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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“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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The entirety of Afterglades unfolds in this manner. A release as capable of tender emotion as it is scorching rage, and furthermore one unwilling to settle for half measures when the stakes of the moment are so high. Take latest single ‘Obsoloscenic’, written during the earlier days of the mass force feeding of AI, Meikle feeling understandably downbeat about a future. “This song came from trying to find a way to reckon with it, but still see hope through it,” Meikle explains. “It’s still a condemnation of humanity’s choices and our treatment of the earth and its creatures, but there is a through line of optimism in it somewhere. There’s just no other option than to be optimistic in my mind, naive and difficult as it may be.” But make no mistake, this is not an acquiescence to the false promises of the tech industry but something wider and deeper. As Meikle concludes: “Maybe there’s something beautiful about humankind relinquishing control of our machinations and reverting to some purer version of biological existence.”

As I’m watching that red sun a’rising
Beyond horizons
Brushing off a teary cheek
Guess there’s beauty in being obsolete

Watch a live version of the track recorded at Catherine North Studios in Hamilton and directed and edited by Cameron Veitch (Black Lake) below:

Afterglades is out now via Paper Bag Records and available from the Mappe Of Bandcamp page.

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Recording under the moniker Bernardo, vocalist, guitarist and producer Sonia Bernardo combines elements of jazz, indie rock and alt-soul to create songs which owe equal debts to her Portuguese and British heritage. Last week saw the release of Secrets Of Six-Figure Women, Bernardo’s debut full-length album which builds upon the promise of early releases to realise this sound fully—a record packed with confidence and sophistication which meditates on what it means to strive and desire within contemporary society. Single ‘Bobby’s Song’ serves as an ideal entry for the uninitiated, highlighting the sleek mood, intricate detail and assured attitude of the release as a whole.

EERA – Honey, do you see me

The recording project of Berlin-based Norwegian artist Anna Lena Kirsten Bruland, EERA has made a mark in recent years with a moody brand of dream pop. New full-length I’ll stop when I’m done, coming soon via Test Card Recordings, has picked a suitably evocative subject to further the style. Taking its title from a quote by Marilyn Monroe, the album explores the lives of the iconic starlets of Hollywood’s Golden Era, as well as those of the characters they brought to life on the silver screen. Ahead of the album’s release, EERA has shared new single ‘Honey, do you see me’, a track inspired by Billy Wilder’s sixties classic The Apartment. “I was fascinated by the fact that the main character (an intelligent and beautiful woman) is madly in love with a man who has a wife and the boss of a big company,” Bruland explains. “It affected her self-confidence with this man playing with her feelings, promising her the ‘world’ etc. I wanted to write a song from her side of the story but also exaggerate these types of feelings in the song, where you almost feel a bit mad. The desperation of trying to be loved by someone who really doesn’t want to be with you takes over your self-worth. You forget about yourself, and all the focus is on him.”

I’ll Stop When I’m Done will be released on the 26th September via Test Card Recordings.

ear – Ceremony

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 with early singles, ear recently released their debut album The Most Dear and the Future, which 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 not easy to describe, nostalgic for something that has never existed. It would fit on the soundtrack to the next Jane Schoenbrun film for sure. You could really start anywhere, but ‘Ceremony’s is my current favourite, so check it out below.

His His – Hardcore Band

We last wrote about His His, AKA Toronto-based songwriter Aidan Belo, back in October 2024 with the release of EP Good Gold, with songs like ‘My Friend Wants to be a Freemason‘ offering “a gentle and folk-inflected [sound] that wears an air of weary wistfulness like the grain in an old film photograph.” Now Belo is returning with brand new EP ’25 via Victory Pool, and single ‘Hardcore Band’ indicates the direction of the release. Recorded entirely to a Tascam cassette deck, the track finds His His at its most fuzzy and intimate, maintaining the earnest tone which has long marked the project and dialling up the closeness through a gauze of DIY texture. Lyrically, the song takes on the age old problem of any folk songwriter. Namely, all of your friends wishing you were in something cooler like a hardcore band instead.

Jamie Lidell & Luke Schneider – The Passing

Fans of experimental music will no doubt be familiar with Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider, the former one of the UK’s premier practitioners of neo-soul, the latter a renowned pedal steel player pioneering within the genre of ambient country. But their new collaborative album is something different. One designed to aid in the inner explorations brought about by Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy, and awake to the true depths of art’s potential. “A mind is often found more exposed during psychedelic experiences,” Lidell explains. “Specifically in a therapeutic setting, where trust is key to approach issues and work through events in the way of growth. This is music to support and guide the listening with or without psychedelic sensory heightening.” Single ‘The Passing’ is a suitably immersive introduction, regardless of whether you go in sober or substance-assisted.

Jonny Tex – Heifer

Hailing from Boston, MA, Jonny Tex is a youth pastor turned songwriter who makes what has been described as “post-faith slacker rock.” Out via Happene Twice, debut single Heifer / Cherubhead welcomes listeners into this distinctive style, with the lead track pairing playfulness, peculiarity and something more grievous. A song inspired by “Texas floods and Southern dread” which twists the easygoing rhythms and droll swagger of the slacker genre into strange shapes, a sense of desperation needling beneath the surface as the clatter of percussion veers between roguish and unnerving. “I don’t wanna be / Cattle in a flash flood where I’m / Tangled in the trees,” as Tex sings in one verse. “Sucking on salinity for all eternity / Buried by the water that just washes over me / Everything i had / I’d give it all away.”

Mia Wilson – Face To Face

Southern California singer-songwriter Mia Wilson is preparing to release her self-titled debut full-length via Royal Oakie Records this November. The album continues the lineage of LA records from the sixties and seventies, taking inspiration from released like Tapestry by Carole King, Heart Food by Judee Sill and Jackson Browne’s Late For the Sky. Latest single ‘Face To Face’ embodies the lush, honeyed light of this sound, not to mention Wilson’s warm and wistful croon. What results is something rich and welcoming and charged with longing, Wilson’s piano, Wurlitzer and Rhodes accentuated by further instrumentation from Skyler Lusteg (bass buitar, acoustic guitar) and Tim Ramsey (acoustic and electric guitars, organ, percussion, bass VI, Mellotron, pedal steel, bass harmonica, string).

Watch the video filmed by Julia Schwebel and edited by Skyler Lusteg below:

Mia Wilson will be released on the 14th November via Royal Oakie and you can pre-order it now.

Petey USA – Anything In Between

Earlier in the year, Petey USA released The Yips, a concept album set within the fictional dive bar The Yips Tavern, imagining a series of interactions between the diverse clientele who all, in one way or another, struggle through life and experience the dreaded titular phenomenon. Ahead of a fall headline tour, Petey is releasing A Case of The Yips, a new extended version of the record complete with three bonus tracks, one of which is being released now as a single. Described by the artist as “a song about being scared about any possible outcome,” ‘Anything In Between’ was written as a b-side to album favourite ‘Ask Someone Else’ though is far more than a handmaid. Better to think of it as the small devil on the shoulder versus the angel of ‘Ask Someone Else’, corrupting the encouragement of the previous track with a creeping sense of doubt. But, true to the Petey USA sound, the result burns through its anxious concern with equal parts unguarded sincerity and cathartic momentum, making for a worthy addition to barstools at The Yips.

A Case Of Yips will be released later this year.

Weirs – Everlasting

“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.” So we wrote of the North Carolina outfit’s new album Diamond Grove, coming next month via Dear Life Records. Lead single ‘‘I Want to Die Easy’ introduced the style. “A hymn” as we continued, “delivered not from the still air and stone of a cathedral but God’s own Earth,” and now Weirs have returned with new track ‘Everlasting’ to further ground the album’s terrestrial textures. It’s an instrumental recorded during a late night improvisation session and furthered with layers of field recordings. These additional sounds range from drain grates at wastewater plants and street preachers in bus terminals to a walk the old “cow cemetery” in the woods at Diamond Grove farm and scooping cheese curd from the vat in Cedar Grove. The result feels like an accumulation of the area’s history, years superimposed to create something able to transcend the ordinary flow of time.

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Decribed as “an anthology-like collection” which displays wide-ranging influences including everything from jangle pop and art rock to tin pan alley, americana and progressive folk, Deep Country is the forthcoming album from Albany outfit Bruiser and Bicycle, to be released this autumn. Lead single ‘Waterfight’ shows how this myriad of inspiration registers within songs as well as between them, pairing retro folk with ample melodies and art pop sensibilities to create something inventive and dynamic. But don’t mistake variation for overabundance, because for all the innovation, the track sees Bruiser and Bicycle dial back the maximalist approach that marked their previous record Holy Red Wagon. The result is rich, endlessly surprising and grounded within the natural experimentation inherent to any collaborative act.

Watch the video filmed and edited by Derick Noetzel and directed by Keegan Graziane below:

Deep Country is out on the 8th October and available to pre-order now.

Eric Angelo Bessel – Scavengers

“Plays with our understandings of reality, presenting a version of physical existence which bends toward the esoteric.” That’s how we described the work of American-German visual artist and musician Eric Angelo Bessel back in 2023. Album Visitation offered what we called “spacious soundscape[s] loaded with the weight of reflection yet simmering with a certain foreboding too, the past and future weighing on the present as shadows, echoes emerging from within a granular fog.” This autumn will see Bessel return with Mirror at Night, a brand new album on Lore City Records which again collapses the distinction between the past and the future into something flat and beguiling. Listen to the nocturnal, ambiguous lead single ‘Scavengers’ below:

FONTINE – Home Right Here

Back in July we previewed Good Buddy, the new album from Winnipeg-based songwriter FONTINE forthcoming via Birthday Cake Records, with the lead single and title track. A song which sat “at the intersection of big rig bravado and unashamed sentimentality,” as we put it, “using a blend of good time rock and bedroom pop sensibilities to explore ideas of love, friendship and self-actualisation.” With the record’s release edging closer, FONTINE is back with new single, ‘Home Right Here’, and the song is no less emotive in style. As the title suggests, the track is a meditation on home in all of its dimensions, be it specific locations, special people or even particular times of life. “Running down to the well, through the forests and the fields, with my cousins at my heels,” as the first verse opens. “In the garden with my mom, pulling weeds all day long, picking sweetgrass from the lawn.”

Heaven For Real – Hold Me Back

Hailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia and now based in Toronto, Heaven For Real is the brainchild of twins Mark and J. Scott Grundy, offering a genre-bending style of music that draws on everything from post-punk and art rock to psych, ambient, electronic and jazz. The project’s most collaborative release to date, new album Who Died & Made You The Dream pushes this swirl of influences further than ever before, stylistically mirroring the dream logic of its themes to moves between genres with fluidity and subconscious intention. Ahead of release this November via Mint Records, Heaven For Real have unveiled single ‘Hold Me Back’ by way of introduction. A song decidedly dreamlike in style, both in terms of its slightly off-kilter haze and the coiled cryptic meaning which seems to edge closer with every repeated listen.

on relinquishment, I remember the cycle
pinwheel of interest
gone with the wind my genoa sail
on relinquishment;
I surrender to the cycle
fixed on the distance
cured through imagination
on relinquishment;
I remember the cycle

Watch the video by Jordan Minkoff below, though those with a sensitive disposition be warned, it features haunted hair:

Who Died & Made You The Dream? will be released on the 7th November via Mint Records and you can pre-order it now.

Jackie West – Offer

“Content to understand change as a kind of potential, and occupy the present in all of its fluctuating strangeness.” That’s how we described Jackie West‘s Close To The Mystery last year, a full-length which followed its lead character “through a city in the aftermath of a relationship,” as we continued, “the various rented rooms in which they find themselves representative of those liminal days between what was and what will be.” Now the NYC/Hudson-based artist is back with ‘Offer’, a brand new single on Ruination Record Co. which is perhaps simultaneously the most ambitious and laid-back song West has written to date. An almost ten-minute epic that pairs conversational spoken word vocals with a warm and catchy melody, unfolding like an internal monologue as it moves between casual observations, quantum theory, Socrates and a hundred other subjects. “‘Offer’ is about many things,” as West explains:

It’s about propaganda—how it’s difficult to trace a message back to its source; how there’s never been much room to ask why and what do you mean by that? We tend to take things at face value and then wonder why all we see is a mask. Offer is about learning to accept your blindspots and realizing we all have them/ how we see someone is generally how we see ourselves, so we must have compassion for ourselves first—real forgiveness and letting go—to see another clearly. Offer is about being attached to the story, generational trauma, seeing it and loving it enough to say, “you’ve been with me, my mother, grandmother and great grandmother for so long,” now you can go back to them—”I don’t need to live according to your script anymore.

Lefty Parker – Illusions

Taking inspiration from titans like Townes Van Zandt, New York-based troubadour Lefty Parker has released a number of records over recent years, establishing a hushed and heartfelt style tuned to the key of classic folk. Often beset by the weight of loss and longing, yet never quite ready to surrender its romantic hope. Next month sees the release of Ark, Parker’s brand new full-length album produced by Buck Meek and put out by Airloom, and single ‘Illusions’ gives an indication of what to expect. With Meek joining too, the song is restrained yet all the more striking for it, delivered from a state of chronic uncertainty familiar to those down on their luck, though shot through too with a kind of heartbroken fondness for life, no matter how cruel or uncaring it might sometimes be.

Ark will be released on the 21st October via Airloom.

Neti-Neti – Grace In Rot

The self-described “lo-fi ritual project” of vocalist Amirtha Kidambi (Elder Ones, Mary Halvorson) and percussionist Matt Evans (OHYUNG, Ben Seretan), experimental duo Neti-Neti aims to collapse the distinction between the personal and the political via improvision and collaboration. Forthcoming release Echo of Being / Grace in Rot was recorded over a single day, Kidambi and Evans tapping into both individual grief, collective trauma and well-worn traditions to charge the process with a sense of momentum and fluency. Single ‘Grace in Rot’ highlights the palpable energy of the sound and the emotional urgency which follows. “‘Grace in Rot’ heaved its way out of us during the last take of the session,” the pair explain, “an unexpected flame of physicality that came after a long day and a deep discussion about the evil and cruelty we witness daily in the world.” The result is visceral, cathartic and transportive, threatening to unravel under its own chaotic impetus while always reaching towards transcendence.

vireo – catching minnows

Following on from single ‘Cloudgazers’ released back in 2024, a single we described as “a soft and gauzy song that evokes the act of the title with warm textures, gentle electronics and little squiggly guitar lines,” Pittsburgh-based indie pop outfit vireo are gearing up to release a brand new full-length later this year. For now, single ‘catching minnows’ serves as a curtain raiser to the release. Turning to the natural world in the face of personal challenges, the track could be said to embody the vireo project as a whole. One attuned 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.

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“There’s something of Kraftwerk in the sound, a smidge of Suicide and no small amount of Lou Reed, though the blend of digital and organic tones is clearly the product of a singular imagination.” That’s how we described the work of Turin-born, Toronto-based ‘poetic jazz rock’ songwriter Fortunato Durutti Marinetti back in 2023, writing about the album Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean. Now FDM is returning with new album Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, what label Quindi Records describe as “his most sweeping, absurd, and emotionally acute statement to date,” and lead single ‘Full of Fire’ hints at the maximalist style at its heart. A song which takes inspiration from iconoclasts like Annette Peacock, Rickie Lee Jones, Donald Byrd, Brigitte Fontaine and Fabrizio De André to paint love as something equal parts fond and fatal.

Green Gardens – Stroom

Leeds ‘feudal indie rock’ outfit Green Gardens have been sharing new material in recent weeks, with singles ‘Year of Love’ (which saw the band, as we wrote, “swapping out some of the grand scale in favour of increased intimacy”) and ‘Ghost of a Tree’ (a song “embodying the spirit of a band who make no distinction between the intimate and the sublime,” as we put it, “positioning an individual’s loves and losses within an almost geolgical span of time”) introducing a slightly new direction for the outfit. The releases have been building up to the announcement of Thistlesifting, a brand new full-length coming later this simmer via Tiny Library Records, and now Green Gardens have unveiled latest single ‘Stroom’ to further whet appetites.

Watch the video made by Joel Johnston and Chris Aitchison below:

Thistlesifting will be released via Tiny Library Records on the 25th August and you can pre-order it now.

Greg Freeman – Curtain

Later this summer, Burlington, Vermont songwriter Greg Freeman is returning with Burnover, a brand new full-length via Transgressive Records and Canvasback Music. It’s a record which pairs laidback country twang with indie rock momentum, furthering the singular style Freeman introduced back in 2022 with previous LP I Look Out. New single ‘Curtain’ captures the mix of playful lyricism and charged energy which makes up the release, Sam Atallah’s piano driving proceedings but Freeman’s vocals stealing the stage. Assured and surprising verbose, like a stream of consciousness unfurling with equal parts conversational immediacy and poetic grace.

My thoughts die out slowly on the blood swept plains where I see you every night
And to the lonely hours, it’s like burning the furniture to keep the house bright at night

The night is getting late and the horns have all been blown
And the drummer’s looking cock-eyed on his rusty metal throne
And I’m somewhere in the distance and you’re somewhere at home

Watch the video directed by Carl Elsaesser below:

Burnover will be released on the 22nd August via Transgressive Records and Canvasback Music and you can pre-order it now.

John Also Bennett – Easter Daydream

His first album for Shelter Press since 2019 solo debut Erg Herbe, John Also Bennett returns this July with new full-length Ston Elaióna. The record—titled ‘in the olive grove’ in Greek—sees the US-born, Athens, Greece-based composer, flautist and multi-instrumentalist blur the lines between the ancient and the contemporary, the physical and metaphysical, with electroacoustic compositions every bit as precise and spacious as fans of JAB will have come to expect. Lead single ‘Easter Daydream’ welcomes the audience into the world of the record, a soundscape built from subtle bass flute and synth which allows the real world to bleed in. Namely the bells from a procession captured during Orthodox Holy Week down the road from Bennett’s apartment in Athens, sounds which have a strangely dualistic effect on the mood, both haunting the track and charging it with immediacy.

Michael Beach – Poison Dart

We’ve long followed the work of Naarm/Melbourne-based songwriter Michael Beach, with 2021 record Dream Violence winning a place among our favourite albums of the year. “Beach reaches into the grab bag of rock history and fashions what he finds into something timely and unique,” we wrote. “Imagine Neil Young meeting The Velvet Underground on a dark and hopeless night in our late-capitalist hellscape to muse on the meaninglessness of existence.” Such a description might have captured the record’s searing heart, though does a disservice to the overall tone of Beach’s work. Because while there is an undeniable darkness, it is often sublime in nature, and certainly anything but nihilistic in its intentions. A fact made clear by new record Big Black Plume, coming soon via Poison City and Goner Records, 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.” Listen to new single ‘Poison Dart’ now:

Watch the video below, directed by Alexandra Millen with cinematography from Claire Giuffre:

Big Black Plume will be released on the 25th July via Poison City and Goner Records and you can pre-order it now.

Omo Cloud – Ultimate Love

Later this month sees the release of Mausoleum, the debut album from Cole De La Isla’s Omo Cloud on Dusty Mars Records. The album sees the San Diego songwriter reckon with their past with the intention, as per the title, of burying it and moving on. The result, as shown by lead single ‘Ultimate Love’, is every inch as bittersweet as that might sound. Enduring the painful process of returning to old traumas in order to redefine the present and future. “I feel like I spent a lot of my teenhood being very angsty and existential and cynical in a lot of ways, but I don’t want that to be the takeaway of the record at all,” De La Isla explains. “I feel the takeaway is actually a very optimistic one. We’re all capable of growth and change, and it is a lot of work, but it is worth it. I want people to trust their gut. I want to help people connect with hard emotions—and I want people to be inspired.”

Mausoleum is out on the 27th June via Dusty Mars Records and available to pre-order now.

Pacing – Nothing! (I wanna do)

Led by Katie McTigue, Pacing has been catching our eye for a number of years with a sound at once fun, idiosyncratic and deceptively heartfelt. “[Pacing] follows in the playful, tongue-in-cheek tradition of the likes of Kimya Dawson,” as we put it back in 2023, “yet always nudges the ideas further to be more than mere twee humour or sardonic fun.” After a number of successful collaborations and a high profile tour with Cheekface, this summer sees McTigue return with PL*NET F*TNESS, a new album on Asian Man Records, and latest single ‘Nothing! (I wanna do)’ suggests Pacing is firing on all cylinders. Inspired by a brain-numbing commute along Highway 85, the song is described as “a classic upbeat depression banger” (“we are all entitled to one per album, and I’m using mine now,” as McTigue says), and embodies the mission which has long lurked beneath the surface of the project. Because, when you peel back the wry humour and off-the-wall personality, it becomes clear Pacing is asking how we are supposed to live beneath the weight of all that is asked of us. How might we find meaning in a banal world?

Watch a live video for the single below, with gig footage by Hali Tauxe and b-roll by errbody:

PL*NET F*TNESS is out on the 25th July via Asian Man Records.

R&D – Everything Becomes a Sign

We’ve long followed the work of Dan Knishkowy (Adeline Hotel) and Rebecca El-Saleh (Kitba) in their own respective projects, with the latest Adeline Hotel full-length Whodunnit making our list of favourites from 2024 and the Kitba’s exceptional self-titled record winning our praise in 2023 (“Proof that art can offer a picture of identity more nuanced than simple labels,” we wrote of the latter. “A deeper understanding reached via an embrace of confusion. Identity as an ongoing thing”). So it is most welcome news the pair have teamed up under the moniker R&D to create improvised, instrumental songs which further delve into the themes they have explored individually. Because while upcoming album I’ll Send You a Sign marks something of a departure from what we might expect from Knishkowy and El-Saleh in terms of style, its thematic concerns feel more like a continuation or deepening. Take the spare, probing single ‘Everything Becomes a Sign’, which mines patience and sensitivity for all of their exploratory potential.

Rival Consoles – Jupiter

We’ve featured a number of tracks from Rival Consoles‘ forthcoming album Landscape from Memory in recent weeks, with tracks like ‘Catherine‘ and ‘Known Shape‘ finding Ryan Lee West working at the intersection of the human and the digital, crafting soundscapes full of euphoria, melancholy and restless motion. With the release approaching via Erased Tapes, West has shared latest single ‘Jupiter’. A song which embodies the album’s spirit in its combination of repetition and variation, its intricate detail and overarching brightness. “At the heart of this piece is a call and response,” as he explains. “The main idea is changing but the response is always the same, this is connected to life and nature. I wanted the music to feel like materials, bending, distorting, shimmering, colourful shards of glass and metal. To me it feels like the sun touching objects with its warmth and power.”

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Featuring Marshall Veroni (second vocals) and Jill Sauerteig (cello), the song is something of a follow-up to the aforementioned ‘Elsewhere’. The thaw after a long winter where the possibility of growth and love becomes real again. “I wrote this song on my classical guitar last spring, and it has evolved quite a bit since then,” Dwi Riana explains. “I have been a fan of Marshall Veroni and Jill Sauerteig for years now through Marshall’s LP In Fields. I’ve listened to this album over and over for the last few years, so Marshall’s vocals and Jill’s cello had become very close to my heart. To be working with them now is such an honour, and they really complete the vision I had for the song.”

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

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‘Soil’ establishes the style of this next step in the Burs evolution, a track which embraces an alt-country aesthetic to weave a sound full of wistfulness and compassion. Though certainly a break-up song, the single is not the typical picture of longing or regret. Instead, led by Dillen’s earnest, reflective delivery, it searches for a path forwards from within the uncertainty of a troubled situation, looking to embrace self-acceptance in order to find contentment once again. “How do you let go of the thing that doesn’t serve you anymore?” the band ask. “What is radical joy?” Questions which form the mission statement of the song as a whole.

Watch the video shot and directed by Burs themselves below:

If ‘Soil’ champions the virtues of being brave enough to be proactive and put oneself first, then ‘Blackflies’ offers a picture of the opposite situation. The fallout of holding onto something beyond its shelf-life, where something which was once sweet begins to slowly decompose in your hands. As such the lush country tones of the previous track are slightly more lonely and desperate here, the sound charged with the slow unease of coming to understand something is souring before you are ready or able to let go. As a pair, the two songs present two sides of the same coin. Both earthy in spirit yet opposite in tone. The potential for growth and rot ever present in the raw materials of life.

Soil // Blackflies is out now via Birthday Cake Records and you can get it from the Burs Bandcamp page.

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The record’s title, and in some ways its entire inspiration, is based on an actual bakery Niemi would pass each day, the image of its broken sign somehow indicative of a bittersweet humour almost cosmic in scale. “A few years ago I sublet an apartment during a pretty heavy time in my life, and right down the street was a spot called Progress Bakery,” Niemi explains. “I would walk by it every day… chew on its name all morning. I thought it was quite funny and weirdly fitting for where I was at in my life. Their sign out front is half fallen off (it says ‘gress bakery’). I wanted to make an album like the bakery’s broken sign—funny, strange, warm, melancholic and hopeful, that embodied this feeling of making steady yet non-linear progress.”

That the last line of that quote works as a perfect description of the record underlines Eliza Niemi’s success. She presents life as a series of small moments filtered through the prism of her brain, some jarring and awkward (like when she psyches herself up to dance on ‘I TrieD’), others smooth and graceful, or at least oddly beautiful. And the idiosyncrasies inherent in such oddness are often key. ‘DM BF’ is something like a love song, but its object of attention is an unexpected one. “When I wrote this song I was living alone with no internet in a remote, wooded area,” Niemi told Talkhouse in a piece about the track. “I’d been thinking a lot about the cryptid Dogman that year. I wondered what it would be like to see him there in those woods, from the window I wrote at each day. I felt connected to him.”

But there’s depth to this offbeat style. Even at her most playful, Niemi is reflecting on life’s big questions. “I thought of how love can feel like this,” she continues on ‘DM BF’. “Like being connected to something that might not even exist, or might just all be in your head.” The album is full of imaginative descriptions and left-field thoughts, turns of phrase that that can be hyper specific or beguilingly vague. She describes a shirt as “Tampax-pearl-blue iridescent,” the sweet smell of drying blood “like a tar street.” ‘Albuquerque’ could be a piece of barely-there Joy Williams flash fiction (“What were you doing at the Albuquerque Airport? What were you doing there?” go the only two lines), while ‘Dusty’ unfurls in an effortless flow. “It tastes like Winnipeg, like cigarettes and snow,” Niemi sings in a moment of particularly pleasing poetry. “Tastes like all my cousins being sad to see you go.”

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?”

Progress Bakery is out now via Vain Mina / Tin Angel Records. Get it from the Eliza Niemi Bandcamp page.

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