Issue 150 – SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Cate Le Bon, Sleaford Mods, John Glacier, Black Country, New Road, Yard Act, King Hannah, Legss, Cassandra Jenkins, Los Bitchos, Paul McCartney, Albums of the Year 2021

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SEN Mark your favourite 3 records we’ve released

☺ FAZER ‘Plex’ – Jan 14th

this year and let us know – via your IG stories

☺ BOY HARSHER

tagging @cityslangrecords – to enter a prize

’The Runner (Original Soundtrack)’ – Jan 21st

draw to win those 3 records on vinyl!

☺ IMARHAN ‘Aboogi’ – Jan 28th ☺ LOS BITCHOS ‘Let The Festivities Begin’ – Feb 4th ☺ KING HANNAH ‘I Am Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me’ – Feb 25th ☺ KAINA ‘It Was A Home’ – Mar 4th

WWW.CITYSLANG.COM

2021

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Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: B.A.M Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Dominic Haley, Esme Bennett, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Isabel Crabtree, Ian Roebuck, Jamie Haworth, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Lisa Busby, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Mike Vinti, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Reid, Sam Walton, Skye Butchard, Sophia Powell, Susan Darlington, Tara Joshi, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney, Zara Hedderman.

Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, Dave Kasnic, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jake Kenny, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Oliver Halstead, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter.

With special thanks to Everyone who has ever read a copy of the magazine over the last 150 issues. All the artists we’ve met, and all the PRs who helped us meet them. And, most of all, all of our writers and photographers. It’s only existed because of them.

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2021 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Gemini Print Distributed by Loud And Quiet Ltd. & Forte

Issue 150

Due to a reason so boring we’ve buried it on page 54, we sailed past issue 100 of Loud And Quiet without being aware of it. We saw 150 coming and initially thought of letting that pass by quietly too.

Then I thought about just how proud I am of all this magazine has achieved, thanks to the countless number of dedicated contributors we’ve worked with since 2005. We owe it to ourselves and them to mark this moment, but I also wanted to give our readers a typically forwardfacing issue too. So L&Q 150 is both – the magazine we’ve always love to make, with a 16-page celebration of why we love it and how we’ve made it this far. Naturally, we approached it with total disbelief.

Stuart Stubbs

Sweet 16 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Albums of the Year 2021 . . . . . . . . .

Artist Customer Survey 2021 . . . . . .

Legss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Los Bitchos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

John Glacier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

King Hannah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cate le Bon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

150 Issues of Loud And Quiet . . . . . .

Algorithms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Black Country, New Road . . . . . . . . .

The Year 2021 in Songs . . . . . . . . . .

05

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10 12 14 16 20 22 26 28 35 53 70 72 78

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Young Then Independent label Young – formerly known as Young Turks before a name change this year – has launched Young Then, a new platform that provides an archive and centralised online resource for “the entire history and future” of the label. The platform is designed to be accessible to all, democratising the releases, events and memories that make Young what it is today and hopefully building towards a new way of working in future.

As it stands now, the platform is an interactive archive, laid out across a timeline that traces the organisation’s development

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from hedonistic club night to award-winning independent label and home to The xx, FKA Twigs and Kamasi Washington. “‘Young Then’ allows the label and its artists, people, friends and collaborators to restore, remember and re-present items and memories that exist beyond the limits of what culture routinely records,” the label has stated. “Just because it didn’t appear on record, is not to say there’s not a story worth telling; and so ‘Young Then’ aims to preserve and make visible that which is ordinarily lost.” then.y-o-u-n-g.com

photography by owen richards

The Beginning: Previously Pirate Studios Since its founding in 2014, Pirate Studios has become a key institution for grassroots music in the UK, providing low-cost, flexible rehearsal and recording space at a range of locations across the country. Now partnering up with Reprezent Radio, Keep Hush and Late Night Shopper, Pirate have launched a new artist opportunity scheme. Budding artists and DJs can apply for radio features, participation in live-streamed events, bookings at high-profile clubs and more. www.pirate.com

Grimes In unsurprising news, Grimes has formed an all-new “AI girl group”. Herself and “infinite members” make up NPC, a project that seeks to “finally manifest the endless characters in Grimes’ head.” They’ve shared their debut track – a collaboration with house producer Chris Lake that sounds, well, like Grimes. Eventually, the “band” will be editable and customisable by fans, which could be interesting. Keep an eye on Grimes’ Instagram to see how this meta-Gorillaz evolves.

led to harassment and detainment by the Turkish authorities as president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to consolidate his power and persecute Kurdish political activists.

Spain It has been confirmed that UK artists undertaking short-term tours in Spain will not need to pay the prohibitively expensive Visa costs, in a policy change that has been months of lobbying and organising in the making. Significant issues for UK acts hoping to tour the EU remain, but this is a real step forward – something to be celebrated and built upon after an incredibly difficult period for the music industry. Congratulations and thanks need to be extended to industry bodies like UK Music, worker groups like the Musicians’ Union, and the many artists and activists whose work has helped make this happen.

Jarvis Cocker Fresh from (sort of) soundtracking the new Wes Anderson film, The French Dispatch, Jarvis Cocker has written a new memoir.

In typically Jarvis style, Good Pop, Bad Pop (to be published by Vintage in May 2022) is not a straight-up autobiography – it’s an “inventory” of items and memories inspired by a loft-clearing session; trinkets and memorabilia used as the basis of his anecdotes and reflections. Obviously, it promises to be a vital read. www.penguin.co.uk

Arthur Russell European Arthur Russell fans rejoice: his catalogue is to be made available over here, after having only been available in North America for some time. Due to a new partnership agreement between Rough Trade and Portland, Oregon label Audika Records, the full archive is now to be reissued for the UK and mainland Europe, giving listeners in those territories new access to some of the late pioneer’s most enduring music on vinyl and CD for the first time. Records like World Of Echo may already be legendary, but they’ve been without full releases for UK/ Europe fans until now. The 2005 Audika reissue of that album, for example, included newly remastered audio and a treasure trove of previously unreleased material – all of which is now to be made available outside of North America. Pre-orders are open at www.roughtraderecords.com

Omar Souleyman Syrian artist and cult favourite Omar Souleyman has been detained – and since released without charge – by Turkish officials as part of an ongoing campaign of persecution against alleged affiliates of the Kurdish militant group the YPG. Along with the associate PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), the YPG has played a key role in the fight against Islamic State extremists in Syria, as well as in the ongoing experiment with direct democracy in the Kurdish-controlled region of Rojava. Yet these groups have long been blacklisted as enemies of the Turkish state, and Souleyman, who has frequently expressed his solidarity with the Kurdish struggle, is just one of thousands of people whose supposed links to the YPG or PKK, however tenuous, have

illustration by kate prior

Iron Maiden Satanic panic is back! A petition has been started against Sharon Burns, a Canadian high school principal whose love of British metal icons Iron Maiden has been interpreted by concerned parents and guardians as evidence of “allegiance to satanic practices” that may be harmful to their impressionable children.

Their “case” rests on Burns’ use of the devil horns hand gesture, her displaying of an Eddie doll (the band’s zombie mascot), and a handwritten note that includes “666” (the number of the beast!!!). Happily, a counter-petition has been launched and has already garnered far more signatures.

Spilt Milk x The state51 Conspiracy London DIY events promoter Spilt Milk and record label The state51 Conspiracy have teamed up for a series of new live sessions, recorded at the state51 Factory in East London and presented in raw, largely unedited form – “no drop ins, edits or cut aways”. The series features a selection of the capital’s most exciting new artists and bands (Opus Kink, The Early Mornings, Lou Terry, Gentle Stranger, Jaws The Shark, BOSS, all cats are beautiful, Modern Woman, Rattletooth, Lime Garden, uh and Pozi) and can be watched in full over on The state51 Conspiracy YouTube channel.

07

The Beginning: <1000 Club

The joy of a great support act, like SOFT LAD In opinion pieces like this, the Spotify algorithm is usually written about in one of two ways. We either characterise it as a devious hidden force that mines our personal data to sell us products, in the same way that internet cookies and your Alexa do. Or, we frame it as The Future Of Tech – brilliant, yes – but also scary [more on this in Andrew Anderson’s Infinite Login piece in this issue, from page 70]! We end by asking if we’ve gone too far, without saying what that means, like they do in the poorer Black Mirror episodes.

There are undoubtedly important points within those ideas, but in talking about streaming AI like this, we miss the more obvious point: it’s just a bit shit, isn’t it? Setting aside the moral, cultural and philosophical issues, at the consumer level, Spotify recommendations just aren’t that good. For the Spotify algorithm to feel like a sign of the impending singularity, I at least want it to autoplay me something other than a Hot Chip song it knows I’ve heard five hundred times when I’m in the shower.

That’s not to say that Spotify isn’t playing fast and loose with our data, or being generally untrustworthy when it comes to its skewed business model – it almost certainly is. But if Spotify knows so much about our listening habits, why are its recommendations so underwhelming? I’d at least like them to be competently evil, enough to give me solid choices to add to my Halloween party playlist. ‘Incapable’ by Róisín Murphy is already in there. Why would I need the single edit?

This is why the company’s recently launched ‘enhance’ feature feels like a waste of money. The idea is that a magic button will instantly flesh out your playlist with similar tracks and new discoveries. The frustration comes when it recommends tracks you’ve been playing for weeks.

This is all to say that Spotify’s AI tools can’t currently compete with the skill and joy of human curation – the kind we get from DJs, radio shows, and friend recommendations. While the company does put needed energy into artist curated playlists, those artists aren’t getting a fair cut of the royalties to begin with. And from the consumer point of view, it’s a waste to have such a focus on AI when true customer convenience comes from being in a safe pair of hands.

This week, while seeing Self Esteem live, I got to return to a curated music experience I hadn’t realized I’d missed so much: the joy of a good support act. Shuffling into the Glasgow venue Audio at the start of her set, it was obvious that the opener SOFT LAD had some fans in the crowd. Specifically, a group of girls in puffer jackets were giving it everything, singing back every word, embracing each other, and generally having a lot of fun. It was clear that they were mates of hers, but I embarrassingly didn’t realise it was Self Esteem’s band until they disappeared through the back to get ready. Thankfully, without her hypemen, SOFT LAD was just as captivating.

08

SOFT LAD is the solo project of Sophie Galpin, a Manchester-based pop musician who’s already made a name for herself as a collaborator of SOAK, and touring musician for the likes of Jessie Ware, The Breeders and James Vincent McMorrow.

Later on when she plays guitar, keys and drums for Self Esteem, it’s partly her contributions that give the set such vibrancy and energy. She naturally moves between roles, no less dedicated or dextrous depending on what’s needed of her.

After fourteen years working in the background, she now steps forward as a solo artist, with her debut EP Maximum Feels out in the spring. Today, I’m inducting her first single ‘Singapore’ (released on the 12th of November) into the <1000 Club. It’s a slinky and uplifting piece of pop that shares her tourmates’ ability to make songs that are instantly familiar but no less impactful.

It’s a breakup song, but one that centres the role of friends who can pull you out of bad situations without judgement.

At the time of writing, I’ve got no way of knowing if ‘Singapore’ will crack that 1000 plays on release day (which might be cheating a bit), but because my first experience of her music was her support set, I’m already rooting for her. Support sets sometimes get stick for going on too long and giving the millennial geriatrics a bad back, but their curation is an invaluable way for new artists to connect with an audience directly. This is especially true in smaller venues, where new acts and local groups are given a space on the stage. I’m not sure if I’d have such an instant affinity for ‘Singapore’ without the unique connection that concerts can bring.

Just as wonderful is what follows, as Self-Esteem offers her other support set to drag queen Ash Kenazi. She starts by performing an Aria to her own birthing scene, and ends by lighting sparklers while straddling the bar in wobbly platform heels. At one point, she runs on a treadmill to ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat (still in those heels), while wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Stop Being Straight’ a la Paris Hilton. It’s the kind of ballsy and surreal opening that can only exist with exciting support act choices.

Long may it continue.

words by skye butchard. illustration by kate prior

CD & DIGITAL OUT NOW LP 11.02.22

LP, CD & DIGITAL OUT NOW

The Beginning: Sweet 16

At 16, Cassandra Jenkins was touring the American folk circuit and apologising to her classmates

I went to an all-girls school, and we would go on these ‘orientation retreats’ every year. This photo is from one of those, in upstate New York, where you’d go and bond and talk about yourselves – your values, the things you appreciate about one another, to move beyond some of the social dynamics of the classroom into a more open space. There was a lot of apologising to each other.

I remember we all ate in these dining halls and they were like, “For the vegetarians, we have tuna fish salad!” I was vegetarian, and it was like, “Guys, it’s the year 2000. We can figure this out.”

That year there was an influx of new students, making a class of 30 a class of 45. I remember seeing this one girl and I just thought she was so cool. She had really long hair and looked like someone I really wanted to be friends with. She came up to me after math class and was like, “Hey, I am starting a band. Do you play the bass guitar?” And I didn’t, but I was like, “Yeah, I totally do now.” And that’s how I started playing the bass – I just wanted to be friends with this girl, and we stayed friends for many years, played in many bands together, up until pretty recently.

I was pretty deeply immersed in music then, but it was through meeting that friend that I got interested in newer

10

stuff – we’d listen to Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana and Metallica together, whereas before that I was exclusively listening to stuff like Ella Fitzgerald and The Beatles and James Taylor, as well as whatever my parents were listening to. I hadn’t gotten into newer music on my own. But she was like, “Let’s cover this Pearl Jam song and this Hole song,” and I was like, “Oh, okay.”

I grew up singing in my family band, playing a lot of the Great American Songbook. We would travel every summer for most of my childhood, to go play these very obscure folk festivals along the eastern coastline of the US. It was a pretty small circuit, but that was what we did – we didn’t go on family vacations, we went on family tours, and it meant the five of us packing into a vehicle of some kind with all of our instruments and all of our bags. It was usually pretty chaotic. But that was what we did: from the age of 12 onwards, we would do this circuit every summer.

My parents still do that every year. I haven’t gone since I became a touring musician, which I think is sort of the ideal thing to come out of that situation. In a lot of ways, I think they expected the kids of the festival to carry on the tradition, but instead I took it and ran with it. I’m still friends with a lot of the kids that I met there. Some of them are still doing incredible things: I met Sam Amidon there when I was maybe 13, and he’s one of my favourite musicians and one of those people who grew up in a similar way, where his family was very immersed in the traditional American music scene.

There’s a folk tradition of being a storyteller, and I never considered myself to be a good storyteller, but recently I realised that that’s a really big part of what I’m doing as a songwriter now. I’m on stage telling stories, and I fall back into some of the patterns that I observed when I was a kid – some of the formal stage banter style. So I’m finding my way with that, and trying to inhabit that in a way that feels natural to me and to the people that I’m seeing at my shows now.

For a long time I wouldn’t have said that I was trying to get to be a touring musician full-time, but the other day I heard one of the Nirvana songs my friend and I used to cover, playing in this little cafe in the countryside in France. It made me realise that, “Wow, I’ve been pointing myself towards this for a long time.”

And now I’m 37 and I am that person, and there’s not really any turning back.

If I could see my 16-year-old self now, I’d just say that you have a lot to offer, even and perhaps especially when you’re doubting yourself. As a younger woman I tried to mould myself to a world that’s trying to quieten a lot of voices out there, because the power that a lot of oppressed people, including women, have is threatening. But as soon as you start to feel like your voice is being smothered, that’s really when you need to speak up.

as told to luke cartledge

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“SPIKY CHRONICLERS OF SOUR TIMES” THE OBSERVER “THRILLING… A LEEDS BAND SET FOR STARDOM” THE TIMES “THERE’S ACUITY, PATHOS AND WIT, DEADPAN STORYTELLING OVER CATCHY, SNAKING RIFFS AND RELENTLESS GROOVES” THE GUARDIAN “YARD ACT HAVE CEMENTED THEMSELVES AS ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING BANDS ON THIS GREEN EARTH” SO YOUNG

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THE OVERLOAD

THE YEAR SONIC CATHEDRAL BROKE

THE DEBUT ALBUM OUT 21ST JANUARY 2022

2021

Albums of the Year 2021 1

Black Country, New Road For the First Time (Ninja Tune)

2

John Glacier Shiloh: Lost For Words (Plz Make It Ruins)

5

audiobooks Astro Tough (Heavenly)

6

Floating Points, Pharaoh Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra Promises (K7) 9

Little Simz Sometimes I Might Be Introvert (Age 101)

10

Dry Cleaning New Long Leg (4AD)

13

Squid Bright Green Field (Warp)

Virginia Wing Private Life (Fire)

Tirzah Colourgrade (Domino)

12

4

Cassandra Jenkins An Overview On Phenomenal Nature (Ba Da Bing!)

7

Anna B Savage A Common Turn (City Slang)

8

Theon Cross Intra-I (New Soil)

11

12

William Doyle Great Spans of Muddy Time (Tough Love)

15

Dean Blunt Black Metal 2 (Rough Trade) 18

Iglooghost Lei Line Eon (Gloo)

Self Esteem Prioritise Pleasure (Fiction)

Sleaford Mods Spare Ribs (Rough Trade) 14

17

3

16

For Those I Love For Those I Love (September Recordings)

19

Nala Sinephro Space 1.8 (Warp)

20

Low Hey What (Sub Pop)

Our favourite 40 albums of the year, voted for by our contributors

21

Ghetts Conflict of Interest (Warner)

22

Space Afrika Honest Labour (Dais)

25

Sassy 009 Heart Ego (Luft) 29

Tyler, The Creator Call Me If You Get Lost (Columbia)

Paris Texas Boy Annoymous (Self-released)

37

Portico Quartet Manument (Gondwana)

Serpentwithfeet Deacon (Secretly Canadian) 31

Danny L Harle Harlecore (Mad Decent)

34

35

CHAI Wink (Sub Pop)

38

Grouper Shade (Kranky)

28

Japanese Breakfast Jubilee (Dead Oceans) 32

Dave We’re All Alone In This Together (Warner) 36

Mabe Fratti Sera Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos (Tin Angel) 39

BABii MiiRROR (Gloo)

24

G. S. Schray The Changing Account (Last Resort) 27

30

33

Jana Rush Painful Enlightenment (Planet Mu)

The Bug Fire (Ninja Tune)

26

Black Midi Cavalcade (Rough Trade)

Divide & Dissolve Gas Lit (Invada)

23

40

New Age Doom and Lee “scratch” Perry Lee “scratch” Perry’s Guide To The Universe (We Are Busy Bodies)

13

Customer Survey 2021 We asked six willing musicians for their honest feedback on a year the some are calling “definitely the worst yet”

What will be your lasting memory of 2021?

STUART BRAITHWAITE, FROM MOGWAI: Finding out we had a number one record while putting my bins out.

AMY TAYLOR, FROM AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS: Any answer will be just as annoying as this question.

ARLO PARKS: To me it was an absolute whirlwind – overwhelming, gorgeous, exhausting – a rollercoaster with me in the front gripping the seat for dear life.

CHUBBY CHARLES, FROM CHUBBY AND THE GANG: I lost a lot of very dear people. Talented friends. I’ll always remember this year for that. Threw myself into doing music. Evaluated my life a bit. Realised it don’t mean anything.

KAM-BU: Performing at Boardmasters in front of thousands of kids, and them enjoying every minute of it.

SELF ESTEEM: I think ‘I Do This All The Time’ getting played twice in the same show by Steve Lamacq. It was so extra and also just felt very exciting. It was also very funny.

I was also very drunk.

What did you do for your birthday this year?

STUART: Went for a nice curry with my wife.

AMY: Went to Luna Park and got a hotdog.

ARLO: I slept in, went to brunch with my best friends in the morning, then ate cupcakes and did a Radio 1 takeover.

CHUBBY: Got steaming pissed. The Mutt’s Nuts came out like the day after so I think we were playing. Can’t remember.

KAM-BU: I actually stayed in. I don’t believe in birthdays.

SELF ESTEEM: Y’know what, I went down that big slide in the Olympic Park. Hahahah. It was £15 for a Go Pro and the footage sent to you. As I was ascending the stairs my banking app chimed “Lindsey Mendick has sent you £15”, so yes there is footage and I shall release it when I’m hard up (mid 2022).

14

What made you laugh the most in 2021?

STUART: Stath Lets Flats.

AMY: I think Seinfeld, it really did.

ARLO: Probably Sarah Paulson-based memes.

CHUBBY: People all of a sudden wanna be my pal now they know I can knock out a punk record. Funny fuckers.

KAM-BU: My friends and family.

SELF ESTEEM: Erm, I binge watched a show called The Pact on iPlayer and every time we went to put another episode on I would say “Packed and ready?” And yeah, me and the person I was with fucking lost it for about 20 mins.

How carried away did you get with England getting to the Euros final?

STUART: I’m Scottish. Are you serious?

AMY: I don’t care, honestly.

ARLO: As someone with a terrible attention span and a crammed schedule, it flew right over my head.

CHUBBY: Painted my face. Threw chairs around. Fun shit.

KAM-BU: Mate, it was bloody well coming home! Instead only life came back, but we got the World Cup to come! Let’s gooo!

SELF ESTEEM: It was weird wasn’t it? I was proud of the beautiful boys but I was so hyper aware that the rancid government would take credit for it I kind of didn’t want a win.

Who is your heartthrob of 2021, and why is it Jack Grealish?

STUART: Mate.

AMY: Who’s that? I don’t know. I like John.

ARLO: It is and always will be Tilda Swinton in a bright blue Balenciaga suit walking her Australian Shepherd in

that Almodovar film La Voz Humana.

CHUBBY: Alicia Keys. Easily.

KAM-BU: Love his hair and spirit.

SELF ESTEEM: Yeah, why would he get it so hard? The curtains? I can make all the progress I want, but I’ll still let a lithe man with curtains ruin my life.

How about the villain of the year?

STUART: Always Trump.

AMY: Oh my god, Covid was. Melbourne was in lockdown all year – we had the longest lockdown in the world.

ARLO: It is and always will be the mum in Coraline.

CHUBBY: Any government type. Hate ’em all. Hate being told what to do. All that money and they can’t get a suit that fits between ’em. Clueless cunts.

KAM-BU: Myself. Because at times I’m my own worst enemy.

SELF ESTEEM: Every single person that profited from a global pandemic.

How did 2021 perform in terms of television?

STUART: I loved Succession and What We Do In The Shadows – both amazing.

AMY: I didn’t really watch any telly shows, but I love 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton, Terminator 2, Total Recall and The Manchurian Candidate.

ARLO: I mainly watched films, but revisiting New Girl, Rick and Morty and Skins definitely brought me comfort.

CHUBBY: I watch cartoons a lot. ’40s ones. I watched The Sopranos again. Oz. Handmaid’s Tale. I try not to watch TV. I hate technology. Rots your brain and I’m not sure how much brain I got left to spare.

KAM-BU: Gogglebox.

SELF ESTEEM: I finally did The Sopranos during the second wave and I’m not sure I would have survived without it.

Would you have gone into space with Jeff Bezos?

STUART: Only if he had a one-way ticket.

AMY: Not with Jeff Bezos, no.

ARLO: I don’t think so! I’m perfectly fine down here thanks.

CHUBBY: Yeah and I would’ve opened the door when I got up there. You’re welcome.

KAM-BU: No. SELF ESTEEM: Y’know what, I did actually really get into the space race, the first one. I think I was quite mentally low and the idea that I could go TO THE MOON and on said moon nobody would be pissed off with me there was really stomach-settling. But nah, I don’t think I’d feel comfortable going anywhere with Jeffrey.

Did you get out to see the new James Bond?

STUART: I was brought up not to trust people who wear suits and also anyone who works for the British Government.

Fuck James Bond.

AMY: It’s not out in Australia yet but I can’t wait to see it!

ARLO: Nope, I’ve been touring unfortunately, but I need to make time to.

CHUBBY: James Bond’s a cunt.

KAM-BU: Yes I did.

SELF ESTEEM: Fucking no way, I can’t think of anything more tired and boring than a man in a suit doing stuff.

What song or artist gives you hope for a brighter 2022?

STUART: Cloth.

AMY: Bryce and Declan’s new band, Needle Injection.

ARLO: ‘timetetheredtogether’ by Cryogeyser – washy, emotional music that makes me feel like I’m in a movie.

CHUBBY: Lil Tjay just dropped ‘Not in the Mood’.

Love that shit. Mastermind LP. Stingray Seven. Island of Love. Micro Moon. Lots of tasty shit in the UK. KAM-BU: PinkPantheress.

SELF ESTEEM: Johanna Sternberg.

What positive will you take from 2021?

STUART: That I’m grateful that people still want to listen to the band I play in.

AMY: Lactose-free milk.

ARLO: That we are stronger than we think we are and that dreams are within reach.

CHUBBY: I don’t believe in positives or negatives.

That’s subjective and anything that’s positive may lead to a greater negative or vice versa.

KAM-BU: The other side of a battery.

SELF ESTEEM: Everyone is as socially anxious as me, it turns out.

Any other business?

STUART: We need to overthrow the UK government.

AMY: None that’s mine.

ARLO: Just that I’m excited for the year to come – to spend time in America supporting Clairo, to delve into new music and throw myself back into the world.

CHUBBY: Yeah. Fuck ’em all.

KAM-BU: Bitcoin.

SELF ESTEEM: I want to start a business that makes trousers for women with fat arses and small waists, and it’s called WIDE LOAD DENIM. I’m open to investors.

15

Legss An experimental London group in conflict with the capital,

by Robert Davidson.

Photography by Dan Kendall

For many up-and-coming South London bands, the first play on Steve Lemacq’s BBC Radio 6 show is a sacred rite of passage.

One that rewards their hard work, cements their ‘one to watch’ status, and sets them on their way. Well, Legss aren’t your typical South London band. Vocalist and guitarist Ned Green recounts the revered DJ’s debut play of Legss’ recent single ‘Hyde Park Coroner’. “He played it and at the end just said, ‘Well, that was rather oblique.’” Despite the anti-climax, Green wears a beaming smile while relaying the story. “You could tell he wasn’t into it and he didn’t understand it. And you know, as odd as it sounds, for Legss that’s a win.”

To be fair to Lemacq, ‘rather oblique’ isn’t the worst take on Legss’ music. Their capricious sound regularly strays far from centre, entering realms unfamiliar for guitar-driven music, incorporating dark sonic expositions, strong fictional characters, and elements of theatre. At times, all three all at once.

Another contributing factor to Lemacq’s verdict may be Legss’ history with another BBC radio DJ, Huw Stephens – a history to which Stephens is almost certainly oblivious. It might be too much to say that Legss ‘sent’ for Stephens on the band’s mercurial ‘Letters to Huw’, sat at the heart of their criminally unheard second EP Doomswayers, but they certainly took a genuine artistic risk. The tense song charts a meeting between a musician and the Welsh broadcaster, where Stephens whisks them off to Paris to catch “the last Euro show of a darling new alternative outfit he was championing”. As the two sit nursing espressos at the Paris Hard Rock Café over a simple piano arrangement that mutates into a sinister soundscape, Stephens confides in the musician a deep, dark secret – he cannot stand any music. The revelation sinks the song into a bleak sonic wasteland, with a soliloquy of apathy wandering its scorched earth. The song ends not with a bang, but a whimper, as Stephens recites T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men. “The character is in no way based on Huw, but was drawn from a few revealing conversations with radio producers and industry types,” Green clarifies. The aim was “to make listeners question the intentions of anyone in a position of authority who is quick to splash cash to impress.” It’s a song that won’t endear them to the BBC playlist makers any time soon. But Legss like to do things their own way.

— Embracing limitation — Legss’ oeuvre, comprising two self-released EPs (Writhing Comedy and Doomswayers) and two tremendous recent singles, is full of these wayward narratives that spiral in surprising directions.

Green asserts that from the band’s formation in autumn 2018 that they were bonded by their “shared enthusiasm for wanting to create slightly odd, uneven, and disconcerting music.

I don’t know how to say this without sounding pretentious,” he says, “but we were all aware quite early on that we wanted to make music that wasn’t one-dimensional. That was slightly more ambitious or conceptual.”

While the description of literary flourishes, entrancing experimentation, and spasmodic sonic shifts is reminiscent of

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other South London bands, in truth, there’s little that connects them with the scene besides location, lazy music journalists and Spotify’s algorithm. Legss’ affinity with London music instead harks back through the decades, with a greater parallel to The Clash, Japan, This Heat, and even old music hall acts such as Dan Leno.

Drummer Louis Grace reflects that “bands like Black Midi and Black Country, New Road were making music when we were getting familiar with ourselves. But you know, they’re all musically trained, so the standard’s set so high. A lot of people are in awe of them and try to follow suit.” Grace believes this blind adoration “isn’t good for South London music” and its authenticity. “We’re trying to write something that’s ignoring what everyone else is doing and make it a sonic representation of who we are as people and what influences us, be it art, film or poetry.”

As a result, Legss’ music swims in its idiosyncrasies: Green’s narrative-heavy but poetic delivery veers and soars like a manic one-man show off Shaftesbury Avenue with theatrical rolling Rs and visceral yells. Grace’s thunderous drumming and sonic experimentation crash through arrangements like that erratic train in Inception. Lead guitarist Max Oliver’s searing guitar licks root the band in a broadly fast-paced punk environ-

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ment, and Jake Martin’s rhapsodic bass fills their world with thick vibrations that give it depth and palpability.

“We produce the sort of music we do essentially because we are not fully musically trained,” says Green. “It forces us to work within a different set of confinements.”

Grace puts it succinctly: “The limitation is what differentiates the band.”

— I work in Hollywood — While Legss has always been a quartet, it does feel that there’s a fifth member driving their music to strange places – London itself. Three members of the band grew up in London’s orbit, while Green grew up near Liverpool.

Martin explains his paradoxical relationship to the city.

“I can get drowned in frustration living here,” he says. “I’m still processing my relationship with the music and the city and writing music in London. It all kind of funnels into one another.”

“You can feel the conflict with the capital in our music,” adds Grace.

The band’s latest single, ‘Hollywood’, embodies this lovehate relationship. Detailing the cognitive dissonance of being an artist in London, Grace explains how “you go home for Christmas and tell your family ‘I got my music played on radio’ and they’re proud. But the reality is that day-to-day you’re working in coffee shops.”

“I was picking litter when we were doing Doomswayers,” says Green. “But you know, like it says in the lyrics, ‘I tell my mum’s friends I work in Hollywood.’”

This violent clash with London’s late-stage capitalism

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bubbles up gradually and then suddenly in Legss’ music, like a round of hiccups. Their music isn’t an ode to The Libertines’ Albion, nor Britpop’s Cool Britannia; instead, it’s in dialogue with Boris Johnson’s vapid Global Britain.

“I don’t necessarily think we are a political band,” says Green. “But I think the way politics comes into the music is through subtlety or nuance.”

This subtlety means the abyss of the capital can appear like neoliberal visions. There’s the sleek anxiety of ‘Venus’ which fidgets like a Ballardian panic attack occurring in Nine Elms’ Sky Pool, for everybody to see. There’s a lull in ‘Doomswayers’ that has a hue of ‘Where Is My Mind’ by the Pixies, conjuring a contorted Fight Club ending that extends to Canary Wharf.

And while ‘Hyde Park Coroner’ is a time-stretching murder ballad, it’s the aborted Marble Arch Mound which flickers through the mind.

The cumulative effect is music that listens like a postmodern novel. A sound that bonds meta-fiction, irreverence, and ingenuity, fusing high and low culture and engaging with the world’s lunacy. It’s the perfect soundtrack to a self-cannibalising city.

But for all that, Legss’ music never comes across as heady.

The music’s core isn’t cynicism, but connection. Green says that at the heart of their music “is an awareness of how affecting sound can be. We are so acutely aware of how we are all equally affected by music, and we have the self-belief that we too can make music that is as affecting.”

Grace condenses it further still: “We really, really fucking care.” These are honest, heartfelt songs for dark, despondent times.

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Los Bitchos Finally, Lindsey Lohan’s life is being soundtracked by an instrumental party band, by Liam Konemann.

Photography by Tom Porter

Culture moves in cycles. We all know this. One day it’s all vinyl and moustaches, and the next thing you know the mullet is making a comeback and everyone you meet looks like your uncle in 1992. So here’s the thing: Lindsey Lohan is due a renaissance.

At least, according to Los Bitchos she is. ‘Lindsey Goes to Mykonos’, the closing track on their upcoming debut album Let the Festivities Begin! could be the first step.

“Number one, massive respect to Lindsey Lohan, and we hope she’s doing okay,” says the band’s guitarist Serra Petale.

“And Number two, we were just all things Lindsey at that time.”

The songs on Let the Festivities Begin! have been in the works since Serra and keytar player Agustina Ruiz started the band in April 2017, so ‘that time’ is technically somewhere between then and 2019, when the majority of the writing was

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wrapped up. But really, it kind of seems like Los Bitchos would be happy for things to be all Lindsey, all the time.

“We were watching her reality show,” Serra continues, “I made Agustina watch –” “– Liz & Dick.” Agustina finishes. “You made me watch it twice, and you hadn’t even watched it yet.”

“We’re really obsessed with her and she had this new reality show coming out – she opened up her own club in Mykonos,” says Serra.

Even if you think you haven’t seen the show, you’ll most likely remember Lindsey’s Mykonos era. Her dance moves were all over the internet for days. So Los Bitchos had Lindsey Lohan on the brain when Agustina sent Serra a recording of a new keytar riff.

“It was like, you know one of those Casio demos?

It sounded like that. It was this really cute –” Serra sings the riff; a kitschy, Countdown-esque number that feels inherently sunny.

“Then I think for some reason I was listening to Faith No More, you know that song ‘Epic’?” She growls out this riff as well, that instantaneously recognisable slice of ’90s rock.

“So I put in those out of control guitars. Then we were like, oh what if we do a sort of life of Lindsey Lohan?”

What if indeed?

“So starting really cute, when she’s [at the] Parent Trap, Freaky Friday, Mean Girls peak,” says Serra. “Then she starts the relationship with Samantha Ronson and starts partying, and that’s the out of control bit. And it ends with Lindsey just cruising off into the sunset.”

At the end of the day, Los Bitchos really hope Lindsey Lohan is happy.

They seem to want that for everyone; it’s sort of the point. That’s the energy that carries through Let the Festivities Begin!, anyway.

— The name is Los Bitchos, for God’s sake — It would be easy for something so layered, so knowingly influenced and assembled, to disappear up its own arse, so to speak, but Los Bitchos are far from po-faced.

“One thing we don’t do is overthink what we do as a band,” says bassist Josefine Jonsson. “[‘Lindsey Goes to Mykonos’] is a joke that led to a whole song being written. All the titles are really random because they’re just weird jokes that come up, or things that happen to us that become anecdotes, and then they become a title or a song. We’re not one of those craftsmen that go in and try to make something very complicated. We just tried the opposite. We just love having fun together.’

They make for a refreshing antidote to the kind of people – let’s face it, usually men – who insist that guitars are going out of fashion, that authenticity is on the wane and quote-unquote real bands are in short supply. Los Bitchos don’t really seem to be concerned with those kinds of broad accusations.

“When we started there wasn’t an ounce of real seriousness, ever,” says Serra. “The name is Los Bitchos for God’s sake, you know what I mean? I’m not even from a Spanishspeaking country.”

While their rejection of seriousness is partly just because they can’t be bothered with such trifling issues when they could be having fun instead, Los Bitchos are well aware of the practical benefits of just doing whatever you like.

“I think once you start evangelising stuff, especially in music, it sort of takes the fun out of it. Really, you end up pushing a lot of creativity and what could be good ideas away,” Serra says.

— Neutral face emoji — Los Bitchos are always on the hunt for potentially good ideas. Let the Festivities Begin! is a magpie’s nest of shiny musical objects, with influences ranging from pop and punk to ’70s

Anatolian rock and Latin American cumbia. From the prowling disco of ‘Las Panteras’ to the psychedelic Western ‘FFS’, the album sprawls across genres not only over the course of the record as a whole, but also within individual tracks. The album is also dotted with what the band call ‘cosmic’ synths, just to round it off – courtesy of what some might consider the record’s unexpected producer.

When you think ‘internationally inspired instrumental punk’, you’d be forgiven for not naturally thinking of Alex Kapranos, frontman of Franz Ferdinand and face of the Wikipedia entry for duffle coats for the last 15 years. And yet here we are – with Kapranos as the album’s producer.

“Funnily enough, he’s really into [the band’s varied influences],” says Serra. “When we started, the project was really born from listening to a Peruvian chicha album. Agustina’s got her roots in [folkloric genre and dance from Colombia] cumbia, she’s from Uruguay, and we started the band with those influences in mind. Turkish Psychedelia as well, because my mother is Turkish. And Alex is really into all that stuff. We had no idea until we talked to him, but he’s got such a fantastic knowledge of all the types of music that we like, and a lot of our influences.”

Of course, making a record isn’t always smooth sailing, no matter how aligned your interests are. When the band were trying to play ‘Try the Circle!’, which Serra describes as “a bit of a proggy little number,” in the studio for the first time, no amount of Anatolian rock records were going to smooth things over.

“We were going to play it to Alex for the first time,” Josefine says with a grin. “And we were all mic’d up with the cans on, and he was listening in and there was a delay in the headphones, and everything was slightly out of time.”

“It was impossible to play along because everything was getting back to you at a different time,” says drummer Nic Crawshaw.

“It just isn’t possible, but we kind of persevered through, and Alex is just –” Josefine makes a face not dissimilar to what the good people at emojipedia call the ‘neutral face’ – a perfectly flat mouth not giving anything away. The others laugh.

“Alex is so polite he couldn’t say it, but then in the nicest way possible told us that basically [the song] was never going to work,” she says. “And we were like, ‘give us another shot!

It’s because of the cans!’ and he was like –” she adopts the very gentle tone of someone gently steering a toddler away from the unicorn or fairy they swear they just saw, “– yeah yeah yeah, maybe we should move on?”

“Me and Josie were like, ‘It doesn’t sound right in our headphones!’, and no one believed us,” says Nic. Just as well they eventually proved their innocence, or the album could have been very different; songs unravelling, everything on a delay, and Alex Kapranos at the desk wondering why he hadn’t gone into modelling duffle coats full time instead.

Luckily, we live in the timeline where Let the Festivities Begin! all came out as it should. Circumstances permitting, Los Bitchos will take it on the road in 2022, bringing audiences into their own personal party like they always do. And if they make it to the Emirates, where Lindsey Lohan is rumoured to have been living, she’s very welcome to come along.

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John Glacier Music for loners, from a lo-fi Hackney rapper, by Gemma Samways.

Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

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Elusive, enigmatic, mysterious: in the limited amount of press John Glacier has done so far, these are the sort of descriptors you’ll usually find following her about. As a result, it’s difficult not to approach an interview with the East London rapper without a mild sense of trepidation: what if she proves hostile, or shuts down every line of questioning?

As it happens, Glacier is a fun, frequently fascinating interviewee. Ask the right questions and she’ll talk animatedly – and at length – holding forth today on subjects as far reaching as social cleansing in Hackney and the mechanics of the music industry. So when I mention her reputation for having an aura of inscrutability, she seems genuinely bemused.

“I don’t believe I’m elusive or an enigma or mysterious,” she shrugs, perched on the sofa of her manager’s apartment in Margate, wine glass in hand. “I’m very talkative, very open, very honest. People see me out. I spam my Instagram page with what I’m doing in my day. So it doesn’t make any sense to me.

I’m just a human.”

That’s not to say that any of these descriptions are entirely inaccurate either. Glacier can be brutally economical in her responses, and would never elaborate out of politeness or to dispel nervous energy. When I enquire why the male pseudonym she bats back, “Because I’m John Glacier!” laughing.

Ask her about the specifics of her creative process, and she regularly retreats into vagueness, saying things like, “There’s not much thought behind it,” and, “I just start writing and see where I end up.”

If it can all feel a bit evasive at times, it’s worth asking yourself whether any of that stuff really matters. Culturally, we’re so conditioned to want context but, really, what more do you need than the music? Maybe it’s just not that deep. As Glacier puts it, “Let’s say I told you the whole project was about my favourite pair of socks: it would just take away your own world of what [the music] meant to you. And, anyway, nothing’s ever as interesting as people make it out to be.”

Except that Glacier is making some of the most interesting music in the country right now. Released at the end of July, her debut project – SHILOH: Lost For Words (second on our Albums of the Year list) – remains every bit as astonishing today as it was on first listen, setting Glacier’s low key, almost conversational flow amongst a range of hazy electronic soundscapes overseen by executive producer Vegyn (Frank Ocean, Dean Blunt, JPEGMAFIA). From the eerie, arpeggiated synths of ‘Cryptomnesia’ to the sun-warped guitar textures on ‘Green Elephants’, via the serene drones and shuffling brush work of ‘Some Other Thing’, there’s a hallucinogenic yet soulful quality to these productions, only heightened by Glacier’s use of pitch-shifting.

Considering both her freeform approach to exper-imentation and her abstract, almost stream-of-consciousness-style bars, it’s tempting to draw comparisons to Dean Blunt (with whom she has collaborated previously as part of his Babyfather project) while the sense of intimacy she conjures brings to mind an artist like Tirzah. Glacier herself has nothing to say on SHILOH’s specific influences today, though she talks freely about the artists that shaped her in childhood.

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— Chocolate browning, shining, shining — Growing up in Hackney Central, Glacier and her siblings would spend hours hanging out in their father’s Caribbean food shop, leaning into their Jamaican heritage by listening to reggae and dancehall artists like Vybz Kartel, Gyptian, Mavado, and Sizzla, as well as soca and hip hop. She cites the most commercial of pop music as influential too, including Atomic Kitten and Westlife, as well as UK hip hop and grime artists like Wretch 32, Kano and Dizzee Rascal.

She looks back fondly on the multiculturalism of Lower Clapton Road at that time, long before the artisan coffee shops and boutiques inevitably moved in. “There was a massive Jamaican community, a massive Pakistani community. And then suddenly [developers] were offering people money to leave, basically. Some people took the money, but my dad wouldn’t because he knew why they were offering it to him: they didn’t want people like us there anymore.”

It’s a feeling Glacier is still brought back to every now and then with a jolt. “I went to this pub in London Fields this summer with my mate, and everyone was just staring at us. And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I was born here, like, fuck off!’ I feel like if [gentrification] was inclusive, then it wouldn’t be an issue. But some of the new people in the area are racist.

They’re not in-your-face racist, it’s more subtle than that.”

She confronts microaggressions like these on ‘Icing’, drawling in the chorus, “Don’t see me as human, no no / Chocolate browning, shining, shining.”

As she explains, music has always been an outlet for processing difficult experiences and feelings. “Instead of me ranting about stuff, I can just make a song, get it off my chest, let it sit there, and I no longer have to deal with it. So this project was literally a huge purge of emotions: it was me laying everything out and then killing it. It’s a form of peace.”

That diaristic feel is further reflected in the project’s purposely rough-hewn edges. Instrumentals are often deliberately lo-fi, and at the end of ‘Platoon’ we hear Glacier telling

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Vegyn on mic, “I think I did a better flow on that, I think.” For Glacier, preserving that authenticity is integral to who she is as an artist.

“I’m not the type of artist that’s ever gonna take the form of something they’re not. My main goal is letting people know that I’m me, otherwise it’s so awkward. Like, imagine if I put out like this crystal clear image of me that was near-perfect, and then you met me in reality. You’d be bloody disappointed, because I’m quite shy. Some people, they get themself into mad uncomfortable positions in life by putting up a false image of themselves, that they then have to step out into the real world and uphold. I feel like that weight would be way too much for me to bear.”

It’s an approach that could feel at odds with much of the music industry, but Glacier is well aware of her worth. “If labels are looking at me as a business opportunity, I will be smart and do the same,” she shrugs. “And if you get frustrated with the industry, it’s just about reminding yourself that if you wanna make music, you can always make music. It can just be for pleasure, and not business.”

— Life support — Knowing yourself is a key theme on the ironically-titled SHILOH: Lost For Words, which sees Glacier speaking freely about her relationships, both with herself and others. It often feels revelatory, particularly on ‘Platoon’ where she admits, “I’ve been searching for myself in the wrong places.” Meanwhile, religious imagery is scattered throughout, which feels a curious choice considering Glacier herself is not religious. “I feel like sometimes when you’ve got nothing, you’ve just got to have faith,” she reasons. “Like, life’s rough – if you have like the comfort blanket of faith, stuff will work out.”

As well as spirituality, there’s plenty of dark humour to be found here – if you look deep enough, that is. “I feel like people that experience depression find laughter in places where others might not,” Glacier says with a wry smile. “So some people might find humour or joy in places where it seems like there isn’t joy.”

For someone pouring so much of her soul into her writing, Glacier seems impressively indifferent to any audience reaction today. “I live in my own head,” she says, a statement that could easily feel disingenuous, but coming from an artist as defiantly independent as Glacier it rings true. When pressed to consider who might benefit from these songs, she suddenly becomes more forthcoming.

“I feel like women would understand what I’m talking about, or relate to the songs, more than anybody else. And that’s the main purpose. I’m a loner so a lot of times when I’ve been bogged down, I didn’t really have anyone to talk to. So music was my way of putting stuff out. And if my music doesn’t speak to you, then it’s probably not made directly for you. It’s music for loners. Music is my friend. Literally, I write every day, I make a beat every day, I’m always doing something music-related. I can’t live without music. And that’s not a lie. It’s my life support.”

It’s a moment of unchecked candour that seems to startle Glacier herself. Turns out, it really is that deep.

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King Hannah The cinematic sound of the American West comes to Liverpool, by Zara Hedderman.

Photography by Katie Silvester

“My favourite kind of films to watch are from a period in American cinema between the late 1960s into the 1970s,” Craig Whittle considers over Zoom. “Badlands,” he exclaims, “I think that’s my favourite film. I suppose that’s where the wide, cinematic sound comes into our music; I love when songs sound the way those films look.”

The King Hannah guitarist’s fondness for Terrence Malick’s 1973 directorial debut chimesl with the influence of cinema on the band’s output. Beginning with their early singles through to their considered debut LP – the brilliantly titled I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me, due February 2022 via City Slang – King Hannah’s expansive arrangements effortlessly encapsulate the dusty, vast terrain of the south-western United States. Delving into storied narratives set to sparse instrumentation produced by any act will often lead back to the master of this style: Bruce Springsteen, an artist who, coincidentally, also found inspiration in Badlands when penning

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the title track to his 1982 record, Nebraska. Closing side one of that record is ‘State Trooper’, a song covered by King Hannah with such ease that a Springsteen novice may think it was a work of their own design. Such is the strength in the colloquial nature of King Hannah’s lyricism, which is transported by the haze of Americana cast upon their immersive arrangements.

“We love film and I love film scores,” Whittle continues.

“So it must seep into the music somewhere. It’s not a conscious thing, though. I used to love listening to film scores when I was writing or reading, so I guess it’s always there in the back of my mind.”

— Minimalism and suspense — Since the Liverpool-based duo, completed by vocalist and lyricist Hannah Merrick, who sits beside Whittle on a comfortable-looking white couch during our conversation, came to prominence off the back of their debut single ‘​​Crème Brûlée’ in mid-2020, all aspects of their music has exuded a filmic sensibility. It’s in the expansive (and often suspenseful) soundscapes, the striking artwork for their debut EP, Tell Me Your Mind and I’ll Tell You Mine, and the Lynchian shots of a car travelling down a darkened, seemingly isolated road in the video for ‘A WellMade Woman’. The accompanying visuals effectively enhance the sensory experience for the listener. Musically, there’s an inherent sophistication borne from the unrushed temperament of both Merrick’s almost spoken delivery and the instrumentation across the songs. The textural atmosphere established early in their already impressive trajectory is taken to the next level on I’m Not Sorry…, which confidently presents a variety of sonic suites over the course of twelve songs.

The minimalism of their initial releases (notwithstanding the raucous guitar solos of the early singles), remains intact.

Behind the album’s sardonic title, King Hannah’s debut is an unapologetic display of Whittle and Merrick’s broader musical tastes as well as being a marker of their artistic maturation.

“I feel like with the EP, we tried to layer too many things into it,” reflects Whittle. “Maybe that was an insecurity thing; a lack of confidence in how we recorded. Sometimes when I listen back to it now, I think we could have had less instruments and a bit more space in it. We were conscious of that for the album. We tried to be a bit more confident in the parts as we recorded them.

The album still has that cinematic sound through it. We didn’t want it to be like, ‘Here are the new songs’ and step completely away from the old songs. It was important to us to have a flow between the old material going into the songs on the album and I think we’ve done that.”

— Making lockdown work for you — I’m Not Sorry’s tonal progression mostly draws from late’90s acts. The sinister edge permeating the rhythm section of ‘Big Big Baby’ comes close to more spacious Nine Inch Nails propositions, while ‘Foolius Caesar’ is instantly reminiscent of Portishead, with Merrick heralding Beth Gibbons’s ethereal cadence. Introspection abounds, and amongst the many high-

lights are the intricacies stitching the songs together across the tracklist; notably on the instrumentals ‘So Much Water So Close To Drone’ and ‘Death Of The Housephone’, the latter drawing on Broadcast’s eerier compositions.

As debuts go, the band have struck a balance between presenting a raw portrait of themselves through a relatable appreciation for solitude (“I like being on my own most of the day,” Merrick reveals on the title track) and earnest concerns of the future (“I wanna be a mother one day / something tells me... Oh that I’ll be waiting a long, long time”) whilst maintaining some mystique, leaving the listener wanting to know more about them.

Beyond an anecdote of Hannah and Craig’s first encounter at a gig – the latter watching in awe at Merrick’s performance – during their uni years, plus a spell in which the pair were employed in the same pub, little exists online about their history as a band. Although they’ve been building a substantial portfolio of music throughout 2020 into 2021, they began tracking demos as far back as 2017.

“We had actually recorded a lot of stuff [in 2017] but didn’t like any of it,” recalls Merrick. “We made the decision to not release any of that material, except for ‘​​Crème Brûlée’ which was the only recording from that time that we loved. So that’s where the length has been.”

In that regard, the absence of live music as a result of the pandemic afforded the duo time to comfortably hone their sound, as Hannah remembers: “Lockdown, in a way, did us good because we weren’t gigging anyway. We were solely concentrating on writing the EP during the first lockdown. So when the second lockdown came around, we used that time to write the album.” Craig expands upon Hannah’s initial point, a common occurrence throughout our conversation that sees the pair picking up where the other left off, or further expanding upon the other’s train of thought. It’s a sweet reflection of the synergy between them that is so apparent in their music. “If it wasn’t for the lockdown – I mean, we would have been fine,” he says, “but I think it would have been slightly too soon for us to start going out and playing to crowds. Throughout 2020 we grew a lot musically.”

With a live set-up expanding King Hannah to a quintet, they’ve finally experienced life on the road, completing their first UK tour in October 2021. They’ve benefitted from reading audience reactions to unreleased material from their debut LP; having spent the best part of four years leading up to this point has enabled them to gain a new perspective on their work.

“We came away from touring having learnt so much about ourselves,” Merrick suggests to Whittle. “Yeah, like seeing what songs really landed with the crowd and what ones didn’t as much. We also thought about ways to emphasise parts of songs, and obviously, we played new songs that nobody had heard so it was really interesting to see which ones people responded well to at all the gigs.”

“We noticed it was the same pattern for every show, more or less,” says Merrick. “The songs we love the most were the ones in the set that the crowd gave the best reaction to. Which makes you feel like you’re doing something right.”

27

Cate Le Bon

Swinging between ‘oh, fuck’ and ‘fuck it’,

by Joe Goggins. Photography by Emily Malan

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Cate Le Bon bought a house last year. Since moving to Los Angeles in 2013, she’d slowly become enamoured with Joshua Tree, making the six-hour round trip more and more often; to get away from the city for the weekend, to visit her close friend, Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, and, towards the tail end of making her last album, to get it finished, renting a place for a month and holing up with collaborator and co-producer Samur Khouja. “That’s when I really fell in love with it,” she explains. “With how it felt to be out here. It’s insanely beautiful; like an alien landscape, but there’s a softness to its beauty. It’s gentle; it doesn’t feel at all oppressive. The days are so long, and the sky is so big. Any time I was ever here, it would break my heart to leave.”

If you can’t quite see Le Bon, a deeply thoughtful crafter of nuanced, intelligent art pop, in surrounds that, to music fans, are most often associated with the arena bombast of U2 and the snarling machismo of Queens of the Stone Age, then you’d be in the same position as her new neighbours were for the past 18 months. She and her partner closed on the property in February 2020, as coronavirus was beginning its slow creep from east to west, from the lower echelons of the news cycle to the headlines.

Le Bon left Joshua Tree, with Khouja, for about as dramatically different an environment as you could imagine, short perhaps of the moon: Reykjavík, where she’d be spending five weeks with her friend John Grant, producing his new album ( June’s Boy from Michigan). Then, as her diary had it, she’d head back across the pond for a tour with Kurt Vile, on which they’d play separate sets but share the same backing band.

We all know what happened next. Le Bon’s stay in Iceland ultimately lasted three months. “I don’t think you could ask for a better place to be in those circumstances, honestly,” she says over Zoom from Joshua Tree, where she is now, finally, permanently ensconced. “A really civilised island in the middle of nowhere, cut off from everything. But it was still terrifying; the Foreign Office urging Britons to come home, and America shutting its borders. Stella arrived on the Tuesday to record drums for John’s album, and at five o’clock the next morning, I was rushing her to the airport so she could get on the last flight to Australia.”

Best-laid plans went up in smoke, as it became increasingly clear that Le Bon would not be writing her sixth album in any of the exotic, far-flung locations she’d shortlisted; not in Chile, or in Norway. She couldn’t even get back to California, which both disrupted Grant’s record – the finishing touches to which were supposed to be applied north of San Francisco – and eliminated her new home as a potential base for album six. When some British restrictions were lifted in the summer of 2020, she returned to her old hometown of Cardiff, where she spent a purgatorial period entering into a cycle of having her hopes

raised then dashed, of the U.S. border reopening. “Eventually, I knew I had to bite the bullet. I couldn’t bank on getting back to America. I flew Samur to Cardiff in January of this year, built a studio, knuckled down, and got to work.”

— Pompeii — Accordingly, Le Bon’s sumptuous sixth record, Pompeii – one swathed in grandeur, from the historical resonance of its title to its songs’ recurring religious imagery – was conceived not in an environment befitting its ambition but, instead, in a child’s bedroom in a terraced house that Le Bon once lived in, fifteen years ago – “the total opposite of what I’d wanted.” She’d craved isolation, but not this kind of isolation – she’d hoped to be secluded, whereas lockdown felt more like being stifled.

“It was extreme,” she says, “marinating day after day in a tiny little room, and the only thing you have control over is what you’re making. Outside of that, you’re going through the same mental polarisation as everyone else. One minute there’s hope, the next there’s existential dread, and you can’t help but wonder if this is the last thing you’re ever going to make – and if it is, will anybody hear it, anyway? We might all be dead. You’re swinging between ‘oh, fuck’ and ‘fuck it.’ Confronting time for everybody, wasn’t it?”

Eventually, routine emerged. She had her most potent weapon in hand: Khouja, who speaks her musical language like nobody else. In the room next door, focusing on his painting, was another close collaborator, Tim Presley, with whom Le Bon released two albums as the duo DRINKS. The three of them would walk down the street for coffee each morning (“our commute”), then back to the house for eggs before retreating to their studios, often for more than twelve hours at a time. Like most of Le Bon’s work, Pompeii shifts shape constantly over the course of its nine tracks, but it feels like a counterpoint to Reward, too. Where that album was an exercise in airy exploration, Pompeii is grounded by a deep sense of groove, a product of Le Bon writing it largely on the bass guitar. “It was a foundation for everything else to interlock around. There’s something meditative about the repetitive nature of bass riffs, and so the genesis of the whole record was my love for playing bass.”

It is the bedrock around which the rest of Pompeii is built, and a consistent sonic palette gradually reveals itself.

Woozy synths and softly fizzing guitars characterise the likes of ‘French Boys’ and ‘Cry Me Old Trouble’, while saxophones are woven into the fabric of ‘Dirt on the Bed’ and ‘Running Away’.

Mozgawa, meanwhile, took her reputation as one of indie rock’s most reliable beat-keepers to a new level by providing Pompeii’s percussion from over 10,000 miles away, in what proved a bittersweet contribution for Le Bon. “We had an app that let us

29

all work together at the same time, on four different screens, with the sessions starting at 10pm UK time,” she explains.

“It was kind of amazing; everything was happening in real time, so you could say, ‘keep it tight here, maybe don’t play that fill there.’ It was almost scary how functional it was, but it was sad, too, because one of my favourite things is to be in the room when Stella’s playing, and it’s quite a cold process doing it remotely.

There isn’t really the room for the normal chat and conversation you’d have.”

— The grief is in the saxophones — The logistics of making a record in the circumstances are one thing (solutions can be sought, whether technological or, in the case of some of the auxiliary instrumentation, practical, with social distancing allowing for the saxophones to be cut at a Cardiff studio), but the emotional tenor of the songs is another matter entirely. And whilst Le Bon’s cramped home studio might not have readily lent itself to sweeping, evocative lyricism, the broader situation and its implications changed the way that she wrote. “There were a lot of different things at play,” she reflects. “I think escapism is definitely appealing to the quarantined mind. Being in a situation where there’s hope in some moments and a fatalistic outlook in others, I think it probably draws different moods and ways of working out of you, without you really realising.”

As she ruminated on how quickly her old life had crumbled under the sudden, unforeseen pressures of the pandemic, the lure of Pompeii as an appropriate metaphor under which to group these songs became increasingly obvious to her. “It felt like the perfect setting for everything that was going on, thematically. There’s a global crisis happening, but you’re locked down in an empty room, and all the exits feel as if they’re sealed.

I couldn’t help but think about existence, and the futility of it.

Resignation, really.”

Le Bon is not religious, but she began to realise that her negative emotional response to her circumstances was coming to mirror those generally associated with faith – Pompeii is laced with references to guilt and original sin. “I was wondering about how culpable we all might be for what was going on, and for me, that smacked of collective guilt, the sort that religion imposes on people. The guilt we were feeling, the sacrifices we were making, they felt like the same sort of things that are touchstones of faith, and I ended up kicking out against that. It’s not meant to be declarative; it’s more of an exploration of my own feelings, as I was trying to find something to hold on to.”

“The grief is in the saxophones,” Le Bon pithily put it in a short blurb on the record that she sent over along with it. It is also, though, in the album’s words, in the manner in which she had to shuffle the lyrical pack, as she found that notebooks full of ideas had suddenly ceased to resonate. “It wasn’t that I wanted to speak directly to the times,” she says, “and already I’m getting the sense that nobody wants to talk about everything that’s happened; people are sick of it, and that’s understandable.

I think writing for the album became its own kind of escapism – almost like a version of Dadaism. It was quite a complicated

30

“One minute there’s hope, the next there’s existential dread, and you can’t help but wonder if this is the last thing you’re ever going to make” 31

process, finding words that felt like they spoke to me in the moment, and in the end, I had to trust that maybe if I don’t fully understand the songs now, that I was just writing a letter to my future self instead.”

— Sister Cate Le Bon — Hanging over Le Bon in a more literal sense, meanwhile, was the image that has made it, in a revised form, onto the cover of Pompeii: a painting by Presley that casts her as a nun, that became an important visual inspiration as the record came together. “There was something very magnetic about it. It sounds slightly ridiculous now, but this portrait had a real power over us – Samur was taken by it in the same way, and it had this massive presence in the room, as if it was helping us choose the right synth part, or whatever. It was like it was a visual representation of the palette we were going for.

“When the time came to figure out the artwork, I knew it had to be that, but I also felt like it would cheapen it or something, to have it reproduced so many times. So we sort of recreated it in photo form. I think it was supposed to be me, at least.

32

Tim always says that when I tell him I like a painting. It’s interesting, though; you’re not always aware of what’s permeating you, what’s driving you. It seemed like more of a mystery than ever this time around.”

With the record finished and the world beginning to open up again, Le Bon is now back in Joshua Tree, ten minutes down the road from Mozgawa’s place. She’s continuing to produce for other artists – as we speak, she’s in the thick of working on Devendra Banhart’s latest. Between her own songs and her appetite for collaboration, her work is as multifaceted as it’s ever been, and her enforced absence from the road has been a reminder not only that touring is only one part of her musical life, but that music itself is just one aspect of a wider creative whole. “The most I’ve ever enjoyed music is when I was in furniture school,” she explains, referencing a year-long stint learning to craft tables, cabinets and chairs in the Lake District in 2017, ahead of the writing of Reward. “It takes the onus off of it, the intensity out of just doing one thing. Since then, I’m always trying to strike that balance with something else, some other project, because it’s a very beneficial thing. I’m always searching.”

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Reviews

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Albums

Deathcrash — Return (untitled) The four members of London slowcore outfit Deathcrash are an unassuming bunch.

Despite coming to prominence with other South London sensations such as Black Country, New Road, Jerskin Fendrix, and Black Midi, Deathcrash have always had a distinctly quaint energy about them.

They’re the shy kids in the corner, quietly constructing something grand.

When I interviewed them this time last year, following the success of their beguiling and prescient EP People Thought My Windows Were Stars, they were quick to politely temper expectations. In truth, you could kind of see why.

The band’s music, which revels in repressively slow builds that climb to tortuously tense eruptions of cathartic release, was entirely in sync with a world that was crumbling in 2020. The beautifully defined tensions nestled within deathcrash’s sound resonated with the chaotic tensions that infiltrated our quarantined lives. The connection was further cemented by vocalist and guitarist Tiernan Banks’ open lyricism that implored you to listen to a story that might well be about you.

The fact that veteran Scottish post-rock band Mogwai, a pivotal influence on deathcrash, picked up their first ever UK number one album after 25 years shortly after we spoke, gave credence to the feeling that the tangled genres of slowcore, post-rock, and shoegaze were having a bit of a moment.

We left our conversation last year with a quasi-serious concern about their potential longevity and relevance.

“Maybe when the debut album comes out, no one will care anymore” said Banks, “It would be great to have some kind of apocalypse next year too,” added

36

guitarist Matthew Weinberger.

There wasn’t to be another apocalypse, just the same old one simmering along. However, what has become clear in the interim is that the world’s pervasive chaos has little to do with Deathcrash’s appeal. The band’s irresistible blend of slowcore’s honest focus on minimalist instrumentation and stripped-back production, propped up by the narrative structure of post-rock, allows the band to alchemise the personal and the universal.

It’s a formula that’s frequently capable of transcendence, and its magic is beginning to spread.

In an interview with Loud and Quiet, Speedy Wunderground producer extraordinaire Dan Carey noted the unique space Deathcrash inhabit: “They’re different from those bands [Squid, Black Country, New Road and Black Midi], much less aggressive but still very weird and dark.” In another interview (with The Quietus), Black Country, New Road discussed re-evaluating their sound’s balance after touring with Deathcrash in early 2020, ultimately paying greater attention to how they could use dynamics to create more “impactful” music.

As such, Deathcrash’s trajectory mirrors one of their own songs, starting quiet and gently growing louder.

Therefore, likely much to the quartet’s bewilderment, their 12-track, hour-long debut album Return arrives full of hype.

It also comes with sizable questions: how does a band who have already penned a three-track, 45-minute EP transition to a full album? How does a post-rock flavoured slowcore band regulate the album’s momentum to avoid becoming a platitude of louds and quiets? How do they evolve the traditionally ’90s American sound to feel authentic from a British outfit made up of twenty-somethings? In essence, how do they prevent themselves becoming “The world’s second best Slint tribute act”?

Well, a lot of questions are answered with the eight-minute opener ‘Sundown’.

Built from the ground-up, the track begins with a sober introduction of each instrument: Noah Bennett’s fragile but dictating hi-hat taps, the band’s ever-present blend

of folkish nostalgic guitar and dominating power chords that’s impossible to ascribe to either Weinberger or Banks, and Patrick Fitzgerald’s chunky bass that, when reverbed enough, acts as a third guitar.

‘Sundown’ steadily builds itself to a tense stasis, the music locked in a delicate battle between voice and fuzzy fed-back guitar, until about two-thirds of the way through the song, when there is a drastic melodic shift, followed by another, and then another. It’s an abrupt and exhilarating fast fracture that unglues the entire track; with decibels, instrumental density, and tempo ratcheting up at an unsustainable velocity, culminating in a monumental krautrock-tinged freak-out.

This is Deathcrash unleashed like never before, shattering the eardrums while still soothing the soul, expertly mixing the musical merits of Explosions in The Sky, Codeine, and NEU! like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. In one song, Deathcrash show that they haven’t stood still.

Having had so many questions prior to listening to the album, only one remains after listening through ‘Sundown’ – how can they top this? Well, the answer is that they don’t – nor do they try to. Deathcrash instead use the remaining 56 minutes of Return to make 11 other statements, 11 other untoppable tracks that operate by their own rules and draw on their own inspirations. Songs that stand alone, but when put together create a tapestry to moody, oneiric music – incorporating elements of singer-songwriter, doom metal, stoner metal, sludge metal, drone metal, folk, emo, screamo, and more, to build a colossal testament to the loosely defined genre of slowcore.

‘Unwind’ nestles in the familiar world of ‘sadcore’. Ridden by a melancholic tempo, the scratchy but sonorous melody brings out Banks’ choppy vocals that sound smeared in tears as he tells his lover ‘I wasn’t resting / I wasn’t living’. It’s the embodiment of an honest reflection found from looking in an opaque pool.

‘American Metal’ is seasoned with a tender third-wave American emo, even slyly referencing Taking Back Sunday’s ‘My Blue Heaven’ in the lyrics. Its pastoral

Albums pace and floral floating chords mean that the music roams rather than ascends, tilling the sound for every crevice of sentiment. But even in its pedestrian tempo, the song travels miles.

The band’s post-rock penchant for embedding recondite samples to drive narrative is also used to expert effect on Return. In particular, ‘Matt’s Song’ is a tender departure from the lyrically-narrated tracks, instead splicing in samples from what sounds like home movies. It washes the track with a halcyon hue, as the solitary plucking of acoustic strings steers the song through a patchwork of suppressed, but recorded memory.

‘Wrestling With Jimmy’ is the inverse: a hellacious, anxious ride, and the album’s flash point. The snake-like chords, imbrued with sinister lyrics that announce “I have dreams / that they visit”, gives way to a catastrophic Steve Albini wall of sound, where the guttural screams of Banks are drowned in the background, bursting to be let out, but instead lost in the galloping drums. It could well be the absolute standout on Return, a track that condenses the dynamics that would usually require 15 minutes, instead being achieved in a 2-minute behemoth.

It’s a cheat-code of a song.

‘Metro 1’ is the album’s cooldown. Decked in resplendent strings and with gorgeous arrangements. It is the most textured of the songs on Return.

The exploration of Bennett’s drum kit, that is regularly the unsung hero of the record, and the creeping paranoia of the guitars leads not to a colossal breakdown, but a stark recognition, finishing with a dream-rock daze reminiscent of Mogwai’s former Chemikal Underground labelmates Aerogramme.

Penultimate track ‘Doomcrash’ is the album’s longest at just under nine minutes. Its build is the most mystic and folky on Return, honed-in on Banks’ suggestive lyrics, with only faint instrumentation heard. But it all leads to the album at its absolute heaviest.

The roaring riff summoned here that upends the track is transfused directly from the most cavernous doom metal.

‘Doomcrash’ is also the album at its most emotionally heavy. The story told throughout Return of two slowly separating lovers comes to a head here with Banks singing “All in life that I love / Runs away again / To know the thought in your head / Goes away again”. For all the instrumental mastery at work during this album, it’s the misty memories that inform the lyrics that truly make the spirits stalking this record feel alive.

Return ends where it all began.

‘The Low Anthem’ pays tribute to the amorphic Minnesotans Low, frequently labelled as slowcore’s progenitors, with the narrative reaching its apotheosis as Banks sings “God bless the reason we die”.

It’s a fitting finale for a richly varied album which consigns itself to a fixed palette, but uses it to paint the most wondrous and far-reaching landscapes imaginable.

Deathcrash’s Return is an embarrassment of musical riches that is only matched by the depth of evocations that haunt the record, its power both lifeaffirming and oddly absent, a photo of a happier time that’s starting to fade. In its totality, Return feels like a keepsake for when the world truly ends, to be played back like the home videos in ‘Matt’s Song’, to remind us what was lost. 9/10 Robert Davidson

Beatrice Deer — Shifting (selfreleased) “Face the world, it’s waiting for you,” sings Beatrice Deer on the only English language track on Shifting. It’s a sentiment that sums up the theme of selfdevelopment on the half-Inuk and halfMohawk’s sixth album.

Raised in Quebec and now resident in Montreal, the eleven tracks are underpinned by her belief that, “Life is an

ongoing growing experience.” The individual words can’t be understood by nonnative speakers of Inuktitut or French but the mood of personal growth is convincingly conveyed through the music.

Frequently warm and uplifting in tone, the release is strongly rooted in the indie rock of her hometown. Helped out by collaborators from her local music community, including members of The Besnard Lakes and The Barr Brothers, their influence can be heard on ‘Uqautinnga’ and ‘Cannibal’. The chiming guitars on the anthemic ‘Free’ and bass heavy ‘Christmas’ are meanwhile reminiscent of James circa Seven.

This sense of positivity is advanced by the rich layers of dream-pop, which is where she’s at her most interesting.

‘Ilinnut (A Prayer)’ has the down-tempo loveliness of Sigur Rós swimming underwater with a harpist. ‘Sunauvva’ rattles along like Lush at their spikiest with additional whistle and throat-singing, and traditional song ‘Aanngiq’ is experimentally built around a vocal loop and submerged, minimal instrumentation.

The prettiness of these tracks makes the addition of the Madchester shuffle of ‘The Storm’ and self-descriptive instrumental ‘Accordion Song’ even more baffling. Little more than fillers, they get in the way of Shifting growing to its full potential. 6/10 Susan Darlington

Black Country, New Road — Ants From Up There (ninja tune) “Everything a rock band can do”; in hindsight, the phrasing of my rapturous review of London group Black Country, New Road’s first album For The First Time treads close to damning them with faint praise.

The Slint comparisons are written out by

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Albums now, but truthfully the primary connective tissue between the two acts was the pitch-perfect synchronisation of scrappiness and vision, a mode of rock creativity that promises a brilliant, gleaming moment, but not necessarily longevity.

And yet, here they are a year later; when your first album is one of the best UK rock albums of the 21st century, where do you go from there?

In a twist, Ants From Up There is neither the stylistic overhaul hinted at by the group themselves, nor the logical next step; perhaps detrimentally, it’s largely more of the same. What’s keenly felt is the different circumstances of the album’s recording. For The First Time was a road album, tweaked and trimmed in sweaty rooms up and down the country.

Conversely, Ants From Up There faced the full severity of lockdowns and social distancing, a ‘studio’ album that occasionally sounds like it rarely left. The folkballad likes of ‘Haldern’ and ‘Concorde’ are soaked in the taut, atmospheric glory that drove ‘Sunglasses’ and ‘Athens, France’ before them, and you figure it’s because they house the same well-travelled, spacious dynamism, as though the rapt reaction of an enthralled crowd made its way in-between the chords. What’s more, there must be something wrong if rapturous 13-minute track ‘Basketball Shoes’, a long-standing live staple and fan favourite, goes down effortlessly while shorter tracks like ‘Good Will Hunting’ seem interminable.

There’s still something encouraging about a group who, no matter how hard they try, simply cannot write a conventional rock song. More often than not, attempts lead to interesting trajectories of almost-pop near-misses. ‘Chaos Space Marine’, the only full-fledged song on Ants From Up There to align with the 3-anda-half-minute principle, is a low-light of the album, a casualty of the album’s overegged approach, so tightly packed with BC,NR’s biggest ideas – mariachi brass lines, piano rock pulses, Isaac Wood’s lyrical comprehensiveness, a section that curiously recalls a chorus chant from an early Arcade Fire song – that no single aspect gets the airing it needs to linger in

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the brain. It’s curious as a lead single, but you can’t knock the attempt.

Ants From Up There is not simply a repeat, but neither is it wholly new.

However, there’s enough here to give BC,NR the benefit of the doubt. Few albums strike with the force of For The First Time; maybe Ants From Up There will just take some time to leave a mark.

6/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Big Thief — Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (4ad) Big Thief don’t make music; it spills from them.

Their first four records emerged magnificently in quick succession, including two released in a single year, and still their live sets are often littered with unreleased material. Yet their music never feels rushed, or forced – it comes from a need, from something that has to be expressed.

With their fifth record, an epic twenty-track double LP, we witness something new from Big Thief: their process. It began with an experiment by drummer James Krivchenia, who produced the album – to record in four sessions in four starkly different locations with four different sound engineers.

Five months later they had 45 completed songs – 20 of which became Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. Just as the cover depicts the band (as animals!) playing their instruments around a campfire, the record has a singletake, organic sound and the rawness of a spontaneous run-through. These songs are living things; in all likelihood they will continue to evolve, and these recordings will simply act as snapshots of the track on that given day in that given place.

The record belongs to none of them and all of them, exploring more of their

individual contributions than perhaps any prior record. Moments of raw, delicate beauty on tracks like ‘Change’ and ‘The Only Place’ undeniably echo singer Adrianne Lenker’s solo material, while warm, whimsical country moments like ‘Spud Infinity’ and ‘Red Moon’ betray Buck Meek’s input. There are completely new sounds too, as the band ventures to previously unexplored soundscapes on tracks like ‘Little Things’ and ‘Wake Me Up To Drive’.

A few days prior to announcing the record, Big Thief ’s members could be found on their Instagram story singing the track’s lyrics a cappella, casually, as though singing along to a classic song.

But there’s no arrogance to that; rather a sense that they don’t see their music as their own, but more as something they have stumbled upon by accident. When the lyrics profess that “I believe in you,” it’s as though they are addressing their own work, or the unnamed thing that bonds them together as a band. As the song concludes: “It’s a little bit magic.”

With Dragon… we glimpse Big Thief ’s magic in action, like pressing an ear to the rehearsal room door. It’s a lived experience, open-hearted and spontaneous, that pushes the boundaries of what the four, between them, can create. 9/10 Katie Cutforth

Amber Mark — Three Dimensions Deep (emi/pmr) The bounce of her self-made production is unmistakably modern, but there’s a classic quality to Amber Mark’s approach to R&B and soul.

Her songs read like standards when she’s at her peak, and her bright, rasping vocal lines could translate into any decade.

Her long-awaited debut, Three

Albums Dimensions Deep, hits the beats you could expect. It often does so joyfully, and with a specificity of personal perspective that elevates its material. Take opener, ‘One’, a touching tribute to her late mother that reaches into the beyond for advice and perseverance, over sizzling horn samples and percussion. Then there’s ‘On & On’, which uses an inventive near-interpolation of Elton John’s ‘Bennie and the Jets’ to offset its heady tale of self-doubt and existentialism.

The album sags when it’s not exploring Mark’s unique or more personal ideas, like on ‘Darkside’, with its hokey Star Wars references and a drab approach to cinematic euphoria. With seventeen tracks, the collection could have been trimmed into a tighter and more impactful offering. But given the thematic return to self-belief and constant growth, it’s obvious that these are important songs to their creator, and her journey through personal doubt and spirituality is relatable. We end on ‘Event Horizon’, a space-age acoustic cut inspired by Mark’s fascination with wormholes in the dark days of lockdown (we’ve all been there). With its hypnotic pull, it reveals just how many directions she could go in the future. With talent like hers, we’d be silly not to follow her into the void. 6/10 Skye Butchard

Beirut — Artifacts (pompeii) A collection of old EPs, covers, rarities and B-sides that go back to some of Beirut’s earliest recordings, it’s safe to say that Artifacts is pretty revealing of the internal working of Zach Condon. Even the minutelydetailed liner notes capture his journey from an Albuquerque-based 11-yearold, “stricken with terrible insomnia and

many lonely hours to kill at night”, right up to the release of his debut album Gulag Orkestra in 2006, nine years later.

A mammoth double album with 26 songs to sink your teeth into, it’s safe to say that Artifacts has hidden gems aplenty, and each could probably warrant a full review on its own. Personally, my favourite aspect of this record is the sense of progression you get as a listener.

The first half of the record is made up of early EPs, and the first hour or so begins with the simple, stripped-down Beirut of the early years. The second LP is more experimental and is stuffed with fascinating creative cul-de-sacs and thoughtstarters. Side C, simply entitled New Directions and Early Works is a complete treasure trove of weirdness, from strange electronica-tinted sea shanties to the laid-back lounge jazz of new track ‘Fountains and Tramways’.

If there’s one criticism, it’s that Artifacts is such a dense record that it’s hard to digest in one sitting and the relentless sense of tweeness makes this a collection that I found myself dipping in and out over just letting it play. However, as a glimpse under the hood of what makes Beirut tick, it’s absolutely fascinating.

7/10 Dominic Haley

Bonobo — Fragments (ninja tune) An organic warmth flows like an ocean current through Si Green’s Fragments, his seventh studio LP under his electronic project Bonobo, and it’s gratifyingly easy to let yourself be pulled into it. Raised in Brighton but now based in LA, Green composed the majority of the album between solo hikes and camping trips in the Californian wilderness. This submersion into nature has undoubtedly shaped

the atmosphere of the record, as there’s a wider sense of time moving and the planet spinning, yet also an air of serenity.

Fluttering strings, orchestral arrangements and choir chants are woven atop infectious beats and triphop rhythms, sounding akin to the work of Caribou and Four Tet on tracks like ‘Otomo’ and ‘Age of Phase’. That being said, Green is undeniably in a league of his own, delivering a rich, majestic sound suited for both late-night festival slots as well as historic big-band halls. It’s also one of Bonobo’s most collaborative projects, with memorable appearances coming from Jamila Woods, Joji, and Jordan Rakei, to name a few.

Though there’s no drastic change to the Bonobo blueprint, it’s unlikely that you’ll find a track in which Green doesn’t sound equally masterful and laid-back in his craft, delivering his most soulful and slick efforts to date. 8/10 Woody Delaney

Boris — W (sacred bones) A great Boris album comes in at least two flavours: titanic stoner suites of blustering guitars or, as the case seems to have been in recent years, smaller shots of gnarled brilliance.

While the latter can come at the price of the truly breathless crescendos of which the legendary Japanese group have long established themselves as the masters, the fitful bursts of inspiration across their 27th album W easily rank as some of their finest work in many years – and perhaps even their most accessible to newcomers.

The album is also a handy reminder that, for every time Boris bring out the roots-grunge battering ram for the likes of ‘The Fallen’, they’re just as adept at quietly contemplative moments on the likes of ‘Icelina’. The album shines when

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Albums the group coalesce these moods into snapshot versions of their long-form work.

‘Old Projector’, ‘I Want to Go to the Side Where You Can Touch…’ and this album’s nine-minute centrepiece ‘You Will Know (Ohayo Version)’ are slick microcosms of builds and drops, darkness and light, showing that Boris can achieve their special kind of transcendence without the side-long run-time. 8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Beverly Glenn-Copeland — Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined (transgressive) If Beverly Glenn-Copeland feels as if he’s spent his entire career waiting for his influential work to meet with the kind of acclaim it deserved, then he might now feel that it’s come along all at once.

He spent sixteen years in the wilderness after 1970, the year in which he released two stunning self-titled albums that represented odysseys into what’s possible when melding classical and jazz influences. When he finally resurfaced in 1986, it was with what’s now considered his magnum opus, Keyboard Fantasies. That record, in and of itself, spent many years in obscurity, with only a few hundred cassette copies having been pressed; its reputation burgeoned with time, thanks in no small part to the tireless work of Japanese record collector Ryota Masuko, who helped garner Glenn-Copeland a cult following.

Fast forward to 2019, and GlennCopeland, by then in his mid-70s, found himself performing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; at the same time, he was the subject of a documentary, Posy Dixon’s Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story (newly reviewed by us on page 50). This remix album serves as much as a testament to his renewed

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popularity as it does his profound impact on those he’s inspired. Remixes of the six tracks on Keyboard Fantasies are provided by the likes of Bon Iver, Julia Holter and Arca, and if, for example, Jamie xx’s We’re New Here did justice to the sound of Gil Scott-Heron’s original whilst imbuing it with his own ideas, Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined feels like a comparable vindication of Glenn-Copeland’s commitment to sonic singularity.

The artists involved are not afraid to bring their own identities to the table; Bon Iver’s ‘Ever New’ shares a musical palette with his 2016 album 22, A Million, while the more maximalist moments on Holter’s ‘Fastest Star’ bring 2017’s Aviary to mind. Yet throughout, Glenn-Copeland’s vision and explorative fearlessness are summoned in stirring fashion. This LP is a rarity – a must-listen collection of remixes. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Boy Harsher — The Runner (OST) (nude club/city slang) Electronic duo Boy Harsher return with a soundtrack to their new film The Runner, continuing their usual mixture of sensual underground darkwave and widescreen revivalist synth-pop.

Opener ‘Tower’ proves the most visceral moment, a haunting blend of murmured vocals and glass-like synths that slowly builds to a chugging pace, before descending into a wall of overdriven screams and militant drums. It’s a shame that this play of dynamics isn’t explored on further tracks.

Elsewhere, the records shines brightest when the big pop sensibilities are embraced with open arms. ‘Autonomy’, with its glittering synth arpeggios and yearning yet punchy bassline,

brings to mind New Order at their most unashamedly world-conquering. Likewise, the Italo-disco leanings of ‘Machina’ featuring Mariana Saldana, mixes cool sensuality with scene-chewing bombast to great effect.

It remains to be seen how the project functions as a soundtrack, though atmospheric mood pieces like ‘The Ride Home’ and ‘Untitled (Piano)’ clearly lend themselves to filmic world-building.

From the stylised sleekness of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, to the futuristic soundtracks of the likes of the original Dawn of the Dead, this genre of music has long proven effective on screen.

As a standalone record, it feels much the same as the group’s previous releases: built upon a consistent aesthetic that wears its influences on its sleeve without falling too far into the pastiche trap; most importantly, it’s delivered with an ear for hooks that cuts through the moody, basement club exterior. 6/10 Oskar Jeff

Brimheim — Can’t Hate Myself Into A Different Shape (w.a.s.) “Imagine the illegitimate love child of Florence Welsh and PJ Harvey – a goth teen who listens to Radiohead and reads Murakami.” An interesting bio introduces half-Danish, half-Faroese, Sweden-based singer-songwriter Helena Heinesen Rebensdorff ’s musical persona, Brimheim. Already a staple in the Nordic queer music scene, having made herself known to a wider audience with her EP last year, Can’t Hate Myself Into A Different Shape is the debut full-length from Brimheim.

The intriguing album and track titles, together with the self-professed influence of the likes of Mitski and PJ

Albums Harvey, set the expectations high for these ten songs. Unfortunately, those expectations are rarely met.

After an auspicious, if overcharged, start with the short “Heaven Help Me I’ve Gone Crazy” (though a bit overcharged) and the following title track, some of the shortcomings begin to show. Can’t Hate Myself Into A Different Shape is a pure pop album, winking more to the most garish qualities of purely commercial music than to the more sophisticated and nuanced sides of the genre.

‘Hey Amanda’ is a particularly low point, with chart polish overpowering a juvenile story of long-term, long-distance friendship in a manner that’s more reminiscent of a very young FM radio station sensation than the much-trailed Björk or Phoebe Bridgers influences. The same sadly also applies to ‘This Week’s Laundry’, whose promising lyrics are weakened by melodies so glossy and oversung it’s too easy to lose interest in them, overwhelmed by the maximalist performance. More widely, this surplus of delivery and sound affects the entire album, making it way less incisive and compelling than it ought to be. And it’s a pity, considering the high level reached by the closing ‘Hurting Me For Fun’. We can only hope that highlights like this can make a good basis on which to build a more effective future. 5/10 Guia Cortassa

Cate Le Bon — Pompeii (mexican summer) With every new Cate Le Bon proposition – whether she’s operating a solo artist, collaborating with Tim Presley as DRINKS, or working as a producer for fellow revered alternative artists – the dawn breaks, illuminating an unexplored path of creativity cobbled with endless

inspiration. In tandem with writing some of the most endearingly angular and abstract music of recent eyars, the Welshborn songwriter and musician immerses herself in more immediately tangible art forms. When recording 2013’s Mug Museum (a record which garnered wider mainstream acclaim and broadened her audience), she cracked the world of ceramics. Everyone who pre-ordered that LP also received a mug handmade by Le Bon. Similarly, 2019’s Reward led Le Bon towards furniture design, and during that album cycle she designed and made custom chairs based on her interpretation of the songs. For her sixth offering, Pompeii, Le Bon drew inspiration from a painting by Presley which hung in the studio. Observing the artwork, Le Bon pondered how she could make an album that “sounds like a painting.”

In this regard, to say that Le Bon is merely a multi-instrumentalist (whilst true) somewhat does a disservice to what she actually creates with her music. She is, instead, one of the few truly multi-disclipinary artists of her generation. Pompeii is another assured stride towards creative reinvention and obliterating boundaries with her singular sound. Written primarily on bass, these nine completely enthralling arrangements incorporate apocalyptically inclined 1980s synth-laden grooves (‘French Boys’ and ‘Cry Me Old Trouble’) whilst retaining a balance of buoyancy provided by jangly guitar pop, not unlike Prefab Sprout, on the irresistible ‘Moderation’. The impact of the driving scuzzy bass riffs are perfectly offset by the feral interjections of saxophone, a marvellous counterpoint throughout. Those brass motifs, along with some melodic patterns in her vocal delivery (notably on ‘Remembering Me’), are amongst the only motifs carried over from previous releases.

There are several instances across Pompeii where the compositional structures and lyricism become suspended in time. This rings through most effectively on the title track. The wonderfully lethargic tones emanating from the synths coupled with Le Bon’s weightless cadence conjure a stark terrain bathed in rustic tones similar to those in ‘Persis-

tence of Memory’ by surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. “I’ve pushed love through the hourglass / Did you see me putting pain in a stone?” she intones. Similarly, ‘Harbour’ delivers more of Le Bon’s beautifully abstract articulation of transient emotions: “What you said was nice, when you said my face turned a memory.”

Pompeii is yet another outstanding turn from Cate Le Bon; sincere, timeless and endlessly rewarding. 9/10 Zara Hedderman

Pan Daijing — Tissues (pan) It takes less than a minute for Pan Daijing’s avant-garde noise album Tissues to begin to irk. This should come as no surprise, or be no slight, if you know the Guiyang born, Berlin based, self-taught artist and composer’s work. Since the release of her 2017 debut LP Lack, Daijing has exhibited an exceptional gift for making music that gets right under your skin. Her work sits at the unpalatable, headache-inducing intersection of extreme noise music, jarring operatic discordance and psychoacoustics. And her latest release, Tissues, follows this same formula with impeccable precision.

If this is beginning to sound like it’s going to make you feel at least a bit riled, you’re not wrong. By playing within the deep extremes of music, she wants to provoke her listeners. She wants to galvanise you, and incite you to opt out of the passive, subdued state of affairs. And at the same time, she’s also asking what music is, and what it can be. It’s also only through making this extreme, avantgarde noise music that Daijing has said she can properly excavate and express her own feelings. Her body of work so far has examined her piercing loneliness, her

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Albums acute fears and deepest grief, so much as to say, her music has examined her emotions in their most distilled states.

Her third full-length, Tissues, marks out even more intimate territory.

Pan Daijing’s exhibition performance, ‘Tissues’, was originally shown at the Tate Modern in late 2019. There it was performed with a cast of twelve dancers and opera singers in the Tate’s Tanks space, as a ‘multi-sensory’ artwork, encompassing space, sound, and movement. It’s now, following on from the pandemic, that she’s chosen to release an excerpt of that artwork, in the form of a studio-recorded, 54-minute-long piece.

It’s the mutations of the human voice throughout Tissues that sting the most. There are shifts from the guttural, with a kind of unpleasant gurgle around forty minutes in, to the repetitively shrill, with a gradually sped-up refrain of highpitched “hi, hi, hi, hi” shrieks earlier on in the piece. Daijing’s direction of her performers produces sharp atonal clashes of operatic vocals, that bring acute attention to some of the most piercingly emotive and moving sounds the human voice can make. It plays into one of the central ideas in her work: that words and language often fail to express anything close to what you feel. Often, they can obscure it.

The use of operatic vocals and a mix of old and modern Chinese dialects alongside snippets of English only helps to compound this idea. To those (like me) with limited exposure to operatic vocals, who didn’t grow up with Radio 3 floating around the home, might have an inherent difficulty in deciphering what is being said in Tissues. It’s an added hurdle that makes the point, to me, that there’s a gulf between your deepest emotions and your words. You can’t really know or understand enough of someone just from what they make explicit in language.

Another essential component of Tissues is how Daijing intersperses her composition with the abrasive, repulsive, acutely jarring noises of the everyday, and grounds these sounds in the four-person skronk, and a nightmarish, intense chorus of synthesisers. What’s

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most effective in pushing you to the brink when listening to Tissues is this ominous mundanity. Whether it’s the feeling that there’s a helicopter flying uncomfortably close to the roof, that there’s a freakishly crisp, rasping cough of a neighbour much, much closer than feels normal, or that there’s an eerie, out-of-tune whistle floating up from someone lingering on the street, throughout Tissues, Daijing has me nervously taking my headphones off to check what’s part of the album, and what’s actually happening in real life.

There’s a sense here that Daijing can deconstruct and undo the feeling of time: if you get immersed in the composition, you can feel taken away from yourself. It can serve as a corrective, bringing you into someone else’s world. Daijing’s work calls into question the boundaries between affect, reality and musical artifice; she suggests that those distinctions may not be relevant.

The other thing that Pan Daijing points towards on Tissues is the fact that pursuing authenticity and exposing your emotion can be frightening, but there’s no need to be afraid of that. The ugly, lonely world of internal fear is worth examining.

To voice that world is to begin to overcome it; somewhere, there’s something beautiful in that. 7/10 Cat Gough

Orlando Weeks — Hop Up (pias) In 2020 Orlando Weeks was very much finding his feet, both as a first-time father and as a solo artist. His debut album A Quickening was a sleepy one, bleary-eyed and level-headed in the face of the anxieties of parenthood; mature and measured in a way that you probably have to be when you’ve just hung up your indie rock frontman shoes and opted for a cleaner,

more intimate and more adult approach to music-making.

But where that record was full of hushed tones and hazy melodies, Hop Up changes tact entirely. Upbeat and assured, the shift doesn’t feel forced, and what could quite easily have come across as a bit of a musical mid-life crisis seems more like a case of organic, career-best progression.

Exultant opening duo ‘Deep Down Way Out’ and ‘Look Who’s Talking Now’ set the mood: the former playing with a plodding funk-tinged bassline and twangy guitars while the latter simmers with elated, more electronic moments and lofty pop instrumentals. Weeks hasn’t abandoned the drowsy persona and warm, fuzzy calm altogether though. ‘High Kicking’ – a humming ballad of a track that features cloying harmonies courtesy of Willie J Healey – is a hark back to that place: all soft string licks and gauzy guitar buzzes. ‘Silver’ plays into the old-timey ambience too, with a twinkling, grandiose opening bar, mellow and meandering vocals and muffled drum beats that pulse like a distant heartbeat.

But as things wrap up on hip-swaying, foot-tapping closer ‘Way to GO’, it’s hard to see this album as anything other than a natural step into the left-field for Weeks: a distinguished metamorphosis of style as much as subject. 8/10 Charlotte Marston

Saba — Few Good Things (pivot gang) Chicago rapper Saba packs an awful lot into the eight short tracks of Few Good Things. He’s been a fiercely independent, ambitious artist for some time, and as part of the collective Pivot Gang has become a key figure in his native city’s DIY hip-hop scene; on this,

Albums his third album, he expands his sound to an impressive scale that does justice to the breadth of ideas and experiences on which he focuses his lyricism.

From opener ‘Free Samples’, a suspended-animation mood piece that eases us into the record in the manner of Flying Lotus’ most sensitive moments before dropping into a slinky, Madlibesque groove, Saba’s sonic restlessness is audible. Soon enough, we’re transported through an impressively various yet surprisingly cohesive range of aesthetics: the DAMN-era Kendrick purpose of the clenched-jawed ‘Survivor’s Guilt’; the pungent funk of ‘Fearmonger’, featuring Thundercat doing exactly what he does; the DOOM-like shuffle of ‘Simpler Time’; the icy drill of ‘Stop That’, tapping into his Chicago heritage. Perhaps most affecting of all is the buttery ‘Make Believe’, whose slick arrangement and soulful vocal contribution from the fast-rising Fousheé close out the record with real elegance.

This is a really smart, multifaceted statement from Saba, promising even bigger things to come. 8/10 Luke Cartledge

Animal Collective — Time Skiffs (domino) Despite billing Time Skiffs as their first new album in six years, Animal Collective are a band who’ve never really gone away. A succession of EPs and solo projects vividly plugged the gaps of our impatience, while charitable ‘audiovisual’ releases oozed from Baltimore’s psychedelic sewage systems, as if philanthropy was their rationale for making less interesting music. Ideas, after their seminal breakthrough LP Merriweather Post Pavilion, seemed hard to come by, and the confidence with which they classified their formats evaporated with them.

But for a band somewhat defined by their inconsistencies, stirrings of the same ingenuity that reckoned them a defining creative force of the fabled ’00s do rumble here like a sleepy volcano.

The sound of keys turning in the ignition rockets into a well-driven space-psych parade; a chirpy glockenspiel becomes the imitative and playful ‘Walker’; ‘Royal and Desire’ sounds like listening to The War on Drugs at the bottom of a wishing well, as gentle melodies range from melismatic to plainchant, slowly reverberating out of earshot. Lead single ‘Prester John’ is still a highlight, knocked off-balance by an outro with woozy, offbeat synths tracing those echoes through an oncoming cosmic traffic. The band sounds audibly more together than in recent years, but all the promise of excitement – a celestial and surreal outreach programme – culminates with muddily mixed vocals and harmonies that morph into one gloopy portion of rice pudding.

Now I love rice pudding as much as the next person, but if Time Skiffs is like listening in on a conversation between old friends, it’s mostly like hearing them reminiscing about the better days. Even the best stories lose their detail over time.

Animal Collective’s journey to becoming arena-ready underdogs has been well-marred with false peaks, however distinguished; here, it’s resulted in something reasonably forgettable. 5/10 Tristan Gatward

Yard Act — The Overload (zen fc) It was hard not to feel the aura of nailedon confidence when last year’s BBC 6 Music favourite, ‘Fixer Upper’, first hit the radio waves. A satirical diatribe against the egotistical mundanity of middle-class

home renovation, the breakout single from Leeds four-piece Yard Act bore all the hallmarks of a hype band about to make their move. Told from the perspective of ‘Graham’, a cocksure small-town property developer, all the bravado and dick-swinging was as entertaining as it was reflective of vacuous suburban existence.

Though ‘Fixer Upper’, along with a slew of other hit-worthy singles, hasn’t found its way onto the band’s eventual full-length debut, Graham and a handful of other true to life personalities continue to breathe life into all facets of a fragmented Britain. Tracing our own misplaced national identity through humorous projections of “the National Front’s new hairdo”, frontman James Smith’s methodical nitpicking of core British values on ‘Dead Horse’ feels all but too close for comfort.

Though the band’s deadpan Mark E. Smith-meets-Mike Skinner impression routinely ticks the box for all we’ve come to expect from the inundated contemporary mass of sullen-faced British postpunk, Yard Act conduct themselves with a degree of respect for their own pop sensibilities. More passive than protesting, the band’s bleak observations of modern life come served up with a helping of irresistible groove. Tracks like ‘Land Of The Blind’ tread close to Sleaford Mods’ straight-talking temperament, with all the foul-mouthed mockery left in. 7/10 Ollie Rankine

Young T & Bugsey — Truth Be Told (black butter) The rise of Nottingham UK rap duo Young T & Bugsey felt a long time coming. The hype surrounding the pair has appeared evergreen since

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Albums they signed with Sony-owned label Black Butter in 2016 at the age of 19. However, last year’s debut mixtape Plead The Fifth sent them into the stratosphere.

A ferociously fun release, Plead The Fifth’s singles ‘Don’t Rush’ and ‘Strike A Pose’ rocketed up the charts, becoming international hits thanks to their infectious energy (and a particular #dontrush TikTok challenge). However, from the opening bars of their second mixtape Truth Be Told, it’s clear this is a graduation of Young T & Bugsey’s sound in almost every department. The tracks are bigger, the hooks more addictive, the breathy flows smoother, the dynamics more pronounced, and amazingly, the sonic territory more diverse.

For those listening attentively, it’s easy to pull apart the mixtape’s influences. Skepta’s glistening nocturnal vibes stalk ‘Truth Be Told’, the clattering keys of Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Humble’ fuel ‘Big Bidness’, M Huncho’s trapwave infests ‘Hall of Flame’, the drowsy vulnerability of D-Block Europe stalks ‘Homerun’, and most crucially, labelmate J Hus’s afroswing erupts in ‘Tense’.

But the true quality of Truth Be Told isn’t the ground covered, but how these sounds are woven together to make one cohesive record, making it a potent synthesis instead of a playlist.

Alongside other recent releases such as Unknown T’s Adolescence and K Trap’s Trapo, Truth Be Told shows that the next generation of UK rap is ready to ascend to the top of the scene. A real treat. 8/10 Robert Davidson

Los Bitchos — Let The Festivities Begin! (city slang) Musicians come to London from all over the world, inspired

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by the city’s long and storied musical heritage. They in turn make great art, adding to that heritage and keeping this brilliant tradition going. Until recently that is; post-Brexit, it’s become increasingly difficult for foreign artists to play in the UK – let alone to settle here.

Los Bitchos, a London based group made up of members from Sweden, Uruguay, Australia and London, are proof of how detrimental these new restrictions could be. Only a band with such an eclectic mix of cultural references could produce a sound like this. There’s a mix of everything on their debut album; cumbia, anatolian rock, Morricone-esque western, psych and post-punk, blended together to form a heady, guitar-heavy cocktail. There’s not too much distinction between the tracks, which are largely instrumental, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing; theirs is the kind of hypnotic, unfurling music that you can get lost in, and the album floats along in such a way that you only really notice you’re listening when it ends. It isn’t to say the music isn’t good – these are four undoubtedly skilled musicians, and their riffs can rival King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard for dexterity (on lead single ‘Las Panteras’, especially).

Enlisting their friend Alex Kapranos to help produce has definitely paid off too – there’s a sleekness to LTFB! that belies their maximalist approach and gives the final product a sense of maturity despite its silliness. On top of all the other references, there are large nods to cinema, and much of the album resembles the soundtrack to a spaghetti western or a Quentin Tarantino movie.

Like Tarantino, Los Bitchos could be accused of putting style before substance.

Their music is not profound, but it’s not meant to be – as their name suggests, Los Bitchos aren’t taking themselves too seriously. As evidenced by their raucous live shows, the thing they do care about is having fun, and this record is the perfect embodiment of that: a vibrant, joyful and sometimes camp explosion of colourful sound, which like its title, is a call to let it all go and enjoy the party. 6/10 Jessica Wrigglesworth

Molly Nilsson — Extreme (night school) On Extreme, Molly Nilsson embraces the power of injecting nostalgic fun into a record that only brushes up against the outre implications of its name.

Opening on a galactic level and encountering random planets populated with ’80sand ’90s-inspired melodies and guitar riffs, the pace of Extreme varies. One track propels you at light speed towards the dancefloor, and the next slowly pulls you into the gravitational force of a hopeful ballad. What’s missing from the Swedish musician’s tenth album is a closeness to Nilsson, an intimacy that can be heard in previous work. As an album that moves away from a “classic” Molly Nilsson sound, the feeling that you’ve known her forever, either as a new listener or a devoted fan, should be front and centre.

An undertone of indie-fied ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ sound whispers in the background of the opening half of Extreme. Mellow synthwave ‘Kids Today’ could soundtrack Black Mirror’s ‘San Junipero’ sequel. This floating longing feeling is filtered out with the arrival of instrumental interval track ‘Intermezzo’. If taken at face value as a dance record, this could fit right in on an Ibiza classics playlist; here, it acts as the representative of the chilly production on Extreme. Although not flowing cohesively with the rest of the album, it gives us an opportunity to hear another fun side to Nilsson; likewise, the shades of drum and bass on ‘Obnoxiously Talented’ and the tinge of Gorillaz on closer ‘Pompeii’ may not exactly fit with the rest of the record. All that being said, Nilsson has delivered an LP that is generally surprising in its trajectory and blasts off into lively territory.

6/10 Sophia McDonald

Albums

Nicfit — Fuse (upset the rhythm) The music of the Japanese underground has always been of the utmost intrigue to Western ears. To namecheck but a few artists, recent years have seen my stereo dazzled by Otoboke Beaver, Dos Monos and Melt-Banana. And whilst Western coverage of modern Japanese music has never been the most comprehensive, logic dictates that if groups of that calibre are emerging fully formed, the music scene across its islands must really be kicking some serious ass.

This was what brought Charley from San Diego to Japan in the late 2000s. Quickly, he met Hiromi, KenKen and Kuwayama in the city of Nagoya, and formed Nicfit around a shared love of frayed post-punk. After 12 years of sharpening their tools with occasional seven-inch singles, the quartet are ready to spark up their debut LP Fuse.

Nicfit’s sound is a volatile mixture of Oh Sees’ beefy garage and Minutemen’s combustible skronk, and here their volcanic essence is captured at the moment of eruption. The Japanese outfit hurtle through 11 songs frantically and breathlessly, Hiromi’s rallying vocals the focal point.

‘Unleash’ revolves around a rumbling no-wave bassline intermittently chipped away by devious Contortions-esque guitar licks, whilst Hiromi’s vocal cries are truly berserk. Meanwhile ‘Rigged’ fuses the unheimlich thwack of a fist on a detuned piano with hardcore guitar gunslinging, a heady and intoxicating mix.

There doesn’t have to be any dynamic range on Fuse – it does what all the very best punk records do. It’s straightto-the-point, take-no-prisoners punk rock. Like the Ramones, Nicfit motor

headfirst through a sterling collection of songs as quickly and urgently as possible.

It is a mission statement best surmised by the closer, a cover of The Urinals’ ‘Ack Ack Ack’. In 73 seconds of shredding and cathartic mutant garage, they cram in as much wild-eyed invention and mania as many bands eke out over decades.

A vital debut from the soft underbelly of Japan’s underground music scene.

8/10 Cal Cashin

Combo Chimbita — IRE (anti) Rooted firmly in the traditions of Colombia, Brooklyn’s Combo Chimbita have always made music that sounds as if it’s being beamed in from the underworld. Combining folkloric mystique and strange-sounding psychedelia with just a hint of no-nonsense NYC punk, their music is urgent, mind-expanding and absolutely banging.

Their third full-length, IRE sees Combo Chimbita sounding slightly more grounded than their previous, more cosmic-leaning outings. The more folky direction of tracks like ‘Me Fui’ and ‘Mujeur Jaguar’ unearths a rawness to the band’s sound that didn’t really come out on other records. It’s a good thing, really, because the result is that Carolina Oliveros’ excellent vocals are given the room to shine in all their passion-laden, soulful glory.

That’s not to say that the mysticism has been ditched completely. Synth player Prince of Queens’ hypnotic lines have always formed the DNA of the band’s sound and IRE contains plenty of proglike progressions to give the heads their fix. However, taken as a whole, this album feels more reined-in and focused, uncovering the menace and danger that has always lurked just beneath the surface.

In a way, it’s a record that has many parallels to Oh Sees, and like one of John Dwyer’s concoctions, IRE fizzes with ideas, energies and possibilities. Don’t get me wrong, Combo Chimbita aren’t the finished article and this record definitely sags a little in the middle, but as a statement of intent, it’s hard to ignore.

I can’t wait to see where they go next.

6/10 Dominic Haley

Various Artists — Open Space Volume 2 (figure) As an often solitary, atomised form of creative expression, less tied to real-life interactions and physical scenes than many music genres (though not, of course, entirely separable from that stuff either), it can be hard to apply the usual kinds of pop culture narratives to ambient music. For example, to say that we’re experiencing a “new wave of ambient music” or something seems vaguely ridiculous; a great deal of ambient work ebbs and flows in accordance with wider technological or musical trends, but has maintained a pretty steady stream of output since Eno and the like popularised the loosely-defined genre in the second half of the last century.

Yet it’s hard not to feel particularly optimistic about its prospects right now.

Perhaps owing to the greater accessibility of sound technology and the increased fluidity of audiences mediated by the internet, the range of voices and innovations we’re hearing at the moment feels wider and richer than it has for some time. Open Space Volume 2, the follow-up to last year’s first volume, is an excellent distillation of that breadth, with beautiful contributions from the likes of Kenyan composer KMRU, Jerusalem techno producer Biri, veteran innovator Laraaji,

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Albums London electronic technician Max Cooper and many more. The variety and intricacy of sound here is thrilling, and bodes very well indeed for the health of ambient music, however we understand that, in the years to come. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Daniel Blumberg — The World To Come (OST) (mute) Confidence may not be the characteristic one most readily associates with the introspective, withdrawn public figure of Daniel Blumberg, but look a little closer and it’s the perhaps the central quality of his career so far.

From his days as the skinny teenage frontman of the spiky Cajun Dance Party, through his decision to leave noisy indie group Yuck after a single, rapturouslyreceived album, all the way up to the uncompromising experimentation of his recent solo work, his conduct is clearly driven by a single-minded trust in his own ability to push forward into new terrain.

Though certain constants remain audible throughout his work – his earnest tenor and ear for incisive melody in particular – Blumberg has never been one to retreat into his comfort zone. His is not the catalogue of a retiring or insecure artist.

His new soundtrack for Mona Fastvold’s new film The World To Come is another bold step. It’s his first score for a feature-length release, a companion to Fastvold’s depiction of romantic love between two married women in the freezing isolation of 19th century upstate New York. For it, Blumberg and his ensemble of revered avant-garde musicians have created a strikingly rich tapestry of contrasting timbres and shades, evoking the film’s by turns icy and passionate movements with enough precision to douse the listener in its

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atmosphere without entirely smothering them. Strings and woodwind dogfight and divebomb above shivering bass and percussion, the tension only occasionally neutralised by bursts of warm vocal or relatively conventional harmony.

It’s yet another rewardingly confident new venture for Daniel Blumberg. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Yeule — Glitch Princess (bayonet) Artistic personas are often seen as a mask, a way for the creator to distance themselves from the art and the audience. But in the right hands, artifice can become more honest than anything else.

A well-crafted persona allows artists to communicate on their terms, closing the gap between them and the listener.

On their second album, Glitch Princess, Yeule is about as honest and artificial as you can get. They open with a spoken-word list of likes and dislikes that gets increasingly confessional, all delivered in a glitching deadpan: “My name is Nat Ćmiel. I am 22 years old. I like music, dancing, ballet, crushing up rocks and snorting them, and genderless people...

I like touching myself and I like being far away from my own body… I like obsessing over people and then throwing them away...” Their detached robot affectation only heightens the heartbreak.

After the dreamlike simulacrum of their ambient pop debut, Serotonin II, Yeule could have gone anywhere. They chose to follow it with a concept-heavy covers project, Nuclear War Post X, which reimagined the songs of Big Thief, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Grouper and Frank Ocean as haunted relics left after the apocalypse. It revealed another side of their musical influences, and high-

lighted how hefty their ideas could be when paired with more traditional songs.

With a further focus on songcraft, Glitch Princess is their most direct and affecting release so far. The album remains focused on portraying an inner/ virtual world. It’s crushingly dark at points, but no less playful, thanks to their boundless approach to genre blending. While the theming is consistent, the album’s scope is constantly shifting. Take ‘Don’t Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty’, a futuristic jangle-pop tune that’s shocking in its intimacy. It’s subtle, cyclical chorus is easily one of the best of the year. ‘Electric’ is a city-sized epic that morphs Yeule’s voice into a distorted synth line, flattened and infinite simultaneously. Then there’s ‘Fragments’, a broken lullaby that turns into a free-form dance track before melting into nothing.

“Tell me why I destroy everything I touch”, Yeule sings like a villainous Vocaloid on ‘I <3 U’ as digital distortion swallows them up. It’s melodramatic, but in the virtual dream logic of Glitch Princess, you empathise. What could be more human than that? 8/10 Skye Butchard

MICHELLE — After Dinner We Talk Dreams (transgressive) There’s an easy kinship between Arlo Parks and New York collective MICHELLE. The labelmates share similar influences in ’90s R&B, with the Mercury Prize winner guesting on a new version of their single ‘Sunrise’ last year.

The parallels are most obvious on the smooth beats of ‘Mess U Made’, the opening track on second album After Dinner We Talk Dreams, and in the way they write relatable relationship lyrics.

“Now you’ve left I’ve no idea/ Who to text

Albums when I’m feeling blue,” they mourn over slick backing on ‘Expiration Date’. By the time they reach the breezily harmonised ‘No Signal’ their phone is “off the grid” in an attempt to get “one night to myself.”

Yet while Parks makes downtempo music for the head, the predominantly queer, POC six-piece capture the cool sound of the heart and streets. Unashamedly commercial, ‘Pose’ shows their fun side with the sweetness of Janet Jackson.

‘Layla in the Rocket’, meanwhile, has the organic instrumentation and sisterly vibe of Haim.

The layered four-part vocals, which they’re at pains to point out remain untouched, illustrate their musicianship at a distinctly human scale. The breadth of their individual interests is meanwhile reflected in the way they push against genre. This can be heard in the funky bassline on ‘End of the World’, jazzy guitar on ‘Spaced Out, Phased Out’, and ’80s synths on the darker mood of ‘Looking Glass’.

There are moments that would work on the club floor but, as the title suggests, the album is mainly intended for after-dinner intimacies. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Imarhan — Aboogi (city slang) In 2021, the population of Tamanrasset, the chief city of the Algerian Tuareg, reached 108,289. At the beginning of 2019, the construction of the city’s first ever professional recording studio began under Imarhan’s supervision. Upon completion, the Tuareg rock quintet named it Aboogi, paying homage to the early structures that helped form their ancestral villages.

It was in this self-built studio where the group captured their finest musical ideas

to date. It was only natural, then, for them to use the name for their third LP, Aboogi.

The significance of their hometown is integral to these brilliantly diverse compositions. There’s an elevating sense of community embedded in the record, providing an overarching cohesion across its duration. Whether it’s a demonstration of unity via layered harmonies on ‘Assossam’ (where collective voices explore economic corruption served by the government) or excellent individual contributions from Tinariwen’s Abdellah Ag Alhousseini (‘Tindjatan’), the wisened cadence of the poet Mohamed Ag Itlale on ‘Tamiditin’ or the unexpected appearance of Gruff Rhys singing in his native Welsh tongue on the mesmerizing closing track, ‘Adar Newlan’.

Whilst Imarhan’s sound is firmly rooted in the traditional Tuareg style, Aboogi is an assured presentation of instrumental range. An abundance of infectious hooks exist in the masterful performances throughout ‘Adar Newlan’, ‘Achinkad’ and beyond. Compared to their previous output, however, Aboogi is a far more introspective proposition. Wistful blues inflections colour guitar tones on the enveloping ‘Temet’ and ‘Imaslan N’Assouf ’. The latter, with an irresistible rippling tremolo permeating the arrangement, is one of the immediate highlights from the LP. A gripping body of work from the offset. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

Ichiko Aoba — Windswept Adan (ba da bing!) I was sitting on the settee as I had my first listen to Ichiko Aoba’s seventh studio album, Windswept Adan.

As the room filled with visceral, omnipotent sound, I half expected the darkened screen of our hand-me-down TV to jerk

to life, filled with swaying palm trees and small weather-worn boats bobbing on benign seas.

It’s a concept album, set on the fictional Adan Island – an archipelago inhabited by a tribe of creatures of no language – which tracks the journey of a young girl as she departs her hometown.

It’s a change of pace for the oft-solitary Aoba; previous releases having been characterised by their folksy vocals and meandering acoustic guitars alone, Windswept Adan is a lot more complex, with neoteric sounds and newfound instruments creeping into the artist’s unwavering ear for composition.

Given this newfangled grandeur, it’d be easy to see why steadfast Aoba fans might have their reservations, perhaps that the songwriter has overcomplicated her first-class formula of softness and singularity, or that the album’s little interwoven collages of string arpeggios, woodwind flurries and sporadic key taps come off as showy rather than sophisticated.

Yet the tracks themselves, studied and meticulous, pull back from this edge. ‘Prologue’s scrapbooked sounds and gentle wind-chimes act as a mediator between Aoba’s past and present, where ‘Pilgrimage’ and ‘Porcelain’ feel like the entrance to a new world, as twinkling flourishes of percussion, woodwind vibrato and swirling string riffs forge a landscape that is anxious and ambient in equal parts. ‘Dawn in the Adan’ is as near as we get to an earworm, rigged with buoyant wind and string sections that harmonise like two threads woven tightly over a loom, before ‘Adan no Shima no Tanjyosai’ makes more use of silence, with long, still beats filling in the gaps between creamy flecks of guitar and velveteen vocals.

As I listen to Windswept Adan for what is probably the eighth or ninth time, it feels like a record worlds away from the one I first listened to in front of the television on my tatty settee. The strings seem cleaner, murmurs clearer and with each fresh listen, new intricacies and previously uncharted minutiae seem to appear.

7/10 Charlotte Marston

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Live

Speakers Corner Quartet Barbican Centre, London 19 October 2021

How does a band with no music out and little public profile, who haven’t played a show in almost ten years, sell out the Barbican Main Hall? That was the question surrounding the live return of South London’s Speakers Corner Quartet this October. So much so that the group even opened the show with a video of some of London’s finest musical talent – Sampha, Kae Tempest – asking, “Who, exactly, are Speakers Corner Quartet?”

The answer stretches back to 2006, when drummer and producer Kwake Bass, alongside flautist Biscuit, bass player Peter Bennie and violinist Raven Bush, formed the house band of the now-defunct open mic night Speakers Corner. It was there – and in the fifteen years since – that the quartet ingratiated themselves with many of the musicians who have come to define the last decade of innovation in London and beyond; from Sampha and Tempest to Shabaka Hutchings and Tirzah, all of whom join the group on stage at the Barbican.

The night’s list of guests could fill the pages of this magazine alone, with Mica Levi, Joe Armon-Jones, Coby Sey, Tawiah, Trustfall, Lafawndah, Wu-Lu

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and more making appearances over almost three hours of cosmic jazz, moody soul, neo-classical experimentation and everything in between. There’s even a credited ‘scent designer’, Ezra-Lloyd Jackson, who ensures that the air in the Barbican is diffused with changing olfactory delights as the show goes on.

The music itself is suitably sprawling for such a vast and experimentallyminded array of guests. Songs often take several minutes to build from near silence and then soar off in nebulous directions.

Guests come and go to universally thunderous applause, and then the auditorium falls silent as we wait to see how each particular artist fits with the quartet’s sound.

The whole evening is an exercise in tension and release.

Things start gradually, with the group unaccompanied as they slowly piece together a percussive, house-tinged introduction. Soon though, they’re joined

by French singer Léa Sen and then by Tawiah for a run of brooding soul tracks.

From here, they hit their stride. With the help of James Massiah and Confucius MC, the energy in the Barbican builds, ready for Shabaka Hutchings and Oren Marshall – wielding the largest tuba I’ve ever seen – to bring the first half of the evening to a stomping, squawking conclusion.

Post-intermission, we’re welcomed back by a video of multi-instrumental icon Laraaji encouraging the audience to

“take [our] dreams off of the shelf.” After appearances from Lafawndah, Trustfall and Leyla, it’s time for Mica Levi, Tirzah and Coby Sey to take the stage, slowly crafting a sort of deconstructed ’90s hip hop jam, complete with harp. People down the front start dancing, and soon everyone in the stalls is on their feet and hollerin approval. Midway through the second half of the night there’s a palpable sense of fun and community in the room, heightened all the more when Kwake switches drums for synths, and things take a turn towards rave.

To close things out, the band invite all of their guests to join them once more.

Witnessing the full roll call of musicians on stage felt like a historic moment in London’s musical evolution; a multi-generational, genre-defying jam that managed to evoke not just the fifteen years of the group themselves but also nodded to the future of the scene. A world that was once niche, born in the basements of south London pubs and sharpened in DIY venues, had now reached some form of mainstream acclaim without losing the community spirit that has been so integral to its evolution. Leaving Barbican, I doubt a single member of the audience was still questioning how Speakers Corner managed to pull it off. Mike Vinti

Clark and the London Contemporary Orchestra Barbican Centre, London 16 October 2021

A strange crowd gathers at the Barbican for Clark and the London Contemporary Orchestra. The usual red wine drinkers in smart casual appease a portion of the stereotype, but there are toddlers in the back row; a school kid wheels in on a skateboard with light-up wheels. The subsidence of a typical Barbican audience in-house – assumedly now watching the livestream – seems to have encouraged tonight a gathering you’d more likely find at a firework display.

photography by laurence howe

Live While the LCO finishes tuning, Clark runs on to huge applause, and then runs straight off again with the look of a man who’s left the house without his keys.

Another man comes on to plug in his laptop, and when Clark finally resurfaces, conductor Robert Ames runs off instead.

The neo-classical pantomime is stopped abruptly by a set that intensely spans the delicate trill of Clark’s groundbreaking, Warp-signed IDM to his compositional work on Lisey’s Story and new “mythological” climate-charged opus Playground in a Lake – it’s brilliant, and no joke.

But as the strobe lighting hits a dramatic apex, an apologetic voice can be heard from the back: “Can the piano player have some light please? She can’t see anything.” Tristan Gatward

Caroline Polachek The Roundhouse, Camden 28 October 2021

According to Caroline Polachek midway through tonight’s delirious encore, this show at the Roundhouse is her favourite ever. Judging by the levels of sheer, unbridled adoration that radiate back at her from the excitable audience, she’s not the only one.

Since the release of Pang in 2019, her first record released under her own

photography by ronan park

name, the former Chairlift singer-songwriter has become a low-key icon of alternative pop. In many ways, its virtuosic production, swooning melodies and irresistible warmth have provided a perfect sonic foil for the tumult of the past couple of years – dense with enormous hooks and floor-ready beats, it’s unifying, communal, designed to be shared in the contexts we’d so sorely missed, but it’s also introspective and heartfelt enough to soundtrack those all-too-familiar dark nights of the soul.

To be able to celebrate Pang with a sell-out crowd tonight, then, feels really special, and from start to finish Polachek and her band deliver. Heavy hitters like recent-ish single ‘Bunny Is A Rider’ (obviously the best pop song of the year) and Pang’s title track are thrown out early, sending the cavernous room into gyrating hysteria, as a spectacular backdrop (a towering, curlicued gate, projected onto a constantly-shifting morass of lightning and cloudscapes) looms imperiously over everything.

Watching her perform is a little like witnessing a world-class athlete at the top of their game: minutely choreographed yet endearingly spontaneous, utterly controlled yet visibly delighted, technically immaculate yet never alienating. As her vocals pirouette up and down multiple octaves, slaloming through the pristine hooks of tracks like ‘I Give Up’ or ‘Hit Me Where It Hurts’, it’s impossible not to be entirely swept away. Luke Cartledge

Cassandra Jenkins Green Door Store, Brighton 9 November 2021

You could be forgiven for being apprehensive about a show based around an album with as coldly academic a title as An Overview on Phenomenal Nature – for fearing that it might all be a bit high-brow bluster, full of art-school distance at the expense of musical warmth. Even if you’ve heard the album in question (a beautifully strange and melancholic document of everyday observations made from drone, elegantly simple melodicism, conversational spoken word and billowy, willowy saxophone, an album that’s intriguing after one play and irresistible after the third) it’s still difficult to know what to expect from its live equivalent.

As Cassandra Jenkins and her band slink on stage this evening and wordlessly begin pushing out a cloudy, serene, onenote murmur through sax, guitars and electronics, there’s still the sense the gig could go one of two ways. Thankfully, though, that note blossoms into something warm and enveloping and, after a couple of songs of bedding in, the performance is totally captivating. Like a millennial Suzanne Vega, there’s a calm, comforting and gently confident incision to the way Jenkins sings, steely-eyed, poised and self-assured, eager for you to listen and clearly thankful that you did.

Despite being the show’s star, though, she leads her band with a sense of inclusiveness, from the earthy Americana of ‘Michaelangelo’ right through to album highlight – and candidate for song of the year – ‘Hard Drive’, a multi-viewpoint story of detachment, heartbreak and redemption, stretched out here into a glorious tenminute panorama.

“This is our first show!” exclaims Jenkins, mid-set, almost surprising herself, as she introduces her new band of Glaswegian hired guns. With them as a backbone, Jenkins is allowed to soar, and the gig, like the album before it, mutates in the telling from curious to invincible over its gone-too-soon hour. Sam Walton

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Film and Books

Keyboard Fantasies (dir. posy dixon) “You’re not allowed to see the secret stash,” says Beverly Glenn-Copeland as he opens a high cupboard just enough to pull down a still shrink-wrapped cassette tape.

He laughs a laugh that soundtracks this documentary almost as much as his music does, although he’d be forgiven for being serious. The street value of one of those cassettes has skyrocketed in the last five years, having been considered worthless from its release in 1986 until its rediscovery in 2016. Only 200 exist. Copeland reckons he managed to sell 50 copies, until Japanese record shop owner (and revered crate-digger) Ryota Masuko discovered Keyboard Fantasies, sold the old stock and helped catapult Copeland to newfound success in his early 70s.

Keyboard Fantasies is a special album, of seven tracks realised long before their time, composed on a primitive Atari computer and a 707 drum machine, combining folk, electronica, loops and newage. “Healing” is the word that follows it around now, and Posy Dixon’s film of the same name casts it in stone – not just in reference to the music, but also Copeland as a figure of positivity, resolve and heart.

Through a series of interviews (some conducted at his home in rural Canada, others on the road playing Keyboard Fantasies for the first time), Copeland tells his unique story, from his musical upbringing in Philadelphia to his isolation at a prestigious college in Montreal, where, openly in a gay relationship with a woman (at a time when homosexuality was still illegal), he narrowly avoided shock therapy treatment by means of “a cure”. He took to the road with his guitar, recorded two virtuoso acoustic albums that bombed, and had settled in Ontario by the time he recorded and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in 1986.

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He only talks positively of his experiences, and the peace he’s found since discovering the term ‘transgender’ in the early 1990s, finally finding a self-identity that had eluded him his whole life.

Copeland’s joy spreads to his backing band too – a ragtag bunch of supreme musicians in their 20s who clearly love their leader. We see them loading in and packing down at shows, and goofing around with an artist they adore but are not intimidated by. Youth is important to Copeland, and perhaps the most touching segment of the film is not when he’s letting loose that deep, soulful voice that went unheard for so long, but when he sits with a group of young transgender fans in the Netherlands and talks about how we need to rebuilt a cross-generational society. It may sound woolly, but you get the sense that Copeland could sell far more absurd ideas on his infectious tone alone. Plus, y’know, he’s right. “‘Thank you for what you said about us,’”he recalls some young fans saying to him after one show. “‘We only ever hear how selfish we are.’” He considers that the moment he realised why his story is what it is. Stuart Stubbs

Run The Riddim: The Untold Story of ’90s Dancehall to the World — Marvin Sparks (no long stories) Run The Riddim is a long-overdue dive into the boom of digital dancehall in Jamaica from the mid’80s through to the ’90s, a pioneering era that, despite its deeply embedded influence across both the worldwide charts and the electronic underground, is yet to see its history told with the reverence of its earlier counterparts ska, reggae and dub. From the outset it’s made clear that in Sparks’ view, the developments and innovations made during this period are some of the most significant in the history of popular

music – and he makes a strong case.

The book takes an oral approach that balances first-hand quotes from the artists, with Sparks’ own personal recollections growing up as a Londoner of Jamaican descent. As he points out, his perspective has a geographic distance to it, a semi-detached immersion that allows a valuable counterpoint to the figures directly raised within the culture.

The book is generally divided in terms of key riddims: iconic instrumentals that highlight shifts in the wider scene, either musically, lyrically, culturally or globally. The approach is loose, with some chapters used as ways to dive into particularly prominent producers, while elsewhere there is discussion on the dancehall as an economic and social space, the rise of dominant female vocalists such as Lady Saw, the development of reggaeton across Latin America, and the ever-shifting developments in lyrical content, be it the emergence of sexually-explicit ‘slackness’ in the ’80s, or the early-’90s return to Rastafarian ideals.

It is at once informationally dense and refreshingly accessible in its tone, and there is a genuine reverence for the subject that is undeniable. Perhaps the rapid pacing of the writing could become confusing to a casual reader – at points, it feels like a lot of prior knowledge is presumed – but these are occasional and isolated issues that don’t affect the overall arc of the book. Conversely, there’s genuine charm to the sporadically scatter-brained approach, a plate-spinning exercise that attempts to wrestle the continually multiplying threads together.

Largely, Sparks leaves it to the voices of his interviewees to paint the picture, occasionally adding his own recollections to help ground the story, a necessary guiding voice throughout. It’s a joy to hear from unsung legends like Jamaican producer Clevie, and there is a shared feeling amongst all involved that the time is right for the history to be told correctly. As Sparks makes clear early on, the book is far from attempting to be a definitive account on the subject, but we can hope it acts as a foundational tome for a period that deserves greater exploration and celebration within music literature. A must-read. Oskar Jeff

MAKING Vol. 1 Vol. 2

150 issues of Loud And Quiet

Vol. 3

Vol. 4

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been reading through the past 149 issues of Loud And Quiet, one toe-curling headline at a time. I’ve spent the last seventeen years interviewing artists who’ve been quick to tell me how present they are; how they don’t listen to their old records; how looking back does not serve their art. What I suspect they’ve meant is that it’s all pretty embarrassing now, isn’t it? Well, artists, I hear you. Finally, and fully. I have tasted my own medicine and it tastes like asking The Long Blondes how they got a gig supporting Franz Ferdinand.

In July 2015, Loud And Quiet reached its 100th issue without realising it. It’s not a very good story, but is told on the following page. If we’d been paying proper attention, perhaps we would have had a big celebration then, where the natural question would have been: “Did you ever think Loud And Quiet would last 100 issues?” You’re always meant to say “not in a million years” to a question like that, but the truth is that as soon as I started making this magazine I could never imagine it no longer existing. I would have felt the same by the 100th issue in 2015, and now it’s late 2021 and things are a little different.

The first year of the pandemic treated us better than we could have hoped for, thanks to the support of the music industry and our fantastic readers. This second year of Covid has been a lot. By June (issue 147), we were running on nothing. 150 issues became our goal – to make it to December and issue 150 and 17 years of the magazine. We couldn’t really think beyond that, financially and emotionally. If the question now is, “Did you ever think Loud And Quiet would last 150 issues?”, my answer would be something like, “I expected us to reach 147, but not 150. Not in a million years.”

The following fifteen pages are a pretty daft, non-conclusive celebration of Loud And Quiet’s naivety and resilience – key ingredients in starting the project in the first place and keeping the ball up in the air beyond issue 2. It’s only been made possible by the people who have contributed to our 150 issues so far.

They’re the reason I never doubted it lasting this long.

Stuart Stubbs

PAPER

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THE L&Q TIMELINE OF SLOW-BURN SUCCESS

JAN 2005

APRIL 2005

SEPT 2005

Issue 001 of Loud And Quiet is printed on a home printer in Southend-on-Sea and handed out at gigs in London

Issue 003 is professionally printed, now in colour.

It features a proper COVER interview for the first time, but that interview is with Idlewild’s then bassist, Gavin Fox

Carving out a niche for interviews with bassists, issue 006 features a fledgling Arctic Monkeys on the cover and an interview with the band’s Andy Nicholson

MAY 2006

NOV 2006

DEC 2007

Issue 012 is put together at Coachella and inexplicably features a cat on the cover.

Madonna, Kanye and Daft Punk play the festival; L&Q chooses to feature The Rakes

Friend and designer Lee Belcher takes pity on Loud And Quiet and offers to start designing it from issue 017 until present day

The final issue of Loud And Quiet in its original A5 format is printed

MARCH 2008

APRIL 2008

AUGUST 2008

MARCH 2011

Loud And Quiet is re-launched in an overly expensive new format featuring Santogold on the cover

The final issue of Loud And Quiet in its new format is printed

Loud And Quiet crawls out of bankruptcy and into another new format – newsprint. It inspires management to reset the numbers to issue 001 (vol.

3). They will later regret it

Ian Beale first appears in Loud And Quiet issue 025 (vol. 3)

SEPT 2011

OCT 2011 – MAY 2012

JULY 2013

Loud And Quiet Japan launches in Tokyo and Osaka, with issue 032 (vol. 3) translated into Japanese and printed with fluoro ink

People continue to pick up Loud And Quiet predominantly for the Ian Beale content

David Lynch welcomes Loud And Quiet into his LA home for issue 050 (vol. 3)

OCT 2014

MARCH 2015

MAY 2015

GOAT give their first ever cover interview and shoot for issue 062 (vol. 3)

Loud And Quiet is made available in selected stores in New York City

Johnny Jewel gives an exclusive interview about new Chromatics album Dear Tommy for the cover issue 067 (vol. 3). Dear Tommy remains unreleased

JULY 2015

DEC 2016

DEC 2017

MARCH 2018

Issue 100, featuring Tame Impala on the cover, is printed. Sadly, due to the new volume system, L&Q didn’t clock the milestone until six issues later

Brian Eno appears on the cover issue 082 (vol. 3) and says, “Music is a like a bit like sausages – you never want to see it being made”

The final issue of Loud And Quiet in newsprint is published. Ian Beale’s column is finally put out to pasture.

Loud And Quiet braces itself for public outcry

The current format of Loud And Quiet is launched with David Byrne on the cover.

All issue and volume numbers are consolidated, making this issue 123. How boring

SEPT 2018

APRIL 2020

DEC 2021

Yoko Ono appears on the cover of issue 128

Loud And Quiet launches a membership plan asking its readers to support it through the pandemic and beyond

Here we are! Issue 150 is published. Loud And Quiet crawls toward its 17th birthday, and perhaps a little past it

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FROM RAGS TO RICHARDS: 17 YEARS OF UPS AND DOWNS WITH JASON WILLIAMSON Since Loud And Quiet first started printing in 2005, a lot has changed for the Sleaford Mods frontman,

by Luke Cartledge

In an Essex spare bedroom in 2005, Stuart Stubbs put together the first issue of a new fanzine called Loud And Quiet; soon, he’d be working 14-hour days from his mum’s house in Southend to get the magazine off the ground.

A couple of counties north, Jason Williamson was also living at his mum’s (in Grantham, Lincolnshire), also pursuing an ambitious new creative project, also skint. He was already releasing music as Sleaford Mods – although he was yet to meet Andrew Fearn, who would become Williamson’s creative foil and the architect of the duo’s singular production style a few years later – but aside from that promising new avenue, things weren’t going well.

“It was trying to find a sound [for Sleaford Mods], taking lots of drugs, drinking, being really really irresponsible,” he says today. “I was not a very nice person, did nothing I’m proud of.

My attitude to people was not good at all. But it got me thinking that I’ve not done bad considering – because, you know, I’m not very bright.”

Periods of low-paid work came and went – in a Little Chef on the A1, in factories, for temp agencies – interspersed with stretches on the dole. All the while, Williamson kept plugging away at Sleaford Mods (by 2009, he’d released three full-length albums, as well as a string of EPs and singles) and, according to him, ranting online.

“This is where Facebook comes in handy. Ahead of this [conversation] I just went down the timeline and I was able to find quite a lot of information from between 2004 and 2009, and every status update was just embarrassing. I had to stop looking, it was just so wrong…” We move swiftly on, through the most significant years of what has been an eventful time for Jason Williamson – and, of course, for this magazine.

2009: MEETING CLAIRE JW: By some miraculous stroke of luck, I met my wife in 2009.

I met her in July, and things did start to change a little bit, but my work and my personal life were still fractious. But she really put those things aside and invested in me – she saved my life. If I hadn’t met her I would have ruined myself, to the point where Sleaford Mods would never have had a chance.

2010: MEETING ANDREW I was making this album Spectre on my own. I met Andrew on 14th October 2010, supporting a noise artist from Los Angeles called John Wiese. And Andrew was DJing downstairs; everyone knows this story, but that’s the night I met him. And we met up just before Christmas and did a song called ‘All That Glue’. And

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we didn’t bother getting in touch again until sort of early 2011.

And that’s when we started writing songs for Austerity Dogs, but we put those on an album called Wank first. Yeah, that was released around summertime 2012.

2014: GIVING UP THE DAY JOB It was September 2014, right before we went on tour with The Specials. I remember leaving work on the last day, and it was an anti-climax. I left work and went straight to Glasgow, booked into a hotel and I’ve put my bags on the floor of the hotel room, and it suddenly dawns on me: “This is my new job.”

In a lot of respects, I went from one job to another, although obviously I’m singing in a band and one of the most interesting bands at the time in the country. But you have to work – this wasn’t early Oasis or something, selling millions of records. It was just thousands and thousands of records.

It took me a while to adjust to not working nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, not wearing a uniform. It probably took six or seven months. And then I started slipping into it, but it felt like I just kept going along. It wasn’t until I stopped drinking that I thought, “This is a new thing.”

2016: GETTING SOBER 2016 was kind of a rebirth. I stopped drinking completely. Stop taking drugs. Stop smoking. And it became an absolute revelation. I think that’s when it truly kicked in as to what I was doing – that I was a professional musician. Or whatever.

It was like a big sigh of relief, like a weight had been lifted.

It was weird. I felt lighter, like I’ve got rid of the thing I’ve been trying to get rid of for years, taking drugs and having comedowns. My intake had got worse. My habits on drugs had got worse. And I couldn’t escape. It was horrible. But when I finally

managed to, [I realised] you have to do it on your own – nobody can help you.

It affected everything, to a degree. I stopped halfway through the [2017 album] English Tapas recording sessions.

It shows on that album – a lot of people consider it to be a bit weak. I just saw it as a rebirth; there are songs on there where we stretched that sound differently. We needed to – we won’t repeat [preceding album] Key Markets or any of the other albums.

What’s the point?

2020: BECOMING BAKING DADDY We’ve effectively had two years off. We’ve done a few festivals, but it still doesn’t feel real – I don’t really feel like I’m in a band anymore. We’d constantly toured, as that was the only way we could make money, so to go without that is an odd proposition.

We had a lot of plans which had to get called off.

Baking Daddy [a series of online videos featuring Jason wearing only an apron and suggestively fondling his kitchen utensils as he whips up various cakes, breads and brownies] just came from being bored at home. If you remember, we weren’t allowed out for more than an hour each day. It was pretty intense. Everybody had taken to their phones; literally everyone was living on the screens. So it didn’t feel wasteful – I was trying to find ways to entertain people and entertain myself.

We’re going back out on tour in a couple of weeks. [Last album, released earlier this year] Spare Ribs has felt like a success, but because I’m not backing up the songs with live performances, I feel like it’s a bit redundant. I think Andrew feels better about it. But it’s fucked with me a bit – turning 50 as well, the whole midlife crisis… I’m 51 next week and I’m in a band, that’s what I do – that’s fucked up. It’s not been good on the old psyche. But I’m starting to come out of the negative things now.

FOR BETTER OR WORSE, EVERY ALBUM WE’VE SCORED 10/10 Floating Points + Pharoah Sanders & the London Symphony Orchestra Promises (2021)

Jamael Dean Black Space Tapes (2019)

Preoccupations Preoccupations (2016)

Warpaint The Fool (2010)

Burial Tunes 2011-2019 (2019)

Father John Misty I Love You, Honeybear (2015)

Caribou Swim (2010)

William Doyle Great Spans of Muddy Time (2021)

Mt Eerie Now Only (2018)

Sufjan Stevens Carrie and Lowell (2015)

Swans My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To The Sky (2010)

Black Country, New Road For The First Time (2021)

Protomartyr Relatives in Descent (2017)

Anna Calvi Anna Calvi (2011)

Sparkle Division To Feel Embraced (2020)

Bon Iver 22, A Million (2016)

Wooden Shjips West (2011)

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MICROGENRES WE’VE MANAGED TO OUTLIVE Night bus (2005-2010) Who: Burial, CFCF, early Disclosure What: Wistful, slow-tempo bass music for crying into your kebab to after the club kicks out

CONFESSIONS OF A ZINE DISTRIBUTOR,

BY ANON I wasn’t impressed when I was made Loud And Quiet’s Head of Distribution in 2005. I thought that there weren’t many upsides to giving up my weekends to push a trolley of magazines around the pubs and shops of east London. Once it was pointed out to me that there WERE upsides, I was so convinced I didn’t even think to ask what they were. And now it’s 2021.

Of COURSE distribution is the most important element of publishing! After all, would The Guardian’s story on the hacking scandal have had the same impact if they hadn’t shown it to anyone? Most probably not!

The legitimate way to get your own free magazine into stockists (this really doesn’t work if you want them to sell it for you) is to call them and ask permission first. Or, failing that, when you pop in there for the first time, ask them politely if they mind taking a few copies. But here’s the thing – that person you just asked probably isn’t in a position to make that call. They’re guessing like you are. Or, in some extreme circumstances, they don’t even work there. So here’s what you do: you don’t ask; you just sneakily put them there and hope that nobody tells you off.

You’ve probably gone hot just thinking about it, which is why your instinct would be to sprint into your targeted shop, avoid eye contact, let gravity decide where your product lands, and run. But no. You actually want to do the complete opposite. You DO want your entrance to be smooth (if you fall over on entry – and it does happen – abort immediately), so a good tip here is to hover outside and wait for a swell of people to enter or leave: they’ll hold the often heavy door for you and give you valuable cover. If no one sees you in this busy shop of Mickey Mouse sweatshirts, jackpot! But if you sense you’ve been spotted, slow it right down. Take your time placing your magazines where you’d like and – I know it sounds insane – say hello to the staff.

Better yet, say hello as if you know them. Like, “Heeeey. How’s it going? Busy in here today. Been meaning to get me one of those Mickey sweatshirts.” Do fly-tippers behave that way? I don’t think they do. They’ll presume you’ve met and are always here doing this, and, after a while, if you’re me, you will have been.

Nu-rave (2006-2008) Who: Klaxons, Late of the Pier, Hadouken What: Indie kids getting bored with guitars, smashing a load of M-CAT and surfing the sine waves into the future Witch house (2008-2012) Who: Salem, The Haxan Cloak, White Ring What: Self-consciously spooky internet beats emerging from dim-lit basement bedrooms; sometimes quite a lot better than that sounds Chillwave (2009-2011) Who: Toro y Moi, Washed Out, Neon Indian What: The reverb-drenched AOR to ’00s indie’s spiky new wave; usually about as bad as that sounds Brostep (2010-2013) Who: Skrillex, Knife Party, Korn (lol) What: Sweaty American and Australian dudes/ bros/homies/twats gleefully murdering dubstep and electro with the sole purpose of annoying British music nerds (it worked) Mallwave (2016-2019) Who: Anonymous YouTube users What: Sensitive teens intoxicated by the allure of 1990s consumerism and possibility, losing themselves in a distillation of vaporwave that’s even more muzak-y than the original genre That sea shanty craze (2020-2021) Who: A Scottish postman with a TikTok account, then seemingly everyone else What: A brief but inescapable fad of setting various lyrics to the earnest swing of traditional sea shanties that went viral everywhere and ‘earned’ the original poster a major record deal A Very Alan Christmas (2015-present) Who: Alexander Armstrong, Nick Knowles, Chris Kamara What: Christmas albums by literally any male presenter over the age of 50, providing they’re willing to promote it on Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh. Which all of them are

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Teen Sheikhs

Sauna Youth

BRITISH GARAGE BANDS, 2009-2011 A brief guide to a DIY moment,

by Stuart Stubbs

For a couple of years back there, Loud And Quiet was very into a British DIY scene inspired by America’s hardcore and garage bands of the 1980s. It felt as if everyone had read Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life and acted upon it, forming not just groups but micro-labels too, often releasing their lo-fi recordings on limited cassettes. A few got bigger deals, but most didn’t particularly want or seek them. It was about sharing a bill with your mates and swapping merch, at pub venues like The Spread Eagle and Hobby Horse, in London, at least. Here are just a few of the key players who made Loud And Quiet feel like it had a home more than it has at any other time.

and African Highlife music by then, as heard on their debut album Everything is Dancing. It was their bassist’s (Matt Flag) Suplex Cassettes who released Teen Sheikhs and almost every great band of the time.

COLD PUMAS

Dan Reeves of another Brighton trio, Cold Pumas, had a brilliant DIY label too, called Faux Discx. It was a place for more experimental artists, often featuring a motorik beat, including a fledgling Hookworms and his own instrumental krautrock jam band.

Cold Pumas were the group nobody wanted to go on after.

MAZES

MALE BONDING

Arguably the most respected band of the London scene, Male Bonding were also, conventionally speaking, the most successful too. They signed to Sub Pop for their excellent 2010 debut Nothing Hurts (which fittingly sounded like a cross between Bleach era Nirvana and ‘Pop Scene’-era Blur), and released a further two records via the dream label. Although not officially disbanded, they were last seen in 2016 when they self-released their third album, Headache.

TEEN SHEIKHS

Eventually, most bands of the time managed to release an album one way or another, but not Brighton’s Teen Sheikhs, which their peers always considered a huge shame. The closest they got was a tape of demos via Suplex Cassettes, called First Four Months. It’s a treasure of the time – a hissing, scratchy collection by a self-professed “shitty punk band” who could have been the best. Bassist Will Young now plays in Beak>.

FAIR OHS

I was such a fan of Fair Ohs that I booked them as my wedding band in 2011. They had long since pivoted away from Black Flaginspired hardcore and were taking their lead from Paul Simon

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Jack Cooper (later of Ultimate Painting and now Modern Nature) originally started Mazes as a solo project from his bedroom in Manchester. He released the brilliant ‘Bowie Knives’ on Teen Sheikhs’ Sex is Disgusting label before Mazes became a full (and prolific) band, releasing four albums on Fat Cat. No one came as close to matching Stephen Malkmus’s musicality like Mazes did.

GRAFFITI ISLAND

Although they only released a handful of singles, Graffiti Island offered something completely different in their short time together. They had the edge in American singer Pete Donaldson, who spoke his way through the trio’s (everyone was a trio) clunking bass lines, sounding exactly like Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson.

SAUNA YOUTH

Having formed in 2009, Sauna Youth took their time in delivering their 2012 debut Dreamlands, a literary punk record (two of the band’s members are renowned authors) where Side One features a single spoken word tale propelled by the group’s focused clatter. Still refusing to rush things – and still so good they’re uncategorisable – it’s no surprise that they remain a group today where so many others are due a reunion. Please.

GETTING TO KNOW YOU

What would you tell your 15-year-old self?

It’ll be fiiiiiine

From 2014 to 2017 we ran the below questionnaire to ask artists the questions that really don’t matter.

Here it is resurrected, with Yard Act singer James Smith

The best piece of advice you’ve been given “It’ll be fiiiiine” (from Ryan, YA bassist)

Your guilty pleasure Deliberately not having tea before pub so I get leathered quicker

Your favourite word ACE!

Your first big extravagance My new trenchcoat

Your pet-hate Nob heads

The characteristic you most like about yourself My new trenchcoat

If you could only eat one food forever, it would be...

Buffet The worst job you’ve had Maccies drive-thru or Debenhams call centre, can’t decide The film you can quote the most of Kes Your favourite place in the world Pub

Your hidden talent What I can hide in my new trenchcoat Your biggest disappointment My old trenchcoat Your biggest fear Losing my loved ones The best book in the world Cannery Row, by Steinbeck

Your best piece of advice for others We are stardust and worm feed, that’s ace!

GOT TO KNOW YOU: OUR FAVOURITE PAST ANSWERS The best piece of advice you’ve been given Don’t be a big shot, take a jacket (Tracey Thorn) The worst job you’ve had I dug up a fella’s muddy garden in the rain with Andy Rourke for 10 hours, on mushrooms. It turned into Apocalypse Now ( Johnny Marr) Your pet hate Guys over 25 in baseball caps (Perfume Genius) Your biggest disappointment “My penis” (Mac Demarco) The worst date you’ve been on I took my girlfriend to the garden I was digging up with Andy Rourke ( Johnny Marr) The celebrity that most pisses you off Kermit the Frog (Anohni)

Your style icon My wife

People’s biggest misconception about you That I’m one thing or the other

The one song you wished you’d written To Love Somebody – Barry Gibb

Who would play you in a film of your life?

Leo

The most famous person you’ve met Cristiano Ronaldo. I used to live down the road from the Man U training ground in Carrington, and used to go and wait outside for autographs in the holidays.

What is success to you?

Many meals out What talent do you wish you had?

Science smarts

Who would play you in a film of your life?

An actor hopefully (Aldous Harding)

The worst date you’ve been on None. All mint.

How would you choose to die?

Peacefully

How would you choose to die I’m not dying (Nadine Shah)

Your biggest fear Dying. I’m not up for it (Nadine Shah) The best piece of advice you’ve been given Run in a zigzag when being chased by an alligator (Baxter Dury)

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Kate, according the recent NME Cool List, you are officially the 39th coolest person in rock’n’roll. How does that feel?

So I was only 39th at the time – I think I went up to number seven the following year. It all seems faintly ridiculous now, doesn’t it – the concept of a ‘cool list’. But before I was in a band I’d always be excited and buy the NME when it had the Cool List in it. The year that I was number seven I think Amy Winehouse was only something like number 40, which is just crazy, because she was obviously way cooler than I could ever hope to be. It just shows what a load of rubbish it actually was.

Who would be number 1 in The Long Blondes cool list?

Barbara Windsor. Did I say Barbara Windsor? That’s what I’d say now… even though she’s dead.

You actually said Russell Senior.

Well, Russell is very cool. And I think at the time Russell has recently come and played violin on our single ‘Appropriation

by Any Other Name’. Dorian had asked him to come and play, and we were not expecting him to turn up whatsoever. And then, in the middle of the session he turned up with a box of percussive instruments that weren’t really instruments, like a box of cereal and some keys. And he had played an amazing violin riff, did that in five minutes, and said, “I’ll be off then,” and that was that.

What was working with Paul Epworth on ‘Separated by Motorways’ like?

He wasn’t the superstar producer that he became back then. He was just coming up, but we were still surprised that he came up to Sheffield to record with us. He was about four hours late and the whole time he was like, “I really want to go to an authentic Northern pub,” so most of it was us taking Paul Epworth to the pub.

WHAT WAS WORKING WITH PAUL EPWORTH LIKE? ... and other terrible questions I asked The Long Blondes in 2005, by Stuart Stubbs

The first year of Loud And Quiet ended with The Long Blondes on the cover of issue 8. The questions I asked them were not good, so God knows why I decided to ask Kate Jackson them a second time, 142 issues later.

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Will you work with him again?

Well, we never did, no. He was far too big and famous and expensive for us after then.

Who inspires you musically?

We would have said Pulp, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Blondie maybe? Or did I go for Shangri-Las, Nancy Sinatra?

You just went for Pulp and The Smiths.

The Smiths! Yeah, yeah… shame about that.

You can definitely tell that you’re Smiths fans, but there also seems to be some Elastica in there.

I don’t know if there ever was, although I was a big fan of Elastica as a teenager. You could have said Echobelly.

Yeah, that might have been the worst thing I said.

Other than music what is your shared passion?

Charity shopping?

Screech [Long Blondes drummer] said “Twin Peaks”.

Oh yeah, we were watching a lot of Twin Peaks at the time.

I think we would have all agreed on charity shopping, retrospectively. That was what we did every Saturday in Sheffield before we were even in a band. All the vintage stuff was very authentic; we weren’t putting that on at all.

Next week you’re playing Ally Pally with Franz Ferdinand.

Did you ever think that would happen?

Absolutely not. Especially not at that point. It was really early on. We never played Ally Pally again after that, unfortunately.

That show was fantastic. We opened, then Roots Manuva, and Franz headlined. It was such a massive step up for us, and I felt I could really perform, because I had room to move around on the stage for the first time ever.

How did you get the gig? Did they just ask you?

Ffs. That’s actually not the worst question, because there was a story there. They’d played a secret show in Leeds a year earlier, under the name The Black Hands, and Andy Brown was our Scottish friend promoting the show, who knew them from Glasgow. He was like, “You’ll be perfect for this show, you’ve got to come. It’s Franz Ferdinand but don’t tell anyone.” Obviously everyone found out and it ended up being the hugely oversubscribed thing, at The Brudenell. Alex and Nick had to go and play an acoustic set in the car park because there were just too many people there. They were the band we wanted to emulate – that trajectory.

Is it true that Kate Moss recently danced to your record in a New York record shop?

That rings a bell, but I don’t know who told us that. At the time, there was a guy in New York who runs What’s Your Rupture Records, and he was putting out a single of ours there. But he also worked in a record shop. Maybe she went into the shop and danced to it. That’s the only explanation I can think of for it.

That was exactly what you said. And then you said: “She didn’t buy it. She was just in there dancing around to it. And then Gwyneth Paltrow went and bought it. I thought he’d said Gwen Stefani but it was Paltrow so I felt a little disappointed.”

I think that’s fully understandable.

WRONG NAMES The most common names people still call us that are nearly Loud And Quiet but not quite 33% Loud And Proud 12% Loud Or Quiet

7% Loud And Noise

46% Loud And Clear

2% Quiet & Round

IN MEMORY OF IAN BEALE’S PHOTO CASEBOOK, 2011 – 2017

Where do you think you’ll be by the end of 2006?

I think we would have said: “Hopefully playing bigger shows.”

What did we say?

Hull Welly Club.

Haha. We must have already played the Hull Welly Club, because the first time we played there someone stole Screech’s snare drum and ran down the road with it, and I had to chase them down the road in my van.

To this question, Dorian said: “I think we will have split up by this time next year, in a blaze of glory.”

Bless him.

And then perhaps you could reform like Take That?

What did we say to that?

Dorian said: “Gary Barlow is another hero I’ve decided and I’m being serious here, not being ironic. Gary Barlow is a very good songwriter. ‘Back For Good’, what a very, very good song. He can be on our Cool List.”

I agree… Well, fascinating, that insight into my past.

Thank you very much for that.

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OUR MCCARTNEY INTERVIEW

THE BIGGEST INTERVIEW WE’LL EVER DO, BUT DIDN’T PRINT,

BY STUART STUBBS

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It’s hard to overstate how much The Beatles informed my life and music taste growing up. Loud And Quiet might have never existed without them, so, naturally, I knew that I would never have the opportunity to interview Paul McCartney – a man I seem incapable of not crowbarring into every episode of our Midnight Chats podcast. It’s a problem.

And then, in October of last year, something ridiculous happened. McCartney had spent lockdown making a new album and we were asked if we’d like to run the first interview with him about it on our website. It would go live to announce the record on the 21st of the month. And this wasn’t just a Paul McCartney solo album; it was his long-awaited third ‘McCartney’ record, 50 years after McCartney, 40 years after the still brilliantly odd McCartney II. It was the dream scenario: actual Paul McCartney, keen to answer questions for the very first time about an album I’d been waiting for, and its preceding records that I loved.

A world exclusive. Plus, it wasn’t a joke.

We ran the interview on the site as planned and watched his fans frantically tweet about it in real time, but we chose not to then publish the piece in our next print edition nearly two months later. I soon regretted it. After all, Loud And Quiet is lots of things, but a magazine first and foremost, even now.

So we’re correcting that bad call now. It’s Paul McCartney for god’s sake – the first edition of Loud And Quiet didn’t even feature a single interview. Here it is...

Of Paul McCartney’s 17 solo albums, it’s his eponymous two that hold the most mythology, not only for the music that’s on them but how they were made and when they were released.

Recorded as The Beatles disintegrated behind closed doors in late 1969 and early 1970, McCartney wasn’t a statement in name alone – it was a record written, performed, recorded and produced by one man who’d been so intrinsically tied to three others. A true solo debut album. He recorded it in secret, mostly at home, and when it came to releasing it he did so a month before The Beatles put out their swansong, Let It Be. Like the rest of the band, McCartney was entering a new decade as a new artist, but the boldness of his first solo album was unparalleled: consciously un-Beatles in its sparseness and homespun production style, it featured ad-libbed instrumentals and an opening track (‘The Lovely Linda’) originally meant only as a line-check. Spontaneous and supernaturally free from pressure, it’s as far away from Abbey Road as you can get, but then, The Beatles had only been able to make Sgt. Pepper by rolling the dice on all that had gone before it – and now McCartney had made something of a proto-indie record.

In 1980 it was another new decade, another band breakup and another one-Paul-band album to try to make sense of it all.

The dissolution of Wings wasn’t such a mess, but McCartney had been in the group for as long as he was The Beatles.

McCartney II remains his most experimental solo record to date, and arguably his best. Just as his debut distanced itself from the sound of his previous band, McCartney II abandoned the soft rock of Wings for new wave electronica, post-punk disco, krautrock and much weirder sounds altogether. You could easily mistake parts of it for Talking Heads, while B-side

‘Check My Machine’ featured a sample of Tweety and Sylvester as McCartney simply enjoyed himself experimenting, with little regard for what fans or critics would think.

Neither of his DIY albums were well received at the time of release, although McCartney II has become a wonky pop cult favourite since, and there’s little denying the beautiful simplicity of McCartney with some distance from the long shadow cast by The Beatles, let alone the guts it must have taken to release it in 1970. And now, at the start of a new decade once again, McCartney has put his lockdown to good use, writing, performing, recording and producing McCartney III – released December 11.

There’s no monumental band breakup this time, but all the other McCartney–isms are still there. It’s a sketchbook of freewheeling ideas completely made by one man at his home in Sussex, with daughter Mary McCartney stepping into the role of artwork photographer, previously held by her mother Linda.

Favouring acoustic instruments over electronic, it shares more in common with McCartney’s debut than its follow-up a decade later, although it’s perhaps number three that’s the most eclectic of them all, opening with a long (practically instrumental) acoustic guitar piece and continuing to throw caution to the wind after that – a vital characteristic in making it McCartney III rather than any other Paul McCartney solo album. Inside are vintage, chipper McCartney tracks, the odd eccentric to sit next to Polythene Pam, some big glam riffs, full band sounds and delicate demos, and a brilliant midway point that accurately portrays the overwhelming feeling of being in love and the current claustrophobia of 2020 lockdown. It definitely features some of the best music McCartney has made in years, and even in its moodier moments his optimism, of course, rises to the top.

“It’s me,” he told me when I spoke with him yesterday, bringing to mind an earworm from the album that’s hard to shake – a hook where McCartney sings, “It’s still ok to be nice.”

Hi Paul. To start with the most obvious question, a lot of people will be thinking why now for McCartney III? It was kind of unintentional. I had to go into the studio at the beginning of lockdown to do a couple of bits of music for an animated short film. So I got got in and did that bit of work and sent it off to the director, and then I thought, ‘Oh, this is nice, I’m enjoying this, this is a nice way to spend lockdown,’ so I ended up finishing off some songs, looking at bits and bobs, making up stuff, and generally enjoying myself in the studio.

And then I’d come home in the evening, and I just happened to be with my daughter Mary’s family. The combination of being able to go to work, make some music, and then hang out with four of my grandkids, I was very lucky. Y’know, we were being super careful, but being able to make music really helped.

At what point did you realise that what you were doing was making McCartney III? Right at the end of it, I’d just been stockpiling tracks, and I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of this – I guess I’ll hang onto it,’ and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this is a McCartney record,’ because I’d played everything and done it in the same manner as McCartney I and II. That was a little light

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bulb going off, and I thought, ‘Well, at least that makes a point of explaining what I’ve been doing, unbeknownst to me.’

It’s been 40 years since McCartney II – has there ever been a point between then and now that you’ve intended to make number III before?

No. Actually, not at all. I did McCartney right after The Beatles in 1970, McCartney II in 1980, and I did other similar projects, like The Firemen, working with Youth – that was a little bit similar because we’d go in the studio and Youth or I would just have a little bit of an idea, and it was a kind of homemade product, but it never occurred to me to do another McCartney album.

As you say, McCartney I and II followed such seismic shifts in your life and career – in that sense, how does the timing of this new record compare?

The common denominator is that I had a lot of time suddenly.

After The Beatles broke up, I suddenly had a lot of time and no particular plan in mind. And then when Wings broke up it was a similar thing. And with me, when I’ve got a lot of time, my go-to situation is, ‘Well, write and record, then – that’s something to do when you’ve got some spare time.’ So this was similar, but it was the pandemic that stopped things. We were due to go on a European tour this year, but very early on Italy got the virus, and gradually all of the other gigs, including Glastonbury, which was going to be the culmination of it, got knocked out. So then it was, ‘Ok, well what am I going to do?’ And that’s my fall-back situation – to write and record.

Are you someone who’s bad at being bored?

I like doing stuff, I must say. I like the idea of, ‘Ooh, I can do that.’

But it’s funny, I was in Japan and I got ill, and they said you’re going to have to rest up for six weeks, and all my mates said, “You’re never going to be able to stand that,” but in actual fact I loved it. I think I read every book, every script, watched every bit of telly I’d missed – I surprised myself that I actually enjoyed it.

Paul McCartney songs have always sounded so effortless to me. Could you write a song every day if you wanted to?

I think so. The secret for me is having a bit of time. This afternoon I haven’t really got anything on, and my guitar is sort of sat here looking at me, saying, “Why am I over here?” But it’s time. I think if I was stuck and needed to write a song everyday, maybe I could.

I kind of play everyday, one thing or another. A mate of mine said, “Guitars is best.” I mean, they are. They’re great.

You can form a good friendship with a piece of wood and metal.

I was always lucky as a kid to have one, and when the world was against you, you could go off into the corner with your guitar and you could make things right. It’s the magic of music, because it comes out of nowhere. It does strike me occasionally – I’ll think, ‘This is great, because I’ve really learned chords, and I can really go between them.’ I can remember a really long time ago finding it really difficult to go between E and A and B, and don’t even talk to me about B7. I was just thinking the other day, “No, I can move between chords. I’m getting pretty good at this.”

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There have been rumours about the release of this new album over the last few weeks, and within those is a theory that McCartney III will be your last record.

Everything I do is always supposed to be my last. When I was 50 – “That’s his last tour.” And it was like, ‘Oh, is it? I don’t think so.’ It’s the rumour mill, but that’s ok. When we did Abbey Road I was dead, so everything else is a bonus.

In 1970, McCartney was an album that featured themes of home, the family and love. What features on this new one?

I think it’s similar. It’s to do with freedom and love. There’s a varied lot of feelings on it, but I didn’t set out for it to all be like, ‘This is how I feel at this moment.’ The old themes are there, of love and optimism. ‘Seize the Day’ – it’s me. That’s the truth.

One of my favourite songs on the album is the midway point of ‘Deep Deep Feeling’, which is over eight minutes long. If people are expecting your lockdown album to feel like lockdown, that’s the track that feels the most claustrophobic to me, despite it being essentially about love.

That was one of the songs that I’d actually started last year.

If I’m lucky, I’ll have a bit of time when I’ll go into the studio and just make something up, and so I try to just do something that I haven’t done before. This was one of those that I didn’t finish. To me, what it was about was, sometimes – I don’t how it happens or even what it is – when you’re feeling real love towards someone, sometimes it can manifest in a tingling over your whole body, and it’s a pretty funny feeling, and you almost don’t like it – ‘What the hell is this?!’ – like you’re about to be beamed up into a spaceship or something. On this song I was fascinated with the idea of that – that deep, deep feeling when you love someone so much it almost hurts. That was the start of that, but after I made it I thought, well, this isn’t for anything. It’s certainly not a three-minute single. What became nice about working in the studio was that in the evening Mary would be cooking, because she loves to cook, and we’d be sitting around before dinner, and she’d say, “Well, what did you do today then?” and I’d go, “Oh, ok, I’ll play it for you.” And I always wanted it to keep going.

I just wanted it to go on forever. It’s a bit indulgent, and I was a little bit worried about that – I thought I really needed to cut it down, but just before I did that I just listened to it, and I thought, “Y’know what, I love this, I’m not going to touch it.”

The album comes full circle when it ends on the riff from the opening track, ‘Long Tailed Winter Bird’, and segues into ‘When Winter Comes’, which you recorded years ago with George Martin, right?

Yes. There’s nothing on that track – it’s just me – but I made a track called ‘Calico Skies’ a while ago [for the 1997 album Flaming Pie], which George produced. And at the same time, because I was in the studio and had an extra minute or so, I had this other song, so I said, ‘let me knock this one off.’ That was ‘When Winter Comes’, and I mention George because it was on a George Martin produced session, but it is just me on the guitar.

It was nearly going to be a bonus extra that was going to be on a reissue of Flaming Pie, but I’d just been reading that great book

on Elvis, Last Train to Memphis, and it mentioned a song and said you’ve probably never heard it because it was buried as a bonus on the B-side of an album. So I thought, no, I’d rather have this one as a proper track. And we finished the album with it because it was the reason for doing the whole thing, because me and my mate Geoff Dunbar, who’s an animation director, were talking about making an animated film to that song. So that’s where the opening and closing tracks come from.

McCartney II has always been a really interesting record of yours, which has only grown in cult popularity over the years. How do you feel about that album now?

That’s a great thing for me, because you do these records and the spirit you do them in is very optimistic. You think, this is great, it’s a record, and you’re pleased with it. And then you get the reception, which is, “Oh no, bloody hell. What’s he doing?”

So it’s disappointing when it doesn’t go down well, and it doesn’t sell well – you just think, nobody likes that. And then a few years ago, someone said to me, “’ere, there’s this DJ in Brighton and he’s playing ‘Temporary Secretary’.” I said, “Get out.” And he said, “It’s going crazy over there.”

I thought, well, I can see that – it sounds very modern with the sequencer and stuff. And that’s a great thing. I mean, Ram [1971] has become something that people talk about. At the time it got some scathing reviews. So you just have to put up with it and think, ‘I dunno, I liked it.’ Suddenly it comes through and you think, ‘Great! Vindication!!!’

What’s great about McCartney II is that people tend to think they know what Paul McCartney sounds like and they’ve already made their minds up, but you can play someone

‘Front Parlour’ or ‘Temporary Secretary’ and they might not even believe it’s you.

I love that about it. That’s what I’m trying to do with those kinds of songs. I was in LA when I was doing Egypt Station [2018] with Greg Kurstin, the producer, and we were wandering around this little studio while they were setting up, and will.i.am was in there with one of his mates, and he said, “Paul, I was just listening to ‘Check My Machine’,” and the other guy was like, “What?

I’ve never heard of it.” He got it up on his phone and they were like, “Yeah!” Vindication! They just come out of the woodwork, those things. I was just goofing around.

Do you still search for innovations like the sampling on ‘Check My Machine’, or making the first music videos for ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’, or producing what is perhaps the first indie record with McCartney?

There’s a lot of things in my life that I’m surprised at. People say, “After touring for all these years, don’t you just hate it? Aren’t you fed up?” I’m like, “No, I’m not.” I suppose I am still looking for something new, but it’s not that important. The more important thing for me is getting into a studio and thinking, what can we do now. It doesn’t have to be something new, it can be something old. And on this record, actually, I had a couple of guitars that I’ve not played much, and we got them out – this old Gibson, this beautiful thing – and I’m like, ‘How have I not played this!?’ and that led me into a track. But I still enjoy what I do very much, and it all comes out as clichés – ‘I feel very lucky’ – but it’s true.

When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was plug a guitar into an amp and turn it up for that thrill, and it’s still there. So it’s not so much that I’m looking for something new, more that I’m looking for something to do to keep me off the streets.

COMPANY HEIRLOOM

Ian MacKaye doesn’t give many interviews at all, but over the years we asked him for one every now and then, in hope.

It was a big deal when he finally said yes in 2015, and spoke to Daniel Dylan Wray for a piece in Loud And Quiet 66 (vol. 3) about his life in music as a pioneer of DIY music and culture. A month later we received a postcard of thanks from him, stamped with his iconic Dischord Records logo, making a quip about Father John Misty, who, coincidentally, had joked in the same issue about not being cool enough to know who Ian MacKaye was.

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QUALITY TIME Tales of meeting artists for more than 20 minutes

There was a time, we’re told, when the smallest of journalistic assignments would mean joining the Led Zeppelin tour. Even if you weren’t writing about Led Zeppelin. That’s the Almost Famous line on it, and while it’s not strictly true, there’s no denying how radically different the artist/journalist relationship is today versus the near open-house approach of the 1970s. And ’80s. And ’90s.

Still, while Loud And Quiet started well into the era of grabbing 20 minutes with the band between soundcheck and doors, we’ve been lucky enough to have our fair share of quality time with artists we love. There’s been plenty of phoners and jobs on the run (I once interviewed a band in a black cab on their way to a more important interview), but we’ve also spent Black Friday with Tobias Jesso Jr in LA, toured Japan with Gold Panda, been hosted by Protomartyr for the weekend in Detroit, and very nearly coaxed David Byrne into a bathtub.

Here, five writers recall some of their favourite encounters that weren’t so rigidly against the clock.

A WEEKEND WITH SHOW ME THE BODY For L&Q 79 (vol. 3): I distinctly remember flying to New York for this feature because it was on the morning of the EU Referendum result. The perfect antidote: to be on a plane, cut off from rolling news for 8 hours. And then, at the other end, I was going

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to a furious punk show with Show Me The Body and a bunch of their mates in a dance school in Chinatown.

As hardcore kids, they didn’t believe much in giving interviews and posing for photos, so they didn’t love me turning up.

The band’s singer, Julian, was particularly suspicious, but I think they warmed to me over the two days we hung out. It helped that after the show I was asked if it was ok to have people back to the apartment I was staying in, which doubled as the band’s label’s office on the Lower East Side. I was pretty drunk and really jetlagged, and absolutely did not want people to come back to the apartment, so I said: “Absolutely. That’d be great.” It’s my disgusting habit of needing to be liked, although believing you should just go with what a band wants to do when spending time with them could also pass as ‘professional’, perhaps. So we went back and ate ice cream cake and smoked weed and a guy there asked where I was from and when I said, “London,” he said, “Oh wow, you guys really shit the bed last night.”

The next day the band vetoed every idea we had for photographs. And, after a good lunch, some more weed, a bizarre visit to a friend and his mum, a failed attempt to get into restricted areas of the Natural History, the guys wished me a good flight home before we’d even done the interview. And we were getting on so well…

We got it done in the end, on the corner of Central Park. I had a brilliant time. Stuart Stubbs

SHOPPING WITH JIMOTHY LACOSTE For L&Q 129: I am many things but I am not a fashionista. So when Loud and Quiet asked me to accompany Camden-based rapper Jimothy Lacoste on a trip perusing the luxury boutiques of Bond Street, it seemed like a fun opportunity to get a glimpse into an alien world while – theoretically – also unravelling the mystery of one of pop’s most confounding voices.

I remember it was an abnormally mild and sunny day for midSeptember, and instantly regretting whatever allegedly autumnappropriate outfit it was that I’d chosen to wear. I also remember Jimothy seemed to be having no such problem, sauntering up to me, Sonny (the photographer) and his PR wearing a cream fur jacket.

We met outside Oxford Circus station and headed straight to his namesake, Lacoste, on Regent Street, and then on to Bond Street to browse Burberry, Ralph Lauren and Gucci, before winding up for a sit down chat in Soho House.

Being both affable and naturally curious, Jimothy made for good company and a fun tour guide, and while I was silently bracing myself to be escorted off the premises at all times, he displayed an enviable lack of self-consciousness critiquing clothes directly in front of staff. That lack of self-consciousness also proved handy for the moments where Sonny had him squatting in the middle of busy shopping streets for photos.

To be given two-and-a-half hours with an artist is pretty much unheard of, at least in my experience. Did I get to the bottom of who Jimothy really is? Probably not. But I think I delivered a pretty decent snapshot of him on that particular September day. It remains one of my most memorable interview experiences, and I can honestly say I’ve never met anyone quite like him before or since. Gemma Samways DINNER WITH GRIMES For L&Q 35 (vol. 3): Some musicians are very aware of the tape recorder during an interview, silent either before or after the red light is on, usually depending on how misquoted they’ve been in the past.

Others appear more laid-back, chatty on both sides of the official interview line. And then there’s Grimes, who gabbled a million quotable things at me before I’d even said hello on a rainy Monday evening in January 2012, gushing about the photoshoot she’d just done with Phil Sharp, and the London weather, and what finger tattoo she was going to get next, and spaghetti hoops. She didn’t even notice when I finally pressed record.

We met in the St John’s Tavern in Archway, two weeks before Visions came out and catapulted her from obscurist bedroom electro sci-fi fantasy nerd to, well, extraordinarily famous bedroom electro sci-fi fantasy nerd. I was vaguely aware of her before researching the piece (she was considered an indie curio at this stage) but there was little online to prepare me for the whirlwind I was about to encounter: our allotted time was 45 minutes, but for the next 90, following that breathless introduction, I happily listened to the most self-possessed person I’d ever interviewed, and also the most hyperactive, completely sure of her own self-taught genius and incapable of staying on topic for

more than 60 seconds. At one point she revealed that she didn’t really care for musicians, and that “the coolest, most attractive people are geeks”, perhaps already certain who she’d end up with seven years later. At another, she told me: “I just think I am really good, and I want power.”

Eventually, the official interview ended, but Grimes didn’t. We had a pub dinner afterwards – her, her label team, and me: she just kept going, on dumpster-diving and software engineering and The Fifth Element, barely stopping to eat.

Sam Walton IN THE STUDIO WITH BRIAN ENO For L&Q 82 (vol. 3): It’s rare you can gain a sense of an artist from the environment in which you interview them. Shouty pubs, cramped backstage areas, sterile hotel lobbies, over the phone – all offer more hurdles than they do insights. However, when Brian Eno invited us down to his Notting Hill studio for the afternoon, it was one of those real treats that didn’t just elevate the experience but also the artist.

I arrived six minutes early and had to wait outside until it was precisely the correct time for our interview to begin. Inside, Eno was ​​excitedly opening coffin-sized boxes filled with giant light box installations he’d designed. There were already a few of these scattered around his studio changing colours, gently altering the warmth and tone of the room as we spoke. Tea and biscuits were produced and his unreleased ambient music played softly over the speakers. The room – which was filled with records, books and various other items – felt like a living room more than an office. His actual music studio was in a separate smaller room, which he took me in as we wrapped up the interview and he gave me a little tour. Once in there, he proudly showed me the artworks hanging, not big name behemoths with eye-watering price tags, but made by prisoners as part of an art programme he had been involved with.

It was an afternoon that was both tranquil and animated.

Eno’s booming and profanity-laden voice echoing around the room over his meditative music playing on a loop is a contrast I’ll never forget. It was a particularly memorable encounter because it placed me not only inside the creative epicentre of where so much groundbreaking work had been conceived and created but also because it was an open invitation into his little universe, a peek into his quirks, routines, tastes and habits. I’ll remember not to arrive six minutes early next time. Daniel Dylan Wray IN ICELAND WITH DAUGHTERS OF REYKJAVIK For L&Q 84 (vol. 3): “Not very many beings can thrive here,” I was told by Salka Valsdóttir, one of the Daughters of Reykjavik, as I sped through Iceland in the dark, driven across the barren landscape of a country which is, weirdly, more green than icy – though there was plenty of snow.

The Daughters of Reykjavik, an Icelandic female rap collective, were more like a coven than a crew. Perhaps I’m saying this simply because they are female, but in my memory, there was a sort of witchy comradery that was utterly without swagger

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or bravado – a fierce feminine power that came from caring for one another’s children, exchanging wisdom over herbal tea and writing rhymes inspired by the Eminem tracks they had listened to while working as chambermaids at a local hotel. Then again, maybe I was projecting due to exhaustion and gratitude. A couple of band members had driven to the airport to collect me, given that I was some eight hours late to that interview, due to the delayed flights operated by the short-lived low-cost airline WOW Air (“We’re sorry,” the voicemail of the customer service helpline said when I called to complain about the flight delays,

“this is so not WOW”). Anyway, Reykjavik smelled of sulphur, and as I flew in low over the country it looked like a landscape from a place someone had imagined.

It’s true that the country has little in the way of wildlife, but nestled in the flat where a group of eleven women had come together to create music, have fun and love one another, attempting to find a model of writing and producing music that sustained and supported motherhood, I thought it wasn’t quite true that Iceland was without pockets of sustenance, where something great might grow. Katie Beswick

LOUD AND QUIET COVER ARTISTS, THE FIRST 150 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Pete Doherty The Paddington Idlewild The Rakes Shout Out Louds Arctic Monkeys We Are Scientists The Long Blondes Test-Icicles Good Shoes Hope of the States LA Special (A Cat) Jamie T Klaxons Larakin Love I Was a Cub Scout Battle End of Year Issue Bloc Party Patrick Wolf The Maccabees Mark Ronson New Young Pony Club The Enemy Dizzee Rascal Crystal Castles Black Lips Foals End of Year Issue

VOL. 2 01 Santogold 02 Battles VOL. 3 01 Metronomy 02 Adam Green 03 Video Nasties 04 Marmaduke Duke 05 The Horrors

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06 The Big Pink 07 Telepathe 08 The Slits 09 Health 10 Erol Alkan 11 Comanechi 12 Bat for Lashes 13 Yeasayer 14 These New Puritans 15 Mystery Jets 16 Fuck Buttons 17 Wooden Shjips 18 Sleigh Bells 19 Factory Floor 20 Wavves 21 Fever Ray 22 Gold Panda 23 Glasser 24 End of Year Issue 25 Lupe Fiasco 26 The Pains of Being Pure

at Heart 27 Smith Westerns 28 Tom Vek 29 Tune Yards 30 Fair Ohs 31 Ryan Adams 32 Veronica Falls 33 End of Year Issues 34 Kwes 35 Charlotte Gainsbourg 36 Kindness 37 John Lydon 38 Lil B 39 Micachu 40 Ariel Pink 41 Bat For Lashes 42 Gabriel Bruce 43 Dan Deacon 44 End of Year Issue

45 Kraftwerk 46 Foxygen 47 The Child of Lov 48 Pissed Jeans 49 Solange 50 David Lynch 51 King Krule 52 Poliça 53 Connan Mockasin 54 Katy B 55 Warpaint 56 Eagulls 57 Metronomy 58 John Grant 59 Mac Demarco 60 Charles Bradley 61 DFA 1979 62 Goat 63 Karen O 64 Azealia Banks 65 10 Years Anniversary Edition 66 Father John Misty 67 Chromatics 68 Health 69 Tame Impala 70 Beirut 71 Ho99o9 72 Boots 73 Tobias Jesso Jr. 74 Anna Meredith 75 Let’s Eat Grandma 76 Anohni 77 Levelz 78 Car Seat Headrest 79 Show Me The Body 80 Kate Tempest 81 Gold Panda 82 Brian Eno 83 HMLTD

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Jarvis Cocker Wesley Gonzalez Charlotte Church Kali Uchis Wiki Protomartyr Shame King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

VOL. 4 123 David Byrne 124 Serpentwithfeet 125 The Internet 126 Idles 127 Gazelle Twin 128 Yoko Ono 129 Jimothy Lacoste 130 Nilüfer Yanya 131 Julia Jacklin 132 Ezra Collective 133 Holly Herndon 134 Black Midi 135 Fontaines D.C. 136 Gloo 137 Richard Dawson 138 Jpegmafia 139 Black Country, New Road 140 King Krule 141 Kelly Lee Owens 142 Tkay Maidza 143 Adrianne Lenker 144 Sleaford Mods 145 Squid 146 Japanese Breakfast 147 Little Simz 148 Audiobooks 149 Tirzah 150 150th Anniversary Edition

Dec 2021

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Final Third: Infinite login

Man, what a song Intelligence researcher Christine Bauer explains how streaming algorithms work to recommend us new music, and how gender biased it turns out they are, by Andrew Anderson

Go to a music streaming platform. Play a song you want to listen to. Then, when that song finishes – assuming you have ‘autoplay’ selected – it will play another song. Probably it’s a song you already like, or else it’s a song you haven’t heard before but that you like immediately. You might even save it to your library or put it on a playlist. Sometimes it’s spooky; it can feel like the system knows your music taste better than you do.

So how does it do that? And is it good that streaming platforms can so successfully predict what we might want to listen to?

Let’s answer the first question first because, well, logically it makes more sense to do that (and also because it’s an easier question to answer and my fingers aren’t quite warmed up yet).

There are two ways that streaming platforms predict what we might want to listen to: content filtering and collaborative filtering. Content filtering looks at what you’ve already listened to and then gives you more of the same. So, if you’re listening to a delta blues song, hey presto, the platform will play you another delta blues song once that one finishes. But it doesn’t just have to be based on simple genre categories; the system could also choose the next song because it has similar lyrics, similar instrumentation or even a similar chord sequence.

Collaborative filtering, mean-while, compares your music taste to that of other users and then plays you songs that they have listened to. For example, if ‘user A’ likes both the Flaming Lips and Pavement, and ‘user B’ likes the Flaming Lips, chances are that ‘user B’ will also like Pavement. Of course, it’s slightly more complicated than that, but essentially that’s how it works.

“Different platforms use these two methods in different combinations,” says interactive intelligent systems researcher Christine Bauer. “Of course, we don’t know how exactly each platform works – that’s the chef ’s secret – but they all use the same ingredients to filter the millions of songs available and find ones that are relevant for each user.”

Based in Utrecht, Bauer has spent the last few years studying how streaming platforms predict what we want to listen – or ‘context-aware music recommender systems’ to use the academic terminology – as well as investigating how they can be improved.

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“These systems aren’t unique to music,” she adds, and she’s right: each time you shop online and get a message that says ‘other users also bought…’ that’s a recommender system. It’s the artificial intelligence behind most customised online experiences, from gaming platforms like Steam to streaming services like Netflix. And, just to reiterate, all music streaming platforms – Spotify, YouTube, Last.fm, Pandora, Apple Music, Tidal – use these systems. Yes, their algorithms will be programmed differently, but the basic processes are the same.

That said, there is one thing we know: the collaborative approach usually works better when it comes to picking tracks that we want to hear.

“Collaborative filtering is closer to how people really engage with music,” notes Bauer. “Finding similar users with similar listening patterns and sharing music between them works really well. Whereas the content filtering approach just gives you more of the same, which can get boring quite quickly.

“But there are a couple of downsides for the collaborative approach,” she adds. “The first is that it doesn’t work well for new users, because it can’t compare you to other users until you’ve actually listened to some music. The second issue is that

Final Third: Infinite login when a new song comes onto the platform it can’t be recommended using the collaborative approach until someone has listened to it.”

— Ed Sheeran Vs audiobooks — As well as studying how these systems work, Bauer also looks at the problems they create. Some are obvious, and not unique to music recommender systems, while others are more subtle.

Let’s start with the big one: popularity bias. Put simply, popularity bias is when things that are already popular become more popular, like a snowball rolling down a hill growing bigger and bigger.

“Items that are already very popular are more likely to be recomm-ended to other people, so they are more likely to be listened to, which again increases the chance that they are recommended,” says Bauer. “So popular items become more popular, while unpopular ones remain in the dark.”

It’s easy to see why this is a problem, especially for the kind of alternative artists found in the pages of magazines like this one. While Ed Sheeran and Adele are getting recommended left, right and centre, that new audiobooks album is sitting there with far fewer listens than it deserves (there’s just no justice, right?).

But while the popularity bias is interesting, it’s kind of obvious: of course popular things get more popular. Numerous psychology studies have found that if something is branded as ‘popular’ it will indeed become more popular, even if that original claim of popularity is a lie. And we know it’s true intuitively: it’s the explanation for cultural trends in fashion, food and music.

What’s more interesting (or should I say alarming) are some of the other biases built into music recommender systems.

There are several that researchers have identified, including both genre and country biases. But the one that Bauer has been looking into lately is the gender bias.

“One topic that kept popping up when we spoke to artists was the perceived gender imbalance in the music industry,” says Bauer. “This bias has been present in the music industry for a long time, but we wanted to know if it also occurs on streaming platforms.”

There were two key questions Bauer and her colleagues tried to answer. Firstly, is there a gender bias in music recommender systems? And secondly, if there is a bias, how can it be corrected?

The answer to the first question was, unsurprisingly (at least, for anyone who has spent more than an hour on planet earth) yes: there is a gender bias in music recommender systems.

In their research, Bauer and her team found that, on average, a female artist wouldn’t appear until the 7th or 8th position in recommended playlists (or, put another way, you’d have to skip past six male artists before you reached a female one).

The researchers then created a new algorithm to see if

illustration by kate prior

they could fix this issue (and just to note: this work was based on an open dataset that came from Last.fm).

“We based it on a collaborative filtering approach, but then we re-ranked the male artists down a few steps,” explains Bauer. “Over time we saw that indeed it could break the loop, and more female artists started getting recommended.”

Well, that’s great news. And it could be that platforms like Spotify and Pandora are already working to counteract this bias… but then again, they might not be, and the fact is, we just don’t know, because their algorithms are black box processes.

I’ll let the expert explain what that means.

“A black box process is where we don’t know what is happening inside,” says Bauer. “We know the input, we know the output, but in between some magic happens. With music recommenders, we don’t know exactly what algorithms are in play, and we don’t know if some of the choices are being curated.

For example, a record label could theoretically pay money to have their artists recommended more often. But we don’t know this: all we can do is use the platforms and see the results.”

On the one hand, this is understandable: music streaming services spend a lot of money perfecting their algorithms, and they aren’t about to share their work for free with the rest of the world. But on the other, it means we have no idea how music platforms are picking which songs are played. And that’s troubling for a number of reasons.

“Most of us rely on music recommenders because we don’t have time to choose from the millions of available recordings ourselves,” says Bauer. “So, music recommenders can steer our lives in certain directions, or keep us trapped in a particular bubble. For example, if the platform only recommends music that puts you in an unhappy mood, that could be a problem.

“But the biggest issue, I think, is for the artists. These recommenders have an impact on their popularity, their exposure and their income. But if you don’t know what the algorithms are doing, then you have no idea if the system is fair or not. There’s a lack of transparency.”

And it gets worse (sorry) because not only do we not know for certain whether these systems are biased, we also wouldn’t have much recourse to change them if we did know. Whereas in the past music broadcasters were either publicly owned (like BBC Radio) or publicly regulated (like every other station) and therefore publicly accountable, that’s not the case anymore. If a music streaming platform has a bias there’s not much we can do about it, aside from mass boycotts (unlikely) or unilateral international government action (even more unlikely).

But perhaps that’s just me being overly negative, because Bauer remains hopeful that bringing attention to these biases will eventually lead to change.

“We have to ask ourselves: ‘Is it the responsibility of platform providers to care about societal issues, or care about the artists – their core content providers?’ I think it is, but we have to let them know that this is important. From the artist perspective, it makes me sad that these issues have not been addressed already… and I want to help change that if I can.”

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Final Third: In Conversation It’s tradition that, in our end of year issue, we interview the artist(s) responsible for our Album of The Year about the record that’s topped our list. But Black Country, New Road have already given us something new to talk about – their second, more personal and markedly different album, Ants From Up There. Skye Butchard spoke to three of the band about the future rather than the past.

Photography by Rosie Foster

Crying on the Megabus

Charlie Wayne, Black Country, New Road’s drummer, has just arrived at his childhood bedroom in Cambridge when we start our call. He’s home to collect some colourful sketches he drew as a kid for the band’s promo imagery – along with an extra duvet for his freezing flat in London.

When bassist Tyler Hyde and saxophonist Lewis Evans join, there’s an easy comfort between the chat that you only get in certain friendships. Our conversation leads to tangents about pub quiz victories, cinema trips – places the band see each other outside of a rehearsal room. Half way through our conversation, Charlie’s mum pops in to say hi, not realising an interview is happening. “Get Theresa on!” shouts Louis.

“Do you want to say hi to Lewis and Tyler?” says Charlie.

“God, of course I do! Let me take off my glasses…

How about we swap and you can do what I’m doing?” she says.

It’s all so easy.

“That was the whole vibe when we were writing these songs, to be honest,” says Charlie. “We had a week where we

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could go to a rehearsal room in London. It was during the real bleak January lockdown where you couldn’t do anything, in the deepest bit of winter.

“Just going to see our friends and having something to do felt like such a retreat. It was a pleasant, productive way of spending your time. You can feel that in how the songs are written. It felt warm, like a reflection of the time that we were able to spend together.”

While we were all losing our minds over the first Black Country, New Road album, the band were already kind of over it. The seven-piece group had blown up as a live act while still forming their collective musical identity, and the explosive, utterly brilliant debut album that followed wasn’t exactly what they were trying to say.

Nearly a year on, they’ve made that record. Out in February, Ants From Up There is a more “personal” offering, with even tighter interplay and more playful ideas than what’s come before.

Final Third: In Conversation

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Final Third: In Conversation

“I also just want to add that I’m not putting Ke$ha and Beyoncé on the same level.

Obviously Ke$ha is way better”

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Final Third: In Conversation Skye Butchard: Congratulations on Ants from Up There.

It’s an emotional listen, which caught me off guard. I listened to it on a Megabus the first time, and got a bit teary.

Charlie Wayne: That’s going to happen anyway on the Megabus.

SB: The first album formed in the live setting and morphed over time. How did you approach writing here?

Lewis Evans: It was very refined. Someone would bring in a skeleton of a tune, almost without structure, and we would all pile in with ideas. Everything was up for debate. It was very democratic. Even if it was just one person that had a problem with something, you’re still heard.

It’s meant that though it’s not as punchy-sounding, because it’s not coming from a live setting, every detail is thought over. We as a group of seven people are much happier with the finished product.

SB: Do you have any standouts that you’re excited to play live?

TH: We’ve played a few of them at recent shows. It’s been a surprise how accepting the audience has been of us playing around four from the previous album and six from the new album. ‘The Place Where He Inserted the Blade’ is one that instantly translates to an audience... A thing with a lot of good pop music is that it sounds familiar, but if you interrogate it, you realise there’s complexity behind it. A song like ‘The Place…’ does that, and has its own unique personality. There are these backing vocals that come in that are chanty and passionate, and sound like we’re all sobbing together. You can’t help but be quite emotionally impacted by it.

SB: As well as emotional, there’s also playfulness in the interplay and writing. I’m thinking of the start-stops on ‘Chaos Space Marine’. What inspires moments like that?

LE: We always try and make what we do funny, because it’s a bit stupid. Take the huge guitar distortion sounds on the first album – it’s so dumb. We might as well make a little bit of a joke out of it… With ‘Chaos Space Marine’ especially, there were some ideas that we were going to include that were a bit too stupid. At the beginning, when it stops and there’s a little violin solo, then the melody, and a little piano solo – everyone was originally going to get a solo for two seconds.

TH: We should still do it one day.

CW: It does always serve a purpose, though, doesn’t it? I always think about the bit at the end of ‘Basketball Shoes’. You can’t quite hear it but when the voices come in, behind that, there’s all of us playing the kazoo.

LE: It’s an incredibly stupid idea, but when it’s layered up properly, it ends up sounding massive... If it sounds shit we won’t put it on, but it usually sounds cooler than you would expect.

SB: When bands use humour, it can paradoxically get misinterpreted as a group taking themselves too seriously. Have you come up against that?

TH: I think that people are on board with what we’re doing. We’re being honest. There’s no irony in what we do. It’s just funny. The other purpose it serves, these silly lines that we

throw in, are what some might think of as the ‘obvious’ thing to do. People like that our music does things that are slightly weird, but it’s a relief to the ear to hear the obvious stupid thing.

SB: Is that obviousness why you look for inspiration in pop sounds as well?

LE: That, and we just like pop music. It’s our most played music… We listen to a lot of the pop music from when we were kids whenever we’re together. Ke$ha, Beyoncé…

CW: It’s difficult to write music like that. It presented a challenge to write songs that grab your attention and hold it in the way that those tracks do. We’re a band that struggles to write anything that’s shorter than six minutes.

LE: I also just want to add that I’m not putting Ke$ha and Beyoncé on the same level. Obviously Ke$ha is way better.

SB: Not much time has passed since the first album, but you’ve known those songs for much longer. How do you reflect on them?

CW: I don’t think any of us go back to it. It’s not a complete body of work in the way we feel about this one, which is coherent and has structure… Those songs are great. There’s sentimental value in them and they’re musically interesting, but it doesn’t represent anything other than a marker in the ground for where we were.

LE: I listened to it recently for the first time since we got the masters in November 2020. The only thing that holds it together is the production… I like that it’s punchy, and it’s not this clickbait post-punk sound. It’s not macho sounding. It’s got a bit of fragility to it. It’s more of a mixtape.

TH: I feel good about that. It was never going to be a normal first album. It was going to represent a moment in time.

When I reflect on it, I don’t feel as emotionally connected to it as I do to this one, which is a better representation of what we all like, and what we’re like as people.

SB: We get more of a personal insight into who you are here. How do you approach that now that you’ve got an audience? Is it more daunting?

LE: It’s a vicious cycle, because the more personal you are, the more people connect with it, but the more you put yourself out there, the more people are going to know about you. It can get complicated. If it’s personal for us, it’s about ten times more personal for Isaac. We don’t have any of our actual voices on the record.

TH: We all feel this is the best thing we’ve been a part of.

It’s a baby that we’re proud of and in love with, so it’s not the end of the world if people don’t like it. At the same time, there’s the feeling of releasing something that you’re being so honest about.

Maybe it will hurt. These might just be words we’re saying now to make ourselves feel better.

CW: It’s the sort of thing that you say around album six, when nothing has gained traction for the last three or four albums. “You know, I think this is really us.”

LE: The Noel Gallagher vibes of “I’ve been checking out loads of Throbbing Gristle.” Then he releases another shit album.

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Final Third: In Conversation CW: “I’m pretty sure that even if people don’t like it – we’ll love it!”

TH: “We don’t care what people say.”

CW: I’ll be devastated.

SB: It’s only natural given how well people resonated with the first one. And then there are accolades like the Mercury Prize. How do you take the positives like that?

LE: It’s helpful to do it with your friends. I imagine awards can get to your head, whether it’s making you more introverted or inflating your ego, especially if you’re a solo musician… We do feel out of place every time we do these things. We don’t try to make ourselves feel out of place – we just are. Doing the red carpet at the Mercury Prize was stupid, and I think we made it clear that it was just a bit silly.

CW: There’s also so many of us. It’s a group of seven.

That’s like a small group of friends rather than a band. You can fill a whole room with us. You’re never out of company.

LE: With friends, if you meet some knob in the industry, you don’t have to smile at them. You can just tell your mate that he’s a knob.

SB: It’s the other side of the coin, but with fan reactions and the music being turned into a meme, is that something that you pay attention to?

TH: No. A while ago, I might have looked things up on Instagram every now and then, and at most found it funny.

Maybe one time I saw something and thought it was a little bit too far and weird.

LE: I’ve had a few creepy things where they’ve tagged me and shit... If you’re going to do it, just don’t let me see it. It creeps me out personally. And we’re a fucking indie rock band.

I’m not David Beckham.

CW: I’ll look at the memes until I get freaked out because someone’s taken it in a weird, psychosexual direction.

SB: It’s mad how quickly it becomes that.

CW: It’s a five-minute search.

LE: I came fifth in a pub quiz last night. Why are you doing that about me?

SB: When you’re back on tour, how will you approach these songs? Will they morph like the first album or stay the same?

“We don’t try to make ourselves feel out of place – we just are. Doing the red carpet at the Mercury Prize was stupid”

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LE: I think they’ll stay the same for a while, until we get bored of them… I saw Caroline Polachek the other day, and she sang all of Pang exactly the way it is on the record, and she’s been doing this since before lockdown. And to still look like she’s enjoying herself? That’s incredible.

I think given the freedom that we have, most artists would do what we do if they could. We get a fair bit of stick for it, but that’s no way near as bad as it would feel to keep doing the same thing every night... It’s the whole performing monkey thing.

SB: Is that why you’ve thrown in covers like ‘Time to Pretend’ or ‘Hey Jude’?

CW: There is a relative consistency in that they’re all songs that we listened to when we were young. When you’re first in a band with your friends, you play songs you listened to when you were younger. For me at least, it’s revisiting that same space.

TH: We approach it in a childish way. We don’t spend months practicing or interrogating the songs. It’s quite the opposite. Sometimes they’re chosen because the chord progressions are easy.

SB: I wanted to say how gorgeous ‘Mark’s Theme’ is.

[The song is a tribute to Lewis’s uncle, who died of COVID in February] LE: He passed away on February 3rd, two days before the first record, and the album will be out a year and one day after he died. As soon as I found out, I got a tenor saxophone and played around a bit to not think about it. I ended up writing that…

When he was drunk, he used to send me voice memos of him making funny noises. He was from a town outside of Glasgow, and was a big Rangers fan. I didn’t watch much Scottish football, but every time Celtic would lose he’d send me a voice note. The same when England lost. I had hundreds of clips to choose from.

After we recorded it, my first thought was that he would absolutely hate this song. We had to find a way to not make it too emotional, because he would have found that boring and asked where the drums were. The voices make it less serious.

CW: It had a place on the album. Mark was a huge active fan of the band, and supported our music even before Black Country, New Road. We’d all spent time with him, and we all knew him.

LE: It was a strange time. He was in intensive care when we were writing the second album, so the music feels so linked to him and that time even though he didn’t get to hear any of it.

SB: As well as being more personal, this album is a lot more patient. There’s more silence and space. Was that intentional, and do you worry how fans who know you for more upbeat material will react to that?

TH: I think that taking away and having silence, there’s just as much energy in that as when you’re playing hard. If anything, there’s more. That was a very conscious decision. It’s something we’ve been trying to work on quite intensely – trying to create the same amount of impact through doing less and being less chaotic. It’s so easy to play hard and whack on a distortion pedal. If you do it too many times, it’s boring.

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Final Third: Year’s End

Be very careful out there The story of 2021 in tracks, by Luke Cartledge

Another year down. 2021, the messy afters to 2020’s horrendous anti-party, is finally over and done with. The year started as it meant to go on – with a mix of vague optimism and far more tangible dread. We had vaccines on the way after all, but they don’t fix things overnight, and it’s not as if everything was going swimmingly before the onset of the pandemic forced us to put all pre-existing problems on the backburner for 18 months. Still, here we are, all jabbed up and suffering from the mega-cold that’s punishing us for having the temerity to go to shows and pubs again. The world keeps turning, and, happily, lots of very good music keeps being released to whoever’s left to hear it.

his supporters decided to invade the Capitol in Washington D.C., storming a session of Congress and going after leftist, liberal or otherwise “disloyal” political figures in the process. It was a rag-tag, heterogeneous crowd, out-and-out white supremacists mixing with somewhat more harmless (if still pretty unpleasant) brain-fried Facebook aunties swept along for the ride, and too easy to either dismiss as either a laughable fringe or hysterically declare the insurrectionary vanguard of an authoritarian coup d’etat. Neither of those perspectives was quite right – but not quite wrong either.

Shortly after the Capitol riot, Olivia Rodrigo released one of the year’s biggest singles, ‘drivers license’, an absolutely okay bit of Lorde-ish lowercase pop that I’m amazed I can remember ten months on. What a soundtrack for the day’s events and their fallout – like Pinochet blasting out Barbra Streisand as the tanks roll into Santiago.

FEBRUARY JANUARY Following the dampest possible squib of a New Year’s Eve – we were still locked down here in the UK, Habsburg Grinch Boris Johnson having fucked up Christmas for everyone – 2021 held off until January 6 to make its dramatic entrance, in as simultaneously stupid and dangerous a manner as possible.

Donald Trump had been whining on about the ‘stolen’ 2020 election for ages, which just seemed a bit pathetic until a number of

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On February 5, Black Country, New Road released their superb debut album, For The First Time, any track from which could be included in this glorified listicle, but let’s go for ‘Science Fair’. As music nerds the world over lost their shit about it (ourselves very much included), the doom from around the globe kept coming – lethal storms swept the US, a military junta seized power in Myanmar, a new strain of bird flu began spreading amongst people in Russia. None of which is much of a laugh is it? Moving on.

Final Third: Year’s End

MARCH In late March, the world was introduced to the Ever Given, destroyer of supply chains, menace to international capital and motherlode of memes. One of the largest container ships in the world, it got wedged in the Suez Canal, blocking one of the most important shipping routes for international trade and being very relatable in the process. It was trying its best, ok?

While all this was going on, Lil Nas X annoyed all the correct people with ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’, a giant successor to his breakout hit ‘Old Town Road’ complete with explicitly erotic lyrics and a deliriously extra, blasphemous video to further prove to the American fundamentalist right that the End Times are indeed upon us. Really though, it’s just a great pop tune, a quality it shares with other March highlights like Japanese Breakfast’s ‘Be Sweet’ and – in a far weirder, gnarlier way – Black Midi’s rambunctious return single ‘John L’ (both of which also compete with ‘Montero’ for the year’s best music video).

oil-rich superpowers like Manchester City and Paris St Germain before taking turns at battering Spurs – was an appalling idea from the start, and deserved all the condemnation it got. As the dominance of the infinitely-resourced likes of City and PSG continues to be consolidated and venerable clubs like Newcastle United are bought out by yet more absolute bastards, it’s hard to convince oneself that football truly dodged the bullet that the Super League represented – but at least we all got to laugh at these mega-corporations shitting the bed in public.

Away from all that nonsense, there have been examples of the opposite phenomenon – figures with bags of talent, who’d been slept on for too long, taking a step up to the next level with grace and panache rather than hubris and incompetence. Take Self Esteem: Rebecca Taylor’s Wetherspoons Madonna routine already had loads going for it – smart, hooky, hilarious – but the release of ‘I Do This All The Time’ on April 28 felt like a real moment. Half spoken-word introspection, half air-punching catharsis, it’s absolutely enormous, heralding the long-awaited coming of Taylor’s imperial phase as a proper pop star. Likewise, April also saw the release of Little Simz’s comeback tune ‘Introvert’ – an ambitious blend of Studio 54 groove, Morricone string arrangements and up-to-the-minute MCing that deserves to send its creator similarly stratospheric.

MAY

APRIL Speaking of big daft lumps getting stuck in embarrassing situations and fucking up entire industries in the process, in April a consortium of grassroots football fans like Roman Abramovich and the Emirate of Abu Dhabi decided to give something back to the game they love by hatching a plan to completely ruin it. The European Super League – in which ailing giants like Barcelona, AC Milan and Manchester United were to rub shoulders with

May was an intense month, full of entirely necessary but pretty full-on social unrest: there was distressing news from Palestine, sparking huge protests around the world; rumblings of aggro with France over fishing rights; continual anti-police actions following the murder of Sarah Everard earlier in the year and the subsequent abuse of demonstrators by the Met, and more. It’s a good job that, musically, it was full of relatively calming, transportive stuff to shelter beneath when you had time for a breather: we convalesced with the help of Erika De Casier’s airy R&B (‘No Butterflies, No Nothing’) McKinley Dixon’s verbose experimental rap (‘Chain Sooo Heavy’) and Mdou Moctar’s fluid, meandering guitar work (‘Afrique Victime’).

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Final Third: Year’s End Back on Earth, Caroline Polachek achieved something more worthwhile than any billionaire ever by releasing ‘Bunny Is A Rider’ on July 14, following up the best pop album of 2019 (Pang) with the best pop song of 2021. Coinciding with the UK’s final removal of Covid restrictions, it was a fitting anthem for a simultaneously liberating, anxious and anticlimactic summer – danceable, sleek, and just a little uncertain behind the melodic fireworks.

JUNE We’re not putting ‘Three Lions’ as a defining track of the year, because fuck that. But obviously it’s basically all we heard for much of June and (at a more hysterical pitch) a fair bit of July – only rivalled in inescapability by Wet Leg’s ‘Chaise Longue’, which can go on the list instead – as here in London, everyone was getting very excited about England’s remarkable progress through the Euro 2020 finals.

To be fair, it was nice to see a demonstrably lovely bunch of lads play so historically well – even if it was overshadowed by the racism and xenophobia that’s unfortunately priced into nationalist football fandom in general, and supporting England in particular. Either way, thanks and solidarity to Rashford, Saka and co – we don’t deserve you.

AUGUST

JULY On July 20, nerdy bookseller turned Dr Evil impersonator Jeff Bezos rounded off another hard day of choosing not to end world poverty by flouncing off to space in a rocket that looked even more like a penis than most rockets. Fellow parasite Richard Branson had made a similar journey a few days earlier; apparently he didn’t get quite as far out, but dignifying such a grotesque pissing contest with specifics seems beside the point.

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In our little world, August was soundtracked by the brilliant audiobooks, an art-pop two-piece with tunes as big as their age gap, fused with seething production and the most disconcertingly funny lyrics anyone is writing at the moment. ‘Lalala It’s The Good Life’ came out on the 5th, and might just be their best song yet. Kanye West also continued to tease his new record DONDA throughout the month with a series of bizarre and problematic stunts, which made its eventual release on the 29th feel even more underwhelming. There’s a good album in there somewhere – it’s just a shame that, at 108 minutes long, it’s obscured by enough material to make up another two or three really mediocre ones.

A lot of significant stuff happened in August, all of which is far too important to trivialise in this bit of tittle-tattle, but it doesn’t really feel right to pass by this month without mention-

Final Third: Year’s End ing the ongoing disaster in Afghanistan. Decades of domestic tumult and imperialism imposed from abroad came to a head this summer; the shock of the Taliban’s reassumption of power will have many consequences, but most pressing is the appalling food crisis that the dramatic shift in political authority has enormously exacerbated. Nearly 23 million people face starvation – if you can, please consider donating to the World Food Programme at www.wfp.org.

SEPTEMBER This month kicked off with Swedish pop royalty ABBA making their grand return, announcing a series of “concert experience” events and releasing two new tunes, ‘I Still Have Faith in You’ and ‘Don’t Shut Me Down’. They’re both rubbish obviously, but that’s not really the point – it’s the concert experience that’s more interesting. Taking place in east London in 2022 inside a purpose-built, 3000-seat arena, digital versions of the band (not holograms, they’re keen to point out) will play the hits night after night, like Jean Baudrillard’s naffest possible nightmare. It’s all very silly, but your nan does deserve a night out after two years of being stuck inside, so fair play.

NOVEMBER It’s still November as I write, but it already feels like a lot has happened this month. COP26 is ongoing in Glasgow, where the leaders we deserve are discussing the climate crisis, urged to act more radically by environmental groups from across the world. More importantly, the leaders we need – Charli xcx, Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens – have teamed up for new single ‘New Shapes’, which is… pretty good? I’ll be honest, I think it’s less than the sum of its parts – but it’s satisfyingly OTT and self-aware, so it should at least tide us over until Charli’s new album drops next year.

DECEMBER OCTOBER As the post-Covid, post-Brexit supply chain crisis really began to bite and petrol stations across the UK descended into a morass of 4x4 drivers in gilets screaming at each other, Adele realised that her target audience needed a calming pat on the head. That came in the form of ‘Easy On Me’, which in a controversial left turn for the singer is a stirring, piano-led power ballad with a rousing chorus and semi-confessional lyrics.

Maybe it’s easy to snipe, but she’s having the last laugh isn’t she?

Reading the tea leaves and taking into account the grim portent that we’re apparently about to see the return of the Crazy Frog, I reckon 2021 can throw at least two more crises at us before bowing out and letting 2022 pick up the slack. So look forward to that. For now, thanks for reading and supporting L&Q for the past year – we really, sincerely appreciate it – and look after yourselves. Until next time.

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It’s the end of the year, which means many things, but mostly that Cliff Richard has a new calendar out. I know it’s not an album, but it’s Christmas and Cliff Richard has a new calendar and we need to pay it some respect.

‘The calendar’ is reportedly Cliff’s favourite music format, despite it having no musical functionality whatsoever. He’s been taking it seriously since the start of his career, five years after the advent of the modern day calendar as we know it, and this year his stiffest competition in the marketplace comes from Frozen (again), Cats With Cakes, Bluey, Pointless and, obviously, Countryfile.

Considering his fan power (Cliff fully accepts that many of ‘The Cliff Clan’ purchase his calendars over his records these day, since the domination of Ball & Boe), I can’t imagine he’s too worried, although Bluey will obviously have a strong debut year.

What makes Cliff the King of Calendars is that he’s still trying even though he doesn’t need to – kind of like Adele. His 2022 edition does look like a framed picture fit for the top of Cliff’s own coffin, but I genuinely think he’s having a bit of I’m-not-dead-yet subversive fun here. Or that he hasn’t realised yet.

It’s more about the image though, rather than the funeral-y vibe, and while the month of May has him skippering a rowing boat, this casual shot (with his right thumb just creeping into the left of the frame) combines the perfect comforting tone of Yoda (the full sized one, not the baby), a happy koala and Helen Daniels. Lovely stuff.

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Better than peloton I bought this for my girlfriend after she’d been heavily hinting that she’d like a peloton bike for her birthday. The Tunturi Ergometer W costs a fraction of the price and has almost all of the same features (saddle, pedals) so it was a complete no-brainer for me. It also comes in a classic white/nearly white, which the dreary black pelotons don’t!

The one function it lacks is the video classes, so I made my girlfriend a series of clips on my phone of me motivating her for when she uses it, shouting “You’ve got this!” and “Now imagine you’re going up a steep hill.” Since we’ve broken up I use it mainly for drying pants and socks.

Reviewed: Peter Jackson’s Get Back

illustration by kate prior

Jan–Jul gigs Sat 2 Apr Vashti Bunyan

Wed 2 Feb Aoife O’Donovan

Wed 6 Apr Circuit des Yeux with London Contemporary Orchestra soloists

Thu 10 Feb GoGo Penguin Tue 22 Feb Manu Delago Fri 11 Mar Keeley Forsyth 30 & 31 Mar Aldous Harding

Thu 14 Apr Grouper Sat 23 Apr New Rituals: Ryoichi Kurokawa + Nkisi

Sat 21 May Hannah Peel & Paraorchestra Mon 23 May Novo Amor Thu 9 Jun William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops with the London Contemporary Orchestra

Image: Ryoichi Kurokawa

Sun 30 Jan Klein