In Perdido Street Station, China Miéville describes “crisis energy”, the moment when a system pushed to its absolute limit transforms, where collapse and maximum release become the same event. Guttersnipe adopt this idea as their guiding principle. On Extinction Burst!, their first record in eight years, they turn crisis energy from concept into visceral reality.
The Leeds duo (Uroceras Gigas and Tipula Confusa) see the supposed split between the cerebral and the visceral as a cultural fabrication. They reject the idea that intellect and bodily experience must be separate, a myth sustained by a society that wants its thinkers detached and its bodies unthinking. As Confusa notes, most lifeforms – bacteria, invertebrates, marine animals…
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Is Trixies for real? The titular ’60s London night club – filled with cutthroats, dancers, toffs, actors, musicians – is evidently a creation of Squeeze lyricist Chris Difford’s febrile imagination. But does, as the promo insists, this song cycle/musical really date from 1974, three years before Squeeze even had a record deal and Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were all but teenagers? The idea seems quite incredible, but yes, a little sleuthing reveals it to be true: there’s a fleeting reference to it in D&T’s 2004 book, Song By Song, and it’s mentioned again in Difford’s 2017 memoir, Some Fantastic Place. Trixies, shelved for the foreseeable after punk loomed onto the horizon, might otherwise have been their first album. And how different Squeeze history may have been if it was…
Once mainly something that existed in a live setting, the group drifts further into its own orbit with a second collection of songs. What began as a collaboration between two voices now expands with the presence of a third, adding new layers that sometimes verge on something almost familiar.
The work continues to explore a method that feels less like collecting from the outside and more like rearranging from within. Fragments are taken apart and reassembled: rhythms, echoes, remnants of recognizable forms. This time, there is a stronger sense of movement, though it never quite settles. The vocals wander through it all, as if searching without urgency to arrive. At unexpected moments, other sounds surface briefly, then disappear again. The whole seems to find…
Jobi Riccio knows that while a quiet heart-to-heart can solve many problems, sometimes the heart needs a giant, all-caps billboard, especially when the world around that massive sign gets louder by the day. As each new track on her new album Face the Feeling (Yep Roc Records) unveils, Riccio faces another inescapable emotion as if it were a billboard screaming into view as she hurtles down the highway. And rather than turn away from their challenge, Riccio faces those uncomfortable moments with the thrill of self-discovery, reveling in growth and change as facts of life.
Throughout Face the Feeling, Riccio finds masterful balance between extremes, indulging in the light and the dark, the subtle and the direct, the ecstatic highs and the mournful lows.
It’s swift, at just 24 minutes across nine songs, but The Afterparty is Lykke Li at her very, very best, which makes her recent claim at an LA listening party that it could be her last, devastating. It might only be May, but it’s already a serious contender for album of the year. For those of you who had a Brat Summer, The Afterparty comes next.
Lykke Li has thrown the kitchen sink at this album. It includes a 17-piece string section, what she calls “apocalyptic bongos” and more flute than old prog-rock outfit Jethro Tull. The first three songs are a sucker punch of hedonistic glee; opener ‘Not Gon Cry’ grabs your toes and sets out what’s ahead – a heady mix of electro, soul and disco, it’s an instant rush with heart-exploding rhythms, an addictive cowbell and a flute that helps you…
‘Blue’, one of the singles from Deb Never’s debut album, tells a story of unexpected meetings and chance-encounter love. “It’s the way you creep into my life,” she sings in its hook. “Like your favourite out of the blue.” It’s an apt description of Deb’s own aesthetic: songs that arrive unannounced and unfurl gradually and patiently.
Arcade has been a long time coming. Following a breakthrough appearance on Brockhampton’s ‘Ginger’ in 2019, the Seattle-raised, LA-based musician spent years working through a series of EPs before arriving at her debut proper. Now, ex-Brockhampton member Romil Hemnani returns to executive produce and feature, while Dominic Fike (who supposedly passed through the studio at various times during its recording)…
“Look out for one another, watch your drinks, respect each other.” It seems simple, but in such fraught times Emily Nenni is keeping an eye on her people. In her world, the dancefloor is a sacred space where everyone is welcome. The Nashville-based Californian has been releasing music since 2018, filtering the present through the honky-tonk of yesteryear. Movin’ Shoes is her fourth album and second collaboration with producer John James Tourville (the Deslondes) who also helmed her 2024 standout Drive & Cry.
Like that album, Movin’ Shoes has a vintage flavor and the type of classy live arrangements that were de rigueur in the studio system of the ’60s and ’70s, but are now the domain of niche specialists. Too often, artists miss the point…
Fifty years after leaving Oklahoma to chase a dream in Nashville, Vince Gill delivers one of the most personal and rewarding projects of his career with the 50 Years From Home series. Rather than simply revisiting past glories, Gill uses this ambitious sequence of EPs to reflect on memory, aging, friendship, heartbreak, faith, and the long emotional road that comes with a lifetime in music.
Spread across multiple releases, the series feels less like a conventional album rollout and more like an ongoing musical autobiography. Each EP carries its own mood and identity while remaining connected through Gill’s unmistakable warmth, elegant songwriting, and deeply human storytelling. The production stays understated throughout, allowing the emotional…
Yorkshire-based folksinger/guitarist Chris Brain’s fourth coming album, Red Sun Rising, replaces the wide optimism of last year’s New Light with a sense of knowing, yet still manages to focus on the brightness of life and the idea of new beginnings and freshness with the rising of the sun.
As the record develops, the feeling of natural repetition through the guitar arrangements comes through, with additional instruments adding points of difference and flourishes of colour throughout. Take the lovely ‘Kinds of Kindness’: Chris is an accomplished fingerpicker with a solid technique reminiscent of stalwarts like Burt Jansch and Nick Drake, and here his piece is a tightly picked refrain that combines played notes with harmonics, giving the guitar sound a complex yet…
Originally released in 2011, Grace For Drowning is the second solo album from Steven Wilson. This Headphone Dust digital edition expands the original double-album experience with additional bonus tracks and demos, including the rare bonus material CD “The Map” originally included with the physical Grace for Drowning deluxe book edition.
“Grace for Drowning is more experimental and more eclectic. For me, the golden period for music was the late sixties and early seventies, when the album became the primary means of artistic expression, when musicians liberated themselves from the 3 minute pop song format, and started to draw on jazz and classical music especially, combining it with the spirit of psychedelia to create journeys in sound I guess you could call them.
Hand. Cannot. Erase. (2015) was recorded at London’s AIR Studios and saw Steven Wilson reuniting with Guthrie Govan (guitar), Adam Holzman (keyboards), Theo Travis (flute/sax), Nick Beggs (bass/stick), and Marco Minnemann (drums).
“Hand. Cannot. Erase. is an album rooted in sonic and spiritual modernity… an inventive blend of bleak and brooding industrial soundscapes.” — The Guardian
Hand. Cannot. Erase. is written from a female perspective; the concept and story were inspired by the case of Joyce Carol Vincent, a woman living in a large city who died in her apartment and went unnoticed for over two years, despite having family and friends.
The basic story, or concept of the record…
The Asteroid No.4 return in 2026 with In Praise of Shadows, their thirteenth full length album and a statement release that reaffirms the band’s enduring place within the modern psychedelic underground.
In Praise of Shadows captures The Asteroid No.4 at their most focused and assured, leaning fully into the shoegaze sound for which they are best known. Swathed in multi layered guitars, dense reverb, and hypnotic melodic drift, the record reflects decades of refinement while retaining the immediacy and emotional pull that has defined the band since their earliest releases.
Formed in Philadelphia in the late 1990s and now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, The Asteroid No.4 have built a reputation…
After a twenty-year spell away from the genre, Canadian Rae Spoon returns to their formative years with Assigned Country Singer at Birth, their thirteenth album.
Born in Calgary in 1981, the non-binary singer and writer wrote their first song as a twelve-year-old, basing it on the religion they had grown up with but subsequently finding a strong connection with country music. This dissipated as Rae Spoon became compromised and threatened by issues of gender, race and sexuality within that genre, but they tackle these in the first song written for the new record, ‘Country Music Breaks My Heart’: “Well we fit and we fit just fine / And we’re just singing to stay alive / Cause there’s more of us than them / We’re the ones they say just don’t fit in.”
Over the last 50 years Scotland has often been the centre of some of the most exciting things to happen to guitar music. Author Grant McPhee has put together this comprehensive 3 CD set which documents 1985 to 1999 when Scottish independent music was thriving. It’s released by the ever reliable Cherry Red and covers a range of scenes and styles. Following on from the beginning of the decade with the mighty Postcard Records label led the way with iconic Scottish guitar bands like Orange Juice, Josef K and Aztec Camera. The baton was passed on to many of the groups featured here.
Beginning with Jesus & Mary Chain’s, ‘You Trip Me Up’ we’re thrown right into 1985. Originally signed to Creation Records…
Feeling Is Structure explores the relationship between physical form and human emotion.
Across 10 spatial audio-visual works, Cooper examines how structure in sound, architecture, biology and art, shapes the way we feel.
The album is built on the idea that our inner emotional lives are profoundly connected to our lived environment. Developed from a commission to create a live show for London’s Royal Albert Hall, expanding on this idea, Max explains:
“I’m fascinated by architects who can imbue brutalist buildings with humanity, or artists who can paint a block of colour representing their soul.” says Cooper. “We have this remarkable capacity to spill ourselves into the world through form. When I began working on a show…
Few bands could turn sheer volume, chaos, and attitude into an art form quite like Motörhead, and The Löst Tapes, Vol. 8 (Live at Winter Gardens, Margate, 5th Nov 1984) is another explosive reminder of why the band remains untouchable in the live arena. Captured during the turbulent No Remorse era, this newly unearthed recording throws listeners straight into the sweat, distortion, and deafening force of Motörhead at one of their most transitional moments.
What makes this release especially fascinating is the lineup itself. The concert documents the short-lived but powerful 1984 formation featuring Lemmy Kilmister, Phil Campbell, Michael “Würzel” Burston and drummer Pete Gill during a period when the band was rebuilding after major internal changes.
Back To The Garden (A Tribute To Joni Mitchell), the excellent free CD accompanying the June 2026 issue of MOJO Magazine, is less a conventional tribute album and more a lovingly curated journey through the many worlds of Joni Mitchell. Bringing together artists from folk, jazz, soul, indie rock and Americana, the collection celebrates not only Mitchell’s songwriting genius, but also the remarkable flexibility of her compositions.
What makes the compilation so engaging is its refusal to play safe. Rather than simply recreating familiar classics, the artists reinterpret them with personality and emotional depth. Roberta Flack brings warmth and elegance, while Fleet Foxes add a dreamy, atmospheric quality that perfectly suits Mitchell’s introspective writing.
They just might not call it by its original name, but trip hop is back. And if you need any further proof that it is coming back in a big way, than you don’t have to go any further than Black Salt, the new (second) album by Kiiōtō. Those who might have forgotten about the prime time of trip hop back in the mid and late ’90s, Lamb were one of the big names in this genre, and Lou Rhodes was lead vocalist and co-founder of that band, and he even got a Mercury Music Prize nomination. Now, he is joined by award-winning songwriter/pianist Rohan Heath to form Kiiōtō, both being in a sort of hiatus from making music.
Joined by several guests, notably guitarist Hawi Gondwe (Amy Winehouse), double-bassist Andy Hamill (4 Hero, Carleen Anderson),…
One thing you can almost instantly spot with singer songwriters is if they have classical music background. The key thing there is how they use that background in a pop/rock musical setting – are they able to make a balance between the two, or are they overstating one or the other?
Judging on her second album, We Swallowed the Sky, L.A.’s Arielle Kasnetz, aka Beatrix, has an almost perfect balance there, using her classical training to bring in different song structures into her music, as well as some intricate arrangements without trying to be either a show-off or overstating any elements there.
It seems that both her background and her penchant for Americana-style pop/rock come to her naturally, making her music here…
It’s become fashionable of late for bands to release powerful new albums after extended absences. My Bloody Valentine did it, Slowdive did it and Boards of Canada will be doing it later this year. The fallow period falls somewhere in the middle for Christopher Barnes’ project Gem Club.
They last released an album 12 years ago, but Emerald Press picks up where they left off, albeit with an improved sense of how to use empty space and minimalist arrangements to fill out bedroom pop songs to massive proportions. There are no left turns here, only the same rainy day recordings writ larger.
Barnes has noted in the lead-up to the release of the album that even though Emerald Press is the first Gem Club record since 2014’s…