You would expect a book about Kurt Cobain to make you cry. But Kelly Catlin’s Kurt Cobain: Forever in Bloom pushes it a notch up by making you feel hopeful, too. Released on what would’ve been Cobain’s 58th birthday, this rock biography has become a tribute that reckons and rehumanizes.…

Music history is usually organized around people. A composer arrives, does something, and the map redraws itself around him. A more revealing way to read the same period is by infrastructure. Four cities on two rivers, each of which built something specific, and each of which got a specific kind…

Trey Bruce’s “All Americans” is a reflective roots-driven song that takes a wide-angle look at everyday life in America while keeping its focus firmly on ordinary people. A songwriter with more than a decade of work behind the scenes, Bruce originally wrote the song 14 years ago, and its concerns…

With Quixote, his twenty-second album, John Michael Hersey turns the classic wandering knight into a roots-rock character study. Blending rock, pop, folk, blues, and country, Hersey follows a South Jersey dreamer who heads toward the big city hoping to conquer fortune and fame, only to discover that his battles are…

“Children of the War,” the flagship song from Foxy Leopard’s upcoming album After, looks beyond the moment when a war is declared finished and asks what happens to the people left carrying its consequences. Built around the idea that a “child of a war” can be anyone shaped by a…

“HUMAN” by British singer-songwriter TaniA Kyllikki turns a message about division, empathy, and shared humanity into an immersive techno-house and soul hybrid. Created with her husband, producer and multi-instrumentalist Rynellton (Garry D. Hairston), the track began after Kyllikki was affected by the hostility she was seeing between different cultures on…

After three decades of making adventurous instrumental music, Cincinnati collective Ray’s Music Exchange returns to the stage with A Live Family Rayunion 2025, their first live album in 15 years. Recorded at the historic Woodward Theater, the six-track release captures the group’s genre-defying funk-jazz sound in a collaborative setting, bringing…

Reetoxa, the artistic project of Melbourne singer-songwriter Jason Mckee, turns intensely personal experiences into music that feels larger than autobiography. Double A Side 2 (Akaroa / Erica And The Stars) brings together two songs born from vastly difficult periods in Mckee’s life, yet neither track gets trapped in its own…

“Sing Me A Song,” the second single from Prism of Dispositions by Firefly Search Party, is a warm invitation to pause, listen, and share something of yourself. The album is built as a cohesive journey through memories, emotions, relationships, and changing perspectives, with each song acting like another fragment in…

Las Vegas-based conscious hip-hop artist Deepwise blends golden-era lyricism with jazz, funk and futuristic electronic textures and creates nostalgic and slightly otherworldly sound. “Keep On Dragging Me Down” turns that genre-fluid approach inward, examining what happens when constantly helping others leaves you with nothing in the tank. Deepwise sounds like…

Trenton’s ASTROKATZ brings together five musicians with years of experience across different projects, but “Guiding Light” feels less like a calculated supergroup statement and more like a band discovering what happens when everyone throws their personality into the same room. Jack “Brump” builds the initial ideas, Joy helps shape their…

Dan Schiz turns a fleeting New York encounter into a soft alternative-rock daydream with “Paris NY,” a song built around the delicious uncertainty of a choice. A man is preparing to leave the city when he meets a girl named Paris, and suddenly a routine flight home feels like the…