This week’s heat-wave hotties start with The Kooks’ sixth studio album, Ten Tracks To Echo In The Dark – a fresh-sounding, electronic-tinged evolution of their iconic sound. The album is the result of several years of creative effort, during which the band partially relocated to Berlin for inspiration and collaborated with several noteworthy artists. This…
Over the past few years, Grammy-nominated Scottish musician KT Tunstall has expanded on her musical selves by focusing on a trilogy of records, each of which zeroes in on a single concept: soul, body and mind. The first, 2016’s KIN, was the soul record; 2018’s WAX was the body record, and the new NUT is…
We’ve got some crackers for you this week, starting with black midi’s new album, Hellfire, which is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet, building on the melodic and harmonic elements of last year’s Cavalcade while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. Full of songs created in the shadow of terror…
The title Sonder, a word with the sense ‘the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own’, instantly resonated with Dermot Kennedy and transformed into the perfect way to encapsulate the feeling in a record. Speaking on the thinking behind the title, Dermot explained: “The meaning behind…
This week’s choicest new releases start with Found Light, which may be Laura Veirs’ twelfth studio album but it also, in many ways, feels like her debut. If 2020’s My Echo – written and mixed in 2019 just before Veirs split from her husband, long-time producer and the father of her two sons – was…
Direction Of The Heart is the first album of new material from Simple Minds since 2018’s outstanding UK Top 5 album Walk Between Worlds. Throughout its nine tracks, Direction Of The Heart finds the band at their most confident, anthemic best on a record that is an inspired celebration of life and that manages perfectly…
The first of this week’s pick of the pops is A Very Lonely Solstice, the new album from Fleet Foxes, which captures a poignant moment in time. The recording was originally broadcast as a live-stream event on the winter solstice of 2020, just days after New York declared a state of emergency, tightening restrictions again…
Up The Bracket, the astonishing debut album by The Libertines, is being reissued to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its original release, in a remaster produced by Mick Jones (The Clash). Up The Bracket arrived like a raging bull in a tired post-Britpop china shop and introduced the world to The Libertines, a new gang…
On The Beths’ new album, Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships – platonic, familial, romantic – and, more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question…
There are some fantastic releases out this week. First, Foals take a fresh, thrilling new direction on Life Is Yours, the follow-up to the triumphant two-part Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost. The new album – with its disco-tinged guitars, tight syncopated rhythms and punchy, insistent hooks echoing the band’s roots as purveyors of rambunctious…