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 story of one music video
One November morning, I went to the antique shop 'LOT ONE TEN'. I loved taking a walk in autumn London after a snack at McDonald's and a large serving of black coffee. I felt in good spirits and even the gray rain could not interfere with my daily ritual, so Walthamstow greeted me with genuine indifference, as if inviting me to take a walk on the favorite street of the designer William Morris, whose mansion-museum was around the corner.
Shmeisani Jazz Massive – As War Starts!
*There are records that arrive as documents. This is one of them.* There is a particular kind of silence that precedes catastrophe — not peaceful, not resting, but coiled and electric, the held breath of a city that knows what is coming before it arrives. Shmeisani Jazz Massive have captured that silence. More remarkably still, they have made it swing.
C’batch – Song For God
Few gestures carry the weight of a composer returning to work long shelved, rummaging through his own creative past not out of nostalgia, but out of a conviction that the music never quite received the hearing it deserved. Stephen H. Cumberbatch — the White Plains, New York composer, guitarist, producer and synthesiser programmer who records as C'batch — has done exactly this with *From The Vault 1*, a carefully considered archival project that excavates recordings from some of his most generative years. "Song For God," the collection's opening statement, announces itself with the confidence of someone who already knows the room.
Liri Dais – Counting Hours
Twenty-five years is a long time to carry a song. Most of us, confronted with a cassette recording of our younger selves — the bum notes, the overreaching ambition, the unearned earnestness — would quietly bury the evidence and move on. Liri Dais has done the opposite. The Sevenoaks singer-songwriter has excavated "Counting Hours" from the ruins of their 2001 student band Landslide, dusted it off with modern production tools, and presented it to the world with something approaching defiance. The result is one of the more quietly remarkable debuts of this young year.
PJD – On New Horizons
Paul Julian Dennis — PJD to those already acquainted with his quietly industrious corner of the Birmingham music scene — is the sort of artist who makes critics nervous. Not because he is difficult or confrontational, but because he is *genuine*, and genuine is harder to write about than provocative. He carries no manufactured mythology, no PR-engineered origin story, no carefully curated Instagram vulnerability. What he does carry is decades of calluses, a studio of his own, and a philosophy — never record the same song twice — that would read as arrogance from a lesser talent and reads, from him, as simple discipline.
Satsuma – Anodyne
**A debut of raw, unflinching emotional honesty from a singular new voice** The word *anodyne* means, of course, to soothe or relieve pain. It is a curious title for a record that does neither — or rather, does both simultaneously, the way only the very best music can. Cam Halkerston, operating under the name Satsuma, has produced a debut EP of such disarming directness that one is tempted to reach for hyperbole immediately. Resist it. The record earns its praise slowly, the way a bruise earns your attention: you don't notice it at first, and then suddenly it's all you can think about.
Signal-23 – Pillars
**The debut from this bi-coastal electronic duo is a remarkably assured statement of intent — austere, aching, and impossible to shake.** Geography has always haunted electronic music. Kraftwerk's motorways. Burial's sodden South London. The precise coordinates of a bedroom at 3am. Signal-23 — split between San Diego and New York, two cities that couldn't be more temperamentally opposed — have built their debut EP from that same kind of spatial tension. *Pillars* is a record about structures: the ones we construct, the ones that slowly fail us, and the ones we find ourselves standing inside long after we've forgotten how we got there.
The Casbahs – Peasants of the Show
Durham has never been the city that music journalists parachute into when filing dispatches from the North. That honour has historically fallen to Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield — places whose mythologies have been so thoroughly canonised they've become almost a burden to the bands born within them. Durham gets on with it quietly. Which is, perhaps, exactly the disposition required to make a record as assured and unhurried as *Peasants of the Show*.
V.E.N! – Virtual Emotions Network
**From a Sevillian power-pop trio to eighteen records of fearless independence — the long, extraordinary journey of Edu Campoy Molinero** Every serious musical project has a prehistory, and the prehistory of V.E.N! is itself a story worth telling. Before the Bandcamp page, before the collages, before the Virtual Emotions Network began transmitting, there was Club Radar: a Sevillian power-pop trio of the Nineties, led by a young guitarist and singer named Edu Campoy Molinero, whose live sets were built on direct melodic pop and garage guitars, soaked in Sixties roots and played with the kind of physical urgency that the decade demanded. Club Radar dissolved at the century's end, and Campoy turned, for a number of years, to another kind of work entirely. He ran a bookshop — Novalis, named presumably after the German Romantic poet who wrote about the blue flower of infinite longing, a detail that tells you rather a lot about Campoy's inner landscape. The shop consumed his days but, as it turned out, it also quietly funded his future: the proceeds went toward a home recording studio, and the hours spent among books and publishers left a permanent mark on the density and literary ambition of the lyrics he would eventually write.
Christopher Peacock – Only The Good Die Young
Grief, as any honest songwriter will tell you, is the great democratiser. It arrives uninvited, it does not negotiate, and it cares nothing for your artistic pretensions or your release schedule. The question that separates the merely competent from the genuinely affecting is not whether an artist can feel it — everyone can — but whether they can translate that feeling into something that resonates beyond their own living room walls. Christopher Peacock, the one-man independent operation behind "Only The Good Die Young," appears to understand this distinction with uncommon clarity.
Lucian Lacewing – Land Of Enchantment
**A bedroom conjurer from Bristol sends eight voices into the void, and the void hums back.** Released quietly on a Thursday in late March, with no fanfare and no live show to follow — Lucian Lacewing does not perform, a position he holds with the sort of principled stubbornness once championed by Brian Eno, his acknowledged patron saint — *Land Of Enchantment* is the kind of record that rewards the patient and baffles the impatient. It is ambient music with a gothic pulse, drone music that refuses to lie down quietly, and a debut single that announces its maker as someone far more interested in the texture of sound than in its conventional arrangement.
Ouroboric – Sin Eater
There is a particular kind of courage required to make music about guilt — not the performative, chest-beating guilt of a thousand confessional singer-songwriters, but the quieter, more corrosive variety: the guilt of someone who watched a relationship curdle slowly, said nothing, and eventually met a version of themselves they no longer recognised. Ouroboric, the Adelaide-based alternative project built around the dual vocal axis of Phil Crowley and Stace, have made precisely that music with "Sin Eater," and the effect is genuinely unsettling in the way that the best alternative rock always should be.
Tabitha Zu – On Reality
Thirty-three years is a long time to wait for a song to find its proper audience. Yet here we are, April 2026, and "On Reality" — Tabitha Zu's second single, first pressed onto 12-inch vinyl in a run so limited it may as well have been distributed by hand — arrives on streaming platforms with the force of something that has been coiled and patient, biding its time. The shock is not that it sounds fresh. The shock is that it sounds necessary.