Longtime Titus Andronicus drummer Eric Harm has announced his solo debut record, All The Wrong Moves, due for release at the end of the week via Freeman Street Records. Produced by Patrick Stickles, and sharing the same indie rock, power pop and punk rock foundations as the (especially later) Titus Andronicus releases, the album focuses on a central character that Harm describes as ““the petty tyrant of the most pathetic kingdom.” Lead single ‘When You Move Back In’ introduced things with a triumphantly catchy take on self-deprecation, and now second single ‘Blood Stirred Up In Me’ offers another glimpse. Again built on big guitar lines that cry out to be played loud, it’s a timeless and celebratory power pop song that seems destined for beer-soaked shout-alongs.

Kramies – We’re All Dead

Fresh off the back of 2025 full-length Goodbye Dreampop Troubadour, which blended autobiography and fiction to create a sound at once dreamlike, nostalgic and “full of the mysterious allure [the project] has always offered,” Kramies has now returned with brand new single ‘We’re All Dead’. If Goodbye Dreampop Troubadour was something of a metamorphosis away from the persona developed on Kramies’s self-titled 2022 debut, then this single suggests the songwriter is far from finished with his personal transformation. With the recording process stripped right back to Derek Lee LaJoie and drummer John Panza, and a widescreen, almost orchestral sound that suggests quite the opposite, the track presents another face in what is quickly becoming a Bowie-esque series of them. An ultimately direct exploration of what it means to live (and die) and what we leave behind, the title’s morbid tone of belying the affirming sentiment underpinning the message.

Legit Smitty – Be My Sweet Escape

Back in the summer we previewed This Living Ain’t That Hard, a new album from Jake Smith’s Legit Smitty written in the aftermath of a near-death encounter and full of the kind of emotional honesty such an experience might trigger (Smith says he is more determined than ever, we quoted in our piece, to “continue to share his heart in order that others might feel more at home in their own skin”). With the album now out in its entirety, Legit Smitty has shared new single ‘Be My Sweet Escape’, and the track is every bit as heartfelt and forthright as its predecessor. The song melds the confessional charm of bedroom pop with a more electrified alt country spirit, and emerges all the more emotive for it. “Take every last part of my heart / and throw it in the dirt one time,” as Smith sings in a typically impassioned verse, “and take every last part of who you are / and hold it up real high.”

‘Losin You’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

l__evi – Summer Ain’t Over

Chances are you know Levi Nattrass from his work as Drench Fries, a project we covered most recently back in 2025 with the release of single ‘Camera‘. But now Nattrass how a new project, appropriately titled l__evi, and single ‘Summer Ain’t Over’ offers the ideal introduction. What could be called a summer song or, perhaps more fittingly, an anti-fall song, the track taps into the refusal to acknowledge the end of something positive, be it an attempt to willingly extend the moment, positive thinking-style, or else a plain act of self-delusion. “They’re sayin’ there’s a chill in the air / but I don’t feel it,” as Nattrass sings in the opening. “They’re sayin’ that the daylight’s gettin’ scarce / but I don’t believe it.” The result is tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless committed in its execution, possessing that Prine-esque blend of playfulness and sincerity.

And I don’t wanna hear
no fuckin’ Bon Iver
Just give me Toby Keith and Alan Jackson
Hey did you hear the news today,
the mayor’s new decree,
summer ain’t over til Halloween

Watch the video shot by Nattrass with Elyse Lankford below:

‘Summer Ain’t Over’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Lo Barnes – Heaven Was His Name

With a steady, creeping build and spaghetti western sensibility, new single ‘Heaven Was His Name’ shows the full evocative depth of Margate-based Lo Barnes. Released in anticipation of forthcoming EP HEAVEN pt I: the veil, the track opens with a taut, nocturnal tone and slowly asserts itself, a picture of duplicity and disillusionment sketched first through hushed despondence and then thunderous cathartic release. “And his name echoed out ‘cross the roses / and his word turned to dust in the flame,” Barnes sings at the climax, “and the wind callin’ out cryin’ heaven / and his word turned to dust in the flame / they don’t love you like I do,” and it is the ambiguity of that final line which really embodies the nuance with which the song works. “Initially I feared that this closing sentiment inferred that these were the protagonist’s words, and she was still caught in the web of her deceiver, but they could also be the lie she was told to keep her there,” Barnes explains. “Not knowing the end of the tale, despite being its author, inspires me to believe the song and its characters have a life of their own.”

Magdelena Abrego – A Friendship Buried

You might know Magdalena Abrego as one half of Deerlady (alongside Mali Obomsawin), whose 2024 record Greatest Hits was one of our favourites of that year. But now the Chicago-born, New York-based artist has released her first ever solo album, Xolo. The record take its name from the Xoloitzcuintli, a breed of hairless dog that in Mexican culture was a gift from the Gods to help guide recently deceased humans to the afterlife. A fitting title for a collection of songs that explore extremely personal themes of memory and loss. “For me, processing what I’ve been through so publicly feels like an act of rebellion against the structures that encourage us to carry our suffering alone,” Abrego describes. “What I know now is that there is a kind of power in looking backward to understand the ones who came before us as not simply gone, but alive in the ways we show care, in the gestures we repeat without knowing where they began, and in what we choose to pass on.” A cyclical combination of field recordings, electronic pop structures and more traditional songwriting, the album is best experienced as a whole, but the deeply affecting ‘A Friendship Buried’ will give you a good introduction.

Max Bien Kahn – Baby Green (Flannel Shirt)

Be it using a shopping list as a jumping off point to explore the physics of a relationship (‘List II‘), or incidental encounters as ways to meditate on life’s existential questions (‘Skipping Stones‘, ‘Neightbors‘), Max Bien Kahn‘s latest full-length Baby Green makes it its mission to collect the seemingly mundane multitude of details which constitute a life and assemble them into something able to tease out the intangible big picture. With the album now out in full, Kahn has shared the title track to further cement this style. A song about encountering someone once held dear after a significant absence, and how such an experience carries a strange duality. On the one hand, it reveals how specific details persist through the years untouched by the decay of time, yet on the other, clear memories are revealed to have be false after all.

When I saw you on the street again
You looked like a friend
Old friend
Where you been

I remembered your blue eyes
But now I see
They’re green green
Baby green

Melissa Weikart – Contact

We have featured a couple of songs from Paris-based songwriter Melissa Weikart in recent months, as she geared up to release new album Contact via Midnight Special Records, impressed with how her work exists at an unlikely crossroads between “experimental improvisation and crowd-pleasing pop.” The record was finally released last week, and to celebrate Weikart has unveiled a video for the title track, a song that underpins the record’s thematic concerns. “It became clear to me very early on that ‘Contact’ would become the title track of the album,” she explains. “The song encapsulates the central theme of desire to seek authentic connection with myself, the people around me, and perhaps even one or two extraterrestrial beings along the way.” A lush piano-led song that warps and bows with a gentle surrealism, evoking the strange, unreal feeling of calling out into a dark unknown, looking for a response.

Contact is out now via Midnight Special Records and available from the Melissa Weikart Bandcamp page.

Savanna Ruth – Bad Thoughts

Recording under the moniker Burr Oak, Chicago‘s Savanna Dickhut made a name through her ability to combine raw emotion and ethereal atmosphere to tell stories of authentic depth. Now adopting the name Savanna Ruth to herald a new era, Dickhut has recently released brand new full-length The Baseball Diaries to push her worker further than ever before. Retaining the narrative bent and emotional heft of Burr Oak but delving into territory far more personal than ever before, the Savanna Ruth project could be seen as both an evolution and revolution, sounding like a culmination of what came before it, yet also marking a pivot towards new territory. Standout single ‘Bad Thoughts’ is a good place to jump in, typifying both the introspection reflection of the release and the blend of vulnerability and fearless with which Savanna Ruth moves through it.

Watch the video below, directed and edited by Todd Diederich, with camera by Andy Resek:

The Baseball Diaries is out now via Easy Does It Records and available from Bandcamp.

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Alongside core members Berman (vocals), Ricky Lorenzo (guitar), Dana Guth (bass) and DJ Nelson (drums/samples), the new album welcomes Daniel Juergens into the Little Oso fold, bolstering the sound with synthesizer and samplers, as well as viola and violin by Elisabeth Fuchsia. Juergens also recorded and mixed the release, with Andy Tyler Clarke (Spirit of the Beehive, Cloud Nothings) mastering, and the result is by far the richest and most complex the project has sounded to date. But more than a mere stylistic evolution for the band, this development is inherently tied to their thematic interests too. We live in a world where the line between physical and digital existence is porous, machine learning is thrust upon us, and perhaps most strikingly, we’re surrounded by things we could never truly make our own no matter what the tech overlords might claim. Such heady themes require a careful balance of intricacy, fury and good old fashioned human feeling, and Little Oso 2.0 appear ready to meet the moment.

I don’t need much, I just need this
(A place I’ve never been)
Will someone please give me the cheat code to
(A place I’ve never been)

The song comes complete with a video to further the themes, directed and written by Jeannette Berman with director of photography Dean Luis Chuquimongo and editor/colorist Ricardo Lorenzo, and featuring 3D Animator by Haven.

Simulation Games will be released via Repeating Cloud and Safe Suburban Home in late spring/early summer 2027. The single is available now from Bandcamp.

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Woven from compositions that date the full span of Mia Joy’s career and recorded over various sesssion stretching across several years, Star Echo Heavy Dove feels like the most full-realised version of the project to date. A true meeting of practice, theme and style, where personal growth is not merely reflected upon but recorded moment to moment, creating an album which documents change as both a measure of distance covered and proof of the potential still ahead. The thematic cornerstone of the album, lead single ‘Wings of Desire’ kicks things off, a track named for the Wenders classic which embodies a theme of longing, juxtaposing an intimate sound with lyrics of distance and remove in order to evoke the sensation of desire in all of its burning nuance.

Watch the video created by Jordan Nelson below:

Star Echo Heavy Dove will be released on the 15th January 2027 via Fire Talk Records and you can pre-order it from the Mia Joy Bandcamp page.

Photo by Athena Merry

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Much has occurred since we first featured Adeem The Artist back in 2016, the Knoxville-based songwriter going on to earn national recognition with their convention-challenging style of folk and country, a style embodied by acclaimed records like Cast-Iron Pansexual and White Trash Revelry. Ideas of spirituality and faith have always been central to the project, not to mention the intrinsic doubt and suffering which comes attached to any serious contemplation of such concepts, so it is fitting that Adeem The Artist’s next record Christians for Goliath is a bona fide Christian album which challenges the tendency of the genre to champion decidedly un-Christian values. “There is this massive wave of evangelical Christianity in America that is largely rejecting the basic tenets of what Christian values are supposed to be,” as Adeem says. “When it’s being done in the name of a God who calls for equity, justice, and radical hospitality, that is the wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The confronting and urgent project was made in Nashville with none other than John Darnielle, and Rich Mullins-inspired lead single ‘Hard To Get’ is a direct collaboration with The Mountain Goats, so you know the mission has the right people on board. Watch the lyric video below:

Christians for Goliath will be released on the 11th December via Four Quarters Records / Thirty Tigers and you can pre-order it now.

Alex Gardner & the Golden Apples – Robin Hood

Writing back in 2023 of album Highly Attainable Dreams, we described the work of LA-based songwriter Alex Gardner as “a kind of outsider folk for the twenty-first century,” drawing on everything from Michael Hurley to classic American literature. Next month sees the release of The Temptation of Thieves a new album by Alex Gardner & the Golden Apples, and this time he casts an even wider net for inspiration. As the title of the record and single ‘Robin Hood’ suggest, the story of everyone’s favourite outlaw is central to the record, though English and German romanticism, ancient Greece, modernist poetry, fairy tales and folkloric traditions all hold an influence, as well as the conventions and myths of classic folk and blues. Such albums were really made to be experienced in full, but ‘Robin Hood’ is available now, providing both a taste of Gardner’s idiosyncratic style and a glimpse into the mind of a heroic scoundrel.

The Temptation of Thieves will be released on the 7th November

Annelise Eppen x An Triangles – Promise

It took a three-month silent meditation retreat for Annelise Eppen to decide her songs were worth collecting into an album, the Massachusetts songwriter using the contemplative space to fully envision the hushed reckoning that is her debut full-length Heaven is Available. Having worked to record the released with Doug Poppe (An Triangles), the album will be released in 2027, though Eppen has shared lead single ‘Promise’ as a taster. Delivered with a spare, lo-fi folk aesthetic, Eppen and Poole channel the meditative spirit of the album’s origins to offer a genuinely spiritual style of music, where humble quiet is matched by a burning desire or indeed desperation to commit to God. The result is as much a vow as a song. A commitment to living more truthfully, more receptively, more inconspicuously, made in the silent relationship we share with our creator. “This is the time to make a promise / But make it in the dark and keep it quiet / This is the time to tend the fire / To listen to the songs and get inspired,” as Eppen sings in the opening verse. “But now’s the time that I will listen / I got a little taste of what I’m missing.”

Hockitay – redstar

“A casual listen… suggests this struggle might have come good, the sound full of apparent heart and fondness,” we wrote of Hockitay‘s ‘half smile‘ back in August. “Though dig a little deeper and it seems the dismay might have just found a new focus. Because, as the above line shows, there’s an existential confusion to at play, the intimacy not so much straight romance as a kind of confession.” Now Montreal artist has shared EP redstar in its entirety via Future Gods and the result is every bit as deep and conflicted, moving between themes as disparate as AI, cosmology and personal identity in order to explore the experience of being alive in a contemporary age full of artifice. Released as a final single, the title track encompasses all of these ideas within one genre-bending song, and serves as the ideal entry point for those about to dive in.

Watch the video directed by Renaud Jacob below:

redstar is out now via Future Gods and available from the Hockitay Bandcamp page.

Michael Feuerstack – Who We Are

Over the past three decades, Montreal-based songwriter Michael Feuerstack has slowly cemented his place among the most celebrated and enduring songwriters in Canadian music, establishing a vast and diverse oeuvre and securing two JUNOs in the process. Before releasing under his own name, Feuerstack used the moniker Snailhouse, and to celebrate thirty years of work, he is returning in 2027 with The Snailhouse Songbook, a double album with Forward Music Group which reimagines a choice selection of songs from the period. Lead single ‘Who We Are’ sets the tone, full of the nuanced, bittersweet spirit which marks so much of Feuerstack’s writing. “At its core, ‘Who We Are’ is a song about being alone in the crowd,” he explains. “How do we seek balance in tending to the isolated and mysterious parts of ourselves while also digging deep into love, patience and kindness as we navigate the outside world? There is a darkness in it, but there’s a beauty that prevails, and a humour that’s maybe almost imperceptible.”

New Balance – Dunce

Back in 2025 we teased a new album from Jeremy Leasure’s New Balance with double single Lemon Slice / Pocket Change, the songs’ ostensibly relaxed sound hiding something much darker as Leasure explored “little devastations.” Now New Balance are finally gearing up to release that album, and as the title To Live And Die In LA, the theme of catastrophe looms large in the shape of natural disaster and human cruelty. Latest single ‘Dunce’ finds Leasure and co. stuck within this disorientating experience, questioning everything in the face on the encroaching ruin. “’Dunce’ came about somewhat by accident,” he explains. “Written a few days after watching Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, I found myself singing ‘I’m the dunce of the universe’ throughout the day without realizing that I’d picked it up from a line Brooks says in the film. It led me to interrogating all the ways that I could be barrelling forward in the wrong direction. Could my belief systems be false? Am I really as confident about these things as I think? If I flipped all of my beliefs would my life be any better? At the end of the day it feels unlikely, but it’s important to live an examined life, otherwise there’s no way to grow.” Watch the video directed and edited by Hallee Morvan and Jeremy Leasure below:

To Live And Die In LA will be released on the 20th November via Anxiety Blanket Records.

Sammy Weissberg – Brass Quintet No. 1 Mvt. II

Last month, we introduced Music For Strings and Brass, the forthcoming record from Brooklyn-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Sammy Weissberg. Writing of lead single ‘String Quartet No.2 Mvt. II’, we described how the album sees Weissberg “channel the spirit of late-Romantic and modernist composers to paint a picture of everyday life in all its elaborate detail and humble simplicity.” Now he’s back with another glimpse, this time at the record’s second work, a brass quintet that’s all the more melodic and charming following the grand impressionistic emotion of the strings. “[For the second movement] I was feeling very inspired by both Yamandu Costa and ML Buch,” Weissberg describes. “While both songwriters typically compose in a guitar-centric fashion, I thought it would be a fun challenge to translate their influence on me to a totally different instrumentation.”

SNEAL – THE QUEEN

Formed of Michael Coleman, Kurt Kotheimer, Hamir Atwal, Luke Bergman and Katie Jacobson, self-described “organ donor art factory” SNEAL is a “manifestation of these collected organs in a single body that was able to make it to the studio on the train.” Which is to say, the Queens-based project is more than the sum of its parts. New album Military Time welcomes a rotating casts of guests too, with the likes of Sam Evian and Jason Burger just some of the faces which pop up, and is unsurprisingly both the most ambitious and fully-realised release from SNEAL to date. Opener and single ‘The Queen’ sets the tone, a track full of languid swagger and left-field lyrics which plays something like a slow-motion trip through some strange hymenopteran world.

everything is breeding impossibly slow
there’s not a single egg in the nest
suddenly i’m feeling impossibly low
i’m so hot
and the canopy’s wet
i’m so hot and the canopy’s wet

Military Time is out now via Baby El Records and available from Bandcamp.

Wendy Eisenberg – Mmeeaanniinngg Bbuussiinneessss” b/w “Tthhee Wwaallllss”

Earlier this year, Wendy Eisenberg released a self-titled album on Joyful Noise Recordings. The record received much acclaim, including from us, drawing upon all of Eisenberg’s experience and genre-bending innovation to present their most comprehensive and certain artistic statement yet. But if the record itself wasn’t inventive enough already, they have just dropped an unexpected follow-up, or rather companion piece, which takes two of the standout tracks and (quite literally) bends and stretches them into new forms. Closer ‘The Walls’ doubles in length, but ‘Meaning Business’ reaches a mammoth 37 minutes, transformed from what was in essence a folk song into something as imaginative and theoretically ripe as a John Cage composition. “I want to write songs that feel infinite,” Eisenberg explains. “I want to write songs that transcend their production, that can weather the changes. It’s probably a holdover from my jazz training, the desire to hear my material in different contexts…Why not literally stretch them, and my songs, out? I want to feel when a slowed-down song becomes ambient music, becomes jazz, becomes something else.”

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Lead single ‘can’t we have both’ hints at the result. One of a couple of vocal tracks on something good, and, structurally, perhaps the closest claire rousay and zander raymond get to a traditional song, ‘can’t we have both’ lives up to its name in both theme and form, combining pop traditions with avant garde abstraction to explore the experience of the artist with a commodified, endlessly distracted world. “Feeling washed up in the used cd store / it’s a burden, it’s a triumph / my industry evaporates and it doesn’t need me anymore,” as the opening verse goes, though as the careful, almost hesitant sound slowly blooms across the length of the track, what at first sounds like fatalism begins to appear as something different. A disappointment yes, plus a clear frustation with the breakneck speed at which our culture cycles through its desires and needs, but also, if you listen closely enough, a nascent sense of possibility. If the CD stores are deserted, if the music industry eats itself, if every present trend is destined to dissolve into the next without any lasting impression, then what’s left to the artist? Perhaps it is just finding one another in the constant motion, conversing and creating, making art free from the baggage of expectation.

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Though of course, the result is not that simple. Just as life is more complex than a journey from A and B, so to does Lick the Spoon, Let It Soften reimagine what finding the correct path might look like in practice. Which is to say, it rejects the notion some map exists to steer our course, and instead views the quest from a different angle. The aforementioned single was inspired The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and the connection between this iteration of Lamplight and Gibran’s work is illuminating. “That book speaks about love like an actor, more than something that can be given, taken, broken, lost,” Williams explains. “Someone that changes us, that does not soften itself when we are weak, though it can be gentle. That perspective is very much present throughout the record, and this song is from deep in the throes of learning to see love this way.”

Part of this process is learning to not only be centred in the moment, but to allow oneself comfort in the knowledge that it will give way to another whether we wish for it or not. Take ‘Clover’, a single that “seems suspended between the retrospection of mourning and a look towards future dreams,” as we continued in our earlier piece, “turning to the small certainties of the present as a kind of balm against the otherwise debilitating doubt which might set in when asking life’s big questions.” Elsewhere the present moment is less than inviting, be it ‘Altar’ with its ominous skies or the unabashed despair of ‘I’ll Be Careful With It’, yet with equal parts compassion and patience, Lamplight attempts to recognise each experience as just another part of richer, more fulfilling whole.

The mood culminates in the near-triumphant closer ‘Ring Stains’, song which doesn’t quite reach two minutes in length yet contains the multitude of emotions which precede it. For a record built around a search or question, you might expect the finale to arrive as an answer, the destination finally reached, but instead it functions more like a snapshot of recognition caught within the ongoing motion. The realisation that life itself is that very momentum, and that nothing dear to us is ever quite lost from our lives, no matter how it sometimes might feel. “I think the majority of us have a tendency to think of love as a finite resource,” Williams as explains in the album notes. “I don’t think that’s true. If love has happened, it is there, permanently etched in the fossil record.” Lamplight is here to speak of love and we’d all do well to listen. Lost he might be, but aren’t we all? The important thing is that he’s trying.

Lick The Spoon, Let It Soften will be released on the 23rd October via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

Cover art by Pauline Mauruschat

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“This project was a lot of, just like songs about waking up to the reality we’re in, coping with that and seeing ourselves as victims of it, but then also as participants in it,” explain Georgia‘s Bayou Princess of their fittingly titled new album Dance Tunes for the End of the World upcoming via Indecent Artistry. “And navigating that as a band, rethinking what does a band mean? Or what can it mean, back to that silliness. I don’t want to be a business or a brand. Just an expression of daily living.” The style is introduced perfectly by latest single ‘He Keeps Talking’, a track which seems to barrel towards the encroaching apocalypse and embrace the entropic movement which results, sounding neither ironic nor flippant in the process, but attuned to the reality of a world in turmoil.

Big Warm Bed – June Bug

The new recording project of Leeds-based musician Jacob Andrews, Big Warm Bed has been long in the making. Having cut his teeth with years in the local scene, playing in projects with members of Adult DVD and English Teacher, as well as touring the US with Far Caspian frontman Joel Johnston, Andrews has slowly stepped out and introduced his own work. A long-awaited debut full-length is currently pencilled in for the early months of 2027, but for now we have single ‘June Bug’ to tide us over. Moving away from the post-punk snarl of his collaborators, Big Warm Bed slots into the wistful corner of indie rock, weaving a compassionate picture of friendship and the importance of being there for the ones you love. True to the theme, a full band join Andrews to bring the sound to life, with Niall Summerton (drums), Meg Lama (vocals/synth), Tom Kettleton (saxophone), Jacob Cracknell (bass/vocals), Chris Aitchison (guitar/vocals) and Connal Doo (guitar/vocals) all lending their talents. Watch a live session recorded at The Calm Farm and directed by Andy Little below:

‘June Bug’ is out now via Dance To The Radio and available from the usual places.

Cameron Keiber – Haunted Castles

Back in 2025, Cameron Keiber released full-length Nurser via Midriff Records, an album which confronted the modern world with the scathing eye it deserves. “There’s no hesitance or lily-livered attempts at peace here,” as we concluded in our review, “just a clear fuck you to all those who try to impose their own will upon innocent others.” Fast forward two years and Keiber is back with The Tide, a follow-up which pushes further than its predecessor, embracing the beauty of imperfection both stylistically and thematically and championing the power of the human in a world quickly tipping towards digital oblivion. Opener and single ‘Haunted Castles’ welcomes the listener into the release, opening with a poignant sense of reflection but soon kicking into gear and building into something urgent and cathartic. You’ll notice the beats of Nurser have been replaced by real drums, the guitars have doubled in size, and most importantly Keiber stands atop of if all fervent and compassionate as ever.

Cloudbelly – Phantom Lung

“Holy gods inside me / Why can no one love me / Without running aground?” So ask Cloudbelly on their latest single ‘Phantom Lung’.  The latest track to be unveiled from the project’s forthcoming full-length Throwing the Game, the single is a love song but not in the traditional sense, detailing the slow disintegration of a friendship as it moved from closeness to distance. A warm arrangement foregrounds the intimacy that is being lost, and there is no questioning the fondness which underpins the entire endeavour, though as the sound swells at the conclusion of the track, the answer to the initial question is ultimately fatalistic. “Maybe no one should come in / Nobody, now.”

Throwing The Game will be released on the 13th November and you can pre-order it now.

Darren Hayman – Darling, All the Time

If you’ve been reading VSF over recent months, chances are you know that cult UK songwriter Darren Hayman has been undergoing the mammoth task of making his vast back catalogue available online for the first time (a project you can read about in more depth here). All manner of rarities and deep cuts are being unveiled in the process, with some gems saved from obscurity along the way, but latest release I’m Your Team is one of the most notable to date. The full-length album had been sitting incomplete for a number of years, Hayman prioritising other musical commitments and dealing with artistic insecurities, though came to be viewed in a fonder light by its creator as time passed by. Inspired by the success of the aforementioned re-release project, Hayman has now decided to put out the album in full via Audio Antihero. Recorded in the wake of 2022 album You Will Not Die, I’m Your Team digs further into the same ground to perfect the contemplative, emotive style. “Sometimes after making an album you don’t want to go into a different direction,” Hayman explains. “You want to go deeper into it, and I felt I was just getting the hang of this stripped, slow, emotional music.” Listen to the title track now:

Eliza Edens – Old Home Video

Continuing to pave the way for full-length Death Drive, coming later this month via First City Artists, Eliza Edens has shared new single ‘Old Home Video’. While previous track ‘Hot & Mean‘ was certainly personal (“turning its attention to the queer experience in the contemporary moment, especially the rollercoaster of dopamine highs and lows facilitated by the access we’re granted into the lives of others by social media”) ‘Old Home Video’ takes things even further. A song Edens wrote while their mother was living with dementia which not only struggles with the cruelty of that present but also begins grieving in anticipation for the inevitable loss. As you might expect, the result is the most poignant and unguarded track on a release full of them, the very sound marbled with a combination of fondness and sorrow.

Death Drive will be released on the 30rd October via First City Artists and you can pre-order it now.

Fleur Geurl – stone in the stew

Back in September, Brooklyn-based songwriter Danielle Sorokin, AKA Fleur Geurl, released full-length 11:11, a collection of chamber folk songs which allow the personal and the mystical to blend together into something with real weight. It is not uncommon for recent folk music to bare its vulnerable heart in order to communicate more authentically, and there’s certainly an open, confessional dimension to Sorokin’s work, but where Fleur Geurl stands apart from its contemporaries is its willingness to play with the tension between display and concealment, clarity and opacity. Take single ‘stone in the stew’, a track indicative of the headspace of a record caught between cold reality and portentous dreams.

soon, I’ll sink into the stew
I’ll let it be true, I am too
a hue of geranium blue
soaks every room
every room

Generifus – Bird Beak

We last wrote about Spencer Sult’s Generifus back in 2024 with the release of Summerberrys, an album which provided “a welcome expansion of the Generifus universe,” as we put it, “again using Sult’s eye for the seemingly mundane details of day to day living to explore themes of growing up in the Pacific Northwest amid the wider backdrop of a hostile world.” Now Sult is set to return with brand new record Pulling on the Seam, and lead single ‘Bird Beak’ hints at the direction of the album. A meditation on hard truths and dashed dreams that comes to accept that moving on doesn’t always mean a clean break, the shrapnel of the past destined to remain embedded no matter how far we might run towards the horizon.

Good Wild Gods – Breathe It In

After meeting on tour in 2017, Luke Sital-Singh and Ben Cramer (AKA Old Sea Brigade) quickly developed a strong creative rapport, working together under the moniker Good Wild Gods and releasing the EP All The Ways You Sing In The Dark in 2020. Both artists returned to the successful solo careers thereafter, though a reunion at Cramer’s Swedish home studio rekindled the project once again, the duo this time pushing things further than before to embrace something closer to a full band richness. Sometimes I Go Missing is the result, a full-length album which builds upon what All The Ways… established yet reaches much further. “‘Sometimes I Go Missing’ is the culmination of many years we could have never seen coming,” as Sital-Singh explains. “We made the music we wanted to make.” Listen to latest single ‘Breathe It In’ now:

Sometimes I Go Missing will be released on the 19th March 2027 via Nettwerk Music Group and you can pre-order it now.

Kin Hana – Shōmetsu / Kodō

“Manages to locate the yearning for connection and community which has persisted from our first days, and will persist to the last,” we wrote of ‘Earthrise’ from Kin Hana‘s new LP Howling World forthcoming via Black Meadow. “The result centers the mythic presence of both the past and the future, twin otherworlds which loom large over the present, warping the material of our existence with equal parts pessimism and possibility.” The track embodied the spirit of an album concerned with how we engage with a world at once woeful and wondrous, moving with equal parts curiosity and dread in the hope of making sense of our irrational present. With the album just days away, Kin Hana has unveiled new single ‘Shōmetsu / Kodō’ to further tease the release. A mighty, haunting track which extends over eight minutes, Aaron Hodges joined by Jared Ashdown (Open Head), Gabriel Birnbaum (Wilder Maker) and Otto Hauser (Vetiver, Espers) to push the sound from a mournful piano piece into a cataclysmic doom metal number.

Left Tracks – Popcorn Lung

We last wrote about Left Tracks back in 2023 with the release of their EP End Times Hauling, describing how the collaboration saw Phil Di Leo (DI LEO) and Kabir Kumar (Sun Kin) use group together to imagine a new future in the wake of COVID and the adjacent catastrophes. “[The EP] sits on the precipice of disaster but makes a decision to envisage a different world,” we wrote, “working on the logic that no significant change can occur without first rekindling a sense of imagination.” The project has expanded and evolved in the interim, not least with last year’s record LT2, and now Di Leo and Kumar are back with brand new single ‘Popcorn Lung’ to further mark the direction of travel. A new, heftier version of Left Tracks bolstered by Sam Thorne (bass guitar) and Mark Edwards (drums, percussion) which is capable of both intricate detail and sweeping energy, playing with the tension between lightness and weight to evoke the strange physics of a codependent relationship.

Nick Bellerose – baby

“Paint[s] the experience of falling in love in all of its overwhelming glory with Bellerose’s trademark style, where cinematic richness meets the intimacy of DIY folk.” So we wrote of ‘About Us‘ by Nick Bellerose back in the summer, the DC-based songwriter channelling the likes of Elliot Smith, Sparklehorse and Nebraska-era Springsteen in his authentic style. With EP maybe, someday now announced, Bellerose has shared latest single ‘baby’, and the result is no less sincere. Based within the liminal space between the end of a relationship and the kindling of another, the track “is less about knowing where love might lead than allowing yourself to feel something again” as the press release explains, and possesses all the earnest, homespun charm you want from such a song.

young friend – michael wakes up

Next month Vancouver-based songwriter Drew Tarves, AKA young friend, will release brand full-length New Entertainment via Nettwerk, and single ‘michael wakes up’ highlights how the records signals an ambitious new era for the artist. Foregoing the simplicity of a single narrative arc, the track instead presents a series of vignettes in order to paint a larger picture, each adding up to a mosaic of the human experience in all of its wonders and heartache. “’michael wakes up’ follows a number of characters that are all experiencing different realities in their lives,” Tarves explains. “Michael being told by Shelly that she doesn’t love him any longer, John winning the lottery with his daughter’s birthday as his numbers, Damien being let go from his company but continuing to do what he loves. These people are all experiencing their own beautiful stories.” Watch the video directed by Zachary Vague & Drew Tarves below:

New Entertainment will be released on the 6th November via Nettwerk and you can pre-order it now.

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To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the EP, ON AIR LIBRARY have decided to make the release available on streaming services for the first time alongside a brand new vinyl edition, not only reintroducing themselves as a pioneering outfit but also hinting towards new material that will soon be unveiled. For the who might have missed things the first time around, single ‘A Word From Benjamin Spock is an ideal place to dive in. A sound at once richly crafted and cryptically opaque which pairs layers of guitars and feeback to envelope the listener, though it is up to interpretation whether this ethereal space is undergoing a process of blooming or decay.

ON AIR LIBRARY can be found at the usual places.

Photo by Dan Mazikowski

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Featuring Dora Noonan, Nat Cimino, Zara Roy and Noah Kelley, Queens-based indie rock outfit blankette combine the irreverence and mischief of twee music with something altogether more cathartic and raw. The result is an unapologetically singular sound able to communicate the full spectrum of emotions. New album doll puts this to good use, exploring knotty ideas of identity, depression and self-actualisation with a decidedly unguarded air, displaying courage in its vulnerability and embracing the communal power of a band. Single ‘after’ shows the kind of mood to expect, a song all about the misplaced suspicion that a simple change might fix your life. It starts out with something like hesitant hope and culminates in a something of an exorcism.

after i stop drinking i’ll feel better
after i stop overthinking i’ll feel better
after i start running i’ll feel better
after i make more money i’ll feel better
after i feel better i’ll feel better

Brimheim – My Collection

“Writing new music had felt like swimming in molasses for months until ‘My Collection’ arrived,” explains Danish songwriter Brimheim of her latest single, a track she considers something of a paradigm shift. “The jazzy direction was surprising to both me and Søren [Buhl Lassen]. It’s a musical tradition I haven’t explored before. Yet somehow, it immediately revealed itself as the most enchanting path we could take. It felt like receiving a gift from the universe.” Where her previous album RATKING sought clarity within the fraught, confusing experience of personal identity, ‘My Collection’ moves in a more ambiguous direction, swapping out the brightness and rhythm in favour of something more fictional and oblique. The story of a perhaps eccentric woman who collects objects discarded by others, valuing the hidden beauty within that which has been rejected, and guarding her prized possessions with an almost maternal instinct.

Watch the video directed by Stine Emil and produced by Monster Crotch below:

‘My Collection’ is out now via Tambourhinoceros and available from Bandcamp.

Caoilfhionn Rose – Horizon

“Some of the lyrics talk about becoming ‘lost inside your own imagination’ and how ‘dreams can seem so real’,” explains Manchester songwriter Caoilfhionn Rose of her fourth full-length, Draw Out Your World, coming early next year on Lost Map Records. “To me, this album is about building a life for yourself, stepping out of daydreams and carving out a path towards a happier future.” Made with husband and collaborator Rich Williams in the years of pregnancy and early parenthood, Draw Out Your World finds Rose working through a tumultuous period with both resilience and curiosity, resulting in a sound that is marked with compassion and always reaching for some brighter, calmer territory. Lead single ‘Horizon’ gives a flavour of what to expect, not least the impact of Danish duo Svaneborg Kardyb (Nikolaj Svaneborg and Jonas Kardyb) who lend their talents to the release and leaven the sound with their ethereal electronics. 

Hank Tree x Peter Broderick – You Can Thrive

Led by Fergus MacDonald (formerly of State Broadcasters), Glasgow‘s Hank Tree first caught our ears back in 2023 with album The Big North. “Hank Tree take folk sensibilities and elevate them into something truly atmospheric with a mixture of field recordings and distortion,” as we wrote, “but amid their invention and subversion of genre, Hank Tree hark back to folk’s best roots, positioning themselves in the long lineage of artists using the form to write about social history and labour movements.” Latest album Care 1 is every bit as thematically challenging and emotionally urgent, a record crafted around MacDonald’s experience working with people with profound learning difficulties and mental health problems. It delves into what it means to care and be cared for within a society which too often seems willing to disregard any semblance of responsibility. This time MacDonald is joined by Clarissa Cheong and Peter Broderick and together the trio conjure a sound that intimate, compassionate and subtly unflinching, as single ‘You Can Thrive’ suggests.

Karen y los Remedios – Mayahuel

Fronted by Mexico City-born, Guanajuato-raised artist and researcher Ana Karen G. Barajas and featuring Z.A.M.P.A. (Guillermo Berbeyer) on guitars and Mexico City producer Jiony (Jonathan Muriel), Karen y los Remedios is a shapeshifting project rooted in cumbia yet fluid and mysterious enough to bring its own mythologies to life. Latest album Bestiaria fulls like the most pure embodiment of the act to date, evoking a series of legendary women from across the world to celebrate femininity in all its desire, sorrow and power. Single ‘Mayahuel’ is a perfect example, “a hypnotic, low-tempo cumbia rebajada that dives into Mexica mythology,” as Barajas explains. “I was deeply moved by her story in the ancient codices—her escape to be with Quetzalcoatl, turning into maguey plants, and the sacred legend of the Four Hundred Rabbits.”

Watch the video directed by Barajas herself below:

Bestiaria is out now via ZZK Records and available from Bandcamp.

LAPêCHE – Parallel Park

“Drawing on shoegaze and post-punk, they make indie rock songs that are both shadowy and catchy, centering on a sense of considered patience that the band says is born from ‘a shared language of healing, honesty and presence’.” So we wrote of Brooklyn‘s LAPêCHE back in July, with single ‘Phantom of Cinder’ introducing the tone of their new album Autotelic on Tiny Engines. With singer and guitarist Krista Diem supported by with Dave Diem (bass), Drew DeMaio (guitar) and Colin Brooks (drums), the entire album channels a nineties sensibility without ever descending to cheap nostalgia, not least thanks to the committed, complex style in which they work. Take ‘Parallel Park’, a song about the end of a relationship which favours emotional honesty over poetic gesture, and thus recognising how any project, be it personal or artistic, relies on a kind of tenacious imperfection in order to move forwards.

Party Dozen – Full Powers

Australian duo Kirsty Tickle (saxophone, vocals) and Jonathan Boulet (drums, loops, production) have recorded under the Party Dozen moniker for near on a decade now, pushing an inventive style of psych rock which leans on improvision. But new Party Dozen album 21 Bum Salute, coming next month via City Slang, finds the band in their purest form, Tickle and Boulet dropping whatever pretenses which might have persisted in their work in order to fully embrace their idiosyncratic vision. Latest single ‘Full Powers’ indicates the raucous abandon of the result, not to mention the ambiguity of record which swings between swaggering confidence and something more volatile, almost dangerous. “There’s ‘Full Powers’ good and there’s ‘Full Powers’ bad,” they explain. “The good is when you’re personally becoming too powerful, an angel pisses on you, everything is going very well and suddenly you’re gliding down the street like King Swinging Dick. The bad is when one side has all the power and more is not enough. Powerlust, greedmongering, gluttonous fiends. This track switches between the two.”

Watch the video below, made with help from John-Henry Pajak and Jos Eastwood:

21 Bum Salute will be released via City Slang on the 6th November and you can pre-order it now.

Samjo – Franconia

Brooklyn born, Lille-based songwriter Sam Rueckert, AKA Samjo, works between folk, indie rock and punk to create songs at once emotive and energetic, as highlighted by 2025 album Barely Even Something. With a new extended edition of the album recently released, Samjo have returned with a video for single ‘Franconia’ to further the life of the record, and the track is the ideal introduction for those who missed the album the first time around. With a slow building and detailed style, the track is a lesson in slow burn, its determined indie rock chug slowly blooming outwards as cinematic strings widen the frame of the arrangement. The style is keyed into the thematic concerns too, the song moving from the doldrums of a particularly bad day towards some appreciation of the universality of misfortune, and in doing so emerging with compassion and solace.

Barely Even Something (Extended) is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Tough Old Bird – Tall Summer Clouds

Tough Old Bird continue their steady stream of new singles with ‘Tall Summer Clouds’. Following on from predecessor ‘Come Back, Come Back‘, a track we described as a poetic narrative that’s at once brooding and compassionate and little world weary too,” the new song again delves into a bittersweet headspace, specifically the strange blend of joy and sorrow which accompanies the passing of time. Written in the weeks before lead Nick Corrigan welcomed his first child into the world, there’s a tension between new beginnings and the inevitable loss which will follow, Tough Old Bird confronting mortality and deciding that life lies not in grand gestures but small moments. Perhaps the humbles snatches of calm are the best life can get.

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You only have to look at the artwork to get an idea of the tone of the single. Avery Friedman grasps the moment with force, even if it means getting her hands dirty. The result is decisive, tactile and loaded with a newfound purpose, as though having cleared the ground with the previous release, she is now ready and willing to grab at whatever life might throw at her next. “’You Move’ is about savoring the unexpected fruits that reveal themselves amid times of uprootedness,” Friedman explains. “It is a song about putting trust in the glimmer of new love, and carefully sowing the seeds for it to sustain. Both thematically and sonically, it’s about searching, surrendering and allowing yourself to relish. My hope is that ‘You Move’ invites people into the world of my soon-to-be-finished sophomore album – a world that encompasses a full-swing of emotionality, and lets loss and pleasure dance together.”

Watch the video directed by Dylan Friese-Greene below:

‘You Move’ is out now via Audio Antihero and available from Bandcamp. You can catch Avery Friedman on tour in the coming months, so check the dates below:

Oct 4th – Cassette, Queens, NY – w/ Mallory Hawk
Oct 8th – Antics Magazine Fundraiser @ Life World, Brooklyn, NY – w/ Lex Walton & Native Sun
Oct 31st – London Calling Festival, Amsterdam, NL
Nov 4th – The Elephant’s Head, London, UK
Nov 5th – Sidney & Matilda, Sheffield, UK
Nov 7th – Simple Things Festival, Bristol, UK
Nov 9th – Fulford Arms, York, UK
Nov 15th – Neue Zukunft, Berlin, DE

Photo by Keegan Burckhard

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