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.…
This week’s blockbusters open with The Harmony Codex. This seventh solo album by Steven Wilson takes you on a trip: it’s a genre-spanning collection that opens up like a musical puzzle box, presenting a series of endlessly beautiful vistas that roll out and shift in front of you. Arguably the best album Wilson has made…
The surprise companion to The National’s April release First Two Pages of Frankenstein, Laugh Track is the band’s most freewheeling, all-hands-on-deck album in years. If Frankenstein represented a rebuilding of trust between group members after 20+ years together, the vibrant, exploratory Laugh Track is both the product of that faith and a new statement of…
First out of this week’s box of delights is João, a collection of songs made famous by Bebel Gilberto’s father. João Gilberto, widely regarded as the father of bossa nova music, passed away in 2019 after a 70-year career in music. Bebel began singing with him as a small child and the songs she sings…
Polaroid Lovers is the seventh studio album from four-time Grammy-winner Sarah Jarosz. Produced by Daniel Tashian, Polaroid Lovers is a bold creative statement that sees Jarosz exploring new sonic territory. The 11 songs on the album, all co-written by Jarosz with songwriters including Tashian, Jon Randall, Ruston Kelly and Natalie Hemby, touch on themes both…
The first of this week’s late summer sizzlers is Race the Night, the eighth studio album from Ash, which comes 29 years, 18 hit singles, seven studio albums and an unfathomable number of tour dates since their appearance on the 1994 Crazed and Confused compilation. Race the Night is both a party with old friends…