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Sounds

A collection of 116 issues

Power Is a Daily Need

The Boo Radleys and the Voltage Outside Last year I wrote about “Lazarus,” a kaleidoscopic milestone in the sizable songbook of a UK indie band whom few now remember. I described it as a song about discernment. The door is unlocked; you can go out; you choose not to. I

Has Anyone Seen the Bridge?

"Sara" is playing in a Starbucks. Six minutes of Stevie Nicks twirling, 1979 piped into 2026, background music for laptops and lattes. The song has become wallpaper—not because it stopped being good, but because that's what survival looks like now. The elongating tail of pop&

Following the Thread (Backwards)

It started innocently enough, the way these things often do: Slayer's Seasons in the Abyss, put on after a long absence, and a technical question that hadn’t mattered the first time around. How clean the separation was between rhythm and lead. How intentional the overdubs seemed. And

Pitch-Slapped

The Bureaucratization of Aesthetics The story we tell about cultural flattening usually starts with a villain. Auto-Tune ruined singing. Algorithms ruined music. AI is ruining writing. The plot is tidy: a tool appears, standards collapse, character disappears. It’s emotionally satisfying precisely because it’s structurally wrong. The problem

Contained Excess: Psychedelia, Custody, and What Survives

There is a temptation, when revisiting canonical rock records, to argue over taste: whether Jim Morrison now sounds corny, whether Forever Changes is overrated or underheard, whether Atmos remixes are revelation or necromancy. Those arguments miss the more durable question. What matters isn’t whether these records are “good” or

Éliane Radigue: A Control Case

Not an edge case, but a control case. That distinction matters more than it first appears. An edge case reassures the system. It says: this is rare, exceptional, statistically ignorable. An edge case proves the rule by standing safely outside it. A control case does the opposite. It reveals what

Unmarketable by Design

Accounting for a Disappearing Network Movietone, Crescent, and the wider Bristol post-rock network were not simply “good bands from a cool scene.” They were proof that, briefly — very briefly — a particular alignment of economic, social, and infrastructural conditions made it possible for unmarketable music to exist without having to

Cantrips

Cantrips, by Buddha on the Moon2 track albumBuddha on the MoonBandcamp New & Notable Jul 10, 2025 Cantrips and Tails “Cantrips and Tails” began as a synthesizer squiggle, a throwaway line made during a lull at work using an iPad app I no longer remember. It was paired with a

In Search of Spaces and a Disappearing Act

Flying Saucer Attack don't really enter the room. They're already there when you notice them. Their records don't announce a position or propose a future. They don't feel like interventions. They feel like something that was happening anyway, and happened to be

Wolves Evolve: Ulver as Weather Systems

Ulver Neverland (House of Mythology) There is a long-standing temptation to describe every new Ulver album as a “reinvention,” as if the band were engaged in a restless chase for novelty. Neverland quietly dismantles that idea. This is not a reinvention so much as an adaptation—an adjustment to