The Big Moon‘s music has always been a personal, introspective affair. The London four-piece’s last album, 2022’s Here Is Everything, concerned lead singer Juliette Jackson’s pregnancy and how she’s negotiating the early days of motherhood. Four years later, Forever has a very different backstory. In 2024, Jackson discovered, during a routine check, that she’d developed a benign cyst in her ear – one that, although not cancerous, would kill her if not removed. The resulting surgery also meant that Jackson would permanently lose some of her hearing. It’s the sort of life-changing diagnosis that could push someone into the depths of despair. However, Jackson was determined to make her band’s next album a joyous affair – imagining a hopeful…
Category: indie
Halloween and Clinic were made for each other – and this year there is a double celebration as the Liverpool band release their first album in five years. Now down to a duo comprising founder members Ade Blackburn and Jonathan Hartley, the masked band have always stood a distance apart from their contemporaries, dodging the spotlight while wearing their surgical masks, which were in place well before the pandemic.
Yet pigeonholing them is a mistake, for Clinic have always toyed with expectations, at their happiest exploring the macabre language of reverberant psychedelic pop and adding unpredictable, stylistic about turns.
Wild in the Streets finds them on strong form, reflecting Blackburn’s recent musical…
The Snuts’ new record Joy in Short Moments marks the Scottish band’s fourth studio album, and it follows the huge commercial success of their opening trilogy, all of which peaked in the UK Top 10. It’s easy to see why; the band are constantly catchy and often relatable.
There’s no better example of this on the record than the reflective and wise ‘Youth Ain’t Easy’, featuring the lyrics “Now that I’m old, youth ain’t easy”, which seems sure to resonate with a young crowd. Yet, the group do not remain so upbeat and joyous that it becomes cheesy; they contrast the happy, upbeat numbers with more sombre moments like ‘PTS’, a song looking back on a relationship through the lens of ‘Post Traumatic Stress’, which ends on the slightly sour…
Daughter’s Elena Tonra originally released the 2018 eponymous album Ex:Re (pronounced “ex ray” and derived from “Regarding Ex”) as a one-time outlet for feelings following a difficult breakup. The solo project’s whispery, melancholic vocals and gloomy, often eerie acoustic-electronic textures connected with certain listeners, and it became something of a cult favorite in the years to follow. Tonra eventually went back to the studio with engineer/producer Fabian Prynn and cellist Josephine Stephenson from the debut to record a follow-up. Joining them was Ben Reed (bass), Jethro Fox (electric guitar), and experimental musician Hinako Omori (synthesizers). The resulting Save As picks up where Ex:Re left off, if without an aggravating stimulus other than…
Radio Free Alice’s debut album What’s in Between has the most surprising of starts. It kicks off with ‘Crying with You’ which initially tinkers experimentally with sound before the fierce drum beats of Lochie Dowd and vocals of Noah Learmonth jump in and effortlessly pull the whole together. And what a whole it is. The track encapsulates everything about this Australian band who have seen a meteoric rise in the last couple of years. The vocals dance all over the track as it soars, creating such an expansive soundscape.
Listening through for the first time to What’s in Between, it’s the imagery which grabs, each song a vignette of storytelling influenced by the band’s surroundings both in terms of relationships and environment. ‘Undressed’ is a gentle…
There are few more distinctive artists in contemporary music than Kali Malone. She is a conservatoire-trained composer whose work pushes the edges of electroacoustics, drone, and minimalism — the kind of music that feels most naturally at home in the lofty institutions of high culture. And yet she has achieved a type of crossover success that few art music figures have managed in the 21st century, winning fans among the indie and experimental rock communities on top of the more traditional constituencies of such uncompromising composition.
This diverse audience has not been attracted by film soundtracks, media placements, or glitzy celebrity commissions, the familiar routes to wider exposure for many contemporary…
The templates and aesthetic he draws from on his third album are about as old as the concept of popular music itself, channelling the canyons around Los Angeles, top pickers in 1960s Nashville studios, and smoke-filled Greenwich Village folk clubs. Assisted on some tracks by co-producer Jonathan Wilson, who knows a thing or two himself about reviving the glory days of West Coast swoon, the LA-based Palestinian–American musician reaches for new levels of emotional resonance with an authority that instantly shuts down claims of derivative recycling.
Granted, we’ve been here before: Burton’s deceptively simple songs are ultimately folk songs, occasionally tinged with country, at times channelled through classic rock…
The year is 2008. Steve Gunn was experiencing the itch to start working on material under his own name after having spent the last several years playing in and around Philadelphia and Brooklyn in collaborative projects such as GHQ. He had recorded some experimental CDRs on his own under the moniker Moongang before branching out in 2007 to placing the name “Steve Gunn” on titles for the first time. The first couple of releases displayed an immediate leap in his songwriting and confidence. His growth as a solo artist seemed to meet the use of his name head on with a burst of creativity. Nowhere was this growth more visible than with the 2008 title “Sundowner”. The album’s first iteration was released on CD by Digitalis Recordings.
The first indication that DIIV were moving into more political territory came as they rolled out their last record, 2024’s Frog in Boiling Water.
The album’s release was marked by a hoax appearance on Saturday Night Live where they were introduced by Fred Durst, a chaotic website replete with conspiracy theories, and a live show punctuated by spoof announcements suggesting that the band had entered into a “creative partnership” with ExxonMobil. It was a tongue-in-cheek campaign that concealed broiling anti-capitalist anger beneath the surface, and that offset the murky, lyrically opaque set of songs they were promoting.
The Los Angeles four-piece have carried this approach into their fifth album, ZIRP!,…
Prolific musical collaborator and tireless rhythm generator Valentina Magaletti rarely seems to rest. But, even for her, this has been a particularly busy month. No doubt as much due to the logistical necessities of release schedules as the movement of the stars or artistic intention, October has already seen new albums from two of Magaletti’s other projects: Vanishing Twin (Archives) and Holy Tongue (Basilikum). Hard on their heels Parallel Commutator is the latest from CZN, a team-up with Portuguese percussionist, sculptor and gong-maker João Pais Filipe.
Potentially this release could be a little over- shadowed by the others. In their individual ways Holy Tongue and Vanishing Twin both head outwards into their soundworlds from roots…
By the early 1980s, the electric organ had started to infiltrate the iconic hotel bands that defined the Addis Ababa music scene of the previous decade. And so keys player, arranger and producer Teodros Makonnen took the leap. Using nothing but a double-manual Yamaha (with a built-in drum sequencer), he made this album of instrumental versions of classic Ethiopian songs.
Originally released on cassettes in the ’80s, it was all recorded in a single take under the shadow of curfews – and, in doing so, mapped out his version of the future of Ethiopian music. It’s a vibe: pop melodies with deep roots in Ethiopian folk music, dreamy runs doused in hazy reverb, and minimalist waltz rhythms shuffling from the tinny drum machine. Some tracks are…
South London-based multidisciplinary artist Clara Mann whispers the secrets of the universe through fey folk songs. You’ll hear and envision: the stirrings of ghosts, will-o’-the-wisps, shadows dancing, and eternity beckoning. These bewitching and weightless songs are prayers sculpted by the wind, which you can walk through like a door. Lyrically, Mann sings as if delivering a sentence to a friend to see their reaction. Yet the words are also for her to assimilate, to feel, to mold, as if listening to someone speak with her voice. Within these folk idioms reside heaven and hell, pulling Mann in opposite directions to truth.
Along with Kiki Cavazos, Natalie Wildgoose, Daisy Rickman, and Juni Habel, Mann is one of the most arresting contemporary folk musicians.
Both an example and an explanation of a blending of two words, the fact that the name of Tommy Lefroy‘s long-awaited debut album is a portmanteau seems fitting.
While labour economist Guy Standing coined the term The Precariat takes its title from (referring to the precarious social class that began emerging in Europe at the beginning of the 21st century), almost everything about the project of Wynter Bethel and Tessa Mouzourakis exists in a perpetual state of “and,” not “or.”
Respectively from northern Michigan and Vancouver, BC, the singer-songwriters met in Nashville, but their project really got underway when both moved to the UK (“I had nothing, then I found you / Built an empire in…
For much of their career, Editors have explored a varied range of approaches to their music. From the stark post-punk urgency of The Back Room through the widescreen ambition of In This Light and On This Evening and the industrial-electronic experimentation of EBM, the Birmingham band have spent two decades repositioning themselves while retaining a distinctive identity. On this, their eighth studio album, Surface, Echo & Sound, they take what might appear an unexpected turn, back toward their fundamentals
Following the electronic intensity of 2022’s EBM, written in collaboration with Benjamin John Power (Blanck Mass), the new album emerges from a markedly different creative process. Frontman Tom Smith arrived with stripped-back…
A project built around lead singer/songwriter/guitarist Bobby Townson and his sister, singer and miscellaneous instrumentalist Emma Townson, who also does the band’s artwork, British Birds emerged from Chorley, England, in the early 2020s. The D.I.Y. outfit, which has rotated bassists and drummers, essentially hand-sold their first two albums at shows and few record shops. Their eclectic sound — which assimilates numerous vintage pop/rock styles (cool ones), from garage pop to ’60s mod music and Beatlesque hard rock, ’80s college rock, arty punk, classic indie pop, and more — as well as their witty, anti-establishment spirit, came to the attention of the U.K.’s Skep Wax Records, which signed on to release their third album. It features bassist…
Michael Gordon‘s Field of Vision transforms percussion into an expansive study of resonance, rhythm, and spatial perception. Written in 2022 for 36 percussionists and commissioned by the Caramoor Center for the Arts, the work uses specially constructed tuned instruments alongside industrial metals, wood, gongs, bass drums, and 24 brake drums. Performed by the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble under Doug Perkins, this world-premiere recording captures a composition in which the physical arrangement of the players is as important to the musical experience as the sounds they produce.
The opening section establishes Gordon’s approach gradually, with sustained resonances, low-frequency pulses, and bright tones…
…In a way, the Picture project is all about this kind of study, as applied to the tools of techno. Via careful filter sweeps, unconventional sample arrangements, and canny operation of the left-right stereo image, Dane Natal Zaks messes with the proprioception you’d expect from a tracky club record, as if turning dials inside your skull. Each track uses minimalist gestures to suggest cavernous inner dimensions.
“Quuuuuuu” bolts shakers and white noise to a high-stepping kick pattern, pulls a stuttering synth taut across them, plays catch-and-release with reversed snares in empty air, and sends ping-ponging percussion to reel off in the distance. Rarely does a techno record generate so many action verbs so elegantly.
Henry O Henry likes to point out that even after 30 years, he is essentially “an Irishman in New York”. The key reason is that coming up with Apocrypha, his debut album at not exactly an early age, is a very personal thing. He also notes that he is “formally and informally not a musician”.
So why all these notes? Because this is all very personal to him, as it is probably to all singer-songwriters around, but the key there is: how able are they to transfer all that is personal and make it accessible to all the listeners that decide to encounter their personal stuff and make it count for them. Make that personal general.
Henry O Henry is able to that on his debut Apocrypha completely and in full. Maybe it is all the years of personal experience, or it could…
