Back catalogue: Folk/Americana

Review: Inner Cop Avoidance is a cult supergroup that is already surrounded by plenty of discussion and conspiracy despite only having played their first gig in 2022. Made up of Krisitan Poulsen on guitar, Mathias Saedrup guitar, Sebastian von der Heide on drums and percussion, Max Stocklosa on synth, xylophone and vocals, this self-titled album from the group lands as the inaugural drop on their own label. It is a brilliantly cacophony of electronics and percussion with twisted rhythms, post-rock guitars and a fiercely experimental approach that results in brilliantly beguiling music that somehow combines the futuristic and avant garde with bird calls and ancient shamanic ritual.

Review: Having just recently made his major acting role debut in Martin Scorsese's Killers Of The Flower Moon, what an opportune time to reissue the debut solo album from former Drive By Truckers lead guitarist Jason Isbell. Originally released in 2007, Sirens Of The Ditch awarded the songwriter a chance to put his own voice front and centre, with a bluesy concoction of neofolk/alt-country meets indie-pop. Working with former bandmates as well as the iconic Spooner Oldham, in an effort to capture a balance between primitive folk aesthetics and modern pop sensibilities, Isbell managed to craft a startling debut that weaves its deft narratives around saccharine compositions, while charting out an immensely successful solo career with even his latest, exceptional ninth full-length Weathervanes landing earlier this year.

Review: On Imitation of War, songwriter and guitarist Kayla Cohen advances Itasca into rockier terrain, with a suite of smoky nocturnes and uneasy idylls surveying, with refreshing urgency, mythologies and psychologies both classical and personal. Co-produced by Robbie Cody (Wand, Behavior), these ten sturdy set-pieces represent the loosest, leanest, and most smoulderingly electric, guitar-forward recordings in Cohen's deepening catalog. Cohen explains the title as the "performance of war postures" evident at every scale of human and animal life, making war itself, or at least the thing we call war, a fundamental fact of existence. But it could just as easily apply to the revelation that, with Imitation of War, Itasca has finally come to inhabit fully the staged postures toward which former records gestured. She sounds more herself, more confidently authorial than the longing protagonist of her earlier work. This self-knowing sentiment implied in the lyrics of 'El Dorado'; no imitation, formal or emotional, of former self or imagined other, remains.