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.
THROES NYC – Fight The Urge (Minimum Risk Remix)
There's a particular kind of record that doesn't so much play as *close in* on you, and Throes NYC's "Fight The Urge (Minimum Risk Remix)" is exactly that kind of record. Forget the sunlit, synth-dappled version of this song you might have heard first — this is the same tune dragged down a fire escape at 3am and left to shiver in the alley behind CBGB's ghost. Where the original single sparkled, this remix scowls. And thank God for that.
Cas du Pree – Blank Page
Every songwriter eventually confronts the same terror: the page that refuses to fill. What separates the merely competent from the genuinely compelling is what they do with that dread once it arrives. Cas du Pree, the Dutch artist whose restless curiosity has long outpaced easy categorisation, turns that anxiety into three and a half minutes of gleaming, hook-laden pop that never once sounds like a crisis of confidence.
Michael Grandel – Eta Carinae
Named after a star system famous for burning too bright and too fast, "Eta Carinae" arrives with a title that does most of the promotional work for you. Michael Grandel clearly understood the gift he'd been handed and built a track sturdy enough to earn it, rather than one that simply borrows the cosmic branding and hopes nobody checks the science.
Dru Melodics – Skyfall
Andrew Marshall did not arrive at hip-hop through a marketing plan. He arrived through a PlayStation, a pirate-radio booth in Nottingham, a decade of institutional wards, and a determination to turn the wreckage of his own biography into something a stranger might recognise as their own. "Skyfall," his lead single from the forthcoming *No Promises* project, wears every one of those years openly, and it is precisely that refusal to disguise its scars that makes the record land with such force.
Washing Machina – Before My Mind Wakes Up
Stockholm's Washing Machina have never been a band content to let a melody sit still. On their debut, *The Spontaneous Splendid*, they let the fuzz do the flirting and the tunes do the talking. On *Before My Mind Wakes Up*, their second full-length, they've turned the whole operation inward, and the result is a record that snarls, aches, and hums with something close to genuine unease — the sound of a band deciding that pretty isn't the point anymore, honesty is.
Sonny Southon – Rolling The Dice
Once in a while a record arrives that feels less like a release and more like a confession whispered through a cracked-open door. *Rolling The Dice* belongs firmly to that rarest of categories: the one-person operation that never once sounds like a demo. Sonny Southon has done the impossible trick of making solitude sound generous.
SilverHorizon – SilverHorizon
Worcester County has not, historically, been mistaken for a hotbed of rock and roll ambition, but SilverHorizon's self-titled debut arrives with enough conviction to make a case for reassessment. Bryce Broberg, Connor MacEachern, and Kenny Snider have spent two years honing a sound that wears its influences openly — Two Door Cinema Club's melodic instinct, the swagger of The Strokes, Fontaines D.C.'s brooding intensity — without ever collapsing into pastiche. This is a trio confident enough to let its record breathe across thirteen tracks, and disciplined enough to make that sprawl feel purposeful rather than indulgent.
Crystal D’Esprit – Echoes Memories & Dreams
Crystal D'Esprit has done the thing so few composers dare to do these days: she has trusted a single instrument, a single room, and two days of tape to say everything she needs to say. *Echoes Memories & Dreams* is a solo piano record in the truest sense — not a showcase for technical fireworks, but a quiet, unguarded conversation between a musician and the upright she calls Aishi, "Gift from God," recorded in stereo in her own home with nothing to hide behind.
Pick Up Goliath – Father Asphyxia
There is a particular strain of British music writing — born somewhere between the *NME*'s appetite for spectacle and *Melody Maker*'s taste for the confessional — that never trusted a record until it had bled a little. Sam George, who records as Pick Up Goliath from his own studio in Cáceres, Spain, has made a career of records that bleed on cue. But *Father Asphyxia*, the fifth single lifted from his forthcoming EP *Salt & Static*, is the first time the wound feels genuinely his, rather than a wound assembled for effect.
Cam Cole – Get Up Ya Honky Tonk
There is a particular strain of British music writing — the kind that used to spill out of the inkies on a Thursday, all breathless hyperbole and back-page swagger — that exists to announce the arrival of somebody who was clearly never going to stay on the pavement for long. Cam Cole's "Get Up Ya Honky Tonk" is exactly that kind of announcement: a record that struts in already knowing it's the best thing in the room.
NO IDENTITY – Almost Nothing
Now and again a record arrives that seems to have been assembled out of spite for the studio manual. "Almost Nothing," the new single and video from the Kansas solo project NO IDENTITY, is exactly that kind of record: a three-and-a-half-minute act of controlled sabotage, built almost entirely from a handclap that has been beaten, filtered, and dragged through enough distortion pedals to emerge sounding like a bass guitar dredged out of a septic tank. It shouldn't work. It works anyway, and works with a swagger that plenty of better-funded productions never manage.
Peter Manning Robinson – Bent Out of Shape
Occasionally a piece of instrumental music arrives that refuses to explain itself, and thank heavens for that. "Bent Out of Shape," the second single from Peter Manning Robinson's forthcoming album *Excursions*, is one of those rare, disarming things: a piano piece that grins its way through the wreckage rather than wallowing in it.