The legendary pop-punkers have released another song in advance of their upcoming October 10th release, Better Days. It’s a nostalgic, chorus-driven banger reminiscent of the band’s Ocean Avenue prime.
Other Tracks to Highlight:
Black Honey – “Vampire in the Kitchen”
“If No Doubt went indie rock. –Tundra” –Sowing. All jokes aside, this just about sums up my thoughts…but also check the sick guitar riffs/solo here.
Pile – “A Loosened Knot”
“Equal parts serene and brutal – often all at once. Pile not only return to their post-hardcore roots but they return with what they’ve learned in their more linear and experimental detours from the past couple releases. Lush strings, beautiful duets clash with harsh scramz, filthy guitar licks, and angular melodies.” –baseddook
ivri – “erosion”
Beautiful, shoegazey indie-rock from a no-name artist will always pique my interest, and this song/album was no different!
Rise Against – “Black Crown” (ft. Manchester Orchestra)
The album’s average rating/score isn’t sitting too pretty thus far, but any song with Andy Hull writing credits and vocal contributions will be a cut above the rest.
Truman Sinclair’s American Recordings is reminiscent of old-fashioned folk/americana. There’s a Dylan-esque flair to his storytelling, as evidenced on the strange tale of justified (even ethical?) murder told during “Joel Roberts”, set atop wailing harmonicas: “I had to kill him for my good goddaughter / I walked in, he was holdin’ her down / I got my gun and I gave him a round.” It’s a barebones production certainly, nothing set to top any charts soon; but it’s the sort of song whose unique lyrics and confident delivery force it to become lodged in your memory. Pay attention to the backstory in the lyrics, too; it’s a goodun.
Michigander’s self-titled debut LP is a breezy, enjoyable exercise in indie-rock/indie-pop, and “Giving Up” brings the sort of stadium-sized atmosphere that an album like this occasionally needs. Its memorable beat, catchy chorus, and slick production make it the type of under-the-radar earworm that sounds like a guilty pleasure on the surface but feels like a hidden gem. Michigander was released on Friday and is available on most major streaming services.
The Indiana Drones are still very much unknown (less than 12k Spotify listeners), but you wouldn’t know it from their sound. Indie-rock infused with huge melodies front-to-end is the name of the game on their self-titled debut LP, and “New Chemical” shines the brightest of the bunch. It manages to make lines like “we’re all slowly dying anyway” sound inspirational; it’s a call to live in the present, with fervor. The song reaches its emotional zenith in the last half minute or so, when the distorted guitars wrap around lead singer Justin Zuccato’s emphatic refrain. It’s a moment well-worth exploring if you enjoy the alt/rock-ier side of the indie underground.
Renny Conti’s “Looking at the Geese” is rooted in the moment. It’s a stream-of-consciousness style of journaling, and also something of a love song. The acoustic guitars are shimmering and match the reflective nature of the lyrics, while dreamy hums serenade from the background and lull you into a sense of complete and utter peace. There’s something so effortless about the song, and even in its placid insignificance, it somehow ends up feeling like a distillation of many different essential life moments. Put it on, sit back, and let your mind drift. Conti’s self-titled album is available to stream now in its entirety.
Maddie Jay’s brand of indie-pop floats gracefully atop her breezy, melodic voice and playful production. Her debut LP, I Can Change Your Mind, marked something of an early-year gem for me with its relentlessly gorgeous aesthetics, and “Eckhaus Latta” was the first song to get lodged in my brain after a few spins. It’s effortlessly pleasing, if unspectacular — the sort of song that will make you feel better about a long bus or train ride to work/school in the morning. It just has the sensation of being perpetually in-motion, and finds the beauty trapped within the hecticness of daily life.
London folk artist Luke Sital-Singh certainly remains under-the-radar of most indie-goers, making him a prime candidate for this feature. “Still Young” is a beautiful single that comes in advance of Sital-Singh’s upcoming LP, Fool’s Spring. The song blends pastoral acoustics with crystalline production and Luke’s soothing self-harmonizing, resulting in a Sufjan-adjacent vibe that still manages to feel distinct in its own right. It feels like a glowing ember in the middle of a cold, harsh winter. Fool’s Spring releases February 21, 2025.
Emily Bowen’s debut album Hate Me For This hits like a series of unfiltered diary entries. The songs were written with the intent of tapping into some of Bowen’s deeper emotions, and the only way for her to access them was to abandon all pretenses and simply write exactly what she was feeling, in the exact words that came to mind during that moment. “Room 17” is a prime illustration, with an admittedly non-poetic lyrical approach that hits harder because of it. The song adopts a confessional indie-pop style that also explores a soft-to-loud aesthetic juxtaposition, and the result is a piece that sounds as powerful as the emotions the artist is attempting to convey — even if she can’t quite find the words. Hate Me For This was released on January 3rd, 2025, and can be heard in its entirety here.
Tucked away between the rural, easygoing strums and hypnotic, swaying vocals of “Barn Nursery” is one haunting message: “If I could’ve changеd your mind / I would’ve ran that fucking light / I would’ve watched you grow up right / And never have to say goodbye.” In what appears to be an ode to a friend who ended their life, the new single from up-and-coming indie darlings hey, nothing cuts deeper than its floating atmosphere or ephemeral runtime suggests. The duo, consisting of Tyler Mabry and Harlow Philips, spans indie folk/rock and midwest emo, having released their 2023 debut LP We’re Starting to Look Like Each Other and an EP last year entitled Maine. If “Barn Nursery” is an indicator of their future direction, then their best work to-date may be just over the horizon.
Let me be honest: it’s actually very hard to describe this album in words. Oak Lace Apparition often feels more like a journey through time and space than it feels like music — and with regard to atmospheric quality, this album stands almost second to none. I could come up with a million different metaphors or similes in a poor attempt at describing the tapestry that Oak Lace Apparition weaves, but it would not do Toby Driver and Alora Crucible justice. I don’t have a better option, though (sorry, Toby, I’ll try to be as poetic as possible about this), so here goes:
Oak Lace Apparition ranges from being as spacious as the universe to being as naught as gossamer passing over your fingertips. The sonic textures are so rich you can practically feel them — like the sharpness of Oregon air when you live in Los Angeles or the softness of fine velvet. At times it is as desolate as being stuck inside on an icy winter morning, and other times it is as stunning as the view of the city from that one secret spot that only you know about. If you can think of a concept with how to describe music — whether that be melancholy, beautiful, isolated or magnificent — all of it can be found on this album.
Brittany Howard’s name alone carries enough weight to make Alabama shake. What Now finds the genre-hopper in a surreal dalliance with soul-adjacent stylings, melding her voice into the music in a way that will affect you even if you struggle to get soulful without a lump of peyote percolating in your gut. No matter where in the stereo field her voice erupts from, no matter which spacious avenue of her range she’s occupying, no matter how her vocals are masked, processed, and extensively multi-tracked, they have an urgent and emergent quality that will sound familiar to anyone who has dabbled in the subconscious warp of improvising. Her voice manages all this while effectively emoting a primal ache for love, a history of heartbreak, and a desire for unity, without ever upstaging or even slightly stepping outside the bounds of each track’s atmosphere. The theatrics come natural, and the production shapes every sound and colour into a precisely sculpted whole.
This is further streamlined by the way Howard only writes the best parts of songs, skipping past languid contextualising and slow builds: the first big Musical Moment of the album, wherein Howard falls into a reverie picturing her name falling from the mouth of somebody that might as well embody love itself, comes a mere minute into the album, 20 seconds of which was basically just chimes. Many such…
Listening to Cindy Lee feels like stepping into a lucid dream where past and future blur together, where nostalgia and invention mesh into a vivid hallucination. Diamond Jubilee is a massive, two-hour-long psych-pop suite that sounds like a transmission from a lost VHS of a world that never was. This lo-fi haze isn’t just aesthetic; it’s the emotional core, draping everything in a bittersweet fog of memory and longing. Cindy Lee (a.k.a. Patrick Flegel of Women) manages to transcend this retro-nostalgia by performing in drag, embodying a non-binary persona that disrupts the rigid norms of the eras the music evokes. Here, drag bridges retrofuturism and modernity — a way to revisit and reclaim the past while reshaping it through a transgressive, forward-thinking lens. This duality makes Diamond Jubilee feel timeless and impossibly new, tethered to the past but endlessly forward-reaching. It’s a sonic time machine for a world that only exists in dreams — and in Cindy Lee’s singular vision. –dedex
49. Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey – Compassion
It may only take three people to form a jazz trio, but the likelihood that three virtuosic musical egos powered by academic rigour and already-bustling careers will have genuine, equilateral chemistry when they start playing together is slim. Enter Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh,…
It’s been a long, long year of compiling tracks — some obvious selections from albums I rated very highly, some one-off singles, and others that were merely gems buried on practically unheard-of releases. Those who know my tendencies on Sputnik may be aware that while I certainly have my genre preferences (indie/folk/rock/pop), I’ll listen to practically anything. This list is at least somewhat reflective of that, with selections from all over the genre spectrum. Rather than ranking all 100 tracks — which (1) is always way more difficult than it seems and (2) I unfortunately don’t have the kind of free time to accomplish — I decided to alphabetize the songs with the hope that you’ll pop this on shuffle (or play it alphabetically if you’re built for 6 straight hours of sowingcore) and either relive some of the best moments of 2024 or otherwise discover music that you otherwise wouldn’t have known existed. They’re not the definitive objective “top” 100 songs, but simply my favorite 100 of the year. Give it a spin and feel free to discuss in the comments anything you love, hate, or have discovered thanks to this list. Happy holidays, and see you all in 2025!
Here’s a list of major new releases for the month of December 2024. These releases have been condensed into one post as, historically, December is a slower stretch for new music. In the meanwhile, our staff will be working on compiling their highly anticipated “Top Albums of 2024” feature, so stay tuned to see what we anoint as the album of the year. With regards to the below releases, please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums. We wish you and your loved ones a safe and happy holiday season. We’ll see you in January!
– List of Releases: December 6, 2024 –
Aara: Eiger
Genre: Black/Doom Metal Label: Debemur Morti Productions
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of November 22, 2024. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff and/or contributors.
– List of Releases: November 22, 2024 –
The Anix: Voltage
Genre: Alt/Indie-Rock Label: FiXT
Blisspoint: DOG
Genre: Dream Pop Label: Candlepin Records
Body Count: Merciless
Genre: Hardcore/Thrash Label: Century Media
Defeated Sanity: Chronicles of Lunacy Genre: Death/Progressive Metal Label: Season of Mist
Distant: Tsukuyomi – The Origin
Genre: Deathcore Label: Century Media
Father John Misty: Mahashmashana
Genre: Indie-Folk/Americana Label: Joshua Tillman
Kim Deal: Nobody Loves You More
Genre: Indie-Rock Label: Kim Deal
Lil Durk: Deep Thoughts
Genre: Hip-Hop Label: Alamo Records
Marilyn Manson: One Assassination Under God Chapter 1
Genre: Industrial/Gothic/Metal Label: Nuclear Blast
![Monkey canción de The Indiana Drones de The Indiana Drones [Explicit] en Amazon Music.](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/418OrjTBI1L._UXNaN_FMjpg_QL85_.jpg)
