When Slift announced their new, fourth album, they promised it’ll contain way shorter tracks than before, which felt tantamount to Usain Bolt promising to cut his own legs off. Since the Frenchmen went surprisingly viral via a KEXP live session during the pandemic, they’ve specialised in increasingly widescreen space rock, pulling metal, krautrock and even jazz into their heady galaxy, up to 15 minutes at a time.
Their vastness has become key to their identity, particularly during the many, many live shows they play each year, where they add hallucinogenic video to the mix and convey the same delirium as the stargate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Fantasia’s opening title track is the only song with a run-time that could have…
Latest Entries »
The ninth studio album from the alt-rock/folk outfit Deer Tick is inspired by their hometown of Providence, RI. The group dug into the city’s shady past and crafted musical tales based on gangsters, religion and the immigrant experience, as the wide-ranging record finds Deer Tick at their most creative. The band (singer/guitarist John McCauley, guitarist/singer Ian O’Neil, drummer/singer Dennis Ryan, and bassist Christopher Ryan) self-produced their album for the first time in their career, and that was key to the musical freedom found on Coin-O-Matic. The title itself comes from a cigarette-vending-machine company that served as the headquarters of Raymond Patriarca, a crime boss from Providence, setting the tone.
The stout “Dog Years” opens with acoustic…
A unique and brilliant collaboration between the legendary dub/reggae pioneer and German electronic production duo Mouse on Mars (aka Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma). Lee “Scratch” Perry’s last ever official album project before his passing in 2019. Recorded in 3 days at Mouse on Mars’ Paraverse Studio in Berlin in 2019.
Lee, Jan and Andi conducted a revolving cast of musicians and collaborators throughout the complex’s different rooms and spaces.
Spatial, No Problem. finds the artists breaking new ground – the one thing Lee was sure of was that this shouldn’t be just another reggae album. It covers everything from krautrock, ambient, dub, jazz, New Orleans brass and much more.
“We hardly spoke about what we were doing.
…8-Tracks is, as one might guess, an eight-track condensed overview of Pink Floyd’s ’70s material (save for 1970’s Atom Heart Mother). It includes singles “One of These Days” (from 1971’s Meddle), “Money” (from The Dark Side of the Moon) and “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” and “Comfortably Numb” (from 1979’s double album The Wall), as well as Dark Side album cut “Time” and Wish You Were Here‘s title track. Honoring the format this collection is named after, 8-Tracks will be sequenced in two continuous programs edited by Steven Wilson, with sections from the original multitrack tapes utilized to foster the transitions between songs. Additionally, closing track “Pigs on the Wing” (from 1977’s Animals) will be heard in a rare, longer version that was…
Going two-for-two with John Congleton, indie stalwarts Death Cab for Cutie built upon 2022’s excellent Asphalt Meadows to create something even more timeless with their 11th full-length, I Built You a Tower. Back on an indie label and reinvigorated by sold-out, arena-packed anniversary tours, Tower benefits from a simpler, more direct approach that was achieved by the band locking in to record the album in less than a month. Without overextending or relying on too many production tricks, it’s a refreshing and surprisingly pure experience that harkens back to those early-aughts days when the band first blew up in the mainstream.
Thriving in this space, their trademark tender yearning elevates highlights like the soaring…
These days – on the new, ninth Fink album – Greenall is operating within a lineage of authentic, quietly revolutionary artists from England’s verdant southwestern toe. Artists like Michael Chapman. In 1970, the elusive acoustic guitar wizard released an album called Fully Qualified Survivor. The cult-classic served as a lodestar for Greenall – along with bandmates Tim Thornton and Guy Whittaker – as he began jigsawing together The City Is Coming to Erase it All, the follow-up to 2024’s Beauty In Your Wake. He even considered covering a song from it, but in the process, inadvertently stumbled into what became the album’s opener. ‘Wishing For Blue Sky’ circles a universal teenage ache: waiting for life to start. “No point dying of patience” goes the first lyric as crunching…
As any of Montreal devotée knows, Kevin Barnes has long been known to make diaristic and compelling hay out of chronicling the unfiltered nuances of his personal life. As the long-running musical project enters its 30th year of existence, Barnes has remained true to form, continuing to evolve while navigating the murkiest waters life has to offer.
Emerging out of great personal upheaval in Barnes’s life, aethermead, of Montreal’s 20th album, recalls the beauty-in-the-breakdown immediacy of Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? mixed with the garage-y jangle of Lousy With Sylvanbriar and Cherry Peel’s homespun intimacy-but, remember, the last band that you’ll ever hear truly repeat themselves is of Montreal.
The tracks on Along the Low Road, by multi-instrumentalist Gustaf Ljunggren and bassist Skúli Sverrisson, seem like modernized versions of medieval music. Many of the songs have a twang and a snap to the string-plucking that adumbrates the Renaissance and Baroque styles. However, the duo offers a fantastic update. The acoustic atmospheres and the jazzier undertones that filter in and out of the pieces all point to an innovative yet approachable musical perspective.
Nowadays, this style sometimes gets pigeonholed into the neo-folk or dark folk genre. However, these two musicians also wander into classical-crossover terrain and chamber jazz areas. They clearly have a great sophistication and knowledge about music from a plethora of eras…
Did David Torn steal Lou Reed’s band? Probably not — the members of Torn’s early 1980s fusion ensemble Everyman Band, who released two albums on the storied ECM label, have all played with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal during in the late ’70s, but Reed had a notoriously mercurial relationship to personnel. Still, a budding jazz guitarist (Torn was mentored by pioneering trumpeter Don Cherry) joining forces with a rock icon’s sidemen for his recording debut shows a strong independent streak and no small amount of ambition. In the four decades since, Torn has delivered on that promise, producing a bewildering wealth of expansive music, from “arrogant ambient” (his term) to EDM (under the alias Splattercell) to acid jazz (check out his work with saxophonist…
With more than 43 million songs uploaded to streaming services every year, how does one avert overload fatigue from the sheer mass of new music? It’s a modern reality that the Dutch music producer Jochem Paap has been wrestling with, with Walkman his first solo release in twenty years. The name of this record harks back to the Sony Walkman, of course, the mobile cassette player that revolutionised personal listening in the ’80s and set us on our way towards the iPod and streaming platforms listened to via smartphones.
If that gives an impression that Walkman might be a retreat into a halcyon past where analogue technology ruled supreme, then, thankfully, you’d be mistaken. Speedy J’s long-awaited new album is made up of one hour and thirty…
Anenoa is Chilean-German artist Matias Aguayo‘s first album since relocating to Mexico City, and one of his most collaborative efforts to date. Sung mainly in Spanish, the record embraces a wide variety of Latin American dance styles, and returns to the playful absurdity of his earlier albums, rather than the stark, skeletal rhythms of 2019’s Support Alien Invasion. One thing that remains from that album, however, is Aguayo’s embrace of different cultures, and here he works with producers, musicians, and vocalists from multiple continents while changing styles with seemingly every track. “Sentimientos Encontraos” is a perky, cumbia-inspired shuffle that Aguayo wrote with the intention of it becoming a future wedding staple. “Asuca, Rock, Roll” starts out as…
The Welsh-born, Sheffield, UK-based Kat Eaton is, for most of you, a refreshing new voice in the R&B/soul genre. What Happens Now is Eaton’s third album, and her most well-crafted project to date. Eaton and her longtime collaborator, producer Nick Atkinson, have been partnering since they were sixteen. They now have their own label. Needless to say, their chemistry is tight. Eaton’s voice is set just right in the crisp mix as she unveils a blend of soul, jazz-adjacent grooves, and splashes of blues and pop. Nothing is overdone, unlike too many female singers who overreach and, even worse, clutter their soundscapes with unnecessary noise. Yes, this is a superb recording, balancing the intimate with the expansive and personal, emotive tunes with those that are generally relatable.
It wouldn’t come as a surprise to any listener of Jalen Ngonda’s second album that the Maryland-born, London-based artist claims to listen to almost nothing released after 1972. Tracing out cadences reminiscent of Smokey Robinson over ’70s Marvin Gaye drum grooves and summoning the impassioned intensity of James Brown, Ngonda delves deeper into the vintage influences that furnished his 2023 debut.
‘Anyone in Love’ opens the album with a bold brush of strings and rolling drums. Gospel-inspired backing vocals are haloed in soft, organic reverb, creating a warmth and sense of space which producers Vincent Chiarito and Michael Buckley carry throughout the album. The title track follows: a solemn minor-key sermon with…
Returning with Ayô Dele, meaning “joy comes to me” in the Yoruba language, Afro-French collective Ireke serve up a suitably joyous blend of Afrobeat, soul, funk and more. At the centre of the sonic storm is Julien Gervaix, who plays sax, keyboards, bass and programs beats. His musical accomplice Damien Tesson offers up further percussion, guitars, keys and dub effects, while vocal duties are shared by a number of featured singers. The most notable of these, Beninese-Nigerian vocalist Nayel Hóxò, raps and sings in Yoruba and English with joyful abandon on slinky Afro-funk number ‘Ta Logbe Jongo’. She adds similar punch and verve to the smooth yet funky ‘Soulshine’. Elsewhere, regular vocal collaborator Agnès Hélène brings beautifully languid vocals…
There’s nothing more country than rebelling against country music. Willie Nelson did it. Waylon Jennings did it. And today’s country music is so easy to hate, whether it’s the AI artists flooding the genre, or a new song from Luke Bryan so brain-numbingly awful it gives you an ice cream headache. Still, bitching about country music doesn’t make you a country music outlaw like Nelson or Jennings. What makes you an outlaw is actually doing something about it. For Nashville country singer Nathan Evans Fox that means a host of rebellions, both small and large. On his new album Heirloom, Fox opens small with “Lots of Beginnings,” a heartfelt, moving letter to his newborn child, voicing worries about bullies and about forgetting the family’s rural roots,…
Words from Holy Gardens was already a very emotionally wrought record, featuring as it does Chip Taylor’s home recordings of his responses to aging and in particular to the death of his wife Joan, after more than sixty years of marriage. That already heavy atmosphere surrounding these new songs has become even more laden with emotional impact with the passing of Chip Taylor himself. It’s a combination of events that makes a traditional critical response to the music presented something of an irrelevance. This is a final statement of love, and a final musical statement as well. The recordings couldn’t be more intimate, as Taylor explained the process: “While I was taking care of her (and she was caring for me), I was often sitting at home with my guitar. I play…
Unspoken, the ACT debut album from Mahan Mirarab, opens up a whole world of personal, deeply felt stories.
The Iranian-born, Vienna-based guitarist draws on his experience of East and West, darkness and beauty, sorrow and joy. His music reveals perspectives which are profoundly human, intimate and sensitive, in album which is emerging at a time full of tensions and contradictions. He performs solo on the double-neck guitar and on some tracks is also joined by Kian Soltani (cello), Lars Danielsson (double bass) and Golnar Shahyar (vocals). His is a unique and personal musical journey: jazz blends with influences from classical and folk music from Iran, with European chamber music, imbued profoundly with the spirit of song.
When Carlos Niño sits behind an arsenal of percussion instruments, he isn’t there to create pockets, lay down grooves, or keep a strict meter; he’s laying out a billowing textural blanket for other instruments to settle upon.
“I’m going to have a lot of bells,” he once told me, “a lot of metals, plants, wood, wind. I’m gonna open it up like it’s a little forest.” If he does create a pulse, it’s reminiscent of the way cicadas’ buzzing can sound like an LFO filter sweep, or how toad calls can sync with firefly illuminations on a warm summer evening. His playing expands and contracts at an intuitive pace, helping guide other players further into the moment and listeners further into themselves.
On a day off from tour in November 2025,…
Thirst, originally released in 1981 is a stone-cold post-punk classic. While still retaining the sharp experimental edge of their debut, White Souls in Black Suits, Thirst stretches out and offers up some cleaner and more hooky moments as it moves away from pure improvisation. “Between White Souls and Thirst, the guitarist changed from David Hammond to Paul Widger,” explains Newton. “David introduced the perfect guitar sound for DVA, whereas Paul brought in a more rhythmic style more towards early Ry Cooder. The material we were developing was a more defined series of pieces, more structured and exact than the improvised works on White Souls.”
45 years on from its original release (on Fetish), it’s a record from the era that sounds like no other.
The Chemical Brothers have released a new compilation called Go: Apex and Beyond. The career-spanning collection arrives just as their 2015 track ‘Go’ explodes again on streaming, thanks to its inclusion in the Netflix film ‘Apex’.
“Beyond ‘Go’… Welcome to The Chemical Brothers’ universe,” the duo wrote on Instagram. “Listen to the new collection.”
Crucially, ‘Go’ has seen a 429% jump in Spotify streams since the ‘Apex’ release. As a result, the track has soared past 150 million plays. Furthermore, it now leads the new compilation.
Notably, the tracklist pulls from across their career. The picks include ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’, ‘Galvanize’, ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’, ‘Let Forever Be’, ‘Star Guitar’, ‘Setting Sun’, ‘Out Of Control’…