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.
VelumVelvet – Yellow Brick Roads ( piano room)
Donna James walks into her own past the way a nurse walks into a ward at 3am: quietly, competently, and without flinching from what she finds there. That she does so under the alias VelumVelvet, and frames the whole affair as a "Reflection Room" within a sprawling conceptual House, could easily have tipped into whimsy. It doesn't. The piano-room rendering of "Yellow Brick Roads" strips the song down to its bare wiring, and what's left humming underneath is something far sturdier than metaphor: a genuinely moving act of self-address.
Zach Adams – Dead Man Walking
"Dead Man Walking" arrives sounding less like a debut single and more like a reckoning — the kind of track that seems to have been dragged, kicking and bleeding, out of its creator rather than written. Zach Adams has built something here that wears its influences the way a boxer wears scars: proudly, and as proof of survival. You can hear Metallica's thunderous discipline in the rhythm section, Alice in Chains' woozy, narcotic melancholy curling through the vocal lines, and Black Sabbath's tar-black riffage lurking underneath it all like a fault line waiting to slip. And yet, remarkably, none of it feels borrowed. It feels inherited — passed down and then set alight.
GLEET – Strident
There's a particular kind of Englishness that curdles into rage so precisely mannered it could pass for politeness, and GLEET have bottled it. "Strident" — a stray offcut from the sessions for their forthcoming concept album *Thames Sea*, a record reportedly imagining London slipping beneath the waves over the coming centuries — is the sound of a band too restless to let a good idea wait its turn. It didn't fit the drowning-city concept, so out it came, fully formed, spitting.
Syna Awel – Arioul in Dub
"Arioul in Dub" takes the eponymous single from Syna Awel's forthcoming record and strips it down to its bones before rebuilding it in echo and smoke. The original "Arioul" was already a study in restraint — a Berber tale carried more by breath than by melody — but this reworking finds a different kind of patience. Where the album version lets David Aubaile's piano open the space, the dub mix hollows that space out entirely, leaving room only for a heartbeat kick, a ghost of bass, and Syna's voice arriving like a memory that refuses to fade on schedule.
Gilgulim – Soulslike
Jerusalem does not often export remix albums, and perhaps that scarcity is precisely why *Soulslike* lands with such peculiar force. Eugene Kuzmin, the composer, multi-instrumentalist and evident engine of this Jerusalem collective, has assembled a record that refuses to sit still: part liturgy, part séance, part late-night guitar confession, stitched together with the kind of unbothered confidence that only comes from people who have stopped worrying about which genre they belong to.
A J Green UK – Before The End
Few records carry this much patience in their bones. Many songwriters treat a new album as a chance to empty the notebook in one breathless rush. *Before The End* sounds like the work of someone who has spent long enough around music to know exactly which songs deserved to survive the wait, and which ones didn't make the cut. That discipline is the record's quiet triumph, and it announces itself within the first few bars.
Youth in Government – Silhouettes
Washington D.C. is not a city one associates with cosmic reverie. It is a place of marble certainties and men in identical ties, a town built to look permanent. So it is a small delight that from within its bureaucratic hum should emerge two musicians determined to sound like they've been beamed in from somewhere far softer and stranger. Chris Mathews-Larsen and Trae Tomko, working together as Youth in Government, have made a debut record that treats the guitar the way a lighthouse treats fog: not as an obstacle to be cut through, but as something to glow inside of.
Aimee Iris – Lavender Skies
Growing pains rarely sound this luminous. On her new record, Brighton's Aimee Iris takes the messy business of becoming yourself — the heartbreaks, the friendship fallouts, the small acts of self-forgiveness — and turns it into seven tracks that shimmer with genuine feeling rather than performed angst. *Lavender Skies* is pop music with its sleeves rolled up, unafraid of sincerity, and all the more disarming for it.
Peter Manning Robinson – Bent Out of Shape
Occasionally a piece of instrumental music arrives that refuses to explain itself, and thank heavens for that. "Bent Out of Shape," the second single from Peter Manning Robinson's forthcoming album *Excursions*, is one of those rare, disarming things: a piano piece that grins its way through the wreckage rather than wallowing in it.
Keesha Blair – Peaceful Power
Healing, as a subject for pop and soul music, tends to arrive either oversold or undercooked: the grand gesture that mistakes volume for depth, or the whispered platitude that mistakes vagueness for tenderness. Keesha Blair's "Peaceful Power" manages the considerably harder trick of sounding both intimate and assured, a record that treats self-acceptance not as a slogan to be draped over a chorus but as a genuine emotional architecture, built line by line and held together by a voice that never once raises itself to prove a point.
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.