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.
Bookended by collapse, “Big Ugly” is a mausoleum for small Southern bygones, wrought in close detail by Aaron Dowdy: torn-down small towns where heaven seemed in-reach, a beer-fisted past self with nothing else to hold, the cans and cigarettes that lined a shabby old convenience store’s shelves. In answering questions of Southern living, it raises an age-old, universal query: What does it mean to love people and places once they’ve become part of history, one that hasn’t quite passed? The album’s title derives from a West Virginian area based around a Guyandotte River tributary named for the crooked, “Big Ugly” creek rushing through it.
A hastily assembled Internet guide to Appalachian West Virginian communities introduces “Big Ugly” as “one of those place names newspaper columnists grab on a slow day,” but Dowdy saw more than a conspicuous headline in the nickname—the evocative, oddly affectionate word pairing captured the essence of the songs he’d been writing: unfiltered snapshots of hardscrabble Southern living zoomed in on the people and places. Fleshed out by a full band and esteemed guest players, Dowdy’s final compositions are, indeed, big.
They aren’t always pretty, per se (although exquisite fiddle pulls and glossy keys attenuate some of the denser offerings, to an unearthly, beautiful effect), but unabated love seeps from every cranny of even the gnarliest, craggiest constructions, deluging every corner of the heart. Each song is a microcosm of its own, and the anecdotes within each, if banal, are so intensely vivid that it’s challenging to imagine them having solely transpired on paper—you can almost trace the steps of every character, deepening their footprints as you meander the dirt roads winding across 11 chapters.
Philadelphia shoegaze band They Are Gutting a Body of Water have announced a lengthy tour and a new album. “Lotto”, their fourth studio LP, arrived October via Julia’s War/Smoking Room/ATORecords. Bolstering the record is new single “Trainers,” which comes with a Ben Turok–directed video.
What began as the solo project of singer Doug Dulgarian has since been expanded into a proper four-piece, with bassist Emily Lofing, guitarist PJ Carroll, and drummer Ben Opatut joining the fold. Their new LP is billed as a step away from the digital collage work of 2022’s “Lucky Styles” and the compilation “Swanlike (Loosies 2020 – 2023)”, with Dulgarian instead putting the emphasis on his guitar again—as evidenced in “Trainers” and the previously released track “American Food.”
The American group are a ferocious proposition – caustic guitar music that unfurls in squalls of noise, they don’t sit easily into any one bracket.
The band will play a full UK tour in February, with new single ‘rl stine’ out now. The title may refer to the famed Goosebumps and Point Horror author, but the lyrics hone in on more personal details, with the volume rising around the words.
“There is a guy who I see every day near my house,” bandleader Doug Dulgarian reflects. “I always buy him a pack of Newport hundreds, knowing full well that he will trade it for crack. I wonder sometimes if it’s the addict in me, enabling the addict in him, or if I just fully understand his struggle. Perhaps we’re the same after all.”
released October 17th, 2025
all songs written by they are gutting a body of water except ‘slo crostic’ written by: canty, lally, mackaye, piccciotto. originally recorded by fugazi
Suzzallo (pronounced Sue-Zuh-Low) is a new Seattle-based rock band fronted by Rocky Votolato. After the devastating loss of his child in a tragic car accident, Votolato created an entire new world inside of music that transmutes extreme grief into something healing and beautiful. The result is Suzzallo’s debut album, “The Quiet Year”, an explosive eulogy of fuzzed-out, ‘90s inspired alt-rock songs that are as anthemic as they are cathartic.
Sonically, Suzzallo is somewhat of a return to form for Votolato. He’s primarily known for his solo career, with nine albums that showcase his knack for intimate, acoustic-based indie folk, but Votolato started out playing in louder bands, like Waxwing, who gained an underground cult following in the mid-2000s Pacific Northwest punk and hardcore scene. Suzzallo’s music taps into that same spirit: blistering guitars, soaring choruses, and poignantly impactful lyrics–all with a volume and fervent intensity that far surpasses even the fiercest of Votolato’s previous work. But Suzzallo’s powerhouse sound is more than an artistic choice, it’s a necessity.
“I guess it all started to take shape in the summer of 2022, about six months after Kienan passed,” Votolato explains. “I knew I needed a louder, bigger, more explosive sound to say what I needed to with this project. This kind of personal tragedy rearranges everything about you as a human and artist. I needed a new channel to express what I was going through and the only thing that made any sense to me were the most distorted guitar sounds I could find–I was doing months of primal screaming as a form of grief recovery before I was ever even able to sing at all, so that played into the vocal delivery as well.” The songs that became Suzzallo’s debut confront the shattering weight of grief head on, while also revealing an uplifting strength and determination to carry on beneath it–not so much a reinvention as a reincarnation. “I was completely shattered and knocked down by this loss, but I feel like Suzzallo is a big part of getting back on my feet and finding a reason to keep going,” says Votolato. “I’m so grateful for the way creating art has helped me process my grief and heal, and I hope these songs can bring some catharsis and comfort to others now as well.”
To make “The Quiet Year”, Votolato was joined by a team of friends and collaborators. Suzzallo’s lineup was rounded out by bassist Steve Bonnell (Schoolyard Heroes) and drummer Rudy Gajadhar (Waxwing), and they recruited legendary producer John Goodmanson (Unwound, The Blood Brothers, Sleater-Kinney) to record the album at Robert Lang Studios in Seattle. Votolato’s longtime friend Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service is even featured on several songs, lending his signature vocals to beautifully placed harmonies, along with performing electric guitar, bass 6, and piano.
On the massive opening one-two punch of “River” and “The Destroyer” Suzzallo introduce their core sound: fuzz-drenched, Pumpkins-esque guitar tones juxtaposed with moving lyric-driven melodies. It’s a highly effective combination that demands the listener’s full attention and doesn’t let go. “I love those ‘90s distorted guitar tones and they were a big comfort to me,” Votolato says. “It’s almost like when Kienan died I immediately was transported back to all of my earliest punk and post-hardcore influences, bands like Jawbreaker, Drive Like Jehu, and Fugazi. Full catharsis was my goal so those were definitely in there, but there was something new as well–something more melody and chorus-driven while keeping that high energy 90’s approach at the same time.”
Lyrically, the songs on “The Quiet Year” are intensely honest portraits of an impossible to describe loss. They’re marked by Votolato’s vulnerability and details that honour his child (such as recurring images of dragons), and throughout the record the singer always manages to deliver heartrending lyrics through bold, well-crafted hooks. It’s a magic trick that somehow makes lines like “no one told us love was this dangerous” (from mid-album standout “Star String Radio”), or “You became the sky, the grey and the white, against the blue, I hope you’re doing alright” (from “Constellations”) all the more effective.
The music that makes up Suzzallo’s debut is more than enough to turn heads based on sound alone. These are truly massive, earth-shaking rock songs, the kind that make your skull rattle while filling it up with instantly memorable hooks. But they’re more than that. They’re also the kind of songs that needed to be made. The kind of songs that fulfill their cathartic purpose before they even go out into the world. But lucky for us they’re also the kind of songs that need to be heard.
The Fat Angel Sings 