“The Clearing” is the brand new album from Wolf Alice. Written in Seven Sisters and recorded in LA with Grammy-winning, master producer Greg Kurstin last year, “The Clearing” reveals where Wolf Alice stands sonically in 2025.
They deliver a supremely confident collection of songs bursting with ambition, ideas, and emotion.
Wolf Alice’s “The Clearing” felt like the moment the fog finally lifted after years of stormy weather: calmer on the surface, but with so much going on in the air if you actually stop and listen.
The guitars are softer around the edges, the drums sit deep and warm, and there’s a gentle glow to the strings that keeps popping up across the tracklist. Seemingly focused on growing up, and trading chaos for control, the themes are reflected in the musical development of the band. Less whiplash tempo changes, more paused and considered, although the Wolf Alice weirdness is never fully sanded off by the more polished production.
The band have grown in stature and emit the kind of presence that turns anticipation into ignition. They wear their songs like armour, radiating a self-belief; an assurance that every note will land exactly where it should. They elevate the stage, charged with the knowledge that they no longer need to prove their worth.
We’ve been chasing a Wet Leg Tiny Desk ever since the Isle of Wight band floored us with the 2021 single “Chaise Longue,” a song that, like much of the group’s work, is as understated and droll as it is frenetic and infectious. So, when we finally got Wet Leg into the office to record this performance, we weren’t surprised by the amount of playful swagger the band brought, or by how carefully calibrated the set was. But fans might be surprised by how much Wet Leg leans into that more understated side. You won’t hear “Chaise Longue” or “Catch These Fists,” the ripping first single from the upcoming album, moisturizer. Instead, singer Rhian Teasdale and the rest of the band chose to spotlight the album’s core themes: the joy of being in love in a state of bliss. That’s not to say it’s a quiet or entirely restrained set. The band opens with “CPR,” a heady alarm about obsession and the ways unchecked love can dismantle you, followed by a preview of the not-yet-released“mangetout” from “moisturizer“.
They also perform the carefree, sunny-day single “davina mccall,” a showcase for Teasdale’s gorgeous voice, before closing with another unreleased track from “moisturizer” and one the band says it’s never played live for anyone before a languid, dreamy ode to the enduring power of love called “11:21.”
SET LIST: “CPR” “mangetout” “davina mccall” “11:21”
L.A. Witch play a psychedelic, post-punk, drugged out drone blues that has become refined to scuzzy psych perfection on their third album. Emerging from the Southern California underground in a mist of dry ice and kick-ass tunes, L.A. Witch released their eponymous album in 2017. They are the bastard offspring of an alternative California where Hope Sandoval took too many drugs, joined The Fuzztones then jumped ship to form an English early 80’s goth band. They create a psychedelic, post-punk, drugged-out drone blues that has become refined to scuzzy psych perfection on third album “DOGGOD2. It’s a wistful, dreamy minimalist sound with gritty goth guitars.
The scene is set on album opener, “Icicle”, with its echoing vocals over a guitar fed through a flanger and backed by tribal drums. It’s a wistful, dreamy minimalist sound with gritty goth guitars. The vocals, as on many of the tracks, sound as though the vocalist is in another room, hearing the music in a dream; it creates an ethereal, sensuous tone.
There is more goth like sounds on “Kiss Me Deep”, with its dreamy, swirling sound, of longing and desire. It probes the longing of the heart and finds passion and despair. The music is akin to the swirling confusion that passion and desire bring. As in all great goth songs it is steeped in sensual longing and a surrender to fate.
The title song has a stripped back feel to the music, with the drums beating the backbeat into submission and the guitar and bass creating a classic rock groove. The lyrics are about submission: You like me best when I’m in distress.
Vocalist and guitarist Sade Sanchez says of “DOGGOD” “I feel like I’m some sort of servant or slave to love. There’s a willingness to die for love in the process of serving it or suffering for it or in search of it… just in the way a loyal, devoted servant dog would. There is this symbolic connection between women and dogs that expresses women’s subordinate position in society. And anything that embodies such divine characteristics never deserved to be a word used as an insult.”
There is similar yearning over swirling guitars, with a very cool drum beat behind it on SOS. Sticking with that early 80s sound, “I Hunt You Pray“, is driven by a Cure bass line with a guitar that jangles down your spinal chord, bending like strung out tension whilst the drums beat out a sinister rhythm. The vocals echo from the grave, from a place we don’t want to be. A song for the forgotten and the abandoned.
The band haven’t forgotten how to punk it up in a garage style though. “777” opens with a heavy punk riff that drives on as the drums hammer out the beat and the bass drives relentlessly, pushing on, whilst the vocals hover on the edge of a void, drifting through the music like a ghost of love’s past. It’s a cool blend of driving punk and ethereal smoke and mirrors. Likewise, on “The Lines” the band rock out behind the vocals which shimmer and accuse. The vocals anchor the song as it threatens to accelerate away into chaos, whilst an organ adds something (un)holy to the mix.
The album was recorded at Motorbass studios in Paris, and the city has clearly seeped into the pores of the band and the grooves of the record, with its gothic art and ghosts of the cafes and avenues. It plays as a soundtrack to draping oneself across Jim Morrison’s grave in Père-Lachaise.
L.A. Witch are Sade Sanchez (guitar/vocals), Irita Pai (bass), and Ellie English (drums),
The Cords have released the best indie pop album of 2025. It has songs, style and will stick in your head for the rest of your life. Simply the best. Comprised of sisters Eva and Grace Tedeschi, the duo began playing drums at a young age. Their love for 80s and 90s indie music led them to form a band together, with Grace on drums and Eva on guitar.
The sisters quickly gained popularity, with their cassette and flexi single selling out in hours. They played gigs with renowned Scottish pop bands like The Vaselines, Camera Obscura, and Belle and Sebastian, as well as newer indiepop groups like the Umbrellas and Chime School. The Cords’ eagerly-awaited debut album will be co-released by Skep Wax and Slumberland Records.
Do you remember that you would have been listening to John Peel religiously, pouring each week over the NME, Melody Maker and occasionally Sounds… these teen sisters have come to this themselves, the Sarah Records DIY aesthetic, with fold-around sleeve and inserts whilst soaking up their parents’ record collections (The Cure, BMX Bandits and Nirvana I believe). What they’ve done to date hasn’t been cynically calculated or done as marketing, it’s been a pure love for a scene/movement or, as they put it they’re just, ‘A Scottish, jangle, DIY indie pop sister duo who channel classic C86 straight from the heart’. The Cords have taken familiar ingredients from what’s gone before and created something utterly fresh. Older indie fans may hear echoes of The Shop Assistants and Tiger Trap but will hear something else too: a yearning, dreamy melodic power that takes the songs into darker, stranger places.
Their music has been compared to bands like The Shop Assistants and Talulah Gosh, but with a unique dreamy melodic power that sets them apart. The album features catchy pop tunes like “Fabulist” and “Just Don’t Know (How To Be You)”, as well as more introspective tracks like “October” and “When You Said Goodbye”.
Produced by Jonny Scott and Simon Liddel, the record showcases Eva’s sinuous guitar and silky vocals, along with Grace’s expressive drumming. The first single from The Cords’ debut album (release date: 26th September 2025) “Fabulist” was released on 22nd July and is available as a very limited transparent lathe-cut 7″ and as a CD single on Skep Wax Records (Europe) and Slumberland Records (America).
Sunny War is an Americana singer/songwriter based in Chattanooga, Tennessee with a punk edge, and her upcoming album features two punk legends, Steve Ignorant of Crass and John Doe of X. She’s the finger-picking blueswoman whose life was changed by the punk band Crass – and went viral for busking while homeless. She talks about ghosts, her ‘smelly’ childhood and fighting the far right.
Sunny War delivers another stunning album of punk folk and blues with a full band and guest musicians of old school punks. Seeing her on the streets of LA and seeing where she is now is testament to her strength and belief. She could have faded away – people would see the video and wonder what happened to that bad ass guitar playing homeless girl and probably determined that her talent had been subsumed by drugs and drink. But she became more than that. More than a cliché. She rose above. She inspires.
“Ghosts”, an exploration of her father’s death and its aftermath, appears on her new album, “Armageddon in a Summer Dress”. It is a fantastic record, more evidence of a song writing talent who has attracted the attention of Willie Nelson (who covered her song “If It Wasn’t Broken” on his last album) and Mitski, who invited War to support her most recent New York shows. It deals in Americana deeply rooted in blues – War is a devotee of Elizabeth Cotten, whose song “Freight Train” became a skiffle-era standard, and plays guitar with a distinctive “crab claw” finger-picking style more commonly used on a banjo – but also displays her longstanding love for anarcho-punk.
“Everybody I love is punk,” she shrugs. “As a kid, those are the only people that would be friends with me, because maybe I was a little bit smelly and I had a drinking problem.”
Once a member of a punk duo with the spectacular name the Anus Kings, War has old Discharge and Multi-Death Corporations posters on the wall of her home; she is frequently seen sporting Rudimentary Peni and Conflict T-shirts. The lyrics on “Armageddon in a Summer Dress” cover everything from romance to the urge to switch off from the incessant news cycle. There are definitely moments when they sound remarkably like the barked contents of a 7in punk single: “Sucking dick for a dollar’s not the only way to ho / We sell labour, we sell hours, sell our power, sell our souls.” Even her stage name makes her sound like a member of a punk band – her real name is Sydney Ward
Signed to a local label and then to the longstanding Americana institution New West – home to Steve Earle, Drive-By Truckers and Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett’s the Coward Brothers. Her breakthrough came with 2023’s “Anarchist Gospel”, which featured contributions from alt-country royalty David Rawlings. The years of busking prepared her for touring life. “I don’t have a lot of fear that some other performers have, because all the craziest shit that could happen while you’re playing has already happened to me,” she says. “I’ve had gangs of teenagers heckle me. I’ve had a crackhead steal all of my tips out of my guitar case and run away. And I pay a lot of attention to how people react to songs, because as a busker you’re always trying to figure it out: oh, people tip really good if you play this.”
The album also features appearances by Valerie June, Tré Burt, Jack Lawrence of the Raconteurs, Kyshona Armstrong, John James Tourville of The Deslondes, and more. The songs with Steve Ignorant and Tré Burt are out now, and both are great.
Their return is 2025’s most unexpected treat. The Armory Show are back! This minor miracle has gone pretty much under the radar, but after a 40 year gap between albums, they have stormed the barricades with one of the finest albums of the year in “Dead Souls”. The Armory Show manage to be epic and gentle, fresh and traditional all at once, sometimes in the same song.
Led by Richard Jobson of the Skids, The Armory Show has released a brand new album, Punk legend Richard Jobson is best known as the frontman of the Skids.
The Armoury Show emerged in 1983, consisting of Skids members Richard Jobson and Russell Web, along with Magazine members John McGeoch and John Doyle. The band released their debut album “Waiting for the Floods” in 1985, before disbanding in 1988.
In 2019, it was announced that The Armory Show would be resurrected with Jobson as the only original member, and a newly amended name without the letter U.
Armory Show: Dead Souls released on Last Night From Glasgow
One of the most exciting new bands in the UK – but with the cool reserve of quietly heroic past-masters. This is a band for the new generation. Teenagers and twenty-somethings who are looking for the new, exciting and original in guitar-based music. This is a band who live in their imagination. Record their day-dreams and write about their nightmares. Tulpa don’t need hype and hyperbole. They are the real deal and sooner or later, the (secret) public will get what they want…the coolest, genuinely Indie-pendant Band in the UK
A band that sound so cool, write songs that are so strange, but look so unexpectedly normal and ordinary that you wouldn’t give them a second glance in the street. The songs are about pyromaniacs, spies, monsters, tulpas, stick-figure boys, UFO’s, reveries, phantoms and psyops.
The singer/bass-player Josie Kirk will be dubbed ‘the Mona Lisa of New Indie’ and Dan Hyndman who provides the male vocal on a couple songs is the definition of laconic as a singer. Both he and Myles Kirk alternate in playing lead and rhythm guitar which meshes beautifully, underpinned by drummer Mike Ainsley who always seems dressed for bad weather.
Tulpa are so cool, you really would think that they are American…. the music press/business Always found it easier and preferable to mythologize and eulogise bands from the USA rather than the UK…. Talking Heads, Sonic Youth, Arcade Fire… rather than UK bands. Maybe it was to do with ‘market forces’ but so many British bands never achieved their potential worldwide and its always been a bugbear of mine that American bands always used to get preferential coverage.
These things don’t matter to me generally but Tulpa have huge commercial potential, being as they are ‘midway between the Sunday and Pixies’ or Lush and Pavement… They have a kinda ordinariness and a mystique that could well translate into mainstream success without vulgar commerciality.
The Skep Wax label seem to specialize in bands who are essentially the spiritual children of the bands they formed themselves as youngsters, Talulah Gosh & Heavenly. So in tandem with reissues of their old material, they are releasing brand new, box-fresh, jangle-pop, naive C86-style indie, thus flooding the market with their signature sound. A style of music and associated look, that was much-mocked by the laddish music press at the time.
“Monster of The Week” is laidback and groovy slacker-pop personified with a hint of The Monochrome Set. You feel like everyone’s against ya is a killer opening line which pale-boys and sad-girls will immediately relate to. Every song on “Monster of The Week” is perfect in isolation… but fit together as a immaculate collection
They open with an instrumental, ‘Theme‘. (Like Pixies did on Bossanova) “Transfixed Gaze” next, condenses the Sundays and The Wedding Present formulae into one perfect 3 minutes 11 seconds of cynical, cyclical pop… the narrative of which has an echo of Devoto (to me, but must be sheer coincidence…) “Psyops” has a chorus/hookline that goes…. you’re so sad and I don’t know why – repeated like a mantra until it becomes hypnotic. “Pyro” is super-fast -the Primitives meets Josef K.
“Let’s Make a Tulpa” will be, in time, looked back upon as an utter classic. Perfection. “Stick Figure Boy” is so perfect, lazy, corny and too long – like a twee parody of Dinosaur Jnr – but still irresistible.
“You’re Living in a Reverie” has a hint of the purity-of-sound of Ceremony, and the lyric is astounding in that it seems to use vocabulary drawn from Ian Curtis, Howard Devoto (reverie), Morrissey (ill at ease), Buzzcocks (inside my head there is harmony) and again, Pixies (Let’s take a ride on a UFO baby..). None of which I’m suggesting is deliberate, but it will hook in older listeners…
“It’s Amateur Hour. I need professional help” is just such a great couplet, sung sweetly with an almost imperceptible hint of menace. “Raw Nerve” is all frenzied guitars, and may remind seasoned listeners of the spiky excitement of Josef K say the label. “Whose Side Are You On?” is the eternal question and a great song sung by Dan to close the album on a slacker note, sounding as it does like Blur in their Pavement phase.
Skep Wax say: A whole set of loud, catchy, perfectly-crafted pop songs have been conjured into existence – and want to be part of your life. Josie’s hyper-melodic lead vocals are cool and crystalline – but the lyrics are warm and human. The twin guitars create a sonic mesh, a web of textures that traps you, whether you like it or not. And yes, something scarier does lie below the surface. Occasionally the guitars force their way to the front, furious and intense. And sometimes those lyrics aren’t as innocent as they first appear. The danger, just below the surface of the songs, is maybe that’s what makes this album so arresting…
Tulpa are so good they could be mistaken for Americans says Ged Babey. ‘Midway between The Sunday and Pixies’ is the tag-line. Tulpa are: Josie Kirk, Daniel Hyndman, Mike Ainsley, Myles Kirk.
Tulpa: Monster of the Week released on Skep Wax released November 28th, 2025
We’re excited to share a new track from our album Arctic Moon — ‘Saviours Are A Dangerous Thing’ — released today as a full promo video. It was the final song written for the album, and one that holds a lot of weight. As Vox explains:
“I’m especially pleased with how this one came together. The initial idea was brought in by Stephen Rice, and from there, it became a full band collaboration. The melody and lyrics came quickly — influenced by what was unfolding politically at the time. There was chaos, and I couldn’t help but see the parallels with the 1930s — and the implications felt deeply troubling, not just for the country I now live in, but for the Western world as a whole.”
“Arctic Moon” has a good claim to be Chameleons’ best album yet: it has breadth, maturity, sophistication and not a single weak track. Time to stop thinking of them as “coulda been contenders” – they’re back in contention now, with an energy that shames many a younger band.
Chiming, cheering guitars and muscular riffs are filtered through a deep melancholy: this is the sound of summer turning slowly yet ineluctably into autumn. It’s a perfect showcase for Vox’s dissections of twisted, tortured relationships. “I need someone who’s not afraid/Of this dark dynamic we have made,” he sings on the opening track, “Where Are You?”
Since they first emerged in 1981, Chameleons have often been described as the most underrated band of their generation. But now, the release of their fifth studio album could finally bring them the acclaim they deserve. Time has taken its toll on the original line-up, remembered for their three genre-defining 1980s albums and their short-lived early 2000s reformation. However, vocalist, lyricist and bass player Vox Mark Burgess remains at the helm, still accompanied by guitarist Reg Smithies. Second guitarist Stephen Rice, drummer Todd Demma and keyboardist Danny Ashberry complete the squad.
“Arctic Moon” arrives September 2025.
The album will be available from all the usual US and UK/EU outlets.
With their fourth album, “Billboard Heart”, Sub Pop-signed the Seattle indie-rockers Deep Sea Diver are in contention for Album of the Year. With the standout track “What Do I know” showcasing frontwoman Jessica Dobson’s captivating singing, with echoes of peak Patti Smith, while her impassioned guitar-playing nods to Radiohead and Yo La Tengo. Skilfully combining ear-worm melodies, propulsive riffs and arresting lyrics, “Billboard Heart” is one of the must-hear albums of 2025.”
St. Vincent, TV on the Radio, and Flock of Dimes, bands that have found newly ornate and magnetic ways to make indie rock by discarding notions of how it must sound or what it must say. It’s their fourth album and first for Sub Pop, and it is a coup, a triumph over self-doubt, transforming failure into an opportunity to find new freedom, belief, and strength. In the middle of July 2023 in a Los Angeles studio, Deep Sea Diver mastermind Jessica Dobson took a guitar solo but somehow felt nothing. Just days earlier, her Seattle band played a series of semi-secret shows for devotees as de facto rehearsals for a new record. The sets had gone well, but the new songs seemed muddled, Dobson’s conviction lost somewhere in the 1,000 miles between Southern California and the home studio she shares with partner, drummer, and frequent cowriter Peter Mansen. On that first night in Los Angeles, she broke down, wondering what she was doing there, and pondering how to fix it. Deep Sea Diver retreated home without an album.
Did they need to scrap it, to begin again with new material? Not at all: Following a brief break, Dobson found a renewed sense of self, a trust in her vision for her band and songs and her ability to capture them. Over dinner with longtime collaborator Andy Park, a humbling confession that she needed help inspired Dobson to reimagine and reinvigorate Deep Sea Diver. This revelation set the stage for the power and brilliance of Billboard Heart, Three years before Dobson’s galvanizing dinner with Park, Deep Sea Diver issued its third album, 2020’s “Impossible Weight”, via the colossal indie imprint, ATO. It was a significant step up, and earned the band a groundswell of exposure and a spot on Billboard charts. But the success caused Dobson to doubt her impulses, to wonder what an idea’s impact or reception might be as much the strength of the idea itself. Moments of domestic creation, with her at the piano and Mansen on guitar in their Seattle living room, forged a path forward, and reinvigorated the pair’s songwriting partnership.
From end to end, the material on “Billboard Heart” is astonishing. The title track is the one song Deep Sea Diver actually finished in Los Angeles. It’s a radiant and magnificent thing, the billowing synths of Elliot Jackson and tunnelling pedal steel of Greg Leisz bolstering an anthem for fearlessly advancing into the future. “Emergency” links hardcore’s vim to electroclash’s instant allure with Dobson’s captivating vocals and guitar work in the spotlight. Tender and vulnerable, “Tiny Threads” is a sweeping anthem for anyone trying to hold anything together—life, love, themselves. “If it haunts me, let it haunt me,” Dobson sings softly over a stillness framed only by bass and noise. She lets her guitar careen into feedback, then steadily sculpts it into something tuneful. It’s a lifetime of anxiety and sublimation, crystallized into 10 seconds. Billboard Heart feels that way at large. “Billboard Heart” emerged when Dobson trusted her instincts, a personal breakthrough that prompted an artistic one. It is, in turn, the best Deep Sea Diver album yet, a defiant and brilliant exclamation mark at the end of a long period of wandering.
Deep Sea Diver: “Billboard Heat” released through Sub Pop
Genre-bending Tropical Fuck Storm present their highly anticipated fourth album. The band’s DIY approach, creating sonic tapestries that depict the dystopian world through which we sleepwalk, while still, occasionally, offering us a glimmer of hope that we can come out the other side, has resulted in a shift in focus that proves just what we already knew. There is no background music here, no distraction, no second screen scrolling. “Fairyland Codex” is a journey, an album that demands attention from start to finish.
The songs on ‘Fairyland Codex’ immerse us in the chaos of a fateful landslide, picking out the characters that litter the impending collapse of society. Acidic, acerbic, anarchic; Tropical Fuck Storm’s command of wordplay, undercut by snarling guitars, pulsing rhythms, and explosive salvos, populates a hinterland between light and dark. The vocal interplay between Liddiard and the soaring harmonies of Kitschin and Dunn creates a teetering balancing act that’s intensified by the frantic narratives that evolve from their collective psyche.
Freshly signed to Fire Records, Tropical Fuck Storm is the Australian rock band and supergroup formed by Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin of The Drones. Their sound is characterised by elements of art punk, noise rock and experimental rock.
“Tropical Fuck Storm are masters of tension and release.” The Guardian.
“Tropical Fuck Storm Stir Up A Psychedelic, Dadaist Spectacle” Bandcamp.
“In Tropical Fuck Storm’s determination to engage as fully as possible with the reality of human existence, in all its ugliness and contradictions, they are tapping into its truths.” The Quietus
“It’s the Golden Age of Arseholes.” Has any band captured the insanity of the last decade in such vivid, poetic, hallucinatory detail better than Australia’s Tropical Fuck Storm? Formed in 2017 by Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin of The Drones, with Lauren Hammel (High Tension) and Erica Dunn (Mod Con), the band have been reporting from the edge of the apocalypse — a surreal “future now” that’s only slightly removed from our actual reality. That lyric is from “Goon Show,” one of many awesomely phantasmagoric songs on TFS’ fourth album. “I’ve seen the cellphone footage and it’s raining cats and dogma,” Liddiard continues. “You can rob a bank, but you don’t really rob the bank.”
Tropical Fuck Storm avoid specifics — names are rarely mentioned — but they always nail the mood. Living in the Australian bush outside Melbourne, where the barren terrain is home to all manner of weird and deadly wildlife, perhaps gives the band their uniquely Darwinian perspective: viewing the current climate as just the latest natural disaster the Earth must weather before eventually hitting the reset button. “Don’t you worry about money, don’t you worry about being alone,” Liddiard sings — backed by Kitschin and Dunn’s harmonies — on the contemplative, brooding ballad “Stepping on a Rake.” “Don’t worry about what’s coming, some things are not worth knowing.”
The interplay between Liddiard’s gruff, distinctly Aussie howl and Kitschin and Dunn’s sweet harmonies — often in call-and-response form — is also at the core of what makes Tropical Fuck Storm so unique. Liddiard calls it like he sees it: a world on the brink, its inhabitants doing what they must to survive. Kitschin and Dunn offer some flicker of faith in humanity. Dunn and Liddiard also have a near-telekinetic guitar interplay, with performances that are wildly unhinged and skronky but somehow land back in the pocket, never going overboard. “Fairyland Codex” mixes Grand Guignol psych-rock and funk (“Irukandji Syndrome,” “Goon Show,” “Bloodsport”) with surprisingly tender moments, like the title track — a perfect example of TFS’ balance of dystopia and hope: “A village in hell is waiting for you… if you choose.”
The Fat Angel Sings 