The single retains his staple gothic electro sound as far as his music is concerned, but the lyrics take a bit of a shift – grief and darkness are replaced by roaming the streets of Berlin with like-minded souls, showing some rays of light in the surrounding darkness. As he puts it, “Black and Blue” electrifies as a testament to finding joy in chaos, to finding a new perspective in the eyes of someone else, to coming back to life after a seemingly unending downfall. The single is a sign that Bleak just might color his music and lyrics in lighter tones, without filly abandoning what became his signature sound.

Bleak, who previously played shows shows in Mexico, the US, UK and all across Europe, is also preparing for new shows in Germany with Foreign Resort, previously sharing stages with the likes of She Past Away, Clan of Xymox and Traitrs.

Listen to “Black and Blue” below or find it on streamers.

Aesthetic feel (the vibe, kids!) takes precedence over conventional song structure for the duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, bringing into play conversations about what exactly constitutes a song, and what doesn’t. The pair align with the tradition of musique concrète, and there are moments on the album where the natural world – a stream, birds, rainfall – can be heard if you listen closely enough. What at first sounds like just a wall of trashy old guitar noise has layers beneath it. Lots of them, too. 

Like being able to draw horses anatomically correctly or successfully editing a film to an inaudible natural beat, people either ‘get’ Sunn O))) or they don’t. There’s rarely any middle ground. Anyone who suggests they “like their early work, but they’ve lost it recently…” is just lying, and there are few things in life worse than a hipster liar.

A curio in many ways, the band have been creating slabs of slow, detuned sonic majesty for 28 years, taking the template created by Dylan Carlson’s band Earth on Earth 2: Special Low Frequency Version and melding it into a colossal maelstrom of rapturous, beautiful noise. To understand Sunn O))) is to move away from the need to require structure, formula, and melody. Often likened to the most terrifying elements of nature; their sound is simultaneously bewitching and bewildering.   

Sunn O))) is the pair’s 10th studio album, excluding their collaborations with Boris, Ulver, and the aforementioned godlike genius Scott Walker. Here, they’re stripped back to the ‘Shoshin duo’ of two guitars, but that only results in more seismic, glacial shifts of loud minimalism as less, for once, is much more.        

“XXANN” opens proceedings and it’s clear that there’s no reinvention here, no shifting of the template. The move to Sub Pop (who also released Earth 2 back in 1993) hasn’t dimmed their vision one iota, and the clarity of the twin guitars as they crash together in unison after a couple of minutes of wailing feedback is simply glorious. There’s a ritualistic element to a Sunn O))) live performance – robes, communal wine, and amplifier worship – which is impossible not to visualise when you surrender yourself to the drone. The contorted, bended notes towards the track’s 18-minute runtime are transcendental, sounding more energetic than anything they’ve ever produced before. Same but different doesn’t make sense, but that’s how this feels. 

After the gloriously quasi-absurd opener, “Does Anyone Hear Like Venom?” opens with a low rumble that feels like the PTSD twitches after the assault of “XXANN”. Its first note drawls and swirls like the start of “Richard” from their 2000 debut album ØØ Void. The separation on this track between the guitar and bass is more pronounced than usual, and the lines interweave almost like atoms colliding. The visceral element of Sunn O))) is all-encompassing, and this record is the heaviest in their catalogue (with the exception of the mountainous live album Нежить). The absence of vocals, often the standout element of albums such as Black One or Monoliths and Dimensions, is a welcome one as it allows for fewer distractions, and for a more immersive experience in the washes of euphoric guitar.   

There are some moments of respite in the eye of the noise storm. “Butch’s Guns” and “Glory Black” both have brief interludes from the onslaught with the former using intermittent moments of silence, the latter a gentle and meandering piano refrain. The relative silence really is quite startling, especially as they happen so early on in the track. You can still hear the gentle hum of the amps, but the disparity between feeling engulfed and then the subsequent lack of noise makes you a little bereft as an air of absence takes over. 

The intense production workfrom Brad Wood (alongside the band themselves) brings a sense of intimacy to the work as it feels as though you can feel each tube valve vibrating. The opening of “Everett Moses” is the most personal that Sunn O))) have ever sounded. For the initial wall of noise, there’s a sense of a lack of control which is entirely against their usual stoic nature. There’s a sense of wild abandon here before the duo manage to take their rightful places as the controllers and conductors of the squall. Then, right at the end, there’s another burst of frenetic noise – this time, a high frequency that’s startling and unsettling. Despite the template remaining the same, they can still surprise. 

Sunn O))) rewards repeat listens as there’s so much going on under the surface. It’s majestic, euphoric, but also clearly not for everybody. But then you should never really trust the majority, anyway.

The inevitability of their teaming up comes not just from hometown proximity, but also because they seem to have been ships passing in the night, having worked with each other separately, but rarely as a trio. Kohl seems to be the connecting thread: she paired up with Stewart on 2020’s Recipe for a Boiled Egg and separately with Johnson on last year’s For Translucence. For BODY SOUND they come together with what feels like an incredibly natural ease; they sink into each other with such deftness it can often be impossible to tell where one person’s contribution starts and the other’s end. It all makes for an album that moves with a watery grace, lulling at certain junctures, vigorous at others, and always forming and reforming. As per the Heraclitus adage, the proverbial river Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart make never feels like the same river next time round. 

Evoking the work of Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, the combination of live strings, field recordings, and tape effects meld seamlessly. The seven-minute centrepiece “stone | piece” showcases the trio’s talent in the way they build new forms before you: the track builds brick by brick, layer by layer, but strands are gradually taken away, loose threads becoming sonic squiggles. “laundry | blood” is anchored by a soft metallic percussive loop, like a washing machine on a gentle cycle. The everyday churn is contrasted with dramatic, pensive strings as wave forms disintegrate, like red stains bleeding out from white sheets and then dissolved in water. When it all coalesces only for it to slowly disperse, it’s as strong an example of the musicians’ work and skills as you could want. 

Just hearing the three artists weaving in and out of each other is as much a pleasure. On final track “fog | mirror” they all take turns as the backbone of the song with slow, thoughtful strokes on cello, violin, and viola. The screechy cacophony on “burning | counting (sleeping)” will jolt any listener into sitting upright as Stewart and Johnson’s agitated violin and viola increasingly impose on Kohl’s soft cello interlude until the din comes to a head again. At moments it sounds dissonant, but a moment of elegance and synergy is rarely far off; BODY SOUND is often locked in but still retains an improvisatory feel, like Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart found a glimmer of gold and kept panning until they found a larger nugget.

Those glimmers and nuggets will come in different forms depending on what qualities resonate with the listener most. Graceful moments showcasing the way their music can unfold (the Tibetan bowl music-like “shadow | mess”, the Max Richter-esque opening track “dawn | pulse”); tracks that sound like the trio reacting in real time to the room (the cavernous “door | watch”, which evokes Andrew Bird’s Echolocations as they play with the reverberations ricocheting off the walls); and curious sonic experiments (“cough | laugh”, with its pizzicato plucks over a slowed down swell of strings). Given how a recorded collaboration between Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart was inevitable at some point, it’s great that there’s little disappointment to be found. The inevitable might sound as expected, but that’s no bad thing with artists with such intriguing talents.

The language of the drums is a language universally understood. It’s a language used to unshackle from the bondage of oppression, a language of communion and freedom, a language to help your body and mind surrender to some sort of higher power.

This year’s Rewire festival is filled to the brim with artists who wield the drums in a fashion recognisant of their wide-ranging potential. Drums have a way of shocking us out of our system, coaxing us into states of alertness oftentimes neutered by the many menial distractions within this era of late-stage capitalism. An act like Nihiloxica wield their drums with whimsical austerity, somehow sounding both ancient and futuristic in their laborious performances. The legendary Einstürzende Neubauten fuse this ritualistic pounce within the crude geometrics of industrial material.

Two collaborative performances, Sumac & Moor Mother and The Bug & Dis Fig conjure drums at a more lurching pace, a Lovecraftian entity looming beneath some murky surface. Beatrice Dillon and Laurel Halo purvey the drums into spastic abstractions that ooze brainy inquisition and zest. Dumama and Slikback, two artists derived from the African diaspora, meanwhile, express the drums as a more internal voice; one capable of streamlining and disentangling hearts and minds. Their beat abstractions have a way of dovetailing miraculously into something organic and alive.

Some artists, namely Valentina Magaletti and experimental rock legends Tortoise, have mastered grooves that travel within their own headstrong wavelength. The rhythmic assault of Blawan and Mandy, Indiana bring the other extreme: cantankerously swaying from any set pulse to pure chaos, expressing the fight-or-flight dread of a war zone. And then, on the far end of that spectrum, stand Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Oneohtrix Point Never: two artists from completely different eras who employ the drums with an infectious and holistic benevolence.

Long story short, drums are definitely not dead at Rewire 2026. So let’s cherrypick 15 of the many exciting acts for Rewire’s 15th edition.

Los Thuthanaka

The Chuquimamani-Condori siblings hurl ritualistic music through a digitised garbage disposal, scrambling it into it becomes a frenzied, oddly infectious miasma of noise. It’s hypnotic, it’s a little loony, and it has a way of hoovering crowds up like moths flocking towards an eternal flame.

Mandy, Indiana

Visceral, confrontational, and very very loud. This quartet’s brand of noise rock strikes like a fractured expression of trauma, survival and uprise – and at times, can astonishingly unfold into frothing, warped pop music. French vocalist Valentine Caulfield eludes any sort of codified stage hijinks, making each show unpredictable and invigorating.

Armand Hammer

The joint outfit of ELUCID and billy woods develops the duo’s peerless lyrical talents into often groundbreaking productions, compelling even legends like The Alchemist to rethink their well-honed beat making wizardry. Armand Hammer has been taking hip-hop to new adventurous directions record after record, and it isn’t getting boring anytime soon.

james K

Sought-after underground producer james K has helped the likes of Drew McDowall (Coil) and Yves Tumor lift songs into the nightmare realm. Her own music, however, remains rooted in a mesmeric dream pop reverie. Amidst all the wayward experimentation, a good pop hook indeed can strike the purest, and james K understands this bliss better than most.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland with Elizabeth Copeland

When artist Beverly Glenn-Copeland made Keyboard Fantasies in 1986, he said he was making music for a generation that had yet to be born. Like many of Copeland’s works, this turned out to be prophetic, as the album was reissued in the 2010s as a lost classic. It has revitalised Copeland’s music into the present day: his music burrows still novel sounding pathways between folk-jazz, new age, gospel and West-African music. At Rewire, he takes the stage with his longtime partner, theatre artist, playwright and producer Elizabeth Copeland.

Nihiloxica

Nihiloxica is without question one of those seeing is believing type of live acts where it’s more or less ‘all drums on deck’: Ugandan drummers Henry Isabirye, Henry Kasoma, and Jamiru Mwanje, UK-based producer Pete Jones (pq), and Amsterdam-based producer Jacob Maskell-Key (Spooky-J) pour their zest in zeal in a noise abomination that’s equal parts African drum music, punk rock and rave party.

Juana Molina

Imagine a Clarice Lispector novel converted to pop music, and Juana Molina’s music is kind of like that; spectral, macabre, beautiful, and agitating, all often in the same melody. The strange marriage of contradictions manifests seamlessly: a freak folk melody can sound like its from another planet, and a voice can feel as if it grows from your subconsciousness. ‘One of a kind’ is putting it mildly.

Kim Gordon

The former Sonic Youth icon has no intent of coasting on her storied alternative rock legacy, instead conjuring a cavalier clash of trap beats, noise pop, kraut rock and contemporary pop. Wonderfully obtuse, yet performed with Gordon’s signature aplomb and dry-witted humor.

Sumac & Moor Mother

Moor Mother is one of today’s most innovative artists and outspoken voices, and her collaborations are often as surprising as absorbing. Joining forces with freejazz/experimental metal collective Sumac unfolds in the menacing howl into the heavens, where words cut through the instruments and vice versa into a mosaic of fireband noise.

WaqWaq Kingdom feat. VJ Kalma

WaqWaq Kingdom is made out of Japanese cyberfolk siren Kiki Hitomi and producer Shigeru Ishihara (who set Concordia ablaze last year as one half of Takkak Takkak). Together they summon a weird and wonderful concert experience where folk and futurism magically coalesce. The visuals by VJ Kalma create an audiovisual odyssey that invites full immersion.

Milkweed

Milkweed are a realm of their own making: the singular outfit that can employ modern-day hip-hop inspired productions and come up with music that somehow still sounds like it’s unearthed like some archeological relic from ancient times. Their source material isn’t briskly rendered in modern context, but delineated in a way that expresses the slower march of history. Truly special stuff.

Leila Bordreuil

Lou Reed shouldn’t be the only individual to lay claim to the term ‘metal machine music’. Enter Brooklyn based artist Leila Bordreuil, who explores the sonic extremities of the cello with inquisitive vigor and raw, unfettered emotion. Noise can indeed be beautiful when its unraveled from the symbiotic relationship between person and chosen instrument, a sentiment Bordreuil’s performance will most certainly underscore.

My New Band Believe

Oddball outsider pop performed in 4K: that’s more or less My New Band Believe. It’s anyone’s guess how this strange dichotomy between slacker sensibility and virtuoso chops will unfold on stage. But purely on a need-to-know basis: the project’s mastermind is Cameron Picton, who was previously employed by defunct post-punk rule breakers black midi.

Jespfur

Dutch sound artist Jespfur has collaborated with MIKE, and conversely, his music similarly awakens this sentiment of just hanging out in a living room and letting impulse lead the way in thrifty, shoulder-shrugging fashion. The prelude may be ‘a nice hang with some music involved’, but the reality often unfolds in something illuminating and emotionally resonant.

Blawan

‘Demented’, ‘punishing’, ‘ear-splitting’ are often markers attached to Blawan’s noise-laden, screwball take on electronic music. But there’s a deeply emotionally-expressive tangent underpinning to his obdurate craft, often depicting heightened states of disarray, mileage and torment. It’s transposed into some of the most thrilling music you can expect: electronic music with the oomph of a live band… now fully in a live setting to boot. Bring them earplugs.

Rewire Festival takes place in The Hague on 9-12 april 2026. Visit the website for more info.

It’s happening.

This is not quite the crowning of legitimacy and respectability that people have insisted Baby Keem is due for years, nor is this the tidy prestige-rap maturity arc. Instead, something much more raw and electric is happening on Ca$ino: Baby Keem is fiercely, defiantly becoming himself, for himself. Keem’s follow-up to the rough but exciting Melodic Blue doesn’t present him as a finished product, but as a more confident one – a restless builder whose instincts are still jagged, yes, but now more bold and intentional. While his last record, as with many debuts, overflowed with a thrilling pileup of ideas, sounds, and things to say, Ca$ino feels like Keem is now choosing, with pride and determination, which parts of that messiness to keep and show the world in his own way.

This deserves attention because Keem has always been easier to describe than to truly feel, beyond just ‘that one rapper who’s cousins with Kendrick’. On Ca$ino, his quirks lose their novelty and predetermined hype, crystallizing into trademarks. The performances across his sophomore effort feel bolder: no longer just sly winks from the edge of your speakers, but direct, room-commanding confessions. Keem demands you feel with him, bristle at his edges, and still laugh with him in discomfort: “Her man bought the dog, he just didn’t have it in him / I just hit my stride, let you clean up my momentum.”

Now, The Melodic Blue was compelling because of how far it reached in every direction. It was breathy, elastic and occasionally aimless in the way breakthrough albums often are – less a straight line than a field test, a machine gun spray of ideas that proved Keem could survive almost any beat, cadence, or mood. Yet, for all its energy, the album barely told anything about him. Its excess was part of the appeal. He sounded like someone discovering himself under different lights and shades, in real time, in a way that was untidy. This made his words a little unbelievable. Despite being a bit aimless, there was no denying that Baby Keem’s debut was also exciting.

Ca$ino reels everything in, keeps that disarming, shapeshifting instinct and redirects it. Instead of using first-record unpredictability as pure momentum, Keem uses it as memory work. The switches in tone, along with vocal pivots, feel less like experiments for their own sake and more like an artist trying to tell the truth without pretending truth arrives in one voice. The sprawling “Circus Circus Freestyle” displays this with quite the flair, and in the song, he even literally tells us, “I’m a genre bender, and I’m comin’ out of broken home.” This track exemplifies how the album’s focus doesn’t come from Keem polishing himself up for mainstream appeal, but from his ability to use his chameleonic ways to frame a more intentional narrative – one which sees him step beyond just being Kendrick’s cousin or pgLang’s next star. Ca$ino treats those labels as incidental. Instead, Keem emerges as an impassioned storyteller, flaunting both a tough beginning and a unique presence. His crooked humor, abrupt emotional detours, and the way his songs can be playful and sad at once – all combine to create a style that is unmistakably his own.

What once came across as messy and volatile now feels like control – not polished control, but the kind that comes from knowing how to exploit instability. Ca$ino gives those unsteadiness  context: place, family, and the psychic-emotional math of betting on yourself. “Highway 95 pt.2” stands out, towering over the rest of the record because it distills what Ca$ino does best. Keem strips back the usual theatrics and lets his growing lyrical ability carry the weight, rapping over a sparse background that leaves room for every detail he wants us to glean. The song’s power lies in how it strains for effect: movement, scarcity, and family history come through in vivid images, and Keem meets that material with restraint that keeps it from turning sentimental—just mysterious, slightly somber, and dashed with a fun, memorable melody that almost feels discovered.

At the same time, there’s still that youthful, exciting aspect that spilled over from The Melodic Blue into the new record, and into Keem himself. He’s still chasing that viral moment – that infectious bit that decontextualizes him in order to lure listeners inside his context. He’s got some pop gems up his sleeve. For example, a cut like “Dramatic Girl” sees Keem take those shiny, elastic impulses that distinguished his debut and apply them with sharper purpose to Ca$ino, providing a bubbly buoyancy against the more solemn content of this record. A raunchy banger like “$ex Appeal” with Too $hort does the same but with a bit more humor and carefree bragadocia. Yes, this is a disarmingly confessional record, but not the kind that is overweight with heaviness. He’s still the fun young rapper we’ve gotten to experience over the past five years.

Baby Keem isn’t sanding down his weirdness to prove he can make a ‘serious’ rap album. Instead, he uses it to paint a more complete picture. He lets seams show, moods clash, so that listeners keep coming back. Ca$ino doesn’t mark the moment Baby Keem becomes easier to categorize, but the moment he stops needing to be. Baby Keem has arrived, no less fun but clearer to his audience.

That Saputjiji opens with a fierce declaration and message that is impossible to misconstrue is practically par for the course then. “Fuck War” is a gutteral and unforgettable example of how powerful and impression Tagaq’s traditional throat singing (known as katajjaq) is. Her voice goes from hoarse and gritty screams to ecstatic high pitch wails as a metallic drum track pings alongside her and flecks of distorted electric guitar and synths simmer to a discordant boil. The need and time for nuance and subtext is gone, and Tagaq sounds like she’s got a full revolution marching behind her.

While Tagaq is often at her most impressionable and memorable when she channels her ire and indignation into incendiary attacks at oppressors past and present, Saputjiji’s most intriguing moments might be when she deals in the photo negative. Towards the middle of the album she dips into a pair of mystical ballads addressing the suicide crisis in Nunavut. On “Exit Wound” she works with noirish textures, scratchy violins hovering about spare piano chords, making for a stark and moving stillness to contrast the fire of the other tracks. “When They Call” builds a backdrop of monochrome strings over five minutes before Tagaq enters with multitracked vocals, sounding not unlike Fever Ray in the process. “Though I know it hurts inside / I’m begging you, don’t take your life / We need you here just to survive / Your bones, your teeth keep us alive,” she urges plainly, addressing that culture exists in each and every individual, and everyone is part of the fight. 

These tracks also open into the album’s latter half, where unfortunately the focus and impact wane. Like Tagaq’s previous album, Tongues, much of the material here is taken from her 2018 book Split Tooth (which now has a new stage production entitled Split Tooth: Saputjiji, which Tagaq recently premiered); regrettably this means that a notable amount of Saputjiji feels like offcuts from the last record, ideas that don’t quite have a place to go or a particular focus in mind. “Bohica” ushers in a woozy, trance-like state, Tagaq’s voice swirling around violin and skittering drum tracks – but it feels like an interlude amongst other interludes, a blank canvass that needs filled in, or a leftover mood piece that demonstrates her range but lacks an emotive hook. On the 88 second “Expensive Plane Tickets” the wail of what sounds like an animal and a grainy radio broadcast weave alongside a decaying electronic loop; it’s a fascinating texture but fizzles out to nothing.

When Tagaq brings words, sometimes the meaning feels too far out of reach. “Lichens” feels missing context, like an extract from a book that needs more of a lead up to explain phrases like “Three lies / Four fists / Eight facts / Stones collected / Warmed by body.” On the other side, sometimes the lack of nuance works against her. On “Foxtrot”, Tagaq brings in Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham to beat chests and snarl with, but it amounts to nothing more than spelling out an expletive with the NATO phonetic alphabet. Not only are there much better ways to use Abraham, the bit becomes tiring all too quickly and even at 93 seconds it feels too long. 

Were Saputjiji to arrive on the heels of Tongues, it would perhaps feel a little less disappointing, but four years later it’s hard to get as much from it as with her previous albums. Shortened to an EP it may still have had the feel of a victory lap, but an impactful and well-earned one. There’s still material to get your teeth into: the trudging “Black Boot” with its vivid imagery, the feverish and threatening “Razorblades”, the starry instrumental closer “Imiq”, and generally just the way Tagaq uses katajjaq in fascinating and inventive ways both in the background and foreground. While Tagaq is still vehement as ever, as a whole, Saputjiji feels lacking in a little direction for her fury. Her best work comes when the target is clear, and sometimes the aim feels less like a pointed target and more like a gesture to the world in general. Still strong, but without precision, the cut isn’t as deep.

Maybe those expectations were concentrated on Bon Iver coming up with more music in the similar vein, but Vernon’s concept proved to be more broadminded and imaginative, and he probably wanted to move away from the experiences that created that album in the first place. He moved into a number of other directions on his follow-up projects, with experimental electronics playing a bigger role than anyone would have expected. Vernon didn’t seem to care much about anyone’s expectation, staying firmly on the track of creating music that suited him exactly at that moment.

And it all seemed to work in his favor, as all of his records up to 2025’s SABLE fABLE, apparently his last studio album, got the acclaim they justly deserved from both sides of the music aisle.

So what is up next? Well, as far as new music we don’t know, but for now he’s releasing a Volumes series akin to some other notable artists (notably Neil Young) which, as he notes, will include live shows, demos, unreleased recordings and other previously unheard material

For the first of these, he’s decided to give time to shine spotlight on the live band he formed during the course of his career, which was built to transfer his studio craft to the stage – and did so spectacularly. The title of the first installment is clear and precise – Volumes: One “Selections From Music Concerts 20219-2023 Bon Iver 6 Piece Band. It does exactly what it says on the tin, with Vernon and his crew (Andrew Fitzpatrick, Jenn Wasner, Matthew McCaughan, Michael Lewis and Sean Carey) showing what Bon Iver’s music is all about. As. Vernon puts it himself – “This particular set of 10 songs is like, ‘Here, if you’ve never heard Bon Iver, or you have and you didn’t like it, this might be for you.’ This is what we became. This is really us at our best. This is it.”

In many ways, that is exactly it – it covers the span of all elements that represents the music of Bon Iver, both as the showcase of the span of Vernon’s songwriting and the actual ability of him and his band to do it justice in a live setting. Notably, Vernon avoided including any songs from that initial album – seemingly telling everybody who cares to listen to this one that he and the band are more that one trick pony.

Ö is dance music for those with attention deficit conditions as all bar one of the tracks are under three minutes long (“Feel the Real” clocks in at a mighty 3:01). This in itself is fine until you realise that it may not be an entirely creative choice and more the fact that Fcukers don’t know how to employ the circle of fifths in their songwriting. There are no expansive progressions beyond verse-chorus-verse hooks. All 11 tracks on Ö stand up on their own accord, but they just don’t gel together all that well as a complete body of work. As each song pauses briefly before the next, there’s a feeling that the record would have been a triumph if they’d taken the bold choice of mixing each track into the other, melding rather than compartmentalising.

The opening tracks of “Beatback” and “Lucky” set the template straight off the bat – we’re in earworm territory with breezy vocals, warped synths, and sharp beats that’ll get any dancefloor moving but there’s also a sterility to the mix that suggests they’re aiming more at a pop crowd. The basslines are present and correct, but too low in the mix which has an overall shine to it when you want it to be grimier. “Lucky” sounds like a Zongamin track without the twisted sensibilities that made him an essential but underrated artist (whose last album in 2018 was called O!, by the way…).  

The production work on Ö by Kenneth Blume (previously known as Kenny Beats) hinders any sense of dynamism or frenetic urgency that was there on Fcukers’ early releases and this is the one great shame of the record as a whole. It’s not trashy enough to be daft or punk, it’s too polished and lacking the required brashness to be electroclash, and it’s too laboured in places to be hyperpop. And yet… and yet there’s still something really endearing at the heart of Ö that feels wide-eyed and out of place with the persona the duo are pushing.   

“Butterflies” takes its cue from UK garage and it’s at this point in the record that you realise that this is nothing but a really lovely pop album. Preconception built from numerous press releases and the general stirrings of the hype machine can be a hell of a thing. This isn’t a sophisticated, sleazy album made by outsiders. It’s product – pure and simple. It’s a melting pot that nods at a range of styles, artists, and cultural movements. It is, to borrow the phrase from subcultural theorist Ted Polhemus, the supermarket of styles. Beats and hooks taken from the shelf, repackaged, and sold back to us as something new, something edgy and exciting. 

Both “if you wanna party come over to my house” and “Play Me” have a (non-Charli XCX) brattish quality to them, an aloof pair of songs built on one idea and one idea only. The constant repetition on each could highlight the social media zeitgeist where nothing that’s valued in that sphere has meaning beyond itself. Attention spans influenced by algorithms don’t require depth, or even feeling – just ‘the point’ being addressed as soon as possible. And the fact that “Play Me” has a background vocal line that sounds like it’s delivered by M dot R (a reference maybe only our UK based readers will know) doesn’t do it any favours. 

“I Like It Like That” has an airy feel, with a soundsystem style vocal intro that feels like it’s lifted from Leftfield’s seminal album Leftism which is carried into “TTYGF” which has the album’s best production work even though it’s the worst song.

The influences present on the record could be read as a postmodern aural smorgasbord, a culture vulture cash grab, or simply artists wearing their lineage on their sleeves. It feels as though Fcukers are taking us through the favourite parts of their record collection, and Ö is merely the sum of its acculturated parts. By the time “Getaway” comes around you get the sense that Fcukers have listened to Lamb’s What Sound? but also there’s a smart game being played as the references are perhaps too niche and too old for Fcukers’ core audience.   

The charm – and there is plenty of it – of Ö may well be accidental. Fcukers aren’t the cutting edge new kids on the block they want you to think they are. They’re a nostalgia trip of intertextual references. Ö will no doubt frustrate some, and delight many others. It is, after all, just a ride that doesn’t need to be taken too seriously.

We’ve picked out a few of the ones that have most excited us during this dark and dreary month. Enjoy our BPM Curates playlist for March below.

Below is the track list and some notes from our team about why they’ve selected them for this month’s playlist.

Beth Orton – “Ground Above”

Four years on from Weather Alive, Beth Orton’s spell might have been receding – but it has us fully in her grasp again with the sudden release of eight-minute single “Ground Above”. A slow-builder, both musically and emotionally, it grasps you in its warm embrace as Orton’s weatherbeaten voice drifts through memories, then ever so subtly tightens as the urgency picks up, with the songwriter piling on the poetry and memories until we’re left with a mountain of feelings. – Rob Hakimian

Cameron Winter – “Warning”

Cameron Winter is on such a heater – both as a solo artist and fronting Geese – that even the ‘throwaway’ track he’s donated to the recent War Child HELP(2) compilation is an absolute stunner. “Warning” is a tense, fraught traipse through pizzicatto strings; a frostbitten atmosphere where Winter considers his life’s achievements and the shadow cast over them by doubt, nihilism and certain death. Filled with stark images and genuinely arresting emotion – bordering on desperation – “Warning” will stay with you. – Rob Hakimian

Charlie Puth – “Home” (feat. Hikaru Utada)

“Home” is built on a quiet idea, that a place doesn’t mean much without the person who gives it weight. Charlie Puth keeps things deliberately restrained: soft percussion, warm synths, and a melody that never quite stretches beyond its comfort zone. It’s steady, almost too steady.

Hikaru Utada’s verse shifts the ambience. Sung in Japanese, it adds distance and softness, turning the track into something less literal, more shared. It stops being just Puth’s sentiment and becomes something wider. The song doesn’t build or resolve in any big way. It loops, sits, lingers. That repetition feels slight, but it works in its favour, the emotion isn’t changing, so the music doesn’t either. – Mary Chiney

Dry Cleaning – “Sliced by a Fingernail”

On Dry Cleaning’s freshly released single, “Sliced by a Fingernail”, Florence Shaw offers surreal imagery (“A disco night full of big heads”, “Every dog with its mouth open”, “Boulder exercise / Fragile person inside”) via her signature deadpan vocal. Tom Dowse on guitar, meanwhile, pivots between wiry single-note progressions, space-y backgrounds, and noisy, punk-inspired chordal arrangements. Shaw’s introversion/withdrawnness contrasts compellingly with the band’s cathartic volatility, recalling some of the high points of 2021’s New Long Leg and 2022’s Stumpwork. – John Amen

foamboy – “Self Improvement”

Portland duo foamboy are back with another new single to add to a recent string of increasingly likeable tracks. “Self Improvement” has producer Wil Bakula laying out a rubbery and infectious bass line while vocalist Katy Ohsiek muses over the idea of the best version of themselves. It’s bright and pastel-coloured, which makes for a welcome soundtrack to the springtime sun cautiously peeking its head through the clouds. – Ray Finlayson

Kelsey Lu – “Running to Pain”

It’s funny how, when an artist is gone too damn long, they seem to reappear just as you’ve given up wondering what the hell gives.

I’d still love to know what’s kept her since 2019’s Blood, but, hell, Kelsey Lu has finally come back to us all. If tracks such as “Due West” dipped a toe into pop of both universal feeling and boundless ambition, “Running to Pain” dives head first into the mechanical offset by bare emotion and vocals. Bring on the album, already! – Chase McMullen

Mammo – “Vikare”

You enter the cave. Water ripples, it all seems still, but that bass gradually throbs. Dive in.

I dunno, I always feel corny writing about this stuff: it’s Ambient house. Just vibe away, you’ll be glad ya did. There’s enough going on in this track to wake the crew of the Nostromo. – Chase McMullen

Melanie Baker – “Real Life”

Ahead of the release of her upcoming debut album Somebody Help Me, I’m Being Spontaneous! (arriving April 10th), Newcastle-based Melanie Baker has unleashed new single “Real Life”. Existential as it scrappy and fun, Baker weaves about needling guitar riffs and molasses-thick bass. When she pauses to look into the camera and utter “Oh God” it’s a moment that grabs your attention as much as when she declares “It’s my fucking birthday party.” As boisterous and fun three minutes as you could ever hope for. – Ray Finlayson

Mike Will Made-It – “D33P3R” (feat. Teezo Touchdown & Ludacris)

Being hype for a Mike WiLL Made-It album in 2026 was an exercise in cautious optimism. I’ll never deny the man his chops: I saw greatness in his gradual perfection of sonic dissonance as pop, but we’ll always be left to wonder what might have been had Miley Cyrus (cleverly, to her credit) not scooped him out from the Atlanta trenches. One can’t help but wish he’d stuck alongside the likes of Future, 2 Chainz, Gucci, and so on, just as they arose to new heights themselves. His never released Ape Shit alongside Pluto himself will forever linger as a “should have been”.

He’s continued to deliver since, of course, such as with the underrated, understated Edgewood alongside Trouble or the gleeful throwback of Dirty Nachos with Chief Keef just two years ago. It’s just that you never know which Mike Will you’re going to get.

The sprawling R3SET doesn’t entirely succeed as a veteran legacy statement, but in its most sincere love letters to his city it can soar.

“D33P3R” finds Mike vividly sliding through something Organized Noize might have delivered in its singular lurch, yet also entirely futuristic, oozing through Atlanta avenues with scattered, urgent tones, inspiring guest Teezo Touchdown to put on his best (entirely sincere) Usher impression, only for Ludacris to careen through, fully delivering on the song’s intoxicating blend of past, present, and some alien future. – Chase McMullen

Portrayal of Guilt – “Object of Pain”

Atmospheric, creeping guitars that instantly make the skin crawl – this is Portrayal of Guilt blossoming into a new era of their sludgy hardcore. The chrysalis has cracked open and what we have is… a hook? “I wanna feel it on the inside / I wanna feel it on the outside” Matt King murmurs and shrieks in double tracked harmonies. “Object of Pain” is PoG going anthemic without losing any of their scabrous appeal – Rob Hakimian

Rett Madison – “Eleven Wednesdays”

With a rockabilly reverb that makes her voice flutter with nerves, Rett Madison fends off loneliness to be back in a toxic relationship. “I can take it! I can take anything if you let me”, she begs; the string section arrives either to mourn or celebrate. The end is particularly chilling: it doesn’t fade out or climax, she has simply said her piece and awaits the reply. – Steve Forstneger

The Scythe (Denzel Curry and co.) – “UP” (feat. Rich The Kid, A$AP Ferg & SadBoi)

Denzel Curry, Rich the Kid, and SadBoi line ’em up so Ferg can knock em down. Spin that shit. – Chase McMullen

Young Fathers – “Don’t Fight The Young”

Buried deep on the incredibly packed HELP(2) compilation dedicated to helping children in war-torn areas, “Don’t Fight The Young” benefits from its simplicity. In many ways, it feels like an amalgamation of their last album, 2023’s Heavy, Heavy, from its TV On The Radio influences to its spiritual outro. Other artists on the compilation include Arctic Monkeys, Damon Albarn & Graham Coxon, Black Country, New Road, Beth Gibbons, Arlo Parks… you get the drift. – Steve Forstneger

Listen to our BPM Curates: March 2026 playlist here.

First of all, instead of sticking to something sonically similar to the big names he played for, Cullum decided to show that his spectrum of musical interests is much wider than just country or folk music variations. To show this off, he decided to record a musical series jointly titled Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection, with the third volume now released.

Additionally, instead of going to any top of the line recording facilities Nashville offers, Cullum decided to record most of the music in his Nashville garden shed. This was not just for creating a down to earth sound, but also as a source of inspiration for what he was attempting to offer musically.

And yes, Cullum did call in a number of collaborators, but he chose the people whose work he thought would best fit his musical concepts, rather than by the name they have in music circles. At the same time, their contributions were more or less all remote, recording their parts where they were at that moment in time. For example, Allison De Groot, one of the collaborators on this third volume of Coin Collection, recorded her banjo parts on an iPhone when backstage between shows. As Cullum notes, wherever the recordings came from, they were all brought together and mixed to cassette tape.

Finally, instead of keeping his lyrical content on the lighter side of things, Cullum pursues some personal themes (including a song devoted to his mother here), covers some pressing social, political and wider interest themes like late-stage capitalism and even discusses the climate crisis.

And all that is done through an incredibly varied musical ground. For example, “Don’t Go Downtown” might be considered as something that would fall within singer songwriter genre, but Cullum adds some psych folk flourishes that would fall squarely within late Kevin Ayers’ songbooks, as well as some subdued jazz flourishes that you could hear from Robert Wyatt, another Soft Machine alumni. 

As was the case with Volumes 1 and 2, Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 3, is not only uniform in its musical and recording concept, but in exceedingly strong and varied songwriting that establishes Cullum not only as a sought-after session man, but also as an exceptional solo artist.

The new track is an eight minute salvo in which we hear Orton in full control of her abilities. We start in a fairly spare setting where her grizzled vocal unfolds some immediately captivating images (“I’m invincible as grief / Violent as a blade of spring released / Ecstatic as a mother’s love / Tearing through the ground to the sky above”) that vivdly expand across the broad canvas presented by her piano and atmospheric guitar. Ever so patiently, “The Ground Above” builds from a small bluster into an emotional storm, the images forming into personal memories that the mind grip gently but firmly: “Remember when we hitched that ride / Dancing in the full beam light / Remember when I thought that I could change”. As trumpet and driving bass subtly imbue the song, Orton spins away from the past and into the urgent present: “Come on lift me higher / I want to touch the sky / Come on wipe me out”.

Watch the visualizer for “The Ground Above” below or find the song on streamers.

“The Ground Above” is out via Partisan. You can find Beth Orton on Instagram.

With their new album (and second on the jazz label Impulse! Records), Irreversible Entanglements again venture into breathtaking improvs, also demonstrating an increased interest in restraint. “Don’t Lose Your Head”, for example, launches with a centrifugal percussion part courtesy of Tcheser Holmes. Keir Neuringer on sax, meanwhile, unspools a more centripetal or anchoring melodic line. Ayewa offers mystical cum activistic cum therapeutic insights. As the track progresses, the musicians achieve a certain harmony, then veer into adrenalized discordancies as if to illustrate existential and socio-cultural novae. Toward the track’s end, they realign complementarily.

With “Vibrate Higher”, Ayewa strikes a balance between a high-minded Michele Obama: “when they go low, we go high” and a mercurial Angela Davis: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept” (with faint hints of a volatile Nina Simone: “I was never a non-violent person”). The band move through serrated dreamscapes and corralled noise explorations. Airy sax parts contrast with a brassy trumpet. Holmes’s drums verge on the ambient and arrhythmic, Luke Stewart’s bass stomping through the track.

On the fast-paced “Panamanian Fight Song”, a horn refrain slices through busy percussion, launches into outer space, then lands back in the refrain. “We Know” is built around striking trumpet-and-sax interactions. “Keep Going” brims with fragmented melodic lines superimposed on austere backgrounds. Potent tensions highlight the way in which individual desire (for opportunity, equality, self-actualization) smacks up against institutionalized oppression – age-old infrastructures/hierarchies that keep a few people on top, a bunch more on the bottom.

Opener “Juntos Vencemos” and closer “We Overcome” feature guest artist Helado Negro (Roberto Carlos Lange). With both tracks, Lange adds sobriety, even vulnerability, to the band’s sound, his echoey moans occurring as refreshing expressions of grief (effectively bookending the band’s intellectualism and Ayewa’s steaminess). Busy drums, moody melodic lines, and horn blasts converge, straddling a line between the sultry and the equanimous.

With Future Present Past, Irreversible Entanglements continue to integrate abandon and containment, revamping free-jazz milestones as well as rock and noise precedents. Ayewa calls out historical and ongoing hypocrisies, acknowledges the reality of intergenerational trauma, and advocates for the marginalized and exploited. Mining archetypal yet still fertile paradoxes, Irreversible Entanglements have much to teach us about inspiration, self-awareness, and truth-telling.

Preceded by a spirited performance by the obviously deeply indebted CHVRCHES and, more movingly, by pre-recorded video segments highlighting the stories of several people who have had their young lives thrown into disarray by The Big C and found support through The Teenage Cancer Trust, it was in an atmosphere suffused with the inherent unpredictability and fragility of life that My Bloody Valentine took the stage.

Opening with “I Only Said” and “When You Sleep”, two of the most immediately catchy cuts from their 1991 masterpiece, it was astounding to hear these songs with Colm Ó Cíosóig’s muscular drumming; if there is one criticism that could be levelled at Loveless it’s that the drums can sound somewhat anemically drum-machiney. But here, and throughout the whole performance, the rhythm section of Ó Cíosóig and bassist, Debbie Googe, was as much of a revelation as the incredible wall of guitar noise that Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher summoned up. 

At first the sound felt admittedly a little off, with Shields’ vocals and the iconic keyboard melody being almost completely submerged under gossamer waves of gliding guitar. I wondered whether a venue famous for its immaculate acoustics (at least since the installation in the late 1960s of the mushroom-like acoustic diffusers hanging from the domed ceiling) was being pushed beyond its limits by this most infamously loud band. But really it’s all part of the hypnotic effect of My Bloody Valentine’s sound; it’s woozy, punch-drunk and dreamy, whilst being overwhelmingly loud. 

Foolishly, I left my earplugs at home, so I was a little nervous that I would suffer permanent damage, but I made it through unscathed, save for 12 hours of mild tinnitus, and am actually happy not to have dampened the experience in any way because I got to really appreciate the way additional “melodies” seemed to appear out of the way the waves of distortion interacted, and the manner in which Shields’ sonic architecture was in a kind of dialogue with the building it was being performed in. I thought I could hear the guitar part pinging around the hall during “new you” off the band’s 2013 comeback LP, adding another level of reverb (or maybe it was actually just another of the myriad effects conjured from the expansive pedal boards at the guitarists’ feet).

“You Never Should” followed and reminded me instantly that, whilst Loveless is often hailed as the band’s magnum opus, their 1988 debut, Isn’t Anything, is equally perfect. Those clattering drums, where the exuberant, barely-keeping-up fills make it sound like the songs are a rollercoaster constantly threatening to fly off the rails; that propulsive bass; the more prominent vocal melodies; and the guitars that, in a live setting, sound like jet engines roaring overhead; all of it makes their 80s material, which took up a significant proportion of the set, sound as vital today as it must have done nearly 40 years ago. “Nothing Much to Lose” and “Feed Me With Your Kiss” from the same album appeared later in the set and were simply extraordinary, creating a sound so big and thick you felt like you could dive into it, even whilst the songs themselves sounded like they were careening down a hill.

One song each from the Tremolo and Glider EPs, “Honey Power” and “Off Your Face” respectively, highlighted the immediate pop songcraft that characterised the band’s earlier work whilst also showcasing their ability to disorientate and enthrall with the strange shapes the guitar parts twist themselves into. Case in point being the latter’s effects-laden acoustic guitar approximating the sound of a hundred zithers being played simultaneously.

Songs from the You Made Me Realise EP (also released in 1988) were wonderful highlights: the incredibly blissful yet melancholic, quiet-loud dynamics of “Cigarette in Your Bed”; the absolute noise terrorism of “Thorn”; and “Slow”, the most explicit paean to sex in the MBV discography, which also happens to sound like a sunny pop song being torn apart in a wind tunnel. 

Curiously, the band’s 2013 comeback album, m b v felt somewhat underrepresented, although “only tomorrow” was an undeniable highlight of the evening. It feels like a magic trick that something this loud and noisy could be this transcendentally beautiful. This is true wall of noise of stuff, although I imagine that if Phil Spector were alive to hear it, he would have been forced to clarify that he didn’t mean quite this much noise. Bilinda’s ethereal rising vocals and Shield’s extended undulating solo combined to stunning effect, reminding us that what makes My Bloody Valentine special is their ability to combine unique sonic textures with truly indelible melodies.

Loveless is the apotheosis of this approach, and rightly accounts for a third of the setlist; after the one-two punch of the opening, “Come in Alone” and “Only Shallow” arrived one after the other at the halfway mark of the performance, and sounded absolutely enormous. Where the iconic guitars of the latter track (and album opener) sound like the roar of a herd of elephants on record, here in the Royal Albert Hall, I could have sworn an army of fucking Mastodons was bearing down on the 5000 spectators assembled within.

The ethereally beautiful, “To Here Knows When”, positively floated around the hall, Bilinda Butcher’s vocals were simply gorgeous, and there seemed to be infinite detail in the rippling, pulsating drones that Shields sent reverberating through the space; it was like a musical fractal, where the closer you listened the more you heard. During the lull after the song faded out, a crowd member shouted out “I love you, Kevin!” and who can blame them? “I love you, too,” replied Shields, “I love you all.” I would have loved him even more if they’d have played “Sometimes” as well, but the transcendental dance party that is “Soon” made up for it. The most “Madchester”-coded song in the band’s repertoire had several audience members in a state of nostalgic rapture, dancing with complete abandon. It’s the kind of track you could happily listen to non-stop for about half-an-hour and you can genuinely understand why Brian Eno heralded it as the future of pop music upon its release back in 1990.

“Wonder 2” made for an appropriate follow-up, leaning as it does even further into the dance music aesthetic with its skittering drum’n’bass beats. It’s a curious track from their now 13 year old latest album and easily the most experimental and “difficult” song of the evening; it’s somehow both psychedelic and methamphetaminised and pointedly sounds like three or four different songs playing at once. It would probably serve as a perfect soundtrack to the stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, give that a go next time you’re at a loose end.

After the barreling barnstormer of “Feed Me With Your Kiss”, the band launched into “You Made Me Realise”, the fourth song of the evening from the EP of that name, which should tell you everything you need to know about quite how important that release is to the history of My Bloody Valentine. It’s a song that has become infamous in its live iteration for its extended noise section, which lasts for about 40 seconds on the original recording but has been extended to upwards of 30 minutes and played at 130dB (approximately the sound of a jet aircraft taking off, with afterburners on, from 50 ft away). It was at this moment, I started to get worried about my unprotected eardrums. However, at the risk of sounding inappropriately aloof, I hazard a guess that perhaps Shields and his bandmates were thinking of the charity the gig was in aid of and decided that some of the young people in attendance had suffered enough already, so they kept the ‘Holocaust’ section, as it has “affectionately” become known, to a mercifully short five minutes. Either that, or they were concerned that the building might not have been able to withstand an extended onslaught, despite it having survived the blitz. 

Nevertheless, the sense of release when the shoegaze-meets-noise-rock-meets-dream-pop melody of the song proper returned was positively hair-raising. On a night dedicated to those that suffer and those that help them get through it, in that instant, My Bloody Valentine reminded us all of what it feels like to come out on the other side of something harrowing and be re-embraced by life with all its messiness and beauty. I for one consider myself very lucky to have been there to see it.

On her follow up, 2022’s i wanna feel happy, felt like the screen was becoming wider. Textured, fizzy electric guitar and pulsating synths started dressing her tracks, building on top of the acoustic cores. On her new album, Doomsday… Don’t Leave Me Here, the upwards trajectory to a “bigger” sound continues. Co-written and co-produced with Ross MacDonald of The 1975 and producer Ed Thomas, Carney feels like she’s readying herself for bigger stages, more spotlights, and more sonic options to explore. 

In terms of texture, Doomsday is arguably her most consistent record to date. MacDonald and Thomas work a sort of magic in recasting Carney here: the soft pastel colours and the cloudy feel make for a pillowy backdrop, even though the music aims upwards. When “Here” cracks into gear during its chorus, the aim narrows as it opens up. Similarly, opening track “Everything Is Wrong” casts what feels like beams of pure sunlight as shimmering guitar chords clear away clouds. When the music draws itself inwards, the delicate, fleecy weave is still there: before “Sixteen” bursts into full technicolour, it floats by on knocking, wooden percussion and dainty piano figures while closing track “Tethered” is anything but the title, a loose combination of acoustic guitar and piano awash with a cloud-like haze.

What carries the album through is Carney. Despite the grander sound, she retains her identity throughout, her ached voice piercing through even the loudest drum machines. Her qualities remain the same as before: she has a way of making words feel like individual weights, each sentiment a memory that’s been troubling her for years. “It’s all the time, just on my mind,” she sings with a blank stare over rubbery synths and chittering drums on album highlight “The Evidence”. On aforementioned “Sixteen” you can practically hear the anxiety bubbling up as she aches “When they stop and look at me / I could turn into concrete.” Channelling a “severe existential dread”, Carney wrestles with what feels like ghostly figures across the album, faceless entities that haunt her on the brightest day as much as they do on the darkest night.

The downside to all of this is that at times Doomsday can bleed from one track to the other. There are moments – especially around the middle of the album – where the bridges of each song seem ready to veer into the same territory. It’s a pleasant pastel wash it becomes, but there are moments where the album could perhaps benefit from some more oomph or a more daring sonic turn. Still, Doomsday is still a good – and often great – exercise in Carney exploring new pastures, working in an upwards trajectory towards attaining that something more you can tell she’s itching for. The shoegaze-leaning, vaporwave-nodding alternative pop suits her pretty well. The end of the world has rarely sounded so lovely.

Ricochet is a vast step forward in terms of subject matter, but also in musical arrangement and confidence. It’s an aural Bildungsroman, a departure from exquisite introversion to addressing the wider questions of being. It’s often wide-eyed, in awe at the world rather than broken by it. When you stop worrying about the actions of others, and realise that all we have is our own moral compass, there’s a newfound sense of freedom which Jordan seems to have reached here. But don’t worry, there are still some moments of angst and melancholy on the album – it’s not a full 180. 

Album opener “Tractor Beam” is ace, but the first guitar line unwittingly (hopefully unwittingly!) sounds like “Peaches” by The Presidents of the United States (a band, not actually former leaders of the US). Once you manage to exorcise that particular ghost, you’re left with a shimmering indie anthem that places Jordan’s vocals a little lower in the mix than fans are used to. The high production values of the record as a whole are entirely evident in the strings arrangement that beautifully underscore the chorus. The lyric “But you can’t find anyone else like me” feels like a deliberate riposte to her greatest lyric to date, from “Pristine” from debut album Lush – “And if you do find someone better / I’ll still see you in everything / Tomorrow and all the time.” This is a new Lindsey Jordan, one with a sense of optimism, looking toward the skies instead of navel-gazing.   

“My Maker” has a haunting quality to it, with hazy production that perfectly complements the restrained mood and subject matter. A hallmark of Ricochet is that many of the songs benefit from the production work which is subtle but brings out another layer of meaning in the arrangements. There’s a sense of reluctant nihilism in the lyrics as Jordan ponders what if nothing matters as another year goes by. The eternal question about the existence of God is answered when “Battalions of angels marching from on high / Say ‘Above us, it’s just sky.’” Instead of this feeling like a moment of anguish and existential dread, there’s a polish to the sound which makes this a positive – clarity and acceptance simultaneously. 

Although there’s a general sheen to Aron Kobayashi Ritch’s production work, Jordan is still borrowing from the 90s alt rock template that was so evident on Lush. Where that album triumphed in its angular guitar work that leant on post-punk, this album has gorgeous and restrained orchestration underpinning most tracks. It feels like an album created for the studio, not a garage rehearsal space. 

“Light On Our Feet” has a Melon Collie-era Smashing Pumpkins backing supporting the plaintive guitar and vocals, while the descending chord sequences in “Cruise” are given grandiose treatment with the introduction of horns towards the song’s end. Both have an expansive feel to them, and a sense of contentment which feels reassuring for those who’ve followed the Snail Mail journey to this point. 

There’s still some fire in Jordan’s belly which is most evident on “Dead End” which recounts teen years hanging out doing next to nothing. It’s the midpoint of the record and the converging centrepoint of the lyrical themes on Ricochet – looking back, but realising that the future is (for once) a bright one. There’s a sense of leaving the old habits behind across the record, a shift in perspective which is needed with the state of the world today. There’s still beauty out there, and it isn’t even that hard to see if you just take a minute to look for it. The track also serves as the gateway for the spikier, more barbed second half of the record.

Both “Butterfly” and “Nowhere” sound like they could sit neatly on either of the two earlier Snail Mail albums as the guitars are more to the front in the mix, while the ethereally glacial intro to “Hell” doesn’t suggest it’ll have the most energetic chorus on the record. It’s nice to hear the distortion pedal used here, too. The title track starts the descent downwards again, and it feels like the album’s taken us on a journey similar in style to the hot air balloon from the “My Maker” video. The song spirals in on itself, much like the shell on the front cover. There feels like a deeper sense of connectivity in all aspects of the album rather than just being a collection of songs.    

It’s a Snail Mail tradition to close an album on a stripped down track that feels like an epilogue, and “Reverie” is just that for the first half of its runtime. There’s a 1960s psychedelic tinge to the song, and it feels as though Jordan’s expanding the sonic palette that she draws inspiration from. There’s a sense of positivity here as she sings about connection, fulfilment and how “life is so worth living now” and from an artist who has always worn her ragged heart on her sleeve this is quite a thing to hear, and long may it last.  

Ricochet is a masterful record of restraint, realisation, and poetic maturity. Beneath the layered production there are pure earworms and killer hooks that are up there with the best of Snail Mail’s work, but the overriding themes are contrary to the aesthetic tone of both Lush and Valentine. It’s a step forward, but one that feels entirely organic. Our little dramas and interpersonal frictions can often mask our own insignificance, but if we let that go then there’s beauty to be seen and Ricochet is an album that’s attentive to that fact.         

Everyone I know has, in the last two weeks, told me in so many words that (to quote a co-worker) “the very worst things that could happen, happened” in their private life. Meanwhile, World War III has officially started and relishes in its hellish, apocalyptic madness of religious fervour and fascist sadism. Our collective climate and ecosystems are collapsing, with a wave of extinction occurring uncommented. Genocide, genocide, genocide, genocide: don’t dare speak the word, or else. Oh, to be choked out by our own ruling powers, systems of slavery and spiritual decay, who barely point attention to what is the largest scandal of the 21^st century: the end of our humanity, embodied by necro-butchers that look and sound like comic book villains.

A few years ago, I wrote an essay on the new genre Futurismus, which I described therein, in no uncertain terms, as a document of coming horrors, an unconscious protest against a world sliding into warfare, chaos, cannibalism, fascism. I expressed that these albums were a warning, which we had to heed.

We didn’t. The Doomsday Clock strikes 12!

Suddenly, this album appears. No church bells, no falling ashes of atom bombs to herald it. It’s just there, born into the world. It’s impossible to talk about An Undying Love for a Burning World without mentioning why it shouldn’t exist. In August 2022, two statements were released in quick succession, one by vocalist Scott Kelly, one by his band Neurosis. Once the smoke cleared, the image was devastating. Kelly – a troubled but charismatic artist – had structurally abused his family and lied to those closest to him. Neurosis decided to part with Kelly when this was brought to their attention in 2019, but understood this as a consequential act of allowing their vocalist insight and betterment. In their words, they tried to reach out in the coming months, showing support and inquiring on his journey of improvement. Kelly seemingly rejected their effort, which the band deemed as intentional – his statement is characterised as “another attempt at manipulation”. The devastation in the group’s statement is palpable. As a consequence, Neurosis seemed totally done, as they close the piece stating: “We also grieve for the loss of our life’s work and a legacy that was sacred to us.”

But this was not the only consequential moment of caesura: in may of 2024, Steve Albini passed away. The legendary engineer had produced every Neurosis album since 1999’s Times of Grace and can arguably be seen as the architect of their “sound” beyond the industrial-tinged early period. Albini often rejected the monicker of producer, understanding himself as much an “engineer” as a recording philosopher. Losing a collaborator is always hard for a band, but losing their figurehead and helmsman seemed to do irrevocable damage. It came with no surprise that drummer Jason Roeder one year ago announced he would retire and, as a consequence, sell most of his equipment – Neurosis were, unofficially but apparently, over.

The world sank into shadow, and yet got darker still. The energies that tore Neurosis apart projected themselves on a larger, global canvas. The truth hurts: we needed them! Recruiting Aaron Turner, former frontman of the legendary Isis and brain of the magnificent SUMAC, Neurosis explain their rebirth as existential necessity: “We need this, perhaps more than ever, and we suspect we are not alone.”

An Undying Love for a Burning World is a harrowing confession of anxiety, of grief, of the inability to face the nightmare and reconcile with the horror of irreversible damage. Recorded by Scott Evans, who also worked on the albums by SUMAC and Shearling, the album is Neurosis’ most apocalyptic in a long time. This might sound like hyperbole, considering the band released an emotional black hole of epic proportions with the legendary Through Silver In Blood, arguably the best metal album of all time. But consider how Albini allowed their later output to embrace the gentility of post-rock, allowing for cautious optimism among the darkness. 

This human longing for a new dawn is only present in one moment, on what could be the album’s masterpiece moment: the euphoric “Last Light” has the quality of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, opening with a nervous, pumping beat, which slowly works itself into horror film ambience and Turner’s anguished organ documenting the end of all: “Seek last light / Stars blink out / Bodies knot in darkness / Together we cling / Stars fall cold / All swept away”. His voice breaks into a shriek during the last line, opening the song to mean tribal drumming, while Turner seems to lose himself to madness: “What have we done / To our own / Our own native clay / Finding our lives / Inside grief’s watchful eye / Learning to mourn / Corpses in the snow”. The song crawls through this section, before suddenly exploding into a section that could have come off Siamese Dream, all gentle, elysian psychedelic euphoria, before tumbling into barren ambience and a choir – an echo of a past: not quite folklore, not quite sacral. A eulogy: “Sorrow we feel as we harrow the fields / As we know death to be a ravenous beast / Weltering in the blood of our love / The river itself starts to weep”. By the end, as the song returns to sludge metal and the anxious beat, its singular gravitas in the current music landscape seems unignorable: a crazy, blistering masterpiece!

Neurosis had always been the most spiritual band in modern metal, incorporating Eastern religion and philosophical introspection into their work. But rarely have they seemed as angry and brutal as on this album, as the intro-segue “We are torn wide open” exclaims: “The separation that burns our hearts / Is the root of all our disease / We’ve forgotten how to live so we suffer / We’ve forgotten how to struggle so we suffer / We’ve forgotten how to die so we suffer / We’ve forgotten we are wild so we suffer / We exist in isolation so we suffer / The dissonance is deafening / The dissonance is deafening”! It is hard to fully encapsulate the songs that follow – I would have to describe each section, list each vocal and lyrical part (which the band, characteristically, exchange amongst themselves), come up with metaphors for the building tension and violent riffs that make this record, exhaust my inner lexicon to convince the mind that this is music that needs to be experienced. But that would be futile. This is way too personal a record for pretentious grandstanding.

“Mirror Deep” is such an intimate experience, for example: as the band interjects what sounds like sudden bursts of a vocal sample yelling “shut up!” between the crushing sludge riffs, before diving into a quiet section of cheap 80s horrorfilm ambience, only to finally grinding their way into Industrial-laced metal, is so furious and hopeless, it can feel almost mocking. These warbling synth tones familiar from “Anthropophagus” and a dozen other Italian low-budget shlockers seem  intentionally cheap, as if to pinpoint that our human struggle is but a joke to the universe, before the final metal section acts as a gigantic meat grinder.

“First Red Rays”’ cosmic, Pink Floyd-adjacent atmosphere (think “Dogs” and “Echoes”) opens to a final section that generates images of alien monks, or angels, serenading the end of mankind, while “Blind” conjures sublime Lovecraftian imagery: “Nothing shines until we feel like we are nothing / Darkness pulls the moon from the ocean / Stars are blind, burning in the shallows / While despair wipes away delusion”.

This dynamic, this tense push-and-pull between quiet passages of nostalgic synthesizer tones, sludgy riffs, atonal madness, gentle vocal harmonies and Industrial nihilism, often is reminiscent of the band’s transitory project, Enemy of the Sun. Often treated as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for Through Silver in Blood, the record’s radical experimentation as a tone-piece is why it is often forgotten between the two masterpieces that came before and after. An Undying Love for a Burning World is not quite as mischievous (no 26 minute tribal drumming detour this time), but it shares a similar quest for pure emotional expression, for stark, at times frightening intensity. But in the end, it also is much better, more mature and – dare I say it – playful. The album is no misery porn, nor starry eyed agnosticism. It finds a frightening clarity of ongoing decay, of failure and disintegration.

Are we doomed? Likely so, I am afraid. An optimist at heart, I’ve pondered this question for a while: what is there left to say if this is the final time, the final line, the final shout into the abyss? What if this is the last album, the last review, the dying moment of all? What could I say – what could I do? Would I wave, would I laugh, would I hug you harder than before? We all hope to have done something good, to have moved the needle and given comfort to fellow travellers. We embrace our imaginary friends, as the tears come and the sound leaves. As von Trier postulated, we all build our tiny fort of sticks: we all dare trying, and yet come short. And there is no mythological comfort in dissolution.

Neurosis postulate that it is not mere human evil that is our undoing, but the very cosmic nature of eradication that is consequential and impossible to avoid. The folly of thinking we could last more than greed or madness. Their collaborator, Steve Albini, once ironically marked that moment: “The End of Radio”. Neurosis find no romanticism of human humour. They reflect the universe’s rays, to leave but one shade of red. To them, the stars blink quietly away. Gone.

The Belfast-based duo (composed of Ross Cullen on vocals and Benedict Goddard on guitar and synths) craft a seamless amalgam of electronic, punk, rock, and dance/techno influences. Both modern and nostalgic, the final sound pulls from elements of the 80s and 90s with an overall contemporary style. Crystalpunk is an ambitious and meticulously produced record, bolstered by the names of producers such as Chris Ryan and Ross Cullen, mixed by Scott Desmarais (Post Malone, Lizzo, blink-182), and mastered by Chris Gehringer (Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga, Rihanna).

It jumpstarts itself aggressively immediately upon opening, breaking itself apart at the start of “Tongue” and then galloping into a galvanising beat, with serrating guitar riffs and cathartic vocals, and a brutalist industrial-rock sound similar to Gilla Band’s discography. 

“Longer” finds the band leaning back into their traditional rock roots, driven by a tempestuous, propulsive beat that evolves into dissolution by its finish. One of the record’s hookiest moments, its chorus deploys sounds nostalgic of alt-rock textures of the mid-2010s.

“Skem” follows the gentle interlude “Eclipse”, and plunges straight into a fussilading track that wastes no time building momentum. With heavy industrial beats redolent of Author and Punisher’s equipment and style, Chalk re-enter with a pulverising dance beat that takes you into a strobing underground. Its abrasiveness and insistent urgency are paradoxically calming, occupying your ear so intensely, little else can intrude. Both lulling and destructive, “Skem” carries an urbane quality with its rawness.

Positioned as a sort of penultimate denouement, “Béal Feirste” brings the tensions of the album to a climax, emerging as its most weighty and politically charged track. Named after the Irish for Belfast, the nearly eight-minute track grounds the intensity of the album in a more explicit cultural and geographical context. 

“Ache” closes the album like an afterthought, and chugs along like a futuristic synth train, whispering its melody quietly into your headphones, “goodmorning, I wake up and kiss your bones,” a tentative closing lullaby to the electronic rock album. 

The album in totality cultivates a sense of safety within its restlessness, finding comfort in the frenetic, thrashing sounds of rock escapism threaded with elements of ethereal electronics. It hardly takes time to come up for air and steers clear of any empty spaces. A sound ultimately unique to Chalk, Crystalpunk is a sensationally realized work, laced with tastes of madness, both cultural and individual. 

The first couplet of singles released earlier this month – “Ecstasy” and “Human Terror” – gave us some insight into the band’s new twists on modern hardcore – and that continues with the new pairing.

Featuring a bit of sludge and swagger, “Object Of Pain” has a 90s-NIN type depravity to it, with Matt King singing menacingly-yet-alluringly: “I want to feel it on the inside / I want to feel it on the outside”.

“Death From Above”, meanwhile, is an atmsospheric spine tingler of a track, with PoG casually cruising down a lake of black audio treacle that routinely passes under obscene waterfalls; downpours of thudding bass and King’s gut-churning growl.

In short, the trio are just as fun as ever.

Watch the videos for “Object Of Pain” and “Death From Above” below, or listen on streamers.

Portrayal of Guilt’s new album …Beginning Of The End arrives on 24 April through Run For Cover. You can find the band on Bandcamp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Tour dates:

Apr 17: Tilburg, NL – Roadburn Festival

May 09: Austin, TX – Mohawk *~
May 12: New Orleans, LA – Siberia *
May 14: Memphis, TN – Minglewood Hall – 1884 Lounge *
May 15: Birmingham, AL – TrimTab Brewing *
May 16: Chattanooga, TN – The Boneyard *
May 17: Louisville, KY – Portal *
May 19: St. Louis, MO – Off Broadway *
May 20: Cudahy, WI – X-Ray Arcade *
May 21: Minneapolis, MN – Zhora Darling ^
May 22: Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle ^
May 24: Indianapolis, IN – Black Circle Brewing ^
May 26: Cleveland, OH – Mahall’s ^
May 27: Grand Rapids, MI – Pyramid Scheme ^
May 28: Detroit, MI – Lager House ^
May 29: Hamilton, ON – Bridgeworks ^
May 30: Toronto, ON – Prepare the Ground – The Cave 
May 31: Montreal, QC – Sotterenea ^
Jun 01: Medford, MA – Deep Cuts +
Jun 02: New York, NY – Le Poisson Rouge (In the Round) +
Jun 03: Philadelphia, PA – Johnny Brenda’s +
Jun 04: Washington, DC – DC9 +
Jun 05: Durham, NC – Stanczyks +
Jun 06: Savannah, GA – Dog Days Fest
Jun 07: Atlanta, GA – The Earl +

~ w/ Street Sects and pageninetynine
*  w/ Street Sects and Taraneh
^ w/ Street Sects and Halloween
+ w/ Street Sects and The Infinity Ring

After a lengthy absence, Peaches is back with a new LP, No Lube So Rude, and if you know her work, then you know what to expect: lots of crude humor mixed in with serious commentary on sex and sexuality, politics, human rights, and being a woman or even really just being a human in this absurd time. It’s at times funny, abrasive, and cutting, in a way really only Peaches can pull off. She’s never been anyone but herself, and it shows. We talk a lot about this new record, including what led to her return to album-making, and what artistic pursuits she was up to since her last record. We talk inspiration, the state of the world, being a woman in her 50s, and trying to hold a mirror up to the calamity and ridiculousness around us. Thanks for listening.

Listen to the podcast Spotify, Apple and other platforms.

Follow Meet Our Makers on its official website, Twitter and Instagram.

This is Blake’s first fully independent record after stepping away from a major label, and you can hear that shift immediately. The songs feel less engineered toward clarity. They move in uneven shapes, sometimes resolving beautifully, sometimes just stopping where they are.

“Death of Love” follows the opener with something heavier, almost theatrical. The London Welsh Male Voice Choir drifts underneath Blake’s voice like a shadow, while a Leonard Cohen sample cuts through the track with a kind of fatalism. It’s one of the album’s most fully-formed ideas, a song about relationships slowly eroding, which is somehow worse.  

“I Had a Dream She Took My Hand” softens things slightly, leaning into retro soul textures, doo-wop harmonies, warmer chords, but even here, nothing feels fully settled. It’s like Blake is borrowing the language of classic love songs without fully believing in it.

The title track, “Trying Times”, sits right at the centre of the record, and it feels like the axis everything turns around. It’s one of his most direct songs in years, simple phrasing, minimal arrangement, but there’s something strained in the delivery, like he’s trying to convince himself of the sentiment as much as the listener.

Then “Make Something Up” arrives, and it’s easily one of the most revealing moments here. The song circles around the inability to articulate feeling in a very real, frustrating sense. Lines drift, restart, contradict themselves. It sounds like a conversation where neither person quite knows what they mean, but both keep talking anyway. That kind of awkward honesty runs through most of the album.

“Didn’t Come to Argue”, with Monica Martin, feels deceptively calm. The arrangement is soft, almost comforting, but there’s distance in it, two voices sitting near each other but not quite connecting. It’s followed by “Days Go By”, which pulls subtly from grime and UK rhythmic structures, a reminder that Blake’s production instincts haven’t disappeared, they’ve just been folded into something less immediate.  

“Doesn’t Just Happen”, featuring Dave, shifts the tone again. It’s more grounded, more external. Dave’s presence introduces a sharper perspective, observational, and suddenly the album opens outward, even if only briefly. It’s one of the few moments where Blake steps back and lets someone else define the emotional weight.

“Obsession” is barely a song in the traditional sense, more like an interlude, or a fragment that didn’t quite need expanding. Then “Rest of Your Life” arrives and re-centres everything. It’s one of the album’s most affecting tracks, taking a straightforward idea, staying with someone, and stretching it into something disorienting. The production builds, then slips, then rebuilds again, like the feeling itself is unstable.  

“Through the High Wire” leans upward, almost hopeful, though even that hope feels conditional. The vocal processing glitches at moments, briefly distorting Blake’s voice, as if the song can’t fully hold itself together.

By the time you reach “Feel It Again” and “Just a Little Higher,” the album has thinned out emotionally, in a way that feels worn down. These closing tracks don’t offer resolution, they just ease the pressure slightly, letting things settle without answering anything.

What runs through Trying Times is a kind of quiet resistance — against expectation. Blake has always balanced electronic experimentation with fragile songwriting, but here he pulls those elements apart instead of blending them cleanly. Some tracks feel almost traditional in structure; others dissolve into fragments. That inconsistency is part of the point.

There’s also a noticeable shift in instrumentation. While earlier work leaned heavily on manipulated vocals and digital textures, parts of this album move toward more organic sounds — piano, guitar, unprocessed space — though never completely abandoning his electronic instincts.  

Lyrically, the album stays locked on love, but not in the usual sense. These aren’t songs about heartbreak or romance in isolation. They’re about the effort of staying, the tension between connection and detachment, between wanting something to work and recognising when it might not. Across the record, that tension never resolves. It just changes shape.

That’s what makes Trying Times difficult at points, and also what makes it stick. Some songs feel underwritten, others overextended. But when it lands — “Death of Love,” “Make Something Up,” “Rest of Your Life” — it lands in a way that feels unforced and slightly accidental.

It’s not Blake’s most immediate album, and probably not his most consistent. But it might be one of his most honest, not because it says more, but because it leaves more unsaid.

From the opening track, Emerson proves herself a skilled eclecticist. The fascinating “Eden” crosses funky rhythms, including slappy bass chops, and synthy pop. One imagines a Hotter Than July-era Stevie Wonder collaborating with U.S. Girls’ Meghan Remy, with Jay Som serving as producer. “Happy Birthday”, too, is built around a funky updraft, synthy accents, and crisp beats. Emerson’s vocal oozes both fatigue and smoldering enthusiasm. “Too young to die / Too old to break through”, she sings, pointing to that unsettling limbo one can often encounter as the years accumulate: you need to find a new pathway forward but can’t quite break out of well-trodden grooves and habits that have been ritualized.

The title song stirs a captivating melody, lulling textures, and dance-y beats, while “Jupiter and Mars” is a steamy yet effervescent take on the way in which a couple can lapse into apathetic drift. The latter piece also evokes the way in which we’re nowhere near as in control as we think or would like (“I locked my keys to the kingdom in your car”). As the song progresses, the singer lands in a state of reluctant acceptance (“I reckon it was written in the stars”).

“God Damn” again cranks the volume on a slappy, meandering bass. Emerson conjures the echoes of dancehall glory, the innocence of disco balls that were never removed when the 80s dawned but are now somehow perfectly in line with the timbre of the times. What era are we living in? Who knows. Hyperreality becomes mockumentary becomes just weird. “I don’t know where it started / And I can’t see the end”, Emerson sings. Yes. Resurrect the vintage sounds, mix in au courant pop, a dollop of regret, a scoop of zeitgeist confusion. Gyrate until midnight strikes and the world blows up. Or doesn’t. And we get to do it all over again.

“Country Mouse” would be at home in the 80s neighborhood bar, the 90s grunge club, or the 2000s festival. Or you could just blast it through your Wonderboom while taking a break from doing your taxes. Time has collapsed anyway, the idea of social enlightenment is absurd. Emerson captures the misnomer of past-present-future, the illusion of linearity. Ultimately we have one never-ending moment, she suggests, and we fill it with content: thesis, antithesis, new thesis. Emerson does what she wants when she wants – at once an epicure and a stoic – and it all coheres. Beats slightly pull the track, evoking a realistic optimism, a can-do attitude. God may (still) be dead, but we’re not.

Emerson has clearly absorbed any number of playbooks, but has also, for the most part, transcended them. While various comparisons may briefly come to mind – the aforementioned Remy, Robyn, MØ, Magdalena Bay, the ebullient side of Caroline Polachek – Emerson claims her own space. In fact, she claims her own corner lot, replete with acreage. She has enough room to swing her elbows or go for a walk in relative privacy. Changes is a meticulously crafted album that brims with hooks, deceptively complex vocals, and timely ambivalence; oh, add a sprinkle of hard-won morale – perfect for spring 2026.

Nelson started operating as Pan•American around 1997, at the same time as Labradford released Mi Media Naranja (in my opinion the band’s most accomplished album), releasing his self-titled debut the following year. Some dozen albums later, Nelson is still operating without any big pomp and still setting the pace for the constantly shifting genres and sub-genres whose boundaries he keeps on blurring.

All that is quite evident and still present on his latest Pan•American offering, Fly The Ocean In A Silver Plane. Memories have always been Nelson’s field of exploration, but instead of looking at them just through lenses that freeze them in time and place, through his music he seems to be trying to explore how they apply to what we are doing today and how they can help move us forward.

This time around he focuses on travel, as our method of movement through time and space. He explains:“Having experienced the arrival of my children, the decline and departure of my parents, and the many years of venturing out and returning home in my own life, travel feels like the perfect tropology to consider the mysteries we inhabit.”

And while on surface such a concept might seem easy to execute by using the well-weathered formulas that could be broadly deemed “cinematic”, there’s nothing simple about how Nelson here tries to be innovative and solely guided by his personal vision of thin. Even when you sense that there is something you think you recognize as familiar as exotica, Nelson presents a different aspect of how you can treat that concept, as he does here on “Heaven’s Waiting Room”.

This is the approach he takes throughout the album – everything might seem familiar but is not the same. All the elements of post-rock, krautrock (shades of Michael Rother’s guitar sounds), drone, ambient electronics, post-modern classical and what not else are there, but placed only in the order Nelson sees them fit together – and they do so captivatingly.  Only the most innovative artists can take this approach and come up with the right results. 

And none of this is too surprising if you are already familiar with Hemingway’s music. Though crafted with a genuine longing here, leaning in heavily to the role of the down on his luck guy with a heart as big as a football stadium is all part of Hemingway’s raison d’etre. On previous records his influence was crooners of rock and pop from the 50s and 60s; it played like a homage on 2021’s The Lonely Hunter EP, but come his 2023 debut album Strangers Again he was sinking into the style, almost letting it swallow him as much as it sounded like his grief and longing was.

On Wings of Desire, Hemingway emerges with the dregs of his favoured influence still biting at his heels, but he’s also wandering down paths of new influences. 80s synth pop and new wave influences are peppered across the album, making for fun and intriguing sonic ventures. The woozy synth of “Desiree” feels pleasingly alien, adding a touch of the unreal, like half-remembering a drunken walk home at night. Elsewhere on closing track “No Future No Future No Future” Hemingway shifts gears to address the New Zealand government and its attempts to legislate away the rights of Māori people. There’s a seething ire rippling through the angsty electric and nocturnal synths, a rare moment where Hemingway sounds like he’s channeling an anger he can’t quite put to words. 

Across much of the rest of the record, Hemingway finds plenty to say, spilling out his heart to the world. “I shoulda called you, baby / I shoulda given anything to keep you with me,” he aches over sultry sax on the opening title track; a call to arms of heartbreak to usher the listener into his world of woe. Georgia Gets By adds a softer edge on the brokenhearted ballad “Promises” as Hemingway sings “Nothing’s gonna change the way I feel for you / Nothing’s gonna break the chain I wear for you” like the wind machine is pointed right at him for full dramatic effect. “Life is cruel / If only you knew,” he offers on “(To Be) Without You” as synths pulse and flicker, like passing streetlights on a nighttime drive. 

At times Wings of Desire reminds me of Grapell’s 2021 album The Answer which had a similar heart-on-sleeve sincerity. Hemingway does the same, but somewhat grander: the gestures are big, the sax plentiful, and the yearning served up in heaps. It’s not so much heart on his sleeve as it is a whole big heart-shaped outfit he’s wearing. Sometimes it veers into sounding a little too pastiche: “Long Distance Lover”, with its spoken word come-ons (“I’ll be puttin’a pillow under your body… And we’re gonna make a mess!”) comes off more like fellow New Zealander Jemaine Clement doing a bit as part of a Flight of the Conchords sketch. It’s likely intentionally cheesy and overcooked, but it does also feel like Hemingway has mined the heartbreak quarry to the point he has to resort to mocking himself – which does dampen the feel of genuine misery surrounding the track.

And even if you are fully invested in Hemingway’s style, Wings of Desire becomes exhausting and tiring all too quickly. Crisper production helps here, but big moments still don’t soar as much as they should, and by the end of the record a fatigue of sorts sets in. “Writing these songs was a grieving of this long-term relationship, but it was also a sort of rediscovery of myself,” Hemingway explains of the album’s creation. Like a good friend, we can be there while he’s going through the motions and support him in whatever way we can. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t tiring hearing him retread the same old ground. Even if he does it with some new features, there does come a point where you want to tell him to just get over it.

Recorded across two studios, one on the Greek island of Hydra and the other in Hamburg, Germany, each setting had its own influence on the sound of the album. The space in Hydra was an old carpet factory and the one in Hamburg had a more clinical feel to it, this gave the group the idea of categorizing the music they wrote for this album into wood (for Hydra) and metal (for Hamburg). The influence of these two vastly different settings can be felt in every track. 

Although it’s not entirely obvious which studio was home to which track, it is easier to apply the wood or metal metaphor to some more than others. The tracks that fall into the ‘metal’ category here feel easier to spot: “All in Metal” the most obvious here, where Esmé’s vocals are hypnotic and soaring violin cuts in to carry the listener through this dreamscape. Meanwhile opener “Three Halves” goes full throttle back into the shoegaze-tinged indie rock sound of their debut, crashing drums characterise the track before a distort pedal comes into play. There’s a sense of urgency to it that exists elsewhere too, there’s anxiety inducing building strings on “Shadow of You Appears” whilst “Embers” adds some texture to the sound, the unease is still there, this time present through pops, clicks and odd percussion. 

There’s a feeling of darkness that cloaks much of the latter portion of the album; “The Woodland Has Returned” feels the most melancholic. Built on jangling guitar, it feels huge and sprawling with Henry Wade’s vocal adding some extra depth to that of Esmé Hand-Halford’s. Something The Orielles have also become quite good at is embracing the weird and wonderful, there’s a building sense of impending doom that lies within “You are Eating a Part of Yourself” which feels fitting for a track about the all-consuming nature of change. 

As with the rest of their discography, The Orielles once again prove that you don’t always have to follow along with the masses to make good music. In fact, they prove that staying true to yourself and what you think is right when it comes to your art pays off wholeheartedly.

When, in 2002, they released Neon Golden, and it became their breakout album, it was after more than a decade of obscurity. Even the most ardent critics weren’t aware about the band’s background and the fact that they started out as a heavy metal outfit and had already started their constant evolution, treading into some darker indie rock territory, only to then bring something new into the electro-pop territory with that early-century mini masterpiece.

Yet, despite finally achieving critical acclaim, The Notwist didn’t stop there. Thy shifted their musical views, incorporating new musical elements. By 2021’s Vertigo Days, their previous offering, they were incorporating everything from melancholy pop to Krautrock with a delicate choice of guest including the likes of avant-jazz and electro experimenters lie Ben LaMar Gay and Juana Molina.

The shifting and moving continues on News from Planet Zombie, their latest album. That movement is not expressed in anything that could be seen as a radical change; it is more of a concentrated focus on consolidating elements they have worked with previously and a more detailed use of ‘regular,’ acoustic instruments. This choice could be heard as their take on musical nostalgia and the melancholy it brings along, which strikes a resonance through the record.

So how does that sound fit the musical line the Notwist have taken to this point? The seven-person lineup is again augmented by a cast of guests that seem to have fitted in perfectly with the concept the band have taken on here; a cosmic take on the perilous point in time we’re currently beholding and a paean to the power of the collective. In many ways, it is a sort of a musical retrospective of what the Notwist have done so far, both lyrically and musically – though the electronic aspects are a bit more subdued in favour of energetic, brass-imbued indie rock gusto, which suits the messaging.

The complex melody lines that were always one of the band’s strongest points remain; see the opening “How The Story Ends”. There are also amlpe dashes of their gentler side that crop up throughout, like the delicate acoustic float of “Snow”. Yet, when they need to go through some Krautrock inspired moves like on “Priopeller” or feel the need to go through some tight indie rock moves like on “Silver Lines”, it all involves some excellent songwriting and musical presentation.

It took half a decade for the Notwist to come up with this album, but their discography is now storied and their new records always prove to be worth the wait. Their age is not showing, just a maturity that is blossoming in the best possible manner.

With her last album, The Collective, Gordon explored the boring-turned-diabolical: nothing is happening versus anything could happen at any time. Jagged textures, industrial atmospheres, and barbed images conjured a palpable anxiety or cultural agitation. While Gordon occasionally lapsed into repetitive babel-scapes and numbed-out vocals, on many of the tracks she seemed particularly vulnerable and activistic in tone.

If No Home Record dealt with instability and The Collective worked with dis-ease related to environmental and sociopolitical factors, Gordon’s new album Play Me emerges from a state of bewilderment, a sense of being unable to recognize oneself or the world in which one lives. The 12 tracks on Play Me unfurl as abstract sketches of real-time angst, collages wrapped in thorny roils and gritty yet entrancing textures.

Play Me also includes some of Gordon’s most pop-leaning work. “Girl with a Look” is built around burnished noise segments (what polished steel would sound like if it could sing). Gordon’s melodies are fragmented yet hooky. Lyrically, the piece exemplifies obliqueness, evoking how loneliness and entitlement are often enmeshed. “No Hands” materializes at the intersection of barbiturate no-wave and speedy clamor-pop. “Let go / no hands on the wheel”, Gordon declares, conjuring that scene in Fight Club when Brad Pitt’s Tyler orders Ed Norton’s IKEA Boy to “JUST LET GO!” (which he reluctantly does, resulting in a crazy yet liberating car crash).

“Dirty Tech” features an intriguing amalgam of synthy sounds and beats. Druggy, futuristic, rakish, a mishmash of elegance and sleaze. Lovers and bosses are now robots or AI functions. Desire’s been reduced to programmatic symbology. Gordon assembles catchy melodic elements, her voice moving between a crisp staccato and a sultry urban drawl. Very St. Mark’s Place, what you might hear in a grungy boutique while you browse through a rack of $200 t-shirts. Then again, the track could be the centerpiece in MOMA’s fringe-but-not-that-fringe series. In other words, it’s retro – CBGB, pre-gentrified Avenue D, Basquiat overdosing on Great Jones Street after painting his masterpiece – and chicly au courant, in the way that Television’s Marquee Moon, David Godlis’s street scenes, and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me still land as edgy, pointing to a lexicon that hasn’t been fully milked or wrung dry of mystery, an outsider-ism that is perennially avant-garde.

“Not Today” is the album’s emotional highpoint. Crunchy waves swirl, juxtaposed with hyper-crystalline refrains. Gordon is at her most languorous, vulnerable yet elusive. “Trees are weeping, grass is wet”, she moans, depicting a watercolor cosmos, everything fluid, interdependent. While there’s often a dingy tint to Gordon’s lyrics, here she dabbles with a more affirming image, the scene unfolding like a fuzzy Monet or blurry Berthe Morisot. It’s a significant track for Gordon, demonstrating her ability to harmonize a grimy overtone with an appreciation for beauty.

On the other hand: “God, he ain’t here”, Gordon repeats on “Busy Bee”, a graffiti-like, tongue-in-cheek take on the contemporary overwhelm. “Subcon” is built around a prickly bass synth that sounds like the drills in Matrix Reloaded run through some sort of “euphonics” filter. Gordon is the self-appointed/computer-generated intermediary translating death-and-displacement imagery for a jaw-dropped mob.

“Nail Biter” turns “lipstick”, “nail polish”, and “teeth whitener” into society’s sacred artifacts (“gotta get some”/“gotta buy some”). Transubstantiation circa the 2020s is plastic surgery and a shot of Botox rather than water becoming wine. A miracle is your product (or personality) going viral rather than your stage-four cancer being healed. The title track fuses show-tune jazz and streaming-platform jargon, as Gordon toys with Spotify playlist titles. The piece drips with mischievous cynicism. “ByeBye25!” (a redux of The Collective’s opener, “Bye Bye”) elevates a list of words banned from federal websites by the Trump administration into a meme-ish manifesto re: oppression, short-sightedness, and the teetering of democracy.

In a 2003 essay, Fanny Howe wrote, “Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability”. Throughout Play Me, Gordon searches for her bearings, though she also seems pretty much okay with being disoriented. Perhaps she is indeed enchanted with not knowing, with being unable to sustain a sense of self or identity. Flux has become her muse. In a time when chaos and unpredictability are the experience de jour, one can push reality away or embrace it. Gordon does the latter. With unflagging allure.

She has spent time working through hundreds of sessions applying her imprint to the music of others, but now, that effort is directed at a vision wholly her own. With the release of I’ve Got Nothing to Lose, and I’m Losing It, she focuses in on what she describes as a “realist hope”, opting for a balance between optimism and sustained melancholy. There are certainly scars to be covered and wounds to be dressed, but Nagler views them as evidence of battles won and memories created, all adorned in rough-hewn melodies and echoing harmonic patterns.

Veering between rugged indie rock soundscapes and more reflective acoustic vistas, she approaches her solo debut without restriction, without trepidation. These songs are filed with life’s intricacies, the tiny moments that color the larger portrait of our years spent in combat with undefinable external forces. Guitars thump and shiver while her voice guides us through transient vulnerabilities, the music a canvas on which she lays out existential nuance. A fierce sense of personal accountability drives the music, a purpose found in the angular crevasses of intense experience and the need to dismantle useless expectations. 

For our latest In Rotation feature, Nagler has curated a playlist that winds its way through the tangled histories of her musical influences, each track a glimpse into the origins of an honest and openhearted perspective on how emotion and experience shape our sonic realities. Listen to the playlist below and then read on to see how each track helped to inspire her own unique viewpoint on the intersection of sound and self-expression.

1. The Lijadu Sisters – “Come On Home”

Listening to the Lijadu Sisters is my happy place, it instantly puts me in the mood I wanna be in. Their harmonies and cadence realign my body so I’m able to fully embrace reality while at the same time making reality a vacation. I strive for this exact type of yin yang, and their album Danger and EP Horizon Unlimited always set the scene for full on life embracement.

2. Liz Phair – “Soap Star Joe”

The essence of early Liz Phair has a spirit I’ve always been deeply affected by. It’s like absolute unapologetic freedom to just be yourself. When I first discovered her in the late 90s it was life changing and opened the door to a whole alternate sonic and lyrical universe that helped shape the world I continue to live in.

3. Cat Power – “Good Woman”

I love Cat Power in general, but this song in particular just pulls every single string. I could listen to it a thousand times in a row. It’s so… sad but true… in the most cathartic way.

4. Mazzy Star – “Be My Angel”

Obviously Mazzy Star is an icon and who wouldn’t want to live in her sonic rough around the edges but oh so heavenly dreamscape. Her frequency just lures you in like the big bad wolf dressed as Grandma … except she’s actually more like Grandma dressed up like the wolf… and her perfect cottage in the middle of the forest is nothing less than a sonic safe haven.

5. Violent Femmes – “Please Do Not Go”

Nothing like nostalgic melodic punk rock folk anthems to cure whatever ails ya!

6. Kim Deal – “Are You Mine”

This song is somehow everything all at once and I’ve listened to it so many times it’s almost absurd how much I still crave it.  Since perfect doesn’t exist, Kim Deal is the most perfectly imperfect artist in existence (in my humble opinion). Her clarity of vision is a true force and hits me where it hurts. (In the best way).

7. John Prine – “Pretty Good”

John Prine is ALWAYS a great answer to the question, “what should we listen to”? You’re instantly sitting on the porch in the magic hour rocking on a chair that’s existed for all of time and singing along in the eternal summertime of your mind.

8. Neutral Milk Hotel – “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea”

Such a classic album obviously. And somehow bridges so many genres. If there ever was an endless open highway, windows-down album to scream along to by yourself, this is it.

9. Lucinda Williams – “Essence”

One time I walked into the Claremont Lounge, which is the oldest still operating strip club in Atlanta, known for its dive bar and almost carnival vibe and unconventional dancers, (including a famous Mother Daughter duo and often older women doing their thing). There was a 7-piece band playing and just absolutely crushing their version of Essence, by Lucinda Williams. The dichotomy of walks of life and this unbelievable version of this beautiful song that was already a part of my DNA brought me to tears in an instant. 

10. Built To Spill – “Carry The Zero”

This band and this song were a pivotal part of my awakening into a whole new world of modern music I didn’t know existed at the time. When I discovered it I was someone who listened to music louder than I do now, someone who threw themselves into an emotion or situation with zero hesitation willing to suffer whatever consequence. That is a spirit I like to stay in touch with, and I can tap right into it any time by pressing play on this song or really anything in the Built To Spill catalog. What a gift!

11. K McCarty version of Daniel Johnston’s – “Hey Joe”

I discovered the songs of Daniel Johnston through this K McCarty album of all Daniel Johnston covers called ‘Dead Dog’s Eyeball’. I absolutely fell in love with the songwriting, and it has definitely shaped me. ‘Hey Joe’ is one of the first songs I learned on guitar, and it brings me so much joy to cover it myself. I love going back and hearing all these versions.

12. Elliot Smith – “Coming Up Roses“

There’s just something so magical about the way it feels like you are fully in his world, and he is whispering in your ear, isn’t there?

I’ve Got Nothing to Lose, and I’m Losing It is out today on Little Operation Records and More. You can order the album here. You can follow Nagler on Facebook, X, and Instagram.

The Chicago-based band’s newest release doesn’t hang out in an imitation Manchester, deliver graduate-studies treatises on celibate love, or otherwise curdle the senses in a manner that caused Henry Rollins to spit while listing a Top 10 albums chart on MTV: “Vauxhall & I: whatever that means”. Likening Brigitte to The Smiths or post-Smiths Morrissey would inevitably lead someone to accuse the band of being a pale imitation. The rudimentary bass/guitar doubling of “Slumber Party”’s melody sounds like The Kingsmen in comparison to Johnny Marr’s effortless fusion of C86-gen and West African players. At least one of his barrage of witticisms could wrest a smirk from the most hardened of the anti-Moz brigade, whereas Leavins and band treat lyrics mostly as function over fashion.

Caving to the temptation of this comparison also de-obviates how very much BCMB like the cut of The Killers’ jib. This is a group that wears suits and sportcoats, not natty pullovers and cardigans. If the private school emblem is on the breast pocket: all the better. Its Swiss Army Knife or credit card is an anthemic chorus and verses are just conveyors. The opener, “There Always”, begins with that outdoor-amphitheatre butterflies-in-the-stomach, straight-out-of-a-U2-concert-film ascendancy. By the end of the first track, Leavins glistens “Always! Always! Always!” and every gentle vibrato is a sign to get on your feet. The aforementioned “Slumber Party” then cuts through the delay effects and becomes something rabid, obeying the classic methodology of the second song raising the temperature a notch. Its punk/shuffle gait draws The Walkmen’s “The Rat” to mind, but has Leavins’ voice as a built-in cooling mechanism. 

Irreversible does midtempo but it doesn’t do mid-album. There’s a link to classic Def Leppard about it, where each song could be a single and video. The slow burn of “The Pit” is less of a break than another showcase, no more a stepladder for the Strokes-ish “Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction” nor the Talk Talk-imbued “These Acts Of Which We’re Designed” than they are for it. (“Of which”: There’s some Morrissey for you.) 

The production by Yves and Lawrence Rothman wisely attunes to the 80s influences and sonic similarities, but it doesn’t force the band to live there. The recording exudes modernity with retro touches – not the other way around. Artists who try to authenticate their sound by replicating old techniques often do so at the expense of their songs or with little understanding that the original artists were trying like hell to not sound amateurish. BCMB and the Rothmans take the hip-rocking “I Can Take The Sun Out Of The Sky” and hear as much Harry Styles as George Michael and excise any tendency toward camp. 

Of course, how long BCMB can live here remains to be seen. It might not be a pale imitation of The Smiths but the anthems do mask a sense that deep-cuts will one day be needed. Leavins’ voice is an instantly identifiable instrument that could present avenues to get really weird in the future. Or else it could just end up being used in tribute.

In the interim since their great 2021 album Seek Shelter, vocalist Elias Rønnenfelt has delivered a few solo projects, but “Star” immediately reminds us why he works best as the leader of this unit. His bandmates – guitarist Johan Suurballe Wieth, drummer Dan Kjær Nielsen, guitarist Casper Morilla Fernandez, and bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless – lay out a version of jangle pop that has their signature seasick dynamism stamped all over it. While more mobile and accessible-sounding than many of their works (it even has handclaps!) there’s a grinding, muscular presence to their playing that adds grit to their singer’s words.

And Rønnenfelt himself is in top form, returning to one of his favourite topics – a love and lust so urgent that it pulls him to a place of near-deadly desperation. Amidst images of “eating cyanide” and “a pint of lead in my head”, he admits “every inch of my earth and sky, you can occupy”. The coup-de-grace comes in the earworm chorus, where he croons “You’ve got me dying like a star / centuries apart”, suggesting that this is an attraction that transcends space and time. With Rønnenfelt and Iceage’s dynamism, that feels entirely plausible.

Watch the video for “Star” below or find the track on streamers.

“Star” is out on Mexican Summer. You can find Iceage on Instagram and Facebook.

Scroll forward a few months and the Nigerian poet-come-party-starter’s debut album has arrived right in the midst of the USA and Israel’s blitz of Iran and the subsequent fallout that has sent shockwaves through the Middle East and around the world. In such fractious times, an album like I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting, everyone is trying, you have got to try could easily feel tin-eared, lightweight and maybe even inappropriate. Here we have a relentlessly positive dancefloor-focused record full of affirmations that are easy to scoff at – and yet, there’s something indelible about what Idehen is doing.

The Stockholm-based artist is no newcomer, despite releasing his debut album at 45 years old. He spent 20 years in London building a name in the city’s poetry scene, featuring on records from its vaunted jazz scene and fronting the trio Benin City. Now, with the help of producer Ludvig Varment, he is stepping out on his own and bringing it all to bear on I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting, everyone is trying, you have got to try.

The album builds on the viral success of 2024’s “Mum Does The Washing”, but for the most part shirks political messaging in favour of personal storytelling and heartwarming preaching. It comes flying out of the gates with a series of soul-sample-backed house numbers, Varment furnishing the vocalist with an array of uplifting arrangements that match his mood; an overwhelming love with an undercurrent of vulnerability. Indeed, where we find him on opening track “You Wanna Dance Or What” is the perfect encapsulation: on a dancefloor, feeling slightly out of sync with the world, “desperate to be held” and ending up in a tender, understanding moment with a stranger. “Alright my G, we gonna go dance or what?” the stranger asks him – and Idehen and Varmint are then on hand to make sure the beats are flowing.

“It Always Was” basically follows the same formula – house beat, chopped up soul sample, story of fondly-remembered moments, overall message of love and self-acceptance – and yet it’s such a potent combination that the enjoyment doesn’t waver for a second. The following “This Is The Place” switches a soul sample for a chopped-up piece of vox pop cheese (“I think it’s all about the rhythm and the love”) but the rest of the recipe is the same. Again, the mood remains at a peak, as Idehen is so good that he makes you feel like you’re right there with him, in the club, “in this sacred place”.

Idehen and Varment bring the energy down slightly for “Could Be Forever”, tugging the heartstrings with some piano, violin and choral vocals. Idehen is just as compelling in this more pathos-laden setting in which he preaches about respecting your elders and relays an anecdotal snapshot about a toilet attendant he met who has “got no papers to make real paper”. 

In fact, the moments where he takes us into these moments from his life are the most vivid – emotionally and visually – on the record. There’s the description of him and his old friend as “two broken men in Leicester Square” on the fizzing breakbeat of “Whatever Comes” and the recounting of a potential relationship that never quite sparked into life on the elegiac rave up “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, to name just a couple of the bleary-eyed highlights.

While the main MO of I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting, everyone is trying, you have got to try is to get you to hash it out on the dancefloor, there are some gear switches along the way. Despite being two years old, “Mum Does The Washing” sits at the album’s centre – and serves not only as a deserved victory lap for the song, but brings the tempo down for a moment, acting a bit like a wide-eyed conversation in the smoking area, a dull bass thump in the background. “My Love” is a piano ballad in which Idehen mewls about regrets and yearning for a few reflective minutes. “Brother” is a much more successful diversion, building gradually into an atmospheric, sax-imbued skeletal drum’n’bass track where Idehen is in pump-up mode: “You are valued, you are loved, the winds behind you are still strong.”

Overall, this is an album about shimmying through the shit, frolicking with friends and swinging towards self-actualisation. Does the proselytising on “Choose Yourself” become a bit much? Potentially. Is the choral reprise of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” overkill? Probably. Does the album need three spoken-word interludes and a therapising outro? Not really. But when those beats are descending on the last (proper) song “Turn It Around” and Idehen and his singers are singing about self-redemption, none of that matters – your face will be hurting from smiling.