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L.A. Witch make you yearn for carefree times on the genre shifting Play With...
If it were released in any other year, L.A. Witch’s new Play With Fire would be the perfect album to blast through the car stereo with the wind in your hair while indulging in an adventure with your...
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Zeena Parkins and Jeff Kolar merge electronic sounds with nature on Scale
The new Scale is billed to composer and improvising harpist Zeena Parkins and Chicago sound artist and radio producer Jeff Kolar, but its story involves a larger group of collaborators. In 2017,...
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Spektral Quartet’s Experiments in Living upends the timeline to stake out a...
The through line of Spektral Quartet’s first studio release in four years, Experiments in Living, is that there is no through line—at least on the surface. The double album covers 150 years of...
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Norwegian shapeshifters Ulver remain as literary, elusive, and dark as ever...
Norway’s Ulver debuted in 1993 as a howling black-metal outfit, but since then front man and composer Kristoffer Rygg has steered his ship into such different waters you can hardly say it’s going...
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Deafkids and Petbrick join forces to make subversively twisted psych on...
Music festivals as we’ve known them may be in jeopardy due to a virus, but festival culture keeps on giving: this summer’s bounty includes Deafbrick, the new album by brain-rattling São Paulo...
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Chicago rapper Neph immerses himself in his own verses on More to Come
Chicago MC Neph gets so wrapped up in his verses that I wouldn’t be surprised if recording his performances is an afterthought for him. In fact, on the new EP More to Come, he gently pumps the brakes...
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Kelly Lee Owens’s Inner Song is laser focused and immersive
Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens begins her sophomore album, Inner Song (Smalltown Supersound), with an instrumental cover of Radiohead’s “Arpeggi.” Her version is all about effervescent electronics,...
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Paulette McWilliams’s A Woman’s Story shows why stars have always relied on...
In the early 1970s, singer Paulette McWilliams quit ascending Chicago R&B group Rufus and recommended that her friend, Chaka Khan, take over the lead spot. The decision benefited everyone, even...
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Death-metal powerhouse Necrot show they’re as ferocious in the studio as...
This three-man Oakland death-metal powerhouse formed in 2011 and quickly began releasing appetite-whetting demos and singles, but on their debut full-length, 2017’s Blood Offerings, they proved they...
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Malian guitarist Sidi Touré dials it back on an all-acoustic, digital-only...
Count Sidi Touré among the billions of people around the world who’ve had to revise their plans in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Malian singer-guitarist’s previous album, Toubalbero, was...
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Thank You, I’m Sorry harnesses midwestern emo to conquer unyielding malaise...
Most Americans felt the pinch of chronic financial instability even before COVID-19 aggravated the country’s catastrophic wealth inequality by helping shift billions more dollars into the pockets of a...
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Throwing Muses evolve their version of alt-rock on Sun Racket
Few bands embody the aesthetic of alt-rock as thoroughly as Throwing Muses. Founded in Rhode Island in 1983 by teenage stepsisters Kristin Hersh and Tanya Donelly, the group made moody songs rife with...
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Frank Leone’s hip-hop experiments make for a beautifully bizarre debut album
Rapper-producer Frank Leone grew up in the town of Monticello, just southwest of Champaign, and began taking music seriously after a chance meeting with Vic Mensa at a downstate Lupe Fiasco show in...
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Big Branch make rock music with an underground-rap mindset
On their debut album, Cliff, Chicago duo Big Branch combine warm vocal melodies with kitchen-sink instrumentals inspired by the dusty samples of underground rap. The record’s ramshackle sound recalls...
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Eclectic Chicago-based jazz unit the JuJu Exchange contemplate grief on The...
In a recent interview with the Yale Center for Faith & Culture’s podcast For the Life of the World, pianist Julian Reid described the way mourning informed the thematic underpinnings of The...
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Synth-pop trio Le Couleur explore beauty through tragedy on Concorde
Montreal synth-pop trio Le Couleur delve into some disturbing history on their new album, Concorde, named for the supersonic airliner that in the 1970s made it possible for elite jet-setters to leave...
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Phew’s harrowing synth-and-voice experiments on Vertical KO channel the...
For more than four decades, Hiromi Moritani has been making music by her own rules. She’s largely known for the short-lived art-rock band Aunt Sally, which she started as a teenager in late-70s Osaka,...
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Noise-rock masters Uniform get even bigger, better, and darker on Shame
I’ve spent a lot of Reader ink gushing about Uniform and the previous projects of their members. With the release of their new fourth full-length, Shame, the band’s sonic assault continues—and so does...
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Bill Callahan has a couple dad jokes for you
In 2019 Bill Callahan broke a bout of writer’s block that had lasted more than five years with Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, a 20-song concept record about the satisfactions of family life. Gold...
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Chilean psych group Vuelveteloca highlight the beauty of resistance on Contra
American news media can be frustratingly myopic. But even when mainstream reporting fails to deliver the goods from outside our bubble, the simple act of listening to an album can remind us that we’re...
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