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Angel Olsen and various: Cosmic Waves Volume 1
New album: A novel form of “compilation reimagined as a dialogue” LP by the acclaimed, serene-voiced American singer-songwriter, showcasing five different lesser-known artists on Side A, and then covering other songs by them on Side B
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Tristan Perich and Ensemble 0: Open Symmetry
Album review: Released on the wonderfully innovative, independent London label Erased Tapes, the New York-based composer joins with the French group on a mesmeric, 50-minute work of seven instrumental tracks for three vibraphones and 1-bit electronics
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Papa M: Ballads of Harry Houdini
New album: The alt-rock LA-based musician from Louisville, Kentucky, aka David Pajo, returns with six long-ish numbers, not necessarily themed around the famous escape artist, but packed with ear-catching, meaty, thrumming, sometimes looped, and always dynamic guitar work and rhythmic experimentation
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Jack Cheshire: Interloper
New album: Following 2020’s acclaimed Fractal Future Plays, the British experimental musician returns with his sixth LP, an excellent exploration across pastoral psychedelia, lysergic polyrhythms and beautiful field recordings on tricky themes of belonging in age of post-Brexit and gentrification
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Fazerdaze: Soft Power
New album: This sophomore album by New Zealand singer-songwriter Amelia Rahayu Murray is dreamy, soft-sheen, shoegazey “bedroom stadium” electro-pop and indie on themes of womanhood, devotion and compassion
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Sofie Royer: Young-Girl Forever
New album: The California-born, Vienna-based Iranian-Austrian multidisciplinary artist’s newest LP is a very catchy mix of eclectic, political and mainstream, electro-pop, disco and new wave, centred on the contradictions of being a female artist today with all of its freedoms and capitalist trappings
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Warmduscher - Too Cold To Hold
New album: The mischievous mayhem post-punk band of Clams Baker Jr.), Mr. Salt Fingers Lovecraft, Quicksand, The Witherer, Three Piece aka the Worm and Bleucifer return with more songs on the seedier side of life, but also one of their most musically adventurous LPs of their five, with guest vocalists including Lianne La Havas, Janet Planet and Coucou Chlo
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Fie Eike: Water
New album: A delicately beautiful distillation through fluid subject in different contexts by the Copenhagen-based artist composer and singer, Anne Sofie Strandheim Eike, with Norwegian roots, creating a soundscape from piano, electronic elements and natural field recordings
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Underworld: Strawberry Hotel
New album: The veteran techno rave and electronica king pair Karl Hyde and Rick Smith return with one of their finest LPs of the 11 to date, a miasma of metronomic beats, stream-of-consciousness lyrics, ambience, energy and ecstatic elevation
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Half Waif: See You At The Maypole
New album: Ethereal, shimmering, poetic, sensual delicate experimental folk and synth-pop in this substantial 17-track sixth LP, following 2021’s Mythopoetics, by the New York singer-songwriter and producer Nandi Rose Plunkett, with lingering release about pain, grief, but resilience and beauty
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Kelly Lee Owens: Dreamstate
New album: The London-based Welsh electronic artist, DJ and producer’s fourth LP takes a new mainstream turn, celebrating daydreaming and emancipated creativity through electronica and dance music, combining ambience and beats with guest collaborators Bicep, Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers, and George Daniel
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Marysia Osu: Harp, Beats and Dreams
New album: Truly gorgeous experimental work by London’s Trinity Laban-graduate harpist of Polish parentage, who as well as conventionally rippling the strings of instrument, creatively uses it with other effects, adds sea other nature sounds with electronica, with magical sprinkles of guest vocals, cello, woodwind and percussion
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W.H. Lung: Every Inch Of Earth Pulsates
New album: The Manchester-formed synth-indie-pop five-piece return with fresh toe-tapping electro retro sounds, but also with a particularly big, live sound, achieved by relocating to Sheffield to work with producer Ross Orton (MIA, Arctic Monkeys, Working Men’s Club)
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cumgirl8: the 8th cumming
New album: Provocative in name, and after a couple of great EPs, the Manhattan four-piece are now fully released in LP form, with their infectiously catchy, witty, punchy, dirty electro-cyber-punk-pop, influenced in part by The Slits and girl-punk era of the late 1970s, new wave, horror and anime, and self-described as “a scantily clad Creature from the Black Lagoon”
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Hayden Thorpe: Ness
New album: The former Wild Beast singer’s new LP is a beautiful, experimental release inspireed by Robert Macfarlane’s book of the same name, an ode to the Suffolk coast’s mysterious ten-mile long shingle spit at Orford Ness, the now wilderness but former Ministry of Defence weapons development site
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The Smile: Cutouts
New album: Following January’s Wall of Eyes, the trio of Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke, alongside Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, return with a second LP this year, and third overall – of intricacy and invention – with dark, moody lyrics, and musical excellence
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The final, posthumous SOPHIE album
New album: This posthumous and final album by the extraordinary, innovative, experimental electro-pop and trans artist Sophie Xeon, who tragically died in 2021, is here finished by co-producer Benny Long and with a huge cast of guest vocalists, but also leaves the question of how much more there could have been
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Mustafa: Dunya
New album: This tenderly delivered debut LP by Sudanese-Canadian performance poet, film-maker, and singer-songwriter is a hushed-voiced, acoustic form of folk, the title translated as “the world in all its flaws” in Arabic, and variously touches on religious devotion, childhood trauma, gang violence to romantic intimacy
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Floating Points: Cascade
New album: Inspired by the dance culture of Manchester, cleverly crafted, evolving, clubby but intricate and supremely infectious work by the British electronica artist and producer Sam Shepherd
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Jónsi: First Light
New album: Beautiful experimental classical and electronica by the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist from Iceland’s Sigur Rós, in his latest solo release, a cinematic, evocative work capturing the landscape of his homeland but also a utopian vision in a climate threatened world
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