A quarter of a century since his self-inflicted coronation and self-released debut solo album, Kenny Anderson – DIY pop voyager, ancestral seaside home restorer, squeezebox lothario, Fife for lifer, diamond miner, hijacker of hearts, and the man also known as King Creosote – brings us I DES. While the record’s kaleidoscopic musical terrain plots vibraphones,…
More than 20 years in the making, this December finally sees the release of i/o, the first album of new material from Peter Gabriel since 2002’s Up. During 2023, Peter has been releasing a new song from the album on the occasion of every full moon. Being revealed roughly every four weeks, each track has…
The first of this week’s smashers is Chronicles of a Diamond, the hotly anticipated second album from Black Pumas. When the Austin-bred duo made their self-titled debut in 2019, they set off a reaction almost as combustible and rapturous as their music itself. Along with earning a career total of seven Grammy Award nominations (including…
All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade is the first new album in nine years from The Libertines and opens with the infectious new single, ‘Run Run Run’. On the album, the quartet of unlikely lads have gathered from their new-found homes in France, Denmark, Margate and London to solder a stronger-than-ever internal bond, and scale…
The first of this week’s gems comes from Israel Nash – hailed as a “master of sonic textures” by Rolling Stone and a “folk-rock visionary” by Uncut – who first rose to fame in Europe, where he built a loyal following with a series of critically acclaimed albums that landed him a deal with renowned…
Little Rope is one of the finest, most delicately layered records in Sleater-Kinney’s nearly 30-year career. To call the album flawless feels like an insult to its intent: it careens headfirst into flaw and brokenness, a meditation on what living in a world of perpetual crisis has done to us and what we do to…
The first of this week’s windfall wonders is Zuma 85, which signals the start of a new era for Allah-Las, with the band reinventing itself in defiance of algorithmic categorisation and robotic sterility. Recorded in the midst of the shift from the old world to whatever branch of reality we’re on now, it’s a return,…
Gruff Rhys and his band piled into a van driven by late, legendary tour manager ‘Dr’ Kiko Loiacono and raced from Dunkirk, where they had just played the final show of a tour of Spain and France, to the outskirts of Paris in the early hours of a March morning in 2022. There, in La…
The first of this week’s six picks is Jolie Holland’s latest, Haunted Mountain. It’s a beckoning, confronting place; at once ancient and of the moment, it hums with literary and political interconnections. The songs illuminate states of dispossession and alienation, lust and pollination: a state of reciprocity with our living planet. The record is a…
Beautifully produced and rich in scope, Iechyd Da is Bill Ryder-Jones’ most ambitious record to date: at times joyous and grand, at others intimate and heartbreaking. The past few years spent producing other artists have provided that gentle nudge to expand into new territory, from kids’ choirs and tender strings to dramatically re-contextualised disco samples.…