#indie-rock

#indie-rock

Roses serves as Widowspeak's seventh album and their first in four years following 2022's The duo, comprised of married couple Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas, also welcomed their first child in between albums. The new project was inspired by the minutiae of daily life, the significance of the insignificant, and everyday rituals.

Indie veterans of Montreal have announced an expansive 2026 North America tour set for June through August. Cormae and Sloppy Jane will serve as openers on select dates for the Kevin Barnes-led band. Spanning 36 dates, the summer run kicks off on June 19th in Athens, Georgia, with subsequent stops in major cities including New York City, Chicago, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.

Working in the vein of "laptop twee" acts like friends& and Worldpeace DMT, who fuse the genre-smashing maximalism promised by hyperpop with the whimsical optimism of '00s buzz bands, the material on their 2025 album Shy at first is as dense and dynamic as the songs you try to compose in your imagination.

Like many of the project's lyrics, it's less of a command to the audience as it is self-directed. Styles knows there's no catharsis without immersion, and on his new album, he is in desperate need of release. That release arrives most powerfully on tracks like "Season 2 Weight Loss," where a frenetic breakbeat gives way to something raw and urgent, or "Pop," where the rush of new love tips into near-panic.

West builds most of the songs around a single repeated chord, strummed high up on the neck. Her band populates the arrangement with everything else she needs-bass licks, chord changes, dynamic surges-while West sends her voice into the song's darkened corners and curls her mind around whichever odd idea grips her.

The first, "JCMF," is a rebellious song about Jesus punishing those who are cruel and helping the children upon his return, while the second single, "No More Darkness," calls for a return to the light and a pursuit of goodness. In a press release, Sparhawk explained that "JCMF" is an older track that he's played on the road for the past year.

"Butterfly is the spring thaw after Beast," they say. "Country fair rides, angels and pixies, talismans, an impulsive fling in a small town, coyotes, fawns - we wanted to contrast the wintry rock of Beast and take listeners on a sonic road trip of different perspectives and in-between places." They've shared a new single, "Worry Angel," where Fraser and Reid's voices intertwine around each other in sinuous harmonies.

The work behind "Waiting for You" by Monotronic spanned two years and several geographic mindsets. Its songs were built in the contained spaces of an East Village apartment and the open humidity of Tulum, initially seeming like disparate projects with no clear direction. Only in retrospect did their shared disposition come into focus. This is an album about the slow work of self-knowledge, which here looks less like an epiphany and more like the gradual acceptance of a particular signal,

In a statement, frontman Ben Gibbard said the band is "thrilled to be joining the roster at Anti- which includes some of our favorite artists, old friends and in many cases, both." Atlantic signed Death Cab away from Barsuk in 2004 off the strength of the band's first four albums, including their 2003 mainstream breakout Transatlanticism. The group went on to release six albums with the label, starting with 2005's and ending with their most recent album, 2022's Asphalt Meadows.

Not only does the track show off Anjimile's lush, patient vocals, it's got a pretty fascinating rhythmic structure; his drummer offsets the groove when they arrive at the chorus, almost like the song gets caught between moving too fast and too slow. That momentum really ramps up in the final refrain, complete with some guitar shredding and open hi-hat smashing. It's a great demonstration of Anjimile's tasteful ear and his ability to match a song's subject with its instrumentation.

After wrapping up their recent massive tour, the Beths are itching to get back on the road; the indie-rock band just announced plans to headline the United States this summer. Check out the complete list of stops below. The Beths previously shared 2026 performance dates in Japan and New Zealand. Once those legs finish, the group will fly across the globe to bring Straight Line Was a Lie, their 2025 album, back to the States for a few festival sets and headlining concerts.

"It's really just a dumb song, isn't it?" Jansson said about the track in a press release. "A dumb guitar riff, dumb lyrics and a dumb beat, and we love it just the way it is. I have no idea where the inspiration behind the lyrics came from, I have no relationship to switchboard operators and they haven't been around since before I was born. But wouldn't it be fun if they were still around and they sounded really hot over the phone?"