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Three years on from the last Hollow Hand album, Max Kinghorn-Mills delivers a fully harmonious union of folk and indie pop on Wish Road South, his best to date. On 2023’s Your Own Adventure, Kinghorn-Mills described the process of creating and recording as an archetype of the virtues of the DIY ethic: “About just doing everything yourself and not needing to rely on anyone. That’s the one thing I love about doing this: no one has any answers for you, you are your own boss, and it’s Your Own Adventure”.
On Wish Road South, the fourth Hollow Hand album, Kinghorn-Mills has clearly been invigorated by witnessing the creative powers of his peers, whilst collaborating with the likes of Aoife Nessa Frances, serving as the house…

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Led by songwriter Willem Smit, Amsterdam’s Personal Trainer established a versatile, visceral sound that draws from styles including introspective indie rock, piano pop, arty post-punk, Britpop, slacker rock, and more with their first two albums. For their third long-player, Smit and his band took a different approach to writing and recording, initially penning the songs on just an acoustic guitar, then later recording them live together in the studio, a first for the band. They titled the resulting 15-track album (12 songs and three short instrumentals) Human Assholes. Prior collaborator Casper van der Lans (the Homesick, Pip Blom) returned to produce.
The record opens with the horn fanfare “Marvin’s Curtain Up” before launching into…

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Guava Girl Summer is so 2025. The era of the “Chaotic Princess” is now. So reads the gospel according to Marci, whose rhinestone-crusted new album Mask Lady and Late Night Girl flicks through the glossy pages of power pop and soft rock with quips about getting baked at sunrise, chatting on the landline, falling on your knees, and making the devil cry. Co-written and produced with her TOPS bandmate David Carriere, Marta Cikojevic’s second LP reprises the disco-speckled all-or-nothingness of 2022’s eponymous debut, serving up a platter of glittery hooks and golden grooves styled with unashamedly retro trimmings.
Marci sounds like the name of the hot next-door neighbor in a John Candy film, but on this semi-autobiographical record, the Montreal…

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…Deluxe 2CD with additional 11 tracks.
God Bless the Band feels like an unexpected encounter with your younger self. Compiling tracks from across Courteeners’ career, the collection revisits a period when British indie was less a musical category than a social world, sticky floors, packed festivals, late trains home and the optimism of believing the next weekend might be the best one yet. The nostalgia here is not simply for the music, but for the atmosphere that surrounded it. That sense of time passing gives the collection its weight. Early favourites sit alongside later material, charting how Courteeners have gradually moved from the rawer energy of their beginnings towards something broader and more polished. “Modern Love” still has that…

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If there ever was a name ambient/drone artists fans hold dear to their hearts, then it would be long-standing duo that goes under the name of Windy & Carl.
The reasons for that is that the ambient/drone musical sphere has rarely had a band/artist (in this case a duo) that tries to make distinct connections to the natural world while investing a hefty dose of emotional content along the way.
Not with an official release since 2020 (Allegiance & Conviction), here the duo combine with another duo that go under the name of Optigan Conservatory, making the title of this collaborative album Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory a bit of a misnomer – the four musicians have been longtime friends. At the same time, ‘the meet’…

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Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, completed in 1987, and first published the following year. More monologue than story, it comes from a narrator on the edge between life and what lies beyond, which might be a vast wheatfield seen in black-and-white, or might be a swirl of stumbling memories. Beckett cherished music, in particular the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert. His writing is musical, in its meticulous phrasing, its use of repetition, and often its form. Stirrings Still is an example: a composition of interweavings and developments.
The music, created for this release by composer Trevor Bača, is no accompaniment but rather a parallel stream, heard in alternation with the words, reflecting and contemplating what they…

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Thirty-four years is a long time for a tape to sit in a drawer, but jazz history is littered with such delays, and Anthony Braxton’s discography in particular has always unspooled out of chronological order. Articulations, a duo session with guitarist James Emery recorded in Florence on June 19, 1992, finally surfaced this year on Emery’s own Bandcamp imprint, self-released and produced by Emery with Ed Petersen. The reasons behind the gap are not spelled out in the credits, and speculation serves no one — what matters is that the recording exists, and that it captures two formidable improvisers near a creative peak, as annotator Ted Panken notes in the release copy.
Emery’s connection to Braxton runs deep. Best known as a founding member of the String…

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…Recorded live at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill, Open or Close gathers compositions from all four members — saxophonist Geof Bradfield, clarinetist Ben Goldberg, pianist Myra Melford, and drummer Dana Hall — who, having crossed musical paths before in several contexts, make a remarkable debut as a group here.
Ornette Coleman’s “Open or Close” is the stunning opener, showcasing a memorable eight-note riff that gradually evolves into staccato activity resembling rhythmic shocks of vibrant color. Initially, Melford constructs melodies around that riff, with Hall’s percussive driving force as her sole support. Goldberg’s sinewy clarinet phrasing also prompts quick responses from the drummer and effective comping from…

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Sometimes a project has so much potential, so much more to give beyond its original iteration, that it seems to take on a life of its own. This is certainly the case with Spell Songs, which can trace its roots back to 2015, when the nature writer Robert Macfarlane published Landmarks, a study (or rather a celebration) of language and landscape. It was in Landmarks that Macfarlane first posited the idea of a word-horde, a lexicon of landscape-words at risk of being forgotten – and worryingly culled from children’s dictionaries – as people become increasingly estranged from nature. In 2017, Macfarlane collaborated with the illustrator Jackie Morris to create The Lost Words: A Spell Book, a stunningly produced selection of some of our most wonderful and endangered…

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Cat Stevens’ Buddha and the Chocolate Box, originally released in 1974, is the latest title in the singer-songwriter’s venerable cat-o-log to get the remastered reissue treatment. One of Yusuf’s four consecutive LPs to reach the top three in both the United States and Great Britain and his sixth A&M release overall, Buddha returns September 4 on CD, vinyl, and digital formats.
In many respects, Buddha and the Chocolate Box was a homecoming for Stevens. After retreating to Jamaica to self-produce the R&B-influenced Foreigner (also reissued as part of the Cat-o-Log series), he returned to old colleagues Paul Samwell-Smith and Alun Davies (producer and acoustic guitarist, respectively) to recapture the feel of their earlier efforts together.

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Talent alone is not enough to get ahead in the music business. You need some breaks too.
That’s the story of Austin Texas’ The Animeros (the word refers to older men who pray for souls in purgatory) path to this, their debut album. Not long after the mostly instrumental Latino trio formed in 2024, was nominated as Best New Act and Best Latin Act in a poll by The Austin Chronicle, in addition to nabbing a slot on the prestigious Austin City Limits Festival, Black Keys frontman/producer/studio and label owner Dan Auerbach got involved. He happened to hear them when their cumbia music wafted down from a rooftop as he passed below during the SXSW festival. It was their second live performance.
After signing them to his Easy Eye imprint,…

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After making their Dualtone label debut with 2024’s Easy Company, Futurebirds return with their sixth album and first double-length outing, Far Out Country. It reunites the alternative country-rock group with Easy Company producer Brad Cook as well as contributors like pedal steel guitarist (and former member) Dennis Love and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. As for the band proper, it features the lineup of Daniel Womack, Carter King, and Thomas Johnson — their three rotating singer/songwriters — along with the returning rhythm section of Brannen Miles and Tom Myers. Perhaps to a higher degree than on prior releases, it showcases the individual perspectives of each songwriter, with personal songs inspired by things like relationships, first-time…

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After releasing the album We Disappear in 2016, post-pop-punk band The Thermals more or less did exactly that. Frontman Hutch Harris broke up the band he had begun in 2002, when he assembled musicians to learn songs he had already recorded by himself. Now, 10 years after what was to be their final album, The Thermals are releasing a new record, Under Crushing Rain.
For Harris, writing and recording are the true artistic expressions of being in a band. Even though he has released three albums as a solo artist (Only Water in 2019, SUCK UP ALL THE OXYGEN in 2022, and Not Everyone is Loved in 2024), he found that he missed writing and recording as The Thermals. Though, strictly speaking, there’s still no band, as such.

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When reviewing Bayonne’s 2016 album Primitives, PopMatters described how “If Debussy and Phil Collins fell in love, Bayonne would be their baby. (That’s a good thing.)” The allusion remains apt. The Texan multi-instrumentalist has continually cited adult pop-rock luminaries such as Phil Collins and Enya, and that fascination with expansive, polished pop remains present on Bayonne’s fourth album, Filters. Yet Bayonne doesn’t simply recreate the sounds of the 1980s. He filters them — appropriately enough — through the loop-based production techniques of contemporary bedroom pop.
On Filters, as with much of Bayonne’s music, the dominant instrumental pairing is a resonating piano accompanied by vibraphone. The piano…

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RAP have nothing to do with hip-hop. Or do they? In the 1990s, after a series of landmark court settlements brought an end to the genre’s sample-tastic golden era, producers began creating their own melodies. Many did so using the Korg Triton, the Japanese synthesizer released in 1999 that gave birth to Clipse’s “Grindin’,” Terror Squad’s “Lean Back,” Jay Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulder,” among many other immortal tunes.
In the late 2000s, as Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” (another Triton classic) faded in the rearview, British producers Guy Gormley and Thomas Bush met somewhere on Britain’s South Coast. Gormley was making sample-based music and Bush loved it. They set about making “humorous big room techno, but with folk singing”…

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The first thing you hear on Opening, the new record from Swedish musician Klara Lewis, is a grainy fog of ambient noise: the sound of waves, a roadside or perhaps just the creaks and echoes of the room she’s recording in. The whining reversed strings that soon emerge from the murk create a wistful atmosphere, but then things take a turn: the loop clips and distorts with strobe-like intensity; after several minutes, it cuts off mid-bar, as though it’s been unplugged.
This deconstructed, shape-shifting approach is typical of the self-styled “sound sculptor”, who has been composing uncanny instrumentals from a combination of acoustic instruments and processed samples since 2014. As always, she imbues the harsh experimentalism with real…

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Hardly a glimmer of light has shone upon the world since Chat Pile broke out into — and against — its awfulness with their staggering 2022 debut, God’s Country. Yet here we are, inching ever closer to the sun all the same.
Sounding the alarm more soul-crushingly than ever, the band remain angry, deranged and mired in the muck of this place. With each release, they’ve sunk further into the dread and spiritual decay their music has always mined, as though modern life keeps rewarding their worst suspicions with fresh evidence.
Their latest, Who Loves the Sun — never mind its brooding, almost-taunting title — is the next evolution of that descent. It plunges further into the band’s sonic depravity, burrowing…

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Around the time that he formed the White Stripes, Jack White had a stint as a guitarist for The Go, a wooly and psychedelic Detroit garage-punk band. White was in the Go when they recorded their debut album Whatcha Doin’, which came out on Sub Pop in 1999. Shortly thereafter, White left the Go, and they recorded another album called Free Electricity. It never came out. But after 26 years on the shelf, Free Electricity finally see worldwide release via Sub Pop.
The Go recorded Free Electricity with their Whatcha Doin’ producer, Outrageous Cherry frontman Matthew Smith. In a press release, Smith says that he and the band were listening to a lot of ’60s free jazz when they recorded the LP and that “there’s a heavy jazz influence on this…

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Psychedelia in White, the third album from former member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Mick Harvey and longtime collaborator Amanda Acevedo, is a natural evolution from their 2023 duet debut, Phantasmagoria in Blue.
…Where the duo’s debut, and their second release, Golden Mirrors (The Uncovered Sessions Vol. 1) were predominately reinterpretations, for this album, the duo have recorded seven tracks of original material exploring some of the themes from their debut – mythology, love, hope, loss and mysticism – but with a distinct shift in musical style and an overarching theme of finding a safe space within the chaos and confusion of the outside world.
Psychedelia in White represents a seismic…

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…features the previously unreleased studio track “Accidental Tattoo” plus twelve never-before-released live recordings captured during the trio’s 2016 tour.
When artists of note collaborate on a project, the greatest obstacle is usually balance. The participants may truly respect one another, but as talent, ego, and personality enter the picture, someone is inevitably going to dominate the proceedings, and someone else will end up in the shadows. Neko Case, k.d. lang, and Laura Veirs seem keenly aware of this on the album case/lang/veirs, an album of songs the three singers and songwriters wrote and recorded between 2013 and 2015. And these songs often suggest a conscious effort to make sure everyone…

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