For people well-versed and passionate about their music, they will understand where I’m coming from and relate to the cathartic kick that comes from supporting your favourite “underground” artists. Hell, it’s this passion for supporting great independent acts that creates terms like “trve” black metal, or having breakout bands having “sellout” hurled their way when they attain wider appeal and success. There is some satisfaction to be had in enjoying and supporting smaller acts as it creates a more intimate relationship between the fan and the artist – like a secret club the Radio One-chomping-masses aren’t privy to. However, in some cases, there is a level of frustration that comes from certain bands and artists not receiving the recognition they rightfully deserve. One such case, in my opinion, is multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer, Nathanael Larochette. While he has many amazing achievements and accolades under his belt, and a thriving following for his many projects, when you listen to the sheer quality and lateral thinking that comes from some of the albums he’s produced and been involved with, it’s bewildering to me his name and accomplishments aren’t as well-known as they should be. And so, for this addition of A Diagnosis from a (Faux) Doctor, I thought I’d do something a little bit different and cover…
Here’s a small list of new releases for February 7th. Please feel free to request reviews from staff and/or contributors, impress everyone with your ability to usesearchenginesandcopy-pasteinthecomments, and let the community know what you plan on jamming this week.
– List of Releases: February 7th, 2025 –
Biig Piig – 11:11 Genre: Dance-Pop Label: Sony
Dream Theater – Parasomnia Genre: Progressive Metal Label: InsideOut
FACS – Wish Defense Genre: Post-Punk / Krautrock Label: Trouble in Mind
Guided by Voices – Universe Room Genre: Indie Rock Label: GBV Inc.
Heartworms – Glutton for Punishment Genre: Post-Punk Revival / Gothic Rock Label: Speedy Wunderground
Impending Doom – Towards the Light (EP) Genre: Deathcore Label: [self-released]
Inhaler – Open Wide Genre: Indie Rock / New Wave Label: Polydor
Jinjer – Duél Genre: Metalcore / Alternative Metal Label: Napalm
Larry June, 2 Chainz & The Alchemist – Life Is Beautiful Genre: Jazz Rap / Drumless Label: ALC
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.
Hey everyone! Time to cap off a surprisingly busy month with the Weekly Releases list for January 31st, 2025. As always, please feel free to request reviews from staff and/or contributors. Happy listening!
– List of Releases: January 31st, 2025 –
All That Remains – Antifragile Genre: Metalcore Label: Independent
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – The Purple Bird Genre: Americana / Country / Folk Label: No Quarter
Burn Down Eden – Dismal Epiphany Genre: Melodic Death Metal Label: Seek & Strike
Confess – Destination Addiction Genre: Groove Metal Label: Opposite Records
Geologist & D.S. – A Shaw Deal Genre: Experimental / Electronic / Psychedelic Label: Drag City
Grayscale – The Hart Genre: Alternative Rock / Pop Rock Label: Infield Records
Great American Ghost – Tragedy of the Commons Genre: Hardcore Punk / Metalcore Label: SharpTone
Heather Maloney – Exploding Star Genre: Folk / Indie Rock Label: Signature Sounds
Jonathan Hulten – Eyes of the Living Night Genre: Folk / Neofolk Label: Kscope
Lilly Hiatt – Forever Genre: Rock / Country Label: New West Records
L.S. Dunes – Violet Genre: Post-Hardcore / Alternative Rock …
Below is a non-exhaustive list of new releases for January 24th, 2025. Please feel free to request reviews from staff and/or contributors, be someone to inform us of what’s unintentionally missing from the list, and let the community know what you plan on jamming this week.
– List of Releases: January 24th, 2025 –
Anna B Savage – You & I Are Earth Genre: Art Pop Label: City Slang
Avatarium – Between You, God, the Devil and the Dead Genre: Doom Rock / Heavy Psych Label: AFM
Beneath a Steel Sky – Cleave Genre: Post-Metal Label: Ripcord
C Duncan – It’s Only a Love Song Genre: Indie Pop Label: Bella Union
Central Cee – Can’t Rush Greatness Genre: UK Drill / Sample Drill Label: Columbia
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.
Bello & Shem’s “Original Flavour” presents a fascinating, albeit brief, sonic expedition worthy of any Hip Hop connoisseur’s consideration. This EP, defying categorical conventions, showcases a duality emblematic of contemporary anxieties regarding artistic authenticity. The seemingly unstructured lyrical dissemination, at first, suggests an absence of overarching thematic coherence. However, a more meticulous investigation uncovers carefully constructed narratives, often employing unconventional rhythmic implementations. The production, simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic, appears deliberately ambivalent, preventing facile interpretation.
The artists’ intentional obfuscation of meaning requires a sophisticated analytical framework to deconstruct their nuanced commentary on musical inheritance. The listener is compelled to navigate a complex labyrinth of intricate wordplay, mum jokes, and deliberately repetitive sonic passages, demanding a multi-perspectival understanding. “Original Flavour,” therefore, transcends typical genre classifications, functioning instead as an intriguing experiment in postmodern performativity and the obfuscation of universally accepted sonic parameters. Its enigmatic nature necessitates subsequent scholarship with potentially transformative consequences for understanding the evolution of contemporary hip-hop.
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.
Here’s a list of major new releases for the week of January 17th, 2025. Please feel free to request reviews for any of the following albums from staff and/or contributors.
– List of Releases: January 17th, 2025 –
Charles A.D.: Cyclone Foraging
Genre: House / Electronic Label: Independent
CkRAFT: Uncommon Grounds
Genre: Progressive Metal Label: Independent
Echos: Quiet, In Your Service
Genre: Indie Pop / Electronic / Alternative Label: Outlast Records
Eidola: Mend Genre: Post Hardcore / Progressive Label: Rise Records
Jasmine.4.t: You Are the Morning
Genre: Indie Folk Label: Saddest Factory Records
The Legendary Pink Dots: So Lonely in Heaven
Genre: Electro/Industrial Label: Metropolis Records
Luigi Tozzi: Sentient
Genre: Techno Label: Hypnus Labels
Mac Miller: Balloonerism
Genre: Hip-Hop / Psychedelic Label: Remember Music
Rebecca Black: Salvation
Genre: Pop Label: Loud Pizza Records
Sarcator: Swarming Angels & Flies
Genre: Blackened Thrash Label: Century Media Records
Sophie Jamieson: I Still Want to Share
Genre: Indie Folk Label: Bella Union
The Weather Station: Humanhood
Genre: Folk / Indie Pop Label: Fat Possum Records
Willow Avalon: Southern Belle Raisin’ Hell Genre: Country Label: Warner Music
Zora: BELLAdonna
Genre: Alternative / Hip Hop Label: Get Better Records
Foxing is exhausted, but don’t take my word for it! Their latest album’s cover depicts an over-saturated, digitized, and hollowed out close-up of the Greek bronze sculpture Boxer at Rest, originating from a period of antiquity marked by a shying away from the heroic regalia accentuated in prior generations. The actual statue survived with minimal oxidation only because it was promptly buried — an apt parallel to how this band, the emo revival’s most restless explorers, lay defeated even if their reputation seems well-preserved. Name me a more decorated, adventurous act from their scene and I’ll call you a liar, not that it seems to matter to them: here at LP #5, reinventing the wheel for the fourth time overall and the first time as their own producers and crowd-funders, a medal is chump change compared to a moment’s reprieve.
Not to bury the lede in there, but yes, Foxing have yet again willed their arc in unforeseen directions. With each release, they course-correct from a criticism of the one prior while accumulating touchstones — once a sound enters their DNA, it doesn’t escape so easily. Exhibit 4.1: observe how the tight pop songcraft of predecessor Draw Down The Moon evaporates in favor of Foxing‘s sprawling, nocturnal cynicism while the band’s comfort with electronics doesn’t just remain, but expands until it bursts — guitars and synths shriek, space age…
All four tracks here are total skramz rippers, from the Jekyll-and-Hyde fury-and-calm in Oaktails’ “Dazzling Dress” to the nihilistic sneer railing against materialistic greed and hubris in Crowning’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Luxor Surrealism”. Intertwining Chicago’s Crowning and Tokyo’s Oaktails throughout the tracklist, rather than compartmentalizing them in Side A/Side B fashion like in previous splits, was a sage idea — while Crowning’s mathy “Jung Money, Freud Problems” is my favorite here, Oaktails’ violence is more immediate in its fury.
By choice, Locktender’s discography has thus far been wholly devoted to the evolution of art between disciplines. The Cleveland-based quartet’s three prior LPs all lifted their names from the works of a different storied figure — for anyone interested in catching up, albums indebted to productions by Franz Kafka, Auguste Rodin, and Caspar David Friedrich await — and Sage: I, the band’s first sizable release in six years, in turn pays homage to three paintings by surrealist Kay Sage, each track sharing its title with an…
Formulas are not inherently a bad thing. That’s a statement that I don’t think should be controversial, but it’s often a commonly heard credo amongst the music community that sticking to the same sonic formula leads to albums sounding same-y, which leads to disinterest, which leads to declines in quality. Naturally, I disagree, and the reasoning behind that lies in the separation between stagnation and consistency. See, stagnation is the same thing without any minute evolutions or creative variations; it’s what happens when the same thing becomes boring. Consistency is the ability to make something that sounds similar but feels fresh upon each listen. And you might be wondering, “What the fuck does this have to do with a deathcore album?” The answer is quite simple: Fit for an Autopsy are living proof that a band can create the same general sonic concept album to album while preventing the next from sounding stagnant and stale.
The Nothing That Is is an album that, realistically, probably isn’t all that different from The Sea of Tragic Beasts and Oh What the Future Holds, putting aside the slightly increased focus on clean vocals. The same heavy djun-djuns are here, Joe Bad still growls like a beast (he is the product of his fucking environment), and the lyrics still paint grim portraits of modern
The word ‘supergroup’ tends to draw some worried glances when brought up in music discussions. It seems like, for every A Perfect Circle or Audioslave, there’s just as many where the individual talent of the group’s members never really adds up when brought together. How lucky we are, in that case, that Better Lovers, formed from former Every Time I Die members, vocalist Greg Puciato of Dillinger Escape Plan, and ultra-prolific guitarist and producer Will Putney, escapes the jaws of mediocrity to deliver one of the year’s finest metalcore efforts. Granted, the band had already proven themselves in 2023 with their debut EP, but holy crap does Highly Irresponsible ever live up to those grand expectations. Jagged riffs meet howled vocals that have somehow managed to match and even exceed the best of Puciato’s work with Dillinger. Whether it be the groovy, full-speed ahead riffs of “A White Horse Covered in Blood” or the shocking amounts of genuine emotion present in “At All Times”, there’s something here for all metalcore fans, and it promises…
Although Bloodflowers has its champions, The Cure released what many considered their last great album in 1992 with Wish. Robert Smith had been promising new material, but few were optimistic that we would ever again hear anything worthwhile from the legendary band. And then new songs began creeping into live performances: in October 2022, Latvia witnessed the debut of two tracks that would eventually bookend the new album – “Alone” and “Endsong”, which opened and closed their main set in Riga, and surprisingly, they didn’t sound out of place at all. Two years later, Songs of a Lost World was released, and Cure fans were almost uniformly satiated: “Their best since Disintegration,” was the general consensus, and after living with the album for two months, it is hard to argue the sentiment was hyperbolic.
“Alone” and “Endsong”, like most of the songs here, feature extended instrumentals before Robert Smith’s ageless voice enters, evoking desolate portraits of loss, isolation and mortality. I read somewhere that Smith now looks indistinguishable from the writer’s “ageing, alcoholic great-aunt”, but whatever pact he made with demonic forces to keep his voice sounding so young is clearly working, it is truly astonishing how vital his vocals remain.
While the album lacks a pop highlight like “Just Like Heaven” or “In Between Days”, it doesn’t need one – it’s not that kind of album. The placement of “And Nothing Is Forever” early in the tracklist is a masterstroke;…
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.
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