Since forming in the mid-2010s, Brighton-based noise rock and post-hardcore band DITZ have built a reputation for their abrasive sound, chaotic live shows, and unfiltered intensity. With Never Exhale, their second full length, they sound sharper and more deliberate, shaping their intensity with clearer purpose.
The record came together between tours, written and recorded in brief windows of time that gave the songs their restless charge. Vocalist Cal Francis said it felt like being on a game show, grabbing the first idea that surfaced before moving on, and guitarist Jack Looker described the pace as hectic in a way that kept the music alive, giving the record its constant push and pull between dissonance and patience. Beneath that tension runs a deliberate mood, a “sense of menace” that Francis considers essential to what they do. “I love it when bands can sort of scare you with a bit of music.” Looker added that their goal isn’t chaos for its own sake, but something closer to a psychological thriller, music that lingers and unsettles rather than overwhelms.
Francis wrote the lyrics as a stream of consciousness, later reshaping them into something more abstract and open to interpretation. He drew from the Bible, not as a matter of faith, but as a source of storytelling and shared language, noting its influence on Western tropes. The result is writing that moves between surrealism and reflection, where personal thoughts blend with cultural noise. The songs also draw from literary corners, with traces of Joseph Conrad, Kafka, and Kurt Vonnegut appearing like pieces of dream logic. Looker called Never Exhale "spooky," and Francis leaned into that feeling, saying that patience and space in the songs became their own pressure release.
There’s something cathartic about listening to Never Exhale. It forces a release of something I didn’t realize I needed and I found myself drawn to the album for reshaping my expectations of where an album can take me. In this regard, Never Exhale works as a complete experience, so follow the band’s advice and listen to it as an album, not in a playlist. Just remember to exhale.
On their new album, Miller’s Garage, the band brings their real world directly into the record. Sessions often began at Alex’s place, where writing turned into tracking the moment an idea surfaced, and long running live staples sat beside songs that arrived fresh from late night jams. They pulled from years of loosely held demos, shaping older ideas like “Burnt” and “Found Me Dead” through repeated shows before committing them to tape. Snippets from tours, phone videos, and the voices of friends weave through tracks like “House Party” and “Tour Song,” giving the album the same layered chaos and spontaneity that circles their weekends.
Musically, the album is a fantastic blend of garage, hardcore, punk, and rock with a splash of surf. The band moves fast and loose, with bursts of raw energy and lots of memorable hooks. Combined with their bare knuckle lyrics you feel like you've been invited into one of their late-night house parties. It’s one that I definitely want to attend.
The result is a set of songs that are more concise than I am accustomed to hearing from the band, but never lose their adventurous edge. Most hover in the three to four minute range, packed with shifting tones and layered textures. “Ecdysis” opens with arpeggiated synths that lean toward Depeche Mode before crashing into heavier riffs. “My Mind Is a Mountain” shows the band’s sharp focus, trimmed of excess but still open to experimentation. Moreno has also stepped into this chapter with a new clarity and energy, having given up drinking, and both are imprinted into the album’s music. It’s a record that feels purposeful and distilled, every sound chosen to heighten its impact.
There are not many bands still making new music after almost forty years, let alone fresh and thrilling music, but here is Private Music standing as one of Deftones’ best.
Now the band returns with Never Enough, an album that takes their genre blending to a whole new level. To make it, they secluded themselves in Laurel Canyon at The Mansion, where they lived and recorded together for two months. The experience was immersive and communal, described by drummer Daniel Fang as more like close friends sharing a house than a traditional recording session. With frontman Brendan Yates leading production, the band shaped the songs through real-time collaboration, spending their days refining old demos, experimenting with arrangements, and cooking meals together. The Mansion became both a creative lab and a blank slate where hardcore collided with synths, spoken word, funk, jazz flourishes, and string arrangements.
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Cameron Winter, Max Bassin, Emily Green, and Dominic DiGesu grew up together in Brooklyn, making noise in after-school practice rooms and friends’ basements, learning how to play and how to listen. As teenagers, they started calling themselves Geese, chasing an impulse to make music that felt offbeat and a little unstable. That sense carried them through their first recordings and still runs through everything they make.
Their 2021 debut Projector captured the tension of youth and discovery, its sharp post-punk edges giving form to a band still learning how to translate instinct into structure. Two years later, 3D Country stretched that foundation, embracing a more loose-limbed approach that let humor and chaos feed into their songwriting. Then came Winter’s solo record Heavy Metal, an unexpected detour that peeled back the noise and revealed how quietly intricate his writing could be. Taken together, the three albums reflect the band’s refusal to be boxed into any fixed idea of what they should be or how they should sound.
Getting Killed feels like the point where all of those threads come together. Recorded in Los Angeles with Kenny Beats, the band embraced risk, chasing moments that felt unpredictable even to them. Yet this didn’t come by accident but by design, through painstaking sixteen-hour days in the studio. The result is a record where the rhythms hit rougher, the guitars take on a shape-shifting quality, sliding between melody and noise, and Winter sings with an off-kilter, imperfect pitch that mirrors the instability the band wants to convey. All the while, there’s a tension running through the album that makes every song sound on the verge of burning out.
If the earlier records traced how Geese learned to make sense of their ideas, Getting Killed shows them letting go of sense altogether and not being afraid to see what happens when they push their creative envelope. It's one of the most intriguing albums of the year and Geese one of the most interesting bands making music today.
In 2019, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker was commissioned to write a song for a play about a woman watching her children from beyond the grave. At the time, his own son was preparing to leave home, and Cocker found himself channeling that personal anxiety into the song. Titled “Hymn of the North,” the track sparked something dormant.
He was emerging from a turbulent period marked by the passing of his mother and longtime bandmate Steve Mackey, as well as a yearlong separation and eventual reunion with his wife. During that time apart, Cocker began confronting the clutter he had accumulated over decades, boxes of belongings from his youth, long stored away and gathering dust. He started photographing the objects, trying to remember why they had once mattered. But the deeper realization came quietly: “I thought I'd rather hang out with people than with objects.” From that moment of clarity, More began to take shape.
Pulp’s music has always thrived on contradiction and refusal to conform. Cocker’s songwriting, in particular, has pushed against the stylized portrayals of love and desire he grew up hearing in pop music, songs that felt disconnected from his own experiences. He has always loved the form and drama of the pop song but has made it his mission to subvert it, to insert truths that feel awkward, conflicted, or raw. More is all of that. It's open-hearted and crooked, lush and unvarnished. Songs like “Got To Have Love” burst with gospel-like energy, while tracks like “Tina” and “My Sex” explore the strange, often uncomfortable dynamics of desire and disconnection.
With its shift in focus from nostalgia and memory to presence and connection, and with themes of love, aging, alienation, and what it means to be different and remain outside, More is a different kind of Pulp album, one that could only come with time. It captures something vulnerable and unresolved. What if the place you thought you were meant to be doesn’t exist? What if stardom doesn’t fix anything? What if growing up just means learning how to live with those questions? Cocker doesn’t pretend to have the answers. But with More, he and Pulp have made an album that faces those questions, not with sentimentality, but with clarity, wit, and edge. It's 100 percent Pulp.
3. Sublunar, A Random Moment Of Stillness
Sublunar is a progressive rock band from Poland who describe their music as atmospheric prog and post rock, with occasional ventures into heavier stylistic territory. A Random Moment of Stillness, their second album, features six tracks that fully commit to that approach. Across forty two minutes, stretched guitar lines, intricate drumming, and deep, resonant bass playing move naturally from one mood to another. Dark, pensive passages slowly open into wider, uplifting peaks, and Lukasz Dumara’s vocals sit comfortably within the arrangements, adding texture without crowding the music.
The band has said they are a sum of sounds, noise, time lapses, and their spare anxieties, which feels like a direct description of this record. From the pulsating, hypnotic opener “Bear With Me” to the cinematic build of the ten minute closer “A Sun Blur,” the album carries tension and detail through the band’s intricate playing, exciting without ever overwhelming. Each section feels considered, with momentum that builds patiently over time.
What stands out most is how expansive the album feels while still playing out as an intimate affair, striking a balance that holds across repeated listens. I was blown away by this album the first time I heard it, and I have returned to it many times since. It continues to reveal itself with each listen and has easily become one of my favorite albums of the year.
Icelandic trio The Vintage Caravan have always loved hard hitting, riff fueled music. “No gimmick or catch, just pure love for the music,” they once said. While classic hard rock from the sixties and seventies has always shaped their sound, the band has said that they never set out to be a band that sounded like it was frozen in 1971 and then put in the microwave all these years later. Their 2021 album Monuments made that clear, stretching in new directions. The trio, singer guitarist Óskar Logi Ágústsson, bassist Alexander Örn Númason, and drummer Stefán Ari Stefánsson, now return with their sixth album, Portals. If Monuments showed them stretching, Portals finds them evolving into something greater.
Recorded in Porto, Portugal, the album’s seventeen tracks, including five interludes titled Portal I through V, run just over an hour. Númason described the goal of the album as doing what they had never been able to do before, capture the live essence of the band on record. To reach that, they filled the recording room with sound. Unafraid to let let things bleed together, cranked up amps stood near the drum kit letting air and vibration blend until, as he put it, “you hear everything in everything.” That natural spill of tone and rhythm defines Portals. It's about three players responding in real time, turning the room itself into part of the performance, and more than on past albums, resisting the urge to complicate ideas that simply work, trusting when a song has said enough.
Between the songs, the five Portals act as bridges. Númason spent months cutting ten second loops from about fifty found cassettes, old worship music, a Russian folk tape, whatever turned up in second hand shops. He then stretched and layered them with synth textures and field recordings from the streets of Porto. The fragments became miniature worlds, handmade transitions carrying voices, birds, and room noise from one piece to the next. Óskar calls them “the proggiest choice we have made,” a move that lends conceptual flow while keeping the music balanced between intricacy and catchiness.
I didn't think the band could top Monuments, yet here they are. Building a world from physical sound, live energy, and handmade transitions, Portals is an album of monumental proportions that plays like a single performance stretched into seventeen movements. It reminds me why I have always loved the album format when everything flows together, because musical odysseys thrill when done well. And Portals is done masterfully.
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