The first of this week’s sparklers is Taylor Swift’s new studio album, Midnights. This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night: a journey through terrors and sweet dreams. The floors we pace and the demons we face – the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout Taylor’s life.
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 to encapsulate the essence of Simple Minds past and present, a band whose recent reascent has seen them once again capture the magic and critical praise of their early days.
South London-based Dry Cleaning’s debut, New Long Leg, became a huge critical and commercial success, reaching #4 in the UK Album Charts and featuring in best-of-2021 polls across the board. Buoyed by its success, Nick Buxton (drums), Tom Dowse (guitar), Lewis Maynard (bass) and Florence Shaw (vocals) returned to the iconic Rockfield Studios in rural Wales in late 2021, partnering once more with producer John Parish and engineer Joe Jones to produce Stumpwork. Working from a position of trust in the same studio and with the same team, imposter syndrome and anxiety were replaced by a fresh sense of freedom and openness to explore beyond an already rangey sonic palette, and a newfound confidence in their creative vision.
In hugo, there’s a central question that Loyle Carner keeps coming back to: “I’m young, Black, successful and have a platform – but where do I go next?” The answer is explored in this epic scream of a third album. With urgent delivery and gloriously widescreen production, Carner confronts both the deeply personal (“You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. So how can I hate my father without hating me?”) and the highly political (“I told the black man he didn’t understand, I reached the white man he wouldn’t take my hand.”). Cinematic in scale and scope, hugo is both a rallying war-cry for a generation forged in fire and a study of internal personal conflict.
Formidable psychic warriors, channellers of the mystic and proponents of a spiritual quest that transcends this realm, Goat remain a band shrouded in mystery. Travelling from their inscrutable origins in the Swedish village of Korpilombo across the stages and festivals of the world in the last decade, this band has created their incendiary music entirely according to their own co-ordinates. The eternal cycles of rebirth have triumphantly produced Oh Death – a ceremonial conflagration as powerful as any this band has made, and a party to which all are welcome. Folk-haunted incantations and free-jazz skronk here find common ground, buoyed by relentless forward motion and raucous energy. Yet all of the above is locked into a delirious gnostic groove that threatens to throw the whole shebang spiralling into orbit.
Our release of the week can only be The Car, the seventh studio album from Arctic Monkeys. The album features ten new songs written by Alex Turner, and it was produced by James Ford and recorded at Butley Priory, Suffolk, La Frette, Paris and RAK Studios, London. The album, which follows 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino, finds Arctic Monkeys running wild in a new and sumptuous musical landscape and contains some of the richest and most rewarding vocal performances of Alex Turner’s career.
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