On their current single ‘Ease Up’, The Astronauts deliver an unashamed love letter to the early 90s. From the moment the main melody hits, the layers of sound tap into a heavy indie/shoegaze sound that’s unmistakeably retro. The tune is also massively appealing, but it’s likely to require three or four listens before this becomes really obvious.
Welcome back to the Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the more interesting individual tracks that have landed in our inbox. This time out, we’ve got a familiar name taking a new musical twist, a couple of genuinely great pop tunes, a complex metal-centric banger from an up and coming act, and even a bit more jazz. Celebrating a variety of new sounds, we hope you find something to enjoy!
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Brooklyn’s Avery Friedman only began playing live shows in 2024, and didn’t spend years honing her sound before the recording and release of her 2025 debut ‘New Thing’, so the album’s songs still have an element of freshness and occasional naivete. You couldn’t call the material raw, though, or even suggest its potential has been sold short in any way. The best of the record’s eight songs represent brilliantly crafted indie pop, often sharing a sound that’s much older than Friedman’s years, but everything is presented in a hugely confident manner.
This visit to the Singles Bar is quite guitar driven in places, with a brilliant single from a Scottish pop-rock band, some heavy shoegaze, and a slab of enormous sounding stoner rock providing the backbone of the eight picks. That said, there’s still enough of a deviation from rock influences to make this as strong as previous Singles Bar selections, with a soulful number shared by one of George Ezra’s colleagues, a great synth based track, and a piece of soul driven pop ready to be discovered. As always, of course, we hope you find something new to enjoy.
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In June 2025, one man band Dotsun Moon released their third album, ‘Tiger’. Coming almost a decade after the previous Dotsun Moon album, you certainly couldn’t call multi-instrumentalist Richard Flierl prolific, but the record was certainly worth the wait. A clutch of pre-release singles suggested it would be a strong album, but those tracks didn’t quite capture the fullness of how great ‘Tiger’ would be. What’s more, those singles actually sounded even stronger when heard as part of the bigger picture.