Browsing Tag

Psych Rock

Battlestar Battering at 145 BPM: Moose Wrench’s ‘Dead Stars’ Hits Like a Neon Prog-Rock Neurological Event

Posted on 31 July 2026
Moose Wrench

If Henge ever needs an intergalactic opening act, they should look no further than Moose Wrench, a synthy prog-rock outfit capable of putting your synapses into so much of a spin that keeping pace with them practically feels like a neurological event. Dead Stars, from their LP Side Quest, is the ultimate example of the freneticness of their fervour.

Imagine Mozart riffing on a keytar under the influence of mushrooms, industrial electronica and the staccato rhythms of reggae, and you will get an idea of what is in store if you hit play. The Leeds trio, built around keytar, bass and drums, have no need for guitars when their progressive psych-rock absurdism already fires off enough kinetic mischief to leave most bands sounding pedestrianly earthbound.

At 145 BPM, Dead Stars works like a battlestar battering, sending synaesthesia of a strobing neon cosmos into your vision while reminding you that we are little more than dust. That universal theme gives the track a surprisingly philosophical spine beneath its psychedelic grooves, tying the silliness to something properly existential.

With reference points including The Cardiacs, Mr. Bungle, Primus and Ween, Moose Wrench make alternative rock feel deranged, technical and festival-ready without sanding away their outsider humour. Their discography is built for listeners who like their prog playful and their left-turns violent. It’s probably safer if you don’t play any of it while driving.

Dead Stars is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Bandcamp.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Elevated Focusion, Eimas, MINY & James R. Basterd Tore Through the Monocultural Mould in the Interstellar Stormer, ‘Trash’

Posted on 10 April 2026
Elevated Focusion

With a little help from Eimas, MINY and James R. Basterd, Elevated Focusion dropped an interstellar genre-mash of a stormer with Trash. Unsettling from the outset, the dark, deeply rhythmic feat of sonic subversion draws you into a collision of metal, psych, industrial and hip-hop through droning, harbinger-like synthetics, before tribalistic beats punctuate their way into a frenetic rush.

Distorted guitars tear through the arrangement while perpetually chameleonic vocals project the lyrics in juxtaposing forms, each international collaborator bringing volition, intensity and flashes of harmony in their mother tongue, allowing Trash to grind the monocultural mould beneath its heel.

That kind of scope makes sense when you know the roots of the project. Raised in Queens, Elevated Focusion absorbed underground hip-hop, punk, jazz, rave culture and the cultural crosscurrents of NYC long before this phase took shape. Earlier instrumental work under the Jonny Rythmns name fed into the experimental cultivation here, before the project re-formed after the pandemic into something broader, sharper, and more collaborative. Since then, Elevated Focusion has pushed further into vocal-led releases with artists from across the globe, tying music and alternative fashion into one unruly vision.

We’re hardly shocked they had the nerve to pull off such a cross-continental triumph without cheapening the culture of a single contribution. This is trash you will never want to take off your playlists.

Trash is now available on all major streaming platforms. Find your preferred way to listen via the artist’s official website. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Dominyka Mauliute Stirred the Spirit of Resistance Through Her Psychedelic Slice of Indie Pop Activism, ‘Changes’

Posted on 10 February 2026

In Dominyka Mauliute’s Changes, contemporary activism is enmeshed within the fervour and psychedelia of the 60s, pulling two eras of uprising into the same emotional current. She shows how resistance still carries necessity, how the threat of futility shadows progress when it creeps into collective consciousness. Her delivery moves with that drifting, spectral quality found in the work of Angel Olsen and Mazzy Star, yet the way she haunts her own soundscapes comes entirely through her instinct. Nothing feels detached or theoretical; the conviction sits right there in the arrangement as if it has been breathed into the structure.

As the single progresses, the edges twist into the hazier textures of 70s psych rock. Those elements weave themselves into the release with a natural sense of momentum, carrying motifs of history forward to become a quiet antidote to apathy. Her jazz guitar background infuses warmth into the track without ever tipping it into ornamentation. Instead, the notes lift the sense of purpose already running beneath the lines, letting the political thread stay rooted in emotion rather than spectacle. The whole piece feels like a reminder that resistance gathers power when it holds both clarity and vulnerability at once.

Outside this release, Dominyka’s path adds to the gravity behind her sound. The Lithuanian singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and jazz guitarist has already established a presence through viral performances, national stages, and a growing catalogue shaped through her own production. Studying philosophy feeds into her introspective tilt, illuminating the way she approaches themes of agency, identity, and internal conflict. Her move towards dreamier indie textures was a natural progression, giving her soulful guitar lines and ethereal vocal tone a landscape where they can settle and stretch.

Changes is now available on all major streaming platforms. For the full experience, watch the official music video on YouTube. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

 

Puppies & a Demon blurred psychotropic lines of lo-fi alt-realism in ‘Illusions’

Posted on 17 January 2026

Puppies & a Demon rode the crux of the surf rock wave in Illusions, their psychedelically twisted, lo-fi cruise through grungy indie territory. In one hand, they clutch the kaleidoscopic soul of the 60s, in the other, the sludge of the alt-90s, all while churning up their own brand of sonic dissonance that doesn’t ask for attention so much as it hypnotically absorbs it.

The title may suggest ambiguity, but the creative conviction in the track’s layered textures leaves no room for doubt. Whether you’re new to the idea of reality being little more than smoke and screen, or you’ve been reading behind the veil for years, the impact of this trip is the same. It’s a cosmic exit sign lit by garagey distortion and psychotropic catharsis. The vocals drift between sardonic sweetness and cryptic harbingering, chameleonically slipping in and out of harmony, allowing the freaked-out to be comforted while ruffling the complacent.

Puppies & a Demon are already gaining notoriety for their commitment to sonically warped storytelling. Illusions feels like it bubbled up through the cracks in the pavement after a rainfall of existential dread and came coated in the kind of fuzz that illuminates. There’s method in their madness, but they never let that get in the way of the obscurity. The track’s lo-fi roots hold steady while the band lets their freak flag fly somewhere between the Californian coast and an abandoned squat’s basement speaker stack.

Illusions is now available on all major streaming platforms, including YouTube. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

YAVENIRIE AMOK birthed ritualistic rebellion from the bones of modern decay in their third single, ‘Obelisque Queen’

Posted on 11 January 2026

Put YAVENIRIE AMOK in a box, and they’ll burn it down as a form of ritualistic rebellion.

Following a sermonic folk rock guitar melody, their third single, Obelisque Queen, hymnally writhes through grungy distortion and psychedelic desert rock twangs of humidity. With vocals that synthesise the spectral style of Siouxsie Sioux with the ethereal ferocity of Florence Welch over Flamenco guitars and white-hot oscillations of transcendental abstraction, the track taps into something intrinsically primal.

It isn’t just a howl into the void, it’s a full-body invocation; a snarl at the gold-plated rot of modern society, where truth is the last thing anyone wants dragged into the banquet hall. While courtiers clink glasses in denial, YAVENIRIE AMOK howl from the gutter, rising sharper and louder as they spit fire back into the faces of the wilfully blind. There’s no apathy here, only arcane heat and a visceral confrontation to protest against how everything has become bastardised since aesthetics overtook ethics and left culture to be gnawed apart by profiteers.

Fronted by vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Zuza Tehanu, and completed by Asia, Tom, and Jan, the London-formed but Polish-rooted four-piece have been shaping their sonic and visual world since 2016. After surviving both personal loss and creative upheaval, they’ve returned from the flames with a sound that refuses definition. Their music straddles the ritualistic and the riotous, the poetic and the prophetic, built on the belief that raw expression can rattle cages and summon spirit back into the art form.

If the recorded material lands like this, the live experience must be nothing short of an awakening.

Obelisque Queen is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 
Review by Amelia Vandergast

Bristol’s art punk powerhouse, Phlegmonade, salved glitched-out minds with the surealist distortion in ‘Ode to a Machine’

Posted on 11 October 2025

Phlegmonade isn’t a band name you’d want to pronounce after a few pints, but you’ll want them on your radar after their latest single, Ode to a Machine. The Bristol-based art-punk provocateurs didn’t hold back when they turned their debut into a snarling, unrelenting barrage of garagey skate punk, injected with enough chaos to rip the soul clean from its technocratic casing. It’s a full-throttle blitz of fuzz-drenched fury that cuts through algorithmic apathy with serrated hooks and seething rhythmic momentum.

As the hypersonically twisted guitars oscillate around frenetic percussive blasts, the only reprieve from the onslaught is the occasional wave of woozy psych rock, bleeding colour into the white hot brutality. It’s an adrenaline shot of no-wave-esque distortion, and it carries enough mental static to grind your internal cogs into a blissfully dysfunctional haze.

Through the track’s raw instrumental assault, the metaphor of the mind and body as a faltering vehicle is delivered with abrasive, unflinching sincerity. You feel every rattling piston and spiralling feedback loop of the sonically visualised psychological collapse. And from that wreckage, Phlegmonade resurrects something oddly tender. Something that says: love the malfunction, embrace the glitch.

Drawing from years in the studio and band members scattered from Ireland to Italy to Bristol, Phlegmonade have alchemised a sound that sits somewhere between philosophical subversion and gleefully absurd destruction. Ode to a Machine is the first hit of what’s sure to be a mind fuck of a legacy.

Ode to a Machine is now available on all major streaming platforms, including YouTube. 


Review by Amelia Vandergast

Grizzberg’s Days & Nights Spun Bedroom Introspection into Radio-Ready Alt 90s Indie

Posted on 3 October 2025

There was a certain kind of psych-tinged kaleidoscopic euphony that drifted through the ’90s, and it is tenderly echoing into the future of indie through Grizzberg’s latest single, Days & Nights, as a conduit. With all the caressing sweetness of The Maccabees, the track uses its paradoxical production, which gives you all the intimacy of a bedroom-born release on a radio-ready frequency, to deliver the panorama of a tempestuous yet innocently off-kilter relationship. The lyrical whiplash of navigating highs and lows becomes an affecting meditation on how we are all imperfect people, forming imperfect relationships, trying people on to see who will fit, maybe even cover some cracks so we don’t splinter in silence.

The project is the brainchild of Steve Adams, a UK artist whose first acoustic album dates back to April 2000. With roots running from Oasis, Radiohead, and Joy Division to Mogwai and Boards of Canada, Adams spent his twenties behind the decks at clubs such as Ministry of Sound and Brixton Jamm alongside Basement Jaxx. Now, with Grizzberg, he is channelling his experience as producer and label runner into a crafted indie rock sound that thrives on emotional turbulence and sonic intimacy.

Days & Nights is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Vindication, Vintage Curves and Sonic Swagger Come Alive in Jimmy Stanfield’s Maybe I’m Doing Something Right By Me

Posted on 12 June 2025
Right Side of Time by Jimmy Stanfield

Jimmy Stanfield served a soul-affirming reminder to trust your own calibration with Maybe I’m Doing Something Right By Me, the third single from his forthcoming LP Right Side of Time, landing in full on July 25th. As a mash of alt-indie, rock, soul and psychedelic garage blues, the track unveils the Melbourne-based singer-songwriter as a troubadour who sees sonic lines as arbitrary barricades to pour rootsy rock colour across.

Already an icon at synthesising style, swagger, soul and substance, Stanfield shakes, rattles and rolls the new intersections right out of rock to deliver groove-led installations of euphoria. His vocals lift the track as much as the horn stabs from Joe Auckland that everyone can prise a little hedonic satisfaction from. If you’ve reached your people-pleasing limit and now it’s time to riff to your own strings, Maybe I’m Doing Something Right By Me needs to be locked and loaded into your vindicating rock playlists.

From the execution of the authentically timbered production to the way suspense grips before every vintage curveball is thrown to the liberating lyricism, the single proves that if anyone has the chops to push rock back into the mainstream spotlight, it’s Jimmy Stanfield.

Featuring players from Lana Del Rey, Elvis Costello, The Libertines and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, this indie launch has major-label magnetism without compromise.

Maybe I’m Doing Something Right By Me is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Bandcamp. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Levi Lights On Project Lit the Signal Fires of Insurgency in ‘The People Awake’ – Orchestral Alt-Rock, Dub-Soaked Electronica, and Arcane World Music Collide

Posted on 23 May 2025
Levi Lights On Project

Levi Lights On Project’s latest single, ‘The People Awake’, sparked a dawning of consciousness on the airwaves; after a cinematically orchestral intro that pulls you in with eerily ornate spectral tones and oscillations, The People Awake slams into a percussion-driven alt-rock manifestation of pure insurgency while Eastern motifs drift around dub-esque electronica and vocals that harmonise as a siren call to action; to join the progressives, to reject the expectation to be complicit to the systematic oppression, to shun the fear of being misunderstood and branded as woke.

As the progressively spellbinding production unfurls, it turns a myriad of stylistic corners before landing in arcane world music territory with a psychedelically ethereal Avant-Garde twist. If it has been a while since the sheer magnitude of an artist’s creativity affected you viscerally to the degree that the lyrical underpinnings became a haunting mantra, hit play.

Levi Lights On Project has always been rooted in philosophical depth and radical sonic experimentations, yet with this release, they pushed the boundaries into oblivion, directing every note into a visceral critique of passivity and complicity, making ‘The People Awake’ less of a protest anthem and more of a spell cast on the disillusioned.

‘The People Awake’ is now available to stream on all major platforms via this link.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Jonathan Stephen Braught Raised a Kaleidoscopic Middle Finger to Convention in ‘Drug Shed’

Posted on 5 May 2025

Drug Shed from one of the most visionary troubadours of psychedelic country in the 21st century, Jonathan Stephen Braught, is a short, sharp sunstroke of sonic disobedience. Surfy, swanky, angularly kaleidoscopic guitars carry plenty of the instrumental weight in the single which ebbs and flows like the waves under the California sun as Jonathan Stephen Braught injects a little garage rock panache into the tropic psychedelic country pop earworm with his playful reprise of ‘I wish I had a drug shed’ which embeds itself into the playful vignette of mind alteration that conjures feelings of complete renegade freedom. Jonathan Stephen Braught is one of the rare kinds of artists you hear once and feel yourself become instantly endeared to. He’s a vibe in himself.

Operating somewhere between the sonic smog of lo-fi country, basement Americana and psych rock, Braught’s songwriting becomes the perfect circle in the unfiltered, weirdly witty, raw, and deeply human Venn diagram. His refusal to sand down the edges only amplifies the magnetic pull of his offbeat charm. From the opening hook to the last warped reverberation, Drug Shed rattles with the ragged joy of a brain just unspooling.

Written, recorded, and mastered in a creative flash fire as part of his latest project, Unorganized Crimes, Drug Shed is a bleary, unapologetically imperfect dispatch from a mind determined to make noise that tells the truth—even if it’s duct-taped together with half-broken guitars and fried drum loops.

Drug Shed is now available to stream on all major platforms, including SoundCloud. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast.