Hall of Ukrainian Rock’n’Roll
In our traditional support of the Ukrainian rock scene, we would like to offer you a story about a remarkable event that took place in western Ukraine in the small town of Manevychi. Every year, at the end of May, all the world's museums hold a night at the museum, and such a night took place in Manevychi, where at the same time the soft opening of the first hall of the future Rock Capital museum took place. The hall is called The History of Ukrainian Rock and Roll and is the first of seven planned halls of the Rock Capital Museum. Perhaps it would not have been so attractive if the Rock Capital Museum had not truly been the first rock museum in Ukraine.
Do you know at least one Ukrainian punk rock band?
Do you know at least one Ukrainian punk rock band? Of course, no one asked me such a question, but I sometimes ask it to my friends. Talking about the glorious traditions of Ukrainian rock n roll, I don't want to miss punk itself. The first thing that comes to my mind is the band Borshch. Some people will say it's not punk rock, and maybe they're right. But musically and lyrically, Borshch has a spark that only lives in this style.
David Bowie’s first address
It remains interesting that even such alien rock stars as David Bowie had his parental home on our unfortunate planet. The future star lived the first 6 years of his life in 40 Stansfield Road, Brixton, London.
Formation of the Ukrainian rock n roll scene
2022 has become too difficult for one of the largest countries in Europe. It is about Ukraine and its heroic people. The passing year has brought devastation and tears, pain and suffering to the country. In its fight against the invaders, Ukraine is choosing its freedom and the right to a democratic future. Today we wanted to remember the glorious past of this musical nation and especially, we are interested in the development of the rock scene in Ukraine, in a country with its ancient roots and culture. How it was and how it was born.
Motihari Brigade – The Great Refusal
Rock music has always had a peculiar relationship with its own extinction. Every decade produces at least one obituary — usually written by someone who has just purchased the very album that proves them wrong. Motihari Brigade, arriving with the sharp clatter of "The Great Refusal," are the latest to decline the funeral invitation, and they do so with considerably more wit and moral fury than the genre typically manages.
Blipboi – Lately
Newcastle has long nursed a particular kind of creative restlessness, a city that wears its grit like a badge and its tenderness like a wound. It is fitting, then, that Blipboi — raised on the sweeping, unforgiving moorland of North Yorkshire and now settled in the northeast — should have chosen that city as the place to finally give voice to something he has been carrying since 2021. "Lately," his single, is the sound of a man arriving, unhurried, at exactly the right moment.
Ferdinand Rennie – THIS IS NOW
The ballad, as a form, rewards the singer who understands that grief is not one thing. It does not arrive cleanly; it does not depart cleanly. It lingers in doorways and in the spaces between breaths. Ferdinand Rennie, the Austrian-born, Scotland-dwelling veteran of stages from Vienna's grand theatrical houses to the quieter drama of BBC television audition rooms, has always struck one as a man who grasps this truth instinctively. With This Is Now — the latest single from his quietly remarkable late-career renaissance — he delivers the most emotionally complete recording of his catalogue to date.
G-STRING – Breathe In Your Dust
There is something almost perversely honest about an artist who, when asked for a memorable quote about her work, simply replies: "I have no quote." In an era of relentlessly curated self-mythology, of musicians who arrive pre-packaged with manifestos and mood boards and carefully workshopped origin stories, G-STRING — the emerging rock project out of Bergamo, Italy — presents herself with a disarming, almost blunt sincerity. And then, rather brilliantly, she lets the music do the talking her words refuse to.
Spectral Twist – Back Row Kid
The best confessional songwriting has always operated like a letter left on a doorstep — it is not addressed to everyone, but whoever picks it up suddenly feels as though it was meant for them alone. That is precisely the sensation conjured by Back Row Kid, the debut EP from Spectral Twist, the solo alter ego of the mind behind North-East outfit Dead Skin. Two songs. No frills. An unflinching stare at the kind of loneliness that schools manufacture daily and that nobody in authority ever bothers to name.
R3b3l I – A Different Frequency
The silence before the first note has always been the most honest moment in music. It is the moment before the artist can hide behind a vocalist's charisma, before a hook rescues an arrangement from its own shortcomings. R3b3l I, a London-based producer operating somewhere in the rich overlap of lo-fi, jazz and soul, understands this implicitly. On *A Different Frequency*, his debut album, he inhabits that silence and then populates it with twelve compositions of considerable emotional intelligence.
MONORA – 99
The Icelanders have always understood something the rest of the world periodically rediscovers: that music is not manufactured but excavated, drawn slowly from the sediment of lived experience. MONORA's debut EP *99* arrives having spent two decades waiting for the right moment, and the patience — involuntary though it largely was — has done it nothing but good.
Palumbo – More Tales From the Big Smoke
There is a particular breed of rock musician for whom the song is not a vehicle for self-promotion but a form of testimony — a sworn statement, delivered at volume, about how the world actually feels when you're standing in it without a safety net. Dion Palumbo is, emphatically, one of those musicians, and *More Tales From the Big Smoke* is the document that proves it.
Baïki – KosmoX
Phil from Charleroi has no business being this provocative and this entertaining simultaneously, yet here we are, staring down one of the more audacious singles to emerge from the Belgian underground in recent memory. *KosmoX*, the latest dispatch from his project BAÏKI, arrives gift-wrapped in satirical fury — a gleaming, darkly comic missile aimed squarely at the rotten heart of human self-delusion.
Damien Cain – Caleb (JD Radio Edit)
Some songs arrive quietly and stay forever. "Caleb," the latest single from German-born, Ireland-based singer-songwriter Damien Cain, is precisely that kind of song — one that does not announce itself with fanfare, but settles into the memory like a photograph found at the back of a drawer. Produced by UK hitmaker Jay Dixie, whose credits span Meghan Trainor and Ella Henderson, this radio edit strips away any potential for excess and leaves something genuinely rare: a ballad that earns every second of your attention.
WINACHI – STATE OF MIND
There is a particular kind of song that arrives not so much as a piece of music but as a reckoning. *State of Mind*, the debut single from Warrington's WINACHI and the opening salvo of their forthcoming album, is precisely that kind of song — a three-minute act of self-examination from a band who spent the better part of two years dragging themselves across three continents and only recently stopped to ask whether they were still intact.
Chandra – Nessun Dorma (We Will Win!)
Some songs arrive fully clothed in ambition. You hear the opening bars and understand immediately that whoever made this was not content with half-measures. Chandra's audacious reimagining of Puccini's *Nessun Dorma* — timed with almost indecent precision to the opening salvos of FIFA World Cup 2026 — is precisely such a record: a work that could have collapsed under the weight of its own hubris, and instead stands tall, chest out, arms wide, daring you not to be moved.