…include two live bonus tracks.
Call it a makeover, or at least a major reinvention of the Tedeschi Trucks Band sound. New management and the outside perspective of new producer Mike Elizondo, perhaps, account for their shift toward more radio-friendly, albeit less exploratory turf on their sixth studio album, Future Soul. That’s not to say they’ve lost their rooted grounding by any means. Arguably, this set of songs comprises their most fully rounded album to date. It comes close to that cliche of ‘all killer, no filler. In fact, there are only two mediocre tracks among the eleven. Many of the tracks have sing-along choruses, which will play well on the band’s upcoming tour. Some fans will miss the lengthy improvisatory solos in this set, but the band will likely bring those to…
Latest Entries »
They say timing is everything. The time to meet the right person. The right time to start over. Blink, and you might miss them. But is there ever really a perfect time? Or does timing just feel perfect when we’re finally ready to listen? The release of Full Circle at the first hint of spring feels almost too on the nose: an album about retreat and renewal arriving just as the world thaws out. For Tom Misch, timing does a lot for narrative work. After years of constant motion, his long-awaited second studio album captures the lightness of transformation and the undeniable bounce of realising you’re once more in bloom.
Once upon a time, Geography cemented him as a defining voice of the late-2010s bedroom producer wave. Everything felt easy. Since then,…
As the latest emo revival continues apace, and particularly as midwestern heroes of its second wave like American Football enter into whole new chapters, some of its more modern stalwarts continue to go from strength to strength. That would appear to be especially true of Philadelphia mainstays Tigers Jaw, as they enter into their third decade together with this scintillating eighth record. Over the years, they’ve alternated between lush, multi-layered sounds and rawer, noisier work; both sides of that divide are in evidence on this first album in five years, Lost on You.
There are poppier, more melodic moments – the standout ‘BREEZER’ is appropriately titled – as well as more reflective indie rockers that play like paeans to some of their forebears;…
Following the two-person effort Could Have Done Anything (2023), Charlotte Cornfield‘s sixth album, Hurts Like Hell, is a much more collaborative outing as well as her first for Merge and her first since becoming a mother. Not coincidentally (and despite its title), it’s a warm, touching set of songs that is still packed with her often profoundly intimate observations, but this time there’s a subtle shift toward gratitude and perseverance. The collaborators include producer Phil Weinrobe (Adrianne Lenker, Lonnie Holley) and a backing band consisting of Palehound’s El Kempner (guitar, vocals), Lake Street Dive’s Bridget Kearney (bass, vocals), and Wilder Maker’s Adam Brisbin (guitar, pedal steel) and Sean Mullins (drums). The album was recorded at Weinrobe’s…
Throughout his career José González has been a pacifying voice, delivering quiet, organically-made records that emphasize patience and humanity. He’s not particularly prolific, though when they arrive his albums tend to hit their mark — consistency, both in tone and quality, is one of his hallmarks. González rarely employs more than one or two guitars and the occasional second harmony, nor does he need to. His gentle, though commanding tenor and deft fingerpicked arrangements are enough to fill the rooms he creates. Understated as they are, his songs are also not without weight and his fifth album, Against the Dying of the Light, is his heaviest to date. It’s posed as a more outward-focused sequel to 2021’s Local Valley, his meditative fourth…
Since debuting as a bandleader in 2020, Nashville studio ace Spencer Cullum has continued to steer his music further and further from the country world where he makes his living. A seasoned pedal steel player will always have a job in Music City, but the first two albums in his Coin Collection trilogy revealed a more adventurous palette steeped in ’60s psychedelia and folk-rock from both sides of the Atlantic.
In 2025, he teamed up with Nashville outsiders Rich Ruth and Sean Thompsonto form Shrunken Elvis, a sleek amalgam of ambient post-rock and jazz fusion that further emphasized his range as a musician. On his third and final record of the Coin Collection trilogy, Cullum presents a quieter, more pastoral style that heavily favors…
It’s instructive that The Twilight Sad’s first album since reducing to founding duo James Graham and Andy MacFarlane yields the most powerful version of the band’s cathartic soundworld. Perhaps the subject matter helped: It’s The Long Goodbye documents Graham losing his mother to dementia while simultaneously becoming a father, a real-life crossroads detailed with unsettling candour from the first line of the opening song (“And we slowly watch you go”).
To counterpoint the singer’s mournful Scots folk timbre, MacFarlane’s euphoric post-punk schemes roughen the shiny patina of 2019’s It Won’t Be Like This All the Time for a transcendent blend of New Order, My Bloody Valentine and, inevitably, The Cure. He’s previously covered…
…features the original album plus ‘Live at Third Man Records’, a 10-song live album.
On his debut for Columbia Records, Pete Yorn wears his heart on his sleeve like Ryan Adams, sings in a husky croon similar to Jakob Dylan, and earnestly plays into passion and emotion like Jeff Buckley. The year 2001 belonged to Yorn, and his critical praise was not unwarranted, with Musicforthemorningafter marking the stunning beginning of a long, varied career. It’s a raw selection of heartland and American trad rock, yet Yorn’s love for Brit-pop is also quite evident, with several breezy acoustic-based songs (“Sense,” “Simonize”) resembling threads of the Smiths. Yorn’s voice may crack at points, but it contributes to the dusty feeling of the entire…
As Pan•American, ambient musician Mark Nelson has gradually shifted through different phases of style and sound while maintaining the same emotional core of muted longing. Nelson was playing in the equally atmospheric band Labradford when he launched Pan•American in the late ‘90s, first exploring dark and dubby electronic landscapes and slowly expanding into more beat-focused pieces and then an Americana reading of his spacious ambience. Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane is another shift for the project, moving away from the high and lonesome acoustic touches of his 2010s and early-2020s output into something that’s at once more playful and more serious. The instrumentation takes different forms over the course of the ten-track album.
Forty years on and the seismic shift that was 5150 – Van Halen’s first album with Sammy Hagar replacing David Lee Roth and also my first introduction to the band still detonates with a force that few records in the hard rock canon can match.
The 2026 expanded edition, remastered directly from the original master tapes and overseen by the band’s longtime engineer Donn Landee, doesn’t seek to reinvent one of the most commercially dominant albums of 1986, but seeks to honour it, warts and all, and in doing so reveals just how staggeringly alive this record remains.
What the expanded edition offers beyond an outstanding remaster is a genuinely comprehensive document of the album and its era. CD2 gathers the singles campaign in full – edited versions…
While this is technically a Jon Anderson solo album, it’s actually a collaborative effort, with Anderson working alongside several other musicians who’ve collectively put together the songs on Survival & Other Stories.
The album came about after Anderson placed an ad on his website inviting other musicians to get involved, and ultimately eight different musicians from across the globe contributed, done by file sharing across the net, sending MP3 samples while Anderson performed the songs.
Whether this was because Anderson had been running on empty after coming through a debilitating illness, which saw him come close to checking out, or because he felt the need for fresh inspiration is unknown.
Over a two-decade career, Robyn has made some of pop’s most propulsive, bulletproof bangers – not least ‘Dancing On My Own’, an eternal, iconic anthem about forging your own path out of heartbreak. On her ninth album Sexistential, though, we find her unmoored and questioning, the end of a long-term relationship having catalysed the explosion of everything she thought she knew about love, life, sexuality, motherhood and more besides. Robyn invites us to journey with her through the unravelling. With a deceptively purposeful strut that evokes the bionic pop of ‘Body Talk’, opening track ‘Really Real’ marches us into an ambivalent sex scene – “You’re mid-performance, I’m planning my escape… I want to swallow but it ain’t the same” – that…
Bassist Miroslav Vitous made his bones in the late ’60s and early ’70s as both player and composer for the original lineup of Weather Report, not to mention as a major contributor to pianist Chick Corea’s landmark trio album Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. But he’s been a leader on his own albums for ECM since the late seventies, and he’s never rested on any laurels in doing it. Thus Mountain Call, which combines three different sets of players into a remarkable program that threads the needle between jazz and classical musics.
Vitous opens the album with a four-song mini-set featuring duets with late clarinetist Michel Portal that sound like two old friends having a truly interesting conversation – interesting enough that more of its appear throughout…
…features the original album as well as sessions, B-sides, a live show from the time and a complete disc of demos from Chapel Studios.
Having exorcised enough bile for two bands on their rickety release Interim, The Fall loosen up their attitude, tighten up their delivery, and squeeze out a rocking album that relies heavily on its highlights. Fortunately, there’s plenty, most hitting with the thwack of the “Sparta FC” single or the Light User Syndrome album. “Pacifying Joint” is a punchy exercise in hooks and sheen, “What About Us” is snide Mancabilly of the highest order, and “Blindness” hypnotizes and chugs its way into the Top 25 original Fall tracks ever. Flashiest of the lot has to be a soaring cover of the Move’s hippy anthem “I Can Hear the Grass Grow,”…
Coming from the small-town roots of Leavenworth, Kansas, Melissa Etheridge has become a modern American music icon. Leaving the comforts of home in 1982 to pursue music studies at Berklee College of Music in California in 1982, Etheridge spent several years building her sound before eventually signing on with Island Records in 1986, and making a national breakthrough in 1988 with her self-titled debut and the Grammy-nominated single “Bring Me Some Water.” Bringing an authentic heartland approach to mainstream Rock-n-Roll, Etheridge would continue to find success into the 1990s and truly arrived in the spotlight in 1993 with her pivotal album Yes I Am. With a record that peaked at number 15 on the Billboard 200 and featured hits like “I’m the Only One,” “If I Wanted To”…
It’s been a long journey for Lindsey Jordan, better known as Snail Mail. From the fledging steps that were 2016’s Habit EP, in which a 16-year-old Jordan released more heart, feeling, conviction in song format than the indie genre had seen in many moons. In many ways, she arrived fully formed, surfing to the front of the indie rock genre on a wave of pure honesty and talent for guitar prowess. With the release of 2018’s debut album, Lush, she became one of the most recognizable voices to skate the scene. With the exceptional and expanding follow up that was 2021’s Valentine, it’s hard to believe that it has been close to five years since Jordan last released an album.
Ricochet at its most honest is a stellar reintroduction to the world of Snail Mail,…
The twelfth album from Los Angeles metal veterans Black Label Society has all of the band’s trademarks. Loaded with pummelling riffs, blazing guitar solos, bluesy licks, and a southern rock twang, Engines of Demolition is undeniably heavy without sacrificing hooks or accessibility.
Frontman Zakk Wylde broke into the industry as Ozzy Osbourne’s new guitarist in 1987 and ended up creating some of Ozzy’s best riffs. Fronting his own band, Black Label Society, since 1998, Wylde took with him Ozzy’s penchant for pairing bone-crunching heaviness with beautiful melodies. Black Label Society’s music hits hard, but beneath that heavy exterior lies intricate melodies and Wylde’s soulful voice.
The album opener, “Name in Blood,”…
…John Mellencamp recently announced the Dancing Words tour, a summer trek through America in July and August that’ll focus on hits he’s not played in a while to audiences in outdoor amphitheaters. A few months before that, Cherry Red’s Lemon imprint issue an exciting new compilation that takes things back to the beginning of Mellencamp’s career – under a different name, and with some enticing unreleased material.
American Dream (The Mainman Recordings 1976- 1977) is a 2CD set that’ll feature both albums he recorded for the MCA-distributed Mainman under the somewhat confounding sobriquet “Johnny Cougar.” Chestnut Street Incident (1976) and The Kid Inside (recorded in 1977 but unreleased for five years) will be accompanied by…
Following a three-year studio hiatus and the arrest of their now-former drummer Joe Seiders on child pornography charges, Canadian indie rock supergroup The New Pornographers are returning with their new LP The Former Site Of.
Many musicians have come and gone from the New Pornographers over the past 30 years, but the core lineup of Neko Case, John Collins, Carl Newman, Todd Fancey, and Kathryn Calder remains. They were joined on the album by session drummer Charley Drayton, though Josh Wells will be behind the kit when they tour.
According to a press release, The Former Site Of features “ten short stories of people at personal and societal extreme.” In a November 2025 exclusive interview with Rolling Stone…
Whatever you think of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, you have to admire Michael Peter Balzary’s efforts to establish an aesthetic hinterland beyond the unit-shifting funk-rock of his regular band. Even at the height of the Chilis’ socks-on-cocks tomfoolery, Flea was telling anyone who’d listen that Gang Of Four were the greatest band who ever lived, acting in indie movies like My Own Private Idaho, investigating Transcendental Meditation and playing lounge jazz with Mike Watt. Since the turn of the millennium, he’s ramped up his extra-curricular activities, forming supergroups with Damon Albarn and Thom Yorke, and guesting with the likes of Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Morrissey.
He’s also gravitated back towards his first instrument – trumpet – and his first musical…