RiYL

Slow Stories took its time. Author Bette A(driaanse) revisited the work decades after initially committing it to print, this time with a new motivating force. An ambient soundtrack marks the second collaboration between Adriaanse and music pioneer, Brian Eno, following closely on the heels of last year’s delightful What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory. Adriaanse can now add narrator to an expanding...

Upon reflection, Beatrice Deer suggests that Inuit Legend may ultimately be her least personal record to date. That's not to say the musician doesn't connect deeply with the work, only that she's opted to draw on the stories of others -- both historical and folkloric. Deer has long approached her own life with a thorough candidness, as she discusses family, sobriety, and the struggles of the Inuit...

The Rise & The Fall marked The Rural Alberta Advantage's return to a trio. Multi-instrumentalist Amy Cole's return was a homecoming, serving to reinvigorate longtime members, Nils Edenloff and Paul Banwatt. The Toronto band is readying a followup -- its sixth LP, overall -- preceded by a handful of singles. The most recent, “The Hunt In Edson," contemplates life through the near death experien...

The pandemic wasn't a creatively fruitful time for Mirah. Life as a new parent no doubt played a major role in any such blockage, coupled, with a loss of the rituals attached to tour dates and album releases. Seven years would ultimately pass between records. When the time came to step outside her life for a moment, however, the deluge of Dedication came pouring out. The musician's seventh album i...

Had he served all 15 years of his sentence, Jason Mills would have re-entered the world last year -- almost exactly half his life to that point. The gravity of that fact hasn't escaped him. As idk, the rapper has seemingly squeezed a few lifetimes in that space, including five albums, seven mixtapes, a lecturing gig at Harvard, and, recently, a Tiny Mix Tapes set. His latest single, "LiFE 4 A LiFE...

The Goldbergs' 2021 move was meant to be temporary, a relocation from Los Angeles to his wife's hometown while the new network television gig did its thing. And then something happened -- The Equalizer stayed on the air for five seasons. There are, of course, far worse fates than a successful TV show, and there are far worse places to see them out than New York's Hudson Valley -- especially when o...

A few moments into My World is the Sun , there's little doubt Dominique Fils-Aimé is doing what she was put on this earth to do. As an ode to vulnerability, the record shines as it strips away instrumentation, focusing the attention on her voice, where it should be. Her work is a celebration of music's connective tissue and the hopefulness it can bring us together when we need it most. Hosted on A...

Surprise, it's all four members of The Happy Fits, beaming in from their Philadelphia practice space. After a rough couple of years -- losing a member, gaining two, moving, breakups, interventions, sobriety -- the band is in remarkable good spirits. Preparing to embark on a tour ahead of their latest at, Lovesick, the group is re-energized and focused on the road ahead. Hosted on Acast. See acast....

Few albums warrant their own YouTube explainer direct from the band. It's not exactly necessary for Deck -- particularly in the wake of compilations produced from the project's 54 songs -- but it's part of the fun. The entire four-album set is a testament to Hallelujah the Hill's ability to keep things fresh 20 years on from their debut. The Boston band is producing some of the best work of its ca...

It takes light 4.2 years from Proxima Centauri, the nearest non-sun star, to reach Earth. It took the songs of 2025’s Stargazer EP nearly five times that to see the light of day. That’s nothing in cosmic terms, of course. But as musicians go, the 20+ years that have elapsed since the songs were written in preparation for KT Tunstall’s debut, Eye to the Telescope, amounts to several lifetimes.&nbsp...

It takes a unique talent to find one's work thumbtacked above desks at libraries across the world. But Tom Gauld wasn't content to simply rest on the literary laurels that come with his frequently shared Guardian strips. The Scottish cartoonist has carved out yet another uniquely wide niche for himself in the pages of New Scientist. Gauld's latest collection, Physics for Cats, showcases why is wor...

How often do we truly afford ourselves a fresh start? Sean Mason went all after his first record. The Southern Suite put the pianist on the map, there was a disconnect. Mason left New York, stopped drinking, and cut off most communication with the outside world. A Breath of Fresh Air is, as the name suggests, a portrait of where the celebrated Grammy nominee lives now. It’s clear in speaking with...

At 17, Michael Hampton blasted off from Earth in the Mothership. More than half a century later, the Funkadelic guitarist has never looked back. He does, however, make the occasional pitstop home for interviews, chatting poolside in between shows during a Southern California stint. Hampton’s latest EP, Into the Public Domain, does what it says on the box. The blistering guitar instrumentals now be...

Happiness wasn’t too far from home. After stints in larger cities, following more traditional music routes, Morgxn settled just outside of Nashville – it doesn’t hurt, of course, when home is Music City USA. When not on tour or in the in the studio, you can generally find him at Fruity Farm, a plot of land he and his husband share. The joy is contagious, and something the songwriter is happy to sp...

A few months after celebrating the 30th anniversary of his debut, Ledbetter Heights, Kenny Wayne Shepherd returns to the show to reflect on three decades in music. Upon release, much of the album's coverage focused on the fact that the guitarist was still in his teens. Writing or co-writing every track on the album, Shepherd was quick to silence critics looking to write him off as a novelty. All t...

A brute force approach helped Drew Stroik land a record deal. The unknown musician sent demo after demo to his favorite musicians, until one -- Andy Chase – responded positively. Chase pulled in frequent collaborator (and current Ivy bandmate) Bruce Driscoll to produce an album full of Stroik’s off-kilter bedroom pop. 65th and York finally saw the light of day last month – 15 years after its initi...

They didn’t go into the forest to create a record. One evening of music and words surrounded by nature was plenty enough reason to gather. Still, Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople emerged, as the first official document of the two long-time friends collaborating. More than 30 years into his career, Williams doesn’t have anything in particular to prove. The mid-90s saw him...

On 2022's I Don’t Know My Words, Anand Wilder embraced DIY in a different way, performing each song entirely by himself. Three years after Yeasayer's non-amicable split, the musician clearly had something to prove. Three years later, however, collaboration is back on the table with Psychic Lessons, a celebration of music making, genre, and just about anything else that popped into Wilder's head. H...

Nothing throughout the Descendents' long history can be taken for granted, started with I Don't Want to Grow Up. The band's second record, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this May, arrived after a two-year hiatus, which found singer Milo Aukerman at college (as the debut album helpfully noted) and drummer Bill Stevenson joining Black Flag. Certainly no one could anticipate, in spite of a few...

Bursting with the vitality of NYC's outer-boroughs, Laveda returned in September with Love, Darla. The Brooklyn by way of Albany harkens back to the heyday of noisy indie, while forging its own playful path. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A radical departure in a music career defined by them, Jamie Lidell's first full length in nearly a decade finds the artist exploring a new instrument, genre, tones, and collaborators. Born of the pandemic, Places of Unknowing is a work of ambient neoclassical piano music with no clear common sonic connections to the electronic-turned-soul musician's earlier work, beyond pervasive and de...

Debi Derryberry's fifth album, Go to Sleep, combines longstanding loves of music making and animation into a single YouTube project, pulling together nine tracks aimed at lulling kids to bed. The work is a labor of love for a voice actress with somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 IMDB credits to her name. Along with playing the title character in the long running Jimmy Neutron franchise, the actr...

Note: The interview was cut short and kind of sputters out at the end for weather related reasons I won’t go into here. We’ll have to get the band back on for a followup. Periscope at Midnight finds doubleVee plumbing familiar depths, as Barbara and Allan Vest revisit the latter’s previous band, The Starlight Mints, to put a spin on a pair of old tracks. Notes of the earlier baroque indie-pop act...

Earlier songs were political, but never as overtly so. There isn’t much value left to wring from subtlety these days. Battlewear is, fittingly, angry. It’s the product of navigating an unpredictable – and increasingly bleak – landscape. An hour before we hop on the call, a right wing reactionary is murdered in broad daylight. Kadhja Bonet believes in the power of art and community. And while they’...

Ahead of their upcoming Image series, Death to Pachuco, artist Rachel Merrill and author Henry Barajas discuss the process of bringing the historical fiction to life. Set against the backdrop of the Sleepy Lagoon Case and Zoot Suit Riots, the book explores themes of racial tension through a lens of hard boiled detective fiction. The pair also talk about picking up the mantle for long running newsp...