Ka – Grief Pedigree [Iron Works Records 2012]
Local Brownsville man is a boom bap classicist. 3.5/5
(“No Downtime”, “Born King N.Y.”)
Ratboys – Singin’ to an Empty Chair [New West 2026]
Will they grow to be the saviors of indie rock? One can hope not if all they can dish out is country fried tap water. 3.0/5
Mandy, Indiana – URGH [Sacred Bones 2026]
Another variation of DMT-core apocalyptic electrobeats. 3.0/5
Armand Hammer – Rome [Backwoodz 2017]
Woods and co-conspirator ELUCID finally team up under one name and prove that they’re much smarter than they are warm. 3.5/5
Billy Woods + Blockhead – Known Unknowns [Backwoodz 2017]
Because he’s an acquired taste billy woods doesn’t automatically leap out as a contender within either the mainstream or underground lanes of hip hop music; his voice is a dusty and gruff bark with little melodic or tonal range, and his lyrics are often so obtuse that outside of the food references it’s hard to get a hold of whatever he’s trying to drill down on outside of his preferred topics of dread and paranoia. On his last collab with veteran undie producer Blockhead there was a sense of thinning since his debut, but now the beats are punchier, moodier, and more clearly part of an alt-rock pallet that suits woods’s voice and delivery quite well. From the gallows humor of the outset – “Re-education camp greeter, name tag says Bill/‘Is this your first time in the killing fields?/We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel!’” – to the genuinely anxiety inducing existential dread of the dénouement – “You won’t ever get no answers!” – woods proved that he’s gotten better at establishing mise-en-scene and allowing his noir to live beside comedy and horror. He might just earn himself enough of a fanbase to pay his bills yet. 4.4/5
Twisted Teens – Blame The Clown [Jazz Life 2026]
Southern punks have flair and humor, all they need now are songs. 3.7/5
Xaviersobased – Xavier [Atlantic 2026]
I’ll give the label A&Rs credit, they see that he’s a cash printing machine, but his studied sloppiness doesn’t contain the charisma that someone who in the Before Times would’ve been termed a yung boul should have. 3.2/5
Amyl and The Sniffers – Amyl and The Sniffers [ATO 2019]
Noise punks, pub punks, a reversion to a type of music that was already a forward thinking version of primitivism in 1976. They love riffs (good), solos (fine), sneering (obviously), hope (now we’re getting somewhere), and unrefined hollering (hmm). 3.7/5
D’Angelo – Brown Sugar [EMI 1995]
The first thing you won’t notice if you’re using headphones or blown out car speakers like the ones in my 2011 Accord, is that there’s more pulse and oomph in his moderately tempoed pseudo-funk low end grooves than initially meets the ears. That is, his beats and bass – which as a Prince fan he plays himself naturally – are best heard on a speaker system with a subwoofer. You’ll be surprised as I was how the headnodding-as-opposed-to-ass-shaking technique that the artist born Michael Eugene Archer employs can still propel the sonics forward and reach for something almost permanent. Clear sound’ll also let his many shining harmonies live as the melodic counterpoint (Greek Chorus? Gospel choir?) to those beats that he seems to be striving for. As a lover of drugs, revenge songs, and women he gets across as never too doggish but never too nice too, a regular guy cutting and pasting together vocal takes to build something pretty. 4.2/5
Open Mike Eagle – Neighborhood Gods Unlimited [auto reverse 2025]
He’s a brainy man who thinks and feels, and though this concept album doesn’t quiet go anywhere in particular there’s a levity to its mundane tragedy. A guy who works in retail and journalism loses his phone while flipping through dystopian TV channels? I supposed there’s less heady stuff that could be focused on 90s commercialism. 3.9/5
(“michigan j. wonder”, almost broke my nucleus accumbens”)
Cosmic Hero 