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.
Kamila Csenge – Against the Wall
There are moments in music when a single note — or rather, the deliberate withholding of one — says more than a hundred bars of frenzied activity ever could. Kamila Csenge understands this. The Czech guitarist and composer, who has quietly been sharpening her craft across stages from New York's ShapeShifter Lab to the Prague Congress Center, arrives with her debut single "Against the Wall" not as an artist announcing herself in the usual blaze of self-promotional noise, but as one who simply sits down, picks up her guitar, and plays with the quiet authority of someone who has earned every single second of your attention.
SEBASTIAN RYDGREN – Talk To Me
The Swedes have long understood something that the rest of pop music keeps needing to relearn: that the most devastating emotional territory lies not in the aftermath of love's collapse, but in that suspended, agonising instant before the verdict arrives. ABBA built an empire on it. Robyn made it her church. And now Sebastian Rydgren — twenty-two years old, raised in the Stockholm suburbs, forged in the furnace of television talent competitions — steps forward with "Talk To Me," a single that plants its flag firmly in that trembling no-man's-land between everything and nothing.
Grim Logick – The Maelstrom
Let us begin not with the music, but with the room. A living room in Louisiana. A collapsible boom arm clamped to a coffee table. An AKG C214 condenser microphone feeding into a PreSonus interface, monitored through headphones that probably cost less than a night out in Shoreditch. No acoustic treatment. No studio baffling. No engineer turning dials behind glass with the serene authority of a man who has never missed a rent payment. Just Dameon Wilson — known to the world as Grim Logick — pressing record, and then saying things that most people spend their entire lives carefully avoiding.
HJ Soul – Unbreakable
The British soul landscape has always possessed a peculiar gift for wringing transcendence from the mundane — think of Sam Cooke refracted through a Birmingham fog, or Sade finding the divine in a dimly lit corner booth. HJ Soul, with his debut single Unbreakable, does not merely gesture toward that tradition. He plants a flag in it.
Reetoxa – Soliloquy
"A double album born from lockdown, obsession, and hospitalisation — Melbourne's finest hour arrives battered, brilliant, and utterly uncompromising." Nobody sets out to make a great album by halving their sleep, surviving on cigarettes and coffee, and driving themselves to a six-week hospital stay. And yet here we are. Soliloquy, the long-gestating double album from Melbourne's Reetoxa, is precisely the kind of record that could only have been wrested from genuine extremity — a work that carries the unmistakable scent of a man who went all the way to the edge and, rather than turning back, took notes.
Layla Kaylif – CALL OF THE YONI
Let us dispense with the obvious pleasantry of saying Layla Kaylif has arrived. She arrived some time ago — a BBC Radio Record of the Week, a Top-10 across Southeast Asia, a screenplay honoured at Dubai's International Film Festival, a Bowie cover that made grown critics sit up and reconsider their assumptions. What Kaylif has done with *Call of the Yoni* is something altogether more consequential than arriving. She has *claimed territory*.
crucifera – Exostential
**The spider spins. The exoskeleton holds. Danielle Astraea's debut is a debut only in the narrowest technical sense.** Nine tracks. One woman. A baby grand piano, a nylon-string guitar, a DIY studio in New Jersey, and what sounds like a lifetime's worth of accumulated rage, grief, and hard-won philosophy compressed into roughly forty minutes of industrial dark electronics. *Exostential* arrives not so much as an album but as a reckoning — with genre conventions, with the music industry's persistent appetite for female artists who perform vulnerability rather than weaponise it, and with the fundamental question of whether beauty and brutality can share the same skeleton.
Tamer Sağcan – Home: Roots
The classical guitar is, by its very nature, an instrument of confession. It lacks the grandeur of the orchestra, the democratic bluntness of the electric guitar, the social warmth of the piano at a party. It is a solitary instrument, built for rooms where the silence matters as much as the sound. When Tamer Sağcan sits down to compose, then, he is already making a statement about the kind of artist he intends to be: patient, interior, answerable to no trend.
Midnite Radio – Fear No Stars
**Nashville's newest theatrical rock outfit arrive with a single that refuses to whisper when it can roar — and a music video to match.** Rock music, at its most vital, has always been a conversation between the intimate and the colossal. The trick — the one that separates the truly remarkable from the merely competent — is knowing precisely when to lean into each. Midnite Radio, a five-piece assembled across the geography of Tennessee and Los Angeles, seem to have cracked that particular code with unsettling confidence on their debut single, "Fear No Stars."
Brooklynzhen – Light of the Dead
Glasgow has always known how to grieve beautifully. From the post-rock cathedrals Mogwai built out of feedback and silence, to the city's long lineage of artists who treat melancholy not as affliction but as raw material — the place has a gift for transmuting darkness into something luminous and necessary. Allan McCafferty, recording under the alias Brooklynzhen, is the latest to drink from that particular well, and "Light of the Dead" announces, with considerable authority, that he has something genuinely urgent to say.
Digging for Kanky – Wide Open
*You don't have to sell your soul all at once. Sometimes you just open your hands and let it go.* Manchester has always understood the transaction. This is, after all, the city that gave us the Haçienda — a nightclub that burned money like a sacrament until the money ran out — and Factory Records, an operation so committed to its own mythology that it filed its catalogue numbers as if the universe itself needed organising. The city knows about deals. It knows about the cost of ambition, the particular flavour of compromise that tastes almost, but not quite, like success. Digging for Kanky, returning with their third single from the forthcoming *Raining Stones*, seem to know it too.
Andrea Pizzo and The Purple Mice – Come Out Lazarus 2 – Ineffability
Death, as a subject for pop music, has rarely been treated with the seriousness it deserves. We get grief songs aplenty — elegies, eulogies, the occasional morbid banger — but the actual phenomenology of dying, the interior cartography of a consciousness coming apart at the seams? That is territory almost nobody dares to enter. The Genovese collective Andrea Pizzo and The Purple Mice have not only entered it, they have built a conceptual home there, and "Come Out Lazarus 2 – Ineffability" is the record that makes you genuinely grateful they did.