This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors Words By Shoaib, Neil G, Benny Thomas, and Irfan Ayaan.
Our inbox is overflowing with new music, it’s easy for those underground gems to get lost in all the noise. That’s why we created Between The Cracks—a series dedicated to unearthing music that deserves your ears but rarely gets the spotlight. No hype or chart positions, just good music that pushes the boundaries across genres: jazz, ambientl electronic, experimental, global sounds and beyond. For adventurous ears, Between The Cracks is our little corner where you’ll find that most intruging music often dances just beyond the mainstream’s reach. Enjoy the music and support artists and labels.
Albums
Tessie Overmyer – Tidelines
Alto saxophonist and composer Tessie Overmyer delivers a remarkable debut with Tidelines, a heartfelt reflection on transition, connection, and place. Recorded just before her move from Sydney to New York, the album captures the warmth of a band united by trust and shared history. Overmyer’s writing shines with melodic clarity and emotional openness, balancing folk lyricism with the sophistication of modern jazz composition. The opening track, ‘The Imposter’, bursts with swinging vitality, showcasing Overmyer’s agile phrasing and the ensemble’s seamless interplay. Meanwhile, ‘Muriwai’, inspired by the New Zealand coastline, drifts between tenderness and grandeur, its melodic lines unfolding like waves, guided by lyrical solos from trumpet and piano. Over the nearly eleven minutes of the closing track, ‘Sunset Walk’s’ duration, you can’t help but be drawn into the hymn-like textures. Across the album, Overmyer’s tone is both confident and unguarded, her compositions radiating an honest sense of place and time. Tidelines feels less like a debut and more like a statement of intent, capturing the exact moment an artist finds her voice. Poised, poetic, and profoundly human, it’s one of Australian jazz’s most luminous new beginnings. – WBS
Ebi Soda – frank dean and andrew
Spawning from the rigorous and spontaneous sessions where Ebi Soda kept exploring and discovering their musical limits and range, the album frank dean and andrew is a welcome disruption to the norm. Injecting elements of punk, electronic and dub into the fray, the album shows a unique and gritty expression of jazz in all its raw wonder. Tracks on the album, such as ‘grilly’ and ‘red in tokyo (featuring Jianbo)’, show how the tension of creating such a spontaneous album has been refined into tightly produced songs that reject polished conventions in favour of something stranger and more eccentric. The album unsettles as much as it captivates. – NG
Luc Moindranzé Karioudja – Mon Balo
When we premiered Luc Moindranzé Karioudja’s track ‘Kozman‘, we spoke about how it showed just how deeply he channels the spiritual traditions of Réunionian Maloya while carving out something distinctly his own. Born from a lifelong immersion in Maloya’s ceremonies and sounds, Mon Balo, his debut album, showcases a masterful synthesis of traditional Maloya structures and modern compositional techniques. As a native of Saint-Benoît, a city on the eastern coast of Réunion – a former French colony and now a region of France nestled within the Indian Ocean, east of Africa – Karioudja’s musical journey began at a remarkably early age. Raised amidst the ceremonies and sounds of Maloya, a cornerstone of Réunionian culture, his upbringing was inextricably linked to ritual and the transmission of ancestral knowledge. “Ritual holds an important place for me and represents something I deeply respect,” he explains, a sentiment that is powerfully evident in the album’s conception. Karioudja’s compositions are inventive, employing subtle harmonic shifts and unexpected rhythmic textures—a deliberate choice that amplifies the music’s hypnotic quality. Tracks like ‘Bal Maï’ and ‘Da war’ are filled with an element of urgency and immediately grab you, while ‘Laz’ has a simple, almost minimalist soundscape and a hypnotic quality. The album’s centrepiece is undoubtedly ‘Yéba’, a song overflowing with positive energy that reflects Luc’s own burgeoning appreciation for Maloya. A wonderful introduction, Karioudja is definitely one to watch! – IA
Rafiq Bhatia – Environments
Rafiq Bhatia’s Environments, is less an album than a living landscape. Across eight improvised pieces, the New York-based guitarist invites listeners into vast, shifting worlds where sound behaves like weather, blooming, melting, and combusting in real time. Joined by trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and drummer Ian Chang, Bhatia blurs the lines between avant-garde jazz, ambient noise, and electroacoustic music, creating a sound that feels both elemental and deeply human. Two early releases hinted at the album’s scope. ‘Aviary I | Sunrise’ begins with pitch-shifted guitar imitating birdsong, swelling into luminous drones that mimic the gradual spread of dawn. It’s a patient unfolding that balances fragility and expanse. In contrast, ‘Volcano △’ rumbles with low-end tension, its simmering eruptions of percussion and guitar feedback conjuring tectonic force. Both tracks reveal Bhatia’s commitment to improvisation as a mode of world-building, each note a step deeper into a new terrain. Ultimately, Environments is about presence: surrendering to sound as it forms, shifts, and dissolves. It’s music to inhabit, not just hear, a sanctuary where time itself seems to slow. – WBS
Snorkel – Past Still Present Tense
Snorkel’s Past Still Present Tense is temporal vertigo pressed into vinyl—a decade’s worth of improvisational archaeology excavated and reassembled into nineteen tracks of prescient nostalgia. Like discovering Krautrock blueprints in a dub laboratory, the album weaponises avant funk grooves as navigation tools through post-punk’s cosmic debris. Seven musicians become eight or nine or four, and so on, across time’s membrane, conjuring sci-fi solitude from spiritual jazz ectoplasm. Electronics sample the past; drums propel toward futures that already happened. This isn’t resurrection—it’s reincarnation mid-flight, where experimental lineage meets perpetual momentum. A chronicle that reads like prophecy, proving the avant-garde’s best trick: making history feel inevitable while it’s still being written. You need this album in your life! – BT
EP’s
Rosie Turton & Miryam Solomon – maar
maar is a contemplative ambient journey where trombonist Rosie Turton and vocalist Miryam Solomon engage in delicate sonic dialogue. Born spontaneously during studio downtime, this 5-track EP features unedited improvisations blending trombone, voice, and modular synth. maar is a place where raw honesty is better than perfection, capturing intimate incidental sounds—shuffling bodies, crackling knobs, quiet sighs—that invite listeners into their exploratory process. Listen to Turton and Solomon as they search, resolve, unravel, and reconnect. Start with the immersive 12-minute wonder that is ‘deep’ and go on from there. Lovely stuff! – CFS
