The Last Dinner Party present a new 7” vinyl to celebrate their debut single release ‘Nothing Matters’. This limited-edition Crystal Clear transparent 7” release features the hauntingly beautiful 'Nothing Matters' on the A-side and a stunning stripped back acoustic version of 'Nothing Matters' on the B-side.

At the turn of the year, The Last Dinner Party was little more than a new name being shared amongst those that had caught them live. Great songs, strong aesthetic. Having spent much of 2022 writing those songs, road-testing them, and then taking them into the studio, it wasn’t until April when the band released the instantly more-ish, dark guitar-pop of Nothing Matters that seemingly everyone had now formed an opinion on them. It was an introduction that took the online world by storm, and yet behind all the excitement and narrative was a fantastically confident indie-rock song by a band doing it the old-fashioned way, out on the road.

Following a heady first-on performance to a packed crowd at the new Woodsies tent at Glastonbury, The Last Dinner Party released Sinner, another gloriously infectious, leftfield pop song that fuelled the fully-formed zeitgeist and set the band up for a Summer that replicated that success of Glastonbury with uncomfortably packed tents ensuing at the likes of Green Man, Reading & Leeds, Latitude and End of the Road (interspersed with support slots to the likes of Florence & The Machine, Lana Del Rey and First Aid Kit). It was a breakthrough Summer for one of the most talked about new British acts in years, delivering on all that early promise emphatically.

Concentrating on their own headline shows, the band skipped confidentally from venue to venue, playing to bigger rooms and on wider stages. Shows sold out and shows were upgraded. In London alone, the band have moved from sell-out dates at Moth Club to Camden Assembly, Oslo to two nights at EartH, and now move on to the 3000 capacity Roundhouse on the eve of album release (remaining tickets on sale now). Crucially, it’s not just London where the band finds its early fans, but right across the UK and into America too, with all five debut shows selling out several weeks in advance.

The band often set a themed dress code for the shows, with many fans relishing the task of rising to the request and donning their finery for a night with their new heroes.

But this is no case of style over substance. With the release of their third single, My Lady Of Mercy, an almost gothic, haunting rock song, and the atmospheric and anthemic ballad, On Your Side, the band’s songwriting is testament to all the buzz and excitement already accumulated. As it should be. Rather than wilt under the spotlight, they’ve arguably become a tighter, stronger unit because of it.

Prelude To Ecstasy is both the closing of that introductory chapter and the opening of the next. The Last Dinner Party? Believe the hype. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A thrilling debut from The Last Dinner Party, channelling the spirit of PJ Harvey, the operatic intensity of Nick Cave and the soaring cinematic orchestral arrangements of Hans Zimmer or John Williams. A powerful, bold melting pot of perfectly manicured influences.

TRACK LISTING

1. Prelude To Ecstasy
2. Burn Alive
3. Caesar On A TV Screen
4. The Feminine Urge
5. On Your Side
6. Beautiful Boy
7. Gjuha
8. Sinner
9. My Lady Of Mercy
10. Portrait Of A Dead Girl
11. Nothing Matters
12. Mirror 

Blonde Redhead return with ‘Sit Down for Dinner,’ their first album in seven years and debut for section1. Its title a nod to the often-sacred communal ritual of sharing a meal with those you love, this immersive, meticulously crafted album appropriately serves an expression of persistent togetherness, a testament to the unique internal logic Blonde Redhead have refined over their three-decade existence.

Understated yet visceral melodies charge each song, creating a foil to lyrics about the inescapable struggles of adulthood: communication breakdown in enduring relationships, wondering which way to turn, holding onto your dreams. Ultimately, ‘Sit Down for Dinner’ lands as perhaps the strongest record in a catalog that’s already as illustrious as it is varied.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A woozy mix of melodic pop melodies atop shifting progressive instrumental backdrops, taking in classic psychedelia and ambient electronica in equal measure. A beguiling and sensitive selection, particularly the eponymous duo of tracks. Lovely.

TRACK LISTING

1. Snowman
2. Kiss Her Kiss Her
3. Not For Me
4. Melody Experiment
5. Rest Of Her Life
6. Sit Down For Dinner (Part 1)
7. Sit Down For Dinner (Part 2)
8. I Thought You Should Know
9. Before
10. If
11. Via Savona

The Liverpool ‘Kitchencore’ band follow up their critically received album England’s Up For Sale in 2020 with their most commercial and musically ambitious album to date. Full of razor-sharp lyrics and musical twist and turns, What’s On The Inside Has To Come Out is briming with energy and ideas.

Whereas the previous album was an observational, sparse, post-punk style snap-shot of a Brexit Britain, the new record has a more personal style with witty tales of northern, working class life in songs like I’m Shy, Mum & Dad, Money & Art and the title track What’s On The Inside Has To Come Out, that you can easily relate to.

Through the bands constant gigging and riotous theatrical live shows, they have gained a big reputation as a great live act with festivalflyer.com including them in their list of the top festival bands in the UK. However, behind the fun and theatrics, the band have always had something serious to say.

The album has their usual garage punk and artrock sound fused with post-punk, folk and even gospel elements for a more eclectic record that should please their hardcore fans and those new to their lo-fi but accessible sound. This is a joyous, life-affirming record for the post-Covid era, by the ultimate people’s band... This is Kitchencore!

TRACK LISTING

1. What's On The Inside Has To Come Out
2. Mum & Dad
3. I'm Shy
4. Money & Art
5. In Toxteth
6. Elvis In My Dreams
7. Life Is Beautiful
8. Kind
9. Happy Birthday Syd
10. Jarg Bizzie
11. Badges
12. Everybody Has A Song

Weaving in and out of R&B, 80’s synth pop, jazz and indie, NYC-based collective Michelle is refreshingly predominated by queer and POC members, showcasing a transformative era in pop music. The album announcement and new track follow a string of celebrated singles as well as their 2018 debut album Heatwave, which came together in just two-weeks and received praise from NME, The fader and more.

TRACK LISTING

Mess U Made
Expiration Date
Pose
Syncopate
No Signal (feat. Isa Reyes)
Talking To Myself
50/50
Looking Glass
End Of The World
Fire Escape
Hazards
Layla In The Rocket
Spaced Out, Phased Out
My Friends

The Sheffield duo have always explored feminist issues through the telling of personal stories – fusing their classical knowledge and rich arrangements with raw expression. Their debut album is no exception to this, exploring themes that will resonate with many women in their 30s who are experiencing the shift in perspectives that this decade can bring. On new single ‘Wreck’ singer Gina Walters mourns the abrupt end of a relationship and a vanishing future that she once counted on. “I thought that relationship was it: we were going to have babies, and when that ended it wasn’t really about losing my partner. It was about losing this whole future I thought lay ahead of me, this whole family I would lose, my house, my cat… it was an absolute bombshell, and it still gets me over a year later.”

On ‘Stand’, the most direct and plain-speaking track on the album, Gina sings, “A house or a heavy womb,” agonising over the idea of having to choose either financial security or motherhood. Speaking with her trademark brutal honesty, Gina says, “As a teenager, I genuinely thought that I would be married with two kids by now. We’ve been conditioned to think that’s what we should be achieving by a certain number. I turned thirty-two a few weeks ago, and I’m dating furiously because I want a baby and I only have a certain amount of years left before it starts to get really really hard.”

Before Breakfast released their debut EP ‘Open Ears’ in 2019. It is a spell-binding collection of songs knitting together Lucy Revis’ intricate cello with Gina’s expressively haunting vocals. “Our music has always been very beautiful with this discomfort,” Gina says, “which I view as very feminine.” Stand-alone single ‘Buddleia’ would become Before Breakfast’s signature, and best known song to date – opening the door to where they would go next. “When Gina played it to me I remember being in love with it immediately,” Lucy recalls. The band soon caught the ears of BBC Introducing, as well as C Duncan. That year, they supported the Mercury-nominated Scottish composer and musician on tour, which, Lucy says, was, “an absolute dream”.

Lucy wrote the lyrics and made her lyrical debut on former single ‘Brush My Hair’ after that very tour while coming down from a giddy three-week crush on a bassist. “It was like I was sixteen years old again,” she remembers. “We had this weird little friendship and the song is just about him: it’s lovely and special and I hold him in the highest regard.” For Gina, the themes that inform the debut as a whole also tie into trying to break out as a new band while holding weighty questions of security and stability versus pursuing your dreams. It’s pretty shocking, yet sadly not at all surprising, that in 2021 she feels the need to say, “I really get caught up in the idea that the industry doesn’t want women in their thirties coming through.” Lucy agrees, adding, “There have been so many barriers for us to even do this by our age. I have exclusively played for men since I was 15 years old. I can count the number of female artists I’ve worked for on one hand.”

Outside of the band, Gina is a singing teacher, and Lucy runs a music school. Over the last eighteen months, the group have been juggling their day-jobs with gradually recording their debut album: a reality they feel it’s important to speak out about. “We couldn’t just go away to a studio for three weeks,” says Gina, “we don’t have the money or time. It was here, there and everywhere.” Whenever they got a chance, the band would lay down parts with their producer Chris Wilkinson – who began his career working in Nashville with Vance Powell (Jack White, Arctic Monkeys) before relocating to his hometown – at Sheffield’s Fox Den studios. “We’d say: Chris, can we come in for a few hours this afternoon to do the vocals? It was a bit haphazard, and a long process.”

Before Breakfast are telling their story on their own terms, and backed by two new live band members as gig venues gradually open up again, the Sheffield band are going for it, with a debut that speaks to the stagnation, malaise, and static of the last “wasted” year. And as the world opens up again, ‘I Could Be Asleep If It Weren't For You’ is a fitting soundtrack. “We’ve got the momentum” says Gina, “and we just want to do it.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Inner Wisdom
2. Wreck
3. Brush My Hair (And Tell Me That You Love Me)
4. Stand
5. I
6. She
7. Voices
8. Sticky Sweet
9. I'm A Good Friend
10. Ii (feat. The Howl & The Hum)
11. Journey

After a four-year hiatus exploring ambient and meditation music, Danish multi- instrumentalist Anders Rhedin has returned to his indie roots. Dream Work, his third album as Dinner, is a lush collection of synth and guitar-laden indie pop that expertly channels Ryuichi Sakamoto, early British indie, and the sound of water.

Like most worthwhile pursuits, the path to Dream Work hasn’t been straight. After signing to Captured Tracks in 2014, he released a series of synth-based avant-pop albums and toured the world with the likes of Mac Demarco, Sean Nicholas Savage, Prince Rama, and King Gizzard, all while splitting his time be - tween Berlin, LA and his native Copenhagen. This whirlwind period ended when, following the release of 2017’s New Work, Rhedin relocated to Copenhagen and took a step back from the Dinner project in order to explore his long standing personal interest in ambient production and guided meditation. Over the last few years, he’s released a series of ambient releases under his own name geared towards meditation, sleep, and relaxation. He’s also led live guided sound baths and meditations at art museums, churches, and rooftops all over the world.

The time away proved fruitful - returning to the Dinner project with fresh eyes, Rhedin sought not to reproduce his previous style, but rather to integrate these two components of his body of work. As a result, Dream Work sounds at once classic and entirely new; a deft balance of Rhedin’s trademark electro-pop with the meditative and organic elements of his ambient work. From the melancholy acoustic guitar and downtempo synth melody of “Spirit Voices” to the ethereal refrain on “Connection”, Rhedin washes his pop songwriting in dark, dreamy tex - tures. These textures lend cohesion to the far-reaching collection - Dinner effort - lessly floats from Stereolab-like electric guitar (“Anima”) to twinkling synth-pop (“Midnight In My Head”) to fluid ambient (“Drøm”) in the span of just 34 minutes. Contributions from labelmates Molly Burch and Charlie Hilton as well as Lina Tullgren, Nicolai Koch help bolster this quality: much like Rhedin himself, Dream Work feels well-traveled even when it’s standing in place.

TRACK LISTING

1. Midnight In My Head
2. How We Talk
3. Big Empty Sky
4. Like You Said
5. Anima
6. Connection
7. Spirit Voices
8. Grateful (Best Shit)
9. Born Again
10. Drøm 

Reissue of this amazing 1986 album where drum machines meet improv jazz. Horvitz gathers together his drum machine and synths along with his talented friends -Elliot Sharp included- for this really original record that is both composed and improvised. An obscure gem by one of the most spirited musicians to populate NY 80's avant-garde, a golden era for vanguard attitudes and sounds. Horvitz, keyboard player at Naked City (along with John Zorn, Bill Frisell, and Fred Frith) had classical musical education and an ulterior demise of the discipline; radical jazz sensibilities, and rock'n roll vitality. That made up for a very unique, highly distinctive, breed of cutting-edge music. The boundaries of contemporary composition are expanded, breathing from improvisatory strategies and awareness of both the pop world and the most experimental milieu's discoveries.

Large is the importance of his long-time collaborator Butch Morris' Conduction method, a system of structured free improvisation. "Dinner at eight" offers new turns on the development of these mixed approaches by being both composed and improvised but also neither fully electronic nor fully acoustic. Written mostly in the loneliness of a San Francisco apartment, the project is less collaborative than others by Wayne, and its sound palette becomes more electronic and rhythm-based. Nevertheless, the helping hand of the most stellar musicians in New York becomes crucial as it rounds the timbral and structural magic of the project. The rhythmic and sound design experiments of tracks such as "Dinner at eight" or "Conjunction For C" go hand in hand with the machine funk of "This New Generation" (where angular bass and guitar are provided by Elliot Sharp).

We can find a robust synthetic marimba and bass jazz in "Extra Extra" or insistent dry percussions on "Second Line" that wouldn't be far from Marc Barreca's investigations. "True" and "These Hard Times" are also harmonizing with these mechanic sounds. Joyous, exotic, and whimsical songs that prove how an ear for experimentation is an open ear to all sounds, including the most melodic and overtly fun. Brilliant fresh sensibilities and musical interests collide in "Dinner At Eight" to form a very special milestone of NYC avant-garde music, offering us an even richer vision of that amazing fertile scene

TRACK LISTING

1. Dinner At Eight
2. This New Generation
3. 3 Questions
4. Conjunction For C.B.
5. True
6. Extra Extra
7. In The Fields They Lay
8. Second Line
9. Danced All Night
10. These Hard Times
11. Reprise For C.B.

Dinner is Danish producer and singer Anders Rhedin. Following the release of his EP collection and last year’s debut album, ‘Psychic Lovers’, the now LA-based artist presents New Work on Captured Tracks.

With ‘New Work’, Dinner had a wish to do things differently. “I just needed to get back to the approach I used when I was still self-releasing cassettes, back in Copenhagen. I spent way too much time on the previous record. I was sitting in front of a computer-screen alone for seven months working on it, obsessing over it. This time I wanted to work very fast in order to think less. I wanted to collaborate more. I hoped that other people’s presence would keep my perfectionism in check.”

Dinner enlisted Josh da Costa (Regal Degal, Ducktails) to produce the album with him. He and Josh worked in the night time at off hours at a studio in an industrial part of downtown LA. The album’s songs were recorded on the spot with no preparation time. In-between studio sessions, Dinner recorded and overdubbed material in his apartment on an early 80s 4-track recorder.

“We did very little editing, we just tried to record what was there. You’ll hear a lot of first-takes on the record. The best part of the process was driving home early in the morning though the empty streets of LA, listening to the night’s recordings. Because it was such an immediate experience.”

The two previous Dinner releases were recorded in Berlin and Copenhagen with mostly European musicians. This isn’t the case on ‘New Work’, which features performances by Andy White (Tonstartssbandht), Charlie Hilton (Blouse), Rori McCarthy (Infinite Bisous, Connan Moccasin), Staz Lindes (Paranoyds) and a duet with Sean Nicholas Savage. “A lot of my favorite music is American. I thought it would be fun to go a little bit less Euro on this one. I’m plenty Euro by myself, some might say. I wanted to add a different color.”

Asked to describe the sound of ‘New Work’ after the first listen, Captured Tracks owner Mike Sniper texted: “Julian Cope, 60’s Baroque Pop, early 70’s Canterbury Sound, Japan, Ryuichi Sakamato, ‘Raspberry Beret’-era Prince... Need to listen a few more times before anything concrete comes!”

TRACK LISTING

Un-American Woman
Don’t Belong
Walk Away
Siren Song
Marble Eyes
Illusions
Get Real
Copenhagen
Waitin’
Thwl

Dinner is Danish producer and singer Anders Rhedin. Dinner leads a nomadic existence, dividing his time between Los Angeles, Copenhagen and Berlin. So far Dinner has released three EPs and a guided hypnosis tape. Now he presents his debut album ‘Psychic Lovers’.

Whether the finished album lives up to Dinner’s vision only Dinner knows. Musically, the album exists in its own space between the 1980s, 1990s and the present. The songs are pop songs held together by somewhat idiosyncratic arrangements.

Opener ‘Cool As Ice’ sounds like the soundtrack to David Lynch directing ‘Miami Vice’ with overdriven synthetic strings and an equally eerie and funky slap bass that slowly grow into a pop structure.

‘Turn Me On’ invokes the feeling of Sade recorded on VHS fronted by Klaus Nomi’s baryton-possessed ghost, or a warped jingle from The Home Shopping Network.

The song ‘Lie’ has distinct Nico-esque undertones and John Cale-ish overtones wrapped in 1980s melancholy, while ‘Wake Up’ and ‘The World’ explore inverted 90s Euro-pop.

In the words of mix-engineer Filip Nicolic (Poolside), “The whole album sounds like Chimo Bayo produced by Marquis de Sade.” An even more concise definition of Dinner comes from labelmate Mac Demarco: “Great face, great body, great tunes.”

TRACK LISTING

Cool As Ice
The World
Turn Me On
Gone
What You Got
Wake Up
Holy Fuck!
A.F.Y.
Lie
Kali, Take Me Home

Keath Mead would like to invite you to Sunday Dinner. The 25-year-old South Carolina native’s debut album is as pleasurable as a drive along the coast, as comforting as a day out with friends, and as sweet as pie after lunch. Steeped in the classic sounds of ‘60s and ‘70s pop singer-songwriters, Mead is just as influenced by contemporary artists such as The Shins’ James Mercer and Jack White. “Waiting” opens the record with a warm bed of synths and Mead sings, “One day you’re gonna land/ in a place that you never planned/ in your life to see.” An optimistic song about potential? Maybe. But it’s definitely a song about regret. Mead has that timeless ability to make songs that seem to say one thing, but move us to feel many things. With Sunday Dinner, Mead aspired to achieve a songwriting ideal: “If a song doesn’t hold up with one person singing and playing a single instrument, then it’s probably not that good of a song,” he says.

The album was recorded in only eight daysover the span of nine months—with the help of Chaz Bundick (Toro Y Moi, Les Sins). Bundick hosted Mead in his Berkeley, Calif., home studio for the recording. Mead’s guitar and vocal tracks came first, then Bundick on bass, before the pair took turns on drums and synthesizers. The collaborative process lent an improvisational aspect to the album, with the pair playing music until they found a passage they both liked. The live playing and “happy accidents” of the recording process add to the easy-going vibe of the LP.

Though recording the album was relatively short, the songs were written over three years. The primary theme of the record is the anxiety induced by the rapid changes brought on by coming of age. Mead also contemplates isolation, loss of innocence, and angst associated with maturation.

TRACK LISTING

Waiting
Grow Up
She Had
Change
Settle For Less
Holiday
Where I Wanna Be
Quiet Room
Navy
Polite Refusal
So Close