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.
Elana Sasson Quartet – In Between (feat. Ara Dinkjian)
One of the more quietly radical acts a musician can commit is to return to their own work and find it unfinished — not flawed, but incomplete, as though the original recording captured only half of a conversation that was always meant to be spoken in more than one voice. Elana Sasson has done precisely that with this reimagined version of *"in between"*, the title track from her critically acclaimed 2025 album, and the result is not a revision so much as a revelation.
Sombre Chairs – Can’t Stop Spinning Around
There is a peculiar, almost anthropological pleasure in watching a band attempt the football song and get it right. The genre is a minefield — a graveyard of cynical cash-ins, trite terrace chants dressed up in three chords, records made to shift units in the fortnight before a tournament before being mercifully forgotten. Sombre Chairs, three lads from Brighton who really ought to know better, have walked straight into the explosion and emerged, impossibly, unscathed. *Can't Stop Spinning Around* is, against all reasonable odds, rather brilliant.
AnTri – Rendez-vous
Krefeld is not a city that announces itself. Nestled in the industrial western corridor of Germany, it is the sort of place that produces quiet ambitions and long memories — which makes it a fitting origin for AnTri, a rapper whose debut single operates entirely on the logic of the unforgettable. *Rendez-vous* is a record about someone you cannot stop thinking about, and it has the audacity to become, itself, something you cannot stop thinking about.
Koentakhinte – Quiet Colors
Koentakhinte — the performing name of Dutch singer-songwriter Koen — arrives on the British radar with Quiet Colors, a single of such disarming emotional honesty that one wonders quite how it slipped beneath the commercial machinery for this long. It is the sort of song that does not announce itself with fanfare. It settles, instead, like afternoon light through net curtains: soft, pervasive, and surprisingly difficult to ignore.
Bill Wood and The Woodies – Same Old Hurt
Canada has always been awkward territory for the rock and roll myth. Too polite, people say. Too sensible. And then someone like Bill Wood comes along and makes a complete nonsense of that particular received wisdom.
DadJoke – Fun Intended
The most subversive thing about *Fun Intended*, the debut album from Chicago's DadJoke, is how completely it refuses to condescend. Not to children, obviously — children's music that talks down to its audience is so commonplace as to be unremarkable. No, what Reminick refuses is the more pernicious condescension: the kind that assumes "music for small people" must therefore be small music. This album is enormous. Ludicrously, thrillingly, almost aggressively enormous.
John Lebanon – Kite without a string
There is a particular kind of album that refuses to announce itself. It doesn't arrive with a manifesto or a provocateur's flourish. It simply appears, quietly, like a letter pushed under a door — and you only realise its weight after you've already read it twice.
SI-KEY – THE COLOURS
Let's get the logistics out of the way, because they matter here. SI-KEY — a solitary figure from Telford, that perpetually underestimated town in the West Midlands — recorded this entire debut EP alone, in a spare room, singing into a phone while leaning away from the neighbour's wall. No studio. No band. No budget to speak of. Just ideas, a phone app, headphones, and what sounds like an almost painful reservoir of feeling that had been dammed up for years and finally, mercifully, broke.
pMad – NineFortyFive
Some records announce themselves with a shove. Others — and these are the rarer, more interesting creatures — arrive like a cold hand laid quietly on your shoulder in a darkened room. *NineFortyFive*, the new single from Irish post-punk artist pMad, belongs emphatically to the second category. It does not demand your attention so much as it seduces it, drawing the listener into a space where the gothic and the genuinely human become, somehow, the same thing.
Mark Winters – Can I Rise?
The finest songwriting always begins with a question the writer cannot answer alone. Johnny Cash ruminated on sin and redemption. Springsteen has spent five decades interrogating the American dream. And now Mark Winters, an aerospace engineer from Texas who moonlights — or perhaps it is the engineering that is the moonlight — as a singer-songwriter, poses his own quiet, essential question: Can I rise? Will my roots hold me down? That it takes a song co-written with his son to surface the question properly tells you everything you need to know about what "Can I Rise" is really doing.
Baïki – KosmoX
Phil from Charleroi has no business being this provocative and this entertaining simultaneously, yet here we are, staring down one of the more audacious singles to emerge from the Belgian underground in recent memory. *KosmoX*, the latest dispatch from his project BAÏKI, arrives gift-wrapped in satirical fury — a gleaming, darkly comic missile aimed squarely at the rotten heart of human self-delusion.
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.