The third installment happened to fall during two relatively quiet months, with a noticeable shortage of major and high-profile releases. For a digest like this, however, that's hardly a problem - the fewer stars there are, the more mysterious brown dwarfs become visible. This edition features a wealth of experimental releases, gothic and magical sounds from Colombia, a Japanese-Brazilian fusion of J-pop and bossa nova, and a broad stylistic spectrum ranging from death metal to indie folk. Nearly 1,600 albums made it through the selection process. As always, the full list is available on Boosty and Patreon.
15. The Wants - Bastard
🇺🇸 US, New York / June 13 / 0,747 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
electronic rock / art pop / minimalism / post-punk / techno punk / industrial / experimental
The digest opens with a highly intriguing album - rough around the edges in terms of production, yet completely unrestrained when it comes to experimentation. The trio “The Wants” (burdened with a name that is terribly inconvenient for internet searches) loves electronic experimentation just as much as it loves unusual rhythmic meters, shuffle grooves, syncopated drumming, and dissonant guitar figures. It's difficult to say who The Wants sound like. Their contrasting blend of organic and electronic instruments, combined with eclecticism and a fearless experimental approach, immediately brings several artists to mind: New Order during the Brotherhood era, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode (specifically the Exciter era - the band's only album dominated by digital synthesis, whereas all their other records relied primarily on analog synthesizers), OSI, or Algiers. Every comparison hits the mark from one angle and misses it from another - which is precisely what makes the band's identity so distinctive.
14. Nicolás y Los Fumadores - Nochenegra
🇨🇴 Colombia / May 22 / 0,749 / 🌙
Spotify / Apple Music
gothic rock / art rock / neo-psychedelia / post-punk / post-rock / indie rock / alternative rock
The band Nicolás y Los Fumadores emerged ten years ago as an indie rock project with a distinctly local character. Their debut album was not so much unsuccessful as it was overlooked, but their second record, "Dios y La Mata de Lulo...", marked a shift from indie rock toward psychedelic rock and finally brought them the attention they had been waiting for, both in their native Colombia and across neighboring Spanish-speaking countries. Their lyrics, centered on everyday life in Bogotá and infused with absurdist elements in the finest tradition of magical realism, struck a chord with many listeners throughout Latin America. Their third album pushes those ambitions even further. With an eye on reaching listeners beyond the region, Nicolás y Los Fumadores broaden their musical palette once again, trading sunlit psychedelia for brooding gothic atmospheres. The lyrics grow more restless and psychologically fragmented, drifting between the tangible and the otherworldly until the line separating the two all but disappears. More often than not, it's impossible to tell whether a song unfolds in reality, in memory, or somewhere beyond both - which is exactly the point.
13. Lucius - Lucius
🇺🇸 US, New York / May 2 / 0,756 / ✨
Spotify / Apple Music
alternative rock / indie pop
Lucius are hardly newcomers. Their debut album was released back in 2009, yet for all these years they remained a niche act, drawing inspiration from the styles of ABBA, Fleetwood Mac, and the Mamas & the Papas. Everything changed with their self-titled 2025 album, their fifth studio record, which became a breakthrough success and attracted hundreds of thousands of new listeners. The frustrating part is that the record never quite lives up to its own promise. Its opening stretch is genuinely exhilarating, packed with surprising detours, elegant modulations, and beautifully crafted guitar work that hint at something truly special. Then the second half pulls the rug out from under the listener, abandoning much of that adventurous spirit in favor of polished, conventional country-pop. The lone exception is the collaboration with Madison Cunningham, who once again proves to be the album's secret weapon. It's become something of a pattern: artists who've invited her into the studio often talk about how effortlessly she reshapes the creative atmosphere. She has a rare ability to inject a song with fresh perspective, giving collaborators the spark they didn't know they were missing.
12. Mei Semones - Animaru
🇺🇸 US, New York & Michigan / 🇯🇵 Japan / May 2 / 0,758 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music
j-pop / bossa nova / jazz rock / indie rock
Fresh out of Berklee (a college whose natural state seems to be lurching from one controversy to the next, while somehow still managing to produce remarkable talent in between), Mei Semones has made her full-length debut with Animaru, an album recorded in a bilingual blend of English and Japanese. As a vocalist, Semones is rather understated, but she more than compensates with intricate guitar work. Complex chord voicings give way to fluid passages that lead seamlessly into equally demanding fingerings, while double bass, violin, and viola fill the surrounding space with constant motion. The album is unmistakably rooted in fusion, though calling it eclectic would miss the mark. Eclectic records thrive on unpredictability; Animaru does the exact opposite. Semones approaches her music like a master pastry chef following a meticulously refined recipe, folding indie rock, J-pop, and the rhythmic sway of bossa nova into a blend whose proportions never seem accidental. She never deviates from that formula across all ten tracks. The result is an album that's endlessly engaging on a micro level, yet so unwavering in its aesthetic that admiration and monotony inevitably begin to coexist.
11. Maëlle Taina - As I Am
🇫🇷 France / 🇺🇸 US, California / May 2 / 0,762 / 🌌
Spotify / Apple Music
indie folk / indie pop / ambient
The most obscure album in this edition belongs to Maëlle Taina, a virtually unknown French singer-songwriter born in Tahiti, French Polynesia, and raised between California and Paris - as though her parents looked at a world map, chose three points as far apart as they could find, and decided that crossing oceans should simply become a way of life. That perpetual sense of movement runs through her songwriting. Her lyrics return again and again to questions of distance, dislocation, taking the wrong road, and feeling an irresistible pull toward somewhere else without ever knowing where that "somewhere" might be - or why it matters. The end result is a quietly remarkable work of independent folk: intimate, deeply personal, and refreshingly free from the formulaic polish and commercial reflexes that so often flatten contemporary singer-songwriter records.
10. Rivers of Nihil - Rivers of Nihil
🇺🇸 US, Pennsylvania / May 30 / 0,764 / 🌙
Spotify / Apple Music
technical death metal / progressive death metal
A self-titled album that arrives five records into a band's career is rarely just a title - it's usually a statement. Sometimes it signals an artist operating at the height of its powers. Sometimes it marks the beginning of a new chapter. More often, though, it's an act of self-validation: an attempt to reaffirm the band's identity after the ground beneath it has shifted. The logic isn't all that different from the way monarchs throughout history leaned on exalted dynastic titles and illustrious bloodlines to reinforce their claim to the throne. A band, too, can feel the need to reassure its audience that, despite lineup changes and internal upheaval, it remains the rightful heir to its own legacy. Rivers of Nihil fit that pattern in an unusual way. In 2022, the band parted ways with longtime vocalist Jake Dieffenbach, attributing the decision simply to his behavior while offering little public explanation. Even so, the group's creative engine - Brody Uttley and Adam Biggs - remained firmly in place. With roles redistributed rather than the band's identity reinvented, Rivers of Nihil endured, even if they lost the voice and face many fans most closely associated with the project. The self-titled fifth album makes a compelling case that the gamble paid off. The songwriting is among the strongest of the band's career, delivering enough ambition, precision, and emotional weight to challenge "Where Owls Know My Name" - the record long considered their benchmark by much of the fanbase.
09. Alexandra Savior - Beneath the Lilypad
🇺🇸 US, Oregon / May 16 / 0,770 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music
chamber folk / art pop / psychedelic pop
The most revealing way to tell Alexandra Savior's story is to begin somewhere else entirely - with Alex Turner. In the years following "AM", the Arctic Monkeys frontman found himself increasingly drawn to vintage art rock, but making such a dramatic stylistic pivot with one of the world's biggest indie bands was no small risk. After an album as universally embraced as "AM", veering into cinematic, retro-futurist songwriting could easily have alienated the audience. Before taking that leap into the unknown with “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino”, Turner chose to experiment with his new musical direction in projects where the stakes were considerably lower. First came the second album by The Last Shadow Puppets. Then, with the same supergroup lineup, Turner and his collaborators joined forces with newcomer Alexandra Savior to co-write and record her debut album, “Belladonna of Sadness”. Finally came a series of jam sessions with Lana Del Rey in Los Angeles, which reportedly resulted in an unreleased album, fragments of which likely found their way onto NFR and Blue Banisters. For Turner, these collaborations were experiments conducted before taking the biggest artistic gamble of his career. For Alexandra Savior, they were something far more consequential: the springboard that launched her as a songwriter in her own right. She has since proven that “Belladonna of Sadness” was no one-off success, following it with the self-written “The Archer” in 2020 and now the equally self-crafted “Beneath the Lilypad”, further establishing a voice that's unmistakably her own.
08. The Amazons - 21st Century Fiction
🇬🇧 UK, England / May 9 / 0,780 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
alternative rock / indie rock / hard rock / psychedelic rock / southern rock / alternative country
When The Amazons burst onto the scene in 2017, they arrived with a self-titled debut anchored by "Black Magic", a song that still stands as the band's defining hit. In hindsight, they may have set themselves an almost impossible standard. Their music chased the scale of arena rock while borrowing the muscular swagger of Foals and Royal Blood - a combination more typical of bands already headlining festivals than ones still trying to earn a place on the bill. For newcomers, that kind of grandiosity can easily feel like writing checks your reputation hasn't cashed yet. What The Amazons lacked in stature, though, they more than made up for in persistence. Rather than chasing trends, they spent the following years patiently expanding both their audience and their artistic vocabulary, allowing each record to push a little further than the last. Their fourth album is the clearest payoff yet. It's their boldest statement both lyrically and sonically. Frontman Matt Thomson writes about a midlife crisis that seems to have arrived years ahead of schedule, while the music embraces unapologetic scale: the glossy confidence of '80s icons like Duran Duran and Bon Jovi, the punch of '90s alternative rock, and enough modern production flourishes to keep the whole thing firmly rooted in the present.
07. Bunny White - The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God
🇺🇸 US, Illinois / June 27 / 0,781 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
retro pop / chamber pop / disco / jazz / bossa nova
Over the course of a decade, Marina Rae White cycled through a series of tomboy personas before taking an abrupt creative U-turn. Enter Bunny White: an exaggerated, unapologetically retro tradwife whose vintage aesthetic extends well beyond the stage. Marina has admitted she's become so invested in the character that thrift stores have turned into a regular hunting ground for period-perfect outfits. That same willingness to reinvent herself defines “The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God”, her debut full-length. After testing the waters with the relatively conventional pop EPs “Jade” and “Marina”, White gradually abandoned stylistic restraint, allowing her songwriting to wander into increasingly unexpected territory. By the time this record arrived, she'd finally found a musical identity expansive enough to sustain an album. What makes the record so engaging is its refusal to stay put. Songs routinely begin as tongue-in-cheek sketches before blossoming into something unexpectedly sophisticated. "Culdesac" starts with almost kitschy simplicity, only to bloom into a smoky groove that recalls the spirit of Amy Winehouse. Elsewhere, "The Game" stacks shimmering synthesizer arpeggios over an 8-bit aesthetic before pulling the rug out completely, letting the electronics evaporate and revealing an unhurried bossa nova hiding beneath.
06. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Phantom Island
🇦🇺 Australia / June 13 / 0,791 / ✨
Apple Music / Yandex Music / Bandcamp
psychedelic rock / orchestral rock / garage rock / surf rock
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are one of the last bands in the entire Milky Way (and the Magellanic Clouds!) to preserve the experimental spirit of 1960s rock music: an impulse toward expansion in every direction and a desire to explore music in all its possible forms. They seem less like a conventional band than a musical research lab driven by boundless curiosity - a group still convinced that every unexplored corner of music is worth wandering into. Most rock acts eventually settle on a recognizable formula, polishing it album after album until it becomes a signature. King Gizzard does the exact opposite. Every record is free to reinvent the band's identity from scratch, with no obligation to fit neatly into an overarching narrative. Even when they stumble upon an idea most artists would happily build an entire career around, they treat it as a one-off experiment before disappearing in pursuit of the next obsession. At their core, they're simply six musicians who never seem to stop jamming, generously allowing the rest of us to listen in.
That philosophy has produced one of the most adventurous catalogues in modern rock. Twenty-seven albums in, they've tackled an extraordinary range of genres and compositional ideas. In 2022, “Changes” explored the expressive possibilities of one song's modal harmony by refracting recurring musical ideas through shifting harmonic lenses. The same year, “Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava” built seven extended pieces around each of the diatonic modes - even the notoriously elusive Lydian and unstable Locrian. The new album feels like a companion piece to “Flight b741”, but reimagined on a far grander scale, with lush orchestral arrangements replacing much of its predecessor's raw immediacy. Its lyrics draw an unsettling parallel between Australia and a vast island asylum - a dark historical nod to the continent's origins as Britain's penal colony.
05. Matt Maltese - Hers
🇬🇧 UK, England / 🇨🇦 Canada / May 16 / 0,809 / 🌟
Spotify / Apple Music
bedroom pop / indie
What we most often expect from British musicians is a combination of musical conservatism, the ability to remain contemporary, and a remarkably high standard of lyricism. Unlike artists from much of the rest of the world, English is their native language, so straightforward love songs built around worn-out metaphors are rarely enough to leave a lasting impression. Matt Maltese has occupied that sweet spot ever since “As the World Caves In” broke through in 2017, a song that remains the defining moment of his career. Five albums later, he continues to strike that elusive balance between classic songwriting craftsmanship and emotional immediacy, each release adding another set of quietly introspective reflections. One of Maltese's greatest strengths is the way his emotional perspective can shift from song to song without ever feeling inconsistent. "Buses Replace Trains" finds hope in the endurance of human connection despite relentless modernization, while "Everybody's Just As Crazy As Me" retreats into a wistful landscape of memory and hindsight. Elsewhere, "Anytime, Anyplace, Anyhow" portrays a state of quiet self-abasement in the presence of someone so exceptional that the narrator accepts he will always play a supporting role. The following track, "Always Some MF", flips that perspective entirely, becoming an outburst of raw jealousy as the narrator watches an endless parade of rivals circling the person he loves.
04. KiNG MALA - And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing
🇺🇸 US, California & Texas / May 2 / 0,823 / ✨
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
alternative pop / indie rock
King Mala - the stage persona of Areli Castro - faces one of the trickiest challenges any emerging artist can encounter: sounding familiar before sounding original. On a first listen, it's easy to reduce her debut to a collage of recognizable influences, with echoes of Billie Eilish, Melanie Martinez, BANKS, and Grimes all competing for attention. The catch is that the album becomes more convincing the longer you live with it. Initial comparisons gradually lose their grip, revealing that Castro isn't simply borrowing aesthetic cues - she's reshaping them into something with a distinct identity of its own. Once that realization clicks, the record opens up as an impressively cohesive statement: stylistically adventurous, densely layered, and remarkably consistent from beginning to end. It moves effortlessly from the razor-sharp pop immediacy of "GØD" to the art-rock ambitions of "ODE TO A BLACK HOLE", where dramatic harmonic-minor modulations lend the music an almost theatrical grandeur. Lyrically, Castro remains fascinated by the psychology of power. Throughout the album, dominant-submissive relationships are refracted through the imagery of cults, rituals, devotion, and deification - a thematic obsession that has defined her work ever since her debut EP in 2022. Rather than treating those ideas as mere provocation, she uses them to examine the strange ways intimacy, authority, and faith can become entangled.
03. meka - The Rabbit
🇸🇪 Sweden / 🇺🇸 US, California / May 21 / 0,824 / 🌑
Spotify / Apple Music
indie folk / acoustic folk
Rocket engineers like to describe engines as either oxygen-rich or fuel-rich, depending on which ingredient dominates the combustion cycle. By the same logic, Meka could be called string-rich. Few contemporary folk records are so thoroughly saturated with plucked instruments that they become the album's defining architectural element. Melissa Lingo herself does not bother specifying exactly which instruments she plays, simply listing "guitars" in the credits and leaving listeners to work out for themselves where the Appalachian dulcimer she poses with in the album photos appears, and where other stringed instruments take over. Those arrangements are astonishingly intricate. Guitar lines constantly overlap in graceful counterpoint, supported by piano and violin in textures that feel meticulously constructed rather than casually performed. This is the opposite of the sparse, reverb-soaked folk aesthetic built around solitary intimacy. Every song is densely orchestrated, rewarding close attention with new details on each listen. Spiritually, the record often recalls Norah Jones's “Little Broken Hearts”. Beyond the shared fascination with travel, movement, and emotional transit, tracks like "Memory Machine" and "The Tower" drift so close to that aesthetic that the influence becomes unmistakable.
02. The Callous Daoboys - I Don't Want to See You in Heaven
🇺🇸 US, Georgia / May 16 / 0,837 / 🌙
Spotify / Apple Music
mathcore / metalcore / post-hardcore / experimental rock / sasscore / screamo / avant-garde metal / alternative metal / emo / noise rock / post-metal
A curious bit of numerology: every three years, the still relatively young band The Callous Daoboys resurfaces to deliver what is almost guaranteed to be the year's most unhinged record. I Don't Want to See You in Heaven is the third album in that three-year cadence. For the third time, the band seems to have erased every remaining genre boundary. Trying to catalogue what happens here is a losing battle: fragments of pop songwriting collide with early-2000s rock, lounge music wanders in uninvited, and countless other styles flash by before you've even had time to identify them. Even the lounge passages have a purpose within the album's elaborate fiction, which frames the entire record as a recently unearthed three-century-old artifact recovered from a museum devoted exclusively to preserving history's most catastrophic artistic failures.
That postmodern mindset extends far beyond the concept itself. The lead single, "Two-Headed Trout", gleefully repurposes the instantly recognizable motif from the laser sequence in “Ocean's Twelve” featuring Vincent Cassel. But accusing the band of theft quickly becomes an exercise in futility. That cinematic cue borrowed from La Caution's "Thé à la Menthe"; La Caution never disclosed where they found it; online researchers eventually traced the melody to Assi El Hallani's 1994 recording "Law Adri"; and some still argue it reaches back even further into the tradition of anonymous Arabic folk music, though no one has managed to prove it. Like the Ocean's films themselves belongs to a franchise based on the 1960 Ocean's 11, whose very premise was inspired by the Rat Pack - the sample becomes another reminder that art is often an endless chain of reinterpretation rather than isolated acts of creation.
Another postmodern homage appears in "Distracted by The Mona Lisa", which openly nods toward the style of At the Drive-In. Yet perhaps the album's cleverest trick is psychological rather than musical. On "Lemon" and "Body Horror for Birds", the band repeatedly hints that another outrageous left turn is seconds away... and then refuses to deliver one. When every track has conditioned you to expect chaos, withholding it becomes the biggest surprise of all. If you absolutely hated this album, congratulations - you are probably a perfectly normal person. But if this kind of beautiful madness speaks to you, welcome aboard.
01. Katatonia - Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State
🇸🇪 Sweden / June 6 / 0,848 / ☄️
Spotify / Apple Music / Yandex Music
progressive metal / gothic metal / doom metal / atmospheric post-metal
Perhaps not the most deserving choice for first place, but this particular stretch of time simply did not produce an extraordinary album that clearly outshone everything else. Instead, this feels like a roundup without a clear protagonist - a fitting coincidence, given the inclusion of "A World Without Heroes", Katatonia's closing cover of the Kiss classic. Katatonia have faced consistent criticism ever since “The Fall of Hearts”. Some of it is justified, while some of it feels excessive. Throughout their career, the band has repeatedly redefined its stylistic identity without ever losing the distinctive emotional core and discographic continuity that make Katatonia unmistakable. The defining weakness of “Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State” is its uneven pacing. The opening five tracks rank comfortably alongside the strongest material the band has released in years, while the second half struggles to sustain that momentum - a contrast that likely explains the album's comparatively muted reception among critics and listeners alike.
The biggest surprise arrives with the Swedish-language track "Efter Solen" - apparently only the second time the band has recorded in their native language after "Vakaren" from the “Mnemosynean” outtakes collection. "Efter Solen" is not a bad song in itself, but Katatonia have never been regarded as an experimental band, so this excursion into atmospheric electronic indie comes as a genuine shock to many listeners. Even the far more stylistically adventurous Leprous puzzled part of their audience with the similarly electronic "Self-Satisfied Lullaby", also positioned as the penultimate track on its album. Viewed in that light, “Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State” feels less like a major artistic statement than a transitional release, perhaps even one delivered to satisfy contractual commitments with Napalm Records. Half of the album slots effortlessly into Katatonia's long-established mythology. The other half feels more like supplementary material: worthwhile for devoted fans, but hardly essential to understanding the band's legacy.
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