"Osees don’t seem to mutate or morph so much as remain extraordinarily open to what moves them to do next and capable of getting music done that’s consistently good. What motivated the band to turn loose this hyperconcentrated slightly less than 22 minute burst of meteor density somewhat punkazoidal music? When it comes to the Osees, that’s at best a mediocre inquiry as they just do the next thing, genre, prevailing tastes or whatever influence might guide a lesser unit are not even a consideration. A Foul Form is a cool pivot from their 2020 studio efforts Metamorphosed, Panther Rotate and Protean Threat. A Foul Form vigorously shakes the Oseesetch a sketch clear so whatever comes next (which will probably be sooner than later) will likely be something completely different yet again. As far as a potential inspirational indicator, you might notice the final track on A Foul Form is a cover of Rudimentary Peni’s Sacrifice, which can be found on their Farce 7” released in 1982. A fitting way to blow out this rad slice." HENRY ROLLIINS.

Brain stem cracking scum-punk
recorded tersely in the basement of my home.
After a notoriously frustrating eon the knee-jerk song path was aggressive and hooky.
This is an homage to the punk bands we grew up on.
The weirdos and art freaks that piqued our interests and pointed us on the trail head to here/now.
Bad times make for strong music is something I agree with.
I would say that is evident by the past few years of output from the underground.
Transmissions have been all over the map.
scanning…
searching…
sweeping out in the darkness looking for a foot hold.
A Foul From represents some of our most savage & primal instincts.
Fight or flight.
And the importance of a sense of humor in the darkest hour.
Nothing wrong with keeping it snappy in the meantime.
For fans of Rudimentary Peni, Crass, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Screamers, Abwarts, Stooges and all things aggressively tilted towards your face.
You can lean back but don’t flinch…it’s a brief foray into the exhausting pogo pit so stiffen your back and jerk with your knees.

Enjoy - JPD.

TRACK LISTING

1. Funeral Solution
2. Frock Block
3. Too Late For Suicide
4. A Foul Form
5. A Burden Snared
6. Scum Show
7. Fucking Kill Me
8. Perm Act
9. Social Butt
10. Sacrific

Songs created in the shadow of terror and loss, but that crackle and pop with defiance Fear Fear is a record made for agitating and dancing, for heart and soul, for here, now and tomorrow. It’s a record that explores juxtaposition; that of life and death, acceptance and isolation, environment and humanity, hope and despair, the real world and the digital world. That top to bottom rigour, the complete vision is what makes the second album from Working Men’s Club such a stunning and unique achievement.

Their critically acclaimed self-titled debut album, released in summer 2020, was the sound of singer and songwriter Syd Minsky-Sargeant processing a teenage life in Todmorden in the Upper Calder Valley. He was 16 when he wrote some of those songs, now 20, he had to get up and out of the Valley. “The first album was mostly a personal documentation lyrically, this is a blur between personal and a third-person perspective of what was going on.” Fear Fear documents the last two years. Yes, there is bleakness – but there is also hope and empathy. “I like the contrast of it being happy, uplifting music and really dark lyrics. It’s not a minimal record, certainly compared to the first one. That’s because there’s been a lot more going on that needed to be said.”

Making the busy feel finessed and the dreadful feel magical – Fear Fear manages those feats, and then some. Or, as Syd Minksy-Sargeant puts it: “We just set out to make the best-sounding album we could.”

Fear Fear was produced by Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys, MIA, Tricky) and recorded at Orton’s studio in Sheffield.

TRACK LISTING

1 19
2 Fear Fear
3 Widow
4 Ploys
5 Cut
6 Rapture
7 Circumference
8 Heart Attack
9 Money Is Mine
10 The Last One

Debut album from The Smile – comprising Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, with Tom Skinner from Sons of Kemet.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
The Same
The Opposite
You Will Never Work In Television Again

Side B
Pana-vision
The Smoke
Speech Bubbles

Side C
Thin Thing
Open The Floodgates
Free In The Knowledge

Side D
A Hairdryer
Waving A White Flag
We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings
Skrting On The Surface

Cheat Codes is Danger Mouse’s first hip-hop album in seventeen years - since his 2005 DangerDOOM collaboration with the late, great MF DOOM - and Black Thought’s only full length collaboration beyond his pioneering music in The Roots.

No Gold Teeth is the debut single from the dream team duo of Danger Mouse & Black Thought, and the first single from Cheat Codes.

On No Gold Teeth, Danger Mouse’s soulful, freewheeling production serves as the perfect backdrop to Black Thought’s metronomic, pin-sharp and chorus-free lyrical deluge. The result is a dizzying, thrilling opening single from two of contemporary music’s most respected artists.

Finally putting an end to years of swirling rumors and speculation, the collaboration is now officially announced: Danger Mouse & Black Thought bring us their debut album Cheat Codes.

The natural chemistry between Brian (Danger Mouse) and Tariq (Black Thought) comes through in the ease with which the artist and listener move through this album. Moreover, it’s an album untethered to any genre, era or trend — uncategorizeable and timeless. It is the sound of the pair observing their own culture and asking questions they still may not have the answers to.

Brian Burton (AKA one half of Gnarls Barkley, Broken Bells, and Karen O & Danger Mouse — and universally regarded as the most versatile producer in modern music) has found a formidable new partner in the incomparably prolific rapper Tariq Trotter - rapper, MC & co-founder of The Roots, film and theater actor, producer, writer or, as Hypebeast sums up: "one of the best lyricists in hip-hop history." 

TRACK LISTING

Side 1
1. Sometimes
2. Cheat Codes (Explicit)
3. The Darkest Part (feat. Raekwon And Kid Sister)
4. No Gold Teeth (Explicit)
5. Because (feat. Joey Bada$$, Russ, And Dylan Cartlidge) (Explicit)
6. Belize (feat. MF DOOM) (Explicit)
Side 2
1. Aquamarine (feat. Michael Kiwanuka)
2. Identical Deaths
3. Strangers (feat. A$AP Rocky And Run The Jewels) (Explicit)
4. Close To Famous Explicit
5. Saltwater (feat. Conway The Machine) (Explicit)
6. Violas And Lupitas (Explicit)

Album #6 from the mysterious Sault!

TRACK LISTING

1 - Reality
2 - Air
3 - Heart
4 - Solar
5 - Time Is Precious
6 - June 55
7 - Luos Higher

Hellfire builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet.

TRACK LISTING

Hellfire
Sugar/Tzu
Eat Men Eat
Welcome To Hell
Still
The Race Is About To Begin
Dangerous Liaisons
The Defence
27 Questions

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash.

Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away.

The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents— are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was in the studio, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she.

If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

TRACK LISTING

1. All The Good Times
2. Big Time
3. Dream Thing
4. Ghost On
5. All The Flowers
6. Right Now
7. This Is How It Works
8. Go Home
9. Through The Fires
10. Chasing The Sun

Returning for the third time to the studio of Speedy Wunderground’s Dan Carey, Hebden Bridge’s The Lounge Society are back; this time, with the mindset of crafting a debut album conceived out of desire, raised by collaborative muscle-memory, and kept beating, by the sacred-heart of emotional-spirit.

Recorded over two weeks in November 2021, ‘Tired of Liberty’ is a stunningly ubiquitous snapshot of instrumental meltdown, and timeless adolescence. Keen to uphold the manipulated elasticity of a recorded event, the majority of the eleven tracks that make up the record (with the exception of ‘Generation Game’, which saw its beginnings as part of the Speedy Wunderground 7” series, and was subsequently re-recorded), were written either just before, or throughout the duration of those fortnight sessions.

A rarity for most bands, The Lounge Society functions best as a collective entity. With no core-leader, everything from the sources of inspiration, to the lyrics themselves, is handled collaboratively, and with equal merit; as they strive to create a self-sufficient creative unit, larger than the individual. Far from a documentation of disenfranchised youth, ‘Tired of Liberty’ seeks to overthrow with striking articulation. Stirringly fearless, it masterfully combines archetypal storytelling, with as many disparate principles as introspectively possible; capturing the aural shifts in time and attitudes between ‘Generation Game’, and where we join The Lounge Society now.

Brimming with anthemic-myriad, this is the real deal. Genuine urgency from a group of young creatives living and breathing their inaugurated prime, with breath-taking, anarchic-proficiency. Whether it’s “lies drenched in sarcasm” (‘Blood Money’), or, the clattering, riff-screaming irony of ‘Remains’, The Lounge Society’s deep-rooted inversion towards our “culture of anti-freedom”- the ludicrous excuses man makes for the ceasing of mankind, is one which is both culturally-associative, and, counter-culturally embracing.

Periodically awakening the living rebel running skin deep in us all, ‘No Driver’ is a heart-wrenching masterpiece. With every guitar-laden growl, it intricately sheds and unveils each layer of humanity until all that remains is skeletal distress, and intervening frequencies of invigorating-abandon. “The sun is sleeping, all of the time” yet The Lounge Society are awake and desirous; insatiably hellbent on tearing down failing social-structures, before the new-dawn seeks to counterattack.

Be it the self-prophesying hum of the studios ‘Lounge’ recording-light, or, the re-configuration of the entire room so the mics moved away from the instruments with each song, (“we wanted to start with a hard focus and end chaotically”- notes Carey), every possible attention to detail was considered in order to honour the core ethos of fulfilled direction. Fervently striving to build an environment that grows bigger with sound and time, in ‘Tired of Liberty’ the creative process itself holds as much experimental value, as the conceptual journey as a whole.

Whether its personal growth, banded maturity, or a hearty combination of the two, ‘Tired of Liberty’ is an expertly captured documentation of four young-adults, at the baptism of their cultural-ignition. After all, you only get one opportunity at a debut record. “Anything that follows, is just an evolution from that.”- The Lounge Society.

TRACK LISTING

1 People Are Scary
2 Blood Money
3 No Driver
4 Beneath The Screen
5 North Is Your Heart
6 Last Breath
7 Remains
8 Boredom Is A Drug
9 It's Just A Ride
10 Upheaval
11 Generation Game

28th April 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of David Bowie’s STARMAN, the first single from THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS. To celebrate, Parlophone Records is proud to announce release details to mark the album’s Golden Jubilee.

On 17th June 2022, 50 years and one day after the original U.K. release date, THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS will be issued as a limited edition 50th anniversary picture disc, featuring a half-speed master and a replica promotional poster for the album.

THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS is the breakthrough album that catapulted David Bowie into the international spotlight. Over the past 50 years it has remained a touchstone record, growing in stature with each passing year. It is now ingrained in popular culture, its undeniable influence spanning musicians from Arcade Fire to Lady Gaga, to Harry Styles’s androgynous fashion sense to Noel Fielding’s shirts on The Great British Bake-Off to Ziggy make-up challenges on Tik-Tok.

David Bowie laid to rest the Ziggy Stardust persona in July 1973 at his infamous last show with the Spiders From Mars at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, but Ziggy’s impact reverberates to this day.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE ONE
Five Years – 4:42
Soul Love – 3:34
Moonage Daydream – 4:40
Starman – 4:10 It Ain’t Easy – 2:58
SIDE TWO
Lady Stardust – 3:22
Star – 2:47
Hang On To Yourself – 2:40
Ziggy Stardust – 3:13
Suffragette City – 3:25
Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide - 2.58

‘While in lockdown I wrote a number of psalms, or small, sacred songs—one a day for a week.

The seven psalms are presented as one long meditation—on faith, rage, love, grief, mercy, sex and praise. A veiled, contemplative offering borne of an uncertain time. I hope you like it.’

Nick Cave.

Rheinzand are back with their electrifying new album 'Atlantis Atlantis'. Upon turning on 'Atlantis Atlantis', the oh so welcome spectre of recently departed Maria Mendola - the airy chanteuse of the beloved Bacchara - seems to appear. Charlotte Caluwaerts, a voice of similar purity proffers the message: “We’ll be alright” on their first single, offering a salve to the troubles the world has faced in recent years.

As with their previous work, melody is key. Rich arrangements abound, with Reinhard Vanbergen’s light and funky crevices detailing a home that feels cozy, inviting the listener into the best, most unexpected club around; the one in their living room with all their closest friends. The “Max Berlin” of the group, Mo Disko, is no stranger to bringing this kind of intimacy to his events and freewheeling DJ sets for decades in Gent, Belgium. Once again his spirit pushes the record into that inviting place where inhibition dissolves, (aka you can really freak out).

Much of Reinhard Vanbergen’s recent output for Music for Dreams has expertly traversed the forgotten worlds of virtuoso led experimental records; full lengths with tracks that maestros like DJ Harvey undoubtedly treasure. There are glimpses of these danceable instrumental improvisational landscapes such as ”Orange Bun”.

One thing about Rheinzand is that they are musicians driven to make dance music that harkens back to a moment when real players appeared on dance music records. These were musicians devoted to their instruments, the kind who made love to them on stage, unafraid of modulations, bombast, histrionics even (cue Elefantasi). Slower subdued numbers reiterate the “journey to Atlantis” we are on, such as the a cover of “Love Games” an honest low slung boogie take on the track.

One of the biggest takeaways from 'Atlantis Atlantis' is the excavation of the real fun that was had in dance music before the advent of loop based technology. Epic chord progressions, singing songs in multiple languages - these are musicians exploring the colour palette of the entire Pantone spectrum, not only shades of grey and black. Are you up to see the world in colour, brave enough for a journey to Atlantis? Welcome aboard, Rheinzand are here to invite you to do so.

TRACK LISTING

A 1 Better
A 2 Orange Bun
A 3 La Nuit
A 4 We Love You But You Are Late Again (Single Edit)
B 1 We'll Be All Right
B 2 Atlantis Atlantis
B 3 Electrify Me
C 1 The Gift Of Love
C 2 Love Games
C 3 Facciamo L'Amore
D 1 Elefantasi (Original Version)
D 2 Hotel Carthago
D 3 Dudo

In this time of strife, insanity and confusion, only one band is depraved enough to offer themselves up as herald. Like sin-eaters if sins had to be ingested from a very small spoon, Viagra Boys have consumed the utterly incomprehensible chaos of our era and distilled it into 12 immaculate tracks of post-truth-cow-funk-kraut-wave-enlightenment.

TRACK LISTING

1. Baby Criminal
2. Cave Hole
3. Troglodyte
4. Punk Rock Loser
5. Creepy Crawlers
6. The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis
7. Globe Earth
8. Ain't No Thief
9. Big Boy
10. ADD
11. Human Error
12. Return To Monke

Two-Piers, the label that brought you ‘Pop Psychédélique (The Best of French Psychedelic Pop 1964-2019)’ bring you the second instalment in the series ‘Garage Psychédélique (The Best of Garage Psych and Pzyk Rock 1965-2019)’. A thrill a minute dive into the crazy awesome world of Garage Psychedelic Rock.

From the Psych sound explosion onto the Underground club scene in the US and UK in the mid 1960s, its discovery by a wider audience via the exceptional Nuggets and Pebbles compilation series in the 1970-1980s. Through its mainstream revival with the Garage sound of the late 1990- early 2000s, to the current crop of exceptional bands flying the Garage Psych flag today, ‘Garage Psychédélique’ takes you on a journey and gives you a little taste of some of the finest music from the scene and the bands that blazed a trail for others to follow…..Sit back and enjoy the ride!

From the opening bars of The Sonics ‘Have love Will Travel’ through the Psych workout that is Count Five’s ‘Psychotic Reaction’ to the joys of 60s Beat Psych groups from the US such as The Paragons, The Preachers, The Strangeloves, The Squires, and the eccentric stylings of The Monks. The album careers along at a blistering pace of Garage Psych brilliance, jammed packed full of Underground floor fillers a plenty.

US legendary underground acts such as The Electric Prunes, The Chocolate Watch Band and MC5 all deliver classic tracks for the cause, and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson even makes a foray into the psych rock sound with ‘Jump into the Fire’.

In recent years such bands as Thee Oh Sees, Moon Duo and Allah-Las from the US have taken the Garage Psych influence and 60s sound and made it their own. A whole crop of bands such as White Hills, Gnod and Goat from the scene have evolved the music into a heavier ‘Pyzk Rock’ feel with a darker and heavier vibe, but crucially still with the joyous undertones that the scene brings to its devotees.

The Garage Psych sound has influenced groups from around the globe with bands like Liverpool’s The Stairs ‘Weed Bus’, Scotland’s finest The Poets with ‘That’s the Way It’s Gotta Be’, The Bogeymen, a largely undiscovered 90s Psych Hammond band from France with ‘Electrocution’. Hailing from Sweden Goat bring us ‘Gathering of Ancient Tribes’ and The Hives their dancefloor anthem ‘Main Offender’. From Perth, Australia Pond’s Psych leanings on ‘Fantastic Explosion of Time’ are clear to see. Finally, Kevin Parker’s band Tame Impala were very influenced by the whole garage psych sound in their early band incarnation, as perfectly showcased here on the epic wig out that is ‘Half Full Glass of Wine’ that closes the album.

This isn’t meant to be a ‘crate diggers’ album or a compilation of ‘obscure hard to find tracks’ to out-do your mates. It is quite simply a celebration of the Garage Psychédélique scene and a chance to revel in its brilliance and dance around your kitchen. If it means you go down a rabbit warren of discovery to unearth more gems and brilliant bands from the Garage Psych scene then job done! 

TRACK LISTING

2LP Vinyl Tracklist:
A1) The Sonics - Have Love Will Travel
A2) Count Five - Psychotic Reaction
A3) The Paragons - Abba
A4) Kim Fowley - The Trip
A5) The Preachers - Who Do You Love **
A6) The Strangeloves - Night Time
A7) The Monks - Oh, How To Do Now
A8) The Bogeymen - Electrocution
B1) Harry Nilsson - Jump Into The Fire (Single Version)
B2) The Eyes - When The Night Falls
B3) 13th Floor Elevators - Reverberation (Doubt)
B4) The Poets - That’s The Way It’s Gotta Be
B5) The Squires - Going All The Way
B6) The Electric Prunes - I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)
B7) The Chocolate Watch Band - I’m Not Like Everybody Else
B8) MC5 - Gotta Keep Movin’
C1) The Stairs - Weed Bus
C2) The Hives - Main Offender
C3) Pond - Fantastic Explosion Of Time
C4) Novella - Somethings Must Change
C5) Thee Oh Sees - Web
C6) Allah-Las - Catamaran
D1) Moon Duo - Eye 2 Eye
D2) White Hills, Gnod - Run-a-Round **
D3) Goat - Gathering Of Ancient Tribes
D4) Tame Impala - Half Full Glass Of Wine
(** Exclusive To Vinyl)

CD Tracklist:
1) The Sonics - Have Love Will Travel
2) Count Five - Psychotic Reaction
3) The Paragons - Abba
4) Kim Fowler - The Trip
5) The Strangeloves - Night Time
6) The Monks - Oh, How We Do Now
7) The Bogeymen - Electrocution
8) Harry Nilsson - Jump Into The Fire (Single Version)
9) The Eyes - When The Night Falls
10) 13th Floor Elevators - Reverberation (Doubt)
11) The Poets - That’s The Way It’s Gotta Be
12) The Squires - Going All The Way
13) The Electric Prunes - I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)
14) The Chocolate Watch Band - I’m Not Like Everybody Else
15) MC5 - Gotta Keep Movin’
16) The Stairs - Weed Bus
17) The Hives - Main Offender
18) Pond - Fantastic Explosion Of Time
19) Novella - Somethings Must Change
20) Thee Oh Sees - Web
21) Allah-Las - Catamaran
22) Moon Duo - Eye 2 Eye
23) Goat - Gathering Of Ancient Tribes
24) Tame Impala - Half Full Glass Of Wine

Tropical Fuck Storm + King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard – need we say more?

Recommended If You Like: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Slits, Amyl and The Sniffers, The Drones / Gareth Lidiard, black midi, Iceage, Bad Brains, The B-52s.

Satanic Slumber Party is a collaborative 12” by two of Australia’s finest - Tropical Fuck Storm and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Pumped full of booze and adrenaline, our heroes offer up 20-minutes of sax skronks, brick-heavy distortion, and punchy riffs. It’s a packed party full of four guitars, three drummers, two synths, bass, harmonica, electronic sax and loads of singers and silliness. It’s like ‘Love Shack’ by the B52’s except more evil.

TRACK LISTING

1. Satanic Slumber Party (18:50)

After releasing her sophomore album Inner Song in the midst of the pandemic, Kelly Lee Owens was faced with the sudden realisation that her world tour could no longer go ahead. Keen to make use of this untapped creative energy, she made the spontaneous decision to go to Oslo instead. There was no overarching plan, it was simply a change of scenery and a chance for some undisturbed studio time. It just so happened that her flight from London was the last before borders were closed once again. The blank page project was underway.

Arriving to snowglobe conditions and sub-zero temperatures, she began spending time in the studio with Lasse Marhaug. An esteemed avant-noise artist, Marhaug envisioned making music that would fall loosely in line with Throbbing Gristle. Kelly, on the other hand, had planned to create something inspired by Enya, an artist who has had an enduring impact on her creative being. They met each other halfway, pairing tough, industrial sounds with ethereal celtic mysticism, and creating music that ebbs and flows between tension and release.

One month later, Kelly called her label to tell them she had created something of an outlier, her ‘eighth album’.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Release
2. Voice
3. Anadlu
4. S.O (2)

SIDE B
5. Olga
6. Nana Piano
7. One
8. Quickening
9. Sonic 8 

Momma, the band led by singers/guitarists Allegra Weingarten and Etta Friedman, will release their new album, 'Household Name', on July 1st, 2022.

Fresh off a series of dates with Wet Leg, the band’s new full-length 'Household Name' reveals an exciting new chapter marked by both personal and artistic growth. Now based in Brooklyn, New York, after relocating from hometown Los Angeles, the duo upgraded from GarageBand and took their time writing and recording in a proper studio alongside multi-instrumentalist/producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch. The resulting album, mastered by Grammy-winning engineer Emily Lazar, is a tightly stitched collection that is magnetic and dynamic, and also marks their debut for Lucky Number, who signed Momma in the midst of the pandemic before the band members had even finished college. In chasing their idols and embracing personal storytelling, the band has skill-fully carved out their own path. 'Household Name' showcases an unfettered vulnerability elevated by serious alt-rock bombast and is an album that tells the world: This is Momma.

Across the album’s 12 songs, Weingarten and Friedman, who met and formed Momma in high school, cull lyrical inspiration from their own lives for the first time - a contrast with the conceptual fiction of Two of Me. Bygone heroes also helped inspire a lyrical theme throughout 'Household Name': the rise and fall of the rock star, and the tropes and tribulations that come with that arc. The theme allowed the group to celebrate (and, in some cases, directly reference) icons like Nirvana, Pavement, Smashing Pumpkins, Veruca Salt, and the Breeders’ Kim Deal, while weaving in their own perspective and experiences.

'Household Name' perfects a balance of heavy riffs, deep emotions, inviting sonic production, and a light-hearted, wry sense of humour, creating a singular lane for Momma in today's world of alt rock.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Rip Off
2. Speeding 72
3. Medicine
4. Rockstar
5. Motorbike
6. Tall Home
Side B
7. Lucky
8. Brave
9. Callin’ Me
10. Spider
11. No Stage
12. No Bite

Originally available as a digital-only release, Invada Records and Lakeshore Records present the original score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to the film La Panthère Des Neiges (AKA The Velvet Queen).

The soundtrack is one of Ellis and Cave’s most heartfelt and haunting film projects. 

High up on the Tibetan plateau. Amongst unexplored and inaccessible valleys lies one of the last sanctuaries of the wild world, where rare and undiscovered fauna lives. Vincent Munier, one of the world’s most renowned wildlife photographers takes the adventurer and novelist Sylvain Tesson (In the Forest of Siberia) with him on his latest mission. For several weeks, they’ll explore these valleys searching for unique animals and try to spot the snow leopard, one of the rarest and most difficult big cats to approach.

Ellis explains how Cave and himself came to be involved : “There is something about the heart of this film that draws you in. I realised after a day, that I wanted to do whatever it took to compose an entire original score. The film deserved to have its own musical voice. I booked five days and asked Nick if he could come in for a day to write a theme song and play some piano. He saw the film and stayed for four days. In the end we made what I think is one of the most beautiful films we have ever worked on. One of my favourite experiences ever working on a project. The stars are the animals in all their wild glory, as we have never seen them before, and man in reverence and wonder.”

TRACK LISTING

L'attaque Des Loups
Les Cerfs
Antilope
La Bête
Les Yaks
Des Affûts Elliptiques
Les Nomades
La Grotte
Les Princes
La Neige Tombe
Les Ours
Un Être Vous Obsède
L’apparition/We Are Not Alone

To celebrate the release of the LP, we are excited to announce that Gwenno will be performing a live acoustic set in store on Friday 1st July at 5pm. Preorder the album to guarantee entry.

Tresor (Treasure) is Gwenno Saunders’ third full length solo album and the second almost entirely in Cornish (Kernewek). Written in St. Ives, Cornwall, just prior to the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and completed at home in Cardiff during the pandemic along with her co-producer and musical collaborator, Rhys Edwards, Tresor reveals an introspective focus on home and self, a prescient work echoing the isolation and retreat that has been a central, global shared experience over the past two years.

Tresor diverges from the stark themes of technological alienation in Y Dydd Olaf (The Final Day) and the meditations on the idea of the homeland on the slyly infectious Le Kov (The Place of Memory). Accessible and international in outlook, peppered with moments of offbeat humour, Le Kov presented Cornish to the world. The impact of Le Kov was resounding, providing for the Cornish language an unprecedented international platform that saw Gwenno touring and headlining in Europe and Australia, and supporting acts such as Suede and the Manic Street Preachers. Her performance of ‘Tir ha Mor’ on Later with Jools Hollandwas a triumph, and the album prompted wider conversations on the state of the Cornish language with Michael Portillo, Jon Snow, and Nina Nannar. After Le Kov, interest in learning Cornish hit an all-time high, and the cultural role of the language was firmly in the spotlight.

On Tresor, Gwenno shifts focus from the external to the internal, and onto the journey of rediscovering oneself after the life-changing experience of becoming a mother. It is an exploration of desire, of reclaiming one's body after childbirth, of working out how to exist as yourself as well as caring first and foremost for somebody else. Inspired by powerful woman writers and artists such as Ithell Colquhoun, the Cornish language poet Phoebe Proctor, Maya Deren and Monica Sjöö, Tresor is an intimate view of the feminine interior experience, of domesticity and desire, a rare glimmer of life lived in and expressed through Cornish. Tresor evokes the waters that shape the Cornish experience, whilst being musically far reaching with influences spanning from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Eden Ahbez and William Basinski. As psychedelically tinged as her previous work, Tresor embeds found sounds ranging from Venice to Vienna, layering cultural and historical atmospheres, decoupling the use of Cornish from any geographic determinism, allowing for an expression of imaginative spaces that are truly free.

It recalls the waters of the unconscious, the undulating elemental tides suggesting emotion, intuition, those features long associated with the archetypal anima. In “Anima” Gwenno asks how do we fully inhabit different parts of the self, acknowledging convergent cultural and personal histories, embracing the shadow. She explores how the power of the feminine voice inspired by the Cornish landscape asserts itself in presenting a richly melodic counterpoint to a place and people known for rugged survival and jagged edges. The title track “Tresor” (Treasure) confronts the contradictions that come with visibility as a woman and the challenges of wielding women’s power. “Tonnow” (Waves) shows the watery depths of woman’s desire and knowing, an invitation to liberation. The Welsh language track, “NY.C.A.W.” (Nid yw Cymru ar Werth - Wales is not for Sale) widens the frame outward from the personal to the collective, condemning our neoliberalist thinking and our growing passiveness to late capitalism. The album also includes the track “Kan Me” (May Song), written for “Bait” director Mark Jenkin’s new film “Enys Men”, which is scheduled for release this summer.

Tresor the film, is inspired by surrealist filmmakers such as Sergei Parajanov, Agnes Varda, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and reflects Gwenno’s growing interest in film and the intersection of music with visual components. Filmed in Wales and Cornwall, Tresor evokes a dreamworld from another time, surreal, and sensual, saturated with light and colour.

Although Tresor is a project birthed from introspection and intimacy, the implications of the messages are much broader. Ultimately Gwenno is asking what are other ways of understanding and being in relation to one's self and to one another? What are our roles in both shaping and being shaped by the cultures we move in, in a world that is ever changing, and where we all have a place? Tresor does not provide easy answers, for Gwenno shows us that we exist in paradox, our threads of place and story entwined like knotwork, our many selves shining as beautiful entanglements.

TRACK LISTING

1. An Stevel Nowydh
2. Anima
3. Tresor
4. N.Y.C.A.W
5. Men An Toll
6. Ardamm
7. Kan Me
8. Keltek
9. Tonnow
10. Porth La

The Afghan Whigs are set to release their first studio album in five years, How Do You Burn?, on 9 September. How Do You Burn?, the ninth studio album from The Afghan Whigs, finds the band in peak form, making the most vaulting and thrilling music of their lives. The album is virile, ready-for-action, and finds frontman Greg Dulli as swaggering, enigmatic and darkly charismatic as ever, and singing up a storm.

The album reaches corners of sound that, twenty-six years after the band's inception, find them at an apex. Referencing Warren Zevon, Prince, and Zeppelin all while plugging in to the soul and R&B influences that have always set them apart, The Afghan Whigs are at a precipice of greatness. Says Dulli, “I’m beginning to see there are a million places we can go. I feel virile, ready for action, and I want to keep stalking greatness.” 

TRACK LISTING

I’ll Make You See God
The Getaway
Catch A Colt
Jyja
Please, Baby, Please
A Line Of Shots
Domino And Jimmy
Take Me There
Concealer
In Flames

Light in the Attic Records is proud to present the next instalment of the Nancy Sinatra Archival Series with a deluxe reissue of one of the most beloved duet albums of all time, Nancy & Lee.

Equal parts strong, sultry, and savvy, Nancy Sinatra has long been ahead of her time – both in her choices as an artist and as a business-woman. Unapologetically, she established her own path early-on and paved the way for decades of female artists to come – all while firmly maintaining control over her career, her image, and her music. Nancy Sinatra would change the face of music, fashion and culture.

Originally released in 1968, Nancy & Lee arguably represents the pinnacle of the collaborative efforts of one of pop music’s most unlikely pairings. Featuring lush orchestral arrangements by Billy Strange, and boasting the talents of famed Los Angeles session musicians The Wrecking Crew, the album’s enchanting and enduringly unique musical tableau propelled the album to success and sales of over a million copies worldwide. Few albums have an iconic cover equal in timeless appeal to the music inside, but Nancy & Lee is truly one for the ages..

TRACK LISTING

1. You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling
2. Elusive Dreams
3. Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman
4. Summer Wine
5. Storybook Children
6. Sundown, Sundown
7. Jackson
8. Some Velvet Morning
9. Sand
10. Lady Bird
11. I’ve Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up To Me)
12. Tired Of Waiting For You * (bonus Track)
13. Love Is Strange * (bonus Track)

Warmduscher have never taken to the term “supergroup”, but it’s safe to say that their unique, potent blend of raw musicianship, down ‘n’ dirty rock riffs and devil-may-care party attitude was birth from the union of Clams Baker and The Witherer of Paranoid London; Lightnin’ Jack Everett and Quicksand, formerly of Fat White Family; and Mr. Salt Fingers Lovecraft, haiking from Insecure Men. After a tumultuous writing and recording process during the height of COVID lockdowns and a triumphant return to the stage at this year’s End of the Road festival, Warmduscher are on the brink of releasing the salaciously groovy and expertly grimey At the Hotspot. Produced by Joe Goddard and Al Doyle of Hot Chip, At the Hotspot takes the raucous energy Warmduscher solidified on their critically acclaimed 2019 release Tainted Lunch, and injects it with a slightly more polished, ‘80s funk sound, kind of like stumbling home to your squatted loft after a drunken night at the local disco. It’s crunchy on the outside, smooth on the inside, and might be the most immediately enjoyable music Warmduscher have ever graced us with.

TRACK LISTING

1 Live At The Hotspot
2 Hot Shot
3 Eight Minute Machine
4 Wild Flowers
5 Fatso
6 Twitchin' In The Kitchen
7 Five Star Rated
8 Baby Toe Joe
9 Double Vision
10 Super Cool
11 Greasin' Up Jesus

This 30th Anniversary Edition of the Pavement full-length debut marks the beginning of Matador Revisionist History 2022, a catalog series that includes releases from Yo La Tengo, Interpol and Spoon this year. 

In 1992 "Slanted And Enchanted", arguably the first and best release of 90s 'slacker rock', felt like a compendium of all the very best post-punk moments from the previous fifteen years as well as a surprising new combination of wit, absurdism, noise and pop. All these years later, the album is still fresh, still exciting and still makes most of the competition sound derivative and lazy. So to summarise; still slanted, still enchanting.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Summer Babe
2. Trigger Cut/Wounded-Kite At :17
3. No Life Singed Her
4. The Mouth A Desert
5. Conduit For Sale!
6. Zürich Is Stained
7. Chesley's Little Wrists

Side B
1. Loretta's Scars
2. Here
3. Two States
4. Perfume-V
5. Fame Throwa
6. Jackals, False Grails: The Lonesome Era
7. Our Singer

Ahead of their ‘Nowhere’ 30th anniversary UK tour starting 20th April, shoegaze legends Ride have announced the details of the reissues of their early classic albums via Wichita Recordings.

Back in the early 90s, before indie bands made the tabloids, Ride were one of our great white hopes. Fusing the sonic headrush of My Bloody Valentine with the Byrds' jingle-jangle immediacy, they seemed destined to shine. Debut album "Nowhere" captured them at their adolescent peak and "Vapour Trail" is effectively their signature tune; FX pedal-enhanced guitar assaults and nascent teenage vocals tempered by a love of all things pop.

TRACK LISTING

Seagull
Kaleidoscope
In A Different Place
Polar Bear
Dreams Burn Down
Decay
Paralysed
Vapour Trail

Ahead of their ‘Nowhere’ 30th anniversary UK tour starting 20th April, shoegaze legends Ride have announced the details of the reissues of their early classic albums via Wichita Recordings.

The follow-up to "Nowhere", "Going Blank Again" saw the Oxford quartet embrace their prog side. Lead single "Leave Them All Behind" was an eight minute FX-pedal onslaught that somehow managed to crack the top twenty and get them on TOTP. On the other hand, "Twisterella" and "Mouse Trap" proved they could strip away the noise in favour of concise three minute pop melodies. A career best.

TRACK LISTING

1. Leave Them All Behind
2. Twisterella
3. Not Fazed
4. Chrome Waves
5. Mouse Trap
6. Time Of Her Time
7. Cool Your Boots
8. Making Judy Smile
9. Time Machine
10. OX4
11. Going Blank Again
12. Howard Hughes
13. Stampede
14. Grasshopper

Ahead of their ‘Nowhere’ 30th anniversary UK tour starting 20th April, shoegaze legends Ride have announced the details of the reissues of their early classic albums via Wichita Recordings.

TRACK LISTING

Chelsea Girl
Drive Blind
All I Can See
Close My Eyes
Like A Daydream
Silver
Furthest Sense
Perfect Time
Dreams Burn Down
Taste
Here And Now
Nowhere
Unfamiliar
Sennen
Beneath
Today

Orbital missed their actual thirtieth anniversary due to lockdown, but it gave Paul and Phil pause to think and find a way to celebrate their past that was actually about the future. Unlike other Best Of’s, the ‘30-Something’ album contains reworks, remakes, remixes and re-imaginings of landmark Orbital tracks based on the duo’s unrivalled live show. Satan, The Box, Impact, Belfast and more appear in new 30-something guises, familiar yet new, time reversing, yesterday becoming tomorrow. Plus new track ‘Smiley’ Also including remixes from Yotto, ANNA, Jon Hopkins, Dusky, Joris Voorn, Logo 1000, Eli Brown, Shanti Celeste and more

TRACK LISTING

LP Tracklisting
A1. Smiley
A2. Satan (30 Something Years Later Mix)
B1. Where Is It Going (feat. Stephen Hawking)
B2. Impact (30 Years Later And The Earth Is Still Burning Mix)
C1. Chime (30 Something Years Later Mix)
C2. Halcyon (30 Something Years Later Mix)
D1. The Box (30 Something Years Later Mix)
D2. Belfast (30 Something Years Later Mix)
E1. The Girl With The Sun In Her Head (Floex Remix)
E2. Belfast (David Holmes Remix)
F1. Halcyon & On (Jon Hopkins Remix)
F2. Chime (Eli Brown Remix)
G1. Impact (John Tejada Remix)
G2. Are We Here? (Dusky Remix)
H1. Belfast (ANNA Techno Remix)
H2. The Box (Joris Voorn Remix)
H3. Are We Here? (Shanti Celeste Remix)

CD Tracklisting
CD1
1. Smiley
2. Acid Horse
3. Where Is It Going? (feat. Stephen Hawking)
4. Impact (30 Years Later And The Earth Is Still Burning Mix)
5. Satan (30 Something Years Later Mix)
6. Chime (30 Something Years Later Mix)
7. Halcyon (30 Something Years Later Mix)
8. Belfast (30 Something Years Later Mix)
9. The Box (30 Something Years Later Mix)
10. Are We Here? (Dusky Remix)
11. The Girl With The Sun In Her Head (Floex Remix)
12. Halcyon & On (Logic 1000 Mix)

CD2
1. Belfast (ANNA Techno Remix)
2. Impact (John Tejada Remix)
3. Chime (Octave One Remix)
4. Halcyon & On (Jon Hopkins Remix)
5. Are We Here? (Shanti Celeste Remix)
6. Belfast (Yotto Remix)
7. The Box (Joris Voorn Remix)
8. The Girl With The Sun In Her Head (Lone Remix)
9. Impact - Rich NxT Remix (Edit)
10. Chime (Eli Brown Remix)
11. Belfast (David Holmes Remix)

Found Light may be Laura Veirs’ 12th studio LP, but it also, in many ways, feels like her debut. If 2020’s My Echo—written and mixed just prior to her 2019 split from her longtime husband, her longtime producer, and the father of her two sons—was her divorce album, Found Light is about what comes after.

Found Light is a liberating collection of inquisitive and surprisingly assured snapshots of healing and personal growth, and her very first release with co-production credits. Despite the sadness and suffering that prompted these 14 graceful wonders, the result is a testament to the inspiration of independence, to shaping new possibilities for yourself even after great loss. It is a reminder that we are always capable of something more.

TRACK LISTING

Autumn Song
Ring Song
Seaside Haiku
Naked Hymn
My Lantern
Signal
Can't Help But Sing
Eucalyptus
New Arms
Sword Song
Time Will Show You
T & O
Komorebi
Winter Windows

Following the huge success of 2018’s Kokoroko EP and the sensational Abusey Junction (100M streams and counting), Could We Be More is an expansive and ambitious debut album that speaks to the force of Kokoroko.

Each song possesses the power to evoke memories and harness the feeling of home through music: from the psychedelic, funk-laden previous single ‘Something’s Going On’ to the congregational energy of today’s track ‘We Give Thanks’, ‘Could We Be More’ fuses together the African- London synergy which so naturally underpins the heat of Kokoroko’s identity.

Winners of a slew of awards in the UK, Kokoroko specialise in soul shaking, horn fuelled sounds with West African roots and Inner London hues. Having played many EU Festivals including Glastonbury, Meltdown Festival, Elbjazz, & Jazz a la Villette, they are are looking forward to extending their reach further around the globe in 2022 and beyond. The band have performed on several BBC TV shows and their two Boiler Room sets have racked up almost half a million plays between them.

“Drawing influence from West African highlife and jazz, wellmarinated in enough polyrhythm seasoning to induce fires on the dance floors they play.” Okay Africa

“Afrobeat, jazz, soul and ’70s psych-leaning funk - luminescent” Cool Hunting

“This female-led, multicultural collective of under 30s is a vital example of not only jazz’s new form but the shape of things to come.” The Guardian

TRACK LISTING

A1. Tojo
A2. Blue Robe (pt.i)
A3. Ewà Inú
A4. Age Of Ascent
A5. Dide O
A6. Soul Searching
B1. We Give Thanks
B2. Those Good Times
B3. Reprise
B4. War Dance
B5. Interlude
B6. Home
B7. Something's Going On
B8. Outro
B9. Blue Robe (pt.ii)

With a back catalogue at Lex Records that spans half a dozen studio LPs as Boom Bip, plus another two as one half of electronic pop duo Neon Neon, Bryan Hollon has already made a name for himself as a Mercury prize-nominated producer and multi-instrumentalist. Equally impressive are the credits to Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa’s name; she’s contributed percussion to albums by Kurt Vile, Cate le Bon, Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten, and Kim Gordon, among others. But as improvisational techno duo Belief, the pair make music that harkens back to ‘90s acts like LFO and 808 State – artists that indelibly, but near-anonymously, altered club and rave culture, mostly identifiable by clean, bold logos on 12” sleeves. “They didn’t have much of an image – you didn’t really know what the guys looked like, it didn’t matter at all,” says Hollon. “Their logos kind of define them.”

Hollon met Mozgawa just after she joined Warpaint, when Boom Bip shared a rehearsal space in Echo Park with the band. The two quickly bonded over a love of early Warp Records, drum breaks, acid house, and Y2K-era rave flyers. They swapped playlists and ideas when Mozgawa played drums for Neon Neon’s 2013 West Coast tour, but due to busy schedules, it would be another three years before they packed every piece of gear they collectively owned into Eric Wareheim’s Absolutely Studios for an initial jam session. “The actual rat’s nest of midi cables was so overwhelming and intense. But for some reason when we just started jamming, it just felt like we intuitively knew how to make something sound the way that both of us wanted it to sound,” says Mozgawa. “We had a kind of mutual taste or something. It just came so easily once there was another mind there.”

Instinctively playing to each other’s strengths and whims – and recording the session to build on later – allowed Mozgawa to explore a style of music she’d long considered a dark art, and pushed Hollon, known for his meticulous planning in previous work, to be more spontaneous. “There is a looseness and jam quality to it that my other music doesn’t have. We have hours of improvised sessions, which is something I always wanted to do but never took the time in my solo work nor have I ever trusted anyone as much as Stella in knowing exactly what to do and when to do it,” Hollon says. “We connect on another level that you can only tap into when improvising.” They found pockets of time to revisit the project over the next four years, even playing some early shows where they billed themselves as ‘Beef’ – a comedic wink to the project’s pulsating minimalism.

While it was all in good fun, more reverent threads began to emerge as they began finalizing and recording headier, more enigmatic tracks. “As the music started developing, it was a bit more soulful and deep,” Hollon says. “There was always that little bit of a religious element in early rave culture… it gave us a bit of a box to work within.”

When they’d hit on something during a performance, they’d make a note to record it; samples they’d used as placeholders were reworked with the duo’s personal touches; Mozgawa tapped bandmate Emily Kokal to record some vocal textures during Warpaint studio time; Hollon chopped, looped and arranged the jungle breaks Mozgawa had recorded from memory; and finally, the two returned to a mostly complete album during pandemic down time to flesh out and warm up some of the cooler machine-like tones, an invaluable final step.

“The house-y acid-y stuff works really well in the live setting but when it came to recording the stuff, some of it just didn’t feel as warm or as whole as it should, to represent Stella and I,” says Hollon. “We were able to go back and inject a lot of personality into the music, so I’m really happy that we didn’t rush it and spent more time digging a little bit deeper into the songs.”
“We were also very aware of not overcooking it,” adds Mozgawa. “It’s such a delicate balance.”

Though governed by the central question – What Would Mark Bell Do? – Belief were careful not to create anything too derivative. “It’s something that really does come up a lot when we’re making decisions in the studio. We felt a kindred connection with one another over that music,” says Mozgawa. “It’s definitely a record that we made with our own influences and capabilities but there’s still this prevalent thread of wanting to add to that conversation in the musical universe, like making a contribution to that out of reverence to what came before.” Born out of an oddly divine foresight the duo share, Belief pays homage to the pioneers of techno, the synergy of two devout tastemakers building a shrine to inner peace and outward pleasure.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. I Want To Be
2. Anx
3. Bayo
4. Luther
5. Dreams
Side B
1. Nebo
2. WOT
3. Ulu
4. Jung
5. Art Of Love

Peter Doherty's is the last of the great rock 'n' roll stories - bad boy and public enemy. To his devoted fans, he is a cult hero, a modern-day Rimbaud. Musically, he has defined the past twenty years of indie rock with his sound, lyrics, lifestyle and aesthetic.

Since The Libertines rose to international fame, Doherty has proved endlessly fascinating. A whirlwind of controversy and scandal has tailed him ever since the early 2000s, so much so that all too often his talents as a songwriter and performer have been overlooked; for every award and accolade, there is a scathing review. Hard drugs, tiny gigs on the hoof, huge stadium shows, collaborations, obliterations, gangsters and groupies - Doherty has led a life of huge highs and incredible lows.

With his wildest days behind him, Doherty candidly explores - with sober and sometimes painful insight - some of his greatest and darkest moments, taking us inside the creative process, decadent parties, substance-fuelled nights, his time in prison and tendency for self-destruction. With his trademark wit and humour, Doherty also details his childhood years, key influences, pre-fame London shenanigans, and reflects on his era-defining relationship with supermodel Kate Moss and the other significant people in his life including Libertines co-founder Carl Barat. There is humour, warmth, insight, baleful reflection and a defiant sense of triumph.

A Likely Lad is Doherty's version of the story - the genuine man behind the fame and infamy. This is a rock memoir like no other.

‘C’MON YOU KNOW’ follows the huge success of Liam’s previous studio albums ‘As You Were’ (2017) and ‘Why Me? Why Not.’ (2019), which established his iconic status for a whole new generation. His ‘MTV Unplugged’ also went straight to #1 on the Official Album Chart. Between his triumphs as a solo artist and his phenomenal success with Oasis, Liam has spent a combined total of almost six months at #1 across eleven chart-topping albums. 

If fate didn’t quite ordain the circumstances for Interpol’s seventh album, it was at least fortunate that the band had happily concluded their Marauder cycle on stage in front of 30 thousand-odd Peruvian fans. Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promoting new music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood.

Coming from a group whose early work was characterised by Polish knife-wielders and incarcerated serial killers, you might expect Interpol’s pandemic record to be an emotional tar pit — doubly so, given the presence of towering producer-engineer duo Flood and Moulder on the boards. But Banks felt the call to push in a “counterbalancing” direction, with paeans to mental resilience and the quiet power of going easy. “The nobility of the human spirit is to recover and rebound,” he says. “Yeah, I could focus on how fucked everything is, but I feel now is the time when being hopeful is necessary, and a still-believable emotion within what makes Interpol Interpol.”

TRACK LISTING

Toni
Fables
Into The Night
Mr. Credit
Something Changed
Renegade Hearts
Passenger
Greenwich
Gran Hotel
Big Shot City
Go Easy (Palermo)

Neneh Cherry announces a new project titled The Versions, a collaboration album of covers from her expansive catalogue by an all female lineup of some of the most exciting and revered artists of our time. 

The Versions is a 10-track album featuring Neneh Cherry reworks from artists that have a personal connection to the artist and her music. Sia expresses her love for Neneh and her family saying, “Neneh was my favorite artist when she hit the scene. I saved my pocket money for red filas and dreamt one day we would meet. When I was struggling with my mental health in my early twenties, I somehow ended up in their house being taken care of as if I was one of their own children. I called her husband during a suicide attempt, who had been mentoring me as an incredible music producer, and they gave me all the love I could have dreamt of. I owe them a huge thanks and would sing ‘a-b-c’ for them if they asked.
Neneh, my very first queen, Cameron my bonus dad, I love you forever amen!

Other artists involved include long-time friend, one of pop's treasured musical geniuses and woman behind some of the most memorable songs of recent decade, Robyn who teamed up with Mapei to re-imagine the seminal track “Buffalo Stance” into a slinky, scandipop song with the help of Dev Hynes on production. Pop provocateur, ANOHNI lends her haunting vocals to “Woman”, delivering an arresting remake of the empowering track and south London nomad Greentea Peng transforms “Buddy X” into a garage infused number. Singer-songwriter and poet Jamila Woods adds her soulful touch on “Kootchi” with artist and violinist Sudan Archives completely reconstructing “Heart” into a sparse and delicate offering. Seinabo Sey adds Scandinavian soul to “Kisses On The Wind”, Kelsey Lu’s ethereal vocals on her version of “Manchild” transports the track into unworldly heights with Neneh’s daughter TYSON bringing her own sensual attitude to “Sassy” before Honey Dijon wraps things up and taking things to the dancefloor with her house remix of “Buddy X”.

Neneh Cherry has continued to define and redefine culture, style and music, releasing five studio albums, including 2018’s Broken Politics, produced by Four Tet, which was met with critical acclaim by the likes of The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Times, Q and Pitchfork. 2020 saw her reissue her radically influential debut album Raw Like Sushi to celebrate its 30th anniversary and recently received the honorary Icon Award at the NME Awards 2022. 

TRACK LISTING

01_Robyn Feat Mapei - Buffalo Stance
02_Sia - Manchild
03_Anohni - Woman
04_Greentea Peng - Buddy X
05_Jamilia Woods - Kootchi
06_TYSON - Sassy
07_Sudan Archives - Hearts
08_Seinabo Sey - Kisses On The Wind
09_Kelsey Lu – Manchild
10_Honey Dijon – Buddy X Rework 

Signed & slipcase with exclusive colourway. Plus, bonus hardback folio ‘Photographic Evidence’, featuring previously unseen photographs from throughout the band’s career.

Born the son of Scotland’s last telescope-maker, Stuart Braithwaite was perhaps always destined for a life of psychedelic adventuring on the furthest frontiers of noise in MOGWAI, one of the best loved and most groundbreaking post-rock bands of the past three decades.

Modestly delinquent at school, Stuart developed an early appetite for ‘alternative’ music in what might arguably be described as its halcyon days, the late 80s. Discovering bands like Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and Jesus and Mary Chain, and attending seminal gigs (often incongruously incognito as a young girl with long hair to compensate for his babyface features) by The Cure and Nirvana, Stuart compensated for his indifference to school work with a dedication to rock and roll … and of course the fledgling hedonism that comes with it.

After an initial outing in the unfortunately (and provocatively named), Pregnant Nun, Stuart – alongside teenage friends Dominic Aitchison and Martin Bulloch - upgrades the band name to MOGWAI. They release their first single ‘Tuner/Lower’ in 1996. Championed by the legendary John Peel, and making a name for themselves for tinnitus-inducing live shows, MOGWAI’S subsequent single ‘Summer’ is named Single of the Week in NME. Their first album, Mogwai Young Team, follows to significant critical acclaim.

Spaceships Over Glasgow is a lovesong to live rock and roll; to the passionate abandon we’ve all felt in the crowd (and some of us, if lucky enough, from the stage) at a truly incendiary rock and roll show. It is also the story of a life lived on the edge; of the high-times and hazardous pit-stops of international touring with a band of misfits and miscreants.

Lee Brackstone, Publisher at White Rabbit said: ‘MOGWAI have blown my head apart live on many occasions; Stuart’s book has the equivalent impact on the page. A chronicle of a life lived on the stage making truly contemporary psychedelic music, Spaceships Over Glasgow is the first book told from the source about a band who have truly lived the rock n roll lifestyle, survived, and thrived, to create some of the most powerful post-rock music of the past two decades plus.’

On their seminal second album, No Wow, The Kills established the ethos that would set the tone for their expansive career - capture the rawest emotions and sounds, and then push them to the furthest possible edge.

The band is celebrating No Wow’s 15-year anniversary with a deluxe reissue featuring a fresh new mix by the multiple grammy award-winning Tchad Blake (The Black Keys, Fiona Apple, Arctic Monkeys) that brings new life to the 11 vivid tracks.

TRACK LISTING

1. No Wow/Telephone Radio Germany
2. Love Is A Deserter
3. Dead Road 7
4. The Good Ones
5. I Hate The Way You Love
6. I Hate The Way You Love, Pt. 2
7. At The Back Of The Shell
8. Sweet Cloud
9. Rodeo Town
10. Murdermile
11. Ticket Man

In many ways Kumoyo Island represents the culmination of a journey for Kikagaku Moyo. While their decade-long career can be summarized as a series of kaleidoscopic explorations through lands and dimensions far and near, there’s a strong intention in each of their works to take the listener to a particular place, however real or abstract they may be.

In that sense, the title and cover art for the band’s fifth and final album draws you into a magical mass of land surrounded by water—but the couch suggests that Kumoyo Island may not be a fleeting stop, but rather a place of respite, where one could pause and take it all in.

TRACK LISTING

Monaka
Dancing Blue
Effe
Meu Mar
Cardboard Pile
Gomugomu 
Daydream Soda 
Field Of Tiger Lilies 
Yayoi
Iyayoi
Nap Song
Maison Silk Road

“His music filled me with the urge to connect with the world,” Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith says of Emile Mosseri. She first heard his work while watching the 2019 film The Last Black Man In San Francisco; just minutes in, she paused it to look up who did the score and wrote to him immediately. “I love Emile’s ability to create melodies that feel magically scenic and familiar like they are reminding you of the innocence of loving life.” Those talents saw recognition in 2020 with an Oscar nomination for Mosseri’soriginal score to the film Minari. He was already a fan of Smith’s and became increasingly intrigued by her impressionistic process as they started to talk. “The music feels so spiritual and alive and made from the earth,” Mosseri says. “I think of her as the great conductor, summoning musical poetry from her orchestra of machines.” I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon, their two-part collaborative album, introduces an uncanny fusion of their sonics. Constructed using synthesizer, piano, electronics, and voice, this soft-focus dream world is lush, evocative, and fleeting. It finds two composers tuning their respective styles inward as an ode to mutual
inspiration, a celebration of the human spirit and its will to surrender to the currents of life.

Early into their correspondence, Smith and Mosseri realized they were neighbors in Los Angeles and met up for a few hikes. Their conversations led to a musical exchange over email. The exercise became a sketch, the start of their first song together, “Log In Your Fire,” with Mosseri finding flourishes in Smith’s cathartic synth lines to intonate and harmonize alongside. Lyrically, it’s a beautiful, open-ended sentiment. “Being a log in someone’s fire, to me, means letting go, and surrendering to that feeling,” says Mosseri. From there, the pair composed a series of musical foundations, trading files from afar, nurturing the eventual expansion as the remote days of 2020 set in. Smith likens the collaborative experience to the exciting uncertainty of starting a garden, “doing what I can to facilitate growth while enjoying the process of being surprised by what will actually grow.”

In the summer of 2021, the duo finished work on the sequel, I Could Be Your Moon, expanding their musical language as the first part reached its September release. Songs from these more recent exchanges find them even more synced, forging into percussive and harmonic experiments, leaning further into their “unused musical muscles,” as Smith and Mosseri put it. A unified vocal presence emerged. “As the friendship grew I think we both learned how to support each other more and musically that was communicated through singing together,” adds Smith.

Now taken as a full album set, I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon moves fluidly from track to track, panning through textural vi- gnettes. Two roughly 17-minute halves, the set evokes the bittersweet sense of something too bright or rare to last, a short-lived glimpse into a golden hour. There is a dreamy, elemental intention to this music, which Smith and Mosseri say came naturally, as they both embraced intuitive interplay throughout their creative back-and-forth. The stylistic threads of each composer are recognizable yet become more ambiguous as the album progresses, sewn into a singular vision. “I’m so grateful that my musical ideas could dance with hers with some grace and harmony,” says Mosseri. Smith adds that this experience helped her “remember that mu- sic can be a connecting layer of friendship, especially in a time when the usual ways were out of reach.”

TRACK LISTING

01. Log In Your Fire
02. Moon In Your Eye
03. Brush
04. I Could Be Your Dog
05. Glendora
06. Blink Twice
07. Moonweed
08. Green To You
09. Amber
10. Standing In Your Light
11. Shim Sham
12. Golden Cow
13. Radio Replacement

‘Tongue Tied’ is the sophomore album from Gemma Cullingford (Sink Ya Teeth). Written and produced from Gemma's humble home studio in Norfolk, ‘Tongue Tied’ blends many styles of electronica from 70's experimental and new wave, early 80's electro, acid house and techno to noughties electro clash, topped with her own vocal style to produce a unique and fresh sound. It explores relationships and the different emotions they can bring, from paranoia, yearning and helplessness to lust, shyness and just downright wanting to dance.

‘Tongue Tied’ is a progressive follow up to her debut ‘Let Me Speak’ which garnered support from the likes of Steve Lamacq, Amy Lame, Nemone, Chris Hawkins, Jamz Supernova, John Kennedy and James Endeacott, plus glowing reviews in Mojo, Uncut and Electronic Sound.

For the cover artwork on ‘Tongue Tied’, Gemma has collaborated with visual artist Kelda Storm who shares Gemma's love for bright, contrasting neon colours and minimal bold designs. She uses the iconography of feminine lips across her work as a symbol of speech and voice.

RIYL: Sink Ya Teeth, Lonelady, A Certain Ratio.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Accessory
2. Tongue Tied
3. Bass Face
4. Holding Dreams
5. Mechanical
Side B
6. New Day
7. No Fail
8. Chronicle Of Sound
9. Red Room
10. Daisy

The psychedelic French garage duo The Liminanas and german-french music composer & sound engineer David Menke wrote together 2 OST for documentaries . “The Ballad Of Linda L” for the Arte eponymous documentary about the life of Linda Lovelace. And “The Devil Inside me” for the Netflix serie “Monsters Inside : The 24 Faces Of Billy Milligan” . 100% new music, fuzz guitars & garage rock.

TRACK LISTING

VINYL 1 - OST THE BALLAD OF LINDA L
FACE A
1. Prologue
2. Deep
3. Doin' It
4. The Ballad Of Linda L.
5. 80's Score Pt. A
6. 80's Score Pt. B
FACE B
1. Friends On Fire
2. Desolation
3. Romance
4. Punky Disco
5. Linda’s Lament
6. Get Up To Fight

VINYL 2 - OST THE DEVIL INSIDE ME
FACE A
1. Them
2. Waiting For You
3. Losing Control
4. A Shot Of Whiskey
5. Strange Girl
6. Meeting Morrison
7. Back To Amanda
8. Oh Lord
FACE B
1. Love Around Us
2. Illusion Song
3. USA Motorbike
4. Surfing
5. The Devil Inside Me
6. Savages
7. West Coast
8. Suicide Solution

‘Personal Best’, the third album from Chichester’s TRAAMS and their first in seven years, represents a band rebuilt from the ground up. After half a decade apart, all it took was a global pandemic to reaffirm their intense urge to create music together, and the limitations the situation brought with it ended up revolutionising their sound.

Though the band never officially broke up after the release of nine-minute behemoth ‘A House On Fire’ and the subsequent tour at the end of 2017, a break made sense to all three members. “I couldn’t really write, and I didn’t have the motivation to do anything musical. I’m pretty sure I didn’t pick up a guitar for 2 years,” vocalist and guitarist Stuart Hopkins reflects. “I was waiting for that feeling to come back.” In the intervening years, the band went their separate ways. Padley making a record with his new project Social Haul, and Adam learning new instruments and buying up synthesisers. Eventually in 2019, Stu began tinkering away on two leftover TRAAMS songs, the ten-minute krautrock epic ‘The Greyhound’ and the fidgety ‘Intercontinental Radio Waves’, which were then released in 2020. “They had been left as instrumental demos with no vocal takes, and to be honest they were beginning to drive me a little mad,” Stu recalls. “I needed them finished and out of my head.”

At the tail end of 2019 the urge to reconnect struck the band, and they headed to Brighton for some initial sessions in a similar way to previous records – guitar, bass, drums, vocals. This continued until the first lockdown happened. After having this initial momentum scuppered, work on ‘personal best’ began again in earnest in summer of 2020, when lockdown restrictions eased. The trio were allowed to meet up in a studio and rehearsal space cobbled together in Stu’s workplace in Chichester. Due to flats in close proximity and only being able to play and record at night, the band were forced to write music at a hushed volume. “We had to re-learn how to play together,” the frontman says. “It was really quiet and considered, whereas before it’s always been obnoxiously loud. All the things we’d usually relied upon – bass and drums locking in, guitar feedback, shouted words – were no longer applicable in this new way of writing. After our initial reservations, it was incredibly inspiring and freeing.”

As a result, ‘Dry’ and ‘Comedown’ – the two songs that bookend the new album, written in those early Brighton sessions – are the only two to feature live drums, a previous staple of TRAAMS’ sound. “There was an element of me not wanting to play drums as much anyway, but lockdown made it happen as we just couldn’t get to a drum kit,” Adam Stock remembers. For a while, the idea was to write within the restraints they were set initially, before imagining full band sessions to flesh out the sound in a more traditional way later down the line.

In the end, this new way of working proved revolutionary for the band. With Adam on guitar and drum machines, and Stu experimenting with softer vocal tones, a new sound emerged for the trio, one that defines their third album. “I like the fact that it touches on old ideas and new ideas, created in this weird middle period of our lives when we were locked down and didn’t know when we’d get on stage again,” bassist Leigh Padley says. “We focused more on the writing than we had done before.” Stu adds: “Lockdown heightened how much we realised we needed to do this, after so many years inactive. We realised that TRAAMS was something we all really needed.”

By stepping away from their usual instruments and working in an untraditional way, TRAAMS have made their most interconnected album yet. Opener ‘Sirens’, a gorgeous and glacial electronic intro, serves as the first pointer of their transformation, while ‘Breathe’ has the scale and scope of some of their biggest songs but in a more controlled manner, building steadily across its nine minutes. ‘Hallie’ and ‘Dry’ provide the most familiar sounds to the TRAAMS of the past, but the idea of progression and forward motion is everywhere on the album. In delegating some of his lyric writing duties to Padley, Stu also reconnected with a previously waning enthusiasm for storytelling. “He gave me loads of stuff and all this inspiration just ran from it,” he says. “I knew what the songs were about but I didn’t have the correct words for them. I don’t know if I was just reading into what Padley was writing and taking what I wanted to get from it, like reading your horoscope, but they all made sense with what I had in my mind.”

Another defining feature for the album is its musical guests. Liza Violet of Menace Beach appears on ‘Breathe’, her vocals intertwining with Stu’s, and surging closer ‘Comedown’, while lead single ‘Sleeper’ – a gorgeously restrained, catchy track which swaps brute for beauty – features a verse from Soffie Viemose of Danish band Lowly, former tourmates of TRAAMS.

Joe Casey, the idiosyncratic frontman of past and future TRAAMS tourmates Protomartyr also makes an appearance on the album’s blistering centerpiece, ‘The Light At Night’. “I had this part where I was trying to sound like a preacher, or someone with unequivocal authority, delivering this ranting speech,” Stu says of his idea for the song, “and as much as I tried to get a good version of me doing it, it just wasn’t working. It just sounded like I was trying to be Joe.” What better conclusion, then, than to get the man himself involved? A speculative Instagram message followed, ending up in Casey writing a brilliantly vivid, chaotic verse to send the track towards oblivion. “Kill the body then the head dies,” he spits over and over at the end of the song in a crazed manner only Casey is capable of, adding some blood and guts to the album’s poise and guile.

The title of ‘personal best’ also serves as emblematic of the overarching development of TRAAMS through the creation of their third album. “A lot of this album is about recognising yourself,” Stu says. “This record is about the little changes we make, and the milestones we achieve in that process,” he adds, reflecting on a seven year period where his band drifted apart before reconnecting and finding an entirely new way of working, a change that has resulted in their most beautiful and fully-formed album yet. “It’s not about big declarations of love or huge outpourings of grief,” he says. “It’s about the little personal realisations and victories that people have throughout their lives. Some of them are massive, some of them can be hard, and some are small and beautiful, but they all matter.”

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1.Sirens
2.Dry
3.Breathe Feat Softlizard
4.Light At Night Feat Joe Casey
Side B
1.Sleeper Feat Soffie Viemose
2.Shields
3.Hallie
4.Comedown Feat Softlizard

Foals take a fresh, thrilling new direction on with their upcoming album ‘Life Is Yours’, which will be released via Warner Records. ‘Life Is Yours’ is the follow-up to the triumphant, two-part ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost’, which proved to be a pivotal pinnacle in the band’s story. Not only did it result in the band’s first ever UK #1 album, but the ambitious scale of the Mercury-nominated album saw Foals win their first BRIT Award for Best Group.

‘Life Is Yours’ feels like a natural evolution for Foals, its disco-tinged guitars, tight syncopated rhythms and punchy, insistent hooks echoing their roots as purveyors of rambunctious house party chaos. Thematically, it’s escapist, transportive and in rapture at life’s endless possibilities. It’s a record that’s perfectly in tune with the prevailing atmosphere of this moment in time – a life-affirming celebration as the world is reunited.

‘Life Is Yours’ immediately establishes its tone with the bright beam of optimism provided by its title track, its ambience and exuberance showing no sign of slowing down as it is followed by the two recent singles. There’s a unity to the sound, whether Foals are bouncing into the Balearic beats of ‘Looking High’, experimenting with West African guitar grooves on ‘Flutter’, or simply savouring the prospect of playing live together again within the dance dynamics of ‘The Sound’. It’s also a consistently transportive experience, at times conjuring images of the Pacific Northwest or St. Lucia, at others directly set in the peppy nostalgia of the recent past. It all comes full circle with ‘Wild Green’, which simultaneously celebrates the rebirth of summer with an existential tinge that all beautiful moments are inevitably fleeting.

Yannis Philippakis says, “I feel that with ‘Everything Not Saved…’ we touched upon all of the facets of our sound up until that point. This time we wanted to find a new way to express ourselves. We wanted to refocus and do something that shared a DNA throughout the songs: a physicality, a danceability, and with energy and joyousness. It’s definitely the poppiest record we’ve ever made.”

Foals – completed by Jimmy Smith and Jack Bevan – started the project within the dark, windowless confines of their south London rehearsal space in the midst of the winter lockdown. Feeling contained and tethered, they were drawn towards spirited sounds that looked to a brighter future, not only in terms of climate but also in terms of the unreplicable thrill of performing live. By the time the process reached its conclusion, the verdant summer surroundings of Real World Studios near Bath matched the album’s ardent atmosphere.

The band also experimented with collaborating with a tapestry of different producers (often working within different configurations) on various tracks. The album’s varied creative voices include John Hill (Portugal The Man, Florence + The Machine), Dan Carey (Tame Impala, Fontaines D.C.), Miles James and A.K. Paul (co-founder of the Paul Institute with his brother Jai Paul). Much of the album was subsequently mixed by ten-time Grammy Award winner Manny Marroquin (Post Malone, Kanye West, Rihanna), with several tracks mixed by another multiple Grammy Award winner in the shape of Mark ‘Spike’ Stent (Coldplay, Muse, Kings of Leon).

TRACK LISTING

1. Life Is Yours
2. Wake Me Up
3. 2am
4. 2001
5. (summer Sky)
6. Flutter
7. Looking High
8. Under The Radar
9. C:rest Of The Wave
10. The Sound
11. Wild Green

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

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

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

Recorded predominantly in Orlando’s studio in Los Angeles, ‘When the Lights Go’ is his first album since 2012’s critically acclaimed ‘Trouble’. The new album marks a departure in sound, defined, of course, by the events of the last few years. Encompassing songwriting, ballads and a pop-centered aesthetic, it’s full of depth, feeling, storytelling and woe - presented in a compelling manner, as only he can.

‘When the Lights Go’ is a substantial body of work, containing 17 tracks, representative of the duration between albums, “I feel grateful to know that there are people who are interested in more music from me. So I want to give them something significant in length”, he says. When the Lights Go also marks a shift into the pop domain, Orlando’s vocals take centre stage with arrangements that complement the sadness in the songwriting.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Crosswalk
2. Persuasion (interlude)
3. Blood In The Snow
4. Never Seen You Dance
Side B
1. Forever
2. The Sleeper
3. Story
4. Sound & Rhythm
Side C
1. When The Lights Go
2. Basement
3. Friend
4. Be With You
Side D
13. Treason
14. Through The Floor
15. Silence
16. Blue Is The Color
17. Thugs

Robin Pecknold brings light to the bleakest of winters with Fleet Foxes' 'A Very Lonely Solstice' a 13-track career spanning collection recorded in December 2020, at Brooklyn, NY's St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church.

'A Very Lonely Solstice' captures a poignant moment in time. The recording was originally broadcasted as a live-stream event on the winter solstice of 2020, just days after New York declared a state of emergency tightening restrictions again in response to increasing COVID-19 cases. Pecknold describes the set as "me by myself on the longest night of the year... honoring the loneliness of 2020 with a nylon string and some songs new and old." Fans worldwide tuned in while quarantined at home, finding solace and a sense of community in a period of extreme isolation.

Much of the performance showcases a solo focus on Pecknold who offers up acoustic arrangements of fan-favorite songs spanning Fleet Foxes' catalog. Selections cover all four of the band's studio albums, including their 2008 self-titled debut album ("Tiger Mountain Peasant Song") to 2011's Helplessness Blues ("Blue Spotted Tail") and 2017's Crack-Up ("If You Need To, Keep Time On Me"), all the way to their latest release, Shore. Resistance Revival Chorus joins Pecknold on Shore tracks "Wading In Waist-High Water" and "Can I Believe You." Also featured: a cover of Nina Simone's "In The Morning" and a rearrangement of the traditional "Silver Dagger."

TRACK LISTING

1. Wading In Waist-high Water
2. Sunblind
3. In The Morning
4. Tiger Mountain Peasant Song
5. Maestranza
6. Helplessness Blues
7. Silver Dagger
8. Featherweight
9. A Long Way Past The Past
10. Blue Spotted Tail
11. If You Need To, Keep Time On Me
12. I'm Not My Season
13. Can I Believe You

Katy J Pearson would like you to know that she is not a country singer. Sure, there was an influence of the genre to the now - 26 - year - old’s celebrated debut ‘Return’ - an album that saw Pearson snowball from Bristolian newcomer to a critically - acclaimed bre akthrough star, selling out shows up and down the UK - but there’s also much, much more to her magnetic blend of soaring, widescreen melodies and warm, intimate storytelling than just three chords and the truth.

“There was one music video [for ‘Tonight’] that I did in the beginning where I line - danced and was wearing rhinestones, and from there it just turned it into this real thing,” she laughs. “Every review would be ‘country - tinged’ whereas actually, there was literally one country song on the record re ally. But I think that’s what’s good about the new record, that I think it’s not what people will expect from me. When people ask me what the new album sounds like, it’s just... a bit different?!”

Happy to wax lyrical about the relative merits of Townes Van Zandt, Elton John and Fugazi within the same breath, there’s always been a lot going on in Pearson’s musical palette (FYI she’d call her debut more of a folk - rock LP, if anything). But though the critics might have skewed the specifics of ‘Return’ - relea sed via Heavenly Records in November 2020 - the acclaim for the album still came pouring in. Having had a previous taste of the industry via a major label project that quickly turned sour, the difference this time around was tangible: praised for “ the arre sting quality of [her] Kate Bush - meets - Dolly Parton vocal delivery” by The Times, labelled as “finding humanity in every moment” by DIY and with lead single ‘Take Back The Radio’ described as “a whoop of pure joy” in the Guardian, amidst the bleak toll of lockdown, something about this curiously optimistic album began to really resonate. “ It was terrifying getting to the point of releasing a debut after making music for eight years, like woah!” she says with an exaggerated grimace (random noises and excita ble gestures are par - for - the - course in a Pearson anecdote).

“But weirdly it feels like it couldn’t have come out at any other time. It felt like everything people were saying to me [during lockdown] was everything that I’d been feeling when I wrote that al bum; it was a very personal album for me, and it was released at a time when a lot of people were in their house, feeling isolated. It was the antidote to a lot of peoples’ lives.” It feels fitting then that, having provided an aural balm at just the righ t moment with her first album, its follow - up should reflect a world brimming with curiosity, back in action and wanting to expand its horizons.

If Pearson’s extracurricular activities in recent months have shown that she can dip a toe into a multitude of g enres - providing guest vocals on Orlando Weeks’ recent album ‘Hop Up’; popping up with Yard Act for a collaboration at End of the Road festival; singing on trad - folk collective Broadside Hacks’ 2021 project ‘Songs Without Authors’ - then forthcoming secon d album ‘Sound of the Morning’ takes that spirit and runs with it. It’s still Katy J Pearson (read: effortlessly charming, full of heart and helmed by that inimitable vocal), but it’s Katy J Pearson pushing herself musically and lyrically into new waters. Written and recorded in late 2021 after a self - prescribed period of down time spent walking, going on daily cold water swims and “just chillaxing massively”, even the credits on ‘Sound of the Morning’ profess a new thirst for experimentation from the sin ger. Joining ‘Return’ producer Ali Chant on desk duties this time was Speedy Wunderground head honcho Dan Carey, who worked with Pearson on some of the album’s grittier tracks. “Dan got a completely different structural, songwriting style out of me which i s what I wanted: something a bit more confident and in your face,” she nods. “He could see that there was a part of me that wanted to branch out, I just didn’t know where and how far to push it, but it was exactly the kind of progression I was looking for. ”

TRACK LISTING

1. Sound Of The Morning
2. Talk Over Town
3. Riverbed
4. Howl
5. Confession
6. The Hour
7. Float
8. Alligator
9. Game Of Cards
10. Storm To Pass
11. Willow’s Song

Second studio album via Island Records.

Signposting a bold and ambitious new era for the band, Sports Team explain that ‘R Entertainment’ explores “The packaging down of all human experience into entertainment, prompted by the infinite scroll through social feeds and the manic formlessness of the images we are hit with every day. Graphic news interrupted by ads for season 17 of The Bodyguard, news as a rubbernecking, passively waiting for the next drop of horror as we flick through recipes.”

Sports Team are Alex Rice (lead vocals), Rob Knaggs (rhythm guitar + vocals), Henry Young (lead guitar), Oli Dewdney (bass), Al Greenwood (drums) and Ben Mack (keyboard + percussion). Formed in 2016, the band released two EPs Winter Nets and Keep Walking! before sharing their debut album Deep Down Happy in June 2020 to widespread critical acclaim, praised by The Times for their “indomitable spirit and a refusal to take things too seriously” and The Guardian for their “sharply observational lyrics skewering the mores of suburbia”.

TRACK LISTING

The Game
Dig!
The Drop
Cool It Kid
Unstuck
R Entertainment
Kool Aid
Getting Better
Fingers
Light Industry

The landmark 40th release in Speedy Wunderground’s singles series is from Manchester (via Widnes)’s titan of the independent UK scene and unshakable figure in experimental pop music Jane Weaver. Having traversed numerous genres across her long and self-propelled career from krautrock to girl-group psyche, indie to folk, grunge to psychedelia – and having worked with an illustrious list of legendary friends and collaborators over the years including Factory Records’ Rob Gretton, Twisted Nerve’s Andy Votel as well as counting Doves and Elbow as early backing bands – this is her first new material since the triumphantly twisted pop of her critically acclaimed Flock album last year.

It's also a first for the label too – with this being the only track in the label’s single series to not be recorded in Carey’s regular Speedy HQ under his family home in Streatham – with this one having been put to tape in the legendary surroundings of Abbey Road Studios.

Carey has been a regular there for a while – having manned the desk numerous times during his career – as well as Christian Wright – one of the in-house mastering engineers there being a close friend of the label and producer. But during COVID the hallowed premises started a series of Lock-In Sessions – a series of events designed to illuminate the musical creative experience – filming and offering a window into what is normally quite a closed process.

‘I was invited to Abbey Road to record as one of their Lock-In Sessions’ recalls Weaver, ‘so asked Dan to be involved. I’ve always admired Dan’s production style - it’s really exciting and dynamic, most records I like these days have his name on them, and for ages I’ve been keen to have a look around his studio and explore the possibilities to do something creative together. We wrote the song at Dan’s place and then recorded most of it at Abbey Road- Studio 3. Having to turn it around, write and record a song from scratch within 24hrs was really exciting as we’d never worked together before, but I knew we shared a joy for certain sounds and equipment- and in true Speedy style it happened pretty quickly.’

As soon as the producer/label heard the resulting track ‘Oblique Fantasy’ it was clear it had to be a ‘Speedy’. Slinky, pulsating bass, ethereal cosmic vocals, jagged minimalist guitar stabs over a menacing krautrock drumbeat – like Roxy Music meets Jane Birkin– it already feels like a classic in the label’s stable and apt that it was written and recorded in exactly the same way –but at the place where some of the most important records of all time were committed to wax.

‘I guess the song is about waiting for passion and inspiration’ says Weaver, ‘writing in lockdown at times wasn’t easy because of the lack of connection, and interaction with others, wanting to write something emotive and pop and looking for a way out of the forced solitude, it was a bit of a puzzle... I guess in the end I’m writing about the longing for normality and that seeming like it was now part of another dimension… a fantasy.’

TRACK LISTING

Oblique Fantasy (Part 1)
Oblique Fantasy (Part 2)

Liam Gallagher is not the kind of artist who was going to be stopped by the sizeable problem of not being able to play to an audience during lockdown. So when the idea of playing a playing and filming a live stream show came up, he looked at the precedent set by the Sex Pistols and The Clash and decided to hit the River Thames, armed with a boatload of attitude, a phenomenal live band (including Bonehead) and an arsenal of classic songs.

The show has been captured in full on the new live album ‘Down By The River Thames’, which will be released ia Warner Records.

Originally streamed on December 5th 2020, the show became one of the most memorable performances of the lockdown era. From iconic Oasis favourites (‘Supersonic’, ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’) to big hitters from his two all-conquering #1 solo albums (‘Wall of Glass’, ‘Once’), Liam’s inimitable snarl boomed across the Thames and dominated London’s gloomy winter skyline. There were plenty of welcome surprises too: debut solo performances of the Oasis songs ‘Hello’, ‘Fade Away’ and ‘Headshrinker’, and the first live version of ‘All You’re Dreaming Of’. Liam’s voice is absolutely on point throughout, with a full-throttle snarl of anger and attitude that doesn’t compromise any of the finesse of the studio recordings.

Liam commented, “So here it is, the gig they said we could never pull off! As we were in lockdown, bored and depressed, rock ‘n’ roll came to save the day once again. It was a top night and a top gig and it’s captured here on record for you to all enjoy.”

TRACK LISTING

1. ‘Hello’
2. ‘Wall Of Glass’
3. ‘Halo’
4. ‘Shockwave’
5. ‘Columbia’
6. ‘Fade Away’
7. ‘Why Me? Why Not.’
8. ‘Greedy Soul’
9. ‘The River’
10. ‘Once’
11. ‘Morning Glory’
12. ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’
13. ‘Headshrinker’
14. ‘Supersonic’
15. ‘Champagne Supernova’
16. ‘All You’re Dreaming Of’

For the first time in over a decade, 20 of the Sex Pistol’s recordings from 1976 to 1978 are collected together to tell the story of one of the world’s most influential and extraordinary bands.

The tracks here cover the entire initial period of the band’s recording career – from Anarchy in The UK, through Never Mind The Bollocks to the post John Lydon Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle soundtrack featuring early demos, cover versions and more.

The compilation is completed by some essential B- sides – I Wanna Be Me (the flipside of Anarchy…), ‘Satellite’ (the b-side of ‘Holidays In The Sun’) and Did You No Wrong (from ‘God Save The Queen’).

TRACK LISTING

Pretty Vacant
God Save The Queen
Bodies
No Feelings
I Wanna Be Me
Anarchy In The UK
Submission
No Fun
(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone
Holidays In The Sun
New York
Problems
Lonely Boy
Silly Thing
Something Else
C’Mon Everybody
Satellite
Did You No Wrong
Substitute
My Way

Without a brutal evaluation of their own becoming, TV Priest might have never made their second album. Heralded as the next big thing in post-punk, they were established as a bolshy, sharp-witted outfit, the kind that starts movements with their political ire. There was of course truth in that, but it was a suit that quickly felt heavy on its wearer’s shoulders, leaving little room for true vulnerability. “A lot of it did feel like I was being really careful and a bit at arm's length,” says vocalist Charlie Drinkwater. “I think maybe I was not fully aware of the role I was taking. I had to take a step back and realize that what we were presenting was quite far away from the opinion of myself that I had. Now, I just want to be honest.”

Having made music together since their teenage years, the London four-piece piqued press attention in late 2019 with their first gig as a newly solidified group, a raucous outing in the warehouse district of Hackney Wick. Debut single “House of York” followed with a blistering critique of monarchist patriotism, and they were signed to Sub Pop for their debut album. When Uppers arrived in the height of a global pandemic, it reaped praise from critics and fans alike for its “dystopian doublespeak,” but the band — Drinkwater, guitarist Alex Sprogis, producer, bass and keys player Nic Bueth and drummer Ed Kelland – were at home like the rest of us, drinking cups of tea and marking time via government-sanctioned daily exercise. As such, the personal and professional landmark of its release felt “both colossal and minuscule” dampened by the inability to share it live.

“It was a real gratification and really cathartic, but on the other hand, it was really strange, and not great for my mental health” admits Drinkwater. “I wasn’t prepared, and I hadn't necessarily expected it to reach as many people as it did.” As such, My Other People maintains a strong sense of earth-rooted emotion, taking advantage of the opportunity to physically connect. Using “Saintless” (the closing song from Uppers) as something of a starting point, Drinkwater set about crafting lyrics that allowed him to articulate a deeper sense of personal truth, using music as a vessel to communicate with his bandmates about his depleting mental health. “Speaking very candidly, it was written at a time and a place where I was not, I would say, particularly well,” he says.

“There was a lot of things that had happened to myself and my family that were quite troubling moments.Despite that I do think the record has our most hopeful moments too; a lot of me trying to set myself reminders for living, just everyday sentiments to try and get myself out of the space I was in.” “It was a bit of a moment for all of us where we realised that we can make something that, to us at least, feels truly beautiful,” agrees Bueth. “Brutality and frustration are only a part of that puzzle, and despite a lot of us feeling quite disconnected at the time, overwhelmingly beautiful things were also still happening.”

This tension between existential fear born from the constant uncertainties of life, and an affirmative, cathartic urge to seize the moment, is central to My Other People, a record that heals by providing space for recognition, a ground zero in which you’re welcome to stay awhile but which ultimately only leads up and out. For TV Priest, it is a follow-up that feels truly, properly them; free of bravado, unnecessary bluster or any audience pressure to commit solely to their original sound.

TRACK LISTING

1. One Easy Thing
2. Bury Me In My Shoes
3. Limehouse Cut
4. I Have Learnt Nothing
5. It Was Beautiful
6. The Happiest Place On Earth
7. My Other People
8. The Breakers
9. Unravelling
10. It Was A Gift
11. I Am Safe Here
12. Sunland

“Sometimes, Forever” refers to the idea that the good and bad are both temporary and always returning. Feelings of sorrow and emptiness will pass but they will always come back around, as will feelings of joy. This album explores many ups and downs. It moves from the high of love to hopelessness and disconnect. A frustrated loss of control over life and a disconnect from the self reoccur throughout the record, only to circle back to a willingness to let go and be free, whether through love (shotgun, with u) or blissful ignorance (don’t ask me). It’s a coexistence of light and dark, not only lyrically but tonally. Dan once called it the angels and demons record lol.

TRACK LISTING

01. Bones
02. With U
03. Unholy Affliction
04. Shotgun
05. Newdemo
06. Darkness Forever
07. Don’t Ask Me
08. Fire In The Driveway
09. Following Eyes
10. Feel It All The Time
11. Still

I kept on visualizing a body, suspended just at the point where gravity took over, and the figure was falling from their feet to the floor. Frozen at this midpoint, there wasn’t much to say which way they were going - suspended between collapse and recovery, they could almost be getting back to their feet. Perhaps I was punch drunk from 2019, however I noticed very soon the zero-gravity feeling of being suspended between these two points was all around me; the impression of a caring democracy hamstrung by 2D visions of old empires; the climate in it’s seemingly terminal demise and the ever emboldened ideas for a functioning future looming from the smog; the suspension between the immortality of my 20s and the strange feeling when everyone starts to get sick more; the feeling that everything is suspended between collapse and recovery, and I am unsure which way it’s heading.

The record was made just before the pandemic started, working closely with the distinct feed-backing Dorophone sounds of Hildur Guðnadóttir, Yair Glotman’s thunderous double-bass, James Ginzburg’s devotion to precise form and muting my reverb stems, the microtonal brass and woodwinds of Hilary Jeffrey and Sam Dunscombe and the infinite intimacy of Icelandic singer-songwriter JFDR. From Berlin, I would flag sounds I loved; some twitching strings, the stolen alto voice from an abandoned English chorale, some words from a climate scientist fleshed into a poem. These email attachments struck up a sort of sonic pen-pal program, with each person sending a sound, some words, some creative parameters and responding in turn. It became an exercise in receptivity, in which openness itself became a creative voice, hushing my tendency to micromanage every detail. These interactions were pulled together in late 2019 into a single piece written for two sides of a single 12” vinyl; one side describing collapse (Darn!) and the other, recovery (Kintsugi). Influenced by the 70s concept prog records of my childhood, the album loops without ending, so you were never really allowed to rest in safety, or wallow in the mess for too long.

Although my 20-year-old self would loathe it, I find myself tired of people believing their own creative voices are the most interesting or that creativity needs another self-aggrandizing voice. I thought of this as a project about restoring balance, the immense power to be found in collaboration, receptivity and the belief that if I am going to contribute to the world in 2022, it should be from a position of openness. It should be kind rather than vulgar. It should be constructive, not destructive. I do not wish to be known as a Vandal.

Working with visual artist Theresa Baumgartner and Dancer / Choreographer Lukas Malkowski the simple visual imagery of a body resisting gravity was realized as an Audio-Visual installation, which will be premiered in May 2022. “I do not wish to be known as a Vandal” uses high speed cameras which compensate for gravity’s pull at 3000 frames per second, suspending an unclothed body in space as it moves from feet to floor and back again. The result is a simple, framed figure of a body moving through space, duelling with inevitably and the cycle of collapse and recovery, set to generative interpretation of the record.

Critically acclaimed, award winning icon for her generation, beabadoobee returns today to announce her forthcoming second studio album Beatopia (pronounced Bay-A-Toe-Pee-Uh). Due for release on Friday 15th July via Dirty Hit, Beatopia is a fantastical yet deeply personal world that was formed in the imagination of a 7 year old beabadoobee and has been carried with her ever since.

Housing Bea's most impressive work to date, Beatopia marks a huge progression, in 14 songs she traverses fuzzy rock, classic singer-songwriter, psychedelia, midwest emo and outright pop whilst remaining undeniably herself throughout.

TRACK LISTING

1. Beatopia Cultsong
2. 10:36
3. Sunny Day
4. See You Soon
5. Ripples
6. The Perfect Pair
7. Broken Cd
8. Talk
9. Lovesong
10. Pictures Of Us
11. Fairy Song
12. Don’t Get The Deal
13. Tinkerbell Is Overrated
14. You’re Here That’s The Thing

Geelong’s favourite sons Vintage Crop return this summer with their much-anticipated fourth album, ‘Kibitzer’. Running with the ball that 2020’s “Serve To Serve Again” punted forward, this album marks another energetic break towards the goal for Vintage Crop. ‘Kibitzer’ sees the band define their field of play, more melodic at times, still bruising, forever droll. These ten tracks of ‘snappy as elastic’ Australian punk are packed with tensile riffage, hefty beats and witty refrains of everyman curiosity.

‘Kibitzer’ was written in quick response to their critically lauded ‘Serve To Serve Again’ album. Harsh guitars, a brutish rhythm section and a knack for always having the right words at hand are still abundant, but this time Vintage Crop’s songs expand upon their forceful nature with greater harmonic arrangement. It was recorded by Jasper Jolley in one single session on a former apple orchard in Geelong, a backdrop that mirrors the band’s own organic growth whilst highlighting their willingness to approach capturing their own sound their own way. The album was then mixed and mastered by Mikey Young.

‘Kibitzer’ delves into themes of identity, resilience and acceptance; some of the more upbeat notions that the band have dealt with to date. ‘Casting Calls’ opens the record, slamming through the speakers with gusto and setting the tone for the following 30 minutes. “It’s rolling, we’re rolling, we’re winding back the tape, we’re getting better with each take” sings lead songwriter Jack Cherry. Accepting your limitations and taking pride in your work are key themes on ‘Kibitzer’. In fact ideas around learning, growing and being able to take things in your stride are strongly felt through their entire body of work. These themes hit home with the album’s title too, with Cherry feeling that ‘Kibitzer’ is an apt way to describe a lot of the band’s focus. “I feel like a lot of our lyrics over the years have been our unsolicited opinions on other people’s situations, the very definition of the word Kibitzer. So for this record we wanted to lean into that tendency by acknowledging it and even go as far as stamping it on the album cover.”

Musically the band have expanded their palette on this album; exploring a world of rhythmic harmony and a newfound vocal melodicism. There’s also greater lyrical elaboration and considered song structures at play. ‘The Duke’ is a mob of rollicking chants and heavy hitting, catchy to the core. ‘The Bloody War’ is a more sanguine reflection of tumbling drums, struck chords and shrill keyboard warble. “He’s got the keys to the universe and they’re hanging from his belt loop, his wit is as quick as lightning, his disapproving gaze is the thunder that follows” pipes Cherry on ‘Double Slants’, guitars chiming through the hubbub. ‘Hold The Line’ turns the wry amusement of dealing with cold callers into a fidgety anthem of knowing frustration. Whilst ‘Switched Off’ even welcomes the introduction of horns (courtesy of Heidi Peel) to the group’s repertoire, ushering in an unexpected serenity into their tough sound. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
01. Casting Calls
02. The Duke
03. Double Slants
04. Hold The Line
05. Impact Of Wisdom
Side B
06. Drafted
07. The Bloody War
08. 2K Hip Pocket
09. Under Offer
10. Switched Off

"The Stylist", Kelley Stoltz's 17th album finds him following up the Third Man Records reissue of his 2001 "Antique Glow", with a collection of 10 new songs. The album was recorded early in 2021, and has been languishing in the vinyl pressing log jam ever since - but luckily Stoltz writes timeless songs, the kind that might've appeared on the fringes of the late 60's or mid 80's. Acoustic guitars, synthesizers, drum machines and strong melodies abound. As with his other classic records "Below the Branches", "Double Exposure" and "Ah! (etc)" Stoltz plays most of the instruments himself and records in his home studio in San Francisco. Kelley says, "I chose the title 'the Stylist' because musically I guess that's what I am... because of the way I write, at my leisure over a period of months at home, I kinda flit around between styles. It's all in the pop-rock vein, but there's usually a wide range of sounds and inspiration from song to song. It sort of fits together in a mix tape kind of way, rather than an exploration of one particular mood. That's always been the case with my albums."

The chorus-y guitar jangle of "Your Name Escapes Me" somehow name checks the New Bomb Turks, while reflecting on familiar if forgotten faces from Stoltz's past. On "My Island" insistent piano and saxophone solos take the listener on a tropical trip to the soft rock radio dial. Stoltz played rhythm guitar in Echo & the Bunnymen for a few years, and "We Grew So Far Apart" clangs like a lost Liverpool 80's classic. Stoltz says, "There's a touch more piano on this record... going back to my Sub Pop days, when I was writing more Beatle-y bits... Harry Nilsson... that kind of thing." Indeed, the piano led "It's a Cold World" plays like a holy union of Todd Rundgren and the Zombies where Stoltz declares, "it's a cold world at times, but I'm not ready to give up the fight."

Thankfully, after 23 years the beat goes on... and no matter what style Stoltz chooses, "The Stylist" is another platter of tuneful delight in the impressive catalog of one of the great songwriters of our time.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Change
We Grew So Far Apart
You Had To Be There
My Wildest Dream
Its A Cold World
Side B
Is There Anything That's Better Than This , Babe?
Your Name Escapes Me
In The Night
Wrong Number
My Island

Leeds art-rock group Mush (Dan Hyndman - vocals / guitar, Phil Porter - drums, Nick Grant - bass, Myles Kirk– guitar) are set to return with album ‘Down Tools’ via Memphis Industries. The new record marks the prolific band’s third album in as many years, following hypebuilding early singles ‘Alternative Facts’ and ‘Gig Economy’, 2020’s debut LP ‘3D Routine’ and 2021's acclaimed ‘Lines Redacted’, which pushed their sound further and, as Uncut wrote, saw them become “kindred spirits to Wand and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, two other bands prolifically honing their sound and approach, steadily developing their voice.”

On ‘Down Tools’, this voice grows again into a more brilliantly singular sound. It sees Mush getting loose, moving away from the defined moods and textures of ‘Lines Redacted’ with a musical openness, straddling genres while avoiding pastiche. Hyndman says of the lyrics on ‘Down Tools’ that “there was a conscious decision to retreat further from an observational approach” with vocals being ad-libbed lending the record a more abstract feel. Hyndman continues: “this album is less dark than the previous one. The Armageddon obsession has eased, or at least the symptoms have become milder due to saturation. Musically there’s a lot more chill on the record – there’s a few more mellow tracks out there and the most astute listener may even be able to decipher some of the words, fingers crossed.”

While grief and work balance form themes on the record, Hyndman’s approach is largely made up of abstract, disconnected streams of consciousness and lines liberally taken from books, paintings, films and beyond. On ‘Human Resources’, Hyndman dramatically retells a battle he had with an HR department at a job in a David and Goliath style. The song ‘Group Of Death’, a phrase chillingly familiar to any football fan, is emblematic of the turn towards softer, more considered sounds. Hyndman says: “In my warped imagination it just sounds like a Paul McCartney song, but it won’t to others. I initially had the idea of doing a World Cup song called ‘Group of Death’, but by the time it was written nothing beyond the title had any relevance to football. Anyway, the next World Cup is in Qatar so fuck that shit.” Northern Safari meanwhile is a song about the way the North of England has been portrayed in the media and used as a mirror to reflect some of the nastier elements of what’s going on in society, in particular vox pops around Doncaster, portraying a particular narrative of the collapse of the red wall and the disgruntled ex-miners.

‘Down Tools’ then sees Mush idiosyncratically ping-pong from finger picked looseners to noise-rock bangers to brilliantly entertaining effect, avoiding post punk saturation with an easy style and wit

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Grief Thief
Karoshi Karaoke
Get On Yer Soapbox
Human Resources
Northern Safari
Dense Traffic
Side B
Inkblot And The Wedge
Group Of Death
Groundswell
Interlude
Burn, Suffering!
Down Tools

Dinked Edition Flexi Disc:
Hit The Bricks (non-album Track)

Chicago trio Horsegirl announce their debut record, Versions of Modern Performance, out June 3rd on Matador. Penelope Lowenstein (guitar, vocals), Nora Cheng (guitar, vocals), and Gigi Reece (drums) - the best friends comprising Horsegirl - do everything collectively, from songwriting to trading vocal duties and swapping instruments to sound and visual art design. The warmth and strength of their bond crackles through every second of their debut. With lyrics intentionally impressionistic and open-ended, and a sound that ranges with joy and enthusiasm across a range of styles, Versions of Modern Performance offers many pathways.

Following last year’s one-off ‘Billy’, lead single ‘Anti-glory’ is elastic and propulsive. The accompanying video, directed by Erin Vassilopoulous, exudes confidence, putting Horsegirl front and center, their uncanny ability to layer sound on full display. “We wrote Anti-glory almost by accident, while messing around with an old song during rehearsal. The song fell into place immediately, and looking back, we have no idea how we wrote it,” the band explains. “As always, this song and album are for Chicago, our friends, our friend’s bands, everyone who can play the guitar, and everyone who can’t play the guitar.”

The friendship of these three goes far beyond Horsegirl. Reece and Cheng, college freshmen, and Lowenstein, a high school senior, learned to play—and met—through the significant network of Chicago youth arts programs, and they have their own mini-rock underground, complete with zine distros, that they describe as somewhat separate from the “adult shows” that take place at bars and DIY spaces they don’t have access to. They’re exultant about their friends’ talent, noting that any of the bands from that scene could have been (or might still be!) plucked up the way they were.

Versions of Modern Performance was recorded with John Agnello (Kurt Vile, The Breeders, Dinosaur Jr.) at Chicago’s Electrical Audio. “It’s our debut bare-bones album in a Chicago institution with a producer who we feel like really respected what we were trying to do,” the band says. Across the record, Horsegirl expertly play with texture, shape and shade, showcasing their fondness for improvisation and experimentation. One can hear elements of the ‘80s and ‘90s independent music the band love so deeply and sincerely—the scuzzy melodicism of what used to be called “college rock,” the cool, bubbly space-age sheen of the ‘90s vamps on lounge and noir; the warm, noisy roar of shoegaze; the economical hooks and rhythms of post-punk. There’s even a bit of no wave mixed in for good measure. But as Horsegirl fuse all of this together, it feels not like a pastiche or a hacky retread but something as playful and unique as its predecessors.

They’re best understood as part of a continuum, but they’re building something for themselves.

TRACK LISTING

1. Electrolocation 1
2. Anti-glory
3. Beautiful Song
4. Live And Ski
5. Bog Bog 2
6. Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)
7. The Fall Of Horsegirl
8. Option 8
9. World Of Pots And Pans
10. The Guitar Is Dead 3
11. Homage To Birdnoculars
12. Billy

LIFE are anchored by their hometown; the geography, history and community has always been the inspiration behind their creativity and on their third LP, North East Coastal Town, the band pay homage to Hull and its folk. North East Coastal Town is mature; it finds the band at the height of their powers as they carve-up a wide-screen, brooding body of work that is drenched in a sense of belonging and reflection but still impressively maintains their trademark swagger and ear for pop sensibilities and guitar hooks.

“Hull and the surrounding area runs through our DNA and has shaped us, weathered us, empowered us, embraced us and made us feel accepted.

North East Coastal Town is our love letter to the city. The album is an ode to kinship and relationship with its musical and lyrical spine picking out themes of love, desire, beauty, horror, chaos, pride and most importantly the sense of belonging.

Upon writing and recording this album it was important to us that this sense of belonging was also reflected in the album’s craft and therefore we used locally based studios, equipment, gear, and the community around us to establish what it means to belong in a North East Coastal Town.”

When the pandemic gripped the world in March 2020, LIFE were in the midst of promoting their acclaimed second album – A Picture Of Good Health (Sept 2019); they had just completed an arena support tour with Kaiser Chiefs in the UK, a triumphant main stage appearance at Rockaway Beach and flown to New York for New Colossus Festival ahead of a packed SXSW and a US tour with IDLES. They scrambled home on the last plane back from New York on 17th March.

The album was BBC 6 Music’s Album Of The Day, BBC Radio 1’s Album Of The Weekend and was one of BBC 6Music's Albums of The Year; all four singles from the album were play-listed at 6Music, and the band were nominated for two AIM Awards 2020 - Best Live Act and Best (Difficult) Second Album and they played major UK festivals including Glastonbury, Latitude, Reading Festival and many more.

They began rebuilding with ‘Friends Without Names’ – the shapeshifting first glimpse from the album – which was added to the A-List at BBC 6Music, and was recorded in the dead of night and hums with a dark, brooding and passionate atmosphere.

“Friends Without Names is the anchor and blueprint for our next record. In a remote part of Eastern England, close to the river Humber, we performed this track as if we were in trance; vibrating in a constant musical crescendo. Our aim was to push ourselves and harness differing time zones whilst giving in to the moments of beauty, horror, love and chaos depicted by the song’s lyrics.” (Mez Green, vocals)

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Friends Without Names
2. Big Moon Lake
3. Incomplete
4. Almost Home
5. Duck Egg Blue
SIDE B
6. Shipping Forecast
7. Poison
8. Self Portrait
9. The Drug
10. Our Love Is Growing
11. All You Are

Learning about what Deliluh has been through these past two years brought the commands on a cassette player to mind: press rewind, forward, play and eject. The band, now a duo of Kyle Knapp and Julius Pedersen, relocated to Europe from their Toronto base with the ambition to plug into a continent that felt more cohesive in terms of a gig circuit and to map new spaces, both terrestrial and spiritual. This bold move came with a number of adjustments.The first was a new touring line-up, following the decision of Erika Wharton-Shukster and Erik Jude to stay in Canada. The second was dealing with the cosmic headfuck of a deadly global pandemic that put a stop to most things outside of staying alive. Looking back, Kyle Knapp sees the process as “somewhat of a crash course in survival and keeping calm. Overall it's taught us a lot about what we want to accomplish, both in the present and the long term.”

The new record, Fault Lines, is the result. Knapp sees the record as reflecting the duo’s “growth away from documenting the spaces in our native Toronto, to going out and experiencing new worlds and communities, something which has allowed us to look further inward.” Transmitting and receiving, then. This duality is expressed through the album’s incredibly spacious and clear sound and a series of what sound like intense sermons, or internal monologues that rail against the injustices of this world. The songs introduce characters who grapple with values that are pitted against the expectations around them. Knapp talks of a guilt-ridden preacher in the song Credence who, in a struggle to keep his church afloat, turns to unethical dealings with dubious people. All the tracks “reveal biases that are challenged by external realities” in different ways, for better and for worse. And yet these characters keep on kicking against the pricks: even if the narrator in Body and Soul shakes his fist at what feels like a relentlessly grim future. “Don’t say the sun still rises to light my way”.

Fault Lines is also a European record in its making. It first took shape at a session in Copenhagen in January 2019 where the band, still a four piece, recorded the beds before heading out on tour. The plan was to take a post-tour break and track some ideas that could be worked on remotely until everyone got back together in the early summer. Then everything “kind of went sideways”. Fault Lines stayed in an embryonic state for more than half a year, during which Deliluh reconfigured as a two piece. The lockdowns did, however, provide the time to rework material, or reposition ideas in line with the circumstances the pair found themselves in. Julius Pedersen: “We did a lot of heavy lifting at home together in Berlin and Marseille, taking turns training back and forth, throwing shit at the wall and experimenting.”

Fault Lines is tough and powerful sounding: a survivor’s record. At times these sparse tracks sound full of menace, at other moments, as in X-Neighbourhood and the soundtracked poem, Mirror of Hope, a sense of remorse. Repetition plays a key role: the band “initially wanted the record to sound circular. (But) repetition and allowing things to breathe was important to these songs, not only to create tension, but to give significance to moments of change when they do occur.” The single Amulet is a mesmeric example of this; where a revolving pattern of notes sketches out a melody which irrigates the brooding, parched vocal line. The circular nature of the music can also trigger a feeling of otherworldliness, as heard on the hypnotic Syndicate II. The track is driven by a simple metallic riff and a caustic vocal line that maybe channels the ghost of an old singer… Regardless it operates in an interzone of its own making.

After all this upheaval, does Deliluh still dream of going to another place? Are places different and do they really have a bearing on the creative path? “There's always another place calling from beyond. Without it we would be stuck and hopeless.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Memorial
A2 Body And Soul
A3 Credence (Ash In The Winds Of Reason)
A4 Amulet
Side B
B1 X-Neighbourhood
B2 Syndicate II
B3 Mirror Of Hope

bdrmm release a new EP, featuring their acclaimed recent single ‘Port’, alongside remixes by Daniel Avery, Working Men’s Club, A Place To Bury Strangers and more. The seven-track Port EP will be released digitally and on CD on April 8, with a limited-edition orange vinyl 12” version following later in the year. The EP is the Hull and Leeds-based band’s first major release since their debut album, Bedroom, which was hailed as a latter-day shoegaze classic when it came out in July 2020.

‘Port’, which was originally released as a single last October, marked a major step forward for the band. Sounding not unlike the Low of Double Negative or Hey What deconstructing The Temptations’ ‘I Know I’m Losing You’, it’s a much darker sounding song; its distorted drones and beats burst into life with frenzied guitar and howls of anguish. "It helped us consider the band in a much more fluid perspective,” says bassist and synth player Jordan Smith of the pivotal track. “Swapping instruments and redefining roles gave us time to spend working on new and more intriguing sonic ideas.”

This new experimental and more electronic approach was expanded as the standalone single release grew, almost accidentally, into a full EP, which features radical reworkings by Daniel Avery (a fearless, all guns blazing techno stomper); Working Men’s Club (New Order’s ‘Sub-Culture’ meets a long-lost early Warp Records classic); A Place To Bury Strangers (a feedback frenzy of total sonic annihilation); Tom Sharkett from Manchester krautpoppers W.H. Lung (DFA Records goes down to the death disco); Jonathan Snipes from LA-based experimental hip-hop trio Clipping (glitchy beats imploding into a wall of white noise); and Jordan himself, as Mouth Company, who brings proceedings to a close with a slow-mo trip-hop treatment.

“The idea originally stemmed from us joking about Daniel Avery remixing one of our tracks one day and we just kind of went from there,” explains singer Ryan Smith of the EP’s unusual genesis. “We’d arranged a remix swap with A Place To Bury Strangers and then somehow managed to gather all these other incredible remixes over the space of a few months, and it seemed ridiculous not to release them as one piece of work. It’s a real journey listening to them individually, but back-to-back it really is something.” He’s right, the seven tracks hang together perfectly, like the best kind of mixtape, despite each one being so different from the next. “I think the sparseness of the original mix gave a fair amount of versatility to whoever wanted to mess around with the stems,” adds Jordan. “I think that shows in the final EP – six completely idiosyncratic mixes that we all fell in love with.” “To have so many influential artists to us putting their own piece of DNA on what has become such an important track to us is so humbling,” gushes Ryan. “It’s brand new territory for us, and we just feel so lucky to have everybody involved.” The EP is being released ahead of bdrmm’s dates supporting shoegaze legends Ride in April and will be followed by their eagerly-awaited second album, which they are currently working on. “I am so excited to embrace the next chapter of bdrmm,” concludes Ryan. “It’s been a fucking tough ride, but one I never want to get off.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Superb band, brilliant song and LOOK at that list of remixers! Every single one is a wonderfully different take on the source material. The winner for me has to be the W.H. Lung remix by the superbly talented (and monolithically barnetted) Tom 'Sharky' Sharkett. Brilliant.

TRACK LISTING

1. Port
2. Port (Working Men’s Club Remix)
3. Port (W.H. Lung - Tom Sharkett Remix)
4. Port (Daniel Avery Remix)
5. Port (A Place To Bury Strangers Remix)
6. Port (Jonathan Snipes Remix)
7. Port (Mouth Company Remix)

Dublin five-piece MELTS announce their debut album Maelstrom. The debut, produced by Daniel Fox of Gilla Band (FKA Girl Band), will be released on Mother Sky on Friday 13th May. To celebrate the announcement the band share new single “Outlier”. Frontman Eoin Kenny says, “Outlier is about the imaginable distance between objects in space and how leaving one way of life and moving on to another life falling into space, into the void. The title refers to an object or person existing at a distance from the centre of the system."

“Repetition is definitely the key to Melts,” says Gaz Earle. “It’s about just keeping it simple and driving and fucking stomping.” Earle (drums) makes up the Dublin five-piece along with Robbie Brady (keys/synth), Colm Giles (bass), "Outlier is about the distance between, like the imaginable distance between objects in space and how leaving one way of life and moving on to another life falling into space, into the void. The title refers to an object or person existing at a distance from the centre of the system."Kenny (vocals) and Hugh O'Reilly (guitar). This idea of keeping it simple has been woven into the fabric of the band since day one. Different line-ups were tried and experimented with and after an immediate connection at a rehearsal, Kenny was quickly in as singer. The inclusion of Kenny who, like all the other members have been in various other bands, unlocked something new and distinct in the group. Then once Brady joined on keys, an even more evolved tone to the band began to take shape.

What became clear was the band quickly outgrew their initial intentions of being a garage rock outfit. The raw, simplistic, primal nature of that approach remained intact but soon they expanded into immersive pulsing grooves. “We wanted to keep the rhythms just really straight and hypnotic,” says Earle. “The aim of the game was to try and get people into a trance when they are watching the gig. With bringing Robbie on board, as he's doing loads of stuff with sequencers and deadly synth bits, there grew a psychedelic hypnotic vibe to Melts.” A friend described the band as like a space rock version of The Doors, which they didn’t balk at.

Lyrically the album weaves between big picture state-of-the-world stuff to the more introspective and personal. The former can be heard on opener ‘Maelstrom’ which is about, according to Kenny, “a storm that sweeps through a town one day and causes an irreversible change to the order of things he song written from the point of view of someone caught in currents, beyond their own making and understanding the frustrations felt by someone who feels powerless against the effects of the upheaval.” ‘Spectral’, on the other hand, one of the album’s most tender moments that unfurls slowly with Kenny’s rich and resonant vocal delivery, is a track dedicated to the loss of a friend to suicide. As a whole, Kenny says, “the theme of the record is kind of based on coming to grips with the world around us.”

The end result is an album that gracefully yet potently merges psych rock with touches of post-rock-esque soundscapes, pulsing krautrock, all of which is driven by demented organ wig outs, engulfing waves of heavily textured guitar and a crisp rhythm section. While they land on a sound that is distinctly their own, their debut occupies something of a middle ground between Spacemen 3 and Primary Colours-era The Horrors. Or, as the band say themselves, something that sounds “driving and fucking stomping.” 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Maelstrom
A2 Signal
A3 Outlier
A4 Circular
Side B
B1 Spectral
B2 Waltzer
B3 Skyward
B4 Tides

Toronto-born, London-based artist Tess Parks will return with her long-awaited new album ‘And Those Who Were Seen Dancing’ on May 20th 2022 via Fuzz Club Records. Following years of international touring and a lengthy list of critically-acclaimed collaborations with Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe in recent years (most recently the duo’s self-titled 2018 LP), the new album will be Parks’ first full-length solo offering since her much-loved debut album, ‘Blood Hot’, was released back in 2013 on Alan McGee’s 359 Music label.

“In my mind, this album is like hopscotch”, Parks says: “These songs were pieced together over time in London, Toronto and Los Angeles with friends and family between August 2019 and March 2021. So many other versions of these songs exist. The recording and final completion of this album took over two years and wow - the lesson I have learned the most is that words are spells. If I didn’t know it before, I know it now for sure. I only want to put good out into the universe.” A growing disillusionment with the state of the world paired with an injury that stopped Parks from being able to play guitar and piano for months meant the album was nearly shelved.

“I really felt discouraged to complete this album”, she recalls: “I stopped listening to music for honestly about a year altogether and turned to painting instead. I really had to convince myself again that it’s important to just share whatever good we can - having faith in ourselves to know that our lights can shine on and on through other people and for other people. The thought of anyone not sharing their art or being shy of anything they create seems like a real tragedy to me. Even if it’s not perfect, you’re capturing a moment.” Recorded over a two year period but with songs, lyrics and ideas dating back over a decade in some form, ‘And Those Who Were Seen Dancing’ is an album full of such moments, people and places.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The brilliant Tess Parks brings another selection of woozy psychedelic ballads, imbued with a glimmer of 1970's folk and Americana but without a doubt a sound all of her own. Lysergic, heady and hypnotic audio bliss.

TRACK LISTING

1. WOW
2. Suzy & Sally's Eternal Return
3. Happy Birthday Forever
4. We Are The Music Makers And We Are The Dreamers Of Dreams
5. Brexit At Tiffany's
6. Old Life
7. Do You Pray?
8. Good Morning Glory
9. I See Angels
10. Saint Michael

Music For The Stars is a collection of songs that may lend themselves to the end of the night in headphones, for me it’s an Ode to Horsenden Hill in West London, where we used to gather of an evening with the compilation tapes we had made introducing each other to new songs which we found; songs some of which would remain with us forever, we would sit there till late overlooking the West End’s City Lights but could lay back and watch the stars.

From the Two-Piers label that brought you the acclaimed ‘Pop Psychédeliqué (The Best of French Pop 1964-2019) comes new compilation ‘Music for the Stars (Celestial Music 1960-1979), a collection of laid back, late night songs perfect for lying back, losing yourself in the moment and just staring at the stars. Includes tracks from legends such as Willie Nelson, Lonnie Liston Smith, and Nina Simone, the English folk sound of Bill Fay and Kevin Ayres, the tortured genius of Tim Buckley, from the 60’s West Coast scene The Electric Prunes, to the sonic sounds of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, and the soulful beauty of Shuggie Otis.

From the beginning of the evening with Alexander “Skip” Spence, until later that night when Willie Nelson may end a tape and it’s time to walk home - sit back and lose yourselves in Music for The Stars.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Alexander 'Skip' Spence - Broken Heart
A2. Fred Neil - I've Got A Secret (Didn't We Shake Sugaree)
A3. John Fahey - Jesus Is A Dying Bedmaker
A4. Bert Jansch - Poison

B1. Roedelius - Balsam
B2. Shuggie Otis - Jennie Lee
B3. Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Observatory Crest
B4. Kevin Ayres - May I?
B5. The Electric Prunes - Holy Are You

C1. Eden Ahbez - Edens Island
C2. Nina Simone - Come Ye
C3. Damon - The Night
C4. Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes - Sais (Egypt)

D1. Kathy Smith – It’s Taking So Long
D2. Tim Buckley - Buzzin' Fly
D3. Bill Fay - I Hear You Calling
D4. Gene Clark - With Tomorrow
D5.Willie Nelson - Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain

Fully updated from the original edition with more stories, two brand new chapters and a new foreword from James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem).

'Literally changed the course of my life' James Murphy.

'The chapter on Larry Levan alone transformed me into wanting to be your favorite DJ' Questlove.

'The original and still the best' Gilles Peterson 'We can't tell the story of dance music without speaking the names of Sharon White and Judy Weinstein, so I welcome this vital update' The Blessed Madonna.

When someone says, 'You have to know your history...' this is it. This classic book is the whole unruly story of dance music in one volume. It recreates the dancefloors that made history, conjuring their atmosphere with loving detail and bringing you the voices of the DJs and clubbers at their heart - from grime, garage, house, hip hop and disco, to techno, soul, reggae, rock'n'roll, and EDM. Whether musical outlaw, obsessive crate-digger or overpaid superstar, the DJ has been at the spinning centre of nightlife for a century, making parties wilder, pushing clubbers harder, and driving music into completely new shapes and styles. In 1999 this was the first book to do justice to the DJ's rollercoaster ride. Twenty years later, it's fully refreshed, carefully updated and filled with even more stories, including two brand new chapters. This edition comes with a new foreword by James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem).

DITZ release their debut album, The Great Regression. The album was recorded by Ben Hampson and mastered by Kate Tavini.

The 10-track album has been a long time coming – the five-piece first came together in Brighton at the end of 2015 and released their debut EP the following year. There have been a few line-up changes along the way, but they have been settled since their breakthrough tracks ‘Gayboy’, ‘Total 90’ and a cover of Peaches’ ‘Fuck The Pain Away’ in 2019, which prompted Joe Talbot from Idles to proclaim “DITZ are the best band in Brighton, if not the world”. Even though the various lockdowns slowed the band’s momentum for a while, they turned the situation to their advantage, using the downtime to fine-tune this incredible debut.

Abrasive but accessible, The Great Regression is set to be one of the most important British guitar debuts of 2022. First single ‘Ded Würst’ – a ferocious mix of Gilla Band, Foals and a lyric bemoaning the moral quandary of minimum-wage employment – unsurprisingly became an instant favourite of Steve Lamacq on BBC Radio 6 Music. Other highlights include ‘The Warden’, a song all about being too intense, ironically set to an intense backing somewhere between Deftones and Mogwai, and ‘I Am Kate Moss’, which, according to singer Cal Francis, is about “the separation between your visual and personal identities, particularly within the context of masculinity and femininity”.

Such themes of insecurity and gender pop up a lot over the course of the album, as well as lots of references to the human body breaking and being harmed in unnatural ways, although there’s no one overarching concept, simply because the songs have come together over such a long period of time. The title is not so much a reference to society going backwards, but more the band’s penchant for childish jokes. “Sitting in a van all day can get silly,” laughs Cal.

That’s not to say The Great Regression is in any way light-hearted. It’s full of anger, rage and despair. ‘Three’ takes some text from Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 sci-fi novel Solaris and applies it to the hollow activism of everyone from big corporations to middle class uni students.

Other literary touchstones include Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr, but even more influential is the band’s ever-growing pile of equipment. “We spent a lot of time during the recording process just trying to make unusual sounds out of pedals, or whatever we could find,” says Cal.

The album concludes with a cacophonous new version of ‘No Thanks, I’m Full’, which originally closed their debut EP in 2016. “Over the years the live version has evolved so much that we just had to record it again to do it justice,” explains Cal. “The lyrics are so old that I can’t place whether they are about the hazards of drinking or not drinking.”

It’s proof of just how far DITZ have come on in that time and a reminder that, in order to progress, you need to regress. And we’ll drink to that. Or not.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Clocks
2. Ded Wurst
3. Summer Of The Shark
4. Three
5. The Warden
Side B
1. I Am Kate Moss
2. Instinct
3. Hehe
4. Teeth
5. No Thanks, I’m Full

‘Heart Under’, Just Mustard’s second album and first for Partisan Records, is an album that asks you to forget what you know. At every turn, this remarkable record reconfigures and stretches the ideas and ambition of a rock band, and turns a year of lockdown and personal struggles into a breathtaking artistic statement.

The music the five friends from Dundalk, Ireland make is strikingly untraditional. Though to look at them, it appears that the band are a five-piece with uniform make-up of a vocalist, two guitarists, a bassist and a drummer, not a single one of them utilizes their instrument in a confined or regular fashion. Guitarists David Noonan and Mete Kalyoncuoglu make their six-strings shriek and wail, the sounds produced sounding like everything from whirring machinery to horror movie monsters. On the introduction to the dark and dangerous ‘Seed’, it’s half-way to being a techno beat. On a great deal of the album, this harshness is juxtaposed by watery, swelling guitar chords that add a dreamy texture to the record alongside the more aggressive, industrial tones. “This is just a piece of wood with some metal strings attached – you can do whatever you want with it,” Mete says of his approach to his instrument.

Behind them, drummer Shane Maguire uses the rim of his drums almost as much as the skins, providing a clattering, metallic backbeat. “I wanted to reinforce the clangy soundscapes of the songs,” he says of his approach to his instrument, and the record includes Shane whacking a metal staircase with a stick in the studio. Most of the melodies on offer poke through from Rob Clarke’s inventive, nodding basslines, which have nods to The Cure, who Just Mustard supported at a Dublin show in 2019. Rob’s sub bass also plays a pivotal role in the sound, creating a sound that feels like an anchor at the bottom of the sea and adding extra emotional weight to the record. “It leaves open the space that a normal bass guitar would normally occupy,” he explains, “and it’s leaving a lot of room in the mid frequencies for vocals and guitars.”

Then there’s Katie on vocals. On the roaring climax to single ‘I Am You’ and the melodic and rhythmic verses in the sprightly ‘Mirrors’, she becomes the transfixing focal point of the band, where past material has seen her voice drop back to within the rest of the band, become an extra texture in the soundscapes.

Since the release of debut album ‘Wednesday’ in mid-2018, the band have undergone a subtle but firm transition, through propulsive 2019 single ‘Frank’ and the gargantuan ‘Seven’ from later that year. While ‘Wednesday’ and subsequent singles pushed Just Mustard away from fitting snugly into the shoegaze category they once occupied, ‘Heart Under’ makes them stand alone as a band that sound like no other.

Across its 10 tracks, the album presents a coherent style and ethos – those scything guitars, Katie’s magical vocals – but still incorporates a wide and untethered vision. There are brooding, atmospheric rock songs (‘Still’, ‘In Shade’) and others that apply a lighter, dreamier touch (‘Sore’, ‘Mirrors’), all tied together with impeccable instrumentation and a united vision. On ‘Wednesday’, the band played with dreamier soundscapes and production techniques, and ‘Heart Under’ serves as the next stage of this development, with every instrument brilliantly pushed to its limit and every boundary of the band stretched.

“This album felt very blue to us,” Katie says of the overarching vision behind ‘Heart Under’. “There was sadness and sorrow in the album, and it felt like being underwater and under something very heavy. We let that influence the music, but it wasn’t a decision – it just naturally happened that way.” Flowing through every part of the album, which unpacks the grief and sorrow that Katie was experiencing at the time of its creation, the theme of water also stretches to its majestic artwork. Commissioned by the band and painted by British artist Graham Dean, it shows a subject up to their chest in water. “His paintings lined up with the emotions in the songs,” Katie says.

The title, ‘Heart Under’, comes from the lyric “the heart under its foot” from the song ‘Sore’, and throughout the recording, the band discussed the idea of wanting the listener to feel like they’re on a train going through a tunnel. In every facet of the album is a physical and emotional intensity, with each note of dissonant guitar, thwack of a drum or piercing lyric hitting you right in the chest, just as intended.

Primary recording took place in Attica Studios in rural Donegal, with additional recording and post-production then completed at home, and this extra time they gave themselves results in an even richer and more intricately composed record. Katie’s vocals were also recorded at home, with extra time and space that allowed her to give a more emotional and honest performance. “The emotion in the vocals is really important to me, and I could really zoom in and take my time when recording at home,” she reflects.

After the band had finished recording and producing the album, ‘Heart Under’ was pushed even further into singular territory when the band worked with mixer David Wrench, whose previous collaborators include Frank Ocean, Let’s Eat Grandma, Jamie xx, FKA twigs and beyond. “We wanted someone who had done pop and electronic records and didn’t just work within rock music,” Katie says, with David adding: “I learned so much from what he did with the record. He put the spotlight on some things in the mix that we had no idea about, and he created so much extra space.”

Though written in the depths of 2020, ‘Heart Under’ is a personal document of a time that doesn’t comment on realities of the outside world. “I always write about what’s going on inside my head rather than anyone else’s,” Katie says. “We all use music to escape, and it’s good to have a break from life with music.”

An album not categorisable by genre or era, ‘Heart Under’ is a guitar album with guitars that don’t sound like guitars, an album that stretches traditional frameworks to make a thrillingly unique sound, and an album like little else you'll ever hear.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 23
A2 Still
A3 I Am You
A4 Seed
A5 Blue Chalk
Side B
B1 Early
B2 Sore
B3 Mirrors
B4 In Shade
B5 Rivers

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

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

TRACK LISTING

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

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

TRACK LISTING

Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
A Scale, A Mirror, And Those Indifferent Clocks (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
Arienette
Hypnotist (Song For Daniel H)
When The Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever, And A Necklace (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. If Winter Ends
2. Padraic My Prince
3. Contract And Compare
4. The City Has Sex
5. The Difference In The Shades
6. Touch

SIDE B:
7. June On The West Coast
8. Pull My Hair
9. A Poetic Retelling Of An
Unfortunate Seduction
10. Tereza And Tomas

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1.The Invisible Gardener
2. Patient Hope In New Snow
3. Saturday As Usual
4. Falling Out Of Love At This Volume
5. Exaltation On A Cool Kitchen Floor

SIDE B:
6. The Awful Sweetness Of Escaping Sweat
7. Puella Quam Amo Est Pulchra
8. Driving Fast Through A Big City At Night
9. How Many Lights Do You See?
10. I Watched You Taking Off

SIDE C:
11. A Celebration Upon Completion
12. Emiy, Sing Something Sweet
13. All Of The Truth
14. One Straw
15. Lila

SIDE D:
16. A Few Minutes On Friday
17. Supriya
18. Solid Jackson
19. Feb. 15th
20. The ‘Feel Good’ Revolution

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1. The Difference In The Shades
2. The City Has Sex (feat. Waxahatchee)
3. Contrast And Compare (feat. Waxahatchee)

SIDE B:
4. Kathy With A K’s Song (feat. M Ward)
5. St. Ides Heaven (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)
6. June On The West Coast (feat. Becky Stark)

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A:
1.Driving Fast Through A Big City At Night
2. Solid Jackson
3. A Celebration Upon Completition

SIDE B:
4. Falling Out Of Love At This Volume
5. Exaltation On A Cool Kitchen Floor
6. Double Joe

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRACK LISTING

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

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