On their morbid new record, London's ever-experimental Tunng explore new sonic contours in their pursuit of all things grief. They mark the occasion by talking about their favorite songs about death.
Bogotá's Meridian Brothers return with another avant-garde take on electric cumbia with Cumbia Siglo XXI.
Culture and nature are beautifully inseparable in the second volume of the environmentally-conscious A Guide to the Birdsong series.
By returning to defined moments of pain and struggle, Haux cultivates breathtaking music built on quiet, albeit intense, anguish.
Consistently exciting, always surprising, and full of soul, Keleketla! is one of the most remarkable releases of the year to date.
"I think even if I lived in the heart of Tokyo, I'd still make music that reminds people of the countryside because it's where my dreams often take me," says Bibio (aka Stephen Wilkinson) of his music and his new rustic EP.
Gordi's Our Two Skins chronicles difficulties and revelations against a backdrop of electronic-inspired folk.
On Sleep on the Wing, Bibio continues his fascination with mid-20th century British folk music that listeners heard on last year's Ribbons.
On Lake Constance, composer Davide Rossi and Matt Hales (better known as the voice behind Aqualung) have pooled their respective talents to craft highly evocative, sophisticated soundscapes from swathes of cool, digital textures and towering layers of majestic strings.
Folklore, dub, and free jazz unite in Dumama and Kechou's new concept album, Buffering Juju. The duo confront the past and the present, taking on not only legacies of pain, but legacies of thriving through it.
Producers El Búho and DJ Raff pay electronic tribute to a Chilean spirit of social resistance with the subtle new single "Resiliencia".
Singer-songwriter Marla Hansen creates a mesmerizing new album. Dust, as a whole, shimmers and sparkles like dust in the bright light.
Suddenly is Caribou's most willfully experimental album to date, his soft, distinctive vocals flow through every track, binding the whole thing together.
Across his career, Patrick Wolf has been a real ratchet of identities, textures, garlands, costumes, hairstyles and colours, reinventing himself with each album.
Justin Vernon's (Bon Iver) lyricism is as cryptic as ever, but the firmness with which he sings his abstractions robs his fourth album of much of its mystery.
British instrumental trio Haiku Salut create a new soundtrack for Buster Keaton's classic 1926 film The General with brilliant and unconventional results.
Rising folk-pop artist Emma Charles continues to innovate by interweaving electronic elements into her new single, “Scorpio".
Bibio's Ribbons is a wonderfully immersive album. The subtle melodies need time to bed in before songs gradually come into bloom but when they do the effect is dazzling.
For Ribbons, Bibio continues to move away from his defining folktronica sounds and to something increasingly pastoral, revealing to PopMatters what song made him feel palpable heartbreak, why he rarely performs live, and why his new album samples actual cow moos.
For an album that is so geographically and linguistically focused, Yann Tiersen's ALL is strangely beautiful when robbed of all its context.
At the start of his latest tour of Europe, David Gray speaks with PopMatters about his 11th solo album, writing to avoid the obvious, finding the perfect collaborator, and how to avoid "crowing on like a middle-aged man".
The 11th studio album by David Gray finds him returning to the "folktronica" through which he made his name in the late 1990s, with some added twists.
Bibio broadens out his sound and blends acoustic instruments with electronics to create a gentle form of folktronica on "Curls".
One half of Kaleida, Christina Wood gives a taste of her mesmerizing first solo album as Vesper Wood.
With a trilogy of striking, multi-genre albums under her belt, a re-release of Jane Weaver's seminal 2014 classic The Silver Globe causes all sorts of reflecting on her own sound, her own legacy, and why she never wants to run a concert from a laptop.
Disregarding a legacy footnoted by a cameo in a film, the Beta Band's collection of The Three E.P.'s is remastered and reissued in celebration of its 20th anniversary and the band's too short career.
For all their wonderfully alien sonic elements, Tunng is a band that's human to the core and can interpret the inherent weirdness of life in a way that makes its strangest moments some of its most comforting.
Following the massive success of 1999's White Ladder and its mega-hit single "Babylon", David Gray could have taken any number of paths. He chose A New Day at Midnight, and it made all the difference.
© 1999-2020 PopMatters.com. All rights reserved.
PopMatters is wholly independent, women-owned and operated.
