Grace Ives has spent the past several years turning archetypal formats — the nursery rhyme, the ringtone, the 9 to 5 — into a repertoire of oblique pop standards so well-crafted they belie the personal chaos inside them.
She trades in stories of glamorous disarray, all bruised egos and Irish exits and rambling thoughts. By Ives’ own estimation, she spent the three years after the release of her 2022 breakthrough, Janky Star, crashing out: drinking too much, pushing people away, falling down, etc. Eventually, she ditched booze, made for Los Angeles, and learned to drive, soundtracking her rides with Peter Gabriel, Mitski, and her personal top-ranked song of all time, Kesha’s “Die Young.”
It tracks that Girlfriend, her resplendent and…
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Digging even deeper into a personal archive of home-recorded tapes from another time, If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes is the third volume of previously unreleased songs from the already obscure Georgia singer/songwriter Robert Lester Folsom. In the mid-’70s, when Folsom was just out of his teens, he self-released the studio album Music and Dreams. For decades, the psychedelic soft rock of Music and Dreams served as Folsom’s only public output, and its combination of quality, mystery, and rarity eventually made it a collector’s item. Folsom’s archive of demos, unreleased solo tracks, and tunes made with friends on his reel-to-reel four-track has proved just as interesting as the strange moods of Music and Dreams, and If You…
There have been a few singles from the UK band, Wille and Bandits, shared on this site that have drawn enthusiastic responses. Let’s fill in some blanks, now that their new album, Salt Roots, has arrived. The band hails from Cornwall, a place that almost feels like the Deep South of the UK, rural, coastal, variable weather, and a place that prides itself on rugged individualism. The band’s live shows have audiences abuzz.
Frontman Wille Edwards (lead vocals, Dobro, lap steel, electric and acoustic guitars) has drawn acclaim from both fans and giants such as Joe Bonamassa and Beth Hart, who have toured with the band. Hammond organist Stevie Watts was voted UK Instrumentalist of the Year. The bass-drum tandem of Harry Mackaill and Joe Harris…
When Cayetana disbanded, Augusta Koch found an outlet for her increasingly personal songs in Gladie. After a pair of albums produced by bandmate Matt Schimelfenig that framed discontented lyrics in an appropriately scrappy grunge-pop, they decided to bring in an outside producer for the first time for their third long-player, No Need to Be Lonely. While this move may cause one to think of cleaner surfaces and a generally stronger, more streamlined sound, in this case No Need to Be Lonely benefits from something else: a more impulsive, immediate sound generated with help from their choice, indie punk hero Jeff Rosenstock.
The album opens with filtered, muffled guitar and half-drums alongside a jagged, cracking vocal melody that begins with the words…
John Zorn’s Sing Me Now Asleep captures The Gnostic Trio — Bill Frisell, Kenny Wollesen, and Carol Emanuel — at their most delicate and inward-looking. Drawing on minimalism, early music and jazz, the album unfolds with a quiet assurance that favours space, texture and restraint over virtuosity. Sing Me Now Asleep is their first CD in over five years and not surprisingly it explores some unexpected new directions — notably two ambient-influenced pieces in the spirit of Zorn’s Absinthe and Redbird, and a dramatic long form composition in the style of his cinematic file card works. Enhanced by the moody electronics of Ikue Mori on one hypnotic track, this ninth CD in the legacy of The Gnostic Trio is their most gentle and soothing to date, and heralds a striking…
US pianist Marilyn Crispell and Swedish bassist Anders Jormin filter their decades of musical experience and improvisational instinct into Memento, their debut duo recording. Combining original compositions with four freely created pieces, the album focuses on the universal themes of memory and loss.
Crispell, recently honored with a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master award, first met Jormin at a Stockholm festival in 1992. It left a lasting mark on her musical thinking. “When I heard Anders playing, it touched a chord in me that resonated strongly,” she recalls. Jormin, a longtime member of the Bobo Stenson Trio, has collaborated with Tomasz Stańko, Charles Lloyd and Don Cherry. He has recorded many albums…
Continuing the sonic universe they first unveiled on 2022’s Antimai, Sunya finds the band leaning into synth textures and tightly wound grooves, drawing as heavily from jazz and funk as from progressive rock.
Clarion Call Media sent over these details: Moving further into the world they began shaping on 2022’s Antimai, Sunya finds the band leaning into synth textures and tightly wound grooves, pulling from jazz and funk as much as progressive rock. The scope is still ambitious, but the lens has shifted.
Where Antimai spoke from the collective voice of a city, Sunya is personal. The songs follow a single perspective stepping beyond the walls for the first time, confronting both the physical…
The newest studio album from singer/songwriter Son Little finds the fluid artist touching on a wide range of genres. CITYFOLK uses synths, soft beats, acoustic strums, and much more as Little delves into his history, love life, and modern-day societal hardships for inspiration across the eleven tracks presented here.
Little was dealing with severe flooding in his Atlanta home, so he headed to Muscle Shoals, AL, to soak in that town’s famous musical history and work with Ben Tanner (Alabama Shakes), who co-produced the record. The talented Little plays everything from mellotron to banjo as he refuses to be restrained by music industry expectations.
For most of CITYFOLK, the programmed beats and synths provide a mellow backing…
Hurray for the Riff Raff release Live Forever, a new live record on the exact two-year anniversary of The Past Is Still Alive-named one of the Best Albums of the 2020s So Far by Pitchfork, and one of the Best Albums of 2024 by the New York Times, Atlantic, Associated Press, NPR Music, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Out, Mojo, Uncut, and a multitude of others.
Live Forever was captured over the course of two sold-out summer nights at the Old Town School of Folk Music in bandleader Alynda Segarra’s new home of Chicago. Spanning 14 songs, Live Forever presents The Past Is Still Alive in its entirety, as well as a selection of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s show-stopping, set-defining staples: decrying ICE on the poetic “Precious Cargo”…
The year is 2026, the rollercoaster ride that was Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine has long since been shut down and covered in tarpaulin to make way for a 21st century theme park of bland pop.
Formed in 1987 by Fruitbat and Jim Bob, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine burst onto the scene with their signature style of punk-pop infused with samples, drum machines, and social commentary. Join Jim Bob and Fruitbat, as they take a retrospective look back at the complete Carter U.S.M. singles, from 1988 to 1997.
First released in 1995, Straw Donkey is an essential introduction to Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine, featuring the U.K. Top 20 singles ‘The Only Living Boy In New Cross’, ‘After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way)’, ‘Rubbish’…
As AI becomes an increasing threat to humans trying to make a living from creative activities, Nubiyan Twist’s latest album is a defiant riposte. It is a celebration of the joyful energy and chaos that comes from musicians getting together in a room to play. While that could imply a scrappy sound, it would be a wildly inaccurate description of the ensemble. Chasing Shadows represents a skilful interception of jazz, afrobeat, R&B and electronics, fused with a mastery that reflects the nine-piece band’s background having formed in 2011 while studying at the Leeds College of Music.
Their fifth album resists the temptation of indulging in extended jams, all eleven tracks timing around the four-minute mark. New vocalist, Eniola Idowu, brings an extra soulful touch…
…“Legendary Edition” of the band’s self-titled debut offers the remastered original album (featuring tracks like “Mama Kin,” “Movin’ Out” and the eventual smash hit “Dream On”) alongside a new remix of the album, overseen in 2024 by Steven Tyler and Joe Perry with producer/engineer Zakk Cervini and producer Steve Berkowitz, plus a further 17 unreleased tracks including studio outtakes and a vintage live performance in the band’s hometown.
…The quintet – singer Steven Tyler, lead guitarist Joe Perry, rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer – had been playing together since 1970 – even sharing a home together on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue – and were famously signed to…
…For this anniversary release, the album has been fully remastered, and accompanied by an additional LP of bonus tracks, including the 2005 tour EP, a trove of previously unreleased studio and live tracks, and rarities like “The End’s Not Near” (as featured on The O.C.) and a demo version of “The Funeral.”
Band of Horses is the phoenix ascending from the carcass of Carissa’s Wierd, Ben Bridwell and Matt Brooke’s former band. (But what happened to the proposed November 16th?) While the penchant for beautiful melody is present everywhere here, that’s pretty much where the similarity between both groups stops. Whereas their former project centered itself on slower-than-codeine-cough-syrup-on-a-cold-day, lushly…
Once upon a time, albums of cover versions were something of a “go to” (along with hastily assembled live records or compilations with one or two new tracks) when an artist’s creative juices were running a bit dry. In recent times though, these stop-gaps seem to have been replaced with the remix album – because who really wants to give away all that lovely publishing income?
However, it seems that the covers album might be making something of a comeback in 2026. Already this year, the Damned have put out Not Like Everybody Else and even Willie Nelson has released Last Leaf on the Tree.
The latest to join this trend is the Dandy Warhols, who have even appropriated the title of David Bowie’s own covers album from 1973.
Zappa Records is rolling out its first archival release of 2026, and in doing so, is belatedly celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of Frank Zappa’s landmark releases. Bongo Fury, The Mothers of Invention’s 1975 collaboration with fellow iconoclast Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, is notable not only as the final original album to be released by Zappa and The Mothers but also as a transitional album featuring band members George Duke, Tom and Bruce Fowler, and Napoleon Murphy Brock alongside newer recruits such as Terry Bozzio and Denny Walley. Zappa was coming off a purple patch that saw his music reaching a new level of success (including the Gold-certified albums Over-Nite Sensation and apostrophe (‘), the latter of which reached the U.S. top ten)…
There should be no lingering doubt that Avalon Emerson has fully arrived, on a mesmering album that has to be heard to be believed.
It’s been a colourful journey for the Californian electronic pioneer so far, even on 2023’s debut album & The Charm the sheer scale of ideas radiating from the album were mesmerising, if that was Emerson in cocoon form then there is no doubt that Written into Changes is a blossoming, and a victory lap for an artist that has grown into a fully realised songwriter, which was never ever going to wobble on uncertainty.
Playful, emotional pop that captures the feeling of an artist in motion, The album is a memoiristic album and the product of five years of constant travel – including multinational…
Vacate the ice baths, people, Ladytron have gone all warm and gooey. The trio are best known for sleek and bleak synth-pop. And they’re masters at it. But for their eighth album, Paradises, Helen Marnie, Mira Aroyo and Daniel Hunt are sounding, well, happy. Two years on from Time’s Arrow, the Liverpool-formed group have headed for the disco. One probably where everyone one is wearing black, but still, there’s dancing.
The group’s new found fun kicks off with ‘I Believe in You’, a banger that uses the hypnotic Roland sound of A Guy Called Gerald’s 80s acid house classic ‘Voodoo Ray’. The sound is used again on ‘A Death in London’, ‘Free, Free’ and to great effect on album closer ‘For a Life in London’, a spoken word song with Pet Shop Boys DNA.
Some artists follow a consistent developmental path in their work, others are more mercurial, the routes they take less predictable by comparison. That overly simplistic binary’s challenged by German ambient pioneer Markus Guentner: his output on the one hand seems to have developed organically, with each step naturally leading to the next and all exemplifying his particular sensibility; he’s also, however, someone capable of a sudden left turn in stylistic direction.
Consider how different his 2025 release, Black Dahlia, is from his latest, On Brutal Soil, We Grow. Whereas the earlier set feels like an unremitting plunge into a Black Hole, the new one feels at times celestial by comparison. The titles Guentner chose mirror that change: Black Dahlia is…
Jürg Frey album Je laisse a la nuit son poids d’ombre (“I leave to the night its weight of shadow” in English) is his thirteenth for the label, some as composer, some as musician.
…Impressive as Frey’s tally of releases with Another Timbre is, it is worth remembering that in his earlier years from 1996 to 2010 most of his releases were on Edition Wandelweiser, which also catalogues his compositions (currently up to 188 of them) varying from many compositions for a single piano up to several compositions for a full orchestra. The composition which gives this album its name dates back to 2019-20 and was written for two soprano voices, cello, violin, trombone, clarinet, tuba, flute,…
This release from instrumental drone trio Setting (Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly and Joseph Westerlund) sees them complete a trio of live albums before they drop their second studio effort next year. at Public Records was recorded last spring when the band descended on Brooklyn to play a bill with Philadelphia band BASIC (previous Setting live albums at Eulogy and at Black Mountain College Museum were recorded in the band’s home state of North Carolina).
In a sense, this set plays out as more of a sibling piece to Eulogy than Black Mountain, with a darker and more urgent feel in places than the latter. After an edgy start, combining percussion that sounds like ghosts in the attic with eerie beeps and an insidious, undulating drone…