Album reviews
VOWWS - I'll fill your house with an army
The Los Angeles–based Australians VOWWS have already earned a decent reputation, at least among the insiders. They describe themselves – or have been described – as death pop, though what that actually means remains anyone’s guess. There was even a compilation
The Last Dinner Party - From The Pyre
A new kind of tension runs through From The Pyre, the second album by The Last Dinner Party. After the triumph of Prelude To Ecstasy, the five Londoners expand their baroque pop language into something richer and more ambitious. Less than two years after their debut, they choose evolution over rupture, building a record that folds in on itself. The fina…
Bar Italia - Some Like It Hot
Bar Italia arrive at their third album in two years and, more than ever, they mean business. Born within Dean Blunt’s World Music orbit but now far beyond that sphere, Sam Fenton, Nina Cristante and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi use Some Like It Hot to show a band that keeps expanding its palette of themes and moods, with greater personality and distance from their…
GIÖBIA - X-ÆON
By their seventh album, Giöbia seem like a fixed constellation in the European heavy-psych sky. From Beyond the Stars to the acid voyages of Acid Disorder, the Milanese band – brothers Stefano “Bazu” and Paolo Basurto, Melissa Crema, and Pietro D’Ambrosio – have travelled through twenty years of fuzz and cosmic visions, arriving now at
Upchuck – I’m Nice Now
Upchuck’s Atlanta isn’t the glossy one you see in trap videos — it’s the city that smells of gasoline and fuzz, where music still feels like survival. I’m Nice Now, the third album from Kaila “KT” Thompson and her crew, produced by Ty Segall and mastered by
Little Pieces of Marmelade - Mexican Sugar Dance
They learned how to make noise long before they made a name for themselves. Little Pieces of Marmelade – Daniele “DD” Ciuffreda and Francesco “Frankie Wah” Antinori – exploded in 2020 through X Factor Italy, as part of Manuel Agnelli’s (Afterhours) team, where they took second place. From that experience a lasting collaboration was born: first their sel…
The Wytches - Talking Machine
In Brighton, the air smells of salt and damp, and Talking Machine, the fifth album by The Wytches, seems to breathe it all in. Recorded live to analog tape, as in their debut Annabel Dream Reader (2014), the record sounds like a reunion with their own demons: no polish, no click tracks, just crackling amps and sizzling strings. It’s a return to a garage…
Nightbus - Passenger
In Passenger, Nightbus move through a disenchanted present, made of glass and rain-soaked concrete. The Manchester trio — Olive Rees, Jake Cottier, and Zac Melrose — debut with an album that is both an urban journey and a mirror of the psyche: between doom, uncertainty, and dependence, the listener drifts through liminal spaces where night bleeds into d…
Idlewild - Idlewild
Born in Edinburgh in 1995, when British indie was caught between post-grunge and a dying britpop, Idlewild emerged with a raw urgency, closer to Fugazi than to Blur. Over time, they learned to temper that fury, opening up to melody and chasing their own emotional geography — the one that, in the early 2000s, led them to release
AFI - Silver Bleeds the Black Sun
AFI have never been afraid to shed their skin. From their hardcore beginnings in Ukiah in the early ’90s, through the gothic-mainstream success of Sing The Sorrow and Decemberunderground, to the alt-rock detours of Burials and Bodies, Davey Havok’s band has always questioned its own identity. With their twelfth album,
Sprints - All That is Over
In the backstreets of Dublin – where the glow of pub lights mixes with the scuff of footsteps and indie postcards dissolve in the rain – you find the origins of Sprints. Formed in 2019, the Irish band broke through with Letter To Self in January 2024, a record produced by Daniel Fox (
Geese - Getting Killed
Getting Killed by Geese doesn’t really begin: you just find yourself inside it, like walking into a room where the conversation is already heated, voices overlapping, and nobody bothers to explain what you’ve missed. It’s an album that offers no introductions, leaving you with a choice: stand on the sidelines or dive headfirst into the fray.
The Cords - The Cords
Some debuts feel like déjà vu: The Cords doesn’t sound like a 2025 record but like a vinyl resurfaced from a dusty box somewhere between Glasgow and Bristol, when indie pop thrived on two chords and sheer urgency. Eva and Grace Tedeschi come from Greenock, Scotland, and quickly earned recognition and important stages: first a 7’’ that sold out in a flas…
Crippling Alcoholism - Camgirl
Crippling Alcoholism, the Boston outfit formed in 2022 by vocalist Tony Castrati and drummer Danny Sher, have spent the past three years cultivating a reputation for turning ugliness into cult fascination. Their first two records — When the Drugs That Made You Sick Are the Drugs That Make You Better
Black Lips - Season of the Peach
With Black Lips it’s always been about the “concept.” The country album (Sing in a World That’s Falling Apart), the kaleidoscopic and deranged one (Satan’s Graffiti or God’s Art?), the more polished but still crooked pop outing (Apocalypse Love). Each chapter arrived with its own frame, a stylistic detour, a new disguise. And now, with
NewDad - Altar
With Altar, NewDad confirm they’ve found an identity that doesn’t deny its debts but reshapes them into their own language: of course, the temptation to play “spot the influence” is strong, and from The Cure / New Order (Pretty, Heavyweight) to Garbage
Maruja - Pain to Power
In Manchester, a city still haunted by the ghosts of Joy Division and the post-punk poses of the past, it isn’t easy to invent something new. Maruja have been trying for more than a decade, through lineup changes, nights at Brixton’s Windmill, and a string of independent EPs that introduced them as a noisy, improvisational band, with Joe Carroll’s howli…
Die Spitz - Something To Consume
Austin, Texas. Four childhood friends – Ava, Ellie, Chloe, and Kate – decided that rage couldn’t stay locked in a bedroom. They turned it into Die Spitz, a fluid collective where instruments and voices are swapped with no hierarchy. That’s the core of
The Chameleons - Arctic Moon
Some bands seem destined to remain on the margins: they influence everyone, but never take the spotlight. The Chameleons, formed in Middleton in 1981 by Mark Burgess, Reg Smithies, Dave Fielding and John Lever, are the perfect example.
Suede - Antidepressants
There are records that come at you like old friends you haven’t seen in years, and, as soon as you listen, you realise they haven’t been stuck telling the same stories. Antidepressants by Suede is like that: not the return of a glorious band, but the breath of those who have crossed storms and now aren’t afraid to show their broken bones and still-beati…
Deftones - private music
There’s something both touching and absurd about watching Deftones step into 2025 like aging skaters who, instead of breaking ankles on half-pipes, are still pulling tricks no one expected them to land. Once upon a time they were the soundtrack to bedrooms where posters curled at the edges and ashtrays overflowed; now they’re an institution, the kind th…
Modern Life Is War - Life On The Moon
After more than ten years of silence, Modern Life Is War return with Life On The Moon. A title that promises orbits and revolutions, but the impact feels more like a neon-lit parking lot, melancholic like those summer nights when nothing really happens.
Prolapse - I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face
In the ’90s, continuing the thread of the previous decade, Prolapse acted as a bridge between post-punk, shoegaze, noise rock, and post-rock. The Anglo-Scottish formation combined the angular edges of Gang of Four, the theatricality of Public Image Ltd
The Hives - The Hives Forever Forever The Hives
The nuclear war launched by The Hives in 2000 has never stopped detonating. Back then, with Veni Vidi Vicious, the quintet from Fagersta proved that three well-placed chords could be worth more than a thousand experiments. Their electric bursts tore through radios and clubs, cementing them among the protagonists of the garage rock revival alongside the …
The New Eves - The New Eve Is Rising
The myth of the English wild woman — a symbol of pagan rebellion and untamed nature — is an archetype often marginalized or romanticized. The New Eves, a Brighton-based quartet, fully embody this spirit, rejecting any confinement imposed by contemporary musical conventions. To call them simply a folk band would be reductive: their sound is a hypnotic fu…
Bush - I Beat Loneliness
They arrived late, and in the wrong place. When they broke out in ’94 with Sixteen Stone, Bush seemed like yet another British surrogate of a sound — grunge — that already had its prophets across the ocean. Too derivative for the purists, too polished for those nostalgic for Seattle’s mud. And yet, over time, they held their ground. Album after album, G…
Leo Luchini - Slug It Out
Anyone who grew up with The Downward Spiral in their ears, smashed something while listening to early Deftones, or danced in anger to a Fear Factory remix cannot stay indifferent to Slug It Out. Leo Luchini takes the noise and tension of that world — industrial, nu-metal, contaminated drum’n’bass — and reshapes it for the present. Not out of nostalgia, …
Atom Juice - Atom Juice
They come from Warsaw and present themselves as the missing link between Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker. The psych landscape may be crowded, but Atom Juice stand out with a debut that surprises through flair: within the psychedelic framework they weave elements of jazz, hard rock, funk, and cinematic storytell…