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.
Joseph Turner & The Dudes of Hazard – Backbone
Start with the shovel. Not a synth pad, not a drum machine click, but the actual dull thud of metal biting into earth — and from that unglamorous noise, Joseph Turner builds a record with genuine muscle. It's a bold opening gambit, the kind of decision that could easily curdle into gimmick in lesser hands, but here it works precisely because it never apologises for itself. The dirt is the point.
Melinda Joy – Too Late
Most records worth caring about announce themselves either with a shrug or a shove. This one lands like a hand on the shoulder, urgent and warm at once, and it does not let go for the length of a single spin.
Ronald Hage – Paragliding
Some records announce themselves with a fanfare. "Paragliding" simply opens the door and lets the wind do the talking — and what a gust it turns out to be. The Hague's Ronald Hage, eighteen releases deep into a career built on Tuesday-night studio sessions rather than industry showcases, has produced a track that feels less like a calculated bid for the festival circuit and more like the natural exhale of someone who genuinely cannot stop making this stuff.
Tom Minor – What a Little Moonlight Could Do
Moonlight has always been rock and roll's cheapest trick and its most reliable one — ask anyone from Van Morrison to The Killers — and Tom Minor knows it. Rather than pretend otherwise, he leans into the cliché with a smirk, dressing up a song about slipping, stumbling and self-sabotage in a coat of vintage guitar pop so shiny you could see your own bad decisions reflected in it.
Zmack – Rustbelt Rejects
Akron does not often produce prophets, but Zmack arrives sounding like one who has spent years shouting into the wind of a dying industrial town and finally found a microphone loud enough to carry it. *Rustbelt Rejects* is a record built entirely from scrap metal and stubbornness, and it clangs, hisses and grooves with the confidence of a man who stopped asking permission a long time ago.
diegoista – TIDELINE
Trieste sits at the hinge between the Adriatic and the Alps, a city built on the friction of two temperaments, and it seems fitting that a producer raised on that coastline should make a record as torn — productively, gorgeously torn — between restraint and grandeur as TIDELINE. diegoista has spent the past few years quietly assembling a reputation as one of melodic house's more thoughtful stylists, the kind of artist who treats a synth pad the way a novelist treats a semicolon: sparingly, and only when the pause genuinely earns its keep. Twelve tracks in, TIDELINE confirms it. This is a producer who has stopped asking what a club wants and started asking what a memory sounds like.
Cash Every Denomination – Hustlers Haven 2.0 – Legacy Edition [Ace The Beat God remix]
Nostalgia is a dangerous drug for a remix record to peddle. Revisit the wrong ghosts and you end up with a museum piece, all velvet rope and no pulse. Cash Every Denomination avoids that trap by refusing to treat "Hustlers Haven" as a relic to be dusted off. Instead, the New York artist and Ace The Beat God have gutted the original and rebuilt it with the wiring of a different decade altogether — part disco chandelier, part trap chassis, humming somewhere between Studio 54 and a stairwell in the Bronx at 3am.
David Moore – A Wink Is As Good As A Nod To A Blind Mule
Loss makes strange producers of us all, but few have channelled it into quite as painstaking a form of devotion as David Moore has on this record. Named with the kind of dry, sideways humour its dedicatee apparently possessed in spades, this is an album built not from a demo tape or a scrapbook of half-finished ideas, but from measure-by-measure MIDI reconstructions of a dead man's drum parts, patiently rebuilt by hand and ear rather than farmed out to any algorithm. That's a laborious, almost devotional way to make a record, and it shows: nothing here feels tossed off.
The Sonic Travelers – Let’s All Go To The Rodeo
There is a particular strain of Americana that British critics have always been suckers for — not the mythologised, dust-blown loneliness of the desert highway, but the noisier, warmer, more crowded version: the county fair, the church supper, the rodeo. It's the America of bleacher seats and funnel cake, and it is exactly the terrain that George Aiello and John Ingram, working under the name The Sonic Travelers, have chosen to stake out with their new single, "Let's All Go To The Rodeo."
The House Flies – Derelict Crawl
The House Flies have never been a band content to sit still in the genre box built for them, and "Derelict Crawl" — the first taste of their forthcoming second album *Lions and Ore* — confirms it with a swagger that feels earned rather than borrowed. This is a Moline, Illinois four-piece taking the bones of English post-punk and dressing them in denim and rust.
NOR.BE – All For You
Guitarists who dream in orchestral colour are rare enough. Guitarists who can persuade Vinnie Colaiuta, John Patitucci and the Bohemian Symphony Orchestra Prague to dream alongside them, on a debut single, are rarer still. NOR.BE has managed it, and "All For You" announces him not as a hopeful newcomer but as a fully formed voice who simply hadn't been heard yet.
Ellijai – Skinny Boyfriend
Glasgow keeps producing them — voices that arrive fully formed, as if they'd been rehearsing in the wings for years before anyone thought to hand them a microphone. Ellijai, eighteen and already several singles into a career built on unflinching candour, has delivered with "Skinny Boyfriend" the most confident and gloriously unserious thing she's put her name to yet. This is a record that knows exactly what it wants — your attention, your hips, and ideally your heart rate up a notch — and gets it within the first thirty seconons of a synth line that arrives like a dare.