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Comfort: What's Bad Enough?
New album: Truly original and arresting cross-genre electronica-postpunk-hip-hop by the Glasgow sibling duo of vocalist and transwoman Natalie and instrumentalist brother Sean McGhee who challenge gender norms and ideas of beauty
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Susanne Sundfør: Blómi
New album: Strange and strikingly beautiful, the sixth album by the Norwegian singer-songwriter is a mix of classic 70s piano-pop and alternative folk, with echoes everything from Karen Carpenter to Rufus Wainwright
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GoGo Penguin: Everything Is Going To Be OK
New album: An evocative, imaginative, cinematic ninth LP by the inventive Manchester experimental jazz trio this time with track ideas first utilising electronica turned into their vibrant acoustic playing of interweaving piano, drums and bass
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Tiny Ruins: Ceremony
New album: Gorgeously intricate, beautifully paced experimental folk comes in this fourth LP by the band of New Zealand’s Hollie Fullbrook, with songs that are poignant, melancholy, but also intelligently uplifting
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Avalon Emerson’s new LP: & The Charm
New album: The San Francisco-born, Arizona-raised DJ and producer’s debut LP, after 2020’s Rotting Hills EP, is indeed a charm, one of dreamy electro-pop, not the first or last to be influenced by Cocteau Twins, but one also with lots of oddball originality and vivid, photography-like lyrics
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Nabihah 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
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The National’s ninth LP: First Two Pages of Frankenstein
New album: The ninth studio LP by the Brooklyn-based Ohio five-piece of the Dessner brothers co, is slow, reflective and beautifully poetic, capturing singer Matt Berninger’s hopefully winning battle with depression, and includes includes guest Taylor Swift, Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens
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Alfa Mist’s fifth album, Variables
New album: A brilliantly inventive mix of dynamic, textured, vibrant jazz, funk, prog, African, and hip hop, from big band swing, boom-bap rhythms smooth, soulful vocals, all in a fifth LP the London keyboardist and producer
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Lael Neale: Star Eaters Delight
New album: The American singer-songwriter returns with a third album of ethereal alternative folk-pop, inspired by moving from the bright lights of LA to the calm of the family Virginia farm and polarities of country-city, humanity-technology, solitude- relationship
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The Bloodstreams: How To Be A God
New album: With oodles of swagger, theatricality and panache, a wonderful debut by the seasoned Deptford quartet, with witty, black-humoured 60s garage rock and stylish echoes of Siouxsie, Birthday Party-era Nick Cave, Stones, the Doors and the Kramps
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Oracle Sisters: Hydranism
Debut album: Classy, and timelessly classic piano pop and more debut by the Paris-based trio of Lewis Lazar, Christopher Willatt and Finnish musician Julia Johansen filled with melting, moving ballads, intimate folk songs, catchy bangers and generally vision of the world suspended in a timeless place
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Fire-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
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Spencer Cullum returns with further treasures
New album: Following 2021’s beautiful first coin collection, another delicious release of gentle 70s-style folk with light touches of country, jazz and pop by the Romford artist who has made his home in Nashville, Tennessee
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Ligeti Quartet x Anna Meredith: Nuc
New album: A dynamic, mesmeric collaboration as acclaimed modern classical string ensemble play career works by the Scottish experimental composer in multi-textured, polyrhythmic, interpretations, using arrangements by viola player Richard Jones
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Small scenes, Big Picture. Fenne Lily’s perfectly formed bittersweet new album
New album: Crisp, stripped back, gentle, intricate and sensitive singer-songwriter folk by the Bristol artist with third album about the last two years of her life, capturing “worry and doubt and letting go”, treading a beautifully bittersweet line between the melancholic and uplifting
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Deerhoof: Miracle-Level
New album: A 19th studio album by San Francisco the prog-punk-jazz experimentalists drummer Greg Saunier, guitarists Ed Rodriguez and John Dieterich, and bassist/singer Satomi Matsuzaki is another blast of brilliant musicianship, but also the first entirely sung in Matsuzaki’s native Japanese
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HMLTD …
New album: Apocalypse: The Musical? This highly entertaining second LP by the British art-rockers could be thus described, but the concept is “an anachronistic version of medieval England” and features a 16-piece string orchestra and gospel choir
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London Brew
New album: A wonderfully rich, collaborative release of new music by a 12-piece group of leading UK jazz musicians including Shabaka Hutchings, recorded in 2020 in Paul Epworth’s Church Studios, inspired by and celebrate the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s landmark LP Bitches Brew
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Desire Marea: On The Romance of Being
New album: An extraordinary, beautiful, passionate, spiritual and erotic new solo LP by the South African multidisciplinary artist, sangoma (Nguni spiritual healer), and previously part of queer gqom group FAKA, now with a 13-piece orchestral ensemble mixing soul, jazz, rock and Zulu chants
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Altin Gün’s fifth album, Aşk
New album: The Amsterdam psychedelic and electro-pop-funk rockers make a fabulous fifth LP with their special interpretations of traditional Turkish and Anatolian folk, echoing the heavier sound of their earlier albums On and Gece
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