Black Lips return with a brand-new studio album, 'Season Of The Peach', a 40-minute rock and roll odyssey, tripping through DIY genres where garage rock meets new wave pop, and disgruntled country shakes hands with epic western soundtracks. The 14-track album captures the energy and spirit of early Black Lips while simultaneously applying new approaches to songwriting.

The album is a musical merry-go-round, a journey featuring road-weary tales from the underbelly of a lights-out America. It’s bookended by 'The Illusion' parts one and two: a barroom quest for hope, fear, and hate, thwarted at each turn by a sense of resignation, “you reach for the sky / but it’s an illusion.” Elsewhere, 'Wild One' plays out like a Morricone romp through another day in Hell. A mantra for the hungover, a skin-crawling lament in praise of the wild at heart.

'Tippy Tongue' sees Black Lips take on 60s girl group soul, like The Shangri-Las and Ronettes infiltrated by Jayne/Wayne County, paying homage to Buddha Records. Meanwhile, 'Kassandra' has a guitar sound scrubbed clean for a Sunday, chiming its way through ever-spiralling salvos like The Chocolate Watchband with Zappa on vocals. 'Zulu Saints' is an upbeat country honk, a good-time brush with bravado, peppered with Cole on an incredulous radio phone-in show, looking for black-eyed peas and winning big on the slot machines.

For the recording sessions they holed up in the bucolic surroundings of drummer Oakley’s new Sound At Manor studio in the Catskills (the first album recorded there since Oakley built the studio in 2020). In this idyllic setting, the band disconnected from city life and committed their music to analogue tape, part of their quest to embrace spontaneity and capture the energy of a live Black Lips show on record.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Illusion Part Two
2. Zulu Saints
3. Sx Sx Sx Men
4. Wild One
5. So Far Gone
6. Judas Pig
7. Kassandra
8. Baptism In The Death House
9. Until We Meet Again
10. Tippy Tongue
11. Happy Place
12. Prick
13. Hatman
14. The Illusion Part One

Peach Discs showcase the talents of Bristol-based producer & DJ Daisy Moon with a playful, energetic and melodic exploration of her club-focused sound.

Inspired by those anticipatory, unifying moments on the dancefloor, the four-track record is upfront and summer-ready - pairing groovy, intricate drums with earworming synth lines, field recordings, and submerged vocal chops, all mixed with vibrancy and dynamism for maximum vitality.

Daisy developed her sound and identity through multiple platforms and collaborations across the UK. She’s a key figure in Bristol’s electronic music scene - with early involvement as a resident at club night Housework (co-run with Shanti, Gramrcy and Golesworthy), co-founding Mix Nights - the DJ initiative from Saffron (music-tech courses and community for women, trans, non-binary and minority genders), as part of the sprawling Curl collective (Mica Levi, Coby Sey, Brother May) and most recently founding Off-Kilter, a mix and event series focused on the fringes, probing the boundaries between club music and live performance.

Following an ethereal debut EP on Idle Hands and excellent contributions to Mica Levi’s Curl label and Rhythm Section’s Shouts compilation, the record marks a distinctive addition to Daisy’s palette, shifting towards 4/4 house and techno, hewing closer to the sounds found in her DJ sets. Proper party tackle!

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Peach's remit for fresh as you like house and techno with fun filled party ethos continues in earnest with Daisy Moon delivering four festival favourites. Check!

TRACK LISTING

Tonyo
System Creak
Unseen Sunrise
Pine Odyssey

Hardly Art debut and first full-length by ill peach, aka accomplished pop songwriters Jess Corazza and Pat Morrissey.

The album is at once exuberantly catchy pop and genre-hopping modern experimental music.

Here’s the thing about ill peach: this band exists because they are too weird to not exist.

The seed of ill peach was first planted in the recording studios of New York City where Pat Morrissey and Jess Corazza were working together as professional songwriters, collaborating with artists like Icona Pop, SZA, Weezer, Pharrell, Big Freedia, and others. Then came the day they were offered their own publishing deal. Cool, right? Well, about that:

“Everyone kept saying, ‘The stuff that you’re writing is slightly too left-of-center—weirdo stuff,” remembers Morrissey. “Why don’t you start your own project?”

Thus ill peach, a pop band with a punk streak and a taste for both the rotten and the sweet, with an approach to making music that goes something like: “Do you want to pick up a guitar and do you want to be on this water jug and we’ll record it on the iPhone and create some weird drum pattern?”

Following a series of well-received EPs on their own Pop Can Records (a record label and artist collective Morrissey and close collaborator Jesse Schuster run with friends), a digital single for Hardly Art’s 15th anniversary series, and some colorful music videos that crystallized the band’s visual aesthetic along with their sound, ill peach’s “weirdo stuff” comes to fruition on first full-length THIS IS NOT AN EXIT: a collection of anthemic songs built out of bright pop and gritty experimental elements (Morrissey names the sculptural use of distortion on the final albums by Low as an inspiration), punctuated with hooky choruses ready to be screamed along to in the safety of your own bedroom or with a bunch of friends at one of ill peach’s intense live shows.

If ill peach first blossomed in New York, it took quarantine in Los Angeles for the project to ripen. The end of the world turned out to be what ill peach needed to get real with themselves. “It helped us creatively to zone in and removed us from the [industry] side of things to where we could just be like: this is our new identity, let's jump with both feet.”

THIS IS NOT AN EXIT’s title is a reflection of something Corazza realized during a period of personal and familial crises. “I kept walking into buildings and I’d try to exit somewhere and the sign would be like, ‘This is not an exit,’” she says. “It just felt like a metaphor for a hopeful thing—don't give up yet.” This combination of hope and anxiety is all over THIS IS NOT AN EXIT, reflected in a sonic palette (Alternative! Electronica! Indie! Radio pop! Coldplay!) as eclectic as it is unpretentious. Ultimately, THIS IS NOT AN EXIT is a record about healing, a process often spoken about in New Age-y terms but one that in reality can be really confusing and, yes, weird. But it is the beautiful strangeness of being alive that ill peach capture so well on THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Bloom
2. Blah Blah Blah
3. Tornado Weather
4. Hush
5. Capillary Bed
6. 17
7. Soft (Intermission)
8. Head Full Of Holes
9. Sour Like Lemonade
10. This Is Not An Exit
11. Colliding
12. Heavyweight
13. Sigh

Ratcatcher provides two new cuts for the esteemed Peach label, with hot-to-trott remixes from Leon Vynehall and Benjamin Damage. "Somehow" is a sleek, sub-heavy slow house jam, delicately pairing syncopated percussion with deep synthetic textures and catchy vocal snippets. "Motion" does away with the vocals and layers up sizzling white noise sweeps and techy stabs to create a pitchblack throbber for late on into the session. Leon Vynehall unloads some tough breaks onto "Somehow", turning the drum palette and overall aesthetic into summat a bit more crunchy and aggressive. Benjamin Damage tears "Motion" a new arsehole as he delivers a forward propelled nu-techno jam complete with rumbling kicks and discordant rhythmic artifacts.
Support from: Mike Huckaby, Trevino, Maya Jane Coles, Jonas Kopp, Nikola Gala, Norman Nodge, Joris Voorn, Lorca, XXXY, Vince Watson, South London Ordnance, Eats Everything, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Shenoda, Iron Galaxy, Atjazz, Randomer, Komon, Physical Therapy, Doc Daneeka, Braille, Thefft.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Somehow
A2. Motion
B1. Somehow (Leon Vynehall Translation)
B2. Motion (Benjamin Damage Remix)