Our 6 summer sizzlers for 3 & 10 August start with James, who are releasing their 15th(!) studio album, Living In Extraordinary Times. As Tim Booth puts it: “We knew something was up when Leicester City won the league then Brexit, then Trump. It’s as if we’d slipped into an alternate reality, a Philip K Dick…
Put simply, True Meanings, the fourteenth solo album from Paul Weller and the twenty-sixth studio album of his career, is a record unlike any he has ever made before. This is an album characterised by grandiose yet lush, delicate orchestration: an aesthetic to which Paul’s voice, never sounding better and singing some of his most…
We kick off our recommendations for 20 & 27 July with the news that Ty Segall & White Fence are become one again, regrooving what we once called Hair into what is now Joy. Rock is dead, according to them, so experience the commencement of on-beyond rock: music made with old tools but emitted from…
For the first time since 2007’s Our Love To Admire, Interpol have opened themselves up to the input of a producer. For two-week spells between December 2017 and April 2018, they travelled to upstate New York to work with Dave Fridmann – famed for his work with Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, MGMT, Spoon, Mogwai, and…
We lead off 13 July’s new releases with Back Roads And Abandoned Motels, on which The Jayhawks play their own versions of songs written by front man Gary Louris with and for other artists, including Dixie Chicks, Scott Thomas, Carrie Rodriguez and more. PBS’s Sessions At West 54th brought the hottest and hippest acts to…
While overseeing the soundtrack for T2 Trainspotting, Underworld’s Rick Smith arranged a meeting with Iggy Pop in a room at the Savoy Hotel on London’s Strand to discuss working on collaborative music for the film. Their respective tracks ‘Lust For Life’ and ‘Born Slippy (Nuxx)’ had perfectly bookended the first Trainspotting film two decades before.…
Mogwai’s first venture into the world of the feature film soundtracks is for Kin, directed by the producers who bought you Stranger Things and Arrival and released on the same date. Mogwai fans won’t be disappointed and it will appeal to lovers of sci-fi film soundtracks. Note: The LP will be available on heavyweight red…
This week’s super six starts with High As Hope, the long-awaited new album from Florence + The Machine and, although sprinkled with collaborators, it’s still at its core a very Florence album: confessional, poetic lyricism is very much the order of the day and this album will come to rank amongst her very finest. The…
Low turns twenty-five in 2018. Since 1993, Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker – the married couple whose heaven-and-earth harmonies have always held the band’s centre – have pioneered a subgenre, shrugged off its strictures, recorded a Christmas classic, become a magnetic onstage force and emerged as one of music’s most steadfast and vital vehicles for…
We kick off this week’s six of the best with No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds, the 16th studio album from ambient house pioneers The Orb. Their previous two albums were creations of the duo at the band’s heart, but this time they have thrown their work open to a number of collaborators, including Youth,…