…Based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, IRKED’s debut, The Grievance, blazes with their own particular (fire)brand of bruising garage punk with vocals howled by a twirling dervish of pure fury.
Whether it’s in the short, sharp jolt of sub-one-minute rager ‘Running’, or ‘Who Asked’s grim cycle of working and drinking, underlined by the chorus “Why does everybody want to fuck with me?”, the band are never far from spitting out a mouth full of bile.
At times it’s delivered in the form of snark, like in the cutting refrain on ‘Death Cult’ around personal responsibility towards global issues: “Keep up, you’re not doing enough.” Or, similarly, in the lines “Keep off the grass, stay out the sea, don’t piss in the pool, keep ‘em on a lead”…
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Pigeon have recorded their debut album Outtanational in Margate of all places – the once-dying seaside town that has become, in recent years, a retreat for artists like Tracey Emin and The Libertines. The choice of location means something here. Like Margate, Outtanational announces itself as something genuinely hard to pin down.
Across 10 tracks, there are elements of afro-disco, krautrock, punk-funk and post-punk. Opener “NRG” sets the tone immediately as lead vocalist and percussionist Falle Nioke sings of smoke magic and energy vampires over a groove that is fresh, fluid, and plain unpredictable. It’s an intriguing sonic stew that certainly grabs the attention.
Nioke is the heart of the record. Hailing from Guinea-Conakry, he is a member…
Every other year, club culture is allotted one perfect track that punctures the underground-commercial barrier; one god-tier banger uniting both the 6 a.m.-arriving Nowadays member and the casual Friday-night goer-outer. In 2024, it was Nick León and Erika de Casier’s “Bikini.” Before that, the now platinum-certified (in four countries) “B.O.T.A.” This year, Jump Source, the duo composed of two of Montreal’s finest producers, Francis Latreille (aka Priori) and Patrick Holland (aka Project Pablo), are vying for the crown with their stellar debut album, Fold.
Entering 2026, Jump Source were in prime position to connect the dots between North America’s niche club music scenes and the mainstream. Over the past decade, the two…
…Born in Montana, Kiki Cavazos ran away at 16 to Alaska before heading south to Mexico. Yet this has nothing to do with how she sings of a fate wherein facts have no face and pathos is all there is.
We’re believing Cavazos’ role as a troubadour due to her performance — not her story. Granted, Cavazos has traveled the country like a Guthrie protégé and thus is “authentic”. Yet authenticity is not verisimilitude; this is to say Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, a middle-class New Yorker born to Lithuanian Jewish parents, who made you fall for his cowpoke drawl and accoutrements. Put differently, it is through Cavazos’ performances that her past is illuminated.
Therefore, the biography of the artist would fall apart without conviction—in fact, what…
The Northern California blues scene continues to be vibrant, now delivering to the national stage, the Carmen Ratti Band featuring vocalist Jill Dineen. Come to Me is the band’s second album and their debut on MoMojo Records. As with most artists in the Bay Area, the album was created at Greaseland and produced by Kid Andersen. Yet unlike most records involving Andersen, he does not play. The album is a showcase for guitarist Ratti’s band as they present an all-original program with either Ratti or Dineen writing or co-writing each song. They span the spectrum of soul, gospel, blues-rock, funk, and traditionally rooted blues. Formed in 2018, they are not newcomers to this music. It’s as if the collective experience of the players has coalesced into a new force,…
Among his many achievements, Cooper’s 2011 release ‘Welcome 2 My Nightmare’ stands out as a gripping sequel to his iconic 1975 concept album ‘Welcome to My Nightmare’. Revisiting the twisted world of Steven, the album blends nostalgia with modern flair.
Originally intended as a sequel to ‘Along Came a Spider’, it features an all-star lineup including legendary songwriter Desmond Child and pop sensation Ke$ha, along with original Alice Cooper band members Michael Bruce, Dennis Dunaway, and Neal Smith to capture that authentic ’70s vibe.
Now, Welcome 2 My Nightmare is being reissued in a newly mastered 2CD digipak edition, as well as a special 3LP vinyl version that runs at 45rpm for superior sound quality.
TripleAkuma is the third in a series of essential live documents from Merzbow.
The stage and the studio are not the same place, and Merzbow has an acute understanding of this juxtaposition. Whilst the sheer density of the music might be maintained across both spheres, the live experience of Merzbow is truly something that exists as profoundly physical and moreover, overtly performative.
Merzbow’s live methodologies draw not just from a saturation of frequency at all levels, but a recognition of how frequency can be used to affect the body. Working at the extremes of both low and high sonic energies, he creates a situation within which the fullness of the body can be tested; the aural body, that of our ears…
Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood and The Rajasthan Express release their new album Ranjha through World Circuit/BMG. Produced by Sam Petts-Davies and recorded at Greenwood’s Oxfordshire studio, ‘Ranjha’ is the follow-up to 2015’s widely acclaimed album ‘Junun’.
In 2015, Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and their Indian collaborators, The Rajasthan Express, released Junun, accompanied by Paul Thomas Anderson’s documentary of the same name. ‘Junun’ was widely acclaimed both for what it was – a joyous synthesis of the sensibilities of several wildly divergent musical backgrounds – and for what it wasn’t. All concerned were determined that ‘Junun’ would be neither solemn experimental exercise nor polite cultural exchange.
Gabriella Smart introduces listeners to the term Parasymbiosis, asking if two separate organisms can share a living space. The parable can be applied to many situations, but Smart concentrates on the earth and the universe as a whole
…Parasymbiosis was recorded live at 2024’s Music Meeting Festival in The Netherlands. Smart plays the Electric Cristal (which creates amplified sounds through manipulation of glass rods), and is joined by Kasper Toeplitz on bass and electronics, and Didier Casamitjana on percussion and electronics. Toeplitz and Casamitjana’s contributions do not become obvious until later in the album (gritty and menacing, no less), though they may have been present throughout.
Across eight numbered and self-titled tracks…
Anastasia Kristensen has spent the better part of the last decade sidestepping expectation. Whether releasing via Houndstooth, Turbo or Warp’s Arcola imprint, the Copenhagen-based producer has consistently pushed against the functional rigidity of club music, favouring something more playful, unstable and deeply personal. Even in large-scale festival settings, her DJ sets rarely settle into predictable patterns, instead veering between moods and textures with a kind of gleeful unpredictability. That same instinct animates Bestiarium Sombre, a debut album that feels less like a conventional techno record and more like an invitation into an unruly parallel ecosystem.
Kristensen once described her ideal records as having “a face” – tracks with character,…
Josiah Leming, the man who goes by the stage moniker of Josiah and the Bonnevilles, has been honing his craft since a young age: he learnt to play the piano at eight and wrote his first song aged 13, but it was only with 2023’s Endurance that it felt like people started to sit up and take notice of him. That recognition led to a sold-out tour and his Grand Ole Opry debut in 2024, then came the signing to the prestigious Rounder Records, which is releasing his follow-up album, As Is. There was no shortage of material for the album, as the final 10 tracks were honed down from almost 100 that he had written with impressive collaborators like Natalie Hemby and Joel Little.
“I’ve been staying out / And off the internet / Working on the bike / I ain’t finished yet,”…
“Wired for anger, wired for deceit.” Screams of these lines close the title track of Wired, Basement’s fifth studio album. The song is a statement of intent: Basement are as emotionally-driven as they’ve ever been, and they return unshakeable and demanding to be heard.
Wired marks their emergence after an eight-year hiatus from new music. Three years after their support for 2018’s Beside Myself, Basement – vocalist Andrew Fisher, guitarists Alex Henery and Ronan Crix, bassist Duncan Stewart and drummer James Fisher — returned with an appearance at Outbreak Festival in 2022, and various tours and another Outbreak slot to follow. ‘WIRED’, in turn, hears the band’s post-hardcore, emo and grunge elements bottled into one…
Gun Outfit is a long running lifestyle band out of Los Angeles, California. For two decades the group has been making unclassifiable underground rock music that strives to remain humble and true to life. This has been documented on several releases through fine imprints like Post Present Medium, Paradise of Bachelors and Joyful Noise. Beginning as a crude duo, they have solidified into a crack five piece; a post punk band playing experimental folk rock with a local flavour. The sound has grown mellower, more expansive and more intimate in response to the schizophrenic environment in which we live.
Process and Reality is their most ambitious record yet. Self-recorded over the course of a month on a ranch in Pine Flat…
Alive & Alright a double live album recorded in front of a small gathering of about 50 fans on February 4th, 2000, performing all of the Between The Bridges album plus one b-side,” also filmed for video in an attempt to find a workaround to the emerging problem of music videos costing more than the budget for entire albums, thinking Canada’s music video channel might possibly play various live recordings in lieu of music videos, which they did not.
When attempting to provide an overview of a big story – one that encompasses both the myriad achievements of its subjects over a span of several decades and the impacts of those achievements – you can take two routes. There’s the “just the facts” approach, where you list off…
On her fifth studio album, Wild, Ashley McBryde continues to navigate the ragged edges that shape an individual’s life. In these hard-charging songs that blend raucous rock and searing country, she peers into the fissures of the human heart as they reveal the jagged darkness of despair and trauma, even as those tears contain within themselves the faint light of redemption and hope.
The album opens with the prowling, growling rocker “Rattlesnake Preacher,” full of screaming lead guitars, squealing fiddles, and McBryde’s soaring vocals. The song captures perfectly the defiant tone of a fundamentalist preacher whose message about the love of Jesus is cloaked in a narrow hellfire and damnation vision of salvation. The echoing psychedelic…
After six albums dedicated to refracting the music of Ahmed Abdul‑Malik, أحمد [Ahmed] – the quartet of Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal – turn their attention to Abdul‑Malik’s one‑time bandleader, Thelonious Monk, in their ongoing search for “future music.” Monk and Abdul‑Malik are more than historical neighbors. In the late 1950s, Abdul‑Malik worked in Monk’s quartets, appearing on Thelonious in Action and Misterioso (both 1958) and on the long‑buried Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. Beneath the surface of those recordings lies a shared project: a radical engagement with time that refuses a simple linear trajectory, offering instead sites of synthesis and rupture where fragments…
Somewhere along the lines of their history, MUNA started calling themselves “the best band in the world.” Not the best synthpop band, or the past queer band, but the best, period. It’s a tall order for three people who make excellent pop music, a genre that, for most people, doesn’t hold a lot of weight or seriousness. But MUNA makes pop music, and even though they’ve done it for almost a decade now, it was surprising to hear the synths and pulsing beat that kicks off Dancing On The Wall, the title track for their ecstatic, buoyant fourth album, as if they’d grow up and get real. But of course MUNA would still make pop music. What else would they do?
Atop one of their stickiest melodies, MUNA-Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson…
Along with fellow wonderkid Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd (KWS) was once branded the heir to heroic, blues revivalist Stevie Ray Vaughan (SRV). Even if you dismiss the triple-pronged, abbreviated initials that both guitarists are best known for, shrugging off the dogged critics and straight-up ‘SRV-clone’ accusations can’t have been easy in those early days for such a prodigious talent.
Bringing in the entire Double Trouble band for his second LP Trouble Is… (1997) probably didn’t help matters either, but it’s not every day you’re a self-taught, Fender Strat-wielding teenager. But just like the gusty first few lines that buccaneer this record, Kenny defiantly surfaced ‘up from the ashes, out of the flames’ and now stands as one of the most respected and electrifying guitarists on the planet.
Fresh off the success of 2025’s Boleros Psicodélicos II, another star-studded collection of romantic ballads, Adrian Quesada formed Trio Asesino and took a slightly different path on their self-titled debut album. With his guitar providing the melodies, Jay Mumford’s drums the backbone, and Joshy Soul’s array of keyboards the texture, the set touches on hip hop, funk, jazz, laid back cumbia, and as it snakes and shimmies through eleven songs that won’t change anyone’s life but they will make it just a bit cooler for a while. The feeling is similar to his 2022 album Jaguar Sound, but where that felt like a producer’s album, this showcases Quesada the guitarist and prioritizes capturing a live band in a room. To that end, the sound is both punchy and relaxed, the group…
When Jimmie Vaughan and Kim Wilson teamed up to form The Fabulous Thunderbirds in 1974, they created a band that helped shape the soul of modern Texas blues. Vaughan’s history with that storied band has finally been chronicled in The Jimmie Vaughan Years: Complete Studio Recordings 1978-1989, a comprehensive four-CD box set available December 11th, 2025 via The Last Music Co.
The Jimmie Vaughan Years captures Grammy-winning Vaughan’s blues journey after he cut his teeth in Austin’s late-60s blues scene, including an early recording produced by legendary American songwriter Doc Pomus and Joel Dorn. The result is a stunning collection, not only of Vaughan’s music, but also The Fabulous Thunderbirds…