Love Spell’s new album ‘LOVE IS THE LAW’
Indie noir R&B with an old-school suitor’s heart. This album carries the devotional energy of Mazzy Star filtered through Prince. Genuinely impeccable throughout, right down to the cinematography on each song’s video.
Charli xcx’s new album ‘Music, Fashion, Film’
Out today, and already dividing opinion, we get crunchy guitars and volatile production from A.G. Cook and Finn Keane, a David Cronenberg contribution, and Charli doing what she always does: absorbing a genre until it’s fully hers and then discarding it. Her brat attitude poured into a grungy, garage-rock mould and left to ferment.
Bricknasty’s new single ‘bobinov’
The Irish crew’s creativity beams through on this one; boppy R&B rhythms and club-leaning soul, with a PS2-era animation and hallucinatory stop-motion video to match. Fab.
Greg Freeman’s new single ‘Indu’
A lovely lo-fi earworm from the Vermont indie-rocker whose ‘Burnover’ made the NYT’s best albums of 2025. It’s got bedroom-noodling Pavement-indebted guitar and a title using the Sanskrit word for moon.
The Stroke’s new album ‘Reality Awaits’
Six years since ‘The New Abnormal’ and The Strokes have come back weird. AutoTuned Julian Casablancas over broken arpeggios and ethereal synths, with the frontman’s political commentary impacted into top-shelf Strokes-core, and a closing epic called ‘Tyrants Of The Mellow Moon’ with a laser-prog guitar solo. Inscrutable, at times bizarre, occasionally brilliant. At least nobody’s playing it safe.