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.
12 Days Dead – Bang Bang Zoom Zoom
Subtlety, one gathers, was never on the shopping list. "Bang Bang Zoom Zoom" arrives less like a single than a controlled demolition, and 12 Days Dead detonate it with a grin you can practically hear through the speakers. This is a band uninterested in the polite fade-in, the tasteful build. They kick the door clean off its hinges and invite the whole street inside.
Ricky Earlywine – the grace code
Bedroom pop has a habit of sounding exactly like what it is: modest, a little threadbare, honest about its limitations. Ricky Earlywine's "the grace code" declines that bargain outright. Recorded in the same room where every previous release was made, mixed alone in BandLab, built from an AI-generated instrumental sketch that Earlywine then bullied into something altogether more human — the track arrives sounding less like a demo and more like a small, glittering production number that has wandered in from a Disney soundstage and decided to stay for the R&B.
Scott A. Flaxman – Love of Strangers
Independent songwriting rarely bothers with subtlety when it comes to the old wound of being misunderstood by the people who ought to know better, and Flaxman doesn't bother either. What he does instead, on this new single, is turn that wound into something closer to architecture — a song built room by room, with the family table on one side of the wall and a lit stage on the other, and the listener left to work out which side actually feels like home.
ESTRADA Music Project – Looking out the window
A record built from a single fixed vantage point risks monotony, but Estrada Music Project turns that limitation into the whole point of "Looking Out the Window." The song was written during a stretch of medical isolation, and it wears that origin plainly, without theatrics. No swelling strings arrive to underline the drama, no chorus tries to console you. Instead, the track sits in its restriction and lets the restriction do the work.
Karen Salicath Jamali – Om Mare Shangri-la
Nine tracks in, and the record still refuses to sound like anyone's homework. That's the first thing worth saying about OM Mare Shangri-la, the debut vocal statement from a composer who has spent a decade letting piano pieces arrive to her fully formed, as though dictated rather than written. Karen Salicath Jamali has finally picked up a microphone, and the results carry the strange, unhurried confidence of someone who has nothing to prove and everything to offer.
Kai Moa – Some of My Best Friends Are…Electric Sheep
Birmingham has given the world heavy metal, bhangra fusion, and now, it seems, a drummer-turned-producer with a taste for wormholes. Kai Moa's debut EP arrives after a run of singles that already hinted at an appetite bigger than any one genre could satisfy, and the full collection makes good on that promise with a confidence that borders on the reckless — the good kind of reckless, the kind that used to get records described as "dangerous" before that word got worn smooth by overuse.
@MoStFeAr – Amore Nero黒い愛
Orlando has never sounded less like Orlando. Across eleven tracks, @MoStFeAr constructs a private geography — humid, neon-lit, permanently after midnight — and refuses to let the listener leave it until the record's final fade. That refusal is the album's defining trick, and it's played with a conviction rare enough to make the whole project feel inevitable rather than assembled.
Talking Horses – I Will Work Harder
Three years of van fumes, sticky floors and half-empty rehearsal rooms have distilled into something genuinely worth your attention. *I Will Work Harder* arrives not as a tentative debut but as a document of a band who have already lived the life the songs describe — and it shows in every bruised, brassy bar of it.
Gravité Fresq – Hypocracy Loop
Dublin's Gravite Fresq has built a reputation on turning private dread into something you can dance to, and "Hypocrisy Loophole" is the sharpest weapon in that arsenal yet. It arrives clad in synthetic armour — a rigid, pulsating bassline that sounds machined rather than played, married to a four-on-the-floor drum pattern so unyielding it borders on liturgical. Fitting, given the subject matter.
Underlowe – No Pictures
There's a particular kind of racket that only comes from a band who've spent five years getting to know each other's bad habits before they ever plugged in together properly, and "No Pictures" — the new shot fired by Cardiff's Underlowe — has that racket in spades. This is a record built on trust, on the kind of shorthand that only exists between old friends and older riffs, and it announces itself with the confidence of a band who know exactly what they're doing, even if the world hasn't quite caught up yet.
Elvana – Viva Las Vegas
Let us be clear about what should not work here. Take a song built on brass-stabbed swagger and pelvic certainty, strip out the horns, bolt on a wall of Sub Pop-grade distortion, and hand the microphone to a man doing his best impression of a Memphis icon fronting a Seattle power trio. On paper it reads like the setlist of a stag do that has gone badly, gloriously wrong. On record, it is a small triumph of bad taste executed with impeccable judgement.
Spoony-B – 99 Apples
Confidence is the rarest ingredient in modern rap, and "99 Apples" has it in spades. Spoony-B has built a track around the kind of central metaphor that shouldn't work on paper — abundance, temptation, the orchard as a stand-in for a heart that keeps saying yes to everyone — and somehow makes it feel inevitable rather than gimmicky by the second hook.