Thanks to steady gigging around his adopted hometown of Chicago, paired with a beautiful, hypnotic voice, Andrew Sa has been dubbed Chicago’s premier queer country crooner. His debut, American Rough, may just make that title national. With a voice that seems to channel Roy Orbison, you can also hear traces of everyone from Chris Isaak to the late Raul Malo in Sa’s swooning vocals. American Rough is a romantic’s record, delivering songs about falling in love and all of the emotions tied to it, vacillating from euphoria to sadness, all set against a beautiful folk-country soundscape.
The album opens with the title track. At just a minute and a half, it serves as a brief introduction, and Sa’s voice is so ethereal that…
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Mark Jenkin is an auteur to an extent rarely attempted by filmmakers. He writes his films, with Mary Woodvine, directs them, shoots them with a clockwork Bolex camera.
His previous feature films, Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022), created a new sub-genre of hazy Cornish psychedelia – a meeting of Don’t Look Now, Penda’s Fen and Wycliffe. Jenkin’s achievements behind the camera obscure his work as a composer. He created the soundtrack for Enys Men, and now for his most recent film, Rose of Nevada (2025). That involved composing, engineering, producing and performing, uses guitar, synethsizers, percussion, loops and effects.
Rose of Nevada is a strange, sad, beautiful film about a faded Cornish fishing village.
Canadian composer Robert Humber is prolific, releasing two albums in 2025. Into Air, his first offering for 2026, is an ambitious collection of pieces written from 2020-2022 for overdubbed solo instruments. Humber’s work involves repetition as a grounding principle, with a fascination for playing with texture serving as a refreshing element.
The title track is played by violinist Adrian Levine. Cast in three movements, it features overlapping ostinatos that first undulate, then gallop through a triadic harmonic palette. In the middle of the piece, there is a fetching passage for hocketing glissandos that softens its edges. The presence of reverb, here as elsewhere, gives the acoustic instruments an outsized character, as if…
DJ Plead‘s music blends percussive rhythms inspired by his Lebanese heritage with production techniques informed by the U.K. bass scene. As he delivered highly acclaimed club bangers on labels like Livity Sound and AD 93, his style ended up being termed hard drum, with other producers like Anunaku and object blue slotted into the same category. His Relentless Trills album for Boomkat Editions was a downtempo set of tracks, revealing more of a reflective side than his usual material. After collaborating with rRoxymore on a 2024 EP for Smalltown Supersound, the label released Plead’s LP Please in 2026. The album’s tracks were selected from a folder containing more than 100 sketches and demos created after the producer wrote and scrapped an entire…
Takkak Takkak make cultural cross-pollination seem easy. Bursting out of the gates with a thunderous mix of metal, electronica, and traditional Japanese and Indonesian sonics, Shigeru Ishihara and Johanes “Mo’ong” Santoso Pribadi grab the reins of their various wild elements and boldly steer them across a landscape of their own design. Keen explorers of modern experimental electronic music have, over the course of the last several years, encountered increasingly compelling connections between disparate genres and distinct musical traditions. But there’s something especially potent about the noisy overtones of Javanese instrumentation combined with seething heavy metal distortion and bludgeoning kicks. Building on the groundwork of artists like…
In 2018, violist and composer Mat Maneri enlisted a quartet of longtime collaborators to assist him in creating a trilogy of albums with an overarching tone. He enlisted pianist Lucian Ban with whom he’d been collaborating since 2013, drummer Randy Peterson, a colleague since 2000, and bassist John Hébert, a partner since the 1990s. The quartet released Dust in 2019. The first of three recordings for Sunnyside, it offered a moody, atmospheric chamber jazz meditation on grief. The group returned with the ephemeral Ash in 2023, using the loose framework of jazz, improvisation, and chamber music to gauzily highlight themes of loss and grief. Mist concludes the trilogy, offering tentative possibilities for hope in the etheric present and future.
South African pianist and composer Nduduzo Makhathini returns with The Myths We Choose, an album whose music advocates for a better world and greater responsibility toward the future. Working with his South African trio at the core, Makhathini invites a number of relevant guests for a program comprising thirteen original compositions (three of them with reprises). Here, he explores new sounds and genres, with several tracks signaling a shift in mindset while retaining the rooted spirituality that has become his trademark signature.
“Kuzodlula”, a soaring 3/4 ballad inspired by the difficulty of forgiveness, opens the album with a delicate compromise between light and dark tones. Resonant bowed bass turning to…
Knitting, the Montreal-based rock outfit, has had one of the more interesting trajectories in the burgeoning contemporary scene. From their humble beginnings dating back to 2021 to the defining moment that placed them in front of their now-cult fanbase, 2024’s Some Kind of Heaven, the four-piece has exercised the limits of modern rock through cathartic sonic calisthenics and a raw, fearless vulnerability. Now, on their highly anticipated new album, the dense, dark, and emotionally complex Souvenir, knitting is already showing signs of restless creativity. This is not the follow-up we expected, but the one the band needed to make, an evolution of sound that is as familiar as it is alien, and the band is holding nothing back in terms of both brutal…
…’Steal Your Face’ has been newly remastered by David Glasser and sourced from the master tapes which were restored and speed-corrected using Plangent Processes.
Grateful Dead’s fifth live album, Steal Your Face, presents the band during a “farewell” run at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in October of 1974. Feeling the impacts of years of touring, along with the responsibilities involved with incorporating their massive Wall of Sound system into their shows, the Dead went on a hiatus from touring after the five Winterland dates, though they would be gathering just a few months later to begin work on the album Blues for Allah. Along with Steal Your Face being released in 1976, the Winterland shows were documented on film for…
…Bruce Springsteen started off his packed Pittsburgh show with an earnest (but scripted) speech, calling these dangerous times for America, lambasting the current administration and calling for a celebration and defense of American ideals, democracy and the Constitution. For the record, he added a few more of those lengthy diatribes throughout the night. But Springsteen and his E Street Band did their best to channel the “righteous power” of arts, music and rock ‘n’ roll over almost three hours on the group’s Land of Hope & Dreams American tour.
“Tonight we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption,…
The follow-up to blue-eyed soul singer Jesper Lindell’s March, 2026 release which found the Swedish vocalist and his band ensconced at Alabama’s Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, replicates the process at Memphis’ famed Royal Studios.
The concept was to record previously chosen and rehearsed covers of music originated at those iconic locations in the 60s and 70s, bringing a fresh perspective from a guy who only knew these songs from the radio (or probably streaming), and have it engineered and mixed by Boo Mitchell, son of the famous Willie Mitchell.
The simply titled Royal like the previous iteration, combines relatively popular songs crafted in Memphis such as Sam & Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” and Ann Peebles’…
Helen Svoboda‘s latest is in the lost tradition of album as journey. Announcing itself like glaring daybreak, it pulls you down into the depths of its own nocturnal dreamworld, one of dusky beauty and clammy tension.
This shift is skilfully done, the album’s opening third slowly shifting from the gently off-centre but relatively linear ‘If’ and ‘Child’ into something more sunken and strange, the album’s final stretch forming an almost uncomfortably raw three-part howl of dissonance.
Svoboda has created an interesting sound world, one of spartanly recorded bowed double bass pushed into the panicky clamour of nightmares, as on ‘Solo’, or soothing, as it is on the swooning ‘Chords’. That said, as the album…
Shadows opens with “The Lone West,” a short, desolate instrumental featuring a simple keyboard refrain with a flute-like quality and what may be an early ’70s drum machine. There’s a bit of Young Marble Giants in there. The Brian Eno of Another Green World, too. The Ghost Box label’s characteristic nebulousness is also apparent.
The next track features a vocal. Sailing over a similar musical bedding, Cate Kennan’s voice on “Shadows” is distant, etiolated, devoid of colour. A twangy guitar plays single notes. There is some Santo and Johnny-esque lap steel and sparingly used castanets. The synthesisers employed sound as if they are old, analogue models. The lady in the radiator in David Lynch’s Eraserhead would recognise a kindred musical spirit.
Everything Pearl & the Oysters have released since their 2018 debut Canned Music has been delightful and that remains the case on their album from 2026, Monkey Mind. Their brand of pop music — which mashes up soft rock, space age pop, ye-ye, city pop, and cocktail jazz — remains as fresh as ever, and the duo of Joachim Polack and Juliette Davis took extra pains to keep it that way. They recorded quickly with producer Jonathan Rado, putting the music directly on tape and keeping the overdubs to a minimum.
One listening would never know as it sounds as blissfully smooth as ever, the electric pianos, flutes, harmonies, and gentle vibes coming together like a sonic hug. The band duo needed a real one during the making of the album as they…
Since their debut album, 2014’s Sun Structures, established them as neo-psychedelic rockers in the first degree, Temples have made a point of never repeating themselves. The albums that followed have taken all sorts of creative left turns, from Volcano‘s synth-heavy modern pop to Hot Motion‘s stripped-down jangle to Exotico‘s stadium indie grandeur. The shift they make on 2026’s Bliss is their most drastic. Influenced by the electronic music and rave culture of the ’90s, the band trade out guitars for synthesizers, pump up the beats, and do their best to add some psychedelic mystery to a very retro dance-rock sound. The album is loaded with slamming beats, huge-sounding synths, jagged sound effects, and dancefloor vibes. Tracks like “Revelation” and…
…freshly remastered from the original analog tapes and includes 4 previously unreleased bonus tracks; “It’s Such a Pretty World Today (Movin’ version),” “Let’s Get Movin’,” “This Town (Film Intro),” and “RC Cola (It’s a Mad Mad Cola)”.
…Without the opportunity to surpass her dad the way Mira Sorvino or Charlie Sheen may have moved beyond Paul Sorvino and Martin Sheen in terms of popularity, Nancy Sinatra deserves credit for a sultry, hip image and the ability to hit a few home runs. It’s easy to hit a home run, of course, when your father owns a piece of the record label, Reprise, and a Rodgers & Hammerstein composition makes its way onto track four, like “Younger Than Springtime,” sung by “a very close relative.” The uncredited Frank Sinatra…
Cécile McLorin Salvant makes big orchestral jazz feel refreshingly intimate on 2026’s With Every Breath I Take. Her first fully orchestral album, it finds the Grammy-winning singer joined by the Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckely, with arrangements by Darcy James Argue. Also by her side is her trio, featuring longtime pianist Sullivan Fortner along with bassist David Wong and drummer Kush Abadey.
Rather than simply picking a set of well-worn standards, Salvant curates her choices, embracing songs that speak to a woman’s point of view and experience in the world. It’s a vibe she underscores whether revisiting her own “Left Over” off 2015’s For One to Love or echoing that song’s heartbreak on Buddy Johnson’s soulful…
…Since 2010, Gold Panda’s Derwin Dicker has been making opalescent, gossamer-tufted tracks in the tradition of Four Tet, J Dilla, and Susumu Yokota. And while he has cut loose on occasion, the emotional gravitas of his music — suffused in wistful sample flips and winsome harps and chimes — has always made it seem more grown up than your average comedown soundtrack. Gold Panda’s last album, 2022’s reflective The Work, was inspired by midlife strides in therapy and sobriety, which are already admirably adult themes. All that makes his new album, TON UP, a delightfully unexpected left turn. Rather than yet another nuanced collection of contemplative home listening, it’s a 35-minute grab bag of antic, automotive-themed house jams that hug…
…This expanded edition has been newly remastered from the original tapes and includes five bonus tracks and two additional discs featuring live performances recorded on the ‘Magic Is a Child’ tour at Hofstra University, Long Island and The Community Theater, Phoenix, AZ in October and November 1977.
Magic Is a Child was released in 1977, the debut for new Nektar guitarist Dave Nelson. Carrying on, though, from where their last set left off, Nektar’s fascination with shorter, punchier songs continued unabated, even while the keyboards continued to swell and the guitars shifted ever more toward the symphonic. Nektar’s brightening vistas were new, however, and a fatal flaw as far as their fans were concerned. They didn’t want…
For more than a decade, River Shook fronted Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, a raucous but fitfully tender country-rock unit that, for most of its run, hit the bottle as hard as it hit the pavement. In that grandest of country music traditions, the Disarmers’ songs were honest reflections of the blackout-chasing lives the members were living, but that changed when Shook got sober in 2019. The albums that followed, especially 2024’s incisive Revelations, were more clear-eyed; they also exposed the fault lines that had begun to destabilize the Disarmers. In June 2025, Shook played their final show with their longtime band. By then, they’d already begun working on the nervy, forthright songs that would become their eponymous solo debut.