Browsing Tag

Art Rock

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

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

Baroque chamber rock, sonic shadows and the deep inheritance of feminine jealousy consume Liya Shapiro’s Another Woman

Posted on 10 April 2026

Baroque chamber rock shadowed by Southern Gothic aesthetics became an affecting conduit for Liya Shapiro’s labyrinthine emotions in her latest single, Another Woman. The London-based singer-songwriter draws from her studies in art history, fashion and anthropology with a rare naturalness, and you can hear those disciplines breathing through the architecture of the track. The arcane sense of nostalgia within her chanteuse-esque vocals, as she glistens emerald with envy, gives the release more than just a temporal sense of resonance, alluding to the jealousy that’s travelled through the ancestry of femininity.

Written from the sting of seeing someone once loved move on, the song confronts the irrational ache of unrequited feeling with striking candour, while letting the emotional contradictions sit there in all their ugliness and vulnerability.

Like a lovechild of Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, Shapiro conjures sonic shadows in a way that leaves you under no illusion that they’re an extension of what lingers within. The cinematography of the juxtaposition between quiescent moments of melody and the artful discord of the rancorous chamber rock clashes of instrumentation reaches the definitive epitome of artful beguile.

Following the momentum of earlier releases and a sold-out Troubadour headline show, Shapiro feels fully in command of her strange, wounded, atmospheric world.

Another Woman is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Kindled-With-Catharsis Orchestral Pop Burns Bright in ‘Back at the Campfire’ by Tristan Blaskowitz

Posted on 9 April 2026

Fuse the glow of Fireflies by Owl City into the often otherworldly sincerity of The Flaming Lips, incorporate the enrapturing tenderness in the colourful world of Mike Oldfield, and you’re left with the whimsical mesmerism of Back at the Campfire from Tristan Blaskowitz’s kindled-with-catharsis LP, Short Stories, where the lines between fantasy and legacy blur through the scintillating sonic sleights of hand by the German-Canadian composer, keyboardist and filmmaker. Featuring Greg Van Kerkhof, the release is shaped by a self-taught musician whose work across film, theatre and video games has clearly sharpened his feel for atmosphere, arrangement and emotional pacing.

Hit play, and you’ll find yourself instantly immersed in the expansive intimacy of a campfire-lit woodland, where vignettes of history lift with the embers. There’s a deep sincerity to the polyphonic production, one tempered by Blaskowitz’s cultivated touch, which refuses to lean on posterity or saccharine tricks to force emotional investment. Instead, the semi-psychedelic revelation of the single rests in his ability to place soul within the grandeur of cinematic orchestral pop.

Back at the Campfire is now available on all major streaming platforms, including YouTube.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Avantide – Sleep It Off: oceanically woozy indie art rock

Posted on 16 December 2025

Avantide deliver the rare capacity to melodically unfray your nerves while sating even the most voracious appetite for indie art rock aesthetics in Sleep It Off, a track that moves as the mellifluous, oceanically woozy equivalent to hitting the ground running with their LP Keep Running. Formed in Bismarck by down-to-earth music fans who met in a record shop and built a band from shared obsessions, they turned their rise into a slow-burn trail of shows, collaborations and studio hours that shaped the sonic tides they steer through now. Sleep It Off embodies that rhythmic sublimity; the Strokes-y twitch of nostalgia dissolves into cascades of timbre carved from artsy garage rock licks that gently warp the air around them.

The semi-lucid sentimentality of the definitively indie vocals hushes reverie into the kind of recognition you yearn for, a tender understanding and carressive caring that sits beside your idiosyncrasies and self-destructive tendencies without flinching. It is a track for the lovers who wear their hearts on their sleeves next to the culture that keeps them stitched together. Their record shop spawning starts to make all the sense here. To boot, few bands that take influence from the likes of Pavement reach this affectingly experimental place, affirming Avantide as a dying breed that I am going to be inseparable from this LP until the summer.

For this LP, Avantide shaped their material through a process rooted in friendship and persistence, from acoustic skeletons in Mandan rehearsal rooms to full-band arrangements refined alongside engineer Tyler Pilot at Red Dot Recording. Their LP Keep Running has so far earned praise from The Pentatonic and Obscure Sound while landing them shows with Dakotah Faye, The MoonCats and Stephen Steinbrink.

Sleep It Off is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Tabitha Booth reimagined Bowie’s Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide with Tori-Amos-esque flickers and volcanic emotional release

Posted on 23 November 2025

Tabitha Booth proved long ago that authenticity and originality sit at the core of everything she touches, and in Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide, taken from her LP Sound and Vision: The Songs of David Bowie, she turns that unyieldingly affecting magnetism toward a celebration of Bowie that never slips into imitation.  Throughout the LP, she deconstructs some of the most revered songs ever written and places her own artful spin on each arrangement, but it is in Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide that she reaches the zenith of her ability to find fresh avenues of evocative intensity.

As the queen of histrionic-pop-rock crescendos, in this string-carved release, she starts with a trickle of Tori Amos-esque pianos beneath the raw power in her vocals, which feel like the harmonic equivalent of tearing out your soul and screaming into the void with a plea to confront the tragedy before building the single into an inferno of urgency in the vein of Queen and The Last Dinner Party. She refuses to let you believe there is nothing new to take from this iconic piece of Bowie canon. It is rife with grief, romanticism, and spiralling social commentary that hits just as hard today as when Bowie penned it.

Creativity runs in Booth’s blood as the daughter of celebrated macabre artist Paul Booth, and she has shaped a reputation as a rare performer capable of turning ethereal rock and meditative pop into something spellbinding. Her award-winning originals, her improvisational instincts onstage, and her ability to soar vocally while pulling emotion from unexpected corners have allowed her to perform at venues from Webster Hall to Wonderbar. Represented by Mint400 Records, she continues to prove that reinvention is a living force, and Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide stands as her latest testament to that instinct.

Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Ascension let Smoke Screens drift through shoegazey post-punk poetry

Posted on 20 November 2025

London-based duo Ascension cracked open their EP with Smoke Screens, a title track that glows like a warning flare over a postmodern cityscape. Ascension earned their moniker in the EP as the opening single moves like a semi-lucid synthesis of shoegaze, ambient downtempo post-punk, art rock and poetry, coalescing into a cocktail of resolving resonance.

For those who feel adrift in their own minds, the single matches the timbre of disillusioned dissonance through reverb-soaked instrumentals drifting through corridors of the production, as the syncopation illustrates the loss of grip from an even keel. If you could imagine David Lynch lending his eye for unsettling beauty to Thom Yorke as he plays havoc with rhythmic patterns in a soundscape that nods to Portishead and carries the luxe, swooning croons of The Walkmen, you get close to what the London-based outfit pulled from the ether with Smoke Screens.

Outside the studio, the duo cut their teeth on stage with live drummer Oli Banyard, letting the songs mutate in improvised London sets before recording them. The EP sketches out a descent into a dystopian skyline while keeping a hold on melody and emotional clarity, hinting this is only the opening chapter for a project wired to push alt music into stranger, even more affecting territory.

Smoke Screens is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Psychedelic sadness and soft revolt: July Morning lifted indie folk into the ether on Beacon

Posted on 20 October 2025

July Morning approaches indie folk as a respected art form. In their latest transcendently proggy single, Beacon, the Australian breakthrough band tantalises through instrumental and harmonic timbre, creating a rhythmic lullaby for the disenfranchised who don’t frequently see the end of many olive branches.

From the soft inflexions in the vocals to the way the instrumentals pour as though they’ve never felt the string of restraint, to the seamless emotive expression, Beacon is a single that finds a plateau above shadow and invites listeners there; to a space where sadness and psychedelia combine, creating a tonally masterful escape from the void. Genuinely, it’s one of those rare singles that makes you feel mournful when the outro delivers you back to material reality.

Formed in Eora/Sydney, July Morning occupies a liminal space between prog rock, folk, art rock, and the kind of emotionally literate indie that prioritises poetic provocation over surface-level sensibility. With roots in British dad-rock royalty and a deep affinity for experimental arrangements, they channel everything from post-punk freak-outs to epically composed dirges and aching ballads. But rather than splitting the seams between their eclectic influences, they stitch them together with a rare sincerity that never overstates itself. Beacon marks their continued re-emergence following time away from the scene; they’ve re-entered with something rarer than hype: purpose.

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

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Captain Mantis Soundtracked Offbeat Hedonism in Moonshine Alley

Posted on 15 August 2025

With Moonshine Alley, Captain Mantis lures listeners down a backstreet far from the gloss of modernity, where the drinks burn hot, the neon flickers low, and the soundtrack is all swagger and sweat. The Francis Bacon-leaning artwork might hint at something sinister, yet the track moves more like a crooked smile in a dim-lit bar, steeped in the kind of offbeat hedonism you only find when the night starts swallowing the clock.

Dirty garage-rock guitars grind out the opening riff with a sly wink, swinging into subtle time-shift trickery that gives the rhythm section its roguish gait. When the bridge hits, it’s a sudden drift into smoky psychedelia, all spacey chords, sky-reaching vocals, and drums that crash like collapsing beams. By the time the third act rolls in, the extended guitar solo sprawls out like an unhurried last call, dissolving into a cascade of arpeggios that shimmer over the haze.

Formed in Mexico, Captain Mantis thrives on an eclectic strain of rock that stitches together garage grit, art-rock experimentation, and blues-laced nostalgia. Ahead of their forthcoming EP, Vice Market, the band proves they can conjure entire cinematic landscapes from sound alone. If Hollywood needs a lesson in crafting spirit-soaked panoramas, this might be their syllabus.

Moonshine Alley is now available on all major streaming platforms, including SoundCloud. 
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Review by Amelia Vandergast