Anticon co-founder Yoni Wolf spent a lot of time in the ’00s being prolific, first with his solo work and then with his band WHY?, as well as various collaborative efforts and side bands. That pace has slacked off over the past ten years, even as Wolf’s life seems to have run into complications. In many ways Oh Golly / Yes Lord, his 10th album under the WHY? name and the eighth with the full WHY? band, is about Wolf trying to find his bearings as he tackles the newfound vagaries of dating and being online in middle age. It doesn’t quite hold up to the band’s best run, but it is a better record than they’ve managed to put together in some time.
There are two types of people: those who’ve never really heard WHY? (the majority) and those who understand that Alopecia…
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Received wisdom holds that the post-punk and new wave sounds of the ‘80s boomed at least in part in response to growing political conservatism. While this idea certainly checks out for the UK and U.S. with the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, respectively, La Ola Nocturna: Experimental Songs and Deviant Pop from the Spanish ’80s tells the exact opposite story about what went down in Spain. When three and a half decades of oppression finally came to a close with the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, Spanish society started opening up on multiple fronts. By the ‘80s, a new breed of musicians were busily building their own counterculture, taking cues from British and American synth-pop, no wave, goth, and new wave acts while bringing their own identity to…
For Los Angeles-based bassist Anna Butterss, 2026 has been a landmark year. In March, she played upright bass on Flea’s glorious Honora as part of guitarist Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet, who released the splendid live album, Happy Today; and with her SML collective, she made June’s groove-laden Spontaneous Music Live. Beginningless is the first time Butterss, trumpeter John Raymond, and drummer/percussionist Ben Lumsdaine have recorded together, though they’ve been in one another’s circles for some time. In 2010, Butterss and Lumsdaine met as students in Bloomington, Indiana. They’ve worked on several projects together, including both Daniel Villarreal albums and Butterss’ Mighty Vertebrate. After she relocated to Los Angeles, Raymond began…
While Carmen Quill tends to thrive on collaboration — as a member of the jazz trio Scree as well as the ethereal, vocal-based three-piece band tilt — her first solo album, Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere (2021), was a true solo effort, as she sang and played upright bass with arrangements that veer between playful and ruminative, partly influenced by her father’s battle with cancer. An album inspired by this kind of personal tragedy can obviously benefit from solitary composition and performance.
On her new record, however, Quill brings other musicians into the fray, creating a broader sound that feels warmer and more infectious, yet still filled with joyous idiosyncrasies.
On Harmless, Quill is joined by her Scree…
It’s third album time for Los Bitchos, and this time around, they’re doing things a bit differently. Ever since their first album, the Alex Kapranos-produced Let the Festivities Begin, they’ve concentrated on predominantly instrumental music. That record, and the follow-up Talkie Walkie, were mostly wordless affairs, but as a title like Los Bitchos & Friends would suggest, this time they’ve roped in some collaborators.
The result is a record that sounds pretty much like a big, vibrant jam session, in which kindred spirits wander in, lay down some vocals and then wander out again. The music isn’t a radical departure – the band’s trademark mix of Cumbia, surf-rock and disco is present and correct, but the album’s guests seem to push the trio’s music…
µ-Ziq’s Tango N’Vectif was released in 1993, a classic year for auteurist electronic music that didn’t always fit on the dancefloor. Written by Mike Paradinas in his late teens with some help from Frank Naughton, it still stands up really well today and its influence on electronic music in the decades since is obvious.
Across an expanse of ideas, taking influences from early Aphex, Detroit Techno and UK Hardcore, Mike created this spirited, funky, jerry-rigged, lo-fi version of rave; with crunchy drums and a knack for melody that fell somewhere between John Barry and classic TV themes.
Without owning a computer, Mike had been writing techno, house and industrial tracks on and off since 1990, playing live keys alongside…
Greenland, the seventh album by Cracker, re-issued for it’s 20th Anniversary on CD. Cracker was formed in 1990 by David Lowery and Johnny Hickman. The main lineup on Greenland includes some of its longest standing members, Frank Funaro on drums, Kenny Margolis on keyboards and Victor Krummenacher on bass.
A truly international affair, Greenland takes us from Californian rock & roll, to space-age-reverb-drenched Moroccan inspired riffs. This edition also includes the previously unreleased track ‘I Know Your Sister, She’s Big in Japan’, penned by Lowery and Hickman and recorded during the original album sessions.
Cracker continue to play live through 2026 in the US and Europe, and are proud…
Award-winning Shooter Jennings presents Diamonds, a new album featuring previously unheard songs by his legendary father, Waylon Jennings. The album’s title track also features in a special CBS Sunday Morning story about Shooter and his father. Diamonds is the second in a series of albums featuring previously unknown recordings by Waylon Jennings that his son, Shooter Jennings, recently unearthed. The song features a surprise appearance by the late great Glen Campbell, who joins Gordon Payne, Jerry Bridges, Carter Robertson, Barney Robertson, Rance Wasson, the collective known as the Waylors, in backing Waylon Jennings.
“This track eluded me,” says Shooter Jennings. “I kept finding it across three different sessions while I was going through my father‘s work.
The mission statement of Bring Your Own Hammer is simple: to reinterpret historical material in the form of song. Simple, perhaps, but also infinitely broad in its scope. The telling phrase here is that innocent-looking infinitive ‘to reinterpret’: it allows for almost total creative freedom, and that is what makes this project so exciting. It involves a long and distinguished roll-call of musicians – Irish musicians, or ones with links to Ireland – and it asks them to retell stories from the darker recesses of history. This is not a band, or even a collective, though there are aspects of collaboration, not just between musicians but with historians and folklorists too. The musicians involved come from the disparate worlds of traditional folk, pop, alternative rock, and seemingly…
Menahan Street Band are craftsmen, the kind who when they build something it fits together just right and lasts forever. On their 2026 album Illusions, the all-star group of retro soul musicians come together to create music that’s both pleasingly familiar and fresh out of the box shiny. Utilizing all their skill sets, the players dig into late night funk, cinematic soul, laid back almost tropical grooves, and even the odd bit of Italian soundtrack music. It’s the same basic formula they’ve been using for years, both together and on their side projects, but it still works like a charm. Credit goes to the arrangements done by Arthur Verocai, which are always well-sculpted and voluptuous, the players who know when to get dramatic and when to drop out, and the production…
Lankum singer Radie Peat’s extraordinary debut album begins without frills or ornament: just her voice, stark and low, each breath like air vibrating through the metal reeds of a harmonium. Singing Hares on the Mountain to the tune Shirley Collins arranged for 1964’s Folk Roots, New Routes, Peat accompanies herself subtly on Fender Rhodes piano before adding layers of Mellotron and Wurlitzer. Her simple, quiet approach is consistently startling and profoundly moving.
No Human Tongue Can Tell collects songs of female struggle, suffering, strength and endurance, although Peat only realised this, she writes in her liner notes, after limiting her choices by her “own mind and abilities” and “personal preferences”. Epic statements clearly aren’t her bag…
When Mississippi native Schaefer Llana took a job as an engineer at Dial Back Sound, the studio owned by Drive-By Truckers bassist Matt Patton, she set in motion the events that would lead to Full Circle, her label debut.
It was at that studio where she met Jimbo Mathus (a founding member of Squirrel Nut Zippers), who, impressed with her vocals, asked Llana to sing on records he was producing and eventually invited her to join his touring band. Years later, after relocating to Austin and touring the country on her own, she returned to the studio, this time to record Full Circle. In keeping with the album’s title, it also features two songs written by Mathus, who appears on the opening track, “In a Scare.”
For many, that track will serve as their first…
Plans for Shane MacGowan’s 60th birthday celebrations in January 2018 were originally modest: a few musicians gathering to play a scattering of the songs he wrote for The Pogues or his later band The Popes. What actually happened, says Victoria Clarke, MacGowan’s wife and partner from the mid-’80s to his death in 2023, gathered momentum to become “something incredibly moving and really magnificent” – a fullscale tribute at Dublin’s National Concert Hall featuring Nick Cave, Bono, Sinead O’Connor and the Irish President Michael D Higgins, who gave MacGowan a Lifetime Achievement Award. For Clarke, the show felt like a metaphor for his reputation: “We just sat back and watched while it grew.”
As Clarke explains to MOJO, MacGowan’s VIP…
…features unique bonus tracks: “Grown Up Xmas List” and “To an Empath at Christmas Time (Intimate Version)”.
Alanis Morissette’s first holiday album, Good Weather for Immaculate Conception, is a mix of recognizable favorites (like “O Holy Night” and “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”) and original material (such as the standout “To an Empath at Christmas Time” and the rollicking “Christmas on the Dancefloor”). Her faithfully tender cover of Joni Mitchell’s “River” is a beautiful moment tucked amongst the celebratory festivities.
Along for the sleigh ride is a packed roster of guests: Brandi Carlile and Steve Martin join Morissette on “Beautiful Star of Bethlehem,” while Amythyst Kiah duets on “Momma Mary” and Joy Oladokun teams up for “Silent Night.”
…features nine bonus track additions — consisting of five previously unreleased studio cuts and four live performances from his tour.
A year on from Puma Blue’s low-key releases ‘antichamber’ and ‘extchamber’, and almost three from previous full-band record Holy Waters, Croak Dream comes with studio-based lore: that he – aka multihyphenate Jacob Allen – and production collaborator Sam Petts-Davies introduced parts of songs to the full band to work with in the room. Not a unique scenario, of course, but it just might be in this switch-up of Jacob’s working methods that the most interesting parts of his latest full-length lie.
For while his often melancholy, occasionally pretty, singing voice excels in projecting…
Masayoshi Fujita’s album Forest of Tranquility originated from a commission to compose the soundtrack to a living nature installation as part of Expo 2025. The release consists of inviting, slowly unfolding pieces incorporating marimba, vibraphone, and hand percussion, along with softly rippling synths, gentle woodwinds, and natural sounds such as birds and frogs. The result is an immersive and transportive sound bath that floats, meanders, and soothes, lending a slightly ethereal aura to natural environments. “Portal to the Universe” patiently sets in, with distant flutes calling along with a backdrop of chirping crickets, and the sound of children playing so far in the background that it’s nearly subliminal. “Departure” contains sparse, considered…
Louis Armstrong is at his most barnstorming best on the archival 2026 album One Night in Highland Park: Live! Recorded in March 1957, it features the trumpeter/vocalist’s then-lineup of trombonist Trummy Young, clarinetist Edmond Hall, pianist Billy Kyle, bassist Squire Gersh, and drummer Barrett Deems. The band had traveled to Highland Park High School in Illinois for a special fundraiser concert where a savvy student stage manager, Joel Goldstein, had the presence of mind to record the proceedings. Minus bassist Arvell Shaw, this is almost the same lineup that appeared alongside Armstrong in the film High Society. He even makes mention of the movie, revisiting the soundtrack favorite “High Society Calypso.” In keeping with what was his tradition at the time…
Jan St. Werner’s album Squares Will Fall contains three collaborative pieces exploring spatial dynamics, improvisation, and generative composition.
The 22-minute title track was created during the sessions for Mouse on Mars’ Dimensional People, and heavily features a guest on that album, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. The piece was presented as part of a choreography installation during the Ural Industrial Biennial, with isolated parts played through multidirectional loudspeakers, moved by the performers, and with audience members free to walk throughout the venue, making each individual experience unique. The version appearing on the album is a stereo mix assisted by Andi Toma, the other half of Mouse on Mars.