Browsing Tag

Alt Indie

Concealer Dragged Angular Guitars and Stone Roses Swagger into Shoegaze’s Next Burst Through the Alt-Indie Zeitgeist with their Debut, ‘Someone’

Posted on 30 May 2026

Alt-90s ear candy is sweeter than ever now that Concealer have entered the alt-indie circuit with their debut single, Someone. After hooking shoegaze fans hook, reel, and sinker with iconic Slowdive-esque angular guitar notes drifting into a kaleidoscope of choral saturation, the band pivots into vocal swagger possessed by Stone Roses and Fontaines D.C., with cadencing so hypnotic and kinetic it acts as a percussive instrument as much as a conduit for bittersweet longing.

Someone feels built from the residue of smoke-machined venues, scuffed pedals, overdriven youth, and the weary romance of guitars sounding half-awake and fully haunted. The production keeps its shoegaze haze lucid enough for the hooks to cut through, while the vocal line prowls across the track with the clipped bite of post-punk and the loose-limbed cool of 90s indie rock.

With just enough psychedelia to twist the atmosphere in a way we’re sure Bez would get high on, Concealer pushed indie shoegaze beyond its usual revivalist limits and landed on something far more affecting than genre nostalgia. Their debut carries the confidence of a band already aware of the room they can command and the cultural pressure they can apply. Someone is a masterstroke of a first strike, armed with exactly what is needed to keep the cultural zeitgeist in a chokehold until their next release.

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

 Review by Amelia Vandergast

Carl Krausnick became a cosmic conduit of the purity in humanity with his sticky-sweet slacker jam, Handle with Care

Posted on 29 May 2026
Carl Krausnick

Carl Krausnick’s Handle with Care tears a strange, celestial hole through the alt-indie ceiling, arriving as the kind of artful slacker-psych jam that makes Wayne Coyne’s cosmic harmonies feel like part of the same far-off constellation. After a soaring rock-opera-esque guitar riff throws the electricity of amplification into a distorted psychedelic kaleidoscope, the track slips into an arrangement swimming with the cerebral care of Radiohead, the endearing wonk of Grandaddy, and a tinge of The Beatles in their most mind-altering era.

Krausnick handles each transition in sound in the way the metaphysics behind alchemy could explain, turning fractured guitar textures, warped pop structures, and emotionally off-kilter songwriting into something oddly pure. The Memphis-based indie psych artist, fresh from his debut LP, Dining Companion, pushes deeper into art-rock terrain here, letting Handle with Care feel loose, lucid, and spiritually aerodynamic all at once.

The Flaming Lips, early Stephen Malkmus, Radiohead, and Grandaddy hover as useful coordinates, yet Krausnick’s signature reaches somewhere stranger than reference points can contain, with genuine cross-over appeal. If humanity ever needs to negotiate with beings from another planet, I’m voting for Carl Krausnick as our ambassador; there are few people better equipped to exhibit the beauty and purity human minds are capable of.

Handle with Care is now available to stream on all major platforms, including SoundCloud.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Tummyache Bent Art-Rock Dissonance and Metaphysical Scintillation into their Standout Single, Interstellar Dr

Posted on 14 May 2026
Tummyache

The standout single, Interstellar Dr, from Tummyache’s forthcoming LP, Fake New, explores intersections lined with the architecture of Radiohead-esque art rock and the hauntingly pensive confessional songwriting of Mitski, Big Thief and Lucy Dacus; conjuring a euphonic yet evocatively disquiet masterstroke of alt-indie provocation.

As chamber strings curl around the soft syncopated electronic percussion and weightless motifs drift through the resonantly rich production, Interstellar Dr is enough to make you feel as though you’re slipping from a material 3D world into a metaphysical space of pure scintillation.

After the mesmeric melodic momentum, the closing post-rock death roll of scathed emotion is sonically visualised through a fervid cascade of tumultuous time signatures designed to knock your rhythmic pulses out of kilter and paralyse you by building a straitjacket of noise around you, amplifying the need to keep Interstellar Dr on repeat.

Tummyache, led by songwriter and producer Soren Bryce, has long occupied that raw threshold where personal confession, DIY resistance, and art-rock abrasion meet. Since first taking shape in 2018, the project has moved through UK and US underground spaces with a fiercely independent ethos, building a reputation for emotionally charged live performances, grassroots community values, and songs that leave the seams showing. Fake New continues that line of inquiry, wrestling with authenticity, performance, and the static of modern life through a sound that stays jagged, vulnerable, and riotously confrontational.

Interstellar Dr is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Bandcamp.

Discover more about Tummyache via their official website.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Yurina’s ‘Liquid Gold’ Turns Infectious Indie Grooves into Twisted Post-Punk Hypnosis

Posted on 28 March 2026

Yurina sink straight into the subconscious with Liquid Gold, a single that pushes infectious grooves in the vein of Arcade Fire into the twisted shadows of post-punk, while instilling the chill of the genre with funk and a sense of wickedly snarled tribalism that hypnotises you into the cosmic production right from the intro.

Yurina’s authenticity as an alt-indie artist should never be understated; so much more than a mindless genre masher, they find alchemic ways of creating fresh friction from familiar aesthetics, making every element feel like an extension of the deliciously dark soul of the single, which features on Neptune Diamond Rain, a record shaped over two years in close creative union between four musicians.

There’s a swish confidence to Liquid Gold, but it never slips into empty stylisation. Closing on a cinematic outro, the track pulls together the sheer immensity of the artist’s vision when penning and arranging this swanky, primal call to your rhythmic core.

If there’s any 2026 album worth getting back into the habit of listening to LPs in full, it’s this feat of mind-altering, mesmerism. Mixed in Zagreb and mastered by Sven Weismann, the album stretches across altered states, connection, poetry, love, and time-space entanglement, with vinyl due later this year.

Liquid Gold is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

The Empty Page pulled a male gaze blinder with their latest single, A Feminine Ending

Posted on 19 March 2026

For their latest anything but pedestrian release, A Feminine Ending, the Manchester-based trio, The Empty Page, initiated by doctoring the wooziness of Pavement around their unmistakably rhythmic alt-indie signature aesthetic before descending into proof hell hath no fury like a woman diminished based on how many trips she’s had around the sun.

After seeing the pre-release hype for A Feminine Ending, which follows hot on the heels of Death on Our Side and When We Gonna Run?, the languid tempo lands as a subversive curveball. Yet as you lean into the post-punk melancholy twisting through the angular guitar notes, harbingering basslines, and cymbals smashing like splintered glass, it becomes undeniable that the melodic medium serves as the perfect conduit of the lament on how divine femininity has an expiration date scribed on their faces by those who fetishise teen bodies.

The refrain of “one day, you start to disappear” couldn’t hit harder, cutting straight through anyone who understands that invisibility is far from a superpower in a world that dictates visibility equals worth. The spoken-word lash-out against hypersexualisation, the commodification of insecurity, and the relentless expectation placed on women to appease the male gaze lands with the same ferocity as the descent into no-wave instrumental carnage that the single was always secretly, seamlessly building to.

The Empty Page has spent over a decade sharpening their voice around women’s rights and cultural critique, and here, they carry feminist sonic fury into the fourth wave, honouring riot grrrl while delivering the punk-pinched artistic alchemics of Fontaines D.C.  If there were any justice in the industry, a slice of Fontaines’ reverence would already be theirs.

A Feminine Ending is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Photo by Debbie Ellis

TRANCES shaped a chorally crystalline alt-indie ascent in Last Devotion

Posted on 31 January 2026
Last Devotion by TRANCES

From the depths of Seattle’s DIY scene, TRANCES have unleashed the sonically diaphanous ecstasy of Last Devotion; the first single from their upcoming EP, beyond the glow. With their name as a manifesto and a sound forged in lucid disarray, they’ve mastered the art of letting experimentation lead the way without veering into indulgence. If you imagine a more chorally crystalline aesthetic caressing the slacker spirit of Britpop at its most gorgeously unbothered, you’ll get a sense of the sonic alchemy TRANCES summon here. Their expressive zeal lands somewhere between Pavement’s playfulness and something altogether more transcendental; the only issue being that it didn’t arrive on the airwaves sooner.

Rather than grappling for a sense of authenticity, it’s embedded in every one of their creative impulses, from the oscillating guitar harmonies to the centrifugal rhythm section that steers the kaleidoscopic progressions into new off-kilter territories. There’s a quiet confidence in the production, recorded by Don Farwell at Earwig Studios and polished by Matt Bayles, that lets the more fever-dream elements unfurl without ever losing shape. With a lush post-punk glaze and flashes of shoegazey friction, the track feels like a product of both longing and propulsion — constantly renewing itself without ever starting from scratch. It’s a full-body immersion into emotive disorientation.

With the rest of beyond the glow due to land in March, and with mastering credits from Rachel Field at Resonant, the pieces are in place for TRANCES to cut through the noise with an alt-indie sound that defines this generation of alt-indie.

Last Devotion is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Bandcamp. 

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Review by Amelia Vandergast

Garden Song soaks The Spikes’ art house romance in Tuscan terrace heat

Posted on 20 November 2025

There is a sharper glint to The Spikes in Garden Song, the latest single and official video from Rome-raised singer-songwriter, poet and painter Iago Haussman. Growing up around film sets has clearly rewired his sense of drama, and it shows here. His earlier work already hinted at this instinct, from the stark unease in Guns for the Children to the slow-burn control games of Dancing In the Palm of My Hand, but Garden Song moves that cinematic fixation into a more amorous frame.

Far from your average indie crooner fare, The Spikes impale aesthetics of neo pop and post punk while emanating the suave magnetism of the Walkmen through an intrinsically cinematically amorous lens; it is the kind of track that is made for an art house OST; as it summons the seduction that blossoms between lovers on a Tuscan terrace, desire drives itself through lustrously layered instrumentals. The guitars shimmer like heat haze over stone, the rhythm section keeps everything steadily smouldering, and Haussman’s vocal sits right in the pocket, louche and unhurried, as if he has already seen how the scene ends. The video leans into that same mood, part diary, part fever dream, all slow tilt towards the inevitable.

Beyond the single, Haussman keeps building this world across mediums; there are paintings in galleries, poetry readings, an earlier self-titled LP and those quietly viral videos pulling in tens of thousands of views. Now splitting his time between the US and Berlin, he’s launched First Light, an eight-track album, which dropped on 31 October 2025, and used Garden Song to open the curtain on that era.

Garden Song is now available on all major streaming platforms. For the full experience, stream the official music video on YouTube. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Havyah hacked rhythmic inertia with the funk-fuelled experimental indie anthem ‘Awake’

Posted on 11 November 2025

Havyah took indie folk down a rhythmic-pulse-bending, uncharted corridor with their riotously experimental debut single, Awake. Visceral vitality runs through the veins of the release, which laces the freeform expression of jazz into the kinetic current of indietronica to construct a track monumentally larger than the sum of its groove-riddled parts. There’s no restraint, no cautious toe-dipping. This is a full-bodied plunge into a euphoric soundscape designed to electrify anything it touches.

If any upcoming UK act is destined to break through on the scale of Lola Young, Sam Fender, or The Last Dinner Party, it’s this trailblazing duo. Awake is the ultimate antidote to jaded inertia; a beat-charged invitation to shake off the sluggish haze of modern dread and live as vicariously as the rhythms demand. It doesn’t ask politely. It compels. With sweetly enlivening vocal inflexions and the ability to bleed syncopated alchemy into the airwaves, Havyah have certified themselves as sonic serotonin-dealers. This track belongs on every indie dancefloor, across the charts, and on loop in your head for the foreseeable.

Formed officially in Mile End in 2020, the British duo of Anthony Kluge and Sam Dennis started their collaboration after meeting at school in Spain in 2003. Their band name nods to the Spanish town of Javea, where their friendship began. Drawing on years of creative synergy, Awake, released on 13th September 2025, delivers a candid reflection on insomnia, where restlessness is transmuted into something life-affirming. Havyah’s forthcoming EP promises to carry that same infectious charge. We’ll be waiting with baited breath, now that we’re officially obsessed.

Awake is now available on all major streaming platforms via this link.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Adam Paddock’s indie pop prism delivered a kaleidoscope of poetic reckoning in ‘THE GREATEST COMPROMISE’

Posted on 4 November 2025

Adam Paddock may as well have strung his guitar with his own heartstrings before recording his sophomore album, THE GREATEST COMPROMISE. The nine-track indie pop release reads less like a standard LP and more like an emotional excavation; a sojourn through grief, longing, reinvention, and tentative hope. From the first prelude to the last outro, it’s a feat of emotionally thematic, stylistically fluid expression that only the most vulnerable singer-songwriters would dare to traverse.

There’s a profound warmth rooted in the vocally driven arrangements, giving power to the notion that beauty can be mined from pain and connection can be born from the rawest self-exposure. Whether whispered in seraphically diaphonous timbre or belted with Broadway-grade bravado, Paddock’s voice wields the kind of resonance that can swell chests just as much as the visceral crescendos. Across this sophomore statement, he proves the quiet power in refusing to hide your scars and the fearless generosity in giving yourself wholly away without overwhelming the melody.

What began mid-tour as an unplanned session soon revealed itself as an album-shaped calling. The first single, WAKE, captures the unsteady reconciliation of love in the face of emotional fatigue, while TENDER delivered one of the most affecting builds in Paddock’s catalogue to date. ARCHETYPE and WHO? digs into the tug-of-war between identity and expectation, SIDEWALK CEMETERY poetically ponders legacy and erasure in a concrete world, and BLUEPRINTS rallies encouragement for the overcomers who still struggle to trust their victories.

The title track THE GREATEST COMPROMISE offers the most soul-baring lyrics of the record, with lines aching for clarity, knowing that salvation is too unreachable in grief. It became the record’s compass following the death of a close friend, a grief that cracked Paddock open and reshaped the tone of the album entirely. Closing with MOM’S POEM, written and read by Paddock’s mother Charity Kuzuhara, the outro balances ethereal sonics with grounded humanity, bringing Paddock’s poetic upbringing full circle.

Rather than stringing the album together with concept or artifice, THE GREATEST COMPROMISE thrives in its emotional architecture. It’s a triumph of sincerity, a rope thrown out to anyone adrift in overthought, and a record that redefines what it means to bleed through song.

THE GREATEST COMPROMISE is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast