Five years in the making, Life May Take Its Toll has the satisfying sprawl of a record allowed to find its own shape. The six-track debut EP from Brisbane songwriter and producer JJ Ryan moves freely between alt-rock, indie, punk, folk and more experimental textures, but its real strength lies in theContinue Reading
Trost is a concise but thoughtfully constructed debut EP from Munich-based Kontai Ensemble. Built around violinist Teresa Allgaier and cellist Juri Kannheiser, the four-track EP brings together new works by Annamaria Kowalsky, Ralph Heidel, Friederike Bernhardt and Matīss Čudars. Each composer arrives from a different musical background, and that range givesContinue Reading
There’s a refusal to tidy things up at the centre of In The End. The new four-track EP from Australian outsider artist Hurb Jephasun is deliberately left raw, preserving room noise, breath, imperfect vocals and the physical presence of the instruments. It’s an approach that certainly suits an artist whose historyContinue Reading
On her debut EP WAR IS OV3R, UCHAYE treats heartbreak as the beginning of a character arc. The Minneapolis-based Nigerian-Zimbabwean artist’s first collection unfolds across five connected tracks, following one protagonist from obsessive denial through escape, ambition and eventual reinvention. It’s a compact concept, but she gives each stage its ownContinue Reading
Friendship Manifesto is a 20-minute jazz improvisation built around the relationship between isolation, community and self-connection. Created by JAE-X, the project of Indian classical percussionist and producer Jay Mistry, the piece uses tabla as its central rhythmic foundation while moving through a series of contrasting emotional and musical sections. TheContinue Reading
Across The Rise and Fall of Eternity, Antoin Gibson constructs a conceptual EP around mortality, consciousness, self-destruction and the uncomfortable limits of what we can ever truly know. But instead of treating those ideas as separate themes, she folds them into one continuous narrative where every answer seems to createContinue Reading
There’s something deeply satisfying about Ozark Moon arriving through a process that feels almost completely at odds with the speed of modern music. Here, Jonivan Jones’ new two-track release leans into tape, texture and patience, allowing its stories to unfold with all the dust, distance and imperfection intact. Recorded across Arkansas andContinue Reading
The Oldman Sound make the kind of music that rewards a second listen. And on Fair-weather, the South Shields band lean into melody, melancholy and arrangement instead of trying to overpower the listener. Across three tracks, their off-centre pop instincts come into focus through bittersweet writing, inventive structures and a senseContinue Reading
MALIK.’s IRIDESCENCE is a club record with a wider argument running through it. Across six tracks, the Lahore-based producer moves between bass music, dubstep, UK garage, drum & bass, jungle and hardgroove, but the EP is far more focused on testing how those forms can be reframed through a contemporary Pakistani perspective.Continue Reading
Anniversary records are often exercises in preservation, but here, Occurrence take the opposite route. For Anniversary, the New York trio of Ken Urban, Cat Hollyer and Johnny Hager return to five songs from their earliest releases and deliberately pull them apart. Vocals are rerecorded, synth parts are replaced or expanded, arrangementsContinue Reading