New music
Jonathan Geddes
There are always a few drawbacks to being a support act. For Allie X, the biggest issue was simply finding space to stand onstage, with so much ground already filled with covered up props for the night’s headliners. Still, she made a good effort with what she had, working the crowd well, and the clattering electro-pop of “Super Duper Party People” and a wickedly noisy “Off With Her Tits” carried enough verve by themselves that no stage craft was needed.Magdalena Bay had plenty of those songs too, but accompanied them with a stage décor that appeared to be aiming for the stars, or the moons. Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For Richard Hawley, a “little banger” is a top-notch single, one condensing everything about the performance and performer into what can he held on one side of a seven-incher. A flab-free, power-packed record. And it’s a mark of his discrimination that anything fitting the bill is a grade-A killer.Little Bangers From Richard Hawley's Jukebox Volume Two follows-up a correspondingly styled comp issued in 2023. As before, 28 tracks are selected: indeed, the first collection was titled 28 Little Bangers From Richard Hawley's Jukebox. For a second time, Link Wray crops up. This time, well-known Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
“Lincoln, you have not been a Monday night crowd, they can be a bit funny,“ says Suede frontman Brett Anderson just before then band exit the stage for the final time. “You’re more than just watchers, you got involved.”It’s doubly true. For multiple obvious reasons, Monday can be an underwhelming gig experience for both bands and audiences (I’ve come to almost resent it when bands I like hit town that day). But within this giant, red brick, converted 19th century steam engine shed, the capacity 1500 crowd respond fervently from the very start.It says something about Suede’s partial rejection Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Jill Scott is neo-soul royalty, without any doubt whatsoever. In fact, her debut album, Who Is Jill Scott? remains a monumental release over quarter of a century since it first saw the light of day.Nevertheless, Scott has continually refused to be boxed-in as a singer but is a true Renaissance Woman who has also made her mark as a spoken word artist, poet and actor. Hence, she can easily be forgiven for making us wait 11 years since her last album, Women. That said, any fans approaching To Whom This May Concern with a degree of trepidation due to its long gestation can be rest assured. Jill Read more ...
Ibi Keita
After leaving my headphones elsewhere, I plugged my wired earphones into my laptop and sat cross-legged on my bed. It felt like the universe wanted me to rewind time, back to when 2014 Forest Hills Drive first dropped, a teen in my room, listening to tinny rap through cheap speakers, imagining myself on some apartment rooftop in New York. The Fall Off took me straight back there, safe and familiar, as J. Cole carries that same boom bap spirit into his latest, and possibly last, 24-track album.From the opening moments, the album feels like home. Cole’s voice sounds like countless artists and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Edward Simon shows again on this new album of re-imagined songs from Venezuela what a very fine pianist he is. His touch and inventiveness, his command of counterpoint and voice-leading are never short of jaw-dropping, and what he does remarkably well here is to create a succession of specific, authentic moods from songs that have a personal resonance.Simon is from that golden generation of musicians who studied as teenagers at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) – Christian McBride, Kurt Rosenwinkel and the late Joey De Francesco. Simon arrived there as a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mandy, Indiana are a Mancunian four-piece with a French singer who's based in Berlin. They make a lot of noise. Their second album is a take-no-prisoners amalgamation of electronic squall, thrashy rap (a distant cousin of Dälek), and tints of deranged hyperpop. In an age when ever-increasing quantities of people seek soothing music, they are outliers. URGH is too cacophonic to be the making of them but those after a solid, catalytic bash around the brain may want to tune in.The album was flavoured by multiple operations undergone by frontwoman Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Another interesting thing about the endless flux of the streaming era is that, for all that it’s supposed to homogenise and flatten things out, sometimes it ends up allowing more interesting things to belatedly get their due. Look at the way once-obscure musicians like Julius Eastman, Alice Coltrane or Arthur Russell have snuck into the vocabulary of alternative and even mainstream music. But also, acts who weren’t short of success or acclaim but were nonetheless perhaps considered a bit cultish, nerdy or niche have gradually achieved a sort of cross-generational depth and universality of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Nothing about this album suggests that it’s a debut. Shaking Hand’s eponymous introductory shot is so assured it sounds as if an awful lot of groundwork has preceded its appearance. As it happens – beyond live shows – the only thing paving the way was a single issued last June.Shaking Hand are a Manchester trio: Ellis Hodgkiss (bass), Freddie Hunter (drums) and George Hunter (guitar, vocals). They deal in a guitar-centred art-rock with touches of Slint and Tortoise, and a muted math-rock feel. There are also hints of Field Music around the time of their 2010 Measure album and a muzzy, out-of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The Weaving is an Ango-Irish trio of accordion, voice, fiddle and piano. The voice belongs to Méabh Begley, from Kerry’s prominent musical family – she sings one of her father Séamus Begley’s songs, “Dán Lae Breithe”, further in this superb debut set of 12 songs and tunes. Cáit Ní Riain from Tipperary is on piano, and the fiddle player is Leeds-born Owen Spafford, of the acclaimed British folk-ambient duo Spafford Campbell, whose second album, Tomorrow Held, on Real World, was my album of the year in 2025.Owen Spafford describes Warp and Weft (Dlúth & Inneach) as “a cultural Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“One pure sonofabitch 45. The record to put them high in the national charts. Top five at least.” In October 1976, the weekly music paper Sounds was unequivocal about Eddie and the Hot Rods’ “Teenage Depression” single.Over at Melody Maker, the tone was similarly frothing: “Everything about the single [released 29 October] works – the explosive power, the convincing presence and the intense sound. They are the first of the new-wave punk bands to trail blaze into the national chart.”
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Depending on how their music was defined, this was so Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the 1990s, the world of electronic music was a frontier where the unimaginable often happened. These were the days of early Aphex Twin, Basic Channel, Autechre and many more pushing at the vanguard, challenging what we might even consider to be music. A golden time, Musique Concrète’s underlying principles were reborn for a chemically enhanced generation of clubbers.Quarter of a century into this millennium, while there are still outliers (such as, say, Oneohtrix Point Never or Simo Cell), the zeitgeist has moved on and, since the advent of dubstep, the sonic frontiers feel well Read more ...