By : Josh Kitchen / October 30, 2026 Photo Credt : Jacob Boll The sound of Sam Burton's voice greets you like an old friend. It's warm and familiar, at times mournful and wistful, timeless and assured. Burton has been crooning his folk ballads and spinning his country-tinged songs for the better part of a decade now, his first two records, I Can Go with You and Dear Departed, showcasing his fine songwriting skills and picking talents, and establishing him as one of the seemin

By : Josh Kitchen / October 21, 2026 Photo Credit : Casey Pflipsen I first met Emily Bjorke through our mutual love of The Beach Boys. When I was looking for a guest to join us on an episode of Pod Only Knows: A Beach Boys Podcast, I came across a musician who described herself in her bio as a "walking Brian Wilson encyclopedia." Naturally, I had to reach out. As it turns out, Emily wasn't exaggerating, telling me she ownsabout five vinyl copies of the Surfer Girl album, whic

By : Josh Kitchen / October 9, 2026 Photo Credit : Maggie Barger Syd Taylor dropped the deluxe edition of her shimmering debut album, After the Fact, today, and in addition to the original album, it features two new songs, “Movie Star” and “Red Light,” both of which are so good you might find it criminal that they didn't make the standard edition. They're two songs in which Taylor once again gives us a glimpse into her heart and soul. On “Red Light,” she grapples with her own

By: Josh Kitchen / October 9, 2026 Photo Credit : Harry Eelman Alex and Zach James of Twin Temple have been brewing demonically inspired rock and roll for nearly a decade now, but there's no denying that they're having a moment. Coining the genre "satanic doo-wop," the duo found themselves at the center of a wave of attention this past summer following a highly publicized tour shake-up, when self-proclaimed "outlaw $10 cowboy" Charley Crockett kicked them off his tour after d

By : Josh Kitchen / September 21, 2026 Photo Credit : Alain Bibb Scout Gillett is pulling a Neil Young and currently occupying her days rockin’ in the free world. The Kansas City-born, New York-forged songwriter has spent years occupying just about every corner of independent music, whether making her own records, DJing, touring or booking shows for other artists through Road Dog Booking. Since relocating to Los Angeles, Gillett has been finding her place in yet another music

By : Josh Kitchen / September 18, 2026 Photo Credit : Garvin Kelly Every time I listen to Strawberry Hands’ new album, A Jazz Blessing for the Animal, I feel like I’ve come out of a different dream. Like a reflection in a river or pool, there’s much to glean from the latest project from Strawberry Hands, the stage name of Philadelphia multi-artist Jacob Brunner, both intentionally and perhaps not. What keeps me coming back is how the record seems to change and evolve with eac

By : Josh Kitchen / September 18, 2026 Photo Credit : Karmen Smith Athens, Georgia duo Hotel Fiction are entering their next chapter with “Cold Cold Heart,” their first taste of new music following this year’s deluxe edition of their 2024 sophomore album, Staring at the Sun. It arrives just ahead of a full-circle Shaky Knees homecoming for Jade Ireland and Jessica Thompson, whose friendship has deepened alongside their songwriting and become inseparable from the music they ma

By : Zach Adler / September 15, 2026 Photo Credit : Jacqui Miller The last time Lucy Dacus took the stage at the Hollywood Bowl, she was still taking it all in. The Halloween blowout to Boygenius’ triumphant 2023 tour—where Dacus was dressed in the visage of God themselves and even the Bowl managed to get dressed up with devil horns—was the first time she’d ever been to the venue. It was understandable. Unlike hometown hero Phoebe Bridgers, Dacus and bandmate/romantic partner

The “Rose of Appalachia” on her stunning sophomore album, the art-life, and freedom in motion By : Josh Kitchen / September 11, 2026 Photo Credit : Avery Norman “Sometimes the comfortable things didn’t actually make me happy or help me expand,” Angela Autumn told me ahead of the release of her sophomore album, Believer—out today from Gar Hole Records. The Western (Zelienople) Pennsylvania-born singer-songwriter, now based in Nashville, has been bubbling up with her twangy, hy

By : Josh Kitchen / September 9, 2026 Photo Credit : MACAMI What if, after going through a breakup, you not only had to sit with your feelings of heartbreak, confusion, pain, and denial, but also decided to share those feelings with millions of people? And what if, to really drive the point home, you put actual voice memos from your former partner on the record itself, allowing the audience to sit with you in those feelings of introspection, memory, and loss? An insane way to

By : Josh Kitchen / September 4, 2026 Photo Credit : Adam Alonzo “In the desert you can catch a big break / I lift a rock and see a rattlesnake,” Hannah Cole sings on the lead single, “MMA,” off her debut full-length album, Switchbacks. It’s a punishing track, recalling the heaviest shoegaze tracks of the ’90s, with Cole using the metaphor of gambling in Las Vegas for the ugly parts of the music industry that can make an artist throw in the towel. It's a visceral idea that

By : Josh Kitchen / August 21, 2026 “You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane / All they will call you will be deportees,” Ken Pomeroy sings in her cover of Woody Guthrie’s righteous indictment of the treatment of migrants and immigrants in America. Pomeroy, the 23-year-old Oklahoma native, has been cropping up on everybody’s lists of the best new singer-songwriters since the release of her 2025 album Cruel Joke, with her songs “Cicadas” and “Pareidolia” appearing

By : Josh Kitchen / August 20, 2026 Photo Credit : Max Flick In Ram Dass’ seminal work on meditation, yoga, and spirituality, Be Here Now, he wrote, “The human mind is like that monkey, incessantly active by its own nature.” This idea, known as the “monkey mind,” in Buddhist terminology describes a restless, unfocused state of mind, where thoughts jump rapidly from branch to branch. It’s within this framework that Pearl & The Oysters’ sixth album, appropriately titled Monkey

By : Josh Kitchen / August 14, 2026 Photo Credit : Max Flick Dent May has been baring it all for almost 20 years, his music existing in that beautiful space between melancholy and hopeful bliss. With a voice that’ll tickle the part of your brain that gives you goosebumps, and often playing multiple, if not all, of the instruments on his albums, May has become that special kind of artist who can tap into the nostalgia his listeners love to surround themselves in while still ex

By : Josh Kitchen / August 14, 2026 Photo Credit : Jeff Andersen Jnr. Much has already been said about Grace Cummings’s voice—and, in this author’s opinion, you could never cease in the attempt, because no earthly word could ever do it justice. The only way I can begin to make sense of it is to declare it tempestuous—a hurricane, a monsoon, some kind of calamitous and biblical act of God. When you look at Grace Cummings, it’s not a voice you might expect, but like the childho

By : Josh Kitchen / August 13, 2026 Photo Credit : Michael Newsted “I can see the future. It’s full of pals.” Those prescient words were spoken by Tim Robinson in his 2025 dark comedy Friendship, about a man who so desperately craves friendship that he’ll sacrifice all social norms in pursuit of it. It’s a heightened take on how difficult finding and securing real human connection has become for so many of us. For Johanna Samuels, the future really is full of pals. On her new

By : Josh Kitchen / August 12, 2026 Photo Credit : Lukas Sunderlin Listening to Martha Reeves talk about her first album in over twenty years, the excellent set of new gospel, jazz, funk, and R&B songs that span 11 tracks over 40 minutes, it’s impossible not to feel just as excited as she is. She’s calling from her home in Detroit, and she tells me there are rain clouds in the sky. We need the rain, she says. I think of the Temptations classic “I Wish It Would Rain.” The Temp

By : Josh Kitchen / August 11, 2026 Photo Credit : Silken Weinberg These lyrics are how Nina Winder-Lind begins a final tribute to all of the women who came before her on “Foremothers,” the explosive and transcendent closer of her debut album, Wild Love, out on Friday. In a thunderous crash of electric guitar solos, Winder-Lind puts a final mark on the themes she has been singing about throughout a record about the ways in which we, as human beings, owe everything not only to

By: Josh Kitchen / August 10, 2026 Photo Credit : Athen Smith After ten years of burning down the road, Daisy the Great are at a point in their careers where they’re feeling the communal love of artistry. After last year’s great record, Rubber Teeth Talk, Daisy the Great, led by former classmates and now creative partners Kelley Dugan and Mina Walker, return with a new version of the record—but unlike a normal deluxe edition, it’s so much more than that. The Rubber Teeth Talk

By : Josh Kitchen / August 7, 2026 Photo Credit: Frank Ockenfels There's a moment toward the beginning of Phoebe Bridgers' new album Lost Weekend, where, after slowly reemerging from the proverbial Hobbit-hole she's been living in for the past few years, an ominous yet itchingly familiar male voice begins droning after a truly epic, Christopher Nolan The Odyssey-decibal level bass drop, followed by a fleeting guitar solo—a micro-epic of pent-up fury, cut short before it can f