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…
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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…
When not leading the Reykjavík Chamber Orchestra or fulfilling her duties as concertmaster of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra (ISO), violinist Una Sveinbjarnardóttir (b. 1975) performs and records with artists such as Björk, Valgeir Sigurðsson, Sigur Rós, Ben Frost, and Víkingur Ólafsson. She’s also a founding member of Siggi String Quartet, partners with Arngerður María Árnadóttir in the violin/organ-duo Translations, and is a composer too, with string quartets and film and theatre pieces among the works she’s created.
But as her latest Sono Luminus release, Ea Fantasia, shows, Sveinbjarnardóttir is as comfortable playing alone and in this case presenting ten favourite solo violin pieces, mostly written by Icelandic composers and the titular one by her.
Like the best arrangers and orchestrators, John Hollenbeck works best with constraints. His own bands, The Claudia Quintet and GEORGE, offer him unusual small-group instrumentations and unique performers to write for. The jazz orchestra is an entirely different animal, but you can still hear him working the same way: both testing and respecting the forces at his disposal.
Hollenbeck’s latest, Peace and Justice мир і справедливість PAZ E JUSTIÇA, is a bit of a paradox. Its source material is particularly far-flung. Part of the project originated as a commission for scores to be performed in Ukraine, and two traditional Ukrainian melodies appear in the final product. The album leads with an arrangement of a Turkish folk tune, and…
Nothing is quite what it seems on Zawsze coś. Ben Bekele is not, in fact, a single musician but the collective identity adopted by Hubert Zemler, Kamil Piotrowicz and Igor Wiśniewski. Nor is Bekele a surname in the Western sense. In Ethiopia, where hereditary family names are not traditionally used, Bekele — meaning “he has grown” or “he has flourished” — is simply a personal name, one that immediately unsettles assumptions about identity. Zemler has long enjoyed these conceptual sleights of hand. “The Life and Death of Ben Bekele,” released on the Portrety compilation (2019) by U Know Me Records, first introduced this fictional figure, while Gostak & Doshes (2014) borrowed its title from the famous linguistic phrase “the gostak distims the doshes.” The album’s…
Visions of Sodal Ye, is eerie and disorientating – the sound of ecological dread – and named for the prophet character in Brian Aldiss’ 1962 novel Hothouse, who realises that life on a far-future Earth is doomed. The record was released by a vanity publishing label who never said ‘non’ as long as they received a fee and a tape. While this should be inconsequential it reveals much about the French counterculture at the end of the ’70s.
Claude Cuvelier and Jean Skowron, the two provincial northern French music nerds who created Mar-Vista, wanted to reach a big audience but suffered countless knockbacks from ‘real’ French labels. The pair came to the conclusion that “the recording industry in France wasn’t interested in our kind of music” and could…
Grief is a universal experience that no one can truly be prepared for, and one that each of us inhabits differently, in ways we are unable to control or predict. Written for Paula Ďurinová’s film Lapilli, Petra Hermanova‘s soundtrack follows an exploration of death through stones, caves and volcanic landscapes, asking how the physical world absorbs and preserves traces of loss. The title refers to the fragments of rock ejected during a volcanic eruption — small stones suspended between destruction and renewal — and Hermanová’s music inhabits that same uncertain territory, poised between fragility and endurance.
The opening suite, “Five Stages”, moves at a measured pace, every gesture carrying its full weight without ever tipping into emotional…
Six years between albums, Nashville’s Elizabeth Cook returns with her latest LP, continuing her streak of writing pretension-free outsider country/Americana music populated by society’s outcasts and the overlooked.
Produced by Shooter Jennings and recorded with Cook’s live band, Great Television mines both her personal experiences and a cast of colorful characters to create an album that is both introspective and a reflection of society.
The album takes its title from a line in the somber opening track, “Sunset Promenade” (“Turns out hurricanes are great television/Turns out all the things in my head are a prison”). The song, complete with a swell of strings, serves as the ideal prelude to what’s to follow,…
After releasing six albums of varying heft under his Melaina Kol alias between 2016 and 2022, Nashville’s Logan Hornyak has taken longer over this one, time spent adding strings to a sometimes literal bow. Up to now, his output’s been decidedly loose and unbuffed indie pop, like an even lower-fi Sufjan Stevens combining a fragile voice, acoustic guitar and cheap electronics, all held together with paper glue. For Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then, he’s learned cello and harp, remembered some ancient piano lessons and found inventive ways of making solid song-like shapes out of them. The results are still small and delicate, but the focus is new.
First, the fibs: Hornyak claims to have moved away from guitar and electronics for this, but…
When you run a record label, no matter how big or small it is, and you are an artist yourself, you have the possibility to spread your wings as wide as you can, no matter how good (or not) it is.
Philadelphia’s Douglas Dulgarian has such capabilities. He runs an up-and-coming indie label (Julia’s War), plays in tagabow and They Are Gutting a Body of Water, but also spreads his ideas, along with Scott Turner (hooky) and Sam Silbert (hooky, circle of fire) in a project that goes by the name of god of war, which just released its second album molly picture.
When you have the freedom to abandon any restrictions it can often lead you to excess, but this trio of musicians seems to have found quite a good balance between…
Comparatively speaking, Rotherham appears in the news more than most British towns of an equivalent size. And much of that news is not good. Much of it is representative of poverty, social disenfranchisement, and the ugly face of flag-waving Britain. But self-released, 2020s grass roots indie rockers The Reytons offer a reminder of working class community power, a band who hark back to the days when the only way out of big city estates was through football and pop.
Their last couple of albums (of four, including this one), made it to No.1 and No.2 in the UK album charts, respectively. This quartet aren’t some music-journo-acclaimed-for-five-minutes flash-in-the-pan. In 2024 they put on a 20,000-capacity concert in Rotherham’s Clifton Park,…
Since 2007, whether alongside the MJC Trio, the El Arranque Orchestra or leading his own sextet, bandoneonist Pablo Jaurena has been developing an outstanding musical career. His latest work – his second as a soloist – is one of the high points of that journey. Here, the composer has brought together 31 bandoneon players to pay homage to the defining instrument of tango.
The album contains four amazing historical rescues. These are meticulous recreations or reinterpretations of emblematic works made with some of the musicians who originally recorded them, such as ‘Canaro en París’, which features Víctor Lavallén, Osvaldo Pugliese’s bandoneon player. Five compositions were written especially for the record, among them,…