Single ‘Man’s World’ occupied the angry end of this spectrum, railing against the patriarchal structures of society and the cruelties and violence it too often imparts on women. Which is not to say there’s no playfulness in the song, Cat Clyde’s distinctive blend of emotive folk rock and boisterous rockabilly creating a sound that’s able to convey more than one mood simultaneously. This nuance and depth is what marks Mud Blood Bone, matching the ambition of its thematic concerns, always shifting, changing and making space for more than one emotion.

Take the difference between the wistful, crepuscular folk number ‘Dark Blue’ and racing catharsis of ‘Wanna Ride’, not to mention the cool bluesy swagger of ‘Hold My Hand’. Then there’s ‘My Love’, a cover of Marty Robbins’s 1960 classic which sweeps and flows like some grand landscape of its own. “I heard the original Marty Robbins version of this song in 2023. Hearing it felt like a great clue in my search for meaning in love,” Clyde explains of the latter. “It reminded me of the love that surrounds me in the natural world, and how it all lives within me as well. That love is accessible to me in every tree I touch, in every bird song I hear, in all the places I go, in the earth below me, the sky above me—it’s all a mirror to the love that lives within me, the love from my ancestors, from my past lives, my gods and my guides and beyond.”

But while this stylistic variety might appear scattershot on first glance, spend any amount of time within the record and an internal logic begins to emerge. A cyclical pattern which rejects linearity to mirror nature itself, Cat Clyde finding both energy and solace within the peaks and troughs of organic life. Which is how the hectic, mischievous personality of penultimate track ‘Press Down’ can lead into the slow croon of ‘Another Time’. There are times for frantic, joyful motion, others for reflection, periods of dieback and growth. A sentiment brought to life in a single elegant verse of the album’s closing track. “Hold me close now baby / Press your cheek to mine / Pull me deep into the dream / So I can live inside,” Clyde sings, “Like a flower in springtime / That must bloom and die.”

Mud Blood Bone is out now via Concord Records and you can get it from the Cat Clyde Bandcamp page.

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With the album now out in the world, we’re pleased to report Songs from the Yellow Couch maintains this level of emotional resonance and sonic experimentation across its length, and thus proves a fitting debut. Take the fluctuation of latest single ‘Roller Coaster’. Clocking in at nearly five minutes, the track represents one of the most expansive and considered Dwi Riana has written to date, its foundations of intimate acoustic guitar built upon with subtle flourishes and heartfelt vocals. This style (not to mention the title) is fitting considering the subject matter, for ‘Roller Coaster’ is a picture of a relationship in all of its ups and downs. Specifically how each party must negotiate the ever-changing needs and desires of the other in order to maintain the bond. Frequent collaborator Julie Meunier lends supporting vocals to further the chemistry and poignancy of the sound, and the result is tender, unguarded and forthright. “I used to feel so resentful singing this song,” Dwi Riana explains, “but in the end, I found it to be a way of understanding, and eventually accepting the nature of some relationships.”

This sentiment holds across the record, Dwi Riana’s ability to combine honesty and self-reflection with genuine tenderness conjuring a sound that speaks harsh truths without sacrificing a sense of compassion. Something apparent from the searching tone of opener ‘Elsewhere’, a drifting, considered number which Connor Bennett’s sax nudges towards almost jazzy territory, or the candid ‘Write Home’, which again builds from an acoustic base to ask difficult questions and confront home truths. There’s a patient longing to ‘Your Girl’, as though spiralling inwards towards the real heart of a desire, while ‘In Between’ possesses a stirring rhythm and poetic clarity which communicates the feeling of exposure while moving through a transitional phase. ‘She/Her’ also displays the vulnerability that runs through these songs, and it comes to seem like this willingness to lower defences is central to the album. As though the only way to really confront something as important as identity or relationships is to bare your heart and endure any pain which might result. But, true to the spirit of Songs from the Yellow Couch, this pain is not the lasting impression. Rather it is the wellspring of gladness which emerges upon finally locating that which has been missing for so long.

Cause nothing
Could ever come close
To the feeling that you get
When you find what you have lost

Songs from the Yellow Couch is out now and available from the Dwi Riana Bandcamp page.

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The result is conflicted, reflective, braided from the twin threads of love and loss. A style captured by the ambiguous image of the title itself. Shadow Child refers to ultrasound scanning, that picture of “a liminal person that doesn’t quite exist yet,” as Lapell puts it. “Their status is ontologically blurry.” But across the nine songs, Lapell places this existenial uncertainty into a wider context, drawing on everything from personal experience and medical jargon to maritime myth, and in doing so allows the full spectrum of experience that is pregnancy the space it deserves.

Featuring fellow Canadian songwriter Jill Barber, lead single ‘Hazel’ introduces this nuanced style. What label Outside Music describe as “part lullaby and part elegy” which soothes and mourns in equal measure, addressed to the existentially vague child, be they in the womb, the future or memory. The single comes complete with a video by Lapell herself, cut from old super 8 footage filmed as a teenager and unearthed in the present. “Shot at a melancholy yet hopeful time in my life,” she explains, “the film features birds in flight and at rest, often shaky, scratchy or out of focus. I feel like this stuttering footage has its own fragile beauty that resonates with the song’s sweet message of a nascent love, half-formed but all-consuming.”

Watch the video by Abigail Lapell herself below:

Shadow Child will be released on the 8th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

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“An introspective view on shame,” was how we described ‘Wave’ from Annie Schultz‘s It Bends Until It Breaks, released via Trailing Twelve Records back in 2023. A song which paired Catholic guilt with a more ecstatic aspect of religious imagery to rise through darkness towards something almost triumphant. Now Schultz is back with ‘MIS’, a similarly evocative track that picks through self-destructive tendencies in something like a lament, swapping guitar for organ to further amplify the sorrowful atmosphere of the Minneapolis-based songwriter’s work. “With ‘MIS,’ I wanted to move away from the guitar-based formula I’m used to,” as Schultz explains. “I filled the song out with Casio organ patches, layered harmonies, and a double bass arrangement, which I later realized was a subconscious influence from songs like ‘Oh Well, OK’ by Elliott Smith.”

‘MIS’ is out now via Trailing Twelve Records and available from the usual places.

Bleary – bug

If Bleary‘s new single ‘bug’ seems to carry a notable sense of depth, then it is with good reason. Featuring on the Nashville group’s full-length Little Brain, coming this May via yk records, the track is part of a larger body of work that was first developed prior to the pandemic. Callan Dwan, Peter Mercer, Taro Yamazaki and Luke Fedorko pushed these songs further in their home studio during lockdowns, before taking them to Joshua Ditty and Mike Purcell to record them in their final, sumptuous form. As ‘bug’ attests, this long gestation period bears real fruit. The Bleary sound packs an emotional punch with its combination of soaring energy and considerable heft. A wall of sound in the truest sense, yet one which boosts the listener up so that they might see further over its height.

Exam Season – Dreaming of a Dog

Ringwood indie pop band Exam Season formed in 2016 and, despite releasing a series of singles and EPs, have never put out a full-length record. That is, until now. The four-piece, Ed Watson (guitar/vocals), Jack Laurilla (guitar), Louis Kneale (bass) and Toby Matthews (drums), have unveiled their first new song in over five years, and with it the promise of a debut record sometime in 2026. You will have to be patient for news on the record, but single ‘Dreaming of a Dog’ should tide you over just fine. It’s a love song, though not exactly a saccharine one. Instead the narrator addresses his significant other and their lives together with all the imperfections left in. “We’re two shards of glass, with a key piece missing,” as he puts it in the final line, “We both feel like dying and that’s what keeps us living.”

The Foot & Leg Clinic – Where did all the fruit go?

Glasgow-based self-described ‘wonk-rockers’ The Foot & Leg Clinic (FKA The Wife Guys of Reddit) are gearing up to release new album Sit Down for Rock and Roll via Bingo Records next month, and the album promises to be something of an inflection point for the band. After a difficult few years of illness, bereavement and general unpleasantness, the quartet (Niamh R MacPhail, Arion Xenos, Angus Fernie and Elise Atkinson) saw the opportunity to re-examine their methods of working and lean into the constraints brought about by change. “We were kind of forced to work at a slower pace, but probably for the better of the final product,” MacPhail explains. And Xenos agrees: “It still feels eclectic, but it’s a little bit more focused. We definitely thought about this as an album project when working on it, as opposed to other things before.” Any fans worried something might be lost in the process need not worry, because lead single ‘Where did all the fruit go?’ finds the band as idiosyncratic as ever. Although the song perhaps represents a newfound sincerity for The Foot & Leg Clinic, some earnest attempt to communicate fighting through the chaotic energy to make itself heard.

GREBE – Insurance

A melting pot of slowcore, shoegaze, alternative and indie rock influences, GREBE‘s 2025 debut EP If You Squint It’s All Soup established the dynamism and versatility of the Atlanta outfit, and now a year later they are ready to let loose full-length Hell Diver to build upon these beginnings and capitalise on the momentum. Coming in April via Indecent Artistry and Rope Bridge, the album sees Kade Whitlark (vocals, rhythm guitar) Logan Neely (guitar) and William Gunnin (drums) match attention to detail with raw energy, practising a tried and tested quiet-loud dynamic to achieve songs of considerable size and cathartic potential. Take ingle ‘Insurance’, a track which simmers with promise before sparking to life periodically, a sound which matches the radical conflagration that’s suggested in the lyrics.

Hell Diver will be released on the 17th April via Indecent Artistry and Rope Bridge.

Hockitay – over/over

Born in Guatemala and now based in Montreal, Hockitay won serious attention with the EP slo mach back in 2025, the release straddling bedroom pop, slowcore, R&B and electronic styles to explore a present moment marked by exhaustion and alienation. Out via Future Gods, latest single ‘over/over’ builds upon these foundations to conjure another very contemporary sound. One where loneliness and restlessness overlap, that curiously digital phenomenon where even an empty room can now be overwhelming. The lyrics dig further into this online world, probing at questions of performance and authenticity (“I haven’t had an opinion / Since high school,” Hockitay sings on one verse. “I wear the jersey / But I’ve never seen them play”), and the result plays like an urgent plea from an otherwise numb persona.

‘over/over’ is out now via Future Gods and available from Bandcamp.

The Montvales – Carolina

Touring in the wake of their successful 2024 album Born Strangers, Knoxville folk duo The Montvales (songwriters Sally Buice and Molly Rochelson) found their journey coincidentally align with the path of a solar eclipse, every stop filled with people gathered for the once-in-a-lifetime event. But that was not the only notable event unfolding at that time—genocide was taking place in Gaza, student protests were being violently quelled in the US, war dragged on in Europe and the cost of living kept on climbing. New album Path of Totality emerged from this period, a picture of an America seized by a variety of spectacles, and haunted by the possibility of a second term Trump. Ahead of release new month via Free Dirt Records, The Montvales have shared single ‘Carolina’, and the single is indicative of the compassionate, unapologetically political brand of songwriting which marks the record. “Written in the wake of Hurricane Helene, ‘Carolina’ explores the creeping feeling that late-stage capitalism has left us with very few places that still feel safe,” Buice explains. “A testament to the folks who forge ahead in beauty.”

Path of Totality will be released on the 20th March via Free Dirt Records and you can pre-order it from Bandcamp.

Nic Panken – Dear Companion

You might know Nic Panken as the lead of Brooklyn folk outfit Spirit Family Reunion, though he has also recorded solo under his own name in recent years, putting out a variety of singles. This spring sees the release of Near Divine or Merely Rhyme, Panken’s debut full-length which makes good on the promise of the initial releases. He enlisted an enviable ensemble of guests to bring the songs to life, with Mat Davidson (Big Thief, Twain), Ken Woodward (Buck Meek, Sam Evian), Austin Vaughn (Cassandra Jenkins, Cass McCombs) and David Christian (Karen O, Curtis Harding) all appearing, alongside others, and the result is every bit as rich as such a line-up suggests. Take the earthy warmth of lead single ‘Dear Companion’, the arrangement wrapping around Panken’s reflective, wistful vocals and elevating the cryptic lyricism into something stirring. “What began as an afterthought became a central part of this record,” Panken explains. “After working through the first batch of songs I brought in, more material was needed, and on a whim I shared an early sketch of an idea with my co-producer Jared Samuel. He grabbed a pair of scissors, directing me to cut out each line, shuffle them all up and piece together something new. In the end we added just a few lines to weave it together, and found a wonderfully mysterious place for it all to land.”

No Spinoza – Airport

The recording project of York-based musician, poet and artist Thomas Pearson, No Spinoza has made a name with an inventive, often conceptual style of music which is more than happy to jump between genres. After Maxim, an album of nursery rhymes recorded together with Drew Worthley, No Spinoza is now preparing to release brand new full-length Jupiter’s Great Hurricane, and lead single ‘Airport’ shows the record is no less ambitious or thought-provoking. “Before leaving for the airport I asked Saint Anthony: how then should I live my life?” Pearson sings in the opening lines over a brooding post-punk/art-rock sound. “He replied: Have no confidence in your own righteousness, your virtue.” The track takes off from this point, continuing its philosophical musings while transporting the listener high above a stark desert landscape via a combination of taut drums, shimmering synths and jazz-adjacent playfulness.

Jupiter’s Great Hurricane will be released soon.

The Same Sky – What’s Left

Based in Montreal and founded by Joseph Simon, The Same Sky is an indie rock outfit which takes elements of shoegaze and post-punk to create what they have labelled ‘outsider pop’. With full-length Haunting in the Mountains coming this April via Casa Joven, The Same Sky have shared new single ‘What’s Left’ to introduce this style. A track where dreamy textures meet an almost mechanical sense of forward motion, and the growing momentum is punctuated by intermittent squalls of noise. Thematically, the single borrows imagery from Greek myth, namely The Odyssey, to explore the experience of a break-up, and the result sits between the real and the fantastical. A voyage forward into the unknown which seems to be both emerging and sailing towards tragedy.

Wendy Eisenberg – Old Myth Dying

Last month we previewed Wendy Eisenberg‘s self-titled album, forthcoming this spring with Joyful Noise Recordings, noting the significance of an experienced, endlessly inventive artist deciding to put their own name as the title of the release, “as though for the first time willing or able to put forward a halfway static vision of themselves within the maelstrom of change.” Indeed, Eisenberg has said the album emerged from a period of self-confrontation, something they liken to “a personal exorcism,” and the result promises to be their most personal and daring record to date. Following the golden classic folk sound of ‘Will You Dare‘ and the Lynch-inspired ‘Meaning Business‘, Eisenberg has now shared new track, ‘Old Myth Dying’. “I wrote ‘Old Myth Dying’ in early 2024 during an insane fever,” they explain. “Although I knew I should have been trying to sleep it off, I wanted to see if I could do this polyrhythmic thing in my right hand and sing over it. Historically, practicing has allowed me to forget that I have a body that feels pain—I disappear into the action, in pursuit of becoming beauty. This time, my lyrics came out straightforward and wary, blunter than usual. They revealed a different pain I was feeling, the pain of actually knowing what you can and can’t control, and what inherited myths have been lies designed to control you all along.”

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Now Jillian Lake has returned with ‘Cold Where You Are’, a brand new single equally attuned to emotional forces and their significant gravitational pull. Namely the strange tension of watching a loved one attempt to navigate a difficult period, willing more than anything to save them from the turmoil but conscious of being dragged into the mire yourself. “It’s cold in the water,” Lake sings in the refrain, “It’s cold where you are.” These lines underscore the distance and remove of that other person, even when delivered with such compassion and empathy. Again, it is this tension which marks the Jillian Lake sound. Between the heaviness of life’s struggles and the emotional warmth which tries to see us through. Watch the visualizer shot and directed by Lauren Kurc below:

‘Cold Where You Are’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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Next month the Canadian songwriter Cat Clyde will release Blood Bone Bone, a new full-length album on Concord Records. An effort to reposition or reimagine her relationship with love, the record sees Clyde turn her indigenous Métis heritage for inspiration, as well as the wide natural world, and serves as a expression of everything from exasperation and fury to personal growth and joy. New single ‘Man’s World’ falls at the former end of that spectrum, though repurposes its anger into something cathartic. “This is an expression of the frustration I feel existing as a woman in a patriarchal world,” Clyde explains. “It sometimes feels difficult to be on a 24 hour clock rather than a 28 day cycle, and a 12 month year instead of a 13 month year. I love and crave masculine energy when it’s strong, protective, and emotionally aware. It has been difficult and deeply disappointing to have had experiences dealing with masculine energy that is childish, cowardly, and encroaching on the feminine space. ‘Man’s World’ touches on my own ideas of what being a woman means in this society and how dangerous and violent it can be for a woman’s heart.”

Watch the video directed and shot by Lukas Hyrman below:

Mud Blood Bone will be released on the 13th March via Concord Records and you can pre-order it now.

Dayydream – Proximity

Back in 2025 we introduced Dayydream, the Glasgow-based indie rock project led by visual artist and musician Chloe Trappes. “Straddles shoegaze, slowcore and indie rock to create a sound both hazy and deep,” we wrote of single ‘Fucked Up’, “its title perhaps belying the song’s inviting warmth but describing its confessional tone to a tee, the sound suspended with a light mist yet not without its own internal force.” Now Dayydream are about to release Trace, and EP which builds upon these foundations to delve into the strange, melancholic way the past persists into the present. True to this mood, the sound is often restrained and reflective, the tracks playing as though in the aftermath of something, Trappes and co. left alone but for the footprints on the ground, the fading fog of breath on glass. Single ‘Proximity’ is a good place to dive in, the upbeat rhythm of its opening belying the weight at its heart, a burden which slowly twists the sound into something altogether more hefty and dense.

‘Proximity’ is out now and available from Bandcamp. Trace will be released soon.

jack k – Welcome To The New World

A cross-gen collaboration between composer Jack Kilburn and his father, British poet Mark Kilburn, the forthcoming jack k album 8 Tracks sits at the intersection of music, narrative and memory. Using primarily guitar and piano, Jack creates soundscapes which gesture towards ambient and alt-jazz, and coupled with Mark’s distinctively Brummie spoken-word delivery, the songs come to represent not only reflection on personal experience and family history but something stranger and more abstract. A hauntological sense of imagined pasts and aborted futures which works to evoke the off-kilter, often melancholic sensation of the contemporary British moment. True to its title, ‘Welcome To The New World’ is the ideal entry point into this style. A track spacious and stark, as barren as the society evoked by Kilburn’s plainspoken lyricism, where the new world is not much of a world at all, but rather just the fading echoes of what we imagined as it falls away from us.

8 Tracks will be released soon.

Lamplight – Year 2083

“An exploration of how one’s sense of identity shifts and changes according to any number of present conditions, not least the place we call home at any given time.” That’s how we described the self-titled album by Lamplight back in 2024, the Western Vinyl release seeing Virginia songwriter Ian Hatcher-Williams grapple with a life which led out of a cult in his home state to a job in tech in NYC before eventually circling back around to returning to Virginia to marry a childhood friend. Glimpse at the title of the latest Lamplight single ‘Year 2083’ and you might think Hatcher-Williams has switched focus from the past towards the distant future, though in reality the song is very much embedded in the present. With hemlock adding supporting vocals, the track possesses all of the warmth of the previous album, not to mention the same emotional openness. As though written from within the fluidity of the current moment, with Hatcher-Williams working to establish what is important in real time. Grab it from Bandcamp now, with all proceeds going to MPLS mutual aid.

Lemoncello – Meet Me Halfway

There’s a very contemporary tension within Lemoncello‘s latest single ‘Meet Me Halfway’. A complicated relationship between intimacy and distance. A sense of push and pull. Out now via Claddagh Records, the song sees Irish duo Laura Quirke (guitar/vocals) and Claire Kinsella (cello/vocals) create a soundscape that’s spare yet loaded with latent feeling, as though the true weight of the track lies just outside of the frame. An atmosphere fitting for a song which explores how even though we’re now able to communicate more freely than ever before, we’re somehow as far apart as we’ve ever been. “To be so connected / And yet so disconnected,” as a pertinent line states. “What’s the point in speaking / With so much left understood.” But rather than settle for a dismayed commentary on such conditions, ‘Meet Me Halfway’ pushes further, reaching for the kind of concerted effort required on both sides of a relationship in order to sustain connection. Watch the video below, wih creative direction by Sophie O’Donovan, editing by AK Heisterkamp and title design by Stina Sandstrom:

‘Meet Me Halfway’ is out now via Claddagh Records and available from the usual places.

new body electric – every day

“It all started with a trumpet,” explain Portland, Oregon-based band new body electric (Aaron Peterson, Evan Smoker and Leah Vautar), but their music has come a long way since then. Following on from a self-titled album in 2024 which drew on everything from funk, electro and jazz to enliven its indie pop sound, the band have returned with new single ‘every day’ to continue to explore new ground. Full of easygoing groove, the result is assured in style if not in substance, the track’s lyrics delving into various personas we adopt to get through day to day existence. But no matter how blurry a sense of self might be thanks to the demands of living, new body electric are here to show this need not necessarily defeat us. Better to commit to the rhythm and groove your way on through.

‘every day; is out now and available from the usual places.

Paul Bergmann – West Rock

“A pleading dirge; a manic rumination on the human condition at the foot of a geological anomaly in New Haven, CT.” That’s how musician Paul Bergmann described his latest single ‘West Rock’, a song released in anticipation of forthcoming full-length Connecticut Cowboy. Across a total of sixteen releases, Bergmann’s work has shapeshifted from one album to another, moving from scrappy folk punk to sleek piano-led croons, not to mention psychedelic excursions too. But it has always been bound by an overarching thematic concern with existential ideas of life, death and all the dreams therein. As the above description might suggest, ‘West Rock’ sees Bergman return to the most immediate, raw form, pitching the audience into a shadowy world and barking confessions at us through the gloom. Think of the nocturnal volatility of acts like Bambara crossed with the Jason Molina’s bitter poetry and you’re getting close to the result.

Run Remedy – Jessie’s Girl

The alter ego of US-born, UK-based songwriter Robin Koob, Run Remedy embraces both the serious and silly sides of life in its folk rock sound, something embodied by latest single, a reimagining of Rick Springfield’s 1981 hit ‘Jessie’s Girl’. This version not only plays with the sound, swapping out the guitar solo for banjo, but also flips the gender to transform the track into a queer anthem. “I swear if I’m back home driving around South Jersey, ‘Jessie’s Girl’ will come on within the hour (shout out 95.1WAYV),” Koob explains. “It’s been stuck in my head my whole life. That level of cringey yearning is timeless, so obviously I had to make my own sapphic spinoff.” The single comes complete with a video to further cement the changes. “The original video is pure camp, so I basically Weird Al’d it with rainbow kids,” Koob continues. “We recreated almost every shot in one day, gorilla-shooting around Manchester, spared my bathroom mirror, and ended the day passing around the wig. Everyone looked better in it than I did, which feels correct.”

‘Jessie’s Girl’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Spirited Followers – Returning

Back in September we wrote about Cardiff-based experimental folk rock outfit Spirited Followers, describing how the project reaches across a huge range of influences to inform its singular sound. “With members hailing from Cyprus, India and Wales, Ireland, and England, the diversity of inspiration is perhaps unsurprising,” we explained, “though the work of Spirited Followers pushes beyond those backgrounds too. You’ll hear elements of Appalachian mountain music in the stark guitar, as well as a Greek flavour among several others.” Released via Libertino‘s new sister label BWGIBWGAN, latest single ‘Returning’ is no less ambitious, mining ancient songwriting traditons for their devotional power while still positioning their sound on the cutting edge of the contemporary movement too. It a glimpse at the band’s reflective side, “reframing themes of death,” as the label put it, “through warmth, acceptance and spiritual calm.”

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Ada Lea – when i paint my masterpiece

Saddle Creek

How does someone approach creating their magnum opus? The title of Ada Lea‘s third album when i paint my masterpiece might set the bar very high for the Montreal artist, not least off the back off two stellar records released in 2019 and 2021 respectively, though spend time within the album and it becomes clear it is not so much concerned with the final product as the process of creation itself. Because contrary to its name, when i paint is no lesson in artistic obsession. Rather it is an ode to the value of stepping back and allowing life the space to unfold. Because while Alexandra Levy did indeed take a big swing, writing over two hundreds songs before slowly distilling the list into the final sequence, her artistic practise was intentionally spacious, curious and open-ended. Levy lists “resting, extending my creative reach, going back to school, studying painting and poetry,” as key components to this mode of working. “Taking a step away from music as guided by industry expectations. Simplifying things. Getting a job, starting to teach. Engaging with the process rather than the product.” The trick to painting a masterpiece, it seems, is learning to put the brush down every once in a while. Being kind to yourself and opening your heart and eyes to the surrounding world.

Adeline Hotel – Watch The Sunflowers

Ruination Record Co.

Across a string of recent albums, Dan Knishkowy’s Adeline Hotel has welcomed listeners into the most complicated, intimate recesses of life, examining themes of love, loneliness, codependency and loss from every angle you might imagine. He’s zoomed in so close the familiar is rendered strange, pulled back so far we get a bird’s eye view from above, each record seeing the sound shapeshift into something different in order to capture a new perspective or subtle change in the circumstances. There’s been solo guitar, piano ballads, languid jazz and raucous rock, but after the austerity and uncertainty of 2024’s Whodunnit, latest full-length Watch The Sunflowers pivots towards the opposite pole of the spectrum with a kaleidoscopic style. “The album is a reaction to the threadbare arrangements of its predecessor,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “As though, having endured the aftermath of loss, the colour has come back into Knishkowy’s world.” This change might not represent a total epiphany, Knishkowy’s lyrics are as questioning as ever, but rather a newfound clarity in which entrenched beliefs dissipate and such searching begins to feel meaningful.

Anna Tivel – Animal Poem

Fluff and Gravy Records

“’It’s hard to know how to hold a creative life in a time that feels fraught with venomous division, careening technological advance, and an ever-widening chasm between the affluent and the dispossessed,’ says Anna Tivel, the songwriter who has won acclaim with albums like Blue World, Outsiders (plus its stripped back Live in a Living Room twin) and Living Thing. Such concerns have long troubled Tivel’s work, the latter record being was what we called ‘a decidedly existential response to a period of entrapment and encroaching death.’ It used the pandemic as a platform to explore human suffering more generally, though dwell on such ideas too long and the entire artistic endeavour can come to seem futile. ‘What good are poems when affordable housing is scarce,’ as she continues, ‘the climate teeters on a dangerous edge, and war breaks out over misinformation spread by profit hungry algorithms?’ Tivel’s latest full-length Animal Poem is not so much an answer to this question as one artist’s small contribution towards one. A small piece of the colossal, communal whole demanded of us. The imperative to celebrate life and warn of its fragility. To remind everyone of just what we stand to lose should the malevolent forces of this world be allowed to grow.” [Review]

The Antlers – Blight

Transgressive

“’Lately I’ve become more aware of the cost of convenience, how the choices I make as a consumer seem insignificant, but can add up to something disastrous.’ So explains Peter Silberman of The Antlers when speaking about the origins of the project’s seventh album Blight. The record, written over several years and mostly recorded at Silberman’s home studio in upstate New York, utilises The Antlers’ distinctive mix of raw emotion and almost otherworldly arrangements to cast the present moment in a new light. One able to take something familiar and apparently ordinary and reveal it as anything but, be that the calamitous consequences of our consumerist culture or else the oft-ignored beauty of the natural world which stands to be lost as a result. As Silberman concludes: ‘These songs were born out of an attempt to come to grips with my guilt’.” [Review]

Benjamin Shaw – Strange Feelings in Nervous Business / Publicly Funded Research into Lofty Enchantment / Immortal Jellyfish

Hand Drawn Hand

Unofficially dubbed the “Fumblinginthedark trilogy,” the three albums Benjamin Shaw released in the second half of the year were as much an exercise in musical therapy as they were creations for an audience. Shaw’s life took a turn for the difficult, and he took refuge in a creative world of his own making, using (mostly) just guitar, synth and some pedals to establish its borders and depths. “In an attempt to try and escape my flailing brain I wanted to find a way of playing and improvising in a live way,” Shaw explains. “After a bit of experimentation and a few trips to Facebook marketplace, I eventually stumbled on a nice way of live-looping and building things in real time.” Luckily for us, Shaw does not close the door behind himself. The trilogy, best experienced as a whole, offers a life line to anyone in need of time out of the harsh realities of the day to day.

Carson McHone – Pentimento

Merge Records

Pentimento is a term from art history that refers to the traces of an earlier painting that show through layers of paint on a canvas. A thought or sketch or discarded draft, even a different painting entirely, that nevertheless informs the final work, if only in its absence. The concept is central to Carson McHone’s latest album, which itself is built from (and literally on top of) a vast catalogue of inspirations, from literature and field recordings to diary entries, watercolour paintings and lines of poetry scribbled on postcards. The result is a folk rock record rich in detail but with a loose artistic flair. Barrelling rockers sit next to beautifully simple pastoral folk, interspersed with snippets of poetry and snatches of other recordings, lost conversations, forgotten songs, fragments that drift in and are suddenly gone. Set against what McHone describes as a “backdrop of global crisis,” this mosaic manages to ponder questions otherwise too big to broach, its apparently dissonant style giving some voice to the unsayable and ultimately exploring how love and beauty can persist in a world in such a dire state.

Craig Finn – Always Been

Thirty Tigers

The theme of redemption has long run through the work of Craig Finn, most notably the resurrection arc of Holly on The Holy Steady‘s seminal Separation Sunday, but also across his solo catalogue, as with the evocation of the story of Ulysses S. Grant on 2019’s I Need a New War. Finn’s characters are often on the margins, existing in the aftermath of lives lived too fast or too hard, searching for salvation in any way it might avail itself, even if it’s just leaving enough of a story behind that people will remember your name. The protagonist of Finn’s sixth solo full-length Always Been is no different, a man with no faith who nevertheless joined the clergy, seeking the security and gravitas afforded to the role (“Cause when I was a child, I used to fixate on the chaplain,” he sings on opener ‘Bethany’, “The way he brought the widows all to tears / And that looked like a decent way to make a little living here / Gave myself to God for a few years”). Only our would-be priest quickly falls from grace and into the arms of any number of vices, and Always Been charts the slow arc towards his own redemption. With this clear focus and a polished LA aesthetic, the record could be one of Finn’s most narrative to date, though various tracks drift from the central character to illuminate other corners of his world. And it’s a testament to Finn’s writing that these songs are some of the highlights. Recalling the likes of Zevon or Browne, ‘Crumbs’ is golden and gathers momentum, while the quasi-bonus track ‘Shamrock’ is a stripped-back slice of traditional folk, though both capture pictures of people driven to desperation by the ratcheting pressure of life, yet always reaching into the future, ever hopeful of that one break which might erase the past and elevate them above the present. The moment they’ve always been waiting for in which they might be saved.

Dao Strom – Tender Revolutions

Antiquated Future Records / Beacon Sound

“Born in Vietnam and now based in Portland, Oregon, Dao Strom is an artist interested in overlap, convergence and symbiosis. Someone, as per their bio, ‘who works with three ‘voices’—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories.’ The result is the perfect marriage of style and substance. Music, poetry, writing and various amalgams of all three cross-pollinated by collaboration and linked across time and geography, giving voice to those who might otherwise be silenced and breaking down established boundaries. Drawing on the sensibilities of ambient, folk, post-rock, spoken word and sound collage, Strom’s latest full-length Tender Revolutions is the embodiment of this style. A joint release between Antiquated Future Records and Beacon Sound, the album comes complete with an accompanying book, released via The 3rd Thing press, to support and expand upon its themes. ‘These songs are, for me, inward and outward (ex)tendings across boundaries of self, diaspora, modalities of voice, across fractures and refractions,’ as Strom explains. ‘They are attempts at honoring small points and lines of connectivity I’ve been entangling in, for over a decade now, namely through creative collaborations and friendships with other Vietnamese women writers and artists’.” [Review]

Daughter of Swords – Alex

Psychic Hotline

“In some ways Alex is the perfect spring record. There are quiet moments of green shoots and bursting buds, and others of sudden, somewhat shocking, metamorphosis. The brash pop moments must be how a butterfly feels after emerging from its chrysalis, suddenly brighter, bolder, realising it has these beautiful wings and deciding to flap them. Messy in the best way possible. [Daughter of Swords‘] Alex Sauser-Monnig takes on the overwhelming, confusingly contradictive nature of contemporary life by mimicking it in music. If their career thus far has been defined by the restraint and minimalism of voice and (sometimes) guitar, Alex is something of its inverse, throwing everything into the pot and stirring gleefully. There’s danceable electronic pop and rumbling indie rock, easy melodies and tangles of synthetic textures… Left-field pop structures and inventive electronics create something equal parts catchy and deep. Plus, its moments of political awareness mean the introspective moments of self-reflection feel less like selfish solipsism and more a blueprint for liberation. A less-than-gentle nudge to defy convention and have the courage to live life as oneself in a world that feels increasingly allergic to outliers and eccentrics.” [Review]

Dean Johnson – I Hope We Can Still Be Friends

Saddle Creek

“Well, I’m feelin’ so much better now,” sings Dean Johnson in a moment that encapsulates his sophomore record I Hope We Can Still Be Friends. It’s the beginning of a song, his emotionally piercing throwback vocal style ringing out unadorned like a breath of fresh air, and it’s easy to imagine the bustling barroom fall to silence as people turn to listen. But, typically for the Seattle-based songwriter, the initial relief is something of an emotional sleight of hand. “Since I had my mind erased,” he continues as the true scenario reveals itself, “If I passed you on the street, I would not recognize your face.” What at first seemed like an instance of self-actualisation was actually just heartbreak wrapped up in a pretty melody and a joke about electroconvulsive therapy. It’s illustrative of a record that effortlessly marries sardonic humour and sincere vulnerability, icy bitterness and easygoing charm. Johnson croons like a long-lost Everly brother as he delivers tragicomic missives on our weird world and the sad and absurd characters that populate it, at times approaching broad social commentary and others bitingly personal. It’s Johnson with his complexities and foibles on full display, prickly and sensitive, hopelessly romantic and unapologetically cynical, often within a single song.

Devin Shaffer – Patience

American Dreams

“As Patience is the first album on which Devin Shaffer is joined by a group of supporting musicians, you’d be forgiven for anticipating something even richer and more intricate than her previous work. But the reality is something different. Because rather than showing off an increasingly ornate, layered sound, the album pivots towards the opposite. A sound stripped back and intimate, swapping out its textures in favour of increased precision, the instrumentalists coming together in a collective effort towards clarity. This turn towards lucidity speaks to the themes of Patience too. If previous album In My Dreams I’m There represented an arc of sorts, Shaffer moving from confusion and hesitancy towards a sense of acceptance, then the new record instead interrogates just what it requires to achieve lasting peace. That is, to reject the idea of a neat arc entirely, resist the temptation to believe one achievement or epiphany will solve your life for good. The songs of her debut sound like Shaffer battling against the noise of the world in search of an answer, but in dropping this ambient backdrop, Patience ceases the fight. Submits to the messiness of our interiors and indeed the wider world.” [Review]

Dylan Henner – Star Dream FM

Phantom Limb

“‘Late one evening, I was listening to the radio alone at home. I couldn’t find the station I wanted, so I shifted the dial around for a while. Between frequencies, fading in and out of fidelity, I found a station I’d never heard before. To my amazement, the station was broadcasting my own memories. Memories from when I was seventeen.’ So explains Dylan Henner of Star Dream FM, the enigmatic producer using this idea as the basis for a collection of songs which explores both the tactile experience of adolescence and the nostalgia of times now past. ‘The result feels personal,’ we wrote in our review, though there’s the undercurrent of something different. The sense Henner is not so much tapping into his own memories but a kind of collective yearning. One developed not through individual experience but the culture itself. The cinematic version of youth delivered to us so steadily we come to mourn it as our own.” [Review]

Ear – The Most Dear and The Future

Self-released

The project of Yaelle Avtan and Jonah Paz, ear make glitchy collages of indie pop and electronic music that draw on the duo’s background in “experimental electronic hardcore” and twee folk. Following some near-viral success on streaming services, debut album The Most Dear and the Future presents their unique and oddly compelling style to the world proper. Each of the eight songs are short and sweet, slipping effortlessly from gentle, near-whispered pop to headphone-shaking electronica in the blink of an eye. It all feels very now. Like indie pop for the age of short form video, kind of wild and hyperactive but also sad and lonely in a way that’s best described as nostalgia for something that has never existed. Imagine a dark room lit only by the harsh blue light of a screen, the world and everything in it whizzing by fried eyeballs in a blur of angst and emotion. It would fit on the soundtrack to the next Jane Schoenbrun film for sure.

Eliza Niemi – Progress Bakery

Vain Mina / Tin Angel Records

“To describe the music of Eliza Niemi as pop music feels like both an over- and understatement. On the one hand, these are deeply quirky and unique songs, built with an artist’s intuitive sense of composition and with little regard for conventional structures. But they are also undeniably infectious, packed with of melody and a sense of playfulness that feels baked into the record’s very bones. Which makes its sense of childlike curiosity (admittedly with more than a little added grown-up cynicism) feel genuine rather than cloying or twee. Niemi isn’t painting a pastel-hued cartoon of real life, but focussing on its gritty, peculiar details. And at the heart of it all are those questions, some funny and knowing, but others piercingly direct and vulnerable, evoking a very relatable sense of bewilderment at trying to find one’s place in this weird world. “Will it be what I wanted?” as she asks on ‘Pocky’. “Will it be how I pictured it?’ It’s a style full of wonder, though not often in the starry-eyed-awe-at-the-majesty-of-the-universe sense. Rather something more literal and commonplace, with Niemi often picking up thoughts and ideas and putting them down again, only to return eight songs later to wonder anew. ” [Review]

Ella Hanshaw – Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book

SPINSTER

Ella Hanshaw always dreamed of being a country star. Born in Procious, West Virginia in 1934, Hanshaw took up the guitar when she was twelve and hardly put it down for the rest of her days, writing hundreds of songs and touring across the state with her quartet, though never recording professionally or releasing anything in an official manner. Released five years after her death, Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book corrects the latter fact, Hanshaw’s granddaughter curating a collection of tracks recorded at home and church, not only celebrating and preserving the legacy of one of Appalachia’s most prolific songwriters, but allowing her devout message to continue to find new ears. “By the late 1970s, her music had become inseparable from her faith,” as the album notes describe. “She considered her work to be authored by God, who would ‘give’ her a song—both lyrics and melody—which she could write down and complete in fifteen minutes”. But ultimately, Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book is more than a document of one singular artist’s faith and vision. It is proof of the rich, lasting history of artists working in the margins, outside of the mainstream, and the ways in which music might allow a person to transcend the hand they are dealt in life. “By writing gospel music, performing in church, and viewing her artistic talent and inspiration as gifts from God, Ella framed her work in such a way that she could still claim artistic agency while avoiding individual attention that may have been perceived as self-indulgent and socially unacceptable,” as the album notes continue. “Resistant to the potential consequences of a professional music career as a woman and mother, Ella chose to keep her music a non-professional pursuit, shared with family, community, and God, which allowed her to uphold the duty she felt to all three.”

Erika Dohi – Myth of Tomorrow

Switch Hit Records / Figureight Records

“Described as ‘a sonic meditation on catastrophe, resilience, and rebirth,’ [Erika Dohi‘s Myth of Tomorrow] builds upon the eclectic style of predecessor I, Castorpollux to push Dohi’s sound in new directions, utilising a variety of sensibilities from dance, jazz, ambient and classical modes to create soundscapes as singular as they are striking. The record draws its title from the Taro Okamoto’s mural of the same name, and the title track draws the clearest line between the two artworks. A song concerned with the endless cycles of existence, not only asking what they demand of us but also how we might find peace and healing within the recurring patterns of life.” [Review]

Florry – Sounds Like…

Dear Life Records

“Positivity permeates [The Holey Bible],” we wrote of Florry‘s seminal album back in 2023, the release seeing Francie Medosch and co. embrace a country aesthetic but swerve the lonesome blues so common in the genre in favour of something more uplifting. “Through woozy waltzes, fuzzy Country-fried rockers and no small amount of narrative attention, Florry rise from an uncertain, bleak world like a Roman candle, as though the only way to live nowadays is to meet despair with an equal and opposite force.” With this style established, follow-up Sounds Like… fires on all cylinders from the off. The release of a band who have nailed down their identity and are now able to explore is vast, idiosyncratic terrain, jamming the pedal to the floor in order to cover as much ground as possible with good old fashioned rock and roll abandon. When Medosch cites The Jackass theme song as a big influence on the record, you sense the inspiration was less stylistic than spiritual. A calling to gather a group a pals together and whip up a storm, even if it means a little chaos and risk along the way.

Friendship – Caveman Wakes Up

Merge Records

“Reconnected trailer hitch / Rerouted drainage ditch / Resenting your fellow man / Shotgunning a Busch Light can.” So plays the average day for the protagonist of ‘All Over The World’ from Friendship‘s Caveman Wakes Up, a hard-working man going nowhere fast, his days locked into an apparently endless cycle of effort, small comforts and jaded acceptance. Yet true to spirit of the album, this apparent mundanity is layered with a plethora of different experiences, revealing the everyday to be more absurd than ordinary. Take how the simmering class consciousness which spikes the nine-to-five (“Got a job pulling weeds / On other people’s property / Shoring up liquidity / On other people’s property”) coexists with a near total capitulation to the boss’s desires (“Boss wants to know where you’re at […] Boss calls and you cave just like that”). Or how laying a lawn, surely the most banal, consumerist and unnatural thing on this manicured-green earth, leads to a chance encounter with the divine (“Dandelion seed caught your eye / Felt the beating heart of God / Laying down a roll of sod”). The song is just one example of a style running through Caveman Wakes Up, and arguably Friendship as a project more widely. A small world in which life is boring and surprising, shocking, magic and lonely all at once.

Frog – 1,000 Variations of the Same Song / The Count

Audio Antihero

“An album which runs the gamut between indie rock, alt country and smoky lounge cool, and packs the expected density and diversity of references from a Frog release, with Daniel Bateman nodding to My Chemical Romance, Gucci, Stillwell construction supplies, fatherhood, the 6 train and seemingly a million other things. But for all of these maximalist sensibilities, the record also lives up to its title by repeatedly orbiting the same ideas […] The effect is something like that of a phylogenetic tree, where the same amphibian DNA passes through generation after generation, morphing through all manner of phenotypes yet retaining that Frog spirit through them all. Just where this organism will evolve next is anyone’s guess, but we have a thousand possibilities to get through yet.” [Review]

Fust – Big Ugly

Dear Life Records

“[Fust‘s] Big Ugly functions as a detailed picture of such a [contemporary Southern] milieu, offering small glimpses into the lives of various characters which move across the frame. The artwork is a mural taken from the Big Ugly Community Centre [in West Virginia] that once served as a backdrop to a school play. Here it serves an identical purpose, albeit in a more abstract light. We meet people wandering as though dazed in the post-industrial present, pining for hard labour and good wages, struggling to find hours selling junk at the gas station. Or struggling with small home improvements as their houses slowly fall down around them. But also, most importantly, we see life continuing its rhythms, memories repeating, hopes emerging still. A picture of Appalachian or Southern life which does not yearn for escape or preach self-improvement, but loves and dreams instead. ‘They’ll have to haul me off,’ as the title track opens. ‘Off a down slope / in some front end loader / in a pine box / if they want me gone / if they want me lost / If they don’t want my lonesome here / they’ll have to haul me off.’ You are from where you are from, after all. A squalid home is home nonetheless, and the funny thing about fondness and pride is how they survive the most naked of truths. Fust aren’t interested in willful ignorance, rose-tinted reminiscence or giddy myth-making. The record wears its name for a reason. They want the big ugly whole.” [Review]

Greg Jamie – Across a Violet Pasture

Orindal Records

“‘I’d get away from that body / there’s nothing left we can do / and if I ever come back from the country / I’m going swimming with you.’ So sings Portland, Maine songwriter and painter Greg Jamie in the opening lines of ‘I’d Get Away’, the first track from his new album Across a Violet Pasture. The cryptic, almost contradictory verse is a fitting introduction for a full-length which exists at the intersection of things. The real and unreal, the physical and spiritual, the personal, the historical and the mythic. One which does not so much blur the boundary between such categories as embrace their duality, the real world punctuated with high strangeness and vice versa, the known and unknown superimposed. The result is undeniably weird yet intrinsically human, demonstrated by an opening verse where the image of floating away from the body is paired with the pleasure of floating within it. As though to exist is to both long for transcendence from corporeal reality and desire an unending experience of bodily sensation. We want to feel forever, yet wish for something more.” [Review]

Hannah Frances – Nested in Tangles

Fire Talk

“Released in 2024, Hannah Frances‘s album Keeper of the Shepherd represented an act of exhumation, digging through the remnants of the past to unearth those things which had long been lost. The process led to no small amount of dirt under the fingernails and demanded a fundamental vulnerability, something Frances happily endured in order to undertake this vital process […] Frances’s new album Nested in Tangles plays like the thicket of flora which sprouts from the ground broken by its predecessor. The life brought forth from turned-over earth. A diversity present not only in theme or tone but style itself […] A healthy and fulfilling life is never just one thing, a monoculture neat and constant and happy, but rather an ecosystem of moods, periods and personas. A place where our different selves coexist and even care for one another, and there’s space for every shade of shadow and light.” [Review]

herbal tea – Hear as the Mirror Echoes

Orindal Records

“The recording project of Bristol‘s Helena Walker, herbal tea takes the DIY intimacy of bedroom pop and expands outwards, building what might otherwise be humble demos into rich, nuanced soundscapes, as though the original basis of each track is merely a door through which entire new worlds lie in wait. The result is a sound rooted in the personal yet innately transcendent. An ethereal space not unlike a dream, stitched together from memories, desires and nostalgic longing yet impermanent by its very nature. A place, that is, removed from the physical demands on existence and thus the ideal vantage for self-reflection. One imbued with the weightlessness of flying or floating which offers the opportunity to examine the familiar without the everyday burden of the body.” [Review]

HLLLYH – URUBURU

Team Shi

“Anyone clued into the indie scene of the noughties will likely have encountered The Mae Shi, the outfit which delivered a blend of art rock, punk, pop and electronic sensibilities bundled up in a manic, madcap intensity, culminating with acclaimed Biblical full-length HLLLYH in 2008. The project has been through various stages of hiatus in intervening years, but now founding member Tim Byron has rounded up the original cast for a new album, URUBURU. Only when Jeff Byron, Ezra Buchla, Brad Breeck and Corey Fogel got together, the result felt less like the last chapter of the Mae Shi and more like a fresh beginning. Hence a new name—HLLLYH. Described as ‘an end-of-the-world story written on a mobius strip,’ URUBURU shows HLLLYH have hit the ground running, displaying no let up from the infectiously inventive sound that won the Mae Shi so many admirers. ‘Built from bright colors and loud sounds, it is a puzzle to be solved written in English, Morse code, and machine language,’ as the band write of the record. ‘It tells several interconnected stories of punk house party disasters, young monsters in love, space travel gone wrong, adventures in other dimensions, showdowns with malevolent forces, and the never ending quest for meaning.'” [Review]

Hour – Subminiature

Dear Life Records

Collected from recordings captured on a variety of devices across more than two years of touring, Hour‘s Subminiature is less an ordinary live album than a celebration of the entire project. Led by the apparently inexhaustible Michael Cormier-O’Leary, the Philadelphia-based ensemble has established itself as a dynamic, ever-shifting entity over recent years, albums like Anemone Red, Tiny Houses and Ease the Work practising an inventive, curious style of chamber folk never content to stay in one place. Thus the form of Subminiature could not be more fitting, the release positioning tracks from all previous albums alongside new material and seeing the band shift from number to number along with the settings and venues. All in all, Jacob Augustine, Jason Calhoun, Em Downing, Matt Fox, Peter Gill, Lucas Knapp, Evan McGonagill, Peter McLaughlin, Keith J. Nelson, Erika Nininger, Abi Reimold and Adelyn Strei all appear, with Cormier-O’Leary the only constant. But spend any time at all within this music and it becomes clear that, far from losing something with the perpetual change, such fluidity is itself the very essence of Hour.

Jahnah Camille – My sunny oath!

Winspear

Jahnah Camille “has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness,” we wrote of 2024’s i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, as the EP reached across genres to create a nuanced tone “entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.” With help from producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza, MJ Lenderman), Camille’s latest release My sunny oath! takes this style to new heights, tapping into a freshly thunderous sound to capture the tumultuous experience of young adulthood. Shoegaze, alt-rock and grunge influences assert themselves more prominently, and while the same sweet and sour approach of its predecessor allows for both heart and sardonic humour, there’s a notable new edge to the tracks. A kind of self-defensive toughness that gives the sense of a young woman passing into a hostile world and coming to realise what it takes to survive.

JJJJJerome Ellis – Vesper Sparrow

Shelter Press

“Through a combination of saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics and vocals, Grenadian–Jamaican–American artist JJJJJerome Ellis creates atmospheric, often improvisatory soundscapes able to disrupt the normal flow of things. Having had a stutter since childhood (the stylising of ‘JJJJJerome’ is a reference to the fact they most frequently stutter their own name), Ellis sometimes found it difficult to express themselves verbally while growing up, though soon found an outlet after discovering the saxophone in seventh grade. The creative practice which developed from that point of origin does not exist in spite of the stutter but in fellowship with it, Ellis developing into a multi-instrumentalist interested in how both stuttering and music can suspend or expand time, working to utilise this fact to further the artistic and thematic potential of their work […] Vesper Sparrow uses this as a framework around which to build something even more ambitious. A space carved out of the hectic every day into which the listener is invited, Ellis using the album as a kind of intermission within ordinary time where we might consider histories both personal and communal, as well as those of the natural world, and thus come to honour and understand ourselves more faithfully. Blackness is central to the record, as is lineage and spirituality, and the result is something which upends the linearity of experience to invite us back into the present.” [Review]

Jouska – How Did I Wind Up Here?

Koke Plate

“While the previous Jouska record Suddenly My Mind Is Blank was crafted from a notably polished electro pop, How Did I Wind Up Here? record sees [Marit Othilie] Thorvik favour something more textured, wrapping raw emotion with a gauzy style. The result, as [single] ‘Pierced’ shows, owes a debt to both dream pop and trip hop. A sound full of contradiction, somehow managing to conjure a sparse night time atmosphere without sacrificing any weight, and managing to pair emotional immediacy with an ambiguously dreamy drift.” [Review]

Kitba – Hold The Edges

Ruination Record Co.

“Proof that art can offer a picture of identity more nuanced than simple labels,” we wrote of Kitba‘s self-titled album back in 2023. “A deeper understanding reached via an embrace of confusion. Identity as an ongoing thing.” New full-length Hold the Edges continues and deepens this exploration of identity, the Brooklyn-based harpist and songwriter calling on a number of friends and collaborators to offer a typically lush, detailed and intuitive sound which works through a particularly tumultuous period while refusing to be dragged down. The path to self-discovery is not a finite number of epiphanic steps but rather something convoluted and unending, Kitba seems to understand. Full knowledge is always just out of reach. But while this might be frustrating in the present, it can be freeing across time, allowing skins to be shed, renewal to manifest, life to be leavened by an ongoing sense of possibility. “Am I enough to carry me through?” asks closing track ‘Cards’, showing that doubt will always be close by, but step back and consider the record, and it becomes clear Hold The Edges has provided the answer already.

Kristin Daelyn – Beyond the Break

Orindal Records

“’I used to hurry everywhere, / and leaped over the running creeks. / There wasn’t / time enough for all the wonderful things / I could think of to do / in a single day. Patience / comes to the bones / before it take root in the heart / as another good idea.’ So wrote Mary Oliver in her poem ‘Patience’, the principle inspiration for the lead single of Kristin Daelyn‘s Beyond the Break. ‘Patience Comes to the Bones’ introduces a collection of songs which looks to carve a space of reflection and peace within the tumultuous present, approaching the dissatisfaction and suffering common to us all from a decidedly compassionate angle. Supported by guest appearances from Dan Knishkowy (Adeline Hotel), Danny Black (Good Old War, Gregory Alan Isakov) and Patrick Riley, Daelyn’s soulful vocals and intricate, intimate guitar welcome the audience into the space so that we too might re-examine our lives from new angles and come to appreciate the fellowship to be found in the universality of longing.” [Review]

Lael Neale – Altogether Stranger

Sub Pop

Written after bouncing between rural isolation and urban rush for several years, Lael Neale‘s Altogether Stranger lives up to its title in more ways than one. “On returning to Los Angeles I felt like an extraterrestrial landing on a dystopian planet,” she explains, “so I’m writing from the perspective of a being from another realm witnessing the peculiarities of humanity.” Thus the ‘stranger’ of the title functions as both a noun and a verb, Neale approaching LA from an oblique angle, an alien who sees the city’s banality as bizarre and its absurdities even weirder. Clocking in at a succinct thirty-two minutes, the record seems to promise more of the tight, electrical minimalism established across previous LPs Acquainted With Night and Star Eater’s Delight, though in reality holds some of Neale’s most adventurous work to date. 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.

Last Quokka – Take The Fight To The Bastards

Self-released

Not every band would kick off their new record with the story of an anticapitalist mihirung (a now extinct Australian bird also known as the ‘demon duck’ or ‘thunder bird’) tearing through the oligarch class of Aussie society. But Last Quokka are not every band. Woolworths, Woodside and favourite enemy Gina Rinehart all get their comeuppance at the hand of this vengeful living fossil within the first three minutes of Take The Fight To The Bastards, setting the tone for a record as fun and furious as anything the Perth punks have put out to date. Across the subsequent ten tracks we get diatribes against the insidious rise of identikit watering holes (‘Save Our Pubs’), condemnations of the greedy and their exploitation (‘Cost of Living’, ‘Out for the Weekend’) and even an ode to the queen of SW6 Sam Kerr (‘Stupid White Bastard’). The newly expanded line-up push the sound further than ever and give Trent Rojahn’s acerbic vocals the backdrop they deserve. We might live in disheartening times but, with the fire of Last Quokka behind us, retaliation starts to feel possible once again. As Rojahn sings on call to arms ‘Murujuga (DBH)’:

Disrupt Burrup Hub
And industry expansion
Take the fight to the bastards
And paint the town yellow
Take the fight to Woodside
Take the fight to Rio Tinto
Take the fight to BHP
Take the fight to the police
Take the fight to the bastards

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like The Sky

You’ve Changed Records

“Our minds are spread out all over this place / full of persistence and surrounded by grace, / their starving lies are crumbling all around / but we belong to this sacred ground.” This verse, taken from the opening track of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson‘s latest album Live Like The Sky, not only encapsulates the spirit of the record, but illuminates the heart which drives the Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg writer, scholar and artist’s work more generally. Like her novel Noopiming and more recent genre-bending book Theory Of Water, Live Like the Sky is both an expression of struggle and celebration of history. It confronts the violence and genocide of the White Western project and reclaims the lands it tried to make its own, all while documenting the catastrophes the colonial powers have brought upon themselves and offering modes of survival and resistance. The result is a castigation (‘Disintegrations’), an elegy (‘Nizhooziibing’), a practical manual (’85 Dollars an Acre’), a prayer (‘Minode’e’). A reminder of the interconnection of all things, and the dire consequences to be faced by those greedy or foolish enough to believe they can rule on their own. “Courage sits and smiles, breaks open the overpass,” Betasamosake Simpson sings on ‘Murder of Crows’. “She sings a hymn for the cars at the pipeline mass / the winds pick up and the snow falls from the lake in the sky / she packs up and drives on to the next lie / she sings no god no boss no husband no state / she sings to me with a murder of crows.”

Leilani Patao – daisy

Audio Antihero

“Starting in 2021 at the tender age of seventeen, Brooklyn (via Los Angeles) based songwriter Leilani Patao put out a series of DIY self-releases, culminating in the acclaimed 2024 album But What If? which earned, among other things, a feature on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. But despite this success, Patao grew disillusioned with the biz, not an unfamiliar story within a contemporary music scene which demands not only on hard work in an artistic sense but an even greater degree of effort (and luck) be spent on self-promotion, algorithmic appeasement and any number of equally soul-destroying things. Many criticize this system but few take concrete action against it, which makes Patao’s new EP daisy all the more notable. A release which promises to shun streaming services, playlists and social media in order to focus on what really matters, and thus an experiment to judge what exactly is possible within the conditions of the twenty-first century. As Patao asks: “Is it possible to share my music properly, pay everyone who was involved, get paid myself,’ Patao asks, ‘and not have to interact with the many systems in place that make me dread music?'” [Review]

Léna Bartels – The Brightest Silver Fish

Glamour Gowns

“‘Only the brightest silver fish / Shows when the light hits,’ sings Léna Bartels on the title track of her second full-length The Brightest Silver Fish, out now via Glamour Gowns. The image might be a small miracle, over in a moment, or else a figment of the imagination caught from the corner of an eye. That we never find out which is typical of a record that does not so much mask its meaning as refuse to settle on a single answer. One caught within a series of dualities, be it between autonomy and inaction, startling beauty and the punishingly mundane, and thus open to a variety of interpretations. Even when, peering into the water later on in the track, Bartels believes she sights the fish again, the result remains ambiguous. Does the small, glinting creature she sees swimming with its family represent the possibility of the things most desired: freedom, connection, agency? Or only reinforce the opposite reality, where such ideals can only exist at a remove from our lives in their own watery, alien world?” [Review]

Lia Kohl – Various Small Whistles and a Song

Dauw

“As the artistically-inclined might deduce from the title, [Lia Kohl‘s Various Small Whistles and a Song] takes inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, a book released in 1964 which featured fifteen photographs of fires and one of a glass of milk, Kohl matching not only the structure of Ruscha’s work (the album offers fifteen whistles and one song) but also its playfulness and deceptive depth. The result is an attempt to convey the subtle textures of life in a way that feels at once incidental and carefully curated, and one that ultimately adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts. The humble whistle, it turns out, is the ideal medium around which to build such a mission.” [Review]

Lily Seabird – Trash Mountain

Lame-O Records

“This album is dedicated to Trash Mountain,” Lily Seabird describes in her liner notes to the record of the same name. “A real place where I lived while writing and recording this record.” That real place is a house for artists and other creative types built on top of an old landfill site in Burlington, Vermont, somewhere which offered both the reliable constancy of home, especially via the like-minded community where Seabird would return after long stretches on the road, and a place of constant flux. This juxtaposition marks the record, Seabird facing up to the regretful pasts and uncertain futures by embracing change as a perpetual truth, though also coming to realise the anchoring stability that can be found in connection and community. “I don’t have hope for the oppressive systems that abandon us, but I do have hope in people,” Seabird says, a line that sums up the record perfectly. “Sure, the world is really messed up, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make something beautiful out of the garbage.”

Lisa/Liza – Ocean Path

Orindal Records

“’Ocean Path is a look back at the first songs I made in my teens and early twenties, including some of my very first recordings,’ explains Liza Victoria of the latest Lisa/Liza EP. ‘For me, it is a letter from my younger self.’ But more than an exercise in nostalgia, the release becomes a meditation on memory and personal change. The ways in which we shift over time, the ways we stay the same, and how we are constantly settling into who we are. ‘I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to share my inner world with others. And now I see where that lead me and feel gratitude for the path set out before me,’ Victoria continues. “Each song holds time between it, at least a year between each, love and memory, and different worlds of view, threads between them’ […] What results is the sense of witnessing Lisa/Liza form in real time, this early [release] already offering that magic, almost contradictory blend of the past, present and future Victoria has since mastered, able to offer sanctuary from the world without ever sacrificing the hope intrinsic to the act of looking forward.” [Review]

Lisa O’Neill – The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right

Rough Trade Records UK

“Some terrors are born out of nature / Some terrors are born overnight / Some terrors are born out of leaders / With their eye on a different prize.” So sings Lisa O’Neill on the title track of The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right. Consisting of handful of covers, original songs and a James Stephens poem reimagined as song, the release is at once timeless and contemporary. An album which pairs a rendition of ‘The Bleak Midwinter’ with Dylan’s ‘All the Tired Horses’, and places an ode to union organiser and activist Mother Jones near a meditation on the current housing crisis. But it is the title track which stays longest in the memory. A searing indictment of the state of the world and the rapacity from which it was born. “Natural disasters devastate and turn our world upside down,” O’Neill explains, “but it is the man-made greed-motivated unnatural disasters put upon our beautiful planet and it’s people that inspired this song.” Such malevolent forces seem to be gathering at pace across the globe, and music like this has never been so timely.

Little Mazarn – Mustang Island

Dear Life Records

On their third LP, Little Mazarn branch out from their primitive folk roots into something more experimental. The core tenets of their style remain, namely Lindsey Verrill’s distinctive vocals and Jeff Johnston’s singing saw, but now there are drums, synths and what the liner notes describe as “a chorus of orchestral oddities.” It’s a new and fitting entry into the canon of Southern outsider art, joining the work of countless other musicians, artists and writers which, although disparate in style, are united by a shared spirit. The result is something sparse and sombre and sincere, evoking the both the wide-open spaces of the band’s home state and something altogether more intimate. Grief and loss are major themes, and the record functions both as a kind of emergency valve to liberate these big feelings and a reminder to hold on to them. “I built a gate for my grief to go freely,” Verrill sings on ‘The Gate’, in a line that captures the entire album, “I’m not meant to contain wild horses / I see them run and I feel their hot breath, alive. I can’t pen them in and I can’t let them go.”

Living Hour – Internal Drone Infinity

Keeled Scales

“Almost didn’t take a photo / But I’m happy that I did / Cause it melted all around me / When I crossed across the bridge.” So sings Living Hour‘s Samantha Sarty on ‘Things Will Remain’, the closing track of the Winnipeg outfit’s fourth album Internal Drone Infinity. Or rather, so sing Living Hour as a whole, the verse delivered with a communal conviction that underscores its importance to a record all about the small beauty and slow pain that constitutes the passage of time. Internal Drone Infinity is the perfect example of “what the band themselves have coined ‘yearn-core’,” as we wrote in our review, “[combining] slowcore, indie rock and dream pop into something shaded by the gauzy texture of memory,” though it hurdles the saccharine nostalgia which can sometimes haunt such music with a shapeshifting sound that isn’t afraid to push into heaviness or intensity. Because while the project is wistful by its very nature, there’s a harder truth inherent within it too. An awareness of entropy. The immutable fact of change. The knowledge everything we have will break down and fall away. Living Hour are here to preserve what they can while it is still possible, but also do something more. An attempt to evoke this wider cycle in all of its messy reality, and come to find meaning in its perpetual, inevitable turn.

Mal Devisa – Palimpsesa

Topshelf Records

We first wrote about Deja Carr’s Mal Devisa back in 2016 with breakout album Kiid A personal record which “plays like condensed version of life,” we wrote, “reaching high and falling low, crackling and bursting and simmering under the surface, at times exploding in urgent streams of consciousness as if the words and thoughts can no longer be held in […] It’s not jazz or gospel or indie rock. Kiid is everything. Kiid is whatever it wants to be.” We might be almost a decade down the line from that startling debut, but latest album Palimpsesa shows that Mal Devisa has only grown in the interim. Eschewing genre conventions to touch on everything hip-hop, jazz, folk and spoken-word poetry, this is an album which manages to surpass the fizzing energy of its predecessors. Verbose but also rhythmic, experimental but never ostentatious, Palimpsesa plays like creation of an artist at the height of their powers, but then again we thought that nine years ago, only for Carr to prove she could reach higher still.

Michael Beach – Big Black Plume

Goner Records / Poison City Records

“Did the sea come near / When you held the shell to your ear? / Did you hear the sound of the tide / Coming or going? // “Did you smell the scent of the brine / In your blood flowing / Or did you hear / The desperate lonesome wind blowing?” So asks California-born, Melbourne-based songwriter Michael Beach on ‘The Sea’, the opening track of his fifth full-length album Big Black Plume. The lines serve as a fitting introduction to a record grounded within our present moment, a reality in which any experience of wonder or joy we might find within the natural world is shadowed by an ubiquitous sense of mourning, and the true cost of humanity’s avaricious folly is coming to pass. But rather than succumb to despair, Big Black Plume pushes further through this cataclysm and emerges with something startling. “While there is an undeniable darkness [to Beach’s work], it is often sublime in nature, and certainly anything but nihilistic in its intentions,” we wrote of the album earlier in the year. “A fact made clear by new record Big Black Plume, which works with perhaps the only form of optimism left. ‘I was wrestling with the beauty and intensity of the natural world and coming to grips with the human destruction of it,’ as Beach explains. ‘I have an overwhelming sense that humans will come and go, and the world we depend on will outlast us.'” This is the soul of the record. One of both unfathomable loss and determined perseverance, where only a reconnection with nature and all of its systems might allow us to transcend the cursed fate we have carved for ourselves, or at least grant the solace of nature’s sure continuation after we are dead and gone. “There are countless ways for disaster,” as Beach sings in the closing title track. “The dreaming of the natural world will go on.”

Mourning [A] BLKstar – Flowers of the Living

Don Giovanni Records

“Released to coincide with the project’s decade anniversary, Mourning [A] BLKstar‘s Flowers of the Living sees the Cleveland-based Afrofuturist collective draw on every ounce of creativity and expertise gained across the years, resulting in a sound that’s intricately detailed yet confident enough to spread its wings and take its time. ‘Not only does space represent stillness, contentment, and mindfulness, it’s also the fulcrum of collectivism and free expression, and a key tenet of the Black ecstatic lineage,’ as the press release puts it. ‘Space has always been politicized, and to view it from a place of abundance rather than scarcity, even in a conceptual sense, is a rebuke of fascist oppressors and an affirmation of love and self-belief.’ MAB hold this sentiment as a mission statement, the album defiant in every sense, from its refusal to restrict itself to any single genre convention to its unbridled invention and confidence.” [Review]

The Noisy – The Secret Ingredient is Even More Meat

Audio Antihero

“A deluxe edition of the project’s debut album The Secret Ingredient is More Meat, [The Noisy‘s The Secret Ingredient is Even More Meat] casts a wide net for its inspiration, drawing on a whole range of cinematic and literary influences as well as the ideas which underpin and support the drag and queer communities. The result is inherently personal yet larger than any one life, lead Sara Mae Henke evoking the true dimensions of their interior with songs that can be televisually glitzy (‘Twos‘) or as intimate as a home movie (‘Grenadine‘), and moreover songs unafraid to delve into the most individual of subjects in order to locate more universal truths (as with ‘Nightshade‘ and its examination of difficult relationships). The superstitious ‘Ballerino’ and its Suspiria-inspired video by Ewan Hill collect all of these ideas together into under two minutes, celebrating all sides of an identity while working through memories and learning to love the past while focusing on what is to come.” [Review]

Okkung Lee – Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities

Shelter Press

“Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities by Okkyung Lee sees the South Korea-born, Berlin-based cellist and improviser reject the established tropes and signifiers of experimental music and thus magnify its creative potential. A style which, per the album notes, sits ‘at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque’ but is not beholden to established pattern or language, forcing both artist and audience to reckon with each composition on its own terms and nothing else. And yet, for all these ambitious intentions, the result is not some exercise in avant garde excess, be that ostentation or confrontation, but instead something tactful, modest and intuitive. The sonic equivalent of the title’s ‘any other day’, where apparent ordinariness is revealed to contain the multitudes of memory, longing and latent emotion which comprise each and every spin of the earth.” [Review]

Patrick Shiroishi – Forgetting is Violent

American Dreams

“It is fair to say multi-instrumentalist and composer Patrick Shiroishi is unafraid to broach big themes. Previous releases like Descension, Hidemi and I was too young to hear silence have all in one way or another revolved around the internment of Japanese-Americans, but new full-length Forgetting is Violence takes things even further. [The album] considers, amongst other things, racism in a wider sense. An attempt to wrestle with the phenomenon as both a historical fact and contemporary shame, and furthermore one which confronts the impossibility of living in this world without participating in its ongoing function. Acknowledging that if the desire to eradicate another is something allowed into the world, then no aspect of a culture can be said to exist above or beyond it. A truth more apparent now than ever as genocide is televised in real time.” [Review]

Pickle Darling – Bots

Father/Daughter Records

It might be tempting to view Bots as metamorphosis of the Pickle Darling project. In fact we did just that back in June, describing how New Zealand-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo decided to channel Robyn, Cher and Ray of Light-era Madonna for single ‘Massive Everything’, dropping some of the playfulness and poetry of previous releases to instead “embrace the exhilaration of being wholly direct.” Subsequent single ‘Human Bean Instruction Manual’ complicated the picture, stretching the definition of direct with a sprawling seven minute slice of fuzz pop. “This new era of Pickle Darling does not jettison the idiosyncratic charm which has won the project so many fans,” as we wrote. “Nor does a commitment to forthright communication elide any sense of ambiguity. Indeed, this is a song all about such ambiguity, and how learning to embrace the doubt inherent within growing up in this strange present.” Spend any time with Bots and you’ll come to see it is less a revolution than the next chapter in a story Pickle Darling has been building from day one. An album willing to embrace contradiction—between old and new ideas, familiarity and foreignness, even the joy and frustration of making art—and in doing so go further than most to evoke the feeling of being alive in 2025.

Ruby Gill – Some Kind of Control

Self-released

“I had been grappling with what it meant to have all and no control over my time and body—all at once,” so explains Ruby Gill of her second album, Some Kind of Control. A record marked by what she describes as “cheekier, looser, gayer and even more raw” style, embodied by ‘Touch Me There’. “[A song] which examines the body in ways both intimate and political, embracing the queer experience both as a means of personal fulfilment and as a wider radical force,” we wrote in our review. “This duality is evoked by the interplay between Gill’s searching delivery and the communal backing chorus which sees the likes of Annie-Rose Maloney, Hannah McKittrick, Angie McMahon, Hannah Cameron, Jess Ellwood and Olivia Hally (of Oh Pep!) all lend their voices. The result is the sense of a call being answered. A single voice echoing back as a community.” [Review]

Sam Moss – Swimming

Self-released

“Stuck in the past / But somehow living / Out of my depth / But somehow swimming.” Four succinct lines from the title track of Sam Moss‘s Swimming capture the album’s essence, as the Virginia-based guitarist and songwriter embraces contradiction in more ways than one to create what might be his strongest release to date. The warm, ostensibly modest arrangements seem to deepen with each listen, not least thanks to the careful additions from a supporting cast of Isa Burke, Jake Xerxes Fussell, Sinclair Palmer, Molly Sarlé and Joe Westerlund. Moss’s lyrics and delivery follow a similar pattern, their gentle fondness belying the intensity beneath the surface. The result is something of a paradox, though one which feels entirely natural. A folk album that is humble in tone yet existential in nature, one drawn with a careful hand that nevertheless reaches for the full spectrum of emotions life inevitably brings. Dip a toe into Swimming and you will feel a pleasant warmth. Submerge yourself within it and something far more urgent will be revealed. “There’s no seasons left that matter / There’s no days, only hours,” as Moss sings on the closer. “And there’s so much to gaze at / In this world.”

SG Goodman – Planting by the Signs

Slough Water Records / Thirty Tigers

SG Goodman‘s Planting By The Signs takes its title and philosophy from the Foxfire books, a series first published in 1972 which aimed to pass on the collected wisdom and history of Appalachian life. The phases of the moon, this volume suggested, have a notable impact on our earthly endeavours, so anyone looking to undertake a task, be it planting a garden, weaning a baby or writing a folk rock album, would do well to align their efforts with the lunar cycle. Goodman’s record, easily one of the strongest released this year, seems to support the utility of this tradition, or at least the wider reconnection to the natural rhythms so often buried within our hectic, fatally human present. Written in a period of great loss, and helping to facilitate a process of reconciliation, Planting By The Signs is a highly personal album about the most universal of themes. Grief, love, God. The suffering of poverty and the dignity of those made to bear it. Not to mention that bond we share with the wider environment, a truth of life whether we like it or not, and the responsibilities of stewardship which result. There’s no small amount loaded into these songs, take the principle image of ‘Snapping Turtle’, where cruelty is met with a fury fit to match that of Christ in the temple, anger which only exists because of the compassion which burns underneath. This aching fondness for all life permeates all the tracks and culminates in the playful, crushing, transcendent closer, ‘Heaven Song’.

Shallowater – God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars

Self-released

If ever there was an album built to evoke a specific place, it is Shallowater‘s God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars. Following on from their acclaimed debut There Is A Well, the Houston outfit doubled down on their self-described ‘dirtgaze’ aesthetic to capture the sweeping landscape of West Texas. Six tracks of crushing weight and panoramic space where the stillness of distance is shot through with dust storms and squalls of violence. ‘Sadie’ is one of the highlights, a song loaded with images as stark and foreboding as the sound itself, its lights in tornadoes and dust covered angels speaking to the mythos of a record keyed into the sublime, though also offering a surprisingly tender meditation of grief that ties the personal into the elemental heft which surrounds it.

Snocaps – S/T

ANTI-

Way back when, before Katie and Allison Crutchfield won hearts via Waxahatchee and Swearin’ respectively, the Alabama twins played together in the beloved yet short-lived P.S. Eliot. In the wake of personal success, diehard fans have called for a reunion, though the Crutchfields are too wise to believe there’s any chance of going home. Snocaps is the alternative, a project with MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook which sees Katie and Allison reunited without forgetting the history in between, the pair taking turns to pen songs about all the obstacles on the road to the present moment, as well as the convictions which have kept the wheels turning all the same. “Give me shit while you can’t see straight,” goes the final verse of opener ‘Coast’. “I got the pedal on the floor / Or I’m slamming on the breaks / I could never just coast.” A simple reunion might have been the easy route to take, but since when has the easy path been true?

Soup Dreams – Hellbender

Candlepin Records

“Storm flooded the freeway / It thundered almost all day / Crying on the street in my hometown / Trapped in the car, the rain coming down.” This image, taken from a verse in opening track ‘Wonderdog’, captures something essential of Soup Dreams‘s Hellbender, the Philly outfit reaching across indie rock, emo and alt country to create a sound that’s nostalgic, emotive and intimate, yet nevertheless charged with a roiling energy. Comparisons will inevitably be drawn to contemporaries like Waxahatchee and Wednesday, with lead Emma Kazan’s lyrics falling somewhere between the unguarded confessions and sardonic bite of the two, though to reduce Hellbender to its influences is to underestimate what is one of the very best debuts of the year. One of heart, subtle humour and bite which captures the tenderness and desperation of solitude without losing the ever-thundering tumult of the world outside.

talons’ – in retreat

Self-released

“There’s a lot about the Covid era that I can’t get past,” says Mike Tolan (aka talons’) in the liner notes to latest album in retreat. “It changed me and largely not for the better.” The project has always been something of a raw wound, conjuring an air of desperate melancholy devoid of any romance or melodrama, but even so, this record feels different. Recorded live to tape at home with all the imperfections left in, this is a dispatch from a troubled mind during troubling times. Songs marked by the kind of quiet despair which descends at the dead at night, the anxiety of the contemporary moment matched only by the deadening suspicion things are only going to get worse. As Tolan concludes: “Things are not OK. The near future is bleak, but we’ve gotta dig in and grind it out for the kids.”

Tan Cologne – Unknown Beyond

Labrador Records

“The music of Taos, New Mexico duo of Lauren Green and Marissa Macias, otherwise known as Tan Cologne, has long probed at the intersection of the physical and ethereal, a style established on 2020’s Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico. ‘Orbiting around the the titular state, the record excavates the physical and metaphysical layers of the specific location,’ as we wrote of the album in our review, ‘digging through strata both natural and supernatural in attempt to represent New Mexico in all its strange, stark beauty’ […] Tan Cologne’s latest full-length Unknown Beyond represents both a continuation of this style and a broadening of its horizons. Almost literally, in fact, with Green and Macias turning their attention skyward with the same curiosity, openness and longing which has always underpinned their work. Their search is driven by griefs personal, communal and global, the songs written in the wake of bereavement amid a country, indeed a world, on fire in more ways than one.” [Review]

Tobacco City – Horses

Scissor Tail Records

Chris Coleslaw, Lexi Goddard and pals make country music that has one foot in the golden-hued past and another in the painfully real present. This is true both in terms of the Tobacco City sound, which freshens up classic seventies country (think Emmylou and Gram) for the modern ear, and its lyrics, which compound the often confusing, disappointing and bittersweet nature of the present day with a yearning gaze at the past. Horses moves from good-time toe-tapping euphoria to solemn late-night longing, and spans comforting nostalgic familiarity to a manic desire to leave the depressing desolation of small-town existence. This is achieved principally through a focus on small snapshots of bygone days. Seemingly mundane moments where boredom breaks its levee and becomes something of its own rush, where the dissatisfaction of cooped-up small-town living is tempered by time’s unhurried passage. Here, the future is not some dark unstoppable force rushing toward you in a clatter of hoofbeats, but something intangible, indistinct. Something to worry about tomorrow.” [Review]

Tuxis Giant – You Won’t Remember This

Worry Bead Records

“You Won’t Remember This both continues the themes explored across [Tuxis Giant‘s] previous albums and expands their sonic palette. But more than a lesson in testing the borders of a project, the invention and experimentation serves its ultimate intention. That is, to paint a picture of life as it is lived, a full spectrum of moods, the shades shifting day to day. And moreover, something experienced not only as the immediate present but also a constant retrospection, memories appearing, merging and changing as the months pass by, each colouring our outlook at any given moment. The album’s most autobiographical song ‘Heart Surgery’ encapsulates all of this in one track. A retelling of the day lead [Matt] O’Connor’s mother underwent the titular operation, complete with stark emotion, naked concern and the small funny details which pop up no matter how serious the occasion. But it is also a meditation on memory. The things we remember, the things we do not, and how both of these might haunt or protect us as we grow and heal.” [Review]

Weakened Friends – Feels Like Hell

Don Giovanni Records

“Back in August we introduced Feels Like Hell, the new album from Weakened Friends [on] Don Giovanni Records, with single ‘NPC‘. What we called ‘a decidedly existential track featuring guitarist Buckethead inspired by the reality-bending simulation theory,’ though one rooted in a very real, contemporary struggle. ‘Far from some exercise in idle sci-fi daydreaming, the song is urgent, defiant and cathartic,’ we described. ‘Fatalistic, but delivered with the kind of full-throated passion that can only exist in those still with the spirit to fight.’ This attitude is the cornerstone to Feels Like Hell, the record representing a rejection not only of the myriads of forces which make our current culture so bleak and painful, but the all-too-common apathy with which so many react to such conditions. A collection of spiky, confrontational and cathartic songs, notably different from the tone of the Portland, Maine outfit’s previous LP Quitter. ‘Every soul-destroying facet of our present moment is used as fuel on the fire,’ as we continued in our preview. ‘The hegemony of global capitalism, complete with its mass surveillance, environmental destruction and rampant inequality, is enough to drive anyone to despair, but Weakened Friends are determined to deny it that one last victory. Better to scream, yell, bring the whole thing crumbling down with us.’” [Review]

Weirs – Diamond Grove

Dear Life Records

“[Diamond Grove by Weirs is] a repertoire of classic songs so indebted to the particular conditions of the moment that they have never sounded quite the same before, and likely never will again. ‘We wanted Diamond Grove to be a record in the truest sense,’ as [lead Oliver] Child-Lannin describes in the liner notes. ‘A living document of a specific time, place, and gathering of friends. Recorded in farmhouses, fields, and an abandoned silo, it channels the spirit of traditional music as a shared practice, alive with the sounds of its surroundings.’ The result owes more to musique concrète than the crisp, professional recordings of the folk revival. It is up for debate whether this represents a stylistic leap for the genre or a circle back towards an even older tradition, music delivered and enjoyed in situ. But to ponder whether Weirs exist in defiance or deference of their forebears is to miss the point completely. This is not an attempt to raze conventions, nor reproduce them. But rather imagine how folk could and should sound today. If the entirety of traditional music could be viewed as a series of specific moments threaded into a timeless whole, then with Diamond Grove, Weirs offer their own bead to add to the chain.” [Review]

Wilder Maker – The Streets Like Beds Still Warm

Western Vinyl

“Wilder Maker’s The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is a very different record to 2022’s Male Models. One even more ambitious in scope (it’s the first of a planned triptych to be released across the next eighteen months) and unique in its creation which nevertheless seems driven by the spirit of its predecessor […] Birnbaum has called The Streets… ‘the inverse of the typical songwriter record,’ the music recorded during open-ended sessions where core band members Adam Brisbin, Nick Jost, Sean Mullins improvised and swapped instruments at will, and guests including Katie Von Schleicher, Joseph Shabason, Macie Stewart, Chuck Johnson, Will Shore, Rebecca el-Saleh (Kitba) and Cole Kamen-Green added their own touches too, before Birnbaum took the result home and slowly whittled it into the form it takes today. The result, made possible by both a band now experienced in working together and a label in Western Vinyl willing to trust them, swaps the sleek psych and goodtime rock sensibilities of its predecessor for something altogether more stark and lonely, less a house party than a late-night wander through unfamiliar streets. Which is not to suggest minimalism, the sound owing much to experimental and alt-jazz forebears, but rather the presiding mood. One indebted to the shadow and subtle desperation of noir cinema, the perfect soundtrack as Birnbaum’s world-weary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.” [Review]

Will Johnson – Diamond City

Keeled Scales

Diamond City is Will Johnson’s tenth solo album and one that finds the legendary Texas songwriter’s style stripped back to the bare bones. Created at home in his Hays County farmhouse “in one room alone with his thoughts,” the record is inspired by the landscapes of both Johnson’s childhood in southern Missouri and the Texan Hills outside his window, painting a picture of the USA’s vast interior using initially just guitar, drum machine and an old Tascam 424. Once completed in this pure form, Johnson sent the songs to longtime collaborator Britton Beisenherz, who fleshed things out just enough, blowing on the embers of Johnson’s demos without smothering them in needless polish and ornamentation. The result is a new entry in the long and storied list of masterpieces created many miles from a professional studio, squirreled away in some corner with a tape recorder and something to say. Lyrically the album is poetic, fragmentary, even opaque, but viscerally emotive too, indebted to the pantheon of Southern writers from Faulker on down. Put simply, Diamond City is a reminder in the raw power of austere simplicity, that sometimes things are better without all their creases ironed out.

Will Stratton – Points of Origin

Bella Union

Set across the full breadth of California over a timespan of ten thousand years, you’d be hard pressed to find a more expansive record than Will Stratton‘s Points of Origin. The ambitious album is as detailed and crowded as an entire book of Where’s Wally? illustrations. Its cast of characters a Pynchonian smorgasbord of artists, con men, criminals, deadbeats and truck drivers, government men, snitches and counter-culturists, all inhabiting a world irrevocably altered by the presence of man. A picture of America before, during and after the imperialist project which has come to shape it, where fires and floods haunt the land as though in divine retribution, and a myriad of tiny struggles add up to the longest of wars. And, for the wild scope of Points of Origin, it is these tiny struggles which mark its true spirit. Each song intimate and detailed, a square inch of a picture too large to display, yet so richly imagined that they are able to evoke the full frame. Be it through the image of ancient hunters on snow-topped peaks or Vietnam attack choppers repurposed to drop flame retardant on home soil instead of napalm aboard, Stratton works with a hand careful, tender, heartbroken and seething, empathetic to the plight of his individual characters while damning the sum of their endeavours.

Wine Country – Hard Times

Self-released

“The liner notes for the debut Wine Country record, Hard Times, put the terms “written” and “composed” in inverted commas, a small gesture which speaks volumes. Because these are not songs finely wrought or painstakingly crafted brick by brick. Rather they just arrived, epiphany-like, [lead Matt] Kivel a willing lightning rod struck by a bolt of pure inspiration […] In the past he has drawn on cinema and literature, folk music and ambient music and experimental jazz. But here, in keeping with the overall vibe, things just flow where they want. Long, meandering pieces of psych-tinged art rock, improvisational lyrics that nonetheless feel charged with poetry and meaning. A testament to the value of committing to something without inhibition, and allowing the result to speak on its own terms rather than being edited and overworked beyond its proper shape. Hard Times is inspiration uncut. Not so much an attempt to communicate something otherwise incomprehensible as an embrace of the incomprehensible itself.” [Review]

Wombo – Danger in Fives

Fire Talk

“Feeling every inch the product of a band nearing ten years together, Danger in Fives finds the Wombo sound realised in its purest form, combining the experimentation and risk-taking which marked their earlier releases with the growing confidence so evident on Fairy Rust. That is, the sound of project which has come to understand its spirit and ambitions and is now committing to them with total conviction. ‘Danger in Fives isn’t a reintroduction’, as the press release states. ‘It’s a reminder’.” [Review]

The post Year in Review: 2025 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

If ‘Alligator’ seemed to embrace certain dualities and contradiction, then the full album takes things to a whole new level. The themes and narratives often explore binaries, the characters surrounded or alone, looking for home or running away from one, and the sound itself is happy to pair haunting atmosphere and cutting emotion with s sense of humour most zany and wry.  Magali’s background as a visual artist has long pushed the project towards multimedia innovation, and Cacchione has also worked beyond the ordinary confines of music, collaborating with those behind fiction podcasts like Welcome to Night Vale and The Space Within. So it’s perhaps no surprise Make Strange Friends has loftier ambitions than most folk records. “On Make Strange Friends, Caged Animals have crafted a multifaceted album that is both a time capsule from a weird era and a tender love letter to the next chapter,” the label describe: 

The album harks to lo-fi treasures like The Basement Tapes and Mellow Gold, marrying rough-hewn, folky impressionism with a lush, post-modern palette, including guest appearances from Jeff Tobias, Frankie Sunswept, and Steven Lambke. The result flickers with the blacklight anxiety of Nebraska, the sepia color of Deserter’s Songs, and the comic surrealism of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.

The resulting album is every bit as varied as that sounds. The protagonist (or more specifically, antihero) of opener ‘Rattle the Quiet’ is suitably stupefied, dropped into a too-bright morning tender and unprepared to face the consequences of the previous nights. But then ‘Radio Down’ soon follows with a satisfying sense of salvation, moving from the throes of addiction to a new life on the other side. The songs are changeable even within the own runtime, and often embrace what might seem competing moods simultaneously. Take ‘Balloon Heaven’ as a case in point, a single of taut bass and ambiguous imagery which conveys its moody atmosphere without sacrificing colour and groove. At once searching, almost desperate, yet still buoyed by its own momentum to have fun along the way.

Make Strange Friends is out now via You’ve Changed Records and available from the Caged Animal Bandcamp page.

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With a sound described as “part pop, part doom, part dance,” Court Jester is the new project from Leicester born cross-disciplinary artist, musician and writer Courtney Askey. New release I’m My Favourite Clown introduces the project’s idiosyncratic tone, its electronic beats and emotive vocals twisted and elevated by an experimental edge. Take lead single ‘Holdem’, a contemplative track which proceeds with a restrained, reflective air for a good portion of its length, though always seems on the verge of spilling over into something larger and less controlled. As the momentum gathers, an electrified intensity enters the sonic palette to make good on this promise, the song suddenly charged with what might be conviction, desperation or else simple stark honesty.

Elisa Thorn – Idle Talk

“I’ve spent years searching for a way of playing the harp that feels true to me, and after a decade and a half of relentless curiosity, I think I’ve started to find it.” So describes Vancouver-based harpist, vocalist, and composer Elisa Thorn, whose brand new album xiik manages to utilise the full range of the harp’s potential without succumbing to the ostentation which can sometimes accompany the instrument. The result is introspective, controlled yet full of invention, marrying pop and avant garde sensibilities into something that refuses easy categorisation. Single ‘Idle Talk’ embodies the style, something which might at first sound like sonic daydream yet soon unfurls to reveal a radical heart beneath the surface, moving with precision and purpose to reclaim the female connection which has been co-opted or taken from them.

Bodies soft enough to hold you
Stories strong enough to kill you

Erik Hall – Music for a Large Ensemble (Steve Reich)

Early next year, Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall will release new album Solo Three via Western Vinyl, the third in a trilogy of records which reinterpret and reimagine contemporary classical pieces within his own minimalist style. Previous releases Music for 18 Musicians and Canto Ostinato focused solely on the work of Steve Reich and Simeon ten Holt respectively, but Solo Three expands its reach across four different composers including Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine and Laurie Spiegel. But for the lead single and the album’s closing track, Hall comes full circle and returns to Steve Reich with his version of ‘Music for a Large Ensemble’, playing every note himself and layering them painstakingly, lovingly, into the full arrangement. “I wanted to conclude this series of albums the way it began, as a sort of bookend and an ode to the process of making them,” he explains. “Beyond the interest of his concept or experiment, Reich’s music also simply imbues a gratifying emotional arc that’s accessible to any ears; something akin to a pop sensibility. The CD of his 1980 recording has lived in my car for years, and it was a total joy to transport this work into the sonic world of my studio.”

Leilani Patao – portrait

We’ve covered several singles from Leilani Patao‘s EP daisy in recent weeks, describing how the release is forgoing the rat race of self-promotion and streaming services in favour of old school word of mouth, “possessing,” as we wrote, “that emotional authenticity which marked the earlier generations of bedroom pop.” With the EP now out via Audio Antihero, Patao has shared latest track ‘Portrait’, and the result is no less compassionate and heartfelt. A song relatively restrained in sound but not in sentiment, giving voice to the experience of falling in love in all of its uncertainties and joys, and learning to submit to the overwhelming feelings of such a process. “In the most plain terms I can put it,” Patao says, “this song is about being loved really well by a wonderful lesbian.”

Natalie Jane Hill – Never Left Me

“[What] emerges is an ecosystem as detailed and changeable as any conjured on Azaela, an interior environment as mysterious as that of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One that holds the best and worst of life and, importantly, holds enough space to sit with both simultaneously, never losing sight of the possibility of change on the horizon.” So we wrote of Solely by Texas-born, North Carolina-based songwriter Natalie Jane Hill back in 2021, praising the arrangements as deft, nuanced and intricate. Now Hill is preparing to release Hopeful Woman, her first album since Solely, and one which continues to develop this style of careful, humane folk an proves what might be her most authentic record yet. Lead single ‘Never Left Me’ offers our first glimpse inside, a song which pairs a kind of domestic modesty with something bright and forthright, Hill’s assured vocals leading the listener into a world where the biggest of questions are addressed not through drastic action or bombast but rather a committed embrace of the small gestures and slow rhythms of life.

Watch the video directed and edited by Spencer Kelly below:

Hopeful Woman will be released on the 6th March 6th via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

Ohly – Not Today

“The embodiment of the project, as though everything which has come before has coalesced into a single song. A track full of tiny details and huge themes, zooming into the smallest moments of life in order to evoke the intangible joy of existence.” That’s how we described Ohly‘s ‘If I Go‘ back in June, a single the Detroit-based songwriter openly described as his magnum opus. How does one go about following up a song which such clear personal significance? Latest release ‘Not Today’ answers this question. Ohly writing about the temptation to put things off, to not grasp the full potential of things, be that friendship, songwriting or self-acceptance. “Not today, not today / there’s too much standing in my way.” Though of course there’s an irony too, because it isn’t a deferral after all, but is itself the answer to the question.

‘Not Today’ is out now via streaming services.

Robert Stillman – Reality Distortion Field

Described by label Orindal Records as a “speculative suite of jazz, ambient and smooth pop-inspired compositions that challenge the myths of Silicon Valley’s early ‘90s techno-utopianism,” 10,000 Rivers is the new album from saxophonist, improviser and composer Robert Stillman. What originated as an exploration of reality and the ways the assertations and delusions of the tech industry attempt to shape it, the release eventually became something of an unintentional concept album based around Steve Jobs. Stillman follows the work of artist and writer James Bridle (whose books New Dark Age and Ways of Being we’d personally recommend) through to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, and ultimately follows Isaacson’s anti-hagiographic lead to paint a far more complex, challenging and interesting picture. “10,000 Rivers points to an alternative narrative about a man who is tormented by the instability of his reality, so tries to invent his way out of it,” as Stillman explains. “Ultimately, his tech designs become expressions of his will to replace the messy, disordered, temporary nature of the world with something that strives to be barely physical: streamlined, symmetrical, uncomplicated, and deathless.”

The song comes complete with a video by James Bridle himself, who also designed the cover:

10,000 Rivers will be released on the 9th January via Orindal (US) and Kit Records (UK) and you can pre-order it now.

SIKADE – eleven

“Embodies the balance between intimacy and scale which marks the project, drawing the listener in with hushed, harp-led verses before the chorus arrives in waves of drama and intensity.” So we wrote of ‘body of water‘ by Oslo-based singer-songwriter, harpist and producer Linnea Vestre, AKA SIKADE, back in August. The track was taken from their upcoming debut album which gave, as we continued, “the sense of having been pulled into a portentous dream.” With the record’s release approaching via re:memory, SIKADE has returned with new single ‘eleven’, and the result is no less ethereal or enveloping. A track where the line between sensuality and symbolism dissolves, the harp and strings pushing towards a lushness which is almost cinematic.

‘eleven’ is out now via streaming services. Keep an eye on the SIKADE Bandcamp page for further news on the album.

Spell of Leaves – Defrost

“Sometimes I try counting the stars at night / Hanging out there just like bandits in the sky.” So sings Trevor Brown of Spell of Leaves in the opening lines of the North Carolinan band’s new single, ‘Defrost’. The image is a fitting introduction to a track loaded with mystery, the ambiguous lyrics painting a vista that’s stark and lonely yet pregnant with a sense of possibility too, as though some unexpected force might suddenly arrive in the night. This force might merely be the luck of a gambler, the translucent body of a ghost, the aforementioned brigade of bandits, or else the great flaming tale of a comet as Hale Bopp arcs across the sky. The band cite Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 as an influence on the song and it is easy to see why, the cryptic atmosphere full of strange symbols and existential struggle, a place where some malicious meaning seems to hang out of view, and the dead are never far from mind.

I thought heaven was a place beyond that cold seam of light
Not some distant neon vacancy sign
A pattern against all that emptiness, I guess
The bigger the cost the less the coincidence

The post Weekly Listening: November 2025 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Employ[s] the apocalyptic tones of Waits and Cohen at their darkest to explore the dangerous present. A world that feels unwell, with climate collapse, rising fascism, televised genocide and a whole manner of other symptoms racking a planet in the vice grip of whatever stage of capitalism we’ve passed into now.” So we wrote last month of All That’s Solid Melts Into Air, the forthcoming album from Winnipeg-born, New York-based songwriter Devon Church. The title track paired stark Biblical imagery with earnest emotion, and latest single ‘Fall Like Lightning’ continues the style. One which sees pessimism and hope exist simultaneously, a spirit tied to the overtly leftist position of the record as whole. The album notes aptly describe the song as “a kind of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ for dejected denizens of the internet,” railing against the myriad of contemporary curses brought forth by capitalism’s iron grip, as well as the false prophets who have risen within this milieu, promising the world while grinding us under their boots.

The track also comes with a video, filmed by Ada Roth, edited by Danny Scales and directed by Church himself. Watch it below:

All That’s Solid Melts Into Air will be released on the 7th November and you can pre-order it from the Devon Church Bandcamp page.

Dwi Riana – Dysphoria

Next year Dwi Riana will release her debut full-length Songs from the Yellow Couch, and the Toronto-based songwriter has been releasing singles in recent weeks to offer a preview. Most recently ‘Springtime‘, a song which evoked, as we put it, “the thaw after a long winter where the possibility of growth and love becomes real again.” Now Riana has returned with ‘Dysphoria’, a track which explores the ongoing experience of gender dysphoria via a mix of bossa-nova, indie jazz and folk influences. “I initially wrote this song as a very short interlude for my album, with no hook, just the bossa guitar and one verse. After playing it more, I developed it into a full song and it turned into this indie-jazz version,” Riana explains. “We wanted to create a feeling of controlled chaos, using dissonance and blending differing sounds together to add to the theme of dysphoria.”

Fealty – Walking on Hands

Thad Kopec has been putting out music for years under his own name, the Nashville artist flitting between styles and genres with each passing release and slowly building up a significant back catalogue that covers everything from ornate indie rock to hushed folk and digital pop. However, such a history gets heavy after a while, and Kopec found himself itching for the freedom of a fresh start. Hence Fealty, a brand new project which sees him turn over production duties for the first time as Bennett Littlejohn takes the reins, allowing for a newfound focus solely on performance. After a self-titled EP earlier in the year, Fealty is now back with new single ‘Walking on Hands’. A song of equal parts intimacy and invention, where Kopec’s renewed drive and curiosity are on full show for all to see.

‘Walking on Hands’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Howling Bells – Heavy Lifting

Hailing from Sydney and now based in London, Howling Bells made a name for themselves in the mid-aughties with a dark, brooding and often cinematic style of indie rock, releasing a string of albums which reached out towards folk, krautrock and various other influences too. After the release of Heartstrings back in 2014, the band went quiet for over a decade, but have now announced their return in 2026 with new full-length, Strange Life. The album not only breaks the hiatus but reflects on it, as shown by latest single ‘Heavy Lifting’. “A hazy and grunge-fuelled declaration,” as lead Juanita Stein puts it. “Like anyone who’s worked at the thing they love tirelessly, you build up great resilience. The callouses on your hands, the muscles you’ve strengthened, the swagger in your stride. ‘Heavy Lifting’ is a song about the thousands of miles you walk to acquire this kind of confidence; this is not anything that can be stripped away from you.” Watch the video directed by Orlando Cubitt below:

Strange Life will be released on the 13th February via Nude Records.

Living Hour – Texting

“A song, like The Weakerthans’ ‘One Great City!’ before it, which uses the dismal skies and cityscape of Winnipeg as a kind of mirror, evoking a personal lethargy and lack of colour […] But for all of its sombre gloom, the track refuses to settle within the leaden environment, each chorus like an upward grasp towards something brighter in the hope of piercing the clouds.” So we wrote of ‘Best I Did It’ from Living Hour‘s new album Internal Drone Infinity a few weeks ago, a song indicative of the band’s ability to excavate the magical from the mundane. With the album out now via Keeled Scales (US), Paper Bag Records (Canada) and Beloved Records (Australia), the outfit have unveiled a video for the track ‘Texting’, a track which continues the mood. “‘Texting’ is written from this really mundane but intimate point of view of trying to explain Winnipeg to someone over text,” explains lyricist Sam Sarty. “In the winter, everything disappears in the snow, but when the snow melts, we’re left with the mosaic of shit. I keep a list on my phone of things I see on the sidewalk: garbage that breaks my heart or situations that I try to explain, either to myself or over text—that blue bubble carrying my thoughts somewhere else.”

Watch the video filmed by Eden Carter below:

Internal Drone Infinity is out now via Keeled Scales, Paper Bag Records (Canada) and Beloved Records (Australia). Order a copy now from the Living Hour Bandcamp page.

The Michigans – Spring Ahead (Fall In Line)

Consisting of Jeff Mensch (guitar, vocals), Jessica Keuskamp (drums, vocals) and Patrick Greer (bass), The Michigans are a brand new indie rock outfit out of New Jersey channelling the spirit of their Northeastern forebears. As debut single ‘Spring Ahead (Fall In Line)’ attests, fans of the like of Yo La Tengo, Dinosaur Jr. and our old favourites Oxford Collapse would be advised to take notice. The track is executed with the kind of confidence most new projects could only dream of, slowly shapeshifting from the jangling brightness of the front half into something heavier and hazier as psych influences descend like a fog. But regardless of where you find yourself in the song, you can bet on the thrilling sense of forward motion to be barrelling onwards, giving everything an infectious, affirming tone that’s only elevated by the singalong vocals.

More Like Shadows – Hive Mind

Recording under the moniker More Like Shadows, Toronto‘s Jordan Allen combines music and visual art to form his own unique aesthetic. Raw, lo-fi indie rock and collage-based visuals meet and intertwine, each element as playful and inventive as the other. New album Vacation Mode was released earlier this month, and single ‘Hive Mind’ serves as the perfect intro to the project for anyone unfamiliar. What Allen describes as “a song about the mindsets and 10-step programs of media addiction, the collective yearning for uprising, and the job market economy comment section wishlists of now,” it manages to capture the wiry spirit of classic post-punk while offering a more muscular dimension too, all tied together by vocals which phase between sardonic and sincere. “Can we eat the rich? / I just think we’ve had enough of their bullshit,” as Allen asks in one verse, a line wryly humorous for sure, but not without its hopeful sentiment.

Pearla – To Love Something

We last featured Pearla back in 2023, including the album Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming among our favourite releases of the year. A record where “playful whimsy and unfiltered introspection are kept in check by a certain self-awareness,” as we wrote, “though cannot help but tend towards the potential of some higher mystery,” and thus marking the project as one which “works in awe of life’s mysteries, determined to see the beautiful and the surreal rise above the grind of the everyday.” The first new release since Oh Glistening Onion, new single ‘To Love Something’ builds upon this style with care and grace, again searching for those small details which lift an otherwise mundane existence into something significant. The track is the first taste of a promised full-length set for release sometime next year, and everything points to the record being one to watch out for over the coming months.

‘To Love Something’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

since torino – reunion dinner

Earlier in the year we let you know Sheffield‘s since torino were preparing to release their debut EP, describing ‘transatlantic flight song’ as the perfect entry point to the project. “Opening with a restrained hush, the song sets out a quiet, reflective mood, combining organ and murmured vocals to create an easy meandering fondness, and gradually develops to push the mood further,” we wrote. “First with glitched guitars and eventually sweeps of violin, all working together to create a song which aches with the fondness of nostalgic contemplation.” The EP, which it turns out is titled reunion dinner, is now available, and the title track embodies its ornate literary folk rock style. Another slow burner, the song draws the audience in with the muted quiet of the opening before blooming with the introduction of horns and strings. But it resists the temptation to puncture the overriding restraint to create a wistful, decidedly autumnal air.

Sweet Nobody – Forget Me

“Embraces the twin joys of melody and noise, utilising both pop and garage rock aesthetics to write songs for the meek and modest among us.” So we wrote back in September of the Long Beach, California-based band Sweet Nobody, single ‘Revenge‘ giving a glimpse at new full-length Driving Off to Nowhere. With the album’s release only weeks away via Repeating Cloud, Sweet Nobody are back with new track ‘Forget Me’. The song is heavier and darker than its predecessor, switching out the sunny indie pop energy for something more clouded and stormy. But for all of its shadowy tones and brooding weight, the prevailing mood is one of catharsis. As though across the track a sense of conviction develops, a decision to voice those things unsaid and let go of the past.

Tara Kannangara – Here We Are Again (From Alice Is Fine)

Back in 2024, we wrote about Extraordinary People, the EP by Sri Lankan–Canadian songwriter and musician Tara Kannangara, describing how the JUNO-nominated artist draws on classical training and jazz sensibilities to push synth pop in new directions. Written for the short film Alice Is Fine, new single ‘Here We Are Again’ is no less evocative or inventive. A track Kannangara describes as “an indie pop song about the repressed rage of not being believed,” able to offer both intimate hush and big, bold defiance. The film follows a female protagonist who decides to stand up for herself against a doctor who dismisses her pain, and ‘Here We Are Again’ gives the scenario all the fury and catharsis it warrants.

‘Here We Are Again’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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