Browsing Category

Spotify

Pierre Englebert’s Jesus Night at the Britestar’ Serves Salvation with a Side of Psychedelic Absurdity’

Posted on 9 June 2026

Pierre Englebert cuts right to the surrealist core of absurdity with his latest single, Jesus Night at the Britestar, a psychedelically twisted rock vignette of satirical salvation which swells with the kaleidoscopic ingenuity of The Beatles, harmonises to the nines of The Beach Boys and swaggers into style with Pavement-esque woozy, off-kilter experimentalism.

Nothing in the fusionist approach to this instant soul-tugger compares to the meta cerebralism behind the orchestration. With far too much wry wit to resound as a novelty hit, Pierre Englebert practically creates a new form of comedy through honky gospel hues, reggae warmth and spacey cosmic sublimity, nodding to Eno in a way that proves his influence can spiral into the most unlikely forms.

Englebert’s double life as a Southern California professor of Comparative Politics and International Relations and prolific singer-songwriter only sharpens the track’s strange intelligence. Across seven albums since 2019, he has built a world of pop-rock, classical sensibility, singer-songwriter intimacy, comedy, storytelling and sophisticated chord turns, and Jesus Night at the Britestar sits among his most gloriously peculiar works. It visualises the kind of transcendence you feel after finding redemption somewhere strange, neon and spiritually sticky.

Whatever Pierre Englebert does next, we’re convinced it will show us another kind of light we’ve never witnessed before.

Jesus Night at the Britestar is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Swanky Cabaret Blues and Red Velvet Melancholy Spill Through Rosalind Powell’s Vintage Pop Showtune, ‘I’ve Been Sick’

Posted on 9 June 2026

Rosalind Powell’s voice is a time machine in itself. In her standout single, I’ve Been Sick, taken from her album Sound Eagle, the West Wales singer-songwriter, composer, pianist, and teacher channels her blues into a swanky cabaret number. The jaunty vintage piano keys carry her theatrically alive voice through the airwaves and through the decades, giving the single the feeling of a stage lamp flickering over a soul that refuses to flatten itself for easy listening.

It is somewhat paradoxical how she allows a single exposing a melancholy soul to become a rapturous showtune, practically inviting you to envision red velvet curtains falling around her during the outro. Powell’s classically trained piano background gives the arrangement its poise, while her songwriting carries the emotional candour of someone who has written hundreds of songs and still treats each one like a living confession.

Inspired by the natural world and artists such as Tori Amos and Lana Del Rey, Powell brings theatrical folk-pop, blues, cabaret, and classical sensibility into one unforgettable frame. With albums including Circumference, Sound Eagle, and Dragonfly already online, plus environmental concerts, global radio play, songwriting recognition, and a Llangollen Festival appearance ahead, I’ve Been Sick lands as another ornate proof of her singularity.

 I’ve Been Sick is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Kobie’s ‘Main Thang’ Carried the Airwaves into a Love Bubble of Retro RnB and Indie-Tinted Soul

Posted on 9 June 2026

Kobie’s Just Friends is the ultimate debut album drop for the true romantics; boundaries blur, steam rises, senses are lost, and soul dominates in the smooth, slow-burning album, which reflects contemporary dynamics through the lens of retro RnB aesthetics. That sensibility reaches its most affecting point in the standout single, Main Thang, written for anyone tired of playing it cool and ready for unconditional, undivided connection.

The Latin guitar flourishes turn up the fire that simmers from Kobie’s harmonies, taking impassioned and pure desire to new euphonic heights. As he visualises the transcendence of letting your heart rule your head, you can feel the hazy love bubble wrap around you, softening the edges of hesitation until surrender starts to sound inevitable.

Built from underground culture and internet-era artistry, Kobie moves with the awareness of an independent artist, curator, and creative entrepreneur shaping more than a release cycle. His world spans music, visuals, live experiences, digital storytelling, and direct audience connection, giving Main Thang a sense of intimacy with serious cultural reach. Hip-hop, alternative textures, and modern youth culture ripple beneath the RnB romance, while the production keeps the focus on emotional immediacy.

Main Thang is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Mikernan Arrell Reorchestrated Pressure Drop into a Hillbilly Reggae Frenzy

Posted on 7 June 2026

Mikernan Arrell is the ultimate orchestrator of aural curveballs. His honky-tonk cover of the iconic 1968 soul single, Pressure Drop, by Toots & the Maytals, which will undoubtedly resound through the decades until we no longer have airwaves, burns fresh fire into the timeless track, branding it with a brand new fervour. Kicking up the tempo with hillbilly-esque banjo strings, Arrell turns the familiar melody into something grinning, restless, and frantically unruly.

Arrell keeps his reverence for the soul of the single intact while refusing to handle the song like a museum piece. His honeyed Motown harmonies honour the original’s emotional lift, while the country-twanged arrangement sends it spinning through saloon floors, porch-light mischief, and late-night jukebox delirium. The result feels both affectionate and audacious, a version that understands legacy as something alive enough to be teased.

Perhaps the most impressive feat is how Arrell’s confidence refuses to let the cover of the reggae classic turn into a novelty exercise. The groove still carries soul, the vocal still glows with warmth, and the whole release proves that a great song can survive almost any costume change when the artist has the wit to pull it off.

Pressure Drop is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Johnny spat out the poison of complacency in the Mediterranean alt-rock shadows of ‘This is Your Life’

Posted on 4 June 2026
https://soundcloud.com/johnnytheb/this-is-your-life?ref=clipboard&p=i&c=1&si=7D72A90A0ACA47559D995845CA070762&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Johnny B brought the Mediterranean’s scorched intensity into dark Americana with This is Your Life, a cinematic alt-rock release created in collaboration with Daniele Macchi. After the Greek alternative artist unleashed the track, a parallel world where Nick Cave soaked up the sun-dazed pressure of the coast and baked it into his dark, snarling sessions of alt-rock alchemy suddenly felt dangerously easy to picture.

Penned around the epiphany that we sleepwalk through stale days without awareness of the sands of time slipping around us, This is Your Life is a sobering full-frontal allegory that refuses to pull its lyrical punches. Instead, it amplifies them through the shadowy intensity falling over this revolutionised reckoning of rock, turning self-awareness into something sharp enough to bruise.

With artful textures pushing the single beyond classic rock territory while keeping the core direct enough for long-standing rock devotees, Johnny B delivers a track capable of carrying the results of ennui into a cross-generational audience. The crossover appeal is as fierce as the thematic core of this sermon on the poison of complacency.

This is Your Life is now available to stream on all major platforms, including SoundCloud.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Inside Starlight Fever, Isaiah Angel Hubbird Found Pop’s Softest Nerve and Made It Shine with the Starlight Fever LP

Posted on 3 June 2026

Starlight Fever, the debut album from the Chicago-hailing singer-songwriter Isaiah Angel Hubbird, teases indie folk pop into the framing of classical arrangements without altering the quintessential instrumentation or architecture. The diaphanous sweeps of choral chamber pop through the melodies and the way his voice harmonises on an octave that would send shivers down the spines of celestial beings bring rare arcane grace to 12 singles which refuse the parameters of contemporary pop.

The album aligns more with Y2K and 2010s stylings, from the era when intimate candour was celebrated and Plain White Ts reigned supreme in the footsteps of vulnerable singer-songwriters such as Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley. Each release is profound with wonder, tenderness, and the wide-open soul of an artist who uses his innate ability to feel deeply to share his gift through sound. It is almost as if starlight refracts straight through his soul-salving scores of scintillation.

Born and raised in Chicago, Hubbird began writing music in 2014 under DreamsofYou before releasing projects including Boundless Rose, Finding Our Way, and I Am Dead (Without You). Since reclaiming his full name in 2020, his acoustic singer-songwriter world has become a vessel for expositions on anxiety, depression, love, hope, and emotional release.

Starlight Fever is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Blue Flame Puts KYXORA at the Edge of IDM’s Cerebral Skyline

Posted on 3 June 2026

IDM reached its cerebral zenith through the unveiling of Blue Flame by the music producer, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and mood curator KYXORA. Following a cinematically Hans Zimmer-esque intro, the instrumental release builds into a world away from filmic opulence, moving towards transcendence, guided by kinetic energy which oscillates throughout the production, seemingly rising from the arrangement itself rather than spilling from any individual instrumental layer.

The track gradually picks up a spacey charge of electricity before winding back down against a neo-classic piano outro, giving Blue Flame the feeling of a mind returning from some astral threshold with its nerve endings glowing. KYXORA clearly has a certain kind of alchemical tenacity when arranging compositions that stick with you emotionally as much as melodically, allowing intellectual intuition and feeling to coexist without the score ever losing its sense of wonder and gravity.

Hong Kong-born and UK-trained, KYXORA brings a background in classical music, piano, percussion, and music technology into a self-produced universe of mood music, easy-listening instrumentals, melodic architecture, and forward-facing electronic design. Every element, from songwriting and arrangement to final mixing and mastering, is shaped independently from their home studio, giving Blue Flame its rare sense of total authorship.

Blue Flame is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Everything Costs Pulls Red Rowanne’s DIY Dream-Pop World into Inflation Anxiety and Analogue Despair

Posted on 3 June 2026

Red Rowanne refuses to allow her sound to shrink into conformity with her latest single, Everything Costs, an exposition of what it means to live in a capitalist dystopia as a soul that craves what cannot be bought. There is a sense of claustrophobia within the cosmic expanse of the analog synth-driven release, visualising how impossible it feels to escape the ennui gifted by contemporary reality.

Sirening synths reverberate through the avant-garde release as a spoken-word narrative relays the frustration and sense of failure that comes with attempting to claw towards enlightenment while price tags keep appearing on survival, stability, desire, and memory. The production moves through dream-pop cloud rap with hazy guitars, warm synth glow, and bedroom-pop intimacy, giving Everything Costs the texture of a late-night spiral under the fluorescent lights of capitalism.

As an independent DIY artist, Red Rowanne writes from lived experience, identity, liberation, love, memory, and the need to reimagine the future before the present drains all possibility from it. After Fire and Sparks and the indie-rock gem Match (Made in Heaven), Everything Costs feels like her sharpest meditation on collective anxiety and our subsequent obsession with nostalgia for the times happiness didn’t seem to come with a receipt.

Everything Costs is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Micah Marine’s second eponymous album allows pop to walk barefoot through blues, soul and Americana fantasy

Posted on 2 June 2026

Micah Marine brought a burst of authenticity back to pop with his second eponymous album, Micah Marine 2. The expansively styled LP traverses the entire pop spectrum, travelling further across the span of one single than many pop artists do in a lifetime. The second track on the LP, Daddy, is the ultimate introduction to Micah Marine’s soul-pop fusionist style.

The way he brings blues beyond genre and into an art form that reverberates with mainstream appeal is almost as affecting as the experience of the single itself. As acoustic guitar strings twang and the percussion is kept traditional, Micah uses his voice to push the arbitrary parameters of blues, allowing it to shine with brand new warmth while pop adopts the salacious-to-the-soul grooves.

Micah Marine’s wider world is rooted in cinematic pop, alternative pop, dream-pop aesthetics, Americana fantasy, and emotional storytelling, yet Daddy proves the mythology works because the feeling comes first.

His music moves between the spaces of intimate confessionalism and movie-soundtrack resonance, where heartbreak is gold-shimmered theatre, and reinvention becomes survival. Across Micah Marine 2, he folds healing, ambition, memory, identity, and escapism into songs that reach for something larger than life. Daddy gives that universe its most tactile pulse, all bluesy intimacy, soul-pop glow, and a fearless emotional core.

Micah Marine 2 is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Apple Music.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Chanteuse Aura, Latin Soul and Cinematic Strings Glow Through Princess Luminous’ Dance Forever

Posted on 2 June 2026

Princess Luminous stayed true to her moniker in her latest release, Dance Forever; luxe Latin luminosity glows through the sensual production, bringing cinematic grace to a chanteuse-esque vocal-led performance. Written by Princess Luminous and co-produced with Phillip B, the single moves with the timeless elegance of rumba, sweeping cello, and cinematic strings while carrying the yearning romance of Bésame Mucho into a dance-floor setting.

The way she teases the promise of passion in perpetuity through the complex rhythmic arrangement leaves your senses in flux as you are drawn into her timelessly ensnaring aura. Dance Forever feels like the dancefloor has been transformed into a grand ballroom, where desire is choreographed through each turn of the rhythm as each string phrase glints with old-world glamour.

Inspired by Princess Luminous’ childhood in Mexico, the track carries warm Latin soul through its melodic architecture, keeping the passion refined rather than overplayed. Following her critically praised cover of Moon River, which earned Song of the Day recognition from All About Jazz, Dance Forever shows an artist who can make sophistication feel sensual, theatrical, and deeply alive. A forthcoming London live performance and debut album should only deepen the spell around her cinematic Latin-pop world, with more velvet-footed drama waiting in the wings.

Dance Forever is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast