By : Josh Kitchen / June 5, 2026 Photo Credit : Bảo Ngô I often liken artists with long careers and dozens of albums to the life of a tree—you get to watch them grow and change. Sometimes they lose a branch here and there, but the ones that stand the longest often bear the sweetest fruit. Today, of Montreal release their 20th album, Aethermead, and witnessing Kevin Barnes guide the band through enough transformations to fill several careers—while constantly reinventing both

By: Josh Kitchen / May 28, 2026 Photo Credit: Rachel Briggs “Simpleton is about attempting optimism in a world that feels increasingly hard to be optimistic about,” says Ryan Kaiser of Yot Club. But, he goes on to say, “No matter how soulless and bleak the modern world can feel, people still manage to carve out meaningful lives and create beautiful things.” That idea — a hopeful refusal to simply accept the world for what it is — sits at the core of Yot Club’s third, and fine

By: Josh Kitchen , May 21, 2026 Kid Sistr - American Teenage Prophecy Talking about “American Teenage Prophecy,” off their new EP of the same name, Kid Sistr “imagines a world where queer love is as natural as breathing.” It’s a sentiment that sounds obvious, but still feels quietly radical — a subtle form of protest woven into so many artists’ visions of an equitable society. Comprised of New York natives bassist Sara Keden, guitarist Sabel Englert, and drummer Becca Webster

By: Josh Kitchen / May 18, 2026 Photo Credit: Nicole Busch Much has changed in the 13 years since Big Harp released an album. While Stefanie Drootin and Chris Senseney, who play together as Big Harp, haven’t put out new music together in that time, Stefanie and Chris have both stayed busy making music, touring, and starting a family. But the root of what makes Big Harp so good is the real love between them — something that, in talking to them, feels elemental. Like it has alw

By: Josh Kitchen / May 15, 2026 “Guitar pick in my pocket at the marketing all-hands,” Nymphlord sings on “Garden,” the opening track on her debut album Shedding Velvet, out today on Lauren Records. Anyone who’s ever sat through one of those corporate “all-hands” meetings — the office colloquialism for a company-wide staff meeting — knows that if you’re in one too long, there comes a point where it can feel like your soul is slowly being vacuumed out of your body. It’s a line

By: Josh Kitchen / May 7, 2026 Photo Credit: Connie Swift “That became my mantra,” girli’s Milly Toomey told me earlier this spring ahead of the release of her new album It’s Just My Opinion, out tomorrow. girli has quietly become one of the most exciting alt-pop voices to emerge from the North London scene in years, crafting self-aware, genre-defying, in-your-face anthems packed with massive hooks, while never shying away from messages of advocacy, acceptance, and the transf

By: Josh Kitchen / May 1, 2026 Photo by: Simone Niamani Thompson Larena and Elysse Winn are no strangers to the act of radical reclamation—whether it be of their identities, their psyches, their physical bodies, their sexuality, their shame, or their very conception of reality and truth. Growing up as the youngest of eleven children, identical twins Larena and Elysse had each other within their strict Mormon family. Raised in Missoula, Montana, the Winn sisters learned early

By: Josh Kitchen / April 23, 2026 Photo Credit: Charlie Weinmann On White Denim’s 13th studio album, simply titled 13, James Petralli is reflecting on this crazy thing called life. I’m talking to Petralli over Zoom, and while I’m cooped up in my apartment, he’s in a comfy lounge chair in his backyard, his pup Sergio by his side. It’s beautiful in LA—I can see it out my window—but Petralli is the luckier one of us right now. And if he looks lucky, you can rest assured there’s

By: Josh Kitchen / March 27, 2026 Photo Credit: Rosie Sco Sitting across from Felix Mackenzie-Barrow and Tiger Cohen-Towell of Nottingham band Divorce, you wouldn’t know they had just wrapped an interview with Sir Elton John, who told them their debut record, Drive to Goldenhammer , currently sits as Disc 1 in his five-disc CD player at home. The band is about to play the first Los Angeles show of their career, fresh off support dates with Sam Smith in San Francisco — a city

By: Josh Kitchen / March 20, 2026 Photo Credit : Studio Förgätmigej It’s rare that a debut record sounds like a band already a few albums in, but that’s what Girl Scout’s Brink feels like. Across the record, from the three-piece Swedish act—comprised of Emma Jansson (guitar, vocals), Per Lindberg (drums), and Kevin Hamring (guitar/bass)—there’s a real sense of confidence in how it’s contained, from the way it opens (literally with a track called “Intro”) to the way it closes.

By: Josh Kitchen / March 13, 2026 L-R: Cathal McKenna, Daniel "Lango" Lang, Gary "Snakeskin" Regan, Conor "Dock" Dockery Photo Credit: Evan Doherty “So rise up I say but ye can’t! You're as flat as a snake’s bollocks!” It’s the kind of line that perfectly captures The Scratch — cheeky, proudly Irish, and delivered with the kind of self-assurance that only comes from a band fully comfortable in its own skin. The Dublin group sing it on their new

By: Josh Kitchen / March 11, 2026 Photo Credit: Dean Chalkley “Trixies was our gold bar that we found in a rubbish tip,” Squeeze founding member Glenn Tilbrook told me, rediscovering his and fellow Squeeze founding member Chris Difford’s first songwriting venture together — the rock opera Trixies . In it, each song tells a different story set in a fictional, but not too distantly recognizable nightclub — one that could exist in any big city, with rainy puddles reflecting neon

By: Josh Kitchen / March 5, 2026 Photo Credit: Raz Azraai // @dancefloormurder On their new album, Reality Star — their best one yet — Surfbort want you to have a good time. They also want you to throw fists and middle fingers up to the government. They want you to eat a hot dog. They want you to dance, make out with someone, touch some grass, or even bake a pie. What all these things have in common is the revolutionary ideas behind them. In our current barrage of fascist Tru

By: Josh Kitchen / February 26, 2026 Photo Credit: Sam Angeletti Jack Rutter, aka Ritt Momney, hasn’t released new music since 2021’s excellent Sunny Boy — that is, until he surprise-dropped the chill and vibey, “GUNNA” at the end of January this year. The five-year gap isn’t due to not wanting to create, however. Disillusioned by the capitalistic and oppressive demands of the modern record industry, Momney fell out of love with making music. It started to feel more like a j

By: Josh Kitchen / February 24, 2026 Photo Credit: Logan White “ I’m drastic / I’m magic / You know this / You see it / I move you ,” Bella Litsa sings on “My Blue Eyes,” a centerpiece off her aptly titled debut album Drasticism . The track builds slowly, Litsa pondering the mysteries of love, her voice rich and cloaked in a masterful Auto-Tune glow reminiscent of Caroline Polachek. At the midpoint, the song transforms into something else entirely, abruptly erupting into a f

By: Josh Kitchen / February 19, 2026 Photo Credit: El Hardwick “I love you, I love you, I’ve known you forever / Your fire was and always will be / I learned your name but missed its meaning / When I didn’t know how to feel / Can’t wait to meet you for the first time again,” Rhode Island–born singer-songwriter Tyler Ballgame croons on the title track that opens his debut album of the same name, For the First Time, Again. It’s a tender ballad that gives the listener the first

By: Josh Kitchen with camera assistance from: Giselle Libby / February 10, 2025 I’m sitting across from absurdist singer-songwriter Dev Lemons in one of the newest smash burger restaurants in Los Angeles — the futuristic, alien UFO–styled Burger 3000. Lemons is wearing a meat suit and meat beret — literally a full-body costume resembling a human muscular system, her eyes and mouth only visible through cut holes in the face. Sitting next to her is Abby Kenna, a fellow singer-

By: Josh Kitchen / February 3, 2026 Photo courtesy of Shintaro Sakamoto Anyone who has followed Shintaro Sakamoto’s career over the years knows that when he releases new music, they’re in for a truly inventive and exploratory sonic listening experience. From his early days in the highly influential psych-rock band Yura Yura Teikoku, to his solo work, which began in 2011, Sakamoto’s whimsical style and philosophical curiosities make his music all the more rich and infectious.

By: Josh Kitchen / February 2, 2026 Photo Credit: Marlowe Ostara On Death in the Business of Whaling , the sophomore album from Searows ’ Alec Duckart, the insular, muted bedroom-pop intimacy that defined his excellent debut Guard Dog is cast far deeper—dragged into the darkest depths of the sea and sealed away in Davy Jones’ locker. In those reaches, Duckart has created a record that feels simultaneously grand and intimate, epic and poetic, drenched in gothic nautical image

By: Josh Kitchen / January 29, 2025 “Songs don’t come that often,” Bruce Springsteen said in 2024, talking about the last time he’d written new material. “I’ve gone two years without writing anything.” This was during promo for his latest documentary, Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band , a film about the band’s first outing together in seven years—their longest break since Springsteen disbanded them in 1988. Springsteen’s last album with the E Street Band, 2020