Our May Day marvels open with Waysides, the third collection of songs from Bedouine, which summarises her creative headspace over the past year and a half. The album comprises some older material and a cover, and ties together many songwriting threads that act as a prologue of sorts. “The luxury of time afforded this whole…
Freakout/Release is another dizzying high in a multi-decade career that’s seen Hot Chip continuing to innovate and develop a rich, resonant songcraft. And while they continue to operate at peak form, the album also feels like a new chapter for the group – a collection of flesh-and-blood songs that finds the band reaching into the…
This week’s lovelies kick off with Zeit, composed and recorded by Rammstein during 2020’s lockdowns. Flake Lorenz confirmed that the recording sessions for the album were unplanned and that the quarantine caused by the pandemic had allowed for ‘less distraction’ and ‘more time to think of new things’. In October 2021, a song from the…
A Light For Attracting Attention is the long awaited debut album from The Smile: Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead with Tom Skinner from Sons of Kemet. The 13-track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass…
We start to unwrap this week’s Easter eggs with Giving The World Away, the new album from Hatchie, which is the truest introduction to the songwriter at the helm of the project, Harriette Pilbeam. Although her sound – a dazzling dream-pop and shoegaze tangle – arrived fully-formed, it’s here that she distils the core of…
Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promoting enhanced music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood. Coming from a group whose early work was characterised by Polish knife-wielders and incarcerated serial killers, you might expect Interpol’s pandemic record to be an emotional…
We open the lid on this week’s tempting tidbits with one of the most thrilling rock albums of recent years: Shoot Me Your Ace. Produced by former Duran Duran/Power Station guitarist Andy Taylor, this album showcases Reef’s talents and is a blast of unadulterated rock’n’roll joy that – from the title track’s swaggering opening salvo…
Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate…
This week’s batch of lovelies opens with Fear Of The Dawn, the fourth studio album from Jack White, founding member of The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and The Dead Weather. True to his DIY roots, this record was recorded at White’s Third Man Studio during the course of 2021, mastered by Third Man Mastering, pressed…