The Kettle Zone are moving quickly and deliberately, and “Iff and Only If” is their third single in under a year. The Edinburgh-based project, built around the songwriting of vocalist, guitarist, and keyboard player Allan Knox, continues to carve out a distinct space in the power pop landscape with another hooky, up-tempo track featuring Richie Werner on drums, who also mixed and mastered the recording.
The singles have each brought slightly different collaborators into the fold. Debut “Every Other Summer’s Day” featured Werner at Edinburgh’s B & B Studios. Follow-up “Little by Little” brought in Derek Smith on bass, Andrew Scott on drums, and additional guitars from Jack Davenport, recorded at The Owl Shed Studios. “Iff and Only If” returns to Werner as the central collaborator, keeping the project fluid and the sound consistent.
The influences anchoring The Kettle Zone are XTC, Squeeze, and Jellyfish, a lineage that says everything you need to know about where Knox’s songwriting instincts come from. More singles are planned for 2026, and for anyone who still believes guitar-driven power pop is one of the great undervalued genres, The Kettle Zone are worth watching closely.
Common People have been building momentum fast, and “Dear Worry” is their most emotionally direct statement yet. The Los Angeles indie rockers’ new single is out now via Parallel Vision/Big Loud Rock, a hopeful, introspective track produced by Cage The Elephant’s Brad Shultz that arrives alongside a visualizer and the band’s debut EP ‘Games’.
Written by Nicky Winegardner and Konrad Ulich, the song captures the intense self-critical internal monologue that most people carry quietly through their days. Ulich frames it with deliberate honesty: “Dear Worry is a love letter to that voice in your head. An honest reflection on worry that is less so about overcoming negative emotions as it is learning to live with them.”
That approach, meeting anxiety with compassion rather than dismissal, gives the track a distinct emotional texture. It’s a reminder to extend yourself the same grace you’d give someone else, delivered over a sonic landscape that feels warm and searching rather than heavy.
Common People announced themselves in 2025 with breakout debut “Thank You,” which drew attention from Rolling Stone, Atwood Magazine, and Flaunt Magazine. Follow-up singles “Propaganda” and “Ready or Not” earned praise from Alternative Press and New Noise Magazine, while the band closed out the year supporting Cage The Elephant and The Criticals on select tour dates.
‘Games’ is out now on all digital platforms, with vinyl available for pre-order on the band’s website. A festival appearance at the Minnesota Yacht Club Festival on July 19 is still ahead.
Gary Klebe has spent decades as a foundational member of Shoes, one of power pop’s most influential and ahead-of-its-time bands, and ‘Out Loud’ is his first-ever solo album. It’s also a one-man operation, written alone and tracked almost entirely without outside help in his basement studio on nights and weekends, using a favorite collection of stompboxes and vintage gear.
Lead single “Not Tough Enough” sets the tone immediately, combining a euphoric, upbeat sonic landscape with self-deprecating lyrics about a once over-confident man finally meeting his match. Klebe explains the song’s premise with characteristic directness: “A once over-confident guy who thought he knew it all has finally met his match and is now facing a thorough ass-kicking. The feeling of helplessness is a new experience and not one he is enjoying.”
The album sounds like Shoes because it comes from the same instincts, but ‘Out Loud’ has its own distinct character shaped by the vulnerability of working alone. Drums were tracked in Nashville with John Richardson, whose credits include Gin Blossoms, Badfinger, and Tommy Keene, but everything else came together in Klebe’s own space. The vocal harmonies, built by multi-tracking his own voice into stacked layers, draw directly from techniques he learned working with iconic British producer Mike Stone, known for his work with Queen, Journey, and Foreigner.
One of the album’s most compelling backstory elements is the Butch Vig connection. Klebe served as something of a mentor to the Grammy-winning producer behind Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ and Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Siamese Dream’, and when he sent Vig the solo project, Vig became one of the main voices pushing for its release.
Vig’s endorsement is unambiguous: “When I listen to Gary’s new record, I hear all that in the DNA. It’s in the production and the songwriting. It’s timeless, in a way. It’s so retro that it sounds fresh, because it’s not like anything on Top 40 radio. He’s made a timeless power-pop album.”
Shoes formed over 50 years ago and are still making music, with more to come. But ‘Out Loud’ stands entirely on its own as a solo statement from a songwriter who has nothing left to prove and everything still left to say.
The Temper Trap are back in full flight, and “Into The Wild” is the clearest signal yet that one of Australia’s most globally recognized acts has found their footing again. The new single and video arrive as the latest in a run of releases that has firmly re-established the band, following euphoric anthem “Giving Up Air” and its Solomun remix, bold indie-rock track “Lucky Dimes,” and a fresh take on “Sweet Disposition” from German dance act BUNT.
“Into The Wild” tackles the duality of body and mind, the existential yearning to push beyond physical limits and find something wilder on the other side. Produced by Styalz Fuego, whose credits include Troye Sivan, Charli XCX, and Khalid, with Catherine Marks, known for her mixing work with Wolf Alice, boygenius, and Manchester Orchestra, the track is freeing, pulsing, and soaring, Dougy’s hypnotic falsetto floating over undulating drums that pull the listener in and hold them there.
The band frames the song’s significance plainly. “After years of being apart and trying to find our groove again, ‘Into the Wild’ was the spark that lit the fire.”
The accompanying video, directed by emerging Melbourne creatives Joey Clough and Edvard Hakansson, leans fully into the surreal, a dreamlike car ride on wide open roads cut with chaos and strangeness, the mind proving wilder and more uncontrollable than the world outside. It’s a visual that matches the track’s spirit completely.
Of Monsters and Men have always understood that their music exists in a world of its own, and the animated short film for “The Block” and “Mouse Parade” makes that world visible in the most beautiful way possible. Directed by Honor Price, the stop-motion film is a tender, surreal journey through miniature sets and hand-made puppets, where humor and vulnerability sit comfortably alongside each other, small characters navigating big feelings inside a playful and fragile world.
The film arrives as a companion piece to ‘All Is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade’, the band’s fourth studio album, a self-produced record with nuanced contributions from Josh Kaufman, known for his work with The National, Bob Weir, and Bonny Light Horseman, and longtime collaborator Bjarni Por Jensson. The album wraps listeners in hygge, that distinctly Icelandic sense of gentle, comforting warmth that lingers long after the music ends.
The short film captures that atmosphere completely. It feels less like a music video and more like a pocket-sized poem, intimate, offbeat, and deeply human, the perfect visual extension of a record steeped in quiet emotional depth and the effortless chemistry of old friends creating together.
Will Lee spent more than 3 decades holding down the bass chair on the Late Show with David Letterman, played with all 4 Beatles, and has a story about Paul McCartney trying to buy his bass that alone is worth the price of admission. In this wide-ranging conversation with Rob Cass on dopeYEAH talk, Lee covers everything from switching from drums to bass as what he initially called his biggest mistake, to the massive influence of Jaco Pastorius, working on Donald Fagen’s ‘The Nightfly’, how John Lennon’s discomfort with his own voice inadvertently led to the invention of flanging, and the James Brown Late Show appearance nobody saw coming. Honest, funny, and deeply human, it’s a remarkable portrait of one of the most connected and undersung figures in modern music history.
Ryan Gosling on Jeopardy is exactly as entertaining as it sounds. The clip, tied to his film Project Hail Mary, puts Gosling in the Final Jeopardy hot seat and the result is the kind of chaotic, genuinely funny television moment that reminds you why celebrity game show appearances exist in the first place.
30 years on, Trainspotting still feels like it landed yesterday, and the cast reunion on The Graham Norton Show is a genuinely warm and hilarious celebration of a film that changed British cinema forever. The iconic cast gather on the sofa to share behind-the-scenes secrets, wild stories from the shoot, and reflections on the friendships and careers that grew out of one of the most culturally significant films of the 1990s, capped off with a reenactment of the legendary movie poster that is exactly as good as it sounds.
Before kicking off the Bridges to Babylon Tour in 1997, The Rolling Stones did what only The Rolling Stones can do: showed up unannounced at a club and played a 13-song set for a handful of lucky people at Chicago’s Double Door. This newly upgraded 4K, 60fps version of the full show captures one of those rare, intimate moments where one of the biggest bands in the world strips everything back and just plays, running through classics like “Honky Tonk Women,” “Start Me Up,” “Jumping Jack Flash,” and “Brown Sugar” alongside deeper cuts that no arena crowd would ever get.
Seth Rogen and Kermit the Frog sitting across from each other debating the greatest rapper, the best Muppet, the worst movie pitch, and the most compelling conspiracy theory is exactly as chaotic and entertaining as it sounds. The Muppet Show co-stars face off in Complex’s GOAT Talk, trading opinions, anecdotes, and the occasional Miss Piggy clapback in one of the more genuinely funny installments of the series in recent memory.
