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.
Alone New Yorker – Room with no corners
Anonymity, in pop music, usually announces itself as costume — a mask worn for mystique, dropped the moment fame demands a face. Alone New Yorker inverts the trick entirely. The anonymity here isn't theatre; it's architecture. It holds the whole song up.
Jalisa Denice – Can I Tell You
West London keeps producing artists who treat genre as a wardrobe rather than a uniform, and Jalisa Denice wears hers with the easy confidence of someone who's spent years working out exactly what suits her. "Can I Tell You" arrives as the lighter cousin to the story-led ambition of Exhibit J Vol. 2, and the shift in mood suits her. Where "Goodnight" closed that chapter on something tender and conclusive, this single opens a new one on a bounce.
Richard Green – Age of Dreams
Milan gave him his hometown accent and London gave him his working hours, and somewhere between the two cities Richard Green has assembled a single that sounds less like a debut statement than the opening line of a much longer confession. "Age of Dreams" arrives as the first cut proper on *First Light*, the initial instalment of a three-part project that maps childhood, adulthood and legacy across three separate EPs — a structure so unfashionably ambitious it borders on the heroic. Pop music rarely bothers with trilogies any more; attention spans have shrunk to the length of a chorus hook, and here comes a composer asking us to sit through an entire human life in instalments. Credit where it's due: he's earned the right to ask.
One Empty Toybox – Cyberstalking
Two men, a basement in Cincinnati, and three decades of unfinished business. That's the raw material behind "Cyberstalking," the latest transmission from Rob Dreyer and Nick Viltrakis, who have apparently been quietly perfecting their telepathy since 1995 without bothering to tell anyone. This is a record built on trust rather than rehearsal, and it shows in the best possible way: loose-limbed, confident, occasionally reckless, never sloppy.
Vidura Barrios – Chant!
Two decades into a career built almost entirely on stillness, Vidura Barrios has produced the record that finally explains what all that quiet was for. *CHANT!* arrives not as a departure but as a summation — the sound of a composer who has spent nearly twenty years circling the same sacred well finally drawing up the water in full.
Kim Cameron – Who Drew That?
Kim Cameron has done something delightfully daft and completely disarming: she has built a children's dance album around the ghosts of modern art. *Who Drew That?* takes Dalí, Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Schulz, Chuck Jones, the graffiti pioneer Barbara 62, and the painter-survivor Gershon Iskowitz, and drags them all onto a sweaty, glow-stick-lit dancefloor built for toddlers and their exhausted parents. It sounds like a fever dream cooked up by a music supervisor who'd spent too long in a gallery gift shop. It also, somehow, works beautifully.
Energy Whores – Invisible
Carrie Schoenfeld has never been much interested in tidy answers, and *Invisible (Four Ways)* confirms it with something close to gleeful stubbornness. Rather than hand over a single, on the release, one composition gets split into four separate confessions — Synth-Pop, Lo-Fi, Cinematic, Indie — each one wearing the same lyrics like a different coat.
i give my friends flowers – DOGSTAR 1
Jacob Klein has spent the past few years accumulating grief the way other people accumulate frequent flyer miles, and on *DOGSTAR 1* he finally cashes it all in. This is a record built from the wreckage of a very specific, very brutal stretch of one man's life — a dying dog, a dissolved decade-long relationship, a flood that swallowed his adopted city whole — and yet it never once curdles into misery tourism. That's the trick of it. Grief albums are two a penny; ones that actually earn their catharsis are rarer than a clear night sky over Asheville.
NOR.BE – All For You
Guitarists who dream in orchestral colour are rare enough. Guitarists who can persuade Vinnie Colaiuta, John Patitucci and the Bohemian Symphony Orchestra Prague to dream alongside them, on a debut single, are rarer still. NOR.BE has managed it, and "All For You" announces him not as a hopeful newcomer but as a fully formed voice who simply hadn't been heard yet.
Ellijai – Skinny Boyfriend
Glasgow keeps producing them — voices that arrive fully formed, as if they'd been rehearsing in the wings for years before anyone thought to hand them a microphone. Ellijai, eighteen and already several singles into a career built on unflinching candour, has delivered with "Skinny Boyfriend" the most confident and gloriously unserious thing she's put her name to yet. This is a record that knows exactly what it wants — your attention, your hips, and ideally your heart rate up a notch — and gets it within the first thirty seconons of a synth line that arrives like a dare.
Kylo – Nimble
Toronto has quietly become one of pop's great incubators, and Kylo's "Nimble" is the sound of an artist stepping out of the machine and into the room. Where her earlier material leaned on synthesised gloss, this single strips the wiring out entirely and leaves her alone with a guitar, a voice that cracks exactly when it needs to, and a heartbreak too fresh to have been tidied up for public consumption. It is a bold pivot, the kind that could easily have gone soft and beige in lesser hands. Instead, Kylo has made something that sounds lived-in rather than styled.
DIE DIE BE – Erased Faces
Bureaucracy has never sounded so seductive. DIE DIE BE, the Swiss duo of Liliane Bürli and Bujar Berisha, open their new single with the coldest of images — a face scratched from a document, a person reduced to paperwork — and then spend four minutes proving that erasure can groove.