On Melting Days, the tenth album by Lusine, Seattle’s Jeff McIlwain brings two decades of production experience to bear.
His particular brand of ambient electronica has a wonderfully tactile quality, juxtaposing warm surges of thickly textured synth against crisp rhythmic and melodic details. Counterbalancing the macro with the micro, there’s a sense of both suspension and subtle movement, simplicity on one level and complexity on another, which keeps these ten tracks immersive.
“Bird’s Eye” has a rapidly whirring clockwork intricacy to its bright arpeggiation, while its slow chord changes muster a feeling of humbling grandeur. “Apparition” conjures the radiant luster of Michigan trio Kiln, while the glitchy…
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From the beginning of her recording career, English singer/songwriter Elanor Moss has demonstrated a faculty for intimate, perceptive lyrics and wistful melodies, even on the partly electric, Brooklyn-recorded Cosmic EP. She takes her investigations of behaviors, outlooks, and emotions to the next level, though, on The Knife, The Needle, her poetic full-length debut. Recorded in a cabin in the Scottish Highlands with producer Peter Miles (Torres, Dodie), who also mixed the album, it sees her strip things down to bare acoustics, with Moss’ guitar subtly fleshed out by instruments like violin, flügelhorn, and double bass in arrangements by jazz and folk musician Matthew Herd. As for the vocals, Moss’ performances here are relentlessly tender, even…
One of the most intriguing features of being an 80 year-old singer/songwriter still composing songs is the acquisition of a lifetime of experience for material. That, among other aspects, makes Texas troubadour Ray Wylie Hubbard’s new album, Reel 2 Reel 4 Real so entrancing.
The Texas veteran outlaw musician, best known for penning the infamous “Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother,” popularized by Jerry Jeff Walker, has been a respected cult figure in the genre since the mid-70s. He has cranked out over 20 albums of gruff, no-frills, music racking up an impressive list of high-profile fans. Many such as Ringo Starr, Chris Robinson, Larkin Poe, Willie Nelson and Steve Earle assisted on two previous Co-Starring albums for a major label.
Who is GB? When Danish record label Posh Isolation called it quits in early 2025, one of the final records in its 16-year run was a mysterious album of savvy post-punk by an unidentified artist whose initials were scrawled in blue across its cover, with very little other identifying information. GB later turned up in The Guardian’s profile of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory — the educational institution that has attracted recent media attention for producing renowned graduates including ML Buch, Erika de Casier, Astrid Sonne, Smerz, Molina, and Clarissa Connelly — and was later revealed to be one Gustav Berntsen, a recent graduate of the program who has been active in Copenhagen for many years.
As frontman for the band Pardans, he’s…
Finding glimpses of joy is very much the theme of Mystery Jets’ seventh album, A Hole to See the Sky Through. Across – for example – the title track, and ‘Godrays’, the indie stalwarts sing of “seeing a rainbow through the thunder” and someone who’ll “clear a hole to see the sky through”. The irony is that listening to A Hole to See the Sky Through often feels like a similar exercise: searching patiently for fleeting flashes of excitement.
Predecessor A Billion Heartbeats felt urgent, spiky, and politically-charged. It was a record that crackled with purpose, sounding worlds away from the sugary exuberance of 2008’s Two Doors Down. A Hole to See the Sky Through never quite matches the urgency of the former or the charm of the latter, often content to drift into…
Who would have thought, 40 years ago, when we watched the Claymation figures of The Housemartins dancing in the ‘Happy Hour’ video, that at least two of that band would be well-respected national treasures by 2026?
Norman Cook’s transformation into Fatboy Slim is well documented of course, but his former bandmate Paul Heaton has had an equally impressive, if more low-key, career. Last year, he even performed a sell-out gig at his beloved Sheffield United’s ground, making him the country’s most down to earth stadium rocker.
The secret to Heaton’s success is consistency. The majority of Jenius would fit easily next to anything in his former band The Beautiful South‘s canon. Rianne Downey, who first appeared…
“If I just get on my bike, I’ll outride any heartache,” sings Ella Williams on “Surfing USA,” a yawning, lovelorn paean to heartbreak in the Great Lakes. Since making her label debut as Squirrel Flower in 2020, Williams has translated her rich emotional life into a catalog of smoky indie rock and folk that careens between whispered intimacy and cathartic sprawl. She’s a Boston native who found her voice in the Midwest, beginning her career in Iowa, then adopting Chicago as her hometown and frequent muse. Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going is her fourth album for Illinois indie Polyvinyl, and finds her in a similar sonic space to Tomorrow’s Fire, the 2023 album she made with co-producer Alex Farrar. This time around, she and a group of Chicago collaborators cut a live,…
Get ready to dive into Wild Pink’s sixth long player, Still Coming Down, which clocks in at just under 33 minutes. The notably concise record finds frontman John Ross trimming the fat in favor of swaggering rock and roll. After the songwriter’s battle with cancer and being a father for the first time, he learned there was plenty of meaning to be found in going back to the basics. The band’s approach exemplifies this newfound vantage point, even if the album would have benefited by creating some space every now and then.
Wild Pink lean into the fact that this is a genuine rock record with big arrangements and even bigger riffs. The recording process at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, with producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza,…
Taking a cue from Happy Mondays‘ smash’n’grab approach to making music, this super-deluxe reissue of the group’s totemic third album raids an array of previous Mondays releases. Alongside a new remaster of Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches is an amalgamation of the Madchester Rave On and Hallelujah EPs; Baby Big Head Bootleg Album, the “unofficial” 1991 live recording originally let loose by the band themselves; and a slew of remixes, some lifted from original singles, others from projects issued earlier this year.
It all makes for a gloriously heady package which befits the Mondays’ time-warping maximalism. With grunge, Britpop and hip hop all outlasting the Madchester scene the Mondays birthed (and transcended), it’s easy to forget that…
Japanese pianist and composer Ayumi Tanaka has become a distinctive voice on the Scandinavian jazz scene since settling in Oslo. A graduate of the Norwegian Academy of Music, she has forged musical relationships with Norwegian drummer Thomas Strønen and American bassist Thomas Morgan, whose intuitive rapport lies at the heart of Windflower. Following early performances at Oslo’s Victoria, Nasjonal Jazzscene, the trio attracted the attention of ECM producer Manfred Eicher, leading to this debut recording.
The album follows on from Tanaka’s 2021 release Subaqueous Silence. Windflower finds three experienced improvisers creating music of patience and restraint. Although eight of its nine pieces are freely improvised, the distinction…
Though the century-old Pulitzer prize – launched as a celebration of the craft and social necessity of good news reportage – was eventually expanded to include fiction and music by 1943, the US-born art of jazz has only been represented by Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis in their lifetimes, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk posthumously – and most recently Henry Threadgill, for his four-part suite In for a Penny, In for a Pound, in 2016.
Publisher Joseph Pulitzer once declared his dreams for his readership were “to arrest their attention, enlist their sympathy … stimulate their imagination, convince their reason, and awaken their conscience”. Contemporary-classical composer and flautist Threadgill has been…
Black Marble has always had a core of melodic brilliance, and each album has peeled away another layer of glum obfuscation. The earliest releases were cavernous and lo-fi, their harsh sound showing reverence to the coldwave revival of the 2010s that helped inspire Black Marble mastermind Chris Stewart to launch the project. Fifth studio album Life in Small Spaces still has smudges of the tape hiss and analog glow of the project’s roots, but there’s a new vibrancy which has been creeping slowly into the sound for years and seems to fully arrive with these songs.
Opening track “It Always Comes to Me” is almost shockingly unlike the Black Marble of the past, with snappy, live-sounding drums and bright, chorus-coated guitars front and center.
2026 may have been a pretty depressing year in many aspects but one thing is for sure – the British music industry is in rude health. This year, bands like Mary in the Junkyard and Man/Woman/Chainsaw have built upon their burgeoning live reputation to deliver stellar debut albums, and now they’ve been joined by Westside Cowboy.
The Manchester quartet have spent the past few years releasing a string of EPs and touring their guts out – if you’ve been anywhere near a festival during 2025, it’s more than likely you’ll have seen them on the bill. The good thing about It Goes On is that the band have successfully transferred their jittery, intoxicating live sound into the recording studio, resulting in an immensely satisfying debut album.
Artists who lack Keb’ Mo’s stature might not have the grit to deliver a solo acoustic record. Yet, he’s a national treasure, sure to draw attention to each release. He’s a five-time Grammy winner and recipient of the AMA Lifetime Achievement Award. You likely know his storied career and have some of his records, though this is a first, born out of life changing events. Keb’ Mo’ survived a life-threatening heart injury that required open-heart surgery. As he recovered and grappled with the dissolution of his 20-year marriage, he recorded The Breakdown in his home studio. It’s his first-ever stripped-down record featuring just his voice, guitar, and carefully selected vocal contributions from The Soweto Gospel Choir and the gospel sextet Take Six, thereby adding…
Here are three immutable facts about Brandon Richard Flowers: he was born just outside Las Vegas, Nevada. He is 45 years old. And he never does anything by halves.
When he and his band the Killers debuted in the early 2000s, as disaffected New York cool was on the rise, he was writing scream-along choruses sung in his upper register. When the Killers were searching for a sound even bigger and grander than the euphoric Springsteen pastiche of 2006’s Sam’s Town, they didn’t think twice before recruiting Stuart Price to produce the spangly 2008 disco-rock record Day & Age.
That’s how you get a record like Thrasher. Flowers’ third solo album finds Vegas’s chosen son decamping to Nashville for a full-throated…
When Chelsea Wolfe was interviewed by the Guardian in 2015 about her fourth album, Abyss, she revealed that her music had been informed by the bouts of sleep paralysis she’d suffered from since childhood. The condition – a transitional state between being awake and asleep – affects sufferers in different ways. Some wake up feeling paralysed, others see ghosts or demonic figures. For the California-born singer-songwriter, it meant “waking up, and you can move your body and your eyes are open, but there are figures and people from your dreams still present in your room”.
No surprise, then, that her music – a blend of drone, alt, folk, industrial and doom metal – had ended up so spookily unsettling. She appeared on album covers with pupil-less eyes, spoke…
In the latter portion of their recording career, The Cramps seemed to lose their calibration of the giddy perversities that propelled their best music. There’s a distinction to be drawn between being in on the joke, winking, even drooling, and being the joke itself. Songs like “Bikini Girls with Machine Guns” (1990) or “I Wanna Get in Your Pants” (1991) reduced the band’s fascination for the demented kitsch of American pop culture to kitsch itself, repetitions of gestures that were empty in the first place. You can forget what a feral, fearsome force the Cramps were, as the 1970s spilled into the 1980s like fluid from the bottom of a split trash bag. Gravest Gravy features the band on the cusp of that fearsomeness, capturing the results of the Cramps’ 1977 Memphis recording…
“My Lost One”, Materia’s second track, is remarkable. Exemplifying the Julia Holter ethos to the max, it begins wispily with interweaving rippling electric piano figures, a whispered, echoey vocal and slippery acoustic bass. Gradually, grandeur is assumed: a sonic architecture soaring into and beyond the clouds, and outwards into the wider cosmos.
Despite the next track “Fantasy” having a similar, though much more brief exposition, nothing else on Materia is so strikingly consummated. The rest of the album is more muted, foggy, out of focus, restrained. Etiolated, even.
Overall, Materia is line with Holter’s adopted style. Her seventh album is very beautiful, and has a contrasting undertone of disquiet,…
Even for longtime fans, the Afghan Whigs still have some surprises left in them on Soft Control, the fourth release of the reunion era. Greg Dulli has always been an album man, and Soft Control follows the Whigs 2.0 blueprint in this regard: ten tracks, not quite 40 minutes, and a track sequence that makes you adapt a side A/side B mentality. Soft Control front-loads its most accessible tracks on side A, and side B begs to be listened to on headphones.
“Jungle Roux” kicks off this collection with a slithery synth before Dulli joins in, sounding as good as ever. It contains many Whigs signatures, but blends them in a new way. In a way, it’s as bold a start to the album as the roaring, Stooges-like “I’ll Make You See God” from 2022’s…
As a fearless thought leader named Todd once argued, Weezer have had a far more interesting career than fair-weather fans who stopped listening after their first two albums realize. It’s been a turbulent ride through beautiful highs and brutal lows — sometimes within the same song, as on 2022’s wildly uneven SZNZ EP series. It’s not always been fun, but it’s certainly been interesting.
The missing ingredient, even throughout Weezer’s best post-millennium moments, has been the production. Increasingly, it sounds like frontman Rivers Cuomo makes albums sitting in front of a laptop with his guitar plugged directly into the interface with an amp sim in his DAW. Heavier rock material like 2021’s Van Weezer and the following year’s SZNZ: Summer has never hit quite…