This week’s smashers kick off with The Winding Way, the highly anticipated new studio album from The Teskey Brothers. Four years after the boys from Warrandyte’s globe-conquering second album, Run Home Slow (2019), which followed their debut album Half Mile Harvest (2017), the artistic vision of vocalist Josh Teskey and his brother, guitarist and engineer Sam Teskey, is more defined than ever.
NO THANK YOU is yet another delicious left-field turn for 29-year old Simbiatu Ajikawo. Sleek, succinct and utterly propulsive, it’s Little Simz’ defiantly punk-rock, two-fingered salute to conformity and fame, and all the expectations and restrictions that come with. Recorded with her regular collaborator Inflo, this is Simz at her most free, daring and spontaneous. In her own words: ‘Emotion is energy in motion. Honour your truth and feelings. Eradicate fear. Boundaries are important.’
In 2004 Drive-By Truckers released what would become the best-selling album in their illustrious catalogue: The Dirty South, a concept album that examined the state of the South and unveiled the hypocrisy, irony and tragedy that continues to exist. The Complete Dirty South is a band-led rework of the original album. Principal member Patterson Hood took the reins and reimagined this record as it was originally intended. The complete version features re-sequenced audio, three additional tracks and four remixes, along with updated vocals. The packaging comes with a perfect-bound book featuring liner notes from Patterson Hood, track-by-track descriptions from Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell, as well as never-before-seen photos along with updated artwork from the late Wes Freed.
Off Planet, the fifth studio album from Django Django, is a 21-track album split into four parts. Originally destined to be four experimental EPs but immediately transformed into an album proper when they started the recording sessions, Off Planet features some of the most exciting and dynamic music Django Django have ever produced. Harking back to their more experimental and electronic roots, the album features guests including Self Esteem, Jack Penate and others.
The enduring success of Yusuf/Cat Stevens’s musical legacy is built on myriad factors, key among them the uncanny ability he has to translate his vibrant imagination into musical form. This hunger and drive to write, record and entertain has not waned and is abundant throughout King of a Land’s new creative landscape. This is an epic body of work: more than a decade in the making, its 12 new songs are full of extraordinary surprises. Unique and transportive, Yusuf’s new music, words and melodies paint a vivid picture of a world where childlike dreams are brought back into touching distance. His poetic storytelling invites the listener on a journey towards the gates of an alternative universe, in which happy endings do happen.
Our release of the week is In Times New Roman…: raw, at times brutal and not recommended for the faint of heart, yet perhaps the most beautiful and definitely the most rewarding album in Queens of the Stone Age’s epic discography. Founder Joshua Homme’s most acerbic lyrics to date are buoyed by the instantly identifiable QOTSA sonic signature, expanded and embellished with new and unprecedented twists in virtually every song. With In Times New Roman… we see that sometimes one needs to look beneath scars and scabs to see beauty, and sometimes the scabs and scars are the beauty.
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