#the-kooks

#the-kooks

Headliners include Pulp, playing a one-night-only show in the Royal Festival Hall, mixing new material with the classics, and Scritti Politti, who'll be bringing their leftfield pop energy across two sets.

Brighton was rarely described as a scene, despite being home to Nick Cave and Paul McCartney and hothousing a surge of remarkable young talent that's still thriving more than 20 years later.

You could go anywhere in America and argue with some success for the cultural impact wrought by most of the once-subcultural stars of Lizzy Goodman's oral history of New York's post-9/11 rock scene, 'Meet Me In The Bathroom.' Or, for God's sake, Jeff Chang's history of hip-hop, 'Can't Stop Won't Stop.' But to explain this era to someone who hasn't devoted their psyche or youth to 'indie rock,' you'd need to spend a whole dinner, and maybe a few drinks afterwards, justifying why the tentpole events that 'Us v. Them' returns to multiple times in its 300-page run mean anything.

"At 2 a.m., sitting up and contemplating our loss during my child's wake, I found myself reflecting on all the major news events that had left their mark on me through the years and the helplessness I sometimes felt to change anything. Writing the last verse was the most difficult and personal thing I've done."

'Smile' is the A-side of a new 12" single, with the B-side 'Hands Up' available for digital purchase, shipping physically on May 8.

Now, more than 50 years into their career, British pub-pop legends Squeeze have rested their pints long enough to revisit Trixies (BMG), a rock opera founding members Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook wrote as teenagers before they had a record deal. In 1974. The ambition! The naivete!

The first single from the forthcoming CoSemo album is the soulful, instant classic, house track 'You Know Where To Go'. Produced by Finnian Casey it features vocals from Nick DeCoSemo and Kristina Train. Aside from Kristina's sublime singing 'You Know Where To Go' is given another, authentic analog dimension via additional Rhodes Piano and classic synth parts - provided by English Mercury Music Prize-nominee and Indie Rock legend Ed Harcourt.

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.

With our music, I particularly like to be on the extremes of things. So if it's supposed to be pretty in your face, I like to be fairly in your face. And then at the same time, if it's kind of warm and gentle, I like that to be as warm and gentle as possible. I'm interested in those juxtapositions and making those, that's how we want it to come across.

Swell Maps were a punk band, but only because that word meant something different when they started making records in 1977. It didn't mean bands called Knuckleheadz or Gimp Fist; it meant unfettered freedom, curiosity rather than rage. Theirs was a music that wandered off in unexpected directions, where songs barely hung together before falling apart, punctuated by peculiar sounds made by whatever happened to be around.

Things begin promisingly enough with the darkly powerful Going Up and All That Jazz from 1980's Crocodiles, the first of the terrific four-album run which blended psychedelia, post-punk and classic songwriting to turn the Liverpudlians into one of most hallowed bands of the decade.

London band Sorry dropped two new songs today, "Billy Elliot" and "Alone In Cologne." The former premiered on BBC 6Music this morning, and the latter was released shortly after. Listen to both, out now on Domino, below.

The band recorded the track at Abbey Road Studios as part of the new compilation HELP(2), due out March 6 on War Child Records. The record also features contributions from Big Thief, Cameron Winter, Arooj Aftab and Beck, Olivia Rodrigo, Sampha, King Krule, Depeche Mode and Black Country, New Road. The Zone Of Interest director Jonathan Glazer served as its creative director.

Wet Leg have gotten The Dare to remix "mange tout," one of the standouts from their excellent 2025 album moisturizer. When the band hit the scene, there were a lot of comparisons to the mid-'00s UK indie scene that gave us Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand, and The Dare is basically milking the whole DFA scene from the same era.

Cameron Picton, the bassist, co-vocalist, and co-songwriter of Black Midi, is back with a new band. Descriptively named My New Band Believe, the four-piece will release its self-titled debut album via Rough Trade on April 10. Listen to their debut single, " Numerology," below. A tour of North America will follow the album; check out the dates below. "Numerology" is a standalone single not featured on the album tracklist (also below); it will come as a bonus 10" with a special edition of the LP.

When he's not making proggy folk as a solo artist, Richard Dawson gets his skronk on as part of proggy new-wave art-rock group Hen Ogledd. Despite my attempts to do so in the previous sentence, the band are hard to succinctly describe: they can pivot from warm synthpop to mossy faerie folk to baggy Manchester shuffle beats to dense prog and even flashes of hip hop. Hen Ogledd are weird, but also welcoming.

"I feel like we were a different band than we were pre-pandemic," says Ryan Jarman, who along with his brothers Gary and Ross lead long-running UK band The Cribs, who just released their ninth album, Selling a Vibe. "It's been like six years since we recorded a record. We weren't sure what we were going to do. We weren't entirely sure how the band was going to move forward.

Holly Humberstone has mapped out a 2026 North American tour. The new dates take place around Humberstone's upcoming festival appearances at All Things Go Toronto on June 6th, Governors Ball on June 7th, and Bonnaroo on June 13th. Billed as the "Cruel World" tour, the run arrives in support of Humberstone's upcoming sophomore album of the same name, out on April 10th.