The feedback loop between video games and music runs deep. Obviously, there’s music’s enriching influence on games — see the banging, drum & bass sensibility of the Wipeout racing series. Going the other way, the interactive medium’s aesthetics and sensibility have wormed their way into the output of a new generation of artists like Bladee; the Swedish rapper’s records are so jam-packed with deep-lore nuggets and sonic worldbuilding flourishes that they almost feel like video games in and of themselves. As listeners, we don’t just listen: we enter.
That’s the best way to approach cellist and composer Patrick Belaga’s gorgeous new album, Solar Calf, which was conceived as a “soundtrack to his own playable environment.” The record…
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The new full-length from Laurie Sara-Smith and Lifeguard’s Asher Case is an experimental, feverish portrayal of physical repetition built from guitars, drum machines, and woodwinds.
…Despite the fact that the first Laurie Duo EP, Early, was bounced between “a Dora the Explorer-sticker-plastered TASCAM 414” and a “very plain desktop computer,” “lo-fi” doesn’t feel like a totally apt description: those songs, especially “Laurie’s Loop 01,” sound like they’re genuinely disintegrating. Day, their full-length debut, is a more fleshed-out forty minutes. On Bandcamp, Case and Sara-Smith refer to the music’s setting as “the little pocket of bygone jazz-age bachelor pad once called Phantom Manor and now called Common Starling” — from The Haunted Mansion…
In July 2024 Kiasmos returned with their second album, II, to critical and fan acclaim. The album took Ólafur Arnalds and Janus Rasmussen across four continents over the next 18 months, playing to sold-out audiences. Now the duo have entrusted five artists to completely reimagine it, II Reworked is out now.
Arnalds and Rasmussen, together with executive producer Robert Raths, invited long-time friend and composer Alex Somers, producers/multi-instrumentalists duo Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith (aka Disiniblud), and fellow Icelandic composer duo Kjartan Holm and Sin Fang to rework the entire album. The result is a sprawling and shimmering trip back through the record’s melodies, with a dream-like daze more suited…
The Mind Maps series occupies a singular position within the broader ecosystem surrounding The Future Sound of London. Issued in collaboration with Touched Music and available exclusively as physical Compact Disc releases, the series has never behaved like a conventional compilation program. Rather than functioning as a simple showcase of artists, each volume serves as a carefully constructed act of curation, interpretation, and contextual reimagining. Across seven installments, Brian Dougans and Touched Music have gradually established a parallel archive—one in which contemporary electronic music is not merely collected but refracted through the distinctive aesthetic lens of FSOL. Mind Maps 7 may be the clearest realization of that concept thus far.
As We Once Were is the third studio album from twice Welsh Music Prize nominated artist and producer The Anchoress aka Catherine Anne Davies. This new record is the long-awaited follow-up to the UK Top 40 album The Art Of Losing, which received wall-to-wall critical plaudits upon its release in 2021 and scooped up a raft of Album of The Year nods from The Sunday Times, to Prog, to the Mail on Sunday. With Sir Elton John naming it “one of my favourite records of the year” and Caitlin Moran calling it “the inadvertent, beautiful and truthful soundtrack to this moment”, it went on to sell over 10,000 physical copies via the power of word of mouth.
Featuring an all-star cast of guest vocalists, including vocals…
Alli Logout and Margo XS might seem to occupy opposite sides of the cultural spectrum. The former is the frontperson for New Orleans-based electronic post-queercore band Special Interest, a firecracker performer who can channel fury and sexuality onstage like few of their punk peers. The latter is one of pop music’s rising producers, with a 2026 Grammy nomination for her work on Zara Larsson’s girlie-pop juggernaut “Midnight Sun,” and the executive producer of Kim Petras’ most recent album and subsequent club rebrand. Logout and Margo XS have been making grimy, sexy, explosive dance music under the name deBasement since 2024, and on their second EP, HARDBODY, instead of trying to simply fuse the sounds of their respective projects, they’ve…
Milwaukee skramz trio snag. have always had their fingers firmly on the throbbing pulse of the horrors of modern existence. In the past, they wrote songs with titles like “Hydraulic Fracturing Makes the Earth Shudder” and “Capitalism Is a Pyramid Scheme.” They spoke of climate change and the apocalypse in equal measures, letting their anxiety out to scrawl itself in primal screams across their aggressive guitar attack.
On their third full-length album, All the Cages Holding Us Will One Day Turn to Dust, they change this up in a couple of key ways: first, by turning to introspection; second, by playing with their style to keep themselves from being another interchangeable hard emo band. Both work well, and the album shows snag. as a band…
CD 83-track box set tracing the development of indie music from the height of the Britpop explosion in 1995 through its aftershocks to the post-Britpop period in 1999, on the cusp of the new millennium. This box continues the story of indie/Britpop from Cherry Red’s Popscene: From Baggy to Britpop 1989-1994.
…1995 was the year that Britpop exploded into mainstream consciousness due to the infamous Blur vs Oasis chart battle that was even covered on the national News at Ten. Both bands had already scored UK number one albums in 1994 but going head-to-head in the singles chart ensured maximum media coverage. Their success focussed attention on a revolution in music that included acts such as Elastica, Paul Weller,…
When Jerry Joseph and his band, The Jackmormons, released Panther Tracks, Vol. 1, last year, he suggested that there was enough material for probably four records. Here is the second one, Panther Tracks, Vol. 2 (Cavity Search Records). These are fan-favorite songs, rendered in the studio, as Dave Schools of Widespread Panic suggested a few years ago. The second installment of this four-volume series, like the first, went to drummer/producer Steve Drizos, who helmed the recording with the band and guests at The Panther studio in Portland, OR, not losing an ounce of ‘live’ energy in the process. The six original songs, all written at different points in Joseph’s four-decade career, were released as a subscription service for fans through Joseph’s website.
Authenticity, thoughtfulness, and depth inform Minneapolis-based guitarist Zacc Harris‘s sequel to his acclaimed 2017 release American Reverie. While only one of the eight pieces is a Harris original, his fresh interpretations make the covers feel like personal expressions. Stephen Foster might be the composer responsible for “Hard Times,” for instance, yet when performed by the guitarist, bassist Matt Peterson, and drummer Lars-Erik Larson it seems more like a Harris piece than a treatment of another’s material. That many of the songs resonate so powerfully in our current climate factors into the personalized impression they make too. Bob Dylan wrote “I Shall Be Released” and “Masters of War” long ago, but each sounds no less timely when broached through…
Kaiso Power: Sound Revolution in Trinidad 1970- 1980 is a collection of rare jazz, calypso and percussive gems from Trinidad and Tobago from the revolutionary generation of the ’70s, bringing radical new political vision and reclaiming ancient spiritual consciousness through music.
…From Soundway comes a slim (just ten tracks) and somewhat understated, but no less sublime, compilation of calypso and jazz from a time of political unrest and sonic experimentation in Trinidad. It’s with the second track, ‘Tabu’, that this compilation makes its personality clear – a laid-back feel that yields dancing alongside revolution. ‘River Comes Down’ is a welcome moment of slightly wilder abandon among the more easygoing pieces – it’s also one of…
Getting ahead of next year’s 90th birthday celebrations, American pianist Simone Dinnerstein presents two works by Philip Glass, performing alongside her own string ensemble.
Baroklyn – the name conflates her home borough of Brooklyn and the baroque sensibilities of J.S. Bach – take a far-from-mechanical approach to the composer’s minimalist tics. Their aim is to emulate the passage of time like sand through an hourglass (hence the title) rather than chopping the music into segments like the hands of a clock. And it works.
Arranged by Michael Riesman, Suite from The Hours splices Glass’s score for Stephen Daldry’s film into an almost symphonic three-movement work. The story’s pain and poetry is…
Highsigh like to stretch definitions. In the studio, they’re about pushing the boundaries of what we might call pop; on paper, they test the meaning of ‘supergroup’. There’s a whole heap of musicians mucking in here on debut album Once Bend, but primarily they comprise Ro Lundberg of freeform New Yorkers JOBS, John Dieterich of Pitchfork art-rockers Deerhoof and Matt Mehlan of whatever-works collective Skeletons (and any number of jazz-adjacent experimental outfits he happens upon). It’s a dense mix of exploratory musical backgrounds and usually sounds like it too.
Part-time percussionists all, the three of them are fixated on rhythm, piling on drum patterns and chewy electronic thumps. They whip up a panic attack on ‘Words We Choose’…
Earlier this year, Cheekface “broke containment,” as the youths say. The Los Angeles trio had spent seven years self-releasing albums of quirked-up indie rock and amassing a following of “Cheek freaks,” loyal fans who revere their playful hooks and meme-poisoned humor. But in March, after revealing that they had rejected an opportunity to appear in an AT&T commercial due to the company’s contracts with ICE, Cheekface drew a surge of attention for their politics — which, like their lyrics, lean lefty and anti-corporate. Then a clip of their jittery deep cut “I Feel So Weird!” blew up and became a TikTok trend in the furries community, and suddenly this humble DIY band was the subject of “discourse” and “quote dunks” and Needle Drop videos and other…
Following the 2LP vinyl edition for Record Store Day, XTC’s 17 April 1981 gig at Emerald City in New Jersey is released once again as Live Boots – Official Bootleg but this time as a 2CD set.
Dave Gregory recalls this as “Gig 11 on a 19-date U.S. tour, planned to promote the living daylights out of our Black Sea album, this night was a return to a hot venue we’d previously visited in January 1980 as part of the gruelling Drums & Wires campaign…. XTC at that time was a performing machine capable of creating megawatts of excitement.” Andy Partridge says: “We were tighter than a firefly’s fundament that night, even more astounding was the adrenaline-soaked speed we took every song at”.
This is apparently the first of a planned…
In addition to being one-half of synth pop legends Erasure for over 40 years and engaging in numerous other solo and collaborative projects, Vince Clarke has racked up a sizeable discography of remixes. Remix/Remodel: The Vince Clarke Remixes selects 26 of them, though that’s nowhere close to complete.
The set begins with the first remix he ever did back in the late ’80s, a house-inspired version of Happy Mondays’ “Wrote for Luck” which stripped out the guitars and placed a thumping kick drum up front. The remix ended up being a bigger hit than the original album version, and helped define the alternative dance sound of the Madchester scene. Aside from this remix, however, the collection skips ahead two decades (leaving…
Playing the vibraphone with a relentless sense of urgency and intent while displaying a strong, distinctive compositional identity, Victor Vieira-Branco is a name to reckon with in contemporary jazz. Rooted in Philadelphia, Bark Culture is Vieira-Branco’s creative brainchild, where intriguing sonic forces feel at once dark and lyrical, sometimes effusive yet always fresh and compelling. For this date, the core trio — with John Moran on double bass and Joey Sullivan on drums — is expanded into a harmonically richer quartet with the addition of pianist Sam Yulsman.
The Giant is Awkward, Bark Culture’s sophomore record, opens with “Palace”, whose lush theme, rhythmically vivid drive, and hip arrangement command our attention from the very first…
Cautious Clay’s The Hours: High Noon is the third part of his conceptual trilogy of songs about one day in a life. As the Beatles might say, “Oh boy”. Cautious Clay has tackled the concept of “a day in the life”, but he’s done so completely out of order. One does not need to have heard the first two volumes before this one. In fact, he released part three (Night) back in October 2025 and part one. The Hours: Morning. in May 2025. Clay purposely issued them out of sequence rather than consecutively. The albums may thematically connect but do not tell a linear story. The new release can stand on its own. One need not know or reference the first two to appreciate this one.
Despite the title, the eight songs on High Noon do not begin with a track about 12 pm.
Powerhouse seven-piece roots-rock outfit Bywater Call stake their claim with Broken Souvenirs, their fourth studio album. It’s a record that confidently blends rock, Southern soul, blues, funk, and singer-songwriter sensibilities. At the heart of it all is frontwoman Meghan Parnell, one of the finest vocalists working today. She possesses killer pipes, not unlike Susan Tedeschi but with an edge. She’s soulful and powerful, dialed back when necessary. With an innate sense of timing not unlike Aretha Franklin, her phrasing is spot on. You’re either born with a voice like Parnell’s or you spend a lifetime reaching for it.
Formed in Toronto in 2017 by guitarist Dave Barnes and Parnell, Bywater Call also features Bruce McCarthy (drums), Mike Meusel…
DICE have always made music for moments. The kind that become memories before they are even over. On their second studio album ‘I Thought the Altitude Would Make It Worth the View’, the Perth quartet effortlessly capture that strange feeling of being nostalgic for experiences that may have not actually happened yet, turning their instinct for connection, movement and living in the moment into their most ambitious record to date.
Following the momentum of ‘Midnight Zoo’ and the ‘Wings’ EP, DICE have moved far beyond their roots as Perth indie favourites, becoming an international touring force. The leap from their garage rock beginnings into ‘I Thought the Altitude Would Make It Worth the View’ feels utterly organic rather than forced.