Most independent labels are built around a taste. Man’s Ruin was built around a squeegee. Frank Kozik was already the most recognisable rock poster artist in America when he started the label in 1994. He had gone from black and white flyers stapled to telephone poles in Austin to large format silkscreens for Nirvana, Soundgarden [
There is no venue in this story. Sometime in the late 1980s, in the wind-scoured flats east of Palm Springs, a group of teenagers loaded amplifiers and a gasoline generator into a truck, drove until the city lights disappeared, and played until the fuel ran out. No stage, no address, no closing time, and no […]
Most festivals ask the same question every year: who is available, and who will sell tickets. Roadburn asks a stranger one. What music does not exist yet, and what would it take to make it exist for one night in Tilburg? That question is the whole thing. It explains why a festival built by two […]
Every heavy guitar tone you love owes a debt to a design brief that fit in a single sentence. In 1969, Mike Matthews, who had founded Electro-Harmonix in New York a year earlier, asked a friend for a circuit that would sing forever. That friend was Bob Myer, a Bell Labs engineer, and the answer […]
Ask where new guitar rock is coming from in 2026 and the honest answer keeps pointing north. Norway and Sweden are quietly turning out a wave of young bands that pull from blues, stoner, classic and psych rock without sounding like a tribute act. None of them are arena names yet, but together they make […]
