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.
James Crowley – Co-Pilot
Falling in love, properly and dangerously, has always been difficult to write about without lapsing into cliché. Crowley manages it by refusing to settle anywhere comfortable. "Co-Pilot" opens with a nervy guitar figure that feels less like an introduction than an ambush — urgent, unresolved, already mid-collision before the first line lands. It's a canny choice for a song that spends its three-and-a-bit minutes negotiating the terror of wanting someone too much.
D.D.R. – Don’t Tell Me How to Grieve
Few subjects are as treacherous for a songwriter as mourning. Handle it clumsily and you end up with either mawkish greeting-card sentiment or the kind of icy detachment that mistakes coldness for depth. D.D.R. walks this tightrope with a confidence that feels almost unfair for a single. "Don't Tell Me How to Grieve" arrives not as catharsis dressed up in strings, but as something closer to a refusal — a clenched jaw set against the well-meaning platitudes of everyone standing at a respectful distance, nodding, offering casseroles and clichés.
Catlea – Someone’s Got To
There is a particular kind of song that arrives not as performance but as confession, and "Someone's Got To" belongs unmistakably to that lineage. CATLEA has not so much written a single as excavated one, and the result is a record that trades in the oldest currency pop music has — the ache of wanting to be loved, filtered here through the far harder discipline of learning to love yourself instead.
Lana Karlay – Think it Through
Frustration, handled properly, is one of pop's most underrated instruments, and on 'Think It Through' the Geelong songwriter tunes hers to something close to perfect pitch. This is not a tantrum set to a beat. It is closer to a diary entry read aloud by someone who has finally stopped whispering.
Youth in Government – Silhouettes
Washington D.C. is not a city one associates with cosmic reverie. It is a place of marble certainties and men in identical ties, a town built to look permanent. So it is a small delight that from within its bureaucratic hum should emerge two musicians determined to sound like they've been beamed in from somewhere far softer and stranger. Chris Mathews-Larsen and Trae Tomko, working together as Youth in Government, have made a debut record that treats the guitar the way a lighthouse treats fog: not as an obstacle to be cut through, but as something to glow inside of.
Aimee Iris – Lavender Skies
Growing pains rarely sound this luminous. On her new record, Brighton's Aimee Iris takes the messy business of becoming yourself — the heartbreaks, the friendship fallouts, the small acts of self-forgiveness — and turns it into seven tracks that shimmer with genuine feeling rather than performed angst. *Lavender Skies* is pop music with its sleeves rolled up, unafraid of sincerity, and all the more disarming for it.
David Scott Weaver – Songs of Hope and Resistance
Certain records turn up that refuse to whisper. David Scott Weaver's *Songs of Hope and Resistance* announces itself not with a knock but with a fist against the door, and once you've let it in, it doesn't leave the room until it's said its piece.
Adrielle Bow Belle – Freeze
Cold, in the hands of Adrielle Bow Belle, turns out to be the warmest possible subject. *Freeze*, her seven-movement song cycle, does the thing so few concept albums manage: it makes structure feel like feeling, rather than homework dressed up as art. Six years in the making, stitched together not by chronology but by a deliberate, looping logic — present, past, deeper past, childhood, and back again — it plays less like a tracklist and more like a nervous system remembering itself in the wrong order. Which, as anyone who has ever lived through trauma will tell you, is exactly how memory actually works.
Keesha Blair – Peaceful Power
Healing, as a subject for pop and soul music, tends to arrive either oversold or undercooked: the grand gesture that mistakes volume for depth, or the whispered platitude that mistakes vagueness for tenderness. Keesha Blair's "Peaceful Power" manages the considerably harder trick of sounding both intimate and assured, a record that treats self-acceptance not as a slogan to be draped over a chorus but as a genuine emotional architecture, built line by line and held together by a voice that never once raises itself to prove a point.
JT Catalano – Felon Angels
Twenty years is a long time to sit on a story, and longer still to sit on a chorus. JT Catalano has done both, and the wait shows in the best possible way: "Felon Angels" arrives not as a debut single trying to prove something, but as a reckoning that has already proved itself, over and over, in a cell, on a bunk, in the space between a chess piece and a clenched fist.
Down South Pepper band – Shady Road
Down South Pepper Band hail from Kvalsund, a speck of a village deep in Norway's Arctic north, and yet nothing about "Shady Road" sounds like it was written under the midnight sun. This is dust-bowl storytelling with a Nordic postmark, and it works precisely because the band refuses to treat that contradiction as a gimmick. Instead, they lean into the outlaw country tradition with the conviction of players who have logged their hours studying the greats and figured out how to make the idiom their own.
The Pixel Rain – Last
Something has shifted in The Pixel Rain's world, and you can hear it in the first thirty seconds of "Last." The Southeast London project, born from a self-titled 2023 debut EP and quietly building a reputation on industrial rhythm and synthetic dread, has finally let the guitars off the leash. The result is the most confident thing Áron Siegler has put his name to yet — a single that snarls where The Pixel Rain's earlier work merely hummed.