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The Car - Arctic Monkeys’ seventh studio album
New album: With lavish orchestration, grandiose dynamics and a crooning falsetto, echoes of Scott Walker and early 80s David Bowie, Alex Turner’s writing and delivery enters a new and fascinating phase of enigmatic, melancholy maturity
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Plains on the roadside: Katie Crutchfield and Jess Williamson
New album: A high-quality classic country duet album with beautifully interweaving vocals by Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee) and Texas songwriter Jess Williamson embellished with soft-brushed drums, banjo, steel guitar, road and porch scenes, and heartbreak
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Louis Cole’s sixth album always has priorities …
New album: Brilliantly clever, agile and innovative sixth new solo funk album by the American multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter and Knower co-founder, mixing fast, perky beats and falsetto with the slower, more tender love songs, often with a twist
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Alvvays return with their third album, and first since 2017
New album: Delayed by floods, theft, and the pandemic, the Toronto band fronted by singer-songwriter Molly Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley make a triumphant third album return with uplifting and melancholy dream-pop indie filled with jangly inflections of The Smiths, shoegazey MBV, loud-quiet Sonic Youth and romantic Belinda Carlisle synth pop
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Gilla Band’s (former Girl Band) ironically titled extraordinary new album
New album: Groundbreaking, and at times ear-splitting noise experimentation by the Dublin band formerly known as Girl Band with a new album with a deeply ironic title and work that truly challenges the senses via a post-punk, distorted guitar and electronic platform
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The Unthanks return in full force with their first album in seven years
New album: After a variety of other projects, the Tyneside folk sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank and co make a welcome return in their usual collective with a hearty and harmonious mix of the traditional and the new with songs on heartbreaks and collieries, rivers and rebellions
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Here Is Everything, the third album by The Big Moon
New album: An emotive, hooky, candid third album by the London indie-rockers fronted by Juliette Jackson, with a running theme around her experience of pregnancy and its life-changing consequences
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Brian Eno’s 22nd solo album
New album: An unusual vocal 22nd LP by the acclaimed producer marries his ambient, evocative, sonic landscapes and his full, rounded rather beautiful delivery - slow, chant-like but filled with profundity, emotion and dark humour about our ultimate, apocalyptic fate
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Bill Callahan’s new album’s YTILAER plays mischief with search engines
New album: Dreams, horses, darkness and uplifting otherworldliness feature in this wonderful, mischievously mirror-titled ninth LP under the Smog artists’s own name, pouring out velvet voiced beauty, vivid lines, deadpan humour, acoustic intimacy and full band momentum
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Sorry’s second LP
New album: This second LP by the London indie band is again inventively inspired by city life, but feels edgier, more melancholy and mercurial, dotted with great melodies, but also lyrics from snatched speech, texts, capturing fragmented thoughts of an underground, young, seething, frustrated, isolated generation
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Mamalarky’s full debut LP Pocket Fantasy
New album: Their recent single Shining Armor was recently a Song of The Day, but the new LP by the Atlanta and LA indie band is rich in inventive, playful, post-punk, psych-rock and shoegaze, with parallels at times to the excellent Deerhoof
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Broken Bells: Into The Blue, their third album since eponymous debut in 2010
New album: Acclaimed producer Brian Burton aka Danger Mouse and James Mercer of the The Shins reconvene for their third duo BB album in 12 years, and first since 2014, with strong, slow, unhurried, smoky numbers of thrumming indie reverberation
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Goats and glory: TSHA’s debut album Capricorn Sun
Debut album: After a series of strong singles and her EP, Dawn, a cleverly crafted, and at times elegant dance music debut by the Tottenham-based DJ and producer Teisha Matthews, fusing 80s and 90s era styles with soul, steel band, orchestral and much more
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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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Lambchop’s 16th studio album, The Bible
New album: Tender, strange, eclectic, Kurt Wagner returns with a 16th album a long way from those earlier heady day releases of of Americana and alt-country, but one filled with fascinating oddities, reflections on mortality, with fusions of jazz, electronica, soul, classical and modulated sounds and voices
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Temperatures rising and falling: Yeah Yeah Yeahs return with their fifth album Cool It Down
A welcome return from the New York trio of Karen O and co, with a fifth studio album and their first since 2013’s Mosquito, one filled with sonic menace and tenderness, with a running theme of embracing the natural world and raging against climate change and its deniers
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Pixies’s eighth album
New album: Meaty, strong new LP by the legendary Black Francis and co, a mischievous, punchy ode to absurdism, with a sound that harks to earlier material than the more polished more recent LPs, with some tracks sitting more in line with their classic 1987-91 era
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Gabriels’ debut album, including the extraordinary voice of Jacob Lusk
New album: Since their breakthrough Love and Hate In A Different Time EP in 2020, the trio of Ari Balouzian, Ryan Hope and most especially the voice of Jacob Lusk continue to soar, now with this new, short debut LP of transcendent, timeless soul and gospel
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Björk’s 10th Fossora, inspired by fungi, grows on the listener
New album: The Icelandic iconic pioneer returns with a 10th LP, mesmeric, strange, beautiful, sometimes challenging, but always original, inspired by fungi, the death of her mother, oodles of woodwind, rich vocal harmony and some Dutch techno
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Dreams is the second part of an album trilogy, the preceded by Blood, and followed by Bones
New album: Oozing old-world charm with quirky invention and wistful beauty, this second thematic LP in a Swan Songs trilogy, the first of which was last year’s Blood, before the forthcoming Bone, is another delicious mix of acoustic and electronica by London’s Stephen Coates and co
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