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.
Anthony Casuccio – Love Song for No One
The great paradox of the love song — and it is a paradox that has kept songwriters honest or dishonest since Cole Porter first sat at a piano — is that the best ones are never really about a person. They are about the *idea* of a person, the ghost of feeling that lingers after the object of desire has been replaced by something more durable: longing itself. Anthony Casuccio, a man who has spent thirty years in the engine room of professional music-making, seems to have understood this intuitively. His new single, "Love Song for No One," does exactly what the title promises, and the audacity of that promise is precisely where the record's considerable power lives.
X-ANONYMOUS – STAND YOUR GROUND
There are records that arrive quietly, slipping through the discourse like a polite apology. And then there are records that kick the door in. X-ANONYMOUS belongs firmly to the latter camp, and *Stand Your Ground* — the latest single from this provocateur of the shadows — is less a song than a manifesto delivered at volume, a fist brought down hard on a table that nobody asked to be sat around.
Martin Lloyd Howard – Hidden Andalucia
Some pieces announce their ambitions quietly. Martin Lloyd Howard's Hidden Andalucia is one such work: a solo guitar composition that arrives without fanfare, yet unfolds with a confidence and historical self-awareness that ought to arrest any serious listener. To fuse the introspective world of Elizabethan lute music with the visceral, sun-baked drama of Andalusian flamenco is no small undertaking. That Howard carries it off is a considerable achievement.
Cicile – Pour que tu arrêtes de pleurer
French children's music occupies a peculiar corner of the cultural imagination — too often dismissed as a minor art, the province of xylophone jingles and nursery-rhyme pastiche. Cicile's "Pour que tu arrêtes de pleurer," lifted from her debut album *P'tit Bout d'Chou*, arrives as a quiet but persuasive argument against that condescension. This is a song that earns its emotional weight not through studio artifice or commercial calculation, but through the rare and disarming currency of lived experience: a parent standing before a weeping child, armed with nothing but love and an acute, humbling sense of inadequacy.
Palumbo – More Tales From the Big Smoke
There is a particular breed of rock musician for whom the song is not a vehicle for self-promotion but a form of testimony — a sworn statement, delivered at volume, about how the world actually feels when you're standing in it without a safety net. Dion Palumbo is, emphatically, one of those musicians, and *More Tales From the Big Smoke* is the document that proves it.
Novitza – From Darkness Unto Light
The first thing one notices about Novitza is the silence between the notes. Not the silence of a composer who has run out of ideas, nor the polite pause of a musician waiting for applause, but the active, pressurised silence of someone who has learned — through what one suspects has been considerable personal cost — that restraint is its own form of power. *From Darkness Unto Light*, released on the 8th of May via Animal Farm Music, is the work of a man who understands this implicitly, and who has built an entire emotional world from that understanding.
Cat TV – Fun in the Ghost Town
Punk rock has always had a complicated relationship with honesty. Strip away the studied nihilism of the genre's second generation and the costumed theatrics of its third, and you arrive somewhere close to Lowell, Massachusetts, where a five-piece who can't stop playing bass have made one of the more quietly thrilling debut EPs of 2026.
Black Leather Birds – of Children and Their Sorceries
A.G. Syjuco has made a record about the dread that lives inside ordinary things. Not the dread of catastrophe — that would be too easy, too cinematic — but the duller, more corrosive variety: the kind that pools behind the eyes at 2pm on a Tuesday when the post arrives and you realise, with quiet horror, that something is asking you to pay attention to it. Chicago gives him the latitude for this. It is a city that knows how to keep secrets behind a respectable facade, and *of Children and Their Sorceries*, the new EP from his Black Leather Birds project, is a record that understands facades intimately.
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.
Rusty Reid – All Through My Days
There is a peculiar audacity to the cover version, when done with genuine artistic intent. Not the karaoke audacity of note-for-note reproduction — that wan exercise in nostalgia which serves only to remind us how much better the original was — but the audacity of reinterpretation: of taking another writer's beloved architecture, respectfully demolishing a few load-bearing walls, and rebuilding something that illuminates both the source and the interpreter simultaneously. Rusty Reid, Seattle-based Texan by birth and temperament, has constructed his entire fifth album, *Lone Stardust: Masterworks of Texas Songwriters*, around precisely this kind of courageous creative audacity. The album's lead single, "All Through My Days," demonstrates just how deftly that gamble can pay off.