Seahaven "Seahaven"
Sometimes, inspiration just flows. That’s exactly what happened when Kyle Soto began writing what would become Seahaven’s self-titled fourth album. Once he made the first step with the song “Wedding Bells”, everything just sort of tumbled out of him. That was in around April of 2025, and over the next four or five months the vocalist/guitarist would sit in his home studio space and “churn out a song nose to tail in a night” until he’d made a base outline of the record.
While reasserting, redefining and reintroducing the identity of a band is something that self-titled albums often do, that wasn’t Seahaven’s express intentions with this one. Rather, the ideas that the band had had for a title never quite clicked, so they decided to lean into what it meant to not have one.
“Sonically, this album takes most of the elements from our previous releases and rolls them into one,” says Soto. “I feel like it accurately represents our sound, so it’s fitting to have it serve as a statement that says ‘This is the sound of the band.’ For a minute there, I wasn’t sure if we were going to roll with it, but then we decided to just own it. A lot of bands have self-titled albums that are hopefully their defining record—and hopefully for us that’s this one.”
Kronstad 23 "Dødehavet"
Kronstad 23 return with Dødehavet, the Norwegian quartet’s third album and first release on Batov Records. Continuing their instinctive, analogue-led approach, the record sits between cinematic jazz and psychedelic rock, threaded with Scandinavian folk and wider global influences. Recorded live to tape with minimal preparation and no modern studio intervention, Dødehavet captures a band working on feel, interaction and momentum rather than polish or precision.
Recorded with all four core musicians playing together in the same room, Dødehavet avoids sterile production in favour of a raw, direct sound. Tracks typically begin with a simple idea — a bassline, melody or chord sequence — before being allowed to unfold naturally through collective playing. Most pieces were captured in one or two takes using a 50-year-old mixing console and tape recorder, deliberately resisting contemporary studio techniques to preserve a timeless, lived-in character.
Weird Nightmare "Hoopla"
On the new studio album Hoopla—co-produced with Spoon’s Jim Eno and recorded at Seth Manchester’s Machines with Magnets— singer and guitarist Alex Edkins expands Weird Nightmare’s dimensions even further. Gilded onto the direct emotions of his straightforward songwriting, new musical textures such as piano, bells, and castanets give these well-wrought tunes a shiny luster. It’s like a beloved indie director leveling up to their first studio feature. Hoopla represents a huge leap forward in his sonic palette and emotional vulnerability.
At its heart, this album is an optimistic, shining light in our strange time. Through Weird Nightmare, Edkins wants you to know that he is still in love with the world, and he invites the listeners of Hoopla to feel the same. Take this chance to seize a glimmer of widescreen pop magic in our used-up old world. You deserve it.
Bolbec "Fotu Félin"
The Bolbec duo return with their sophomore album Foutu Félin, a richly cinematic collection of instrumental music that unfolds like an imaginary soundtrack, melodic, tactile and transportive. The record is inspired as much by the cut-and-paste production techniques of Portishead and the Beastie Boys as by the legendary composers of le cinéma français and il cinema italiano.
Following directly from their debut Victime De L’aube, Foutu Félin feels like a continuation rather than a departure, a second reel instead of a reset. Axel Concato and Barth Corbelet each wrote five pieces independently, deliberately exploring as instinctively and introspectively as possible before reshaping their embryonic ideas together into bigger, brighter compositions, uncovering hidden humor along the way.
Ultimately, Foutu Félin confirms Bolbec’s identity. Music that feels like the beginning of a story. Less theatre, more cinema. Close your eyes, the film is already rolling.