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Big Special: Postindustrial Hometown Blues
New album: A witty, punchy, restless post-punk debut LP by the heavily accented Midlands duo of Joe Hicklin and Callum Maloney, with echoes of Sleaford Mods who they’ve supported on tour, packed with sharp jokes, wordplay and sweary anger about toxic masculinity and the absurdities of modern life
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Barry Adamson: Cut To Black
New album: The Manchester legendary singer and composer, bass player of Magazine, The Bad Seeds and other bands, returns with a stylish, swaggering, 60s-influenced 10th studio solo LP, including timeless Motown, seductive blues, and vividly noir cinematic hues
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Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown
New album: The Portishead singer’s first solo LP, 10 years in the making, is an exquisite release of genre-spanning folk, sometimes with eastern inflections, her haunting voice touching on mutability, motherhood, menopause, bereavement, health and heartbreak
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Jordan Rakei: The Loop
New album: Silky, soulful new work by the falsetto-smooth London-based New Zealand-Australian musician, singer-songwriter and producer with a sophisticated cocktail or perky pop, jazz, and R&B
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Keeley Forsyth: The Hollow
New album: Following 2022’s Limbs, another extraordinary, experimental release by the rich-voiced British singer and actress from Oldham of atmospheric, beautiful, evocative, at times vocalisations
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Arab Strap: I'm Totally Fine With It I Don't Give A Fuck Anymore
New album: Menacingly poetic, darkly humorous, searingly sordid and the sweetly sarcastic? It can only be the return of Scotland’s Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton with another fabulously articulate assault on the self and society’s sadness and strangeness
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Stevie Toddler’s sophomore album, Last Time Forever
New album: So good it garnered two Songs of the Day this year before release, a sophomore LP packed with sublime bass lines, infusions of brass, a unique experimental blend of voice and instruments mixing pop, jazz and classical by the Bristol artist
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Fat White Family: Forgiveness Is Yours
New album: Lias Saoudi and co return with their first since 2019’s Serfs Up, one with that despite the troubled departure of founding member Saul Adamczewski during its creation, is an entertainingly sharp, ironic, aesthetic, literary release packed with stylish reference points, soundscapes and tunes
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All aflame: St. Vincent - All Born Screaming
New album: Annie Clark’s follow-up to 2021’s 70s-inspired Daddy’s Home is a striking, stylish self-produced LP, with a rawer, starker edge, fierce guitars, a theme of characters pushed between their true selves and how they’re perceived, an includes guests Dave Grohl and Cate Le Bon
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Leyla McCalla: Sun Without The Heat
New album: A deliciously uplifting fifth solo LP by the American singer-songwriter and mult-instrumentalist, fusing folk, country, Americana, Afrobeat to Brazilian tropicalismo
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Lynks’ debut LP: Abomination
New album: After a series of entertaining singles, the flamboyant, often masked south London artist Elliot Brett’s debut LP is full of bounce and thrust – a humorous, witty, catchy collection of stylish synth-electro-pop mainly about gay sexual adventures in the city
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Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
New album: After 2022’s mini-album solo, Afrikan Culture, the acclaimed and prolific British jazz saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, known best for Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming returns with a reset – swapping reeds for flutes, with an LP of delicate, experimental beauty, and featuring guests including Moses Sumney, André 3000, and Saul Williams
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Melts: Field Theory
New album: Following 2022’s Maelstrom, a fabulous second studio LP from the Dublin quartet of electronic psych-rock with dirty fuzzy synth lines and layered guitars, searing vocals of frontman Eoin Kenny and percussion pushing it all along like unstoppable krautrock train of wizzing, fizzing new wave energy
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A Certain Ratio: It All Comes Down To This
New album: Following last year’s 1984 album, Manchester’s pioneering and highly influential post-punk trio of Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson return with a punchy, potent, stripped-back sound with a dark funk flavour, produced by the prolific and brilliant Dan Carey
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Khruangbin: A LA SALA
New album: After the more energetic last LP, Mordechai, a return to slower, feathery, easy, seemingly effortless instrumental funk-jazz grooves from the super-cool American trio of bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald Johnson Jr and guitarist Mark Speer
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Still House Plants: If I Don't Make It, I Love U
New album: This third album by the truly alternative experimental avant-garde rock-jazz trio brings them stretching to an even more unique sound, oddly free-forming, woozy, otherworldly, and abstract
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Cosmo Sheldrake: Eye To The Ear
New album: A mesmeric new experimental release of 21 short tracks by the British producer, musician and soundscape artist who uses field recordings of nature, human and “more-than-human voices”, traditional instrumentation and electronic production
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English Teacher: This Could Be Texas
New album: An outstanding debut LP – subtle, original and experimental – by the Leeds quartet of Lily Fontaine, Douglas Frost, Nicholas Eden and Lewis Whiting, packed with intelligent, tender, rich, thoughtful, observational metaphor, and broad, inventive instrumentation
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Dana Gavanski: LATE SLAP
New album: Deftly original, wry, humorous, gently dreamy, brilliantly oddball folk-pop by the London-based Canadian-Serbian artist in this third LP with a theme of tenderness in a desensitising world, playing out tensions between negative cynicism and despair against positive openness and trust
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Jane Weaver: Love In Constant Spectacle
New album: A gorgeous new LP by the Merseyside artist, with her distinctive blend of tender, melancholic synth-pop, but here also some avant-garde jazz and gently surreal, newer pastures of otherworldly, vivid psychedelia, and a first guest producer in the form of the excellent John Parish
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