Review

Armand Hammer, the New York duo of billy woods and Elucid, released Snakes & Ladders on Backwoodz Studioz on November 11 with no prior announcement. Sixteen tracks, their eighth full-length overall, and it arrives not long after Mercy, their 2025 album with The Alchemist. There was no lead single, no tracklist and no rollout: just a record, appearing overnight. A varied, textured production Snakes & Ladders is not built around a single producer. The album benefits from a vari

On October 16, Fontaines D.C. released their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber, via XL Recordings. The follow-up to Romance (2024), again produced by James Ford, it is the band’s most ambitious project to date: eleven tracks blending synths, trip-hop rhythms, strings and post-punk, set in a world designed to keep us hooked. We have already covered the album announcement and its first single, “Marianne,” as well as the collaboration with Rosalía. Now let’s look at what the rest of

On July 10th, Austin psych-rock veterans Holy Wave released their eighth studio album, i'm DADA, via Suicide Squeeze Records. Ten tracks, forty-five minutes, and a record that trades some of the band's trademark haze for something more grounded, without losing the atmosphere that's defined them since the early 2010s. Formed by Ryan Fuson, Kyle Hager, Joseph Cook and Julian Ruiz, who grew up together in El Paso's DIY scene before relocating to Austin, Holy Wave stepped outside

Yesterday, September 4th, Glasgow's corto.alto releases his third album, SOME SMALL FORTUNE, his debut for Ninja Tune, and the follow-up to the Mercury Prize-shortlisted Bad With Names (2023). Fifteen tracks, twenty-two minutes, and by far the widest cast of collaborators Liam Shortall has worked with under the corto.alto name. Shortall trained on trombone, studied at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and cut his teeth playing in the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra before

On August 28th, Erykah Badu & The Alchemist released Before the World Blows, Badu's first full album in more than a decade, following 2015's But You Caint Use My Phone. Sixteen tracks, recorded over eighteen months between Dallas and Los Angeles, built from a pairing that sounds unlikely on paper and inevitable once you press play. Badu and Alchemist met at her annual Birthday Bash in Dallas, and the chemistry shows: Badu's atmospheric, melodic songwriting wrapped around Alch

On February 27th, Brooklyn trio FORAGER released their sophomore album, Even a Child Can Cover the Sun with a Finger. Eleven tracks that push the band's signature kaleidoscopic pop into rawer, stranger territory, whispered verses colliding with blaring sirens and distorted drums, choruses that start out singable and dissolve into something closer to chaos.

On July 28th, guitarist Cory Wong and saxophonist Joshua Redman released On A Random Tuesday: Live At The Blue Note, an eight-track document pulled from Wong's week-long residency at the legendary New York club. Nearly an hour of music, captured live, with none of the studio polish, just two serious players working a groove in real time. The pairing might look unlikely on paper: Wong made his name in the funk world through Vulfpeck and his own instrumental records, all "Wong-

Le 19 juin dernier, le collectif lyonnais Le Grand Sbam a sorti Janus sur le label Dur et Doux. Dix-huit pistes, 23 musiciennes et musiciens-actrices, presque cinquante minutes de musique : ce nouvel album n'est pas un disque qu'on écoute distraitement, c'est une traversée. Composé par Antoine Arnera et écrit avec son frère, le sociologue Thomas Arnera, Janus se présente comme un « opéra Cthulhu » à la fois philo-zoophique, zoopunk et écoféministe. Le projet rend hommage à tr

On June 19th, the Lyon-based collective Le Grand Sbam released Janus on the Dur et Doux label. Eighteen tracks, 23 musician-performers, nearly fifty minutes of music: this isn't a record you put on in the background. It's a journey. Composed by Antoine Arnera and co-written with his brother, sociologist Thomas Arnera, Janus is billed as a "Cthulhu opera" that's philo-zoophic, zoopunk, and ecofeminist all at once. The project pays tribute to three very different figures: scien

Out now on International Anthem / Nonesuch Records Happy Today is the third album from guitarist Jeff Parker's long-running ETA IVtet, recorded live at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 20, 2025, and for the first time, outside the walls of the now-shuttered bar that gave the band its name. The context matters. Parker describes 2025 as a very difficult year: displacement from the Eaton fires, family strain, political despair. The Lodge Room show became something else, a mom

Photo Peter Iain Campbell It's here. Thirteen years after Tomorrow's Harvest, the Hexagon Sun is burning. Inferno, the fifth Boards of Canada album, dropped today on Warp Records, and it arrives not as a nostalgia trip, but as a genuine statement. Darker, denser, and more direct than anything they've released before, it sounds like a band who spent thirteen years with a specific vision and refused to release it until it was exactly right. One Album, One Listen The promo itsel

Two of music's most uncompromising voices. One track. And a world that gave them every reason to make it. On April 16th, 2026, the same day Boards of Canada broke their own silence, Massive Attack dropped Boots on the Ground, their first new music in six years. The feature? Tom Waits. The subject? The state of the world. The tone? Exactly as dark as you'd expect, and then some. A Collaboration Years in the Making As Tom Waits said: "One day many years ago I accepted an invita