Goat Girl’s third album, Below the Waste, was pieced together like a collage over an extended period of time, with the instrumentation tracked mostly over a ten-day stint at Hellfire Studios in Ireland, in the shadow of the infamous Hellfire Club itself. They also used Damon Alban’s Studio 13. Additional strings, woodwind instruments and vocals…
The Big Decider comes into view as an album of stark significance to The Zutons. Written against the backdrop of a decade and a half’s worth of lived experience, it is born under the weight of family tragedies, lives lost and created, reality checks, and home truths faced up to and stared down. Wrestled into…
Michael Head, ‘our greatest living songwriter’, vividly recalls 62 years of music, loves, losses, long summer days and longer, darker nights as he and The Red Elastic Band play out flickering scenes from his life on new album, Loophole. Twelve evocative and autobiographical songs will be accompanied by the written word as Michael Head prepares…
Lucy Rose was busy balancing the success of her own career with running a record label when she was diagnosed with a rare form of pregnancy-induced osteoporosis after the birth of her first child, Otis, in the summer of 2021. After that, any fleeting thought of writing a new record, or even sitting down with…
If 2020’s Mordechai, the last studio album Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record that enhanced the band’s musical reputation far and wide, then A La Sala is the measured morning after. It’s a gorgeously airy record completed only in the company of the group’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It’s a…
The Bill Fay Group is Fay’s most significant collaborative work; on Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow, he recorded as a member of a larger group, and the result summons a grander sonic scale, an elegent counterweight to Fay’s instincts for the understated. Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow brings to bear the galactic qualities of early rock, the…
After conquering the charts and claiming the number one trophy last time out with What’s Rock and Roll?, Sheffield sensations The Reytons are back with their third full-length album, Ballad of a Bystander. “We’re once again releasing 100% independently, with no label backing. Let’s get out there and do it all again! #AllReytons” Note: The…
When Bob Vylan won the first MOBO award for Best Alternative Music Act in 2022, the punk-grime duo took to the stage and used the platform to speak about how they managed to achieve the impossible as independent artists in a genre-defying space. “We released an album this year that we produced entirely, mixed entirely,…
Wall of Eyes is the new album from The Smile, the supergroup consisting of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with jazz percussionist Tom Skinner. The album was recorded between Oxford and Abbey Road Studios, and was produced and mixed Sam Petts-Davies. It features string arrangements by the London Contemporary Orchestra. The album is the…
Before and After contains some of Neil Young’s favourites from his playbook, which he performs mostly alone on a solo acoustic journey into his music history. The songs blend into each other and morph with mesmerising clarity into a continuous flow of music, creating a pure and intimate 48-minute listening experience. The 13-track album spans…