Indie Basement (10/3): the week in classic indie, alternative & college rock

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Hello October and hi Indie Basement readers. This week I’ve got five new releases for you: LP #2 from London band Pynch, the debut album from LA ’90s obsessives Rocket, Peel Dream Magazine‘s best yet, and the second album from Nashville mutant punks Snooper, plus DFA unearths Eric Broucek‘s singles as Babytalk and Watussi for a new compilation. Meanwhile, this week’s Indie Basement Classic is a Britpop smash that turns 30 today.

Over in Notable Releases, Andrew reviews new ones from Agriculture, Prewn, Nala Sinephro’s The Smashing Machine score, and more.

If you’re feeling behind, check out the Indie Basement Best Songs & Albums of September 2025 roundup that comes with a three-hour playlist.

In other news, Super Furry Animals, Gene and Bishop Allen are back; The Cure are announcing all sorts of shows; we have new album announcements from Dry Cleaning, Melody’s Echo Chamber and Plantoid; and Record Store Day announced their 2025 RSD Black Friday exclusives.

On this week’s podcast I talked to Fred Armisen.

Head below for this week’s reviews…

Pynch – Beautiful Noise (Chillburn Recordings) London band Pynch level up on their charming second album

“I’m giving up making plans for forever,” Spencer Enock sings on “Forever,” the opening track on Pynch’s second album. “I’ll do my best to stick around for the summer.” As he exits his twenties, Enock is getting philosophical, ruminating on love, death, art, and all the big stuff. Beautiful Noise marks a big leap forward — it feels like there was an album in between this and their 2023 debut that never got released. Part of that may be thanks to a new lineup that now includes a keyboardist, adding a welcome electronic element to Pynch’s trad-indie guitar sound. It gives songs like “Forever,” “Revolve Around You,” and “Microwave Rhapsody” extra lift they might not have had two years ago. The ’00s are still a major influence — you could imagine Slumberland or Captured Tracks releasing this in 2009 — especially on the airy “How You Love Someone,” which channels that era’s obsession with The Wake’s “Pale Spectre.”

Enock has always had a knack for self-analysis, wandering-soul lyrics, and clever turns of phrase, and he’s especially sharp and thoughtful here. On the title track he wonders, “Is it all just a beautiful noise? Daily pain and joy before we return to the void,” as squalling guitars give way to trumpets and jazzy drumming. He also turns the lens on his own band and their place in the world on “Post Punk / New Wave”: “It’s Post-Punk, it’s New Wave with a little bit of Shoegaze / I want it all, I want it all,” before cracking wise with “Jaguars and Casios, five minute solos / Lyrics about dying / I swear to God we’re trying.” With Beautiful Noise, Pynch show you really can have it all.

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Rocket – R is For Rocket (Transgressive/Canvasback) Rocket’s debut album is a love letter to the ’90s that points to a bright future

Los Angeles band Rocket are clearly in love with the ’90s, and since forming in 2021 they’ve quickly become an opener of choice for actual ’90s bands, having toured with Ride, Sunny Day Real Estate, and The Smashing Pumpkins (and with Silversun Pickups, an ’00s band who also love the ’90s). They’ve clearly picked up a lot from their elders, as can be heard on their full-length debut, R is for Rocket. The quiet-loud-quiet dynamics, roaring guitars, fuzzy bass, dreamy verses, and ripping choruses are all there.

All that touring gave Rocket a chance to test their material on stage and figure out what worked best. They even went back and re-recorded some songs, convinced they could do better. While the touchstones are obvious, R is for Rocket is still impressive in its synthesis of their heroes, while featuring memorable songs that don’t just feel like carbon copies. Slow-build opener “The Choice,” the skyscraping “One Million,” and bulldozing “Pretending” are especially satisfying. The best part of R is for Rocket, though, is the sense that the best is still to come.

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Peel Dream Magazine – Taurus (Topshelf) Joe Stevens distills past experiments into his best Peel Dream Magazine record yet

Joe Stevens tries on indie styles like he’s browsing a well-curated thrift shop where almost everything fits. As Peel Dream Magazine, he’s dabbled in shoegaze, Stereolab-style drone-and-zone, and High Llamas tropicalia. On “Venus in Nadir,” the opening song on this new mini-LP, he channels early Belle & Sebastian, even though the title nods to the Velvet Underground and Stevens cites Nick Drake as the real inspiration (also two of Stuart Murdoch’s biggest influences). It’s very “A Century of Fakers,” but Stevens puts his own spin on it.

The rest of Taurus, though, doesn’t rummage through Tigermilk and Dog on Wheels, instead aiming for a gentle indiepop sound that distills everything he’s released to date. Vibraphones, acoustic guitars, electric piano, gurgling synths, and Stevens’ hushed but more confident vocals come together in autumnal perfection on “Letters,” baroque psychedelic beauty on “Seek and Destroy,” and skipping woodwinds-and-thumb-piano charm on “Believer.” Taurus is PDM’s best record yet, and the one that sounds most like him.

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Snooper – Worldwide (Third Man) Working in an actual studio with producer John Congleton doesn’t seem to have tamed these Nashville mutant punks one bit

Defiantly DIY Nashville band Snooper formed during the pandemic out of stir-crazy boredom, creating a glitchy hybrid of hyperpop and punk in the bedroom that they were soon playing live in their living room at house parties. After a handful of Bandcamp releases, countless wild parties, and SXSW buzz, Snooper signed to Jack White’s Third Man, which didn’t seem to tame their sugar-high manic energy one bit, as heard on their whirlwind 2023 debut Super Snõõper.

But what happens when Snooper are put in a real studio in Los Angeles with big-name producer John Congleton? You get Worldwide, which somehow doesn’t slow them down at all. This is their most band-sounding record yet — no longer like it was banged out on a laptop in an afternoon — but it’s still flipped-out, bouncing-off-the-walls mutant new wave. The songs all hover around two minutes, are catchy as hell, and include a demented cover of The Beatles’ “Come Together.”

It’s Devo played at 5x speed, a Tasmanian devil crashing your dinner party, destroying your house, drinking all your champagne, and pausing only to ask if you’ve got more dip before spinning back out the door. Despite the mayhem, you find yourself hoping they come back next time.

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Babytalk & Watussi – Shaking Moving Dancing People: The Stickydisc Records Anthology (DFA) DFA dusts off Eric Broucek’s “out of time” Babytalk and Watussi singles from the late-’00s for this new compilation

As James Murphy puts it, Eric Broucek was the “ur-engineer of the most fertile era of DFA Studios, from about 2003 to 2008.” During that time he worked behind the boards on records by LCD Soundsystem, Black Dice, The Juan Maclean, Shit Robot, and more. Broucek also made his own music under the names Babytalk and Watussi (a collab with Morgan Wailey). Murphy wanted to release it on DFA, but Broucek instead put it out through his own label, Stickydisc Recordings. He only released a handful of singles, but they were beloved by those who heard them — you might remember “Keep on Move” from James Murphy and Pat Mahoney’s FabricLive.36 mix.

Murphy finally got his wish with this compilation of all three Babytalk and Watussi 12″s from Stickydisc. As heard on “Keep on Move,” “Chance,” and “Purple Moon,” Broucek’s style is minimal, lithe, funky, and spaced-out, with beats that never hammer but glide. Perfect for remixing, too: the Six-Leg Friend mix of “Keep on Move” is deeply psychedelic without losing its dancefloor pull, while Hercules & Love Affair’s version of “Chance” adds just the right dash of disco. Best of all might be the two Watussi tracks, which head straight into deep house territory — “If All We Had Was Love,” with its bright horns and melancholy vocals, is the real standout.

The set also includes two tracks that seem previously unreleased: the MFWiley dub of “Purple Moon,” and Babytalk’s “Enough,” which sounds like The Residents if they’d recorded at Compass Point Studios.

“His music is so unlike everything else of that era, so profoundly singular, that it still sounds completely out of time,” Murphy says. Kudos to DFA for rescuing these songs and putting them back in the spotlight.

r Child charity. The concept was inspired by John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” – the idea that all art should be released to the world as soon as it’s made. So 20 artists went into the studio on September 4, 1995 and the album was in the shops five days later. Some of the Britpop highlights: Radiohead’s “Lucky,” which would appear two years later on OK Computer; a new, terrific acoustic version of Oasis b-side “Fade Away” featuring Johnny Depp and Kate Moss; Suede covering Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding” (also famously covered by Robert Wyatt); Blur in playful instrumental mode on “Eine kleine Lift Musik”; The KLF’s Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty as The One World Orchestra with a cover of The Magnificent Seven theme (their first music in four years); Salad and Specials frontman Terry Hall covering “Dream a Little Dream of Me”; and The Charlatans covering Sly & The Family Stone’s “Time for Livin’.” The biggest deal was a cover of The Beatles’ “Come Together” by The Smokin’ Mojo Filters (aka Paul McCartney, Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller), but the secret best song is Sinead O’Connor’s cover of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe.”