The Huntertones, the powerhouse funk-soul group and the second coming of sorts of Tower of Power, waste no time establishing an irresistible groove on Transmission, their sixth album. If you are new to the band, chances are that you’ve heard them before. Their high-profile collaborations include Jon Batiste (when he was bandleader on Colbert), Stevie Wonder, Ed Sheeran, Snarky Puppy, Charlie Hunter/Kurt Elling’s SuperBlue, and most recently, backing Lake Street Dive at this year’s Newport Jazz Festival. They reciprocate some of those honors by inviting Elling and Rachael Price of Lake Street Dive to sing on a track each.
The group began as the Dan White Band at Ohio State University in 2014 but is now located in NYC. They are: Dan White (tenor and baritone…
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On August 20, 1976, KISS performed in front of over 42,000 fans at Anaheim Stadium in California. It was the then-rising band’s largest audience to date; only three years earlier, the band had been performing to audiences of ten people. The band are now commemorating the 50th anniversary of a seminal concert with a new collection titled Destroys Anaheim ’76.
Eddie Kramer, who originally recorded the concert, has newly mixed the material from the original multi-track tapes. The album features liner notes by Ken Sharp, who has authored multiple books on the hard rock group, including the New York Times bestseller Nothin’ to Lose: The Making of KISS. The special collection includes unreleased photos and memorabilia imagery.
With her new album Trespasser, Grace Potter introduces a beautifully unruly cast of characters who step into forbidden spaces with absolute abandon. As the spiritual sequel to 2023’s Mother Road, the four-time Grammy nominee’s seventh studio LP continues the kaleidoscopic storyline shaped by her many road trips from her Topanga Canyon home to her part-time residence in her native Vermont (a journey she’s made eight times in the last five years, usually on her own). But while Mother Road was born from a desperate need for solace in the midst of emotional freefall, Trespasser reveals an artist firmly anchored in her singular vision. Produced by her husband and frequent collaborator Eric Valentine (Queens of the Stone Age, Weezer, Slash)…
Sounds Like Art is an exciting new concert initiative that invites musicians to perform amongst works of art in a European museum of their choice. World-renowned artist Sting performs in the beautiful surroundings of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum amongst paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Judith Leyster, and reflects on the works of the old masters.
The 17-time Grammy Award winning artist performs a unique concert amongst masterpieces in the Gallery of Honour. Playing a rare 17th century guitar, Sting, managed by Martin Kierszenbaum/Cherrytree Music Company, reveals his love for the Old Masters and revels in the power of books and reading, while performing in the museum’s spectacular library.
Dreamin’ Of is Pieta Brown’s ninth album and her second recorded with Bon Iver alumni S.Carey and Mike Lewis producing with her and forming the rhythm section, and with Jeremy Ylvisaker returning on guitar too. Her previous album, Freeway, released in 2019, met with critical acclaim and recognition from eminent peers Ani DiFranco, whose Righteous Babe imprint released the record, and Don Was, who wrote the sleeve notes. Although there has been a lengthy gap between records, this continuity of label and band gives a palpable assurance to the album.
The record is predominantly indie-folk styled, with a production feel not unlike Daniel Lanois, with a sparse and open feel, additional instruments layered in sparingly and to add texture,…
…Almost a decade ago, when the Minnesota-born Brennan Wedl was a college student living in Boston, she shared vocal duties with bandmates Lea Jaffe and Otto Klammer as a member of the short-lived queercore outfit Dazey and the Scouts, whose 2017 EP Maggot found a new cult fanbase on TikTok in the early 2021. A lot has happened since Dazey and the Scouts amicably disbanded — according to Wedl, they still maintain a “pretty active” group chat. Wedl grew up, moved to Nashville, signed to ANTI-. She amassed a star-studded crew of collaborators, including labelmates MJ Lenderman and Katie Crutchfield, sought-after alt-country and indie rock producer Brad Cook, and grunge revivalist Lindsey Jordan, all of whom have contributed to Wedl’s debut.
Ever wished you could be someone else? Ok Cowgirl’s Leah Lavigne surely has. The Brooklyn indie rock outfit’s second LP, Rhinestone Cowgirl, is preoccupied with “what if”’s and “why”’s, ruminating on the burnout and precarity in an artist’s path. Lavigne opens the record with what initially seems like an explicit expression of disillusionment: “Rock n Roll Ruined My Life” runs through the safer, more domestic scenarios that touring musicians forego for their art. But it’s the heartbreak and adventure that make it worth it, she explains as moody arpeggios simmer in the backdrop. It’s both a mourning of what could have been, and an acceptance that there’s something beautiful about putting everything on the line for self-expression. Ruining your life…
On his previous album 2022’s Avatars of Love, Sondre Lerche hit on a sound that really worked for him. Super sophisticated with loads of strings, smooth textures, and intricate instrumentation, the backing was perfect for his wistful tales of love and heartache. It was such a perfect amalgam of sound, emotion, and performance that it makes sense that for his next album Lerche would want to keep things roughly the same.
2026’s Acrobats brings back the strings and smoothness, as well the pristine arrangements that frame the songs, sometime with sensitive grace, other times with almost bombastic power. It’s a bit of a shift from Avatars of Love in that the songs and sound are a little more insistent. “Drive Me Away From You” is strident and pulsing…
…a digital deluxe edition of the album with three bonus tracks.
The U.K. band Wolf Alice have been making eclectic pop-rock for a decade, specializing in textural music that swings big emotionally while moving within different sonic settings, proving what a guitar band can do to stay on its game in a post-guitar world. They’ve never put it together with the sweep and depth of their fourth album, The Clearing, steeped in classic Seventies and Eighties influences yet never feeling like they’re just firing up a playlist of old bangers.
Singer-guitarist Ellie Rowsell goes all-in on huge rockers while delivering serious personal impact on this album’s softer stock-taking moments. Musically, they’re sharp as ever.
Art is rarely as orderly as a gallery — or a rock album, for that matter. Even when restraint is involved, even when it’s finished, shit’s all over the place in the studio. That’s kind of the point, really: There’s always a bit of chaos in getting the ideas down. Tyondai Braxton understands this. Those who existed, perhaps lived through the late 2000s, recall his stint as frontman of experimental wunderkinds Battles. But his path was never truly meant to be with a rock band, as the aftermath of his exit indicated. Rather, it was to revel in the discord of music in different forms through composition. He’s the type of guy who fits in more with collaborators Kronos Quartet and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma than, say, Grizzly Bear. Braxton was more at home with orchestras and museum…
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…
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…