Speaking things into existence is a powerful tool, even if it’s just a casual comment to then-strangers on your first day at college orientation. It might initially seem insignificant, but when that comment becomes real years later, it feels like time folding in on itself – your future self catching up with your past self and vice versa. That’s the kind of spiritual déjà vu that comes to mind when I speak to Racing Mount Pleasant members Connor Hoyt, Kaysen Chown, Sam DuBose, and Sam Uribe about how their big-band folk rock project came together.

Asher White thrives in contradictions. The Brooklyn-based artist’s music clearly draws on the pop canon, but her songs rarely unfurl with the expected linearity or instant accessibility associated with pop music. She has an affection for solitary home recording, clashing instrumental assemblage, and outré sonic experimentation, but she’s also able to tap into a reservoir of viscerally catchy melodies. She has over a dozen albums publicly available online, yet she feels like she’s still just scratching the surface of where her career could take her.

A man is convinced a gang of mischievous creatures is psychologically torturing him — messing with the temperature of his apartment, cooking food and playing vinyl, ransacking the pantry. But he’s gonna beat the little fuckers at their own game. He slips on his Crocs and, over a flurry of discordant guitars and bludgeoning drums, screams: “I’m going to smoke them out of my house/ They won’t go, so I’ll go, but I’ll take them with me.” This isn’t the plot to some sci-fi thriller, but the crux of “Neighbors,” the abrasive lead single and opening track of Glasgow five-piece Humour’s debut album Learning Greek.

Some things about Golomb feel preordained — as if their backstory was dictated by fate, as if their music has always existed. Not that they stumbled into their current upward trajectory. The Columbus power trio, who’ll make their debut on Philly’s esteemed No Quarter Records next month with sophomore album The Beat Goes On, have worked their asses off to write songs this potent and broadcast them to an audience far beyond their local scene. But from the origins to the output, it all seems meant to be.

“She’s one of those uniquely beautiful people—” Eli Scarpati starts to explain, before correcting himself. “Well, not people, because She’s not a person. She’s similar to one of those uniquely beautiful people, where anyone who meets Her is immediately in love and also completely terrified and viscerally, physically uncomfortable around Her, but when She leaves you’re missing Her and you’re like, ‘Aww, let’s bring Her around again!'”

The first time you hear Mei Semones, you’re likely to contort yourself into some weird shapes in an attempt to describe her music. My first pass, “Pat Metheny and Gilberto Gil start a Midwest emo band with a folk singer who’s fluent in English and Japanese,” nearly tore my hamstrings. That was in reference to fall 2023’s “Wakare No Kotoba,” and in fairness, it’s quite an ambitious blend of pastoral jazz, bossa nova, emo, and baroque pop.

As recently as three years ago, the prospect of being a shoegaze rockstar would’ve been seen as laughably ridiculous. In 2025, who the fuck knows what’s possible.

Immediately due west of Detroit sits the USA’s first Arab-majority city. Dearborn, Michigan is home to over 100,000 residents, a University of Michigan campus, and the continent’s largest mosque. Its wide roads are lined with strip malls and gas stations; the spectre of a desiccated auto industry looms large above the whole region. It’s in this environment that vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Moe Kazra and drummer Andrew Kaster became fast friends in their youth, evolving into a brotherhood while working the same job and forming their band, Prostitute. This past fall, Prostitute dropped their dizzying debut album, Attempted Martyr, after furiously debating every line, every drum hit, every riff. Their passionate attention to every last detail paid off: Attempted Martyr has broken containment, with audiences worldwide taking in their theatrical noise rock with flashes of Arab, West African, and East Asian influences.

Death metal often seems to belong to a bygone time, whether that’s the white-sneakered ’80s that birthed the genre or much, much further back. Simple power chord progressions get called “caveman riffs” when they’re tuned down a step and run through an HM-2 pedal, and there was once a whole-ass subgenre called “caverncore.” London’s Vacuous certainly have more than a passing familiarity with death metal’s most primordial aspects. They’re also perhaps the first death metal band to growl the word “internet.”

While not as flogged into near-meaninglessness as those ubiquitous descriptors “punk” and “psychedelic,” “shoegaze” is nevertheless hella overused. While it still evokes something broadly knowable in most minds, it’s spawned multiple subgenres: “dreamgaze,” “Nu gaze,” “hazegaze.” I still own an old “Genre” T-shirt by Hipster Runoff’s king of the droll, Carles, that includes the absurd “no gaze” and “crab_gaze.”

Junior Varsity have built their reputation on doing the unexpected.

There is a phase in a young band’s development when they’re starting to find their form, understanding how to harness their collective power, but vestiges of their primordial freeform lunging remain. That’s where we now find Man/Woman/Chainsaw on the rising buzz band timeline. It’s a tantalizing moment for a listener, a window into chaos being wrangled into order while still coursing with volatility.

The Marathon Petroleum refinery looms over the Boynton neighborhood of Detroit, MI like massive drill bits that cored through the center of the Earth. At night, when the lights on its dozens of towers light up, it resembles an alien electric grid, its red, blue, and white bulbs imprisoned like trapped Tinkerbells within steel beams. A few years ago, the plant was forced to pay an $80,000 fine, plus almost $300,000 in “community investments,” after a broken pipe leaked toxic gas into the lungs and waterways of local residents.

A Love You Cannot Shake, the sophomore album from Fashion Club, starts with a lumbering, stuttering synth impossible to place. Pascal Stevenson tells me the synth is a vocoded, time-stretched kick drum, manipulated and looped in Ableton. That’s just one of many instances I could ask about. Not a moment goes by without something distorted and alien; even the quieter songs feature mangled vocals, pitch shifted in the margins of the mix.

How did you spend your evenings during lockdown? Some people took up prodigious amounts of baking. Others caught up on TV shows they’d neglected or movies they’d missed. I trolled Bandcamp, doing everything I could to fill the void of nighttime DIY shows with discovery of new band after new band. I had a network of friends who did the same, and we’d exchange links to new favorites like hunting trophies.

Is playing a show to 13 people in a laundromat worth it? Do Mr. Krabs and Peter Griffin have more musical hot takes? Has the American contemporary experimental music scene lost its edge? Are glitchy hyperpop production, ubiquitous samples, and goofy ’90s pop-rock effective devices for rigorous, high-concept art, or do tongue-in-cheek, doomscroll-evoking sound collages now feel cynical or dated? Is subjecting yourself to the grueling life of a working independent musician a cry for help? A character flaw? A beautifully noble pursuit in this isolating, morally bankrupt world? These are just a handful of the questions raised by Callahan & Witscher’s audacious new LP, Think Differently.

Twangy indie rock is in full swing this year. Waxahatchee returned with her new album Tigers Blood in March; next month sees the release of Allegra Krieger’s Art Of The Unseen Infinity Machine and MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. Enter Merce Lemon, a Pittsburgh native whose third LP Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild also arrives in September. The sweeping second single “Backyard Lover” is a grief-stricken yet sunlit sprawl bursting with charged guitars and melancholy pedal steel, and lucky for us, the rest of the record is just as compelling.

Flower Face is more than just a musician. Montreal’s Ruby McKinnon has been building up the mythology around her upcoming album with Polaroids, drink recipes, a loveline, and poems. Girl Prometheus, the follow-up to her 2022 breakthrough The Shark In Your Water, is as intense and magical as its name suggests, containing 10 dynamic songs that explore the extremes of heartbreak and desire.

“Jesus Christ, I’m 26,” Dan Campbell screamed on the Wonder Years’ “Passing Through A Screen Door,” perhaps the earliest onset of midlife crisis ever captured in pop music. Dedicating one’s life to any kind of band certainly magnifies a sense of arrested development when friends are getting married, having kids, and owning homes, exponentially so when that band plays pop-punk. With COVID and social media accelerationism irrevocably warping our relationship with the passage of time, it’s unsurprising that someone in 2024 can feel like their life is already over by their junior year of college. Having spent nearly half his 20 years immersed in the depths of Wikipedia and Discogs, Holden Wolf admits, “I straight up don’t know how to be normal.” And that panic is the main driver of Combat’s Stay Golden, a classically bombastic pop-punk opus about the futility of existence.

In Cormac McCarthy’s 2017 essay “The Kekulé Problem,” the late novelist defines the subconscious as “a machine for operating an animal.” He goes into detail about the German organic chemist August Kekulé, who was puzzled over the molecular structure for benzene until Kekulé’s dreams solved it for him. In his sleep, a visual representation materialized: an ouroboros, a snake perpetually feeding on its own tail. According to McCarthy, the scientist awoke with a start, saying to himself: “It’s a ring. The molecule is in the form of a ring.” It leads the author to wonder, “Why is the unconscious so loath to speak to us?” Broken down to its core components, the subconscious is pure impulse with no potential hindrances. It’s instinct. A pure gut feeling.

“Could you ever live anywhere but New York?” I am sometimes asked, by people who know that I have spent more than three decades in the city that may occasionally sleep but which never gets less expensive. My response is usually, “Probably, but I could live without a limb or two as well.” Being here is that important to me. I am a sucker for songs and videos that evoke the place: Interpol’s eternal “NYC” – “The subway is a porno, the pavements they are a mess” — or Vampire Weekend’s lyric video for “Step,” with its images of Astor Place and Washington Square Park, my college-days stomping grounds.

To borrow a tired refrain from the early COVID era, we’re now living through ~unprecedented times~. A former US president was convicted of 34 felonies. AI is ruining the internet. And a one-man slam-metal band influenced by avant-garde classical and free jazz, whose War On Terror-themed music has no lyrics and is sung by a drummer strapped with a headset microphone, are now the hottest new band in hardcore.

Baltimore’s hardcore scene, once the precocious little sibling of the one in DC, has become the spiritual capital of the genre in America. Maybe it’s just that punks will always chase cheaper rents, but the Maryland city just north of Minor Threat’s birthplace has produced a disproportionate number of the 21st century’s essential hardcore bands. The boom that arguably started with the founding of Trapped Under Ice in 2007 has continued unabated ever since, through feminist firebrands War On Women, TUI spinoffs Turnstile and Angel Du$t, and younger upstarts like End It, Jivebomb, and Sinister Feeling. The latest addition to that proud lineage is Doubt, whose first proper EP, Held In Contempt, is announced today alongside the release of “The Hard Way.” Like so many of their scenemates, they’re a band of Baltimore transplants who found themselves intoxicated by the energy of their adopted hometown.

When most 20-year-old kids start making music, they do something that all young men can justifiably understand: They play girls their new songs. Some do it to impress; some do it because they are eager to get a woman’s read on things. The Alabama rapper Yhapojj does it because he is in love with someone. He calls her his baby mama, even though they have no children together. And, if you’re wondering, she seems to love Yhapojj’s stuff as much as the underground does. “She damn near always listening to it,” Yhapojj says, smiling. “Everything about her makes me fall in love. It’s the connection. We’re like twins.”

Tyler Jordan learned a lot of hard lessons from 15 mostly futile years trying to make a go of this indie rock thing, but few were more valuable than “say what you actually mean.” “If I’m writing a song to someone or about someone, I’d like them to know that,” he explains. And as excited as we are about Lived Here For A While, I can think of a few people who would not call Good Looks’ sophomore album “highly anticipated” – Christian fundamentalists, Jordan’s ex-girlfriend, his ex-bandmate, and even his own mother are all put on notice, often by name. Yet, when we speak about a month prior to the album’s release — it’s out this Friday via Keeled Scales — Jordan only regrets his words towards his least sympathetic targets: the joggers and farmers market merchants and tech developers who turned Austin into a place he had to leave after spending nearly half of his 37 years there.

To echo one of the most contentiously discussed articles on this website, GIFT are a band. But that wasn’t as apparent on the New York outfit’s 2022 record, Momentary Presence, a solid debut that more or less functioned as a solo project for vocalist-guitarist TJ Freda. Not that Freda necessarily wanted to isolate himself to make that album, but it was more so born out of, to put it euphemistically, extenuating circumstances.

Brennan Wedl can’t stop bowling splits. Time and again, the musician and bowling enthusiast quietly but confidently palms a waxed bowling ball from the shelf, sizes up the alley stretched out before her, and releases in a fluid curved motion before backing away to evaluate her work. The ball travels straight down the center before inevitably tipping at the last second, taking down all but the two farthest pins. Never one to turn down a challenge, Wedl takes her best second shot, but in the end, at least one always remains standing, defiantly refusing her the spare.

When we meet on a Manhattan Saturday, the East Coast is experiencing its first torrential spring downpour, drenching the concrete jungle in a quantity of water that should bring the city to a standstill. New Yorkers, however, don’t stand still. The sidewalks are just as packed with tourists and locals alike, sporting umbrellas in every hue. Owing to the crummy weather, we meet at Eataly, enticed by a coffee slushie that promises more than it ends up delivering. Al Nardo is all smiles and Bailey Wollowitz appears more stoic, but the duo’s shared enthusiasm is abundantly clear as we wander the store’s colorful departments, marveling at culinary finery that exceeds the luxury of our usual diets while discussing their emerging band, fantasy of a broken heart, and its first proper release, a full-length entitled Feats Of Engineering, announced today via Dots Per Inch.

Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego sound almost relieved to be playing in their new band, Deerlady. Though neither is a total stranger to the world of indie rock, they’ve both found success in recent years in other musical milieus. Obomsawin, a Berklee-trained bassist and composer, tours the jazz festival circuit as the leader of the Mali Obomsawin Sextet. In 2022, she released an acclaimed free jazz album called Sweet Tooth, which she sang entirely in the Abenaki language. Abrego also has a jazz background that runs through Berklee; she studied guitar performance there before moving on to the New England Conservatory of Music, where she’d eventually become a faculty member. On Greatest Hits, Deerlady’s winkingly titled debut album, those biographies dissolve, and Obomsawin and Abrego tap into something more instinctive.

Lip Critic understand the power of Wawa. Seated in a Park Slope bar a couple blocks away from their rehearsal space, the four-piece explain the magic of the luxury gas station. The broccoli mac and cheese is exceptional. According to Danny Eberle, one of multiple drummers in the band, the iced tea “is goated” — better than both Snapple and Arizona. And their sandwich size options are peerless. “Honestly, Subway are like cowards,” lead vocalist and lyricist Bret Kaser casually proclaims.

The Southern California emo band Boycomma formed when Brad Warriner approached a mysterious figure nicknamed Jimbo at a skate park to tell him that he looked like Rivers Cuomo from Weezer. After they formed a band, Jimbo had the title of their debut album Use Me tattooed on his chest, then quit around Christmas last year. “No one really knows why,” Warriner explains. “He just quit music.”

Liverpool quartet Courting are following up their 2022 debut album Guitar Music with another debut album. This backwards logic is par for the course for a Charli XCX-covering, hyperpop-loving group trying to prove they’re anything but a boring British post-punk band. Their first rejection of such project pigeon-holing was naming their first debut album Guitar Music, inspired by lazy media characterizations of them as a rock group. The eight-song album was a glorious, glitchy, and unexpecting rabbit hole. Alongside corroded guitar melodies and road-raging drums, frontman and self-proclaimed “creative director” Sean Murphy-O’Neill deadpanned reference-heavy lyrics, ranging from David Berman to A.I. influencer Lil Miquela. Behind his sometimes pointed, sometimes silly allusions, Murphy-O’Neill penned sentimental reflections about beauty standards, aging versus growing up, and the relationship between cityscapes and financial division. The, at times outrageous, album was meant to be a bit outrageous by design.

If you’re cynical, last summer’s parade of country chart-toppers was just culture-war bullshit, with nothing further to read into it. Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony at least partially scored their hits from an aggrieved conservative impulse to own the libs; to some extent, Morgan Wallen did, too. But something else was happening when Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves’ duet “I Remember Everything” reached #1 in September. The somber ballad casts Bryan and Musgraves as former lovers, now separated by an unbridgeable chasm of booze and disappointment. It’s a song powered not by opprobrium, but by an even mightier force: nostalgia. “Do I remind you of your daddy in my ’88 Ford?” Bryan, who was born in 1996, asks Musgraves. Against a bed of dusty acoustic guitar and fiddle, his deep voice crackles with borrowed authenticity.

“Shadow Of A Doubt,” the new song by Sprints out today, was a bold choice for a single: the rawest, most desperate track on the Dublin post-punk band’s debut album Letter To Self. A song about begging for reprieve from all-encompassing mental anguish, it builds slowly from a guitar-picked intro to the powerful end, by which point vocalist Karla Chubb lets out an agonized howl. “We recorded the vocal in like, three takes only. You can hear me hyperventilating and catching my breath in between crying, which we decided to leave in,” Chubb says, on a call alongside bassist Sam McCann and drummer Jack Callan (guitarist Colm O’Reilly couldn’t make it). “That’s gonna be a scary one to release.”

When Heriot put out the EP Profound Morality last year, they went from an anonymous part of the glut of metal bands populating UK scenes like the one in their hometown of Swindon, to one of the country’s most hyped heavy exports. Kerrang! called them the best new metal band in Britain, while NME named them one of the reasons there’s “never been a better time to be a UK metalhead.”

When Daneshevskaya announced her debut full-length Long Is The Tunnel at the end of August, she shared the sweeping single “Big Bird.” At two and a half minutes, it goes farther than most indie songs can reach. Anna Beckerman’s silky soprano leads fluttering synthesizers and fuzzy guitars: “For the last time/ I am whole,” she croons, the instrumentation capricious yet calculated, building until the euphoric end, marked by the squawking of seagulls. It’s as if she’s pondering her life while looking at the water, which is a motif on the record; on the sprawling opener “Challenger Deep,” she sings, “There’s a place where oceans meet/ And a darkness underneath/ Things I’m not meant to see.” Long Is The Tunnel plunges straight into those depths, finding beauty and peace even in the murk.

If there is one thing Twitter is good for, it’s galvanization. Even as it creeps closer and closer to the sweet embrace of death, the site now known as X (ugh) is still capable of having moments where the most random shit spreads like wildfire.