The complete 19-track collection combining both installments of Yungblud’s album ‘Idols’, which adds 6 brand new songs and a re-imagined version of the GRAMMY® nominated single “Zombie” with The Smashing Pumpkins to the tracks released June 2025.
Since emerging in the late 2010s, the British yelper Yungblud — a.k.a. Doncaster, England-born Dominic Harrison — has become an anti-pop hero. His songs channeled the angst and agitation of youth into frenetic mini-anthems that musically reflected the on-shuffle mentality of the 21st century. Yungblud’s voice — a piercing yelp that exists somewhere between Gerard Way’s wail and Brian Molko’s sneer — slotted him in the alt-rock world, but his aspirations seemed…
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On her sophomore album Speed Kills, Ally Evenson revels in the ecstasy, longing, and anger that comes at the end of a relationship. Following up her debut record, Blue Super Love less than two years later, the LA-based singer-songwriter has a lot to say about love and moving on.
Evenson is a multi-talented songwriter, vocalist, and guitar player, and is also credited as a producer on the record. Her songs feature distorted electric guitar riffs, sleek synth production, and even acoustic guitar on the pensive final track “Stoic”. She shows off her guitar skills on the track “Blame it on You”, which starts with an electric guitar riff based on the opening of Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy”. The whole record feels inspired by this spunky 90’s culture, and…
Belgian pianist Bram De Looze’s Vice Versa project is one that gradually becomes visible, the way a constellation appears only after your eyes adjust to the night. The music feels as if it had always been orbiting somewhere just beyond earshot, waiting for the right trio of creatives to call it into being.
At the center of it all, De Looze’s playing carries a sensitivity to hidden paths. Reaching outward across cities and oceans, he did not recruit sidemen but encountered kindred voyagers. New York drummer Eric McPherson brings a gravity that never weighs the music down, while Berlin-based bassist Felix Henkelhausen provides a foundation that feels more like an undercurrent than a floor. Together they form a triad held in place not by agreement but by attraction, a musical…
Pat Thomas takes a leaf out of the Darius Jones titling book, with his puzzling selections. XT is Paul Abbott and Seymour Wright, the latter a regular with the pianist’s [ahmed] combo.
The vinyl and CD alternatives feature different versions of the chosen piece, but the digital makes all five available, three manifestations in Zürich and two sets from Cafe OTO in London. The opening first set (taped at OTO) is 43 minutes, and the closing first set from Zürich is almost 17. This latter is the most acoustic showing of what we know as free jazz, jabbing piano galore. Two hours and 47 minutes in its optimal digital entirety!
But not a moment is flab. Every second is vital. Boiling up in a shard-bucket of torn-up and dismembered electronic fragments,…
Morton Feldman‘s composition “Intermission 6” dates from 1953, and is considered to be one of his most open, indeterminate piano works. Its score comprises a single page on which there are fifteen events — single notes or chords — which can be played in any order by one pianist or two. According to Feldman’s writing, “The pianist or pianists begin with any sound on the page, will hold until barely audible, then proceed to whichever other sound he/she/they may choose. Sounds may be repeated.” The music on this version of “Intermission 6” was all played by Finnish pianist Antti Tolvi and was recorded in Westers, Kiila, Finland, on 21st October 2024.
Feldman’s writing and music for “Intermission 6” are reminiscent of various other issues.
The star of Trio Ramberget‘s self-titled sixth album isn’t Trio Ramberget, but a “fourth player”, a big oil cistern on the island of Svanö, Sweden, in which the album was recorded. While it’s unclear how many people can fit in such a cistern, while listening, one yearns for the live experience; such is the gorgeous reverberation, the echo, the decay.
Released on New Year’s Day, Trio Ramberget is perfectly suited to the sprawl of deep winter and the contemplations of a new year. There are no markers in the slow, six-part suite, which flows together as one, although the tone changes subtly from piece to piece: for example, the peering into a higher register in the second part. The trombone, bass clarinet and double bass find themselves in conversational territory with…
In the beginning, there was This Heat. Charles Hayward and co traversed the disused pie factories and damp warehouses that suffused South London, and the resultant music was something seriously challenging: dread-laden, perversely fun, janky, dancey, genre-collapsing. Some believed it encompassed post-punk.
…Based in South London, MPTL (‘My Pussy Tastes Like’) Microplastics describe themselves as an “8 person industrial folk collective playing chronoplastic ballads of the future / folk music for a polymer people / stiob-eulogies arranged in the canon of the desecrated harp / crisis songs for the exploding (micro)plastic inevitable” (or 8PIFCPCBOTF / FMFAPP / S-EAITCOTDH / CSFTE(M)PI, for short). They are also…
Long before Rosalía’s operatic theatrics broke the internet, Colin Self was injecting joy into the artform via an experimental trans-feminist opera project called Elation. Launched in 2011, the series consisted of multiple parts with 2018’s Siblings followed by Orphans in 2019. Self re-emerged five years later with the lemniscate EP, after enduring a particularly challenging period marked by “loss and uncertainty.”
Originally released last February, respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis became the follow-up to lemniscate and the third full-length album for the U.S.-born composer, producer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist — a record described in the press notes as “a greeting after years of conscious exile.”
These days the term singer songwriter has grown in its scope from just a solo artist with an acoustic instrument and introspective lyrics to a solo artist that basically has a mind of their own and goes anywhere where their fancy, inspiration, and inventiveness take them.
You can add to the latter Delaney Bailey, who after millions of streams has readied her debut album Concave, an album where she seems to care very little about neat musical labels and genres, covering a vast ground between dream pop and everything else, keeping that introspective music and lyrics concept fully intact.
And she may be doing it all instinctively, but she seems to have a deep musical background that she has transformed into music of her…
James Brown wants to know one thing before he and his band begin Sex Machine. “Can I get into the thing, really?,” he asks. His cohorts enthusiastically respond in the affirmative. And for the next hour and change, Mr. Dynamite gets into it and more, turning in a sweat-soaked, feet-moving, hip-swiveling, emotion-purging, in-the-red, drop-everything-you’re-doing-and-dance performance for the ages. Ranked by Rolling Stone among the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the sweeping 1970 effort towers as a testament to Brown’s inimitable legacy as well as the peak powers of his voice, vibrancy, and bands.
Sourced from the original master tapes, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD presents Sex Machine in audiophile sound for…
Belfast-based Dani Larkin follows up her 2021 debut Notes for a Maiden Warrior with the spellbinding Next of Kin.
A mix of traditional songs and self-composed pieces, it is an enthralling listen.
Larkin’s storytelling provides the keystone, taking the listener on a journey through coming-of-age into adulthood, before concluding with a poignant and mesmeric rendition of ‘Danny Boy’. ‘End of It All’, a “song for the times”, layers Larkin’s vocals with David Odlum’s beat-driven drums and Ruth O’Mahony Brady’s moody synth.
Add in a haunting echo of the children’s rhyme ‘Row Your Boat’ and you are left with an uneasy, yet hypnotic, listen.
Reflective and at times playful, Next of Kin…
Consummate troubadour and songwriter Tim Easton wrote much of his new album beneath a painting of a red horse. The artwork — created by his sister, visual artist Susan Easton Burns—was executed in an abstract-realist style, using gardening tools instead of paintbrushes to form a vivid image from fragmented strokes. It now serves as the cover art for fIREHORSE, Easton’s 14th commercially released record. Made with zero artificial intelligence, the album also arrives just as the Chinese calendar enters the Year of the (Fire) Horse — an apt coincidence given that Easton himself, born in 1966, is a Fire Horse.
“Whether the painting influenced the songs or the album was shaped to fit the painting makes no difference anymore,” Easton says.
The Wilding soundtrack was produced in partnership by the English electronic musician Jon Hopkins and Icelandic soundtrack composer Biggi Hilmars. Hopkins‘ contributions mix electronically generated and/or processed sound effects, while Hilmars tends to emphasise orchestral textures, with both occasionally collaborating and blending their sounds. Wilding’s 13 short tracks form the ambient soundtrack to a 2024 documentary film of the same name, which tells the story of the wilding of 3,500 acres of English farmland, letting land that was once intensively farmed be recolonised by its flora and fauna.
…In the six-minute-long album opening “Wilding Theme”, Hopkins electronically processes his voice to sound “like a strange kind…
Convention versus innovation: it’s techno’s constant battle. Sure, there aren’t meant to be rules, but ultimately it’s music created to blend and flow within a set. Dallas-born artist Gautham Garg, AKA Decoder, has been probing at this very tension from an early age. Since debuting at just 17 with Dark Shape on Jeff Mills’ Axis label in 2021, he’s released a head-spinning six albums and well over 20 EPs before arriving at his new double-length LP, Prakasa.
Now, at 21 years old, Garg’s sound has matured through action and experience. Dark Shape boasts all the taut, impactful production and functionality you expect from an Axis release, but the dry, monochromatic loops have a formulaic, techno-by-numbers quality to them.
Although they’re based on opposite coasts, Elori Saxl and Henry Solomon have collaborated in the past – Solomon played in Saxl’s quartet live and accompanied her on the Texada soundtrack and Drifts and Surfaces EP – but this latest release marks the first time they’ve worked together as equal partners. With Solomon on baritone saxophone and bass clarinet and Saxl on the Juno 106 synthesizer, Seeing Is Forgetting exquisitely blends ambient and jazz while working in the occasional pop melody.
Saxl is based in New York City, and Solomon is in Los Angeles; their new record was recorded in Solomon’s hometown over five days. Self-described as “improvised music from the ground up… a meeting of both our minds,…
Berlin’s experimental trio Zahn returns with their most electrifying work yet. A lush fusion of heaviness, electronics, and hallucinatory color. Monolithic grooves meet synthetic shimmer. Purpur breathes tension and danger, pulsing with depth and density.
Known for their intense, driving sound that echoes the relentless march of a world on the edge, the trio Zahn Chris Breuer, Nic Stockmann and Felix Gebhard are deepening their sonic exploration with a record that is simultaneously more electronic and more rock-infused than their acclaimed predecessors.
Recorded once again in Gyhum with recording engineer Peter Voigtmann (ex–The Ocean, Death By Gong, Heads.), Purpur follows in the footsteps…
Intrinsically entwined with the landscapes of Hokkaido, Japan, Whispers of the Distant Past is a meditation on transience and nostalgia. Yuki Aizawa’s first physical release acts as a vessel to preserve and reflect on the fading vestiges of childhood. This emotional core is rooted in Aizawa’s memories of vast fields of lavender in Furano, an endless purple horizon acting as a calming yet melancholic backdrop to the passing of time.
The soundscapes of Whispers of the Distant Past were built through the intricate layering of guitar volume and feedback swells. Aizawa then sculpted the resulting textures into living spaces using a variety of treatments and effects, flecked with field recordings of rivers and wildlife captured…
Formed in the 1980s, IQ is comprised of Martin Orford, Paul Cook, Mike Holmes, Peter Nicholls, and John Jowitt. This prolific band has released 14 albums, beginning with 1983’s Tales From the Lush Attic. They followed two years later with The Wake and Living Proof was also released in 1995. The next year saw the group release Nine in a Pond Is Here and Nomzamo came out in 1987. It was two years before they would release another disc, Are You Sitting Comfortably? and after another two years, IQ released J’ai Pollette D’arnu. 1993 saw the release of Ever and it would be three years this time until the world would see another album by IQ, Forever Live, released both in standard form and as a box set. The following year the group released Subterranea and Seven Stories Into ’98…
Welcome to the Civilised World drags the dusty 1960s desert sound into the modern age- a hazy, sun-cracked journey through Americana and psych. Ghostwoman prove that guitar bands still have plenty of noise left to make.
A title to take with a pinch of salt, Ghostwoman make music that does not sound like music made by a band from the 21st century world. Their sound has echoes of the American frontier, the sort of sound you could only imagine coming from a desert state. Despite this, Canadian born Evan Uschenko and Belgian Ille van Dessel have paired together on the back of an Antwerp jam session and have released a number of gorgeous psyche albums fit for the modern urban cowboy. Previous releases have had a garage-rock feel, an obvious…
Counterfeit Blues, originally released in 2014, was met with critical acclaim and remains a shining example of what Corb Lund’s longtime band, The Hurtin’ Albertans, are capable of. “My old friend Joel Stewart cooked up the idea for this record. Joel was one of the key people responsible for a lot of the successes we had when we first started out and has been a great supporter for many years. He was working at CMT Canada at the time, in his subversive way, and decided he wanted to grab a band and make a live off the floor documentary/recording at Sun Studios in Memphis. Same room Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis used,” said Lund. “He told us that of all the bands he worked with we were the most capable of pulling it off, which is…