Indie / Alternative
395 products
Artwork by Nicola Tirabasso and Alison Fielding
Thanks to Jack Colleran, Henry Earnest, Finn Carraher Mc Donald, Margie Jean Lewis, Róisin Berkley, Luka Seifert, Diego Herrera, and Olan Monk
Recorded in Conamara and Dublin between 2021 and 2023.
Antigone is a chilling look at our already-alternate reality, coming from inside Eiko Isibashi’s own head. Her band brings a wide array of sounds and moods, shading pop, funk and jazz, ambient, electronic and musique concrète in a bittersweet latticework. Interlocking her new songs in seamless long-play flow with the compositional ambitions of her acclaimed soundtrack work, Eiko’s expressions are epic and intimate. 2025 will never be the same!<iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 406px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=507708664/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://eikoishibashi.bandcamp.com/album/antigone">Antigone by Eiko Ishibashi</a></iframe>
2025 repress forthcoming in Feb. One of the brightest and most famous projects of the entire punk/new wave scene, No New York was released in 1978 on Island's sub-label Antilles. Featuring some of the most incredible rule breaking bands of the underground N.Y.C. art and music scene, the project - produced by Brian Eno - is a genuine snapshot of the massively creative N.Y.C. scene. Artists: Contortions, Teenage Jesus And The Jerks, Mars, D.N.A..
For the first time on vinyl, Yo La Tengo’s understated, lonesome score to Kelly Reichardt’s classic “Old Joy.”
Recorded in a single afternoon at Yo La Tengo’s studio in Hoboken, Old Joy is a drifting, improvisatory journey, born out of years-long friendship between the band and the film’s director.
The six instrumental tracks, created in collaboration with legendary guitarist Smokey Hormel, carry that unmistakable Yo La Tengo sound, but delivered in service of another great work of art. The music, like so much of Reichardt’s film work, is low-key yet arresting, stripped down to the essentials, warm and unpretentious. The record includes two variations on the beloved “Leaving Home” theme, released for the first time on vinyl after years traveling in Yo La Tengo fan circles.
This music is a balm, remarkably full of emotion despite (or maybe because of) its restraint and minimalism. Originally released on They Shoot, We Score, a CD compiling several of the band’s soundtracks, Old Joy stands as a cohesive whole here, blooming and rewarding repeat listens. Sliding reverbed guitars, muted piano and percussion, the hum of an old amp - the blurry memory of an afternoon in the studio, or a short-lived road trip through the backwoods of Oregon.
Small-run, high-quality LP pressed at Smashed Plastic in Chicago, on black and transparent pink vinyl.</p><iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 340px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=853350/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://mississippirecords.bandcamp.com/album/old-joy-official-soundtrack">Old Joy (Official Soundtrack) by Yo La Tengo</a></iframe>
Bon Iver’s three-song collection SABLE, was an act of vulnerability and unburdening. Written and recorded at a breaking point, they were songs of reflection, fear, depression, solitude, and atonement. The word “sable” implies darkness, and in that triptych, Justin Vernon sought to unpack some long-compounded pain. Then, at the tail end of its final track “AWARDS SEASON,” there’s the barest thread of a lighter melody—a drone, a glimmer, an ember, hope for something more. SABLE, was the prologue, a controlled burn clearing the way for new possibilities. fABLE is the book. Stories of introduction and celebration. The fresh growth that blankets the charred ground. Where SABLE, was a work of solitude, fABLE is an outstretched hand.
Compared to the sparse minimalism of its three-song table setter, fABLE is all lush vibrance. Radiant, ornate pop music gleams around Vernon’s voice as he focuses on a new and beautiful era. On every song, his eyes are locked with one specific person. It’s love, which means there’s an intense clarity, focus, and honesty within fABLE. It’s a portrait of a man flooded and overwhelmed by that first meeting (“Everything Is Peaceful Love”). There’s a tableau defined by sex and irrepressible desire (“Walk Home”). This is someone filled with light and purpose seeing an entire future right in front of him: a partner, new memories, maybe a family.
While not as minimal as its companion EP, fABLE’s sound appears to walk back the dense layers of sound Vernon hid behind on records like i,i and 22, a million. There’s nothing evasive or boundary-busting about this music. It’s a canvas for truth laid bare. Much of the album was recorded at Vernon’s April Base in Wisconsin after years of the studio laying dormant during a renovation. The album’s conceptual genesis happened on 2.22.22 when Jim-E Stack, Vernon’s close collaborator and guide throughout the creative process, arrived at the base with Danielle Haim. Snowed in for multiple days, their voices intertwined for the ballad “If Only I Could Wait.” Suddenly, Haim gave voice to this crucial perspective—the one Vernon seems to hold in sacred regard across fABLE. Accompanied by Rob Moose’s strings, it’s a track about weariness—about not having the strength to be the best version of yourself outside the glow of new love.
There’s something undeniably healing about infatuation. Cleaving to someone else can feel like light pouring in from a door that’s suddenly swung wide. But there’s a reason SABLE, is of a piece with fABLE; even after you put in the work, the shadow still rears its head from time to time. On “There’s A Rhythmn,” Vernon finds himself back in an old feeling, this time seeking an alternative instead of erasure: “Can I feel another way?” There’s an understanding that even when you’ve reached a new chapter, you’ll always find yourself back in your own foundational muck. A fable isn’t a fairy tale. Yes, there’s the good shit: unbridled joy, trips to Spain, the color salmon as far as the eye can see. But fables aren’t interested in happy endings or even endings at all; they’re here to instill a lesson.
As the album winds to a close, he acknowledges the need for patience and a commitment to put in the work. There’s a selfless rhythm required when you’re enmeshing yourself with another person. The song—and by extension the entire album—is a pledge. He’s ready to find that pace.
Funded by Capitol, tracked in 14 studios, issued by Tiger Style, and lost in the Y2K shuffle, Ida’s fourth album captures a band caught between Brooklyn and Woodstock, temping and adulting, burying a parent and birthing a child. A tireless compendium and ode to sleep, sex, all-night talking, and other bed-ridden activities, Will You Find Me‘s 14-songs are pillowed with 34 outtakes, alternate mixes, 4-track demos, and covers from the band’s extensive vault, unfolding thematically across four LPs. The accompanying 24-page booklet documents Ida’s major label album that never was in both stunning photographs and Douglas Wolk’s blow-by-blow essay. Who were you then?
Graham Jonson is drawn to the comforts of melody and noise. How the two conspire in tension, tonally and atonally, stirring up memory and mood. This quality animates the technicolor world of quickly, quickly, the psych-pop project that emanates from Kenton Sound, his basement studio in Portland, Oregon. “Everywhere your eye lands, there’s another curio to marvel over,” noted Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne when he visited Jonson’s recording space for a Rising feature just after the release of his “strikingly original” 2021 debut LP, The Long and Short of It. Since then, Jonson formed a live band, released his Easy Listening EP in 2023, got into production projects (for Moses Sumney, Kid LAROI, and SahBabii), and navigated the up-and-downs of a young musician, the sustainability of tours and relationships. While shaped by personal bouts and fallouts, his highly-anticipated full-length follow-up finds Jonson making music that’s universal, open-ended, and rewarding, like great songwriters can do. He set out to make a folk album but couldn’t help coloring it in with noise; a confluence of lush instrumentation and unexpected sounds. Ambitious yet intimate, hi-fi yet homespun, the idiosyncratic songs on I Heard That Noise curve around the contours of everyday life with warmth, wit, and dissonance.
When asked to unpack the inputs of I Heard That Noise, Jonson cites the unpredictable vocal melodies and sound design of Phil Elverum (The Microphones, Mount Eerie), the raw emotion of Dijon, and the timeless cadence of Nick Drake. While drums were the focus of Easy Listening, he challenged himself to think outside of the beat with new material: “to see how much I could do with a song, specifically with production, without having a beat to it… there are moments with drums but it was more about the space in between.” Songs utilize visceral delay and distortion; sometimes, they melt out of frame before the peak or take sharp turns with sudden chord changes or sweeping jolts he likens to “jump scares” in film. “Experimenting with the idea of being comfortable, and then some crazy shit flies at you, takes you out of it for a second, and then maybe brings you back in.” What makes these non-linear choices effective is that Jonson remains a natural pop architect, knowing where to push and pull, add and subtract; and essentially, how to draw in and hold one’s attention.
Themes reach from recent experiences — a breakup followed by “periods of either being miserable or, like, living…trying to better myself” — to childhood memories. There’s a recurring low-frequency hum in his neighborhood; he and his friends have come to know it as the “Kenton Sound” (which gives his studio its name), and they’ve narrowed it down to some industrial testing site nearby. Every time it vibrates, he thinks of that time he heard “that noise” while skateboarding outside his mom’s house. Similar, but louder, scarier, a sky siren of sorts. “I remember all the dogs started barking in the neighborhood at the same time...a really weird, bizarre phenomenon.” The thought pattern, scattered with a cathartic headspace, led him to record the title track, where an abrasive intro dissipates into a sweet piano ballad about remembering and surrendering.
Jonson has a knack for interludes and outros, and he’s in full stride here; the opener’s ambient wobbles snap into the stomp of “Enything,” which at one point swelled with so much information he needed to get a new computer. Above bright and jagged guitar lines, harmonized with backing vocals from friend and past tourmate Julia Logue, Jonson playfully rattles through everything he’d do (“for you”). He’s quick to admit he often dreads the process of writing lyrics, yet the loose wordplay of “Enything” is proof his subconscious runs clever.
On “Take It From Me,” subtle sonic flourishes surround acoustic strums and tender keys as Jonson recalls the resignation of a night when a relationship’s end was imminent (“a great storm is coming over the hill.”). He explains, “I've always found peace in knowing that other people, even if I don't know their exact experience, may have the same feeling that I do.” The mantra-like reprise of “Take It from Me” carries that notion, a soft reassurance before the song washes away.
Kenton Sound’s ceiling can attest to the truth of “I Punched Through A Wall.” Jonson says in reality, the act emerged from a silly intrusive thought. The image (“The silhouette of myself”) lent a figurative scene to wrap real angst around. “I feel love like a cannon ball / I like being ripped apart,” he sings over one of the record’s sweetest, most pop-forward arrangements. As the chorus takes its final pass, a gentle piano phrase gets clipped by an outburst of power chords and feedback, repeating the lines twice as loud.
“Raven” crosses fable-like fiction with the sad story of a friend who lost his way; and just when the track’s innocent country twang settles in, he pulls the rug out with near-metal levels of heavy. The juxtaposition gets to the heart of I Heard That Noise. By excavating the extremes of his sound, Jonson not only brings the best out of himself but introduces myriad ways to engage with his music, which grows ever more inviting and boundless.
<p><iframe seamless="" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=824606394/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;">I Heard That Noise quickly, quickly</iframe></p>
In the discourse around new albums from singular, world-building artists, the phrase “a big step forward” can often be a blinking red warning sign. You know you’re about to be pulled somewhere new against your will. Inertia is a hell of a thing. It’s nice here.
Surely, the party’s not over yet? JJULIUS’ Vol. 3 album is a big step forward, or a step up, out of the murky basement of the preceding two volumes. There’s no time to acclimate. A spindly violin grabs you by the hand and pulls you into the pastoral bounce of “Brinna ut,” which, in spite of its meaning (“Burn out”), creates the kind of blind positivity and warm stomach feeling less cynical people might find in self-help seminars. For us, we have records like this. And, inertia be damned, Vol. 3 has charm like a balm.
JJULIUS records have always arrived like meteors from another planet, an impression hammered home by the fact that they’re titled like compendiums of artifacts. And while Vols. 1 and 2 carried that notable tinge of darkness, Vol. 3 has (almost!) cast that shadow, adding elements of disco (“Dödsdisco”) and
dream-pop (“Etopisk hallucination”) to his forever favorites Arthur Russell, African Head Charge, and The Fall.
Some of that new car smell could be attributed to a change in process. Each song was written over beats played by Tor Sjödén of the wild-eyed Stockholm group Viagra Boys, beats that were themselves inspired by tracks from the likes of Patrick Cowley, CAN, Count Ossie, Black Devil Disco Club and others that Julius would send to him as inspiration.
Unless you’re Mark E. Smith, fervor fades. Eventually we all crave a lie down in some nice grass, a few minutes to gaze at the sky and wonder if everything is actually all that bad. Vol. 3 gives you 35 of those respiting minutes. “No looking back, no misery, no talking trash, no enemies.”
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 208px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1295288989/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://mammasmysteriskajukebox.bandcamp.com/album/jjulius-vol-3">JJULIUS-VOL.3 by JJULIUS</a></iframe>
Roomer is the meeting point of four distinct creative forces in the European music scene, united through long-standing friendships and years of collaboration across projects ranging from avant-garde free improv to ethereal folk and ambient electronica. Inevitably—if surprisingly late—the question arose: why not start a band? In their hands, the rock band format became a canvas for their many musical worlds to collide.
Ronja Schößler, a fixture in Berlin’s experimental singer-songwriter scene, pens compositions of crystalline vulnerability that cut through the band’s guitar architectures with diaristic directness. Ludwig Wandinger, polymath producer and visual artist—recently featured on Caterina Barbieri’s light-years label—injects his drumming with an energy grounded in sharp sound-design instincts. A wizard of the 8-string guitar, Arne Braun lays down layered foundations that evoke the presence of multiple players at once, while minimalist composer and synthesist Luka Aron contributes electro-acoustic textures that shimmer with the weight of distant memories.
With Arne Braun stepping away from the band to focus on other projects—including Make-Up, the DIY recording studio where much of Leaving It All to Chance was brought to life—Roomer now continues as a trio for their upcoming live shows. Expect the occasional special guest or multidisciplinary collaboration, though, as Roomer moves through the gamut of Berlin’s artists, performers, and poets.
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Leaving It All to Chance opens with '2003', where overlapping planes of distorted flute and shimmering guitar create a temporal fold through which memory keeps seeping. Ronja’s confessional voice recounts a moment of disclarity: “I accidentally stepped into 2003,” she admits, reflecting on holding on too long and the realisation that starting over might be futile.
'Nothing Makes Me Feel' performs a decoy, opening with acoustic guitar patterns that suggest singer-songwriter fare before high-pitched distortion tears through the fabric of the song. The chorus arrives like a scene from some imaginary American teen drama finale, yet its pull is complicated by layers of wailing harmonics that hint at something darker.
Perhaps the album’s centrepiece, 'Windows' combines minimal music’s interlacing patterns with sudden eruptions of power chord catharsis. The track’s opaque lyrics (“you ask for purity / I have this melody”) float above guitar work that draws as much from Steve Reich’s phasing techniques as it does from My Bloody Valentine’s tremolo manipulations.
The album’s eponymous single 'Chance', accompanied by a gloomy video steeped in veiled imagery and opaque symbolism, sees Ronja holding light and shadow in her hands. Flame shards flicker through a prismatic lens as the song gradually shifts from straightforwardness into spectral webs of saturated echoes.
Reappearing from Roomer’s previous EP, Skice, albeit in a slower, moodier form, 'Much Too Loud' commences with acoustic guitar and a looming drone that set the stage for the slightly irked vocal delivery, lamenting undertones of power and control, softened by an almost disarming tenderness. Then, without warning, the chorus alters one’s sense of gravity with breathy vocals, countrified plucks, and angelic harmonics that render its central command (“put your head low and shut your mouth please”) both intimate and threatening.
'Stolen Kisses', the album’s penultimate track, reinterprets Psychic TV’s 1982 original—a sly nod to Roomer’s blend of experimental depth and pop immediacy. The British industrial post-punk pioneers blurred the lines between avant-garde provocation and melodic allure, and Roomer channels that spirit, turning the track into an anthem of their own. Distorted guitar downstrokes merge with swirling, feedback-laden slides, all underscored by the band’s undeniable knack for hooks.
Closing the album, 'Your Arms Are My Home' shifts into more pastoral territory. Wide-open, flanged acoustic guitars trace a thin line between comfort and doubt, offering a fragile sense of refuge. Each pause in the music weighs a tension, as if caught between holding on and letting go, its hushed conclusion lingering like a half-remembered promise.
release date June 7th. Formed in 2018 by Takujuro Iwade, film director and drummer Kaya Koike and Mayumi Sakurai with the theme of " Lovers Rock from the other side," Love Wonderland performs reggae with a unique interpretation influenced by psychedelia and synth-pop.
The Best Twilights LP compiles tracks from three demos released between 2019 and 2024 and reflects their full spectrum from electronic dub to pop tinted reinterpretation of their peers.
Considered as the best kept secret of the Japanese dub scene, they continue to grow at each live performance with faith and passion.
Love Wonderland's main aspiration is to keep their motto alive.
Mastered by Krikor Kouchain and limited to 400 copies.
In 2005, Headphones arrived as a seismic shift in David Bazan’s already formidable canon—a collection of synth-driven confessions that push the boundaries of narrative songwriting. Stripped down to its barest essentials, the album finds Bazan and collaborators Tim Walsh and Frank Lenz constructing an audaciously raw soundscape: no guitars, just synthesizers, live drums, and Bazan’s unmistakable vocals. Twenty years later, it remains a masterwork of emotional excavation and geopolitical reckoning, as relevant today as the day it was released.
This 20th Anniversary edition, remastered by Christopher Colbert at National Freedom (The Walkmen, Richard Swift, Pedro the Lion), is housed in a gatefold jacket with expanded artwork by Grammy-nominated designer Jesse LeDoux, plus liner notes by writer and Belmont University Associate Professor David Dark. The self-titled album threads a delicate needle, simultaneously personal and prophetic. Songs like “Major Cities” tackle the macrocosm of American imperialism with clarity and anger, while tracks like “I Never Wanted You” unearth the raw wounds of interpersonal defeat. These are stories of inner and outer collapse, of bullies (both personal and political) wreaking havoc, yet rendered with humanity. Even in its darkest moments, though, Headphones pulses with the hope that honesty might light a way forward—if only we’ll bear witness to the truth.
On its twentieth anniversary, Headphones feels more vital than ever. For those who’ve lived with it since 2005, this reissue is a chance to revisit an old wound, to press on it and see what’s healed and what still aches. For new listeners, it’s a chance to sit with something audacious and true—an album that invites us to reckon with the ways we fail each other—and the ways we might still be good. Twenty years on, Headphones remains a rare album that doesn’t just speak to you, but asks you to listen harder.
