XTC legend Colin Moulding’s new three-track EP ‘Want It Bad (The Pep Talks and Playing Fields of Old England)’, offering a revealing glimpse into his enduringly inventive songwriting. Available on CD exclusively via Burning Shed, the spirited title track is accompanied by a James Bond-inspired track and a raw demo of ‘Want It Bad’, capturing Moulding’s distinctive English pop sensibility while opening a window onto the ideas, experiments and musical possibilities behind the finished songs.
The EP arrives 47 years to the week after XTC’s seminal single ‘Making Plans for Nigel’, written and sung by Moulding and released in 1979 as the lead single from ‘Drums and Wires’. The song became XTC’s first UK Top 20 hit and remains one of the defining recordings in the band’s catalogue.
The anniversary provides a fitting backdrop for a new release from the songwriter whose melodic voice and idiosyncratic approach helped shape XTC’s music and legacy — and whose work continues to explore the relationship between a fully formed song and the creative process that brings it to life.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released their self-titled debut album in November of 1976. In the next year that followed, the Gainesville-bred rockers found themselves facing an explosive level of fame they weren’t prepared for.
“Origins 1971–1978” captures the sonic formation of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers in the white hot ’70s era. Digging into country, rock, folk, punk and soul, this collection chronicles Tom Petty’s first eight years as a recording artist through 51 tracks, including 27 unreleased, live, extended, and previously unheard tracks.
It has been almost 50 years since Tom Petty and his Heartbreakers released their self-titled debut album. “Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers” will have its half-century birthday this November, and Petty’s estate will celebrate the occasion with the release of “Origins 1971-1978″, a new box set that’ll include previously unreleased tracks from Petty’s earliest days.
The Origins box set will include newly remastered versions of that self-titled debut album and “You’re Gonna Get It!”, the band’s 1978 follow-up, that’ll include extended versions of 11 tracks, including the all-timers “American Girl” and “Refugee.” It’ll also include “Live From The Record Plant 1977”, a recording of the band’s live broadcast from the legendary Sausalito studio, with a guest appearance from Al Kooper. Perhaps the box’s biggest selling point is the rarities collection “No Sleep Til L.A.“, which will also be available as a standalone release. It collects music that Petty made when he was figuring out his sound, from his older band Mudcrutch to the earliest days of the Heartbreakers. Seven of that disc’s 12 tracks are previously unreleased, including the newly shared single “Parade Of Loons.”
The “parade of loons,” was the way band members came to describe the increasingly chaotic scene on the road.
One other disc included in the Origins box is “The Cut Out Bin“, another rarities collection that features tracks that Petty made with session musicians, including what a press release describes as “a yacht rock track with Leon Russell.” The box also has a live-album version of the Heartbreakers’ 1978 appearance on the British show The Old Grey Whistle Test.
The deluxe of the many versions of the box set also has a Blu-Ray, a DVD, and an 88-page fanzine with liner notes from David Fricke and Bud Scoppa, track-by-track annotations from the band, and other stuff.
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers are to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Americana Awards, and surviving members Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Stan Lynch, and Ron Blair will reunite to perform with country star Chris Stapleton, who has covered Petty a few times. Two other Heartbreakers, Steve Ferrone and Scott Thurston, will join in for the final song.
The year is 2008. Steve Gunn was experiencing the itch to start working on material under his own name after having spent the last several years playing in and around Philadelphia and Brooklyn in collaborative projects such as GHQ. He had recorded some experimental CDRs on his own under the moniker Moongang before branching out in 2007 to placing the name “Steve Gunn” on titles for the first time. The first couple of releases displayed an immediate leap in his songwriting and confidence. His growth as a solo artist seemed to meet the use of his name head on with a burst of creativity. Nowhere was this growth more visible than with the 2008 title “Sundowner”. The album’s first iteration was released on CD by Digitalis Recordings. Not only was it the first Gunn title to have a release on a non-recordable media, but it was his widest release to date. Gone were the days of micro-editions. Now folks from far and wide could get deeply into what Steve was working on and the spells he was weaving.
Jump forward a couple of years to 2010. Gunn had released his widely acclaimed “Boerum Palace” the year prior, a title which amplified the spotlight on both his craft and his place within the broader new weird America scene. Venerable Asheville institution Harvest Records couldn’t shake the ghostly majesty of “Sundowner” and reached out to him to see if they could do a vinyl edition on their then-new label imprint. Steve obliged the request but felt that he could lay down “better” versions of half of the album’s tracks. He re-recorded these tracks, paired them with a few of the originals and that became the album’s vinyl edition. Without formal distribution but sold through Harvest’s webstore and by Steve at shows, this one was for the true heads in the know.
Jump once more to 2026. This missive is being written in connection with a current vinyl and CD reissue of “Sundowner” by Three Lobed Recordings, the title’s first widely distributed version. Eighteen years removed from its original release, what is it that keeps bringing folks back to this title time and time again? The answer is simple – the songs and the performances. You have Gunn-specific guitar workouts like “No Atlas” and “Concrete Beach”. You have haunting vocal turns like “For the Horse, Etc.”, “Money Train Blues” and a gorgeous take on John Martyn’s “Over The Hill”. This is the album where Jack Rose told Steve he needed to keep putting out material in this vein. Ask anyone who knows it and they will all tell you that this album is both timeless and has earned the legend. Three Lobed is excited to bring this one back into the wider conversation, back into store shelves and onto the turntables of listeners everywhere.
releases October 30th, 2026
All songs by Steve Gunn except “Over The Hill” by John Martyn.
Gurriers have shared “Pins,” the fourth single to be released ahead of the Dublin band’s new LP, “Nobody’s Coming to Save You”. The swaggering cut is built around a circular, meditative guitar melody and drums that recall the UK alt-rock scene of the mid-’90s and early 2000s. Dan Hoff yearns for his partner, singing: “I want it / I need it / Your love is / Everything.”
Gurriers are currently in the midst of a US tour leading up to the release of “Nobody’s Coming to Save You” on September 25th. They’ll perform at Levitation in Austin before shows in Dallas, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh. They’ll also make a stop at Riot Fest in Chicago next weekend.
Check out “Pins” , and pre-order “Nobody’s Coming to Save You” via Play It Again Sam
Lambrini Girls Let Their Return Policy Be Known with Newly Announced Second LP “No Refunds“
Lead single “Bang Bang Bang” arrives today ahead of the record’s January 15th release via City Slang.
Lambrini Girls turn their attention to a grim roll call of modern horrors on No Refunds, tackling genocide, fascism, AI, reproductive rights and the murky depths of the manosphere. The duo push their punk sound further, bringing industrial abrasion, angular basslines and flashes of pop immediacy into the mix. Beneath the confrontation, there’s room for vulnerability too, while the biting humour and wit that made their debut hit so hard remain firmly intact.
Lambrini Girls, the Brighton duo of vocalist/guitarist Phoebe Lunny and bassist Selin Macieira, have announced that their second LP, “No Refunds“, will arrive on January 15 via City Slang. The news arrives alongside lead single “Bang Bang Bang,” which I would describe as “pummeling,” “electrifying,” “delightfully snarling,” “itching to soundtrack a rowdy ass moshpit.” According to Lunny, the song is about, “a man who has been revered as a Christ-like figure but also as the devil.” Sounds familiar!
Alt-country songwriter Jason Molina is best known for his crowning work with Songs: Ohia, ‘Magnolia Electric Co.’, a cosmic alt-country record inspired by the ferocity of Steve Albini, its producer. ‘Didn’t It Rain’, though, is a different kind of masterpiece, reflecting Molina’s more commonly utilised slow-burning folk rock, always focused around quiet strumming and the vocal exchanges of him and singing partner Jennie Benford. Named after a classic folk gospel standard, ‘Didn’t It Rain’ is proof of a plaintive songwriter in thrall of music’s old lexicon.
‘Didn’t It Rain’ is a difficult record. Released a year before Jason Molina’s hippy earthquake masterpiece — the shocking, gruelling, soul-destroying, Steve Albini produced ‘Magnolia Electric Co.’ –– it never makes peace with itself. It toils with folk rock, wrestles with it, struggling through wearied eight-minute songs with one chord sequence on the same well-rusted guitar. If you only know Molina through his most famous record, this one will be a shock: with its quiet lethargy and resigned tone, it’s a far-cry from the country punk dude who looked up at the sky and screamed “must be the big star about to fall!”. There’s no such apocalypse this time, no stakes: it’s folk at the roots, and nothing more.
In spite of this, ‘Didn’t It Rain’ is a special record, and perhaps the most crucial snapshot of Molina there is. It tributes both Cleveland and Chicago, two cities that took him for a ride again and again, and trades in all of his standard lyrical hallmarks: four out of seven songs have the word “blue” in their title, one of them “bell”, another “moon”. Molina liked to use these words in every other song, as if presenting us with a hastily sketched atlas of the lonely world he lived in. In most of his songs, you got the feeling he was lost and tracing his way back home by looking for directions in the sky. Motifs aside, though, ‘Didn’t It Rain’ is most representative of how Molina spent the majority of his songwriting career: he wrote slowly and modestly, crestfallen by the world and reacting to it with strums.
‘Didn’t It Rain’ is, as was common for Molina, a live cut. It was recorded with a band surrounding him to add sparse flourishes, as if articulating him when his stories got tied up in themselves or became too insular. Singing partner Jennie Benford offers some of her best vocal performances here, joining in on the wordless choruses of “Didn’t It Rain” as if she’s taking Molina’s hand. The backing vocals on “Steve Albini’s Blues” peek past the sharp strums to invoke the spirit of country twang, giving the black and white images Molina is producing a splash of colour. Not too much, though: this record exists in greyscale. The newly expanded version of the record, which offers Molina’s home recorded demos, actually retreats — it offers a version of the record in which he’s on his own, deserted by his empathetic backing band. The rawness of the recordings means you can hear the goings-on outside of his house, a world that feels a million miles away.
Like a generation Y kid watching a black and white movie, I found this record stupefying at first, too dark and impossibly paced to cope with. It is perhaps Molina’s steadiest work, his misery inflicted with none of the urgency found in later works away from the Songs: Ohia moniker. But once you clear the tree-line and listen to what Molina’s saying, ‘Didn’t It Rain’ becomes one of his most fascinating and heart-breaking works, full of lyricism that demands this strict, slow tempo. On “Blue Factory Flame”, he sings like he’s lived his whole life in a black hole: “Every mile for ten thousand miles / and every year for a thousand years / every night for a thousand more / I hear ‘em call”. It’s indicative of this classic career: for Molina, there was plenty of time, too much time, a cruel endless amount of time, to make music. So he played it slow. Be patient with your folk rock masterpieces: slow and steady breaks the hearts.
Last month, Sub Pop announced the signing of the prolific and mythical Twisted Teens, the New Orleans band led by Caspian Halliwell and RJ Santos, with plans to release their new music throughout the known universe in 2026 and beyond.
A fearless blend of garage punk, country, folk, and proto-punk, powered by gritty guitars, pedal steel, and razor-sharp songwriting. Equal parts ragged, melodic, and exhilarating, it carves out a sound that’s unmistakably its own.
Twisted Teens are a New Orleans band making scrappy, hook-filled rock ‘n’ roll that lands somewhere between punk and country. Drawing loose comparisons to The Kinks, The Rolling Stones and Buzzcocks, they deliver rough-edged songs packed with big melodies and restless energy. Equal parts swagger, wit and chaos, their music blurs familiar influences into something entirely their own, proving that catchy tunes and anarchic spirit can happily coexist.
Asheville, band Wednesday are releasing a deluxe version of their 2025 LP Bleeds to coincide with the album’s one-year anniversary. Out this Friday, September 18th, from Dead Oceans, the 20-track expanded edition includes a couple of previously unheard songs in demo form, as well as remixes from the original record. Among those, Avey Tare will rework “Carolina M urder Suicide”; Fire-Toolz will give her take on “Bitter Everyday”; and DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ will do who-knows-what to “Elderberry Wine.”
check out the full tracklist and listen to “June 2 (Early Version),” a new track produced by Kenneth Blume.
Earlier this summer, Karly Hartzman duetted with Rivers Cuomo on “We Might as Well Be Strangers,” the Blume-produced lead single from Weezer’s new Gold Album. It was surprisingly good! Wednesday and Mannequin Pussy will kick off their joint Bitch Cabal Tour in late October.
Ian McCulloch was the original Cosmic Scally, one foot on the Kop, howling on David Fairclough, the other in some Benelux brasserie, crooning along to Jacques Brel. The balance between the gutter and the stars was crucial, and their scratchy, psychedelic nonsense-funk was just as vital an ingredient in their potent scouse slumgullion as their keening, arctic intensity or their swooning sex shanties.
Maybe the stars have aligned, maybe the waning light has raised the stakes, but somehow this late in the day, approaching their 50th anniversary, on their 13th album, the Bunnymen have tapped back into that founding spirit. You’ll have heard “Brussels Is Haunted” by now, roaring out of the radio: equal parts Proust and Ian Rush, frites and mayonnaise. In his own mid-sixties, Mac’s pole star David Bowie formally introduced his final chapter with “Where Are We Now?”, haunting the Schöneberg strasse he once prowled. By contrast, Mac seems freshly intoxicated by the sense-memory of frozen Stolly, the rum and cassis of the Brussels nightclubs where the Bunnymen were greeted as post-punk conquistadors on their first trip abroad, in 1980.
And he seems to have slipped out a side-door from the wintry memory palace. “Apples For Isaac” is 11 brisk tracks, keen not to outstay their welcome, none breaking the four-minute barrier. Even as Will Sergeant is eclipsed in the band he founded, reduced to a hired hand supplying occasional lunar tremolo and skyscraping solo, McCulloch flying solo, writing, producing and playing almost everything himself, covers the waterfront of everything you want from a Bunnymen album: the desolate docks and the dreaming spires, the spooked sidestreets and the ecstatic stadiums.
“Take Me By The Hand” opens on the iconic A/G chords of “Silver”, then lurches into a nervy funk that reminds you what a crucial influence the Bunnymen were on the sublime shambles of early Happy Mondays. “The Honey” (“it feels like flying but there’s no sky/Feels like crying but the tears won’t cry“) slaloms gloriously like Stevie Heighway, reminding you of when the Bunnymen felt part of a fancy-dan British pop forward line alongside The Cure and New Order.
But elsewhere the album draws deep on Mac’s rich and strange memories of the 1970s, outside of the holy trinity of Bowie, Cohen and Reed. “The Light That Surrounds You” has an ecstatic, scarf-waving chorus that might have graced one of ABBA’s epic Scandi-Hispanic ballads (“Chiquitita”, “Fernando”), while “Lab Rats Run” is a delirious fantasia taking in Pelé, Henry VIII and Elvis on his throne, pondering his fifth Cornetto, driven by a sax fusillade .
At the heart of the record, Side Two, track one, is “The Unstoppable Force”, which, this late in the day, turns out to be one of the truly great Bunnymen ballads. It begins, quite naturally, at post-punk ground zero: the sound of the first Velvets album, Lou Reed’s guitar from “Heroin”, John Cale’s strings from “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. But Mac uses this as a launchpad. On an album keen not to outstay its welcome, you feel, quite reasonably, that this one should have run maybe three times as long.
“More and more diminishing time, you’re in sight of the finishing line…” Mac croons, quite beautifully, bringing some of the sly Leonard Cohen gravitas to the final curtain. Because the unstoppable force, as both Isaacs, Newton and Asimov, knew, is gravity: the slow, patient reducer that brings all fireworks and footballers, poets and pop stars, back down to the cold old earth eventually. Maybe it’s the presence of Blondie’s Clem Burke drumming throughout (and this is quite a swansong for that particular maverick), but it’s an album touched by mortality, emerging richer and stranger for it.
Almost 50 years ago on “Crocodiles”, the Bunnymen began their long, strange space odyssey with “Going Up”. If “Apples For Isaac” is the beginning of the descent, if it inaugurates the official start of the Bunnymen’s Late Style, this promises to be one of the great final seasons in British rock.
Angine de Poitrine introduced new music while reaching another milestone in their rapid rise. The anonymous Quebec duo made their U.S. television debut on Monday’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon with the first public performance of the new original “Zugzegk.”
Microtonal guitarist Khn de Poitrine and drummer Klek de Poitrine opted for the previously unreleased instrumental rather than a song from “Vol. II”, their six-track sophomore album released in April. While soundchecked several times earlier this summer, “Zugzegk” does not appear on either of Angine de Poitrine’s two albums.
The Tonight Show appearance followed several other firsts for the duo in 2026. Angine de Poitrine made their British television debut on Later… With Jools Holland in June before presenting their first U.S. concert at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 31st. Primus bassist Les Claypool and Rush members Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have also recently shared their admiration for the group.
The Fat Angel Sings 