Fifteen years is a long time between records. Soulive have spent that stretch doing other things, building other projects, living other musical lives, and ‘Flowers’ arrives with the relaxed confidence of a band that never doubted it had another album in it. Recorded at Flóki Studios in northern Iceland under executive producer Chad Pike, it’s the sound of Eric Krasno, Alan Evans, and Neal Evans picking up exactly where they left off, and then going somewhere new.
The album moves through jazz, funk, R&B, and blues with the ease of a group that has spent 25-plus years internalizing all of it. Opener “XI” sets the mood immediately, a deep, haunting groove with Krasno’s reverb-drenched guitar oozing swagger over the Evans brothers’ locked-in rhythm. “Baby Jupiter” gets the body moving, “3 Kings” pays tribute to B.B., Freddie, and Albert King with the kind of blues fluency that only Krasno can deliver, and “Basher”, a nod to Don Cheadle’s Ocean’s Eleven character, showcases the trio’s stop-start telepathy at its most playful.
The sole vocal appearance comes from Grammy-winning soul artist Van Hunt on “Flowers at Your Feet”, a Parliament-influenced centrepiece that broadens the album’s palette without disrupting its flow. The closing stretch, from “Pikes Place” through the symphonic warmth of “Window Weather”, lands like the payoff of a well-earned journey. This is an outfit still operating with borderline telepathy, and ‘Flowers’ captures that bond in full.
Soulive have two dates at Ardmore Music Hall outside Philadelphia on April 24 and 25. Limited opportunities to hear this material live, so the window is tight.
‘Flowers’ is out now.
Upcoming Dates:
April 24, Philadelphia Area, PA, Ardmore Music Hall
April 25, Philadelphia Area, PA, Ardmore Music Hall
The Brian Wilson estate has been doing right by the legend’s catalog, and ‘On Tour 1999-2007’ is the latest proof. Released by Oglio Entertainment as a Record Store Day exclusive on April 18, the live album draws from eight years of Wilson touring with his celebrated backing band, capturing a period that reminded an entire generation exactly what made him one of the great figures in American music.
Only 2,000 copies are being pressed, which tells you everything you need to know about how quickly this one will move. The backing band assembled across these recordings is remarkable in its own right: Darian Sahanaja on keyboards and musical direction, Jeff Foskett on guitar and vocals, Probyn Gregory handling trumpet, French horn, and keyboards, Paul Mertens on woodwinds, and orchestral contributions from The Stockholm Strings ‘n’ Horns. These were not casual live shows.
The tracklist pulls from deep in Wilson’s catalog, touching ‘Friends’ and “Meant For You”, “Busy Doin’ Nothin'”, “Desert Drive”, and a version of “She’s Leaving Home” that carries real weight in this context. The selection reflects the kind of setlist curation that made Wilson’s late-career touring so affecting for audiences who saw it firsthand.
Oglio Entertainment recently released a revamped 25th anniversary edition of ‘Live at the Roxy Theatre’, originally from 2000, making this the second significant archival release from the Wilson vaults in short order. ‘On Tour 1999-2007’ is available at independent record stores worldwide on April 18, in strictly limited quantities.
HeyBobby! arrive fully formed. Gina Del Vecchio and Bobby Peek’s debut album, ‘The Unclouding of Otilla Vanilla’, is a 12-track rock opera that introduces a project with a clear vision, a complete narrative world, and the craft to back it up. It’s out now, and it demands to be heard as a whole.
The story follows Otilla Vanilla, a young singer drawn into the orbit of industry power broker Vivienne St. Clair, also known as “Big Shooter.” What begins as opportunity curdles into something more complicated, and the central question the album keeps asking is a sharp one: what will she sacrifice to be seen? It’s a story as old as rock ‘n’ roll and told here with real urgency and cinematic weight.
Each of the 12 tracks pairs with a corresponding visual episode, combining AI-driven imagery with traditional artistic design to extend the narrative beyond sound. HeyBobby! are clear that the music itself is built on real instruments, real voices, and real emotion. The technology serves the storytelling, not the other way around. Broken 8 called it “a seamless collision of traditional rock craftsmanship and cutting-edge visual storytelling,” and that reads accurately.
The Further described it as “a complete multimedia universe where rock and theater converge.” That’s the ambition, and ‘The Unclouding of Otilla Vanilla’ earns it. This is rock narrative pushed into genuinely new territory, episodic, immersive, and fully realized from the first track to the last.
Charlotte Sands has been building toward this moment since her 2018 debut, and ‘Satellite’, her sophomore album, is out now. The LA-based alt-pop force has done it entirely on her own terms, fully independent, over 300 million global streams deep, and with a sound that keeps expanding in every direction she points it.
Latest single “back to you” is a strong closer to the album’s pre-release run, opening as a slow, introspective burn before cracking open into a cathartic, emotionally charged chorus. Sands describes the track plainly: “It’s the loop you fall into when you ignore your intuition and mistake warning signs for butterflies.” That kind of self-aware lyrical precision has defined her writing, and it lands hard here. The song sits comfortably alongside recent singles “Afterlife”, “neckdeep”, “HUSH”, and “one eye open”, all of which appear on the album.
‘Satellite’ pushes her genre-blurring instincts further than anything she’s released before. The record feels personal and arena-sized at the same time, a combination that’s genuinely difficult to pull off and that Sands makes sound natural. She’s charted in the US Top 40 for more than 15 weeks and took home Best Breakthrough Album at the Heavy Music Awards. Those aren’t small numbers for an independent artist working without a major label behind her.
The live game has always been a core part of how Sands operates. She’s shared stages with My Chemical Romance, 5 Seconds of Summer, and YUNGBLUD, and headlined her own global run in 2024 behind ‘can we start over?’. In 2026, she joins Simple Plan’s European tour, a significant step in her international reach.
Joe Jackson has never been an artist who stays still, and ‘Hope And Fury’, his first studio album since 2019’s ‘Fool’, makes that abundantly clear from the opening notes. New single “Fabulous People” is out now, and it leans into the rhythmic, radio-forward side of Jackson’s range, built around a tight dance groove and the kind of melodic wit that’s been his calling card for nearly five decades.
The album was shaped across two cities and two studios. Jackson laid the groundwork at Michael Tibes’ Fuzz Factory studio in Berlin before heading to New York’s Reservoir Studios with co-producer Patrick Dillett. His core band came with him: bassist Graham Maby, guitarist Teddy Kumpel, drummer Doug Yowell, and Peruvian percussionist Paulo Stagnaro, whose Latin textures add a new dimension to the record. The result draws from across Jackson’s catalog, landing somewhere between ‘Fool’, ‘Laughter and Lust’ (1991), and ‘Night and Day’ (1982).
The first single, “Welcome to Burning-By-Sea”, sketched a fictional English seaside town, part Brighton, part Portsmouth, as a sharp-eyed microcosm of modern Britain. “Fabulous People” shifts the mood without losing the sharpness. Together, the two tracks map out an album with real range and something genuine to say.
‘Hope And Fury’ is out now on earMUSIC, available on digisleeve CD and 180g gatefold vinyl. To support it, Jackson and his band are heading out on a massive world tour covering 80 shows across 14 countries, starting in North America in May and moving into Europe in September through December.
This is a serious touring commitment from an artist who clearly has no interest in coasting, and the setlists across a catalog this deep will be worth the ticket price alone.
North America Tour Dates:
May 11, Poughkeepsie, NY, Bardavon 1869 Opera House
Manchester Orchestra have spent over two decades building one of the most emotionally demanding catalogs in rock, and ‘Union Chapel, London, England’ finds them doing something genuinely unexpected with it. The 21-track live album, out now via Loma Vista Recordings, was recorded during a sold-out three-night residency at London’s historic Union Chapel in fall 2023, and it reframes the band’s music entirely, stripping the songs back to voice, strings, and the resonance of gothic chapel walls.
What Andy Hull and Robert McDowell have created here is liturgical in the truest sense. Hull’s vocals, always the band’s most powerful instrument, have nowhere to hide in this setting, and he doesn’t try. The rendition of “The Grocery” alone, pulled from 2017’s ‘A Black Mile To The Surface’, is a breathtaking piece of work, a vocal performance Pitchfork-praised material reborn in a completely new context. Paste got it right: “Manchester Orchestra’s dynamism is made for echoing concert halls.”
Hull reflects on London’s place in the band’s history with real feeling: “The town has become a kind of canon in our lives. A way to compare past with present.” The residency drew from across their entire catalog, touching ‘Mean Everything to Nothing’ (2009), ‘The Million Masks of God’ (2021), and ‘The Valley of Vision’ (2023). The result is a rare document of a band in genuine dialogue with their own past.
The album is available on 2LP vinyl in translucent Sea Blue (retail) or opaque Silver (artist store and tour), and in 2xCD format with an 8-page roll-fold booklet. Hull took the material on a solo US tour this spring, with multiple dates selling out, including both Chicago nights at Old Town School of Folk Music, New York’s Le Poisson Rouge, and Boston’s City Winery.
Tracklist:
Intro (Union Chapel, London, England)
I Know How To Speak (Union Chapel, London, England)
The Grocery (Union Chapel, London, England)
The Maze (Union Chapel, London, England)
The Gold (Union Chapel, London, England)
Deer (Union Chapel, London, England)
Angel of Death (Union Chapel, London, England)
I Can Barely Breathe (Union Chapel, London, England)
Capital Karma (Union Chapel, London, England)
The Way (Union Chapel, London, England)
The River (Union Chapel, London, England)
Telepath (Union Chapel, London, England)
Simple Math (Union Chapel, London, England)
I Can Feel A Hot One (Union Chapel, London, England)
Some songs find their moment years after they’re written. “See Me Now” first appeared on The Kooks’ 2014 album ‘Listen’, spent a decade as a cherished deep cut, and then something shifted. A viral groundswell, a new generation of listeners, and a sold-out O2 Arena show in London turned it into the emotional centerpiece of the band’s biggest-ever UK headline tour. Now the live recording from that night is out, and it’s the version the song always deserved.
The performance is staggering in its quiet weight. Luke Pritchard sat alone at the piano, surrounded by tens of thousands of phone lights, singing to the father he lost when he was three years old. “Would you be proud?” The O2 crowd held that question with him. Pritchard has spoken openly about what unlocked the song’s new meaning: home tapes his mother delivered, footage he’d never seen, his father teaching a three-year-old Luke to use a microphone and pose like a rock star. “It was like a time capsule experience,” he says.
The accompanying music video, directed by Julien Temple (The Filth and the Fury, The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle), weaves that home footage together with clips from the original 2014 video and the O2 performance. Three stages of Luke’s life, one continuous story. Temple said he was “keen to work with Luke and bring his deeply moving relationship with his father to life.” The result is devastating in the best possible way.
The release lands during a strong stretch for the band. Their seventh album, ‘Never/Know’, released in May 2025, hit number 5 on the UK Albums Chart, their highest position since 2008, with NME calling it “The new era of The Kooks.” A new album is already in progress with producer Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers), with Pritchard describing it as leaning toward a “psychedelic rock and roll record.”
The Kooks also have a series of major outdoor summer shows lined up to mark the 20th anniversary of their debut album ‘Inside In/Inside Out’, including Delamere Forest, Scarborough’s Open Air Theatre, Isle of Wight Festival, and The Piece Hall in Halifax.
AIR have never released a live album. After more than 25 years, that changes on April 18th, and they’ve chosen Record Store Day to make it happen. ‘Moon Safari, The Athens Concert’ is a limited-edition vinyl exclusive, recorded during the band’s Moon Safari Anniversary tour and pressed for independent record stores worldwide only.
The setting alone makes this release remarkable. Recorded on a warm night in Athens beneath the Acropolis, the duo performed inside one of the world’s oldest and most acoustically distinct theaters. The analog warmth AIR built their reputation on collides with that ancient architecture in ways a studio recording simply can’t replicate. It’s a genuinely rare combination.
The performance moves through the full ‘Moon Safari’ tracklist, from “La Femme d’Argent” to “Le Voyage de Penelope”, with new arrangements woven throughout. This isn’t a straight reproduction of the original album. AIR reimagined the material for the space and the moment, and the recordings capture that in full.
The Moon Safari Anniversary tour ran across 2024 and 2025, bringing the duo’s landmark debut back to stages around the world to a response that confirmed just how deeply that record has held up. ‘Moon Safari, The Athens Concert’ is the document that tour deserved.
It’s available April 18th, 2026, at indie record stores worldwide. Limited quantities. No second pressing has been announced.
Stephen Pearcy is moving on multiple fronts at once, and none of them are slowing down. The voice of Ratt has launched “The Undercover Tour” for 2026, with several dates featuring performances alongside guitarist Warren DeMartini under their Pearcy/DeMartini banner. These two have been making noise together for decades, and their chemistry on stage remains the real thing.
The tour runs through the summer, hitting venues across California, Iowa, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Florida. Pearcy is also offering post-show VIP Meet N Greet packages at each stop, with signings, photos, and exclusive memorabilia. Tickets are limited, so early purchase matters.
While the tour builds, Pearcy is deep in the studio recording his sixth solo album, due later this year and stacked with guest appearances. Fans who want inside access can follow along on his Patreon, where he’s documenting studio sessions and road life in real time. “This is real life, Rock & Roll, and Raw access,” he says. “It’s where the real story lives.”
The momentum is already there. Pearcy’s recent appearance on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others Podcast racked up 600,000 views across four clips since debuting in January, making it the fastest-rising release on the platform to date. DeMartini was also recently honored at the Metal Hall of Fame as a Sunset Strip Inductee, with Pearcy on hand to salute his longtime bandmate.
Pearcy at his best is a reminder of exactly how that era of hard rock sounded when it was firing on all cylinders, and “The Undercover Tour” delivers that live.
Twelve albums in, Ben Reel hasn’t lost a step. ‘Spirit’s Not Broken’, out now via Dutch label Mars Music Group, is the latest chapter from one of Ireland’s most tireless and underrated voices, and it hits with the kind of range and conviction that only comes from 35-plus years of doing this for real.
Focus track “Better Be Better” opens the conversation with pounding drums, big guitars, and a raw emotional core lifted straight from the best of 1960s rock. The story is a desperate plea inside a crumbling relationship, “It better be better than the year before or I’m walking out that door,” and the nod to The Beatles is unmistakable. It’s a strong, immediate song that earns every second of its intensity.
The album moves through raw rock and into soulful, R&B-infused territory, drawing comparisons to Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Van Morrison, and Sting. Reel has always worked in that tradition without being beholden to it, and ‘Spirit’s Not Broken’ finds him at his most focused. His message is direct: in a world full of noise and conflict, love and human connection are what hold. It doesn’t feel like a slogan when the music backs it up this completely.
