“They say it was a failed utopia / but it ain’t failed if you’re flexible.” So sings LA-based songwriter Dolly Creamer on latest single ‘Like Water’, two lines which could be said to serve as the mission statement of the song. With a loose, easygoing spirit, the track embraces this philosophy to create its own small world within the imperfect whole, leaning into the image of the title to stay attuned to the natural world and go with the flow of life. Sarah Harris, Sasha Massey, Joon Voigt, Riley Geare and Joel Crocco lend their talents to flesh out the sound, and Voigt also created a suitably lo-fi video to further bring the mood to life as part of their thunderwurld motion picture co. The result is an affirming reminder of the hope inherent within any community.

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

Erik Hall – A Folk Study (Laurie Spiegel)

Back in November we introduced Solo Three, the closing release in a trilogy of albums by Erik Hall on Western Vinyl which sees the Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist reimagining contemporary classical pieces by passing them through the prism of his own unique minimalist sensibilities. Where predecessors Music for 18 Musicians and Canto Ostinato focused solely on the work of Steve Reich and Simeon ten Holt respectively, Solo Three casts a wider net, the release featuring reinterpretations of pieces by Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Reich again and, as with the latest single, Laurie Spiegel. As though led by the title, Hall brings an added tempo and warmth to ‘A Folk Study’, favouring an acoustic palette to tease out the organic spirit of Spiegel’s original.

Hiding Places – Holy Roller

“I’m a holy roller / I move so much.” So sings Audrey Keelin of Hiding Places on single ‘Holy Roller’, invoking a phrase in the Holiness movement for those of the congregation so struck by the presence of God they dance and shake uncontrollably. Released to celebrate the Brooklyn-based outfit’s signing with Keeled Scales, the single embraces this sense of spontaneity in more ways than one, not only in how it explores the restless spirit of its creator but also in terms of its very construction. “’Holy Roller’ was a lesson for me, a song that happened with no planning, no ‘trying to write’, but a pure, detached channeling,” Keelin explains. “That metaphor made perfect sense to me after the fact, there is a voice in my heart that I have a complex relationship with that tells me to move around, be somewhat nomadic, not really settle down in one specific place. During that writing session, that bittersweet feeling of moving from my home state kept returning,”

Howling Bells – Chimera

Back in October we introduced Strange Life, the first new album from Sydney-born, London-based outfit Howling Bells for over a decade. “The album not only breaks the hiatus but reflects on it,” we described when talking of lead single ‘Heavy Lifting’, a testament to the effort and resilience required to persist within the music industry and develop a sense of confidence. Latest single ‘Chimera’ continues this meditation on making art, exploring the double-edged sword of ambition and how it can both cut you down and lift you towards higher achievements. “Chimera is a strange word. It means a few different and curious things; in this context, however, I’m using it to mean something of an absurd nature, unattainable, a fantasy. Such is the relationship we have with music at times,” lead Juanita Stein explains. “This song speaks to my experience as a musician, surviving the perpetual ups and downs of the game. But if you’re lucky enough, you have someone who can cut through the noise and help you realise that the fantasy is half the joy. That the longing is part of the journey and that our achievements along the way are deeply meaningful. At its core, ‘Chimera’ is a song about hope and relinquishing control.”

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

Ken Wohlrob – William

“A song is a stubborn thing. It’ll resist you with all its might. As you try to bend it and twist it, it will reject your strokes of genius, leaving you feeling like a damn fool for thinking they would work in the first place. A song will tell you, in no uncertain terms, what it wants to be.” So explains musician and composer Ken Wohlrob of new single ‘William’, a track which seemed to repel all attempts to develop it beyond its core guitar riff. You might know Wohlrob from acts like End of Hope, Swarm of Flies, Northern Heretic and Eternal Black, but his solo work offers space for something more meditative. And it was with that spirit he decided to drop the attempt to complicate the sound and let ‘William’ have its own way. “What I had was a single take of a repetitive guitar riff, played live through a reverse-echo feedback loop for eleven minutes,” he continues. “The feedback loop created oscillations and repetitions that took on a life of their own, extending past the riff, even re-absorbing it. There was a compelling journey in that single guitar line.”

No Singing – Care Takers

In recent years, Ben Godfrey has made a name with baroque, off-the-cuff recordings under the moniker Belaver, offering what we’ve called “a blend of deadpan humour and human heart which proves ideally suited to capturing the bleak and bizarre milieu to which it belongs.” Now Godfrey is back with new project No Singing, and there’s something of a stylistic change. Gone are the live arrangements and wry sensibilities in favour of something more considered, personal and nostalgic. Single ‘Care Takers’ introduces the sound, the tale of a character who intends to find a car and drive until the gas runs out. Only this yearning for forward motion is complicated by its very existence, both the lo-fi sound and Godfrey’s vocals betraying a sense of stasis. The stuck feeling of being young and lonely within a city which barely knows you exist, longing for any sense of speed which might allow an escape.

Sam Wenc – Limitless of Blue

Recording under the moniker Post Moves, Philadelphia-based composer, improviser and interdisciplinary artist Sam Wenc released fifteen albums across a variety of labels, establishing the sonic strand of his work as something intricate, finely crafted yet always surprising (just check out Cut Into Your Own Dimension or Heart Music). Wenc has decided to release latest album Language At An Angle under his own name, though it very much feels a continuation of an ongoing body of work. Inspired by and dedicated to pedal steel virtuoso Susan Alcorn who passed away earlier in the year, the record is a lesson in the possibilities of the instrument, one grounded in years of experience and deepened by an ongoing practice of sitting meditation, as well as a reminder of the raw power of art. Perhaps the only real way we can truly confront the unknowable and create meaning, this record suggests, is to continue the work of our forebears and never stop pushing the boundaries. Listen to lead track ‘Limitless of Blue’ now, and watch the video directed by Mikel Patrick Avery below:

Language At An Angle will be released via Lobby Art Editions on the 30th January and you can pre-order it now.

Sophie Gault – Is There Anyone Out There

We last wrote about Nashville-based songwriter Sophie Gault back in 2023 with the release of ‘Christmas in the Psych Ward‘ from album Baltic Street Hotel, a track which followed a lineage of Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and Patty Griffin to delve, as we put it, “into highly personal experiences of bipolar disorder with a tone both steely and wry.” With new album UNHINGED set for release in January 2026 via Torrez Music Group, Gault has now returned with single ‘Is There Anyone Out There’, and the track is no less emotive or evocative. A version of the Gurf Morlix song of the same name, the track preserves the intimacy of the original while reaching towards something more connected and communal. Morlix’s album Kiss of the Diamondback came out in the heaviest days of the pandemic and its sound was very much informed by the isolation and solitude of the period, but Gault adds a certain layer of warmth to create a mood that’s still melancholic but a little more bittersweet.

Unhinged will be released via Torrez Music Group on the 23rd January and you can pre-save it now.

vireo – the great golden gloom

We’ve featured a couple of tracks from vireo‘s forthcoming album The Great Golden Gloom in recent weeks, firstly ‘catching minnows’ back in September and more recently ‘icanicanican‘. Both tracks highlighted the spirit of a project attuned, as we put it, “to the curative power of the environment and the small beauties therein, packed full of brightness and wonder as though written in honour of the joy of being alive.” With the record now out, Chris Beaulieu and co. have shared the title track as one final single. Serving as the conclusion of the album, the track is in many ways a culmination of its ideas and tones. One grounded in the richness of nature yet marked by a trademark sense of invention, its bright style is as earnest as anything vireo have put out to date, and perhaps more accomplished and assured. The sound of a band who have discovered both their musical style and view of the world and have taken great pleasure in committing it to tape.

Weirs – Lord Bateman (Live at Feast V)

“A hymn delivered not from the still air and stone of a cathedral but God’s own Earth,” was how we described ‘I Want to Die Easy‘ from Weirs‘ album Diamond Grove earlier in the year. “Where fellow contemporary traditionalists like Lankum and ØXN highlight the stark, foreboding tones of the genre to push towards the realm of folk horror, the Weirs sound is more in line with the work of Terrence Mallick. Songs heightened not by an emergent dread or the suggestion of the supernatural but rather an abundance of life itself. The humblest of details given the closest of attention and the latent beauty revealed.” To celebrate the album and kick off a new tour, Weirs have shared a live version of the epic ‘Lord Bateman’, complete with a video filmed at their album release show at the 5th annual Feast in Orange County, North Carolina. “Each year in the fall, friends and I host Feast, a harvest meal and music event that spans the first weekend of October,” explains lead Oliver Child-Lanning. “This year, to mark the release of Weirs’ new album Diamond Grove, we opened Saturday night by playing through ‘Lord Bateman’ from the album in its entirety, with shadow puppets by my sister Violet and other friends and family. Everyone gathered around the glowing puppet theater as we played and sang, accompanied by insects and the fall breeze.”

Diamond Grove is out now via Dear Life Records and you can get it from the Weirs Bandcamp page.

Where’s Beth – Overtime Waltz

Following on from 2024 album Bone Broth, a release we described as “a picture of domesticity in the weeks and days around marriage,” which “for all its tender fondness, still finds room for the peculiar and idiosyncratic details,” Sarabeth Weszely’s Where’s Beth has returned with a festive offering that uses the pressures of the period to highlight chronic struggles and loneliness. “I wrote ‘Overtime Waltz’ from a place of burnout,” Weszely explains, “working long hours in NYC, struggling to connect with loved ones even when we were physically together, and feeling a vague and relentless sense of grief.” Abbey Blackwell (Alvvways) contributes upright bass and harmonies while Steve Moore (Sufjan Stevens) adds Wurlitzer and synth, lifting the sound to its full, melancholic warmth.

Is the snow ever coming, will it always be rain?
Will the cold bring numbing to take away the pain?
I’m needing some kindness to show me the way

Watch the lyric video below:

‘Overtime Waltz’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

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“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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