On its own, much of the music on Be Sweet to Me absolutely rips, a satisfying hit of ’90s-coded nostalgia for listeners missing their days from that decade or, in the case of Violet Grohl herself, for those who weren’t even alive to experience it in real time. With a wide range of influences, honed in part by her father, she cited the Breeders and PJ Harvey as touchstones for the project. One could also add Pixies, Cocteau Twins, L7, Soundgarden, and, of course, Nirvana and Hole to that mix. So as a document of personal influences and artistic inspiration, this debut does its job well, delivering a blissfully tight attack that mimics those peak alternative sounds so well that Be Sweet to Me‘s higher calling might be to serve as an entry point for younger generations to discover…
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L.A. band Dogstar (guitarist/vocalist Bret Domrose, drummer Robert Mailhouse and bassist Keanu Reeves) return with their fourth album All In Now, produced by Nick Launay (IDLES, Amyl And The Sniffers, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds).
“The album really sets up the energy at the heart of this album and the fun that we’ve always had playing together,” Mailhouse shares. “We couldn’t fucking wait,” Reeves says about Dogstar’s collective desire to get right back to the studio. “Personally, I loved it all. For me, the attitude was like, ‘let’s work hard and let’s GO.’ ” “It felt like our last album was our ticket into a party,” says Bret Domrose. “And now we’ve shown up to the party – the three of us.”
Although My Precious Bunny, the solo project of Penelope Isles’ Lily Wolter (and her mother’s nickname for her), predates her noise pop band, it remained a collection of in-progress ideas until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaving Brighton and sheltering in place at her family’s home in Penzance, Cornwall, she didn’t have much to do except go surfing, write songs, and make demos. When her brother – Penelope Isles co-leader Jack Wolter – then became busy with recording the full-length debut of his own reanimated solo project, Cubzoa, Lily took the opportunity to record My Precious Bunny’s debut album with childhood friend Allister Kellaway (Last Living Cannibal, Eera). With songs inspired by a recent breakup as well as her childhood, the resulting…
Bruce Springsteen brought his E Street Band to Chicago for a sold-out show on Wednesday night, marking the latest stop on the “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour. As the band made their way through a varied setlist that spanned over 10 albums and 40 years of music, Springsteen struck a balance between respectfully mourning the tragedies of recent history and inspiring an infectious, joyous hope. All the while, the 76-year-old proved he’s still got it, hopping around, hollering, and playing to the crowd in the way only The Boss can.
Springsteen set the tone for the night as soon as he stepped onto the stage. Under a spotlight, the artist made his greetings before laying out his mission statement: “The E Street Band is here in Chicago tonight in celebration and peaceful…
Sony are releasing Bruce Springsteen’s ‘homecoming’ performance in Asbury Park that formed part of the Sea.Hear.Now festival back in 2024.
The live album captures Springsteen’s three-hour hometown show in all its glory. Serving as the first-ever physical release of the performance, Live from Asbury Park 2024 is a 5xLP, 3xCD set featuring Springsteen and The E Street Band tearing through classics like “Thunder Road” and “Dancing in the Dark,” plus early gems penned just down the road, including “Blinded By the Light” and “Growin’ Up.”
Of course, the concert was a major homecoming for the Boss, who grew up and still lives just a few miles from Asbury Park, has played there countless times over his career…
…Featuring two acoustic, warm takes of her songs “Champ” and “I Just Do!”, an emotional cover of Charli xcx’s “I Might Say Something Stupid”, and a new original track “Sweetness”.
Throughout the early 2020s, singer/songwriter Rebecca Harvey made a name for herself under the music alias girlpuppy with her moody blend of midtempo indie rock, floatier dream pop, and sparer intimacy, including on her debut LP, When I’m Alone. That album was produced by Sam Acchione (Alex G, Tomberlin), mixed by Slow Pulp’s Henry Stoehr, and released on Royal Mountain Records. For the darker, heavier-textured follow-up, she adds washes of shoegaze, grungier alt-rock, and catchy 2000 indie pop/rock for her Captured Tracks label debut.
Philadelphia singer/songwriter Greg Mendez had been plugging away on the regional D.I.Y. scene for over 15 years when he unexpectedly generated some buzz with his 2023 eponymous LP. That album had stripped back the arrangements of many of his prior self-recorded indie rock tracks, arriving at something more intimate, acoustic-minded, and disarming while hanging on to his affinity for short, sensitive, self-conscious songs.
The Dead Oceans label signed him soon after its release. Arriving a full 20 years after his first MySpace uploads, he makes his proper full-length label debut with the like-minded Beauty Land, an album of regretful, confessional songs so short that they verge on a different art form. (Its 14 tracks clock in at 26 minutes.)
Gigi Masin‘s form of ambient music has often incorporated rippling textures and forward motion, so it’s not hard to see how his records have become favorites of DJs and sample-flipping producers. Soon after the Talk to the Sea compilation on Music from Memory introduced Masin’s music to new listeners, he made two albums with Tempelhof which delved into downtempo and Balearic house, and later recorded some mellow jazz sessions with Greg Foat.
For his 2026 solo album Movement, he intentionally created ambient music that connects with the body as well as the mind. While some of the album’s tracks, like opener “Bed on Mars,” sound like drifting clouds or a fog rolling in, others are far more rhythmic, utilizing deep house…
…includes 3 bonus early demo versions.
Toronto duo Ducks Ltd. wasted no time issuing their mission statement on debut album Modern Fiction. The first sound on opening track “How Lonely Are You?” is a wall of bright multi-tracked guitars firing off a barrage of nervous, ever so slightly melancholic chords. It’s jangle pop excellence from the first few seconds, opening up into a powerful but compact rush of simple drum machine rhythms, melodic basslines, and layers of smart vocal hooks. The song is here and gone in less than three minutes, beginning an album of thoughtfully constructed tracks that take notes from some of indie pop’s best artists.
Over the course of Modern Fiction‘s streamlined runtime, Ducks Ltd. channel…
Jana Bahrich, the mastermind behind the emotional and epic music by Francis of Delrium, is growing up before our very eyes. With the artist’s debut EP arriving just as the multi-hyphenate was graduating high school in 2020, and thanks to her prolific nature, fans have seen her grow into an unabashed poet, more akin to a troubadour than to any other artist on the alt-pop/indie rock spectrum. That busy release schedule, though, is not for appearances, nor is it an attempt to keep up with the dwindling attention span of a generation chronically online. Bahrich makes ethereal music meant to be felt as a whole, with each complex emotion broken down and every sonic trick felt from the minute it touches your ears to the moment it reaches your soul, and she has…
Some albums outlive their era, carrying their magic from one generation to the next. The Jerry Garcia Family and Round Records celebrate the 50th anniversary of Reflections, “one of Garcia’s most artistically unified statements of harmony, affirmation, and joy,” with an expanded 3xLP set for Record Store Day on April, 2026. Reflections (50th Anniversary Edition) presents the remastered original studio album – famously described as “really two half-albums in one” – recorded with the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band, and includes two bonus LPs featuring studio outtakes, jams, and four previously unreleased live recordings.
Originally released in early 1976, Garcia reflected that much of the album’s energy “is really a continuation of…
Iceage have always seemed like a band in a state of constant development. You might say that’s understandable, given the Danish musicians were in their teens when their debut album New Brigade was released in 2011: if you don’t change between the age of 18 and your early 30s, you’re probably in trouble. But rock music isn’t real life, and a less adventurous band might have been minded to stick with a good thing, given the reception New Brigade was afforded. Twenty-four minutes of hardcore blended with noisy Birthday Party-esque post-punk and a sizeable pinch of gothic gloom, it was praised so vociferously that the praise itself provoked heated debate, as claims any one band are the “saviours” of an entire genre are wont to do, particularly when said genre is punk.
Back in 2016, The Monkees celebrated their 50th anniversary with their first album of new material since 1996’s Justus. The appropriately-titled Good Times!, produced by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, was a true return to form. The acclaimed album reached No. 14 on the Billboard 200, becoming the group’s highest-charting release in 48 years.
Now Rhino is revisiting Good Times! in a 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition which celebrates not only the album, but the 60th anniversary of The Monkees and the memory of Schlesinger, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork (all of whom died following its release) and Davy Jones (who had passed away in 2012 but was nonetheless featured on Good Times! via archival material).
Featuring Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Sierra Hull, Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and more The Fiddle and the Drum brings together 5x Grammy winning soprano Renée Fleming and 19x Grammy-winning banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck for a celebration of Appalachian folk music.
Produced by Béla Fleck, the album mines a rich vein of America’s musical heritage, weaving the expressive depth of Fleming’s voice with the brilliance of Fleck’s banjo, backed by an all-star bluegrass line up and special guests including Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Mike Bub, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Sierra Hull, Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Bryan Sutton.
Through mountain songs, haunting ballads, and folk hymns, The Fiddle and the Drum…
The Bug Club are back with a new album. It’s been a whole eleven months since their last. Where have they been?
Every Single Muscle, the band’s fifth LP, arrives May 29th, 2026 via Sub Pop, making it a hat-trick for the Welsh duo and their esteemed Seattle-based patrons. Since Very Human Features, which emerged in June of 2025, the non-stop tour has seen the BBC 6 Music and KEXP favourites ping-pong across the Atlantic like they used to the Severn Bridge. Various festival slots in the summer kept them from having any sort of holiday – who needs one when you live in Wales anyway? – until it was time to head back to the writing room.
So that answers that first question. Not that you’d have otherwise known.
The Nashville, TN-based rock outfit All Them Witches almost called it quits in 2024 when drummer and founding member Robby Staebler left, but the group recalibrated, bringing on their friend Christian Powers to man the kit. This lineup change reinvigorated the collective and put them on the path to develop their newest offering House of Mirrors.
The core of Charles Michael Parks Jr. – bass, vocals, Ben McLeod – guitar, vocals, and Allan Van Cleave – Rhodes piano, keyboards, violin, along with Powers, worked with producer Eddie Spear (Zach Bryan, Jesse Welles) and have shifted the band’s sound yet again. For House of Mirrors, All Them Witches have delivered the most straight-ahead rock record of their career while absorbing…
The “Paramount” in Joe Lovano’s new quartet can be interpreted as a statement of intent. “I feel like at this point I’m on the rise,” Joe says, seemingly unaware of the decades of experience and several dozens of leader-recordings under his belt. “We’ve arrived at this unique place with this quartet – It’s very special. It’s a new thing. And those cats, they play with a real global awareness.” The “cats” in question are guitarist Julian Lage, Asante Santi Debriano on bass and drummer Will Calhoun (otherwise known for his part in the American rock group Living Color) – all players who help shape a striking, adventurous new chapter in Joe Lovano’s expansive oeuvre on Paramount Quartet.
Reviewing the group’s show in London from days before the recording session…
This may be Willie Nelson’s 79th solo studio album, and his 156th in all, but despite such prodigious and prolific writing, the Red Headed Stranger is still a minimalist in his 93rd year. Case in point: Dream Chaser’s 10 tracks clock in at half an hour, and they’re each as astute, funny and affecting as ever.
Title song and album opener “Dream Chaser” lasoos Bobby Tomberlin into the very well-oiled Cannon-Nelson writing team, for a sweet bout of lossless reflection, while “Fly Away”, penned by Cannon and Bobby Whitlock, is a sweet, spare heart-breaker. The more intimate, gravelly vocal of “We’d Make a Good Movie”, with it’s sad, witty chorus – classic Willie – sits well with his guitar Trigger’s grace notes, and his punctuations and runs throughout the whole set are as deft and as…