Blue Tomorrows strikes a bittersweet note on “Santa Cruz.” Somewhere betwixt the tone of a countrified Marianne Faithfull on “Witches’ Song” and Low doing a Christmas song, the band employs an electronic bass line with a touch of phaser, light, almost shimmery acoustic guitar and vocals processed to sound both tender and otherworldly to great effect. The music video shows snow-laden trees the kind one isn’t likely to find in Santa Cruz, California but the warmly luminous melodies and wistful evocation of more pleasant memories to chase away the heartfelt melancholia paired with this imagery seems fitting. The song ends with our narrator finding a way to laugh again after a period of working through heartache and really feeling those lows as the only path to get through an emotionally rough patch intact. Watch the video for “Santa Cruz” on YouTube and follow Blue Tomorrows at the links below. The new album Weather Forever released December 12, 2025.
An enigmatic yet warm drone brings us into meekmoss’ “modest” before minimal guitar and percussion joins vocals in an impressionistic dynamic until the song opens up like a rapidly developing dawn. This is a pattern in the song that reflects its themes of the recurring patterns and rituals in one’s life that whether we think about them or not keep our lives going and sustainable. Sure there are moments of great action color, drama, intensity and deeply meaningful experiences but all are connected by quieter moments that whether or not we appreciate them or notice make the big events we get to experience possible. The song meditates on that interconnecting time and activity that seems manageable and an awareness of these times and how important they are to our very existence. The line “And daily routine keeps me alive” is so simple but anyone that has had to deal with health issues knows that regular activities and rituals can be critical to keeping one’s life going and on an even keel so that those things that count as significant events can be engaged in with our full selves. The song balances the line between folk and experimental electronic pop and between texture, tone and rhythm perfectly without seeming effort in parallel with the need for awareness of small details that don’t always get our full, conscious focus. Listen to “modest” on Spotify and follow German Folktronica group meekmoss at the links provided.
“I Was Ill, You Were Wrong” by Canadian post-punk band TRAITRS has the hazy synth melodies underneath highly emotive vocals and driving rhythms one might expect out of early 80s The Cure. The heartwrenching vocals express the feelings of someone who has been on the receiving end of what feels like an especially spate of lack of empathy. It is the sound of someone profoundly hurt and disappointed yet sympathetic to the pain and misfortune that resulted in a situation in which people connected are split because bad habits are unbanished by affection. Listen to “I Was Ill, You Were Wrong” on YouTube and follow TRAITRS at the links below. The band’s new album POSSESSOR releases March 13, 2026 on vinyl, digital download and streaming.
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.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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