Three recommended albums for 12.6.2026 from Upupayama, Øresund Space Collective and Phantom Logic, plus my May Doom Charts list.
Last month I mostly listened to... for 2026.05. A list of very high importance!
The songs simply had to come out. Annie Taylor recorded their third album between the band’s U.S. tour and a run of European shows. In keeping with its title, Out of Scale’s songs are characterized by intense emotions, chaotic relationships and big dreams. At times we can hear singer Gini Jungi’s suffering. All the hurt […]
The Nashville, TN-based rock outfit All Them Witches almost called it quits in 2024 when drummer and founding member Robby Staebler left, but the group recalibrated, bringing on their friend Christian Powers to man the kit. This lineup change reinvigorated the collective and put them on the path to develop their newest offering House of […]
In the 1990s, during Japan’s second psychedelic revolution, three players with an insatiable appetite for epic aural freakouts were working overtime together in two simultaneous supergroup trios. When they weren’t busy with their regular bands, High Rise bassist Nanjo Asahito, Acid Mothers Temple guitarist Makoto Kawabata, and Ruins drummer Tatsuya Yoshida constituted both Musica Transonic […]
“What strikes me again, even now, is that rock from the late ’60s through the early ’70s remains the most compelling – whether Western or Japanese. In the mid-1960s, British groups like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones swept across the globe, while in the United States Bob Dylan famously swapped his folk guitar for […]
The Asteroid No.4 return in 2026 with In Praise of Shadows, their thirteenth full length album and a statement release that reaffirms the band’s enduring place within the modern psychedelic underground. In Praise of Shadows captures The Asteroid No.4 at their most focused and assured, leaning fully into the shoegaze sound for which they are […]
Quando uma banda abandona o que a tornou grande, costuma perder-se. Os AMORPHIS encontraram-se. Havia algo de inevitável no que os AMORPHIS fizeram em 1996. Quem tivesse ouvido com atenção os últimos minutos do incontornável «Tales From The Thousand Lakes» — aquele esmorecimento gradual, quase contemplativo, que encerra o disco — talvez tivesse pressentido que o passo seguinte não seria uma…
During the late ’70s, the beginnings of a wave of music heavily inspired by the garage rock and psychedelia of the 1960s began to swell. Chalk it up to many factors — the availability of a number of reissues, especially the Pebbles series, a disillusionment with the restrictive rules of punk rock, the passage of […]
Alan Bishop’s latest album seems at first like a showcase of his music at its most rocking. But it’s also steeped in psych, folk, and desert blues, making good on Sun City Girls’ exploratory rep. The long career of Arizona’s trio Sun City Girls went in every direction you could imagine, and many you probably […]
Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow is the second album from funk innovators Funkadelic. Arriving in 1970 mere months after their trailblazing debut, the record saw the band honing their songcraft, while still allowing plenty of space for mind-bending exploratory jams. The album’s origin story famously involved a single marathon session on LSD. It […]
…features a brand new remaster of the original album an additional CD of rare live recordings from 1970 from Dave Brock’s archives along with with seven bonus tracks drawn from a 1969 demo session, both sides of the ‘Hurry On Sundown’ single and a studio out-take and new stereo mixes of the album by Stephen […]
Consistency and continuity are what make the backbone of Water Damage. The Austin-based psych/drone-rock collective consists of noise rock veterans and experimental musicians from bands like Marriage, Expensive Shit, USA/Mexico, Black Eyes and Swans, some of whom are in their third decade. Water Damage functions more as a commune with variable line-ups from five to […]
Featuring new member Simon House on synths and violin, and following the departure of Robert Calvert and electronic effects man Dik Mik, Hall of the Mountain Grill feels like something of an interim album for Hawkwind. Despite their cosmic pretensions, they were wary of the commercial success they had enjoyed with 1973’s Space Ritual and […]
Khruangbin did not know if they were actually making an album. All they knew in the first frigid days of 2025, as they shivered in the Central Texas barn where they’ve recorded almost all of their music, was that the 10th anniversary of their debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was steadily approaching. Months earlier, […]
For the vast majority of the recorded output under his Plankton Wat pseudonym across well over two decades, Dewey Mahood has operated as a solitary sculptor. Yet, in more recent years, guest accomplices have been drafted-in to subtly contribute sonic parts or to help technically refine the end products, most notably on 2021’s tremendous wider-screen […]
When Iggy Pop sang “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” on The Stooges’ 1973 swan song Raw Power, he anticipated the anti-romantic punk era nihilism that was to see future Brexit fan John Lydon describe love as “two minutes and fifty-two seconds of squelching noises.” Fifty three years later Bristol’s immortal space-garage psychonauts The […]
Bright Spirit marks the third instalment in a trilogy that began with The Universe Also Collapses (2019) and continued with Unending Ascending (2023). Recorded with long-time collaborator Frank Byng in his South London studio, Bright Spirit sees Gong at their experimental best, more adventurous and more open to the dream than ever. And dreams are […]
This latest salvo from the PDX cosmic outfit is a continuous rush, its multi-guitar onslaught striving towards anthemic, psychedelic motion, its giant drum (a marching band’s bass drum turned onto its side) pounding in ritual, magic exultation. You can still experience the spreading, unbound serenity of past releases — “Walker’s Dead Birds” is, at its […]
A companion piece to the album, Right Now!, this collection contains additional recordings from those sessions, as well as Tchad Blake remixes and reworkings of songs from Right Now! All recordings, except for “Reap What You Sow,” have never been released. The psychedelic supergroup featuring Dave Alvin, Victor Krummenacher, David Immerglück, Michael Jerome, and Jesse […]
Bloody Head have been lurking at the fringes for some ten years now, occupying a greasy, hard-to-clean crevice where noise-rock and psychedelia begin to intermingle. In this time they’ve tottered, threatened, collapsed and cajoled, their unexpected incursions akin to having a mysterious, slightly cracked ‘character’ glom onto you at the pub. Like said pub weirdo, […]
In January 2021, unassuming clubbers looking for a Saturday night out at Taipei’s FINAL might’ve been surprised to encounter Taiwanese drone-doom duo Scattered Purgatory flooding the room with noise, in what was billed as their last performance. Yet the duo had already been toying with the boundary between the city’s rock and electronic scenes; guitarist […]
“Hypnosis Tapes” opens with a vacuum cleaner played in reverse — an inside joke, apparently — before the fuzzy guitars and humming synths layer in, stacking blips and pockets of sound until you realize you’ve stopped paying attention to anything else. Mute Swan named the opening track appropriately. It immediately puts you into a trance. […]
The newest offering from the Fremantle, Australia-based GUM is a swirling collection of psych-pop as Jay Watson (Pond, Tame Impala) lets layers of synths and effect-laden guitars wash over the listener throughout Blue Gum Way. Watson’s last offering as GUM found him partnering with Amborse-Smith Kenny (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Murlocs) for the more swaggering, […]
France’s near-revolution of May ’68 kicked the country’s small but vibrant counter-culture into overdrive and birthed a local underground music scene. The bands it spawned made music with far less rock purity than groups from the UK and US – their influences foregrounded improvisation, disjunction and genre-blending: Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, free jazz […]
Motorpsycho has always been of the opinion that the most interesting stuff happens in any art form before it is formatted and settled. In rock music, this phenomenon peaked in and around 1970, and it is in this period that the best heavy music was made, simply because the rules weren’t set, there were no […]
Berlin’s experimental trio Zahn returns with their most electrifying work yet. A lush fusion of heaviness, electronics, and hallucinatory color. Monolithic grooves meet synthetic shimmer. Purpur breathes tension and danger, pulsing with depth and density. Known for their intense, driving sound that echoes the relentless march of a world on the edge, the trio Zahn […]
Welcome to the Civilised World drags the dusty 1960s desert sound into the modern age- a hazy, sun-cracked journey through Americana and psych. Ghostwoman prove that guitar bands still have plenty of noise left to make. A title to take with a pinch of salt, Ghostwoman make music that does not sound like music made […]
If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation. But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big […]
As opening statements go, you can’t get much more gloriously emphatic than ‘Diyanye Ko’ which kicks off the fourth album from California-based African psych-rockers Orchestra Gold. The hypnotic Bambara vocals of Mariam Diakite soar dramatically, Erich Huffaker peels off cosmic guitar licks like a cross between Jefferson Airplane’s Jorma Kaukonen and Mali’s Lobi Traoré. The […]