It’s been exciting to watch Dummy’s evolution over the past five years from fairly reverent Stereolab homage to something far more complex, as they burrow deep beneath the neo-psych sheen and Lætitia Sadier homage of their 2021 debut “Mandatory Enjoyment”. After 2024’s “Free Energy” opened the door to the sounds of the early-’90s baggy movement, this week they’ll drop what is their most experimental release to date, as well their most politically fueled. Much of “Do You Love the Color of the Sky?” feels like first-gen shoegaze chopped up and reconstructed to fit a more contemporary musical and sociological context.
Case in point, the record’s final pre-release single is called “N of 1,” and takes aim at the Flockification of daily life. Vocalist Emma Maatman’s vocals keep cool across the single’s five-minute runtime as the backing instrumental feels like a much more soothing interpretation of the whirring of overworked power generators. “‘N of 1’ is a plea to both the proprietors and the more complacent subjects of the ever-encroaching surveillance state,” Maatman shares of the track. Meanwhile, guitarist Joe Trainor speaks to the song’s structure, which reflects that of the album more broadly: “I liked the idea of taking glacial guitar drones and cutting ’em up into new forms, infusing those dreamy walls of sound into a D&B context. To me, so much of the record is like the remixed versions of pop songs you’ll never hear.”
The track’s music video features Maatman in full hacker garb tracking down each of her bandmates on Google Maps as they may or may not be traversing the Buzludzha monument. “Typically our videos aren’t such a direct visual representation of the meaning of the song,” adds Maatman, “but I had just gotten it into my head that the zooming action on Street View would go perfectly with the meter and energy of the song, and the rest sort of fell into place after that.”
“N of 1” is taken from Dummy’s new album, “do you love the colour of the sky?” – out now via PolyvinylRecords
R.E.M. have shared a new visual for “Supernatural Superserious” from their 2008 album “Accelerate” after the song was featured in Jane Schoenbrun’s latest film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. “With Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun has somehow made the funniest, deepest and most transgressive film of the year,” Michael Stipe shared today alongside the video. “On par with Being John Malkovich.”
First released on the band’s 2008 album “Accelerate”.
In other R.E.M. news, the band is gearing up to share a new 25th anniversary edition of “Reveal” on November 20th. Check out the new visual for “Supernatural Superserious”
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of R.E.M.’s Reveal, The Black Sessions Revealed captures the band live in Paris on May 7th, 2001, in a performance recorded for Radio France.
The 2-LP gatefold set features 17 songs, pairing tracks from “Reveal“, including “Imitation Of Life“, with favourites such as “Losing My Religion” and “Man On The Moon“.
At the beginning of this year, Dry Cleaning released their new album, “Secret Love”. The third album from the London-based group consisting of lyricist Florence Shaw, guitarist Tom Dowse, drummer Nick Buxton,and bassist Lewis Maynard received glowing accolades across the globe.
Dry Cleaning shares an expanded version of the record, “Secret Love (Deluxe Edition)”, featuring three brand-new tracks recorded during album sessions with producer Cate Le Bon last year; ‘Grass’, ‘I Have The Key’, and the recently released single, ‘Sliced by a Fingernail’. “Secret Love (Deluxe Edition)” also features alternate Erica Eyres artwork.
Of the Deluxe Edition, bassist Lewis Maynard comments: “As difficult as it is to choose the final tracklist, we’ve learned with previous records that songs which don’t make the album will see the light of day and sometimes even receive more attention. This is the first time we’ve released a deluxe edition, and we’re especially excited because it includes some of our favourite songs from the session.”#Vocalist Florence Shaw goes into detail on each new track, saying: “The three new songs have a lot of tenderness and vulnerability to them. They’re about feelings of love and loss but also humour that comes along with those heavy feelings.”
“‘Sliced by a Fingernail’ is about looking for places to hide; fantasies like packing yourself into the centre of a huge flower bud, but also more everyday ones like being part of the crowd at a karaoke bar.”
“‘Grass’ is about grieving for someone still alive. The lyrics use some metaphors from nature inspired by two trips, one to see the melting Rhône Glacier in Switzerland and the other to Laurissilva, the ‘living fossil’ ancient forest on the island of Madeira. Whilst it has lots of imperfections and was a bit improvised, Cate had a real affinity for the vocal performance we chose for this track.”
“The lyrics to ‘I Have The Key’ came from a feeling of sadness and helplessness at the state of the world. The genocide in Gaza had begun around the time I was writing some of the lyrics. The saxophone part wasimprovised by Bruce Lamont at the Loft studio in Chicago, and the structure and delivery of the vocal, as well as the choice of words came as a response to his playing.”
Accompanying the “Secret Love (Deluxe Edition)”, BULLYACHE (who choreographed visualisers for all eleven songs off “Secret Love“), joined forces with the band again to produce dedicated visuals for the three new tracks, all shot at the Mandrake Hotel in London.
“The band delivers Shaw’s postcards from the edge with music that’s appropriately ironic and mordant, but also varied and at points even kind of rousing, from the Eighties college-pop strum of ‘Blood’ to the street-rock strut of ‘The Cute Things’.”- Rolling Stone, The Best Albums of 2026 So Far
“It’s an album of unusual pleasures—the assured musicality provides the immediate hook, holding you over until you focus on the lyrics. Once that happens, Ms. Shaw’s uncanny magic takes over.” – Wall Street Journal
“Dry Cleaning is one of those bands with the capacity to change your life.” – Paste
Heavens to Betsy—the pre-Sleater-Kinney duo of Corin Tucker and the Husbands’ Tracy Sawyer—haven’t released an album since 1994, but their comeback LP, “Baby’s Gone”, has been even longer in the making. The record brings together 16 tracks from multiple releases: a long-lost demo the pair recorded in 1992, the following year’s “These Monsters Are Real”, and 1994’s “Direction 7” recordings.
Older and wiser but as full of conviction as they were all those decades ago, Heavens to Betsy remind us that righteous feminist fury never loses its relevance or power.
The kickoff date of Bob Dylan’s “Lights of Autumn” European tour at Oslo’s Spektrum generated a lot of attention over the weekend due to the addition of guitarist Mike Seal, surprise covers of Randy Newman’s “Louisiana 1927” and Guy Clark’s “Dublin Blues,” and the first live rendition of “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)” since 2005.
But the song we keep returning to from the remarkably clean recording of the show that emerged the next morning (recorded on an Apple Watch) is “Tangled Up in Blue.” Dylan hadn’t played the “Blood on the Tracks” classic in eight years, but it’s hardly a rarity since he did it 1,709 times between times between 1975 and 2018, fourth in the all-time records behind “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Highway 61 Revisited,” and “All Along the Watchtower.”
Unlike those standards, however, “Tangled Up in Blue” continued to evolve in substantial ways over the decades, musically and lyrically.(The Dylan super-fan dylyricus once launched the “Project Tangled” endeavor in which he listened to every single rendition and logged each alteration.
In Norway, Dylan gave Project Tangled a lot of new material by radically stripping back “Tangled Up in Blue” to a torch ballad he performed on the piano with minimal accompaniment. The saga of the star-crossed lovers begins in familiar fashion (“Early one mornin’ the sun was shinin’/He was layin’ in bed/Wond’rin’ if she’d changed at all/If her hair was still red”), but then the third verse takes a totally different course from all past renditions.
“Way up north in the frozen woods,” Dylan sings. “Teardrops touch the sky/The leaves are falling one by one/And the mornings pass you by/Sometimes it gets so quiet/Sometimes it’ll get in the way/Look here for another/Tomorrow’s another day.”
The verse concludes like the original (“And all the while I was alone/The past was close behind I seen a lot of women/But I never escaped her mind, and she just grew”), but then the next one is again totally different.
“Things were getting to cost too much,” Dylan sings. “Summer slipped through my hand/Certain truths about that thing I never did understand/You bury the hatchet, you put it to bed/Sometimes you go for a ride/Nothing ever looks the same/After you’ve been on the other side/They turns around, merge and disappear/What I know he was looking at/He never did find it here/Neither did you/Tangled up in blue.”
Just a few years ago, it would be near-impossible to get a clean transcription like that from a single live Dylan performance, since so much of it would have been slurred and garbled. But he’s wisely shrunk the band down and softened their approach in order to highlight what remains of his voice, which hasn’t sounded this crisp in quite a while.
We’ll resist analyzing new couplets like “Summer slipped through my hand/Certain truths about that thing I never did understand,” but it’s hard to imagine the Dylan of 1975 or even 1995 singing those lines. The song, one of his all-time greats, has grown along with him.
The first time he gave “Tangled Up in Blue” a significant re-write was in 1984 when he played a European stadium tour with co-headliner Carlos Santana and special guest Joan Baez, who bolted after just a few shows. (They haven’t shared a stage a single time since.) This wasn’t Dylan in his finest era as a live performer, as evidenced by the dismal concert LP “Real Live”, but this new “Tangled Up in Blue” was revelatory.
“I always wanted it to be the way I recorded it on “Real Live,”Dylan told Bill Flanagan in 1985. “The old ones were never quite filled in. I rewrote it in a hotel room somewhere. I think it was Amsterdam. I wanted to sing that song so I looked at it again, and I changed it. When I sang it the next night I knew it was right. It was right enough so that I wanted to put it down and wipe the old one out. That was another of those songs where you’re writing and you’ve got it, you know what it’s about, but half of it you just don’t get the way you wanted to. Then I fixed it up, and now I know it’s where it should be.”
He didn’t touch the song again until the Never Ending Tour began in 1988, and it continued to mutate in significant ways over the next three decades. Most fans feel it reached its peak during the Charlie Sexton/Larry Campbell era of 1999 to 2002 where it would regularly be stretched out beyond the eight-minute mark, and became a showcase for the skills of each band member.
It’s hard for this brand new rendition of “Tangled Up in Blue” to compete with those turn-of-the-millennium ones on a musical level since that was one of the greatest bands Dylan ever used, and he was a relatively youthful 60. But on a purely emotional level, the one he debuted in Oslo is right up there.
Back in 1974, Dylan began writing “Tangled Up in Blue” in tiny red notebooks that now reside at the Morgan Library in New York City and the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa. He recorded it that September in New York, and almost immediately second-guessed himself and redid it that December in Minneapolis. But the story didn’t end there. And it’ll continue as long as he’s stays on the road, headed for another joint.
The experimental shoegazers TAGABOW show off the versatility with a commanding performance of ‘Violence I.’
Since 2017, the brilliant, bracing Philly shoegaze four-piece TAGABOW has been steadily refining a sound both pioneering and reverential, manifesting a radical new spin on the templates created by master noise merchants Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Neil Young. Bolstered by blitzkrieg guitars, earworm melodies and the frenetic, pounding assault of their concussive rhythm section, TAGABOW features harrowing-if-ultimately-life-affirming tales of addiction, relapse and redemption pulled straight from the real-life struggles of frontman and principal songwriter Douglas Dulgarian.
As part of “The One For New York”. concert film, we recruited TAGABOW to be one of the acts on the three-day, seven-band bill in support of Dinosaur Jr. and their set was a master class in anthemic catharsis and ecstatic demolition. Check out this video to see them play their song “Violence I” to a rapt audience at TV Eye in Ridgewood Queens.
Performing in their trademark circle formation, with the band facing each other and Dulgarian singing from the audience, the band highlighted the highwire versatility and vast tonal and emotional range and depth . Like generations of great artists before them, TAGABOW wrenches novel sounds from the stalwart tools we created decades ago and continue to innovate to this day. May the circle be unbroken.
Mon Rovîa’s breathtakingly beautiful debut ‘Bloodline’ is a searching, deeply human album that weaves memory, lineage, protest, and care into a living companion – an intimate indie folk journey through suffering and self-discovery that holds fast to love, hope, and empathy, inviting us to leave the world a little better than we found it.
The record channels themes of identity, survival, and transformation into a sound and story that have already resonated with millions worldwide. Mon’s music is rooted in his groundbreaking Afro-Appalachian folk sound, a genre-defying blend that bridges folk tradition and modern storytelling. At the heart of Mon Rovia’s artistry is a commitment to fostering community and connection. Whether performed in intimate settings or reaching millions online, his work resonates as a call to gather, to reflect, and to imagine a more connected future together.
But what makes “Bloodline” feel so striking isn’t only how soothing it sounds. It’s what that softness is doing. Mon Rovîa writes with the calm conviction of someone trying to leave the world a little more human than he found it – and if the album often feels spellbinding, it’s because his songs are built like lanterns: Warm enough to hold, bright enough to see by, steady enough to follow when everything else feels unstable.
Built on chance connections and a defining love of guitar music, Arkayla are earning a place among Manchester’s illustrious musical alumni. Cal Blakebrough getting stood up could have been just another forgettable night – a bruised ego and a story told on bleary nights at the pub.
Instead, it sparked “Waste of Time,” one of the standout tracks on Arkayla’s 2025 EP “Don’t Look For Answers“, and a reminder that sometimes rejection can be the best kind of inspiration. The song quickly became a highlight of Arkayla’s sets, with fans belting out every line like it’s their own story, setting the tone for the band’s infectious live energy.
“We weren’t setting out to ‘make an EP’ this time,” says Blakebrough. “We just wanted to supercharge our live set with as much excitement as possible. That energy really comes across in the songs and the production – they were built for the stage.”
Blakebrough and his bandmates – Joe Harley, Finley Rubens, and Dylan Murphy – spent 2025 sweating it out on stages that have launched generations of Manchester talent, turning what could have been a one-off moment into anything but a waste of time. Support slots grew bigger, crowds grew louder, and by the end of the year, the four-piece headlined their biggest hometown show yet: a 900-capacity sellout at Manchester’s O2 Academy, confirming their status as one of Britain’s most talked-about rising indie bands.
Praised for their nostalgic undercurrents, Arkayla have drawn comparisons to The Smiths, the La’s, and Oasis, setting them up for a comfortable spot among Manchester’s illustrious music alumni.
That nod to the past is evident on their record, which channels the band’s live-wire energy into a batch of tight, guitar-driven songs – from the breezy and “criminally underrated” (according to one fan) “Doctor” to the explosive “Long Way Back.”
Compared to their previous release, “Ella Malone”, which many have described as “Beatles-esque,” this EP feels more natural and self-assured, signaling a band growing into their sound.
Building on the momentum earned last year, the band is gearing up for a run of shows across Europe starting in February. Arkayla said about the unbelievable moments standing on iconic stages, staying optimistic, and why, when the world is f**ed, that’s exactly when some of the best music gets made.
A legend is a heavy thing to carry. It has been 27 years since the last album by The Olivia Tremor Control. In that time, they have influenced countless bands, been the subject of documentaries and biographies, and now, finally, improbably, there is a third Olivia Tremor Control album. In the 1990s,
The Olivia Tremor Control released two albums of experimental and psychedelic pop genius, “Music From TheUnrealized Script: Dusk At Cubist Castle” (1996), and “Black Foliage: Animation Music Vol. 1” (1999). As founding members of the Elephant 6 collective, they redefined the U.S. underground scene, injecting bright paisley colors and sonic adventure into a scene weighed down by grim irony and a fear of pretension.
Work began on this album as far back as 2005 but progress was slowed by other projects, other responsibilities, but in 2010, the band began to record. By 2011, Olivia Tremor Control had reemerged as a fully active band. Then in 2012, Bill Doss suddenly passed away. In 2024, with the album nearly finished, Will Hart unexpectedly died. Drawing on his extensive collections of notes, “The Same Place” was finally completed by the surviving band members, the broader Elephant 6 community, and producers Derek Almstead, Jason NeSmith, and Ron Kwasman.
“The Same Place” does everything The Olivia Tremor Control ever did well. It also does it better, and goes further, than anyone could have imagined was possible
Tony Iommi, the founding member of Black Sabbath and the godfather of heavy metal, returns with his first new solo music in 21 years and his first full-length release since Black Sabbath’s final album “13″. Across eight inventive, expansive and absorbing tracks, Tony and long-term producer Mike Exeter shape one of 2026’s defining rock albums. It is sonically heavy and rich in texture, bringing a long-held musical vision to life with some of the finest guitar playing of his career.
“From The Dark” sees Iommi joined throughout by Jorn Lande, who shares writing credits on all songs, as well as bassist Becky Baldwin and drummer Karl Brazil. Co-produced by Tony and Exeter, the sound is crystalline, vibrant and enormous, engulfing the listener in a state-of-the-art sonic experience that is as contemporary as it is timeless. Iommi says: “It’s an album we’ve really enjoyed making. We’re not trying to prove anything — it’s a great album, it rocks!”
Tony Iommi – Guitar Jorn Lande – Vocals Karl Brazil – Drums Becky Baldwin – Bass Mike Exeter – Keyboards
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