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Four masters making a perfect blend: (from left) Vincent Peirani, Ballaké Sissoko, Émile Parisien and Vincent Segal
New album: A gorgeous genre-spanning jazz-folk-Anatolian LP featuring Malian kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko, specialist improv cellist Vincent Segal, accordion virtuoso Vincent Peirani and French soprano saxophonist Émile Parisien
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Sky’s the limit: James Holden’s fourth album, Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of all Possibilities
New album: As exemplified in a January Song of the Day, Contains Multitudes, with loops, tabla and violin, the British producer’s fourth LP is a wondrously inventive landscape of imaginative electronica, bells, birdsongs, bleeps and heartbeats
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A Certain Ratio: 1982
New album: The Manchester post-punk veterans Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson, return with a sparklingly eclectic record of electronica, dance, jazz, funk, Afrobeat and more with a retrospective feel on their history
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Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus together as boygenius
New album: After 2018’s EP, a fabulous LP debut of folk, Americana and indie combining the talents of American singer-songwriter trio of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus, who have each also released three successful solo LPs
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JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown: Scaring The Hoes
New album: A frenetic, eclectic, mischievously ironic and culture-bashing collaboration between iconoclastic Brooklyn rapper Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks, and his Detroit counterpart Daniel Dewan Sewell in a crazed mish-mash of samples, voices and rhythmic restlessness
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Caroline Rose: The Art of Forgetting
Lucinda 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
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Lana Del Rey returns with her ninth album
New album: The queen of noir returns with her ninth LP – steeped in powerful, beautiful, piano-based numbers of melancholy and rich vocal harmonies, with rumination about dangerous love, religion and of course, death
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Death & Vanilla: Flicker
New album: The trio from Malmö, Sweden return with another selection of smooth, delicate, vintage Moog synth dream pop and psych-folk, more upbeat than 2019’s Are You A Dreamer, but still creating a musical “melancholic utopia”
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Emilíana Torrini & The Colorist Orchestra: Racing The Storm
New album: Charming, beautifully arranged acoustic intricacy in this crisp collaboration between the clear-voiced Icelandic-Italian singer-songwriter and Belgian multi-instrumentalist duo Aarich Jespers and Kobe Proesmans and friends
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Yves Tumor’s latest album: Praise A Lord Who Chews …
New album: A mouthful of a title but another striking, genre-spanning fifth LP by the unique Knoxville-raised Sean Bowie, whose extraordinary non-gender presence adorns this mix of thrumming postpunk, indie R&B, trip-hop, funk, glam, sensual soul and psychedelia
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Technology + Teamwork: We Used To Be Friends
New album: Sarah Jones and Anthony Silvester’s debut brings experimental electro-pop, new wave, R&B, disco and more, from brilliant bangers to the oddball and bizarre, and influences from West Coast 60s synthesis movement to late 70s and early 80s Cabaret Voltaire with little dash of Yello
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Unknown Mortal Orchestra: V
New album: New Zealand’s Ruban Nielson and co return with a post-lockdown double album, a fifth LP keeping that distinctive dirty mic vocal filter, and a mixture of the upbeat and downbeat
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Frankie Rose: Love As Projection
New album: Dreamy, sophisticated, literate, soft-sheen new wave electro-pop in this fifth solo album by the long established New York artist and former member of Dum Dum Girls and Vivian Girls
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Dutch Uncles: True Entertainment
New album: Vibrant, tight, bright, excellent toe-tapping indie electro-pop with a darker undercurrent by the Manchester quartet in their sixth full LP and first for six years, echoing influences such as Yellow Magic Orchestra and The Blue Nile
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Shana Cleveland: Manzanita
New album: A sublime third solo LP by the singer and La Luz co-founder, a beautiful selection of Californian-style folk, named after a native evergreen tree with medicinal properties, and awash with pristine acoustic guitar and her mesmeric voice
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H. Hawkline: Milk For Flowers
New album: Cardiff’s Huw Evans releases his fifth LP, a charming, tender, wistful, sensitive, intelligent, and beautiful collection of alternative pop with a folk/country hue, co-produced with Cate Le Bon, and players including Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo)
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Fever Ray’s third LP, Radical Romantics
New album: Sweden’s Karin Dreijer returns with her first Fever Ray LP since 2017’s Plunge, this third packed with rich, eerie, complex, multifarious songs about the bewilderment of love
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WOW - by Russian experimentalist Kate NV
New album: A wonderfully oddball, playful and original LP by the Russian electronica artists Kate Shilonosova, whose palette of sounds include 90s video game bleeps, blips, pings, cat meows and snippets of other disembodied vocals
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Steve Mason: Brothers & Sisters
New album: The former Beta Band main man returns with one of his finest solo albums yet, a groovy protest record (“a big fuck off to Brexit”) drawing in different cultures and throwing a party for Britain’s rich heritage from an immigrant population
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