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.
Stefanie Michaela – Let Me See the Real You
There is a particular sort of courage required of the American independent artist in the current moment — not the swaggering bravado of the major-label machine, with its algorithmic playlists and demographically optimised drops, but something quieter and therefore considerably braver: the willingness to be genuinely, nakedly, uncomplicatedly honest. Stefanie Michaela, a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter who is also, we are informed, a mother of five including two sets of twins (a biographical detail that alone implies a woman who has long since dispensed with the luxury of artifice), understands this instinctively. Her new single arrives not as a calculated career move but as something that feels more like a confession — and therein lies its considerable power.
Dominic Crane – So Moseley
The thing about songs rooted in place is that they either smell authentic or they don't. You know within eight bars whether a songwriter genuinely inhabits the geography they're invoking, or whether they're renting it for colour. With "So Moseley," Crane inhabits it entirely — the Moseley of junk shops and retro clothing emporiums, of antique spectacles and art school posture, of a particular kind of Birmingham bohemia that never quite made the history books but shaped the people who passed through it more profoundly than any NME cover story ever could.
Kat Kikta – Dreamer
Sleep, Freud once argued, is the royal road to the unconscious. Pop music, rather less often, gets anywhere near that road — let alone travels it with any conviction. Kat Kikta, the multi-disciplinary artist, singer and sonic architect who has been quietly assembling one of the more genuinely peculiar catalogues in the contemporary independent scene, does not merely visit that territory on *Dreamer*. She sets up residence there.
The Forever Takeback – Breathe Again (Semi-stripped)
Shreveport, Louisiana is not a city that typically colonises the imagination of those searching for the next seismic shift in alternative music. It is a place more readily associated with oil refineries and Texas heat than with the kind of confessional, guitar-sparse introspection that has long been the domain of Portland basements and Brooklyn loft apartments. And yet here comes Jared Trahan — operating under the quietly devastating moniker The Forever Takeback — arriving without fanfare, without a label, without even a bandmate to share the existential weight, and delivering something that lodges itself beneath the ribcage like a splinter you cannot quite reach.
Mary Knoblock – Peach
**Peaches, as any decent poet will tell you, bruise easily.** They demand to be handled with something approaching reverence — too firm a grip and the whole thing collapses into sweetness and ruin. Mary Knoblock understands this. *PEACH*, her latest offering from Portland via the quietly formidable Aurally Records, is an album that holds its own tenderness with extraordinary care, and dares you to do the same.
Mattock – Daughters
Rock music's most persistent lie is the one it tells about spontaneity — the myth that the best recordings arrive fully formed, blurted into a microphone at two in the morning between cigarettes, raw and reckless and magnificent. Casey Brandt and Jason Fletcher, the two men who constitute Mattock, have spent enough years in enough rooms — CBGB's sweat-soaked floors, the cluttered rehearsal spaces of the DMV scene — to know better. "Daughters," the title track from their sophomore album, is a record that understands the difference between rawness and carelessness. It has the former in abundance. It contains none of the latter.
Klas Jonsson – Versions
Klas Jonsson does not come to you. This is perhaps the first thing worth understanding about the Gothenburg-based musician who has spent the better part of two years releasing music with the unhurried confidence of someone who has already made peace with the fact that the algorithm will not save him. Versions, his new EP and first release of 2026, is a collection of four remixed tracks pulled from his existing catalogue — a document less of reinvention than of revelation, the kind of record that turns a light on in a room you thought you already knew.
Tonje Gravningsmyhr – Maze
Norway has always kept its own counsel. While the rest of the continent chases trends with the desperate energy of a dog after a bus it has no intention of boarding, Scandinavia tends to arrive quietly, set something extraordinary down on the table, and wait. Tonje Gravningsmyhr — musician, songwriter, classical trumpeter turned pop architect from Moss — does precisely this with *Maze*, the title single from her second album.
Nemesis Uncle – The Sword
Darren Purvis has built himself a bunker. Not metaphorically — literally. Somewhere in the Forest of Dean, one of England's oldest and most peculiarly atmospheric woodlands, a man has locked himself away with his instruments, his tea, his cake, and his obsessions, and has emerged with something that sounds like it was recorded at the precise moment the ancient oaks outside decided to lean in and listen.
Ron Morven – Paper Sun
Ron Morven arrives with little fanfare and considerable nerve. *Paper Sun*, his debut single, does not ease you in. It drops you, blinking, onto a Los Angeles freeway at the precise moment the heat becomes something more than weather — when the asphalt stops being infrastructure and starts being a psychological condition. That is a bold gambit for any debut, let alone one aimed squarely at dance floors and streaming playlists. Morven pulls it off with the confidence of someone who has been writing long enough to know that the gap between a mood and a song is smaller than most producers are willing to admit.
Agnes Fred – After Death
**There is a particular kind of silence that certain records understand better than words ever could. Agnes Fred's debut single inhabits that silence completely.**
Vela Jones – Static Air
Vela Jones arrives with the quiet confidence of someone who has already decided, long before anyone else caught on, exactly what kind of artist she intends to be. The cover art for *Static Air* tells you nearly everything you need to know before a single note sounds: a young woman, robed in flowing white lace, festooned with silver stars, boots planted firmly on a stage floor that glistens with fairy lights, holding an acoustic guitar decorated like a celestial map. She has named her artistic persona "space hippy," and the phrase is not merely decorative. It is a manifesto compressed into two words.