Photo Credit: Claryn Chong Born in Lincolnshire, England thirteen days before the new millennium, Holly Ffion Humberstone grew up a small-town girl, playing the violin for the Lincolnshire Youth Symphony Orchestra. Some years later, she released two extended plays, performed at Glastonbury Festival and on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, as well as opened for Olivia… Read more
Photo Credit: Eluvier Acosta It’s hard to know where to place identical twin duo Tegan and Sara Quin in the current musical landscape; having released their debut Under Feet Like Ours in 1999 at the tender age of 18 years old, they enjoyed relative commercial success in the mid-2000s and even a Grammys nomination in… Read more
Photo Credit: Edward Cooke Though one of the most popular songs from their great 2021 debut album W.L. was “Glasgow,” for a major city in their native Scotland (though they’re actually from West Lothian), the Snuts widen the range of their subject matter quite a bit on their second album Burn the Empire. The title… Read more
Photo Credit: Jimmy Fontaine / Courtesy of Atlantic Records Since their 1998 debut album Something About Airplanes Bellingham, Washington alternative rockers Death Cab for Cutie at least outwardly appear to have missed out on mainstream success, even though four of their albums went Top 10 in the U.S. between 2005 and 2015. The band’s tenth… Read more
Sure, one could argue that being a household name within the music industry in any way should disqualify you from complaining. Still, there are plenty of groups out there that deserve way more appreciation than they get. Here is a list of ten groups – new and old – that we think should be talked… Read more
To have something important to say and to know how to say it – that’s the art of succeeding with your debut album. Some debut albums have such an important message that they change the world forever. Some of them are just incredibly well executed, burning with the energy of a new artist who finally… Read more
Photo Credit: Pip Upon hearing the song “Lies,” some listeners might at first think that their ears are lying to them, and that they’re not in fact listening to the opening cut from Pale Waves’ third album Unwanted, but rather to veteran pop punk princess Avril Lavigne. Indeed the similarity – of both the musical… Read more
Photo Credit: Getty/Roskilde Press The post-festival discussions about the 50th edition of Scandinavia’s biggest festival have mainly dealt with the Strokes’ reportedly awful performance. I, who ended up at the festival thanks to a fortunate coincidence, had to travel back home before the Strokes, and instead of going on about Julien Casablanca’s awkward dialogues for… Read more
Photo Credit: Erika Kamano Filipino-British singer-songwriter Beatrice Lauss, known professionally as Beabadoobee, is one of the most promising musical talents of the 2020s. Or was, at least. Her new album Beatopia, while hardly merit-less, lacks the focus, immediacy, and overall enjoyability of her last full-length release, Fake It Flowers (which this writer named as the… Read more
Photo Credit: Sophie Hur Los Angeles-to-Brooklyn transplants Momma are the latest in a string of bands to embrace the sound of the early and mid-Nineties alternative rock and re-shape it for the 2020s. They’ve already forged a close alliance with Wet Leg, a UK band that has been deservedly hyped and is unmistakably similar in… Read more