The Dandy Warhols are a psychedelic/alternative rock band, formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1994 by singer-guitarist Courtney Taylor-Taylor and guitarist Peter Holmström. They were later joined by keyboardist Zia McCabe and drummer Eric Hedford. Hedford left in 1998 and was replaced by Taylor-Taylor’s cousin Brent DeBoer. The band’s name is a play on the name of American pop artist Andy Warhol.
The band gained recognition after they were signed to Capitol Records and released their major label album debut, …“The Dandy Warhols Come Down”, in 1997. In 2001, the band rose to new levels of fame after their song “Bohemian Like You” enjoyed extensive exposure due to being featured in a Vodafone advertisement. They have released 12 studio albums to date.
Split 7″ vinyl version of The Black Angels ‘Sister Ray’ and The Dandy Warhols ‘Rave On” both recorded Live At The Filmore. Pressed on Red and White Swirl Vinyl in a single pocket sleeve.
Horsegirl the New York-via-Chicago trio of best friends Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, and Gigi Reece announce their second album, “Phonetics On and On”, out February 14th, and release lead single/video, ‘2468’. Produced by Cate Le Bon and recorded at The Loft in Chicago, the band’s original and sonic home, “Phonetics On and On” is an exploration of the lines between pop, minimalism, and playful experimentation.
Since the release of 2022’s “Versions of Modern Performance”, “compelling from its first note to its very last” (NME), much has changed for Horsegirl. In the fall of that year, they relocated to New York City, where Penelope and Nora were to attend NYU leading to the first time the trio had written music outside of Penelope’s parents’ basement. You can hear the push in a new direction by virtue of their new environment, but through this time of unparalleled change, the band turns inward.
Horsegirl returned to Chicago to record in January 2024, finding focus and intimacy in the studio that can only arise when it’s simply too cold to step outside. Le Bon led them into new, bright, clear, sonic territories highlighting the inventive nature of these songs. New tools help bring this world to life; violins, synths, and gamelan tiles are all woven into the record. The songs are a testament to experimenting with space and texture while maintaining a pop song at the core. All the while, a confident simplicity brings the band’s songwriting ability to the forefront.
Lead single ‘2468’ is one of the shining examples of experimentation on “Phonetics On and On“. Horsegirl explores Raincoats-like violin parts and kinetic percussion, building stealthily towards a head-spinning motorik crescendo. Written almost entirely in the studio, ‘2468’ stands as an achieved byproduct of rewriting and rearranging, adding and subtracting, flash-moments of instability, and embracing the unexpected result. The song’s video, directed by writer and filmmaker Eliza Callahan and choreographed by Alexa West.
It’s hard to imagine any of these songs being written by anyone but Nora, Penelope, and Gigi. Horsegirl write with unanticipated honesty, leading us through scenes of girlhood and youth. These are moments of their lives. The indelible truth is that Horsegirl is a band of best friends; being around them you can see that love in their eyes and it is always a joyous thing to witness. It’s a love that is ever-present in “Phonetics On and On” as tenderness reverberates back and forth across the recording.
“Julie,” taken from ‘Phonetics On and On,’ the new album from Horsegirl out February 14th, 2025 on Matador Records
“Asphodels”, is the seventh studio album from The Veils, recorded live to tape over five days at Roundhead Studios in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Veils debut album “The Runaway Found” turned 20 last year which provided lead singer/songwriter Finn Andrews with a healthy dose of existential dread. “I feel as though this album is the end result of a now disconcertingly long career in music,” he says. “I think after your 7th album, much like turning 40, you should really just stop counting. I’ve learned a lot along the way, which I suppose is the whole point, and I’ve really distilled it all into these 9 songs. As always, I really just write about love and death – it’s a compulsion – and that is once again the case here. But I feel as though I’ve never been able to express this stuff rattling about in my brain quite as directly until now. I have rarely felt proud of anything I’ve made for very long, but this one feels different. It’s built on a strong foundation I think.”
The album takes its name from the Ancient Greek flower of the Underworld, and lyrically, Andrews draws more from the great poets than he does from the well of more traditional rock and roll songwriters. The collaboration between Andrews and string arranger Victoria Kelly is a central aspect of the record, and as with the band’s previous album “And Out Of The Void Came Love”, Kelly plays an integral role in bringing the songs to life. Andrews says “I really wanted the string arrangements to behave like another member of the band. We even fleshed the character out, like an actor playing a role. It’s this collaboration with Vic that is really at the centre of this record I think.”
Since being signed to Rough Trade when singer Finn Andrews was 16 years old, The Veils have released six studio albums and toured consistently throughout their twenty year history and garnered a formidable reputation as one of the world’s greatest live bands. They have also been praised by film directors Paolo Sorrentino, Tim Burton and David Lynch who have all used their music on their soundtracks.
Toronto punk bank PUP – comprised of Stefan Babcock, Nestor Chumak, Zack Mykula, and Steve Sladkowski – have announced the release of their forthcoming album Who Will Look After The Dogs?.
“Within days of announcing our last album, coincidentally titled “The Unraveling ofPUPTHEBAND”, my life unexpectedly imploded. I wrote the lyrics for ‘Hallways’ while all that was going on. It was a weird fucking week,” says Babcock on the new single, “Hallways”.
“The title of our new record, “Who Will Look After The Dogs?“, is what I wrote at the top of the page, the very first thing written for this album. I think it’s devastating, but in a ‘holy shit this is overdramatic’ kinda way. At least in context of the line that comes before it. That’s what makes it funny to us. That overblown stuff we all say in our dark moments can be hilarious once you’ve cooled off a bit. I don’t know if anyone else thinks it’s funny, but sometimes you gotta laugh at yourself. It’s the only way out of the abyss. Trust me.”
“Who Will Look After The Dogs?”, was made in Los Angeles with producer John Congleton over the course of three weeks, and it’s the culmination of PUP’s past decade of constant touring. Frontman StefanBabcock excavates his life’s relationships – romantic, with his bandmates, and most ruthlessly, his relationship to himself. While PUP historically are at one another’s throats during the album process, this time they scrapped their tedious perfectionism and rediscovered the joy of making loud music together.
PUP will return to the UK and EU for a headline tour in May, with dates in Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam,
The Ride guitarist and songwriter Andy Bell has shared new single “apple green ufo”, taken from his third solo album, “pinball wanderer”. ahead of debut solo acoustic shows, “I had this riff on an acoustic and it was kind of like one of those Led Zeppelin folk bangers, but I brought it into the Serge Gainsbourg world and gave it a glass of absinthe,” jokes Andy Bell. “The lyrics imagine if I met an alien and had to show them around Earth, what would I want to show them? It also references The Simpsons’ Mr Burns (“I bring you love”) and ET (“If you’re lonely, phone home”).”
Andy will be playing a series of acoustic solo shows for the first time, forming part of a tour of independent record shops in February and March, kicking off London’s Stranger Than Paradise.
To accompany the Stranger Than Paradise instore, there will be a free ‘pinball wanderer’ release party featuring DJ sets from Andy, alongside Justin Robertson, Richard Norris, Simone Marie and Arveene, plus visuals from Innerstrings.
Beirut detailed their forthcoming album, “A Study of Losses“, is the 18-track odyssey commissioned by Swedish circus Kompani Giraff for an acrobatic stage show of the same name. Accompanying the album’s announcement is new single “Guericke’s Unicorn” together with a video showcasing Kompani Giraff’s stunning choreography, shadow puppetry and stage design.
“Guericke’s unicorn is a supposed reconstruction of a fossil unicorn which was actually created from the bones of a bunch of different animals like the woolly mammoth and a narwhal. It’s worth looking up the image”, says Zach Condon. “I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of bizarre chapters and odd side notes of history, and I wanted to reflect the unorthodox / eccentric madness of that ‘unicorn’ in a more playful song that is somewhat disjointed from the rest of the album. I think my music can have that disjointed / chaotic tendency in general, but with the whole album otherwise being somewhat uniformly baroque inspired, ‘Guericke’s Unicorn’ really makes for an outlier on this record, having its origin in an old modular synth experiment of mine.”
As a free interpretation of Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, the novel by German author Judith Schalansky, “A Study of Losses” journeys through eleven songs and seven extended instrumental themes, named after the lunar seas and inspired by the chilling tale of a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations. Like Verzeichnis einiger Verluste, “A Study of Losses” finds Condon writing about disappearance, preservation and the impermanence of everything known to us – extinct animal species, lost architectural and literary treasures, the process of aging and other abstract concepts.
“A Study of Losse”s will be released on 18th April via his own Pompeii Records.
The new single, “Back In The Game”, is the second time these two musicianshave collaborated on record, following the acclaimed “Beautiful People”, which appeared on Mark Pritchard’s “Under The Sun” solo album for Warp Records in 2016.
The song is paired to a video by Jonathan Zawada, a visual artist who says, “On first hearing the original demo of “Back In The Game” I was immediately struck by the deranged bass line that made me think of the final scene of Staying Alive where John Travolta is cockily strutting through the New York streets but I saw it with a more sinister overlay.
Slowly a version of that visual arose around a character wearing a kind of giant parade head with a fixed expression of mania stuck on their face, such that you couldn’t tell if their endless march was one of aggression or celebration”
The Misunderstood must rank as one of the greatest cult bands of the 60s psychedelia era. ‘Children Of The Sun’ assembles The Misunderstood’s entire known output from 1965-1966 onto one package, remastered by Alec Palao.
With incisive sleevenotes from Mike Stax (Ugly Things) and involvement with various original band members, plus a handsome design from Andy Morten (Shindig!), this is truly the definitive document of a legendary underground band, assembled by those who love their music.
The band began forging their innovative sound in Riverside, California, where they were discovered by DJ John Peel (then working in the US as John Ravenscroft). Having cut a few recordings locally, the band relocated to the UK on Peel’s recommendation.
In London, The Misunderstood signed to Fontana Records to cut what are considered six landmark tracks. Issued that December, ‘I Can Take You To The Sun’ remains a high watermark of the original psychedelia era and was backed by an explosive version of Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love’, but the band broke up soon afterwards when singer Rick Brown was drafted. A second single, the blistering psych rock of ‘Children Of TheSun’ (backed by the anti-war gem ‘I Unseen’) was belatedly issued in February 1969 when a new line-up of the band re-signed to the label.
In 1982, Cherry Red released the landmark compilation LP, ‘Before The Dream Faded’, which not only unveiled two further Fontana recordings, the high octane ‘Find The Hidden Door’ and ‘My Mind’ but also collated seven archive tracks from the band’s Riverside days. Since then, additional recordings have surfaced on various retrospectives.
