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.
Tholly – Moonlit Habit
Grief has a way of redecorating a room without asking permission, and Tholly understands this better than most singers half his age. "Moonlit Habbit," released this February from a Lexington bedroom studio, arrives less like a single and more like a confession set to a beat you can't stop nodding along to — the sonic equivalent of crying at a party and having everyone assume you're just really enjoying the song.
Karen Salicath Jamali – Wild Birds Flying High
Karen Salicath Jamali arrives at songwriting the way a painter arrives at a blank canvas after decades of knowing exactly what a brushstroke can carry. "Wild Birds Flying High" is spare almost to the point of austerity — a voice, an acoustic guitar, and the nerve to leave space around both. That restraint is the record's whole argument. Jamali, who spent thirty years as a visual artist before a 2012 accident rerouted her toward music, treats silence the way a sculptor treats negative space: not absence, but material.
Carpe Diem – Oh Yeah Let’s DateBack
Hong Kong's Carpe Diem have spent the better part of a decade quietly refining a sound that most bands spend a career reaching for and never quite grasp: the trick of making nostalgia feel like forward motion. "Oh Yeah Let's DateBack" arrives as the duo's first single proper since the release of their sprawling debut album *Dream Odyssey*, and it does something rather cunning — it reaches backward into the group's own history, into the wreckage of an old six-piece incarnation once called Dateback, and drags a forgotten song kicking and singing into the present.
Gideon unna – Heaven is here
Somewhere between a kibbutz guitar and a laptop full of arrangement software, Gideon Unna has stumbled onto something quietly radical: a pop song that dares to be sincere without flinching. "Heaven Is Here" wears its influences on its sleeve — literally, if the cover art's flower-power swirl is anything to go by — but it wears them like a well-tailored coat rather than a costume borrowed for the occasion.
Rinalds Maksimovs – Rincore
There is a particular kind of record that could only have been made by a drummer, and *Rincore*, the debut full-length from Latvian percussionist and composer Rinalds Maksimovs, wears that lineage proudly. This is music built from the inside of the beat outward — not songs decorated with rhythm, but rhythm itself, dressed up and sent out into the world.
Paper Mountains – An Olive Tree and a Warm Breeze
Toby Lloyd has done the unfashionable thing: he has made a record about love that refuses to hide behind irony. *An Olive Tree and a Warm Breeze*, the debut album from his project Paper Mountains, arrives on 14th August 2026 as one of the most quietly ambitious pieces of songwriting to come out of Aotearoa in years — a concept record built, brick by tender brick, from the wreckage and reconstruction of Lloyd's own relationship with Wellington indie-pop artist January Blue.
Amy Aytchi – Cyclosis
Some albums announce themselves quietly. This one arrives with a barometric drop and a warning siren. *Cyclosis*, the debut concept record from Glasgow-and-Stirling songwriter Amy Aytchi, takes a premise that could easily have curdled into gimmick — a heartbroken girl transformed into a literal tornado, tearing through the houses of everyone who wronged her — and turns it into something genuinely felt, genuinely strange, and genuinely moving.
The Bastas Project – Sharp Comfort
Family bands carry a particular kind of risk. Get it wrong and you end up with the sonic equivalent of a Christmas dinner argument nobody asked to overhear. Get it right, though, and you get something no amount of session musicianship can fake: people who have spent decades finishing each other's sentences finishing each other's phrases instead. *Sharp Comfort*, the new album from Woodstock, Georgia's The Bastas Project, belongs firmly in the second category, and it announces itself with the confidence of a group who know exactly what they've got.
DIE DIE BE – Erased Faces
Bureaucracy has never sounded so seductive. DIE DIE BE, the Swiss duo of Liliane Bürli and Bujar Berisha, open their new single with the coldest of images — a face scratched from a document, a person reduced to paperwork — and then spend four minutes proving that erasure can groove.
Terra Nai – Foliada de Berducido
Costa Rica is not, on paper, a natural home for Galician folk music. And yet Terra Nai — Diego Alfaro on voice, gaita and acoustic guitar, Keith Guerrero on violin and illustration — have spent the past three years proving that geography is no obstacle to devotion. Their reading of "Foliada de Berducido," the traditional tune from the Galician village of Berducido best known through Milladoiro's celebrated 1980s arrangement, arrives as a small triumph of cross-continental fidelity: a Costa Rican duo bottling the spirit of northwestern Spain and somehow losing none of the original's mist and mischief in transit.
Syna Awel – Acoustic Live Session
Twenty-nine minutes, one afternoon, four musicians and a voice that refuses to be tidied up: that's the whole conceit of Syna Awel's Live Acoustic Session, and it turns out to be plenty. Strip away the studio gloss from a record and you usually find out fairly quickly whether the songs were ever more than production. Here, the opposite happens. "Isem-is Amazigh" opens the set sounding less like a performance than a summons — Mahir Bostandzija's percussion arriving like a heartbeat remembered rather than counted, Anis Agrebi's oud curling around Syna Awel's phrasing the way smoke curls around a lamp. You sense immediately that nothing on this session was rehearsed into submission.
Laji George – Sittin Here Thinkin
Grunge, as a genre, has spent the better part of three decades ossifying into cliché — flannel, feedback, and the same four chords borrowed wholesale from Seattle and worn thin by imitators who mistook volume for feeling. Laji George, to his considerable credit, has no interest in that museum piece. "Sittin' Here Thinkin'," the latest single from his forthcoming record *Out of Line*, takes the bones of that sound and grafts onto them something stranger and warmer: soul phrasing lifted from Otis Redding, the rasp and swagger of Chuck Berry's rock and roll, and — improbably, gloriously — an accordion, wheezing away underneath the distortion like it wandered in from a French dockside bar and decided to stay.