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 (the 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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I discovered the largely forgotten Del Shannon through Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!, Bob Stanley’s excellent book on the history of pop music. The late Michigan singer-songwriter sounded as if the Crystals decided to make country music – listen to that high pitched “Why why why why wonder?” here in Runaway. And in case you were wondering: that bridge in the middle of the song is a ‘musitron’, a kind of analog synthesizer which appears to have only ever been used on a few of Del Shannon’s songs. So maybe we shouldn’t have forgotten Del Shannon.

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Etran de L’Aïr comes from the Nigerien desert. That is Niger, not the better known Nigeria. The band sings in the local Tuareg language and thus the cd booklet includes lyrics written in the Tifinagh script (as well as a Latin transcription and French and English translations). I think that is cool. I also think their music is really cool. ‘Desert blues’ they call it, but unlike most American blues, this is uptempo, really catchy, and music to dance to, not to mourn a lost love to. Which actually makes sense for what once started off as a wedding band.

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Debsey Wykes was one-third of Dolly Mixture, an early 1980s Cambridge band who pushed post-punk towards what later would become indiepop. Being an all-woman band somehow helped with that. About her time in the band, Wykes recently wrote the memoir Teenage Dream. I am terribly behind on reading books so I don’t see myself reading it any time soon, but I do enjoy the reviews, such as this one in the Guardian last week. And of course there’s the music, such as this very teenage and very punk-in-spirit song which has long been my favourite of theirs.

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The Primitives — a 1980s indiepop band from Coventry, best known for their minor hit Crash — are playing some 40th anniversary reunion gigs at the moment. That’s awesome if they happen to play near you. This is not The Primitives though. This is Fortitude Valley. A band from the north of England (though with Australian roots) and one of many modern bands on the edgier side of indiepop that are indebted to The Primitives. And this song in particular is as catchy as those were on Crash.

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A post on Bluesky by the band reminded us that it would have been Stereolab‘s Mary Hansen’s birthday. Would have been, if it weren’t for the fatal cycling incident she suffered in Dcember 2002. This song, from their 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup, is one of my favourites from the time Mary was in the group. And I’m pretty sure it’s her doing the ‘doo la la’ in the background to Lætitia Sadier French lyrics.

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Members from fellow Bay Area artists Ryli and Chime School play on Joel Cusumano’s songs, but this is power pop, not indiepop. So a little bit more muscle and a little less twee. And on this Two Arrows, also a lot of fun: a catchy tune, a rhythm that never loses its pace and vocals and instruments that perfectly respond to each other, resulting in a song that I can’t stop adding to my music player’s queue.

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I don’t feel very qualified to describe John Glacier‘s music, but let’s call it a dreamy version of grime. She — look at you assuming her pronouns given her name — lives in London and this song in particular feels very London to me: that feeling of sitting on a mostly empty bus on a rainy evening as it takes you to your destination somewhere in zone 3 or 4 of the Big Smoke. “If you’re looking for respect I’ll drop respect too / We can build a bed of roses on the lawn.”

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I hadn’t listened to Estonia’s Pia Fraus (you’ll notice I have a soft spot for artists from ‘unusual’ places) in almost two decades but the band is still going, apparently, having released several albums and singles while I wasn’t paying attention. Pia Fraus made noisy shoegaze long before it became cool and still does, with two new singles out in 2025. I love this one in particular: a simple dreamy pop song covered by several layers of foggy noise.

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I took a 12-year break from focusing on music and pretty much the last thing I remembered was that the Pains of Being Pure at Heart were really, really good. And then I came back and they still were, even if they since had disbanded. Last year, the band reunited for a number of gigs though, while this year the great Slumberland Records put out an album with ten songs taken from early singles. The perfect dreamy reflection song Higher than the Stars, originally released in 2009, is my favourite. “Now you can’t think straight / Because you’re not straight”.

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The great American satirist and singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer passed away this summer, more than half a century after he quit making music because “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize”. It’s one of many great anecdotes about Lehrer who, incidentally, was also a fellow mathematician. I have a special affinity for this song about Wernher von Braun as the lines “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department’ says Wernher von Braun” are often quoted in discussions around ethics in cybersecurity.

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