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,…
Here’s our last batch of recommended releases for 2023, due out in the next couple of weeks. In 2022, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis returned to their native Australia for 16 shows, taking their acclaimed 2021 album Carnage on the road, along with songs from the Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds catalogue. Three performances…
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…
We’ve got some more peaches due for release on 17th November, and the first is Songs of Silence – incredibly, Vince Clarke’s first ever solo album. As its title suggests, Songs of Silence is a lyric-less instrumental album, and is hugely evocative for that. Unlike anything you’ve previously heard from Clarke as an artisan of…
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…
The first of our six stormers for the next two weeks to blow in is Substance (out 10 Nov), which compiled the 12″ versions of all of New Order’s singles from 1981 to 1987 with many of their respective B-sides (on the CD and cassette versions), including specially recorded new versions of ‘Temptation’ and ‘Confusion’.…
Where’s My Utopia? is the follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Leeds band Yard Act’s debut record The Overload, which was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize after a slew of positive reviews, national radio playlistings and a placing at #2 in the Official Charts. Frontman James Smith has said that lead single ‘Dream Job’ “feels like an…
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…