Music is bigger than words and wider than pictures

With the humble beginning of a demo showcasing his first moments picking up a guitar and finding his voice in 2019, longtime experimental music composer Drew Collins stepped into the next phase of his songwriting career as Sundots.

Joined by familiar faces of the Connecticut DIY scene, friends Jake Fucci, Austin Traver, and Nick Restivo have been a fundamental part of the band’s journey in translating their bedroom “studio” songs to a live setting.

The music combines the feelings from freak-folk and ambient to slowcore and indie-rock in a way that comes across as both sincere and playful. Many of the songs showcase Drew’s heart on his sleeve, with an almost stream-of-consciousness approach to lyric writing. ‘Honeyspot’, the band’s most recent record from 2024, displayed a newly refined direction while reflecting on themes of youth, maturity, love, and fantasy.

Paying homage to the previously mentioned demo tape, appropriately named ‘room’, Drew has a collection of five more solo recordings on the way due sometime this summer.

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Kiss Facility is the multidisciplinary duo of Mayah Alkhateri and Salvador Navarette, who have been working across sound, image, and performance since their first encounter. Their practice is rooted in spiritual enquiry, drawing on themes of psychic perception, ritual protection, intimacy and the afterlife as a force of future destiny. Through symbolism and real-life emotion, Kiss Facility pushes artistic boundaries whilst examining identity as a site of self-transformation.

Sonically, the project sits at the margins of modern shoegaze, built on thick guitars, submerged vocal poetry, and compressed emotion. The duo adapts the genre’s familiar language and redirects it through Arabic lyricism, private mythologies, and inward worlds rarely foregrounded in alternative music. Their upcoming album, KHAZNA (meaning safe, vault, or treasury) refers to what is kept hidden. Its themes unfold through layered vocals and unexpected sound, holding vulnerable subjects such as love, liberation, and lived experience without spectacle or declaration.

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The Stockholm-based project, fronted by Paul Adamah (One of Borderline Festival’s Hottest Acts of 2026) is returning to Dublin after a packed out mainroom set in The Workman’s Club.

Boko Yout is the outsider infiltrating the mainstream.

Boko Yout has built a reputation for performances that blur the line between concert, catharsis and performance art. Drawing equally from post-punk chaos, punk-funk propulsion, alternative rock and spiritual symbolism, Boko Yout operates in a space entirely of its own – intense, theatrical and impossible to ignore.

The debut album GUSTO, released in 2025, introduced a band with pop instinct and art-school unpredictability. Structured around a fictional therapist known as Dr. Gusto, the record explores identity, ego, anxiety and self-liberation through a series of surreal therapy sessions. Tracks such as “9-2-5”, “GUSTO”, and “DEMOLITION MAN” showcased the project’s ability to combine explosive energy with philosophical depth, earning widespread critical acclaim across Europe.

Live, Boko Yout has become known for turning rooms into something closer to a ritual than a concert. Following appearances at festivals including The Great Escape, Borderline Festival, ESNS, Reeperbahn, Lowlands, Paléo and Pitchfork Paris, as well as support dates with Viagra Boys, the band has developed a reputation as one of the most arresting live acts to emerge from Scandinavia in recent years. Equal parts chaos and precision, Adamah leads audiences through a world of wiry grooves, raw emotion and theatrical intensity.

Lauren Wallace is a 17-year-old singer-songwriter from Dublin, Ireland. Her music blends influences from contemporary pop artists like Gracie Abrams and Olivia Rodrigo, as well as Irish musicians, both new and established, who have shaped the singer-songwriter genre. With a fresh perspective, Lauren is developing her own sound, rooted in both modern pop and with an undeniably Indie flavour celebrating her intimate yet artful lyricism’

The release of Lauren Wallace's single ‘Gap Teeth’ in February, saw great radio support across Ireland, a sold out first headline show upstairs in Dublin's hallowed halls of Whelan's and solid DSP support.

She's now back with the punchy indie pop earworm single ‘Mr. Saving Grace’ which drops May 22nd. Lauren is heading out on tour supporting Christopher Cross in the TF, Castlebar, Belfast's Ulster Hall and the Gleneagle Arena, Killarney as well as announcing her second headline show ever, in Workman's on 17 Sept 2026.

Swapmeet is a 4-piece band from South Australia composed of Venus O’Broin (guitar, vocals), Joshua Doherty (bass), Maxwell Elphick (guitar, drums, vocals), and Jack Medlyn (guitar, drums, vocals).

Having recently caught the ear of American indie label Winspear, the band is readying their debut album and offering a taste of the newmaterial with “I Know!”, a cathartic and buoyant debut single for their new label home.

Revved up with gleaming, fuzzy guitars and energetic percussion, the new track blurs jangle pop, shoegaze, and alt-rock with tongue-in-cheek precision. The group met as teenagers in the early 2020s while playing in various projects around the Adelaide music scene and bonded over their love of 90s alternative.

They soon started writing music together and released their debut single in late 2023 and quickly returned with their debut EP, Oxalis, in mid-2024. Now, the band has started moving out of local pub gigs and into big venues, opening for international touring artists across the whole of Australia, and recently won the Emerging Artist & Best Performance Award at SXSW Sydney for their charismatic live show.

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“If there is one thing I know how to do, it’s how to get the most out of life. Yeah, sure, not everything is perfect. You fuck up. You make mistakes. But hopefully, you’re achieving more than you’re fucking up. Overall, I would say I do well, milking life for all it’s got.” — Mykki Blanco

On Café Paradiso, Mykki Blanco is completely reborn, trading the persona-driven theatrics of his previous releases for something more interior and exacting. The record draws from the diverse, banal and yet idiosyncratic contexts of the artist’s life in transit: “...shitty Wall Street lunch counters and an endless stream of dive bars in the East Village” in New York; “...drinking beer and playing pool in Belleville; the drink that lasts forever at Les Chope des Artists and Chez Jeanette” in Paris; and “languishing for hours at the tea houses or Café Hafa” in Tangier. From these fragments, Café Paradiso assembles a soundtrack for the contemporary, queer flâneur, moving through spaces where being alone does not necessarily mean being lonely. “Café Paradiso is a record for artsy kids,” Blanco explains, “for my cosmopolitan aesthetes to sit alone in a café and work on crafting the life of their dreams, or just make sense of it!” When asked which earlier versions of himself appear here, Blanco is unequivocal: “None.”

If Blanco’s discography exists less as a linear evolution and more as a series of deliberate mutations — each project shifting in terms of tone, genre, and even the function of the voice — then Café Paradiso represents his post-rumspringa clarity. “I love creating music but I’ve never liked the idea of being a one-trick pony,” Blanco explains, “I need to check some things off my ‘Life List.’” After his 2022 album Stay Close to Music and the Postcards from Italia (2023) EP, Blanco spent two years at art school in Switzerland, getting his MFA and deepening his studio practice as a visual artist. In  September of 2024, Blanco submitted his thesis "The Black Presence In Early Soviet Union Russia" and graduated, then returned to his “first love” — songwriting.

Francis of Delirium (Jana Bahrich) will releases her second album, Run, Run Pure Beauty via Dalliance Recordings.

Praise for debut album

"The debut album from Luxembourg-based Jana Bahrich – aka Francis of Delirium – is an absolute knockout” - KEXP

"Jana Bahrich showcases a remarkably contemporary approach to songwriter-rock on her debut, reflecting a sensibility akin to the music of Boygenius, Wolf Alice, or Soccer Mommy.” - Rolling Stone Germany

“A project as thematically poignant as it is sonically captivating” - Paste

“Capturing a similar melancholy sparkle to indie favourites such as Japanese Breakfast and Snail Mail, its 11 tracks encapsulate both bittersweet, desperate yearning and a breathless new romance” - NME

Francis of Delirium style, guitars and drums crescendo with sugar-rush vocal melodies. A sting of Gen-Z melancholy reminds why Jana’s heart-on-sleeve, emotionally intelligent songwriting forms such a strong connection with her fans.

Connect with Francis of Delirium : Insta | FB

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Lemoncello, the Dublin based duo of Laura Quirke and Claire Kinsella,announce their second album, Perfect Place, due for release on May 8 via Claddagh Records. Alongside the announcement, the band share the new single and video for “Articulate Animal,” the album’s opening track, following the earlier release of “Meet Me Halfway.”

Co-produced by Ruth O’Mahony Brady (Lisa O’Neill, Gorillaz) at her studio in Cabinteely, Dublin, Perfect Place evolves from the band’s folk soaked roots of their critically acclaimed 2024 self-titled debut, and confidently explores intricate new shapes, marking a bold new chapter for Quirke and Kinsella. Imbued with assuredness, the record encompasses full band recordings that weave synths and electronic percussion into the duo’s staple organic sound.

Written and recorded over a two-year period, the album began with an artist residency in late 2023 in a cabin overlooking the Skellig Islands off the southwest coast of Kerry. From there, Quirke and Kinsella spent a year exchanging voice notes and demos before bringing the material into the studio.