black midi’s new album, Hellfire, builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of last year’s Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet. Note: The LP is initially available on clear red vinyl with a bonus flexi, exclusive to independent shops. Click…
Her first official album since Hypoxia in 2015, Night Drives opens with some of Kathryn Williams’s most immediately electronic tracks to date, such as the nihilistic ‘Human’, big ballad ‘Answer In The Dark’ with all its bold, layered production, and the dynamic, infectious ‘Radioactive’. Elsewhere, on the likes of ‘Moon Karaoke’, ‘Magnets’ and ‘The Brightest’,…
Freakout/Release is another dizzying high in a multi-decade career that’s seen Hot Chip continuing to innovate and develop a rich, resonant songcraft. And while they continue to operate at peak form, the album also feels like a new chapter for the group – a collection of flesh-and-blood songs that finds the band reaching into the…
A Light For Attracting Attention is the long awaited debut album from The Smile: Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead with Tom Skinner from Sons of Kemet. The 13-track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass…
Rather than be sent scrambling like so many other musicians on tour or promoting enhanced music, when lockdown clamped in March 2020, Interpol quickly got into a productive mood. Coming from a group whose early work was characterised by Polish knife-wielders and incarcerated serial killers, you might expect Interpol’s pandemic record to be an emotional…
Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate…
A Very Lonely Solstice, the new album from Fleet Foxes, 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 in response to increasing COVID-19 cases. Pecknold describes the set as…
Muse frontman Matt Bellamy says: “Will Of The People was created in Los Angeles and London and is influenced by the increasing uncertainty and instability in the world. A pandemic, new wars in Europe, massive protests & riots, an attempted insurrection, Western democracy wavering, rising authoritarianism, wildfires and natural disasters and the destabilization of the…
Dropout Boogie will be released one day before the twentieth anniversary of The Black Keys’ first album, The Big Come Up. As they have done their entire career, the duo of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney wrote all of the material in the studio, and the new album captures a number of first takes that…
A Bit Of Previous is the tenth studio album by Belle & Sebastian and their first full-length in seven years. This may be surprising to anyone following the recent life pursuits of the Glasgow 7-piece: a trilogy of EPs; a soundtrack for the directorial debut of The Inbetweeners’ Simon Bird; The Boaty Weekender – a…