All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade is the first new album in nine years from The Libertines and opens with the infectious new single, ‘Run Run Run’. On the album, the quartet of unlikely lads have gathered from their new-found homes in France, Denmark, Margate and London to solder a stronger-than-ever internal bond, and scale…
Little Rope 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 headfirst into flaw and brokenness, a meditation on what living in a world of perpetual crisis has done to us and what we do to…
Gruff Rhys and his band piled into a van driven by late, legendary tour manager ‘Dr’ Kiko Loiacono and raced from Dunkirk, where they had just played the final show of a tour of Spain and France, to the outskirts of Paris in the early hours of a March morning in 2022. There, in La…
Beautifully produced and rich in scope, Iechyd Da is Bill Ryder-Jones’ most ambitious record to date: at times joyous and grand, at others intimate and heartbreaking. The past few years spent producing other artists have provided that gentle nudge to expand into new territory, from kids’ choirs and tender strings to dramatically re-contextualised disco samples.…
The surprise companion to The National’s April release First Two Pages of Frankenstein, Laugh Track is the band’s most freewheeling, all-hands-on-deck album in years. If Frankenstein represented a rebuilding of trust between group members after 20+ years together, the vibrant, exploratory Laugh Track is both the product of that faith and a new statement of…
Polaroid Lovers is 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 Hemby, touch on themes both…
They say long live the king and all, but nothing’s ever set in stone. A quarter of a century since his self-inflicted coronation, and self-released debut solo album, Kenny Anderson – DIY pop voyager, ancestral seaside home restorer, squeezebox lothario, Fife for lifer, diamond miner, hijacker of hearts, and the man also known as King…
The Harmony Codex – the seventh solo album by Steven Wilson – takes you on a trip. A genre-spanning collection that opens up like a musical puzzle box, it presents a series of endlessly beautiful vistas that roll out and shift in front of you. Arguably the best album Wilson has made during a career…
The Asylum Years (1972–1975) is the latest entry in Rhino’s ongoing, Grammy-winning series exploring the vast untapped archives of rare recordings by Joni Mitchell – a project guided intimately by Mitchell’s own vision and personal touch. The collection begins with an early cut of ‘Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire’, one of two songs (along…
The Handsome Family’s new record, Hollow, began with a scream in the night. “It was a bleak winter during the middle of the pandemic,” says Brett Sparks. “One night around 4 a.m. Rennie started screaming in her sleep. She screamed, ‘Come into the circle, Joseph! There’s no moon tonight.’ Scary as it was, I thought,…