recording debut with…
…expanded digital edition featuring 11 additional b-sides and live recordings.
Listening to a new Solex album is a bit like being suddenly and completely immersed in a foreign language. At first it sounds alien, unpredictable, and impossible to decipher, but as time goes by, its rhythms become natural, and charming idioms and turns of phrase slowly reveal themselves. Elisabeth Esselink’s third Solex album, Low Kick and Hard Bop, could be considered a primer in advanced Solex — it’s an evocative and wildly creative, but not immediately accessible collection. Listeners not already fluent in Solex Vs. the Hitmeister and Pick Up may be bewildered by the strange, ever-changing melodies and arrangements, which Esselink crafts from samples of…