In his latest dispatch from Central and Eastern Europe’s underground music, Jakub Knera turns his attention to Latvia, and finds a creative scene built around curiosity, experimentation, and collaboration rather than stylistic purity

Sofi, photo by Aino Ahola

I’ve seen Elizabete Balčus perform twice, first at Ljubljana’s MENT in 2023, the second, more unexpectedly, in my hometown of  Gdańsk this May, when she appeared on a small Polish tour..

The concert took place at Lawendowa 8, a tiny venue where everything happens very close to the audience. She was dressed like a character from some surreal fairytale – somewhere between Alice In Wonderland and a post-internet fairy from another dimension. She combined theatrical costumes, visuals, flute, electronic beats, operatic singing, and fruits and…

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We mark half a century of Rough Trade by sitting down to listen to 10 essential tracks from the label as an insight into their ethos, love of community, and being hugged by Mark E Smith

Jeannette Lee and Geoff Travis photographed by Lisa Goodall

Everyone reading this will have their own Rough Trade history, picking out artists from their now 50 year history to create a personal radio station that’s entirely your own. Although, thanks to The Smiths, the band became synonymous with indie as genre, the true picture is far more diverse, taking in industrial, dub, folk, experimental music and so much more. Label bosses Jeannette Lee and Geoff Travis are not always keen to speak about the past,…

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Neptune

Play Some Music

With instruments built from scrap, the trio return after a decade+ hiatus for an album of sublime junkyard noise rock

Neptune "Play Some Music" by Sleeping Giant Glossolalia

It starts with bleeps. A lost signal finding its way through time, sonar rising from the deep causing ripples of notes, blurring out into long whale tones. At first I thought they were sending it out to alert us, now I’m more inclined to feel they are answering the call. Neptune have been quiet for a while. The edges of their hiatus are blurry. A build up of activity in recent years now delivers Play Some Music, their first new album in over a decade. A reopening of the channel.

As soon as…

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It’s the third song to be unveiled from forthcoming album new avatar

Photo by Neva Wireko

Kelela has released a new song, titled ‘point blank’.

It’s the third track to be shared from forthcoming album new avatar, after ‘idea 1’ and ‘linknb’. Much like the rest of the album, it was produced by Oscar Scheller. The song, a press release said, is about “the emotional weight of romantic misogynoir and the labour of loving someone who mistakes your care for endless resource”.

Offering more details, Kelela said: “I first outline the baseline dynamic, which is that we’re expected to endure men’s inability to self-regulate. The fantasy many of us are invested in is one where we do such a good job of holding space…

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The 11-track record is out next month

Charli xcx has shared details of the official follow-up to 2024 album BRAT.

Spanning 11 tracks and clocking in at 30 minutes, Music, Fashion, Film opens with recent singles ‘Rock Music’ and ‘SS26’. Its cover art, which you can see below, features three iconic figures of the respective disciplines listed in the album title: John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese.

The new record marks Charli’s second full-length release of 2026 having started the year with her soundtrack album to Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Cale appeared alongside her on the album track ‘House’.

Atlantic will release Music, Fashion, Film on 24 July 2026.

…

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The digital music retailer has gone offline after two decades of trading

Juno Download has closed down after two decades of operations.

The shock closure was confirmed this morning with the digital download retailer’s homepage now redirecting to a message, which reads: “It’s been our privilege to share some of the most incredible music from the most amazing artists. But we’re sorry to say, that the time has come to say goodbye.”

The message continued: “There’s still plenty of great music available from Traxsource, Beatport, Mixupload and Volumo, but for now, this is Juno Download signing off.”

Juno Download COO Lucas Garcia added: “It’s obviously a sad day, but as streaming has become the dominant model of digital music consumption, artists and labels are now more connected than ever…

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Our top two tier supporters can catch up with everything we wrote about last month

We’ve had a great response to our spring sale on subscriptions, with nearly 200 sign-ups over the past week. To boost tQ into a glorious future, we’re looking to add another 300 before the end of June – you can join their number with 35% off the top tier here. These subscribers can instantly access the following perks from over the past month: In the Low Culture Podcast, Luke Turner and John Doran discussed subversions of masculinity, magic and the death of the 60s in 1970 cult classic, Performance. Our Organic Intelligence newsletter was on the fertile underground scene of the US west coast during the early 00s, while the Low…

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Kikù Hibino and Merzbow

Rococo ∞ Echomatter

Chicago-based sound artist and Signal Noise founder collaborates with the legendary Tokyo-born noise musician with results that sound primal to the point of meteorological

Rococo ∞ Echomatter by Kikù Hibino and Merzbow

The album opens like a thunderstorm. The voice that echoes around you (Alexandra Cupsa’s ASMR-modulated French vocals) becomes the green-gray sky, and suddenly, there are flickering tremors of distorted chaos, coming at you in bursts, like lightning. You hear the sounds of a tape rewinding, appropriately enough, since the album starts with the end (‘dB.XYZ’) and ends with the beginning (‘abcdefg’), as if the whole thing is being played backwards. ‘dB.XYZ’ in particular feels redolent of that sensation: a tape rewinding, or a scratchy video…

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Toby Manning examines the cultural amnesia surrounding one of Radiohead’s best (if sometimes forgotten about) albums

The fact that Amnesiac has been subject to a cultural amnesia is less ironic than apposite. Like the fabled millennium bug, Radiohead’s 2001 hit album was an expression of doubt and trepidation at the dawning of a new, digital century. The malfunction and misery which these invoked would prove to be less paranoid than prescient about a future where material and mental precarity have proved more a feature than a bug. With the forced brightness of poptimism becoming the new century’s dominant mode instead, such turn-of-the-century wobbles needed to be memory-holed.

For many, Amnesiac, like the preceding Kid A, merely reflected the contrarian, combative impulse that…

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Sapphire Goss talks with Bernie Brooks and Kristen Gallerneaux about the materials, magic, and catharsis at the heart of her debut album, Light Sensitive Materials

Screenshot

“I’m using optical sound effects. For people that don’t know, optical sound used to be to the side of the image on the film strip. When I was working with archives, there were all these public information and education films. They were always distorted and making this weird AAAAAAAA sound I really like. So, I got some samples of that, and I was trying to recreate it using different techniques,” says Sapphire Goss, talking us through the processes used to create Light Sensitive Materials, her debut album. “I’ve got some field recordings as well. It’s just…

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