Michael Krassner & John Dieterich — bullish(ish) (Moone)

Neither Michael Krassner (Boxhead Ensemble, many production gigs) nor John Dietrich (Deerhoof, duos with Mary Halvorson and Tashi Dorji) are strangers to the idea of sitting down with another guitarist and seeing what comes out. This record isn’t exactly an improvised encounter — that was their first gig, and bullish(ish) is the result of recordings that were made shortly after — but there’s still an air of “let’s see what happens” about it. Side one (both sides spin at 45, making this a short LP or bus-commute-friendly digital listen) is a sequence of fragments, some unemphatically wiggy, some lurching in a clankety-rocking way. Side two drifts into a shiny atmosphere that flickers and evaporates around the Laraine Kaizer-Viazovtsev’s pensive violin. Some records try; this one just is.

Bill Meyer

Magda Mayas’ Filamental — Murmur (Relative Pitch)

In other settings, Magda Mayas’ handiness with keyboard preparation opens up extraordinary realms of sound. But her own playing is submerged into the discourse of a string-heavy octet in Filamental, which has become the Berlin-based improviser’s vehicle to explore group behavior. One feels more than hears her prepared piano tolling within a moving mass of strings and reeds on Murmur. The musicians seek to emulate the combination of spontaneous reconfiguration and precision maneuvering achieved by flocks of birds, attaining achieve cohesion through pitch selection as each instrument contributes sounds near to the rest. But as the sounds gather, some player will assert a contrary notion, which may cause the rest to pivot or simply absorb the dissenting gesture. This is the group’s third recording, and while the organizing principal has been different each time, their common preference for apposite understatement makes this recording one that rewards recurring scrutiny.

Bill Meyer

Dustin O’Halloran — Lumiere (Splinter)

Lush bolts of silky strings unfurl in slow melodic patterns. Piano chords strike thoughtful, melancholic poses. Poised somewhere between ambient music, soundtrack and new classical, Lumiere was the fourth album for film composer and A Winged Victory for the Sullen artist Dustin O’Halloran. The album debuted in 2011, and all of the original tracks remain. To this, however, O’Halloran has added four more cuts, all recorded around the same time as the original material. These new tracks hold up very well against the ones from before. “Fragile N. 1” infuses the soft crescendo of piano and drums with altered angelic voices, a larger palette companion for the piano-led, string-throbbing “Fragile N. 4” from the earlier disc. A Robert Lippok remix of “We Move Lightly” interjects a playful percussion cadence into O’Halloran’s slow-blooming atmospherics. Lumiere is lovely but a little repetitive; play it when you want to wind down.

Jennifer Kelly

Ben Richter — Mymerian (Sedimental)

Label name and artistic concept converge on this set of slow-motion, long-tone music, which was recorded on a cold evening using the 120-year-old pipe organ at Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro, Vermont. Temperature matters, because it dropped the instrument’s tuning, adding a degree of low-frequency disorientation to the three pieces played by organist-accordionist-composer Ben Richter. The music is layered, and each layer is coded with both personal and geological time stamps, but you don’t need to know anything about them to appreciate this music’s looming murk. The ways its monochrome façade fronts endless depth makes it an ideal surface on which to project your own! For example, the way that bassist Mike Bullock and cellist Laura Cetilia’s lines arc and wind through Richter’s thick keyboard sonorities on the title track evokes a view of pterodactyls gliding through the black clouds belching forth from a volcano.

Bill Meyer

The Sleeves – The Sleeves (12XU)

Jack Cooper purposely streamlined Modern Nature into a tight quartet for their most recent album The Heat Warps; he goes even sparser on this new collaboration with guitarist Tara Cunningham. These are intensely intimate songs that the pair formed through joint improvisation on electric guitar. The clean, ringing tones are entwined, as are the pair’s hushed vocals. Aside from occasional whistling and vocal overdubs, The Sleevesrelies entirely on raw guitar interplay and delicate vocal melodies. This lean and gentle approach really emphasizes Cooper and Cunningham’s probing guitar work, encouraging deep listening and introspection. Their sound functions perfectly as a minimalist foil to the groove-based tunes of Modern Nature, using sound and silence in equal measure.

Bryon Hayes

St. Silva — Forager (AKP)

St. Silva’s Ben Dexter Cooley made these luminous ambient compositions partly in his studio, but also partly in the verdant swamps and meadows and mountain paths of upper Vermont. It’s a mix of electronic futurism and primordial nature, shot through with bird song and vibrating with synthesized calm. You can move through these tracks as if through sun-dappled forests, pushing back the undergrowth to catch a glimpse of red-bellied robin, pausing in cooler shade to appreciate a sunny clearing opening out of old growth trees. Cooley lists no fewer than 11 bird species represented in Forager, but he is by no means a nature documentarian. He views these sounds as raw materials, an element in pieces that defy easy classification. Pulsing Germanic synths percolate the buzz of “Sun Flies,” while haunting long tones hover in droning “Little Acorn.” Imagine Roedelius sauntering though the sudden warmth of Vermont spring or Tangerine Dream admiring local flora and fauna from their gleaming spaceship. Wholly natural—and beautiful for it—but also fit together with art and care.

Jennifer Kelly

Whitelands — Sunlight Echoes (Sonic Cathedral)

Whatever the reasons, it’s a real shame that Whitelands have split. After an excellent 2024 debut (Dusted review here) and opening for Slowdive on tour momentum seemed to be building, but whether it’s the brutal financial realities of being a band in 2026 or any other of the innumerable reasons bands stop working, the release of Sunlight Echoes earlier this year showed no signs of a sophomore slump. Maybe a little tougher and scrappier than Night-bound Eyes Are Blind to the Day (even as standout tracks “Songbird (Forever)” and “I Am No God, an Effigy” brought in Iskra Strings to sweeten the mix), if anything their songwriting and playing suggested they were about to go to another level even as Sunlight Echoesitself is once again one of the best shoegaze records of the year. For most of us, these two short LPs (each clocking in at just over 33 minutes) are all we have to remember Whitelands by, but they will be remembered.

Ian Mathers

You-On — New Side (12XU)

New Side is the result of three improvisational sessions between pianist Masami Tomihisa and drummer Jim White. On these recordings, the pair play with sound, acknowledging this with the name they chose for this project, You-On. They shift between moods, carrying a sprightly bounce at times, turning introspective at others, and bringing the thunder when the situation calls for it. Synchrony reigns, belying the fact that this is the pair’s first recording together. The mind meld is palpable, and while the piano-drums combo is a rarity, New Side will have listeners chasing down more.

Lumpeks — Polonez (Umlaut)

Who nominated it? Bill Meyer

Did we review it? No

Ian Mathers’ take:

I’m honestly not familiar enough with either jazz or traditional Polish dance music to be able to spot or articular exactly where this intriguing and very enjoyable fusion of the two has joined them. There’s a similar feel to other acts I’ve heard that both clearly deeply respect the traditional music they draw on and are unafraid to put their own spin on that source material (both Xylouris White and Black Ox Orkestar came to mind), and as with those other cases the results on Polonez could equally be ancient or brand new. That the quartet’s main instrumentation (which also includes Louis Laurain on cornet, Pierre Borel on alto sax, and Sébastien Belief on double bass) includes steady, deep frame drumming (using a local variation called a bębenek obręczowy) from Olga Koziel (who also sings) gives it plenty of distinct character. And the mostly French group cares enough about actually understanding and respecting that traditional Polish music they made a short documentary about the field research that went into making Polonez. There’s an energetic, joyous swing to both the jazz and folk sides of Lumpeks’ music that makes the result much more than just an academic curiosity.

Mdou Moctar — Funeral for Justice (Matador)

Who nominated it? Jennifer Kelly

Did we review it? No, but we did a Listening Post. In the intro, Jennifer Kelly wrote, “The new record is as sharp and impassioned as any Moctar and his band have done so far, and it is inflamed with political energy.”

Andrew Forell’s take:

Mdou Moctar is an extraordinary guitarist and must be incredible in a live setting. The rhythms, the vocal back and forth and the moments Mochtar sprays power chords and shards of riffs that explode like bombs are all great. You feel his rage and frustration even when you don’t understand the lyrics. But the super intricate, high-speed soloing, whilst impressive, had the same effect on me as listening to electric blues-rock. I’m caught between the passion of the band, the eloquence of their anti-colonialist, pro-African politics, and the technically brilliant guitar noodling. The title track is a fantastic meld and it’s hard not be carried along but I really prefer the slower tracks, particularly “Takoba” and “Imajighen”, which lope along behind the drums while the bass darts around between entwined guitar lines and call and response vocals. Funeral for Justice is an album I admired and enjoyed hearing but, for me, the pyrotechnics get in the way.

Jessica Moss – For UNRWA (self-released)

Who picked it?  Ian Mathers

Did we review it?  Yes, Ian said, “sorrow and elegy and rage and strength all course throughout the piece.”

Bryon’s take:

This is a beautiful album born from an ugly situation.  Violinist Jessica Moss released this Bandcamp-only album to raise money for the UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) after nation states halted funding when it was erroneously thought a few of its members were aligned with Hamas.  It’s a 42-minute suite of violin, electronics, and vocals that Moss captured at a live set in Berlin.  As someone who hasn’t had the pleasure of investigating her solo work but is enamored with her contributions to Silver Mt. Zion and other bands, I find this album to be an effective port of entry.  It swells with all the emotions that Ian describes in his review, unfurling with a beauty and grace that at times evokes stillness and at others exudes passionate fervor.  Based on this piece alone, I’ve decided that I need more of Moss’ music in my life.    

NYSSA — Shake Me Where I’m Foolish (Six Shooter)

Who nominated it? Alex Johnson

Did we review it? No.

Jennifer Kelly’s take:

NYSSA gets its kick from the charisma of the eponymous front woman, a wailing, belting, crooning dynamo, whose delivery is part punk, part roots rock, part blues and part adrenalized, corruscating confession. NYSSA’s first album, Girls Like Me, was long-listed for the 2021 Polaris Prize. This follow-up is less synthy and more rock, fleshed out by a ripping band. It’s larger in every way, from the stomping, vibrato-laced rager, “Werewolf,” to the torchy, piano-bar introspection of “Blessed Turn.” “I’m good for nothing but the hell I raise,” NYSSA intimates on the rollicking “Hell I Raise,” but she’s wrong. She’s good at lots of things.

Rosali – Bite Down (Merge)

Who picked it? Jennifer Kelly

Did we review it? Yes. Christian Carey wrote: “Rocking out is on the menu” and “the connections between pleasure and pain seem to coalesce in Rosali’s work.”

Alex Johnson’s take:

It’s a ferocious album, but intimate too. I hear a lot of Christine McVie in Rosali’s vocal. The way her delivery of “I want to feel right at the end of the day/I’m letting things come as they may” on “Rewind” contains warmth and sadness and joy and a sense of power in powerlessness that’s somewhere between cynicism and hope. It’s right out of Rumors. There’s some Fleetwood Mac in the groove of the title track too. But the spaciousness and spontaneity that Rosali and Mowed Sound capture remind me more often of the Oldham family — Will, Ned, et al. — from the raucous and inviting Viva Last Blues of “My Kind” to the clanging Anomoanon-ish country rock of “Hopeless.” 

This is music that not only lets you in but keeps you there. Like how the primordial bass drum in “May It Always Be on Offer” both grounds the rhythm and carves out a space you can practically sit in. The charismatic draw of Bite Down, though, is the guitar work. There’s so much texture and dimension in, say, the fraught duet that rips through “Change is in the Form” or the gravelly solo patched under the strings of “Slow Pain,” echoing the toughness of “maybe I’m just used to it/maybe I don’t give a shit.” With their various yelps and rumbles, the guitar tones that run through “Hills on Fire” don’t so much create the atmosphere as define it, adding a palpable, tectonic heat to the song’s otherwise easy daze.

Bite Down is a big, organic album, full of sensations — heard, articulated, and felt. Someone yells “act natural” as “My Kind” gets revved up — I’m surprised the band needed a reminder.

Thou — Umbilical (Sacred Bones)

Who nominated it? Jonathan Shaw

Did we review it? Yes, Jonathan wrote, “If we set aside Umbilical’s thorny thematics, we still have a superlative metal record, loud, as aggressive as it is palpably aggravated.”

Andrew Forell’s take:

At the end of his typically on point review of Umbilical, Dusted’s Jonathan Shaw pondered whether Thou singer Brian Funck might agree with his assertion that “pleasure isn’t what we need most from culture right now” and asked, “Should we listen to him?”. On the first point, there’s not much pleasure evident on Thou’s new album, which perversely or not appears to be this half year’s metal album de jour with even The Guardian unguarded in its praise. And yes, there are so many reasons right now when pleasure seems futile in the face of No Future. To the second point, a definite yes! Once you acclimatize to Funck’s voice, a dyspeptic shredder of a thing which renders his lyrics nigh indecipherable, the wall of sound coming at you is a caustic bath for the ears. The drums and bass a thumping foundry shaking and burning whilst the guitars surround you like a swarm of rusting chainsaws. Amidst this maelstrom, Funck screams as if his spleen is about to join his word splatter. Now, that’s a t-shirt I’d wear again without washing. Umbilical is a nasty, irate fury that I will be revisiting.

Uranium Club — Infants Under the Bulb (Static Shock)

Who picked it? Alex Johnson

Did we review it? Yes. Alex wrote, “these enigmatic Minneapolitans fling their conceptual heft in a new direction and expand their musical objectives without ceding much, if any, of their signature, careening tension.”

Patrick Masterson’s take:

When I first heard Infants Under the Bulb in the spring, it was with only a cursory commitment; I understood its tinny, furiously strummed contours, but the full thrust of its oddball conceptual heft passed me by. A second, much closer listen for this midyear exchange has proven far more rewarding, and while Alex pretty well nails what makes this record so interesting in his review, what I keep coming back to are the myriad voices across this record. I think core members Brendan Wells, Harry Wohl, Ian Stemper and Matt Stagner all take a turn behind the mic, though liner notes prove frustratingly (appropriately?) limited, and Molly Raben drives the four-part “Wall” sequence. A few points of order unite the Club and its associates — namely, all of them take pointed barbs at contemporary society in different ways, all of them play with noticeable tightness (even Raben in the New Age-y “Wall” songs), and none of them can sing. Musically, “Small Grey Man” might be an obvious single to that effect, but it’s the guitar licks in “Game Show,” “2-600-LULLABY” and “Abandoned by the Narrator” to which I keep returning. More than anything else in Alex’s review, what hits home hardest is very succinctly tucked away in its middle (my emphasis): Chorus of voices aside, Uranium Club has been and remains a great guitar band.

Waxahatchee — Tigers Blood (Anti-)

Who picked it? Christian Carey

Did we review it? Yes, Christian said, “Tigers Blood doesn’t have a weak cut on it. One imagines it will be in heavy rotation for many long after its release.”

Tim Clarke’s take:

Tigers Blood starts out promisingly enough. On opening track “3 Sisters” it’s immediately evident that Katie Crutchfield has an intensely expressive voice, plus the skill to wield it with nuance. There’s plenty of space for her to emote, then when the song takes off, it feels well earned. From there, things start to feel too rote to fully engage. The band is clearly playing in the country-rock pocket, but there are no surprises to be found in the songwriting to capitalize on the promise of that opening song. Ultimately, it mostly ends up sounding a little hokey. A genuine shame, as I had high hopes coming into this one.

Whitelands — Night-bound Eyes Are Blind to the Day (Sonic Cathedral)

Did we review it? Yes, Ian said, “Right from the start, there’s a clarity and focus in the songs here that belies their sometimes diaphanous settings.”

Tim Clarke’s take:

Right from the opening blare of guitars, British quartet Whitelands nail a particular shoegaze aesthetic: Ride’s Going Blank Again. The six-strings are loud, but with enough delay and reverb to create a blurry wall of sound, while the rhythm section keeps things punchy to give the songs plenty of momentum. Can’t say there’s anything here that quite rivals the first wave of shoegazers who combined hallucinatory sonics with catchy songwriting, but Whitelands are clearly tapping into some inspiring sounds, which will hopefully mean their next release will have its own distinct personality. 

Winged Wheel — Big Hotel (12XU)

Who nominated it? Bryon Hayes

Did we review it? Yes, Bryon wrote, “No Island hinted at Winged Wheel’s ability to craft such a sonic space, but that record was merely an appetizer for the hefty dose of momentum that Big Hotel provides.”

Christian Carey’s take:

A collection of artists who also belong to other bands, Winged Wheel coheres far more fluidly than most “supergroups.” On their second recording, Big Hotel, the band recorded in the studio together rather than remotely collaborating as they did on 2022’s Big Island. The difference is palpable, particularly in the power and execution of the rhythm section, which now includes Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley. At the beginning of the recording, the one-two combo of the spacy and clangorous “Demonstrably False” and “Sleep Training,” on which Whitney Johnson supplies beguiling singing amid a raft of guitar textures. The songs tend to move directly into one another, underscoring their interconnectivity. Most of them stretch out a bit, clocking in at around the six-minute mark, but “Aren’t They All” and the album-closer “From Here Out Nothing Changes” are both under three minutes. The former is a bustling instrumental featuring oscillating riffs and urgently rendered and foregrounded percussion. The latter begins with a brief, disjunct, nasal wind solo and a discordant guitar duo, that rhythm section punching away. Johnson shares a brief, delicately delivered vocal, which then disappears into a concluding maelstrom.

Z-Ro—The Ghetto Gospel (One Deep Entertainment)

Who nominated it? Ray Garraty

Did we review it? No