New album: British musician Kieran Hebden returns, with his first album since 2020’s Parallel, with a new syncopated electronica beats, twinkling, rippling textures and rumbling ambience to invigorate the spring season
Read moreNailah Hunter: Lovegaze
New album: Slow, sensual, simmering, lingeringly beautiful numbers in this debut LP of experimental, ambient, will-o'-the-wisp, dream-like quality by the Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer and harpist with Belize ancestry
Read moreFavourite albums of 2023 Part 2: Anohni to Blur to Mitski, Ren to Sufjan Stevens
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 2, and Part 1 was yesterday. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order …
Read moreFavourite albums of 2023 Part 1: Anna B Savage to Young Fathers
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 1, and Part 2 is also out here. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order. This is all about quality and innovation …
Read moreAndré 3000: New Blue Sun
New album: The actor and former half of superstar hip-hop duo Outcast makes a very surprising return after 17 years – a lengthy low-key, instrumental album built around his love of flute playing – minimal, meditational and relaxing
Read moreVince Clarke: Songs of Silence
New album: The legendary synth-pop songwriter best known for Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Erasure releases, at last, his first solo album, a mesmeric, ambient, darkly sci-fi cinematic work made from modular synthesisers
Read moreHania Rani: Ghosts
New album: The Berlin-based Polish singer, pianist and composer returns with her bewitching voice, elevating, ethereal, minimalistic, ambient electronica and classical, with guests Patrick Watson, Ólafur Arnalds and Duncan Bellamy of Portico Quartet
Read moreArt School Girlfriend: Soft Landing
New album: Absorbing, introspective, sensual, experimental indie-pop and electronica by London’s Polly Mackey, with a sound that evoke acres of wide landscape and sky, melancholy, wistful songs, and her breathy voice not unlike EBTG’s Tracey Thorn
Read moreSigur Rós: ÁTTA
New album: With climate change ever on on the horizon, a beautiful, moving, melancholy, ethereal and dynamic LP by the elemental Icelandic experimental band, their first for a decade, with Kjartan Sveinsson rejoining since he left 2012, to complete the trio with frontman Jónsi and bassist Georg Holm
Read moreThe Orb - Prism
New album: The veteran dance music and ambient noise duo still with co-founder Alex Paterson return with a vibrant release of cosmic electronica, dub and reggae, house, drum n’ bass, guest vocalists plus newscaster and other sampled voices
Read moreNabihah Iqbal: Dreamer
New album: The London electronica artists and DJ, formerly known as Throwing Shade, brings a mix of dancefloor with the dream-like, sensual, breathy and ethereal, with echoes sometimes of Cocteau Twins, but also of New Order
Read moreFire-Toolz: I am upset because I see something that is not there
New album: Like a bizarre recipe filled with flavours that should not mix, but by some strange alchemy really work, an extraordinary fusion of electronica, ambient, drum’n’bass, jazz, prog, pop, and blasts of dark metal by the Chicago producer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid, a heady fusion that must been heard to be believed
Read moreLucinda Chua: YIAN
New album: A beautiful, sensual, intimate debut LP by the Milton Keynes-raised singer-songwriter, themed around personal history and identity, the title (燕) meaning the swallow bird in Chinese, part of her given name, Siew Yian from her Chinese-Malaysian heritage
Read moreM83: Fantasy
New album: Over two decades in, this ninth LP by the French electronica band of Anthony Gonzalez is epic, big-scale 70-minute sprawl of smooth, retro-synth pop and ambient indulgence, that has an almost cinematic scale
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 moreDaniel Avery: Ultra Truth
New album: The Bournemouth electronic musician and producer’s latest LP is an intense journey of tender piano to drone, rave, hardcore, ambient and many interweaving textures, drawing in from influences such as Aphex Twin, David Lynch, to My Bloody Valentine
Read moreBrian Eno: FOREVERANDEVERMORE
New album: An unusual vocal 22nd LP by the acclaimed producer marries his ambient, evocative, sonic landscapes and his full, rounded rather beautiful delivery - slow, chant-like but filled with profundity, emotion and dark humour about our ultimate, apocalyptic fate
Read moreWilliam Orbit: The Painter
New album: The acclaimed British super-producer and composer of the 1990s and 2000s, and now painter, returns with his first LP for nearly a decade after a prolonged period of health issues, with refined, gentle, colourful collection of electronica and ambient textures, with guest vocalists including Beth Orton and Georgia
Read moreUnloved: The Pink Album
New album: This third LP by trio behind the soundtrack to TV series Killing Eve, Belfast producer David Holmes alongside singer Jade Vincent and musician Keefus Ciancia, is a huge, sprawling cinematic 22-tracker filled with alluringly oddball, woozy, dark pop, electronica, 60s French noir and psychedelia
Read moreKaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Let's Turn It Into Sound
New album: Wondrously inventive, mesmeric, ingenious experimental work by the electronic composer from Orcas Island, Washington State, whose tools include a range of Buchla and other modular synthesizers, woodwind instruments and clever layering of her own vocal samples
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