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Iron & Wine: Light Verse
New album: A poetic latest release indeed North Carolina’s Sam Beam, packed with beautiful lyrics and melodies, articulate alternative folk, rock and country with flavours of Paul Simon and Cat Stevens, filled with vivid fictional and personal insights, desperate characters and wide-eyed optimists, heartache, tears and laughter including an appearance by Fiona Apple
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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 new twist: Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department
New album: The American omnipresent megastar returns with a surprise but also widely well-received 11th LP – a twisting, voluminous collection of 31 songs (Anthology version) of luxuriant pop, but packed with extremely caustic, often brilliantly dark, cutting break-up lyrics
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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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Lucy Rose: This Ain't The Way You Go Out
New album: The English singer-songwriter returns with her fifth LP, following 2019’s No Words Left, with a triumph-against-adversity comeback of beautiful piano-based songs fuelled by difficulty and yet also hope
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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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Grace Cummings: Ramona
New album: Slow, inexorable, compelling beauty in the powerful voice of the Melbourne singer-songwriter and actor, here, following 2022’s extraordinary Storm Queen, with a less raw, more lavishly orchestrated sound and grandeur, to express themes such as grief and self-destruction and emotional violence
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Jess Ribeiro: Summer of Love
New album: A gorgeously delicate, stripped-back noir folk release by the Melbourne singer-songwriter with her first LP since 2019, an album about isolation, loss, tiny snatches of love and instability, written when she lived in nine places over a two-year period
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BODEGA: Our Brand Could Be Yr Life
New album: Smart, literary, packed with cultural references from film, books and art, the New York post-punk band’s fourth album is a more melodic release than the punchier of previous, being in part a self-reflexive reworking of much older songs from their previous incarnation as Bodega Bay
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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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Gustaf: Package Pt. 2
New album: Whipsmart, clever, caustic, wonderfully crafted post-punk? It must be the return of the Brooklyn five-piece fronted by the charismatic, funny and fierce Lydia Gammill with another selection of excellent, angular numbers
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Bob Vylan’s second album: Humble As The Sun
New album: The London hip-hop-punk-heavy-rock duo return with a second helping of articulate, pull-no-punches, take-no-prisoners social and political commentary, taking aim at Tory-ruled Britain, corrupt police, toxic masculinity and other social ills, but alongside righteous rage, some doses of positivity
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Fabiana Palladino’s debut album
New album: This striking pop debut with a retro sound, at times evoking sounds of Janet Jackson and Prince, harking back to the late-70s and smooth sheen of the 80s mainstream, has been gestating for 13 years by this seasoned session musician
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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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