British guitarist Ray Russell has enjoyed a prolific career that is now in its seventh decade. From the late 1960s through the early ’70s he led electric jazz ensembles on a series of iconic jazz fusion albums. He also spent decades as a composer, arranger, and producer on hundreds of sound library sessions, and was a session and touring musician for top-shelf artists including Tina Turner, Cat Stevens, Heaven 17, and Robert Plant.
Russell’s Dangerous Bends is his third album for Cuneiform. Early in 2026 he joined guitarist Nathan Moore and drummer Eddie Prevost on Stacked. On this eight-track set, Russell captures his quintet playing (mostly) live in the studio. He shares the frontline with saxophonist Tim Whitehead, while alternating bassists…
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Musical polymath Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s credits number more than 350 recordings. Whether playing several instruments, composing, arranging, or producing, his work has accompanied Bilal, Shafiq Husayn, Marisa Monte, Ceu, Kandace Springs, and Anderson Paak to name scant few. In 2010, he conducted and arranged an orchestra playing the music of J Dilla on Timeless: Suite for Ma Dukes. In 2023, his Les Jardins Mystiques Vol.1 showcased 52 original compositions on three discs, over three-and-a-half hours. ANATA: Spirit of Coltrane appears on Impulse! during John Coltrane’s centenary celebration. Atwood-Ferguson, who claims the saxophonist as a lifelong influence, served as composer, arranger, violinist, and violist.
During the pandemic, Spanish DJ and producer Oriol Riverola, aka John Talabot, found himself feeling lost. Beyond losing his primary source of income as his tour schedule evaporated, the complete lack of dance floors also left him feeling creatively strained.
He wanted to make energetic, club-ready music to release his pent-up fear about the state of the world — but with no crowded rooms to play those tracks in, the exercise felt futile.
Talabot finds a fascinating middle ground on new album Music for Empty Stadiums, which he produced in the thick of isolation. He keeps the upbeat sounds of huge music events, but splatters them all over the place in a truly beautiful expression of what the producer was…
…Like many of the pioneers who would go on to inspire the genre, Hysterical Love Project are resistant to being boxed in as trip-hop at all. But that doesn’t mean they’re afraid to plunge headfirst into its bassy depths. While the Melbourne-based husband/wife duo of Brooklyn Mellar and Ike Zwanikken deploy a similar bedroomy fusion as the newer artists mentioned above, texturally they’re in much murkier waters.
After a handful of supremely mellow releases that blended lurching ’90s breakbeats with wintry, Mazzy Star-like songwriting, their third album dives into a vat of mercurial distortion and slippery, all-consuming bass. This is still swooning, dejected music designed more for the kick-back than the club, but even with…
…newly remastered and include five bonus tracks: rare single edits, alternate versions, and legendary electronic remixes from the archives.
It was pretty hard to guess what Primal Scream would do with a follow-up to their bombastic 2000 release, XTRMNTR. That record broke all kinds of ground for a group that had consistently shifted with popular culture since their Madchester/acid house success of Screamadelica. XTRMNTR offered up a maddening scope of aggressive beats and screaming politics that the group had not previously tackled. Jarring and off-putting at times (albeit a stroke of brilliance), the record is a tad difficult to sit all the way through. Evil Heat seems to attempt to bridge together the two worlds of their past club psychedelia and…
Sometimes there’s music that makes you feel like you’ve been listening to it your whole life. It immediately gets under your skin and stays in your head forever. Even when an artist is new, their songs might sound as iconic to you as, say, J Mascis or Jason Pierce’s stuff. Juice Webster somehow works exactly this kind of magic on your mind. Her 2023 debut, Julia, felt like coming home, like returning to your old teenage bedroom full of posters, vinyl, and precious memories. Her sophomore outing, Kind of Fantasy, is akin to Greta Gerwig’s Narnia – it’s like reliving a whole mix of emotions just by opening an old wardrobe full of you-know-what.
Having started down this path around 2019, with bare folk ballads in the vein of Joan Baez…
For anybody still convinced that Geese’s explosion in popularity was a fully botted psy-op rather than the natural byproduct of present-day digital marketing in a culture starved for new rock’n’roll saviors (and, you know, an album that’s actually good), allow me to offer Heathers as an analogue study. The solo project of one Heath Michael Thomas, a 23-year-old kid from the town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Heathers until now has primarily existed as a TikTok page where Thomas performs a constellation of various crunchy covers: Big Star, Ween, Frost Children, music from Earthbound, Kings of Leon, Gram Parsons, and, naturally, Geese. His page has a respectable few thousand followers, but nothing stratospheric. Nevertheless, his debut album,…
The cliffsides of Big Sur, California are rugged, romantic, and seemingly endless. The shimmering coastline stretches both outward and upward, as the rocks the waves crash against hold the roots of the redwood trees, some of the tallest and most ancient in the world.
Mimicking the rough splendour of its namesake, this debut album by Big Red – a solo vehicle turned trio from Joe Scarisbrick of UK band The Orchestra (For Now) – builds from quiet hums to a torrential storm, flitting between melancholy and heartbreak along the way.
As a songwriter, Scarisbrick already proved nimble on the Orchestra EPs Plan 75 and Plan 76, where the seven-piece band oscillated between tenderness, detachment, and anxiety,…
Brixton’s The Windmill is easily the most discussed music venue of the decade. Its 150-capacity room nurtured an eccentric art rock community, birthing now-renowned acts Black Country, New Road, Black Midi and the Last Dinner Party. It sparked a wave of jazzy, multi-instrumentalist musicians worldwide, from English Teacher (Leeds) to Geese (New York) to Hesse Kassel (Santiago, Chile).
HMLTD were among the first artists from the venue to gain attention, before the press had even decided the Windmill was South London’s supposed hub of eclecticism. While their contemporaries performed brooding music, donning drab, working-class garb for post-punk credibility, HMLTD stood out like a sore thumb with their multicoloured, aristocratic glam…
When you learn that this album is all bassoon, from top to bottom, you might think, “I don’t want that!” But you do, and here is why: It will put you in a great mood.
What could be better than a chorus of bassoons singing and bopping around in your head? Anyone who has spent time with bassoonists knows that they are delightfully quirky. Relatively recently some composers, notably Stravinsky, started to give the singular instrument that is the modern bassoon the respect it deserves, after which it was only a matter of time before these humble geniuses would start to take their creativity seriously and find their voices. Here we have such a bassoonist in Rebekah Heller, who commissioned three of the works and arranged the other two.
Christian McBride brings together all of his varied stylistic passions on 2026’s Points of Light. The album is the bassist’s first with his quartet Ursa Major, an exploratory ensemble of younger improvisers from across jazz, gospel, and R&B, featuring saxophonist Nicole Glover, keyboardist Mike King, guitarist Ely Perlman, and drummer Savannah Harris. Also on board is keyboardist Quintin Gulledge and keyboardist Terrace Martin, the latter of whom also produced the album. While acclaimed for his deep grasp of the acoustic hard bop traditions, McBride has long investigated his many diverse influences, even digging into Weather Report-style electric fusion and R&B as far back as 2003’s Vertical Vision. Here, he strikes a nice balance, moving between…
Songs for Sinners is drummer and producer Moses Boyd’s first album in six years, one he’s been thinking about since he was 16. Boyd’s project explores the tensions of spiritual faith and doubt as human forces capable of comforting, dividing, unsettling, and restoring balance via a highly individual meld of contemporary jazz, modern gospel, Caribbean rhythms, and soundsystem culture with individual voices, a choir, and deft musicianship over a dozen tracks.
“Precious” is introduced by Boyd’s shimmering electronics and drums, an electric bass, hand percussion, and organ before Donovan Haffner’s bluesy saxophone and the Kitchen Choir (family members and others recorded in Boyd’s kitchen) paint a blissfully sacred groove.
Cold War Kids have released Robbers & Cowards / Complete Cowards (20th Anniversary Edition), revisiting their debut with four songs completed from the album’s original era and six live recordings captured in 2007. The original album’s breakout singles included “Hang Me Up to Dry,” “We Used to Vacation” and “Hospital Beds.”
The Digital Deluxe Edition adds Phantogram’s reworking of “Hang Me Up to Dry,” which reshapes the song with electronic beats, layered atmospherics and vocals. The collaboration is the first part of a broader anniversary project, with more reinterpretations of songs from Robbers & Cowards planned for 2027. The four completed songs are “Loyalty,” “There Goes The Night,” “Jesse Latour” and “She Can Do No Wrong.”
Weezer founding member and original bassist, Matt Sharp, while working on a series of “lost-albums” from the cutting room floor of his creative-life, stumbled upon a curious multi-track reel of analog tape. This mysterious reel found at the bottom of a treasure chest of other master recordings just happened to contain Weezer’s very first studio sessions.
These were the very same recordings that were responsible for earning the band a record contract for their iconic debut “Blue” album. These newly discovered sessions feature raw, vividly emotional and ecstatic versions of the band’s timeless hit songs Say It Ain’t So and Undone (The Sweater Song.) Sharp and legendary music producer Joe Chicarrelli took these recordings…
Between the release of their first album 1965’s Begin Here and the second, and last, 1968’s Odessey and Oracle, the Zombies issued a staggering number of excellent songs. Unlike many of their compatriots in the U.K. like the Beatles and Kinks, the group’s output was regulated to singles and a few songs recorded for the soundtrack of the film Bunny Lake is Missing. It seems the record company lacked the vision to steer the band’s career in the only direction that made sense – the LP market – and kept trying to replicate the success of early hits like “She’s Not There.’ The band themselves did their part by making songs that were easily the equal of anything topping the charts, but their fortunes kept waning until they finally threw in the towel.
And true to her word, she cuts right down to the bone across the album’s 15 tracks, living and reliving her traumatic experiences with assault and misogyny, processing fragments of trauma in laboured screams and audible gasps, pursuing anyone who’ll listen.
In an interview with The Guardian, guitarist Tyler Paterson likened PISS’s instrumental approach to “scoring a film” starring Zantingh, situating her voice against what the band describes as “a centuries-long conversation about gender-based violence.” As such, these tracks are as confrontational as can be: mostly two minutes or shorter, constructing and deconstructing noise-rock soundscapes at the pace of a post-traumatic flare-up.
Timeless, and yet always fresh: utterly oblivious of any wiles of the pop business, Planet Yello has been turning on its orbit for nearly fifty years, plunging us into a world where past and future are one and James Bond joins forces with the Man in the Moon, Dionysos and Philip K. Dick. “To the future, through the past,” declares Dieter Meier. With their fifteenth studio album Time Lab, Dieter Meier and Boris Blank put this maxim into practice more than ever.
Blank constructs his imaginary soundtracks from a combination of freshly minted samples and a deep dip into his archive, which in the course of nearly fifty years of incessant creativity has accumulated innumerable song fragments, riffs and motifs. Meier then arrives to uncover the tales of anarchic romance, absurd robberies…
At nearly 40 years old Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) remains one of Coil’s trippiest and most ludic sets, beloved for its febrile fusion of field recordings (a drunken brass band in Mexico; a Muay Thai boxing arena) with a malfunctioning Fairlight synth and the pair’s homoerotic, eccentric energies. In the grand scheme of their catalogue ‘Gold…’ marks a line in the sand between their earliest work and the new decade advance of ‘Love’s Secret Domain’, a groundbreaking LP and huge influence on everyone from Æ to NIN, Surgeon and the electronic music at large. In key with a slew of posthumous Coil releases over the past decade, the remastered versions now better backlight the vastness of their sound, revealing ‘Gold…’ among their sexiest and most seductive.