Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Margo Price release a protest mixtape, Days of Unrest, a nine-track collection inspired by the causes and communities she’s championed throughout her career, ranging from prison reform and marijuana legalization to immigration, farming and labor rights.
Produced by longtime collaborator Matt Ross-Spang, the set blends original material with reimagined classics. Among the covers are Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” featuring Joan Baez and Memphis Mariachi, Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” Charlie Daniels’ “Long Haired Country Girl” featuring Billy Swan and the traditional folk song “De Colores,” also with Memphis Mariachi.
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In the ‘80s, F/i was so underground that even their founder, Richard Franecki, didn’t have copies of their earliest albums. “I don’t really count those in our discography, since they were privately issued under our fake ‘Uddersounds’ label,” he has said. The group eventually found modest success — a series of albums on the much-respected noise label RRRecords, European tours, shows with Hawkwind and Acid Mothers Temple — but in those early days, F/i recorded cassettes to trade rather than sell, swapping single copies for material from like-minded bands. 1985’s Invisible Men is the holy grail of this era, a tape so rare that they didn’t even bother releasing it on a fake label.
Franecki came up through Milwaukee’s tiny punk scene in the late ‘70s, playing in bands…
Brutalismus 3000, the Berlin electronic duo comprised of producer Theo Zeitner and singer Victoria Vassiliki Daldas, call their music “nu-gabber post-techno punk.” They deride Berlin’s techno scene as painfully serious and “unstylish,” cringing at ravers self-styled as revolutionaries. They shoot music videos with happy crews of children smashing and spray-painting TVs. And if they had to write a manifesto, they’d title it “Fuck Shit Up” (or “We’ll Kill a CEO”).
This devil-may-care attitude befits the duo’s loud, aggro, in-your-face music: scrap-metal synths and air-raid sirens, jackhammering hardstyle kicks, and banshee shrieks that sound like they’re being shredded through chopper blades. Brutalismus 3000’s second album, Harmony,…
Pressing play on Spacemoth’s new album is like stepping into a ‘90s Magic Eye painting: Everything suddenly becomes 3D, jumping off the page in a blur of motion. Infectiously catchy from the get-go — all Day-Glo synth splodges, fuzzed-out guitar, boxy drum workouts, and strawberry bubblegum basslines — Inward Eye is both instantly gratifying and wrapped in deeper meaning. At its heart, it’s a paean to journeying — on the road, inside your mind’s eye, and to other cosmic dimensions, all while you ponder things like “Do We Exist?” and how to communicate through a paper cup.
That Maryam Qudus wrote most of the record in the back of a tour van while traveling across the U.S. with psych rockers La Luz makes sense. Who hasn’t felt their most creative when…
…Nixon Boyd hails from Ontario and has been playing in the indie rock band Hollerado since 2007. Hollerado make a much different brand of indie rock than Boyd’s solo stuff — infectious anthems laced with power-pop ecstasy. When Boyd was almost finished with his debut solo album Every Time We Turn a Corner, the bag with the hard drives containing the album was stolen from his car, and he started over.
…The title track, which serves as the opener, has an almost surfy atmosphere to it, à la Mac DeMarco at his calmest. As with “You Will Always Get Away with It,” the irresistibility is in the repetition of the refrain, which in this case is just the words of the song/album title. But he draws out the phrase by repeating the word “turn”…
…newly remastered by Technology Works from the original source tapes.
Strut Records presents the first definitive expanded reissue of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Sun Ra’s 1977 session recorded at the Bluebird in Bloomington, Indiana. The Arkestra were at the peak of their powers in 1977, releasing revered albums like The Soul Vibration of Man and My Favorite Things with Arkestra regulars Marshall Allen, Danny Ray Thompson, Michael Ray and Luqman Ali among the core musicians. Ra also continued his touring in Europe with historic gigs in Italy. During this period, Arkestra live performances were often loosely structured into thematic blocks that moved from reflections on jazz history to cosmic “space narrative” sections…
Trumpeter and composer Ralph Alessi cuts a distinctive figure in contemporary jazz, with a remarkable ability to use the same tools as most – acoustic instrumentation, quartet and quintet formations, bop vocabulary – and still come up with something that sounds like no one else.
A Sun That Never Set, his fifth album as a leader for ECM, bears this out. Fronting a fivesome made of friends and family, including his brother Joseph on trombone, Matt Mitchell on piano, John Hébert on bass, and Ches Smith on drums and percussion, Alessi carefully and calmly sculpts environments that feel like a singularity in the middle of post bop, chamber jazz, and some sort of sonic language unique to the leader himself. Despite, or, rather, encouraged by the craft with…
Purgate’s latest release, Leavings, has a simple yet effective formula. Take a short abstract motif, and let it loop for a few minutes.
These motifs, however, are synthesized from melodic fragments, static, distortion, and other unusual features. And the looping varies each of them slightly across iterations.
Purgate is Frederic Arbour, also known as the label head for Cyclic Law. Thus, he is intimately familiar with dark ambient, industrial, and adjacent genres of music. His efforts on this album only provide a respectful nod toward those established forms before heading out in new directions.
‘Cinders’ opens the album with shards of airy, floating synth grounded by a pulsing rhythm. ‘Ashes’ is even more focused on repeating,..
The album November 89 comprises a selection of very early GAS tracks, some of which date back to the late 1980s. They were first released in 2008 as a CD insert in the art book ‘Wolfgang Voigt GAS’, published on Raster-Noton.
Just like the photographs in the book, these pieces are early precursors that would evolve in the ensuing years with the albums ‘Zauberberg’ and ‘Königsforst’ into a style-defining, audiovisual “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art) comprising hypnotically focused forest imagery and an abstract, psychedelic wash of sound created by alphorn and bass drum.
…As the title suggests, it was mostly, remarkably, made in ’89, back when Voigt was finding his feet between techno, house and…
…20th-anniversary edition has been remastered from the original tapes and includes an exclusive live LP of the band’s performance at the 2007 Lowlands Festival in Biddinghuizen, Netherlands.
In the metal community, there are two veteran/legendary bands that, whenever they release a new album, you know pretty much what you’re going to get. We’re talkin’ ’bout AC/DC and Motörhead, of course. While the former band now takes several years between albums, the latter cranks them out on a much more frequent basis, as evidenced by the arrival of 2006’s Kiss of Death (which arrived barely over two years since 2004’s Inferno). The fact that the hard-living group is still at it is an astonishing feat unto itself, but when you realize they’re still keeping pace with…
2026 marks the 40th anniversary of Truthdare Doubledare, the second studio album from UK synth outfit Bronski Beat. Four decades on, London Records revisit the album with its first-ever reissue, presented across a range of formats including digital, limited edition purple LP, picture disc LP, 1CD, and expanded 3CD. Fully remastered, the release also unearths rare and previously unreleased studio sessions and live recordings.
New remixes include a striking rework of “Hit That Perfect Beat” from Doncaster-born, London-based DJ I. JORDAN. Injecting the original track with euphoric synth lines, complex arpeggios, and a driving vocal hook, the rework is built for the modern dance floor whilst respecting the original’s important roots.
“You can change the chapter, you can change the book, but the story remains the same if you’d take a look”. So runs the chorus line from ‘Nobody’s Diary’ by Yazoo, an unexpectedly prophetic lyric looking forward to the formation of Doublespeak. For here is a supergroup founded in the 2020s but rooted almost entirely in the early development of electronic music.
As supergroups go, this one is entirely logical – and in fact, the only surprise about the Orwellian Doublespeak is that it took this long for them to form. Electronic music royalty Vince Clarke (not just Yazoo, but Depeche Mode and Erasure) and Neil Arthur (Blancmange) have been good friends since the early 1980s, when making your own pop music was fast becoming a pleasure…
One of the most patriotic albums of 2026 comes from a place of shame and disgust. Watching the country passively shift toward authoritarian rule and turn its back on the principles and ideals the U.S. was founded on in favor of racism, tribalism, and a raft of other -isms, Adam Weiner, better known as Low Cut Connie, has delivered a stellar call to action against the bigots in charge with Livin in the USA. Across 10 tracks, he oscillates between highlighting just how low we have sunk as a country and grabbing the wheel, jerking the album into a more upbeat tempo that refuses to let the fascists steal our collective joy. Nowhere is this clearer than on the first two cuts: the title track is a moody, piano- and electric guitar-driven lament about living in a country that…
It’s easy to romanticize New York nightlife — and sometimes you might wonder if it’s cheesy to do so. After all, the late David Mancuso’s foundational Loft parties have been the center of embittered schisms and fights over branding that call into question their founding ethos: “Love Saves the Day.” But what would New York City be without a little conflict, eh? And there are still plenty of true believers in the fiercely independent, dizzyingly multicultural, polysexual spirit that has kept people dancing in the half-century or so since Mancuso first blew up balloons and tuned on his huge hi-fi. Key among them are the Love Injection crew — conceived by Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele at a Loft party, and who are determined to keep the spirit alive through zines, record…
Guitarist Miles Okazaki’s ninth album as a leader, Boomtown, showcases his progressive ideas and singular musical voice. Comprising 12 original compositions, the album derives its distinctive identity from the contributions of 10 exceptional musicians and improvisers who, while occasionally throwing a few upward jabs, always keep the collective spirit firmly in focus.
“Magic Hour” opens the album with a graceful sense of balance, its acoustic guitar-driven melody immediately palpable and its clustered harmonies intriguingly alluring. The horn players enrich the texture, helping transform the piece into a seductive, almost magical soundscape. This peaceful Threadgill-ish opening gives way to a markedly different mood on…
Toronto was always a sort of musical melting pot, so it is no wonder that the core trio of Toronto-based, Brazilian native multi-instrumentalist Felipe Sena with co-writers Artu Bastos and Dan McLay that goes by the name of Orbital Ensemble, has found its nesting place there.
With a help of a multitude of truly experienced musicians, this true ensemble has come up with its second album, Continua, recorded primarily live with the core six-piece that is often the manner in which Orbital Ensemble plays on stage, Sena, Bastos, and company have come up with something that is labelled quite precisely as neotropical psychedelic sound.
And yes, that is exactly what this mostly instrumental music sounds like – a combination…
Who needs frivolous instruments like guitars or four string basses to make frisky, rollicking pop rock? Not the dudes in the self-titled Lester Winchester McKendree trio.
While the unusual arrangement of keyboards, drums and two string bass might seem like they’re working with a few hands tied behind their backs, the offbeat lineup provides such a rich, full sound, few will notice, or care, about missing instruments (or bass strings). With the somewhat boastfully titled They Got It All, these guys lock into a groove and ride it for ten sharp, snappy tunes that’ll leave even the grouchiest listener grinning.
Although the three musicians share equal billing, two-string bassist (influenced by Morphine’s late Mark Sandman’s similarly primitive…
If the sepia-toned photograph of a house on a hill is any indication, proun’s debut LP Maybe Luck is about revisiting memories, working through them and standing on the other end with a different perspective. The Austin-based trio’s main songwriter, Jamie Weed, also the band’s guitarist and singer, works through the tumultuous feelings that came with her gender transition.
Originally written solo on a nylon-string guitar, when mapped out with bassist Dante Zatto and drummer/engineer Alex Peterson, the songs on proun’s first album become a touching exploration of what it means to accept yourself, even if that means pushing past others’ expectations of who you should be.
Weed began writing this album with the title…
There’s a certain charm to an after-school band. In an age of industry plants and X Factor it-boys, listeners still crave the intimacy of bedroom pop and the rough authenticity of garage rock.
Atta Boy has carved out a home between the two homegrown genres, and no wonder: the LA band’s four members met in middle school, formed the group in their early teens, and released their debut album, Out of Sorts, around the time of their high school graduation.
After an eight-year hiatus spent pursuing other interests — one of them being a starring role in Yellowstone and another in Top Gun: Maverick — the band reunited in 2020, returning with a tighter, more layered version of the sound that made Atta Boy a cult favorite in the first place.
…The live release all hardcore Devo fans have been waiting for, Nitrous Nightmare demonstrates a band harnessing their artistic greatness in the purest of forms. This mythic performance captures Devo perfecting some of their most iconic concepts in the raw. Expertly restored, this live recording makes for a thrilling experience, it also captures Devo as a lightening rod for hostility.
On Halloween 1975, Devo took the stage at the WHK Auditorium in Cleveland, in a supporting capacity for jazz legend Sun Ra, to perform for a raucous crowd dressed in the finest of Halloween cliché. Already riding high on Nitrous Oxide and booze supplied by the sponsoring radio station, this unaware horde was expecting to see a slick cover band churning out renditions of…