Dylan Shirley is an emerging singer/songwriter and musician, who over the past year has quickly established a sound and approach rooted in genre defying, restless experimentation. Shirley recently released his full-length debut, A Guy Named Dylan.
Clocking in at a little over 90- seconds, the 35-song effort’s latest single “Jan/12/2025 Silly Games” is a bruising and gritty mosh pit friendly ripper that seemingly channels Pantera and Helmet.
Last year, The Smile — Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and Sons of Kemet‘s Tom Skinner — released their critically acclaimed Nigel Godrich-produced full-length debut A Light For Attracting Attention. The album saw the acclaimed outfit collaborating with London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section of contemporary British jazz musicians that include Bryon Wallen, Theon Cross and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman, and Jason Yarde.
The acclaimed trio started this year with the release of their Sam Petts-Davies-produced sophomore album Wall of Eyes. The album, which featured “Friend of a Friend” and album title track “Wall of Eyes” was recorded in Oxford and Abbey Road Studios saw the trio continuing their ongoing collaboration with London Contemporary Orchestra. The album, which charted at #3 on the UK album charts has also received “Best Album of Year So Far” nods from Pitchfork, The Needle Drop, Consequence, BrooklynVegan, Treblezine and Spin.
Their third album — and second of this year! — the 10-song Sam Petts-Davies-produced Cutouts was recorded in Oxford and Abbey Road Studios during the same period of Wall of Eyes. The new album is slated for an Friday release through XL Recordings.
Adding to a busy and wildly creative year, Thom Yorke shared the original score for Daniele Luchetti’s film Confidenza and announced solo tour dates in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Japan. (Tour dates can be found here: https://www.wasteheadquarters.com/schedule/thom-yorke) Johnny Greenwood debuted a new work X Years of Reverb at Norwich, UK’s 268 year-old Octagon Chapel — and is writing the score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming film, The Battle of Baktan Cross. Tom Skinner released Voices of Bishara Live at “mu” and is touring the summer jazz festival circuit with his own solo material.
Earlier this year, the trio shared two tracks from the soon-to-be released third album:
Cutouts‘ latest single “Laughing Bodies” is a brooding and atmospheric track featuring strummed acoustic guitar, eerily atmospheric synths, skittering and propulsive drumming paired with Yorke’s imitably yearning vocal. Sonically, “Laughing Bodies” brings later Radiohead to mind — particularly In Rainbows and The King of Limbs but somehow eerier and more unsettling.
Emerging Vancouver-based indie pop act Vox Rea — siblings Kate Kurdyak (lead vocals, piano, guitar, bass), her sister Lauren Kurdyak (vocals, piano) their childhood friend Kaitlyn Hansen-Boucher (vocals, percussion) and Mitchell Schaumberg (vocals, piano, guitar, bass) can trace some of their origins back to when the Kurdyak Sisters and Hansen-Boucher singing in choirs together as children.
Lifelong academics at heart, the Kurdyaks attended a small liberal arts schools in the mountains, where Kate studied philosophy and Lauren studied ecology. And while at the school, they met Mitchell Schaumberg and started playing school parties under the name BEEF. Although they started the band as a lighthearted endeavor, the trio quickly realized the creative chemistry they all shared, and would later meet up all over the world for late night, liquor-fueled writing sessions that would eventually comprise Vox Rea’s earliest material. But more on that later. . . .
The Kurdyak Sisters and Hansen-Boucher formed the indie pop trio The Katherines, which released their full-length debut To Bring You My Heart back in 2017 through 604 Records. The album amassed over one million Spotify steams with songs off the album appear on a number of prominent playlists including New Music Friday, Pop All Day, Hot Hits Canada, Indie Pop Chillout and the Canada Viral 50 chart. The Katherines were featured in a number of major media outlets including Vice, MTV, Vancouver Sun, the National Post — and they’ve performed on morning shows in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.
Accompanied by a top-notch backing band, the members of The Katherines have toured across Canada and have made stops along the national festival circuit. including Rifflandia, NXNE, Juno Fest, Canada Day Vancouver and Denim on the Diamond, among others. And adding to a growing profile, the trio had songs appear on TV shows like Orphan Black, Reboot and The Order.
The Vancouver-based quartet’s latest project together Vox Rea is a bit of a sonic and stylistic departure. Citing influences that range from Arcade Fire to Friedrich Nietzsche, the members of Vox Rea, the act’s full-length debut chronicles a group of artists trying to come to terms with their generation’s place in the larger human story — and thematically, the album’s material touches upon addiction, self-doubt. lust, identity. independence and grief. And as a result, the album can be seen as a soundtrack to the confusion and euphoria of coming of age in a world seemingly on the verge of annihilation. The band’s unique brand of noir pop finds them crafting material that features classically inspired string arrangements, three part harmonies, brooding atmospherics and a seamless mesh of digital and analog while underpinned with raw emotionality.
Written in collaboration between the Kurdyaks, Hansen-Boucher, Schaumberg, Luca Fogale, Begonia, and Joël, their Connor Seidel, Tim Buron, Derek Hoffman and Joel Stouffer-co-produced Vox Rea full-length debut was written in apartments in Vancouver, Toronto, Berlin, Montreal and Boston — and was recorded during a snowy winter in the Quebec forests.
Vox Rea’s latest single “Dose Me Up” is a slow-burning, atmospheric ballad centered around a stunningly gorgeous lead vocal and three part harmonies, twinkling piano, brief bursts of shimmering guitar, stuttering drumming and electronic plinks and a soaring hook. Sonically speaking, the track may draw comparisons to Cloud Castle Lake‘s gorgeous Malingerer, PJ Harvey and others but with all the sturm und drang of one’s 20s.
