Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield & sister Allison have a new band, and their surprise debut album finds them backed by MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook. Earlier this month, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield and her twin sister/frequent collaborator Allison teased something that also included MJ Lenderman (who played guitar and sang all over Waxahatchee’s 2024 album “Tigers Blood“) and Brad Cook (who produced the last two Waxahatchee albums), we learn that what they were teasing was a new band from Katie and Allison called Snocaps. And to make matters even more exciting, they just surprise-released their self-titled debut album.
It’s Katie and Allison’s first band together in about 15 years (they previously played together in P.S. Eliot, Bad Banana, and The Ackleys), but Allison has also been on Waxahatchee albums and she’s toured as a member of the band.
It’s also Allison’s first album since the 2018 “Swearin’ comeback album “Fall into the Sun”. and all four of them play multiple instruments on the album. It has a little more of a pared-back indie rock vibe compared to the two Brad Cook-produced Waxahatchee albums, but still with that Americana twist that Katie’s been embracing lately (with no lack of twangy MJ Lenderman guitar), and the Crutchfields’ complementary songwriting styles are in excellent form.
Gumm’s 2023 debut LP “Slogan Machine” was a mix of bands like Drug Church, Touché Amoré, and Revolution Summer, and the Chattanooga, TN band’s sophomore album “Beneath The Wheel” finds them blending those and other influences into something that feels even more original. Like the recent album by Gumm’s Convulse labelmates Destiny Bond, “Beneath The Wheel” makes the case that hardcore punk is alive and well.
This isn’t metalcore, this isn’t alt-rock; it’s the kind of punk rock that’s so gritty that people had to put a new adjective in front of it, and it’s a treat to hear a band carrying the torch for this kind of thing as well as Gumm are right now. On “Beneath the Wheel“, they’re taking familiar ingredients and making them sound very fresh.
Lucinda Williams has today announced that her new album, “World’s Gone Wrong“, will be released by Highway 20 Records on January 23rd. Described as “a raw and fearless commentary on modern America”, the album was co-produced by Tom Overby and long time collaborator Ray Kennedy, who recorded and mixed the album at his Room & Board Studio in Nashville. Guest stars include Norah Jones, Mavis Staples and Brittney Spencer.
Performance video for “We’ve Come Too Far To Turn Around (feat. Norah Jones),” from the new Lucinda Williams album ‘World’s Gone Wrong,’ out January 23rd, 2026.
Lucinda Williams tours the UK and Ireland early next year. Thu 29th January Birmingham, Birmingham Town Hall
Courtney Marie Andrews has long been celebrated as an artist who challenges herself, and who finds new interplays of Folk and Americana. Also a vivid poet and accomplished painter, she brings a multidisciplinary richness to her work that shines throughout her 9th studio album, Valentine.
Co-produced with Jerry Bernhardt and recorded almost entirely to tape, the album features complete in-studio performances that prize raw performance rather than perfection. It is Andrews’s most sonically explorative record thus far – she plays flute, high strung guitars, myriad synths, and draws heavy inspiration from her art outside of music. Her voice is gorgeous and acrobatic always, but on “Valentine” it finds a new depth, an assertiveness that brings new dimension to its biggest anthems and its softest moments.
Written during a period of profound endings and new beginnings, “Valentine” is a vulnerable exploration of love vs. limerence. While anticipating the imminent loss of a loved one who would eventually recover, a new but uncertain romance began to develop. Rather than lift her up, the two emotional poles seemed to bleed into each other to sow doubt, trouble, even obsession. But through her own exploration of music and art, Andrews found a way to grow stronger inside this feeling.
“I didn’t want to slink into my pain, I wanted to embrace it, own it” she says. The songs that emerged are devotional in their lyrics but defiant in their energy; it’s the very sound of a woman standing in her first wisdom. With “Valentine”, Andrews rejects the objectification of love, the love filled with gestures and objects instead of trust, mess, and growth. In doing so, she delivers her most beautiful and loving album to date.
Irish folk rock band Lankum are to release a cover of The Specials‘ “Ghost Town”. The standalone single will be available on 12” vinyl from January. Lankum explain how the track came about. “Ghost Town” came to us through some curious circumstances. Oona Doherty, who we were familiar with through her phenomenal dance work on the video for Gilla Band’s ‘Shoulderblades’, contacted us and told us about a new show she was putting together.
“It was about her great-great-grandfather being sent to Belfast as a child to live with his aunts and work in an abattoir. She wanted a new piece of music for the show, for a party scene set on Halloween night, and told us she wanted it to start out indistinguishable and woozy, before developing into the very recognisable track by The Specials.
“At first we were slightly reticent, since a cover of a ska tune wasn’t something we’d usually ever consider, but after a bit of deliberation we decided we’d give it a shot, and the result took us on an incredibly enjoyable journey that had us gleefully playing with synthesisers and drum machines in Hellfire Studios, trying to come up with the scaldiest ’90s sounding techno for the outro section of the track.
The version was originally created for an Oona Doherty dance show Specky Clark at Sadler’s Well earlier this year. The video was filmed in County Wicklow by the director Leonn Ward, with cinematographer Robbie Ryan.
“We’re very excited with the end product and delighted that Oona approached us and challenged us to step out of our comfort zone. It’s an honour to be releasing a version of this iconic tune, and it feels eerily relevant to be referencing yet again themes of urban decay, economic hardship and working class frustration.
Jeff Tweedy was on a episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Before playing music, the Wilco frontman spoke with Stephen Colbert about his new triple album, “Twilight Override”, working with his sons, Spencer and Sammy, and more. Tweedy performed of “Enough” and “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,”
“Enough” by Jeff Tweedy, who’s released music both as a solo artist and as lead vocalist and guitarist of Chicago-based alternative country-rock band Wilco. Featuring an opening guitar riff that reminds me of the one from The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset”, “Enough” is featured on Tweedy’s ambitious new triple album Twilight Override, which dropped September 26th.
Tweedy released the 30-song “Twilight Override” in September. He is in the midst of a North American tour in support of the triple album.
It was novelist and critic John Berger who first posited that “calm is a form of resistance”. Who knows if Jeff Tweedy was channelling that sentiment while creating the gentle behemoth that is “Twilight Override“, but he has certainly responded to the maelstrom of paranoia and inhumanity unleashed by the second Trump term – what the Wilco frontman has dubbed “a bottomless basket of rock bottom” – with a disarming composure, and a big batch of tunes for his fifth solo outing.
“Twilight Override” is a 30-song triple album of mostly mellow consolation, insightful rather than intimidating. In the studio performance video for “Feel Free” – one of four tracks released in advance of the album – there is a glimpse of a sign on the wall of Wilco’s Chicago studio, The Loft, saying ‘It CouldBe Worse’. The song itself is a seven-minute invitation to shut out the white noise and slow down, to lay down anger and concerns, “to fall in love with the people you know and fall harder for the people you don’t”.
Tweedy is not in this alone. The album bears his name, but it is an assiduously arranged band record featuring his sons Spencer and Sammy and compadres James Elkington, Sima Cunningham, Macie Stewart and Liam Kazar, written with their capabilities in mind and recorded with the intention of capturing a communal warmth. The soothing backing vocals alone could be marketed as a cure-all balm.
The songs are grouped notionally to represent the past, present and future, though the distinction between each record is a little blurry. It is possible, even recommended, to take in Twilight Override in a single seamless sitting. It’s no pleasure cruise but the scenic rewards are there, from peaceful vistas to invigorating stormy weather and back to calmer waters.
Opening track “One Tiny Flower” takes one such mini-outing, into the joys of urban rambling, which many pursued during the pandemic. The mesmeric acoustic arrangement gradually takes a more torrid turn, as the natural world order fragments and more dissonant notes are sounded. The pacey yet plaintive “Caught Up In The Past” also has the air of a cautionary Covid reflection, with Tweedy making poetic observations from the side lines over a cantering rhythm. He breaks into shrewd spoken word on thrift shop symphony “Parking Lot”, concluding with quiet desperation, “I’d like to teach the world to sing…fuck…anything”.
Lovers of a Wilco blowout better dine out quickly on the grungey guitar wrangling and rag-tag chorale of “Forever Never Ends”, because most of the songs on the first record are studies in restraint, be it the beautiful desolation of “Love Is For Love” or the languorous Laurel Canyon vibes of “Betrayed”. This first set ends with “Throwaway Lines”, a pitch-perfect troubadour confessional in which Tweedy wrestles with the art of the lyric, worried he’ll give too much away (“I don’t want to write about all the things I’m still working out”) while knowing that deeper resonance is surely the songwriter’s goal.
As if taking his own counsel, the second record is more about gentle modulation of mood than individually spectacular songs, though the easy propulsive rhythm of “Out In The Dark” and pocket guitar oratorio at the heart of “New Orleans” make their mark before Tweedy and band pitch into some cultural specifics.
Kicking off the third LP, “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter” is inspired by the great man’s louche rock’n’roll, while “Amar Bharati” is a whimsical tribute to the Hindu sadhu who has kept his right arm raised for peace for over 50 years. “Stray Cats In Spain” is exactly what you might hope for, a snapshot of the rockabilly favourites in Iberia, one among a handful of pleasures set to a two-chord scratchy strum. “Ain’t It A Shame” is a deliberately creaky meditation on the past, present and future, lamenting lost youthful optimism with a sage cynicism. Tweedy sounds close to breaking on “This Is How It Ends”, but there is warmth amidst the fragility. In contrast, the title track is a feast of buoyant picking, enhanced with the muffled patter of drums and sighing strings.
Tweedy and band maintain a bittersweet equilibrium across these later stages of the journey, before the burnished indie blues parting shot of “Enough”, replete with musical and lyrical nods to “Waterloo Sunset” and “Like A Rolling Stone”. Like the rest of the collection, it is a reassuringly empathetic tap on the shoulder for those in need of succour and a steer.
Big Thief performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night, breaking out the “Double Infinity” single “Grandmother.” Backing the nonchalant trio were multiple percussionists on wind chimes, congas, shakers, and more, as well as backup singers, a bassist, and an additional guitarist.
“Double Infinity” came out last month via 4AD Records. In addition to “Grandmother,” it includes the singles “Incomprehensible,” “All Night All Day,” “Los Angeles,” and “Words,” the latter of which got the music video treatment—the band’s first proper music video since 2017. The album also marked Big Thief’s first record since the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik.
If that live rendition of “Grandmother” has you itching to see Big Thief live, then act soon. They’re currently on tour in support of their new album. Those North American dates are ongoing,
Chicago indie-rock band Ratboys have announced a new album: “Singin’ to an Empty Chair” is out out February 2026 via New West. Featured on the album is the new single “Anywhere,” a tightly wound slice of pop-rock with a music video directed by Bobby Butterscotch.
“Singin’ to an Empty Chair” spans 11 songs—including recent track “Light Night Mountains All That”—and was produced by Chris Walla, the former Death Cab for Cutie member who also worked on the band’s 2023 album, “The Window”. According to a press release, singer-guitarist Julia Steiner penned most of the songs after attending therapy for the first time and finding new ways to work through a tough, but necessary, conversation with a loved one from whom she’s estranged.
“The goal is to update this person on what’s been going on in my life and to try to bridge that impasse and reach out a hand into the void,” explained Steiner. To do so, she followed the “Empty Chair” technique learned in therapy, during which a person attempts to have a difficult conversation with someone who isn’t physically present by imagining they’re in a chair opposite them and speaking directly to it.
Ratboys recently announced a 2026 North American tour, which begins on February in Detroit, and lasts on through until mid-April. “Singin’ to an Empty Chair” is out in February via New West Records
London’s High-Vis play aggressive, frosty post-punk that’s as hard as any hardcore record. Like Black Flag, Sleaford Mods and of course Public Image Ltd before them, High-Vis’ anger is artful, gripping, and energising. It’ll trim the fat from your soul. We’ve just released limited copies of our debut album “No Sense No Feeling’ on our own label ‘Studio High Vis’.
500 on ‘Baby Blue Splatter’ vinyl and 500 on ‘Cream’ vinyl with an updated Gatefold cover. We’re so happy with how they’ve turned out and it’s great to have it back in press!
Massive thanks for Venn records and Six Feet Under for doing such a good job with it initially.
Formed in 2016 from the ashes of some of the UK’s best hardcore bands (Dirty Money, Tremors, DiE, The Smear), the band maintain a hardcore energy in their live shows – it’s not uncommon for cheerfully miserable, gold toothed Scouse vocalist Graham Sayle to come away from a show with a bleeding forehead – but they’ve taken their aural cues from old UK bands like Gang Of Four, Crisis, Joy Division and Stone Roses.
Recently, they’ve played with all the other smart bands who have been fucking with the old blueprints – Angel Du$t, Turnstile, Culture Abuse, Higher Power to name a few – and like all those bands, their sound is uniquely theirs.
Lots of variety on this album. Masterfully uses post-punk sounds to create songs that sound new and fresh
The Fat Angel Sings 
