My Days of 58 is the eighth Bill Callahan album, his first since 2022. The twelve tunes here open uncanny depths of expression as Bill continues to blaze one of the most original songwriting-and-performance trails out there. With My Days of 58, he applies the living, breathing energies of his live shows to the studio process, sharpening his slice-of-life portraiture to cut deeper than ever before.
The core musicians featured on My Days of 58 is the group that toured for 2022’s Reality: guitarist Matt Kinsey, saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White, whose synergy was evident in 2024’s live Resuscitate!. This showed Bill, as he puts it, “that they could handle anything I threw at them,” adding:
“Improv/unpredictability/the unknown is the…
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Craft Recordings mark the tenth anniversary of The Record Company’s Grammy®-nominated debut with an expanded deluxe edition of Give It Back to You. The reissue pairs the original 10-track album featuring the chart-topping “Off the Ground,” alongside fan favorites “Rita Mae Young” and “On the Move” with a newly unearthed live document: the band’s legendary Living Room concert, recorded in bassist Alex Stiff’s Los Feliz home in 2013.
Heard today, Give It Back to You still lands with the same immediacy that helped launch the band a decade ago. The songs are built on tight interplay, gritty textures, and a lived-in blues-rock feel that favors momentum over excess polish. There’s a directness to the writing and performance that makes the album easy to return to-hooks…
With Country Sides, The Band of Heathens lean fully into their rootsy instincts, delivering an album that feels both lived-in and refreshingly unforced. The record sits comfortably at the crossroads of country, Americana, and soul-tinged rock, favoring groove and feel over flash. It’s the sound of a seasoned band trusting the songs, letting space, harmony, and restraint do the heavy lifting.
The album opens in a relaxed, open-road mode, where dusty guitars and warm organ tones set an unhurried pace. There’s a conversational ease to the vocals, passed around between band members, that reinforces the group’s greatest strength: chemistry. Nothing here feels overworked. Instead, the arrangements breathe, giving each song room to settle into its own pocket.
Jazz legends Dave Holland and Norma Winstone, together with the versatile London Vocal Project, present Vital Spark-an album featuring a collection of Kenny Wheeler’s final compositions that were sent over time to Pete Churchill and brought to life through patient arrangement, deep listening, and mutual trust.
Vital Spark captures a rare unity between jazz ensemble and choir, revealing a sound that’s both unforced, delicate, reflective and full of Kenny’s character and energy. The music features new lyrics by Norma Winstone, alongside Wheeler’s settings of poems by Stevie Smith, Lewis Carroll, and William Blake. The result is unmistakably Kenny Wheeler: lyrical but unsentimental, harmonically rich yet spacious. For Dave, Norma, and Pete…
Historic 4 hours of previously unissued 1959 live Art Pepper recorded at Vancouver, Canada’s legendary jazz club The Cellar.
The release of Art Pepper’s Everything Happens To Me: 1959 – Live at the Cellar is the stuff music archivists can only dream of finding. Recordings by an historic and important jazz artist, at a storied venue, at a time when the artist was making some of their most essential work. In this case, catching Pepper on tape at The Cellar in 1959 finds him in the midst of creating and straddling landmark releases like, Art Pepper Meets The Rhythm Section (1957), Modern Art (1957), Art Pepper + Eleven (1959) and Gettin’ Together (1960). Though Pepper was going through a down time, Vancouver, Canada’s jazz club, The Cellar was in full swing…
…features five new bonus tracks.
Coming off an extended three-year hiatus, the Neighbourhood deliver a hushed yet hooky fifth album with 2025’s Ultrasound. The LP is the group’s first since 2020’s Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones and finds them moving away from that previous production’s glittery, conceptual sci-fi David Bowie intimations and back toward the shadowy alt-pop of their early years.
Notably, it finds them reunited with producer Justyn Pilbrow, who helmed 2013’s I Love You. and 2015’s Wiped Out!, as well as Jono Dorr, who contributed to the band’s 2014 mixtape #000000 & #FFFFFF. Consequently, many of the tracks have a soft, dreamy quality, recalling the late-night beach party melancholy of the group’s early…
Third Man Records have released the first-ever live anthology from Ann Arbor, MI–based noise rock legends Laughing Hyenas.
That Girl – Live Recordings 1986–1994 collects 18 ferocious tracks, painstakingly compiled by founding member John Brannon from his personal archive of cassette tapes, then transferred, mixed, and mastered by Grammy® Award–winning producer Bobby Emmett (known for his work with Sturgill Simpson, Jack White, and The Sights).
The collection captures the band’s full-on sonic groove assault in its purest, most unadulterated, and gloriously abrasive form. Highlights include such hard-hitting classics as “Here We Go Again,” recorded live for NYC’s famed WNYU in 1990.
If ever a band deserved an LP of live material…
Tori Amos’ daring 2001 concept album Strange Little Girls returns February 20 in an expanded edition that adds rarities and previously unreleased recordings. The Grammy® Award-nominated album finds Amos reinterpreting a dozen songs written by men, shifting them to a female perspective and performing each through one of 12 personas she created for the project. Strange Little Girls (Expanded Edition) combines the original album and B-sides with two unreleased covers from the sessions.
Celebrating 25 years, Strange Little Girls remains one of Amos’ most striking and conceptually ambitious works. To bring the concept to life, she collaborated with renowned makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin, who helped transform her into 12…
Hen Ogledd’s Discombobulated is in the radical mould of music that tackles the now. Unconcerned that references may go out of date, the timelessness of their sound comes in documenting the present, rather than in seeking to transcend (or ignore) it. Lyrically, Discombobulated celebrates dissent with all the force of the protest tradition in folk music; musically, the album glues together sounds and genres to evoke the chaos of today.
Hen Ogledd is the project of Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington. The first releases were just Dawson and Davies; since then, with the addition of Bothwell for 2016’s Bronze and then Pilkington on 2018’s Mogic, Hen Ogledd have grown both more complete and more porous. Complete, because…
We last encountered Midori Hirano in the company of a pair of Berlin electronic improvisers, noting that “A grounding cadence of piano arpeggios, a tremulous wash of strings, the fluting pulse of synthesizers, Berlin experimental artists Sebastian and Daniel Selke (“the brothers”) and Midori Hirano mix together organic and electronic sounds in this meditation on the scale.”
Here the Berlin-based artist — who trained on classical piano but has more recently shifted to analog and modular synths — revisits the spare, searching aesthetic on her own, mostly on synthethic keyboards but also on piano.
On the synthy side, consider the purity of “Before the Silence,” as it negotiates a brief but luminous keyboard riff. It rolls like a wheel,…
On their debut album together, post-punk trio the Messthetics and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis arrived at the same point by following two different paths. Lewis, a player grounded in gospel and post-bop, grew increasingly adventurous in the years after delivering Divine Travels to Sony’s revived OKeh imprint in 2014.
He became a crucial part of New York’s jazz and new-music community, where he met Anthony Pirog, an improvising guitarist who had teamed up with drummer Brendan Canty and bassist Joe Lally in their post-Fugazi project, the Messthetics. Pirog extended an invitation to Lewis to join the trio onstage in 2019, setting in motion a series of events that led the group to sign to storied jazz label Impulse! Records for its 2024 LP.
Peaches is primarily known as a purveyor of transgressive, sex positive anthems that have no room for shame whatsoever. This is just as it should be, although her music might not be for the easily offended, and her seventh album is not only one of her best, but possibly her most audacious too.
No Lube So Rude is packed with hardcore punk attitude, biting sarcasm, raw electroclash grooves and is blatantly sexually explicit throughout. Seemingly, as she stares down the barrel of her sixties, Merrill Nisker feels no need to veer towards the middle of the road, declaring herself “a horny little fucker and I’ll bring you to your knees” on “Fuck Your Face” and “a woman in control of all her holes” on “Panna Cotta Delight”…
…Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, and RCA Records release the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a collection of 27 recordings heard in the upcoming film, featuring updated mixes of iconic live performances alongside new remixes and medleys of classic Elvis recordings.
…A follow-up to director Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic of the singer starring Austin Butler in a star-making, Golden Globe-winning turn as the late singer, EPiC is sourced from scores of long-vaulted material utilized for film research. Warner Bros. Pictures unearthed unseen footage and outtakes from Elvis’ concert documentaries That’s the Way It Is (1970) and Elvis on Tour (1972)…
If you’re looking for those raucous, foot-stomping, banjo-slapping bangers in the vein of ‘The Cave’ or ‘I Will Wait’ from Mumford & Sons, you won’t really find them on their new album Prizefighter (unless you count fourth track ‘Run Together,’ which sounds suspiciously like a Mumford & Sons classic).
However, this is in no way a bad thing. While 2025’s comeback album Rushmere contained tracks with more of Mumford & Sons’ traditional musical stylings, we love that Prizefighter feels like a challenge they have not backed away from. It’s great to see them evolve their sound and even greater to hear how enthusiastic they have been about this latest album in interviews they have done, recently.
On Prizefighter the trio (Marcus Mumford,…
Staffed by Turkish, Indonesian and Dutch members, Altın Gün have always favored tunings and tonalities exotic to Anglo-American ears. Utilizing a saz (a long-necked lute played in Eastern Europe, the Levant and Asia) as lead instrument adds distinctive flavor to their respectful yet non-rote modernizations of Turkish folk classics and to their own serpentine compositions. It would be easy for Altın Gün’s recordings to come off as arid museum pieces, but through sheer virtuosity and zeal for the source material, they instead create vibrant renovations of these chestnuts.
Garip focuses on reimagining the work of Turkish troubadour/bağlama player Neşet Ertaş (1938-2012). Here, Altın Gün put supple muscle on the bones of Ertaş’ stripped-down songs,…
One can almost imagine the hypothetical 2025 tour reviews: “To hear him in person, you would never imagine Milton Keanes must be pushing age 80. He zips across the keys with abandon like a man half that age, matched by his equally spry bandmates keeping up with every gallop. The trio continually whips up a storm, defying any age and fit for any time.”
Or so it would be fun to picture, if you enjoy playing along with the fictitious Jazz Sabbath background story. The “official” legend posits that the iconic early Black Sabbath catalogue was originally stolen from a short-lived 1960s underground jazz trio, which belatedly reemerged in the 2010s to present the music the way it was always meant to sound. It remains…
In order to escape the world’s pressures, Moby often finds refuge in ambient and neo-classical music, and Future Quiet is one of several ventures into such territory. It isn’t the type of extended meditation session he reserves for his lengthy ambient releases, instead coming a bit closer to his orchestral releases on Deutsche Grammophon.
The album begins by revisiting “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die,” the elegiac closing number to Everything Is Wrong that gained a new audience after it soundtracked particularly emotional moments during three seasons of Stranger Things. Jacob Lusk of Gabriels stays faithful to the Mimi Goese-sung original, if anything making the song sound more intimate and sacred. Two songs from the previous Moby album,…
Compiling music from throughout continental Europe during the height of psychedelia and progressive rock, So High I’ve Been: A European Rock Anthology 1967-1973 touches on several different styles and movements, from Dutch Nederbeat to Krautrock. This ranges from more blues-based rock & roll and beat music to groups exploring the outer limits, either through cosmic jamming or more ambitious and conceptual means, like French Zeuhl legends Magma, who sing in a self-invented language. Selections by a few groups like the Rattles and Necronomicon are occupied with occult themes, but the music is closer to the dark side of prog, and not heavy enough to be deemed metal. Other material runs the gamut from druggy freak-outs to more…
Getting so obsessed with a band that you book a local show just to see them play — we need more freaks like that in the world, and that’s what Merge Records’ Mike Krol did this spring when he put together a bill featuring himself, Shannon Shaw’s new group Voilà!, and this not-so-known New Orleans duo Twisted Teens, Krol’s recent fixation, here in Los Angeles. “I blasted it in the car at night with the windows down, tracked down records, mailordered merch like I was 16, and all of a sudden I felt excited about THE CREATION OF MUSIC again,” he wrote on Instagram. “I couldn’t believe a band I didn’t even know existed at the beginning of this year made — quite possibly — my favorite record of the past 2 decades.” Amen, Mike. This shit tears.
It’s nearly nine years since U2 released a collection of original material, 2017’s Songs of Experience. They’ve hardly been idle since: two tours, two films, a 40-date residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, nearly three hours of stripped-down re-recordings of old material on Songs of Surrender, plus Bono’s autobiography, which spawned a solo tour, a stint on Broadway and another film. An impressive workload by any standards.
Still, you could take the gap between original albums – the longest in U2’s history – as evidence of a problem that’s bedevilled the band for nearly 20 years: where do U2 fit into the current musical landscape?
The obvious answer is to acquiesce to the “heritage rock” label, rest on the laurels of their…