“Introducing Self Portrait, the latest chapter from the endlessly inventive one-man force Ryan Adams — a brand-new, 24-track album that brings together fresh, unheard originals alongside spellbinding reinterpretations of classics by R.E.M., New Order and more.
Capturing restless creativity and emotional depth across the two dozen songs, this bold collection once again proves why Ryan Adams is one of the most distinctive voices in modern music. Self Portrait shows Adams at his finest – poignant, unpredictable and sonically rich. For long-time fans, it’s another essential chapter in a prolific career, for newcomers, it is the perfect entry point into the world of Ryan Adams.
This project isn’t just another album from…
Category: indie-rock
Paz Lenchantin, the Argentine American bassist, has worked up a hell of a resume. In 1999, she helped form A Perfect Circle, Maynard James Keenan’s “other band” at the turn of the century. A few years later, she joined Billy Corgan’s indie-rock super-group Zwan, appearing on that group’s only full-length platter. An accomplished violinist in her own right, Lenchantin offered backing strings for a Queens of the Stone Age song in 2002. She returned to the “featured guest” post three years later on Silver Jews’ Tanglewood Numbers. Lenchantin’s C.V. and discography are not short on substance. This year, Paz releases her third solo outing, Triste.
But, if there’s anything that will help listeners navigate their expectations for Triste,…
There’s a timeline where Eliza McLamb is nearly finished with a law degree, and another where she’s climbed the corporate ladder in the solar paneling industry. In lieu of that, McLamb has fully committed herself to music, something that was once a hobby. At nineteen she gained TikTok virality from a replayable ditty about adolescent sexual confusion, and used that wit and self-awareness as a jumping off point for the career she’s built since. Now at twenty-four, McLamb’s sophomore album Good Story is her first release after stepping away as co-host of Binchtopia, the prolific and successful podcast she ran with Julia Hava. She doesn’t take the trial and error for granted, though.
…“Catch it quick/Frame the image/Make your…
…includes two previously unreleased songs “Leave Overjoyed” and “Something Drive”.
Arriving ten years after the fun-loving indie rockers released their debut EP in 2015, the self-produced IRON is Post Animal‘s fourth studio album and their first to feature Joe Keery — aka Stranger Things’ Steve Harrington — since their 2018 full-length debut. IRON also saw all six of them gathering in person in the studio after operating remotely for a few years, with several other members besides Keery having relocated away from their base of Chicago. These reunions seem significant on an album that is not only named for the friends’ connection but proves to be their most sentimental release yet, with topics like friendship, loss, and aging surfacing on many of…
Formed in 1987 by Fruitbat and Jim Bob, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine burst onto the scene with their signature style of punk-pop infused with samples, drum machines, and social commentary.
Released in 1995, Worry Bomb was Carter USM’s fifth album and their fourth in a row to break into the top ten of the UK album charts. It would also be the first to feature their new drummer, Wez, marking a shift away from the famous drum machine sound.
The album mixed things up musically, balancing mellow acoustic tracks like ‘My Defeatist Attitude’ with Carter’s signature high-energy indie rock, including ‘Let’s Get Tattoos’ and ‘The Young Offenders Mum’ which both hit the UK top 40.
To mark the 30th\u202Fanniversary…
Spiritual Cramp have tapped into something special on their sophomore album Rude, a nod to the budding UK punk, ska, and reggae scene of the 1970s.
While these genres have persisted with new artists popping up daily, few bands have captured the right combination to truly emulate that period. Spiritual Cramp manage to do it five decades later, channeling London grit through San Francisco fog. It’s a sound they’ve been chasing since day one — those first EPs were all snarl and speed, but you could already hear the tug toward something catchier. Their debut flirted with that punk-meets-dub swagger, but Rude is the real arrival: confident, danceable, and steeped in the kind of attitude that made this genre of music exciting in the first place.
Lê Almeida’s improvisational indie rock troupe Oruã had been making fine records for years before their debut for K, 2025’s Slacker. In fact, their earlier work impressed Built to Spill’s Doug Martsch so much that he asked most of Oruã to join his group and together they made one of the best BTS albums, 2022’s When the Wind Forgets Your Name. Slacker gives the uninitiated plenty of clues why Martsch was so enamored; the album is made up of long songs that unspool at languid paces and are just barely moored by swirling guitar lines, hazy melodies, and a crack rhythm section that pushes and pulls on the underpinnings like it was so much taffy. Almeida sings in a similar drawl too, delivering the words in a plaintive fashion that gives the proceedings some added…
After spending 2024 wrestling with that classic second album syndrome, Hotel Lux have returned, having finally pinned writer’s block down on the mat. Named after a Billy Childish song that inspired the band’s formation, The Bitter Cup is a rough and ready LP that marks a new creative direction for the five-piece.
Hotel Lux’s well-received debut, Hands Across the Creek, was laced with politically charged vitriol, and fans will be relieved to hear that the band refuse to shy away from tackling tricky topics on their second full-length offering. From ‘Costermonger’, a musical interpretation of a BBC documentary about the fall of Deptford Market, to ‘Another One Gone’, a lament for those the band have lost to suicide, The Bitter Cup reflects myriad issues in…
Released exclusively for Record Store Day Black Friday 2025, Avon Calling! captures the band in full flight, raw and raucous at 1994’s Phoenix Festival. The set finds Carter firing through classics like ‘The Only Living Boy In New Cross’ and ‘Sheriff Fatman’, fresh cuts ‘Let’s Get Tattoos’ and ‘The Young Offender’s Mum’, alongside a cover of Buzzcocks’ ‘Everybody’s Happy Nowadays’.
Equally revered and despised in their native England, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine has been on the cutting edge of the U.K.’s dance-pop scene since their first hit single in 1989. Instead of following the disco-derived pop songs of the Pet Shop Boys, Carter relies more on the underground club/dance scene, bringing such techniques as spoken word samples, drum and riff samples…
The Smith Street Band, release their seventh studio album, Once I Was Wild, out via Pool House Records and Remote Control Records.
Recorded at the band’s own solar-powered Bush House Studios in regional Victoria, ‘Once I Was Wild’ sees The Smith Street Band in-studio with long-time live sound engineer Joel Taylor. The album was mixed by Anton Hagop (Silverchair, Powderfinger) and mastered by George Georgiadis (Gang of Youths, Alex Lahey).
Following singles This Is It and Star Child, today’s focus track Constellation captures the emotional shift that inspired much of lead singer Wil Wagner’s writing across the album.
“Constellation is a song about a lot of things. It started with the line about sleeping…
Elias Rønnenfelt often sounds like the act of singing physically pains him, like each breath he draws to fuel the next cavernous howl is a self-inflicted punishment. The Danish rocker has never been one to rest easy. He was just 17 when Iceage formed in 2008, and for over a decade, the band has remained consistent in its lineup and the quality of its output. Rønnenfelt released his solo debut, Heavy Glory, in 2024, and hasn’t hit the brakes since. This year, he teamed up with Yung Lean and Fousheé for two songs and collaborated with Dean Blunt on an EP, as well as a follow-up single: “Tears on His Rings and Chains,” a serene and stripped-back ballad with production from Blunt and Vegyn and a sly namedrop of the title of Rønnenfelt’s forthcoming record.
A 20th anniversary edition of the album, pair the original album (featuring favorites “She’s Hearing Voices,” “Helicopter,” “So Here We Are” and “Banquet”) with 23 B-sides and rarities, including nine unreleased demos and live cuts.
Silent Alarm was the culmination of several years of work by the London-based band, founded by singer/rhythm guitarist Kele Okereke and lead guitarist Russell Lissack in 1999. The band’s initial line-up featured bassist/keyboardist Gordon Moakes and drummer Matt Tong; their combination of nervy, danceable approach to post-punk and lyrical existentialism aligned perfectly with what rock radio listeners on both sides of the Atlantic were craving at the time. Positive feedback from BBC Radio 1 programmers transcended…
Innovation can sometimes materialise as a sleight of hand trick. We often think of innovative art as some bold, audacious show-stopper or a head-spinningly avant-garde experiment, but it can just easily take the form of a deft work of magic whose singular brilliance incrementally dawns on you. Cultural progression is a marathon not a sprint; a gradual development that needs resonant and endearing qualities as much as it does unorthodox and iconoclastic forms. Sword II’s Electric Hour is a prime example of approachable art that intuitively pushes against its own apparent boundaries.
The Atlanta trio’s gently radical second album is a warm, emotionally-resonant brand of colourful indie rock – oscillating between dream pop, psych and even hardcore – that’s flecked…
The title of Charlie Kaplan’s latest album stems from an episode involving his father, who was being visited in the hospital by a longtime friend. When his friend laid his baseball cap on Charlie‘s father’s bed, the usually polite–but–superstitious elder Kaplan was abruptly shocked.
“In old cowboy movies,” he said, in a story recounted by Charlie himself in the press notes, “a hat on the bed is an omen, a premonition that someone will die”.
Indeed, A Hat Upon the Bed is a tribute to Kaplan’s father, who passed away in 2013, as well as to his son, born in 2025. This “fatherless decade” between those two events was a source of love and pain, which Kaplan has used as inspiration for this, perhaps his most personal and…
Los Angeles electronic duo The Hellp are often characterized as “indie sleaze,” but Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have said they’d prefer for you to think of their music as “American” — not in the sense of jingoistic nationalism or dudebro country rock, but in the sense of “America” as a place of constant reinvention. You can spot this appetite for remix in the band’s no-holds-barred approach to genre looting: a smattering of crunchy Justice electronica here, a sing-along pop-rock Phoenix chorus there; throw in some dark and droning Salem production, glitchy Crystal Castles beats, and, hell, why not some Strokes-y guitar riffs while we’re at it.
On last year’s LL and the 2021 compilation Vol. 1, this reappropriation of post-punk,…
This live set compiles the best performances and unique recordings that were all part of our big Flood celebration tour across the US over the last few years, presented in alphabetical order.
The selections include the live-in-reverse stelluB followed by the reversed version of the same performance, as well as the unique recordings of the songs They Might Be Giants and Hearing Aid that were featured in the video material of the live show.
This album was a pleasure to put together, and everyone in the band really shines.
Special thanks to A&R man Marty Beller and mixing engineer Scott Bozack for their eternal patience, and a hearty hat tip to Robert Vosgien for mastering.
A band that has drawn on a variety of ’90s alternative inspirations (grungy alt-rock, winding math rock, tuneful pop-punk, shoegaze, and more), Cusp find their way to something still varied but more streamlined on their second album, What I Want Doesn’t Want Me Back.
Some of its relative consistency may well be due to how it was recorded: it was tracked almost entirely live at Electrical Audio in Chicago by a newly expanded five-piece edition of the group (with returning engineer Scoops Dardaris). This is not to say that the album suffers from sameyness; on the contrary, it was written during a period of transition as the project moved from Rochester, New York, to the Windy City, and is rooted in anxiety and the examination of forces like…
There’s a marked crossover from Celtic folk music at the moment. The Mary Wallopers now fill major rooms, while the likes of Lankum and Kingfishr edge the genre into the mainstream. Leading this charge are Brògeal, mixing the similarly imbued folk-punk of The Pogues and The Dubliners with indie-rock grandeur. Emerging during COVID, the band have since played pub basements up and down the country, packed festival stages, and nailed some high-profile support slots.
Each song layers vivid images of the pubs and streets of their home town of Falkirk (‘Vicar Street Days’), and its people (‘Draw the Line’), making the record an immersive scrapbook of vignettes. But beneath the frenzied tales of beer-soaked nights runs a remarkably delicate…
Good Flying Birds‘ debut album Talulah’s Tape is the work of youngsters deeply in love with the sounds of indie pop. Their devoted infatuation dates back to C-86 and gathers up every twist and turn in the story as they bop along to the present day. They add elements of jangle pop, shoegaze, lo-fi, dream pop, indie rock, and noise pop, gleefully taking bits and bobs from each and welding them into a glorious creation of their very own. It helps that they only borrow and steal from the best aspects of each style, injecting plenty of joyous energy into the arrangements and performances while making every melody as sweet as ice cold lemonade on a sweltering summer day. The production is perfect as well, coming across happily mid-fi and home cooked.
Even in the most deeply personal narrative records, you can only know so much of an artist’s story by what they choose to tell you. Maybe the picture only adds up to 75% once you’ve had your fun pushing pieces together on the countertop. More likely you only get a curated chunk, the rest safely banked in the artist’s head forever. Maybe they don’t even have it all put together themselves. It’s all fragments, the way memories can be.
A Fear of Open Water is, in the words of its creator Mike James, “sort of an anthology of opaque memories from my childhood” and deals with an attempted coming to terms with a traumatic event from those years. He speaks of sifting through social worker reports trying to piece together the whole of it, this thing unspoken to us…
Thanks a lot!