Honest, calm, heartfelt, soothing, mysterious. Alternative guitar music. The spoken word bits are the extra gold nuggets that I didn’t expect to find.
King Hannah – Big Swimmer
Brutus – Unison Life
It’s a new find, the kind where it’s obvious from the first track I hear that it’s a match. Great metal sound with a grunge feel to it and strong female vocals. What makes it stick is how honest and human it is. It’s like friends from the neighbouring rehearsal room throwing a concert.
IDLES – TANGK
Indie punk.
Crawlers – The Mess We Seem To Make
I am generally not a fan of UK alternative rock and indie, but the DIY nature of this record I just find charming.
Cymbaline – Computerleven
This band is such a perfect krautrock blend where alternative rock meets coldwave. I’ve seen them live once, they were so professional and maintained this spot-on atmosphere during their whole set.
Dog Fashion Disco – Cult Classic
Has every bit of Dog Fashion Disco in it I want in a Dog Fashion Disco record. Fits the discography like priest in a nursery.
Deap Vally – Marriage
Such cool girl power rock from the indie-garage axis, but mostly just hot rock and roll.
Moin – Moot!
It’s some alternative post-rock, sometimes I feel it’s shoegazer style but then often it’s much more upbeat and lively than that. The percussion grooves are killers. It’s rare that I hear a drummer and start looking up other projects by them just based on the beats played—this is one of those cases. But all other aspects are amazing too, like bits and pieces of melodies, and some well-placed spoken word segments or samples. It’s a record that I have a hard time putting into words: I feel like I don’t have the right dictionary to describe what I hear, but I love it so much. It’s really surprising and absolutely amazing.
Wet Leg – Chaise Longue
It doesn’t get any more effortlessly cool than this. Fun, quirky alt rock that’s catchy like covid.
Sometimes you can think “but all the tunes have all been written already, so what new are we expecting” and then comes something like this, which just opens a complete new portal with three notes on the bass. I love when this happens, makes me keep going and listen to ten new records a day again.
The Terrordactyls – The Terrordactyls
I came across the track Fall on an episode of Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet and it has that trigger of “alright, what’s this, search immediately”. The album as a whole is like a low-fi bedroom alt-rock recording, and in that Fall is a smash hit.