TripleAkuma is the third in a series of essential live documents from Merzbow.
The stage and the studio are not the same place, and Merzbow has an acute understanding of this juxtaposition. Whilst the sheer density of the music might be maintained across both spheres, the live experience of Merzbow is truly something that exists as profoundly physical and moreover, overtly performative.
Merzbow’s live methodologies draw not just from a saturation of frequency at all levels, but a recognition of how frequency can be used to affect the body. Working at the extremes of both low and high sonic energies, he creates a situation within which the fullness of the body can be tested; the aural body, that of our ears…
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Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood and The Rajasthan Express release their new album Ranjha through World Circuit/BMG. Produced by Sam Petts-Davies and recorded at Greenwood’s Oxfordshire studio, ‘Ranjha’ is the follow-up to 2015’s widely acclaimed album ‘Junun’.
In 2015, Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and their Indian collaborators, The Rajasthan Express, released Junun, accompanied by Paul Thomas Anderson’s documentary of the same name. ‘Junun’ was widely acclaimed both for what it was – a joyous synthesis of the sensibilities of several wildly divergent musical backgrounds – and for what it wasn’t. All concerned were determined that ‘Junun’ would be neither solemn experimental exercise nor polite cultural exchange.
Gabriella Smart introduces listeners to the term Parasymbiosis, asking if two separate organisms can share a living space. The parable can be applied to many situations, but Smart concentrates on the earth and the universe as a whole
…Parasymbiosis was recorded live at 2024’s Music Meeting Festival in The Netherlands. Smart plays the Electric Cristal (which creates amplified sounds through manipulation of glass rods), and is joined by Kasper Toeplitz on bass and electronics, and Didier Casamitjana on percussion and electronics. Toeplitz and Casamitjana’s contributions do not become obvious until later in the album (gritty and menacing, no less), though they may have been present throughout.
Across eight numbered and self-titled tracks…
Anastasia Kristensen has spent the better part of the last decade sidestepping expectation. Whether releasing via Houndstooth, Turbo or Warp’s Arcola imprint, the Copenhagen-based producer has consistently pushed against the functional rigidity of club music, favouring something more playful, unstable and deeply personal. Even in large-scale festival settings, her DJ sets rarely settle into predictable patterns, instead veering between moods and textures with a kind of gleeful unpredictability. That same instinct animates Bestiarium Sombre, a debut album that feels less like a conventional techno record and more like an invitation into an unruly parallel ecosystem.
Kristensen once described her ideal records as having “a face” – tracks with character,…
Josiah Leming, the man who goes by the stage moniker of Josiah and the Bonnevilles, has been honing his craft since a young age: he learnt to play the piano at eight and wrote his first song aged 13, but it was only with 2023’s Endurance that it felt like people started to sit up and take notice of him. That recognition led to a sold-out tour and his Grand Ole Opry debut in 2024, then came the signing to the prestigious Rounder Records, which is releasing his follow-up album, As Is. There was no shortage of material for the album, as the final 10 tracks were honed down from almost 100 that he had written with impressive collaborators like Natalie Hemby and Joel Little.
“I’ve been staying out / And off the internet / Working on the bike / I ain’t finished yet,”…
“Wired for anger, wired for deceit.” Screams of these lines close the title track of Wired, Basement’s fifth studio album. The song is a statement of intent: Basement are as emotionally-driven as they’ve ever been, and they return unshakeable and demanding to be heard.
Wired marks their emergence after an eight-year hiatus from new music. Three years after their support for 2018’s Beside Myself, Basement – vocalist Andrew Fisher, guitarists Alex Henery and Ronan Crix, bassist Duncan Stewart and drummer James Fisher — returned with an appearance at Outbreak Festival in 2022, and various tours and another Outbreak slot to follow. ‘WIRED’, in turn, hears the band’s post-hardcore, emo and grunge elements bottled into one…
Gun Outfit is a long running lifestyle band out of Los Angeles, California. For two decades the group has been making unclassifiable underground rock music that strives to remain humble and true to life. This has been documented on several releases through fine imprints like Post Present Medium, Paradise of Bachelors and Joyful Noise. Beginning as a crude duo, they have solidified into a crack five piece; a post punk band playing experimental folk rock with a local flavour. The sound has grown mellower, more expansive and more intimate in response to the schizophrenic environment in which we live.
Process and Reality is their most ambitious record yet. Self-recorded over the course of a month on a ranch in Pine Flat…
Alive & Alright a double live album recorded in front of a small gathering of about 50 fans on February 4th, 2000, performing all of the Between The Bridges album plus one b-side,” also filmed for video in an attempt to find a workaround to the emerging problem of music videos costing more than the budget for entire albums, thinking Canada’s music video channel might possibly play various live recordings in lieu of music videos, which they did not.
When attempting to provide an overview of a big story – one that encompasses both the myriad achievements of its subjects over a span of several decades and the impacts of those achievements – you can take two routes. There’s the “just the facts” approach, where you list off…
On her fifth studio album, Wild, Ashley McBryde continues to navigate the ragged edges that shape an individual’s life. In these hard-charging songs that blend raucous rock and searing country, she peers into the fissures of the human heart as they reveal the jagged darkness of despair and trauma, even as those tears contain within themselves the faint light of redemption and hope.
The album opens with the prowling, growling rocker “Rattlesnake Preacher,” full of screaming lead guitars, squealing fiddles, and McBryde’s soaring vocals. The song captures perfectly the defiant tone of a fundamentalist preacher whose message about the love of Jesus is cloaked in a narrow hellfire and damnation vision of salvation. The echoing psychedelic…
After six albums dedicated to refracting the music of Ahmed Abdul‑Malik, أحمد [Ahmed] – the quartet of Pat Thomas, Seymour Wright, Joel Grip and Antonin Gerbal – turn their attention to Abdul‑Malik’s one‑time bandleader, Thelonious Monk, in their ongoing search for “future music.” Monk and Abdul‑Malik are more than historical neighbors. In the late 1950s, Abdul‑Malik worked in Monk’s quartets, appearing on Thelonious in Action and Misterioso (both 1958) and on the long‑buried Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. Beneath the surface of those recordings lies a shared project: a radical engagement with time that refuses a simple linear trajectory, offering instead sites of synthesis and rupture where fragments…
Somewhere along the lines of their history, MUNA started calling themselves “the best band in the world.” Not the best synthpop band, or the past queer band, but the best, period. It’s a tall order for three people who make excellent pop music, a genre that, for most people, doesn’t hold a lot of weight or seriousness. But MUNA makes pop music, and even though they’ve done it for almost a decade now, it was surprising to hear the synths and pulsing beat that kicks off Dancing On The Wall, the title track for their ecstatic, buoyant fourth album, as if they’d grow up and get real. But of course MUNA would still make pop music. What else would they do?
Atop one of their stickiest melodies, MUNA-Katie Gavin, Naomi McPherson…
Along with fellow wonderkid Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd (KWS) was once branded the heir to heroic, blues revivalist Stevie Ray Vaughan (SRV). Even if you dismiss the triple-pronged, abbreviated initials that both guitarists are best known for, shrugging off the dogged critics and straight-up ‘SRV-clone’ accusations can’t have been easy in those early days for such a prodigious talent.
Bringing in the entire Double Trouble band for his second LP Trouble Is… (1997) probably didn’t help matters either, but it’s not every day you’re a self-taught, Fender Strat-wielding teenager. But just like the gusty first few lines that buccaneer this record, Kenny defiantly surfaced ‘up from the ashes, out of the flames’ and now stands as one of the most respected and electrifying guitarists on the planet.
Fresh off the success of 2025’s Boleros Psicodélicos II, another star-studded collection of romantic ballads, Adrian Quesada formed Trio Asesino and took a slightly different path on their self-titled debut album. With his guitar providing the melodies, Jay Mumford’s drums the backbone, and Joshy Soul’s array of keyboards the texture, the set touches on hip hop, funk, jazz, laid back cumbia, and as it snakes and shimmies through eleven songs that won’t change anyone’s life but they will make it just a bit cooler for a while. The feeling is similar to his 2022 album Jaguar Sound, but where that felt like a producer’s album, this showcases Quesada the guitarist and prioritizes capturing a live band in a room. To that end, the sound is both punchy and relaxed, the group…
When Jimmie Vaughan and Kim Wilson teamed up to form The Fabulous Thunderbirds in 1974, they created a band that helped shape the soul of modern Texas blues. Vaughan’s history with that storied band has finally been chronicled in The Jimmie Vaughan Years: Complete Studio Recordings 1978-1989, a comprehensive four-CD box set available December 11th, 2025 via The Last Music Co.
The Jimmie Vaughan Years captures Grammy-winning Vaughan’s blues journey after he cut his teeth in Austin’s late-60s blues scene, including an early recording produced by legendary American songwriter Doc Pomus and Joel Dorn. The result is a stunning collection, not only of Vaughan’s music, but also The Fabulous Thunderbirds…
The Loft’s return to the recording studio to make their long-awaited full-length debut album – 2025’s Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same – was such a delightful treat that it feels greedy to expect anything more from the group. It would have been fine if they had packed up their gear, shaken hands warmly, and moved on to other projects secure in the knowledge that not only had they not besmirched their legend, they had added to it. Things didn’t quite work out that way and the band decided they had so much fun making Everything Changes that it seemed like a good idea to tempt fate and give it a second go. The more cynical among their fans and followers might have felt that it was a risky move, that hoping for lightning to strike again was folly.
Social Distortion has returned with their first album in 15 years. born to kill is led by a pair of singles and follows 2011’s Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, as the Orange County punk rock legends mark a significant comeback on their eighth studio album.
The album opens with the title track. Born To Kill is an anthem of an opener, designed to be listened to loud. Mike Ness sounds absolutely unstoppable as his no-frills but all-powerful guitar tone rips through the soundscape of the driving title track, supporting his signature, gravelly voice that still carries a venomous bite. “Born To Kill,” like most of what is to follow, stays true to what you would expect from Social Distortion; this is punk very much influenced by classic rockabilly.
Let X=X triple-LP / double-CD set was recorded live during a 2023 tour by Anderson and the jazz band Sexmob-Steven Bernstein on brass, Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion, Douglas Wieselman on winds and guitar, Briggan Krauss on saxophone and guitar, and Tony Scherr on bass. Its cover and interior packaging feature paintings by Anderson. The album features 23 songs, including many favorites from throughout Anderson’s career, performed in new arrangements-plus one by Lou Reed and Metallica, “Junior Dad.”
The New York Times said Anderson and Sexmob’s concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) “wasn’t a historical recreation of past recordings; Sexmob’s sound is a beefier one than on Anderson’s albums.
After the Numero Group released a comprehensive look at the American Analog Set’s 1990’s recordings on the New Drifters box set, it only makes sense that they would do the same for the combo’s 2000’s output. Destroy Destroy Destroy is another beautifully packaged retrospective that gathers up the three albums they released during the decade — 2001’s Know By Heart, 2003’s Promise of Love, and 2005’s Set Free — plus two discs of stray singles, EPs, compilation appearances, and rare tracks.
The set captures the evolution of the group from a more abstract musical group dedicated to repetition, space, and subtlety to one that utilized that same basic template while applying it to songs that were more narrative and concise.
Whitehorse have returned to their folk-rock roots on their latest full-length record, All I Want Is All of It. The Canadian husband-and-wife team of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClellan recorded the album in a 19th-century farmhouse to capture the mood of past spirits in the ancient place.
Of course, only a New World denizen would consider a place built 200 years ago old. Its semi-rural setting on the other side of the tracks offers a haunting aural landscape. The musicians said the location functioned as the creative inspiration behind the new disc.
Whitehorse‘s 11 songs are purposely experimental and vary in style and tone. They range from the primitive rawness of a demo (“Lighthouse”) recorded on McClellan’s iPhone…
There are very few pressures in life as intense as a debut album. Sure, art isn’t the end-all be-all of life, but when that life revolves around an artistic output, your first introduction into the recorded world could make or break any promise shown for an artist. This sentiment, though, has been explored in countless ways, and most music fans are vaguely aware of the mounting pressure on an artist as the label-approved release date draws nearer. A debut is a chance to prove yourself, in the case of Brother Wallace, though, very little is left to prove. The natural gospel prodigy has been in music since he was a child, taking the lessons learned in his church choir and using them to lead him to performances with legends like Kirk Franklin and to getting up on stage at…