Lifeguard, the young Chicago trio who brilliantly channel the arty, noisy post-punk of the late ’70s and early ’80s, will release their Matador debut album Ripped And Torn about a month from now. Lead single “It Will Get Worse” elicited a strong endorsement from us, and today’s new track is similarly great.

Last year, the legendary Americana musicians Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, two longtime collaborators, released the joint record Woodland, which won the Grammy for Best Folk Album. Last night, Welch and Rawlings were musical guests on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, where they got a chance to show how they can cast a spell. I get why musicians like Welch and …

It’s been a little while since we’ve heard from Lawn, the New Orleans duo of Mac Folger and Rui De Magalhaes. After the release of their 2022 EP Bigger Sprout De Magalhaes moved to Chicago and released a solo album under the name Rui Gabriel. Now, the two members of Lawn are back together, and they’re getting ready to head …

Cola is the trio of ex-members of the broken-up Montreal post-punk band Ought, and things have been awfully hectic for those guys lately. Cola released their sophomore album The Gloss last year, and frontman Tim Darcy saw his home destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year. That apparently hasn’t slowed things down for Cola, who are about to …

In 2023, Marcus Brown shared the debut Nourished By Time album, Erotic Probiotic 2, but he’s stayed busy since. The Baltimore musician released collabs with Kevin Abstract and evilgiane, dropped an EP called Catching Chickens, and was revealed as part of the lineup for this year’s Outside Lands. Now, he’s announcing his sophomore effort The Passionate Ones, arriving in August.

DJ Haram makes music that cuts through the air and demands to be heard. The New Jersey native, now based in New York, came up in the club world, adding notes of Middle Eastern dance and experimental noise to her DJ sets. She’s half of the duo 700 Bliss with Moor Mother, and she’s produced tracks for people like Armand …

We haven’t heard much from NYC country singer Dougie Poole since 2023’s great The Rainbow Wheel Of Death, but he’s been out there touring, and now he has an album to show for it. At Tubby’s, Poole’s new live album, documents his performance last September at the upstate New York venue Tubby’s Kingston. The stripped-down performance finds Poole backed by …

Louisville musician Ryan Davis used to be a member of groups like State Champion and Tropical Trash, and now he makes poetic, off-kilter Americana with his Roadhouse Band. Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band released their debut album Dancing On The Edge in 2023, and now they’ve got plans to follow it with a new LP called New Threats From …

Though “Doctor Worm” never appeared on any of They Might Be Giants’ studio albums, the 1998 single has become one of the band’s signature songs. Over 25 years after the music video debuted on Nickelodeon’s KaBlam!, they performed it on Jimmy Kimmel Live Tuesday night, in celebration of last year’s live album Beast Of Horns. Watch the very colorful performance …

Fiona Apple is a court-watcher. She spent a few years monitoring bail hearings in publicly accessible courtrooms, documenting the soul-grinding legal grind that faces some of the American people who really have the deck stacked against them. In the past, Apple has scored and narrated a PSA about court-watching, and she recently wrote a new song about the things that …