Among the many, many albums released to Bandcamp and tagged “prog rock” or “progressive rock” in June 2026, these are five I enjoyed the most — projects with high production value, strong composition, and solid performances that reward repeat listens.

Think I missed something great? Please share in the comments.

Ian Neal — This Gemlike Flame (CD, 2026)

I am actually obsessed with this unabashed Genesis ‘style expansion’ (my words) by British composer and deep-cut Genesis fan Ian Neal. As Fireflies singer-songwriter Owl City apparently expanded on the unfinished business of The Postal Service; as many a band have mined The Beatles’ Helter Skelter for new sonic identities; so too does Ian Neal explore the ever-vibrant tone palettes of such Genesis tunes as Undertow and Entangled. Analog synth leads beaming over 12-string guitar arpeggios, dreamy mellotron, and soaring electric guitar solos — it’s all there, and it’s masterfully applied to Neal’s own compositions. The tunes have a melancholic and mysterious feeling, always yearning upwards, and many times reaching skin-tingling highs above the clouds like in the 13-minute epic with the genre-appropriate title of Cretan Angel: i) Parousia ii) Diaphania iii) Quiescence iv) The Marian Veil. Certainly, the anachronistic reverence can be distracting when a riff or a synth twirl rings a bit too familiar. But if Ian Neal is treading on old ground, he has carved his own homestead into that landscape with This Gemlike Flame.

See also friend of the blog and fellow Substacker ’s review:

The Long Play Project

Long Play Project Essay: Ian Neal - This Gemlike Flame

The Long Play Project is an exploration of the musician, the unknown, and the album. I treat the album as a critical case study into human creativity and radical innovation…

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14 days ago · 10 likes · Ian Paul Sharp

Listen to This Gemlike Flame on Bandcamp:

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ESP Project — Extra Sensory Perception (CD, 2026)

Evoking the trip-hop downtempo vibes like the 2000s solo albums of ex-70s-80s-band frontmen, the UK-based ESP Project’s Extra Sensory Perception is a cool Y2K jam apt for today’s revival of wraparound sunglasses, impossibly baggy jeans, and undersized tank tops. Though the musicians behind this project have bewildering credentials in the prog rock and new wave worlds, the sound is completely unpretentious — just cool. Dreamy vocals and electric guitar flanked by pulsing synths, wavy pads, and some mellotron paint over the driving drums and bass. At times the mix leaned thin to me, but the album is strongest when locked in on a bassy groove like in the tune A Beam of Light — highly crankable in an open-top convertible as the sun comes up on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Listen to Extra Sensory Perception on Bandcamp:

Le Grand Sbam — JaNuS (CD, 2026)

The Lyonnaise collective Le Grand Sbam’s “Chthulu[sic] opera” and “zoo-punk ecofeminist album” JaNuS is a pleasantly uncomfortable soundtrack to a psychological breakdown or liberation, the shedding of anthropocentricity and rejection of its destructive, ever-consuming maw. The occasional French rap punctuates the otherwise textural vocals of 9 singers over the pounding rhythms of the 14 others in the orchestra. I can hardly parse the French, but it’s apparently “a triple homage to the courageous scientist Jean-Pierre Petit, the ecofeminist biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway, and Matshish Kapéu, a powerful spirit of the Innu people who uniquely expresses himself through farts”, and musically it evokes as much. It may sound alienating, distressing even — and it certainly would be at a party or shopping mall — but there’s a magnificence and beauty throughout, climaxing in the epic and moving track Symbiotshish II.

Listen to JaNuS on Bandcamp:

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Luge — MIARKLEZ (LP, 2026)

Toronto band Luge presents the make miarklez irlz project, which consists of two EPs with tracks meant to interleave to form a single album. Is this a gimmick to boost Bandcamp sales? Or deliberate friction meant to rebel against a world that discourages curiosity and would rather have us all passively consuming slop all day? I don’t know, but I like it — feels like it elevates the project from yet another release into a lore artifact to be discovered. Musically, it’s heavy, at times attention deficient, almost hyperpop-like, just a few gecs. Some tracks have Latvian lyrics; the English lyrics are just as mysterious to me in a way I like. The dense compositions don’t always allow for cathartic payoff over the course of the album. Still, it’s never boring — it’s a head-banging, wicked trip that probably makes for a great live show.

Listen to MAKE on Bandcamp:

And/or listen to IRLZ on Bandcamp:

Anthony Garone — OK, But Why? (Double LP, 2026)

Anthony Garone is “an entrepreneur, author, musician, and technologist” and also a really sick guitarist. OK, But Why? is a collection of his work across the last many years, refreshed and presented together for the first time. Evoking the sounds of Robert Fripp, Tony Levin, and more from the King Crimson tradition, the mostly-instrumental album is a platform for virtuosic guitar playing by Garone and friends over pensive grooves. Those tunes with vocals are of the classic psychedelic pop style or soft ballads. And then there are two movements of a Bach concerto for some reason and a Giles, Giles and Fripp cover. So, musically, the album as a whole feels less cohesive, but as a collection representing years of work by a great talent, it’s a delight.

With tongue in cheek, Garone’s own website describes it as “the album nobody asked for” and calls out to the void: “Expand your mind with music you’ve never wanted to hear before.” Even the title OK, But Why? is self-deprecating. Is this irony meant to preempt any ‘midlife crisis’ reads? Or is it a daring rebellion against the human need to supply art even when there may be little-to-no demand? Either way, I’m glad he put this album out there — indeed, how could I want to hear it if it never existed?

Listen to OK, But Why? on Bandcamp:

By day, Tom studies electrical engineering at North Carolina State, possibly with intent to design his own guitar pedals. By night, Tom and his childhood friends John Fleischer, James Colone, and Xander Schnegelberger form the band named Banff. Summoning their shared childhood love for classic prog rock acts like Rush, Yes, and King Crimson, the Cascone-Colone-Fleischer-Schnegelberger outfit has a particular talent for catchy and moody rock songs that echo the lush sounds, driving rhythms, and whipping, bendy riffs of a more innocent and optimistic but still paradoxically goth-as-fuck early 1990s. The 5-song EP Flood, engineered by Max Gowan at Found After Dark in Raleigh, NC, and released May 2026, finally crystallizes the band’s live set into something anyone in the world can grab.

Indeed, among the deluge of worthy music released every day, Flood is a handle you can grab onto. But as a debut DIY EP by an unknown college band, it would be easy to let it go too quickly. Read my full review.

Credited for the electric and acoustic guitars, synthesizer, piano, handclaps, voice, lyrics, co-arrangement, and additional production on the Flood EP, Tom is clearly a driving force in this band, and seemed like a good guy to chat with.

First of all, sorry for dissing your lyrics in my first writeup.

[laughs] I’m open to criticism. So I’m really glad you gave an honest review instead of just glowing all the way.

Why the name Banff?

I’ve tried to come up with a story that’s funny and cooler, but it’s really just a dumb thing that we thought was funny. Banff is a national park in Canada, as you know. Well, our first gig was in James’s backyard for his mom’s birthday. We just loaded up Microsoft Flight Simulator, and John was like, what’s the most remote airport we can fly out of? And James was like, we can go to Banff. I’m like, I don’t know where that is, I don’t know that word, that’s a cool word. What if we called the band Banff?

It got to the point where we’d been using the name for a few months and it was just wrong to try to call it anything different. And then once we made our first batch of shirts, I’m like, alright, now we can’t change it. Like most things with us, it’s a joke that went a little bit too far.

And that humor and sense of fun made it into the EP?

We just like kind of being silly. The handclaps in Doll started as a joke to surprise the other guys since it was just me and John in the studio at 2 AM, but they ended up sticking because everyone liked it.

Is that usually how the songs come together?

More often than not I’ve got a riff, or a section, or a couple things that I’ve just shoved together and it sounds good. John, our drummer, is also a great guitar player, so him and I will hash something out. We go to different schools, so we’re always just sending random stuff back and forth.

Then James, our bassist, comes in. The dude can just come up with the best possible bass line and completely flip what we thought the song was on its head. And then Xander, our other guitar player, usually comes in last and puts his little sprinkles on top.

Everybody’s kind of throwing their hats into the ring, and sometimes the hat you throw in isn’t the one you get back after the fact.

Are you writing with live performance in mind?

This is our first thing we’ve ever done in a studio, so all of these songs are just the five best songs that we had over the past two years. All of these songs were written with the intent of playing live. I couldn’t really, at least right now, imagine writing a song with the intention of playing, like, seven guitar parts that are all different and impossible to replicate. That just doesn’t sound fun to me.

Once we got into the studio, we did figure out there were certain things we wanted that weren’t really possible live. But all of the songs had been cycled through the set a ton of times before we recorded. I really like that — it makes the song owed to all of us, instead of just everyone recording their part and then I record fifty more things on top. We were reasonable.

Was the bass pedal keyboard always in the mix?

I like when people point that out. It’s kind of hard to see from the crowd sometimes.

That kind of spawned as just a funny gimmick, and then it snowballed into something I started taking seriously. It’s a cool tool to have. In Stay, the synth line is really sparse because I’m playing it with my right foot! So it breeds some wacky things. But it also makes way for more expansive sounds; at the end of Flood I throw in a synth bass that augments James’s fuzz bass and just makes everything grow.

Homage to Geddy Lee?

Yeah. We all did the School of Rock program and did a full season of Rush music. For Christmas one year I was just like, I want this thing. I already had a synth to work it with — it’s just a MIDI controller. I started bringing it to band rehearsals and it was just like, alright, this is a part of the band now.

How long were you involved with School of Rock?

It was just me, John, and Xander, all there for various periods, starting around middle school. We were all playing there together from probably 2019 to 2022, but by that point we’d already decided we wanted to do our own thing. That’s when we really started writing, around late 2022.

I worked there until last year, teaching a lot of the little kids — Rock 101, the band program for the little ones. A test of patience, for sure.

What did School of Rock not prepare you for?

I didn’t know how to book a show. I’d played the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill once or twice, but I had no idea what went into setting that up — getting the backline sorted, all that boring shit. You send out 100 emails and you get one response and it’s a no.

Musically, you don’t really write music in School of Rock unless you decide you want to. But that’s not a weakness of the program. It’s kind of as advertised: you play covers with a lot of young musicians, you play in cool places, you go on little tours. I wouldn’t say there’s a huge weakness in what they do.

Is that also where you connected with Max Gowan?

We played a show at this venue called Kings in Raleigh. Yvonne and Travis — they’re in this band called Truth Club — they work at Kings. When we’d played there for the first time, Yvonne asked me, have you guys recorded anything? I said no. She said, “Well, you should talk to our friend Max. He owns a studio with Travis in Raleigh. He would definitely be down to record you guys.”

It took me about a year to actually hit him up because that show was the last one we played before we went to college. Maybe last August we were like, okay, we should probably get serious about making a recording. We hit up Max and he was just like, yeah, just come by the studio.

We had three big sessions: drums and bass, then all the guitars, then vocals and everything else. His studio is DIY enough to be comfortable but professional enough to sound really good. We know virtually nothing about recording and mixing and mastering and everything that isn’t playing, so he was a Gandalf figure. The guidance he gave us throughout recording and mixing was really great. He’s just a great friend too.

How do you feel about the EP’s reception so far?

It’s been a pretty positive reception. It hasn’t been doing crazy numbers because it’s our first thing, but it’s been really nice to just have something out. We’d had a few singles before, but it wasn’t anything we considered real or worth listening to. This is our first kind of big thing that we’re really proud of, a good representation of us.

How have you been promoting the EP?

We haven’t been doing maybe as much as we could to promote it. We’re depending a lot on word of mouth, trying to get it into the hands of people who want to hear it. I kind of manage everything with publicity and booking, and I don’t really know how to reach out to press, so I’m just playing it by ear and doing interviews here and there with local folks and people who want to know what’s up.

How did your New York show go?

Playing in New York was a different beast. We were staying with a family friend in Hoboken and we’re like, okay, how the hell are we gonna get to Brooklyn with all of our shit? We ended up taking the Metro, which was awesome, but tough, carrying all our guitars, pedals, the synth. Thankfully the other bands backlined the drums and amps.

I’m a pretty neurotic person. I get kind of stressed out when things don’t go according to plan. But I think going to New York and playing that gig taught me that random stuff’s gonna pop up and you just gotta take it in stride. The other guys are much better at that than me.

Are you drawn to a bigger city?

I know a non-zero number of bands that have kind of flocked from North Carolina. It’s either New York or Chicago, none going to LA, because I think LA’s kind of whack now for some reason.

I’ve always kind of liked the idea of living in New York City, but I honestly don’t know. We’re in school for another couple of years, so for the foreseeable future it’s kind of just sticking around the state, doing short tours when we can.

NC seems to be having a moment. What’s going on there?

North Carolina in the past few years has just skyrocketed in music. Out of Asheville and the mountain towns you have Wednesday and MJ Lenderman and Tombstone Poetry, bands that are getting a lot of notoriety. Wednesday has been on late night TV a ton. That’s awesome, just seeing a band from North Carolina, because growing up I’m like, what musicians are from North Carolina? And it’s like, oh, John Coltrane, kinda, but that’s it.

The Triangle — Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh — it’s not really recognized as a huge music hub nationally, but it should be. There’s Truth Club, who just did a five-week tour with Pool Kids. There’s Charlie Paso, who we played our release show with. They just put a new record out, wonderful shoegaze. verity den from Carrboro, Motocrossed from Charlotte. Just a lot of bands making music that’s weird and new. I need everybody to see these bands.

With the Flood EP done, what’s next for Banff?

A triple-album. [laughs]

Now that we have something out, we have something to talk about. Our problem for a not insignificant amount of time was that we’d play a show with a really good turnout, but these people have nothing to hold on to. They just have the thought of you, and that’s not gonna stick as much as an album or an EP does.

We put it out as a homemade cassette and home-burned CD just because it was cost effective and fun, and they’ve been selling pretty well. I think people like the fact that we made it ourselves. We’ve been selling those, stickers, and shirts.

The idea is just to play more shows, play with bands that we want to ingratiate ourselves with, and get our thing in front of as many people as possible. Max has been a really great resource for that. It’s kind of a grassroots campaign. You gotta see it to believe it.

Among the deluge of worthy music released every day, Flood is a handle you can grab onto. But as a debut DIY EP by an unknown college band, it would be easy to let it go too quickly.

A quartet of childhood friends, Banff have been playing these songs live for years. It was late 2025 when they finally recorded five songs, and, in May 2026, they released the collection online and as a homemade cassette or home-burned CD. Engineered by Max Gowan at Found After Dark, a small studio in Raleigh, NC, it sounds good.

Aside from the guitar feedback textures that hint at the depth to come, the eponymous opening track starts off as any unassuming college rock band’s song might, with a chipper riff and simple beat. Lead singer Tom Cascone’s tenor voice comes in, crisply and clearly, with an idiosyncratic though unmistakably young edge. The lyrics are of the classic psychedelic tradition with some rich, metaphorical imagery (“The crack in the dam is widening / … the mountain will become a shore”), and some spacey pre-choruses with a piano texture and soft ride cymbal evoke the Chris Cohen school of 2010s throwback to 60s psychedelia in a lo-fi bedroom recording. It’s all fine — good, even — but not unexpected. Then the song devolves into a slow and heavy doom throwdown, and the dim hint of the feedback at the start goes full glare as the washed-out slow double-stop bends on the guitar over the pounding toms beam into our imagination a vision of the flood breaking the dam, and we’re like, oh shit, this band rules, what the hell is happening.

Next is Chester, a bouncy but grungy tune that showcases bassist James Colone’s talent for catchy melodic lines. The band drives along, tambourine in tow, through verses and choruses and a guitar solo reminiscent of Sum 41’s Dave Baksh rising out of the swimming pool in the video for In Too Deep. The song then undergoes a genre metamorphosis, emerging as post-rock for its climactic jam. Through effective sonic foreshadowing and granting the spectral space-time for new ideas to develop, the band avoids making this song feel all over the place. Instead, it’s a satisfying journey that starts as a bop and ends as a post-rock rainstorm. What probably also helps is that the intro, again, hinted at where the song would end up. That’s good songwriting.

New Moon starts with a jaunty riff and gets into some jazzy business with a few catchy delights, particularly when the whole band pauses for a beat then kicks back in together. Everybody loves that. Tom really comes out vocally on this one, melodically bridging across sections with sophistication. The song wraps mid-transition, going right into…

Stay. The distinctive Cure-like synth lead that Tom plays with his right foot on his pedal keyboard joins James’s high bass line and the layered stereo strumming guitars to evoke an atmosphere like when you’ve stayed up all night and now the birds are out and you gotta make it home. The verse comes in with a grounding bass, revealing the key we’ve been in the whole time. It’s a harmonic surprise that gives a sense of resolution mirroring the lyrics’ affirmation of bravery in the face of a breakup. The lyrical content is sweet, if solipsistic: characteristic of much young male heartbreak writing, the “she” in the story exists only as a prop catalyzing the narrator’s angst. And I already critiqued the lyrics’ rhyming couplets forcing unnatural vocabulary in my original roundup. But Tom’s voice is bold, reaching a high, sustained note at the pivotal moment before the song’s instrumental final act. Here the guitar solo is psychedelic but somewhat timid compared to the others on the album. Still, it builds with the band to an effective climax, after which the instrumental subsides with more trippy stuff, more synth lead, and more soloing over a long denouement that’s earned by the track’s two major catharses over its just-under-6-minute runtime.

The EP closes with Throw Me Around Like a Doll, which comes on with a pensive and sweat-inducing beat like you have reason to suspect yourself of a crime you can’t remember committing. Then the song blasts off in a full-stereo, full-spectrum rocket with some of the band’s best riffing, evoking the best Smashing Pumpkins licks. Tom takes a more spoken-word register over the interrogative beat that alternates with the ripping chorus. Backing vocals ahh over the chorus, elevating the track from banger to certified banger. It’s a strong closer to a great first DIY EP.

Flood is available as a homemade cassette or home-burned CD and for streaming on Bandcamp.

Check out my interview with Banff lead singer and guitarist Tom Cascone:

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Every month, a sea of releases floods Bandcamp, and each release has its own story, merit, and message. Of those albums released in May tagged “prog rock”, these are just a few of my favorites. Whether they’re truly prog or some other genre like shoegaze or post-grunge doesn’t really matter to me. I love ambitious but listenable arty rock, and these all fit that bill.

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Banff — Flood (EP, May 2026)

Banff — not of Alberta, Canada but of Raleigh, North Carolina — launched their EP Flood, an exploratory 22-minute, 5-track EP with moments ranging from groovy shoegaze to proggy jangle pop. Fronted by Tom Cascone, a singer I don’t know but whose voice I really like, Banff puts forth well-constructed, never-boring tunes recalling The Smashing Pumpkins, Catherine Wheel, and various eras of Faith No More. The album’s weakness is in the lyrics’ forced rhyming couplets and resulting awkward vocabulary. Still, there’s a lot of great face-melting rock here. This band easily has me boarding their rocket ship.

UPDATE: In fact I like them so much I reviewed the EP in detail and also interviewed their lead singer:

Listen to Flood on Bandcamp:

Unit Wail — Petrochemicals Corp. (album, May 29, 2026)

Paris zeuhl-adherents Unit Wail bring us a nasty Crimsonian instrumental concept album apparently about fossil fuel worshippers who live to maximize shareholder value. ELP’s Tarkus, the actual armadillo tank, pulls into Texaco for a $5,000 fill-up. Strap in for the day-one orientation video at the cult of polyurethane. Tense and gnarly throughout, Petrochemicals Corp. is the soundtrack for locking in while hacking into Exxon’s mainframe.

Listen to Petrochemicals Corp. on Bandcamp:

Animatist — SHAPESHIFTER (LP, May 2026)

Toronto band Animatist’s third album SHAPESHIFTER offers a knob-twiddlin’, sax-blastin’ instrumental ride atop a monstrous beast through a psychedelic savanna. Holding on for dear life when this stampeding rhythm section tries to throw you off, you eventually lock in and become one with the beast. A perfect soundtrack to whatever the modern equivalent of cave painting by firelight is.

Listen to SHAPESHIFTER on Bandcamp:

Y STREET — The Bizarre Marsupial (album, May 2026)

Melbourne band Y STREET’s debut album The Bizarre Marsupial has apparently been in the works for many years, with some tunes dating back seven years and attributed to earlier band lineups. This might explain the genre range across this 12-song, 37-minute album that centers on a sort of post-punk, post-grunge crotch rock with vocal stylings at times evoking Jim Morrison. Jangly, textural moments here and banger anthems raging against the 9-5 machine there, it’s all delightfully weird with hints of Minutemen and DEVO throughout. Whatever it is, it rocks, and it’s probably best enjoyed stumbling around some underground music festival in a parking lot with a frothing tallboy in hand.

Listen to The Bizarre Marsupial on Bandcamp:

For Breakfast — Longer Than Spring (LP, May 2026)

North London self-described “yearncore” band For Breakfast’s full-length Longer Than Spring is a moody contemplation evoking a ghostly figure in a lacy nightgown running over a wily, windy moor just before dawn — but the one they’re after is already gone. Textural woodwinds and brass, pensive arpeggios, post-rock reverb-drenched electric guitars form revelatory passages to complement singer Maya Harrison’s wistful-dramatic vocals. There’s a calm-on-surface, intense-underneath beauty throughout the album, like getting lost on a nature walk before sunrise but still finding your way home in time For Breakfast.

Listen to Longer Than Spring on Bandcamp:

So what is the music? If you like prog, Legs On Wheels fits right in the tradition, crafting Gobble from the DNA of Wakeman-era Yes, Gabriel-era Genesis, The Mountain-era Haken, and loads of Zappa-era Zappa. Dramatic lead vocals; layered harmonies; plucky guitars over yet more electric and acoustic guitars; tight drumming; ripping bass; the occasional organ, piano, and synth. In no way do all these layers form an overwhelming sonic sludge. Instead, the band’s musicality paints a lush picture, and the engineers captured every stroke.

There’s a frantic energy from the opening track Oysters On The Half Shell through the end without much pause, though the band takes a few slow trips through melty, contemplative territory. From the alien bar music in A.P.E.S. to the infernal rock of Dinnertime for Rat, I was saying, yep! That’s prog™.

Lyrically, like all great prog, there are moments you scratch your head and ask, “What are you even talking about?” And, like any prog enthusiast, I wouldn’t really care as long as the words sound good. But the lyrics are not entirely dadaistic. With vivid imagery, they explore themes ranging from the exploitation of nature by the wealthy to the folly of humankind to the very purpose of life. The grandeur here suits the genre but more importantly carves out depth that makes Gobble worth revisiting with the lyric sheet in hand.

Indeed, a second listen, at least, is required to fully appreciate Gobble. Taking this frantic, ADHD-coded approach to music comes with the risk of throwing out so many musical ideas that the listener simply does not have enough to grab onto before the handle is yanked away for the next idea. I found myself lost a few times here, and found even my uncommonly high tolerance for progginess and musical dorkiness tested. But then the band hits with their quirky but irresistibly catchy chorus like in Peekaboo or the triumphant hell-yeah headbanging payoff at the end of Waiting For His Drowning, and I was back on board for the ride. Plenty of moments induced that gnarly frown-smile you get when music is absolutely so nasty it rocks. The ripping keys solo in Centipede in particular had my jowls[sic] on the floor.

No prog album would be complete without at least one ten-plus-minute track. The finale Masteroid satisfies the role. Here, the lyrics wrap up by the halfway mark, launching the instrumental into a sick journey through some afterlife suggested by those final words. The tune builds into an overdrive, evoking some hyperactive run into a speeding neon grid where you’re hopping waist-high fences and ducking electric bats while heading toward the light. Suddenly, the ticker gives out, and the music slowly devolves through a trippy and chill if somewhat depressed post-lude as the screaming feedback of a tape loop overtakes it all. Finally, in an even slower denouement, you’re back where you started, in space, almost feeling, as the lyrics say, “destined to drift forever”.

Here’s where I wish the album kept reaching and pushing, maybe recapitulating an earlier theme for an ultimate payoff. The 10-minute track, like elsewhere on the record, comes to a bit of an anticlimax. So, perhaps, the album didn’t quite reach that holy catharsis for me. It is dense with musical ideas, but maybe those musical ideas aren’t always fully explored or revisited. Nevertheless, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable ride with lots of highs and plenty to dig into again. And its existence is a testament: prog is alive and well.

Favorite track: Peekaboo

Listen to Gobble on Bandcamp:

The band has a particular taste for lush atmospheres and tones, especially the eerie-beautiful synth filling out Goodman or the gang vocals nah-nah-nahing over the stadium solo at the end of ZIELLO. The album reaches moving, goosebumps-inducing highs as Ozmun’s vocals and lyrics evoke the fear of being out of reach of a helping hand, of being left behind.

At times, it does risk flying too low, like in midpoint track Edgewater. For me, the composition here doesn’t give me enough harmonically or melodically to latch onto, so I struggled to follow it from the very low start into the intended high-point catharsis. But the wicked talent for tone, groove, and pure rock soon returns with the next track, the title track, a banger that ends so heavy I was begging for more.

In fact, the energy is even higher on the back half of the album. It’s not a quiet contemplative collection of tunes meant to be heard in private. It’s a journey worth seeing through to the end. Like in life, man. One day, you look back on all the homes you had to move on from and think: at least you were Always Living Somewhere.

Favorite track: Stray Black Dog

Listen to Claire Ozmun’s Always Living Somewhere on Bandcamp:

Los Angeles band Cheekface’s single Black Site doubles up every ingredient in the well-established Cheekface Cookbook to make enough sorta-middle-class protest power pop to feed the masses starved for meaningful rock: 2x driving beat, 2x ripping bass line, 2x painfully funny lyrics delivered irony-smothered but not masking the rage underlying them, and this one riff in the chorus that is so catchy literally everyone cheers when it happens, x2. Adding Cheekface to my favs on that morally-bad-but-too-convenient-not-to-use delivery app so I can get another slice of whatever they’re cooking on the double.

Listen to Black Site on Bandcamp: