The news of Return Of The Dream Canteen’s imminent release marks the Red Hot Chili Peppers’s second album of 2022, hot on the heels of the platinum-selling chart topper Unlimited Love, which debuted at #1 in the UK in April. It will also be the band’s second Rick Rubin-produced album of 2022, and reinforces their…
The last time you heard The Big Moon was when you welcomed the release of their dazzling second album, Walking Like We Do, back in January 2020, when life was very different to how it is now. That was a coming-of-age record: bold songs for Saturday nights and sad songs for Sunday mornings. So much…
Over the past few years, Grammy-nominated Scottish musician KT Tunstall has expanded on her musical selves by focusing on a trilogy of records, each of which zeroes in on a single concept: soul, body and mind. The first, 2016’s KIN, was the soul record; 2018’s WAX was the body record, and the new NUT is…
The title Sonder, a word with the sense ‘the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own’, instantly resonated with Dermot Kennedy and transformed into the perfect way to encapsulate the feeling in a record. Speaking on the thinking behind the title, Dermot explained: “The meaning behind…
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…
Up The Bracket, the astonishing debut album by The Libertines, is being reissued to celebrate the 20th anniversary of its original release, in a remaster produced by Mick Jones (The Clash). Up The Bracket arrived like a raging bull in a tired post-Britpop china shop and introduced the world to The Libertines, a new gang…
On The Beths’ new album, Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships – platonic, familial, romantic – and, more importantly, their aftermaths. The shapes and ghosts left in absences. The question…
Has there been a busier musician over the last two years? A more prolific artist? More creative? More heroic? Tim Burgess – as self-effacing a band leader, solo star, label runner, repeat memoirist and all-round caffeinated can-do kid as you’ll find – would certainly shrink from that last accolade. “A hero??” he’d likely mutter with…
Take It Like A Man is a fearless confessional featuring 10 emotionally raw tracks from Amanda Shires, produced by the talented gender-fluid singer-songwriter and producer, Lawrence Rothman (Angel Olsen, Girl in Red, Courtney Love). Upon hearing Amanda for the first time Lawrence said: “I was just mesmerized. I thought she was the new Dolly Parton;…
Formed in Bellingham, WA in 1997, Death Cab For Cutie almost immediately entered the ranks of the era’s definitive bands, fueled in large part by the remarkable power of co-founder, vocalist, guitarist, and lead songwriter Benjamin Gibbard’s complex, often bittersweet songcraft. Asphalt Meadows, their tenth studio album, finds them exploring further into their own unique…