After releasing two of the hottest singles of the year, Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers were catapulted from their confines on the Isle of Wight to sold out venues across the UK and packed-out tents at festivals causing giddy excitement wherever they went. Now, the duo is thrilled to unveil news of their debut album. 

“We've always done things our own way and without any outside pressure,” says Paul Isherwood of The Soundcarriers. “Making music like this keeps things fresh, you always lose something and gain something as you go along but I think of it as just another chapter.”

There have been many chapters in the life of the band to date and each one is defined by the singular approach and style of the group. Since forming in 2007 the band - comprised of Isherwood, Adam Cann, Dorian Conway and Leonore Wheatley - have released three albums that position them as a distinct and unique force in British music. Eschewing fads and trends that come and go, they have instead focused on honing their own sonic world that glides between woozy psychedelia, immersive grooves, subtle pop and rich, enveloping soundscapes. They’ve consistently moved at their own pace and on their own terms and on their fourth album, Wilds, they return after seven years since their last. “The sessions started in a cottage in the wilds so there's a literal meaning,” Isherwood says of the title. “But figuratively we've pretty much been in the wild for the last few years as far as a lot of people are concerned.”

The recording was staggered over a few different locations, from cottages to primary schools, before finishing in an art gallery. “The beauty of recording in non-studio studios is you have the time for the unexpected to happen,” says Isherwood. “Which is really what keeps you coming back for more.” As a result of the timeframe of the album, it’s one that has changed and grown a lot over the years. “The record has been through a lot of stages,” says Isherwood. “It's almost been circular. We started off wanting to do an album of more shorter, concise tracks and then sort of sidestepped into some more spacey ambient ideas so in a way the album is kind of a synthesis of the two phases, overall carrying on with many of the themes and influences of the first three but with a more focused approach.”

The opening ‘Waves’ leaps out the gate with an infectious hook kissed by a touch of French pop before leaping into a devilishly catchy chorus and into a mini prog-like flute breakdown. It sets the tone for an album that is rich in adventure and unpredictability that manages to balance experimentation with accessibility. ‘At The Time’ is almost unrelenting in its grinding charge, managing to create a groove that cracks and pulses at the same time, ‘Wilds’ is a gorgeously floating piece of music that skips along with strutting bass as Wheatley’s vocals merge melody with texture magically. The closing ‘Happens Too Soon gently stirs to life with an almost pastoral folk air to it, as it slowly builds into swirling psych pop rich in texture before reaching a rousing crescendo. “I feel this album sums up a lot of our influences,” says Isherwood. “There’s a strong folk influence in the sense of the actual songwriting but musically we wanted to create songs that were like those rare oddities you find on a bizarre charity shop record. A collection of "one offs" capturing a moment rather than trying to make a hit song.”

This sense of it being an album of unique songs is clearly apparent throughout but it also maintains a natural flow and cohesion. This is something that stems from the band’s approach to songwriting for the record. “A lot of the tracks started with a feel or groove,” says Isherwood. “Then building it into a more concise arranged piece. We were conscious that we didn't want the recording to sound too over-polished so although a lot of the tracks were quite painstaking in how they evolved we wanted the actual recording to be quite raw and not be reliant on cutting things up or overly editing things. We wanted it to sound natural rather than perfect.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Waves
2. Traces
3. At The Time
4. All These Things
5. Falling Back
6. Saturate
7. Driver
8. Wilds
9. Happens Too Soon

Formed in 2019, Yard Act began life when friends Ryan Needham (Bass) and James Smith (Vocals) started creating minimalist rock tracks using a primitive drum machine and borrowed bass guitar. Later drafting in George Townend on drums, and Sammy Robinson on guitars whom they met at their spiritual home The Brudenell Social Club / Leeds

The quartet have only played three gigs but have already released two superb singles, pulsing with post-punk indie dance, their creativity thriving despite reduced circumstances this last year.

In a world of great polarity, nuance is normally the answer. We may shame and bicker and amplify our outrage, but at the core of it all, we’re all still inhabitants of the same ecosystem, most of us trying to tow the delicate line between empathy and self-preservation. If nothing and no-one is purely good nor evil, true societal improvement can only come from recognizing some kind of middle ground.

In many ways, Yard Act is a project that exists through the fusion of seemingly opposing entities. Old friends in a new band, they seek out shades of socio-political grey, imbibing their stories with sharp, satirical spoken-word humour. Spearheaded by James Smith (vocals) and Ryan Needham (bass), the now four-piece, completed by Sam Shjipstone (guitar) and Jay Russell (drums), have built a sound that speaks inherently to their birthplace of Leeds, West Yorkshire, and yet ties together observations from all walks of modern British life – the small-town bloke in the local pub, the anti-capitalist stuck at a desk job, the tired activist in all of us torn between easy complicity and the desire to fight. Their sound and ethos might be progressive, but it’s not about pointing fingers so much as opening eyes.

“Lyrically, I think it’s a record about the things that we all do - we're all so wired into the system of day to day that we don't really stop and think about the constructs that define us,” says Smith. “But also beyond that, it's kind of exciting, because there’s still so much we don’t understand; how a hive mindset is forged, how information spreads, how we agree and presume things without thinking. Some people think more than others, but a lot of this sloganeering - 'I'm on the left, I'm not wrong' - doesn't achieve anything. Gammons, Karens, Snowflakes, whatever – I find it all so boring. I'm just not into that.”

What Yard Act are into is ideas. Having grown from relatively casual pub acquaintances to housemates, Smith and Needham found living together to be conducive to a high work rate, racking up demos in quick succession. Settling into a system of programming, looping and layering, the alchemy between the two created a base from which to build their narrative world. “Ryan is a vibe guy, whereas I overthink everything,” laughs Smith. “It’s been the greatest creative partnership I've ever had. When you find a groove that works, it just kind of looks after itself.”

With just three hometown shows under their belt, world events intervened. But rather than letting the pandemic derail them Yard Act set up their own imprint, Zen F.C. and across the course of 2020 and into early 2021 released four increasingly coruscating, hilariously dark singles with ‘The Trapper’s Pelts’, ‘Fixer Upper’, ‘Peanuts’ and Dark Days’ all securing BBC 6Music play, and despite the circumstances developing a remarkable, ever increasing fanbase.

“One of the first reasons we started the band, before anything even took off, was to play live because we had fun playing live,” says Smith. “but very quickly, we realised that we just loved writing songs, and writing songs isn't just about jamming in a room and writing those long noodly songs. It’s a massive cliché, but we've always been influenced by pop music, and finding a way to present it in a way that feels like ‘us’. The more people reacted to the spoken word thing, the more we felt encouraged; you can kind of hear how it gets more and more ridiculous as the singles came out. Positive reinforcement is how you explore and push the strongest bits to the extreme. And our extreme is just me talking loads — I'll talk until the track runs out!

Far from the self-indulgent bluster that Smith jokes about, ‘The Overload’ is a record of great dexterity and curation, the output of a band who were raised on a 00s digital-revolution buffet of wide musical influences. Growing up on US MTV Hip-Hop, minimal 70s No-Wave and sharp-witted British indie, Yard Act benefit from this rich tapestry of musical near-history, using it to create something that feels like more than a trendy pastiche. “There are generations of digital crate-diggers now that just absolutely love music and know how to navigate it,” says Smith. “Old music becomes new music. It's made everyone less worried about the now I think.”

While time-travelling in parts sonically, ‘The Overload’ weaves a very-2021 storyline. The group made the decision early on to leave ‘Fixer Upper’ and ‘Dark Days’ off their album debut (“it sounds arrogant, but we felt we had enough good songs without ‘em”), but the joyous specificity of their early lyrical observation is still in fine evidence, plotting a visceral, satirical journey through capitalism and greed. Across the album’s 11 tracks, an unnamed character – a bricolage of characters that Smith has met, imagined, or himself been – finds himself in quite the financial pickle, ricocheting from desk job to desperate illicit activity to police investigation, before culminating in the kind of half-cut personal epiphany that even the most law-abiding among us could relate to. Bookended by cheeky cameo’s from ‘Fixer Upper’s' Graeme and a clear structure of four parts, there is no getting around it — Yard Act have written a soap opera.

“At Ryan's insistence, the record was actually called ‘Yard Act The Musical’ for a long time, but I've got a really weird relationship with musicals, as in I fucking hate them,” deadpans Smith. “I don’t want to overthink it, but I do like concept albums, and I do think stuff works better when it's given time to be gestated and let people pick at lyrics and think what they mean.”

“We had about six standout tracks when we started thinking about an album, and from those, I saw a theme of money and capitalism, a sort of mockery of it. It's basically just a man in their late 20s, early 30s, who's always tried to fight against the system, stood up for things that they believe in and had a very strong moral compass. But it kind of crushes them in as many ways as it makes them happy – you sacrifice your beliefs for a life of comfortability, and still have to carry the burden of that decision.”

For a record of some potential heaviness, a dark sense of humour is integral. The record’s title track – its opener — plays like a raucous spaghetti western-themed night at the Hacienda, while ‘Land Of The Blind’s loose-swinging bass and jabbing guitars gives acerbic pace to its sordid tale of financial exploitation. The influence of post-punk is apparent, but the shackles of ‘authenticity’ have been shaken loose - “I think we could all feel that this post-punk thing was getting tired; ‘Land Of The Blind’ felt like quite a pivotal song in switching us away from what people thought we were.”

Even through Smith’s openly cynical lens, the world isn’t an entirely cruel and hopeless place. As our character finds themselves in the reflective epitaph of the final three songs, they explore how they might have come to be; the narcissistic peers they grew up with (‘Tall Poppies’), the Friday nights setting the world to intoxicated rights (synth-tinged “Pour Another’), and then ‘100% Endurance’, a poignant, emotional release which finds some kind of freedom in the futility of it all, an opportunity rather than an oppression; “It’s all so pointless/ But it’s not though is it?” As a closer, it’s entirely pivotal for the juxtaposition they’re trying to achieve.

“When that came right at the end of the record, it felt like it really completed it by sounding different to the rest .” says Smith. “It’s a little bit like a slip of the mask, which felt really important after a record of me being quite sarcastic, which I’m quite good at. It feels a bit like a gateway to where we can go.”

Pulling off a debut album in a pandemic isn’t easy, but somehow, Yard Act have made it work. Recording with Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius, Aldous Harding) at his Bristol studio, those prolific demos have been sharpened down into something that speaks to the times we live in, creating a statement of intent that survives on nuance – a record of retro influences, recorded in a modern way, that manages to poke fun at society without punching down from a place of lefty superiority. ‘The Overload’ is a political record, but in the same way that all great observations of human nature are – a messy, complex, knowingly hypocritical snapshot of our current state of play.

“I just hope it makes people laugh at the peculiarities of human nature,” says Smith. “The world feels very heavy at the moment; it has done for a while, and when bad things happen, the weight of the world makes you panic, you want to change everything like flipping a switch. But that's not how it works. All you can do is plant seeds. I don’t think good and bad really exists, and I don't think you can change people's minds any other way.

“So that's what I hope, but I also just hope people can just enjoy it. And I hope it lasts. I hope people like the detail - I think we can learn a lot about each other through an observational smirk. Jenessa Williams

TRACK LISTING

Vinyl Tracklist:
Side A
A 1. The Overload
2. Dead Horse
3. Payday
4. Rich
5. The Incident
6. Witness (Can I Get A?)
Side B
7. Land Of The Blind
8. Quarantine The Sticks
9. Tall Poppies
10. Pour Another
11. 100% Endurance

CD Tracklist:
1. The Overload
2. Dead Horse
3. Payday
4. Rich
5. The Incident
6. Witness (Can I Get A?)
7. Land Of The Blind
8. Quarantine The Sticks
9. Tall Poppies
10. Pour Another
11. 100% Endurance

Andrew Weatherall was Heavenly’s first true friend. By the time the label was born in the spring of 1990, he was already an inspirational sounding board, as well as a fellow traveller on the bright new road that stretched out ahead thanks to the massive cultural liberation of acid house. Back then, every energised meeting could be turned into a fortuitous opportunity in this burgeoning new underground economy. Bored of your job? Start playing records out! Start a club night! Get in the studio! Start a label! Just don’t stand still. Andrew would follow two of those commandments for the rest of his life, and he’d have a hand in the others at various points as well.

At the start of things, Andrew was a regular visitor to Capersville — the pre-Heavenly press office run by friend and label founder Jeff Barrett (soon to become Andrew’s manager). It was there that he famously picked up a copy of Primal Scream’s unloved second album and singled out a track that would later become Loaded, after being given an instruction to ‘fucking destroy’ it by the band’s Andrew Innes; it was there too that the idea to remix the first Heavenly release came about.

Andrew’s mix of that first Heavenly record is very much a product of its time. The World According To Sly and Lovechild is a swirling bass punch topped with a hypnotic marimba line and the kind of ecstatic diva vocal that you’d hear coming out of the speakers all night at post-Shoom clubs like Yellow Book. His take on the label’s next release — Saint Etienne’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart (A Mix of Two Halves) — would set the template for his next three decades of audio exploration. A drawn-out imperial dub, the track builds and builds with a moody intensity (partly down to the melodica played by Weather Prophets legend Pete Astor) that’s far more Kingston JA at dusk than Kingston-upon-Thames at kicking out time. It’s both a dancefloor record to get lost in and headphone psychedelia of the highest order — a perfect example of what he did better than anyone else.

Between 1990 and his untimely death in 2020, Andrew fed more Heavenly bands through the mixing desk than those of any other label. Consistently, he returned visionary music to the office, often in person for (at least) one ceremonial playback — a ritual that would involve the volume cranked up high and Andrew rocking back on his heels, eyes closed, lost in the alchemy of it all.

Each time, he would warp and twist originals into beautiful new shapes — elasticated club records that might evoke Detroit techno one second and Throbbing Gristle the next, before wheel-spinning into something akin to The Fall produced by King Tubby.

Andrew’s studio adventures would always be guided by that early advice to fucking destroy the source material. It’s why he was the first name that came up when remixes were discussed; the first number on the speed dial. Listening back to these remixes now — to thirty years of glorious outsider sounds — it’s more obvious than ever that Heavenly was blessed to have a friend like Andrew Weatherall. 

TRACK LISTING

Sly & Lovechild - The World According To Sly & Lovechild (Soul Of Europe Mix)
Mark Lanegan - Beehive (Andrew Weatherall Dub)
Flowered Up - Weekender (Audrey Is A Little Bit More Partial Mix)
Gwenno - Chwyldro (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
Saint Etienne - Only Love Can Break Your Heart (A Mix Of Two Halves)
Confidence Man - Bubblegum (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
Espiritu - Conquistador (Sabres Of Paradise No. 3 Mix)
The Orielles - Sugar Tastes Like Salt (Andrew Weatherall Tastes Like Dub Mix Pt.1 - Live Bass)

Andrew Weatherall was Heavenly’s first true friend. By the time the label was born in the spring of 1990, he was already an inspirational sounding board, as well as a fellow traveller on the bright new road that stretched out ahead thanks to the massive cultural liberation of acid house. Back then, every energised meeting could be turned into a fortuitous opportunity in this burgeoning new underground economy. Bored of your job? Start playing records out! Start a club night! Get in the studio! Start a label! Just don’t stand still. Andrew would follow two of those commandments for the rest of his life, and he’d have a hand in the others at various points as well.

At the start of things, Andrew was a regular visitor to Capersville — the pre-Heavenly press office run by friend and label founder Jeff Barrett (soon to become Andrew’s manager). It was there that he famously picked up a copy of Primal Scream’s unloved second album and singled out a track that would later become Loaded, after being given an instruction to ‘fucking destroy’ it by the band’s Andrew Innes; it was there too that the idea to remix the first Heavenly release came about.

Andrew’s mix of that first Heavenly record is very much a product of its time. The World According To Sly and Lovechild is a swirling bass punch topped with a hypnotic marimba line and the kind of ecstatic diva vocal that you’d hear coming out of the speakers all night at post-Shoom clubs like Yellow Book. His take on the label’s next release — Saint Etienne’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart (A Mix of Two Halves) — would set the template for his next three decades of audio exploration. A drawn-out imperial dub, the track builds and builds with a moody intensity (partly down to the melodica played by Weather Prophets legend Pete Astor) that’s far more Kingston JA at dusk than Kingston-upon-Thames at kicking out time. It’s both a dancefloor record to get lost in and headphone psychedelia of the highest order — a perfect example of what he did better than anyone else.

Between 1990 and his untimely death in 2020, Andrew fed more Heavenly bands through the mixing desk than those of any other label. Consistently, he returned visionary music to the office, often in person for (at least) one ceremonial playback — a ritual that would involve the volume cranked up high and Andrew rocking back on his heels, eyes closed, lost in the alchemy of it all.

Each time, he would warp and twist originals into beautiful new shapes — elasticated club records that might evoke Detroit techno one second and Throbbing Gristle the next, before wheel-spinning into something akin to The Fall produced by King Tubby.

Andrew’s studio adventures would always be guided by that early advice to fucking destroy the source material. It’s why he was the first name that came up when remixes were discussed; the first number on the speed dial. Listening back to these remixes now — to thirty years of glorious outsider sounds — it’s more obvious than ever that Heavenly was blessed to have a friend like Andrew Weatherall. 

TRACK LISTING

Audiobooks Feat. Andrew Weatherall - Dance Your Life Away (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
Saint Etienne - Heart Failed (In The Back Of A Taxi) (Two Lone Swordsmen Dub)
Doves - Compulsion (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
TOY - Dead & Gone (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
Confidence Man & Andrew Weatherall - Out The Window (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
LCMDF - Gandhi (Andy Weatherall Remix II)
Espiritu - Bonita Mañana (Sabres Of Paradise Remix)
Unloved - Devils Angels (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

There are pieces of music that seek to tell us deeper stories. Others harness the talents of the players at their disposal in adventurous ways. Then there are the rare, generous works that make us think back to our roots as human beings and to our shared beginnings in the universe, that lift us in their melodies, rhythms and textures, that carry us with them.

The Unfolding is all of these things. An extraordinary eight-part collaboration between composer Hannah Peel (Mercury Prize and Emmy nominee) and Paraorchestra, it was made over three years in precious morsels of time around a global pandemic. These circumstances – unexpected when the collaboration began – add weight to its explorations in sound about who we are, where we came from, and who we could all be. The Unfolding also explores Paraorchestra’s progressive idea of what an orchestra should be, mixing analogue, digital and assistive instruments with a unique ensemble of disabled and non-disabled musicians to make magic happen, and accessible to all.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1. The Universe Before Matter [10:58]
A2. Wild Animal [3:55]
Side B
B1. Passage [5:22]
B2. The Unfolding [5:47]
Side C
C1. If After Weeks Of Early Sun [4:16]
C2. Perhaps It Made Us Happy For A Minute [4:17]
C3. We Are Part Mineral [6:06]
Side D
D1. Part Cloud [10:31]
D2. The Unfolding Credits Instrumental Version [02:19] *vinyl Exclusive Not On CD*
D3. The Unfolding Credits [02:19]

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record.

TRACK LISTING

Change
Time Escaping
Spud Infinity
Certainty
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Sparrow
Little Things
Heavy Bend
Flower Of Blood
Blurred View
Red Moon
Dried Roses
No Reason
Wake Me Up To Drive
Promise Is A Pendulum
12,000 Lines
Simulation Swarm
Love Love Love
The Only Place
Blue Lightning

“Style wise, it’s incredibly different, going back to thinking about guitars and guitar sounds. Obviously you have to take into consideration things like percussive elements such as drums, which I haven’t been using in my other projects; but this is the mind set that makes up Loop.”

So says Robert Hampson, the indefatigable visionary behind inspirational sonic architects Loop, whose eagerly anticipated fourth LP Sonancy (Latin for “to create noise”) is the perfect document for these strange times. Dynamic, dystopian, righteously angry and unashamedly Loop-ian, it’s an album that marks a vital re-emergence for Hampson and co.

Formed in South London in the mid-1980s, Loop blazed a trail with their potent mix of motorik beats and heavy guitar riffs, recording a trio of brilliant albums that set the indie charts alight before imploding in 1990 after the release of album number three, A Gilded Eternity. As critics enthused at the time, Loop were the sound of Suicide jamming with the Stooges aboard a spaceship built by Hawkwind and piloted by CAN. They were post-psychedelic, pre-shoegaze figureheads in a world of anodyne pop jangle and baggy rhythms, and even their closest contemporaries like Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine didn’t plough such a distinctive furrow as theirs.

After Loop’s demise, Hampson pivoted away from guitars with electronic project Main, before moving to France and hooking up with fabled experimental collective Groupe de Recherches Musical (GRM). Loop were a distant memory, one that Hampson seemed unwilling to revisit, so it was a delightful surprise when they remerged in 2013 to play and curate the All Tomorrow’s Parties (ATP) festival, followed by a performance personally requested by Robert Smith of The Cure at Meltdown Festival in 2018.

“Through that long period when I often said I wouldn’t reform Loop, I didn’t miss it, I didn’t feel the need to have it in my life,” Hampson explains. “It was working with people like Barry Hogan at ATP and the re-mastered reissues of our original albums coming out that sparked my interest again. It took me a few years to be comfortable to say, ‘Yes, we can do this again, we’re relevant’. I’m not someone who will do something for the sake of doing something.”

Along with the live shows, there also came new music in the shape of a 2015 EP called Array 1, the first in a planned trio of EPs of protracted tracks which Hampson eventually abandoned in favour of the more direct pleasures of their astounding new full length Sonancy.

“I dropped the idea of the EP series and went in an entirely different direction. I started writing songs that were much more immediate, tighter, dare I say more aggressive – although not aggressive in the old Loop way, but with a spikiness. It needed to sound more modern. When Main petered out, I started working with people like the GRM in France, so I went in the direction of electroacoustic musique concrète. Loop is completely removed from that, but there are parts of the Array EP and Sonancy that go towards the more experimental sounds. It’s not just guitar thrash.

“My motto has always been ‘Forward’ and I always try to do something new with each record. I always try to push different influences in there. Specifically for this record, I wanted to counter the idea of the Array EP, on which all the tracks were longer and drawn out. They still had the motorik element of bands like Neu! and CAN, but Loop’s always had that. With Sonancy I also wanted to take a post-punk sound, spin it on its head and mix it with a psych influence. A total gumbo. Which has always been Loop, this mash up of spicy rhythms.”

Indeed, with its rich mixture of styles and cadences, Sonancy is the sound of Loop in the 21st century, Hampson’s intense guitar work anchored by propulsive backing in service of songs with clinically dissociative titles such as ‘Eolian’, ‘Supra’, ‘Penumbra’ and ‘Fermion’.

“People who know my music well know that from the last Loop album onwards, my interest in chemistry, science and astronomy have come to the fore,” Hampson elaborates. “I use those titles but I use them in an abstract context. With the cutback, minimalist sound I wanted for this record, I wanted to do that with the lyrics and the titles as well. It’s very immediate. The songs are shorter in length, the lyrics more minimal than ever.

“I’m often asked to print the lyrics but I want people to approach our records with a sense of mystery, so you don’t necessarily know what’s going on. You may call it challenging. I’m influenced by J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick to a certain degree. Lyrically, if you listen to it intently, there’s this dystopian outlook. There’s a lot of anger in there. I don’t like seeing the wanton abuse of power, which is what we’re seeing right now and I’m disgusted by it. I wouldn’t say Sonancy is bleak though because I’m one of those people who believes there’s a chance for change. That may be naïve, but I always hope that people will come out of this coma they all seem to be in. I’ve imbued the lyrics with a little bit of hope.”

Hope is a powerful force, one perhaps needed more than ever today. Pandemic lockdowns stretched the making of Sonancy, recorded at long-term Loop soundman Joe Garcia’s Bristol-based studio Joe’s Garage, from an expected couple of weeks to almost a year. Still, if recording was elongated, the experience was made easier by the interplay between the members of what is the most enduring line-up of Loop to date.

TRACK LISTING

1. Interference
2. Eolian
3. Supra
4. Penumbra I
5. Isochrone
6. Halo
7. Fermion
8. Penumbra II
9. Axion
10. Aurora

After leaving London in 1999 for the sleepy seaside retiree town of Weston-super-Mare, Coil co-founders John Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson set up shop in a palatial eight-bedroom estate to pursue the outer reaches of the group’s heightening cabalistic chemistry. Among the staggering string of late-era masterpieces they produced is lunar opus Musick To Play In The Dark, widely hailed as an artistic zenith upon its release. The sessions that birthed it were in fact so fruitful that a second LP took shape during the creation of the first one.

Aided by the recent addition of Welsh multi-instrumentalist engineer Thighpaulsandra, Coil mined further into the recesses of surrealist eldritch electronica Balance termed “moon music” – post-industrial spellcasting at the axis of narcotic and nocturnal energies. Musick To Play In The Dark² spans a full witching hour of bad acid sound design, synthesizer voyaging, opiated balladry, Luciferian glitch, and subliminal hymnals, alternately ominous, oracular, and absurd. Scottish gothic icon Rose McDowall guests on vocals for two tracks but otherwise the album is a hermetic affair, tapping into the group’s limitless insular synergy.

Opener “Something” is stark and incantational, a spoken word experiment for windswept voids. “Tiny Golden Books” unspools an aerial whirlpool of cosmic synth, both whispery and widescreen. “Ether” is an exercise in funeral procession piano and intoxicated wordplay (“It's either ether or the other”), while “Where Are You?” and “Batwings – A Liminal Hymn” lurk like liturgical murmurings heard on one’s death bed, framed in granular FX and flickering candlelight.

As a whole the collection skews more muted and remote than its predecessor, as if having grown accustomed to the nether regions of these darkening seances. But music box hallucination “Paranoid Inlay” captures the group’s oblique comedic side, always glimmering beneath: over a warped, wobbly beat Balance intones an opaque narrative of serenity, Saint Peter, and suicidal vegetables, accompanied by spiraling harpsichord and stuttering squelches of electronics. “It seems concussion suits you,” he repeats twice, like a macabre pickup line, before dictating a dear diary entry about risks and failures, finally concluding with as close to a self-portrait as Coil ever came: “On a clear day I can see forever / that the underworld is my oyster.”

TRACK LISTING

A1. Something
A2. Tiny Golden Books
B1. Ether
B2. Paranoid Inlay
C1. An Emergency
C2. Where Are You?
C3. Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)

PRE-ORDER THE ALBUM TO BE ENTERED INTO A DRAW TO WIN A SIGNED TEST PRESSING OF 'POMPEII'. 
NPN.

Pompeii, Cate Le Bon’s sixth full-length studio album and the follow up to 2019’s Mercury nominated Reward, bears a storied title summoning apocalypse, but the metaphor eclipses any “dissection of immediacy,” says Le Bon. Not to downplay her nod to disorientation induced by double catastrophe - global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding ecotraumas resonate all too eerily. “What would be your last gesture?” she asks. But just as Vesuvius remains active, Pompeii reaches past the current crises to tap into what Le Bon calls “an economy of time warp” where life roils, bubbles, wrinkles, melts, hardens, and reconfigures unpredictably, like lava - or sound, rather. Like she says in the opener, “Dirt on the Bed,” Sound doesn’t go away / In habitual silence / It reinvents the surface / Of everything you touch.

Pompeii is sonically minimal in parts, and its lyrics jog between self-reflection and direct address. Vulnerability, although “obscured,” challenges Le Bon’s tendencies towards irony. Written primarily on bass and composed entirely alone in an “uninterrupted vacuum,” Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) and recorded the album largely by herself with long-term collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja in Cardiff, Wales. Enforced time and space pushed boundaries, leading to an even more extreme version of Le Bon's studio process – as exits were sealed, she granted herself “permission to annihilate identity.” “Assumptions were destroyed, and nothing was rejected” as her punk assessments of existence emerged.

Enter Le Bon’s signature aesthetic paradox: songs built for Now miraculously germinate from her interests in antiquity, philosophy, architecture, and divinity’s modalities. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, and her narrativity favors slippage away from meaning. In “Remembering Me,” she sings: In the classical rewrite / I wore the heat like / A hundred birthday cakes / Under one sun. Reconstituted meltdowns, eloquently expressed. This mirrors what she says about the creative process: “as a changeable element, it’s sometimes the only point of control… a circuit breaker.” She’s for sure enlightened, or at least more highly evolved than the rest of us. Hear the last stanza on the album closer, “Wheel”: I do not think that you love yourself / I’d take you back to school / And teach you right / How to want a life / But, it takes more time than you’d tender. Reprimanding herself or a loved one, no matter: it’s an end note about learning how to love, which takes a lifetime and is more urgent than ever.

To leverage visionary control, Le Bon invented twisted types of discipline into her absurdist decision making. Primary goals in this project were to mimic the “religious” sensibility in one of Tim Presley’s paintings, which hung on the studio wall as a meditative image and was reproduced as a portrait of Le Bon for Pompeii’s cover. Fist across the heart, stalwart and saintly: how to make “music that sounds like a painting?” Cate asked herself. Enter piles of Pompeii’s signature synths made on favourites such as the Yamaha DX7, amongst others; basslines inspired by 1980s Japanese city pop, designed to bring joyfulness and abandonment; vocal arrangements that add memorable depth to the melodic fabric of each song; long-term collaborator Stella Mozgawa’s “jazz-thinking” percussion patched in from quarantined Australia; and Khouja’s encouraging presence.

The songs of Pompeii feel suspended in time, both of the moment and instant but reactionary and Dada-esque in their insistence to be playful, satirical, and surreal. From the spirited, strutting bass fretwork of “Moderation”, to the sax-swagger of “Running Away”; a tale exquisite in nature but ultimately doomed (The fountain that empties the world / Too beautiful to hold), escapism lives as a foil to the outside world. Pompeii’s audacious tribute to memory, compassion, and mortal salience is here to stay.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Dirt On The Bed
2. Moderation
3. French Boys
4. Pompeii
5. Harbour
SIDE B
1. Running Away
2. Cry Me Old Trouble
3. Remembering Me
4. Wheel

Following on almost exactly a year to the day from the release of their acclaimed debut “For the first time”, the band have harnessed the momentum from that record and run full pelt into their second, with “Ants From Up There” managing to strike a skilful balance between feeling like a bold stylistic overhaul of what came before, as well as a natural progression.

Their debut “For the first time” is a certain 2021 Album of the Year, having received ecstatic reviews from critics and fans alike as well as being shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Released in February to extensive, global, critical support - perhaps best summed up by The Times who wrote in their 5/5 review that they were "the most exciting band of 2021" and The Observer who called their record "one of the best albums of the year" - the album made a significant dent on the UK Albums Chart where it landed at #4 in its first week, a remarkable achievement for a largely experimental debut record. The album also reached #1 on Any Decent Music, #2 at Album Of The Year and sat at #1 on Rate Your Music for several weeks, remaining the record to generate the most fan reviews and site discussion there this year. Black Country, New Road were also declared Artist Of The Week and Album Of The Week by The Observer, The Line Of Best Fit and Stereogum, and saw features, including covers and reviews, from the likes of Mojo, NPR, CRACK, Uncut, The Quietus, Pitchfork, The FADER, Loud & Quiet, The Face, Paste, The Needle Drop, DIY, NME, CLASH, So Young, Dork and more.

With “For the first time” the band melded klezmer, post-rock, indie and an often intense spoken word delivery. On “Ants From Up There” they have expanded on this unique concoction to create a singular sonic middle ground that traverses classical minimalism, indie-folk, pop, alt rock and a distinct tone that is already unique to the band.

Recorded at Chale Abbey Studios, Isle Of Wight, across the summer with the band’s long-term live engineer Sergio Maschetzko, it’s also an album that comes loaded with a deep-rooted conviction in the end result. “We were just so hyped the whole time,” says Hyde. “It was such a pleasure to make. I've kind of accepted that this might be the best thing that I'm ever part of for the rest of my life. And that's fine.”

Black Country, New Road's live performances have already gained legendary status from fans and has seen them labelled "one of the UK's best live bands" by The Guardian. After the success of their livestream direct from London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, stand-out performances at SXSW and the BBC 6 Music Festival, and following a sold-out UK tour this summer, high-profile festival appearances, and a 43 date UK & EU tour to follow in the Autumn with sold out US dates next year, the London-based seven-piece today announce further UK & IE dates in support of the album for April 2022, preceded by their biggest London headliner to date at The Roundhouse in February.

Black Country, New Road Live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road, will be available as part of the Deluxe LP and CD versions of ‘Ants From Up There’.

TRACK LISTING

LP
Side A
A1. Intro
A2. Chaos Space Marine
A3. Concorde
A4. Bread Song
Side B
B1. Good Will Hunting
B2. Haldern
B3. Mark’s Theme
Side C
C1. The Place Where He Inserted The Blade
C2. Snow Globes
Side D
D1. Basketball Shoes

CD 
Intro
Chaos Space Marine
Concorde
Bread Song
Good Will Hunting
Haldern
Mark’s Theme
The Place Where He Inserted The Blade
Snow Globes
Basketball Shoes

4LP Box Set / Deluxe CD
Ants From Up There
Side A
A1. Intro
A2. Chaos Space Marine
A3. Concorde
A4. Bread Song
Side B
B1. Good Will Hunting
B2. Haldern
B3. Mark’s Theme
Side C
C1. The Place Where He Inserted The Blade
C2. Snow Globes
Side D
D1. Basketball Shoes

Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall
Side A
A1. Mark’s Theme (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall)
A2. Instrumental (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall)
A3. Athens France (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall)
Side B
B1. Science Fair (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall)
B2. Sunglasses (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall)
Side C
C1. Track X (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall)
C2. Opus (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall)
C3. Bread Song (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall)
Side D
D1. Basketball Shoes (Live From The Queen Elizabeth Hall) 

Summer at Land’s End is not an interlude or tangent for The Reds, Pinks & Purples but rather a perfect fourth movement following the albums Anxiety Art, You Might Be Happy Someday, and Uncommon Weather. As with these self-recorded records (the primary work of songwriter Glenn Donaldson), the songs on Summer at Land’s End were crafted slowly and then drawn together to make a unified statement. But here, and more than before, Summer at Land’s End combines Donaldson’s rueful pop sensibility with a parallel musical universe, one composed of pictures, dreams, and feelings without words. Even if the underlying theme of this collection is one of conflict or unhappiness, the vision of the music presents an escape to a new world, always fading in and out of sight.

For listeners who may not be familiar with Donaldson’s corner of San Francisco––the Richmond district––or the current wave of hazy, melodic DIY pop groups performing in the city, Summer at Land’s End pulls in images and scenes that feel like a collision of the mundane and the sublime of this present landscape. But settings such as these are the backdrop for personal narratives, expressed as a struggle with love, with companionship and the conflicts of home. With this record, The Reds, Pinks & Purples give less focus to the vanities of a subculture and more to the challenge of connecting with someone, to the ordinary goals of being human and finding harmony with others.

This deliberate saturation in drama and ambiance, along with some of Donaldson’s best songwriting to date, is what gives Summer at Land’s End its special class in the project’s discography. Of the album’s cinematic mood, Donaldson refers to films like Summer of ‘42 and the influence of the classic 4AD catalogue of the 1990s. This style informs much of Donaldson’s prior and current ventures of course (The Ivytree, Vacant Gardens, and a dozen projects in between) but now The Reds, Pinks & Purples have taken the mantle, embracing this instinct for instrumental or dreamier modes of pop songwriting. It’s a pleasure to experience Summer at Land’s End, as this record finds a thrilling balance between songs and sounds, instruments and voices, and the ironic twin poles of art and life.

TRACK LISTING

1. Don’t Come Home Too Soon (03:12)
2. Let’s Pretend We’re Not In Love (03:06)
3. New Light (02:53)
4. My Soul Unburdened (02:21)
5. Summer At Land’s End (07:02)
6. Pour The Light In (04:10)
7. All Night We Move (02:42)
8. Tell Me What’s Real (03:05)
9. Upside Down In An Empty Room (03:15)
10. Dahlias And Rain (02:37)
11. I’d Rather Not Go Your Way (01:56)

DINKED EDITION:
Side A
Don’t Come Home Too Soon (03:12)
Let’s Pretend We’re Not In Love (03:06)
New Light (02:53)
My Soul Unburdened (02:21)
Summer At Land’s End (07:02)
Side B
Pour The Light In (04:10)
All Night We Move (02:42)
Tell Me What’s Real (03:05)
Upside Down In An Empty Room (03:15)
Dahlias And Rain (02:37)
I’d Rather Not Go Your Way (01:56)
Side C (DINKED EXCLUSIVE)
Never Said I Was Sorry Then (02:34)
Hummingbirds (03:19)
Holiday Cheer (02:56)
Randy, If You Were Here (02:34)
Public Fountains (02:37)
Side D (DINKED EXCLUSIVE)
Outer Avenues (02:37)
Sea Wall (02:43)
Mountain Lake Park (05:10)
Conservatory Of Flowers (03:19)
Like A Ghost Warmed Over (02:48)
Midday Sun (04:05)

During lockdown last year, J Spaceman would walk through an empty “Roman London” where the world was “full of birdsong and strangeness”, trying to make sense of all the music playing in his head at the time. The mixers and mixes of his new record weren’t working out yet. Spaceman plays 16 different instruments on Everything Was Beautiful which was put down at 11 different studios, as well as at his home.

He also employed more than 30 musicians and singers including his daughter Poppy, long-time collaborator and friend John Coxon, string and brass sections, choirs and finger bells and chimes from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Eventually the mixes got there and Everything Was Beautiful was achieved.

The result is some of the most “live” sounding recordings that Spiritualized have released since the Live At The Albert Hall record of 1998, around the time of Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space.

TRACK LISTING

1. Always Together With You
2. Best Thing You Never Had (The D Song)
3. Let It Bleed (For Iggy)
4. Crazy
5. The Mainline Song/The Lockdown Song
6. The A Song (Laid In Your Arms)
7. I’m Coming Home Again

Loss and hope, isolation and communion, the cessation and renewal of purpose. Timeless and salient, these themes echo throughout the fifth album from Midlake, their first since Antiphon in 2013. Produced to layered, loving perfection by John Congleton, For the Sake of Bethel Woods is an album of immersive warmth and mystery from a band of ardent seekers, one of our generation’s finest: a band once feared lost themselves by fans, perhaps, but here revivified with freshness and constancy of intent.

From the cover to the title and beyond, a longing to reconnect with that which seems lost and seek purpose in its passing sits at the record’s core. The cover star is keyboardist/flautist Jesse Chandler’s father, who, tragically, passed away in 2018. As singer Eric Pulido explains, “He was a lovely human, and it was really heavy and sad, and he came to Jesse in a dream. I reference it in a song. He said, ‘Hey, Jesse, you need to get the band back together.’ I didn’t take that lightly. We had already had these feelings with everyone in the band of, oh, this could be a cool thing to do. But the dream was a kind of beautiful depiction of a purpose to reconvene and make music together as friends.”

Featuring Chandler’s father during John Sebastian’s set, the cover image was taken from the 1970 documentary Woodstock. In 1969, Jesse’s then-16-year-old dad had joined a friend and hitchhiked from Ridgewood, New Jersey, to the legendary festival. Raised in Woodstock after his father moved there in 1981, Jesse later paid pilgrimage to Bethel Woods with his father; there, the elder Chandler recorded an audio account of his festival experience in the museum’s public database. “So for me, the picture of that kid, my dad, forever frozen in time,” says Chandler, “encapsulates what it means to be in the throes of impressionable and fleeting youth, and all that the magic of music, peace, love and communion bring to it, whether one knows it at the time or not. (I think he knew it).”

A desire to commune with the past and connect with present, lived experience asserts itself from the opening of the album. A song that resonates with Midlake’s return and, perhaps, our lockdown era, ‘Commune’ can also be read in terms of a deeper urge to re-engage with sometimes neglected ideals and beliefs. ‘Bethel Woods’ sustains and develops that reconnection, evoking the steadfast and contemplative urgency of The Trials of Van Occupanther to back a lyric steeped in yearning for a paradisal time and place of hope and optimism. Soaring guitars and atmospheric noise effects extend a sonic scope further developed by ‘Glistening,’ where arpeggios dance like light glancing off a lake. In just three songs, Midlake reintroduce themselves and reach out into fresh territory with a richly intuitive dynamism, honouring their past as a seedbed of possibility.

The psychedelic space-rock and sticky guitars of ‘Exile’ shift the album to another plane, promising rich returns live, before ‘Feast of Carrion’ splices apocalyptic imagery with lustrous harmonies: darkness and light, held in rarefied balance. A deeply personal turn follows on ‘Noble,’ a song of tender innocence named after drummer McKenzie Smith’s infant son, born with a rare brain disorder called Semi-Lobar Holoprosencephaly. Pulido, who has been friends with McKenzie since they were 16 years old, kept McKenzie in mind for the lyrics. “I wrote the song from his perspective in a way, his expression to me of how he had been feeling towards his son. And then among the lament of his condition, it’s also embracing this child who has only joy. Noble doesn’t know that he has a condition, he just loves life. And smiles, and is so innocent, and perfect in so many ways.”

Elsewhere, the prog-enhanced funk-rock of ‘Gone’ seeks to find hope in relationships that seem fragile. The ELO-esque ‘Meanwhile…’ draws inspiration from what happened when Midlake paused after Antiphon, developing universal resonance as a song about the beautiful growths that can emerge from the cracks and gaps between things. ‘Dawning’ draws on 1970s soft-rock stylings for another song searching for hope, its keyboard line reaching out towards an uncertain future while everything seems to collapse around it; ‘The End’ reflects on the difficulties of partings. Finally, ‘Of Desire’ meditates on letting go of what you can’t control and attending to what you can during uncertain times. “It’s about finding peace in that humbling,” says Pulido. “Sometimes it’s hard to have a large effect, so it’s just about shrinking that and saying, these are the things I can do and the rest is to be seen, to be known.”

Midlake began re-attending to their patch in 2019, with the bulk of the album’s work undertaken when the world shut down in 2020. The lockdown turned out to be helpful, in terms of offering an escape from grim reality and focusing the band’s energies – essential for an outfit whose members (Pulido, Chandler, Smith, Eric Nichelson and Joey McClellan) had all pursued alternative ventures following Antiphon. Also on-hand was new collaborator John Congleton, who produced, engineered and mixed the album, marking Midlake’s first record with an outside producer. “I can’t say enough just how much his influence brought our music to another sonic place than we would have,” says Pulido. “I don’t want to record without a producer again. Part of that is the health of the band, because as you get older you get more opinionated and you kind of need that person who says, ‘No, it’s going to be this way!’ It’s hard to do that with your friends.”

The result is a powerful, warming expression of resolve and renewal for Midlake, opening up new futures for the band and honouring their storied history. Formed in the small town of Denton, with roots in the University of North Texas College of Music, Midlake delivered an auspicious debut with 2004’s Bamnan and Slivercork. For the follow-up, they looked further afield and deeper within to deliver 2006’s wondrous The Trials of Van Occupanther, a modern classic pitched between 1871, 1971 and somewhere out of time: between Henry David Thoreau and Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, between 1970s Laurel Canyon thinking and a longing for something more mysterious.

Confidence bolstered by a growing fanbase and a developed sense of their own far-reaching abilities, Midlake – a band acutely attuned to seasonal shifts – then embraced change. In 2010, they visited darker psych-folk thickets for The Courage of Others and backed John Grant on his lustrously spiky breakthrough album, Queen of Denmark. When singer Tim Smith departed Midlake in 2012, Pulido stepped up to the lead vocal role for 2013’s freshly exploratory Antiphon, teasing out singular routes through vintage electric-folk pastures.

Since then, domestic projects have beckoned as children entered various band-members’ lives. Pulido joined Bob Dylan’s 75th birthday celebrations at Nashville’s prestigious Ryman Auditorium and launched the project BNQT with a cast of all-star guests, backed by Chandler, McClellan and Smith; Pulido and Chandler also recorded solo albums.

In reuniting, the bandmates were adamant that Midlake needed their absolute focus. The result is an album of tremendously engaged thematic and sonic reach with a warm, wise sense of intimacy at its heart: an album to break bread and commune with, honour the past and travel onwards with. In ‘Bethel Woods’, Pulido sings of gathering seeds. On For the Sake of Bethel Woods, those seeds are lovingly nurtured, taking rich and spectacular bloom.

TRACK LISTING

1 Commune
2 Bethel Woods
3 Glistening
4 Exile
5 Feast Of Carrion
6 Noble
7 Gone
8 Meanwhile…
9 Dawning
10 The End
11 Of Desire

'Once Twice Melody', the first album produced entirely by Beach House, was recorded at Pachyderm studio in Cannon Falls, MN, United Studio in Los Angeles, CA, and Apple Orchard Studios in Baltimore, MD.

For the first time, a live string ensemble was used, with arrangements by David Campbell. Once Twice Melody was mostly mixed by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.

TRACK LISTING

1. Once Twice Melody
2. Superstar
3. Pink Funeral
4. Through Me
5. Runaway
6. ESP
7. New Romance
8. Over And Over
9. Sunset
10. Only You Know
11. Another Go Around
12. Masquerade
13. Illusion Of Forever
14. Finale
15. The Bells
16. Hurts To Love
17. Many Nights
18. Modern Love Stories

Metronomy’s new album Small World is a return to simple pleasures, nature, and an embracing in part of more pared down, songwriterly sonics, all while asking broader existential questions: which feels at least somewhat rooted in the period of time during which it was made – 2020. Finding appreciation in nature and our roots, while reappraising the things we value as we get older are all things that are part and parcel of the human experience: though it has all felt accelerated and emphasised in this past year or so. Through the tumultuous ebb and flow of the years, Metronomy continues to endure, and Joe Mount’s ability as a songwriter, arranger and producer shines through on Small World, evergreen.

TRACK LISTING

1. Life And Death
2. Things Will Be Fine
3. It’s Good To Be Back
4. Loneliness On The Run
5. Love Factory
6. I Lost My Mind
7. Right On Time
8. Hold Me Tonight
9. I Have Seen Enough

Entangled Routes is the fourth Pye Corner Audio album for Ghost Box Records. It’s the third part of a loose trilogy of albums starting with Stasis in 2016 and followed by Hollow Earth in 2019. Each album is a kind of high concept sci-fi epic, the latest instalment of which plays with the idea of mycorrhizal networks and attempts by humans to listen in and communicate.

As always with Pye Corner Audio and Ghost Box Records generally, narrative is not spelled out. It's only implied in the drama and mood of the music, with the help of careful attention to track titles and sequence and of course Julian House's consistently evocative artwork.

Martin Jenkins builds up tension with his minimalistic synth sequences and dance floor abstractions. His masterful sound design creates a sense of awe and vast space as he takes us on a fantastic and exciting voyage from peril to redemption.

Pye Corner Audio specialise in majestic, cinematic electronica that evokes sci-fi soundtracks, dystopian futures and the sound of haunted dance floors. The discography to date includes ten full length albums and many more singles and EPs across several labels. There are also remixes for John Foxx, Mogwai, Ride’s Andy Bell, Mark Lanegan, Alice Hubble, Stealing Sheep, Knightstown and Dolphin Midwives.

TRACK LISTING

New Roots
Synaptic
Paleolith
Earthwork
The Creeper
Hive Mind
The Clearing
Growth Potential
The Long Now
Phantom Orchid
Leaf Mould
Buried Network
Symbiosis

Fear of the Dawn is the fourth studio album from Jack White, founding member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather. True to his DIY roots, this record was recorded at White's Third Man Studio throughout 2021, mastered by Third Man Mastering, pressed to vinyl at Third Man Pressing, and released by Third Man Records.

TRACK LISTING

1. Taking Me Back
2. Fear Of The Dawn
3. The White Raven
4. Hi-De-Ho
5. Eosophobia
6. Into The Twilight
7. Dusk
8. What's The Trick?
9. That Was Then (This Is Now)
10. Eosophobia (Reprise)
11. Morning, Noon And Night
12. Shedding My Velvet

Keeley Forsyth’s 2020 debut album found an elemental voice ringing out from beneath the rubble. Understated but devastating, Debris' success led to a transformation as the songs were brought to the stage. An innate performer, Forsyth found herself channelling something she hadn’t yet fully come to understand, and it was here that the voice found on Debris began to probe outwards and discover a physical form. It’s a form that fully takes shape on her second album Limbs.

Anyone who saw Forsyth perform in the brief window after Debris was released and before shows ground to a halt can testify to the show’s power. In pin-drop silence, enraptured audiences watched as Forsyth inhabited a new body. No stranger to portraying characters in her career as an actor, this was something different.

Limbs is a record of reckoning with that change. After the initial purge of Debris, those feelings of trauma and fear remain but there’s also a life to live. “Save me from the chair where sadness lies,” she sings on opener ‘Fires’, wrestling the need to be creative within the routine of daily life. Where Debris was composed and recorded in close proximity to instrumentalist and arranger Matthew Bourne, Limbs deploys a more expansive palette. With Forsyth at the centre, collaborator Ross Downes acts as another limb, remotely producing the pulses and drones which feed back into the voice. Bourne this time is enlisted to “Bring some of the soil of Debris” into Limbs. The result is clearer and more spacious. If Debris sounded like it was buried under the earth - Forsyth’s voice repressed and breathless - Limbs brings some of that live presence. 

TRACK LISTING

1. A1. Fires
2. A2. Bring Me Water
3. A3. Limbs
4. A4. Land Animal
5. B1. Blindfolded
6. B2. Wash
7. B3. Silence
8. B4. I Stand Alone

A Place to Bury Strangers defund post-punk orthodoxy with the most audacious and varied songwriting of their career on their sixth album, See Through You' on Oliver Ackermann's label, Dedstrange. Following up on 2021"s highly acclaimed Hologram EP, the rebooted lineup' vocalist/guitarist Oliver Ackermann plus drummer/vocalist Sandra Fedowitz and bassist John Fedowitz (both of Ceremony East Coast)' delivers an overclocked set of futuristic electronic punk music encoded with punishing industrial rhythms, swirling voltage-starved guitars and unclassifiable auditory annihilation. Across thirteen tracks recorded in seclusion throughout the nihilistic absurdity of the coronavirus pandemic, See Through You is proof-positive that the group hailed as 'The Loudest Band in New York' is still finding new ways to push the needle deeper in the red.

BIO:
Fans all over the globe know: Oliver Ackermann always brings surprises. The singer and guitarist of New York City’s A Place To Bury Strangers has been delighting and astonishing his audience for close to two decades, combining post-punk, noise-rock, shoegaze, psychedelia, and avant-garde music in startling and unexpected ways. As the founder of Death By Audio, creator of signal-scrambling stomp boxes and visionary instrument effects, he’s exported that excitement and invention to other artists who plug into his gear and blow minds. In concert, A Place To Bury Strangers is nothing short of astounding — a shamanistic experience that bathes listeners in glorious sound, crazed left turns, transcendent vibrations, real-time experiments, brilliant breakthroughs.

And just as many of his peers in the New York City underground seem to be slowing down and settling in, Ackermann’s creativity is accelerating. He’s launched a label of his own: Dedstrange, dedicated to advancing the work of sonic renegades worldwide. He’s also refreshed the group’s lineup, adding bassist John Fedowitz and drummer Sandra Fedowitz, and the band has never sounded more current, or more courageous, or more accessibly melodic. The Hologram EP is the first release from the new lineup — and the first on Dedstrange — and it’s no overstatement to say that the reaction has been ecstatic. Ghettoblaster wrote that the band’s racket outpaced everything to emerge from New York City in the past decade. Brooklyn Vegan praised Ackermann’s “terrific, emotive” singing, and lauded the group’s recent commitment to foregrounding its melodies and lyrics. Pitchfork, Flood, AllMusic: they’ve all lined up to call Hologram an example of the best work of a tireless band with a deep discography and an unquenchable drive to create challenging, unprecedented music. A Place To Bury Strangers release their highly anticipated sixth album See Through You February 4, 2022 on their newly formed label Dedstrange.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Nice Of You To Be There For Me
2. I’m Hurt
3. Let’s See Each Other
4. So Low
5. Dragged In A Hole
6. Ringing Bells
7. I Disappear (When You’re Near)
Side B
8. Anyone But You
9. My Head Is Bleeding
10. Broken
11, Hold On Tight
12. I Don’t Know How You Do It
13. Love Reaches Out

Liverpool duo Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle, aka King Hannah have announced their debut LP I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me via City Slang. The announcement is accompanied by the release of the new single “All Being Fine”. Originally inspired by Smog and noisy, lo-fi 90s bands, the track pulls the listener in immediately with its upbeat on the outside, sinister on the inside atmospherics, coming across like the aural equivalent of the opening of David Lynch’s classic film “Blue Velvet” - the bloody finger lying in the lush green grass. The video’s sun-drenched visual, directed by Whittle, is a perfect pairing, showcasing the band at their best: enigmatic, mysterious, but blackly humorous with it.

“All Being Fine” sets the stall perfectly for the rest of I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me , drenched as it is in cinematic, often immersive and offbeam soundscapes, punctuated by lyrics that are darkly romantic and thrillingly sardonic in equal measures. Written and then recorded with additional musicians Ted White, Jake Lipiec, and Olly Gorman in just eight months, the LP is a bold, memorable, even startling document of a dream shared, an ambition fulfilled and a vision realized. I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me is a spectacular debut from the duo and a clear indication this is the beginning of a long, fruitful journey for King Hannah.

King Hannah make music that lives somewhere between the gorgeously meditative pop of Yo La Tengo and the beautiful drama of Sharon Van Etten, the latter of which gave them a cosign for their 2020 EP. The foundation of I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me lives in Merrick's, Raymond Carver-Esque realism-inspired lyrics. Formed in 2017, the duo met waiting tables in Liverpool. Having seen Merrick perform years before and being serendipitously assigned to show Whittle the ropes at the new job, he immediately pestered her to play music with him. A writing routine was formed leading to their debut EP Tell Me Your Mind And I’ll Tell You Mine, which garnered early attention from The Guardian, Under The Radar, Brooklyn Vegan, Stereogum and more.

TRACK LISTING

A1. A Well-Made Woman
A2. So Much Water So Close To Drone
A3. All Being Fine
A4. Big Big Baby
A5. Ants Crawling On An Apple Stork
A6. The Moods That I Get In
B1. Foolius Caesar
B2. Death Of The House Phone
B3. Go-Kart Kid (HELL NO!)
B4. I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me
B5. Berenson
B6. It’s Me And You, Kid

Georgia Gothic, a magic third in Mattiel’s run of full-length albums, was shaped in the quiet seclusion of a woodland cabin in the north of the Atlanta duo’s mother-state; “Some faraway place that just Jonah and I could go where there would be no distractions, nothing else going on, and we could turn everything off and only focus on writing songs”, reflects Brown. Where 2017’s self-titled debut and its 2019 follow-up Satis Factory were written with what Swilley refers to as a “hands-off” approach — he arranging the music and Brown the lyrics and vocals, the two working largely separately — the making of Georgia Gothic was, for the first time, a truly collaborative undertaking. “This was the first time we made a point to just be together and work out ideas in the same room. That was the initial intention ... it was about learning what each other wanted to accomplish on a sonic level, and then just trying different things out” Swilley continues. “Everything happened backwards. Normally, you’d have friends that make a band ... with us, we started making music from the jump, and then became homies.”

Cultivated by time spent together on the road touring the first two albums, it is this newfound sense of intimacy between Mattiel’s members that enabled the writing of Georgia Gothic not as two separate musicians, but rather as one creative entity. The album remained within the four walls of Brown and Swilley’s private world for much of its evolution — with recording taking place in a simple studio set up by the pair in the borrowed room of a dialysis centre, Swilley in the producer’s seat — until, nearing completion, it was transferred into the trusted hands of the Grammy-award-winning John Congleton (whose extensive list of credits includes artists as diverse as Angel Olsen, Earl Sweatshirt, Erykah Badu and Sleater Kinney) for mixing.

Not only does the affinity between its creators translate into an electric synergy between Georgia Gothic’s words and music — the brine-shock of Brown’s taut lyricism cut against the bourbon-smoothness of Swilley’s instrumentation — but here too are the palpable spoils of experimentation, each party trustful enough of the other to trial and error their practices into new geometries. Swilley puts this wide palate, in part, down to the place they call home. “I definitely feel like being from Georgia allows us to have a certain way of approaching music”. Brown chimes in: “We haven’t really highlighted where we’re from in the past two records, even though those were also written in Georgia. There’s so much great art and great music that’s come from Georgia, from all different types of genres and all over the state — but take R. E. M. and OutKast: there’s this weirdness that I can’t really put my finger on.” Swilley concurs: “It’s the same with the B-52s, the Black Lips ... it doesn’t feel like L.A., it doesn’t feel like New York, it feels like another planet. We’re not really in a ‘scene’ here in the same way. You have to make your own sound, create your own identity.”

And it is precisely the forging of Mattiel’s distinct musical identity that Georgia Gothic signals; its members guiding each other ever-homewards not just in a geographical or sonic sense, but spiritually, too.

TRACK LISTING

1. Jeff Goldblum
2. On The Run
3. Lighthouse
4. Wheels Fall Off
5. Subterranean Shut In Blues
6. Blood In The Yolk
7. Cultural Criminal
8. You Can Have It All
9. Other Plans
10. Boomerang
11. How It Ends

In a year of the moon, Kreidler have produced the album Spells And Daubs. In a year of the moon – and in a year with 13 moons. Such years are known for not being the most comfortable.

In September 2020 the band met for exploratory sessions and initial recordings in Düsseldorf, in the familiar settings of the Kabawil Theater. That already has a certain tradition. The impetus this time was a solitary gig in the conspicuously spacious surroundings of the (former) Philipshalle. In a year that threw everyone back on themselves. Over the winter Kreidler worked remotely, sifting through the material, arranging the pieces, adding textures and contours. They met again in the spring of 2021 for further recordings at the Uhrwerk Orange studio in Hilden, near Düsseldorf. That, too, has a certain tradition.

From fifteen pieces they filtered out ten, and thus held an album in their hands. Then – and this is new – they took it to London, to Peter Walsh, so that he could mix the tracks.

Daubs are in no doubt here. This is a tenfold of colourful-blotches-thrown-onto-canvas. Then a stepping back, contemplating, remixing paint, layering, overlaying, scraping free again elsewhere. And these spells are not devastating curses, rather they are enchanting incantations, a calling forth a spring without having to ban winter in a sombre masks. Spells And Daubs is a melodious interplay. Not that Kreidler neglect the rhythmic; their characteristic drive runs through all the pieces on Spells And Daubs. Perhaps it's like this: The beat is musicalised, the melody rhythmitised.

Spells And Daubs is like a collection of short stories. Its ten pieces explore the same space drawn together by an overlaying arc. All of them have the length of a single, and each one has the potential of a single in the way the arrangements are laid out – so enticing is the melodic line and the beat. This succinctness was perhaps last heard on the 2000 eponymous Kreidler album. The drums are powerful with a light swing. The bass alternates beyond its functionality and its indicator just of the low frequency, swoops up and takes over the melodic lead. Perhaps most beautiful in the irresistible pop gems Arena, Unframed Drawings, and Revery. Aptly Alex Paulick moved to the fretless Bass – conjuring the spirit of Mick Karn.

For all of their Krautrock attributions, Kreidler never tire of reminding us that their musical development stemmed form a love of British pop music. So you might say the co-op with Peter Walsh is a match made in heaven. His illustrious mixing and production skills have lifted works from Shalamar or Lynx to Heaven 17 to Scott Walker, Pulp or FKA Twigs into other spheres. Kreidler had previously collaborated with him in 2013 for two tracks (Snowblind, Escaped, BB169). On Spells And Daubs, Walsh's methods and magic are especially audible in the spatial production, with his hallmark blend of depth and punch. Spells And Daubs is wrapped up in an enigmatic black-and-white drawing by prolific artist and filmmaker Heinz Emigholz from his Basis of Make-Up series. Their ongoing collaboration feels like a constant now. The mutual interference of Heinz Emigholz's and Kreidler's universes started about ten years ago, when he expanded the album Den with seven videos.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Tantrum
A2 Toys I Never Sell
A3 Dirty Laundry
A4 Revery
A5 Unframed Drawings
Side B
B1 Freundchen
B2 Arise Above
B3 Music Follows Suit
B4 Arena
B5 Greetings From Dave

Dinked Edition Bonus Disc:
Side C
C1 Howling At The Third Moon
C2 Moon
Side D
D1 Howling

Mr Maserati showcases two decades of Baxter Dury’s idiosyncratically louche music, a universe of late-night London meet-ups, shuffling basslines and comedown disco tunes, all run through with a wry bleakness and sweet love of humanity. Mr Maserati collects tracks from across Dury’s six albums, plus a new song D.O.A.

Baxter Dury on new track: “It’s a kind of provincial nod to the music I got into during lockdown because my son Kosmo was playing it – Frank Ocean, Tyler the Creator and Kendrick Lamar. I became obsessed. They’re embracing everything – sexuality, politics, all of it – and I find that inspiring”

TRACK LISTING

A
1 Miami
2 I'm Not Your Dog
3 Leak At The Disco
4 Cocaine Man
5 Palm Trees
6 Oi

B
1 Oscar Brown
2 Claire
3 Other Men's Girls
4 Carla's Got A Boyfriend
5 Prince Of Tears
6 D.O.A.

• Latest in quickly selling-out series of John Dwyer (OSEES frontman) with friends lock down experimentations and improvisations.

• Featuring fantastic collage art by Dan Lean.

• Recorded at Stu-Stu-Studio by John Dwyer in the peak of dope smoke lock down.

What’s this? Today’s holiday gift? One final transmission from the core of the planet! Cresting slabs of concrete and powdered bone, rich soil—improvisation freak flag flitters atop a gutted highrise: Gong Splat. Featuring Ryan Sawyer on drums, Greg Coates on upright bass, Wilder Zoby on synth and mellotron, Andres Renteria on conga, bongos and hand percussion, and John Dwyer on guitar, synths, pan flute, cuíca, hand percussion, space drum and effects.

This one is spitting fat and neon night-light city drives, white in the corner of the pilot’s mouth. Furry, fuzzy and frenetic, motorik and full of blood-rich ticks…maggots unite! There’s a show tonight! Welcome back humans.

TRACK LISTING

1. Gong Splat
2. Cultivated Graves
3. Toagut
4. Anther Dust
5. Yuggoth Travel Agency
6. Hypogeum
7. Oneironaut
8. Minor Protocides
9. Giedi Prime

We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit.

Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. Valentine, Texas
2. Working For The Knife
3. Stay Soft
4. Everyone
5. Heat Lightning
SIDE B:
6. The Only Heartbreaker
7. Love Me More
8. There’s Nothing Left For You
9. Should’ve Been Me
10. I Guess
11. That’s Our Lamp

Cat Power returns with Covers, Chan Marshall’s third album of her celebrated reinterpretations of songs by classic and contemporary artists including Lana Del Ray, Nick Cave, Frank Ocean & The Pogues.

TRACK LISTING

1 Bad Religion
2 Unhate
3 Pa Pa Power
4 White Mustang
5 A Pair Of Brown Eyes
6 Against The Wind
7 Endless Sea
8 These Days
9 It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels
10 I Had A Dream Joe
11 Here Comes A Regular
12 I'll Be Seeing You

Franz Ferdinand have announced details of Hits To The Head, a 20-track greatest hits collection showcasing the world-conquering success of the band’s career to date. Released on Friday March 11th 2022 on Domino, Hits To The Head also features two brand-new tracks Billy Goodbye and Curious, produced by Alex Kapranos, Julian Corrie and Stuart Price (Dua Lipa, Madonna, Pet Shop Boys).

Armed with an astute sense of what constitutes the ‘classic pop song’ (famously proclaiming that they write music ‘to make girls dance to’) the music of Franz Ferdinand continues to resonate globally and over the course of nearly two decades they’ve become, commercially and critically, one of the biggest UK bands in the world, selling over 10 million albums, 1.2 billion streams to date, 14 platinum albums, winning Brit, Ivor Novello + Mercury Prize awards, Grammy nominations and selling 6 million tickets for their incendiary live show worldwide.

TRACK LISTING

01 Darts Of Pleasure
02 Take Me Out
03 The Dark Of The Matinée
04 Michael
05 This Fire
06 Do You Want To
07 Walk Away
08 The Fallen
09 Outsiders
10 Lucid Dreams
11 Ulysses
12 No You Girls
13 Right Action
14 Evil Eye
15 Love Illumination
16 Stand On The Horizon
17 Always Ascending
18 Glimpse Of Love
19 Curious
20 Billy Goodbye 

UK eight-piece caroline’s eponymous debut album often cascades with force like an avalanche, squalling and rumbling on the edge of all-out collapse. At other points they slip back into impossibly fragile moments of quiet – a simple bassline or a rattle of snare the only sound amid a dark sea of silence. caroline know exactly the right balance between restraint and release. These songs are expansive and emotive pieces, their rich palette drawing on a mixture of choral singing, Midwestern emo and O’Malley and Llewellyn’s roots in Appalachian folk.

“Sometimes things sound much better when there’s empty space,” says Llewellyn. “Sometimes you might populate [a song] with too many things and forget that an element on its own is enough.” Elsewhere on the record the band have employed a collage-like technique, combining snippets of lo-fi recordings from a myriad of different locations – a barn in France, the members’ bedrooms and living rooms, the atmospheric swimming pool in which they also filmed sublime live sessions for ‘Dark blue’ and ‘Skydiving onto the library roof’ – with more traditional group sessions at the Total Refreshment Centre and their studio in Peckham.

The growth that began as a scrappy guitar band above a pub many years ago is still continuing. caroline’s astounding debut album is merely the first step. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Dark Blue
Good Morning (red)
Desperately
IWR
Messen #7
Side B
Engine (eavesdropping)
Hurtle
Skydiving Onto The Library Roof
Zilch
Natural Death

Dinked Edition 7” Tracklisting:
Side A - Good Morning (red) Demo
Side B - Dirty Triple (3) #2

11 years after their acrimonious split, Pixies returned for an acclaimed sold-out reunion tour. ‘Live In Brixton’ brings together the complete recordings of all four shows from Pixies’ legendary run at the iconic London venue.

Available on vinyl for the very first time, each show is pressed on two heavyweight 180g vinyl and housed in a wide spine sleeve with printed inner bags. 

This special edition version is pressed on clear vinyl with coloured splatters and is exclusive to indie retailers. 

Each show has been newly mastered for this release by Phil Kinrade at Alchemy Mastering at AIR 

Includes a 24-page booklet featuring photographs and new artwork, plus memories and paraphernalia from fans who attended the Brixton gigs 

Also includes a 68cm x 48cm fold-out poster featuring the new ‘Live In Brixton’ boxset artwork 

All housed within a deluxe slipcase box featuring silver foil detailing

TRACK LISTING

June 2nd, 2004
LP 1 And 2

Side A

1. Winterlong
2. Nimrod's Son
3. The Holiday Song
4. Here Comes Your Man
5. Vamos

Side B

1. In Heaven
2. Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf)
3. I Bleed
4. Monkey Gone To Heaven
5. Bone Machine
6. Velouria
7. Dead

Side C

1. No. 13 Baby
2. Subbacultcha
3. Gouge Away
4. Caribou
5. Hey
6. Cactus
7. River Euphrates

Side D

1. Debaser
2. Broken Face
3. Something Against You
4. Tame
5. Gigantic
6. Wave Of Mutilation
7. Into The White

June 3rd, 2004
LP 3 And 4

Side A

1. La La Love You
2. Ed Is Dead
3. Here Comes Your Man
4. Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf)
5. Crackity Jones
6. Isla De Encanta
7. Something Against You
8. Broken Face
9. Mr. Grieves

Side B

1. Hey
2. Is She Weird
3. Gouge Away
4. Tame
5. Debaser
6. Bone Machine
7. Levitate Me
8. Monkey Gone To Heaven

Side C

1. Velouria
2. I Bleed
3. Gigantic
4. Nimrod's Son
5. Vamos
6. Where Is My Mind?

Side D

1. U-Mass
2. Wave Of Mutilation
3. No. 13 Baby
4. Caribou
5. Cactus
6. Into The White

June 4th, 2004
LP 5 And 6

Side A

1. Bone Machine
2. Crackity Jones
3. River Euphrates
4. Wave Of Mutilation
5. Monkey Gone To Heaven
6. I Bleed
7. Caribou
8. Cactus

Side B

1. Broken Face
2. Something Against You
3. Isla De Encanta
4. Hey
5. No. 13 Baby
6. Dead
7. U-Mass
8. Gigantic

Side C

1. Velouria
2. Ed Is Dead
3. In Heaven
4. Where Is My Mind?
5. Mr. Grieves
6. Here Comes Your Man
7. The Holiday Song

Side D

1. Vamos
2. Into The White
3. Gouge Away
4. Debaser
5. Tame
6. Planet Of Sound

June 5th, 2004
LP 7 And 8

Side A

1. Head On
2. U-Mass
3. Monkey Gone To Heaven
4. Cactus
5. Caribou
6. No. 13 Baby
7. Broken Face
8. Crackity Jones

Side B

1. Isla De Encanta
2. Something Against You
3. Hey
4. Mr. Grieves
5. I Bleed
6. Velouria
7. Dead

Side C

1. Gouge Away
2. Tame
3. Gigantic
4. River Euphrates
5. Debaser
6. Wave Of Mutilation
7. In Heaven
8. Wave Of Mutilation (UK Surf)

Side D

1. Where Is My Mind?
2. Blown Away
3. Here Comes Your Man
4. The Holiday Song
5. Vamos

Eve Adams offers solace within life's shadows. Un-numbing senses with anthems of surrender and tender-hearted tales that tingle with Californian folk-noir, her album Metal Bird takes flight with the turbulence and romance of Hollywood’s golden age, and meditates on the mysteries of love, death, insecurity and loneliness.

Like a match struck in a cobwebbed attic, Adams voice is a fiery detective, unafraid to explore the unseen; the liminal spaces between mourning and rapture, between the coldness of a corpse and the heat of cremation. Imagery of flight and the denial of gravity floats slyly through the ten songs on Metal Bird by the California-born musician and hints at the experience of being caught in purgatory, like a passenger on a plane ride from Hell to Heaven.

Combining airy folk with haunting soundscapes the album takes listeners on an auditory voyage from sonorous lullabies, to dreamy ambience, skeletal jazz, 1930s torch songs and 1940s film noir. Metal Bird has a distinct, genuine tone, with orchestral arrangements, ambient hallucinations and high fidelity vocals that are unafraid to be heard loud and clear.

For those who are hopelessly enamoured with a by-gone time, there is solace in these songs and sounds. Flickering back and forth between dread and hope, the unrelenting march towards a spiritual transformation and the realization that each of us are driven by our own dreams and as much as we want to hold it in our hands, often it is intangible. The sublime remains elusive, existing somewhere in the heart, and it sounds like Eve Adams knows this best.

Metal Bird gets a release on Basin Rock, the Todmorden based record label who gave lift off to Julie Byrne, Aoife Nessa Frances, Nadia Reid and Johanna Samuels. 

"Metal Bird feels blissfully unmoored from any sense of time and space, its astral Americana hymns hovering somewhere between the dirt and the stars, between a bygone golden age and our tense present, between raw intimacy and dreamlike splendour." Pitchfork.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Blues Look The Same
2. You're Not Wrong
3. Butterflies
4. A Walk In The Park
5. Metal Bird
Side B
6. The Dying Light
7. Woman On Your Mind
8. La Ronde
9. Prisoner
10. My Only Dream

Island Family is the fifth album from Isle-of-Eigg dwelling electro-acoustic psych-pop wonder Pictish Trail, AKA Johnny Lynch. A strange, unpredictable, sardonic and yet deeply personal record inspired by all from Fever Ray to The Flaming Lips, Liars, Mercury Rev and Beck, Island Family is Pictish Trail’s contrarian view of arcadia; a search for the euphoric in the bucolic, bound up in sometimes conflicting ideas and feelings around nature and environment, sincerity and artifice, escapism and belonging. It’s an album about how no man can remain an island, however hard he might try.

Released by Fire Records, with support from Johnny’s own label Lost Map, and produced by long-term collaborator Rob Jones (The Voluntary Butler Scheme, The Gene Dudley Group), ‘Island Family’ opens with its title track, a song of death, ghosts and the ties that bind, fusing abrasive electronic beats with a tongue-in-cheek fireside folk refrain and the haunted ice cream van melody of a digitally reincarnated traditional Scottish jig. A purgative surrender to nature’s whim driven by a clattering machine drumbeat rolled in a puddle of filthy dirty fuzz, ‘Natural Successor’ is five-and-a-half-minutes of cathartic churning bass.

‘In The Land of The Dead’ is an eight-bit glitch-core reflection on island party excesses spasming into existential dread and regret, suitably accompanied by a funereal mariachi band. It’s followed by the epic ‘It Came Back’, the understated verses and arms-aloft falsetto chorus of which are accompanied by a tense, foreboding bass-driven electro hip hop instrumental with (spoiler) a brain-shattering industrial-metal meltdown. ’Melody Something’ is the album’s purest moment, a cautiously uplifting solar-powered-ballad about losing track of time in the cycle of the seasons, and the gap between memory and reality. Shapeshifting closer ‘Remote Control’ is a channel hopping cabin-fever-dream flipping from warped boyband ballad to deep-fried fuzz pop.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Island Family
A2 Natural Successor
A3 The River It Runs Inside Of Me
A4 In The Land Of The Dead
A5 It Came Back
Side B
B1 Thistle
B2 Melody Something
B3 Nuclear Sunflower Swamp
B4 Green Mountain
B5 Remote Control

The impossibly buzzy Dublin-based quartet Sprints unveil details of their new EP A Modern Job, which is out on Nice Swan Records.

Lyrically, Modern Job finds singer Karla Chubb at her sardonic and angry best, detailing her own personal wish-list "I wish I had the guts/I wish I had the gall/ I wish I had a girl" - all set to cascading guitars and a formidable rhythm section; working in unison to create unrelenting tension, all the while echoing the subject matter Chubb explores in her lyrics.

On the new single, singer Karla Chubb offers the following: "Modern Job is a critique of modern existence but also an exploration of growing up queer. In your formative years, you are bombarded with media, books, news that depict what a “normal” life should be. Grow up, fall in love, get married… long live the nuclear family.

By contrast when you grow up queer all these ordinary things can seem extraordinary, out of reach and in some parts of the world, illegal. It leaves you feeling lost, excluded and confused. I wanted Modern Job to capture those feelings; chaotic energy, loneliness and longing of normality while trying to find acceptance within yourself."

Sprints have received support from the likes The Guardian, Clash, NME, DIY, Dork as well as love at Radio 1 and Radio 6Music. Recent single How Does The Story Go? (also on the EP) was premiered by Steve Lamacq who praised it as “their best song yet! These guys are going to be something," The single was included in Spotify UK's New Music Friday as well as leading in playlists from NME, Loud & Quiet and others. Sprints combine guitar-driven hooks, motoric rhythm and emotive lyricism to create a unique sound that pulls from garage, grunge, punk and beyond. Like the Irish guitar acts who have paved the way for them: Fontaines D.C., Silverbacks and Girl Band, the sound of Sprints is urgent and vital at every turn.

Sprints have hit a nerve. Driven by experience, tough political climates and social and economic uncertainty - their music is honest, often politically charged and authentic.

TRACK LISTING

How Does The Story Go
Modern Job
Deliah Smith
Little Fix
I'm In A Band

The follow-up to the band's acclaimed debut album, Endless Scroll (2018), and 2019's Shiny New Model EP, Broken Equipment was inspired by a book club. In the early months of 2020, the Brooklyn art-punk incendiaries gathered together with close friends to study the works of a wide range of philosophers. Passionate debates lasting long into the night became a regular occurrence, motivating the band to become as ideologically unified as the weighty tomes they were reading. Broken Equipment is Bodega’s attempt to interrogate the external factors that make them who they are, propelling existential quandaries with tongue-in-cheek humour, highly personal lyrics, and irresistible grooves.

Since Bodega’s formation in 2016, Ben and Nikki (who previously played together in the band Bodega Bay) have experienced a rare meteoric rise. The duo double as filmmakers, earning acclaim for their 2020 erotic drama PVT Chat starring Peter Vack, Julia Fox, and other recognizable faces from the Safdie Brothers’ cinematic universe. When the pandemic forced them to hit pause, they used the opportunity to regroup with drummer/performance artist Tai Lee, bassist/book club leader Adam See, and lead guitarist Dan Ryan. Broken Equipment was produced by Ben himself with Bobby Lewis, Bodega’s NYC live sound mixer. The record was mixed by Bryce Goggin, whom the band sought out for his work with Pavement, and Adam Sachs (WIVES).

The album’s 12 songs are set in present day New York City, packing in references to contemporary issues of algorithmic targeting, media gentrification, and the band itself. On 'NYC (disambiguation)', they break down how the Big Apple was “founded by a corporation” and history remains alive in the present. The poetic 'Pillar on the Bridge of You' is the first love song Ben ever wrote for Nikki, while 'All Past Lovers' gazes back to the “southern belle” and “chat room suitor” who still live inside him today.

To accompany the propulsive pace of 'Statuette on the Console' and its lyrics about switching perspectives, Nikki recorded alternate versions in eight different languages. “I used God in that song as this arch overlord character, but it could also be a real estate developer,” she explains. “It’s about anyone who puts their reality on your back and forces you to carry it around.” In that song, Nikki also wryly states that although she doesn’t have faith in this particular “God,” she is still “living life with (my) platitudes.” On 'Territorial Call of the Female', Nikki playfully quips that “when the man is around that’s when I’m putting you down,” highlighting how in the past she unknowingly reinforced patriarchal values by turning against other women to attract men. It’s moments like these where Bodega most exemplifies their self-professed motto that “the best critique is self critique.”

As the band’s art director, Nikki commissioned the sculpture featured on the cover of Broken Equipment as a companion to the cover of their debut, Endless Scroll. “They’re in the same world,” she explains. “The Endless Scroll sculpture was kind of shaped like a computer but also a gavel that a judge would have. That album was about how we do not yet know in the information age what technology is doing to our brains. It was almost on the precipice of a judgement. Now, with the pointing finger machine on the cover of Broken Equipment, I wanted to convey the sense in which social media and Web 2.0 turn people who would otherwise be allies against each other.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Thrown
2. Doers
3. Territorial Call Of The Female
4. NYC (Disambiguation)
5. Statuette On The Console
6. C.I.R.P.
7. Pillar On The Bridge Of You
8. How Can I Help Ya?
9. No Blade Of Grass
10. All Past Lovers
11. Seneca The Stoic
12. After Jane

In September, Placebo resurfaced from a long hibernation to release their first single in five years – and first from the new album - ‘Beautiful James’. A joyous and celebratory song, it came quietly loaded with antagonism for the increasingly prominent, ignorant, factions that have come to litter modern conversation. As Brian Molko commented at the time, “If the song serves to irritate the squares and the uptight, so gleefully be it.”

As great masters in cataloguing the human condition, Placebo’s unique way of examining both its flaws and beauty finds fertile ground in 2021. Crawling out of the pandemic into a landscape of intolerance, division, tech-saturation and imminent eco-catastrophe, theirs is a voice that has rarely felt more significant to contemporary discourse, and more appropriate to sing these stories to the world. Within the magnetic slow-burn of new track ‘Surrounded By Spies’ no punches are pulled in confronting the erosion of civil liberties, as Brian Molko’s deft lyrical delivery is married to a creeping sense of claustrophobia that fittingly makes the walls feel as though they are closing in from all around.

Brian Molko comments:

“I began writing the lyrics when I discovered my neighbors were spying on me on behalf of parties with a nefarious agenda. I then began to ponder the countless ways in which our privacy has been eroded and stolen since the introduction of worldwide CCTV cameras that now employ racist facial recognition technologies; the rise of the internet and the cellphone, which has turned practically every user into a paparazzo and spectators in their own lives, and how we have mostly all offered up personal information to enormous multinationals whose sole intent is to exploit us.

I used the cut-up technique invented by William S Burroughs and popularized in modern song by David Bowie. It’s a true story told through a lens of paranoia, complete disgust for modern society’s values and the deification of surveillance capitalism. The narrator is at the end of their tether, hopeless and afraid, completely at odds with our newfound progress and the god of money.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Forever Chemicals
2. Beautiful James
3. Hugz
4. Happy Birthday In The Sky
5. The Prodigal
6. Surrounded By Spies
7. Try Better Next Time
8. Sad White Reggae
9. Twin Demons
10. Chemtrails
11. This Is What You Wanted
12. Went Missing
13. Fix Yourself

Originally released via Heavenly in October 1991 the album was quickly recognised as one of the most important and influential releases of the year and nominated for the first Mercury Music Prize.

Foxbase Alpha includes the classic Neil Young cover version of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ (possibly one of the best cover versions ever!) plus the single ‘Nothing Can Stop Us Now’.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. This Is Radio Saint Etienne
2. Only Love Can Break Your Heart
3. Wilson
4. Carnt Sleep
5. Girl VII
6. Spring

Side B
7. She’s The One
8. Stoned To Say The Least
9. Nothing Can Stop Us Now
10. Etienne Gonna Die
11. London Belongs To Me
12. Like A Swallow
13. Dilworth’s Theme 

Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years – both in and out of lockdown – these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-colour.

From the detuned guitars anchoring “The Hardest Cut,” to the urgency of “Wild," to the band’s blown-out cover of the Smog classic “Held,” Lucifer on the Sofa bottles the physical thrill of a band tearing up a packed room. It’s an album of intensity and intimacy, where the music’s harshest edges feel as vivid as the directions quietly murmured into the mic on the first-take. According to frontman Britt Daniel, “It’s the sound of classic rock as written by a guy who never did get Eric Clapton.”

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Held
The Hardest Cut
The Devil & Mister Jones
Wild
My Babe
Side B
Feels Alright
On The Radio
Astral Jacket
Satellite
Lucifer On The Sofa

Porcupine Tree are Steven Wilson, Richard Barbieri and Gavin Harrison. They are a hugely influential, relentlessly creative British rock band.

First dreamt up by Wilson in 1987 as an outlet for experimental recordings he was making outside of his synth-pop duo No-Man, Porcupine Tree expanded to become a proper band in the early ’90s in order to further explore his ideas both on record and on stage.

Over the years Porcupine Tree have constantly evolved as their expansive music has shifted from pastoral psychedelic rock and ambient electronic soundscapes to experimental pop and eventually - with “21st century masterpiece” In Absentia (Classic Rock) - a propulsive metal sound all of their own. Their latter records effortlessly combined each of those genres and allowed Porcupine Tree to occupy a musical universe unique to them.

Bloc Party return with their forthcoming sixth studio album 'Alpha Games'. 'Alpha Games' is the band’s first studio album since 2016’s 'Hymns', and the first Bloc Party album written and recorded as this four piece; adding the musicality of Justin Harris (bass) and the unbridled energy and power of Louise Bartle on the drums to capture the spark of their live shows and to deliver the most exciting Bloc Party album yet.

'Alpha Games', produced by Nick Launay & Adam Greenspan (Nick Cave, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, IDLES), includes new single Traps, which sees the band returning to the raucous, high-octane sound of their earliest work in an outburst of propulsive post-punk. The album’s 12 tracks veer from the intense and confrontational (Traps, Day Drinker) to melodic and introspective (If We Get Caught, By Any Means Necessary), and marks a new and important chapter in one of music’s most important voices in Kele Okereke and important bands in Bloc Party.

“Alpha Games was conceived on the road, playing in front of amazing crowds on our last tour and then brought to life with the fire and the frustrations of 2020,” says Kele Okereke on Bloc Party’s first new album in seven years.

“We wanted to can what was happening at those massive gigs in 2019, to showcase what Louise can do, what Russell is capable of and most importantly the electricity coming off the audience. We knew that Nick & Adam were the right choice of producers to do that and the result feels like fire in a bottle.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Day Drinker
2. Traps
3. You Should Know The Truth
4. Callum Is A Snake
5. Rough Justice
6. The Girls Are Fighting
7. Of Things Yet To Come
8. Sex Magik
9. By Any Means Necessary
10. In Situ
11. If We Get Caught
12. The Peace Offering

Hello Sadness is Los Campesinos! shooting for a pop album. Not pop-punk, not indie-pop – punchy, pristine pop. But as with everything in life, nothing ever quite goes to plan.

The UK’s First and Only Emo Band™ (see also: Your Ex-Girlfriend’s Favourite Band©), started off with the best of intentions. Opener ‘By Your Hand’ is a horny, hilarious tragi-comedy, rife with masturbation, stallion-like thighs and a sick covered rental tuxedo. ‘Songs About Your Girlfriend’ is sarcastic and punchy, with lines cribbed from T.I songs and a drunken brag of a chorus.

But by the title track, the bravado evaporates and from there on out, Hello Sadness might be the most gut wrenching, emotionally devastating album the group has ever produced - quite a feat considering the rest of their catalogue.

Recorded back in 2011, just outside of Figueres, Catalonia, and their first with new members Kim, Jason and Rob, it's an album of break ups, body parts and football. An album that finds bandleader Gareth cracking while the band around him play more frantically, more powerfully than they ever had before. It’s an album that, ten years ago, cemented Los Camp!’s position as més que un band.

Hello Sadness is the album that made you a 4lyfer. The rawness and brutal honesty that spilled out felt like an invitation to join the band itself, or at least some broken hearts support group. In current times, the effort and drive the band put into furthering progressive politics, inclusivity and DIY spirit has always been mirrored by their fans, the feeling of collective effort uniting waifs and strays worldwide to create thriving scenes, collectives, venues, bands and zines.

But LC! aren't about to give up the good fight, and that the reissuing of Hello Sadness comes on the band’s own Heart Swells label is a reaffirmation of their commitment to being DIY till they Die. And maybe it is their pop album – John Goodmanson’s production is crisp and cutting, Jason Campesinos!’s drumming adding a controlled intensity to Tom Campesinos!’ luscious compositions – but nothing for Los Campesinos! will ever be that straightforward.

Since its original release the band's membership has changed, beloved venues have closed, we are all far older and more jaded. But Hello Sadness still hurts. ‘The Black Bird, The Dark Slope’ swirls desperately, ‘Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions)’ serves as a reminder of the dust gathering thicker in the England men's football team’s trophy cabinet, and we, Los Campesinos!’s ‘sad eyed children’, still hang on their every word.

Los Campesinos! are: Gareth (vocals, he/him), Kim (vocals and keys, she/her), Tom (lead guitar, he/him), Neil (guitar, he/him), Matt (bass, he/him), Rob (keys and percussion, he/him) and Jason (drums, he/him)

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1. By Your Hand - Remastered
2. Songs About Your Girlfriend - Remastered
3. Hello Sadness - Remastered
4. Life Is A Long Time - Remastered
5. Every Defeat A Divorce (Three Lions) - Remastered
Side B:
6. Hate For The Island - Remastered
7. The Black Bird, The Dark Slope - Remastered
8. To Tundra - Remastered
9. Baby I Got The Death Rattle - Remastered
10. Light Leaves, Dark Sees Pt. II - Remastered

The third album proper for 'Country-got-Soul's finest, The Delines, on Decor Records sees them exploring the US Gulf Coast, not far from where Amy Boone grew up. The songs in this cinematic opus all focus around this area and are inspired by when Amy asked Willy Vlautin to write her a song like Tony Joe White's 'Rainy Night In Georgia' after her tragic accident being hit by a car in 2016 and her 3 year recovery. This follows on from 2019's The Imperial which was number one in the UK official AMA charts for two weeks. Written and partially recorded before lock down the rest of the album was finished last Summer, produced by John Morgan Askew at his Bocce studios just outside of Portland, Oregon.

The album features the classic line-up of the band with Amy Boone (vocals), Willy Vlautin (guitars, vocals, songwriting), Freddy Trujillo (bass), Sean Oldham (drums, vocals) and Cory Gray (keyboards, trumpet and arrangements) doing some of their finest work yet. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Little Earl
2. Kid Codeine
3. Drowning In Plain Sight
4. All Along The Ride
5. Lynette's Lament
6. Hold Me Slow
7. Surfers In Twilight
8. Past The Shadows
9. This Ain't No Getaway
10. Saved From The Sea
11. The Gulf Drift Lament

Elvis Costello and The Imposters release, ‘The Boy Named If,’ a new album of urgent, immediate songs with bright melodies, guitar solos that sting and a quick step to the rhythm.

Costello tell us, ”The full title of this record is 'The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories).’ ‘IF,’ is a nickname for your imaginary friend; your secret self, the one who knows everything you deny, the one you blame for the shattered crockery and the hearts you break, even your own."

Produced by Sebastian Krys & Elvis Costello - the album is a collection of thirteen snapshots, “That take us from the last days of a bewildered boyhood to that mortifying moment when you are told to stop acting like a child - which for most men (and perhaps a few gals too) can be any time in the next fifty years," as Costello put it.

TRACK LISTING

1. Farewell
2. The Boy If Named
3. Penelope Halfpenny
4. The Difference
5. What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love
6. Paint The Red Rose Blue
7. Mistook Me For A Fool
8. My Most Beautiful Mistake
9. Magnificent Hurt
10. The Man You Love To Hate
11. Death Of Magic Thinking
12. Trick Out The Truth
13. Mr Crescent

Sly & The Family Stone are celebrating their 50th anniversary of There’s a Riot Goin’ On released December 10th 1971. The album was a commercial success featuring the hit single “Family Affair” reaching number 14 on the official UK chart.

This was a departure from the optimistic psychedelic soul of previous records and shifted to a more political and militant vibe, perfectly encapsulating the turbulent political climate in the United States at the turn of the 1970s.

To this day the album is highly regarded and continues to rank in many publications’ best-album lists, including 500 Greatest Albums of All time.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Luv N’ Haight
Just Like A Baby
Poet
Family Affair
Africa Talks To You “The Asphalt Jungle”
There’s A Riot Goin’ On
Side B
Brave & Strong
(You Caught Me) Smilin’
Time
Spaced Cowboy
Runnin’ Away
Thank You For Talking To Me Africa

Johnny Marr started his career with The Smiths, beginning an amazing history as one of the most influential songwriters and guitarists in British independent music. His subsequent creative journey has seen him at the heart of The The, Electronic, Modest Mouse and The Cribs, as well as working with such names as The Pretenders, Talking Heads, The Avalanches, and the musician and composer Hans Zimmer - with whom he recently recorded the score and soundtrack for the forthcoming James Bond film, No Time To Die, including the title track created with Billie Eilish.

In the wake of his time leading The Healers, Marr’s solo career has given rise to three UK Top Ten albums - The Messenger (2013), Playland (2014) and 2018’s Call The Comet, and he will be returning in February with his most expansive work to date, Fever Dreams Pts 1-4. It was created during the long, uncertain period that followed the arrival of the UK’s first lockdown, when his focus was pushed into both his interior life, and evoking the emotional states of others. “It’s an inspired record, and I couldn’t wait to get in and record every day,” he says. “But I had to go inwards.”

The upcoming album reflects his multi-faceted past, but takes his music somewhere startlingly new. “There’s a set of influences and a very broad sound that I’ve been developing - really since getting out of The Smiths,” he says. “And I hear it in this record. There are so many strands of music in it. I think it’s the most ambitious solo record I’ve done.”

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Spirit Power And Soul
2. Receiver
3. All These Days
4. Ariel
Side 2
1. Lightning People
2. Hideaway Girl
3. Sensory Street
4. Tenement Time
Side 3
1. The Speed Of Love
2. Night And Day
3. Counter Clock World
4. Rubicon
Side 4
1. God's Gift
2. Ghoster
3. The Whirl
4. Human

Fragments is the most emotionally intense record that he - aka Simon Green - has ever had to make. It’s no surprise that it’s also his masterpiece. The album features Jamila Woods, Joji, Kadhja Bonet, Jordan Rakei, O’Flynn and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. Born first out of fragments of ideas and experimentation, the album ultimately was fused together in a burst of creativity fuelled by both collaboration and Green’s escape into the wild.

Fragments is a series of 12 sonic affirmations, featuring some of the hardest and most hip-shaking grooves that Green has ever created. The ballads are perfectly placed throughout; they capture a world in flux and glow with hope. Coaxing the ideas out initially took some hard work. The constantly-touring Green creates best while on the move; the global shutdown forced him to stand still.

Musical themes began to arise through Green’s exploration of modular synthesis, recordings he had made of harpist Lara Somogyi, his work with arranger and string player Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, his own playing of the Fender Rhodes and more, as the album was created, recorded and mixed by Green over the past two years. The album also came into focus as he sought refuge on solo adventures into nature, away from the shutdowns and wild fires and into the blazing California desert.

“Tides,” featuring Chicagoan singer and poet Jamila Woods, acted as a catalyst, and the album began to click into place around it. “I knew I had a centrepiece, I knew how it was all going to sound,” he says. Working with arranger and string player Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, musical themes began to emerge. Recording orchestral musicians in actual studios helped bring the songs “out of the box” even more.

A rhythmic framework started to come together too: the structures of UK bass music and rave began to seep into beats that would become tracks like “Otomo” (eventually co-produced by O’Flynn and featuring a sample of the Bulgarian choir 100 Kaba-Gaidi), and “Sapien.” The ”old school, Detroity, Moodymann and Theo Parrish inspired” “Shadows” was recorded with friend Jordan Rakei. “Rosewood,” “Closer” and “Counterpoint” each start with an ecstatic snap to them, but snake down surprisingly different paths. Somogyi's harp and Atwood-Ferguson's strings mingle together on the beatless “Elysian.” Two ballads flesh out the second half of the record: “Day by Day” featuring Kadhja Bonet and “From You” featuring Joji.

It's about the dancefloor in many ways, about how “I remembered all over again how much I loved crowds and movement and people connecting with each other,” Green reflects. But the positivity isn’t just in the uptempo rhythms: even the most introspective and melancholic pieces have joy in them.

TRACK LISTING

1. Polyghost (feat. Miguel Atwood-Ferguson)
2. Shadows (feat. Jordan Rakei)
3. Rosewood
4. Otomo (feat. O’Flynn)
5. Tides (feat. Jamila Woods)
6. Elysian
7. Closer
8. Age Of Phase
9. From You (feat. Joji)
10. Counterpart
11. Sapien
12. Day By Day (feat. Kadhja Bonet)

Artifacts began humbly as a means of compiling a few early Beirut EPs for a proper physical release. However, as Zach Condon explains in album’s excellent liner notes, reconnecting with old recordings through fresh ears turned a simple re-issue project into something much more expansive. “When the decision came to re-release this collection, I found myself digging through hard drives looking for something extra to add to the compilation. What started as a few extra unreleased tracks from my formative recording years quickly grew into an entire extra records-worth of music from my past, and a larger project of remixing and remastering everything I found for good measure.”

Artifacts is a phylogenetic tree. A double-LP’s worth music that traces the evolution of Beirut from a 14-year old Condon’s first attempts at bringing the music he heard in his mind to life, to the fully formed Beirut we know today.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
01. Elephant Gun
02. My Family's Role In The World Revolution
03. Scenic World
04. The Long Island Sound
05. Carousels
06. Transatantique
07. O Leãozinho
SIDE B
08. Autumn Tall Tales
09. Fyodor Dormant
10. Poisoning Claude
11. Bercy
12. Your Sails
13. Irrlichter
SIDE C
14. Sicily
15. Now I'm Gone
16. Napoleon On The Bellerophon
17. Interior Of A Dutch House
18. Fountains And Tramways
19. Hot Air Balloon
SIDE D
20. Fisher Island Sound
21. So Slowly
22. Die Treue Zum Ursprung
23. The Crossing
24. Zagora
25. Le Phare Du Cap Bon
26. Babylon

Time Skiffs’ nine songs are love letters, distress signals, en plein air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry. But they are rendered with Animal Collective’s singular sense of exploratory wonder. Harmonies so rich you want to skydive through their shared air, textures so fascinating you want to decode their sorcery, rhythms so intricate you want to untangle their sources. Here is Animal Collective nearing 20, still in search of what’s next.

TRACK LISTING

1. Dragon Slayer
2. Car Keys
3. Prester John
4. Strung With Everything
5. Walker
6. Cherokee
7. Passer-by
8. We Go Back
9. Royal And Desire

“The letter X marks the spot, crosses over, literally with a cross. It’s the former, the ex-. The ex-lover known simply as “an ex”. Ex- is the latin prefix meaning “out”. Exterior, an exit. Extraordinary. Excellent. It’s exciting. Generation X. X-files. X is the unknown. X is Extreme“.

Extreme is Molly Nilsson’s tenth studio album. Recorded in 2019 and throughout the 2020 global pandemic at home in Berlin, Extreme is a departure for Nilsson, an explosion of angry love. It’s an album of anthems for the jilted generation, soaked with joy and offering solace, bristling with distorted, Metal guitars and planet-sized choruses that bring light to the dark centre of the galaxy. It’s an album of the times, by the times and for the people. It’s a record about power. About how to fight it, how to take it and how to share it.

Absolute Power explodes with massive guitars, double kick beats and the instantly iconic line “It’s me versus the black hole at the centre of the galaxy.” Nilsson’s performance itself portrays absolute power in its confidence but the song is a call-to-arms, an entreaty to grasp the here and now, to take the power back. It’s Nilsson pacing the ring and we’re instantly in her corner. Earth Girls takes familiar Molly Nilsson themes - female empowerment and subverting the patriarchy - but casually throws in one of the choruses of her career. “Women have no place in this world” she sings, but it’s the world that isn’t good enough. Stadium-sized but still warmly hazy, Earth Girls has its fists in the air, glorifying in harmony, almost ecstatic in its feeling good. Nilsson’s Springsteen-level conviction and righteousness bleeds through the speaker cones, the cognitive dissonance between the song’s cadences and angry lyrics redolent of Bruce in his prime. Female empowerment isn’t always an angry energy on Extreme, however. On Fearless Like A Child, Nilsson’s anthem to the female body and women’s sovereignty of it, she croons over a mid-80s blue-eyed Soul groove. It sets a nocturnal scene as the narrator surveys her past and her surroundings. Before we’re fully submerged in a dreamlike, Steve McQueen-era Prefab Sprout poem to learning from your mistakes the song erupts into one of those lines only Molly Nilsson can get away with: “I love my womb, come inside I feel so alive” she fervently sings. Against the backdrop of ever-encroaching, conservative rulings on women’s reproductive rights in places like Texas, it’s simultaneously angry and full of love.

Every song on Extreme is a gleaming gem in a pouch of jewels. On Kids Today, Nilsson is the voice of wisdom, archly commenting on the eternal struggle between youth and authority. Wisdom infuses Sweet Smell Of Success with a transcendent love that forgives the narrator’s shortcomings and celebrates the moment, it’s a letter to the author from the author that asks “what is success” and concludes that this is it, this song, this moment. It’s a rare moment of simple reflection that is generous in its insight to Nilsson’s inner life. “Success” is a tool of power and we don’t need it… We need power tools and there are moments on Extreme where it feels like Nilsson is showing us how to find them. It's an open conversation through out Extreme. She’s a warm, comforting presence through out the album and specially on these songs of encouragement, songs perhaps sang to a younger Molly Nilsson or, really, to whomever needs to hear them. “They’ll praise your efforts, they’ll call you slurs a rebel, a master, an amateur / Merely with your own existence, you already offer your resistance.” On Avoid Heaven she’s even more direct, pleading with us to avoid concepts of purity and to embrace the glorious, ebullient, emotional mess we’re often in as a method of upending the power structures who need things to be perfect.

They Will Pay brings back the big, distorted power chords in the form of a agit-punk, pop slammer. Of course, when Molly Nilsson does punk pop we get the catchiest chorus this side of The Bangles or The Nerves. It’s rendered in an off the cuff, throwaway manner that is just perfect in its roughness. However, it’s on Pompeii that Nilsson delivers the album’s epic, emotional heartbreaker. Like 1995 on Nilsson’s album Zenith, or Days Of Dust on Twenty Twenty, the lyrics of Pompeii are heavy with a transcendent sadness, an aching poetry that cuts to the truth of the heart like the best Leonard Cohen lines, though here delivered with an uplifting, life-affirming love. It contains the most personal moments of Extreme, a song lit by the dying embers of romance. Yet it’s here where the alchemy at the base of all Nilsson’s best work is found. Turning small nuggets of personal truth into big, generous universal moments that invite everyone to cry, to love and to fight the power. In an album of jewels, it might be the shining star.

Molly Nilsson’s biggest, boldest and most vital album to date, Extreme is about power. Against the love of power and for the power of love.

TRACK LISTING

1. Absolute Power
2. Earth Girls
3. Fearless Like A Child
4. Kids Today
5. Intermezzo
6. Sweet Smell Of Success
7. Obnoxiously Talented
8. Avoid Heaven
9. Take Me To Your Leader
10. They Will Pay
11. Pompeii

Boy Harsher’s latest release, ‘The Runner (Original Soundtrack)’, is an exorcism.

Augustus Muller and Jae Matthews’ fifth release entitled ‘The Runner (Original Soundtrack)’ is not a traditional album. Rather, it is the soundtrack to a short film, also entitled ‘The Runner’. The film, written, produced, and directed by the duo, is a searching horror film, attached to a meta-style “documentary” about Boy Harsher’s recording process. The album includes several distinct components: cinematic arrangements, vocal features, and of course classic Boy Harsher dark pop.

Last year, in the midst of the obvious chaos (the global pandemic), but additionally with Jae’s MS diagnosis, Augustus started working on moody, cinematic sketches. It was uncertain what these pieces would become, other than catharsis. In Jae’s period of convalescence, she kept thinking about this sinister character: a woman running through the woods. Together, they developed this idea further into a film. They were unable to tour, a drastic (and isolating) shift in their career, and making ‘club music’ did not feel right. But there was so much they needed to get out. The next Boy Harsher release would be a reconciliation of this time. The album processes feelings of universal anxiety and the confrontation of at home illness. A necessary expulsion during a time of unrest.

The album opens with “Tower”. The only track on ‘The Runner (Original Soundtrack)’ that Boy Harsher has previously played live, but never recorded. The song is an incantation, with its pulsing synth and Jae’s begging vocals. A spell about desire and impending destruction. Jae asks 'But are you honest? Do you trust? You trust in me?' Questions answered by her desperate yells. It starts both the film and the soundtrack with a heavy presence.

Two songs on ‘The Runner (Original Soundtrack)’ feature vocalists other than Jae Matthews. He allows a distinct sound for both vocalists and really leans into the possibility of divergent genres. “Machina”, is a HI-NRG homage, performed by Mariana Saldaña of Boan, and “Autonomy” a new wave tribute, performed by Cooper B. Handy of Lucy. Augustus Muller fully embraces the soundtrack ethos, by creating fictional ‘bands’ to generate additional content.

‘The Runner (Original Soundtrack)’ is exactly what’s in the name: a soundtrack. At first the shape of the release was nebulous - yet once realized the album is dynamic. It serves as the story of the running figure and her musical accompaniment. Those expecting a traditional release will be surprised, but not disappointed.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Tower
A2. Give Me A Reason
A3. Autonomy (Feat. Lucy - Cooper B. Handy)
A4. The Ride Home
B1. Escape
B2. Machina (Feat. Ms. BOAN - Mariana Saldaña)
B3. Untitled (Piano)
B4. I Understand

In years from now, anyone seeking to make sense of what life was like during a global pandemic should extend their research beyond the newspaper clippings and dive into the art produced during the period. Archive Material - the aptly-titled second album by Dublin-based art-rock quintet Silverbacks - will make for a particularly illuminating listen on the subject. Capturing the absurd mixture of monotony and creeping disquiet experienced by many of us this past 18 months, it’s simultaneously sobering and wickedly droll.

Spend more than five minutes in the company of brothers/band founders Daniel and Kilian O’Kelly and you’ll quickly realise this playfulness is hardwired. Reminiscing about their upbringing in Brussels, they gently rib one another about their early creative abilities. “When Kilian started writing music, around the age of 14/15, it was like, oh shit, that's better than what I've been doing - maybe I should latch on to him a bit,” older brother and lead singer Daniel chuckles. “And that’s still the case,” guitarist/vocalist Kilian bats back, grinning.

They laugh too recalling how - prior to the existence of streaming services - they used their dad’s extensive record collection as a lending library, much to his disapproval. “The rule in the house was [you could borrow] just one CD at a time,” Daniel explains. “It was like borrowing a book: you’d check it out for a night and then the next day he'd be immediately chasing up on the CD asking, ‘Where is it?’ And then he’d fine us.”

It was via these limited loans that the pair first discovered the work of Frank Zappa, the Beatles and Miles Davis, as well as some of the records and bands that would go on to inspire their output in Silverbacks specifically. “Television’s Marquee Moon was a big one,” Daniel recalls. “Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain was another. And then Sonic Youth generally.”

The siblings’ songwriting partnership only began in earnest when Daniel moved to Kildare to study music in 2008, with the pair swapping ideas over email under the band name Mighty Good Leaders. Two years later, Kilian joined Daniel at college in Maynooth and - after changing their name to Silverbacks - they expanded the line-up, recruiting course mates Peadar Kearney on guitar and Emma Hanlon on bass, alongside a revolving cast of drummers. This arrangement continued until 2014, when Peadar left Ireland to live in France and the band reverted back to being a bedroom project. The current incarnation of Silverbacks officially began two years later, upon Peadar’s return to Dublin, with drummer Gary Wickham completing the line-up.

The five-piece’s first release together - ‘Just For A Better View’ - arrived in 2017, instantly picking up praise from an array of blogs. 2018-single, the BBC 6 Music playlisted ‘Dunkirk’ extended their audience even further, showcasing Daniel’s sardonic lyrical style as he played a man having a mid-life crisis on the site of the former battleground. As a result of the single’s success, they gigged solidly for the next two years, touring Ireland extensively, and playing shows across the UK and Europe with Girl Band, in-between working on their full-length debut, Fad.

Recorded with Girl Band-bassist Daniel Fox - who the band had initially admired for his production work with Paddy Hanna - its release was initially scheduled for November 2019, before being put back to March 2020 for logistical reasons. When the music industry was derailed by the pandemic, its release was postponed indefinitely. Frustrated, the band took control and opted to put it out in July 2020, against the advice of their label. Daniel explains, “We knew it was a risk, but just for our own sanity, we just needed to get it out there and move on to the next thing.

It was a leap of faith that paid off, with the Irish Times declaring the 13-track collection “seriously exciting”, DIY Magazine calling it “an excellent example of how a debut should be done” and it getting nominated for the RTE Choice Music Prize Irish Album of the Year. Not that the band hung around to revel in the acclaim: they were already hard at work on the follow-up.

Archive Material only cements Silverbacks’ status as one of Ireland’s most fascinating bands. Recorded at Dublin’s Sonic Studios in November 2020, with Daniel Fox undertaking production duties once more, it finds the band leaning into their early influences, delivering idiosyncratic indie-rock packed with intricate, Tom Verlaine-esque “guitarmony”. Other reference points for the record included Neil Young, Weyes Blood and - on ‘Wear My Medals’ in particular - Bradford Cox and Cate Le Bon’s collaborative record Myths 004.

Where Fad found Silverbacks focused on recapturing the live experience rather than reveling in studio experimentation, Archive Material skillfully traverses the line between the two. As a unit, they replicate that irrepressible live energy via complex arrangements incorporating everything from wistful Rhodes (‘Carshade’) to congas and Gang Of Four-style bass (‘Different Kind Of Holiday’).

Thematically, the record is every bit as rich, displaying an anthropological approach as exemplified by the album’s artwork. The initial premise for ‘They Were Never Our People’ came from a YouTube comment, portraying the decline of a town that has lost its footfall as the result of a bypass. Meanwhile, ‘Central Tones’ is an empathetic character study of someone seemingly content to trade off former glories, but secretly deeply unhappy.

On several songs, the pandemic functions as a particularly effective prism through which to examine ideas of community. ‘A Job Worth Something’ finds Daniel reflecting on his real-life experiences working in insurance while his sister treated patients on a COVID ward, and the feelings of futility and guilt he felt at the time. ‘Different Kind Of Holiday’ was inspired by the ways in which previously uncommunicative neighbours bonded with each other during periods of enforced confinement. Throughout, his observations arrived drenched in the same surreal strain of gallow’s humour that many of us were forced to adopt to lighten the toughest moments of the lockdown.

Daniel explains, “I can't remember who it was, but I saw a musician who said that they'd be keeping away from writing anything about the pandemic, because who wants to hear about that? But I’d much rather hear about an event via someone who actually lived through it, rather than someone writing about it retrospectively.”

Keenly observed and vividly rendered, Archive Material is an eye-witness account of human resilience as much as it is a compelling indie-rock record. Future historians take note.

TRACK LISTING

Archive Material
A Job Worth Something
Wear My Medals
They Were Never Our People
Rolodex City
Different Kind Of Holiday
Carshade
Central Tones
Recycle Culture
Econymo
Nothing To Write Home About
I’m Wild

Panthers prowling through a desert. Cowgirls swaggering into a saloon and kicking up dust. Riding shotgun with a Tarantino heroine. Having the fiesta of your lives under a giant piñata with all your friends. Los Bitchos’ hallucinatory surf-exotica is as evocative as it is playful: the London-based pan-continental group could well be your new favourite party band with their instrumental voyages that are the soundtrack to setting alight to a row of flaming sambucas and losing yourself to the night. They’ve got a bun-tight knack for a groove – and they’ve got the best fringes in rock’n’roll too.

Serra Petale (guitar), Agustina Ruiz (keytar), Josefine Jonsson (bass) and Nic Crawshaw (drums) hail from different parts of the world but met via all-night house parties, or through friends, in London. Their unique sound binds them together, though, taking in a retrofuturistic blend of Peruvian chicha, Argentine cumbia, Turkish psych and surf guitars. They are London’s answer to Khruangbin, if Khruangbin spent all weekend getting slammed on cheap tequila in a Dalston dive bar.

TRACK LISTING

A1. The Link Is About To Die
A2. I Enjoy It
A3. Pista (Fresh Start)
A4. FFS
A5. Tropico
B1. Las Panteras
B2. Good To Go!
B3. Change Of Heart
B4. Tripping At A Party
B5. Try The Circle!
B6. Lindsay Goes To Mykonos

Sea Power (formerly British) announce what will be their first new album in five years – Everything Was Forever. Their music has won them some remarkable admirers – Lou Reed, David Bowie and London's National Mari- time Museum. Indeed, the BSP fanbase now includes Doctor Who, Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes. Peter Capaldi is a con- firmed BSP fan. "A band of stark originality," he wrote in his foreword for the reissue of the band's 2003 debut album, The Decline Of British Sea Power. "BSP's songs bring you the bite of the wind, the fury of the sea, and music that is simply exhilarating." Daniel Radcliffe has talked in detail about his plan to get a BSP tattoo (featuring the 2002 T-shirt slogan Bravery Already Exists). Benedict Cumberbatch is also an admirer of the band.

Supported by their ever loyal fans who have very generously crowd funded the making of the next studio LP, BSP were able to get through the ravages of Covid and are on course to release their 7th studio LP later in 2021 and hopefully get back on the road.

Fifteen years on from their first concert, British Sea Power continue to make bold, galvanising, idiosyncratic marks on the world. Race horses and massive ocean-going yachts have been named after the band. London's National Maritime Museum recently opened a new £35m exhibition wing. Visitors are greeted by huge, sculpted quotations from Shakespeare and Coleridge – and a lyric from British Sea Power.

TRACK LISTING

Scaring At The Sky
Transmitter
Two Fingers
Fire Escape In The Sea
Doppelganger
Fear Eats The Soul
Folly
Green Goddess
Lakeland Echo
Vestiges *
Amsterdam *
We Only Want To Make You Happy 

* Bonus Tracks For CD And Deluxe 2LP Editions.

When you’re trying to make it through tough times, you need a little light to find your way. That light blazes brightly on the alchemical second album from Penelope Isles, an album forged amid emotional upheaval and band changes. Setting the uncertainties of twentysomething life to alt-rock and psychedelic songs brimming with life, colour and feeling, Which Way to Happy emerges as a luminous victory for Jack and Lily Wolter, the siblings whose bond holds the band tight at its core.

Produced by Jack and mixed by US alt-rock legend Dave Fridmann, the result is an intoxicating leap forward for the Brighton-based band, following the calling-card DIY smarts of their 2019 debut, Until the Tide Creeps In. Sometimes it swoons, sometimes it soars. Sometimes it says it’s OK to not be OK. And sometimes it says it’s OK to look for the way to happy, too. Pitched between fertile coastal metaphors and winged melodies, intimate confessionals and expansive cosmic pop, deep sorrows and serene soul-pop pick-you-ups, it transforms “difficult second album” clichés into a thing of glorious contrasts: a second-album surge of up-close, heartfelt intimacies and expansive, experimental vision.

These extremes come into sharp focus on ‘Terrified,’ a reflection on anxiety set to a dreamy sunburst of psychedelic jangle-pop. As Jack explains, “I love that juxtaposition. It reminds me of when you’re feeling a bit delicate or not ready to socialise but you have to go out because you need milk for tea. Then you go to the supermarket and you bump into someone you kind of know and you have to pretend that everything’s OK when, really, you’re dying inside.”

With the album’s almost prog-psych ambitions on fulsome display, ‘Rocking at the Bottom’ taps coastal motifs for a call to embrace open possibility, twinkling with hope over a deep space-rock bass line and a phased Hammond. In an album of fluent dynamism, ‘Play It Cool’ offers a swift tonal about-turn, emerging from Lily’s gloriously in-character vocal as a sweet soul-pop message to the troubled self amid rousing drums, lush glockenspiels, creamy harmonies and wonky guitars. Warm and rippling, ‘Iced Gems’ is a sorrowed lament, played out over the gentlest of fluttery keyboards and experimental electronic sounds – plus, samples of carrot crunches. Written over a couple of years, Lily’s ‘Sailing Still’ charts the life of a relationship to a slow-burn and sorrowed soundscape of dulcitones, cello, violin and more: building in increments to a climax of measured grandeur, it sustains a sense of intimacy in a framework of great scope.

The album swerves into Mercury Rev and MGMT’s cosmic slipstream with ‘Miss Moon,’ a galloping centrepiece with an irresistible call to dream: “Hey, kids – look up!” As Jack says, “We wanted it to seem like lift-off.” After its exclamatory explosion, the psychedelic dream-pop of ‘Sudoku’ offers a mellowed invitation to turn off your mind, relax, float downstream. Steering the album through further contrasts, ‘Have You Heard’ is a feelgood flurry of insistent, pulsing space-rock; ‘Pink Lemonade,’ meanwhile, is a song of sweet, sharp beauty, touching on fading childhood memories and lifted by Fiona Brice’s strings. ‘11 11’ hosts Lily’s most tender vocal yet: recorded in one take through tears, it finds Penelope Isles at their most exposed, with Brice’s strings weeping in sympathy. Finally, ‘In a Cage’ cogitates on confinement yet finds solace in field recordings of happy, high times – a judicious note of meditative reflection after a giddy ride.


More field recordings were made during a stay at a small cottage in Cornwall, where Penelope Isles began work on the album. With romantic heartache already in the air, things swiftly got worse: lockdown began, claustrophobia kicked in and emotions ran high. As Jack puts it, “We were there for about two or three months. It was a tiny cottage with four of us in and we all went a bit bonkers, and we drank far too much, and it spiralled a bit out of control. There were a lot of emotional evenings and realisations, which I think reflects in the songs.”

At different point along the way, Jack Sowton and Becky Redford left the Isles. An old friend, multi-instrumentalist Henry Nicholson, stepped in swiftly – “A godsend after a low time,” says Lily. Another friend, Hannah Feenstra, contributed drum parts; now, Joe Taylor is the band’s drummer. After Cornwall, the band redid many of the rhythm tracks, recorded a little in Brighton, then recorded more in Cornwall at their parents’ house. “It was,” says Jack, “a proper rollercoaster ride.”

The ride continued with Fridmann, whose recent credits include Isles’ favourites Mogwai’s No 1 album, As the Love Continues. As Lily puts it, the process of sending Fridmann a mix, receiving it back in the morning and then having five hours to make decisions on it resulted first in stress, then in something sublime. “I love everything he’s touched – MGMT, Mogwai, Mercury Rev. He would turn our mix into this electric, fiery thing. There were some moments that were initially hard, like on ‘Miss Moon,’ where he took out the bass when it gets to the chorus. But now it’s my favourite bit on the record. He made everything so colourful. It’s an intense-sounding record – a hot record. It was so refreshing to have that blast of energy from Dave – it’s like he framed our pictures.”

Away from the confines of the cottage, the Wolters also opened the door to a collaboration with storied composer Fiona Brice, whose credits include John Grant, Lost Horizons and Placebo. A “big bucket-list tick” for Jack and Lily, the team-up results in glorious arrangements across the album: for Lily, ‘11 11’ stood out. “I was in absolute tears when she sent back the strings for ‘11 11’. It was like, oh my goodness, she’s nailed it.”

Flushed with resourceful detail, Which Way to Happy adds extra strands to the Isles’ ever-tightening core DNA. Born in Devon and raised on the Isle of Man, the Wolters’ bonds were already strengthened by separation when Jack (six years Lily’s senior) moved away to university at 19. As Lily grew older, they rediscovered their connection and formed a band called Your Gold Teeth. When both moved to Brighton, Penelope Isles came to being, fuelled by a passion for DIY alt-rock and all who sail its seas.

On its release, Until the Tide Creeps In received rave reviews from Q, DIY, The Line of Best Fit and many others, while finding champions in Steve Lamacq and Shaun Keaveny. It also become part of a lifeline for music fans during the 2020 lockdown when the band participated in Tim Burgess’s Twitter Listening Party. Meanwhile, extensive touring saw the Isles develop into a formidable live force, with ‘Gnarbone’ emerging as a sure-fire show-stopper.

Now, the Isles have 11 more show-stoppers to add to the mix. At the album’s heart, the band’s core traits have never been stronger: the bond between the Wolters, a sensitivity towards complex feelings, a desire to celebrate life in all its facets and an ambitious reach combine to create an album that feels utterly, emphatically present on every front, rich in depth and uplift.

“There’s so much love between me and Jack, we couldn’t do it without each other,” says Lily. “And even in that chaotic, tiny bubble of a cottage that sent us all mad, we had some really funny, stupid, lovely times together. There’s a lot of emotion in the album.” Wherever Penelope Isles go from here, that guiding emotional compass couldn’t be more finely attuned.

TRACK LISTING

1. Terrified
2. Rocking At The Bottom
3. Play It Cool
4. Iced Gems
5. Sailing Still
6. Miss Moon
7. Sudoku
8. Have You Heard
9. Pink Lemonade
10. 11 11
11. In A Cage

Primal Scream’s fusion of indie pop and dance broke down musical boundaries and changed the face of British pop music in the '90s, helping to push dance and techno into the rock mainstream. Their lasting influence is crystallized across nine tracks, on Primal Scream - Live At Levitation. Recorded in 2015 at Levitation in front of underground rock fans from around the world, the LP marks the next release in The Reverberation Appreciation Society’s Live at Levitation series, which captures key moments in psychedelic rock history and live music in Austin, Texas--pulled from Levitation’s extensive archives. Amongst a lineup of classic Levitation bands--Thee Oh Sees, Night Beats, and frontman Bobby Gillespie’s old band, The Jesus And Mary Chain--The Primal Scream set shows the band’s undeniable creativity and unique place in the psych-rock canon, combining psychedelic garage rock, kaleidoscopic pop, and acid house to create a sound that’s simultaneously of its time and ahead of it. Known for their explosive live sets, the recordings show why Primal Scream is still considered one of the preeminent Scottish rock groups, with the Mercury-prize winning band blasting through tracks off of 1991’s touchstone album, Screamadelica, its boogieblues- influenced follow-up Give Out But Don’t Give Up, and the heavily electro-influenced cult favorite XTRMNTR. Making it an essential collection for any Primal Scream or psychrock aficionado.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Jailbird
2. Accelerator
3. Kill All Hippies
4. Burning Wheel
5. Shoot Speed / Kill Light

SIDE B
1. Higher Than The Sun
2. Country Girl
3. Loaded
4. Movin' On Up

With time as fluid as The Coral’s journey through sound, the band cut short the party to celebrate this year’s universally acclaimed, Number 2 album, Coral Island and visit the strange world where it all started. The Coral, released on Monday 29 July 2002 with the singles Dreaming Of You and Goodbye, catapulted the band to mainstream success as teenagers, landing a Mercury Prize-nomination and Platinum-certification.

Now remastered from the original mixes, the album will be reissued with Run On Records in association with Modern Sky UK. Two, unreleased, never-before-heard-tracks, She’s The Girl For Me and Tumble Graves, produced by Ian Broudie, but shelved after the 2001 album sessions are included in the track-listing. The rarities appear on an all-formats bonus disc, alongside a complete singles B-sides collection and the band’s pre-album EP The Oldest Path.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Spanish Main – Remastered 2021
I Remember When - Remastered 2021
Shadows Fall - Remastered 2021
Dreaming Of You - Remastered 2021
Simon Diamond - Remastered 2021
Goodbye - Remastered 2021

Side B
Waiting For The Heartaches - Remastered 2021
Skeleton Key - Remastered 2021
Wildfire - Remastered 2021
Badman - Remastered 2021
Calendars And Clocks - Remastered 2021

Side C
The Oldest Path - Remastered 2021
God Knows - Remastered 2021
Short Ballad - Remastered 2021
Flies - Remastered 2021
Dressed Like A Cow - Remastered 2021
Darkness - Remastered 2021
Sheriff John Brown - Remastered 2021

Side D
Good Fortune - Remastered 2021
Answer Me - Remastered 2021
Follow The Sun - Remastered 2021
Travelling Circus - Remastered 2021
Sweet Sue - Remastered 2021
Another Turn In The Lock - Remastered 2021
She’s The Girl For Me - Remastered 2021 (PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED)
Tumble Graves - Remastered 2021 (PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED)

Dinked Bonus 7” Tracklist
(a) Shadow Falls
(b) Tbc

Dinked Bonus Flexi Tracklist
(a) Simian Technology

Gender Studies it the debut EP from Irish Post-Punk band M(h)aol, for release on 29th October digitally, and then a 12” vinyl on 14th January via indie label TULLE which champions underrepresented voices in music. The 12” will be a Dinked Edition - a limited edition clear vinyl with 300 copies only. It’ll come with a hand signed postcard from the band, a glittery 'Ghost A Post- Punk Boy Today' sticker, and additional track.

Gender Studies was recorded in just 3 days, and covers topics such as violence against women, the misogynistic music scene in Ireland and the UK, and trying to navigate life when you're not a cis straight white man.

On the EP, lead vocalist Róisín says, “Gender studies weaves past & present in an exploration of how the construct of gender shapes our lives. From feeling like you're not performing your gender right to the way it shapes how we move through the physical, sexual & romantic sphere it marries urgent lyrics with a threatening yet (blank) sound.”

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
Gender Studies
Desperation
Kinder Bueno
SIDE B
Laundries
No One Ever Talks To Us
Óró Sé Do Bheatha Bhaile

As Stereophonics celebrate 25 years as one of the UK’s most loved bands, with ‘Oochya!’ Kelly Jones continues to cement his place amongst the great British songwriters.

Bumps Per Minute is a full-throttle reinvention of the traditional fairground dodgems, from Mercury Award-shortlisted composer, producer and musician Anna Meredith. The music is part of the DODGE installation, which can be experienced until 22nd August at Somerset House.

For Bumps Per Minute, Meredith has collaborated with BAFTA-winning sound artist Nick Ryan to design a bespoke tracking technology so that every thump, bump and swerve of the 18 dodgems around the track can trigger a separate composition. This results in a kind of ultimate shuffle where high octane music and ideas compete for airtime and each performance is unique. The installation will occur approximately every hour at DODGE through the day/evening.

The idea for Bumps Per Minute came about when the composer was thinking about what might be a more pandemic friendly replacement for the ice rink at Somerset House where she has her studio. The idea grew from there and now this summer DODGE is taking over the main courtyard at Somerset House, featuring a full smorgasbord of Yinka Ilori designs, DJs, food, drink and of course, dodgem rides.

Today, Meredith announces that she will be releasing a special extended cut of her material via Moshi Moshi out on the 15th July 2021. Bumps Per Minute: 18 Studies for Dodgems will feature full-length individual musical identities of all 18 dodgems – each one a bold and distinct musical track in its own right as well an intro and outro track (voiced by comedian Rob Broderick).

The key to both the dodgems themselves and the release is a user ‘driven’ triggering and shuffling of the material. Meredith encourages the listener to ‘take the driving seat’ and jump from one track to another, mirroring the real dodgem ride, shuffling and curating their own listening experience via the virtual interactive dodgems page or their preferred listening platform.

Bumps Per Minute: 18 Studies for Dodgems explodes out of the starting gate with Meredith’s uncategorisable sound and signature energy, combining fairground wildness with a healthy dose of the nostalgic electronics of old school gaming.

On the composition, Meredith says “I approached writing these 18 tracks like little exercises, making identities that are bold, playful and characterful but without beats, percussion or any acoustic elements and relying on my skills to create melodic and harmonic based energy”. She continues “they’re also less about musical development than my orchestral work or material in my studio albums, these tracks are only themselves and unapologetically so, and that freed me up to unleash some pretty bonkers ideas, knowing it’s about these bold switches - like a sort of musical Whacky Races…"

TRACK LISTING

A1 START ENGINES
A2 BPM 100
A3 BPM 144
A4 BPM 108
A5 BPM 178
A6 BPM 62
A7 BPM 124
A8 BPM 112
A9 BPM 130

B1 BPM 200
B2 BPM 72
B3 BPM 104
B4 BPM 131
B5 BPM 110
B6 BPM 109
B7 BPM 101
B8 BPM 194
B9 BPM 155
B10 BPM 107
B11 STOP ENGINES 

The Joseph Mount-fronted electronic pop collective Metronomy announce details of the forthcoming special vinyl release of the instrumental versions of their career-changing 2011 album The English Riviera, which is this year celebrating its ten year anniversary. The English Riviera (Instrumentals) are available to listen to online now and will be released on vinyl in November.

The Dinked vinyl edition of The English Riviera (Instrumentals) will be a cream coloured 12” vinyl with numbered sleeve, complete with transparent sticker sheets, A6 Postcard and Dinked sticker.

A love letter to the stretch of coast a stone's throw from where Joe Mount grew up, The English Riviera marked a breakout moment in the band’s history that would lead them to global success and see them constantly developing their sound for a decade to come. 

TRACK LISTING

A Side:
The English Riviera
We Broke Free (Instrumental)
Everything Goes My Way (Instrumental)
The Look (Instrumental)
She Wants (Instrumental)
Trouble (Instrumental)

B Side:
The Bay (Instrumental)
Loving Arm (Instrumental)
Corinne (Instrumental)
Some Written (Instrumental)
Love Underlined (Instrumental)

Originally released on 25th February 2007, Malcolm Middleton’s third solo album and first for Full Time Hobby is being made available on vinyl once more for its 15th anniversary.

Only ever released on black vinyl in limited numbers around the original release, this updated version has been re-cut to optimise sound quality and pressed to natural / clear vinyl, includes liner notes from broadcasting legend Colin Murray, and is presented in a high-quality gatefold sleeve with updated art from David Shrigley.

Also available is a very special Dinked Archive edition featuring an alternative sleeve, again by David Shrigley, silver vinyl and an exclusive 7” featuring three b-sides from the original sessions (Point of Light, Pick Me Up, Black Marks) limited to 500. This 15th anniversary edition will be released 25th February 2022. 

TRACK LISTING

1. We’re All Going To Die
2. Fight Like The Night
3. A Brighter Beat
4. Death Love Depression Love Death
5. Fuck It I Love You
6. Stay Close Sit Tight
7. Four Cigarettes
8. Somebody Loves You
9. Up Late At Night Again
10. Superhero Songswriters

Bonus Dinked Edition 7"
A1. Point Of Light
B1. Pick Me Up
B2. Black Marks

There are approximately a great deal and very many ‘Welcome Breaks’ scattered throughout the sprawling motorways of the UK.

Now, regardless of whether that statement’s true or not… when life’s become a series of long-stretches and welcomed breaks, it’s to no avail that sometimes all it takes to alleviate spirits is the simplest, of experiential indulgences.

Be it the buzz of an overly exhausted tour van, or the green light and smell of sausage rolls in the near Beaconsfield distance... inspiration can be found in the funniest corners of this place we call home; and it’s in the heart of day-to-day simplicities and sprawling services, that we gladly receive Amsterdam’s beamy-grinned, indie-pop powerhouse Pip Blom, back into lives.

Following an extensive touring schedule which saw the Dutch 4-piece roam over field, oceans, and Glastonbury’s John Peel stage following the release of their debut record ‘Boat’, any such cool-cat would be forgiven for wanting to kick back, and indulge in some very appreciated, time off.
As is often the way, such timely-abandon cannot be said for Pip Blom however, who immediately began to gather up all her soaked-up inspirations taken from the road, and manifest a re-energised sense of self, and ritualistic songwriting.

Cosying down in a room of her parents’ house (which she shares with her brother and fellow bandmate Tender Blom), Pip, a self-confessed “fan of deadlines”, set aside three months to write twenty songs- sixteen of which
were to become demos for the band to structure and flesh out, once in the studio together.

It’s at this stage in our indie-fairy-tale that things start to get ever so 2020. Whilst the world was suddenly put on hold as a result of Covid-19, Pip Blom, who’d made plans to return to their favourite ‘Big Jelly Studios’ in Ramsgate, England, were suddenly faced with a very sticky, kind of dilemma. “We’d scheduled to go into the studio in September but summer started moving and there were a couple of countries not allowed to go to the UK anymore... a week before we had to go, the Netherlands was one of those countries”- notes Pip.

Sentimentalities, and pre-established friendships (by way of Grammy award-winning engineer Caesar Edmunds) took president, and the decision was made to pack up their gear and a variety of board games and exercise equipment, all in preparation of a fourteen-day quarantine faced upon arrival in the UK.

In total, three weeks were spent recording what would become the groups sophomore release; a Al Harle engineered love-affair which was self produced entirely by the band and culminated in a legally intimate, fully seated album play-back, to six, of Ramsgate’s most chorus-savvy and ‘in the-know’ residents.

Getting out of their hometown and into an environment which removed all notions of “normality” or personal space, was an atmospheric godsend in terms of motivation; an act which encouraged Pip Blom to re-adjust and buckle down as a unit again, after spending so long in mandatory isolation.
Much like the danceable-realism of Pip’s beloved Parquet Courts, the key to an album well done, is the balancing act of fine-production, and capturing that core live-essence we all miss. “We always play one live track three times and after we then build that track in the studio” says Pip, assembling together amalgamated “live-energies” in order to produce a capsule of environmental-satisfaction, that can be appreciated during any time of day, or life’s little moments.

Actively seeking out moments of creative-authenticity, be it via a slightly out-of-tune guitar or proudly-fuzzed vocals, Pip Blom take us back full circle and introduce us to their ‘Welcome Break’- an eleven-track release which resonates with about as much decisive allure as it’s ‘Boat’ precursor, but this time with a bit more contemporary chaos to boot.

Where ‘Boat’ reckoned as a fresh-faced, yet gloriously fearless game changer, ‘Welcome Break’ is the self-assured older sibling who, with an additional year or two behind themselves, isn’t afraid to speak out, take lead, and instigate a liberated revolution-come-bliss-out.

Lead single’s ‘Keep It Together’ and ‘You Don’t Want This’ are glistening masterclasses in feel-good chorus- the very kind of coming-of-age relatability where a soul would want to let down their hair, stick their arm out the window of their best friends car and roll with the motions in a rapture of soundtracked euphoria, and jangled adventure.

Unhinging genre in our instant-access era of musical snoot, no-one does an enthused-chorus quite like Pip Blom yet much can be said for this gang being far from one-trick-ponies.

Anthemic drifters ‘Different Tune’ and ‘It Should Have Been Fun’ are slow building, amplified highlights. Carrying all the weight of convicted fearlessness on their shoulders, Pip Blom unhinge pre-disposed expectations of crafted alternative like graduates straight outta Kim Deal’s school of rock, whilst closing number ‘Trouble In Paradise’, sets the tone for what will only be the ultimate, set-list once gigs resume again.

With Pip Blom, no mood is untouched nor sense of renewal left behind. The trick to it all? As Pip reveals: “I just really like catchy songs and I feel like that’s something we try to do. I’d classify it as being sentimental – it’s not sugar-happy Pop.... more like ‘Titanic’ pop songs...”

For those of us missing the buzzed adrenaline of communal music exploration, the idea of escapism in cramped and sweaty crevices can seem quite lifeless. If it's a sense of community you’re after then look no further than ‘Pip Blom Backstage’.

Streaming goodness 24/7 as a fan-centric loyalty app, ‘Pip Blom Backstage’ gives access to exclusive news, premium content, and, a chat box for the Pip Blom Backstage community; further cementing Pip Blom as undeniable pals for life as fan-clips, spotify playlists and even a cooking lesson from bassist Darek Mercks, are all made available from the VIP lounge of your own back-pocket.

In conclusion, there're actually thirty-five ‘Welcome Break’ pit stops a weary traveller can make in a lifetime spent on the M1, and it’s associates. Whilst the road’s presently a little less travelled, Pip Blom’s ‘Welcome Break’ is adamantly nothing to do with the present state of affairs. In fact, it doesn’t have anything to do with much at all and that’s the way they like it.
‘Welcome Break’ is but two nouns of which when placed together in context, ring confidently with prowess, intent, and a radiant true-spirit - much like Pip Blom herself. 

TRACK LISTING

1 You Don't Want This
2 12
3 It Should Have Been Fun
4 Keep It Together
5 Different Tune
6 I Know I’m Not Easy To Like
7 Faces
8 I Love The City
9 Easy
10 Holiday
11 Trouble In Paradise

Comprised of three celebratory, joyful, sweet house tracks, Gay Dreams Do Come True is Planningtorock’s aural mission to own their queer happiness, and to share that joy with anyone who wants to listen. 

About the track, Planningtorock says, “This song is a dedication to my love, my wife Riinu and too the Black trans women who fought for the rights we have today as queer, gay, non binary lesbians.” For the uninitiated: Planningtorock has been a disruptive voice in dance music for the last fifteen years. Initially signing with DFA via James Murphy himself, in addition to subsequently opening for LCD Soundsystem in America, Planningtorock has released four acclaimed studio albums thus far, using the personal as political on each record while playing with gender in their costumes and photos for each release. These albums, along with early collaborations with subversive innovators like The Knife and Peaches, established Planningtorock as a recognised force in politicised dance music that moulds sound into new shapes, and explores ideas around gender, queerness, sexuality, and desire.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Gay Dreams Do Come True
A2 Gay Dreams Do Come True (Instrumental)
B1 Girl You’ve Got My Heart
B2 Her Heart Is Now My Home

Earlier this year, Transgressive reissued American-Canadian composer and activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s 1986 masterpiece, Keyboard Fantasies, marking the 35th anniversary of its original release. Today, he announces, Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined - a collection of songs from the now legendary album, re-worked and re-imagined by a collection of creative kindred spirits.

The remix album and reissue of the original work follows the Autumn 2020 release of Glenn’s album, Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Transmissions was a career-spanning album that includes compositions from his early works including selections from Keyboard Fantasies. It also included both new and archival unreleased tracks and live versions. This collection marked the first new release from Glenn-Copeland since 2004. The New York Times called it a “life-spanning mixtape that moves from the mournful torch songs of his youth to joyously soulful odes to survival.”

TRACK LISTING

Ever New (Reworked By Bon Iver & Flock Of Dimes)
Fastest Star (Julia Holter Remix)
Let Us Dance (Arca Remix)
Old (New) Melody
Ever New (Kelsey Lu’s Transportation)
Sunset Village (Blood Orange Remix)
Ever New (Reworked By Joseph Shabason & Thom Gill)
Ghost House (Performed By Jeremy Dutcher)