The band use distortion and perception as a lens through which familiar shapes are refracted into something slightly alien, as if seen through a different kind of light. Synthesisers, strings, acoustic guitars and percussion are integrated into the fabric of the songs, expanding the palette while revealing colours already latent within it, resulting in…
We’ve got some crackers for you this week, starting with black midi’s new album, Hellfire, which is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet, building on the melodic and harmonic elements of last year’s Cavalcade while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. Full of songs created in the shadow of terror…
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…
This week’s smashers start off with Small World Turning, the first new collection of songs from Thea Gilmore since 2017’s The Counterweight, which was her third successive Top-40 album. An artist of enduring international acclaim (Bruce Springsteen regularly names her as a favourite) and a justly revered lyricist, Gilmore’s musical settings have taken many ingenious…
Here we go again, with six smashers due out in the next two weeks. Performance is the new album from White Denim, a band who have long pulled hard at the parameters of rock & roll, admitting garage punk, soul, psychedelia, prog, jazz and blues while holding onto its vital good-time core. There simply is…
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…
