We included Finnish band Drug Store Raid in our 2024 list of Favourite Albums of the year, courtesy of their ‘Background Music For Family Arguments’ release, so it’s great to see them back with new single ‘Apple Junkie Birds’. It’s another release in the post punk space that I’ve featured a lot this week, but the Helsinki 5 piece are certainly far more complex in their musical approach than Green Tea Bitches whom we featured yesterday. ‘Apple Junkie Birds’ is a riotous 2 1/2

I can’t deny that I was slightly disappointed when I finally surfaced from anaesthetic / critical care to discover that the world had, rather selfishly, carried on much as before. I’d been quietly expecting a few developments in my absence: Trump and Farage both serving lengthy prison sentences, and more importantly I assumed that Green Tea Bitches had already been confirmed as Glastonbury headliners for 2027, and that, in a diplomatic initiative aimed at securing interplanet

Writing about 7ebra got me thinking about bands in a similar genre, and it reminded me that we hadn’t heard from Danish band Kindsight in a while. The good news is that they've just released a new single after a 2 year absence (from their outstanding album ‘No Shame No Fame’), entitled ‘The Head (This Body Deserves’), Now I try and avoid quoting band / record label notes directly, but feel I must on this occasion from Bandcamp, because any attempt to simplify the following w

So what have I been missing? As always a quick look at the PNKSLM Record Label website is a pretty good start, and it seems like the excellent indie post punk pop duo 7ebra are poised to release a new album at the end of September, which is very good news indeed. From that album they've just released 'Dinner and a Movie', a nicely balanced 2 mins 30 of chunky guitars and harmonised melodies that disappear off in a direction I wasn't quite expecting. The new album is curiou

I’ll catch up on the last 3 months of enforced absence by trying to cover as many albums as possible, and Misty Coast (led by Richard Myklebust and Linn Frøkedal) are a great place to start, as their new album ‘Always Sun’ is a timeless melodic dream pop release, which is easy to get to grips with on 1st listen thanks to the melodic intent, yet complex enough instrumentally to offer months of repeat listening pleasure . It’s their 5th album and the already released singles ar

We have a couple of Tromsø artists to feature this next week, the first of whom I’ve been meaning to write about for ages. Vilde Bye is a quietly compelling voice from northern Norway, and her track ‘Bird Up a Tree’ is a lovely introduction. Now we’ve covered a few fairly heavy lyrical ideas recently, so an acoustic indie-folk song about a bird sitting in a tree really appealed to me the first time I heard it in a very busy train station a couple of weeks ago. Except of cours

I normally start each feature with some nonsense about Pinegazing, jetpacks or hats, but I’m keeping this one short and simple today — mainly because I’m not sure I’ve ever properly written about quite how much I love Hater. It’s been a while since we last featured them here, but alongside acts such as Girl Scout and VEPS, they remain one of my most-played Scandinavian indie guitar bands. For me they strike the perfect balance: melodic, hugely listenable songs paired with th

Regular readers will know that we ‘discovered’ a new genre a couple of weeks ago: Pinegaze - a close musical relative of shoegaze, specifically reserved for Nordic musicians who play shimmering guitars while staring mournfully into pine forests. It’s pretty popular up there to be honest and judging by historic promo shots, Ghosts on TV may well have been involved in the movement themselves, but sonically they do remain firmly rooted in post-rock / shoegaze territory. And rec

We’re generally trying to feature new releases, but we’re going to jump back a year to one I somehow missed, courtesy of Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Gisli Gunnarsson. Regular readers will know I take particular pleasure in writing about a multi-instrumentalist, for reasons I’ve never quite worked out. ‘Árstíðir’ was released this time last year and obviously we have previously featured the Icelandic chamber folk band Árstíðir’ name meaning “Seasons”, and if you’ve somehow

So the aim this weekend is to cover four Nordic post-rock releases. Yesterday it was After-Math. Today we return to a relatively new favourite, Swedish duo ÅHM. We’ve written about them recently, but this week they’ve released ‘Eliana Never Sleeps’, which immediately grabbed me with a blistering rush and an opening guitar riff that explodes into life. But unlike ‘Broken Beams’, which was coated in melancholy (if melancholy can, in fact, be applied like varnish), Eliana Never