New releases for 22 March 2024

The first of this week’s sublime 6 comes from one of the most hard-working singer-songwriters in the game. Katie Crutchfield, who was raised near Waxahatchee Creek in Alabama, skipped town more than a decade ago and struck out on her own as Waxahatchee. Crutchfield says she never knew the road would lead her here, but…

Pre-sale of the week: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Wild God, out 30 August

Across ten tracks, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds dance between convention and experimentation, taking left-turns and detours that heighten the rich imagery and emotion in Cave’s soul-stirring narratives. This is the sound of a group emboldened by reconnection and taking flight. There are moments ton Wild God hat touch fondly upon the Bad Seeds’…

New releases for 15 March 2024

The first of this week’s six smashers is Deeper Well, the fifth album from six-time Grammy winner Kacey Musgraves, whose music is almost chimeric, with rolling acoustic guitars, puffy clouds of strings and synth, warm bass punctuations, layered harmonies, moments of Celtic melody and plenty of room on the tracks for Musgraves’ silvery vocals. On…

New releases for 8 March 2024

The first of this week’s treasures was recorded on The Rolling Stones’ 40th anniversary Licks World Tour in 2002 & 2003, with the band performing in arenas and stadiums in addition to the occasional theatre. In November 2002, the Stones arrived in Los Angeles to perform at a packed Wiltern Theatre, treating fans to a…

New releases for 1 March 2024

March comes in like a lion with with six belters this week. The first comes from Liam Gallagher & John Squire, long-term friends with a mutual admiration for each other’s work, who first had the idea to collaborate when John joined Liam on stage at his biblical Knebworth shows. Song ideas were soon flowing, and…

New releases for 23 February 2024

The first of this week’s six sparklers comes from Laetitia Sadier. Over the course of her more than three-decade career, she has never shied away from the hard topics or stopped advocating for the possibility of self-determination and emancipation in the face of the powers that be, conscious or unconscious. This is an essential part…

Pre-sale of the week: Goat Girl – Below the Waste, out 7 June

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…

New releases for 16 February 2024

This week’s hot six bursts into action with Tangk, the righteous and vibrant fifth album from madcap truth-seekers Idles. Pronounced ‘tank’ with a whiff of the ‘g’ – an onomatopoeic reference to the lashing way the band imagined their guitars sounding that has since grown into a sigil for living in love – the record…