Special pre-sale offers

Sigur Rós – Odin’s Raven Magic

Release date: 4 December

• Composed in the 14th or 15th century, Odin’s Raven Magic is an Icelandic poem in the ancient Edda tradition (Edda – a term that describes two Icelandic manuscripts of which together are the main sources of Norse mythology and Skáldic poetry) its anonymous author clearly had an intimate knowledge of the Edda literature and mythology which alludes to a number of pagan motifs which are now lost. The poem recounts a great banquet held by the gods in Valhalla while they were absorbed in their feasting, ominous signs appeared that could foretell the end of the worlds of the gods and men.
• The album Odin’s Raven Magic is an orchestral collaboration between Sigur Rós, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Steindór Andersen and Maria Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir which premiered 18 years ago at the Barbican Centre, London and is now finally – almost two decades later – being released. The performance honours the poem, dramatic and beautiful, classical with a modern strike. A stone marimba was built especially for the performance by Páll Guðmundsson.

Pre-sale offer CD £11.99 / 2-LP £29.99

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The White Stripes – Greatest Hits

Release date: 4 December

• This essential career-spanning collection showcases 26 previously released peak performances by The White Stripes. The album is produced by and features Jack White (guitar, vocals, piano, organ, synthesizer, marimba) and Meg White (drums, vocals).

Pre-sale offer CD £11.99 / 2-LP £28.99

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Belle And Sebastian – What To Look For In Summer

Release date: 11 December

• What To Look For In Summer features twenty-two live performances featuring songs from across Belle And Sebastian’s 25-year career. The recordings showcase the Scottish septet at the height of their power during their 2019 tour, including tracks performed on the band’s own Mediterranean cruise, ‘The Boaty Weekender’.

Pre-sale offer 2-CD £11.99 / 2-LP £21.99

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The Kills – Little Bastards

Release date: 11 December

• The Kills have compiled an extraordinary career-spanning collection of B-sides and rarities entitled, appropriately, Little Bastards. The songs date back from the band’s first singles between 2002 and 2009. All of the material has been newly remastered, and marks the first ever vinyl pressing for some of these tracks.
• The compilation includes the unreleased and never-before-heard demo ‘Raise Me’ from the 2008–09 Midnight Boom era. Other highlights include ‘I Call It Art’ from the Monsieur Gainsbourg Revisited covers compilation, the brilliant Midnight Boom digital bonus track ‘Night Train’, a blistering performance of ‘Love Is A Deserter’ from an XFM radio session and a handful of classic American roots songs performed with the kind of bruising delivery they’re famous for: Howlin’ Wolfs’ ‘Forty Four’, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put A Spell on You’ and Dock Boggs’ ‘Sugar Baby’.
• Note: The LP is available on indie-shops exclusive yellow vinyl.

Pre-sale offer CD £10.99 / 2-LP £27.99

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The Kinks – Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Pt. 1

Release date: 11 December

Pre-sale offer 2-CD £15.99 / LP £21.99 / 2-LP + 3-CD Box set £61.99

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Riverside – Lost’n’Found: Live In Tilburg

Release date: 11 December

• Polish progressive rock masters Riverside return with a very special live-release. Previously only available as strictly limited fanclub edition, Lost’n’Found: Live in Tilburg re-visits an outstanding performance at one of the biggest shows during Riverside’s European tour in 2015 for their acclaimed Love, Fear and the Time Machine album. Lost’n’Found: Live in Tilburg also documents Riverside’s last tour with original guitarist and founding member Piotr Grudzinski, who died in 2016.

Pre-sale offer 2-CD + DVD £18.99 / 3-LP + 2-CD £35.99

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Sturgill Simpson – Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1 (The Butcher Shoppe Sessions)

Release date: 11 December

• Since breaking through in 2014 with his Grammy-nominated Metamodern Sounds In Country Music album, Sturgill Simpson has established himself as one of the most daring and most acclaimed artists of our time. His music stretches across genres and styles, from the psychedelic soul of 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth (Grammy-nominated for Album of the Year and winner for Best Country Album) to the fuzzed-out rock attack of Sound & Fury in 2019. Now Simpson returns to the music of his native Kentucky with his first bluegrass project, Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1 (The Butcher Shoppe Sessions). The album, which he calls “a mixtape for the fans”, was dreamed up while he was recovering from Covid, and sees him reimagining songs from across his catalogue backed by some of Nashville’s finest acoustic virtuosos.

Pre-sale offer CD £12.99 / 2-LP £23.99

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Alanis Morissette – Havoc And Bright Lights

Release date: 18 December

• Havoc And Bright Lights is the eighth studio album by Alanis Morissette and became her first top five album in the US since 2004’s So-Called Chaos. The album peaked at number one in Canada, Italy, Austria and Switzerland, and at number two in the Netherlands and Germany. Havoc And Bright Lights was produced by Guy Sigsworth and Joe Chiccarelli and sounds much brighter, sunnier and up-tempo than her previous album Flavors Of Entanglement, winding up with a wide-open, cheerful set of adult pop. The album spawned three singles: ‘Guardian’, ‘Lens’ and ‘Receive’. The package includes a 4-page booklet with pictures and lyrics.
• Note: The LP is available on limited-edition turquoise vinyl.

Pre-sale offer 2-LP £29.99

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Blackfield – For The Music

Release date: 4 December

• Blackfield, the collaborative art-rock/alt.pop project between Israeli superstar Aviv Geffen and English songwriter/musician Steven Wilson, returns after a three-year hiatus with a new album for 2020: For The Music.
• For The Music is Blackfield’s most ambitious and expansive album to date, melding their psychedelic sonics to a perfect pop sensibility whilst, simultaneously, carrying a serious, and at times, dark, undertone.
• As with previous album, Blackfield V, Aviv has once again taken a central role as producer, lyricist, composer and instrumentalist, but Steven is still very much involved, playing guitar on several tracks and singing lead vocals on 3 songs. For The Music’s ten tracks move from psyche tinged melodies to exquisite balladry; a compact and fully realised expression of modern pop.
• Note: The LP is available on limited-edition transparent pink vinyl.

Pre-sale offer CD £11.99 / LP £25.99

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Steven Wilson – The Future Bites

Release date: 29 January

• The Future Bites is an exploration of how the human brain has evolved in the internet era. Steven Wilson’s phenomenal sixth solo album is an online portal to a world of high-concept design, custom-built for the ultra-modern consumer. Where 2017’s To The Bone confronted the emerging global issues of post truth and fake news, The Future Bites places the listener in a world of 21st-century addictions. From out-of-control retail therapy, manipulative social media and the loss of individuality, The Future Bites is less a bleak vision of an approaching dystopia than a curious reading of the here and now.
• Note: The LP is available on indies-only coloured vinyl.

Pre-sale offer CD £11.99 / LP £25.99

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Kurt Vile – Speed, Sound, Lonely KV

Release date: 15 January

• Kurt Vile’s Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP was recorded and mixed in sporadic sessions that spanned four years at The Butcher Shoppe studio in Nashville, Tennessee. It includes five songs – covers of John Prine and “Cowboy” Jack Clement as well as two originals – and was recorded alongside a cast of local heavies like Bobby Wood, Dave Roe, and Kenny Malone with Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys) and Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Superwolf) tossed into the mix as well.
• Most importantly, it features what KV has called “Probably the single most special musical moment in my life” – a duet with the late John Prine on the songwriter’s well-loved tune, ‘How Lucky’. “The truth is John was my hero for a long time when he came into The Butcher Shoppe to recut one of his deepest classics with me. And, man, I was floating and flying and I couldn’t hear anything he told me while he was there till after he was gone for the night,” notes Vile in a personal statement that accompanies the record. “A couple nights later we were playing ‘How Lucky’ together again; this time onstage at the Grand Ole Opry on New Year’s Eve at the turn of 2020. Nothing like seeing John and his band of musical brothers and family and friends playing into the new decade in front of an adoring audience on that stage in Nashville, TN... and, yup, that’s just how lucky we all got that night.”

Pre-sale offer CD £8.99 / 12" £11.99

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Goat Girl – On All Fours

Release date: 29 January

• Goat Girl’s new album, On All Fours, was produced by Dan Carey (Kae Tempest, Black Midi & Franz Ferdinand) in South London in early 2020. This new record sees the band veer away from the confrontational lyricism of their debut, and indicates Goat Girl’s maturing perspectives in discussing the world’s injustices and social prejudices, using the music to explore global, humanitarian, environmental and mindful wellbeing.
• Throughout On All Fours, Goat Girl’s frequent use of sci-fi synthesisers, off-beat chord progressions, analogue drum machines, diverse vocal styles and distinct, gritty guitars fuse a musical language that expresses both former characteristics and newer developments of the band’s sound and vision.
• Note: The LP is available on indie-shops exclusive translucent pink vinyl.

Pre-sale offer CD £10.99 / LP £22.99

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Jeff Tweedy – Love Is The King

Release date: 15 January

• It was inside Jeff Tweedy’s second home, The Loft in Chicago, that Love Is The King was recorded in April 2020, surrounded by an assemblage of treasured instruments and loved ones in a world that felt more and more alien by the day.
• This “beautifully honest ode to love and hope” is the follow-up to 2018’s Warm and 2019’s Warmer, and comes on the heels of Tweedy’s second book, How To Write One Song, out on 13 October. “At the beginning of the lockdown I started writing country songs to console myself. Folk and country type forms being the shapes that come most easily to me in a comforting way. ‘Guess Again’ is a good example of the success I was having at pushing the world away, counting my blessings – taking stock in my good fortune to have love in my life,” comments Tweedy. “A few weeks later things began to sound like ‘Love Is The King’ – a little more frayed around the edges with a lot more fear creeping in. Still hopeful but definitely discovering the limits of my own ability to self soothe.”
• Note: The LP is available on limited-edition clear vinyl.

Pre-sale offer CD £9.99 / LP £21.99

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Cerys Matthews – We Come from The Sun

Release date: 15 January

• We Come from The Sun was composed by Cerys Matthews with Hidden Orchestra and features 10 UK poets: MA.MOYO, Raymond Antrobus, Lemn Sissay, Liz Berry, Anthony Anaxagorou, Adam Horovitz, Cia Mangat, Imtiaz Dharker, Kim Moore and Kayo Chingonyi. In February 2020 Abbey Road studios welcomed each of the 10 poets to record pieces from their collections. Then lockdown hit… But, remotely and with the help of field recordists and musicians around the world, Cerys and Joe Acheson (Hidden Orchestra) created a sound journey for these poems with the theme of genesis, birth, heritage, and a journey about to begin.
• “We are living in extraordinary times, I wanted to respond but had the urge to offer more than one voice, more than one perspective. Not an echo chamber.” – Cerys Matthews.

Pre-sale offer CD £11.99 / LP £21.99

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Bicep – Isles

Release date: 22 January

• Belfast-born, London-based duo Bicep’s hotly anticipated second album, Isles, was two years in the making and expands on the artful energy of their 2018 debut, Bicep, while digging deeper into the sounds, experiences and emotions that have influenced their lives and work. Bicep (Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson) describe Isles as “a snapshot in time” of their work in this period, with the tracks designed to evolve in their different iterations from record to live show and beyond. “This is definitely the home listening version,” says Matt, “the live version will be much, much harder.”
• On the title: “We have strong mixed emotions, connected to growing up on an island,” they say, “wanting to leave, wanting to return.” For two natives of Belfast, any talk of islands, communities and identities will also have other, more domestic connotations, and has always been an aspect of their lives they’d been reluctant to talk about. “It’s always been an unquantifiable topic for us,” says Matt. “We’re not religious, but we’re from different religious backgrounds. There was always a lot of interest in us talking about those issues, but we always felt that one of the things we loved about dance music was that freedom it gave you to be released from talking about those things.”
• “You’d enter the club and it would be people from both sides of the tracks and they’d be hugging,” says Andy, referring to massively influential Belfast club Shine, where both cut their musical teeth. “And the following week, they’d be with their mates rioting. It felt like the safest place but, on paper, it should have been the most dangerous.” Musically, too, they find echoes of those days in their work. “It was like being smacked in the head with a hammer,” Matt says, of the tunes that defined that scene, and which find expression in Isles’ most raw and energetic corners.
• Note: the deluxe 3-LP is available on transparent neon-orange vinyl.

Pre-sale offer CD £10.99 / 2-LP £25.99 / Deluxe 3-LP £34.99 / Picture Disc 2-LP £33.99

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Sleaford Mods – Spare Ribs

Release date: 21 January

• Recorded in lockdown in a furious three-week studio blitz at JT Soar in July, Sleaford Mods – the polemical Jason Williamson and dexterous producer Andrew Fearn – kick against the pricks with unrivalled bite, railing against hypocrisy, inequality and apathy with their inimitable, scabrous sense of humour. And Spare Ribs, featuring Amy Taylor of Melbourne punks Amyl and the Sniffers and the British newcomer Billy Nomates, finds the duo charged with ire at the UK Government’s sense of entitlement, epitomised by its devil-may-care approach to the coronavirus crisis.
• Commenting on the new album Jason says, “Our lives are expendable under most governments, secondary under a system of monetary rule. We are stock if you like, parts on a shelf for the purposes of profit, discarded at any moment if fabricated or non-fabricated crisis threatens productivity. This is constant, obviously and notably in the current pandemic. The masses cannot be present in the minds of ill-fitting leaders, surely? Or else the realisation of their catastrophic management would cripple their minds. Much like the human body can still survive without a full set of ribs we are all ‘spare ribs’, preservation for capitalism, through ignorance and remote rule, available for parts.”
• Note: The LP is available on green vinyl, exclusive to independent shops.

Pre-sale offer CD £10.99 / LP £17.99

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Magnum – Dance Of The Black Tattoo

Release date: 8 January

• It’s been three years since Magnum brought out The Valley Of Tears: The Ballads, a compilation that focused on the British rock act’s quiet, more otherworldly and dreamy side. Three years during which the idea matured to follow this successful release with a companion piece. Dance Of The Black Tattoo has turned into exactly that: a collection of 14 rare live cuts, studio recordings and outstanding radio versions that present Magnum exclusively as tough-as-nails rocking and extremely vibrant musicians. What makes this collection so special is the fact that Magnum have gone through their impressive archive, looking for rare live cuts and outstanding radio versions and have come up with spirited live recordings and edits that concentrate on the essential components of some of their most accomplished rock numbers. Naturally, guitarist and band mastermind Tony Clarkin has used this opportunity to remaster and update all 14 tracks so that they comply with the state-of-the-art of sound technology.
• ‘On A Storyteller’s Night’, the title track of their 1985 masterpiece, and ‘Dance Of The Black Tattoo’ are another two rare live tracks from the bonus section of Escape From The Shadow Garden, followed by radio edits of their seasonal anti-war number ‘On Christmas Day’ and the fan favourite ‘Born To Be King’ from the classic Goodnight L.A., previously only available on vinyl or for digital download, followed by ‘Phantom Of Paradise Circus’ and ‘No God Or Saviour’, both bonus tracks from Sacred Blood Divine Lies. ‘Your Dreams Won’t Die’ and ‘Twelve Men Wise And Just’ are two live bonus tracks which first featured on Lost On The Road To Eternity, before ‘Show Me Your Hands’, ‘Not Forgiven’ and ‘Madman Or Messiah’, three previously unreleased radio edits from the still topical studio recordings ‘Lost On The Road To Eternity’ (2018) and ‘The Serpent Rings’ (2020) round off the new release.
• Note: The LP is available on limited-edition magenta vinyl.

Pre-sale offer CD £16.99 / 2-LP £28.99

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Passenger – Songs For The Drunk And Broken-Hearted

Release date: 8 January

• Passenger’s latest album, Songs For The Drunk And Broken-Hearted, is his thirteenth to date. He thought it was ready to go in early 2020, but then the Covid-19 pandemic turned the world upside down. The majority of the album had been written when Rosenberg was newly single and many of the songs are populated by drunk and broken-hearted characters with the album being about heartbreak across the board. Songs For The Drunk And Broken-Hearted includes the recently released tracks ‘The Way That I Love You’ and ‘London In The Spring’ as well as a number of additional tracks written during lockdown.

Pre-sale offer CD £11.99 / Deluxe CD £16.99 / 2-LP £26.99

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Buck Meek – Two Saviors

Release date: 15 January

• Big Thief’s Buck Meek announces his new solo album, Two Saviors. While his last album, 2018’s Buck Meek, is a yarn of blue-collar fairy tales and character driven narratives, Two Saviors emerges as a cathartic, naked confession of heartbreak, resiliency, and enchantment. The first word on Two Saviors is ‘pareidolia’, a word about recognising shapes where none were intended to exist – like searching for images in the clouds. It’s an uncommon word, with a beautiful sound, and serves as an apt guide through these new songs of Buck’s, which are themselves uncommon and beautiful, and which invite a deep, cloud-gaze state of attention.
• Note: The LP is available on indie-shops exclusive clear smoke translucent vinyl.

Pre-sale offer CD £12.99 / LP £23.99

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Bring Me The Horizon – Post Human: Survival Horror

Release date: 22 January

• Continuing to push their creative boundaries, even during lockdown, Bring Me The Horizon have created Post Human: Survival Horror, a body of work that is arguably one of their most exciting, diverse, intricate pieces of music to date. The first two tracks from the EP – ‘Parasite Eve’ and the recent colossus ‘Obey’, featuring fellow Brit Yungblud – have received critical acclaim and amassed over 115 million audio and video streams combined to date. Other guests on the EP include Babymetal, Nova Twins and Amy Lee from Evanescence.

Pre-sale offer CD £11.99 / LP £21.99

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