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Fronted by the fierce rockmommy Chrissie Hynde, The Pretenders are one of the most iconic bands in history. Rockmommy ranks their ten best songs.

The post My Top 10 Favorite Songs by The Pretenders, Ranked appeared first on Rockmommy.com.

It’s been two years since Oslo’s The Northern Belle put out an album — 2024’s Bats in the Attic — and the follow-up, Even Cowgirls Get Sad, arrives August 21. For this latest release, Andreassen brought together some talented friends from across the Norwegian Americana community. The music is easy-going, anchored by the crystalline voice […]

Westside Cowboy have announced that they will be playing their biggest ever headline shows in early 2027.

The band may be about to hit the road for a tour across Europe and the UK next month, but they are already putting in the groundwork for 2027 being even bigger with this trio of appearances.

Here is where they will be playing:

MARCH 2027

23 – GLASGOW Barrowland Ballroom
24 – MANCHESTER Victoria Warehouse
25 – LONDON Brixton Academy

Tickets will be on general sale from September 10.

The announcement comes off the back of the band’s debut album ‘It Goes On’ dropping last month.

Westside Cowboy had this to say about the record:

“Put simply, we wanted to make an album for our younger selves, one that reminds us of all the bodies of work that made us fall in love with music. We wanted the music to be instant, concise, and honest to us as people today. There will be plenty of time in the future for the sprawling triple album with horns and string sections but for now, it’s young music made by some young(ish) people. We want to make songs that are lean and imperfect. We’re really proud of it and we hope that you enjoy it.”

And here is ‘Pin Up Boys’ which can be found on it:

And if you’re lucky, this is where you can check out the band this year before next year’s massive shows:

OCTOBER

24 – DUBLIN Whelan’s, Dublin
28 – NIJMEGEN Doornroosje
29 – AMSTERDAM Paradiso THT
30 – COLOGNE Helios37

NOVEMBER

01 – AARHUS Voxhall
02 – OSLO John Dee
03 – STOCKHOLM Debaser
05 – COPENHAGEN Lille Vega
06 – BERLIN Lido
07 – PRAGUE Bike Jesus
09 – MILAN Arci Bellezza
10 – ZURICH Exil
12 – BRUSSELS Botanique (Museum)
13 – PARIS Petit Bain
14 – LILLE Aeronef
24 – GLASGOW St Lukes
25 – NEWCASTLE NUSU
26 – SHEFFIELD Crookes Social Club
27 – LEEDS Irish Centre
29 – BIRMINGHAM XOYO
30 – SOUTHAMPTON 1865

DECEMBER

01 – BIRMINGHAM Chalk, Brighton
02 – LONDON O2 Forum Kentish Town
04 – BRISTOL Electric Bristol
05 – MANCHESTER Albert Hall

The post Westside Cowboy Announce 2027 UK Headline Shows appeared first on Rock Sound.

Famously, in August 2000, Bon Jovi were the last band to play the ‘old’ Wembley Stadium, the one which hosted Live Aid, the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final, and every global superstar from Bruce Springsteen to Madonna in the 1980s. But when Jon Bon Jovi returned to England’s national stadium in the summer of 2019, it seemed highly likely that the next much-loved institution soon set to crumble into dust would be his band. That night, the New Jersey hard rockers didn’t sound great at all, the problem, sad to say, very obviously being their frontman’s voice. And although it clearly stung when I told him so to his face five years later, the superstar singer took the criticism with commendable good grace.

“Yes, it wasn’t like it was in 2000 or 1995,” he admitted. “Or any of the other times I played in that building. I knew that. I won’t argue with you.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with,” he said, looking genuinely upset. “Imagine knowing it’s not working right, and you can’t figure out why. It was tough… It was fucking tough.”

Tonight though, that gleaming million-dollar smile is back on Jon Bon Jovi’s face, and it’d take a heart of stone not to feel pleased for the man. Not least when, in an acknowledgement of the fans who stood loyally behind him while he recovered from major vocal cord surgery in 2022, his band open the first of their three sold-out shows back at the national stadium with a powerful cover of Lennon and McCartney’s With a Little Help From My Friends.

By his own admission, Jon Bon Jovi is feeling “caffeinated” tonight, and with his post-op vocals largely sounding strong and true – at least from our vantage point in block 201, where absolutely no-one is complaining – he has the demeanour of a man who’s finally shifted a huge weight from his shoulders.

At one point, he tells the 90,000-strong crowd he’s going to take us back to 1986 song-wise, and jokes that his “pants are a little tighter” than then. But if he wanted to guarantee a home run tonight, JBJ could have absolutely stacked his band’s setlist on their first stadium run in seven years with selections from Slippery When Wet and New Jersey, and to his credit, he doesn’t take that easy option. Granted there are seven songs from that era written in black type on the 22-song setlist at his feet, but the multi-generational crowd also get songs from five of the ten albums the band have released this century. And if it’s true that, say, Legendary isn’t met with the same whoops of joy as You Give Love A Bad Name, then neither is it a cue for thousands to hit the bars.

If tonight isn’t peak Bon Jovi, it’s still a brilliantly staged, slickly produced, state-of-the-art stadium rock show, delivered by a band in full control. It’s hard not to escape the feeling that Jon Bon Jovi needed this tour, that he felt that he had something to prove tonight, and was seeking some personal validation and redemption. Well, he got it, and when 90,000 voices help him over the finish line on a slightly shaky Always, it’s clearly an emotional moment for the man. Don’t imagine that all superstar rockers are happy to dial in mediocre performances as they hit the twilight of their career: this still means something to Jon Bon Jovi, and tonight, it’s only the demons of the past which feel irrelevant.

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“Everything will be fine,” Raygun Busch tells us at the end of Who Loves the Sun. “The sun will continue to shine.” It is the kind of reassurance we hear from the institutions that gaslight us: a phrase uttered as cities flood, the wages stagnate, the endless feed refreshes, and another disaster slides beneath our thumb. Chat Pile‘s third full-length is about that practiced numbness—the small acts of compliance and self-erasure that make a slow-motion apocalypse feel like ordinary life. By the time the record closes, Raygun’s platitudes illustrate a world where the sun will continue to shine, but how much of us—how much of our personhood—will remain to see it?

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Chat Pile have never sounded more confident in their sludge-lined brand of noise rock than here, simultaneously their mellowest, moodiest, most vitriolic, and most vicious. Where Cool World explicitly confronted the more overt state-sponsored and interpersonal violence, Who Loves the Sun looks at the subtler harm inflicted by the modern quotidian. It also benefits from immediately following In the Earth Again, the band’s collaboration with Hayden Pedigo, whose fingerpicking style has left an impression on L. Manhole’s playing. More uneasy melodic textures now interrupt the riffs that slam like Godzilla raiding the Rust Belt.

Clanging anvil-strike chords land across muscular blacksmith rhythms, but the band has become more deliberate about when to swing the hammer. Stin’s filthy, Korn-esque bass tone and Cap’n Ron’s tight, unshowy pocket provide the record with a poured concrete foundation even at its most disorienting turns. Chord modulations and tonal shifts on “Shrine” evoke the dissociation many of us rely on to survive, while choruses like the one on “Intruder” linger like a parasite after the record ends. Raygun’s vocals contort between unhinged high screams, wounded wails, and dissociated spoken repetition in his signature monotone drawl. This is Chat Pile’s most melodically legible songwriting to date, but it carries enough sludge to defy any accusations of mainstreaming.

Climate collapse, degraded labor, and digital submission all populate the same poisoned thematic environment. On opener “Creature,” cities disappear under water, ash, and dust. “Deep Blue” finds landfills creeping into homes as we wade further into a blue-light sea of screens to drown. “PEN I S MALL” makes the soul-crushing indignity of hourly labor painfully specific, its grubby folk storytelling featuring a cast of sketchballs and cretins getting high and jerking off at work matches its dissonant, step-by-step trudge. On Who Loves the Sun, the apocalypse is not a mushroom cloud or a plague but ten thousand tiny cuts delivered on an Amazon Prime schedule.

A recurring vocabulary of skulls, shrines, ghosts, and intruders gives the record a haunted internal logic without forcing it into concept-album territory. The skull speaks on “Creature,” becomes a teacher in the collapsed trust and empty ritual of “Shrine,” then finally enters the feed on “Influence.” 

It’s on that track that Chat Pile’s ability to make songs sound like their lyrical themes is sharpest. Over combustion-engine-motivated grooves that feel mechanical and toxic-smelling, Raygun describes scrolling past screaming and raising the threshold for what can still disturb us. His “rough beast replies” nods to W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” but the monster at the heart of Who Loves the Sun is no longer slouching toward some distant birth. It is already here, responding to and manipulating us in a horrific feedback loop: the more horror we consume and discard, the more inhuman the system serving it back becomes.

Beyond the screen, these themes find intimate means of expression on tracks like “Family Funeral,” a contemporary sludgy retelling of Medea. The poisoned gown and coronet, the dying bride and father, the murdered sons, and the chariot of the sun make this less a literary Easter egg hunt than an ancient story shown, again, to be timeless. “And though it hurts me / I needed to hurt you” distills one of the Who Loves the Sun’s central cycles: hurt answering hurt, passed down to people who had no part in causing it.

When “October All the Time” promises that everything will be fine, its indie-rock moodiness offers one final mask rather than relief. The unholy signs and shrines remain lodged in the listener’s mind. A dog barks, the sun keeps shining, and the world continues pretending it is not ending. Or it finally gives up caring.

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Who Loves the Sun is available now via The Flenser.

Thirty years have passed since Az éj szeme, one of the defining albums of NEVERGREEN’s career, was released in 1996. The band is celebrating the anniversary of this heavy, dark-hued record with a newly remastered edition. The album returns on September 11 as a red-and-black marbled LP and a digipak CD, with the latter also […]

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Posted on September 7th 2026, 1:33pm

The post The Alternative Number Ones: Sugar Ray’s “Fly” appeared first on Stereogum.

BETTER NOISE MUSIC is pleased to welcome the ever-enigmatic DEATH VALLEY DREAMS to the label’s roster. The band serves up a cocktail of brooding rock, atmospheric vibes, neo-new wave synths, and gloomy guitars. Indeed, Death Valley Dreams are a master class in gloriously melancholic music — they provide the soundtrack for nyctophiles. Siphoning influence from […]

Danish death/metallic hardcore practitioners LIFESICK today unleash their new stand alone single, Hard To Kill, a ceaselessly riotous auditory torrent that embodies the band’s celebrated ferocity. Issues the band, “Hard To Kill blends a groovy death metal-inspired riff with fast hardcore energy before collapsing into a series of crushing breakdowns, closing with the statement Hard […]