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Noname’s second album, Sundial
New album: Super-slick, intelligent, angry but beautiful rap and and soul by the Chicago poet Fatimah Nyeema Warner in this second album after 2018’s debut, Room 25, building on her uncompromising perspectives on Black culture, racism, relationships and celebrity double-standards
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LYR: The Ultraviolet Age
New album: A beautiful, profound, utterly absorbing second LP by the trio of current British poet laureate, Simon Armitage, singer-songwriter Richard Walters and multi-instrumentalist and producer Patrick J Pearson
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Baxter Dury: I Thought I Was Better Than You
New album: Droll, dark, crisply phrased, downbeat, self-deprecating, sleazy and funky? It can only be the West London artist, in a candid, unflinching sixth solo album that draws on his strange childhood as son of famous Ian, echoing his brilliantly funny and painful 2022 memoir Chaise Longue
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The Orb - Prism
New album: The veteran dance music and ambient noise duo still with co-founder Alex Paterson return with a vibrant release of cosmic electronica, dub and reggae, house, drum n’ bass, guest vocalists plus newscaster and other sampled voices
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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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JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown: Scaring The Hoes
New album: A frenetic, eclectic, mischievously ironic and culture-bashing collaboration between iconoclastic Brooklyn rapper Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks, and his Detroit counterpart Daniel Dewan Sewell in a crazed mish-mash of samples, voices and rhythmic restlessness
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Liv.e: Girl In The Half Pearl
New album: A dizzyingly indefinable and innovative debut by the Dallas-born singer-songwriter Olivia Williams, mixing experimental R&B, gospel, neo-soul, spoken word, electronica, cosmic jazz, and pop
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M(h)aol: Attachment Styles
Debut album: They’ve been pacing around with singles for several years, but this debut by the Dublin post-punks (pronounced male) is powerful, funny, dark, feminist, funny and dirty, filled with fabulous thumps, bangs, crashes, guitar clangs and killer lyrics
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Five more fabulous albums by Sault
New albums: An unprecedented five albums landing simultaneously without warning, and with a temporary free download period on the mysterious London collective’s website, producer Inflo (Dean Josiah Cover) and co have again brought untold riches in soul, funk, gospel, jazz, RnB, hip-hop, experimental and contemporary classical
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Vivid, droll absurdity: The Cool Greenhouse second album, Sod’s Toastie
New album: An excellent second LP by the wittily droll wordsmith Tom Greenhouse and band, bringing oodles of hilarious, oddball short stories and killer lines about the absurdity of life, backed by strangely wonderful post-punk and electronica
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Loyle Carner’s third album, Hugo
New album: The British rapper returns with one of his best LPs yet, a candid exploration of his own identity, from seeking out his estranged biological father, how that reflects back onto his own son, ADHD, being mixed race and fearing inner-city violence
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Perfect marriage of the banal and the inspiring: Stumpwork by Dry Cleaning
New album: The London post-punk band continue where they left off from last year’s debut, New Long Leg, with Florence Shaw’s beguiling, droll, laconic, surreal, stream-of-consciousness, darkly humorous spoken delivery over clever, off-kilter music.
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The Orielles’ fourth LP, Tableau
New album: This fourth, sprawling, ambitious, cinematic, genre-spanning double LP by the Halifax trio of singer/bassist Esmé Hand-Halford and co is an enthralling, constantly morphing mix of psychedelia, prog, jazz, funk, R&B, indie, space pop, electronica, house and disco
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Crack Cloud: Tough Baby
New album: Eclectic, original, energised and experimental, this is an enthralling third post-punk, pop, rock and thunderous concoction release by the Vancouver collective led by drummer and lead vocalist Zach Choy filled with the passionate and oddball
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Jake Blount
New album: After his acclaimed 2020 solo debut Spider Tales, the American bluegrass fiddler, banjo player, Afrofuturist and historian returns with a starkly beautiful, atmospheric album drawing on old spiritual numbers and set in a climate-changed, apocalyptic world
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Jennifer Vanilla’s Castle In The Sky
New album: Wonderfully inventive, eccentric new LP of talky electronica, dance, funk, jazz and pop by gender fluid persona of Becca Kauffman, the performance artist, vocalist, and voice over artist based in New York City
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Black Midi’s Hellfire
New album: With heatwaves and wildfires ablaze globally, there could hardly be a more prescient title or dystopian theme by the London prog-rock-jazz experimentalist, whose third LP is strangely among their most accessible among its lightning riffs and stop-start energy of King Crimson or even Buckethead proportions
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Wu-Lu’s debut album Loggerhead
Debut album: A strikingly alternative and genre-defying release by the south London producer and multi-instrumentalist Miles Romans-Hopcraft with influences and echoes from grunge to grime, trip hop, electronica to jazz, dark 80s Factory Records era, Tricky to DJ Shadow to Slipknot
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Moor Mother’s Jazz Codes
New album: A mesmeric new album that began as poetry book by the American artist Camae Ayewa mixing jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop and spoken word in her own form of Black Quantum Futurism group, her multi-artform fusion of black history ontology
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Seven Psalms by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis
New album: Less an LP of songs, more a 25-minute series of low-key ambient synth pieces by Ellis over which Cave’s spoken word prayers of reflective, intense, meditative poetry on death, sin, guilt, grief and more
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