Since forming in 1989, Mercury Rev has made a career out of boldly exploring the fringes of artistic perception, channeling colors and sounds and visions that always seem just beyond our mortal reach. The Guardian hailed the group as “a rarity in indie rock: a band who have continually evolved their sound, pushing at the boundaries of what rock music actually means over 25 years, borrowing from jazz, funk, doo-wop, techno, folk and more along the way,” while Rolling Stone praised their “majestic chaos,” and the BBC lauded their “shimmering psychedelic pop, immersive indie-rock, [and] spectacularly engrossing passages of sumptuous instrumentation.” The band’s 1991 debut, ‘Yerself Is Steam,’ landed on Pitchfork ’s rundown of the Best Shoegaze Albums of All Time, and their 1998 breakthrough, ‘Deserter’s Songs,’ was named NME ’s Album of the Year upon its release. Major festival and television performances around the world solidified their status as that rare group capable of straddling the line between mainstream appeal and progressive musical and technological experimentation, but the band’s journey was also a tumultuous one, full of lineup changes, setbacks, and heartbreak.

Since first arriving on the scene in 2009 with blistering inversions of shoegaze, Montreal’s No Joy has always found formidable ways to reinvent itself. Now solely composed of musician Jasamine White-Gluz, No Joy has evolved over the course of four studio albums and five EPs, defying expectation and genre, and cementing itself as something rare: a band without a category. For No Joy’s first full length in five years, White-Gluz took what she learned from synthesis, reincorporated guitars, and produced an album that is not a departure from No Joy’ s early shoegaze, but a stylistically omnivorous expansion that ekes into trip hop, trance and nu-metal. 2020's "Motherhood" is the culmination of years composing outside of her comfort zone, and a return to DIY recording with a leveled-up expertise in production. Touring with genre-divergent artists has honed the band’s comfortably multifarious sound; No Joy picked up post-hardcore fans on the road with Quicksand, and ambient techno fans on gigs with Baths. “As long as people are open minded about music, they can hear different things,” explains White-Gluz, “Maybe because there are a lot of layers.” Once again pulling sonic inspirations from every corner the band had mastered before, "Motherhood" is a staggering and melancholic tapestry of fuzzy, 90s/early 2000s nu metal and trip hop, faithful shoegaze, and bold lyricism -- with blunt meditations on femininity, fertility and mortality -- all while maintaining a sense of humor. It’s no surprise, then, that with 2021's new No Joy EP, "Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven," sees White-Gluz finding new things to mine and explore from "Motherhood." Comprising the tracklisting of "Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven" are four "Motherhood" tracks, all of which were reworked during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixed by frequent collaborator Jorge Elbrecht, mastered by Heba Kadry, and co-produced by White-Gluz and Tara McLeod (who also lends her guitar work to the recordings), the new takes veer into slower, dreamier territory ... but calling it “softer” would be a disservice. To help re-conceive the tracks under a new light, White-Gluz enlisted a fresh set of collaborators: there’ s booming percussion from Sarah Thawson, a cutting cello from Ouri, delicate harp work by Nailah Hunter, and French horn from Brandi Sidoryk -- who also provides backup and operatic vocals. They settle into a strange and confident harmony, highlighting the urgency of Motherhood’ s themes, as White-Gluz’ s hazy, ethereal vocals soar over the din. Aside from these reimaginings, there’s another delightful surprise: a dusky cover of Deftones’ immortal classic “Teenager” rounds out the five-song EP. It’ s no wonder that a song by Deftones, another band willing to bulldoze through sonic boundaries, would find a home here. There’s a kinship between these artists that makes this cover even more necessary. With "Can My Daughter See Me From Heaven," No Joy continues to conjure an effortless mix of sound, achieving new heights, while playing with the more traditional confines of the shoegaze genre.

The Besnard Lakes have passed through death and they're here to tell the tale. Nearly five years after their last lightning-tinted volley, the magisterial Montreal psych-rock band have sworn off compromise, split with their longstanding label, and completed a searing, 72-minute suite about the darkness of dying and the light on the other side. "The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings" is the group's sixth album and the first in more than 15 years to be released away from a certain midwestern American indie record company. After 2016's "A Coliseum Complex Museum" -- which saw Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas attempting shorter, less sprawling songs -- the Besnards and their label decided it was time to go their separate ways; with that decision came a question of whether to even continue the project at all. What use is a band with an instinct for long, tectonic tunes -- rock songs with chthonic heft and ethereal grace, five or 10 or 18 minutes long? How do you sell that in an age of bite-sized streaming? How do you make it relevant? "Who gives a shit!" the Besnard Lakes realized. Ignited by their love for each other, for playing music together, the sextet found themselves unspooling the most uncompromising recording of their career. Despite all its grandeur, "...The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings" honours the very essence of punk rock: the notion that a band need only be relevant to itself. At last The Besnard Lakes have crafted a continuous long-form suite: nine tracks that could be listened together as one, like Spiritualized's "Lazer Guided Melodies" or even "Dark Side of the Moon," overflowing with melody and harmony, drone and dazzle, the group's own unique weather. Here now, The Besnard Lakes finally dispensed with the two/three-year album cycle, taking all the time they needed to conceive, compose, record and mix their opus. Some of its songs were old, resurrected from demos cast aside years ago. Others were literally woodshedded in the cabanon behind Lasek and Goreas's "Rigaud Ranch" -- invented and reinvented, relishing this rougher sound. Some of that distortion makes its way into the final mix: an incandescent crackle that had receded from the Besnards' more recent output. Rightly -- nay, definitively! -- "The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings" is a double LP. "Near Death" is the title of the first side. "Death," "After Death," and "Life" follow next. It's literally a journey into (and back from) the brink: the story of The Besnard Lakes' own odyssey but also a remembrance of others', especially the death of Lasek's father in 2019. Being on your deathbed is perhaps the most psychedelic trip you can go on: in Lasek's father's case, he surfaced from a morphine dream to talk about "a window" on his blanket, with "a carpenter inside, making intricate objects." That experience pervades the album, catching fire on the song "Christmas Can Wait"; elsewhere the band pays tribute to the late Mark Hollis and, on "The Father of Time Wakes Up," they mourn the death of Prince. In these scorched and pitted times, as the world smoulders, there might be nothing less trendy than an hour-long psychrock epic by a band of Canadian grandmasters. Then again, there might be nothing we need more. "...The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings" is a bright-blazing requiem: nine tunes that are one tune and six musicians who make one band - unleashed and unconstrained, piercing and technicolour. At the end of the golden day, The Besnard Lakes are right where they should be.

Miki Berenyi began her career as a recording artist in 1989, as co-founder of the band Lush, releasing a series of EPs (Scar, Mad Love and Black Spring compiled as Gala) and LPs (Spooky, Split and Lovelife) on the iconic 4AD label. The band toured extensively, many times in the US — with Ride, Babes in Toyland, Jane's Addiction, Flaming Lips, Weezer and, most notably, as openers on the 1992 Lollapalooza tour. Lush split in 1996, and Miki retired from music, but a 2015-16 Lush reunion tour, which included a Coachella date and release of an EP Blond Spot, revived her enthusiasm and she formed Piroshka, who released two albums on Bella Union: Brickbat (2019) and Love Drips and Gathers (2021). When the global pandemic made touring impossible, Miki spent the lockdown months writing her memoir, Fingers Crossed, released in 2022 to widespread acclaim. To provide some musical accompaniment for the string of book events and signings, Miki Berenyi Trio was formed, with her partner Kevin 'Moose' McKillop on guitar and Oliver Cherer on bass (both had played in Piroshka). The band has developed a momentum of its own and they are now writing new songs, inserted into the set of Lush and Piroshka tracks as they continue to fulfill live bookings, with a plan to record and release an album in 2024. For the US dates, they will be joined by Michael Conroy — also a founder member of Piroshka and Modern English.

The fourth full-length from Wild Pink, ILYSM unfolds with all the fractured beauty of a dreamscape. Over the course of 12 chameleonic tracks, the New York-bred rock band build another world inhabited by ghosts and angels and aliens, inciting a strange and lovely daze as the backdrop shifts from the mundane (subdivisions, highways, hotel parking lots) to the extraordinary (deserts, battlefields, the moon). But within its vast imagination lies a potent truth-telling on the part of singer/guitarist John Ross, whose lyrics closely examine his recent struggle with cancer. The follow-up to 2021’s A Billion Little Lights—a critically acclaimed effort praised by the likes of Pitchfork, NPR, Vulture, and Stereogum, who named it “one of the prettiest rock records of the past decade”—ILYSM emerges as a truly revelatory body of work, transforming the most painful reflection into moments of transcendence. As Ross reveals, ILYSM’s feverish yet fragile intensity has much to do with the unmooring experience of being diagnosed with cancer early in the writing process. Now in the surveillance phase of recovery, Ross explains, “Even though I’d already started working on the record, everything took on new meaning after my diagnosis. I started writing songs that tried to make sense of the whole experience, including the love and support I felt from the people in my life—particularly my wife, which is where the title came from.” Co-produced by Ross with Justin Pizzoferrato (Pixies, Body/Head, Speedy Ortiz) and Peter Silberman of The Antlers, ILYSM finds Wild Pink joining forces with a thrilling lineup of guest musicians, including J Mascis, Julien Baker, Ryley Walker, Yasmin Williams and Samantha Crain. As the most experimental work to date from Wild Pink—whose lineup also includes bassist Arden Yonkers and drummer Dan Keegan—the album embodies a finespun yet mercurial sound embedded with so many unexpected details (e.g., the spirited gang vocals of its title track, the slippery grooves and unearthly narration of “Abducted at the Grief Retreat,” Mascis’s frenetic solo on “See You Better Now”). Mainly recorded at Sonelab in Easthampton, Massachusetts, ILYSM ultimately marks a bold departure from the lush orchestration of A Billion Little Lights, yet still bears an endlessly immersive quality. “I wanted to make a record with more organic elements than the last one,” says Ross. “Playing live in the room together as a band was very important to me—I really leaned on them to bring their talents to the table, which they did.” An album informed by the odd poetry of everyday life, ILYSM opens on “Cahooting The Multiverse”—a gorgeously hazy track encapsulated by Ross as “a stream-of-consciousness tune inspired by watching the light come in through the sugar maples where I live, or taking a walk by the school and seeing this little mountain of cigarettes where the teachers sneak out to smoke behind the cedar trees.” From there, Wild Pink drift into the quiet grandeur of “Hold My Hand” feat. Julien Baker, one of ILYSM’s most profoundly vulnerable moments. “I wrote that song right after my first surgery, about lying on the operating table where a member of the surgical team held my hand right before I went under,” says Ross. “It sounds kind of arbitrary, and like it shouldn’t have been as impactful as it was, but I felt very comforted and wanted to capture that loving feeling in the song.” Featuring the elegant piano work of David Moore (leader of the ambient ensemble Bing & Ruth), the result is a hypnotic piece of chamber-pop, brightened by Baker’s warm and wistful vocals. Graced with the dreamy pedal-steel tones of Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner (Magnolia Electric Co., Badly Drawn Boy) and the syrupy clarinet of Jeremy Viner (Bing & Ruth), “War on Terror” presents a lonesome and sprawling portrait of wandering the beach at night, once again illuminating the gently jarring effect of Ross’s lyrics (“Stay in the ocean because it’s just me/And the big moon rowing across the sky/Time is always moving to the right/And measured in things like tumor markers”). “There’s a running theme throughout this record of the moon being a constant companion, and I think that comes across in this song the most,” notes Ross. And on “Sucking on the Birdshot,” Wild Pink deliver one of ILYSM’s most devastating tracks: a six-and-a-half-minute epic driven by crashing rhythms and gloriously careening riffs. “I was in Florida and saw a sandhill crane by the side of the road; its partner had been killed by a car, and the bird was mourning and screaming in pain—I’ve never heard anything like it,” says Ross. “They’re these very striking birds that look like dinosaurs, and I came to learn that they mate for life, which is unusual in the animal kingdom. I had that in mind when I wrote this song about a pure expression of love in the natural world, and how your own first love can feel huge in a similar way.” For Ross, the process of bringing ILYSM to life provided a certain sense of escape, even at its most daunting moments. (“I was actually back in another cancer surgery within a week of wrapping up the recording,” he recalls. “It was pretty surreal to record this album knowing I had cancer in my lymph nodes—but since I couldn't have the surgery any sooner, I just stuck with my studio time.”) And with the release of ILYSM, Wild Pink hope the album might supply others with their own outlet for solace and catharsis. “Writing about all this has helped me process my experience, or even just acknowledge that I still don’t completely understand how I feel about it,” says Ross. “It’s been a very confusing, overwhelming time, and hopefully it’ll offer some kind of comfort to anyone else who’s feeling overwhelmed or confused too.”

The Eagle Rock Gospel Singers began as friends getting together. They began as a choir of 15 people who revived the old Gospel spirit with songs like “I Shall Not Be Moved,” “12 Gates,” and “In My Time of Dying.” They evolved into a band of five, committed to the richness found in early 20th century recordings. They are influenced by past Gospel musicians such as The Dixie Hummingbirds, Washington Phillips, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe as well as a number of modern artists from all genres. The band preserves traditional music by echoing the stylings of blues, folk, country, and Gospel music. They push these genres with electricity, modern vocal harmonies, and pop music arrangements. They play a combination of Gothic Americana roots, indie folk rock, rock 'n' roll, and traditional Gospel music.