Darryl Kissick "Character Actor"
Best known as a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist in Foxwarren, Darryl Kissick has long been drawn to music that rewards patience and close listening. While his songwriting has helped shape Foxwarren’s distinctive blend of folk, psychedelia, and experimental pop, his latest solo work reveals a more meditative side.
Character Actor was born from a convergence of personal recovery and collective uncertainty. As Kissick watched Saskatchewan skies fill with smoke from northern wildfires, witnessed increasingly chaotic weather, and grappled with the political and technological forces reshaping daily life, a quiet sense of existential dread settled in. Rather than respond with louder music, he found himself drawn toward stillness.
“While feeling overwhelmed by outside forces,” Kissick explains, “I felt compelled to make something sparse and quiet.” Throughout Character Actor, peaceful ambient passages are occasionally interrupted by harsher textures, mirroring the way moments of calm are so often disrupted by the world beyond our control.
The album’s creation was also shaped by an unexpected physical setback. After injuring himself in a hockey accident, Kissick spent six weeks confined to bed recovering from surgery. Sleep-deprived and in constant pain, music initially felt impossible. As his wife brought his recording equipment downstairs so he could work from home, something unexpected emerged: instrumental compositions began flowing naturally. “Perhaps I lacked the capacity to worry about words and melodies,” he reflects. “Whatever the case, working on this album helped bring me calm and gave me a sense of purpose.”
The resulting collection trades lyrics for atmosphere, unfolding through ambient textures, tape-warped soundscapes, fluttering acoustic guitars, and quietly cinematic arrangements. There are echoes of experimental folk, minimalist composition, and classic ambient music.
Following his recovery and touring with Foxwarren, Kissick completed the record with the help of those closest to him. His brother and Foxwarren bandmate Avery Kissick contributed drums and arrangement ideas, while Saskatchewan musicians Jakob Bjornson added double bass and Ian Cameron contributed pedal steel. The album’s striking cover artwork, created by his sister Emily Hamilton, depicts a skull pasted onto a beautiful sky—a fitting visual metaphor for the existential anxiety that inspired these recordings.
In a world that often feels impossibly loud, Character Actor offers something increasingly rare: space to pause, listen closely, and find beauty amid uncertainty.
A Certain Ratio "Tumba Rumba (EM)"
From Side-line: “A Certain Ratio mark two anniversaries in 2026: 45 years since recording “Sextet” at Revolution Studios in Cheadle Hulme, Stockport, and 40 years since the release of “Force”. “The Joy of Sextet” is a nine-track companion to the 1982 album, newly mixed by Meecham from the original 1981 two-inch multitrack tapes and featuring “Tumba Rumba”, “Knife Slits Water”, “Lucinda”, “Crystal”, “Gum”, “Day One”, “Below the Canal” and “Waterline”. The second companion, “Force Majeure”, reworks the 1986 album “Force” and adds previously unreleased versions produced by the band with the late Stuart James, including the title track “Force” that was left off the original. Both arrive on 28 August 2026 on limited coloured vinyl – “The Joy of Curacao” for “The Joy of Sextet” and “Unforced Purple” for “Force Majeure” – plus CD and digital formats. Side-Line reported on the two companion albums and their announcement in an earlier article, and the band previously worked with Meecham on his reworking of “Constant Curve” in 2023.
A Certain Ratio "Force Majeure"
A Certain Ratio (ACR) revisit one of their most influential works, Force, with the new, accompanying companion album Force Majeure, out via Mute.
Offering a fresh perspective on ACR’s enduring legacy, it celebrates the 40th anniversary since its release. Force Majeure is a deep dive, featuring unreleased original versions of tracks from the album, which differs from the 1986 release, including the title track “Force,” which never appeared on the original album.
Dos Santos "Es Amor"
One night, a traveling melody knocked at the door of singer and multi-instrumentalist Alex E. Chávez—a visitor, dressed in garb not quite placeable, with a face blurred, though vaguely familiar, like a friend long unseen. “It stuck with me, this melody. Though I didn’t then know why,” Chávez said. Singing it in near darkness while plucking out chords on his nylon-string guitar, he felt he’d met something bigger than himself—mysterious, powerful, embracing.
Fast-forward a few weeks to an archive in sweltering Texas heat: classic albums in bins, questions on the mind, artistic promise in the air. A record cut in the 1980s was spinning on deck—a record, as it happens, made by Chávez’s own father. “And there it was,” Chávez said. “That very same melody, the one that came knocking at my door. It was the voice of my father in his twenties.”
Equal parts dream and memory, spirit echo and migration story, that melody forms part of the sonic texture of Chicago quintet Dos Santos’s propulsive new album, Es Amor. (The title song, “Es Amor,” is a rearrangement of the song by Chávez’s father, “El Amor.”) So too does that melody’s journey set up the album’s core message, delivered with ánimo and style: love, in all its shades and surprise appearances, remains the most spirited, lasting response to a world marred by hate. Love, in all its ways, remains.
Sonically, Dos Santos’s Es Amor, the band’s fourth full-length release (now on “Otherly Love” records), is a groove haven, a thrumming balm for trying days. Tight, intricate drums build syncopations to set bodies in motion, their interlocking rhythms creating friction, heat. Spectral, clarion vocals layer into thick harmonies, hanging in the air like knowing sighs. Warbling synths and electric guitars and spoken-word poems and elliptical choruses link arms and sway, all moving together to evoke a definitively Américan conversation. Listening to it all feels like arriving at a huge downtown dancefloor in the early hours of the morning, a convening at once a limpia (cleanse) and its own revolution.
“We wanted to make a record that sounds like us live—raw, intense,” Chávez said. Produced by Grammy Award–winner Beto Martinez, brought to life by a quintet that knows no bounds—Jaime Garza, Nathan Karagianis, Peter “Maestro” Vale, Daniel Villarreal, and Chávez—the album makes good on that intention, the sound itself a performance of migration, gathering, and love.
Unexpected resonances abound across its ten crystalline tracks: son jarocho and cumbia rub elbows with psychedelic rock, contemporary jazz, and Afro-Cuban percussion; familiar bass lines and chord strums and lyrical croons surprise when they appear, made fresh and gleaming by creative arrangements and production. At every turn, Dos Santos’s sounds and sentiments align, creating peaks and valleys that beg to be responded to with hips, feet, hands, hearts.
“Making this album together, each of us bringing our own stories and experiences, I couldn’t help but think of my father, of his melody, of everyone like him, then and now,” Chávez said. “Of people, immigrants, writing and singing love songs in the most brutal of circumstances, amidst power working to deny them their very humanity.” In this moment in which fear feels like an unwanted lingua franca—in which cruel, violent raids on cities and more have broken families and spirits, repressed dissent, surveilled communication, and taken lives—songs like these remind us all of ourselves and each other, of beauty and audacity and compassion and more. They remind us of our linked stories and places and movements—of those flatlands and mountains, those rivers and oceans, those family homes and tight city quarters. They remind us, in the face of overwhelming odds, of the urgency of renewed connection, and of what that feeling can sound like.
So, blast this album loud, and let it move you into bliss. Feel its vibrations in your bones, and know, as you do: it’s love, it’s love.