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.
Jonathan Lobo – Hero
There is a particular kind of courage involved in writing a song that asks, sincerely and without irony, how you would like to be remembered. Pop music, on the whole, has little patience for such questions. It prefers the transaction: the hook, the drop, the thirty-second skip window. Jonathan Lobo, a Dubai-based lawyer and independent songwriter, appears entirely uninterested in any of that. *Hero*, his latest single, arrives like a letter written by candlelight — unhurried, honest, and slightly terrifying in its emotional clarity.
Last Crow – Whales
The very name is an act of declaration. Whales — not sharks, not wolves, not any of the grasping, territorial creatures that populate the imagery of heavy music — but something ancient and unreachable, moving through depths that daylight never touches. It is, you suspect within the first thirty seconds of Last Crow's new single, entirely the right title. This is music that operates below the surface.
Alexander Nantschev – Vibrant Secrets
The Viennese have always understood that music is architecture. You feel this immediately in "Vibrant Secrets," the lead single from Alexander Nantschev's album Half A Century — a record conceived, rather beautifully, as a 50th birthday letter to himself and to the half-decade of pandemic-born introspection that preceded it. From its opening bars, the track announces itself not as a song in any conventional sense but as a constructed space: enter it, and it rearranges the dimensions around you.
Seema Farswani – Evolved
The question that haunts every serious piece of popular music is not whether it sounds good — competence is cheap, and the contemporary production landscape is littered with tracks that gleam without illuminating anything — but whether it *means* something. Seema Farswani, the Singapore-based singer-songwriter and composer whose musical education has sprawled across Dubai, Chicago, and the wider world, does not merely ask this question. With *Evolved*, her new cinematic rock single, she attempts to answer it with honesty and considerable atmospheric nerve.
SI-KEY – THE COLOURS
Let's get the logistics out of the way, because they matter here. SI-KEY — a solitary figure from Telford, that perpetually underestimated town in the West Midlands — recorded this entire debut EP alone, in a spare room, singing into a phone while leaning away from the neighbour's wall. No studio. No band. No budget to speak of. Just ideas, a phone app, headphones, and what sounds like an almost painful reservoir of feeling that had been dammed up for years and finally, mercifully, broke.
Connie Lansberg – Aeroplane
Lead singles are, at their best, a promise. They ask you to trust that whatever lies on the other side of the release date will be worth the wait. Connie Lansberg and Brad Rabuchin's "Aeroplane" — the title track from their forthcoming voice-and-guitar duo album — is the kind of promise that is very easy to believe.
Geese Da Goon – Let Me Take you to Snap City EP
The Washington, D.C. skate scene has always had a peculiar relationship with sound. Concrete parks and parking garage sessions carry their own acoustics — the crack of a board on a ledge, the clatter of wheels down a staircase, the distant throb of a Bluetooth speaker somebody dragged out from a backpack. What Geese Da Goon has done with *Let Me Take You to Snap City EP* is bottle that ambience and make it sellable, portable, and — on his best days here — genuinely thrilling.
Valley Lights – Devil May Care
The sophomore record is the great test of nerve. Any artist with half a pulse can stumble into a debut — accident, urgency, and luck conspire to create something irreducible. The second album is where intention is revealed: does the artist know what they are, or were they simply discovered by their own sound? With *Devil May Care*, Valley Lights answers that question without flinching, and the answer, delivered with considerable swagger and no small amount of craft, is an emphatic yes.
Baïki – KosmoX
Phil from Charleroi has no business being this provocative and this entertaining simultaneously, yet here we are, staring down one of the more audacious singles to emerge from the Belgian underground in recent memory. *KosmoX*, the latest dispatch from his project BAÏKI, arrives gift-wrapped in satirical fury — a gleaming, darkly comic missile aimed squarely at the rotten heart of human self-delusion.
Damien Cain – Caleb (JD Radio Edit)
Some songs arrive quietly and stay forever. "Caleb," the latest single from German-born, Ireland-based singer-songwriter Damien Cain, is precisely that kind of song — one that does not announce itself with fanfare, but settles into the memory like a photograph found at the back of a drawer. Produced by UK hitmaker Jay Dixie, whose credits span Meghan Trainor and Ella Henderson, this radio edit strips away any potential for excess and leaves something genuinely rare: a ballad that earns every second of your attention.
WINACHI – STATE OF MIND
There is a particular kind of song that arrives not so much as a piece of music but as a reckoning. *State of Mind*, the debut single from Warrington's WINACHI and the opening salvo of their forthcoming album, is precisely that kind of song — a three-minute act of self-examination from a band who spent the better part of two years dragging themselves across three continents and only recently stopped to ask whether they were still intact.
Chandra – Nessun Dorma (We Will Win!)
Some songs arrive fully clothed in ambition. You hear the opening bars and understand immediately that whoever made this was not content with half-measures. Chandra's audacious reimagining of Puccini's *Nessun Dorma* — timed with almost indecent precision to the opening salvos of FIFA World Cup 2026 — is precisely such a record: a work that could have collapsed under the weight of its own hubris, and instead stands tall, chest out, arms wide, daring you not to be moved.