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Dave’s Picks Volume 60 contains the two previously unreleased complete concerts recorded on April 13 and 14, 1984 at the Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia on 4 discs, and was recorded by a reportedly “super-dialed-in” Dan Healy and mastered to HDCD by Jeffrey Norman at Mockingbird Mastering. In his “seaside chat” about the album, David Lemeiux, the namesake and overseer of the series, says he couldn’t believe they were at number 60. He calls the two shows “magnificent”, noting that one of the “Morning Dews” from the two was one of the best he had heard from the band’s 1980s performances. He also says that the second show is “really interesting”, as the set begins with “Scarlet Begonias” segueing into “Fire on…

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Given that Grey DeLisle keeps herself quite busy doing voice animation, it’s always a pleasure when she finds time to record a new album, especially one as rewarding as Don’t Turn Around. It’s a smart, fun, and vibrant record where she effortlessly cruises through several styles, unified by her wonderfully flexible voice and trademark incisiveness about love, loss, and heartbreak. While DeLisle has already proven herself to be a songwriter and vocalist of note, the bar is raised by some fabulous production and arrangements that make every track shine.
Original production was handled by the late Andy Paley, and his touch is everywhere, from the soaring, sun-dappled harmonies on Drive Around to the big melodic hooks on Disneyland.

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As this album’s title implies, and her bio confirms, roots singer/songwriter Miko Marks has been through personal challenges in the four years since her previous release. A marriage of 29 years ended (amicably), she lost her mother and sister and, as the promotional notes say, “she began her journey with sobriety.”
So it’s little surprise that Hell or High Water is Marks’ first full blues album. As those who have followed Marks’ career know, blues has always been woven through her folk, country, gospel, Southern fried rock and roll, and singer/songwriter material. So this isn’t a major shift. Regardless, the singer’s powerful, churchy voice injects power, honesty and heat into these ten tracks.
She leaves her Resurrectors band, so essential…

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A behemoth of an album, Trip the Night Fantastic arrives carrying the weight of big ideas, and an overriding belief in the power of community to spark social change. Built around the core chemistry of pianist Aaron Parks, guitarist Matthew Stevens and multi-instrumentalist Morgan Guerin, and delivered under the aegis of drummer, educator and changemaker Terri Lyne Carrington, the project manages to sidestep the earnestness that can sometimes dog overtly political projects, favouring deep grooves, rich textures and a cinematic sense of movement.
Opener ‘Riddim Song’ is a glorious tempo-changing clash of spoken word, organs and horns and crisp, unfussy backbeats featuring the golden voice of Malian diva Fatoumata Diawara…

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Dan Barrett, also known for the dark ambient project Worms of the Earth, runs Aetherium Nebula out of Baltimore, Maryland. Barrett spent 2026 extending the project’s fiction across two parallel story cycles, the Dhuna-Rhim series and the ArcSec City cycle, released as a run of singles and EPs, before returning to a full-length with Ephemeral Port on Cryo Chamber.
…The focus is on cyberpunk-themed electronics, lilting voices, and aleatoric percussion elements, all centered around a synth grounding. While some passages may come across as brightly-toned at first, this is a wrapper that surrounds a hidden darkness. The tracks generally move at a slow pace, evoking feelings of melancholy, longing, and dread. Thematically, Ephemeral Port comes…

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Hildur Guðnadóttir celebrates two decades of music on This Will Be Us, placing old compositions in new skins with Robert Ames and the DSO Berlin. When initially recording her first album, Mount A (as Lost in Hilderness), she set out to “involve other people as little as she could;” now she admits, “I always dreamed of having more people playing with me.” This is not to say that the new versions are the definitive or even better versions, because there is great appeal in the intimacy of her solo work, which jump-started her career. In her early years she worked with luminaries such as Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ben Frost and Múm; in later years she has become famous for her scoring work, from the award-winning Chernobyl and The Joker to this year’s The Bride! and…

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On Melting Pillars of Snow, Swedish composer Maria W Horn attempts to map the relentless passage of time across five expansive compositions. The record sets out to chart the friction between microscopic moments and deep historical time. Yet for all its conceptual weight and formal intent, the listening experience remains curiously remote, leaving the pieces sounding like static, glass-encased dioramas which may be meticulously assembled, but are emotionally lacking in power. Lead single ‘Scythe of Saturn’ sets the template. Built around slow-motion acoustic and electronic friction, it features a guest spoken performance from Swans’ Michael Gira. Gira’s low and heavy delivery is commanding, but his presence feels strangely grafted onto…

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There’s something of a throwback feel to Disgusting Sisters‘ debut album. Those old enough to remember Shampoo will recognise a similar ‘not bothered’ aesthetic, as will those who can remember Daphne & Celeste‘s gloriously defiant reaction to being bottled off at Reading Festival. Yet Josephine and Julianna Hopkins aren’t simply playing a tribute act. Ever since suddenly appearing on prolific super-producer Dan Carey’s Speedy Wunderground label with 2024’s Killing It, they’ve gained an army of loyal fans with a series of EPs and every festival spot you can think of. If you’re familiar with them, Skin & Blisters will already sound like an old friend – 10 tracks of snarky indie-pop which at times (check out ‘Weirdo Magnet’) feels like the missing link…

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There’s something wonderfully old school about the hype that has propelled RIP Magic’s career thus far. Total frenzy. Whether it’s the Mascara Bar residency sold out on word of mouth alone (before the release of a note of music), tours with Fcukers and Tame Impala, or the Tyler, The Creator and James Murphy stamps of approval on their fuzzy, buzzy demos, RIP Magic’s entire existence has felt like an exciting secret that everybody’s in on.
Achieving some of these landmarks in a two-year lifespan would be an elusive, almost impossible challenge for most bands, but for RIP Magic, it’s been as easy as 1,2,3.
Although their rise has been rapid, RIP Magic didn’t spring up out of nowhere. This is not a psy-op. Repeat: not a psy-op. This project…

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Apocalypse takes many forms on Sigil, the second record from Sour Widows. Its songs are littered with black holes, disasters, nuclear bombs; there are guttural screams and onslaughts of distorted guitar. This brutality isn’t the Bay Area band’s only mode, but hardly a song passes on Sigil without destruction, or at least the looming threat of it. Often, these crises follow the logic of dreams, where angels can crawl in through your ceiling, or a door can let in “all the filth from the world.” The album was conceived from a series of dreams, too: It takes its title from one that singer and guitarist Susanna Thomson had about making a record named Sigil, and the premise of its title track comes from a dream her bandmate, Maia Sinaiko, had about the end of the world.

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British guitarist Ray Russell has enjoyed a prolific career that is now in its seventh decade. From the late 1960s through the early ’70s he led electric jazz ensembles on a series of iconic jazz fusion albums. He also spent decades as a composer, arranger, and producer on hundreds of sound library sessions, and was a session and touring musician for top-shelf artists including Tina Turner, Cat Stevens, Heaven 17, and Robert Plant.
Russell’s Dangerous Bends is his third album for Cuneiform. Early in 2026 he joined guitarist Nathan Moore and drummer Eddie Prevost on Stacked. On this eight-track set, Russell captures his quintet playing (mostly) live in the studio. He shares the frontline with saxophonist Tim Whitehead, while alternating bassists…

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Musical polymath Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s credits number more than 350 recordings. Whether playing several instruments, composing, arranging, or producing, his work has accompanied Bilal, Shafiq Husayn, Marisa Monte, Ceu, Kandace Springs, and Anderson Paak to name scant few. In 2010, he conducted and arranged an orchestra playing the music of J Dilla on Timeless: Suite for Ma Dukes. In 2023, his Les Jardins Mystiques Vol​.​1 showcased 52 original compositions on three discs, over three-and-a-half hours. ANATA: Spirit of Coltrane appears on Impulse! during John Coltrane’s centenary celebration. Atwood-Ferguson, who claims the saxophonist as a lifelong influence, served as composer, arranger, violinist, and violist.

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During the pandemic, Spanish DJ and producer Oriol Riverola, aka John Talabot, found himself feeling lost. Beyond losing his primary source of income as his tour schedule evaporated, the complete lack of dance floors also left him feeling creatively strained.
He wanted to make energetic, club-ready music to release his pent-up fear about the state of the world — but with no crowded rooms to play those tracks in, the exercise felt futile.
Talabot finds a fascinating middle ground on new album Music for Empty Stadiums, which he produced in the thick of isolation. He keeps the upbeat sounds of huge music events, but splatters them all over the place in a truly beautiful expression of what the producer was…

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…Like many of the pioneers who would go on to inspire the genre, Hysterical Love Project are resistant to being boxed in as trip-hop at all. But that doesn’t mean they’re afraid to plunge headfirst into its bassy depths. While the Melbourne-based husband/wife duo of Brooklyn Mellar and Ike Zwanikken deploy a similar bedroomy fusion as the newer artists mentioned above, texturally they’re in much murkier waters.
After a handful of supremely mellow releases that blended lurching ’90s breakbeats with wintry, Mazzy Star-like songwriting, their third album dives into a vat of mercurial distortion and slippery, all-consuming bass. This is still swooning, dejected music designed more for the kick-back than the club, but even with…

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…newly remastered and include five bonus tracks: rare single edits, alternate versions, and legendary electronic remixes from the archives.
It was pretty hard to guess what Primal Scream would do with a follow-up to their bombastic 2000 release, XTRMNTR. That record broke all kinds of ground for a group that had consistently shifted with popular culture since their Madchester/acid house success of Screamadelica. XTRMNTR offered up a maddening scope of aggressive beats and screaming politics that the group had not previously tackled. Jarring and off-putting at times (albeit a stroke of brilliance), the record is a tad difficult to sit all the way through. Evil Heat seems to attempt to bridge together the two worlds of their past club psychedelia and…

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Sometimes there’s music that makes you feel like you’ve been listening to it your whole life. It immediately gets under your skin and stays in your head forever. Even when an artist is new, their songs might sound as iconic to you as, say, J Mascis or Jason Pierce’s stuff. Juice Webster somehow works exactly this kind of magic on your mind. Her 2023 debut, Julia, felt like coming home, like returning to your old teenage bedroom full of posters, vinyl, and precious memories. Her sophomore outing, Kind of Fantasy, is akin to Greta Gerwig’s Narnia – it’s like reliving a whole mix of emotions just by opening an old wardrobe full of you-know-what.
Having started down this path around 2019, with bare folk ballads in the vein of Joan Baez…

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For anybody still convinced that Geese’s explosion in popularity was a fully botted psy-op rather than the natural byproduct of present-day digital marketing in a culture starved for new rock’n’roll saviors (and, you know, an album that’s actually good), allow me to offer Heathers as an analogue study. The solo project of one Heath Michael Thomas, a 23-year-old kid from the town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Heathers until now has primarily existed as a TikTok page where Thomas performs a constellation of various crunchy covers: Big Star, Ween, Frost Children, music from Earthbound, Kings of Leon, Gram Parsons, and, naturally, Geese. His page has a respectable few thousand followers, but nothing stratospheric. Nevertheless, his debut album,…

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The cliffsides of Big Sur, California are rugged, romantic, and seemingly endless. The shimmering coastline stretches both outward and upward, as the rocks the waves crash against hold the roots of the redwood trees, some of the tallest and most ancient in the world.
Mimicking the rough splendour of its namesake, this debut album by Big Red – a solo vehicle turned trio from Joe Scarisbrick of UK band The Orchestra (For Now) – builds from quiet hums to a torrential storm, flitting between melancholy and heartbreak along the way.
As a songwriter, Scarisbrick already proved nimble on the Orchestra EPs Plan 75 and Plan 76, where the seven-piece band oscillated between tenderness, detachment, and anxiety,…

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