In the summer of 1968, an 18-year-old Genesis P-Orridge (then Neil Andrew Megson) gathered with friends in a modest attic space to experiment with sound. The result was 'Early Worm', a collection of recordings that capture the nascent creativity of an artist who would later become a pivotal figure in avant-garde music. These sessions, pressed to a single acetate in 1969, showcase a fearless exploration of noise, improvisation, and tape experiments, reflecting influences from psychedelia, Fluxus, John Cage, and beatnik Bohemia. Early Wormstands serves as a testament to P-Orridge's early commitment to pushing musical boundaries. The album's raw and unfiltered soundscapes offer listeners a rare glimpse into the foundational moments that would eventually lead to the formation of COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. Remastered and preserved in a limited vinyl pressing, with liner notes written by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge recalling the zeitgeist of the late 60′s UK underground.

Previously thought to be missing, these never-before-available songs were created on extremely primitive equipment in the attic of 6 Links Drive, Solihull, Warwickshire, England, by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and friends using Thee Early Worm as their collective group name. Only one copy had originally been pressed on an acetate. This disc and its corresponding analogue reel-to-reel master tape were discovered in the Porridge With Everything Archives by Ryan “Gelik” Martin during a recent reorganisation. This album is mastered directly from the original reel-to-reel tape and is made available to devotees of GenesisBreyer P-Orridge’s life-long musical body of work as a missing link, and curiosity, that reveals significant structural themes and sonic textures that, with hindsight, can be seen to have remained central to her creative processes ever since. Please be aware that this is inevitably a low-fire recording intended for collectors and researchers.

TRACK LISTING

1. Joint Effort
2. Firesong
3. Mourning To Thee Dusk
4. Clockwork Cloud
5. Rather Hard To Libel
6. A Very Short Middle
7. Balloon
8. Lament
9. Breakfast
10. Thee Early Worm

At just 21-years-old, p-rallel has cultivated a reputation that most can only ever dream of. He’s become a go-to producer in the scene and one of the most important polymaths of his generation, partly responsible for changing the future of the London clubbing and sonic landscape.

His latest EP, ‘Soundboy’, oozes confidence and style as p-rallel delivers his strongest project yet. Features include Greentea Peng, Louis Culture, Nayana IZ, Lord Apex and Venna, as well as a remix from IZCO and an extended instrumental version of ‘soulboy’, exclusive to this vinyl format.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Nice package that spans hip-hop, garage & drum & bass: rising star Green Tea Peng's distinct delivery pairing beautifully with lead track, "Soulboy".

TRACK LISTING

Signal
Soulboy (Ft. Greentea Peng)
WestBorn (Ft. Venna)
Packed Bags (Ft. Louis Culture)
Know Why (Ft. Nayana IZ)
Been Living (Ft. Lord Apex)
Soulboy (IZCO Remix)
Soulboy (Instrumental)

New York-based Patrick Sullivan AKA P-Sol has a terrific track record when it comes to refined re-edits and classy, sample-rich mash-ups. Even so, his latest effort, delivered on a tidy and must-check seven-inch, is particularly potent. On the A-side, he takes us into immersive, seductive and ultra-deep territory via the mid-tempo house headiness of 'Everybody' - a kind of 'quiet storm goes deep house' affair featuring warming electric piano chords, heady bass and selected vocal samples from a soulful classic. On 'Walk Away', he provides a warming, percussion-rich new take on R&B classic 'Don't Walk Away', adding her familiar vocals to a head-nodding instrumental full of mazy solos, rubbery bass guitar and handclap-heavy beats.

TRACK LISTING

Everybody (7" Version)
Walk Away

New York's P-Sol lands again on their small but already well-formed PS7 label with a pair of smartly crafted and soul-soaked cuts. 'Fat Beatty' comes first and glides in on silky, neo-soul style deep hip-hop with an easy, late-night warmth topped by a few bars of neat rhyming. On the flip is something more playful and funky with jazzy keys dancing over the languid rhythms. 'Legend' features some familiar gravelly but emotive tones as well as some other smart samples from the hip-hop world. Smooth yet substantial, this is P-Sol at his most relaxed and refined.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Here at Picc HQ we love a dusty dug hip-hop / soul mash-up. Following in the footsteps of GAMM, Moar, Mato et al, P-Sol blends Gil Scott Heron, Q-Tip (maybe?) and some head nodding grooves to devastating effect.

TRACK LISTING

Fat Beatty
Legend

New York-based Patrick Sullivan AKA P-Sol has long proven his credentials when it comes to editing hip-hop joints, mashing together classics, and generally pulling apart favourite jams and rebuilding them with a different perspective. Most of them come on PS7, as does this new long player, which is a top-shelf example of how to sample properly. Title tracks make subtle hints at inspirations, if not source material, as he works through loopy, sketchy jams that are short but sweet, and more club-ready rollers and loved-up beats that drip with sexuality and jazzy sophistication. A great accompaniment to a long journey or lazy afternoon.

TRACK LISTING

Child Of Tribe
What Gil Says
Alice
Far From Animation
Only You
Cabbage
Saturday Night
Margiano
My Love
Extra
One Mistake
Trouble Trouble
Shit Is Real (Remix)

The PS7 label continues to impress a year after first launching with more soul-drenched sounds and lazy grooves. P Sol is again the NYC beat maker behind this 7" which kicks off with the deep, laid back swing of 'Trust'. A range of vocals, from backing tunes to r&b females and smoky males, all coalesce around a most organic groove with hooky pads. 'Harlem World (7" Edit)' then has even more of a noodling funk bassline and deconstructed, slow motion groove full of hip-hop style conscious lyrics and serene string sweeps. Two real heart warmers which will likely sell out, just like all previous releases.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A silky smooth duo of finely produced disco / R&B grooves and echoing vocal loops, recalling the glory days of NYC disco with a production aesthetic that's right up to date.

TRACK LISTING

Trust
Harlem World (7" Edit)

Though better known as fine purveyors of kosmische and 'krautrock', Bureau B have been making excellent inroads into the NDW scene of late, and there are few more sought after records from the Neue Deutsche Welle than this self titled beauty from Munich's P!Off?. Released in 1982 by Transparent, the album achieved some respectable successes at the time, but quickly disappeared in the flood of NDW releases of the early 1980s. Songs like the boogie track "Mein Walkman ist kaputt" or the enchanting slow disco jam "In der Nacht" are still very popular among diggers and DJs to this day. They are happy to finally make this rarity available again. The ‘82 Album has become a sought-after collector’s item and cult object so we are very happy that Bureau B is presenting a lovingly remastered reissue after almost 40 years.

TRACK LISTING

Das Dicke Kind
Mein Walkman Ist Kaputt
Pass Auf!
In Der Nacht
Starker Bruder
Ich Kann Kein Franzosich (Dansez)
Schau Dich Doch An
Was Ist Das?

P.E.’s sophomore album, ‘The Leather Lemon’, ushers in a new era for the New York band. A wild ride through chewy bubblegum pop, sweeping synthetic orchestrations and mutant club beats, the album slides ever closer to the fully-realized pop sensibility only winked at with their debut album, ‘Person’ (2020), and subsequent releases.

Recorded primarily at Schenke’s Studio Windows in Brooklyn, NY, ‘The Leather Lemon’ was cultivated from a fertile creative period between spring 2020 and summer 2021, which also yielded 2021’s acclaimed ‘The Reason For My Love’ EP.

Digging into mystery, romance and sex appeal, the album centres its sound within a Bermuda Triangle of dance music, electronic composition and experimental rock. Members Jonathan Schenke, Bob Jones and Jonny Campolo play within pop parameters, building upon free-form collaboration to create a fluorescent groove machine that harnesses the energy of their frenetic live shows.

Singer Veronica Torres explores her softer side, expanding her vocal repertoire from spoken word and jagged growls to cherubic and sensuous psalms.

Sax virtuoso Benjamin Jaffe’s chiseled experimental tone is heard in an extended solo of true romance in ‘Tears in the Rain’, a sombre surrealist duet penned by Torres and Andrew Savage, singer/guitarist of Parquet Courts.

It is a reckoning record for the times; an album of psychedelic resurfacing, real-time response to world events, and soft, sympathetic magic. This is a collection of songs shaped by five individuals who embrace music-making as a way to centre themselves in times of uncertainty; it’s resilience and imagination given shape. ‘The Leather Lemon’ is a true sweet-and-sour listening experience, an album as bright and clear as it is fractured and fun.

“Drum cuts feel sharper and lighter, bringing a sense of structure... sensuality suits them well” - Pitchfork

“A skittery piece of post-punk with blithe vocals and saxophone squawks and brittle bits of synth” - Stereogum

“A sultry, infectious, off-kilter groove” - Brooklyn Vegan

For fans of Primal Scream, Parquet Courts, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Depeche Mode, Gang of Four.

TRACK LISTING

Blue Nude (Reclined)
Contradiction Of Wants
Lying With The Wolf
The Leather Lemon
Tears In The Rain
The Reason For My Love
Magic Hands
New Kind Of Zen
86ed
Majesty

P3RF3CT STRANG3RS is a collaboration between Mexican DJ/producer PAURRO and NY vocalist STEVEN KLAVIER. Featuring remixes from TAMA SUMO & LAKUTI, and MIDLAND, "RUN AWAY!" is inspired by 90s house classics & club divas, driven by a passion for melodic rhythms, organic beats, and silky smooth flow.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Electrified, warehouse friendly house trax via a NY - Mexico connection. Silky and sophisticated, matching grit and emotion across a perfectly balanced formula.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Run Away!
A2. Run Away! (Midland's Flow State Remix)
B1. Against!
B2. Against! (Tama Sumo & Lakuti Remix)

Ten years ago, Anderson .Paak didn't just release an album; he staged a full-scale takeover of the soul and hip-hop landscape. Released on January 15, 2016, 'Malibu' served as the definitive arrival of an artist who had spent years grinding in the underground before a star-making turn on Dr. Dre’s Compton. While his previous work hinted at his potential, 'Malibu' was the moment the world met the "Cheeky Andy" persona in full—a virtuosic drummer, a raspy-voiced crooner, and a sharp-witted rapper all rolled into one.

The album is a sprawling, sun-drenched journey through the Southern California coast, blending 1970s funk, church-reared gospel, and gritty boom-bap into something that feels both nostalgic and entirely futuristic. With a heavyweight production lineup including 9th Wonder, Madlib, Kaytranada, and Hi-Tek, the record maintains a warm, analog texture that was a breath of fresh air in an increasingly digital era. It’s an album that breathes, full of intentional imperfections and the kind of "in-the-pocket" groove that can only come from a seasoned live performer.

Beyond the infectious, dance-floor-ready energy of tracks like 'Am I Wrong' and 'Come Down', the album is a deeply autobiographical masterwork. .Paak uses the 65-minute runtime to unpack his life story with startling clarity, touching on his mother’s gambling addiction, his father’s incarceration, and his own brushes with homelessness with a sense of resilience that never feels heavy-handed. He weaves these heavy themes through a lens of triumph, grounded by vintage surfing documentary samples that give the project its cinematic, coastal atmosphere. It’s a celebratory record born out of struggle, anchored by his impeccable technicality on the drums and a guest list—featuring ScHoolboy Q, Rapsody, and The Game—that feels hand-picked to complement his specific brand of West Coast swagger.

A decade later, 'Malibu' stands as a modern classic and the blueprint for the soulful revivalism that would eventually lead .Paak to global superstardom and Grammy-winning heights. It remains a testament to the idea that the most profound music often comes from the most personal places, proving ten years on that the best way to move forward is to stay rooted in the groove.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Bird
2. Heart Don't Stand A Chance
3. The Waters (feat. BJ The Chicago Kid)
4. The Season / Carry Me
5. Put Me Thru
6. Am I Wrong (feat. ScHoolboy Q)
7. Without You (feat. Rapsody)
8. Parking Lot
9. Lite Weight (feat. The Free Nationals United Fellowship Choir)
10. Room In Here (feat. The Game & Sonyae Elise)
11. Water Fall (Interlude)
12. Your Prime
13. Come Down
14. Silicon Valley
15. Celebrate
16. The Dreamer (feat. Talib Kweli & Timan Family Choir)

The two-time GRAMMY Nominated timeless album, 'Malibu'. After dropping his debut album, 'Venice', in 2014, and then being featured on six tracks on Dr. Dre’s 'Compton' album in 2015, 2016’s 'Malibu' marked a major landmark moment in Anderson .Paak’s now storied career and paved the way for him to be the household name he is today. Known by many as one of the best live performers around, and with countless brand collaborations, sold out tours, chart topping albums, and even a joint album with the legendary Bruno Mars to his name, it’s safe to say that Anderson .Paak has reached Icon status. This classic catalog piece features appearances from Schoolboy Q, The Game, BJ The Chicago Kid, and more.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Bird
2. Heart Don't Stand A Chance
3. The Waters (feat. BJ The Chicago Kid)
4. The Season / Carry Me
5. Put Me Thru
6. Am I Wrong (feat. ScHoolboy Q)
7. Without You (feat. Rapsody)
8. Parking Lot
9. Lite Weight (feat. The Free Nationals United Fellowship Choir)
10. Room In Here (feat. The Game & Sonyae Elise)
11. Water Fall (Interlude)
12. Your Prime
13. Come Down
14. Silicon Valley
15. Celebrate
16. The Dreamer (feat. Talib Kweli & Timan Family Choir)

Anderson .Paak's 'Venice' returns with a limited run exclusive 10th anniversary vinyl reissue!!

GRAMMY-winning, influential, and cultural tastemaker, Anderson .Paak is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer known for his unique blend of R&B, hip-hop, funk, and soul. He first gained significant recognition with his debut album 'Venice' in 2014.

TRACK LISTING

1. Waves
2. Milk N' Honey
3. The City
4. Might Be
5. Miss Right
6. Put You On
7. Already (feat. SiR)
8. Dogtown
9. I Miss That Whip
10. Get 'Em Up
11. Paint
12. Drugs
13. Miki Doralude
14. Luh You
15. Right There
16. Off The Ground

Augustus Pablo (Horace Swaby) was born just outside of Kingston. “I am a Kingstonian,” he told the NME in 1986, “but my heart is for the hills.” This mystical connection to “the hills” is at the heart of Pablo's unique and immediately identifiable sound. By the late '60s, Swaby and his brother Dougie had founded a small sound system they called Rockers. The brothers spent a lot of time in record shops, including Aquarius, where owner Herman Chin-Loy heard Swaby experimenting on his melodica and was struck by the inspiration to record. The resulting tune was credited to Augustus Pablo, a name that Chin-Loy invented, as the story goes, to give an air of mystery to the release. Pablo recorded two more singles soon after with “Java” becoming a major hit and being voted Instrumental Song Of The Year by Jamaica's Swing Magazine. This success led to the Randy's label moving to create a full-length album from Pablo. Recording in the Randy's studio upstairs from the record shop “we weren't watching the clock...we had the studio,” Clive Chin recalled. The band included a cast of the greatest reggae musicians of all time: future Wailer Tyrone Downie on keyboards, Aston “Family Man” Barrett, “Fully” Fullwood and Lloyd Parks on the bass, Carlton Barrett, “Santa” Davis and Lloyd “Tin Leg” Adams were on drums and Earl “Chinna” Smith played guitar. In addition to these future Hall of Famers, the mixing board was helmed by Errol Thompson. Thompson and Chin would together pioneer a tough, new reggae sound that, Chin referred to as “Rockers” after the Swaby brothers' Rockers Hi-Fi sound system. 'This Is Augustus Pablo' is considered among the greatest collections of Jamaican instrumental music and is an essential part of reggae history. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Dub Organizer
2. Please Sunrise
3. Point Blank
4. Arabian Rock
5. Pretty Baby
6. Pablo In Dub
7. Skateland Rock
8. Dread Eye
9. Too Late
10. Assignment No. 1
11. Jah Rock
12. Lover’s Mood

Re-mastered version of the 1977 dub companion album to the classic Hugh Mundell release (also re-released this week) marking the 40th anniversary of the Greensleeves label. Pablo chucks Mundel outta the studio replacing him with buckets of thick ganja smoke and infinite tape delay! Heady and heavy, packing just as much punch as the politically charged vocal-led original; Pablo just hammers home his message through thick walls of bass psychedelic tape echoes. Obviously featuring the same musicians as the original album (listed on our site), extra mixing is done by Prince Jammy at King Tubby's (probably where the tape delay is housed). A wonderful companion piece and a great standalone dub album in its own right. Recommended!

TRACK LISTING

1. Levi Dub
2. Revolution Dub
3. Judgement Dub
4. Sufferer Dub

1. Unity Dub
2. Africa Dub
3. My Mind Dub
4. Western Kingston Style

As the meteoric rise of reggae began to captivate listeners around the globe in the 1970s, innovative artist Augustus Pablo emerged as vital creative force pushing the genre forward. An important figure in the Jamaican music scene during this remarkable era, Pablo was not only a skilled musician but an influential producer who shaped the sound of countless classic recordings. While his instrumental work and legendary dubs remain essential, Pablo was also responsible for iconic vocal tracks from a wide range of local talent, many of which were released on his own label Rockers. Now, Nature Sounds is proud to present Rockers United!, a collection of classic and rare vocal selections from the Rockers archives, all produced by Augustus Pablo. Deeply rooted in hypnotic, bass-heavy instrumentation, the album features remastered audio transferred from the original master tapes, with vocals by Jacob Miller, Delroy Williams, Hugh Mundell, Tetrak, Junior Delgado, Earl Sixteen, Spliffy Dan and more.

TRACK LISTING

1. Jacob Miller – Keep On Knocking
2. Junior Delgado – Away With You Fussing And Fighting
3. Hugh Mundell – Africa Must Be Free By 1983
4. Jacob Miller – Baby I Love You So
5. Delroy Williams – Think Twice
6. Spliffy Dan – No Justice Place
7. Tetrack – Let’s Get Together
8. Sister Erica – One In The Spirit
9. Dillinger – Brace A Boy
10. Jacob Miller – Who Say Jah No Dread
11. Earl Sixteen – Changing World
12. Paul Blackman – Earth Wind & Fire

“Both are legends because both innovate – and activate and motivate. King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock) arrived on earth in 1941. As a teenager he repaired radios before moving onto repair sound system speakers. Since the mid-50s, sound systems had conquered Jamaica, replacing live bands as the people’s favoured choice of access to their music. Tubby (a very slim man) found himself much in demand. In 1968, Tubby opened his own shop, Tubby’s Home Town Hi Fi. That led him into the world of sound, led him into recording studios where first he remixed. But then he got bored and in doing so released himself by devising his own amazing aural vision. Tubby invented dub and he did so by experimenting, by creating a unique template where he stripped away certain parts of the record, replaced them with another, highlighted some instruments, dropped others, and on top of this used all kinds of studio effects.

And thus King Tubby became King of Dub. In 1971, inevitably, he opened his own studio – and he took the music deeper. Many musicians loved his set up, including Augustus Pablo. Pablo (Horace Swaby) arrived on earth in 1954. He hit the musical scene playing…the melodica. No one had thought to do so previously. Again, the breaking of new ground was heard in Jamaica. The instrument was perfect for the King Tubby vision, Pablo’s playing producing a sound that was melodic, harsh, edgy, and soulful. Over Tubby’s shuffling rhythms and maelstrom of sound, Pablo improvises with huge imagination and skill. His major hit East Of the River Nile suggested and put forward a sound derived from the Far East and he was up and running. In 1975, he began a fruitful collaboration with King Tubby. Their first album together Ital Dub is a classic. The later King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown is more than that, it is legendary. And now The Messenger is upon us, an album cut at some point in the 70s and which remained in the vaults. Should it have stayed there? No way. This is music that upholds the very high stars of their past, music which fires itself on imagination and strength, a collusion and collaboration of immense proportions, music that provides and creates moods with such purpose and drive. Pablo’s melodica is centre stage but is counterpointed by contagious rhythms and touches of inspiration as horns and bass lines mesh in and out of view, held down by an ever steady barrage of sturdy drums and bass and a never ceasing source of imaginative and delightful sounds. The sound constantly changes and because it does the album contains a staggering array of moods, from upbeat into deep waters. The Messenger is forward music, still sounding as fresh as it did on the day of its conception. And it will do so for time eternal.” Paolo Hewitt 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Some classic riddims here from Tubz N Pabberz, in some cases in their original conception. Augustus' mystic melodica collides beautifully with Osbourne's magic dub techniques making for an enchanted early prototype of the genre.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Stars 03:16
A2. That’s Real 03:34
A3. Sugar 3:02
A4. Happy And Merry 02:59

B1. Watchful 03:04
B2. Prince 03:24
B3. Uprising 03:00
B4. Smiling Faces 02:49 

Following the releases of the vinyl compilation "Spring Break" and the maxi 12” compilation "Bardo for Pablo", Stroom conclude their Pablo's Eye trilogy with the typically diverse and utterly devastating "Dark Matter". "More than anything, Pablo’s Eye is a temporary atmosphere, like a taste or a dream…", well so say the sales notes, and if that's true, opener "Worship & Passion" is a Michelin starred appetizer, served at a restaraunt in purgatory. Celestial pads and poetic vocals seduce you with their heavenly charm, but that still doesn't shift the stainless steel anxiety that this could go the other way. "More Hestiant Than Before" seizes on this moment of uncertainty, applying the classic ambient combo of tremulous drone and stately strings but with an intensity far removed from your typical day spa. I'm a sucker for rhythm, and the rolling toms, propulsive bassline and ruthless breakbeat of "Different Observers" more than tickles my pickle, upping the energy before the moody and mystical ambience of "She Would Stand Alone" provides the party fear. Help arrives via the dramatic "He Closed His Eyes", an uplifting and esoteric composition adorned in hang drums and metallic textures, which strolls effortlessly into the paradisiac "When You Were Asleep", a triumphant combination of healing frequencies.
On the flipside, "L.A. Desert" takes a diversion into the ethno-ambient terrain of Laurie Anderson's "Mister Hearbreak", before the rainsoaked "She Told Him The News" harnesses the noir of Blade Runner. "Tamil Nadu" is trip hop in henna, while "A Pagan Use" exploits your inherent vertigo to pull you into its tower of song. Sparse studio dubbing and cinematic tones show us out on "Out Of The Corner Of Her Eye" and "Loisada Dub", bringing this most excellent and esoteric trilogy to an end.

STAFF COMMENTS

Patrick says: Stroom bring their Pablo's Eye trilogy to a triumphant close this week with the deep musica of "Dark Matter". Whether exploring straight up ambience, cinematic interlude or propulsive trip hop, Axel Libeert's outfit always maintain their signature sound. Pro-Tip - save a fortune on therapy and listen to "When You Were Asleep" once a day.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Worship & Passion
A2. More Hesitant Than Before
A3. Different Observers
A4. She Would Stand Alone
A5. He Closed His Eyes
A6. When You Were Asleep
B1. L.A. Desert
B2. She Told Him The News
B3. Tamil Nadu
B4. A Pagan Use
B5. Out Of The Corner Of Her Eye
B6. Loisaida Dub

More excellent and previously unreleased instrumental 1970s roots from 12 Tribes musical director Pablove Black and cohorts. Side A has an instrumental cut of the sublime rhythm used for Ewan Naptali's classic "Africa Awaiting Its Creator", the flip side has another instru titled "Sons of the Most High", which we think was voiced by Dan Hutson but never released.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Africa Awaiting (Instrumental)
B1. Sons Of The Most High (Instrumental)

Peach Discs' first release of 2026 comes from fast-rising star of the Manchester scene PACH. (pronounced 'pack'). Five slippery rollers built for dark rooms, wafty terraces and the most locked-in of afters.

"The Wake-Up Call" EP represents the full spectrum of the PACH. sound, one rooted in the minimal tunes coming out of Romania but with a cheeky playfulness that can only come from a life spent in the trenches of UK club culture. The A1 "Keep It Bubblin’" is a prime example, as Todd Edwards-style vocal chops flirt back and forth with dub-inspired feedback lines, or "5am Wake-Up Call's" skipping, UKG-adjascent hats. Things get a little rowdier with "Complex Waveform's" scuzzy bassline that wouldn't sound out of place coming from the Clone Records ecosystem. Here it's bolted to a chassis of tough, techy drums and trippy vox that tickle at your peripheries. Flip to the B-side for something a little deeper – the dubbed-out percussion and disembodied voices of "Not That Kinda Party" contrasting with the moody, low-key synthetic tones of "Book The Dungeon", both sharing a mutual concept of smartly stripped-back, hypnotic jams that focus on heads-down grooves and rolling energy.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Some new cat from Manchester (show yourself!), Pach makes frenetic, elastic, tightly woven tech and I for one am a FAN. Big ups gee this shit is mega!

TRACK LISTING

Keep It Bubblin
5am Wake-up Call
Another Complex Waveform
Not That Kinda Party
Book The Dungeon

Enter Pacheko, of Caracas, Venezuela. A long time producer and supporter of the breakcore sound in his homeland, his sound has slowly adapted to dubstep with exciting effects. Musically, "Tryouts" and "Bi-Polar Bear" are similarly structured to the golden era Moving Shadow (Think Hyper-On Experience's "Disturbance" applied to dubstep), with each track revealing a series of distinct movements. "Tryouts", for instance, starts out quite aggressive, yet ends dubby. Pacheko shares an office in a design firm in Caracas with Cardopusher, and once he heard what was being plotted up with Lo Dubs, he threw his hat in the ring and rapidly presented a positively scorching remix of "Tryouts" for the flipside. About the same time, Philly ruler Starkey was working on a remix for Cardopusher on Terminal Dusk, and when his dubstep-to-four-beat-bassline-eight-minute-and-change epic remix of "Bi-Polar Bear" was added to the pyre, the circle was complete.

In the spirit of the classic Jamaican recordings of the late 1970s and early 80s, Pachyman brings us his sophomore record with ventures in dub and roots reggae.

Inspired by Roots Radics band, this time Pachyman extends his exploration of the early Studio One sound, Sly & Robbie’s steppers style and a bit of soul jazz reggae.

Mixed using the techniques of Scientist and King Tubby, Pachyman pays tribute to the sonic pallet of the dub masters themselves.

Recorded in between the months of April and October 2019 at his own 333 House studio.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sensi
2. Dose It
3. 333 House
4. Guy Goodwin
5. Babylon Will Fall
6. Easy St. Special
7. I High
8. Smokeshop
9. Feeling Good
10. Zion Love Sound
11. Javius Malones
12. In A Yard
13. Dust To Dust

Over four albums, Pachyman has proven himself a dedicated craftsman working in the lineage of dub reggae while mastering the methodology of masters like King Tubby and Scientist, using vintage gear, constructing glorious walls of sound, and developing an intuitive understanding of the power of repetition. With 'Another Place', he synthesizes the myriad scenes that have recontextualized dub, from the synth-pop of William Onyeabor and Yellow Magic Orchestra to Basic Channel’s amniotic dub techno.

TRACK LISTING

1. Calor Ahora
2. In Love
3. Berlin
4. SJU
5. Take Me To Dance
6. False Moves
7. Strikes Back
8. Hard To Part
9. Another Place
10. ADSH

Formed in Buenos Aires by Inés Adam and Martina Nintzel, Pacifica emerged in 2021 from an online friendship sparked by a shared love of The Strokes. What began as a series of YouTube covers quickly evolved into a full-fledged creative force—culminating in their signing to TAG Music after a fan-funded trip to see The Strokes in New York City. Drawing on the raw urgency of early-2000s garage rock, the swagger of post-punk, and the emotional undercurrent of '90s alt, Pacifica’s music feels instantly familiar but entirely their own. Their sophomore album In Your Face marks a new era for the band as they continue to ride the line between vulnerability and rebellion, proving that even in a fractured world, two friends and a couple of guitars can still make something unforgettable.

TRACK LISTING

1. What You Doing
2. Fixer Upper
3. Indie Boyz
4. Just No Fun
5. Don't Blame Me
6. Mine
7. Let Me Have This
8. Corridor
9. Show Your Credentials
10. In Your Face
11. For Us
12. Wasted A Drunk

Heavyweight Digital Reggae featuring the late, great Jamaican singer Pad Anthony! For the lovers of King Jammys Digi era productions, and those ‘Shaka Style’ soundsystem selections.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Rebel
B1. Version

The Preservation label presents Burnt Offerings, the fourth album from Brooklyn’s Padna. As Padna, Nat Hawks initially made his name in the cassette underground on the revered Stunned label with two works of pop experimentalism displaying a bustling - often boggling - and vivid imagination. Veritable joyrides in sound and style, these releases were in line with the DIY aesthetic, primitive songcraft and eclectic sonic stew pioneered by the likes of Tall Dwarfs and forwarded by Olivia Tremor Control, though with an even more exploratory skew.

Burnt Offerings is a mellower, simpler counterpart to those earlier works, but still elastic and ever expanding in its peculiar pursuit of the transcendental. Making up its sweet, song-oriented meditations through a hazy circle of intoned psychedelia, drone, bedroom folk and dub filters, these tracks roam from kaleidoscopic melody slowly loping with a whimsical way to a contrasting, shadowy elegance for murkier intent. Burnt Offerings’ oddly charming spectrum – built on acoustic guitar, vintage synths, electric violin, toys, objects and a dizzying array of effects - is by turns romantic, melancholic, curious and always full of heart.

Burnt Offerings is the sixth and final work in Preservation’s limited edition series Preservation called Circa for 2012. Only 300 copies of each release in the series will be available and will feature a design by Mark Gowing. Each design is realised using an abstract alphabet that creates an interlocking grid, determined by artist and volume number for something both fixed, random and unified across the entire series.

Full on garage punk on Crypt.

4 track EP from Pain Struck Stanley Dumb, feat remixes from Radioactive Man & Paul Blackford.

The genesis of Pain Struck Stanley Dumb is as dignified as their sound. Picture this: 7am at an afterparty, and Doctor Luke Dumbstruck, commanding the decks. Neuro-dnb at its most raw, trousers around his ankle, and a single eyepatch completing the enigmatic tableau.

Amid this sonic debris, Christopher D Ashley found a kindred spirit - PSSD was born with a manifesto: to forge timeless electronics, drawing inspiration from Drexciya, Underground Resistance, Two Lone Swordsmen, and Juan Atkins.

Their latest release, "Breakfast At Brian's", marks a significant milestone: their debut on Radioactive Man's esteemed Asking For Trouble imprint. This record is a masterclass in stripped-back electro/techno production - a testament to the power of simplicity.

"The 13th release on my Asking For Trouble label, I proudly present :
Pain Struck Stanley Dumb 4 track 12" Vinyl, feat remixes from Radioactive Man and Paul Blackford (Breakin' Records, Militant Science, CPU, Battery Park, Twilight 76 ). This particular lead track has been sitting around since around 2010 and I've been playing it on and off ever since, thinking "This really needs to come out at some point" , but it's never happened until now..
Well, you can't rush these things can you. :)" - Keith Tenniswood

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: If ya get signed to Keith Tenniswood's Asking For Trouble label you know you're rubbing the machines up the right way. 'Certified mainframe molesters'. There's a list, look it up. (spoiler: there isn't - Ed).

TRACK LISTING

A1. Breakfast At Brian's
A2. Berwick Upon Tweed
B1. Breakfast At Brian's (Radioactive Man Remix)
B2. Breakfast At Brian's (Paul Blackford Remix)

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart exploded out of the late 00s Brooklyn indie scene with a bright, distinctive sound that paid tribute to everything from C86 to early Slumberland, Sarah and Creation label pop, but with a distinct American flavor drawn from groups like Smashing Pumpkins and The Exploding Hearts. Their 2009 self-titled debut is rightly considered a classic, and with Perfect Right Now we're thrilled to round out the story of The Pains' early years.

The ten tracks here compile the much-loved (and LONG out of print!) b-sides from the 7"s that accompanied that first album, the follow-up Higher Than The Stars EP, a couple of scarce tunes from split singles, and finally "Say No To Love," a spectacular tune that points the way forward to the band's next chapter. There are some proper lost classics here, songs like "Kurt Cobain's Cardigan" and "The Pains of Being Pure at Heart" that still pack the dancefloors at indie discos from Göteborg to Glasgow and we couldn't be more excited to make them available again.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A quintessential part of 00's indie, POBPAH epitomise the glistening post-grunge production and crystalline, playful melodies that were the antithesis to grunge's super serious, thoughtful textures.

TRACK LISTING

Kurt Cobain's Cardigan
Come Saturday ('searching For The Now' Version)
Ramona
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
Side Ponytail
Higher Than The Stars
103
Falling Over
Twins
Say No To Love

Most cities have a cyclical history to their punk scenes, and Philadelphia is no exception. The duo of Dan Yemin and Dave Wagenschutz (Good Riddance) has helped lead the charge of more than one wave, first in the mid-90s in the legendary Lifetime and then again with Kid Dynamite. Now, reunited in Paint It Black, the duo is poised to kick off yet another chapter of passionate and threatening music. Paint It Black marks Yemin's vocal debut and introduces Dave Hause on guitar and Andy Nelson on bass. Paint It Black delivers unabashed, uncompromising hardcore, negating the preconceived boundaries between the personal, political, melodic and aggressive, accentuating a much-appreciated axiom: maximum intensity. CVA is highly recommended for fans of Black Flag, Seven Seconds and Faith.

Paint It Black's follow up to the last year's "CVA" picks up it's intensity and urgency and runs with it at full tilt. It's a highly charged catharsis, very effectively expressing through poignant lyrics and a raging sound the pain surrounding such personal trauma as divorce and the generalised agony of war. This is chainsaw hardcore echoing the bruising violence of Black Flag, "Damaged" vintage - yup, it's really rather good.

Porto-based experimental duo Paisiel comprise Portuguese drummer João Pais Filipe and German saxophonist Julius Gabriel. Both full-time musicians across several genres and disciplines, with Rocket Recordings having just released a collaborative album between João and Salford hit squad Gnod titled ‘Faca De Fogo’, the vibe Paisiel achieve across their second album ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’ sounds specific, singular and ultimately unique.

The pair first met in 2014, began recording as Paisiel in 2017, released their first, self-titled album on cassette through local label Lovers & Lollypops in 2018 and had it pressed onto vinyl in 2019 courtesy of Rocket Recordings, who have maintained the partnership for this follow-up. A progression from what was already forward-facing music, ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’ is a single 39-minute piece recorded using improvisation based around composed structures, or what the drummer calls “instant composition”.

Beginning quietly and mournfully, an array of percussion, avantelectro synths (think Cabaret Voltaire or Muslimgauze) and expansive sax swiftly takes hold. At times, this could be a late 60s proto-Krautrock cafeteria jam, early 70s New York loft jazz happening or Brazilian street parade from whichever decade takes your fancy.Listeners might read all kinds of emotions or states of mind into this music: Paisiel themselves play to transcend such earthly concerns. ‘Unconscious Death Wishes’ is their way of evoking, in Julius’ words, “landscapes, shapes, colours, proportions and movements”.

TRACK LISTING

A. Unconscious Death Wishes Part 1
B. Unconscious Death Wishes Part 2

Pajaro Sunrise has a new album and that is very good news."The Future Is Not What It Used To Be" presents a wonderful collection of songs that capture, almost unintentionally, the complexity of modern life.

Since his last album,"Man Of Many Faces", Yuri Méndez's days have been busy with five moves, a pandemic, several soundtracks and the surprise release of three singles in Spanish. And despite –or thanks to– the many unopened boxes, studio work, global emergencies and an unnecessarily large number of different rooms, out of those convulsive years emerged a luminous album that speaks lucidly of the passage of time, of truncated expectations that herald liberations and of growing old not as a drama, but as the long process of "learning not to worry and to love the bomb".

Throughout the album, irony shines through, as in 'Small Circus, So Many Clowns' or 'Parking Lot', while pop innocence sparkles in 'Devotion' or 'Hey Matisse'; combined also with Pajaro Sunrise's more somber moments, such as 'The Mute And The Blind', 'Shallow Waters' or 'Inhale', where Mendez's voice reaches a new degree of maturity without completely shedding the candor ofhisfirst albums.

Pajaro Sunrise is a rare specimen in Spanish independent music, a guy who treads his own path with a catalogue of exceptional songs and a diverse body of soundtrack work. He is a craftsman who has produced a flawless album which leaves room at times for traces of Mark Fisher and Ken Kesey, while other moments feature post-Lacanian puffy-cheek trumpet sounds.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Mute And The Blind
2. Small Circus, So Many Clowns
3. Devotion
4. Parking Lot
5. Hey Matisse
6. Not Hungry
7. Inhale
8. Lover Lover
9. The Real Top Of The Pops
10. Shallow Waters
11. Pointless
12. The Sweetest Thing

Hailing from France with Moluccan roots and now based in Amsterdam, Pala.G effortlessly blends global musical influences into his own unique sound, moving free like the waves that guided his ancestors halfway across the globe. Now with his debut on Jiwa Jiwa Records.

In "Sometimes" Pala.G infuses contemporary R&B with psych elements, delivering hazy vocals, and introspective lyrics wrapped in feel-good melodies, leaving you grasping for the repeat button on this soul not soul anthem that's an earworm for every season.

"Don't Ask!!!" offers an off-kilter slow jam experience like no other, with sparse drums, smooth guitar licks, and distorted vocals creating a hypnotic atmosphere for your mind to wander.

The record comes in a hand stamped sleeve in different colors,representing the Moluccan sea, its beaches, and jungles, and the blood and spirit of their ancestors.

TRACK LISTING

Sometimes
Don't Ask!!!

For a limited period both formats come with a free 5 postcard set in a printed wallet. Each postcard featuring the artwork of the release.

The second Palace Brothers album was originally self-titled (or untitled), though the moniker "Days In The Wake" was appended to later pressings. The release is at once a progression from and reduction of the twisted lo-fi country-folk of the debut album. "Days In The Wake" is essentially just Oldham, his cracked tenor and his acoustic guitar. The songs aren't as unremittingly dark as on the previous recording, since Oldham injects a fair amount of stream-of-consciousness humour and light-hearted, elliptical song-poetry. The extreme sparseness amplifies the emotion in Oldham's voice and lyrics though, and on "You Will Miss Me When I Burn" the emotional desolation is harrowing, bringing to mind the best work of Mark Eitzel. The brainy non-sequiturs of the closing "I Am a Cinematographer" are evidence that there's more forethought than savant at work in Oldham's artistic process.

For a limited period both formats come with a free 5 postcard set in a printed wallet. Each postcard featuring the artwork of the release.

The debut Palace Brothers album was released in 1993 when much American music was going through a particularly bombastic period. In contrast ‘There Is No One’ sounded like a field recording, as though a tape of back porch confessionals recorded by Alan Lomax as an example of high Southern Gothic style, had been newly discovered and released.

The sense of other worldly timelessness was enhanced by the song titles, which were rich in biblical imagery and a backwoods sensibility: ‘Idle Hands Are The Devil’s Plaything”, “I Tried To Stay Healthy For You”, “O Lord Are You In Need?” The music on the record was equally arcane and ancient sounding. Banjos and loose snare drums rattle together in accompaniment to Oldham’s guitar and voice as he sings songs of a desperate and broken worldview. That he was just twenty-two at the time led some critics to wonder if Oldham was acting out a role as a Steinbeck character.

Listening to the record almost twenty years after its release it’s impossible to underestimate “There Is No One’s” influence on what would become known the New Weird America or alt-country, and that any questions about Oldham’s integrity, motives or authenticity are a dead end compared to this dark, unsettlingly brilliant record.

For a limited period both formats come with a free 5 postcard set in a printed wallet. Each postcard featuring the artwork of the release.

'Lost Blues' was the first compilation Oldham released. The collection rounds up many of the Palace singles and B-sides along with some unreleased recordings.

The debut Palace Brothers single: ‘Ohio River Boat Song’ is included as is Oldham’s version of Sally Timms of The Mekons song ‘Horses.’ Although a cover ‘Horses’ is one of the definitive Palace songs. Oldham’s voice wavers with an intensity he saves for more emotional lyrics and an extraordinary guitar solo by David Pajo cuts through the rest of the song with a delightfully unhinged aggression (Oldham had asked Pajo to play a solo that sounded like Slash).

Other highlights of Lost Blues are the songs from the ‘West Palm Beach / Gulf Shores,’ two of the dreamiest tracks Oldham has recorded and a highlight of the Palace canon. The live version of ‘Riding’ is also a revelation. Originally featured on the ‘There Is No One” album, the song was an agnostic foot stomp about brothers and sisters, here it is turned into a three guitar assault. The contrast perfectly illustrates how Oldham refused to be constrained by any signature style, but how everything he did under the Palace name was instantly recognisable as his and his alone.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ohio River Boat Song
2. Riding
3. Valentine's Day
4. Trudy Dies
5. Come In
6. Little Blue Eyes
7. Horses
8. Stable Will
9. Untitled
10. O How I Enjoy The Light
11. Marriage
12. West Palm Beach
13. Gulf Shores
14. (End Of) Traveling
15. Lost Blues

Available on vinyl for the first time since 2020. The ‘Someday, Somewhere’ EP comprises the single 'I’ll Be Fine', written and recorded by the band remotely during lockdown, alongside a selection of unreleased tracks recorded during the ‘Life After’ album sessions including the EP's much-loved title track (previously a live set exclusive). Originally released back in 2020 the vinyl version includes the bonus track ‘Trouble On The Water’ as previously released on the band’s ‘Hoxa Sessions’ acoustic EP. Bassist William Dorey left Palace after their first album and now records under the name Skinshape. 

TRACK LISTING

Someday, Somewhere
I'll Be Fine.
Flesh To The Fallen
Trouble On The Water

For a limited period both formats come with a free 5 postcard set in a printed wallet. Each postcard featuring the artwork of the release.

The mini album 'Hope' was another change in sound, and featured arrangements by Sean O Hagan, then of the High Llamas. Featuring six songs including a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Winter Lady, Oldham’s voice is set in a reflective and soft-hued sound throughout.

The use of piano as a lead instrument suggest a parlour-song atmosphere, something which is enhanced by Oldham’s frequent repetition of lines in the lyrics, which also expand on his own brand of surrealism. On ‘Untitled’ Oldham sings ‘Did you like the cake? some of it was nice’ as though the importance of the cake is of a more far-reaching consequence than the cake and anyone who may be eating it realises.

TRACK LISTING

1. Agnes, Queen Of Sorrow
2. Untitled
3. Winter Lady
4. Christmastime In The Mountains
5. All Gone, All Gone
6. Werner's Last Blues To Blockbuster

Armed with an already extensive back-catalogue of stunning music, Palace return with the announcement of their brand new, deeply personal, fourth studio album, Ultrasound - out April 5th, 2024. The record’s production sees the band reunited with Adam Jaffery, 8 years after working together on their debut album, and arrives off the back of ‘Part I - When Everything Was Lost’ and ‘Part II - Nightmares & Ice Cream’, the band’s 2023 companion EPs. While writing the first batch of songs for the album, frontman Leo Wyndham’s partner suffered a late miscarriage, which left the band’s chief song-writer bereft and adrift. Ultrasound naturally became an open diary of their year-long struggle from devastation to deliverance.

“It was incredibly hard to comprehend what had happened, how to deal with it and how to move forward,” Leo says. “The album is the journey of that absolutely earth-shattering experience - starting with a loss, then a period of processing, and then finally acceptance, release and growth. And being in awe of women within that. Their dignity, strength and courage in how they can deal with these things that feel beyond a man.”

Pale Blue Eyes release a remix of ‘How Long Is Now’, the first single from new album 'New Place', by legendary ‘spatial landscaper’ Richard Norris on their own Broadcast Recordings label. The original track features on their current ‘New Place’ album released earlier this year.

Richard describes his approach to the track as such:
"As soon as I heard the track I knew I'd approach the mix somewhere along the autobahn, about 3am, with Klaus Dinger trying to overtake on the inside lane. Approaching the speed limit. One for the kosmik and expanded psychonauts."

TRACK LISTING

1. How Long Is Now (Richard Norris Remix)
2. How Long Is Now (Richard Norris Remix Instrumental)

The third album from Pale Blue Eyes is called 'New Place' – invocation of fresh horizons; swapping creamy Devon for the synth central of Sheffield. The album arrives on the back of extensive and emotional transit. For PBE, 2024 started with a wonderful tour of 12 European countries with Slowdive. Over 12,000 kilometres. Snow and deep cold in Norway and Poland. Drought-stricken landscapes in France and Spain. On and on, joyously so. The year’s end brought more movement for the married couple at the core of Pale Blue Eyes, singer and guitarist Matt Board and drummer and synth queen Lucy Board. Sadly, family tragedy catalysed a move from South Devon to South Yorkshire.

“Change is a theme throughout the new album,” says Lucy. “It’s about being in a new place, starting again but reflecting on the journey and what and who got us to this place. It's a celebration of making it to this point and starting again.”

That new start is fully manifested on Pale Blue Eyes’ new album, released on the band’s Broadcast Recordings label. Return single 'How Long Is Now' brought uplifting synth carousels and was titled after a Berlin mural and art installation. On 'Pieces Of You' gorgeously deliquescent guitar ripples out over Matt’s distinctive tenor voice. Be There is meditative, delicate, with guest vocals from Rachael Swinton of Glasgow electronic-rock duo Cloth. Aubrey made his own fretless bass. It features on the track 'Seven Years'. Several tracks have input from two musicians who have featured in the PBE live line-up – Tom Sharkett, music producer and guitarist with W.H. Lung, and music producer and musician Lewis Johnson-Kellett.

“The new album comes with a new landscape,” says Matt, summing up. “We were in new surroundings with new city sounds – a bit overwhelming for me, but also exciting. I hope the result is uplifting, driving, a perpetual forward motion." There are new sounds but also a steadfast Krautrock influence, alongside some of the band’s other favourite moods and flavours. The album reflects the end of an era and embracing new beginnings in a new place.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Beautifully rich shoegaze soundscapes with shimmering chorused guitars and dreamy, lysergic vocals swimming over the top. There are echoes of classic 90's 'gaze here, but it's accomplished with an injection of modern sounding pop song structures and a keen production ear. Wonderfully hazy, but without being muddied, Pale Blue Eyes take the best elements of shoegaze, synth and pop and bring them together perfectly.

TRACK LISTING

1. How Long Is Now
2. Scrolling
3. Pieces Of You
4. On The Surface
5. The Dreamer
6. Travel Day
7. Rituals
8. Our Lost Words
9. Now And Again
10. Be There
11. Half Light
12. Seven Years 

Spanning recordings from 2018 to 2025, 'Archive Vol. 1' is a curated collection of outtakes, alternate versions, and previously unreleased tracks that didn’t find a home on the band’s three studio albums. The band describes the project as “an album that came together almost by accident,” born from revisiting forgotten demos and half-finished ideas that, when assembled, revealed a cohesive and emotionally resonant body of work.

The album features 18 tracks, including fan-favourite live staples and experimental interludes.

With its blend of shoegaze textures, new wave energy, and introspective songwriting, 'Archive Vol. 1' offers a unique glimpse into the creative process behind Pale Blue Eyes’ evolving sound.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: I always think it can give you a good impression of a band if you listen to their outtakes as well as their LP's and this one really leaves me thinking 'why would you leave that off?' Ram-packed with moments of divine beauty. Mixed and mastered by Dean Honer.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Park
2. New Boots
3. Daisy
4. This House
5. Signify
6. Don’t Hurry Time

7. Believe It All
8. Records
9. How Long Is Now (Alt Version)
10. Loops
11. Not The End Of The World
12 Outro (Narcissist)

The PBE album is called Souvenirs because, as Lucy explains, “The songs encapsulate a few years’ worth of memories and experiences – times of change and personal sadness. The songs were an outlet for us and they now serve as souvenirs of all those times”.

As Pale Blue Eyes worked toward the album, Matt’s father died – the album is dedicated to the late Danny Board. Matt has endless fond memories of his father, including “when I’d wake up on a summer’s morning to the sound of dad playing a Cocteau Twins album – really loud with all the windows and doors open”. PBE built their studio adjacent to Matt’s old family home – so they could be there to help Matt’s mum through long-term illness. The album includes reflection on death and despondent times, as on the former single TV Flicker, which, perhaps surprisingly given the subject matter, became a playlisted radio smash. But Pale Blue Eyes accentuate the positive – reacting to difficult times by making an album that pulses with exhilaration, beauty and joy.

The album brims with a kind of elective positivity, as made clear when Matt lists the album’s themes: “Embracing good times, escapism, losing yourself in a moment of bliss when the world around you is going to shit… Processing and understanding loss and grief and using our music as a vehicle to move on… Fighting against the mundane and not giving up on dreams… The pure joy of a good night out or a moment of being moved by a band or a piece of artwork or a great film… Making the most of the time you have…” The tracks Little Gem and Globe, in particular, beam with positivity – alighting on optimism, gardening and hedonistic days in a shared student house.

TRACK LISTING

1. Globe
2. TV Flicker
3. Little Gem
4. Dr Pong
5. Honeybear
6. Star Vehicle
7. Champagne
8. Sing It Like We Used To
9. Under Northern Sky
10. Chelsea

“When Mum died, five years after Dad, there was this charge hanging in the air, connecting each person in the room,” says Matt. “Time stopped. I felt like I momentarily entered an alternative dimension between life and death. Days and weeks later I’d see my family in every corner of the house – all the reminders, ghosts and memories. Then, gradually, it felt like time for a new start, moving on from the house and my amazing parents.”

While the band’s debut LP Souvenirs captured memories and melancholy from around the death of Matt’s father, This House is its next-door neighbour. The new album was finished in the immediate aftermath of the death of Matt’s mum. As soon as the record was completed, PBE were packing up the contents from their self-built Penquit Mill home studio, financed through endless casual work and a bank loan. The location was a dream – in the middle of nowhere, just south of Dartmoor, midway between Plymouth and Totnes.

The studio was where they spent hours recording and self-producing both records, while supporting Matt’s mum through the decline of a long-term illness. Matt and his bandmate and wife Lucy Board (drums/synth/production) have now returned north, to her native Sheffield, with funk-mad bassist Aubrey Simpson living between Devon and London.

“It’s a more sombre and more ecstatic album, with an urgent desire to remember and enjoy every moment,” says Matt of the record’s life-defining “end of era” moments. “We’ve dealt with loss throughout both albums,” says Matt, “but this time there has been rebuilding – appreciating and relishing the things and people still here.” Pertinently, album tracks ‘Sister’ and ‘More’ celebrate the complexities of relationships between family and friends.

“We wanted to turn a shitty situation into something positive,” says Lucy, “ so we put all our energy into making music that was fun to play live and perhaps open up a way out.” Matt concurs: “The album captures moments of elation and joy alongside the grave mood that eventually engulfed our home. During those tough times we played all over the UK and overseas, buoyed by the thrill of people listening to what we’d been working on… knowing two days later we’d be in a hospice saying our final goodbyes to Mum. The ultimate headfuckery.”

PBE say the new album is a “slightly more worldly-wise sibling” to 2022 debut LP Souvenirs. The latter was roundly acclaimed. “Joyous... propulsive… exhilarating”, said Uncut. Magic of France were impressed: “Ultrapuissante... orgasmique... profondeur infinie.” Line Of Best Fit said, “‘Like all great debuts it’s both a culmination of their beginnings as well as a pointer to the wide open road ahead.”

Mixed and mastered by Moonlandingz’s Dean Honer (Róisín Murphy, The Human League, I Monster), with jam sessions its driving force, This House bounces through analogue tape delays and effects pedals to capture life’s oscillating journey. Celebratory ‘Simmering,’ and ‘Hang Out’ offer peaks, highlighting the importance of pressing the ‘off’ switch. “It’s about enjoying simple moments,” says Matt, “the sun on your face, hanging with friends in the pub, looking at the night sky...”

Any threat of troughs are lifted by motorik rhythms from their Moog Little Phatty and Prophet 12 – thanks to Lucy’s fascination for South Yorkshire synth innovation. The dissertation for her music degree was titled “An Investigation into Sheffield's Alternative Music Scene Between 1973 and 1978, with Particular Reference to Cabaret Voltaire.”

With This House, Lucy’s hometown sounds blend with Aubrey’s evangelical interest in Motown and various funk titans. These diverse touchstones comes through in the PBE album’s blend of pop hooks and psych-rock sophistication. ‘Heating’s On’ is a driving anthem, glistening with ’80s guitar and a trumpet part care of Lucy. ‘Sister’ mixes goth-rock guitar with DIY choral grandeur, a tasty mix of The Cult and Joe Meek. ‘Millions Times Over’ takes feelings of hopelessness and then creates a lovely bittersweet feel via shimmering synths and wistful vocals. The album concludes with the widescreen expanse of ‘Underwater’, a moving, meditative set-piece.

“Mum always said she loved hearing the sounds of the recording process as people would come and go from the studio,” Matt remembers.

Making music as a means to go on, Pale Blue Eyes’ two albums bookend other significant moments, such as soundtracking the Atmos arts-and-housing project in Totnes (featuring a sound-and-light installation by Brian Eno). There was also the time PBE’s beloved old Citroën blew up between gigs, reinforcing a valuable lesson. “You have to embrace the Berlingo!” says Lucy, rolling out the band’s new motto.

“Change is inevitable,” Matt adds. “You have to embrace it all, the good and bad, and the horribly ugly.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: With rich grooving guitars, snappy percussion and Matt Board's gorgeous psychedelic vocal stylings, Pale Blue Eyes' formula might not sound like the most complex, but it results in the huge, warm sound bath we hear on 'This House'. Beautifully written melodies and stuck-in-your-head riffs abound, Pale Blue Eyes have smashed out an incomparable debut.

Electronic duo Pale Blue returns to Crosstown Rebels with their long-awaited sophomore album ‘Maria’, revealing a spellbinding eight-track trip across electronic spheres.

After forming their critically acclaimed Pale Blue project with their debut album ‘The Past We Leave Behind’ in 2015, Mike Simonetti (Italians Do It Better) and Elizabeth Wight (Silver Hands) have only furthered intrigue and interest in the years since, uniting for a series of expansive EPs on Simonetti’s own 2MR imprint exploring dancefloor-focused acid through to gripping electronica. Having already offered a first look and preview into their long-awaited album return via three singles on the label, with remixes provided by DJ Tennis, Kölsch, Fort Romeau and Perel, mid-May sees Simonetti, and Wight finally reveal their sophomore album ‘Maria’ on Damian Lazarus’ Crosstown Rebels - offering a uniquely raw yet seamlessly polished trip into their idiosyncratic world.

“‘Maria’ is an album of love songs - the good, the bad, and the ugly… The album is written entirely in Elizabeth’s voice. These are all her words - her thoughts, based on her personal experience. When writing this record I took inspiration from classic rock LP sequencing, and tried to dial in on a coherent concept, a natural flow. Although these are clearly techno tracks, one would argue they have more in common with rock music than dance music. I wanted to try make something a little different, verse/chorus/verse tracks but still heavy enough for the club, full of melody and emotion… poppy but not THAT kind of poppy. Pale Blue has been known to take on political subject matter in the past, but the politics of love is something we can all relate to.” - Mike Simonetti.

Opening with the slow-blooming and beautifully crafted dreamlike melodies of the aptly titled ‘Spells’, the eight-track long-player navigates and traverses the broader realms of electronica through to lighter pop-influenced touches and sonics for an absorbing and compelling dive. ‘Dive’, the first single from the project, provides a hazy but resonant web of polyrhythms and textures guided by Wight’s captivating vocals, while ‘Laura’ reaches for sparkling leads synths amongst sweeping tones and moments of bliss. Offering up change to the aesthetic ‘Ice Is Falling’ is a stripped-back and haunting production as Wight’s vocals carry eerie tones and pockets of space for a hair-raising effort.

The second half of the project welcomes second and third singles ‘No Words’ and ‘Together Alone’, with the playful tones of the former complementing the wistful and floaty soundscapes of the latter for two tracks to keep listeners in a trance. Closing out the package, ‘The New Year’ is a delightfully worked pop-leaning gem built on electronic foundations with a slinking acid-tinged bassline snaking through the mix, before shaping things up with the anthemic and rosy glow of final track ‘The Last Song’.

Further emphasising Simonetti and Wight’s innate connection and bond when creating and crafting music, ‘Maria’ is an exemplary display of the two at their best across a collection of eight productions straddling the electronic-pop border with poise and aplomb.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Spells 
A2. Dive 
B1. Laura 
B2. Ice Is Falling 
C1. No Words 
C2. The New Year
D1. Together Alone 
D2. The Last Song 

The Pale Fountains were formed in Liverpool in 1980 by Mick (as he was then known) Head with Chris McCaffery on bass, Thomas Whelan on drums, trumpeter Andy Diagram and guitarist Ken Moss.

Signing with Virgin in late 1982, this was the first time the music world became aware of the work of singer-songwriter Michael Head.

1985's . . . From Across The Kitchen Table was produced by Ian Broudie, soon to form and redefine sugar-pop with The Lightning Seeds. The album is more unified than its predecessor as it was recorded over a shorter period of time. Lead single Jean's Not Happening is one of the great lost indie gems of the 80s, complete with a powerful string arrangement. The closing song, September Sting, is a joyous slice of scouse-a-billy that points the way clearly to later groups such as The Las.

Near four decades later, Michael Head is adored by his hardcore following and the wider world freshly discovers him as each of his new releases achieves widescale acclaim, whether it be his subsequent band, Shack, or his current outfit, the Red Elastic Band. But The Pale Fountains was where it all began.

This re-issue faithfully replicates the original 1985 Virgin Records UK release with printed inner and is pressed onto high quality 180g vinyl.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Brilliant follow up to Pacific Street, this record had a harder sound than its voluptuous predecessor but in Shelter, These are the Things, It's Only Hard and the title track Mick's songwriting was still right up there. Did I miss one out? Jean's Not Happening: World Number One that never was!!!

TRACK LISTING

Shelter
Stole The Love
Jean's Not Happening
Bicycle Thieves
Limit
27 Ways To Get Back Home
Bruised Arcade
These Are The Things
It's Only Hard
... From Across The Kitchen Table
Hey
September Sting

The Pale Fountains were formed in Liverpool in 1980 by Mick (as he was then known) Head with Chris McCaffery on bass, Thomas Whelan on drums, trumpeter Andy Diagram and guitarist Ken Moss - Signing with Virgin in late 1982, this was the first time the music world became aware of the work of singer-songwriter Michael Head.

At the time of its release in February 1984, Head described Pacific Street as "like a greatest hits LP, except we haven't had any hits!" It not only showcases the ambition of 80s pop in general, but the very specific singularity of the Liverpool scene, that seemed to add love and (Arthur Lee's) Love to everything recorded. It reflects the swing away from the post-punk and funk of the early years of the decade, aiming for a mellower, bossa-nova influenced pop. It is difficult to understand how tracks such as Unless and (Don't Let Your Love) Start A War were not big hits and are not viewed as standards.

Near four decades later, Michael Head is adored by his hardcore following and the wider world freshly discovers him as each of his new releases achieves widescale acclaim, whether it be his subsequent band, Shack, or his current outfit, the Red Elastic Band. But The Pale Fountains was where it all began.

This re-issue faithfully replicates the original 1984 Virgin Records UK release with printed inner and is pressed onto high quality 180g vinyl.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Just a really beautiful pop record. So youthful ,romantic and impossibly melodic. It felt like Liverpool had produced a new, young genius.

TRACK LISTING

Reach
Something On My Mind
Unless
Southbound Excursion
Natural
Faithful Pillow Part 1
(Don't Let Your Love) Start A War
Beyond Friday's Field
Abergele Next Time
Crazier
Faithful Pillow Part 2

• The Pale Fountains were an English band formed in Liverpool in 1980, and composed of Mick Head, Chris McCaffery, Thomas Whelan, Andy Diagram and Ken Moss.

• Inspired by 1960s music such as Love, Burt Bacharach and The Beatles, the group released their debut single ‘(There's Always) Something on My Mind’ in October 1982. Although the Pale Fountains failed to make much commercial headway, the band would earn critical praise for the two albums released on Virgin, ‘Pacific Street’ (1984) and ‘...From Across the Kitchen Table’ (1985).

This 4-CD box set brings together both albums as well as all the B-Sides, mixes, and some previously unreleased material from the Virgin vaults all housed in a sturdy box with extensive sleeve notes by Classic Pop’s John Earls.

Mick Head – Vocals, Guitar (1981–1987)
Chris McCaffery – Bass Guitar (1981–1987)
Thomas Whelan – Drums (1981–1987)
Andy Diagram – Trumpet (1982–1984)
John Head – Guitar (1984–1987)

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Michael Head's first band were so romantic and melodic and young and beautiful. It's all here!

TRACK LISTING

DISC ONE: 
Pacific Street
1 Reach
2 Something On My Mind
3 Unless
4 Southbound Excursion
5 Natural
6 Faithful Pillow (Pt 1)
7 (Don't Let Your Love) Start A War
8 Beyond Fridays Field
9 Abergele Next Time
10 Crazier
11 Faithful Pillow (Pt 2)
BONUS TRACKS
12 Thank You - Single
13 Meadow Of Love - Single B Side
14 (There's Always) Something On My Mind - Remix
15 Palm Of My Hand - Single
16 Palm Of My Hand - Instrumental - Single B Side
17 Love's A Beautiful Place - Single B Side
18 Unless - Extended Version 12" Single
19 (Don't Let Your Love) Start A War - Single
20 (Don't Let Your Love) Start A War - Extended Version 12" Single
21 Love Situation - Single B Side

DISC TWO:
Mixes And Unreleased Tracks
1 Partner Picking Man - Rough Mix With Bass And
Drums*
2 Fight Think Love / Love Situation - Rough Mix Take 1*
3 Jock's A String Bean - Rough Mix*
4 Fight Think Love / Love Situation - Rough Mix Take 2*
5 Spanish Tragedy (Beyond Fridays Field) - Rough Instrumental Mix*
6 Take A Little Shelter - Rough Mix Take 2*
7 Partner Picking Man - Acoustic*
8 Sun Drenched Girl (Crazier) - Acoustic
9 Lavinia's Dream - Rough Mix Take 1
10 (There's Always) Something On My Mind - Rough Mix
11 Hey There Fred - Rough Mix
12 One By One - Rough Mix Take 2*
13 Norfolk Broads - Rough Mix Take 1
14 Untitled Jam / 7 And 7 Is*
15 Unless - Rough Mix
16 (There's Always) Something On My Mind - Rough Mix
17 Sundrenched Girl (Crazier) - Rough Mix
18 Southbound Excursion - Rough Mix

DISC THREE:
From Across The Kitchen Table
1 Shelter
2 Stole The Love
3 Jean's Not Happening
4 Bicycle Thieves
5 Limit
6 27 Ways To Get Back Home
7 Bruised Arcade
8 These Are The Things
9 Its Only Hard
10 ...From Across The Kitchen Table
11 Hey
12 September Sting 

DISC FOUR:
Mixes And Unreleased Tracks
1 From Across The Kitchen Table - Extended Version 12" Single
2 Bicycle Thieves - Remix Single B Side
3 Just A Girl - Remix Single B Side
4 Thank You - Remix Single B Side
5 Silver Bendix – Demo*
6 The Outsider – Demo*
7 Detrimentally (Stole The Love) - Demo
8 27 Ways To Get Back Home - Demo
9 Summertime (It's Hard) -Demo
10 Shelter - Demo
11 Yeah Eah Eah – Demo*
12 These Are The Things (Stay) - Demo
13 Bruised Arcade - Demo

*Previously Unreleased.

The German quartet Pale, have developed into one of the best emocore acts on the European scene and their fourth album, "How To Survive Chance" is probably their best yet. More diverse, veering between infectious rock and slow and harmonic emo.

For Fans Of... Jungle, SAULT, Aaron Frazer, CARRTOONS, daste., Thee Sacred Souls, Yaya Bey, Durand Jones.

Admittedly, I'm not a great salesperson when it comes to running our little label. I do my best not to give into hyperbole or build something up too intensely if someone has not heard a new artist yet. I prefer to simply present the music and let the listener decide how they feel about it. However, we live in an age when the "story" put together by publicists, labels, and managers are often the driving force of an artist's ascension into the zeitgeist. And for me, that's always felt rather artificial, even when the narrative is genuine.

But every once in a while, a project comes along that takes on a life of its own. And I can say without a doubt that the growth of Pale Jay's reach since we first started working with him has little to do with conjured narratives or clever marketing, but more to do with how the music makes the listener feel. It's that simple. In fact, Jay is so enigmatic and without a narrative that the mere absence of a story has become the story. Who is he? Where is he from? What's next?

Some questions are better left unanswered in my opinion, my friend. Including the question, "Why does this music make me feel so much?" You're better off just sitting back, disconnecting, and letting Low End Love Songs by Pale Jay wrap you up. Enjoy and spread the good word. Terry Cole (Colemine).

“Low End Love Songs”, more so than previous releases, is a diary in form of song. I knew I just had to wait for the songs to be ready to be picked, like ripe fruit from a tree. Each tune encapsulates a distinct moment in my life, with music serving as my means of processing complex and sometimes conflicting emotions. In this album, I depart from loop-based song structures towards more intricate and lush compositions. Latin influences permeate the music, adding new layers of rhythms and textures to my soul-music roots. Pale Jay

TRACK LISTING

1. The Simple Days
2. Quadris De Ouro
3. Baby
4. Branch By Branch
5. The Garden
6. Floating On A Memory
7. Spend More Time With Your Friends
8. Love Around The World
9. Easy, Lee

The 1990 debut album from Pale Saints, The Comforts of Madness, is an outstanding record that owed as much to post-punk and L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene than it did to shoegaze. The Sunday Times called it “an unintended indie manifesto: music that is at once wayward and concise, dissonant and beautiful.”

Shortly after its release and in need of a second live guitarist, Lush founding member Meriel Barham joined the Leeds trio of Ian Masters, Graeme Naysmith and Chris Cooper, bringing a new dynamic to the band.

Having previously worked well with producer Hugh Jones (Echo & The Bunnyman, Modern English, The Sound), he did a brilliant job recording their second album, In Ribbons (1992), despite some studio tensions. Brooklyn Vegan said in a recent celebration of the album that it was the “push and pull between Masters’ outsider tendencies and (the rest’s) commercial interests that makes In Ribbons so good. If some of the wild, ragged edges of Comforts of Madness have been smoothed off, the album makes up for it with scope and beauty. And there’s still no shortage of weird.”

Missing its original release date last year due to Covid delays and a production plant in meltdown, In Ribbons is finally getting the 30th Anniversary celebration it deserves with a special double LP / CD release – the first disc be- ing the UK version of the album, the second a bonus disc of never before heard demos (including their first attempt at Slapp Happy’s ‘Blue Flower’ and Ian’s 4 track recording of ‘Kinky Love’) and two brass band versions by The Tintwistle Band.

TRACK LISTING

Tracklisting (2LP/2CD)
A1 - Throwing Back The Apple
A2 - Ordeal
A3- Thread Of Light
A4 - Shell
A5 - There Is No Day
A6 - Hunted
B1 - Hair Shoes
B2 - Babymaker
B3 - Liquid
B4 - Neverending Night
B5 - Featherframe
B6 - A Thousand Stars Burst Open
C1 - Babymaker (Demo) *
C2 - Kinky Love (Demo) *
C3 - Hair Shoes (Demo) *
C4 - Shell (Demo) *
C5 - Hunted (Demo) *
C6 - Featherframe (Demo) *
D1 - Blue Flower (Demo) *
D2 - Throwing Back The Apple (Demo) *
D3 - Ordeal (Demo) *
D3 - Untitled Instrumental (Demo) *
D4 - A Thousand Stars Burst Open (Tintwistle Band Version) +
D5 - A Revelation (Tintwistle Band Version) +
* = Previously Unreleased

Tracklisting (LP Black Vinyl)
A1 - Throwing Back The Apple
A2 - Ordeal
A3 - Thread Of Light
A4 - Shell
A5 - There Is No Day
A6 - Hunted
B1 - Hair Shoes
B2 - Babymaker
B3 - Liquid
B4 - Neverending Night
B5 - Featherframe
B6 - A Thousand Stars Burst Open

Pale Saints complete their series of 30th anniversary reissues with the release of an expanded edition of their third and final album, 'Slow Buildings'.

By 1994, they were the quartet of Meriel Barham (vocals / guitar), Chris Cooper (drums), Graeme Naysmith (guitar) and Colleen Browne (bassist), who having just left The Heart Throbs replaced founding member Ian Masters who had departed the band to form Spoonfed Hybrid with AC Temple’s Chris Trout.

Primed by the brilliant single 'Fine Friend' (a song adapted from 1981’s 'Poison in the Airwaves' by Scottish band Persian Rugs), third album 'Slow Buildings' shows the band still venturing forward - this time, keeping the experimentation and guitar fuzz of their early records whilst opening-up their songs so Meriel’s vocals could hit new, pop heights.

As with the 30th anniversary reissues of their previous two albums, this special pressing sees this long out of print record being remastered and expanded to include a wealth of bonus material that’s sure to delight fans. Working with mastering engineer Kevin Vanbergen, this new edition runs over two discs with the album being packaged with the 'Fine Friend' EP and a great selection of previously unheard tracks and demos as handpicked by the band.

TRACK LISTING

1. King Fade
2. Angel (Will You Be My)
3. One Blue Hill
4. Henry
5. Under Your Nose
6. Little Gesture
7. Song Of Solomon
8. Fine Friend
9. Gesture Of A Fear
10. Always I
11. Suggestion
12. Fine Friend (Extended Version)
13. Special Present (Edit)
14. Marimba
15. Reprise
16. On Your Own (Tape Demo)
17. Always I (Demo)
18. Loopy (Tape Demo)
19. Henry (Demo)
20. Angel (Acoustic Tape Demo)
21. Honesty Spills (Tape Demo)
22. Marimba (Demo)

On the eve of a post-Thatcherite Britain, the Pale Saints, alongside the likes of Lush, Ride and Slowdive, were ushering in a new wave of British indie. And in 4AD, they found a perfect home for their music - an exciting & undeniable meld of noise and dream-pop.

Their debut album, The Comforts of Madness, didn’t disappoint, now standing as one of the best of its era. Pitchfork placed it in their Best 50 Shoegaze Albums Of All Time saying, “There’s a restless urgency, particularly when the volume swells and the rhythms intensify. That energy not only keeps (it) vital, it emphasizes Pale Saints’ inventiveness, how they channelled softness and rage into something distinctive.”

Nearly 30 years on and The Comforts of Madness is finally getting the reissue treatment. Having been remastered, a faithful LP repress on black vinyl is being released as well as double CD and double clear vinyl editions, both of which come with a bonus disc of previously unreleased demos and the band’s only John Peel Session, recorded in 1989.

STAFF COMMENTS

Javi says: This year, my new year’s resolution was “don’t buy records, save money instead”. Everything was going swimmingly for the first two weeks of January - until one grim Friday when ‘The Comforts of Madness’ received its 30th Anniversary reissue. Like a dry January defeated by an old friend’s 30th birthday bash, I cracked and splurged, and did so with good reason.

Visually, ‘The Comforts of Madness’ is instantly recognisable as a Vaughan Oliver creation. Familiar shapes and textures shimmer under a psychedelic sheen, all petals and whiskers and shadow; the tracklist splattered across the back like a mystic incantation (“way the fell. deep sleep, the sun. time in sight.” Amen.)

Opening track “Way The World Is” crashes in like a horseman of the apocalypse, while the much-anthologised “Sight Of You” still sounds every bit as fresh and swooning as Martin assures me it did 1990. Across the album, crushing shoegaze guitars ebb and flow, bass lines worm and drums fizz, only letting up for tender moments like the balladic “Little Hammer”. It’s a sprawling LP of ambitious indie, pushing both instruments and the mixing desk to extremes, masterfully streamlined into a near-continuous soundscape with each song graciously giving way to the next.

The bonus disc of unreleased live sessions and alternative recordings lifts the magic curtain slightly, revealing the band behind the sonic wizardry and dream-pop production - this version of Pale Saints is more earnest yet every bit as melodic, with shades of The Smiths, early MBV, and even The Beach Boys permeating the lower-fi recordings. They provide a warm and welcome counterpoint to the soaring album proper, and are well worth checking out and marvelling over.

‘The Comforts of Madness’ is from start to end, front to back, 1990 to 2020, a chaotic, ethereal, and epic work - and to these ears, at least, it might just be the 4AD album.

TRACK LISTING

Way The World Is
You Tear The World In Two
Sea Of Sound
True Coming Dream
Little Hammer
Insubstantial
A Deep Sleep For Steven
Language Of Flowers
Fell From The Sun
Sight Of You
Time Thief

2LP & 2CD

Way The World Is
You Tear The World In Two
Sea Of Sound
True Coming Dream
Little Hammer
Insubstantial
A Deep Sleep For Steven
Language Of Flowers
Fell From The Sun
Sight Of You
Time Thief
Sight Of You (Original Woodhouse Studio Version) *
Way The World Is (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
Language Of Flowers (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
You Tear The World In Two (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
Fell From The Sun (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
A Deep Sleep For Steven (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
Time Thief (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
Sea Of Sound (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
Insubstantial (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
Little Hammer (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
True Coming Dream (Woodhouse Studio LP Demo) *
She Rides The Waves (John Peel Show Version) *
You Tear The World In Two (John Peel Show Version) *
Way The World Is (John Peel Show Version) *
Time Thief (John Peel Show Version) *

* = Previously Unreleased

Tipped by many to become one of the most exciting and unique British guitar bands of the decade off the back of rapturous critical acclaim, Pale Seas, on the eve of the release of a long-anticipated debut album, simply disappeared. No hiatus announcement, no press release, nothing. For the following three years the band, led by enigmatic frontman Jacob Scott alongside Graham Poole (Lead Guitar), Matthew Bishop (Bass) & Andrew Richardson (Drums), emitted no signal, instead embarking upon a period of prolonged isolation, rejecting the industry and the outside world to hole themselves away inside a medieval abbey in most remote Isle of Wight. To capture their expansive sound and enhance it further the band enlisted the help of producer Chris Potter (The Verve, Urban Hymns) & Paul Butler (Michael Kiwanuka, Devendra Banhart & The Bees), with whom the band had begun their journey 5 years previously. Scott is influenced by Neil Young, Elliott Smith and Half Japanese but it’s not been music that’s shaped who he is as an artist. His mother, a painter, was a much bigger influence. “I learned more from growing up with her than I have from music. She found a way to channel her life experiences into something beautiful and real. To see that, to witness someone so close to you turning their life in to art was, to me, more powerful than hearing any band play.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Into The Night
2. My Own Mind
3. Someday
4. In A Past Life
5. Blood Return
6. Bodies
7. Stargazing For Beginners
8. Animal Tongue
9. Heal Slow
10. Evil Is Always One Step Behind 

Acclaimed Manchester-based pop-rock outfit Pale Waves burst onto the scene back in 2018 with the runaway success of their debut album My Mind Makes Noises. Two top five albums later and an outpouring of support from the likes of BBC Radio 1, Apple Music, Spotify, NME, and more, the band are back with a newfound maturity to accompany their fourth studio album Smitten.

While Pale Waves’ first three albums focussed on the band’s immediate present, Smitten is a lot more preoccupied with past lives – some more recent than others. Written two years after Unwanted, and after the tour that followed, Heather found herself in a headspace where she could finally breathe, and reflect, like peeling through the pages of a long-forgotten teenage diary and being surprised by what she found. “I found myself writing about not just a certain time period, but my whole life, from years ago,” she says. “When I fall in love, I fall deep, and it’s interesting to me that you can feel so fascinated and smitten with someone and then they can become a total stranger. So I feel like Smitten really summarised perfectly what I felt for others at a certain point.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Glasgow
2. Not A Love Song
3. Gravity
4. Thinking About You
5. Perfume
6. Last Train Home
7. Kiss Me Again
8. Miss America
9. Hate To Hurt You
10. Seeing Stars
11. Imagination
12. Slow

A fiery, confident kick-back against convention, Pale Waves’ third record Unwanted sees the group building on the promise of last year’s UK Top 3 album Who Am I?, and staking their claim as British rock’s most dynamic young group.

“It’s bold and unapologetic, and that’s what the Pale Waves community is about,” says frontwoman Heather Baron-Gracie herself. “We don’t need to fit a perfect mould, we don’t need to apologise for being ourselves, and we won’t change for anyone. That acceptance is what connects us.”

Led by riotous lead single “Lies”, Unwanted is a record that reaches out to the passionate community of misfits and LGBTQI+ fans around the band, tapping into darker emotions than ever before while also striking a fresh tone of defiance.

‘Who Am I?’ is the second album from indie-pop icons Pale Waves, due for release on February 12th 2021. Recorded in L.A. over early 2020 with Rich Costey (Muse, Biffy Clyro, Sigur Ros), and led by the unabashedly huge lead single ‘Change’, it finds the Manchester band stepping up once more, fulfilling the promise of that widely-lauded debut album and striding towards pop megastardom.

TRACK LISTING

1. Change
2. Fall To Pieces
3. She’s My Religion
4. Easy
5. Wish U Were Here
6. Tomorrow
7. You Don’t Own Me
8. I Just Needed You
9. Odd Ones Out
10. Run To
11. Who Am I?

With their third album, 'Inanimate Objects of the 21st Century', Newcastle’s The Pale White prove once again that there’s no slowing them down. Following the success of their introspective sophomore album 'The Big Sad', brothers Adam (vocals/guitar) and Jack Hope (drums) return louder, sharper, and more defiant than ever. This third full-length is their most expansive yet: a record that blends the anthemic punch of classic rock with the urgency and edge of modern alternative.The title, 'Inanimate Objects of the 21st Century', is a nudge to the uncomfortable irony of our time – as technology accelerates, humanity feels increasingly frozen in place. Lead singer Adam Hope says: “Technology is moving, but we are not. Human civilization entered the 21st century wide-eyed and naive with mobile phones that would barely fit in our pockets. Fast forward a few decades and we’re so far from where we were that it almost looks like a bad 80’s sci-fi movie. Back then, that film would be watched in packed-out cinemas after an eagerly anticipated release, but now they stand emptier than they once were, attended mainly as a nostalgic experience in the age of Netflix and doomscrolling.

The birth of AI, algorithms, cryptocurrency, drones, holographic concerts, autonomous cars… we’re living in a strange transitional period which is both fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. We humans have now in fact become the inanimate objects - mannequins.After our softer, melancholic second album ‘The Big Sad’, we felt it was only right to move as fast as our world is moving and release our next within the year. ‘Inanimate Objects of the 21st Century’ is the evil twin, the Yin to The Big Sad’s Yang.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Moth In The Headlights
2. Float Away
3. Göbekli Tepe
4. Absolute Cinema
5. Oh Brother
6. Medusa
7. Carpe Diem
8. Mannequin
9. This Fascination
10. Disappoint Me
11. All I Have To Do Is Dream

This is the northeast calling, with songs of stillness, reflection, renewal, defiance, hope, classic melodies and, at certain perfectly judged moments, furniture-shifting riffs. With a powerful album shaped by pandemic-era loss (of momentum, and of a band member), and by the wins brought by what singer/songwriter/guitarist Adam Hope describes as a “weight lifted off my shoulders”. With a fresh, front-footed, fired-up approach that owes everything to a band returning to their roots in Wallsend and Newcastle – and, for the first time, making their music entirely on their own independent terms: self-produced and self-confident.

'The Big Sad': an album born from the ashes of dark times, but representing a beacon of light for the future. An album of honesty and purity, one that our current fanbase sonically may not be expecting. The sound of a band that got tired of slamming on the fuzz pedal to tick the ‘rock’ box and dares to try something new, dares to shock, dares to be great.

TRACK LISTING

1. Lost In The Moment
2. The Big Sad
3. Woolly Thunder
4. I’m Sorry (This Time)
5. January, Please
6. Preparing For The Big Sad
7. There’s An Echo
8. Real Again
9. Trapped In The Vacuum
10. Interlude
11. Nostradamus
12. My Abacus
13. The Big Sad

A trailblazing amalgam of elevator-friendly R&B and synth-forward smooth jazz, Tony Palkovic’s 1986 debut goes down easy as a huff of dentist-issued nitrous. Born With A Desire’s silky grooves and bursts of drum machine 1.0 endure as an ’80s vision of future earth where 8-bit graphics and pastel palettes swath a synthesizer Shangri La.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
Born With A Desire
True To Yourself
Breath Of Sound

SIDE B
Better Than Before
Day To Day
Electric Heart
Hoping For A Better World

Made in the wake of the end of a long relationship, this album is an intimate record that sees Fabiana Palladino confront complex questions about love, loneliness and normativity in relationships. The result is a 10-track full-length of shapeshifting sonics that draws inspiration from the big R&B, Soul, Pop and Disco studio productions of the 80s and 90s and filters them through a modern lens. Written and self-produced by Palladino, the album features performances from renowned musicians and close friends including Paul Institute co-founder Jai Paul, her father and legendary session bassist Pino Palladino, brother and Yussef Dayes bassist Rocco Palladino, renowned drummer Steve Ferrone and strings from Rob Moose.

Speaking on the new music Fabiana Palladino says:
“A central theme of the album is aloneness. Whether it’s a song where I’m searching for connection with someone else, or trying to embrace the aloneness, it tends to come back to me, who I am when I’m alone, what I feel when I really look inwards. I’d say it’s a pretty introspective record overall. The songs are often about trying to go deeper into yourself, exploring your true feelings and how they then relate to and affect your relationships with others.

“Stay With Me Through The Night” is the first song I wrote for the album. It was at the end of a tricky period where I hadn’t written music for nearly two years, and it came out in a bit of a flood, I barely even remember where or how I wrote it, but I knew it was going to be an important song for me. It ended up being the centrepiece of the album, a song that encapsulates a lot of the feeling and emotion of the rest of the record and musically it brings old together with new, which became a theme across the record…a way of combining my influences with a modern perspective.

Rhythmically the feeling of the song comes from funk and disco, I was thinking about the piano playing of Patrice Rushen and Michael McDonald, Chaka Khan’s ‘What Cha’ Gonna Do For Me’, Bernard Edwards bass playing on Chic’s ‘Good Times’, and The Bee Gees ‘Spirits Having Flown’ but we tried to take the track somewhere else in other aspects of the production to bring out the big feelings in the song. It situates us in the emotional world that I tried to create for the rest of the album.”

Fabiana Palladino first broke out in 2017 as one of Paul Institute’s founding artists after her shadowy R&B-influenced spectral pop reached Jai Paul, who founded the label alongside his brother A.K. Paul. Releasing three singles in four years, she caught the ear of critics - Pitchfork likened “Mystery” to “a scratch track from a big-budget 80s studio that’s been smuggled out on reel-to-reel tape” – but Palladino’s output remained slight. The intervening years have seen her working as an in-demand session musician for the likes of Jessie Ware, Sampha, SBTRKT and Laura Groves while intensely striving for pop perfection in her own music. Last year, she formed part of Jai Paul’s band for his live debut (which she also supported solo) on his hugely celebrated comeback tour.

TRACK LISTING

1. Closer
2. Can You Look In The Mirror?
3. I Can’t Dream Anymore
4. Give Me A Sign
5. I Care
6. Stay With Me Through The Night
7. Shoulda
8. Deeper
9. In The Fire
10. Forever

For the uninitiated (which included me until about 7 minutes ago), Paul Institute is the boutique label, cultural hub and sonic exchange run by synth soul genius Jai Paul, who we all know from his mega smash "Jasmine". Intent on causing a counter frenzy, Jai (or Paul) has dropped not one...not two...not three, but FOUR new label release AT THE SAME MF TIME! Coming at them in catalogue order, "Shimmer", is Fabiana Palladino’s first self-produced track, following on from 2017’s celestial collaboration with Jai Paul, "Mystery". Driven on by a stadium-inspired rhythm section, spectral sequences and huge pop progressions, "Shimmer" is an anthem written for anyone who feels like they’re being underestimated - a reminder to stand up for yourself! File next to: Sheila E, Kate Bush, Jessie Ware - instrumental on the flip.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Huge, pulsing DX7 stormer from Fabiana Palladino here, throbbing basses and digital pads duck around the beautifully sung vocal syrup. Swooning synthwave through the medium of stad-rock progressions. This is definitely one to grab while you can. Killer track.

TRACK LISTING

A. Shimmer
B. Shimmer(Instrumental) 

"Are You in Heaven?" was famously shouted by Roxy DJ Eddy de Clercq to the crowd at one of the very first legendary house parties in Amsterdam. This phrase not only symbolizes an iconic moment that captured the spirit of the era - it’s also the title of one of the three tracks featured here.

In 1991, inspired by the dance music craze that swept across Europe at the time, Arnoud Winkler and Jochem Peteri (who would later become the one-man supergroup Newworldaquarium) produced music that is equal parts euphoric, emotive, vital, and vibrant - youthful in spirit, naive yet clever. A European translation of a US-American art form, born from pure enthusiasm and concentrated passion for a culture that, to this day, continues to resonate universally.

Originally released on Lower East Side Records, the story told here is full of rave symbolism, after-party joy, and literal can-you-feel-it moments: rattling sub-bass, blissful pads, whispering voices, dub techniques, and subconscious peak-time signals.

Complemented by a new edit of "Ulysses Horizon" by Gerd Janson (alongside a revised version of the original), alongside "Flowerdale Beach", and "Are You in Heaven?", the music here hasn’t lost a single inch of its charm or allure. A taste of Dutch house deluxe.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Running Back Double Copy continues in earnest with this lost European dream house prototype. It wasn't just the UK that was under a wave of ecstasy and repetitive rhythms in 1991 - the Dutch were at it too!

TRACK LISTING

A1. Ulysses Horizons (2025 Adios Adonis Version)
A2. Ulysses Horizons (Gerd Janson Extended DJ Version)
A2. Flowerdale Beach
B1. Are You In Heaven?

PALLBEAERER's landmark sophomore album 'Foundations of Burden' given the complete overhaul, remixed from scratch by Mario Quintero, remastered by Adam Gonsalves with additional audio reconstruction by the band themselves.

This re-issue of Foundations of Burden has been given the elixir to bring a new sense of exaltation to this milestone release. Also featuring new cover art courtesy of Benjamin Vierling.

TRACK LISTING

1. World's Apart (2025 Mix)
2. Foundations (2025 Mix)
3. Watcher In The Dark (2025 Mix)
4. The Ghost I Used To Be (2025 Mix)
5. Ashes (2025 Mix)
6. Vanished (2025 Mix)

‘Island’, the latest album from Oscar-nominated composer and songwriter Owen Pallett, released on Domino / Secret City Records (Canada).

Almost entirely acoustic, ‘Island’ begins with 13 darkened chords and was recorded live at Abbey Road Studios with the London Contemporary Orchestra. The introduction is the sound of waking up alone and on the shore of a strange land. What follows is a shimmering and luscious orchestral album that draws across the full breadth of Pallett’s discography, from ‘Heartland’’s Technicolor to the glittering, fingerpicked guitar that marked Pallett’s first records with their trio, Les Mouches.

In addition to Pallett’s Grammy Award-winning work with Arcade Fire, Pallett’s commissions have included string, brass and orchestral work for Last Shadow Puppets, The National, The Mountain Goats, Christine and arrangements for Frank Ocean, Caribou, R.E.M., Linkin Park, Sigur Rós, Taylor Swift and the Pet Shop Boys.

Since the release of ‘In Conflict’ (2014), Pallett has earned an Oscar nomination for their film scoring work on Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ and an Emmy for Sølve Sundsbø’s ‘Fourteen Actors Acting’. Their score for Matt Wolf’s ‘Spaceship Earth’, a documentary about a crew who spent two years quarantined inside a replica of Earth’s ecosystem called BIOSPHERE 2, is out now.

TRACK LISTING

---> (i)
Transformer
Paragon Of Order
---> (ii)
The Sound Of The
Engines
Perseverance Of The
Saints
Polar Vortex
---> (iii)
A Bloody Morning
Fire-Mare
Lewis Gets Fucked Into
Space
---> (iv)
In Darkness
Paragon Of Order
(version)
Fire-Mare (version)

A gentle interplay of cello and acoustic guitar make for thoughtful and understated songs. This is a quite beautiful CD, for Rachel's fans maybe?

In the midst of the music industry crisis art student Norman Palm had an idea: Why not visualize the rough recordings he had made between Paris and Berlin, produce a 200-page artbook with a cd and throw it on the collapsing market via his own DIY-record label? Sometimes it seems one has to ignore all golden rules to make something work: Norman Palm's book did not only sell pretty well, soon he was also invited to play live shows all over Europe such as the renowned Austrian art festival Steirischer Herbst and Haldern festival where he played along with bands such as Fleet Foxes and Yeasayer. He played at countless art events, sang next to Jane Birkin in a Parisian radio studio, was hyped by music magazines such as Stereogum, got filmed by french Blogotheque and eventually even found himself featured on the world's most visited blog run by Hollywood gossip boy Perez Hilton. Norman Palm got around.

Norman Palm also gets around because he decided not to live his life at one place only. Taking the adventures of a long-distance relationship to a not always easy level he practically commutes between Berlin and Mexico City. Enough exercise for body and soul to make contacts, get inspired and write new songs.

While Norman Palm's DIY-debut was a loose collection of songs, "Shore to Shore" is a homogenic piece and a musical quantum leap! Palm gets rid of his singer-songwriter image, irony and shyness of his debut have vanished. "Shore to Shore" is pop and love-long-distance set to music. Start/Stop, the album's overture brings together what is later split up into its parts: Ukulele, electronic beats, crazy choirs, African vs. technoid vibes, warm vs. synthetic. Above all floats Palm's distinctive voice. In Smile Palm sets foot into the american indie-terrain normally conquered by the likes of Wilco, he designs a 2.0 version of Paul Simon's Graceland with Images, flirts with Beck and the Beta Band in Landslide and spins out of $20 with an extensive Krautrock steelpan synth loop. Easy, virtually the title track of the album and a lyrical centrepiece ("Let's all be friends with the telephone calls / Let's all be friends with the departure halls") layers voices, basslines and synthesizers thus providing a perfect soundtrack for an early morning after clubbing. It's almost like listening to the radio, only that radio stations of such quality are hard to find!

Norman sings about love and how it interferes with life. About distance and closeness, about intimacy and strangeness, about missing and losing, love in a digitalized and globalized design of life. Doing that he avoids kitsch and cliché, writes poetry without being corny, makes himself clear, honestly and humble, never awkward, never bigger-than-life. Palm throws his very personal and his musical influences into a pot, cooks his own soup and puts it right on the table of international contemporary pop culture.

TRACK LISTING

01. Start/Stop
02. Smile
03. Images
04. Landslide
05. $ 20
06. WDYD?
07. Easy
08. Sleeper
09. Phantom Lover
10. Go To Sleep

“The brash clangor of pre-SST Sonic Youth, the tricky time signatures of math rock demigods Battles and the wonky iridescence of Deerhoof and tUnE-yArDs (the latter two have shared producer Eli Crews with Palm). - Pitchfork 'Shadow Expert EP' review.

“Palm’s unpredictable songs prove there’s still room for boundary-pushing in rock” FADER.

On Rock Island, their second LP, Palm produces evidence of a distinct musical language, developed over time, in isolation, and out of necessity. On the island, melodies are struck on what might be shells or spines. Rhythms are scratched out, swept over, scratched again. Individual instruments, and sometimes entire sections, skip and stutter. There is the sense of a music box with wonky tension or a warped transmission in which all the noise is taken for signal.

Like other groups so acclaimed for their compulsive live show, Palm has been burdened by the constant comparison between their recorded material and their touring set. On Rock Island, they render this tired discussion moot, using the album form to present that which could never be completely live, reserving for performance that which could never be completely reproduced.

Despite appearing behind the instruments typical of rock music, Palm trades in sounds of their own making. On these songs, one of the guitars and the drum kit are used as MIDI triggers, producing an index that can be combed through later and replaced with new information. The percussion is sometimes augmented so as to suggest a multiplication of limbs. The strings are manipulated to choke, crack, and hum like other instruments, or other bodies, might.

Working again with engineer Matt Labozza, the band spent the better part of a month in a rented farmhouse in Upstate New York. With the benefits of time and space, Palm recorded the various elements piecemeal, only rarely playing together in groups larger than two or three. While some members tracked, others holed up in the next room, experimenting with quantization, beat replacement, and other methods borrowed from electronic music. Even accounting for the many labors that brought them to be, these materials seem produced by an organic logic. Their complex friction forms a habit of thought, scores a network of grooves on the floor of the mind.

This is music with dimensionality. Sonic objects are deployed, developed, and dissected in various states of mutation. The listener flits about between the field and the lab. The tone is warm in a way only the sun could make, the pace as forceful and as variable as a gale. Whether one locates Rock Island in a sea or in a refinished attic (as in Greg Burak’s album cover), whether one escapes to there or is banished, its psychic environs are charted clearly enough. Only at this remove from the mainland can we sense the conditions necessary for such a strange species of sound.

TRACK LISTING

1 Pearly
2 Composite
3 Dog Milk
4 Forced Hand
5 Theme From Rock Island
6 Bread
7 Colour Code
8 Swimmer
9 Heavy Lifting 

One of the most highly anticipated debut albums of the year, comes in the shape of the Palma Violets '180' via Rough Trade Records. They kicked things off with last years 7" debut 'Best Friend' - a burst of raw hook-filled energy which sets a general template for the entire album. The tempo fluctuates throughout, but there's always that energy bubbling away. I've read a couple of reviews that have said it sounds a little rough around the edges, but I don't think it's any worse for it. It has an urgency and exhuberance that goes some way to matching that of their live performances.

‘180’ is also the number of the Lambeth house that the four-piece have become known for regularly throwing parties and impromptu gigs for friends and fans in. The album artwork features the band stood outside the building.

'180' was recorded in London at RAK Studios (produced by Steve Mackey), and also at The Lightship (produced by Rory Attwell).

TRACK LISTING

1. Best Of Friends
2. Step Up For The Cool Cats
3. All The Garden Birds
4. Rattlesnake Highway
5. Chicken Dippers
6. Last Of The Summer Wine
7. Tom The Drum
8. Johnny Bagga' Donuts
9. I Found Love
10. Three Stars
11. 14

Two year’s on from the release of their debut, top 10 UK charting album ‘180’, which NME declared to be ‘the new soundtrack to your life,’ Q Magazine ‘one of the best debut albums of the decade’ and The Quietus ‘fucking brrrilliant,’ Palma Violets have announced the full details of their highly anticipated follow-up ‘Danger In The Club’. The album was produced by John Leckie (Stone Roses, Radiohead, The Fall), recorded at Rockfield Studio in Wales and is released on Rough Trade Records.

Anyone lucky enough to catch Palma Violets road testing the new album at intimate UK venues recently (including Scunthorpe where the local rugby team had to be called in when the venue’s bouncers couldn’t handle the over-excited crowd) can testify that the new material is a giant step up from the band’s debut. ‘Girl, You Couldn’t Do Much Better On The Beach’ and ‘Hollywood (I Got It)’ build on ‘180’s exhilarating, primal rock and roll, whilst the hook-heavy choruses and imaginative lyrics of ‘English Tongue’ and ‘Coming Over To My Place’ demonstrate how much Palma Violets - still all in their early twenties - have developed into first class songwriters and honed their own unique sound.

Speaking about the new album, bassist and singer Chilli Jesson explains:
“We wanted to make a young-sounding record. We listened to a lot of pre-punk while we were making the album. We like its rawness and simplicity. A lot of bands want to over-complicate their second album, we know that we didn’t.”

Two year’s on from the release of their debut, top 10 UK charting album ‘180’, which NME declared to be ‘the new soundtrack to your life,’ Q Magazine ‘one of the best debut albums of the decade’ and The Quietus ‘fucking brrrilliant,’ Palma Violets have announced the full details of their highly anticipated follow-up ‘Danger In The Club’. The album was produced by John Leckie (Stone Roses, Radiohead, The Fall), recorded at Rockfield Studio in Wales and is set for release on 4th May 2015 on Rough Trade Records. 

Anyone lucky enough to catch Palma Violets road testing the new album at intimate UK venues recently (including Scunthorpe where the local rugby team had to be called in when the venue’s bouncers couldn’t handle the over-excited crowd) can testify that the new material is a giant step up from the band’s debut. ‘Girl, You Couldn’t Do Much Better On The Beach’ and ‘Hollywood (I Got It)’ build on ‘180’s exhilarating, primal rock and roll, whilst the hook-heavy choruses and imaginative lyrics of ‘English Tongue’ and ‘Coming Over To My Place’ demonstrate how much Palma Violets – still all in their early twenties – have developed into first class songwriters and honed their own unique sound.

Speaking about the new album, bassist and singer Chilli Jesson explains: 
“We wanted to make a young-sounding record. We listened to a lot of pre-punk while we were making the album. We like its rawness and simplicity. A lot of bands want to over-complicate their second album, we know that we didn’t.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Sweet Violets
2. Hollywood (I Got It)
3. Girl, You Couldn’t Do Much Better On The Beach
4. Danger In The Club
5. Coming Over To My Place
6. Secrets Of America 
7. The Jacket Song 
8. Matador
9. Gout! Gang! Go!
10. Walking Home
11. Peter And The Gun
12. No Money Honey
13. English Tongue

Bonus Tracks:
1. Five Gold Rings
2. The Man Is Asleep
3. In The Rain
4. Scandal

Roots Records continues its exploration of Jah Thomas’ Midnight Rock label with the releases of this sought after and rare early dancehall album.

Recorded at the legendary Channel One Studio, Osbourne and Palmer are two sublime vocalists and they are backed here by The Roots Radics, with Scientist on the mix.

Lifted from the "Africa Caribe" album, where Joaquin 'Joe' Claussell was given free rein to rework anything he wanted from the extensive Fania Records label archives, Eddie Palmieri's "Mi Congo Te Llama" is transplanted to a 12" pressing here. 

Never one to miss the opportunity of creating an extended epic, Joe's remix clocks in at a whopping 16.30 minutes of spiritual Latin-jazz-house brilliance. As Joe says, “Some songs were edited, some were time-stretched…many parts were re-recorded…some new parts were recorded on top.” Or, in the case of this track; all of the above! On the flip there's a more (relatively) stripped-down 'Sacred Rhythm Dub Mix' - also guaranteed to rock the dancefloor.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Back for a short while and at a fraction of the cost of its current online value (£100), the extended, full fidelity remix of Eddie Palmieri by Body & Soul legend Joe Claussell.

TRACK LISTING

A Mi Congo Te Llama (Yoruba Chant) (Sacred Rhythm Main Mix) 16:30
B Mi Congo Te Llama (Yoruba Chant) (Sacred Rhythm Dub Mix) 9:22

Second album from this LA band. Epic soaring pop songs with intense wavering vocals reminiscent at times of Thom Yorke.

The debut album from Paris Paloma, 'Cacophony' follows (and includes) her breakthrough single 'labour'.

Written around themes of feminine rage, societal expectations on women and deeply embedded misogyny, the album continues the deep consideration and dissection of Paris' own experiences and observations as a woman. 'labour', and subsequent singles including 'as good a reason', have seen her lyrics and music resonate deeply with an every growing fanbase. The 700+ fans at her sold out London show were termed a 'politely loving coven', capturing the sense of community and female energy which Paris inspires. Unheard tracks such as 'his land' are emotive and cinematic, while the gloriously climactic 'the last woman on earth' has become a fan favourite already via TikTok.

TRACK LISTING

My Mind (now)
Pleaser
His Land
Drywall
Labour
Boys, Bugs And Men
Knitting Song
As Good A Reason
Triassic Love Song
Escape Pod
Last Woman On Earth
Bones On The Beach
Hunter
The Warmth
Yeti

'The Fatal Flaw' is the much anticipated sophomore album from Paris Paloma; and quite simply it is an album all about Love.

Love as Art, Love under the Patriarchy, Love as a political and radical act - in short 'The Fatal Flaw' examines Love from a deeper and philosophical perspective. Even the songs that aren't about Love, also are. They are about the absence of love, and what happens in those spaces, so they are songs about the necessity of love, and the consequences of its absences.

TRACK LISTING

1. Miyazaki
2. Rothko 
3. Stem the Flow 
4. Bleeding Part of Me 
5. Get Her The Fucking Flowers
6. Pre-Raphaelite 
7. Good Girl 
8. Pyrrhus (You Go Where I Cannot)
9. Silhouette on the Hill
10. Good Boy
11. Beautiful Birds 
12. I Cry in Front of Paintings

If you think you know what Palomar is all about, you're wrong: the Brooklyn band's new album "All Things, Forests" will shatter your expectations and stop you dead in your tracks. The charm and playfulness of the band's previous releases is still present, but the songwriting has rocketed from bright to stellar on this, their fourth album. Frontwoman Rachel Warren sings with a confidence heretofore unseen and the results are incredible, the songs shifting in that subtle yet defining change from clever to sublime. The careful arrangements and the depth of thought that have gone into the making of this record constitute a monumental leap forward for the band. "All Things, Forests" expresses the tangled feelings of loss, doubt, joy, wistfulness and the struggle to keep going. This band is clearly at the height of their powers in terms of musicianship, songwriting, and lyricism, and they've crafted a rock album of enduring quality. Prepare yourself for a record that will invite itself up for tea and biscuits, and have your clothes off by the second cup.

It’s been almost eight years since Alan Palomo, the auteur musician/producer behind the long-running avant-pop project Neon Indian, released a full body of music. For years before then, he’d garnered a strong and loyal fanbase and his music, while entrenched in the scenes at the time, sat apart from them, creating a movement of its own. VEGA Intl, ignited further interest in him and broadened the audience's scope, gaining more critical acclaim than previously, well received albums.

World of Hassle is a vivid piece of world-building that takes listeners into a slightly surreal pocket dimension saturated with anxiety and nostalgia, where jazz-funk and wide-shouldered Claude Montana suits never went out of style, and the Cold War chill that suffused Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man never lifted. World of Hassle is a Pynchonesque place, packed with characters and situations rendered in dreamily absurdist strokes—guerilla freedom fighters camped out in a Rainforest Cafe in “The Wailing Mall,” a crumbling ex-pop star in “The Return of Mickey Milan,” the Leisure Suit Larry-does-Ibiza fantasy of “Nudista Mundial ’89” (featuring Mac DeMarco), whose indelible hooks and accompanying absurdist animated video by Johnny Woods immediately propelled the song to critical accolades and broad social sharing upon its release last month.

From the intricate fictional details packed into the cover art (co-created by Palomo and designer Robert Beatty), to the lyrical collage of pop culture and political references, to the music’s early-digital sheen, the album evokes the 80s golden age of rock stars like Bryan Ferry and Sting leaving their own breakthrough projects to strike out as jazzy solo musicians. It’s parody, sure—of rock star ego trips, the mall-ification of America, and our own self-obsession, even on the brink of apocalypse—but it’s also dead serious, the sound of history repeating itself as the Doomsday Clock clicks past its Reagan-era maximum and nuclear anxiety comes back into style along with digital synthesizers and sax solos. The deeper it pulls you into its own uncanny reality, the clearer it becomes how thin the borders are between Alan Palomo’s World of Hassle and our own.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Wailing Mall
2. Meutrière (feat. Flore Benguigui)
3. La Madrileña
4. Nudista Mundial ’89 (feat. Mac DeMarco)
5. The Return Of Mickey Milan
6. Stay-At-Home DJ
7. Club People
8. Alibi For Petra
9. Nobody’s Woman
10. Is There Nightlife After Death?
11. Big Night Of Heartache
12. The Island Years
13. Trouble In Mind

Palooka 5 present MetroKino; eleven original tracks, inspired by Fritz Lang's 1927 expressionist classic 'Metropolis'. Expect a riot of 'live' instrumentation, retro flair and a whole new dimension inspired by one of cinema's most influential works. Strap in for a theremin, vocoder, retro synth ride, blended with the twang of 1960s-tinged sci-fi surf.

TRACK LISTING

1. MetroKino
2. Evil Machine
3. Give The Robot Your Face
4. Moonstruck
5. Club Of The Sons
6. Born In Berlin 
7. Torschlusspanik 
8. Cellars Of Hope 
9. Der Kuss 
10. Ave Maria 
11. Evil Machine (Reprise)

After two incredible 7-inch singles released on the band’s own excellent Jack Shack Records, Brooklyn’s Pampers are proud to announce their debut full-length on In The Red. Pampers are a four-piece—two guitars, bass and drums, plus echo-laden vocals—and there’s a postmodern art-punk angle afoot here, yet the band’s relentless, breakneck tempos and all-out aggression tilt more punk than art. Self-described as “thug pop,” the band’s sound is a brutal, psyched-out pummeling with hooks fighting to be heard beneath the din. It’s certainly more thug than pop. Produced by Ben Greenberg of The Men, Pampers’ twelve tracks explode with opener “Eruptions” and don’t let up until “Head Bag” fizzles out in a whirl of guitar noise and equipment buzz. Everything in between is a cavernous whomp of mongoloid vox, primitive drumming and a cloud of warped sonics swirling above the rock ’n’ roll thud.

“I only caught the last song of Pampers’ set and mainly remember them being very, very loud.” —Brooklyn Vegan “They’re awesome and you all are missing out by not seeing them perform. Seriously, they’re great.” - Impose.

TRACK LISTING

1. Eruptions
2. Not
3. T.H.T.F.
4. Edge Of Knife
5. Monkey Drip
6. Sack Attack
7. The Wigga
8. Purple Brain
9. Shot
10. Night Brunch
11. Rat Hole
12. Head Bag

Legacy Chicago craftsman Mark Nelson’s latest offering as Pan•American is less a distillation or divergence than it is a return to his musical and spiritual beginnings. Spare, subdued, and largely acoustic, A Son unfurls like late summer dusk on the edge of town, expansive but intimate.

Motivated by notions of “moving backward” and tracing roots – as well as a couple years of hammered dulcimer lessons – the album’s nine songs were written and recorded in his home in Evanston, Illinois, and honed during a recent solo tour in Europe. The emphasis on uncluttered arrangements and the centrality of the guitar and vocals reveal these songs as the most direct and emotional statement of his career.

Nelson cites everything from June Tabor, The Carter Family, Suicide and Jimmy Reed as oblique inspirations, though his truest muse was creative self-inquiry: “What does music do, Where does music start? How simple can it be? How honest can it be?”

After decades of mining post-rock pathways and latticework electronics in Labradford and early Pan•American, A Son strips away ornament and distraction in favor of a direct gaze into the heart of what is.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ivory Joe Hunter, Little Walter
2. Memphis Helena
3. Sleepwalk Guitars
4. Brewthru
5. Dark Birds Empty Fields
6. Drunk Father
7. Muriel Spark
8. Kept Quiet
9. Shenandoah 

Pan American, the musical project of Mark Nelson, returns with the new album 'Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane'. 

“The music on this record is a reflection of journeys and travel. The real world kind and the metaphorical ones as well. Having experienced the arrival of my children, the decline and departure of my parents, and the many years of venturing out and returning home in my own life, travel feels like the perfect tropology to consider the mysteries we inhabit. Travel and its impressions, rituals, superstitions—the possibilities and risk-all open up onto the landscape of our biggest questions, fear and wonder.

“Two songs established the spine of this music. Songs I’ve always loved, it seems even before I’d heard them. The first one, and the source of the title is ‘You Belong to Me’ by Jo Stafford. Colonial overtones unmissable to our modern ears aside, it’s also a beautiful mid century romance—and an ode to the threat of a shrinking world. The song represents the loneliness and the mystery of being alone and left behind. The singer is not asking their loved one to shut down horizons, merely reminding them to return when the traveling is done. To set aside The Silver Plane of transition, change and the in-between for the intimacy of solid earth.

“The second song is ‘Promised Land’ by Chuck Berry. Also about a journey and another one that moves easily between allegory and narrative. The singer is on the move across segregated America trying to get to the promised land of California. The song is both a tall tale that evokes Mark Twain, and an American epic that can keep good company with Herman Melville. When the hero finally makes it to California, his first instinct is to call home and reassure the Old World that he’s safely arrived in the new one.

“The songs on Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane were recorded at home over the last couple years. I played electric guitar, rubber bridge acoustic guitar, Ableton Live and an Electron Digitone synth. My friend Mallory Linnehan aka Chelsea Bridge contributed beautiful violin and vocals to a couple of the songs. We recorded those performances on a summer afternoon in Chicago at the Not Not space with the windows open.

“The cover is a photo of my mom—one I never saw when she was alive. With the headscarf and that excited, nervous expression, she looks about to embark on a journey. Ready, finally, to cross the tarmac and board the Silver Plane. “Wishing safe travels to all.” — Mark N / Pan•American

TRACK LISTING

1. SILVER PLANE, NOW BOARDING
2. DEATH CLEANING
3. ENTRANCE TO THE AFTERLIFE
4. DESERT UNDER BRIDGE
5. HEAVEN'S WAITING ROOM
6. SILVER TRAMWAY (IN SNOW)
7. HONEYMAN-SCOTT
8. TAXI TO THE TERMINAL GATE
9. A WINDOW IN THE STRINGS
10. GOLDEN GATE, SILVER CITY

The glacial distillation of Pan•American aka Mark Nelson’s “romantic minimalism” achieves unique fruition on his latest Kranky collection, The Patience Fader.

A suite of solo guitar instrumentals accented with lap steel, harmonica, and twilit atmospherics, the strings smear and sparkle in elegant, windswept swells, a guitar mode once described by Brian Eno as “Duane Eddy playing Erik Satie.” These are elegies as much as songs, lulling and lilting in private currents of beauty and bereavement. Nelson speaks of the notion of “lighthouse music,” radiance cast from a stable vantage point, sending “a signal to help others through rocks and dangerous currents.”

Composed during the highly isolated summer of 2020, the pieces took shape as meditations on “roots and mourning, trying to connect with those deep hidden rivers that lead to a greater communality.” There’s something ageless, scarred, and American about this music, both displaced and devotional, the ghost of rust belts and dust bowls looming in a horizon of deepening dusk.

TRACK LISTING

1. Swimming In A Western Motel
2. Outskirts, Dreamlit
3. Corniel
4. The North Line
5. Baitshop
6. Harmony Conversion
7. Memorizing, Memorizing
8. Just A Story
9. Nightwater
10. Wooster, Ohio
11. Almost Grown
12. Grounded

Pan Amsterdam blends experimental hip-hop, jazz, funk, and electronic influences, resulting in shapeshifting, genre-defying tracks. His forthcoming album 'Confines' exemplifies his improvisational style, mixing calculated ideas with spontaneous creativity. He describes his approach as organic, reflecting life’s unpredictable nature, and likens his sound to a fusion of George Clinton and Bootsy Collins.

'Confines' explores diverse themes, from racial politics and identity to pop culture references. With a stream-of-consciousness style, Pan Amsterdam raps about everything from cultural observations to food. This mix of humour, social commentary, and introspection is an exploration of the world through a childlike, almost alien perspective and his background in gospel, jazz, hip hop, and even the Grateful Dead shapes this eclectic sound.

The album title reflects Pan Amsterdam’s refusal to be confined by genre. The music channels influences from hip hop’s golden age, alongside nods to artists like Kool Keith, Busta Rhymes, and MF Doom.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Skittering, syncopated percussion and woozy synth stabs forge their way through churns of bass and reverb, providing the perfect backdrop for those trademark avant hip-hop vocals. Wonderfully weird, endlessly inventive and enjoyable.

TRACK LISTING

1. Day Out
2. Evening Drive
3. NYC Town
4. White Ninja
5. Venus Fly Trap
6. Plus One (ft Iggy Pop)
7. Meeshy J
8. Fashion Week
9. Pai Mei
10. Sure
11. Children Of Bear Creek
12. Confines 

Though PAN is an entirely new artist - new outlook, new message, new material and name - you may have met the woman herself before. Back in the mid-‘10s, the Taipei-born rapper went by the moniker Aristophanes. After performing a career-changing feature on ‘SCREAM’, taken from Grimes’ celebrated NME Album of 2015 ‘Art Angels’, Aristophanes went on to build a cult fanbase, releasing her debut mixtape ‘Humans Become Machines’ two years later and then her distributor went bust during covid. Signed to Transgressive she re-released her mixtape followed by 'Reborn' and 'Ghosts' EPs earlier this year.

Across a constantly morphing sound palette that moves from metallic, apocalyptic beats to delicate nods to the traditional music of her Asian heritage, via heavy, industrial moments, spacious soundscapes and much more, the thread is Pan’s utterly mesmeric vocal. Performing in a mix of Mandarin and English, she explains that having the two languages to play with is “like featuring another artist who has a different way of describing things”.

Across the releases, confident sexual expression mixes with tenderness, empathy and a particularly feminine sort of strength to create a world that Pan hopes will transcend language and connect her audience via something more innate. “The music is a place to feel safe,” she says. “The message that I want to carry through these two EPs and the album is to demonstrate the strength of accepting your own situations. When you can’t make things right but you’ve done your best, sometimes it’s really hard to admit that to yourself. It takes strength to do that. I use lots of sexual metaphors, but I feel like it’s more about the female need to be seen and heard. I want to build something more delicate and layered and connected to our life experience - to the trauma and the pleasure and the growth.”

In the time since she last stepped into the spotlight, the musician has experienced her fair share of all these things. Now, it’s as an entirely evolved artist that she returns with a new collection of music that revels in it all: the trauma, the pleasure, the growth and the long-awaited rebirth of PAN.

TRACK LISTING

1. Pansexual
2. FNGRMEHRDR
3. Imperfect Poetry
4. Look Into The Fire
5. Embers
6. Tearz
7. Reborn
8. Ghosts

Very rare Chilean album that blends folk and rock in a similar way to one of the most successful bands on IRT: Los Jaivas.

A roster of very experienced and talented musicians, including some members of Aguaturbia, was recruited for this project and this self-titled album was finally released in 1973.

Fierce percussions, stunning guitar riffs and filtered voices create a unique sound across this only album by Panal.

First official reissue with remastered sound from the original master tapes.

Although Panda Bear and Sonic Boom are no strangers to each other’s music, Reset marks their first collaborative release. When SB pitched an idea to take their working relationship to the next level, he reckoned PB might reject the proposition outright—in the nine gloriously, feverishly hook-bound tracks of Reset, though, you can hear exactly how much he loved the prospect.

SB’s notion was simple enough: After lugging his records to Portugal years ago, his fascination was renewed by old favorites and standards he had not heard in years. Something struck him, the way the ornate intros by Eddie Cochran or the Everly Brothers felt largely like stage curtains, compelling in their own right even if they had very little to do with the hits that followed. SB began crafting loops from these preambles, twisting and bending the parts like scrap metal before sending them onto PB.

The kernel of Reset emerged not long after international lockdowns began. If making it supplied temporary medicine for the duo, it is now permanently so for the rest of us, a reminder that sometimes playing and singing along to old favorites with friends can be enough to make the world feel a bit better.

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: Noah Lennox AKA Panda Bear and Pete Kember AKA Sonic Boom are longtime collaborators so it seemed only a matter of time before they’d team up together on an album. Reset is a 60s concept record built around intros to rock’n’roll 45s, before being reshaped with harmony overloads, repetitive loops, and psychedelic heavy samples. A perfect sonic melding of their previous bands, Animal Collective and Spacemen 3.

TRACK LISTING

1. Gettin’ To The Point
2. Go On
3. Everyday
4. Edge Of The Edge
5. In My Body
6. Whirlpool
7. Danger
8. Livin’ In The After
9. Everything’s Been Leading To This

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom, the duo of Noah Lennox and Peter Kember, release Reset in Dub, a dub version of their acclaimed 2022 LP Reset, featuring reworkings of all nine tracks by the legendary British dub producer Adrian Sherwood, via Domino. Sherwood created his version of Reset at his On-U Sound Studios with a crew that included such storied musicians as Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald of the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, as well as Prisoner, Alex White, Horseman, Mark Bandola, “Crucial” Tony, Ras Badthings, Ivan “Celloman” Hussey, and Mathew Smythe. “One of the primary influences on Reset was Jamaican rocksteady and it seemed like an interesting idea to explore taking it back to that sort of tropical root,” says Kember.

“I like big empty spaces; I like malls when there's no one there and the beach in the wintertime - visually it’s simple and uncluttered and the noise of the surf drowns out everything else, so I suppose it's no surprise I've always liked the sound of dub,” says Lennox, “and though some stuff bears its mark more than others I'd wager you can find residues of it in everything I've done. As a fan of Adrian’s I was excited when Pete suggested we ask him to do some dubs of Reset tracks, but as they started to come through it was clear what he was working on was much more than a dub. Reset in Dub feels like the thing filtered through a prism and it recontextualizes the OG.”

“This is a complete reset of Reset from myself and the On-U Sound crew,” says Sherwood. “Being a fan of Animal Collective and Spacemen 3, when it was suggested we do this together I loved the idea and relished the challenge. We talked about influences, old records, mixing techniques and made a plan, which was to keep all the elements of trippy fun, but with added menace, groove and an ultra active mix for the ‘heads.’ Very happy and proud of the result.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brilliant flipside to PB & SB's already superb Reset album. You just know a suite of dubs put together by the great Adrian Sherwood is going to be a great time, and with such stallar source material it's no surprise that it's turned out this well. Rich, cosmic dubby madness.

Noah Lennox's sixth solo album as Panda Bear is Buoys. The first song to be released from Buoys is “Dolphin”: Lennox’s bright, sincere voice front and center, with miles of space surrounding it, a guitar and some textured samples fleshing out the dubby sparseness and undercurrent of speaker-limit-pushing sub-bass low-end. Buoys was co-produced and co-mixed by collaborator Rusty Santos in Lennox’s adopted home of Lisbon, Portugal. Lennox and Santos last collaborated on the landmark Panda Bear album Person Pitch, which had its 10-year anniversary last year.

Animated by their ongoing interest in contemporary music production techniques, Lennox and Santos envisioned something that would “feel familiar to a young person’s ears.” However, Buoys retains a deep layer of experimentation coursing through the hyper-modern production – a hallmark of Panda Bear releases that will feel intimately familiar to fans of Lennox’s decade-plus body of work.

Alongside Santos, Buoys also features collaborators in Chilean DJ/vocalist Lizz and Portuguese musician Dino D'Santiago, both artists who came to Lennox via Santos’ recent trap and reggaeton production work; the former contributes arrangements throughout the album including “Dolphin,” and both lend their vocals to “Inner Monologue."

Buoys is the first Panda Bear release since 2018's vinyl-only EP A Day With the Homies, and the follow-up to 2015's kaleidoscopic full-length Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper. "The last three records felt like a chapter to me, and this feels like the beginning of something new," says Lennox whilst surveying how Buoys relates to the estimable Panda Bear catalogue. Indeed, the forthcoming Buoys is full of fresh ideas from one of modern music's most fascinating, innovative, and emotionally generous artists.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Having always been the more electronic side of the musical monolith that is Animal Collective, Panda Bear clearly brings the off-kilter melodies and syncopated Books-esque loop manipulation, with 'Buoys' proving to be every bit the staggered and echo-laden monolith we'd expect. Comfortingly avant-garde without stepping too far into art-rock or ostracising the listener, buoys takes a while to reel you in but when it does, you're stuck for good.

TRACK LISTING

01. Dolphin
02. Cranked
03. Token
04. I Know I Don’t Know
05. Master
06. Buoys
07. Inner Monologue
08. Crescendo
09. Home Free 

Panda Bear aka Noah Lennox has had a far-from-quiet few years since the release of his fourth solo record, 2011’s ‘Tomboy’. Since the breakout success of 2007’s universally-adored ‘Person Pitch’, each new Panda Bear release is a highly anticipated event and, one high profile Daft Punk collaboration later (‘Doin’ It Right’ from ‘Random Access Memories’), this is more the case than ever.

Old school hip hop textures and production techniques meld with the intuitive, cyclical melodies he has become known for, a sound that is at once both dense and playful.

Recording for the album came together everywhere from El Paso, Texas, to a garage by the beach near his home in Lisbon, Portugal. In a relationship that already proved fruitful on ‘Tomboy’, Noah partnered again with Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember (Spacemen 3, Spectrum), this time in a more top-to-bottom production role.

TRACK LISTING

Sequential Circuits
Mr Noah
Davy Jones’ Locker
Crosswords
Butcher Baker Candlestick Maker
Boys Latin
Come To Your Senses
Tropic Of Cancer
Shadow Of The Colossus
Lonely Wanderer
Principe Real
Selfish Gene
Acid Wash

Quite simply, this is an astonishing album. Animal Collective member Panda Bear (a.k.a. Noah Lennox) boldly returns with his third solo record "Person Pitch". Years in the making, "Person Pitch" marks a dramatic departure from Panda Bear's previous solo record "Young Prayer". The acoustic instruments of "Young Prayer" have been replaced with samplers and electronics. Imagine if you will, a stoned out, ethereal collaboration with a young Brian Wilson, Steve Reich, My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields and Brian Eno and you might be getting half way near to the aural brilliance on show here. The songs here shimmer along combining dizzying melodies, abstract sounds and off-kilter rhythms, all coated in a super rich surround-sound that mesmerizes the listener into a state of wide-eyed bliss, like a drug induced dream of all the best bits of music from since time began rolled into one album.

TRACK LISTING

Comfy In Nautica
Take Pills
Bros
I’m Not
Good Girls / Carrots
Search For Delicious
Ponytail

On ‘Sinister Grift’, Panda Bear’s first solo album in five years, Noah Lennox has returned with another statement that feels equally cumulative and unprecedented in his catalog. While his solo records have ranged from starkly intimate expressions of grief to colorful, electronic opuses, his music has never before sounded so warm and immediate. Working in his Lisbon, Portugal home studio with Animal Collective bandmate Josh “Deakin” Dibb, Lennox transforms Panda Bear into something resembling an old-school rock ensemble, playing nearly all the instruments himself and inviting kindred spirits into the process such as Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede, and—for the first time on a Panda Bear solo album—each of his Animal Collective bandmates.

TRACK LISTING

1. Praise
2. Anywhere But Here
3. 50mg
4. Ends Meet
5. Just As Well
6. Ferry Lady
7. Venom’s In
8. Left In The Cold
9. Elegy For Noah Lou
10. Defense

Recorded at his studio in Lisbon, "Tomboy" sees Panda Bear, aka Noah Lennox, stepping away from the sample-based parameters of his previous record and incorporating more guitar and synthesiser. Still prevalent though, is the interest in texture that made "Person Pitch" such a dense record; crashing waves and cheering crowds bounce against the gurgling arpeggios and give the tracks an immense sense of space. Soaked in reverb and punctuated with inflections of delay, the album’s drums reveal a dub influence which gives them a visceral punch that lingers after each hit. Lennox’s lofty, self-harmonising vocals smooth out the songs, and Sonic Boom’s mixing gives the work a large dynamic range.

Through it all, Lennox has remained resilient in following his singular vision and voice. 'I’ve definitely traversed some kind of mind field the last year or so and it hasn’t always been pleasant or easy', Lennox says. 'But it’s been more a positive irritant than anything else'. "Tomboy" proves, above all else, that he’s risen to the challenge and surpassed (as well as sidestepped) all expectations. And in following up "Person Pitch", Panda Bear has again taken to releasing the album as a batch of separate singles first, for labels like Kompakt, Fat Cat, Paw Tracks, and Domino. 'Doing the singles helps me focus on every song and also helps me move along in the process'.

Also part of the process was moving past the gear that informed the dense sonic tapestries of "Person Pitch" and MPP: 'I got tired of the severe parameters of using samplers. Thinking about Nirvana and the White Stripes got me into the idea of doing something with a heavy focus on guitar and rhythm'. Favouring a darker, more-streamlined sound on "Tomboy", Lennox went for a more visceral and direct approach, though that rock tendency was offset by another old influence on Lennox: 'With regards to where I am with Tomboy, I’m definitely reliving middle school and all the Baltimore R&B radio we used to ingest'.

It lends itself to the paradox of the title itself. Lennox explains: 'A lot of the songs are about something that’s in conflict with itself, so the image of a ‘tomboy’ has become the overseeing figure as far as the group of songs go'. It might even exemplify the conflict of Panda Bear himself: underground and experimental in his approach to sound, he also strives to craft gorgeous pop for the widest audience possible. With "Tomboy", he’s attained his greatest balance between the two extremes yet.

Both as a member of Animal Collective and as solo artist, Panda Bear, Noah Lennox spent the aughts helping redefine the aesthetics and methodology of experimental and independent music. With work ranging from splayed but lyrical noise, florid acoustic arrangements, and guitar-centric psychedelia, he and his bandmates have covered a vast musical territory that blurs the line between pop and experimentalism.

TRACK LISTING

You Can Count On Me
Tomboy
Slow Motion
Surfer's Hymn
Last Night At The Jetty
Drone
Alsatian Darn
Scheherazade
Friendship Bracelet
Afterburner
Benfica

A new wave of indiepop is emerging in the UK, and Panic Pocket are at the forefront of it. Playful, tuneful, sardonic and sassy, Sophie and Natalie have been friends since childhood, know each other’s secrets - and probably know a few of yours too.

Formed in 2017, Panic Pocket soon became a DIY sensation, releasing debut EP Never Gonna Happen, with Reckless Yes in 2019. Their debut album has found a new home.

Amelia and Rob at Skep Wax Records fell in love with the mixture of punk-grrrl attitude and songwriting skill: “They reminded us of all our favourite bands rolled into one. Panic Pocket know how to turn anger and humour into brilliant pop songs.” Panic Pocket will be the main support band at Heavenly’s sell-out London shows in May.

Many of Mad Half Hour’s 10 indie-pop anthems are concerned with being at odds with life's accepted milestones, feeling alienated from the people you thought wanted the same things as you, while trying to forge your own path. So the top-down janglepop of ‘Boyfriend’ reflects on what happens when your best friend finds love…and insists on bringing it everywhere, and ‘Get Me’ answers claustrophobic questions about ‘settling down’ with a not-so-silent scream over some deliciously dirty riffs.

But Panic Pocket’s superpower is their sense of fun. On Mad Half Hour, you’re never more than a few seconds away from a monster hook, killer harmony or an acerbically witty turn of phrase worthy of the band’s heroes Aimee Mann or Liz Phair. From receiving a cryptic “frog emoji” from a long-forgotten one-night stand, to ‘Don’t Get Me Started’’s streetlit walk of shame “via Morrisons car park”, no memory is off-limits, no matter how painful.

If you want punkpop exuberance, lyrics that are so truthful they hurt, plus some very infectious tunes - then Mad Half Hour is exactly the soundtrack you need, right down to the minute.

TRACK LISTING

1. Get Me
2. Still The Bad Guy
3. Mad Half Hour
4. Say You’re Sorry
5. Out Of The Woodwork
6. Boyfriend
7. Cheryl (Red Is The Bluest Colour)
8. I’ve Earned My Right To Be Petty
9. Mr Big
10. Don’t Get Me Started

If there's one thing Panic Shack know, it's how to have a good time. Comprised of Sarah Harvey (vocals), Meg Fretwell (guitar/backing vocals), Romi Lawrence (guitar/backing vocals), Em Smith (bass/backing vocals) and Nick Williams (drums), the band formed in 2018 as a middle-finger to the “members-only club” atmosphere of indie and punk scenes – not just because they’re male-dominated, but because they make playing music seem out of reach or, even worse, boring. “Boys make it look so hard,” Em says, rolling her eyes. “Whenever I see someone on the floor fiddling with their pedals with a face like a slapped arse I think, you're making this look so unattainable and it’s actually so fucking easy.”

This carefree approach gives Panic Shack’s music the same effect as popping a bottle of Prosecco – explosive, intoxicating, and delightfully chaotic. With barely any music available online, they built a word-of-mouth following off the back of their live shows, which have been praised for fusing “thrashy early LA-style punk with choreography that owes something to the Go-Go’s and Iron Maiden all at once” (The Guardian). That quickly snowballed into tours with the likes of Bob Vylan and Soft Play, and festival appearances at Glastonbury, Reading & Leeds, Green Man, End of the Road, SXSW and more. Released in 2022, their acclaimed Baby Shack EP bottled the lightning they have on stage, cementing their ability to blend killer hooks with a contagious sense of humour. The first vinyl pressing – splattered pink, obviously – sold out almost instantly.

Panic Shack’s self-titled debut album represents a serious level up. Linking up with producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius, Yard Act), it finds the band expanding their gutsy punk sound into fuller territory, packed with vocal harmonies, synths, electronic experimentation, and even a trumpet at one point.

Over 11 breakneck tracks, Panic Shack never lets up or loses momentum. It opens with the rising sound of chatter, glass clinking and laughter, most of which was recorded in the beer garden at an Amyl & the Sniffers gig. Fizzing with the anticipation of walking into a club at the start of a night out, it feels like party-punk’s answer to the intro of Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’. From there, the bouncy bass line and blistering guitars of ‘Girl Band Starter Band’ kick in, and the band pulls you into their world the way a friend would grab your hand and drag you onto the dancefloor. “Four iced lattes / Sit outside / Smoke a rolly / Sun is shining / People watching / Things are moving / Got us talking…” Sarah chants, the pace ramping up like a heartbeat beginning to race.

Across the album, the lyrics are conversational, often stemming from in-jokes, while the subject matter spans the full range of the feminine experience. Whether it’s everyday stuff like browsing Hinge (‘Unhinged’) and remembering everything you need to stick in your bag because your dress has no pockets (‘Pockets’), or broader societal issues like the impact of toxic tabloid culture on body image (‘Gok Wan’) and sexual harassment (‘SMELLARAT’), no topic is too frivolous or too vast. There’s no point-scoring or political commentary to be made here, though. The songs spring naturally from the way they live their lives, which is, more often than not, with a great deal of enjoyment.

Irresistible because of their simplicity and charming because of their familiarity, Panic Shack are the answer to a question that, quite frankly, isn’t asked often enough: what if the funniest girls you know started a band? The sonic equivalent to a coming-of-age film unfolding over a single night, Panic Shack takes the shape of a bender, beginning by approaching a bar and ending with an impassioned speech at sunrise about how much you love your friends. Swerving the expected topics of sex and romance, the entire album revolves around the ionic bond between the four girls.

“This band has taken us on the most mental journey that nobody else will fully understand,” says Meg. It’s only right, then, that their debut marks a celebration of that as much as it does the start of a new journey entirely. “We've always wanted people to come in and be part of our world, and this album is every part of who Panic Shack are. The party side, the angry side… It’s a story about us, really,” Sarah explains. “That’s why we named it after the band. We can't help but be ourselves.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Bouncy, punky dance music that's rooted in garage rock and the clattering mayhem of lo-fi but is shining with the sort of modern production and song structures that lean heavily into modern, wild party music. RIYL a good time.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Girl Band Starter Pack
2. Gok Wan
3. Lazy
4. Tit School
5. We Need To Talk About Dennis

SIDE B:
6. Do Something
7. Personal Best
8. Pockets
9. Unhinged
10. SMELLARAT
11. Thelma And Louise

Panic! At The Disco announce their seventh studio album, VIVA LAS VENGEANCE. The upbeat, driving, anthemic title track, kicks off the new era of Panic! At The Disco.

VIVA LAS VENGEANCE shows a change in process for frontman/songwriter Brendon Urie, having cut everything live to tape in Los Angeles alongside his friends and production partners, Jake Sinclair and Mike Viola. The cinematic musical journey is about the fine line between taking advantage of your youth, seizing the day and burning out. The songs take an introspective look into his relationship with his decade plus career including growing up in Las Vegas, love, and fame.

“Viva Las Vengeance is a look back at who I was 17 years ago and who I am now with the fondness I didn't have before. I didn’t realize I was making an album and there was something about the tape machine that kept me honest.” - Brendon Urie.

TRACK LISTING

Viva Las Vengeance
Middle Of A Breakup
Don’t Let The Light Go Out
Local God
Star Spangled Banger
God Killed Rock And Roll
Say It Louder
Sugar Soaker
Something About Maggie
Sad Clown
All By Yourself
Do It To Death

Theo Delaunay aka Panoptique aka Constance Chlore releases his first solo album on Macadam Mambo. Head of the Simple Music Experience label (dedicated to releasing punk experiments on tape), member of Violent Quand On Aime, Succhiamo, Simplists, Ono Omen and United Assholes, he had previously been part of the “Danzas Electricas” volumes 1 and 3, released a little single in 2019 and curated the “Simple Music Experience Vol.2” compilation. Panoptique sticks to what he knows best, to present his stories, singing spoken words, gogolitos deliriums, whispers and rough voices on minimal synth wave ballads or Drexciyanesque electro bangers. It’s scuzzy, DIY, maverick sometimes gritty sometimes groove. Special mention to his guest : Fiesta En El Vacio, for her ‘caliente’ featuring on “Menta Y Regaliz”.

Perfectly suited to the label’s ethos and a treasure for DIY electronix, minimal wave and electro-punk occultists! Check! 

TRACK LISTING

A1. La Colonie Penitentiaire
A2. Slippery
A3. Sable
A4. How Did You Find Me
A5. Menta Y Regaliz (Featuring Fiesta En El Vacio)
B1. Rice & Beans
B2. My Desire
B3. Sulpice
B4. Sub RDV
B5. Look At The Stars (Shoot A Drone, Man) 

Not all music can cope with physical reality. Instruments can be pushed until they lose grip. Eventually, they will slip so far that their untethered voice is all that remains. Panoram follows up on his "Pianosequenza" series engaging in seventeen excursions into playing the part of the piano that doesn't exist, coaxing out inarticulate feelings in lieu of familiar characteristics. Sounds and rhythms resulting from thoughts that can't be put into quite the right words.

Reichian in parts, Cale-esque in others, but still very much of the producer's own imagination. If you've a penchant for experimentalism within classical forms, or piano music in general, this one needs to be fimly at the top of your listening pile. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: We're all big fans of Panoram in here, and 2015 's brilliant 'Background Story' still gets played in my house quite a bit, so it's always nice when something new comes along. It's always a little different with Martirani's work, so I don't know what I expected but it ceratinly wasn't prepared piano / Bibio style ambient guitar business. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Onde
A2 Matelica
A3 Colombino
A4 Lux
A5 Indovinello
A6 Scherzo n.5
A7 Senza Mani
A8 Altissimo
A8 Oubliette
B1 Il Corpo Immaginato
B2 Moscacieca
B3 Eterno Breve
B4 Metallo Urlante
B5 La Stanza MutaB6 Ascesa
B7 Brucomela
B8 Specchio Riflesso 

‘The Butterfly Ate The Pearl’ is the follow up to 2008’s remix and collaboration collection ‘Heart Of the Sun’ and features nine new tracks including the forthcoming download single 'If I (Was)'. Recorded and complied during the last year, and co-produced with Hugo Race, the new album is another great collection of hypnotic, magical and understated songs that Degens has become known for, but with ‘The Butterfly Ate The Pearl’ there is a more psychedelic feel and a real progression of sound and it is without doubt the most accomplished release to date.

The multi-talented Andria Degens not only provides vocals, but plays a diverse range of instruments and effects including distorted and delayed dulcimers, guitar, keyboard, Indian harmonium, bass, samples, loops, pedal board, fx, vibra, bells, tambourine and sansula. She also brings together an array of eclectic musicians to elevate the dream, evolving the tracks into their full potency – Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy), James Blackshaw, Otto Hauser (Vertiver), Jay Darlington (Oasis, Kula Shaker), Steve Finnerty (Alabama 3), to name a few.

The result is a cinematic soundscape, a journey, through terrains, both familiar and unknown, with her gorgeous and heartbreaking voice leading the way, and sounding like nothing else around. Over the last few years Pantaleimon have released an acclaimed collection of EPs, singles and albums, the most recent releases being ‘Heart of the Sun’ (which contained remixes by the likes of Andrew W.K., Stephen O’Malley, Fovea Hex and Chris Carter/Cosey Fanny Tutti), and the EP, ‘Tall Trees’. Degen’s has played live with a host of artists such as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Antony & the Johnsons, Six Organs of Admittance, James Blackshaw, Dirty Three, and Lightning Bolt. In 2012 she collaborated with Strings of Consciousness and Lüüp on their latest releases. She has also worked with the renowned film director Cam Archer, and animator Eric Leiser.