As “A Monolith of Alarms” by Post Death Soundtrack progresses from its sinister, murky beginnings with a shuffling beat and the echoing vocals come in, the song becomes increasingly reminiscent of something that might have appeared on the 1994 Killing Joke album Pandemonium. The guitars are both moody and savagely cutting, haunting synths cast a simple and icy figure in the background and the rhythms are insistent and hypnotic. But the whole while the song sounds like it’s on edge and ready to unravel at any moment as the singer relates what sounds like a harrowing tale of deceit and manipulation with a dramatic illumination of the truth that will bring down the cycle of abuse and control. It’s a heady song that should appeal to fans of the more industrial end of post-punk. Listen to “A Monolith of Alarms” on Bandcamp and follow Post Death Soundtrack at the links provided. The band’s new album In All My Nightmares I’m Alone dropped May 30, 2025.
In the video for HLLLYH’s “Flex It, Tagger” we are taken back in time to an alternate reality where a punk tagger is adding some color to a rundown, possibly abandoned house. All the while headlong drums and a minimal, spiky guitar melody sketches the soundtrack to come. What the tagger doesn’t know is that someone inside seems to be hacking reality itself. And streaks of color run across the screen over normal existence as various taggers are profiled and hunted down by drones from a retro-futurist version of an authoritarian, technocratic regime as part of “Project Carnivore.” The song is like a more eccentric pop punk but with the same exuberance and ear for melody and exciting rhythms that make that music work. But not to worry, as in real life, things don’t go as planned and the infrastructure that makes the drone strike and persecution malfunctions and waxes itself. The end. It’s an absurd premise straight out of a more ambitious and surreal take end of the movie Hackers (1995) but it has the kind of energy we need now when technology seems to be channeled into the most dystopian, fascist plots to destroy society and the planet and it needs to be subverted by ideas and actions the techbros can’t envision with no small amount of mockery thrown in. Watch the video for “Flex It, Tagger” on YouTube and follow HLLLYH (formerly The Mae Shi) at the links below. The band’s debut album URUBURU released June 27, 2025 via Team Shi.
Icelandic experimental pop band múm is set to release its seventh studio album History of Silence on September 19, 2025 via Morr Music. Ahead of that event the group has released the tender and ethereal single “Mild at Heart.” The melody is seemingly carried by percussive tones in simple yet layered strands of textural sound, spare piano and echoing melodies that well and dissolve like dappled sunlight on lake. The vocals are near-whispered like introspective readings from an old poetry diary and discovering glimmers of observational insight into heartbreak and heartache within that inspire a delicate treatment to honor the precious sentiments uncovered. In the music video we see Sigurlaug Gísladóttir languishing about a set of rooms and buildings appointed like the secret and magical chambers of personal reverie out of a folkloric fantasy novel. Fitting for the way the song orchestrates organic, analog sounds and sensibilities with great subtlety and hushed but vibrant emotional resonance. Watch the video for “Mild at Heart” on YouTube and follow múm at the links below. The band is on tour in North America in fall 2025.
The Problem With Kids Today, photo courtesy the artists
The Problem With Kids Today is a punk and power pop trio from New Haven, Connecticut. The group’s sound bursts out of narrow genre with great exuberance, demonstrating an affection for and kinship with 1980s Kiwi rock, the more rambunctious and noisy C86 contingent, the unvarnished pop sweetness of Sarah Records bands like East River Pipe and Sugargliders, the Siltbreeze roster and earlier icons of tuneful ramshackle rock and roll rebellion like The Jam, The Who and The Replacements. The group is set to release its third album Take It! on August 22, 2025 via their own In The Shed Records imprint on CD, digital download and through streaming services. The album represents the band, having had its brush with more “professional” studios and its first tour under its belt, returning to its roots recording in its cleaned up and revamped shed-turned-home-recording-studio with friend Joe LeMieux. The resulting album has a scrappy charm and irrepressible enthusiasm with songs that have the punk spirit but a sound that incorporates a myriad of influences that fans of Tyvek, the more melodic side of Times New Viking and Parquet Courts at its most raw will appreciate greatly. In the interview we discuss where the band came from and its origins in the unique DIY scene in Connecticut where its members met and developed into the purveyors of melodic punk pop it has become.
Listen to our interview with the members of The Problem With Kids Today and follow the group at the links below.
Bad Flamingo stretches its songwriting skills well beyond where it has been before on the new single “Hold Up the Lighter.” With the music video and one of the members seen almost acting out the story of the song it’s like a the song is a noir power pop song about love and obsession. It’s tempting to say it’s supernatural and fantastical given the line about “a vampire bite” and sitting up well into the night spying the object of one’s affections and staking out their place waiting for the moment to consummate one’s desires with the line, “Wanna sink my teeth into you” – one has to wonder if it’s purely metaphorical or if the band is telling a darkly romantic story about a creature of the night yearning for a special connection. Either way the song works and the touch of banjo, the subtle guitar screeches and the finely accented percussion give the song something paradoxically less musically dark than some of its earlier songs. And yet, Bad Flamingo once again proves that its gift for love in peril and between people who might be a little dangerous is unchanged. Watch the video for “Hold Up the Lighter” on YouTube and follow Bad Flamingo at the links provided.
With Twin Fates’ “Ribs” you are from the very beginning pulled into a fantastical sonic realm of intimate spaces and ethereal soundscapes. Processed vocals hover and come into focus like a fey shoegaze hyperpop singer—autotune used truly creatively to bring to the song a sense of the otherworldly that demands being taken on its own terms like something Alice Glass would write if she put her hand to writing a dream pop piece. The placid drones that weave in and through the song seemingly about sweet and tender memories of another time and of the recognition of one’s infatuation and the ways in which one has felt the need to mask one’s absolute true self as a sustained act of self-protection but being accepted when the facade can no longer be fully maintained. That moment of feeling that embrace of one’s truth is so poignant in the song that the fact that the song isn’t in some super established subgenre of music doesn’t matter at all and is a symbol of the meaning of the song. Listen to “Ribs” on Spotify.
Oklahoma City-based duo doubleVee is comprised of former Starlight Mints frontman Allan Vest and his wife Barbara Vest who have been releasing some of the most imaginative pop songs going since starting to work on and release music in 2012. The Vest’s have a deep background in music and music culture with Allan writing scores for film and television and Barbara working in radio and producing the nationally syndicated film music program Filmscapes. Starlight Mints were one of the last, great indiepop bands out of that great 90s tradition that included artists out of and connected to the Elephant6 Collective. You can hear that level of compositional and aesthetic sophistication in the music of doubleVee. All of the project’s songs involve a fusion of imaginative storytelling and emotive melodies and an emotional immediacy and intimacy that truly sets the music apart from a lot of modern music. Their music videos reveal an eye for making something that feels like someone dispensed with the usual methods of production and made something accessible like a video a good friend with creativity and cinematic talent would make to share with an immediate social circle. The music of doubleVee invites you to step out of mundane normalcy into something more vital and fun.
The new doubleVee EP Periscope at Midnight, with eye-catching art by Grant Fuhst, is being released on July 25, 2025 digitally and on CD. It’s a kaleidoscopic journey to fantastical places through the lens of everyday curiosity pursued to stimulate the mind and the senses. For the EP the Vests wrote four new tracks and re-imagined a couple of older Starlight Mints songs “Submarine Number Three Vee” and “Maybe Tonight [What’s Inside of Me?]” and brought to all the songs an orchestral power pop sensibility lends each a cinematic aspect that give a dramatic dimension to the songwriting. Fans of XTC and The Apples in Stereo will find much to like about doubleVee’s creative pop songcraft.
Listen to our interview with doubleVee on Bandcamp and follow the band at the links below.
Inspired by film noir Adrianna Krikl’s new EP The Shadow Lounge is a trio of tracks that layer textured rhythm, echoing trumpet processed almost into abstract atmospheres and harmonic synth backdrops that give each song a baseline mood of suspense and mystery lurking beneath the surface with a touch of menace. Which is what you want when evoking the kind of noir that David Lynch seemed to execute so well over the course of his filmmaking from Blue Velvet onward. The title track sets that expectation and “A Memory of Tomorrow” would suit well Jim Jarmusch’s own adventures into noir with a song imbued with more forward momentum and electronic strings evoking an exotic setting and sensibility. Violins streak with a tense urgency across a slow roiling wave of a dynamic in the rhythm and you feel like something ominous is quickly approaching. Concluding track “Fading Lights” is more ethereal in its orchestration of dark things afoot. Like the listener is wading through the aftermath of the skulduggery suggested by the earlier tracks. The spectral winds blow through the song and the threads of tone ripple and drift slowly into a hazy infinity. Listen to The Shadow Lounge on Spotify and follow Adrianna Krikl at the links provided.
Guitars sketch faint tonal lines of melody in the opening parts of Jouska’s dream pop single “Flower Moon.” Jouska’s voice is soft yet evocative in describing a situation of melancholic yearning. Wanting a sign from a loved one that seems uncommunicative after a disruption in the relationship. The warm harmonic keyboard figure that illuminates the song’s backdrop embodies the underlying sadness that informs the song and with the sweeping percussion it all establishes a beautiful atmosphere that soothes the morning and lovesick feeling one can get into in those moments where you feel left wondering what comes next with no real sense if anything will. Listen to “Flower Moon” on YouTube and follow Norwegian dream pop artist Jouska at the links below.
Chris Stamey is one of the leading figures of American indie rock as we know it. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Stamey grew up in Winston-Salem and earned a degree in philosophy from NYU. While living in New York, Stamey became the bass player for Alex Chilton’s band for around a year and released a 1978 by another Big Star alum Chris Bell on his own Car Records imprint with “I Am the Cosmos” and “You and Your Sister.” Around that time he formed The dB’s with Peter Holsapple. That band’s jangle guitar and post-punk sensibilities in terms of literary lyrics and willingness to write emotionally complex songs made it a favorite of college radio throughout the 1980s before splitting in 1988 (though back together since 2005). Stamey is renowned for his production and his credits would be too long to list. For example perhaps unexpectedly he produced the first two Le Tigre records and Pylon’s classic 1983 album Chomp. Simply put indie rock and pop bears the hallmarks of Stamey’s work directly on indirectly for decades. He has played in numerous bands during the course of his lifetime including a short stint in Let’s Active with his friend and also legendary producer Mitch Easter and he has had an acclaimed solo career as well.
Stamey’s latest long player Anything Is Possible released via Label 51 Recordings on July 11 on 12” LP vinyl (out August 8, 2025), CD, digital download and on streaming. The new record Stamey says “is a love letter to the kind of harmonically rich yet often lyrically innocent pop music I heard, on the family turntable and especially on AM radio, growing up in the late 50s and mid-60s in the American South.” With contributions from Tthe Lemon Twigs, Mitch Easter, Probyn Gregory (Brian Wilson Band), Marshall Crenshaw among other luminaries of modern music the album has the sophisticated and sonically detailed pop songcraft that Stamey has perfected across a lifetime. Shades of Harry Nilsson and Brian Wilson can be heard throughout the album supported by Stamey’s knack for fusing texture and tone into the kinds of pop hooks and moods that linger with you.
Listen to our interview with Chris Stamey on Bandcamp and follow the artist at the links below.
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