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| Photo - Harry Freeman |
Tartanya/Adelaide post-pub-rocker, and a favourite hardworking touring machine, Ricky Albeck has announced the release of a new album in 2026 via Bedroom Suck Records. "Expensive Music" is Ricky's second full-length after 2024's Nocturnal, not counting this year's earlier vinyl-only project Downtown Ricky.
Known for his frequent touring both in solo format and with the infamous Belair Line Band, Ricky has become a staple of the Adelaide music scene. You can find him most nights playing somewhere in town, and his weekly honky-tonk residencies at the now-defunct Crown and Anchor Hotel are things of legend.
Ricky celebrates this album announce by sharing a track from the record, Spend the Night. Recorded by Jon McNichol at Twin Earth Studios in Adelaide, and featuring the Belair Line Band, the track also has a guest appearance by Edo Ekic (Carla Geneve, Peter Bibby) on slide guitar.
Says Ricky on the making of the record, "The original idea for this album was hatched over time. The songs were mostly written between 2022 & 2024 and then in late 2025 me and the band started looking at deciding where & when & how to record them. I really wanted to work with Jon at Twin Earth because he’s got a heap of really cool shit there in terms of gear and he records to tape. It’s also a nice big live room and we knew we wanted to do it all live."
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| Photo - Andrea Zvadova |
This week MF Tomlinson releases a new EP Heaven Is Other People, led by loose-limbed new single 'Now, I Am Free'. MF Tomlinson will play Left Of The Dial Festival in Rotterdam in October. Heaven Is Other People is Tomlinson's first body of work since completing a remarkable self-produced album trilogy with 2025’s Die To Wake Up From A Dream.
Awarded 9/10 by Uncut, included in Mojo's Best Albums Of 2025 and supported by Rolling Stone, The Needle Drop, The Line of Best Fit amongst others - the album marked a career high for the London-based Australian. Now a father, Tomlinson returns creatively transformed, working more instinctively and making some of the most open-hearted, immediate music of his career.
Written following the birth of his first child and recorded during impromptu sessions at his studio in Poplar, London, Tomlinson describes Heaven Is Other People as "a collection of lo-fi gestural pieces on human connection".
Speaking about the EP, Tomlinson shared: "Sometimes the power of a song is to reach for meaning words cannot access. At other times it’s a gift that lets you name something profound - so simply - that it feels effortless. It’s too easy to forget in the cynicism of our day-to-day that it’s people who make our lives what they are, and people that we will see in our dreams."
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Canadian singer-songwriter Shiloh Lindsey shares “Failing Hail,” a tender, bittersweet, and quietly hopeful alt-country ballad drawn from one of the most personal moments on her forthcoming album, The Western Veil, set for release on November 6th, 2026. Blending the warmth of Canadiana, indie folk intimacy, and roots rock restraint, the single transforms a late-night message between siblings into a moving meditation on resilience, compassion, and the ways we carry one another through life's darkest seasons.
The song began not with a guitar, but with a text message. While Shiloh was recovering from the devastating motorcycle accident that nearly claimed her leg, her oldest brother found himself awake at two in the morning wrestling with demons of his own. Hoping, as he later told her, to “fool them with some nicer thoughts,” he wrote a poem and sent it to his younger sister.
Deeply moved by his words, Shiloh eventually transformed the poem into a song. “It became about the quiet ways we carry one another through difficult times,” she explains, “Sometimes hope comes from someone else when you’re having trouble finding it yourself.”
Its title comes directly from one of the poem’s most striking images: The bad times will fail like melting hail. The metaphor immediately resonated with Shiloh, who saw something profoundly comforting in the idea that even life’s fiercest storms cannot last forever. “Hail can arrive violently and suddenly and feel overwhelming while you’re caught in it,” she says. “But it can’t sustain itself – it melts.”
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Following the singles "I Found a River" and "Rabbits," this week Starpainter releases their latest album Cayenne Flowerbed, an 11-song collection that sees the band’s sonic ambitions, established on their internationally acclaimed 2023 album Rattlesnake Dream, pushed even further.
Produced in Calgary by Chris Dadge—who also plays drums with Alvvays and Chad VanGaalen—Cayenne Flowerbed began as a project that Starpainter’s principle singer/songwriter Joel Stretch says grew to become their most collaborative to date. “I’m always seeking greater artistic freedom. I love albums that feel like they’re searching and taking risks artistically.
“Creating this album was a process of trying things out and it turned out different than I could have predicted going into it. There was a real sense of exploration as we recorded this one that I haven’t always allowed myself on previous projects. All six of our personalities come across pretty strongly and really shaped this album, and Chris really jumped in as a significant collaborator and artistic contributor as well.”
The pride of Lethbridge, a city in southern Alberta that serves as the hub of the local rural community, Starpainter likes to think of itself in similar geographic terms—a little bit town, and a little bit country.
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| Photo - Mason Poole |
Nashville-based artist Olivia Wolf announces she has signed with Soundly Music/Thirty Tigers and will release her sophomore album Snake Of Diamonds on January 22. The follow up to her acclaimed debut Silver Rounds, which found Wolf processing unimaginable grief, this new album turns its attention toward what comes next. Traditional enough to feel timeless. Adventurous enough to feel unpredictable. That's the balance at the heart of Snake Of Diamonds.
Wolf isn't trying to erase the past so much as learning to live alongside it, balancing restlessness with hard-earned redemption. "I'm focusing on myself now," she says. "Far too often, as a woman, you're taught to make everyone else comfortable. What happens when you put yourself first instead?" The debut single "Drag It Back" is an anthem of appetite and ambition, released this week alongside a fiery music video filmed in Joshua Tree, directed by Mason Poole, who has also helmed videos for Beyoncé, Annie Lennox and Allison Russell.
After writing her way through life-changing loss on her 2025 debut, Olivia Wolf found herself tackling a different challenge during the months that followed: not just how to survive, but how to truly live again. Snake Of Diamonds captures that transition. Teaming up with producer Sean McConnell again, she chased down a sparse and singular interpretation of folk music. Vocals were recorded quietly, often just above a speaking voice, and imperfections remain. Her songwriting takes center stage, with sharply-written explorations of romance on the rocks, a country torn apart by division, and a narrator caught at the intersection between danger and adventure. "I wanted this record to feel like roots and dirt and earth," Wolf explains. "If something wasn't absolutely perfect, that's what we wanted, we wanted raw, real sounds."
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| Photo - Jacob Swetmore |
Alt-rock newcomer Cordelia Gartside blends powerful lyricism with post-rock intensity. Now she releases her invigorating new single 'good' via state51 Distribution. Recorded live with Gartside’s band in a single take, 'good' builds from controlled restraint to a visceral vocal release, the melody rising through groaning guitars, strings and relentless drums as she confronts the cycle of self-criticism that once followed her offstage.
"i used to have performance anxiety so bad that i'd be depressed for weeks after shows. i got therapy, and i love playing live now, but this song speaks to the voice that told me i really sucked at it. and all the voices that tell me i’m not good enough in other ways," she says. On 'good', Gartside uses repetition to capture the distance between her self-belief and denial. In the chorus, she insists "if it took a long time / if it hurt for a while / I’m good," before questioning what exists inside and outside her own head: "it’s not a lie / if you believe it isn’t."
Across just a handful of releases Gartside has established a distinct sound - combining stark intimacy and uneasy atmosphere with distorted guitars and cathartic vocals, with reference points spanning Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey, Mitski and Radiohead. Recent singles 'hospital corners' and 'x ray' both received support from BBC 6 Music's Emily Pilbeam on her Introducing Mixtape: "Cordelia's voice is just wild. The power in this song is truly something else."
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