VIA PRESS RELEASE | Van Halen’s final studio album, A Different Kind Of Truth, will be back in print on October 23 from Rhino on CD and as a 2LP set pressed on 180-gram vinyl in a double gatefold package.

A limited crystal-clear vinyl version will be available exclusively at participating indie retail stores and from Rhino.com. The lacquers were cut by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering. Pre-order here.

A Different Kind Of Truth features Eddie, Alex, and Wolfgang Van Halen and was the first original studio album with singer David Lee Roth since the band’s classic multi-platinum album 1984. Originally released on February 7, 2012, the album debuted at #2 on the Billboard 200 and received widespread acclaim from critics and fans alike.

Formed in Los Angeles in 1974, Van Halen changed the rock and roll landscape forever with the release of their self-titled 1978 debut album, displaying unparalleled stage presence, revolutionary musicianship, and extraordinary songwriting.

With more than 75 million albums sold worldwide, the band’s record of achievement is hard to top. Presented with two Diamond Award RIAA Certified Status’ for their albums Van Halen and 1984, the band has produced a repertoire of hits that remain some of the strongest and most influential rock songs ever written, which fans will admire for decades to come.

VIA PRESS RELEASE | Following last year’s acclaimed Deluxe Edition of Foreigner 4, Foreigner continues its fifty-year celebration with a newly remixed and remastered edition of Head Games, the band’s multi-platinum third studio album, originally released in 1979, now available October 30, 2026 on CD/Blu-ray and black vinyl. Pre-order here. The collection will also be available the same day via DSP. To celebrate the announcement, the newly discovered unreleased track “Trouble” is available digitally.

Featuring the iconic hits “Dirty White Boy” and the title track “Head Games,” the expansive new collection has been overseen by Foreigner bassist Jeff Pilson and the band’s longtime production collaborator, Wyn Davis. The collection also features a new essay by acclaimed music journalist Ken Sharp detailing the history and creation of this iconic album.

The 1979 debut of Head Games featured Lou Gramm (lead vocals, percussion), Mick Jones (lead guitar, piano, backing vocals, lead vocals), Ian McDonald (guitars, keyboards, synthesizers), Rick Wills (bass, backing vocals), and Dennis Elliott (drums).

The album was notable as it marks the first appearance of bass guitarist Rick Wills, and the last album to feature original founding members Ian McDonald and Al Greenwood. It was also the last Foreigner album to feature founder and lead guitarist Mick Jones on lead vocals.

Head Games Super Deluxe CD/Blu-ray edition features the original 10-track studio album newly remixed, alongside a full disc of outtakes and alternate versions that offer a revealing look inside the album’s recording sessions. The collection also unearths a previously unreleased concert from the Head Games tour, capturing Foreigner at a pivotal moment in the band’s rise, featuring classics including “Cold As Ice” and “Feels Like The First Time.” A Blu-ray completes the package with an immersive Dolby Atmos mix of the original studio album.

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Celebrating Don Brewer on his 78th birthday. —Ed.

A half century and change down the line, it boggles the imagination to think that Flint, Michigan’s Grand Funk (with or without that “Railroad”) were one of the biggest touring acts of the early Seventies. The proof lies in this shocking factoid—in 1971 (the Chinese “Year of the Funk”), the trio of Mark, Don, and Mel sold out Shea Stadium in 72 hours. It took The Beatles (The Beatles!) several weeks to do the same.

Manager Terry Knight was a key driver of the band’s success, and his messianic belief in their world importance took a hilarious turn in his liner notes (written on parchment scroll!) to the 1972 compilation Mark, Don & Mel. Wherein he compares “the Funk” to Moses, Cleopatra, and Napoleon and writes, “From the dawn of recorded history, stemming through the lifetimes of every man, woman, and child who ever walked upon the earth, there have been but a handful whose fate it was to become known as Phenomenon.” It was quite a tribute to a band whose output included songs like “High Falootin’ Woman,” but you have to admire his grandiosity.

Knight’s hype, a manic album release schedule, and over-the-top promotion (a huge billboard in NYC’s Times Square) helped fuel the fire, but Grand Funk did it mostly on their own, with nonstop touring and a high-energy, “obnoxiously loud” live show that emphasized shirtless torsos over finesse, subtlety, and great songs. Guitarist Mark Farner, drummer Don Brewer, and bassist Mel Schacher were three groovy dudes fashioning clunky, workmanlike grooves that not only achieved highly amplified mediocrity but came to personify it.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Leonard Graves Phillips, co-founder and lifelong member of Californian punk icons The Dickies, is poised to reveal all about his 50-year career with the band, in a hefty, high-quality hardback autobiography.

Published on August 21, The Dickies And Me comprises some 50 chapters spread across 230+ pages, all packed with the extreme ups and down of one of the longest-running punk bands in existence, as well as stories from Leonard’s turbulent life.

A riot of absurdist humor and thoughtful reflection, the story is accompanied by a host of incredible behind-the-scenes photos, and cartoon illustrations by the brilliant KRK Ryden who has collaborated with Devo and others.

It is half a century since Leonard, his friends Bob “Chuck Wagon” Davis and guitarist Stan Lee, plus bassist Billy Club and drummer Karlos Kaballero, first emerged as The Dickies—and swiftly became the first California punk band to appear on network TV and score a major record deal.

A lot of musicians, deals, and music have passed through the ranks since those frenetic beginnings, but still The Dickies remain true to their original ideals, a breakneck good-times punk band that is as comfortable maiming rock ’n’ roll’s most sacred cows as it is quick firing out its own wild compositions.

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Celebrating Al Jardine on his 84th birthday. —Ed.

Existence is unutterably strange. It’s a fact. The world is filled with miracles and marvels and inexplicable occurrences that defy all rational explanation and that stand, in fact, as rebukes to the very conception of rationality itself. Take the 45 rpm record I hold metaphorically before me. Soon, I will place it on my metaphorical record player. It’s by a band called The Beach Boys. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. Boy, could they sing!

But I’m not here to write about the baroque vocal skills of the band that gave us “Good Vibrations,” or how the Beach Boys gradually shed their squeaky-clean image to become hirsute, coke-snorting, acid-gobbling hippies. I’m here to talk about their choice in covers, specifically in the case of the metaphorical single that is now playing on my record player.

The A-side of the 1968 single, entitled “Bluebirds Over the Mountain,” was written and recorded by rockabilly artist Ersel Hickey in 1957. The B-side is entitled “Never Learn Not to Love,” and is a blatant (as in he took everything from soup to nuts) Dennis Wilson steal of “Cease to Exist,” a song written by one Charles Milles Manson, of swastika-carved-forehead and Tate/LaBianca murder-spree fame. Both tunes ended up on The Beach Boys’ 1969 LP 20/20.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Black Sabbath forged the dark sound of heavy metal in 1970 across two monumental albums—their self-titled debut and its multi-platinum follow-up, Paranoid. Today, new audiophile editions of both are available on reel-to-reel from Rhino High Fidelity.

Black Sabbath and Paranoid (Rhino High Fidelity R2R) were duplicated in real time from 1:1 copies of the US analog master tapes. The result is a master-quality listening experience that captures the full dynamics of these recordings. The 15 i.p.s. half-track 1/4″ tape is produced to the IEC equalization standard on premium RTM LPR90 tape stock and stored on a 10.5″ metal reel. Each Reel-to-Reel edition is limited to 500 copies worldwide and available exclusively at Rhino.com.

Released on Friday the 13th in February 1970, the self-titled debut from the Birmingham, England quartet conjured a sinister, visceral sound that reshaped rock music. Powered by Tony Iommi’s crushing guitar riffs, Ozzy Osbourne’s primal vocals, Geezer Butler’s seismic bass lines, and Bill Ward’s powerhouse drumming, tracks like “Black Sabbath” and “N.I.B.” set a high bar for heavy music. The album peaked at #8 on the U.K. chart and #23 on the Billboard 200, eventually earning platinum certification in the U.S.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Mute—in conjunction with Threshold House—have shared a track from 1987’s Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders), the first in a series of releases in a new partnership between the labels that will see four early, often overlooked, works by Coil—remastered and released with restored artwork, previously unseen imagery and new sleeve notes.

Originally conceived by John Balance, Coil swiftly became a duo with Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle) and after their 1984 debut release, the one-sided 12” single “How to Destroy Angels,” they were joined by a young Stephen Thrower. On the recordings in the series, Coil are John Balance (1962–2004), Peter Christopherson (1955–2010) and Stephen Thrower. The series launches with Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders), the third in a trilogy that began with Scatology and Horse Rotorvator.

Where Scatology and Horse Rotorvator are revered, the period immediately after is sometimes skipped over, but these years were enormously potent moments in their history, ones where sex and sexuality, as core engines of their work, were cast under increasing shadow by homophobia and the fear of AIDS, both of which were deliberately fanned and propagated by the mainstream media.

Gold is the Metal (With the Broadest Shoulders) draws on work that had been sidelined during Horse Rotovator’s sequencing. It takes textural and instrumental pieces and shapes them into a fully-formed album.

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As Neil Young passes 80, time doesn’t stand still. For Young, time is a shifting, changing, moving force that encompasses the past, the present, and the future, and not always in that order. While his contemporary Bob Dylan has said “don’t look back,” Young often does, using memory as a jumping-off point for yet another new song and another new album.

Young also subscribes to Dylan’s assertion not to look back but to move ahead. He does it by creating new sounds, working with new people, and confounding those who would like him to remain the blue-jeaned ’60s icon of Sugar Mountain, forever mining for gold and living the hippie dream.

While he does release a cascade of archival music, it’s the new albums and new groups he plays live with on the road that keep him as relevant as ever. Time is very much on his mind with his new live album, appropriately titled As Time Explodes. The name of the album follows other similarly titled releases: Time Fades Away and Comes A Time, as well as albums where some reference to time exists: Tonight’s The Night, Long May You Run, Old Ways, Early Daze, Decade, Journey Through the Past, and Before and After, to name a few.

In 2010 and 2011, when Young reformed the Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay for benefit shows and a short tour, at the Bonnaroo Festival, in Manchester, Tennessee, on June 11, 2011, he walked on stage and introduced the performance by saying, “We’re Buffalo Springfield; we’re from the past.”

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I recently spoke with Jez Kerr and Martin Moscrop of A Certain Ratio.

Jez and Martin talked about the new recordings, becoming A Certain Ratio and the early Hacienda days along with Joy Division, plus future plans. And while they came up through Factory Records alongside all the classic acts that emerged in the late ’70s they built a sound out of funk bass, Afrobeat drums, brass, dub, and Latin percussion along with the angular edges of post-punk. This year marks two anniversaries: 45 years since they recorded Sextet, their 1982 third album that hit number one on the UK Independent Chart, and 40 years since Force, their 1986 fifth album and last for Factory.

They’re celebrating the anniversary with two companion releases, both just out via Mute. The Joy of Sextet is a new mix by Andy Meecham (The Emperor Machine), pulled from the original 1981 two-inch multitracks. Force Majeure is a nine-track set built around four-track recordings made by the late Stuart James, including an unreleased version of the title track. In October they tour the UK playing both albums in full.

You can find ACR across all social and at www.acrmcr.com. Follow along for tour dates and all A Certain Ratio happenings.

Radar features discussions with artists and industry leaders who are creators and devotees of music and is produced by Dylan Hundley and The Vinyl District. Dylan Hundley is an artist and performer, and the co-creator and lead singer of Lulu Lewis and all things at Darling Black. She co-curates and hosts Salon Lulu which is a New York based multidisciplinary performance series. She is also a cast member of the iconic New York film Metropolitan.

Thorn Wych builds her own instruments from the branches of trees. On her debut album, Aesthesis, she delves deep into an organic experimentation with a folkloric edge. Utilizing grooves, drones, chants, and hazy clouds of abstraction, her sound is connected to long-established traditions while standing apart through pure distinctiveness. Recorded and edited at home, Aesthesis has been available for a couple of years but is getting a welcome North American LP release on September 4 through Tompkins Square.

Living in the UK town of Bacup in Lancashire (near Manchester), Thorn Wych makes deeply spiritual music that leans toward swirling strangeness rather than slipping into blissful placidity. Starting with tree branches, Wych crafts flutes, strings for bowing, and percussion, and then further enhances the sounds she produces with delay pedals, looping, and pitch-shifting devices.

The results, as heard on Aesthesis, strive not to produce sharp contrasts of her rustic baselines against boldly applied technological strategies. Instead, Wych is just attempting to conjure beautifully weird blends. These final results, twisted but natural, are achieved through studiously applied repetitions, edits, distortions, and sound stretching.

The initial release of Aesthesis emerged on cassette (50 copies) and vinyl in late 2024 on the Hood Faire label. Early the following year, a 6-copy run of cassettes in a very attractive wooden case added a bonus track. And at the beginning of 2026, Hood Faire brought out a vinyl repress in a 150-copy edition. Now here comes Tompkins Square with the Stateside availability. There is digital, but only through Bandcamp.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Capitol Records/UMe and Frank Sinatra Enterprises announce a special new suite of physical and digital releases to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s first-ever live album: Sinatra at the Sands with Count Basie & The Orchestra, arranged and conducted by Quincy Jones.

On October 23, 2026, Sinatra at the Sands will be reissued on 2LP 180gm black vinyl as the next release from UMe’s acclaimed Vinylphyle series. It’s available exclusively via uDiscoverMusic HERE. Arriving in tandem, fans can experience five complete shows from the original sold-out 1966 Sands’ Copa Room residency for the first time on the brand new 5CD set—Sinatra at the Sands 60th Anniversary. Dolby Atmos versions of both Sinatra at the Sands releases will be available the same day on streaming platforms. All versions are available for pre-order/pre-save HERE.

The new Vinylphyle Edition of Sinatra at the Sands boasts 2026 mixes from Sinatra’s longstanding trusted engineer Larry Walsh and best-in-class mastering courtesy of Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound. The 2LP Vinylphyle Edition is housed in the original gatefold packaging, which features GRAMMY®-winning liner notes by Stan Cornyn and now includes an insert of never-before-seen photos shot during the residency and new liner notes by New York Times best-selling author Charles Pignone.

While the original Sinatra at the Sands 2LP set was curated from several shows, Sinatra at the Sands 60th Anniversary showcases five complete, previously unreleased performances from the iconic residency, which ran from January 26, 1966–February 1, 1966.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | Fire Records will release the definitive version of The Evil One by Roky Erickson And The Aliens on October 30th, 45 years after its original release. For the first time since 1981, the release restores the original front cover from San Francisco’s 415 Records edition. The 15-track 2xLP is cut at 45 rpm, for maximum sonic depth and clarity.

The origin story behind The Evil One is a dark one. The 13th Floor Elevators were gaining attention in Texas and beyond with their compelling single “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” but their open association with psychedelic drugs also brought unwanted attention from the authorities. After Erickson was found with marijuana, he pleaded “not guilty by reason of insanity” to avoid prison and was sent to Rusk State Hospital for the criminally insane. There, he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy and Thorazine treatment. During his three and a half years at Rusk, he formed a band, shaping early versions of songs that would later appear on The Evil One.

When Erickson was released in 1974, his reputation had grown thanks to the inclusion of “You’re Gonna Miss Me” on the landmark 1972 Nuggets compilation and top 40 radio support across multiple US states. His time in the hospital became a powerful source of inspiration. He formed Roky Erickson And The Aliens and began writing about zombies, demons, vampires, and other such subjects. Moving away from the Elevators’ psychedelic garage blues, Erickson And The Aliens created a harder-edged rock sound.

The Evil One was recorded in 1978 and 1979 with producer Stu Cook, best known as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s bassist. The sessions yielded 15 songs, now presented together in this definitive version on Fire Records. Earlier UK and US editions, released in 1980 and 1981 respectively, each featured different 10-track listings.

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