1. The Soft Boys – I Wanna Destroy You
2. Doctors of Madness – Bulletin
3. Vic Godard – Malicious Love
4. Andy Partridge – Earn Enough for Us
5. John Cooper Clarke – Psycle Sluts (Parts 1 & 2)
6. Billy Bragg – Levi Stubbs’ Tears
7. Squeeze – Up the Junction
8. Nick Lowe – Cruel to Be Kind
9. Philip Rambow & Kirsty MacColl – There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop… (Demo)
10. Deaf School – Capaldi’s Cafe
11. Graham Parker – Saturday Nite Is Dead (Live)
12. Madness – Friday Night, Saturday Morning
13. Radio Stars – Is It Really Necessary?
14. Wilko Johnson – Down By the Waterside
15. Wreckless Eric – Our Neck of the Woods
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There is no warning and no chance to prepare. The instant you press play on Ash Fure’s Animal, a mass of thundering sub-bass hits you like a predator pouncing on its prey. With consciousness too slow to react, some ancient, primal region of the brain lights up. Suddenly, you find yourself in fight or flight mode, pumped with adrenaline, heart racing and palms sweating.
The US experimental musician and composer has dedicated a significant part of her career to exploring the physicality of music and our instinctual feedback to sound, with The Force of Things: An Opera for Air (2014–2022) and Hive Rise (2020) tackling the human body’s relationship with fear and the palpable effect that sonic waves have on the psyche. However, none…
Typically, when an artist stays out of our view, every public gesture he or she does make is loaded with extra significance. Think of the ways each demo, cover, or bit of extramusical trivia is instantly subsumed into the canons of D’Angelo, Fiona Apple, or Frank Ocean.
But given how Corbin, who drifted from SoundCloud stardom to deeper recesses of the internet, has released music — first under a different, instantly infamous stage name, and then in intermittent bursts that suggest a true disregard for self-promotion and self-mythologizing — the temptation is to receive his songs as a series of experiments, tips of an iceberg that will languish in a Google Drive folder until it melts.
The grey cover of his new album, Crisis Kid,…
Julee Cruise was a remarkable enough talent in her own right that it seems a shame to emphasize her links with David Lynch, but he’s an inescapable presence on this 2-CD set. That’s because Fall_Float_Love comprises her two albums for Warner Brothers, Floating into the Night (1989) and The Voice of Love on which, apart from one song, all the lyrics were written by Lynch, and all the music was composed and arranged by his collaborator Angelo Badalamenti. With the deaths of both Cruise and Badalamenti in 2022 and Lynch this year, the music takes on an even more spectral and haunting quality (and it started off with plenty of both those qualities), and Fall_Float_Love stands as a fitting memorial to the meeting of three unique but entirely compatible talents.
If you know anything about SAULT, they don’t do interviews. They don’t do photo shoots. For years, the British collective — anchored by producer Inflo, has released music with almost no promotion, no faces attached, no origin story to sell. It’s philosophy that the songs belong to whoever needs them, and the people who made them would rather stay out of the way. Since 2019, SAULT has dropped nearly a dozen albums spanning funk, gospel, orchestral ambience, and protest soul, often releasing multiple projects at once (in 2022) as free downloads. Their 2020 records, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise), arrived during the summer of George Floyd’s murder and spoke to that moment. The anonymity lets the collective voice stay collective — no star to distract…
…digital Deluxe Edition adds four new tracks.
On her debut album, 2025’s The Long Way Round, British singer and guitarist Maya Delilah brings you deep into her chilled-out musical world. It might be a little too easy to sum up Delilah’s sound as the answer to “What if Norah Jones could play guitar like Eric Clapton?,” but the comparison does nicely capture the influences at play in the London-bred artist’s work.
While not explicitly a jazz or blues album, there are improvisational moments throughout and Delilah’s sweet-toned fretboard work certainly recalls the late-’70s/early-’80s style of players like Clapton and Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler. Vocally, Delilah favors a hushed intimacy that she sustains throughout the whole album, easing…
“This is our last concert, ever. And we’d love to do you for now on our last concert ever…” After the words peter out, a ragged, yet blistering, five-minute version of “(I Can’t Get no) Satisfaction” explodes from the stage. Show over, The Rolling Stones leave Hawaii’s Honolulu International Center to…what?
It’s not as noteworthy a stitch in rock’s rich tapestry as David Bowie’s 3 July 1973 announcement at the Hammersmith Odeon that “not only is it the last show of the tour, but it’s the last show that we’ll ever do.” Or even George Harrison’s “that’s it, then. I’m not a Beatle anymore” comment after playing San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on 29 August 1966 – what turned out to be The Beatles last-ever (conventional) live show. But it was unequivocal. On 28 July 1966, Mick Jagger told the audience…
When announcing his sixth studio album, With Heaven on Top, on Instagram earlier this week, Zach Bryan added the disclaimer, “Hope you don’t hate it.” Now that the followup to 2024’s The Great American Bar Scene has arrived.
With Heaven on Top spans 25 tracks. Bryan tends to prefer an overloaded album, as evidenced by the 19-song track list on The Great American Bar Scene and the 16-song track list on Zach Bryan (2023) — and especially by the 34 entries on 2022’s American Heartbreak.
After the rapid release of three studio albums in the span of three years, not counting a flurry of EPs and live recordings, Bryan mostly took last year off to recalibrate. He still racked up a few headlines regarding his high-profile break-up…
Convex was the only LP Conrad Schnitzler released in 1982, though he continued recording an untold amount of cassettes, as he did throughout his lengthy career. On this record, he utilized a sample-and-hold generator, which converted sounds into random sequences of tones. Using sequencers and generators rather than keyboard-based synthesizers, he created slowly unfolding pieces which were left up to chance. While the compositions often have an unhurried pace, they seem far from relaxed or tranquil, and it would be a misnomer to refer to them as ambient. They’re generally hypnotic and often quite busy, and even when they aren’t, they sound like an exploration of an alien planet. “Convex 2” contains high-pitched, semi-melodic pulsations over…
Control originally appeared in 1981 during an especially productive era in Conrad Schnitzler’s career. Inspired by his friend Peter Baumann (like Schnitzler, a former member of Tangerine Dream), he experimented with different sound generators, and attempted to incorporate traditional harmonic elements into his work. When the LP was originally issued, it simply consisted of two sidelong pieces, but subsequent reissues have divided the album into short tracks. Most of the pieces sound different from one another, with some being meandering drones, and others sounding much busier and more exciting. The most memorable ones demonstrate Schnitzler’s curious, playful side, with “Control 4” having sprite-like high-pitched melodic tones, and “Control 6” containing…
This is a very unusual Australian album, featuring the spoken and singing voices of Warlpiri elders Wantarri ‘Wanta’ Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu and his father Jerry Jangala Patrick, who hail from the Aboriginal desert community of Lajamanu. They are backed by electronic composer-producer Marc ‘Monkey’ Peckham.
Together they have created Crown and Country, an immersive sound-and-film project that translates their shared intergenerational cultural knowledge of country, history, language, spirituality, and even Indigenous astronomy, utilising a fascinating contemporary format.
Wanta’s flair for storytelling centres the narrative, a product of his central role as a fully initiated elder in the traditional law and culture…
Few bands capture the absurdity of modern life with as much grotesque glee as Viagra Boys. On their feral fourth record, Viagr Aboys, the Swedish outfit distil their signature blend of scuzzed-out post-punk, sharp observational humour, and dance floor-ready grooves into their most refined – and deranged – work yet.
The album kicks off with ‘Man Made of Meat’, one of the band’s catchiest offerings to date. A more danceable, less scuzzy lead single, it retains the sleazy lyrics and absurdist humour as Murphy sneers his way through lines about your mum’s OnlyFans and scoring free women’s sweaters from LL Bean. He even lets out a full-throated burp halfway through the first verse for good measure. As Henrik Höckert’s bass and…
Marc Almond has personally curated this celebratory 2CD expanded re-issue of his lesser known 2016 electro-pop album. Lesser known simply because, hitherto, it has only had a limited vinyl release in Germany.
Silver City, now a definitive 20 track techno-pop opus, was written and produced by Marc with celebrated cult German electronic music production duo Starcluster and is Marc Almond’s “most synth laden body of work since Soft Cell” (Electricity Club, 2016). It is indeed, a sheer joy to hear Marc Almond’s deft and distinctive vocals alongside a vast array of vintage analogue synthesisers in this resplendently authentic, retro-futuristic setting; an album that provides an eloquent refracted echo of his formative synth-pop work in revered…
Nightvision finds Devon Allman stepping out of familiar territory and into something far more understated and exploratory. Best known for his blues-rock lineage, Allman strips things back here, abandoning vocals and classic song structures in favor of an instrumental, late-night soundscape that feels closer to art-rock, ambient, and DIY cinema than traditional rock records.
This isn’t an album built for instant gratification. Nightvision moves slowly, letting tones breathe and moods develop. Guitars shimmer rather than solo, synths hum in the background, and rhythms creep forward with a restrained, almost hypnotic pulse. The music feels intentionally dim-lit — like walking empty streets after midnight with nothing but neon reflections and distant noise for company.
Although it’s hard to know whether Zu themselves will be happy to hear this image being invoked, there’s something slightly eerie about one of the first sounds on the opening track of their latest album sounding more than a little like the whirring of helicopter blades. Recalling a key image of the first major news story of the year feels like one of their strange but apt alchemical coincidences that great artists can sometimes conjure up. Italian trio Zu are true musical alchemists. Their singular jazz-punk/experimental rock sound takes base materials (saxophone, bass and drums) and turns them into something wondrously radiant; a heavy, meditative, groovy and spiritual fusion whose formula belongs to them alone.
While the band have plied their singular trade…
Few bands feel as tied to their hometown mythology as The Flaming Lips, so it makes perfect sense that their full-album performance of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots would eventually circle back to Oklahoma City. Recorded on August 30, 2024 at the Zoo Amphitheater, this release captures a band revisiting its early-2000s peak with both affection and a steadier, lived-in sense of timing.
After an introduction by the mayor of OKC thanking the band for their contribution to the city, the Lips launch into “Fight Test,” which establishes the tone immediately. The rhythm section sits heavier than on the studio version, and Steven Drozd’s keyboard work gives the song a low, steady hum that pushes the chorus forward. “One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21” follows with a gentle lift…
If you’re tapped into the right corners of the underground, Winged Wheel are a supergroup. Recruiting a member of Sonic Youth — arguably the greatest experimental rock band of all time, and inarguably one of the most popular — certainly bolsters that designation.
But even before Steve Shelley got behind the kit for 2024’s Big Hotel, the “creatively and geographically scattered collective” was an impressive assemblage of talent. More importantly, the music lives up to the pedigree.
The band began as a remote file-trading operation early in the decade, deep in the dregs of the pandemic. The players: Chicago-based Whitney Johnson, who releases music as Matchess and plays in Circuit Des Yeux; Cory Plump,…
Pullman is a studio-born acoustic supergroup that emerged from Chicago’s post-rock milieu in the late ’90s, uniting Ken “Bundy K.” Brown (Tortoise/ Directions in Music), Curtis Harvey (Rex), Chris Brokaw (Come), and Doug McCombs (Tortoise/Eleventh Dream Day); drummer Tim Barnes later joined, solidifying the group’s core lineup. They debuted on Thrill Jockey with Turnstyles & Junkpiles (1998), a hushed, live-to-2-track collection of interwoven guitars that critics likened to John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Gastr del Sol. Their follow-up, Viewfinder (2001), expanded the palette with percussion, subtle electric textures, and multi-track layering, while maintaining Pullman’s rustic, cinematic restraint. Across both albums, the band became a touchstone for…
At only 26, Jenny Hollingworth has already (incredibly) been making music for half her life. Having formed freak-pop project Let’s Eat Grandma with Rosa Walton as a young teen, the duo released their striking debut effort, ‘I Gemini’, aged just 16. Now, with three Let’s Eat Grandma albums under their joint belt (the most recent being 2022’s confronting ‘Two Ribbons’), the pair have taken that record’s crux – namely, the metamorphosis of their relationship from inseparable teenagers to independent adult entities – to its natural conclusion, each embarking on solo endeavours under new monikers.
Jenny On Holiday, then, sees her step sideways with a staunchly pop palette, leaving behind the quirkier corners of LEG’s fantastical…
As a group who’ve always existed with a winning duality of punk and pop at their core, you can often gauge where The Cribs are about to land on that spectrum by the outside hands they’ve enlisted to help guide the ship. On 2017’s raw and grungy ‘24-7 Rock Star Shit’, legendary Nirvana producer Steve Albini sat at the desk. On new record ‘Selling a Vibe’, they decided to throw a curveball by bringing in former Chairlift member and Lil Yachty producer Patrick Wimberley. As guitarist Ryan Jarman told NME last year: “We wanted to try working with someone who specifically worked with more pop kind of people.”
But fear not: the band’s ninth studio album is far from a big, Swift-ian attempt to infiltrate the commercial pop mainstream. Within the first…