Musicians who become parents sometimes feel compelled to write songs about it. But really, what is there to say? Every parenthood experience is unique, and also very much the same, and probably has been for something like three hundred thousand years since humans evolved. All the wonder or magic inherent in the process is deeply personal, and therefore dreary as hell when someone else sings about it. That’s a grinchy perspective, no question, but Shakey Graves — a.k.a. Alejandro Rose-Garcia — does little to change it on his latest, Fondness, etc..
The album is said to reflect the new contours of Rose-Garcia’s life with his wife and young daughter, who was born in 2024. That means these songs are in many ways about…
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I’m Kingfisher is the alter ego of Swedish singer-songwriter Thomas Jonsson. Give Up Together is his sixth album under that guise and comes three years after his last release, Glue, which was far less structured and had a jazzier, looser feel to it.
It opens with the lead single ‘Years of Depression’, which is an emotional entry point and undoubtedly sets the tone for the tracks to come. It certainly has a heavier tone than his earlier work, but it still has that slow, thoughtful application that signifies Jonsson’s work. His writing is both deep and reflective, and in many ways can be seen as almost Leonard Cohen-like in its imagery.
“Here I am. White as f**k and privileged, but also an open wound. I go to the bathhouse to enjoy silence, with naked men with no bodies.
“What strikes me again, even now, is that rock from the late ’60s through the early ’70s remains the most compelling – whether Western or Japanese. In the mid-1960s, British groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones swept across the globe, while in the United States Bob Dylan famously swapped his folk guitar for an electric one, igniting the folk-rock movement. From the surge of new energy among young people in Britain and America – entwined with hippie culture, drugs, and the radical momentum of the anti-Vietnam War movement – an extraordinary body of rock music emerged, ushering in what would become the golden age of rock in the 1970s. In Japan, from around 1968, record companies began grouping these sounds under the label “New Rock”…
The dominant theme of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s 2023-2024 concerts was mortality, with key songs such as “Ghosts,” “Last Man Standing” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” tackling the topic head-on. With their European Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, last year, though, politics started to play a greater role. And their current Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour is even more political. And more urgent.
“We never planned this tour, but we came out because I needed to feel your hope, your strength, and I needed to hear your voices,” Springsteen, 76, said near the end of his sold-out April 20 concert at The Prudential Center in Newark. “My wish is that we brought some hope and some strength for you tonight.”
Alto saxophonist and flutist Alan Braufman first emerged as a singular voice in New York’s 1970s loft-jazz scene with his 1975 debut Valley of Search, a record that would later be recognized as a landmark of spiritual and free jazz. After decades outside the spotlight, Braufman returned with a new wave of acclaim, releasing two highly regarded albums in 2020 and 2024 that reestablished him as both an essential elder and a vital contemporary presence-long described as “a legend in free music” (Gilles Peterson / BBC).
Recorded in a single day in the fall of 2025, Anthem for Peace is a fully new studio album that captures Braufman in the present tense. Leading a quartet with vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Chad Taylor…
Sixteen killer 70s reggae funk and soul cuts from the likes of John Holt, Lee Perry, Cornel Campbell, The Cimarons , The Chosen Few and more featuring superb reggae takes on songs by artists including The Jackson 5, William DeVaughn, Diana Ross and The Supremes, War, The Temptations, Roberta Flack, The Stylistics and others!
Well-documented is the influence of American black music on Jamaican styles of the 1960s – from the birth of ska music, when The Skatalites ska-ified the jump-up southern USA rhythm and blues music of Rosco Gordon, Louis Jordan and Fats Domino, through to the creation of rocksteady when Jamaican artists like The Techniques, The Paragons, Alton Ellis and The Melodians turned to the slower rhythms…
For Mind Abandon, Ital Tek incorporated more live instrumentation into the creation process, rather than primarily composing on a computer. The tracks are often based on guitars and even processed vocals, as well as live percussion and other instruments played by hand. The album still unmistakably sounds electronic, but it has a human touch. Ten years on from 2016’s Hollowed, Ital Tek has firmly established a cinematic style that has almost nothing to do with the dubstep, IDM, and juke hybrids he used to produce, even if his newer work is still informed by the more beat-forward direction of his earlier releases.
Opener “The Ice Is Thin” is a sparkling inferno with melancholy bass, and “A Hidden Path” almost sounds like a dark version of new…
Indie singer/songwriter Spencer Krug released his latest solo album, Same Fangs. Though best known for his string of formative records with Wolf Parade, Krug has also stayed busy with other projects, releasing a prolific run of albums with Sunset Rubdown and Moonface, in addition to his solo albums. Fans last heard from Krug with his latest Sunset Rubdown album, 2024’s Always Happy to Explode, which followed soon after his last solo album, I Just Drew This Knife, in 2023.
Krug returned earlier this year amidst an unexpected cultural resurgence of his Wolf Parade track, “I’ll Believe in Anything,” thanks to a triumphant needle drop moment in Heated Rivalry. However, rather than leaning into chaotic indie rock highs, the songs on Same Fangs…
Primitive Ring is a hard rock power trio, forged in biker rock grime, heavy metal swagger, psychedelic flakes, and bad attitude. Their debut album is reductively self-titled and their sound is similarly free from frills and niceties. Guitarist Charles Moothart made his bones in the Ty Segall universe and much of his musical DNA has made the trip, which makes for an album that would slot in nicely with his work. Bassist Bert Hoover and drummer Jon Modaff are also familiar with the kind of Blue Cheer-meets mustachioed garage rockers vibe and the trio lock together in greasy precision throughout the record. most of the tracks have all the grace of a motorcycle doing donuts on the lawn outside a high school on the first day of summer. Pounding the hooks into…
As founding member and principal songwriter of The Pineapple Thief, Bruce Soord has spent the last decade steadily refining a voice that balances emotional directness with musical restraint. Ghosts In The Park, his latest solo album, is his most personal and unguarded work to date: a record shaped by loss, memory, and the quiet spaces that reveal themselves when life continues to move while everything else appears to stop.
Written over a two-year period while Soord was touring extensively with The Pineapple Thief, the album emerged in hotel rooms, unfamiliar cities, and moments of enforced solitude. Against this backdrop, Soord was navigating the drawn-out decline and eventual death of his father, alongside the continued progression…
49 Winchester the six-piece outfit from southwest Virginia release Change of Plans. The record features 10 tracks, nine of which were written by Gibson, the band’s frontman and lead vocalist. The title is apt for a band that, were it not for the blend of folk, soul, and country that define 49 Winchester, would be unrecognizable from the group that recorded Leavin’ This Holler.
“Each record we’ve made has been a distinct chapter in our life,” Gibson tells Rolling Stone. “I’ve felt it kind of level up, up, and up. I think that this jump is more drastic than it has ever been from album to album. The big, overarching theme of this record is how much our lives have changed since we started this band. We’ve got families. We’re getting married.
Critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and instrumentalist, Patrick Grossi, widely known as Active Child, released his new self-titled album, on Sony Music Masterworks. Co-produced with Alex Goose (Kali Uchis, Childish Gambino, Vince Staples), the album is Active Child’s most personal and introspective work yet, marked by a candid exploration of adulthood and fatherhood. A reflective portrait of his own journey, Grossi navigates the space between creative devotion and familial responsibility, exploring how love and quiet self-protection shape a life no longer driven by youthful idealism.
“Pursuing art feels less romantic and more chaotic as I age,” Active Child notes. “It demands a selfish, often solitary lifestyle…
Cowboy Junkies release Open to Beauty, a transparent yellow 3-LP and 2 CD collection of songs from their 21st century albums to date. This ‘Best Of’ set revisits selected tracks from albums Open, One Soul Now, Early 21st Century Blues, At The End of Paths Taken, Renmin Park, Demons, Sing In My Meadow, The Wilderness, All That Reckoning, Songs of the Recollection, and Such Ferocious Beauty.
Speaking about the new collection, Cowboy Junkies’ Michael Timmins said: “We are now 25 years into this century, the beginning of which saw us leave the world of major labels and return to making music as an independent band. We figured this was as good a time as any to look back, reassess, and reflect on the music…
An indie rock group with a lo-fi, slowcore sensibility, Hiding Places formed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with several members of the original lineup serving as DJs at UNC’s student radio station. They then scattered across various states, occasionally meeting up in places like Athens, Georgia, and releasing a handful of EPs while shifting members of their rhythm section. Produced by new bassist Michael Matsakis, The Secret to Good Living marks the band’s full-length debut, Keeled Scales label debut, and their first release to be recorded together after they all relocated to New York.
A certain Southern aesthetic inhabits the album, however, at least after it opens with the dark, metal-tinged rocker “Dead Dove…
A simplified take on Austin band Touch Girl Apple Blossom and their debut album Graceful is that they’re twee pop revivalists, unambiguously re-creating the softhearted melodies and yearning tones of the ‘90s rosters of K or Sarah Records as closely as possible in the late 2020s. There’s some credence to this assessment (the anything-but-high-definition analog tape production, the hand-stamped fanzine aesthetic of the album art, the band’s name being borrowed from a Beat Happening lyric), but it’s not the entire story. Opening track “The Springtime Reminds Me Of…” is a flurry of jangly guitars of all sorts, kicked off by the kind of sweetly sad and unfussy riff that might have shown up in a Tiger Trap song. Listening closer, there are more layers of…
Green World Image is the second album and Sub Pop debut of spirited post-punk revivalists Telehealth, a group that build on both the sound and subversion of acts like Devo and the B-52s while updating subject matter for the 2020s. Launched from the Seattle music scene by married couple Alexander Attitude and Kendra Cox, Telehealth are fleshed out by members of Slowdive, Tomten, and other indie projects. Attitude and Cox particularly evoke the B-52s at times thanks to the couple’s dual and rotating lead vocals and accented enunciation. The album begins, however, with the soothing voiceover track “[user onboarding sequence],” which asks, “What if there was a model for living that connects people, finances, nature, and technology into one seamless…
For two decades, Tamikrest’s music has illuminated the sound, culture and conscience of the Kel Tamasheq (Touareg) people of the Sahara. Tamikrest means ‘connection’ or ‘union’ in Tamasheq, and the band have become one of the Kel Tamasheq’s most vital voices, raising awareness of their plight while channelling experiences of exile, loss and resistance. Their sixth studio album, Assikel, which means ‘voyage’ or ‘journey’, shows just how far the band have come.
…Tamikrest have always struck a balance between the calm and contemplative on one hand and the heavier, proggier sound on the other. Here, it’s all brought together under a particular atmosphere: analogue tape hiss, wide-open reverb and the inclusion of Paul Salvagnac’s…
Taking the title to musical heart (the album cover pointedly having him sporting different looks), after two albums mining country, reunited with producer David Mansfield who contributes, among other things, guitars, pedal steel, lap steel, celesta and Ondes martenot, alongside drummer Charley Drayton, bassist Tony Scherr and keyboard player Andy Burton, Teddy Thompson’s latest album, Never Be the Same, digs back into rockier seams for his first album of original material since 2020 and, with influences ranging from Crowded House and The Beatles to his father Richard Thompson, songs exploring love, change and the passage of time.
With John Grant on synthesizers, there are, though, still country ballad traces to album opener ‘Come Back’ with its major chords and…
Originally brought together in September 2015 to perform the Zorn Bagatelles, Julian Lage and Gyan Riley have become two of Zorn’s most trusted and soulful musical collaborators, having recorded over a dozen CDs of his compositions for acoustic guitars both in duo and in trio with Bill Frisell.
Seven Sonnets is their sixth CD together as a duo and the music is a lovely series of compositions referencing early music, minimalism, contemporary classical, soundtracks, folk, jazz, and more. Two of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed guitar virtuosos perform a beautiful book of original music inspired by the Sonnets of William Shakespeare. Volume One of Zorn’s musical Sonnets contains some of his loveliest and most intimate creations.
Isotope was formed in 1973 by talented guitarist Gary Boyle and originally featured Jeff Clyne on bass, Brian Miller on keyboards and Nigel Morris on drums. Clyne had previously played with Ian Carr’s Nucleus, while Gary Boyle had played with Stomu Yamashta’s East Wind.
Isotope’s self-titled debut album was released in 1974 and continued the tradition of Jazz Rock fusion that had been pioneered by acts such as Tony Williams’ Lifetime and The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Although their debut album was critically acclaimed, Brian Miller and Jeff Clyne departed Isotope shortly after its release and were replaced by former Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper and keyboard player Laurence Scott. This line-up recorded the excellent…