You might think that the last thing the world needs at this time is another couple of compilation albums of Neil Young songs performed by other artists, but you’d be wrong. You’d be wrong because, fundamentally, these releases and the series to which they belong aim to raise the profile of and funds for The Bridge School, a non-profit organisation founded by Neil and Pegi Young to serve individuals with severe speech and physical impairments. All of the artists here donated their recordings in support of The Bridge School. Based in Hillsborough, CA, The Bridge School provides support to children between the ages of three and 13 years of age with extensive speech and physical disabilities, working in tandem with its affiliate charity, Bridge to Life, which…
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…The expanded edition features the track “San Francisco Christmas,” a collaboration with The Secret Sisters originally issued on an exclusive Record Store Day 7-inch single in 2025.
According to the fifth song on their first Christmas album, seasonal shenanigans in Old Crow Medicine Show’s family are boozy and raucous.
Step aside Santa because “Grandpappy’s been a-brewing since before the war” and is “the best bootlegger for a Georgia mile”. The result is the riotous barndance fiddlin’ of “Corn Whiskey Christmas” (which brings “good cheer to all the gals and the fellas).
The song is a highlight of OCMS XMAS, a 13-track set which showcases the light-hearted side of a Nashville outfit who’ve been at…
…digital-only deluxe version expands the tracklist with three bonus songs.
Billy Valentine is a Los Angeles-based soul singer/ songwriter/producer who has been performing for five decades. He scored some hits during the 1980s with his brother John in the Valentine Brothers, including “Money’s Too Tight (To Mention)” and “Lonely Nights,” and has sung for film and television. He has held club residencies for many years, playing to sold-out houses.
Billy Valentine & The Universal Truth collects eight topical, spiritual, and socially conscious soul and gospel songs. This is the first release from the newly revamped Flying Dutchman label run by producer Bob Thiele, Jr. It was founded by his producer father and was the home…
There is something reassuring about a band reaching its fifth album and deciding that, rather than reinventing itself, it might be worth remembering what made it exciting in the first place. After the glossy dystopian theatrics of 2023’s Dead Club City, Nothing But Thieves returns with Stray Dogs, trading conceptual ambition for five musicians making considerable noise and apparently enjoying themselves enormously. Unfortunately, the results are rather less adventurous than intended.
The Essex quintet has always occupied an interesting position in British rock: too ambitious to be dismissed as conventional arena rock, yet occasionally too enamored of enormous choruses to venture far beyond it. At their best,…
New York indie artist Eliza Edens was navigating two deeply personal reckonings leading up to the recording of Death Drive. As they entered their late twenties, Edens was grappling with the grief of losing their mother to dementia while also exploring their queerness for the first time. That collision of emotions found its way into their latest LP, with songs exploring everything from grief and desire to uncertainty and moments of joy.
It’s also a musical departure for Edens, away from the more acoustic folk of their previous efforts into a stronger, plugged-in indie pop/rock sound with experiments in tape loops and, surprisingly, bongos on every single track. Their queerness is addressed in the stellar opening song “All in Sinnin’,” where they sing about…
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ mythology was built on abandon. Across Lower East Side dives in the early 2000s, Brian Chase, Nick Zinner, and Karen O put on otherworldly rock shows that verged on performance art — a blaze of vodka-spitting, mic-fellating, IDGAF unruliness and explosive, clamorous tracks. But the indie trio has always operated at two registers: riot, yes, but also ache. That latter quality is there on the back half of Fever to Tell, their 2003 debut, and on later ballads like “Warrior” and “Skeletons.” “Maps,” a career-defining song, isn’t a screamer but a torch song about anxious love. You could argue that this heart-on-sleeve vulnerability is what made their early shows so electric. The point was never instigation but pure, unbridled feeling.
Perfection came quickly to gyrofield. At the beginning of the decade, just 18 years old, the Hong Kong-born, Netherlands-based producer Kiana Li made their name with drum’n’bass tracks that showcased a precocious technical flair, weaving together snappy drums and strobing melodies without breaking a sweat. As the 2020s progressed, Li’s style tested new permutations: an ambient mixtape here, a breakcore riff there, a touch of acidic sleaze corroding the edges of their supple basslines. With the release of 2025’s Succession of Belief EP, gyrofield’s evolution took a sudden leap, reorienting around flushed, hypnotic beats that marched to an obdurate pulse. Amid the ensuing hubbub, Li launched their own label, Field Research, and a creed: to build…
After merging influences from throughout their 20-year career — including but not limited to kosmische, disco, dub, post-punk, and art pop, and bands like Neu!, Kraftwerk, Stereolab, and the Orb — on 2022’s Slight Variations, U.K. alternative dance mavens Fujiya & Miyagi settle into this effortlessly blended approach on the follow-up, New Shiny Object.
Elements of kosmische, post-punk, and disco pulse through opener “Lowest Common Denominator,” a song that also doubles down on singer/guitarist David Best’s dry humor, which includes a dance-motivated world view. They edge toward hip-hop on “Elasticated Waste,” a bass-heavy rap on the subject of aging that incorporates found objects and sounds like drips of water…
Sweden’s Cult of Luna have been creating their engaging take on post-metal for 25 years and show no sign of slowing down or stagnating. This was a concern of main man Johannes Persson when they set about making their tenth studio album In the Shadow of Your Shadow.
…Supported once more by Daniel Berglund’s spotless recording and a finely toned mix from mainstay Magnus Lindberg, Cult of Luna don’t sound tired or sorely in need of reinvention. Rather, remarkably, after 28 years, their core muscles are strong as ever. The title track is a massive flex of post-hardcore’s aggression on the emotional scale of post-rock. Of course, as a post-metal band, the weight primary vocalist and lyricist Johannes Persson carries is all mental.
In the hands of Kurdish-Syrian “King of Keyboard” Rizan Said, the synthesiser becomes an improbable orchestra, its sounds stretched and distorted. His musical vocabulary draws on the traditions of the Jazeera region, where Kurdish, Arab, Syriac and Armenian cultures have long intersected, and on shaabi, a broad term for popular, often working-class music associated with street celebrations, weddings and communal dancing. Through turbo-fast ornamentation and extravagant pitch bends, Said transforms these familiar musical idioms into something poised somewhere between folk music and science fiction. His earlier album King of Keyboard, with titles such as “Electric Mawwal”, “When Vans Turned Into Clubs” and “Cosmopolitan Hacha”,…
In a vanitas painting, life is captured in ephemera. Popular with Dutch Baroque painters during the 16th and 17th centuries, the style used the still-life format to comment on the frivolity of earthly possessions. Artworks showcased scattered — and for the time, pretty mundane — stuff: a lute, a conch shell, a half-drunk glass of wine. The old masters didn’t include descriptions of why each item mattered or what historical memory they were meant to evoke. But they rendered them in vivid detail nonetheless.
The French producer Malibu, whose debut album Vanities draws its name from the vanitas movement, imbues her New Age-inflected ambient with a similarly sharp eye for the totemic. Past records, like 2024’s Essential Mixtape…
When Bar Italia hit the Dean Blunt-starved Zillennial masses like a fucking atom bomb, skeptics accused the disaffected trio of coming off as too cool for their own good. We can argue over whether Tracey Denim has held up, but I’d counter that what made the band stand out in the first place wasn’t some effortless sense of style, but rather how awkward and discomforting they all seemed. Though their references may have been extremely well-worn, their pitchy singing, bizarre fashion choices, and sweet-but-slightly-off songwriting made them poster children for a growing generation of artists whose rock-star fantasies were shaped from late nights spent scrolling soon-to-be-shuttered blogs.
One such band is Los Angeles’ untitled (halo), who have been dogged by Bar Italia…
The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings picks up four months after 2019’s Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings ends. This set captures all but one concert from the second leg of Bob Dylan’s spring tour of 25 shows in 22 cities using most of the same players and guests (Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Kinky Friedman, etc.). It contains 39 discs, and 381 tracks, only 10 of which were officially issued (ten are from the Fort Collins, Colorado show on 05/23 that produced the glorious Hard Rain). The Steve Berkowitz-produced set is handsomely illustrated and contains tons of ephemera, plus a brilliant liner essay by critic Mikal Gilmore. His analysis reveals that the tour’s charged, sometimes difficult and chaotic energy was due to changes in…
Silver Lake, California. Hipster suburb of East LA, preferred haunt of artists and bohemians, and fertile ground for a burgeoning independent scene: gentle souls bringing folk, soft rock, chamber pop and psychedelia together to create meticulously crafted yet beautifully balmy music that captures the ache of the human condition in universally relatable terms. But just what decade are we in? Because the mid-2020s in this happening ’hood are sounding a lot like the early 1970s.
As Sylvie, musician and producer Ben Schwab collapses the years which separate Jackson Browne, Beck, Elliott Smith and onetime bandmate Sam Burton, living up to the easy listening cosmic country vibe of the Matthews Southern Comfort song from which he took his outfit’s name.
…Doom Country is Hudson Freeman’s first album with a label — Mom+Pop, whose small but mighty roster holds indie darlings like Courtney Barnett and Flume, as well as artists who, like Freeman, have gone exceptionally viral (Tiny Habits, Ashe). He’s described the record as a “personal, post-apocalyptic road trip album through America.” Perhaps the title and description speak to the album’s genre as well as its subject, though not much of this record falls into the “country” genre (though much can be said for “doom”).
A road trip, though — that takes restlessness, a running away from something as well as a running towards. The state of being on the road is one of curious limbo; Kerouac described it as having “nothing behind me, everything…
A year on from the release of A Jackal’s Wedding, Westerman returns with Reception Pairing A Jackal’s Wedding with four new tracks made with producer Marta Salogni (Björk, The xx, Sampha), Reception revisits the world of the original album from a new perspective. Today, Westerman introduces the release with the lead single “L/C.”
If A Jackal’s Wedding was shaped by the heat of the Greek island of Hydra, the new songs on Reception emerged from its opposite. Westerman and Salogni recorded them in winter, working from a newly acquired building without heating on an island in the middle of Lake Iseo as snow fell outside. The result is a colder, bluer counterpart to the humid, nocturnal world of the original record.
Westerman explains: “These songs were recorded…
Michael Orr‘s cult jazz-soul album Spread Love gets a much-deserved spotlight on this 2026 Mr. Bongo reissue. A Detroit singer, pianist, and songwriter, Orr was raised on the classic Motown soul and jazz sounds, traditions that continued to resonate with him even after he moved to West Virginia. It was while working there that he wrote several songs, including the ballad “Feelings,” which he sent to his childhood friend, bassist Carey Harris, at the time a member of Gladys Knight’s band. While Knight ultimately passed on recording the song, Orr and Harris conspired to move ahead with the project themselves.
Recording at Cleveland’s Agency Recording Studio, they brought on board other associates, including drummer Ricardo “Ricky Speed”…
The barefoot, country Alabama singer-songwriter Grayson Capps delivers nine new songs that seem disparate on the surface on The Weight of the World. It’s as if he culled the best from his seven-year recording hiatus. Sure, not every singer-songwriter album is a concept album or even bound by a common theme. Yet, the title may serve as the binding idea. The weight of the world is like a pendulum, shifting from heavy to light. The opening salvo about the trials and struggles of the troubadour life morphs into two political rants, a desperate view of mortality, lost love, passionate and whimsical love songs, and two peaceful meditations. The sonics are almost equally as wide-ranging, from country balladry, swamp rock, atmospheric psychedelia, and roots rock.