Opus Kink - The Sweet Goodbye

Opus Kink have been Brighton’s best-kept secret for the better part of a decade, and they seemed to like it that way. Formed in 2017 around the six-headed hydra of Angus Rogers, Sam Abbo, Fin Abbo, Jazz Pope, Jed Morgans, and Jack Banjo Courtney, the band spent years feeding on cabaret theatrics and jazz-punk sprawl through a run of EPs — Requiem For a Quarantine, Til the Stream Runs Dry, My Eyes, Brother! — that built a reputation without ever cashing it in. Every UK music blog worth its salt has been calling them a live-show phenomenon since roughly forever. The debut LP was the one thing missing, and they made everybody wait eight years for it.

The Sweet Goodbye, out now via SO Recordings, is the overdue reckoning, and it’s a blast. Opener “Come Over, Do Me Wrong” sets the tone: a swampy, horn-drenched stomp that sounds like a jazz combo and a punk band merged into one organism. Rogers sings with a nicotine-stained sneer that owns every line. “Will It Come For You?” is the record’s pop move, if you can call it that — a wonky, off-kilter groove dressed up with the kind of brass stabs that make the whole thing feel like a cabaret revue slowly catching fire. Ska, mariachi, and vaudeville bleed into the margins throughout, and the record never sits still long enough to get comfortable. That restlessness is the whole appeal — ten tracks of barely-controlled chaos that never let up.

For a debut this theatrical, it’s exactly the kind of chaos worth signing up for. Eight years in the making, and it sounds like it.

For Fans Of : Fat White Family, Squid, and that one uncle who thinks every family barbecue needs a horn section.

talker - Runaway Jane

Celeste Tauchar has recorded as talker since 2024’s I’m Telling You the Truth, a debut built on direct emotional disclosure. Runaway Jane picks up where that record left off, addressing what comes after the truth is out — the accountability that follows once something can’t be taken back.

The album treats the instinct to run not as avoidance but as forward motion. “Truck,” co-written with Matt Bernstein, is about the patterns you fall back into without noticing, set against a spare arrangement that leaves room for the lyrics to do the work. “Strangers,” made with members of LA’s Moontower, is about relational drift caused by plain distance and time rather than any one rupture. Tauchar’s vocal delivery is unpolished by design, matching her stated aim of evoking geographic scale — a fitting choice given a personal history that runs through Germany, Sacramento, Miami, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

Runaway Jane is a record about accountability that uses travel as its organizing structure, tracking that theme across the whole runtime.

For Fans Of: Julien Baker, Now, Now

Shearwater – The New World

Jonathan Meiburg has been doing this a long time, and he’s never done it the same way twice. Shearwater started in 2001 as a side project he ran alongside Will Sheff in Okkervil River, and once Sheff moved on in 2006, Meiburg took full ownership of it. The band has spent the two decades since restlessly shape-shifting — the moody, orchestral Palo Santo and Rook, the louder rock pivot of Animal Joy, the Cold War tension of Jet Plane and Oxbow. Meiburg is also a trained naturalist who’s written a whole book on caracaras, and that sensibility — migration, ecology, the natural world pressing in on human affairs — has never been far from the songwriting.

The New World is the first Shearwater record since 2022’s The Great Awakening, and it’s also the first one Meiburg has done entirely on his own terms: after six albums split between Sub Pop and Matador, he crowdfunded and self-released this one through his own label, Polyborus, with Secretly Distribution handling the logistics. Four years of traveling and fieldwork went into it, tracked in London, Berlin, New York, and Texas, and the guest list reflects that range — Shahzad Ismaily, saxophonist Doug Wieselman, qanun player Farouz Zriek, ngoni player Mamadou Kouyate, and members of Malian group Ngoni Ba all show up across the nine songs. Meiburg finished the record and then left for Antarctica, and he’s reportedly been shooting footage for lead single “Daydream Unbeliever” from a research ship parked in the Weddell Sea pack ice — which is such a Shearwater move it’s almost on the nose.

It’s an expansive, patient record, and it sounds like a band with nothing left to prove opening up its process to the widest cast it’s ever worked with.

For Fans Of: Talk Talk, Bill Callahan

Victor Jones has a new EP out and a new album on the way. Victor will always be mentioned in this newsletter when they have something new after seeing them in Chicago and Madison earlier this year (which I wrote about here.)

Best Worst Enemy is the new EP. It features 5 songs that presumably won’t be on the album, Mad Flowers that is due later this year. Best Worst Enemy is more electronic than Zookeeper and his first long player, Long Cold Night. Zookeeper has instruments peppered throughout as does Long Cold Night where BWE is strictly rooted on the dance floor.

The first tune “Turn Grey” is a classic Jones love song. Over the beats of drum machine and a synth, Victor explains that they’ll “Love you ‘til the sky turns crimson, To the kiss you like a Roman candle, I just wanna see your hair turn grey.” In keeping with Jones style, the song does not sit in the same spot too long. A manic drum break comes up in the middle of the song and creates the sense of urgency and longing. “Devil in Everyone” follows and is an answer to “Turn Grey.” It’s an anti-love song. It’s the downside of love and wanting. Jones describes a situation that maybe doesn’t turn out quite the way you want. “Cowards (Come Over)” is the “hookiest” song on the EP. Jones sings of wanting a lover to come over but it seems more of desperation with Jones explaining why he’s a mess.

“Crying with the Camera On” is my favorite song on this EP. One suspects that this is Jones’ biographical statement with this EP. One gets the feeling that the entire EP was written about a single situation in that there seems to be a story arc. Love begins (“Turn Grey”), turns a little stale (“Devil in Everyone), dissolves (“Cowards (Come Over)”), and has retrospection (“Crying with the Camera On”). “She Can Love” finishes up the EP as a declarative. Jones sings “She could love me again and we could go dancing.”

Again, Victor Jones is one of my favorite new artists that I have heard in a long time. Their lyrical wordplay is amazing as is their ability to write hooks…

For Fans Of : Bleachers, early Fall Out Boy, or the group chat that’s always “one text away from a breakdown.”

Charli XcX - Music, Fashion, Film

Full disclosure before we start: this isn’t a DIY basement release; it’s a pop star with a stadium tour and a Scorsese cameo on the cover. Not my usual lane. I built this newsletter on bands you find through a Bandcamp wormhole at 1 AM, not artists doing press for British Vogue. But I’ve spun this thing eight times in a week and I’m not pretending otherwise, so here we are.

Charli’s been the one of the smartest people in the pop room since True Romance, and Brat cashed that check into a cultural event. Music, Fashion, Film is her walking away from the till on purpose — swapping the hyperpop chassis that made her famous for distorted, often degraded guitar, built with longtime collaborators A.G. Cook and Finn Keane. The reference points are specific, not vague gestures: “Yeah” borrows its riff shape straight off Blur’s “Song 2.” “I’m Afraid” sits in MTV Unplugged in New York territory if Kurt had a fashion-week guest list instead of a flannel. “Card Declined” runs Wire’s minimalist sneer for two minutes before dissolving into indie pop sweet enough to be a dare. It reads less like pastiche and more like fluency — someone who actually lived inside this stuff rather than studied it.

It’s worth putting this next to Olivia Rodrigo’s you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, (reviewed here) out the same season and pulling from an overlapping shelf — Cure-adjacent new wave, a Garbage-and-Elastica flicker on “my way.” Rodrigo’s version reads as studious, almost curatorial, the work of someone doing careful, reverent research into a canon she loves. Charli’s reads more like inhabited memory than homework. Neither approach beats the other. Taken together they’re evidence of something more interesting than either record on its own: a real line running from 90s guitar music straight up into mainstream pop charts in 2026, and it’s a good time to be watching that happen.

For Fans Of: Sky Ferreira, Wire — and anyone who still thinks “irony” is a personality trait.

long odds - perfect day

Adam Elliott’s continued output with Long Odds exists somewhat independently of the renewed attention paid to Times New Viking, his prior and now-reactivated project. Long Odds has functioned as his primary vehicle since 2022’s Fine Thread, and on this record — with guitarist Philip Kim, bassist Joseph Camerlengo, and drummer CLH completing the Columbus-based lineup — the band appears to favor a more structured, song-oriented approach than the abrasive, tape-degraded aesthetic that characterized Elliott’s earlier work.

The Dry Land was reportedly recorded in a single session in June 2025, a compression that seems legible in the finished product: eight tracks, minimal excess, mastered by Cooper Crain, and organized around what Elliott has described as an intent to reduce each composition to its most essential form — “a cardboard box and a voice.” This restraint is largely borne out across the record. The opening track, “Perfect Day,” establishes a lyrical preoccupation with impermanence (”it’s rolling paper thin”) that recurs throughout the album without tipping into overt morbidity. “New Dawn,” written in part with Elliott’s daughter in mind, registers as the record’s most emotionally direct moment, while the closing track, “Here,” terminates abruptly mid-phrase — a structural choice Kim has characterized as an intentional gesture toward mortality itself. Despite this thematic undercurrent, the album resists a dire tone, functioning instead as a meditation rather than a lament. “Faorah” operates as something of a counterpoint: a comparatively lighter single concerned with domestic stasis on an overcast day, its Kinks-adjacent chord voicings offering a tonal reprieve from the record’s more contemplative material.

The Dry Land does not represent a significant departure for Long Odds, nor does it seem particularly invested in being one. Rather, it reflects a band exercising a fairly disciplined sense of proportion — a quality less common than one might expect. The result rewards repeated listening more than a single pass.

For Fans Of: Blank Dogs, Grass Widow, or the realization that your uncle’s Kinks collection had a point all along

The gestation period of this record warrants attention before any assessment of its content. Basic tracking occurred in 2009. A subsequent hard drive failure rendered the material inaccessible until 2015, after which overdubs were completed intermittently over the following decade. The result is less a conventional “comeback” than a compositional artifact assembled across a non-continuous production timeline — a fact that bears directly on how the record should be evaluated.

The lead single, “Wolf,” is instructive as a summary of the album’s stylistic project. It synthesizes proto-punk’s structural volatility with math-rock’s rhythmic precision, arriving at choruses of near-arena scale without abandoning either impulse. Moore and Howard continue to share both guitar and vocal duties, a division of labor that produced a rawer, more combative effect on the band’s 2005 debut. Here, the same arrangement yields a more deliberate result. The compositions no longer rely on volume or vocal urgency to sustain listener attention; the material itself has been given room to develop.

This represents a meaningful evolution from the garage-punk register of the earlier catalog. The underlying aggression persists, but it has been reorganized around more complex song architecture. Howard has cited Captain Beyond’s 1972 self-titled debut as a formative influence on the band’s approach to structure, and that lineage is more legible on this record than on prior releases — the band appears to have absorbed, over sixteen years, lessons its earlier work only gestured toward.

The record is not without inconsistencies. A composition process spread across multiple locations and years produces audible discontinuities in tone and cohesion. These are mitigated, though not eliminated, by the ambition of the writing. The album’s lyrical conceit — a man contending with lycanthropy induced by robotic intervention — could easily have undermined the record’s credibility; instead, it functions as a productive absurdist counterweight to the music’s structural seriousness.

For Fans Of: Early Kylesa at their most structurally adventurous, Torche recorded with a decade of patience instead of studio time, and anyone still re-litigating whether Blue Cheer’s third album was a step forward or a mistake.

Babe Rainbow - Acid and Honey

Babe Rainbow formed in 2014 when Angus Dowling and Jack Crowther, having met in secondary school in Byron Bay, began collaborating on psychedelic material, later recruiting Elliot O’Reilly, whom they encountered while working as farmers in Duranbah. Across seven studio albums, the band has maintained a consistent aesthetic: 1960s psychedelic revivalism inflected by Australian surf culture, distinguished from contemporaries such as King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard by its comparatively unthreatening, pastoral disposition. Where much of the neo-psychedelic revival trades on disorientation, Babe Rainbow’s project has remained one of ease.

Acid & Honey, the band’s seventh full-length, originated in recordings made on a secondhand acoustic guitar aboard a houseboat in Amsterdam, and was subsequently completed under producer Kyle Mullarky at his Malibu studio. This transatlantic production history is audible throughout the eleven-track album. “Waterfall” synthesizes the sun-worn alt-country idiom associated with Sheryl Crow against the hazy production style of Unknown Mortal Orchestra. “Mangoes” and “Dream Gasoline” extend this hybridity further, incorporating funk and country-pop elements without clear generic boundary, while the closing track, “Wisteria,” functions as a formal denouement. Dowling has characterized the band’s compositional approach as genre-agnostic, and the record substantiates the claim: hip-hop-derived rhythmic patterns coexist with heavier rock instrumentation without apparent friction.

This adaptability constitutes the band’s central achievement. Whereas many acts pursue a fixed sonic signature and risk stagnation, Babe Rainbow’s practice of absorbing the circumstances of its own production has, across seven records, reinforced rather than diluted its identity. Acid & Honey is unlikely to persuade listeners resistant to the band’s essentially optimistic disposition, but on its own terms it succeeds without reservation.

For Fans Of: Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Allah-Las, an extended and financially inadvisable holiday

Swapmeet - Mount Zero

Swapmeet’s debut opens with a dare: two chords, a repeated “I know,” and a hook so simple it should curdle into cuteness. It doesn’t. That’s the whole trick of Mount Zero — an Adelaide quartet who’ve spent six years teaching themselves to sound like they’ve been doing this forever, and mostly pull it off.

The record was built at a beach house outside Adelaide, all four members bunking next to the gear, and you can hear that claustrophobic, all-night intimacy in the arrangements. Nothing here stays still. “Mount Zero” itself starts as a cozy folk-rock sway and ends in blown-out riffs and digital collage; “Sand” reportedly carries something like 120 tracks stacked into a song that never once feels crowded. That’s the real flex — Swapmeet build maximalist wreckage, then sand it down until it sounds unlabored. Venus O’Broin’s vocals do a lot of that smoothing, drifting between deadpan and childlike without tipping into either.

The touchstones are audible and mostly earned: Pavement’s crooked hooks, Sonic Youth’s noisier melodicism, the hush-then-swell dynamics of Big Thief. There’s a Wilco lift buried in “My Heart Breaks II,” a half-remembered “Ashes of American Flags” riff, and it’s the good kind of theft — filtered until it’s theirs. Where the record wobbles is in the writing itself, which leans on mood and texture more than lines that land on their own; a few tracks (”Seeds,” “Personal”) coast on atmosphere when a sharper lyric would’ve closed the deal.

Still, for a band this young writing about firsts — first loves, first heartbreaks, first disasters — Mount Zero has an unnerving amount of poise. It’s a debut that sounds like a band mid-ascent, not one still finding its footing. Whatever’s actually on that mountain, they’re already most of the way up it.

For Fans Of: Pavement, Big Thief, Sonic Youth's "Incinerate"-era sprawl, Wednesday, Pinegrove.

Twisted Teens - Florida Water Blues (Going Underground Records)

This will be the second Twisted Teens album this year. This will also be Twisted Teens second album to be highlighted in this newsletter. Caspian Honeywell and RJ Santos’ latest, Florida Water Blues (Going Underground Records) extends the party that was started on Blame The Clown (cpncp). However, this album could be considered the morning after the party. The album is less manic than Blame The Clown but still retains the hallmarks of Twisted Teens’ sound. We have slightly overdriven bass, console steel cutting through, guitars playing simple but deadly rhythms and of course, cpn’s incredible vocals. His voice is a combination of energy, rasp, and world weariness.

Caspian Hollywell and RJ Santos, have described Florida Water Blues as the darker, “blue” counterpart to Blame the Clown, with RJ comparing the pairing to bipolar states — Clown as the manic phase, Water Blues as “when they’re about to go into a four-month depressive state.” Caspian actually said he prefers Blame the Clown, calling Florida Water Blues“magnum opus variety” by comparison. A third record, Holy Cross Tigers — a “burgundy,” breakup-themed one inspired by Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks — is slated for fall release.
This album sounds like a southern swamp. The lens narrows and turns inward and southward. This one is explicitly about place — The South as setting, not just backdrop — and about drinking, solitude, and road life. The title track opens on “had about a hundred beers of solitude” and closes on the warning about going blind on Florida water; “Swamp” locates the whole record physically (”crotch of America,” cat-and-chicken-smell atmospherics) rather than staying in Blame the Clown’s more abstract identity-anxiety space. Where the last record’s darkness was social (masking, performance), this one’s darkness is personal and geographic — isolation, vice, and a kind of homesick weariness running through the road songs (”Javelina,” the title track). It also pulls in an unusual devotional thread: “Riding” builds off a Sacred Harp shape-note sample, giving the record a spiritual undercurrent Blame the Clown didn’t really touch.

For Fans Of : Delta Blues, Jon Spencer, Moon Pies

da.daer. - Waltz Into The Water (Knuckles On Stun)

da.daer. is a lo-fi/DIY outfit built around Jon Robertson (bass) and Ben Bracey (drums), joined by a guitarist/keys player going by “Poison-Free Pizza Party.” Drums get recorded at Tone Hill Studio and Productions (engineer Ben Juul), everything mixed/mastered at Pizza Friends Recording Company. Robertson also does the cover art. The Bandcamp tagline is simply “chaotic art-punk,” which tracks with the catalog.

This is basically the summation of da.daer. There is not much known other than what’s on the Knuckles On Stun description of their limited run cassette that was just released, Waltz Into The Water. They had previously released Paradise Lost (2023) and minimize (2024). Paradise Lost was 12 tracks, genre-hopping across post-punk, noise, garage, shoegaze, folk, and psych. minimize was a 10-track instrumental release, actually written back in 2022 alongside Parasite Lost sessions, then shelved and forgotten for two years before they rediscovered and dropped it. Billed as “noise punk, psychedelic head-fuckery.”

This leads us to Waltz Into The Water. It was originally written four years ago as a 10th wedding anniversary gift, and now gets released as, in the band’s own words, a document of a marriage on the verge of divorce. They remixed, remastered, and rewrote the drums for this version, with a line in the album notes wondering if it sounded this good originally, maybe the divorce wouldn’t have happened. “Chicken Shit” opens things sneering, and “Stalkerish” doubles down before “Everything Is All Right” undercuts the title with everything in the mix. That’s the trick of this record: the band tells you it’s fine while the arrangement tells you otherwise. “Thunderstorms” and “Pill” are where the confessional stuff really lands — no punchline, just two people who used to make each other a mixtape and now can’t make eye contact. “Deep End” closes it out exactly how you’d want: not resolved, just tired.

For Fans Of: Ovlov, Great Grandpa, finding out the wedding registry gift card still works after the divorce papers are filed

Compandas - Tropical Finasteride (Lauren Records)

Sam Treber’s day job is Short Fictions, the Pittsburgh outfit that’s spent years making music built for lying down in traffic — his words, not mine, and he’s not wrong. Compandas is the pressure valve. Treber steps out from behind the guitar and onto the drum kit, hands the low end to Alex Barkley, and the two of them call it “2000s blog punk.” That’s not a marketing gimmick. It’s 2009 Brooklyn preserved whole, MGMT vocal filters and all, like the last seventeen years never touched it.

Tropical Finasteride runs nine songs deep and never stalls out. “I Just Quit My Job at the Liquor Store” opens things with fuzz bass and a glockenspiel line way too bright for its own good, a hook built for peeling out of a parking lot on your last day at a job you hated. “You’re SO Fine I Can’t Believe It” clocks in under two minutes, pure Matt and Kim sugar, gone before it can overstay. “Can’t Stop It” is where the band flexes hardest — Treber’s drumming locks in tight enough that the guitar solo actually earns its spot instead of just showing up. “Kill All Cops” rides a glockenspiel riff so chipper it nearly swallows its own title, and both “Leather Lungs” tracks strip to a bare bass groove under spoken-word rambling about tripping face-first into a hallucinogen binge — either a joke or the most honest writing on the record, no reason it can’t be both.

This is dumb on purpose and played better than it wants you to notice. Treber’s proven he can gut you with Short Fictions; here he’s just having a good time, and it turns out that’s just as convincing.

For Fans Of: Matt and Kim, Wine Lips, MGMT, Rosenstock-adjacent blog punk

Sick Gazelle - Veld

Chicago doesn’t get enough credit for being a city where heavyweight musicians just casually end up in the same room. Sick Gazelle is proof. This is a band built from guys who’ve spent decades in the city’s underground trenches — Eric Block running his ambient outfit Veloce, Bruce Lamont howling through Yakuza and Bloodiest — plus two ringers who happened to land here: Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and Tortoise’s Douglas McCombs. That’s not a lineup; that’s a Chicago experimental music family tree with the branches grafted together.

Veld is the band’s second LP, and the first to feature McCombs on bass, which matters more than you’d think. Odum, their 2019 debut, was a trio feeling its way through improvised fog — gorgeous, but loose at the joints. Add a fourth player who’s spent thirty years locking basslines into Tortoise’s elastic, post-rock pocket, and suddenly the whole thing tightens without losing its nerve. These five tracks were still born out of improvisation, but they’ve been carved into actual songs. “Hippies” struts with a dubby, sideways groove that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Tortoise record. “Ocean Always Wins” is the cinematic gut-punch, all dread and slow-building tension. And “February” — Lamont actually sings something resembling a chorus here, a first for this band, and it lands like a flare going up over a record that’s mostly been content to drift.

Released on Shelley’s own Vampire Blues label, Veld feels like a victory lap for Chicago’s improv scene without ever cashing in its weirdness. This is what happens when guys who’ve spent their careers in different corners of the underground — noise, post-rock, free jazz, no wave — stop circling each other and actually build something together. 37 minutes, no filler, no ego. Just four veterans proving the city’s still got it.

For Fans Of : This Heat, Can, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden

Sincere Engineer - Probable Claws

Deanna Belos has been doing this out of Chicago for nearly a decade, and four records in, she’s still the most direct songwriter in the room. Probable Claws doesn’t reinvent anything. But that’s the joy, Deanna knows what she is doing and she does it very well

The whole album was tracked at Electrical Audio — Steve Albini’s room on the northwest side — and that choice tells you something about where Belos’ head is at. You don’t book time there to soften your edges. The drums hit and clear out. The guitars run hot without burying the vocal. The harmonies land clean. This is a record about how it sounds in a room, and it sounds like a band that’s been on the road with Joyce Manor and The Menzingers long enough to know exactly where every piece goes.

The record’s obsession is time — the way it disappears faster than you can account for it. “The Perfect Crime” turns the clock into an actual thief. “Twist My Tongue” opens the whole thing with the specific embarrassment of the comeback you couldn’t find in the moment. These aren’t big philosophical gestures. Belos writes small and specific, which is why it works.

Not everything is a revved-up sing-along. “LOL” pumps the brakes, leans into spoken word. “Arborvitae Evergreen” goes softer, some kind of childhood nostalgia that doesn’t spell itself out. Closer “Dynamite” starts acoustic and builds into something genuinely messy and earned — probably the best thing here.

Your favorite Chicago band’s favorite Chicago band just made their strongest record. It was recorded a train ride from where you’re sitting. Go listen to it.

For Fans of : Joyce Manor, Emo, Converse Hi-Tops

Spacemoth - Inward Eye

Maryam Qudus wrote half of Inward Eye in the back of a tour van. Not in some vague “restless energy” way critics trot out when they don’t know what else to say — you can actually hear the motion in the grooves, the way the songs lock into a loop and then quietly rearrange themselves while you’re looking out the window. This is music made by someone who spent years engineering other people’s records and finally had enough of her own ideas to fill two of them.

Inward Eye is her second album as Spacemoth, and it’s a krautrock record that doesn’t announce itself as one. The bones are motorik — circular basslines, drum patterns that function more like clockwork than rhythm, synths that layer in and drift out. But Qudus wraps it in psych-pop warm enough that you might not clock the Neu! DNA until the third or fourth listen. By then you’re already in.

Opener “Do We Exist?” opens on a lone bouncing bassline and builds from there, piece by piece, until Qudus is repeating “we’re all alone in this world” so many times the phrase loses its meaning and finds a new one. That’s the record in miniature: take something simple, loop it until it transforms. “Internet Fantasy” does it with a droning organ that feels almost too comfortable before the whole thing detonates. Again and again, the album earns its repetition.

Her vocals are crystalline and controlled, deployed less as a showcase than as another instrument in the arrangement — floating through the loops rather than rising above them. It’s a disciplined choice that pays off. Inward Eye is 36 minutes of precision disguised as drift.

For Fans Of : Beachhouse, Stereolab, Krautrock

Madison, Wisconsin’s …or Does It Explode? have been building toward something since guitarist/vocalist Shawn Bass and drummer Erik Rasmuson rebuilt the band around a Midwest emo blueprint in 2019. They came out of an earlier project called Our Friends, The Savages, added bassist J Granberg and guitarist Brandon Boggess, and pointed the whole thing in a different direction. Four albums in, Realities Disguised as Symbols is where it clicks.

The full lineup — Bass, Rasmuson, Granberg, Boggess, and vocalist Katya Pierce — recorded at Electrical Audio in Chicago, engineered by Jon San Paolo. Electrical Audio has a sound, and San Paolo doesn’t mess with it: drums that sit in the mix without being buried, guitars that have actual weight, no digital sheen smoothing the edges off. It suits oDiE well. This is a band that works better raw than polished.

The album covers a lot of ground across thirteen tracks. “Noise in the Quiet” and “Baby’s First Rorschach Test” are post-hardcore in the bluntest sense — loud, angular, unresolved. “Weaker Gods” is more direct, a straightforward rocker that moves fast and doesn’t overstay its welcome. “Broken Teeth” is the one that sticks — patient and tension-based, it builds slowly and earns the payoff when it comes. The dual vocal dynamic between Bass and Pierce is at its best on tracks like these, each bringing a different weight to the material. The seven-minute closer “Shelter” takes its time without overreaching, and lands as a strong finish to a consistently strong record.

oDiE have been doing the work in Madison for years, playing the local circuit, building an audience the slow way. Realities Disguised as Symbols sounds like a band that knows exactly what they’re doing. Worth your time.

Grivo - Impose

Grivo started in small-town Michigan, brothers Timothy and Matthew Heck grinding through the Midwest hardcore scene before relocating to Austin in 2015 and slowing everything down. Bassist Ricardo Tejeda joined after answering a Craigslist ad. That’s the band. Three people, and they’ve been making the same essential record for a decade. They know what they’re doing and they keep doing it better.

Impose is their third album. Six tracks, nearly an hour, self-released. They recorded it at Club Sound Machine in Lockhart, Texas with Max Lorenzen engineering and Greg Obis mastering. The production is clean without being sterile — the quiet parts breathe, the loud parts land. Opener “May” is three minutes and functions as a setup, not a statement. Then the title track takes over at seven-plus minutes and the album’s logic becomes clear: this is music that builds through repetition and patience rather than peaks and drops. Timothy Heck’s guitar is less about riffs than accumulation. The rhythm section doesn’t call attention to itself. It just holds. “Middle Distance” is the record’s best song. The arrangement earns its runtime by actually changing, not just continuing. “Sunset Receipt” and “Until Soon” are back to back and carry most of the album’s emotional weight — the first concerned with things already leaving, the second sitting in the space between hope and resignation without trying to resolve it. Heck’s lyrics work the same way throughout: fragments, not declarations.“Heaven Howls” closes things out at eight-plus minutes. It works.

Hum and True Widow comparisons are going to happen and they’re fair, but Impose doesn’t sound like a band working from influences. It sounds like a band that processed those influences a long time ago and has since moved on. That’s the difference between this and most of what gets called doomgaze in 2026.

Styrofoam Winos - Any River

Styrofoam Winos are three people — Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, Joe Kenkel — who met at Belmont University in 2011 and started a band after working together at J.J.’s Market & Cafe in Nashville. They write songs together, rotate instruments, and all three sing lead. No designated frontperson. No single songwriter calling the shots. That’s been the premise since day one, and Any River, their third album, is the fullest realization of it so far.

They recorded it in Louisville with Jim Marlowe — Roadhouse Band colleague, Equipment Pointed Ankh architect — the first time they’ve made an album outside Nashville. Marlowe keeps the production clean and direct. Nothing on this record is trying to impress you, which is exactly what makes it work.

Eleven tracks, 43 minutes. The album opens warm and stays warm. “Pearls” and “BBQ” establish the mood early — easygoing but not lazy, the sound of people comfortable enough with each other to leave space in the songs. “BBQ” has a line about a barbecue in a hospital parking lot that lands harder than it has any right to. Kenkel’s “Somebody Wants to Send You a Message” features Marlowe on bass clarinet and sits in a slightly stranger corner of the record, as does “Next Thing,” which handles social media alienation with a shrug instead of a screed. Turner’s “Off My Mind” opens with waking up is clocking out of dream time, which reads like it came from the erasure poetry sessions that generated the band’s earliest material. Maybe it did. The talkbox shows up on a few tracks and gets used fully committed, not as a gag. The closing “Gettin’ Down” is Turner-led and intentionally silly in a way that earns it. The album ends on a grin.

All three members have logged time in Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band and with MJ Lenderman’s crew. That road experience is audible — not in polish, but in confidence. They know how to play together and they know when to get out of each other’s way. Bonnie “Prince” Billy wrote the liner notes. Lenderman’s blurb was four words: “They know how to boogie.”

He’s not wrong.

Let me just get this out of the way: yes, I listened to the new Olivia Rodrigo album. Yes, I liked it. No, I’m not sorry.

you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love is not a pop album pretending to be adventurous. It’s a shoegaze-adjacent dream pop record that happens to have 80 million Spotify followers. That’s a meaningfully different thing. When Robert Smith shows up on “what’s wrong with me” and it doesn’t feel like a stunt, when the guitars on “drop dead” are genuinely pulling from the same fuzz lineage as early Slowdive, when the whole album is structured in two halves like it was meant to be flipped on vinyl — that’s not marketing. That’s someone who listened to the right records.

The concept is simple: side A (”girl so in love”) is the falling, side B (”you seem pretty sad”) is the floor. Rodrigo and producer Dan Nigro commit to it completely. “Drop Dead” opens with saturated 80s chords and a “Just Like Heaven” DNA strand in the melody. “Stupid Song” has a chorus that makes you feel briefly invincible. “Honeybee” sounds warm on the surface while being quietly terrified underneath — a harder trick than it looks.

The back half is where it gets interesting. “The Cure” and “Begged” are written from inside the anxiety and co-dependency rather than looking back from the safety of hindsight. The narrator is clingy and knows it and can’t stop. That’s rarer than it should be. “what’s wrong with me” puts Robert Smith over synths and atmospheric guitar that sounds like a Disintegration-era outtake, and neither artist gets swallowed. It shouldn’t work as well as it does.

The album closes with “cigarette smoke,” which finally puts some blame on the table after 12 tracks of self-interrogation — though not quite enough of it. You can feel the record was rewritten mid-breakup and ran out of time to fully process what happened. That’s actually the album’s most honest moment.

You don’t need to care about Olivia Rodrigo to care about this record. You just need to care about what happens when someone listens to the right music and lets it change how they make their own.

For Fans Of : 90’s, The Cure, connecting with your kid

MONO - Snowdrop

Steve Albini made MONO sound like the end of something — every time, on purpose, and they loved him for it. So when he died in 2024, the question wasn’t just personal. It was practical and existential and tangled up together in a way that doesn’t come apart cleanly.

OATH turned out to be the last studio album they made with him — nobody knew it at the time, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes grief weird and impossible to process cleanly. No proper goodbye because nobody knew it was goodbye.

So they called Brad Wood, who moved in the same circles, who knows what it means to serve the music instead of your ego. They brought in a ten-piece orchestra, an eight-voice choir, Chad McCullough conducting. They named the songs after flowers because apparently you speak in botanical metaphors when language fails you. And then they made something that doesn’t sound like a tribute record at all.

The Albini subtext runs deep here, because what he understood about MONO — and what Wood seems to have absorbed like doctrine — is that the job isn’t to decorate. It’s to get out of the way. The guitars on Snowdrop have that same roomed-up, physical presence. Albini would recognize it. He’d pretend not to care, then tell someone it was good.

Farewell to Spring closes the album and it destroys you in the best possible way. Gratitude as a mode of grief — not denial, not wallowing. Something more mature and honestly more devastating than either. Twenty-five years in, MONO still sounds like a band that knows something you don’t.

For Fans Of : Post-punk, instrumentals, Electrical Audio

YHWH Nailgun - Magazine

There’s a version of this review where I try to explain YHWH Nailgun to you. Where I lay out the coordinates — noise-rock, post-punk, no-wave lineage, the New York-via-Philly origin story — and let you triangulate your way to caring. I’m not going to do that. You either already know what 45 Pounds did to a room last year, or you’re about to find out the hard way.

Magazine is ten songs in eleven minutes. That’s not a runtime, that’s a philosophy.

The band — Zack Borzone on vocals, Sam Pickard on drums, Saguiv Rosenstock on guitar and production, Jack Tobias on synths — debuted on AD 93 and promptly signed to 4AD, which feels slightly surreal in the present tense. But Magazine doesn’t sound like a band polishing their edges for a bigger platform. It sounds like a band that previewed the whole thing at C2C Festival NYC, played it start to finish, and walked offstage. Which is exactly what they did. The audience was split between bewilderment and elation. Correct response.

Rosenstock pulls back as producer here, giving Borzone more space. The paradox is that more space in a YHWH Nailgun song doesn’t mean breathing room — it means you can hear the thing that’s been suffocating you more clearly. “Ghost of Love” opens at a minute thirty-five. “Ballerina” clocks in at exactly one minute. These songs hit and vanish before you’ve processed what happened.

“Sewer Tree” and “Burns” sit in the back half like the album finally caught its breath, which is when it gets most unsettling. Closer “To the Devil” lands like a period at the end of a sentence you didn’t realize was being written.

Eleven minutes. No filler. No fat. Pay attention.

For Fans Of : Chatpile, Noise, quickness

Monolord - Neverending

Monolord is a doom outfit out of Sweden that was founded in 2013. Amazingly, they have kept their same line-up for the whole run of the band, guitarist-vocalist Thomas V Jäger, drummer Esben Willems, and bassist Mika Häkki. Thomas has described their mission simply: “From day one, it’s always been our aim to build a massive wall of rumbling sound. We’re the exact opposite of a band consisting of members with identical record collections. We come from three fairly different places, but we’re all drawn to dark, heavy, and gritty music.”
The band has six albums to its credit and the latest, Neverending, is the most ambitious to date. In fact, the band used a different producer and method. Working with Sylvia Massey (Tool, System of a Down), she asked the band to bring her everything they’ve ever recorded. Not just album stuff but riffs, progressions, stems of the last ten years. She listened to it all and sent them a list of what she wanted to work on. The band rehearsed 12 songs, recorded 11, and chose 8 for the album. The result is a doom album that moves out of the doom territory. The classic Monolord sound is still there and huge as ever, but Massey has introduced negative space into their sound to great effect. The rumble of the low end is still present, but it doesn’t feel as numbing (Not that it ever did with Monolord but some of their fellow travelers fall into this trap). The lead single, “You Bastard” exemplifies this. There is the rumble of the low-end and a classic Monolord riff, but the song ventures into classic rock territory at times and almost pop. Now this isn’t to say Monolord is looking to have a set at Coachella (although that would rule), but they definitely have opened their sound up.

For Fans Of : Sleep, Mastodon, Orange Amplification

Guided By Voices - Crawlspace of the Pantheon

Of course, I was going to write about the new Guided By Voices album. Their album, their 43, made my best of list last year. This album is no different. Crawlspace of the Pantheon is the band’s 44^th overall album. That’s a dizzying number in itself but it speaks to bandleader Robert Pollard’s prolific output. Pollard’s recipe has been ‘write ten songs and two will be bangers. However, he has been a lot better than a 20% hit rate lately. The new album is no different. The only thing that could make it better is if Pollard and company take the show on the road. (One can dream, can’t one?)
Crawlspace of the Pantheon opens with a feedback squeal, a driven chord, some overdriven bass and we are off. “Lost In The Sun” opens with Pollard suggesting that things we were told to look for will lead us into disappointment. Notably, Pollard is less obtuse on the current release. He has always dealt in haze but on Crawlspace of the Pantheon, he admittedly wrote closer to form and made a direct effort to look at the overall song. He said some are autobiographical in moments. One can almost hear that in the lead single “We Outlast Them All.” Pollard sings about being still around :

”And we outlast them all
Every keepsake, every law
With a school girl’s voice
A career for the curtains
That rise and fall”

Pollard sings. Now, he’s not getting anywhere near Ramones territory in being evident, but this is still open for a man that made his bones being a bit removed. But then there’s

”I’m knocking it out on kazoo
“I can’t get next to you”
I radiate the moon
The quintessential lycanthrope
A double bass buffoon
A zig zag path is logical”

in “Grand Ceremonial Jester”. Pollard said the next GBV album will be a bit different in approach. They have been recording live in the studio so it will be a curious to see what the sound will be like

For Fans Of : I mean Guided By Voices, I guess..lol

Francis of Delirium - Run, Run, Pure Beauty

Jana Bahrich, born 2001 or 2002, performs under the name Francis of Delirium and is a Luxembourgish indie-rock musician. As a child she played French horn and rented a banjo so she could learn to play “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” She said she has been influenced by both Sufjan Stevens and Pearl Jam. Two very disparate acts. The influences do show through. In the confessional writing of Stevens and the arena rock of Pearl Jam. She has released three EPs and one other album, 2024’s Lighthouse.

Run, Run, Pure Beauty is her brand-new album, and it shows and artist who is expanding her sonic palette while honing her songwriting. The album opens with “Aliens”, a song that Jana says is about the Earth after humans have destroyed themselves. However, with lyrics like

”Well I don’t wanna know what’s coming for me no

Disaster is knocking at my door

I’ll stay inside & bolt myself in

Lay on the floor

If it’s my time

I’d rather not have to know”

One has to wonder if Bahrich is referencing a more current feeling, one of doom in today’s world. The album has an overall pall that seeps through every song. Not a “feel good” album and that’s okay. It’s an album that commands a listen. Not something you will be playing in the background while you are doing stuff around the house. If you do, you will find yourself stopping and listening.

Sound wise, Francis of Delirium does a fantastic job of living in the 90’s rock world while still sounding modern. Bahrich plays all the guitars herself. She does the majority of production as well. She has a partner in crime, Chris Hewett, whole also handles production. Denis Schumacker on drums is a constant as well.

For Fans Of : Lana Del Ray, 90’s geetar, Kacey Musgraves with a rock band

Beck Zegans - Engraving of Armor

Beck Zegans has been a session musician, live sound engineer and spent time a large portion of her life playing guitar for Palehound and releasing music under the name of Goo. Based in Queens, Zegans was already a deep player in the Indie scene there. Engraving Of Armor is the debut solo album from Zegans. She is joined on the album by Alex McKay (Nation of Language) and Julian Faber (Remember Sports, Ava Luna), both of whom share coproduction credits. Zegans is also joined by El Kempner, the main force in Palehound, who contributes guitar work to the album.

Zegans and company made the album through a series of collaborative efforts from the artists in their home studios. Zegans would send her guitar demos around with some basic drum tracks around and the others would add their own flavor. Taking about a year to make, Engraving Of Armor, opens with Zegans singing quietly over a synth and a simple melody over guitar singing about grief over a failed relationship. The song, “When You Were In My Bed” then opens up to Fader’s drums creating a rolling beat and overdriven guitar being the main drivers. Zegans voice never waivers though. It stays in the quiet register and creates a calm in a storm. “Record Tamer” follows and one can’t help but get the feeling of Radiohead in the sound of the track. With Zegans soft vocal delivery, the comparison seems easy. “Love In The End Times” is a bit of a 90’s alt-rocker. “I Want You” is Zegans version of a “rocker”. Neu! rhythms with a wall of sound behind it. “Slither” conjures up dark version of REM with maybe a bit of Mazzy Star thrown in. “Riddle”, near the end of the album utilizes synth as a lead instrument and creates a nice tension between the music and Zegans vocals.

For Fans Of : Breeders, Sonic Youth, 90’s

Douglas Diamond - Welcome To Diamondland

Douglas Diamond was born in the wrong decade. The Stockholm-based artist should have been hanging out with Bowie or Lou Reed in the 70’s. That being said, we are just glad that Diamond is currently making music for us.

There isn’t a whole lot out there about Douglas Diamond and he prefers it that way. There is a lore that is being built-up about the mystery of the artist. What we do know is that he has been a session musician for Skaraborgs Sista Riddare, Leo leone, and CIVIL POLIS. He tours with CIVIL POLIS as well as Fred Soila & The Karaoke Machine and La La Superstar. Not only a session musician and touring bassist, but he also has his own record label as well, Dream On, which Welcome To Diamondland was released on.

The music on Welcome To Diamondland reflects this aesthetic love of the 70’s and that sound. However, it’s not pure nostalgia-bait on the release. Diamond weaves in samples and modern studio tricks to achieve his vision. Many of the tracks almost sound 90s-Manchester coded in that you could almost hear Happy Mondays in many of these tracks. The album opener “All Night” or the track “Vice” definitely fits this style. Two of the more obvious 70’s inspired songs, “Chemtrail Love” and “Modern Connection” channel Pink-Floyd and 70’s electric piano, respectively. “(Jesus) Take The Wheel” is a bit of groovy funk in an album that leans mostly Prog’ish. In fact, the last tune, “Stockcity Blues,” ends the album with a wash of acoustics and synths recalling the more experimental tunes of the 70’s.
Through 7 tracks, Diamond creates a world of characters. As his Bandcamp states,

“A bartender in a cowboy hat with an unknown past serves homemade drinks. A crooner sings his million-dollar hits to an audience that does not hear. A full-time lover suddenly finds himself in trouble. Chemtrails draw their lines across the sky like a bad idea you can no longer back out of.”

It will be fun to see where Diamond takes his career

For Fans Of : Bowie, Prog, Bucket hats

Thomas Dollbaum - Birds of Paradise

Thomas Dollbaum has a famous drummer. Well, when they recorded the album, MJ Lenderman was the guitarist for Wednesday and had yet to release Manning Fireworks. I mention this to highlight the fraught trail Dollbaum has carved as an artist. Both his debut album, Wellswood (2022) and a follow-up EP, Drive All Night (2025) took much too long to record and release he felt so he went and recorded Birds of Paradise (2026) in four days. But again, the album was recorded in 2024 but issues with his former label delayed the release until this year.

Dollbaum, who hails from Tampa, Florida studied for his MFA at University of New Orleans. His path of degreed poet to songwriter is evident in his songs that he writes. He writes about Florida and the characters that inhabit the southern state. Dollbaum is joined on Birds of Paradise by the aforementioned Lenderman on drums, Nick Corson, and Josh Halper. They all trade off instruments on different songs.

The ten song collection doesn’t stray too much from the Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Florry recipe. Opening with a gently picked guitar, Dollbaum sings “The older I get, the more I do magical thinking” in the song “Visitation”. Dollbaum is referencing a mellowing with age. He sings about not “believing in such things” but the visitations from cardinals feel like something more meaningful. “Dozen Roses” follows and brings the louder guitars and a longing for an old friend. “Rabbits” comes next and Dollbaum sings about being a kid and chasing rabbits. The darkness in his writing comes through when you realize he’s singing about killing rabbits with an iron bar. Lenderman provides backing vocals on “Coyote” another tune that is about a relationship that the narrator is longing for.

Dollbaum is a fantastic lyricist, and it shows on this album

For Fans Of : MJ Lenderman, NC, flannel

Unwed Sailor has been Jonathan Ford’s project since he left Pedro The Lion and Roadside Monument in 1998. Originally formed in Seattle and now based in Tulsa, the current line-up Johnathon Ford (bass, keys, guitar), Matt Putman (drums), and David Swatzell (guitar) take us on a trip through 90’s alt rock, dream pop, Americana and everything in between. It’s a great example of how a song, well crafted, doesn’t necessarily need vocals to convey a message or a feeling.

The album opens with “Truest Sentence.” Ford’s use of the bass as a lead instrument comes through immediately as the guitars are used sparingly. It’s the bass and drums driving the song. The track also sets the stage for the sound of the rest of the album. The track opens up and pulls you in. “West Coast Prism” follows and Ford described it as drawing on a deep fondness for the landscapes of the American West Coast, including “the ocean, surfing, redwoods, and rocky coastline of Oregon.” “Don’t Let Go” is next and it builds on that 90’s alt rock sound. It’s at this point that I would be remiss to not mention the influence of The Cure here. These songs all have leanings to Messrs. Smith and gang in their approach. In fact, I was telling a friend that the album sounds like all the intros to Cure songs. And I don’t mean this in a negative way. The Cure have a habit of playing the entire song in their intros and this is what several songs feel like. Not all though. The tune “Punk Broke” sounds like it could have come off a Lucinda Williams album with the use of surf guitar and dream-like shimmer on the reverb.

It takes a lot for an instrumental album to be interesting for the entire length of the album. Unwed Sailor achieved that.

For Fans Of : Caspian, Hammock, instrumentals

sssiv - sssiv 2

Obviously with a name like sssiv, there is a backstory. The Copenhagen group all met at an impromptu jam session at a studio and resulted in a four-day recording session that led to their first album. The name comes from the first letters of their names, Sara Mou Mouritzen on drums, percussion, and vocals; Stephen Burns on bass, guitar, and vocals; and Sasha Bay Neierdi on guitar, bass, and vocals. The band centers their approach on improvisation and spontaneity. Their first album released in December of 2024, sssiv 1, was a mix of improvisational jams and composed pieces. The new EP, sssiv 2, follows the same mix; However, the band describes their new EP as “the most formal recording session we’ve done to date.” The music was still recorded live in their rehearsal space - their ‘home’ studio “where we always play and practice.”
The music itself represents a bit of a step-up in production and support. Signing to Pink Cotton Candy Records, the sound has gotten tighter and a little more polished. They still recorded the EP in their practice spot, but this time worked with a producer (Benedicte Pierleoni) and did some pre-production for the EP.

Mixing dreamy pop with shoegaze, the EP checks in at 20 minutes. The first tune “all the time” opens the EP and immediately on is drawn in by the propelling bass and drums. The guitars provide a lilting melody over top of the movement. “summer rain” follows as an interlude as experiment in sound layering. “summer vibe 2026” is the next tune and seems an extension of the interlude. “ask for better” checking in at over 4 minutes is the longest song on the EP. It provides an almost Lynchian-feel to their music.
sssiv are a genuinely interesting band in the current underground landscape — a rare group whose process (long-form improv collapsed into song form) is legible in the finished music rather than just a press-release talking point. The move from self-releasing on False Harmonics Records to Pink Cotton Candy Records for sssiv 2 is worth watching; it’s a small but real sign of momentum.

For Fans Of : Hand Habits, Hovvdy, Florist

Future Teens - Still Life

“Seems like a pretty fucking shameful way to die. Outside the worst venue you’ve played in a while” is the way Future Teens album Still Life begins. It’s not often that a band can (or tries) to coin their own genre but Future Teens have done it. “Bummer pop” is the term that Daniel Radin came up with as a bit of a joke. The conceit was a high school band that reformed in their 20’s but was still playing the same juvenile songs. Radin then met guitarist Amy Hoffman on Tinder, where they “exchanged” musical ideas. Their very first release was 25 floppy discs. It sold out. The band’s self-coined genre tag — “bummer pop” — became its calling card: a descriptor for tracks dealing in romantic frustrations, misfortunes, and miscommunications. The result were the 2016 EP Holiday Favorites and the 2017 EP, Hard Feelings. The band’s lineup has evolved over the years. At their most active, they were a four-piece — guitarists/vocalists Amy Hoffman and Daniel Radin, drummer Colby Blauvelt, and bassist Maya Mortman. More recently, following the departure of Mortman, the band has functioned as a trio, with Hoffman taking over bass duties. The current core is Amy, Daniel, and Colby.

Still Life is their fourth full-length album. Radin and Hoffman, being ten years down the road in the band, are not singing about adolescence anymore (if they ever did) but the decisions one has to make as they make their way through life. The aforementioned album opener, “Half Loser” hears Hoffman singing about not “wanting to be a loser again.” “Unmade Bed” is a song about losing a loved one and the grief that comes from that. Trans identity is explored in “Double Down.” Both Radin and Hoffman trade off vocals on the album to great effect.

Still Life is the work of a band that has stopped playing small. The bummer pop tag still fits — this is music about being a mess, about the gap between who you are and who you wanted to be — but the record reaches for something more serious than that label usually implies. It’s an album about sobriety and grief and identity and the stubborn, unremarkable courage it takes to keep showing up. At 35 minutes it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and there isn’t a throwaway track on it.

For Fans Of : Illuminati Hottie, Ratboys, ennui

Growing up in Houston together, Alejandro Skalany, Matt Serefian and Atticus Lopez were all friends and making music together. They were doing backyard DIY shows and worked on various projects until Serefian moved to New Orleans and began attending Loyola University. Skalany, who was in Boston at the time, was then convinced to relocate to NOLA. The pair then went to work on Lopez and convinced him to move south as well. They all moved in together and Pope was born.

They released their first EP, Known Weed Smoker in 2013. Full length albums, Fiction (2015), True Talent Champion(2017) followed. The band took some time off before returning with the 2020 EP, The Lunchbox. Establishing themselves as active during the pandemic, Pope released an EP, Super Sonic and a set of singles in 2022.

The brand-new release, BFM, or “Big Fucking Music” is the band’s most realized album to date. Indeed, both Serefian and Skalany played in New Orleans band Donovan Wolfington, and that band satisfied the more punk leanings and Pope was the “indie” music outlet. Donovan Wolfington dissolved in the early 2020’s so they now could concentrate on Pope full time. The result is an album that incorporates both the noisier, and quieter sides of the three. In addition, Skalany has said, that in the past, a majority of the writing would be done on the road. This would mean the songs had a more “manic” feel to them being around a live setting. On BFM, there is time to let the songs breathe and take shape. The song “Nothing for Nothing” highlights this. Guest vocals from Julie Steiner of Ratboys are sung over acoustic guitars and background noise. This is followed by “SOLU”, a slowed-down tape experiment of a song.

Over 13 songs, Pope defines who they are as a band in 2026. It’s a great place to be

For Fans Of : 90’s rock, heartfelt music, jangle

Genre is death - ‘Attractive People’

In an Atlanta suburban skate park, Genre is death was formed, well, not immediately. Ty Varesi and Tayler Lee first met at the skate park and Varesi invited Lee to a Halloween party. The pair became friends. Varesi had been playing in punk bands since he was a pre-teen asked Lee is she wanted to learn the bass and they bonded over a love of doom metal. They played together for four years and a handful of shows when they decided to make a change. In 2023, they relocated to New York City. They also dropped the doom side of their music and grabbed a drum machine to provide the beats. The result is a sound that moves beyond doom metal and lands squarely in the post-punk or noise rock category.

The first album, Talk (2024), opens with a minute of noise, announcing its intentions. The new album Attractive People announces its intentions as well. The opening track “Heaven Hits The Wall” begins with a droning guitar playing a single chord until both Varesi and Lee start singing.

Esoteric lyrics are chanted more than sung. The guitar keeps playing a dissonant chord as Lee’s bass work creates tension in the back. On the title track, Attractive People, Lee’s bass takes center stage. The driving bass line creates motion while Varesi’s guitar work paints an almost 50’s-style surf sound. “You don’t have a life; you just want to be attractive” Varesi and Lee sing. Behind the knobs is Martin Bisi, one of the great producers of the New York scene. Bisi has recorded Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, Bill Laswell among others. In fact, Genre is death has been opening for Live Skull and Lydia Lunch, both Bisi alumni. The band rerecorded the title track from their first album Talk and called it ‘Talk (Bisi’s Version).” Obviously trusting the famed producer to rerecord their old material. It works.

For Fans Of : Jon Spencer, Sonic Youth, uncomfortableness

Weird Nightmare - Hoopla

Weird Nightmare was not named after the pandemic insists Alex Edkins. It was just the working title he came up with while being stuck at home with his son all day.

Edkins is the singer and guitarist for METZ, the Toronto-based band. Releasing 5 albums from 2012 ‘til 2024. After the release of Up On Gravity Hill in 2024, METZ decided to take an indefinite hiatus. This allowed Edkins to embrace a more melodic approach to his music. Comparisons can be made between The Replacements and Teenage Fanclub in his approach to Weird Nightmare. The music is definitely on the poppier side than that of METZ. Weird Nightmare’s first full length album in 2022, the self-titled Weird Nightmare, hinted at this. One can hear the blossoming of a more jangly sound. It still had the METZ snarl, most notably through the production. The self-titled album has much more of a DIY feel.

The new album, Hoopla, was produced by Spoon’s Jim Eno and it shows in the hooks the album delivers. Big choruses, power chords, and upfront vocals all make this album more sing-along friendly. “The intention is to get straight to that endorphin rush that comes with a hook or a chorus, and just not overcomplicate the songs,” says Edkins in a Brooklyn Vegan article.
This is highlighted in the third song on the album, “Baby Don’t,” an infinitely catchy chorus and harmonies to spare, this would not have been out of place on any number of jangle-pop bands of the 90’s..or the current crop of young bands coming out of Chicago. “Forever Elsewhere” is the lead single off the album. The song is forward in the refrain “Love, it will come,” as Edkins says it’s the most hopeful song he’s ever written. The album, and the band, benefit from the work of Eno.

For Fans of : Power Pop, Teenage Fanclub, Rickenbackers

Florry - Smells Like…Florry Live

One of my bigger concert regrets is not seeing Florry yet. I have a soft spot for country twinged slacker rock and there has been no lack of that lately. Between the Wednesday’s and MJ Lenderman’s of the world, there has been no lack of guitars, vocals that are mumbled, and pedal steel. What sets Florry apart is they seem to have a lot of fun doing it. There is a joy that comes from their music…and they rock. Francie Medosch leads the group and provides many of the guitar theatrics. Between her leads and what I consider, the beginnings of iconic solos, she colors the songs as much as she plays them. Her voice barks, screams, cracks and provides a counter to all the ruckus that Florry brings live.

Medosch is the obvious focal point, but Florry is definitely a collaborative effort nowadays. The band now includes Jon Cox (Sadurn, Son of Barb) on pedal steel, John Murray on electric guitar, Collin Dennen on bass, Will Henriksen on fiddle, Katya Malison (Doll Spirit Vessel) on Vox, and Joey Sullivan (Bark Culture) on drums. Based out of Philadelphia, they have three long players under their belt. Last year’s Sounds Like… ended up on many year-end lists. The current release “Smells Like…Florry Live” is a Bandcamp cassette only release. Well worth the price of admission. Through fourteen songs (The cover of “Passenger Side” with Kurt Vile is on the cassette only) the band tears through their catalog playing selections from all three albums. The sound quality is good but don’t expect a pristine live recording. There are distortions and little issues but that’s what makes Florry such a great band. They reside in the immediate. The music itself is not manic or hurried, it is just that Florry makes music that is meant to be enjoyed as it is played. This album will be a summer soundtrack for me

For Fans Of : Lucinda Wiliams, Wednesday, jams

Friko - Something Worth Waiting For

Friko formed in Chicago in 2019 as a trio. Niko Kapetan, Luke Stamos, and Bailey Minzenberger all being graduates of Evanston Township High School. Stamos left the band in 2022 after the release of their second EP, Whenever Forever, two leaving only Kapetan and Minzenberger. The duo was signed to ATO Records. The resulting album, Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here (2024) garnered critical acclaim and was on many year-end lists. Following the release of Where We’ve Been… Friko expanded out to a 4-piece by adding guitarist Korgan Robb and bassist David Fuller. The new album features all four members.

Something Worth Waiting For is an outstanding sophomore effort. Recorded in Los Angeles and produced by John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen, Mannequin Pussy, and Mogwai), the album builds on the first album’s momentum. One notices immediately, the sound being tightened and cleaned up a bit. Congelton did not take a belt-sander to Friko’s lo-fi charm but rather gave it a little direction and purpose. The themes of life and traveling permeate the album. The song “Hot Air Balloon” describes a situation waking up outside an Albuquerque Cracker Barrel during the city’s hot air balloon festival. Kapetan’s writing reflects the changes that Friko has experienced since the success of their debut album, growing out of comfortable scene that nurtured them and taking that next step .

The music of Something Worth Waiting For has expanded for Friko as well. To be sure, all the markers of “indie album” are still there but have been buttressed by bigger sound. Everything from noise-rock to 70’s-era easy listening is represented on this album. Congleton keeps all of this in control and in-hand. The album never feels performative. All the songs sound like they are songs first and (((vibes))) second.

For Fans Of : Bright Eyes, Horsegirl, Chicago

April + VISTA - Traditional Noise

April + VISTA is the creative partnership of vocalist and multi-instrumentalist April George and producer/composer Matthew “VISTA” Thompson. April, raised in Virginia, brings vocals, piano, and violin to the project, while Maryland native VISTA handles production and engineering. Rooted in the DMV, their sound draws from a wide constellation of influences — trip-hop, R&B, jazz, and indie rock — all filtered through a distinctly alternative soul lens.

The two crossed paths at Hampton University without ever really meeting — just orbiting the same social circles. Their actual connection came down to a single SoundCloud message shortly after graduation. April had stumbled onto VISTA’s beats through a mutual friend and reached out. They met at a Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., and quickly discovered a shared musical DNA — Portishead, Radiohead, the kind of music that leaves a mark. “We realized we liked the same musicians and said, ‘We need to make an album right now,’” Thompson recalled.

VISTA’s production journey started in high school after Kanye’s The College Dropout moved him to download FL Studio and start making beats with a friend at Friendly High School in Maryland. April’s musical upbringing was more formal — raised in Virginia Beach in a household where her grandmother made learning an instrument non-negotiable. Piano came first, then violin, then viola on her own terms, and eventually she was writing all of her own string arrangements.

After more than a decade of EPs, April + VISTA have finally released their debut full-length. The album was originally going to be called Traditional Noise for Anxious Adults — a project built around finding comfort in the music of their formative years. But what they created resists easy categorization, weaving orchestral arrangements, electronic production, and rock instrumentation into something that feels familiar and entirely its own at once.

Every song traces back to April’s personal journal entries. Consumed by the idea of documentation — of how the art we make becomes proof of our time here — she leaned into vulnerability throughout an intense period of healing. “My goal was to use themes like nostalgia, tradition, and memory to discuss heavy topics like depression, racism, and the oppressive nature of capitalism, without sounding preachy,” she explains. “I want people who are hurting and struggling to know that they’re not alone.”

For Fans Of : Portishead, Massive Attack, Beats

Acetone formed as a band in 1992 from three core members of the group Spinout. The band was Richie Lee on bass, Mark Lightcap on guitar, and Steve Hadley on drums. Richie Lee took his own life on July 23^rd, 2001, effectively ending the band.

Hailing from Los Angeles, Acetone released 4 studio albums, Cindy (1993), If You Only Knew (1996), Acetone (1997), and York Blvd. (2001). The live album I’ve Enjoyed As Much Of This As I Can Stand - Live at The Knitting Factory, NYC: May 31, 1998 was originally released as a Record Store Day exclusive in 2024. The record documents the final night of a long tour when the band was at the height of their powers. It is now available on streaming services and is an excellent excuse to write about the band.

I discovered Acetone through a “What’s In My Bag?” episode from Amoeba Records with Steve Selvidge from The Hold Steady. He held up a copy of York Blvd. and declared his love. I listened to York Blvd. and also fell in love. The sound is laid back without being boring, urgent without sounding rushed, and intense without falling on the crutch of volume.

The live album is a testament to this sound. Guitar and bass work in and out of melody over the top of Hadley’s exquisite drumming. Opening with a cover of the Link Wray classic, “Rumble”, the band then turns to a burning version of “Cindy” off their self-titled EP. The live versions have a life to them that doesn’t come through on the studio versions. The rhythm section is more immediate and more willing to stretch the song out. The guitars tend to breathe a bit more live as well. In the studio, Acetone was very careful about sound. Live, they let their inner Crazy Horse take over.

In the end, it’s an excellent document of band that should have been bigger.

For Fans Of : Son Volt, Slow-Core, Neil Young

Teen Suicide- Nude descending staircase, headless

Teen Suicide, formed in 2009, is the project of Sam Ray. Ray has also worked with American Pleasure Club, Ricky Eat Acid, Julia Brown, and Starry Cat. Teen Suicide has had several members throughout the years but since 2018, has been the work of Ray and wife, Kitty Pryde. Early Teen Suicide music featured lo-fi production and buried vocals. In 2016, they released It’s the Big Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir the Honeypot. The songs became longer, bigger, and more adventurous. This record was a comeback album from an earlier breakup announcement. They had such a hard time marketing the name Teen Suicide that they briefly became American Pleasure Club. That lasted from 2017-2022. Ray brought the controversial name back. Ray had had a serious asthma attack and an ICU stay and that brought the morality themes back but with more maturity.

Teen Suicide always felt on an edge, that at any minute it come all come apart. This album has more confidence and that comes through in the production. Everything is bigger and more dynamic. Their most “studio” album they have ever made. Ray’s writing has aged and the recent health scares of both Ray and Pryde has brought a new perspective to the writing. The opening track, “Anhedonia” announces that immediately. Ambiance gives way to crashing guitars and heavy post-rock sounds. “Idiot” feels like classic Teen Suicide but updated with the newer and more pointed sound. “Living Death” calls out to Radiohead or 90’s art-rock.

The expanded use of Kitty Ray has also helped the group step forward. In the past, Sam Ray’s influence would dominate and feel like only his project. Kitty splitting the vocal duties consistently makes the album feel much more like a band than a solo project.

For Fans Of : Heavy Alex G, Car Seat Headrest, My Bloody Valentine

Matt Corby - Tragic Magic

Matt Corby has had quite the career. Born in 1990, he became nationally known as a teen finalist on Australian Idol. He could have used this as a springboard to pop success, but Corby had a different trajectory in mind. Intentionally distancing himself from “manufactured reality-show artist”, Corby spent years developing an authentic sound. His debut album, Telluric (2016) was the first evidence of the serious music turn that Corby made. Psychedelic soul mixes with layered production in his move beyond acoustic ballads. Rainbow Valley (2018) and Everything’s Fine (2023) followed. Corby’s voice is the focus of everything. It is the main instrument in everything he does.

Tragic Magic is Corby’s new album. In the thirteen songs, Corby writes with less a linear narrative and more of an emotional state. The album opener, King of “Denial”, is a song about self-deception and avoidance. “Is It Healthy” and “Big Ideas “follow. “Is It Healthy” explores relational imbalance while “Big ideas” is about ambition clashing with real life. “Big Ideas” also lifts the energy early on. These are followed by “Know It All”, “Stained”, and “Burn It Down.” “Know It All” explores grief and self-examination. “Stained” is about wearing the marks of the past.

The instrumentation on the album stands out as well and is probably what sucked me in first. I am a sucker for great bass tone and Tragic Magic delivers in spades. In fact, all the musical choices made on the album serve the overall feel rather than try to stand out as showy.
Whether it’s the earlier acoustic intense, emotional outburst writing or the later grooviness and subtle songwriting of these later years, Corby keeps delivering.

For Fans Of : Bon Iver, James Blake, Singer-Songwriters

Gnod is a British psychedelic collective that has been making music since 2006. Gnod’s discography is vast and deliberately messy, reflecting their fluid, collective nature. I count at least twenty releases with various live albums, CD-Rs, split singles and other ephemera behind the name. This speaks to the ever-changing nature of the project. Founding members Paddy Shine and Chris Haslam remain core, with key long-term contributors including Marlene Ribeiro, Alex Macarte, and Andy Blundell.

The Chronicles of Gnowt (Vol.1) is the first of three planned releases this year. Shine spoke about the new album on Bandcamp where the band keeps an active presence. Shine said they went into a neighborhood studio with producer John “Spud” Murphy (Lankum, Black Midi, Caroline) for six days and the resulting sessions resulted in a wealth of material.

“Working with Spud was probably the best studio experience we’ve had” Paddy said. “He was open to all our ideas, facilitated them the best he could and always had great suggestions. The vibe was right and things just flowed”.

The first installment, Chronicles Of Gnowt (Vol. 1) is mostly instrumental. Leaning into the meditative side of Gnod, the album eschews the noisy past of Gnod for the most part. The grooves are still there but with a little less, friction. “Three Trees (Part 1)” opens the album with a folk-like acoustic guitar with ambient sounds in the background. “Three Trees (Part 2)” has the same feel and bookends the first section of the album nicely. Between the “Trees”, we have “Shadow Mirror” and “Neptune” which finds Gnod traversing familiar terrain. Doomy and atmospheric, both songs create a heavy feel.

The last two tracks, “All Tunnel and No Light” and “Ekstasis” close the album. With a combined 20 minutes between the two, this is where Gnod gets a bit noisy and pays homage to their earlier work. “All Tunnel..” slowly builds on almost an Earth-like momentum until ending as guitars come cascading down. I kept getting “Sleep from their first album” vibes. “Ekstasis” the closer, is a drone tune that establishes a bass line and works off it. At a runtime of 12 minutes, it works in electronic noises around the propelling bass riff.

For Fans Of : Throbbing Gristle, Can, NEU!

Brown Horse - Total Dive

Brown Horse sounds like they should have been cutting their teeth through the various dive bars in middle America rather than the pubs in Norfolk, England. They formed in 2018 as a folk quartet playing covers in the local pubs. With the pandemic shutting everything down in 2020, they regrouped in 2022 and this led to a fuller, more electric sound. Patrick Turner (vocals, guitar), Emma Tovell (bass, lap steel), Nyle Holihan (guitar), and Rowan Braham (organ, piano) were joined by Ben Rodwell (drums) and the current iteration of Brow Horse was formed. The band shares songwriting credits across all the albums. Braham said in a 2026 interview that “We gain so much by having multiple songwriters… the combination maybe most exciting.”

Total Dive is the result of all those dates in pubs and endless…kilometers?...in the van. Produced and mixed by Owen Turner at Sickroom Studios and Bam Bam Studios (both in Norfolk), with live engineered takes by Harry Jordan and mastering by Scoops Dardaris, the album feels like a perfect distillation of what Brown Horse is trying to achieve. It’s definitely Americana but with a British twist. The guitars bounce from 90’s edginess to warm tones of classic rock. Themes from Brown Horse’s writing center on small town disaffectedness and loss. The first song “Sorrow Reigns” describes a downtown area that is familiar to many small towns in America (or England). It’s a vision of a stagnant progress. The music evokes Son Volt or Drive-By Truckers. “Comeback Landing” references Bruce Springsteen in what may be the only “too obvious” moment on the album. Brown Horse continues throughout the album with loss, isolation (emotional/physical/psychological), defiant dark humor, weary rumination, and cautious optimism. It’s poetic nihilism with a glass-half-full undercurrent—small revelations in the mundane, the surreal glow of ordinary objects, and the endurance of staying with feelings instead of escaping them.

For Fans Of : Son Volt, Americana, Flannel Shirts

Pictish Trail - Life Slime

Pictish Trail is the project of Johnny Lynch, a Scottish singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer. After graduating from University of St. Andrews, Lynch got involved with the Fence Collective, a Scottish indie music scene hub. This led him to form his own record imprint, Lost Map. Lost Map and Lynch has been a key figure in the UK independent music community releasing and supporting acts such as Belle & Sebatian, Mogwai, Pavement, Sea Power, and KT Tunstall. Lynch runs the label and lives on the remote Isle of Eigg, which has been community-owned since the 90’s. He told The Guardian that living there is a “dream” that still feels magical.

Pictish Trail is not the usual singer-songwriter album in that Lynch avoids the tropes that come with the genre. You won’t find any acoustic redemption songs on Life Slime. Life Slime is his sixth full-length album. It is a “goo-soaked swirl” about decay, renewal, personal tumult, and things falling apart then re-forming in weird new shapes. Written amid a relationship break-up (“I was going through a bit of a slimy time,” he’s said), tt balances woozy synth-pop, motorik propulsion, intimate acoustics, and absurd pathos. The title-track video famously features Lynch covered in 170 liters of slime. “Hold It”, the album’s opener, sets the album’s tone with rudimentary loops, gently strummed guitar, and auto-tuned/tweaked vocals. It’s about the fragility of perfect moments—the impossibility of truly “holding” time or happiness before it inevitably crumbles. “Life Slime”, the title track (and a key single) features squelching analogue synths, looping phased beats, a whisper of acoustic guitar, and a rousing chorus. It’s a weary acceptance of time marching forward, the end of a relationship, emotional numbness, and life slipping away “like so much slime.” A highlight track for me was “Another Way.” It moves with a LCD Soundsystem or Tame Impala feel. At 8 minutes, it’s also the album’s longest track. Verses have lightly doubled, conspiratorial vocals; the chorus soars with lines like “you move me like a stone, softly breaking / you move me like a stone, gently waking.” Overall, Life Slime feels like a refined synthesis: the emotional directness and folk heart of Scottish indie (Fence/King Creosote lineage), the textural playfulness of Tunng/Hot Chip electronics, and the colorful psychedelic absurdity of Flaming Lips/Beck—filtered through Lynch’s isolated Eigg perspective and “slimy time” personal catharsis..

For Fans Of : Beck, Flaming Lips, Remote Scottish Isles

(My band is playing shows the next two weeks so my attention is elsewhere. So enjoy a wrap-up of the first quarter)

Twisted Teens - Blame The Clown

Reviewed Here

Place Position - Went Silent

Reviewed Here

Cult Objects - Amulet

Reviewed Here

Station Model Violence - Station Model Violence

Reviewed Here

Missed Dunks at Summer League - Fared Well

Reviewed Here

Clearwater Swimmers - Seasons (EP)

Reviewed Here

Courtney Barnett is a name that should be familiar to anyone reading this newsletter. The Australian artist has been releasing music since 2012. Her debut album, Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit (2015) gathered critical acclaim and won her numerous industry awards that year. 2017 found her collaborating with Kurt Vile on Lotta Sea Ice. Two more albums, 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel and 2021’s Things Take Time, Take Time followed.
Courtney Barnett’s Creature of Habit (2026) is a strong, comforting return — her most cohesive and satisfying album since her 2015 breakthrough Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.

It’s a record about breaking (or at least acknowledging) personal patterns, self-doubt, the comfort of habits, and the messy courage required for change — themes drawn from Barnett’s move to Los Angeles, closing her Milk! Records label and reflecting on life in transition. The tone is warm, witty, and often sunny on the surface, even as the lyrics dig into anxiety, overthinking, and feeling stuck (”I got my head sorted / sort of”). Production (with John Congleton, Marta Salogni, and others) gives it a lived-in, jangly indie-rock feel with crunchy guitars, tasteful synth touches, strong rhythms, and occasional psychedelic or ‘80s-flavored edges — more energetic and guitar-forward than her last album but never forced. The songwriting remains Barnett’s greatest strength: conversational, observational lyrics that feel like smart conversations with a friend who’s articulate about the mundane and profound at the same time. She balances humor, vulnerability, and insight without over-explaining. Musically, it synthesizes elements from her whole catalog — the jangle and distortion of early work, the melodic warmth of recent material, plus fresh textures — into something that feels complete rather than scattered. Creature of Habit isn’t a radical reinvention, but that’s the point — and its charm. It feels like Barnett has integrated everything she’s good at into a confident, inviting package: witty lyrics that nail everyday existential feelings, excellent guitar work, and melodies that stick with you. It’s jangly, thoughtful, and often fun, making it easy to return to repeatedly. If you loved her earlier energetic records but also appreciated the maturity of Things Take Time, this bridges them beautifully.

For Fans Of : Waxahatchee, Sharon Van Etten, jangle

Suep - Forever

SUEP’s debut album Forever is a breezy, eclectic, and highly enjoyable 10-track indie record that clocks in at a lean ~27 minutes. It’s the full-length arrival for the South London five-piece, who have been building buzz in the UK underground scene (including ties to the Gob Nation collective) with playful, hook-driven songs that draw from a wide swath of influences without feeling scattered. SUEP (fronted by Georgie Stott, formerly of Porridge Radio on keys/vocals) trades some of that band’s post-punk intensity for something lighter and more danceable, leaning into early-’80s vibes: dubby post-punk, soulful girl-group melodies, jangly synth-pop, garage rock, pub rock, and even touches of country. The band describes their approach as “car boot sale” pop—rummaging through music history’s jumble and reassembling the fun bits into something artful and unpretentious. The result is snappy songcraft with straight-to-the-heart lyrics, melodic earworms, and a loose joie de vivre. It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel or chase trends; it’s just a confident, charming collection that wears its influences fashionably. A couple of standout tracks include “Highway II,” which is a glistening synth-pop with a Marr-like jangle. “The Rain” offers a slinky bassline and surf rock.

The album dips into country, synthpop, garage, post-punk, and pub rock while keeping a consistent signature: melodic hooks and tight structures. Forever is a strong, refreshing debut. If you enjoy bands like Porridge Radio’s more playful side, or acts mining ‘80s indie/post-punk with modern wit (think elements of The Tubs or other Gob Nation affiliates). Perfect for sunny drives, house parties, or just lifting the mood.

For Fans Of : Tubs, 80’s New Wave, Early Talking Heads

Helicopter Leaves - Sabrina Nickels

Helicopter Leaves’ Sabrina Nickels is the sophomore album from Anthony Vaccaro’s solo project. Vaccaro is best known as the guitarist and co-songwriter for the Chicago indie band Beach Bunny. The album is named after a childhood family friend, Sabrina Nickels, who died of cancer and profoundly influenced Vaccaro by taking him to shows and sharing music as a kid. It serves as an earnest tribute, blending bittersweet reflection with hopeful undertones. Vaccaro wrote and performed all instruments himself. Recording took place at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio and Rosebud Studios. The music delivers dreamy yet crunchy guitar rock with strong power pop, indie pop, and jangle elements—think big hooks, fuzzy warmth, and dynamic shifts. Tracks range from deceptively bright/clap-along openers and boisterous sugary refrains to lilting fairytale moments, experimental synth touches, and rawer garage/shoegaze-leaning closers. Vaccaro’s relatively delicate vocals sit nicely in a twee/indie pop space while the guitars and hooks stay bold and unbashful.

The album leads off with “It Really Never Did.” It’s a power pop about outgrowing relationships and inspiration hitting hard. “Feeling Nothing Is Worse” follows and explores emotional numbness, sobriety, and missing lost friends. “Sorry From Now On” is about self-blame, apologies and life’s cycles. “Moreoff More Off Than On” is the lead single. With synths and distorted bass, it is a song about maturity, listening, and new eras. “NÜMBER GIRL” and “What’s One More Place?” are the rockers on the album. Moving through the album, themes of relationships, family and vulnerability keep cropping up. In fact, that is the theme of the last song, “Self-Reliance”

Sabrina Nickels feels like a confident coming-of-age statement for both the artist and the project—personal without being navel-gazing, accessible yet layered. It balances nostalgia, regret, and forward motion in a way that feels genuine and relatable.

For Fans Of : Beach Bunny, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr

I’ve got a confession to make. This particular selection stepped on the scales. What I mean by that is that I loved their last album so much (The Clearwater Swimmers 2024) and didn’t have the newsletter going at that time so when they released something new, it was going to be an automatic choice. And so we have the Seasons EP.

Sumner Bright was writing acoustic demos and recording them under the name of “twitches” in the early 2020’s. As people who listened heard something that resonated with them in his writing, they encouraged Sumner to expand out the sound to a full band. Sander Casale (guitar), Timothy Graff (drums), and Connor Kennedy (bass) soon joined and formed Clearwater Swimmers proper. They released the self-titled Clearwater Swimmers in 2024. In my opinion, one of the best albums to come out that year.

Their sound is a combination of the best parts of Americana and Slow-Core. Guitars shimmer and stay minimal in chords and melody lines. The music is uncluttered in sound. Sumner’s vocals lie between Neil Young’s falsetto and Michael Stipe’s more talking vocals.

The Seasons EP was recorded on an 8-track tape machine in June of 2025. The EP feels a bit lighter than the debut album. That just may be due to the recording. There is a clarity to this production that the debut didn’t have. Think of it as a room that goes from cloudy to morning sun. Leading off the EP is “Seasons,” a slow burn that finds Bright singing about wanting to stay together with a (friend/lover). This song is the closest to the debut album in feel. “Landline” follows and Bright alludes to failure trying to accomplish an objective. It isn’t clear what the failure was so that is left up to the listener. “Engine” is Clearwater Swimmers’ version of a rocker, or as close as they are going to come. It has the slow burn of a Son Volt song. Jay Farrar is present in quite of bit of Bright’s work. The simmering and use of minor chords feels like it could have come right off of Trace. “Radio Flyer” closes up the EP and uses the allegory of the ubiquitous children’s wagon to describe all the history in one’s life.

For Fans Of : Neil Young, Son Volt, MJ Lenderman

The Leaf Library - After The Rain, Strange Seeds

The Leaf Library is a British band from London that formed in the mid-2000’s. Guitarist/Songwriter Matt Ashton’s previous group, Saloon, had split up and he began collaborating with vocalist Kate Gibson. They were joined by Gareth Jones on bass and Lewis Young on drums and this forms the core of The Leaf Library. They have several albums and EPs under their belt.
However, their fourth studio album, After The Rain, Strange Seeds easily their most immediate and melodic work to date.

On After the Rain…As ever, the band have drawn in their extended musical family. Guitarist Mike Cranny (Firestations) brings his live-band presence, James Underwood’s Iskra Strings return on four tracks with sumptuous arrangements by Daniel Fordham, Melinda Bronstein adds her unmistakable voice, and Will Twynham (Dimorphodons) contributes delicate harpsichord. They even welcomed Paddy Milner (Hammond organ) and Scott McKeon (guitar)—both currently in Tom Jones’ band—for a startlingly delicate, rolling crescendo on the closing track “There Was Always A Golden Age.”

Recorded across multiple studios between April 2022 and August 2023, After The Rain, Strange Seeds marks a deliberate step forward. The Leaf Library have pushed themselves into more traditional songwriting—more chords, more choruses—without losing the textural magic that has always defined them. The result is their most accomplished and affecting record yet. John McEntire’s mix lends a bold clarity to the meticulous arrangements, pulling the sound closer to how the band actually feels live than anything they’ve released before. It is the natural culmination of everything they’ve been reaching toward.

Bright, transcendent, yet blissfully intimate, After The Rain, Strange Seeds is The Leaf Library at their luminous best: a record that stares at the dying of the light and answers, softly but fiercely, with color, memory, and strange, stubborn hope.

For Fans Of : Yo La Tengo, Clientele, Early Stereolab

Grace Ives - Girlfriend

Grace Ives is a New York based indie pop artist. A bit out of my comfort zone for a pick for a Three From Last Week but that’s okay. That’s what this newsletter should be about.

Raised in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood by parents deep in the film and music industries (dad a cinematographer, mom a creative director), she was performing as a kid in a short-lived band with future indie star Frankie Cosmos through the School of Rock program. She studied graphic design at Maryland Institute College of Art before transferring to SUNY Purchase, where she started making music in her dorm room—initially inspired by M.I.A.’s groovebox energy and Mitski’s emotional directness, while pulling pop hooks from Britney Spears and Rihanna. One EP and three albums under her belt, Ives has been making music since 2016. The 2022 album Janky Star was her breakout album. After Janky Star (2022) blew up (Pitchfork Best New Music, Stereogum’s Best New Bands list, Jimmy Kimmel Live! performance of “Lullaby,” support slot for Lykke Li), the nonstop touring led to a full “crash out” in late 2023: heavy drinking, pushing people away, glamorous disarray that she’s now openly calling out. She then sobered up and moved to L.A. The result was 2026’s Girlfriend.

The album is definitely influenced by the move out west, as evidenced by the opening track “Now I’m”, where Ives describes her life in California and how she is happy. She visits this as well with the penultimate track on the album, “Garden.” She sings about finally knowing her worth and how it is not tied to a person anymore. She describes the end of what may be a toxic relationship. The last song on the album, “Stupid Bitches” sums up Ives new outlook on life, with the refrain in the lyrics, “…doesn’t hurt me anymore.”

The instrumentation on the album is widely varied with Ives programming drums as well as playing various instruments such as piano, guitar, mellotron etc. The award-winning producer Ariel Rechtshaid contributes as well as John Debold. Ives, Rechtshaid and Debold form the production nucleus.

For Fans Of : Kate Bush, Lana Del Ray

Missed Dunks at Summer League - Fared Well

Missed Dunks at Summer League is an indie rock project based in Memphis, Tennessee, led by Jordan Petersen-Kamp. Petersen-Kamp wrote all the songs, played most of the instruments, and recently relocated from Grand Rapids, Michigan—a move that heavily shaped the band’s debut album, Fared Well (released March 13, 2026, via Machine Duplication Recordings). The album explores themes of change, transition, acceptance, and bittersweet goodbyes to past lives or phases. Production and additional bass were handled by Spence Bailey, with percussion cameos from Elijah Poston (General Labor) and Zach Mitchell (Big Clown). Kendra Petersen-Kamp contributed the album art, layout, and photos, while Greg Obis mastered the record.

The album opens with the title track, “Missed Dunks at Summer League,” featuring a distinctive bass groove and several Sonic Youth-inspired jams—controlled chaos rather than full noise, with lyrics that introduce the bittersweet theme of leaving one life behind for another. The basketball dunk in a casual summer league serves as a metaphor for past experiences and history. “Miller’s Thumb” continues the Sonic Youth vibe as a reference point (not a direct copy), staying grounded within the song structure rather than veering into atonality. “Don’t Slip” brings the first real rocker, with lyrics emphasizing perseverance and staying present.A standout is “Mr. Fable’s Leaving Town,” a straightforward indie rock track driven by Petersen-Kamp’s lyrics. It critiques cultural homogenization driven by chain stores and corporate flattening, as seen in lines like:

“Olive burger, chocolate cake A late-century woolen space to thrive Go to church a code away Good thing the good Lord’s man enough to drive”

For Fans Of : Sonic Youth, 90s indie rock (with nods to influences like Built to Spill or Mountain Goats in the broader scene descriptions)

Night Moth - Night Moth

Night Moth is the project of Emery Spooner (they/them), who launched it in 2018 as a solo endeavor following their time in the Boston indie band Squitch, where Spooner was a central figure on guitar and vocals alongside drummer Denzil Leach and later bassist Kit Malmberg.

Early Night Moth releases were lo-fi and introspective, centering on personal themes like heartbreak, hope, and growth. The project’s self-titled 2026 album marks a shift to a full band, reuniting Spooner with former Squitch collaborators Leach (drums) and Malmberg (bass), plus Miles Chandler (from Clifford), forming a close-knit quartet.

Recorded live in a Charlestown loft apartment and DIY venue by producer/engineer Seth Engel, the album captures warm, intimate musical chemistry. As Spooner’s Bandcamp notes: “With acoustic versions written between 2021-2024, the eleven songs were arranged in practices in apartment bedrooms and layered-over voice memos… This is a record made by friends.”

The songs expand on Spooner’s earlier solo ideas with richer arrangements. Fans of Squitch will notice a tighter, less noisy sound here. The record blends personal and political elements, with anti-capitalist and liberatory undercurrents, while emphasizing friendship and joy in music-making—giving it a grounded, scene-rooted freshness rather than trend-chasing.

Opener “Blood Ties” builds dynamically, weaving personal reflection with broader commentary on desperation, reality, and connection (e.g., “Blood ties and flower wine and houses made out of clay / and rivers run wild”).

Standout track “Truly” shines with direct, sincere delivery, showcasing Spooner’s graceful lyricism at its peak in exploring authenticity in relationships and struggles.

For Fans Of : Pixies, slowcore, Angel Olsen.

Mt Fog - Every Stone is Green

Mt. Fog is an indie/art pop band based in Seattle, Washington. It began in 2019 as the solo/creative endeavor of Carolyn B., a singer and classically trained violinist. Fresh off a post-doctoral program, Carolyn found herself in an “artist” house with no internet in Olympia, Washington. Leading up to this moment, she had performed at early open mics, released a rough secret album (Giants Built This Blade, later pulled from the internet), then the public Hauntology Vol. 1 (September 2020 EP) and debut album Guide to the Unusual (July 2021).

By Spells of Silence (October 2022), the sound had sharpened into something critics hailed as a “sophomore gem,” blending Björk’s fragility with DIY groundedness (Seattle Times). What changed everything was inviting drummer Andy Sells and bassist Casey Rosebridge for a one-off vinyl release party after Spells of Silence. One show became monthly gigs, then a full band.

The band—Carolyn B. (vocals, synthesizer, violin, primary songwriter/lyricist), Andy Sells (drums, percussion), and Casey Rosebridge (bass)—fully embraces their full-band dynamic here, building on the evolution from Carolyn’s earlier solo-ish projects. Recorded at spots like Vertigo Studios and their own Rhythm Station, mixed/produced mostly by Carolyn with help from Andy and Casey, and mastered by Chuck Johnson, it captures a lush, textural sound that’s both intimate and expansive.

Influences run medieval-to-modern: Hildegard von Bingen’s viriditas (green life force/energy within us all—Carolyn even organized a mini festival around her); the Brontë sisters’ Gothic emotional universes (they call Every Stone is Green a “Gothic tale in the Brontë sisters’ sense”—not dark-wave, but feminine journeys through scary landscapes, ghosts, and heightened feeling); Gondal (their imaginary world); goblins; Björk (household poster; Carolyn loves the “gross, muddy footsteps” of Volta); prog; psychedelic dreams; and nature’s interconnectedness.

Carolyn B.’s voice is the album’s beating heart: acrobatic, nimbly dancing/leaping/darting/skipping through ethereal terrain with Kate Bush-like theatricality, Björk fragility/playfulness, Siouxsie Sioux edge, and operatic leaps. No guitars here—just sparse electronics, spectral synth grooves, cosmic jazz portals (ECM-inspired skips), ambient/Krautrock fringes, and earthy percussion (raindrop plops, mushroom rhythms). The trio’s locked-in yet freewheeling interplay feels organic: Andy’s sophisticated, unconventional drums and Casey’s skipping bass lines amplify Carolyn’s vision without overpowering it.

For Fans Of : Björk, Kate Bush, Brit Lit Classes

Formed in 2003 in London, Hey Colossus is a long-running project from childhood friends Joe Thompson (bass) and Robert Davis (guitar/vocals). After going through several different configurations, the lineup stabilized in 2020 to include Paul Sykes (lead vocals), Chris Summerlin (guitar), Rhys Llewellyn (drums), and Will Pearce (guitar/backing vocals). Heaven Was Wild is the band’s 15th album, recorded in a week playing live in the studio — according to their Bandcamp page.

I really like this approach for bands with a bit of legacy about them. Older acts can fall victim to overproduction and disappearing up their own arses (it’s why Andrew Watt has had such success with aging bands, coaxing them to “sound like themselves”). This is not an issue with Hey Colossus — they do, indeed, sound like themselves. The songs on Heaven Was Wild were reportedly played through a four-show live run before the band entered the studio, and it shows.

The album opens with a repeating chord and thunderous drums. “Cannibal Forecast” is first out of the gate and sets the tone: guitars and bass grind away beneath Sykes’s vocals, calling to mind Richard Butler of the Psychedelic Furs. The record doesn’t stray far from the post-punk lane. Songs like “Roses,” “Consequences,” and album closer “The Spider’s Line” all pay homage to the sound of Britain in the mid-eighties. More up-tempo numbers like “Clock” inject the energy that can sometimes go missing across a full album of post-punk-influenced material.

From the band’s Bandcamp page:

“We asked Claire from Objections / Nape Neck to sing on a song and Angi Fletcher and James Finlay of Nottingham’s Fists to sing on another. Angi did the sleeve too: all our pets, alive or dead, together and reporting back to us that ‘Heaven was wild!’ They had the best time. No humans allowed, obviously. We don’t deserve it.”

For Fans Of: Vulture Feather, post-punk, anthemic post-rock

Station Model Violence - Station Model Violence

Station Model Violence are an Australian post-punk supergroup operating across the Melbourne and Sydney underground scenes. At their core are Daniel Stewart — known as DX — and Buz Clatworthy. Stewart built his reputation as a key figure in Total Control, one of the most influential bands to emerge from Australia’s post-punk milieu, while Clatworthy established himself as the driving force behind R.M.F.C. (Rock Music Fan Club). Rounding out the current lineup are Michael and Micky from Den, Alan of R.M.F.C., and Kuceli of Gaud.

The band’s origins trace back to late 2022, when Stewart relocated from Melbourne to Sydney in the wake of pandemic lockdowns and a Total Control tour of Japan. Restless and creatively hungry, he put together a short-lived collective called KX Aminal — drawing on members of Den and Diat, including Josh, Greta, Michael, and Micky — tied to a prospective support slot for Iceage at the Sydney Opera House. Around the same time, Clatworthy had been sitting on a batch of demos that didn’t suit R.M.F.C. When Stewart came through Buz’s home studio one winter in 2024, added his voice to the material, and the chemistry was immediate.

The record announces itself with “Learn To Hate,” a track born out of an apparently mushroom-assisted writing session in the cold months, now stretched into something both hypnotic and unsettling. A motorik pulse runs like a current beneath much of the album — steady and propulsive, somewhere between Neu!’s forward momentum and post-punk’s more abrasive instincts. That rhythmic undertow surfaces in the delicate 12-string work on “Cliffs,” the jarring silences of “Immolation,” and the wide-open drift of “Heat.” Stewart’s vocals sit low and unguarded, less confrontational than contemplative — lines like face the sky and learn to hate in the light of day read less as directives than as dark, shared acknowledgments.

Station Model Violence doesn’t pander to the listener but like to keep things moving when inertia threatens. “Crepe Throne” and “Falling Down” bring it home with something like worn-down relief: the feeling of having pushed through something difficult and come out the other side still standing.

For Fans Of : Wire, The Fall, Protomartyr

Nothing - A Short History of Decay

Out of Philly, the band Nothing has been creating shoe-gaze or “post-shoegaze” or whatever label you want to put on it since 2010. The band started out as a bedroom project solo project from vocalist/guitarist Domenic “Nicky” Palermo. Palermo came out of the hardcore punk scene and went through some wild years that included incarceration. He had stepped away from music but returned with the Nothing project. Early demos and EPs (Poshlost in 2010, Suns and Lovers 2011, Downward Years to Come 2012) led to a deal with Relapse Records. Their debut full-length Guilty of Everything (2014) established Nothing as one of the shoegaze revival pioneers. The band has had a revolving cast of characters with Palermo being the constant. In 2015 they famously ditched a label deal with Collect Records over its connection to Martin Shkreli. They have worked under the Relapse label up until the latest album A Short History of Decay.

A Short History of Decay is the first album since 2020. That span of time does influence Palermo’s writing. Take the first song for instance. “Never Come Never Morning” sees Palermo marking time. Comparing carefree early life (“Free from fury / When I was young”) with the messiness of adulthood (“When I was old / Ain’t life terrible / With beautiful things getting between”) marks the maturing songwriting. The title A Short History of Decay carries a clever dual significance. At 44, Domenic Palermo writes with the insight that comes from personally confronting human decline and mortality. At the same time, “decay” in a musical context refers to the heavy, distorted effects and reverb tails that define shoegaze’s signature sound. As both a seasoned artist in the genre and a dedicated longtime listener, Palermo is perfectly suited to chronicle its evolution through his own work.

For Fans Of : Philly shoegaze, MBV, chorus pedals

Liz Cooper’s latest album is big. It sounds big and really steps out and resets her career at this point. Her first album, Window Flowers, was recorded in 2018 with her then band, The Stampede. That album had all the hallmarks of somebody trying to “make it” in Nashville. It was pleasant enough Americana but did not have a “listen again” appeal. 2021’s Hot Sass was a step in the post/punk direction, but Cooper still didn’t step fully away from the folk feel. Cooper then relocated to New York, navigated the pandemic, came out as queer, entered her first same-sex relationship, and endured its end—all of which fuels this record’s emotional core. That’s what makes New Day a true statement of an album. From the first song, the aptly titled “New Day”, you can hear Cooper making a conscious effort to forge a new sound. Guitars are distorted but with an edge. It’s not the warm distortion of classic rock. It’s the sound of somebody embracing their post/punk direction. Now, this is not the return of Joy Division, but Cooper definitely steps away from the flannel shirt crowd. On “Better Than Ever”, Cooper could almost be accused of sounding British neo-Soul. The bass tone and the spoken lyrical delivery definitely have that feeling. “Loss of Signal” sees Cooper return to her roots somewhat in that it’s the closet she comes to Americana on the album. Cooper’s guitar playing is excellent on “IDFK” and “Boy Toy”. She taught herself how to play piano as well . What elevates the album beyond a simple style shift is its honesty. Cooper doesn't sugarcoat the journey—it's not just celebratory queer anthems; she confronts the "really hard shit" of self-discovery, isolation, loss, and growth. That vulnerability makes the record connective, especially for queer listeners who've shared how validating it feels.

For Fans Of : Alt/Rock, Post/Punk

Hen Ogledd - DISCOMBOBULATED

English musician Richard Dawson has plenty of solo albums to his name. Peasant (2017), 2020 (2020), The Ruby Cord (2022), and more recently End of the Middle (2025). Those albums are pretty straight forward singer-songwriter fare. His unique voice and his incredible guitar work drive those projects.

Hen Ogledd is his project with harpist Rhodi Davies. Over time, it expanded to Dawn Bothwell and Sally Pilkington who both provide vocals as well as other instruments.

DISCOMBOBULTATED is the seventh album from the collective. The album opens with a track called “Nell’s Prologue” and it establishes the theme of the album. A childlike awe and understanding of the world…or the way it looks to innocence.

“Kids rise up, tearing down thе corporate wall
Hands in the dirt, building futures for us all
Monеy doesn't matter - reclaim what they stole
Youth lead the change, for the first time it’s ‘final call’!”

The first proper “song” of the album reiterates the theme of youth. Are we looking forward and hoping that “the children will save us” or is as the chorus repeats, “Fools Gold”. “Dead in a post-truth world” follows and mixes Welsh and English. Using the handy Google translate, the song is a comment on mass media and the hold it has on us.
The music itself is a mix of progressive folk, some indie, chamber pop and just electronic weirdness. Hen Ogledd has in the past been a wee bit hard to approach but Dawson and gang cool the weird impulses to make an album that is much more accessible. Those early Hen Ogledd albums were more improvisational and noisy but as the band matured, the albums tightened up. The album contains a feeling of community as well. Dawson and group welcome other guest musicians and even children into the Hen Ogledd universe.

For Fans Of : Chamber Pop, Beefheart, Zappa

Lucid Express - Instant Comfort

Lucid Express are a shoegaze/alt-rock band from Hong Kong. Formed in 2014 as teenagers, and originally called Thud, the group has three releases to its name, Lucid Express (2021), Floret -EP (2022), and Instant Comfort (2026). The initial seeds for Lucid Express were planted in 2012, when guitarist Andy Tsang Wing-tak (Andy) answered an online advert posted by bassist Samuel Chan Cheuk-wang (Wang) on a Hong Kong music forum. Samuel brought his brother Chan Cheuk-wai (Wai) along on drums (In fine indie tradition of making no money in indie music, the brothers run a restaurant to actually make ends meet). At the Hong Kong Design Institute, Tsang and the Cheuk brothers met the other two members, Kim Ho (vocals and synth) and Kung Siu-yum (known as “Sky”) on second guitar. The band recorded the aforementioned Floret EP as Thud in 2015, but re-released it under the Lucid Express name in 2022. The rumor mill is that on signing to American indie-label, Kanine Records, the record company asked them to change the name. This rebrand also was the catalyst for Wai to switch from electronic drums to acoustic drums.

On Instant Comfort, the switch pays off. The band takes another step forward in creating their own brand of distorted swirling guitars and layered sound. Singer Kim usually has her vocals buried and they act as another instrument or texture. On the new album, Ho is a bit more out front. Now I don’t mean she’s leading the charge and you can digest every word but at least they are a bit more decipherable. And that’s a good thing. The band is credited with songwriting, but Ho is the one that has to deliver them. The lyrics range from wanting more on a relationship to longing for a person that you can’t reach. They aren’t esoteric or obtuse. This makes it more enjoyable when we know what she is signing about. The music stays in the indie/shoegaze lane for the most part There are moments when they get heavier but not too crazy or aggressive.

For Fans Of : MBV, Swervedriver, The Cranberries