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.
The Cockney Cowboy – Waterloo Road
Romford is not, by any reasonable geographical measure, Nashville. And yet here comes Justin Vella, the self-styled Cockney Cowboy, striding out of a London council estate in a Stetson, determined to prove that heartbreak, nostalgia and a decent pedal steel line know no postcode. "Waterloo Road" is his calling card, and it is, against all sensible expectation, rather good fun.
Awaywhere – New Misty Morning
Justin Kleiner has built himself a world, and on "New Misty Morning" he finally lets you through the gate. Awaywhere has always sounded like a place glimpsed rather than a project announced, and this single is the first properly furnished room in it: bright, humid, faintly unreal, the kind of morning you only get in dreams or in the opening credits of a film nobody remembers the plot of.
PLAYKNOW – Is It So Hard To Be Good
Pop music likes to pretend it doesn't have opinions. It dresses its arguments up in synth washes and four-on-the-floor kicks until the message slides past unnoticed, a spoonful of sugar for whatever the songwriter actually wants to say. Hans Petter Stormoen doesn't bother with the disguise. "Is It So Hard To Be Good" wears its thesis on its sleeve and dares you to skip past it, which is either a bold move or a foolish one, and happily it turns out to be the former.
Annika Bellamy – Thats What I’m Thinking
Daydreaming, as a subject for pop music, carries an obvious risk: nothing much happens. The mind wanders, the kettle boils, the bus arrives late, and somewhere behind the eyes a whole cinematic romance unfolds without anyone else noticing. Annika Bellamy has built a single around exactly that gap between the mundane and the imagined, and she's found a clever way to make the daydream itself the drama, rather than just the excuse for one.
Pick Up Goliath – Salt & Static
Sam George has spent his career building cathedrals out of concept — an AI apocalypse rendered as a four-movement metal symphony, a collaboration with video-game demons that somehow won him Best Producer at the Elite Music Awards. Salt & Static is the opposite gesture: six tracks, one man, and nothing to hide behind. It's the sound of an architect setting down his blueprints and picking up a scalpel instead.
Tre Nash & Jenesis – In Tandem
Tre Nash & Jenesis have done something quietly radical with "In Tandem": they've made a breakup record and a love letter simultaneously, and somehow neither cancels the other out.
Music by Jeremy – Scenes from a Well Worn Path – Side One
Debut albums usually arrive apologetic, hedging their bets, unsure whether they're a mission statement or a demo tape with delusions of grandeur. Jeremy, a singer-songwriter working alone from a home studio in Banbury, has skipped that stage of adolescence entirely. Side One of "Scenes from a Well Worn Path" — six tracks, the first instalment of a larger project that will eventually span four sides — lands fully formed, confident enough in its own skin to open with a song about the exhaustion of performing a version of yourself for other people's comfort.
The Northside Pleasure Club – Shadow
Nine years is a long time to keep a secret. That's roughly how long Charlie Coupland has been quietly gathering the finest players Melbourne has to offer into a room at Soundpark Studio and coaxing something honest out of them. *Shadow*, the third full-length from The Northside Pleasure Club, arrives less like a debut announcement and more like a dispatch from people who have already found their sound and are simply refining it, session by session, until the edges gleam.
Ellijai – Skinny Boyfriend
Glasgow keeps producing them — voices that arrive fully formed, as if they'd been rehearsing in the wings for years before anyone thought to hand them a microphone. Ellijai, eighteen and already several singles into a career built on unflinching candour, has delivered with "Skinny Boyfriend" the most confident and gloriously unserious thing she's put her name to yet. This is a record that knows exactly what it wants — your attention, your hips, and ideally your heart rate up a notch — and gets it within the first thirty seconons of a synth line that arrives like a dare.
Kylo – Nimble
Toronto has quietly become one of pop's great incubators, and Kylo's "Nimble" is the sound of an artist stepping out of the machine and into the room. Where her earlier material leaned on synthesised gloss, this single strips the wiring out entirely and leaves her alone with a guitar, a voice that cracks exactly when it needs to, and a heartbreak too fresh to have been tidied up for public consumption. It is a bold pivot, the kind that could easily have gone soft and beige in lesser hands. Instead, Kylo has made something that sounds lived-in rather than styled.
DIE DIE BE – Erased Faces
Bureaucracy has never sounded so seductive. DIE DIE BE, the Swiss duo of Liliane Bürli and Bujar Berisha, open their new single with the coldest of images — a face scratched from a document, a person reduced to paperwork — and then spend four minutes proving that erasure can groove.
Terra Nai – Foliada de Berducido
Costa Rica is not, on paper, a natural home for Galician folk music. And yet Terra Nai — Diego Alfaro on voice, gaita and acoustic guitar, Keith Guerrero on violin and illustration — have spent the past three years proving that geography is no obstacle to devotion. Their reading of "Foliada de Berducido," the traditional tune from the Galician village of Berducido best known through Milladoiro's celebrated 1980s arrangement, arrives as a small triumph of cross-continental fidelity: a Costa Rican duo bottling the spirit of northwestern Spain and somehow losing none of the original's mist and mischief in transit.