Sunny Day Real Estate Reread Their Diary Mdou Moctar – Funeral For Justice Matador Records Mdou Moctar’s 2021 album, Afrique Victime, marked a crucial breakthrough for the acclaimed Nigerien guitarist. His trademark fusion of Tuareg music and modern psych-rock resonated with the English-speaking world, demonstrating a gradual yet continuous opening up to new sounds and cultures. More from Spin: Jessica Pratt Wants to Take You to the Hidden Realm 5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: Nicole Row of Incubus Sunny Day Real Estate Reread Their Diary This was confirmed by extensive European and Nor ..read more

Dismemberment Plan, Cap'n Jazz Reuniting For Best Friends Forever Sunny Day Real Estate – Diary—Live at London Bridge Studio “Novum Vetus,” the title of the only new-to-you song on Diary—Live at London Bridge Studio, roughly translates from the Latin for “new old.” Which is a good way to approach this project: Sunny Day Real Estate rerecording their 1994 debut at the legendary Seattle-area facility where Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam tracked their early work.  In recent years, the touring industry has milked a cash cow of bands playing classic records in full, but Sunny D ..read more

Watch Calexico and Iron & Wine's Tiny Desk Concert Iron & Wine – Light Verse Sub Pop It would be taking things too far to categorize Light Verse as a “post-pandemic” album. Yet its emergent themes resonate with that time’s corollary yearning for hope and community amid profound loneliness. Timeless as that territory may be, there’s poignancy in this being the first full-length Iron & Wine solo album since 2017’s Beast Epic. Throughout the 10-track record, singer-songwriter Sam Beam erects a push-pull emotional dynamic, a desire to remain optimistic in the face of a society that m ..read more

Beyond The Sea Maybe there’s some irony in the fact that the first time Jon Muq ever flew on an airplane, his destination was a cruise ship that would take him on a months-long journey at sea. The Ugandan artist, whose debut album, FLYING AWAY (Easy Eye Sound) is out on May 31, has never let the endpoint confine the journey.  “I just do things without a rule,” the 31-year-old says, sitting in a small bar area in the back lobby of the historic Blue Moon Hotel on New York’s Lower East Side. “Because the rule creates the boundary for you. And the boundary creates a style.”  The point ..read more

Brittany Davis on New Album Image Issues and Navigating a Visual World Kamasi Washington – Fearless MovementYoung You can argue about the various ways Kamasi Washington has impacted jazz culture, but one thing is undeniable: Compared to the prolificacy that has defined most important jazz musicians’ discographies, his pace and scale are positively Kubrick-ian.  More from Spin: Chaos Theory: How Justice Shattered Their Six-Year Silence in Style The Smashing Pumpkins Reveal Kiki Wong As New Guitarist Brittany Davis on New Album Image Issues and Navigating a Visual World Running almost 90 ..read more

Our Editors Pick Their Albums of the Year Mandy, Indiana don’t get around as much as they’d like. They’re a noise band out of Manchester, England, and it’s where they spend most of their days working real jobs between live gigs while letting their songs of distortion, electronics and a searing, often frantic energy do the traveling. “We don’t play all that much,” says guitarist and songwriter Scott Fair, at the moment sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the band in a trailer at the Coachella festival in Indio, Ca. They played about 30 dates in 2023, spread out over a year of one-off festivals a ..read more

The Smile Debut Paul Thomas Anderson Video, Tease More New Music Thom Yorke – Confidenza OST XL Recordings Thom Yorke’s latest soundtrack opens with “The Big City,” an electro-symphonic slumber of synth bleeps and vocal blips. The album ends with “On the Ledge,” which evokes the sublime nightmare of a free-jazz brass band strutting down a portal into hell. If you could time travel back to the strained, exploratory sessions for Kid A and Amnesiac—his Big Swing albums with Radiohead, where he led his bandmates into dark corridors of sampling, vocal processing, modular synths, and krautrock ..read more

Brittany Davis on New Album Image Issues and Navigating a Visual World Hovvdy – Hovvdy Arts & Crafts The songs from Hovvdy, Texas natives Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, lead with their heart. It doesn’t matter if it’s inconvenient or unpolished—life’s too precarious to live any other way. And that approach has led them to their definitive work: their self-titled fifth album.  On “Give It Up,” Martin recalls a tender pep-talk: “‘It’s all in your heart’ / You say, ‘Don’t doubt it, boy / Don’t you know life’s too short?’” The track continues to blossom, each new instrument popping up ..read more

Where to Next, Charley Crockett? Charley Crockett – $10 Cowboy Son of Davy/Thirty Tigers There’s always someone who’s shit out of luck in Charley Crockett’s songs, but the desperation is especially palpable on $10 Cowboy, his 13th studio album in nine years.  He populates these songs with the usual assortment of ramblers and gamblers, roustabouts and rounders, but these hard-livin’ folks have been hardened by the empty promises of American life in the 2020s. On the Bakersfield-style two-stepper “Ain’t Done Losing Yet,” a woman holding court at a roulette table tells Crockett, “I ain’t ..read more

Sam Barber Is in Go-Mode He’s opened shows for Bruce Springsteen and Ed Sheeran, has been compared to one of his heroes, Zach Bryan, and somehow made it out of a town of roughly 200 people to get to this thrilling moment in his career. But burgeoning country artist Sam Barber, who this week will appear at Stagecoach, remains a bit uncomfortable with his current position in his career. Sitting in Minneapolis venue Fine Line’s basement, the 21-year-old Missouri-bred singer-songwriter admits it’s not uncommon for him to still bask in self-doubt. “I still get in my head like ‘Maybe all this isn’t ..read more