The Big Decider comes into view as an album of stark significance to The Zutons. Written against the backdrop of a decade and a half’s worth of lived experience, it is born under the weight of family tragedies, lives lost and created, reality checks, and home truths faced up to and stared down. Wrestled into…
We open this week’s stormers with the 15th-anniversary reissue of British Sea Power’s 2008 classic Do You Like Rock Music?, which has been expanded with radio sessions and B-sides plus extensive new sleeve notes by Roy Wilkinson. This kaleidoscopic record encapsulates Sea Power’s true heart. “Easy, easy”: only Sea Power could turn a football chant…
Michael Head, ‘our greatest living songwriter’, vividly recalls 62 years of music, loves, losses, long summer days and longer, darker nights as he and The Red Elastic Band play out flickering scenes from his life on new album, Loophole. Twelve evocative and autobiographical songs will be accompanied by the written word as Michael Head prepares…
The first of this week’s crackers is Kula Shaker’s new album, Natural Magick, on which the band harness the power to cast their most potent spell yet, incorporating blazing psychedelic sermons, raga rave-ups, stardust-coated pop pearls and mood-enhancing mantras. Kula Shaker reformed permanently in 2021 with the return of keyboard wizard Jay Darlington, reuniting all…
Lucy Rose was busy balancing the success of her own career with running a record label when she was diagnosed with a rare form of pregnancy-induced osteoporosis after the birth of her first child, Otis, in the summer of 2021. After that, any fleeting thought of writing a new record, or even sitting down with…
This week’s six smashers open with Polaroid Lovers, the seventh studio album from four-time Grammy-winner Sarah Jarosz. Produced by Daniel Tashian, Polaroid Lovers is a bold creative statement that sees Jarosz exploring new sonic territory. The 11 songs on the album, all co-written by Jarosz with songwriters including Tashian, Jon Randall, Ruston Kelly and Natalie…
If 2020’s Mordechai, the last studio album Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record that enhanced the band’s musical reputation far and wide, then A La Sala is the measured morning after. It’s a gorgeously airy record completed only in the company of the group’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It’s a…
There’s a strong opener to our recommendations for 2024: Little Rope (out 19 Jan) is one of the finest, most delicately layered records in Sleater-Kinney’s nearly 30-year career. To call the album flawless feels like an insult to its intent: it careens head-first into flaw and brokenness, a meditation on what living in a world…
The Bill Fay Group is Fay’s most significant collaborative work; on Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow, he recorded as a member of a larger group, and the result summons a grander sonic scale, an elegent counterweight to Fay’s instincts for the understated. Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow brings to bear the galactic qualities of early rock, the…
After conquering the charts and claiming the number one trophy last time out with What’s Rock and Roll?, Sheffield sensations The Reytons are back with their third full-length album, Ballad of a Bystander. “We’re once again releasing 100% independently, with no label backing. Let’s get out there and do it all again! #AllReytons” Note: The…