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.
J12 – Diva
Pop music has always thrived on the collision of accents, and few recent singles collide quite so gleefully as "Diva." J12, the Nottingham-based Nigerian Afrobeats talent with an ear for melody sharp enough to cut glass, has spent the past eighteen months quietly assembling a catalogue that suggests a songwriter unwilling to sit still. With "Diva," featuring the Spanish vocalist Merblond, he delivers his most ambitious statement yet: a record that treats the dancefloor as diplomatic territory, where English, Nigerian Pidgin and Spanish trade verses like old friends catching up after years apart.
Slow Life – Last Train
Now and again a band arrives sounding like they've been eavesdropping on the right pubs. Slow Life, the London-Welsh five-piece who've spent the last twelve months quietly stacking up momentum, have returned with "Last Train," and it's the sound of a group finally cashing in every chip they've been sitting on.
Martha Hill – Granite Feet
Martha Hill's return arrives not with fanfare but with weather — grey February skies, a storm cloud settled somewhere behind the eyes — and it's exactly the right register for a song built around the ordinary miracle of finding what you weren't looking for. Where her 2024 debut dealt in the propulsive certainties of indie pop-rock, this single steps back, softens its shoulders, and lets the quiet do the work.
Martin Kuiper – Still I Promise
Martin Kuiper has always worn his influences like a well-loved denim jacket — patched, faded in the right places, and unmistakably his own. On "Still I Promise," the sixth single lifted from his forthcoming album *Prison Of Modesty*, he takes that jacket out for a stroll along a sun-bleached boardwalk and returns with something genuinely radiant.
SilverHorizon – SilverHorizon
Worcester County has not, historically, been mistaken for a hotbed of rock and roll ambition, but SilverHorizon's self-titled debut arrives with enough conviction to make a case for reassessment. Bryce Broberg, Connor MacEachern, and Kenny Snider have spent two years honing a sound that wears its influences openly — Two Door Cinema Club's melodic instinct, the swagger of The Strokes, Fontaines D.C.'s brooding intensity — without ever collapsing into pastiche. This is a trio confident enough to let its record breathe across thirteen tracks, and disciplined enough to make that sprawl feel purposeful rather than indulgent.
Crystal D’Esprit – Echoes Memories & Dreams
Crystal D'Esprit has done the thing so few composers dare to do these days: she has trusted a single instrument, a single room, and two days of tape to say everything she needs to say. *Echoes Memories & Dreams* is a solo piano record in the truest sense — not a showcase for technical fireworks, but a quiet, unguarded conversation between a musician and the upright she calls Aishi, "Gift from God," recorded in stereo in her own home with nothing to hide behind.
Cognitive Constellation Corps – Thank You for Your Feedback (I)
Every so often a record arrives that takes the most exhausted sentence in the English language and makes you fall in love with it again. Brooke Tamsin Clevenger has spent three decades coaxing feeling out of circuitry, and on *Thank You for Your Feedback (I)* she performs a small act of alchemy: she picks up the deadest phrase in modern life — the one your bank, your landlord, and your least favourite customer service chatbot fire back at you on a loop — and teaches it to breathe.
Land Mass – Fading
Greg Zucker makes records the way a person writes a letter they never plan to send: privately, urgently, and with no thought for who might eventually read it. That the letter has now been posted, under the name Land Mass, is the great gift of "Fading" — five tracks that wear their solitude like a well-cut coat rather than a hair shirt, and that reward the listener at every turn.
Cam Cole – Get Up Ya Honky Tonk
There is a particular strain of British music writing — the kind that used to spill out of the inkies on a Thursday, all breathless hyperbole and back-page swagger — that exists to announce the arrival of somebody who was clearly never going to stay on the pavement for long. Cam Cole's "Get Up Ya Honky Tonk" is exactly that kind of announcement: a record that struts in already knowing it's the best thing in the room.
NO IDENTITY – Almost Nothing
Now and again a record arrives that seems to have been assembled out of spite for the studio manual. "Almost Nothing," the new single and video from the Kansas solo project NO IDENTITY, is exactly that kind of record: a three-and-a-half-minute act of controlled sabotage, built almost entirely from a handclap that has been beaten, filtered, and dragged through enough distortion pedals to emerge sounding like a bass guitar dredged out of a septic tank. It shouldn't work. It works anyway, and works with a swagger that plenty of better-funded productions never manage.
Peter Manning Robinson – Bent Out of Shape
Occasionally a piece of instrumental music arrives that refuses to explain itself, and thank heavens for that. "Bent Out of Shape," the second single from Peter Manning Robinson's forthcoming album *Excursions*, is one of those rare, disarming things: a piano piece that grins its way through the wreckage rather than wallowing in it.
Keesha Blair – Peaceful Power
Healing, as a subject for pop and soul music, tends to arrive either oversold or undercooked: the grand gesture that mistakes volume for depth, or the whispered platitude that mistakes vagueness for tenderness. Keesha Blair's "Peaceful Power" manages the considerably harder trick of sounding both intimate and assured, a record that treats self-acceptance not as a slogan to be draped over a chorus but as a genuine emotional architecture, built line by line and held together by a voice that never once raises itself to prove a point.