Top Releases 10/10/2025
The Raven's Ghost: Sailing Through the Haunted Waters
The Raven's Ghost sound like they've been raised on stormlight and distortion. Their music is dripping with the atmosphere of a midnight sea: heavy guitars, spectral melodies, and a rhythm section that moves like waves hitting the hull. On first listen, it's pure rock-and-metal grit. But the longer you stay, the more it comes across as something cinematic: a ghost story told through the amplifiers.
There's a pirate streak running through their songs, not in costume but in the restless defiance of people who live by their own tide. The themes of resilience and redemption are all the more impactful because of this. Tracks twist between shadow and revelation, the haunted and the human. Their shows have that rare balance of precision and abandon, like old Iron Maiden colliding with the storytelling punch of Alkaline Trio or Ghost.
Listening to The Raven's Ghost is like boarding a ship crewed by the outcast and the brave: theatre and thunder, wrapped in the kind of rock that remembers why it mattered in the first place. You hear shades of early Metallica, flashes of Danzig, even a touch of Nick Cave's dark romance. Haunted waters, yes-but these ghosts know how to wail.
Great Adamz & Maddox Jones: The Sound of Two Worlds Meeting
Body and Soul is what happens when rhythm meets reflection. Great Adamz and Maddox Jones bridge Afrobeats and soul-pop so naturally, it feels like a conversation that was always meant to happen. Adamz brings the sunlight: the pulse of Lagos, the swagger of his Delta State roots. Jones brings the heart: the ache of the English skies and late-night writing sessions. Together, they create something radiant.
The track unfolds with warmth, its melody carrying both dance and devotion. There's an ease to it, as if both singers understand that connection is stronger than genre. The production gleams but never feels polished for its own sake. Smooth-phrased Adamz finds a foil in the emotional grit of Jones, evoking classic duets like Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo or even George Michael and Aretha Franklin.
This is a point both artists arrive at via rich paths. Adamz has just come off major festival stages and award wins, continuing to push Afrobeat onward; turning global success into something local and alive. A songwriter steeped in indie pop, Jones continues his streak of heartfelt releases that stare life right in the eye. Body and Soul feels built for more than playlists-it's a song for summer nights that turn into memories.
AC Scott: Writing Through the Fire
Some voices arrive with a story you can't fake. AC Scott's 15 Minutes of Fame sounds like someone telling the truth with nothing left to lose. It's a slow-building piano ballad that starts in reflection and rises to something cinematic — not in scale, but in sincerity. The song looks at fame's temporary glitter with the weary clarity of someone who's seen both sides of the glass.
Scott's background reads like a novel: broadcaster, novelist, survivor. After years in front of cameras and microphones, a serious lung condition forced her to step away from the career that defined her. Instead of silence, she found melody. The result is music that feels both fragile and fierce.
15 Minutes of Fame follows her debut Sometimes, a track that drew comparisons to Judie Tzuke and Julia Fordham, with hints of Kate Bush's emotional reach. The new single digs deeper. You can almost imagine it underscoring the last scene of a lost Richard Curtis film - the credits roll on a bittersweet triumph. Scott writes like someone who's made peace with impermanence, finding power in the act of creation itself. Every note feels earned. This isn't reinvention; it's resurrection.
The Bare Minimum: Holding It Together in a Broken City
Doomed City doesn't pretend to save anyone. It just screams the truth loud enough that you might remember why punk still matters. The Bare Minimum tear through four tracks of burnout, fines, and late-night chaos — all the mundane pressures that make modern city life feel like a trap, flipped into cathartic noise.
Somewhere between early Against Me! and Dead Kennedys, their sound retains a certain Canadian grit that makes them more grounded. The guitars snarl without overplaying, while the drums are all urgency and no polish. It's how joy leaks through frustration that amazes: community, even in collapse, is so worth hollering about.
The Bare Minimum live what they sing. Between DIY documentaries, local playlists, and work with non-profits, they keep their scene alive by sheer force of participation. That's rare. You can hear that very same spirit in the EP - part exhaustion, part revival.
If Doomed City were a movie, it'd sit next to Trainspotting and Suburbia, soundtracked by chaos and heart. It's not tidy, but it's real. Punk, as it turns out, is still the most honest way to say you care.
Trueclaw: Machines with Heart
Trueclaw's music sounds like solitude turned into signal. The Swedish artist's songs balance human emotion with the shimmer of digital creation-a lone voice working alongside code to build something strangely intimate. It's electronic, but not cold. Similarly, The Ones Remembered and One Road pulse with feeling, each track tracing a quiet arc from reflection to release.
Working completely solo, Trueclaw writes, records, and produces with the obsessiveness of a person who shapes every sound into exactly what it needs to be to reflect the emotion behind it. The use of AI tools such as Suno and ChatGPT isn't some sort of gimmick here-it's collaboration in the truest sense. The machines act like mirrors, amplifying human depth instead of replacing it.
There's a calm intensity to the work, calling back to Bon Iver's digital isolation, Burial's shadowed beats, and the cinematic quiet of Cliff Martinez's Drive soundtrack. Yet Trueclaw's voice remains distinct: personal, unguarded, and weirdly comforting. These songs feel like letters to the future in a world of noise. You don't just hear the technology, but you hear the soul behind it, tracing what it means to be both maker and machine.
KAYTIE: When Friendship Sounds Like Heartbreak
Some songs arrive when you've had enough. KAYTIE's Evil Person isn't about romance, but it carries the same ache-the kind that comes when someone you love becomes a stranger. Written in the fallout of a broken friendship, the song channels that quiet fury that follows disappointment. What begins in D minor shifts to E minor, a small but striking move that mirrors the mounting tension in her story.
KAYTIE is a singer-songwriter from Cincinnati, age 20, who has been writing songs since she was twelve — more than 350 of them, she estimates. But Evil Person feels like a turning point, the one where craft and confession finally lock in step. She's part of a growing wave of young artists who take everyday heartbreak and hone it into sharp, relatable pop, a la early Olivia Rodrigo or Gracie Abrams, with a pianist's sense of intimacy.
What makes her writing stand out is restraint — a willingness to sit with discomfort instead of dressing it up. She's not chasing chart perfection; she's chasing connection. It's easy to imagine Evil Person soundtracking a key scene in some coming-of-age film: that moment when the friendship ends but the growth begins.
TRÄLALALÄ: Morten Alsinger's Quiet Return to the Storm
Morten Alsinger has lived several musical lives. In the 80's and 90's, his sound echoed through Denmark's electro-punk and underground electronic circles. Then came silence - years spent raising a family, working behind the scenes, watching from the wings. Now with his new project TRALALAS and the debut album Ornament, Alsinger steps back into the light with something patient, deliberate, and quietly cinematic.
TRALALAS bridges digital and analog, electronic pulse meeting fragile melody. The ghosts of Leonard Cohen's baritone reflections, the texture of Joy Division's industrial melancholy, and the spatial melancholy of Beach Boys balladry can all be heard. But dark pop doesn't wallow; it reflects. Each song feels like an artifact - imperfect, lived-in, full of grace.
When he rediscovered his love for music through the electronica duo VERTICAL, it was through collaboration with singer-songwriter Heidi Lindahl that Alsinger found a new source of creative energy. The project's debut single, Winter on the Vine, shimmers with the cool glow of Scandinavian twilight, equal parts romance and reckoning.
Ornament isn't just a return; it's a statement from someone who has seen enough to realize the noise fades, but the tone endures. Fans of Nick Cave, Scott Walker, or early Depeche Mode will be offered a world in which they will want to linger courtesy of TRALALAS.
Jaan: Soundtracks for the Edges of the Map
There's mystery in Jaan's music: not the marketing kind, but the old-school, analog kind. Their hallucinatory and unclassifiable debut album feels like it could have been unearthed from some forgotten archive: dusty reel tapes, faded labels, stories half-erased. The sound drifts between jazz chaos, ambient haze, and grainy field recordings-a lattice of noise that never sits still.
Jaan isn't a band so much as a presence-a self-described veteran sonic alchemist who works across Greenland, the Middle East, and Europe. The anonymity isn't a gimmick; it's part of the art. Their sound recalls Brian Eno's Discreet Music, Jon Hassell's "fourth world" soundscapes, and the shadowy tones of Cat People. It's cinematic but not polished, exploratory but not indulgent-a kind of organized drift where emotion and geography blur. In an era of over-explanation, Jaan's refusal to self-define feels refreshing. Listening to the album's tracks is like walking into a dream in which you really have no idea what century it is. You can imagine these tracks running under a Tarkovsky film or some late-night documentary about forgotten cities. It's experimental music that feels human: strange, quiet, full of hidden warmth.