Alternative Rock

New album: The Karma Effect || Cruel Intentions

Sleaze, soul, and stadium-sized ambition

By / / Alternative Rock, Blues & Roots / Leave a Comment

On Cruel Intentions, their third full-length album in as many years, The Karma Effect sharpen their “modern vintage” mantra into something bigger and bolder. The London five-piece delivers eleven hard rocking songs that revive the golden years of Headbangers Ball, pairing mighty vocals and chunky blues riffs with soulful swagger. Every box gets ticked here, from towering stadium anthems to lighter-in-the-air power ballads, all blasting from the speakers at full volume and built for fists-in-the-air moments. The tales of obsession, temptation and self-destruction are captured in sound that drips with a sleazy charm that stops things becoming too heavy, the sound of a hungry band pushing for more.



Cruel Intentions—produced by Michael Charman—is out digitally, on CD and vinyl LP, through Earache Records.

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp || Discogs || Earache

Album review: The Escape Society || The Escape Society

Fuzzed-out hooks and glam-soaked optimism on a psychedelic joyride

By / / Alternative Rock, Glam Rock, Psych / Leave a Comment

The Teletubbies are hardly the poster children for hazardous riffs and hard-hitting drums, although after a few mind-altering substances, those wide-eyed colors might start making a strange kind of sense. Still, the toddler’s icons take center stage in the video for Derelicts in the Fungus Shed, a 2024 single from The Escape Society. The track appears on the Ottawa band’s self-titled debut full-length, a nine-song collection that now gathers the standout singles from the past three years into something that plays less like an introduction and more like a greatest hits set.

Bandcamp lists The Escape Society as progressive rock, alternative rock, garage rock, glam, power pop, and psychedelic rock, and miraculously the band lives up to all those tags, turning big hooks and crazy ideas into kaleidoscopic dancefloor-ready anthems with genuine heart. Theatrical and over-the-top, surreal and infectious? Yes, actually, but it is anything but childish, with fun above all.



The Escape Society’s eponymous debut album—produced by Troy Huizinga and Dean Watson—is out digitally (self-released), Featuring Troy Huizinga (vocals, guitars, bass, synths, drum machine, percussion, handclaps, toy guns), Scott Norris (guitar, bass, backing vocals), Dean Watson (bass, backing vocals, drum machine, percussion, handclaps), and Jay Watts (drums, bass, percussion, backing vocals), with Jacob Elgin (guitar) and Stacy DuBois (backing vocals) guesting on select tracks.

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp

New album: High on Stress || Still Here

Heartland rock with loud riffs, hungry vocals, and powerful energy

By / / Alternative Rock, Country & Folk, Power Pop / Leave a Comment

High on Stress sounds like the kind of band that’s spent decades inhaling bar smoke, chasing last call, and turning hard miles into sharp hooks. Earlier this year, we shared their take on Tommy Keene’s Nothing Can Change You (in our monthly overview of favorite cover songs), but they are even more awe-inspiring (and more satisfying) with original material.

On studio album number six, aptly titled Still Here, the Minneapolis quartet sharpens their wear-and-tear spirit into a dozen guitar-driven anthems that hit the sweet spot between pub rock toughness, power pop punch, and alt-country swagger (a sound you rarely hear these days but which works surprisingly well). The riffs are big and make you at least nod your head along, the rhythm section plays loose and grooving, the lead vocals are raw and charismatic, and the songwriting carries enough lived-in grit to keep things grounded. It makes for a ragged but soulful blast of heartland rock ’n’ roll done right.



Still Here is out now digitally, on CD and vinyl LP, through Rum Bar Records. Featuring Nick Leet (vocals, guitar, piano, organ), Chad Wheeling (guitar), Jim Soule (bass, backing vocals), and Mark Devaraj (drums).

Add to wantlist @ Bandcamp: High on Stress || Rum Bar

New album: Third Ego || More Ego

Brooding punk rock with some weight behind it

By / / Alternative Rock, Punk / Leave a Comment

After their self-titled debut landed in late 2022, Third Ego return with More Ego, 25 minutes of punk rock that is melodic while still carrying a dark undercurrent. Their sound leans heavily into alternative rock territory, with shades of Bob Mould and Mission of Burma, and an emotional weight to these songs that is palpable.

This is not the kind of band sleepwalking through familiar moves. Third Ego clearly have a strong idea of what they want this project to be, and the collective experience from members of NRA, Brat Pack, NEED, Human Alert, and Selfish shows all over this thing. The songs are short and urgent without feeling rushed, sharp without sounding clinical. They give the record a tension that keeps pulling you back in.

There’s a brooding intensity running through More Ego, but also enough melody to stop it from collapsing under its own heaviness. A rewarding listen from a band that sounds fully locked in.

LP (with pretty awesome art by Menno Wittebrood) available through a bullet train of labels including Shield Recordings, White Russian Records, Flight 13 Label, Slow Death, Scuderie Ducali Records, and Serial Bowl.


Add to wantlist: Bandcamp || Shield Recordings || Serial Bowl || Linktree

New EP: Blimps || Over The Moon

From a storage unit to our hearts, meet Blimps!

By / / Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Jangle Pop / Leave a Comment

You may recall us writing about Tom Lawns earlier this year, a sneaky-good collection of unpolished slacker alt rock and power pop, hiss and tape noise proudly intact. Turns out the guy behind Tom Lawns, Colin Musolf, also has a brand new band called Blimps with his best friend Rocky Mercer. The pair out of Charleston (South Carolina) met in theater class as kids and have apparently been making music together for eight years already.

Blimps is a fully DIY operation, with the duo handling all the recording and playing themselves. Two songwriters bouncing ideas off each other. The seven songs on their debut EP Over The Moon were recorded on an 8-track cassette machine in their storage unit. Listen closely and you might hear some terrible metal band rehearsing in the background, though chances are you’ll be too locked into the songs to notice.

This is another band operating somewhere in the Guided by Voices, Superdrag, and Teenage Fanclub universe, which suits us just fine. Blimps throws Neil Young and Cheap Trick into the mix too. In a local scene apparently filled with bands carrying giant egos and not enough hooks, Blimps go the other way. They keep things raw, loose, on a bare-bones production, but never lose sight of the melodies. These jangly, power-poppin’, alt-rockin’ songs about feeling out of step in a small town hit with sincerity instead of posture.

Definitely a band to keep tabs on. And apparently they’re already writing the next record. We’ll be listening! Limited tape run available through their own Terminal Releases label.


Add to wantlist: Bandcamp

New album: The Haunted Youth || Boys Cry Too

From dreamy sorrow to total destruction and back

By / / Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Psych / Leave a Comment

How to follow up a debut album that was received as a perfectly constructed masterpiece? On Boys Cry Too, The Haunted Youth trade the dreamy fragility of 2022’s Dawn Of The Freak for something heavier, louder, and more emotionally unfiltered. Across eleven tracks, Joachim Liebens pushes his shoegaze-meets-indie formula into darker territory, where grunge riffs, towering walls of reverb, and whispered confessions collide with outright screams. Once again the knack for a hypnotic melody is omnipresent, but captured in a bigger sound, more mature and confident. In that regard, the eight-minute opener In My Head alone feels like a statement of intent, as cinematic, suffocating, and eventually explosive as it is.

What makes this record hit so hard, is its refusal to hide behind cool detachment. The Flemish genius writes openly about loneliness, self-destruction, addiction, and the chaos inside his own head—to be honest, the lyrics on “all the mistakes a boy makes when his heart breaks” are quite upsetting. Tellingly titled tracks like Deathwish and Murder Me inject flashes of emo-punk and 90s alt-rock into the band’s hazy atmospherics, while the instrumental Falling To Pieces stretches grief into something almost transcendent. All in all, we can only experience this 53-minute trip as a massive, bruised, and immersive performance that proves The Haunted Youth are truly unique.



Boys Cry Too is out digitally, on CD and vinyl LP, through Play It Again Sam.

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp || Discogs || The Haunted Youth || PIAS

New EP: The Northern Line || The Northern Line

A vibrant revival of Cool Britannia through an eager American lens

By / / Alternative Rock, Indie Pop / Leave a Comment

The Northern Line may be a band from Boston, Massachusetts, but their self-titled debut EP is a four-track rush of Britpop shimmer driven by Madchester grooves. Yet this isn’t just a nostalgia exercise. The band avoids imitation by filtering the baggy-era dance rock influences through a raw, modern DIY spirit that’s bursting with confident optimism and unfiltered enthusiasm. Even more, the emotional core is rooted firmly in the present, with lyricist/frontman Bilvox singing loosely about resilience, escapism, and the search for connection in anxious times: “Bang the drum // Here it comes // When the lightning strikes // You know it’s right.”

Across its 16 minutes runtime, the EP thrives on pulsing rhythms, soaring guitars, and an undeniable sense of communal freedom, capturing the kind of euphoric energy that especially comes fully alive in crowded clubs and sticky-floored late nights, so let’s hope DJs take notice. Either way, every psychedelic hook and shouted refrain here sounds fueled by genuine belief in the joy that music can unleash, regardless of time and place.


The Northern Line’s eponymous debut EP, produced and engineered by Mark ” McG” McGettrick, is out now digitally via Mad Fer It. Featuring Bilvox (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Pete Kitchener (lead guitar), Mike Ackley (keyboards), Carrie Ingber (additional keyboards), Joshh Magee (bass), and McG (drums, percussion, backing vocals).

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp

New EP: Sumos || Luck

Meritorio and Safe Suburban Home team up for another fine co-release

By / / Alternative Rock, Indie Rock / Leave a Comment

It’s been a minute since we last checked in with Manchester’s Sumos. I had to look it up, but their acclaimed debut album Surfacing already came out back in 2023.

Its follow-up is the Luck EP, in case the giant typography on the cover somehow didn’t give it away. From opener Icebreaker, it’s immediately clear what made this band stick in the first place: they know how to write songs. Proper ones. There are six of them here, all wired into that distinctly British strain of indie rock where the vocal melodies feel faintly shaped by generations of folk music, even when the band is making a racket.

Because Sumos are not a folk band. This is energetic indie rock and noise pop driven as much by crashing guitars as memorable hooks.

Luck is out now on Meritorio and Safe Suburban Home Records, alongside that excellent new Rural France LP.


Add to wantlist: Bandcamp || Meritorio

New album: Arlo Matthews || Model Rockets

A loose concept album sharpened by collaboration and change

By / / Alternative Rock, Country & Folk / Leave a Comment

Model Rockets, the sophomore full-lengther by American singer-songwriter Arlo Matthews, carries the charm of a DIY project that grew far beyond its bedroom origins. It is a quite ambitious snapshot of transition, restless and reflective, rooted in 1970s folk rock but branching into looser, genre-hopping territory.

There’s a clear communal spirit in the nine new songs, with about twenty collaborators—including Tyler Eld on bass, Aaron Leventhal on guitar, Matthew DeSario on drums, and Charles Ritz on saxophone—adding texture, warmth, and richness without diluting the heartfelt vocals on themes caught between nostalgia and forward motion.

The album, landing as a sincere, evolving document of an artist finding his footing, is best appreciated as a whole—the building kit completely assembled—and fortunately, it can be listened to as such below.

Model Rockets is out now streaming via Arlo Matthews’ own label SolarTune Records & Tapes.

Add to wantlist: Linktree

New album: Weird Nightmare || Hoopla

A roll-your-windows-down feel good record

By / / Alternative Rock, Indie Rock, Power Pop / Leave a Comment

Sub Pop released a real feel-good record this week. The title Hoopla gives that away, though maybe you would not expect it from a band called Weird Nightmare.

Fronted by Alex Edkins of METZ, Hoopla is packed with alt power pop goodness. Instead of burying the hooks under layers of noise, Edkins, together with co-producer Jim Eno of Spoon, puts them right out front. The whole record is built around getting to the good parts fast and often, then making them sound huge. Roll-the-windows-down, drive-around-for-no-reason, let-the-chorus-do-the-work kind of stuff. In-your-face catchy.

While the first half comes out swinging, the second half opens things up a bit more. There’s jangle, a little psych, a little Britpop, and a few deeper dips into the pop archive, including that Needles and Pins nod at the start of If You Should Turn Away.

This is way too easy to like. Maybe Sub Pop should slap a Sun Pop logo on this one.

Add to wantlist: Bandcamp || Discogs

Scroll to Top