British indie outfit Hallucinophonics exists as the crossroads of consciousness and sound, creating immersive, psychedelic soundscapes that defy and blend the boundaries between reality and dreams. Drawing inspiration from Pink Floyd, Tame Impala, NEU! and others, they attempt to create […]
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New Video: Marcos Jobim Shares Meditative “Silêncio”
Brazilian singer/songwriter and musician Marcos Jobim released his sophomore album, Singelinha last year. Sonically, the album sees the Brazilian artist branching out into multiple sonic directions, traversing across Brazilian popular music, folk and world music, while also featuring elements of rock and concert music. But the material is guided by the delicacy of the arrangements and the power of its poetic lyricism.
Fittingly, the album’s songs shift between intimate and expansive atmospheres. Instrumental album title track “Singelinha,” which was originally written back in 2023, was the album’s starting point — and was inspired by his desire to achieve a poetic and sonic synthesis. “I was seeking something with a synthetic character—something that could convey deeper insights through a simple, objective form,” Jobim explains.
Following the recording of “Singelinha,” the idea emerged that the Brazilian could expand upon the project. “The process was so inspiring that we realized we could create something on a larger scale,” he says. The end result was the 13-song album that featured ten songs and three compositions.
Much of the album features two versions of most of the album’s songs: one version featuring solo acoustic guitar arrangements, as originally written and another version arranged for a chamber ensemble with violin, clarinet, trombone, cello, tuba and double bass. Those arrangements were revised and edited by Pablo Schinke, who also handled production and engineering duties. “Pablo was fundamental to shaping the album’s sonic identity, in addition to performing as the cellist,” the Brazilian artist says. “He possesses a keen eye for aesthetics and brought a sense of balance and innovation to the tracks.”
Schinke went on to meticulous work to preserve the unique character of each track during the mixing process, “He always made a point
of preserving the essence of the compositions, even during moments of
greater experimentation,” Jobim adds.
Jobim will be embarking on his first international tour this year, but in the meantime, he further establishes Singelinha‘s aesthetic. The album’s latest single “Silênecio” is a meditative, introspective song anchored by a gorgeous arrangement featuring acoustic guitar, brooding strings and clarinet and gently padded drums paired with Jobim’s dreamily laid-back delivery.
Filmed by Zé Carlos de Andrade the video was shot in the Bacupari District in Mostaradas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The video follows Jobim in the desert. conveying solitude while serving as an invitation to the listener to slow down and listen to the void that surrounds us.
New Audio: El Paso’s oKMark Shares Swooning “Sin Tu Permiso”
El Paso-based outfit OkMark crafts an analog synth-driven take on space rock and psych rock, anchored by their frontman Marco’s deeply personal lyricism.
Their latest single “Sin Tu Permiso” is a brooding bit of lo-fi-like psych pop that seemingly channels JOVM mainstays Tame Impala and Kainalu but anchored around a swooning, desperate heartache and unease. The song captures a narrator, who’s paralyzed by their own fear in the face of an unbelievably difficult situation.
The band’s frontman explains that he wrote the song for anyone, who has wanted to leave a relationship but couldn’t — not because of their partners but because of what they would be leaving behind.
“I started working on the music on a Shinkansen train in Japan using an OP-1, building upon minor chords that already carried that weight of melancholy,” he explains. “The production reflects this: a Moog bassline [sic] at 90 BPM, dense layers of dark synthesizers, and vocals that crack at the emotional peak. It is dark electronica infused with the intensity of the Mexican bolero.”
New Video: A!MS Teams Up with ZieZie, Ramz, Lillz, and leon & Brodie on Swaggering “Wait What”
A!MS is an emerging and rising Ayia Napa, Cyprus-based artist, who has received international attention for a sound that he has dubbed “Global Street,” which is informed by his multicultural background and blends hip-hop’s spirit, street culture, global sounds, and digital-era creativity. He sees this new, hybrid sub-genre as a home for artists beyond traditional scenes, and as a way to unite voices from overlooked corners of the globe with a “as street, as it is worldwide” ethos.
The Cyprus-based artist’s sophomore album, last year’s Peak Season includes the Antaeus-produced “Light & Love,” feat. Julian Marley and Hypertone, the Golden Boy-produced Stjge co-written “Need Somebody” feat. UK-based rapper ArrDee, and the album’s latest single “Wait What?” features a collection of rising British emcees ZieZie, Ramz, Lillz, and Leon & Brodie. Clocking in at a little under two-and-a-half minutes, the song showcases each artist’s unique energy and distinct flows over a slick, hook-driven trap-meets-grime production, which features a looping, fluttering flute sample paired with bursts of twinkling keys, skittering, tweeter and woofer rattling triplets.
While anchored around an All-Star cast of up-and-comers, along with an established veteran, “Wait What” showcases the UK scene’s remarkable talent to a global audience hungering for new talent outside of North America.
Directed by WALKMNS, the accompanying video for “Wait What” is shot in a gorgeous, cinematic black and white and is split between footage of the artists performing at a festival and hanging out at what looks like a mix of suburban hotel, house, and mall.
Lyric Video: EYRE LLEW Returns with Cinematic “Bloom”
Initially conceived as a studio project back in 2014, Nottingham, UK-based trio EYRE LLEW — Sam Heaton (vocals, guitar), Jack Clark (drums, piano) and Jack Bennett (guitar, piano) — have developed and honed a sound that meshes elements of shoegaze, post rock and dream pop and channels influences like Sigur Rós, Frightened Rabbit, Bon Iver and The National into cinematic, emotionally overwhelming soundscapes.
2017’s debut album, Atelo was released to widespread critical acclaim with the album landing at #25 on Drowned in Sound‘s Top 100 Albums List of 2017.
During that same period, the Nottingham-based trio also established themselves as a compelling live act, playing over 300 independently booked shows across 23 countries, including sold-out shows across their native UK, the European Union, Latvia, Lithuania and Asia. Adding to a growing profile, the trio made the rounds of the national festival circuit playing sets at Glastonbury‘s John Peel Stage, The Great Escape, Dot to Dot, FOCUS Wales, Y Not Festival, Ritual Union, Rockaway Beach, Alternative Escape, Handmade, Glastonbury’s Shagrai La, Icebreaker, Perth Music Expo, 110 Above, Beat The Streets, Splendour, Riverside, On The Waterfront, Farm Fest, A Carefully Planned, Hockley Hustle, and others. Internationally, they’ve played sets at Singapore’s Music Matters, Taiwan’s Beastie Rock, South Korea’s Zandari Festa, Germany’s Umsonst Und Dresden, France’s FIMU, Belgium’s Fifty Lab, Sweden’s Future Echoes, Lithuania’s Zagare Fringe Festival and What’s Next In Music, Hungary’s HOTS Outbreakers Lab, Latvia’s Riga Music Week, Estonia’s POFF Shorts, Poland’s Seazone Music Festival and Conference and SpaceFest.
EYRE LLEW’s highly-anticipated sophomore album Bloom is slated for a September 18, 2026 release through Penance Music Group. The new album is deeply informed and influenced by pandemic-enforced quarantines and lockdowns.
For the bulk of their time as a band, they defined themselves by seemingly constant motion: Cities blurred into one another. Border crossings were routine. Their lives revolved around airports, late night drives, ferry ports, backstage rooms, festival fields, hotel corridors and long-distance journeys. As a touring band, success, such as it exists, was often measured in miles traveled, crowd size and momentum developed and sustained.
They kept moving because that’s how it always was. As countless touring bands would view it, slowing down would mean — on some level, at least — slowed momentum. And stopping would mean accepting failure, when “making it” seemed to be just within their grasp.
Much like countless other touring acts across the globe, the pandemic managed to dismantle their trajectory. That relentless forward motion that had shaped their identity for the better part of a decade just suddenly stopped. Tours vanished. Plans dissolved. The result was an uneasy silence. Understandably, for the trio, it was devastating.
But in the stillness, something else emerged for the band — space: The space to rest, reflect, recover, feel and importantly, to make different choices. The band made a quieter, more human recalibration, shifting away from survival to towards sustainability. Rather than constantly feeling that they had to prove something, they moved towards building something — and choosing meaning over the endless chase of momentum.
The result was Bloom. Written during lockdown and the subsequent years, the album is about several things simultaneously: presence, the love that feels like home, stillness as strength, devotion without spectacle, grief without melodrama, healing without performative optimism, growth that happens slowly, privately and honestly.
Whereas their previously released material was frequently defined by scale and endurance, Bloom‘s material is defined by intimacy and grounding. Its songs are built from small moments rather than big, grand statements. It’s about choosing to stay. Not just in relationships but in places, in moments, in emotions and in identity.
The shift in the band’s approach, fittingly led to a shift in their sound. While the album’s material continues to carry the vastness they’re known for, it lives alongside of a sense fragility and restraint. Instead of actively attempting to overwhelm the listener, the band is trying to meet the listener where they are right now.
The album will include the previously released “Miningsby” and the album’s second single, album title track “Bloom.” While being incredibly cinematic, “Bloom” captures the contented sigh of a hard-won, well-deserved intimacy, describing the couple at the core of the song as flowers blooming, which is remarkably fitting for the season.
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New Audio: Dominque and the Diamonds Share Heartbreakingly Gorgeous “I Don’t Mind”
Led by Colombian-American frontwoman Dominque Gomez, Los Angeles-based country band Dominique and the Diamonds can trace their origins back to 2024: the band came together on a whim, after Gomez was asked to perform a country set at the local summertime concert series The Grand Ole Echo.
Friends from cosmic country outfit Caravan 222 and rock band Triptides were recruited to play as Gomez’s backing band, and over the course of the subsequent year started to gain attention locally for a sound that seemingly channeled Linda Ronstadt, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Townes Van Zandt and the Laurel Canyon sound — but with a contemporary feel.
The Los Angeles-based outfit’s Glenn Brigman-produced full-length studio debut album Honky Tonk Queen is slated for a June 26, 2026 release. Recorded at Crestline, CA-based Skyforest Sound, the group tracked the album’s material on tape with a Tascam 388 and then mixed digitally, offering that old-timey/classic grit while being remarkably modern. “The recording sessions for Honky Tonk Queen had such a family vibe to them,” Brigman says. “The band would leave the city behind and trek up to my cabin in the mountains where we recorded on tape, built fires, listened to Grateful Dead records, drank wine… I even made some homemade country biscuits for breakfast just to make sure we had all the vibes dialed in properly. And of course we celebrated after the last session with a night out at the local mountain saloon.”
Brigman is also heavily featured on every song playing a variety of vintage Rhoes, Wurlitzer, piano, Mellotron, organ and some lead guitar, making Brigman the unofficial fifth member of the band.
Honky Tonk Queen reportedly sees the Los Angeles-based quartet summoning the spirt of 1970s Sunset Strip and Laurel Canyon, weaving vintage-era country storytelling with shimmering, reverb-kissed pedal steel and gorgeous harmonies and melodies. While their sound openly and lovingly draws from the likes of The Flying Burrito Brothers, Exile from Main Street-era Stones, Harvest-era Neil Young and Townes Van Zandt, the album’s material never feels imitative; in fact, the band reinterprets those influences through a distinctly contemporary lens in which dreamy and cosmic textures meet down-to-earth, lived-in storytelling.
Fittingly, the album is the product of Dominique Gomez’s comfortably poised footing as a California-based country artist. “I’m a vocalist first. But I grew up singing all kinds of genres, country being one of them. In my younger days, I couldn’t really decide on which one I wanted to pursue more because I just loved it all,” Gomez says. As a working songwriter, who has worked in the worlds of sync and music libraries since 2020, the Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter found strength and reassurance in country. “I’ve always written different types of songs; soul, pop, rock, country, R&B, blues, etc. But I kept getting hired to write more and more country songs,” she recalls. This helped pushed Gomez to dive deeper within country, and the release of the band’s debut will mark one of many milestones in her career.
Representation is central to the album. The Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter is proudly Latina and she carries that identity into every performance. Her visibility and leadership are deeply intentional: to create a space where her community feels safe, seen and accepted in a genre that admittedly has a troubled history and is still evolving — albeit sometimes, slower than it should. ““I had my hesitations of getting involved in country music for many reasons, but being a daughter of Colombian immigrants was by far the biggest reason why I didn’t think I would fit in. I’m half white and half Colombian but very Latina presenting.”
But as the band progressed and began to build a fanbase, she quickly realized how important her role was, “Connecting with our fans on tour is what really did it for me. In Sacramento, I had a girl come up to me after the show and tell me, ‘I love country music but I don’t feel safe in those spaces being Latina. Because of you, I feel safe to love it now,'” Gomez recalls. “Representation matters and I hope to continue to deliver safety and inclusion to everyone who comes to our shows or listens to our music.” Though the band sounds nostalgic, they’re also a promise — that classic country can expand its circle, embrace new voices and still honor the soulful and gritty roots that inspired it.
Honky Tonk Queen‘s latest single, album title track “I Don’t Mind” is a classic country-styled ballad that showcases some gorgeous, shimmering pedal steel, Gomez’s mesmerizing delivery and her lived-in, story-as-song driven songwriting rooted in a mix of heartache, uncertainty, hope and gratitude.
“I moved to LA in 2021 for music, but the entire reason I ended up in southern CA in the first place was from fleeing a dangerous relationship in the Bay Area,” Gomez recalls. “I didn’t want to leave West Marin. I was heartbroken over that, not so much the relationship itself. I had plans of making it back to that small coastal town I lived in, but when I found out my ex had planted roots there, I knew it wouldn’t be safe for me to go back.” Though Gomez’s heart will always live in that small town, she also knew that Los Angeles had much bigger plans for her
“Moving to LA was the best decision of my life. Yes, what I had experienced was terrible, but unfortunately, I don’t think I would have ended up here if I hadn’t gone through it all. There would be no Dominique and the Diamonds, no songwriting opportunities, no touring. This incredible, dream-like life that I live now because of this project would have never existed. So in the end, I don’t mind that my ex took that old dream away from me. This is exactly where I’ve always wanted to be all along.”
New Audio: Copenhagen’s Bending Backwards Shares Yearning “i See You From Here”
Copenhagen-based trio Bending Backwards — Frederik Blæsild Vuust (vocals), Halfdan Stefansson (guitar) and Johannes Østlund Jacobsen (drums) — specialize in a distinctly contemporary take on alternative rock that sees sees the trio moving fluidly between dream pop, shoegaze, grunge post-punk, noise rock and folk.
Thematically, the Danish trio’s work touches upon recurring and uneasy dichotomies: the longing for home and stability and the pull of the outside world, and intimacy and disorientation. Their work also touches on love, especially between siblings, as well as reflections on distance, memory and everyday tenderness. Lyrically, Blæslid Vuust’s lyrics draw on a wide range of literary influences and references, including biblical passages, the work of T.S. Eliot, László Kraszenahhorkai and more.
As part of Copenhagen’s experimental and alternative music scenes, a loosely connected network of band and artists including the Movement Shaped Like A Heart Collective.
The trio’s latest single “I See You From Here” is also the first single off their full-length debut still and quiet, brother, are you still and quiet. Sonically channelling a synthesis of brooding post punk, indie rock and folk featuring Blæsid Vuust’s achingly tender, vulnerable delivery ethereally floating over the arrangement, “I See You From Here” describes the push and pull of an new relationship between two dysfunctional, deeply human people,
Bending Backwards describes the song as beginning with “the image of an apartment in Berlin . . . and a large park just down the road,” where two figures are placed within the scene. What follows is loose yet recurring sequences of events: They meet. They sit in the apartment just down the road rom the park .They took a walk in the park, then separate and return. The song captures that seemingly endless push and pull.
Throwback: Happy 60th Birthday, Too Short!
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New Video: Atsuko Chiba Returns with Two New Singles Off Just Released Fourth Album
Montréal-based outfit Atsuko Chiba — Karim Lakhdar (vocals, guitar, synths), Kevin McDonald (synths, guitar), Eric Schafhauser (guitar, synths), David Palumbo (bass, bass VI, vocals) and Anthony Piazza (drums, electronic drums, percussion) — have firmly established a sound that’s a cohesive and hypnotic blend of post-rock, prog and krautock paired with offbeat songwriting through the release of 2013’s Jinn, 2019’s Trace and 2023’s Water, It Feels Like It’s Growing.
The Montréal-based quintet’s self-titled fourth album was released last Friday through Mothland. The album sees the band rethinking their sound and approach, drawing inspiration from Mark Lanegan, Beak>, Talk Talk, Can and Portishead, all while retaining elements of their long-established post-punk fueled psychedelia.
Though the band has been introducing more vocals and lyrics with every subsequent release, their fourth album sees the band further wielding vocals and lyrics as a well to delve deeper into their intrinsic meta. The result is an album that’s one-part gritty post-rock and one-part intimate hymn to self-reflection with its moodiness amplifying a communal desire to eschew recurrent patterns for the sake of comfort, approval and longevity.
The band decided upon a freeform creative process, which could only be achieved by pursuing a hands-on approach, and with each member sharing the roles of engineer and producer,
“Overall, Atsuko Chiba is an exercise in patience and restraint. The mood of the album is melancholic, at times feeling optimistic, while other times feeling almost hopeless—there’s a sense of loss and disconnect, but also a glimmer of hope,” the band explains. “It is the most vulnerable and stripped down music we have ever made. It is a departure from the aggressive and distorted guitar sound we’ve relied on over the years. We also chose to make it a self-titled record which is something we battled with. We went with Atsuko Chiba because its overarching themes relate to us in a deep way. The material on this album presents itself as a mosaic of our interests and experiences as a band. We let the music guide us every step of the way, never forcing our will upon it, instead paying attention to what it was telling us and what we could do to further support it.
At first, we would come into the studio without a plan, just playing and recording the entire time, with no pressure as to a specific outcome: free jams during which we were just generating grooves, parts, and moments that felt good to us. We also put limitations, cutting out certain instruments from session to session, opening us to new options and pathways, generating new sound palettes. A lot of attention was put into creating space and holding back from always going for big epic moments. We focussed on keeping things simple and using dynamics to create exciting moments instead of relying on loud guitars to get us there. This album features a lot of auxiliary percussion, synthesizers, and keyboards, and places a strong emphasis on vocals. We explored acoustic guitars and created many custom percussive sounds by layering two or three sources together, also programming rhythms using samplers and drum machines.”
The album includes the previous released album opening track “Retention” “Torn” and its two latest single “Pretense” and “Future Ways,” which sequentially follow each other on the new album. “Pretense” is a brooding yet lush and melodic mediation on loss and grief, seemingly rooted in the lived-in experience of losing someone dear. Anchored around a motorik groove, “Future Ways” is a mind-bending, krautrock-inspired bit of psych rock that feels both uneasy and urgent simultaneously. “Future Ways” is meant to evoke invasive thoughts racing through one’s mind, as they attempt to make sense of foreseen tragedy. Impassioned vocals dance and dart around fuzzy and distortion pedaled guitars and glistening synth arpeggios, leading to the song’s coda and uplifting mantra: Go wild/Stay Forward/Going up . .
“’Pretense’ confronts loss and my perspective on an impossible situation with someone deeply close to me. It traces a profound depression, a daily struggle to remain alive, shaped by the belief that something inside was irrevocably broken, beyond diagnosis or repair,” Atsuko Chiba’s Karim Lakhdar explains. “‘Wanted out, couldn’t wait‘ echoes his constant proximity to the idea of ending it. Life felt unbearably tense, with no center to return to. He had a brilliant mind, always in motion—always an answer, always a reason—yet never at rest. In the end, I am left standing before the grave, realizing this is not something you move on from. It stays with you. I am not okay… I’m only learning new ways to carry it. That day, I lost someone irreplaceable: a friend, a brother, a mentor, a fellow cosmonaut.
“’Future Ways’ is intrinsically linked to ‘Pretense,'” Lakhdar continues. “They were initially conceived as a single piece. The title feels inevitable: this is life after death. It asks how we continue, how we carry what has already happened. ‘This light, it grows in spite of you‘ speaks to taking what I learned from him and using it as forward motion. In this sense, he never fully disappears, he continues through me. I learned how to listen, how to see, how to approach life and music from shifting vantage points, to question, to push beyond what is given. The second verse reflects how, even in moments of profound despair, he remained deeply charismatic, silver-tongued to the point that I believed everything he said. He predicted what would happen, how he would be seen, how people would respond. There was a rare coexistence of hysteria and startling clarity, and through it all I am left confused, powerless, unable to intervene. In the third verse, a mantra repeats as a way of keeping spirits up. It’s a commitment to forward motion. It becomes a reminder that life is still here, still unfolding, and that I must remain an active participant in it, careful not to disappear into the weight of what was lost.”
The accompanying visual features footage of the band in the studio goofing during the writing and recording process and during candid moments while on tour and outside of beloved local venue L’Esco.
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New Video: Sugar World Shares Buzzy “Terra Incognita”
Los Angeles-based duo Sugar World — Ryan and Katryn Stanley — can trace its origins back to 2013: The duo started their careers in earnest a member of the Tallahassee-based bedroom pop outfit Naps. After Naps split up in 2016, Ryan and Katryn Stanley started releasing a series of singles and EP as Sugar World, which saw the pair crafting a sound that’s an idiosyncratic mix of lo-fi, twee pop and fuzzy electronica.
The duo released their Sugar World full-length debut, Lost & Found back in 2022. But since 2024, the Los Angeles-based duo have been increasingly exploring a more digital sound that draws from noise pop, hyper pop and underground internet hip-hop that features fuzzy, distorted guitar noise and blown out autotuned vocals.
Their sophomore album supercassettevision is slated for release later this year. The album, which will include the previously released “In Magazines,” will see the band further cement what they’ve dubbed a “new version of classic twee pop for the 2020s” that combines catchy melodies with harsher noisy elements.
supercassettevision’s second and latest single “Terra Incognita” derives its title from the Latin phrase “unknown land,” and sonically seems to channel a woozily lysergic synthesis of Mogwai and Evil Heat-era Primal Scream. The band explains that the song “was an experiment to see if we could bring our indie rock and jangle pop songwriting into a sonic environment inspired by electronic music and digicore. It’s fundamentally about making a bunch of money and then putting that money into car, and then driving the car off a cliff.”
Fittingly, the accompanying visual is comprised of fuzzy, VHS-style shot footage, treated in harsh color negatives. The result is a video that videos the lysergic buzz of the song.