Blind Yeo -  The Lemoine Point
Genre: Pop, psych rock
If you’ve read enough of my New Music Drops picks, then you’ll already know if there’s a krautrock-tinged pop album out there…I’m mentioning it!! Been really enjoying this sweetly psychedelic, electronically euphoric, nature-themed album from UK collective Blind Yeo. Great balance of spacey production with organic, folky instrumentation. Favorite song: “Hour Glass of the Eye”, for fans of Junip 
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Alewya - Zero
Genre: Pop, electronic, R&B
London-based Egyptian-Ethiopian singer-songwriter producer making big impressions with her debut LP. Electronically-driven, soulfully sung, genre-spanning music that incorporates rhythmic influences from her cultural heritages, like the track “Eshi” which flips a short Ethiojazz sample into a sultry London soul-style cut. Been following her visual art and singles throughout the years, very glad to finally see a full length release! For fans of Sampa the Great and Ibeyi 
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Lone - Hyperphantasia
Genre: Electronica
A kaleidoscope of bright ‘n playful dancefloor sounds - from techno, house, r&b reworks, UK garage, and old school rave sounds. As producer Lone says, it's an “unrestrained, self-indulgent bat-shit pop music from an alternate dimension.” Lots of bops in here, but I’ll always be partial to jungle and the freaky old skool sounds, as featured on the opening and closing track 
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Coprolith - Putrescence
Genre: Death metal
Old school-inspired death metal for fans of Incantation or Autopsy, with super bass-heavy riffs that add a ton of weight to this album. For sure one of my favorite releases of the summer, just in time for the oppressive heat that makes me go full caveman brain. 
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Saul Williams - Leap Life
Genre: Spoken word 
A pure work of art from one of my favorite poets/artists/activists. Spoken word poetry and improvisation over “fluid arrangements that blur the lines between spoken word, jazz abstraction, hip-hop cadence, West African rhythmic logic, ambient composition and ceremonial sound design”. I put this on during a hot, humid day and watched the clouds take over the skies and bring some solace - this album really encapsulates that exact feeling. 
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TUL8TE - Narein Live Sessions
Genre: Egyptian jazz, smooth jazz
I’m not regularly an “easy listening” jazz kinda gal, but with TUL8TE’s buttery smooth voice I’ll soak it right up. Egyptian rapper and producer recently released this new album (and live performance) reworking his 2025 album, Narein, into a jazz production. His voice is just swoooooonworthy. Would also recommend his other new album that just dropped, Sadeek El Bernameg, if you’re into 2000s era Arabic pop.
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Lero Lero - S/T
Genre: Sicilian folk (or perhaps, anti-folk)
Lero Lero is a collective of artists creating a Sicilian Sound Archive, persevering the melodies and spirit of Sicilian folk music with a contemporary sensibility. Ancestral sounds infused by “Mediterranean electronic textures and microtonal melismas, echoing the hypnotic tones of bagpipes and marranzani, the laments of cart drivers, and the cries of salt workers”, taking an anti-folkloristic approach to reinterpret traditions and legacies. This album has been on heavy rotation for me, definitely my most listened to album of the past month. Hard to pick a favorite track as the album and concept is so beautiful as a whole, but I’d have to say my stand-out tracks are “Monrealesi”, “Franculina” and “Salinai”
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Thank you for reading! Feel free to leave a comment below with what you enjoyed from this blog, or what new releases you've been diggin' lately!
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​ICYMI: Our song of the week selections from the past couple of months!

"I was thinking the other night how it's been a while since I've paid much attention to remixes, so to get back in the groove, I started thinking about some of my all-time favorites. The first track that immediately came to mind was this Free Zone Mix of "Root Down" by the Beastie Boys, produced by Danish hip hop crew The Prunes. This first appeared on the Root Down EP that came out just after Ill Communication, containing a couple remixes of the singles plus some live tracks. To me, this embodies everything a remix should do. With its trip-hop production, it shifts the entire mood of the song and offers new insight to their flows while maintaining the integrity of the original. And when that slick, jazzy bassline comes in right before the 'there goes that guy with the funky sound'...I mean c'monnnn it's too good. I'll never forget when I first heard this back in high school, I must've listened to it 50 times in a row. Probably listened to it more than the original at this point!" 
-- Parisa
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"I feel lucky to have experienced the early stages of the internet, back in the glory days of fan forums and endless diy indie music blogs and p2p file sharing. It was back when the internet was an exciting and hopeful thing - a source of endless discoveries, and a place where a lonely tween such as myself could find obscure sounds that made me realize there are other weirdos out there in the world that like strange sounds too. Six Finger Satellite, a noise rock band from Providence signed to Sub Pop, was one of the many bands I remember discovering in the early music blog days and still holds such a big place in my heart. While they were most known for their heavy, distorted noise rock material (they went on tours with bands like Shellac, The Jesus Lizard and Trans Am), I've always been partial to their krautrock-influenced, Kraftwerk and Chrome-worship songs, like 'Hans Pocketwatch'.  They had an incredible knack for making cool, moody, unaffected, alien-sounding synth music - a sound that was so formative for me as a kid discovering music on the internet, and still sounds just as exciting today." 
​-- Parisa

​"After the split of 70's synthpop group New Musik, members Lee Mansfield and Rob Fisher formed a duo group called Planet Ha Ha. EMI Records asked them to record a single for the E.T. soundtrack, and they produced this single that has to be one of the sickest new wave 7"s of 1982. Space-age, angular, punchy synthwave with a spoken word avant-garde element, spectacularly cool and just the right amount of cheese. Kinda makes me wonder what society would be like now if only this landed E.T. soundtrack, we'd probably have flying cars or world peace or what have you. But alas, the song was rejected. Planet Ha Ha ceased to exist, so Mansfield and Fisher went on to form Naked Eyes and "Home" was left for the archives."
-- Parisa

​Ubik #3, 30 pages.
8646 Carter Ave.
Allen Park, MI 48101

This is basically everything I want out of a music fanatic magazine.  A perfect mix of local and touring, new and historical acts.  Plenty of good photography and cover art to keep it engaging, and reviews written in accessable language by someone not confined to one genre's fandom.  Though it is mostly punk/adjacent, Ubik gives room and worthy praise to metal, ska and industrial acts as well.

The highlight for me was an interview with Jimmy Doom of The Almighty Lumber Jacks of Death.  Ubik is out of the Detroit metro area, but you don't need to be to dig it.  

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#3, Winter 2026, 39 pgs., $4.00
PO Box 3067
Laurel, MD 20709
joe3ofcp@gmail.com

Made up of three essays and a fantastic 'zine review section, this is a topnotch personal 'zine.

The first essay, "What's Going On?" is three pages of personal updates that sets the tone nicely for the rest of the issue.

The second essay is "Commentary," starting off with a review of Amie McNee's TED Talk, "The Case for Making Art When the World Is on Fire."  After reading the review I watched McNee's talk on the youtube.  As with most things like this I don' agree 100% with either McNee or the 'zinester, Joe3, but both are good as a starting point or encouragement if this sort of things has been on your mind, and isn't that largely the point of talking and writing in the first place?

After about a page, Joe3 shifts to the work of the recently passed 'zinester Fred Argoff as a case in point.   

The third essay, "True Story," is about the rise and fall of a community library Joe3 helped start.  As a longtime participant in the Infoshop movement, this is some of my favorite kind of material.  Why start a library when there's already a public library?  What went right?  Wrong?

Section four is 'zine reviews, and the main thing that kept me from finishing this review faster was I kept stopping to put together wingnut mail art to send to some of the other 'zinesters in the hopes of doing some trades for more potential review copies! 

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This month's lineup includes:
- Resistance-fueled occitan folk traditions from Southern France 
- "Psychotropicolumbian" futuristic electronica
- Byzantinian scaled droney techno
- Anti-colonial Algerian conscious hip hop 
- Buchla synth-infused dodo music of western Kenya
- Industrial street performance art from Kinshasha
- Mapanta dancefloor music from the Bapedi people of Limpopo
and much more!

​Global Rhythm Radio originally airs the fourth Thursday of every month on 91.3 FM KXCI Tucson is archived here on T&E.

Tracklist is available here. 

The experimental backdrop of this record is built around the modular Buchla synthesizer, but the glue that binds these varied sounds and textures together is the bond between the three artists. Per the press release:

Ogoya Nengo (which means "the most precious and expensive singer in the region” in the Dholuo language) has performed as a singer since her early childhood. However her appearances were very limited to the region where she is from. (Siaya, Rangala, Kisumu). She usually performed at wedding, funerals and special parties and events. Fast forward decades and she met Kacirek in 2009 as part of this field recording project, The Kenya Sessions, and credits Kacirek for helping to launch her career, having worked together on the aforementioned Rang'ala. “That is why I like Sven, because Sven lift me up. I took him like my son, and Sven took me like his mother,” she says. What’s more, as neighbours in Kenya, Ratego and Nengo live just three minutes apart by motorbike, and have known each other for “a very long time”.

​It's a beautiful, heady, contemplative release and accomplishes an incredibly dynamic and unique form of global fusion. Definitely recommend this full album!
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For my reissue track feature, I have to go with the final track of this mix because it was one of my favorite reissued albums from late last year. From Bongo Joe Records comes a short compilation of Moroccan artist Cheb Nacer called Maroc Électronique Vol. 1.

Some notes on the release per the label:

Born in Oujda, he grew up surrounded by raï, staïfi and chaâbi before moving to Casablanca, where he blended these roots with the electronic sounds filling cabarets and clubs. Inspired by the international clips broadcast on 2M and RTM, he reimagined European hits in darija, creating a hybrid, dance-driven sound. Between 1993 and 2006, he released a string of tapes, shows and hits, defining his unique style: spontaneous, raw and festive techno-raï born in studios, living rooms and wedding halls. 

For context, raï is an Algerian popular music genre that originated back in the 1920s, and by the 1940s became a form of resistance for marginalized peoples in Algerian society. In a 2025 article for Shado Magazine, an author describes the movement as such: “Raï was giving a voice to a whole segment of Algerian society entirely absent from mainstream discourse and culture, especially one tightly controlled under French colonial administration. Raï was cementing its place as ‘a musical statement rebelling against political, social, and religious constraints,’ as defined by ethnographer Nasser Al-Taee.”

By the '60s, the genre saw incorporation of Western instruments and electronic sounds. And as you can hear from this '90s Cheb Nacer release, some releases became heavily inspired by eurorave club music. Well...perhaps a little more than "inspired", this track is basically an exact rip of "Boom, Boom, Boom Boom!!!" by Vengaboys. It's real good corny fun, and very endearing to hear the way '90s club music was universally admired and reinterpreted in its own unique way around the globe.

Like punk and hardcore, prose poetry is meant to be heard live.  It's not just the art; it's the crowd, venues, the way the poet read, banter between poems.

But much like recordings and reviews can spark interest or bring back memories, chap books are the 'zines of the poetry world.  This effort by Razorcake and Spokenest's Daryl Gussin is well worth the read.

Published in Los Angeles this year, the rebellion against ICE last year is addressed somewhat playfully in the second poem, "Two Onions and a Potato," without trivializing the events.  The rest of the chap book runs basically the rest of the whole spectrum of human emotion from the hopeful, idealistic hanging on of the first poem, "Belly Fat," the petty jealousy of "Young Couple" whose title practically says it all, to the darkness of school shooting in "A Love Poem for Big Lu" and "I Know."

It's all the same kind of down to earth, slice of life material that attracted me to and keeps me into specific hardcore and punk acts and writers.  Whether poems about public transit which are my favorite, slipping on shit, or an intense and random conversation with a committed dog person at a laundromat; it's all literally about holding on to the little things that make life worth it, without ignoring the things that ruin lives.

Being able to write about Love without being corny, and sex without bragging; it's about embracing the good and trying to overcome the bad.  Dreaming without being overcome by fantasy or nightmares.

But really, if you get the chance, try to go hear Gussin perform live, that's where the magic is.