Merge

Destroyer conceived of Have We Met as a Y2K album. Dan Bejar assigned producer and bandmate John Collins the role of layering synth and rhythm sections over demos with the period-specific Björk, Air, and Massive Attack in mind, but he soon realized the so

Suddenly is the most surprising and unpredictable Caribou album to date. Though it retains the trademark Caribou warmth and technicolor, this album is littered with swerves and left turns. Songs drop out and morph into something else entirely just as they

Destroyer: City Of Daughters LP

Oyster Cuts, the Merge Records debut of Quivers, finds the Melbourne, Australia–based outfit awash in the kind of emotions people tend to fear losing themselves in. Finding love after grief, the outsized guitar pop of Quivers gleams like the surface of an

Originally released in October 2000, "The Coroner's Gambit" finds John Darnielle between physical and sonic spaces, five of its sixteen songs recorded in Simon Joyner's Nebraska studio, five more at home in Colo, Iowa, and the rest in Ames. "The Coroner's

Pull the Rope by Ibibio Sound Machine casts the Eno Williams and Max Grunhard-led outfit in a new light. The hope, joy, and sexiness of their music remain, but, further honing the edge of their acclaimed 2022 album Electricity, the connection they aim to

What an enormous room is not only the title of the new album by Torres, it is an incantation, a phrase Mackenzie Scott has had in her head now for several years, for as long as some of the songs found here. What an enormous room is an entirely new look at

Based in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, London, and Bristol, the Irish intersectional feminist five-piece M(h)aol have gained a reputation for their engaging and invigorating live shows. The group’s 2023 album Attachment Styles is about social connection, queerne

The Mountain Goats’ catalog is thick with recurring characters—Jenny, who originally appears in the All Hail West Texas track bearing her name, as well as in “Straight Six” from Jam Eater Blues and Transcendental Youth side two jam “Night Light,” is one o

"Foreign Land" is the opening track on Teenage Fanclub's 2023 studio album, Nothing Lasts Forever. That track – and the rest of this beautifully rich and melodic album – is the sound of a season's end, of the last warm days of the year while nights begin

The Clientele's "I Am Not There Anymore" regularly evokes what singer-guitarist Alasdair MacLean calls "the feeling of not being real". Recording for the album began in 2019 and continued piecemeal until 2022 - in part because of the pandemic, but also be

Every Day Like the Last: Collected Singles 2019–2023, is a physical home for three new tracks and previously released music from Wye Oak, charting the past four years of the band’s lives. Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack’s musical partnership bloomed in the unc

"All Hail West Texas" was originally released as a free-standing compact disc on the late, lamented Emperor Jones label. The songs were originally transferred from the cassettes onto which they were recorded to 1/4" reels at Tiny Telephone by Alex Newport

The New Pornographers have proven themselves one of the most excellent bands in indie rock. They've constantly offered new sonic surprises with every album, and Continue as a Guest is their greatest leap to date. The group's first album for Merge establis

Coloured vinyl repress of Polvo's 2009 album "In Prism". There is not a thing on "In Prism" that Polvo weren't doing better than before: the sidewinder guitars and the mighty roar and the moody atmospheres and the psychedelic explosiveness; the writing, t

Reason in Decline, Archers of Loaf's first studio album since the 1998 release of White Trash Heroes, is no nostalgic, low-impact reboot. When they emerged from North Carolina's '90s indie-punk incubator, the Archers' hurtling, sly, gloriously dissonant r

Like every record Superchunk has made over the last thirty-some years, Wild Loneliness is unskippably excellent and infectious. It's a blend of stripped-down and lush, electric and acoustic, highs and lows. On Wild Loneliness you'll hear echoes of Come Pi

Merge Records reissues Superchunk's long-out-of-print 2001 studio album Here's to Shutting Up as a vinyl LP + CD-set to commemorate its 20th anniversary. In addition to the original album on vinyl is Bestial Warning, a bonus CD of 13 previously unreleased

Spoon's classic "Gimme Fiction" pressed onto limited red and white vinyl. Recorded throughout 2004 at Jim Eno's Public Hifi studio in Austin with the production help of Mike McCarthy (...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead), "Gimme Fiction", Spoon'

In First Cow, Kelly Reichardt once again trains her perceptive and patient eye on the Pacific Northwest, this time evoking an authentically hardscrabble early nineteenth century way of life. A taciturn loner and skilled cook (John Magaro) has traveled wes

Written immediately in the period following Katie Crutchfield aka Waxahatchee's decision to get sober, Saint Cloud is an unflinching self-examination. This raw, exposed narrative terrain is aided by a shift in sonic arrangements as well. While her last tw