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Mountain of Youth – the moniker for Hunter Morris’ latest project – mines a slew of classic influences from ‘90s lo-fi rock to folk and Americana on his debut, making for a mix that manages to sound musically nostalgic but with enough of a contemporary feel that it’s not wasting time wallowing in the past.
That doesn’t necessarily pertain to the characters that populate Nowhere, NW, though. “Atomic Days” opens the album with whistling and a steady 4/4 drum beat, before Morris jumps in with lyrics about an aging couple cycling through thoughts of “what if” looking at where they are in life right now. And while the song could just as easily have been a ballad, Morris’ decision to opt for a mid-tempo rock vibe creates a far more…

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“I got a feelin’ this party’s just about to begin” sings Americana singer/songwriter Ryan Bingham in his world-weary, gravelly voice as a fiddle saws behind him chased by rocking piano chords. And on this, his sixth studio platter, there’s plenty of raw, tough, country rocking to back up that exhortation. Bingham emerged from semi-obscurity to practically household name status when in 2009 he provided the Oscar, Golden Globe and Critic’s Choice winning “The Weary Kind” tune for the critically acclaimed film Crazy Heart. That trifecta is pretty far in the rearview mirror these days, but Bingham never stopped working, delivering gutsy, unvarnished albums (now on his own Axster/Bingham imprint) overflowing with soulful sounds mixed into country, folk, rock…

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Mia JoyMia Rocha writes music for herself. Releasing songs under the moniker Mia Joy, the Chicago-based artist is the daughter of a poet and a musician, and since a young age, she was encouraged by her father to channel her feelings into music as a way of understanding them.
Taking the advice, she wrote her debut ethereal dream-pop album Spirit Tamer over the course of several emotionally tumultuous years. It captures Rocha’s inner loneliness, cultivates healing, and creates a safe space where she can work through her darkest moments.
“The beginning of writing this album was an incredibly low, dark period and it was also a period where things were just pouring out of me,” she said in a recent episode of Jessica Risker’s…

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Flying Mojito Bros released The Swamp Fox, an album featuring their remixes of recordings by late singer-songwriter Tony Joe White. Tony Joe White, known as The Swamp Fox, was a native of Louisiana and wrote such noteworthy songs as “Polk Salad Annie,” “Undercover Agent for the Blues” and “Rainy Night in Georgia.” White died in 2018 at age 75. White’s son and official archivist, Jody White, contacted Flying Mojito Bros (London-based duo Ben Chetwood and Jack Sellen) to collaborate with them on the remix album.
…”During the late 70’s and early 80’s, Tony Joe was blending country, swamp and disco into his own recipe of funky dance music,” Jody White explains. “With some help from the Flying Mojito Bros, these songs are about to see the light…

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Jethro Tull released their debut album in 1968, titled This Was. Shortly after the release, guitarist Mick Abrahams left the band to embark on his own solo career and play a more blues-based rock. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull was leaning towards incorporating more folk and rock in their sound, leaving behind the blues influenced rock of their debut album. Although there were no ‘Mick Abrahams is God’ statements spray painted around London, he has always been recognized as one of the great guitarists of that era. He formed the band Blodwyn Pig, and they released their debut album in 1969. By 1970, following their second album, Blodwyn Pig had run its course and basically split. It is worth noting that both albums made the U.K. top 10 album charts and were…

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There’s a reason Greg Lake deemed Trilogy “such an accurate record” when looking back at it decades later. Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s third studio album teems with exacting arrangements, copious overdubs, and multi-hued colors that showcase the band’s willingness to experiment and desire to put everything in its proper place without becoming too self-serious. Expanding by distilling the ferocious power of its debut and epic leanings of the preceding Tarkus into a more accessible whole, Trilogy stands as the most representative example of the ensemble’s trademark styles.
Mastered at MoFi’s California studio and housed in a mini-LP-type gatefold sleeve, Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of Trilogy presents the gold-certified effort in audiophile sound.

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Musicians who become parents sometimes feel compelled to write songs about it. But really, what is there to say? Every parenthood experience is unique, and also very much the same, and probably has been for something like three hundred thousand years since humans evolved. All the wonder or magic inherent in the process is deeply personal, and therefore dreary as hell when someone else sings about it. That’s a grinchy perspective, no question, but Shakey Graves — a.k.a. Alejandro Rose-Garcia — does little to change it on his latest, Fondness, etc..
The album is said to reflect the new contours of Rose-Garcia’s life with his wife and young daughter, who was born in 2024. That means these songs are in many ways about…

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I’m Kingfisher is the alter ego of Swedish singer-songwriter Thomas Jonsson. Give Up Together is his sixth album under that guise and comes three years after his last release, Glue, which was far less structured and had a jazzier, looser feel to it.
It opens with the lead single ‘Years of Depression’, which is an emotional entry point and undoubtedly sets the tone for the tracks to come. It certainly has a heavier tone than his earlier work, but it still has that slow, thoughtful application that signifies Jonsson’s work. His writing is both deep and reflective, and in many ways can be seen as almost Leonard Cohen-like in its imagery.
“Here I am. White as f**k and privileged, but also an open wound. I go to the bathhouse to enjoy silence, with naked men with no bodies.

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“What strikes me again, even now, is that rock from the late ’60s through the early ’70s remains the most compelling – whether Western or Japanese. In the mid-1960s, British groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones swept across the globe, while in the United States Bob Dylan famously swapped his folk guitar for an electric one, igniting the folk-rock movement. From the surge of new energy among young people in Britain and America – entwined with hippie culture, drugs, and the radical momentum of the anti-Vietnam War movement – an extraordinary body of rock music emerged, ushering in what would become the golden age of rock in the 1970s. In Japan, from around 1968, record companies began grouping these sounds under the label “New Rock”…

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The dominant theme of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s 2023-2024 concerts was mortality, with key songs such as “Ghosts,” “Last Man Standing” and “I’ll See You in My Dreams” tackling the topic head-on. With their European Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, last year, though, politics started to play a greater role. And their current Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour is even more political. And more urgent.
“We never planned this tour, but we came out because I needed to feel your hope, your strength, and I needed to hear your voices,” Springsteen, 76, said near the end of his sold-out April 20 concert at The Prudential Center in Newark. “My wish is that we brought some hope and some strength for you tonight.”

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Alto saxophonist and flutist Alan Braufman first emerged as a singular voice in New York’s 1970s loft-jazz scene with his 1975 debut Valley of Search, a record that would later be recognized as a landmark of spiritual and free jazz. After decades outside the spotlight, Braufman returned with a new wave of acclaim, releasing two highly regarded albums in 2020 and 2024 that reestablished him as both an essential elder and a vital contemporary presence-long described as “a legend in free music” (Gilles Peterson / BBC).
Recorded in a single day in the fall of 2025, Anthem for Peace is a fully new studio album that captures Braufman in the present tense. Leading a quartet with vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Chad Taylor…

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Sixteen killer 70s reggae funk and soul cuts from the likes of John Holt, Lee Perry, Cornel Campbell, The Cimarons , The Chosen Few and more featuring superb reggae takes on songs by artists including The Jackson 5, William DeVaughn, Diana Ross and The Supremes, War, The Temptations, Roberta Flack, The Stylistics and others!
Well-documented is the influence of American black music on Jamaican styles of the 1960s – from the birth of ska music, when The Skatalites ska-ified the jump-up southern USA rhythm and blues music of Rosco Gordon, Louis Jordan and Fats Domino, through to the creation of rocksteady when Jamaican artists like The Techniques, The Paragons, Alton Ellis and The Melodians turned to the slower rhythms…

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For Mind Abandon, Ital Tek incorporated more live instrumentation into the creation process, rather than primarily composing on a computer. The tracks are often based on guitars and even processed vocals, as well as live percussion and other instruments played by hand. The album still unmistakably sounds electronic, but it has a human touch. Ten years on from 2016’s Hollowed, Ital Tek has firmly established a cinematic style that has almost nothing to do with the dubstep, IDM, and juke hybrids he used to produce, even if his newer work is still informed by the more beat-forward direction of his earlier releases.
Opener “The Ice Is Thin” is a sparkling inferno with melancholy bass, and “A Hidden Path” almost sounds like a dark version of new…

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Indie singer/songwriter Spencer Krug released his latest solo album, Same Fangs. Though best known for his string of formative records with Wolf Parade, Krug has also stayed busy with other projects, releasing a prolific run of albums with Sunset Rubdown and Moonface, in addition to his solo albums. Fans last heard from Krug with his latest Sunset Rubdown album, 2024’s Always Happy to Explode, which followed soon after his last solo album, I Just Drew This Knife, in 2023.
Krug returned earlier this year amidst an unexpected cultural resurgence of his Wolf Parade track, “I’ll Believe in Anything,” thanks to a triumphant needle drop moment in Heated Rivalry. However, rather than leaning into chaotic indie rock highs, the songs on Same Fangs…

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Primitive Ring is a hard rock power trio, forged in biker rock grime, heavy metal swagger, psychedelic flakes, and bad attitude. Their debut album is reductively self-titled and their sound is similarly free from frills and niceties. Guitarist Charles Moothart made his bones in the Ty Segall universe and much of his musical DNA has made the trip, which makes for an album that would slot in nicely with his work. Bassist Bert Hoover and drummer Jon Modaff are also familiar with the kind of Blue Cheer-meets mustachioed garage rockers vibe and the trio lock together in greasy precision throughout the record. most of the tracks have all the grace of a motorcycle doing donuts on the lawn outside a high school on the first day of summer. Pounding the hooks into…

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As founding member and principal songwriter of The Pineapple Thief, Bruce Soord has spent the last decade steadily refining a voice that balances emotional directness with musical restraint. Ghosts In The Park, his latest solo album, is his most personal and unguarded work to date: a record shaped by loss, memory, and the quiet spaces that reveal themselves when life continues to move while everything else appears to stop.
Written over a two-year period while Soord was touring extensively with The Pineapple Thief, the album emerged in hotel rooms, unfamiliar cities, and moments of enforced solitude. Against this backdrop, Soord was navigating the drawn-out decline and eventual death of his father, alongside the continued progression…

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49 Winchester the six-piece outfit from southwest Virginia release Change of Plans. The record features 10 tracks, nine of which were written by Gibson, the band’s frontman and lead vocalist. The title is apt for a band that, were it not for the blend of folk, soul, and country that define 49 Winchester, would be unrecognizable from the group that recorded Leavin’ This Holler.
“Each record we’ve made has been a distinct chapter in our life,” Gibson tells Rolling Stone. “I’ve felt it kind of level up, up, and up. I think that this jump is more drastic than it has ever been from album to album. The big, overarching theme of this record is how much our lives have changed since we started this band. We’ve got families. We’re getting married.

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Critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and instrumentalist, Patrick Grossi, widely known as Active Child, released his new self-titled album, on Sony Music Masterworks. Co-produced with Alex Goose (Kali Uchis, Childish Gambino, Vince Staples), the album is Active Child’s most personal and introspective work yet, marked by a candid exploration of adulthood and fatherhood. A reflective portrait of his own journey, Grossi navigates the space between creative devotion and familial responsibility, exploring how love and quiet self-protection shape a life no longer driven by youthful idealism.
“Pursuing art feels less romantic and more chaotic as I age,” Active Child notes. “It demands a selfish, often solitary lifestyle…

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