In 2019, Anne Helen Petersen published her widely shared BuzzFeed essay, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation”. It examined the exhaustion of a generation expected to thrive in every area of life while taking on more debt, enjoying less security, and working harder for increasingly uncertain rewards. Even basic tasks could become insurmountable as the promised returns on all that effort slipped further from view.
The new album from British artist SOFY reads like a musical sequel to the article. This time, though, we follow a zoomer trying to build a satisfying adult life, with the added chaos and disillusionment that comes with pursuing a music career. Across the album, professional frustration, emotional fatigue and self-sabotage are woven…
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The second ECM Reich LP. Three pieces representing three different scales of ensemble. Music for a Large Ensemble (1978), Side A, is Reich’s first major work for genuinely orchestral forces (mallet instruments, brass, strings, voice, around thirty players), a step toward the chamber-orchestra writing that would define the eighties Reich. Octet (1979), Side B opener, scored for two pianos, string quartet, two clarinets and two flutes: more contrapuntal and chamber-music-like than its predecessors. Violin Phase (1967), Side B closer, Shem Guibbory plays all four violin parts (three pre-recorded against one live), the canonical recording of one of the early phase pieces.
Recorded August 1979 at Tonstudio Bauer, Ludwigsburg, the same West German facility ECM…
The piece in which Reich turned to his Jewish heritage. Tehillim (Hebrew for “Psalms”) sets four psalm-fragments (19:2-5, 34:13-15, 18:26-27, 150:4-6) for four high voices and chamber ensemble, in a setting where for the first time in Reich’s mature work the text drives the rhythmic structure rather than being fitted into a pre-existing pattern. The vocal writing draws on Hebrew cantillation Reich studied with Cantor Edward Berman in New York; the percussion is tuned tambourines without jingles, clapping, maracas, marimba, vibraphone, crotales.
Recorded September-October 1981 at Tonstudio Bauer in Ludwigsburg, engineer Martin Wieland, produced by Manfred Eicher. George Manahan conducts. Sopranos Pamela Wood…
Singer, songwriter, humanitarian, activist, poet, philosopher, artist… as the music legend Labi Siffre prepares to release his first album of new music in 28 years, Demon are making his stellar catalogue available again as vinyl reissues and 3CD sets.
1972-1973 brings together Labi’s third and fourth studio albums – ‘Crying Laughing Loving Lying’, the follow-up ‘For The Children’ plus a bonus disc of B-sides and rarities originally featured on the now-deleted ’My Song’ box set from 2020. It comes in Deluxe 7”-sized packaging with a reversable front sleeve. ‘Crying Laughing Loving Lying’ from 1972 is traditionally seen as the album that propelled Labi into the limelight with the UK Top 20 hit ‘It Must Be Love’ – covered to memorable effect by Madness in 1982 where it reached No. 4 in the singles chart.
Finnish guitarist/singer/songwriter Erja Lyytinen sure does love live albums. This is the fifth (and sixth) collection of concert recordings since 2002s studio debut. Its title, 50th Birthday Live, though indicates why she’s in a celebratory mood. The sprawling package not only contains a double CD/DVD of a 90-minute March 21, 2026 gig in her home turf of Helsinki, but another live disc from Tempo, Finland 2025, featuring some of the same tunes, plus five different ones.
She hasn’t toured America recently (although she went to school here and recorded 2006’s Dreamland Blues in Oxford, Mississippi) but Europeans know Lyytinen as a well-respected, uncompromising, veteran blues rocker. She sings in English, with between-song-patter in her…
Everyone Says Hi return with their second album Funny Cos It’s True — a hook-heavy, groove-forward alt record that expands on the momentum of their acclaimed self-titled debut. The title says it all: the songs are candid, personal, and lived-in — delivered with lead singer and songwriter Nick Hodgson’s sharp humour and a big-chorus instinct.
Funny Cos It’s True is eleven tracks of intoxicating indie-pop.
Following their acclaimed self-titled debut album in 2024, the record sees the band firmly stepping into their sound. Layered with a hazy retro sound, while sounding distinctly new, the album sees the band rediscover and reinvent a classic sound with a heavy dose of infectiously anthemic choruses and a knack for lustrous songcraft.
…features four additional tracks, including brand-new renditions of the classic blues song ‘Nobody Knows the Way I Feel This Morning’ and the traditional jazz standard ‘Ill Wind (You’re Blowing Me No Good).’ Other bonus tracks include a special Village Studios session recording of Washington’s iconic hit ‘What a Difference a Day Made’ and the recently released single ‘Teach Me Tonight.’
Ledisi‘s second album of 2025, For Dinah can also be seen as a follow-up to Ledisi Sings Nina, her Grammy-nominated homage to Nina Simone. The singer’s bond with the music of Dinah Washington began to form when she heard it through her mother. It was strengthened through her jazz studies at UC Berkeley and has continued throughout her career, culminating…
Mika Oki’s art installations are all smoke and mirrors, quite literally. Roiling clouds of fog are lit by prismatic lights, while images are variously reflected, distorted, and projected through frames, making doors become mirrors and mirrors become windows. They are more experiential than physical, serving to make reality oddly illusory. They are also a great introduction to IVM Trio, Oki’s band with fellow artist/producer Apulati Bien and percussionist Sébastien Forrester. The group’s debut album, Explain Yourselves, is similarly ungraspable — a moody set in which each track is structured more like a dream than a song.
Explain Yourselves shapeshifts in such surreal ways because of the push and pull of its constituent parts. The trio trades equally…
The Howlers return with their sophomore album Heavy, following on from their debut, What You’ve Got to Lose to Win It All. The opening couple of tracks stay in fairly charted indie-pop territory, with lyrics focused on romantic encounters, relationship trouble, and mistrust, though the group do a good job of keeping it catchy and to the point. That being said, the track ‘Late Nights’ is where some of the lyrics are too on the nose to allow the listener to consider their own impressions of the song; “You never knew love could make you feel sad” is the most pertinent example of this. The Howlers could benefit from some further use of metaphor in their writing process and leave a bit more to the imagination.
The standout track of the record, the aptly…
There’s a charming spit-and-sawdust quality to Linda’s Head, the new album from Helen. It’s easy to catch incidental parts of the recording process that studio polish might otherwise have erased, like clashing frequencies, room sound, and messy reverb tails. Songs often open with the fading end of the preceding number, as if the album were one warts-‘n’-all live set haphazardly divided into ten. And yet a finely wrought songcraft lurks just below the surface.
Linda’s Head is the second album by Helen, a trio from the Pacific Northwest comprising Liz Harris (also known as Grouper, the by-now legendary experimental folk artist), Scott Simmons, and Jed Bindeman. This album builds on the sounds first explored on their 2015 debut, The Original Faces.
Released as an exclusive covermount CD with the November 2026 issue of MOJO magazine, The Gold Rush: Neil Young Covered brings together 15 interpretations of songs by one of the most distinctive and influential figures in rock music. A songwriter whose work spans folk, country, hard-edged rock and deeply personal acoustic balladry, Neil Young has spent more than five decades creating music that continues to resonate across generations. This collection celebrates the enduring power of his songwriting through the voices and musical visions of other artists.
Covering Neil Young is no easy task. His songs are often defined by their apparent simplicity, yet beneath their melodies lie emotional subtleties, restless arrangements…
Paul McCartney’s internationally acclaimed album The Boys of Dungeon Lane receives a Special Edition this October, featuring four additional recordings, including a new version of “Home To Us,” his celebrated duet with Ringo Starr, alongside three brand-new songs.
The Special Edition announcement arrives at a landmark moment for The Boys of Dungeon Lane. Released in May 2026, Paul McCartney’s first new solo album in over five years tops the global charts, with Top 5 debuts in more than a dozen countries. It also marks Paul’s 24th UK #1 album across his extraordinary career as a solo artist, with Wings, and as a member of The Beatles.
The album has also received widespread international critical…
Originally released in March 1969, From Genesis To Revelation marked the beginning of an extraordinary journey, the first chapter in the story of a band that would go on to achieve immense success and lasting acclaim. These new editions offer the most comprehensive and revealing presentation of the album to date, revisiting this vital early work with fresh perspective and unprecedented depth.
At the heart of all formats is a powerful new stereo mix by Stephen W Tayler, created with a renewed focus on the band’s performances and with less emphasis on the orchestral elements that shaped the original release. The result is both revelatory and immersive, bringing new clarity and immediacy to the album while preserving…
The mid-20th century was a period of dramatic social upheaval across the Caribbean, especially for the islands of Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. Claimed by the Dutch in colonial times, this area became a hub for the slave trade, and following abolition it gradually receded into a sleepy cultural backwater. But an influx of outsiders—first oil companies, then later waves of tourists and migrants—opened the area to the outside world, sparking cultural mixing and a new spirit of political self-determination that led to events like the 1969 Curaçao uprising.
Antiyano Progresivo: Musical Experiments from the Former Dutch Caribbean, 1968-1986 offers a snapshot of this cultural revolution, as local musicians blended homegrown…
I Should Have Stayed Dead: The Death and Life of Allen Lowe is the three-disc soundtrack to a documentary film about the life, career, skills, death and rebirth of saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist and writer. Lowe, a cancer survivor, endured 25 operations post remission. The film, produced by Jonathan Scheuer, discusses Lowe’s compositional and playing approaches, and offers performance clips, Lowe’s surgeries and recovery, and offers interviews with his surgeon and music historian Greil Marcus. This three-disc, 55-track package contains recordings between 2025 and 2026, and music between the 1990s and early 2000’s. Lowe’s ensemble includes bassist Colson Jimenez and drummer Ethan Kogan; his range of occasionbal collaborators…
After creating something more down to earth with HUMANiSE, a vocal-heavy art-pop album featuring two choirs and multiple guests, Australian DJ and producer HAAi heads back to the club with companion piece DIGITiSE. The two records are essentially different sides of the same coin, as both approach the subject of being human in a digital world. They’re both highly collaborative efforts, with previous guests like James Massiah and Kaiden Ford returning, while others such as Echonomist, Skybreak, and Colombian children’s choir Cantoalegre make debut appearances on a HAAi release. HAAi placed a greater emphasis on creating tracks she could play in her DJ sets, yet HUMANiSE still has a distinct flow as a complete listening experience.
The Smashing Times do one thing and they do it really well; make catchy, jangling guitar pop that sounds like it was recorded in the bottom of a well. Inspired by other fidelity challenged bands like Guided by Voices, Television Personalities, and Times New Viking, they add some freshness to the bloodline. Their 2019 debut cassette EP Come Along with Me is full of hooky, heart-felt pop tunes that sacrifice crisp, clear sound in favor of immediacy, but don’t submerge the singing and playing in so much clatter that the emotions are blunted. Much of the album has the autumnal wistfulness of the Byrds at their most elegiac, only recorded on a beat box instead of a state-of-the-art studio. All seven songs on the record all dig deeply into this mood…
…Originally self-released in 2023 as an ultra-limited cassette run of about 50 copies, the album received a wider official reissue on vinyl, CD, and digital formats on September 4, 2026 via Perennial and K Records.
Sharp Pins‘ Mod Mayday 23 is a cute concept; the band’s Kai Slater picks his favorite tracks from the Mods Mayday ’79 collection, which was recorded in at a live 1979 concert featuring the cream of the U.K mod revival crop. Bands like Squire, Secret Affair, the Merton Parkas, and Small Hours were all formed in the wake of the Jam’s ascendance and followed a similar path of pairing the hopped-up R&B sounds of the original mod scene with the feisty aggression of punk. Slater captures the intensity and hookiness of…