Beyond ‘favouriting’ the odd song on a music app, I had not paid proper attention to North London’s The Leaf Library until last week. This despite their ‘electric drone pop’, as they call it themselves, really being my thing. Sure, this kind of music, also known as ‘heirs to Stereolab’, can easily become a bit monotonous and hide in the background, but the Leaf Library sounds fresh and exciting even on their fourth album (After The Rain, Strange Seeds, just released on Fika Recordings), of which this Still & Moving is my favourite song. Totally my thing.

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The Chutes are Kenny and Erika, husband and wife from San Francisco (they’re named after a former amusement park in the city), who are about to release their self-titled 7-track debut album on local Dandy Boy Records. This Scraping the Last Bits of Light has been pre-released as a teaser and it really makes me want to listen to the other six songs: upbeat, confident indiepop with call-and-response vocals that befit a married couple. The duo appears to have a history in the local hardcore scene but, no disrespect to punks, there’s very little anger here and I like that.

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Another reunion: after a 32-year break, Heavens to Betsy is playing live again. Heavens to Betsy was Corin Tucker’s band before she formed the better known Sleater-Kinney. I’ve always had a weak spot for them and in particular the quiet, atypically introspective punk of this White Girl, written decades before George Floyd’s murder made some white people confront their inner racism, at least for a while. I hope they play it during their reunion gigs, but even if they don’t it’s worth listening to several times in a row. Especially today.

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“Liberty Belle is a band named after this great album from The Go-Betweens”, according to Bandcamp. In fact, it is one person, Jean-François Cantot from France, who has been writing songs for the past 35 years and now released eleven of them as the album 11 Songs. I like it, especially opener Time Step, which even more than the other songs reminds me of The Go-Betweens (the band’s later work in particular). I’m not complaining, if anything provides me with an excuse to listen to that band again. But the 95 seconds of this song are also really good.

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Named after Primal Scream’s contribution to the legendary C86 compilation, Velocity Girl was one of America’s earlier indiepop bands. In the early 1990s, the DC area band released three albums and many singles. Their sound was a bit heavier than their British influences – they released albums on Sub Pop – but still really good indiepop. Most indiepop purists would argue that their early stuff was the best and as luck would have it, Slumberland is about to release a compilation with some of their early songs, including this Forgotten Favorite, which the same label released as a single back in 1991. 

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Almost three decades in, Death Cab For Cutie remains one of the best band names out there. Music wise, I find their songs pleasant enough, but I am more into the synth pop of Ben Gibbard’s other band, The Postal Service. That’s probably why this Trap Door is my favourite song of DCFC’s most recent album, I Built You A Tower: it’s the most electronic among the songs: a steady background beat of a song that builds up to a cute keyboard solo. That’s more than pleasant enough, actually. 

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I had forgotten I knew about Vivian Girls until Tidal reminded me. Wild Eyes is from 2008, when I was very busy with life and didn’t pay much attention to new music. I wish I had as this is how I like my indiepop: mixing the best parts of Black Tambourine, Henry’s Dress and — to use a non-American reference — the Tidy-Ups. 2008 is so long ago already, but one of the best parts of the Internet is that I can listen to it on places like Tidal or Bandcamp as if this is fresh. And it does sound fresh.

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Night-blooming Jasmin is one of several alternative names of cestrum nocturnum, a plant in the potato family. It is also, with slightly different spelling and punctuation, the name of a song by UK underground rapper fakemink, that has been stuck in my head for the past few days. It has a lo-fi feel to it and doesn’t feel very in your face, more like mumbling out loud. I am not a huge connaisseur of the genre, but this is how I like my hip hop. “Ayy, night, bloom Jasmine, second name Yasmin / Th-they wanna eat me alive, can’t stop them”.

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I’m following the football World Cup more than I expected. It’s fun, with all the usual caveats. I didn’t see any Scotland game though and I know I won’t see any because the Tartan Army is already out of the tournament. That leaves me with It Only Takes One Lion, the unofficial theme song Belle and Sebastian (introduction not needed) wrote in support of their country’s football team. No, it doesn’t come close to the band’s best work (like most indiepop fans, that’s their 1990s work), but it’s fun, catchy and – very rightly, given history – says “we love Haiti” too.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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”.

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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.

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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”!

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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.

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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.

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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.  

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