R.M. Hendrix’ latest offering entitled YUKS is one that mutates genres as fluidly as it deconstructs meaning. Recorded in Iceland with producer Valgeir Sigurðsson (known for his work with Ben Frost, Björk, and Isabelle Lewis), the record channels dream pop, trip-hop, ambient noise, and experimental electronica into a dense, politically charged suite. It’s an album that feels equally composed and volatile—lyrical one moment, violently abstract the next.

The record opens with “The Yellow Dwarf Sleeps but the Judge Never Does,” a brooding, dissonant overture that evokes the icy dread of Tim Hecker. From there, “Heat Surrounds the Hive” heads across a hazy atmosphere before snapping into a head-nodding rhythm—a tension between beauty and decay. The production is hypnotic, recalling the dark majesty of Massive Attack and Portishead without ever feeling derivative. YUKS’ vocals arrive like coded transmissions: cryptic, cool, and eerily human.

“Thing Fellow” pulses with a subterranean energy, built around mutating electronics that feel like they’re breathing from inside a hive. It’s claustrophobic, immersive, and deeply tactile. “Moderate Rain Warning” shifts that energy into something even more alien—horns cut through the fog like distress signals from a distant spacecraft, eventually giving way to “Murder of Crows,” one of the album’s most gripping moments. Here, YUKS leans fully into trip-hop, but filters it through an industrial lens, sharpening each beat until it feels like it might shatter.

“Sniper Cert” is perhaps the album’s most unhinged descent. Whispered vocals, typewriter clatter, and menacing textures coalesce into something that blurs the line between musique concrète and psychological horror. It’s genuinely unsettling, even within an album that rarely offers comfort.

Later, “The Cult That Eats the World” draws from the smeared guitar atmospherics of Fennesz, wrapping warped melodies around seismic synths. “What Do Boys Become?” is a standout—a bruised dance track with soaring synths and some of the album’s most memorable hooks. It’s an emotional pivot point that still maintains the underlying sense of tension.

“I Scratched My Blood” plays like a score to a film that doesn’t exist yet. It's cinematic, shapeless, and quietly threatening. The closer, “Will the Sun Rise?”, emerges from the wreckage with an unexpected sense of beauty, reminiscent of Fennesz’s Glide, but with a bruised optimism that feels hard-earned.

This is might not be an easy listen for some, but it’s a fascinating one for those who enjoy darker experimentation. YUKS is an album that navigates environmental collapse, disinformation, and emotional entropy through meticulously constructed sound. For listeners drawn to the tension between chaos and control, this is essential listening.

Dino DiMuro’s music has often been labeled with the kind of taglines that sound like dares: “Walt Disney on Acid,” a namecheck away from the far corners of Zappa and Beefheart’s sonic playground. But while those references track—especially in his penchant for satire, structural chaos, and tonal whiplash—they only scratch the surface. DiMuro’s latest release, MACHINE, is a twitchy, homespun patchwork of drum machines, loops, and off-kilter samples that somehow makes room for both sci-fi paranoia and cartoon absurdism.

Built around the mechanical pulse of vintage rhythm boxes and cut-and-paste textures, MACHINE finds DiMuro leaning into the unnatural. The album opens with “The Black Orchestra Part One,” a skeletal introduction that functions more like a test pattern than a proper song—beats snap and stutter in the void, daring you to keep listening. “A Certain Starchiness In His Speech” follows, playing like a warped Peanuts theme left to decompose in a malfunctioning tape deck—jazzy, dissonant, and totally destabilized.

Then there’s “Elmwood’s Irish Trip,” a mutant folk sketch that veers gleefully into Zappa-esque territory, its lopsided charm riding atop fragmented instrumentation and dadaist detours. “The Charming Man,” full of absurd vocal delivery and surreal lyrical jabs, sounds like a lounge singer glitching out mid-performance. Comedy becomes a recurring motif: “Makin’ Fun of Everyone” delivers pure camp through over-the-top vocals and chaotic instrumentation that borders on musical theater for the deranged.

Still, amid all the noise and goofiness, MACHINE lands some surprisingly emotional punches. “Grandpa’s Dark Drawers” and “Skip’s Aquarium” explore grooves and guitar lines with more introspective undertones—the latter being one of the album’s most resonant and conventionally “beautiful” moments. It's a welcome detour, proof that DiMuro’s not just playing mad scientist for its own sake.

Elsewhere, MACHINE spirals. The title track morphs into something queasy and sinister, like getting stuck inside a dying arcade game. “Sad Ronald’s Christmas Packet” teeters between whimsy and dread, while “You’re Pushing Me Into the Arms of the Print Sisters” drags us back to the edge of DiMuro’s Zappa zone. “Circuitree” feels like a B-movie synth score left unfinished on purpose, and “Assells Dub Guitar” closes things out in full meltdown mode—a vision of Las Vegas as imagined from the bottom of a bad trip.

Despite its name, MACHINE is far from cold. DiMuro’s command of texture, structure, and personality makes the record feel oddly human—even when it’s melting. It’s not just a collection of beats and jokes. Beneath the sarcasm and sonic splatter lies a real sense of play, precision, and emotional variance. The drums may be programmed, but the weirdness is entirely alive.

Yvonne Lyon and Boo Hewerdine’s *Things Found In Books* is rooted in quiet observation, drawing inspiration from the overlooked corners of everyday life. The album takes its cues from a notice board in Culzean Castle’s second-hand bookshop, where a collage of found objects—postcards, receipts, letters, and photographs—documents the lives of strangers with startling intimacy. Rather than inventing stories from scratch, Lyon and Hewerdine listen closely to what’s already there.

The collaboration between the two songwriters feels intuitive and unforced. Their voices blend and diverge with natural grace, while the instrumentation—acoustic guitars, piano, accordion, orchestral strings—stays grounded in the tactile and the human. The production favors atmosphere over excess, creating space for the songs to unfold at their own pace.

There’s a quiet exuberance to tracks like “Marion and Sydney,” and “Viennese Horses” stands out as a peculiar gem, full of stately movement and unexpected charm. Elsewhere, the mood shifts into more fragile terrain—“Down By The Harbour” is a hushed reflection on loss, memory, and the ache of things left unsaid.

Things Found In Books feels timeless not because it tries to be, but because it taps into something elemental: the power of small stories to carry weight. It’s a record made with care, and it invites the same from its listener.

The Only Way Is Through, the debut album from Nick Bellerose, plants itself firmly in the quiet soil of introspective folk, unspooling eight understated songs that linger in the air like the final traces of a memory. It’s a record that resists urgency, choosing instead to move with the solemn pace of emotional recovery. Bellerose leans into a classic singer/songwriter mode—equal parts confessional and pastoral—with arrangements that rarely stretch beyond acoustic guitar, ambient textures, and the occasional harmonica. But within that restraint, there’s a gentle power.

The opener, “Our Love Is Gone,” sets the tone with stark, echoing acoustic strums and a vocal performance that feels more like a conversation with oneself than an attempt to impress. The harmonies arrive like ghostly afterthoughts—easy to miss, but rewarding in their subtlety. It’s a song about acceptance, but not quite peace.

“I’m Going Through” follows in a similar emotional key, but lets a sliver of light in through the cracks. The lyrics still sit heavy in the chest, but there’s a forward motion here, as if searching for something just out of reach. “Hold Me” channels Lower East Side ‘60s folk with striking clarity—a harmonica-laced lament that evokes early Dylan without tipping into imitation. There’s a weathered romanticism to it, bohemian but grounded.

“Walk Like a Man” plays like a sigh from the past, and “That Night”—arguably the album’s centerpiece—wraps its melody in just the right amount of reverb, making every note feel like it’s echoing through a canyon of longing. Even the slight rhythmic pulse of “Every Time” feels like a major event in the album’s hushed emotional ecosystem. It’s not bold, but it doesn’t need to be—Bellerose’s voice and melodic instincts do most of the heavy lifting.

“Camila” returns to the album’s preferred mode of tender despondency, a quiet sketch of possible unrequited love, while “Since I Laid My Eyes On You” closes the album with a restrained touch of keys, offering a muted sense of closure.

The Only Way Is Through rarely shifts gear, but that’s part of its quiet conviction. It stays planted in a singular emotional frequency, content to whisper rather than shout. You won’t blast this album at a party or take it on a run, but when the world gets too loud, it’s the kind of record that knows how to sit with you in the silence.

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Maryse Smith is an artist who recently released "635." Recorded over a fleeting three-day session in Burlington, Vermont, just before the 2024 total solar eclipse, “635” emerges from the haze of a short-lived, loosely knit trio—an ostensibly under-rehearsed constellation of players whose chemistry feels less deliberate than divined.

​Produced by Benny Yurco at Little Jamaica Studios, the track is part of a larger collection steeped in impermanence: a document of trying again, of tracing the tangled circuitry of life as it doubles back on itself, of aging, shifting, and remaining stubbornly the same.

“635” is the kind of song that gets under your skin before you realize it. There’s an immediate charm to its gentle sway—an off-kilter sweetness that recalls the understated gravity of Big Thief or the diary-like candor of Frankie Cosmos. It’s an unassuming track, but the mood is quietly infectious: slightly askew, a little melancholic, but carried by a warm undercurrent of hope.

Every element falls into place with a natural ease, giving the song a lived-in brightness, like a half-remembered day that still somehow matters. There’s a looseness to the performance that never drifts into sloppiness, a kind of raw clarity that makes the emotions feel raw, organic and realized. It’s the sound of a moment that wasn’t supposed to last, somehow echoing long after it’s gone.

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Frida NOVA’s REBIRTH plays like a transmission from parallel timelines—each track tuning into a different frequency of her artistic identity. The Swedish artist’s self-produced album spans soul, electropop, club rhythms, ambient drift, jazz, and folk, creating a shape-shifting collage that feels both intimate and unbound. It’s a deliberate tilt toward pop, but one that refuses to sacrifice nuance or emotional depth for immediacy. Rather than chase cohesion, NOVA leans into multiplicity—crafting a record that doesn't settle into one genre. It finds new ways to move between them.

“Lifetime” sets the pulse early with crisp electronic percussion and bright guitar stabs, launching into an uptempo club groove that’s tightly constructed but leaves room for her vocal presence to breathe. NOVA’s voice sits confidently above the shimmer, not overpowering the production but guiding it with poise. Then comes “Base Camp,” a full stylistic pivot—grounded in live bass, keys, and guitar, it strips away the digital gloss in favor of something more tactile and organic. Two tracks in, and REBIRTH has already dismantled any expectation of predictability.

From there, the album moves like weather through moods and styles. “The Healing Mountain” leans into New Age atmospherics with airy synths and layered arpeggios that carry both sorrow and uplift. “Still Believers” channels a kind of 1970s folk nostalgia, all dusky warmth and wistful melodic turns, while “Rainbow” pulses back into club-pop with renewed energy and a buoyant sense of rhythm. “Syzygy” injects the album with jazz horns and Latin percussion, giving it a vibrant, festival-like energy. “Unexpected” dials things down with moonlit restraint—what you might call lounge jazz on an alien planet.

“Lyfja” occupies a liminal space where pop structure intersects with jazz harmony, nodding to NOVA’s more experimental instincts without losing its accessibility. The closer, “Away From Darkness,” lands gently but with purpose—a silken, R&B-tinged farewell that’s as lush as it is emotionally resonant.

REBIRTH's refusal to commit to a single musical identity is impressive. The album often feels like a museum of selves, each track inhabiting its own distinct wing. But there’s a quiet thrill in that variety. NOVA builds a world where genre isn’t a boundary but a palette. REBIRTH might not leave you with a single defining sound, but it leaves you with plenty to return to—each listen revealing new corners, new textures, new echoes of a voice still in bloom.

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​Farbod’s “Brother” begins in near-solitude—just a few piano chords and his baritone voice, which carries the weight of restraint like a man standing in the eye of a storm. It’s a deceptively simple introduction, almost monastic in its minimalism, but there’s an undercurrent of something much larger stirring beneath the surface.

Based in San Francisco but drawing from a wide-ranging palette—think the spiritual grit of Hozier, the earth-rooted mysticism of Xavier Rudd, and the melodic sensitivity of Chopin—Farbod threads together organic and electronic textures with remarkable control. When the beat arrives—a steady, pulsing 4/4—it doesn’t disrupt the atmosphere so much as deepen it. Guitar lines curl like smoke, while orchestral strings creep in with a cinematic, almost haunted elegance.

The track’s midpoint is where things rupture. A brief breakdown gives way to a more expansive second act—Farbod’s voice climbs an octave, the percussion grows insistent, and the previously restrained arrangement begins to swell with choral firepower courtesy of a Gospel Choir from London. By the final stretch, “Brother” becomes something sprawling and elemental. It doesn’t just build; it ascends, pushing its own emotional threshold until it reaches a kind of sacred fever pitch.  

It’s a song about connection, yes, but also about reckoning—spiritual, personal, ancestral. In “Brother,” Farbod blurs the line between the intimate and the mythic, and the result feels like a hymn for something long lost and suddenly remembered.

Jenny Maybee’s “Love Let Me In” opens like a slow sunrise—reverb-soaked guitar and softly struck keys stretch out beneath a steady, understated rhythm, laying the groundwork for something more devotional than simply romantic. Maybee channels the sacred and the secular in equal measure, drawing on the gospel tradition not just as an aesthetic choice but as emotional scaffolding. You can hear the ghosts of Aretha and Whitney in her delivery, not in imitation but in reverence.  

The song builds patiently, almost cautiously, before swelling into a full-bodied declaration. Maybee’s voice—clear, aching, and unafraid—cuts through the arrangement like a flare. Her collaborators, including Isha The Mad Scientist, Nick Carico, and Larry Batiste, flesh out the production with a rich choir that doesn’t just support her but lifts her up. The choral section, pure gospel in spirit, feels like a cathartic release: a moment of transcendence that’s less about spectacle and more about spiritual exhale.  

“Love Let Me In” is a song about surrender—not to doctrine, but to feeling. It flirts with the language of worship but keeps its feet planted firmly in the terrain of human longing. It’s a love song, yes, but in Maybee’s hands, it becomes something bigger: a plea, a prayer, a quietly thunderous affirmation that some kinds of devotion don’t need to be explained.

​Ooberfuse's “We Will Overcome” arrives not just as a song, but as a direct response to a political rupture with devastating human consequences. After the Trump administration gutted key USAID programs—many of which supported efforts to rescue and rehabilitate children exploited by traffickers, abusive families, and even U.S. servicemen—British-Filipino duo Ooberfuse partnered with the People’s Recovery, Empowerment and Development Assistance Foundation (PREDA) in the Philippines. The result is a music project that functions less as protest anthem and more as a global call to attention, built in collaboration with PREDA founder and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Father Shay Cullen.

Musically, “We Will Overcome” floats along on a breezy reggae pulse, with breathy vocals and a gentle optimism that recalls the socially conscious lightness of mid-era Bob Marley or even early-'70s Lennon.

​The lyrics are uncomplicated, almost mantra-like in their clarity—there’s no metaphor to decode, no irony to wade through. It’s a straightforward expression of resilience and collective strength, the kind of message that’s been repurposed across decades but still holds weight in the right context.

The video leans into the communal spirit, showcasing a range of voices and faces that bring the message into sharper focus. Toward the end, a spoken-word appearance by Father Cullen grounds the track in its true purpose: raising awareness for the children and communities PREDA serves. “We Will Overcome” may not be sonically groundbreaking, but that’s beside the point. It’s a vessel—one that carries the weight of real lives, real urgency, and a quiet kind of hope.

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Over the past decade, Georgian composer Tornike Tabatadze—who records under the name Sizmara—has quietly carved out a niche at the intersection of ambient minimalism and classical introspection.

​A self-taught musician with a reverence for the quiet grandeur of nature, Sizmara builds his pieces with the patience of someone who’s learned to find resonance in stillness. His latest offering, “Mimosa,” is no exception: a weightless, gently glowing track that opens like a curtain drawn slowly to let in morning light.

“Mimosa” begins with a sustained ambient drone that hovers in the air like mist. Each piano note arrives like a soft footstep in freshly fallen snow—measured, warm, and unhurried. But it's not just the notes themselves that matter; it’s the space around them. The silences are charged, like the brief pause between inhaling and exhaling. When paired with the delicate undercurrent of synth pads and faint strings, the effect is something close to emotional hydrotherapy: calming, cleansing, and necessary.

Sizmara isn’t interested in crescendos or catharsis. “Mimosa” is more like a long exhale, a meditative drift into someplace untouched by urgency. If you find yourself looking for salvation —something to listen to when the world feels too much—this is it.

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