Back catalogue: Indie/Alternative

Review: DIY pop titans the Reds, Pinks & Purples take aim at the threads of hope with untethered abandon on their new album Unwishing Well. With the project helmed up by songwriter and musician Glenn Donaldson and backed up by collaborators Thomas Rubenstein, Lewis Gallardo, Daniel Pearce and Kati Mashikian, the new LP is a romantic sadcore memory-dive, fleshing out a 90s leftfield pop quintessence and lending it a contemporary production edge. Touchstones like The Go-Betweens, The Smiths, Magnetic Fields and Felt lend well to a terrific outpouring of emotion over ten tracks, which is remarkably frank in its admission of the worst foibles of the music industry and the metaphor for life evoked in this (read: 'Your Worst Song Is Your Greatest Hit').

Review: Shoegaze and indie rock fans rejoice! The new Ride album - their first for five years - is here, featuring 12 new songs in total, many of whch were with some of them being debuted on their recent tour. 'Peace Sign' triumphantly begins the album with the signature wall of sound that Ride is so well known for, while 'Last Frontier' seems to be a firm fan favourite already. Stunning , dynamic and beautifully crafted, the album comes on double colored vinyl complete with insert and MP3 download code and looks likely to be the best shoegaze album of 2024.

Review: When 2017's Weather Diaries marked the first full-length from Oxford shoegaze legends Ride in 21 years, many welcomed what was presumed to be a reshaping of legacy so as to not have bowed out with the negatively received Tarantula. This made 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place even more of a joyous sonic spectacle (before touching on the fact that the LP legitimately bore some of the band's finest work to date). Now that the dust has settled on a plethora of tour dates and festival appearances, we arrive at the third of their post-reunion albums with the highly anticipated Interplay. From the bubbling, ethereal synths of lead single 'Peace Sign' to the hazy, neo-psych dream-pop of 'Last Frontier', Ride appear more rejuvenated and hopeful than they've ever sounded, and it's a miracle in and of itself to be on the cusp of nearly having as many post as pre-break up records.

Review: Claire Rousay continues her compelling evolution with this stunning new album on Thrill Jockey. sentiment once again finds threads of instrumentation and field recordings interweaving with snatches of poetry, dialogue and of course rousay's heart-rending vocal turns. The lens on this particular record is focused on loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt and sex, captured in moments of heartfelt songwriting and passages of experimental, ambient exploration. It's simultaneously challenging and immediately endearing, adding ever more depth to rousay's intriguing profile as she dabbles in pop without ever compromising her experimental instincts.

Review: Los Angeles-based Canadian-American experimentalist Claire Rousay has made a name for herself due to her unique approach to post-rock-inflected ambience built off of primitive DIY field recordings captured on a Zoom H5 Handy Recorder, resulting in a curious form of emo musique concrete or "emo-ambient". Following on from a myriad of collaborations, projects, and singles, Sentiment marks her first full-length to put her usually hidden voice front and centre; utilising auto-tune to craft emotive hyper-folk musings delivered with androgynous hues. Described as a "meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex"; Rousay uses fractured narratives and one-way conversations to deliver painfully relatable, often uncomfortable musings, smothered beneath layers of droning reverb, monotonous acoustic plucking, and everyday sounds almost too familiar to pinpoint. The end result is the musical equivalent to our inner monologue at its lowest ebb, nattering incessantly while the world moves on around us, while sonically, it's the culmination of all Rousay's experimentation thus far, yet simultaneously more fearless and fragile.