In 21 minutes, this New York band’s debut chews you up and spits you out the other side in a tentacular whirr of rototoms, guitars that shriek and whine like neglected machinery, erratic tempos and frontman Zack Borzone’s choked-out vocals. The way the record lurches and reels brings to mind the classic horror film scene in which a human undergoes a violent, magnificent transformation into some sort of beast: much like Gilla Band’s Most Normal, “45 Pounds” is a font of mutant rock pleasures.
With every one of “45 Pounds’ feverish slices of panicked, post-punk clangour, New York’s YHWH Nailgun displayed an unnatural gift for hammering a groove or hooky beat amid the most twisted industrial forms. Erratic, fizzing with electrolyte energy, and seemingly convulsing between brittle snaps of terse disquiet and gargantuan slabs of metallic engulfs, YHWH Nailgun seized the senses and transported them to a realm of sheer somatic heft sincerely sounding like no one else before them.
The key to “45 Pounds’ pugnacious marvel is the electric synergy between each member. Each of their aural elements collapsing and crumpling into each other with teeming, wriggling, insectoid anxiety, YHWH Nailgun spat out their electronica whirlwinds with an effortless sense of ever-changing metamorphosis, each cut across “45 Pounds’ barely 20 minutes, never quite sure of its final form. This all makes for a fascinating immersion into their world, scoring the buzzing, noisy contemporary we’re all forced to wade through. Burnishing a truly unique voice in the crowded world of industrial, YHWGNailgun summoned an explosive debut of an arcane, otherworldly aura.
YHWH Nailgun’s debut is noisy, clipped, and physical, built around jagged guitar, twitchy electronics, and songs that often hit like short bursts rather than long builds.
Pitchfork framed the record around the band’s live-wire intensity and the AD 93 connection. The pre-release run also made the point clearly, especially with the 86-second “Sickle Walk” getting a Best New Track nod.
It’s confrontational music, but it’s structured, not random
“Earthstar Mountain” is an ode to curiosity. It asks what it means to live a life: how do we decide which direction to take? How do we stay there? And what happens when the rug is pulled from under our feet?
Once again working with her partner and collaborator Sam Evian at their home studio Flying Cloud,Hannah Cohen’s fourth full-length album “Earthstar Mountain” is a keepsake of Cohen’s time in the Catskills, built over the course of 2020-2024. As blurred, shimmering memories come into focus to produce a collage of echoes and sonic souvenirs.
The essence of a great album is the execution of an idea. Not in a technical, virtuosic sense or even an experimental sense that opens up the possibilities of a new musical world. But execution of ideas in the way of truthfulness, where the songs within an album feel inherently linked to the artistic voice of the musician. “Earthstar Mountain” is the clearest example of that I have seen in years. There’s a familiarity to the arrangements, be it on the upbeat indie of ‘Draggin’ or the groove-laden pop of ‘Summer Sweat’, but it’s all presented through the lens of Hannah Cohen.
Here is a wonderful live version of the Fleetwood Mac-y standout from Hannah Cohen’s excellent album “Earthstar Mountain”.
Despite whatever influences she is taken from, each song feels like an extension of her, as though she is wasting no energy trying to be somebody else and instead operating in her own sphere of confidence. This album just feels right; it feels simple, and at best, it feels meditative. It’s almost like music medicine that slows you down and crystallises your attention to be calmly focused on entering the alluring world of Cohen’s artistry.
The title of Japanese Breakfast’s album, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)“, comes from the record’s first single, “Orlando In Love.” It’s a retelling of Orlando Innamorato, a Renaissance poem by Matteo Maria Boiardo, in which a knight pursues a princess through forests and castles and duels and wars. In singer, guitarist, and lyricist Michelle Zauner’s hands, the tale turns into the story of a poet living in a Winnebago by the sea who is tempted by a siren’s song. Temptation is a major theme of the album, and Zauner drew from her experience with becoming an overnight sensation after the success of her 2021 memoir, “Crying In H Mart”. Japanese Breakfast has been a cool-kid bellwether since their 2016 debut, “Psychopomp“, but with Zauner’s newfound mainstream fame, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)” might be the band’s major breakout, too.
Michelle Zauner has had a whirlwind few years, having released the best selling memoir “Crying In H Mart” as well as her acclaimed 2021 Japanese Breakfast album, “Jubilee”, which earned her two Grammy nominations. Her latest, “For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)“, finds Zauner scaling back, examining the “perils of desire” on a more understated set of songs produced by Blake Mills. Its first single, “Orlando In Love,” is gorgeously orchestrated, a more ornate kind of chamber pop than the brighter new wave of a song like “Be Sweet.”
from ‘For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)’, out March 21st on Dead Oceans.
Picture Parlour are an English indie rock band formed in Manchester by Katherine Parlour (vocals and guitar) and Ella Risi (guitar). Their line-up is completed by Kitty Fitz (bass/rhythm guitar), Joey Django (rhythm guitar/bass) and Michael Nash (drums).
It’s surreal to finally be releasing our first ever album, we have played this moment out in our heads repeatedly since we first picked up a guitar, and we can’t wait to share the journey.
The making of this record saw us screaming at each other, holding one another while we cried, and being in complete awe of everyone we’ve worked with on it. We recorded opposite a cemetery in East Iris Studios, Nashville, where we just about dodged being 6 feet under ourselves. It was the most fulfilling, hysterical and unforgettable 3 weeks of our lives, and we hope you guys love this record as much as we loved making it. So enough, and WELCOME TO THE PARLOUR.
The band performed their debut show in December 2022 at the Windmill in Brixton and immediately became regular performers there. The band released their debut single, “Norwegian Wood”, on 19th June 2023, which was followed by “Judgement Day” on 18th October 2023.
The Liverpudlian rock outfit’s debut EP was worth the wait. Singer and front-woman Katherine Parlour has such a distinctive voice and guitarist Ella Risi leads the charge with infectious riffs and ripping solos. With an almost baroque and art-rock feel, the album is both uplifting and nostalgic, with plenty of reflection on the journey which has got this under-appreciated duo (and their backing band) to this point. I think it is only a matter of time before they are commanding far larger venues.
Three years after their debut album, caroline returned in gloriously off-kilter fashion with ‘Total euphoria’. Driven by stabbing guitar, drums that never quite gel into place, and keyboards that hover radiantly but never quite in sync, you’re left wondering how the song could possibly amount to a sound befitting its title, but the experimental UK outfit naturally gets there. The instrumentation doesn’t cohere so much as endlessly revolve into something greater than the sum of its part, something blissfully communal, especially as Jasper Llewellyn and Magdalena McLean start singing in unison. The ambiguous betrayal at the song’s emotional core is never resolved, but you somehow get it, totally.
“Three years on from the release of their self-titled debut album, London eight-piece band Caroline deliver “Caroline 2”. In one way, it picks up where its predecessor left off — 2022’s sublime self-titled debut concluded with “Natural Death“, where they also explored the possibilities of interlocking off-kilter guitar patterns — but in many, many others, it finds them breaking new ground. Those two worlds on the opener are only the beginning. “One of the fundamental themes is the idea of different things happening at once, things that are very different from each other but also simultaneous,” says Jasper Llewellyn, who forms the songwriting core of the band with Mike O’Malley and Casper Hughes. It makes for a record of extraordinary scope — where the organic and the artificial, the harsh and the beautiful, the pristine and the hazy all clash and combine. “The first record was a compilation, but this one is a declaration,” says Llewellyn. We were just about an eight-person band on the last one, but now we’re a proper eight-person band.”
DEERHOOF long ago established themselves as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth, the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. Their latest album‘Noble and Godlike in Ruin’ (their 19th studio album) is either a portrait of a world descending into monstrous hate, dehumanization, and dollar signs, or a haunting self-portrait of band-as-monster, singing tirelessly of love, increasingly alienated from that world. Songs crash and break apart, then reassemble in surprising and delightful new fashion. The music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, all at once. Strings that evoke avant-garde chamber music and classic horror-film soundtracks bounce off guitar and bass lines that chug on impervious to the creeping dread.
The drums are sometimes filtered to sound almost electronic, but no computer could come up with rhythms so funky and dynamic, with each minute variation from one snare hit to the next conveying worlds of possibility. The world may be going down, but Deerhoof is going down swinging.
It’s simply amazing that this US/Japanese quartet is now celebrating their 31st year. Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t spent enough time listening to Deerhoof —the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. As “Noble and Godlike in Ruin” reaffirms, each one discovers some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humour. This music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, carrying an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom. Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom. Deerhoof is defined by such paradoxes.
The beloved songwriter is back putting her expressive voice as an artist at the forefront whilst pushing her sonic evolution to mesmerising heights. Renowned multi-disciplinary artist Ezra Furman marks a landmark in her career with the announcement her 10th studio album “Goodbye Small Head”, due out May via Bella Union. Written during a maelstrom of overwhelm, the album title is a nuanced homage to the 1999 Sleater-Kinney single “Get Up”.
Hi my name is Ezra Furman this is the press release for my new record. I don’t trust nobody and that’s why I had to write this myself.
“Goodbye Small Head” is the name of this record. Twelve songs, twelve variations on the experience of completely losing control, whether by weakness, illness, mysticism, BDSM, drugs, heartbreak or just living in a sick society with one’s eyes open. These songs are vivid with overwhelm. They’re not about someone going off the rails, they are inside that person’s heart. The songwriting here is a revision to William Wordsworth’s famous proclamation that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” I can agree with that, except for the tranquility part. This poetry, my poetry, arrived in the midst of the storm. It was written as I teetered toward the edge. (I did the edits once I was safe again.)
The band and I had had a run of records that were very communal, very first person plural. We, us, ours. I was trying to exist in and create a shared space with my audience, make anthems for taking care of one another in dark times. But there does come a time when a woman is left alone in a room to unravel. And you need anthems for those times too.
“GSH” also reflects a band reaching a new peak of our powers. If I were a music journalist, I would call this an orchestral emo prog-rock record sprinkled with samples. Thank goodness I’m not a music journalist! I think of this music as cinematic and intense. A friend of mine said it sounded like “the coolest movie soundtrack of 1997,” and I’m quite pleased with that description. We’ve incorporated a small string section into eight of the twelve tracks, and are using samples for the first time—nothing you’d recognize, just some uncredited singing that Sam found online, chopped into beautifully evocative bits. Other than that, this record features something that’s become nearly an anachronism: a band that’s been playing real instruments together for over a decade, intuitively in touch with each other as musicians. Four players in a room together who know exactly how to respond to one another.
We recorded in Chicago with Brian Deck producing; a return to both my city of origin and my producer of origin, since Deck produced my first rock’n’roll records many years ago (“Banging Down the Doors” (2007) and “Inside the Human Body” (2008) by Ezra Furman & the Harpoons). In some way I think I was trying to return to some much younger mindset, when all the intensity and fear and emotion of life was less mediated by adult coping mechanisms. When it was all brand new with no filter.
Though I wrote parts of it earlier, I think the making of this album really began on the morning of April 11th 2023, when I woke suddenly ill, limped into the bathroom and lost consciousness. At the hospital they gave me all the tests and told me that actually, I wasn’t sick, and I could go home now. (Thanks, fellas!) I stayed in bed for months, exhausted and in pain, no doctor offering any convincing explanation or cure.
After a while I began hemorrhaging songs. Many of these songs arrived unexpectedly and left my body violently. All of them seemed to be steeped in the helpless transcendence of being suddenly overcome, undone. The lyrics to album opener “Grand Mal” and its following companion “Sudden Storm” were written in one hypomanic sitting after talking to an epileptic friend about the mystical quality of certain major seizures. “Jump Out” is a panicked rocker for realizing you are going to have to leap from a moving vehicle because the driver has no intention of letting you out. “Power of the Moon” is an existentialist wrestling match with whoever’s in charge of the universe, and “Submission” is the combination of dread and relief felt when you realize the long-suffering “good guys” have no chance against 21st-century forces of evil. And that’s just Side A.
Is it dark? Yeah! Is it also wonder-struck, laced with psychedelic beauty, triumphant in its wounded way? Yeah again. And by the end of it, the whole thing flames out in a burst of good old-fashioned rock and roll, a desperate cover of underappreciated genius Alex Walton’s bottomlessly yearning “I Need the Angel.”
The title, “Goodbye Small Head” is a lyric from the 1999 Sleater-Kinney single “Get Up,” a phrase breathlessly, almost ecstatically intoned by Corin Tucker as she contemplates death and the dissolution of the self. There’s something about that dissolution that is both horrible and absolutely gorgeous. We fear losing ourselves and we want it more than anything. That’s where this record lives. That’s what this kind of music offers us: a look over the edge into the frightening and beautiful realm that lies beyond ordinary life. Have a look with me, won’t you?
From start to finish, “Goodbye Small Head” is a masterclass in the beauty of letting it all go, At the heart of all of that, Ezra Furman focuses on the art of finding liberation during trying times and emerging from the other side feeling more powerful than ever.
The overarching major of the entire record centres around not confining itself to one thing while also not oversimplifying the themes it tackles, many of them overlapping or coinciding to concoct a picture of the convoluted nature of life itself. In this world, experiences can be complex and frustrating, but ultimately, it’s about rising on top and being yourself, even in the flames.
Sometimes the simplest things are the best, and Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s latest EP was an excellent example of that, with five perfect folk songs all about love, offering a neat and flawless package that is truly golden and so sure to never rust.
Katie Gregson-MacLeod has already been through the whirlwind. She’s experienced the major label system, gone viral, and felt the pressure of being labelled the ‘next big thing’ far too early in her career. Now, she has found her footing again as an independent artist. She’s releasing through Matt Maltese’s label, which is quickly becoming a haven for artists who want to share tender, lyrically rich work without the pressure to over-polish.
Here we have some of 2025’s best lyrics as the artist seems to take the universal and well-worn path of the love song and still find new phrasing and perspectives. Speaking to Far Out about this victory, she said, “I don’t think there’s been a year in which I have felt more settled in my songwriting than this year. My approach has evolved, my instincts a little different when I pick up the pen, but the intention and honesty behind it has remained the same.”
Clearly, with more to come in 2026, the singer said, “Releasing my EP, Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early and going on my first headline tour in two years, has left me feeling so connected and fulfilled. It has paved a clearer path for me going forward, and I feel I’m heading into 2026 knowing myself and the wee pocket of music I want to carve out and work within, so much better.
EP ‘Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early’, out July 4th.
You almost don’t need to hear Eliza Edens’ album to be struck by its power – the titular lyric alone is rich with emotion. It’s simple yet expansive, carrying shades of joy, awe, and a quiet grief all at once. That balance of depth and restraint runs through the entire record. Drifting between delicately crafted folk songs, field recordings, and snippets of conversation, Edens’ project feels rare, spontaneous, and deeply tender.
Most of these songs are a documentation of grief in real time from 2021-2024 as i was losing my mother to dementia. she passed in fall of 2024. these recordings were made just as I had finished writing the songs. they are imperfect, lo-fi, raw, and true to the emotions and realities of those moments. there were times during this period of my life when my guitar was the place I felt safest as i was trying to come to grips with what it means to lose the person who raised me in slow motion.
It’s the sort of album that would be a sin to shuffle, as it is truly made for that start-to-finish experience, designed to draw you in and keep you for the full 38 minutes. You barely even notice one song evolve into the next as it keeps you in this pretty trance, but even in that trance, there are standout moments that truly stick in the mind, with ‘Puzzle Piece’, ‘Heart Rot’ and the album’s titular track all glowing with some of the year’s best lyricism.
Iron & Wine, the solo project of multi-instrumentalist and producer Sam Beam, will release their eighth full-length album and sixth for Sub Pop, entitled “Hen’s Teeth”, worldwide on February 27th.
“Hen’s Teeth” arrives fully formed but sits as a sibling record, of sorts, to 2024’s acclaimed and Grammy-nominated “Light Verse”.Its seeds were sewn during the multiple sessions done over the last few years in the foothills of Los Angeles with studio owner/engineer Dave Way (Fiona Apple, Jakob Dylan, Sheryl Crow) at the helm. The record features many familiar names from the Iron & Wine universe – David Garza, Sebastian Steinberg, Tyler Chester, Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow, Kyle Crane, and Paul Cartwright – lending their talents to a collection of songs that, while complementary in nature, had their own distinct feel.
“Hen’s Teeth” includes a few new, fresh voices; the Grammy-winning Americana trio I’m With Her – Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins – are featured on two tracks. The trio bring their harmonizing prowess to the ebullient track,“Robin’s Egg,” and in the tender, mournful “Wait Up” they make more with less on a song that is sure to become a fan favorite. The record also marks the recording debut of Arden Beam. Arden (one of Beam’s daughters) contributes harmonies and backing vocals on “Roses,” “Singing Saw,” “Defiance, Ohio,” and “Grace Notes.” Her contributions lend a personal poignancy and a wonderful sonic texture to “Hen’s Teeth”.
The title “Hen’s Teeth”, much like the birth of this record, takes its inspiration as something that should not exist; a happy accident that fell out of enjoying the company of the aforementioned players in a setting that offered creativity and inspiration. As Beam states : “To me it suggests the impossible. “Hen’s teeth” do not exist. And that’s what this record felt like: a gift that shouldn’t be there but it is. An impossible thing but it’s real.”
Iron & Wine has shared an official video for their sonically poignant track, “In Your Ocean.” It’s one of several songs on “Hen’s Teeth” in which lovers are depicted as so deeply entwined they physically merge. “Praying for dry ground / Though I only want to drown / When I find myself swimming in your ocean.
The Fat Angel Sings 