One of my very favourite periods of music was that of the indie scene of the late eighties. So many incredible bands, and the great thing about Silk Daisys is that they are well and truly bringing it all back home. And then some.
‘It’s A Laugh‘ opens proceedings like if The Darling Buds and Lush had formed a kind of supergroup and roped Johnny Marr in on guitar. Then on ‘Kiss Me Like You Mean It’, they’ve swapped out the Smiths man for Will Sergeant and moved closer to the sound of Curve instead. To say this is a strong start is quite feasibly the understatement of the century. Aural ecstasy and nectar for the soul.
silk daisys: karla jean davis – vocals james abercrombie – vocals, guitar, bass, synthesizer
additional musicians: damon moon – drums and percussion andrew lawandus and ora abercrombie – handclaps on “it’s a laugh” olive abercrombie – background vocals on “nervous wreck”
Ichiko Aoba‘s, “Luminescent Creatures” is absolutely wonderful, offering moments of quiet isolation and meditative beauty and hope amidst the overwhelm of doom scrolling..To listen to Ichiko Aoba is to be drawn into a world as intimate as a warmly lit home, but cosmic in scale. The Japanese singer, songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist has taken a dedicated online fanbase built from TikTok sounds and critically acclaimed, and translated that into international tours spanning more than 20 countries.
Opener‘COLORATURA’ has delicious echoes of the work of Françoise Hardy, with the whirring instrumental motifs, and pungent wood wind notes guides us into a new terrain of the environment man has sought to destroy, while colourful wisps of melody comfort as you are submerged in slumber. ‘FLAG‘ distills pure simplicity and transfixing majesty, with her beguiling isolated voice and a guitar, Aoba reflects on life while gazing at the sea and singing: “Is it true that we are reborn so many times over?”
At the heart of “Luminescent Creatures” is the push and pull between the beauty and brutality of nature, one moment its vast landscapes and oceanic depths can make us feel insignificant and powerless to its cruelty, and the wonder and awe of nature and the glowing illumination of the core of every living creature: it’s these dichotomies that Ichiko Aoba channels quite exquisitely. A beacon to call you home in the dead of night, safe harbour, a reminder of what it means to feel grounded, to be alive and it sounds absolutely magical.
When The Beths released 2022’s dazzling, “Expert In A Dying Field“, the band found themselves gaining a bigger audience thanks to earworms such as‘When You Know You Know’ and the instant classic title track. Despite this success, the path to the follow-up wasn’t an easy one. Liz Stokes, lead singer and songwriter, suffered from writer’s block, as well as various health issues. In an interview with The Guardian, she talked openly about dealing with Graves’ Disease and the effects of the prescribed medication. Stokes spent time writing pages of lyrics and ideas for this album, and eventually finessed them into a concise ten track album.
Stokes’ revealed some of her insecurities and struggles in the newspaper interview, and this is part of what makes her such a remarkable songwriter and performer. She puts those topics into her songwriting, whether it’s a love song ‘Til My Last Breath’ or a song about her mental health ‘No Joy’.
Impressively, she has a gift for turning these confessionals into immaculate hook-filled pop songs. “Straight Line Was A Lie” isn’t just another great Beths album, it’s their most varied and best album since their stellar debut.
New Zealand indie rock heroes The Beths latest album “Straight Line Was A Lie“ is a catchy, instant classic out on Anti. Written in Los Angeles and self-recorded in the band’s hometown of Auckland, “Straight Line Was A Lie” is their first release for ANTI-Records follows 2022’s critically celebrated LP “Expert in A Dying Field”.
Lead singer and songwriter Liz Stokes delves deeper into her psyche to address everything from roundabout progress to physical and mental health challenges, and fraught family dynamics. Inspired by The Go-Go’s, Olivia Rodrigo, filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and Stephen King’s On Writing, amongst others, Stokes’ songwriting has achieved startling new depths of insight and vulnerability.
Fans will agree that “Straight Line Was A Lie” is the most sharply observant, truthful, and poetic Beths project to date.
“The inclusion of personal issues has given these songs an infectious juxtaposition between some of their best songwriting and the underlying melancholy…It’s so easy to root for Stokes and The Beths in general, because struggles and growth are relatable and the music captures it beautifully. “Straight Line Was a Lie” is a remarkable record that epitomises why the band is so special. They hit the ground running almost a decade ago and haven’t faltered one bit. “
By the time Irish musician Maria Somerville started writing “Luster”, her landmark label debut for 4AD, she had lived away from her native Connemara for quite some time. Having grown up amongst the wild, mountainous terrain of Galway’s rural west coast, she later relocated to Dublin, where she patiently developed an atmospheric dream pop signature inspired by the landscape of her youth – a spellbinding sound world of gusting ambient electronics, ethereal guitar strums, sparse percussion, and hushed lyrical vignettes. In 2019, this culminated in “All My People“, a self-released LP steeped in reverb, nostalgia and a yearning for home that won praise from discerning press and listeners alike.
It was upon returning to Connemara, in a house near where she was raised overlooking one of the country’s largest lakes, Lough Corrib, that work commenced on the songs that would eventually become “Luster”, an album that illuminates Somerville’s music anew, pushing it forward in both sound and spirit. “Where All My People” conveyed memories and melancholic longing with misty slowcore balladry, these 12 tracks show us an artist who’s more assured in the path her life has taken, and the person she’s become in the process. As she sings in ‘Trip’ “I can see more clearly than I could before. I know now what’s true for me.”
Invigorated by her surroundings and emboldened by her community, Somerville found a renewed sense of creative energy upon returning to home soil. It provided “fertile ground” for free-flowing recording sessions in her small living room studio, where she stitched together demos that were then fleshed out with friends and collaborators, and later mixed by the renowned New York-based engineer Gabriel Schuman. Contributors included producers J. Colleran, Brendan Jenkinson and Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft), as well as Lankum’s Ian Lynch, whose uilleann pipe drones you can hear in ‘Violet’, and Margie Jean Lewis, whose violin bows reverberate through the ambient haze of ‘Flutter’. Sessions with musicians Henry Earnest and Finn Carraher McDonald (aka Nashpaints) helped “tie it all together”, while contributions from friends Roisin Berkley and Olan Monk enshrined the companionship they’ve shared since Somerville returned to Connemara.
Listeners have had a window into Somerville’s world every Monday and Tuesday morning since 2021 via her beloved Early Bird Show on NTS Radio, where her dawn chorus selections range from blissful ambient and shoegaze to traditional Irish folk songs. Since signing to 4AD that same year, Somerville has toured with her labelmates Dry Cleaning, and released two covers for the label’s 40th anniversary celebrations – taking on Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Kinky Love’ and Air Miami’s ‘Sea Bird’. With the release of “Luster”, she has signalled the arrival of a new era that will see her play around the world in 2025 accompanied by a live band. Rest assured though, no matter where Somerville goes, she’ll take a piece of home with her – a living, breathing, timeless essence you can sense in every note, as clear as the air by the Corrib.
Hailed by Stereogum as “the most important band in modern shoegaze,” They Are Gutting a Body of Water (TAGABOW) made their name approaching the genre with an experimental edge. “Lotto” captures the sound that made the band a prominent force in the American underground. Menacing riffs, soaring leads, wailing distortion, and in a world of automated robo-calls and pervasive AI content optimized to keep us scrolling, “Lotto” is an attempt to capture the sound of four human musicians in a room.
On “Lotto”, TAGABOW’s fourth studio album, the band pulls the plug on hyperreality and abandons electronic elements in favour of a more straightforward, live approach: finally letting the screens go black, pulling the blinds up. It’s their rawest album yet, both in subject matter and in sound.
Though Dulgarian has previously delved into themes of numbness and isolation, the lyrics have tended to be evasive, allowing his terse, imagistic motifs to slip quietly beneath the crashing riffs. “Lotto” strips his words bare from the jump. The album opens with “the chase,” a first-person account of suffering through fentanyl withdrawal. “Boosting Gillettes in a hopeful exchange for a sharp but tranqless synthetic isolate,” he mutters, “a substance that’ll make me sob pathetic to my girlfriend up high in miracle’s castle.” Even when the lyrics are fuzzier and sparser, Dulgarian’s voice comes through clearer than ever. On “rl stine,” dedicated to an unhoused friend, he allows certain phrases to come to the forefront of speaker-busting guitar swells: “I know that hurts/Greet the day with a sweet reserve.” “Lotto’s” vignettes become all the more gut-wrenching in their pointed swings toward clarity.
Still, “Lotto” is not a pessimistic album; it’s the band’s most hopeful work, in both its brutal honesty and its conscious pursuit of staying grounded. Dulgarian notes that the album is “rife with perceivable mistakes, ebbing and flowing with the most humanity [he] can place on one record.” This sentiment was always present in TAGABOW’s music (“Evolve, or die,” he sang on 2022’s “webmaster”), but it comes alive in these pared-back arrangements.
On the instrumental standout “slo crostic,” Dulgarian, bassist Emily Lofing, and guitarist PJ Carroll each take turns riffing off Ben Opatut’s walloping drums before coming together into a relatively simple yet undeniably hooky finish. It feels unrehearsed, or at least looser and more laid-back than ever.
Closer “herpim” explores the band’s new steadfast approach with lyrics that describe an airplane emergency over ambulance-like guitars and a looming, hoarse bassline. “We couldn’t land where we intended ‘cause there’s storms,” Dulgarian announces through loudspeaker fuzz, “but now we have to so I need you to buckle in.” The instruments fade out one by one, concluding the album with a few muted drums and the sound of a door opening.
It feels less like a happy ending than a steadfast commitment to finding new territory. That’s not to say that TAGABOW have abandoned the sounds that first made them connect; the guitars on instrumental “chrises head” adopt the band’s synth interlude skins for old time’s sake, and “baeside k” evokes the classic scuzz of 2019’s “destiny XL”.
But for the most part, “Lotto” gambles on TAGABOW’s ability to craft songs more compelling in their simplicity and vulnerability than their technical capabilities. By trading in their plastic sheen for a more ragged sense of real-life urgency, TAGABOW expose the tenderness at their music’s core: a refusal to anesthetize, an avowal to meet the bone where it breaks.
TAGABOW are the Pixies to the Nirvanas of TikTok-gaze – Stereogum
The indie-country boom (not surprisingly) tends to be very US-centric, but one of the genre’s best newer bands hails not from America but from Norwich, England: Brown Horse. They began their life gigging around their local pub scene as a folk group before adopting a more electrified country rock sound on their acclaimed 2024 debut album “Reservoir”, and now 15 months later they released the even better “All The Right Weaknesses”.
Uncut‘s 9/10 review of the album points out that “Reservoir” gradually came together before the band had much of a following. After it came out, the band’s profile rose, relentless touring ensued, and the energy of the road resulted in a louder, looser, more collaborative follow up.
They’ve got three vocalists in Emma Tovell, Patrick Turner, and Phoebe Troup, and the album is powered by a fiery mix of rugged Crazy Horse-esque guitars, soaring pedal steel, and uplifting choruses. It only takes a couple listens to Brown Horse for them to feel like a band you’ve known your whole life, and even then, there’s something new and refreshing about them that stands out from every single artist they might remind you of.
Brown Horse rides again Not satisfied with a live review from March 2024, and a news item from last month, the six-piece Norwich-based country rock band has now muscled its way into today’s TOTW on the strength of new single ‘Dog Rose.’ It is the second single to be taken from Brown Horse’s new album All The Right Weaknesses, which came out earlier this year on the 4th of April via Loose Records.
The review makes comparisons to Crazy Horse, The Band, R.E.M., and David Berman, and points out that the album also makes a lyrical reference to indie-country pioneer Bill Callahan. Another 9/10 review from PopMatters also compares the band to Songs: Ohia, Adrianne Lenker, Uncle Tupelo, Son Volt, and Richard Buckner. All of these comparisons should give you a very good idea of what to expect, and Brown Horse already stand tall next to established names like these.
Like its predecessor‘Corduroy Couch’, the new single confirms the growing confidence of Brown Horse’s songwriting. ‘Dog Rose’ barely gets out of a canter but its initially slow, loping stride enables us to luxuriate in the warmth and self-possession of their clearly developing melodic craft. But as the song gathers momentum and the guitars start to crash in Brown Horse show they are also not afraid to dust things up.
Indie pop continues to inspire a high number of outfits to write songs and practice them, then record them and release them to a public that’s ever hungry for jangling and chiming guitar melodicism. It’s a genre with an unusually high percentage of success, likely because the bands are doing it out of love and not for fame. Jeanines are clearly smitten as they add some gorgeous ache to their sharp, ’60s-influenced songs. Repeated spins haven’t revealed a flaw in the construction. This here’s the indie pop record of the year.
Over the course of a decade playing together and making records as Jeanines, the duo of Alicia Jeanine and Jed Smith have charted a distinctive course through the history of pop, evoking influences as varied as the 60s folk of early Fairport Convention and Vashti Bunyan, the sunshine pop of Margo Guryan and Laura Nyro, and of course indie pop touchstones like Dear Nora, Marine Girls, Dolly Mixture, and the post-Black Tambourine projects of Pam Berry.
Their new album “How Long Can It Last” finds Jeanines grappling with serious themes of personal and professional upheaval, adding weight to their finest set of songs yet. With lyrics that look deeply at time and its reverberations, connections and ruptures, songs like “Coaxed A Storm,” “What’s Done Is Done” and “On and On” combine richly melodic tunes and crisp arrangements to stellar effect. While the themes might be heavy, the melodies and harmonies are simply heavenly, elevating these economical songs and giving each the feeling of a lost classic.
Jeanines, “How Long Can It Last” released on Slumberland Records
Racing Mount Pleasant take their name from an exit off the highway on the way to Chicago. On the album cover of their self-titled debut LP, we’re far away from the city, looking in on two figures standing together on a frozen expanse; the sky is pale, and the entire frame is so muted it almost undermines the warmth of the crew’s music. How can such a vast space hold such emptiness? And what might the two people – one lifting a deer trophy, for some cruel reason – have to say about it all?
Racing Mount Pleasant release their eponymous debut album, via R&R (label home to Mk.gee, Dijon). The album’s opening track, “Your New Place”, sets the stage for an album brimming with intricate arrangements that swell and recede with the charged emotions of the songs themselves. The new song continues to show the band’s dynamism, following early offerings “Call It Easy” and eponymous track “Racing Mount Pleasant”, which Stereogum described as harnessing “the power of big band grandiosity with suspenseful drum builds and a blend of gritty garage rock that explodes with sublime tenderness”.
Racing Mount Pleasant began as a group of friends and like-minded musicians in Ann Arbor anchored at a single creative house that various members of the band have frequented and to this day, continue to live in near the University of Michigan. After an early album and smattering of songs under the Kingfisher, including one beguiling and ambitious album released in 2022, the band reimagined themselves as Racing Mount Pleasant. Now the band are gearing up to introduce themselves under this new moniker, with a beautiful, challenging debut album that draws on each member’s academic mastery of their instruments, but also a spirited defiance of conventional song structures, or even what a contemporary band looks or sounds like.
For fans of Neutral Milk Hotel, Tindersticks and Black Country New Road.
Multi Platinum singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Maeson leans into a season of change on his 2025 third full-length album, “A Quiet and Harmless Living”. The Nashville-based troubadour explores the trials, tribulations, turbulence, and triumphs of marriage, fatherhood, and life on the road and at home.
Much of the material originated in the middle of the night long after his young family fell asleep. From this intimate headspace, he threads the kind of questions we usually ask ourselves in private into the fabric of alternative anthems like the piano-driven lead single “Everlasting.”
The world met Matt when he dropped his 2019 debut “Bank on the Funeral” making history with signature Platinum singles “Cringe” and “Hallucinogenics” [feat. Lana Del Rey]. Beyond jaunts with Zach Bryan and more, he has sold out headline tours and built a devout audience. He opens up more than ever on “A Quiet and Harmless Living” and invites everyone to do the same.
A classic forty-minute set of inquisitive pop songs, blessed with a lightness of touch and a sharp focus that can’t help but charm the listener. Angel Deradoorian wants her process to feel immediate, but unlike the meditative and jammy “Find the Sun, Ready for Heaven” took time. The singer-songwriter started writing music for the record by herself in a really small, uninhabited town in upstate New York, but ended up reworking and editing it tirelessly across various stages. In their recorded form, the songs remain fluid and kinetic while carrying a blazing, prickly intensity all the way through. Even at its most despairing and subconscious, “Ready for Heaven” feels like a wake-up call.
It conjures up some last, faint afterglow of the old belief that an electronic, programmed beat can smash itself – and you – into another, more egalitarian consciousness It is a remarkable fact that this bold and open-hearted record is made by one person, working alone.
Repeatedly reworking the songs until they were complete is a painstaking process that generated an energy and space where Angel Deradoorian could indulge in the arcana of her artform.
“I love the production more than the songwriting. […] In fact, I don’t even feel like a songwriter at times, I feel like someone who is just inspired by so much music. And I want to try it all out! Like Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Mingus, or ESG and Silver Apples, or making weird krautrock and industrial music. I love dub, and Sly and Robbie. I love the productions of those records and the collective energies released by their creators in the studio. It’s just a weird thing to do it by yourself!”
Angel Deradoorian, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known mononymously as Deradoorian, grew up in Orangevale, California. After leaving school to pursue a career in music when she was 16, she moved to Brooklyn and joined Dirty Projectors, appearing on their 2009 album “Bitte Orca”, which came out the same year she released her first solo EP, “Mind Raft”, produced by the band’s leader David Longstreth. Before releasing her debut album, “The Expanding Flower Planet”, in 2015, she guested on records by acts including U2, Flying Lotus, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, and Discovery, and followed it up with the ambient folk collection “Eternal Recurrence” in 2017.
Mirroring her spiritual journey, her next album, the meditative and jammy “Find the Sun“, saw her working with Samer Ghadry and Dave Harrington in New York. Between that album and her latest one, “Ready for Heaven”, Deradoorian teamed up with Russian musician Kate Shilonosova (aka Kate NV) to release “Ticket to Fame“, their first album as Decisive Pink, via Fire in 2023.
She developed, reworked, and tinkered tirelessly with the new songs, which in their recorded form remain fluid and kinetic while carrying a blazing, prickly intensity all the way through. Even at its most despairing and subconscious, “Ready for Heaven” feels like a wake-up call.
This stellar third solo album, which offers Downtown NYC dance grooves, Krautrock-tinged art-pop, Silver Apples-flavoured electro-psych, a solemn neo-baroque processional, post-punky collage spillage, diva soul synth-pop, and more. Giving this the clear edge over similar albums in the same zone is that Deradoorian recorded the whole shebang herself.
The Fat Angel Sings 