Lowertown’s Olivia Osby and Avsha Weinberg almost didn’t survive themselves. After signing to Dirty Hit as teens, they were strapped into the up-and-comer indie rock grind, touring and churning out EPs and an eventual debut album, I Love to Lie, in 2022. The problem wasn’t that they drifted apart, but rather that they got too close. Co-dependently close. After a four-year “break” (three, if you’re counting the Skin of My Teeth EP), Osby and Weinberg have re-emerged with Ugly Duckling Union, their long-awaited sophomore record. Back in Weinberg’s basement, where they cut the earliest Lowertown tracks, the pair return to their blunt yet lyrical writing and unraveling song structures. The result comes with a little more grit and a little less studio polish, which is perfect…
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For more than 3 decades, David Eugene Edwards has carved out a singular path through American music. First with the gothic folk urgency of 16 Horsepower, then with the devotional intensity of Wovenhand, and more recently through the stripped-down landscape of his solo work.
…The booming bass voice of David Eugene Edwards is imposing to begin with. Now imagine how it sounds when he’s singing Latin. That’s what he’s doing at various points in Mercurial Silence, an album that continues the shift that started with 2023’s Hyacinth, drifting away from deeply haunting (and haunted) Appalachian barnstormers and toward the modern era — employing drum machines and electronics but still managing to make them sound like they’ve…
Steep Canyon Rangers arrive at a moment of renewal and reaffirmation with Next Act, their 15th studio album. The record represents a conscious tightening of focus: a return to the bluegrass foundations that first bound the band together, approached with the confidence and emotional range earned through years of collective evolution. It is an affirmation that bluegrass still contains endless expressive possibility. Next Act finds the Rangers sounding deeply at home in their own musical language, drawing strength from tradition while continuing to write new chapters within it.
Formed in North Carolina and shaped equally by the Appalachian Mountains and the Piedmont, Steep Canyon Rangers have long occupied a singular space in American roots music.
In a recent column for the New Yorker, writer Kyle Chayka details a “lo-fi rebellion” against the aesthetics of tech-driven uniformity: “Anything that appears too smooth these days is suspicious,” he says, citing a recent Weezer tour poster featuring the “Cool S,” the universal sigil of our shared humanity, as a counter-example. Chayka’s subjects primarily operate in the visual worlds of marketing and design, but it’s easy to identify sonic parallels. The kids are selling their turntables and buying guitars, saving rock’n’roll, and banging their heads until they incur nerve damage. In the face of A.I. homogeneity, the human —embodied, subjective, flawed—is in.
MASK, a new collection of songs from Aaron Maine’s indie pop project Porches…
Live albums are either superb or meh. Luckily, vocalist Catherine Russell sounds amazing, whether in a studio, jazz club or theatre setting. Live at Jazz at Lincoln Center exhibits the singer’s soulful vocals as well as wonderful backing support from the musicians joining her: guitarist Matt Munisteri, pianist Ben Paterson, bassist Russell Hall, drummer Domo Branch, trumpeter Jon-Erik Kellso, trombonist John Allred and Evan Arntzen on tenor sax and clarinet. Russell’s usual style is prevalent throughout the project. The mix of vintage New Orleans jazz, swing, rhythm and blues is always sure to delight a variety of listeners.
Whether it’s a slower melody or an upbeat, toe-tapping tune, the pieces are sung with emotion and sensitivity.
Country boy-in-the-Big Apple, Arthur Russell does folk fusion with his own, peerless verve on a remastered edition of his evergreen 2008 retrospective.
One of the most fascinating, multifaceted, greatest artists of the late C.20th, Arthur Russell is variously known as a disco auteur, virtuoso avant-pop cellist-composer, and bard of the highest order, but maybe less so as a country crooner. Compiled and issued in 2008, Love Is Overtaking Me most ideally framed this lesser-covered aspect of his work with 21 songs recorded under his own name and as part of The Flying Hearts (with Peter Zummo, Rhys Chatham, Jon Gibson, a.o.), plus in duo with Steven Hall as Turbo Sporty, The Flying Hearts, and Bright & Early.
Noise can feel like drowning. This is often intentional and a large part of its appeal to the sickos, but even the largest of whales comes up for air every 15 minutes — breaking the surface tension, pupils constricting toward the atmosphere, and taking a bus-sized gulp.
Is there anything that experimental noise can learn from this mammalian constraint?
Max Klebanoff is working on it. For several years, his project Death Kneel has kneaded noise music into a wide range of shapes, from diving directly into the harsh void on 2023’s Dawn Simulation, released via très fashion noise imprint Chondritic Sound, to the cavernous, waterlogged ambiance of 2025’s Ink Wash Apparition. On his new release Remembering Well, he picks up…
A lot has changed in the eight years since West Yorkshire rockers Marmozets went on hiatus, in 2018 cruelly vanishing from the scene just shortly after the critical acclaim of their second studio album, Knowing What You Know Now. Frontwoman Becca Bottomley became a mother and married bandmate Jack, all faced a global pandemic (remember that one?), and the world took a dramatic shift towards the right. For Becca, it birthed a generation of cowards – herself apparently included – ultimately spawning CO.WAR.DICE, a ferocious return to the forefront and the end of a self-confessed life in the shadows.
Largely picking up from where the now-four piece left off, this third record is driven by Becca’s snarling vocals and a frantic…
Engraving of Armor is the solo debut of Beck Zegans, an established member of New York’s indie scene with years of experience by this point both as a live sound engineer and guitarist. She’d been writing her own songs for some time but noticed her material taking on a heavier, more confrontational demeanor while holed up during COVID-19 shutdowns. When it came time to record some of these songs for her first album, she worked collaboratively with her band – synth player/bassist Alex MacKay (Nation of Language) and drummer Julian Fader (Remember Sports, Ava Luna) – who took turns building upon Zegans’ demos (guitar and drum loops) in their individual home studios. A fourth contributor on a couple tracks was guitarist El Kempner…
Mirror Ball is a 1995 collaboration between Neil Young and members of Pearl Jam, released through Reprise Records during the height of the grunge era. Recorded largely live in the studio over a handful of sessions in Seattle, the album captures a loose, raw sound that blends Young’s songwriting with Pearl Jam’s dense guitar interplay and rhythm section.
The project grew out of Young’s friendship with the band following several live performances together in the early 1990s. Songs like “Song X,” “Downtown,” “I’m the Ocean,” and “Throw Your Hatred Down” reflect themes of conflict, idealism, and social tension, while the recordings retain an unpolished, spontaneous feel with audible studio chatter and extended jams throughout.
At some point over the more than 20 years that she has been performing and recording, Alela Diane quietly became an American treasure. Every time she releases a record, it feels like a gift, something tangible you can hold in your hands whenever you need a reminder that powerful music comes from actual humans playing real instruments. With the release of her new record, Who’s Keeping Time?, that gift is more poignant than ever.
Conceived in the wake of losing her friend and mentor, the legendary folk singer Michael Hurley, Diane nurtured this new set of songs from ideas to live recordings in the attic of her Victorian home in Portland, Oregon. Coinciding with that was her deepening need to reconnect with the town’s music community. She took guitar lessons…
Introducing a brand new series of ultra rare, vintage concert recordings from notorious NY rowdy punk rockers, Dead Boys, performing their best songs before a homegrown crowd! 2 shows, both recorded at the historic CBGBs club, both capturing one of the rowdiest, raucous musical acts to ever set foot on stage – and digitally remastered to capture all the gory, gruesome glory!
50 years ago this year, the placid seas of British and American rock were disturbed… if not destroyed… by a tsunami of sound arising from the streets of New York City and London. It wasn’t called punk rock yet… just a bunch of bands, disparate in nature and unique in sound, but seemingly bound together by a single common cause. Something must change. Everything must change.
Radhika Dade’s debut album is a dreamy delight that balances her lovely vocals against varied musical backing that’s exceedingly poppy, but not afraid to gently paint outside the lines. Cine-pop is a fine title for the album; she seeks to make each song a different mood and each could fit a different scene in a film. The lilting ballad “Feline Bandits” would be perfect for a melancholy seaside walk on a rainy day, “Starry Eyes” is a fine soundtrack for a swirling party scene, the jangling girl group inspired “Cocoa Butter Eyes” feels like a falling in and out (and back in) of love montage, and “Sleep” is just right for a scene where the lonely protagonist can’t sleep thanks to a nocturnal obsession. Dade’s voice is a fine vessel for the songs, coming across sweet…
Simon Joyner’s 2024 album Coyote Butterfly ranks among the most simultaneously beautiful and devastating documents of its kind, a painfully raw and autobiographical account of the untimely death of Joyner’s son Owen. Since the early ‘90s, Joyner has been one of independent music’s most authentically independent artists, and while his poetic songs have never shied away from difficult emotions, the depths of vulnerability and sorrow he found on Coyote Butterfly were even more searingly real than anything he’d made before. Even though the album focused on collecting the finite feelings of grief, it represented a place to honor these feelings rather than a capstone in Joyner’s life of work. Tough Love, Joyner’s 19th solo effort and his first since Coyote Butterfly…
“He has an energy to him like he’s floating,” Fratti said about Orcutt when she chucked his self-titled 2017 album, his first solo electric studio jaunt, on her Baker’s Dozen list for the Quietus. She’d stumbled over the record via a blog and immediately set about following the breadcrumb trail, picking through his blues deconstructions, free jazz side-quests and his early, formative work with Adris Hoyos as Harry Pussy, one of the USA’s greatest noise duos. What happened next isn’t completely clear, but Fratti and Orcutt began communicating and, at some point, Orcutt shuttled over a pack of improvised guitar solos that lit the touch paper for the next stage. At home in Mexico City, Fratti (alongside her partner and Titanic cohort I. La Católica) retreated…
The Deslondes are a five-piece group from New Orleans, Louisiana. The band splits up songwriting and lead vocal duties among its five members, continuing its democratic ethos and musical versatility.
Now, with their latest record, Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1, the band continues to build on their inventive take on New Orleans country and R&B by covering some of their favorite songs that have inspired their sound and love of music. Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1 finds the band covering select songs from artist such as Swamp Dogg, Johnny Cash, Pat Reedy and Hurricane Smith but Don’t Let It Die: Vol. 1 is the sound of a band that understands the history of American music, while embracing their own contemporary approach.
Bruce Springsteen took the high road during his Sunday concert at Austin, Texas’ Moody Center, praying for President Trump in the wake of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting and exhorting fans to uphold American ideals such as honesty, compassion and humility after they went home. Then the Boss rocked the packed arena with such soul-stirring fervor that it would have been nearly impossible not to heed his call.
When Springsteen surprise-announced his current Land of Hopes and Dreams Tour in February, he made it clear he considers this trek nothing less than a battle for the soul of America. He threw himself into the charge on Sunday with the gusto that’s made him one of rock’s most gargantuan stars for the past half-century.
While their instrumentation and aesthetic may evoke parts of Appalachia and the rural South, North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband (MTS) are anything but a traditional folk group. Theirs is a different kind of rootedness, one indebted to the landscape they call home, but as attuned to its ecology and environmental contours as to its social history. Since making their label debut on Thrill Jockey in 2024, the duo of Courtney Werner (fiddle) and Evan Morgan (guitar/organ) has expanded to a trio, welcoming banjoist/bassist Mike DeVito into the band. There are no vocals, yet they manage to convey complex emotions through their strange, discordant music. Heavy Water, MTS’s second release for the label, is an emotional map of a place that was lost.
Mexican Institute of Sound’s Camilo Lara and Meridian Brothers’ Eblis Alvarez are two musicians who know how to take traditions and twist them up in modern ways, ending up with music that joyfully lives in a time and place of its own. A collaboration between the two looks on paper to be something of a dream and on record – 2026’s Ruido Tovar – it comes true in thrilling fashion.
The record is a tribute to – and deconstruction – of the Mexican cumbia stylings of legendary singer and band leader Rigo Tovar. In the 1970’s, he was the first to bring modern touches like Moog synths and electric guitars to the style and he became an outsized figure on the Mexican music scene. Lara and Alvarez pay homage to him the only way they know how, by turning…
PIG is Raymond Watts, a British musician whose brand of electronic rock is danceable and deadly serious in turn. Watts’s words spring from the well of gallows humour in a world of corruscating cruelty and truth. Pig climbs peaks and mines troughs, and musical genres slide and collide like tectonic plates.
In his past lives, Pig warlord Watts was known variously as Raymond Scaballero in Foetus, an icy addition to Psychic TV, a savage PA destroyer in Einsturzende Neubauten, and a founding catalyst of KMFDM. Watts began his arrest record in London, where he was most likely pissed off about something and doing sound manipulations, loops and live sound for Psychic TV. He soon crashed into Einsturzende Neubauten…