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.
JB Elwood – Who We Are
Heartbreak has been strip-mined so thoroughly by songwriters that fresh ore is hard to come by. Elwood, a Texan with a voice built for empty rooms and last orders, manages to find a seam nobody else had quite located: the moment blame stops pointing outward and starts pointing home.
Andrei British – Distant Moon Cantina
There's a particular kind of alchemy required to make nostalgia feel like invention, and Andrei British pulls it off with a swagger that borders on the theatrical. "Distant Moon Cantina" doesn't so much reference the outer-galaxy tavern of collective pop-culture memory as it reconstructs it, plank by plank, out of brass, static, and shadow. This is a single that understands atmosphere is not decoration but architecture, and it builds its world with the confidence of a composer who has spent long nights thinking about what smoke sounds like.
RISE – Hard To Leave You
There is a particular strain of British rock songwriting that understands heartbreak not as a wound but as a weather system — something you can't outrun, only stand inside and let batter you — and RISE's "Hard To Leave You" belongs unmistakably to that lineage. The Liverpool four-piece have taken a track that already had good bones on 2024's *Memories and Possibilities* EP and done the thing bands rarely have the nerve to do: admitted the first version wasn't quite it, and gone back in with a blowtorch.
LeBarons – Running River
Toronto and Hamilton have quietly been brewing something worth paying attention to, and "Running River" is the proof poured out in full. LeBarons have spent years working the unglamorous seam between alt-country and something rawer, more wounded, and on this single they finally strike a vein of pure gold.
DONELLI A.I. ENSEMBLE – Previsioni del tempo incerto
Weather, as a metaphor for the times, has been worked to exhaustion by lesser songwriters and lazier sleeve notes. Donelli A.I. Ensemble picks the metaphor back up, dusts it off, and finds it still has teeth. *Previsioni del Tempo Incerto* — "Uncertain Weather Forecasts" — arrives as eighteen tracks that refuse to sit still, sliding between jazz, prog and world music with the confidence of a band that has stopped worrying about which shelf a record store will file them under.
Mr. Charisma – Some People
**Some People** arrives from Houston like a confession whispered across a bar at closing time — unhurried, unshowy, and considerably darker than the room's lighting would suggest. Daniel Austin and Chris Hatfield have spent the better part of three decades screaming into hardcore bands with names like Die Young and Will To Live, and the temptation with a record like this — two punk lifers reaching for gothic folk and outlaw country — is to expect a novelty, a costume change. What they've made instead is something closer to a reckoning. Hatfield's baritone carries the weathered gravity of Cash without ever borrowing his swagger; Austin's guitar work, recorded entirely at home on what sounds like little more than nerve and patience, wraps around the vocals like smoke curling off a cigarette nobody asked for but everybody understands.
Xxäm – Xxäm
Most confessional records flatten themselves into something palatable, sanding down the jagged edges until grief and shame arrive pre-approved for radio. Xxäm refuses that bargain. This self-titled debut is eleven tracks of unruly, gorgeously overdressed feeling, and it treats the listener as someone capable of sitting with discomfort rather than being soothed past it.
Honey VHS – With Pulp
Brooklyn has coughed up another guitar band, and this one, mercifully, has bothered to write actual songs. *With Pulp*, the debut long-player from Honey VHS, arrives sounding less like a calculated bid for a sync deal and more like four musicians who locked themselves in a room until something true fell out. Produced by Lucas Saur and cut largely live, the record has the grain and stumble of a band actually playing together — chairs scraping, amps breathing, nobody quantised into submission.
JF Roy – Sundress
Pop songs about happiness are notoriously difficult to pull off. Misery hands a songwriter automatic gravitas; contentment forces them to earn the listener's attention through craft alone, with no shortcut through shared wreckage. JF Roy, a Canadian singer-songwriter better known until now for rock built on faith and struggle, has wandered into this trickier territory with "Sundress," and come out the other side with something genuinely disarming: a love song that refuses to manufacture conflict it doesn't feel.
OpCritical – Parachute
Rock and roll has always had a soft spot for the grand gesture — the three-minute sermon dressed up as a single, the chorus built to be bellowed back at the band from a festival field. OpCritical understands this instinctively, and "Parachute" arrives as their most fully-formed statement yet: a song that takes the oldest trick in the songwriting book — turn a physical object into a metaphor and don't let go of it — and executes it with the kind of conviction that makes cynicism feel like a wasted effort.
The Sonic Travelers – Please Comfort Me
Some songs arrive fully formed and instantly dated, tethered to whatever sonic gimmick happened to be fashionable the week they were tracked. Others get buried for decades and come back sounding like they were always meant for right now. "Please Comfort Me," the new single from The Sonic Travelers, belongs firmly to the second camp — a song written in the late 1970s by George Aiello and John Ingram that has spent nearly fifty years waiting for its moment, and has finally found one worth the wait.
Fish And Scale – Holy Man
Roland Wälzlein has never much cared for tidy categories, and "Holy Man" makes that abundantly clear within its opening bars. Recorded live in the studio, the piano sits close and unadorned, each note allowed to hang in the air a beat longer than convention would permit — a decision that rewards patience rather than punishing it.