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.
LunaRover – Throw Me A Line
Silver Spring, Maryland isn't exactly synonymous with cosmic disaster narratives set to a funk groove, but LunaRover have never been a band content to work within the confines of geography or genre. "Throw Me A Line" arrives as a gleaming, slightly unhinged single that manages the rare trick of sounding both meticulously engineered and gloriously off-kilter — a combination that shouldn't work nearly as well as it does.
Scott Lowder – Ghost of You
Songwriting has a lousy track record when it comes to loss. Most who attempt it either drown the thing in strings until it becomes a funeral parlour advert, or they flinch at the last second and reach for a platitude instead of a truth. Scott Lowder does neither. "Ghost of You" is a song that had the patience to wait a decade for its author to be ready to record it properly, and that patience is audible in every bar.
Untold Jukebox – Empire Of Stone
Somewhere between the high passes of the Andes and the low, bone-crushing throb of a Marshall stack, Untold Jukebox have found a sound nobody asked for and everybody suddenly wants. "Empire of Stone," the towering lead single from their new six-track concept record of the same lineage, doesn't so much blend panflute and heavy metal as stage a coup between them — and metal, remarkably, loses gracefully.
Madeline Rosene – I’ll Seduce God to Get into Heaven
There is a very specific kind of nerve required to write a song that treats the Almighty as just another mark to be worked, and Madeline Rosene has it in spades. "I'll Seduce God to Get Into Heaven" doesn't so much knock on the pearly gates as kick them off their hinges, saunter in, and start making eyes at the doorman.
Bloomfield Machine – algorithm & blues
A bedroom in Orange County has produced nine albums now, and on the ninth, something loosens. Guitars muscle their way to the front of the mix, elbowing the keyboards that once ran this operation unchallenged, and the result is a record that sounds less like a solitary hobbyist tinkering after midnight and more like a man finally letting the noise in his head off the leash.
Litvar – Being Here
Loss makes strange architects. It tears down whatever you thought you'd built and leaves you standing in the rubble, wondering what to do with your hands. On their third record, Litvar's Rex Thurstan picks through that rubble with a Gibson J-45 and something like tenderness, and the result is the most persuasive thing this band has committed to tape.
Paper Nova – Black Whole
Four musicians who met over a decade ago in Seattle have finally made the record their whole career seemed to be circling. *Black Whole* is the sound of a band refusing to be pinned down, and refusing beautifully.
Pick Up Goliath – Salt & Static
Sam George has spent his career building cathedrals out of concept — an AI apocalypse rendered as a four-movement metal symphony, a collaboration with video-game demons that somehow won him Best Producer at the Elite Music Awards. Salt & Static is the opposite gesture: six tracks, one man, and nothing to hide behind. It's the sound of an architect setting down his blueprints and picking up a scalpel instead.
Ellijai – Skinny Boyfriend
Glasgow keeps producing them — voices that arrive fully formed, as if they'd been rehearsing in the wings for years before anyone thought to hand them a microphone. Ellijai, eighteen and already several singles into a career built on unflinching candour, has delivered with "Skinny Boyfriend" the most confident and gloriously unserious thing she's put her name to yet. This is a record that knows exactly what it wants — your attention, your hips, and ideally your heart rate up a notch — and gets it within the first thirty seconons of a synth line that arrives like a dare.
Kylo – Nimble
Toronto has quietly become one of pop's great incubators, and Kylo's "Nimble" is the sound of an artist stepping out of the machine and into the room. Where her earlier material leaned on synthesised gloss, this single strips the wiring out entirely and leaves her alone with a guitar, a voice that cracks exactly when it needs to, and a heartbreak too fresh to have been tidied up for public consumption. It is a bold pivot, the kind that could easily have gone soft and beige in lesser hands. Instead, Kylo has made something that sounds lived-in rather than styled.
DIE DIE BE – Erased Faces
Bureaucracy has never sounded so seductive. DIE DIE BE, the Swiss duo of Liliane Bürli and Bujar Berisha, open their new single with the coldest of images — a face scratched from a document, a person reduced to paperwork — and then spend four minutes proving that erasure can groove.
Terra Nai – Foliada de Berducido
Costa Rica is not, on paper, a natural home for Galician folk music. And yet Terra Nai — Diego Alfaro on voice, gaita and acoustic guitar, Keith Guerrero on violin and illustration — have spent the past three years proving that geography is no obstacle to devotion. Their reading of "Foliada de Berducido," the traditional tune from the Galician village of Berducido best known through Milladoiro's celebrated 1980s arrangement, arrives as a small triumph of cross-continental fidelity: a Costa Rican duo bottling the spirit of northwestern Spain and somehow losing none of the original's mist and mischief in transit.