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.
Aurealis – Exquisite
Desire is usually pop's loudest subject, and restraint is usually its most neglected. Aurealis has built a whole single around the second. "Exquisite" is glossy, cinematic synth-pop about a man who finds himself devastated by an attraction he has no intention of acting upon. It is a love song in which nobody touches anybody, and it is thrilling for exactly that reason.
The Real Anthem – Silent War
Releasing a song about September 11th on its twenty-fifth anniversary invites disaster. The risk is easy to name: mawkishness, opportunism, the hand-on-heart bombast that turns grief into a product. The Real Anthem walk straight into that minefield and emerge with their dignity, and their nerve, intact.
2nd Magpie Project – Divine Intervention
Pop music has always been better at falling in love than at surviving what follows. The charts are crowded with first kisses and last dances, but the long, grey Tuesday afternoon after a love has died gets far less attention. 2nd Magpie Project have moved into that Tuesday afternoon, hung some heavy curtains and turned the lights down low. *Divine Intervention*, their third single of 2026, is the most affecting thing they have made.
GlowDriver – Tell Me
There is a particular kind of pop song that arrives dressed as a good time and turns out to be a confession. The best of them smuggle the ache in past the bouncers, under a strobe light, and you only notice you've been emotionally ambushed when the lights come up and your mascara has gone somewhere it shouldn't. "Tell Me," the new single from Phoenix's GlowDriver, belongs to that noble and slightly devious tradition.
Music by Jeremy – Scenes from a Well Worn Path – Side Two
There is a particular kind of songwriter England keeps producing, usually in a spare room or a shed, who has spent decades listening to Lennon, Simon, Newman, Dylan and Springsteen and concluded that the trick was never the tune but the telling. Music by Jeremy, a Banbury-based writer who works from a small studio in the Oxfordshire heartland, belongs to that lineage. *Side Two*, the second quarter of a 24-track double album released in four monthly instalments, suggests he has earned his place in it.
Lyons Lane – You’ll Talk About It!
Detroit has never been short of people who can make a racket. It gave us the Stooges, the MC5 and the White Stripes, and it has a long habit of exporting noise with a point to it. Lyons Lane, five young men with a Little Richard fixation and a horn section, are something stranger and more welcome. They have made a debut EP that swings like a saloon door in a gale and still manages to sound like it was cut last Thursday.
Flame – Medea In Blue
Euripides gave us a woman who burns her own house down and dares the audience to look away. Flame, an Edinburgh band barely two years into their existence, have borrowed her name for a debut live EP, and the gamble is a bold one. To invoke Medea is to promise fury, intelligence and a refusal to apologise. Happily, these six tracks, captured in a rehearsal studio in the middle of the city, keep that promise with room to spare.
Innocent Darkness – VOIDWALKER
Grief rarely makes for tidy art. It arrives without warning, rearranges the furniture of a life, and leaves behind a silence that some people fill with noise. Innocent Darkness, a producer working from the same Ekeren home he has occupied for 52 years, fills his with reverb. *VOIDWALKER*, released just days after the fungal rave-nightmare of *The Dark Fungus*, is the sound of a man losing both parents within twelve months and choosing, with remarkable stubbornness, to make something beautiful out of the wreckage.
Vela Jones – Mama’s Coming Home
Proxima b is a long way from the nearest kitchen table, which makes it an improbable setting for the most tender single of Vela Jones's career. Yet she has gone to the far edge of human settlement and come back with something rarer than a silver jumpsuit and a slogan: a song about missing your mother.
Co.LeGa – you.Love
Digital romance has never sounded quite so uneasy, nor quite so danceable. "you.Love" arrives as the second salvo from Co.LeGa this year, and it lands with the poise of someone who has stopped worrying about whether electronic music can be both cerebral and physical, and simply gone ahead and made it both.
The Lazz – The Crown
Benjamin Lazzaro has spent four decades wielding a guitar, and it shows in the muscular confidence of "The Crown," the opening salvo of Act IV in his sprawling, Jungian-soaked concept saga. This is not a musician chasing trends; this is a craftsman who has finally built the machine capable of matching the scope of his imagination.
TrixxStarr – Enough
Some bands are formed in rehearsal rooms. TrixxStarr appear to have been assembled at the kitchen table. What began as the solo project of Dusty Starr, of Chihuahua and Les Biches, has grown into a family firm, with brothers Heli, C.C. and Darc pulling up chairs. On "Enough" the result is a band asking the question the rest of us dodge at parties: when do we stop chasing the things we've been told should make us happy? They ask it without a finger wagged and without a sermon in sight.