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.
Pick Up Goliath – Monolanguage
Sam George has built his career on confession dressed as spectacle, and "Monolanguage" might be the cleanest distillation yet of that particular alchemy. The fourth cut from *Salt & Static* arrives less as a single than as a diagnosis, and it's a remarkably precise one: this is a song about the words men reach for when the real word is too dangerous to say out loud.
Modern Neutrals – Beach Theatre
There is a particular strain of British rock criticism that has always preferred its anger served loud, its metaphors mixed, and its sincerity worn like a chip on the shoulder rather than a badge on the lapel. It's the tradition that turned three chords into a manifesto and treated the seven-inch single as though it might genuinely change something. Modern Neutrals, five souls out of Blackwood who have spent a handful of years scuffing up the underbelly of South Wales' live circuit, sound like they were raised on that tradition rather than merely taught it. *Beach Theatre*, their latest dispatch, doesn't so much arrive as detonate.
Fierce Friend – Put You Right
Alan Grice has spent two decades building a quietly remarkable CV — Electric Soft Parade, Foxes!, Octopuses, a debut Fierce Friend album that Stuart Maconie generously called sophistipop — and 'Put You Right' sounds like everything that experience was leading towards: a songwriter finally cutting loose with total confidence in his own instincts.
P00TA5H – ELECTROPHOBIA
Gravesend has given the world precisely two things of cultural note: a fortress and, as of this week, a bedroom producer who believes he is the spiritual heir to Ralf Hütter. Whether "Electrophobia" earns him that lineage is the question worth asking, and the answer, delivered with the bluntness Kent deserves, is: not quite, but the wiring is interesting enough that you'll forgive the loose plug sockets.
Solar Flare Alert – Disco Au Soleil
Davide Ungaro and Erika Neri have spent the best part of a year doling this record out one single at a time, and the wait turns out to have been entirely worth it. By the time "Mondo Disco" struts in halfway through side two, it's clear this is a band who arrived at their debut album already knowing exactly who they are — a rare and rather lovely thing.
Kat Kikta – Moldavite
Debut albums tend to announce themselves with either a whisper or a roar. Kat Kikta opts for neither — she summons a deity instead. *Moldavite*, named after the olive-green tektite forged when a meteorite met the atmosphere and rained down across central Europe, arrives less like a record and more like an incident: alien, slightly molten, impossible to file neatly on a shelf.
Laura Williams – Ready to be Found
Some records arrive trailing a press kit so neat you brace yourself for disappointment: primary school teacher by day, shy soul finds her nerve, falls for the producer, makes an album in the kitchen. It sounds like the pitch a publicist dreams up after three espressos. The remarkable thing about *Ready to Be Found* is that it earns every word of its own backstory, and then quietly outgrows it.
Pocket Lint – Wunderkammer
Mark Heffernan, recording under the name Pocket Lint, has always behaved like a man rummaging through a junk drawer for treasure, and on *Wunderkammer* he finally builds the cabinet to put it in. The conceit is a cabinet of curiosities, each song a glass case, each glass case holding something slightly unsettling that catches the light. It is a tidy organising principle for an artist whose previous work scattered its ideas like loose change, and it suits him. Heffernan has stopped emptying his pockets onto the table and started arranging the contents.
Andrei British – Alien Jazz Girl
Some records announce themselves with a slammed door; this one saunters in through a side entrance, swirling a martini glass that probably contains rocket fuel. "Alien Jazz Girl" wears its homage on its sleeve and its tongue in its cheek with equal confidence — Andrei British borrows the loose-limbed swagger of the Cantina Band, strips out the slapstick, and lets a lounge singer from somewhere considerably further than Tatooine take the mic.
Aurealis – Cursed
Pop music has always loved a haunted house, but few artists bother to furnish the rooms. Aurealis does. "Cursed" arrives not as a single but as a séance, summoning every doubt you've ever swallowed and handing it a microphone.
Janger – Interspace
It takes a particular kind of nerve to drag Underworld's most over-quoted vocal fragment out of its glass case fifteen years after Trainspotting turned it into shorthand for chemical bliss, and have the cheek to make it sound like a discovery again. Janger, a CalArts product with a half-decade gap in his discography and apparently no fear of ghosts, pulls it off — mostly by treating the sample less as a totem and more as debris, something washed up and half-dissolved rather than triumphantly restored.
Keesha Blair – Truth Always Shows Its Face
There is a particular kind of song that arrives not to entertain but to confront, and Keesha Blair's "Truth Always Shows Its Face" belongs unmistakably to that lineage. It is neo-soul built less for the dancefloor than for the long drive home after a difficult conversation, the kind you have with yourself in the rearview mirror. Blair, the songwriter and creative director behind Divine Purpose Music, has built her short catalogue on exactly this premise: that healing is not a hook but a process, and that pop music can still afford the patience to trace it properly.