When Iggy Pop sang “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” on The Stooges’ 1973 swan song Raw Power, he anticipated the anti-romantic punk era nihilism that was to see future Brexit fan John Lydon describe love as “two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squelching noises.”
Fifty three years later Bristol’s immortal space-garage psychonauts The Heads may still be sculpting their sonic monuments with some of the same flint axes initially fashioned by The Stooges, but rather than being petty and personal, their disgust is profound and existential. For The Heads, on what they claim is their final album, our whole pretty place is going to Hell.
Housed in a sleeve depicting an oil rig that is tempest-tossed by exactly the sort of…
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Lisbon-based American bassist and composer Michael Formanek introduces a new septet, New Digs, featuring his trio partners from Thumbscrew — guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara — alongside British organist Alexander Hawkins and a three-horn frontline of saxophonists John O’Gallagher and Chet Doxas, plus trumpeter João Almeida.
Driven by imaginative, free-flowing arrangements, the band opens with “New Old World”, a platform for resolute bass lines, psychedelic organ textures, slippery rhythmic shifts, and bursts of cacophony marked by stabbing saxophone and trumpet figures over counterintuitive guitar accompaniment. Solos by Halvorson, O’Gallagher, and Doxas stand out, with the latter channeling…
Bassist Clovis Nicolas plays with the building blocks of jazz on his 2026 trio album Blues in Blueprint. Named after the Duke Ellington song covered here, the album finds the French-born/New York-based instrumentalist exploring the varied harmonic, textural, and structural possibilities of the blues; the musical form from which jazz (not to mention most popular music) is built upon.
Joining him are two veteran New York luminaries in pianist Larry Goldings and drummer Carl Allen. Together, they each bring a deep wealth of experience to the album which, while showcasing Nicolas, is imbued with a deep sense of collaborative group camaraderie.
They open fittingly with “Old Stack O’Lee Blues,” a relaxed midtempo number whose origin…
No stranger to a juxtaposition, Bangladeshi composer Teerath Majumder has previous in merging seemingly disparate forms to create something new. His 2023 EP Mouno Shonchar blended traditional Bangla sounds with more contemporary compositions, whilst a collaboration with Dhaka-based, electro-acoustic outfit Taraga resulted in spiky metal riffs butting heads with ambient soundscapes. And last year’s Do Not Feed the Robots participatory concert featured musical improvisations responding to toys and robots as a way of criticising the disenfranchising approach of “so-called Artificial Intelligence (AI)”.
On Dust to Dust, however, he’s upped the ante. Within the space of a single track, he takes us through a multitude of distinct and…
The Funkhaus complex in Berlin, originally built in the 1950s, was in Communist times the home of an East German radio station. After the fall of the Wall, it fell into disrepair and remained neglected until Nils Frahm oversaw a restoration of Studio 3 where he has subsequently recorded his own music during the last ten years or so.
The renovation has also brought back the distinctive acoustic of the original studio, and this is certainly a contributory factor in the success of this fine album by the multi-instrumentalist Ralph Markus Sieber (aka Aukai).
The main instruments here are classical guitar and charango (ten-stringed, lute-like, Andean), but these are delightfully supplemented and complemented by, among other…
In January of last year, Dagmar Zuniga uploaded her debut album to YouTube. By the serendipitous workings of the algorithm-perhaps boosted by the cryptic title and album art in filth your mystery is kingdom/far smile peasant in yellow music took off with surprising speed; within months, she’d hit hundreds of thousands of views and was touring with Mount Eerie. Comment sections and message boards couldn’t contain her, and now in filth is seeing a much-deserved official release through experimental indie powerhouse AD 93.
Zuniga’s songs are alluring largely thanks to their otherworldly patina: simple compositions built around voice, guitar, and synth, filtered through tape hiss so they feel like alien transmissions. (In reality, the songs were captured between…
Two albums in, Special Friend‘s brand of gentle indie rock keeps getting better, more interesting, and more emotionally satisfying. This time are drummer/vocalist Guillaume Siracusa and guitarist/vocalist Erica Ashleson took a little more time to record — seven days in the isolated countryside — and made use of a slightly wider range of instruments along the way.
The result on “Clipping” is one of a band firmly in control of their sound and presentation. The basics of drum and guitar with their lovely, subtle vocals on top sounds extra good when the synths come in, acoustic guitars weave a warm musical bed, and they gently mess around with song structure. At its core Clipping bolls down the best things about indie rock — the simplicity of…
Damaged Bug started off as a place for John Dwyer to experiment with synths and songs didn’t quite fit in with what the Osees were doing at the time. Over the years, the project inched closer to the Osees, by the time of 2026’s ZUZAX it was hard to tell the two groups apart. The only real difference is the use of synths as the main driver of sound instead of guitars, but really songs like “Double Yolks” or wouldn’t sound out of place on an Osees album. Some of the more outré tracks like “Mozzy Rooves & More” do travel some distance from the norm, but as long as Dwyer is behind the mic and is going bonkers in that fascinating way he has, this will all be instantly recognizable to fans of his work. That’s a wordy way of saying this is prime Dwyer made up of songs that were never…
The pressures an artist or band faces when releasing a debut album have been discussed in countless articles. Still, when it comes to young shoegaze hopefuls Ringing and their Julia’s War Recordings-released LP Another Cycle in the Cosmic Wash, there are even more layers of stress for the band to deal with. What started as a noisy solo project built on experimenting with the limits of the middle ground between alt-rock and shoegaze has blossomed into a youthful, promising trio. Although for Colton Walker, Marcos Rocha, and Josh Matthews, the mission has stayed the same since Ringing uploaded their first songs to Bandcamp in 2020: leave their mark on what is slowly becoming a contemporary shoegaze revival.
This is not only Ringing’s debut album…
John Hollier hails from Louisiana, and though there are hints of his roots in his sound, it is mostly easy-flowing Americana music. After all, he and his band, John Hollier & The Reverie, wrote much of and recorded Rainmaker in Nashville. The band name stems from the French word, ‘rever,’ which means ‘’to dream,” a descriptor of being lost in thoughts, or daydreaming. Thus, the bulk of the album has a meditative quality, though they fire up occasionally,
Hollier took his road band, unseasoned in session work, into the studio to record live. Hollier is on guitar and lead vocals with Teddy Thebedoux Jones (sax). Zachary Scott Cline (lead guitar), Ray Akers (bass), and Brian Cox (drums). Hollier wrote all the songs, some in conjunction with bandmates…
Mike Finnigan: if you know you know, and if you don’t, you probably know Electric Ladyland. In June 1968, The Jimi Hendrix Experience were booked into New York’s Record Plant, as were The Serfs from Wichita, Kansas, cutting their only album, The Early Bird Café. “Jimi happened to hear us and said he’d like to have us play on his record,” the Hammond B-3 maestro Mike Finnigan told MOJO in 2008. “Jimi was very easy-going, very loose. His notion was the Jimmy Smith organ quartet with a different kind of slant, and we jammed it down on the spot. If I’d had any sense I’d have got some writer’s credit on that Rainy Day deal. And I never got paid for the session, by God!”
Was this the moment the affably self-effacing Finnigan heard his calling as a sideman to…
Coming off two excellent records released on Habbi Funk that showed off his skills as a beatmaker, sample wrangler, song crafter and arranger, the Lebanese musician Charif Megarbane teamed with the Indonesian trio Ali to make a record. Tirakat is the result of the pairing and it’s brilliant. Organic, genre-bending, flowing and free, the album was recorded in three days’ time and feels like a well-curated journey through an amazing record collection. They jump all over the map, trip through time, and visit as many styles as possible, all with a mix of precision and spontaneity that makes the record a joy to listen to.
They venture into disco on “Mosaics”, Arabic funk on “Kuda Arab”, tender balladry on Ahmad’s Lament”, dancehall reggae on…
Pianist Harold Mabern (1936-2019) was talented beyond measure. Though he never received the honor and distinction of the prestigious NEA Jazz Master designation, his music and the musicians who knew him tell a different story. That story unfolds beautifully throughout the 10th anniversary reissue of Mabern’s 2015 recording, Afro Blue. The newly remixed and remastered recording features performances from some of the most celebrated names in vocal jazz, including Gregory Porter, Norah Jones, Kurt Elling, Jane Monheit, and Alexis Cole. The recording also features contributions from an all-star band, including longtime bandmates Joe Farnsworth (drums), Eric Alexander (sax), and John Webber (bass), alongside Steve Turre (trombone), Jeremy Pelt…
Almost three years after the release of É Soul Cultura, Vol. 2, Luke Una harvests another unmixed crop of deep dancefloor truffles that spans decades, genres, and continents. The well-traveled U.K. underground club institution asserts his intent with track one, “Spread Love” – impelling disco-funk from Harris & Orr, a duo on the same wavelength as Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson.
The ’90s and 2020s are each represented with two cuts, including DJ Harvey’s aloft and beatless mix of DJ Food’s “Peace” and a shadowy downtempo gem from Fatdog. All else dates from the latter half of the ’70s through the late ’80s, and though there’s wide variety even among what was made within close proximity, a dialogue of sorts occurs from track to track.
On May 15 and 16 in 2025, the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet entered the Village Vanguard, New York City’s legendary jazz room, to record the saxophonist’s first ever live outing. It is the first of three volumes from those shows: Vol. 2 was released in April, and Vol. 3 in May. In addition to Wilkins’ alto horn, the quartet consists of pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Ryoma Takenaga, and drummer Kweku Sumbry. The entire project contains just 13 tracks: four lengthy tracks appear here. This music is wildly creative, making for intense listening as this group improvises in the moment and communicates seemingly instinctively.
The 14-minute-plus “Warriors” opens the set. Its introduction is balladic before the band follows Sumbry’s frenetic drumming and the pace…
The Draft was recorded by Trent Bell at Bell Labs in Norman, OK in October 2010 and originally released by Count Your Lucky Stars (#26) and strictly no capital letters (#25) in March 2011.The 15th Anniversary Edition was remixed by J. Robbins at the Magpie Cage Recording Studio in Baltimore, MD and remastered by Dan Coutant at Sunroom Audio, Cornwall, NY in September 2025.
For a genre that seems to have a stigma attached that it’s “girly,” emo has a surprising lack of women in the genre. This fact alone automatically sets Football, etc. apart because they have not one, but two females in the band. Football, etc. are a three piece emo band based out of Houston, Texas that play a refreshing blend of the highs and lows of the genre. While most emo bands set out to…
Across numerous releases since they formed in the mid-2000s, London’s The Leaf Library have experimented with everything from a gentle fusion of indie pop and post-rock to experimental indie electronica, noise, and drone minimalism. With their fourth studio album, After the Rain, Strange Seeds, the group wanted to prioritize more-traditional, structured songwriting over sounds and atmosphere. Longtime fans will likely be happy to learn that the results are still notably textured and adventurous. To start, they combine distorted, slowcore-adjacent rock timbres, strings (by guests Iskra Strings), and lightly bouncy, sweet vocal harmonies on the deceptively tuneful “Colour Chant,” a song inspired by shifting weather. As the album title implies, the great…
Xylitol‘s first release for Planet Mu, Anemones, drew from atmospheric jungle as well as Krautrock and minimal wave, creating a wondrous form of breakbeat-driven electronic music that levitates as it crushes. Blumenfantasie is the follow-up album, and it’s no less impressive, strengthening the elements that made its predecessor stand out. Opener “Chromophoria” has just the right amount of atmosphere to momentarily make you feel like you’re falling through time, paired with bugged-out breaks that snap everything into focus. The title track slips Cluster-like puttering drum machines beneath shuffling drums and a flood of bass. “Melancholia” takes its time to let a sorrowful atmosphere unfold, then erupts with perfectly timed hard breaks.
Los Angeles-based duo Green-House first surfaced in 2020 with Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, an EP of calm, delicate, flora-inspired synth instrumentals accompanied by bird song and other natural sounds. Appearing soon after the much-heralded reissue of Mother Earth’s Plantasia by Mort Garson, it slotted nicely into plant-themed playlists of ambient and new age music, and became a streaming favorite during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Green-House’s music continued to celebrate nature and domestic environments on subsequent releases like Music for Living Spaces and A Host for All Kinds of Life. After releasing most of their work on Leaving Records, Hinterlands is Green-House’s first effort for Ghostly International. It maintains the same soothing feel…
Following no floor, a remarkable instrumental collaboration with claire rousay that focused on pastoral electro-acoustic soundscapes, more eaze remained with Thrill Jockey for her vocal-based solo effort sentence structure in the country. The album’s lyrics, often delivered through Auto-Tune but occasionally left unaltered, explore intimate moments and frustrating situations, reflecting on jealousy, apathy, and the difficulties of trying to succeed as a musician.
Fragile vocals and bubbling, twinkling synthesizers adorn the patient opener “leave (again),” while ambient pop gem “bad friend” is propelled by a gently blipping pulse and softly crying steel guitar. Another of the record’s more accessible tunes, “the producer,” also contains…