The Boys of Dungeon Lane is not only the 18th solo album to be released by Paul McCartney; it is a collection of rare and revealing glimpses into memories never-before shared along with some newly inspired love songs, from one of the most culturally significant figures of our time.
Across the album, Paul turns the lens inward, revisiting the formative years that shaped not only his life, but the very foundations of modern popular culture. In a career defined by timeless storytelling and unforgettable characters, Paul now tells the most personal story of all, his own. The album is his most introspective album to date, taking the listener back to where it all began. These extraordinary new songs find Paul writing with rare openness about his childhood…
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Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me, the near-title homage on Kurt Vile’s album-length valentine to his hometown, is a high time no matter where you’re from: a deliciously hazy twist on Todd Rundgren’s white-soul futurism with pillowy synthesizer, church-bell treble guitar and heartbeat drumming in a sultry-ballad stride that suggests Billy Paul’s 1972 cheatin’ hit ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’ with the Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker on that session. At times, Vile sounds like he’s singing in dialect, crooning about a city waterway, the Schuylkill River (“Always hard to spell” and “polluted as hell”), with the marbled articulation of Murmur-era Michael Stipe.
But the greater effect, across the whole record, is universal in trance and gratitude.
The day Robert Pollard stops making music is the day Hell freezes over. The Guided By Voices singer and songwriter has been at it for over four decades now, and his pace hasn’t slowed — if anything, it’s picked up. More impressive than even that, though, is just how consistent the beloved rock band has been throughout the years. They have a formula and, goddamn, have they perfected it. But that doesn’t mean they’re not willing to explore. Take Crawlspace of the Pantheon, the Dayton group’s 44th album (give or take; the exact count seems to depend on who you ask): compared to other recent entries into Pollard’s vast discography, Crawlspace is considerably more lyrical, more intent on content — there’s a strange thread of semi-autobiography running through it, pulled both…
Originally released on vinyl for Record Store Day in April 2025, the release in other formats over a month later clarifies how, in more ways than one, Neil Young’s live album with the Chrome Hearts is a mirror image of last year’s studio album with that band. Whereas Talkin’ to the Trees was full of the former Buffalo Springfielder’s observations about life as he sees it right now, from an aged perspective, As Time Explodes finds him rendering more broad, yet focused observations on our contemporary times in the context of his own history.
To that end, the album begins with “Daddy Went Walkin’,” a winsome number taken from the 2000 album Silver & Gold. Ostensibly about the passing of Young’s late father Scott – and…
Combining different genres through your music has become something of a norm these days, the effectiveness and quality relying mainly on two artistic variables – the level of the artist’s knowledge and understanding of the genres they are combining and the ability (including technique) and inventiveness to make such a combination work. The above might sound a bit dry and scientific, but then, it all comes down to the results, and Norwegian pianist, organist and composer Ruth Viggen makes it all art turn into music as art on her second solo album Open Plains.
Throughout the seven piano/ rhythm section compositions, Viggens shows all her knowledge of everything from jazz and classical music to prog and post-rock and at an inventive…
Trying to make instrumental albums that, as an entity, do not stick to a specific genre, but at the same time have their own identity and character, is not something a faint-hearted artist should attempt to do. More simply put, such albums are an excellent recipe for a disaster because you have to have a full grasp of what you are attempting to do, as well as being truly knowledgeable about the genres you are trying to mix and match in such an attempt.
That is exactly what NYC artist Jason Vitelli is trying to do on amply titled 2. No Wave Gaze, a second in his series of thematic albums (his fifth overall) that started with 1. Ambient Corridors is supposed to continue with an album focused on classical pieces and will be recorded live.
The Suncharms are a band with an interesting history. They date back to 1989, and called it a day in 1993, but not before releasing a couple of EPs. In 2015 they reformed, and since then have released two albums.
…their third album Darkening Sky unfolds as a luminous exploration of reflection and sonic patience, a record that balances emotional immediacy with the quiet assurance of seasoned musicianship. From the opening track, “Midnight Train,” the band establishes a world of expansive indie-pop textures, Matt Neale’s guitar shimmering over a subtle rhythm section, while the trumpet’s late entrance adds a warm, unexpected depth that hints at the album’s willingness to bend conventional forms. The song evokes…
The songs simply had to come out. Annie Taylor recorded their third album between the band’s U.S. tour and a run of European shows. In keeping with its title, Out of Scale’s songs are characterized by intense emotions, chaotic relationships and big dreams.
At times we can hear singer Gini Jungi’s suffering. All the hurt and struggles. Sometimes her voice floats longingly over Tobias Arn‘s guitar riffs. But when Michael Mutter‘s bass and Daniel Bachmann’s drums kick in, it’s clear that these new songs will get the crowd moving.
The band met in a bar in the Swiss mountains after a snowboarding session. Fast forward a few years and they are now well known for their live shows, having already played SXSW…
On their new duo album, Michael Wollny and Emile Parisien invite listeners into a conversation shaped by trust, intuition and complete artistic freedom. Recorded in concert as part of the Bodenseefestival 2025, the album captures two singular musical voices meeting in a space where nothing is controlled, nothing is predetermined, and every gesture becomes a response to the moment.
“Here, you are invited to witness one of our many conversations with Michael Wollny, in complete freedom and spontaneity. I feel the rare privilege of sharing this space with such an exceptional musician – someone with a profound sense of listening, where everything becomes possible. It is an honor to have met him and to be able to express myself in this way by his side…
Released at a pivotal moment in their career, Tensongs remains one of the most fascinating chapters in the catalog of Hubert Kah. Arriving in 1986, the album marked the band’s full transition into English-language material, an ambitious attempt to carry the success of the Neue Deutsche Welle movement into the broader international synthpop market. Forty years later, Tensongs stands not only as a time capsule of mid-80s electronic pop, but also as an underrated artistic reinvention.
Produced by Michael Cretu and Armand Volker, the album wrapped Hubert Kah’s melancholic songwriting in sleek, atmospheric production that clearly aimed beyond Germany’s borders. The influence of sophisticated…
The tapes started arriving on April 7, VHS cassettes stickered with the Boards of Canada hexagon sun logo, sent from Warp Records to the homes of various people who’d previously purchased something from their Bleep.com retail site. The purposefully degraded footage contained therein featured various mysterious images including a Greek Christogram and a distorted image of US TV evangelists Jim & Tammy Faye Bakker, while the audio featured a reversed snippet of The Elegants’ 1958 doo-wop single ‘Little Star’ (taken from 2019 Boards Of Canada mixtape, Societas x) plus audio from an advert for the Moody Bible Institute’s long-defunct monthly magazine (“all for only $2.95!”) And the promise of a “free hexagonal flexi-disc…six voices and music to guide your…
U.e.’s Other Girl is a singer-songwriter album that strips away a lot of the singing and even more of the songwriting. With the words buried behind layers of interference, the music itself is left to do most of the emotional legwork, and while the palette is the sort traditionally associated with “intimacy” in Western pop music — acoustic guitars, piano chords you can feel in your chest — there’s no readymade narrative to map onto these 10 songs. You can either let this obscure approach bewilder you or treat it as a blank slate on which you can map your own feelings. From this angle, the spaces between the chords can fill with your own thoughts, and the distance between these recordings and your ears can stand in for the distance from whatever you…
Think about music, all the music that is available to hear, all the music that’s been made, especially in the past 80 years of popular styles. Where does it all go in your mind? How do you get from one thing to another?
These questions matter for this album, because Haruhi Kobayashi started off in the public eye as a J-Pop singer, putting out the 2017 album Inside Out on Sony. To be frank, it’s an undistinguished derivation of American soul and soft rock, the kind of imitation of styles that young musicians work through to find their own voice.
Well, Kobayashi has found that voice, and it’s not just orders of magnitude distant from the earlier album, but a remarkable journey from the universe of pop music into the kind of…
Known in the fine art sphere as wildly praised disruptive painter and Degenerative Artist ‘Shardcore’, Eric Drass is also an in-demand (if acerbic) global speaker on AI, deep fake, and machine learning tools in art (he’s showed up as a guest expert at the BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and even on telly explaining deep fakes to Ian Hislop). DRASS is his first solo music project. On the Hill was gestated through 2025 in Eric’s secret lair in Sussex (genuinely accessed via a hidden doorway in a bookshelf).
…With his rhino-horn quiff and black varnished nails, a classy dresser, he cuts a ubiquitous silhouette around town, at our juicier tech gatherings, or propping up the bar at a certain kind of indie gig. Furious and funny, debut…
London Jazz Classics originally came out in 1993 – the first album ever to be released on Soul Jazz Records. The album brought together rare and obscure dance tracks in a unique mix of jazz dance and fusion, funk, Brazilian and Latin grooves.
The album was ironically titled – none of the music was from London, none of the music was traditionally classified as jazz, and all of the tracks were at the time practically unknown to most people. Instead, these were tracks that were filling dancefloors in a nascent jazz dance scene in London being created by a small group of DJs – Paul Murphy, Gilles Peterson, Sylvester, Patrick Forge and a few others.
As demand for these rare groove jazz tracks grew, previously unknown records…
Dervish is a celebrated Irish traditional folk band from County Sligo, formed in 1989. Fronted by charismatic singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Jordan, the ensemble also includes accomplished players on flute, fiddle, guitar, accordion, and mandola, drawing deeply on the rich musical heritage of northwest Ireland. For more than three decades, they’ve become one of the most respected names in Irish music, known for their dynamic live performances and a repertoire that weaves traditional Irish music with songs by contemporary Irish songwriters. The BBC, which presented the band with a lifetime achievement award in 2019, has described Dervish as “an icon of Irish music,” and the group has represented Ireland on stages from Glastonbury to Rock in Rio.
Few bands have shaped the landscape of rock music quite like The Who. With a legacy spanning nearly six decades, their sound, spirit, and spectacle have resonated across generations, cementing their place as pioneers of classic rock. From their role in the mod movement to groundbreaking albums such as My Generation (1965), Tommy (1969), and Who’s Next (1971), The Who helped define the genre while pushing its boundaries. Their music was instrumental in the development of hard and heavy rock, they famously entered the Guinness Book of Records as the loudest live act, and their sensational stage shows—complete with the ritual smashing of instruments—remain iconic. Often hailed as forefathers of punk rock, their influence…
Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts restores a night that sat in legend for decades to its full, disorienting glory. On 3 November 1969, Cecil Taylor brought his working Unit to the 8th Paris Jazz Festival and, instead of offering a polite festival sampler, delivered two full sets of unbroken invention at Salle Pleyel.
Here, for the first time, those performances are heard complete: no editorial fades, no selective excerpts, just the sustained pressure and turn‑on‑a‑dime responsiveness of a band at absolute peak. The lineup alone signals the gravity of the event – Taylor on piano, Sam Rivers on tenor and soprano saxophones and flute, Jimmy Lyons on alto saxophone, Andrew Cyrille on drums – but it’s the way they inhabit the room…