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.
The story of one music video
One November morning, I went to the antique shop 'LOT ONE TEN'. I loved taking a walk in autumn London after a snack at McDonald's and a large serving of black coffee. I felt in good spirits and even the gray rain could not interfere with my daily ritual, so Walthamstow greeted me with genuine indifference, as if inviting me to take a walk on the favorite street of the designer William Morris, whose mansion-museum was around the corner.
HJ Soul – Unbreakable
The British soul landscape has always possessed a peculiar gift for wringing transcendence from the mundane — think of Sam Cooke refracted through a Birmingham fog, or Sade finding the divine in a dimly lit corner booth. HJ Soul, with his debut single Unbreakable, does not merely gesture toward that tradition. He plants a flag in it.
Grim Logick – The Maelstrom
Let us begin not with the music, but with the room. A living room in Louisiana. A collapsible boom arm clamped to a coffee table. An AKG C214 condenser microphone feeding into a PreSonus interface, monitored through headphones that probably cost less than a night out in Shoreditch. No acoustic treatment. No studio baffling. No engineer turning dials behind glass with the serene authority of a man who has never missed a rent payment. Just Dameon Wilson — known to the world as Grim Logick — pressing record, and then saying things that most people spend their entire lives carefully avoiding.
Hi Ho, Six Shooter! – Close as Kin
Twenty-odd years is a long time to wear a cowboy hat without it becoming a joke. Hi Ho Six Shooter have somehow pulled it off — not by abandoning the sartorial absurdity of their Richmond, Virginia origins, but by letting the music grow quietly enormous underneath it. Close as Kin, the second of two newly minted singles from this long-dormant outfit, is the sound of a band returning not because they felt nostalgic, but because they actually had something to say.
Logan Taylor – CLIMB
Worcester is not a city that announces itself. Folded quietly into the West Midlands like a letter nobody remembered to post, it has produced little that has demanded the music press pull up a chair and lean forward. Logan Taylor may be about to change the terms of that sentence.
Layla Kaylif – CALL OF THE YONI
Let us dispense with the obvious pleasantry of saying Layla Kaylif has arrived. She arrived some time ago — a BBC Radio Record of the Week, a Top-10 across Southeast Asia, a screenplay honoured at Dubai's International Film Festival, a Bowie cover that made grown critics sit up and reconsider their assumptions. What Kaylif has done with *Call of the Yoni* is something altogether more consequential than arriving. She has *claimed territory*.
crucifera – Exostential
**The spider spins. The exoskeleton holds. Danielle Astraea's debut is a debut only in the narrowest technical sense.** Nine tracks. One woman. A baby grand piano, a nylon-string guitar, a DIY studio in New Jersey, and what sounds like a lifetime's worth of accumulated rage, grief, and hard-won philosophy compressed into roughly forty minutes of industrial dark electronics. *Exostential* arrives not so much as an album but as a reckoning — with genre conventions, with the music industry's persistent appetite for female artists who perform vulnerability rather than weaponise it, and with the fundamental question of whether beauty and brutality can share the same skeleton.
Tamer Sağcan – Home: Roots
The classical guitar is, by its very nature, an instrument of confession. It lacks the grandeur of the orchestra, the democratic bluntness of the electric guitar, the social warmth of the piano at a party. It is a solitary instrument, built for rooms where the silence matters as much as the sound. When Tamer Sağcan sits down to compose, then, he is already making a statement about the kind of artist he intends to be: patient, interior, answerable to no trend.
Johnette Downing – My Little Snap Bean, Zydeco for Children
Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to take the sweat-drenched, accordion-driven glory of Louisiana zydeco — a music born of Creole field hollers, the Catholic fais-do-do, and the bone-deep grooves of the Black prairie Southwest — and hand it, undiluted and unapologetic, to the very youngest ears. That somebody, it turns out, is Johnette Downing, New Orleans' tireless Musical Ambassador to Children, and she has done it with the assistance of Grammy-nominated zydeco titan Nathan Williams & The Zydeco Cha Chas. The result, *My Little Snap Bean*, is not a polite domestication of a wild music. It is the wild music itself, barely leashed, wearing a festive hat.
Paul Thompson – Until the Cradle Falls
**The Norfolk troubadour greets spring with a song of uncommon warmth and craft** Picture the scene: dawn breaking over the flat, wide skies of rural Norfolk, mist retreating from the treeline, the first brave wood anemones shouldering up through the leaf litter. Paul Thompson, ensconced in his Cabin Studios, has been watching this slow annual miracle unfold across the fields and woods visible from his studio window — and rather than simply witnessing it, he has done the thing that separates poets from passengers. He has made a song of it.
Loren Wylder – Just Drive!
Somewhere between the Hitchcock blonde's composed insolence and Dorothy Gale's ruby-slippered reckoning with the fraudulent wizard, Loren Wylder has located her aesthetic coordinates. *Just Drive!* — nominally a rock single, functionally a short film with an exceptional soundtrack — arrives as the work of someone who has been watching, and watching carefully, for a very long time. Wylder grew up in Gainesville, Florida, Tom Petty's hometown, absorbing Southern rock storytelling through some form of regional osmosis. But she was simultaneously studying Hitchcock's grammar of tension, George Cukor's handling of women, John Ford's mythic Americana, and the precise semiotic language of Edith Head's costume design. The collision of these two educations produces something genuinely unusual: a music video that operates with the rigour of a film school thesis and the emotional velocity of a power chord.
Eddie Cohn – Weight of the World
There is a particular kind of courage required to make a quiet record when the world is screaming. Eddie Cohn, the self-taught Los Angeles polymath who has spent the better part of two decades threading grunge instincts through folk-rock sensibilities, demonstrates precisely that courage on "Weight of the World" — a song that arrives not with a fist raised but with a hand open, palm upward, exhausted.
CAYNE – Outcast
Twenty-five years is a long time to carry a wound. And Cayne — the Milan-born alternative metal outfit that has spent the better part of three decades navigating grief, lineup upheaval, and the perpetual shadow of their Lacuna Coil connections — arrive at "Outcast" with the particular authority of a band that has genuinely earned every scar advertised on the tin. This is not a comeback forged from nostalgia or commercial calculation. It is something rarer and considerably more interesting: a resurrection that sounds like it was always inevitable.