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.
2nd Magpie Project – Divine Intervention
Pop music has always been better at falling in love than at surviving what follows. The charts are crowded with first kisses and last dances, but the long, grey Tuesday afternoon after a love has died gets far less attention. 2nd Magpie Project have moved into that Tuesday afternoon, hung some heavy curtains and turned the lights down low. *Divine Intervention*, their third single of 2026, is the most affecting thing they have made.
GlowDriver – Tell Me
There is a particular kind of pop song that arrives dressed as a good time and turns out to be a confession. The best of them smuggle the ache in past the bouncers, under a strobe light, and you only notice you've been emotionally ambushed when the lights come up and your mascara has gone somewhere it shouldn't. "Tell Me," the new single from Phoenix's GlowDriver, belongs to that noble and slightly devious tradition.
LUNA14 – Zero Gravity
Berlin has spent decades exporting austere minimalism: the kick drum, the sparse loop, the hushed nod towards restraint. LUNA14 have released a debut single that treats restraint as somebody else's problem. "Zero Gravity" is a gloriously overstuffed pop record, made by two people in a small living room, and it sounds like it was built to be heard from orbit.
Deepwise – Keep On Dragging Me Down
Las Vegas is a city built to make people forget the clock. Its casinos have no windows and its buffets never close. It is an odd place, then, for a rapper to make a record about tiredness, and odder still for that record to be one of the most quietly persuasive hip-hop singles of the year. Deepwise, raised in Salt Lake City and now settled in Nevada, has made a song about running on empty, and he has the nerve to let it sound empty.
Innocent Darkness – VOIDWALKER
Grief rarely makes for tidy art. It arrives without warning, rearranges the furniture of a life, and leaves behind a silence that some people fill with noise. Innocent Darkness, a producer working from the same Ekeren home he has occupied for 52 years, fills his with reverb. *VOIDWALKER*, released just days after the fungal rave-nightmare of *The Dark Fungus*, is the sound of a man losing both parents within twelve months and choosing, with remarkable stubbornness, to make something beautiful out of the wreckage.
Innocent Darkness – The dark fungus
Ekeren is not a place one associates with the end of the world. It is a quiet, unglamorous district on the northern edge of Antwerp, all suburban hedges and tram lines, and yet from a home studio there comes *The Dark Fungus*, an EP that imagines civilisation dissolving into mycelium and dancing itself to oblivion. It is a preposterous conceit. It is also, against every reasonable expectation, a triumph.
Massimo Donelli-Paolo Rossi – Adorati Spiriti
Concept albums have a reputation for grandiosity. They tend to arrive wrapped in gatefold sleeves and self-importance, ready to explain the cosmos to a public that only wanted a decent tune. Massimo Donelli and Paolo Rossi have made something far rarer: a concept album with a beating heart and a conscience, and, best of all, restraint. *Adorati Spiriti* asks large questions in a quiet voice, and it is all the more persuasive for it.
John Michael Hersey – Quixote
Twenty-two albums in, a songwriter either repeats himself into oblivion or finds a way to make repetition itself the joke. Hersey has chosen the latter path, and *Quixote* is the sound of a man who has finally admitted that the windmill was never going to fall, and decided to enjoy the tilting anyway.
Co.LeGa – you.Love
Digital romance has never sounded quite so uneasy, nor quite so danceable. "you.Love" arrives as the second salvo from Co.LeGa this year, and it lands with the poise of someone who has stopped worrying about whether electronic music can be both cerebral and physical, and simply gone ahead and made it both.
The Lazz – The Crown
Benjamin Lazzaro has spent four decades wielding a guitar, and it shows in the muscular confidence of "The Crown," the opening salvo of Act IV in his sprawling, Jungian-soaked concept saga. This is not a musician chasing trends; this is a craftsman who has finally built the machine capable of matching the scope of his imagination.
TrixxStarr – Enough
Some bands are formed in rehearsal rooms. TrixxStarr appear to have been assembled at the kitchen table. What began as the solo project of Dusty Starr, of Chihuahua and Les Biches, has grown into a family firm, with brothers Heli, C.C. and Darc pulling up chairs. On "Enough" the result is a band asking the question the rest of us dodge at parties: when do we stop chasing the things we've been told should make us happy? They ask it without a finger wagged and without a sermon in sight.
Peter Melodist – Fear
Thirteen is an odd age to hand someone a guitar-shaped microphone and ask them to say something true. Most who try it hide behind borrowed phrases, safe choruses, the sound of an artist rehearsing adulthood rather than living inside it. Peter Melodist does something more interesting on "Fear": he sounds like a kid who has already worked out that rock music was invented for exactly this — for turning the unnameable stuff in your chest into something you can play loud.