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.
Fish And Scale – Letter from Paulus
There is a particular kind of audacity required to plant your flag beside one of the most celebrated passages in all of human literature. When Paul of Tarsus sat down to write his letter to the Corinthians — that luminous thirteenth chapter, the so-called Hymn to Love — he produced something so complete, so ruthlessly concise in its wisdom, that two thousand years of composers, preachers, and poets have circled it like moths around an open flame, rarely improving upon it, frequently diminishing it. Roland Wälzlein, the Nuremberg-born songwriter who records as Fish And Scale, has done something rather brave with "Letter from Paulus": he has not merely borrowed the text as wallpaper, as so many have. He has taken its beating heart and transplanted it into a living, breathing pop-rock ballad that pulses with hard-won personal conviction.
Shelia Moore-Piper – Show Love
Soul music has always lived on the knife-edge between the sacred and the carnal, that old tension between the church and the street corner that gave the genre its essential electricity. Shelia Moore-Piper, the multi-award-winning Christian soul vocalist from the American South, has spent her career refusing to let those two worlds fall apart — and on "Show Love," the lead single from her forthcoming Love/Soul Session Vol. 2, she achieves something quietly remarkable: a song of radiant, unguarded faith that never once feels preachy, because it is, at its core, simply and profoundly human.
Micayla Shafran – Fallen
There are songs that arrive already fully formed in the imagination, as if they had no choice but to exist. Micayla Shafran's debut single "Fallen" is not quite that kind of song, and yet it is something more interesting — a song that feels wrenched from circumstance, shaped by necessity rather than ambition, and that carries, in its very roughness, an emotional authority most polished pop records spend entire careers failing to manufacture.
Ítallo – CATATAU
Somewhere between the cracked pavements of Alagoas and the restless interior of a mind that refuses to be pacified, Ítallo França has made the most fully realised record of his career. CATATAU — the word itself a Brazilian colloquialism for a chaotic abundance, a mess of things piled high — arrives as his fourth studio album and announces, with considerable confidence, that França has moved beyond the role of sensitive chronicler into something altogether more urgent and combative.
Saline Grace – The Tree of Knowledge
There are records that arrive like weather — slow, inevitable, carrying the smell of something about to change. *The Tree of Knowledge*, the fifth studio album from Ricardo Hoffmann's singular project Saline Grace, is exactly such a record. Released three years after the haunted arboreal drift of *The Whispering Woods*, it does not so much pick up where that album left off as dig deeper into the same dark soil, retrieving something altogether more unsettling: a portrait of modern man that is by turns pitying, furious, and achingly sorrowful.
Keeble – Totemic
The debut album arrives fully formed, which is either a miracle or a warning. With *Totemic*, the UK artist known simply as Keeble does something that ought to be more difficult than it sounds: he constructs a ten-track ritual, and makes you feel the heat of it.
Seven Nation Army – Power and Money
Kraków is not a city you typically associate with the grinding machinery of industrial rock. It gives us cathedrals, cobblestones, and a magnificent dragon myth. And yet, for two decades now, Jarek Balsamski has been constructing something altogether more combustible beneath its medieval skyline. Seven Nation Army, the project he founded there in 2006, has long refined its dark, atmospheric sound while maintaining a fiercely independent creative sensibility. *Power and Money* — a three-track EP released this week — is the latest dispatch from that ongoing and admirably uncompromising mission. And if the band's own framing is to be believed, this is something more than a record: *"Power and Money is not only about sound — it's about asking questions about the world we live in."* Bold words. Remarkably, the music earns them.
By Million Wires – Not Over
The most instructive thing about *Not Over* is what it doesn't sound like. It doesn't sound like *Letters to the Absent*, the 2012 debut that earned By Million Wires comparisons to skyscraping guitar psychedelia and established them as a band of genuine atmospheric ambition. It doesn't sound like the transitional instrumental work that followed Anna's departure — that more decisive, harder-edged post-rock that suggested the band might retreat entirely into wordlessness. And it doesn't sound like a band trying to sound like anything in particular. For a record fourteen years in the making, *Not Over* carries almost no anxiety about its own identity. That, more than any individual moment of brilliance, is what makes it worth your time.
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.
Rusty Reid – All Through My Days
There is a peculiar audacity to the cover version, when done with genuine artistic intent. Not the karaoke audacity of note-for-note reproduction — that wan exercise in nostalgia which serves only to remind us how much better the original was — but the audacity of reinterpretation: of taking another writer's beloved architecture, respectfully demolishing a few load-bearing walls, and rebuilding something that illuminates both the source and the interpreter simultaneously. Rusty Reid, Seattle-based Texan by birth and temperament, has constructed his entire fifth album, *Lone Stardust: Masterworks of Texas Songwriters*, around precisely this kind of courageous creative audacity. The album's lead single, "All Through My Days," demonstrates just how deftly that gamble can pay off.