Przemysław Jankowiak, aka 2k88 (and fka 1988), is one of Poland’s most singular producers. Long associated with alternative rap and experimental electronics, he gained a cult following as a member of duo Syny and later lent his hand to some of the adventurous figures in the Polish mainstream. His music is, like his concerts, full of smoke: airy, cloudy, inscrutable, dreamy, and unreal.
Everything Always Changes, for We’re Truly Here started as a one-off special project for Kraków’s Unsound Festival. Jankowiak enlisted a trio of acclaimed, like-minded British artists who, like him, work across ambient, rap, R&B, and pop. The four musicians passed ideas back and forth, bringing forth their shared sensibilities and aesthetics: Rainy Miller delivers his signature…
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Arguably no contemporary vocal ensemble is more daring than NYC-based Ekmeles (Charlotte Mundy, Elisa Sutherland, Timothy Parsons, Tomás Cruz, Steven Hrycelak, and Musical Director Jeffrey Gavett). As if its earlier releases, A howl, that was also a prayer (2020) and We Live the Opposite Daring (2024), didn’t already argue that point, it’s rendered incontrovertible by its third, Nonsongs, and the trio of works George Lewis, Wolfgang Von Schweinitz, and Katherine Balch fashioned expressly for it and the ensemble. Whereas another vocal outfit might focus its attention on harmonizing celestially, Ekmeles leaves standardized singing behind for microtonality, extended techniques, and other innovative strategies. As challenging as the music is, it’s all…
For a pianist whose prodigious recorded legacy goes back to the 1960s, Ran Blake has only rarely deviated from his preferred settings: solo albums and duos with vocalists. While his Short Life of Barbara Monk (1987) is arguably one of the finest quartet records of the 1980s, and his Sonic Temples (2001) is a superb later trio effort, he has for the most part been largely content to limit himself to more intimate contexts, especially with talented singers such as Jeanne Lee, Christine Correa and, more recently, Sara Serpa and Dominique Eade.
His first two records with Eade, Whirlpool (2011) and Town and Country (2017), offered compelling readings of the American songbook, both within and outside standard jazz…
The leaders of Hew have been around for a long time. Your Version might technically be the debut album for this band, but Mercy Harper and Lindsay Minton have been making pristine second- meets fourth-wave emo for 20 years.
Their original college band, Tin Kitchen, crafted unsteady, introspective indie rock. Their longest-running group, football, etc., released a string of excellent yet underrated emo records that blended Rainer Maria with Braid to tremendous effect. They followed that with Overo, which introduced some post-hardcore flair to their sound. Suffice to say, this duo has experience and songwriting chops to spare.
And yet, Harper and Minton refuse to rest on their laurels with this new 11-song album.
Whenever some music that has not been in the immediate focus of critics and audiences, pops up, they tend to call it ‘resurrected.’ Power pop is one of those, but it is just another genre that has been around since the 60s that has never gone away, it just isn’t given the attention and credit it deserved all along.
It seems that Little Steven Van Zandt never lost it out of his focus, as his Wicked Cool Records keep coming up with some serious power pop (extended) gems more often than not.
Count among those Haunted By American Dreams by Ryan Hamilton. It is the kind of power pop where that extended addition to the term comes in – Hamilton adds bits and pieces of the so-called heartland rock to the usual mix of…
When Twisted Teens broke through with their second album, Blame the Clown, only five months ago, the New Orleans duo’s southern-fried mix of garage rock, early punk, rockabilly, and country screamed both “First thought is absolutely best thought” and “Wait until I show you what else I can do.” But if their last album presented the band at their most gleeful and cocky, ready to call the world as they saw it, then Florida Water Blues takes place the morning after: a touch more vulnerable now that the liquid courage has subsided and the hangover is setting in. Blame the Clown may be where the makeup was first put on, but Florida Water Blues is where the tears start to show.
That’s not to say that Twisted Teens have suddenly upended their approach.
Drakulas are a Texas punk band, three of them veterans of the Riverboat Gamblers, all native to the same Denton nexus that birthed the Marked Men, Radioactivity and Bad Sports. (The great, now sporadically active Dirtnap Records released records from all these bands as well as this one.) Yet while Riverboat Gamblers were frenetic but straightforward Ramones-style garage rockers, Drakulas has a bit more new wave in its DNA.
“Going Going Gone Gone” thumps and pillages, true, but with style and a certain amount of decadence. The hammer of drums, the giant guitar chords are block simple, but the vocals vibrate with lurid romanticism, and the keyboards gleam with futurism. Sophistication goes slightly rotten, grand gestures turn theatrical, and all…
If there’s one thing you can be sure of with The Last Dinner Party, it’s that they’re not short of confidence. After releasing a debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, that debuted at Number 1 and was nominated for the Mercury Prize, and playing a succession of gigs that successfully combined camp theatrics with magnetic stage presence, you wouldn’t be surprised to see the London five-piece put their feet up for a while.
Not a bit of it. The band’s second album, From the Pyre, follows just 18 months on from that planet-straddling success story and already sounds like an instant hit. It has all the elements that made Prelude to Ecstasy such a success, and seems to refine them. Abigail Morris’ voice swoops and soars magnificently, Emily Roberts launches…
Sophie Wellington was born and raised in Virginia but moved to Boston to attend the renowned Berklee College of Music. On Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still, Wellington is the only performer laying down guitar, fiddle, vocals and percussive dance. Their style involves blending a lot of influences as well as applying the methods from one instrument to another to create what they describe as a quilt of American folk music.
The record is their second full-length release. One of the most striking things about the album is a sense of space where, despite quite a lot going on, the music and the vocals leave a lot of room for the listener to reach in and appreciate the different dimensions of each piece. A spell of stillness in a busy world. That said, the percussive…
Trever M. Keith, frontman for the Southern California pop-punk band Face to Face, has released an homage to country music, We Drank from a Poisoned Well. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds.
Keith grew up in the high desert, Southern California town of Victorville, where Face to Face was formed. Country music was the go-to music in the area and an inescapable part of Keith’s childhood, shaping him in ways he didn’t fully realize at the time. To some extent, this may be true for other members of Face to Face. Put together, guitarist Dennis Hill and bassist Scott Shiflett have a handful of co-writing credits on this record, and Hill arranged the backing vocals, performed by Mykele and Jagger Hill.
There are plenty of rags to riches stories in the blues but few, if any, compare to the interesting career of singer/songwriter/harmonicist Chris O’Leary. His is a much different story than the rags to riches type. He fought in the Middle East as a Marine during the Gulf War. He guarded nuclear weapons as a Federal police officer, and yet his love for the blues landed him as the frontman for Levon Helm and the Barn Burners, including stints in New Orleans. The characteristics of discipline, confidence, aggression, poise, and passion are all part of his makeup. Discerning listeners will find these in his songs.
His self-produced Blue Collar is O’Leary’s seventh release and second for Alligator Records, following 2024’s The Hard Line. This high…
FATHERS conjure a tropical, ’70s-inspired jazz, funk, and fusion atmosphere on their eponymous 2026 Blue Note debut. A supergroup, FATHERS features creative director/producer Kenneth Blume (aka Kenny Beats), keyboardist Keifer Shackelford, bassist/multi-instrumentalist Ben Carr (aka CARRTOONS), and drummer Nate Smith. While they formally came together in 2026, the group initially began as a one-off collaboration when Smith brought Kiefer and Carr on board his 2023 residency at the Montreal Jazz Festival. No stranger to cross-genre experimentation, Smith won a Grammy for 2025’s Live-Action, an album that showcased his broad-minded taste, dipping into funk, hip-hop, and sophisticated modal jazz. Here, FATHERS take a similarly…
Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irisarri have independently created some stunning ambient-drone over recent years, including Mogard’s Circular Forms (2015) and Irisarri’s The Shameless Years (2017). Where Light Pauses in the Silence of the Sun is the duo’s third collaborative release, following 2024’s Impossibly Distant, Impossibly Close and 2025’s Live at Le Guess Who? The raw materials for this new collection originally came together during a three-day live residency at Morphine Raum in Berlin, with Mogard on synths and Irisarri on guitar. The sound masses accumulated during those performances were later hewn in the studio, then cello (Martina Bertoni), and violin and vocal (Andrea Burelli) overdubs were added. The resulting six-track suite is…
Toward the end of “I’ll Let You Finish,” the rollicking opener of his second record Fire from the Hip, Finn Wolfhard does something unexpected. After affecting a nineties indie rocker drawl and doling out charmingly rambling lyrics, the twenty-three-year-old singer/actor finishes the song by singing Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift’s speech at the 2009 VMAs. It’s an odd moment, one that would come off as a pretentious cop-out in another’s hands. And in a way, it does have a quality of randomness for its own sake, but Wolfhard somehow makes it work. Part of that is due to how much crackling personality he suffuses into the song itself, but Wolfhard’s recontextualization of that soundbite offers a strangely compelling parallel to his own difficult…
Forty-two years into a career that has quietly defined the underbelly of American neo-psychedelia, Seattle’s The Green Pajamas return with When Fever Let Me Dream. Led by the ever-prolific singer-songwriter Jeff Kelly, the band delivers a record that feels like a lucid, late-night transmission from a bygone era-yet it remains completely timeless.
When Fever Let Me Dream captures the band at their most atmospheric. Heavily indebted to the experimental studio sorcery of the Beatles’ Revolver and the pastoral whimsy of early Pink Floyd, the album floats seamlessly between melodic baroque-pop and hazy, nocturnal rock. The brief opening instrumental “Intro: Pastyme With Good Companye” immediately sets…
Over the course of his career, Will Sheff has released 10 albums that have given the frontman of esteemed indie rock band Okkervil River a reputation as one of the greatest working songwriters in the country.
As Sheff and his shifting lineup of players have traveled the world many times over, they’ve made fans ranging from Lou Reed to Barack Obama. Praised as one of indie-rock’s most ambitious thinkers, Sheff released his debut solo album Nothing Special in 2022 to critical acclaim. Extra Mile follows in the path of Nothing Special – patient and alive and breathing and musical. With collaborations and contributions from friends and musicians like Griff Goldsmith of Dawes, Zac Rae of Death Cab, Peter Silberman…
In 2014, drummer and bandleader Eric Harland released Vipassana, a collection of loose, groove-centric jams with a contemplative vibe. Vipassana II is almost wholly different.
For starters, only bassist Harish Raghavan returns from the earlier project. The rest of the musicians include keyboardist/electronicist BIGYUKI (Masayuki Hirano), percussionist Keita Ogawa, saxophonist Ben Wendel, and guitarist Gilad Hekselman; the latter two are longstanding colleagues while Ogawa and BIGYUKI are more recent collaborators. Over eight selections, these seven players congregate in quartets and trios, and on “Duo,” Harland doesn’t even appear.
Opener “Ghosted” and second track “Tron” are played by the trio of Harland, BIGYUKI, and…
Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto recorded Lichtung after the married couple decided to settle down near Berlin, close to where Hacke grew up, after living a nomadic lifestyle for 14 years. The album also marks the duo’s first since Hacke left industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten, the group he joined as a teenager in 1981. In some ways, particularly due to the vocals, which are entirely sung in German this time around, Lichtung actually sounds closer to Neubauten than hackedepicciotto‘s previous work. Hacke re-incorporates electronic experiments similar to the ones he made as a youth, before he joined the group. Several of the songs take the form of slow-moving, sorrowful dirges with weeping strings and drone metal guitars.
If Caetano Veloso started working with Arthur Russell instead of Arto Lindsay at the end of the ’80s, it might have sounded like Bruno Berle. Since his 2022 debut, No Reino dos Afetos, the Brazilian songwriter has bridged lo-fi dream pop and música popular brasileira, or MPB, by adding his acoustic guitar and thick vocal timbre to looped sample-based beats. On his latest album, Sem Fronteiras, when the alchemy works, he lands on weird, tender lullabies like “A Noite de Estrelas” that extract and expose the alien elements of the Brazilian sound into a kind of “hyperbossa.” When it fails, it’s because Berle is still finding a way to compound the many genres he is interested in — indie rock, forró, lo-fi hip-hop, and disco — without erasing their distinct identities. In “Amor Inteiro,”…
Fabienne Delsol does modern garage psych as well as anyone; her handful of solo albums have been mysterious, magical delights full of drama and intrigue; it’s no wonder that one of her songs ended up on the soundtrack of Killing Eve. Any music coordinator looking for a song that combines the hooky pop of French ye-ye, the guitar and keys swirl of psychedelia, the stomp of Freakbeat, and the sweetness of the beat group era would do well to pick any one of her songs.
There are plenty of fine examples of Delsol at her best on her 2026 record Indigo Red. Co-produced by Ed Deegan and Delsol herself with a crack band of contributors (Thomas Gardner, Carwyn Eliis) on board, the record sounds typically good, coated in reverb and echo but still cracking…