New album: Cardiff’s Huw Evans releases his fifth LP, a charming, tender, wistful, sensitive, intelligent, and beautiful collection of alternative pop with a folk/country hue, co-produced with Cate Le Bon, and players including Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo)
Read moreFever Ray: Radical Romantics
New album: Sweden’s Karin Dreijer returns with her first Fever Ray LP since 2017’s Plunge, this third packed with rich, eerie, complex, multifarious songs about the bewilderment of love
Read moreKate NV: WOW
New album: A wonderfully oddball, playful and original LP by the Russian electronica artists Kate Shilonosova, whose palette of sounds include 90s video game bleeps, blips, pings, cat meows and snippets of other disembodied vocals
Read moreSteve Mason: Brothers & Sisters
New album: The former Beta Band main man returns with one of his finest solo albums yet, a groovy protest record (“a big fuck off to Brexit”) drawing in different cultures and throwing a party for Britain’s rich heritage from an immigrant population
Read moreLowly: Keep Up The Good Work
New album: On a smaller, more intimate scale than previous album Hifalutin, as previewed on Song of the Day, Seasons, the Danish experimental quintet’s new album is filled sensitive, vulnerable, textured, beautifully building electro-folk-pop
Read moreDavid Brewis: The Soft Struggles
New album: A beautifully arranged release by one brother half of Field Music, with his falsetto voice, gentle piano, woodwind, acoustic guitar and some brass decorating a folk-pop-jazz fusion that also has the magic of early 70s Van Morrison and Nick Drake
Read moreMiss Grit: Follow The Cyborg
Debut album: Sensual, strong, intelligent, highly original indie-electro-pop debut by the Brooklyn-based Korean-American artist Margaret Sohn with songs that explore the idea of identity and what it is to be alive
Read moreTombouctou: Tricky Floors
New album: Clever, sharp post-punk debut by the French trio from Lyon/Toulouse packed with dynamic, thunderous drumming and razor-sharp guitar work, energised stop-start sections, and the powerful, high voice of Cocrelle who has echoes of Siouxsie Sioux
Read moreAnna B Savage: in|FLUX
New album: Following 2021’s superb debut LP, A Common Turn, the London-based singer-songwriter returns with an exquisitely beautiful, bittersweet, intimate, candid personal set of songs about the difficulties of love
Read moreLiv.e: Girl In The Half Pearl
New album: A dizzyingly indefinable and innovative debut by the Dallas-born singer-songwriter Olivia Williams, mixing experimental R&B, gospel, neo-soul, spoken word, electronica, cosmic jazz, and pop
Read moreQuasi: Breaking the Balls of History
New album: A welcome return with clever, punchy, alternative indie and a wry look at the world, from the Portland, Oregon indie duo of Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss, in their 10th album, and first for a decade
Read moreYo La Tengo: This Stupid World
New album: Nearly four decades into the New Jersey trio’s prolific career, Ira Kaplan Georgia Hubley and James McNew’s 17th studio LP one of their best, mesmeric, krautrock-inspired, semi-improvisational, shoegaze indie
Read moreM(h)aol: Attachment Styles
Debut album: They’ve been pacing around with singles for several years, but this debut by the Dublin post-punks (pronounced male) is powerful, funny, dark, feminist, funny and dirty, filled with fabulous thumps, bangs, crashes, guitar clangs and killer lyrics
Read moreThe Go! Team: Get Up Sequences Part Two
New album: Ian Parton’s Brighton band return, in their follow-up to 2021’s Part One, with a truly joyous, upbeat and vibrantly colourful, wham-bam wonder tour of worldwide cultural vocals and samples ranging from Benin to Japan, France, India, Texas and Detroit
Read moreHamish Hawk: Angel Numbers
New album: After the lauded Heavy Elevator LP, further fabulously crafted, numbers by the witty, articulate, smooth-voiced Edinburgh singer-songwriter, with a set of sensitive, moving and gently humorous songs about patterns of destiny and the future
Read moreYoung Fathers: Heavy Heavy
New album: There’s nothing quite like them. Joyous energy and endless invention, the Edinburgh trio’s fourth LP is filled with soulful, emotional vocals, fabulous oddball, dynamic beats and sound textures, and already an album of the year contender
Read moreThe WAEVE: The WAEVE
New album: Fantastically original, eclectic and melodious eponymous debut by the duo of Blur’s Graham Coxon, and ex-Pipettes’ Rose Elinor Dougall, packed with an indefinable mix of indie pop, folk, post-punk and much more in a free-flowing tapestry of sounds and textures
Read moreJadu Heart: Derealised
New album: A third album from the British duo of Diva-Sachy Jeffrey and Alex Headford brings an eclectic, innovative mix of indie and electronic and dream pop, with a strong flavour of shoegazey My Bloody Valentine
Read moreL.T. Leif: Come Back To Me, But Lightly
New album: Slow, measured, pared-back and beautiful, this creative concoction of cosmic country and folk is a gorgeous gem by the Glasgow-based Canadian artist
Read moreComplete Mountain Almanac: Complete Mountain Almanac
New album: A uniquely beautiful, complex, layered project of 12 monthly releases created by Stockholm-based singer/songwriter Rebekka Karijord and the poet, artist and dancer Jessica Dessner, who also brings her younger brothers Aaron and Bryce of The National
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