Your Custom Text Here
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
Read more
Hurray For The Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive
New album: New Orleans-based Alynda Segarra’s ninth album is a classy, intelligent emotional mix of country and folk, travelling in time and place reflecting on her youth, family, community, ups and downs, and life’s passing
Read more
Ghost Funk Orchestra: A Trip To The Moon
New album: After 2022’s A New Kind of Love, the dynamic New York group return with wonderful cinematic concept album of funk, big band jazz and psychedelia featuring samples of Apollo mission transmissions, and songs from the perspective of a woman wondering when her astronaut partner will return
Read more
Real Estate: Daniel
New album: Warm, engaging, easygoing alt-folk-country-pop by the Brooklyn band with their sixth album, here given a name as if a person, but also produced by acclaimed songwriter Daniel Tashian at the famous RCA Studio A, in Nashville
Read more
Luca D'Alberto - In Our Hearts
New album: A serenely beautiful third album by the Italian composer and instrumentalist with a cinematic, symphonic work of 17 tracks over three sections, largely with piano and strings, but with sprinklings of electronica and guest vocalists
Read more
Pregoblin II
New album: A long-awaited LP of brilliantly effortless, fun-filled experimental pop - clever, wryly humorous, gently melancholic, mischievously playful - by the strangely under acclaimed south London band fronted by singer-songwriters Alex Sebley and Jessica Winter
Read more
Nadine Shah: Filthy Underneath
New album: The charismatic Tyneside-raised singer-songwriter of Norwegian and Pakistani heritage returns in fabulous, rich-voiced form with a powerfully dark fifth LP, resilient after a tumultuous few years of family grief, failed marriage, attempted suicide and rehab
Read more
MGMT: Loss of Life
New album: Rich, dream-like, eccentric, eclectic, surreally humorous psychedelic prog-pop amid a huge range of influences in this splendidly strange fifth album by the Connecticut multi-instrumentalist-vocal duo of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser
Read more
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
Read more
Lime Garden: One More Thing
New album: A fresh squeeze of catchy, grungy indie-pop comes in this very tasty debut LP by the Brighton quartet, tackling the struggles of young creativity, heartbreak and self-doubt with wistful humour and a great ear for melody, all with no-nonsense sound and production
Read more
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
Read more
Les Amazones d'Afrique: Musow Danse
New album: A joyous, vibrant, powerful, life-affirming third LP by the West African Mali collective female artists, mixing traditional, rich African vocal harmonies with electronica, dance, funk and folk of course no shortage of feminist fervour
Read more
Grandaddy: Blu Wav
New album: This serene, sixth LP from California’s Jason Lytle brings that meltingly beautiful melancholic voice, slow, caressed guitars, country pedal steel (Max Hart) and some Beach Boys echoes with themes of loneliness dotted with droll humour
Read more
William Doyle: Springs Eternal
New album: Superbly crafted, innovative ‘art-pop for the anthropocene’ by the innovative British artist, with landscaped sounds in a whirlpool of clever invention, narratives threading through an existential lifespan of gorgeous turns through this follow-up to 2021’s Great Spans of Muddy Time
Read more
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
Read more
The Miserable Rich: Overcome
New album: The likeable Brighton string-led collective return with their first studio LP in nearly 13 years, a wordplay-rich, drily humorous, catchy, poignant collection of vivid storytelling via chamber pop and indie folk
Read more
Declan McKenna: What Happened To The Beach?
New album: Less overtly political than his previous work, but still satirical and now more personal, this is jaunty, quirky, eccentric, eclectic pop by the 25-year-old LA-based, Enfield-raised singer-songwriter, experimenting like a 1960s psychedelic troubadour.
Read more
Helado Negro: PHASOR
New album: Finding that sweet spot with smooth, mellow Latin rhythms in an experimental mix of folk, jazz and electronica, the American artist of Ecuadorian Roberto Carlos Lange’s eighth studio album one of gentle, melting joy
Read more
Chelsea Wolfe: She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To
New album: Dark, simmering, sensual, ghostly, goth-noir rock with restrained thundery rumblings by the California artist, in a powerfully effective, slow, atmospheric release that sounds like tears in a downpour, an echoey, innovative potion of metal melancholy
Read more
Brittany Howard: What Now
New album: The Alabama Shakes singer and guitarist returns with her second solo album after 2019’s superb debut, Jaimie, with an equally brilliant but wider scope of styles, from soul to funk, jazz, but also dancefloor energy, and more than a dash of Prince
Read more