The Fat Angel Sings

For years, Greet Death’s music got better as their personal lives became more hopeless. The “suicide summer” incantations of their 2017 doomgaze debut, “Dixieland”, were downright cheery compared to the existential crises lining “New Hell“, the Michigan band’s heavier, more poignantly pretty 2019 follow-up, which situated them at the forefront of the nascent shoegaze renaissance.

“Die In Love” is a beautifully melancholic album by Greet Death. The band’s dizzying melodic nature shines throughout its nine tracks, featuring delicate acoustic shimmers, somber percussion, and high-volume post-everything fuzz. Greet Death with their third album, “Die In Love“, due out June 27th via Deathwish. It’s the follow-up to 2019’s “New Hell” and their 2022 EP “New Low”, and they recorded it in Harper Boyhtari’s parents’ basement in Davisburg, Michigan.

The album includes Greet Death’s 2024 single “Same But Different Now,” and they’ve shared another new single, “Country Girl,” which Harper says is about “identity, alienation, and detachment. It’s like trying to solve a murder mystery and finding out you were the killer the whole time.” Watch the video, directed by Kelly Ngo,

On the smouldering “Punishment Existence,” Logan Gaval sang about coming home from work just to crawl into bed and stare at the ceiling contemplating death. His co-vocalist/guitarist, Harper Boyhtari, put her all-encompassing dread even more succinctly on the hauntingly beautiful “I Hate Everything,” a song so riddled with apathy and numbness that if you received the lyrics in text form then you’d have grounds to call in a wellness check on whoever sent them your way.

A reasonable listener would hear “New Low” and wonder, “How could life possibly get worse for these people?” Well, it did. In the three years since its release, Gaval and Boyharti each endured a string of family deaths, forcing them to quite literally make uneasy acquaintance with the subject they’ve spent their whole adult lives singing about. For a while, they felt encumbered by the stark reality that all their relationships are terminal. However, mixed in with the unfortunate finales were a slew of new beginnings for Gaval and Boyharti. New jobs, new identities, new band members, and new realizations about the function they want their art to serve.

Greet Death is: Logan Gaval, Harper Boyhtari, Jim Versluis, Jackie Kalmink, Eric Beck

releases June 27th, 2025

Three years on from the release of debut album ‘caroline’, London-based eight-piece caroline announce new album ‘caroline 2’, to be released on May 30^th via Rough Trade Records.

The group spent 18 months working across various writing sessions in the UK, with recording primarily taking place at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate. The album was produced by the band’s own Jasper Llewellyn, Casper Hughes and Mike O’Malley, engineered by Syd Kemp, mixed by Jason Agel and mastered by Heba Kadry in NYC.

Returning with ‘caroline 2’, the eight-piece collective embrace a bolder, more expansive sound. Going beyond their debut’s explorations of repetition, slowness and space, the new album pushes further into dynamic contrasts — organic and electronic, raw and refined. Launched with the striking single ‘Tell me I never knew that’, featuring Caroline Polachek’s unmistakable vocals, “caroline 2” showcases a fearless interplay of layered instrumentation, warped vocal processing, and moments of both euphoria and melancholy. Intentional and immersive, this next chapter solidifies caroline as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary music. 

Launch single ‘Tell me I never knew that’ features Caroline Polachek and its accompanying video self-shot by her and the band. The band explain how the song evolved:

 “We used to call this one ‘Backstreet boys’ because the opening top line felt like a Backstreet Boys song. The main riff was written by Casper on acoustic guitar and stuck out as a really catchy, bouncy, hypnotic thing. We wrote the opening top line together and straight away we thought ‘this sounds like a melody that Caroline Polachek might sing’ in its hooky-ness. We sort of joked that we’d ask her to sing it but didn’t think it’d actually be on the cards, until about a year later when we sent her the half-finished song and she was up for it!”

Perth’s finest, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, continue their onslaught on 2025 with the release of a brand new single & announcing details of their 7th record due in May 2025. ‘Carpe Diem, Moonman’ promises to be another weird & wonderful journey through the mind of Jack McEwan, the talisman of the Perth 5-piece. It’s announced alongside brand-new single ‘Weird World Awoke’, another ferocious blast of inimitable rock & roll, with a lyrical rollercoaster to keep pace with the relentless tempo & guitar slaloms.

McEwan himself had this to say about the new record: “Carpe Diem, Moonman” is an entanglement of chaos, the bi-product of excessive touring, an explosion of doubt, wonder, excitement, dog bites, Greek philosophy, death, weekend benders and a partridge in a pear tree, a mongrel of sorts.

There’s so many genres, flavours, cream crackers and fairground amusements packed into CDM. It blasts out the gates, takes you for a spin then leads you off into somewhere beautiful, fun and enthralling. I want people to come back and find something new with each listen.”

‘We’re Dr Feelgood, son, and we haven’t had any dinner.’ What was pub rock, when did it happen, and why? Read all about it in the new Record Collector, out Thursday. Also! Smokey Robinson discusses Motown majesty and orgasms with Rob Hughes, we meet Opeth and Blue Aeroplanes, Daryl Easlea picks the greatest ever 45s from Southend and environs, Gang Of Four’s Jon King elaborates on the soundtrack to his life, Dr Strangely Strange tell us where they’ve been, Scaffold and Hawkwind discuss their latest records, and more. The (Ducks) deluxe music monthly.

On June 6th, Chicago’s Lifeguard will release their debut album ‘Ripped and Torn’ on Matador Records. The youthful trio of Asher Case (bass, baritone guitar, vocals), Isaac Lowenstein (drums, synth), and Kai Slater (guitar, vocals) have been making music together since they were in high school, nearly a quarter of their lives. Noisy and immediate, cryptic but heartfelt, they draw inspiration from punk, dub, power-pop and experimental sounds, and bring them all together in explosive cacophony. 

Today, listen to the blistering d-beat driven first single “It Will Get Worse.” The band has also announced a full slate of UK, EU, and US tour dates, which will kick off in June.

Recorded last year in Chicago with producer Randy Randall (No Age), the album captures a claustrophobic scrappiness that evokes the feeling and energy of house parties and tightly-packed rooms, where ears are easily overwhelmed, and ragged improvisations connect with the same force as melodic hooks.

This Friday, April 18th, two of music’s most iconic young songwriters Julien Baker (boygenius) & TORRES will release their highly anticipated debut collaborative album, “Send a Prayer My Way, via Matador Records. “Send A Prayer My Way” has been taking shape since Baker and TORRES shared a stage for the first time in 2016. After the show, one turned to the other and said, “You know, we should make a country album.” That offhand comment became the spark—a kind of origin myth—for a collaboration rooted in mutual respect and a shared commitment to honest, elegant songwriting. Both artists are known for laying bare their struggles in ways that resonate deeply with fans, and this album is no exception. Like the most enduring country records, “Send A Prayer My Way” offers both solace and strength, a reminder that none of us are ever truly alone—and that music can be one of life’s most loyal companions. 

“Bottom of a Bottle,” taken from ‘Send A Prayer My Way’ the debut album from Julien Baker & TORRES out next Friday on Matador Records.

Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” is being reissued on limited-edition metallic silver vinyl for Record Store Day 2025 Seen as a massive middle finger aimed at his record label RCA — and perhaps fans — when it was released in 1975, Lou Reed’s fifth solo album was 60 minutes of sheer punishing noise. Dubbed “The greatest record ever made in the history of the human eardrum” by famed rock critic Lester Bangs on its release in 1975, “Metal Machine Music” was a punchline for years but has gained fans in recent decades as experimental music has neared the mainstream. This 50th anniversary edition has been pressed on silver vinyl and given reimagined cover art.

A silver vinyl (and cover) pressing of what was once called Lou Reed’s most divisive album, but which has since been reappraised to become his most far-sighted. Certainly four sides of unrelenting feedback (“recommended cuts – none,” claimed Billboard’s review) unquestionably laid the final foundations to the rise of electronic noise, while the album has since encouraged both live performances and acoustic cover versions.

It also sounds great on headphones, as the all-pervading roar is undercut by some really rather pleasant melodies — you just have to listen closely enough. It’s fun, too, if you’re sitting on a bus with it playing, while imagining how it sounds to your fellow passengers. There’ll be no rinky-dink tinny percussion leaking out of this one. Buy it, play it, absorb it. Nobody would describe “Metal Machine Music” as Lou Reed’s most commercial offering ever. But they said that about “Sister Ray,” as well.

After teasing their next project last week, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have officially announced “Phantom Island“, their 27th studio album. The second release on the band’s own (p)doom records imprint will arrive on June 13th with some of their most adventurous offerings yet, bolstering their shape-shifting psych-garage-prog-rock with a full orchestra of strings, horns and woodwinds. To preview this new horizon, the genre-obliterating Australian rockers have shared the album’s second single, “Deadstick,” plus a music video directed by longtime collaborator Guy Tyzack.

“Phantom Island’s” radical step forward was forecasted in June 2023, when King Gizzard took the stage at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl for their unforgettable three-hour marathon set. Backstage, the sextet crossed paths with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who quickly put forward the idea of a collaboration. A year later, as they blazed through the sessions that produced the ten tracks of “Flight b741”, they worked out ten further promising tracks that didn’t fit. In a release, frontman Stu Mackenzie said they “were harder to finish. Musically, they needed a little more time and space and thought.”

“The songs felt like they needed this other energy and colour, that we needed to splash some different paint on the canvas,” Mackenzie continued. To complete these more involved compositions, the band connected with the Los Angeles Philharmonic again, as well as keyboardist, conductor and arranger Chad Kelly, who sculpted historically informed and zealously disruptive orchestrations to meld the two groups’ disparate sounds. “We come from such different worlds – he plays Mozart and Bach and uses the same harpsichords they did, and tunes them the exact same way,” Mackenzie said. “But he’s obsessed with microtonal music, too, and all this nerdy stuff like me.”

The triumphant result of this pairing is apparent on “Deadstick,” a bopping, bluesy, horn-powered thrill ride that not-so-subtly continues the Gizzverse thread from the high-flying adventure songs of “Flight b741” into a more grounded, “introverted” record. Between the smouldering triplane fuselage on the album, the second single’s lyrical fixation on “panic in the cockpit” and Tyzack’s wreckage-strewn album cover, the band makes it clear that they’ve come crashing down to earth for a more emotionally focused album. “When I was younger, I was just interested in freaking people out,” Mackenzie reflected, “but as I get older, I’m much more interested in connecting with people.”

King Gizzard will take this sonic upheaval to the stage with the “Phantom Island” Tour, which will feature a different 28-piece orchestra at each of its nine performances from July 28th to Aug. 11th.

“Phantom Island” is available to pre-order now. 

Last year, Adrianne Lenker released “Bright Future”, her tender, country-inflected sixth solo studio album that earned a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album and widespread acclaim as one of the most powerful albums of 2024. Today, she continues to celebrate that breakthrough project with the announcement of “Live at Revolution Hall”, a sprawling collection of live treatments of those songs and more from her celebrated discography. The album will arrive next Thursday, April 24th, via 4AD Records, and it’s preceded by the new single “happiness.”

“Live at Revolution Hall” comprises 43 tracks recorded over three nights during her summer 2024 tour, including all ten cuts from “Bright Future” and other favourite entries from her solo catalogue, like “anything,” “symbol,” and “zombie girl.” Also featured are five previously unreleased songs, “happiness,” “oldest,” “ripples,” “i do love you,” and “no limits,”; “happiness,” is a gentle, intimate and richly textured recording grounded in her keen eye for poignant details, below.

The Big Thief bandleader is alternately alone on these songs and accompanied by her touring and recording collaborators, pianist Nick Hakim and violinist Josefin Runsteen. The project is artfully engineered by Andrew Sarlo, who captures the gravity of the performance with a soft, humming atmosphere.

“It was impossible to do this album without the immense love and respect I have for my friend,” Sarlo shared in a statement. “Watching the power of the music disarm and permeate feels a bit like an ‘I told ya so’ but I am still amazed every time.

From the sidelines I cheer. This live album is another generous offering from Adrianne… Clocking in around 120 minutes featuring songs & vignettes recorded exclusively on reel to reel and cassette tape, there was an attempt to create a different spin on what a live album could be… we put friendship at the focal point making this a loving memento from one friend to another.”

“Live at Revolution Hall” is available to pre-order and pre-save of digital and limited double-cassette formats.

 “With her sandpaper voice, fragile yet steely, and simple melodic songs imbued with poetic mystery, Lenker played solo acoustic guitar and brought to mind a modern, female equivalent of the young Bob Dylan.”
– The Times
“Even performing solo, Lenker is an orchestra onto herself … She is a masterful storyteller, and her lyrics, like her instrumentals, can be impressionistic, but it is the small, personal details that can grab and emotionally throttle you.”
– Brooklyn Vegan