’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse Gives Familiar Songs Room to Answer Back
The most revealing moments on Lisa B’s ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse often occur when a familiar song encounters a voice that its original version did not contain. Lisa uses spoken interjections, new poetic passages, and an original guest rap to create exchanges across time. Her eighth album, digitally availableContinue Reading
“AUTONOMATIC” Connects HOL1D4Y’s Psychedelia With an AI-Era Question
Photo credit: Rick Horn The possibility that machines might eventually want independence sits behind “AUTONOMATIC”, Scott Holiday’s second single under the HOL1D4Y name. Its subject arrives at a point when artificial intelligence is increasingly involved in work, creativity and social communication. Holiday follows that development to a speculative next stage,Continue Reading
Two Full Careers, One Musician: Kristina Aglinz Releases Her First Original Single
A master’s degree in piano performance is a career. A Gold Medal in Jazz Vocal at the World Championships of Performing Arts is a different career. Kristina Aglinz holds both, along with the Overall Grand Champion title from the same competition, and she has never treated them as separate lanes.Continue Reading
“The Grand Elsewhere” Finds Eric Hirshberg Taking Stock of a Distracted Life
A crowded restaurant can contain dozens of people and remarkably little eye contact. Eric Hirshberg builds “The Grand Elsewhere” around that recognizable picture, watching a room full of lowered heads and wondering where everyone has gone. His answer is the imaginary destination named in the title. The Grand Elsewhere isContinue Reading
INTERVIEW: Almost Alive
For Almost Alive, artificial intelligence isn’t intended to replace creativity; it’s another instrument in the toolbox. The modern rock project created by software engineer and video game developer Evan Kanter has spent recent years exploring the meeting point between emerging technology and traditional rock songwriting, accumulating more than one million streams along theContinue Reading
Flywheel reclaim the haze with the striking ‘CryBaby’
Cork outfit Flywheel first emerged in the 90s, releasing their debut album She in 1996 before stepping away for an extended period. Now, after reforming during the pandemic years, they return with ‘CryBaby’, a single that feels like a sharpening of everything that made their early work so compelling in the firstContinue Reading
Loser Demon turn backyard chaos into a sharper statement on EP3
There’s something immediately appealing about a band that understands exactly where its rough edges belong. And on their new collection EP3, Riverside four-piece Loser Demon continue refining a sound that lives somewhere between wiry post-punk, fuzzed-up indie rock and the kind of early-2000s guitar music that once made nervous energy feelContinue Reading
Traquair finds romance in the wreckage on ‘Held the Pulse’
There’s something distinctly nocturnal about Held the Pulse. Throughout its runtime, Glasgow singer-songwriter Stewart Traquair seems drawn to the point where a city starts to empty out, conversations become looser, memories sharpen and optimism has to fight a little harder to survive. Across five tracks, Traquair moves between psychedelic colour, soul-inflectedContinue Reading
K Abby Jasper transforms modern pressure into a strange, spiritual escape on ‘Separate the Sage’
There’s something quietly subversive about the way K Abby Jasper approaches ‘Separate the Sage’. Instead of meeting stress, uncertainty and modern overload with outright anger, Joey Fasolino filters them through something more elusive that is part indie folk confession, part ambient experiment, and part private ritual. The title-track from hisContinue Reading
Witte find beauty in the cracks on ‘Glas und Steine’
There’s a quiet ache running through ‘Glas und Steine’. Here, Witte approach heartbreak as something slower and more difficult to name; capturing the gradual recognition that a relationship is changing while part of you still hopes it can be repaired. The northern German duo, formed by producer Marvin Burfeind andContinue Reading