Welcomer’s Miles Sutton observes the world from a remove, delivering even intimate scenes from an ironic remove. Most of the time, he’s only half singing, through the verse injecting conversational lyrics with the barest tinge of melody.
Yet in the chorus, Sutton reveals a fascination with pop: the arrangements bristle with hooks and billow with strings, multi-voiced singing and rock instruments.
This is Sutton’s first full-length album as Welcomer, following a self-titled EP in 2022. The Wellington, New Zealand artist enlisted producer and engineer Jesse Austin-Stewart for this one, working with him to develop layered but buoyant orchestrations for these songs, which glisten and shimmer with trebly picking, swoops of…
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“Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.” Famously uttered by bassist-guitarist Greg Lake, those words encapsulate the theatricality, thrills, breadth, and fascination surrounding Brain Salad Surgery — Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s fourth studio album. Originally released in late 1973, it finds the trio taking front-to-back control of its situation and incorporating several studio firsts. The platinum-certified effort also stands as one of the greatest prog-rock feats in history. Its cohesive blend of musicianship, songwriting, and production set a standard that, decades later, remains revered amid fans and critics alike.
Mastered at Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab’s California studio, the reissue label’s numbered-edition hybrid SACD of Brain Salad Surgery presents…
The lo-fi, melancholic slowcore of Duster proves a magical fit with the atmospheric, pleasingly pastoral sampledelica of Dirty Art Club; they teamed together under the name Sooj to make the excellent Crusher. A drifting, meandering, and hazily trippy album, it’s made up of songs that are a soundtrack for staring out the window on a cloudy day wondering where it all went wrong. Or perhaps accompaniment for a long bike ride in the autumn haze of a late afternoon, twisting and turning down unknown streets losing oneself in the music. So, a lot like a Duster album, but somehow even more so. The lovely samples and washes of sound Matt Cagle (aka Dirty Art Club) fits between the strums, thrums, and croons of Clay Parton and Canaan Amber (aka Duster)…
Many bands have written songs about surviving, whether that’s dissecting the circumstances of life events or analysing pain, but very few make survival sound so exhilarating. On their debut album, Hoping As a Coping Mechanism, Bristol trio MOULD manage to tap into and bottle the nervous energy of being human in the world today, then they shake it until it fizzes over the edges. “Misanthrope” immediately launches the listener into a paradox of simultaneously combustible and life-affirming noise.
Building on the ferocious promise of their previous EPs the band allows themselves more time and space to broaden their sonic vocabulary here. Lead singles “Float” and “Falling Posture” hinted at this evolution and within the context…
As Michael Cloud Duguay points out, church organs are the only instruments that form part of a building. Organs only play in the place where they were constructed, and people come to them if they want to listen.
Duguay is a composer and producer from Ontario, and he describes Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go as “almost” a documentary about organs. Using recordings made during a nine-day road trip around the remote fringes of Newfoundland, the album is built around the sounds of organs in seven different churches – in places called things like Agathuna, Bonavista and Cupids.
Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go is a complex, multi-layered album with a strong documentary flavour – not only bringing these crumbling…
Terry Riley has always had a propensity for cosmic whimsy. As such, and given the fluidity of his work over the last decades, it comes as no surprise that his contribution to flautist Claire Chase’s multi-decade Density 2036 project arrived not in the form of Sibelius-drafted PDFs but as a colourful sketchbook of caricatures, flying creatures, and doodled marginalia.
Expectedly, Riley’s non-conformist approach resonated deeply with Chase’s vision of a future flute repertoire – one that lives outside the rigid boundaries of classical music academia.
Fittingly, The Holy Liftoff spends most of its time in breezy motion and joyous buoyancy, where the eight-part flute chorus, multi-tracked by Chase, and JACK Quartet’s strings generate…
Drum-less, bass-less, and piano-less, this improvising quartet won’t leave you thinking about what’s missing for any longer than it takes to read this sentence. A pair of woodwinds, a couple of strings, and some restrained electronics are more than enough to keep the frantic foursome teetering on the edge of chaos for 40 minutes.
The makers of Heavy Handed are equal contributors, but the centerpiece is Camila Nebbia’s tenor sax. The Berlin-based Argentinian transplant seems to be part of a stellar new release every month, and it’s easy to hear why. She is a font of ideas, rarely stretching into extended technique or even reaching for peaks of intensity or volume, just pushing the group forward.
The other half of the woodwind section is…
Making guitar pop/rock (of any kind) work more often than not depends on the synergy of musicians involved, rather than the guitar expertise, and sometimes even the songwriting quality. That synergy seems to be the driving force for the guitar pop Manchester-to-London duo atmos bloom (Tilda Gratton and Curtis Paterson) create on their second album Everythingness.
The duo, who also became life partners, create the kind of guitar pop where that of every kind from above parentheses comes into play – it can be dream pop, it can be twee pop, it could be jangle pop or whatnot – the thing is Gratton and Paterson practically cover it all here. And they wrap it in some very good to excellent songwriting and equal quality harmonies, with high quality…
On Christian Name, an album inspired by the devastating loss of a child, Charles Wesley Godwin narrates his journey through despondency, grief, and redemption to a new understanding of his faith.
Godwin explains, “These songs really meant a lot to me. There’s parts of me and parts of the things that I’ve gone through in the last couple years that are in each and every song on this album.”
The title of the album – Christian Name – and the cover art were inspired by his late grandfather, Charles Godwin, who was a preacher in the Methodist Church. Alongside two standout collaborations, the catchy “Better That Way” with Luke Combs and the moving “Hey There Son” with Wyatt Flores, Christian Name finds …
…2CD edition with a second disc containing 10 of Neil Diamond’s hits.
…Wild at Heart is composed of outtakes recorded with producer Rick Rubin in 2007 for the Home Before Dark album (which was released the next year). Diamond has recently completed the tracks for this release.
Diamond and Rubin – whose production credits at the time already encompassed Johnny Cash, Tom Petty, Donovan, Run-DMC, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and numerous others – first teamed up for 2005’s 12 Songs. Rubin encouraged Diamond to go with a raw, minimalist sound for the album, echoing back to his earliest recordings on Bang in the 1960s. Crucially, he also encouraged Diamond to once again pick up his guitar and…
Perhaps at the end of time we will feel the full weight of history hitting us from behind like a train. Perhaps as the world limps towards its final moments we’ll experience a flickering, cut-up dream movie made up of random constituent parts of human history.
These are the sort of thoughts that must have preoccupied Creekbed Carter Hogan during the making of Peasants Revolt, a record that acknowledges the possibility of an imminent apocalypse but is steeped in a wide range of musical and social histories: medieval uprisings, the Haitian Revolution, twenty-first-century trans activism, Americana, political folk music.
To say Peasants Revolt provides a rich and varied listening experience is…
…Made up of teachers, activists and artists, London’s Shovel Dance Collective recontextualise the folk canon, steepings their songs in field recordings, subterranean drone passages and the theatrical grandeur of second wave post-rock to better fit the realities of modern Britain.
One of the shining lights in Shovel Dance is Nick Granata. A supremely gifted vocalist, Granata’s introduction to traditional music only began around the time of the recent folk resurgence, but they have since become an invigorating and uniquely moving presence among practitioners of the style, as if ANOHNI chose the pedal harmonium over the piano. Their debut solo LP, My Heart is Running Backwards! A Martial Artist! With a Closed Fist! Woof! only cements further…
The title of foodman’s new album, HIKARIGA- SASHIKOMU, translates from Japanese as “light shines in” — meaning, a sign of hope and optimism seen from a dark or difficult place. It’s a clear indicator that Foodman — real name Takahide Higuchi — is writing from a deeply personal space, not just through the emotions he conveys, but in the sense he’s inventing his own musical language as he goes.
Higuchi has been producing since the early 2010s. But it was his 2021 Hyperdub debut Yasuragi Land that really put him on the map: a quixotic spin on footwork that invested the sound’s jittery repetitions with a kawaii sense of play. Since Yasuragi Land, Higuchi has continued to release (slightly) more formally straightforward…
Mohamed Bourouissa has long treated sound as an integral part of his artistic practice, but LILA marks the first time it fully steps into the foreground. Conceived as a “musical object,” the album functions as an inventory of relationships: each track is dedicated to someone who has shaped the artist’s life, transforming memory into vibration rather than portraiture. Just as Bourouissa’s photographs and films explore lives at the crossroads of integration and exclusion, LILA constructs an intimate sonic space where people survive not through representation but through the emotional traces they leave behind.
Drawing on a decade of collaborations and experiments with sound, Bourouissa assembles a vocabulary that slips effortlessly between…
…Deluxe Edition expands Daniel Herskedal’s fifth trio album with 3 previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded during the original sessions.
Quick — when you think of instruments that sound airy, what comes to mind?
Piccolo, mandolin, some kind of synthesizer or possibly the theremin? Most of us would take quite some time before guessing the tuba.
It takes some imagination to look past its conventional low lines and thumps, but Daniel Herskedal is just that kind of thinker. Even if the tuba’s role in jazz commonly involves features or solos, it is rare to hear any player handle it with such gentleness and finesse.
Amidst travel-themed works like the sweeping Voyage (2019) Herskedal’s catalogue has…
Where will new musicians gain their experience? Alden Hellmuth, a saxophonist and composer based in New York City, offers one compelling answer: by forging her own path. A graduate of the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz, she was awarded the 2025 German Jazz Prize for Debut Album of the Year and has appeared internationally at major venues and festivals, including the NYC Winter Jazz Festival, the Hollywood Bowl, the Blue Note Jazz Festival, and International Jazz Day events in Morocco and Abu Dhabi.
Hellmuth’s discography charts a clear artistic trajectory — from acoustic, texturally nuanced jazz toward increasingly exploratory and experimental terrain. Tiny Windows (2022), released with the Focusyear Band on the German…
Few archival releases feel as genuinely worthwhile as this newly expanded edition of The Autumn Stone. Originally assembled and released by Immediate Records in 1969 without the band’s involvement, the compilation has long occupied an unusual place in the Small Faces catalogue. While it introduced listeners to some of the group’s finest work, it never truly reflected how the band wanted its music to be presented. More than five decades later, that finally changes.
Curated by drummer Kenney Jones to mark the 60th anniversary of Immediate Records, the 2025 deluxe edition transforms The Autumn Stone from a posthumous compilation into a thoughtfully restored retrospective. Rather than simply remastering the original album…
Amigos has been beloved for decades by both long-time and recent Santana admirers, with multiple generations of fans drawn in by the record’s contagious blend of R&B, Latin, rock, and funk elements. As well as its immense accessibility. Coming off a series of albums that heavily leaned into jazz fusion, the band returns to the more dynamic and concise approaches of its earlier works without losing the sense of adventurousness, craftsmanship, and virtuosity that turned it into a juggernaut embraced by both the mainstream and experimentally minded communities.
The enhanced aural perspectives extend not only to Carlos Santana’s intoxicating fills and solos, but to the rich tapestry of the rhythmic, melodic, and vocal elements that help Amigos…
Nick Hakim is one of those artists you’ve come across whether you realize it or not. From his extensive collaborative history with the likes of Show Me the Body and Pink Siifu to his own solo output that seemingly set out to expand the mind, the multi-instrumentalist / producer / singer / songwriter has built one impressive, undeniable career. The self-reliant renaissance man is capable of conceiving and executing every portion of the creative process at its highest level, allowing Hakim to build these psychedelic sonic universes that are welcoming to the exploratory mind. His solo material and collaborations have never dabbled in the conventional, yet sought to change that norm, with Hakim’s innate experimental tendencies colliding with a natural knack…
Following a hiatus of nearly three years, Tramp Records return to their acclaimed Can You Feel It series with a fifth edition, resuming their treasure hunt through the oft-overlooked depths of the late 1970s disco and modern soul landscape.
As ever, the focus falls on long-lost private-press obscurities, unreleased recordings and neglected dancefloor cuts, with Bill Deal & The Rhondels sharing space with Ryjel’s ‘Heart’s On Fire’, Avatar’s ‘Been Thinkin’ About You’ and King Perkoff’s ‘When You Live In Marin’. Including bonus 7″ of a very rare disco single!
From extremely rare tracks to easily accessible ones and even unreleased material-this release has everything to make a collector’s heart race. Once again, these songs will get you…