The duo of multi-instrumentalists Courtney Carmichael and Nikki St. Pierre, sundayclub started out in rural Canada as a way to process the emotions of growing into adulthood, having relationships that fade, and self-discovery. Framing their yearning, bittersweet songs in a shimmery, classic dream pop sound perfected by Carmichael’s gentle, airy vocals, they soon landed on Paper Bag Records (with help from the Weakerthans’ Stephen Carroll, who heard them and passed their music along to the label’s A&R) and based themselves in Winnipeg. Produced by Carmichael, St. Pierre, and Kris Ulrich (Boy Golden, Field Guide), the SUNDAYCLUB LP begins with the brief introductory track “Tune In,” which, while not fully orchestrated, establishes their dreamy, longing…
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Parts & Labor were mainstays of the American noise-rock underground which flourished during the 2000s, and even if they never received the major critical acclaim or cult following of someone like Lightning Bolt or Black Dice, they toured constantly and released a sizeable discography of powerful, risk-taking records. Most significantly, they stood apart due to the way they combined freewheeling noise, triumphant melodies, and muscular drumming in equal measures. After making a few diversions such as a fully electronic EP and an attempt to make grindcore pop songs, they released their most accessible effort, Constant Future, before calling it a day around the band’s tenth anniversary in 2012. Dan Friel released solo electronic efforts which continued…
…features 3 bonus alternate tracks.
If you’re looking for those raucous, foot-stomping, banjo-slapping bangers in the vein of ‘The Cave’ or ‘I Will Wait’ from Mumford & Sons, you won’t really find them on their new album Prizefighter (unless you count fourth track ‘Run Together,’ which sounds suspiciously like a Mumford & Sons classic).
However, this is in no way a bad thing. While 2025’s comeback album Rushmere contained tracks with more of Mumford & Sons’ traditional musical stylings, we love that Prizefighter feels like a challenge they have not backed away from. It’s great to see them evolve their sound and even greater to hear how enthusiastic they have been about this latest album in interviews they have done, recently.
Dark Wings is Mason Jennings’ 18th studio album. Across 11 songs, the Minneapolis-based singer/songwriter grapples with trauma, faith, survival, and hope, while embracing a looser, more collaborative approach than many of his most recent recordings. The album was developed through a series of sessions with drummer Scott McPherson, best known for his work with Elliott Smith, Beck, and She & Him.
At age 51, Jennings finds himself moving between raw honesty about childhood scars and dark thoughts, spiritual questioning that refuses easy answers, and a stubborn belief in love’s power to endure. Tracks like “If,” “Sacred Heart,” and “Eagle” capture an artist who has walked through the valley of death and come out…
Seattle indie-folk icons The Head and the Heart commemorate the 15th anniversary of their landmark debut album with the release of a 2011 live show at their beloved hometown venue Neumos. This CD captures a vibrant live set right at the moment the band was breaking out. Live at Neumos (2011) features all the songs from The Head and the Heart’s platinum-selling self-titled album, plus two previously unreleased songs: the original “Long Time Away,” and a cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “T is for Texas (Blue Yodel #1).”
The Head and the Heart are an acclaimed indie folk band whose influences include Americana, country-rock, and classic Beatlesque pop. The band was formed in Seattle by a group of Northwestern transplants and broke…
The Story of Michael and Tanya is the fifth album by the award-winning the War and Treaty, and their debut on Atlantic Outpost. Wounded Iraq war veteran Michael Trotter, Jr. and gospel/R&B singer Tanya Blount met at a music festival in 2010. They married in 2014, moved from Albion, Michigan to Nashville and released debut album The Healing Tide in 2018. Their music covers vast stylistic and lyric territory; it embraces Black gospel, soul, country, blues, Americana, R&B, and adult contemporary pop with searing emotional honesty, spiritual sophistication, and hooks.
The Story of Michael and Tanya offers fingerpopping truth about their marriage, relationship, personal triumphs, contradictions, and trials in ten songs.
Since 1980 at the very latest, guitarist Kim Simmonds and whatever group of ringers he chooses to call Savoy Brown have been playing bad, late-’70s boogie rock disguised as the blues. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an “original” or a cover, Simmonds and Savoy Brown sound tired on virtually every cut of this set, which covers the years 1992-2007. And his playing, while capable, is simply a reflection of the guitar god imagery of the ’70s. Check out his Robin Trower-ized version of Lowell Fulsom’s classic “Monday Morning Blues,” both the author and Trower (a true electric bluesman) should be insulted. In Simmonds’ hands, the tune becomes a generic, wah-wah-pedaled, psychedelicized blues number with a hint of faux soul thrown in, as does his reading of Willie Dixon’s…
Since their 2008 debut, Luluc have been immersed in the beauties of the everyday, spellbound by the delicate majesty of nature: the view from a “small window” as 2014’s Passerby framed it.
On the duo’s latest record Sweet Thief, a river addresses a mountain, two ravens ponder where to go and an oak’s roots become a symbol of hope. Recorded after moving back to their native Australia after years in the US, Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett’s follow-up to 2023’s Diamonds is hushed and intimate, as if welcoming you into the pair’s living room, lit with the inviting glow of ’60s-inspired melodies and carpeted in soft, resonant harmonies.
The humble record tiptoes in with fingerpicked guitar and brushed percussion…
The 1960s were exhilarating times for the music business. Independent labels across the United States were creating overnight sensations almost daily. Creative hubs like Detroit, Memphis, Chicago, and Los Angeles were shaping and defining the sounds of tomorrow—today.
Among these vibrant scenes was Baltimore, Maryland—home to Chariot Records, a label that delivered a deeply soulful strain of R&B unlike anything else in the country.
Omnivore Recordings, the award-winning reissue label, is proud to announce the acquisition of Chariot Records. Founded in the mid-1960s by four friends from Baltimore who were all working in the record business locally, the label enjoyed a brief but impactful run from 1966 to 1972…
New Avatar marks a full-circle moment for Kelela, who started out playing in rock bands as part of Washington, D.C.’s indie scene before she began working with electronic producers and making more club-based music. The album’s stunning opener, “Idea 1,” layers ethereal, shoegaze-like guitars with existentialist lyrics inspired by Octavia Butler’s dystopian classic Parable of the Sower. Both a return to the singer’s roots and an exciting new direction, it begins a lush, emotionally gripping record which fuses multiple styles she’s explored throughout her career.
“Point Blank” is one of the album’s more club-influenced moments, with slowed-down jungle breakbeats underpinning frank lyrics about a dysfunctional, dangerous relationship.
Ellen Allien‘s first album in six years, New Life is meant as a statement of protest. With song titles like “Be Your Own Leader” and “Riot,” the release encourages taking control, overthrowing oppressive forces, and building a positive future. It’s also about dancing, and staying true to club culture, preserving clubs as spaces for liberation and community. Most of the album’s ten tracks are hardly anthemic, however. “Cruising” sets the tone for the record’s first half, creating the atmosphere for a midnight city drive, with stark, pumping kick drums flecked with shreds of melody. “Lights Off” and “Wonderful Moment” are designed for deep club immersion, with eerie voices occasionally surfacing while the bass pounds relentlessly. The album escapes the feeling of…
Before delivering their first album, South London-based Ebbb made waves with their live sets and a debut EP that merged seemingly divergent sounds such as rich, ’60s-inspired vocal harmonies, arty synth pop, and diverse, kinetic rhythms, many inspired by the underground club scene. Still evolving with their debut LP, Shallow Hits finds the trio — German producer/instrumentalist Lev Ceylan, Scottish drummer Scott McDonald, and English trained tenor Will Rowland — evoking the wistful, crystalline harmonies of the Beach Boys and the unpredictable electronic-organic textures and song structures of experimental pop groups like Animal Collective and Young Dreams alongside a wide range of mathy, pop, and U.K. jungle-informed rhythms.
Holy Wave‘s evolution from laid back neo-psychedelic reverb freaks to a more experimental group who folding shoegaze and dream pop into their sound began on 2020’s Interloper, took flight on 2023’s Five of Cups, and comes as close to perfect as possible on 2026’s enthralling i’m DADA. Working with longtime engineer Joo Joo Ashworth and the duo behind Lorelle Meets the obsolete (Lorena Quintanilla and Alberto González) in the latter’s Mexican studio, the band have left behind almost all their garage rock influences, instead trafficking in heavily overloaded shoegaze, billowing dream pop, echoing dub reggae, and deconstructed indie rock, while also taking a swing at their own take on the charmingly retro futuristic pop Stereolab invented back in…
The Temper Trap conjure an elemental love on their fourth studio album, the shimmeringly moody Sungazer. The follow-up to 2016’s Thick as Thieves, the album is the Australian band’s first LP of new material since going on hiatus in 2018. It also arrives on the heels of singer Dougy Mandagi’s own solo project, the Blood Moon EP, which found him recording in Berlin and exploring a more electronic sound. Also during his time away from the band, he deepened his Indonesian roots, settling in Bali with his family. All of this experience informs Sungazer which finds Mandagi and his bandmates reinvigorated, leaping with abandon into the soaring falsetto and guitar-based balladry that made 2009’s Conditions and their 2012 eponymous album so compelling.
Romance is a funny old game. One minute, you’ll be in the trenches of heartbreak, swearing off love forever. The next, you’re down bad for someone new and do a full 180 into living in a swoony movie in your head.
Suki Waterhouse’s third album, Loveland, captures some of the feelings of that latter experience, mining her relationships and infatuations past and present to build a world you’ll want to immerse yourself in whether you’re coupled up, on the hunt or convinced you’re destined to be alone.
“Picture this, it’s innocent / ‘Cause I haven’t even held your hand yet / Do you know that you’ve been coming up in my dreams?” she asks over the Strokes-y guitars of ‘Almost’, diving into a fantasy that plays out in her head alone.
Baby Rose‘s easy evasion of being classified as simply an R&B throwback continued after the release of her second album, Through and Through. Slow Burn, the distinctive contralto’s subsequent EP with BadBadNotGood, contained a stellar folk-soul collaboration with Mereba. Covers of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” and the Velvet Underground and Nico’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” — the latter of which was recorded for Materialists, in which Rose made her film debut as a wedding singer — further demonstrated a natural flexibility. While Yearnalism is another tradition-rooted R&B record more than anything else, it sees Rose subtly expanding her sound in a way that makes her even more suited for adult album alternative radio than urban contemporary stations.
Few archival releases manage to function simultaneously as historical document, artistic statement, and visceral listening experience, yet Xmal Deutschland’s The Complete BBC Peel Sessions achieves precisely that. Recorded between 1982 and 1985 at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios under the auspices of John Peel’s famously adventurous programming, these sixteen tracks form a portrait not simply of change, but of concentration and refinement. What emerges is a band in motion, shaping and reshaping its internal logic with each successive session, guided by the commanding presence of Anja Huwe and the evolving interplay between Manuela Rickers, Rita Simon, Fiona Sangster, Manuela Zwingmann, Wolfgang Ellerbrock, and Carlo Karges.
Sartre said that hell is other people, but hell is actually being stuck in the company of someone of a certain age banging on about the TV they used to watch as a kid. Thankfully, Luke Haines has previous where it comes to reanimating what could potentially be seen as nostalgia fodder, always bringing an intelligent twist, as 2011’s 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s attests. Fifteen years after that cult classic, we’re back predominantly in the 1970s, a fertile period for the Haines’ imagination where the Baader Meinhof gang are still bringing some much needed glamour to domestic terrorism (Haines also recorded the 2014 concept album New York in the ‘70s featuring songs about Alan Vega and Lou Reed, among others).
Girl Trouble are a garage-punk band from Tacoma, Washington, who have been powering out guitar-based coolness since 1983, and if history teaches us anything, it’s that bands who have been around that long either get tired and run out of ideas or they find a good groove that they can ride almost infinitely. Girl Trouble fall into the latter category, and they continue to find joy in three chords, a cheap guitar run through a cranked-up amp, and a stomped-out 4/4 rhythm.
2026’s As Is is the first studio album from Girl Trouble since 2005’s The Illusion of Excitement, and if a two-decade-plus recording layoff might suggest they’ve gotten a bit rusty, a couple spins of the album confirm that’s hardly the case. Kurt P. Kendall’s big, beefy vocals, Kahuna’s…
For over three decades, Norwegian trumpeter and composer Nils Petter Molvaer has stood as one of the most influential figures in European jazz. On Be Quiet, he continues to push the boundaries of his already remarkable body of work, collaborating with a different artist in a different location on each of the nine tracks.
Molvær is no stranger to bold concepts. Since first attracting attention through his work with Arild Andersen in Masqualero, his brand of Nordic restraint has carried him across musical boundaries, gaining acclaim in electronica, club music and jazz improvisation. His landmark album Khmer (1997) set his distinctive trumpet alongside beats and electronic walls of sound to open up the way for genre-fluid instrumental…