“All eyes fixed on the doorway / Some day, something good will come this way”. This feels like my experience of being a die-hard Cannanes fan for more than a quarter of a century until I finally got to see the Australian band play live twice this spring. And then I got to hang out with Frances and Stephen after the shows too. What more does a fan want? They didn’t play Vivienne, my favourite song of theirs, but they played many other great songs and those two nights in Athens and Paris are among my happiest as a music fan.

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It seems that Amelia and Rob of Heavenly et al have a hand in at least half the new indiepop that comes out. Usually through their Skep Wax label, but on European Sun they play music too. The main character in European Sun is Steve Miles though, a singer songwriter made from the same mould that also produced Billy Bragg. This is especially true on When Britain Was Great, a very timely tongue-in-cheek ‘ode’ to Britain’s bigoted past. “I remember so proudly those heavenly years / In a miserable, murky, misogynist land”.

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Shatta is a variant of dancehall originating in the French-speaking Caribbean, that is more bass-heavy and with vocals that are more robotic. It has gained popularity in the French-speaking world (the genre thus far only has a Wikipedia article in French) and Maureen, apparently, is the Queen of the genre (that is a nod to her recent album). This song, with its intro borrowed from Für Elise, is a favourite of mine, with all the ingredients (multiple languages, multiple rappers) I previously argued for.

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There are many things wrong with the world today, but from books to music, there is a lot more attention to things from beyond the anglophone world than 20 years ago and that is a good thing. It has led to garage indie punk quartet Alvilda – four women from Paris who sing in French – do a US Tour this year. Which is awesome, for not only does Alvilda play really catchy tunes, French with its many é and u sounds, works really well for this kind of music. But then, we kind of knew that ever since Plastic Bertrand.

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When Lush was around in the 1990s, I was only vaguely aware of the band; I might have mentally filed them under ‘Britpop’. It took me decades to fully appreciate them as one of the best bands to come out of Britain in that era. Which is awfully long, given that they played a poppy kind of shoegaze and had not one but two female vocalists. That objectively doesn’t matter, but is the kind of thing I love, and this is my blog. Downer is from their 1990 debut album Gala, which label 4AD recently reissued in a remastered version.

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I remember seeing Guided by Voices live in 1995 and being quite disappointed: they played rock songs, not those fragile lo-fi songs I liked so much. Also, the members were approaching 40, which felt ancient. The band members are a whole lot older now, but then I am much older now than they were back in 1995. They still make music and now sound more rock on record too. But they still put out the occasional pretty pop song, such as this Phantasmagoric Upstarts, from their latest album Thick Rich and Delicious.

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I was there when in December 2002 the Television Personalities made its comeback, after singer Dan Treacy had spent some time in prison. The mini festival in London where they played turned out to be quite pivotal for my life, though not because of the band. About whom there are a lot of things to say, but they did write some of the finest late punk/early indiepop songs, such as this Geoffrey Ingram. This song is for Andreas, whose smile that weekend I can still remember and who, I learned, passed away early this month.

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Star Feminine Band is a group of young women – when they formed, their average age was 16 – from the north of Benin. They have been picked up by some of the bigger European festivals (they played both Glastonbury and Roskilde) and now by me too. Their music mixes various African styles, including highlife, leans heavily on vocals and drums (they have three drummers!) and is really addictive. Their lyrics include references to feminism and women’s rights, though this song is more about themselves and their plans to go to the end of the world. Let them go there!

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There’s an Internet verb ‘to wilf’, short for What was I Looking For: getting lost in some rabbit hole, usually on Wikipedia, having long forgotten what your original purpose for opening the browser was. The other day, after some wilfing, God knows why I found myself on the Wikipedia page of the Oblivians, a Memphis garage punk band that was most active in the 1990s. I had never been more than a casual fan of their music, but I saw them live once, which was good, and this has always been my favourite song of theirs.

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This song, the first one not on Tidal, seems a good moment to let you know that all the (other) songs shared on this blog can be found in a Tidal playlist.

The Gentle Spring is Michael Hiscock’s new band. He once formed The Field Mice and in my world, that is a recommendation even more than 30 years after that band ceased to exist. Michael now lives in Paris and in The Gentle Spring he plays really nice, slightly more introverted music (he has aged 30 years too), joined by some locals. On Severed Hearts, one of them, Emilie Guillaumot, sings, just like Anne Mari sung on some Field Mice songs. Her French accent is subtle but noticeable, and that is actually what makes this my favourite song of theirs.

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We all do silly things when we are young. Bavaria’s The Notwist once started out as a metal band. Thankfully, they moved on from that long ago and for the last few decades, The Notwist has been making music on the border between electronica and postrock. It’s the kind of music that tends to be album centered, but I don’t have the patience for all that. I do like the occasional song though, such as this Run Run Run, especially in this Ada remix (from a recent collection of remixes and rarities), which reminds me a bit of later Hood.

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Laundromat Chicks sounds as if they come from Oxford in 1988 or Göteborg in 2004. In fact, they come from Vienna in 2025. There is a whininess in the singer’s voice in Secrets but combined with a jangly guitar and a very basic pop song, that is actually a recommendation: this is how good indiepop is supposed to sound. This is good classic indiepop. Like, really good indiepop.

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I learned about Strange Passage’s Palace Behind the Shade from a Rosy Overdrive blog post that also mentioned Hüsker Dü and maybe that’s why that comparison keeps popping up in my hand. Just like the Hüskers did, this Boston-New York band shows that punk is really just an extension of pop. I like this song in particular, for the pace it manages keep throughout and that then reminded me of Joe Cusumaro whom I wrote about a few weeks ago and whom I also discovered through Rosy Overdrive.

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With Slumberland releasing all these fine records lately, one would almost forget that the label has been around for well over three decades. Washington DC’s Lorelei released an album with noisy shoegaze (that band itself prefers the term ‘postrock’) back in 1995 – this is my favourite song from that album – and then went on to do other things, such as become the CEO of Amtrak, as former bass player Stephen Gardner did between 2022 and 2025. The band reformed in 2012 for a second album and still plays gigs it seems, but this remains my favourite.

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For me, The Mountain Goats will always be the one-man lo-fi band I fell in love with in the late 1990s. I know they’ve released a million albums as a full band since but it still doesn’t feel like the real thing. But then occasionally, they release a song that takes me back to those early recordings where it was just John Darnielle, an acoustic guitar and a boombox recorder. Though properly produced and recorded, Rocks in my Pockets from their latest album Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan is that kind of song.

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The excellent JanglePopHub blog — a great source for new music in, well, that particular subgenre — refers to Dreamcoaster’s music as ‘jangle-gaze’. An excellent description, as the music by the husband and wife from Brighton is too jangly to be labeled as shoegaze and too dreamy for pure jangle pop. Maybe, the metaphor-desperate reviewer in me wonders, this is the compromise needed for a good marriage. Or maybe, the more realistic music lover in me thinks, it just sounds good. For it really does. 

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I am a sucker for songs that switch between two languages and B.A.S.T.A.R.D. switches between three: French, English and Cameroon pidgin English. Alternating between rappers (Jovi and Reniss, both from Cameroon) is another weak spot of mine and you get why this is one of my favourite rap songs from Africa – or any continent really. And if you don’t, pay attention to that cute xylophone-like thing following Reniss’s vocals.

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Right from the opening keyboard notes of High Beams I knew that this was my favourite song of what their label Slumberland calls The Laughing Chimes’ “sophomore album” (I had to check the US educational system to confirm that does indeed mean second). The Ohio band borrows heavily from decades of American jangle pop history, as well as from 1980s British indiepop (on this song in particular) and all the great things Flying Nun released in New Zealand. In a time where libraries are under a lot of pressure, I’d say: keep borrowing. And keep jangling too.

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Nothing says that my taste in music isn’t that of most people than the fact that about half the plays of Gaze’s Eric Idol on the various music platforms is me playing the 74-second song over and over again for the past ten years. But seriously, what isn’t there to love about this song with its vocals bouncing between the two singers (one of them being Rose Melberg of The Softies et al fame) until it climaxes at “How do you have him at your fingers so?” Yeah?

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The high-pitched vocal harmonies of Jeanines’ songs hide the fact that at its core this is a punk band. The three-piece from Massachusetts (recently upgraded from a duo) write simple tunes that are very catchy and, in true punk spirit, often rather short. And why not? If you like the 92 seconds of On and On so much, as I do, why don’t you play it, erm, on and on? Oh, and do go and see them live if you can; I saw them in Paris this summer and they were pretty great to watch – and dance to.

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