Matthew Culnane

The Elliott Smith comparisons are everywhere for Beauty Land, and they’re correct, if you’re specific about it. These songs wouldn’t necessarily sit on Either/Or. What they share with Smith is the trick of tying off devastating lyrics around sweet melodies: relapses, rehab, rejection, all delivered without flinching. It’s honest to the point of discomfort.

The other reason the comparison sticks is how Mendez records his acoustics. Close-miked and over the bridge, so the sound of his fretting hand on the strings comes through. A small detail, but it’s what gives these songs the feeling of being let in on a secret. There’s even a whistle solo of sorts on “Gentle Love.” Not quite Jealous Guy, but reaching.

Fourteen songs in twenty-six minutes, none of them past three. That could point to throwaways or sketches abandoned early, and a couple do end sooner than you’d like. But each one earns its place, and Mendez gets out before any idea overstays.

Power pop is back. Again. I wish we tracked its rises and falls the way we do the successive named waves of emo (people tried, then lost count; the Wikipedia page gamely attempts a taxonomy and gives up), but instead I’ll just be pleased the albums keep arriving.

The last few years have been good ones: Sharp Pins, This Is Lorelei, Good Flying Birds. Co-produced by Teenage Fanclub’s Gerard Love in Edwyn Collins’ studio, Just A Day has its bona fides in order. This is the substrain that runs on chiming guitars, bubbling organ, transatlantic vocals and stacked harmonies. They’ve dropped the horns and pedal steel of earlier records and, lovely as those were, the stripped-back four-piece is the better sound.

It isn’t pure pre-millennial Glaswegiana, though. There are more ambitious moments here, and the band hasn’t shed its cosmic Americana entirely; I caught the Flying Burrito Brothers more than once. A summer record, then. Long live the genre.

Bob Pollard’s 44th album as GBV (solo records and side projects not included; nobody has the time). Familiarity might ordinarily breed contempt, but it never has with Pollard. Each album adds something, gives someone a new way in. There have been many eras of GBV, and this one, a decade or so deep with Gillard, Bare Jr., Shue and March, is among the strongest.

When I reviewed Broken Social Scene’s Remember the Humans I said not to expect anything wildly different, just an excellent BSS record. Pollard works at the opposite extreme of productivity, but the principle is the same: you know roughly what to expect, and reliability is sometimes better than reinvention. The danger is taking it for granted. They won’t be around forever.

Or will they? The record keeps circling its own story without quite admitting to it. “We outlast them all” is classic GBV power pop; Pollard insists it’s about anyone who perseveres, not the band, though good luck hearing it that way. Then “Out With a Theory” gives the actual autobiography, a covers act writing Cheap Trick knock-offs and dreaming of recording in Mitch Easter’s garage, and he calls that one the ballad of GBV’s history. Deflection and confession, two tracks apart.

Thomas Dollbaum writes about in-betweens: watching TV, catching rabbits, sitting on rooftops, plotting an exit from a Podunk town that the songs already suspect won’t happen. Birds of Paradise moves through Florida’s pine flatwoods and the backroads feeding the interstate, and it’s preoccupied with the sights and sounds of the American South: coyotes in the yard, birds flying south, discount cigarettes.

Some of these are short stories more than songs. “Big Boi” recounts an ugly encounter with a fractious couple who need the narrator’s help scoring drugs. “Waterbirds” belongs to someone who needs proper rest and wants to be useful to someone else, and isn’t sure he can manage either: “I always wanted to help / But it doesn’t mean I’m good at it.”

Dollbaum is a writerly songwriter, indebted to David Berman in the way he can deliver a devastating line without raising his voice. Berman’s ghost has been loud in this corner of music for a while now, and Dollbaum is squarely in it. The lyrics point as much to Southern gothic fiction as to any record, with Bill Callahan’s habit of letting one specific image hold a whole song somewhere in the mix too. The other touchstone is MJ Lenderman, who turns up on drums and backing vocals plus a ragged solo on “Dozen Roses.” The album was tracked live in four days, which you can hear in the looseness—it’s all the better for it.

Friko’s second record wears its influences the way the best maximalists do: the heart-on-sleeve 00s indie pop of Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, Bright Eyes is all over it, but never as debt. Singer and songwriter Niko Kapetan has digested it into something of his own.

It moves between nostalgia and escape. ‘Dear Bicycle’ is an ode to a childhood bike; ‘Hot Air Balloon’ yearns toward a plan to get away, and would sit comfortably on Pablo Honey.

The arrangements are the real pleasure. On ‘Certainty’ the strings dial up the urgency under the vocal rather than just dressing it. ‘Seven Degrees’ revels in some 60s pop with a touch of psychedelia, Beatlesy and bright, though it perhaps throws in one key change too many.

I suspect the sequencing will be the bone of contention. Where you land on the couple of slower songs depends on what you want from a record like this: respite and variety, or unbroken momentum. Some listeners will feel the air go out of the room; others will be grateful for the window.

Katy Beth Young has spent years lending her voice to other people’s records and records (she sings in Peggy Sue and Deep Throat Choir, members of both turn up here). True is the first one that’s entirely hers. According to the Bandcamp notes, it arrives several years after the initial demos were cut, but it’s worth the wait.

It opens with “Saturday Morning”: “Are you busy Saturday morning? / I’ve got thousands of things to tell you / Like how I’ve started making plans to replace you / With one perfect song that goes on and on.” That’s the record in miniature.

Calling it a country album would oversell the twang. Harry Bohay’s pedal steel runs through almost every track, but the reference points are as much Big Thief as Patsy Cline, and the spare, introspective arrangements leave plenty of room around Young’s voice. The lyrics belong to now: dating mediated by screens and algorithms (“Touchscreen”, “Database Blues”), and, underneath, the kind of grief no app can route around. “Playing ‘Country Roads’” is written for her late father. However the subject matter resonates with you, this is a very strong set of songs.

The story so far is on the record, and it isn’t pretty. Mike Kinsella’s divorce, his drinking, Steve Lamos walking away for two years: LP4 puts all of it on the table.

Opener “Man Overboard” begins with a stuttering 7/4 drum pattern and soft vocalising, Kinsella resigned to his fate. “No Feeling” carries the mood: ‘Tell the doctors I’m done / The kids, “Adieu” / And mother, “Désolé”’. By “Blood On My Blood” the story of his life is in disarray. Three songs in, it’s clear Mike is struggling.

His voice has changed since LP1. More expressive, less one-dimensional. What was a constraint 25 years ago is now the thing that makes him worth listening to.

The lyrical themes peak on “Bad Moons”, the teenaged feelings of the debut firmly in the rear-view. This is a record about the difficulty of middle age. The kids of LP1 are divorced dads now.

The band keeps up its recent habit of using guests sparingly. Brendan Yates, Caithlin De Marrais and Wisp appear as backing vocalists, adding texture rather than rewriting the songs.

A record full of gut punches, then. Sonically it’s a leap over LPs 1–3, less in style than in execution: the twinkly, expansive sound is intact, the synths and strings improve everything without announcing themselves, and the arrangements are lusher than the band has managed before.

Put your headphones on for this one. Mike might not be alright, but the record is.

I wasn’t a fan of Iceage when they first broke. Strange, given I love nearly every band that fed into them. They had the attitude. The songs were another matter.

That was a long time ago. What changed was Elias Rønnenfelt’s two solo records, Heavy Glory and Speak Daggers, released inside a year of each other. The former leaned into Americana, the latter braided punk, folk and hip-hop, with detours via experimentalists like Dean Blunt. Suddenly prolific, and broadening his palette without dropping his standards. Both were among my favourites of 2024 and 2025.

For Love of Grace & the Hereafter arrives nine months after Speak Daggers and slots neatly into the sequence. It keeps the brightness, urgency and restlessness of early Iceage, recorded back in the same remote Swedish house where they cut Plowing Into the Field of Love, but adds melody, songcraft and a romanticism the early records never had. On “Ember” Rønnenfelt declares “I love you in an ominous way” over a major-key riff that pulls the menace out from under itself.

Look back at the early albums and the distance he’s travelled as a frontman and writer is the real story. He always had presence. He hasn’t suddenly turned into Jeff Buckley, but he now has greater range—emotional and vocal—and, more to the point, the songs to put it to use. I shouldn’t be surprised; we’re all different people in our mid-thirties than we were at nineteen. He’s becoming one of the best frontmen in rock.

The first Broken Social Scene album in 21 years to be produced by Dave Newfeld. With so many singers and instrumentalists in the fold, every new member is additive. Newfeld is multiplicative. No other producer does so much with so much: instruments fade in and out, emphasis shifts to a different part of the mix, of the band. His return is excellent news.

It also makes it hard to resist comparing Remember the Humans to the earlier masterworks. I’m not sure this one has an era-defining piece like “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl”. It doesn’t open with the unbroken run of 10/10 songs that the self-titled album did.

So what do we have? The highlights are very strong. “Only the Good I Keep” arrives early, sung by new member Hannah Georgas (they had room for more?), full of forty-something nostalgia. Lisa Lobsinger brings “Relief”, a highly addictive piece of electro-pop with some great drumming. Feist turns up near the end on “What Happens Now”, a song that starts as a mantra and builds into something tender.

The consistency across the album is high, and the basslines are particularly good. BSS songs have always been melancholic. The specific flavour may have subtly changed, but it’s still there, still tangible through the densely layered arrangements.

Whether they’ve “grown” or “improved” is hard to say. They stretch the definition of a band. They arrived sui generis and have done what they do, well, across several albums, so don’t expect anything groundbreaking here. Expect an excellent Broken Social Scene album, which is a high watermark indeed.