The Harmony Codex – the seventh solo album by Steven Wilson – takes you on a trip. A genre-spanning collection that opens up like a musical puzzle box, it presents a series of endlessly beautiful vistas that roll out and shift in front of you. Arguably the best album Wilson has made during a career…
We kick off this week’s sizzlers with everything is alive, the fifth album from Slowdive, which is exactly what the title suggests: an exploration into the shimmering nature of life and the universal touch points within it. While there are parts of this record that could sit neatly next to the atmospheric quality of 1995’s…
The first of our six scorchers for this week 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…
The Handsome Family’s new record, Hollow, began with a scream in the night. “It was a bleak winter during the middle of the pandemic,” says Brett Sparks. “One night around 4 a.m. Rennie started screaming in her sleep. She screamed, ‘Come into the circle, Joseph! There’s no moon tonight.’ Scary as it was, I thought,…
First out of the gates this week is Intercepted Message. A pop record for tired times. Sugared with bits of shatterproof glass to put more crack in your strap. At long last, verse–chorus. A weathered thesaurus. This is Osees’ bookend sound. Early-grade garage pop meets proto-synthpunk suicide-repellant. Have a whack at the grass or listen…
Wilco’s thirteenth studio album, Cousin, was recorded in the band’s legendary Chicago studio The Loft over a period of two years. The ten new tracks were written by band leader Jeff Tweedy and feature musical performances by the long-time line-up of Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen, Glenn Kotche, John Stirratt, Pat Sansone and, of course, Tweedy…
The first of this week’s sizzlers is the exciting creative collaboration of two rock icons from different generations. Face to Face is an album of original duets written by KT Tunstall and Suzi Quatro that covers themes of love and loss, fear and triumph – all essential to their experiences as groundbreaking women in rock.…
Black Grape could only have been made in Manchester. The swagger, fun and cryptic humour seem hewn from a city historian AJP Taylor once described as offering an archetypally different way of English urban life to London. Both Shaun Ryder and Paul Leveridge, known as Kermit, came from edgy-but-cool parts of the city: in Shaun’s…
The first of this week’s smashers is Prestige, the much-anticipated third album from Girl Ray, the three-piece comprising Poppy Hankin, Iris McConnell and Sophie Moss. Co-produced by Grammy Award-winning producer Ben H. Allen (M.I.A., Gnarls Barkley, Christina Aguilera, Deerhunter) with the band’s singer and songwriter Hankin, Prestige takes the shambolic charm of their debut, Earl…
Emma Anderson, co-founder of Lush, is one of the most underrated British songwriters to emerge from the era that encompassed shoegaze and Britpop. She has now teamed up with producer James Chapman (aka Maps) for her debut solo album, Pearlies, an album that combines effervescent electronic pop with psych and folk textures with lyrics covering…