The first of this week’s Mayday marvels finds Grammy award-winning, multi-platinum rock band Kings of Leon coming back big with their 9th full-length studio album, Can We Please Have Fun. As the title suggests, it’s a document of one of this era’s great rock & roll bands cutting loose, trying new things, and, yes, having some fun. Recorded at Dark Horse Studio and produced with new collaborator Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Florence + the Machine), the album sees a new side of Kings of Leon. On the new album, the band harks back to their gritty origins while simultaneously finding new gears. It’s the sound of a band unified in vision and purpose, freed from any expectations, and the album the band says they’ve always wanted to make.
Josienne Clarke has not only embraced her past on Parenthesis, I but has also redefined herself in the present with a body of work that is shimmering, warm, intimate and, at times, profoundly heart-wrenching. Throughout her career, Clarke has been both a Rough Trade-signed artist and a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-winner, two opposing poles that neatly sum up the impossibility of pigeon-holing her music. Parenthesis, I is a masterful journey through her personal and musical evolution, drawing influence from folk greats such as Nick Drake and Sandy Denny as well as more contemporary artists like Julia Jacklin, Courtney Marie Andrews, Anaïs Mitchell and Lucy Dacus.
The wilds of Keeley Forsyth’s adopted home in the north of England seem to inhabit The Hollow, her third record. An often bleak and foreboding landscape surrounds the Yorkshire town in which Forsyth resides. The moors, on clear days, visible from her home studio window, impact upon a music that often feels made of these places. Windswept, rain-soaked and blinking through the low-lit landscape, it is here through the gloaming mist that the storm breaks and the fox tears at the throat as the red kites circle to scavenge whatever’s left. “There was a sound I had in my head. One to reach, that hovers above and is slightly less grounded. But a sound and feeling that nonetheless is inevitably tethered to the soil.”
Following their critically acclaimed UK Top 20 album As Days Get Dark, Arab Strap return with their second long-player for Mogwai’s Rock Action Records, the wonderfully titled “I’m totally fine with it don’t give a fuck anymore ”. Almost 28 years after their debut, Arab Strap have never sounded more essential, and this new record is a fierce testament to their laser focus on wider horizons. Written and performed exclusively by Malcolm Middleton and Aidan Moffat, and finessed with long-time collaborator Paul Savage, the album furthers the band’s transformation from swooning, slow-core romantics to raging alt-pop chroniclers.
Keane’s classic album Hopes and Fears receives a limited-edition 20th-anniversary reissue, remastered on bespoke galaxy-effect vinyl and housed in updated artwork. The album is full of soaring and romantic songs like ‘Everybody’s Changing’ and ‘Somewhere Only We Know’. Tim Rice-Oxley’s piano stylings range from Ben Folds on ‘Can’t Stop Now’ to Chris Martin on ‘Your Eyes Open’, never leaning too heavily in one direction and ultimately providing the musical backbone over which Tom Chaplin’s voice is allowed to sweep and soar.
Our release of the week is from Villagers. Following the kaleidoscopic adventure of their fifth album, Fever Dreams, award-winning Dublin singer-songwriter-instrumentalist-dramatist Conor O’Brien returns with the intimate That Golden Time. After the band-centred sessions of its predecessor, the solo-centric core of the new album was not forced on O’Brien by lockdown. “For me, That Golden Time has an internalised voice, so much so that I almost found it impossible to let anyone else in,” he says. “It’s probably the most vulnerable album I’ve made. I played and recorded everything in my apartment, and finally, towards the end, invited people in.”
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