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AD 93

GB

Herzsprung

'Herzsprung' is GB’s most expansive work yet. Written while living in London, the Copenhagen-based songwriter and producer spent weeks cutting up copies of Metro — one of the city’s free newspapers — to form the lyrical foundation of the songs. In makeshift studios, he began bringing these ideas to life.

Where GB’s debut record was shrouded in a downtempo haze, 'Herzsprung' creates a distinct sound that pushes outward: something more melodic, more full-throated, and more assured. The album draws together a wide spectrum of influences; from the groove-driven fusion jazz of the 1970s to Japanese noise-rock psychedelia, anthemic grunge, and outsider pop. There are traces of the alt-pop qualities that GB shares with his Copenhagen peers, but you hear London’s influence too, an urge to stretch rock tradition and break with form.

After finding himself improbably cast in a viral Jaguar ad in 2024, he used the money to book out a studio villa in the Swedish wilderness, joined by a band of trusted musicians. Over the course of a week, the songs — which had previously existed as memos and notebook scribbles — took full shape through live performance and collective instinct. Tracked largely live to 24-track tape, the result is a record that feels immediate and playful in its execution. It captures the chemistry of an uncompromising band brimming with ideas and welcoming spontaneity. 'Herzsprung' sifts through the past and present with urgency, cutting it open so that the future leaks out.

On the record's climax, 'Shit River', GB is backed by a full choir as he screams for "someplace beaming with more colors”. “..and everything in between collapsed, rushing floods of insignificance”.

TRACK LISTING

1. Adrenaline
2. If Only You’re Still Around
3. The Next Day
4. Starsound
5. Belly
6. Pipe Dream (ft. Alba Akvama)
7. Era
8. Small Gods
9. Shit River
10. Katie Magic True

One Leg One Eye

CRONE

'CRONE' is the second album from Lynch and Brennan, following on from 2022’s slowburn slab of ambient grit, '...And Take The Black Worm With Me'. Bewildering, psychedelic and ultimately transcendental, the four tracks of One Leg One Eye’s 'CRONE' shapeshift and morph endlessly in a coarse miasma. Traditional song structures and vocal melody are eschewed, instead the trio directly channel energies from the rich seams of mythological significance submerged below the Irish psyche. The anger, rage and beauty of the sovereignty goddess burn a consistent and deliberate line through the album in the form of obscure incantations and dire pronouncements, the gnarled sinews that bind it all together.

Just as the subject matter of the tracks delve deeper into Irish myth and the remote past, the temporal reality of the album reaches back into the bands prehistory, with the majority of it the material being recorded by Lynch and Brennan in 2021 before One Leg One Eye was conceived of as an entity with Brennan working on the 'CRONE' project while Lynch worked on '...And Take The Black Worm With Me'.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: One Leg One Eye skilfully blend the traditional folky leanings of Lynch's band (Lankum) with a riotous, metallic heft and cataclysmic doomy blast of noise. It's not drone, nor metal per se, but an extension of the sound of folk twisted and churned and stretched into a thousand constituent parts before being smashed through a Boss MT-2 (or 3). Incredibly transformative, catatonic mayhem.

TRACK LISTING

1. Many are my Names Besides
2. Neither Fell nor Flesh
3. What I shall Follow, I Shall Hunt
4. Save What Birds Will Bear Away in Their Claws

James K

Friend Remixes

James K’s critically-acclaimed third album, 'Friend', opens as a portal, a constant earworm that continually resonates with listeners as the map of its emotional cartography shifts into new ground. The map continues to unfold with the announcement of Friend Remixes. K has invited friends to rework twelve tracks. Dance floor and heavy hitting bangers flit across the record, reworked by electronic pioneers Objekt, Drew McDowall (Coil), Hesaitix (M.E.S.H) and Arushi Jain, as well as collaborators and contemporaries Special Guest DJ, Priori (who both co-produced elements of Friend), JASSS, K Wata, Yushh , Roza Terenzi, Loidis and Stone.

TRACK LISTING

1. Days Go By (K Wata Remix)
2. Blinkmoth (Special Guest DJ VIP)
3. Doom Bikini (Hesaitix Remix)
4. Idea.2 (Yushh Remix)
5. N’Balmed (JASSS Purple Mix)
6. Rider (Drew McDowall Remix)
7. On God (Roza Terenzi Remix)
8. Peel (Loidis Remix)
9. Play (Objekt Remix)
10. Lung Slide (Stone Remix)
11. Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream (Priori Remix)
12. Collapse (Arushi Jain Remix)

Shackleton

Euphoria Bound

Somewhere between revelation and delusion, 'Euphoria Bound' maps a familiar trajectory: the irresistible pull towards dissolution, the gradual erasure of memory, the self rendered irretrievable. It moves between states of consciousness where such distinctions of enlightenment or self-deception are erased. Across ten tracks, the album constructs a spectrum of sound that is both ambitious and uncompromising. The approach here is more direct than recent releases, with textures that accumulate and disintegrate with renewed urgency.


STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Neo-tribal technician Shackleton returns with more of his idiosyncratic sound. Punctuated rhythms, electro-acoustic intervention, frog-licking sonics and shamanic vibes aplenty on this eagerly awaited new LP. He's still the wizard at this stuff!

TRACK LISTING

1. Elemental Dream
2. Philistine Wavelength
3. Contagious Illusions
4. Crushing Realities
5. The Unbeliever's Pulse
6. When Memory Ceases
7. The Past Awakening
8. The Soul Of Everything
9. The Dream In Fragments
10. Buried And Irretrievable

Ben Vince

Street Druid

Saxophonist and producer Ben Vince's sixth album, 'Street Druid', the first in almost six years via AD 93.

'Street Druid' merges acoustic, manipulated, and electronic sound. It has saxophone, synth, voice, guitars, and drum machine, and features drum kit from Moses Boyd. It features artwork by Byzantia Harlow. It is at once tender, psychedelic, and fierce. It is not interested in genre or category. It lasts just under 45 minutes.


TRACK LISTING

1. Prelude.
2. Peace Spell.
3. Deepbluereflection.
4. Street Druid.
5. Sentient Interlude.
6. Sentient Kinetics.
7. (Ride A) Wave. 00:00 08:23.
8. Longville.

YHWH Nailgun

45 Pounds

45 Pounds is a record of thrilling cacophony: whirring drums meet the sound of instruments which have been twisted and bent into new shapes, all of which are paired with the arresting growls of Zack Borzone. Across the record the four-piece re-imagine what is possible within the confines of a band set up, creating music that perfectly encapsulates the information overload of our times.

The band have become known for their stellar live performances and now with 45 Pounds they have set that electrifying feeling to record. With 45 Pounds YHWH Nailgun have created a statement that is short to cut through the modern day post-algorithmic sludge. Stay tuned for more news. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Penetrator
2. Castrato Raw Fullback
3. Pain Fountain
4. Animal Death Already Breathing
5. Ultra Shade Beat My Blood Dog Down
6. Iron Feet
7. Tear Pusher
8. Sickle Walk
9. Blackout
10. Changer

Leif

Collide

Much of the 'Collide's sound is derived from an old Aria Pro II electric guitar from Leif’s childhood, scratched up with damaged and unpredictable
electrics.

The record leans into this sense of things being broken or damaged - and how sometimes things need to break in order for us to make sense of them- revelling in, rather than resisting, unpredictability.

Lush textures traverse us across unexpected terrains.


TRACK LISTING

1. How To Eat An Orange (Part 1)
2. How To Eat An Orange (Part 2)
3. Yes No
4. Wrong Way
5. Aria
6. Filmed Backwards
7. Learn And Unlearn
8. Wearing The Sea

Feeo

Goodness

Illuminated with breathtaking vocals and uncanny poetics, ‘Goodness’ is an open, impressionistic assemblage of drone, ambient, experimental electronics, improvisational music and minimalist dance music. Across protean forms and voices, feeo explores an ever-evolving counterpoint between connection and isolation, the city and the natural world, the external and the internal. Contrasting beauty with volatility, communion with disintegration, feeo creates an album of absorbing tension between distinct contrasts.

With eleven interconnected pieces of music, each engaged in symbiotic dialogue, ‘Goodness’ represents a sinuous yet uniform work. Each track is like a link in a chain, with each piece revealing its lustre when held up to the light.

feeo describes the album as “an exploration of simultaneous yet opposing states of being; darkness and lightness, obscurity and visibility and most fundamentally, solitude and togetherness. Each song is an adumbration; a partial sketch of one aspect of the LP - each finding its complete meaning when read in the context of the whole.”

Mirroring the push and pull of perception and contemporary experience, ‘Goodness’ oscillates between disparate moods and intensities, reflecting moments of interiority, intimacy, seclusion, collective experience and exterior turbulence.

With gentle lyricism and mercurial musicality, the album carries us through multitudes, from the ruptured spoken word noise of ‘Days pt.1’, to the elemental close-mic ambient of ‘The Mountain’, through the arhythmic electronic soulfulness of ‘Win!’ and the aching piano loops of ‘Sandpit’, to the languid lap steel abstraction of ‘There Is No I’ and the luminous improv cycles of second single ‘The Hammer Strikes The Bell’. Together, these tracks form an album of profoundly emotive, radical resonances; music both tender and fearless.

‘Goodness’ marks an evolution in feeo’s artistic practice, both as her first full-length release, and as a product of wider collaboration after several years working independently. Welcoming close collaborators and select affiliates into the fold, the process of making ‘Goodness’ was very much like the record itself; a deeply personal, special convergence of expression and artistry.

Hailed by The Wire as ‘part of an exciting new wave of London experimental artists and improvisors’, ‘Goodness’ signifies a culminationin feeo’s output, which spans an acclaimed run of solo releases as well as collaborations with Loraine James and bassist Caius Williams.


TRACK LISTING

1. Days Pt. 1
2. The Mountain
3. Requiem
4. The Last Great Storm
5. Win!
6. Sandpit
7. Here
8. Days Pt.2
9. The Hammer Strikes The Bell
10. Night Forgives Those Black As Her
11. There Is No I

Alpha Maid

Is This A Queue

Beginning from a sense of frustration at the predictable and boring narratives and systems that we live under, and the feeling that such rules were the rules of the universe, Alpha Maid formed an interest in particle physics.

“We only know 4% of the universe, there is hope in that and the unknown 96%. I found excitement and wonder in that. The theories I was reading about relied more on the conditions of the present moment, and it made the idea of living in the moment feel more accessible. It started to be possible to see present time from all these different angles, and to have infinite more options to choose where to be next.”

Written across many years and different places, the LP documents a journey and the people Alpha Maid met while moving around, collating moments of the present. Her guitar remains a constant amongst an array of sonic influences throughout: from dub which honours her Jamaican heritage and the Windrush Generation, to the twinges of an emo love song in 'On Smoke'.

Is this a queue revels in the magic of that which we cannot see and coherently understand, and the narratives that have been shrunk down to fit. Remembering, continuing, forgetting, paying attention, building, navigating, contributing, time.

Alpha Maid (aka Leisha Thomas) is a guitarist, vocalist, and producer from South London. Her debut EP 'Spy' (2019) was released by the collective/label CURL. She continues to collaborate in various forms with fellow members such as Coby Sey and Mica Levi. Alpha Maid's debut vinyl release 'CHUCKLE' EP (2021) was released on the C.A.N.V.A.S. collective/label, and garnered significant critical attention. In spring 2023 Alpha Maid teamed up with Mica Levi to self-release their joint 'EP spresso'.


TRACK LISTING

1. 6-9
2. 2 Numbers (ft. Leo Hermitt)
3. Guarded
4. CC
5. GOAT Rosetta
6. WHY WE HAVE TO MOVE (ft. Valentina Magaletti)
7. On Smoke
8. Strut In Straddle
9. Palimpsest (ft. Coby Sey, Ben Vince)

Olan Monk

Songs For Nothing

'Songs For Nothing' was written upon Olan Monk’s return to the west coast of Ireland. The album is imbued with the influence of sean-nós singing, Irish language songs in the “old style” that often proclaim tales of love, loss and landscape; and also heavily indebted to the late Sinéad O’Connor’s confessional songwriting.

Reconstructing these influences through their unique perspective has resulted in a fragmentary album veering between co laged pop, machinic rock and slow airs, “dedicated to Conamara and all who have called it home”. The western, Atlantic-facing edge of Ireland has a particular feeling and energy, one that permeates the release: the granite pulsates, the ocean and sky reflect intensities, seaweed rots on shingle shores, plants bloom, ancient trees come up for air from the drowned forest in Galway Bay, the sun splinters through the low clouds. The album’s title suggests a one-way transaction, an offering to the listener expecting nothing in return, but also a devotion to nothingness; and the realm of infinite possibility that springs from its well: singing out into a sparse landscape, which once was home to long-lost forests and communities.

A departure from Olan Monk’s previous, more electronic work, the instrumental arrangements of 'Songs for Nothing' delve deeper into the "gothic art rock" descriptor (coined by Irish writer Eoin Murray, Anois Ós Ard), with elements of shoegaze, witch house, cloud rap and Irish traditional music bleeding through the wals of the studio. Never straying too far from the vocal refrains and guitar riffs of their previous collaborations over the past few years; from co-writing and performing vocals with fellow AD 93 act Moin on 'Guess It’s Wrecked' from their wide-reaching album 'You Never End' in 2024, performing in the same year on the acclaimed Princ€ss debut; to recording guitar on Maria Somerville’s 4AD debut 'Luster' and contributing guitar and production to Ghost Mountain’s 'Haunted Mound' return on October Country, both released earlier this year.

'Songs for Nothing', in melding influences old and new feels at times absurd, but never ironic; it is from the heart, and its respect for song traditions and dedication to process are felt in two arrangements of older songs embracing this new trajectory: 'Fate (Reprise)' is an earlier recording reimagined as a doomer ballad with Maria Somerville singing in a duet, and 'Amhrán Mhaínse' is a Conamara anthem slowed down as a duo of accordion performed by Peadar Tom Mercier accompanied by heavy guitar drones. Folding in other Irish neo-traditional expressionists and experimentalists, the record also features Michael Speers, Dylan Kerr, Aindriú De Buitléir, Risteárd O'hAodha and Róisín Berkeley. The addition of the tin whistle across the album, full of intention, captures the uncomfortable relationship between our love as a people for our traditions with a long-standing alienation from our own language and culture. 'Songs For Nothing' rejects today’s disconnect with this heritage; they ca l for us to collectively work our way back out of this void. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Corp
2. Down 3
3. 10 Days
4. Blank Page
5. Drón Feadóige
6. Oatmilk
7. Can’t Wait
8. Pomegranate
9. Fate (Reprise)
10. Amhrán Mhaínse 

James K

Friend

James K follows up on AD 93 with her third album, 'Friend'. The oneiric fogs of James K lifting into vision have stirred and shaped the landscape of contemporary music since her first release. It is not hyperbole to say that K has consistently beta-launched sounds and perspectives that have rippled across many mediums for years, defining a way that is both singular in vision and marked by collaboration and shared dreaming. Known for her polychromatic hypersensitivity, K’s hauntological dream pop is making ‘music that slows the anxious heart while holding a mirror to {the} deep-rooted angst we prefer to leave unspoken.’

An opening of the portal, 'Friend' is the culmination of a decade of K’s work; the gates of which gleam like a slow drip of melodic infusion, at once a remedy and an inquiry. Friend encapsulates a lifelong praxis of intuitive music making, delivering a more precise and controlled sound, with versions of songs shifting into focus like recovered memories. Feeling her way through textures, a return to, and a melding of, the voice and technical mastery, these soundscapes lay down a framework over time that traces the history of her practice. James K has been a cosmic point of the aesthetic underground across the world, as a vocalist, producer, artist and collaborator. Her breathy, lilting vocals have floated across some of the past year’s best music. Expanding and ethereal, they make you feel like the call is coming from inside the house.

You can trace touch points across her lengthy catalogue, spanning from the foundational urgency of 2013’s debut 'Rum' EP, to the prismatic elasticity of PET (She Rocks!/Dial), to the strange-faced, visceral and, at times, sepulchral intoxication of Random Girl (Incienso), from the universal ecstasy of trip-hop lullaby ‘Scorpio’ (AD 93). To this day, her transmutative career has led K to amass a bouquet of collaborations with artists like Heith, Moin, Fergus Jones + Huerco S., Priori, Yves Tumor, Drew McDowall, LEYA, and others.

Friend is K’s return to the core; with a vault of hard lessons and inimitable love to draw from. Based in New York where she was born and has lived most of her life, there is a constant evolution of the city which she embodies sonically, like the growth, decay and push, pull of relationships and spaces. At the crux of these crossroads is the homespun and ever-evolving DIY rave culture which continues to embody and cycle through lives of its own. This ecology spans across geographical lines and remains the touchstone and core of the james K vocation: the backbone and infrastructure from which her distinctive command of interwoven guitar and electronic arrangements ultimately coalesces. Grafting fragments of the real and the surreal is the provenance she draws from in her thoughtful and emotive international performances including Dekmantel, Sustain Release, Mutek, iii Points, and more.

TRACK LISTING

1. Days Go By
2. Blinkmoth (July Mix)
3. Doom Bikini
4. Idea.2
5. N’Balmed
6. Rider
7. On God
8. Peel
9. Lude (Unwind)
10. Play
11. Lung Slide
12. Hypersoft Lovejinx Junkdream
13. Collapse (Falling Forward Blissfully All The Time)

Biosphere

The Way Of Time

Biosphere’s album 'The Way Of Time' takes loose inspiration from Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ novel The Time Of Man, sampling Joan Lorring’s voice from the 1951 radio play adaptation of the novel. Biosphere’s signature ambient loops, soothing arctic synths and melodies combine with Lorring’s sweet, wistful and deep-south wonderings to create a record that is both deeply human and searching.

TRACK LISTING

1. TIME OF MAN
2. THE WAY OF TIME
/3. LIKE THE END OF THE WORLD
4. ALL STARS HAVE NAMES
5. THE OLD WAY WAS GONE
6. THE WAY OF TIME (ON AND ON)

"Process Of Elimination" explores sickness as a teacher for anti-capitalist modes of being; a rewilding of the self. The product of an attempt to be indestructible, this sickness has an unknown diagnosis. The only route to determine the indeterminable is via a process of elimination. Eliminate the noise so it may quieten and make space for listening to what whispers underneath, allowing a return to the present moment. Slowness and queerness as technologies, questions as answers and mysticism as a path to healing when science alone does not suffice.

London-based multidisciplinary artist El Hardwick’s sophomore album follows their experience of becoming chronically ill after years of treating their body like a machine. El explains: 'After failing to receive a diagnosis, which is only given via a lengthy process of elimination, I instead turned to autonomous modes of healing rooted in mysticism and herbalism; putting aside the need to be defined. My journey towards accepting my disability is told in parallel to my coming-out as trans. I also see my non-binary identity as a process of elimination: I am neither gender, both, in-between. It is through rewilding myself from capitalism and gender normativity that I learn how to connect to my body and the earth; no longer allowing either’s energy to be extracted from. The less I sought answers, language, metrics and analysis, the more peace I found.'

TRACK LISTING

The Queer Art Of Slowness
Dual
Quantology
How Do I Know What I Want When Everybody Is Telling Me I Should Want What I Dont Have
Laying On The Floor Staring Up At Dust In The Air
Breathing Room
Language Couldnt Say
Pataphysical
Wildest Imagination

BZDP

Jump Ship, Sit Lean, Be Still, Stand Tall

A collaboration between Duncan Bellamy (Portico Quartet) and Belinda Zhawi (MA.MOYO), Jump Ship, Sit Lean, Be Still, Stand Tall is a collection of sonic-poetry that sets Zhawi’s illuminating, elliptical words in dialogue with diffuse, explorative music and sound by Bellamy. Fluctuating between expansive contemporary classical arrangements and intimate layered vocal experiments, together they render these disparate forms into something distinct, melancholic and luminous.

Belinda Zhawi is a literary & sound artist based in London & Marseille, author of Small Inheritances (ignitionpress, 2018), & experiments with sound/text performance as MA.MOYO. Her work explores African diaspora research and narratives, and how art and education can be used as intersectional tools. Her literary & sound works have been featured on various platforms including The White Review, Vogue, NTS, Boiler Room & BBC Radio. She’s held residencies with Triangle-Asterides, France; Cove Park, Scotland; Serpentine Galleries; ICA London and was a Brixton House Associate Artist 2022 - 24. Belinda’s the co-founder of literary arts platform, BORN::FREE. She is working on her first full poetry collection.

Duncan Bellamy (b. Cambridge, UK, 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. His diverse practice encompasses painting, silkscreen, photography, sound and music. His work examines the shape of time, loss and our relationship to the past and present in a period of compressed transformation. He is a founding member of Mercury Prize nominated Portico Quartet, and has contributed sound work to the artist Hannah Collins audio-visual installation I Will Make Up A Song. Bellamy is working on a debut exhibition and new music.

TRACK LISTING

Dancesing
Stockwell
Jump Ship
Shield
Water
Tomb
Dream Sequence
La Recherche
Holes
Your Absence

LICE

Third Time At The Beach

Formed in Bristol, 4-piece LICE have become one of UK experimental rock’s most inventive and ambitious outliers. Their second album ‘Third Time At The Beach’ – a three-part epic exploring our struggle to better understand the world around us – arrives via AD 93. Darting between minimalism, rock, techno and more, it sends us hurtling us through time and space: featuring a cast of astronauts, cavemen and dinosaurs.

This follows LICE’s internationally acclaimed debut album ‘WASTELAND: What Ails Our People Is Clear’ (2021). Praised as “exciting, alive, packed with musical ideas” by Financial Times and “a welcome lease of life for British avant-rock that plays with expectation at every turn” by CRACK, it also gained radio support across BBC 6Music, BBC Radio 1 and KEXP. The album led LICE to perform at major festivals including Reading & Leeds, Green Man and End Of The Road, embark on an extensive EU tour supporting Sleaford Mods, and tour across the UK & EU.

‘Third Time At The Beach’’s concept is expressed through three movements. The first (‘Unscrewed’, ‘White Tubes’, ‘Red Fibres’) presents the child being introduced to the world, hammered into shape through prevailing culture, and realising they have reached adulthood with a blinkered understanding of the world. The second (‘To The Basket’, ‘Wrapped In A Sheet’, ‘Scenes From The Desert’, ‘Mown In Circles’) is a disorientating, alien sequence: reevaluating fundamental concepts including money, time, nationhood and language. In the third (‘Fatigued, Confused’, ‘Third Time At The Beach’, ‘The Dance’), the individual embraces these new ideas – granting them a changed understanding of the world, and more agency in the path they take through it.

Everything is always changing in ‘Third Time At The Beach’. The album shifts from lush piano balladry to crushing industrial, and from swampy avant-garde compositions to triumphant rock freakouts. Employing vocal manipulation and field recordings, as well as cutting together studio recordings and home demos, the band produces a spatially elastic, collage-like effect. The album, like the ideas being reached within it, presents a work-in-progress. Lyrically, the record employs a scattershot style to present the experience of learning (or ‘unlearning’). The listener visits ancient civilisations, the Industrial Revolution, outer space and the land of the dinosaurs: encountering mediaeval farmers, silver miners, cavemen, Napoleon and Satan.

Speaking on the record, the band say: “This album’s about trying to understand the world and everything in it: history, science and the way we explain it all to each other. It’s a celebration of feeling confused or intimidated by the processes that shape our lives.”

Of the album’s muscular, agitated lead single ‘Red Fibres’, LICE explain: “This song is about realising you’ve reached adulthood with a blinkered understanding of the world, and feeling confused and frustrated. After visiting some key moments in the history of language, science and the human eye, we arrive at a campsite: where two shipwreck survivors are about to have a fight.”


STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: The UK has a bit of a burgeoning avant-rock scene at the moment, and Lice are (for me) the most immediately appealing of the whole bunch. We get the weird noises and syncopated industrial scree of Black Midi or the hardcore thump of Fat Dog, but with a keen sense of melody and most importantly, songs that flow beautifully, weirdness or no.

TRACK LISTING

Side A:
A1. Unscrewed
A2. White Tubes
A3. Red Fibres
A4. To The Basket
A5. Wrapped In A Sheet

Side B:
B1. Scenes From The Desert
B2. Mown In Circles
B3. Fatigued, Confused
B4. Third Time At The Beach
B5. The Dance

Moin

You Never End

‘You Never End’ is the third album from Moin, a London trio made up of Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead (Raime / Blackest Ever Black) as well as long time collaborator and percussionist visionary Valentina Magaletti. Its title alone expresses the teetering and shifting nature of both the album and band. This record marks the Moin’s shift into a new phase with vocal collaborations across the album from Olan Monk, james K, Coby Sey and Sophia Al-Maria.

The album’s collaborators all have voices that are alluring in their own right whilst hard to pin down: from james K’s ethereal, reverb drenched vocals, Coby Sey’s words that bounce and echo across London’s concrete streets and Olan Monk’s emotive songwriting, while artist Sophie Al-Maria’s voice and thoughts are known to stretch across her multidisciplinary practice as an artist, filmmaker and writer. The unique mystique of each collaborator is maintained throughout the record while simultaneously opening Moin up to new possibilities, in a gentle shifting alchemy.

Continuing their enigmatic re-configuring of the traditional band, Moin use a mix of conventional and unique production and compositional techniques. Subtly re-framing the current conversation about what band in 2024 needs to be, Moin walk the line between what's reassuringly familiar and what's unsettling and inquisitive. ‘You Never End’ is a more sensitive record in sentiment, it re-contextualises grunge, shoegaze and indie rock with a weirdly comforting melancholy while still sounding direct and alive.

Showing Moin at their most accessible, the vocal collaborations bring the most articulate moments and lucid emotion while still remaining uniquely within Moin's established world. Alongside this, the record fine tunes the elements of electronic production that have always been a feature of the band's unique sound in a deeply subtle way. Elements are simpler and more direct, offering robust functional support as well as textural and emotional resonance. Together they show the potential for both practices to intertwine.

‘You Never End’ is both produced and mixed by Tom and Joe, demonstrating the extended range of control the pair have over the band's sound, and their ability to truly hold together Moin’s intricate world.


STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: This new one from Moin is an absolute must! Bursting with proper interesting mathy and angular textures, the atmosphere on this thing is mega! For fans of Slint, Sonic Youth or anything slowcore/no-wavey, you need to get all over this!

TRACK LISTING

Side A
A1. Guess It's Wrecked Feat. Olan Monk
A2. Cubby
A3. Family Way Feat. Sophia Al-Maria
A4. What If You Didn't Need A Reason Feat. James K
A5. Lift You Feat. Sophia Al-Maria
A6. It's Messy Coping

Side B
B1. We Know What Gives Feat. Coby Sey
B2. C’Mon Dive
B3. Anything But Sopo
B4. Happy In The Wrong Way
B5. Just Married

“Whispers From Ancient Vessels” is a collection of tales, speakings and relationships with nature’s beings such as trees, the sea and the inner self.

The tracks pose as reflections of relearning to join with nature again. To grieve and to hope. To take in wise words, to listen to truth that can feel intense. Reconnection can be a painful process.

The sounds and the visual identity of “Whispers From Ancient Vessels” is an attempt to remove the rose tinted view of nature and to put it at the forefront of the piece. Nature often tends to be a pretty backdrop where we come and go as we please. But this is a reminder that it is not separate from us and we exist as one. To realise its beautiful evil.

To amplify alternative communication. The tracks are about listening to the wisdom of the earth, translating it and taking the wisdom on board. Being vulnerable to the rawness and darkness of the earth. Being vulnerable to truth, to change and proximity. Succumbing to oneness.


TRACK LISTING

Speakings I
Whispers From Ancient Vessels
Shoreline
Dream Of The Rood
Speakings II
You're Mine

Clara! hits AD93 with a 6 track LP ft. productions from the SKY H1, Pearson Sound & Low Jack.

'"Pulso" is about sexual desire, my desire. Me as the subject, not only the object of it. I sing my pleasure and daydreams, because it's my body and my imagination, so I know what I like to feel."

Sonically inspired by reggaeton, a genre that is personally nostalgic and reminiscent of times spent at parties listening to the imported genre as a teenager in her home country, Spain. Clara! works with producers who don’t usually dabble in the genre - SKY H1, Pearson Sound and Low Jack - in order to mix their own, unique universes with it. 

It's another unwavering statement of intent from the anything-but-the-mainstream-goes, AD 93. 



STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Hauntingly alluring soundscapes, neck-snapping tight beats and seductive Spanish vocals equal another winner from the AD93 camp.

TRACK LISTING

Brillo
Lluvia De Sal (Feat. El Manantial)
Elle ( Feat. Kabaeushé)
Te Llevo
Pulso Gotas
Pulso Charcos

Composed, produced and arranged by Evangelia VS, the artist behind Abyss X, ‘Freedom Doll’ is the culmination of a year of emotional unloading through songwriting, offering an introspective journey into the ocean of her mind. Produced andorded between an artist residency near the Mayan jungle in Mexico and her Berlin home, the album chronicles transformations the performer tackled mentally during the writing process, tracing the rollercoaster of falling in love during the pandemic, as well as the pleasures and tribulations of womanhood.
‘Freedom Doll’ encapsulates the romantic escapade between her voice and the guitar. The amalgamation of seduction, sexual tension, vulnerability and assertiveness pulses throughout the entirety of the album, spiraling out of the cracks spawned from her vocal chords. From the twirling dance between her lush harmonies and the progressions of the acoustic guitar in tracks such as ‘Ascend’ and ‘From Hot to Cold’, to the explosive confrontation between the metallic and operatic qualities of her voice, the searing sound of the electric guitar in industrial rock / psychedelic anthems such as ‘Torture Grove’ and ‘Banyana’ and the cathartic momentum found in the gospel inclined chants in ‘A CHEW’ - ‘Freedom Doll’ untethers the dramatics and theatricality that defines Abyss X’s vocal performance and music production, while maintaining the sensual vibrations of her creative essence.

‘Freedom Doll’ is the encapsulation of the Minoan woman, the elusive harlequin tiptoeing her way through the circus of terror that is living and loving her way through womanhood. With this visual reference, Abyss X pays tribute to her ancestors and their groundbreaking ancient artistry. The back cover of the vinyl features a reiteration of depictions of bulls leaping found in Minoan frescoes; an inherently male cultural act that in the ancient Minoan times presumably gave expression to a tension that underlies man's somewhat tenuous mastery of nature. ‘Freedom Doll’’s artwork challenges this preconceived notion through an eco-feminist approach, bringing the Minoan woman slash Gaia in the seat of the bull leaper, taming the unhinged and predominantly male earth - threatening human force. 


STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Another week another alluring and mystic synth-pop masterpiece from the outlying AD93 label. Abyss X has a yearning, pop sensibility which in my ears at least, has a little bit of Christine & The Queens about it. Not all the way through though - sometimes she dives down the industrial synth wormhole with completely contrasting results.

TRACK LISTING

A1 - Ascend
A2 - A Chew
A3 - Torture Grove
A4 - Oceans Of Heat
A5 - Vacuum (feat. Juliana Huxtable)
B1 - From Hot To Cold
B2 - This Strange Asylum
B3 - Banyana
B4 - Feeling A Type Away
B5 - Never Apart (feat. Juliana Huxtable)


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