“Different Talking”, the sixth and, so far, best album by NYC indie-rock four-piece Frankie Cosmos, seems to exist across time and space, as we all kind of do. It’s a collection of fragments and memories, remembered places, and reinterpreted feelings that adds up to a lucent, humming whole: a sturdy, worldly indie-rock record about aging and the passage of time that nonetheless manages to feel sharply current. Frankie Cosmos’ lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Greta Kline has long been heralded as one of contemporary indie music’s most deft and most necessary writers, but on “Different Talking“, her lyrics soften out slightly, the wry cynicism that defined recent records now giving way to an acknowledgment of the awesome, and necessary, fallibility of the human brain and heart.
To classify “Different Talking” as a return to form, or at least a return to the lush directness of earlier Frankie Cosmos records, would be rude but also wholly incorrect: as “Different Talking” makes clear, you can never return to the comfort and bravery of your early twenties, but that person always kind of lives inside you, no matter how much you change.
“Different Talking” is about finding that person, honouring them, and learning from them. “A lot of the album is about being grown up and figuring out how to know yourself – like, ‘What is moving on?’” says Kline. “How do we move on when we’re addicted to a cycle of haunting our own past? Writing songs is just the way through that.”
From the upcoming album ‘Different Talking’, out June 27th on Sub Pop Records.
2CD / Blu-Ray video release of this special concert staged at the Roundhouse in London on 21st January 2007 to celebrate the life and music of Traffic co-founder and acclaimed solo artist Jim Capaldi. Aside from his work with Steve Winwood and Chris Wood in Traffic, (a band inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2004), Jim also worked with many other artists and was a successful solo performer in his own right.
A wonderful house band was joined by a stellar line-up of musicians to perform their favourite Traffic and Jim Capaldi songs including Steve Winwood, Paul Weller, Pete Townshend, Joe Walsh, Yusef / Cat Stevens, Gary Moore, Bill Wyman, Jon Lord, Dennis Locorriere, Simon Kirke and many others who performed to a full house.
Originally issued in 2007, this new Esoteric Recordings edition gathers together the concert recordings on two CDs and a multi-region Blu-ray video of the concert film, issued in this format for the first time, in a clam shell box set.
‘Dear Mr Fantasy – A Celebration for Jim Capaldi’ is the ultimate document of this wonderful night of music.
Pink Floyd have released their performance of “One Of These Days” from their 1972 Pompeii concert film, which arrives in cinemas in a fully restored format on April 24th. Retitled Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII, it’s been digitally remastered in 4K from the original 35mm footage. With enhanced audio by Steven Wilson, it’s described as the definitive version of the production.
“The film documents what Pink Floyd did before they became giants of the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic,” producers say. “Set in the hauntingly beautiful ruins of the ancient Roman Amphitheatre in Pompeii, Italy, this unique and immersive film captures Pink Floyd performing an intimate concert without an audience.
“It features the vital “Echoes”, “A Saucerful of Secrets” and “One Of These Days”. The breathtaking visuals of the amphitheatre, captured both day and night, amplify the magic of the performance. Additionally, the film includes rare behind-the-scenes footage of the band beginning work on “The Dark Side of the Moon” at Abbey Road Studios.”
Wilson comments: “Ever since my dad brainwashed me as a kid by playing “The Dark Side of the Moon” on repeat, Pink Floyd has been my favourite band. I first saw “Pompeii” from a grainy print at a local cinema. It made an incredible impression on me with its untethered and exploratory rock music made by four musicians that seemed to epitomise the notion of intellectual cool.
“It was an honour to remix the soundtrack to accompany Lana Topham’s incredible restoration of the film, which looks like it could have been filmed yesterday.”
The “grungegaze” pioneers entirely meet the moment on their first album in 10 years. The Doylestown Pennsylvania band once known as Daylight officially stepped away in 2016, after touring their album, “Ours is Chrome“, saying they wanted to pursue “things in our own personal lives.” For instance, bassist Joe Kane has been working as a carpenter since the break. But the band still popped up for one-offs here and there, to say nothing of co-guitarist/vocalists Taylor Madison and Jake Clarke starting the still-active offshoot Webbed Wing together. But now, Superheaven are really back, with an eponymousalbum like the rockers are who they’ve always been on their first studio album in a decade.
In the decade since Superheaven last released an album, they’ve become massively influential and bigger than ever. Their mix of post-hardcore, grunge, and shoegaze paved the way for what’s now often called “grungegaze,” and the TikTok-driven success of their especially shoegazy 2013 deep cut “Youngest Daughter” helped bring in a whole new generation of Superheaven fans.
With their self-titled comeback album, they totally meet the moment with an album that picks up where they left off and fits right in with the current scene of punk-informed, guitar-based, underground rock music that Superheaven themselves helped pave the way for.
Sometimes there’s a reverence among musicians that doesn’t always translate to press cycles or playlists. It’s quieter, more instinctive more about a kind of shared fluency. That’s what comes through on Snail Mail’s new cover of “Two Legs,” a song by This Is Lorelei’s Nate Amos. The original version is twitchy, endearing, and faintly self-sabotaging: part electro-folk, part mid-2000s college-radio static, like a folk song filtered through a broken laptop fan. Snail Mail (Lindsey Jordan), leans into the song’s nervous system. She’s always had a gift for sounding slightly inconvenienced by her own emotions, and on “Two Legs” she turns that skill into something closer to alchemy. Her voice—cool, precise, and just a little bruised around the edges—slips into the song like it’s always lived there.
She pulls the melody into focus without sanding down its strangeness, a sort of reverse-remastering that retains the feel of the original while adding Jordan’s own personality to the mix. Amos has said that Jordan was the first person he thought of when the idea of a deluxe edition came up, and you can hear why. They’re operating on similar frequencies: allergic to over-polish, fluent in the performance of awkwardness, and devastating when they decide to commit to a melody—and commit they do
Sunflower Bean is gearing up to release their new album “Primetime” due this Friday, and ahead of it, they’ve put out the best single of this cycle so far: “There’s a Part I Can’t Get Back.” it’s a bright pop song with gut-punching, heart-breaking lyrics. On this track, Julia Cumming opens up about the lingering trauma of being groomed at a young age. Sometimes, the best revenge is making sure those who’ve hurt you can’t escape their actions—in this case, it’s by way of an ultra-catchy chorus: “There’s a part I can’t get back / You stole it from me / There’s a bag I can’t unpack / It’s always with me / If I die before I wake I pray the Lord lets me get even first / I do, I do.”
The band’s move from New York City to Los Angeles seems to have left its mark in the making of this track, too, as Cumming’s vocal delivery and melodic flourishes echo California icon Jenny Lewis.
From a career in advertising to editing fiction for The New Yorker to founding the beloved indie-rock group the National, Matt Berninger has never been rooted in a single notion of identity, something that was surely only exacerbated after being launched into the role of a lifetime: critically acclaimed rock star.
Now, on the second single from his upcoming solo album “Get Sunk”“Breaking Into Acting,” following the phenomenal, more rollicking “Bonnet of Pins”.
A strangely tender, quietly devastating duet about the artifice of feeling. It’s not a dramatic song, but it is full of drama Matt Berninger has teamed up with Meg Duffy, aka Hand Habits, for his new single ‘Breaking Into Acting’.
Lifted from the National frontman’s forthcoming album “Get Sunk”, the acoustic track gently confronts performativity as the pair sing, “Your mouth is always full of blood packets/ You’re breaking into acting/ I completely understand.” Berninger had this to say about it: “Sometimes you have to fake forgiveness before you can actually forgive.”
Check out the song’s Hopper Mills-directed video .
“Get Sunk” is set to arrive on May 30th. It was led by ‘Bonnet of Pins’,
If anyone can find the silver lining in moments of despair through her songwriting, it’s Lana Del Rey. Following last week’s release of “Henry, come on”—the lead single from her forthcoming, still-untitled country album (which has already undergone two title changes “Lasso” and “The Right Person Will Stay” still to be decided ) Lana Del Rey has gifted us another excellent track. While “Henry, come on” leaned into classic Lana territory with a country twist, featuring a confrontation with a former lover, nods to blue jeans, and her trademark wistful coos “Bluebird” allows her voice to take the spotlight. Set against a tender, acoustic guitar-led melody, accented with harmonica, piano, and soaring synths, Del Rey pleads with the titular bird not to share her fate, urging it to “fly away for the both of us.”
Much of Del Rey’s best songwriting is rooted in her real experiences, leaving fans breadcrumbs of her elusive personal life. “Bluebird” is no exception. On the day of the song’s release, she revealed on Instagram that she had written it “a long time ago,” inspired by a fateful moment. She was getting ready to reconnect with an old flame when a bird crashed into her bedroom window. To her, it was a sign—one that urged her to break free from the toxic cycle of that doomed romance.
In May 2025, Lana Del Rey will release her 10th studio album “The Right Person Will Stay”, confirmed back in November alongside the announcement of her UK & Ireland Stadium Tour. Originally called “Lasso” when Del Rey first mentioned the plans for a new album in September 2024, the album will be a country record influenced by her earlier songs “Ride” and “Video Games”, and her covers of “StandBy Your Man” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads”.
This change of genres indicate an entirely new direction for Lana Del Rey, who has previously been labelled an alt-pop artist. However, she hedged that the sound of the album will not be a “heavy departure” from her previous albums, but would be a “classic country, American, or Southern Gothic production”.
Tickets for her stadium tour in 2025 are currently sold out,
David Thomas, who fronted the boundary-pushing rock band Pere Ubu from the late 1970s forward, died on Wednesday at age 71. The news was announced on the group’s Facebook page, where the cause of death was only given as the result of “a long illness.”The US musician became a major influence on post-punk and alt-rock scenes thanks to his spirited, chaotic style,
A statement on Pere Ubu’s Facebook page said that he died “in his home town of Brighton & Hove, with his wife and youngest step-daughter by his side. MC5 were playing on the radio.” The statement continues: “He will ultimately be returned to his [family] home, the farm in Pennsylvania, where he insisted he was to be ‘thrown in the barn’ … We’ll leave you with his own words, which sums up who he was better than we can: ‘My name is David Fucking Thomas… and I’m the lead singer of the best fucking rock and roll band in the world.’”
That band were indeed a force to be reckoned with, channelling the raucous, raw energy of garage rock into adventurous songwriting decked out with saxophones, funky bass and Thomas’s spirited exclamations. With a post-punk spirit even before punk had properly got going, Pere Ubu were a big influence on the alt-rock that emerged in the 1980s including bands such as Pixies.
Born in Miami and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Thomas formed his first band Rocket From the Tombs in 1974, a Cleveland based group that was considered influential in proto-punk circles even though they split up before ever recording an album. The band who despite some notoriously energised live shows couldn’t find a record deal and never put out studio material. Thomas later said he was dismayed by the band’s desire to play cover versions, and “knew that Rocket From the Tombs was dead”.
His band Rocket From the Tombs had just been commemorated on Record Store Day this year with a 50th anniversary edition of a collection of rehearsal and live tracks from the band, which also included members who would go on to form the Dead Boys. A sticker on the LP included a quote from the Guardian that called Rocket From the Tombs “the most self-destructive group ever to smash a six-string.”
Thomas then formed Pere Ubu, taking their name from a character in a play by absurdist French writer Alfred Jarry. “It was a name that wouldn’t mean anything to 95% of an audience,” he later said. “I wanted to create a band that Herman Melville, William Faulkner or Raymond Chandler would have wanted to be in.”
Debut single “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” was released in 1975, and the band impressed an A&R at MercuryRecords, which created a whole new imprint for their 1978 debut album “The Modern Dance”. Described as “harsh and wilfully ugly” in Rolling Stone, it contained superb vocal performances from Thomas, such as the exhilarating rant of Life Stinks, and while it wasn’t a commercial success it chimed with a growing post-punk movement.
The band broke up briefly in 1979, then for a longer period after fifth album “Song of the Bailing Man”. Thomas put out a series of records away from the group, with backing bands such as the Pedestrians and the Wooden Birds, Thomas had began crafting his own, equally abstract but often beautifully melodic solo albums with the help of guitar wizard Richard Thompson, under the name David Thomas & the Pedestrians, with albums such as 1981’s “The Sound of the Sand & Other Songs of the Pedestrian” and 1983’s “Variations on a Theme.” before Pere Ubu reformed in 1987. This was the beginning of the band’s most commercially successful phase, with a major label behind them, prompting minor MTV hits such as “Waiting For Mary”, and appearances on British TV.
When Thomas reformed Pere Ubu to record 1988’s “The Tenement Year,” it was a softer-edged, even poppier Ubu that appeared, one that carried on as such through 1989’s “Cloudland,” the synth-filled “Worlds in Collision” from 1991, and 1993’s “Story of My Life,” an album that was followed by the departure of longtime bassist Tony Maimone and founding drummer Scott Krauss.
They released 14 albums in the following years, with Thomas the sole founder member leading a changing line-up of more than 20 musicians. “If I called up 20 of the 21 tomorrow they’d come back. They love to work with me,” Thomas said in 2022.
Thomas also had intriguing side projects, such as an appearance in Rogue’s Gallery, a star-studded concert series performing pirate songs (he also performed “What Will We Do With a Drunken Sailor” on a 2006 album that also featured Sting, Lou Reed and Nick Cave) and a 2002 West End production of “junk opera” Shockheaded Peter.
He later lived with kidney disease. The Facebook post announcing his death stated Thomas had been recording an album that “he knew was to be his last”. The album will be completed after his death, along with an autobiography and an archival project of live concerts.
We will endeavor to continue with mixing and finalizing the new album so that his last music is available to all. Aside from that, he left instruction that the work should continue to catalog all the tapes from live shows via the official Bandcamp page. His autobiography was nearly completed and we will finish that for him. Pere Ubu’s Patreon will continue as a community, run by communex.”
This is a new limited edition 10” single from Brian Jonestown Massacre, the bands first new recordings for 2 years.
Side A includes “Makes Me Great Again“, a whimsical song rooted heavily in Psychedelic Folk Rock – the way Anton Newcombe does it best. Side B offers the up-tempo “Out Of Body”, a joyous plunge into an experimental shoegaze ode to the 60s, with multiple experiments conducted on an array of instruments. The art work is a photo taken by the talented Francis Delacroix, part of a series of photos of Anton Newcombe taken by the artist.
One More Thing: i wish people wouldn’t comment to me about how much they like a song, but rather re-post it on social media. that’s what helps the group survive and thrive and reach new listeners… thanks again,
The Fat Angel Sings 