Black Lips – Season of the Peach (Fire) (13th Floor Album Review)
Season of the Peach, the latest album from Black Lips, kicks the doors down from the first warped note. What follows is a relentless 14-track, 40 minute, loud, high-speed ride through death wishes, celebrity name-drops, and glorious chaos.
Jeff Tweedy – Twilight Override (dBpm) (13th Floor Album Review)
Jeff Tweedy doesn’t need another write-up to “drum up listenership.” Throngs of devoted Wilco fans will simply lap up his latest solo triple album Twilight Override—a genuine fucking gem of a record, I should add—by word of its existence alone.
Nick Drake – The Making Of Five Leaves Left (Island/UME) 4-CD Box Set
The Making Of Five Leaves Left, a project nine years in gestation, was released on July 25th via UMR/Island Records. This Nick Drake Estate authorised edition comprises over 30 previously unheard outtakes from the sessions which gradually became Five Leaves Left (1969) and is available as 4 CD and 4 LP boxed sets. The 13th Floor’s Faith Hamblyn has a […]
Something They Call Myth – Too: Matheson Bay Sessions (13th Floor EP Review)
From the first hush of finger-picked guitar, Too: Matheson Bay Sessions by Something They Call Myth feels like a night around the fire with friends, music as an invitation and memory all at once. Across four songs it moves from the fading glow of Embers to the slow-burn intimacy of House of Friends, weaving stories of camaraderie, risk, and […]
Neko Case – Neon Grey Midnight Green (Anti-) (13th Floor Album Review)
After a seven-year hiatus, the fearless Neko Case returns with Neon Grey Midnight Green, perhaps her most fully realized and ambitious album yet.
Underwire – State Between (13th Floor Album Review)
It’s been incubating for nearly 15 years, now at last Underwire deliver their debut album State Between.
Amanda Shires – Nobody’s Girl (ATO) (13th Floor Album Review)
Amanda Shires’ Nobody’s Girl is a luminous, defiant chronicle of life after the end of both a marriage and a musical partnership with fellow songwriter Jason Isbell.
Robert Plant – Saving Grace (Nonesuch) (13th Floor Album Review)
Robert Plant continues his exploration of the “remote corners of recorded music” with this collection of covers and trad blues recorded in his own corner of the world…along the Welsh borders.
Ben Chavasse – Boxing (13th Floor Album Review)
Tamaki-Makarau-based indie-folk artist Ben Chavasse is no stranger to honing his craft. Having won Smokefree Rockquest at age 16, he’s been slowly refining it ever since – and now, he’s stepped triumphantly into the open with his debut album, Boxing, an impressive 10-track compilation. The album is produced by Ben and Michael Luke Howell, who […]
The Third Mind – Right Now! (Yep Roc) (13th Floor Album Review)
From the opening notes of Right Now! it’s clear that The Third Mind have once again captured the thrill of discovery in real time. Their third studio album is a dynamic dialogue between musicians, eras, and every earlier version of these songs that these fearless improvisers now claim them as their own.
Joan Shelley – Real Warmth (No Quarter) (13th Floor Album Review)
Joan Shelley writes songs that feel like places you can step inside: quiet rooms, wooded trails, a friend’s porch at dusk. With Real Warmth she invites us into the most welcoming space she’s built yet. It’s an album of home, connection, and slow-burning growth, recorded live in the dead of a cold Toronto winter yet filled with […]
Carson McHone – Pentimento (Merge) (13th Floor Album Review)
Carson McHone’s fourth album Pentimento arrives like a living manuscript, its pages alive with shifting landscapes, salt air, and the grain of skin.
Scarlet Rae – No Heavy Goodbyes (Bayonet) (13th Floor EP Review)
Every so often an artist emerges who feels both familiar and utterly distinct. Scarlet Rae, born in Los Angeles and now based in New York, is one of those.
Dead Famous People – Wild Young Ways (Tiny Global) (13th Floor Album Review)
Dead Famous People… their story is a pop parable. Formed in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in the mid-1980s by the singularly gifted Dons Savage, they quickly shone with two Flying Nun EPs and Savage’s backing vocals graced The Chills’ Heavenly Pop Hit.
BB & The Bullets – High Tide (Dixiefrog Records) (13th Floor Album Review)
It’s no mean feat to put out a debut long player, but to do so through a well-respected overseas indie label has to be viewed as a triumph.
Sydney Minsky Sargeant – Lunga (Domino) (13th Floor Album Review)
Sydney Minsky Sargeant, his debut solo album, Lunga, represents a sharp departure from the taut, electronic bite of his previous work as Working Men’s Club. Recorded over several years, it drifts between pastoral folk, ambient interludes, and occasional bursts of intensity. At its best, it offers a glimpse of Minsky Sargeant stripped back and vulnerable; […]
Rhian Sheehan & Arli Liberman -Traces (Loop) (13th Floor Album Review)
Sweeping, layered sound panoramas prevail on Traces, a collaboration between Rhian Sheehan and Arli Liberman. It’s all a wonderfully other-worldly journey: music to take us places beyond the usual.
IVY – Hush (Velvet The Label) (13th Floor Album Review)
Ivy is one of those bands whose beginnings may sound humble and ordinary, but whose debut album Hush, surges with scale and ambition.
Grant-Lee Phillips – In the Hour of Dust (Yep Roc) (13th Floor Album Review)
Grant-Lee Phillips is a songwriter who moves between the intimate and the expansive. From the widescreen alt-rock of Grant Lee Buffalo to the quieter folk of his solo records, he places private anxieties within a larger frame of history, myth and politics. In the Hour of Dust, his twelfth solo album, continues in that spirit.
El Michels Affair – 24 Hr Sports (Big Crown) (13th Floor Album Review)
Leon Michels and his El Michels Affair are about to release 24 Hr Sports featuring appearances from Norah Jones, Shintaro Sakamoto, Florence Adooni, Rogê, and Dave Guy, as well as a prominent sample of the late Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Is it worth waiting for? Here is The 13th Floor’s Jeff Neems with an advance listen.