The Orielles - Emily Nenni - Birds Flying Backwards - Hunter Morris / Mountain of Youth

The Orielles - Only You Left (Album).

The Orielles new album Only You Left is officially released today March 11 via Heavenly Recordings. “You’ve got to die and be reborn between albums,” begins Henry Wade, guitarist for The Orielles, describing the foundations of the band’s fourth studio album, Only You Left. “It comes naturally,” adds singer and bassist Esmé Hand-Halford, “it’s not something we consciously do.” Through this process of creative renewal, the Manchester-based trio – completed by drummer Sidonie Hand-Halford – have managed to weather a pandemic, defy the fickleness of a trend-led music industry, and emerge, phoenix-like, with something familiarly Orielles, yet altogether different.

Recorded in two locations – Hydra and Hamburg – over the summer of 2024, the 11 tracks of Only You Left sees the band consolidate the bold experimentation of their previous LP, Tableau (2022), with a return to the more stripped-back, song-led approach of their early origins. “There’s nothing more trad than a three-piece,” quips Henry, in reference to the band’s decision to return to their roots as a trio. Originally from Halifax, the Orielles first came to recognition in 2018 with their debut album, the indie-rock Silver Dollar Moment, which is approaching its eighth birthday in February 2026. “These things come in like seven year cycles. So we've come in like a full circle back to a familiar place, just as different people.”

According to Henry, the first ideas for Only You Left came in May 2023. Esmé had bought a freeze pedal, which allowed her to play around with sustained notes on her guitar – these heavy drones would later form the basis for the tracks ‘Wasp’ and ‘Three Halves’. In the lulls between touring, the band began to meet up and record their practice room sessions, later analysing the voice notes to the finest detail. “We recorded everything on our phones, every snippet,” explains Henry. What each song needed or what we wanted to hear from it.”

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Photograph by Emilia Paré

Emily Nenni - Not a Winner.

Emily Nenni will release Movin’ Shoes on May 1, 2025, via New West Records. The 13-song set was produced by John James Tourville (of the Deslondes) and recorded and mixed by Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price, Jason Isbell) at Southern Grooves in Memphis. Movin’ Shoes is Nenni’s follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2024 album Drive & Cry. Rolling Stone named it one of “The Best Country Albums of 2024” and called it "the most exciting hard-nosed honky-tonk record of the year,” while Bandcamp said, “In a genre overstuffed with craggy male singing voices, Emily Nenni is a breath of fresh air.” Saving Country Music said, “Emily Nenni has released a fun, infectious, twangy, diverse, and career-defining album that will renew your spirits in the state of country music.”  
 
Movin’ Shoes eloquently and wryly blends southern soul from Memphis and Muscle Shoals with southern rock from Macon and outlaw country from Austin. In addition to some of her most incisive lyrics, the album features some of her most powerful vocal performances. These songs percolate with new sounds, like the Rhodes organ that kicks off the supremely funky title track and the Lone Star harmonica that weaves throughout her bluesy cover of Paul Simon’s “Tenderness.” Nenni cites Sly Stone and Linda Ronstadt’s Motown covers as specific influences, but the old styles sound fresh and current because her personality and charisma come through in every note. “This isn’t strictly honkytonk like my former records, even though it’s still all the same influences,” Nenni explains. “I’m just drawing from more artists and genres than I have in the past.” 
 
Yesterday, the album standout “Not a Winner” was shared with Nenni saying, “There’s a song on an early Diana Ross solo record, Surrender, called ‘I’m a Winner.’ It got me thinking how I’d technically never ‘won’ anything in my life, except a dragon-shaped bong in a raffle at a show about ten years ago. Winning looks different to everyone. For some, it’s the accolades. For others, it’s getting to do what you love. It can also just be making it through another day. I’m genuinely grateful for this life, it isn’t easy, and we all work so hard to stay afloat it seems. I just want the chance to try, that’s all I ever wanted. It’s even better when you’re alongside your friends, watching them get after it, too. That’s a win.” 

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Photo - Dessy Baeva

Birds Flying Backwards - Lovebirds (Album).

London-based six-piece Birds Flying Backwards today release their anticipated debut album Lovebirds (March 11th via Real Love Recording Co.). Building a reputation for their blend of alt-country, indie-folk, psychedelic rock and timeless 70s aesthetic, Birds Flying Backwards have quickly established themselves as one to watch. Lovebirds captures the band’s warm, organic sound through rich acoustic instrumentation, worn-in textures. Moving fluidly between folk, Americana and psychedelia while maintaining their stylistic, tightly locked dual vocal harmonies, and reflective yet uplifting tone throughout.

Mixed by Joe Wyatt at Abbey Road Studios (The Smile, The Beatles Anthologies) and mastered by Timothy Stollenwork (Kevin Morby, Drugdealer, Arthur Russell), further enhancing its earthy, timeless feel, the album was recorded entirely live over four days in early 2025. The 10-track album foregrounds intimacy and immediacy, allowing the band’s chemistry and emotional clarity to shine. From the melancholic whimsy of ‘One Heartbreak To Another’ and ‘All I Need’, to the emotive sweller, ‘Moving On’, to the driving Fleetwood Mac-esque approach of ‘If There’s Any Justice’ the album showcases the band’s Diversity and feel for beautifully arranged, melodic songcraft. 

Speaking about the album, “Lovebirds is an ode to love in all its forms — romantic love, love for friends, familial love, heartbreak, and the process of learning to love yourself. Love feels more important than ever to us. Love, compassion and solidarity are powerful tools with which to oppose oppression, dehumanisation and a political elite intent on dividing us. Recorded entirely live over four days in early 2025, Lovebirds stands as a testament to the unifying power, enduring beauty and the profound but life-affirming sadness that love, in all its forms, inevitably brings.”

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Photo - Sam Johnson

Hunter Morris / Mountain of Youth - Automatic Days.

Hunter Morris / Mountain of Youth will release the debut album, Nowhere, NW, on May 15, 2026 via Strolling Bones Records. The 10-track set was produced by the multi-instrumentalist Ben Hackett (Patterson Hood, Craig Finn) and recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, GA. The remarkable debut emerges as a sort of equilibrium state, balancing Morris’s breezy heartland and lo-fi garage influences with his ‘70s singer/songwriter and ‘90s grunge sensibilities. 

The songs are mature and reflective, reckoning with loneliness, regret, and mortality, and the performances are raw and vulnerable to match, with lean, muscular arrangements. It’s an honest, empathetic meditation on purpose and impermanence delivered by a keen observer of the human condition, one who’s only just begun to truly understand himself. “When I started writing these songs as Mountain of Youth, it felt like I’d finally found my voice,” Morris reflects. “For the first time, I felt comfortable saying what I needed to say.” 
 
Born and raised in Georgia, Morris didn’t begin taking music seriously until college. After a brief stint in Wyoming, he returned east to settle down in Athens, where he found work as a fly-fishing guide and launched various rock bands. After a few years, he was then ready to strip things back to their barest, most essential elements. The material he began penning was deeply autobiographical, but often filtered through the perspectives of characters at various crossroads in their lives. “All the characters on this record are choosing their path up the slope or looking back on the route they took and wondering what life would be like if they’d done things differently.” 

The characters are also contemplating the passage of time and the loss of innocence, which he suspects is deeply intertwined with his work as a fly-fishing guide and conservationist helping protect and restore the streams and forests of North Georgia. “There’s a youthfulness and a joy and a curiosity that comes with being out in nature,” he explains, “and I always find myself trying to go places that have been left undisturbed by man. There’s a purity and a beauty in those ecosystems that I think we’re all searching for in ourselves.”

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Cheyenne - The Jack Rubies - Mesh - Alice Costelloe - Hirta - The Orielles

Cheyenne - Anticipating You.

The indie artist's latest drop bridges the intimate polish of Harry's House with the confident pop sheen of Sabrina Carpenter and Dua Lipa.
 
Cheyenne has made it clear that in 2026, she's here to smolder and wow audiences, and she is not holding back. With her latest single “Anticipating You”, the rising singer-songwriter blends the sensual pulse of retro inspired synth-pop with fun, modern textures. Built around shimmering synths, sun drenched guitar strums, and a radiant vocal, “Anticipating You” sounds like radio ready, chartworthy pop. Think Steve Lacy by candlelight or Harry Styles in his late-night, off-the-record era. “Itʼs craving this personʼs touch, intimacy, closeness, personality. Itʼs being so in love you canʼt get enough. You crave their touch and everything about them. Itʼs also craving the emotional intimacy that comes with sex and being intimate" Cheyenne says.
 
The track traces that longing with the perfect lyrics: “Lying wide awake, while you saturate every part of my brain…” she croons. There's a commanding, confident ownership in the way Cheyenne delivers on “Anticipating You.” She's unapologetically open to pleasure and that magnetic pull that changes your chemistry. As she readies a new body of work for 2026, her sound is expanding, her vision is sharpening, and her message is clear: vulnerability is power, and self-expression is sacred.
 
Coming off a standout Pirate Studios showcase and four previous singles that mapped her evolution, Anticipating You marks Cheyenne's fifth and final release before a new musical era begins in 2026. With upcoming shows slated across the East Coast, she's inviting fans into the next chapter of her story.

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The Jack Rubies - Be Good Or Be Gone.

With their new album Visions In The Bowling Alley announced at the end of last year and set for release on Vinyl, CD and Streaming in late January (23rd), UK postpunk veterans The Jack Rubies ofer up one more single to preview the record. “Be Good Or Be Gone,” a slice of groovy guitar pop as danceable and hook-heavy as anything from the band's four-decade history, is out today January 9, 2026.

may have emerged from the British C86 scene and be more often thought amongst the likes of Shriekback or Nick Cave, but there's something about the groove and hooks of “Be Good Or Be Gone” that whispers “Madchester” – think “Fool's Gold,” “Step On” or “Groovy Train”. You can most certainly dance to it, and the vocal interplay between Rubies frontman Wright and guest Cat Henry(returning after the last album's hit single “I'll Give You More”) is thrilling. It sounds like a party, and while the words betray an underlying darkness, it's of an almost pop-classicist bent, as direct as a set of Johnny Cash lyrics: “You crucify me then you dance up and down on my grave/That’s what I say even though it isn’t true.” Taken together, it's the stuf of which enduring hit singles are made.

“It's based on an almost forgotten sketch from yesteryear and with a nod to our past,” the band ofers, “a dance-favored and nostalgic meditation on the closing of a chapter.” The Rubies' SD Ineson features on harmonica, adding to the rootsy favor, and delivers signature guitar lines that complement Wright’s slide guitar and and tight postpunk funk rhythms. Drummer/producer Peter Maxted’s keyboard textures foat, then punctuate, while bass and percussion hold the beat close until gradually letting go as the track wistfully concludes. “It’s time to move on. Two empty deck chairs are all that’s left on a deserted beach,” the band says in summary. 

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Mesh - Exile.

Mesh unveil the stylish music video 'Exile' as the first new song from the UK alternative electronic duo since nine years! This single is an edit of the opening track of the English band's forthcoming new album "The Truth Doesn't Matter", which has been scheduled for release on March 27, 2026. 

Mesh comment on 'Exile': "I was trying to write some music that was uplifting but had a dark and moody undertone", Richard explains. "I had the chord structure and the chorus, but felt something was missing. That's when I added the arpeggio type line at the start. This changed the character of the song and gave it that hypnotic, driving feel. It is the glue that holds it all together. After we had finished mixing the album and almost a year after the music was written, Mark sent me the track with the vocals added. It was one of those moments when I knew immediately that this track had to be the single. It was as quick as that."
 
"We were about to go to Germany to mix the album with Olaf", Mark adds. "I still had a couple of instrumentals from Rich which had no lyrics or vocals. I loaded one into Cubasis on my phone and started working on it in dead time during the mixing. I needed inspiration, and Judit, the wife of our producer Olaf, gave me the only English books that she had: 'Chicken Soup for the Soul – Stories for a Better World' by various authors, and 'The Man Who Fell to Earth', which is a Bowie biography. I was also reading Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land' on my pad. The lyrics kind of just fell out of those influences. I recorded the vocals on the phone outside on Olaf's balcony and recorded them properly when I got home. It was all very last minute, but worth that last push."

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Alice Costelloe - How Can I.

London singer-songwriter Alice Costelloe shares new track 'How Can I' this week, the final preview of debut album 'Move On With The Year' out 6th February via Moshi Moshi Records. One of the album's most revealing moments, new track 'How Can I' skips blithely, all honeyed harmonies and tambourine shakes, while Costelloe wrestles with a dichotomous truth, both a question and a statement: “How can I / Still adore / You know I still adore you”.  

“So much of my childhood I had this feeling that something wasn’t right, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it,” Costelloe admits. “My dad was so different: he’d fall asleep mid-sentence with a lit cigarette in his mouth, he couldn’t be woken up no matter how much you tried, and when he wasn’t sleeping he’d take us on strange, and in retrospect, insanely dangerous adventures.” It wasn’t until her early teens, when her older sister confirmed his substance abuse, that those memories came into focus - an awakening that threads through the album’s writing.

Speaking more on the song release, Alice said: "When I was finishing the song, I read a quote from Feist where she said, ‘When you say something or sing something enough times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – it’s almost like casting spells.’ It made me think about what it would feel like playing songs full of sadness, night after night, and whether those were the spells I wanted to be casting,” Costelloe explains. “So I added the line ‘I am good, I’m enough, I’m surrounded by love’. I know it’s unbearably cheesy, but I wanted a moment in the set that could counteract some of the darker parts of the record and manifest something more positive."

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Photo - Ash Drummond.

Hirta - Black Chimneys.

"Black Chimneys", is the second single from Hirta's new LP 'Soft Peaks' to be released in February 2026. The song is the perfect anthem for blessing your new year. In Alistair's own words, "...it feels appropriate to share the song 'Black Chimneys’ as a simple New Year greeting, as we all do the thing we do every year where we take stock of where we are in our lives and reset to begin another year. 

The song itself is a reminder to myself of what’s important and, while not necessarily written as a new year song, has the recurring line, ‘Lang may yer lum reek’ - this is a traditional Scottish phrase that people use to toast or say farewell to friends and family around New Year. It translates as ‘long may your chimney smoke’ and symbolizes warmth, and having enough of what you need to be warm, safe and prosper, so it’s extra nice to be able to share it with you at this time."

Hirta is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Alistair Paxton and this record hasn't left my rotation since I first heard it last autumn. Hirta’s ‘Soft Peaks’ finds solace in the natural world and comforts through an intriguing map of familiar trailheads and newly chartered terrain. The debut official release from Scottish - American multi instrumentalist, Alistair Paxton, ‘Soft Peaks’ casts a windswept and lonely spell yet retains an air of optimism across its ten warm and desolate tracks. 

This album was self produced and recorded in 2025 in sessions split between the Hudson Valley town of Nyack, NY and rural Bovina in the Western Catskill mountains culminating in both vinyl and digital releases under Paxton’s own imprint, Half Painted Door.

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Photo - Neelam Khan Vela.

The Orielles - You are Eating a Part of Yourself / To Undo the World Itself.

The Orielles have today shared double-single "You are Eating a Part of Yourself" and "To Undo the World Itself", two new tracks taken from their fourth studio album, Only You Left – out March 13 via Heavenly – a meticulous yet exploratory record which sees them emerge anew from their seven-year cycle where they began with Silver Dollar Moment (2018).

"To Undo the World Itself", has hints of Tara Clerkin Trio in the repeated, reverb-drenched vocal melodies, but also leans towards the expansive post-rock of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky in its cathartic forward-motion and "You are Eating a Part of Yourself" shares a similar dark euphoria as both gradually submerge the listener in a glitch-laden tide of feedback and noise. Coupled with the rising harmonic progressions there’s a pervasive sense of bittersweetness, of time irrevocably passing by.

Accompanied by a video directed by Neelam Khan Vela which spans both tracks, the band said: "'You are Eating a Part of Yourself’ began when a durational guitar loop was released from the archive of improv’s recorded in Henry’s bedroom. The title, which comes from a video artwork dating 1996, captures the darkness emanating from the original recording, and reflects the clarity to be able to define that feeling some years later. Through music (and some words) we unfurled the emotion captured back then, as we put our ears up to the organs of the body orchestrating their own symphony and dissonance.

Closing track of the album ‘To Undo the World Itself’ sings of rebirth and reversal, or outstanding finality, depending on the impression that ‘Only You Left’ leaves you with. The cathartic crescendo meant that this was a favourite to play in the various live rooms that we wrote / recorded in, where it was trialled against the backdrops of thunderstorms and peaceful sunsets alike."

Neelam added about the video: "After almost a decade of collaborating with The Orielles, we share a connection that makes our creative process completely intuitive, like a long rally where ideas are passed back and forth without needing to be spoken. The band filmed with Lewis and Giulia in Manchester, and from that starting point I let the emotional pull of the tracks guide the edit, completing the video through what the music evoked and what the evolving images seemed to ask for."


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