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Patrick Wolf: Crying The Neck
New album: Dramatic, flamboyant, emotionally charged, melancholy, powerful chamber pop by the English singer-songwriter blessed with a powerful high tenor voice, returning after a career lull, and inspired and recharged by his new home on the Kent coastline
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Endless musicianship: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: Phantom Island
New album: An impressive 27th album already by the unstoppably prolific Australian band, and this is one of their most experimental and theatrical releases yet, less prog- and riff-based, more harking back to the days of dramatic, full-on, 1970s rock operas and musicals with dynamic orchestral pop, funk and jazz
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Slick Rick - Victory
New album: The legendary English-American rapper, now 60, and one of the most influential in the hip-hop’s history, returns with his first for 26 years with a stylish, playful, talkative, narrative ‘visual’ LP featuring guests – the actor and sometime rapper-DJ Idris Elba, alongside Nas, Giggs and Estelle
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Matt Berninger - Get Sunk
New album: While fans of The National wait for a potential 11th studio album, their singer-songwriter returns with his second solo release, one that captures similar intimacy, melancholy and also expansiveness with songs about uncertainty and anxiety with a certain poignant catharsis
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The Bug Club: Very Human Features
New album: A tremendously catchy, lively, witty, humorous and poignant new LP by the Welsh trio of Sam Willmett, Tilly Harris and Dan Matthew with a terrific toe-tapping indie-rock-pop take on a whole spectrum of human contradictions
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WITCH: SOGOLO
New album: Zambia’s zamrock pioneers with (with the acronym ‘We Intend To Cause Mischief’) and still fronted by original member Emanuel "Jagari" Chanda, return with their special fusion of infectious psychedelic, 60s garage-inspired funk rock and and afrobeat, with a meaty, melodious, selection of catchy new numbers
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Tiberius B: NEVERYTHING
New album: After a series of striking singles and EPs, a debut LP of cleverly nuanced experimental pop exploring diametric forces of self and relationships by the London-based artist born as Frank Belcourt, from Cortes Island, BC, Canada, co-produced by Dan Carey and Jamie Neville
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Loaded Honey: Love Made Trees
New album: Like a huge soft-focus swoon, fabulous 70s retro Philly soul and sixties pop made new by the British duo of Lydia Kitto and J Lloyd (Josh Lloyd-Watson), better known from dance-pop band Jungle, with this debut side project, exploring and inspired by their own up-and-down romance with panache and a glorious sense of irony, melodrama, and style
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Shura: I Got Too Sad For My Friends
New album: With her first music since 2019’s acclaimed album forevher, the British singer-songwriter and producer Alexandra Denton returns with a third LP, one that embraces melancholy and addresses the self, capturing six years of uncertainty with a gentle, intelligent perspective, wrapped in refined, matured indie, pop, folk and Americana
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McKinley Dixon: Magic, Alive!
New album: Classy, literary, cultured, narrative-rich, experimental, dramatic, dynamic and stylish hip-hop by the Richmond-born, Chicago-based rapper in this follow-up to the acclaimed Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (2023) in a release exploring the fate of key characters and the idea of what constitutes magic in the turmoil of daily life
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Lucy Gooch: Desert Window
New album: Hovering and evolving in its own delicious, delicate, ghostly hinterland between folk, classical, jazz and ambient electronica, this exquisite debut by the British singer and composer from York is an ethereal, mesmeric tapestry of layered voices and acoustic instruments
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Aesop Rock: Black Hole Superette
New album: The acclaimed Long Island rapper Ian Matthias Bavitz returns with another rich pageant of ingeniously rapid rhymes, ideas, beats and riffs, this one themed around invisible forces that shape our lives and psyches, featuring guests Lupe Fiasco, Armand Hammer, Hanni El Khatib, Open Mike Eagle and Homeboy Sandman
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Little Simz: Lotus
New album: The Mercury prize-winning London rapper and actress Simbiatu Ajikawo brings a powerful, playful as well as personal issues, defiant rage-filled articulate new sixth album, broadening her musical scope with collaborator and producer Miles James with a title inspired by the flower that blooms, despite a harsh environment in mud and swamp
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Kathryn Joseph: WE WERE MADE PREY.
New album: Stark, menacing, visceral also hauntingly beautiful, the Glasgow singer-songwriter’s fourth LP reprises her creative partnership with fellow Scottish artist Lomond Campbell first explored on 2022’s For You Who Are The Wronged, with striking experimental soundscapes coloured by electronica as well as her piano and other instruments
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Caroline 2
New album: The London eight-piece experimental group return three years after their self-titled debut, with a stop-start, meandering, sometimes challenging but also magical album of interweaving vocals and analogue instruments – guitars, trombone, violins and more, but also electronica – and a guest appearance from Caroline Polachek
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Goddess: the eponymous debut by Fay Milton
New album: Striking in many ways, this excellent eponymous debut LP by the Savages drummer Fay Milton brings together an array of female and non-binary collaborators, not only celebrating a sisterhood, but also one that has musical echoes of Massive Attack, with powerful songs addressing themes in uncertain and dangerous world
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Léa Sen: LEVELS
New album: A classy, cool, effortlessly stylish, soulful, experimental electro-pop, R'n'B, and trip-hop debut LP by the south London-based French singer, songwriter and producer, whose vocal delivery has a warm, woozy, mellifluous style, with a smudged, muted and soft guitar sound, scattered, subtle electronics, jittering percussion and nuanced, philosophical lyrics
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Foxwarren: 2
New album: This new studio LP from the band project of Canadian singer-songwriter and solo artist Andy Shauf from Regina, Saskatchewan, is a charming, warm, experimental indie-rock and chamber-pop release that collages snippets of dialogue and music from old movies, between and within songs
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Alan Sparhawk: With Trampled By Turtles
New album: Suffused with a warmth, tenderness and powerful, grieving melancholy, this second solo album by the Low co-founder since the death in 2022 of his wife and lifelong creative Mimi Parker joins him with the fabulous fellow Duluth, Minnesota bluegrass and folk band Trampled By Turtles
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Jacob Alon: In Limerence
New album: A sublime contemporary folk debut by the high-voiced Scottish singer-songwriter from Dunfermline, Fife, who exudes a fragile vulnerability, has warm musical echoes of Nick Drake and Jeff Buckley, finger-picking acoustic guitar, the gentle brush of drums and subtle, emotionally nuanced, poetic lyrics
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