Now the summer holidays are over, the release schedule has picked up and there’s a huge number of releases coming out on 5th September. Click here for the full list.
Our pick of the bunch starts with Chosen, the latest album from Glenn Hughes, who rose to fame in the early 1970s with the band Trapeze before joining Deep Purple in 1973. He later launched a prolific solo run and formed several notable bands, including Black Country Communion (with Joe Bonamassa), California Breed and The Dead Daisies. Chosen is a hard-hitting album that presents him at his most explosive and inspired. Produced by longtime collaborator Søren Andersen, it is a masterclass in powerful songwriting and production. This is Glenn Hughes at the peak of his craft: bold, loud and unforgettable.
Saint Etienne’s new album, International, is the group’s final album-length statement after a 35-year excursion through pop. A dreamlike drift with friends and collaborators, International features cameos from the higher echelons of pop – from Vince Clarke to Nick Heyward, Confidence Man to Erol Alkan, Chemical Brothers, Orbital, Doves and Xenomania. Saint Etienne are the ’90s band who never left us, never imploded and never adhered to clichéd excess. They are a testament to getting along, getting on with creating something new – and, of course, getting away with it.
Cutthroat is Shame at their blistering best: an unapologetic album that’s souped-up and supercharged. It’s exactly where you want Shame to be, with ambitious sonic ideas and the technical chops to execute them. Stamped throughout with Shame’s trademark sense of humour, the album takes on the big issues of today and gleefully toys with them – casting a merciless eye on themes of conflict and corruption, hunger and desire, lust, envy and the omnipresent shadow of cowardice. Musically, too, the record plays with visceral new ideas: electronic loops made on tour for fun have found their place on the album. Cutthroat shows with a resounding flourish that, right now, Shame have never sounded better.
Who Is the Sky?, the first new album from David Byrne since 2018’s acclaimed and award-winning American Utopia, incluldes contributions from musical friends old and new, including St. Vincent, Paramore’s Hayley Williams, drummer Tom Skinner (The Smile) and percussionist Mauro Refoscow. The album was produced by the Grammy-winning Kid Harpoon (Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus) and features intimate orchestral arrangement by members of New York-based chamber ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra.
Double Infinity – the follow-up to 2022’s Grammy-nominated album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You – was recorded last winter at the Power Station, New York City. For three solid weeks, Big Thief rode bicycles along frozen streets between Brooklyn and Manhattan, meeting in Power’s Station’s warm wood-panelled room, where they would play for nine hours a day, tracking together – simultaneously – improvising arrangements and making collective discoveries.
Our release of the week is Antidepressants, a milestone achievement that sees Suede at the top of their game, translating their approach to playing in front of a live audience directly into this recording. “If Autofiction was our punk record, Antidepressants is our post-punk record,” says frontman Brett Anderson. “It’s about the tensions of modern life, the paranoia, the anxiety, the neurosis. We are all striving for connection in a disconnected world. This was the feel I wanted the songs to have. This is broken music for broken people.”
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