Fountain sees Emika delivering one of the most personal and emotionally resonant records of her career. Following a successful crowdfunding campaign to build a new immersive recording studio, the Berlin-based artist fulfills her promise to supporters with an album that feels both intimate and fully realized.
Over the years, Emika’s work has moved fluidly between classical composition and electronic pop, often leaning more heavily toward one side or the other. On Fountain, however, she brings these worlds together with striking clarity, revealing herself at her core as a songwriter. The result is a cohesive and deeply human record that captures her artistic identity more completely than ever before.
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Some bands respond better to spontaneity than others, and more than four decades after their first album, the Young Fresh Fellows have been learning a lot about making things up as they go. The genesis of 2020’s Toxic Youth came when their longtime production ally Conrad Uno announced he was closing his studio in Seattle, and the YFF booked the room’s last three days and came up with 17 songs, mostly invented on the spot. 2026’s Loft pushes this concept even further; during a rare 2024 tour of the Midwest and East Coast, the YFF were invited to spend a day at the Loft, Wilco’s studio and rehearsal space in Chicago, and they took full advantage of the opportunity. Though they had only a few fragments of songs ready for the occasion, they cut enough…
Hopes and Dreams is the title of the brand new compilation series from Tramp Records. This new series draws on the music selection of ‘Praise Poems’, not only in terms of obscurity, but also in terms of genius. Similar, but anything but a poor copy, the focus is on rare grooves from the 1970s. The album contains genuine rarities that definitely deserve more attention. Take, for example, the opener by Guamanian Frankie & the Karter’s Peanut Organization. The protagonist comes from Guam, a tiny island in the western Pacific, a good 5000km north of Australia. The previously unreleased ‘Back In Time’ comes from an acetate pressing. As far as we know, it is the only existing copy. Easy and Carrie Chaplin & Mark Perron delight us with light folk soul, and fans of Terry Callier will…
At 75, Suzi Quatro is still shaking her ass – and, crucially, there is no silence. There is instead the same devil-gate drive that propelled 14-year-old Susan Kay Quatro to join all-female garage rock band the Pleasure Seekers with her sister before most of us had worked out how to tune a transistor radio. Precursor to The Runaways, to Pat Benatar, to Courtney Love. Bass slung low, chin set high. Suzi didn’t so much kick down the door of rock’s boys’ club as remove the hinges and pawn them for (17 bottles of) Schlitz.
Freedom, her third album in collaboration with her son LR Tuckey, knows all this. How could it not? This is a record about identity, legacy, survival. About Suzi being Suzi. ‘I remember walking along, dreams in my pockets/Singing my songs…
Since its inception in 2002, independent label Soundway Records has unearthed coveted musical gems from far-flung corners of the world, with foundations that are rooted in meticulously sourced reissues. A collection of fourteen digital reggae, deep roots and dub rarities from the Nigerian underground, spotlighting a time when Jamaican reggae entwined with Nigerian styles, politics and consciousness, creating a bridge between Lagos and Kingston. Fight the Fire is a companion piece to Soundway’s seminal “Doing it in Lagos” and “Nigeria Special” compilations, celebrating the innovation and musical experimentation of Nigeria in the 80s. Features rare tracks from key figures of the time including Oby Onyioha (with a crucial Burning Spear cover) and Orits Williki.
In 1974, Merle Haggard released Merle Haggard Presents His 30th Album. Having released thirty albums is in itself a remarkable accomplishment, but it was all the more impressive that Haggard cut those LPs in just nine years. It’s a shame Haggard never talked to Billy Childish about productivity; In 1991, Childish brought out a compilation, I Am the Billy Childish, that included one track each from the fifty long-players he’d put out between 1977 and 1991. Of course, Hag had the resources of Capitol Records behind him as he cranked out his recordings, while Childish cut his music for tiny indie labels, mostly on his own dime, and was also making lots of non-LP singles, publishing poetry, and creating various sorts of visual art at the same time.
Dr. John – Live at Rockpalast 1999 is a powerful live document capturing one of New Orleans’ most iconic musical voices in full command of his craft. Recorded on July 9, 1999, at the legendary Loreley open-air stage in Germany.
Known worldwide as The Nighttripper, Dr. John—born Malcolm “Mac” John Rebennack Jr.—was far more than a performer. He was a musical high priest of New Orleans culture, blending blues, funk, R&B, Creole traditions, and voodoo mysticism into a sound that was entirely his own. A six-time Grammy Award winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member, his influence reaches far beyond genre boundaries.
Dr. John’s recording career began in 1968 with the haunting debut album Gris-Gris, a spellbinding…
…featuring a new mix of the album by engineers and longtime archival overseers Justin Shirley-Smith, Joshua J. McRae and Kris Frederiksen plus two discs of mostly unreleased studio material (including session takes, B-sides and backing tracks) along with two discs of live cuts sourced from previous archival releases.
…Queen II, again made by the band and returning producer Roy Thomas Baker (with a new co-producer, Robin Geoffrey Cable, in the mix for several tracks), expanded on the progressive metal style of its predecessor, adding sharper focus to guitarist Brian May’s dense, distinctive tone; the rhythm section of bassist John Deacon and drummer Roger Taylor and the vocal harmonies of lead singer Freddie Mercury…
In this most challenging of times, we need music to lift our spirits and relieve the gloom. Step forward, in all their retro-chic, cabaret-burlesque splendour The Puppini Sisters, with their perfect harmonies and songs that cheer and distract.
Their style, and sometimes the songs themselves, are drawn from the dark days of the 1940s, when The Andrews Sisters filled the crackling airwaves with songs such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, their style heavily influenced by an earlier close-harmony sister act, The Boswell Sisters, who came out of the Jazz Age and enlivened the years of the Great Depression.
The Puppinis aren’t in fact sisters and there have been changes of line-up during their 20-year career, but for The Birthday Party,…
Just over two decades ago, Holy Fuck were forged on the musical fringes — and there, ever since, they’ve stayed.
If the inherently inaccessible name wasn’t enough, the closest they came to mainstream recognition for years was the “Tom Tom” needle-drop in Amazon’s Invincible (up until “Lost Cool” appeared in 2024’s The Substance, that is).
As such, the experimental Toronto quartet have never had to fret about how many streams they’re accumulating, or how many TikTok followers they have to engage with. This band of fearless freaks are in it for the love of the game — and their comeback LP, Event Beat, ensures said love is as strong as ever.
Within moments of pressing play, the six…
…Original album recorded by Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in 2000 and remastered by Bob Weston in 2025 and never-before-released live studio album, ‘True Live Tapes’, recorded by Greg Norman in 2000 and mastered by Bob Weston in 2025.
Before, listening to Don Caballero felt similar to being beaten over the head with a huge baseball bat of pure audible genius: often too overwhelming and complicated for your average music listener to listen to for very long, much less understand. With American Don, it seems that the baseball bat has been traded in for a pillow, and instead of beating they are slowly smothering. Much of the aggressive bite of the music has been simmered out: distortion is much more rare, time…
The “post-tour musings” album should be a privilege to make. It typically arrives a few years and releases into an artist’s career — that is, if they’ve been fortunate enough to be able to go out on the road. This is the very moment we find the Chicago-based trio, Stuck, in now. Off the back of 2023’s Freak Frequency, the band ventured overseas to perform their frenetic entanglement of janky post-punk guitar riffs across Europe and the UK, a prospect that’s becoming increasingly challenging for the majority of artists today. It seemed as though Stuck’s stock was rising. Therefore, it might come across as odd that within the first five minutes of their contagious new record Optimizer, we hear frontman Greg Obis exclaim, “My life was in decline!”
Opening the album emphatically, ‘Flowers in the Water’ is a refreshing return from The Boxer Rebellion. Brimming with optimism and positivity, lyrics such as: ‘Don’t obsess, be an optimist/ The glass half full is bottomless’ feel like an ode to overcoming adversity and living in hope rather than submitting to despair. Their first album in six years, The Second I’m Asleep is “10 songs mapping the emotional landscapes of life – moments of clarity in chaos, letting go of old ghosts and the art of understanding ourselves in a rapidly changing world”, as the band put it themselves in the album’s press release.
Known for their cinematic sound having featured in television and film soundtracks, the album’s lofty soundsacpe layered with guitar really…
Curated by Ricardo Villalobos, When There Is No Sun reflects on Afrofuturist icon Sun Ra’s influence on electronic music. The release (issued as a single CD or three 12″s, one of which includes bonus mixes) draws from the Sun Ra Arkestra album Living Sky, as well as My Words Are Music, an album of Sun Ra’s poetry recited by Saul Williams, Last Poet Abiodun Oyewole, TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, and others. Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance appears twice, both times with Williams, adding sparse but insistent beats to lyrics about natural blackness and cosmic waves of sound. Chez Damier and Ben Vedren also contribute two tracks based on Ra’s poetry, with “The Three Dimensions of Air” featuring lush kora playing along with restrained…
Jess Weiss takes the shadowy intensity of her band Fear of Men deeper into chasms of dark synth pop with Pain Will Polish Me, the debut album under her solo guise, New German Cinema. While Fear of Men have incorporated electronics into their sound at times, the songs of Pain Will Polish Me are built almost exclusively around heavy synth bass, uneasy ambient pads, and programmed drum sounds, creating a foundation of Weiss’ songs that’s sharp and menacing while still making space for hooks. A perfect example of this tenuous balance is “I Become Heavy,” a track made up of tortured verses and exciting dance-pop choruses. Weiss’ ability to take the song from the dungeon-ready atmospheres of early Cure material to club-ready melodies at the flick of a switch is…
Includes 2 brand-new songs: “When You’re with Him” and “Before I Hung Your Picture On the Wall”.
Since the death of Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell has assumed the crown as the King of Country Music, at least the Americana side of the genre. The 75-year-old former son-in-law of the Man in Black has a complete record of accomplishments and achievements as a singer, songwriter, and producer. Earlier this year, Willie Nelson put out a full-length album, Oh What a Beautiful World, which featured 12 songs written or co-written by Crowell over the past 50 years. What could top that? Well, Crowell’s not about to retire. He’s just released his 20th studio record, Airline Highway.
The new record reveals Crowell is still the master of diamonds and dirt, as he labeled his…
Before his career as a singer, songwriter, and recording artist took off, Luke Winslow-King spent several years supporting himself as a busker, both in the United States and Europe. Part of making a living playing on the streets is playing what people want to hear; maybe singing “Brown Eyed Girl” for the fifth time that day isn’t your favorite thing in the world, but if the guy with ten bucks in his hand wants to hear it, that’s what you play. Winslow-King has gone through plenty of changes since those days, and as he’s evolved from his early days playing traditional blues with a soulful accent, he’s opened himself to other sounds, and 2026’s Coast of Light is the work of a different Luke Winslow-King. While tracks like “Don’t Worry Your Mind,” “Shoot from the Hip” and…
…includes new tracks such as “song for tik tok” and “strange request” alongside “bedroom versions” of previous hits.
Hunny’s SPIRIT! finds them in a transitional place. The record has the same punky indie-rock sound as their earlier material. Lineup-wise, though, singer-guitarist Jason Yarger has essentially dismissed the rest of the band and is continuing as a solo project under the same name. Despite this, Hunny’s now-former drummer Joey Anderson plays drums on SPIRIT!, while the ex-bassist Kevin Grimmett serves as producer and is credited as co-writer on just over half of the tracks. It feels like this change must have been entirely amicable.
Yarger notes in the press materials that he’s happily married with a child, so he’s mostly…
The duo of Verity Susman and Matthew Simms don’t change the basics on the second MEMORIALS album, 2026’s All Clouds Bring Not Rain, but there are some welcome changes afoot. Recorded in a remote cabin in the French countryside, with the occasional excursion elsewhere to find a particular instrument, the record ironically sounds more expansive and less insular than their debut. Like that record, this is built around the sounds of experimental indie rock, space age pop, soundtrack music, left-field jazz, and progressive German rock of the ’70s. Unlike that record, here the duo come across much more focused and intent on delivering not just an array of fascinating sounds, but also some moments of melodic beauty and some real emotional punches.
After spending a few years exploring his gentler, more singer-songwritery side, Kyle Thomas moved back home to Vermont, dug out his old guitar and tape machine, and welcomed back King Tuff the rocker in all his gritty, grungy glory on 2026’s Moo. The first track — “Twisted on a Train” — is a call to arms of sorts, with live wire guitar riffs coiling around thumping bass and drums, then exploding into shards of shattered noise as Thomas lets loose and dashes away any remnants on the calm found on his previous album. Smalltown Stardust was truly a magical record, full of warmth and sweetness, but it makes sense that someone raised on rock like Thomas would want to break free of the chains of restraint. There are loads of gnarly guitars on the record, drums…