Multi Platinum singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Maeson leans into a season of change on his 2025 third full-length album, “A Quiet and Harmless Living”. The Nashville-based troubadour explores the trials, tribulations, turbulence, and triumphs of marriage, fatherhood, and life on the road and at home.
Much of the material originated in the middle of the night long after his young family fell asleep. From this intimate headspace, he threads the kind of questions we usually ask ourselves in private into the fabric of alternative anthems like the piano-driven lead single “Everlasting.”
The world met Matt when he dropped his 2019 debut “Bank on the Funeral” making history with signature Platinum singles “Cringe” and “Hallucinogenics” [feat. Lana Del Rey]. Beyond jaunts with Zach Bryan and more, he has sold out headline tours and built a devout audience. He opens up more than ever on “A Quiet and Harmless Living” and invites everyone to do the same.
A classic forty-minute set of inquisitive pop songs, blessed with a lightness of touch and a sharp focus that can’t help but charm the listener. Angel Deradoorian wants her process to feel immediate, but unlike the meditative and jammy “Find the Sun, Ready for Heaven” took time. The singer-songwriter started writing music for the record by herself in a really small, uninhabited town in upstate New York, but ended up reworking and editing it tirelessly across various stages. In their recorded form, the songs remain fluid and kinetic while carrying a blazing, prickly intensity all the way through. Even at its most despairing and subconscious, “Ready for Heaven” feels like a wake-up call.
It conjures up some last, faint afterglow of the old belief that an electronic, programmed beat can smash itself – and you – into another, more egalitarian consciousness It is a remarkable fact that this bold and open-hearted record is made by one person, working alone.
Repeatedly reworking the songs until they were complete is a painstaking process that generated an energy and space where Angel Deradoorian could indulge in the arcana of her artform.
“I love the production more than the songwriting. […] In fact, I don’t even feel like a songwriter at times, I feel like someone who is just inspired by so much music. And I want to try it all out! Like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Mingus, or ESG and Silver Apples, or making weird krautrock and industrial music. I love dub, and Sly and Robbie. I love the productions of those records and the collective energies released by their creators in the studio. It’s just a weird thing to do it by yourself!”
Angel Deradoorian, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known mononymously as Deradoorian, grew up in Orangevale, California. After leaving school to pursue a career in music when she was 16, she moved to Brooklyn and joined Dirty Projectors, appearing on their 2009 album “Bitte Orca”, which came out the same year she released her first solo EP, “Mind Raft”, produced by the band’s leader David Longstreth. Before releasing her debut album, “The Expanding Flower Planet”, in 2015, she guested on records by acts including U2, Flying Lotus, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, and Discovery, and followed it up with the ambient folk collection “Eternal Recurrence” in 2017.
Mirroring her spiritual journey, her next album, the meditative and jammy “Find the Sun“, saw her working with Samer Ghadry and Dave Harrington in New York. Between that album and her latest one, “Ready for Heaven”, Deradoorian teamed up with Russian musician Kate Shilonosova (aka Kate NV) to release “Ticket to Fame“, their first album as Decisive Pink, via Fire in 2023.
She developed, reworked, and tinkered tirelessly with the new songs, which in their recorded form remain fluid and kinetic while carrying a blazing, prickly intensity all the way through. Even at its most despairing and subconscious, “Ready for Heaven” feels like a wake-up call.
This stellar third solo album, which offers Downtown NYC dance grooves, Krautrock-tinged art-pop, Silver Apples-flavoured electro-psych, a solemn neo-baroque processional, post-punky collage spillage, diva soul synth-pop, and more. Giving this the clear edge over similar albums in the same zone is that Deradoorian recorded the whole shebang herself.
Hailing from Manchester, Autocamper formed with the goal of dodging the city’s tired rock clichés. Fronted by Jack Harkins and Niamh Purtill—who split vocal duties and bring a natural contrast in tone—the band also features Harry Williams on bass and Arthur Robinson on drums. Starting in DIY spaces and home-recording setups, they’ve taken a big step forward with their full-length debut, “What Do You Do All Day?“
The record ditches the band’s earlier lo-fi aesthetic but keeps all the charm. Built around small moments—shared flats, fading friendships, awkward confessions—these songs are handled with care. The Harkins-Purtill vocal interplay adds a conversational push-and-pull that gives each track its own vibe. The album feels personal without being self-indulgent, and breezy without ever sounding lightweight. It’s the kind of record that quietly sneaks into your daily rotation—and stays there.
Autocamper leans into jangly pop textures—clean, chiming guitars, soft keyboard touches, and melodic basslines—all supported by rhythm patterns that borrow from ’60s sunshine pop and ’80s indie’s undercurrent. Their arrangements are understated, letting melody and mood breathe naturally. There’s a looseness to the playing that keeps things feeling lived-in and spontaneous—like a friend making you a mix with hand-drawn liner notes.
What began in bedrooms now blooms in full colour. “What Do You Do All Day?” marks a shift toward something more expansive, thanks in part to producer Chris McCory at Green Door Studio. The songwriting is sharper, the instrumentation fuller, and the pacing more assured. They’ve clearly grown, but haven’t lost the spark that got them here—the result is a tighter, richer version of themselves.
Autocamper’s sound will strike a chord with anyone drawn to the melodic looseness of The Pastels or the conversational delivery of Beat Happening. There’s a clear kinship with The Vaselines and The Ocean Blue, where pop simplicity meets subtle emotional weight. If you’re into the off-kilter charm of The Feelies or the bright-eyed jangle of early Orange Juice, you’ll hear echoes here too. Their use of keys and soft textures occasionally recalls The Proper Ornaments, while deeper listeners might catch a shimmer of The Field Mice or even a wink at sunshine pop greats like The Millennium and The Left Banke. What ties it all together is Autocamper’s ability to blend sincerity with breezy pop instincts—without ever sounding like they’re trying too hard.
“Red Flowers” is a standout—a hushed, melancholic reflection on feeling like an extra in someone else’s story. Purtill’s vocal lead and the delicate flute line give it a beautifully somber air. “Proper” flips the mood entirely with a breezy, sing-along hook and a dash of vintage bubblegum joy. “Map Like a Leaf” slows things down, adding subtle textures courtesy of guest Tom Crossley, while “Dogsitting” highlights Purtill’s offbeat keys and quiet introspection with just the right amount of quirk.
Autocamper specializes in making the mundane feel meaningful. Their lyrics dig into minor emotional shifts—feeling out of place, overthinking a conversation, or holding onto fleeting joy—with a tone that’s conversational and unforced. Harkins and Purtill don’t try to over-explain; instead, they trust everyday phrasing to carry the weight, which makes the emotional punch land even harder.
“What Do You Do All Day?” doesn’t shout for attention—it earns it by being consistently thoughtful, tuneful, and quietly addictive. It captures the in-between spaces of life with warmth and honesty, all wrapped in melodies that stick without wearing out their welcome. Autocamper may be at the start of their story, but this debut shows they already know exactly who they are. If this is their first proper outing, we can’t wait to hear where they go next.
Out on Slumberland Records / Safe Suburban Home Records on the 11th July 2025
The Cords are a bright new indiepop band from Scotland. Comprising sisters Eva and Grace Tedeschi, they started playing drums when they were little kids. They found that they liked 80s and 90s indie music more than their peers did, and so formed a band, just the two of them, with Grace on drums and Eva on guitar – and the songs started to flow.
Their debut album out this year is a delight.‘Fabulist’ is a jangly hook-laden pop song that skips along with bittersweet melodies and brisk drumming, with echoes of The Shop Assistants, and The Primitives and the C86 era. It’s so upbeat and shiny with brisk drumming that you could miss the fact that it’s a wholehearted take-down of people who lie for a living.
With only a cassette and a flexi single released so far, both of which sold out in a matter of hours, The Cords (Eva and Grace Tedeschi) have honed their skills by playing a whole series of gigs with some of the biggest names in Scottish pop. Their first show was with The Vaselines, and since then they have played with Camera Obscura, Belle and Sebastian, BMX Bandits and others, while also sharing stages with the new generation of indiepop stars: the Umbrellas, Chime School, Lightheaded.
Like all great pop bands, The Cords have taken familiar ingredients and created something utterly fresh. Older indie fans may hear echoes of The Shop Assistants, The Primitives, Tiger Trap and Talulah Gosh, but they will hear something else too: a yearning, dreamy melodic power that takes the songs into darker, stranger places. Younger pop fans won’t care about these old reference points: what they will hear is the sound of two young women doing something utterly exciting: playing loud guitar and loud drums, taking analogue instruments and hitting them hard in the service of immediate and infectious pop tunes, and not giving a second thought about the digital world that wants to own everything we do. The Cords sound free: they remind us that pop music, played right, is expressive, liberating, joyful and deeply personal.
released September 26th, 2025
The Cords are Eva Tedeschi and Grace Tedeschi.
I love this! I think my favourites are “Just Don’t Know (How To Be You)”, “Vera”, “Yes It’s True”, and “WeirdFeeling”.
Militarie Gun frontman Ian Shelton has never really sounded all that hinged, but on “God Save the Gun”, he practically revels in his own depravity. “Put me in the trash,” he sings proudly on “Throw Me Away,” the pummelling drums and wallop of a chorus seemingly there to beat the singer black and blue. It’s the most prevalent theme of the band’s second proper studio album, one that’s intent on looking inward with a ferocity both playful and almost unbearably intense.
Nowhere is this more evident than on “God Owes Me Money,” a song which might soundcheeky but is, with its depiction of childhood abuse, downright brutal in its bare-metal vulnerability. “I’ve been drunk every day for a month, I learned from you and mom,” Shelton sings later on the surprisingly restrained “Daydream,” unafraid to assign blame even among all the self-flagellation. Even so, “God Save the Gun” is a genuinely ecstatic record, a pure stank face of infectious hooks, call-and-response vocals, and wiry riffage. Even its dourest moments find an almost rapturous form of release. Like the open-handed shaman of its cover, Militarie Gun imagines a world where even the death cult of The Gun might put together a few fun group meals and a movie night or two.
The title of Planting by the Signs comes from southern Appalachian folkways, a custom of orienting life cycles by the moon that S.G. Goodman grew up with in Western Kentucky and rediscovered in the Foxfire books. The record is a rumination on that ritual reconnection to nature, and what to do when ritual itself seems futile. Marked by the deaths of her mentor Mike Harmon and her beloved pet dog, as well as the reconciliation with her former collaborator Matthew Rowan, Goodman navigates grief and renewal in her lyrics—and, like in nature, these seeds grow in wild and sometimes surprising shapes.
There’s a stroke of righteous fury on lead single “Snapping Turtle,” but a wistful serenity permeates the Bonnie “Prince”Billy duet “Nature’s Child,” written by Asheville songwriter Tyler Ladd.
Woven through it all is a sense of community: as a balm, as a shelter, and as a fortifying force. When Goodman cries “I have seen the light” on “Michael Told Me,” she’s not preaching—she’s witnessing the redemptive power of our connection to each other.
Rather than expanding or polishing up her sound, Lucy Dacus’ Blake Mills-produced fourth LP charts an ongoing evolution by refining the subtleties and zoning into the minutiae of her song writing, whose reflections of love, fame, and trust now concern some of the very people helping to bring it to life. Save for ‘Limerence’, the album’s advance singles have mostly been bouncy and mid-tempo, but there’s an enticing tug-of-war between those songs and the deep cuts that pull back. “Forever” is about travelling long distances and trying to transcend them, about tasting forever in the throes of change, taking the gamble on love when you’re caught between fantasy and truth. It doesn’t always sound as big as the concepts Dacus invokes – God, Fate, Chance – but it’s in the stillest moments that you know exactly what she means, leaving you in a chokehold.
The indie-rock troubadour’s fourth album, “Forever Is a Feeling”, trades coming-of-age storytelling for adult-specific love songs, “I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon,” Lucy Dacus confesses in “Limerance,” one of the highlights from her fourth album “Forever Is a Feeling”. It’s a twisted supper-club piano ballad where she’s munching popcorn with friends who smoke weed and play Grand Theft Auto. But the Virginia indie-rock troubadour croons as if she’s living out a lush-life fantasy of Hollywood romance. When she delivers that line about breaking someone’s heart, she gives it a twist: “And if I do, I’ll be breaking mine too.” It’s startling to hear Dacus switch gears like that, in her warmly familiar voice — earnest, mournful, calm even when she’s tormented.
Dacus stretches out on “Forever Is a Feeling“, at a moment when she’s at her most high-profile. It’s her first album since she conquered the world with Boygenius, teaming up with two of the only indie peers anywhere near her level, Julian Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. “The Record” had three radically different singer-songwriters blending their voices to come up with new kinds of magic. Dacus’ “You’re in Love” was a brilliant heart-crippler on par with “Triple Dog Dare,” from her masterful 2021 musical memoir “Home Video”.
“Forever” takes a different approach, going for adult-specific love songs, rather than the coming-of-age and coming-out tales that made her name. These songs take place in the middle of long-running messy relationships — some desperately romantic, some just painful. “Best Guess” might be the most hopeful song she’s done yet, singing, “You’re my best guess at the future/If I were a gambling man, and I am/You’d be my best bet.” She gets vocal help from comrades like Bartees Strange and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, telling her inamorata, “You may not be angel, but you are my girl.”(Bridgers and Baker pitch in with back-up vocals elsewhere.)
When Dacus first arrived, she was a Southern indie kid with a shy voice, yet her own steely onstage charisma. It was a revelation to see her get up in a bar and sing her solo acoustic version of Bruce Springsteen’s“Dancing in the Dark,” turning it into the tale of an anxious queer teen in the sticks, hating what she sees in the mirror but gearing up her courage to go face the great big world. Her sophomore gem “Historian“, in 2018, stopped you dead in your tracks with “Night Shift,” turning a stupid coffee get-together with an ex into a seven-minute soliloquy of revenge and guilt.
On “Forever Is a Feeling“, she aims for more intimate drama. “If the devil’s in the details, then God is in the gap in your teeth,” she sings in “For Keeps.” In the jubilant title song, she takes a romantically charged road-trip over sped-up piano, recalling, “We were cherry-red in your forest-green 1993 Grand Cherokee.” It’s also a song about the emotional compromises that go with desire, as she sings, “You knew the scenic route/I knew the shortcut and shut my mouth/Isn’t that what love’s about?” But there’s a new sense of giddy release in her voice, especially when she asks, “My wrists are in your zip-tie, 25 to life—why not?”
“Bullseye” is a duet with Hozier, where she pines for a guitar-playing mailman. “I miss borrowing your books to read your names in the margins,” Hozier purrs to her harmonies. “The closest I got to reading your mind.” “Last Time” and “Big Deal” are more downbeat acoustic ballads. “Most Wanted” is the album’s only guitar rocker, and easily its most urgent track sonically, a Byrds-style rave where she’s on a mission “to catch the Most Wanted Man in West Tennessee.” It’s full of electric sexual tension, with her most breathless vocals, as she sings, “I feel your hand under the table at the fancy restaurant/Gripping on my inner thigh like if you don’t I’m gonna run/But I’m not going anywhere.”
Dacus does a lot of self-conscious playing with clichés on “Forever”, a trick that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, as in the dud “Come Out,” which uses over-the-top harp glissandi as a camp punchline.
But it works beautifully in “Ankles,” where she sings about libidinal frustration over staccato cellos, asking, “What if we don’t touch?/What if we only talk about what we want/And cannot have/And I’ll throw a fit?” The tension builds until it explodes in the chorus (“Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed”), with surprisingly poignant Eighties synth burbles. Near the end of the song, she muses, “How lucky we are to have so much to lose.” It could be a motto for Dacus looking back on her amazing first decade—and looking at the unlimited future ahead.
It’s a shame when everyone seems to talk around (not even about) one of the year’s best releases—and it certainly doesn’t help when the artist also shares what she’s deemed a “real” album in the same year, pulling the focus of more fair weathered fans away. Regardless of whether you first checked out Ethel Cain’s January “release” “Perverts” just to hear a supposed middle finger to a more mainstream fanbase and a label situation the artist wanted over and done with, it doesn’t take away from the fact that it remains Hayden Anhedönia’s most staggering full-length work to date.
Mining inspiration from the drone and ambient north stars she’s proudly cited as favourites since 2021’s “Preacher’s Daughter” first pulled her fully into the spotlight (if you’re a Grouper fan, this is likely high on your personal ranking for the year), “Perverts” is an atmospheric exercise, digging to the filthiest, most cryptic core of her sonic obsessions. The grinding whir of “Houseofpsychoticwomn” and bleating strings of “Pulldone” might have driven all the heated conversation for those less interested in Anhedönia’s more avant-garde tendencies, but there are moments of pure salvation (the climax of “Onanist” or the sparse beauty of closer “Amber Waves”) that could convert any skeptic, if they have the patience. Let them talk all they want. I’ll spend my time kneeling at “Perverts’ altar again and again.
Though its nine tracks are almost 90 minutes long, “Perverts” isn’t an actual album, according to its creator. Rather, this drone-inspired record that scared, confused, and put off a lot of Ethel Cain’s fans upon its release in January is an experimental sideshow that has nothing to do with her 2022 debut, “Preacher’s Daughter“, nor the two succeeding records that will complete that narrative trilogy. Except, of course, for the fact that Cain is behind it.
The project is a starkly haunting, harrowing, and challenging piece of music that transports the listener into a wholly unrecognizable world from that of “Preacher’s Daughter” as well as from the proper album “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You“, which was released later in the year.
Especially early on during the eerie, old-timey introduction of the opening title track and the periods of near-but-not-quite silence that follow over the song’s 12 minute run-time, it feels like you’re in the pitch black of a horror film or video game, such is the visceral sense of dread and unease that underlines this record. Yet there are (very necessary) moments of sublime and poignant beauty, too. It all makes for a demanding but immensely rewarding listen that marks Cain out as a truly incredible, iconoclastic talent.
Long time friends and collaborators Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten are back with a new album as Momma, which sounds straight out of the mid ’90s but takes place in the summer of 2022, when Momma were on their first-ever tour. More than just chronicling the breakups and new romances of that time period, their best songs shimmer with summer’s potential and immediacy, pairing easy harmonies with the punch of slacker rock. They also expand their sound into other cornerstones of that era, delivering shoegazey riffs on “Last Kiss” and hushed acoustic tenderness on “Take Me With You.”
“Welcome to My Blue Sky” is an album that’s easy to like, and even easier to imagine blasting on a road trip with your best friend sitting shotgun. The second full-length from Momma bottled up hot July days defined by cicada buzz, cheap booze, and go-nowhere rubber-burning. It sounded like a coming-of-age movie and a gonzo-style road trip while also transcending the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-the-’90s pitfall once and for all.
Built around the song writing core of Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, Momma came in hot with 2022’s breakout “Household Name“. And while their love of joyrides (so many lyrics about cars) and ’90s bubble grunge never waned, they did soften their focus on “Welcome to My Blue Sky”, creating a more insular album that resonated because of the dialogue between its two personalities. Friedman and Weingarten were likely the outcast kids scrawling lyrics in their notebooks at the back of their respective classrooms, finding each other wordlessly in the hallway between periods. And when they aren’t answering each other with words—inside jokes and knowingly kitschy sweet-nothings—their guitars finish each other’s sentences.
These riffs can flutter and waver like butterflies or slam you across the room á la Marty McFly with that jet-engine-sized amp. “Blue Sky” is always purposeful but never feels laboured-over, glossy but not airbrushed. It’s sometimes the stuff of movie scripts but also founded on shared experiences and connections that are totally real. I guess occasionally life is just that cinematic.
The riveting debut album from the young firestarters from Austin is the year’s most explosive new soundtrack for your local moshpit. The all-female quartet, all still in their early twenties, has mastered multiple hard-rock genres with attitude and skill—punk, grunge, metal, doom—and sounds both blissfully unhinged and utterly in command.
How good is the band Die Spitz? Well, the quartet was awarded Album of the Year by the Austin Music Awards last year… for an EP! The band, Ava Livingston, Chloe Andrews, Ellie Livingston, and Kate Halter, are one of, if not the best young live act in Texas right now, and their debut album, “Something to Consume”, all but confirms their place in the punk pantheon right now.
Released by Jack White’s Third Man label, “Something to Consume” opens with the crunch and growl of “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay)” as singer-guitarist Ava Schrobilgen roars in frustration and rage amid the crashing guitars: “All this tension / Everybody here can see / And did I mention / I need you to take care of me?” On “Throw Yourself to the Sword,” Schrobilgen’s childhood friend Eleanor Livingston rides a galloping metal riff, growling and grunting a warning: “Take what’s mine, then I take two times more.” Believe her. Meanwhile, “American Porn” is fully flowered ’90s grunge, with riffs thick enough for the Melvins. The group’s 34-minute debut statement.
There’s a great balance in the tracklist, as “Go Get Dressed”’ steady, gentle build turns into a thrashing, throbbing breakthrough on “Red40.” Every song pummels, but not every song blisters. Working with Will Yip, it’s clear that he was the best man for the job. “Something to Consume” tackles everything from hardcore to metal to grunge. “Riding With My Girls” is fantastic, and “American Porn” is a bad-bitch tome. “Punishers” carries Twilight inspirations, and the powerful “Voire Dire” sounds like a sign of our fucked-up times. There’s a trust percolating throughout the record, one brought on by four people who couldn’t imagine making music with anyone else. This is music that yells in all-caps.
The album captures the melody and chaos without unwarranted studio gloss. By the time “Something to Consume” reaches its brooding finale, this restless gang of rockers are still just getting started and have already raised the bar.
The Fat Angel Sings 