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| Photo - Henriette Sagjord |
Oslo-based singer/songwriter and composer Resa Saffa Park has announced her new album 'Kendra' will be released 6th November, and shares latest single 'Forever as Her Friend'. Cinematic indie steeped in jazz and soul, Resa Saffa Park's music occupies a world of its own, sitting in the orbit of Tamino, Michelle Gurevich and Portishead - while drawing from the work of Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Nirvana, Mitski and Julia Jacklin.
A graduate of Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA), Resa returned to her home city of Oslo to write new album Kendra. Written largely in her Oslo apartment over the course of a year, the album finds Resa Saffa Park paying closer attention to the people around her. Across twelve songs, she keeps returning to the same question: how do we understand ourselves through other people?
Produced by Daragh Patrick Wearen and Bård Berg, new single 'Forever as Her Friend' pairs smoky piano and slow-burning guitars, specifically examining the unravelling of a friendship.
Speaking on the song's release, Resa Saffa Park said: "Forever as Her Friend is a song I wrote about a friendship that meant a lot to me, one that changed in a way I still don’t fully understand. It's a story of holding on to something that once felt permanent, and feeling it slowly come to an end without knowing how to accept it. It’s about the longing to be loved, chosen, and kept, and how losing a friend can sometimes hurt more than losing a lover.
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Norwegian cult act Ulver return again to the track 'Hollywood Babylon' from their previous album "Liminal Animals" (2024) for the best of all reasons: a stunning music video that has been long in the making. Following a fascinating remix by Gazelle Twin aka Elizabeth Bernholz that offered a brooding reinterpretation, the Norwegians now add this beautiful clip to the growing corpus around the original track.
Ulver comment: "Working with our wonderfully mad old friend Christian Mona from the Bogus Blimp days never disappoints", mastermind Kristoffer Rygg writes on behalf of Ulver. "He started to create this video before we released our last album (sorry about that) and he has finally delivered a splendidly grotesque little gem from within his Automated Bathroom. 'Hollywood Babylon' has never looked better! It is a distorted mirror of our times. Please feel free to stare into it a little too long."
The Norwegian visual artist collective AKFF! adds: "2025 marked 20 years since Ulver made the animated music video 'It Is Not Sound' in cooperation with us", Christian Mona states. "It has been a hypnotic journey through the Sea of Sorrows all the way to the Pinnacle of Truth. Thinking back on what a great experience it was to visualise and expand on Ulver's universe, we started wondering why AKFF! hadn't made more videos with Ulver. As it turns out, Ulver had been thinking along the same lines! And so the making of 'Hollywood Babylon' began.”
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| Photo - Nicole Osrin |
Existing between London and the inherited landscapes of the Lake District and Norfolk, silt. emerged yesterday with new track 'trauma porn' the first glimpse of a forthcoming body of work due for release later this year. Neither a traditional band nor solo alias, silt. is an evolving musical project that places the focus firmly on the songs themselves. Its songs explore the realities people build to escape themselves, the traces they leave behind, and the collision between natural imagery and synthetic modern life.
Blending dreamlike ambience, towering guitars and electronic abstraction, 'trauma porn' unfolds through recurring images of flies, bones and artificial flowers. Rather than offering fixed narratives, silt. treats songs as "open systems": works that continue revealing new meanings with every return.
On 'trauma porn', silt. explains: "'trauma porn' is about how hard it is to be alone - and the lengths people will go to to avoid sitting with themselves. It's interested in the realities we build, the emotional loops we trap ourselves inside. It embodies the volatility that comes from flicking through your own emotions and realities as if they’re pieces of content."
Conceived as an evolving musical project rather than a conventional artist identity, silt.'s ambition extends beyond, with songs as living, endlessly interpretable spaces. Named after the sediment from which landscapes are formed, it reflects what silt. describes as "what everything is built on" and "what remains after everything is gone."
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| Photo - Jordan Malane |
Recording for the latest Babe Rainbow record existed on a Marey Louise houseboat in Amsterdam, which feels fitting to the overall bright and summery aesthetic the album possesses. Finishing touches including mastering and production were completed by Kyle Mullarky at his Malibu ranch, who the band also use as their sound engineer for touring. Out now, the album contains groovy, dance-heavy production backed perfectly with wailing vocals and hard rocking finger funky sounds.
An eclectic, hazy offering featuring eleven country-pop tracks, the release marks a sonic shift for the Australian lads. While they still maintain their beachy stoner aesthetics, the duo become more bold and brazen on the new album, reaching territory they’ve previously never explored. Known for their boogie psychedelia and throwback surf cult imagery, Babe Rainbow are an Australian stoner pop band.
The group was formed in 2015 by Jack Crowther (aka Cool Breez), Angus Dowling, and Elliot O'Reilly, who lurked at the kiosks around Rainbow Bay. The three of them worked for John Cutts, a local grower near Tropical Fruit World in Duranbah, NSW. The guys at John's farm were churning out kale long before it became trendy.
While Babe Rainbow's musical style was originally rooted in 60's psych and 70's French surf-pop, it has evolved throughout its career to incorporate woodland bop and folk disco, dub, dance, and international grooves while maintaining an Aquarian quality through Dowling's musical spacemen singing style and Cool Breez's chiming guitar sounds.
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Building upon this year’s previous releases, “Lay Your Mind,” “Ground Falls Away,” and “Time Killing,” Strange Plants share “What A Time,” an upbeat and driving alternative rock single that disguises sharp social commentary beneath an infectious, pop-leaning exterior. Balancing propulsive grooves with tongue-in-cheek lyricism, the track examines the accelerating pace of modern life and the growing sense that many people are being left behind economically, culturally, and technologically.
At its core, “What A Time” reflects the strange contradictions of contemporary living. While the music surges forward with energy and momentum, the lyrics paint a more complicated picture: one where endless scrolling, rapid change, and increasing disconnection have become defining features of everyday life. The title itself serves as the song’s central punchline. “It’s slightly sarcastic,” explains songwriter Matt Brannon. “The verses aren’t describing a world that’s super great right now, so the chorus becomes this tongue-in-cheek ‘what a time to be alive.’”
That contrast between optimism and unease became one of the song’s defining characteristics. Strange Plants intentionally leaned into the tension between the verses and chorus, creating a dynamic push-and-pull that mirrors the subject matter itself. The verses ride atop a driving groove inspired by artists such as Fleetwood Mac and Future Islands, while the chorus shifts into a brighter, synth-forward landscape without abandoning the song’s underlying momentum.
The recording process also brought together an impressive group of collaborators. The band connected with producer John Mullane after sharing a bill with a project he was producing, immediately recognizing a creative chemistry that felt right for the song. Drums were performed by Loel Campbell (Wintersleep, Billy Talent), while Robbie Crowell (Sturgill Simpson, Deer Tick) contributed keys and synthesizers that shape the track’s expansive sound.
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Cinder Well the hauntingly stark musical project of multi-instrumentalist Amelia Baker new album A Blooming Body arrives today July 17th via Hen House Studios (where the album was recorded with Harlan Steinberger). The album is preceded by the lead single and video ‘While the Womb Screams Silently.’
Since 2015, Cinder Well has extracted dark, rich and tender compositions which nod to, but also stray from traditional musical languages. By comparison to the more diaristic tones of previous releases (2015’s self-titled EP, 2018’s The Unconscious Echo, 2020’s No Summer, 2023’s Cadence), A Blooming Body feels like glimpsing scattered vignettes of a whole world rather than a sequential narrative from beginning to end.
Through richly textured arrangements, A Blooming Body expands the sonic world of Cinder Well, resulting in a more immersive, visceral and unconventional collection of songs than we’ve heard before. The music on A Blooming Body shimmers with clarity, Cinder Well’s annunciation crystal clear, and yet there are heady depths to the stories told here that plunge fathoms beneath the ethereal, acoustic surface. “I find that sonically, pulling back into moments of silence and restraint can be eerie in a way that sometimes we think only loudness can achieve.” says Amelia.
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The Spongetones continue their series of fresh standalone singles on the way to their first album for their fifth decade as a band with the new track “Liftetimeline” out today July 17 on all digital platforms worldwide. The third new single from the Power Pop Hall Of Famers in 2026 following the indie hits “So Long” and “(I Really Need) To Kiss You,” it joins their three singles from last year as part of a true renaissance for one the genre's leading lights over the past five decades.
One of the thrills of any new Spongetones tune is discovering which of the band's superb singer-songwriters is stepping to the fore, and on “Lifetimeline” it's bassist Steve Stoeckel, continuing not just his decades of contributing to the band's esteemed canon but also momentum of his 2024 solo debut The Power Of And. It's a personal journey this time out, as Stoeckel explains: “I wrote this song five months after having had a heart attack in April 2025. It was one of those mortality checks (a large one: it could have been fatal) that changed me.
Each year my wife and I vacation at the Outer Banks in NC in October, and I took a beach chair, my phone recorder, and a uke out to the beach, which was deserted at that time of year. I sang the whole thing into my phone, and when I got home, I made a demo in my studio. The band liked it and as usual elevated the idea with their wonderful playing.”
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