This tenth anniversary edition of Venetian Snares’ ‘Traditional Synthesizer Music’ adds ten bonus tracks and alternative versions originally available only on limited edition compact disc from the artist’s Bandcamp.
For an artist whose recordings typically consist of intensely edited, sample-heavy sonic constructions, the “traditional” way to go about making music is to spend countless hours programming an overwhelming modular synthesizer system that takes up an entire room. Aaron Funk has explored analog synthesizer music before, but he usually saves this type of work for his Last Step moniker, which veers toward acid techno rather than the frenetic breakcore of his more well-known guise, Venetian Snares.
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2026 marks the 20th anniversary of Nightmares On Wax‘s (George Evelyn) seminal In a Space Outta Sound, as a dub clash with On-U Sound producer and mixing desk wizard Adrian Sherwood titled In a Space Outta Dub, revisioning eight of the 2006 album’s songs. While the original tunes remain recognizable, Sherwood adds his own visionary sonic signature full of humid warmth, languid rhythms, and sultry grooves
Opener “You Bliss” is a sonic redesign of “You Wish.” The original William Bell Stax guitar sample remains, but it’s submerged by smoky saxophone and an organ that sounds like it was lifted from the Doors’ LA Woman sessions. Sherwood’s trademark dread bassline is boosted, heavily reverbed, and echo-laden. It sounds quite…
Let’s look at the numbers: John Williams has been on this mortal plane for 93 years, and has been composing for visual media for 73 of those years. Compact discs have been a part of music lovers’ collections for at least four decades, and the “art” of John Williams on CD – a real, curatorial approach to his iconic film scores – began in earnest more than 30 years ago, when the 4CD box set Star Wars Trilogy: The Original Soundtrack Anthology hit record stores in 1993. From basic compilations like Greatest Hits 1969-1999 to hefty box sets covering his material recorded with The Boston Pops and other orchestras on two labels between the ’80s and the ’10s – not to mention the Herculean restoration work of remastering and expanding Williams’ scores beyond…
The album Reach Their Final Destination and Play Their Greatest Hits by Geof Tick & the Howling Fantods is a masterclass in conceptual noise and experimental soundscapes, released in early 2026 under the Easyriders Noise imprint.
Despite the title suggesting a conventional “Best Of” compilation, the record is anything but. It functions as a dense, atmospheric journey that feels more like a career-spanning manifesto than a simple collection of tracks. The album leans heavily into the “extreme sound” aesthetic typical of the label. It blends harsh industrial textures with moments of haunting, melodic decay. Geof Tick utilizes the “Howling Fantods” moniker to explore themes of finality, transition, and sonic exhaustion. The “hits” here are reimagined…
Angine de Poitrine are the most thrilling Canadian mystery since David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. Though the anonymous Québécois duo had been gigging quietly around the Great White North for years, a single KEXP session last December at France’s Rennes Festival rapidly made them viral superstars. In bobbing paper-mâché masks and monochromatic wardrobes, these two “space-time voyagers”—known only as Klek de Poitrine and Khn de Poitrine—make weirdly danceable math-rock for muffled drums and comically fretted microtonal guitar. Self-described as a “Mantra-Rock Dada Pythagorean-Cubist Orchestra,” they’ve managed to rack up better view counts than the Tiny Desk Concerts from Clipse and Weezer. A copy of their debut, 2024’s Vol. I…
Live and Acoustic presents Trey Anastasio at his most stripped-back and introspective, capturing a series of performances from his sold-out 2025 Spring Acoustic Tour. Produced by Vance Powell and featuring longtime collaborator Jeff Tanski on keyboards, the album offers a focused and intimate listening experience.
Spanning 22 songs drawn from across Anastasio’s four-decade career, Live and Acoustic highlights the strength of his songwriting in its purest form. Without the expansive arrangements often associated with his work, the songs are allowed to breathe, revealing their melodic core and emotional depth. Fan favorites such as “Stash,” “Waste,” “Divided Sky,” and “Pebbles and Marbles” take on a new dimension in this setting…
Joe Pernice has been playing an uncompromising brand of indie music for more than three decades now. He dug into alternative country with the Boston-based Scud Mountain Boys before switching to a more indie rock/pop sound with the Pernice Brothers. But it’s his latest — and first — solo studio effort, where he strips it all down for a mellower, often somber vibe that is as beautiful as it is thoughtful.
The album opens with the pristine and surprisingly sardonic “Peace in Our Home,” with Pernice gently singing the title over light acoustic guitar and immaculate harmonizing backup vocals before adding the stinging “…when you’re gone” to punctuate the song. “Deep into the Dawn,” the following track, is just as mellow,…
U2’s second surprise six-track EP of 2026, Easter Lily arrives six weeks after Days of Ash – the period in the ecclesiastical calendar known as Lent. For U2 fans, it’s a case of feast rather than fast, with both releases standing alone and distinct from the band’s new studio album, for which recording sessions remain ongoing.
As The Edge explains in the new accompanying edition of the band’s Propaganda ’zine: “We wrote some songs meant for our album, but they started to assert themselves in some unexpected ways, demanding special attention, their own devotional world, suggesting they didn’t feel part of our album. So we folded… agreed to their timeline… the songs are the boss.”
These are certainly boss songs – Easter Lily…
Poetry and song are related, but they’re not kissin’ cousins, more first cousins at one remove. Composers of art song in the 19th and 20th centuries turned to poets for their song cycles, and rock-era lyrics have often been hailed as poetry, but what happens when a poet – a page poet, albeit adept at performance – combines with musicians and lyricists and adds his own voice to the mix; his reading voice, not a singing one.
In the case of Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate, former probation officer and resident poet with LYR, he’s fortunate in his collaborators, singer-songwriter Richard Walters, with his fine and distinctive lyrical vocals, and multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick J Pearson, who with Armitage work up a broad palette of…
Offering up more of her perceptive, increasingly world-wise songs, Responsible Friend is Elizabeth Ziman’s sixth Elizabeth & the Catapult album and first since the COVID-concerned sincerely, e. A little more playful but no less profound, it finds her grappling with relationships, work, and, more generally, human stewardship amidst the existential threat of things like worsening socio-politics and climate change. Ziman produced much of the album herself, but longtime collaborator Dan Molad (Lucius) produced four tracks and mixed most of the songs, and Jon Titterington (Father John Misty) lent a hand on a couple tracks.
Responsible Friend opens with the earnest “I Love You Still,” a song whose tender, supportive sentiments are underscored by…
Charley Crockett has always been a prolific artist, stretching the limits of his imaginative approach to country, which toes the line between tradition and the lofty. Recently, though, the long-standing troubadour has been releasing distinct, genre-altering releases, starting with 2025’s Lonesome Drifter and Dollar a Day, which arrived a few short months later. These two subsequent releases, both co-produced by the iconic Shooter Jennings, build the story Crockett is calling “The Sagebrush Trilogy.” Now, the time has arrived for Crockett to close this chapter of his storied career with Age of the Ram, the third and final installment of his Jennings-assisted trilogy.
Each of these albums that make up The Sagebrush Trilogy has had a specific sound…
If you could distill the guiding philosophy of Robber Robber’s second album down to a single word, it would be the one that appears about a minute into “Avalanche Sound Effect”: “upend.”
With a frenetic, trash-can-clanging backbeat ricocheting behind her, singer and guitarist Nina Cates calmly repeats that word as if reciting her daily-affirmation mantra, transforming a word synonymous with upheaval and disorder into a source of strength and possibility.
Certainly, the Burlington, Vermont band can appreciate the value of a good coping mechanism: In January 2025, the building where Cates and drummer/partner Zack James resided caught fire. Though the couple’s apartment was spared any major structural damage, every…
Jed Bindeman’s ears hurt. As a co-founder of reissue label Freedom to Spend, he acquired some 1,200 cassettes from the archive of ND, an influential Austin-based magazine from the ‘80s and ‘90s, and began systematically working through the stacks of tapes. What he found made all the effort worthwhile: a home-recorded, self-illustrated cassette by someone called Larrison, entitled Connecters [sic]. When he pressed play on this mysterious tape, Bindeman heard a warbling, lo-fi keyboard, amateur yet sophisticated, unlike anything else he had encountered.
It turns out that Bindeman’s tape was the only copy of Connecters in existence. Its creator, Larrison Seidle, had moved from Indiana to Austin and recorded the entire album on…
Six years to the date of his last LP, Thundercat release his fifth studio album, Distracted, coming out via Brainfeeder. The new album features contributions from A$AP Rocky, WILLOW, Tame Impala, Channel Tres, Lil Yachty and a previously unreleased collaboration with the dearly departed Mac Miller.
Distracted was primarily created in close collaboration with a new creative partner for Thundercat – the superproducer Greg Kurstin, known for his work with some of the biggest names in pop like Adele, Paul McCartney, Sia, Beyoncé, Beck and more – with additional production turns on the record from Flying Lotus, Kenny Beats (Kenneth Blume), and The Lemon Twigs. Distracted vividly captures…
Temple of Blues II: All-Stars sees Cactus, led by legendary drummer Carmine Appice, continuing their late-career resurgence with a star-studded follow-up to their 2024 comeback Temple of Blues. Rather than simply revisiting past glories, the band expands its sound and scope here, leaning heavily into collaborations that celebrate both their legacy and their influence.
The album thrives on its “all-stars” concept, bringing together a wide range of notable musicians who help shape its blues-rock foundation into something dynamic and varied. One of the standout moments is a new take on the blues standard “The Little Red Rooster,” featuring Dee Snider on lead vocals and Tracii Guns on guitar. The track captures a raw…
The Gathering, originally released in 2007, returns in an expanded edition that reaffirms the lasting significance of Marianne Segal’s long-awaited comeback. This reissue not only revisits the album but also casts new light on a work that already proved her artistic voice remained as compelling as ever after decades away from the spotlight.
Best known for her work with cult ‘70s outfit Jade, Segal used The Gathering to reconnect with the spirit of that era while subtly updating it for a more contemporary audience. In this expanded form, the album’s depth and craftsmanship become even more apparent, offering listeners a fuller picture of her creative vision.
The record moves effortlessly between traditional folk balladry, roots…
VOLUMES: ONE, the first non-studio release from Bon Iver, captures 10 distinctive live performances, recorded between 2019 and 2023, showcasing Justin Vernon and his band at their most whole. There’s a warmth and exuberance across the album, as well as the sort of muscular sound you can really only get at a live show. For the uninitiated and die-hards alike, these recordings could well be the defining versions of the tracks, no doubt made possible through the essential live engineering of Xandy Whitesel and performances from bandmates Jenn Wasner, Sean Carey, Michael Lewis, Matthew McCaughan, and Andrew Fitzpatrick.
Vernon began working on VOLUMES: ONE in 2020, and he spent a considerable amount of time combing through concerts…
After a five-year run of musically intrepid and critically acclaimed studio LPs – Absolute Zero, Non-Secure Connection, ‘Flicted, Deep Sea Vents – as well as entire albums’ worth of still-unreleased material, the virtuoso pianist suddenly found himself “creatively fried.”
Despite his best, well-intentioned efforts to step away from songwriting for a brief time, his creative musings ultimately prevailed. One particularly tenacious song idea led to several months of sleepless nights before Mr. Hornsby finally relented, resulting in the incredibly satisfying title track to his latest release, Indigo Park.
Within the ten tracks of Indigo Park, Mr. Hornsby and his uber-talented musical cohorts, The Noisemakers, this time…
When Dave Grohl and Nate Mendel took over the curation for the May 2026 issue of MOJO, they didn’t just pick a few favorite songs—they built a bridge between the Foo Fighters’ legendary past and their 12th studio album, Your Favorite Toy.
Foo.Fm functions as a 15-track “musical odyssey.” It’s a rare look behind the curtain at the records that fueled the band’s recent creative pivot back to their punk-rock roots.
The tracklist is a masterclass in balance, weaving together the “holy trinity” of their influences: legacy pioneers, contemporary heavyweights, and the new guard of alternative rock.
The compilation kicks off with a heavy nod to the underground. The inclusion of Hüsker Dü and Kim Gordon acts as a reminder…
Horrorful Heights marks a formidable new chapter in The Bevis Frond’s deep and storied catalogue, showcasing the enduring creativity of songwriter, guitarist and frontman Nick Saloman as he moves into yet another decade of recording. Long established as one of the most distinctive voices in British underground rock, Saloman continues to refine the band’s signature blend of melodic psychedelia, wiry guitar epics and sharp, emotionally attuned songwriting. Horrorful Heights offers one of the most approachable entry points to the band’s world in years: a record that gathers their core strengths into a cohesive, vivid set.
Recorded with long-time drummer Dave Pearce and guitarist Paul Simmons, alongside new bassist Louis Wiggett, the album moves…