Listening

The Lemon Twigs have never been short of hooks, and the harmonies are stacked as high as ever. This time, though, Brian and Michael D’Addario have let their touring drummer and bassist into the studio, and the record sounds fuller for it. My favourites are the first two. Michael’s title track opens on a bright jangle, and Brian’s ‘2 or 3’ piles harpsichord, flute and key changes onto a chorus he says he dreamt the night after a gig in Buenos Aires (I just dream about my teeth falling out). Fourteen songs is a lot, and a few of them blur together. Still, I’ve had it on repeat since early summer.

Chelsea Wolfe has always been folk for metalheads. The Dark goes a step further and leans into the more conventional side of her songwriting and instrumentation. That might disappoint fans of her more avant-garde tendencies (my own Wolfe of choice is the trip-hop and synths of She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She), but it makes the album instantly accessible. Her most-streamed song is still “Flatlands”, an acoustic ballad from 2012’s Unknown Rooms, so this may well be the Chelsea Wolfe most people already know. The songs are melodic and easy to dive into, and her vocals are clear, confident and emotive. Highlights are the opener, “Cold”, which grows out of hushed vocals and acoustic guitar, and “Halo”, a post-apocalyptic love song stripped back almost to a demo (Wolfe says it was inspired by the first series of The Last of Us). It’s taken her nine albums to call one The Dark, which shows admirable restraint.

Rockingham County is in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and Dogwood Tales have packed it into this album: a song named after Ralph Sampson, the town’s most famous basketball player; McDonald’s Coke and high school football in “McMemories”; a friend in tears over a plate of fried chicken in “Angel Dreams”. “Mt. Jackson” goes from Kyle Grim’s uncle in a hospital bed to the bills that follow. It’s an album of big feelings in small places.

MJ Lenderman, who has songs called “Dan Marino” and “Toontown”, is the obvious comparison, though Grim and Ben Ryan play their own “Ralph Sampson” and “Princess Peach” with a straight face instead of Lenderman’s wry smile.

They’ve played together since high school, when both were in pop-punk bands in neighbouring towns, and the opener, “Soundcheck Infinity”, looks back to practice sessions loud enough to draw parental complaints. Perhaps that’s where the touches of Midwest emo come from. Otherwise the debt is to Neil Young. For every pedal steel line there’s a distorted lead or a wash of shoegaze, and the songs mostly move at their own unhurried pace. The standout for me is “Shield”, the longest thing here at five minutes, which starts slowly before vanishing into a wall of fuzz.

Bondo have good taste. The first song, ‘On The Cross’, starts out like Mogwai’s ‘R U Still In 2 It’, and the second, ‘Listen Back’, like Slowdive’s ‘Dagger’. The third, ‘Strummer’, could be an outtake from Slint’s Spiderland. In each case the resemblance is fleeting and the song ends up somewhere else, so Bondo are hardly short of ideas. The references just tell you what’s in their record collections.

So you’ll have a sense of the sound already: post-rock, slowcore, shoegaze. You can hear Tortoise, Codeine and Duster in there too. Some songs meander along glacially, while others, like ‘Brian Screams’, are propelled by guitars and loud vocals. All the name-dropping is only there to anchor you. This record is a great modern example of the sound, and the songs are expansive and easy to get lost in.

I said in September’s recap that I’d give this another couple of spins, and I’m glad I did: it opens up the more you play it. At the time I called it ‘slowcore-ish’, which is true as far as it goes.

This is perhaps Death Cab for Cutie’s best record in a decade. It’s haunted by Ben Gibbard’s divorce, and the title is his image for compartmentalising grief: a tower to lock the marriage away in while the band toured old albums for their twentieth anniversaries. The tower is also a cage. On ‘Full of Stars’ she accuses him of walling her in, and by ‘I Built You a Tower (a)’ he’s trying to keep her inside it, and failing.

Gibbard has said he wouldn’t make Kintsugi, his first divorce record, again. This time he set out to leave the bitterness behind, and no single party carries the blame here. It opens with an apology and closes with a kind of acceptance: he’s getting used to life without her, and still thinks about little else. His sighing, plaintive voice suits these lyrics.

The band sound punchier than they have for a while. Bassist Nick Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr are on fine form and sit well in the mix. The whole thing was recorded in only three weeks, the five of them in one room, but nothing sounds rushed. You get the sense Gibbard walked into the studio knowing exactly what to do with these songs. ‘Stone Over Water’, a song about convincing everyone you’re fine, combines its introspective lyrics with a very catchy chorus: “I’m trying to hold it together / Trying to take the first step”. You almost believe him.

I only knew a few Aldous Harding songs before Train On The Island, and the first listen was fairly hard going. None of the melodies stood out, and I had no idea what she was singing about, so it wasn’t much fun. It rewards repeat listens, though. A few months on, it’s become a favourite. I’m no closer to understanding the lyrics, but the songs have slowly unravelled and lodged themselves in my head. A good example, appropriately enough, is ‘Worms’. The way in was the arrangement: Hammond organ and Joe Harvey-Whyte’s pedal steel over slow piano.

The production is delicate. Piano dominates, but plenty else comes and goes, from the synth textures on the opener, ‘I Ate The Most’, to details you only catch after several listens. Harding’s own voice is a shapeshifter: her register changes from song to song as needed. It all adds up to dreamlike art pop that tends at times towards folk and psych.

The lyrics are another matter. They’re very abstract, and to get anywhere with them you have to zoom right in. Even then you’re inferring from tone and imagery rather than sentence structure or literal meaning. Collect enough pieces of the puzzle and perhaps the whole picture will eventually reveal itself. I’m still collecting.

In the summer I wasn’t sure Florida Water Blues matched blame the clown, Twisted Teens’ first album of the year. Two months on, the earlier record is still a little more immediate, but this one might have more staying power.

The dominant feeling is overload. Take a typical song and almost every component is pushing into the red. Caspian Hollywell plays most of the instruments, but you notice his deep, gnarly vocals and scratchy riffs first. Behind them are a drum machine and RJ Santos’s pedal steel. The net result is equal parts garage punk and country. Within that template, it’s about as close as they could come to a comedown record. The beating sun of blame the clown is setting (the closer is, helpfully, called ‘Sun Go Down’).

The melodies are strong throughout, which is all the more impressive given how much they release: a third album, The Holy Cross Tigers, is due from Sub Pop on 6 November. Lyrically, it’s great, and the wry lines come faster than you can catch them. The title track opens with “had about a hundred beers of solitude”. Simon Price has reworked a Dolly Parton quip for the Ramones: ‘it takes a lot of brains to sound this dumb’. I’d extend the compliment to Hollywell and Santos.

I like this a lot. Mary in the Junkyard’s debut opens with ‘Mantra III’, which sets sparse, atmospheric instrumentation to a single repeated phrase, ‘It is yours babe, you deserve it’. It isn’t quite a fake-out, but it might give you the wrong idea: the rest sticks a touch more closely to conventional structures, without ever becoming predictable. ‘Blood’ and ‘Seek and Destroy’ make an interesting contrast. Both start with a knotty post-rock riff before the fragile vocals emerge, the former full of lust and longing, the latter more fearful, at times enraged.

Clari Freeman-Taylor’s vocals are distinctive and quite twee; they sound like they’d blow away in a stiff breeze. It’s a love-or-hate voice, and it won me over. Parts of the album hark back to ‘00s and ‘10s indie: ‘New Muscles’ (apparently written about the drummer joining a gym) reminds me of Tune-Yards’ off-kilter approach, while other aspects of the album’s the instrumentation and orchestration variously recall Grizzly Bear, Beach House and Arcade Fire. But this isn’t copycat music, and there’s plenty of variety. The band’s influences run from folk rock to post-rock, so they’re never far from something atmospheric, occasionally foreboding.

Lyrically, it covers rebirth, metamorphosis and toxic masculinity (‘Crash Landing’ is about men keeping their emotions locked away), alongside Freeman-Taylor’s potential past life as a fisherman. Her best friend in that life was a mouse, and closer ‘Mouse’ is about the pair meeting again, both reincarnated as people. That’s her on the cover, in full prosthetics, as the fisherman.

Asher White is prolific. She’d put out two dozen records on Bandcamp before Home Constellation Study got her noticed in 2024, and this February she released a full-album cover of Jessica Pratt’s self-titled debut, which I wrote about in April. Love Aggregates was written as a long relationship fell apart, though White has said she was wary of making a breakup record.

It’s a beguiling album, and a lot of that is down to White’s gift for songs that turn in unexpected directions, with melodies lovely enough that the turns make sense. The lyrics range from the lovelorn ‘White Castle sad’, which is also the song closest to Pratt, to ‘Jerryboy’, which details the birth of Jerry Garcia. ‘Nightingale Version (Sailor’s Moon)’ is a standout, one of several songs that recall recent power-pop successes like This Is Lorelei. Sonically it’s adventurous: trumpet, trombone and violin on ‘My day at the casino’, more violin on ‘Atoll’, and White’s own experiments with field recordings and omnichord.

The running order is as unpredictable as the songs. It rewards your full attention. The energy spikes in odd places, and a sound gets set aside for something different, then picked up again a few songs later. ‘Stage Diva’, the obvious single, is the album in miniature: catchy as hell at either end, while the middle drops the tune and most of the instruments for a breakdown. Naturally, it’s placed at track ten of eleven.

Record a debut EP in Frome with Dom Monks, whose CV includes Big Thief, and the Adrianne Lenker comparisons will follow. Dermot Henry counts her among his heroes, so presumably he doesn’t mind. The resemblance is mostly in the songwriting: plain lines that hit harder than they look, and melodies that stick. It’s a bit uneven over five songs, and a couple sit a notch below the rest. The best of them is about how absurd it is, Henry says, that our molecules can connect with anyone else’s when we’re all on a rock floating in nothing. It’s a big subject for a song called ‘Little Rib’.

To get the obvious comparison out there: Brennan Wedl sounds like Lucinda Williams. Not the weathered drawl of the later records, but Lucinda circa her own self-titled album in 1988, before the rasp thickened. Katie Crutchfield (Waxahatchee) and Brad Cook produce, building guitar-heavy, nearly punk alt-country underneath; Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail plays electric guitar on two tracks and Crutchfield takes some harmonies.

So the voice matches, and the genre very nearly does. The lyrics, too: the same split between plain speech and something more literary. “Fake Cowboy” is a straight account of a man met in a bar. “Let’s Be Models” points out that a good night out needn’t cost anything. The closer, “When The Crazy Comes Out”, cuts back to acoustic guitar and puts questions to a partner: “If I get knocked up I’ll have your baby / Will you still want me when the crazy comes out?“

This album’s been my obsession for the last week or so. A cursory glance this morning didn’t surface many reviews online; if there’s anything right with the world then people will catch up and this album will give Wedl the attention and acclaim she so richly deserves.

Thirty years of obsessive listening to Elliott Smith has left me primed to hear him everywhere. A fingerpicked figure in a minor key is usually all it takes.

The song ”The Governor’s Waltz” has apparently made headlines in some places due to lines that can be read as being about her ex Paul Mescal and his current partner Gracie Abrams. But I am Smith-pilled, so instead my ears are drawn to how Bridgers (or perhaps Christian Lee Hutson) plays an inverted tremolo fingerpicking pattern Smith used on “New Disaster”. Most reviews mention Smith on that track anyway, though they tend to mean the broader feeling of it. The song that actually sounds like him to me is “Lost Boys”: a hook that sticks in your head, richer instrumentation, and the XO and Figure 8 trick of hiding the worst thoughts inside the brightest arrangements.

The comparison stops being useful at the first person. Despite reputation as a confessional miserabilist, Smith wrote stories in first person that weren’t always his. The “I” was a role at least as often as it was a confession. Bridgers seems to reserve the first person for things that happened to her. Lost Weekend opens at her father’s funeral with a couplet that’s startling before you’ve worked out what it’s describing (“Crying in a suit and tie / But you should see the other guy”), and he shadows most of the tracks that follow, including an appearance via voice message.

What she has instead of personae is production. That funeral arrives through a vocoder, her voice processed to the point of anonymity; the closing reprise returns to her father with the effect stripped off and nothing left between her and you. Smith used a character; Bridgers uses a machine, then switches it off.

The score-settling works less well. Everywhere else the first person reports what actually happened to her; those lines are the one place it’s playing to a gallery.

The back half is a scrapbook of interludes, instrumentals and vignettes. It ought to be a mess but the sequencing works for me in this context: grief doesn’t always arrive in four-minute songs with hook-laden choruses.

I’ll go on hearing Smith in her. That’s absolutely my problem rather than hers, and this is the first of her records where the resemblance stopped being the most interesting aspect.

Each of the tracks on this feel like they’re over as soon as they’ve settled down. And Starker sounds very late for something on all of them, in a hurry to say what he has to, his raspy, rushed syllables piled against each other. The loops underneath barely shift to accommodate him; a dozen different producers all digging the same dusty, near-drumless crates. Which leaves the writing with nowhere to hide. Sneakers, sports, New York specifics, boasts all fly past before you’ve checked them. (Except “The gang don’t change like the cast of a Happy Madison production”, I caught that straight away.)

It’s the first Starker I’ve heard, so I don’t have anything to measure it against. Some of the beats recall Wu-Tang and Roc Marciano. If the idea of a man talking very quickly over four bars that rarely change appeals to you—and it should—this is worth it.

Baby Rose’s voice makes most production decisions feel secondary: a contralto somewhere between Nina Simone and Tracy Chapman, tracked here on an old microphone never meant for singing because the better gear kept losing something important in these songs. Most of Yearnalism circles vintage 70s pop-soul, melodic and occasionally cinematic, with “But, Nvm” the standout. Not that it’s all warmth. Track one gets the venom out of the way first: “You ain’t got the motherfuckin’ answers / You’re a cancer.”

“Sunday” leaves other people out of it entirely, unhurried in her own company, she describes “a day of redemption” before it briefly breaks into Beatlesy blues rock near the end. A couple of duets appear along the way—Elmiene takes the second verse of “Is This Love” (neither of them answers the question), and Leon Thomas trades lines on “Friends Again” until it resolves into her speaking rather than singing—but this is her album, her triumph.

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.