A selection of the most interesting releases from March and April - 2⁴ albums for the second edition. In this digest: no fewer than 2 albums from the The Windmill scene, 2 albums devoted to celebrating nature (the Catskill Mountains and Vancouver Island), a phoenix bird from 4chan that broke up 20 years ago, as well as numerous albums by various expats who changed their location in order to make music: from Arab countries to Canada, from Canada to the United States, from the United States to the United Kingdom, and from the United Kingdom - to just about anywhere.
16. BRKN LOVE - The program
🇨🇦 Canada / March 28 / 0,774 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music
alternative rock / hard rock
This release was meant to be a neat top fifteen, same as last time, but the competition was stronger this time, and leaving this album out would have been a shame. It features punchy riffs, sticky hooks, and that gritty, high-voltage energy somewhere between Royal Blood and early Highly Suspect. The only downside is the repetitive lyrics about the frontman’s endless relationship drama - Justin Benlolo is quite the notorious ladies’ man, whose adventures have long spilled beyond his native Toronto, and practically the entire album feels like a collection of snapshots following yet another one-night stand. Even the band’s name plays games with you. BRKN LOVE can be pronounced in several ways: “broken”, “Brooklyn”, or even “barking” (a personal favorite, and honestly not a bad fit for a rock outfit). There’s also a pattern to how these records come together: each BRKN LOVE album has been preceded by a trip: first to New York, where they were signed by Spinefarm Records; then to Los Angeles for the second album; and now the third album was born out of a trip to Charleston, South Carolina, where Benlolo immersed himself in an unfamiliar social circle and returned home with an almost finished record. BRKN LOVE’s discography makes it abundantly clear: the only way to record an album is to get out of Toronto.
15. Panchiko - Ginkgo
🇬🇧 UK, England / April 4 / 0,781 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
indie rock / art rock / neo-psychedelia / indietronica / shoegaze / trip hop / post-britpop
You’ve most likely already heard this story - it was circulating on Reels and Shorts for a while. A dusty, long-forgotten CD from an obscure band surfaced on 4chan, where one user posted it in the hope that the internet hive mind could track down its creators. By the barcode, they determined that the disc came from Nottingham, and then simply went through all the bands from that area until they found the original group, who had recorded the music as teenagers and had no clue their music had quietly gone viral years later. Against all odds, they got back together. The rediscovered tracks were remastered and reissued, quickly turning into Bandcamp’s top-selling release. From there, Panchiko didn’t just ride the wave of nostalgia - they pushed forward, dropping a proper debut, “Failed at Math(s)”, and following it up with “Ginkgo”. The original 2000 EP was a technical mess in the best possible way - warped by CD decay and jitter, its already hazy trip-hop textures blown out into something almost absurdly overcooked. But apparently, any glaring flaw can become your signature, and now Panchiko actively incorporates lo-fi noise into modern production - and it sounds very compelling, especially considering that their 2000-era tastes were ahead of their time and only became relevant two decades later.
14. BAMBARA - Birthmarks
🇺🇸 US, New York / March 14 / 0,786 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
post-punk / gothic rock / new wave / alternative rock / noir / industrial
Bambara clearly should have been born on the other side of the Atlantic - they sound like the perfect British band, and even a slight touch of gothic Southern rock doesn’t give them away. It helps that they’ve practically adopted the UK as a second home, touring far beyond the usual London stops and covering the country with near-ritual consistency. Fittingly, Birthmarks was recorded there too. As for the lyrics of frontman Reid Bateh... any true crime show could hire him as a writer, and he would come up with the most disturbing and intricate noir stories, permeated with violence in the style of William Faulkner: violence that is mundane, senseless, and irreparable. But irreparable not because it cannot be fixed or prevented, but because the characters are so indifferent that it’s hard to imagine anyone even trying to stop anything. That emotional detachment finds its perfect match in the band’s sound. Their brand of post-punk and new wave is cool, distant, almost clinical - a stark backdrop that lets these bleak narratives unfold without interference. And crucially, it never feels derivative; Bambara has a knack for carving out ideas that sound lived-in rather than borrowed.
13. Adja - Golden Retrieve Her
🇧🇪 Belgium / April 11 / 0,795 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
neo-soul / vocal jazz / funk / fusion
Introducing a new column: artists with zero Grammys - and, realistically, no shot at one. Musicians like Adja Fassa - along with much of the contemporary jazz scene that slips into this digest - will never receive this award, because all the Grammys up until 2060 are reserved for Samara Joy, with rare exceptions for other names from a closed circle. What makes Adja compelling is the ease with which genres blur in her hands. “Happiness and Butterflies” leans heavily into hip-hop, riding a fluid, effortless flow over a drifting double bass line, stitched together with a vocal harmonizer. Elsewhere, she plays linguistic games - “A Moment” pivots on the elasticity between moment and minute, gliding over bossa nova grooves. That love of such lexical twists runs deep: friend-unfried, better-bitter, empathy-emphatitties. Even the album title itself doubles as a sly pun involving a golden retriever.
12. Kazdoura - Ghoyoum
🇨🇦 Canada / 🇸🇾 Syria / 🇱🇧 Lebanon / March 15 / 0,804 / 🌙
Spotify / Apple Music
indie rock / oriental / arabian jazz / fusion / alternative pop / psychedelic rock / dream pop
Not long ago, in my “artists without an album” section, I wrote about a wonderful indie rock band of Arab expats and their song “Khayal”, and now the time has come for their debut album Ghoyoum. No track here quite matches the breakout buzz of “Khayal”, but that’s hardly a flaw. If anything, it speaks to a healthier kind of album craft: one or two anchor singles to pull listeners in, surrounded by riskier, more exploratory cuts that reward deeper listening. The alternative - chasing viral lightning with every track - is a trap too many artists fall into, and it rarely ends well. Ghoyoum keeps things tight: seven original songs, two reimagined Levantine folk pieces (“Mili” and “Al Ain”), and “Hmool El Safar”, set to a poem by Mosab Al Nomairy - just over half an hour in total. But brevity doesn’t mean uniformity. Each of the ten tracks brings something distinct to the table, balancing Leen Hamo’s expressive lead vocals with John Abou Chacra’s imaginative, multi-instrumental flourishes.
11. Messa - The Spin
🇮🇹 Italy / April 11 / 0,814 / 🌙
Spotify / Apple Music
gothic rock / heavy metal / progressive doom metal / dark ambient / post-punk
I’ve been tracking Messa for years, and their latest record caught me off guard - and not entirely in a good way. Messa used to be a kind of enigma, combining elements of old-school sound with modern influences, as if belonging to both worlds at once. The cavernous sound of doom metal absorbed fusion elements like a sponge - from jazz, oriental music, psychedelic rock - sometimes even tipping into full-on extreme metal assault. This is how they appeared with their debut Belfry in 2016, and they developed this approach to its peak on Close in 2022. Then came the shift: signing to Metal Blade Records and releasing The Spin. The new material leans more decisively toward heavy metal, with a production style that feels tighter, more compressed, less open-ended. It’s a noticeable recalibration. And yet, paradoxically, it worked - the new album became the most successful release in the band’s history, because previously only a small audience knew about Messa. So where does that leave the album? In an uneasy middle ground. It’s more approachable, a touch more streamlined, and arguably a step down from the expansive ambition of Close - but not by enough to accuse the band of selling out. If anything, it feels like a compromise: one that broadens their reach without entirely erasing what made them distinctive in the first place.
10. Hannah Cohen - Earthstar Mountain
🇺🇸 US, New York / March 28 / 0,814 / ✨
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
indie folk / alternative
How many records can you name that unfold like a field journal - part biology log, part naturalist’s notebook? The list isn’t long: Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants, select works by Ichiko Aoba, Björk, and Joanna Newsom, Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, the later Charles Darwin-inflected work of Nightwish, and, here and there, Goldfrapp. Instrumental music would widen the scope - Boards of Canada come to mind - but even then, it remains a niche tradition. Which is precisely why Earthstar Mountain lands the way it does. The album grows out of hikes through the Catskill Mountains, each track quietly paired with the fungi of New England that Hannah encountered along the trail. It’s less a concept record than an ecosystem. What sets her apart as a songwriter is that almost anthropological sensitivity to the mundane - something not far removed from the observational lens of Erving Goffman. Her songs hinge on details most people would overlook: small, private moments that open into something larger. In “Shoe”, the claustrophobia of small-town life becomes a tight-fitting boot you can’t quite break in. In “Rag”, she notices a scrap of fabric by the roadside and wonders whether this discarded fabric is waiting for someone - and whether she herself could pick it up, wash it, and bring it back to life.
09. Claire Morrison - Where Do You Go at Night?
🇨🇦 Canada, Québec / April 25 / 0,818 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music
alternative folk pop
The deepest cut in this digest might just be Claire Morrison, a Winnipeg native now based in Montreal. Before striking out on her own, she played in the folk band Fire & Smoke - a project so low-profile it somehow managed to release no albums over fifteen years, which is almost impressive in its own right. Her solo debut, Where Do You Go at Night?, feels like a quiet archive of small-town life, arranged in a loosely acoustic palette. It’s as if you’re eavesdropping on a year’s worth of local stories in one sitting: fleeting romances, ill-fated marriages, a sudden trip to Tokyo, or a solitary walk down to the river to sit with the memory of an old tragedy. Where many albums lose steam as they go, Morrison flips the script. The back half is where things open up. “The Star” starts as a gentle cascade of acoustic picking before slipping into a fuzz-laced haze, finally dissolving into unresolved suspended chords. “Like We Used to Do” toys with tempo shifts and bends a waltz rhythm into something more fluid. And that’s the pattern - almost every track holds something in reserve, a final turn that gives it a sense of quiet lift just when you think it’s about to settle.
08. Black Country, New Road - Forever Howlong
🇬🇧 UK, England / April 4 / 0,819 / ✨
Spotify / Apple Music
alternative rock / progressive folk / baroque pop / math rock / art rock / chamber pop
Both incarnations of the experimental supergroup Black Midi, New Road proved surprisingly fragile. Black Midi unraveled quietly from within, while BCNR lost their frontman Isaac Wood - not in a blaze of drama, but in the quieter language of burnout and mental strain. His presence had been central, injecting that unmistakable, Slint-like tension into their sound; without him, the band’s identity seemed almost impossible to imagine. And yet, they pivoted. Hard. Rather than clinging to the droning unease of their earlier work, BCNR veered into something closer to baroque, minstrel-tinged art rock, dense with winding harmonic detours. The loss of a vocalist was offset by distributing vocal duties more or less equally among Georgia (mandolin, violin), May (piano, harpsichord, accordion), and Tyler (bass). As a result, BCNR suddenly became a female-led band - without a clearly defined frontwoman. Crucially, this isn’t a total rupture. The instrumentation was always there; the voices, too, just waiting in the wings. What’s changed is the center of gravity. On Forever Howlong, the band leans fully into harmonic play - restless, ornate, and deliberately disorienting. “Besties” sets the tone immediately, stitching together a compound meter (4/4 + 3/2) with a three-key framework that slips between F major, F-sharp major, and D major. And then there’s that moment in the chorus: “night and day”, where the long-delayed arrival in D major lands exactly on “day”.
07. Bianca Steck - The Joy of Coincidences
🇧🇪 Belgium / 🇪🇸 Spain / 🇬🇧 UK, England / 🇩🇪 Germany / March 14 / 0,824 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
indie rock / folk pop
I have a bit of a niche obsession: music gear. Old machines, new machines - I’ll read about all of it, even if it’s ultimately useless trivia. What’s less charming is the culture around it. Gear reviewers often drift into a kind of ritualized snobbery: every keyboard soundbank is judged against Clavia Nord (or some equally pricey equivalent), every effects unit falls short of Neural DSP, and no microphone is ever quite a Neumann U87. The subtext is hard to miss - don’t even think about releasing music until you can afford “proper” tools. A widespread mental injury among musicians. Which is why Bianca Steck feels like such a perfect counterexample. In a recent studio live session (one, two, three), her setup was almost disarmingly odd: a cheap Casio CT-360 from 1987 (the kind of plastic keyboard marketed to kids), paired with a much more respectable Crumar MOJO 61 and a vintage Suzuki Omnichord from the early ’80s - now a collector’s piece more for its mythology than its sound. And when I call the Casiotone cheap, I mean you can find one on eBay for $36. You can look up demos of this device to hear just how bad it sounds. Do the math and it’s almost comical: $36, $1200, $700. A setup that looks like a punchline, especially for an artist touring alongside Hania Rani. So why cling to such relics? Because the magic was never in the gear to begin with. It’s in the hands of the person using it. Give a curious musician even the most laughable synth, and they’ll find something distinctive in it, something worth building around. Yes, Steck processes the Casio, layers it with live instrumentation, shapes it into something fuller. But that doesn’t change the point - music is worthy of being written on anything.
06. Spiritbox - Tsunami Sea
🇨🇦 Canada / March 7 / 0,843 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
progressive metalcore / alternative metal / deathcore
Spiritbox have somehow managed to get heavier again - despite the fact that it already felt like they were operating near a physical limit. After Eternal Blue, the release of “Rotoscope” sparked the familiar prediction cycle: success, therefore dilution, therefore inevitable mainstream softening. But no - Spiritbox recorded a beautiful album dedicated to their hometown of Victoria and to Vancouver Island, located opposite the city of Vancouver. This is a place with a harsh climate, a violent ocean, dangerous navigation routes, and a rugged, fractured landscape carved by countless fjords. It is easy to dedicate music to beautiful places, but few artists manage to embody the spirit of their homeland as Spiritbox does in their music. Even when the lyrics drift elsewhere - often into more personal terrain shaped by Courtney LaPlante - the imagery keeps snapping back to the island: cliffs dropping into black water, forests thick with conifers, mountain silhouettes, lighthouses cutting through storm systems like warnings signs "DON'T GO HERE". Another surprising thing is how, after the album’s release, many videos appeared where enthusiasts try to recreate the chain of effects used to achieve its sound. It says something about where Spiritbox are now - no longer just a band riding the modern metal wave, but one actively expanding its edges.
05. The Orchestra (For Now) - Plan 75 & Plan 76
🇬🇧 UK, England / March 28 & October 31 / 0,851 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music & Spotify / Apple Music
art rock / progressive rock / noise rock / chamber rock / post-punk / symphonic prog / post-hardcore / post-rock
The Brixton scene has, in recent years, become a phenomenon in its own right - one that is already the subject of full-fledged journalistic studies. Tucked just south of Westminster is The Windmill, a pub that, at first glance, looks more like a tired roadside diner than a cornerstone of British music culture. And yet, it is exactly that. Since the mid-2000s, when it pivoted into a live venue, and especially after 2010, The Windmill has been a breeding ground for post-punk and experimental acts - music that once lived firmly in the underground but surged back into relevance in the wake of Brexit. Some have even dubbed it “post-Brexit punk”, a label that captures both the tension and the timing. The alumni list reads like a roll call of the current UK scene: Black Country, New Road, Black Midi, Wet Leg, Maruja, The Last Dinner Party, Squid, Shame - and that’s only the headline names. Some started here, others relocated just to tap into the energy. The Orchestra (For Now) is a new discovery from The Windmill, having released two EPs that I’ve arbitrarily combined into a single 47-minute release. What’s striking, though, is how little the venue itself has changed in response to its own success. While its alumni fill venues worldwide, The Windmill has stayed stubbornly the same - ticket prices hovering around £5, creeping up to £10-15 only when bigger names return for a homecoming set. No rebrand, no upscale pivot. If anything, that’s the real story. A place that doesn’t chase the future - it incubates it. And if you happen to be nearby, you can walk in and hear what’s coming next years before anyone else catches on.
04. Tamino - Every Dawn's a Mountain
🇺🇸 US, New York / 🇧🇪 Belgium / 🇪🇬 Egypt / March 21 / 0,861 / ✨
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
chamber folk / indie rock
To be honest, when I first heard Tamino described as the Belgian Jeff Buckley, I found it rather presumptuous. But the more time passes, the less absurd that comparison feels. A lot has happened over the years - for instance, Matthew Bellamy bought Jeff Buckley’s Telecaster, saying that a guitar shouldn’t gather dust in a collection but should be played. He then used it to record an acoustic version of his own “Guiding Light”, as well as several tracks on "Will of the People". There’s some truth to the idea that a legendary guitar should be heard, but for me it prompted a different reflection - on how and why artists develop their signature sound. Jeff Buckley was a poor musician, and he built his sound from just a handful of inexpensive pedals by Boss, MXR, Ibanez, and a rack reverb from Alesis. He pieced together whatever he could find, often buying second-hand. From this emerged his philosophy: what really matters is “voice, guitar, and space”. Even when he gained access to money, he didn’t abandon his “cheap” sound or chase custom boutique gear - he saw that as excessive, only slightly refining his pedalboard with higher-end devices. No matter how extravagantly Matthew Bellamy records with Buckley’s guitar, he simply cannot capture that signal. But Tamino grew up in somewhat similar circumstances, albeit slightly more comfortable: a Flemish mother and an Egyptian father, affectionate toward women but distant from his children. Raised on his mother’s music collection and making music with whatever was at hand - without dreaming of expensive studios or gear - Tamino learned to find elegance in simplicity. He has a gift for shaping complex emotions into perfectly structured songs, creating pieces as refined as “Babylon” or “Raven”. And special thanks to him for “Elegy” - 9/8 is one of the rarest and most beautiful time signatures in this universe.
03. Valley James - Star
🇺🇸 US, Tennessee / March 14 / 0,869 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music
americana / folk / indie pop / baroque pop / country
Kaitlyn James arrives as a collision of archetypes you didn’t know could coexist: a touch of Lana Del Rey, a hint of Disney royalty, the aura of a B-movie actress, and Red Dead Redemption cosplayer all at once. Yes, it’s all available in one package - part sincerity, part secondhand embarrassment - and somehow it holds together. Valley James strongly resembles Lana, yet often pushes melodrama and exaggerated feminine coquettishness too far... I’m not sure why, but no matter how far Lana ventures into vulgar territory, she remains organic - embarrassing at times, but never inducing vergüenza ajena, unlike Valley James. Disney still hasn’t come up with a cowgirl princess, but Valley James has already filled that niche - right from the opening track, she sounds like the perfect beginning of a typical Disney storyline, crystallized in the line: “This is not a tall tale of how my soul was won / And my story’s just begun”, after which every neuron in your brain screams, “the animated movie is about to start!” Her few music videos are charming in their amateurishness, with Kaitlyn waiting for the right timing to match her movements to the lyrics - visually resembling a fan-made short film by RDR cosplayers. This might just be my own weakness, but I find a kind of perverse pleasure in how something staged and low-budget can feel more natural and genuine than polished, expensive production - as if imperfect works by unknown artists create a more sincere connection between performer and listener.
02. The Mars Volta - Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacio
🇵🇷 Puerto Rico / 🇺🇸 US, Texas/California / April 11 / 0,895 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music
art rock / neo-psychedelia / latin rock / experimental rock / jazz fusion / indietronica
The release of Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacío almost reads like a controlled experiment - what if you take a genuinely strong set of songs, drown them in gratuitous AutoTune, slice them into disjointed fragments, and then drop them in a way that feels like both release and not release it at the same time, as if falling into the very “eye of the void” they sing about on the album. Sonically, however, the new record is not really a return to roots, as some journalists have claimed - aside from the very last track, which carries some Amputechture-like vibes. The eighth album is actually a curious step forward, a new sound altogether, and borrowing Argentine jazz pianist Leo Genovese from Esperanza Spalding turned out to be a brilliant move - a worthy replacement for the late Ikey Owens. (Full review)
01. Black Foxxes - The Haar
🇬🇧 UK, England / March 7 / 0,916 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
shoegaze / alternative rock / indie rock / art rock / post-rock / slowcore
A failed, unwanted album - one that failed to engage either the band’s longtime fans or a new audience. Such indifference is a major mistake, because The Haar has a strong case for being one of the defining records of its moment: bleak, suffocating, and eerily attuned to a world where globalization is fraying, shared cultural narratives are dissolving, and the idea of a universally “better future” feels increasingly hollow. The theme of loneliness and displacement, long central to the work of Black Foxxes vocalist and guitarist Mark Holley since their debut, is now stripped of the softening layers of major tonalities and expands into a pure, essential emotional state. It exists far beyond the boundary between everyday sadness and clinical depression, with a clear presence of anhedonia: the flattening of affect, the absence of pleasure, the slow erosion of emotional response. This is the true and singular thematic thread that holds the entire album together - from the opening track “I Can’t Be Left Alone With It” to the closing “In the Image of Perfection”... (Full review)
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