Defiant in the face of existential dread, The Orielles were always going to approach their second album with nothing but stellar levels of intent. Disco Volador sees the 4-piece push their sonic horizon to its outer limits as astral travellers, hitching a ride on the melodic skyway to evade the space-time continuum through a sharp collection of progressive strato-pop symphonies.

“Its literal interpretation from Spanish means flying disc but everyone experiences things differently. Disco Volador could be a frisbee, a UFO, an alien nightclub or how you feel when you fly; what happens to your body physically or that euphoric buzz from a great party,” suggests bassist and singer, Esme. “But it is an album of escape; if I went to space, I might not come back.”

Voyaging through cinematic samba, 70s disco, deep funk boogies, danceable grooves and even tripping on 90s acid house, Disco Volador is set to propel The Orielles spinning into a higher zero-gravity orbit. Written and recorded in just 12 months, it captures the warp-speed momentum of their post-Silver Dollar Moment debut album success; an unforgettable summer touring, playing festivals like Green Man and bluedot, and deepening their bond whilst witnessing the sets of their heroes Stereolab, Mogwai, and Four Tet. Disco Volador’s library catalogue vibes stem from a band lapping up and widening their pool of musical discovery whether nodding to Italian film score maestros Sandro Brugnolini and Piero Umiliani, or the Middle Eastern tones of Khruangbin and Altin Gün. “All the influences we had when writing this record were present when we recorded it, so we completely understood what we wanted this album to feel like and could bring that to fruition,” tells drummer, Sid. “This is the sound of where we are at, right now.”

Returning to Stockport’s Eve studios where the band cooked together, went swimming, took walks, and relaxed in the soundwaves of an occasional gong bath, Henry, Sid and Esme called a family reunion under the watchful whisker-twitching of studio cat, Adam (“He was probably a producer in a past life,” they say). With keysman Alex now adding texture through his classically trained know-how, they re-joined engineer Joel, and producer Marta Salogni (Liars, Björk, The Moonlandingz) whose vast expertise of drones, delays and mad effects were so intrinsic to their Disco Volador vision – sketched out by the band in Sharpie doodles on the studio wall. “Marta is so positive, she has a great way of getting the best out of us,” guitarist, Henry tells. “Marta is the 5th Orielle,” affirms Sid. “Because we’d worked together before, we were even tighter; it’s a shared mind-set.” For Marta, the feeling is mutual; “It’s sonic tidying really, the band just do their thing and I work with that.”

Built from instrumentals around the concept of “boogie to space, space to boogie,” Disco Volador’s energy comes from the melodic fission of tension and release. Recurring motifs explore space, not only of earth’s celestial atmosphere, but also what happens within the gaps and how sound manipulation has the power to carry, or displace, its listener. “We like throwing in wide curveballs by taking the music somewhere different then figuring our way back… like jumping off,” says Henry. “Jez from ACR taught us about pauses and that’s massive on this record; space can be the most beautiful part of a song.” In fact, by unleashing the tension with their own smattering of esoteric noise through delay pedal fuckery, the layered poetics on ‘Whilst The Flowers Look’ and ‘Memoirs of Miso’s saxophone stylistics (loaned by Glasgow band Lylo’s Iain McCall), filling voids is exactly what gives the album its magic. “Those unplanned moments are great,” Sid says, “mistakes can become something special. For these next shows we’ll have to change our tech spec up so much!”

At times haunting and unsettling, Disco Volador’s film-like structure flows from fact to fiction. Its tales are culled from waking life as easily as they become a soundtrack for lucid dream sequences. Watching Foley-inspired 70s thriller Berberian Sound Studio whilst recording may account for the album’s dynamic sound effects – created with Eve’s array of instruments plus Henry’s flexatone - a Secret Santa gift from Esme. Lynchian outros capture the album’s thematic dread as they spiral into infinity and pave the way for potential loops, imitating the fades between the songs of the band’s summer DJ sets. Brian Eno-inspired dreams about a rocket-fuelled mission may or may not have inspired ‘Rapid’ or ‘Come Down On Jupiter’ after ideas sunk deeper into their subconscious. “I’d been reading about phenomenology and Czechoslovakian writer Milan Kundera’s ideas about existence; the weight of your own body, what you feel and how that interacts with your surroundings,” hints Esme, at possible inspiration behind the lyrics.

Whilst the future of the world and its current cosmic wasteland might be up in the air, The Orielles’ new album has its feet beating out a much-needed four to the dancefloor. Welcome to Disco Volador; time really does fly when you’re having this much fun.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Transparent orange vinyl with green blob centre.
Initial quantities include "The Universe Is Blue" bonus 'mixtape' on CD.

CD Info: Initial quantities include "The Universe Is Blue" bonus 'mixtape' on CD.

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig” reasoned George Bernard Shaw. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. This is made manifest on ‘Viscerals’, their third proper, and an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough ‘King Of Cowards’.

Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, ‘Viscerals’ is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigs, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverising one-riff workouts of their early days. Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity, and the personality of this band has never been stronger, whether on the Sabbathian and philosophical warcry of ‘Reducer’, the debauched, Jane’s Addiction-tinged swagger of ‘Rubbernecker’, the Melvins vs Sonic Youth demoltion derby of ‘New Body’ or even the demented MBV-meets-Twisted-Sister party-banger from hell that is ‘Crazy In Blood’.

“We’re a peculiar bunch of people - a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd” notes vocalist Matt Baty. Such is the unstoppable character of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; still the hungriest animals at the rock trough.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: 'Drained Of Blood vinyl' (Blood Red vinyl).

Indies Exclusive LP Info: 'Blood And Guts vinyl' (Blood Red / Guts Yellow Swirl vinyl).

Thundercat is set to release his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records on April 3, 2020, and shares the first music; ‘Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy & Steve Arrington)’. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox.

“It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.”

The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.”

‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings… Part of me knew this [track] was where Steve [Arrington] left us.”

Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his game-changing third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Standard (Red) - 140g red vinyl LP housed in a 3mm spined sleeve with gold foil detail and OBI strip.

Coloured LP includes MP3 Download Code.

Deluxe LP Info: Deluxe Gatefold Clear - 140g clear vinyl LP housed in a 6mm spined gatefold sleeve with gold foil detail and OBI strip.

Deluxe LP includes MP3 Download Code.

Indies Exclusive LP Info: Standard Indies Edition (Cream) - - 140g cream vinyl LP housed in a 3mm spined sleeve with gold foil detail and OBI strip.

Indies Exclusive LP includes MP3 Download Code.

Picture Disc Info: Deluxe Gatefold w/ Picture Disc - Limited edition 140g picture disc LP housed in a 6mm spined gatefold sleeve with gold foil detail and OBI strip.

Picture Disc includes MP3 Download Code.

CD Info: CD softpack.

Ty Segall and Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt) are Wasted Shirt. Their debut, collaborative album, Fungus II, is out February 28th on Famous Class Records.

Read below for Henry Rollins’ words on the project.

“Ty's 2019 album, First Taste, and the new Lighting Bolt album, Sonic Citadel, are easily some of the best material either entity has ever released so if these two happened to find themselves in the same recording studio, a fan just might entertain elevated expectation levels. In fact, some might actually show signs of enthusiasm, even excitement at the fact that from July 5 -13, 2018, in the air-conditioning free environs of Ty's home studio, the duo, eventually calling themselves Wasted Shirt, wrecked the joint as thoroughly as you hoped they would.

The album is exploding euphoria from start to finish. The more you play it, the better it kabongs you upside your head. Hectic doesn't even begin to describe it. Brian and Ty, two mere particles in the grand scheme, collide at high speed, the technicians dive for cover, the reaction is recorded. Mutation is achieved. This is Freedom Rock. Turn up the volume. Hasten your emancipation. Sonic joy awaits.”

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Indie stores exclusive on orange coloured vinyl, 500 only.
Comes with a 8 page Risograph lyric zine by Brian Chippendale.

LP Info: Black vinyl edition.
Comes with a 8 page Risograph lyric zine by Brian Chippendale.

The brand new album delivers the band’s most inspired and self-aware set of songs to date, created over the course of a year at upstate New York’s Marcata Sound. Following his work on 2011’s Days, engineer Kevin McMahon returns as producer, and, for the first time ever, Real Estate have brought in outside instrumentalists and special guests like Sylvan Esso, whose vocalist Amelia Meath features on first single, “Paper Cup.”

Across the album’s 13 interrogative tracks – as full of depth, strangeness, and contradictions as they are lifting hooks – the band balances existential, environmental, and political anxieties with fatherly sentiments, self-satirizing lyrics, forever-lively guitar lines, and shimmering strings.

The Main Thing arrives with a fresh commitment the members of Real Estate - Alex Bleeker (bass), Martin Courtney (vocals, guitar), Matthew Kallman (keyboards), Julian Lynch (guitar, vocals), and Jackson Pollis (drums and drum programming) - have made to each other, 10 years and 5 full-length LPs into a career spent crafting unmistakable and influential palettes of sound. The band underwent a collaborative evolution for this album, which saw each member experimenting in new roles, and alongside Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, Matt Barrick of The Walkmen, Aaron Johnston of Brazilian Girls and a string quartet all play on the record.

FORMAT INFORMATION

2xDeluxe LP Info: Deluxe double LP (tip-on gatefold jacket with Bjorn Copeland’s collage piece mounted on the front cover).

In the making of their new album Darkness Brings The Wonders Home, Smoke Fairies drew inspiration from mysteries both real and imagined: sea monsters, flocks of crows taking flight in extravagant formation, strange creatures dwelling in the mud near their new South London abode. With their mesmeric vocal presence and starkly poetic lyrics, singer/multi-instrumentalists Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies embed all that odd magic into songs that speak to the realities of modern times—isolation, insomnia, an overall unease with the state of the world—and ultimately uncover an unlikely sense of hope.

“Times of darkness are when people are often the most imaginative,” says Davies in reflecting on the album’s title. “It helps you to see all the wonders of the world you hadn’t noticed before—the things you’ve been blind to because you’ve been on autopilot for so long.”

Produced by Phil Ek (Fleet Foxes, The Black Angels, The Shins), Darkness Brings The Wonders Home merges Smoke Fairies’ musings and meditations with a decidedly guitar-driven sound, the duo’s unearthly harmonies endlessly floating atop lead-heavy riffs. Over the course of a rigorous month-long session in Seattle, Smoke Fairies adopted a purposely intimate approach to achieving that singular sonic tone.

‘We spent a long time trying to fathom the direction we wanted to take on this album. At times the options seemed overwhelming, but as new songs started to form we realized we needed to take them back to our core sound – our interplaying guitar parts’ says Davies. “So then we had to really step up and do it ourselves, without relying on a band to fill anything in, which was quite a challenge—physically, mentally, everything.”

While Smoke Fairies initially intended to return to the earthy folk of early work like 2011’s Through Low Light and Trees, the duo soon found themselves assuming a new boldness in their guitar style and, in turn, pushing into much wilder terrain. In doing so, Blamire and Davies spent much of their time perusing the guitar shop near Ek’s chosen studio, experimenting with countless guitars and amps to augment the album’s sonic palette. “It was like being in a sweet shop, getting to try all these guitars we’d normally never be able to afford,” says Blamire. “We ended up making friends with guitars we never thought to use before, like this weird vintage Kay that sounded great but was so hard to play—to the point where there were days when our fingers were bleeding, or we had blisters in places you didn’t even know you could get them.”

Opening with “On the Wing,” Darkness Brings The Wonders Home quickly proves the power of matching that pummeling guitar work with Smoke Fairies’ finespun songwriting. With its woozy intensity and spellbinding rhythms, the song also introduces one of the album’s most prominent themes: the often-futile attempts at true connection at a time when the most impetuous behavior tends to prevail. “When we were little my brother wrote a poem about waking up and finding he’d changed into a swan overnight, with feathers growing out of his arms,” says Blamire of the song’s inspiration. “To me that’s an interesting metaphor for how people can grow into becoming quite flighty, where they’re never really able to settle in one place or with one person.”

An album deeply informed by aberrations of nature, Darkness Brings The Wonders Home delves into a different kind of fascination on “Out of the Woods”—a song sparked from Smoke Fairies’ study of the overgrown pond behind their house. “There’s something magical about all these weird things living out there in the mud,” says Blamire. “We started to project onto that, like the idea of something unexpected and good coming from the mud of your emotions.” Another song attuned to the fear of the unknown, the hypnotically ominous “Chew Your Bones” mines inspiration from the titular beast of Sarah Perry’s novel The Essex Serpent and from a local urban myth involving a character called The Croydon Cat Killer. “For years people thought someone was going around killing cats—they put a proper police force on it and everything, and then realized it’s just foxes,” Davies notes. “I’d also recently read an article about how some people feel uncomfortable with the idea of bringing kids into the world at the moment,” she adds, “We needed to write about the growing feeling that the world is on the verge of real change, there is the sense that there is this scary, unknown future lurking just beyond us ’.

Despite its many wanderings into otherworldly territory, Darkness Brings The Wonders Home remains rooted in real-life anxieties, particularly on tracks like the fluttering and urgent “Don’t You Want to Spiral Out of Control.” “The modern way of interacting around love seems too empty to me—it feels like it makes us into much colder people than we ever were before,” says Blamire. “It’s like we’re missing that spontaneity, the ability to bind together over something more than an image on a screen. That song came from wanting to just shake people and go, ‘don’t you want to spiral out of control again? Don’t you want to just let loose?’”

Throughout Darkness Brings The Wonders Home, Smoke Fairies adorn their observations with so many exquisite flourishes: the swinging melodies and elegant shredding of “Elevator,” the girl-group harmonies and spiky riffs of “Disconnect,” the delicate tension between taut guitar lines and swooning vocals on “Chocolate Rabbit.”

For Smoke Fairies, Darkness Brings The Wonders Home signals a strengthening of the inextricable bond they’ve forged through the years. “So many of the songs are about these feelings of disconnection, but the irony is that Jessica and I have each other, and that means so much more than any of the other relationships that come and go,” says Blamire. And because of that connection, the two found the courage essential for bringing such an emotionally trying album to life. “I think what we’re attempting to show is that, in all this chaos that’s so tumultuous and overwhelming, there are always ways to change your perspective,” says Blamire. “Making this album, we conquered so many worries and doubts and felt so much stronger at the end—we went right into the darkness, and somehow brought something incredibly positive out of it.”

FORMAT INFORMATION

Dinked Edition LP Info: Exclusive Coloured vinyl – Gold & Black Splatter.
Exclusive Sleeve.
Signed & Numbered 12”x12” Print.
Exclusive Lyric Book.
Dinked sticker.

Coloured LP Info: Gold coloured vinyl.

Humanist, the expansive and ambitious project orchestrated by guitarist and producer Rob Marshall, features new single “Shock Collar”, with iconic Depeche Mode singer Dave Gahan.

The self-titled debut album is masterfully conducted by Rob Marshall (guitarist of Exit Calm and co-writer of Mark Lanegan’s celebrated “Gargoyle” and “Somebody’s Knocking” albums) who wrote, played and produced all the music here.

Humanist is a swirling Niagara of fuzzed-out industrial melody and noise, that has attracted an all-star cast of collaborators including Mark Lanegan (Queens Of The Stone Age), Dave Gahan (Depeche Mode), Mark Gardener (Ride), Carl Hancock Rux (David Holmes, Portishead), John Robb (The Membranes), Joel Cadbury (UNKLE), Ilse Maria, Ron Sexsmith and Jim Jones (The Jim Jones Revue, Thee Hypnotics).

New single “Shock Collar” featuring Dave Gahan offers a stirring insight into the world that Humanist soundtracks, and its accompanying video is a dizzying, emotive and luminous visual gateway into the song. Filmed in New York, directed by Derrick Belcham (Brian Eno) and designed by Tracey Maurice (Arcade Fire), the video the explores the psychology of a heartbroken and regretful figure and the dual symbol of the halo / shock collar as a guide.

Gahan comments; “It was a pleasure to be asked to be a part of Rob’s 'Humanist' project. Mark Lanegan asked me, and I liked the idea immediately… It’s a beast! I went for the vocal, with the visual of driving fast on an empty highway… We shot the video over a couple of days in New York, and it all came together”.

FORMAT INFORMATION

2xLP Info: Heavyweight black vinyl.

“This is an examination of madness and loss,” says Brian Christinzio, the inimitable force behind BC Camplight. “I hope it starts a long overdue conversation.”

Fired by his ongoing battle with mental illness, Shortly After Takeoff is the final, and finest, chapter of what Christinzio calls his “Manchester Trilogy”, following 2015’s “How To Die In The North” and 2018’s “Deportation Blues”. All three albums were created after the native Philadelphian had moved to Manchester. Like Deportation Blues, Shortly After Takeoff spans singer-songwriter classicism, gnarly synth-pop and ‘50s rock’n’roll, with Christinzio’s similarly distinctive, flexible vocal carrying a fearless approach to lyrical introspection, but the new album is a major leap forward in songwriting sophistication and lyrical communication.

“It’s important to stress that this isn’t a redemption story,” he says. “I'm a guy who maybe lives a little hard and I’m in the thick of some heavy stuff. But as a result, I think I've made my best record.”

The “heavy stuff” has come thick and fast for Christinzio. Just days before How To Die In The North was released, he was deported and banned from the UK because of visa issues. Estranged from his new home, his girlfriend and his dog, unable to promote his album and back home with his parents, Christinzio sunk deep into the dark. An Italian passport, care of his grandparents, eventually allowed him to re-settle in Manchester, but then just days before Deportation Blues was released, his father Angelo unexpectedly died.

“I went into a spiral that was worse than any time since my twenties,” he recalls. Hence the title Shortly After Takeoff: the feeling of being suddenly thwarted by what life throws at you. Making matters worse was a neurological disorder that returned after years in remission: “I see TV static, and it messes with how my brain interprets everything from sound to my own feelings.”

One way to process tragedy is comedy, which elevates Shortly After Takeoff to a heightened plateau, from grief-stricken vulnerability to armoured bravado, from the black dog of depression to gallows humour. None more so than ‘Ghosthunting’, which opens with an extraordinary (fabricated) passage of Christinzio doing a stand-up routine, centring on the memory of hallucinating his father’s ghost. “I want to drag the listener into this world and hopefully they question why they feel uneasy,” he explains.

“I also wanted to make a record totally free of whimsy and irony, that was just clear and open and honest. I don’t think you really heard the chaos in Deportation Blues, but in Shortly After Takeoff, I can hear I’m finding undiscovered places to go, only because I was so lost. Lyrically, I wanted people to hear and understand me this time. Before, if I would have written about my father dying, I would have made up some weird bullshit, like an analogy about a tree shedding leaves or something. That Brian is gone. I have a direct line to the listener now. I have a direct line to myself too. It’s a benchmark moment for me.”

Shortly After Takeoff ends with the gorgeously tender 93-second ‘Angelo’, “a little fleeting moment for my dad. I wanted his name on the album, and something that sounded like a goodbye. It ends with the drums, like a heartbeat stopping…”

That’s Christinzio and Shortly After Takeoff: his best, most honest, open and frequently heartbreaking record.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Clear vinyl.

English songsmith Douglas Dare returns with his third and most stripped back studio album to date, Milkteeth, released on 21 February 2020 with Erased Tapes. Produced by Mike Lindsay — founding member of Tunng and one half of LUMP with Laura Marling — in his studio in Margate in just twelve days, Milkteeth sees Douglas become confident and comfortable enough with his own identity to reflect on both the joys and pains of youth. In doing so, he has established himself as a serious 21st century singer-songwriter with an enduring lyrical poise and elegant minimalist sound.

Douglas Dare grew up on a farm as the youngest member of a large extended family, where he was often found in his own private world, dancing in his mother’s pink ballet dress. “Only now do I feel free to express my inner child again, and am giving myself permission to play dress up,” says Dare of Milkteeth’s cover shot, in which he wears soft makeup and is draped with layers of white linen, acting the part of a Greek muse. “I never felt like I fit in. I was different, odd. I wanted to dance and sing and dress up and on a small farm in rural Dorset that really stuck out.”

Where previously he has been known as a piano player, for Milkteeth Dare picked up a new instrument, the autoharp, and as soon as he sat down with it, songs poured out – he wrote the album’s first single Silly Games, in under an hour. “Instinctual feelings about childhood and innocence were the catalyst,” he explains. “Then with the autoharp, it all just clicked – I could see the album laid out ahead of me.”

Milkteeth opens with I Am Free, which loops piano and lyrics in an intimate dance, comparing the seemingly inexorable freedom of childhood to flying. The Playground is a song Dare says he’s wanted to write for years, about a yearning for childhood innocence and simplicity. While Red Arrows tells a story of vulnerability, of craving parental comfort, The Joy In Sarah’s Eyes is a Jeff Buckley-esque ballad for a new generation. In Heavenly Bodies there is an unhurried darkness that nods to Leonard Cohen’s songwriting, and is also the first time Dare has played the guitar on record. The melodies on Milkteeth are deliberately simple; Dare wanted it to feel familiar right from the first listen. In between these songs sit instrumental pieces – The Piano Room, The Stairwell, The Window – named for the spots they were recorded in, moments for stillness and reflection.

Marking his arrival in 2014 with the release of his acclaimed debut Whelm and establishing his musical dexterity on the much darker follow up Aforger in 2016, Dare’s star keeps growing. In 2017 he was asked to contribute a re-interpretation of Dance Me to the End of Love to the Leonard Cohen exhibition A Crack in Everything at the Contemporary Art Museum of Montréal, currently showing at The Jewish Museum in New York before opening at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in September 2020. He was invited by Robert Smith to perform at his Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre in 2018, followed by the David Lynch-curated Manchester International Festival alongside Anna Calvi in 2019.

Dare’s music speaks of his own experiences of universal themes like love, loss, and childhood. Perhaps most importantly, his music gives a voice and a sanctuary to anyone who’s ever felt unusual or out of place. Whether he’s singing of the pain of those in the Magdalene Laundries as on Whelm, describing coming out to his parents on Aforger, or processing his own childhood isolation on Milkteeth, Dare has a graceful honesty and an abiding clarity of vision in his simple and distinctive sound.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Dinked Edition LP Info: Limited to 300 copies.
Alternative cover art.
Numbered.
Coloured Vinyl.

Indies Exclusive LP Info: Ltd 500 indies only clear vinyl.

Manchester’s The Slow Readers Club release their fourth album, The Joy Of The Return. 

Opening to an energetic blend of driving drums and infectious guitar lines, the opening track builds through evocative verses and anthemic choruses, imbued with their idiosyncratic brand of insightful and confronting lyricism and set against relentlessly danceable and energy-provoking instrumentation. “‘All I Hear’ is about a lack of agency and an inability to affect change. That there’s something happening, and you have no choice but to go along with it,” explains singer Aaron Starkie.

Throughout the album, the band explore a vast swathe of sonic territory, from the passionately delivered ‘All The Idols’, to the poppier tones of ‘Jericho’ that power through with bright indie guitar lines and ethereally melodic choruses.

Recorded at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool and produced by long-standing collaborator Phil Bulleyment, The Joy Of The Return marks a significant change in the band’s process, with their extensive touring allowing them time to write and develop tracks and arrangements through soundchecks and back-of-van jams.

“I think it’s definitely our most interesting and accomplished record musically,” says singer Aaron Starkie. “Lyrically the album covers love, alienation, the rise of right wing populism and comments on algorithm driven propaganda. And as always, I try to deliver those lyrics with uplifting melody.”

The dark power-pop that defined their previous releases holds a strong influence, with the brooding ‘No Surprise’ providing a powerful dose of evocative lyricism amid immersive soundscapes, while the unsettling ‘Paris’ is an undulating exploration of observational songwriting and eclectic musicality.

The swelling, arena-sized ‘Zero Hour’ displays the enormity of The Slow Readers Club sound and sets the precedent for their incredibly exciting future, while ‘The Wait’ closes the album with a beautifully absorptive combination of atmospheric synths flipping the pace of the record on its head to intoxicating effect.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Dinked Edition LP Info: • Exclusive Clear Vinyl with Magenta Splatter.
• Exclusive Dinked Edition Art print (Numbered & Signed).
• Exclusive Sleeve Design (Dinked edition).
• Limited to 400 copies.

Coloured LP Info: Magenta coloured vinyl.

Tame Impala (Kevin Parker) has officially announced his fourth studio album, The Slow Rush out via Fiction Records.

The Slow Rush was recorded between Los Angeles and Parker’s studio in his hometown of Fremantle, Australia. The twelve tracks were recorded, produced and mixed by Parker. The Slow Rush is Parker’s deep dive into the oceans of time, conjuring the feeling of a lifetime in a lightning bolt, of major milestones whizzing by while you’re looking at your phone, it’s a paean to creation and destruction and the unending cycle of life. Parker told the New York Times earlier this year, “A lot of the songs carry this idea of time passing, of seeing your life flash before your eyes, being able to see clearly your life from this point onwards. I’m being swept by this notion of time passing. There’s something really intoxicating about it.” The album cover was created in collaboration with photographer Neil Krug and features a symbol of humanity all but swallowed whole by the surrounding environment, as though in the blink of an eye.

In the last six months Tame Impala have headlined multiple major festivals including Glastonbury, Coachella, Primavera, Lollapalooza, ACL and more. He debuted two new songs on Saturday Night Live and sold out arenas around the world including two nights at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.

Tame Impala is Kevin Parker. His last album Currents was released in 2015 earning him a BRIT Award for Best International Group, a second GRAMMY nomination and went platinum in Australia, Gold in the USA, Canada, UK, France, Netherlands and Belgium, and enjoyed word-wide critical acclaim. The New York Times labeled it a "a tour de force" and Pitchfork said, "nearly every proper song on 'Currents' is a revelatory statement of Parker's range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and vocalist while maintaining the essence of Tame Impala." NPR noted, "[Parker] advocates for constant reinvention... That commitment to evolution helps make Tame Impala an unlikely but worthy candidate for major stardom."

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Double dark forest green coloured vinyl, includes folded A3 poster.

Indies Exclusive LP Info: PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A DIFFERENT EDITION TO THE ONE BEING SOLD ON THE TAME IMPALA WEBSITE.
Indies exclusive double red and light blue coloured vinyl (one disc red, one disc light blue), includes folded A3 poster.

2xLP Info: Standard double black vinyl, includes folded A3 poster.

After a global trek we're back at base camp with a pair of thrillers from the chiller for your next rumble in the jungle...

Prepare to take a cosmic cruise on the A side with 'Dromedary', a masterclass in daft drum-breaks, Saharan strings and syrupy synth-lines perfect for Arabian nights and disco daze.
This one's been a TD sure shot since our first parties, so it's high time we shared the love boat.

Move to the flip for an interdimensional trip, as TD Transport welcomes you aboard the 'Super Express', a lysergic locomotive burning up the mainline from Mos Eisley to Mumbai.
Linn drum lasers lock into a lurching groove, fuelling the furnace as we blast past Bollywood, take a detour into the Metro Area and arrive right on schedule to save your party.

100% Drum fun guaranteed.

Limited pressing inc. hand numbered insert...

FORMAT INFORMATION

12" Info: Limited 12" with hand numbered insert...

What do we hold on to from our past? What must we let go of to truly move forward? Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield spent much of 2018 reckoning with these questions and revisiting her roots for answers. The result is Saint Cloud, an intimate journey through the places she’s been, filled with the people she’s loved.

Written immediately in the period following her decision to get sober, the album is an unflinching self-examination. This raw, exposed narrative terrain is aided by a shift in sonic arrangements as well. While her last two records featured the kind of big guitars, well-honed noise, and battering sounds that characterized her Philadelphia scene and strongly influenced a burgeoning new class of singer-songwriters, Saint Cloud strips back those layers to create space for Crutchfield’s voice and lyrics. The result is a classic Americana sound with modern touches befitting an artist who has emerged as one of the signature storytellers of her time. Many of the narratives on Saint Cloud concern addiction and the havoc it wreaks on ourselves and our loved ones, as Crutchfield comes to a deeper understanding of love not only for those around her but for herself. This coalesces most clearly on “Fire,” which she says was literally written in transit, during a drive over the Mississippi River into West Memphis, and serves as a love song to herself, a paean to moving past shame into a place of unconditional self-acceptance.

Over the course of Saint Cloud, which was recorded the summer of 2019 and produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver), Crutchfield peels back the distortion of electric guitars to create a wider sonic palette than on any

previous Waxahatchee album. It is a record filled with nods to classic country, folk-inspired tones, and distinctly modern touches. To bolster her vision, Crutchfield enlisted Bobby Colombo and Bill Lennox, both of the Detroit band Bonny Doon, to serve as backing band on the record, along with Josh Kaufman (Hiss Golden Messenger, Bon Iver) on guitar and keyboards and Nick Kinsey (Kevin Morby) on drums and percussion. Saint Cloud marks the beginning of a journey for Crutchfield, one that sees her leaving behind past vices and the comfortable environs of her Philadelphia scene to head south in search of something new. If on her previous work Crutchfield was out in the storm, she’s now firmly in the eye of it, taking stock of her past with a clear perspective and gathering the strength to carry onward.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Indies only coke bottle clear LP

First new studio album since 2017, I Am Not A Dog On A Chain was recorded at La Fabrique in France in 2018. The eleven track album, which was produced by Joe Chiccarelli will be release on Friday 20th March 2020.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Exclusive coloured vinyl edition.
140 gram red transparent vinyl.

After two feverishly received albums as King Krule, plus another low-key outing under his own name, this extraordinarily gifted 25-year-old from Peckham in South London adds further depth and substance to his oeuvre with another wondrous long-player called ‘Man Alive!’. It arrives packed full of his trademark sonic ambition and compositional skill, as well as the now-familiar corrosive lyricism and lurid social observation.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: White vinyl limited to first pressing only.

Indies Exclusive LP Info: Indie edition with bonus flexi disc including the ‘Hey World!’ version of Perfecto Miserable.

Grammy-winning and BRIT and Mercury-Prize-nominated artist La Roux returns with her first new album since 2014’s ‘Trouble In Paradise’ is released on her own label Supercolour Records. From the cover to the contents, this is unequivocally the album Elly Jackson always wanted to make a claim that with some artists might ring alarm bells, but in this instance simply means that ‘Supervision’ sounds precisely, unmistakably, gloriously like La Roux.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Heavyweight white vinyl.

For Sophie Allison, aka Soccer Mommy, 'Color Theory' is a distillation of hard-won catharsis. The album confronts the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued the 22-year-old artist since pre-pubescence, presenting listeners with an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait, and reminding us exactly why her critically-acclaimed debut, 2018’s 'Clean', made her a hero to many. Wise beyond her years, Allison is a songwriter capable of capturing the fleeting moments of bliss that make an embattled existence temporarily beautiful. With 'Color Theory', Allison’s fraught past becomes a lens through which we might begin to understand what it means to be resilient.

'Color Theory' investigates a traumatic past in exacting detail; in doing so, Allison finds inroads for healing through self-acceptance, and occasionally, humor. (“I’m the princess of screwing up!” she declares at one point.) This isn’t a quest to uncover some long-since forgotten happiness so much as it is an effort to stare-down the turmoil of adolescence that can haunt a person well into adulthood. Allison is a gifted storyteller, one who is able to take personal experience and project it to universal scale. On 'Color Theory', she beckons in outsiders, rejects, and anyone who has ever felt desperately alone in this world, lending them a place to unburden themselves and be momentarily free.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Indies exclusive coloured vinyl.

LP Info: Black vinyl.

On October 22nd 2019 Courtney Barnett performed a unique and special show at the invitation of MTV in her hometown of Melbourne.

The “Unplugged” performance features Barnett as you’ve never heard her before, warm, vulnerable and emotional, performing a stirring set of eight songs to an intimate audience including “Depreston”, “Avant Gardner” and “Sunday Roast”.

Joined by her usual band Dave Mudie and Bones Sloane, she also enlisted cellist Lucy Waldron.

Barnett made the night even more iconic by inviting some of her favourite musicians to collaborate including legendary songwriter Paul Kelly, angelically-voiced New Zealander Marlon Williams and Milk! Records label-mate Evelyn Ida Morris.

The performances include covers of Leonard Cohen, Archie Roach and Seeker Lover Keeper as well as a never-before-heard original track from Courtney herself titled "Play It On Repeat".

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Aqua blue vinyl.

Porridge Radio grew out of Dana Margolin’s bedroom, where she started making music in private. Living in the seaside town of Brighton, she recorded songs and slowly started playing them at open mic nights to rooms of old men who stared at her quietly as she screamed in their faces.

Though she eventually grew out of them, for Margolin these open mic nights unlocked a love of performing and songwriting, as well as a new way to express herself. She decided to form a band through which to channel it all, and be noisier while she was at it – so Porridge Radio was born.

Inspired by interpersonal relationships, her environment - in particular the sea - and her growing friendships with her new bandmates (bassist Maddie Ryall, keyboardist Georgie Stott, and drummer Sam Yardley) Margolin’s distinctive, indie-pop-butmake-it-existentialist style soon started to crystallise. Quickly, the band self-released a load of demos and a garden-shed-recorded collection on Memorials of Distinction, while tireless touring cemented their firm reputation as one of UK DIY’s most beloved and compelling live bands.

As the band’s sound – bright pop-rock instrumentation blended with Margolin’s tender, open-ended lyrics – has developed and refined, Porridge Radio have also received enthusiastic radio airplay on the BBC, Radio X and more. Now, they are taking that development a step further, as they put out their label debut, Every Bad.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Indies exclusive milky white vinyl.

The Chats are a pub-punk shed-rock band from Queensland, Australia. They began playing together in high school, releasing their debut self titled EP a month away from graduating in 2016. Triple J described the EP as "seven joyous sky-punching tracks that combined 60s garage punk and 70s new wave punk" About nine months out of high school, The Chats went back into the studio to record their follow up EP, "Get This In Ya". The second EP sat online for half a year until the band had a viral hit with the music video for their song "Smoko", which racked in millions of views on Youtube in a couple of days, quickly becoming a viral hit and drawing attention from popular rock musicians Josh Homme, Iggy Pop, and Dave Grohl. Since then, The Chats have become notorious for their loud and chaotic live shows and their zero fucks attitude.

The Chats have sold out shows in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Europe. They've toured with Australian punk legends Cosmic Psychos, US rock heavyweights Queens of the Stone Age, and fellow pisswrecks Pist Idiots. With a debut album in the works, as well as national and international tours, The Chats aren't showing any signs of slowing down soon. The Chats have coined the term "shed rock" to describe their sound. Their self-contained approach has been likened to that of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. They have cited Australian bands Cosmic Psychos, Dune Rats and Eddy Current Suppression Ring as major influences The band takes its name from the phrase "that's chat" - (Australian slang to describe something terrible) and Sydney suburb of Chatswood. 

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Piss Colour Vinyl

Coloured LP 2 Info: Indies Exclusive Blue & Black Coloured vinyl

"I never learned how to swim.

In years of sailing, I never let the water touch me. The ocean was an abstract dread, an obliterating void as untenable as outer space.

In January 2018 we went on tour. After years of scraping by, we found our footing with our fourth record Yours Conditionally. It was a commercial success that set us up to to play the biggest rooms of our career. But three shows in, I developed a raging case of influenza. Each night I dragged myself onstage and croaked out the set in a delirium. After a particularly bad soundcheck, Patrick asked me if we should cancel the show. I couldn’t imagine giving up the thing we’d work so hard to achieve. “I’ll be on stage even if you have to mic my coffin,” I joked.

The next morning I fainted and had a seizure while grocery shopping for breakfast. Patrick carried me through the check-out lanes screaming for a doctor. I woke later in a hospital bed. Patrick leaned over me, crying. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m canceling the tour. I thought you were dead. We’re quitting the band. I’m going to be an accountant.” But I was on the mend. We missed two shows and pressed on.

During sound check at the 930 club, Patrick stepped out to take a phone call. His fa-ther had been in the hospital all week, but he had cancer and brief hospitalizations were routine. Back at the hotel that night, Patrick poured two shots of whiskey and handed me one. “I’d like to toast my dad.” He said. “The doctors offered to put him on life-support to give me a chance to fly out there, but I didn’t want him to suffer. Instead I said goodbye.”

Patrick went home to grieve with his family and rejoined us on the road two days lat-er. I couldn’t believe how quickly our lives had unraveledin the midst of what was supposed to be a milestone in our career. As the tour continued, we found refuge in playing music to-gether. Songwriting had always been an extension of our inner-world. Now we retreated to that world every time we stepped onstage.

After the final show of our tour in Austin, we received another phone call. Patrick’s mother Karen was in the hospital on the brink of a stroke. We got on a plane and went straight to her bedside. Her recovery took weeks. In the hospital waiting room, I wrote the opening line of “Matrimony II”: I only have certainty when you hold my hand.

On a hot July day, after Karen’s return to good health, we sailed as a family into the Pacific and scattered Edward’s ashes at sea. I marked our position on the chart with a small x. The album was already well under way. In that moment, I realized what I wanted to call it.

Swimmer is a tour of the darkest time in our lives. But it is not a dark record. Named for the feeling of suspension and upendedness that characterized this period, it is the story of deep-rooted companionship strengthened by pain and loss. These songs carried us through our grief. It is us at our most vulnerable, so we kept a small footprint, recording eve-rything ourselves in our home studio. I set out to describe the love I have come to know after ten years of marriage, when you can no longer remember your life before that person, when the spark of early attraction has been replaced by a gravitational pull."

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Transparent blue vinyl.

In 2014 Dan Snaith aka Caribou released Our Love to overwhelming critical acclaim and massive fan support. Now Caribou returns with his seventh studio album Suddenly, an album about family and the changes we go though as those relationships evolve.

Suddenly is the most surprising and unpredictable Caribou album to date. Though it retains the trademark Caribou warmth and technicolour, this album is littered with swerves and left turns, and amazes with it’s yet unheard nuances, samples and hooks.

As Snaith puts it, “these albums are like photo albums for me – when I look back at the old ones, they’re a snapshot of my life at that time, full of people who are close to you”. This is the drive to continue to make Caribou albums. Full bodies of work where Snaith is able to evaluate things, look at those around him and celebrate them. As his passion and joy in music making remains as fresh as ever, Suddenly is the purest example of this yet.

For the last 30 years, Greg Dulli, frontman of The Afghan Whigs and The Twilight Singers, has been the poet laureate of the bizarre whims and cruel tangents of desire. A foremost authority on the sell-your-soul rewards of carnal lust, the high voltage epiphanies of chemical enhancement, and the serotonin lows left in their wake.Therein lies Random Desire, the first solo album under Dulli’s own name.

Random Desire started in the aftermath of the last Whigs record, 2017’s In Spades, which Pitchfork named one of the best rock records of the year, hailing it as a “heavy, menacing work of indie rock majesty…thrilling and unsettling.” Drummer Patrick Keeler was about to take a short sabbatical to record and tour with his other band, The Raconteurs. Dulli’s longtime collaborator, bassist John Curley went back to school, and there was the tragic death of the band’s guitarist, Dave Rosser.

In response, Dulli returned to his teenage bedroom roots, finding musical inspiration via the model of one-man-band visionaries Prince and Todd Rundgren. The Los Angeles-by-way-of-Hamilton Ohio native wrote nearly every part of the record from piano lines to drums to bass riffs. As always, the music came first and the lyrics were completed later. Recording and writing way stations included his home in Silver Lake, the village of Crestline high up in the mountains above San Bernardino, and New Orleans. But the bulk was finished amidst the arid beauty and stark isolation of Joshua Tree (at the studio of engineer Christopher Thorne). Dulli handled most instrumentation, but an all-star cast of characters appear across the track-listing including The Whigs’ guitarist Jon Skibic and multi-instrumentalist Rick G. Nelson, Mathias Schneeberger (Twilight Singers), pedal steel wizard, upright bassist, and physician Dr. Stephen Patt, and drummer Jon Theodore (Queens of the Stone Age, The Mars Volta).

Clocking in at a lean 37 minutes, Random Desire is a clinic put on by a veteran master operating at the height of his powers, offering evidence of the hard-fought and weary wisdom learned from setbacks and victories alike. A lucid, confident and self-assured document of the songs of experience, the perils of existence, and the possibilities that offer themselves anew with each breath. Another death and rebirth from an outlaw who has seen it all and somehow lived to tell.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: RSD stores exclusive coloured vinyl.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the release of I’m New Here, the thirteenth - and last - studio album from the legendary US musician, poet and author Gil Scott-Heron, XL Recordings will release a unique reinterpretation of the album by acclaimed US jazz musician Makaya McCraven. Titled We’re New Again, the album is released on 7th February 2020; exactly a decade after the release of Scott-Heron’s original Richard Russell-produced recording. It’s set to follow in the footsteps of Jamie xx’s highly acclaimed 2011 remix album We’re New Here and will be McCraven’s first release of 2020, following the huge global acclaim heaped upon his 2018 album Universal Beings. One of the most vital new voices in modern jazz, McCraven is described by the New York Times as a "Chicago-based drummer, producer and beat maker, [who] has quietly become one of the best arguments for jazz’s vitality".

No one ever got anywhere by standing still. As an artist, you must move to grow. It’s a sentiment Nadia Reid knows well. Leaving her beloved New Zealand for America to record her third album with strangers, what she didn’t expect was a family awaiting her; teaming up with Spacebomb, her evocative travel tales push explorations of love, personal growth and deep reflection beyond boundaries she ever thought possible.

Out of My Province further marks Nadia’s wildly expanding trajectory, this time from outside her comfort zone. Nadia packed up for Spacebomb studios in Richmond, Virginia with long-term “musical rock” and guitarist Sam Taylor. They were joined by joined by the Spacebomb house band - Cameron Ralston (electric and upright bass), Brian Wolfe (drums) Daniel Clarke (organ, piano, and keys), and producer Trey Pollard, who would arrange strings, horns, piano and Rhodes to give the album a depth in sound Nadia had always imagined. “As an artist, progression is key. I want to always be changing, pushing boundaries, to feel growth. It’s good for us,” Reid says.

“Out of My Province is definitely a travelling album; they are road songs,” tells Nadia, written during a period of intensive touring following the release of her critically acclaimed LP, Preservation. “I felt inspired while I was moving and playing most nights. Sometimes good. Sometimes hard – there was this term I came up with called ‘digging for gold’ where some nights, you’d need to dig deeper for that feeling. During that time I felt really alive and useful.”

Completed back home in her hometown of Dunedin, first single “Best Thing” is a "song is about relationships, childhood and nostalgia. It is about intimate love and about the love between a mother and a daughter." The video was directed by Charlotte Evans and shot on film in locations around her neighbourhood including Tunnel Beach, the Railway Station and Botanic Gardens, starting at 6 AM in wintertime. "Dunedin is full of places that will flaw you with its natural beauty." reveals Reid, whose new songs act like postcards back to Port Chalmers.

The album takes its title from an interview with one of Nadia’s favourite New Zealand authors, the late Janet Frame, in which the interviewer asks if she has considered the supposition that she is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, to which Frame uncomfortably replies, "That question doesn't reach me. It's out of my province." Explains Nadia, “I was so moved by her response for some reason. I am enamoured by her books. I can re-read them at any time and take such comfort from them. So ever since... out of my province. That phrase has never left me.”

FORMAT INFORMATION

Dinked Edition LP Info: Dinked Sticker.
Gold Foil Numbered.
Alternative outer artwork with pink back sleeve.
Pink with white edge splatter vinyl exclusive to Dinked.
Limited to 400.

'Dark Matter’ is a landmark record, a producer album by a young auteur, threading several thrilling musical traditions into a bold new tapestry: the raw energy of grime and afrobeats and the rolling club rhythms of the London underground, combined with the freewheeling creativity and collaborative spirit of his jazz training. With that mentality in mind, it’s no surprise that his talents have trickled over into fashion, producing original compositions for the Louis Vuitton Foundation x MoMa Archive film (2017) and most recently scoring the Men's Dunhill Paris Fashion shows in both 2018 and 2019.

A double MOBO & Jazz FM Award winner, Boyd’s live and studio collaborations have been as varied as they have been prolific, from touring with Sampha & Kelsey Lu, to drumming on Sons of Kemet’s Mercury-nominated album, to his recent collaboration with South African Gqom king DJ Lag, which made its way onto Beyonce’s official soundtrack for The Lion King. He produced Zara McFarlane 's 2017 full-length, Arise, in its entirety, for Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label, and released several acclaimed solo projects though his Exodus record label. Boyd has produced original scores for major Paris fashion shows, and with saxophonist Binker Golding, he’s co-leader and co-producer of the ferocious semi-free group Binker and Moses.

FORMAT INFORMATION

2xDinked Edition LP Info: Limited to 500 copies
Double 140g Grey Vinyl.
90cm x 90cm Flag Wrap.
Silver Foil Inners.
Numbered Edition & Dinked Stickered.

2xIndies Exclusive LP Info: Double LP with 2 x 140 gram.
Splattered pressings.
Silver foil inners.

2xLP Info: Double LP with 2 x 140g.
Black pressing, Foil inners.

Incorporating a diverse range of influences, from samba to no wave, Handle, a three-piece from Manchester (now based between Manchester / London / Brussels) made up of Giulio Erasmus and Nirvana Heire former members of D.U.D.S (the first British band to sign to Castle Face) and Leo Hermitt, a genderqueer multidisciplinary artist, renowned for their challenging, thought-provoking work on the city’s arts and literary scenes. The group mesh politics with a trans experience of time and a vibrant, avant-garde freedom of approach.

Handle make a uniquely minimal sound, buoyed by poetic, urgent vocals. Each instrument (bass, drums, keyboard and voice) is permitted its own space, yet somehow the result is a brilliantly unified yet understated sonic experience that demands then commands your attention.

Powered by looping, hypnotic synth lines, quaking flexes of bass, clattering tribal percussion and expeditious, often agitated vocals that cordially sprint, Handle's songs – all of which clock in around the two minute mark – owe as much to performance poetry as they do to the vibrancy of post-punk and new wave. In these times of anxiety and confusion, Handle provide a much-needed dose of musical catharsis, albeit disorientating at times, pre-empting sense from the shards of sound they gather about themselves. 'Life’s Work' begins with isolated swells of pitch before driving full throttle into an exuberant rhythmic workout. 'Sunday Morning' shares this elasticated feel for melody and communication, twisting about itself in rubbery fashion. 'Coagulate' is more disembodied from the pulse, but similarly retains a boldness of vision.

'Step By Step' showcases what Handle excel at, it's a clangorous leviathan of beat-forward dance punk, peppered with Leo's fluid vocal inertia. It's dizzying yet divinely exuberant. 'Punctured Time' evokes the same cascading flow "Punctured time, bicycle wheel, what if I told you that your lips were like venus, lips were like what? Lips were like venus and that my tongue was a trampoline?" sings Leo amid undulating bass, toppling drums and jabs of keyboard ambience.

Handle make music occupied by dark shapes that move beneath a roiling surface. Jolting, shattering, cracking, smoothed, bounded, punctuated. Handle's debut album ‘In Threes’ is a collection of frenetic sounds for frenzied forms. 'In Threes' was recorded and mixed by Robin Williams and follows on from the band's previous EP 'Demonstrations', released through their own imprint Absolute Fiction. 

FORMAT INFORMATION

Ltd LP Info: Limited 180g black vinyl 500 Only .

CD Info: Digipak CD 500 Only.

The “yéyé noir” of Juniore has always been rooted in the cinematic as much as the musical. The Paris outfit’s blending of 1960s French pop, hazy psychedelia, seamless pop, surf grooves and lush orchestration feels as intertwined with big screen aesthetics as greatly as it does being found in the grooves of vinyl. So it makes perfect sense that the band would sooner or later find themselves appearing on more film and TV soundtracks, including the universally lauded drama Killing Eve.

It marks a period of continuous upward trajectory and forward momentum for the band who, since the release of their acclaimed 2018 album Magnifique, have been exposed to more people all over the world via stages and screens. From playing huge venues to thousands of people opening for the likes of the Dandy Warhols, to “corners of dive bars with duct tape holding the stage together” the band have been solidifying their sound, approach and relationship by playing extensively. “We’ve become more connected and better musicians,” Says the band’s songwriter and singer Anna-Jean. “I think the new songs are full of that wonderful conversation we have with each other on stage.”

It’s this sense of deeper understanding that the band have reached between one another that has allowed them to record an album that sounds as natural, graceful and seamless as this one. “We are now even more who we are than before,” she says of their musical and personal bonding. “And yet we still don’t really know who we'll become next. I know it sounds absurd but it's a very nice feeling.” It’s a feeling that is mirrored in the music too. There is a sense of familiarity, a retro pop flourish – filled with infectious rolling bass lines, razor-sharp guitar lines, dense atmospheres and immersive melodies – yet predicting where the album will go remains a constant impossibility.

The album’s title Un, Deux, Trois is another nod to the tight unit of the group. Swanny Elzingre and Samy Osta make up the trio, with the former on drums and the latter sharing guitar and keys along with Anna-Jean. It was in Samy’s cosy Paris studio that the album was recorded. The finished tone of the album - recorded often live to a 16 track - sounds like an amalgamation of their favourite French 60's muses like Françoise Hardy, Brigitte Bardot and Anna Karina with the new wave spark of Devo and the B-52's. While that cross-pollination between sultry, sophisticated pop and good-time energy and vibrancy is certainly present, there’s also a wealth of other touching points that underpin the record. So much so that Anna-Jean says of the themes that run through the album: “It’s a mix of everything we have loved and watched and felt in the last few years. It's like a laboratory of feelings – not really my or our feelings but more universal feelings and emotions – it's like a nonsensical Frankenstein’s laboratory."

However, as fun as this record is, much like its predecessor, there's an underlying lyrical message that remains a key part of the band’s identity as they push forward equality-based principles. “It's the same as we've been trying to state since the beginning,” Anna-Jean suggests. “The importance of being independent, of counterculture, humour and poetry. Of not taking ourselves seriously but being very serious about it and fighting against sexism, ageism, racism, consumerism – all the worthwhile fights.”

FORMAT INFORMATION

Dinked Edition LP Info: Unique alternative colourway sleeve.
Heavyweight Vinyl.
Numbered Edition of 500.
Exclusive bonus 7”.
Drinks Coaster / Beer Mat.
Postcard.

New York band The Men have always been genre-morphic and unpredictable, but on their eighth album Mercy they have truly done something new as a band. For the first time since forming, they have now created three straight records with the same lineup, and the result is a sound that feels developed and continuous despite running the gamut of mood, in true Men fashion. Having this lineup stability has allowed the band to deepen and finesse the sounds they were exploring on 2017’s Drift and produce tracks that have a unique and distinct voice.

Mercy was recorded live at Serious Business studio to 2” tape with Travis Harrison. The band did minimal overdubs, contributing to the urgent feel of the recording. The album is simply the sound of a band that has a deep and unjaded passion for songwriting and creation, working at the peak of their collaborative connection.

Mercy takes the listener on a cinematic journey throughout its seven tracks, beginning with the soothing but lonesome country rock opener “Cool Water.” This track, like many on the record, feels timeless, illustrating the band’s ability to write songs you are convinced you’ve heard before on the B-side of your favorite record from the ’70s. You are then pulled into its longest song, the 10-and-a-half minute psychedelic blues rock opus of “Wading in Dirty Water.” The band explore some new territory on Mercy, and they also revisit the Suicide-style sound they have been working on for a while through Drift and also with one of their side projects Dream Police, resulting in the highlight “Children All Over the World,” a song that could stand next to any classic rock hit but with The Men’s unique artistic savvy. It wouldn’t be a contemporary Men record without a total fuzzed-out stomper a la their Open Your Heart-era sound, and this record’s offering, “Breeze,” shows the band’s complete command of this urgent and pulverizing style. 

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Blue & purple splatter vinyl.

“A Stones-gone-Purple riff forged in up-to-the-minute desperation and an empowering memory of the heavy music that soundtracked Midlands life when Singh and Ayres first connected at college in Preston, Lancashire.” David Fricke, Rolling Stone, USA

In the latest of a series of albums that have mirrored the exceptional story of the band itself, Cornershop return with a new album ‘England Is A Garden’ on March 6th 2020 on Ample Play Records. It is an album that strides in an upbeat fashion, to deliver a full listening experience, bringing songs of experience, empire, protest and humour, steeped in the way only Tjinder Singh would come with.

Listen to a first taste of the album now, ‘No Rock: Save In Roll’, that is to say that there is not one without the other, that rock, for all its focus on death is the saviour of life.

The anvil here is music itself, and a celebration of Tjinder’s birth place - The Black Country, which also gave birth to heavy metal that has gone on to influence the world to dirty rock, whether the streets are lined with pylons or palm trees, the Black Country has allowed us to see things differently.

So the sound here goes back to Englands’ Midlands with two thumbs up to the feeling of hearing heavy metal from the back of a stage, as we all ride on and await the female backing vocals of our song to come in.

Where do you go after making an album that the Guardian hailed as “a rich, ambitious triumph”, American Songwriter called “a strikingly original, complex and inspired work”, MOJO described as “a record you could lose yourself in for months”, and Billboard as a “most magnificent recording, one that is mandatory listening if you are in search of an immersive album rock experience in the 21st century”? It's a question Jonathan Wilson asked himself after his “maximalist” album Rare Birds was released in 2018 to glowing reviews.Not only did it earn him Album of the Year awards in Rolling Stone, France and Blitz in Portugal, it brought him his first national television appearances in the US, on Conan and CBS Saturday Morning.

Rare Birds had been the culmination of three solo albums in seven years that the singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer released to widespread acclaim. His first, 2011's Gentle Spirit, a beautiful California dream of an album, is a classic by now and won him the admiration and friendship of Graham Nash, David Crosby, Elvis Costello and Jackson Browne. His follow-up, Fanfare, was also well-received with Uncut calling it “a lavish musical epic, the work of a dedicated and stone cold studioholic.” But now Wilson was looking for something completely new.

In 2019 he appeared on the celebratednationally-syndicated live music radio show eTown. “It was sort of bluegrass-based”, Wilson says, “and on this particular show I was playing with Steve Earle. Next thing you know, I'm talking with Steve about recording.” Earle advised Wilson that, if he had a bunch of songs written, he ought to take them to Nashville and make the record blind, since Nashville's crawling with studios and top-notch session players. “And that's how I got into the idea of going to Nashville and tapping into that sound,” says Wilson. “The sound of my home.”

Wilson was born in a small town in North Carolina. As a child he was raised on a mix of Beatles, 60’s and 70’s rock, country, and bluegrass.His uncle played in bluegrass legend Bill Monroe's band. His father had a rock band, but he would often jam with local friends who could “moonlight on banjo and mandolin and do gospel harmonies that would knock you out. I would sit there and strum along,” says Wilson, “There’s this astute southern rhythm and musicality in western NC… Then there’s this crazy three finger banjo style that you have to be really good at it because you’re from the place where Earl Scruggs is from. One of my father’s best pals was the music director at the Caroleean gospel church where my grandfather was a preacher and on the side he could pick the shit out of a mandolin. So, I was exposed to something super-authentic that I was soaking up. In hindsight, it doesn’t get more authentic than that.”

A musical prodigy himself, Wilson wrote his first song at three. He was also a musical polymath, playing drums, horns, woodwind, piano and guitar. He joined an R&B band at 14; left high school to study jazz with some old masters, and joined a rock band, Muscadine. He also became a noted luthier and a record producer. Among the artists he has produced albums for are Father John Misty, American band Dawes, British folk legend Roy Harper and ConorOberst.

In 2017-18 Rogers Waters asked Wilson to join him on his US+THEM tour on guitar and as musical director. Wilson also sang all the David Gilmour vocal parts. On that two-year tour, Wilson would sometimes find himself thinking about his Southern home. “Stuck out there in a hotel in Latvia, it's a long way from anything that feels like home or family. I felt I was subconsciously being led back to my roots.” In the new song '69 Corvette' he sings, I still think of Carolina sometimes. I miss the family. I miss that feeling. I miss home.

Those feelings were still fresh in his mind during that conversation with Steve Earle. Making his next album live in the studio with a Nashville band, instead of building them alone, piece by piece in his L.A studio, seemed like a good way to go back while simultaneously moving forward. An example of that is Wilson's new take on “Korean Tea”, an old song he had done with his ‘90’s band Muscadine. “That is a song about having a shining musical gift to share with the world. My brother says that’s one of the prettiest melodies I’ve written, so I decided to bring it back into the world”. “Heaven Making Love” is a song Wilson wrote for Rare Birds but abandoned; “I tried but I could never really get it, it had that locomotive polka thing sorta so I guess it was waiting for an album like this to join!”

With Wilson's longtime friend Pat Sansone of Wilco producing, Wilson and the band recorded in Studio A at the Sound Emporium, the late country maverick Cowboy Jack Clement's studio. The musicians included Nashville’s premier session players including bass player Dennis Crouch, Russ Pahl on pedal steel, multi-instrumentalist Jim Hoke, and world renowned Fiddle master Mark O’Connor.

“I was thinking about fiddle as being an integral part of the record, and I needed to find the best. In my mind the best of the best was Mark O'Connor. So I decided to reach out to him. I said, ‘Hey man, I'm doing a session, would you like to come down and play fiddle?’ and he's like, ‘Thank you, but I haven't done a session since 1990.’ So, he didn't say no and he didn't say yes! Over time, he eventually said, ‘Maybe, but my only stipulation is it's got to be with the band, no overdubs. That's what drove me out of the session business.’ That was a big deal to all of us. Mark truly elevates the record and he shines as the most brilliant fiddler on Earth, I thank him for his beautiful melodies on this album.”

Working with this Nashville band gave Wilson the same kind of feeling he had as a kid, strumming along with those bluegrass bands. “There's something about this level of musicianship, they've been in so many sessions. It was fun to play some of the more stoner Canyon-ey tunes for this crack session band and watch them write up their special Nashville charts with their numbers, symbols and diamonds… they call it ‘hillbilly arithmetic’ over there….

The album was cut in only six days. “It was so fast it was a blur.” Hence the title, Dixie Blur. “And there really is a magic that occurs when musicians play together in a room and create that one consistent thing in time, something is created by the collective energy that is impossible to recreate otherwise,” says Wilson.

“It feels like another side, you know? Sort of like a personal, unplugged, just got off the road feeling. I think it's the most down to earth and emotional both musically and lyrically that I've ever been.”

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Mint Green Vinyl

Syrian wedding singer turned global dance icon Omar Souleyman releases his 4th studio album Shlon via Mad Decent / Because Music.

On Shlon (Arabic for “how,” or literally “which color”), Omar Souleyman presents 6 new techno-meets-dabke songs of romance and love — singing poetry of a woman’s lips as sweet as Hillah’s dates on “Layle”; an intriguing woman he watches from afar whose kiss would be worth 10 million other kisses on “Shlon”; a lover ready to offer his beloved anything she wishes under the sun on “Shi Tridin” (“What Do You Wish For?”); a man in admiration of a woman with green eyes and blonde hair on “Abou Zlilif” (“Her Face is Like The Moon”); a song about love that will last forever on “Mawwal”, a traditional — all superimposed on complex techno arrangements by Hasan Alo, and based on the hi-speed Kurdish and Arabic dabke and baladi styles with the exception of “Mawwal” being presented in its traditionally slower pace.

Shlon features double keyboard work from Hasan Alo, a fellow native of the Hasaka region in Northeastern Syria who has recently been active in the vibrant nightlife scene of Dubai. Azad Salih, a young Syrian man currently living in Mardin, Turkey, accompanies on saz, with the lyrics and love poetry written on the spot during the album’s recording session by longtime Omar collaborator Moussa Al Mardood - also currently based in Turkey.

Omar Souleyman, who has collaborated with Björk and Four Tet, began his career as a prolific wedding singer, releasing nearly 500 live albums before civil war broke out in his native Syria in 2011. He then moved to Turkey and in 2013 released his Four Tet-produced debut studio album Wenu Wenu via Ribbon/Domino, which NPR called, "...a jam so visceral, thrilling and intense as to make the mysterious matter of earthly borders seem hardly worth the time to contemplate." His 2015 sophomore album Bahdeni Nami (various producers including Four Tet, Gilles Peterson and Modeselektor) garnered widespread critical praise including The Guardian, who proclaimed "It's so fast that the only appropriate way to engage with it is to wriggle your limbs. Melodies are both abrasive and ebullient, chattering endlessly like raucous birdsong," and 2017’s To Syria, With Love via Mad Decent placing Omar firmly in the canon of global electronic music.

Souleyman has bolstered his growing status as a world and electronic music icon establishing an extensive international following after touring widely and performing at major festivals including Glastonbury, Bonnaroo, Pitchfork Paris and Roskilde. Since its founding in 2013, Souleyman has been an advocate for the charity "Our Heart Aches for Syria," which operates in collaboration with Doctors Without Borders. In that same year, he performed at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Norway.

Omar Souleyman has been touring tirelessly since the release of To Syria, With Love, or in fact for as long as he can remember in the last 10 years. He has crossed the planet – now seeming quite small – several times over and looks forward to meeting his fans everywhere to celebrate the release of Shlon.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Vinyl comes with CD version of the album enclosed.

The highly anticipated seventh album by U.S. Girls, the protean musical enterprise of multi-disciplinary artist Meg Remy, will be released on 6 March entitled Heavy Light. While Remy has been widely acclaimed for a panoply of closely observed character studies, on Heavy Light she turns inward, recounting personal narratives to create a deeply introspective about-face. The songs are an inquest into the melancholy flavour of hindsight, both personal and cultural. Remy makes this notion formally explicit with the inclusion of three re-worked, previously released songs: ‘Statehouse (It’s A Man’s World)’, ‘Red Ford Radio’, and ‘Overtime’, the latter of which is released today as Heavy Light’s lead single. Its companion video, which stars Andrea Nann of the Dreamwalker Dance Company, was created by Remy.

Heavy Light follows 2018’s internationally critically-acclaimed breakout album In A Poem Unlimited. Recently named one of the best albums of the decade by Pitchfork, it was lauded across the pond by the likes of The Guardian, The Sunday Times, Crack and Q magazine for being Remy’s most accessible record in her then decade-long career.

Heavy Light is produced by Remy and was recorded live with 20 session musicians - including E Street Band saxophonist Jake Clemons - in Montreal’s acclaimed Hotel 2 Tango studio. Remy worked with co-writers Basia Bulat and Rich Morel to develop the core of Heavy Light, a set of songs conceived as a balance between orchestral percussion (as richly arranged by percussionist Ed Squires) and the human voice (conducted by Kritty Uranowski). The resulting album finds Remy casting herself as lead voice among a harmonious multitude, the singers of which lend not only their voices, but also share reflections on childhood experiences that are collaged into moving spoken word interludes throughout the album. The album is mixed by long-time collaborators Maximilian ‘Twig’ Turnbull, Steve Chahley and Tony Price.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: White and purple splatter vinyl.

Long awaited new album featuring collaborations with 潘PAN & i_o.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Indies exclusive translucent pink vinyl.

Noel says of the single: "It was written in Abbey Road last November on the same day I wrote ‘Black Star Dancing’. It’s that good, it sounds like it took 5.4 people to come up with it. It’s already a live standard and we haven’t even played it yet.”

The upcoming EP features new songs plus a remix of the title track and will be available digitally and on limited edition vinyl formats.

Driving anywhere in Texas can cost you half a day, easy. For example, it’ll take you over four hours just to get from R&B singer Leon Bridges’ hometown of Fort Worth down to Houston, where the psychedelic wanderers in Khruangbin hail from. The state is vast, crisscrossed with rugged expanses of road flanked by limestone cliffs and granite mountains, forests of pine and mesquite, miles of desert or acres of sprawling grassland, all depending on what part you’re in. And it’s all baking under the Texas Sun that lends its name to Bridges and Khruangbin’s new collaborative EP.

“Big sky country, that’s what they call Texas,” Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee says. “The horizon line goes all the way from one side to another without interruption. There’s something really comforting about that.”

On Texas Sun, these two members of the state’s musical vanguard meet up somewhere in the middle of that scene, in the mythical nexus of Texas’ past, present, and future—a dreamy badlands where genres blur as seamlessly as the terrain. It calls equally to the cowboys bootscooting at Billy Bob’s in Fort Worth, the chopped-and-screwed hip-hop fans rattling slabs on the southside of Houston, the art-school kids dropping acid in Austin, the cross-cultural progeny who grew up on listening to both mariachi and post-hardcore out on the Mexican borders of El Paso. All of these things, overlapping in a multicolored melange, purple hues as vivid and unpredictable as one of the state’s rightfully celebrated sunsets.

A journey through homesick reminiscences, backseat romances, and late-night contemplations, the kind of record made for listening with the windows down and the road humming softly beneath you. Like the highways that inspired it, Texas Sun is guaranteed to get you where you’re going—especially if you’re in no particular hurry to get there.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: First pressing on limited translucent orange vinyl.

After a 5 year hiatus that has seen him delve into a range of diverse musical projects, Squarepusher will return with a long awaited album Be Up A Hello, out on the 31st of January. Fans can enjoy a taster as the double-A side 12” Vortrack will be released on the 6th of December, featuring Squarepusher's Fracture Remix which already caused a stir when it was dropped into his brain-melting breakbeat and jungle set for Warp's 30th anniversary NTS takeover in June.

With this new album, Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher) has returned to using a bewildering array of vintage analogue and digital hardware, the same equipment that first helped him develop his sound in the early '90s. Something of a 180 degree turn, these synths, effects units and even a Commodore Vic20 are in complete contrast to the tools he used to create 2015’s Damogen Furies - cutting edge software that Tom developed over the course of 15 years. The result is Be Up A Hello, an album that is celebratory with rinsing breakbeat tracks such as Nervelevers and Terminal Slam - classic floor fillers - as well pieces loaded with visceral atmosphere and melody in Squarepusher’s inimitable style. Darker moments such as Vortrack and Mekrev Bass illustrate Tom's continuing fascination with finely balanced psychological overload. As such, Be Up A Hello gives a nod to the mayhem, joyousness and abandon of the DIY Essex rave scene that was a strong determinant in Tom's work. 

Squirrel Flower - the moniker of Ella O’Connor Williams - announces I Was Born Swimming, her debut album, out January 31st on Full Time Hobby. The album’s title was inspired by Williams’ birth on August 11th 1996 - the hottest day of the year - born still inside a translucent caul sac membrane, surrounded by amniotic fluid. Throughout the 12 songs, landscapes change and relationships shift. The album’s lyrics feel like effortless expressions of exactly the way it feels to change - abstract, determined and hopeful.

Squirrel Flower’s music is ethereal and warm, brimming over with emotional depth but with a steely eyed bite and confidence in it's destination. The band on I Was Born Swimming plays with delicate intention, keeping the arrangements natural and light while Williams' lead guitar is often fiercely untethered. The album was tracked live, with few overdubs, at The Rare Book Room Studio in New York City with producer Gabe Wax (Adrienne Lenker, Palehound, Cass McCombs). The musicians were selected by Wax and folded themselves into the songs effortlessly. At the heart of the album lives Williams’ haunting voice and melancholic, soulful guitar.

The sounds expand and contract over diverse moods, cutting loose on the heavier riffs of 'Red Shoulder'. "'Red Shoulder’ is a song about destabilisation and dissociation,” explains Williams. “Something soft and tender becomes warped and sinister, turning into sensory overload and confusion. How can something so lovely turn painful and claustrophobic? The song ends with a heavy and visceral guitar solo, attempting to reground what went awry."

Williams comes from a deep-rooted musical family tree. Her grandparents were classical musicians who lived in the Gate Hill Co-op, an artistic cooperative from upstate New York that grew out of Black Mountain College. Ella’s father, Jesse Williams, spent most of his life as a touring jazz and blues performer and educator, and lends his bass playing to the album. Growing up in a family of hard working musicians fostered a love of music and started Williams down her own musical path. As a child, Williams adopted the alter ego of Squirrel Flower. A couple years later, she began singing with the Boston Children’s Chorus while studying music theory and teaching herself to play the guitar. As a teen, she discovered the Boston DIY and folk music scenes and began writing, recording, and performing her own songs, now returning to Squirrel Flower as her stage name.

Sheer determination and belief quickly saw her make a name for herself in this newly discovered scene. Doing everything from making videos and artwork to the production of her music herself she recorded two EP's and began touring, appearing on bills with the likes of Moses Sumney, Lucy Dacus, Frankie Cosmos, Jay Som, Julien Baker, Soccer Mommy and Big Thief. During this time the signature artful songcraft heard on I Was Born Swimming was formed.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Dinked Edition LP Info: Exclusive transparent blue vinyl.
Exclusive bonus 7” with two tracks (A: Take It Or Leave It / B: Hold On (Tom Waits cover).
Exclusive signed postcard.
Hand numbered sleeve.
Download code.

Ltd LP Info: Standard edition on recycled vinyl.

Ltd LP includes MP3 Download Code.

Failed Fashionistas, Instagram voyeurs, jilted Romeos, reeking insecurity, the willingly self deluded, the comically unware, the Night Chancers… “Baxter Loves You” The album was co - produced by long time collaborator Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, John Grant, Artic Monkeys) and Baxter, and was recorded at Hoxa studios West Hampstead in May 2019.

From thrilling affairs that dissolve into sweaty desperation (Night Chancers) to the absurd bloggers, fruitlessly clinging to the fag ends of the fashion set (Sleep People), via soiled real life (Slum Lord) social media – enabled stalkers (I’m not Your Dog) and new day, sleep – deprived optimism (Daylight), the record’s finely drawn vignettes, are all based on the corners of world Dury has visited.

Baxter says “Night Chancers is about being caught out in your attempt at being free”, it’s about someone leaving a hotel room at three in the morning. You’re in a posh room with big Roman taps and all that, but after they go suddenly all you can hear is the taps dripping, and all you can see the debris of the night is around you. Then suddenly a massive party erupts, in the room next door. This happened to me and all I  Could hear was the night chancer, the hotel ravers”.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Crystal clear vinyl.

For almost a decade, Agnes Obel has been one of the most independent and originalartists in contemporary music. Now she has returned with new music, releasing the enchanting single “IslandOf Doom”, ahead of the release of her highly anticipated new album Myopia–through Deutsche Grammophon, Universal Music Group’s prestigious Yellow Label, and Blue Note in North America.

Following the same principles as with her previous albums (Philharmonics, Aventine and CitizenOfGlass), which she completed as a one-woman project in her own Berlin home studio, Obel has been under self-imposed creative isolation with the removal of all outside influences and distraction in the writing, recording and mixing process.“The albums I’ve worked on have all required that I build a bubble of some kind in which everything becomes about the album.”

“For me the production is intertwined with the lyrics and story behind the songs,” says Obel.This is precisely what makes her music so compelling and the same is true withMyopia. “Paradoxically, for me I need to create my own myopia to make music.”Obel was experimenting with techniques of recording processing, warping and pitching down vocals, strings, piano, celesta and lutheal piano, finding ways to melt these elements together to become one and twisting them in a way that you feel at homewithin the soundshe conjures throughout the record.

Although Obel’s music can often curate a monologue of modern-day dystopian-esque news stories that we are all now subject to, the contents of “Island Of Doom”are much more personal, as she explains: “The song is made up of pitched-down piano and cello pizzicato and vocals, all choirs are pitched down and up… In my experience when someone close to you dies it is simply impossible to comprehend that you can’t ever talk to them or reach them somehow ever again. They are in many ways still alive because in your consciousness nothing has changed, they’re still there with everyone else you know.

“For me Myopia is an album about trust and doubt. Can you trust yourself or not? Can you trust your own judgments? Can you trust that you will do the right thing? Can you trust your instincts and what you are feeling? Or are your feelings skewed?” –Obel

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Blue vinyl.

When Poliça’s Channy Leaneagh fell off her roof while clearing ice in early 2018, she smashed her L1 vertebrae and battered her spine, leaving her in a brace with limited mobility for months. Yet Poliça’s fourth album, When We Stay Alive, is not about one debilitating accident. It’s about the redemptive power of rewriting your story in order to heal, and reclaiming your identity as a result.

When We Stay Alive possesses a new confidence in its sound, reflected in its fierce, determined songs and anchored by the heavy synths and punctuating beats of Poliça co-founder and producer Ryan Olson. Over the last several years Olson and Leaneagh have widely collaborated with musicians from all over the world: both with Bon Iver, and Leaneagh individually with Boys Noize, Lane 8, Sasha, Leftfield, and Daniel Wohl; Olson with Swamp Dogg in addition to countless musicians from the Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon’s 37d03d collective. As a result, When We Stay Alive features one of the largest musical casts of any Poliça record to date. To create the album, Olson brought his favorite collaborators into his studio for all-night sessions. He’d then send Leaneagh the files to write lyrics to while recovering at home, which she’d record alone or with engineer Alex Proctor. Drummers Drew Christopherson and Ben Ivascu colored the songs with a new approach – drastically changing the rhythmic dynamic from previous efforts by creating an indistinguishable hybrid of live and electronic instrumentation--and bassist Chris Bierden provided a melody-laden low-end as well as more layered backing vocals than ever before.

On Poliça’s first three albums, Leaneagh focused on restructuring the world and her relationships within it. On When We Stay Alive, she realizes the power in restructuring her inner self. The album’s title references the idea of moving forward through life – our experiences, both good and bad – and what happens next with the strength we find. “I had been living unconsciously in past trauma,” Leaneagh says. “I don’t want to deny something happened – this is not about repression – it’s about taking the power back from the past, holding the power in the present, and creating a new story for myself.”

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Crystal clear vinyl with gatefold, spotgloss sleeve.

Drive-By Truckers’ 12th studio album and first new LP in more than three years – the longest gap between new DBT albums – The Unraveling was recorded at the legendary Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis, TN by Grammy® Award-winning engineer Matt Ross-Spang (Jason Isbell, Margo Price) and longtime DBT producer David Barbe. Co-founding singer/songwriter/guitarists Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood both spent much of the time prior doing battle with deep pools of writer’s block. “How do you put these day to day things we’re all living through into the form of a song that we (much less anybody else) would ever want to listen to?” says Hood. “How do you write about the daily absurdities when you can’t even wrap your head around them in the first place? I think our response was to focus at the core emotional level. More heart and less cerebral perhaps.”

The songs that eventually emerged are among Drive-By Truckers’ most direct and pointedly provocative, tackling the myriad horrors of our new normal through sincere emotion and unbridled heart. Indeed, “Armageddon’s Back in Town” takes a whirlwind joyride through the whiplash of events we collectively deal with each day while the concluding “Awaiting Resurrection” dives headfirst into the despair and pain roiled up by these troubled times.

“The past three-and-a-half years were among the most tumultuous our country has ever seen,” says Hood, “and the duality between the generally positive state of affairs within our band while watching so many things we care about being decimated and destroyed all around us informed the writing of this album to the core.

“While a quick glance might imply that we’re picking up where 2016’s American Band album left off, the differences are as telling as the similarities. If the last one was a warning shot hinting at a coming storm, this one was written in the wreckage and aftermath. I’ve always said that all of our records are political but I’ve also said that ‘politics is personal’. With that in mind, this album is especially personal.”

The remarkable songcraft found on The Unraveling receives much of its musical muscle from the sheer strength of the current Drive-By Truckers line-up, with Hood and Cooley joined by bassist Matt Patton, keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez, and drummer Brad Morgan – together, the longest-lasting iteration in the band’s almost 25-year history. The LP also features a number of special guests, including The Shins’ Patti King, violinist/string arranger Kyleen King (Brandi Carlile), and North Mississippi All-Stars’ Cody Dickinson, who contributes electric washboard to the strikingly direct “Babies In Cages.”

A person whose words are so potent that they cause the people and beings around them to vibrate is said to have a “silver tongue.” It’s apt, then, that Mackenzie Scott—who has spent the 2010s making boundary pushing pop music under her TORRES moniker—has chosen to call her fourth album, and first release on Merge, just that. Recorded at O’Deer in Brooklyn, New York, Silver Tongue is a full-scale realization of the world Scott has created over TORRES’ last few albums. Even when singing in more subdued tones, Scott’s voice is fervent, her lyrics stirring and unyielding as she draws from both the divine and the everyday. It’s also the first TORRES record produced solely by Scott. After having shared production duties on her first three albums, the latter two alongside PJ Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis, she found the process liberating: “I made exactly the record I want, and it feels very ‘me.’”

Silver Tongue fastidiously chronicles the impulses that make up desire from the dreamy first blushes of infatuation through the slightly terrifying wonder that accompanies connection with another. In between, Scott wrestles with the highs and lows of what “being in love” might mean over heady guitars and swirling synths. While potent vocal hooks punctuate songs like the sparkling “Dressing America,” which combines New Wave glitter with hovering frustration, and the brooding “Good Grief,” which gently pokes at the idea of fetishized sadness, the knottiness lurking underneath reflects Scott’s realtime processing of her emotions while making the record. Silver Tongue’s musical world is vast and at times seemingly infinite. Edge-of-the-world synths add gravity to the vulnerability of “Two of Everything,” and refracted guitars offer a gnarled counterpoint to Scott’s increased determination at the end of “Last Forest.” On “Gracious Day,” one of TORRES’ most forthright love songs, Scott’s voice hovers over a starlit landscape in a way that transcends the mundane and enters the otherworldly as she sings. TORRES’ music has long navigated the space between the physical and the metaphysical, and Silver Tongue faces that conflict head-on, examining the ways in which the actions of others can stir up deep-seated feelings and seemingly alter the space in which one exists.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Colored vinyl LP is half green & half silver vinyl, this is for Indies only.
Initial copies also come with a bonus 2 track 7", "Too Big For The Glory Hole", "Good Scare (demo)".

Coloured LP includes MP3 Download Code.

LP includes MP3 Download Code.

Blossoms have today revealed the details of their new album, Foolish Loving Spaces. Set for release on January 31, 2020, Foolish Loving Spaces is the follow up to the band’s 2018, top 5 album Cool Like You and features recent single Your Girlfriend, released earlier this year.

Foolish Loving Spaces was produced by the band’s consistent and talented team of James Skelly and Rich Turvey at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool. Tom Ogden’s increasingly direct lyrical range turns album three into a romantic page-turner of light and shade, while its divergent moods are supplied by Myles Kellock’s piano and keyboard lines, careering from urgent stabs of TV game show-theme synth to more classic, rolling notes. The record’s multi-instrumental colour and widescreen sound is provided by pedal steel / lead guitarist Josh Dewhurst, while Joe Donovan on drums and Charlie Salt on bass bring fluidly danceable grooves throughout, complemented on occasion, by a wall of gospel harmony.

Speaking about the inspiration for the album, the band explain:
'It’s just a pure celebration of love in all of its splendid and baffling guises, toying with the so-called sins of lust and forbidden infatuation … inspired, in ways, by a summer spent listening to Stop Making Sense, The Joshua Tree & Screamadelica’.

FORMAT INFORMATION

2xDeluxe CD Info: 2CD Deluxe (includes Acoustic version of the album).

Bold, weird, wild, wired, sonically luxurious yet never losing touch with its DIY-‘til-I-die roots, Thumb World is a voyage to the outer rings of Pictish Trail’s mind at its darkest, funniest and most inventive – a plugged-in, fuzzed-out, fucked-up contemplation on, as he puts it, “life repeating and gradually degrading, the inevitable cyclical nature of things, and the sense of their ultimately being no escape.”

Expect alien abductions, thumping beats, Trump-haired pigs, paternal panic, astronaut sex, bad acid trips, worse hangovers, lashings of distortion and a lot of anthropomorphic thumbs. “Our opposable thumbs are the things that separate us from most other animals on Earth,” Pictish explains, of the fat digit symbolism, “they are also the things that we use to swipe on screens, to separate ourselves from our normal lives, but which in turn trap us within an artificial reality.”

Produced and mixed by Rob Jones, featuring string arrangements from Kim Moore and drumming from Alex Thomas (Squarepusher, Anna Calvi, Air), Thumb World is Pictish Trail’s most collaborative album to date.

An audio-visual dialogue with Swatpaz, AKA Scottish artist Davey Ferguson – the man behind the Turbo Fantasy series and an entire episode of cult TV phenomenon Adventure Time – furnished Johnny with not just a graphic aesthetic for the album, but even helped him to shape the sound of the finished record. “I sent Davey a work-in-progress mix of the album,” Johnny says, “he came back with sketches in which he had reimagined Thumb World as an 80’s arcade game. Some of the songs are centered around specific visual images, inspired by Davey’s sketches.”

Due for release on Fire Records on February 21, 2020. Four years in the making, Thumb World is the much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Scottish Album of the Year Award public vote winner Future Echoes.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Deluxe LP Arcade Edition is on PINK vinyl, Spot Gloss Gatefold sleeve + Sticker Sheet.

Coloured LP includes MP3 Download Code.

THE LATEST IN THE HUGELY SUCCESSFUL ‘C’ SERIES, RIFFING ON THE ORIGINAL C86 CASSETTE.

FOLLOWS PREVIOUS BEST-SELLING COLLECTIONS C86 (2014), C87 (2016), C88 (2017) AND C89 (2018)

SIXTY-THREE TRACKS CHARTING THE RISE TO DOMINANCE OF THE INDEPENDENT MUSIC SCENE, AS ONCE SHOESTRING ARTISTS AND LABELS BEGAN TO FIND AN AUDIENCE BORDERING ON THE MAINSTREAM.

INCLUDES MORE HOUSEHOLD NAMES THAN EVER – THE CHARLATANS, THE LA’S, OCEAN COLOUR SCENE, BOO RADLEYS, SPIRITUALIZED ETC – ALONGSIDE SCENE FRONTRUNNERS LIKE PARIS ANGELS, WORLD OF TWIST, NORTHSIDE, THE SUNDAYS, FLOWERED UP, NED’S ATOMIC DUSTBIN AND THE SARAH RECORDS ROSTER.

ALSO DIGS DEEP INTO THE LESSER-KNOWN 1990 UNDERGROUND, REVEALING COUNTLESS HIDDEN GEMS AND EXCITING REDISCOVERIES.

PRODUCED BY THE TEAM THAT BROUGHT YOU ‘SCARED TO GET HAPPY’, ‘STILL IN A DREAM’, ‘ANOTHER SPLASH OF COLOUR’, ‘LOSING TOUCH WITH MY MIND’, ‘ELECTRICAL LANGUAGE’ AND COUNTLESS OTHER HIT COMPILATIONS AND BOX SETS.

Over a decade now since punk rocked the British musical scene to its foundations and caused an eruption of independently produced records, the scene and a new generation of figurehead artists began to let ambition in and head overground, playing to increasingly large crowds, working with bigger budgets and selling more copies, finding a footing in the UK’s Top Forty, venturing into the USA and, ultimately, creating a mainstream audience now primed for credible, guitar-tinged pop. Meanwhile, an underground revolution in clubland began to push towards the commercial same space, resulting in an inevitable fusion of songcraft and dancefloor aesthetics.

“C90” captures perfectly the moment these tribes began to coalesce. From the opening, club-friendly rendition of The Charlatans’ ‘Polar Bear’ to The La’s knowingly backward looking ‘Timeless Melody’ and all in-between, this is the sound of a scene dropping the raincoats, dropping acid and aiming for domination. 1990 was the start of a new decade when the Indie scene was dominated by Madchester and the arrival of Shoegaze and with nods towards grunge and what would become known as Britpop, plus hints of a proto-laddism peering out from between the cracks in a post-Smiths aesthetic, the sound of 1990, it could be argued, set the tone for the remainder of the decade.

“C90” is a snapshot of a unique moment in time. A piece of history. The sound of a country putting the hard-biting 1980s behind it, embracing the Daisy Age and looking to move forwards.

Maria McKee has been out of the proverbial spotlight for some time, her creative talents re-engaging with her first love of acting, performance and the musical tapestries that accompany such activities.

Candid and passionate, she’s, quite simply, had a beatific awakening and in a crescendo of prose, her new album ‘La Vita Nuova’ unlocks her story, sketching out her journey that started many moons ago when she sang in her bedroom with her older brother, the late, great musical innovator Bryan MacLean. Along the way she retooled punk and country in Lone Justice, released a string of evocative and eclectic solo records, wrote chart topping hits and touched millions of people before seemingly disappearing…

Some of the new album sounds like modern show tunes for musical extravaganzas that are still to be penned.

‘Little Beast’ is almost Disney-esque and ‘I Should Have Looked Away’ has a real stagey feel to it. Title track ‘La Vita Nouva’ and ‘Let Me Forget’ are all beautifully written stories of relationships in various states of evolution or disrepair. And, ‘However Worn’ is like a slice of American gothic.

A homage to new life, the completion of ‘La Vita Nuova’ saw Maria’s life entirely change and illustrates an important period in the artist’s life.

“It’s a really personal record; all I can do is tell my story. People can find their own meaning in it, taking them deeper, perhaps, into something they need to experience, I think that’s what music and art does.”

FORMAT INFORMATION

2xColoured LP Info: Indie stores exclusive. Ltd edition Double White Vinyl in Gatefold sleeve.

Deluxe CD Info: CD is Ltd Edition Bookback CD.

Harvieu’s defiance against the odds and her willingness to lay herself open to make what she believed was within her is baked into every groove of the record, across every stylistic turn: the giddy pop of ‘Strange Thing’, the gothic swoon of ‘Cruel Disguise’, the smokey seductiveness of ‘Yes Please’ through to the stirring torchsong finale ‘My Body She Is Alive’.

Harvieu has come a long way from the 17-year-old who was signed to Island Records and who had no intention of becoming a singer-songwriter. Even when she made her debut album “Through The Night”, her confidence was low. “I did help write a few of the songs on that record, which I’m still very fond of, but I felt more of a mouthpiece for someone else’s talent, which eats away at you especially because I had so much to say lyrically I just hadn’t learnt how to as yet.”

Her injury - a broken spine following “a freak accident” between recording and releasing her debut album - undermined Harvieu even further. Likewise, Island parted ways with her six months after it’s release, despite a Top 5 chart entry, making the BBC’s Sound Of 2012, a 5-star live review from The Guardian and TV exposure. What followed was what Harvieu describes as “some very dark years” which she addresses in songs like ‘Spirit Me Away’ and the 50’s ballad-evoking ‘You Don’t Know Me.’ A split with her long term partner, her manager and then her beloved Salford. “In one fell swoop everything was gone. I knew I had to get away, start again, rebuild myself.”

It wasn’t until 2015 to be exact, when she met Romeo Stodart, the Magic Numbers frontman and songwriter who had emailed after seeing her perform on Later… With Jools Holland, to ask if she’d consider writing together. “When we started, the energy was immediately different to anyone I’d worked with before, there was this insane instant musical connection” she says. “I loved that Romeo really embraced who I was and encouraged it, I was starting to realise that I didn’t have to be anything other than myself.”

The pair spent the next two years co-writing: “I wasn’t in a massive hurry, because at last I was having fun” Harvieu says. ‘We’d stay up all night drinking, dancing and playing music, I felt like I was re-discovering a girl who had been hidden, quietened. I’d tell Romeo, I don’t just want to paint pretty pictures I want to revel in the drama of my life, the good and the bad, before I was afraid to say something in my lyrics, but no longer. I felt free.”

The album was co-produced by Romeo Stodart and Dave Izumi Lynch, owner of Echo Zoo studio in Eastbourne where recording took place. “It was a truly magical experience working with Dave & Romeo, they are two absolute nurturing musical wizards.” says Harvieu.

Harvieu’s lyrical confidence is evident throughout the album and has you leaning in to absorb line after line. Her voice, soaring and caressing in equal measure, is matched in force by her flirtatious personality. From the album’s opening lyric “Let me put my paws on you, strange thing’through to the feminine bite of ‘Curves And Swerves’ “I’ve got some curves and some swerves, what you gonna do about it?” which crackles with sexual tension and an aching vulnerability.

Among Harvieu’s new songs are messages of hope to her younger, anxious self. To the teenage goth Ren in ‘Little Raven’, she says: “I want you to know, that I’m starting to feel, but its gonna take time, but I’m ready to heal”. ‘Tomorrow Girl Today’ is to the Ren “who would make bad decisions… we can all be very self-destructive, but will we make it this time?”

So what now, Ren Harvieu? “I’ve created a second chance for myself“ she says. “And I will keep creating second chances for myself, because this is my life and I’m not afraid to revel in it anymore.” Revel In the Drama of Ren Harvieu - finally we all can too.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: indies-only clear vinyl

London based five-piece HMLTD release their long-awaited debut album, West of Eden. The expansive, labyrinthine debut has been several years in the making, a daring collection of songs created to incite conversation about proposed new visions of masculinity, the decadence of western capitalism and the violence of insecurity and repression. Across its 15 tracks, the band’s artistic vision is realised in full technicolour, with all shades of their sonic palette used to create an album that is equal parts lush and abrasive.

FORMAT INFORMATION

Coloured LP Info: Limited-edition indies only format. Red vinyl with a gatefold die-cut sleeve and bonus flexi disc.

London-based folk-psych-country band The Hanging Stars return with their eclectic third studio album, A New Kind Of Sky, due out on 21 February 2020. Carrying on their exploration of transatlantic psychedelic folk and cosmic country, the new album blends twelve-string, harmony-laden lullabies with soft rock anthems to create a guilded box of bucolic folk-rock. As well as the band’s signature wistful pastoral escapism, there are lyrical concerns about the recent past; the systematic division of people, values, facts and humanity in The West in general - and the UK in particular. The band weave the same thread they have always woven but this time with a more unified vision, creating a kaleidoscopic poncho for these times.

The Hanging Stars comprise songwriter, singer and guitarist Richard Olson, Sam Ferman on bass, Paulie Cobra on drums, Patrick Ralla on guitars, keys and vocals, and renowned pedal steel player Joe HarveyWhyte. Returning guest Collin Hegna from Brian Jonestown Massacre plays an instrument called a Marxophone on “Choir of Criers”. They also welcome Sean Read of The Rockingbirds and Dexy's Midnight Runners, who adds horns to “Three Rolling Hills” and “I Was A Stone”. The main bulk of the recording for the new album was done live in the studio at Echozoo in Eastbourne with Dave Lynch. For the first time, the band decided to dive straight in to the recording studio following their German tour in 2018.

Having lived in each other’s pockets and playing their new songs every night, the band were as tight and primed as they could possibly be. There ensued a few, very long, days of recording, capturing the essence of the band in their element. The songwriting process was even more collaborative for this album, with the usual co-writes between Richard Olson, Sam Ferman and Patrick Ralla enhanced by Joe Harvey-White’s arrangements and Paulie Cobra’s harmonies. The biggest difference is that Sam Ferman sings lead on the first single “‘(I’ve Seen) The Summer in Her Eyes”, a song about lost love and self doubt channeled through two and a half minutes of garage pastoralism. The album’s title track “A New Kind of Sky” tells a story from the point of view of somebody who idealises a past that never existed. The band go glam-rock on the stand-out track “I Will Please You”, a tale of a cult leader/world leader and his irresistible (for some) charm from the point-of-view of his most recent victim and “Heavy Blue” is a country music tale of drunken debauchery seen through the eyes of an inexperienced young man.


The triumphant trumpet-driven song “These Rolling Hills” is a minor-key tale of a journey into the hills of Marin County, California undertaken by Paulie and Richard to visit friends Asteroid No. 4, with a most interesting outcome. The Hanging Stars released their debut album Over the Silvery Lake in 2016, which received plaudits from broadsheets such as The Times, who described it as; "An album with enough of a hazy, sun-dappled charm to make the capital's dreariest weather bearable”, as well as The Guardian, who said; “Mersey-laced harmonies and just a whiff of the Gun Club.” They picked up a good amount of support at 6 Music and “The House on the Hill” scored a much-coveted 10/10 by John Robb on Steve Lamacq’s Roundtable.