The ferny Brutalist cityscape on the cover of Soli City’s Poetics of a New Estate is a fine advertisement for what’s inside: curated Copenhagen vibelessness, shorn of grit but not without a certain numinous quality. Anyone who’s heard the computer-screen fantasias of ML Buch’s Suntub or the mallsoft jazz of MK Velsorf and Aase Nielsen’s Opening Night knows on some level what to expect: spiffy ’80s guitar that twangs and ripples just this side of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” a conservatory-schooled ear for arrangement, a lack of friction that belies the spookiness rumbling underneath. Less expected are the jarring tonal shifts liable to induce whiplash across its 45 minutes — and which would seem haphazard if every single one of them wasn’t…
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In November 2025, trombonist and composer Kalia Vandever released the celebrated quartet offering Another View on Northern Spy. The five-track set was performed by the artist’s quartet that included Mary Halvorson, Kanoa Mendenhall, and Kayvon Gordon. Vandever’s music won attention not only for its quality, but for its difficulty to categorize. While their compositions often utilize modern jazz and vanguard classical music as frameworks for new exploration, Vandever has also worked in pop, classical, and theatrical settings. Mana, her International Anthem debut, relationally returns to the solo framework the artist adopted for 2023’s We Fell in Turn for trombone, voice, and electronics. The seven works here loosely follow that direction, but they expand…
With No Nation But Imagination, British pianist Alexander Hawkins delivers a radical and fascinatingly complex work that may leave listeners wondering how its intertwining layers of piano, synths, harp, flute, drums, turntables, and samples fit together so naturally. Yet Hawkins — already proven capable of leading large ensembles (Togetherness Music) and engaging in adventurous duos with cellist Tomeka Reid, saxophonist Evan Parker, and vocalist Sofia Jernberg — continues to push boundaries, reshaping the language of modern improvised music through another ambitious and experimental undertaking.
“Solo Way Far Gone” opens the album in a restrained glide, its slightly distorted synth waves evoking obscure Sun Ra recordings.
On Music for Tombak & Synth, Paris-based Iranian musician Cinna Peyghamy transforms a technical experiment into something deeply personal. What began as research into contact microphones and live improvisation gradually evolved into a meditation on exile, double identity, and inherited memory. The dialogue between the Persian tombak and modular synthesis — “a piece of wood and skin” confronting a hyper-technological electronic system — becomes both sonic method and autobiographical metaphor.
The album’s greatest strength lies in the extra- ordinary physicality of its sound design. Peyghamy gives space to every resonance, allowing intricate rhythmic patterns, modular modulation, and acoustic textures to breathe and…
Private Recordings 1968 is a Carnatic Indian classical music archival album featuring the mridangam (double-headed drum) master P.S. Devarajan alongside a young K. Shivakumar on violin. Originally captured as intimate home tapes in Chembur, Bombay, on January 3, 1968, by Swedish musician Bengt Berger, the album was officially mixed and released by the Country & Eastern record label.
…Perhaps a disc for the true enthusiast, but one that is extremely rewarding and provides great insights into the fundamentals underpinning Carnatic music. From the very first track, we are brought into the heart of the process, where the recitation of syllables and singing show how the music emerges from a deep…
Andrew Jim Gannon feels like he’s lived multiple lives. Starting off in an indie/guitar band, then sliding into studio work, then being asked to set up a studio for an unknown client.
This led to him producing, and engineering, the 2010 Giggs album Let Em Ave It. In the early 2020s he stepped away from anonymous studio work to release music as On Man. This led to a glorious self-titled album, which led him to finally release music under his own name.
Listening to his new album Hydrate Those Folds! it’s all there – a lot of it in plain sight, but some of it hidden just below the surface.
‘Golden Kayak’ is the first great song on the album. The backing track as a pulsating drone, stuttering beats and languorous synths,…
With its idiosyncratic song structures and choice of instruments, Mexico City psych rock group Diles Que No Me Maten’s new album Escrito en Agua (“Written in Water” in Spanish) has more in common with jazz than alternative/post-punk music. Listening to the album you really get the sense each song has been sculpted and moulded, fermented and buffed to perfection. Take how the pedal steel on “Viene el viento” literally seems to moan, or the utterly beautiful saxophone and clarinet duet on “La rata modesta,” on which you can hear the valves opening and closing, the resonance of the reeds, the way the dissonance occasionally resolves like sunlight beamed through the gaps in moving clouds. Shorter instrumentals such as “La rata modesta” are common across…
…Brown Wimpenny formed in Manchester in 2023. Within weeks, their ranks had swelled to twenty-five, with members based in Liverpool and London. For a spell, they existed as an amorphous entity, a folk collective with the spirit of punk experimentation, traditional music’s answer to dada or situationism. By 2024, they had settled on a line-up of a mere eleven members and released a selection of brilliantly raw demos in January of that year. Their first single, ‘The Sheffield Grinder/Black Joak’, came out last year and was swiftly followed by ‘Raglan Road’. Both of those songs appear on the band’s full-length debut, Long Live Brown Wimpenny.
‘The Sheffield Grinder/Black Joak’ was quite an introduction. Accordionist James Brown…
Darren Hayman is reissuing ‘The Violence’, the sprawling double album he regards as the most ambitious work of his 30-year career. Originally released through Fortuna POP! in 2012 and recorded with his 16-piece ensemble The Long Parliament, it returns with previously unreleased songs and demos folded into the running order.
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, if she floats or drowns” wrote Darren Hayman on Hefner’s ‘The Sad Witch’, a decade later he’s returning to the subject for The Violence, a concept album based around seventeenth century Essex witch trials and the English Civil war.
As concepts go it’s not as odd a choice as you might think. Leaving aside allegorical links to the present day, intended or otherwise…
…Alex Amen, at 26 years old, appears like a fresh-faced 1970s James Taylor. He is described by his record label ATO as “an artist untethered from time and place”. Growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas, he moved to California to attend film school, before dropping out to join a commune. He then spent three and a half years on Vashon, an island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, living an outdoorsy, back-to-nature lifestyle that weighs heavily in his music. As he absorbed his environment and honed his musical skills, he released his first batch of solo recordings, The Zorthian Tapes, in 2024. He now lives between Texas, California and New York, and Sun of Amen is his first full-length album.
‘Diamonds’, the first track, is described as…
Fischer-Z found success across Europe and sold more than two million albums and collaborated with Peter Gabriel, Steve Cropper and Dexys Midnight Runners’ horn section. Band main man John Watts has released 26 albums and played around 4,000 concerts so far.
Fischer-Z continue to release brand new music and tour all over the world and celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2026. The celebrations begin with this expanded 3CD deluxe digipak which collects their first three albums; World Salad (1979), Going Deaf for a Living (1980) and Red Skies Over Paradise (1981), originally released on United Artists and Liberty. This expanded collection is completed by a selection of bonus tracks from each album’s original release.
Kronstad 23 return with Dødehavet, the Norwegian quartet’s third album and first release on Batov Records. Continuing their instinctive, analogue-led approach, the record sits between cinematic jazz and psychedelic rock, threaded with Scandinavian folk and wider global influences. Recorded live to tape with minimal preparation and no modern studio intervention, Dødehavet captures a band working on feel, interaction and momentum rather than polish or precision.
Despite living at opposite ends of Norway, old friends Øyvind Arnodd Vie Berg (keys), Alexander Tøsdal Tveit (guitar, sitar), Eirik Rømcke (bass) and Hans Christian Dalgaard (drums, percussion) conceived the album almost casually, sketching the idea of a reunion over a drink…
Maria is the debut long-player by London-based Brazilian bassist and composer Moyses Dos Santos. Originally from Sao Paolo, he emigrated to the U.K. in the late 2000s, where he’s made a name as a first-call session and concert musician who has worked with many artists, including Omar, Nile Rodgers, and Janelle Monáe. The album’s flavor is rooted in the styles and rhythms of northeastern Brazil filtered through 21st century British jazz, funk, and soul. Among the set’s many contributors are Azymuth’s keyboard ace Kiko Continentino, arranger Arthur Verocai, trumpeter Theo Croker, vocalist Lynda Dawn, Incognito drummer Francesco Mendolia, pianist Chris Eldred, and many others. The album is titled after Dos Santos’ mother, and given that root connection,…
The Susto Stringband was born in 2022 when Susto frontman Justin Osborne relocated to Asheville, NC and met some of the key players of the Asheville bluegrass scene at an open mic night. The solidified lineup includes Clint Roberts and Jackson Grimm of Holler Choir, Nat Copeland, Helena Rose and Joey Brown, and on this volume, they’ve added the help of friends like Morgan Wade, Joshua Hedley and Madeline Dierauf.
Starting with an acapella version of Ralph Stanley’s ‘Gloryland’ leads you to expect something out of the ordinary. So, when ‘Diamond’s Icaro’ turns out to be paint-by-number bluegrass, it’s all a bit of a disappointment. The album is sold as a set of “Susto favourites” reworked in a bluegrass style, but listening back to the original of…
Frankie Archer combines traditional balladry with very contemporary-sounding electronica. This idea in itself isn’t new, but Archer’s fresh approach and sure hand – and, most importantly, her willingness to experiment – result in a sound that is unlike anyone else. Her first two releases, the EPs Never So Red (2023) and Pressure and Persuasion (2024), seemed like fully-formed, finely-cut gems, but debut album The Dance of Death, which was co-produced by Kylie Minogue collaborator Guy Massey, sees her take her artistry to new levels. As the title suggests, this is a record built around the ideas of death and mortality, but it is anything but one-dimensionally depressing.
The way the album quietly foregrounds theme and structure without compromising on…
London’s Shannen SP has had an ear for cutting edge club sounds since her secondary school days, when she developed a penchant for bass at DMZ nights and Club Exodus in Leeds. In the late 2010s, her NTS residency and multidisciplinary Ø party at Corsica Studios with Kode9 highlighted African diasporic genres from kuduro to gqom, bringing on guests like Nazar and DJ Lag. On Mzansi Bass, her latest curatorial effort for Colombian label TraTraTrax, Shannen SP assembles a team of South African producers innovating on local genres like 3-step, gqom, and amapiano. From veterans like DJ Lag to newcomers like Jay Music, the artists featured here share a murky minimalism that still imparts an irresistible groove, filling out the spaces between the four-on-the-floor.
Cloud Machines is the extraordinary debut collaboration between M.C. Schmidt of legendary electronic duo Matmos and John Berndt, the Baltimore avant-garde institution and band leader behind High Zero Festival, the Red Room collective, Geodesic Gnome, and radical sonic concepts like Spectral Relay (a bespoke signal processing architecture) and Relabi (a conceptual genre defined by a Rorschach-blot pulse). After more than one hundred combined years of this pair pushing the boundaries of what music can be and where it can come from, these two iconoclasts have delivered something genuinely unexpected: an oddly sweet electronic opus that’s as immediately engaging as it is a series of delicious puzzles. When two of experimental music’s most…
With Vesper, Sean Shibe continues his collaboration with the Pentatone through a program entirely devoted to contemporary music. Released in 2026, the recording brings together works by Thomas Adès, Harrison Birtwistle, and James Dillon, three composers with no direct ties to the guitar, yet whose writing highlights some of its most unexpected possibilities. The unifying thread lies less in any clear stylistic or aesthetic coherence than in an exploration of contrasting sonic textures. Adès’s Forgotten Dances, which open the album, revisit the model of the Baroque suite while subjecting it to modern distortions. Shibe approaches them with a highly controlled sense of articulation, serving the rhythmic complexity of the works, but his reading, at times…
As the old philosophical question goes, “If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound?” That query feels newly relevant in the age of modern music-making.
We live in a world where anyone can hear virtually any song ever recorded, anytime, anywhere (provided there’s an internet connection). Today’s artist isn’t just competing with peers for attention, but with the entire history of recorded sound. The forest is so dense with trees that it becomes impossible to hear anything at all.
That context frames the central question Mike Richmond raises in the press notes for his first solo record: why bother making music? As the former Love Tractor guitarist puts it, “Why am I writing these songs? Is anyone going to care? I’m an old guy who played in a pretty…
On his third LP, Tender Country, Thomas Csorba delves into the softer side of country music, eschewing rowdy barroom burners in favor of a more laid-back, emotional connection to life. The album’s title is fitting, considering the tenderness woven throughout these songs. That’s not to say Csorba is above singing a good drinking song, as evidenced by “Homemade Margaritas.” Only his version involves moving out to the patio and sharing drinks over a citronella candle, with one ear tuned to the sleeping baby inside.
Across ten subdued tracks, Csorba explores love, family, and the everyday emotions of life. Carried by fiddle and guitars, “Lived In” is a perfect example. Csorba describes an ordinary house, with glitter worked into the floorboards…