15 Reissue Record Labels You Need To Know About in 2024

Taking stock of our culture today, with its incessant taste for reboots and revivals, it seems fair to suggest that we presently have a thing for nostalgia. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise—the present and, more pertinently, the future are scarier prospects than what has already passed us by. As the climate disintegrates, people’s economic prospects become increasingly bleak and the United States faces another presidential race to potentially be fought by two men whose grasp on reality seems to grow more tenuous by the day, it’s understandable that we might wish to escape from our moment and to seek refuge in the past.

Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing when it comes to art, in so much as it has the potential to stifle creativity, but assuming old works are exhumed with care, their creators are treated with respect and an appropriate level of historical background is provided to help contemporary audiences understand where and when they came from, there is no reason why we can’t take something genuinely meaningful from them today.

At their best, reissue record labels sift through dusty collections and vast archives in search of long-lost musical works of profound artistic and historical value. It is their responsibility to learn the stories behind the recordings that they discover, to track down the people responsible for them—or their descendants—and to fairly offer their music up to new audiences, who, having been informed of their original contexts, are free to interpret them in ways that reflect their own lives and times. It is a rich and fascinating business, and these are just some of the labels who are doing it best that you should be aware of this year.

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Analog Africa

Be it the history we learn in school, the stories we hear in the news or the cultural output we’re exposed to, Africa is so often overlooked by people in the West. But thanks to record labels like the Frankfurt-based Analog Africa, that last point, at the very least, is being confronted. Analog Africa’s focus is primarily on releasing little-known music recorded on the continent between the late 1960s and the early ‘80s, which allows for a massive amount of styles and genres to appear throughout their ever-expanding catalog. One of their earlier releases, African Scream Contest, shines a light on the glorious, gritty funk that was produced throughout the ‘70s in Benin and Togo and which is every bit as characterful as the American funk that most of us define the genre by. In recent times, Analog Africa has also begun to release Latin American music, with the record Ecuatoriana – El Universo Paralelo de Polibio Mayorga 1969​-​1981 representing a notably arresting example, wherein earthy, Andean music is blended with synthesizers to instill a purposefully spacey quality that expresses a fascination with the wider universe that, in keeping with the world at large, was prevalent throughout Ecuador during the Space Age era.

Athens of the North

Taking its name from a nickname often assigned to its home city of Edinburgh, Athens of the North is a label with rare American funk and soul at its heart. Though they have a growing roster of contemporary artists and have begun to reissue music from other genres—the ‘80s post-punk of Scottish group Boots For Dancing has a charmingly funky quality that the more dour post-punk acts of today might do well to take note of—it’s mainly about rescuing soulful 7-inches and LPs from obscurity. A highlight has to be the 2015 reissue of Black Fairy, which is the soundtrack to a jazz-funk musical aimed at educating Black children about their history and heritage. Created by the Chicago-based LaMont Zeno Community Theatre in 1975, the musical seeks not to patronize its young audience or to shy away from the oppression they faced then and still face today, but to imbue them with a greater sense of themselves and where they came from. It’s a moving work, and some of the musical numbers are incredible—“Black Land of the Nile” is notably magical.

Cinedelic

Italy’s Cinedelic Records has put out plenty of smutty records during its time—a recent release is called Sexy Banana, and the euphemisms contained within are fairly on the nose—but those of the Italian porn stars Moana Pozzi and Ilona Staller, aka Cicciolina, really stand out. Moana and Cicciolina’s respective forays into italo-disco are very fun and very vulgar, but they more importantly introduce those of us unfamiliar with the Italian porn industry of the 1970s through to the 1990s to these fascinating women. Beyond their X-rated films and italo music careers, Pozzi and Staller were deeply political and co-founded the Love Party of Italy together, which advocated for the legalization of brothels and better sex education throughout their country. It’s not all about sex at Cinedelic, though. Incidentally, there are reissues of South African pop-jazz, plenty of film scores and a gloriously erratic record that’s probably best described as Japanese psychedelic big band jazz.

Death Is Not The End

Initially focused on collecting field recordings of early American blues, gospel and folk music, Death Is Not The End now dips into archives all over the world and releases the recordings it finds with their imperfections often firmly intact. Some of the label’s discoveries are literally more than a hundred years old, so it would be absurd to expect a clean and crisp listening experience from the resulting collections it offers up. But there is a sublime pleasure to be taken from the crackles and hums of recorded music gifted to us from the distant past. Auditory glitches do nothing to take away from the beauty of the label’s collections of early Brazilian country music, Ghanaian blues or Shidaiqu music, a genre that originates in Shanghai and combines western pop, jazz, blues and Hollywood-inspired movie soundtracks with traditional Chinese elements. Death Is Not The End has even put out an album of recordings taken from house parties in London that occurred between the mid 1980s and early 1990s. These are tactile records, where the distortions and blemishes of old, analog audio tracks serve to transport you into a specific time and place in perhaps the most visceral manner possible. If a picture says a thousand words, what does an amateur cassette recording of a banging, decades-old house party say?

Frederiksberg Records

Based in Brooklyn, Frederiksberg Records was set up by Andreas Vingaard, whose Scandinavian roots are quite evident throughout much of his label’s catalog. While it puts out music from all over the place—there’s Trinidadian calypso, Bermudian disco, and the cosmic jazz recordings of an Italian-American music teacher—so many of its releases originate from Vingaard’s native Denmark. One highlight is a 7-inch recorded by a group of musicians and peace activists called Kvinder for Fred, which means “Women For Peace,” whose two soulful tracks were released in 1980 in support of a fundraiser for a women’s pacifist network. While non-Danish speakers will obviously struggle to understand what is specifically being sung, the music is itself imbued with the collective joy and power of its performers in a way that is difficult to misinterpret. Elsewhere, the Danish musician and teacher Ole Knudsen’s 1992 sunny, romantic album Det Handler Om Kærlighed sits somewhere between folk and jazz, while the remarkably ethereal “cosmic synth-rock” record Sound Painted Pictures Of Cosmic Love by Gert Thrue is experienced rather like a pleasant, lazy drift through space.

Habibi Funk Records

Due to its mishmashing of Arabic and Western influences, the sound of Berlin-based Habibi Funk Records is really distinct. The label’s releases tend to be rooted in disco, soul, funk and jazz, but they bear an obvious twist born of the specific Arab region from which they came. Digging up records like that is far easier said than done, not only because the sound Habibi Funk seeks is so niche, but because of the specific histories of the countries within which it explores. In Somalia, for instance, many musical archives were destroyed by the extremist military group al-Shabaab. In Sudan, the rights to a great number of the records Habibi Funk might be interested in belong to a single wealthy man, who, at his own discretion, may or may not be willing to negotiate. Given the many hurdles and the fact that Habibi Funk’s releases come from such a vast region with so many different cultures and musical styles contained within, it’s all the more remarkable that the label maintains an identity that’s so coherent.

Jazzman Records

When Gerald “Jazzman” Short was working as a record dealer in London back in the ‘90s, he found that demand for rare vinyl was far outstripping supply and that prices were consequently on the rise. A solution, he figured, was to up the supply himself—and Jazzman Records was born. Specializing in rare American jazz and funk, Jazzman has unearthed some beautiful music over its quarter of a century of operations. An especially charming release came in May 2023, when the label put out Professor James Benson’s 1973 record The Gow-Dow Experience. Benson was a music teacher back in the ‘70s and, with his own cash, he pressed this LP he’d made with his teenage students. “I wasn’t trying to make a record to compete,” a 92-year-old Benson told Jazzman around the time of the reissue. “I was trying to make a record so the students would have something to remember the experience that we had. I was doing it for the kids.”

Light in the Attic Records

In 1997, Matt Sullivan, an American teenager embarking on a big adventure traveling across Europe, ended up in a car wreck somewhere in Madrid. Neither he nor the driver of the other car were badly hurt, and soon they were striking up a rapport. This other person, incidentally, was Iñigo Pastor, the co-founder of the reissue label Munster Records, who soon began to teach his young “crash mate” about how to successfully operate such a business. By the time Sullivan had returned to the States, he was ready to set up his own operation. Light in the Attic, as he called his label, has since gone on to reissue records from some out-and-out legends such as Lee Hazlewood—doing a surf rock album, of all things—Lou Reed, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Sixto Rodriguez, Sly Stone and Betty Davis. There are more obscure releases, too, like compilations of Native American folk, rock, and country, little-known Seattle funk and soul and one record charmingly aimed at children, which comes with a coloring book and features artists such as Nina Simone, Jerry Garcia and Kermit the Frog singing bedtime lullabies. It’s a remarkably sweet album that parents, perhaps more than their young kids, might wish to drop the needle on to help lull themselves into peace.

Luaka Bop

Set up by David Byrne in 1989, Luaka Bop has been responsible for breathing new life into so much old music over the years. If it wasn’t for the label, the Western world might well have never become familiar with the late William Onyeabor, an enigmatic figure who transformed into something of a cult legend following the 2013 release of the Who Is William Onyeabor? compilation of his songs. A man of fierce privacy, Onyeabor gave few interviews during his lifetime, but his novel electro-funk sound nonetheless became hugely popular in the West and even inspired Byrne to go on tour with a band of rotating collaborators—including Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, LCD Soundsystem’s Pat Mahoney, Ghostpoet and Sinkane—to perform his music. Other iconic figures in Luaka Bop’s back catalog include Shuggie Otis, Tim Maia and Alice Coltrane, whose album of ecstatic recordings represents the most beautiful expression of her Hindu spirituality. Though Luaka Bop today releases the music of contemporary acts, its reissues are still a major part of its business. The Pharoah LP by Pharoah Sanders, which was put out in September 2023, is especially gripping, while the Dance Raja Dance collection of Vijaya Anand’s film scores offers a fascinating taste of the first wave in electronic instrument usage in South Indian movies.

Mississippi Records

If you sift through the back catalog of Mississippi Records with the (reasonable) expectation of finding a strictly Mississippi Delta blues sound, you’re in the wrong place. The label isn’t even based in Mississippi, having originally been set up in Portland, Oregon—it stood on Mississippi Avenue, though, so the name isn’t entirely spurious—before later moving to Chicago. The output of the label is a mixed bag of great music, some of which is, indeed, blues recorded across the American South and Southwest, but there are also the hauntingly beautiful recordings of the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, whose mourning for the home that terror and violence forced her to abandon is evident with every note struck on her piano, and the roughly recorded Greek rebetiko music of Markos Vamvakaris, who drags his listeners into the sordid misery of the 1930s, conflict-plagued Athens within which he languished. There is strange, alien beauty, too, in Clara Rockmore’s album of classical compositions performed on a theremin, an instrument that emits a sound which should, by rights, feel cold and technological, but which inexplicably cuts directly to the core of the human heart.

Munster Records & Vampisoul

In the early 1980s, two brothers from Spain, Iñigo and Gorka Pastor, set up a zine called La Herencia De Los Munster, which was dedicated to their shared love of psychedelic music. It wasn’t long before that zine had spun off into Munster Records, a label initially focused on releasing old garage and punk records. Iñigo soon found himself engaging more and more with Latin American music, which eventually became such a big part of Munster’s reissuing activities that a dedicated imprint called Vampisoul was set up in 2002. Both Munster Records and Vampisoul are still going strong today with a constant spate of wonderful releases. There are entire studio albums from little-known artists like Marie Queenie Lyons being reissued, wonderful 7-inches from people like the Colombian sisters Elia y Elizabeth and the Californian punks The Zeros, and compilations covering specific genres and time periods, like one focused on Spanish-language yé-yé and another on ‘60s West Coast garage and psych. This new year of 2024 has already seen a few releases from Munster, including a pop punk record by Nikki and The Corvettes which is driven by such a ceaselessly heady, adolescent energy that you can’t help but smile as you bop along.

Numero Group

For the last 20 years or so, Numero Group has been one of the major players in the reissue scene. Its initial focus was on forgotten funk, gospel, and country music dug up from the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. But, in recent years, the label’s operators have found that, as the people behind those era’s records began to grow old and, in some cases, pass away, it has naturally become more difficult to track down those artists to negotiate a deal to release their music. With that, the label has started to shift its attention towards artists active throughout the 1990s. This pivot has added yet more breadth to the already wide limits of its decades-spanning catalog, which includes sounds as varied as the ‘60s garage rock of the Tsimshian First Nation group The Chieftones, the country stylings of ‘70s homemaker Joyce Street, the ‘80s Chicago club music of Maxx Traxx, and now the early ‘90s shoegaze of Ozean. The turn towards the darker, more desolate sounds of the ‘90s jars against Numero’s more joyful releases from earlier decades, but, given the foreboding air of much of contemporary life, perhaps it’s no surprise that the label has found an appetite among its customers for a more doom-tinged sounds these days.

Souffle Continu Records

There’s no getting away from it: The music on Paris’ Souffle Continu Records is largely very strange. That’s no bad thing, but it’s worth stating plainly right out of the gate. Listening to December 2023’s reissue of Le Composant Compositeur by Philippe Doray and Les Asociaux Associés should illustrate the point quite plainly, with Souffle Continu itself astutely explaining that the record comprises songs of the “schizo-electro” variety. An experimental record released some months before that is, if anything, even weirder—it’s called In Fractured Silence, and it makes for a legitimately terrifying time. This stuff is not easy listening, but I defy you to deny that it’s fascinating. For anyone who can’t quite hack the peculiarity of all that, though, there are far more grounded albums on offer, too, like the soulful jazz of Blues and News by Hal Singer and the wonderful Breton-language Marc’h Gouez by Kristen Nogues.

Time Capsule

With an emphasis on what it calls “time art,” the London-based reissue label Time Capsule doesn’t limit its releases to a specific genre, but instead focuses on music imbued with an unmistakable trace of the era and place from which it came. While the label’s output does span the entire width of the planet, there’s an evident preoccupation with music originating from Japan, reflecting label operator Kay Suzuki’s own heritage. The Nippon Acid Folk compilation contains some gorgeous protest songs from the 1970s, which, even to non-Japanese listeners unable to understand the lyrics, are quite evidently tinged with the hope of a young generation shaped by psychedelia, leftist politics and Dadaist sensibilities. The Tokyo Riddim compilation showcases artists performing Japanese reggae pop during the ‘70s and ‘80s, which is hardly a scene people from outside of Japan are likely to have encountered before, but which undeniably suits any listener with a taste for a steady tempo and honey-sweet vocals. At the stranger end of the spectrum we have the Anime & Manga Synth Pop Soundtracks, which feels rather like slipping into a 40-year-old video game from which the only escape is to proceed swiftly through the levels, overcoming any and every boss who stands in your way.

We Want Sounds

Be it releases like the Ray Charles-produced Windows Of The Mind by Billy Brooks or the self-titled soul-jazz LP by Alice Clark, there’s a thread of groovy American Black music that runs through much of Paris-based We Want Sounds’ catalog. While there is clearly a love and reverence for such sounds at the label, there is quite a bit more to explore, too. There’s the self-titled avant-funk album by French artist Ramuntcho Matta, which has an impish habit of seducing you to dance in one moment only to then submerge you in vast, empty weirdness the next. The 1973 record Sunset Gang by Makoto Kubota is a wonderful release, a straight-up rhythm and blues record that feels so familiar to English-speaking R&B devotees until the moment you realize the lyrics are partly being delivered in Japanese. Serge Gainsbourg even pops up in the We Want Sounds catalog, with his typically moody and seductive soundtrack for the 1968 French film Le Pacha, composed alongside Michel Colombier, being reissued in 2018. It’s almost possible to smell the cigarette smoke on his breath when Gainsbourg intones into the mic on the opening track “Requiem Pour Un Con.”