New album: The American poet and musician Camae Ayewa returns with with a pointed, powerful release aimed at Britain’s murky, slavery-profiting colonial past, with a vivid, profound, visceral, declamatory narrative and soundscape that charts many injustices about wealth and compensation
Read moreBolis Pupul: Letter To Yu
New album: After 2022’s acclaimed Topical Dancer with Charlotte Adigéry, the Belgian musician returns with a charming, quirky electronica LP dedicated to his Hong Kong-born Chinese mother, Yu Wei Wun, and a celebration of that territory’s culture
Read moreAstrel K: The Foreign Department
New album: Quirkily beautiful, surreal songs of displacement, love, heartbreak and bewilderment, change and feeling in limbo, by the Stockholm-based British ex-pat, Rhys Edwards, also known for the project Ulrika Spacek
Read moreKim Gordon: The Collective
New album: Dark, crashing, whispering, abstract, deadpan internal monologues, dreamlike off-beat poetry, trip beats, crunchy electronica and industrial grunge-guitar noise, the ex-Sonic Youth frontwoman, bassist and visual artist’s new LP is a challenging, truly innovative release
Read moreYOVA: Dreamcatchers
New album: An alluring, breathy, sensual, supernaturalistic LP by the duo of Jova Radevska and Mark Vernon, with a theme delving into the unconscious, for lost and unrealised dreams and ideals, and how they are nurtured, then realised, abandoned or destroyed
Read moreStrange Boy: Love Remains
New album: After three EPs, the London experimental duo Kieran Brunt and Matt Huxley’s debut LP is an ethereally beautiful, impressionistic, distinctively delicate fusion of very pure, high falsetto vocals, and sparse, classically influenced electronica
Read moreFaye Webster: Underdressed At The Symphony
New album: Gentle, reflective indie with flecks of country in this fifth LP by the Atlanta singer-songwriter, capturing tiny, intimate details of life’s in-between, under-the-radar moments, and inspired by the idea of slipping late in the audience at an Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert
Read moreYard Act: Where's My Utopia?
New album: With continuing appeal, the experimental post-punk Leeds quartet return with their second LP, with highly entertaining, broadened musical scope, frontman James Smith’s agile, candid, conversational wit musing on the ironies of success, the music business, resultant guilt, climate change, and titular worries about the future
Read moreReal Estate: Daniel
New album: Warm, engaging, easygoing alt-folk-country-pop by the Brooklyn band with their sixth album, here given a name as if a person, but also produced by acclaimed songwriter Daniel Tashian at the famous RCA Studio A, in Nashville
Read moreLuca D’Alberto: In Our Hearts
New album: A serenely beautiful third album by the Italian composer and instrumentalist with a cinematic, symphonic work of 17 tracks over three sections, largely with piano and strings, but with sprinklings of electronica and guest vocalists
Read morePregoblin: Pregoblin II
New album: A long-awaited LP of brilliantly effortless, fun-filled experimental pop - clever, wryly humorous, gently melancholic, mischievously playful - by the strangely under acclaimed south London band fronted by singer-songwriters Alex Sebley and Jessica Winter
Read moreNadine Shah: Filthy Underneath
New album: The charismatic Tyneside-raised singer-songwriter of Norwegian and Pakistani heritage returns in fabulous, rich-voiced form with a powerfully dark fifth LP, resilient after a tumultuous few years of family grief, failed marriage, attempted suicide and rehab
Read moreMGMT: Loss of Life
New album: Rich, dream-like, eccentric, eclectic, surreally humorous psychedelic prog-pop amid a huge range of influences in this splendidly strange fifth album by the Connecticut multi-instrumentalist-vocal duo of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser
Read moreTalk Show: Effigy
New album: A dark, arresting, gnarly, frenzied fusion of dance-funk post-punk by the south London quartet with an LP that feels like a gripping journey through a fictional night-club underworld, with echoes of the Prodigy and Baxter Dury-style vocalisations
Read moreRoyel Otis: Pratts & Pain
New album: Brilliantly vibrant, fresh yet oddly timeless indie-pop, post-punk by the Australian duo Royel Maddell and Otis Pavlovic, with echoes of 60s-90s garage rock, 80s indie, Velvet Underground to the The Strokes, and produced here by the acclaimed Dan Carey
Read moreGrandaddy: Blu Wav
New album: This serene, sixth LP from California’s Jason Lytle brings that meltingly beautiful melancholic voice, slow, caressed guitars, country pedal steel (Max Hart) and some Beach Boys echoes with themes of loneliness dotted with droll humour
Read moreWilliam Doyle: Springs Eternal
New album: Superbly crafted, innovative ‘art-pop for the anthropocene’ by the innovative British artist, with landscaped sounds in a whirlpool of clever invention, narratives threading through an existential lifespan of gorgeous turns through this follow-up to 2021’s Great Spans of Muddy Time
Read moreIDLES: TANGK
New album: The fierce, rage-filled Bristol post-punk band’s fifth album has an unfamiliar, far more tender but wider selection of sounds, this dynamic range of love songs intriguingly experimental, less shouty, more melodious
Read moreThe Miserable Rich: Overcome
New album: The likeable Brighton string-led collective return with their first studio LP in nearly 13 years, a wordplay-rich, drily humorous, catchy, poignant collection of vivid storytelling via chamber pop and indie folk
Read moreDeclan McKenna: What Happened To The Beach?
New album: Less overtly political than his previous work, but still satirical and now more personal, this is jaunty, quirky, eccentric, eclectic pop by the 25-year-old LA-based, Enfield-raised singer-songwriter, experimenting like a 1960s psychedelic troubadour.
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