The Ultra Vivid Lament is the 14th studio album from Manic Street Preachers. It is both reflection and reaction; a record that gazes in isolation across a cluttered room, fogged by often painful memories, to focus on an open window framing a gleaming vista of land melting into sea and endless sky. Musically, The Ultra…
Animal was a word Laura Marling threw into a lyric simply to meet a rhythm. But it seemed to capture the mood of the new record, and of LUMP as a whole. “There’s a little bit of a theme of hedonism on the album, of desires running wild,” she says. “And also it fed into…
Billie Eilish’s highly anticipated 16-track second studio album, Happier Than Ever, continues where her multi-Grammy Award-winning, record-breaking debut album When We All Go To Sleep, Where Do We Go? left off. Happier Than Ever features no outside songwriters or producers, and was written by 19-year-old Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, who produced the album…
Stand For Myself is the anthemic new album from Yola. Produced by Dan Auerbach, the record is a timeless masterpiece marking an idiosyncratic sonic shift, which will defy all expectation. It’s a sophisticated and diverse sonic mix of symphonic soul and classic pop, tracing an expansive musical thread to Yola’s most eclectic musical inspirations. Yola’s…
The Black Keys release their tenth studio album, Delta Kream. The record celebrates the band’s roots, featuring eleven Mississippi hill country blues standards that they have loved since they were teenagers, before they were a band, including songs by R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, among others. Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney recorded Delta Kream at…
Rock ‘n’ roll is often hard to define, or even to find, in these fractured musical times. But to paraphrase an old saying, you know it when you hear it. And you always hear it with The Wallflowers. For the past 30 years, the Jakob Dylan-led act has stood as one of rock’s most dynamic…
Sons Of Kemet returns in 2021 with their new album Black To The Future. The follow up to 2018’s Mercury Prize nominated breakout release Your Queen Is A Reptile. This is their fourth record, and their second on Impulse! Compared with Your Queen Is A Reptile, this album has featured vocalists and more of an…
Produced by long-time friend Cate Le Bon, Boy From Michigan is John Grant’s most autobiographical and melodic work to date. Grant stopped being a boy in Michigan aged twelve, when his family moved to Denver, Colorado, shifting rust to bible belt, a further vantage point to watch collective dreams unravel. Across 12 tracks, Grant lays…
Seeking New Gods, the seventh solo album from Gruff Rhys, was recorded following a US tour with his band and mixed in LA with superstar producer Mario C (Beastie Boys). The album concept was originally driven to be the biography of a mountain, Mount Paektu (an East Asian active volcano). However, as Gruff’s writing began…
The inimitable Godspeed You! Black Emperor returns with another soundtrack for our times. As the heretical anarcho-punk spirit of the title implies, G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! features some particularly raw power, spittle and grit across two riveting 20-minute side-length trajectories of noise-drenched widescreen post-rock: inexorable chug blossoms into blown-out twang, as some of the…
