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.
Greg Germain – Cloud Highways
The past three years have been conspicuously quiet from Greg Germain — a silence that, with hindsight, carried its own weight. The Surinamese-Dutch artist's return with "Cloud Highways" is not merely a re-emergence; it is a reckoning, a carefully assembled emotional architecture built from grief, memory, and the peculiar solace of moving through darkness at speed. This is music that understands what absence costs.
Michael Vdelli And The Art Of Dysfunction – You And The Blues
The blues has always been a music of testimony. Not performance, not posture — testimony. The act of a human voice, a bent string, a dragging rhythm section bearing witness to something that actually happened, something that left a mark. By that standard, *You And The Blues*, the debut single from the newly minted alliance of Michael Vdelli and Art of Dysfunction, does not merely pass the test. It engraves its name on the door.
Fish And Scale – Letter from Paulus
There is a particular kind of audacity required to plant your flag beside one of the most celebrated passages in all of human literature. When Paul of Tarsus sat down to write his letter to the Corinthians — that luminous thirteenth chapter, the so-called Hymn to Love — he produced something so complete, so ruthlessly concise in its wisdom, that two thousand years of composers, preachers, and poets have circled it like moths around an open flame, rarely improving upon it, frequently diminishing it. Roland Wälzlein, the Nuremberg-born songwriter who records as Fish And Scale, has done something rather brave with "Letter from Paulus": he has not merely borrowed the text as wallpaper, as so many have. He has taken its beating heart and transplanted it into a living, breathing pop-rock ballad that pulses with hard-won personal conviction.
Shelia Moore-Piper – Show Love
Soul music has always lived on the knife-edge between the sacred and the carnal, that old tension between the church and the street corner that gave the genre its essential electricity. Shelia Moore-Piper, the multi-award-winning Christian soul vocalist from the American South, has spent her career refusing to let those two worlds fall apart — and on "Show Love," the lead single from her forthcoming Love/Soul Session Vol. 2, she achieves something quietly remarkable: a song of radiant, unguarded faith that never once feels preachy, because it is, at its core, simply and profoundly human.
Novitza – From Darkness Unto Light
The first thing one notices about Novitza is the silence between the notes. Not the silence of a composer who has run out of ideas, nor the polite pause of a musician waiting for applause, but the active, pressurised silence of someone who has learned — through what one suspects has been considerable personal cost — that restraint is its own form of power. *From Darkness Unto Light*, released on the 8th of May via Animal Farm Music, is the work of a man who understands this implicitly, and who has built an entire emotional world from that understanding.
Cat TV – Fun in the Ghost Town
Punk rock has always had a complicated relationship with honesty. Strip away the studied nihilism of the genre's second generation and the costumed theatrics of its third, and you arrive somewhere close to Lowell, Massachusetts, where a five-piece who can't stop playing bass have made one of the more quietly thrilling debut EPs of 2026.
Black Leather Birds – of Children and Their Sorceries
A.G. Syjuco has made a record about the dread that lives inside ordinary things. Not the dread of catastrophe — that would be too easy, too cinematic — but the duller, more corrosive variety: the kind that pools behind the eyes at 2pm on a Tuesday when the post arrives and you realise, with quiet horror, that something is asking you to pay attention to it. Chicago gives him the latitude for this. It is a city that knows how to keep secrets behind a respectable facade, and *of Children and Their Sorceries*, the new EP from his Black Leather Birds project, is a record that understands facades intimately.
Kirk Monteux Mysoftmusic – Total Tranquility
The title is not a promise so much as a destination, and Kirk Monteux arrives there with the unhurried confidence of a man who has genuinely stopped rushing. *Total Tranquility*, his most fully realised record to date, is the sound of a composer who left the noise of Frankfurt behind and found, somewhere among the fields and birdsong of his adopted rural life, something rarer than a good melody: a point of view.
Damien Cain – Caleb (JD Radio Edit)
Some songs arrive quietly and stay forever. "Caleb," the latest single from German-born, Ireland-based singer-songwriter Damien Cain, is precisely that kind of song — one that does not announce itself with fanfare, but settles into the memory like a photograph found at the back of a drawer. Produced by UK hitmaker Jay Dixie, whose credits span Meghan Trainor and Ella Henderson, this radio edit strips away any potential for excess and leaves something genuinely rare: a ballad that earns every second of your attention.
WINACHI – STATE OF MIND
There is a particular kind of song that arrives not so much as a piece of music but as a reckoning. *State of Mind*, the debut single from Warrington's WINACHI and the opening salvo of their forthcoming album, is precisely that kind of song — a three-minute act of self-examination from a band who spent the better part of two years dragging themselves across three continents and only recently stopped to ask whether they were still intact.
Chandra – Nessun Dorma (We Will Win!)
Some songs arrive fully clothed in ambition. You hear the opening bars and understand immediately that whoever made this was not content with half-measures. Chandra's audacious reimagining of Puccini's *Nessun Dorma* — timed with almost indecent precision to the opening salvos of FIFA World Cup 2026 — is precisely such a record: a work that could have collapsed under the weight of its own hubris, and instead stands tall, chest out, arms wide, daring you not to be moved.
Rusty Reid – All Through My Days
There is a peculiar audacity to the cover version, when done with genuine artistic intent. Not the karaoke audacity of note-for-note reproduction — that wan exercise in nostalgia which serves only to remind us how much better the original was — but the audacity of reinterpretation: of taking another writer's beloved architecture, respectfully demolishing a few load-bearing walls, and rebuilding something that illuminates both the source and the interpreter simultaneously. Rusty Reid, Seattle-based Texan by birth and temperament, has constructed his entire fifth album, *Lone Stardust: Masterworks of Texas Songwriters*, around precisely this kind of courageous creative audacity. The album's lead single, "All Through My Days," demonstrates just how deftly that gamble can pay off.