Ethel Cain’s Perverts is a dark and experimental follow-up to her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter. It takes listeners on a haunting journey through unsettling soundscapes that blend elements of drone, slowcore and dark ambient music.

I don’t really want to talk about this year. Genuinely.

It’s been so horrific on the macro scale with deranged Fascism and the effects of rampant and undeniable climate change looming everywhere you look – and on the personal level I’ve been been bombarded with all the inevitable, arbitrary slings and arrows that life can muster, from multiple bereavements on down – that I’d very much rather just neck a load of tranquilisers and fine wines and resolutely enter my hands-over-ears, “lalalala can’t hear you”, era.  

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Blood Incantation Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)

I won’t give it loads about the atmosphere and attendees at We Out Here – suffice to say that in its fifth edition, it has maintained all the strengths I mentioned last year, with the added benefit of slicker-operating infrastructure having ironed out any remaining wrinkles in its new Dorset site. The navigability, sound levels, smooth running bars etc were all just a little better, which only added to the good vibes that have been there from the start.

I had been softened up for the Medicine Festival by a recent visit to the global music extravaganza WOMAD – a trio of us met a guy called Paul aka SpriITman – an ex-IT expert who after a health crisis realised he was a healer. Bear with me on this.

Natasha Khan’s musical career has always explored the artier end of pop. Her latest album, her sixth and first in five years, is more akin to the soundtrack work she did with Swiss composer Dominik Scherrer on BBC spook-thriller Requiem in 2018 than her Bat For Lashes albums.

Since The Smile drummer Tom Skinner’s bandmates Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are two-fifths of Radiohead, the trio is often designated a “side project”, or satellite, as if its music pales beside the mothership’s. On the strength of its second album, that’s an absurd, not to mention insulting notion.

Nailah Hunter’s debut album occupies a domain where trip-hop, Lana Del Rey were she recording in a deep, echo-filled cave and ambient-slanted pop overlap. There’s a kinship with FKA Twigs and Julia Holter, but Hunter’s propensity to channel what feels like a mystical experience means that Lovegaze is more inscrutable than what’s generated by first impressions.

The first of two December theartsdesk on Vinyls which will appear in quick succession. This one's mostly new artists. The next one will be our Christmas Special, filled with seasonal fare and present-suitable reissues and boxsets. For the best musical finds, dive in!

VINYL OF THE MONTH

The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde thinkers in pop, though, they made a glorious and highly unlikely commercial success of it, via a series of globally successful singles (and, to some degree, the album, The White Room).