Samia’s third album was an astonishing step up, a vehicle to explore the idea of selfhood and how the world shapes us even without us realising. It would be easy for a weighty subject like that to drag a record down, but in Samia’s hands, it became warm and rich, each song an engrossing vignette.
Samia’s third album was an astonishing step up, a vehicle to explore the idea of selfhood and how the world shapes us even without us realising. It would be easy for a weighty subject like that to drag a record down, but in Samia’s hands, it became warm and rich, each song an engrossing vignette.
When we excise parts of ourselves to appeal to a friend or lover, is that process something like cattle mutilation, gory but “bloodless?” Samia reckons with this weighty concern on her third album, which is also her most varied, ambitious, and appealing release yet. After the pop-forward “Honey“, she broadened her sonic palette on “Bloodless”, which reaches from gentle folk to almost post-rock heaviness – and in the case of “Carousel,” both in the same track.
These are songs that stick with you, from their ear-worm melodies to their vivid lyrics, with references to Diet Dr. Pepper, a Nikon Coolpix camera, and a pair of Levi’s drawing you ever further into Samia’s world. She went viral on TikTok this year with her plaintive lyrics and delivery on “Pool,” the opening track of her 2020 debut, “The Baby”, and since then she’s only become more adept at evoking emotion.
Bog people and talking dogs with dental problems, a wellness shaman and meth-smoking miscreants: Viagra Boys’ fourth LP might have a nightmare-fuel cast, but it also has eclectic, exciting art-punk hooks coming out of every orifice.
That single point of light and a knowing smile is a common thread with Viagra Boys, who, despite taking a more punk-based approach to their singular endeavour, sound pin-sharp and laser focused on their goal, whatever that happens to be. What they have to say may be veiled in allegory and buried beneath sarcasm and piss-taking, but it still isn’t that difficult to find. Unremarkable men in tracksuits they may be, but on this album, there’s more funk than a cowshed’s guttering and enough great titles alone to earn them kudos. After all, unless it’s related to the chorus, the thought a band puts into titling a song may tell you a lot.
This theory starts us off neatly at “Man Made Of Meat“, a dissection of masculinity and its various social standings, as singer Sebastian Murphy consistently puts himself in the first-person narrative, the firing line where no artist is allowed to be with irony. This sounds not dissimilar to that other well-known Swedish punk band, The Hives, though they are a more linear, obvious outfit. Spiked, aggressive riffs, short and staccato, characterise the beginning of this record, sonically bass heavy and occasionally reminiscent of LCD Soundsystem, it is a great opening track, surly, snarly and danceable, and an outstanding video, that via Tony Hancock’s The Rebel, layers another meaning on top, in case of dissemination.
“The Bog Body” may be a short essay on beauty standards, or it may be completely literal, but importantly, it does feature a full verse on the difference between a swamp and a bog, so it’s at least educational. Resolutely old school musically, it’s beautifully bass-heavy and from the Pistols/Dead Boys/Damned school of acceleration and also has a brilliant and pointed video worth watching for the genuine unsettling strangeness of the Bog Lady alone. “Uno II” is, for all intents and purposes, an ‘80s pop-rock chart hit, a la The Bangles or The Cars and sounds great for it, a tale of Xenophobia and self-obsession that will hopefully find its way to Classic Rock radio without notice.
Like the Amyl And The Sniffers album, there’s a lot going on here, under the surface, but you’re not obliged to take that dive, even if you should. Ultimately, the surface sounds great too, and all culture meant as art has other meanings. “Pyramid Of Health” has the arrangement of ‘90s pop-grunge classics, the Husker Du/Pixies motif and it is employed to excellent effect over lyrics reflecting the selling out of the hippie dream, or possibly a real-time witnessing of the Mescal worm. There are mentions of bodily health in this and “Uno II“, perhaps an underlying concern after so much touring.
“Dirty Boyz” is a discofied arse shaker with a Scissor Sisters swagger and enough sass to silence Tik-Tok, in a sane world it would be a huge hit song or become culturally significant after some obscure remix finds it used at every sports event, but that is for the future to decide, it will put a smile on your face regardless. “Medicine For Horses”, if you forget the deeply wonderful lyrics, sounds similar to early Go-Betweens, with that same world-weary longing and broken desire, but there doesn’t appear to be any songs written by McLennan or Forster about having the freedom to be kicked to death by horses. The whole lyric deserves to be singled out as immaculate poetry, but ..” I need your credit card; I need to pay a guy to get my pineal gland re-calcified..” is next-level brilliance.
There’s a level of uncapitalised genius at work, as the running means you don’t notice the cross-genre perfection at work. Same with the aesthetic, the exaggerated postmodernism, it all just works.
“Waterboy” is a great example of the band’s ability to inhabit the characters they sing about from that first-person perspective, while the mix of keyboard and guitar riff makes a sound like a beefed-up Elastica, and more health concerns played out as personality traits. “Store Policy“, meanwhile, is possibly about the gentrification of our neighbourhoods by pony-tailed men and their floral-dressed wives, buying up cheap housing stock for profit with a smile, but it is definitely a cracking, post-acid-house chemical boogie, another almost industrial swipe of excellence in a long line. “You N33d Me” is a dancefloor-packing monster about Toxic Masculinity, or loneliness, or both.
“Best In Show pt.IV” hinges on yet another monumental bass line, handclaps, but no actual drums, that still move majestically, while musing on the vagaries of organised religion. It moves almost unnoticed into a Stooges LA Blues type saxophone breakdown of unexpected but welcome magnificence, skronking all the way to church.
The final song “River King” appears to be a heartfelt love song, a piano-led thing about the ease of love and Chinese food, It is an interesting way to end the album. “Fully Robot Rock” compatible, an inspired collision of Mark E Smith, James Murphy and Jello Biafra, this collection of unreconstructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed punk-funk wonder is as good as modernism gets.
An Irish folk super-trio comprising Landless’s Ruth Clinton, Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada and their live drummer John Dermody, Poor Creature diverted from the intensity of their other groups to make one of 2025’s most surprising, haunting and gently poppy debuts. The title track and “Adieu Lovely Erin” spring off digital rhythms to sound like Broadcast entering the whirlpools of folk, while in “Willie-O” and Irish love song “AnDraighneán Donn (The Blackthorn Tree)”, they build up delightful, dream-like layers of texture. Fiddles and guitars mix with theremin, mid-century organs and modern-day synthesisers to create an intriguing new palette for the genre.
The latest gorgeous release from the fecund Irish folk scene doesn’t begin with bassy dread in the Lankum mode, but a mood of gentle, haunting psychedelia. “Adieu Lovely Erin” starts by evoking Broadcast swirling around a maypole; then it’s as if Cocteau Twins had been transported to a traditional music session. Its sweet, high female vocals also evoke the improvisations of sean-nós singing, while simmering, krautrock-like drums build drama.
Poor Creature comprises three musicians expert in heightening and managing atmosphere: Landless’s Ruth Clinton, Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada plus live Lankum drummer John Dermody. Their debut album steeps cowboy songs, Irish ballads, bluegrass and other traditional songs in a misty, playful lightness that somehow also carries an eerie power. “Bury Me Not” is a 19th-century American song about a dying sailor desperate not to be buried at sea, and Clinton delivers its lamenting lyrics with a bright, shining innocence. MacDiarmada leads “Lorene“, a rolling, country ballad by Alabama duo the Louvin Brothers, with a similarly soft, brooding magic. Singing as a boy desperate for a letter from his beloved, despite clearly knowing he’s being ghosted, the song’s melancholy slowly rises as voice and guitar mesh together.
Cate Le Bon’s seventh album “Michelangelo Dying” is a luminous exorcism of love, loss, and solitude, her most vulnerable work to date. Produced and performed largely by Le Bon herself, it expands on the otherworldly textures of “Reward” and “Pompeii“, weaving guitars, saxophones, and ghostly vocals into an iridescent song cycle. At once intimate and alien, the record captures what it means to grieve, to reach for connection, and to ultimately meet yourself.
Cate Le Bon is releasing a new album, “Michelangelo Dying”, on September 26th via Mexican Summer. This week she shared its second single, “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?,” via a music video. Fellow Welsh musician H. Hawkline directed the video.
Le Bon previously shared “Michelangelo Dying’s” lead single “Heaven Is No Feeling.”“MichelangeloDying” is Le Bon’s seventh full-length and the follow-up to “Pompeii”, which was chosen among ther Top 100 Albums of 2022 list.
Le Bon produced “Michelangelo Dying” with collaborator Samur Khouja.
Le Bon, who has worked as a producer with St. Vincent, Wilco, and others, said in a previous press release: “There’s this idea that you could do everything yourself, but the value of having someone you completely trust, as I do Samur, be your co-pilot allows you to get completely lost knowing you’ll get pulled back in at the right moment. We have come to quietly move as one in the studio.”
Cate Le Bon is releasing a new album, “Michelangelo Dying“, on September 26th via Mexican Summer.
The band behind the fuzz are ready to rise, too: they’ve already warmed stages in the UK for their pumpkin-smashing forbears and signed to taste-making label Transgressive, all before the release of their debut album. Relatively speaking, it’s taken Rocket a hot minute to deliver “R is for Rocket”. After all, it was in high school that Alithea Tuttle and Cooper Ladomade added Baron Rinzler and Desi Scaglione to their in-crowd to become a quartet. (Tuttle and Scaglione have been dating since this time, too.)
As of 2021, the four had officially become Rocket the band. And now, in their twenties, it seems the band is mastering the art of growing together with patience. All this to say: “R is for Rocket” is a fantastically confident and truly complete debut. It’s not perfect, but there’s nothing missing either. We’ve had bands in this genre space start hesitant and bedroom-y before tip-toeing into bolder self-actualization, like Snail Mail or Momma or Cryogeyser—and maybe some of that endearingly DIY uncertainty would have been nice to see from Rocket. But if they ever reckoned with that awkward growing stage, it was never publicized. Instead, to make their debut album, they strutted into not one but two of rock music’s sought-after studios: 64 Sound and the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606, utilizing the latter’s thunderstorm drum sound and the former’s storehouse of vintage gear.
But rather than call in John Congleton or Chris Walla—or any of the go-to producers behind the big indie-rock statement albums of the last decade—to shepherd this process, Scaglione opted to wrangle the consoles. He made “R is for Rocket” sound big. His and Rinzler’s guitars whip up a hurricane, leaving only Tuttle’s bass to cling to. Their big pedalboard and bigger amps wail to the high heavens, reaching their extremes on “Wide Awake,” a track that’s less about the notes they’re playing than the mad-scientist way they go all Lee and Thurston with it.
There’s not a thesis statement to the Dove Ellis album “Blizzard“, but the more I listened, the more I returned to that same sentiment, albeit from multiple angles. Naturally, it resonates across the record—within individual songs “Little Left Hope,” “Love Is,” “Heaven Has No Wings,” “It Is A Blizzard,” and so on) and as a subtle connective tissue across the arc of the album.
Even sonically, It’s littered with instrumental creaks and scrapes that sound almost accidental—an off-beat brush of a stick against a drum, a faint blurted shriek from a reed, a barely-there tick of a metronome. You feel as if you’re in the room during the recording the cracks of Dove Ellis’ made-for-indie-folk voice ringing in your ears. The production is kept light and dry, adding an immediacy to the deceptively dense arrangements: percussion from Matthew Deakin and Jake Brown grounds the restless tempo while Reuben Haycocks and Louis Campbell’s guitar fleshes out the rest of the sonic foundation. Lili Holland-Fricke’s cello, Saya Barbaglia’s strings, and Fred Donlon-Mansbridge’s reeds, on the other hand, flutter around the edges, feeling almost like characters themselves.
Yet the emotional depth of the album rarely inhibits Ellis’ apparent ability to churn out radio-ready hooks. His voice, meanwhile, remains the centerpiece—a flexible instrument that winds through octaves and moods with disarming warmth. To be blunt, he’s been blessed (or cursed) with what might be ideal of a white male indie-folk-rock voice.
Every breath seems to conjure a reference: namely, a Jeff Buckley cry, or perhaps a Thom Yorke murmur, or maybe a Cameron Winter vibrato. I even heard Will Toledo in there somewhere (the refrain in “Love Is” calls to mind Teens of Denial-era Car Seat Headrest), as well as Andrew Bird (the whole of “Jaundice” and, for a split second, Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart (the eerie near-whisper at the end of “To The Sandals”. Crucially, though, it never feels derivative. Where many peers echo past voices to trade on nostalgia, Ellis uses those echoes as scaffolding for his own tonal world.
Like her inspiration, benefactor, and collaborator Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams has enmeshed herself within the Eaux Claires extended universe. Abrams, the hit-making folk-pop singer-songwriter, is multiple albums deep into a recording relationship with the National’s Aaron Dessner, a big-deal indie producer who became a big-deal pop producer when Swift recruited him to produce her 2020 album “Folklore“. Dessner worked on Abrams’ 2021 EP “This Is What It Feels Like” and was the main credited producer on both of her full-lengths, 2023’s “Good Riddance” and 2024’s “The Secret Of Us“.
Dessner has worked closely with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon for many years. He welcomed Vernon into the fold for those Taylor Swift albums during the pandemic. Before that, Dessner and Vernon co-founded the Eaux Claires music festival in Vernon’s Wisconsin home turf, which is about to return next summer for the first time since 2018. Even earlier, they formed the band Big Red Machine for a song on the scene-defining 2009 compilation “Dark Was The Night”. Big Red Machine became more of a going concern a decade later, releasing a pair of fantastic albums in 2018 and 2021. The latter, “How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?”, featured Swift on two tracks.
Now there’s a Gracie Abrams song that features both founding members of Big Red Machine. “Sold Out,” a new track out today, is billed as a collaboration with Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner. Written after a school shooting last year, it’s a benefit for the gun safety organization Everytown. As such, it’s not available to stream, only to purchase.
The artists shared this statement:
We made this song last year in the wake of a school shooting. I was reminded of it this week as our hearts were broken yet again. It’s a sad one to share during the holidays, but the world is hurting and we shouldn’t look away. We are proud to support Everytown, an organization dedicated to ending gun violence in America. We are releasing this song to raise awareness of their mission of reducing gun violence. Please visit their website for more information on the unbelievable work they do. http://www.everytown.org
Since, releasing his fourth studio album “Idols”, aspiring rock god Yungblud has had a nice streak of wins predecessors aside — in the name of rock ‘n’ roll, including an Aerosmith collab and a few Grammy nominations. One of those nominations is Best Rock Song for the ballad “Zombie.”Yungblud breathes new life into the nominated track, while also crossing off another name on his list of idol collabs. He’s released a new version of “Zombie” featuring the Smashing Pumpkins.
The British rocker revealed that he was “channelling “Siamese Dream” while making “Zombie.” He shared: “It was really the sadness and the melancholic emotion mixed with the aggression of Billy’s fucking guitars … Billy, as a songwriter, was really at the forefront of my inspiration when I was making this album. When ‘Zombie’ came along, I knew I wanted to do a new version if it.”
“I called Billy and I was like, ‘Billy, please help me scratch this itch. I want this record to dig in harder.’ There still needs to be an almost Jekyll and Hyde element, there needs to be the version that’s full of light and full of life and optimism, but then there needs to be this dark version that is pessimistic and a little bit bitter and a bit aggressive.”
“Trying Not to Have a Thought” isn’t just the first Algernon Cadwallader album since 2011’s “Parrot Flies”. It’s also the first with their original line up—vocalist-bassist Peter Helmis, guitarists Joe Reinhart and Colin Mahony, and drummer Nick Tazza—since Algernon’s seminal 2008 debut, “Some Kind of Cadwallader”. Shortly after that album was recorded—and long before it was heralded as a lodestar for the 2010s “emo revival”—Tazza and Mahony departed the band. Despite their looming influence on the aforementioned “revival,” Algernon broke up in 2012 following the release of “Parrot Flies” and remained stubbornly deceased until their fiendishly anticipated resurrection in 2022.
“I almost see it as fate that it boiled us down to this core, our original form,” Helmis says. “There’s a certain magic to that that couldn’t really be replicated.”
There was no expectation that the reunion tour would precipitate new music. However, as the band began rehearsing their classic songs, new ideas started leaking out in the form of off-the-cuff jams, and the seeds of “Trying Not to Have a Thought” began to germinate. Reinhart was pleasantly surprised that, even after 17 years of not playing together under the Algernon umbrella, the foursome’s foundational musical chemistry was still surging.
“I’m kind of hearing in my head what this person’s already doing,” Reinhart says, recalling the intuitive flow of those improvisational jams.
“Trying Not to Have a Thought” is simultaneously the most considered and off-the-cuff Algernon Cadwallader album yet. The 11-song classic was written across two rural retreats on either side of the country, first in Snoqualmie, Washington (mythically known as Twin Peaks), and then in the Poconos in the woods of Pennsylvania. After an initial session at Pachyderm Studios in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, the collection was largely recorded and self-produced at Reinhart’s Headroom Studios in Philadelphia. Whereas some reunion records sound stilted and forced, this record sounds resplendently natural: the production warm and lively, the musicianship congenial yet exacting, and the hooks effortlessly sticky. Fans who’ve been listening to Algernon since their 2005 formation will be fondly reminded of the band’s familiar ring, but the album feels distinctly uncoupled from any of the ephemeral trends that Algernon were previously filed under. Their musical touchpoints remain unchanged—“Joan of Arc and Pavement in a blender is where we end up sitting,” Reinhart says with a smile—but the band sounds more comfortably singular than ever before.
Algernon Cadwallader are certainly cognizant of their cult legacy, a status that’s transformed their fanbase into a unique convergence of graying punk lifers and fresh-faced teens who first discovered “midwest emo” on TikTok. Given the long gap between albums and the critical acclaim they’ve garnered in that time, it would’ve been understandable for the guys to feel pressured to live up to their own standards while making this new record. Thankfully, the opposite was the case.
“If anything, I think [our legacy] made us feel like we had more freedom to be ourselves and let it come out naturally,“ Helmis says. Reinhart doubles down on their creative autonomy: “The only thing we ever try to do is entertain ourselves. Do we like this? Good. No? Let’s try harder.”
“Trying Not to Have a Thought” differs most from previous Algernon records in its lyrical content. On their first two albums, Helmis avoided heart-on-sleeve emo tropes by penning prose that was ambiguous and out there. For this batch of songs, Helmis felt compelled to be a little more thematically explicit, pointedly exploring the tension between the necessity of self-improvement and the urgency of the external. Specifically, the doom-scrollable apocalypse that is modern American life. Album opener “Hawk” is a brisk, poignant meditation on grief that weighs the ache of loss against the bittersweet memories that keep the deceased ever present. “Revelation 420” and “Million Dollars” are scorching political diatribes that excoriate capitalism’s failures and venerate protest. “Attn MOVE” is a historical reminder of the MOVE 9, a group of Black radical activists whose Philadelphia homes were notoriously bombed by police in 1985—a block of houses that’s located right between Reinhart’s current house and Headroom Studios.
“With Trying Not to Have a Thought”, Algernon Cadwallader juggle intrinsic musical connection and shrewd lyrical intention with remarkable poise. The album’s title perfectly captures that dual approach: the effort to resist being mentally bogged down by the bottomless list of daily atrocities, and the band’s decision to let their unspoken connection guide this rejuvenated take on their classic sound. “This is just what comes out of us when these four people get in a room,” Helmis says. And this record is exactly that: an Algernon Cadwallader album that’s leisurely, intensely, tremendously their own.
Everyone heaping praise on this year’s releases from Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei should show some love to fantasy of a broken heart, whose latest EP is even better than their frenetic 2024 debut “Feats of Engineering“. Mixed by Nate Amos (Water From Your Eyes and This is Lorelei), of the aforementioned bands with which the duo have spent months on the road, “Chaos Practicioner” refines the rhythmic and melodic puzzles of their song writing – solving more than it leaves in pieces – without compromising on its oddball humour; the bossa nova-inflected ‘Victory Path’ begins interpolating ‘La Vie En Rose’ to court the opening line “Swish me around like Listerine.” As densely colourful as the collection is, vocalists Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz earnestly embrace not just the dynamic interplay of their voices but a pervasive darkness; the final track and standout is called ‘We Confront the Demon in Mysterious Ways’, but their music has never been more transparent in its exorcism of toxic human forces.
“I don’t know what I want from the moment/ I say softly as I trace your eyelids,” Wollowitz sings, in striking vulnerability that contrasts a boisterous moment like the Brutus VIII’s guest spot. But it’s true, what the Slow Hollows member joins in to say: You’ll want just a little more.
The Fat Angel Sings 