More laptop twee! New York state duo ear (stylised in lowercase) is more laptop than twee. Given the choice I side with the latter, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the duo’s music. In particular this Ne Plus Ultra (released as a single, and also available on the band’s recently released second album Rumspringa), that sounds like a quiet, introverted version of the Femcels, with whom it shares its sketchiness. And I happen to love sketchy, introverted pop songs.
They were certainly not the first all-girl indiepop band, but given their name they are kind of the quintessential one and, actually, one of the best too: All Girl Summer Fun Band. I fondly remember the few shows they played in my native Netherlands back in 2003 and I am happy to hear the band is still playing the occasional gig. Such as this weekend in their native Portland at the awesomely named and themed Menopunkpapalooza festival, in support of the Menopunks documentary. You’re very lucky if you are going. For everyone else, here is the band’s timeless theme song.
Look, I can wait until mid August when label Slumberland says the upcoming third album by Real Numbers (of Minneapolis, Minnesota) will be released. Or I can just get really excited about Never Never Again, the one song that has been pre-released and that reminds me more than a bit of Razorcuts (mid-1980s English indiepop is a good reference for the band’s previous work too), including lyrics like “What’s to be done about it / No use to dance around it / You know I thought about it all”. So I’ll just do that.
https://tidal.com/track/520501695/u
Megan From Work is looking for a new bass player to join the band. If you’re interested and you’re available to practice Tuesday nights in Manchester, New Hampshire (or Thursdays, if that works better for you) and willing to go on tour with them sometimes, drop them an email. You will then be able to say that one of pop music’s best band names of the moment is a little bit yours too. And you get to play edgy power pop like this The PIMS (from their 2024 debut Girl Suit, recorded a few years before you joined the band).
Oh hey, this is fun! I had added Season 2 to my playlist because of a recommendation from I don’t remember where. Then when listening I had to double check to confirm this was released in 2026 and not in 1986 and that this band is from Melbourne, Australia and not from Oxford or Glasgow. They just released their debut album Power of Now with eleven jangly, punky indiepop songs in the style of Shop Assistants or Girls at our Best. I love every single song, it’s just that this What For is the opener that blew me away first.
Shapes Like People is Carl from England and Kat from New Zealand, now living married life and making music in Wiltshire. And for a change I won’t mention that New Zealand pop label. The jangly indiepop songs sound somewhere between the early indiepop from Glasgow 1984 and the sixties pop from San Francisco 1968. I like it, just as much as I like their description of their “utterly quaint British country home topped with traditional thatched roof”. That sounds like the right kind of middle-aged life. “Don’t change the view, grow gracefully older”.
I think I’ve said this before, but when indie folk hits things right, it is really good. Angelo De Augustine is from Southern California, is “has his own Wikipedia page” big, and though I just discovered him has released no fewer than six albums; Goodbye Baby Blue is from his latest album Angel In Plainclothes. He has performed with Sufjan Stevens, whom I somehow never got into, but for me in this beautifully quiet song it is comparisons with Elliot Smith, Kings of Convenience or, much further back, Nick Drake that I use as rational explanations for really loving it.
The six members of The Kind Hills met while studying in Perth, Australia. They now live on four different continents, but that hasn’t stopped them from being a band with what looks like already a pretty impressive collection of releases. Their latest album Little Epiphanies is my first introduction to them and I have become a fan. It’s simple, cute indiepop, a bit dreamy here and a bit electronic there and surprisingly varied. I Need A Holiday is the song that keeps popping up in my head and it seems fitting given the season. “Not quite soon but right away”!
My friend told me the other day he had dreamt of Beulah. Then a few days later, I found their 1999 album When Your Heartstrings Break in a record store. I don’t know how often I would have thought of the San Francisco band otherwise, but I am glad I did. Elephant 6 pop in its purest form (so that’s the triple-B influence of Beach Boys, Beatles and Byrds), more smooth than other E6 bands and with this awesomely titled We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart as a perfect album finisher.
Kids these days don’t know this but early Mountain Goats releases (some of which on cassette only) included some lo-fi casio music. It’s those songs that The Chop’s The Auditor reminds me of, and guess what it is also from a cassette-only release, on Vancouver’s Lost Sound Tapes label. Musically, this husband and wife duo is probably closer to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: lo-fi bedroom indie dance music, with Gemma’s prominent vocals, despite the duo residing in Glasgow, Scotland, sounding very English. I like it.
A loud punk band? On my blog? Yes, I am not someone to join the mosh pit, but instead prefer to stay quietly on the outside, with the other indiepop kids. But this song by Minneapolis’s Dillinger Four, their first in many years apparently, is loud but also so… catchy. As if Mac Superchunk got himself a skateboard. And it keeps popping up in my head, which makes it deserve its place on the blog.
I’ve had Prism Shores’ I Didn’t Mean To Change Your Mind on my playlist since it first appeared as a single in February but never got round to writing about it. Now a full album (Softest Attack, their second) has come out and while it contains some fine jangly pop, this remains my favourite song by far. The band is one quarter New Zealander (and three quarters Canadian) and that makes the Flying Nun comparison an easy one to make, but the song could easily have been released on that label, two or three decades ago.
Two albums in (Love You Hate You is from their 2025 debut), there is so little to find about The Parker Posies (from Oak Bay, BC, Canada, apparently) that someone suggested they may have been AI generated. It would be truly sad if it were. This sounds very human: very “awkward high school kids with an appropriately lo-fi production singing about love” that is the core of indiepop. Let’s hope they’re just too shy to do anything but sing cute songs. “Sitting on my bed / Feeling so alone / Dreaming of your smile / Wishing you would phone”.
More than this blog would suggest, I am really into electronic music. My neurodivergent nature however means I am really not a club person. Which is why my ideal kind of electronic music is somewhat introverted, music that I can dance to, but quietly in the safety of my living room. Zoumer really fits that bill. It is the alter ego of Yasmina Derradj, living in Copenhagen and from Algerian descent, something reflected in the title e.a.l. (euro arab lovergirl) on her recently released second album (from which this is taken), as well as her North-African influences.
Sometimes it takes me months of brooding to find something to write about a song I like. And sometimes I get inspired to write on the first listen. That is what happened to Fall Breaks, self-described as “the recording project of a 16-year-old music nerd” to which I add that he is from Uberlândia, Brazil. I’ve been in love with his Unmarked EP (his fifth, according to Bandcamp) since yesterday. Laid back, synth-driven indiepop that occupies the space somewhere between Sarah Records and Jesus & Mary Chain. Of which there is quite a lot these days. But this is really good.
Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records describes Above Me as “the main songwriting vehicle for San Francisco based artist Rick Altieri”. As part of Blue Ocean, Rick released two albums on another Oakland label, Slumberland. The dreamy shoegaze of that band (and many other bands on that label) is a good reference for Above Me, though here the synths and drums play a more prominent role, making me almost write ‘soundscapes’. I say almost, as underneath the electronics this Water Drops, like most of Above Me’s debut album Soften The Blows, is a really fine pop song.
I started a new job last week and went to a conference right away. That was great. It was also mentally exhausting and that is when I fall back to ‘safe bands’. The Softies are a very safe band. There is a lot to say about all the bands Jen and Rose were in too, because that matters, but The Softies are also two women, two guitars, two voices and very intimate songs. This is from their 2024 comeback album, that I love to bits and is as good as their early work. I am so glad The Softies exist.
There is a kind of synth-driven indiepop that goes all the way to British bands like the Field Mice and Another Sunny Day back in the 1980s. It was very popular in Sweden in the early 2000s, when that country was an indiepop Valhalla (and this kind of music was particularly popular) and now lives on in bands like Vain Pursuit, who I discovered recently through the JanglePopHub blog. Vain Pursuit appears to be the solo project of Vinny Ball from New York and ten (digital) singles in, Fears (from 2023) is my favourite song.
More laptop twee! Josephine’s Next Million Miles (cool band name, BTW) are a four-piece from New York City. They share with bands like London’s Worldpeace DMT and The Femcels a playful enthusiasm and a childish seriousness (or serious childishness) that goes all the way back to the original twee pop from the 1980s. I would gladly recommend any song from their recently released debut album Buckle Up (out on dawk26). I’m choosing this Summer Song because it reminds me of Architecture in Helsinki who, come to think about it, were kind of proto-laptop twee.
This week, a friend scanned the first band interview I ever did, in 1996, with Peter Hughes of DiskothiQ. I didn’t know what to ask a band – I still don’t – and most questions were about the European tour Hughes had just done with the Mountain Goats, whom he would later join as a full-time bass player. DiskothiQ ceased to exist around the turn of the century, but not before they had planted this very catchy (that bass line!) simple 3-minute pop song (a lo-fi pop variant of college rock, if you need a description before you listen) in my brain.
There’s some kind of About page at the bottom of the first post. There is an Instagram account and also a Bluesky account and a playlist on Tidal. I am Martijn and this is my personal-professional website.