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.
Matthew Phillips – BattleField Of Love
Let it be said plainly: fidelity is unfashionable. The pop landscape has spent the better part of a decade rewarding detachment, teaching us to treat devotion as a punchline and permanence as a personality flaw. Into this rather cynical arena strides Matthew Phillips, San Diego's reigning purveyor of big-hearted alt-pop, with a single that dares to be sincere without once curdling into sentimentality. "Battlefield of Love" is a record built on a wager — that a listener still wants to believe two people can choose each other, deliberately, every single day — and Phillips wins that bet with room to spare.
Memoryy – snoopdoggguardianangel
A hotel elevator door is an odd place for a life to quietly fall apart, and pop music rarely admits when it's laughing through tears — yet here, across six unhurried minutes, Memoryy manages both at once. "Snoopdoggguardianangel" is the sound of a man's worst day colliding with a stranger's unbothered cool, and somehow spinning that collision into one of the most quietly moving synth-pop moments of the year.
De Fans – Nights Machine
There is a particular kind of record that doesn't so much arrive as *arrive late*, sliding into the room after the party has already found its rhythm, unbothered by the fact that everyone else got there first. "Nights Machine," the new single from German producer däh De's project De Fans, is exactly that record: unhurried, self-possessed, and entirely too cool to care whether you noticed it walk in.
Shortout Kid – Toy Shop
Picture Mozart handed a chainsaw instead of a harpsichord. Picture Kurt Cobain developing a dependency on a sampler rather than anything more predictable. Picture the softest note salvaged from an amplifier mid-explosion, somehow coaxed into a ballad. Picture Jimi Hendrix, asked to invent a new instrument capable of channelling a far more brutal century. None of these images quite prepares you for Shortout Kid, and yet all of them circle close to what he's actually done.
Tony Sieber – Tides of Stillness
Certain records arrive feeling less composed than *weathered* — shaped by wind, salt spray and altitude rather than a click track. "Tides of Stillness" is exactly that kind of object. Sixteen tracks deep and built almost entirely from guitar, it plays like a diary smuggled out of three very different landscapes: the high pastures of Switzerland, the cracked salt flats of Chile's Atacama Desert, and the grey, foam-lashed cliffs of southern England. Few lo-fi ambient records this year have travelled so far to sound so still.
DownTown Mystic – Mystic Highway Road Trip
Six songs, one open road, and not a wasted second: DownTown Mystic's *Mystic Highway Road Trip* is the sound of a band who long ago worked out exactly what they do well and has spent every release since sharpening it rather than second-guessing it. Robert Allen, the writer and producer behind the project, has built a career on sync placements and roots-rock craftsmanship, and this EP feels like a victory lap dressed up as a summer playlist — generous, unpretentious, and knowing exactly where the guitar solo goes.
Andrei Marian – Ethics Unimposed
Vibraphone records tend to arrive either drenched in cocktail-lounge gloss or bristling with academic rigour, and it takes a rare confidence to sidestep both traps on a debut. Andrei Marian manages it on "Ethics Unimposed," the first full statement from the Moldovan vibraphonist and composer, recorded with his trio Triptology and released this April. The record wears its dual heritage plainly: trained across Moldova and Belgium, Marian writes music that keeps one foot inside jazz tradition even as the other reaches for something less settled, more inventive, harder to pin down.
Watch Me Die Inside – Infinity Fall III
Comfort, that band once suggested, might be the real enemy. On this three-track EP, Watch Me Die Inside make that argument with the conviction of people who've actually lived inside it, and the result is a record that unsettles far more than it soothes — deliberately, gorgeously so.
Plain Drifter – Canine Reputation
Sam Lillicrap builds his records the way old dogs build their reputations — through repetition, through consequence, through refusing to bolt the first time someone raises a hand. "Canine Reputation" is a home-studio production that doesn't sound like one, a Sunshine Coast riff dispatched with the swagger of a band that's spent decades on arena stages, and it announces Plain Drifter as an act with a proper ear for the difference between loud and forceful.
SPACE3GHXSTX – Full Metal
Heartbreak wearing armour makes for the most compelling kind of pop record, and "Full Metal" understands this instinctively. The single arrives dressed in designer plating — Saint Laurent, Moncler, the whole glittering exoskeleton of contemporary luxury — but underneath the metal sits something far more tender: a man trying to keep his heart from shattering in a city built entirely of glass and static.
ANNIE – (Bang, Bang) Down You Go
Estonia is not, on the whole, a country the pop world looks to for its verdicts on global catastrophe. That makes ANNIE's arrival with "(Bang, Bang) Down You Go" all the more striking a proposition: a debut-adjacent single that walks straight past the usual apparatus of heartbreak and hedonism and plants itself, unflinching, in the middle of a war.
Doctor Noize – Some People See, But I Don’t
Doctor Noize's new single refuses to sit quietly in its assigned corner of the industry. Titled "Some People See, But I Don't," it lands as the closing statement before his August full-length, *Positive Energy! (The Music of Doctor Noize)*, and it announces itself less like a promotional single and more like a manifesto set to horns.