Matthew Culnane

A year to the day since this went up on Bandcamp. I’d like to claim the timing is deliberate.

Joel Johnston is a producer first, and Autofiction sounds like it. He plays everything here, alone in his Leeds studio, and the surfaces are immaculate: lush, faintly downbeat dream pop on a dry, clean guitar tone he’s spent years dialling in. ‘Ditch’ was the last thing added, after he rediscovered The Glow Pt. 2 and wanted noise at the front. The right call: it hands him a tape motif that runs to the last track.

The influences aren’t hidden. Alex G is the obvious reference point, but I kept hearing Wild Nothing too, particularly Gemini, which never got the credit it deserved. ‘First Day’ is the clearest case.

Johnston was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in 2021, and most writing about the record starts there, this included. Reading last summer’s reviews, the line everyone quotes from ‘Lough’ comes from elsewhere: he’s had emetophobia since childhood, a fear of being sick that hardened into OCD, and he wrote “your mind changed from a fear to a song” partway through a treatment course he hadn’t finished. Hope recorded before the outcome was known.

So: safe songs, comforting. Johnston knows what works and doesn’t push far past it, not a complaint exactly, more an observation about where the ceiling sits. The lyrics are diaristic this time; he used to reach for metaphor. The vocals sit higher in the mix than on The Last Remaining Light. I’d take more of that, and some real experimentation alongside.

Various labels passed on Julia, which is strange, because it’s so easy to like. Julia Cumming shelved it, shopped it, got told to tease it and make it a hit first, then sign. Partisan eventually let her make the thing she’d already made.

That thing is a solo debut rooted in sixties and seventies pop, and unembarrassed about it. Carole King, Burt Bacharach, the odd drift toward yacht rock. Cumming calls these her “dorkiest” influences, and the record leans in rather than winking. In Sunflower Bean her voice is one instrument among several; here it’s the main event, and the Brill Building and Laurel Canyon songcraft is in service to it.

The opener, “My Life,” is the highlight: a song entirely about what she does and who she does it for. “I don’t do this to impress you” sounds like both a shrug and a slammed door.

The appeal cuts across ages. I’m old enough to come for the songcraft; younger listeners get the DIY scenester reinventing herself, or the unfiltered confessional oversharing. Something for everyone, which is presumably the problem the labels couldn’t solve. For me that’s no problem at all; it’s a reason to listen to it again.

I listened to this while making dinner most evenings for a fortnight before it properly took hold. Immediate enough to keep me coming back from the first spin, experimental enough that the hooks kept rearranging themselves each time.

feeble little horse are a trio now, founding guitarist Ryan Walchonski having left in early 2025, and bitknot is louder and stranger for it. Plain, detached, conversational vocals sit over electronic textures that keep getting shredded by bursts of distorted guitar. On “Dior” Lydia Slocum picks apart some indie frontperson by telling them who they aren’t: “You are not David Berman / You are not Kurt Cobain.” The person she’s actually addressing gets bleeped, redacted like a curse on the radio.

It saves its best for the end of its short running time. “Shopping” is petty envy, Slocum eyeing a prettier girl and plotting to swipe her phone and scroll her designer wishlist. Then “DMT” (death, money, tech, and the drug) build into much bigger, nastier territory: Slocum listing those harbingers like a mantra while the guitars fuzz over her. Noise and melody at once.

Five years in the making, recorded in gaps between tour legs, and produced by Andrew Watt, who gives The Boys of Dungeon Lane the same modern sheen as McCartney’s other recent records. But everything underneath points backwards. Nostalgia abounds, which is nothing new: plenty of his best Beatles songs were wistful, often about the specific people and places that make other people’s nostalgia bearable. Here the memories get more specific still, and more autobiographical than he’s usually allowed himself in song.

It opens with “As You Lie There” and an odd chord arpeggiated that Paul says he didn’t recognise—the whole album grew out of him worrying at it. That’s the McCartney method in miniature: go wildly experimental on one element while holding everything else steady, almost as a control. I think of it as “controlled experimentalism”, and it’s all over this record in small doses. “Never Know” turns its staccato “oh oh” vocals into something more rhythmic than melodic. “We Two” runs through actual sixties tape machines. None of it capsizes the pop song underneath.

Two strands run through the album. Some tracks are about the Beatles (“Days We Left Behind”, the single, premiered on BBC Radio Merseyside, is the most obvious); others are about his childhood and family. I prefer the second kind, and I say that as a serious Beatles fan. Usually loving something means wanting more first-person testimony of what it was like, but we’ve had several decades of Beatles talking about being Beatles. “Down South”—the literal story of Paul and George bonding over guitars—is charming, but the family songs cut deeper. “Home to Us”, the Ringo duet, is warm enough that on first listen I didn’t clock it was Ringo singing. “Salesman Saint” opens with horns and is really about his parents getting through the Blitz and postwar period, and how songs and laughter get people through.

The love songs hold their own too. “Ripples in a Pond” is a bright pop thing about a relationship starting; “Life Can Be Hard”, Paul in falsetto, thinning but still affecting, is its companion piece years down the line, reflective and grounded with a slight jazzy lean. “Momma Gets By” closes beautifully, a hint of Dixie jazz underneath.

Rob Sheffield, in Dreaming the Beatles, argues that Paul is the most Beatlesque of the Beatles: whatever problem you have with the band, it’s really a problem with Paul, and he’s the only one anyone bothers to hate. Tell him your Paul McCartney, he says, and he’ll tell you who you are. Hard, then, not to hear this as the last one. Thematically he’s cornered himself: you can’t give a life-retrospective at age 83 and then put out, say, ten obscure fifties covers a year or two later. But then again, that would be very Paul.

Kurt Vile is a cool dude from Philadelphia who writes songs about being a cool dude from Philadelphia who writes songs. It should be insufferable. It’s lovable instead.

Ten albums in, the sound hasn’t shifted much since the early-2010s breakthrough. This one is longer, mellower and looser than Wakin on a Pretty Daze, and just as rewarding for it. The guitar playing has never been better, deceptively intricate under all that reclining.

The lyrics circle the working life of a musician, partner and father in his mid-40s. They’re idiosyncratically his: “99th Song” spends ten minutes on the last loop his red pedal can hold before the software gives out, and somehow makes studio housekeeping feel like a whole way of living. “Every time I look at you” is just a man being proud of his kid.

He calls the Schuylkill River polluted as hell, then decides he loves it anyway. That’s the vibe. Easy to get lost in, from the most prolific slacker going.

Hiss Golden Messenger albums usually come with a good roster of collaborators, and this is no different: Bruce Hornsby and Sam Beam turn up, as do Sara Watkins, Amy Helm, members of Dawes, and plenty of others. Josh Kaufman produced it in a decommissioned church outside Woodstock, the players recorded live in a circle, and you can hear that room in the record. But these are MC Taylor’s songs. Storytelling songs, often intimately told, that I imagine would also work on a bigger stage and to a bigger audience.

Well crafted and loosely played, which I mean as a compliment. The album moves through familiar Americana registers: “Last Orders” and “Spirit Cat” lean bluesy; “Alright and Then Some” and “Seneca” more country; “Mercy Avenue” more soul; “Gabriel” more folk. Taylor’s stated subjects are fatherhood, ageing, love and luck and the black comedy of being alive in America in 2026.

A few standouts. One of my favourites is the closer, “Depends On The River”. My eight-year-old thinks it sounds like Bob Dylan (he’s a big fan so there’s no higher praise), and I’m inclined to agree with him. A really strong album and one of Taylor’s best.

Mikaela Davis is a harpist who plays in jam bands. You’d likely guess neither from Graceland Way, her fifth record, where the songs are tightly composed and the harp sits back in the mix, surfacing on songs like “11:11” where it belongs and otherwise playing a quieter supporting role.

Listening to it I variously thought of Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks. Upbeat, major-key country pop with the California light turned up. Davis has coined “bootgaze” for the country-shoegaze blend, which joins cowboy punk and farm emo in this year’s growing pile of useful neologisms. There are fuzzed-out guitars low in the mix, though anyone arriving for Loveless will leave disappointed.

“Nothin’s on the Radio” is the platonic Sheryl Crow major-key country rocker, right down to the childhood-in-the-back-seat lyric. The guest list is interesting: Madison Cunningham on the opener, Tim Heidecker somewhere in there too, Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman on “Junk Love.”

The harp turns out to be the least interesting thing about Mikaela. This isn’t a gimmicky record, it’s one of the year’s best.

Doug Gillard has spent most of his career as someone else’s guitarist. Guided by Voices, currently. Nada Surf, Cobra Verde, Death of Samantha, plus a long list of collaborations that reads like a who’s who of American indie rock. The consummate sideman.

Parallel Stride is only his fourth album under his own name, and his first since 2014’s Parade On. It’s also his best.

The lineage is exactly what you’d expect from the bands he’s kept company with: The Who, Big Star, the Kinks, the Raspberries, Teenage Fanclub. Opener “Face of Smiles” leans hard into that last one, a warm rhythm strum and wistful turn in the melody. Gillard handled the arrangements and most of the instruments himself, recorded across a few years, and the dedication and assurance shows through.

“Saving My Life Every Day” and “Cannons” are the ones that grab you first, big-hearted and immediate, the hooks that pull you in on a single listen. Then the other nine do the rest of the work of convincing you to stay. A guitarist’s guitarist, finally pointing the songs at himself.