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.
Ravens Beats – Trauma
Loss has a way of arriving uninvited and refusing to leave, and it is precisely that unwelcome permanence that Ravens Beats captures with startling clarity on their debut single. "Trauma" announces itself not with bombast but with the quiet confidence of someone who has already survived the worst thing imaginable and lived to set it to music.
TEMERITY – Off the leash
Every so often a record arrives that sounds less like a calculated bid for radio play and more like a diary entry set to a beat, and "Off the Leash" belongs firmly in that camp. TEMERITY, the 24-year-old London MC making his proper introduction here, has not so much released a single as thrown open a window and let the neighbourhood in.
Cheryl Craigie – What’s Going On
Covering Marvin Gaye ought to come with a warning label. So many singers have stumbled into "What's Going On" thinking reverence alone will carry them, only to discover that reverence is precisely the trap. Gaye's original was never a museum piece; it was a live wire, cut through with grief, tenderness and quiet fury, and any cover that merely genuflects before it ends up embalming the thing it claims to love. Happily, Cheryl Craigie has done no such thing. Her rendition breathes.
Naoko Hiranuma – Sea of Light
Pop songs about summer romance arrive by the crate-load every June, most of them disposable, few of them worth a second listen come autumn. Naoko Hiranuma's "Sea of Light" belongs firmly to the latter category, a track that treats nostalgia not as a gimmick but as a genuine emotional architecture, built brick by brick until the whole thing glows.
Adrielle Bow Belle – Freeze
Cold, in the hands of Adrielle Bow Belle, turns out to be the warmest possible subject. *Freeze*, her seven-movement song cycle, does the thing so few concept albums manage: it makes structure feel like feeling, rather than homework dressed up as art. Six years in the making, stitched together not by chronology but by a deliberate, looping logic — present, past, deeper past, childhood, and back again — it plays less like a tracklist and more like a nervous system remembering itself in the wrong order. Which, as anyone who has ever lived through trauma will tell you, is exactly how memory actually works.
A-jam Siin – Forever finding me
Leeds has a way of producing musicians who sound like they've been squeezed out of terraced houses and drizzle, and A-jam Siin belongs firmly to that lineage. *Forever Finding Me*, the debut full-length from this Leeds-based producer and songwriter, arrives not as a polished statement but as something far more valuable: a document of a mind mid-transformation, caught in the act of becoming.
Quiet as a Mouse – Nostalgia is fine…but…
Alex Moran has always sung like a man arguing with his own memory, and on this second full-length under the Quiet as a Mouse banner, the argument finally gets resolved on his own terms. Ten years and several continents removed from the Scottish scene that first championed him — Edinburgh, the BBC Introducing slots, the Daily Record's breathless proclamations — Moran has arrived somewhere warmer, sadder and considerably more assured. The title tells you everything before the needle drops: nostalgia gets its due, then gets politely shown the door.
Tulegon – Rovine
There is a particular breed of record that arrives without fanfare, without a label machine behind it, and quietly insists on being taken seriously anyway. *Rovine*, the debut full-length from Milan-based songwriter Tulegon, belongs to that lineage. Self-recorded, self-financed, self-everything, it carries the unmistakable fingerprints of a man who has spent twenty years scribbling lines into notebooks on trains between Puglia and Lombardy, waiting for the moment they'd finally fit together.
JT Catalano – Felon Angels
Twenty years is a long time to sit on a story, and longer still to sit on a chorus. JT Catalano has done both, and the wait shows in the best possible way: "Felon Angels" arrives not as a debut single trying to prove something, but as a reckoning that has already proved itself, over and over, in a cell, on a bunk, in the space between a chess piece and a clenched fist.
Down South Pepper band – Shady Road
Down South Pepper Band hail from Kvalsund, a speck of a village deep in Norway's Arctic north, and yet nothing about "Shady Road" sounds like it was written under the midnight sun. This is dust-bowl storytelling with a Nordic postmark, and it works precisely because the band refuses to treat that contradiction as a gimmick. Instead, they lean into the outlaw country tradition with the conviction of players who have logged their hours studying the greats and figured out how to make the idiom their own.
The Pixel Rain – Last
Something has shifted in The Pixel Rain's world, and you can hear it in the first thirty seconds of "Last." The Southeast London project, born from a self-titled 2023 debut EP and quietly building a reputation on industrial rhythm and synthetic dread, has finally let the guitars off the leash. The result is the most confident thing Áron Siegler has put his name to yet — a single that snarls where The Pixel Rain's earlier work merely hummed.
ShanDaria – Livin’
There is a particular species of R&B record that arrives not to seduce you, but to shake you gently by the shoulders and remind you that you are, in fact, alive. ShanDaria's "Livin'" belongs unmistakably to that lineage, and it announces itself with the unhurried confidence of an artist who has waited long enough to know exactly what she wants to say.