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A Certain Ratio: It All Comes Down To This
New album: Following last year’s 1984 album, Manchester’s pioneering and highly influential post-punk trio of Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson return with a punchy, potent, stripped-back sound with a dark funk flavour, produced by the prolific and brilliant Dan Carey
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BODEGA: Our Brand Could Be Yr Life
New album: Smart, literary, packed with cultural references from film, books and art, the New York post-punk band’s fourth album is a more melodic release than the punchier of previous, being in part a self-reflexive reworking of much older songs from their previous incarnation as Bodega Bay
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Gustaf: Package Pt. 2
New album: Whipsmart, clever, caustic, wonderfully crafted post-punk? It must be the return of the Brooklyn five-piece fronted by the charismatic, funny and fierce Lydia Gammill with another selection of excellent, angular numbers
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Blue Whale: Last Immediate Images
New album: A brilliantly angular, experimental, partly instrumental prog-post-punk and jazz sophomore release by the Belfast quartet of riveting cross-rhythms, innovative guitar and bass work creating an oddball but ornate aural tapestry
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Yard Act: Where's My Utopia?
New album: With continuing appeal, the experimental post-punk Leeds quartet return with their second LP, with highly entertaining, broadened musical scope, frontman James Smith’s agile, candid, conversational wit musing on the ironies of success, the music business, resultant guilt, climate change, and titular worries about the future
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Talk Show: Effigy
New album: A dark, arresting, gnarly, frenzied fusion of dance-funk post-punk by the south London quartet with an LP that feels like a gripping journey through a fictional night-club underworld, with echoes of the Prodigy and Baxter Dury-style vocalisations
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Royel Otis: Pratts & Pain
New album: Brilliantly vibrant, fresh yet oddly timeless indie-pop, post-punk by the Australian duo Royel Maddell and Otis Pavlovic, with echoes of 60s-90s garage rock, 80s indie, Velvet Underground to the The Strokes, and produced here by the acclaimed Dan Carey
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IDLES return with their fifth album, TANGK
New album: The fierce, rage-filled Bristol post-punk band’s fifth album has an unfamiliar, far more tender but wider selection of sounds, this dynamic range of love songs intriguingly experimental, less shouty, more melodious
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Erotic Secrets of Pompeii: Mondo Maleficum
New album: Gloriously theatrical, witty, panache-filled, this is a lavishly swaggering, swirling cauldron of excess, rock-pop, post-punk, prog, baroque indie, and classical, a debut whirlwind LP of history-spanning reference and energy, from Greek myth to Shakespeare and the apocalypse
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Black Grape: Orange Head
New album: Salford’s Shaun Ryder and Manchester’s Paul ‘Kermit’ Leveridge return with their first LP since 2017’s Pop Voodoo, and their fourth overall together, with an especially funk-filled laced with their classic banter, wit and talent for cleverly daft, surreal and addictive lyrics
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Sleater-Kinney: Little Rope
New album: With perhaps best yet, certainly since reforming in 2014, and 11th overall, a passionate, catchy, powerful, defiant LP by Portland-based singer-guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker with searingly brilliant postpunk, rock and pop
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Folly Group’s debut LP - Down There!
New album: After a series of strong singles and a couple of EPs, the London quartet and Goldsmith’s graduates’ full debut LP is explosive, taut, dark, energetic, angry post-punk brimming with inventive, rhythmic dynamism
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SPRINTS: Letter To Self
New album: After many strong singles and EPs, a bold, dynamic, blistering punk and post-punk debut by the Dublin four-piece, tackling turbulent existential crises with dark passion and wit
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Bound by Endogamy
New album: Released last month, dark, oddball and original, this electronica, industrial, post-punk LP is full of fantastic visceral sounds and droll, vocal delivery by the Geneva-based duo Shlomo Balexert and Kleio Thomaïdes
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Favourite LPs of 2023, Part 2.
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 2, and Part 1 was yesterday. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order …
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Part 1 selection of 2023 favourite albums
Welcome once again to the annual tradition of Song Bar’s favourite album releases of 2023. This is Part 1, and Part 2 is also out here. There’s no such thing as a chart rundown or ‘best of’ here, and these come in no particular order. This is all about quality and innovation …
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Problem Patterns’ debut album: Blouse Club
New album: Belfast’s answer to Amyl & the Sniffers pull no punches and leave no prisoners with their angry, shouty, catchy, feminist, caustically sharp and witty debut LP, their fast furious songs of social critique, from the energetic Riot Grrrl punk quartet of Beverley Boal, Bethany Crooks, Ciara King and Alanah Smith
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Lol Tolhurst x Budgie x Jacknife Lee: Los Angeles
New album: The ex-Cure drummer and the acclaimed percussionist of Siouxsie, Creatures and other bands team up with the Irish producer for a wonderfully rhythmic, sharply witty, krautrock-style/synth pop-punk fusion with guest vocalists including LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy
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Unschooling: New World Artifacts
New album: A striking post-punk debut of lo-fi, spiky guitar sounds and abstract, strangely alluring disharmony by the French, Rouen-based quintet fronted by guitarist and vocalist Vincent Fevrier
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CLT DRP: Nothing Clever, Just Feelings
New album: Brilliantly original and fresh post- and dance-punk and electro-pop by the Brighton band with songs about heartbreak and queerness, feminism, vulnerability and gender fluidity, packed with unique sounds, passion and humour
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