In what is technically the post-chorus of ‘Nettles’, Hayden Anhedonia delivers a devastating line: “Gardenias on the tile, where it makes no difference who held back from who.” Devastating as a postscript in the love story of Ethel Cain and Willoughby Tucker, whose wedding remains a distant dream because we’ve already learned of the latter’s death. We know Cain’s fate, too, through “Preacher’s Daughter”, but ‘Nettles’, being the first song she wrote in the house in Alabama where she finished that album, serves as a prequel. And it’s devastating, too, because though it passed through many iterations, the track’s vision of Americana stretches over eight minutes yet remains as sweet as can be, nestled by layers of fiddle, pedal steel, and banjo; a devotional that dares not be entirely mournful or anything less than idealistic.
The story of two teenagers “in a race to grow up” is a familiar one in the Ethel Cain universe, but what’s moving about ‘Nettles’ is how they’re forced into the slowness of adulthood through “the flicker of the hospital light,” and how the song itself honours and extends that slowness, clearly beyond the realm of realism. Where it makes no difference if it’s nettles or gardenias, suffering or love. Where it’s always.
Ethel Cain’s upcoming album “willoughby tucker, i’ll always love you”
‘The Field’ is a sunbeam, a deep breath, a prayer, an everyday feeling. But above all, Blood Orange’s first release in three years is a gorgeously orchestrated dialogue. First, between the impressive cast of collaborators Dev Hynes has brought together: a skittering dance beat set against Durutti Column leader Vini Reilly’s lush, fluttery guitar work, the interplay between Hynes and guest vocalists Tariq Al-Sabir,Daniel Caesar, and Caroline Polachek. Maybe you can recognize some of these voices, but the more entrancing conversation happens between the narratively faceless protagonists, who hate to say goodbye but keep yearning for home.
There’s a haziness to the warmth, which somehow also feels like a gravitational force. “Sing to me, in the heat of the sun,” Polachek pleads, making quite an entrance. You wouldn’t expect a song this understated to be a contender for song of the summer, but it should be.
Now “The Field” feat. The Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek & Daniel Caesar:
When Modern Nature toured their last album, 2023’s “No Fixed Point In Space”, it became apparent to Jack Cooper – the band’s main creative force – that they were already pulling away from the free, open-ended approach they had spent five years working towards; almost as if the music had become so abstract and elasticated, it now had to snap back towards something more structured. As they found themselves naturally locking into more fixed grooves, he realised a new direction had been set. Their new album – “The Heat Warps” – is the triumphant manifestation of where that new direction took them.
In the aftermath, Cooper’s song writing, which had become increasingly impressionistic, found a new focus and the idea of making an album that followed a similar path to the last two increasingly seemed obtuse. The purpose was to forge a radical change. The core trio of him, Jim Wallis (drums) and Jeff Tobias (bass guitar) were augmented by a new guitarist Tara Cunningham.
Modern Nature’s recent records have reflected an insular life. Cooper had moved out to the countryside in 2021 and had, in his words, been “hibernating” while he started a family. He felt this new band was a symbol for his reawakening and the perfect vessel for him to continue to explore themes that he’s sung about with Modern Nature – collectivism, our relationship with the natural world, the weight of consciousness – but with more directness and purpose. The key was the new dual guitar sound.
In the time Modern Nature has been a band, the world has undoubtedly changed. The words Cooper had been writing previously were somewhat ambiguous but it had started to feel like he was sitting on the fence and that was something he needed to address. “Every day we’re confronted with a confusing and scary world,” he says. “Making music and creating things can feel flippant or unnecessary, but my own world view was defined and influenced by art and artists who weren’t afraid to highlight and offer solutions: Public Enemy, The Smiths or a wider American counterculture.”
As the new band started to play together more, the energy, excitement and telepathy between them gained momentum and it became clear they needed to make a record that captured that. They locked into a process where they booked a couple of shows, directly followed by four days in the studio (the all-analogue Gizzard Recording in east London). They’d spend two weeks living in each other’s pockets – a very condensed rush of creativity.
For all this wrestling with the grimmer realities of 2025, “The Heat Warps” is ultimately not a record entirely consumed by anxieties. Its frequently beautiful sounds offer consolation and a wide-eyed optimism amid all the upheaval. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the transcendent album closer, Totality. As Cooper explains: “It was fascinating spending time in America as the country geared up for the 2024 solar eclipse. The news stations covered the event in the same way they’d cover a big football game or the Oscars. Everywhere I went, people were talking about the eclipse and for a few days it really seemed to capture the public’s imagination.“My friend’s dad had organised a huge party and had obviously done his homework. When he was running us through his preparation and how the day was going to go down, he said, ‘We’re hoping for totality, ’ and it blew my mind.
“The day of the eclipse I was driving through New Mexico and we stopped by the side of the road with hundreds of other people gazing up to the heavens. It felt exciting to be part of something that clearly resonated with people on such a profound level. It’s a fitting album closer and somewhere in there is a philosophy; a romantic nihilism”. And at its heart, right there is the core of Modern Nature’s appeal. Never more so than on this new record.
“The Heat Warps” will be released 29th August 2025 via Bella Union.
“The Past is a Garden I Never Fed” is the new long player from the sedulous Glenn Donaldson’s The Reds Pinks and Purples and his first in partnership with Fire Records. We are big fans as I am sure you’ll recall, but there is something a little bit sparking about this one as the guitars crunch with distortion and move about as far into shoe-gazing as he has to date. There is a gorgeously whispery quality to his voice and when the guitars jangle, we are talking 12-string-Crosby-jangle!
Having penned over 200 songs and released eight albums in the last six years, The Reds, Pinks and Purples release a collection of tracks previously unreleased on physical format that continues to romanticize the wonders and woes of the world.
With song titles that read like chapter sub-heads for a post-Douglas Coupland novella,‘The Past Is A Garden I Never Fed’ takes The Reds, Pinks and Purples central orator Glenn Donaldson through the turmoil of small talk and everyday water cooler moments with a fine sense of pathos and irony.
Set to a soundtrack that swerves between the dark days of Television Personalities and Byrdsian twang to the Jarvis Cocker-styled rhetoric and vocal tenderness of ‘Richard In the Age Of The Corporation’ with hints of everything from Husker Du’s fuzzed splendour to the chiming majesty of The Chameleons it’s an empowering listen.
The Reds, Pinks and Purples story started when Glenn Donaldson released songs like monthly postcards to a small but loyal following.
Glenn: “I looked around at the indie landscape and I felt that there weren’t enough people putting themselves out there as the awkward emotionally exposed main character in the songs.”
Eventually, he decided to make some honest pop music, and since 2019 he’s released eight vinyl LPs on Slumberland (USA) and Tough Love (UK). From humble beginnings as a home recording project, The Reds, Pinks and Purples has blossomed into a sporadic live unit with tours on both sides of the Atlantic and appearances at Pitchfork Festival London and Woodsist Festival as well as support slots for indie legends such as Destroyer, Guided By Voices, and The Feelies.
The Reds, Pinks and Purples new album release ‘The Past Is A Garden I Never Fed’ out 4th July on Fire Records.
For the most part, “Hunting Season” is a full-blown alt-country album, an album that probably wouldn’t get referred to as “emo” at all–save for the Midwest-y riffs and screamo parts of “Artificial Grass”–if not for Home Is Where’s roots in the scene. It’s heavy on strummy acoustic guitars, Dylanesque harmonica, soaring pedal steel and dobro (by Dan Potthast of Jeff Rosenstock’s band and MU330), earthy vocal harmonies (from Bea and awakebutstillinbed‘s Shannon Taylor), and some countrified piano (by Evan Bailey).
Bea MacDonald wanted to make a record “that you could grill to but also cry to… not cry, just feel something.” As a band who adopted the “fifth wave emo” categorization early on, “Home Is Where are part of a scene that’s full of great crying/feeling-something records, but emo grilling records? Those are harder to come by. Enter: Hunting Season. As everyone from Beyoncé to Lana Del Rey to Post Malone to Julien Baker have been finding ways to embrace country music, Home Is Where found comfort in fellow Florida-born artist Gram Parsons and his band The Flying Burrito Brothers while they were out on tour and missing their swampy hometown (a town that Bea and guitarist Tilley Komorny no longer live in due to Florida’s treatment of trans people).
As Bea puts it, Parsons “mixed country rock and roll, which is what we were doing–we wanted to mix punk and country and all kinds of different stuff and have it be poetry.”
Bea’s half-yelled vocal delivery reflects the band’s punk-informed DNA, and the harder stuff shines through in other ways too, like with the high-octane riffs of “Bike Week” (which Tilleysays were inspired by Lonesome Crowded West-era Modest Mouse) and the noise freakout at the end of the 10-minute “Roll Tide.” From where I’m standing, “Hunting Season” looks like fifth wave emo’s answer to Meat Puppets II; it’s a swampy, noisy, country/punk crossover that suits today’s DIY scene in the same delightfully strange way that that album suited the SST era. And as that band have done for their entire career, I expect “Hunting Season” is gonna confound some listeners. Even in a time when artists are going country left and right, Home Is Where’s oddball approach to the genre is like pretty much nothing else.
“Migration Patterns” is out now, off of Home Is Where’s upcoming album, Hunting Season, out May 23rd.
Hannah Cohen released her third album, “Welcome Home”, the year after she and her long time partner and collaborator Sam Owens (Sam Evian) moved to the Catskills and started converting their home and barn into a recording studio and retreat. Cohen’s first album in six years, “Earthstar Mountain”, is a different kind of invitation to the life the pair have built, surrounded by beauty both natural and musical, once again produced by Owens and featuring peers such as Sufjan Stevens and Clairo.
It’s just as lush and enchanting as anything she’s put out before, but dustier and sneakily vulnerable, too, bridging the ordinary and magical, pleasure and frustration, even as they seem to breeze through it all. “The rug could get pulled out/ The heartbreak could get loud,” she reminds herself on the closer. “Better to measure it in dog years.”
What a gorgeous-sounding album this is. Hannah Cohen has created a sumptuous garden of earthly aural delights for her fourth album. The cascade of flutes and strings on “Dusty” that opens the album instantly sets the mood, conjuring rainbows and spring. (This record couldn’t have picked a better release date, as trees are in full bloom on the East Coast.) While that song is an homage to Dusty Springfield, it also brings to mind Minnie Riperton’s kaleidoscopic single “Le Fleurs” and more than holds up to the comparison. “Dusty” is a hard act to follow, but Hannah follows it with the sultry, sassy strut of “Draggin’” and “Mountain” which has serious Fleetwood Mac vibes and harmonies via Sufjan Stevens.
The wonders keep flowing from there, from sunshine pop to spectral folk, groovy soul, and even a wonderful cover of Ennio Morricone’s “Una Spiaggia” with Cohen and Catskills neighbour Clairo nailing those otherworldly vocalizations. Hannah’s partner and producer, Sam Evian, did similar magic with records by Kate Bollinger and Katie Von Schleicher and helps Cohen catch those sounds she’s chasing, and no doubt those guest contributors are cool, but “Earthstar Mountain” is Hannah’s baby all the way.
The new record from Dutch Interior. Stereogum has called the band’s music “fantastically immersive” and Paste cosigns their “recipe for a rock song that’ll stick with you long after it’s over.” Friends since childhood, the Los Angeles-based sixpiece’s new record is an an inventive blend of modern day Americana, shapeshifting indie and ultimately an inspired passion project from six lifelong friends who have made a record that sounds bigger than themselves. In the same way artists like Wilco or MJ Lenderman have turned classic song writing on its head, the album both acknowledges and breaks with tradition, and is an ultimately hopeful elegy of what it means to confront change and find beauty in a precarious world.
Five of the six members of twangy, low-key LA band Dutch Interior write and sing and their distinctive creative and actual voices keep things interesting on their pretty, contemplative third album, “Moneyball”, that also feels cohesive via a love of ’90s indie rock, alt-country and slowcore (along with those genres’ original ’60s/’70s influences). The most current day analog is probably MJ Lenderman, and while Dutch Interior don’t deliver his level of quotable couplets (few do, let’s face it), songs are memorable, nicely impressionistic and full of dreamy atmosphere.
The most apt comparison, though, is probably Acetone, the cult ’90s group whose influence, the band say, “is all over our discography.” You really feel that influence on songs like “Canada,” “Wood Knot” and “Beekeeping” which float slow like a lazy river, but also in the harmonies and layered guitars on “Fourth Street” and “Sandcastle Molds” which both kick up some dust.
Noah Kurtz might write the most immediate songs here, but contributions from Conner Reeves, Jack Nugent, Davis Stuart and Shane Barton balance things out and allow everyone to bring their A-game.
The Australian group’s third LP is via ATO Records.I, for one, have never been opposed to the prospect of a noise-rock LP summed up by its creators as a “nihilistic death march,” but the first half of 2025 has surely made a record like “Chrome Dipped” a particularly welcomed sound for a broader demographic of ears. The melodically aggressive tones of Australia’s CIVIC feel geared toward this moment of tension and frustration both here in the States and abroad, with the band’s lyrics vaguely addressing themes that conveniently match up with the conspiracy wormholes we’ve lost distant relatives to over recent years and a growing sense of AI supremacy some of us may soon be losing our livelihoods to, as well.
The band mostly speaks in abstraction when discussing the 11 songs on “Chrome Dipped”, perhaps less as songwriters carefully guarding the true meanings of their work and more so due to the fact that the snarling vocals and wailing guitars behind them (to say nothing of the “disgusting” central riff on at least one of these tracks) do plenty of talking themselves. While their overarching sense of nihilism can be found in the lyrics if you’re searching for them, it’s hard to deny that the catharsis this mood permits provides more than a bit of the muscle behind each of these doomy post-punk cuts.
Melbourne garage punks Civic look a little different than on their last album, with a new drummer and one fewer guitarist. They sound a little different too. While the snarl of earlier records remains, “ChromeDipped’s” pace is comparatively subdued, relying on moodier sounds and textures to demonstrate their ferocity. The result is an engrossing display of rumbling rock’n’roll that calls to mind great Australian punk of the past while retaining its own identity.
They haven’t abandoned the aggression of previous records entirely — limbs will continue to flail when they play thrashier songs like ‘Poison’ and ‘Fragrant Rice’ live — but the evolved sound points to a new-found versatility that makes an already great band all the more compelling.
1. “The Fool”“The Fool” is about living in an illusion or lie that supports your own selfish narrative and lifestyle patterns. You think you’re sailing, but you’re actually drowning. [It’s] a nihilistic death march about dreamers and idiots. A jangly pagan punk song meant to provoke the senses. It recalls the story of the fool and what’s behind the thousand-yard stare.
2. “Chrome Dipped”A balancing act between human emotion in a world that’s hurtling toward complete reliance on the machine.
3. “Gulls Way”Paints a picture of a rose expelling its seeds to create offspring. The garden is grown only to be tainted by a freezing storm. Your world freezes over. A farewell song to loved ones.
4. “The Hogg” Finding peace and gratitude in being out of your depth in a foreign place. The song is about staring into the abyss and seeing nothing but its pure beauty. Surface-level pleasure with sinister undertones. A porcelain dancer draped in flesh, pirouetting to the infinite beat. ‘The Hogg’ is my reality. ‘The Hogg’ is my destiny.
5. “Starting All the Dogs Off” I’m painting a picture of this character on a mission to nowhere, that’s leaving a trail of destruction behind him, but can’t deny his human emotions getting in the way. There’s a love story in there, there’s loss, there’s all this life stuff getting in the way of his journey to emotional freedom. The ending is kind of this ultimate form—it’s like the final blow. It’s about giving into who you are, and coming to that realization.
6. “Trick Pony”Being stuck in the anxious brain. Fight-or-flight in full effect. The pinnacle of disaster.
7. “Amisuss” Serendipitous events around the loss of my mother. Noticing/experiencing her spirit in a non-tangent way. It was almost like watching the transformation of her leaving her physical body behind and becoming something that still resides in and around me.
8. “Poison” Ultimately a song about a relationship/friendship becoming toxic.
9. “Fragrant Rice” The change of hand in kinship and the fear around that becoming your reality. Humanity is the rice. We are all the same. We will all have loss.
10. “Kingdom Come”“Kingdom Come” is a ballad about people who live with longterm addiction and manage a life through a chaotic and turbulent existence. Somehow functional and always on the edge of collapse, but also wanting nothing else.
11. “Swing of the Noose” Finding freedom in nihilism and embracing the demise.
“Instant Holograms On Metal Film” is the first Stereolab album in 15 years, featuring 13 new studio recordings. There’s a sophistication to the band’s gentle, thoughtful, propulsive indie pop that extends beyond frontwoman Laetitia Sadier’s French coo. It’s in Andy Ramsay’s gentle but decisive snare taps, the texture of Tim Gane’s guitar, and the webs of vintage synths that scaffold each song.
Sometimes, like on ‘Aerial Troubles’, you get so engrossed in their groove it’s jarring when it ends. Thankfully, there’s always another uber-cool synthy jam to swallow you up.
There’s a certain sense of comfort in hearing that the first new album from Stereolab in 15 years contains much of what made their back catalogue so beloved and continuously rewarding: lush jazz-pop arrangements, twisty time signatures, splashes of Marxist politics, pop-art visual aesthetics, playfully dadaist song titles and a sense of melody that prevails in spite of or perhaps even because of their litany of avant garde influences.
It’s identifiably, unmistakably a Stereolab album, reacquainting us with the groop’s playfully cerebral aesthetic, always evolving but identifiably their own, whether drifting into dreamy ambience or firing up some “Electrified Teenybop!” “The sound of Instant Holograms on Metal Film” after so much, even arriving after all this time, is enough to make you believe no time had passed at all since they brought a close to their first act—the logic of the timeline of their choosing is the only one that matters.
Played by Laetitia Sadier, Tim Gane, Andy Ramsay, Joe Watson and Xavi Muñoz, with contributions from Cooper Crain and Rob Frye of Bitchin Bajas, Ben LaMar Gay (composer/jazz multi instrumentalist), Holger Zapf (Cavern of Anti Matter), Marie Merlet (Monade) and Molly Read among others. The group will be playing live throughout 2025, with shows in Europe, North America, South America and the UK. The album follows “Not Music” released in 2010; remastered and expanded reissues of seven of their albums in 2019; and volumes 4 and 5 in the Switched On series appearing in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
The Fat Angel Sings 