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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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.

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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”. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Chicago’s Sunday Records was active in the 1990s and early 2000s, releasing 7” singles and CDs by legendary indiepop bands such as Fat Tulips, The Cat’s Miaow and Aberdeen. They returned in 2018 to release some great music from all over the world, all musically going back to 1980s Britain, the golden age of indiepop. Sheffield’s The Suncharms are not only British themselves, they also go back to the 1980s; like the label they reformed some years ago. The songwriting and vocals here remind me a lot of Razocuts, if perhaps slightly more shoegaze-y. Great stuff for any day.

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Someone wrote a book about The Clean. And though it may never reach the top of my To Read pile, it was a good reason to listen to some of the songs of the legendary and influential New Zealand band. Thankfully, The Guardian compiled a list of ten essential songs. Of which this 1994 song Secret Place is my favourite. Less Velvet Underground than a lot of their other music and more jangly organ-led pop like, say, The Bats. Which I guess is hardly surprising as the song is written and sung by Robert Scott, who is in both bands.

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The thing with reading announcements of upcoming releases is that I get impatient and end up falling in love with previous work and then write about that. So with apologies to Love, Burns (Phil Sutton of Brooklyn, NY; previously of Comet Gain, Kicker and others): their new album Pavement Drawings will be out in a month, but I currently really love its 2024 predecessor Blue and this Hard To Fall in particular. For fans of 1980s British new wave (say Aztec Camera, but less Scottish). And, well, with more to come in a month.

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I saw a video of Loren Vanderbilt performing with Heavenly and that reminded me that I had never posted anything by Humdrum, of which Loren is the main member. And that despite this There And Back Again being one of my favourite songs of the past few years, one that even made it to my very selective playlist with favourite songs I put on when I am sad and need grounding. It is happy, it is pure indiepop, British at heart but Chicago by location, obviously released on Slumberland but also reminding me a lot of mid 2000s Matinée records. 

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In what feels like last week but was actually the beginning of the century, I traveled to Sweden for a tiny indiepop festival. One of the bands that performed was Dorotea, a then very young trio from Gothenburg who played very energetic, punky indiepop, as if the Ramones were decent people and into indiepop. Speaking of decent, Decent is my favourite song (at 84 seconds far from their shortest) by the band, who were still going a dozen years later when they played the song at Indietracks and had not lost any bit of their youthful energy.

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Does anyone remember Kindercore Records, the Athens, GA label that around the turn of the century released a lot of soft, gentle indiepop (Kincaid, Masters of the Hemisphere)? It is those bands that Research Vessel’s Where You Are reminds me of. (Their own bandcamp says it evokes the melancholy of The June Brides, if you want an officially endorsed comparison. I don’t disagree.) I loved those bands and I love this song, from the five-song debut EP Research Vessel (the alter ego of Danny Rowland of Seattle, WA, who also plays guitar in Seapony), just released on Sunday Records.

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I got all excited when I read on Slumberland Records’ website “Kids On A Crime Spree are set to release a new record”, only to realise this actually refers to the band’s 2022 second album Fall In Love Not In Line. That won’t stop me from writing about this song — the album’s opener — of the band with members who were in #Poundsign# and From Bubblegum To Sky. I’m also adding Pains of Being Pure at Heart as a musical reference, especially on this shoegaze-y dreampop song. And hey, maybe that third album will come one day.

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