About Surface Noise

Surface Noise is a free weekly newsletter for people who still care about records. Every week we track new vinyl pressings, reissues and back-in-stock alerts from independent bands, labels and record stores, and send them straight to your inbox before they sell out.

The name comes from John Peel. When a record industry executive tried to convince him to abandon vinyl for CDs, the pitch was that CDs were better because they had no surface noise. Peel’s response: “Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen, mate, life has surface noise.‘” Peel spent decades on BBC Radio championing independent artists, labels and sounds the mainstream ignored. His sessions produced some of the most important recordings ever made. We are fans. This is our small version of that same idea.

The vinyl market has become genuinely hard for real fans. Records sell out within hours of release and appear on Discogs the same day at three or four times the price. The money goes to flippers, not to the bands, the labels or the stores that stocked them. Surface Noise exists to close that gap. If you know a release is coming, you can actually buy it at the price it was meant to be sold at, from the people it was meant to support.

We work with independent artists, labels and stores across indie, rock, punk, post-punk, shoegaze and post-rock. Labels like Rough Trade, Sub Pop, 4AD, Matador, Domino, Bella Union and Secretly Canadian are the kind of world we live in. It is curated and it is completely free for fans, always. If you are an artist, label or store who wants to be included, get in touch at contact@surfacenoise.net and we will add you to the list.