Listening

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.

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.

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.

The “cowboy punks” tag has been following National Photo Committee around, and it fits: all the instrumentation and song structure of a typical Americana band, with the slacker attitude turned up a few notches. The analogue is Tiberius’s farm emo; a genre tag self-applied with enough wink to deflect, accurate enough to stick.

The Chicago four-piece describe themselves on Bandcamp as a band “that sounds like they grew up in Virginia and got kicked out of college in Olympia,” which was enough to make me play the album immediately. The David Berman influence is everywhere, and perhaps it’s just the corner of music I’m currently in, but his ghost is loud right now. You can hear it in Max Bottner’s double entendres and wry lines delivered with a perfectly straight face. At one point a phone goes off mid-song and nobody seems bothered. Bottner’s deep baritone does most of the storytelling. The richness of his voice makes him sound older than his years, and you eagerly sit round and listen to what he has to say.

This sort of thing usually comes across as half-arsed or throwaway. Red Hot Photo Committee is neither. It’s a polished, serious record delivered with a glint in its eye and no small amount of swagger.

Big Long Sun started as Jamie Broughton on his own and is now an eight-piece, though you wouldn’t always guess it from the recordings. Broughton still tracks most of it himself in a Brighton bedroom on a Tascam 244, and the other seven turn up to add detail rather than thicken the mix. love songs and spiritual recollections is their third album in eighteen months, which would normally be cause for suspicion, but the songs don’t sound rushed.

It’s psych-pop with folk-pop instrumentation, and the eight members are used sparingly. ‘heavy (on your mind)’ is a good example: nothing it does is individually complicated, but the song slowly piles up until it sounds full without ever sounding crowded. That restraint runs through most of the record.

The warmth of the playing keeps pulling against the lyrics, which are not warm. Not always dark either: more often aloof and guarded, hinting at something rather than explaining it. Broughton has called one of the singles “a dark, paranoid folk anthem for the spiritually insecure mind,” which gives you the temperature, even when the arrangements are doing their best to disguise it.