Listening

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.

Maya Hawke’s voice is imperfect and endearing. Lyrical themes flit between existential whimsy and the kind of self-examination that celebrity tends to provoke. The production keeps things warm and unfussy, which suits her. An impressive folk-pop record from someone who could easily have settled for the day job.

The easy comparison would be Berman or Malkmus relocating to northern California and making a CSNY record. Wry couplets about workplace mediocrity, theologians, fish fingers, all set to a gently rocking country-rock backdrop. But the easy comparison isn’t quite the right one. Mildred are four roughly equal parts, all sharing vocals and writing; as a result the songs feel passed around the room rather than handed down from a bossy frontman.

Age matters too, perhaps. This is a debut by friends who started living together in their early thirties and ended up writing some songs; what emerged has none of the showy push of a younger band. “Charlie” ambles along on accordion and horn, “Cobwebs” has a brisk motorik thing going underneath some genuinely bleak lines, and “Fish Sticks” lands its chorus with confidence. The whole thing sounds like it was played live in a room, their interviews suggest that more or less it was.

It’s warm, confident, relaxed, reminiscent of plenty of wonderful things without being in thrall to any of them. The kind of record that turns up on a friend’s stereo and you ask what it is.

Lo-fi riffs to drone out to? Simultaneously reminiscent of Jeff Buckley’s demos that comprise Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk—particularly “Your Flesh is So Nice”—and Grouper. Sit with it a few times for the structure and melodies to make themselves clear.

Across its run city of careless angels moves through bedroom folk, glitched electronics, lo-fi power pop and something close to ambient rap, which makes for an uneven listen, though it mostly keeps its charm throughout. “Fall Asleep” and “Reason” recall early Alex G a little too closely. “Imaginary Woman” skirts the same line but the composition is strong enough to carry it, and the ooh-and-aah background vocals are the best thing on the record.

I’d have called myself reasonably well versed in the first wave of punk. Not an expert, but better than the average person who came to it two decades later. La Peste, though, had passed me by entirely. Boston’s first true punk band, as it turns out.

The original lineup managed one single, 1978’s “Better Off Dead”, before a personnel change and the slow fade that followed. Everything else stayed in the vault: practice-room recordings, 4-track loft tapes, and four songs cut by a pre-fame Ric Ocasek. The opener is one of the Ocasek four, and it’s superb, all forward motion from the first bar.

You can hear where Mission of Burma and the Bush Tetras would go next, the angular Boston racket already half-formed here. Hard not to wonder what La Peste might have become with a few more years of their own.

This is the first I’ve heard of Chris Brain, and it’s a quiet, easy record to sit with. Mostly acoustic guitar, picked rather than strummed, with other players filling in around it. There’s pedal steel, clarinet, violin and piano, but never much at once. The songs don’t change a lot as they go. Quite lovely.

Brown Horse are from Norwich, which you would never guess from Total Dive. The guitars are pure Crazy Horse and the pedal steel weeps on cue. A song called “Heart of the Country” arrives with no apparent irony. This is the modern Americana mould—the one Ovven, Ratboys, Florry, Tiberius and a dozen others are working right now, all of them tracing the same lines back through MJ Lenderman to Jason Molina, Lucinda Williams, Silver Jews, the Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo.

The geography is the only misdirection. The other song titles (“Wreck”, “Sadness Reigns”, “Oblivion”) tell you exactly where the lyrics live, and they aren’t wrong.

The standout is “Twisters”. You could argue the record doesn’t move around much: the mood, the tempo, the instrumentation and the preoccupations hold fairly steady from start to finish. That’s a fair criticism of a less assured album. Here it isn’t one. When a band sounds this good doing one thing, the consistency reads as confidence rather than limitation, and I’m happy to sit in it for 45 minutes.