Nika is a writer interested in underground music, visual culture, and artists who build a world around their sound. Her work follows atmosphere, subculture, and the details that make music feel alive, especially when it is theatrical, abrasive, genre-resistant, or strange enough to stay with you.
Jacqui Hunt’s “Cycles” strips her electronic and dream pop history down to piano, voice, and grief, turning repetition into the song’s quiet emotional force.
Joan As Police Woman’s “I Defy” returns as part of Real Life Evolution, drawing its force from her close vocal, Krystle Warren’s entrance, and an arrangement that grows from worn intimacy into dramatic heat.
The Joy Thieves return with “No Anchor,” a Chris Connelly-fronted industrial rock single that turns isolation, moral drift, and collapse into something aggressive, precise, and hard to shake.
Julia Greenberg’s “Leaves” turns loss into something warm, plainspoken, and quietly hopeful, letting memory, humour, and live-room intimacy carry the song forward.
Bring Your Own Hammer’s “From The Tombs” turns a harsh historical fragment into polished, melodic indie pop, giving a nearly vanished life movement, colour, and care.
“Melancholia,” Modesty Blaise’s returning album carries its fullness easily, with careful songwriting, odd warmth, and enough detail moving through the record to make the 25th Anniversary remaster feel genuinely worth returning to.
Ecce Shnak’s “Vincent” moves with theatrical force, operatic vocal lifts, jagged rhythm, and heavy art-rock bursts, turning a smug antagonist into something strange, sharp, funny, and fully alive