June 2026 (part 2)

It's time to again share some thoughts about some cool songs I listened to recently. Below is the followup to the first part of our overview of our June 2026 playlist, featuring nine blurbs about nine cool songs, new and old. 

Jonny Nash & Tomo Katsurada - “Sunshower Rite”
I’ve really been enjoying At The Emerald Pool, a collaborative album between frequent Horse Combinations appearer Jonny Nash and former Kikagaku Moyo frontperson Tomo Katsurada. Warm, dusky instrumentals share space with more vocal forward tracks, like the meditative single “Sunshower Rite.”

John Galm - “bonfire”
This new John Galm record, peace in the valley, is a fascinating, beautiful piece of work that foregrounds the ambient textures that occasionally punctuated his excellent last record, River of Blood. I’m told that most, if not all of these sounds were created by an acoustic guitar, which is an incredible thing to behold.

June 2026 (part 1)

I'm back and never more behind schedule, but the grind continues and the cool songs don't stop. Here are some thoughts on ten cool songs I heard in June.

Hell Trash - “I Know You’re Wrong”
Friends of the blog Hell Trash return, channelling the spirit of We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes-era Death Cab For Cutie to meditate on personal and global despair and then play an awesome guitar solo.

Anysia Kym & Tony Seltzer - “To Death (Remix) (ft. 454)”
I’m absolutely loving the collection of reworks of Anysia Kym’s 2025 LP Purity. One of my favorite tracks on there is a remix of album opener “To Death,” which adds a killer guest verse from weirdo rapper 454.

May 2026 (part 2)

We have once again returned from the blurb mines, face dirtied and hair tousled, to offer up some thoughts on a few recent and not so recent tracks that I listened to and loved back in May. Check out volume one of May writeups if you haven't done that already, otherwise we can get straight to it:

wishbone - “Spout”
An incredible heartwarmer, “Spout” opens with a total gut punch of a first line and doesn’t ease up from there. It’s a sincere, charming debut that has me expecting big things from these Chicagoans.



ear - “Ne Plus Ultra”
Call me Vincent van Gogh because I’m excited for more ear!

May 2026 (part 1)

We're back with more blurbs about some cool songs, new and old, that I listened to and enjoyed during the month of May!

Sega Bodega - “I Created The Universe So That Life Could Create a Language So Complex, Just To Say How Much I Love You”
Can’t really remember what convinced me to finally check out this Sega Bodega record from November, but the cinematic ambience that awaits is pretty excellent stuff once you get over their band name as well as the goofily romantic name of the record/title track. The sort of sweeping, just on the edge of saccharine atmospherics that made us all fall in love with Sigur Ros 25 years ago or whatever.

 

Krypton Tunes - “Limited Vision”
I was clicking around through some more recent releases from the crate digging gurus at Soul Jazz Records and came across Secret Superstar Sounds, which compiles fifteen tracks released in the late 1970s from a bunch of forgotten British bands that operated at the intersection of power pop and first wave punk. One of my favorite discoveries was this nervy polemic from Krypton Tunes, which reminds me of everyone from Wipers to Vampire Weekend to Talking Heads. It's so cool how there is literally infinite awesome music out there.

April 2026 (part 2)

It's been a few weeks since we last spoke so now there's a big ol backlog of songs for me to tell you about. Let's first wrap up April 2026 by discussing the nine songs not blurbed in our last post!

Josephine’s Next Million Miles - “Rug”
The new Josephine’s Next Million Miles record is so cool! Dense, strange production and cryptic lyrics delivered wistfully, I’m happy to announce I’ve found another “laptop twee” band to fixate on.

Yu Su - “One Place After Another (ft. Seefeel)”
Tons to love on the latest LP from Yu Su, especially this intergenerational collab between two official Horse Combination vibemasters. Six minutes of gauzy, ASMR’d out dream pop!

April 2026 (part 1)

After a quick detour to take stock of the best releases from first few months of 2026, we're back living in the present with a collection of cool songs I've listened to this month and added to our April 2026 playlist. See below for eight blurbs about eight new(ish) songs!

Pan-American - “Entrance to Afterlife”
A glitchy, expansive standout from Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane, a late-career highlight from one of the foundational members of the Kranky Records family and one of my favorite ambient releases of the year so far.

Avalon Emerson & The Charm - “Country Mouse”
Perennial Horse Combinations favorite Avalon Emerson’s Written into Changes has been in pretty frequent rotation in my home for the last month or two and I’m still finding new tracks to be thrilled by. Lately I’ve been all about “Country Mouse,” a propulsive banger buried deep in Side B.

Q1 2026 in review

Despite the continued erosion of the ethics, self-reliance, and grassroots community that drew me to independent music in the first place, there still managed to be a ton of great records released in the first few months of 2026. Here are some thoughts about fifteen of my favorites!

March 2026 (part 3)

Q1 2026 is wrapped up and we're ready to move on, but not before one last roundup of some cool songs, old and new, that I listened to in March. Parts one and two of our March posts are still available if you haven't already scoped those out, beyond that we'll just commence the blurbing:

Mammal Hands - “Window to Your World”
The opening track on the new album from UK instrumental trio Mammal Hands album is one of the cooler pieces of music I’ve heard all year. The slow build of the piano and sax lines backed by nonstop frenetic drumming, influenced more by techno than jazz, is intoxicating. The rest of the album doesn’t quite reach the heights of “Window to Your World” but is absolutely a worthwhile listen.

Sleater-Kinney - “Heart Attack”
Man I love Sleater-Kinney’s Call The Doctor, it's not something I revisit all the time but after seeing news of a new 30th anniversary remaster, I threw it on and was as engaged as ever. It’s definitely a favorite in their catalog for me, maybe second only to The Woods, with the closing track “Heart Attack” the single most impactful song they’ve ever recorded. 

March 2026 (part two)

Here's eight more blurbs about eight cool songs I heard this month, music from close friends and old French guys, jazz gurus and future pop art school freaks. Here's part one if you missed it, otherwise we'll get right down to it:

Del Paxton - “Another Heaven”
The three songs on Del Paxton’s new Dogeared EP, surprise released earlier this month as a split 12” with Chicago emo favs Retirement Party, are among the best work the band’s done in their thirteen years together. Featuring guest vocals from Ratboys’ Julia Steiner, the extended outro on the opening track “Another Heaven” knocked me out the first time I heard it (Dylan sent me an advance stream last year) and it still hits just as hard all these months later.

The Thinking Of The World Began Pounding In Our Ears The Moment We Hit Shore - “Walk Away”
A collaborative studio experiment helmed by ambient guy/Horse Combinations blurb getter Florian TM Zeisig, the self titled record from The Thinking Of The World Began Pounding In Our Ears The Moment We Hit Shore covers a lot of ground across 40 minutes, but most reductively sounds like if Dean Blunt tried to make a Broken Social Scene record. My favorite track on the album is the uncannily dreamy “Walk Away,” full of sparkling harp and wistful vocals from Róisín Berkeley and odd tape loops provided by Cal Fish.

March 2026 (part one)

It's me, I'm back and I'm here to tell you about nine cool songs. This time around they've all been released in the last few months, which isn't always the case but is sometimes. They're the first nine songs on the Horse Combinations March 2026 playlist, a work in progress until it's not March anymore, then it's done and it's time to get to work on April's. You get the idea, right? Here are some blurbs:

Okonski - “Easy”
The two Okonski LPs have been a go-to soundtrack for having people over for the last few years; it’s the right kind of vibey, smoky, late night jazz with enough texture and character to prevent it from fading fully into the background. The new one-off single “Easy” is a great addition to their catalog, sounding like a lost track from Galt MacDermot’s Shapes of Rhythm or something.

Pearly Drops - “Heaven”
I haven’t dug much into their other stuff but this new song from Finnish synth pop duo Pearly Drops is really good! [Guy who listens to too much TOPS voice] sort of getting a TOPS vibe.

February 2026 (part two)

It's time to dig into eight more songs, new and old, that I liked listening to last month and added to the official Horse Combinations February 2026 playlist. Check out part one if you haven't done so already, otherwise let's get blurbing:

Touch Girl Apple Blossom - “The Springtime Reminds Me Of…”
I was already on board with this band based on name alone, before I'd heard a note of their music. I’ve been spinning their solid EP from 2023 pretty regularly for the last month or two, after seeing their name pop up on some concert poster on Instagram or something. I was stoked to see this single drop recently, along with news of their debut LP coming soon on K Records. I’ve written frequently on here about the exciting wave of twee influenced gen z indie rockers, and with “The Springtime Reminds Me Of…”, Touch Girl Apple Blossom has cemented a spot on the official Horse Combinations pantheon of cool new bands.

Royal Trux - “Turn of the Century”
Despite having spent the last twenty years or whatever listening to basically anything Drag City records puts out, I’ve never gone very deep on Royal Trux. Their legacy and influence is undeniable but I never took the time to familiarize myself with their work. In an attempt to see what the fuss was about, I was listening to their acclaimed record Cats and Dogs and was mostly into what I was hearing, especially “Turn of the Century,” the album’s ragged 7 minute long centerpiece that appears to have perfected Jack White’s whole deal five years before the first White Stripes single. Is that a hack observation? Have we all had this discussion?

February 2026 (part one)

Every month I'm making a new playlist and adding a variety of cool new songs and cool old songs I listened to and then once every week or two I log onto my website and write 2-4 sentences about those songs. That's the Horse Combinations promise, baby! Here's what we've come up with so far for the February 2026 playlist, streaming exclusively on Tidal!

Barry Walker Jr. - “Peridot, Call Me”
Portland-based paleontologist Barry Walker Jr. moonlights as a pedal steel player with groups like Rose City Band, North Americans, and Mouth Painter. He’s also released a handful of really solid recordings under his own name, most recently January’s excellent Paleo Sol, a collection of earthy instrumental tracks that manage to stand out from the increasingly crowded ambient Americana scene.

Gia Margaret - “Everyone Around Me Dancing”
Gia Margaret’s Romantic Piano is one of my favorite albums of the decade. It’s a record I played endlessly after it's summer 2023 release and is something I revisit frequently when in need of a half hour or so of peace. Album opener “Hinoki Wood” has taken on a life of its own over the last few years as a sound on TikTok, used mostly as an easy aesthetic shorthand for all things carefully curated and self-consciously cozy. Being a middle aged indie rock fan, I’m used to latecomers embracing music I love in new, weird contexts, it’s fine, but when I’m scrolling Instagram reels and hear the first five seconds of a song that introduces a record that to me represents sort of the sort of peace and stillness that is in direct opposition to looking at my phone, it still feels a little uncanny. It’s the same irked feeling I get when I hear "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" or “Maps” in Walgreens, like this is too meaningful of art for me to be hearing while I’m just in here for a minute trying to buy chips. Anyways there’s a new Gia Margaret album coming and this is the first single from it and I think it’s really good.

January 2026 (part two)

We're back and blogger than ever! Let's take a look at some blurbs about ten more songs I listened to last month and liked and think you might like too.

Julianna Barwick & Mary Lattimore - “Stardust”
A standout from the overall extremely nice new collaborative record from Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore, two of the best ambient/new age/experimental etc. artists going.

Talking Heads - “Love Goes to a Building on Fire (CBS/Columbia Demo)”
I’ve always loved "Love → Building on Fire,” an early single that is often tacked on to the end of the first Talking Heads record. All this time I didn’t really know how to pronounce the arrow in the song title but I never would have guessed “goes to a” would have been it, Anyways this demo version is the first song released from a forthcoming triple CD boxset featuring a bunch of Talking Heads rarities that I’m gonna devour when it comes out next month.

January 2026 (part one)

Damn it's cold here in Chicago! Only thing cooler than the wind chill are these tunes!! Here are some thoughts on the first ten songs added to the Horse Combinations January 2026 playlist!!!

Yusef Lateef - “Semiocto”
It’s 9am in early January, the holidays are over and I’m walking the 10 minutes from the train station to my office making my brain feel crazy listening to Yusef Lateef’s Psychicemotus.

Jana Horn - “Go on, move your body”
I’m all in on the new Jana Horn record. I’ve been listening to this song repeatedly since it was first released back in November, hoping the rest of the album would live up to the expectations set by this spare, subtly noisy gem. Now that the full thing is here, I’m pleased to announce that it does and I will be listening to it a lot over the next few months (at least).

December 2025 (part 2)

Wow it's 2026! Before we start talking about all the cool songs to come in the new year, let's look back at the final ten tracks added to the Horse Combinations December 2025 playlist. Lots of reminiscing happening in various ways across these songs; there's stuff I loved when I was a kid, covers of some all-time classics, meditative piano jazz from one of the best guys to ever do it, etc. 

Lemuria - “Bugbear”
A couple times a year I will, in a fit of nostalgia, listen to basically every song Buffalo indie rock band Lemuria released between 2005 and 2009. A formative band for me in high school, Lemuria was the bridge between the far off, inaccessible world of A-list indie music I read about in blogs and magazines and the small, interconnected Western New York DIY scene. Rather than passively consuming art from musicians from my bedroom deep in a secondary market, hoping to catch touring acts who settled for a Buffalo gig when they couldn’t make a date in Cleveland or Pittsburgh work, I could see these bands play live in basements, record stores, and tiny bars, maybe even nervously talk to them at the merch table in between sets. You could also book them on shows yourself, pairing them up at house shows with your friends’ bands, maybe even worm your way into an internship for their record label. As an excitable 18 year old with a developing sense of taste and talent for sending emails but not much else, discovering DIY was a paradigm shifting moment for how I interacted with art for the rest of my life. Anyways “Bugbear” is an unbelievable song.

25 albums from 2025

2025 has drawn to a close and there are lots of cool songs to look back on with fondness despite the darkness, despair, and complacency overwhelming nearly every aspect of the independent music landscape. Let's focus on what's good and encouraging out there!

Below are some thoughts on 25 of my favorite releases of 2025. This is actually the second 2025 retrospective I've put together, the first of which can be read over at RIYL. In order to keep from repeating myself, any records included on that list were not named here, but other than that anything goes! Let's get into it.

December 2025 (Part 1)

Hope you're having a nice holiday season! We've slowly been getting into the spirit, mostly drinking eggnoggy cocktails watching an endless stream of Lifetime/Hallmark Channel style holiday romcom clones and digging up rips of old VHS recordings of various Christmas specials people have uploaded to Youtube. 

It's also year end list season, and though the online music writing landscape has maybe never been bleaker, this time of year remains a great opportunity to discover some stuff released in 2025 that I may have missed the first time around. Horse Combinations will be checking in with a list of favorites from this year soon, but for now let's talk about some cool songs I listened to over the last few weeks!

cootie catcher - “Straight Drop”
As mentioned earlier this year, cootie catcher sounds uncannily like the type of band I would have seen opening for Lemuria in a basement in like 2007 and briefly became obsessed with. “Straight Drop” and “Gingham Dress,” the two singles available so far from Something We All Got, out in February, are as strong as anything they’ve released. I’m obviously predisposed to this kind of DIY/twee indie pop but I am feeling bullish as hell on cootie catcher in 2026!

Takuro Okada - "Nefertite"
Dylan told me about this Takuro Okada album a few weeks ago, it’s really cool! A loving appreciation of the music of Black Americans thoughtfully infused with Japanese aesthetics by a beloved Tokyo experimental musician, Konoma gracefully traverses the worlds of instrumental funk, jazz, and hip hop. The shimmering, languid cover of Norwegian jazz legend Jan Garbarek’s “Nefertite” acts as an acknowledgment of outsiders past.

November 2025 (Part 2)

And just like that, another Cool Music November is behind us, folks. December is here and everyone's posting their Spotify Wrapped. I famously left Spotify earlier this year (something you should consider doing too) but I am also not above looking at every single Spotify Wrapped screenshot posted by every single person I know online.

As an extremely nosy guy I'm always curious about the media people consume, seeing how their favorite artists interact with my preconceived notions about them. I also just love the simple joy in finding out a former coworker got really into The Dismemberment Plan this year or that my friend's kid's ongoing Hans Zimmer phase has totally destroyed his algorithm. 

Obviously Wrapped is a lethal combination of navel-gazing ego stroking and FOMO manipulating free advertising for the evilest of streamers and sharing it in 2025 feels a little tone deaf to the valid pleas artists and other people smarter than me have been making all year. What complicates it for me is getting to see people earnestly share the music they love, something that is, at least in my social media sphere, becoming increasingly rare. 

Even if it's packaged as a roundup of data visualized KPIs or whatever, I'm happy to learn more about my friends and the shit they're into. Thankfully the other big streamers like Tidal and Apple Music also offer year end stats so we can all just plan on doing that next year.

Anyways here's blurbs about thirteen more songs I listened to and loved in November. Part one is here if you missed it. 

Westside Cowboy - “Can’t See”
The very exciting young rock and roll band Westside Cowboy has already been dubbed an official Horse Combinations “band to keep your eye on” and the designation stands with “Can’t See.” The dream of the mid 2000s blog rock scene is alive, baby!

Robber Robber - “Talkback”
Robber Robber’s 2024 debut was an underrated highlight of last year that deserved way more attention than it got and has stayed in regular rotation for the last eighteen months around these parts. They’re back with “Talkback,” a new single that refines the precise, nervy sound of Wild Guess, and has me excited for whatever 2026 holds for these guys.

November 2025 (Part 1)

It's been an awesome few weeks for live music in Chicago, in the last few weeks alone I've checked out incredible shows from David Byrne, Tortoise, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and Wednesday, among a handful of others. To keep the spirit of Cool Music November going, it's time for me to tell you about ten great songs I listened to this month and added to the Horse Combinations November 2025 playlist, now streaming on Tidal.

Living Hour - “Big Shadow”
I was listening to Living Hour earlier this month before seeing them at the Empty Bottle, opening for the aforementioned Pains of Being Pure at Heart underplay. Their new LP Internal Drone Infinity is one of those things where every song sort of sounds like a different band, drawing from a slightly different well of influences, with “Big Shadow” doing the Yo La Tengo thing as well as anybody in 2025.

John Roseboro - “Players Bawl”
I’ve been following John Roseboro for the last few years, ever since a friend shared the cover of “Waters of March” he recorded with Mei Semones. He’s released a string of charming bedroom bossa nova LPs at a steady clip across the early 2020s, but he’s been pretty quiet since releasing Fools last October, I’m happy to hear he’s back with the intimate, playful love song “Players Bawl,” one of the better songs he’s written so far.

October 2025 (Part 3)

My friends, it's time to discuss the final nine songs that were added to the official Horse Combinations October 2025 playlist, a mix of cool new releases and classic older tracks that I listened to and loved at some point last month. Here's parts one and two if you missed those, otherwise we'll get right down to business:

Daily Toll - “Mountain Song”
Just some classic indie rock from Australia, I’m always gonna go for someone sing/speaking oblique lyrics over cowboy chords and a Pavement ass guitar line.

Edna Lee - “You Can’t Decieve Me”
One of the coolest songs from Numero Group's overall very good new Barnyard Beehive comp, which collects a bunch of forgotten singles from aspiring country divas recorded in the 1960s and 70s. Really charming stuff from start to finish!