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 : 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

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 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 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 / July 23, 2026 "Second wind, fill my sails and carry me again into the night / I will not be giving up the fight," Dent May sings on "Second Wind," the latest single from his upcoming seventh album, The Big One. It's another superbly polished and expertly crafted pop tune ahead of the album's release on August 14, but its optimism isn't immediate. In the new video for "Second Wind," May quite literally dances his way to salvation. "The song itself takes you

By : Josh Kitchen / June 29, 2026 Photo Credit: Ryan Faist fans who've come to know you and enjoy how you think about—and share your love of pop music have been really blessed by this record. I think at my core, I'm always going to be a punk and hardcore kid, really. So I think, try as I might, that's always going to be there, and I'm happy about that. Finding that music when I was younger changed my life in a very positive way. I met my best friends and family that way, so t

By : Josh Kitchen / June 26, 2026 Photo Credit: Josh & Kathryn Brolin Atta Boy have been at this a while. The Los Angeles-based quintet consisting of Eden Brolin (guitar/vocals), Dashel Thompson (keyboards), Freddy Reish (guitar/bass), and Lewis Pullman (drums) met in middle school, bonding over the albums they were obsessed with before discovering they had something special when they started jamming together. On their fourth album, Silt, Atta Boy dig through a lifetime of sh

“This one really feels like the truest version of me.” By : Josh Kitchen / June 26, 2026 Photo Credit : Dana Trippe Susannah Joffe has been building toward this her whole life. Growing up in Texas, she spent weekends tagging along with her parents to folk and country open mic nights in the Hill Country, soaking up the sounds of singers belting Tammy Wynette and Willie Nelson covers before she was even in the first grade. But when she moved to New York to pursue music, she tri

By: Josh Kitchen / June 12, 2026 Photo Credit: Lucy Black “When we sort of unlocked that we could do it better together, and liked doing it together, that felt like discovering treasure for the first time,” Maia Ciambriello tells me of her and Sasha Goldberg's songwriting partnership. Ciambriello and Goldberg have known each other since childhood, but they've been writing music together since college under the name The Army, The Navy. Like members of a tactical unit, they've

By: Josh Kitchen / June 10, 2026 Photo Credit: Sandra Ebert On the title track of their debut album, Johnny's Dreamworld, Sophie Harris—lead singer and songwriter of London four-piece Modern Woman—draws listeners into a world suspended between fantasy and reality. Slippery, tense, and propelled by a hypnotic groove, the song unfolds with a slow-motion swagger that's mysterious as it is unsettling. Across the album's nine tracks and 33-minute runtime, frenetic guitar solos abo