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…
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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…
Cabin Fever returns to print and reclaims its place as one of Corb Lund’s most defining records. Originally released in 2012, the album still sounds tough, grounded, and alive, capturing the moment when Lund’s songwriting reaches beyond borders and starts connecting with a truly global audience. Now expanded with an acoustic bonus disc, this reissue gives the record new space to breathe while preserving its grit.
The album leans into a raw, organic sound built on dusty rhythms, twangy guitars, and stories that feel pulled straight from the road. Fan favorites like “Gettin’ Down On The Mountain” and “Bible On The Dash” continue to stand out as live staples, songs that thrive on their simplicity and swagger. They move easily between humor and hard…
Losin’ Lately Gambler returns to print as part of a renewed celebration of Corb Lund’s extensive catalog, and it lands with the same grit, humor, and lived-in storytelling that define his best work. Originally released in 2009, the album still feels stubbornly timeless, rooted in dust, whiskey, and the hard edges of working-class myth.
The record moves forward on a galloping stand-up bass and the lonesome cry of steel guitar, giving the songs a restless, road-worn momentum. Lund sings in Jack London-like yarns about down-and-out cowboys, ranching life, and late-night barroom philosophy, painting scenes that feel less like fiction and more like stories overheard at the end of a long shift. The production stays raw and unfussy, letting the groove and the narratives…
Almost four years separate Waves from Starfruit, the Grammy-nominated fifth record that brought Moonchild’s first round of guest features and gave the trio wider footing without altering the music’s center of gravity. Starfruit was recorded remotely during lockdown, populated by collaborators like Lalah Hathaway, Rapsody, Alex Isley, and Tank and the Bangas who slotted into the band’s pocket without disrupting it. Amber Navran has said the new project grew from a difficult stretch of personal reckoning, and the love songs that filled every prior Moonchild release have mostly vanished. In their place are songs about cutting people off, surviving hurt without pretending it ends, and telling yourself the truth when you’d rather not. Waves continues the collaborative instinct, but the subject…
Continuing Pet Shop Boys’ infrequent series of remix collections, Disco 5 mainly focuses on the duo’s own remixes and productions for other artists, like Disco 4 did, rather than outside remixes of their own material, like the first three volumes. Of course, when the pair remix or produce a song for another artist, they pretty much turn it into a Pet Shop Boys song, and considering that the majority of Disco 5 consists of material created during the 2020s, it’s close to being a PSB album that happens to have a lot of guest vocalists on it. Two of the set’s highlights are minor rarities that hadn’t appeared on a PSB collection until now. The duo produced several selections on the soundtrack to the 1993 film The Crying Game, including Boy George’s hit title track, but…
Formed in Jacksonville, Florida, in the mid-1980s, the Beggar Weeds were a trio who chased the offbeat — driving miles out of their way on tour to visit strange museums and roadside oddities. Their music reflected that same fascination with the eccentric: a jangly mix of R.E.M., the almost-falling-apart-ness of the Replacements, and the rumbling melodicism of Hüsker Dü, filtered through Southern folk and punk grit. Their lone 1988 EP, Sure Pants Alot, captured their raw, fast, and fiercely melodic sound — equal parts humor, heartbreak, and rural storytelling.
Michael Stipe of R.E.M. became an early fan, co-producing unreleased sessions that now appear on their career retrospective Tragedy in U.S. History, out via Strolling Bones Records.
Unsuk Chin describes her music as a conscious attempt to render in sound the visions she encounters in her dreams. This ear-catching profile album from Ensemble Intercontemporain presents three of the Korean-born, Berlin-based artist’s works: a triptych of visionary panels that flicker and swarm with kaleidoscopic colours.
It opens with ‘Gougalon’, a playful suite inspired by the travelling amateur theatres of her native country. Prepared piano and a percussion section that hums with gongs, bells, bottles and vibraslap lend a riotous jocularity to six contrasting episodes, including the lugubrious ‘Lament of the Bald Singer’, the clangorous ‘Grinning Fortune Teller with the False Teeth’ and the madcap ‘Hunt for the Quack’s Plait’. First-class engineering…
Whenever Lust for Youth‘s Hannes Norrvide and Malthe Fischer collaborate with Croatian Amor’s Loke Rahbek, the results are dramatic. Rahbek was a member of the band when they transformed their music into sweeping synth pop on albums such as 2014’s International, and though he departed after the release of 2016’s Compassion to concentrate on Croatian Amor’s fractured yet flowing soundscapes, they never truly stopped working together in some form.
Sparked by a 2023 performance at the Sydney Opera House, All Worlds presents the next phase of Lust for Youth and Croatian Amor’s partnership. For inspiration, Norrvide, Fischer, and Rahbek looked to the field recordings and traditional music launched into space on Voyager 1 and…
…Adding to the remarkable collection of work the Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist has produced as a solo artist and through collaborations with figures such as Monolake and Paul St Hilaire is this strong contribution to the quiet details label.
The Deadbeat moniker’s granted immense stylistic latitude to Monteith, as a given release might as easily be a clubby floor-filler as trippy ambient excursion. No matter the direction a release takes, it always bears the unmistakable handprint of its creator.
Scott’s in full-blown ambient-soundscaping mode on Kansai Botanticals, whose creation was inspired by an autumn Japan tour and explorations of the countryside undertaken during downtime. Sounds were gathered during such…
There are so many instrumental combinations that artists use to create ambient soundscapes. Some work, some don’t. Some create credible music that works, some turn into vapid, new-age-like aural wallpapers. And that does not necessarily depend on the combination of instruments but on the inventiveness of the artists involved and their ability to transform that into music that actually resonates with the listeners, instead of just creating an aural background.
Being Grammy-nominated doesn’t necessarily have to be a good sign, but both Manu Delago (handpan) and Max ZT (hammered dulcimer) not only have Grammy nominations but are recognised as innovators, able to use their instruments to create intriguing music, as they do…
It’s been over 80 years since Robert Oppenheimer stood in the New Mexico desert and quoted the Bhagavad Gita, and we haven’t stopped imagining a world in which someone actually pressed the damn button. Thanks to the movies, we know what the ruins and the barren spaces might look like — but what would they sound like? A series of fractured transmissions, Phew and Danielle de Picciotto’s Paper Masks is a soundtrack for the post-apocalypse. Across eight tracks, Paper Masks plays out like a conversation between desolate souls who can’t tell if anyone is on the other end, but still they keep sending the signal.
Phew has been a constant in Japan’s underground scene since her time fronting post-punk pioneers Aunt Sally before collaborating…
Sugar On My Blackbeans is the third release from Venezuelan-born, UK-based guitarist Aleph Aguiar. It follows on from Pataruco (2015) and Maku (2017). He has spent the intervening years working with Tony Kofi, Elton John and Georgia Cecile and served as the guitar and singing coach for Simon Bird for the 2014 The Inbetweeners 2 movie. Additionally, he has collaborated with numerous dance artists, composing music to accompany their choreography.
That varied background serves him well on this quintet album, as he brings an assortment of approaches to his tribute to the swinging Latin jazz of the 1960s across nine original compositions. Typically, that era would suggest a combination of saxophone and piano.
Portland folk singer Jeffrey Martin releases one full show, Alive July 25, 2025, recorded at Portland’s The Showdown, with 16 tracks, unedited, overdub-free, and unsequenced. Sam Weber (Madison Cunningham, Anna Tivel, Bahamas) joins Martin on acoustic and electric guitars. Weber also recorded and mixed the record. Only five of these songs appeared on his acclaimed 2023 Thank God We Left the Garden. The others are selected from his sixteen-year recording career, along with a cover of Neil Young’s “Out on the Weekend,” along with a new song, ‘1519.”
Martin opens with “I Know What I Know,” in one sense an anthem of the well-informed, as Martin articulately points out that hate survives on a lack of information; it can’t function without it.
Born in Argentina and raised in London, Malena Zavala earned critical plaudits for the DIY bedroom pop of her 2018 debut album Aliso. Her 2022 follow-up effort La Yarará found the singer-songwriter exploring her roots across a variety of Latin American styles.
This third album returns to the guitar pop of that first salvo but with a more mature, fleshed-out sound. While South America is still an ongoing inspiration in her work, here its influence is more thematic. Inspired by a road trip from Chile down to Patagonia in Argentina, the music has a softly melancholic tone.
The spare guitars and echoed vocals of ‘Only Thing That’s Right’ and ‘Lost in the Depths of the Andes’ are enlivened by the lusciousness…
Guitar anthems: they were all the rage during the 1970s and 1990s, but have become less prominent in the mainstream in recent years. The Arctic Monkeys, clattering hooks and epithet-coated choruses in 2006, moved away from the genre in 2018 for croonier melodies. Legacy bands Manic Street Preachers, Guns N’ Roses and My Bloody Valentine proudly carry their instruments, blasting power chords into the prying audience, every plectrum bearing an attitude and confidence. It’s becoming harder to think of a younger equivalent, so it’s a relief to find KEELEY’s Girl on the Edge of the World. Rock guitars form the central DNA of the record, for all the glory it can muster.
“Who Wants to See the World” starts with reverb playfully echoing around the speakers,…
Clémentine March is a French British singer and multi-instrumentalist based in London, and if a first thing that comes to your mind is a possible connection to Stereolab, formally there isn’t one. Musically, though March’s latest album Powder Keg has all the trademarks of a great new Stereolab album.
Oh, and March is not a copyist, but like Stereolab, her musical style is so hard to pin down, as she veers all over the place, from sixties pop musings whether it is the psych pop or French yé-yé, or Brazilian Bossa to krautrock and anywhere else that she fancied at that moment.
And she does it with some great flair, whether she takes on the instrumentation herself or whether accompanied by quite an excellent…
My World Is the Sun, from Québécois vocalist and songwriter Dominique Fils-Aimé, is introduced by her Haitian mother, Claudette Thomas, singing “Ma Mélodie” from an old ’70s-era cassette. Its placement inspires the entire 15-track set. My World Is the Sun offers lyrics populated by the elements, weather, the sun, and the moon sung in both French and English. Fils-Aimé’s voice lies at the center of 21st century soul, jazz, pop, folk, and blues. The album is nocturnal, warm like a bath, and yet gently mercurial in its subtle abstractions. “Sea of Clouds” opens with the sounds of waves crashing against the shore. Keyboardist David Osei Afrifa offers a dark, subtle synth drone under her vocal, appended by percussion, chimes, and a wordless, chantlike lower-register…
Ten thousand years ago, a man died in what would become Somerset. His bones waited in a cave until 1903, when they were discovered and given a name: Cheddar Man. Now he’s the subject of a song by Voka Gentle, who use his story to contemplate what we’re doing to the places where people have lived for millennia. “Let’s say the sea levels rise and we lose north Somerset, which, by the way, is looking increasingly likely…” William J Stokes’s voice is dry, conversational, with the studied neutrality of a local news presenter. Beneath it, the music shuffles and twitches, glassy and off-kilter; post-punk refracted through Laurie Anderson’s deadpan intelligence.
The album circles power from multiple angles: a photoshoot, a Greek tragedy, a preacher…
Isabel Pine has been quietly releasing independent EPs for a while now, and it was high time that a label like Kranky would pick up her new album release, Fables. And it all seems to fall into place, with that quiet description, the album title and cover, telling a bit about what is going on here.
Pine, a classically trained viola and cello artist, has exactly that touch to make that fluid area between modern classical and ambient music work.
It is not just about creating moody soundscapes but make those soundscapes transform obvious instrumental capabilities into music that presents personal emotions in a way that listeners can not only pick up on them, but understand them in a way the artist, in this case Pine, wanted it in the first place.