Dundalk’s finest The Mary Wallopers have announced details of their third album – produced by The Coral’s James Skelly and packed with their own songs - a new single and their biggest headline tour to date, including arena shows in Scotland and Ireland

Paddywhackery follows up 2023’s hugely acclaimed Irish Rock’n’Roll. That album saw the band grow in confidence, writing their own songs for the first time. Paddywhackery finds them leaping forwards to create an album that sounds like it’s been made by a band with a tightness and a power that’s unparalleled in music right now.

Recorded in an intense two-week period in Liverpool with producer James Skelly and engineer Chris Taylor, Paddywhackery lets the band’s grand wildness shine through and allows their songs to flow out of the speakers with the kind of verve and potency that will make you - the listener - press play again, and again, and again.

Andrew and Charles Hendy on the album: “It’s mainly about the fact that people would call us “paddywhackery” because we are too Irish or whatever, but it’s all very fucking hip to be Irish the last couple of years, and maybe that’s performative too, it’s very sincere. If all you do is serious songs, it sterilises everything. It becomes like there’s only one human emotion and its seriousness. People are terrified of being laughed at. If people are going to call us paddywhackery anyway, we might as well just call the album Paddywhackery. So its more of a “fuck you” than anything else. We want to spread like a virus and destroy anyone who thinks they are above The Mary Wallopers”.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Crowns of England
The Juice
Seán na Sagart
Smuggling the Tin
Castlecoe Hill

Side B
The Big Mixer
Worker’s Song
Banks of the Roses
Landlord’s Demise
Kit Kat Club
Mickey Dam

'Bossanova' is the third Pixies album. The band continued to work with Gil Norton after collaborating to such success on their platinum-selling second album 'Doolittle'. Their third album in as many years, 1990 was a particularly fertile time for the band with Kim Deal also having success with The Breeders, who released their debut album 'Pod' just a few months prior.

Featuring the singles ‘Allison’ (a tribute to jazz and blues pianist Mose Allison), ‘Dig For Fire’ and ‘Velouria’, plus the first cover to feature on one of their albums ‘Cecilia Ann’ (originally by The Surftones), 'Bossanova' showed a less primal side to the band, with surf and space rock rising to the fore. Lyrically, Black Francis is even more cryptic with a recurring sci-fi theme running throughout, which in turn influenced Vaughan Oliver’s classic planet design for the sleeve.

TRACK LISTING

1. Cecilia Ann
2. Rock Music
3. Velouria
4. Allison
5. Is She Weird
6. Ana
7. All Over The World
8. Dig For Fire
9. Down To The Well
10. The Happening
11. Blown Away
12. Hang Wire
13. Stormy Weather
14. Havalina

'Trompe le Monde' bookended a golden run of landmark records released in quick succession that cemented Pixies as one of the best of a generation.

Translated from French to mean “fool the world”, 'Trompe le Monde' showed the band still restless to push their sound forward. With producer Gil Norton again at the controls, their fourth album is arguably their most playful with Black Francis’s lyrics on UFOs and conspiracy theories keeping things weird while power pop creeps in to amplify the space rock established on predecessor 'Bossanova'.

'Trompe le Monde' goes full throttle with 15 tracks coming in a quickfire 40-minute salvo. It proved to be the end of act one for the band with them taking over a decade before returning to stage together.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: This is an absolutely incredible record. Motorway to Roswell: what a stunner.

TRACK LISTING

1. Trompe le Monde
2. Planet of Sound
3. Alec Eiffel
4. The Sad Punk
5. Head On
6. U-Mass
7. Palace of the Brine
8. Letter to Memphis
9. Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons
10. Space (I Believe In)
11. Subbacultcha
12. Distance Equals Rate Times Time
13. Lovely Day
14. Motorway to Roswell
15. The Navajo Know

Some artists don’t ask permission; they just land in your gut and stay there. Some records arrive polished and pristine. Others bleed the moment you press play. On their debut album ‘Put A Smile On For Me’, the fast-rising London four-piece Keo choose the latter. Raw, bruised, and unflinchingly self-aware, their first full-length release captures the emotional fallout of love, guilt, shame, and self-destruction with a clarity that feels almost confrontational. The record captures a band documenting themselves in real time, preserving every fracture, ugly thought and moment of collapse without compromise.

Blending grunge intensity, shoegaze textures and confessional songwriting, the record draws on the charged candour of artists including Led Zeppelin, Sun Kil Moon and Smashing Pumpkins, while carrying the lyrical directness and storytelling instinct of artists like Radiohead. Across its 11 tracks, Keo move between moments of towering vulnerability and total collapse, pairing brooding atmospheres with melodies that feel built to be screamed back in over-spilling rooms.

“The next big guitar band." - The London Standard.
“A sound that has given UK guitar its biggest kick up the fretboard in years.” Rolling Stone UK.
“Keo are already that band." - DORK.
“There’s something undeniably compelling about Keo’s willingness to lay everything bare.” -Kerrang!
"Indie-rock’s most promising new proposition” - DIY.

The Dinked Edition of ‘Put A Smile On For Me’ comes in an exclusive collector’s format featuring alternative artwork and a limited yellow marbled vinyl pressing. It includes a heavyweight outer sleeve with alternate artwork, a printed inner sleeve, transparent outer sticker and exclusive fold-out poster. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Be Happy
That’s Me
Fly
Best I Can Do
Bird On The Wire

Side B
Pistol
Loser
Black Dress
Blue Song
Spent On You

‘Baby You’re A Winner’ is a perfect illustration of the elevated musicality of the album that bears its name. Linking up across the record’s twelve tracks with producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius, Yard Act), Baby You’re A Winner showcases a real levelling up for Grandmas House: more layered and involved than their trio of previous EPs - Grandmas House (2021), Who Am I (2023), Anything For You (2025) - with a greater focus on the use of vocals and harmonies to embolden the meticulously crafted arrangements.

It’s the sound of the quartet - Yasmin Berndt (guitar, vocals), Poppy Dodgson (vocal, drums), Zoë Zinsmeister (bass, vocals) and Polly Jessett (guitar) - bringing a greater sense of nuance and space to their music, while deploying myriad genres to maximum effect. From the righteous, elasticated rock of recent single ‘DOG’ to the syncopated post-punk and brass blasts of ‘Dance’ and on to the chamber folk ambiance of closer ‘Spring’, Baby You’re A Winner is the most authentic, realised portrait of Grandmas House to date.

The songs here navigate a precarious balancing act between sadness and catharsis, ultimately landing in a place of salvation - the product of the band’s tight-knit friendship, this album is their gift to the world, born from a period of grief and hardship but emerging from the other side with profound love and strength. It’s a testament that even when the odds are against you, anyone can be a winner.

“We wrote this album about the existential crisis of going through life,” explain the band. “It’s about love and infatuation but also about grief and loneliness. It’s emotional, powerful, sad and a good time all at once.” 

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
Baby You’re A Winner
DOG
Blue Oblivion
The Table
Hurricane
Dance

Side B:
Next Big Hit (Choo Choo)
Taxidermy
Soaked
I Miss That House
How It Is
Spring

Stoke-On-Trent’s most tuned-in and turned-out trio are releasing debut album Punch Card, which might be the avant-garde pop record of the year.

Driven by a desire for sonic collage and bolstered by lateral thinking, ‘Punch Card’ is a crafty lesson in how, with touches of masterful manipulation, the collision of opposing forces can cause sparks to fly and an irrepressible need to dance. “Our aim is to undermine anything leaning too far one way or the other. We shoot for homogeneity - if it sounds good and its component parts can't be pulled out, we’ve matched the job description,” they say of finding balance in their desire to ‘pull the rug’ musically whenever listeners least expect it.

Much like the typo in their name, now proudly worn by the band as a badge of honour, the result is an album of happy accidents that truly embody their audiences’ visceral knee-jerk reactions. The cut-out windows of an eighties protocomputer punch card that line the sleeve offer a portal into Formal Sppeedwear’s universe.

After signing with melodic in 2023, the trio’s now sold out 2024 debut EP - a self-titled, self-produced 12” sample of elastic bass arrangements, leaping guitar motifs and sparse, un-assuming percussive work - picked up notable fans at BBC 6 Music and helped to secure shows around the country with the likes of Fat Dog, Preoccupations, Warmduscher and Divorce. A legion of listeners grew, barraging Instagram DMs curious to unearth the mystery behind their idiosyncratic, off-kilter lyrics – usually a product of Beck’s phonetically-associated wordplay.

Prolific in their output, the band diligently produced Punch Card themselves with mastering from Paul D. Millar (Slug Bug). Led by a preference for sonic variety, they even discarded three tracks not belonging on the record; not because they didn’t fit - but because they did. Through their boomerang voice notes and a sense of telepathy that only college friends bonded by Neu! and Yellow Magic Orchestra could possess, they explain; “There’s definitely a subconscious level to what we do but it’s always driven by what works sonically. The real challenge becomes how to recreate it live.”

Blame those tracks which formed quickly when raw ideas and lyrics flowed from jam sessions in their Tremolo rehearsal room. Jagged, punchy ‘Indecent’ was largely improvised by the trio as a single recorded live take, and ‘The Ballad of DCB’ (avid bookworms in Stoke may have an inkling as to the meaning behind its acronym) was wrangled from a spritely brink of uncertainty after twilight tinkering powered a plethora of jangling guitar lines. Live staple ‘Wait (Hatchet Gets a New Hide) serves as collage of ideas and melodies harking back to the early days of Sppeedwear, completed on a Tascam 488 cassette recorder.

But, between joyfully jarring twists and turns, it is a rare moment of wistfulness which offers the biggest hint to the album’s wider Punch Card themes. A turning point in the recording process, finale ‘Friedrich Backs Up Nothing’ shimmers with strange atmospheres and sound-manipulated cellos; lyrically considering how history might react to the world today.

Formal Sppeedwear may look and sound something like pop, but Punch Card emerges through collision, constraint, and chance - much like the stamped out geometry that inspired its artwork.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Hit ‘n’ Run
Who Needs Spain Ball?
Indecent
Knutmo 1-5
Aardvark x2
A Concise History
Fleas

Side B
Wait (Hatchet Gets A New Hide)
The Ballad Of DCB
New Brother
Appointment

‘Massive Champion’ is the highly anticipated new album from Bristol’s Getdown Services, the follow up to cult classic debut ‘Crisps’.

An odyssey of anarchic joy, seditious wit and boundless energy, the album finds Josh Law and Ben Sadler pushing deeper into the singular world they have been building for years, while opening up new emotional and lyrical ground. Written in green rooms, on long car journeys and in the gaps between relentless touring, it stands as their boldest and most expansive statement to date, an ode to childhood, British cultural detritus and the absurd poetry of everyday life, distilling everything that has made Getdown Services one of the most exhilarating and unpredictable bands around. In the band’s words it is “about self pity and realising that maybe all of the healing your inner child stuff you hear about isn’t actually total bollocks. Musically and lyrically I think it’s about us trying to clean up our act a bit.”

New single ‘I Can’t Die Like That’ provides the second taste of the album and is the kind of instant earworm built for festival crowds. Wildly infectious, it is quintessential Getdown Services, pairing huge hooks with the band’s perceptive and poignant lyricism. As the band explain, “‘I Can’t Die Like That’ is about the feeling of simple things becoming complicated. We thought it was interesting to think about the ways in which something as straightforward as dying can be difficult. It’s also about clinging on to feelings that comfort you but aren’t necessarily healthy.” Like much of ‘Massive Champion’, it finds catharsis in contradiction, meeting often heavy subject matter with both candour and humour.

A triumph of hard work and the grassroots scene, Getdown Services jokingly coined themselves Britain’s Best Band. With ‘Massive Champion’, it feels less like a punchline and more like a statement of intent. As their audience continues to grow exponentially both at home and across the world, they look every bit on a fast track to becoming one of the country’s biggest and most vital bands. Joyous and utterly singular, ‘Massive Champion’ feels set to soundtrack the year ahead and, very likely, many more to come.

Mystery Jets return with ‘A Hole To See The Sky Through’, a conceptually rich new album that acts as the inward-facing counterpart to ‘Curve of the Earth’, shifting focus from vast external landscapes to the intimate ways we perceive and process the world. Inspired by Yoko Ono’s artwork of the same name (used with permission as the cover art) and her recent London exhibition, the record embraces the idea of finding meaning, hope, and perspective through absence, limitation, and reframing.

Mystery Jets are a highly regarded London-based indie rock band, known for their evolving, critically acclaimed albums and captivating live performances. They have been recognized with a prestigious Ivor Novello Award nomination, achieved multiple chart-reaching albums and singles, and are often noted for their distinctive songwriting and artistic longevity.

Bloc Party’s place in hearts & minds was never up for debate, but the past four years have reaffirmed that position and simultaneously ignited the a new passion with fans young & old. From touring the world with their friends Paramore to headlining a sold out Crystal Palace Park, performing songs from their seminal debut Silent Alarm through to the constant reinvention of their more recent work, before returning to Reading & Leeds last year to enormous crowds.

Now, propelled by this renewed energy and buoyed by their biggest year of touring in two decades, Bloc Party are ready to release their next album; a narrative work examining a year-long relationship in intimate and often brutal detail, realised in the studio with the legendary Trevor Horn.

TRACK LISTING

22.01.22
Coming On Strong
Love Bombs
Pigwig
Lagoon Blue
Muscleworks
Clark Kent
Worst Birthday Ever
Not Your Problem
Now We Can't Be Friends
Rotherhithe
Stories
Moving On
Eulogy

Since their beginning, breaking through as a smart, witty new force within the British guitar music landscape back in the dark days of the pandemic, Yard Act have been wrangling with the knotty complexities of the human condition.

Their Mercury Prize-nominated 2022 debut The Overload span wry, winking tales of capitalism and the strive for success, wrapped in the sort of propulsive, serrated riffs that quickly saw them labelled as post-punk’s new darlings. With its Top Five-placing 2024 follow-up Where’s My Utopia?, the band - vocalist James Smith, bassist Ryan Needham, guitarist Sam Shipstone and drummer Jay Russell - blasted both of those conceits apart, creating a musically-exploratory and diverse record that worked to unpick and examine the very notion of ambition and fulfillment; of ‘what happens next’.

The journey of Smith’s lyrics across each of their albums, Shipstone muses, has always been quite Faustian: “It’s someone who’s seeking a goal, and then makes a pact with the devil to get the goods they want, but when they get them they’re corrupted so they get the rewards but also this bitterness too.” “And how does Faust end?” questions Needham. “Oh, not well…” If this sounds like a macabre place to root the objectively excellent third album from one of the country’s most celebrated bands of the last decade, then it’s also crucial to understanding Yard Act’s newest - and best - record yet, You’re Gonna Need A Little Music. Simultaneously the most dynamic, collaborative, energised work they’ve laid to tape, but also containing some of the darkest, most cynical and truly questioning moments they’ve concocted too, it picks up their tale and examines the findings more unsparingly than ever.

It feels appropriate that, in order to interrogate these existential subjects, the writing and recording of You’re Gonna Need A Little Music involved the four musicians coming together and strengthening their own core unit more than ever. Weirdly, for a band so associated with incendiary live shows and constant touring, their third LP marks the first time that the quartet have ever made an album together, as a live band in the same room. “The first two records were both laptop records essentially,” says Smith. The Overload was written alongside Needham before the band had fully formed; its follow-up was carved out in snatches of time on tour buses and hotel rooms, amongst a relentless schedule of “slinging [all our gear] in the rehearsal space, going back home, and then a week later piling it back into a van again.”

If their last record was created like a game of Exquisite Corpse, each member taking the track and adding their part in turn (“I always thought that was a really over the top name for a piece of folded down paper…” Needham notes), then this time they laid down roots and gave themselves time. Russell kitted out their new studio in Leeds with everything they required to track the band live at the same time throughout the writing process, including an old piano passed down from Smith’s late aunt that would become integral to the process. For the first time in a long time, Yard Act were able to settle into an “uninterrupted five month period” of creativity, crafting “40 or 50 songs” and allowing themselves to follow their ideas with no external pressure. “It felt like freedom,” says Smith. “It felt like everything I’d wanted from being in a band - to be able to make enough money to be left alone.

The results speak for themselves. Recorded between Leeds and Glendale, Los Angeles with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Nine Inch Nails, Beck, St. Vincent), You’re Gonna Need A Little Music rings with the chemistry and energy of a band absolutely locked in. Each track has its own distinct character, whether in the ominous, guttural ferocity of ‘Redeemer’, the sleazy disco odyssey of its title track, the fizzing indie smarts of ‘Cherophobe Rock’ or the loose, cerebral meditations of ‘Janey Said’. It stems from a time of experimentation and exploration - ask Shipstone about “The Code” and he’ll give you a technical explanation as to why these songs are able to constantly veer into unexpected places whilst never undermining their melodic clout. The sense is of a band hitting a purple patch, where all the efforts of the last half-decade come together and create magic. “I think most bands’ best stuff comes around the 3rd or 4th album where they really outgrow their influences and become their own thing,” muses Smith as Needham chips in: “I keep saying, it’s like Blur. This is Parklife. The first album they were doing the genre-y thing; the second one was a kick against that but they didn’t really know what they were doing, and then they made Parklife, which was the perfect distillation of it all.” You’re Gonna Need A Little Music, however, is no whimsical walk through suburban England. From the opening self-analytical sprawl of ‘Empty Pledges’ - a track that begins with juddering deep breaths at the top of a skyscraper and freefalls into a torrent of thoughts about purpose, pride and the feeling of punching your way out of a prison of your own making - Yard Act’s third seeks to work through some of the most complicated facets of life.

In some ways, and on purpose, it is a step away from Smith’s venerated vignettes and character studies; a move towards something more “impressionistic” and up for interpretation. “I felt like I’d taken it to its logical extreme on ‘Blackpool Illuminations’ [on the last record], and I didn’t want to tread old ground,” he says. And yet the feeling still pours through, perhaps more than ever. There is a journey, should you want to trace it, from the fictional Isle of Balamory to the fantasy/ reality of San Francisco Bay. Tread the path with him and you’ll keep running into Janey - a mirror to Smith’s own psyche; a person but, y’know, not exactly. “I think the album is about multiple realities and how individualism has led us, in the modern world, to question if there even is a shared reality anymore because everyone just believes what they want now, this is the price we've paid for pursuing neoliberalism ultimately” Smith suggests.

The questions are deep, but the spirit of You’re Gonna Need A Little Music is boundless - not for nothing does its title point to the power of art and creativity to rescue us from the mire. ‘Thrill of The Chase’, with its snarled, frenetic climax as close to rap as Smith has ever reached, is filled with venom but you can also picture it giddily going off in the mosh pit. ‘Redeemer’ might have thrown the kitchen sink - or at least its cookware - at the situation, with Meldal-Johnsen concocting a brittle, metallic soundscape out of a day of rattling pots and pans, but the result is direct, visceral and exciting.

It’s a balancing act that culminates, as all Yard Act albums do, with a final moment of optimism in ‘Over The Barrel’: a track that travels from rinky dink bar-room piano through a euphoric indie- rock chorus and out, finally, into that sought-after ocean. Perhaps it’s less certain than Smith has been in the past. “‘Over The Barrel’ [as a saying] can have multiple meanings. The choice is yours. But,” says the frontman, “personally, I still have a bit of hope in me for how it all works out.” The destination might still be unknown, but the journey is unequivocally Yard Act’s finest yet. Maybe Faust didn’t have the ending all worked out after all.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Empty Pledges
New Beginnings
Tall Tales
Fiction
You're Gonna Need A Little Music
Cherophobe Rock

Side B
Thrill Of The Chase
Janey Said
Redeemer
Talky Talky People
Over The Barrel

The scope, variety and ambition of Ebbb’s debut album 'Shallow Hits' is clear from the off. 'Come Alive' whirs into being quietly before morphing into a sun-kissed, radiant piece of calypso-esque electronic pop; the Latin-flavoured 'Now You Know' feels destined to soundtrack sun-drenched festivals this summer; 'Shallow Hits' is as deft and detailed as it is big, bold and euphoric; while the wonky yet propulsive charge of 'Side On' sounds like a drum ‘n’ bass club and church choir combined.

A fervent eclecticism and unpredictable restlessness underpins the album. Latterly the record dives into the moody technoid textures and multi-layered harmonies that characterised their debut EP 'All At Once' - exemplified by ‘Youth’ and the closing track 'I’m Not Enough' that lands an emotional gut punch to an album that is already littered with them. However there’s a remarkable coherence and identity that underpins the album. Ebbb are exploring far and wide, deep and vast, yet they do so via an approach that remains unmistakably them.

'Shallow Hits' is an album bursting with ideas, textures, rhythms, detail and emotion. A bold and singular debut record from a group who truly do not sound like anyone else right now.

TRACK LISTING

1. Come Alive
2. Home Ground
3. Now You Know
4. Pander
5. Side On
6. Shallow Hits
7. Remedy
8. You’ve Got Me Where You Want Me
9. Moving On
10. Youth
11. I’m Not Enough

Dinked Edition Bonus 7":
Side A:
Book That You Like
Side B:
Manners

Originally released in 1990 by Happy Mondays, Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches captured the chaotic, euphoric spirit of the Madchester movement, blending indie rock, acid house rhythms and funk grooves into a sound that helped reshape British alternative music. Featuring era-defining tracks such as “Step On” and “Kinky Afro,” the record became both a commercial breakthrough and a cultural snapshot of a generation fuelled by dance culture and Northern nightlife.

More than three decades later, its grooves, attitude and genre-blurring production still resonate strongly with contemporary audiences, influencing modern indie and electronic artists alike.

TRACK LISTING

LP Tracklisting:
Side One
A1. Kinky Afro
A2. God's Cop
A3. Donovan
A4. Grandbag's Funeral
A5. Loose Fit
Side Two
B1. Dennis And Lois
B2. Bob's Yer Uncle
B3. Step On
B4. Holiday
B5. Harmony

2CD Tracklisting:
Disc One - Album Remastered
1. Kinky Afro
2. God's Cop
3. Donovan
4. Grandbag's Funeral
5. Loose Fit
6. Dennis And Lois
7. Bob's Yer Uncle
8. Step On
9. Holiday
10. Harmony
Disc Two - Remixes Remastered
1. Hallelujah (Club Mix)
2. Rave On (Club Mix)
3. W.F.L. (Think About The Future Mix)
4. Step On (Stuff It In Mix)
5. Kinky Groovy Afro Remix (12")
6. Loose Fit (Perfecto 12" Mix)
7. Tokoloshe Man
8. Hallelujah (Daniel Avery Edit)
9. Loose Fit (Shadow Child Edit)
10. Gods Cop (Anna Prior Edit)
11. Step On (Paul Oakenfold Edit)
12. Hallelujah (Ewan Pearson Remix)

5LP Box Set Tracklisting:
Side One - Album Remastered
A1. Kinky Afro
A2. God's Cop
A3. Donovan
A4. Grandbag's Funeral
A5. Loose Fit
Side Two - Album Remastered
B1. Dennis And Lois
B2. Bob's Yer Uncle
B3. Step On
B4. Holiday
B5. Harmony
Side Three - Madchester - Rave On Remastered
C1. Hallelujah
C2. Holy Ghost
C3. Clap Your Hands
C4. Rave On
Side Four - Hallelujah Remastered
D1. Hallelujah (MacColl Mix)
D2. Hallelujah (Club Mix)
D3. Rave On (Club Mix)
D4. W.F.L. (Think About The Future Mix)
Side Five - Baby Bighead Bootleg Remastered
E1. Hallelujah (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
E2. Donovan (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
E3. Kinky Afro (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Side Six - Baby Bighead Bootleg Remastered
F1. Clap Your Hands (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
F2. Loose Fit (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
F3. Holiday (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
F5. Rave On (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Side Seven - Baby Bighead Bootleg Remastered
G1. E (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
G2. Tokoloshe Man (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
G3. Dennis And Lois (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Side Eight - Baby Bighead Bootleg Remastered
H1. God's Cop (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
H2. Step On (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
H3. Bobs Yer Uncle (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Side Nine - Remixes Remastered
I1. Step On (Stuff It In Mix)
I2. Kinky Groovy Afro Remix (12")
I3. Loose Fit (Perfecto 12" Mix)
I4. Tokoloshe Man
Side Ten - Remixes Remastered
J1. Hallelujah (Daniel Avery Edit)
J2. Loose Fit (Shadow Child Edit)
J3. Gods Cop (Anna Prior Edit)
J4. Step On (Paul Oakenfold Edit)
J5. Hallelujah (Ewan Pearson Remix)

4CD Bookset Tracklisting:
Disc One - Album Remastered
1. Kinky Afro
2. God's Cop
3. Donovan
4. Grandbag's Funeral
5. Loose Fit
6. Dennis And Lois
7. Bob's Yer Uncle
8. Step On
9. Holiday
10. Harmony
Disc Two - Madchester - Rave On - Hallelujah Remastered
1. Hallelujah
2. Holy Ghost
3. Clap Your Hands
4. Rave On
5. Hallelujah (MacColl Mix)
6. Hallelujah (Club Mix)
7. Rave On (Club Mix)
8. W.F.L. (Think About The Future Mix)
Disc Three - Baby Bighead Bootleg Remastered
1. Hallelujah (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
2. Donovan (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
3. Kinky Afro (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
4. Clap Your Hands (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
5. Loose Fit (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
6. Holiday (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
7. Rave On (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
8. E (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
9. Tokoloshe Man (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
10. Dennis And Lois (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
11. God's Cop (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
12. Step On (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
13. Bobs Yer Uncle (Live at Elland Road, 1991)
Disc Four - Remixes Remastered
1. Step On (Stuff It In Mix)
2. Kinky Groovy Afro Remix (12")
3. Loose Fit (Perfecto 12" Mix)
4. Tokoloshe Man
5. Hallelujah (Daniel Avery Edit)
6. Loose Fit (Shadow Child Edit)
7. Gods Cop (Anna Prior Edit)
8. Step On (Paul Oakenfold Edit)
9. Hallelujah (Ewan Pearson Remix)

Manchester-born poet, writer, and producer Antony Szmierek has announced the release of his second album, Decoding Birdsong. Just eighteen months after his critically acclaimed debut, Szmierek returns with a new body of work that signals a clear evolution in both sound and scope. Rooted in his personal touchstones within electronic music, the album pairs expansive, immersive production with his trademark razor-sharp lyricism.

Where his debut had been a solo endeavour, Decoding Birdsong brims with collaboration, including Australia’s Pretty Girl, London band Los Bitchos, and Bristol producer 1-800 GIRLS, as well as Imogen and the Knife and indie pop star Ellur. Speaking about the new record, Antony explains “Decoding Birdsong is about choosing to believe in something. Coincidence as a religion. Making your own luck in the face of loneliness and doubt. The smallest things can feel seminal, seismic and life affirming if you just choose to lean in, but it also asks if this is a dangerous way to live. What happens when your numbers come in? What are the consequences of luck? Should you listen to the birds, or are you only ever going to hear what you want to hear? To help us explore this: a heron, dice, a plummeting airplane, the late-night TV show Aussie Gold Hunters and a fibreglass replica of Godzilla.”

Decoding Birdsong follows the wild success of his debut album, 2025’s Service Station at the End of the Universe, which launched Antony into a whirlwind of Glastonbury, Jools Holland, and repeat BBC airplay. He’s sold out venues across the UK and Europe, and in February 2026 performed to 20,000 while closing Solomun’s Alexandra Palace shows. The former English teacher had been working at a college for special needs students when his blend of spoken word and dance music started taking off, earning him accolades such as 6Music’s Artist of the Year in 2023 following his Poems To Dance To EP, and frequent comparisons to Mike Skinner, Jarvis Cocker and John Cooper Clarke.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1. Chalk
2. The Heron
3. Bookie’s Favourite (ft. Ellur)
4. Godzilla Hotel (ft. 1-800 Girls)
5. Seminal
6. Flight Simulator (ft. Imogen and the Knife)

Side B:
1. Dave’s Angling Superstore (ft. MAX RAD)
2. The First Five Minutes Of Magnolia (ft. Pretty Girl)
3. The Same Heron Again
4. Commune
5. You’re Not Supposed To Do This Forever
6. Decoding Birdsong
7. Aussie Gold Hunters

DINKED EDITION 7” TRACKLISTING:
Side A:
Three Crystals
Side B:
Seminal - Los Bitchos Remix

Five-piece 1000 Rabbits (FKA Rabbitfoot) release their debut EP Are we friends yet?, a six-track release that captures the band’s first two years in motion. Featuring recent singles “Virgin Soil” and “Rubik’s Cube”, the EP arrives via YOUNG as a snapshot of a band defining themselves in real time.

Written across living rooms, rehearsal spaces, and stages over the course of two years, Are we friends yet? captures a formative chapter: six tracks shaped by time, space, and the energy of the people in the room. Some tracks date back to their earliest days, others are more recent, but together they form a vivid introduction to the band’s world. Each track has been molded through live performance, evolving night after night.

The EP’s title - Are we friends yet? - comes from a defining moment that has emerged in their live show; a question posed by River during the closing track “Spring Cleaning”, the final song of both the record and every set they play. It’s a moment that captures both the warmth and vulnerability at the heart of the band.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
White Horse
Virgin Soil
Bear Hunt

Side B
Cinema Aisle
Rubik’s Cube
Spring Cleaning

The legendary artist and producer Tricky today announces his new album, Different When It’s Silent, out 17 July 2026 via False Idols.

His 15th studio album and first full-length release under his own name in six years, Different When It’s Silent is a direct, focused record that reconnects with the distinctive sonic language that has defined Tricky’s work since his groundbreaking 1995 debut, Maxinquaye.

Following a premiere by Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music, the album’s first single, “Out Of Place” arrives as a powerful closing moment for the record. Featuring longtime collaborator Marta, the track pairs Marta’s restrained vocal with Tricky’s urgent, almost punk-like delivery. The contrast between the two creates a dynamic finale that captures the album’s stripped back intensity. Originally written for Marta’s own album, Tricky ultimately reclaimed “Out Of Place” for Different When It’s Silent.

Different When It’s Silent follows a prolific period of activity. Since 2020’s Fall to Pieces, Tricky has released music under several different guises, including the collaborative project Lonely Guest, the Fifteen Days project with producer Mike Theis under the name Theis Thaws, and last year’s joint record Out The Way with Marta, al via his own label, False Idols. Yet returning to an album under his own name took on a different shape.

“In my mind it was another side project” he explains. But after hearing the material, his manager Alan McGee felt the songs clearly belonged to a Tricky record.

Recorded between Tricky’s home in France and sessions in Bristol, the album draws strongly on the musical community that shaped him. Central to its sound is the voice of Bristol singer Mitch Sanders, whose soulful falsetto runs through much of the record. Their connection reflects a shared musical background and an instinctive chemistry that carries through the performances.

Across fourteen tracks, Tricky blends skeletal blues, brooding electronics, distorted guitars and stark hip-hop rhythms into a sound that feels both stripped-back and expansive. The album moves fluidly across styles while maintaining the restless experimentation that has defined his work for more than three decades.

“I just love making music” Tricky says. “I’m grateful I’ve had the chance to live this life and keep creating.”

With Different When It’s Silent, Tricky delivers one of the most focused and powerful records of his career - a reminder that artists who build their own language never fall out of time.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Still See Me There Ft. Mitch Sanders
A2. I'M Yours Ft. Mitch Sanders
A3. Be Still In The Pain Ft. Mitch Sanders & Run Red Rambo
A4. I Tried Ft. Mitch Sanders
A5. So Cold Ft. Mitch Sanders
A6. Paris Maybe Ft. Mitch Sanders
A7. Cannon Fodder Ft. Mitch Sanders
B1. Because I Don’T Know Ft. Mitch Sanders
B2. Marinade Ft. Mitch Sanders
B3. Radana Ft. Mitch Sanders & Radana
B4. Piano Ft. Mitch Sanders
B5. Frontier Town
B6. Hengrove Blues Ft. Mitch Sanders
B7. Out Of Place Ft. Marta 

For nearly a decade, Lucia has been carving out her place as an artist in the UK indie scene. Her latest record, Picking Petals, is the culmination of that hard graft and bold vision — an album rooted in her Scottish upbringing and shaped by the creative community she has built around her in Glasgow and beyond, featuring collaborations with Lauren Mayberry of CHVRCHES and Abigail Morris of The Last Dinner Party.

Lucia’s debut, Burning Castles, was streamlined and statuesque, built on metronomic beats and synth-led pop. The intention behind Picking Petals sharpened into focus in the face of this. This time, it was crucial to capture the essence of Lucia & The Best Boys’ live shows— loud and electric. In recent years, Fairfull has shared bills with a new wave of women in alternative music: joining Wolf Alice on their Blue Weekend tour in 2022 and, more recently, opening for the aforementioned The Last Dinner Party. In summer 2024, she toured alongside fellow Scottish icon Shirley Manson on the UK and European leg of Garbage’s live shows.

The Scottish synchronicity feels poignant. This rich and historical landscape is where Picking Petals came to be, Lucia heading north to write in weather-beaten bothies alongside the band or in solitude. Likewise, the songwriter was insistent that acclaimed alt-pop producer Yves Rothman experience her stomping ground rather than sun-drenched LA, hunkering down in Mogwai’s Castle of Doom studios, a Glasgow townhouse transformed into a citadel of sound. For some people, Picking Petals will be a coming-of-age album. For Lucia & The Best Boys, it’s just coming home.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Back Inside My Heart
2. Lonely Girl
3. Wolf Cry
4. Better For The Worse
5. You Look Like Somebody In Love

Side B
6. Picking Petals
7. Pleasure And A Prayer
8. Forgot The Arrow
9. Big Romance
10. Ephemeral

JJerome87 is the solo moniker of British songwriter Joe Newman, musician and frontman of the critically acclaimed Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello-winning band, alt-J. Recorded in LA alongside producer Carlos De La Gaza, a dedicated group of session musicians and a trio of female vocalists, The Canyon is a collection of alt-J (esque) songs with a Californian, Motown, Blues and Gospel energy.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Mr. Alligator
Green Velvet
Quaaludes
Interlude
Juicy
Walkaway Music

Side B
Brush Me Like A Horse
Two Hearts
Track And Field
Last Man Alive
Pennine

Indie-rock group The Temper Trap make a triumphant return with 'Sungazer', a decade on from their last album. An explosive, anthemic new record that looks to the future as much as embodying their wildly successful past. Including singles 'Giving Up Air', 'Lucky Dimes' and 'Into The Wild', 'Sungazer' sees a new era of The Temper Trap unfurl. The past few years have seen the band return to live stages around the world, huge dance remixes of their hit 'Sweet Disposition' by John Summit, Lost Frequencies and BUNT., and a long-awaited official release of Mac Miller bootleg 'Love Lost'.

TRACK LISTING

1. Lucky Dimes
2. Into The Wild
3. These Arms
4. Bird on a Wire
5. Giving Up Air
6. Sungazer
7. Lifeline
8. Runaways
9. Halfway
10. Dystopia Radio
11. Kuru

In the technical sense, every previous album by the radiant and heavy French trio SLIFT has been a fantasia—a composite of genres and forms that allowed the band to improvise, to jam on themes until they seemed to spiral together into space. Their acclaimed third album, 2024’s 'Ilion', was a sci-fi story built with 10-to13-minute exploratory escapades, often starting with doom metal or stoner rock before spinning freely into glorious instrumental oblivion. But, in a bit of intentional irony, SLIFT’s fourth album is actually called 'Fantasia'. It’s their leanest and most direct record to date. It is also their most riveting album yet, a pointed saga about overcoming international upheaval delivered by a band bearing down, not wasting a single second in the process.

Though only Jean and bassist Rémi Fossat are related, SLIFT is essentially a band of brothers. They’ve been friends with drummer Canek Flores since high school, and 2026 marks a decade together in this trio. They rehearse with religious regularity in a basement in the countryside near Toulouse, inside the jam room where they’ve long indulged their propensity for longform wonder. But they built the songs of 'Fantasia' differently. Jean started many of the songs by himself, then quickly brought them to basement rehearsals with a clear and concise idea of how he imagined them taking shape. By the time they crossed France’s northern border into Belgium to record in the enormous live room at Daft Studios, they had a tight set of lean, agile, and punchy songs.

The band’s vast influences are evident: the album evokes Clutch getting wild, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov, Pink Floyd, and 'Master of Reality'-era Sabbath. And the sonic tapestry is aided by the skillful mixing of Kurt Ballou (Converge, Cave In, High on Fire). The songs aren’t lacking the complexity or intensity that have made SLIFT a rising star in heavy music; they’ve simply found new ways to weave the complexities of their past inside every piece, like a tapestry that reveals a new layer every time you look. In doing so, they offer an affirming and urgent message: Together, we can still change the times in which we live.

It is dreadfully easy these days to feel powerless. SLIFT reckons directly with the modern onslaught of cruelty and absurdity on 'Fantasia', whether that’s not caring about our home planet or one another. But these eight songs are about trusting in some hidden power for fighting back, for believing in a world where something we cannot yet articulate or define offers not just a way to disrupt the status quo but perhaps to destroy it completely. SLIFT is loud, heavy, and aggressive inside these anthems. They’re preparing for a battle they think we can still win.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A roaring wave of pummeling percussion, rolling bass and snappy drums beneath the perfectly pitched roar of vocalist Jean Fossat. Taut, burning leads and psychedelic mathy guitar licks to boot. Ace.

TRACK LISTING

1. Fantasia
2. Corrupted Sky
3. The Village
4. A Storm of Wings
5. Orbis Tertius
6. Waiting Man
7. The Day of Execution
8. Secret Mirror

First released in 1986 on Geoff Travis’ ‘Blue Guitar’ label, Happy Head is the debut album from Wolverhampton’s The Mighty Lemon Drops. Produced by Stephen Street, fresh from his work with The Smiths, the record shimmers with ringing guitars and a vibrant blend of psychedelia and post-punk energy.

Includes the singles ’The Other Side Of You’ and ‘My Biggest Thrill’, alongside the title track ‘Happy Head’ - a song which first appeared on C86 - NME’s now iconic compilation that helped define a generation of indie guitar music.

The album also features a re-recorded version of ‘Like An Angel’, the band’s breakthrough independent single.

Newly remastered from the original tapes by Phil Kinrade at AIR Mastering to mark the album’s 40th anniversary. Pressed on 140g black and red marbled vinyl, accompanied by a bonus black 7” featuring the early ‘Dreamworld’ versions of ‘Something Happens’ and ‘Now She’s Gone’. Assembled with the assistance of the band who have provided a new introductory sleeve note. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
The Other Side Of You
My Biggest Thrill
All The Way
Hypnotised
Like An Angel
Behind Your Back

Side B
Happy Head
Pass You By
Take Me Up
On My Mind
Something Happens
Turn Me Round

Bonus 7"
Something Happens (Dreamworld Version)
Now She’s Gone (Dreamworld Version)

Hailing from Darlington, Pollyfromthedirt creates raw, rough-edged alternative music steeped in grit, emotion, and unfiltered truth. Blending jagged guitar work with lo-fi textures and stark lyricism, their sound is as uncompromising as it is evocative. At the heart of Pollyfromthedirt’s music lies a deep sense of place and memory – songs that dig into the bones of English nostalgia, suburban unease, and the beauty found in broken things.

Distinctly British in both name and spirit, Pollyfromthedirt – a playful nod to his hometown’s affectionate nickname, The Dirt, and his mum Polly – is an artist who wears his roots on his sleeve.

If folk and lo-fi punk share any kind of resemblance - strained balladry, a DIY ethos and bewildering sparse arrangements - then an act like Pollyfromthedirt, fluent in both mocking dry wit and heavier techniques, is perfectly poised to disrupt them. His playfully defiant name thumbs its nose at the local archetype of a true northerner. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
1. Mucky town
2. Kalm
3. Theres no such thing as england
4. Cherry seeds
5. Darlos cowboys
6. A weekend in majorca

Side B:
1. When england comes
2. Blow my lid
3. Mucky town2
4. Sounds like hell
5. Dont shoot now
6. The dirt

The Indigenous fronted punk band from Denver CO unleash their third album ‘Wagon Burner’. Dead Pioneers is rooted in a 2020 piece called The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy, a deeply personal work that dealt with vocalist Gregg Deal’s cultural upbringing. Following an embryonic performance of the piece, Deal secured a grant to expand it to include music created especially for the work. “The idea was to mix spoken-word with punk music” explains Deal, who hooked up with drummer Shane Zweygardt and guitarist Abe Brennan during lockdown and began kicking the concept around.

But what became Dead Pioneers didn’t truly take shape until Deal connected with bassist Lee Tesche, who you may know from righteous Atlantan post-punks Algiers. Unlikely as it sounds, a conversation between Tesche and Deal about Sleaford Mods evolved into a creative connection that’s now three albums deep; the arrival of guitarist Joshua Rivera made the quintet quorate. “Josh is Mexican-American,” says Deal. “He is also inherently indigenous, under a different set of circumstances within colonialism. But I consider him to be my indigenous brother. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how all of this fits together.”

A miraculous, natural chemistry made this supposed one-off project an actual band almost as soon as they cut what became their 2023 self-titled debut album (“We approached it like I approach my visual art: execute quickly, first thought is best thought,” Deal says), but they didn’t necessarily take it seriously until, unexpectedly, the outside world did. “I was like, we’ve made this record – what should I do with it? Put it online?” Deal remembers. The response was vigorously positive, and soon came demands to commit this noise to vinyl. A first thousand-copy pressing sold out in minutes. “So then we pressed another thousand,” he adds, still marvelling at it all. “And then they were gone, too.”

What followed was “a series of strange accidents” that led to the group signing to Hassle, befriending Jello Biafra and touring with kindred spirits like Pennywise, Propaghandi, even Pearl Jam. “Punk-rock had made everything seem so accessible when I was a kid,” says Deal. “Like, simply having the balls to get up on stage and stage dive and then be carried off by people that become your best friends once they get your feet back on the ground.” Now, punk-rock was reaching out its hands to Dead Pioneers and pulling them onto larger and larger stages. The group returned that favour by simply getting better and better: their second album, 2025’s PO$T AMERICAN, was sharper, angrier, funnier than the debut, a riot riveted with punch-a-Nazi thrills.

And now, Wagon Burner, their fearsome third album. Described by Deal as “more collaborative”, it’s a heavier, harder but also more accessible set, vicious hooks scattered among the punk-rock melee and guest appearances by kindred spirits Cheap Perfume (on the righteous ‘Nazi Teeth’), The Interrupters (on the shout-a-long anthem ‘Never Alone’) and, bringing it back to the group’s beginnings, Sleaford Mods (on the searing slow-burn of ‘The Worst Among Us’). The world might be darkening by the day, but Dead Pioneers are rising to that miserable occasion, casting their empowering light into the gloom.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Dead Presidents
Nazi Teeth (feat. Cheap Perfume)
A Message From Mr. Bell
No Kings
Animals The Roam The Earth
Never Alone (feat. The Interrupters)
The Worst Among Us (feat. Sleaford Mods)

Side B
1. Seeing Red
2. Circle Jerk The Wagons
3. Zealots
4. Nobody
5. LFG

Today, South London outfit Ain’t return with their first new music of 2026. The propulsive new track “Grazer” comes on the heels of an enviable last year for the five-piece, with highlights that include a spot in the latest NME 100 list, showcase performances at The Great Escape’s First Fifty for NOTION, DORK 100 (alongside Lime Garden), and The Line Of Best Fit’s Five Day Forecast. All of this is on top of a packed-out UK tour with THUS LOVE and shows with the likes of The Belair Lip Bombs, The Hold Steady, Thistle, Sunflower Bean, and a sold-out headline London date.

“Grazer” also follows an immaculate run of five singles which have seen the band deliver on all the promise of their early word-of-mouth live reputation, earning widespread support that includes a digital cover with Dork, and props from the likes of Stereogum, Consequence, Under The Radar, NME, CLASH, DIY, The Line Of Best Fit, Paste, and So Young, as well as radio play from BBC Radio 6 Music, Radio X, Apple Music 1 and more. These singles, alongside “Grazer”, will now form a six track EP titled How They Faked The Moon Landing. The one-stop introductory release will be landing on 12” vinyl on 22nd May via Fear Of Missing Out Records, as one of DINKED’s Early Doors Editions.

Recorded with Ali Chant (Dry Cleaning, Yard Act, Sorry), the sub-3-minute new single epitomises everything that has brought Ain’t to this point. It’s full of warm, slurring guitar lines, hooky vocal harmonies, subtly intricate drumming, fluid bass, and contemplative lyrics. In keeping with their earlier material there are knowing nods to idiosyncratic guitar music and 90s slacker indie with hints of shoegaze, Midwest rock, and lo-fi, atmospheric dream pop.

How They Faked The Moon Landing rounds off an incendiary start for Ain’t, start being the operative word. With more music planned for 2026 and a slew of headline dates and festival appearances at 2000trees, The Great Escape, Ritual Union, and more, the new single and EP act less as a rounding off and more as a primer for what’s yet to come.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Airy, melodic grunge-adjacent indie with beautifully harmonised vocals (they particularly remind me of Joanna Gruesome) and huge, Smashing Pumpkins fuzz and breakdowns. Wonderfully arty but beautifully rendered psychedelic grunge pop.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Long Short Round
Jude
Teething

Side B
Oar
Grazer
Pirouette

Death Cab for Cutie is one of the definitive indie-rock bands of the century.

After twenty-odd years in the major label system, the band returned to their indie roots and signed with ANTI- Records and they're back with their brand-new eleventh album. I Built You A Tower is the sound of loss, compartmentalization, and then grief bursting out from the seams. It's also the sound of the growth that comes after falling apart, of acknowledging pain without letting it destroy you. "I see the tower existing on your emotional horizon," Ben Gibbard states. "You don't always have to look at what's inside it, but it's a reminder that it happened. You know it's there. You have to face it."

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brand new, vigorously energetic slice of DCFC's trademark poppy indie, wrapped in the freedom of small-label release and unhindered by expectation. The resulting album is gloriously chameleonic and in parts, emotionally taxing. In the end though, if you're a fan of DCFC, you'll love this and if you're not already then this might be time!

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Full Of Stars
2. Punching The Flowers
3. Pep Talk
4. I Built You A Tower (a)
5. Envy The Birds
6. Stone Over Water

Side B
1. How Heavenly A State
2. Trap Door
3. Riptides
4. The Flavor Of Metal
5. I Built You A Tower (b)

Drawn to the darker nuances of human experience, Night Swimming craft vivid, cinematic soundscapes that blur the lines between dream-pop and indie rock. Driven by a love of film, the Bath-based five-piece invite listeners to visualise and indulge their imaginations, pairing atmosphere and texture with intimate emotional honesty.

Night Swimming's influences span Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Radiohead and Slowdive, through to contemporary touchpoints like Wolf Alice, Daughter, Just Mustard and Warpaint - artists whose sensory depth and emotional clarity continue to shape the band's evolving sound.

Across five Summer days in August 2025, producer Peter Miles recorded the EP tracks live to tape at Middlefarm Studios in Devon. The surrounding moors provided a haunting backdrop, enveloping the creative process and setting the tone for 'Melting, Sometimes Bleeding'.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Nothing Safe Is Technicolour
Submarine
Poison Berry

Side B
Hope And Wavering
Dark Clouds

Mabe Fratti is a Guatemalan cellist, vocalist, and composer based in Mexico City, celebrated for her experimental yet deeply melodic work. Blending cello, voice, synthesizers, and electroacoustic textures, she builds songs that move between improvisation, ambient soundscapes, and off-kilter pop forms. Emerging from Mexico City’s improvisational and experimental scene, she has become a key voice in contemporary avant-pop

Bill Orcutt is an American guitarist and composer known for his raw, highly individual approach to improvisation. A co-founder of the 1990s noise-rock duo Harry Pussy, he helped shape a fiercely abrasive aesthetic that drew from no wave, hardcore punk, and free jazz. Often playing a four-string guitar in unconventional tunings, he combines shards of melody, sudden silences, and surging rhythmic bursts, creating music that feels both primitive and structurally intricate. In parallel with his work as a guitarist, he runs the Palilalia and Fake Estates imprints and develops his own audio software, continuing to blur lines between avant-garde experimentation, song form, and DIY practice.

Almost Waking
I had known about Bill’s music for a while: since his 2017 release under his own name. I connected a lot with his music and I had no idea that years later we would be collaborating! It was a total surprise that we started chatting on the internet of collaborating! — we bounced ideas back and forth, all starting with a series of guitar solo stuff that Bill sent me. I had a great time with the pieces and in some of them had the honor to collaborate with I. La Catolica in the studio here in Mexico as well where we were trying to decipher the harmonic possibilities of Bill’s ideas and very carefully develop some good melodies that followed correctly the guitar. The vocal melodies followed also the same principle of trying to get tight with Bill’s iniciatives. The idea was to leave a lot of space but in only one of the tracks I just went on with the idea of harmonizing shamelessly the vocals. The album ended up having this nostalgic vibe to it. I am so happy on how it turned out and grateful with the crazy coincidence that made it happen!

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Breathy, avant chamber classical with free-wheeling psychedelic guitar and constantly evolving key changes, resulting in something that's as organic as it is surprising. Wonderfully deep, emotionally wrought experimental sounds, RIYL Constellation Records, John Zorn etc.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Almost Waking
El Inicio Es Cuestión De Suerte
Forced & Forced & Forced
Arise From Graves And Aspire

Side B
The Heaven Of Our Misery
Steps Of The Sun
Todo Puede Ser Error
A Rural Pen

Frankie Archer has exploded onto the electro folk scene with music that transcends stereotypes. Frankie has been featured on ‘Later... With Jools Holland’ and championed by tastemakers at BBC Radio 2 and BBC 6 Music. Following the release of her debut EP ‘Never So Red’ (November, 2023), she has supported the likes of The Futureheads and The Last Dinner Party on tour. On 'The Dance Of Death', Archer channels these experiences and reconstructs some of the oldest songs in the English canon with fractured, future-facing production. Working from archival ballads of obsession, devotion and loss, she warps fiddle lines, processes her own vocals and drives the material with pulsing drum machines and colourful synth arrangements.

Co-produced with Guy Massey (Kylie Minogue, Spiritualized, Richard Hawley), the record expands English folk into something immersive and modern. Influenced by the work of Little Dragon, Hannah Peel, Rosalía, Björk and Bat for Lashes, Archer approaches folk as a producer first. Inspired by the medieval Danse Macabre, 'The Dance Of Death' is, in Archer’s words, “a collection of nu-ancient trad bangers” - stark narratives of mortality and longing rebuilt through meticulous studio experimentation.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A hugely inventive clash of traditional folk and gothic danse macabre flamboyancy, wrapped in beguiling production and off-kilter rhythmic pacing. A brilliantly mad and uncompromisingly hefty electrifying of classic folksong.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Death And The Maiden
2. The Dance Of Death
3. The Outlandish Knight
4. In Brunton Town
Side B
5. The Unquiet Grave
6. The Demon Lover
7. Young Edwin Of The Lowlands Low
8. Oxford City
9. The Lover’s Ghost

Following an illustrious stint as founding member of Mercury Music Prize nominated The Comet Is Coming, and also Soccer96, the producer and synthesist Danalogue heralds a new chapter, with his debut solo album Teleportations. His music has been supported by Mike D from The Beastie Boys and Thom Yorke, has been A-listed on BBC6 Music, where he has performed sessions for Mary Anne Hobbs, Tom Ravenscroft, Gilles Peterson and Steve Lamacq. His tracks have featured on numerous TV shows such as I May Destroy You, Black Ops and Utopia. He recently wrote his first video game soundtrack for C Smash VRS on Playstation, his work featuring alongside UNKLE and Ken Ishii. As an integral part of the legendary East London studio/venue/community Total Refreshment Centre, Danalogue has produced/mixed records for Snapped Ankles, Joshua Idehen and Rozi Plain, and collaborated on albums with Alabaster DePlume, and Sarathy Korwar.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Awakening On The Planet
Mother Of Mars
Far Beyond The Sun
Moebius Triptych
You Are On The Right Track 

Side B
Theta Wave Convergence
Arrival At Rho Ophiuchi
Fallen Out Of Phase
Onto The Next Dimension
Earth Remembrance Day

The epitome of a modern artist, Jana Bahrich does most things herself, no matter how painstaking - writing, producing, directing, often hand painting t-shirts the day of shows when the band have run out of merch. This has helped give her band Francis of Delirium a unique identity, with her rock confessionals breathing a new life in to the genre and her paintings creating a striking design aesthetic.

Released as she was finishing high school, 2020’s single 'Quit Fucking Around’ was a great introduction and it remains one of her most enduring songs. Shortly after it’s release, she signed to artist-first indie Dalliance Recordings (Gia Margaret, HighSchool, lilo) and three EPs - 'All Change' (2020), 'Wading' (2021), 'The Funhouse' (2022) and a striking debut album - 'Lighthouse' (2024) - on and Jana has Francis of Delirium flying.

While the EP’s fizzed with promise, her debut album 'Lighthouse' landed its punches. Seeking a more vulnerable and open sonic palette, she wove in pop elements to create anthems that celebrated heartbreak and love. Lead singles ‘Real Love’ and ‘First Touch’ were the first tracks she made with an outsider - working with GRAMMY winning producer Catherine Marks (boygenius, The Killers, Wolf Alice) - while the rest of the album was produced by Jana herself and day one collaborator Chris Hewett. 

Live, Francis of Delirium are Jana (guitar and vocals), Jeff Hennico (bass) and Denis Schumacher (drums). Together, their brilliant quiet-loud dynamic and tight interplay only elevate her songs and over the last 5 years, they’ve toured across Europe and North America, playing headline shows, festivals and tours with the likes of Blondshell, Briston Maroney, The Districts, Horsegirl and Soccer Mommy. They’ve also supported The 1975, Alanis Morissette, DIIV and Wolf Alice.

Last summer saw a memorable UK tour with Bôa, the 90s band resurrected by a huge TikTok moment for their track ‘Duvet’. There was a real sense of excitement for these shows with young crowds snaking outside every venue hours before doors and bringing the sort of energy Jana thrives on, she road tested new material to an overwhelmingly positive response, giving her the impetus to go and finish album two.

An artist who seeks to connect with her listener on a deeper level, it’s no surprise then that she’s made hope and inner strength central themes on her new album, 'Run, Run Pure Beauty'. Jana says the title track is “an imagining of the world after it has been destroyed by humans and technology. Thrashing against what humans have left behind, ultimately the pure beauty of nature wins out.” Wanting to bring different perspectives into her songwriting with this record - informed by both her travels and the tumultuous times we find ourselves in - she’s also brought about a progression in her sound with these new songs somehow sounding larger, with undeniable harmonies and more orchestration.

Featuring the singles ‘Little Black Dress’ and ‘It’s a Beautiful Life’, 'Run, Run Pure Beauty' serves as an excavation of hope in bleak times. Produced by Jana and Chris, and mixed by Nicolas Vernhes (Deerhunter, Dirty Projectors, Silver Jews, Wild Nothing), its eleven songs of discovery, despair and perseverance ultimately serve as a mirror on its creator and is a brilliant next installment in the Francis of Delirium arc.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There's a strong sense of fist-waving Springsteen-adjacent country-rock here, but it never feels like Frances Of Delerium puts the melody above the nuance behind the pieces, with roaring rock offset with tender balladry and shimmering echoic acoustic guitar, resulting in an end product that is as capable as it is revelatory. A beautifully developing journey.

TRACK LISTING

1. Aliens
2. Out Tonight
3. Run, Run Pure Beauty
4. Higher
5. Damned
6. Little Black Dress
7. Sucker Punch
8. Open Up Your Mouth To Love
9. Requiem For A Dying Day
10. Modern Madonna
11. It’s A Beautiful Life

Recorded in the aftermath of Strawberry Switchblade's break up, the original "Sunflower Demos" included songs intended for the unrealised 2nd album. These songs posit an alternative future where McDowall pursued a Pop career instead of becoming an underground icon.

"In McDowall’s world, cake and chaos go hand in hand. She’s the witch at the door of the gingerbread house, beckoning you inside."
- Pitchfork

"One wonders what would have happened had these delirious songs made it to mainstream radio airplay. The exquisite nature of this slices of dappled pop genius is a joy to behold."
-The Quietus

Rose McDowall's Cut With The Cake Knife was originally reissued in 2015 by Night School Records and Sacred Bones. Since then, Rose McDowall and her previous band Strawberry Switchblade have only grown in cult status. Following a discovery by a generation of young, disaffected kids on social media of Strawberry Switchblade and McDowall's succeeding band Sorrow, Night School Records has remastered Cut With The Cake Knife and presents the album with a reimagined artwork that more closely recreates the original hand-made CD produced by McDowall.

Cut The With The Cake Knife was recorded by Rose McDowall in 1988/89 following the break up of her group Strawberry Switchblade. Produced with the aid of several musicians in several studios, the album features songs written for the fabled second Strawberry Switchblade album. More importantly perhaps it showcases the honest, direct and life-affirming songs of one of the greatest unsung songwriters of the modern pop era at a tumultuous time in her career.

Tibet opens the set and could be one of the best pop songs you’ve never heard. The innate sadness of the songs’ content – the loss of a friendship, impending sorrow – is heightened to heart-melting level by McDowall’s pop nous and melodic sensibility. Choruses and hooks are everywhere on Cake Knife, from the outsider take on stadium 80s pop in Wings Of Heaven to the spiraling, ecstatic So Vicious, a glorious anthem that highlights the human fragility in McDowall’s vocal performance, an instrument that has never lost the naïve purity it first exemplified in Strawberry Switchblade’s early 80s recordings. The centerpiece of the album, the title-track, is the greatest Switchblade pop chart hit that never was. Like the veiled melancholy of her former group’s hits, Cut With The Cake Knife hints at a darkness beneath the gloss, a darkness that saw McDowall delve into more esoteric territory with her subsequent recordings and collaborations. Cut With The Cake Knife serves as the bridge between the pop music McDowall had been making with her friends Jill Bryson, Lawrence from Felt and Primal Scream to what became a more extreme, deep sound informed by neo-folk and post industrial music.

Rose McDowall’s role in the canon has always been one of an outsider. Beginning in Glasgow’s East End in the avant proto-noise group The Poems, achieving fame briefly in the 80s and then disappearing into counter-cultural folklore, the emphasis in the internet-age has been skewed towards her image and cultural significance. Unseen to many, her solo work, her groups Sorrow and Spell and her collaborations with a whole host of underground luminaries have still touched lives. As McDowall elucidates: “They're real sad songs, about real life. I've had people come up to me to say I'd connected with them and helped them. I remember a gig in America when we made a whole room cry. It was bizarre. A couple at the front of the stage started crying and then these two boys beside and suddenly everyone was crying. And I thought, "that's power."

Night School’s issue of Cut With The Cake Knife includes unpublished photographs, extensive sleeve notes from Rose McDowall and 2 bonus tracks culled from the bootleg 7” “Don’t Fear The Reaper.” 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 Tibet
A2 Sunboy
A3 Wings Of Heaven
A4 Sixty Cowboys
A5 On The Sun
A6 Cut With The Cake Knife

Side B
B1 Crystal Nights
B2 Soldier
B3 So Vicious
Don't Fear The Reaper 7" EP (Rio Digital 7RDS3)
B4 Crystal Days
B5 Don't Fear The Reaper (Written-By [Uncredited] – Blue Öyster Cult)

Released on 7th November 2025 - Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party was a standout album last year and puts Hayley Williams’ full range on display. “Mirtazapine” is a late-’90s alt-rock love letter to antidepressants, while on “Glum,” she subverts her own voice - using vocal presets to striking effect as the track meditates on loneliness. Other standouts include “Whim,” an easy Americana earworm with a songwriting backbone that nods to her Nashville roots, and “Ice in My OJ,” a thoroughly modern track that pairs sharp production with some of Williams’ most biting and humorous lyrics to date.

Long-time Paramore fans may quickly recognize the “Ice In My OJ” chorus, as it was first sung by Williams in 2004 on “Jumping Inside” by the Mammoth City Messengers. But perhaps all of her talents converge most impactfully on the album’s only previously unreleased track, “Parachute.” It’s a reminder of Williams ability to strike right at the heart, with not only her confessional lyrics, but her unmatched delivery. The album captures all the dynamism Williams has shown throughout her career and collaborations. At its core, these songs are the work of a supremely gifted artist with a voracious, genre-defying appetite for music and creative exploration.

These songs come as the third batch of work released from Williams as a solo artist. The COVID-era saw her release two extraordinary albums – 2020’s Petals For Armor and 2021’s Flowers for Vases. Both albums were gorgeous and stark meditations on loss and offered up a contrast to the high-energy and up-tempo muscle she displays in Paramore. “The record—epitomizing vulnerability and transformative growth—reveals a more mature and introspective side of Williams,” said Pitchfork of Petals, and went on to say of Flowers “her voice is undoubtedly the standout feature… husky and gentle, dangerous yet warm,” and explained that the minimal production “makes this a purposeful reset.”

Hayley Williams is a 3x GRAMMY winning singer, songwriter and musician best known for her role as the frontperson of legendary rock band Paramore. With her incredible range and delivery, Billboard ranked her at #13 on their list of 50 Greatest Rock Singers of All Times saying, “when it comes to singers in contemporary rock, Hayley Williams reigns supreme.” Frequently listed as a source of inspiration from contemporary performers as varied as Chappell Roan, Doechii and Billie Eilish – she’s also appeared on a wide variety of albums and singles as a collaborator and guest vocalist including Turnstile’s latest “Seein’ Stars”, Moses Sumney’s “I Like It I Like It,” and Taylor Swift’s “Castles Crumbling.” Swift went on to have Paramore open the first ever The Eras Tour show that debuted in Arizona and later they went on to open all dates on the European leg of her world tour.

At just 16 she brought the band to the masses with the release of their album All We Know Is Falling which was certified Gold and just celebrated its 20 year anniversary last week. The band’s breakthrough came with 2007’s Riot!, powered by the success of the 6X certified platinum single “Misery Business.” In 2009, Brand New Eyes solidified their place in the rock landscape. Paramore’s self-titled 2013 album marked a commercial and critical peak, with the platinum single “Ain’t It Fun” earning Paramore their first Grammy win for ‘Best Rock Song’ in 2015 and further nominations for ‘Best Rock Album.’ 2017’s After Laughter introduced a polished, ‘pop-influenced sound that continued to attract acclaim with the breakout single “Hard Times.” After a long hiatus, in 2023, they returned with This Is Why, a full grown, alternative-leaning record that earned the band two Grammy wins for ‘Best Alternative Song’ and ‘Best Rock Album’ making Paramore the first female-fronted rock band to ever win the category in its 31-year history. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Ice In My OJ
2. Glum
3. Kill Me
4. Whim
5. Mirtazapine

Side B
6. Disappearing Man
7. Love Me Different
8. Brotherly Hate
9. Negative Self Talk
10. Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

Side C
11. Hard
12. Discovery Channel
13. True Believer
14. Zissou
15. Dream Girl In Shibuya

Side D
16. Blood Bros
17. I Won’t Quit On You
18. Parachute
19. Good Ol’ Days
20. Showbiz

'The Endless Dance' is the first collaborative album from Northern Irish producer and composer Hannah Peel and Chinese percussionist Beibei Wang. The record is grounded in the strength of ancient concepts, but comes alive with the joy and freedom of play as together, Peel and Wang travel through the 24 solar terms of the Chinese calendar with a cornucopia of sound in tow – synths and prepared piano alongside traditional and unconventional percussion.

The album is collaged together from recordings made over five days at legendary rural studio Real World, a setting which aligned with the duo’s inspiration from the natural world creating a permanent record of their shared musical landscape, informed by the flora and fauna that emerge and retreat through the seasons. 

Both genre-defying, storied artists in their own right, Peel and Wang met while working on Manchester Collective’s 2023 album NEON and 'The Endless Dance' certainly represents a step-change from the duo’s shared classical backgrounds – but their knowledge and training is also the foundation of its freewheeling audacity, giving them the confidence to trust their instincts.

The album is produced by Mike Lindsay [LUMP, Tunng, Guy Garvey, Jon Hopkins] who, with free rein, brings added energy and creativity to the album, whilst Peel & Wang are also joined by Hyelim Kim on Daegeum, a Korean flute with “colourful overtones on every note”. 

Track to track, 'The Endless Dance' is unpredictable and unexpected, which is in part due to the genuine curiosity and outside perspectives that each player brought to the sessions. “I am so familiar with Chinese heritage, but I don't see how it can present in electronics, for instance,” says Wang. “Hannah comes in with that direction, to imagine what the sounds could be together.” The characterful richness of the album stems from the commonalities they found in the sessions. “We both come from cultures where story is really important,” explains Peel. “The attention to detail comes from telling a story, and one note can set that off in a different direction.” 

'The Endless Dance' is a major work from two accomplished, singular artists - but it’s also the sound of mutual curiosity and shared fun, or as Wang puts it: “Two women talking in totally different language that had a wonderful chat.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A wonderfully evocative album, forged through a mutual understanding and collaborative chemistry that you dont often hear. Peel's powerful electronic core and jagged, glitched melodies are bolstered by the thundering percussive power of the myriad instruments of Chinese percussionist extraordinaire, BeiBei Wang. A wonderful collaborative endeavor.

TRACK LISTING

1. Wild Geese Arrive
2. Awaken The Insects
3. Mantis Vs Horse
4. Grain Rain
5. Tiger Sex
6. Feed The Fireflies
7. Offerings To The Beast
8. Limit Of Heat
9. Thunder Begins To Soften

White Flowers, the long-running collaboration between Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, exists within what they call “the realm” – a shared creative space, wherein time, rather than being a restrictive force, is fluid and boundless, and music exists as an endless conversation with their past and present selves. Adopting what the band describe as a “sketchbook” approach to writing, White Flowers is the product of a decade’s worth of recordings - snippets nestled away on hard drives, only to truly make sense years later.

On Dreams For Somebody Else, the band expand upon the dark-hued dream pop of their debut, this time channelling the catharsis of dance music via repetitive structures and “sad, euphoric sounds”: a mosaic of soaring choruses swirl around imposing arrays of synths, guitars, and percussion. Drawing inspiration from Annie Ernaux’s The Years, the album delves into themes of isolation, dissociation and identity. “The album has that same feeling of disassociating from your own life, because you’re just blending into everyone else”, the band explains. “There’s a sadness there, because it’s as if you’re looking back on things that happened to you, and they feel like they don’t belong to you anymore”. It’s the dull ache of nostalgia intertwined with a sense of wonder at what could lie ahead - the hopeful optimism and endless loss that defines the human experience. “It’s this idea of identity not being a fixed thing, but something that’s always changing. It’s a fluid thing, similar to time. Things aren’t really fixed, but rather in a constant state of change. It’s important to remember that we’re all going through that.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Spinning
2. Heaven
3. Backseat
4. Tear
5. Lamp
6. Heart Breaks
7. Visual
8. In The Sky
9. Dreams For Somebody Else
10. Thinking Of You

Proudly independent and deeply rooted in community, LIFE are a tightly-bonded collective whose creative world has always extended far beyond their music. On ABSTRACT / NATURAL, that world expands further still.

Lead single ‘The Dollywaggon’ stands as a compelling entry point to the record as a whole. Built on razor-sharp guitars, swirling synths and lightning-quick, surgically precise drumming, the track finds frontman Mez Sanders-Green delivering near stream-of-consciousness reflections from a protagonist caught between escape and self-reckoning (“I never wanted to leave myself, but I’m leaving now”), and driven by a restless sense of adventure: “the placard reads right to roam, and the boy is roaming”. Written while Mez was walking the 193-mile UK coast-to-coast route, the song traces a physical and emotional journey from the West Coast, over the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales, across the moors and finally home to the East Coast.

That sense of movement runs throughout ABSTRACT / NATURAL. Characters rooted in folklore and landscape sit alongside reflections on fatherhood, freedom and personal evolution, forming a body of work that feels both intimate and outward-looking. The album began life not in a rehearsal room, but on the pages of a poetry book frontman Mez has been writing; a collection of musings on landscape, nature, love, acceptance and letting go. Hearing melodies embedded in his words, Mez began presenting fragments to the band as “wonky lullabies”, turning hills, ridges and landmarks into characters: Hen Comb, Pavey Arc, Sergeant Man, The Grey Friar and The Dollywaggon. From there, bandmates Stewart Baxter, Lydia Palmeira and Mick Sanders shaped the music around these narratives, instinctively weaving them into vivid arrangements that collectively present a fully-realised universe.

Produced by Stewart Baxter and Oliver Varga, mixed by James Kenosha and mastered by Stephen Kerrison, ABSTRACT / NATURAL was recorded at LIFE’s own studio in Hull (The Moon Factory); a space the band built themselves on the banks of the river and now run as a creative hub for emerging Northern artists.

The result is LIFE’s most expansive and experimental work to date: story-rich, exploratory and beautifully rooted in a sense of place. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Wild Grasses
The Dollywaggon
Turning In
Thistles Kiss
Mermaid Feet

Side B
My Yan
Drinking Games
Sun In Nancy
Buried Giant
Morning Fog

Brighton quartet ladylike sign to cult label Heist or Hit (Her’s, Westside Cowboy) and announce their debut EP 'It’s A Pleasure Of Mine, to Know You’re Fine'.

The EP delicately treads the tightrope between folk and post-rock - evidence of the particular kind of quiet the four-piece inhabit: Natural, controlled, and brimming with a subtle euphoria, it speaks to renewal, growth and repair. The quartet — Georgia Butler (vocals, guitar), Spencer Withey (vocals, guitar, synth), James Ely (drums), and Archie Sagers (six-string bass) serve their folk rare: raw and pastoral, but with a side of textural, atmospheric builds directly wired into the tensions of the modern world. It’s a formula that has gained them slots at Green Man; Left Of The Dial; The Great Escape; and Dot To Dot, plus support slots with Ugly, Mary in the Junkyard and Lime Garden.

After soft-launching the idea of starting a project together at End of the Road, the band’s initial practices took place in a recital room on a brutalist university campus. A setting that, on the surface, is wildly at odds with the rural authenticity of their sound. Pause and look, however, and the campus may have seeped its way into the architectural structures of their songs, with an emphasis on functionality, honesty, and the incorporation of rougher textures and exposed materials. The alchemy lies in the band’s ability to marry those spaces, and when raw elements meet modernity, they absolutely soar.

The band’s debut EP was recorded with producer Ali Chant (Aldous Harding, Perfume Genius, PJ Harvey). It captures the quiet urgency that has always been ladylike’s hallmark. Across four tracks, they explore cycles renewal, and the beauty of persistence, finding poetry in English idioms and the banality of the mundane.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There's definitely a sort of post-rock leaning here from ladylike, with woozy guitars and growing reverb swells dancing around brittle melodicism and tentative wisps of melody before plunging into a pool of reverb and skittering snares. I get a little reminder of Daughter in there as well as Cate Le Bon and a good dose of instrumental rock.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Burning Heather
2. Rome (in Progress)
3. Mountains
4. Burning Heather (continued)

Side B
1. Fresh Linen
2. Sour Carol, I

South London sibling duo PUNCHBAG (Clara and Anders Bach) pair their new EP 'I Am Obsessed' with their debut EP 'I'm Not Your Punchbag' in one combined record, marking their first-ever physical release, arriving as a Dinked Early Doors Edition.

Opening on off-kilter piano stabs, the track sets up a tension that quickly gives way to something far darker beneath their restless left-field pop. Clara’s lyrics frame fixation as bodily and inescapable, from dirt under fingernails to crumbs in bedsheets and thoughts that won’t leave your chest.

"It's about being completely obsessed with something or someone, but not in a cute way, more in a 'your whole body is under attack' kinda way. It's sort of disordered, chaotic, overwhelming," Clara explains.

The new single follows July 2025 release ‘I Love This!’ (also set to feature on the EP) – a wide-eyed surge of feeling that reinforced PUNCHBAG’s instinct for pairing pop immediacy with emotional overload.

Speaking more on their upcoming second EP, the band said:

"If our first EP was a selfie, these new songs are like zooming in and thinking, 'fucking hell my pores look huge'. This EP is turning up the contrast on everyday life, rinsing the disgusting dish towel so far that all the gunk comes out. It’s pushing PUNCHBAG’s sonic world even further, into a grander landscape, and dramatising the everyday more than ever before."

With each release, Clara and Anders continue to push their instincts further, tightening their sound and leaning harder into the extremes that define it - all part of a wider mission to distil the most intense, concentrated version of who they are as artists.

That intensity spills directly into their live shows, where the duo’s sibling chemistry and unfiltered energy have earned a reputation for turning rooms into something closer to group therapy than a gig - a visceral, communal thrill and a celebration of feeling too much, all at once.

Clocking in at just under 15 minutes, PUNCHBAG's debut EP 'I'm Not Your Punchbag' (released May 2025) was a breathless introduction. Veering between chaos and clarity where sweetness clashed with distortion, every track felt like a full-body jolt. The EP saw the band receive early tastemaker press: NME (Radar Interview), Dork (HYPE Cover + ★★★★ review), CLASH (Next Wave), Wonderland (New Noise), DIY (★★★★ review), plus further tips from PAPER Mag, The Line of Best Fit, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan, Popjustice and many more.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. FUCK IT
2. I’M NOT YOUR PUNCHBAG
3. PRETTY YOUTH
4. YOU USED TO BE SO SEXY

Side B
1. WHAT’S IN MY BAG
2. PILE OF CLOTHES
3. PLAYING GOD
4. I LOVE THIS!
5. I AM OBSESSED

Mildred is a band from Oakland, CA of four equal parts. They don’t have a lead singer, no one person writes the songs. The songs that make up their debut album Fenceline come together as a group with their genesis sprouting from any one of their members each time. This isn’t a case of Henry (vocals, guitar), Jack (vocals, guitar), Matt (vocals, bass, woodwinds) or Will (drums, production) sauntering in and slapping their latest offering down on the table to be fleshed out as they see it in their mind though. Mildred have a quieter, sweeter process. The songs are often wrestled from the lead writer by the other three, a lyric might have been mumbled absentmindedly for a few days before one of the other three grabs at it, forcing the lead writer to focus on something great they had come up with without really noticing. If you ask any Mildred member what their favourite part of Fenceline is, it will never be something they wrote. If you pin them down and ask them what their favourite part of something they did write was, it will always be something somebody else added to it.

This is what makes Mildred - in many ways a classic four piece - so special. This wonderfully easy bond between four friends just hanging out and writing songs is so palpable it’s intoxicating. Summed up neatly by Clash Magazine saying, “imagine if Pavement went Americana and you’d be close”, Mildred make music that is pure and poetic, gently addictive and never overwrought. They describe the creation of the band as being born from “deciding that playing/talking about/thinking about music together is fun and something we want to structure our lives around as best we can”. Mildred is a vehicle for these four people to continue to spend time in each other’s company, encouraging whatever phrase one of them might have been humming to be explored as fully as possible, nurtured into something tangible. Most bands are formed so they can get out of whatever diy space they start out playing in, Mildred was formed so they can spend more time there.

The space in question for Mildred is a house. The Ward St. house in Berkeley to be exact, already a landmark in Mildred lore. When Fenceline began taking shape Henry, Jack, Matt, and occasionally Will were living there together; Matt hunkered in an “extra-legal” room in the attic where he bathed on his knees and Henry and Will would have to stoop to visit. Jack and Henry shared a wall in adjacent shoeboxes on the middle floor, Henry staring directly out at an old walnut tree they nicknamed Walter. Will was away studying in the desert but would stay whenever he was in town. While living on Ward St. they would write songs in the porous space between the kitchen and the living room after dinner, before they even knew they were a band. A drum set, guitars, and Matt’s woodwinds were always strewn about. After that they would go up to the roof - beautifully painted by Jack for the cover of Fenceline -, Jones the cat often creeping up the stairs curiously behind, and talk the songs over some more, or just continue hanging out, talking about whatever. (The Mildred core belief system goes as follows: “talking about the weather is a legitimate and profound form of human discourse and exchange. So is talking about grocery stores and produce prices. Front lawns are too tidy, let them grow. Free associating is one of life's great pleasures. We believe in the reality of pathetic fallacy. The crunch wrap supreme is the pinnacle of modernity.”).

This is what makes the songs on Fenceline hang together, naturally, as roommates do. These four people are very different in many ways. Jack is a PHD student, often working underground, studying the atom beyond any conceivable point. Will is an environmental lawyer. Matt is an architect, a job he took up properly after a year in a Benedictine monastery. Henry works in affordable housing, helps his dad grow beans, and plays a lot of basketball. The lyrics for their songs are written largely alone and often draw from their own individual lives and experiences but there’s a shared something there. “It makes sense when common threads emerge” they say, “because we do things together a lot as friends: cook, laze about on a weekend, listen to an album, go walkabout, read, go see movies etc. People will tell us after seeing us live that we’re, “like… a real band.” There’s maybe a shared rhythm and camaraderie in our lives that comes through in the music.”

That shared something takes many forms; flaming pinecones floating down the river, scattered papers and dog-eared books, exhausting party conversation and Irish goodbyes, leaves the colour of UPS trucks. Songs often take place across whole days: long days working at Henry’s aunt and uncle’s farm, an afternoon down in San Francisco on the day the sailors come in and booze all day in their cracker-jack uniforms, one of those youthful afternoons that seemed to stretch forever. Others stem from a shared love of a good reference; breadcrumbs dropped from old favourite books, songs and poems, or Matt’s favourite little red book on architecture, waiting to be found by those who love to go over lyrics with a fine-toothed comb. Strikingly literal or intriguingly oblique, Mildred have a remarkable way with lyrics that lodge themselves in your head softly but with such determination that they begin to feel like shimmering memories from your own life. Fenceline is a collection of songs that you want to hold close and delve into, and yet play to everyone you know.

While the lyrics were largely written in and around the Ward St. house, the fleshing out of the songs had to take place elsewhere. The house was owned by septuagenarian slumlord Suzanne, along with 17 others in various states of decay across Oakland. “She drove around in a BMW, with red lipstick smeared on and beyond her lips, and thick black sunglasses” the band recall, “one time she made our friend get down on his knees on the curb and bend over to sign his lease on the passenger seat.” When the band called her one day to let her know that the makeshift sauna they had built in the backyard had gone up in flames and set fire to Walter the tree, she didn’t even call them back. That kind of landlord. Suzanne eventually did catch wind of Matt’s secret bedroom though and that was enough to stir her into action. She called them “matricidal felonious degenerates” and asked if they would inflict such horrors on their own mothers, threatening to lock them out in the next 24 hours. They managed to stay until the end of the month, but Ward St. was no more.

Fleshing out the songs written in Ward St. was therefore largely done in Matt’s new abode. He moved in with a handsome but fragile 97-year-old ex-lawyer/taxi driver who likes to chat about baseball and has a sizable garage. He didn’t mind the band setting up there in the evenings and they would power up a bunch of big stage lights Matt found in a dumpster and play. “They make the room feel atmospheric in a way that borders on over-the-top corny/comical” Mildred say, “often when the lights come out is when our practices devolve into heinous nonsense:bad spoken word, screaming, impersonations etc.” In amongst this heinous nonsense the songs took on their final forms, a lot of that atmosphere creeping into their makeup. Mildred’s songs have a magic that makes them feel like they were purposely written for whatever time of day or time of year you’re listening to them in, maybe a result of this liminal space where they were finalised, maybe just the sign of great songs.

For recording, the band took a week off work and decamped to Luke Temple’s studio in Pasadena, having all been carried through the pandemic by his 2019 album Both-And. Thrilled by the prospect of a full week of just playing music together rather than squeezing in around work, they recorded live together in the room, the only way they know how.

The sound that emerged is warm and organic rather than polished or ‘perfect’. Mildred slip effortlessly into grooves and perfect harmonies on songs like ‘Charlie’, ‘Fenceline’ and the extended rolling free association of ‘Mumblecore Melody’ while on the like of ‘Cobwebs’ with its racing pulse and distant, roomy vocals or closer ‘Hardcore of Beauty’ which tumbles from steady drum-machine languor into yelping, shouting crescendo, you can hear the thrill of more left-field ideas taking shape live in the room. When the recording week had finished, only one song didn’t feel quite right, ‘Fish Sticks’.

Ahead of Fenceline, Mildred have just released their debut twin EPs mild and red, a collection of songs impossible not to play over and over in a startling way considering they were created before Mildred even knew they were a band, with no thoughts beyond just messing around back in Ward St. Arriving purposefully on the scene in that gentle, approachable Mildred way, the EPs picked up support from The Guardian, The Line of Best Fit, DIY, Uncut, The New Cue, Clash, Brooklyn Vegan and more. In amongst the release, they also played made their debut on UK shores with a headline show at The Windmill in Brixton (during which they took a blackout well in their stride with some rip-roaring acapella fun), as well as playing at London’s The Shacklewell Arms and Bristol’s The Louisiana.

While in Bristol with a free afternoon, Mildred took ‘Fish Sticks’ to a friend, Jack Ogborne aka Bingo Fury (The Cindys, Naima Bock), to give it another go in his studio in the basement of a centuries-old pub across the street from what used to be a prison, with a secret passageway connecting the two. It’s not easy to tell that ‘Fish Sticks’ has a very different recording setup as it settles so comfortably in with the rest of Fenceline; but the change of scenery gave it new life and a final product - an endlessly repayable distillation of the Mildred sound with a central guitar line for the ages and irresistible harmonies - that they all liked so much it became the lead single.

A bit of tinkering, overdubs and a beautifully cohesive final mix from Will followed by mastering from GRAMMY nominee Jason Mitchell, and Fenceline was finished.

The title track, and album title, in part stems from long drives (Mildred’s music is perfect for long drives). In the US you can’t drive anywhere for any length of time without seeing an ‘Adopt-a-Highway’ sign. “It’s some sort of state program whereby businesses/individuals sign up to clean a portion of a highway a couple times a year in return for roadside advertisement” Henry explains, “I had the line “I’m adopting a highway... just to try things my way” and then an image of a narrator “adopting” a stretch of highway, not out of civic duty, but as a petty way to remain in someone’s mind, knowing they’ll have to drive past the signs over and over again”.

This is a perfect example of the kind of songwriting that makes Mildred already feel timeless. Ordinary - everyday, even - objects from daily life looked at in such a way as to change the way you see them forever. Songs dance back and forth over the line between crystal clear snapshots of the real world and hazy poetic embellishment, to create a dream-like version of life that is both intensely relatable and tantalizingly out of reach. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is about this band that makes the atmosphere they conjure so enticing but it’s impossible to step away from.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Deep, melodic country rock and gorgeously evocative instrumentals from Oakland's Mildred. Though all the songs here are impeccably written and perfectly performed, they have the loose collaborative feel of improvisational sessions, which results in something that feels free and easy, and incredibly competent.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. UPS Brown
2. Fish Sticks
3. Charlie
4. Cobwebs
5. Fenceline

Side B
6. Fleet Week
7. Aquinas
8. Mumblecore Melody
9. Pitch Boats
10. Hardore Of Beauty

'Trying Times' is James Blake’s seventh studio album and features British rapper Dave, and singer-songwriter Monica Martin. Written between Los Angeles and London, it’s a record about being in love whilst battling the limits of the self against a backdrop of global uncertainty. He explores the tension between intimacy and isolation, the pressure to curate and perform even as everything, inside and out, feels fragile and precarious. Themes of reflection, both literally and metaphorically, run through the record’s visual presentation, as Blake holds a mirror to the contradictions of modern connection - how we see ourselves, how we’re seen by others, and what gets lost in between. It’s about the disorienting loop of joy and dread: feeling safe in love, yet knowing the bubble could burst at any moment; struggling to stay present while global anxiety and private doubt pull you in different directions. A meditation on love, identity, and fragility in an age where the world feels balanced on a knife edge.

Since emerging in the early 2010s, British producer, songwriter, and musician James Blake has become one of the most influential artists of his generation. He has earned nine GRAMMY® nominations and two wins, a Mercury Prize, and an Ivor Novello Award, while his groundbreaking blend of electronica, soul, hip-hop, and alternative R&B has shaped the sound of contemporary music. Across six acclaimed albums, including his GRAMMY®-nominated 'Playing Robots Into Heaven', the platinum-selling ‘Overgrown', and the UK Top-5 'Friends That Break Your Heart', Blake has evolved from post-dubstep visionary to globally celebrated vocalist, composer, and producer. His signature sound and midas-touch production have supported some of the most defining artists and albums of the last decade, including Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, ROSALÍA, SZA, Travis Scott, Jay Rock’s GRAMMY®-winning hit “King’s Dead" and most recently ground breaking UK rapper Dave.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1 Walk Out Music
2 Death Of Love
3 I Had A Dream She Took My Hand

Side B
1 Trying Times
2 Make Something Up
3 Didn’t Come To Argue (ft. Monica Martin)

Side C
1 Days Go By
2 Doesn’t Just Happen (ft. Dave)
3 Obsession
4 Rest Of Your Life

Side D
1 Through The High Wire
2 Feel It Again
3 Just A Little Higher


Exclusive Bonus 7”
Side A: So Far Away (Carole King Cover)
Side B: Landslide (Fleetwood Mac Cover)

“I’ve always wanted to make work that’s a reflection of my life experience,” says singer-guitarist James Petralli, leader of venturous L.A.-based rockers White Denim. “The just-below-the-surface significance to ‘13’ as an album title is that I was born on the thirteenth of August. ‘13’ in numerology can signify independence, creativity, and a solid foundation, but inversely is often considered to be unlucky and can signify chaos and misfortune. Like everyone, I can certainly see both sides in my life.”

‘13’ also happens to be the thirteenth album of White Denim’s career. An incandescent, groove-heavy alchemy of rock, funk, dub, soul and down-dirty blues – and plenty more besides – it’s imbued with the same questing spirit that’s been the band’s trademark since first starting in Austin, Texas, some 20 years ago.

Petralli’s wide-ranging musical appetites have become more voracious over time. The sounds and textures of ‘13’ are informed by everyone from Scritti Politti to The Gap Band, Terry Reid to King Tubby, Caetano Veloso to John Cale, Stevie Wonder to ‘80s-era Steve Winwood. Such diversity is reflected in multi-faceted gems like “(God Created) Lock And Key”, “Only A Fool” and “That’s Rap”. The seed of the project is rooted in the irresistible “Chew Nails”. “It’s a straightforward glam-rock tune,” says Petralli. “My take on the ‘New York Groove’, which is itself a take on the Bo Diddley beat. It has a big ol’ guitar riff and a singalong chorus. It’s familiar territory for me, yet the vocal is perhaps more forward than most things I’ve done for the band. It’s the song that made me feel like I was definitely making a White Denim album.”

The duality of ‘13’ is immediately apparent. The pungent funk-blues of opener “(God Created) Lock And Key” begins with a piece of waggish self-mythology – “On the thirteenth day God created White Denim…” – but soon goes somewhere darker. “This is a Beefheart / Sun Ra sort of thing,” Petralli explains. “I hope that it’s a somewhat terrifying, startling, and visceral piece for everyone that hears it. Everything I say in that song is the truth. It's about power, generational cycles of abuse, shame, violence, and survival. The things that we all understand and know and see and push down to get through the day.”

Elsewhere, the temperate “Time Time” heads into the kind of soulful, horn-gilded territory that earmarked White Denim’s previous album, 2024’s critically lauded ‘12’. Here, Petralli addresses the roll of the years, creative freedom and the importance of family: “It’s a sort of promise that, as long as I’m alive, I will try to prioritise my wife and children and our relationships above all else.” This is a key theme of ‘13’. “I felt that I had to write about my life and experience as a middle-aged dad trying to do better for a family and make sense of this life through making art,” he adds.

A similar sensibility drives the fabulous “Earth To”, a hallucinatory piece of self-reflection that charts Petralli’s journey thus far. Though, as ever with White Denim, it also speaks to the universal. “If you zoom out a little bit, the song is ultimately a sort of takedown of the American dream,” he says.

Then there’s “Keep Calling Me (Baby)”, which rides a fine line between dubby calypso and shimmery sunshine-pop. Petralli likens it to “sort of Ace of Base meets Cyndi Lauper meets Roy Orbison in my mind. Nick Lowe’s ‘Jesus Of Cool’ tells me it’s OK to do whatever you want. He gave me permission to do this one.”

The song features band members Michael Hunter (keyboards) and Cat Clemons (guitar), alongside original drummer Josh Block, who, having also journeyed west from Texas in recent times, is now Petralli’s neighbour. Block’s presence on ‘13’ - alongside the likes of Matt Young (drums, percussion), Jesse Chandler (clarinet, sax, flute), Kosta Galanoupolis (bass), and Dawes siblings Griffin and Taylor Goldsmith – highlights both the fluid nature of latter-day White Denim and Petralli’s determination to honour the band’s initial directive. Also aboard is fellow original, bassist Steve Terebecki. “I wouldn’t call a project White Denim if it didn't include significant contributions from another founding member of the group,” asserts Petralli. “‘12’ and ‘13’ both feature Josh and Steve in various capacities. I recorded and arranged these last two records for the most part, but I really don’t ever want to be alone. Music has given me a place and purpose in this world. And it’s been the primary way I’ve connected with other people over the years.” ‘13’ proves that Petrali continues to do so. And in imperious style

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: An unabashed tribute to rock and roll here from White Denim, with a roaring selection of distorted guitars and screaming gravelly vocals, rolling basses and pummeling percussion. Though there are moments of off-kilter funk and melodic oddities peppered around, this is at it's heart, a great rock record. If it ain't broke...

TRACK LISTING

Side A
(God Created) Lock & Key
Chew Nails
Only A Fool
Time Time
Crossfyre
Keep Calling Me Baby

Side B
1. Earth To
That’s Rap
3. Hired Hand #2
4. Ruby
5. Matchbook Baby
6. Quiet Moments
7. Drive Trucks

With “Creature of Habit”, Courtney Barnett leans further into the quietly transportive charm that has always defined her songwriting - the ability to turn the mundane into something intimate, profound, and strangely luminous in just a few lines. Recorded in the expansive openness of Joshua Tree, the album doesn’t push Barnett’s voice into the background so much as let it float within a noticeably wider sonic space, where atmosphere becomes as important as lyricism.

There’s a strong sense of place running through the record: faint silences between instruments, unhurried pacing, and arrangements that stretch outward rather than rush toward resolution. “Creature of Habit” often feels meditative, cohesive, and unforced, with tracks built less around traditional verse-chorus structures and more around steady, evolving grooves that reward patient listening.

Sonically, this is perhaps Barnett’s most textured work to date. While guitar remains central, it’s frequently softened, with warm, rounded basslines layering underneath and subtly guiding each track without ever dominating it. The rhythm of the album tends to breathe - building, receding, and circling back - creating a hypnotic quality that makes the record feel less like a collection of songs and more like a continuous emotional environment.

The opening track, "Stay in Your Lane", sets the tone with a hazy, dreamlike drift, establishing the album’s preference for atmosphere over immediacy. It’s followed by "Mostly Patient", which feels like a love song viewed from a distance: gentle guitar strums cradle Barnett’s restrained vocal delivery, which carries an ease and comfort that feels newly settled. Across the record, her voice is notably more restrained than in earlier work, favouring spaced-out phrasing and repetition over her once more rapid-fire delivery. At its most effective, it takes on a mantra-like quality - calming rather than confrontational.

This shift in vocal approach deepens the album’s emotional palette. When she sings lines like “The sky stretches wider than I thought it could,” they land less as literal observation and more as shifts in perspective - moments where external landscape and internal state quietly blur into one another.

Compared with earlier records like “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit”, “Tell Me How You Really Feel”, and “Things Take Time, Take Time”, this is a more expansive, patient iteration of Barnett’s voice - less focused on immediacy, more willing to linger in ambiguity. Even the sharper edges of earlier releases like “The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas” feel reinterpreted here through a slower, more reflective lens, while her collaboration with Kurt Vile on “Lotta Sea Lice” feels like a distant precursor to this looser, more spacious sensibility.

If there’s a challenge, it’s also the album’s defining trait: its patience. “Creature of Habit” doesn’t chase instant hooks or immediate gratification. Instead, it unfolds gradually, layer by layer, revealing emotional weight that only becomes fully visible with time.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A stunning new album, replete with soaring melodies and clever, incisive lyrics delivered in a typically laid-back, jangling bed of woozy indie. There are hints of off-piste electronics and experimental leanings (Thanks Floating Points) but in all, a wholly melodic, reliably brilliant Barnett outing.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Stay In Your Lane
Wonder
Site Unseen (featuring Waxahatchee)
Mostly Patient
One Thing At A Time

Side B
Mantis
Sugar Plum
Same
Great Advice
Another Beautiful Day

Cosmic exploration. Spiritual transformation. Unbridled spontaneity. These are the guiding principles of Pigeon, a psychedelic five-piece rooted in the English seaside town of Margate, yet making music that transcends borders. Pigeon are Falle Nioke (vocals, percussion), Graham Godfrey (drums), Josh Ludow (bass), Steve Pringle (keys, synths) and Tom Dream (guitar), musicians whose combined credits include Little Simz, Michael Kiwanuka, SAULT and Saul Williams.

Their debut album, OUTTANATIONAL, is a thrilling collection of party songs without limits: think William Onyeabor in outer-space or early Hot Chip making motorik afrobeat in a 70s New York loft. Building on a string of acclaimed EPs that have been playlisted on 6Music and led to coveted live slots at UK festivals like Glastonbury, Pigeon have evolved out of Afro-disco territory into something moodier. It’s an expansive record laced with heady krautrock, post-punk and punk-funk, indebted to the power of the groove and questing to find the meaning of home. Pigeon must fly.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Driving cosmic passages and soaring synth lines, snappy kosmische percussion and distorted vocal snippets, Pigeon present a wonderfully deep and danceable mix of indie, post-punk and afrobeat.

TRACK LISTING

1. NRG
2. Black James Dean
3. Miami
4. Horse With A Blind
5. 117
6. Mirror Test
7. Hype Prototype
8. Future Country
9. Today Is Another Day
10. Caramel

SLAG joined hands on the Brighton seafront in September 2023 and brought their music to the people 2 months later. Since then, they have cemented themselves as a household name of the Brighton music scene and are continuously working on getting their sticky fingers in the pies of other cities across the UK and the world.

The band is comprised of Amelie Gibson (guitar and vox), Seb Cooper (Keys and Bvs), Luke Martin (Drums), Freya Eastcott (Bass and Bvs) and Dan Phillips (guitar). They all like each other very much and this is why they don’t mind going on tour in a car that only has 3 doors. The music they make is a glorious Frankenstein of influences that looks a little bit like prog rock in the right lighting. When they perform it’s like watching the Winx Club reach their full potential through the irrefutable power of friendship.

SLAG won’t tell you that they’re the best because they don’t feel qualified to make your mind up for you, but with outstretched arms they invite you to see for yourself.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Face Off
Losing
Still Here
Private Gyno
Dislocated

Side B
1. Ripped
2. Heaven
3. Legs

Irish duo Chalk’s full-length debut LP, Crystalpunk, speaks directly to the upbringing and roots of the band members—award-winning musicians and filmmakers Ross Cullen [vocalist + producer] and Benedict Goddard [multi-instrumentalist + director]. The beauty, confusion, complexity, and intensity of their youth – lived under the shadow and around the scars of conflict – are entangled in the industrial dance-punk hybrid encoded in the record’s DNA, aptly entitled Crystalpunk.

“This record is us waving a flag for that generation — the ones who inherited confusion, resilience, and a fractured sense of self.” They’re waving that flag as intensely as possible too. For the uninitiated, Chalk mainlines the reaction between genres, eras, and cultures, commuting this collision into their sound. The Belfast group could comfortably power an underground warehouse party after-dark, incite a mid-day festival mosh-pit, or shake an arena on any given evening. Their power has seamlessly translated to the stage with the group packing venues and delivering alternately sweaty and electrifying performances to a growing rabid fan base. As a group, they've sold out shows across the UK, EU and USA, notched festival performances such as Glastonbury, SXSW, BBK, Trans Musicals and more across 11 countries and were handpicked to tour alongside IDLES and Fontaines D.C..

Coming from dissimilar backgrounds and rallying together naturally, Ben and Ross first crossed paths in film school. As the story goes, Ben had noticed a framed poster of Dublin disruptors Gilla Band in one of Ross’s Instagram photos and felt a kinship before ever actually speaking to him. “Nobody else at our school was into experimental noise guitar bands, so that was all I needed to see,” laughs Ben. Emerging in 2022, Chalk initially made waves with songs like “Them,” “Velodrome,” and “Static.”

In 2025, the guys hit the studio in Donegal with producer and longtime creative cohort Chris W Ryan to bring Crystalpunk to life. Documenting youth and living fully in their process allowed the band to create their most immersive piece to date.

Ultimately, they come-of-age and tell a story that resonates beyond borders. Not just a portrait of the band, but one of their home, a complicated place where the sacrifices made and risks taken by activists, artists, ravers and punks created the only environment that a band like Chalk could emerge from. Crystalpunk is not about choosing a side, it’s about choosing the future.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Tongue
Pain
Can’t Feel It
Longer
One-Nine-Eight-Zero

Side B
Eclipse
Skem
I.D.C.
Béal Feirste
Ache

Hotly anticipated debut album from the fast-rising Birmingham four-piece whose heart-on-sleeve, emotional indie rock and powerful live shows have earned them a devoted young following across the UK and Europe.

Produced by Rich Turvey (Blossoms, Rachel Chinouriri) and mixed by Cenzo Townshend, the debut follows large sold-out headline shows across the UK and Europe, support slots including with Wunderhorse and Inhaler, and appearances at Reading & Leeds, Boardmasters and Isle of Wight Festival.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Blazing, emotionally charged punky indie from Birmingham, with hints of pop-punk and alt-rock, and a huge focus on the vocalists particularly powerful performance. A hugely energetic debut that reminds me of the punky blast of Ash's '1977', no bad thing.

TRACK LISTING

1. Union Station
2. Sandman
3. Is This Real?
4. Fall In Love
5. Bonnie & Clyde Pt. 2
6. Forever. You
7. Spinning
8. I Will
9. Get Up!
10. Heaven

deathcrash’s third album, Somersaults, glimmers with an everyday euphoria. The London-based slowcore/ post-rock quartet has always had an affinity for building worlds only to crush them. From their breakout EP, People thought my windows were stars (2021), through two critically acclaimed studio albums, Return (2022) and Less (2023), they have been both the architects and the destroyers, the creationists and the ones manning the flood barrier. But, recorded between Black Box Studio in the Loire Valley and Haggerston’s Holy Mountain, Somersaults is almost joyful.

Its ten tracks are more vocal heavy than any of the band’s catalogue – think Mark Linkous via The Kinks – but lyrically, Somersaults resists revelation. For all its abrasion, phrases appear half-swallowed, broken off at the edge of meaning, consumed by the smaller textures of living. “Thirty, no career, it fucking worries me / And doing the band doesn’t help,” Banks sings in ‘NYC’. But, “This life is the best life,” he finishes in ‘CMC’ on top of the ambient white noise of an office printer, thankful that the band is still there, “still making noise in the doorway.”

Musical abstractions jettison the same way sunlight might catch the broken glass of a ransacked liquor store. Within those prisms are songs crafted from real hurt, but reflect beautifully. Their role as caretakers of Duster, Low and Codeine’s slowcore lineage is all across Somersaults – songs scud to a narcotic crawl, sound monolithic and inwards before spotlighting a crystalline nothing. Cathartic builds are muddied with tenderness, the bass a heavy grounding, the drums an exhausted heartbeat grasping for air. But more so than ever, even the silence feels collaborative – a gesture of communal trust – friends celebrating the room they’ve made for each other’s ghosts, and some of the biggest, brightest songs they’ve made to date.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Somersaults
NYC
CMC
Triumph
Bella

Side B
The Thing You Did
Wrong To Suffer
Stay Forever
Love For M
Marie’s Last Dance

wing!’s debut EP MISSED IT JUST THE ONCE is a ghostly instrumental hip hop project shaped by instinct, collaboration, and the constraints of a work lunch break - combining sample-based beat-making with live instrumentation.
Emerging from a period of creative exploration and personal transformation, MISSED IT JUST THE ONCE marks a pivotal moment for wing!, the moniker of Bexleyheath born-and-raised producer Adam Swan. “This EP was a breath of fresh air for me,” he shares. “It was the first time I had multiple tracks I was proud of. The idea of having an EP to listen back to and be excited about was completely new to me.”

Each track on the EP tells its own story, both in sound and in the moments of its creation. The first single "Out From Outer" was the first track written for the EP, and its original skeleton was conceived during wing!’s lunch break from working in a coffee shop - a habit that has been the basis of all of the tracks on the EP. “I was listening to a lot of Brazilian funk and thinking about how J Dilla layered samples on Geek Down,” he recalls. “I wanted it to feel like a live DJ endlessly flipping samples over a drum loop.”

The track served as the catalyst for the formation of wing!’s live band: after sending it to drummer Joe Killick, they had their first rehearsal and began transforming the music into a live experience, soon joined by bassist Kai Charlton. They made their debut at The Windmill Brixton in April 2024. As a trio playing live, they bridge the gap between beat-driven electronic & hip hop music and live jazz-inflected improvisation. Their blend of trip-hop textures with post-rock dynamics contributed to the EP’s final completion, with all three performing on the closing track.

Closing track In A Second I Will Need A Second’s post-rock inspired sound blends seamlessly with wing!’s more native hip-hop beatmaking. Drawing influence from the likes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Butch Kassidy, the track's energy is built around a drum crescendo of epic proportions. Initially hesitant to incorporate live drums over the usual sampling, wing! ultimately embraced the organic energy it brought to their live and recorded sound. The track’s momentum is driven by drummer Joe Killick’s subtle dynamic shifts. Kai Charlton brings deeply melodic bass, resulting in a piece that feels immense while remaining introspective.

The EP came hot off the back of opening Green Man Festival’s iconic Mountain Stage after winning the Green Man Rising competition.

MISSED IT JUST THE ONCE is wing! planting his flag in the ground, and making their first definitive statement. Boom bap grooves melding seamlessly with trippy ambiance and propulsive composition. With ‘In A Second I Will Need a Second’ the trio close out their debut EP in an epic conclusion. wing! continue to move from strength-to-strength, and have cemented themselves as one to watch with this release. With Missed It Just The Once, wing! establishes himself as an artist unafraid to follow his instincts, experiment freely, and find creativity in unexpected places.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Let The Rest Go
Out From Outer
Pack It In
In A Second I Will Need A Second

Side B
Let’s Just See (Physical Only Bonus)

For his new album, Irreparable Parables, Andrew Wasylyk felt a strong desire to write a set of songs featuring an element hitherto rare in his work: the human voice. Equally strong was the conviction that he did not want to sing them himself.

The Scottish multi-instrumentalist and composer set about assembling a group of guest singers, sending out the songs to wherever they were in the world. The vocals were recorded remotely and then, like migrating birds, winged their way back to Scotland. The result is an album of great beauty which, perhaps preeminently in Wasylyk’s work, expresses the vulnerability and resilience of the human spirit.

Six singers appear on the record, represented by six songbirds illustrated on the sleeve by Clay Pipe Music’s Frances Castle. The cuckoo is a nod to Belle and Sebastian’s 2004 single ‘I’m A Cuckoo’, that band’s Stuart Murdoch being the first voice you hear on the new album. When the vocal for ‘Private Symphony #2’ arrived, says Wasylyk, “it was everything that I was looking for and more. But this is Stuart Murdoch. Of course he’s going to make something incredibly beautiful and thoughtful.”

The song lyrics were, for the most part, written by the singers. The music is Wasylyk’s creation. He navigates a sound world that lies somewhere beyond the borders of classical and jazz, ambient and abstract. It is difficult to describe, but easy to understand, which is to say to feel. That is the way Wasylyk’s work is experienced: as a feeling. It takes you back to childhood, perhaps, to feelings of comfort and safety, or to memories of walks at sunrise and sunset, or to the way a shadow falls on a particular field in a particular place at a particular time in your life. This is consoling music. That is why, though pretty, it is not merely pretty. These are songs to shore up the soul.
Wasylyk writes in a room, in his native Dundee, full of “half-broken” instruments. He picks these up, plays a little, seeking an idea, a feeling, a door that lies ajar. The musical palette of Irreparable Parables includes brass and woodwind, a six-piece string section, guitar, bass, drums, vibraphone, Mellotron, Fender Rhodes, tape loops, synthesisers and percussion. The strings were arranged by the cellist Pete Harvey, a long-term collaborator.
Among the other guest vocalists are Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals, Saya Ueno from Japan’s Tenniscoats and Peter Brewis from Field Music. Wasylyk himself takes the lead vocal on the title track, though a throat infection and touch of pitch-shifting have altered his singing in a way that even he, having fallen out of love with his own voice, finds acceptable.
The heart of the record can, arguably, be found in two tracks, ‘Love Is A Life That Lasts Forever’ and ‘Spectators In The Absence of God’, sung respectively by Molly Linen and Kathryn Joseph. The former, bright with trumpets, was inspired by the writing of Derek Jarman. “I was feeling deeply upset about the world and wanted to try and write something that was obviously hopeful,” Wasylyk says.

‘Spectators …’ offers an emotional counterpoint. It is an “apocalyptic hymn” that seems to grapple with watching human suffering from afar, too distant to be at physical risk, but experiencing the psychological wounding, and feelings of helplessness, even complicity, that come with constant awareness of other people’s pain. “Kathryn’s a pal, I love her dearly, and she’s a brilliant artist who really feels what she writes,” Wasylyk says. “The cracked tenderness of her voice is spellbinding.”

The album closes with an instrumental piece, ‘Soul Enters The Ocean Sun Climbs Out Of The Sea’, all piano and strings, that offers a sense of resolution and ascension. A good moment, too, for Wasylyk to reflect upon the artistic companionship that he enjoyed while making this record – the songbirds that answered his call: “These humans are incredible at what they do. I’m deeply grateful and feel so lucky. It blows my mind.”

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Private Symphony #2 (Feat. Stuart Murdoch)
2. The Cold Collar (Feat. Gruff Rhys)
3. Love Is A Life That Lasts Forever (Feat. Molly Linen)
4. First Moonbeams Of Adulthood
5. Road To The Amber Room
Side B
1. Hachi No Su (Feat. Saya From Tenniscoats)
2. In Portmanteau (Feat. Field Music)
3. Irreparable Parables
4. Spectators In The Absence Of God (Feat. Kathryn Joseph)
5. Soul Enters The Ocean Sun Climbs Out The Sea

Dinked Edition Extra CD:
01. Private Symphony (Instrumental Mix)
02. The Cold Collar (Instrumental Mix)
03. Love Is A Life That Lasts Forever (Instrumental Mix)
04. First Moonbeams Of Adulthood (Alternative Mix)
05. Road To The Amber Room (Alternative Mix)
06. Hachi No Su (Instrumental Mix)
07. In Portmanteau (Instrumental Mix)
08. Irreparable Parables (Instrumental Mix)
09. Spectators In The Absence Of God (Instrumental Mix)
10. Soul Enters The Ocean Sun Climbs Out The Sea (Alternative Mix)

Bruise Control are a loud-mouth four-piece punk outfit from Manchester who’ve become a serious force in the UK DIY scene. They’ve been carving their name with a ferocious energy, mixing the raw aggression of ’80s hardcore with hooky, jagged indie riffs pulled straight out of the early ’00s. Their new EP and extended physical release, which they co-produced (by their guitarist Niall Griffin), really captures that chaotic, live-wire feel - think shout-along choruses, gritty vocals, and a jagged musical edge that somehow still feels melodic.

On stage, Bruise Control are notorious for bringing the party - wild shows, loose banter, and a real sense of community. They’ve played at festivals like 2000Trees, The Great Escape, Bearded Theory, Left Of The Dial and more, bringing their DIY punk spirit to a big crowd. The band have also played shows with Amyl & The Sniffers, Spiritual Cramp, Civic, Press Club and loads more.

Their single “Gone to Ground” is "raw, urgent, and emotionally honest — and it’s a great example of how they balance grit and melody". - Punkinfocus

If you like bands who hit hard but still keep things weird and thoughtful, Bruise Control are here for you…

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1 Be Like You
2 Left Behind
3 Spinners Mill
4 Gone To Ground
5 If You’re Not Mine
6 Jumping Ship

Side B (Exclusive To Vinyl)
1 Nostalgia (Demo)
2 Bruise Control (Live In Manchester)
3 Dead On Arrival (Live In Manchester)
4 No More
5 Left Behind (Alternative Version)

At last, a brand new album from the legendary outfit, The Heads.
'yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell' is their first new material for 20 years.
It will be released almost 30 years on from their seminal debut “Relaxing With”, this will be their fifth studio album proper.

The band are a well established though reclusive part of the UKs underground / cult psychedelic rock scene. A constant four piece, they also perform/record in their own projects; Paul Allen/Anthroprophh, Simon Price/Kandodo and Wayne Maskell and Hugo Morgan are both now in Loop.

The album was recorded over three days whilst the Heads were rehearsing for a couple of live dates with their friends, and peers, Mudhoney. The guitars, drums and bass were laid down live in Bristol, over-dubs added and then mixed/produced by John McBain in Portland.

Initially planned as two single albums, (Volumes 1+2) it soon made sense that they should be put together as a double LP.
Named in a nod to the Stooges' Raw Power classic 'Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell', it describes the trajectory we're all on.

The Heads are renowned for their brutalist take on psychedelic rock, this new album shows how much they have absorbed from their years of existence, their peers and the world around them. Not much change though, they haven't mellowed out.

The pummel is there, the spaced out sike zones are there, there’s wigged out guitar solos that will peel the paint off the walls, there’s even pop songs if you look/listen hard enough. John McBain has done a grand job in fine tuning the noise and sonic assault.
It's hard to draw a direct “for fans of “ list, because ultimately this album is for fans of The Heads.
However, you can trace the DNA of this album back to the Stooges, Hawkwind, 13th Floor Elevators, Can, Mudhoney, Monster Magnet, Loop, Spacemen 3, MC5 etc. all squeezed through The Head's heavy sonic blender.

A band that only ever existed on the fringes, "if you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much space''.
Life and jobs got in the way a bit but hey, at least that kept it pure.
'One chord, three pedals, six years' was an old mantra of theirs. They've pushed that to 'three chords, double album, 20 years'.
Don't expect another.


notes from Simon Price about the album........
The lyrics reflect a despair at what we, the human race, has done, is doing and will do. Not only to ourselves and to each other but also to the delicate balance of our ecosystems, Gaia, Mother Earth. The creatures and critters really don't deserve us.

But it seems it's so much easier to kill than to create. We're crap custodians, quick to destroy habitats and homes rather than to nurture our inter-connected futures.
Playing loud guitars, creating beautiful noise, gives us release, escape from the mundanities of life. Screaming into the void. Know that doesn't really help much but it's better than nothing.

your pretty place is going to hell, Raw Power from a lost age of comparative innocence.
'what've we done? Made it for nothing? The race was won but can't stop the rushing?' The money machine chews it all up,spitting out diminishing returns, ever increasing pain and poisoning our planetary home.

'So many lives in concrete hives' This is progress? We've lost our connections to the 'Vast One', forgotten that we are a part of the greatest whole. 'Chopping it down, delicate balance.'
if only plastic would rust

Music allows us to vent some frustrations of powerlessness, confusion, anger, of living in a world run by egotistical greedy old men. 'Cos it's always been this way' Does it have to be this way? is this it? really?

we, humanity, are the plague that will choke our planet, the only animal that kills for fun.'The only hope is in the trees, bullets fly but no bees'
in 5000 years, a flicker of a candle in space's eternity, we have managed to go from caves to the moon and yet seemingly get nowhere.
Everybody knows we got nowhere.

Animals adapt or die, only we haven't/can't adapt to our environment, still gathering in excess and hunting wealth to the detriment of all else.
'The earth/the planet, the future is gold/sold'

yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell
Wars rage endlessly, driven by vain ancients, warped realities, climate collapse, greed and desperation.
The innocents are at best ignored, at worst destroyed.

It's not all doom, gloom and pessimistic rantings; shyness, love and loss are also covered.

We know everything and yet have seemingly learnt nothing. snafu
'the less you know, the more that you say' there's a 'post truth' media slop overload,
AI can only speed the descent, junked up food for primitive brains.
wanna just shut out the noise,
so we plug in, bang the drums, hit the fuzz

Apparently we want to go to Mars and beyond but cannot see what we've already got, heaven in a wild flower.
Not to worry, we're fucked, but, hey, we've got enough distractions, such as making this album, so we can ignore that iceberg dead ahead.
yourprettyplaceisgoingtohell

pre-apocalypse blues of rhythmic fuzz and acid rock.

This album will be the soundtrack to navigate 2026.
Released on the Vernal Equinox (March 20th 2026)

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The Heads' incendiary 5th album comes incredibly cold on the heels of their last new material some 20 years ago. Fortunately then, they've still retained all of the irresistible groove and pummelling force of their earlier, seminal works. It's fitting that it should include such an overt Stooges reference, but the stylistic similarities stay well within the confines of the Heads' characteristic maelstrom.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1 Hits Like A Dove
2 Cardinal Fuzz
3 Can't Stop The Rushing
Side B
4 It's About Time...and Space
Side C
5 On
6 Snake Oil
7 Sunquaker
8 Socially Awkward
Side D
9 Entropic Dissolution
10 Bullets Fly But No Bees
11 It's All Over Now Sunshine
12 Off

Following the crazily limited Dinked Edition white label pressing of this incredible album (it sold out in minutes), we now bring you the official worldwide release on Mute. Hailed as one of the US’s most exciting and provocative new bands, Prostitute’s bracing debut Attempted Martyr has been quite the talking point!


Emerging out of Dearborn, Michigan, this five-piece deal in pure chaos and catharsis - fiery live shows, razor-sharp intensity, and a sound that’s as incendiary as it is brutally tight. Their name reflects their fixation on identity, desperation, and survival under late capitalism.

Attempted Martyr was written in the midst of global and personal turmoil, capturing the zeitgeist of a world unraveling. A loose concept record, it chronicles the rise and fall of a doomed zealot whose pursuit of holy vengeance spirals into a psychotic orgy of violence, greed, and lust. It’s dense, turbulent, and charged with blaring Middle Eastern, African and East Asian influences - all scorched into shape by producer Chris Koltay (The Armed, Mdou Moctar).

With mounting online buzz, critical acclaim and a run of sold-out bootleg editions, Prostitute’s debut continues to gain momentum.

“Really heavy, intense, intriguing, thrilling, and thematically unique album, and aesthetically unique, too” - Anthony Fantano

“Calling the Dearborn noise rockers’ debut “intense” is somehow still underselling it.”- Pitchfork

“...a terroristic noise rock opera, complete with groovy riffs, pummeling drums, and a frontman more crazed than anyone in their orbit” - Stereogum

STAFF COMMENTS

Darryl says: The insanely fabulous debut album from Michigan’s Prostitute is provocative, intense, and deeply unsettling. The band forge an uneasy, densely layered collision of brutal post-industrial percussion, blown-out noise rock, and eerie Middle Eastern-tinged motifs. The result is a raw, claustrophobic sound that feels both hypnotic and confrontational, pushing distortion and rhythm into dark, ritualistic territory. Bold, abrasive, and strangely captivating - amazing stuff.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 All Hail
A2 Judge
A3 M. Dada
A4 Body Meat

Side B
B1 Senegal
B2 In The Corner Dunce
B3 Joumana Kayrouz
B4 Harem Induction Hour

The New Eves’ extraordinary debut The New Eve Is Rising was released on 1 August 2025 to critical acclaim. Written in Brighton and at an artistic residency at The Cornish Bank and recorded at Rockfield Studios and Bristol’s Cotham Parish Church, The New Eve Is Rising takes the four-piece’s untamed melting pot of musical styles - an instinctive, incendiary mix of Patti Smith radical poetry, rock’n’roll recklessness, freak folk experimentalism and plenty more - and somehow turns it into a collection of clarion calls that you can still hum. It’s completely immersive; a whole world to dive into that’s taken on a life of its own. “We’re all adhering to The New Eve entity of the band,” Ella notes. “The band knows what it wants.”

Across its nine tracks are references to highwayman’s caves and 12th Century lovers Heloise and Abelard; to krautrock and Swedish cow calls and even lyrics whispered into a bat detector. The band call what they make Hagstone Rock. “There’s a lot of mythology around a hagstone, and it’s different in different places, but generally if you look through the hole of hagstone you can see the truth,” says Ella. “We see ourselves as a rock band, but there’s a lot of depth in there and putting hagstone in front of it felt better.” Pause. “It also has the word ‘hag’ in it, which we really identify with…”Nestled somewhere between primal rock'n'roll live performance and transcendent ritual, there's an unmistakable alchemy that happens when Violet Farrer (guitar, violin, vocals), Nina Winder-Lind (cello, guitar, vocals), Kate Mater (bass, vocals) and Ella Oona Russell (drums, flute, vocals) step onto a stage together.

Now, they've distilled this visceral energy into their extraordinary debut album 'The New Eve Is Rising': a lighting rod of inspiration channelled by a quartet with the ability to create something greater than the sum of their parts. 'The New Eve Is Rising' was written in Brighton and at an artistic residency at The Cornish Bank, co-produced by The New Eves and Jack Osbourne (Bingo Fury) and recorded at Rockfield Studios and Bristol's Cotham Parish Church

TRACK LISTING

1. The New Eve
2. Highway Man
3. Cow Song
4. Mid Air Glass
5. Astrolabe
6. Circles
7. Mary
8. Rivers Run Red
9. Volcano

Ellur is one of those unique artists who combines an undeniable authenticity with a forceful ambition and a voice that reaches beyond her years.

From Halifax, Ellur (named after the Yorkshire pronunciation of her name Ella) writes songs about feeling, battling with, and ultimately drawing comfort from vulnerability in a way that takes influence equally from classic alternative rock as it does the new school of songwriters of today. ‘At Home In My Mind’, her debut album, is an open invite into the world and is a brutally honest reflection on life in your emerging 20s - an arm extended out, looking for people who need a hand to hold.

“Recording this album felt like the crescendo of years of struggling to understand myself. It can get quite claustrophobic living inside my head.” The album is a journey around Ellur’s mind, it dips into different musical genres that have shaped her for the past 24 years – from the 90s indie rock she grew up with, to glitch-pop she discovered in her late teens to the alt-folk she cherishes now. Ellur has created a warm abode for her thoughts and experiences as a young woman growing up in Yorkshire’s Calderdale Valley and ‘At Home In My Mind’ beds them all in, safely together. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Shimmering synthpop meets driving electronica and swooning folk, topped with Ella's evocative, bracing vocals (there's a particular similarity to Lucy Dacus - thus Bruce Springsteen running through these pieces). A stylistically diverse, beautifully produced whole.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
God Help Me Now
Missing Kid
The Wheel
Dream Of Mine
Yellow Light
Black Sands

Side B
Pushing Away
The World Is Not An Oyster
Disintegrate
Lonelier In Heaven
At Home In My Mind
Knowing

YARD are the electrifying three-piece electropunk band from Dublin. Known for their intense and immersive live shows, YARD bridges the gap between electronica and post-punk, creating an auditory onslaught that leaves audiences sweaty, energised, and strangely unnerved.

Since their inception, YARD has shared stages with the likes of A Place To Bury Strangers, Psychotic Monks and Mandy Indiana. Their electrifying live performances, akin to Death Grips, Nine Inch Nails and The Prodigy, have earned them coveted slots at festivals such as Les Transmusicales, Haldern Pop and Into The Great Wide Open.

With a recent live performance on KEXP, continued support from Rolling Stone, BBC Radio 6, Clash and Louder Than War among others, a string of European festival appearances, featured tracks in Netflix’s ‘House of Guinness’ as well as Nicolas Cage’s ‘The Surfer’ and the release of their second self-titled EP, YARD are set to continue their meteoric rise in 2026.

A recent live review captured the YARD experience perfectly: “In their presence, you see and feel them painstakingly crafting every note and sound with their bare hands, wrestling with different sockets, switches, strings, or even their voices. The venue was transformed into this factory of raw, unadulterated noise which kept us all at the mercy of the sound - collectively banging our heads in synchronicity.”

TRACK LISTING

Side A (EP1)
Trevor
Appetite
Slumber
Sunlight

Side B (EP2)
Essential Tremor
Big Shoes
Friction
Lawmaker
Auto Erotic

For Mandy, Indiana, the truth is the only way through. On their Sacred Bones debut URGH, the four-piece - vocalist Valentine Caulfield, guitarist and producer Scott Fair, synth player Simon Catling, and drummer Alex Macdougall - are a force of uncanny nature, grafting together a record that is as much a call to action as a parlay into oblivion and transcendence. Across the ten tracks, the band interpolate their own unconventional language into a mantra for self-determination and resilience, forging a template for a brighter future before it fades to black.

Much of the album was written during a residency at an eerie studio house in the outskirts of Leeds, then recorded across Berlin and Greater Manchester. It was an intense environment partially due to the health issues faced by Caulfield and Macdougall during the writing and recording process.

Yet Mandy, Indiana remain uncompromising. Caulfield uses her voice as a distorted instrument and a weapon, oscillating between playful and eviscerating. The throbbing siren-sound of “Magazine” stands alongside the cut-up vocal fry of “try saying” and the shapeshifting ferocity of “ist halt so,” which channels the urgency of protest movements, referencing resistance to the genocide in Gaza while speaking to struggles more broadly, while final track “I'll Ask Her” is a deliberate directness calling out toxic boy’s club culture and a tenacious reckoning that hangs over the album at large.

Although there are still undeniable “bangers” (like the frazzled rap of “Sicko!” featuring billy woods), URGH often feels hewn with precise cinema. From the bristling techno of “Cursive” to the deconstructed feedback loops of “Life Hex,” the album moves between industrial catharsis and cinematic unease, threading a tension that Fair describes as “a remix of itself.” This contrasting palette is both a necessary aspect of the record as well as the underlying connective tissue.

Though deeply personal, URGH reflects the violent, fractured state of the wider world. Caulfield’s lyrics grapple with assault, systemic indifference, and the omnipresence of pain, while also insisting on moments of beauty and solidarity. URGH belongs in the physical world, and the artwork by Carnovsky, featuring an anatomical illustration of Andreas Vesalius, underscores the record’s visceral confrontation with the body and its limits.

URGH is both otherworldly, and physical and cathartic, a first step toward healing and a refusal to let the conversation die. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A sonically scathing, rave-indebted mix of post-industrial soundscapes and fever-dream glitch. There are moments of perfect, uninterrupted melody but it feels like the unintended result of endless, dizzying syncopation rather than ultimate the goal of it. Endlessly surprising and undeniably rousing post-everything electronica.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Sevastopol
Magazine
Try Saying
Dodecahedron
A Brighter Tomorrow 

Side B
Life Hex
Ist Halt So
Sicko! Ft. Billy Woods
Cursive
I’ll Ask Her

Glasshouse Red Spider Mite share their much awaited debut EP ‘What Do You Mean The Monster?… Hahaha’ on its first vinyl pressing.

Recorded by Louis Milburn (Folly Group) - a “one of a kind friend & talented producer” according to bassist Alex - in the back of an audio equipment shop, the EP is a diverse but cohesive collection of slow-burners, delivering an incredibly well-developed exploration of instrumental and lyrical storytelling, and the band’s longstanding musical relationships with each other.

Growing up together in Devon, and initially forced together by the encouragement of a secondary school music teacher, Glasshouse Red Spider Mite began in earnest in 2023 in Brighton. Their first two singles in 2024 created a buzz in the local scene and industry; with this EP they have attempted to create their first signature body of work, and plant their flag in the ground. The band say “The songs were written before we even dreamt of playing our first shows, let alone before seeing the release of our first music as a band. No one knew about these songs & we weren't exactly sure if people would one day hear them. They only existed between us four until we found the courage to give this band a go.”

Drummer Benji explains that the EP is “a testament to our friendship, a strong bond & commitment to the cause. A vessel for therapy - helping each other keep mobilised, in belief & pushing towards a collective objective or something out of our individual control or capacities… an emotional outpouring of vulnerability, absolute honesty & healing.”

The EP immerses the listener, carefully rising from tense beginnings into unflinching heights. Guitarist Ethan says that the songs “all help to tell a story from a time that feels hard to put into words.” Each rhythm is a fault line waiting to crack open. Despite this, the tracks manage to remain sensitive in their delivery, through layers of swelling guitar, atmospheric strings and insistent percussion. Slow-building, deliberate, and massive in its impact. The band say this EP is about “facing all the pieces of yourself that you’ve let run riot. It’s about revealing yourself to yourself. Questioning your judgements & challenging your laurels. Using past pain to build a fear-free future. It’s post-rock. It’s the sound of the hole in your heart & the pit in your stomach.”

On ‘What Do You Mean The Monster…’ the band have tried to “encapsulate the highs & lows which the 'monster' that life seems to be, swallows you whole… there's been a lot of change, turbulence & learning to understand ourselves, which we think is trapped in the music we make.”

‘What Do You Mean The Monster?… Hahaha’ is available for the first time vinyl, containing a 20+ minute physical exclusive track ‘Spider Mite Season’. It is the band’s first release on London indie label, Memorials of Distinction, whose previous releases include Porridge Radio, caroline, Grove, Naima Bock, Kiran Leonard, and JPEGMAFIA.

In the wake of the EP, Glasshouse Red Spider Mite had sold out headline shows in London (Third Man) and Brighton (Alphabet), followed by their festival debut playing 2 sets at End Of The Road Festival, followed by their international debut at 043 in Maastricht, and then supporting Dutch Interior on their UK tour. This followed supporting Porridge Radio’s UK tour in 2024.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Everyone Loves You
Ant Mill
Time For Change
I’m Batman

Side B
Spider Mite Season

We are so honoured to bring you an official Dinked (Bootleg) Edition of Attempted Martyr, the debut LP from Dearborn experimental noise / post-punk band, Prostitute.

Formed in 2020 in Michigan, and born out of the isolation of the COVID-19 lockdown, the album was written in the midst of global and personal turmoil, capturing the zeitgeist of a world unraveling. A loose concept record, it chronicles the rise and fall of a doomed zealot whose pursuit of holy vengeance spirals into a psychotic orgy of violence, greed, and lust.

The album debuted late last year to huge critical acclaim, but we've all been struggling to get hold of copies for the racks. In classic record shop serendipity, we spoke to the right person who spoke to the right person and the band hooked us up. But not only did they hook us up with stock on this thrilling album, they have gone one better with a one-and-done, hyper-limited special edition for Dinked... White label, all hand sprayed, Dinked stickered and including the band's manifesto. Do. Not. Blink!

"Calling the Dearborn noise rockers’ debut “intense” is somehow still underselling it." - Pitchfork 7.8

A full official release will follow in 2026, but do not miss the chance to cop this hugely important album.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Attempted Martyr
All Hail
Judge
M. Dada
Body Meat

Side B
Senegal
In The Corner Dunce
Joumana Kayrouz
Harem Induction Hour

“You’ve got to die and be reborn between albums,” begins Henry Wade, guitarist for The Orielles, describing the foundations of the band’s fourth studio album, Only You Left. “It comes naturally,” adds singer and bassist Esmé Hand-Halford, “it’s not something we consciously do.”

Through this process of creative renewal, the Manchester-based trio – completed by drummer Sidonie Hand-Halford – have managed to weather a pandemic, defy the fickleness of a trend-led music industry, and emerge, phoenix-like, with something familiarly Orielles, yet altogether different. Recorded in two locations – Hydra and Hamburg – over the summer of 2024, the 11 tracks of Only You Left sees the band consolidate the bold experimentation of their previous LP, Tableau (2022), with a return to the more stripped-back, song-led approach of their early origins.

“There’s nothing more trad than a three-piece,” quips Henry, in reference to the band’s decision to return to their roots as a trio. Originally from Halifax, the Orielles first came to recognition in 2018 with their debut album, the indie-rock Silver Dollar Moment, which is approaching its eighth birthday in February 2026. “These things come in like seven year cycles. So we've come in like a full circle back to a familiar place, just as different people.”

By exploring binaries and contrasts, the Orielles are finding shapes in the chaos and confusion of the world around us – it’s an undertaking that benefits from more than 15 years of close collaboration, driven by friendship and the artistic compulsion to find meaning in music.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Esme, Sid, and Henry return after the dark majesty of Tableau, bringing an album that still explores mysterious, shadowy landscapes but lets more light in. Jangling, post-rock-inflected jams often unfold into bright, melodic pop songs, revealing a newfound warmth and clarity in their sound. The Orielles’ adventurous spirit remains intact, but there’s a sense of growth and confidence throughout, proving that the band has matured while keeping their playful, genre-blurring charm fully alive.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Three Halves
Shadow Of You Appears
Tears Are
Embers
Tiny Beads Reflecting Light

Side B
The Woodland Has Returned
All In Metal
You Are Eating A Part Of Yourself
Whenever (I May Not Feel So Close)
Wasp
To Undo The World Itself

Geese’s 'Getting Killed' lands like a seismic shock. Tracked in a whirlwind ten days in Los Angeles with producer Kenneth Blume (Kenny Beats), the band’s third album is a chaotic comedy, shambolic in structure but laser-focused in vision. It trades classic rock mythology for something stranger and more self-destructive, balancing big riffs and choir samples with lyrics about war, anxiety, and emotional ruin. The result is a jagged, joyfully unhinged triumph that was immediately heralded as the best rock album of the year.

The reaction has been explosive.

Thousands of tickets have vanished in minutes, streams and sales are surging, and co-signs are flooding in from Cillian Murphy to The Dare. Geese have even slipped into meme culture without lifting a finger, becoming that rare band that’s both dead serious and untouchable.

From New York’s dive bars to Times Square billboards, Geese have somehow spun pure chaos into unstoppable global momentum.

STAFF COMMENTS

Willow says: There’s very little ground not covered by this manic, sprawling masterpiece. A challenging and unique effort by a prolific collective of artists, ‘Getting Killed’s devilish genius is in the minutest of its many subtle details. Bombastic and cathartic at some points, subdued and hypnotic at others, the common threads through this album are the off-piste but considered instrumentation that elevate simple ideas to unexpected heights and, of course, Cameron Winter’s distinctive Walker-cum-Cave croon, at once comforting and unsettling.

In a year of both newer faces and veterans honing in on their areas of expertise and producing fantastic work, Geese have emerged as one of the biggest winners by deciding to have a go at one of everything - the biggest surprise not being that it works, but that it fits together so cohesively - typified by the lead single from the album “Taxes”, that in its short run time embarks on an ethereal journey through the various moods and styles that this project boasts. My personal favourite moments from the album are of course psychotic Doors-esque opener “Trinidad”, the Stones-y one-two punch of “Islands Of Men” and “100 Horses”, and the gorgeous closing track “Long Island City Here I Come”. Careful not to overstay my welcome in gushing about the grip this album has had on the Saturday squad since its relatively late entry into the year’s canon, suffice to say that this is a gem that will not lose its lustre with the passage of time.

TRACK LISTING

1. Trinidad
2. Cobra
3. Husbands
4. Getting Killed
5. Islands Of Men
6. 100 Horses
7. Half Real
8. Au Pays Du Cocaine
9. Bow Down
10. Taxes
11. Long Island City Here I Come

Courtney Marie Andrews has long been celebrated as an artist who challenges herself, and who finds new interplays of Folk and Americana. Also a vivid poet and accomplished painter, she brings a multidisciplinary richness to her work that shines throughout her 9th studio album, Valentine.

Co-produced with Jerry Bernhardt and recorded almost entirely to tape, the album features complete in-studio performances that prize raw performance rather than perfection. It is Andrews’ most sonically explorative record thus far – she plays flute, high strung guitars, myriad synths, and draws heavy inspiration from her art outside of music. Her voice is gorgeous and acrobatic always, but on Valentine it finds a new depth, an assertiveness that brings new dimension to its biggest anthems and its softest moments.

Written during a period of profound endings and new beginnings, Valentine is a vulnerable exploration of love vs. limerence. While anticipating the imminent loss of a loved one who would eventually recover, a new but uncertain romance began to develop. Rather than lift her up, the two emotional poles seemed to bleed into each other to sow doubt, trouble, even obsession. But through her own exploration of music and art, Andrews found a way to grow stronger inside this feeling.

“I didn’t want to slink into my pain, I wanted to embrace it, own it” she says. The songs that emerged are devotional in their lyrics but defiant in their energy; it’s the very sound of a woman standing in her first wisdom. With Valentine, Andrews rejects the objectification of love, the love filled with gestures and objects instead of trust, mess, and growth. In doing so, she delivers her most beautiful and loving album to date.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Warmly evocative ballads, floating melodies and airy vocals twist together in a frayed but wonderfully solid whole. Brittle vocals grow into grand, roaring statements and die again into hushed whispers and reverb tails. It's a beautifully crafted and innately human feeling expression, relatable and transportive.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
PENDULUM SWING KEEPER
CONS & CLOWNS
MAGIC TOUCH
LITTLE PICTURE OF A BUTTERFLY

Side B
OUTSIDER
EVERYONE WANTS TO FEEL LIKE YOU DO
ONLY THE BEST FOR BABY
BEST FRIEND
HANGMAN

Howling Bells return with their first new album in over a decade. The Australian trio's version of hypnotic indie-rock always stood separate from the pack and very much a reflection of their unbreakable union. Equal parts sepia-toned romance and gritty rock’n’roll thrills. Together with long term collaborator Ben Hillier, in the producer’s chair 'Strange Life' is an album that harnesses the unique musical perspective that pricked up the music world’s ears back in their beginnings, but transposes it onto a lifetime’s more experience, ‘Strange Life’ is both familiar and new; a record that will unfurl like an old friend to long term fans whilst speaking in a language that only hard-won experience and a few more trips around the sun can understand. It may be a ‘Strange Life’ and a weird old world, but it sounds better with Howling Bells back in it.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brand new album from Howling Bells after 10 long years is more than welcome, and hits all the notes you'd expect despite the long break. Evocative lyrics ride atop jangling guitars, rolling bass and that super laid-back aussie vocal style, pushing into fuzzy grunge territory on a good number of occasions. Top stuff.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Unbroken
2. Heavy Lifting
3. Angel
4. The Looking Glass
5. Sacred Land
6. Halfway Home

Side B
7. Melbourne
8. Dreamer
9. Chimera
10. Sweet Relief
11. Light Touch

With his new record Croak Dream, Puma Blue (real name Jacob Allen) returns to the spectral intimacy that first won him a cult following, now reimagined with the raw, instinctive energy of his live band. The album fuses lo-fi jazz balladry with jungle breaks, krautrock textures and trip-hop atmosphere, drawing comparisons to Portishead, Jeff Buckley, and D’Angelo.

Written in solitude and brought to life in collaboration, Croak Dream was conjured from tape loop sessions at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, co-produced and engineered by Sam Petts-Davies (The Smile, Frank Ocean) where the band improvised to fragments of Allen’s songs they’d never fully heard. The result is a dreamlike collage of baritone sax-drenched ballads and restless grooves: tender, feverish, and alive.

This record marks a daring evolution for Puma Blue, balancing bold sonic experimentation with raw emotional clarity, tailor-made for the stage.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A wonderfully off-piste collection of gloomy missives and crackling unease, haunting vocals and woozy delay lines held together by Allen's perfectly imperfect vocals and impeccably rendered atmospheres. There aren't many RIYL's that would fit here, but there are certainly similarities to be drawn to Radiohead without stretching too much.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1 Desire
2 Mister Lost
3 Hold You
4 Croak Dream
5 Heaven Above, Hell Below

Side B
6 (Fool)
7 Hush
8 Jaded
9 Silently
10 Cocoons
11 Yearn Again

Rooted in London’s DIY scene and with a steady run of compelling singles and unpredictable live shows, Hank have gained a reputation for being “one of the best alternative acts in London right now” (So Young). On record, they slip between noise and melody, intimacy and dissonance, drawing comparisons to forebears like My Bloody Valentine, The Breeders and Beck, while their live performances only serve to elevate these contrasts. The past few years has seen formative performances at DIY parties and support slots alongside Been Stellar, Catcher, DEADLETTER, HighSchool, Mannequin Pussy, RIP Magic, Sorry, and Sunken, with this summer seeing them play their first headline shows across the UK as well as appearing at festivals including Left of the Dial and The Great Escape.

Their debut EP 'Twist Grip' set the tone, produced by Jamie Neville (Mark William Lewis, PVA) and featuring guest spots from Asha Lorenz (Sorry) and Ben Romans-Hopcraft (Warmduscher), it earned quick attention with Still Listening Magazine naming it their EP of the Year for 2024. Their second EP ‘Spiralic' came just six months later; again working with Neville, it showed their first EP was no fluke. From the expansive opener “Stand On Yr Star” to the probing “Temp Fix” (featuring Lola’s longtime friend Theo Bleak), Spiralic explores vulnerability, memory and unease through a circular motif of resurfacing thoughts (hence the title).

To close the year, both EPs are being released on vinyl for the first time, being collected as a mini-album as the third in the exciting series of Dinked’s exciting new ‘Early Doors’ series limited and exclusive pressings for the best new bands around. This special edition is also being expanded with second EP’s previously unheard title track “Spiralic” being added; a meditation on repetition, confrontation and escape which features both Sorry’s Asha Lorenz and Marco Pini (also RIP Magic, Slow Dance), the latter also designing the beautiful sleeve art that extends the record’s spiral theme into its physical form.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1. Angel Says
A2. Pull It Off
A3. DYLM
A4. RanThruBlue

Side B
B1. Stand On Yr Star
B2. Temp Fix
B3. Trusted
B4. Dogstar
B5. Spiralic

Dear Life Records and Dinked are proud to present an limited edition deluxe repress of MJ Lenderman's breakout album Boat Songs (DLR031). A little over three years after its release, 'Boat Songs' is now commonly read as the keystone to the 2020s renaissance of alt-country (or whatever you want to call it), and features some of his most enduring hits and live set staples.

“The thing about loving your own frailties is that it deepens your ability to love the rest of it, too. Lenderman renders suffering and joy in the same gentle, unhurried deadpan, dragging all those heightened feelings back down to the ground where they can sprout” - Pitchfork

“There are few eternal truths in this world, but drinking beer with your buddies is always a good time. Asheville’s MJ Lenderman understands this. His third LP Boat Songs doesn’t get bogged down with intellectualism or make apologies for its love of Southern ephemera. These 10 tracks of countrified indie rock sound primed to soundtrack plenty of beer-battered bull sessions” - Flood Magazine.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Hangover Game
You Have Bought Yourself A Boat
TLC Cage Match
Toontown
SUV

Side B
Under Control
Dan Marino
You Are Every Girl To Me
Tastes Just Like It Costs
Six Flags

Legendary singer, composer and transgender activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland today announces his new studio album, Laughter In Summer - a collaborative effort born from the love story between himself and eco-poet, activist and producer Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland.

From the moment we are born, we begin the long walk home. Elizabeth and Beverly Glenn-Copeland started down the path together nearly half a century ago, and have been trailing it since, hand in hand and song by song. Together, they’ve made a life sharing their unselfish hearts - ones too large for earthly configuration - through art and community, encouraging us all to take our own dance down the road with elemental love and grace.

Now, as Glenn lives with a version of Dementia known as LATE, their walk has taken on a different weight. Out of this season comes Laughter In Summer, an album the couple made together - realising, before long, that it was a love letter to one another: a tender ledger of memories, shared devotion, grief and joy.

Laughter In Summer follows Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s highly acclaimed 2023 record The Ones Ahead, as well as the 2024 collaboration with Sam Smith on a new recording of his classic song “Ever New” for the Red Hot Org Transa compilation record

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: There is no precidence for my enjoyment of Beverley Glenn-Copeland (aside from the previous album which I loved, and the Gybe / Hotel2Tango connection), I have little knowledge of Copeland's brand of softly spoken jazz-folk or indeed the milieu in which it was conceived, I just know it's so well done and so earlestly delivered, It gives me chills. Beautifully done, evocative and touching.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1 Let Us Dance (Movement One)
2 Ever New (At Hotel2Tango)
3 Laughter In Summer Feat. Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland
4 Children's Anthem Feat. Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland
Side B
1 Harbour (At Hotel2Tango) Feat. Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland
2 Middle Island Lament Feat. Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland
3 Shenandoah
4 Let Us Dance (Movement Two)
5 Prince Caspian's Dream (At Hotel2Tango)

Though Death in the Business of Whaling arrives as Searows’ second album, it’s the product of many firsts, including his first time recording outside the creative cocoon of his bedroom. His 2022 debut Guard Dog was written, recorded and self-produced in Duckart’s Portland home and independently released with little expectation as to how it would be received. The music soon found a passionate audience that were already sharing snippets of Duckart’s music via communities on TikTok and received co-signs from prominent artists such as Ethel Cain and Gracie Abrams, both of whom he went on to support on tour.

Time spent on the road touring the hushed and compelling songs from Guard Dog and subsequent projects End Of The World and flush was instructive when working out the direction his new material would take musically and lyrically, with collections of ideas for his new record starting to take real shape in late 2024. When the time came to commit them to tape, he set up shop in a converted horse barn outside of Seattle, keen to harness a greater sense of scale and space in the creation of the music, working this time with co-producer Trevor Spencer (Father John Misty, Beach House, Mary Lattimore) to expand his creative vision. The result showcases Duckart’s range as a songwriter, pushing the boundaries of his typical acoustic palette into electrifying guitars and beating drums, and writing songs that read more like folklore.

The songs became a vessel for digging deep and exploring his life and point of view, but in a way that spoke outwardly more symbolically than literally. “Something your subconscious understands before your conscious mind does. Visceral rather than literal. And that relationship to our deeper selves, our subconscious, our souls, is a major theme of the album for me. Most of these songs are about the different ways we all bump up against the human condition. Our spirit, the shadow self, our egos, trauma, love and fate. How we cope with our experiences and how we connect and take care of one another in an exceedingly dark and violent world. This record is still deeply personal to me. But it is an attempt to reveal my cards in a more coded, symbolic manner.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Beautifully shining acoustic guitar, impeccable dreamy vocals and warm synths come together into a deep orchestral wash of emotion. Impeccably produced and wonderfully written, it's another step forward from Duckart's brilliant 'End Of The World' EP.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Belly Of The Whale
Kill What You Eat
Photograph Of A Cyclone
Hunter
Dirt

Side B
Dearly Missed
Junie
In Violet
Geese

On her fourth album, Unclouded, Melody’s Echo Chamber embarks on a life-affirming new chapter with an album that celebrates the present moment, whatever state we find ourselves in. There’s a continuity that runs through Melody’s Echo Chamber’s brand of psychedelic pop going back to 2012’s self-titled debut but now comes a perfectly executed shaking up of personnel.

Unclouded’s impressive cast includes Swedish maestro Sven Wunder, who co-produced the record and contributed to the writing, bringing his unique sonic palette to the richly-textured canvas; Josefin Runsteen on strings, who brings her avant-garde smarts to the tableau; Dina Ögon’s Daniel Ögen on guitar and Love Orsan on bass who Melody describes as “masters of the velvet groove”; British drummer Malcolm Catto, collaborator with Madlib and DJ Shadow, and the powerhouse behind The Heliocentrics; and frequent collaborator Reine Fiske whose guitar parts can be heard throughout the record.

Last but not least, Leon Michels - the Wu-Tang, The Carters, Norah Jones and Clairo collaborator - worked with Melody on the album’s closer “Daisy”, a sparkling pop song plucked from the ether. El Michels Affair’s Grammy-winning mixer Jens Jungkurth was drafted in to bring everything to life. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. The House That Doesn’t Exist
2. In The Stars
3. Flowers Turn Into Gold
4. Eyes Closed
5. Childhood Dream
6. Memory’s Underground

Side B
7. Broken Roses
8. Burning Man
9. Into Shadows
10. How To Leave Misery Behind
11. Unclouded
12. Daisy (feat. El Michels Affair)

It was the arrival of a Studer A80 master recorder at the front door of Sam Shepherd-otherwise known as Floating Points-that caused him to begin building the studio that led to the creation of his debut album, Elaenia. After a slight miscalculation meant that he could not physically get the thing inside his home, what happened next can only be described as a beautiful example of the butterfly effect. Breaking away from making electronic music on his laptop, the DJ, producer and composer spent the next five years engineering Elaenia, all the while deejaying in cities across the globe and working towards his PhD in neuroscience. An incredibly special album that draws inspiration from classical, jazz, electronic music, soul and even Brazilian popular music, Elaenia-named after the bird of the same name-is the epitome of the forward-thinking Floating Points vision in 2015.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Nespole Track
2. Silhouettes (I, II & III)
3. Elaenia
Side B
4. Argenté
5. Thin Air
6. For Marmish
7. Peroration Six
8. Precursor

Vintage recording equipment has long been a bit of a fetish, but to sound pioneers Voka Gentle, even the most magical machines are a means to an end. The band, made up of twins Ellie and Imogen Mason, along with Imogen’s husband, William J Stokes, are a family band in the truest sense. Whilst they started out as a folk trio, their new album Domestic Bliss is an album of throat-grabbing, avant-garde indie rock songs studded with eccentric choices: a synth with its keys jammed, playing a tune of its own making; field recordings – Morris dancers, motorbikes – captured on binaural headphones.

Domestic Bliss is concerned with power: the abuse of it, being on the cusp of it, and what it really means. The album is teaming with imaginary people in picaresque scenes that reveal the band’s rich cultural storehouse. The songs draw on history, literature, everyday life and pop culture references (specifically Jude Law’s 1995 Vogue cover), with tracks like Cheddar Man reflecting on climate change and prehistory and Creon I tracing the unease of authority through the lens of Greek mythology.

Recorded in the orchestral studios of City University, the album folds intimacy into scale, from phone-recorded vocals and samples of breath to heavy, tribal electronics in grand acoustic spaces. The result is by far their most refined record yet, where the band treat the recording studio like an instrument.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Cheddar Man
2. Creon I
3. Torpedo Mike
4. Battle Sequence (I’m Atomic)
5. You Deserve It!

Side B
1. Kinema
2. The Creature
3. K Sees The Deal Go Down
4. Jude Law For Vogue (1995)
5. Ultra Aura Glow Feat. Hamish Hawk

BONUS CD (DINKED EDITION ONLY)
Creon I (Goat Girl Remix)
Cheddar Man (Sonic Boom Remix)
K Sees The Deal Go Down (Jonathan Snipes Remix)
Creon ! (state51 Factory Session)
Cheddar Man (state51 Factory Session)
Battle Sequence (I’m Atomic) (Dope Isotope Mix) By Curtain Twitcher
First Snow (Bo Ningen X Voka Gentle)

Following the breakthrough success of 'Suburban Light', the 2001 collection of The Clientele’s initial singles and EPs, tastemakers and aficionados were eager to hear what the trio of Alasdair MacLean (guitars, vocals), Mark Keen (drums, piano), and James Hornsey (bass) could make if set loose inside a studio to record a full-length album. What they emerged with from London’s Medina Road Studios in the fall of 2002 was tantalizing: Their already sharply realized motif of ’60s psychedelia and modern fuzz-pop took on inflections of jazz, particularly in how the space afforded by the LP format allowed for a keener articulation of atmosphere.

The Clientele stretch the early evening of 'The Violet Hour' out infinitely, manipulating the structured time of the pop song the way poets manipulate the structure of language—to capture place, mood, stray thoughts, disappointments, potential, and, above all, longing. It is a shimmering jewel of a record, its languid melodies and reverb-drenched choruses at once sublime and tragic, its hazy, dreamlike discursions at once recalling the warmth of a favorite record played over a midsummer rainstorm while yearning for the mist-veiled future of a yet unwritten night.

'The Violet Hour' has endured decades later as a signature album in
The Clientele’s catalog, not only perfecting the sound that made the band
a message-board phenomenon but revealing entirely new depth to it. In its wake, it was no longer possible to declare them one of the best-kept secrets in indie pop. The Clientele were, and remain, one of the genre’s most important figures, and 'The Violet Hour' was, and remains, one of their most vital statements: a lush invitation to their underground.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Violet Hour
2. Voices In The Mall
3. When You And I Were Young
4. Missing
5. Jamaican Born Rhumba
6. House On Fire
7. Everybody’s Gone
8. Porcelain
9. Haunted Melody
10. Prelude
11. Lamplight
12. The House Always Wins
13. Policeman Getting Lost

When Chuck D proclaimed "Bass, how low can you go?" on Public Enemy's anthemic 'Bring the Noise,' maybe he was pre-empting or inciting the 10,000 fathoms-deep, spine-bending basslines and sub-quake tremors of 'Implosion.'

Implosion is a crushing split album, appropriately released on The Bug's own PRESSURE label. Mapping out a new form of spectral dub, the sound is deliberately immersive, introverted, and yes, definitely implosive. In pursuit of heavy lids, blurred vision, and merciless bass bin punishment, it’s one part meditation, two parts low-end theory, and essentially a confession of devoted sound system addiction.

As expected from a tag team featuring British soundlab explorer and 'London Zoo' composer Kevin Martin, aka The Bug, and Michael Fiedler, aka Jah Schulz—a long-time graduate of Germany's new school of sound system reggae culture—the duo approaches their target differently yet share the goal of keeping their sound "raw" (Fiedler) and "brutally minimal" (Martin). This proves that opposites can attract, even if their tools are different and their methods sometimes diverge.

From such a disparate combo, hailing from different geographical and aesthetic backgrounds, contrasts are certainly on display, even within each artist's own contributions. From the melancholia and transcendence of 'Alien Virus (West Indian Centre, Leeds),' to the duality of ascension and descension on 'Hope,' or the Sunn 0))) in dub, visceral drone of 'Dread (The End, London),' to the tripped-out repetitions of 'Midnight,' which reinvents Chain Reaction for post-millennials, the result is both sacred and narcotic. Each track illuminates the emotional impact and atmospheric pressure being explored across this deceptively sparse album—a mastery of tone and texture.

This collection might be as reduced, minimal, and deep as The Bug has ever gone, perhaps echoing the solemnity of his recent Kevin Richard Martin Black release and invoking the futurist steppas self-pioneered on his previous Pressure album. Alternatively, Fiedler‘s Ghost Dubs project ventures into his most heavyweight direction yet, which is no mean feat considering his previous, the critically acclaimed album Damaged, was a monstrously massive triumph of analogue weight and enviable sound design.

Implosion is ice-cool, a stark contrast to the warmth and sociability of traditional Jamaican roots and the current trends in digi-dub. Instead, the mood is soaked in tension and intense dread, finding an unexpected melting point where classic dub's stark rhythm attack, isolationist ambience's eerie drift, dub techno's floatation strategies, and even the relentless riffs of doom metal collide. As the bass-obsessed pair drop what is arguably the heaviest ambient dub album to emerge from any electronic sector—a moody counterpoint to The Orb's fluffy clouds, etc, Martin has cited The Roots Radics, Black Jade, and On U Sound's Pounding System as heavily influencing his approach to the album, while Fiedler has expressed his admiration for Adrian Sherwood's productions and Rhythm & Sound's enchanting soundscape. Yet, the super heavyweight pulsations, emotive resonances, and bone-rattling vibrations detonated here effortlessly go far beyond these influences.

Shadowy and elusive, there’s a mysteriousness at this record's core. A haunting moodiness oscillating between nostalgia and future shock. Despite the deadly fixation with SLOW and HEAVY, the album maintains a totally hypnotic swing throughout. Implosion and its lead single 'Imploded Versions' are testaments to being enveloped in bass, seduced by bass, submerged in bass, and utterly crushed by bass, as The Bug and Ghost Dubs seek to craft a new form of dub for zonal headz and Babylon seekers.

Mastered by Stefan Betke (a.k.a. POLE) at Scape Mastering studio, this record is heavy as f-ck without resorting to continuous distortion. It’s low-end worship taken to an absolute extreme, yet remains highly listenable and definitely danceable, albeit at the slowest of paces. Sacred and narcotic, this is low-end worship amplified to the max. Dive in if you dare. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Living in a small block of flats, and being the considerate neighbour I am; I rarely get to fire up my separates subwoofer. This weekend however I will make an exception - as I simply cannot envisage listening to this mighty slice of tectonic bass meditation without detailed profiling of the 20hz - 150hz range. I suggest you do the same! An absolute beast for bass heads, and a real development of sound system dynamics.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1 THE BUG – Hooked (Hyams Gym, Leytonstone)
A2 GHOST DUBS - In The Zone
A3 THE BUG – Believers (Imperial Gardens, Camberwell)
Side B
B1 GHOST DUBS – Hope
B2 THE BUG – Burial Skank (Mass, Brixton)
B3 GHOST DUBS – Dub Remote
Side C
C1 THE BUG - Alien Virus (West Indian Centre, Leeds)
C2 GHOST DUBS – Down
C3 THE BUG - Militants (The Rocket, Holloway
Side D
D1 GHOST DUBS – Into The Mystic
D2 THE BUG - Dread (Mass Brixton)
D3 GHOST DUBS – Midnight

DINKED BONUS DINKED EDITION 12” / CD
A1. THE BUG - Spectres (Plastic People, Shoreditch)
A2. GHOST DUBS – Waterhouse
B1. THE BUG - Duppied (Brixton Rec)
B2. Ghost Dubs – No Words

On Love and Fortune, the third album from Australian musician Stella Donnelly and first for Brace Yourself Records, Donnelly returns with a deeply personal and anchored set of songs, a body of work that traces the journey back to herself after a period of profound change. Recorded in Naarm/Melbourne, the album carries the grounding energy of place, offering a sonic landscape that feels both intimate and expansive.

After several intense years on the road, Donnelly stepped away from touring to re-evaluate her relationship with music and to ask whether she still loved it. That quiet pause led to a deeper listening: to her instincts, her emotions, and the many past versions of herself. What emerged is a collection of songs shaped by multiple endings — the dissolving of relationships, the closing of chapters, the echo of things that once felt permanent. These are breakup songs, but not just of the romantic kind. They mark a shedding of skins, a release of old expectations, and a cautious openness to what might come next.

“These songs wouldn't leave me alone,” Donnelly says. “Like seagulls, they screamed at me when I rode to work, they pecked at me while I wrote essays, and they stole my chips the second I thought I was happy without music.”

Tapping back into this source, Donnelly arrives at a starker sound that lays bare the individual behind the artist. Love and Fortune blends pianos and guitars, as in her earlier work, but this time the arrangements are more exposed, more intentional. It captures the stiller self, the reflective self, that gently asks where to next. There is a clarity here, the kind that comes from reconnecting with what matters. The result is Donnelly’s most open-hearted and self-assured work to date — a record about loss, certainly, but even more about the quiet, enduring fortune of finding one’s way home.

Love and Fortune follows 2019’s Beware of the Dogs and 2022’s Flood, two albums that marked out Donnelly as one of Australia’s finest contemporary songwriters and drew praise and acclaim from the likes of The Guardian, Pitchfork, NME, BBC Radio 1, Clash, DIY, NPR, BBC 6 Music, Paste and many more. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A profoundly gorgeous selection of pieces that move between barely adorned, vocal-forward folk (Love And Fortune / Baths / Ghosts) and the more dynamic, upbeat groovers (Being Nice / Feel It Change). For me, 'Baths' is a probably the most heartfelt, affecting thing she's done. A stunning, beautifully textured whole.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Standing Ovation
2. Being Nice
3. Feel It Change
4. Baths
5. Year Of Trouble
6. Please Everyone

Side B
7. W.A.L.K
8. Friend
9. Ghosts
10. Love And Fortune
11. Laying Low

“We died when we started writing this album,” say Sorry, preparing to release 'COSPLAY', their third studio album, set for release on 7th November on Domino. But if Sorry did, indeed, die before a note had been recorded, before a single word had even been jotted down, who the hell are this bunch now masquerading as Sorry? Who has donned the Sorry outfits so convincingly? Who is it that has recorded 'COSPLAY', this album that first meticulously erases and then extravagantly redraws the perimeters of what a contemporary rock’n’roll band can achieve? Welcome to the world of 'COSPLAY', where anyone can be anyone, past or present, real or imaginary, dead or alive.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Effortlessly slipping between jagged, angular garage rock and woozy alt-pop with flickering post-rock instrumentation and soaring synthy accents. All of this perfectly twisting around Asha Lorenz's evocative, chameleonic vocal. A brilliantly momentous, constantly evolving treasure.

TRACK LISTING

1. Echoes
2. Jetplane
3. Love Posture
4. Antelope
5. Candle
6. Today Might Be The Hit
7. Life In This Body
8. Waxwing
9. Magic
10. Into The Dark
11. JIVE

On WE WERE JUST HERE, Dundalk, Ireland five-piece Just Mustard surge out of the shadows from the submerged world of Heart Under with a sound that leans toward light and euphoria. Their signature elements remain intact - warped guitars, cavernous low ends, twisted sound design - but this time the noise is channelled into something warmer and more melodic. Inspired by club spaces and physical joy, the songs strive for immediacy and feeling. Katie Ball’s vocals rise higher in the mix, capturing a conflicted pursuit of happiness that she describes as “trying to feel euphoric, but at a cost.”

Produced by the band and mixed by David Wrench (FKA Twigs, Frank Ocean, Caribou) the album expands their emotional palette while keeping things strange, textured, and uniquely their own. WE WERE JUST HERE explodes into technicolor, creating a world that feels immediate, haunted and ecstatic.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. POLLYANNA
2. ENDLESS DEATHLESS
3. SILVER
4. DREAMER
5. WE WERE JUST HERE

Side B
1. SOMEWHERE
2. DANDELION
3. THAT I MIGHT NOT SEE
4. THE STEPS
5. OUT OF HEAVEN

The Dead 60s seminal self-titled album gets a timely deluxe edition reissue on vinyl for its 20th Anniversary, on Deltasonic Records

“Back in the day, punk and dub weren’t just sharing space—they were smashing into each other headfirst. Late '70s Britain was a pressure cooker, and for kids like me, growing up between Brixton’s bass bins and the chaos of King’s Road, that collision was everything. Jamaican sound system culture met punk’s raw spirit in a haze of smoke, sweat, and feedback. It wasn’t about genre—it was about energy. Identity. Defiance. so when The Dead 60s came along, post-Britpop and post-bullshit, it felt like someone had dusted off the blueprint and run it through a battered old tape echo. These weren’t just lads with good taste—they understood the assignment. They took the DNA of two rebel cultures and mutated it into something that could stand tall in the 21st century. Dub-soaked, punk-fuelled, dripping with that Liverpool attitude. I remember first hearing them and thinking—yeah, here we go again. Not in a retro way, but in a real way. Guitars that cut like sirens in the night. Basslines fat and warm, straight out the Channel One playbook. Lyrics that painted the grey corners of Britain like CCTV poetry. It was the sound of youth under pressure. The sound of not fitting in—and not wanting to.

Their debut album dropped in 2005, and it hit like a flare in the dark. “Riot Radio” was a pirate broadcast from the concrete frontlines. “Control This” swaggered with menace and reverb. It was like someone opened a time capsule from the punky-reggae party and rewired it for a new generation.

Now, with this 20th anniversary vinyl reissue—complete with the full dub companion produced by Central Nervous System—we get to hear the bones and blood of it all. The dub versions pull the tracks apart and let the ghosts speak. Reverb, delay, space—it’s not just production, it’s meditation. Revolution slowed down to a heartbeat. It’s music that makes you move and think. What they’ve done here is more than remix a record—they’ve revealed its soul. That’s what dub does when it’s done right. And The Dead 60s, they got that. They weren’t tourists in the culture—they were students of it, shaped by it, and ultimately, contributors to the legacy. Liverpool’s long had a love affair with Jamaican music—you can hear it in the streets if you’re really listening. The Dead 60s tapped into that lineage, but they brought their own thing to the table. Punk's fire. Dub’s depth. Ska’s bounce. All filtered through a Northern lens and blasted out like protest graffiti. This 20th anniversary reissue ain’t about nostalgia. It’s a reminder. A celebration. A call to arms. Music like this doesn’t belong in a museum—it belongs on a system, shaking walls and waking minds. Crate diggers, completists, young punks, old heads—this one's for all of you.

So put it on and turn it up. Let the punk edge sharpen your thoughts, and the dub shake your bones ‘cos this isn’t just a reissue - it’s resistance on wax.....”
-Don Letts The Rebel Dread 2025.

TRACK LISTING

The Dead 60s
A1 - Riot Radio
A2 - A Different Age
A3 - Train To Nowhere
A4 - Red Light
A5 - We Get Low
A6 - Ghostfaced Killer
B1 - Loaded Gun
B2 - Control This
B3 - Soul Survivor
B4 - Nationwide
B5 - Horizontal
B6 - The Last Resort
B7 - You're Not The Law

Bonus Vinyl: Space Invader Dub
C1 - Too Much TV Dub
C2 - Invader Dub
C3 - D-60 Fights The Evil Force
C4 - No Control Dub
C5 - Tower Block Dub
D1 - CNS Lazer Attack D-60
D2 - Police Radio Dub
D3 - Flight Mission Dub
D4 - No Good Town Dub
D5 - Game Over 

Dinked Edition Bonus 7"
A Train To Nowhere
B Riot Radio (Live In New York)

Amsterdam indie stalwarts Pip Blom and Willem Smit, respectively the songwriter & vocal force behind Pip Blom and the driving creative mind behind Personal Trainer, have come together after a decade of intermittent collaborations to launch a new project: Long Fling. The duo's self-titled debut album arrives 3rd of October, 2025, unveiling a collection of charming, offbeat guitar and drum machine, kraut-rock tinged anthems, touching on everyday oddities like socks, shoes, and the allure of staying home.

Unlike typical duets, Long Fling doesn’t focus on harmonies or traditional back-and-forth vocals. Instead, Pip and Willem trade lines over minimal, melodic arrangements that reflect their shared sensibilities. The songs are direct but often playful, shaped by a mix of guitars, drum machines, and off-the-cuff lyrics.

Over the course of ten years, Willem and Pip’s songwriting process evolved from tentative beginnings filled with creative tension to a natural, collaborative flow. Willem reflects: “Over the years, I feel we’ve grown more comfortable making music together... Assembling a record we have been accidentally making without the goal of making a record was fun, but also weird. It felt a bit like archaeology sometimes. We tried to change things... but found out quite quickly that it made most sense to stay true to the initial ideas we had.”

Pip adds: “We’d never done everything including the mixing ourselves before. I think we both felt comfortable doing it this time because we were in it together, and we were okay with the idea that the record didn’t need to be super polished or perfect... When we each asked our dads whether the album sounded more like a Willem album or a Pip album, they both said the other’s name. I really feel like we made this album together - it’s a true blend of the both of us.”

TRACK LISTING

1 / A1 - Pig
2 / A2 - Mouse House
3 / A3 - Weird Peace
4 / A4 - Flung
5 / A5 - For Someone
6 / B1 - Cool Bottle Water Park
7 / B2 - Waste Line
8 / B3 - Shoes
9 / B4 - Tossed
10 / B5 - Peter Dickens

Bonus 7 Inch (Two Unreleased Tracks) (with Dinked Edition)
A. Flowers
B. Screwdriver

Flickering in ultraviolet, there is an elusive place where blue pill meets red, ups become downs, and day merges with night. Those liminal spaces where anything is possible is where you’ll find Nightbus and their hypnotic debut album Passenger. Doom, uncertainty, and opportunity lurk in the shadowy corners of their murky existence with stops at disassociation, co-dependency, and addiction before reaching its final destination - a glimmer of hope.

The in-between of Nightbus’ own Gotham lies where Manchester’s city pulse meets Stockport’s outer realm. An audio-visual entity formed among a musical family of friends, freaks, and foes in messy mills and after hours on dancefloors alike, their sound bleeds from tension where collective creative forces are bound together and collide with the fallout of being torn apart. Before even playing a show, their So Young released single ‘Mirrors’ – a knowing nod of respect to some well-known gloomy Northerners - may have made old school indie heads shimmy at shows in Salford’s The White Hotel but also signalled the duo’s knack for offering listeners a Bandersnatch approach to hitchhiking their own personal Nightbus in whatever direction they choose to take. “Everyone can have their moment with our songs; the music is our response to who we are as young people, living in the city full of this energy right now,” they say.

Whilst reverb hefty melodies and dread-filled loops embody isolation from writing at each of their home studio set-ups, magic happens in the ether across 90s trip-hop, indie sleaze and electronica; Jake’s production layers Olive’s pop sentimentality with drums and samples whilst tales of a cast of faceless characters place Olive as puppet master; her severed self’s perspective manipulating their stringed limbs at arm’s length to see how their stories play out when scenes reflecting her own lie close to the bone. “It’s a bit fucked; like having this out of body experience with a made-up movie running through my head,” she says. “As I write I can see they’re all from a similar world, but they allow me to explore different feelings without giving away part of myself.”

Recorded at The Nave in Leeds with producer-engineer Alex Greaves (Heavy Lungs, Working Men’s Club), surprise and danger lies in every crevice. Brooding whispers turn to chants on 6-minute opus ‘Host.’ Improvised when performed live, its immersive shift in tempo leads to hefty dub courtesy of Jake’s pedals. Even then, you won’t know shit’s hit the fan until its mid-point reveal when ominous bass blasts a thunderous soundtrack as its protagonist defiantly walks away after committing the perfect crime. “It makes you wait, and more songs should have sirens,”Olive grins.

Leaning deeper into alter-egos via the video game-psychological horror of a Silent Hill dystopia, the band’s Fight Club moment ‘Angles Mortz’ turns its literal translation of death angles on its head as it reflects upon kink and internalised shame reincarnated as pride. Elsewhere the ice cool ‘Landslide’ is a Requiem for a Dream about the addiction of being in a band; ‘The Void’ explores co-dependency and estranged relationships; and carefully selected samples revive house track ‘Just A Kid’ from the band’s early incarnation. Passenger’s every direction is to face challenges head on. “That is what’s so great about horror; you can see through predictable patterns so when the unexpected occurs it's more realistic and uncomfortable... I want to own the dark stuff!” As for Passenger’s first single, the pulsating ‘Ascension’ is a spiralling deep dive into death, suicide, and legacy around who or what we leave behind. A noughties club banger by way of NYC beats - ergonomically designed for those who like to stay out a little too often and too late - it throbs like a house party’s partition wall as the literal levelling up undergoes a neon transformation; blue glitching to pink, diffusing the white construct of the Nightbus Matrix. “It really does feel like the end of something and was purposely written that way,” they say, “the ascension is like a firework going off!”

With wheels in motion, Nightbus has become a movement surpassing sonic realms. Between shows from Porto to Brighton taking in The Great Escape, Rotterdam’s Left Of The Dial and Paris’ Supersonic; DJing; remixing; guesting (BDRMM’s Microtonic album); and even enlisting talented like-minds to craft a 3-part queer coming-of-age music video series which ties in with a new ‘hyperpop’ phase in the evolution of their popular Nightbus Soundsystem club night, heads are now being turned from sports brands to high-end fashion designers. “There are things we can’t reveal just yet,” tells Olive, “but we’re excited about the direction this beast we’ve created is heading.” As the album philosophises and asks one ultimate question; what does it truly mean to be ‘Passenger’? Nightbus may not claim to offer a definitive answer, but it might make you feel a bit better about those demons.

STAFF COMMENTS

Andy says: Nightbus are the Manchester / Stockport duo Jake Cottier and Olive Rees. They burst onto the scene a few years back with a 7 inch single which could only be described as a synth-pop take on Joy Division. It flew off our shelves! Now having enlisted the skills of producer Alex Greaves (Working Men’s Club) they have matured into a sleek and classy update, for me at least, of those electro-pop maestros Ladytron.

‘Passenger’ is a shadowy voyage into the neon wilderness with propulsive beats and plenty of cinematic scope. It’s a moody immersive experience specifically for late nights or early mornings: It’s comforting whilst at the same time having more than a small dose of melancholia. The production is hypnotic with low slung grooves and 90s dance elements competing with post-punk guitars and spectral electronics. This is a dream-like world and one previously inhabited by the likes of The Cure, The XX or even Portishead.

In album standout ”Host“ Nightbus use a dub drenched soundscape with trip-hop beats to create a whole world in itself, whilst the glacial “Ascension” (featured on our Piccadilly Records 2025 compilation), simply glides and glistens in a weightless blissed out space, moving along like prime time New Order yet somehow floating, detached, above it all and beautiful. It’s a track that’s typical of the whole record really; spectral, immersive, glowing (blue, like that artwork !) and dreamlike. Welcome aboard the Nightbus.

TRACK LISTING

Side A (21.03)
1. Somewhere, Nowhere
2. Angles Mortz
3. False Prophet
4. Fluoride Stare
5. The Void
6. Ascension

Side B (21:20)
7. Just A Kid
8. Host
9. Landslide
10. Renaissance
11. 7am
12. Blue In Grey

Deluxe 2LP Edition of Terry Hall’s second solo album pressed on Red Vinyl exclusively for Dinked. Includes the singles ‘Ballad of a Landlord’ and ’I Saw the Light’.

Features an alternate sleeve and includes new liner notes by journalist Pete Paphides, including reflections from Damon Albarn, Ian Broudie and Stephen Duffy.

Originally released in 1997 on the Southsea Bubble Company label, Terry Hall's Laugh, followed his acclaimed debut with a blend of wit, melancholy, and melody that marked him as one of Britain’s most distinctive voices.

Much of Laugh was co-written with former Smiths guitarist Craig Gannon, with further collaborations from a stellar cast including Stephen Duffy, Sean O'Hagan (The High Llamas), and Damon Albarn of Blur—who had previously worked with Hall on his 1995 Rainbows EP. The album was produced by Hall himself, alongside Gannon and Cenzo Townshend, and has since gained cult status for its sharp songwriting and intimate, understated arrangements.

This special edition expands Laugh across two discs:
Disc One: The original studio album, newly mastered by Phil Kinrade at AIR Studios.
Disc Two: B-sides, live recordings, and acoustic versions—all appearing on vinyl for the first time.

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: This second solo LP from Terry Hall is an absolute gem. As with his debut, Home, it's a collection of witty, melancholic pop songs, delivered in his own inimitable style. It also includes a cover of Ted Rundgren's "I Saw The Light" (IMO better than the original!) And being a Dinked Edition it's beautifully packaged with a bonus disc of added extras too.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Love To See You
Sonny And His Sister
Ballad Of A Landlord
Take It Forever
Misty Water

Side B
A Room Full Of Nothing
Happy Go Lucky
For The Girl
Summer Follows Spring
I Saw The Light

Side C
Ballad Of A Landlord (Acoustic Version)
Working Class Hero (Live)
Close To You
Music To Watch Girls By

Side D
Bang Went Forever
Love To See You (Acoustic Version)
Misty Water (Acoustic Version)

Woven with tight grooves, beautiful vocals and catchy melodies, 'Shy Girl' hears singer and songwriter Hollie Cook revel in her contemporary lovers rock sound, more confident and open to vulnerability than ever before.

A sun-drenched exploration of love in all its guises, 'Shy Girl' tells stories of the magical and the melancholy, the heart-lifting and heart-breaking, across 12 luscious, analogue reggae compositions - the culmination of a soft- hued and instantly recognisable "tropical pop" sound that Cook has made her own. Put together across three years and four cities - from LA and NYC, to Vejer de la Frontera in Spain and Cook's hometown London - Shy Girl was written with long-time collaborators, The General Roots Band, and features a contribution from legendary dub MC Horseman, who lends his voice to the album's first single 'Night Night'.

The album opens with the title track 'Shy Girl', a buoyant and elastic slice of lovers rock that was written in a moment of spontaneous intuition, and bubbles with a charisma and positivity that Cook radiates. "I'm not a natural show-off," Cook explains. "The 'Shy Girl' theme is me. It's just about being my most vulnerable self and being as true to the music that I Iove as possible." It is this honesty which shines throughout, from the chugging deep dub of 'Frontline', complete with raking electric guitar lines, to the bittersweet roots ballad 'We Share Love', which closes out the album.

It's clear to see that Cook's songwriting draws on a lifetime of musical influences and inspirations. From her father, Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook's record collection and touring with post-punk icon Ari Up's The Slits, to her love for strong female-led pop music and the bassweight of London's sound system culture. Enamoured with the music of Janet Kay and Phyllis Dillon, 'Shy Girl' represents a homecoming and a coming-of-age for Hollie Cook, distilling and refining a shimmering reggae sound that will capture your heart, as it first captured hers.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A huge sounding suite of cosmic dub, smooth lovers rock and deep grooves, drawing on classic reggae but pushing the boundaries into more experimental dubby cuts. A beautifully balanced affair, and all topped with Cook's wonderfully silky overtones.

TRACK LISTING

1. Shy Girl
2. Ooh Baby
3. Rockaway
4. Night Night
5. Holding On
6. In The Pictures
7. Frontline
8. Take Me In Your Arms
9. Crying Wolf
10. River Runs Deep
11. Hello Operator
12. We Share Love

Strut presents Mulatu Plays Mulatu, the first major studio album in over 10 years from the father of Ethio-jazz, Mulatu Astatke.

Featuring masterful new arrangements of some of his classic compositions, Mulatu Plays Mulatu finds Mulatu revisiting the sounds that helped to change the face of Ethiopian music during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The album was recorded between London and Addis Ababa, working with his long-standing UK band, a tight, intuitive ensemble honed through years of live performance, alongside cultural musicians resident at his Jazz Vi lage club in Addis. Mulatu Plays Mulatu realises Mulatu’s long-term vision of Ethio-jazz, intricately balancing Western jazz arrangements with the rich sounds of traditional Ethiopian instruments including the krar, masenqo, washint, kebero and begena. Throughout the album, he reshapes familiar material with rich textures, expanded improvisations and a deepened rhythmic complexity, creating a body of work that feels as vital and contemporary as it does steeped in tradition. Familiar compositions like ‘Yekermo Sew’, ‘Netsanet’ and the celebratory ‘Kulun’ are reinvented here as elegant big band performances.

“Ethio-jazz brings us together and makes us one,” explains Mulatu. “This album is the culmination of my work bringing this music to the world and pays respect to our unsung heroes, the original musical scientists in Ethiopia who gave us our cultural music.”

Bridging continents and generations throughout his 50-year career, Astatke now offers us an invitation to hear his music again, with a completely fresh perspective. Ethio-jazz, like its creator, is always in motion.

Mulatu Plays Mulatu was produced by Dexter Story and features contemporary artists LA-based artists Carlos Niño and Kibrom Birhane. The album was recorded and mixed by Isabel Gracefield at RAK Studios in London and by Dexter Story in Addis. The inspired album artwork was created by acclaimed Oslo-based Ethiopian artist, Wendimagegn Belete with photography by Alexis Maryon.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The Ethio-jazz godfather returns for a brand new album, clearly showing how his dedication to the preservation of classic Ethiopian music has shaped the appreciation of it throughout the world. One of the true legends and pioneers, in the finest form of his stellar career.

TRACK LISTING

LP
A1. Zelesenga Dewel
A2. Kulun
A3. Netsanet
B1. Yekermo Sew
B2. Chik Chikka
B3. Motherland
B4. Yekatit

CD
1. Zelesenga Dewel
2. Kulun
3. Netsanet
4. Yekermo Sew
5. Azmari
6. Chik Chikka
7. The Way To Nice
8. Motherland Intro
9. Motherland
10. Mulatu
11. Yekati

‘Humdrum’ is the new album by East-London sextet, Home Counties. Written in the Summer of 2024, and recorded with Al Doyle of LCD Soundsystem last Autumn, the band’s second album explores themes of fractious communication, quiet resentment, and the spiral of overthinking. Told through the dual voices and perspectives of lead vocalists Will Harrison and Lois Kelly, 'Humdrum' trades in wiry grooves, synths that lurch between menace and euphoria, and razor-sharp pop instincts - wrapping knotty ideas into songs that feel both meticulously constructed and joyfully unhinged.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Take You Back
2. Humdrum
3. Spain
4. New Best Thing
5. When In Rome
Side B
6. Meet Me In The Flat Roof
7. Ravelling
8. Cheeseball
9. Roundabout
10. Like That

Blue Lake reveals his most ambitious album yet, which finds its visionary creator Jason Dungan harnessing the collective alchemy of his band, with ten spirited tracks that resonate with a powerful directness, evoking an ecological connection to the wider world.

Growing up in Dallas, Texas, Dungan then moved around for many years, living in both Europe and the USA, before finding a close connection to the Danish capital Copenhagen, where he now resides, a location heavily spotlighted in recent years as fertile creative ground for fellow experimental artists like Astrid Sonne, ML Buch and Clarissa Connelly. This well travelled upbringing would no doubt prove of spiritual significance on Dungan’s emergence as a singular artistic voice, traversing the planes of Ambient, Americana, with hues of Kosmische, uniquely infused with his own Nordic aesthetic.

The solo project (Blue Lake), now on its fifth album, found its name and inspiration via Don Cherry’s 1974 live album, sparking a creative epiphany in Dungan, who set off on a path into his own untapped sonic world, guided by what he cited as the emotional potential found within non-lyrical composition. With a newly inspired ethos aimed toward creating direct and simple instrumental music imbued with a deep sense of feeling, Jason began combining an array of musical elements that gave rise to his highly revered album ‘Sun Arcs’ (2023), with its “ornate, zither-led lattices” (Pitchfork, Best New Music). Conceived in the blissful isolation of a Swedish cabin set in the woods, this was music that soundtracked spring in full bloom. Then, in contrast to the solitary approach of ‘Sun Arcs’, the highly lauded mini-album ‘Weft’ (2025) began to set the tone for a more band-oriented approach to delivering the Blue Lake sound. Jason had by this time experienced a special collective energy with his band during a swathe of live performances, which he then sought to harness and distill on ‘The Animal’, leading him to take the project into a traditional recording studio (The Village) and its limitless potential along with his gifted cohorts.

‘The Animal’ at its core vividly celebrates human collaboration and is deeply rooted in a sense of community and non-hierarchical connectivity. The group's creative alchemy transcends outwards and beyond the musicians performing together, to summon an inclusive, existential and ecological connection to the wider world and its inhabited spaces. The album contemplates the idea of the human as an animal as Dungan explains: “I’m quite fascinated in thinking about humans more as part of the animal environment and not as something that’s so separated into a “human” realm, or sitting on top of a hierarchical pyramid. So the Animal is also me, or us - that we are just living, existing, in the same way as a piece of moss or a sparrow or a cow.

Dungan welcomed an entirely open dialogue, a process that started from early band rehearsals, which saw his demos quickly evolve and amass weight from double bass, cello, clarinet, viola and drums to become refined and audibly decorated. Jason focused on capturing more wide ranging depth in the recording process, dissecting detailed nuances in instruments to convey the intricate, ever changing balance and dynamics that play out in the natural and urban world as the theme too circulates around the idea of The city as an animal or urban being. Speaking of his Copenhagen home town, with its industrial past but close proximity to areas of semi-wilderness, as well as the sea, he explains the overlapping scenario: “I don’t think it’s possible now to think about nature as a pure or isolated thing. Being around animals in this setting, I think about how they communicate with each other, forge relationships, and navigate the city, but all without language. It’s not an experience of nature which is bucolic and uncomplicated - it’s an experience of nature and the animal world which is bound up in human activity.”

On ‘The Animal’, Dungan introduces the use of voice as an instrument, as a way of unlocking song-like characteristics as heard on the gracious album opener ‘Circles’, which sees the group embrace in choral unison, like in birdsong, their voices echo as a part of the surrounding sonic environment. The band are foregrounded and formidable in their delivery, forming a rich, acoustic accompaniment to Dungan’s zither strokes, earthy guitars and percussive patterns. The soundworld is noticeably bolder and livelier as evidenced on ‘Cut Paper’, with now regular mixing collaborator Jeff Zeigler capturing the fullness of the new band sound. Jason also enlisted the help of Danish producer Aske Zidore who encouraged him toward new working strategies, a liberating intervention which allowed the element of surprise and discovery. The centre ground is never fully consumed by Dungan as we find him consciously orchestrating from a respectful distance, giving generous space for the musician's spontaneous performance and improvisation, allowing their musical intuition to give rise to beguiling, holistic synchronicity.

Dungan wrote the cinematic ‘Berlin’ whilst on a tour stop in the German capital, with its lush zither flurries and long reverb decays painting an expansive late night ode to the rolling hill country of Texas. The poignance of Jason’s intimate, evocative writing is heard on ‘Flowers for David’, a heartfelt folk-leaning tribute with lofted fingerpicking guitar, signalling a fond farewell to a friend's passing. The album gains forward momentum on ‘Yarrow’ as the group move in melodic tandem, before the kaleidoscopic ‘Strand’, with its soaring solos and earthy undercurrents propelling toward a euphoric komische crescendo. The title track ‘The Animal’ is a brief melancholic foray into ballad-esque territory, with a drum machine charting a dotted path for emotive horns and a second gathering of wordless, healing atmospheric vocals. As we reach ‘To Read’ Dungan’s quest is encapsulated with wondrous clarity as the group lands entirely together on a resounding chord, a precious moment for Dungan who reels in the existence of the moment as they remain interlocked in sound and space. He concludes: “I’m interested in moments that are fleeting, with a powerful sense of togetherness, shared in the music.”

‘The Animal’ is a form of musical metamorphosis, still acoustic, yet more amplified, elevating it to new dimensions. The Blue Lake project takes on a new lease of life to encompass collaboration with Jason Dungan bound in a universal connectivity, resulting in his most ambitious album to date. A harmonious rejoicing that cements his reputation as a transformative presence in contemporary music. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A properly lovely selection of rippling, bucolic ambience, slide guitar and zither recalling folk traditions with a heavy nod to Americana and new age improvisation. A thoroughly lovely, hypnotic set of acoustic songwriting.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Circles
Cut Paper
Berlin
Flowers For David
Seeds

Side B
Yarrow
Strand
The Animal
Vertical Hold
To Read

The second album from Dublin’s For Those I Love, Carving the Stone is a stark and stirring portrait of modern Irish life. Expanding the intimate world of his acclaimed debut, David Balfe turns his lens outward - grappling with the pressures of working-class survival, the erosion of home, and the passage of time. Set to soaring instrumentals and raw spoken word, this is his most direct, urgent work to date: a deeply human collection of songs rooted in memory, resistance, and emotional honesty.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Deeply emotive found sound instrumentals, truncated snippets of speech and shimmering, crackling acoustic instruments all topped by David Balfe's rhythmic spoken word, reminiscent of the beat-backed drawl of Mike Skinner or Antony Szmierek's poetic real-life tales. A rousing, folk-influenced take on Balfe's life in Dublin, a gorgeous surprising triumph.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Carving The Stone
2. No Quiet
3. No Scheme
4. The Ox / The Afters
5. Civic

Side B
1. Mirror
2. This Is Not The Place I Belong
3. Of The Sorrows
4. I Came Back To See The Stone Had Moved

Beneath Strawberry Moons, is the third album from Gulp and this time around the combined inspirations of Lindsey Leven and Guto Pryce are supplemented by the musicianship of Andrew Wasylyk as the stomach -butterflies of optimism flutter around and the lapping foams of the band’s ethereal, folkish psych-pop.

Musician and multi-media artist, Leven rejoins Pryce, who traces faintly around the simmering offbeat sounds of his life as a Super Furry Animal (as well as part of Das Koolies and The Pictish Trail), and supporting bandmates, Gid Goundrey (guitar) and Stuart Kidd (drums), for Gulp’s third album. The nine-track Beneath Strawberry Moons, released via ELK Records, follows their 2014 debut, Season Sun, released with Sonic Cathedral and the acclaimed All Good Wishes, which arrived four years later. Extending the gestation of a complete, new collection of work to seven years, accounting for the pair’s relocation from Pryce’s native Cardiff, Beneath Strawberry Moons emerges as a minimal-carbon-footprint, hyperlocal album, created amongst friends with no deadlines between Piggery Studio and the duo’s garden cabin in North East Fife.

Describing their surrounds as ‘idyllic’ and responding artistically to the significant life change, that has brought energy and release, Leven describes the album as “in the most part a love letter to this new way of life”, celebrating space, love, connection and time, cut with an underlying awareness of the fragility of this beauty. Having leaked new material, the cinematic showdown of Always So Far, back in May, the choice of Hope Shines Through The Haar as Gulp’s first single since 2018 links the pair’s delicately charged sense of abundant possibility, Scotland’s heritage and their bracing proximity to the sea.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: It's no secret that I love Andrew Wasylyk, he's talented musician and a very nice man so it was with some excitement I heard he'd teamed up with Leven and Pryce for their latest outing of dreamy tropical pop music. There are few artists that have the same grasp of pace and melody that Gulp do but their sound is very much in the rein of AW's drifting folk for Clay Pipe records, so this collaboration is bang on for me. 10/10 would listen again.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sea Bear
2. Always So Far
3. Salt Years
4. Hope Shines Through The Haar
5. The Way We Live
6. Wildflower
7. Summer Storm
8. Someday In A City
9. Ultramarine Blue

The 12 tracks on ABOMINATION... are a hypnotic, maniacal, and propulsive attack on the senses – a fitting reaction to a world suffering from genocide, environmental collapse, state sanctioned violence, progressing technocracy, and more. The album was recorded by Enrique Tena Padilla, Mario Ramirez & John Dwyer, mixed by Padilla and Dwyer, and mastered by JJ Golden.

OSEES are John Dwyer (vocals/guitar/synths), Tom Dolas (guitar/samples/keys), Tim Hellman (bass), and Dan Rincon (drums)."

"It feels like its all lighting off. A lot of fodder in today’s world for an artist.
Too easily humans forget their humanity. Forgiveness is a dead science. Empathy is viewed as a weakness by cretins. Easier to hate rather than love. Fear and greed have dug their bloody hands into everything.
At least now we know who you are. We see you. We defy you.
People are under duress. Recognize this abomination. Oppose the oppressor. FUCK the fascists and their enablers. Fuck the war mongers
Good luck out there. ACAB. "—OSEES

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another fiery missive from the scuzz-rock behemoth that is OSEES (OCS, Oh Sees etc.). Big, bold and brash and ram-packed with attitude. Long live Dwyer & co and for the love of god, get this on the player.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. ABOMINATION
2. SNEAKER
3. GOD'S GUTS
4. INFECTED CHROME
5. GLUE
6. ASHES 2
Side B
7. COFFIN WAX
8. ASHES 1
9. FLIGHT SIMULATOR
10. PROTECTION
11. GLASS WINDOW
12. GLITTER

There’s a palpable flurry of momentum surrounding SPRINTS. The Dublin band have enjoyed a whirlwind year, marked by back-to-back wins and rapid ascent. They unveiled their Top 20 debut album “Letter to Self” in January 2024, picked up two RTÉ Choice Award nominations for Best Irish Album and Breakthrough Irish Artist, opened for IDLES and Pixies, and delivered feverishly talked- about sets at Glastonbury, End of the Road, and All Together Now.

Since the album’s release in 2024 – met with 5-star reviews from NME, DIY, and Dork, and acclaim from Pitchfork and Brooklyn Vegan – the four-piece have taken their visceral live show across the globe. Along the way, they’ve become an essential new name in contemporary rock, known for urgent, compassionate songwriting shaped by personal tales of trauma and resilience.

Now, SPRINTS are turning that relentless energy into new material. Later this year the quartet will unleash brand-new music and pack an even busier schedule, with a major slot at Glastonbury, appearances at Pinkpop, Dour and Latitude, plus a run of German arena dates supporting Fontaines D.C.

SPRINTS about the new album:
“While the world is literally burning down around us there are voices that seem hell bent on pointing the finger at anyone but those responsible. There’s no need to dream-up dystopia, we’re living in it.

And somehow, while the world has never seemed uglier, our life has never been more beautiful. We have clawed ourselves out of the depths of imposter syndrome, anxiety and struggle to come together, stronger than ever, in the pursuit of that which we love most, music.
All That Is Over feels like a second chance at a first album. Gone are the shackles of insecurity, and we have confidently stepped into what we feel is our best work yet. Its loud, emotive, boisterous and a lot of fucking fun.

This is an album about love, lust, art and passion. It is a rejection of the narratives they will try to spin to force those already marginalised to suffer more. It is the repelling of criticism, critique and the combat of the modern world. This is renaissance and rebellion because within the disillusionment with the world, the fatigue, there is still hope. There is still love, music and art and a chance to start again and that’s where you’ll find us. In between hope and a hard place. Welcome to our cowboy gothic.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A raucous, distorted distillation of garage rock and post-punk, with a breadth of sound you don't necessarily expect from a second album. 'To The Bone' is a particularly brilliant non-sequitur that shows how flexible the band are.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Abandon
2. To The Bone
3. Descartes
4. Need
5. Beg
6. Rage

Side B
7. Something’s Gonna Happen
8. Pieces
9. Better
10. Coming Alive
11. Desire

This very special second​ album was recorded in a secluded location in the north of Iceland with producer Sam Petts-Davies, and follows on from the Black Country band’s 2023 debut ‘Morning Ritual’.

The dynamic of the band feels wholeheartedly distinct, the four-piece are intimately intertwined and each of the band’s experiences informs their new material with the remote recording location providing a sanctuary from personal struggles. The band continues their precedent of equality with the instruments they play and lead vocals interchangeable, and swerve the traditional tropes of indie bands, using their instruments and production techniques in unusual and thrilling ways.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Brilliantly athletic arty progressive rock music, with strong roots in folk music and your classic singer-songwriter dynamic but with a firm grasp of the avant garde and an unbelievable ear for melody and production. Nothing else sounds like this.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Bless You & Be Well
Fixin'
I'm Losing It
Kid Won't Eat
Offerings
More

Side B
Sequence Of Voices
Fold
Holiday From Normal Dreaming
Moon Man
By July

London’s gothic five-piece, Dog Race, unveil ‘Return The Day’ - a debut EP that drags you deep into the fog of burnout, codependency, and emotional stasis. Across five tracks, the band unspools the slow horror of fading joy and fractured identity, where insomnia bleeds into daylight and personal growth is sacrificed to keep others comfortable. Following the stark theatrics of ‘It’s The Squeeze’ and the icy operatic swell of ‘The Leader – which earned praise from BBC Radio 6, landed them in NME’s 2025 Top 100, and left Anthony Fantano in awe, placing It’s The Squeeze at #11 in his Best Singles of 2024 – the EP pushes further into the dark. Operatic vocals drift through modulated guitars and synths that crackle with unease. Produced by Ali Chant and released via Fascination Street Records, ‘Return The Day’ captures a band fully embracing psychological unrest and emotional paralysis. Dog Race may take their time, but they strike hard.

This EP is proof of that—cinematic, unnerving, and uncomfortably honest. "A soundscape born from sleepless nights, intrusive thoughts, and the quiet war between the mind and the world around me. Each track pulls at the threads of cultish beliefs and everyday expectations, exposing the weight they place on someone already battling inner turmoil."

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
Where The Barrel Meets The Badger
The Leader
Return The Day (Colours)

Side B:
40 Winks To Wyoming
It’s The Squeeze

Prolapse formed in Leicester in the early 90s and are now spread across the UK and Scandinavia. Still pursuing their own path of repetition and twisted melodies, they merge influences from post punk to krautrock and even folk. Their previous releases have included numerous singles and four albums on various labels, including Cherry Red and Radar. They feature vocalists Mick Derrick and Linda Steelyard, whose intense duelling vocals combine with ferocious triple guitar assault and pummelling rhythms.

The fifth Prolapse album “I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face?” will be released on Tapete Records and marks the band’s first new recordings since their last album, “Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes”, released 26 years ago, but in some ways it feels like there hasn’t a break at all. From the opening incessant riff of ”The Fall of Cashline”, Prolapse set their stall out, hammering the message that they’re back, over and over (and over and over) again.

The album cover is a photo of a broken mirror the band discovered in a skip in South London whilst on tour. If you look closely, you can make out blurred images of the vocalists staring into it.

The first new sound to be heard from Prolapse this millennium, the opening beer can of ”On The Quarter Days“, the return single, perhaps gives an insight into the short, sharp, creative sessions that produced this album. Despite the elapsed 10 years of reformation Prolapse, now actually longer than they existed in the 90s, the time together has been all too brief, gigs every couple of years, writing sessions even rarer.

The album was mainly written in Leicester and recorded at Foel Studio in Wales. Some songs had been evolving for a few years whilst others (three on the album) were improvised and recorded on the spot, just like they’ve always done. Get ready, turn the microphones on, press record…. and something just happens. Perhaps channeling some of the ghosts that have previously recorded at Foel: Amon Düül II, the Groundhogs, Young Marble Giants, My Bloody Valentine and inevitably The Fall. “Err on the Side of Dead” is one of these songs; it grinds and gnaws away, gradually changing until Linda eventually yells “I hate, I hate, I hate”.

The supernatural appears again, with “Ghost in the Chair”, perhaps the album’s stand out track, not exactly like the Prolapse you know, but very much the Prolapse you want to come back to now. It starts off sleepy and eerie, as a kind of displaced therapy session between Mick and Linda, before developing into a wash of noise near the end.

The second single ”Cha Cha Cha 2000”, brings Prolapse into a more dare we say ‘jaunty’ sphere, with Mick recounting a dreamlike escapade with Canned Heat, Donovan and Cat Stevens, not regular touchstones in the 90s, but time brings a new perspectives.

“Ectoplasm United” is a messy but melodic maelstrom, which has also recently had a Faust remix (this will be available on a separate 7 inch single with the vinyl release of the album on Tapete Records).

The last words of the album are said by Linda Steelyard, recounting a tale of arriving at Leicester Forest East Services, and deciding to stay….forever.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Who doesn't love a brand new Prolapse? Their first album for over quarter of a century sees the band perfectly mixing raucous scathing punk and cosmic industrial groove with Derrick's snarling voice and the cooling balm of Linda Steelyard.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
The Fall Of Cashline
Cha Cha Cha 2000
Err On The Side Of Dead
Ghost In The Chair

Side B
On The Quarter Days
Cacophany No. C
Jackdaw
Ectoplasm United
A Forever

Side C
Swearing For Decoration

Side D
Ectoplasm Untied (A Faust Remix)

Brighton-based, Welsh instrumentalist Gwenifer Raymond is set to announce her third studio album to be released September 5th on Canadian label We Are Busy Bodies. Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark is a hybrid of the ancient and the futuristic where the arcane etchings of occult folk horror fuse with the unfathomable equations of the cosmos. A big bang, yes, but also an atom cleaved. On her latest album, this celebrated new champion of the finger-picked guitar looks upwards, outwards. somewhere beyond. Now the landscape is mapped – its knotted woodlands, its aurora-crowned mountains, its tangled undergrowth – Gwenifer Raymond hears the stars call.

Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark is a natural evolution for such an intensely questing, personally excavating artist. The album is Raymond’s first since 2020’s Strange Lights Over Garth Mountain, which drew widespread acclaim for its repurposing of Mississippi blues and John Fahey’s intricate Americana to embody Raymond’s roots in rural South Wales and her interests in folk horror and the avant garde, a new form dubbed Welsh Primitive. Now, on her forthcoming album, Raymond finds herself conjuring the work of pioneering rocket scientists, the words of fictional hobo prophets and the concepts of mathematical infinity.

Having toured Europe, the US and Canada with the likes of Michael Chapman, Michael Hurley, The Handsome Family, Lankum, Charlie Parr, Richard Dawson, Ryley Walker and Squid, and played festivals including WOMAD, Green Man, End of the Road and Transmusicales in France, Raymond began recording Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark; exploring textures and following threads alone in her flat’s home studio, trying to get a sonic grip on a world spinning out of control.

Sci-fi and scientific readings provided a strange, objective clarity. One key reference was Tom O’Bedlam, an insane homeless mystic from Grant Morrison’s comic book series The Invisibles who sees holy words in street signs reflected from the city’s wet concrete, hidden meanings within the modern chaos. “The world seems to have been taking on an increasingly surrealistic tilt,” Raymond says, “and ol’ Tom makes more and more sense.”

“I’ve always been a big sci-fi reader,” she says, listing Phillip K Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury amongst the authors she read avidly as a child from her parents’ extensive sci-fi collection. Raymond would go on to complete a PhD in Astrophysics at Cardiff University, before moving to Brighton to become an AI and video game programmer.

Midway through writing her third album, then, she was drawn to the pulp sci-fi corners of Brighton market, picking up and devouring second hand tomes of strange science and the mystique of eternities. “A bunch of the stuff I was reading had these themes about the nature of infinity, and tying this into concepts about the afterlife,” she says. “Those thoughts were running in my mind a lot, especially when I was creating some of the droney sounds that book-end the album. The album enters from the cosmic void and exits through the galactic plane. Maybe you’re exiting out of hyperdrive into some strange planet where the album lives, then you zip out to find whatever is next.”

At times, ladies and gentlemen, she found herself floating in space. The opener ‘Banjo Players of Aleph One’, for instance, is built on a celestial drone – its Gibson Mastertone banjo an off-world presence, purchased second-hand from a widow looking to pay for her husband’s funeral. “I had this image in my head of him somewhere very distant, playing the banjo on the cliffs of Mount On,” Raymond says. Hence the reference to Aleph numbers, a mathematical concept often used to describe the size of infinite sets, and by Rudy Rucker in his novel White Light to outline levels of the afterlife. “I’ve always felt a strong pull to the world of the weird, and I don’t think there’s a lot weirder than infinity, the product of a division by zero,” this atheist astrophysicist muses. “We all get divided by zero eventually.”

‘One Day You’ll Lie Here But Everything Will Have Changed’ has a more serene star-gazing feel, Raymond’s slide guitar tones resembling comets filling the night sky with warping, criss-crossing threads. The title track – a Tom O’Bedlam quote – is a frenetic blues that bends and twists like space-time. And lead single ‘Jack Parsons Blues’ is a passionate fingerpicking dervish full of Arabian flair and flamenco fury, named in honour of a 1940s Californian rocket scientist who helped found NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was also a friend of L Ron Hubbard and acolyte of Aleister Crowley.

“I’ve long been obsessed with Jack Parsons,” Raymond says, recalling reading Fortean Times articles about him as a teenager. “He lived in this vast old mansion which he shared with a whole cast of oddballs and shysters. He also came to an abrupt end, blowing himself up in his home lab. For all his faults, I find him to be a sort of romantic character – full of boundless zeal and ideas. He was both a scientist and an embracer of the weird and esoteric. He’s oddly inspirational.”

Converts to Raymond’s brand of Welsh Primitive will find plenty to clutch at their ankles here too, with tracks evoking mythical Welsh goddesses (the prairie-wide ‘Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds’) and Raymond’s childhood woodland discovery of gruesome animal remains (the frantic, exotic ‘Bleak Night in Rabbit’s Wood’), played on a devil-haunted guitar.

A kissing cousin of Lankum’s mutant folk, the furious, gothic and wonderfully wild ‘Champion Ivy’ sounds like Hell’s hoedown, while ‘Bliws Afon Taf’ (Welsh for ‘Taff River Blues’) is more pastoral and tumbling, wrapping the listener in spider threads of gossamer guitar. At Raymond’s blessed fingertips, the earthly meets the stellar on some far-off event horizon, and you can barely see the join. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Gorgous, dark folk music that's got more than a little hint of Alexander Tucker or John Fahey and moves beautifully between frenetic fingerpicking and slow, bucolic fireside balladry.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Banjo Players Of Aleph One
Jack Parsons Blues
Bliws Afon Tâf
Bonfire Of The Billionaires

Side B
Dreams Of Rhiannon’s Birds
Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark
Cattywomp
Bleak Night In Rabbit’s Wood
One Day You’ll Lie Here But Everything Will Have Changed

‘Songs for Nina and Johanna’ is the beautiful new album from James Yorkston, this time featuring not one but two of Sweden’s most recognisable female vocalists. Recorded in Stockholm with Nina Persson (The Cardigans), Johanna Söderberg (First Aid Kit) and members of The Second Hand Orchestra, these are songs about family, love and parenthood. Tender and heart-breaking yet overwhelmingly life-affirming, ‘Songs for Nina and Johanna’ is a vital addition to the James Yorkston catalogue.

Songs for Nina and Johanna is the beautiful new album from James Yorkston, his sixteenth on Domino and his third to be recorded in Stockholm in conjunction with members of The Second Hand Orchestra. Nina Persson (The Cardigans), who teamed up with James on his previous critically-acclaimed album, The Great White Sea Eagle, this time divides singing duties with Johanna Söderberg (First Aid Kit), the two of them singing separately with James on five and four tracks respectively.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: I've always been a huge fan of the otherworldly vocals of Nina Persson and this gorgeous LP from James Yorkston features both Nina and Johanna from First Aid Kit singing alongside Yorkston's perfectly pitched syrupy drawl. It's beautifully written and performed even more beautifully than you'd expect. A wonderfully warm, evocative study in collaboration.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. I Can Change
2. Oh Light, Oh Light
3. A Moment Longer
4. Love / Luck
5. Where's The Time?

Side B
6. Rabbit
7. Love That Tree
8. Oh Sparrow, Up Yours
9. I Spooked The Neighbours
10. With Me, With You

Dinked Edition Bonus CD EP: “Reimaginations” By The Second Hand Orchestra
1. Time Was Short (5 1/2 Min To Be Exact)
2. With You, With Me (in Swedish)
3. A Moment Longer (Lina Langendorf Solo Saxophone)
4. Where’s The Time? (Instrumental)

It’s A Beautiful Place opens with zero-gravity instrumental ‘One Small Step’ – a fitting prelude for what is one giant leap for New York duo Water From Your Eyes. The album is a gleaming megalopolis, a satellite view of eras and musical forms, a reframing of the y2k songbook that is at once awe-struck and mindful of its place in the vastness. “It ended up being about time, dinosaurs and space,” says Nate Amos. “We wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip.”

The duo recorded the bulk of It’s A Beautiful Place last summer, just as they have every other WFYE release: in Amos’s bedroom. But this time, much of the writing and recording were shaped around the dynamics of a full-blooded live group: “When you’re playing with a band you tend to write with one in mind - this was the first time I wrote anything for WFYE imagining us playing anywhere bigger than a basement,” he observes.

Throughout the album is a clear sense of a band who have honed their curveballs into home runs. Looming and melancholy, wide-eyed and petrified, it’s Blade Runner meets WALL-E, it’s Kubrick and Asimov with a hint of Jay and Silent Bob. These are songs that look outward, conscious of our smallness and questioning our place in the universe while admiring the surrounding beauty.

“A song can feel like everything, communicating vast emotional landscapes,” says Amos, “but your favorite album is less important than any person. That person is less interesting than any mountain. That mountain is boring compared to any planet. That planet is only a part of a solar system. If music and all other human practices are meaningless on a cosmic scale why does it still feel so important?”

“One of the most exciting bands out there right now.” Rolling Stone.

“There’s a lot of beauty to be found in the scatterbrained mayhem.” Stereogum.

“Excellent” The New York Times.

“Thrilling” The Guardian.

“WFYE are one of the most interesting acts in music these days.” Under the Radar.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Water From Your Eyes forge a sort of noise that could result in me trying to describe song after song in an endless stream of genre descriptions, but it would do no good. You need to hear it. Mad avant indie, jagged math rock and arty psychedelia, and the rest.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
One Small Step
Life Sings
Nights In Armor
Born 2
You Don’t Believe In God?

Side B
Spaceship
Playing Classics
It’s A Beautiful Place
Blood On The Dollar
For Mankind

When Modern Nature toured their last album, 2023’s No Fixed Point In Space, it became apparent to Jack Cooper – the band’s main creative force – that they were already pulling away from the free, open-ended approach they had spent five years working towards; almost as if the music had become so abstract and elasticated, it now had to snap back towards something more structured. As they found themselves naturally locking into more fixed grooves, he realised a new direction had been set. Their new album – The Heat Warps – is the triumphant manifestation of where that new direction took them.

In the aftermath, Cooper’s songwriting, which had become increasingly impressionistic, found a new focus and the idea of making an album that followed a similar path to the last two increasingly seemed obtuse. The purpose was to forge a radical change. The core trio of him, Jim Wallis (drums) and Jeff Tobias (bass guitar) were augmented by a new guitarist – Tara Cunningham.

Modern Nature’s recent records have reflected an insular life. Cooper had moved out to the countryside in 2021 and had, in his words, been “hibernating” while he started a family. He felt this new band was a symbol for his reawakening and the perfect vessel for him to continue to explore themes that he’s sung about with Modern Nature – collectivism, our relationship with the natural world, the weight of consciousness – but with more directness and purpose. The key was the new dual guitar sound.

“I’ve always been drawn to bands where two guitarists work as a unit to move around and colour the rhythm section,” explains Cooper. “I’d been listening to the demos Television did with Brian Eno in the day and then that night I played with Tara for the first time at an improvised music show. We have a very similar approach to the guitar and that extends to the way we sing, so it gives the music an interesting balance.

“What we do is mirrored; a symmetry on either side of what Jim and Jeff are doing in the rhythm section. We’ve played with lots of amazing musicians who continue to orbit around what we do, but Tara joining the band felt like finding the other side to the square. Previous records have been performed by upwards of fifteen people but it was apparent the four of us could achieve something more powerful and more direct.”

In the time Modern Nature has been a band, the world has undoubtedly changed. The words Cooper had been writing previously were somewhat ambiguous but it had started to feel like he was sitting on the fence and that was something he needed to address. “Every day we’re confronted with a confusing and scary world,” he says. “Making music and creating things can feel flippant or unnecessary, but my own world view was defined and influenced by art and artists who weren’t afraid to highlight and offer solutions: Public Enemy, The Smiths or a wider American counterculture.”

“The community we’ve built our life around – artists, musicians and the people who gravitate to these things as way of communicating – are struggling to reconcile how they fit into an increasingly cruel world. This album, the themes and the lyrics are directed towards them because I think there are still seasons to be optimistic. There are amazing things happening all around us and it’s up to communities like ours to double down on the things we believe in. It feels as if being part of a group like Modern Nature and making an album that’s open, optimistic and ambitious is in itself part of the solution.”

As the new band started to play together more, the energy, excitement and telepathy between them gained momentum and it became clear they needed to make a record that captured that. They locked into a process where they booked a couple of shows, directly followed by four days in the studio (the all-analogue Gizzard Recording in east London). They’d spend two weeks living in each other’s pockets – a very condensed rush of creativity.

“It’s rare to hear a recording of a band playing in a room together,” adds Cooper. “And that interaction, the discrepancies in timing, synergy, in pitch, that’s where the magic really is, I think, and that’s what we wanted to capture.”

One additional (and slightly unlikely) influence on the record was Andrew Weatherall. Before he passed away, he’d played Modern Nature on his NTS show and Cooper was thrilled that he liked them. He made it an aim to make a record Weatherall might have played to his friends late at night. His motto “Fail we may, sail we must” is what the Can-esque track Pharaoh is about.

“It’s difficult to stay aware of the world around you without becoming despondent,” says Cooper. “Pharoah makes the case for finding a personal philosophy and trying to live a life that might inspire others or at the very least not hurt them.”

Elsewhere, Radio touches on the contempt capitalism has for the natural world. The line “there’s a fire all around” offers a kind of gallows humour. Cooper adds that recently they played the songs on a day that the news was showing footage of the Los Angeles fires. It occurred to him that it was perhaps an insensitive subject to be singing about but there again – in his words – he feels it’s “important not to turn away from these things.

” The same desire not to shy away might also be attributed to Source, which touches on the recent riots in the UK directed towards asylum seekers, inspired by misinformation spread online.

For all this wrestling with the grimmer realities of 2025, The Heat Warps is ultimately not a record entirely consumed by anxieties. Its frequently beautiful sounds offer consolation and a wide-eyed optimism amid all the upheaval. Nowhere is that more apparent than on the transcendent album closer, Totality. As Cooper explains: “It was fascinating spending time in America as the country geared up for the 2024 solar eclipse. The news stations covered the event in the same way they’d cover a big football game or the Oscars. Everywhere I went, people were talking about the eclipse and for a few days it really seemed to capture the public’s imagination.“My friend’s dad had organised a huge party and had obviously done his homework. When he was running us through his preparation and how the day was going to go down, he said, ‘We’re hoping for totality, ’ and it blew my mind.

“The day of the eclipse I was driving through New Mexico and we stopped by the side of the road with hundreds of other people gazing up to the heavens. It felt exciting to be part of something that clearly resonated with people on such a profound level. It’s a fitting album closer and somewhere in there is a philosophy; a romantic nihilism”. And at its heart, right there is the core of Modern Nature’s appeal. Never more so than on this new record.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: I've always been a fan of everything Jack's done, since his time (and mine) and Trof all those years ago, through various monikers, but for me this is the highpoint. Gloriously textured, impeccably pitched harmonies, *perfect* textural changes and stunningly written songs. A real masterclass.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
Pharaoh
Radio
Glance
Source

Side B
Jetty
Alpenglow
Zoology
Takeover
Totality

Wrexham’s The Royston Club return in Summer 2025 with Songs For The Spine — a soaring, emotionally-charged second album that captures a band stepping up and standing tall. Opening track Shivers sets the tone immediately: a dark love song that channels the spirit of The Cure at their most euphoric, and signals a bold new era for the band. Recorded at Liverpool’s Kempston Street Studios with acclaimed producer Richard Turvey (Blossoms, The Courteeners), and released via Run On / Modern Sky Records, this is the sound of a group at the peak of their powers.

Following the success of their Top 20 debut Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars and a sold-out UK tour in 2024, The Royston Club have emerged tighter, louder, and more emotionally driven. Songs For The Spine builds on the band’s signature indie DNA while embracing something weightier and more expansive. The soul-baring The Patch Where Nothing Grows is already resonating as a fan anthem, while tracks like Crowbar shimmer with glad-but-sad disco nostalgia. Cariad wears its heart firmly on its sleeve, and The Ballad Of Glen Campbell brings the record to a cinematic close.

At its core, this is a collection of songs about the people and places that hold you up — the emotional backbone of everyday life. There’s love, loss, guilt, longing and joy in these ten tracks, delivered with a raw honesty and a more human, less polished sound than before. The band and Turvey purposely embraced imperfection in the studio, leaning into live takes and leaving in the edges that give these songs their pulse.

Songs For The Spine is the sound of The Royston Club turning a breakthrough into a mission statement — urgent, ambitious, and unafraid to evolve. If the first album was a sprinting start, this is a victory lap with the road wide open ahead.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The Royston Club bring us a beautifully relaxed mix of soaring 90's jangle and euphoric pop-indie, both wonderfully written and produced and a clear indication that they're here to stay. Lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

Shivers
The Patch Where Nothing Grows
Crowbar
Glued To The Bed
Cariad
30/20
Spinning
Through The Cracks
Curses & Spit
The Ballad Of Glen Campbell

Maybe I’m Dreaming is the latest collection selected by Mikey Young (Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring) and Keith Abrahamsson (Founder and Head of A&R at Anthology Recordings), the mangled minds behind the beloved Follow the Sun, Sad About the Times, and …Still Sad compilations. The twenty tracks of Dreaming make a conscious, and unconscious, detour from its predecessors, sourced entirely from private press releases, spanning new decades and production modes within homespun folk, soft rock, and otherwise 70s and 80s FM radio adjacent music. The magic of Dreaming is the untold story of the artists behind these songs; those who missed the big time, but whose song craft and unrequited care hit the right notes, both high and low.

Where Follow the Sun and Sad About the Times introduced us to the fame chasing, ambition crashing crooners who missed their shot in the mainstream, Dreaming delves deeper into the isolated wilds — a private world where production quirks, late-night tape hiss, and one-man studio dreams were not necessarily a choice but the hand that was dealt. With the parameters set to "private press only,” Young and Abrahamsson follow a circuitous trail of invention and emotion, documenting a spirit that’s more homespun, sometimes lonelier, and often a little weirder. The guitars still strum, but the keyboards’ hum is more prevalent and precious; wistful harmonies brush up against lo-fi drum machines; a bittersweet fog lingering over even the brightest melodies.

As with their previous collaborations, Young and Abrahamsson weren’t interested in constructing a museum or drafting a historical survey. Dreaming is a sentimental mixtape, assembled late at night when the mind wanders and old memories blur with imagined futures, those within reach and those far too mysterious to ever encounter. Songs were unearthed in personal collections, deep YouTube burrows, dilapidated web archives, and the dim corners of Discogs, with many selections tied not only to intuition but to personal connection. Some tracks arrived via friends — Kelley Stoltz, a frequent guide for Young, tipped him off to both Peter Kraemer’s lost gem “Let the Light Slip” and Awakening’s revelatory closer — adding an unseen but deeply felt thread of camaraderie to the compilation.

The journey takes in a wide, strange sweep: The Watson Brothers Band's “Just Whistle” opens the collection with a sigh and a shrug, a song that feels like it’s been waiting for decades to be heard again. Jim Huxley’s “Tessa on a Magazine,” rediscovered after a long and winding search by Young, shimmers with a distinctly Australian melancholia. The heartbreak of Rick Penta's “My Story Changes” and Twice As Nice’s delicate “Thoughts of You” float easily alongside the more buoyant, radio-dream sheen of Barracuda’s Baby “I Love You” and MAK’s sunshine-dappled “That's Life.”

Widening the aperture to the late 70s and early 80s allows for a deeper exploration into evolving production techniques and musical technologies. The Squad’s “D.L.M.H.I.M.A.” and Christoph Spendel Group’s “Forever” crackle with the kind of bedroom synth warmth that could only come from the analog age, while the soulful, yearning undercurrent of Awakening’s “Gotta Do Somethin / Might As Well Cultivate” caps the collection with a call for action — or maybe just acceptance – in an accidental Brian Eno Here Come the Warm Jets parroting.

While Dreaming moves away from the "sad man with guitar" archetype that hovered over its predecessors, it remains tethered to a familiar emotional gravity — a balance of longing and lightness that defines this corner of the musical universe. Each track shuffles gently between resignation and hope, sadness and serenity, as if the artists themselves were chasing a dream just beyond reach, recording not for fame but for the simple act of getting it, that primal, creative itch, out into the world.

The result is a collection that feels both ephemeral and eternal. A flicker caught in amber. A transmission from the other side of the night; a place where the angels and demons mingle, sharing shots and lines with those that enter their parlor. Dreaming is an invitation to drift a little while longer, eyes half-closed, into that liminal space between memory and imagination. Maybe you're dreaming. Maybe you're awake. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Gorgeously evocative drifters that span the psychedelic spectrum, from saturated folk and woozy country to blipping synthpop and bold, bubbling minimalism, all perfectly slotted together. A proper melting pot of influence, brought together with clear respect for the source material, and a deep field of knowledge.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1. The Watson Brothers Band - Just Whistle
A2. Jim Huxley - Tessa On A Magazine
A3. Rick Penta - My Story Changes
A4. MAK - That's Life
A5. Palm Pizazz! - Silent Letter
A6. Twice As Nice - Thoughts Of You

Side B
B1. Barracuda - Baby I Love You
B2. Elderberry Jak - Forrest On The Mountain
B3. Dennis - Walk With Me
B4. Jim Ware - Green Eyed Gypsy
B5. John Lyle - Oh My Wind

Side C
C1. Peter Kraemer - Let The Light Slip
C2. Brian Freel - Nightrider
C3. Michael Moore - Holland
C4. Clete Stallbaumer - John's Song
C5. Ronnie White - The Jump

Side D
D1. David Owens - Take Off Your Armour
D2. The Squad - D.L.M.H.I.M.A.
D3. Christoph Spendel Group - Forever
D4. Awakening - Gotta Do Somethin / Might As Well Cultivate

Coach Party return with their explosive second studio album, ‘Caramel’, set for release on September 26th via Chess Club Records.

Coach Party are poised to make their mark on 2025 and beyond with their new album ‘Caramel’, it is a melody packed, infectious record born from the shared experiences and unity of the band's four members: Jess Eastwood, Steph Norris, Guy Page and Joe Perry. Produced by the band’s own Guy Page, it channels the introspection and bite of bands like Hole, Sprints, Turnstile, and Amyl and the Sniffers. Clocking in at 33 minutes, it’s a sharp, melody-driven record that expands on the themes of their 2023 debut ‘Killjoy’ - heartbreak, identity, and finding your voice.

The band have built a reputation for intense, sweat-soaked live shows, touring with the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, Wet Leg and Royal Blood, and making festival appearances at Glastonbury and Rock en Seine.

With ‘Caramel’, they push their sound further than ever-hook-heavy, emotionally honest, and made for the big stage.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1. Do It For Love
A2. Girls!
A3. Georgina
A4. Control
A5. I Really Like You

Side B
B1. Disco Dream
B2. Fake It
B3. Medicate Yourself
B4. Do Yourself A Favour
B5. Still Hurts

Makeshift Art Bar, the rising sonic powerhouse hailing from Belfast, released their highly anticipated debut EP, Lackluster Writing Makes Fundamental Reading, on the 3rd of January 2025. This EP solidifies their place as one of the most innovative voices in the underground music scene.

The four-track record captures the raw intensity and unapologetic experimentalism that have made Makeshift Art Bar a must-see act on stages across Europe. Each track on Lackluster Writing Makes Fundamental Reading takes listeners on a journey through jagged guitar riffs, pulsating rhythms, and lyrics that oscillate between the poetic and the provocative.

Their unique sound hurled them into the spotlight achieving a Radio 6 live session and playlisting, multiple festival slots including Borderline, Ypsingrock and All Together Now and sold out support slots with Chalk across the UK.

Press Quotes:
“The band unleash chaos with an instrumental so sick and evil that it’s massively enjoyable.” - Peter Martin, So Young Magazine.

“Each plectrum pluck shivers the ribcage and mangles the guts like a queue of ghosts drifting through your body, beat by tremulous beat.” - Elvis Thirwell, So Young Magazine.

“The noise rock quartet pitch into and lurch through this lively song, a Frankenstein’s monster of post-punk, grunge and––low-key––sludge metal. All sung with an unmistakable Belfast accent.” - Cyrus Larcombe Morre, Clunk Magazine.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1. Birthday Party
A2. Notice Me

Side B
B1. Sonic Shelf
B2. Bedwetter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

STAFF COMMENTS

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

TRACK LISTING

1. Girl Band Starter Pack
2. Gok Wan
3. Lazy
4. Tit School
5. We Need To Talk About Dennis
6. Do Something
7. Personal Best
8. Pockets
9. Unhinged
10. SMELLARAT
11. Thelma And Louise

At the tail end of 2022, Glasgow's Humour put out their debut EP ‘Pure Misery’, a six-track fever dream that established the band as one of the most exciting new bands on the circuit, a record they called themselves "a montage of miserable things... a bit desperate and a bit grim, but also a bit ridiculous". Already known for the strength and raw unpredictability of their shows, 2023 saw more touring, their inclusion in the NME100 and the group taking further strides with A Small Crowd Gathered To Watch Me, a second collection of songs that showed a further progression towards capturing the powerful sound that emanates from their live stage - "something unique: vocals that veer wildly between extremes, sometimes a manic gibbering mess, others an emotive swagger, the instrumentals tightly wound and hard-hitting." (NME)

Humour live together in Glasgow and formed across the lockdowns, writing and recording their material at home, with the music intended as a backdrop to Andreas' narrative-driven and often surreal lyrics. Sometimes they’re about letting people down, sometimes they’re about pets dying, sometimes they’re about trying to say something when you don’t have anything worth saying.

The imagery of the lyrics is reflected in the illustrative designs Andreas makes for the single and album artworks, making drawings to go along with each of their songs, and the visuals behind the lyric videos for previous singles.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Snappy, soaring punk that's instantly reminiscent of the post-hardcore boom of the 00's but with a distinctly modern outlook on cross-genre pollination, sounding at times like a wonky Pavement, and at others like a wrong-speed Green Day record. A uniquely melodic, scathing blast of wild Glaswegian rock.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Neighbours
2. Memorial
3. Plagiarist
4. Learning Greek
5. Dirty Bread
6. Die Rich

Side B
1. Knew We’d Talk About It One Day
2. Aphid
3. I Only Have Eyes (feat. Theo Bleak)
4. In The Paddies
5. It Happened In The Sun

‘On The Wing’ is the debut album from Yoshika Colwell - a captivating and sophisticated collection of eleven songs that traverse the outer regions of folk, it is a record of acceptance and self-discovery, rooted in solitude and personal healing, from one of the UK’s most exciting new singer-songwriters.

Life, for us all, comes in seasons: the bitter frosts and balmy awakenings that herald the literal passing of time, but also the periods of retreat and re-emergence that bookmark our own individual paths along this mortal coil. For Yoshika, the last decade has found her existing at both ends of the spectrum. Following a period of complete dislocation fuelled by a move to a new town, lockdown and a traumatic break-up all striking in quick succession, it would take a stretch of restorative isolation to bring her back to full creative and personal health. Now, however, all of that sadness and pain, acceptance and slow-dawning hope has been channeled into ‘On The Wing’. Speaking about the album, she says:

“This album is a bit of a shrine I suppose to all of the pivotal experiences that shaped me during my twenties and it’s also, I feel, a tentative lean towards hopefulness for the future.

It is, at its core, an album about acceptance and release, and freedom from old binds. It was an extremely emotional and cathartic record to make. It was a challenge to put all of the things I was scared to say into these songs, to finally let them out of my head without shying away from the ugly or unpalatable emotions, but it felt like the only thing to do.

The process felt quite ritualistic, akin to writing down the things you know you need to let go of on a piece of paper and burning it.”

Produced by Oli Bayston (Barry Can't Swim, Rachel Chinouriri), the album was recorded at Studio Orbb, where Yoshika recorded her critically acclaimed debut EP ‘There’s A Time’. Since then, a string of releases have seen support from The New Cue, BBC 6Music, Paste, The Line of Best Fit and Stereogum, to name a few, whilst Yoshika has played her first shows in the US at SXSW. This summer she plays The Great Escape, Moseley Folk Festival and End of the Road.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Beautiful flickering folky melodies and silky smooth vocals, rich in the folk tradition but also awash with non-traditional production and an uncharacteristic levity and easy joy. That's not to mention the more meditative pieces that could easily sit on the greatest Laura Marling albums, seamlessly sitting next to these joyful ballasts. It's stunning.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
On & On
Last Night
In Bloom
Turn My Face Away
It’ll Never Be Enough
Into The Water

Side B
There’s Got To Be A Loser Babe
Fighting On The Wing
A Poem About Walking
Once In A Blue Moon
Maybe

‘Tuff Times Never Last’ is a spirited and vibrant collection of songs serving as an optimistic reminder to tightly hold and embrace the many dualities that occur in life. Over the course of the 11-song suite, the album explores togetherness, community, sensuality, childhood, loss and above all perseverance.

Initially drawing inspiration from a viral social media meme, co-bandleader Onome Edgeworth said of the title’s origins and meaning: “It’s true! Although we’re reflecting on joy and celebration, you realize that a lot of that beauty comes out of challenges and difficulties. It felt like a natural truth that we discovered whilst writing”.

The accompanying artwork was painted by Luci Pina, the acclaimed illustrator whose work has been sought and commissioned by the likes of The Cut, Soho House, DICE, Apple Music and It’s Nice That. Embedded within the image is Kokoroko’s ode to London in the summer. Speaking on its design, co-bandleader Sheila Maurice-Grey said: “The remit was summer in London, family and sense of everyone being in a congregation-like audience, and us being the musicians”.

The artwork’s imagery and colour was inspired by feelings of innocence and nostalgia - coming of age in London and those rare summer nights where everything felt full of hope. The cityscape also pays homage to Spike Lee’s 1994 film ‘Crookyln’ and Rick Famuyiwa’s 1999 opus ‘The Wood’. The band saw these movies as heartwarming representations of black family, community and resilience that served as a balm for them as Londoners. Speaking further on this, co-bandleader Onome Edgeworth said: “‘Crooklyn’ is very emotional, but also very uplifting. It felt like how I grew up. This album is us sharing our own feelings, hopes and dreams. We didn’t always have those stories in the UK”

Three years on from their debut album ‘Could We Be More’ which peaked at No.30 on the UK Albums Chart and received acclaim from The Guardian, The Telegraph, Financial Times, Jazzwise, CRACK Magazine and Downbeat Magazine, ‘Tuff Times Never Last’ sees the London band with careless abandon expand their wide-ranging palette and influences.

While the afrobeat jazz of their previous work is still a core part of the record’s sonic design, the new album largely pulls from British R&B from the 80s, neo-soul, West African disco, bossa nova, lovers rock and funk. Sonically taking cues from the likes of Loose Ends, Don Blackman, Common, Sly & Robbie, William Onyeabor, Patrice Rushen, Ofori Amponsah and Cymande. Throughout this instinctive evolution, the septet's seasoned musicianship preserves the essence of who Kokoroko are as masterful jazz artisans.

Speaking on the band’s progression in sound, co-bandleader Sheila Maurice-Grey said: “Innately, we’re jazz musicians but we've tried not to kind of box ourselves into one sound. So there is a level of freedom we're starting to feel. We want to continue being as creative as possible without feeling any boundaries”.

STAFF COMMENTS

Millie says: Kokoroko’s second studio album ‘Tuff Times Never Last’ is a literal message, a beautiful dose of optimism, joy and that resilience with the help of music and community, it might just all be ok in the end - if not better.

You can really get the sense that the 8-piece band have grown their sound from more Afrobeat jazz, to being influenced by soul, R&B, bossa nova and quite a range more. The progression of their style feels like an organic movement into this new chapter and I’m all for it. Vibrant, emotive, almost as though a snapshot of Summer 2025.

“Never Lost” has got to be my favourite track from the album, the harmonies they reach, the emotions it evokes, it really encapsulates the feeling of golden sunshine on your face. The album holds the sentiment that, with the people closest to you held tightly, it’s true, good times are only around the corner.

TRACK LISTING

A1 Never Lost
A2 Sweetie
A3 Closer To Me
A4 My Father In Heaven
A5 Idea 5 (Call My Name) [feat. LULU.]
A6 Three Piece Suit (feat. Azekel)
B1 Time And Time (feat. Demae)
B2 Da Du Dah
B3 Together We Are
B4 Just Can’t Wait
B5 Over / Reprise