Summer doesn’t quite seem ready to fade out… September has dimmed its glow all the same, softened its heat and perhaps calmed the frenzy of a sometimes chaotic return to routine. Happily, a few much-awaited events sumptuously punctuated this back-to-school season with their raging riffs, frantic rhythms or intimate acoustic softness. Here’s an essential taste!
LIVE GEM OF THE MONTH: THE AFGHAN WHIGS
The Afghan Whigs, “the best-kept secret of 1990s rock” and already 40 years of a remarkable career led by Greg Dulli, the dark, charismatic frontman of the alternative rock band from Cincinnati, Ohio.
On September 27th, back at the Trabendo more than 11 years after their last visit, the band finally returned to greet us with its intense energy and powerful sound, proving a group in great shape and happy to share.
A quick aside on an opening set beautifully led by the talented Ed Harcourt: his tribute to Mark Lanegan, with a cover of “One Way Street,” is a deeply moving rendition, accompanied by Rick G. Nelson’s violin.
The transition is perfect.
The echo of the late Lanegan, Dulli’s brother-in-arms and partner in crime, still rings through the room as the band takes the stage and launches into “Parked Outside.” A direct entrance, raw in its intensity, aggressive as a primal scream. In the very first verse, Dulli throws down the gauntlet to anyone who thinks they’ve seen it all: the tone is set.
The musicians backing him play with explosive power: co-founder John Curley’s bass is the backbone of the whole, heavy, punchy, inspired. Drummer Patrick Keeler (of The Raconteurs fame) hits with surgical precision and a cannonball’s organic energy. Christopher Thorn’s rock star flair intoxicates us with winding slide textures and incisive solos. Multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson brings a sonic singularity essential to the band’s DNA, with his structured keyboards and the lyricism of his string playing (violin and cello). As for Greg Dulli, his leader’s charisma is as possessed, passionate and absolutely generous as ever, with that raw, on-the-edge voice, alternating rhythm guitar and lyrical piano.
Driven by obvious chemistry, the band parades its songs with the fiery ardor we know it for and works in 5 tracks from the latest album, Soft Control, every bit as acclaimed as signature tunes like the hypnotic “Oriole” or the visceral “Gentlemen,” among them “Duvateen,” dear to Dulli’s heart for its metaphor on finitude…
The band closes its set with the dark, cult “Miles Iz Ded,” in an extended version: launched gently, the track tips into massive intensity as the musicians recover their electrifying fire, merging their contributions into a tidal wave of heavy, saturated distortion, before ending on a bed of utterly exalted sounds.
I’ve lost track of my own address, hurled into their steamy, twilit universe of raw alternative rock and sensual, tormented soul. That’s… The Afghan Whigs.
ALBUM CRUSH: SOMETHING WORTH WAITING FOR (EXPANDED EDITION) BY FRIKO
The expanded edition of Friko‘s sophomore album Something Worth Waiting For (Expanded Edition), released September 11th on ATO Records, divinely enriches the original with 6 bonus tracks every bit as steeped in the folk rock atmosphere that defines them, blending noise rock with saturated, explosive guitars and symphonic ballads imbued with childlike poetry.
This quartet from Evanston, near Chicago, Illinois, has been making waves for some time now, crisscrossing festival stages with fervor and opening for The Flaming Lips as well as our indie rock darlings Modest Mouse, Water From Your Eyes and Black Country, New Road.
The album is shot through with a devastating, raw-nerve sensitivity, vibrating with urgency and exaltation.
Big shout-out to this extended version, especially for their track “Necessary”!
A STUNNING VIDEO CLIP FROM PSYCHEDELIC PORN CRUMPETS
The music video for “Juice a jumbo jet” by Australians Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, released September 11th, 2026, shakes up the codes of visual creativity with its hallucinatory animation. Entrusted to director and animator Mike Wyatt of Attack Animation studio, this supercharged, psychedelic visual flight perfectly illustrates the explosive garage-prog energy of a track with the feel of an interstellar bad trip. Image and sound fuse in perfect symbiosis to plunge us into a hypnotic vortex, creating a total synesthetic experience. Buckle up!
NEWS YOU CAN’T MISS
Beck‘s long-awaited new record has finally hit the shelves! September 18th marked the artist’s folk, melancholy return with his fifteenth album, Ride Lonesome, on Capitol Records, indirectly heralded by his compilation Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime earlier this year?
The Californian shares his experience of time passing and of solitude as a creative engine, in an intimate acoustic atmosphere. This stripped-back “heartbreak record” is skillfully arranged and produced by his faithful collaborators David Campbell and Nigel Godrich, for a vaporous, elegant folk odyssey. Endless pedal steel sustain, subtle string orchestrations, hazy textures, a morose breath: the album plunges us into the fatalistic gentleness of a raw-nerved soul whose wounds have forged his maturity. Beck, pure poetry… We love it!
