The Fat Angel Sings

Big World lives up to its name. Slated for release on August 14th, it arrives on the heels of Hovvdy’s 2024 self-titled album with a palpable sense of expansion – songs that stretch outwards and fill every room that they’re played in – while still being rooted in the close, unguarded intimacy characteristic of the Texas duo. It’s a progression that underscores how Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, now over a decade into their collaboration, continue to refine a shared language without losing the sincerity that has come to define it.

Hailing from Austin, Texas, Hovvdy is the indie rock duo of Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, who were both touring drummers when they first met at a baseball game a decade ago. Combining their solo songwriting efforts, they put out their debut LP, “Taster”, in 2016, gradually sharpening and layering their warm, low-key sound with a series of heartfelt releases, including 2018’s “Cranberry” and their 2019 breakthrough “Heavy Lifter“.

This time, all four were present for each session, giving Martin and Taylor the space to hone their collaborative craft while finding ways to honour their lo-fi origins. The result is a 19-track double LP of sprawling intimacy, one that allows big choruses to jump out and quiet moments to linger longer than you might expect. It’s a gorgeous record about the passage of time that keeps you hooked, ensuring no amount you spend with it feels wasted.

Hovvdy have shared another new single, ‘Blast’, from their forthcoming album Big World. For a track called ‘Blast’, it’s quite bleary, which fits into Hovvdy’s overall aesthetic. Still, the hook worms itself into your brain. Check out director Michael Rees’ video for it below.

Their new self-titled album, out Friday on Arts & Crafts, sees them continuing their collaboration with producer Andrew Sarlo and multi-instrumentalist Ben Littlejohn, who worked with the duo on 2021’s “True Love” and 2022’s “billboard for my feelings” EP.

“Big World“, which was led by the single ‘Try Try Try’, is set for release on August 14th via Arts & Crafts. 

This week, Wishy also announced a new album, “Nature’s Pill“, and released its first single, “Lovesick.” They have also announced some new tour dates. 

Wishy’s “Nature’s Pill” captures a world where life feels unpredictable and overwhelming, yet full of possibility. On their vibrant sophomore record, Wishy entertains the madness–capturing romantic frustration, neurotic desire and the melodrama that ensues from simply being human in a jubilant remix of the past.

“Nature’s Pill” is the band’s sophomore album, the follow-up to 2024’s “Triple Seven” and 2025’s “Planet Popstar” EP.

“Nature’s Pill” bears all of Wishy’s trademarks: zany lyrics transfiguring melancholia into freedom, choruses set to become instant classics, and an unholy fusion of sugary grunge, indie rock and dream-pop. Wishy’s genesis has been a prolific burst powered by the band’s musical synergy: the “Mana and Paradise” EPs in 2023, debut LP “Triple Seven” in 2024, and a follow-up EP “Planet Popstar” in 2025. After those releases met acclaim and the band’s stature rose, the conception of “Nature’s Pill” was fundamentally different. Written more collaboratively than past releases, the group reconvened with “Triple Seven” co-producer Ben Lumsdaine in Los Angeles, where the quintet packed into a tiny studio and tracked half the songs live in the room, imbuing the album with the immediate energy of a band in sync after heavy touring.

It gave them the ability to synthesize an even greater array of touchstones this time around, with the ‘90s dream-pop and alt-rock of “Triple Seven” fusing with ‘80s college rock and ‘00s indie.

Wishy is vocalist/guitarist Nina Pitchkites, vocalist/guitarist Kevin Krauter, guitarist Dimitri Morris, bassist Mitch Collins, and drummer Conner Host. The Indianapolis shoegaze/dream-pop band recorded the album in Los Angeles .

Krauter had this to say in a press release: “Being in an indie band feels bizarre when the world is on fire. What can you do at the end of the day other than carve out some space—at the very least I have my imagination and I can invite others to join me there. At a certain point you need to say fuck it and roll with it.”

Of “Lovesick,” Pitchkites says: “There’s not much more that needs to be said about yearning in 2026, but here it is anyway. Kevin and I are stupidly romantic people who like twee pop so that combination alone was a recipe for a cheeky ‘main character’ song. We really leaned into the overzealous lyrics here because 1) we’re allowed, 2) can do whatever we want and 3) it’s fun 🙂 yay!”

“Nature’s Pill” is due out October 2nd via Winspear.

Anna Graves is an alt-folk artist whose music casts spells through storytelling. Raised on a farm in Minnesota, she left home chasing big dreams and bright lights, only to return years later and rediscover the magic that first sparked her songwriting. Her sound weaves cinematic pop melodies with folk intimacy where vulnerability transforms into power, and heartbreak alchemizes into healing.

“America’s Greatest Burnout” is Anna Graves’ deeply personal autobiography, tracing the last ten years of her life with unflinching honesty and heart. The singer-songwriter seamlessly blends elements of pop, country, and folk to create a sound that feels both timeless and immediate. Brought to life by producer Davis Naish (Maggie Rose, Eric Church), the album features A-list musicians including John Humphries (Kacey Musgraves), Rob McNelley (Luke Combs), Marty Rifkin (Bruce Springsteen) and more.

This record was born from some of the most transformative years of my life. It came from asking difficult questions, sitting with uncomfortable truths, and learning that what feels like the end is only the beginning of something new.

I don’t know where I’d be without these songs, as they helped me find my way home.

releases August 21st, 2026

With only two albums out, Slow Pulp are one of the defining bands of the generation that grew up on ’90s alt rock radio and came of age with the 2000s indie wave.

Their new album, “Melodie”, out on September 18th was produced by Elliott Kozel (whose credits include SZA, Lizzo, Jean Dawson, and Rosalia) and was co-written by Emily Massey and Henry Stoehr in the band. “Melodie” sees the band exploring beyond their shoegaze roots into new sonic territory with pop-tinged hooks and melodies. 

“Melodie” is the follow-up to their acclaimed sophomore album Yard. With resounding praise from the likes of Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Billboard, The FADER and Stereogum, with Variety declaring it “one of 2023’s best rock records”.

Releases September 18th, 2026

Slow Pulp is Alex Leeds, Emily Massey, Teddy Mathews, and Henry Stoehr

Alex Leeds – Bass
Emily Massey – Vocals, Guitar
Teddy Mathews – Drums, Percussion
Henry Stoehr – Guitar

First ever vinyl reissue of key Australian post-punk compilation, now a deluxe 2LP set – Includes six bonus tracks of never before reissued tracks from the era. Features future members of Dead Can Dance, Hunters & Collectors and more.

The second instalment of Chapter Music’s acclaimed Australian post-punk compilation series “Can’t Stop It!” is released on vinyl for the first time as a deluxe double album.
The compilation was originally released on CD in 2007 and presents an incredible array of inventive and often previously unheard music from the period 1979-1984. Now Chapter Music updates the compilation with six never before reissued bonus tracks, plus new liner notes, photos and layout.

This is a fantastically rich and dynamic time in Australian music history, a time when Australia stepped out of the shadows of overseas influence and asserted its own musical identity for perhaps the first time.
“Can’t Stop It! II” features tracks that have now become touchstones in Australia’s post-punk history, including Lamborghini by Severed Heads and proto Oz-rap classic Do the Job by Use No Hooks, plus early works by the likes of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard and Hunters & Collectors’ Mark Seymour.
Bonus tracks include the astounding How by Brisbane’s This Five Minutes, which pre-dates The Stone Roses’ Fool’s Gold by at least five years, and Tasmania’s own performance punk Chainmale with his outlandish Freakout.

The second instalment of Chapter Music’s acclaimed Australian post-punk compilation series “Can’t Stop It!” is released on vinyl for the first time as a deluxe double album. The compilation was originally released on CD in 2007 and presents an incredible array of inventive and often previously unheard music from the period 1979-1984. Now Chapter Music updates the compilation with six never before reissued bonus tracks, plus new liner notes, photos and layout. This is a fantastically rich and dynamic time in Australian music history, a time when Australia stepped out of the shadows of overseas influence and asserted its own musical identity for perhaps the first time.

“This era of Australian music wasn’t defined by a sound or an instrument, but by an anarchic creativity” – Stephen Deusner, Uncut

Wooden Shjips’ aptly titled fifth album serves a heavy dose of warm, gauzy psychedelia. Embodying the psychic spectrum of a nighttime desert drive, a lost weekend in the valley of beyond, the band alchemizes atmospheric ripples of ragged glory guitar, sorcerous waves of synth, free jazz skronk, and blissed out boogies. It was a more than welcome collection this past scorching summer, emitting its freak out transmissions across high noons and blood moons alike.

Wooden Shjips, long-time leaders of the contemporary psychedelic movement, expand their sound with V. The quartet of Omar Ahsanuddin, Dusty Jermier, Nash Whalen and Ripley Johnson augment their already rich sound with laid back, classic summer songs.

Wooden Shjips, long-time leaders of the contemporary psychedelic movement, expand their sound with V., augmenting their already rich sound with laid back, classic summer songs. Wooden Shjips has with V. created the most concise, laid back songs of their career. Their music is a balm of sorts, a respite from the insanity that, through its regenerative abilities, empowers continued, calm resistance. A reminder of the simple power of peace and beauty. Wooden Shjips, through V., have demonstrated the power of beauty and the power in creating it even while experiencing overwhelming dread. It is the perfect summer album, brimming with optimism and a peaceful energy, aptly timed for release at the height of spring.

The band’s members collectively share a love of classic rock from the Velvet Underground to Neil Young, as well as more overt love of the San Francisco scene of the 60’s. This commonality in their formative musical years binds them even as they live in different cities. V. finds Wooden Shjips embracing the emotions behind those sounds; peaceful defiance and opposition, while creating a sound and counter narrative to today’s hostilities that is wholly their own. Wooden Shjips has with V. created the most concise, laid back songs of their career. Their music is a balm of sorts, a respite from the insanity that, through its regenerative abilities, empowers continued, calm resistance. A reminder of the simple power of peace and beauty. Wooden Shjips, through V., have demonstrated the power of beauty and the power in creating it even while experiencing overwhelming dread. It is the perfect summer album, brimming with optimism and a peaceful energy, aptly timed for release at the height of spring.”

Shearwater have announced a new album, “The New World”, and shared two new songs from it: “Daydream Unbeliever” and “More and More.” We preferred “Daydream Unbeliever,” but “More and More” makes our honorable mentions list.

Now they have shared the album’s third single, “Slugs in the Marigolds,” via a music video.

Shearwater is led by Jonathan Meiburg (also of Loma), and also includes Emily Lee and Dan Duszynski. “Daydream Unbeliever” features Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, who contributes strings and also smashed a gong. The album also features, as a press release puts it, “instrumental wizard Shahzad Ismaily, saxophonist and clarinetist Doug Wieselman, qanunist Farouz Zriek, guitarist Leo Abrahams, ngonist Mamadou Kouyate, percussionists Mahamadou Tounkara and Moctar Kouyate (of Malian group Ngoni Ba), and the unclassifiable drummer Thor Harris.”

In the past quarter-century, those in the know have watched Shearwater slyly become one of the most distinctive and adventurous American bands. Led (as always) by songwriter and natural historian Jonathan Meiburg, “The New World’s” nine immersive songs find the group farther afield than ever, and in rare company: along with Meiburg’s fellow Shearwaters Emily Lee and Dan Duszynski,

(There’s even a surprise visit from a certain L. Anderson.) That might sound like a lot of passengers, but they’re all ideal company for a headlong journey through joy, confusion, reverence and defiance, with Meiburg’s voice as a graceful yet elusive guide. Both spare and ornate, “The New World” is absorbing in a way few albums are; it’s hard not to listen to the end once you drop in.

“Daydream Unbeliever” featured Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, who contributed strings and also smashed a gong. 

The band crowdfunded and produced the album themselves, recording it in London, Berlin, New York, and the band’s native Texas. Duszynski was the chief engineer on the album, with additional production by Leo Abrahams and Danny Reisch (the latter mixed the album with the band in Los Angeles).

“If you’re like us, you wake up feeling like the world’s on fire, and hoping you could reckon with it if you knew where to begin,” says Meiburg of the new singles. “‘Daydream Unbeliever’ and ‘More and More’ come from this uneasy place. If they help you feel a little less insane, welcome home.”

“This was a band favorite on “The New World,” Meiburg says in a press release. ”We liked how its loose, sunny feeling plays against the lyric—and we loved how Doug’s sax slithers up beside you.”

Meiburg had this to add about the song’s video: “This was one of those rare videos where everything just fell into place. The idea came to me on a walk in the woods, near the spot where I found our slug hero. Forty-eight hours later, after a grand day out with photographer Jason Benson, I put the slug right back where they came from, with a little extra lettuce to chew on. It’s my favorite Shearwater video since ‘Quiet Americans.’”

In 2022 Shearwater released “The Great Awakening“, their first album in six years.

“The New World” is due out on July 31st via the band’s own Polyborus label (in partnership with Secretly Distribution).

The Talking Heads spawned a number of worthy side projects and spinoffs—David Byrne & Brian Eno’s “My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts”, Jerry Harrison’s “The Red And The Black” — but none were as funky, danceable, and flat-out fun as Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s Tom Tom Club. Conceived as something of a larkish break from the grandly realized intellectual and artistic pretensions of the Heads’ “Remain In Light” record, the duo’s self-titled 1981 debut was recorded in Barbados with Weymouth’s sisters and Adrian Belew and Steven Stanley from the “Remain In Light” band, and not only spawned a couple of hit singles in “Genius Of Love” and “Wordy Rappinghood” but also became, in its own way, enormously influential.

Get ready to anchor your groove with “Let There Be Love”, a brand-new boxed set collecting all six legendary studio albums from the architects of dancefloor rhythm, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth.

This was the sound of downtown New York talking, listening, and rapping to the burgeoning hip hop movement, a hybrid heard in a whole host of acts in the ‘80s and ‘90s, from Madonna to Mariah Carey to the Beastie Boys and beyond. Weymouth and Frantz went on to record several more albums under the Tom Tom Club moniker, but the debut remains the classic.

The bubblegum smack of synth that introduces “Genius of Love” holds a special place in the hearts of Tom Tom Club fans. Bold and assertive, the instrumentals scorn the group’s debut self-titled record, trailing the typewriter clicks and subsequent ring of new waves beckoning to early hip hop trends asserted on “Wordy Rappinghood.” Now, 45 years after their debut, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth’s Tom Tom Club project is gearing up for the release of the three-decade boxing of “Let There Be Love” via Rhino – a 7LP and 6CD collection arriving July 24th. 

The new set pulls from Tom Tom Club records such as Tom Tom Club (1981), Close to the Bone (1983), Boom Boom Chi Boom Boom (1988), Dark Sneak Love Action (1991), The Good, the Bad, and the Funky (2000), plus Downtown Rockers (2012). As a compilation, it provides a path for listeners to experience a near-complete oeuvre that links ’80s new wave tendencies to the inception of hip-hop’s dynamic flow. 

Frantz, Weymouth, and Talking Heads started recording 1978’s “More Songs About Buildings and Food” and 1980’s “Remain in Light” “at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas, a place Tom Tom Club returned to during the David Byrne-cited project’s ensuing hiatus a year later. It was there that Frantz and Weymouth began playing with Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Uzziah “Sticky” Thompson, and Tyrone Downie as the Compass Point All Stars – while also tapping Adrian Belew and vocalists Lani, Laura, and Loric Weymouth.

The Rolling Stones Star In The Latest Issue Of MOJO!

As The Rolling Stones get ready to release their new album “Foreign Tongues”, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood speak exclusively to MOJO about the making of the record, the Stones’ rich history, recent jeopardy, and why they’re not done yet. “You’ve got to be really tough to survive…” they tell Will Hodgkinson.

Also in the issue: Janis Joplin – her whirlwind rise; 50 years of The Fall – Music; The Waterboys revisit “Fisherman’s Blues”; The Beatles unseen in ’66; the dub reggae revolution; Lenny Kaye – we salute you! Plus: Deep Purple; Deaf School; Dexys and Dexys Midnight Runners; The Cramps; Echo & The Bunnymen; Japan; Bruce Springsteen; Yoko Ono; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy; Frank Zappa; Wednesday; Ron Carter; Sonny Rollins; Panda Bear & Sonic Boom… and all

This month’s covermount CD is The Waterboys: “Abandonment And Love – Lost. Rare. Live. 1986-1989”. Amazing unreleased music from the “Fisherman’s Blues” sessions, plus revelatory live versions of And “A Bang On The Ear” and Dylan’s “New Morning”.

The new MOJO is on UK newsstands from Tuesday June 16th