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.
The story of one music video
One November morning, I went to the antique shop 'LOT ONE TEN'. I loved taking a walk in autumn London after a snack at McDonald's and a large serving of black coffee. I felt in good spirits and even the gray rain could not interfere with my daily ritual, so Walthamstow greeted me with genuine indifference, as if inviting me to take a walk on the favorite street of the designer William Morris, whose mansion-museum was around the corner.
adequate – go
Let's get one thing straight from the off: the name is a provocation. adequate. Lowercase, deliberately modest, almost aggressively self-deprecating — the kind of title you choose when you know full well the music beneath it is anything but. It's the oldest trick in the rock and roll handbook, the shrug that conceals a clenched fist, and on the evidence of debut single "go," these smelly Wexford grungers — their words, worn like a badge of considerable honour — are playing the long game with considerable intelligence.
Daniel Trigger – Alone Tonight
Some records arrive quietly. They slip beneath the door like a note slid under a hotel room at midnight — no fanfare, no machinery, just the thing itself. Daniel Trigger's comeback single 'Alone Tonight' is precisely that kind of record: unhurried, unfashionable, and almost defiantly itself. Which, depending on your appetite for melodic hard rock delivered with genuine conviction, is either the best news you've heard all year, or confirmation that certain corners of the musical universe remain gloriously immune to trend.
Lancaster Rayne – I Don’t Wanna Love You
Somewhere between the cracked neon of a Route 66 dive bar and the clean severity of a desert midnight, Lancaster Rayne has built himself a peculiar and rather wonderful problem. He makes country music that sounds like it genuinely means something — and he does it entirely alone, in a private studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with no Nashville cheque to cash and nobody to answer to. The gall of it.
David Omlor – The American Boys (The Ballad of Frank Gusenberg and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre)
Let's get one thing straight before we go any further: the story of Frank Gusenberg is not one that invites subtlety. Shot fourteen times in a Chicago garage on the morning of 14th February 1929, he was found breathing by police who arrived expecting nothing but bodies. "Who shot you?" they asked. "Nobody shot me," he replied. He was dead within hours. The man took fourteen bullets to the chest, refused to name Al Capone's hitmen, and died with his loyalty intact and his lips sealed. If that story doesn't demand a song that rattles the walls, nothing does.
SADFACE – Unsolved: KD-1
On the night of October 26th, 1999, a twenty-five-year-old railway worker named Małgorzata Ż. was murdered at the KD–1 signal box in the Silesian town of Czerwionka-Leszczyny. No arrest was ever made. No conviction, no closure, no name pinned to the act. The case calcified into one of those silences that provincial towns carry like a stone in the chest — present always, spoken of rarely. Twenty-six years on, a documentary and now this five-track EP have broken that silence with something approaching the force of a fist through glass.
Raw Soul – Still High…
Raw Soul — the nom de guerre of Vancouver-based hip-hop artist and practicing barrister Rawad — arrives not with a thunderclap but with the measured confidence of a man who has learned, through considerable difficulty, to trust his own counsel. *Still High…*, his nine-track original album released on the 12th of May, is the document of a mind that has survived its own turbulence and chosen, rather defiantly, to be grateful about it. That's a harder emotional register to pull off than most rappers attempt. Gratitude, after all, doesn't sell mixtapes. Raw Soul doesn't appear to care.
RIOT SON – My Love Is A Promise That I Can’t Keep
Picture the scene: it is two in the morning somewhere on the Blue Ridge Parkway, fog pressing against the windscreen like a slow suffocation, the radio dead, and a young man receiving what he will later describe as a "direct download" from the void. Whether you find that sort of language romantically overwrought or genuinely prophetic rather depends on what RIOT SON — the bedroom alias of Justin Ridge Frissell — has actually managed to pull off with this debut three-track EP. The verdict, somewhat against the odds of expectation, is that he has pulled off quite a lot.
Shotgun Marmalade – Boomtown
Somewhere between the West Midlands and the outer reaches of musical taxonomy, Shotgun Marmalade have spent years quietly refusing to be categorised. Punk? Broadly. Ska? Certainly. Folk? Occasionally. Pop? When it suits them. *Boomtown*, their third long-player, is the sound of a band that has stopped worrying about where to file itself and simply got on with the rather more important business of making records that crackle with life, purpose, and the particular kind of righteous indignation that only comes from genuinely paying attention to the world.
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.
Julie Paschke – Flying Above
Delusion is an unfashionable subject. Pop music, in its perpetual race toward the hyper-confessional and the algorithmically optimised, tends to mistake self-deception for weakness — something to be overcome swiftly, narrated briskly, monetised and moved on from. Julie Paschke is having absolutely none of it. On Flying Above, her new single and accompanying visual, the Melbourne-based artist treats self-delusion not as a flaw to be corrected but as the very texture of human experience — the fog we agree, collectively and privately, to breathe every day. It is a quietly devastating proposition, and she handles it with the kind of unhurried confidence that most artists spend entire careers pretending to possess.
Nemesis Uncle – The Sword
Darren Purvis has built himself a bunker. Not metaphorically — literally. Somewhere in the Forest of Dean, one of England's oldest and most peculiarly atmospheric woodlands, a man has locked himself away with his instruments, his tea, his cake, and his obsessions, and has emerged with something that sounds like it was recorded at the precise moment the ancient oaks outside decided to lean in and listen.
Ron Morven – Paper Sun
Ron Morven arrives with little fanfare and considerable nerve. *Paper Sun*, his debut single, does not ease you in. It drops you, blinking, onto a Los Angeles freeway at the precise moment the heat becomes something more than weather — when the asphalt stops being infrastructure and starts being a psychological condition. That is a bold gambit for any debut, let alone one aimed squarely at dance floors and streaming playlists. Morven pulls it off with the confidence of someone who has been writing long enough to know that the gap between a mood and a song is smaller than most producers are willing to admit.