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Can Caspian really be 21 years old? You Are the Conductor was released in 2005, instantly launching the Beverly, MA post-rock band into the upper ranks. These past two decades have been kind to the quintet, although six years have passed since the release of On Circles, whose title ironically fits this release; the band has gone back to its roots. The cover art, depicting the Great Boston Fire of 1872, is a depiction of “the way something recognizable could be transformed without losing its underlying identity;” the same principle can be applied to Caspian.
We’re especially enamored with the increased use of strings, hearkening all the way back to the early days of GY!BE. When the full ensemble plays, the quintet becomes a dectet. This is…

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The Sheepdogs have now been in an amazing groove of producing upbeat, West Coast-leaning blues-rock for over twenty years. Their trademark sound manages to embrace the paradox of being both nostalgic and contemporary. Keep Out of the Storm fits in perfectly to their catalogue: it feels both familiar yet fresh. It’s a great listen. The songs are plainspoken, melodic, emotionally direct and more concerned with feeling authentic than being literary. Where there’s grit, there’s also an underlying optimism.
The album begins with Nobody But You, a song about romantic commitment, two people simply being, no plan, just mutual dependence. The expression of love is simple and affecting: “Every time I see your face / I get a smile that I can’t…

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A lot of the music covered under the “post-punk revival” centers around the poppier set of bands from the early ’80s, the ones you can still hear on the radio today – your Cure, Joy Division and Gang of Four.
Toronto duo WHIMM, comprised of Mounir al Shami and Andrew Matthews, delve into a much less commercial space within the vast warehouse of post-punk. They explore the work of Coil overtly, but also acts like Pere Ubu and Swell Maps. As such, their newest album No Promotion is not an album you’ll see gushed about on social media or subject to countless think pieces on Reddit’s Indieheads community, but if your taste in post-punk runs to the noisy, chaotic and slightly scattershot, then it’s an album you’ll need to add to your listening pile.

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As a club DJ, radio broadcaster, podcaster, and label founder, Jamz Supernova has become one of the U.K.’s foremost tastemakers, exposing audiences to music from around the world, particularly from regional dance music scenes. Her first official release is Dance Around the World, an unmixed selection related to her radio show and event series. The set is programmed to resemble a day-into-night sequence, with the more acoustic, earthy tracks up front, and the heavy dance grooves in the second half. She gives a particular spotlight to Maloya music from the Réunion Island, first with the lush harmonies of Simangavole and Soa Ravelo, then later with a jagged electro remix of a song by singer and storyteller Lo Rwa Kaf. Brazilian group Oruã’s “Capoeira Demo”…

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…Now teaming up with the pastoral synthesist Dorian Concept, Bibio has produced a collection that is flexible enough for at least three seasons; we’ve yet to hear how it might sound in winter, but suspect that its tones may be too warm for the whiter months.
Friends since 2009, Stephen Wilkinson and Oliver Johnson share a love for “aging technologies” and imperfect analogue equipment, which results in a sound that is occasionally brittle, held together by tape and twine. The album is suffused with a soft tenderness that borders on nostalgia, reflecting the cover, in which a child already seems to be looking back on a younger, smaller self. When does nostalgia first surface, and when does it set in for good? Without providing…

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…features seven previously unreleased bonus tracks from the same period, as well as a comprehensive selection of remixes from artists like Max Cooper, Robot Koch, and Aparde.
Christian Löffler’s second album is a lovingly sculpted and likeable collection of electro moodworks. Recorded in a log cabin on the Darss peninsula in the north-east of his home country, the isolation of the writing and recording process is party reflected in the bare-bone arrangements. For the most part, it works and less is more.
Mare models deep house grooves with minimal ornamentation and much of the album’s musicality manifests itself in warping loops, barely-there synth washes and deftly employed vocals. For the latter, Danish singer Mohna ghosts…

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On their 2026 album do you love the color of the sky? the intrepid shoegaze explorers Dummy continue to alter their template and come ever closer to fully integrating the Avant Garde and dreamy pop instincts that are their guiding tenets. Their previous album Free Energy saw them adding new age and experimentally soft sounds to the mix, here they strip them away and go for a more direct, if still at times challenging, approach. Pairing cloudy drifts of lush shoegaze guitar with thrumming drum & bass-inspired rhythms on many tracks, the overall feel of the record is more immediate. Tracks like the grindingly propulsive “Full Spectrum Dominance” delivers the kind of punch Curve did on their early records, which is a very good thing to emulate.

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June McDoom grew up in a Jamaican household in Florida, and her family was a musical one. Her father was a DJ and carpenter who built his own speakers and multi-room sound systems — she grew up hearing amplified basslines from his DJ sets through the floor — and her grandfather was a mento musician who built his own rumba boxes and gave June her first access to a guitar. While her own music takes further influence from everything from 1960s and ’70s folk-pop and pop-soul to Cocteau Twins, the significance of mentioning her upbringing becomes evident upon hearing her unusual spin on eerie indie folk. She landed on Jagjaguwar’s roster on the strength of early short-form releases, and she constructed Follow the Light, her full-length debut,…

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…includes eight previously unheard demo recordings captured solo by Shelley on a reel-to-reel tape recorder in late 2014 before the formal album sessions.
The third solo outing from the spell-casting Kentucky songstress, Over and Even is a breezy, lyrically bold, sonically beautiful soft barrage of bucolic country-folk that evokes Linda Thompson, Joni Mitchell, Vashti Bunyan, and Hem. It would be easy to peg Joan Shelley and crafty six-string co-conspirator Nathan Salsburg as the Bluegrass State’s answer to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, but they lack that duos’ trad-folk stridency and penchant for dust bowl pageantry, and their particular brand of mountain music feels much more rooted in the immigrant-rich…

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If you were asked to vote in a poll of the most activist artists in modern popular music or were minded to vote in a poll of the best singer-songwriters or greatest guitarists, it is most likely that you would leave off the name Bruce Cockburn, the Canadian from Ottawa who has flown largely under the radar, despite having possibly been the most awarded singer in Canadian music; many Juno awards for his albums, honorary doctorates from several universities, lifetime achievement awards and a member of the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. As an acoustic fingerpicking guitarist, he is almost without peer, as anyone who has listened to his instrumental albums Speechless in 2005 and Crowing Ignites in 2019, or who has seen him perform live, can attest.

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There’s a hollow space surrounding the guitar solo on “Shiver,” an absorbent deep cut on the second studio album from British indie-pop darling Rachel Chinouriri. The production is both distant and overwhelming as it mirror the 27-year-old’s inner turmoil. She’s feeling alone again, haunted by memories, and it’s like her words are vanishing into thin air before reaching anyone who will listen. Still, she sings, “Life goes on, and on, and on.” But what does she want that life to look like?
Chinouriri realizes she needs to make some changes on I Think I Spoke Too Soon. It’s reflected in the BPM spike across the record, a bold shift from her debut, 2024’s What a Devastating Turn of Events. She spends most of the album physically on the dance floor — sometimes…

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The extended edition adds 4 previously unreleased tracks to the original 11-song 2025 tracklist.
The well-decorated Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, with only three albums to his name, makes a bold move to control his artistic direction while providing a home for the next generation of artists on his Red Zero Records. The native son of Clarksdale, MS, still in his mid-twenties, is a global star who has quickly moved past ‘the next big thing” to become arguably the foremost blues artist today, blending tradition with contemporary. He is an ‘old soul” who knows where the music came from, with the ability to reshape it and attract a younger audience.
Hard Road, executively co-produced by Kingfish and Ric Whitney, has three producers in…

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Illustrious Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava, a longtime force on the European jazz scene, returns with his Fearless Five ensemble, welcoming guest saxophonist Joe Lovano, a powerhouse improviser who had collaborated with the bandleader on the live recording Roma (2019). All members of the quintet contribute compositions, trusting the bandleader’s candidly investigative approach that opposes rigid perceptions.
Rava’s “Certi Angoli Segreti”, an exceptionally beautiful tune first recorded in 1998, gracefully materializes with beautiful color shades. Francesco Diodati’s guitar gives it a particular touch, later soloing with motivic ability and acerbic distortion; Francesco Ponticelli’s dynamic bass builds a solid foundation with drummer…

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Flatlands is a new John Zorn project for rock power trio, in the tradition of Simulacrum, Naked City and Insurrection: twelve short pieces that turn on a dime, built on infectious riffs, atonal melodies, shifting rhythms and virtuoso solos, intense, quirky and ecstatic.
The trio is made of three of Zorn’s closest collaborators of recent years: Matt Hollenberg (Shardik, Secret Chiefs 3) on electric guitar, Simon Hanes (Gargantua, Tredici Bacci, Tsons of Tsunami) on electric bass and Ches Smith (Clone Row, We All Break, Laugh Ash) on drums.
Titles include ’69-68′, ‘Into the Dreamverse’, ‘Mabinogion’, ‘Priapus’, ‘Erotic Hyperbola’, ‘Almas Perdidas’, ‘The Blue Circle’, ‘Slipped Disk’ and ‘Greywacke’.

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In 1988, The House of Love’s debut album arrived as a fully-formed piece of pop perfection, following two years of intensive writing, rehearsing and live performances. The Gift explores those two years, as the band leapt from the Camberwell squat scene into the centre of the UK’s indie world as it went overground.
Taken from the archive of bassist Chris Groothuizen and compiled by him with chief songwriter Guy Chadwick’s full approval, this 3CD set offers unprecedented insight into the development of one of the standout bands of the late ’80s British music scene. Featuring previously unheard rehearsal recordings and live shows captured in London and Paris, all of which has been carefully restored and remastered using…

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…This release serves as a direct alternative to the controversial 2022 reissue, which was completely remixed by producer Chris Lord-Alge. According to the band, while the 2022 edition was a modern re-interpretation, it suffered from incorrect tape speeds. In contrast, the 2026 version is a true remaster sourced directly from the original studio tapes. It is designed to preserve the raw, urgent punk aesthetic and the “barely-contained chaos” of the original mix, while providing cleaner sound clarity across its 14 standard tracks.
A hyper-speed blast of ultra-polemical, left-wing hardcore punk, and bitingly funny sarcasm, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables stands as the Dead Kennedys’ signature statement. As one of the first hardcore albums, it was a galvanizing…

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@ (pronounced “at”) is the art-folk project of Philadelphia-based multi-instrumentalist songwriters Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak. The band release their new album Autosmile, their second full-length record and first release with 4AD.
Across Autosmile’s 11 songs, @ reimagine the psychedelic folk tradition as an undeniably contemporary art form, carefully balancing beauty and pain and shifting between black hole heaviness and patient understanding.
Autosmile follows @’s 2021 debut album Mind Palace Music — displaying the duo’s penchant for confessional lyrics and affinity for blending digital and analog elements, the album was an organic success story via word…

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What hits first about Manchester Orchestra’s debut, I’m Like a Virgin Losing a Child, is how fully formed it already sounds. Recorded independently and driven by instinct, it captures the push and pull between Southern gospel tones, fuzzed-out guitars and the emotional candour that would come to define the band. From the swell of Wolves at Night to the fragile calm of Sleeper 1972, the record moves between hush and full-volume release with real purpose. Andy Hull writes with striking honesty, taking on spirituality, romance, identity and mortality with the urgency of someone living every word. For its 20th anniversary, Manchester Orchestra revisit I’m Like a Virgin Losing a Child in a deluxe reissue with all-new packaging, plus a full second disc of reimagined versions.

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