New Releases

Truly

Twilight Curtains

Bang

***First time ever on vinyl, Twilight Curtains presents a long-overlooked chapter in the legacy of Truly, the acclaimed Seattle band formed by songwriter Robert Roth alongside Hiro Yamamoto, co-founder of Soundgarden, and Mark Pickerel, founding drummer of Screaming Trees. Originally released in 2000 as a CD-only collection, Twilight Curtains gathers rare, unreleased and alternate recordings captured between 1991 and 1997, documenting the band during its most creative and exploratory period. More than simply another Seattle group, Truly forged a singular sound that blended heavy psychedelic rock, grunge-era intensity, damaged pop and expansive melodic textures. Featuring the contributions of three key figures from the Pacific Northwest underground, this collection offers a fascinating glimpse into the band's evolution through alternate versions, lost recordings and previously unavailable material. Twilight Curtains finally makes this missing piece of the Truly catalogue available on vinyl.

Flower Travellin' Band

Satori

Munster

***REISSUED!!! Originally released in 1971, Satori is Flower Travellin' Band's groundbreaking masterpiece and one of the most visionary albums of the early heavy rock era. It fused hard rock, psychedelia, progressive music and traditional Eastern influences into a sound unlike anything heard before. Unlike many rock albums of the era, Satori is structured as a continuous musical journey, with its five tracks presented as interconnected movements rather than conventional songs. The band's powerful rhythm section, extended guitar passages, and the commanding vocals of Joe Yamanaka create an atmosphere that feels both intense and hypnotic. Recorded during a period when Japanese rock was developing its own identity, Satori drew inspiration from Western hard rock and psychedelia while incorporating a unique sense of space, improvisation, and spiritual exploration. Over the decades, the album has gained international recognition among collectors, musicians, and fans of vintage heavy rock, often cited as an overlooked classic that anticipated elements of later hard rock, stoner rock, and heavy metal. More than fifty years after its release, Satori remains as one of the most influential and forward-thinking records in Japanese rock history. Includes an insert.

Frogs, The

My Daughter The Broad - 30th Anniversary Edition

Foreign Leisure

***Originally released by Matador Records in 1996, The Frogs’ opus My Daughter The Broad is returning to vinyl after nearly 30 long years away—and it’s now expanded to a double LP with a whopping eight bonus tracks of Frogs mania. It’s “one of the funniest albums ever made” according to Magnet.Formed in Milwaukee in 1980 by brothers Dennis and Jimmy Flemion, The Frogs lit up the underground with their fearless sense of absurdism. On one hand, they composed pop-centric masterpieces inspired by glam and classic British pop. On the other, they maniacally created what they called “Made-Up Songs,” fully improvised bits of largely acoustic pop jingles that were, more often than not, accompanied by lyrics that would make your mother blush.Some of those “Made-Up Songs” were collected for 1989’s classic It’s Only Right and Natural, which led The Frogs to the vaunted halls next door to fame: They were beloved by Kurt Cobain, taken on tour by Pearl Jam, produced by Billy Corgan, sampled by Beck. It was a whole thing. A feature-length documentary on the band has been in the works for nearly a decade, and will see the light of day soon.So it was decreed in 1996 that another set of “Made-Up Songs” would be collected—the Flemion brothers had more than a thousand of them at this point—and the chosen 22 became My Daughter The Broad, named as a nod to their admirers in Mudhoney, who had recently released My Brother The Cow.My Daughter gathers some of the...

Bug Bath

Too Much Heaven

Transylvanian Recordings

***Nostalgic bliss is alive and well in the music of Bug Bath. Fuzzy anthems that combine the gritty charm of underground punk and alternative rock from the 90's with the catchiness of early 2000's emo. Presented on super limited 180 gram colored vinyl.

Soda Pop

s/t

Transylvanian Recordings

***Infectiously catchy emotional indie rock. The type of music that gets stuck in your brain with the only reprieve coming from giving in & listening to it over & over. Recommended for fans of Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, Hot Water Music & Circa Survive. Presented on super limited 180 gram colored vinyl.

Foreign Body

Libertine

Brutal Panda

***Foreign Body play raw, hideous, and vulgar music. Emblematic of the seedy underbelly of yesterday’s New York City– where sex workers walked the streets freely, rubble and decay were prevalent, drugs were readily available and every businessman’s briefcase contained a loaded gun, the quartet spin Musou black yarns that polite society would rather have swept under the rug, soundtracking them with jaw-clenching and furious mid-tempo punk exploding with fresh ideas. And even though Foreign Body drips with a loathsome mix of hatred for modern living and a desire for its immolation, they’re also one of music’s most promising faces.Libertine is wholly relentless album with unflinching portrayals of vice, perversions and glorified excesses. Their sophomore full-length was recorded by Matt Russell (REZN, Oozing Wound) and produced by Matt Ibarra of Rectal Hygienics.

Crazy Clue

Where The Dregs Dwell

Beach Impediment

***Crazy Clue's Where the Dregs Dwell is ten blasts from the unraveled gaseous mass of 80s HC a la NOTA, Rebel Truth, and Pig Children, the thumping bloodwart of the modern greats like Dawn of Humans and SHIT, and the hysteric touch of Totalitar in some kind of Scandi-wegian pogo tinged open faced sandwich. Featuring the greatest mind of 21st century traditional hardcore Mr. Bobby Cole (Annihilated, Total Con), and the Vanda-Young of distorted guitars, Mike and Jonah from Canada, Crazy Clue’s Where the Dregs Dwell is ten tracks of ear damaging fizz thud clunk and squeal, paved with anguished cries and dotted with gloriously wrong sounds, cheap techniques, and luxury results. When there’s no more room in hell, where will the dregs dwell?

Sin Offering

Guilty

Beach Impediment

***There is no other verdict. You were born with the mark on your forehead. You have always known that you are to be expelled from their circle. And the door will creak; it will be heavy; you will struggle to cross the threshold. You will feel their eyes on your back, and it will be like this even when you reach where it is sylvan. You will smell ash; you will find your veil is burning. The leaves underfoot will be dead. You will walk along the riverbank, and your skirts will catch on the brambles.There is, somewhere else, innocence. Sin Offering offers only Guilty, their debut 12” EP for Beach Impediment Records, Sound Grotesca, and Side Two.Guilty, named for Georges Bataille’s Le Coupable, is stitched from discarded fragments of metallic punk, deathrock, doom metal, and post punk—think Tožibabe, the Dead Relatives, Potion for Bad Dreams-era Void, Paul Chain Violet Theatre, and Danse Macabre. Or: vocals many have described as “girl Rozz Williams” + the Simmons SDSV + Will Heggie’s bass on Garlands + Mick Mars by way of Randy Uchida. Lyrically, Guilty fixates on the uneasy proximity between prohibition and violation, drawing from the Pentateuch and the Gospels as much as from nineteenth and twentieth-century literature of abjection (Mary Shelley’s Mathilda and Colette’s L’ingénue libertine).Elizabeth Siddal, sketched as Ophelia, opens her mouth to speak: “All changes pass me like a dream, / I neither sing nor pray; / And thou art like the poisonous tree / That stole my...

Peebles, Ann

Tellin' It

Fat Possum

***Ann Peebles was at the height of her fame in 1975 when she cut the album Tellin' It—she had scored her biggest chart hit the year before with "I Can't Stand the Rain," and Tellin' It reflected the kind of hard-edged but soulful groove that had taken Peebles to the upper reaches of the charts.Earlier this year, recovered from the Hi Records vault and untouched for decades, the tapes were sent to Nashville Tape Transfer for their first listen in fifty years. From there, every step stayed close to home: Remastered by Clay Jones, lacquers cut at Take Out Vinyl, plated and pressed right in Memphis at Memphis Record Pressing.The first vinyl pressing in 50 years.

Added Dimensions

Added Dimentions Demo LP

Hozac

***"When Sarah Everton and her husband hoofed it to rural Virginia some years back, that spelt the unofficial break-up of her Philadelphia trio Blowdryer, and she proceeded to hole up for the great plague that we’ve all pretended to forget. Some of those 'late period' Blowdryer songs were sitting around from a direction Everton had been plotting in which she’d attempt Carole King doing Electric Eels-style songs. Added Dimensions—triumphantly named after a plus-sized clothing store her mother frequented back when stores really had names like that—was the result.Those first 2022 home-assembled recordings might not have fully nailed the Tapestry / God Says Fuck You hybrid (keep trying!!), but they weren’t far off, and there was some real 'buzz' that year, as we say in the industry, about her sharp, minimalist punk cassette tape debut. Added Dimensions’ short and aggressive pure-DIY songs then were particularly influenced, and still are to some extent, by The Urinals and Wipers. Everton’s themes centered around hating her job, being depressed, the indignities of masking and how exhausting it is/was, drugs ('Default Mode'), hating the music industry ('Wirey'), and social media/internet bullshit ('You Got My Number'). Themes everyone can rally around!For years, dating back to her time in Reading/Bleeding Rainbow in the late 00s/early 10s, it’s been Everton’s voice that’s been a primary calling card. Not because it’s operatic or snotty or bratty or overwrought, but because she brings a clean, melodic and still tuff set of pipes to each track, a thoroughly natural voice with...

Graphic Violets

Endless Parade

Hozac

***Just a little over a year since Rob Garcia (Product Placement, Telepathic, Reading/Bleeding Rainbow) debuted his Graphic Violets project with the six-track Immune from Evil cassette, he’s back, this time with Endless Parade, a full-length album out on HoZac Records.Immune from Evil was all about living through a terrible moment in history, and unfortunately, things have only gotten worse. That’s what Garcia’s concerned with on Endless Parade, 13 songs that ruminate on that downward trajectory.Endless Parade is about realizing you’re stuck in a vicious cycle, a neverending loop of control, addiction, fear. The search for happiness winds up at a dead end. All attempts to assign meaning are futile. Nothing works.Garcia’s themes are heavy, it’s true. But the music isn’t a drag. With Endless Parade, Garcia puts his spin on the Dunedin sound for the present moment: jangly, pop-oriented, self-aware and thoughtful, but without a trace of treacle. He found kinship in the sounds of Tall Dwarfs, Swell Maps, Wire, and Psychic TV, and in the message of Sly Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin On.”Graphic Violets is Garcia’s return to music after some time away.In the four years prior to working on the cassette, Garcia didn’t write any music. He moved multiple times, worked jobs that weren’t the right fit and lost people who were close to him. Life kinda sucked.Playing drums for longtime collaborator Sarah Everton’s Added Dimensions project set him back on the path toward music.And once he started writing again, he couldn’t stop.Garcia wrote, played and recorded...

Hinely, Tim / Eric Eggleson & Friends

Where The Wild Gigs Were Vol. 2 - Another Trip Through America's Underground Music Venues

Hozac

***Tim Hinely and friends are back with another immensely entertaining volume of their acclaimed Where The Wild Gigs Were series delving into the fascinating stories behind some of the best-loved, sometimes-legendary, and not-soon-to-be-forgotten music venues across the USA. With his co-hort Eric Eggleson, they’ve assembled another knockout cast of underground luminary contributors; some new on this volume, and others returning with more war stories, and its packed with the sordid tales that keep those wild memories alive. Chock full of original newspaper ads, obscure flyers, and vintage snapshots, this second volume turns up the heat with eye-popping and/or jaw-dropping entries for The Rat (Boston), Madame Wong’s (and Wong’s West, LA), Cathay de Grande (SF), X-Ray Cafe (Portland), The Island (Houston), The NO Bar & Grill (Muncie), Bacchanal (Philadelphia), Coney Island High (NYC), Jabberwocky (Syracuse), The Keg (DC), Churchill’s Hideaway (Miami), WC Don’s (Jackson, MS), and so many more no longer with us. 241 pages, paperback. 1st edition of 500 copies

Modern Apartments

Light On Water

Dark Entries

Modern Apartments arrive on Dark Entries, with Light on Water, an LP featuring 8 cuts of instrumental cosmic-kosmische analog synth workouts. Modern Apartments is Ryan Ambridge, the musician and producer best known for his work with dark synth projects Linea Aspera and Lust Pattern. While both of those outlets lean towards the greyscale and robotic, Ambridge wanted to explore a more colorful palette with Modern Apartments, a livelier, looser sound. The medium of film plays a major role here; Ambridge works as a projectionist, screening archival prints of 35mm and 16mm films, and the textures and temporality of the medium fed directly into the Modern Apartments aesthetic. But it isn’t all blurry edges and fuzzy optimism on Light on Water. Says Ambridge, “Regular beats from old rhythm boxes and the sharp angles of post-punk found their way in. The contrasting imagery from those old film prints, of dense cities and open countryside, is reflected back in the dialog between looser sounds and rigid stylistic choices.” This tension shines through on tracks like album opener “Completely,” which pairs the icy minimalism of John Foxx with the meandering grooves of Cluster, or the eponymous “Light on Water” which leans even further into the sun-bleached vibes of Roedelius. Artwork for this record was designed by Eloise Shir-Juen Leigh. Light on Water is perfect late-summer listening, as the last gasps of seasonal radiance fade into autumnal splendor.

Fruited Planes

Dismal Nitch

Dot Dash Sounds

***"Fruited Planes are a contemporary Portland, OR band. Their debut cassette release––Introducing The Moth Eggs (2024 Curly Cassettes)––introduced the sound they’ve now honed on Dismal Nitch, their first vinyl release. Dot Dash Sounds, a NY label run by Tom Hyland (WFMU dj) was smitten enough by the cassette to get this LP out. This is guitar music first and foremost. The album production is aces! Think back to the halcyon days of smogged out sunsets in Los Angeles circa 1967-68/ 1981-84, the soundtrack to those lysergic fueled happy hours, Fruited Planes nails a perfect nexus of the former era via The Seeds/Love/LA nuggets and the latter via The Rain Parade (David Roback era), Gun Club, X, 100 Flowers, with the melodic hooks of the Kendra led Dream Syndicate locked in arms with the first coupla Green On Red LPs and you’re getting the vibe. Now, add a heaping dose of Dan Tracey’s TVP’s via Kevin Ayers’ calypso hiccups and some bratty treble UK Messthetics soaked barks updated for the modern miasma of deception and gaslighting epoch we’re all muckin through.The band is comprised of subterranean lifers Seth Bender (Marzipan/Pernicious Knifs), subunderground connoisseur Scott Derr (Monoshock/Black Jack Records/ Terminal Waste Band/ et al.), Michael Henrickson (Jackie-O MF/Evolutionary Jass Band/Eat Skull) and Jason Willmon (Mouth Painter/Barry Walker Unit). These gristled veterans can tear up it live too! They’ve got enough of that barn rock guitar juke joint swagger that would make the Panther Burns rubber neck. Hell, I’ve seen and heard them...

Marca Diaboli

Labyrintomb

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Chilean​/Austria​n​ occult rock/post-punk necromancer Marca Diaboli emerges with its first hexation—"Labyrintomb", a grave-born spell book of primeval shamanic rock musick invoking evil spirits and dark forces from beyond the flesh.​ Sordid and decaying in formal aesthetic, yet enchanting in its bewitching magnetism, the eighteen-minute debut offering sees influences from bands like In Solitude, Negative Plane, Bauhaus, Amebix and The Devil's Blood sublimating into the nightsky like ​cursed invokations howling from a witch's cauldron.​ Its subterranean production quality and deteriorated lo-fi aesthetic are surely black metal derived, revealing an evil origin and nurturing a nauseous presence of death that permeates every note played.​ Yet its restless vibrancy and hypnotic melodies unearth a primeval seduction impossible to restrain. Cobweb-clad sepulchers, moldy, dripping ruins and bygone graveyards reanimate across its five rapturous spells into a cathartic moon-lit trance, as the frenzied ritual burns cryptic offerings in the night, ​unto the marvel and immensity of death.

Gunn, Steve

Steve Gunn

Abandon Ship

***Steve Gunn's debut, originally released as a CD-R on Onomato in 2007. This all instrumental album documents a formative moment in Gunn’s evolution. Recorded to 4-track in his Brooklyn apartment, the compositions move freely between American primitive guitar, meditative drone, and free improv. The result is a deeply personal listening experience: unpolished, exploratory, and remarkably assured in its sense of atmosphere and space.Remastered by legendary sound artist Lasse Marhaug nearly two decades after its original release, this early work receives its first ever pressing to vinyl. Limited to 500 LPs, this long overdue reissue preserves a vital document of Gunn’s early creative world.

TV HWY

Progress Down

Black Water

***Progress Down by PDX local rockers, TV HWY has been a record in the making since 2022, recording at drummer Seve's home studio and completing the process at Red Lantern Studios, a name synonymous from a wide swath of the Black Water Records catalog. This album drifts between in-your-face punk bangers, jaunty pogo-y sing-alongs to moodier and more contemplative and introspective compositions. The dual vocals are energetic, passionate, and catchy. The gated drum sound along with the added percussive hits give it an almost 80’s vibe with synth lines buried under the tracks. The bass lines drift along over the riffs, plodding along with flourishing fills punctuated at just the right places for added feeling. Overall, this record goes in the certified banger category and there is something for everyone on this release. Heavy influences from the likes of Magazine, Camera Silens, Sad Lovers and Giants, the Zero Boys and DEVO etc.

Thorn Wych

Aesthesis

Tompkins Square

***Thorn Wych makes instruments from tree branches; bowed strings, flutes and percussion that she runs through a chain of loopers, pitch bending glitches and delay pedals. Strange songs sung in tongues, mashed up chewed and spat out. As the adder weaves her way through the dirt and mycelium hum, we play in the mud and converse with insects.Aesthesis is Thorn Wych's debut LP that she recorded and mixed herself at home, often performing long improvised pieces, then later editing them down, cutting and pasting and overlaying other instruments.This album takes inspiration from such works as The Secret Book of John, the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad, and Lata Mangeshkar's Meera Bhajans. She dedicates her work to the Divine Mother Asherah, Holy Spirit, Guardian of the Tree of Life.

Chat Pile

Who Loves The Sun

Flenser

In a world increasingly shaped by disposable content, Chat Pile answer with something defiantly real and organic, a mentality that permeates Who Loves The Sun, their third full-length record. Since the band’s formation just over six years ago, the Oklahoma City-based quartet Chat Pile has grown from a scrappy passion project into one of the defining heavy acts to emerge from the 2020s underground. Ray B. (vocals), L. Manhole (guitar), Stin (bass), and Cap’n Ron (drums) create a crushing, crass, and cathartic take on noise rock that captures a raw, undeniably human essence in an age marked by technological overreach and the cold state of society. Nothing about Who Loves The Sun feels synthetic. Whereas their debut album God’s Country depicted a particularly American flavor of dread, and the follow up Cool World showed a cruel planet defined by global systemic violence, Who Loves The Sun peels the skin back on how collective indifference defines this new century. Spanning imagery of coastlines devouring cities, dead-end jobs, and submission to data-driven inauthenticity, the album dissects the apathy-bloated state of 21st-century existence as a slow-motion apocalypse. As with much of Chat Pile’s work, Oklahoma City itself looms over the album like a character, its sprawling isolation, economic contradictions, and underlying sense of decay embedded in the fabric of the record. The perfect allegory for the thematic essence of Who Loves The Sun is the photo embossed on the record’s cover, where Devon Tower, a glassy, largely vacant monolith, looms high above the...

Todd, Blaine

Angle of Repose

Nudie Records

***Angle of Repose, the fifth solo record from Bay Area songwriter Blaine Todd, unfolds as a sequence of nine plainspoken and pared back transmissions from the uneasy edge of country music. Acoustic guitar, pedal steel, lonesome horns and fiddle wrap around these brief sketches of runners and restless figures moving through landscapes both psychic and geographic. Here are highway hymns of people who sense what must be done but seldom find the conviction to do it, sliding slowly downhill in search of a temporary resting point.Todd’s writing favors a kind of shrugging candor: jokes and idioms used as vessels for some bleaker truth. The world these songs inhabit is often stark, though not without romance—a place where insight comes easily while resolve remains elusive.Angle of Repose is less like a collection of songs than a stretch of road, punctuated by a sequence of vacant roadside motels offering short-sighted salvation.Blaine Todd is a songwriter and musician based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work draws from country, folk, and experimental music traditions. In addition to his solo work, he has performed with Night Collectors, Real Life Rock & Roll Band, the Andrew Weathers Ensemble, Common Eider, King Eider, and Ecstatic Music Band. His solo recordings have been released by Nudie Records, Worried Songs, Perpetual Doom, Debacle Records, and Full Spectrum Records.

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.f.o.

In A Not C

Vhf

More than 25 years after the start of collaboration with Acid Mothers Temple mastermind Makoto Kawabata (including the INUI series and the classic Kawabata/Youngs release) comes the first proper VHF LP by the prolific quintet. One of an occasional series of “minimalism” inspired LPs by the group, In A Not C is a not a barely changing drone, but a wild ride with the band in full flight, rushing along in a glorious swirl of psychedelic madness. Like the band’s well-known 2001 version of Terry Riley’s In C, the group uses a small cell of repeating sound as a jumping off point and then gradually revs up to maximum velocity. The current AMT lineup has produced a series of fun and unique variants on the band’s longstanding signatures, with the addition of vocalist/guitarist Jyonson Tsu and drummer Satoshima Nani providing a lightness and nimbleness of touch that resets the context of the band’s usual blazing electric guitar and burbling synth. Both sides here build to a multi-layered crescendo, with loops of Tsu’s gentle vocals competing with frenetic drums, whistling electronics, and guitar that alternates trebly feedback and soft arpeggios. Cut by Golden, pressed in Chicago at Smashed, first pressing on clear vinyl.

Rosnet, Jean-Emmanuel

Les Rivières Sont des Chemins qui Marchent

Not Not Fun

The third collection by French abstractionist Jean-Emmanuel Rosnet was developed during a residency in Thiers and the Dore Valley in central France, which was once a thriving hub of paper mills, workshops, and tanneries powered by the Dore and Durolle rivers. Inspired by the region’s abandoned factories, and visions of the workers who once animated these places, Rosnet sought to echo their gestures and rhythms, crafting mosaics of intimacies and disorientation with modular synth, tape loops, and elemental sounds: flowing water, clattering machines, resonant metal.The title translates as “rivers are roads that move,” alluding to the music’s muse of transience and absence, erosion and exploration, melancholy and drift. It’s art as deep listening divining rod, attuned to the traces of memory murmuring from cracks, rust, soil, and subcurrents. Eight glimpses through the veil, equal parts tribute and eulogy. Mastered by Jared Carrigan. Art and design by Jean-Emmanuel Rosnet.

Windy & Carl With Optigan Conservatory

Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory

Kranky

Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory is a purposefully misleading title for the first collaborative work from four friends who met close to thirty years prior. All active participants in Michigan independent music circles since the early ’90s, Windy & Carl are well-known for their foundational contributions to drift and guitar-born ambient sounds, with songs characterized by deep connections to the natural world and a hard to pin down yet impossible to miss emotional vulnerability. Optigan Conservatory is another duo, made up of Frank Rotondo (leader of Detroit area free music ensemble Laughing Gas) and Fred Thomas (songwriter and producer most often associated with his band Saturday Looks Good To Me), who have been making minimalistic and time-defiant electro-acoustic sounds since 2016. The album came together almost effortlessly in a very short timeframe, but the idea had been building steam for many a year.In the last days of 2024, Windy & Carl and Optigan Conservatory got together, falling into a mode of sound creation that was almost hyper-natural. Without any discussion outside of the usual stream of jokes and chatter, the quartet set up and started communicating. Added to Windy & Carl’s hovering augmented chord voicings and vaporous guitar drones were electric piano and synth bedding from Frank & Fred. After the initial sessions, all involved parties took time to consider what they’d made, adding new layers and editing the pieces into more definitive articulations. A beautiful and hermetic energy larger than the sum of its parts is captured in...

Dragnet

Dragnet

Total Punk

***After an 8 year absence Gary Wrong comes barreling out of the wild’s of Alabama with his new project DRAGNET. New collaborator Matt Leary standing at his side laying down the licks and making the beats, while Gary’s throbbing baselines do the driving. Trudging the empty beer cans and filthy muck, that line the murky swamp floor, behind their beat-up airboat while slinging Gary’s signature harsh vibes. They shout in unison about the end of the world on lead single ‘Para-noid.’ Bummer punk with a bit of sunshine slipping into the sludge courtesy of some catchy hooks. Pulsing, hypnotic, and 100% TOTAL PUNK! 12” out on TOTAL PUNK on August 7th, but get your preorder in now. Limited to 300 copies!

Spread Joy

III

Feel It

***"Are your shoelaces tied? Have you stretched? Good. Spread Joy’s new record will have you up and moving before your brain can even comprehend what the body is doing – fuck you, Renè Descartes! As always, the band’s rhythmic hivemind is more locked-in than your local synchronized swim team.The good news is that III isn’t a pure adrenaline rush. You see the band in lineage to the kinds of post punks who never let being smart as hell keep them from having a good time. The B52s and Talking Heads and Suburban Lawns of the world knew that any highbrow lyricism would wash down better with hefty doses of killer melodies and Spread Joy bears this lineage well.As always, it’s a full-bodymind workout with Spread Joy: don’t say you weren’t warned."—Annie Howard

Wild Magnolias, The

They Call Us Wild

Jackpot

Coming on the heels of Jackpot Records' vinyl reissue of The Wild Magnolias' S/T debut LP, Jackpot proudly announce the band’s follow-up record, They Call Us Wild. Championed by critic Robert Christgau as creating “the most boisterous recorded party I know,” the band released this funk masterpiece in 1975, but now with a psychedelic streak running deeply throughout it.While the first album (which was also the first commercially released record by a Mardi Gras Indian group) declared "Smoke Your Peace Pipe (Smoke It Right)", They Call Us Wild is a different type of "elevated" sonic celebration.Vocals echo and drip; saxophones and keyboards swing from each other’s arms, and the omnipresent multi-layered percussion, which The Wild Magnolias were known for, showcase why they continue to be one of the most sampled bands of all time (they have been sampled by everyone from Nas to Public Enemy to Jungle Brothers).With producer Philippe Rault at the helm once again, he continued to capture the dense magic within the band, but on They Call Us Wild, they are taking a darker, more haunted approach with their music. The smokey interplay on songs like “Injuns, Here We Come”, with its jazzy piano/bass meltdown (courtesy of Erving Charles Jr. & Wilson Turbinton of the legendary New Orleans funk band The Gaturs), solidified them as a band rather than capturing a moment...even though the celebration in the studio is still going just as strong. The band also takes itself to new sonic territory, for instance, slowing things...

1-800 Mikey

In Yun

Goner

Bedroom powerpop with hooks on speed dial—1800 MIKEY—is the lo-fi garage pop project of Michael Barker. On any given night in his home of Sydney, Australia, you might find Barker gleefully wailing away on stage with any number of local underground garage punk stalwarts including Gee Tee and RMFC. And it seems he’s everyone’s secret weapon for a reason—his joy on stage is infectious and it comes across in his music. Barker’s own project leans more into the pop side of the garage punk spectrum—with great results.In Yun is the third 1-800-MIKEY album and the first on Goner Records. And in terms of songwriting it’s a strong step forward. And while the basic formula here is the same—melodic bass lines, crunchy guitar riffs and catchy sing-a-long vocals—there is more going on here. The sound is just as immediate, but also more dynamic and nuanced. Lead single “Me and My Only” is a high speed collision of distorted city rock guitar riffs and heart-on-your-sleeve poptastic vocal hooks. If that seems like familiar territory, “K Style” and “Falling in Love” are more reminiscent of British noise poppers the Shop Assistants and the Pooh Sticks. And the earworm guitarwork anchoring “Pleasant Morning” and “Faery” is fresh and catchy—good luck getting them out of your head.It’s fun and sincere and adorable and it totally rips.

V/a

Endangered Species Vol. 2

Dark Entries

In their countless years of deep digging, Dark Entries has uncovered many curiosities, oddball Italo and synth-wave creatures too rare to live, too funky to die. Dark Entries’s conservationist efforts began with 2020’s Endangered Species Vol 1. Six years later, we are finally treated Endangered Species Vol 2, an even more ambitious effort which features eleven specimens previously deemed extinct, now safely preserved on vinyl. Things kick off with an extended mix of Palazzo di Danza’s “Play That Song For Me,” a lavishly produced German-Italo number propelled by a slinky bassline. Russian Olga Vosconyan’s “Cars” delivers what might be the moodiest song ever produced for a car commercial. Fuzz Dance maestro Alexander Robotnick appears with a previously unreleased male vocal demo version of “I Wanna Believe,” a legendary track that would later appear under the name Gina & the Flexix. Canadian industrial royalty Dwayne R. Goettel (Psyche) and cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy) team up on the horror-sampling hit-heavy blaster “Bastards.” Belgian EBM progenitors à;GRUMH... report for duty with a slab of machine funk on “The Army.” UK DIY stalwarts Khmer Rouge bring Krautrock-inflected minimalism with “Take Me (Across the Floor Tonight) In Dub.” Endangered Species Vol 2 comes housed in a sleeve designed by Eloise Shir-Juen Leigh, and includes a 16 page booklet featuring liner notes, lyrics, and photographs of each featured project. Please assist Dark Entries in their efforts to preserve the rarest of beasts (and beats).

My Face Is Dancing

s/t

Positive Elevation / 577 Records

***Positive Elevation, the imprint dedicated to electronic experimentation and avant soul, proudly presents MY FACE IS DANCING, the debut release by a unique family collective led by Federico Ughi.More than an album, My Face Is Dancing is a celebration of family, spirit, creativity, and freedom. It marks the first officially released collaboration between Federico Ughi and his sons—young artists Alberto Ughi, Martino Ughi, and Benjamin Ughi—alongside other members of the family. The recordings that form the foundation of this project were captured at different moments throughout the children's lives, documenting their growth and artistic evolution between the ages of two and ten.Musically, the album reflects Federico Ughi's lifelong journey across improvisation, hip hop, jazz, and experimental electronic music. Its atmospheric textures and cinematic sensibility are also informed by his years performing and touring internationally with Tobias Wilner's Blue Foundation between 2012 and 2019, an experience that deepened his exploration of electronic sound design, song form, and immersive sonic landscapes while remaining rooted in spontaneity and improvisation.Rooted in deep spiritual inspiration, My Face Is Dancing is an expression of connection across generations. It celebrates who we are, where we come from, and the invisible forces that guide us forward. Drawing strength from family roots while reaching toward the unknown, the music embraces both ancestral memory and cosmic possibility. It is spiritual music in its purest sense—a reflection of love, curiosity, imagination, and the belief that creativity can connect us to something larger than ourselves.The album originates from a series of improvisational...

Pearson, Michael

My War On Wilshire: Black Flag vs. the Wilshire Federal Building... and the Vex

Bazillion Points

***On July 4, 1983, Los Angeles hardcore punk band Black Flag invaded the terrace of the Federal Building on Wilshire Blvd. Young punk-with-a-camera Michael Pearson captured indelible color images of the band exploding like fireworks against a backdrop of California skies, palm trees, rippling U.S. flags, and the Marlboro cowboy. Behind the frenzy of band members Rollins, Ginn, Dukowski, and Stevenson loomed the imposing modernist infinity of the Wilshire Federal Building, landmark home of the IRS and the FBI. Later that month, Pearson caught Black Flag again, this time with suffocating intimacy at the infamous and truly dangerous hole-in-the-wall Vex club. Seen for the first time in MY WAR ON WILSHIRE, Pearson’s snapshots preserve a precarious and vivid moment in Black Flag’s campaign of conflict—portraits of a band confronting reality at the breaking point.

False Flag

Art School

FYJFY

***False Flag's third release on vinyl, 10th release on FYJFY, Art School takes you on a trip that celebrates and mourns, laughs and cries, winds up and winds down, smiles and frowns. Every song is unique in its own way, it is a celebration of freedom and community in punk rock. First pressing of 500, lyric sheet included, and released by FYJFY, a local record label run by punks in San Francisco.

Surprise Privilege

Hard Listen

FYJFY

***Surprise Privilege's third release on vinyl and the 9th release on FYJFY. Probably the best album you'll hear this year (from Surprise Privilege). It's about 30 minutes of 14 songs straight from the heart, man. Some of it's fast, some of it's slow, some of it is angry, some of it is technical, all of it is excellent. See for yourself! San Francisco punk rock, man! First pressing of 500. Includes a lyric sheet.

Segall, Ty

Chrome

Drag City

***In the spring of 2025, right around the release of Possession, Ty Segall started hearing voices, calmly at first, but soon screaming: “Get the band back together!!!”Immediately, his mind began working, creating, collecting and collat- ing riffs for songs, an album that he and the band—Ben Boye, Evan Burrows, Mikal Cronin & Emmett Kelly—will come to all call Chrome.Chrome—the element, not the album—is shiny, reflective, resistant to corrosion. Chrome the album’s got that too: in hard-springing rock strung with lyrically allusive passages moving furtive and bleak through labyrinthine paths in the darkness. Joining social phenomena and autobiographical dream imagery in song-sequenced, head-snapping flashes, hitting left/right hemispheres fast and furiously. In massive riffs and thudding power in the rhythm core, twin-guitar attack and parry, tightly arrayed lines of fuzz distortion, keyboard textures of bright and thickness. All mixed immediate and flexible, colorful and clean, spicy-sweet, with Ty’s vocals of vinegar and sand, wine and grains of silver nitrate, pointing the way. That’s Chrome.

Faun Fables

The Transit Rider

Drag Cty

***Arriving right on time for its 20th anniversary, Faun Fables’ musical theater work The Transit Rider returns in a lovely 2xLP vinyl edition that dimensionally burnishes the bristling performances and elevated chamber/cabaret folk sounds of the original CD-only release. At once a work of theatre, allegory and autobiography, The Transit Rider amplifies Faun Fables’ distinctive electroacoustic wash of Anglo-European folk sounds, shimmering allusively from traditional to Kurt Weill to folk-rock and back again. This new 2xLP edition features revamped artwork with previously unseen photos of the original show.

Great Lakes

Fear of the Fear

HHBTM

***Fear of the Fear is the 9th album by Great Lakes, my long-running band and recording project. I think of it as my Memphis Record, since the bulk of it was written and recorded there. Like 2022's Contenders, Fear of the Fear was mixed by Luis Leal. In fact, while thematically it is very different, aesthetically it could almost be considered Contenders II, even though 2025's Don't Swim Too Close came out in between. It features two musicians I've been working with for nearly 20 years, drummer Kevin Shea and vocalist Suzanne Nienaber. It also benefits from the contributions of two of my favorite go-to multi-instrumentalists, David Gould and Petter Folkedal. Some talented Memphis-based musicians grace the record, as well, including Leah Keys, Andrew Geraci, Seth Moody, and John Whittemoore. Finally, my old friends Kyle Forester and Steve Silverstein each play on a few songs. Fear of the Fear is a collection of songs mostly about the death of my close friend, Ryan Trammel. As such, it deals thematically with loss and grief. A very personal album, it touches on feelings of anxiety, brokenness, and the role of the subconscious in our lives-be it subconscious memory or subconscious knowledge/wisdom ("there is a truth we have known without knowing it" is how I put it in the album opener). This is an idea I find especially potent. Maria Montessori wrote that as babies we are as smart as we are ever going to be. When I read that in one of...

Bitchin Bajas

Isle Peaks

Drag City

***In the wake of the acclaimed Inland See, the on-growing analog ecosystem being animated for ten albums now by Bitchin Bajas boasts new high energy views. Isle Peaks speaks of directions in beats of time, weather and the heart to wherever coast they found themselves when they got it all laid out. Sourced from Inland See sessions, these cuts were subjected to further edits and tweaks, with electroacoustic textures of sampled kalimba, field recordings, autoharp and EWI to activate and transport divergent quadrants of the Bajas cinematic universe. The first two songs were previously released digitally on Qobuz in Jan ’26. “Watch your Step” has been added to balance scales and acidity for the Isle Peaks vinyl edition.

Rusty

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Just Add Water

***This Rusty album is proof that the well is truly bottomless. There's still unheard gold out there waiting to be discovered. It's 54 years late but worth the wait! Ex-Sheephouse, Blitzkrieg and future National Flag members. Recorded in 1972 in Switzerland during a year-long stay. After returning to London, the band pressed up just 25 copies to send to labels in the hope of getting signed only to have some of the tracks released by a library music label in 1974 in bastardized remixed and sped-up forms. Rusty supported the likes of Dr. Feelgood, Brinsley Schwarz, Hawkwind, Barclay James Harvest, Colin Blunstone, and Climax Blues Band but, until now, their music has never been widely available. These incredible UK glam-tinged original recipe power pop gems are finally getting a well-deserved wide release as they were originally intended to be heard. Painstakingly restored and remastered by GRAMMY-nominated engineer Jessica Thompson. Expansive liner notes by Plastic Crimewave from fresh interviews with band members Danny Edwardson and Seamus Sell. Edition of 500 copies on black vinyl.

Totalitar

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Prank

***Swedish Punk legends TOTALITÄR return with their first new album in twenty years! Nine rampaging tracks, crafted with their trademark sublime innovation, where something beautifully and wonderfully simple as D-beat hardcore is innovated on, changed up and perfected again and again. That's the brilliance of Totalitär, their world renowned old master innovation, and this welcome return finds them in fine form, encased in distortion with Poffen's shouts firing an abrasive volley of anger and reflection at the state of the world. Recorded and mixed by Kenko at Communichaos in 2025/2026.

Generacion Suicida

Hombre Nuevo

Vitriol Records

***The new LP from LA’s Generacion Suicida is released along with a bunch of shows, a tour and various LA shows before then. The new record Hombre Nuevo is ten new songs and the first album to be released following Regeneracion in 2021.

Opera De Nuit

Opera de Nuit

Dark Entries

Opéra de Nuit emerge from their long slumber to grace Dark Entries with the frostiest of reissues. Formed in 1982 in Valréas in the southeast of France, Opéra de Nuit only released 3 records throughout their career: EPs in 1984 and 1986, with a full LP following in 1988. But devotees of dark music will need no introduction to this band, who are almost definitional of the coldwave genre, and whose rabid cult following has each record readily trading for three-digit prices. Opéra de Nuit’s sound is pure hellish heaven: frigid synths, jangly guitars, and sorrow-laden vox. Check out the pummelling desperation of “Annabella,” the uber-brooding vibes of “Boris Transylvania Camp,” or the elegant anthem “Karen Lloyd” (and don’t forget to watch the video!). This reissue collects their entire newly remastered discography - thirteen lucky tracks. This reissue marks the first time that their work will be reissued on vinyl and digital, and is presented in gatefold jacket with lyrics and photos. Whether you’re new to the genre or a veteran of the coldest waves, Opéra de Nuit brings the essential sound of immortal despair.