Barely a month after Brooklyn noise-rockers Parts & Labor made their triumphant return with Set of All Sets, their first album in 15 years, Dan Friel‘s other band, power trio Upper Wilds, continued their planetary series with Mercury. For a group whose music has always been inspired by space and the cosmos since the beginning, this is easily their most human work to date, with lyrics focusing on death and mortality. Skin cancer began to develop on Friel’s face as the group started working on the album, and though the cancer’s removal was easy and painless, the mere presence of something potentially life-threatening had a major impact on him and put a lot of things in perspective, from issues like climate change and capitalism to cemeteries and the afterlife.
Tag Archive: Thrill Jockey
In early 2025, experimental trio Black Duck went on a tour of Spain with their Thrill Jockey labelmate, the Copenhagen-based singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Elena Setién. The two acts found common ground through improvisation, and developed a nightly habit of sitting in on each other’s sets. Once the tour wrapped, they decided to continue their collaboration in the studio and met up with Chicago engineer Nick Broste a few months later.
Although its three members — Douglas McCombs (Tortoise, Eleventh Dream Day), Bill MacKay (Ryley Walker, Nathan Bowles), and Charles Rumback (Colorist) — combine decades of experience within the Midwestern indie, jazz, and folk worlds, this joint effort with Setién is only their…
Peals — the Baltimore duo of William Cashion (Future Islands) and Bruce Willen (Double Dagger) — return with twin releases via Thrill Jockey: The Compound 76 and Le Pantoum 46.
Both albums document live performances in artist-run rooms separated by three years and a continent. Le Pantoum 46 was recorded in 2013 at Le Pantoum, a long-running DIY space in Quebec City partly run by friend of the band Jean-Michel Letendre Veilleux, during a North American tour with Small Sur that followed Peals’ debut Walking Field. Andy Abelow, then of Small Sur, joined the duo on that tour and plays saxophone on Blue Elvis and Floating Leaf — both Walking Field originals — beginning a collaboration that would continue on subsequent Peals records.
Cloud Machines is the extraordinary debut collaboration between M.C. Schmidt of legendary electronic duo Matmos and John Berndt, the Baltimore avant-garde institution and band leader behind High Zero Festival, the Red Room collective, Geodesic Gnome, and radical sonic concepts like Spectral Relay (a bespoke signal processing architecture) and Relabi (a conceptual genre defined by a Rorschach-blot pulse). After more than one hundred combined years of this pair pushing the boundaries of what music can be and where it can come from, these two iconoclasts have delivered something genuinely unexpected: an oddly sweet electronic opus that’s as immediately engaging as it is a series of delicious puzzles. When two of experimental music’s most…
Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE recorded in grief or in hope at producer Seth Manchester’s Machines with Magnets studio, with touring bassist Liam Andrews contributing to the group’s recording sessions for the first time. The result is the most texturally detailed, sonically overwhelming BIG|BRAVE record to date. Nearly every moment is bristling with blown-out distortion, yet it’s shaped so that there’s enough space for all the elements to breathe instead of cancel each other out.
On opener “what may be the kindest way to leave,” waves of doom-laden noise set in, with Robin Wattie’s manipulated vocals floating in the center, and when the bass pierces through towards the end, the impact is felt deeply. Then, “a shape of shame” gently rocks back and…
While their instrumentation and aesthetic may evoke parts of Appalachia and the rural South, North Carolina’s Magic Tuber Stringband (MTS) are anything but a traditional folk group. Theirs is a different kind of rootedness, one indebted to the landscape they call home, but as attuned to its ecology and environmental contours as to its social history. Since making their label debut on Thrill Jockey in 2024, the duo of Courtney Werner (fiddle) and Evan Morgan (guitar/organ) has expanded to a trio, welcoming banjoist/bassist Mike DeVito into the band. There are no vocals, yet they manage to convey complex emotions through their strange, discordant music. Heavy Water, MTS’s second release for the label, is an emotional map of a place that was lost.
Americans are increasingly finding themselves stuck behind slamming doors separating them from other cultures and ideas. Guitarist Marisa Anderson’s efforts to counter our current sociopolitical paradigm are all about underlining the crucial, often ignored difference between un-American and anti-American. The latter defines a hostile outsider or inside agitator, but the former simply identifies whatever lies outside our national experience. And as this project makes clear, that’s something to be sought after.
In 1952, Folkways Records released quirky artistic polymath Harry Smith’s incalculably influential Anthology of American Folk Music. The collection’s rare folk, gospel, blues, and country recordings revealed to America…
On their self-titled album (and their first recordings for the Thrill Jockey label) North Carolina group Setting takes rustic acoustic sounds into deep space, sitting around a cosmic campfire and creating a group sound that’s naturalistically beautiful and mysterious. The trio of Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund work in both improvisation and composition with stringed instruments, synthesizers, and percussion, landing in a place that’s partially informed by traditional Appalachia, part droning fields of synthesis, and part meditative Krautrock repetition. All of these aspects of Setting’s sound are in play on the album’s opening track “Heard a Bubble.” The nearly nine-minute piece opens with a lonely banjo line, and is quickly joined…
The Horizon Spirals/The Horizon Viral brings together OOIOO and Lightning Bolt, both Thrill Jockey labelmates and longtime pillars of the experimental rock underground. The split LP arrived in April of 2026, soon after the two groups had played several West Coast dates together. The OOIOO side consists of two long tracks, both of which revisit the gamelan-inspired percussion arrangements of their 2014 album Gamel. “The Horizon” focuses on hypnotic percussive patterns and YoshimiO’s supernatural vocal abilities. The song changes to a faster rhythm halfway, elevating the mood with soaring trumpet and busy, locked-in percussion. “Gamel Be Sure to Spiral” revisits “Be Sure to Loop” from 1999’s Feather Float, adding gamelan percussion to…
Colleen’s music has long been praised for the way its reveals depth and beauty with almost imperceptible shifts. Her gift for building tiny melodies until they arrive somewhere profound remains intact on Libres antes del final, but the greatest shift is in Colleen’s attitude. On Le jour et la nuit du réel, she transformed the way light moves through a room over the course of a day into subtly gripping listening. Here, she pairs her brilliance at evoking and observing with dynamic action. After years of living near the Barcelona coast, Colleen confronted a long-standing phobia and resolved to swim in open water once again. With her trusty Moog Grandmother synth, she translates her battle between fear and freedom into pieces that are darker, and more propulsive,…
Following no floor, a remarkable instrumental collaboration with claire rousay that focused on pastoral electro-acoustic soundscapes, more eaze remained with Thrill Jockey for her vocal-based solo effort sentence structure in the country. The album’s lyrics, often delivered through Auto-Tune but occasionally left unaltered, explore intimate moments and frustrating situations, reflecting on jealousy, apathy, and the difficulties of trying to succeed as a musician.
Fragile vocals and bubbling, twinkling synthesizers adorn the patient opener “leave (again),” while ambient pop gem “bad friend” is propelled by a gently blipping pulse and softly crying steel guitar. Another of the record’s more accessible tunes, “the producer,” also contains…
The Patterns Lost to Air is Marielle V Jakobsons‘ first solo album in a decade, though she’s collaborated with guitarist Chuck Johnson in the duo Saariselka. The album was recorded in a studio she built in Oakland, California, and its sonic palette consists of violin, Fender Rhodes, and Moog Matriarch. It marks Jakobsons’ intentional shift from drone-based music to harmonic composition, utilizing her classical training. The release is a reflection on renewal and loss, informed by a long-term case of the COVID-19 virus. Jakobsons’ music has always sounded warm, immersive, and exquisite, but this is her richest, most melodic, and most sonically detailed work to date.
Opener “Warm Spring” is an inviting blend of rippling synths, chiming Rhodes keys,…
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,…
…Now 56 years old, Nobukazu Takemura’s first album in ten years knot of meanings is a natural (and more mature) extension from his early works like Child’s View (1994), Child and Magic (1997) and Funfair (1999). In knot of meanings, he evolves within and away from “tinkertoy electropop,” a genre he has pioneered and developed for the last three decades. While he has changed, Takemura still nonetheless marshals creative force through the memory of youth.
Over two decades ago, Dusted reviewed Takemura’s Sign and described Takemura’s style as a “sort of cartoonish hip-hop that your stuffed animals might listen to if you left the room, Toy Story style.” Of course, so much in the world has shifted since then, including Takemura.
A common theme through The Soft Pink Truth’s records of the 2020s is music’s ability to build sanctuaries. As the world’s got harsher, SPT’s albums have got lusher.
2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, recorded during the first Trump presidency, saw the project, led by Matmos’s Drew Daniel, blur propulsive deep house into velvety minimal composition. 2022’s Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?, made during pandemic lockdown, is a glimmering electro-orchestral record played by a ‘fourteen-piece virtual disco band’. Latest album Can Such Delightful Times Go On Forever? meanwhile, is a suite of largely drum-less chamber music played on harps, pianos, acoustic guitar and strings.
Uncut readers may already be familiar with Barry Walker through his association with Ripley Johnson, for whom he serves as pedal steel guitarist in Rose City Band. Or perhaps his collaborative work alongside Patrick McDermott as country-folk duo North Americans, or else heading up experimental trio Mouth Painter, whose broad palette encompasses acid country, weird exotica and the odd freakout.
In 2021, extended solo piece “Shoulda Zenith” (from the album of the same name) fetched up on Uncut’s Sounds of The New West: Ambient Americana CD, placing Walker in roughly the same territory as Steve Gunn, Andrew Tuttle and Luke Schneider. And it’s here where Paleo Sol, the latest in a series of inquisitive solo…