Listening to “Ten Times” by Ludwig Bauer is like stepping into an alternate reality of sound design where a clock tower rings endlessly and counts down the time all around you, steam bursts in the near distance and harmonic drones and electronic blips cycle through somewhere in the dark as you wander down a hazy late night street. The clock’s bells resonate eerily and sometimes double on each other and somehow both establish a deep mood and sense of place while disorienting you from familiar reality. It is an anchoring, mechanical mantra that guides you through the song with its unignorable yet steady presence. The song is sort of a soundtrack to after hours in an old industrial city in Europe and calming in a settled and slightly haunted way that such places seem to possess. Listen to “Ten Times” on Bandcamp and follow Dresden, Germany-based artist Ludwig Bauer on Instagram. Bauer’s new album 18 Studies was released on November 18, 2025.
Sylvia Black’s brooding bass lines from “Talking in Tongues” will immediately hearken the knowledgeable listener to early 80s post-punk and deathrock when the instrument drove much of that music. The wailing, distorted guitar haunts the edges of the song and in the music video the singer/songwriter/bassist is surrounded by winking stars as she dances with ritualistic, hypnotic gestures. The steady pace just adds to a sense of menace and sonic darkness and adds to the mysterious quality of a song that even if it has familiar resonances manages to be alluring and unsettling at once. Watch the video for “Talking in Tongues” on YouTube and follow Sylvia Black at the links below. Her new album Shadowtime is out January 16, 2026.
The Salt Collective formed in 2016 with songwriter and guitarist Stéphane Schück, guitarist Ken Stringfellow and lead vocalist and keyboardist Anton Barbeau. The core group was joined by bassist Fred Quentin and drummer Benoit Lautridou and released a debut album The Loneliness of Clouds in 2019. Schück had come up with an appreciation for American jangle rock and power pop and he and Quentin and Lautridou became friends during high school in Caen, Normandy, France. The trio formed a band in their college years but Schück and Quentin went onto careers in medicine and Lautridou in education. In the 2000s Schück contacted one of his musical heroes on a lark and received a letter back. Which is how he came to work with Scott Miller of acclaimed Paisley Underground-affiliated group Game Theory to produce a demo. The two would go on to co-write a few songs brfore Miller died in 2013. But Schück wasn’t done making music and when he started making music with Stringfellow of influential power pop band The Posies and former Miller associate Anton Barbeau it seemed that the songwriter had a knack for crafting songs as well in the vein of the musicians that had inspired him.
The group shrank to a trio by 2022 but by then it had begun working with The dB’s singer/guitarist Chris Stamey, bringing in another circle of the band’s influences. Stamey in turn was able to help bring aboard collaborators for recordings including the likes of Juliana Hatfield, Matthew Sweet. Mitch Easter, Richard Lloyd, Susan Cowsill and Matthew Caws. The group’s subsequent records have continued an ambitious type of pop songwriting and its latest A Brief History of Blindness (released November 21, 2025 on 12” LP, CD, digital download and straming via Propeller Sound Recordings), is a bit of a concept album about how we as humans approach the world we try to navigate as best we can. The contributors to the new album include Lynn Blakey of Let’s Active, Mike Mills (REM), Aimee Mann and Andy Partridge of XTC as well as some of the aforementioned. It is a vibrant record that expands beyond the power pop roots while honoring the level of songcraft of the group’s most obvious influences.
Listen to our interview with Stéphane Schück on Bandcamp and follow The Salt Collective at the links below.
Luke MacRoberts gives us a warped daydream of a pop song with “Don Juan.” The single from his recently released album Escapism (out November 7, 2025) begins with shifting melodies like a soap opera end credit sequence taped onto a VHS cassette that has already been taped on multiple times. Tonal lines drift, bell tones trace the edges of the song and when MacRoberts’ vocals come in they sound processed so they have an aspect of a recording slowed down. It suits musings on being in an existential crossroads with love and identity. The song hits like a super left field hip-hop and R&B song, think like something Yoni Wolf would have been involved in making. For all its bizarre sonics there is a delicacy of feeling here that ramps up in just over the last third in an impassioned pleading for something better than the diminished expectations and further the reality we’re supposed to accept as how things are. Listen to “Don Juan” on YouTube and follow Luke MacRoberts at the links provided below.
“Beaten Bloody” sounds initially like a quirky indie rock song but as the song progresses and as you take the lyrics in it’s obvious the song by Baby Grendel is weirder and darker than it is in the beginning. Near the minute twenty mark the upbeat pace feels mired in a wonderfully murky melancholia and the self-deprecation of the lyrics in the first half of the song wax into tragedy and a sense of isolation with the music brooding and noisy. But in the outro the pace picks up as though a last hurrah of pulling out of despair and clutching to a desperate hope. It is a refreshingly unpredictable song that has an element of humor but not one that downplays the whirlpool of emotions that seem to have inspired the words. It’s more or less an indiepop song in the classic vein in style but the sounds and structure more than hint at artier influences. Listen to “Beaten Bloody” on Spotify and follow Portland, Oregon’s Baby Grendel at the links below. The group’s new EP Everybody Hates Me in the House released October 10, 2025.
French post-punk band Buckaroo Banzaï released its new EP Big Trouble in Little China on October 15, 2025 thus referencing two of the great B-movies of the 1980s. The single “Lost” is infused with fuzz tone in the urgent intro that gives way to more clean tones in the middle, more introspective section as the vocals further contemplate feeling lost in isolation. The video is like a first person game going through a tunnel of images including those of records and going through the center, into eyes, into the mouth of an orangutan, images of a cathedral, an old camera, bridges and myriad of other impossible to travel through landscapes in real life but not unreachable through art and the imagination. The song seems to also contemplate finding meaning in community even though recent years have meant people have become more atomized in their everyday lives by the pandemic era and demands of economy and the ways we’ve been encouraged to relate to one another virtually. The song concludes with a spirited bit that resists the inertia of disconnection from one’s fellow humans. Musically its reminiscent of both early deathrock and International Noise Conspiracy. Watch the video for “Lost” on YouTube and follow Buckaroo Banzaï at the links below.
Rousers were a staple of the late 70s CBGB’s scene. Inspired by the likes of New York Dolls, Ramones and 1950s rock and roll, the group included vocalist Jeff Buckland, rhythm guitarist Bill Dickson, bassist John Hannah, lead guitarist Tom Milmore and drummer Jerid O’Connell. Its sound was an amalgam of punk energy and attitude and vintage rock and roll sound and knack for melodic hooks. By the end of the decade the band had been courted by Sire records yielding a 1979 demos recording session with Ed Stasium who had then recently recorded Ramones and Talking Heads. But Sire decided not to sign Rousers and the demos remaind in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Sire archives until digitized and restored in 2024. Those recordings were mixed between Bob Stander of Parchessi Studio and Ed Stasium as well. Aside from some 1981 seven inches, Rousers would have been lost to history except in the memories of those who were there to see them in their prime but the newly mixed tracks were released as 1979 Sire Session on October 14, 2024 on black and transulcent white vinyl as well as 2 CD set with bonus tracks. The 13 main tracks have a vibrant, kinetic energy and clarity of tone that is immediately striking with songwriting that makes you wonder if Rousers would have been pop radio stars had the record been released and promoted especially during a period then when retro-rock was back in vogue. The album will be made available for digital download and on streaming services other than Bandcamp in 2026.
Listen to our interview with Bill Dickson on Bandcamp and follow Rousers at the link below.
Guitars sketch in almost impressionistic fashion the textural tones at the beginning of “What I’ve Found” by Bung. The guitars fade out and re-enter as minimal figures once the vocals begin with a strong and intimate presence. Bung’s voice sounds channeled with a directness as background drones swell and cast a lingering warmth drifts and winds with the trailing guitar lines. The enigmatic lyrics about being confronted by your own limitations and your willingness to adapt to those of others feel like statements as much as observations and embody the ambiguity of the lived experience of navigating an uncertain psycho-social landscape. Fans of Julia Holter’s pop experimentalism and Joanna Newsom’s willingness to go off any folk convention may appreciate this song and the rest of Bung’s new EP Here too, where to (out November 27, 2025). Listen to “What I’ve Found” on Bandcamp and follow Bung on Instagram.
“Yearn” begins with great momentum and the vocals Mark Weatherley puts into the track while highly processed convey the aching emotions expressed. “I don’t want want to miss you like this” in the chorus sums up the mood of the song. It expresses the feeling like you do miss someone but when you feel like the relationship has ended or in significant flux leaving one or both people feeling confused and lost when that bond may be in peril. Desperate might be too strong a word but it approaches the exact energy of those moments of poignant uncertainty. The switch-up in percussion styles throughout the track is reminiscent of a mashup of early early 2000s breakbeat but the way the song is arranged it has great atmospheric resonance like a downtempo song but infused with a sense of emotional urgency. Listen to “Yearn” on Spotify and follow Mark Weatherley at the links below.
The most recent Tiberius album Troubadour was released through Audio Antihero on November 14, 2025. The record represents a benchmark in the development of Brendan Wright (they/them) as an artist and a full expression of the project as a full band. The song “Sitting” in particular showcases a sound on the album that one might describe as a kind of pastoral emo, a countrified shoegaze. The lyrics that truly sketch existential pain and an aching honesty with one’s grappling with the essential meanings and identities in life that once anchored you but which lose coherence when life seems to take you beyond what used to define you and you’re becoming comfortable with the changes even if it can seem scary at first. The guitar slides and impressionistic melodies paired with Wright’s thoughtful and passionate vocals strike the kind of mood that makes it feel okay not to have it all figured out and to have a sense of openness to what’s ahead. Listen to “Sitting” on Bandcamp and follow Tiberius at the links provided.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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