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Joy Crookes: Juniper
New album: With a style that’s sometimes stripped back, but always silky and smoky, the hugely talented, golden-voiced artist from Lambeth of a Bangladeshi and Irish heritage returns with her first LP since the acclaimed 2021 debut Skin, with smart, emotional, classy, beautiful soulful songs about heartbreak and other life struggles
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Stealing Sheep: GLO (GIrl Life Online)
New album: Always bringing effervescently quirky, original and experimental work, this is an especially vibrant, fizzing, percussive, witty and superb LP – and surely the very best yet by the excellent Liverpool electro-pop trio of Emily Lansley, Luciana Mercer, and Rebecca Hawley
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The Divine Comedy: Rainy Sunday Afternoon
New album: Sumptuously charming, filled with melancholy, wit, gorgeous melodies and songwriting, Neil Hannon and co bring a 13th LP of particularly tender, moving and humorous chamber pop with a vaudevillian feel, and running theme of time passing and mutability, all performed with classic panache
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Titanic: HAGEN
New album: Following their 2023 debut Vidrio, the Mexico City-based partners Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti and guitarist Hector Tosta return with another mesmeric, exciting and highly eclectic experimental album, moving here from jazz into more pop and classic rock in combinations yet unheard
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Sydney Minsky Sargeant - Lunga
New album: The Working Men’s Club frontman from Todmorden in West Yorkshire makes his debut solo LP, a melancholy yet beautiful collection of acoustic and gently reflective pastoral, psychedelic songs, with echoes of Elliott Smith, Syd Barrett and Nick Drake
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Jens Lekman: Songs For Other People's Weddings
New album: Borne from a 2020 novel-with-music side project idea with writer David Levithan, the Swedish singer-songwriter charts his 20 years’ experience of being an occasional and accidental wedding musician in this witty, profound double LP that among other issues and emotions, examines the role of love songs in our live
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Baxter Dury - Allbarone
New album: Alongside his usual droll, witty wordsmithery and distinctive dark, deep-voiced spoken delivery, the Londoner and son of Ian also brings a slightly different, more boisterous style of satirical and nihilistic misery with a collection of supremely catchy, danceable numbers in this ninth LP, produced Paul Epworth
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Saint Etienne: International
New album: Catchy retro, singalong electro-pop, soft, bouncy beats, simple melodies and a big dose of nostalgia? If this 13th really is the British trio’s final album across 35 years, it's a decent sign-off by Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs since that breakthrough LP Foxbase Alpha in 1991
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Curtis Harding - Departures & Arrivals: Adventures of Captain Curt
New album: The Michigan-born, Atlanta-based golden-voiced artist returns with uplifting, classy retro-soul funk, rock and pop with an extra layer of takeoff - he plays the cinematic thematic role of a space travelling astronaut expressing how much he misses his true love on Earth
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Sabrina Carpenter: Man's Best Friend
New album: Mischievous, provocative, satirical, saucy, sexy, intimate, explicit, shiny, cleverly catchy relationship songs, packed with naughty whip-smart wordplay pop, musical echoes of 80s and Madonna, to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, all by the US singer-songwriter, and expertly produced across a range of funky to country styles by Jack Antonoff
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David Byrne: Who Is The Sky?
New album: With his first since 2018’s acclaimed American Utopia and its performance film, the ex-Talking Heads frontman’s new LP is an antidote to dark times - brilliantly joyous, optimistic, catchy, variously eccentric and profound, accompanied by Brooklyn’s Ghost Train Orchestra and guests including St Vincent, Paramore’s Hayley Williams and The Smile drummer Tom Skinner
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Nova Twins: Parasites & Butterflies
New album: Following 2022’s acclaimed Supernova album, south-east London’s Amy Love and Georgia South return with a third LP of banging boundary-pushing hybrid goth-rock-nu-metal-punk-hip-hop with feisty punch-the-air anthems as well as themes addressing mental health, confidence, negativity and the music industry
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The Beths: Straight Line Was A Lie
New album: The New Zealand quartet fronted by singer-songwriter Elizabeth Stokes return with a fourth LP of particularly strong, warm, cleverly nuanced, poignant indie numbers spanning contradictory pulls of emotion and expanded sounds and production
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Blood Orange: Essex Honey
New album: Eclectic, dream-like, transitional and reflective with a late-summer smooth ambience and an over-riding theme of looking back on his Ilford childhood days, the 39-year-old British NY-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Dev Hynes returns with a fifth LP as Blood Orange, joined by a variety of other artists including Caroline Polachek and Lorde
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CMAT: EURO-COUNTRY
New album: “I waited for love with a cricket bat …” Packed with witty, offbeat and super-sharp, candidly personal lyrics, soaring, gorgeous vocals and melodies, all with an eccentric turns, the charismatic Dublin country-pop star and songwriter Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson brings home her third, and best LP yet
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Water From Your Eyes: It's A Beautiful Place
New album: Indie Brooklyn-based duo Nate Amos and Rachel Brown unleash a highly original fusion of experimental art-rock, pop, and shoegaze, mixing musical dynamism with the vocally deadpan abstract through thematic portal of otherworldly science fiction
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Wolf Alice: The Clearing
New album: Still riding high on awards and big sales, the London rock band’s fourth LP, following 2021’s Blue Weekend, explores a wider breadth of styles into more piano-based pop and 70s rock, with songs broadly about self-acceptance, wellbeing, contemplating identity and some stylistic echoes of Fleetwood Mac and ELO
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Laufey: A Matter of Time
New album: Witty, classy, and with oodles of charm, humour and her exquisitely pure delivery with sublime vocal control, the Icelandic-Chinese singer-songwriter Lín Bing Jónsdóttir turns back the clock with timeless, gorgeous brand new numbers that capture a bygone era of smooth sophisticated jazz, and sumptuously scored musicals all about matters of the heart
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Black Honey: Soak
New album: Smoky, stylish, horror-dark, simmering, swaggering, searing goth-rock and indie-pop by the Brighton band in a fourth album vocalist Izzy B. Phillips describes as "picking at the layers of messy, romantic, confusing, woozy, beautiful and fucked up things"
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Ada Lea: When I Paint My Masterpiece
New album: Sharing its title with a Bob Dylan song, this third album of 16 tracks of experimental folk and Americana by the Montreal singer-songwriter aka Alexandra Levy comes with a free-flowing acoustic brush of the imagination, a rich seam of art and literary reference, and lyrics of the dream-like psychedelic with notes of optimism and plainspoken wisdom
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