In a note to fans, Bono says that this second surprise EP is not going to delay the arrival of the band’s album.
“We are in the studio, still working towards a noisy, messy, ‘unreasonably colourful’ album to play LIVE… which is where U2 lives. We still look to vivid rock n roll as an act of resistance against all this awfulness on our small screens. These are for sure ‘wilderness years’ for so many of us looking at the mayhem out there in the world.”
‘It’s a time that has our band digging deeper into our lives to find a wellspring of songs to try meet the moment… With “Easter Lily” we ended up asking very personal questions like: Are our own relationships up to these challenging times? How hard do you fight for friendship? Can our faith survive the mangling of meaning that those algorithms love to reward? Is all religion rubbish and still ripping us apart…? Or are there answers to find in its crevices? Are there ceremonies, rituals, dances that we might be missing in our lives? From the rite of Spring to Easter and its promise of rebirth and renewal… Patti Smith’s album Easter gave me so much hope when it was released in 1978. I wasn’t yet 18. The title is a nod to her.
‘We will attempt hoopla and fanfare at a later date to remind the rest of the world we exist but in the meantime… this is between you and us.’
While the ‘Days of Ash’ EP was a response to chaotic times in the outside world, the ‘Easter Lily’ EP is a more reflective set of songs emerging from a more personal, private place that some may retreat to in such times – exploring themes of friendship, loss, hope, and ultimately, renewal.
‘Song for Hal’ is a COVID-19 lockdown lament, with The Edge on lead vocals, written for the band’s friend, the music-maker, Hal Willner, who would have turned 70 on Easter Monday and passed away almost 6 years ago to the day. ‘In a Life’ is a song celebrating friendship. ‘Scars’ is a song of encouragement and acceptance; scars and all, with a twist. ‘Resurrection Song’ is about pilgrimage, a road trip into the unknown with a lover or friend. ‘Easter Parade’ is a devotional song, a celebration of new life, rebirth and resurrection. ‘COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?)’ is a lullaby for parents of children caught up in war, featuring a soundscape by Brian Eno.
The ‘Easter Lily’ EP is accompanied by another special digital e-zine edition of ‘Propaganda’.
Titled ‘U2 – Propaganda – Easter Lily’, this edition features contributions from all four band members including sleeve notes from The Edge; Adam Clayton on art and the journey of recovery; a conversation between Bono and Franciscan friar Richard Rohr; and in-the-studio photographs shot by Larry Mullen Jr.
The e-zine also features song lyrics along with an interview with the band’s producer, Jacknife Lee and a piece on Hal Willner by his friend Gavin Friday.
Forty years ago, in February 1986, the first issue of ‘Propaganda’ dropped through the letterboxes of U2 fans around the world. Aspiring to match other fan magazines at that time, ‘Propaganda’ was born out of the punk-era D.I.Y. zine culture that embraced attitude, ideas and dialogue.
The tracklisting for ‘U2 – Easter Lily’ EP is: 1. Song for Hal 2. In a Life 3. Scars 4. Resurrection Song 5. Easter Parade 6. COEXIST (I Will Bless The Lord At All Times?)
“Horrorful Heights” marks a formidable new chapter in The Bevis Frond’s deep and storied catalogue, showcasing the enduring creativity of songwriter, guitarist and frontman Nick Saloman as he moves into yet another decade of recording. Long established as one of the most distinctive voices in British underground rock, Saloman continues to refine the band’s signature blend of melodic psychedelia, wiry guitar epics and sharp, emotionally attuned songwriting. “Horrorful Heights” offers one of the most approachable entry points to the band’s world in years: a record that gathers their core strengths into a cohesive, vivid set.
Recorded with long-time drummer Dave Pearce and guitarist Paul Simmons, alongside new bassist Louis Wiggett, the album moves fluidly between jangling psych-pop, heavy-lit guitar workouts and pastoral comedown reveries. Wiggett also brings a surprising new colour to the Frond palette, contributing pedal steel to “Best Laid Plans” and “Momma Bear,” recalling early-70s country-tinged British rock from Bronco or Cochise.
The album’s range is wide but sharply defined. “Draining The Bad Blood” channels the classic Bevis Frond mode of melodic guitar pop—cut from the same cloth as longtime fan favourites later covered by Teenage Fanclub and The Lemonheads. “Space Age Eyes,” a concise nine-minute odyssey, nods toward the transcendental explorations of ’70s electric Miles Davis, complete with a blistering solo from Simmons and rhythmic elasticity from Pearce.
The sitar-laden title track, written off-the-cuff while Saloman half-watched a football match, drifts through incense-hazed psychedelia with layered vocals and tumbling tablas—an affectionate echo of the head-shop mysticism he has toyed with throughout the band’s history. Elsewhere, “Mossback’s Dream” splices lysergic leads with the propulsive energy of ’80s American hardcore, forging a hybrid that feels both timeless and entirely its own.
Additional highlights include the Byrds-tinged “Buffaloed,” the swirling narrative freeze-frame of “Silver Insects,” and “That’s Your Lot,” a rapid-moving burst of melancholic euphoria and one of the record’s most immediate songs.
Though unmistakably eclectic, “Horrorful Heights” presents a focused portrait of The Bevis Frond in 2025 – vital, tuneful and unburdened by nostalgia. Saloman describes the collection simply: the best songs he’d written in recent years, arriving unforced and instinctive. The result is a late-period peak from one of Britain’s most quietly influential underground bands.
The opening of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s newest American tour had a familiar ring. He debuted the Land of Hope and Dreams banner on last year’s European dates, and this new leg continues in that spirit, again opening with a “call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock ’n’ roll in dangerous times.” But the ICE invasion of Minnesota, as well as President Trump’s illegal war against Iran — among much else — has amped Springsteen’s indignation, not to mention that of the 20,000 people hanging on every word at the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis on opening night of the tour’s newest leg.
Three days earlier, at the No Kings Rally in St. Paul, just over the Mississippi River, Springsteen had already performed an acoustic version of his new single, “Streets Of Minneapolis”. It wasn’t the first outing for the song, either: he’d debuted it at an anti-ICE benefit put together by Morello at First Avenue in late January — literally across the street from Target Center. But this night’s full-band version made those sound tentative; the sheer fury with which Springsteen delivered the third verse – “they killed and roamed / in the winter of ‘26” – was bone-rattling. Accordingly, the guitar solos during “Murder Incorporated” and especially a towering “Ghost Of Tom Joad” were suitably bloody. Guitarists Morello, Springsteen, Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren took turns stepping out — and making unfettered, noise much of the time.
Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band perform the first two songs from their set for the opening night of the Springsteen & E Street Land of Hope & Dreams American Tour live in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 31st, 2026.
In the Steve Van Zandt documentary Believer, Springsteen noted that in the ‘80s, his confrere had “gone from no politics to allpolitics.” Bruce didn’t quite do that here — crowd-pleasers like “Dancing In The Dark” and “Because The Night” helped to effectively leaven things. But the first song set the tone. Edwin Starr’s “War” — short, sharp, and surging, with guest guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine shredding-not-soloing over the arrangement — followed hard by “Born In theUSA”, with Bruce hitting a piercing falsetto in the second verse and drummer Max Weinberg’s drum rolls even more commanding.
Nevertheless, there was still real playfulness on offer — the third time (of four) that he led the crowd in a chant of “ICE out now!” during “Streets Of Minneapolis”, Bruce offered a cheerful, “Almost!” During “Out In The Street,” someone in the front handed him their NO KINGS sign, which he held up for a verse before handing it back to its owner: what a gentleman. Played a dozen songs apart, “Death To My Hometown” and “Wrecking Ball” had a lighter cast to them, closer to the folky Seeger Sessions than E Street crunch, a welcome change of musical pace. “Born To Run” was scheduled as an encore — only there really wasn’t one, because the band just stayed on stage and kept playing without a break.
But the underlying seriousness of the night wasn’t lost on anyone. When “American Skin (41 Shots)” began, the crowd went rapt. This quarter-century-old song, written about the murder of Ghanaian immigrant New Yorker Amadou Diallo, by police, didn’t need to call attention to itself; the resonances were horribly plain for all to hear. It was an elegy, not a war cry, and the audience listened intensely. For all the volume the band (and audience) dealt, that relative quiet also made a statement.
“This tour was not planned,” Springsteen said near the finale, a grandiose “Chime Of Freedom”. (The Dylan song followed a number from another Minnesota songwriter: “Purple Rain”, the fourth time the E Street Band has covered it.) “We needed to feel your hope and strength, and I hope we offered some hope and strength to you in return.” There was no question — the energy had gone both ways, in a manner that nobody who was in the room is likely to forget.
With their third album, “Inanimate Objects of the 21st Century”, Newcastle’s The Pale White prove once again that there’s no slowing them down. Following the success of their introspective sophomore album “The Big Sad“, brothers Adam (vocals/guitar) and Jack Hope (drums) return louder, sharper, and more defiant than ever.
This third full-length is their most expansive yet: a record that blends the anthemic punch of classic rock with the urgency and edge of modern alternative.The title, “Inanimate Objects of the 21st Century“, is a nudge to the uncomfortable irony of our time – as technology accelerates, humanity feels increasingly frozen in place. Lead singer Adam Hope says: “Technology is moving, but we are not. Human civilization entered the 21st century wide-eyed and niave with mobile phones that would barely fit in our pockets. Fast forward a few decades and we’re so far from where we were that it almost looks like a bad 80’s sci-fi movie. Back then, that film would be watched in packed-out cinemas after an eagerly anticipated release, but now they stand emptier than they once were, attended mainly as a nostalgic experience in the age of Netflix and doom scrolling.
The birth of AI, algorithms, cryptocurrency, drones, holographic concerts, autonomous cars… we’re living in a strange transitional period which is both fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. We humans have now in fact become the inanimate objects – mannequins.
After our softer, melancholic second album ‘The Big Sad’, we felt it was only right to move as fast as our world is moving and release our next within the year. ‘Inanimate Objects of the 21st Century’ is the evil twin, the Yin to The Big Sad’s Yang.”
Like his pal Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart isn’t an easy listen. His initial recordings with the rotating Magic Band were basically garage-blues stompers highlighted by the frontman’s raspy, Howlin’ Wolf-like voice. But by the time of their first album, 1967’s “Safe as Milk“, they had taken a turn toward more experimental territory. By 1969’s career peak “Trout Mask Replica”, they were engaging the avant-garde like few other bands of the era. The band made more than a dozen albums before Beefheart, born Don Van Vliet, retired in 1982 to focus on painting.
“Lick My Decals Off, Baby” is the fourth studio albumfrom American musician Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet) and the Magic Band, released in December 1970 by Straight and Reprise Records. T
he follow-up to “Trout Mask Replic”a (1969), it is regarded by some critics and listeners as superior, and was Van Vliet’s own favourite of his albums. In his words, the title credo of the album was an encouragement to “get rid of the labels”, and to evaluate things according to their merits.
Their catalogue includes some of the wildest and most boundary-pushing rock ‘n’ roll ever made, serving as a template for generations of forward-thinking artists.
Deluxe edition of the classic 1970 album from Captain Beefheart and The MagicBand. This limited edition 2LP vinyl set features the original album, recut from the original master tapes at Bernie Grundman Mastering, plus an additional LP with previously unreleased instrumental versions and alternate takes from the original album sessions.
Oklahoma psych kings the Flaming Lips have been around since 1983 — a mind-boggling fact, given they’ve been shedding members and tweaking their sound for most of that time. They formed around the eccentric vision of frontman and chief instigator Wayne Coyne, who guided the group’s early voyages through harsh, experimental noise (Telepathic Surgery) and warped pop melodies (In a Priest Driven Ambulance).
Back in the early ’90s heyday of true alternative rock, they even managed to sign with a major label, Warner Bros., who’ve bankrolled the Lips’ cosmic creations ever since. But there was one other chief addition: Multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd joined for their 1993 breakout LP, “Transmissions From the Satellite Heart“, which spawned the fuzzy earworm “She Don’t Use Jelly.” And the Coyne-Drozd partnership has anchored the band ever since, through grand art-pop explorations (1999’s “The Soft Bulletin“, electronic dream-pop (2002’s “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” and stately psychedelia (2020’s “American Head“.
If the average listener had had the four CD players playing simultaneously required to listen to Oklahoma psych-rock band The Flaming Lips‘ 1997 album “Zaireeka”, we might have seen it coming, but for most of us “The Soft Bulletin” was a beautiful sucker punch, a smack upside the head with a rainbow. What happened to the band that sang “This Here Giraffe,” “The Magician vs. the Headache,” and “She Don’t Use Jelly”?
This was an album of deep thoughts, boundless empathy and the weight of the world on its shoulders, all set to wonderful melodies and inventive widescreen sonics. Sixteen years into their career, on their ninth album, and as frontman Wayne Coyne was nearing 40, The Flaming Lips delivered their masterpiece.
“We were a not very successful weirdo rock group about to get dropped from our label,” Coyne said in a documentary about the album, setting the scene in 1996. A lot of things happened simultaneously to the group that led to their near total transformation. Guitarist Ronald Jones, who had been a big part of the Lips’ sound in the first half of the ’90s, quit the band, making room for Steven Drozd to fully assume the role as musical director. He was the drummer, but also a polymath multi-instrumentalist genius. Meanwhile, Coyne became more interested in non-band musical ideas. He hit on an idea where The Flaming Lips would take different elements of a song and put them separately on dozens of cassettes to be played at the same time on dozens of car stereos while he orchestrated the whole thing like a conductor at a symphony. The “Parking Lot Experiments” became cult events which then led to the bigger and more portable “Boombox Experiments,” which led to Coyne wondering “Can we make an album this way?” and then “Will they let us make an album this way?”
The band, along with producer/collaborator David Fridmann and manager Scott Booker, talked Warner Brothers into letting them do it on the condition that simultaneously and on the same budget they would make a “normal” album that only required one CD player / tape deck to listen to it.
To facilitate this, Fridmann built his own studio, Tarbox Road, in Cassadaga, NY, and The FlamingLips would be the first to use it. Free of hourly studio rates, they had unlimited time to test out what the studio could do while working on songs. Coyne set down some rules for the recordings, namely no distorted guitar. He hoped to find a new way to bring about the same effect that loud-quiet-loud had served. To achieve it, Drozd, Fridmann and bassist Michael Ivins turned to synthesizers, new digital technology, and a lot of creative inspiration. “Though we were using the most modern synthesizers and digital junk that you could get at the time, we were trying to make it sound like it wasn’t a band any more,” Coyne said in 2019. “We wanted it to be more of an emotional sound than a band.”
On that emotional front, a lot was happening personally to the members of The Flaming Lips. Coyne’s father was dying of cancer and passed during the making of the albums. Drozd confronted his heroin addiction after he almost had his hand amputated from what he thought was a spider bite that turned out to be an infection from intravenous drug use. Ivins nearly died in a freak auto accident. (Many of these real life occurrences turn up in The Soft Bulletin’s “The Spiderbite Song.”) Things were getting heavy and Coyne stopped writing about absurdist, weirdo ideas (like Giraffes) and began writing from the heart. It was still from his psychedelic mind, but pondering the mysteries of the universe by way of his own experiences with death, grief, and despair led to wonderfully off-kilter yet highly relatable songs with real staying power.
“Theirs is to win, if it kills them,” he sings on the album’s first single and opening track, “Race for the Prize,” a song which also introduces us to the new sonic world of The Flaming Lips that is closer to Phil Spector and Brian Wilson than to Nirvana or Dinosaur Jr. “They’re just humans with wives and children” is an unlikely shout-along anthemic chorus, but there’s no denying it works.
The album’s other single, “Waitin’ for a Superman,” is as much a moving rumination on grief against seemingly insurmountable odds as R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” is, but without being so obvious about it. “Tell everybody waitin’ for Superman, that they should try to hold on as best they can / He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them, or anything / It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift.”
The rest of the album is just as wonderful. “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton” covers similar thematic territory as “Superman,” but plays as Disney music by way of John Bonham. Drozd’s drumming is the most awesomely bashed, impactful playing of the ’90s that wasn’t recorded by Steve Albini. Those drums really bring the album to life, juxtaposed against the orchestra of warbly synths and layers of harmonies that may at times fool you — like on “The Spark That Bled” — into thinking there was an actual orchestra involved. No violins were harmed during the making of this record, but many drum heads died so that these songs may live.
“The Spark That Bled” and many others on “The Soft Bulletin” take surprising zigs and zags that would seem insane on paper and sound like they were just born that way. “What is the Light,” one of the album’s sunniest pop songs, transitions into pensive instrumental “The Observer” which you could imagine sound tracking an arthouse sci-fi film or an episode of Cosmos. Need some Grand Guignol honky-tonk loneliness? “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” is there for you. Gospel? “The Gash” makes room for that alongside phantasmagoric Morricone-style bombast and ’80s orchestra hit samples in a song that asks “Will the fight for our sanity be the fight of our lives lives / now that we’ve lost all the reasons that we thought we had?”
“Suddenly Everything Has Changed” was a pivotal moment in the making of the album. Reflecting on the song recently, Coyne said he had the verses figured out but suggested to Drozd that the song could, after the refrain, could go into “an expansive emotional, cinematic moment,” but “we didn’t really consider how unexpected this interlude is…but for us it fit perfectly with the idea of suddenly everything changes. And it kind of felt like we were doing our own thing, like no other group would wanna do something like this .. we were making our own world.”
The album closes as brilliantly as it opens with “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” arguably “The Soft Bulletin‘s” best song, where Coyne ponders all the Big Questions (life, death, the universe, everything) in just four lines that are both entirely psychedelic and entirely grounded: “Love in our life is just too valuable / Oh, to feel for even a second without it / But life without death is just impossible / Oh, to realize something is ending within us.” It finishes with a repeated refrain of the title against a galaxy of “ahhs,” and a very groovy bassline from Ivins and Drozd’s slide guitar. “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” then segues into another instrumental, “Sleeping on the Roof,” that sounds like looking at the stars on the hottest day of the summer as you drift off into slumber.
“The Soft Bulletin” when I hear it now it really is about despair, but there’s no despair in it,” Coyne said in 2019. “It’s not singing about despair, it’s being in despair and singing.” And finding beauty and hope in all of it.
“Horrorful Heights” marks a formidable new chapter in The Bevis Frond’s deep and storied catalogue, showcasing the enduring creativity of songwriter, guitarist and frontman Nick Saloman as he moves into yet another decade of recording. Long established as one of the most distinctive voices in British underground rock, Saloman continues to refine the band’s signature blend of melodic psychedelia, wiry guitar epics and sharp, emotionally attuned songwriting.
“Horrorful Heights” offers one of the most approachable entry points to the band’s world in years: A record that gathers their core strengths into a cohesive, vivid set.Though unmistakably eclectic, Horrorful Heights presents a focused portrait of the band in 2025 — vital, tuneful and unburdened by nostalgia.
Saloman describes the collection simply: The best songs he’d written in recent years, arriving unforced and instinctive. The result is a late-period peak from one of Britain’s most quietly influential underground bands.”
Recorded with long-time drummer Dave Pearce and guitarist Paul Simmons, alongside new bassist Louis Wiggett, the album moves fluidly between jangling psych-pop, heavy-lit guitar workouts and pastoral comedown reveries. Wiggett also brings a surprising new colour to the Frond palette, contributing pedal steel to “Best Laid Plans” and “Momma Bear,” recalling early-70s country-tinged British rock from Bronco or Cochise.
The album’s range is wide but sharply defined. “Draining The Bad Blood” channels the classic Bevis Frond mode of melodic guitar pop—cut from the same cloth as longtime fan favourites later covered by Teenage Fanclub and The Lemonheads. “Space Age Eyes,” a concise nine-minute odyssey, nods toward the transcendental explorations of ’70s electric Miles Davis, complete with a blistering solo from Simmons and rhythmic elasticity from Pearce.
The sitar-laden title track, written off-the-cuff while Saloman half-watched a football match, drifts through incense-hazed psychedelia with layered vocals and tumbling tablas—an affectionate echo of the head-shop mysticism he has toyed with throughout the band’s history. Elsewhere, “Mossback’s Dream” splices lysergic leads with the propulsive energy of ’80s American hardcore, forging a hybrid that feels both timeless and entirely its own.
Additional highlights include the Byrds-tinged “Buffaloed,” the swirling narrative freeze-frame of “Silver Insects,” and “That’s Your Lot,” a rapid-moving burst of melancholic euphoria and one of the record’s most immediate songs.
Though unmistakably eclectic, “Horrorful Heights” presents a focused portrait of The Bevis Frond in 2025 – vital, tuneful and unburdened by nostalgia. Saloman describes the collection simply: the best songs he’d written in recent years, arriving unforced and instinctive. The result is a late-period peak from one of Britain’s most quietly influential underground bands.
The deluxe edition includes “Horrorful Offal“, an eleven-track companion drawn from the same fertile sessions. Far from a grab-bag of leftovers, it extends the world of “Horrorful Heights” with alternate moods, deep-cut experiments and songs that illuminate the album’s edges. Together they form a panoramic view of the Frond’s current creative streak. Both albums are housed in a striking deluxe edition, presented in a bespoke die-cut slipcase that frames the artwork
3XLP Limited Deluxe Vinyl Edition: ‘Horrorful Heights’ 2XLP + ‘Horrorful Offal’ LP available from Rough Trade
“Horrorful Heights” · The Bevis Frond released through Fire Records
“When a song comes, I make sure I don’t let it go by,” says Joe Pernice. Pernice has been catching songs for 30 years now, first with the alt-country legends Scud Mountain Boys and then with the indie-pop mainstays Pernice Brothers.
“Sunny, I Was Wrong”, his first studio album of new material under his own name, was born during a period of concentrated inspiration and productivity. Songs were coming almost more quickly than he could get them down on tape, as though they’d been waiting to pounce at just the right time. With a little help from his friends, Pernice fashioned a handful of them into a beautiful refinement of all the qualities that have distinguished him as a songwriter over the years: His facility for aching melodies, his penchant for arrangements that nod to pop’s past without getting mired in nostalgia, and a deep empathy for the characters who inhabit his verses.
From the new album, ‘Sunny, I Was Wrong,’ available April 3rd, via NewWestRecords
Nashville based psychedelic blues rock act All Them Witches return with brand new album, “House OfMirrors“, the band’s first new studio album since 2020 Seminal “Nothing As The Ideal”. The album features singles “Red Rocking Chair” and “Starting Line” and is set for release on May 29th. The band will be touring worldwide in support of the new album throughout 2026 and 2027.
Time at last for All Them Witches to release the album they’ve been heralding on tour since last year. Due out May 29th I think as a self-release, “House of Mirrors” will be the Nashville four-piece’s first full-length since 2020’s “Nothing as the Ideal“, and that’s probably long enough even with the “Baker’sDozen” singles project they spent 2022 dug into.
The new single “Starting Line” — as though to mark the beginning of the album cycle that, again, has already started — has a video filmed on tour .
It’s not actually the first single, though, as the prior-posted visualizer for the blues traditional “Red Rocking Chair” that they put out last month will lead off the record. Curious if “Culling Line” and “Starting Line” will have any interaction, and how the crunch in this current single and the prior will play out across the entirety of “House of Mirrors“, what shape the psychedelic lean of their sound might take this time around. I guess I just want to hear the record, It’s nice to feel excited about a thing.
They did a whole thing with tarot cards on their socials and at shows, Preorder links, the album tracklisting and announcement, and dates for the European tour will follow.
The Fat Angel Sings 