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Swans: The Beggar
New album: This 16th album in just over four decades by the veteran American experimental band fronted Michael Gira brings brooding, dark menace, written in lockdown, a moving, powerful contemplation of mortality that’s oddly stirring
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Geese: 3D Country
New album: A brilliant second album following 2021’s Projector by the Brooklyn indie-rock quintet, packed with thunderous rocky, bluesy psychedelic grooves, retro yet fresh, stop-start rhythms, and charismatic deep-voiced delivery of Cameron Winter
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Django Django: Off Planet
New album: A 21-song mega-release by the innovative, experimental London-based art-rock and pop quartet features a variety of great guest vocalists with music that plays around more in the electronica-dance genre and various world music beats, but overall feels more like four EPs
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Meshell Ndegeocello: The Omnichord Real Book, out on Blue Note
New album: Classy, supercool and stylish, the revered German-born American bassist and vocalist returns with an album of distinctive and varied fusion of funk, jazz, Afrobeat, electronica and hip hop with a variety of distinctive guests
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Bettye LaVette
New album: With last month’s passing of Tina Turner, it’s heartening to find another great voice still going strong, the gravelly soul delivery of the 77-year-old veteran with bluesy funk and candid killer lyrics
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Ursa Major Moving Group
New album: A stellar, innovative and absorbing debut LP project by London multi-instrumentalist, composer and writer Ursula Russell fusing folk, chamber pop and gentle post-punk
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Killer Mike reveals the young Michael
New album: One half of Run The Jewels, the Atlanta rapper and social activist Michael Santiago Render releases a powerful, articulate, and frank autobiographical solo LP, candidly exploring his childhood and more of the other side to his Killer Mike persona
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Sigur Rós: ÁTTA is their first album for 10 years
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
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Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth LP, In Times New Roman
New album: After a six year absence, Josh Homme and co return with an eighth blistering, brutally brilliant, meaty loud rock LP, returning to more to their roots too – dark, powerfully emotional, ironic, sharp, witty and powerful, here with some elements of Scary Monsters-era Bowie, Cream, epic glam rock, and all fuelled by various personal tragedies
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Dream Wife: Social Lubrication
New album: Punchy, whip-smart, witty, menacing, fierce but also explosively and mischievously fun, the London post-punk band fronted by return with a perhaps their best yet - a pulsating set of sharp, feminist songs about relationships, society and more
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Another landmark: Squid’s second album, O Monolith
New album: The second album by the Brighton-formed experimental post-punks after 2021’s Bright Green Field sees them push into abstract prog, folk, jazz and other musical territory of light and shade, loud to intimate and intricate, all with sharp sense of life’s tragedy, comedy and absurdity
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Big release: Janelle Monáe’s fourth LP, The Age of Pleasure
New album: The American artist returns after 2018’s dystopian Dirty Computer a series of acting roles with a celebratory LP of her full sexual liberation and confirmed non-binary status in a release that feels like a hedonistic non-stop party of the LGBTQ Black culture scene
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Christine and the Queens: Paranoïa, Angels, True Love
New album: French artist Héloïse Letissier aka Chris, now using the he/his pronoun, returns with a passionate, epic, sensual, existential synth-pop triple LP odyssey, fuelled by the grief over mother’s death, and expressed through concepts of inner angel voices, including a guest appearance by Madonna
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Hak Baker: Worlds End FM
New album: Vibrant, witty, energetic debut by the east London rapper and musician, presented like a pirate radio station the mixes hip hop and storytelling with echoes of The Streets’ Mike Skinner and Ian Dury, as well more conventional, yet pointed indie about troubled Britain
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This Is The Kit: Careful Of Your Keepers
New album: Another peach of an LP from Kate Stables and band, whose voice especially with her acoustic alternative folk, effortlessly caresses the microphone with clarity, beauty, profundity and minimalism, and is produced by Gruff Rhys
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Extranauts: The Alchemist
New album: Wonderfully stylish, catchy, uplifting indie pop and retro 70s disco with a dash of 60s psychedelia and krautrock by the Irish sextet fronted by singer and songwriter Keith O’Neill and produced with added sheen by Jagz Kooner.
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Baxter Dury: I Thought I Was Better Than You
New album: Droll, dark, crisply phrased, downbeat, self-deprecating, sleazy and funky? It can only be the West London artist, in a candid, unflinching sixth solo album that draws on his strange childhood as son of famous Ian, echoing his brilliantly funny and painful 2022 memoir Chaise Longue
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WITCH are back with Zango, their first album since 1984
New album: After a whopping 38 years’ absence, Zambia’s pioneers of zamrock (their name an acronym We Intend To Cause Havoc) return with their heady and wonderful mix of psychedelic rock, reggae, Afrobeat and funk
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Protomartyr: Formal Growth In The Desert
New album: Stormy, dark, passionate, punchy, with biting lyrics, this powerful sixth album by the Detroit-formed post-punk quartet is inspired by the metaphorical desolation of the titular landscape and getting on with life even when it feels impossibly hard
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Lanterns on the Lake: Versions of Us
New album: Sumptuous sounds, passionate lyrics and dynamic musicianship by guitarist Paul Gregory and co in the indie Newcastle-upon-Tyne band fronted by superb singer-songwriter Hazel Wilde with an album about self-definition, identity and “existential meditations examining life’s possibilities” in a troubled world
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