Imagine starting a new creative endeavor and then being mentored by your heroes right off the bat. This was pretty much the case for Rocket, the Los Angeles quartet of 20-somethings who began making amped-up guitar music together in 2021. In the two years between their formation and their debut EP Versions Of You, Rocket started regularly playing local gigs, sharing bills with their friends in bands like Milly and the now-defunct Regrettes. Before long, Rocket were opening for some of the very same bands they’d grown up worshipping: Sunny Day Real Estate, Ride, Smashing Pumpkins. They hadn’t even put out a full-length album yet.

The most harrowing part of a breakup isn’t the moment it happens — it’s the disorienting calm that comes after. Left alone, orbiting oneself. Michelangelo Dying, Cate Le Bon’s seventh studio album, is suspended in this space: “No revelations. No conclusions. There is no reason. There is repetition and chaos.” Across these songs, the Welsh musician wades through the dissolution of a relationship using full psychedelic beams of sound not to make sense of the wreckage, but make room for it.

“I wanted it to feel like it was swallowing itself whole.” In a recent interview, Luna Kupper of the Nashville shoegaze duo Total Wife was explaining her approach to producing “rest,” a song from the band’s 2023 album in/out. Inspired by bandmate Ash Richter’s lyrics, Kupper attempted to make the song “a steady linear incline,” a procession toward the heavens in which the listener’s perspective gradually blurs together with their environment. On that track, Total Wife build a hypnotic foundation out of an acoustic guitar loop that sounds like the intro to “Cherub Rock” reframed as a Microphones track — a one-chord sonic mantra that slowly, and then quite suddenly, is consumed by a visceral inferno. It’s the kind of sequence that takes your breath away, inspires visions, adjusts the temperature in the room.

Everyone’s got an airport story. A stop through an airport is a green light to act undignified: It might be the only place in the world where you can drink a cocktail with your breakfast and then nap on the floor afterwards with no repercussions. It’s both crowded and lonely, neither here nor there. You’re only at an airport because you’re trying to go somewhere else farther away.

Some bands would call this an EP. That would be stupid, of course, but a more sheepish bunch might use the short tracklist as a hedge. Shallowater, on the other hand, are rightly presenting these six songs as their next grand statement.

You don’t want to be outside the venue when the End It set starts. Finish that cigarette quick. If you need to take a shit, take a shit early. Make sure you’re in the room when the Baltimore hardcore band first steps onstage, or else you’ll miss my favorite part of the show: Frontman Akil Godsey belting the hell out of seemingly whatever song is stuck in his head at that exact moment. The first time I saw End It, it was Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” A couple of times, he did Smiths songs. One glorious occasion, it was “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.” The last time I saw End It, Godsey sang “Pieces Of Me” — not the Ashlee Simpson original but the Rare Essence go-go cover that was all over DC rap and R&B radio in the mid-’00s. (The intonations are just slightly different.) For a brief moment, Godsey gets to show the world that he can sing, an act that he doesn’t often get a chance to do on actual End It songs. The song is always different, but the ritual is the same. Godsey gets as far as the first chorus, and then the first riff kicks in and the mayhem begins. It’s so much fun.

The University Of North Texas is a huge public research school that has a funny way of feeling like a small liberal arts college sometimes. When people ask me what it was like being a student there 10 years ago, I tend to tell them one of two stories: the time I wrote about a block-wide house show “festival” for the school paper, or the time I drunkenly scaled a fence to flee a DIY steel drum ensemble gig as the cops shut it down. Denton, Texas is close enough to Dallas that you can forge the hour-long drive to catch a touring band coming through Deep Ellum if you really want to, but I certainly didn’t need to in order to get my live music fix. Everybody was either in a band or knew somebody in one. There wasn’t exactly a revolution happening in Denton in the mid-2010s, but when I was 19, that understated counterculture felt as close as I could get to being in DC in 1986 or Olympia in 1991.

It was never about the gimmicks. The spectacle, maybe — it’s hard to imagine seeing the Armed in concert and not being blown away by the overwhelming audacity of their live show, in which an army of wild-looking people team up to bombard you with sonic violence. But before I’d witnessed a performance by the band, before I’d wrapped my head about their reality-blurring lore, the first thing that drew me to the Detroit experimental hardcore collective was the sheer blitzkrieg of their records.

Nihilistic Easyrider. The moniker Jacob Duarte chose for his solo project is almost a disclaimer in itself: Don’t read too far into this. “Easyrider” invokes a multitude of definitions, most of a titillating, opportunistic, or otherwise anti-status quo nature — interpretations that pique questions about morality. “Nihilistic,” however, suggests that Duarte, our unreliable narrator, isn’t too concerned with the distinction between right and wrong. Maybe you could uncover some sort of meaningful philosophy about that combination of words if you smoked enough weed — and our narrator will confess shortly to having smoked a lot — the Narrow Head frontman probably just thought the combination of two antithetical, multisyllabic words together would be funny to tell your buddies next time they ask what you’ve been listening to lately.

In November last year, I meditated on the persistent beauty of Forth Wanderers’ debut full-length Tough Love for its 10 year anniversary. This week, the band is releasing their first album in seven years. The Longer This Goes On picks up right where the phenomenal indie outfit left off.

Kenny Becker had an idea. Goon, his LA-based psych-pop quartet, had just released 2022’s Hour Of Green Evening, a lush live-band affair tracked together in the studio. That album was a work of placid splendor, achingly pretty but with a vaguely unsettled undercurrent, like a darker, more lysergic update on Real Estate’s pastoral sighs. It was a real achievement, one that elevated Goon’s standing within the independent music world, but Becker was feeling the urge to mess with the band’s approach next time around. He wanted to merge the pristine, straightforward, live-in-the-room qualities of Green Evening with “more of the haphazard, intuitive, 4-track cassette, homemade style” that had previously characterized the band when he began it as a home recording project a decade ago.

Do you put “motherfuckers” in your band name to attract attention or to put a cap on your audience — or, more likely, because such questions could not be farther from your mind? Relatedly, do you drop your debut album on the Fourth of July because it’s such a dead release week and there will be fewer releases competing for people’s attention, or do you choose a holiday exactly because yours is a low-stakes project that does not demand some grandiose rollout? Or, again, are these kinds of questions beside the point of a band like Motherfuckers JMB & Co.?

Do you remember the band Kamikaze Palm Tree? It’s fine if you don’t. I definitely got PR emails about Kamikaze Palm Tree, but I don’t remember them at all. The two permanent members of Kamikaze Palm Tree, Dylan Hadley and Cole Berliner, both came from the San Francisco psych-rock scene. Together, they made skronky, skittery art music full of herky-jerk riffs and off-kilter math-rock self-interruptions. There are lots of bands like Kamikaze Palm Tree, baby Deerhoofs whose euphoric splatter conveys a sense of permanent restlessness. It is not my thing, but maybe it’s yours.

Since its earliest iteration seven years ago, Hotline TNT has been, for all intents and purposes, Will Anderson’s solo project. For his 2023 breakout album Cartwheel, the shoegaze-inclined musician hit the studio with little more than the record’s producer, assembling its great 12 songs almost exclusively by himself. It was a big level up from Anderson’s first Hotline TNT record, 2021’s decidedly lo-fi Nineteen In Love, though his fiercely DIY ethos still gave way to Cartwheel’s cozy, delightfully imperfect fuzz. For maybe the first time, Cartwheel made Hotline TNT a buzz band beyond their New York City home base, sending them out on the road with peers and buzz-band predecessors Wednesday and earning their first proper festival gigs. Live, the songs on Cartwheel soared — that studio distortion became blissfully overwhelming, the melodies atop it sounding somehow even more triumphant. A full band, at least relative to just one dude, can have that effect.

In 1839, the Spanish-born carriage driver Diogo Alves was convicted of killing a total of five people in Portugal, and he was executed for those homicides less than two years later. After his death, he’d be given the nickname “the Aqueduct Murderer,” a reference to a series of dozens of deaths that occurred at Lisbon’s Águas Livres Aqueduct, all around the same time. But Alves was never actually suspected of those deaths at the aqueduct during his lifetime. Recent historical investigations show that Alves’ unrelated murders were probably used as a scapegoat for the moral panic that ensued after the string of deaths, which are now widely believed to have been suicides and which continued for a few years after Alves’ execution. A head preserved in formaldehyde on display at the University of Lisbon was, for decades, believed to have belonged to Alves. Today, researchers think the skull — much like his reputation oft-referenced in Portuguese media — shouldn’t be attributed to him after all.

There are people who make a fine living by closely monitoring this nation’s youth sports leagues in hopes of finding players to replenish America’s college and professional teams. I wonder if Matador Records has a similar program, but for potential next-generation indie rock stars? The tastemaking institution established its rep by plucking Pavement, Guided by Voices, and Liz Phair from the tape-trading micro-release deep underground, and in the past decade or so it’s shown a keen interest in what the young people are getting up to, ushering young acts like Snail Mail, Car Seat Headrest, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus into the big leagues after they built up varying degrees of buzz. More recently, the “cool parents and after-school music programs to Matador Records” pipeline remained remarkably strong with the young Chicago trio Horsegirl, and now it’s given us the young Chicago trio Lifeguard, an outstanding coup by Matador’s perhaps apocryphal youth development division. Raises all around.

2021 was a terrible year. The pandemic persisted and uncertainty took over everything. Sometimes it seemed as if it’d never end, and at other times there was hope of life going back to normal. Everyone was fighting about it. As if the sickness forcing us to distance ourselves from each other wasn’t enough, there was constant political tumult furthering the divide. For me, I was in college and hopelessly stuck in a romantic situation that felt like a form of self-destruction. Everything was a mess, so I figured I may as well give in to the disarray. I turned to an album by a band I’d never heard of for solace: Moontype’s Bodies Of Water.

“He sounds like he’s dying.” When my wife — by no means an aficionado of diaristic indie country-rock steeped in melancholia — happened upon me listening to Friendship’s new album Caveman Wakes Up while doing yard work last weekend, her response mirrored Cher Horowitz’s disdain toward “the maudlin music of the university station” upon encountering “Fake Plastic Trees.” It’s true enough that the wordless mewls and moans with which Dan Wriggins closes out “Hollow Skulls” could be confused for a man in his death throes. He definitely doesn’t come across as vibrant in that moment. He seems fragile, weary, beaten down but resilient. He’s not triumphant, but he’s getting by.

It’s the middle of December, and a family is being evicted. They’ve packed up everything they can fit into a couple of cousins’ cars, and now the rest of their stuff is laid out on the sidewalk, abandoned. The neighbors shake their heads with disgust. What kind of sick monsters would put kids out on the street — just before Christmas, at that? But then, one by one, those neighbors all start to realize something else: There is now a whole lot of free stuff sitting right there on the sidewalk, waiting to be taken. Nobody wants to be the first to rifle through it, but everyone hovers closer and closer, and soon they’re all in there, picking through the remains like vultures. Imagine that you’re one of them. Imagine that you’re on the verge of getting evicted, too, and that maybe you can find a Christmas present for your own kids amidst this wreckage. Imagine how quickly you’d get back inside with your share of the loot. Imagine the greed and the guilt screaming at each other inside your head. Imagine knowing that all your neighbors did the same thing as you, that the only thing keeping you from judging them is knowing that you did the same. Lots of people don’t have to imagine it. Something like that happens every day, probably somewhere near you.

The way Cole Haden commands a stage, you might not guess the band he fronts sounds anything quite like Model/Actriz. The Brooklyn quartet broke through with their 2023 debut Dogsbody, a haunting, gnarly update on aughts dance-punk replete with piercing feedback and industrial flourishes that often took the forefront. “A body count higher than a mosquito,” he proclaimed on album highlight “Mosquito,” likening the pursuit of sex to something as nagging as a seemingly inescapable, blood-sucking parasite. But in spite of the grating noise and graphic lyrics of Dogsbody, Haden doesn’t assume his role in Model/Actriz quite like a Trent Reznor or a David Yow. He’s more like… well, did you see Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” video?

“You don’t know me, bitch.” Near the end of her new album Bloodless, on a minimal ballad called “Proof,” Samia Finnerty unfurls those words as defiantly as one can when singing in a trembling whisper. In the most intimate moment on an album full of indie-rock confessionals, this is her message, delivered firmly even at a volume that suggests she’s trying not to wake anybody up. It’s addressed to a fickle flirt, a guy who loves her “like a child’s toy or cigarette,” but it’s possible to hear that quiet diss as a takedown of listeners who think they’ve got Samia pegged.

How do you stop someone from rising through the ceiling? This is the first line of Ribbon Skirt’s “Deadhorse,” the opening to their debut album Bite Down. It only gets more visceral and surreal from there: There’s someone kicking through window panes. There’s piss in a cup. There’s someone fucking up their whole life on a Wednesday. There’s a midnight meeting at a 7-Eleven. There’s black ice on the freeway. There’s someone crying on an airplane.

They say your frontal lobe doesn’t fully develop until you’re 25. In crossing that milestone you might find yourself subjected to a slew of preconceived notions and expectations: Are you well-established in your career yet? Is your current partner “the one”? You can no longer chalk up your moral missteps to naivete; you risk fucking up your life. And, if you’re Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, you might develop an affinity for the sleepy corners of the Midwest, belying your coastal roots. “I never got Ohio, babe, but now I do,” the core duo of Momma proclaim on “Ohio All The Time,” an early single to their fourth album Welcome To My Blue Sky. It’s a heartwarming admission on a record brimming with tiny moments of self-discovery.

Let’s just get this out of the way first: YHWH Nailgun is not a rapper. Those abbreviated letters don’t pledge allegiance to any hip-hop collective. “YHWH” is pronounced “Yahweh,” as in God in the Hebrew Bible, and YHWH Nailgun are four guys. The oddball noise-rock band don’t make a lot of explicit deity references on their debut album 45 Pounds, out this Friday. But vocalist Zack Borzone’s lyrics occasionally toy with references to higher powers: “I feel like the king of the sky/ Watch me choke this sad demon from behind.”

“Brazilian shoegaze” sounds like a subgenre that might be rattled off by a record collector in a High Fidelity-esque satire of hipster music nerds, in a list along with lo-fi post-bebop and early 21st century zydeco revival. Yet there’s a shoegaze lineage in Brazil, and Terraplana have been part of it for nearly a decade. Formed in 2017 in the southern city of Curitiba, the quartet has been more recently gaining traction internationally thanks to their 2023 debut album Olhar Pra Trás and a split with Shower Curtain, fellow dreamy Brazilians now stationed in New York. Natural, their sophomore LP out today, ought to put them on even the most casual underground rock fan’s radar.

The first time I heard Jason Isbell’s music, I was at Hangout, the music festival that used to take place on the beach in his native Alabama. (This year, in an extremely Trump’s America™ development, they’re replacing it with a fest curated by Morgan Wallen, the troublemaking country megastar who famously turned Isbell’s “Cover Me Up” into a country radio hit.) The encounter took place in May 2013, a few weeks before the release of Isbell’s career-altering masterpiece Southeastern. He was performing on a side stage a little ways back from the sand, singing earnest alt-country ballads backed by a small but skillful band. Between songs, he made it a point to talk up his violinist and backup singer, Amanda Shires, who he’d married a few months prior — not that I could have missed Shires, whose contributions added color and grace to Isbell’s material. They seemed like a perfect match.

“There’s a graveyard in my dreams/ I lay a flower once a week/ For you and me.” The way Saya Gray sings these words on “H.B.W.,” a standout of her new album SAYA, you can almost see her still wearing her mourning veil, meandering through endless headstones. The phrase comes in a vacillating melody, sounding like something between a seance and a playground song. Maybe you’re familiar with the feeling; everybody thinks their worst breakup is the worst breakup anyone has ever endured, at least while they’re in the thick of it. SAYA, out this Friday, won’t remind you how things will get better or how true love will find you in the end. The end, as far as Gray can tell in this moment, is right now.

Ollie Judge introduces Squid’s new album Cowards by imagining life as a cannibal. “We call it/ Something else/ To disguise/ Our memory,” he begins, before later adding: “I couldn’t eat/ Another thing/ No more pages and pages of crispy skin.” It’s not quite as twisted or out-of-left-field as it appears; Judge took inspiration from Agustina Bazterrica’s novel Tender Is The Flesh. Over first a discomfiting bed of gnarled guitars and corroded synths and then a surprisingly beautiful piano melody, this is just the latest surreal reintroduction to the strange and anxious world Squid occupies. And on Cowards, Squid’s songwriting and lyricism alike sharpen to get to the guts of things, capturing an illness at the heart of the world that only seems to have metastasized during the years the band has been chronicling it.

The first time many of us heard about MIKE, we were listening to Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs in 2018. On “Nowhere2go,” Earl raps, “I be with MIKE and Med, nowadays I be with Sage and sixpress?” At first I thought this was a throwaway line, perhaps referencing Mike G along with Medhane, Navy Blue, and Adé Hakim. As the album continued and I heard another shoutout on “The Mint,” with Earl claiming, “I was in the kitchen with that n**** MIKE,” I was forced to ask myself, who is MIKE?

“How can I be homophobic? My bitch is gay!” It’s one of the dumbest rap lines in recent memory, and that’s almost the point. You can hear London rapper Central Cee’s shit-eating grin. He knows it’s dumb, and he also knows that it’s attention-grabbing and memorable. If his song “Doja” came out a few years earlier, it would’ve been the subject of countless tiresome thinkpieces, people arguing over how seriously to take that line. But Cench released that song in 2022, when that kind of willful ignorance was sheer TikTok bait. He knew it would work, and he was proven correct. Central Cee was already a big name in the UK rap world before “Doja,” but that song was a full-on smash over there. It also found its way to American rap radio, still a vanishingly rare feat for a UK rap hit. Two and a half years later, Can’t Rush Greatness is the end result — a big-push major-label album specifically intended to turn Central Cee into a global star. It might just work.

“Abrir Monte,” the opening track of Ela Minus’ sophomore album DIA, comes from childhood. Translating to “open the mountains,” the phrase references the process of cutting through jungle undergrowth to create a new path. Those words stuck with a young Gabriela Jimeno during a youth in Colombia, and they returned to her in her thirties, during the long and searching gestation of DIA. Ela Minus, too, was cutting through murk and mist to reach somewhere else. The phrase and its accompanying music — a curtain-rise instrumental of aqueous synth drones — provide as evocative a reintroduction as one could ask for. For a moment, Jimeno looks all the way to origins and turns deeply inward, but towards the end of once more reinventing herself on DIA.

Ethel Cain’s Perverts is accompanied by a short text called “The Consequence Of Audience,” penned by project mastermind Hayden Anhedönia. The piece is presented in the allegorical language of Biblical prophecy, but it’s not too difficult to figure out what she’s really talking about. We encounter Anhedönia walking “through the long, long wood,” an image that equally calls to mind Dante’s “dark wood of error,” the Garden of Eden, and an erection. She is alone and without self-consciousness. But the trees soon part, and she arrives in a clearing, “the rocky expanse that was the Great Dark.” She goes on: “There I saw first face and heard footstep, few and far between, but I was no longer alone. It was a shameful deed to carry these two naked hands as they clenched hotly, now in full display for all to see.”

The videos always look nuts. Every once in a while, an American DIY hardcore band, an Ingrown or a Magnitude, will make it over to Southeast Asia to play a few shows. The gigs generally look a lot like the ones that those bands might play back home — same horseshoe crowd formation, same spinny mosh moves, same pile-on singalongs, same stagedives. But since those bands had to hustle hard to make it to Indonesia or Vietnam, and since they probably won’t be back again for a long time, both band and crowd move with real urgency. They act like this will be their only chance to throw down like this, and they might be right.