Two years on from their ambitious debut, Hysterical Strength, the North Yorkshire-born but now London-based six-piece DEADLETTER return with their sophomore album, Existence Is Bliss. Across twelve tracks, their evolved, multi-layered sound underpins lyrics that explore what it means to truly live, rather than merely exist, in an increasingly tumultuous world where life can be extremely challenging.
Shortly after recording their previous record, the band faced challenges of their own. A line-up change that came mid-album campaign saw saxophonist Nathan Pigott, who has a background in jazz, step in to fill the boots previously occupied by Poppy Richler.
In recent years especially, saxophone has had…
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Conjuring images of blizzards and howling winds, Kevin Richard Martin’s Sub Zero is called that for a reason. It’s monolithic and unforgiving, even by the Bug’s standards, representing his most suffocating take on ambient dub yet. It’s not just a matter of making already heavy music heavier: Here, Martin hollows out his materials, leaving just the bass and high frequencies.
The only real midrange comes from what sounds like inclement weather or the occasional distant, lumbering percussion. It’s a new wrinkle in Martin’s sound, making yet another record of bleak electronic dirges feel unexpectedly novel. Sub Zero is a black hole of sound that sucks the color out of everything around it and makes a universe out of what feels like nothingness.
Annie Hogan is something of a quiet icon of goth and post-punk. A longtime friend of Marc Almond, she put on early Soft Cell shows and played with his dark cabaret side-project Marc and the Mambas. She appears on Barry Adamson’s seminal Moss Side Story and has worked with Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and several members of Einstürzende Neubauten. She’s also been releasing evocative solo music since the late 1980s, the latest of which, the six track album Tongues in My Head, strikes an elegant balance of light and shade.
Opening track ‘Alles Ist Verloren’ is measured but bleak, a taxonomy of a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled with faith healers, wilting trees and “shaking bones of the dead”. The bones of the track are also bare – a simple chord…
Slipping into a ghostly voice on the opening tune, Ritt Momney takes the audience into a country unbalanced by politics and unfocused in theme. These dreamlike, picaresque tunes take many different forms; a collage equal parts inventive and heroic. Jangly garage pop number “Lightshow” exhibits a singer beneath a torrent of swirling instruments: angular, opaque and eerie.
Ritt Momney (née Jack Rutter), on his third record, fearlessly tackles the ennui that envelops his generation. The 21st century has been a cycle of war, chaos and pandemic; that turmoil forms the skeleton of Base. Occasionally oppressive, the record holds a bittersweet undercurrent that should be readily identified by all who listen carefully. Organ-drenched ballad “Body”…
Every now and then a record comes around that just knocks you off your feet on the first listen. Floors you, insists to be played again, rinse and repeat. Carnival is one of those records. An album that demands one’s full attention for its entire duration. Which is testament to the tenacity and talents of its creators, Vona Vella.
The British band is essentially the brainchild of songwriting duo Izzy Davis and Dan Cunningham, who initially started the project from their living room during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Originally from Loughborough, they finally settled in Nottingham via London. The (then) duo put out an EP in 2022 (Go Outside Forever) followed by a self-titled album the next year having been discovered then signed by…
“If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward / If I’m so strong, why am I broken?” asks Self Esteem, aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor, on ‘I Do and I Don’t Care’, the opening track on her third album A Complicated Woman. Hopeless though the outspoken pop diva may sound, these contradictions are an invitation into the spectacularly more interesting grey area where two things can be true at once.
Paradoxical thinking is nothing new to Taylor, who cut a choppy path to liberation on her widely acclaimed second album Prioritise Pleasure, having gone solo from indie duo Slow Club in 2017. Lamenting cycles of misogyny, feminist anxieties and societal pressures, it was a brave, bolshy portrayal of all her knotty complexities,…
In TV they talk of the “anthology series”: a regular, recurring show, like The Twilight Zone, Tales of The Unexpected, Inside No.9 or Black Mirror, where each episode has a different setting, cast and sometimes director, unified only by a small team of writers or showrunners. In a similar vein, you could see certain 21st-century outfits – Sault, UNKLE, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Mr Jukes – as “anthology groups”: modular ensembles with a shifting cast of guest musicians and vocalists, changing from song to song.
Gorillaz are, of course, the anthology group ne plus ultra. Just two threads hold the project together. One is the punky, cartoonish artwork of Jamie Hewlett; the other is the anything-goes sonic adventurism of Damon Albarn…
When it came to composing for her new album In the Low Light, British singer-songwriter Lucy Kitchen’s songs first started life as small poems, a simple way to capture her thoughts and mood during a very difficult time: her husband’s battle with cancer and, tragically, his eventual death. With such a heavy shadow hanging over it, perhaps the most surprising thing about the album is that it’s not all darkness and depression; in fact, there is a brightness of hope there too that reflects the mending Kitchen found through the creative process.
The album opener, ‘Winter King’, is hauntingly bleak as Kitchen, her voice fragile and airy, expresses yearning using some fantastic, dark, imagery: “Would you come to me on…
On his fifth album, Joe Wilkes delivers a powerful statement of intent. Hope in My Chest, Fire in My Throat finds the folk troubadour at his most focused, combining intricate finger-picking guitar with traditionally delivered songs rich in storytelling, humour, and sharp political observation. The album was conceived in the shadow of accident, illness, death, and personal upheaval, and stands as a testament to Wilkes’ determination to succeed at all costs. Rather than retreat inward, he leans into the rawness of experience, producing a record that feels lived-in and urgent.
The opening track, Seven Gypsies immediately surprises. Beginning with the sound of a Sarangi — a nod to the Middle East – it sets…
The Michigan power pop trio’s fourth album Lost at Sea is their first to be written together and this sense of camaraderie and togetherness has led to their most consistent sounding record yet, their simmering outrage at the state of the world also led to a little bit more angst in the lyrics and noise in the guitars. A couple of the songs here really tilt the scales toward the power side of the power pop equation, and that’s a good thing. “It Doesn’t Matter” is a fiery blast of hard rocking guitar pop that bursts out of the speakers in the might verses, “The Message” unspools in a haze of blazing overdriven guitar, and a couple of other tracks quietly seethe. Surrounding these moments are plenty of harmony-heavy pop songs that show off their skills as writers of the kind of warm…
Up in the North Star State recently, America’s seams appeared to be unravelling, with Minnesotans having to weather the chill of ICE. Meanwhile, down in the Golden State, Rose’s Pawn Shop was applying the final stitches to a musical security blanket for these turbulent times. American Seams is their Californian quilt of sound, a ten-track patchwork of country, rock, folk, and bluegrass, with a golden ratio of banjo and fiddle.
Rose’s Pawn Shop’s fifth studio album comes hot on the heels of Marigold, frontman Paul Givant’s solo album of 2025. It was recorded live in the studio at Los Angeles’ Love Street Sound, owned by The Doors’ founder member and guitarist Robby Krieger. Production was in the hands of Eric Corne, whose recent CV also includes…
After a half-dozen full-lengths and a clutch of EPs and live releases, plus one miraculously injury-free van crash in the French countryside, EXEK has arrived. The seventh studio offering from the Melbourne-based sextet, Prove the Mountains Move, comes courtesy of Brooklyn’s DFA Records, which has been fusing together rock and electronic music since the halcyon days of flagship act LCD Soundsystem.
First emerging as acolytes of Public Image Ltd.’s immortal Metal Box (aka Second Edition), EXEK has subsequently been delivering dubbed-out death-disco the equal of paragons such as The Rapture and Anika. Each EXEK album finds the group adding and subtracting elements to their core sound; Prove the Mountains Move finds…
deathcrash emerged from the same London art-rock scene that birthed contemporaries like Black Country, New Road and caroline, which means they’re young enough to still be figuring the world out but old enough already to have grown disillusioned with a lot of it.
“This life is the best life/ Oh god, it’s the only one,” vocalist/guitarist Tiernan Banks laments on “CMC,” a highlight of deathcrash’s new album Somersaults, as a wash of arpeggiated guitars unspool around him. The more the phrase repeats, the more its meanings seem to multiply: Are deathcrash suddenly aware of temporal finality, or are they dissatisfied by the notion that this is as good as it’s ever going to get? Is it too self-piteous to identify with both?
…Composer and sound designer Victoria Barca combines bleeps, crunchy percussion and chirping electronics on her albums to create music that blurs the line between acoustic and synthetic, laboratory-created and field-recorded. Her fourth album, released by Mondoj, has the power to create musical worlds. It combines electronic, electroacoustic and acoustic sounds, juxtaposing exotica-style sounds, quasi-folk forms, vocalisations and snippets of recordings. It also shows the potential and possibilities that sound offers. This album was created almost entirely without leaving home.
…Camilla Nebbia’s saxophone in ‘Sporo’ spins seductive phrases, sounding as if someone were playing in the next room. Everything here…
This first record to feature Ryuichi Sakamoto, a collaboration with percussionist Toshiyuki Tsuchitori, pre-dates both his first solo album and also the debut release of Yellow Magic Orchestra by a couple of years.
However, its re-issue here, the first on vinyl since the 1976 original, is very welcome, and highlights both his versatility and, at the same time, the breadth of his musical interests, from modern classical (as an undergraduate, he paid close attention to the likes of Stockhausen) to what would become known, not very satisfactorily, as world music reflecting his postgraduate studies in ethno-musicology. There’s also more than an echo of his enthusiasm for such jazz figures as Herbie Hancock. In the context of his role in…
Vila is L.A.-based virtuoso guitarist and composer Fabiano do Nascimento‘s 15th album in a decade, and second in three months. In November 2025 he released the mysterious Cavejaz in collaboration with vocalist Jennifer Souza and Uakti’s Paulo Santos. Here he delivers a dreamy, deliriously beautiful collection of originals with musical partner, arranger, and trombonist Vittor Santos and his orchestra. Recorded between L.A. and Rio de Janeiro, the music comes out of time itself. According to the guitarist, it evokes the spirit of his childhood home in Bairro Saavedra in Rio’s Catete neighborhood. Here, lithe classical and folk music meet samba and orchestral jazz in lush compositions. Nascimento plays six- and-seven string and soprano guitars amid…
Three years after Planet Mu released Flood City Trax, an illuminating LP by Pennsylvania-based producer Nondi_, the label simultaneously issued two more efforts by the artist, the proper album Nondi… and the limited Bonus Nondi… As with Flood City Trax, Nondi… is a mix of tracks that first surfaced through the producer’s netlabel, HRR, as well as previously unissued works. She describes Nondi… as containing some of her prettiest material, as well an expression of the sense of freedom she experienced when she got into her musical influences. Her tracks embrace the abstract sides of club culture — the weirder elements of footwork, outsider house, IDM, glitch, and dance music that isn’t really all that danceable — and filter them all through the lens…
Tron Ares: Divergence arrives as a surprise release from Nine Inch Nails, shadow-dropped on February 27, 2026, right in the middle of the band’s North American arena tour. Framed as a remix companion to their score for Tron: Ares, the album feels less like a simple reworking and more like a parallel universe to the original soundtrack—darker in places, more club-oriented in others, and fully committed to pushing the digital dystopia of the Tron world into new sonic territory.
The release is currently digital-only, but it’s presented as a two-disc set that reflects two distinct moods. Disc 1 reimagines the Tron: Ares material through new compositions and remix collaborations with a range of electronic artists, pulling the score toward industrial techno…
Crooked Fingers was the solo project of singer/guitarist Eric Bachmann. In the wake of the 1998 dissolution of his much-beloved previous band Archers of Loaf, Bachmann founded Crooked Fingers in early 2000.
One afternoon, Eric Bachmann’s son returned home from school with a sheath of pictures he’d drawn, all of them macabre. “There were crows and sinister figures with scythes and tombstones,” he recalls, “and in the center, there was a strange, lush green tree growing out of all of this red and black. On one of them, he had written ‘Deth, Swet Deth,’ and everything clicked in my head.”
Swet Deth, Bachmann’s first album under his Crooked Fingers moniker after a 15-year hiatus, organized itself around the image: its songs…
In January 1984, The Colourfield released their eponymous debut single. It stalled just outside the Top 40, a better fate than that awaiting its follow-up, ‘Take’, a few months later, which barely made the Top 75 at all. It was a markedly different reception to that afforded frontman Terry Hall’s previous enterprises, both of which had been successful from the get-go: The Specials’ debut single ‘Gangsters’ was a Top 10 smash, while The Fun Boy Three debuted in the Top 20, the British public having chosen to ignore the fact that ‘The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum’ was wildly uncommercial.
But the fans that were happy to send that gloomy stew of lumbering percussion, needling organ and lyrics about famine, nuclear war and…