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.
Scott A. Flaxman – Love of Strangers
Independent songwriting rarely bothers with subtlety when it comes to the old wound of being misunderstood by the people who ought to know better, and Flaxman doesn't bother either. What he does instead, on this new single, is turn that wound into something closer to architecture — a song built room by room, with the family table on one side of the wall and a lit stage on the other, and the listener left to work out which side actually feels like home.
ESTRADA Music Project – Looking out the window
A record built from a single fixed vantage point risks monotony, but Estrada Music Project turns that limitation into the whole point of "Looking Out the Window." The song was written during a stretch of medical isolation, and it wears that origin plainly, without theatrics. No swelling strings arrive to underline the drama, no chorus tries to console you. Instead, the track sits in its restriction and lets the restriction do the work.
Don Cicci – Polpette
Somewhere between the fog-draped rooftops of a London bedroom studio and the sun-bleached film reels of 1970s Rome, Don Cicci has found his sound, and on "Polpette" he sounds thoroughly at home in it. This is a producer who has clearly spent years with his ear pressed to vinyl crackle, absorbing the swagger of vintage Italian film scores the way other musicians absorb the blues, and the result is a track that feels less like a beat than a mood board set to a metronome.
Cupp – Raindrops Falling
Palos Hills isn't exactly Laurel Canyon, and Cupp isn't pretending otherwise. What arrives instead, on this new single, is something far more useful to the modern ear: a rain song built by a man who clearly adores the ones that came before him and refuses to simply photocopy them.
Kai Moa – Some of My Best Friends Are…Electric Sheep
Birmingham has given the world heavy metal, bhangra fusion, and now, it seems, a drummer-turned-producer with a taste for wormholes. Kai Moa's debut EP arrives after a run of singles that already hinted at an appetite bigger than any one genre could satisfy, and the full collection makes good on that promise with a confidence that borders on the reckless — the good kind of reckless, the kind that used to get records described as "dangerous" before that word got worn smooth by overuse.
@MoStFeAr – Amore Nero黒い愛
Orlando has never sounded less like Orlando. Across eleven tracks, @MoStFeAr constructs a private geography — humid, neon-lit, permanently after midnight — and refuses to let the listener leave it until the record's final fade. That refusal is the album's defining trick, and it's played with a conviction rare enough to make the whole project feel inevitable rather than assembled.
Talking Horses – I Will Work Harder
Three years of van fumes, sticky floors and half-empty rehearsal rooms have distilled into something genuinely worth your attention. *I Will Work Harder* arrives not as a tentative debut but as a document of a band who have already lived the life the songs describe — and it shows in every bruised, brassy bar of it.
Last Night Watchman – Old Blighty
Songwriters who dare to rhyme "colonial" with anything at all deserve applause before the needle even drops, and Last Night Watchman — the recording alias of a Herefordshire-based veteran of Birmingham's indie underground — clears that bar and keeps climbing. *Old Blighty*, the title track and centrepiece of this new EP, takes its cue from the toppling of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol, and turns a moment of street theatre into something far more durable: a genuinely unsettled meditation on inheritance, guilt and the stories a nation tells itself to sleep at night.
Gravité Fresq – Hypocracy Loop
Dublin's Gravite Fresq has built a reputation on turning private dread into something you can dance to, and "Hypocrisy Loophole" is the sharpest weapon in that arsenal yet. It arrives clad in synthetic armour — a rigid, pulsating bassline that sounds machined rather than played, married to a four-on-the-floor drum pattern so unyielding it borders on liturgical. Fitting, given the subject matter.
Underlowe – No Pictures
There's a particular kind of racket that only comes from a band who've spent five years getting to know each other's bad habits before they ever plugged in together properly, and "No Pictures" — the new shot fired by Cardiff's Underlowe — has that racket in spades. This is a record built on trust, on the kind of shorthand that only exists between old friends and older riffs, and it announces itself with the confidence of a band who know exactly what they're doing, even if the world hasn't quite caught up yet.
Elvana – Viva Las Vegas
Let us be clear about what should not work here. Take a song built on brass-stabbed swagger and pelvic certainty, strip out the horns, bolt on a wall of Sub Pop-grade distortion, and hand the microphone to a man doing his best impression of a Memphis icon fronting a Seattle power trio. On paper it reads like the setlist of a stag do that has gone badly, gloriously wrong. On record, it is a small triumph of bad taste executed with impeccable judgement.
Spoony-B – 99 Apples
Confidence is the rarest ingredient in modern rap, and "99 Apples" has it in spades. Spoony-B has built a track around the kind of central metaphor that shouldn't work on paper — abundance, temptation, the orchard as a stand-in for a heart that keeps saying yes to everyone — and somehow makes it feel inevitable rather than gimmicky by the second hook.