Denzel Curry and Kenneth Blume’s new album ii finds the pair of visionary artists at their most focused. The follow-up to their acclaimed collaborative UNLOCKED project is the product of two artists who have both grown substantially in their careers since its release. While the new project demonstrates the clear-eyed focus they’ve developed in their time apart, the unbridled energy of their chemistry remains present. In the years following their initial musical relationship, beyond purveying their individual sounds, Denzel and Kenneth have solidified themselves in veteran roles as trusted authorities and generational groundbreakers running point on the lively creative worlds around them.
Describing their dynamic and creative process, the duo circles a relative working romanticism not void of its own clashes. Despite longstanding friendship outside of the studio, the pair found themselves facing new challenges amidst the highs and tense moments of making the record. Both driven and strong-willed, they often disagreed, nearing the point of blows before settling back into productivity and care for each track. Their trust in one another’s greatness is tried and true, ultimately leading the push to a singular body of work that harkens back to the basics – no mixed beats, just an SP-404 beat machine and a cheap mic as tools of the trade. Hard-fought lessons over years of experience bring a mutually fortified knowledge together in their new work and the duo’s passionate collisions have resulted in bringing the music to new heights for an instant classic record. Mutual admiration beyond any familiar caricatures of themselves helped the duo to push their pen further than ever. While sometimes boisterous yet constantly dynamic, ii marks Denzel’s most personally lyrical and cumulative songwriting thus far. As such, Curry and Blume present their latest with a refreshing honesty and thoughtfulness that’s rare to find on the surface.
Chelsea Wolfe – The Dark
words by Pam Grossman and Hannah Ewens
Like the moon, Chelsea Wolfe’s luminous music has illuminated the lives of her fans through various phases. For almost 20 years, she has reflected the precise amount of light needed to guide them on their paths. Her ninth studio album, more so than ever, gives reassurance that there is no need to worry if they find themselves in a time where they don’t know where to turn. Instead, The Dark makes a conscious decision to lean into the mystery. To stop and be still and honor any tenebrous surroundings. Each of its 10 spellbinding songs blends into the last, reminding the listener that sometimes comfort comes from embracing the unknown.
Wolfe’s work has always felt fascinatingly fluid, running between gothic rock, doom metal, industrial, folk, and sometimes even pop melodies. Through the past decade, her critically acclaimed magic has begun to echo through the work of a new generation of artists. Whether it was the lo-fi dread of 2010’s The Grime and the Glow, the sleep-paralysis nightmares of 2015’s Abyss, or the industrial pang of 2017’s Hiss Spun, her experimentations make sense. It’s always Chelsea at the heart of things, walking the same dark fields with a different lantern.
Ahead of Wolfe’s last album, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, she was in a place of newness. In retrospect, she was “a bit naive,” riding the high of having made life changes, including getting sober. But by the end of that release cycle, she found herself unhappy, going through the motions. “I felt I was putting on an old version of myself over and over, living for others rather than my own desires,” she reflects from her home in Northern California. This led to more difficult decisions, all related to letting go: saying goodbye to various relationships, aspects of identity, and perhaps most importantly, patterns of self-abandonment.
Wolfe wrote The Dark while knowing she was travelling through a dark night of the soul. She found herself drawn to the Joseph Campbell-esque idea of entering the woods at the darkest point, becoming the thing you fear in order to feel more brave. Surrounded by this symbolism, when her new songwriting collaborator Jennifer Decilveo questioned Chelsea on the type of album she wanted to make during one of their focused writing sessions in LA with Wolfe’s longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm, she knew instantly: “I want the heart of this album to be about pushing myself to write better songs. I want guitar, piano, drums.” Wolfe embraced the opportunity to invite some musicians she and Ben had long-admired into the fold, players like Robin Finck, Matt Chamberlain, Troy Van Leeuwen, Stella Mozgawa, Justin Meldal-Johnsen. Electronic elements remain to provide the traditional textures of this project, but they’re not the centre-piece of the album.
What emerged was a dark folk-influenced cocoon from which Wolfe could sing, her voice more confident than it had ever sounded, calling out from the dark as clear as a bell. Each track is a testament to the power of turning inward, to exquisite excavation. To being courageous enough to come face-to-face with the keeper of the crossroads. To sing a lullaby to the monster under the bed.
Opening ballad “Cold” slides between hushed and expansive tones and builds over spacious, quietly devastating piano and acoustic guitar. “I’m breaking my own heart again / But I don’t do well under your influence,” Chelsea sings, asking, “Are we doing the best that we can?” The fierce “Humours” pulls the listener into a darker place yet, filled with ghostly murmurs, curdling screams provided by Icelandic trio Kælan Mikla, pulsating rhythms, and no escape from grief. “I built a house around me / Just to hide from your gaze,” she offers from inside her torment. Emotional relief comes mid-record with the title track of a haunting but reassuring voice over warm, finger-plucked guitar. “The Dark” is quite literally, Chelsea says, her “love letter to the dark.” Its lyrics celebrate her own introverted, watery nature (she’s an intense Scorpio with an emotional and intuitive Pisces moon) and her kinship with the night. “In a world that feels so heartless / The light returns,” she promises. Nowhere in any of these songs is a note out of place or a lyric superfluous. Each exquisite track feels like its own invocation – a calling down of forces, primordial, bone-shaking, self-altering.
In the bleakest moments of The Dark, she’ll lead you with silvery sonar echoes through the caverns, sometimes gently, sometimes ferociously, but never letting go of your hand. And just when you think you’ll never see daylight again, she’ll have you emerge with fistfuls of dirt, stronger than before and pointed skyward. By the end, you’ll be convinced of the necessity to face the formidable directly.
Unsurprisingly, then, a recurring image that emerged from the writing was that of the séance. As a visual and conceptual metaphor, it runs throughout the album and its visuals. Letting go doesn’t mean something is gone for good – both parties can reach out for a last grasp or two, explains Chelsea. It reminds her of the film The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001) – “The ghosts are haunted by the living just as much as the living are haunted by the ghosts,” she says. “On this album, I’m not pointing the finger at anyone. I’m taking responsibility. Someone who may have been a toxic presence in my life.. maybe I was bad for them, too. It’s ok to move away from these types of connections that only seem to cause confusion for both parties, after a long stretch of trying to work it out.”
Throughout The Dark, Chelsea provides a stunning and steady presence. Now 42, she is just as softly powerful in person too, as she describes this album being “simultaneously a return to form and very much a reflection of who I am now.” It has been fascinating to her to grow older, and to discover as a singer that her voice keeps getting richer and deeper. She quotes David Bowie, sharing, “Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been,” and adds, “I’ve sensed that same feeling recently of ‘Oh, this is the person I was meant to be.’ For most of my life, I was sort of uncomfortable and squirming, and now I’ve suddenly become more comfortable within my own existence.”
In her poem “The Uses of Sorrow,” Mary Oliver wrote that it took her years to realize that a box full of darkness was a gift. Perhaps longtime Chelsea Wolfe fans are there already. But for anyone who discovers this album, the realisation will be immediate: The Dark is a cache of lush shadows and deep melodic solace, wrapped in a velvet bow.
Words by J Bennett
MASTODON // Marrow Deep
Much has happened since Mastodon released their last album. Loss, grief, and rebuilding have been the band’s day-to-day reality for years. The deaths of those close to them have turned their lives upside down. But for every door that closes, a new one opens. And the door that Mastodon have opened leads to nothing less than total rebirth. With a reinvigorated spirit and a new lineup, Mastodon have entered a new era.
With Marrow Deep, the Grammy-winning band reinforces their position as metal’s forward-thinking standard bearers as they expand their artistic purview. Five years after their acclaimed double album Hushed and Grim, Brann Dailor, Troy Sanders, and Bill Kelliher have emerged with what might be the most important record of their career. Marrow Deep is the first chapter of Mastodon’s next era, featuring Nick Johnston on guitar as well as significant contributions from keyboardist João Nogueira.
“It’s rare that we don’t have some sort of tragedy that helps fuel the artistic vessel that is Mastodon,” Sanders says. “There’s only been one or two records that weren’t of completely serious subject matter. But for Brann and me as lyricists, it does really create something very honest and authentic and relatable because we’re not afraid to share things that everyone else goes through as well.”
“I wish we could write a happy record, but these things keep happening,” Kelliher says. “On the other hand, I believe that the music we write is like medicine. It’s very therapeutic and I think our fans expect that from us. We’re all human and we all go through the same shit—cancer, death, accidents. I think that’s part of why people relate to us, because they know we experienced the same things they do.”
Marrow Deep is the sound of a band that has endured and persevered. The first single, “Your Ghost Again,” is a tribute to Mastodon’s former guitarist Brent Hinds and Dailor’s mom, Michele Lawrence, both of whom passed in 2025. It’s an acknowledgement of the profound effect those close to us can have on our lives—effects that can extend well beyond the time we have with them.
“When we were in the studio recording, I kept seeing Brent,” Dailor explains. “I’d see him on my right holding the guitar because that’s where he’d usually be. It’s the same with my mom: I keep seeing her. And you get a little jolt of excitement because you think you’re actually seeing them, but then you remember they’re not here and it takes you down a notch. So, it’s these big relationships for me that became the subject matter of the song. I was just singing about what I was seeing, and I was seeing ghosts.”
“Snakes for Dinner” is a song of mourning, as evidenced by the lyrics: When you left, you took the moon and stars. When you left, you took our hearts and minds. “It’s both my mom and Brent wrapped up in a little bundle of sadness,” Dailor says. “You’re left with memories, but you can’t talk with that person anymore. That deep feeling of loss you have when someone passes makes it seem like they took everything with them, for a little while at least. It’s kind of hard to feel whole again.”
The song features a guest appearance from Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, whose last Mastodon cameo was 20 years ago, on Blood Mountain. Also returning is Neil Fallon of Clutch, who lends some spoken word to “Three Fates.” “A Vampire’s Demeanor” has guest gang vocals from Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe and Converge bassist Nate Newton. Opener “Barbarians Blood” features percussion from Converge drummer Ben Koller. And none other than Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler plays the intro on “The Vanishing,” which also includes guest vocals from Joe Duplantier of Gojira.
For the theme of the album, Dailor chose the Three Fates of Greek mythology, the weaver goddess-sisters who were believed to determine our destiny. “We’re talking about two people who maybe tried to outsmart the Three Fates and hide from them—one unintentionally and one intentionally,” Dailor points out. “My mom was pretty sick for most of her life, but she kept dodging bullets left and right over and over again. And Brent cheated death more times than I can remember.”
Along with the mythology of moths, which are often seen as harbingers of death, the Fates are incorporated into the Marrow Deep cover art created by longtime Mastodon collaborator Paul Romano.
Though Marrow Deep is an expression of grief and sadness, the album ultimately represents resilience and solidarity. No one person is Mastodon: It’s a collection of individuals with unique talents and abilities who contribute to a musical entity that’s bigger than themselves. “All of us know that nobody is filling Brent’s shoes,” Sanders points out. “That’s an impossible task.”
Marrow Deep was recorded at Mastodon’s own West End Sound in Atlanta, GA. The band co-produced the album with Patrik Berger (Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX) and Kurt Ballou (High On Fire, Converge). The album was mixed by Andrew Scheps, who has worked with the likes of Adele, Black Sabbath, and Metallica.
“Bill, Brann, and myself are thrilled that we still have the opportunity to do this, and we’ve got other members who are just over the moon to be in the band with us,” Sanders says. “That’s a magical feeling that makes us keep wanting to go to band practice. It’s reminiscent of the very beginning of our band, where all members are hungry, we’re united, and excited to get to work. And we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to do this record.”
Show Me The Body is a New York City based ecClesiastical hardcore trio consisting of Julian Cashwan Pratt (founder; banjo and vocals), Harlan Steed (founder; bass), and Jackie McDermott (current drummer). The band has organized non-traditional, intentional DIY spaces for NYC youth since 2015, and since expanded that work to a global capacity through their urgent, ceremonial live shows, subterranean punk and hip-hop mixed tours, and their CORPUS NYC platform. Trouble the Water is the culmination of nearly a decade of barrelling against New York City’s structural ambivalence and indifference; an invocation to a like-minded global community to consider the alchemy of family-building, and of turning water to blood.
Trouble the Water both references and pays homage to the physical city, and the New York Sound: not one particular genre, but the people and subcultures that encapsulate it’s true foundation, style, and spirit; while expanding upon and reckoning with the hyperlocal territory of 2019’s Dog Whistle. With Pratt’s most encantatory, interrogative poetry to date, and Steed expanding the glitchy, caustic arena of his electronic experimentation, the band is feeling more like themselves than ever. The founding duo, who have worked together since 2009, used Trouble The Water to methodically inhabit one another’s forms; Pratt experimented recklessly with production and synths, while Steed challenged his own focus to include melodies and riffs.
Although the title invokes the ancient alchemy Moses wielded to free and unite Israelite peoples, Trouble The Water refuses nostalgia, or mimicry. Instead, it considers the sublime power of the unifying physical practices that can be enacted daily, to invoke immeasurable spiritual and collective reactions. Buoyed by moments of stinging stillness and compulsive, almost optimistic, malfunctioning rhythms, the work is literally a conjuration to dance, and move. If we are really living through the end of the world, maybe every movement we make, no matter how slight, is actually boundless and radical. How do we find freedom through rejecting time altogether, and existing only in communion, in space, and in the constellations we form as we choose our “blood” families? Or, as Pratt demands on Demeanor, “What’s better than when we come together? Fighting, dancing, fucking together.” Trouble the Water is at once a homily for those left behind or displaced, and a searing investigation of what survival looks like from within the borders of an aggressively policed city and state, that postures those unignorable calls for rage and migration to a world at war.
Bandmate and long-time music inspiration Jackie McDermott (Sediment Club, Urochromes), joined Show Me the Body in 2020 as drummer, and is featured on the project. Trouble The Water was recorded entirely at the band’s CORPUS Studios in Long Island City, with veteran metal producer Arthur Rizk, and co-engineered by studio co-founder Aidan Bradley.
Dog Whistle (2019) was produced by Chris Coady, Show Me The Body and Gabriel Millman. The heavy, honest project was in direct conversation with the oppressive, claustrophobic psychology of the city, and their most critically-acclaimed work to date, described by NME as “a dedication to the community, friends and family at the heart of Show Me The Body” coupled with “the jarring noise and harsh sonics that made [SMTB] one of punk’s most idiosyncratic voices.” Dog Whistle followed Show Me The Body’s now historic, genre-defying debut album Body War (2016).
Since 2015, Show Me the Body have expanded their international music community into an independent label, recording studio, and community organizing platform. The band recently completed their Half-A-USA tour with support from Soul Glo and WiFiGawd, which included their inaugural In Broad Daylight festivals in New York and Los Angeles. Through the intentional cultivation of their local and global chosen families, and a decade-long dedication to sustaining the New York Sound, Show Me the Body has solidified a legacy of confronting and permanently shifting the rigid limitations of the hardcore genre.
Today, Korn announces their new studio album Requiem. In tandem with the album announcement, the band shares the lead single and video “Start The Healing.” The first offering from Requiem arrives with a video directed by Tim Saccenti (Flying Lotus, Run The Jewels, Depeche Mode) that is a live action and animated visual feast about death and re-birth amidst an array of preternatural creatures, humanoids and Korn’s electrifying live performance symbolizing the dawn of a new era for the band.
Director Saccenti’s words on the genesis of “Start The Healing” visuals:
“Our idea for this video was to mutate that aspect of the DNA of Korn, of what makes them so inspiring, their mix of raw power and transportive aesthetics and human emotion.
I wanted to take the viewer on an emotional journey, as the song does, a visceral, cathartic death and rebirth that will hopefully help transport the listener through whatever their personal struggles are.
Collaborating with 3-D artist Anthony Ciannamea we tapped into Korn’s mythology and explored their vast well of light and darkness to create a surreal, liminal-pace body-horror nightmare.”
Due to the effects of Covid and the inability to play live shows for the first time in the band’s illustrious career, Requiem was conceived out of very different circumstances than the majority of the band’s catalogue. It is an album born of time and the ability to create without pressure. Energized by a new creative process free of time constraints, the band was able to do things with Requiem that the past two decades haven’t always afforded them, such as taking additional time to experiment together or diligently recording to analog tape – processes which unearthed newfound sonic dimension and texture in their music. Requiem was produced by Chris Collier and Korn.
Fans have been anticipating new music after Korn previewed a snippet of “Start The Healing” within an augmented reality filter and billboards bearing the band’s iconic logo began appearing worldwide last week.
Watch “Start The Healing” and pre-order/save Requiem above, get more album details and information on the band below and stay tuned for more Korn coming soon.
About Korn:
Korn changed the world with the release of their self-titled debut album. It was a record that would pioneer a genre, while the band’s enduring success points to a larger cultural moment. The FADER notes, “There was an unexpected opening in the pop landscape and Korn articulated a generational coming-of-angst for a claustrophobic, self-surveilled consciousness. Korn became the soundtrack for a generation’s arrival as a snarling, thrashing, systemically-restrained freak show.”
Since forming, Korn has sold 40 million albums worldwide, collected two Grammys, toured the world countless times, and set many records in the process that will likely never be surpassed. Vocalist Jonathan Davis, guitarists James “Munky” Shaffer and Brian “Head” Welch, bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu, and drummer Ray Luzier, have continued to push the limits of the rock, alternative and metal genres, while remaining a pillar of influence for legions of fans and generations of artists around the globe.
The level of Korn’s reach transcends accolades and platinum certifications. They are “a genuine movement in a way bands cannot be now,” attests The Ringer. They represent a new archetype and radical innovation, their ability to transcend genre makes barriers seem irrelevant.
Critically-acclaimed North Carolina rapper MAVI has just shared his highly-anticipated mixtape, The Pilot – out now, with features from Earl Sweatshirt, Kenny Mason, Smino and MIKE, along with a new music video for “G-ANNIS FREESTYLE”. A mixtape representing both a creative reset and a personal milestone of ongoing sobriety, The Pilot follows an electrifying early preview of “Silent Film” via his recent COLORS performance, and the entire project last week, at an intimate hangar event in Los Angeles, where MAVI performed the new material for fans and a circle of his contemporaries that included IDK, Saba, MIKE, Jordan Ward, Redveil, and the internet-famous Fake Earl Sweatshirt. Shortly after, MAVI also debuted the new mixtape’s artwork which earned a co-sign from Tyler, The Creator. The listening event doubled as a celebration of MAVI’s first full year of sobriety, a transformation that guides both the tone and intention of The Pilot as he embraces his newfound artistic control and emphasis on collaboration.
With 2025 proving to be a year of transition and expansion for MAVI, he spent the past seven months stretching his sound and reach by releasing a number of collaborative singles including “Landgrab” with Earl Sweatshirt (5M+ Streams), which marked the first time he collaborated with another rapper on his own song, “Potluck” with Smino (8M+ Streams), “Jammer’s Anonymous” with Niontay and “SWIM” with Guapdad 4000 from the HIM Soundtrack. Where his last project, 2024’s shadowbox explored self-confrontation and the weight of addiction amidst a dark personal period, The Pilot captures MAVI with a sense of renewal that signals a looser, lighter body of work that embraces spontaneity, creative freedom and collaboration.
In the process, MAVI is re-framing the trajectory of his career as he fully embraces a new sound and lyrical territory backed by a newfound willingness to flex braggadocio –– “Never touched college diploma but I seen a hundred racks flow through a money counter”, he raps on “G-ANNIS FREESTYLE”. With appearances from Earl Sweatshirt, Kenny Mason, Smino and MIKE, The Pilot finds MAVI expanding his once-insular process into one defined by community and creative exchange. The music maintains the introspective depth MAVI has become known for, but brings newfound clarity and warmth in ideas, exploring the uncomfortable stretch that comes with personal growth. Conceptually, it’s less a continuation of 2025’s successes than a reframing of them, a project that looks forward rather than back.
After spending his first three albums (Let the Sun Talk, Laughing so Hard, it Hurts & shadowbox) garnering critical acclaim for his introspection and poetic storytelling, building a reputation as one of Hip-Hop’s most profound young writers revered for his emotional depth, the new release of The Pilot reveals MAVI’s duality as both an interior philosopher and exterior showman. Preceded by July’s Lunch Break Freestyle for Lyrical Lemonade where he blended self-expression, humor, personal ritual, and technical precision, MAVI then spent the summer and early fall on the road, first joining Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist on the nationwide Alfredo 2 Tour, and is now stepping into a new spotlight as a support act on Earl Sweatshirt’s 3L World Tour. Consistently hailed for his poetic lyricism and virtuosic technical abilities as a rapper, MAVI’s last full-length release, the heart-rendering third studio album, shadowbox was met with instant critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork and The FADER, while even being hailed by Rolling Stone as the #4 Best Hip-Hop Album of 2024.
MAVI then embarked on his headlining shadowbox tour. Following the sold-out success of the tour, MAVI began ushering in his new era with the aforementioned string of independently-released singles, paving the way for The Pilot –– out now, along with an accompanying music video for “G-ANNIS FREESTYLE”.
GRACES THE COVER OF ALTERNATIVE PRESS
PERFORMING AT TYLER, THE CREATOR’S CAMP FLOG GNAW FESTIVAL
TOURING ACROSS SOUTH AMERICA WITH LIMP BIZKIT THIS DECEMBER & MAKING COACHELLA DEBUT IN 2026
Sri Lankan, South African-born, Melbourne-based artist Ecca Vandal is a fearless sonic shapeshifter that fuses punk, hip-hop, jazz, soul, trip-hop and electronic influences into a sound that’s as explosive as it is unmistakably her own. Today, she shares her new single “MOLLY,” which arrives with a music video directed by Ecca Vandal and Richie Buxton shot in Ballarat, Australia. Ecca and Richie are the masterminds behind all of Ecca Vandal’s visuals to date, creating the vibrant and electric world that Ecca’s sonics live in. “MOLLY” follows her Alternative Press cover story that was released last week, where Ecca spoke about her specific sound that’s shaking up the conversation and hints at a forthcoming full length project to come.
Speaking about “MOLLY,” Ecca shares, “There’s the surface meaning, the chaos, the high, that kind of bliss that comes from forgetting things for a while, from turning the volume down on the world. But underneath all that, there’s something quieter going on – the feeling of being cut down, sometimes broken into pieces, and then slowly finding your way back, getting up again, rebuilding yourself bit by bit.”
“MOLLY” is a taste of a larger body of work to come and follows previous singles “CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE,” “BLEED BUT NEVER DIE” and “THEN THERE’S ONE.” Spending her formative years as a jazz musician, her passion for improvisation led her to fall in love with the DIY abandon of punk and foster an ability to effortlessly balance soulful melodies with raw, unapologetic power.
Ecca Vandal will be performing at Tyler, The Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw Festival this weekend and will be making her Coachella debut in April 2026. Next month, she’ll be heading out on a string of tour dates with Limp Bizkit across South America. Additionally, Ecca will be performing at Rock im Park Festival and Rock am Ring Festival in Germany next June ahead of performing at Outbreak Festival in Manchester, United Kingdom on June 27th, 2026. Full live dates listed below and more 2026 live dates to come.
South African-born with Tamil heritage and an upbringing in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia, Ecca Vandal strutted her way onto the musical landscape in traditional punk-style with an edgy disposition and something to say. Ecca brings unrelenting energy to the stage with a history of touring alongside global heavyweights such as Queens of the Stone Age, Idles and The Prodigy, among others. Refusing to be confined, Ecca shapeshifts between defiance and vulnerability, wielding her music as both statement and spectacle. She embodies rebellion with grace — a modern-day provocateur whose magnetism is undeniable.
Check out “MOLLY” above, see full upcoming live dates below and stay tuned for more from Ecca Vandal coming soon.
“CAN’T HOLD US FT. MWANJE”
HOSTING LUSAKA BLOCK PARTY NOVEMBER 22ND
Sampa the Great returns with a brand new single “Can’t Hold Us” via Loma Vista Recordings, marking the beginning of a new era for the Zambian musician and rapper. The track is included in EAFC 26 and will be dropped into in-game playlists from today. “Can’t Hold Us” is also accompanied by an official visualiser directed by Iggy London.
The song was first teased on a live performance in Brixton last month with legendary streamer DJ AG – watch back here. Sampa also this week announced a free block party in Lusaka, Zambia for November 22nd. The party will be hosted in conjuncton with the Lusaka Thrift Market, a creative collective who put on monthly pop-up themed fashion & art youth events in the centre of Lusaka. Any profits from the event will go back into the local creative community. In September, Sampa also released an exclusive new track ‘GOAT’ for the soundtrack of new film HIM – listen here.
As she embarks on a new era, Sampa finds herself reimagining Zamrock – that daring fusion of rock, funk, and African rhythm – through her own lens, merging it with hip-hop, poetry, and soul to create Nu Zamrock, a form both ancestral and futuristic. “Zamrock is my sound,” she says. “It’s my voice. Being Zambian, being loud, being defiant — that’s what Zamrock is.”
“Can’t Hold Us” stands as a declaration of that awakening: a fierce statement of arrival that fuses the raw energy of rock, hip-hop, soul, and Zambian rhythm into a sound that’s entirely her own. “This is the declaration track. I’m saying: I’ve stepped into my power, into my sound, into my purpose. I’ve claimed this thing — Nu Zamrock — as something of my own, something I’m shaping in real time. And in this new form, with this much clarity and drive? You can’t hold us. You can’t stop us. Not anymore.” Radiating confidence and creative freedom, “Can’t Hold Us” captures Sampa’s evolution into an artist fully in command of her voice, her heritage, and her moment.
“Can’t Hold Us” is the first taste of a forthcoming 3rd album project, following on from Sampa’s acclaimed ‘As Above, So Below’ (2022) and her breakout debut ‘The Return’ (2019), which was met with a series of accolades including three ARIA Awards (from six nominations), Bandcamp’s Album Of The Year, BET’s Amplified Artist of the Month, and the 2019 Australian Music Prize – the latter making Sampa the first artist to win the award twice. Sampa blew up globally, beyond Australia and gracing The Roots Picnic, NPR’s Tiny Desk series, AFROPUNK and, Later….With Jools Holland. An artist who landed on Michelle Obama’s personal playlist, who earned support from industry heavyweights like Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden and Annie Mac.
As the world becomes increasingly preposterous, HEALTH’s music sounds less like a hostile future dystopia and more like a sane response to reality. Their fifth album RAT WARS (2023), billed “The Downward Spiral for people with at least two monitors and a vitamin D deficiency,” encapsulated the misery and absurdity of contemporary life by throwing every genre the band has ever worked with into a power blender. Critically acclaimed and leading to some of their biggest live shows to date, RAT WARS’ hybrid sound has now become the bedrock of their follow-up project, CONFLICT DLC.
“Wrestling with existential meaninglessness in the face of unreckonable, unavoidable death,” is how HEALTH vocalist/guitarist Jacob Duzsik describes the band’s subject matter, which has been unwavering since their self-titled debut. “That’s kind of it. We are all trying to find some semblance of authenticity, and maybe a non-miserable existence, while dealing with those things.”
Since their formation, HEALTH’s sound has evolved from harsh electronic noise (GET COLOR) to gale-force industrial pop (DEATH MAGIC) to their own half-joking categorisation “cum metal” (RAT WARS), all rooted with the same depressive weight. Equal parts crushing and sublime, delicate and destructive, the L.A. trio of Duzsik, John Famiglietti (bass, electronics) and BJ Miller (drums) exist in a hinterland of their own aesthetic. They’ve shared bills with bands from Deftones to Interpol to Pierce The Veil, and collaborated with everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Bad Omens to Poppy on collaborative tracks. Their dystopian nihilism has a cinematic quality that has also landed them on several video game soundtracks, Max Payne 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and Grand Theft Auto V.
More recently, HEALTH has spent the last year and a half touring RAT WARS on the metal festival circuit alongside in-your-face mega-bands like Slipknot and Sleep Token. That experience prompted them to up the tempo going forward. “When you’re sandwiched between these insane bands you start to think, ok, we need a little more firepower,” says Famiglietti. CONFLICT DLC, brings exactly that.
A stack of 12 full-octane industrial metal bangers, CONFLICT DLC refracts the band’s formative influences like Ministry, Rammstein, and Black Sabbath through their own maximalist lens. “Still doing our thing, but adding new weapon types,” Famiglietti jokes. It’s produced by RAT WARS’ STINT (Ajay Bhattacharyya), taking the cinematic heaviness established on that album and pushing it in a more concentrated direction. The band also tapped Knocked Loose producer WZRD BLD (Drew Fulk) to mix the album alongside Lars Stalfors, and the two somehow perfectly balance it’s high contrast textures. Stalfors steers the pulse of synth slow-jams and extra-terrestrial instrumentals (“ANTIDOTE,” “YOU DIED,” “TORTURE II”), while Fulk lends HEALTH’s aggressive side an even more monstrous dimension.
While the new LP acts as a companion piece that inhabits the same sprawling aesthetic universe as RAT WARS, it is more direct and harder-hitting. Heavy riffs and blistered snares rain down like boulders on singles “ORDINARY LOSS” and “VIBE COP,” while the dance-friendly beat of “SHRED ENVY” and yearning thrust of “THOUGHT LEADER” demonstrate a newfound embrace of bouncing between modes in the same track. Pop jams transition into heavy breakdowns transition, into suspended ambience – a sonic mirror for the chaos of modern life.
So, while CONFLICT DLC may carry the ironic name of a video game add-on, the title ultimately ties in more with a wider cultural mood. Specifically, the juxtaposition of digital culture and sociological turmoil. “You’ve got this very online phenomenon of downloadable content and patches for games, and then also the entire fucking world is at war,” says Duzsik. “We didn’t know everything was going to continually devolve when we were writing RAT WARS and it’s follow up…But it has.”
Lyrically, Duzsik stays in familiar territory, only this time it reflects something beyond his own interior landscape. His usual themes of depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsion are now eerily in sync with the doomscroll of 2025. We have arrived at a point in time where staring into your phone in the dark while feeling absolutely terrified isn’t an activity reserved for introverts and the philosophically perturbed, it’s the prevailing mode of living. “I’ve just been struggling with my usual shit, but the personal content of the lyrics ended up well timed,” says Duzsik, “because the state of the world has made the general public have the same issues as me. Come on in everyone, the waters fine.”
“There’s this mainstream view right now that, oh, everything’s fucked, isn’t it?” Famiglietti adds. “Whether it’s on social media or not, people are very concerned.”
Though it acts as an affront to the chaos of the wider world, like a bunker in a tornado, CONFLICT DLC isn’t an attempt to spark a large scale conversation. In many ways this album speaks directly to HEALTH’s own fanbase, which they describe as a “coalition of subcultures” spanning memelords, heavy music diehards, the delightfully perverted and generally pop culture obsessed.
“Our fans are this fascinating coalition,” notes Famiglietti, describing a community of people who are just as likely to show up at a HEALTH show in bondage gear and a furry mask as they are confide that the band’s music has helped them weather a mental health crisis. In that respect, what HEALTH brings to the table is more than just music. Their fanbase has become central to how HEALTH write and think about their work. The band has an active Discord, and fans have been able to call Famiglietti personally for over 10 years. The video for DEATH MAGIC single “NEW COKE” included, alongside an extraordinary quantity of slow-motion vomit, a phone number attached to a message that states “if you need to talk.” If anyone called it, Famiglietti would answer. That has been the case ever since.
There are growing signposts to that sense of community within the music itself. Giving a song the title of “DSMV” (a reference to The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) on RAT WARS, for example, was Duzsik’s way of making people “feel seen” on the record.
“On CONFLICT DLC, there is an attempt to achieve the seemingly disparate goals of being fun, cathartic and aggressive, while also earnestly addressing the emotional and psychological challenges that people deal with,” he explains. “There’s a lot more openness in talking about [mental health] now, but it’s not always easy to find it addressed in a way that makes people feel they are actually connected to someone who understands what they are going through.”
That intimacy with fans has shaped the sound as well, with HEALTH increasingly treating their records not as detached statements but an ongoing conversation between the band’s instincts and the energy they get back while performing live. CONFLICT DLC is a direct product of that feedback loop, reflecting where the band, their fans, and the world they share are right now: more extreme in every direction.
“It’s a strange potpourri. It’s more fun, faster, heavier and more sad all at the same time, which has its own strange relationship to how life is now anyway… except the more fun part” Duzsik laughs. “Life’s definitely not more fun.”
For all its existential strain, though, CONFLICT DLC is ultimately designed for enjoyment. “We want you to come to the show, dance, and get those feelings out. We’re definitely trying to reach our people and get them out of the basement a little bit. These kids have to touch some fucking grass.”
A slate of sad bangers for the end times, CONFLICT DLC finds connection in the disconnect and comfort in the dark.
Militarie Gun’s new album, God Save The Gun, starts with a confession. “I’ve been slipping up” frontman Ian Shelton roars on the opening cut “B A D I D E A.” It’s real vulnerability tucked amongst distorted bass and blown-out drums, and the perfect introduction to one of the most exciting records of the year. This isn’t just a sonically daring, massive swing of a rock album, it’s also a very human document of being at your worst when you should be on top of the world – an absurdist guide to the intersection of self-destruction and self-belief.
“I’m well aware that being this vulnerable turns my personal trauma into a marketing hook for this album,” Shelton says. “But I’m fine with it, if not provoking it. Over the past couple years, as I spoke about addiction from the perspective of someone affected by it, I became the one struggling with it. There’s a farcical logic to entering a situation, fully knowing the consequences, and doing it anyway–but that’s where my head was when I started leaning on drinking.” Militarie Gun’s 2023 debut album, Life Under The Gun was centered around lifelong cycles of hurt, with the singer looking back at growing up with family members struggling with addiction, and while God Save The Gun is still tethered to that history, this time, he’s not the witness—he’s the protagonist. It wasn’t until the band was scheduled to enter the studio in early 2025 that Shelton realized he was the one who needed to hear God Save The Gun’s message. “I thought I was playing a character, but it was becoming my reality,” he explains. “Right before recording, it hit me that I was really losing control and needed to do something about it. I looked at the record as a whole and could see that it was a note to myself – when I read back those lyrics, I could clearly see they’re saying ‘yeah man, you’re fucking up.’”
Despite all of the inner turmoil leading to God Save The Gun, Shelton and his bandmates – guitarists William Acuña and Kevin Kiley, bassist Waylon Trim, and drummer David Stalsworth – more than rose to the challenge of following up Militarie Gun’s acclaimed debut. Stalsworth, Trim, and Kiley all joined during Life Under The Gun’s extensive touring cycle after a series of member shakeups that would hobble most bands, but only made Militarie Gun stronger. “It took us a long time to find the right people to be in this band but it feels like all the pieces have finally fallen into place,” Shelton says. “It’s like we’ve had a fast car for a while but we just now figured out how to drive it. We wrote for three years consistently because our intention was to make a classic record—full stop. The songs need to be as emotional as possible but the music needs to fully hit too. Big ideas need big songs.”
God Save The Gun certainly lives up to that credo, and to do it, the band recruited a village of new and old collaborators. Shelton continued his creative relationship with songsmith Phillip Odom, co-wrote with longtime conspirator and frequent harmonizer James Goodson of Dazy, and newly tapped Nick Panella of MSPAINT, among others. “Phil really taught me how to sing, he knows my voice better than anyone,” says Shelton. “Or sometimes it’s about bringing in a fresh perspective – I call someone like James or Nick because those guys write songs in a totally different way than I do.” That outside view also came from producer / engineer Riley MacIntyre (Adele, Arlo Parks, The Kills), who was chosen not only to make the songs sound huge, but also to access the sentiments behind them. “We went with Riley because he’s the emotional producer,” Shelton says. “We wanted someone who locked in with what the songs were about, not just how they sounded. And he was so dedicated – we would do 14-hour days and Riley would be there an hour before me and an hour after I left.” God Save The Gun does indeed feel massive, but it’s the sound of real people working together to make something bigger than themselves–not computer-replaced perfectionism. And its musical scope is matched by its lyrical depths.
The album’s cover art depicts Shelton as a cult leader, subverting the idea of a charismatic rock n’ roll messiah: the vocalist is selling salvation when he’s the one in need, a sly jab at the commodification of art and self-help. “The album has a pretty defined arc,” Shelton explains. “Sometimes I think people like me more when I’m at my worst and the first few songs are about seeking external validation – needing people or drugs or alcohol to provide your value, anything but yourself. Then it’s songs that reflect on what I went through when I was younger and coming away with the wrong conclusions. It’s kind of ridiculous, me thinking ‘I saw my mom attempt homicide, so it’s ok for me to get out of control as long as it’s less than that.’ After that the album gets manic. Then it’s the hard comedown after the episode, where the stakes get very real.”
God Save The Gun’s begins with “Pt II,” a spoken word intro where Shelton sets the tone, admitting “things have not been great…” before kicking into the pissed-off pogo of “B A D I D E A.” The record then surges forward with “Fill Me With Paint” and “Throw Me Away,” two gigantic alt-rock barnburners that sound more confident than ever despite lyrics of biting self-doubt and paranoia. It’s a magic trick that Militarie Gun performs throughout the record: hyper-energetic songwriting that makes the heavy lyrical content hit even harder. “God Owes Me Money” follows, a defiant synth-flecked rocker that just might be the jewel of the record and ties Shelton’s past to his present. “The idea of god or the universe owing you something because of the bad hand you’ve been dealt is just a brash idea that I really connect to,” he says. “It’s my right to redefine my pain and make it pay me.” Next on the hazy acoustic ballad “Daydream” Shelton begins to subconsciously realize he might have a problem, but things get messier and more complicated from there as the narrative and the music jackknife through turbulence. “I was trying to make an album with so much chaos in my life and in my head,” Shelton says. “A break-up, crazy touring, family trouble from the past, family trouble from now… It’s hard for me not to just lean into the absurdity of it all sometimes, like if you’re not laughing you’re crying.” God Save The Gun swings from the punk stomp of “Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down,” to the Killing Joke sampling rave up of “Kick,” to the chiming jangle pop of “Laugh At Me,” tackling nihilistic abandon, anger, and love–all that mania channels into the record’s harrowing next chapter.
“I’m a depressed person and so much of this has really just been about trying to find a distraction from that,” Shelton says plainly. “At the end of the day it’s not appropriate for me to talk about a lot of the things I see in my brain – it would bum people out – so the only place I have for this stuff is in these songs.” Shelton puts that idea to the test with “I Won’t Murder Your Friend,” an agonizing portrayal of suicidal ideation that’s very intentionally drained of any possible romanticization. “I grew up hearing songs that glorified suicide and I wanted to write a song that de-glorified it,” he explains. “I heard David Choe talking about Anthony Bourdain with that perspective – that suicide doesn’t make you the glorious martyr, you’re the selfish murderer and your own life isn’t the only casualty – it really stuck with me and he let us put that audio into the track.” Thankfully God Save The Gun stops short of the abyss, with Shelton finding hope by looking outside himself. “The album gets more empathetic,” Shelton says. “It becomes about realizing you’ve been missing that other people are struggling because you’re so wrapped up in your own problems.”
That glimmer of hope carries into God Save The Gun‘s climactic title track, a song that tries to reject the cycle of bad choices and bad results. If reveling in self-destruction didn’t work then maybe only the hardest option is left: change. “Your people love you, they don’t let it show / and I know you’re out of control,” Shelton howls over top of churning bass and tremolo guitars, singing each verse to the various characters that populate the song’s unhinged existential party-gone-wrong. Suzy, Martin, Blaine, Lucy, Liam – Shelton rattles off the names with increasing desperation, as if he’s trying to direct the lines to anyone but himself. “It’s me speaking to other people, but I was the person who needed to hear what I was saying the most,” he admits. “You shouldn’t have to wait until your life is completely destroyed to try to improve it, and I don’t want to lose what I’ve worked for because I have a drinking problem.” The song’s twisting structure hurls the listener through exhilarating dynamic shifts before abruptly cutting to just bass and vocals for its final lines: “If you want to keep your life, you gotta let it go,” Shelton sings, his voice resolute. God can’t save The Gun but he can do it himself.
Nearly a decade ago, Margo Price turned Nashville on its head with her breakthrough, beloved debut solo album, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter. Released in the throes of bro-country and before pop stars were crossing over into the genre left and right, it showcased an artist completely unafraid to double down not only on herself, but what she’d always loved: classic country songs written from the intellect and the gut, hell-bent on truth-telling and both timeless and urgent all at once. Respected by her peers, praised by critics and beloved by her fans, Price created a lane where independent-minded, insurgent country music can exist and thrive alongside the mainstream, and became an ardent fighter for her beliefs in a genre where the norm is to shut up and sing. A trailblazer and a champion for the craft, Price redefined what it meant to be a modern country artist.
And now she’s back with an exquisite, truly timeless album that reconnects with her roots and pays tribute to the art of the country song, inspired in part by the legends whom she now calls colleagues and friends. Hard Headed Woman is both a look forward and a look back: a way to march forward while staying true to yourself when the path of less resistance is right there in front of us, and short cuts are around every corner. And a way to look back when we need to trim what is no longer working, and to stay connected with where we’re from. It is a promise and a manifesto, a love song to both a city and a genre, and a defiant cry for individuality.
In creating Hard Headed Woman, Price brought all of her power as one of our most beloved and respected songwriters to craft a deep exploration of love and America in a time of unprecedented uncertainty. Featuring appearances from Tyler Childers, co-writes with Rodney Crowell and a Waylon Jennings song that his widow, Jessi Colter, urged her to sing, it is country music as only Price can make it: free of rules, cherishing tradition, hard headed to the core but with a delicate, beating heart.
Since releasing Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, Price has barely slowed down. She’s made four records, played Saturday Night Live, been nominated for a Grammy, toured the world alongside artists like Chris Stapleton and Willie Nelson, released a lauded memoir (Maybe We’ll Make It, due on paperback September 2nd), became an in-demand producer and was appointed as the first female board member of Nelson’s Farm Aid. And she’s been fearless when it came to genre, venturing into psychedelic rock on her most recent, Jonathan Wilson-produced record, Strays. It would have been easiest to just stay that course, and keep running. But Price doesn’t follow success or comfort. She follows the art.
It took a whole lot of hard work and honesty with herself and others to get there, but that’s never stopped Price before. “I made the decision that I had to rebuild everything from the ground up,” Price says. “There’s all this pressure to be pumping out content, and I felt the opposite in the way I wanted to approach this record and my life in general.”
Price had also established herself as one of the most passionate, vocal artists in country music and beyond when it came to standing up for political and personal causes, from the presidential election, to abortion to gun control: happily hard headed when it came to the fight for equality and justice, especially for the working class and underserved in our society. Price has always brilliantly woven her activism into her songs, but her role as a spokesperson had started to overtake, on occasion, her role as a songwriter. She wanted to focus on using her written word to deliver the most potent punch of all.
“I always hope to do like Johnny Cash did,” Price says, “which is speak up for the common man and woman. But there have been so many threats and anger and vitriol over the years, when I am only coming from a place of love.”
Price realized she just needed a break from everything outside of the bubble of family life and her art. She started spending more time at home, writing songs alone and with her husband, Jeremey Ivey. She started popping up in the dive bars and tiny venues around Nashville where she got her start, sometimes just to play a country cover or two or dance with the crowd. She refused guidance to write for pop stars or compromise her values for a quick buck. Most of all, she turned the emphasis in her music back to songwriting, exactly where she began.
“So much of Strays was leaning into this psychedelic, textural territory,” says Price. The music lent itself to vibrant, heavy stage jams, with Price often hopping behind the drumkit and bruising her thigh from a tambourine beat. She found herself longing for the days when it was just her and her guitar, playing at an East Nashville dive bar. “I always knew,” she adds, “I would come back to this more rooted sound.”
Hard Headed Woman is rooted to its core. Rooted in Price’s history and struggle to make it as a musician for so many years in a town that prizes uniformity and the bottom line, rooted in the country and folk sounds that have become her signature, rooted in the simplicity of a few key collaborators instead of songs-by-committee. At the heart of Price’s work is her creative partnership with Ivey, with whom she describes as having a “soul connection.” “I’m a songwriter,” Price says. “I’m not somebody who goes out and needs five people to craft a song, and then tack my name on it. That’s never been my style. I have something to say.”
Something to say, nothing to prove. The first song they wrote for the album that would become Hard Headed Woman was “Close to You,” a simple, pining call for a lover that is infused with the sounds of the desert. It’s unfettered and truth-telling, accented by some flamenco guitar and Price’s gorgeous, urgent vocals. “We played the jukebox while democracy fell,” Price sings, never letting her songs fall out of the context in which they exist. It’s the kind of thing that only she could write, carrying both love and fear in one single line.
As more songs started to form, an early boost of confidence came from her friends Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris, who heard some of the work at a political fundraiser and encouraged Price to keep going. “I have both of them to thank for building me up and making me believe in the songs I am writing in this season of my life,” Price says. Crowell remained not only an inspiration and supporter of the album but a contributor: he co-wrote two songs with Price and Ivey.
The album that unfolded from there is drenched in Price’s unique story and unshakeable instincts: while Midwest Farmer’s Daughter was about her journey from childhood to Nashville, Hard Headed Woman is very much her battle since from dive bars to tour buses, through parenthood and marriage, through scrutiny and sacrifice all while fighting constantly for what she believes in, and the music she loves. It begins with a proclamation on the prelude, which serves as the album’s mission statement: or, Price puts it, “a disclaimer and reminder that I don’t owe you fucking shit.”
Songs like the album’s lead single, “Don’t Let the Bastards Get you Down,” speak for the downtrodden and the forgotten, an “anthem for people who are being overlooked in society and need to be lifted up,” Price says, “because we are up against so much right now.” As so many of Price’s songs do, it speaks both for the personal and the political all at once. Price was inspired by the message Kris Kristofferson whispered to Sinead O’Connor when she was booed on stage at a Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary show, and even got Kristofferson’s widow’s blessing to include his name on the credits. “I always admired Kris for how he stood by her in that moment, instead of pulling her off the stage like they told him,” Price says. It serves as a reminder to anyone who encounters resistance in the face of fighting for justice to keep going, especially when it would be so much easier to capitulate and cower.
“The song was originally written for a movie that never happened, but it feels so timely with everything that’s going on in the world,” Price explains. “The phrase, ‘Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down’ originates from Margaret Atwood’s brilliant 1985 piece of literature, The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s referred to in Latin and used as a rallying cry for resistance against the oppressive regime that symbolizes resilience and hope in the face of adversity. Nolite te Bastardes Caborundorum.”
That spirit resonates all across the songs of Hard Headed Woman. The blistering “Don’t Wake Me Up” was based around some writings that Ivey stumbled upon in one of Price’s notebooks, inspired in part by her deep readings of Frank Stanford, one of her favorite poets due to his freewheeling work free of boundaries. They spun it all into song in minutes that chugs with the essence of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “The way this world is going, ain’t where I’m at,” Price howls in her powerful, unmistakable voice. “Nowhere is Where,” turns slow and contemplative, road-worn but never broken, the call of someone who has been to the mountain but never forgets the prairie below. And “Losing Streak” whirls in with an organ and out with a weary, world-worn defiance: our worst times don’t define us, but they’re always part of who we are.
There are songs that go back to the beginning of Price’s early grind, like the western-tinged “Wild at Heart,” reflecting on how much her life and the city of Nashville has changed over the years – and how important it is to stay true to exactly who you are despite it all. Another, called “Red Eye Flight,” is about both leaving a lover and also leaving her longtime band the Pricetags. “I’ve been with those players for ten, thirteen years,” she says. “But I could feel that I needed to make a change, and to change texturally what’s going on with the band. But it’s a familial bond, different than a friendship.”
There are a few choice covers and cuts, too: “Love Me Like You Used To Do” is by Price’s friend Steven Knudson, an unsung Nashville writer on whom she hopes to shine a spotlight (helping to elevate the town’s incredibly talented but buried voices is one of Price’s favorite pastimes). Friend Tyler Childers joins Price on that waltzing country ballad, while “I Just Don’t Give a Damn” is Price’s “Jolene goes to Memphis” take on the Jimmy Peppers and George Jones classic. And showcasing how Price has been trusted by the greats to lead the next generation of country music renegades, “Kissin You Goodbye” was given to Price by Jessi Colter, Waylon Jennings’ widow, when Price was producing her record. They’re songs chosen to appreciate the past and the present as she sees it – not as Music Row or the algorithm might dictate – and place Price squarely amongst her heroes as a living and breathing part of the new country tradition.
When it came time to record Hard Headed Woman, it was important for Price to keep that ethos alive, decamping to Nashville’s RCA Studio A and reuniting with producer Matt Ross-Spang, with whom she made her first two solo albums. Though she has worked with everyone from Sturgill Simpson to Jonathan Wilson since, it was Spang’s vocal rebuke of easy studio shortcuts that made her eager to reunite again. “He’s so unpretentious,” Price says. “He fully believes in me, he fully believes in my songs. He got us back to feeling it in your gut and not needing everything to be so perfect.”
It felt truly significant for Price to make the album in Nashville, a city where she’s lived for over two decades and played a seminal role in its transformation, yet somehow never recorded an album in the place she’s called home. The historic RCA Studio A helped connect Price even closer to the legacy of songwriting she holds so dear, a place where everyone from Dolly Parton to John Prine to Loretta Lynn have made albums. “It felt like there were ghosts and spirits just hanging out,” Price says. In perfect kismet, she also launched her own signature Gibson J-45 guitar, inspired by her 1960’s Gibson she’s had by her side for years as her career took off. It’s all part of the continuity that she wishes to create with her art, not just with timeless songs but inspiring future generations of women, mothers and artists in general who don’t want to sacrifice their vision, moral compass or family life in favor of mainstream success.
At its core, Hard Headed Woman is about that furious instinct to never waver, especially when ourselves, our values and our future is so clearly on the line. As she sings on the title track, “I ain’t ashamed, I just am what I am.”
“I hope this album inspires people to be fearless and take chances and just be unabashedly themselves,” Price says, “in a culture that tries as hard as it can to beat us into all being the same.”
There are moments standing on a high ledge where wild space beckons. In that moment, instinct stirs: “What if I just jumped?” It’s been described as “the call of the void,” an experience somehow more primal than even feeling or urge. On her new album, Precipice (due July 25th via Loma Vista), Indigo De Souza looks over the creative and spiritual cliff and just leaps. The North Carolina native is a prolific, poetic singer-songwriter who already has three albums and four EPs in just seven years, with her most recent full-length (2023’s All of This Wild End) earning rave reviews for her daring vocals and thrilling songwriting. But on her latest, De Souza hears the void calling and calls back, taking control of difficult memories and charged emotions via pop bombast and diaristic clarity, and finding a stronger self. “Life feels like always being on the edge of something without knowing what that something is,” the singer-songwriter says. “Music gives me ways to harness that feeling. Ways to push forward in new directions.”
On the album’s title track, De Souza faces down the potential darkness of change, and finds hope in surrendering: “Coming to a precipice/ Holding on for dear life/ Looking out into the world/ Everything has gone dark.” That sort of emotional daredevilry is definitively not new for De Souza. Her catalog brims with unwavering honesty and unflinchingly personal songwriting, including most recently the familial excavation on the pained and mighty All of This Will End. “I feel constantly on the precipice, of something horrible, or something beautiful–something that will change my life for better or for worse,” De Souza muses. To that end, Precipice cracks De Souza’s world open. As a new challenge, the songwriter took on blind studio sessions in Los Angeles, reveling in the expanded pool of collaborators and ability to focus on music. “I’d been wanting to work on more pop-leaning music for a while, so when I came out to LA I made sure to meet with people that could help bring that to life,” she says. “I wanted to make music that could fill your heart with euphoria while you dance along.”
In those sessions, she made a quick and deep connection with producer Elliott Kozel—a musician who has produced and collaborated with the likes of SZA and Yves Tumor, not to mention scoring TV with FINNEAS. The two quickly got to work on album highlight “Not Afraid”, the track setting the tone for the album’s bold defiance of the unknown. “What, what does it look like, when you are free?/ When you are being true?/ When you let go, the people you love are free when they’re with you too,” she sings. The track also signaled the start of a long and important collaboration. “Elliott is really good at allowing space for songs to reveal themselves, and I felt very seen and respected both musically and personally,” De Souza adds. “That song became a compass for what I wanted the album to be: pop songs with meaning and feeling, pop songs with lyrics that tap into raw humanity.”
Lead single “Heartthrob” exemplifies the ecstatic duality the pair found, a way to both bring immediate energy and thoughtful depth. The track is a fanged rebuke of those who exploit and prey on young people, delivered in panoramic indie rock glow. Multi-instrumentalist Jesse Schuster’s chugging guitar riff pushes De Souza’s delivery into a headrush, her voice wavering somewhere between pain and fury. “God, when I’m a grown up/I wanna have a full cup/A true heartthrob,” she shakes, a satirical jab at the false safety that some adults can exude and an honest cry to inspire light and freedom in the people she loves. “I’ve lived through harmful experiences in my past that are helpful to process through music.” De Souza says. “A way to remind myself that I am still a full human being.”
As with so much great pop, Precipice transcends the giddy highs of new attraction and the haunted lows of a broken heart. But true to her idiosyncratic approach, De Souza somehow manages to invert and subvert both, finding their points of connection rather than their differences. The thrumming synthpop of “Crying Over Nothing” exemplifies those new, glistening heights musically, even as the lyrics digest unimaginable heartbreak. De Souza skips over the coyly shuffling rhythm, her voice cracking into the upper register with a warm glow akin to the ‘80s synths. “There’s some pain that follows no matter where you go or how much you try to lose it, pain that comes from memories you can’t erase and love you can’t unfeel,” she says. “This song is about the one that got away. That feeling of being haunted by loss.”
The Robyn-esque “Crush” follows, a sugar burst that subtly weaves its way across the dance floor. “Come up to get some air/ It’s like you’re playing solitaire/ So good to see your face/ I was missing you when you were down there,” she sways, the knowing grin practically beaming through the track. The embodiment of catching feelings, “Crush” rides a gritty snap-pop drum loop from percussionist Jonathan Smith and tingly synth prickles. “I remember thinking about how, in the same way that I sometimes have to talk new lovers through eating me out, I also have to help them understand how to care for me in ways that make me feel good and seen,” De Souza blushes.
But of course even the most hypercharged crushes can crumble—and the sighing “Heartbreaker” was written when the person she was falling for on “Crush” eventually broke her heart. While De Souza’s voice acrobatically flickers across the rest of the album, here she delivers this pained memory more simply, with her full throat: “When I wake up, still thinking that you’re there/ And it all comes flooding back to me, I’m living in a nightmare,” she cries, churning piano and ghostly guitar floating in the edges. “I was broken up with, and I flew out to LA as quickly as possible so I could get to the studio to make a song instead of being at home, sad and lashing out,” De Souza recalls. “My heart was fully soaked in poisonous pain, and I am deeply grateful for the creative space to process what I was feeling.”
On album highlight “Be Like the Water”, there are times where you can practically feel the tears dripping on the microphone. But rather than mourning, these are tears of awe, a song of amazement at the possibility of living truly and on your own path. “It’s about being brave and protecting your energy, following your gut,” De Souza says. “It’s a reminder that you can always follow your heart and your spirit, but you can also make boundaries and choose your own direction.” To achieve that spiritual depth, Kozel’s production bends between mantric ethereality and golden Americana. Spectral synth tones and finger chimes play like a yogic drone, while gleaming organ puts a direct frame on De Souza’s verses. “I won’t be sorry/ And I won’t be silent/ I’m temporary/ I am an island,” she sings, her ownership of herself overcoming the pains that pervade the album.
There are points in life where the precipice feels furthest from our control—something De Souza faced in late 2024, as Hurricane Helene ravaged the East Coast of the United States. Though her recently finished album showed the buoyant joy of change, De Souza’s flooded home and destroyed belongings represent its potential tragic side. When not in the thick of clearing the mess and helping her community recover, she continued to return to music as a comfort, already having written another album worth of breathtaking songs. Even when the void seems darkest, De Souza leaps boldly—and on Precipice she soars through wild, uncharted territory with open eyes, a full heart, and gritted teeth, finding new beauty even further beyond.
Robert Glasper’s contribution to music and culture spans over two decades, forming an exceptional legacy that permeates throughout contemporary art and advocacy. 2022 not only marks the 10 year anniversary of the era-defining, Grammy-winning album Black Radio but also Glasper’s solo return with the upcoming release of Black Radio III.
Arriving alongside the announcement is new single, “Black Superhero” featuring Killer Mike + BJ The Chicago Kid + Big K.R.I.T. The official music video first premiered yesterday via broadcast channels BET Soul, BET Jams, MTVu, MTV Live, and Yo! MTV including social support across MTV, BET Soul, and BET Jams platforms. Shot in Los Angeles and directed by award-winning Director/Filmmaker, Charlie Buhler, the video takes viewers through a series of vignettes that highlight real-life Black heroes who live in and work for their communities.
On creating the music video, Buhler says “Black Superhero” is a visual love letter to the Black community. It’s an ode to our strength, vibrancy, and joy. We have struggled, and yet we are still here, and not only are we here, but we are so much more than the adversity heaped upon us. I am grateful to Robert and the team at Loma Vista for trusting me with such a powerful and important song, and everyone who came together to help bring the concept to life. It was a true labor of love.”
Like its predecessors, the new studio album celebrates Black joy, love and resilience and features Grammy-winning single “Better Than I Imagined” featuring H.E.R + Meshell Ndgeocello and “Shine” featuring D Smoke and Tiffany Gouché. Black Radio III’s guests also include Q-Tip, Jennifer Hudson, H.E.R. Yebba, Common, Ty Dolla $Ign, Esperanza Spalding, Ant Clemons, India.Arie and more.
Glasper reflects, sharing “I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of Black Radio than by releasing Black Radio 3. To debut a live performance of “Black Superhero” on The Tonight Show with some of my own heroes is really special to me. Hopefully, it inspires more to come.”
The 4x Grammy and Emmy winning artist, composer and producer made history with Black Radio as the first album to debut in the top 10 of 4 different genre charts simultaneously: Hip Hop, R&B, Urban Contemporary, Jazz and Contemporary Jazz, as did the follow-up album Black Radio 2. The ongoing Black Radio brand has become synonymous with Black music culture and has placed Glasper alongside some of music’s most legendary- from early days with J Dilla, Bilal and Yasiin Bey to playing alongside Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, Herbie Hancock, Erykah Badu, Snoop Dogg, Jill Scott, Brandy and more.
Glasper is nominated for two 2022 Grammys, including Best Progressive R&B Album for Dinner Party (Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington and 9th Wonder) and Best Traditional R&B Performance for “Born Again” with Leon Bridges.
Tune in live to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on January 17th for a special MLK Day performance from Robert Glasper, performing “Black Superhero” with Rapsody, BJ The Chicago Kid, Amir Sulaiman and DJ Jazzy Jeff, backed by The Roots.
Black Radio lll will be available on all formats (digital, CD, and 2xLP) worldwide on February 25th via Loma Vista Recordings – more to be announced soon.
“Child, Take Your Dark Memories
Like Seeds, And Plant Them Far From Here”
It’s virtually impossible to overstate how far GHOST has come since manifesting from the imagination of Tobias Forge in the early 21st century. Over the course of the nearly 20 years since its inception in Linköping, Sweden, GHOST has become so much more than Scandinavia’s foremost theatrical rock export. The achievements and accolades amassed by the GHOST discography include nearly 10 billion streams, five GRAMMY nominations (including a 2016 Best Metal Performance win for “Cirice”), an RIAA-certified platinum single (“Mary on a Cross”), an American Music Award and an iHeart Radio Music Award (both Rock Album wins for 2022’s international #1 charting IMPERA). GHOST’s ambitions have only risen with the exponential growth of its profile, recently resulting in the highest grossing hard rock cinema event in North American history (the band’s feature film debut RITE HERE RITE NOW). As GHOST continues to strengthen its bond with the world-spanning legion of kindred souls that commune with the band and each other at its vaunted live rituals, it’s no exaggeration to describe GHOST — and the uniquely intense connection formed with the faithful who find refuge in the personae, lore and world Forge has created — as a singular global phenomenon.
“There Is Something Inside Me
And They Don’t Know If There Is A Cure”
Having spent the better part of the last few years enrapturing GHOST’s passionately devoted and ever-growing following throughout multiple legs of touring—a stretch of time spanning from before IMPERA’s March 2022 release through the U.S. finale that took place September 11-12, 2023 at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum (as documented in the aforementioned box office smash RITE HERE RITE NOW)—the next uncharted creative direction would prove to be an inward journey. This deeply introspective turn in Forge’s creative process would ultimately result in SKELETÁ: a collection of 10 new songs originating from and cutting as close to the bone as (in)humanly possible.
“And The Road That
Leads To Nowhere Is Long”
Produced by Gene Walker and mixed by Andy Wallace and Dan Malsch, GHOST’s sixth psalm, SKELETÁ, is its most unflinchingly introspective work to date. Where previous GHOST albums dealt largely with chronicling and/or observing outward facing subject matter—such as IMPERA’s meditations on the rise and fall of empires and its predecessor Prequelle’s evocations of the ravages of era-defining plagues—SKELETÁ’s lyrics render the distinct individual emotional vistas of each of its 10 songs in one-on-one fashion, at times as if in a dialogue with oneself in a mirror. The end result is a singular collection of timeless, universal sentiments, all filtered through a prism of a uniquely personal point of view. However, SKELETÁ is so much more than the sum of its tracklist. Its songs form a thematic arc that begins with the ascendant and anthemic “Peacefield,” then delves into progressively darker spiritual territory by way of the bittersweet melodies of “Lachryma,” demonically hooky first single “Satanized” and soul-searching epic ballad “Guiding Lights.”
“Where Ever I Go
You’re Always There
Riding Next To Me”
SKELETÁ’s second half charts a trajectory through this darkness, back to the unbridled optimism of its opening salvo. Beacons along the way include “Cenotaph” with its notion of existence transcending the physical grave, while the ominous portents of “Marks Of The Evil One” are hailed with a deceptively joyous “There! There!” refrain, and “Umbra” takes a decidedly carnal turn. “Excelsis” concludes the journey in divine fashion, its deceptively mournful intonations actually conveying a promise of eternal life—cementing the song cycle’s overarching theme of reassurance that all dark ages, mourning periods and the like eventually come to an end.
“Come With Me
To The Rainbow’s End”
SKELETÁ will be brought to life over the course of GHOST’s impending SKELETOUR WORLD TOUR 2025. The most ambitious incarnation of the GHOST live ritual to date, the tour recently revealed a first wave of more than 55 dates—including a historic first-ever headlining show at New York’s hallowed Madison Square Garden—with more to be announced. With tickets already selling at a brisk pace, the SKELETOUR WORLD TOUR 2025 live ritual experience promises to expand the GHOST community to attract its largest and most diverse audiences to date. From lifelong disciples to the curious uninitiated first-timers to the outcasts and others who find solace in the ritual, all are welcome to escape the travails of daily life and to become one with the phantasmagoric spectacle that moved THE LOS ANGELES TIMES to rave “As far as live acts go, they’re one of the best in the business” and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL to anoint the band as “the next generation of arena stars.”
Killer Mike is celebrating his birthday by formally launching the countdown for his new solo album MICHAEL via the release of “DON’T LET THE DEVIL (feat EL-P & thankugoodsir).” MICHAEL marks the celebrated MCs first solo project since 2012’s critically lauded R.A.P. Music and serves as an introduction to the totality of Michael Render, a lifelong rap fiend whose consciousness is seeped in the sounds of community that raised him – multiple eras of southern rap flows, Sunday church service, and barbershop discourse. Speaking on his most autobiographical and independent album to date, Mike states “RTJ is the X-Men, this is my Logan.” For the new single Mike linked with his Run The Jewels partner in rhyme EL-P, trading verses over a lilting soul loop produced by No I.D., EL-P, & Little Shalimar. “My favorite group (US) with my favorite producers! It’s our 10 year anniversary and MICHAEL is an origin story so I wanted to start w/ El.”
“DON’T LET THE DEVIL” arrives in the wake of RTJ announcing a 10 year anniversary run this Fall, the release of their collaborative sneakers with Nike this week, and Mike’s recent appearance at SXSW, where he performed an intimate career-spanning show at Stubb’s flanked by a choir, and previewed several new songs that are expected to appear on the Atlanta MC’s new album (read more here). He further brought the album to life at a private listening event in NYC this past Monday, where a couple hundred attendees crowded into St. Ann's & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn to hear Mike present the album in his own words.
The single was preceded last year by “RUN (ft. Young Thug)” and “TALK’N THAT SHIT!,” his first batch of solo material since linking up with El-P to form Run The Jewels in 2013, who have gone on to create four fanatically received albums and achieved near cultural ubiquity. Mike has also frequently surfaced as a cultural commentator in high regard, from his own shows Love and Respect and Trigger Warning (Netflix), to regular appearances on Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Real Time with Bill Maher, to his stint as a campaign surrogate for Bernie Sanders, to viral moments addressing the public in the wake of the Ferguson verdict and the police killing of George Floyd. Last week he re-asserted his acting bonafides in a cameo on FX’s Dave, where the titular rapper agonizes over a perceived Twitter beef with Mike, adding to a growing acting CV that also included an appearance on the last season of Netflix’s Ozark.
words by Jeff Weiss.
The lies are inescapable. On every screen, the merchants of disinformation exert their cruel dominion. There is the queasy sense that we’re drowning in a slipstream of screeching noise and mindless ephemera. The water is rising. The ground is shaking. The shadows are long and the lights are low. It’s the perfect time for a new album from Rise Against.
Few bands have ever been as accurately named as the Chicago punk quartet. While fleeting styles and fashionable imitations have entered and exited vogue, Rise Against have remained a north star of artful resistance. While continuously updating their formula, they’ve sustained their original spirit of rebellion over a quarter century – amassing a body of work that doubles as a chronicle of our collective unraveling. Melodic hardcore detonations co-exist in perfect tension with dire warnings about the looming dystopia. And on their latest Loma Vista release, Ricochet, they’ve made what might be their most visceral, urgent, and high-stakes song cycle.
In the four years since Rise Against’s last opus, the world has continued to be torn asunder by shameless falsehoods, brazen greed, and episodes of shocking cruelty. This devolution has not gone unnoticed by the band. Ricochet takes these crises under the scope and dissects them with lucid clarity, raw emotion, and global perspective. Amidst a period of nationalist aggression and isolationism, the album reflects on our own interconnectivity. A form of chaos theory in which our unruly actions and anger wreak havoc in ways that aren’t always easily understood.
“We rely on each other, whether we like it or not,” Rise Against lead singer, rhythm guitarist, and lyricist, Tim McIlrath says. “Everything that you do will affect somebody. We’re connected to other countries and other economies; we’re connected to undocumented immigrants. We’re connected to every decision that our leaders make. We are not as isolated as we think. What we do, good or bad, creates one big ricochet effect.”
The album’s gestation started after the marathon tours for 2021’s Nowhere Generation. In their trademark fashion, McIlrath and the band’s other songwriter, bassist Joe Principe, reconvened to gather and compare notes. When the ideas began cohering, they entered the studio with lead guitarist Zach Blair and drummer Brandon Barnes, with the stated goal of relinquishing the notion of what a Rise Against song needed to sound like. Enlisting producer Catherine Marks (Boygenius, St. Vincent), they trusted her vision to expand upon their naturally colossal rippers. While mixing engineer Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails, Paramore, The Killers) added a sophisticated and atmospheric touch to the finished product.
You can hear the subtle shift most acutely on “I Want It All” and the album’s title track. The former is an infectious headbang-ready riff that almost sounds like a long-lost ‘70s FM radio classic from the Kinks (if the Davies brothers had somehow been raised on Fugazi). While “Ricochet” opens with slinky drum machine claps that feint towards electro-clash before swiftly ascending into a sky-rattling Kevlar anthem that should make arenas consider paying a higher premium of roof insurance before booking the band.
On “Nod,” the album’s first single, Rise Against capture the emotional turbulence shrouding the current zeitgeist (“the line…drawn between dreams and nightmares is thin like a razor”). Rolling Stone rhapsodized that it’s a “particularly potent rallying cry for the moment.” Vice raved that it was the “anthem that we need now” – one featuring Rise Against at their best – “passionate, confident, and encouraging.” The second salvo, “Prizefighter,” is a propulsive burner that invokes a boxing metaphor to explore the connection between an artist and their fanbase. Balancing introspection with the incendiary, the song builds on the characteristic duality of the band’s previous Platinum and Gold-certified classics.
It’s this three-dimensional nuance that has allowed Rise Against to write some of the most important rock songs of their generation. On Ricochet, McIlrath’s lyrics navigate many of the most pressing crises of the moment, offering unerring righteousness without sanctimony, and empathy without letting malefactors off the hook. They cover apocalyptic scenarios (“Black Crown”) and false promises sold to the youth (“Gold Long Gone”), the necessity of resisting blind allegiance (“Soldier”), mental health (“Sink Like a Stone”), and the sensationalism of the algorithmic entertainment-industrial complex (“State of Emergency). Throughout it all, there is a cautious optimism for real lasting change.
“The fight for a better world almost always starts with an unpopular opinion or a minority of voices,” McIlrath says. “When you feel overwhelmed, when it feels like it’s you against the world, it’s important to remember that every resistance movement started as a small and passionate group. Our songs may take you to a dark place, but there’s always breadcrumbs of hope to help get you out of there.”
Like the band’s literary hero, George Orwell, they have absorbed the maxim that “in a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Ricochet is a success at simplest level: a collection of indelible rock and roll songs with infectious hooks that sound best played at eardrum-shattering volume. But it also functions as something more profound: a document of artists capturing the chaos of the moment, articulating complex truths with seismic power, and an awareness of the consequences that may befall us. This is an album built to be a part of the solution.
Meet HiTech, the dynamic trio recently signed to Loma Vista Recordings (Denzel Curry, Killer Mike). A mix of Ghettotech, house, Rap & Miami base, HiTech are a mission to destroy stereotypical “bottle service” club culture by bringing raw energy, humour, dancing and moshpits back to electronic music. In the process, they’ve become one of the most talked about live acts since their debut last summer. Comprised of MCs/producers King Milo, Milf Melly and DJ 47Chops, HiTech released their albums HiTech & Detwat last year on FXHE label, hitting The Fader’s Top 10 and Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2023 lists, racking up fans including Earl Sweatshirt, Danny Brown, Pink Siifu, Show Me The Body & Crystalmess and playing much lauded shows everywhere including Berghain, The Lot, Rinse, The Face’s Rated and across PFW. Hilarious and raunchy, HiTech are also outspoken and principled. With a summer full of festivals and news that HiTech and Detwat are being re-released on streaming services this summer, HiTech are bringing Detroit back to the global stage.
Sophie Allison has always written candidly about her life, making Soccer Mommy one of indie rock’s most interesting and beloved artists of the last decade. Allison has used Soccer Mommy’s songs as a vehicle to sort through the thoughts and encounters that inevitably come with the reality of growing up. After all, Soccer Mommy began as a bedroom-to-Bandcamp exercise with teenage Allison posting her plaintive songs as demos. Over the years, though, she has often enhanced that sound, using the endless production possibilities, newly at her fingertips, to outstrip singer-songwriter stereotypes. The records would start with songwriting’s kernels of truth, and she would then imagine all the unexpected shapes they could take. Every Soccer Mommy record has felt like a surprise.
On Soccer Mommy’s fourth album, the tender but resolute Evergreen, Allison is again writing about her life. But that life’s different these days: Since making her previous album, 2022’s Sometimes, Forever, Allison experienced a profound and also very personal loss. New songs emerged from that change, unflinching and sometimes even funny reflections on what she was feeling. (Speaking of funny, this is a Soccer Mommy album, so there’s an ode to Allison’s purple-haired wife in the game Stardew Valley, too.) These songs were, once again, Allison’s way to sort through life, to ground herself. She wanted them to sound that way, too, to feel as true to the demos—raw and relatable, unvarnished and honest—as possible. The songwriting would again lead where the production would follow. Nothing overindulgent, everything real.
Evergreen is the absorbing result, an 11-track seesaw of articulate feeling that suggests Allison is driving you through the streets of her native Nashville, the Tennessee sun bright as she plays you a tape of songs she cut to document those very dark days. Eschewing the experimental production of Sometimes, Forever, Evergreen mirrors that earlier self-made work, but recasts it with a sense of cinematic scale. There’s the beautiful acoustic billow of opener “Lost,” a tormented thesis that still manages to break through the most oppressive clouds. There’s the haze and sway of “Some Sunny Day,” where the promise of reunion is the only palliative for the vertigo of loss. And above the muted jangle of “Dreaming of Falling,” she summons momentary glimpses of madness—waking terrors, sunlight burning the skin, everyday experiences that begin to frame the black hole of forever. “Half of my life is behind me,” she sings, chords wafting like low clouds, “and the other has changed somehow.”
Allison began writing Evergreen without really knowing it. At home between sessions for Sometimes, Forever, she penned “Changes,” an acoustic ballad about what we lose with time, about how even our most familiar and important lodestars will warp, fade, disappear. She set it aside, knowing little about its fate other than it didn’t need the complex electronic textures of what she was then making. But as those sessions ended and she began to write her way through loss, “Changes” seemed like the skeleton key, its mantra of inescapable impermanence putting the rest of the songs into context. Allison most often wrote quickly, verses and choruses piling up after months of contemplating all that had gone missing. A frank glimpse into nostalgia and the troubles it can bring, “Thinking of You” came together in 10 minutes. “How long is too long to be stuck in a memory?” she asks. “Lost,” like many of the songs that follow, didn’t take much more. The goal was always to make snapshots of a moment’s feelings, to portray the sadness or beauty, survival or hope that bobs there in the wake of loss.
This became the working directive for capturing Evergreen, too—serving those moments, framing them without obfuscating the emotional burdens or gifts that anchored them, to let the lyrics and moods speak for themselves. Allison rendezvoused in Atlanta with producer Ben H. Allen III (Deerhunter, Animal
Collective, Youth Lagoon, Belle and Sebastian) and told him she wanted to elide synthesizers and digital flourishes this time, favoring acoustic guitars, rich drums, and interweaving flutes. They built basic tracks for half the album as a pair in Allen’s Maze Studios before ushering in her touring band to add more. There were real flutes and real strings, just as Allison had imagined. As the layers and ideas mounted, Allen and Allison focused on peeling them back, on leaving subtle touches that never crowded the sentiments. The songs retain the spirit of the demos, candid and direct.
Evergreen animates Allison’s reckonings with loss through sounds that can conjure a sad-eyed daydream or an ecstatic weekend escape. Allison sings to shadows and ghosts during “M,” the band shuffling and swaying as she communes with open air. She recognizes that staying so devoted to something that’s gone could be a problem, but for right now, it’s the best she’s got. The delightfully crunchy “Driver” is a testament to Allison’s spaciness and indecision; it’s a cheeky song about someone who is willing to deal with those flaws, to love you in spite of them. The Janus-faced “Salt in Wound” functions as the record’s thematic and musical nexus—graceful but gnarled as it balances dual needs to be honest about what hurts and press on, anyway. Indeed, despite Allison’s aim to render instants in full, repeated phrases and concepts bubble up throughout Evergreen, the songs questioning and answering one another in the tussles of past becoming present becoming future.
Allison assembled Evergreen as she crept into her late 20s, that tenuous time where the travails of adulthood suddenly look much closer than the playground of childhood. And during the three-year span since finishing Sometimes, Forever and beginning Evergreen, Allison learned loss is not a monolith. Some days are brutal and others are beautiful, as you take what you have gained from someone who is no longer here and try to carry it ahead, a talisman for whatever may come. “She cannot fade/She is so evergreen,”Allison sings in the devastating but strangely affirming title finale, strings sighing beneath the brush of her acoustic guitar. It feels like a lucid note to self. And that, after all, is where these songs started—Allison, writing songs for herself that documented what it was she was going through, just as she’s always done.
Pacific Highway Music, the new album from Skegss, reintroduces the Australian band as the duo of Ben Reed (vocals, guitar) and Jonny Lani (drums) presenting their most masterful and fully realized work to date. The Byron Bay-bred band’s third full-length—the follow-up to their acclaimed sophomore album Rehearsal, which debuted at #1 on their homeland Australia ARIA Albums Chart and led to their first-ever Coachella appearance and a sold-out U.S. tour—brings a newly heightened creative energy to every aspect of their explosive yet introspective form of rock. Centered on Reed’s frenetic and playful lyricism, Pacific Highway Music ultimately finds Skegss exploring the more complicated elements of the human experience with sincerity, soul, and unabashed joie de vivre.
Skegss’ second full-length for U.S.-based label Loma Vista Recordings, Pacific Highway Music was created following the departure of co-founder Toby Cregan in 2023, and with producer Paul Butler (Devendra Banhart, Michael Kiwanuka, St. Paul & the Broken Bones). The album expands on the combustible riffs and euphoric rhythms of Rehearsal (an LP whose triumphs also include a Rolling Stone Australia Awards nomination for Best Record), but also finds Reed and Lani embracing a more experimental and free-flowing approach to its sonic architecture. “In the past I’d deprived myself of using things like synthesizers, not realizing how much texture and atmosphere they can add to the music,” says Reed. “Working with Paul felt like letting our guard down and completely opening up in terms of what these songs could be.”
Recorded at two iconic L.A. studios (The Village and Topanga Canyon’s Fivestar Studios), Pacific Highway Music partly owes its wildly unpredictable sound to the period of time Skegss spent cutting demos at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree with studio owner Dave Catching (a musician/engineer known for his work with Queens of the Stone Age, Mark Lanegan, and more). “Sometimes it’s hard to explain what you hear in your imagination, but Dave was incredible at deciphering my rambling and finding exactly the right guitar to get the sound I wanted,” says Reed. “We were in the desert during a meteor shower so we’d jam all day and watch the sky at night, and the whole experience felt like magic as far as discovering new sounds for the album.”
Lead single “Spaceman” is a potent introduction to Pacific Highway Music, providing an immediate conduit to the expansive state of mind that sparked the album’s creation. Slow-building and strangely majestic, the gorgeously fuzzed-out track channels both weariness and wonder as Reed contemplates infinity and the relative inconsequence of our existence. “I don’t think we even have the capacity to comprehend the fact that the universe goes on forever, but there’s something beautiful about that,” says Reed. “It’s fun to go out walking at night and go on a little adventure in your mind, asking yourself those questions about what we’re all doing here.”
Pacific Highway Music sustains an unstoppable velocity even as the band confronts what Reed refers to as “the rollercoaster of emotions that come with being human.” On “High Beaming,” bouncy grooves and exuberant gang vocals merge in a tender tribute to the ones who keep us going when the world gets overwhelming. “I wrote that song as a thank-you to my girlfriend for how she helps me see things in a new way whenever I’m in a negative headspace,” says Reed. “Stuck In Cheyenne,” written after a mid-tour blizzard left Skegss stranded for days at a Wyoming truck stop, arrives as a gloriously punchy meditation on psychic inertia. And on “Out Of My Head,” Reed brings his gravelly vocals to a heavy-hearted track spotlighting his gift for spinning nature imagery into lyrics with a visceral impact (e.g., “Like a warm wind from the west/Smoothing out the ocean/I need one to blow into my head/And smooth out my emotions”). “Sometimes when you can’t stop dwelling on things from the past that you regret, the best you can do is let that door close instead of continuing to guilt-trip yourself,” says Reed. “It’s a song about making the decision to move forward, and recognizing that those battles can help you become stronger.”
Reed lists punk libertines like Iggy Pop and underground artists like Deepakalypse among his inspirations, and first immersed himself writing songs after taking guitar lessons from a neighbor at the age of 11. “I was always fascinated by music, but once I started playing I became obsessed with making up stuff of my own,” he says. As he broadened his musical palette with the help of surf-movie soundtracks, Reed began self-recording in his bedroom and creating entire comic books to accompany the collections of original songs he burned onto CDs to hand out at school. In 2013 he moved from his hometown of Forster to Byron Bay, where he reconnected with his childhood friend Lani and co-founded Skegss the following year. Although the band started out playing skate parks and dive bars, they quickly ascended through the scene and made their debut at Splendour in the Grass within a year, famously drawing a crowd of 20,000 for their opening-slot set. Skegss’ 2018 full-length debut My Own Mess climbed the charts in Australia, earned an ARIA Award nomination for Best Rock Album, and gained widespread recognition in the U.S.—a major accomplishment that soon found the band selling out such famed venues as The Roxy in L.A. and New York City’s Bowery Ballroom.
In choosing a title, Skegss honor their roots by nodding to the Australian coastal road they’ve driven on countless of times (on tour and on frequent surf trips), while also reflecting the band’s deepened sense of purpose. “I’ve spent a lot of my life driving on the Pacific Highway, and most of the time it puts me in a bit of hypnotic state,” says Reed. “With this album I tried to be as honest as possible, but I also wanted to create the kind of songs that give you that same feeling—songs where you can shut your eyes, let your imagination take over, and drift off into another world that exists only in your mind.”
Andrew Bird presents his take on the Great American Songbook. The renowned artist, songwriter and virtuosic musician replaces saxophones with violin solos, and showcases his signature vocal prowess as he reimagines standards by Rodgers & Hart, Ellington, Cole Porter, Lerner & Loewe and more. It’s a record that Bird’s had in him for nearly 30 years, yet after earning GRAMMY nominations, becoming an icon of indie rock and folk, acting in a prestige drama, scoring a Judd Apatow film, and collaborating with everyone from Phoebe Bridgers and Fiona Apple to Esperanza Spalding and The Muppets, Sunday Morning Put-On is unlike anything he has done before. While his music has always served as a sharp, singular reflection of the present, the album sees Andrew Bird travel back in time to his formative 20s:
He was living in an old apartment hotel in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, surrounded by retired Jesuit priests and nuns from the nearby university. Most every Saturday, he would stay up listening to a local, late-night radio broadcast that played rare 78s of old blues, jazz and gospel, falling asleep then waking up to a morning show focused on the “Golden Era” of music’s 1930s and 40s. Those nights and mornings have inf luenced Bird’s work in ways both conscious and subliminal ever since, and now with the Andrew Bird Trio featuring Ted Poor on drums and Alan Hampton on bass, plus guitar from Jeff Parker and piano by Larry Goldings he transcends nostalgia, and pushes his limits as an improviser. Bird’s voice and strings together act like a reed instrument, captured completely live in southern California’s legendary Valentine Studios (Bing Crosby, Burl Ives, Beach Boys). The sound of longing and depth in his voice has never been heard so clearly, until now.
“Under the jazz banner we are blessed with some of the greatest moments in the history of music,” says Bird. “Once I had some distance between myself and this time when I was under its spell, I wanted to immerse myself in it again.” Think of this record as an homage to mid century, small group jazz, or just think of it as Andrew Bird plays music he likes.
Following their acclaimed 2021 album The Million Masks of God, Manchester Orchestra is back with The Valley of Vision, a brand new project that takes on the weighty themes of adulthood, faith and redemption through a wealth of fresh new sounds and textures. But if The Million Masks of God served as a cry for help – exploring a man’s encounter with the angel of death, inspired by frontman and songwriter Andy Hull’s reflections on grief as well as the battle with cancer faced by guitarist Robert McDowell’s father – The Valley of Vision offers a collective, cathartic expression of gratitude. Throughout the 27-minute album, you can almost feel the band take a giant exhale and then put its arms around you.
Continuing to push themselves into fascinating and immersive creative realms with each release has always been the mantra for Manchester Orchestra, and The Valley of Vision finds the band reinvigorated once again. Across the six-song salvo and VR film out March 10th, the band conjures a story that is further illuminated through a cinematic experience by writer-director Isaac Deitz, created with 3D-computed radiography technology.
Hull started writing and recording The Valley of Vision in the summer of 2021, sparking a spontaneous and new approach to releasing his band's music. “Making this was an exciting idea of what the future could be for us in terms of how we create.”
Hull was inspired to begin writing the record while rummaging around in his suitcase looking for his lyric notebook and instead found The Valley of Vision, a 1975 book of old Puritan prayers his mom had given to him the previous Christmas. “I realized it should be our title too, because to me, it meant you can’t see the forest for the trees, but you’re recognizing you’re in the valley, and you can eventually get out,” he says.
Sonically, those energies evoke places Manchester Orchestra has visited on prior albums without ever really setting up a permanent home. In fact, there’s not much guitar at all on The Valley of Vision, and Andy Prince’s bass operates in sub-synth frequencies rarely utilized before. In other instances, drum parts by Tim Very were excised from one song and repurposed in other places they weren’t originally intended to go. The whole feeling is one of peacefulness, even zen — perhaps because recording sessions at a converted manor in Muscle Shoals, Ala., were “almost a complete abandonment of all the instruments we’re used to using,” Hull says.
“None of these songs were written with the band being in the same room in a live setting,” he continues. “They were really like science experiments that started from the bottom and were added to gradually over time, to catch the vibe of each one.”
Opener “Capital Karma” and “Quietly” are both songs Hull composed via his idiosyncratic self- taught methods on piano, which involve him physically writing notes on the keys to remind himself what he’s actually playing. “The Way” is a beautifully atmospheric, piano-and-beats-powered ballad, which Hull credits Million Masks producers Ethan Gruska and Catherine Marks with helping him shape after struggling for years with how to present it.
Elsewhere, the uplifting “Lose You Again” is the first Manchester Orchestra song in a long time that could be played with acoustic guitars around a campfire, while “Letting Go” threads wisps of emotive, effects-drenched vocals through gorgeous shimmers of sound.
“We decided, let’s live in that feeling,” Hull says. “When we tried to add anything that took us out of it, it started to feel contrived and forced. We try to listen to our instincts when it comes to that. As far as just going for some of the sounds, we’re intrigued by doing things the wrong way or attempting things we haven’t done before and getting inspired by them.”
Out now on Loma Vista Recordings.
While the album follows the highest charting album of Iggy’s career, Free has virtually nothing in common sonically with its predecessor—or with any other Iggy Pop album.
On the process that led Iggy and principal players Leron Thomas and Noveller to create this uniquely somber and contemplative entry in the Iggy Pop canon, Iggy says:
“This is an album in which other artists speak for me, but I lend my voice…
By the end of the tours following Post Pop Depression, I felt sure that I had rid myself of the problem of chronic insecurity that had dogged my life and career for too long.
But I also felt drained. And I felt like I wanted to put on shades, turn my back, and walk away. I wanted to be free. I know that’s an illusion, and that freedom is only something you feel, but I have lived my life thus far in the belief that that feeling is all that is worth pursuing; all that you need – not happiness or love necessarily, but the feeling of being free.
So this album just kind of happened to me, and I let it happen.”
Full tracklisting for Free:
1. Free
2. Loves Missing
3. Sonali
4. James Bond
5. Dirty Sanchez
6. Glow In The Dark
7. Page
8. We Are The People
9. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
10. The Dawn
For further information, stay tuned to Iggy’s site and socials.
