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.
Lilia Asha – My Morbid Reverie
Every so often a record arrives that refuses the tidy grammar of pop songwriting and insists on its own strange logic instead. "My Morbid Reverie" is one of those records — a single that behaves less like a hook-driven statement and more like a confession caught halfway between speech and dream.
Koentakhinte – When You’re Not Here
Grief rarely announces itself with drama. More often it arrives as a kind of administrative oddity — the chair still pulled out at the same angle, the mug still hanging on its hook, the world stubbornly refusing to redecorate itself around a hole that's just appeared in it. Koen Ruiter, the Utrecht-trained songwriter who records as Koentakhinte, understands this instinctively, and "When You're Not Here" is built entirely from that understanding.
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.
Litvar – Being Here
Loss makes strange architects. It tears down whatever you thought you'd built and leaves you standing in the rubble, wondering what to do with your hands. On their third record, Litvar's Rex Thurstan picks through that rubble with a Gibson J-45 and something like tenderness, and the result is the most persuasive thing this band has committed to tape.
Paper Nova – Black Whole
Four musicians who met over a decade ago in Seattle have finally made the record their whole career seemed to be circling. *Black Whole* is the sound of a band refusing to be pinned down, and refusing beautifully.
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.
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.