Mary Ocher’s leftist politics have always been baked into her art. Her first record was called War Songs, and she has continuously interrogated militarism, capitalism, and nationalism across subsequent works, including her 2017 breakthrough, The West Against the People.
Recently, she’s even taken to performing karaoke-style renditions of some of her new repertoire live to avoid using backing tracks or laptops on stage, something she has described as “a wonderful icebreaker” and a “really, really great opportunity to talk about broader political subjects with the audience.”
In short, Ocher is a multi-hyphenate outsider artist who wraps sharp geopolitical reflections in peerless avant-pop packaging, as her latest…
Category: art pop
Anjimile (ann-JIM-uh-lee) Chithambo has forged a distinctive musical path characterised by unflinching introspection and deep honesty. Emerging from Boston’s vibrant indie scene while studying at Northeastern University, Anjimile captivated audiences with earnest songwriting, delicate sonic textures, and performances that felt like prayer and celebration.
Critical acclaim quickly followed; 2020’s Giver Taker, hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the year’s best albums, positioned him as a compelling voice exploring enduring themes of spirituality, identity, and liberation. With The King (2023), Anjimile intensified his examination of Black and trans existence amid personal and societal turbulence, reaffirming his courageous…
Bliss is the kind of record AI would make if it were actually what its most delusional adherents say it is: Not a pathetic, thought-terminating, and uncanny imitation of human creation but a beguiling alien intelligence capable of wringing new forms out of a near-bottomless archive.
Listening to it, it’s easy to imagine its maker (Alice Gerlach, erstwhile cellist for claire rousay and Tomberlin) as a strange cyborg locked inside a spacious chamber, worming their way through clusters of instruments with preternatural curiosity and mathematical precision. Across four tracks, each clocking in at exactly ten minutes, Gerlach assembles soundscapes from witchy ambient tones, buzzy drones, field recordings of birds chirping and muffled conversations, and…
Annie Hogan is something of a quiet icon of goth and post-punk. A longtime friend of Marc Almond, she put on early Soft Cell shows and played with his dark cabaret side-project Marc and the Mambas. She appears on Barry Adamson’s seminal Moss Side Story and has worked with Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and several members of Einstürzende Neubauten. She’s also been releasing evocative solo music since the late 1980s, the latest of which, the six track album Tongues in My Head, strikes an elegant balance of light and shade.
Opening track ‘Alles Ist Verloren’ is measured but bleak, a taxonomy of a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled with faith healers, wilting trees and “shaking bones of the dead”. The bones of the track are also bare – a simple chord…
Long before Rosalía’s operatic theatrics broke the internet, Colin Self was injecting joy into the artform via an experimental trans-feminist opera project called Elation. Launched in 2011, the series consisted of multiple parts with 2018’s Siblings followed by Orphans in 2019. Self re-emerged five years later with the lemniscate EP, after enduring a particularly challenging period marked by “loss and uncertainty.”
Originally released last February, respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis became the follow-up to lemniscate and the third full-length album for the U.S.-born composer, producer, choreographer, and multidisciplinary artist — a record described in the press notes as “a greeting after years of conscious exile.”
Ten thousand years ago, a man died in what would become Somerset. His bones waited in a cave until 1903, when they were discovered and given a name: Cheddar Man. Now he’s the subject of a song by Voka Gentle, who use his story to contemplate what we’re doing to the places where people have lived for millennia. “Let’s say the sea levels rise and we lose north Somerset, which, by the way, is looking increasingly likely…” William J Stokes’s voice is dry, conversational, with the studied neutrality of a local news presenter. Beneath it, the music shuffles and twitches, glassy and off-kilter; post-punk refracted through Laurie Anderson’s deadpan intelligence.
The album circles power from multiple angles: a photoshoot, a Greek tragedy, a preacher…
Hen Ogledd’s Discombobulated is in the radical mould of music that tackles the now. Unconcerned that references may go out of date, the timelessness of their sound comes in documenting the present, rather than in seeking to transcend (or ignore) it. Lyrically, Discombobulated celebrates dissent with all the force of the protest tradition in folk music; musically, the album glues together sounds and genres to evoke the chaos of today.
Hen Ogledd is the project of Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington. The first releases were just Dawson and Davies; since then, with the addition of Bothwell for 2016’s Bronze and then Pilkington on 2018’s Mogic, Hen Ogledd have grown both more complete and more porous. Complete, because…
Labeling any music as spiritual can play as a (fiery) double-edged sword for any artist involved, and if that is your debut full-length album, like is the case with Brooklyn’s multi-media artist AnAkA, and her album Crisis of the Concrete, those edges just might get a bit sharper, and those edges might spew just a bit more fire either way.
Of course, that spiritual element that the artist might be trying to evoke could have more or less openly religious content (less in AnAkA case here), and it can involve a number of musical elements and/or genres, and AnAkA certainly goes that multi-genre route here. Very often, the best music with that spiritual element was done with quite a few jazz elements, and AnAkA certainly doesn’t shy away from bringing them in,…
Working with some musical legends and renowned musicians (often both) can be a blessing and a curse. On one hand, you not only gain specific experience, but it means you have capabilities and are doing something right. On the other hand, when you have to go on your own and present your individually conceived music, it might be a burden if you are not able to come up with something that is at least above average.
That could have possibly been a burden for L.A. vocalist Holly Palmer, whose long list of artists she has worked with includes David Bowie, Gnarls Barkley, Seal, Michael Buble, Billy Preston and Dr. Dre. So far, Palmer has recorded three solo albums, with Metamorphosis being her fourth.
Whatever Palmer, who is also a vocologist…
Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys build a captivating sonic world tinged with intimacy on Pale Bloom. The Berlin-based band’s seventh studio album maintains a hauntingly atmospheric quality, ultimately honing the gothic art-pop sound the group have become known for.
Opening track ‘Bloom’ establishes the album’s persistent eeriness, initially playing with the melodies and lyrics of nursery rhymes. This almost ghostly nostalgia for childhood is evoked throughout Pale Bloom, supported by a mesmerising viola part courtesy of Jean-Louise Parker. The song’s instrumentals build, combining strings with electric guitar effectively. Like its title would suggest, ‘Bloom’ unfurls organically – a manifestation of slowly…
Formed in 2020, toso toso is made up of producer, drummer, and sound designer Kabir Adhiya-Kumar; synth and keyboardist Rahul Carlberg; producer and guitarist Celia Hill; and interdisciplinary artist Isabel Crespo Pardo, the group’s vocalist and wordsmith.
Essentially a wide-ranging supergroup of left-field solo acts from across a plethora of musical forms as classical pianists sit beside sound designers and improvisational vocalists, toso toso forge these disparate crafts into something dense, emotional and properly distinctive on their self-titled debut album.
Opener ‘cLAcLAcLA’ serves as a microcosm of the record; bounding out in a flurry of micro-sampled chaos, like the contents of your…
Jessica Pratt sings in a voice as gentle as unspun wool, but her stories feel deeply rooted, like they were born from a collective subconscious to reveal fundamental truths about human longing. Asher White gets at similarly heady ideas: leaving your city to seek reinvention, wondering whether your fate is predetermined. But where Pratt works primarily in the folk tradition, White’s approach is decidedly contemporary, drawing from Palberta and 100 gecs’ internet-laden glitchiness. Her music has the jangling, intentionally constructed commotion of an artist who synthesizes new sounds to understand something essential about the world she lives in.
As timeless as Pratt’s songs have always been, she’s followed a clear evolution since…
Yamila Rios is a kind of sound vessel — a composer, singer, and cellist who has the ability to conjure ethereal beauty in multiple contexts, carving out a space where gauzy textures, elegant melodic gestures, an almost subversive rhythmic presence, and trippy incantations mingle, collide, and pull apart. While she makes drifty, ambient pop as Yamila, she’s also been actively collaborating with choreographers and dance companies. Despite placid surfaces, her music pulses with movement. Splitting her time between Madrid, in her native Spain, and Brussels, Belgium, Yamila has found strong collaborators in the Echo Collective, whose founding duo — violinist Margaret Hermant and violist Neil Leiter — has established it as one of the go-to string ensembles in…
From the moment we are born, we begin the long walk home. Elizabeth and Beverly and Glenn-Copeland started down the path together nearly half a century ago, and have been trailing it since, hand in hand and song by song. Together, they’ve made a life sharing their unselfish hearts-ones too large for earthly configuration-through art and community, encouraging us all to take our own dance down the road with elemental love and grace.
Now, as Glenn lives with a version of Dementia known as LATE, their walk has taken on a different weight. Out of this season comes Laughter In Summer, an album the couple made together-realizing, before long, that it was a love letter to one another: a tender ledger of memories, shared devotion, grief and joy.
As an artist who tries to present your art in more forms than one, there are so many obstacles in front of you, particularly if you try to present a certain concept or concept through it. It not only requires a ton of talent but also hours of hard work to make something sensible out of it.
Producer, singer, rapper, and visual artist Quadeca is one such artist who started out by presenting his work through YouTube, whose previous work which slowly took him to a spot at last year’s Coachella Music Festival. Now, Quadeca is coming with his latest concept album and a feature film Vanisher, Horizon Scraper, through which he presents a concept, as he puts it, “about a man who sets sail alone in search of freedom but is unknowingly drifting toward destruction”.
Marta Del Grandi is in a liminal space between the past she always has one eye on and a future she consistently encourages herself to move towards. Her third album, Dream Life, feels like grappling with a reality check where you’ve put in the work but things don’t look the way you expected and there are untold peripheral problems beyond your control.
In the great indie pop tradition, Dream Life masks melancholia with whimsy, whether it’s fantasy land synths, syncopated programmed beats, or slide guitar. The dreamy, brooding, and vaguely foreboding synth arrangement of ‘20 Days of Summer’ touches broadly on a feeling of not being able to laugh at the chaos, as Del Grandi reminds herself “to keep going / try to breathe”.
There’s something about trees and storms in Iti Eta No. Heimat’s third album is an exploration of collage and landscape – not just the physical landscape of the French countryside where Olivier Demeaux (Cheveu, Accident du Travail) and Armelle Oberlé (The Dreams, Badaboum) moved after lockdown, but it’s visceral, emotional imprint. A violent storm left trees scattered across the road, and that image inspired the atmosphere of Iti Eta No. Heimat’s early records were a deliberate exploration of ‘Eastern’ tonalities, but Iti Eta No sees the group moving away from that kind of orientalist imagery. It feels more refined, like deviant pop made dance-floor accessible thanks to Krikor Kouchian’s (L.I.E.S, I’m a Cliche) mastering. There is a distinct sense of…
What is a watch bird? In Jane Weaver’s telling, it’s a remarkable creature that can travel long distances, seek out the lost, and weather great storms. This album, too, is of sweeping scope: it dances through eras and splashes through genres with abandon. Fifteen years on from its first release, and now in an expanded edition, The Fallen By Watch Bird remains as chimerical as it ever was.
Inspired by the nightmares for children that 1970s popular culture enjoyed churning out, The Fallen By Watch Bird recreates the sensation of ancient fables told through a flickering cathode ray. Weaver’s previous albums had been folk-oriented, and this influence is still palpable, but now she merges these impulses with spacerock, prog and psychedelia. Never quite analogue,…
There are possibly two key reasons why musicians take on other professional tasks – they need a number of personal channels to express their talents and ideas or, they simply need more money. Or both. Whatever is the case with Max Alper, who as a musician goes under Peretsky, he tries to express himself as a composer (and performer), as well as an educator (there he is La Meme Young), and technologist.
For the case in hand, his most recent album It Doesn’t Get Cold in October Anymore (and he’s got over 30 of those), he maybe can stick to music, as the one he makes works on a number of levels. While previously he spread his musical palette from noise, sound art, and free improvisation, this time around he decided to work…
…The Australian singer-songwriter Georgia Knight‘s debut record, Beanpole, is a dark, introspective meditation on desire — the Lacanian kind: desire rooted in the Other. Always is, isn’t? In some sense, we’re actors waiting to be seen and chosen, as if by a film director (where are you, Antonioni? Dead. Oh.). You won’t be hearing Knight drawing these conclusions — as the narrator, in the throes of an all-consuming desire, can barely think, let alone think critically.
Desire is about escaping yourself; this is why, on Beanpole, you will hear of a character wanting to be a “rockerbilly”, and, although it might seem silly, transcendence is at the heart of desire and, thus, the record.
Recorded between Knight and Andrew “Idge”…