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WRONG SPEED RECORDS

Hey Colossus

Heaven Was Wild

"The idea was simple: a week in a studio together playing live, no click-track, amps up full, don't stress the spill. BE A BAND.

"Shortly before recording, we did four sold-out London dates in three days: North, South, East and West. We played the new album across the weekend, tweaking songs between gigs. Then it was into a room in Bruton, Somerset with the JT Soar mobile studio coming down from Nottingham. Five days and it was done, warts-and-all. Some imperfections. Some un-ironed creases. And better that way too."

This is Hey Colossus album number 15 and record number 30 or 40 or something equally ridiculous. The band is heading towards a quarter of a century of existence and there are some deep thoughts to be had about this. But not here. There's therapy in music; listening AND playing. This felt like therapy. And it was needed.

"We asked Claire from Objections / Nape Neck to sing on a song and Angi Fletcher and James Finlay of Nottingham’s Fists to sing on another. Angi did the sleeve too: all our pets, alive or dead, together and reporting back to us that “Heaven was wild!”. They had the best time. No humans allowed, obviously. We don’t deserve it.

"At this point, in 2026, we run our own record label, release our own records, and release music by people we love. It is absolutely the time to be in control. To be able to platform those around who are fighting the same fight. The music industry is in pieces. Wrong Speed Records and Hey Colossus are not part of the music industry."

TRACK LISTING

1. Cannibal Forecast
2. Roses
3. Clock
4.Death And Deliverance
5. Runaway Heart
6. People You Long To Forget
7. Consequences
8. Party Of Fleas
9. You'll Rot
10. The Spiders Line

Jellyskin

In Brine - 2024 Repress

Limited repress of much anticipated debut album from this Leeds-based electronic duo, following high-profile UK festival slots, and shows alongside luminaries Sleaford Mods, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Warmduscher, Sea Power, Moonlandingz, The KVB, with multiple plays across BBC6/BBC Introducing and Amazing Radio, jellyskin are finally ready to unleash ‘In Brine’, their first full length release. The result of four years spent writing, recording, and refining the album between Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Palamos, and Berlin, ‘In Brine’ showcases the many talents of Will Ainsley and Zia Larty-Healy in a work straddling iridescent electronica, tungsten-tipped techno, art pop, and queasy, brown acid folk.

The songs are pieced together with themes of longing, misadventure by the sea, desire and aquatic apparitions that showcase Larty-Healy’s warm but urgent vocal range, as at home around the campfire as it is in the club. The pair’s meticulous arrangement and rearrangement, sculpting, recording, and mixing was a glacially slow process of adaptation, mutation, cooperation, growth, and, yes, natural selection. First single ‘Bringer of Brine’ thumps from the speaker anthemically and forcefully, pitched somewhere beautiful and uncanny; Larty-Healy’s vocals soar and skim off the production like a smooth stone across choppy waves.

The radio-ready pop electronica of ‘I Was The First Tetrapod’ bursts into the world with an urgency in line with the lyrics. An aquatic tale of crawling onto land for the first time, desperate to make new life forms, it’s also a positive, joyful rebuke to the despair of the world around us. “Growing my legs...”. The fuzzed-out psychedelic keys and forward-moving, Knife-like structure echo throughout while beautiful lyrics detail visions of where this would all lead life as we know it- “I can run freely, white horse behind me. Flexing my bones and artery twine, find human tone and reach for the vine.” ‘Fox Again’ opens with chopped alarm clocks segueing into a lurching rhythm, before exploding into skittering beats and a soaring chorus. The effect is like waking up drowsily, going over to the window in your room and yanking open the curtains to be blasted by searing sunshine.

The pair brought in Berlin based co-producer, mixer and masterer Lewis D-t to help finesse the tracks into fat-free hunks of ecstasy and sonic exploration, their rich depths marking ‘In Brine’ as an album everyone should be talking about this summer and beyond-all nine tracks will have feet moving and hearts swelling in equal measure. As opening track ‘Lift (Come In)’ positively opines “Going up!/Just want to keep going up!”. It’s time to get in on the ground floor...

TRACK LISTING

1. Lift (Come In)
2. Bringer Of Brine
3. Fox Again
4. Chicken, Milk, And Oranges
5. Marmalade
6. I Was The First Tetrapod
7. Pulpy Mouth And Skin
8. 52 Blue
9. Punnet 

Jacken Elswyth

At Fargrounds

Jacken Elswyth is a London-based folk musician, banjo player, and instrument builder. At Fargrounds is her third solo album, her first for the Wrong Speed label and the latest in a rich catalogue that repositions the spectral, vulnerable sound of the banjo away from its familiar role as signifier of the past and onto lands brave, new and unexplored. The living wood is imbued with qualities that require engagement and understanding. Working with cherry, oak or walnut involves naming it an equal partner. The parallel, synchronous transformations of wood into instrument, of growing tree into resonating sound, musical tradition into musical flourishing, lie at the heart of Jacken Elswyth’s practices both as an instrument builder and as a creative musician.

One might consider her primarily as a worker in wood, but whose craft and fields of expression are absorbed by those transitional and interim processes that manifest change. The traditional tunes included here have been cultivated and maintained by generations of players and collectors, pruned, grafted, and shaped over time. However, in this setting, their long-established forms seem to morph and shift. They audibly accrue unique qualities, blossoming and swelling into new modes of being, bright-stepping arrangements unfolding with a liveliness hinting at practices of ritual and community. Meanwhile, other pieces, creative cornerstones of this collection, appear fluid, partially formed. They suggest not the cultivation of new growth from established stock, but instead the actions of something on the verge of taking form. Working with raw elements of melodic and tonal abstraction, they illuminate the process of emergence and evolution.

In this context, the title At Fargrounds is telling. It suggests a point set at some distance from any centre of human concerns, a liminal space in which the cultivated world encounters the world of other living things in their living state. Here, the innate strangeness of the maintained environment–vast lawns, sculpted hedges, vacant playing fields–encounters sprawling vistas of driftwood, dense thickets of brambles, stony hillsides. Across a full century-and-a-quarter, long-standing rural and pastoral musical traditions, at some distance from their origins, have been preserved, nurtured and re-shaped under the folk revival. Placed here, these artefacts now sit in alignment with unvarnished documents featuring the raw elements of sound-making. Their working-together is achieved through a universally-applied interest in musical growth and development.

The juxtaposition and combination of these elements gives evidence of new, emerging approaches to community and social music: familiar, known, yet charged with an alien vitality.

TRACK LISTING

1. Singing Birds/Jack Lattin
2. Warm Machinery
3. Private
4. Lost Gander
5. Waken Workshops
6. White Cockade/BigSciota
7. Sussex Waltz
8. Princess Royal
9. Who Remembers
10. A Fisherman's Song For Attracting Seals/Full RiggedShip
11. Falls Of Richmond/Squirrel Hunters
12. Coffin Maker

Hey Colossus

In Blood

PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth, Dead Can Dance, Black Sabbath, Birthday Party.

In Blood is the group’s 14th album and the follow-up to 2020’s critically acclaimed Dances/Curses.

It was typical of a band so well-known for stellar live performances to release their most successful album at a time when they were unable to back it up on the road. As was the case for many, lockdown changed the band’s lives in unexpected ways. Some felt a form of cabin fever at not being able to continue to make music (diverting their energies elsewhere - founding Wrong Speed Records for starters) whereas others relished the peace and quiet, perhaps questioning whether they wanted to return to the life they had before. Gigs (so long the lifeblood of the band) were booked, postponed, and cancelled. Things began to unravel and perhaps for the first time since the band formed in 2003 it was hard to see how it could continue.

A plan was hatched to attempt to re-energise and reassemble the band: they would begin work on a new album. They would approach this as though a Somerset version of The Desert Sessions – members old and new and guests would contribute as and when time and restrictions allowed.

Lyrically, British folk and ghost mythology provided the starting position for the song themes ranging from mutated stories of grief and loss written in the 14th Century (Perle), spiritual reawakening by ancient apparitions (Avalon) to the growth of nature after devastation (Can’t Feel Around Us, Over Cedar Limb), a metaphor also for spirit and body renewal and rebirth after trauma.

The results sound free of any genre shackles and it suits Hey Colossus. They have taken the expansive anything-goes approach that made Dances/Curses so successful and fine-tuned and shaped it into an 8-song single album that never treads water or fills time. The prominent vocals steer the listener through the music, defining it as opposed to punctuating it (or being buried by it).

The album is a calling card for the band in their 20th anniversary year. As odd and challenging as long-term fans would expect or hope for, but somehow more accessible and to the point than ever before. It is the closest the group have ever come to a pop record, radiating positivity through the murk like a small ray of light in some very dark and very weird times. Music can never entirely negate these feelings but, like the natural world referenced in the lyrics and sleeve, it invisibly bonds people together, lifting us up if we choose to let it.

TRACK LISTING

1. My Name In Blood
2. I Could Almost Care
3. Perle
4. Can’t Feel Around Us
5. Curved In The Air
6. Avalon
7. TV Alone
8. Over Cedar Limb

Enablers

Some Gift

Enablers (no The) first made music together in San Francisco in 2002.Their individual histories join the dots through the major musical events in America of the 80s and 90s: the fertile Texas underground, Homestead Records, New York noise, Bay Area metal, the post-Nevermind goldrush and everything that got left in its wake. As with all the best bands, they formed by accident. Author and poet Pete Simonelli convinced guitarists (and fellow bar-dwellers) Joe Goldring (Swans, Touched By A Janitor, Wade, Toiling Midgets) and Kevin Thomson (Nice Strong Arm, Timco, Touched By A Janitor, Hazel Atlas, YEARS) to provide musical backing for a few poems. The addition of drummer Yuma Joe Byrnes (of 4AD’s Tarnation) sparked Enablers into life, away from the cerebral idea of a “book project” and into the infinite possibilities of a living, breathing band.

We agreed that (Enablers) were not going to sound like much of what had already come before in the vein of "spoken word" recordings: a voice in front of a droning, basically static piece of music. We wanted solid musical compositions with dynamic and tense arrangements – Pete. They’ve been doing that very thing, collectively, from day one. Simonelli punctuates the thrilling out-rock of the musicians as if directing the chaos with each jabbed finger or kick of a boot, rhythms explode on a single syllable or are seemingly sucked back into their shell by a breath in the text. Goldring and Thomson constantly reinvent the wheel, using the limitations of guitar to their advantage, always surprising listeners with new possibilities. It is primal, powerful and absolutely hardcore, the product of 40 years of music-making that stands apart from very many – if not most – contemporary bands. In the tradition of the punk and underground era they grew up in, Enablers have always treated each new recording as a bookmark in time used to generate resources to tour.

They’ve stayed defiantly DIY with releases on Neurot, Lancashire & Somerset, Exile On Mainstream and Human Worth with each tour increasing their audience a little more. Some Gift is their seventh LP and the first on Wrong Speed Records. To our ears it represents a summation of the history of the band. It recalls the incendiary power of the early records whilst being delivered with a loose, human feel that can only have been cultivated through the time and experiences they share together.

These seemingly gradual changes in sound from album to album reveal themselves as revelations once fully experienced and understood as a whole. It sounds like this music comes effortlessly to the players, yet it leaves the listener punch drunk, exhausted and elated. We’re thrilled to bring you Some Gift. If you’re familiar with Enablers, you’ll love it immediately like we did. If you’re not, then now is the perfect time to get acquainted. You’ve got a lot to catch up on. “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now” (Proverb)

TRACK LISTING

1. Phone Blows Up
2. Beam
3. The Stink Of Purity
4. Suburban Death March
5. And Other Oddities Of The Brain
6. Monkey To Man
7. The Scythe
8. Willard To Kurtz
9. Year Of The Dog

The Web Of Lies

Nude With Demon

RIYL: Sonic Youth, Comets on Fire / VU / 60s garage / early Flaming Lips, new band from Leeds/Glasgow - you'll know some of the people involved, we couldn't help but fall in love with it.

Here's some words from T House (Sweet Williams/Charlottefield): “Ostrich tuned and chronically distressed, The Web Of Lies is Neil Robinson (Buffet Lunch) and Edwin Stevens (Irma Vep, Yerba Mansa). Having played together years back in Robert Sotelo’s band and forged a singular connection, the pair have been biding their time, waiting for the perfect moment Nude With Demon, their first LP, lurches from the incendiary to the world-weary, like a drunk alternately haranguing and commiserating on the rush hour tube. Drafted quickly in a handful of hungover early morning sessions, fleshed out with a few carefully chosen collaborators - Kathryn Gray (Mia La Metta, Nape Neck), Dylan Hughes (The Birth Marks), Ruari Maclean and Jess Higgins (Vital Idles), Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club) and Dan Bridgewood Hill (dbh) - it’s one long dribbling lunge at the grab strap, regret seeping from the pores, mitigated by wry humour and, when the rage momentarily subsides, the suggestion of humanity"

TRACK LISTING

1. Receiver
2.The Wasp
3. RnR Resurrection
4. Best Friend
5. Crossed Arms
6. Yeah Yeah Yeah
7. The Golden Road
8. Redeemer
9. Ender

Part Chimp

Drool

In the psychic wastelands of the 21st century, one particular sonic force looms large. Transcendental like the malignant force that fuels the zombie movies of lore, Part Chimp have made it their business to shake speaker-stacks, fry brains and induce jouissance and tinnitus alike all across the UK. Yet now Drool - their fifth and perhaps finest transmission to date - is set to launch forth triumphantly to a world beyond the vinyl racks and battered amps where they’ve already achieved godhead status.

Guitarist and vocalist Tim Cedar sums up the raison d’être of Chimp as “the stupid amounts of fun you can have with very loud amps, stupid tunings, weird pedals and weird people. That inspires us. I think our joy at playing our tunes comes through the panic and chaos“.

Echoes of their forebears - the ornery prehistoric lurch of Melvins and the droogy ur-clang of Sonic Youth among them - can be distantly discerned, Yet they’re now drowned out by an individual assault as pulverising as invigorating, nihilistic yet life-affirming. Smash together abandon and intent, and what you get is Drool - a fearsome testimony to a band with a skewed melodic skill to match their mighty potency. This band will demolish your house, but you’ll cheerfully thank them for it afterwards. Drool is where unwise decisions blossom into serendipity. It’s more joy through vacuum-tubed catharsis than you’re entitled to. It’s coming for the hearts and minds of heavy music dropouts everywhere whether they like it or not, so they’d be best advised to pay attention. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Yet another full-force sonic assault from the masters of catatonic grooving noise, Part Chimp. We get blazing riffs and half-hidden psychy wails wallowing beneath huge cavernous percussion and unmitigated distortion. It's yet another tour de force from one of the heaviest bands around.

TRACK LISTING

1. Back From The Dead
2. Wallow
3. One In The Eye
4. Clever
5. I Feel Fantastic
6. Drool
7. Up, With Notes
8. No Sad Faces
9. Dirty Birds
10. It’s True Man
11. USisA
12. Worms


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