“Black water, black water / I am still your daughter.” So sings Claire Cronin on the lead single and opening track of her new full-length The Bruise, immediately positioning the record as a continuation of the project established across a series of releases dating back at least as far as 2015’s Over and Through. Cronin’s music, much like her 2020 memoir-cum-film-study Blue Light of the Screen, collapses the distinction between the worldly and the otherworldly, the living and the dead. A study of personal experience which functions as both ritual and lament, always bending towards the uncanny, loaded with eerie symbols, ominous portents and the shining glint of transcendence. As ever, Cronin is joined by Ezra Buchla, who contributes viola, piano and synth as well as vocals and processing, plus a handful of other guests, resulting in a sound that pushes folk towards its most atmospheric frontiers, be that haunted drone or crushing doom metal. The Bruise will be released via Orindal Records and Cronin’s own new imprint A Moth Object in October, complete with a booklet of lyrics and art, but for now submerse yourself in the somber glory of ‘Black Water’ and we’ll have more to say soon.

The Bruise will be released on the 9th October via Orindal Records and A Moth Object and you can pre-order it now.

Cloudbelly – Oh, Antarctica!

We last covered Western Massachusetts band Cloudbelly back in 2024 with the release of i know i know i know, an album driven by “a sense of hard won conviction,” as we put it. “Lessons learnt not via bright epiphany but the slow grind of living through difficult circumstances. Understanding how to not only roll with the punches but rise from knockout blows.” With a new LP on the horizon, Cloudbelly have now returned with lead single ‘Oh Antarctica!’ to whet appetites. Like its predecessor before it, the track find Corey Laitman and co. facing down challenges with a sense of determination, not least the dispiriting experience of mourning the future in a present world which seems to be tilting in a bad direction. As ever, the result unafraid of darkness yet always charged with energy, and as attuned to the personal moments as the wider global scene.

‘Oh, Antarctica’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Great Klons – Visions of Exile

We have featured several singles from Great Klons, the recording project of Rochester‘s Scott Klon, in recent months. ‘More Beauty in the Rain’, explored “devasting wildfires, parental illness [and] the encroachment of pernicious technology… [with a] decidedly mid-00s feel”, while ‘Hidden Signage’ was “a vivid slice of indie pop rooted in both driving percussion and fresh guitar.” Both songs were taken from an EP, Visions of Exile, which was released last week. The record sees Klon joined by Ben Morey, Katie Morey and Billy Martin, who together whip up a singular style that they say draws on “krautrock, psychedelic surf and indie dream pop.” Tonally it lands somewhere between wistful and weary, everyday worries and self-deprecation sitting side by side with something that feels dangerously like hope. Nowhere is this more apparent that on the title track, a grooving psych pop song about the unease that sits beneath a comfortable surface. “It’s a song that touches upon a common theme in Great Klons’ work,” as the press release puts it. “Hell is often having something to lose.”

koleżanka – Single Wooden Bullet

Following on from 2023 album Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes, Kristina Moore’s koleżanka is set to return this September with brand new record Zone 2, a release which explores the liminal space between trauma and health in the wake of an injury. After lead single ‘Lessons in Textiles‘ worked towards reworking oneself in the wake of loss, subsequent track ‘Levers and Pulleys’ furthered the style. The song “plays like recovery unfolding in real time,” we wrote in our preview. “A process not necessarily as joyous nor neatly linear as we might hope, rather something won hour by hour, day by day as the cells replicate and repair themselves, and the body relearns the world according to its new shape.” With the release of Zone 2 coming soon, koleżanka has shared brand new track ‘Single Wooden Bullet’, a song which takes inspiration from Only Lovers Left Alive by Jim Jarmusch to imagine a life after death, be it figurative or literal, and the embrace of imperfection which such a state might demand.

Lael Neale – Slip Away

Last year Lael Neale released Altogether Stranger, an album which “seem[ed] to promise more of the tight, electrical minimalism established across previous LPs [but] in reality holds some of Neale’s most adventurous work to date,” as we wrote in our review. “Because scratch the sleek surface and you’ll find a dizzying concoction of moods and influences, the album a mirror of the odd, alluring city which serves as its setting, enemy and muse.” Refusing to rest on her laurels, Neale is preparing to return with new LP As Killers Do, the inaugural release from her new label Consensual Sound, and the album promises to be every bit as ambitious. Take lead single ‘Slip Away’, a track which uses her trademark blend of dreaminess and urgency to explore the transience inherent within any human existence, though one which focuses not on the fear or grief of such a fact of life, but the reassuring justice mortality will inevitably mete out, regardless of a person’s status. “We act as little gods. Assuming great import. All that we build, create, collect and become, to be taken away,” Neale explains. “We are not gods. The only consolation I have in a world of megalomaniac billionaires and sociopathic leaders. They all will die. We all will die. The Earth will go on.”

Watch the video below featuring analog stop motion paintings by Neale herself and camera by Guy Blakeslee:

As Killers Do will be released on the 20th November via Consensual Sound and you can pre-order it now.

Marika Che – Bonfire of Tragedy

“Packs an emotional punch yet delivers it within a breezy warmth, drawing the audience in with an easy-going rhythm and assured vocal style. A debut this might be, but there’s clear experience within its craft, and you’d be hard pushed to find a more pleasant soundtrack as summer blooms.” So we wrote of ‘Edge of the Storm’, the lead single from Marika Che‘s LP Bright Flame back in June, the track positioning the LA-based songwriter somewhere between dream pop and Waxahatchee-esque folk rock. With the release of the record approaching, Che has now returned with latest single ‘Bonfire of Tragedy’ to further introduce the emotional depth of the release. “The first song I wrote on the album, shortly after my dad passed away,” Justad explains. “I felt a little lost, and very lonely in my experience of grief.” But from this low point comes a moment of catharsis, as she continues:

I was driving home one night and had this vision of a massive bonfire and all these people being drawn to the warm glow in various states of wellbeing. It was a place to drink, dance, sing, tell stories, unburden yourself without worrying about judgment. A place to howl at the moon and befriend a stranger. It’s pretty sentimental, I guess, but it’s what I needed at the time. This song became that for me, and I feel the cure of it every time I sing it onstage for a room full of people.

Nick Bellerose – About Us

Back in July, we introduced the work of Nick Bellerose, a former international diplomat who decided to pivot more fully towards songwriting in response to a period of personal upheaval. With elements of Elliot Smith, Sparklehorse and Nebraska-era Springsteen, first single ‘maybe i think’ was “characteristically bittersweet,” as we wrote, “the track explor[ing] heartbreak with a world-weary acceptance, ultimately landing somewhere life-affirming,” and latest track ‘About Us’ is no less emotive. This time, Johnny Cash classic ‘Ring of Fire’ serves as inspiration, the song painting 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.

NOIA – As Per My Last Email

The recording project of Barcelona-born, Brooklyn-based artist Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, NOIA released her debut album gisela to acclaim in 2023, though has since had to endure one of the most difficult periods of her life, navigating personal loss amid a wider picture of turmoil across the world. The first NOIA release since the debut tackles this experience head on, using a distinctively experimental style of pop to evoke the absurd contemporary phenomenon of never switching off. “It’s what happens when ‘just circling back’ becomes a way of life,” Fullà-Silvestre explains. “A song about the slow collapse of hyperfunctionality, that state of being permanently ‘on,’ answering messages at midnight, running on notifications instead of sleep, until you’re less a person than a broken, over-wired robot still sending polite replies.”

The track comes with a video directed by Varya Rootwood with movement director Viva Soudan, which furthers the themes of the song by taking the office environment out into the natural world, representing how the boundaries between work and life have been eroded in our hypercapitalist society.

‘As Per My Last Email’ is out now via streaming services and available from the NOIA Bandcamp page.

Val McCallum – Fifty Fifty

Chances are, if you’re familiar with the name Val McCallum, it’s down to his forty-year stint as the sideman of Jackson Browne, or maybe thanks to his guitar playing with the likes of Lucinda Williams, Randy Newman and Sheryl Crow. But while he might seem most comfortable as a collaborator, he is also a stellar songwriter in his own right, his work representing something of a well-kept secret among the LA music scene (if an artist who has been covered by Phoebe Bridgers could still be called a secret). But after developing a partnership with the Berlin-based lyricist and producer Rudi Maier, McCallum looks finally set to announce himself on a wider stage with As If We Didn’t Know, a full-length which serves as a long overdue introduction for listeners unfamiliar with his talents, and merely confirmation for those who always knew. The record isn’t out until spring 2027, but lead single ‘Fifty Fifty’ is here to whet appetites. A fittingly filmic folk song about the roles we play in trying to escape our own lives and the people who help lead us back towards authenticity, all the more resonant when you consider McCallum is the son of Hollywood stars Jill Ireland and David McCallum, not to mention the stepson of Charles Bronson.

As If We Didn’t Know will be released on the 19th March 2027 and you can pre-order it now.

Winter – hide-a-lullaby (feat. Peel Dream Magazine)

We’ve featured a couple of tracks from Winter‘s upcoming Romantix Mixtape in recent times, an EP which sees the New York-based artist reimagine the songs on 2025 full-length Adult Romantix. After lead single ‘hollow (mixtape version)‘ (“A song succinct and bound by forward motion, clocking in at almost half the length of its twin sister yet no less atmospheric for it”), Winter enlisted Soccer Mommy for a new version of ‘without you‘ which offered “a cinematic representation of love, loneliness and longing.” And the star guests keep on coming, with latest track ‘hide-a-lullaby’ inviting Peel Dream Magazine to help reshape the sound, stripping things back to an intimate acoustic arrangement which foregrounds the vocals, and further amplifies the songwriting which might otherwise be submerged beneath gauzy textures.

Romantix Mixtape will be released on the 18th September via Winspear and you can pre-order it now from the Winspear Bandcamp page.

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After the title track introduced the tone of the EP, King’s Evil are now back with latest single ‘Private Failure’. Like much of the EP, the track is hewn from golden era indie rock, with K Records and Slumberland clear touchstones, as well as Berman, Guided By Voices and The Glands, though to list comparisons is to risk clouding the real triumph of the release. Because King’s Evil is an EP all about recombination, taking the sensibilities of its two principle songwriters and the acts which have come to inform them and assembling the constituent parts into something new. On ‘Private Failure’, the result is a succinct yet potent confession, a song which does not lack energy but seems to linger in the same space, like a message delivered from a chopper hovering low over your old house.

Art by Sami Martasian, layout by J Kimball

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Most recent single ‘Can’t Sleep’ suggests one such course. With a certain alt-country twang and renewed narrative focus, the track sits somewhere between contemporaries like MJ Lenderman and the likes of Tom Petty, and supporting vocals from Kira Cuthbertson of fellow Vancouver outfit runner only add to the bittersweet tone of the track. Because, as with Buddie before it, D.L. Forrest possesses an admirable ability to meld searching emotion with a fresh, cathartic energy, able to occupy more than one mood within the same three minutes.

The style is fitting for a song as open and unguarded as ‘Can’t Sleep’. Because despite the apparent brightness of the track’s sound and rhythm, the ideas it explores are in fact far more conflicted, detailing people so caught up in their own trials and tribulations that they are unable to be there for others. “I wrote this song on April 30, 2024, while taking a break from a sleepless night, writing comprehensive exams for grad school,” Forrest explains. “I was doing too much but somehow feeling like I wasn’t ever doing enough. That anxiety started spilling over into the rest of my life. I wasn’t present with the people I cared about most. And all of that made me feel like a failure. This song isn’t exactly about that, but about realizing what that headspace felt like, where it came from, and how it affected everyone around me.”

Watch the video filmed by Kyle Huck, Ian Webster and Forrest himself below:

L

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The benefits of this modus operandi are manifold. With an ever-changing array of musicians, Hour is uniquely resistant to retreading old ground, each recording session or performance shaped by the configuration present in that specific moment. But more importantly, the sheer breadth of talent available to Cormier-O’Leary allows him to explore themes which might too great to confront on his own. Consider Hour’s new full-length, Ghost Bridge, set for release this autumn via Dear Life Records. An album which, as per its title, repurposes an unrealised film concept in which a bridge literally starts to dematerialise into thin air. With a sound decidedly cinematic, Hour use this image as a starting point for a far wider meditation on loss and disappearance. What it means to be on one side of something without hope of crossing over. The helplessness of being stranded in any given location. Not to mention the almost dreamlike experience of witnessing a tangible aspect of your world suddenly vanish in an instant. How do we live with the knowledge this will happen to people around us, be they lovers or strangers? What would it feel like to take their place?

A thirteen-strong cast of musicians assembled to bring Ghost Bridge to life, and each song was arranged with specific players in mind. To give the full roll call, Cormier-O’Leary is joined by Jason Calhoun, Em Downing, Matt Fox, Peter Gill (2nd Grade, Friendship), Pat Keen, Lucas Knapp, Evan McGonagill, Peter McLaughlin (Little Wings), Frank Meadows (Fust, Dear Life co-owner), Keith J. Nelson, Abi Reimold, Adelyn Strei (Skullcrusher) and Heeyoon Won (Boosegumps). You only have to listen to the subtly mesmeric title track to appreciate the newfound depth of this iteration of Hour. A song, clocking in at near ten minutes which must rank among Cormier-O’Leary’s most ambitious and thematically loaded to date. Nothing is hurried, yet there is nevertheless an urgency to the poignant, curious sound. The level of detail is striking but there is no ounce of ostentation. Lesser acts might be overwhelmed if tasked with exploring concepts of loss and mortality, prone to slipping into maudlin excess, but with a unique blend of compassion and abstraction, it seems Hour are up to the task.

The song is paired with an equally abstract and evocative short film made by Cormier-O’Leary and his collaborators themselves. “I was transfixed by this triangle hallway in one of the buildings at the Circus Campus in Germantown, so I gathered my friends Buzz Lombardi, Heeyoon Won, Hayden Hall, Lucas Knapp and Silas Reidy to make the video there,” he explains. “We spent most of our time lighting the hallway so Silas’ long, slow walk towards the camera would be disorienting with him emerging from and descending back into shadow.” Watch in full below:

Ghost Bridge will be released on the 9th October via Dear Life Records and you can pre-0rder it from the Hour Bandcamp page.

Band photo by William H. Travis, album cover photography by Matthew Chasney, layout by Francis Lyons

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There’s a new Jane Schoenbrun film hitting theatres right now, and like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow before it, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma comes complete with a score by Alex G. Waxwork Records will be putting out two releases in support of the movie, first with a soundtrack that collects several of Alex G’s compositions along with needle drops from the likes of Okay Kaya, R.E.M. and Counting Crows, then a full score later in September. Single ‘Pain Is The Heart of Love’ introduces the tone, a song crafted by Alex G with vocals from The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan which encapsulates the alluring mix of physical and ethereal which has long marked Schoenbrun’s work, as well as the blurred line between reality, memory and dreams.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) will be release on the 21st August and you can pre-order it now.

Bonnie Hook – songbird

Back in 2025, Bonnie Hook (AKA Detroit songwriter Katlyn Sartor) released diadem, an EP which introduced an experimental brand of folk music which draws upon everything from ambient to psych. The result was something simultaneously personal and mysterious, intimate in its intention yet unafraid of pushing towards ambiguity. Set for release next month, Bonnie Hook’s new full-length whitelodge builds upon this style, further widening the sound and increasing its transportive qualities. Take single ‘songbird’, a lush and patient track indicative of the kind of richness Sartor can conjure, its lyrics stripped back to a poetic abstraction yet never lacking for emotional clarity.

songbird you’ll wait to fly
into our string of time
open foreboding eyes
though it may take a while
to coo

Cooper Kenward – Bit Better

“Step outside, walk the dog / SSRI shades on / Feel alright, feel okay / Nothing new just another day.” So sings Cooper Kenward in the opening lines of ‘Bit Better’, the first taste of a new album coming via Soggy Anvil Records which sees the Northern California songwriter employ an ostensibly sunny sound to delve into some rather deep, existential themes. Indeed the first verse encapsulates the mood of the track, where a sense of self-reflection meets the inherent hope of a new day, a vibe as bound up in the country twang as the lyrics themselves, though never without a certain tongue-in-cheek fatalism chasing behind. The result plays as both an optimistic mantra for the depressed person and wry joke at the end of the world, though in Cooper Kenward’s hands, these two things need not be mutually exclusive.

History, they say is dead
Images mean nothing at all
Music is just a bore
Ring cam shows horsemen
at the doooooor

And I’m sure we’ll get another chance soon
To do what we’ve done
But a little bit better

‘Bit Better’ is out now via Soggy Anvil Records and available from the usual places.

Essy Sparrow – Weak at the Knees

This October, songwriter and multi-disciplinary artist Essy Sparrow will release new EP Gossip From a Coastal Town. As the title suggests, the album is deeply rooted in a sense of place, not only painting a picture of life within a Cornish town but evoking its wider landscape of heritage and history, the myriad of personal memories and narratives which weave together to form the story of any given environment. “Some of these songs are true, some are exaggerated and some are straight up lies for fun,” Sparrow explains. “I became obsessed with the idea of writing music like rumours—emotional snapshots rather than perfect autobiographical truth.” The result is often whimsical but never lacking heart, as displayed by latest single ‘Weak at the Knees’. A bright folk song in which any bittersweet rumination or self-deprecative confession is vastly outweighed by the fondness at its core. “I wanted it to sound like a traditional coastal wedding by the sea,” Sparrow continues. “A village showing up to watch a couple renew their vows on a hillside. I wanted to sum up love, summer and the feeling of the UK coast as much as possible.”

Gossip From a Coastal Town will be released on the 2nd October and you can pre-order it now.

Lane Hartley – I Am Not Ashamed

No Home, the forthcoming new record from LA-based artist Lane Hartley, is something of a team effort. It features contributions from a long list of musicians, including Mary Lattimore, Seth Kaufman of Floating Action and David Hartley of The War On Drugs, who elevated the collection of ten songs with a combination of collaboration and intuition, taking Hartley’s often dark lyrics and brightening them with lush arrangements and a community spirit. “All of the players on this record really brought it to life in such a cosmic way,” says Hartley. “They instilled so much childlike wonder and fun into the making of the album. It inspired me to keep going.” Lead single, ‘I Am Not Ashamed’, which takes its name and ethos from the memoir by fifties Hollywood star Barbara Payton, is our first taste. A breezy and timeless folk rock song, it possesses a tough defiant streak, a dogged determination not to be cowed by shame. As Hartley describes, “It’s about knowing that whatever you’ve done to survive, you still deserve love.”

Lost Film – Blossom Rot

‘Blossom Rot’, the new single from Western Massachusetts indie pop band Lost Film, is in some ways the perfect late summer indie pop song. As the title suggests, it is inspired by gardening (or more precisely, learning to be more laidback and trusting to avoid losing fruit to the titular rot), but there’s something more than that too. Wrapped in Casio arpeggios and a sweetly pensive shimmer, it captures the carefree contentedness of a warm and quiet evening as the sun begins to set and paints everything in a rosy, nostalgic glow. Indeed, nostalgia is perhaps the key emotion, due in at least some small part to the band’s choice of background entertainment while recording. “While Max (Newman, who adds percussion) and I were tracking this one,” explains lead Jim Hewitt, “we had Disney’s 1994 Summer classic, Camp Nowhere on which really set the tone for the session.” Jordan Lawlor (of M83) then came on board to lend his mixing talents, which only amps up the effect further.

The Male Pattern – I’m a Soldier

We’re not certain a satirical concept album described as “Springsteen meets Ween” was on our bingo card of releases in 2026, but sometimes you only realise you’ve been waiting for something when it finally arrives. I Was Shot in the Heart! by The Male Pattern is exactly that, telling the story, as per lead Will Schwartz, of “an unnamed suburban dad as he navigates his acrimonious divorce, spends too much time watching TV and on the computer, gets addicted to pills, loses his job as a mortgage broker, shoots and kills a small-time drug dealer, finds God, and commits suicide by cop at a 24/7 Stop and Shop in White Plains, NY.” Featuring Daniel Bateman of Frog fame, single ‘I’m a Soldier’ sets the tone of the record, where the undeniable irony and playfulness do nothing to undermine the heartbreaking loneliness running through its heart. An anthem of America in 2026, where vapidity, ridiculousness and mean-spirited self-interest feel like symptoms of some dark, cursed pathology lurking beneath the surface.

Ok Cowgirl – Rock N Roll Ruined My Life

Led by Leah Lavigne, Brooklyn‘s OK Cowgirl released their debut Couldn’t Save Us From My Gut back in 2024, winning acclaim with an unguarded, often introspective style of indie rock. Set for release this month via Easy Does it Records, follow-up Rhinestone Cowgirl builds upon these foundations with new levels of confidence, both increasing the scale and widening the scope of the songs to create a bona fide slice of American rock. The result is understandably conflicted in tone, set as it is within a country rigged against so many of its people. Yet it is the energy and drive which most catches the attention, Lavigne and co. pressing on with life and grasping its joys as their own display of revolt. Take new single ‘Rock N Roll Ruined My Life’. “I wrote this song to myself and to so many friends who have struggled to justify staying the course while pursuing this precarious path of being an artist,” Lavigne explains. “It is not an easy path, and as an artist with a day job I have had periods of time where I’ve grown resentful of music for taking up all my time-off requests and keeping me in a job without healthcare. I wrote this song to vent those feelings, and every time I sing the tongue-in-cheek hook I am reminded how untrue it is. Music is the most fulfilling and joyful part of my life. That’s the beautiful thing about giving yourself space to feel your challenging feelings–you’ll often find they’re misnamed.”

Watch the video directed, filmed and edited by Matt Birkenholz below:

Rhinestone Cowgirl will be released on the 21st August 21st via Easy Does It Records.

Paul Spring – Tell Me That You Love Me

The work of Saint Cloud, MN-based songwriter Paul Spring is nothing if not varied. His work shifts from project to project with the idiosyncratic vision of a true artist. The last time we featured his work, he was “combining electronic and Medieval influences,” as we wrote of 2022 release Thunderhead, “casting Spring as some strange bard that wanders into your village with tunes so odd and unfamiliar they sound like sorcery,” but latest full-length Barnstorm is very different. After meeting a group of Irish musicians and developing a working chemistry when touring in 2025, he wanted to make the most of the encounter, returning months later to record the album in Inchiquinn in County Galway. Tadhg Ó Raghallaigh (Uilleann piper), Ben Duffy (drums), Sam Wright (bass) and Macdara Ó Faoláin (bouzouki) joined to flesh out the sound, creating a cross-pollinated style born of folk and baroque traditions. The result is varied and ever-changing across the record, but latest single ‘Tell Me That Your Love Me’ captures the detail and drama perfectly.

Routine Caffeine – Porcelain Doll

We’ve covered Louisville trio Routine Caffeine several times in recent years, from 2024 EP Weeds Under Concrete Stones to the 2025 single ‘Green Glass‘, each utilising a blend of dreamy haze and forward motion to explore themes of nostalgia, memory and the passing of time. Now the band are back with brand new single ‘Porcelain Doll’ and the track again exists within the push and pull between the past and the present, its insistent rhythm softened by an almost ethereal air, all while a sense of tension simmers beneath the surface. The result is beguiling and ominous in equal measure, something only amplified as the song progresses towards its evocative conclusion. “Dancing inside a frame / The roses bloom, then fall away,” Katie O’Brien Kelley sings in typical cryptic fashion. “Echoing, spiral stairs / Oh, how it was to walk in there.”

Slow Down Molasses – Follow (Eric’s Trip Cover)

We last featured Slow Down Molasses back in 2021 with the release of their album Minor Deaths, an album of clever details and visceral weight which explored the dark contemporary moment. “There is no prevailing mood or conclusion,” we wrote, “just a committed decision to embrace the energies of the contemporary moment in all of their frustrations, aggressions, vulnerabilities and dread.” Something of a hiatus has since followed, though now the Saskatoon outfit are back and gearing up for what promises to be a busy new era ahead, promising some of their most succinct and ferocious songs to date. To celebrate this return, SLM have turned to what they consider to be one of Canada’s most iconic acts, Eric’s Trip, recording a cover of the gloriously boisterous ‘Follow’ together with old friend Jeanette Neufeld. As they explain:

To say Eric’s Trip and their various members’ bands made an impact on me would be a massive understatement. There may not be a more important and more loved Canadian band for us than Eric’s Trip. They blew my teenaged mind and opened up an amazing world of lo-fi, noisey, but tuneful music for me. Inspiring quiet mornings listening to gems like Behind the Garage and Allergic to Love, road trips listening to Forever Again straight through, late nights blasting ragers like Follow, Anytime You Want and Sunlight and many, many hours letting my guitar feedback swell into the perfect lo-fi My Bloody Valentine moments that filled Eric’s Trip records.

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It is this experience which ultimately came to shape Automatic, Mali Obomsawin’s new full-length, coming this autumn again via Out Of Your Head Records. The period saw the Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer gain access to a vast quantity of ethnological recordings of the Abenaki language made in the mid-1900s, material previously held exclusively at Obomsawin’s alma mater, Dartmouth College, allowing her to delve far deeper into the history of her ancestors than ever before and reclaim the material from the outsiders who seized it. What results is a record crafted by an Odanak person directly from Odanak voices, working against the external curation and contextualisation which can drain a culture of its life. “Behind Automatic is a deep awareness about institutions’ predatory relationship with Native material,” Obomsawin explains. “I wanted to make a record that institutions couldn’t own.”

A host of collaborators help bring the sound to life, with Andrew Broder (turntables, electronics), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Taylor Ho Bynum (cornet), Allison Burik (bass clarinet), Yuma Uesaka (tenor saxophone), Noah Campbell (tenor saxophone) and Zack O’Farrill (drums) all lending their talents, as well as longtime collaborator and other half of Deerlady Magdalena Abrego (electric guitar). But in truth the record’s cast is larger by orders of magnitude. Because, with help from Broder’s turntables, Obomsawin is able to reclaim a community from within the ethnological study, her work not aiming to chisel the material into a neat narrative but instead liberate the authentic chorus of voices from which it was made. “The turntable is an instrument that explores time and temporality,” as she continues, “and is able to give a form of agency to the ancestors in the recordings.”

The lead single and title track of Automatic offers an encapsulation of this style. Here, Obomsawin’s own voice is presented alongside that of her great-grand relative, Malian, eroding the temporal distance between two individuals and thus collapsing the distinction between then and now. If the Western act of studying and recording the Abenaki people was a process of commodification, then Automatic represents the opposite. Not merely a repatriation but a complete reversal, Obomsawin taking that which has been desiccated for preservation and rehydrating it so that it might once again exist in its natural form.

Photography by Nolan Altvater Gerard, graphic design by Neosha Pendergraft

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After the suitably existential, transformative lead single ‘Country Rose’, Jonathan Something has now shared latest track ‘Gasoline’ to further build anticipation for the release. A prime example of how One More Lonesome Cowboy Song lives up to its name, the track manages to evoke both the intimacy of personal experience and something far larger, bringing in the melancholy of the archtypal wanderer in search of meaning. Katie Martucci (bass) and Dylan McKinstry (drums) join to flesh out the sound, and the result is relatively understated yet charged with real feeling, driven by a persistent yearning for something more. Watch a live version recorded at Greenpoint Recording Collective with Dogstar Films below:

One More Lonesome Cowboy Song will be released on the 16th October via High Shelter. ‘Gasoline’ is available from this usual places.

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With the album’s release on the horizon, Perennial have unveiled latest single ‘Ready! Steady! Go!’, another blast of relentless energy that somehow combines raucous punk rock with an air of 60s cool. The juxtaposition is just one of the many which mark the sound of Modernism—the record dense yet propulsive, experimental but intuitive, caustic and welcoming—and ‘Ready! Steady! Go!’ embodies the vibe perfectly. A song at once buoyant and bruising which seems to want to both dance with you and slap you around that face, earning each of the three exclamation marks in its title as it barrels towards its conclusion in under two minutes. Watch the video, directed, filmed & edited by the band, below:

Modernism will release on 18th September via Safe Suburban Homes (UK) and Ernest Jenning Record Co. Order a copy now from the Perennial Bandcamp page, includingCD and a limited edition white vinyl.

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After ‘‘cowboy bebop & eric’s trip’ (what we labelled “a characteristically off-the-wall and hyperactive slice of electronic (anti-)pop”) and ‘return of jafar‘ (“sits in the sweet spot between unapologetic nostalgia and contemporary neurosis, its tone unafraid of self-deprecation yet so bright and bouncy that it seems to simultaneously conquer it”), applied communications is back with new single ‘tarot sans tinseltown’ ahead of new full-length applied communications bites the big one, coming via Rare Noodles and Bar/None Records. We described the album as sitting in the centre of “a Venn diagram consisting of early Casiotone For the Painfully Alone, Emperor X and Dan Deacon,” and while the latest track could be said to conforms to this label, it also shows the limitations of comparisons when dealing with an act so singular. But however idiosyncratic the track might seem, it is only bringing to life the bizarre details of the time and place which inspired it. The song is about “an impromptu trip to LA during a depressive spiral,” Max Wood describes:

during the trip, pope benedict came out of the conclave and i saw beck at the scientology celebrity center while taking advantage of their free brunch. (i’m not a scientologist, don’t worry!) the song leans on LA’s weird history (eatonville, dw griffith, amy mcpherson) as a well of metaphors for the mental health precipice i was on at the time.”

applied communications bites the big one will be released on the 25th September via Rare Noodles and Bar/None Records and you can pre-order it via the applied communications Bandcamp page.

Black Duck – Funeral in my Brain

Over recent months, we’ve covered a couple of singles from the upcoming album between Chicago‘s Black Duck (that’s Douglas McCombs on bass/guitar, Bill MacKay on guitar and Charles Rumback on drums) and Basque musician Elena Setién, with both ‘Land of Many Eyes‘ and ‘Connects By Water‘ proving how stimulating collaboration can be. “[Meeting Setién], the trio felt they had discovered someone else clearly attuned to the Black Duck spirit,” as we wrote, “and have taken this forward to not only invigorate the project, but to reimagine its very boundaries [becoming] a quartet in order to bottle the lightning of this live performance.” With the release fast approaching via Thrill Jockey, the outfit have now unveiled new track ‘Funeral in my Brain’. The song is inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem for which it is named, elevating the emotional landscape of the work into something larger and more forceful, an almost cinematic vista which performs a kind of transubstantiation, the fear of death morphed into its own form of transcendence. “This one is a funeral, but a surrealistic one in some way,” as Setién explains. “In a sense, as a performer, and as a listener, I lose fear of death and just embrace it.”

Black Duck with Elena Setién will be released on the 28th August via Thrill Jockey Records and you can pre-order it now from the Black Duck Bandcamp page.

Burley – Change

Following on from a self-titled EP released last year, Brooklyn folk project Burley are teasing their upcoming full-length with a brand new single ‘Change’. Consisting of Antony Jeffares, Austin Chappell, John Dockery and Sam Lopane, the band make what they call ‘gas station core’ A style of folk rock which pairs the rawness and twang of alt-country with an extra dose of wistfulness, certain to appeal to fans of Fust, Friendship and Sluice. ‘Change’ finds the quartet at their most confident yet, able to confront thorny personal themes with a tone that’s as assured as it is bright. As the title might suggests, these themes involve change in its strange complications, namely how a relationship can reconfigure a person, and how the end of a relationship can be equally seismic, not to mention the ways in which we stay the same no matter how strong the external forces might be. “Light up, sun down / find a big block to walk around / where all the concrete knows your pain,” as one verse goes. “Old friends, same talk / breaking down off of Eastern Park / where all the benches know my name / when all the brightest colours seem to fade // It ain’t too late to change again / no, it ain’t to late to change.”

‘Change’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Hockitay – half smile

“”I’m not sure what I want / Except not wanting at all.” So sings Hockitay on latest single ‘half smile’, a deceptively downbeat line on what might be the Montreal artist’s warmest track to date. Hockitay’s 2026 releases have hinted towards this sound, with the almost eerie ‘buttons‘ striving for humanity in the algorithmic present, and ‘two crows‘ looking for hopeful omens to point towards a better future, both songs disillusioned with the world yet struggling for reprieve. A casual listen to ‘half smile’ suggests this struggle might have come good, the sound full of apparent heart and fondness. 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.

Aw baby, don’t cry
I say this with love
I’m not sure what I want
Except not wanting at all

Watch the video directed by David S. Blouin & Buvard and featuring Sékou and Myriam Doumbia, & René Bazinet:

‘half smile’ is out now via Future Gods and available from Bandcamp.

Jordan Sand – Baby with the Sail

Known for her talents with the bowed double bass, string player and singer Jordan Sand has long supported the vision of others, collaborating on everything from film scores to SNL appearances. But it was only after an extended hiatus in making music that her own solo vision started to take shape. Upon her return, Sand found her process and sensibilities had shifted, with the desire to plan and prepare falling away in favour of a more intuitive, impressionistic approach. Sand’s debut solo full-length Baby Ghost feels like the culmination of this new era. A release recorded in single takes and eschewing overdubs and edits, it is what has been described as a “spectral song cycle set within the transition space between life and death.” Lead track ‘Baby in the Sails’ hints at the power of such a style, the song exploring the tension between silence and intensity as it progresses from spacious beginning towards a bold, dissonant conclusion. The video, made in collaboration Berlin-based photographer and videographer Juliane Schütz, offers a visual representation of this mood, presenting a series of images which play like memories as experienced in the liminal space between this life and whatever comes next.

Baby Ghost is set for release on the 2nd October via Hallow Ground and you can pre-order it now.

June McDoom – Without You

June McDoom first came to our attention with her self-titled EP in 2022. We were taken with how the New York-based artist took “relatively simple folk blueprints and weave[d] whole worlds of sound around them,” describing her style as “a constantly shifting collage of her influences, warm and rich and strangely dream-like.” Following another EP and a double EP compilation release, McDoom has now signed with Jagjaguwar and is preparing to release her debut full-length. Titled Follow the Light, and recorded with partner and long-time collaborator Evan Wright, the album promises to double down on the otherworldly atmosphere, which the press notes liken to that liminal space you slip into just before sleep. Lead single ‘Without You’ offers an initial peek at what to expect, a dreamily romantic track that pokes the tender spot that is the realisation of how important a loved one is. “The ending celebrates the awareness and commitment to never take that person for granted,” McDoom explains, “because it’s never too late to change how you’ve been.”

Thavoron – Blurry tattoos

The work of Seattle-based Cambodian-American artist Thavoron has always possessed a cinematic edge, painting vivid if at times challenging pictures of a person search for their true identity with a rich, R&B-inflected pop sound. But latest single ‘Blurry tattoos’ takes things a step further, drawing inspiration from acts like FKA twigs and Kelela to offers sound that’s unapologetic in its widescreen drama and longing. The accompanying video, directed by Thavoron and Maddie Ludgate, even begins with a TMZ-style celeb report before moving through dance numbers and surreal nocturnal landscape, furthering the themes through filmic shots and choreography.

‘Blurry tattoos’s is out now via Trailing Twelve and available from the usual places.

Tough Old Bird – I Was a Giant

“Continuing to display the newly electrified version of the project, the track sees the Corrigans and co. straddle the traditional and the contemporary, maintaining the narrative and emotional heft of classic folk while always striding forwards.” So we wrote of ‘Shape of Our Love’, the second single (after ‘Wednesday’s Child‘) from Tough Old Bird that saw the Buffalo outfit push its traditionally folk-centric sound towards more rock-adjacent territory. However, do not be fooled, Tough Old Bird is still a folk project at heart, something new single ‘I Was a Giant’ certainly attests. After realising the track was resisting attempts to arrange it as a full-band piece, they decided to strip the sound right back to their folk roots, leaving only Nathan Corrigan on vocals and acoustic guitar, with usual drummer Ricky Bechard (usually the band’s drummer) lending a second acoustic guitar. The result proves that sometimes less is more, the relatively sparse arrangement carrying an intimacy that might be overpowered in a busier style, and displays the confidence of the project as a whole. Tough Old Bird have not pivoted to a new sound so much as expanded their armoury, and are now equipped to tackle whatever emotional palette any given song demands.

V.V. Lightbody – Practice Smiling

V.V. Lightbody, the project of Chicago songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and collaborator per excellence Vivian McConnell, returns this October with Period Piece, her third full-length, via Egghunt Records. The record sees McConnell take full control of production, crafting inventive indie folk songs that morph and shift with a chameleonic playfulness. There are also contributions from an impressive list of friends, including Sam Cantor (aka Minor Moon), Emma Hospelhorn (Em Spel), Macie Stewart and Cassandra Jenkins. We got a first taste late last year with lead single ‘Best Problem’, and now V.V. Lightbody has officially announced the album with another track, ‘Practice Smiling’. Light and danceable but with an edge of anxiety, the song was written in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, when everyone (and especially professional musicians) stepped out excited but blinking and unsure of themselves after a period of forced isolation. “In that moment,” McConnell describes, “I so clearly felt the passage of time and a surprising nervousness that had built up in my mind and body, forcing me to reassess my social confidence which I feel like I am still gaining back.”

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For those unfamiliar, Thomas Dollbaum combines the stylings of alt-country that are very much en vogue with a beefier brand of heartland rock, tracing a lineage back through Molina and Springsteen as far as van Zandt, though there’s another set of influences that cannot go unmentioned. A parallel bloodline of writers (think Breece D’J Pancake, Barry Hannah and Larry Brown) who capture the beauty and sorrow in an often rough and tumble Southern existence. Interestingly, arguable heir apparent Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, whose short story collection Sleepovers is one of the best contemporary example of this literary genre, writes the liner notes and has a great interview with Dollbaum in Southwest Review, which digs deeper into the album’s literary influences, from Raymond Carver to the poetry of Jay Hopler, C.D. Wright, Joy Harjo and Philip Levine.

The country-rock-album-as-short-story-collection might not be a new idea, but paired with the aforementioned immediacy with which the songs were recorded, Birds of Paradise feels less like a set of penned vignettes and more like short glimpses at lives themselves. Each song drops the listener alongside its characters within their Southern homeland, people often on the margins of society, eking out a living within the transient space between a lost past and unknown future. Lead single ‘Dozen Roses’, arriving after the subdued and tender opener ‘Visitation’, plays like the album’s mission statement in this regard. A meditation on loss and the soothing wonder of the natural world that’s full of taut energy and forward motion, even while the narrator cycles back to the same sentiment, repeating themselves with increasing urgency.

When you were still around
I’d carry you across the river
I’d ramble through the dark until the time would deliver
Before the time would deliver

Many of the songs on Birds of Paradise are repetitive in this way, swinging back around to the same verses as if Dollbaum is working through thoughts in real time, lingering over memories both positive and not so much. This internal world provides a neat counterbalance to the present tense of many of the tracks which is altogether more transient. Our narrator(s) look for sure ground in the uncertainty of the in-between, or at least acceptance that the time spent on the “backroads leading to I-95” or “rambling through the pines” is not so much a path towards something as the body of life itself. Poignant closer ‘Blue Meets Blue’ confronts the idea head on, an ostensibly a fatalistic track (“There’s nowhere to go this is just a circle,” as Dollbaum sings, “there’s nowhere to run this is just landlocked blues”) that transforms acquiescence into a kind of charged catharsis.

It’s not too much of a reach to say this cyclical nature evokes another of the album’s key themes. Imagery of nature is abundant, and its rhythms extend across the songs as a backdrop to the very human emotions that often take centre stage. A place choked with vine and timber, where the waterbirds are strange and tall and coyotes howl at night. You only have to peek at the album art (an incredible embroidered quilt by Cora Nimtz) to understand the kind of picture Dollbaum paints across the record. Nature as something vivid and precious and undeniably peculiar, like some half-understood miracle which happens to occur all around. Yet, true to its setting, Birds of Paradise has dirt beneath its fingernails. Wonder and violence sit side by side. No more directly than on ‘Rabbits’, where the childhood innocence and bursting life is depicted as its own inversion, kids running through the burnt fields of Okeechobee with iron bars, trying to beat their siblings to the song’s titular prey as their mother watches on, keeping count.

This same mix of animation, desperation, melancholy and absurdity run through many of the songs, regardless of their subject matter. Take ‘King’s Landing’, with its childhood dream of a pilot’s license and the freedom it offers giving way to the mundane (“So lets go home and watch Judge Joe Brown / And reruns of Cops episodes in our home town”), though without ever extinguishing the desire and imagination which kicked off the fantasy in the first place. Or ‘Pulverize’, where a narrator fights the urge to look back through forward motion, then ‘Coyote’, where stasis seems to hold latent potential, as though some drastic act might materialise out of boredom itself. ‘Big Boi’ sees a teenaged Dollbaum act as chauffeur for a feuding couple strung out and desperate and looking to score. “Big Boi showed me his tattoos all down his arms,” Dollbaum sings, “said he got his nickname for being so goddamn large,” before switching the tone several shades darker, painting the titular character as a victim of the opioid crisis with the deft brevity of a poet.

Scars all from the emergency room
Asked me if I could fill a script too
Says he’s in a lot of pain right now
Who am I to say no to him anyhow?

Dollbaum might have recorded the album in the blink of an eye, but these are songs born of a lifetime in the worlds they inhabit. Places ignored by many, full of the kind of sensations we all too often forget. The dejection and sadness, yes, plus the weight of aborted dreams and all associated regrets, but also a nascent wonder which sits at the edge of our vision. A peculiar light which illuminates the future, colours the pictures of our memories. This might be human or mystical or else just something out in the wild, but we would do better if only we looked for it. Even if it can never really offer a satisfactory answer to whatever afflictions we’re called to bear. “I know you never believed / And me not in a long while,” as Dollbaum sings on opener ‘Visitation’, a fitting conclusion if you view the album as a cycle in itself. “But the older I get, the more I do magical thinking / About how the birds ride out on the sky / How the echoes hang out in the wind / How them ghosts are here in the light/ But you cant talk to any of them.”

Birds of Paradise is out now via Dear Life Records and available from the Thomas Dollbaum Bandcamp page.

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