‘Miss America’, the centrepiece of Jennifer Walton’s stylish, painful debut record, sits us down in a hotel room near JFK airport, watching on as Walton learns that her father has been diagnosed with cancer. The Sunderland-born musician had been touring the US for the first time, drumming with indie band Kero Kero Bonito, and now grief greys everything out. Faltering piano and hushed strings accompany gothic dispatches from the tour van: “Cattle farm and broke down shack / Strip-mall, drug deal, panic attacks.”
Walton’s gentle vocals are deadpan, with the record’s tension brought by her penmanship (encompassing fiction, folksy sayings and blunt diary entries) and her sharp, surprising maximalism. Few songs this year have…
You need to be logged in to view the rest of the content. Please Log In.
Anyone stumbling across the utopian cerulean vistas of 
Home Counties’ flirtation with provincial-pivoting alt anthems alongside lyrics mapping tongue-in-cheek suburban excursions – by way of socially-charged takes on contemporary life – found feet on last year’s funk-flecked debut LP Exactly As It Seems. Tracking from rural to urban since their formation five years ago, the East London-via-Buckinghamshire six-piece intersect space and time in equal sonic measure. Their first two EPs came leaning on the skewiff yet nimble post-punk footwork of acts such as Yard Act and Squid to evermore synth scored dabbling that has seen the band flaunt twitchy electronic segues adjacent to straight-up indie-pop panache.
First, we need to note that 
While drummer 
…remastered from the original tapes.
Although Unfold in the Sky may be the first album by the solo project of 
For those interested in a world of true fusion and synthesis, a Montreal-based multi-instrumentalist (she plays seven, to be exact) by the name of Ourielle Auvé offers another enveloping ambient anthology.
When Dimitri Giannopoulos was a teenager, he thought he might be living in a dream. Alienated, anxious, and unsettled, he tried his hardest to process a world that he felt disconnected from. “I refused to believe anything I was seeing was happening to me or even happening at all,” he told Allston Pudding in 2016. “I was just freaked out by everything.” He says that he’s since outgrown his existential angst, but similar feelings have clearly found a home in the slow-moving gloom of the songs he makes in 
…The album’s original 12-tracks return in freshly remastered form, while the total number of rarities spread across CD and digital versions totals 23 tracks, including early demos, remixes and B-sides including four previously unreleased.
August 13, 2025. An Evan Dando in-store appearance at Rough Trade Records, East London. The evening is a mix of old originals (‘Confetti’, ‘My Drug Buddy’) and covers plus anecdotes about Jackson Pollock and a word-perfect rendition of Peter Cook’s Coal Miner sketch (“I didn’t have the Latin”). Looking simultaneously bedraggled and regal, like a lion surprised by a sudden rain shower, Dando is scrappy, vulnerable, heartfelt, and enervated. You sense he feels uncomfortable singing his own songs. In fact, the only Dando composition delivered with complete ease and self-belief is a new one, ‘In the Margin’. Written with Massachusetts friend and collaborator, Marciana Jones, it’s an eviscerating break-up song (“If periphery is what you give…
…A quick look at the titles on Oneiric – and, indeed, the album cover and title – indicates that Arne Kjelsrud Mathisen, aka 
Two naked, moustachioed beefcakes sit back to back, eyes averted, linked by wires, resistors, and switches, as if plugged into the same circuit board. Connection, sex, loneliness, and electricity all smashed together — has there ever been a better pictorial representation of 
On his fourth release on Orindal Records, 
The typical