Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Loud And Quiet 157

Anna B Savage, Deathcrash, Kate NV, Nia Archives, O, Young Fathers, Lilo, M(h)aol, Shame Sleaford Mods & Dry Cleaning, Liv.e, Humour, What is an ‘industry plant’ anyway?

issue 157

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs

We’re doomed

The second album from JAMES YORKSTON & THE SECONDHAND ORCHESTRA featuring the glorious vocals of special guest NINA PERSSON OUT NOW

THE NEWALBUM / OUT NOW featuring Weyes Blood, Fat White Family, Animal Collective, Actress, Tei Shi and Sylvan Esso

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd 445 Hackney Road London E2 9DY Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: Ed Seymour / B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Contributing writers Alastair Shuttleworth, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Andrew Anderson, Ben Lynch, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan Wray, Dominic Haley, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hamza Riaz, Hayden Merrick, Ian Roebuck, Jack Doherty, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jessica Wrigglesworth, Joe Goggins, Jumi Akinfenwa, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Max Pilley, Michelle Kambasha, Mike Vinti, Nadia Younes, Nick Tzara, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Orla Foster, Patrick Clarke, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Walton, Shrey Kathuria, Skye Butchard, Susan Darlington, Tara Joshi, Theo Gorst, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Tyler Damara Kelly, Woody Delaney, Zara Hedderman, Zhenzhen Yu Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Cielito Vivas, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Eddie Whelan, Eleonora C. Collini, Ellen Dixon, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Henri Kisielewski, Jake Kenny, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Kyle Johnson, Khali Ackford, Levi Mandel, Mathew Scott, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Owen Richards, Phil Sharp, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter With special thanks to Amy Azarinejad, Annette Lee, Duncan Clark, Emily Gale, Frankie Davison, James Parrish, Jamie Woolgar, Joe Taylor, Luke Twyman, Patrick Johnson, Rachel Silver, Sinead Mills, Sophie Brocklehurst, Tommy Hudson 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 2023 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Issue 157 If I was forming a band today, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs would be my blueprint. Over the past decade they’ve moved at their own pace, in their own way, and – somewhat against the odds – found a huge following for their bloody-minded doom metal. We’re not only pleased to have them on our cover this month, but also as the first band in our limited edition flexi disc series: all full subscribers to Loud And Quiet have received an exclusive live session recording of new Pigs track ‘Terror’s Pillow’ on a blue flexi disc with their issue this month. Thanks Pigs.

Stuart Stubbs

Liv.e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Humour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Nia Archives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 M(h)aol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Lilo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Kate NV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Deathcrash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs . . . 52 Anna B Savage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Young Fathers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 What is an industry plant anyway? . . . 70 Cold Take: Alex Turner at the Brits . . . 76 Sleaford Mods & Dry Cleaning . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

The EU metaverse rave In early December 2022, the European Commission’s foreign aid department threw a beach party in the metaverse to engage young people in their Global Gateway investment plan. Unfortunately, only 6 people turned up for the online event that reportedly cost €387,000 to put together, according to one reporter who did log on. Covering the event for US business website Devex, Vince Chadwick tweeted: “I’m here at the ‘gala’ concert in the EU foreign aid dept’s €387k metaverse. After initial bemused chats with the roughly five other humans who showed up, I am alone.” Leading

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up to the event, the rave’s trailer posted to twitter looked brilliantly bizarre, featuring some avatars that looked like giant paper clips stomping around a beach to house music, watching dolphins leap from the sea, flying (it is the metaverse, after all) and dancing as badly as people do at real raves, in front of a DJ with decks lit up with the EU flag. But it wasn’t enough, with Chadwick also reporting that staff within the Commission weren’t happy with the turnout or the metaverse itself, with one calling it “digital garbage” while another labelled the project “depressing and embarrassing.”

The Beginning: Previously Afroman As 2022 drew to a close, Afroman threw his hat into the ring to become America’s next president, finally adding some credibility to a race that had been belittled by the candidacies of Kanye West and Donald Trump. At his show on December 17, the US rapper announced: “Can I make the biggest announcement I ever made in my life? I’m running for president in 20-20-fro! We gonna get legal weed everywhere.” He followed it up on social media with a post that read: “I AM RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA !! VOTE FRO, TWENTY TWENTY FRO!!” This is a man who’s 2000 hit single ‘Because I Got High’ listed things he was going to do until he got high, and right now he has as much chance of becoming President of the United States as anyone else. It might even be a good idea.

Bob Dylan At the end of November 2022, Bob Dylan confessed to having used a machine to sign copies of his new book, The Philosophy Of Modern Song. Not the crime of the century perhaps, but considering fans had bought each copy for $600 due to the signature (unsigned copies retail at £17.50), the backlash wasn’t undue. Addressing the issue on Facebook, Dylan wrote: “I’ve hand-signed each and every art print over the years, and there’s never been a problem. However, in 2019 I had a bad case of vertigo and it continued into the pandemic years… With contractual deadlines looming, the idea of using an auto-pen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done ‘all the time’ in the art and literary worlds… Using a machine was an error in judgment and I want to rectify it immediately.” Fans were granted an immediate refund from publishers Simon & Schuster.

Wu-Tang Clan St. Vincent podcast On January 12, Annie Clark launched a new podcast series called History Listen: Rock, which zeroes in on pivotal moments in the evolution of the genre. The series (which is exclusive to Audible and therefore requires a paid subscription) unpacks the Sex Pistol’s doomed American tour, hardcore band Bad Brains’ battle with the law, and the moment Jimi Hendrix met Patti Smith. It follows Clark’s previous appearance on another Audible show called Words and Music.

Wham!

In late December, a couple launched a campaign to buy the rights to ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! so they never have to hear it again. Hannah Mazetti’s hatred of the song began when she was working in a café 13 years ago, where her boss would play it continuously throughout December. Her husband had the idea to buy the rights to the track and remove it from streaming platforms after a friend suggested that it is theoretically achievable. So far, 330 people are on their side, pledging £51,500 to this big dream – a fraction short of the estimated asking price of the rights (held by Warner Chappell Music UK), which currently stands at £15–20million.

Wu-Tang have announced a coffee table photography book called Legacy to commemorate the 30th anniversary of their seminal debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Of course, that doesn’t mean we’ll all be able to pick up a copy in Waterstones this year. The same rap collective who made just one copy of their 2015 seventh album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and sold it for $2million (the highest price ever paid for a work of music) will publish – fittingly – 36 copies of Legacy, which will have a price tag of $360,000. The book itself (leather-bound and 300 pages deep) appears to be the size you’d expect a book of this nature to be, but the display cabinet it comes in is something else, and where most of your $360k is going. Its steel and bronze globelike structure, which opens out like butterfly wings to reveal the book, stands at chest height and has been designed by artist and Antony Gormley protégé Gethin Jones. It’s inspired by the bronze ritual bowls from the Chinese Zhou Dynasty and is available to “enquire about” at wutanglegacy.artofpublishing.net.

Madison Square Garden New York City’s Madison Square Garden has started using facial recognition technology to remove from their venues lawyers who are working for firms currently pursuing lawsuits against them.

Barbara Hart and her husband were removed from a Brandi Carlile show at the Garden, as was Kelly Conlon from the MSG affiliated Radio City Music Hall, despite neither lawyer working directly on cases against the company brought by the large firms they work for. In a statement, MSG confirmed their tactic, while Evan Greer of digital rights organisation Fight For The Future told Rolling Stone: “This was a corporation with what amounts to a petty grievance, using a deeply invasive surveillance apparatus in a way that left a mom sitting outside while her kid went into a concert.”

illustration by kate prior

Goodbyes Over the course of December and early January we lost an unusually high number of beloved musicians who defined their fields and changed music for all future generations. Amongst them were Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, Primal Scream keyboarding Martin Duffy, the Pointer Sisters’ Anita Pointer, Modest Mouse drummer Jeremiah Green, German electronic pioneer Manuel Göttching, who is widely credited with producing the first ever minimal techno album quite by accident (E2-E4), Faithless singer Maxi Jazz and the immeasurably influential Terry Hall of The Specials. A sad 40 days or so, but what music these wonderful artists left us with.

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The Beginning: Losing My Edge

We asked Shame’s Charlie Steen what his favourite song is, really

Stuart Stubbs: Hello Charlie. Please tell me what your favourite song is?

Charlie Steen: I don’t know if it’s my favourite, but I really love ‘Minor Swing’ by Django Reinhardt.

SS: Yeah, but what is it really?

CS: Ok. It’s ‘The Pretender’ by Foo Fighters.

SS: Now we’re talking.

CS: I refuse to believe that anybody can listen to it and not get it; not understand how someone can like it. It’s like going to the cinema and seeing Batman or any Hollywood blockbuster.

You know what you’re getting and it fucking delivers.

SS: Tell me about how you first heard it.

CS: My dad used to drive me to school listening to Absolute or Xfm, or whatever it was called at the time, and they would have been playing it. At that age, as an early teenager, it would fit with the angsty stuff I liked, like Linkin Park. I even liked – this is going into a weird realm now – I even liked… Nickelback.

SS: Jesus Christ.

CS: And Feeder. Weezer. All very melodic and angsty and whiney and over the top.

SS: Were you an angsty teenager Charlie?

CS: I wasn’t very popular, at all. When I started secondary school I didn’t have any friends. One person came to my Year 7 birthday party.

SS: Oh mate. What was their name?

CS: He was Laurie. Laurie Batchelor. A fucking hero. After a few years I met Eddie and Josh from the band, but in those first

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couple years I was angsty, yeah. A black sheep.

SS: What had you done to upset your classmates so much?

CS: I had glasses, I didn’t like football, I didn’t have Nike trainers or a cool jacket. Eddie remembers that on non-school uniform day I came in in a brown vest with a dragon on it from Primark.

SS: That’s very brave. A vest in any colour, I mean.

CS: It was. I think I was quite confident, and I don’t think I’ve changed that much. But when you start Year 7, the difference between what personality is allowed in comparison to when you’re a real person is very different.

SS: Back to ‘The Pretender’ – have you ever seen Foo Fighters perform it live?

CS: No, but we were supposed to play with them at Wembley Stadium last summer. And then Taylor Hawkins died, which was fucking tragic.

SS: They play for up to three hours per night, which is too long, isn’t it?

CS: Yeah, it is. I remember speaking to Beck once and I asked him how long he plays for and he said: “Y’know, I used to play for 44 minutes, because I looked into it once and it said the average human attention span is only 44 minutes, so that’s how long I play.” I was like, “Yeah, that’s fair enough.”

SS: Did Beck give you any other advice?

CS: We saw him recently at Primavera and it was nice to see him again… Oh yeah, he did give me fucking advice! I was with Grian from Fontaines and we were chatting with him, and we were just about to go in to record the new album [Food for Worms] with Flood, who he knows. I asked him if he did everything on Odelay himself, and he said yeah. So I asked if he had any advice on the mixing. He said, “When you mix, put on a song that you love and want it to sound like. Then put on your song that you’re mixing. And then put on another song that you love afterwards, so it’s sandwiched in between.” And then you try to make yours fit somewhere between the two. I think he did it with a Led Zeppelin song on one side and a Beatles song on the other.

It’s good advice.

SS: It sounds like you’re best friends with Beck?

CS: I don’t think we’re best friends, but he seems like a very lovely person.

SS: Dave Grohl has that reputation too. People are always calling him the nicest man in rock, aren’t they? How would you like your peers to refer to you? “Charlie Steen – the…”?

CS: Oh, fucking hell. I don’t know… I really don’t… “The biggest blagger in rock”?

SS: I think that might be Nickelback.

CS: Yeah. We’ll only put Nickelback on when we’re driving through LA now. “We all just wanna be big rockstars.”

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The Beginning: Bad Advice

‘Burial’ on how to mend a broken heart

Dear Mr Bevan. I think I’m getting the seven-year itch – six years and 364 days after all my mates, I’m slowly beginning to realise that my boyfriend is a total prick. Should I be honest with him and end it, or stick it out a bit longer to see if he miraculously turns into a normal person? — Stormzy Daniels, Merthyr Tydfil [Crackle] Firstly, less of the Mr Bevan – I’m actually a really approachable, down to earth kind of guy. Mr Bevan was my father’s name. So please, call me Burial. [Keys jangle] To be honest, it sounds like this has been overdue. If your man’s a genuine prick, there’s not a lot you can do about it. I’d consider talking to your mates about it privately – public conversations, or activity of any kind, are so gauche – and if any of them tell you to be forgiving and consider anyone else’s feelings, you know to tell them to fuck off as well once you’ve dumped your boyfriend. Look out for number one. [A cold wind gusts through the estate] Dear William. Why do all the cool girls only want to go out with arseholes, and nice guys like me get left behind? I’ve tried everything – starting a band, having rich parents, pretending to have read some books – but they still ignore me. I’ve even taken up smoking! Please help – I’m clearly, visibly desperate. — Anonymous, via email [Whispered vocal sample] Honestly man, treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen. That’s my advice. I’ve not actually spoken to anyone out loud since 2007 and I’ve never been happier. Everyone wants to hang out with me, book me for DJ sets and kids’

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parties and stuff, and the more I stay in the flat drinking Kestrel and playing Metal Gear Solid the more fascinated they seem to be. All I have to do is put out an hour’s worth of voice notes recorded on the bus mixed with a YouTube rip of a two-step compilation every couple of years and they’re all dying to get to know me. Idiots. [Whoosh] Hi B-man. I’ve been having a passionate secret affair with a short, disgusting man for three years. My husband is extremely confident, but extremely stupid, and doesn’t suspect a thing. I reckon I should just keep at it, don’t you? — Mrs Clarkson, Chipping Norton [The loud exhaust of a modded Peugeot 106 belches, somewhere on the distant South Circular] Absolutely. Sounds like you’ve got it worked out there to be honest. Crack on until you eventually get bored, then take dickhead to the cleaners in divorce court. Make sure you key his Range Rover at some point too – if you record the sound on your phone and WhatsApp it to me I’ll stick the sample into my next hit pop song. [Wistful melisma] Hey Bez, how many girls have you snogged in the past week?

Like proper on the lips and everything? — Steven Patrick M., Stretford This isn’t really an advice thing is it? [808 glitch] But rest assured, fucking loads. [Something indecipherable is muttered on the other side of the smoking area, that’s really quite profound when you think about it]

illustration by kate prior

Liv.e Moving beyond experimental R&B to make a coming-of-age album like no other, by Joe Goggins.

Photography by Mathew Scott

Few debut albums of recent years have been rendered as sharply in the image of their creators as Liv.e’s Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… When it landed in 2020, it took the potential that Olivia Williams had already demonstrated on a clutch of EPs – most notably on hoopdreams, a collaborative 2018 release with 10.4 Rog – and delivered on it in visceral style. hoopdreams borrowed its title from Steve James’ searing 1994 state-of-the-nation documentary, but only the Texan lilt in Liv.e’s languid, semi-spoken delivery would give away that she was American; she appeared to be of no fixed musical address, drawing influence from across the spectrum of R&B, soul and pop and building her own world in the process, setting intimate, conversational vocals against experimental collages that melded gospel, jazz and chopped and screwed hip-hop into a sonic language all of her own.

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In what we can take as confirmation that imitation remains the sincerest form of flattery, Erykah Badu emerged as a kind of mentor figure to Liv.e, appearing in the livestream that announced Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… and making a guest turn on the record itself. She is the only obvious point of reference when trying to figure out Liv.e’s place in the pantheon of modern R&B; the stylistic wanderlust that defined that debut album evoked memories of the seminal Baduizm, but even those quick to draw the comparison between the two would have to concede that Liv.e appears to be playing with her own musical currency.

On that basis, it’s not inherently surprising, in and of itself, that she has thrown some serious curveballs on the fulllength follow-up to Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… What does catch you off guard, though, is the manner in which she reflects on who she was then and who she is now. Her first album oozed with the confidence of an old hand, and belied, in its slick assurance, the fact that it was a first attempt by a 19-year-old who made the record in her bedroom at her mother’s house in St. Louis, Missouri.

Now, though, when she looks back at the girl who wrote Couldn’t Wait to Tell You…, she sees only the naivety of youth.

“My outlook on life is completely different now,” she says over a Zoom call from the city she now calls home, Los Angeles. “I couldn’t have written the new album in the same mindset I was in last time. A lot of it is really the sound of me evolving into an actual woman, as opposed to a young one.”

If that makes Girl in the Half Pearl sound like a standardissue coming-of-age album, it is in fact anything but. It is 100% a heartbreak record; dark, stormy, burning with tangible anger, scored through with the kind of excoriating self-examination that only the most painful emotional experiences can provoke.

“When I made Couldn’t Wait to Tell You…, it was like I was living in this fantasy of what I thought love was going to be,” she relates. “And then all that shit just came crashing down very, very dramatically. I think the metamorphosis from Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… to Girl in the Half Pearl is about me coming into the reality of what love is. I had a lot of wisdom on Couldn’t Wait to Tell You…, but I was still living my life in a very naive way, thinking everything was sweet and shit. I still like fantasising, but I think I’ve realised that the reality of love is definitely not all roses. The album is a reflection of what that has taught me about myself. I learned how important it is not to lose sight of what’s real and what isn’t.”

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“This song feels like speed, that one feels like ecstasy. That was the reality of how my psyche felt” It’s a stark admission from somebody who sounded so selfassured last time around, who gave off the impression of somebody who had everything figured out, who expressed herself with such conviction. The emotional tumult of Girl in the Half Pearl instead shows us a different side of her, one that suggests she’s realised that she remains a work in progress. “I wouldn’t say that I’ve lost my innocence,” she says of the obviously devastating fallout of the breakup that hangs heavy over the album.

“I think I still have some innocence to me, and I still feel pure – it’s just that I have different stripes now. I’m not trying to be melodramatic about what I’ve been through, because I know it’s not the end of the world, and I know myself better now. The girl who wrote Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… had a lack of herself.

She wanted to put herself in somebody else’s hands; she wanted somebody to choose her, even if it sounded like I was playing it off and pretending I didn’t care. My music, then, was a bit more like premonition. I was speaking to the future, or how I imagined it would be. Girl in the Half Pearl is me right now, in the moment, which is rare for me, but I feel like real life is all I know how to write about.”

— Love is a drug — Liv.e, now 24, is open about the emotional carnage that the breakup wreaked, and admits to having self-medicated

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throughout that period “with weed and with alcohol, driving myself into that shit because I didn’t want to face the reality of what I was really going through. There was a lot of cognitive dissonance.” She’s moved past that unhealthy moment in time now, and found facing her situation head-on in her music helped her to process her troubles. “There’s a lot of cold cut reality on the record,” she laughs.

It’s something that’s reflected in the often discordant sound of the album. She shies away from melody and leans into noise, name-checking a disarming array of influences on Girl in the Half Pearl that include The Slits and Sonic Youth (alongside a few more obvious touchpoints, like “Sign of the Timesera Prince, duh”). Either way, it means that sonically, Girl in the Half Pearl is an accurate document of a time characterised by personal turbulence. “A lot of electronic stuff, too,” she recalls of the musical backdrop to the Girl in the Half Pearl sessions.

“Anything with noise, rather than melodic shit. That’s what I was feeling. So, that was way, way different to Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… It resulted in a different energy, that’s for sure. I wanted to written shit where I’d be able to fucking scream, to feel like I could choose to sing on a song or scream on a song and the feeling would be basically the same.”

Liv.e avoids hard drugs, but talks about wanting Girl in the Half Pearl to “feel like I’m on drugs. Last time, I was trying to connect with a sort of warm, fuzzy feeling inside of myself. On this one, I was going for something cold and murky, but I realised there are a lot of similarities between being in a toxic relationship that’s like an addiction. So it made sense to me to be thinking of each song as having a feeling of different drugs – this one feels like speed, that one feels like ecstasy. That was the reality of how my psyche felt, because I was kind of addicted to this toxic situation.”

If it sounds like Liv.e has taken a drastically different approach, it’s in keeping with the fact that her life and circumstances have changed beyond recognition since she finished up Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… as a teenager living at home.

She’s put down permanent roots in LA, spent time working at London’s restaurant venue Laylow as part of its residency programme, and got a taste of life on the road when she went across the US opening for Earl Sweatshirt right around the time the debut album dropped. “It’s an opportunity for me to see what sticks and what doesn’t,” she says of her experimental live shows. “If I have the opportunity to see how people receive my music right in front of me, then that’s my shit. You just have two remember to take feedback with a grain of salt, because relying on that too much doesn’t teach you to trust yourself.”

By betting on herself with such a bold change of direction on Girl in the Half Pearl, Liv.e’s laid down an early marker in the contest for the year’s most strikingly personal artistic statement; this is a dazzling reinvention. “Whoever that was on Couldn’t Wait to Tell You…, I’m not that person no more,” she accepts. “That shit is actually crazy, how much has changed.

But that’s what I was thinking about when it came to naming it; I think of the half pearl as an actual womb, and a pearl is an egg, right? So it’s like I’m in the belly of myself, and this is my rebirth.

Or maybe even just my birth; the birth of me, right now, and me as I’m going to be in the future.”

Federico Albanese

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Humour We want disconnection, by Alastair Shuttleworth.

Photography by Craig R McIntosh

In their bracing, bizarre debut EP Pure Misery, Glaswegian five-piece Humour combine melancholic, open-hearted instrumentation with Andreas Christodoulidis’ utterly alien vocal performances, replete with violent pitch changes and lurching dynamics. Though consigned to the same spaces as less-inspired peers in the British ‘post-punk revival’, Humour occasionally sound closer to their contemporaries in Glasgow’s rich avantgarde, such as Still House Plants and Comfort.

While Humour suggest this is incidental (their primary influences are North American groups like Protomartyr), Pure Misery is underpinned by a genuinely experimental impulse to establish the lead vocals and instrumentation as entirely separate, counterposed elements. “We wanted them to be disconnected,” grins guitarist Ross Patrizio.

This is epitomised in EP-highlight ‘Alive & Well’: the arrhythmically howled lines “I tried to please too many people / And somehow every one of them is pissed off at me” competing with a yearning, desolate chord progression. “We were experimenting with different ways of delivering Andreas’ lyrics,” Patrizio explains. “One of the things we tried was a ‘rule’ where Andreas was never allowed to react to what the music was doing – if it got bigger, he had to stay the same or get quieter,” creating jarring dynamic contrasts. “We also tried this ‘theme’ thing, of feeding him one little idea and leaving him for a couple of days to see what he did.”

Christodoulidis explains this song’s lyrics stemmed from guitarists Patrizio and Jack Lyall giving him “a voice note with the idea of being confused why everyone’s pissed off at me.” By

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screaming the lyrics hysterically, Christodoulidis disconnects them from the song’s subdued, forlorn instrumentation: moving rudderless in the gloom, the monologue feels all the more disorganised and interminable. The acuity with which this technique captures the experience of stewing miserably on a personal misstep is exploited throughout Pure Misery. As Christodoulidis explains, “All of these songs are sad, in some way or another.”

This disconnect between vocals and music becomes the subject of the EP’s title track, which presents a singer performing with no lyrics prepared. Frantically ad-libbing to keep the audience’s attention, they drift into panicked non-verbal scatting: “I’ve got to tell you something! / You know I, I wouldn’t have a microphone if I…” Humour point here to absurdity and mediocrity in their genre, but especially the commonly-demarcated role in bands of the (non-instrumentalist) vocalist, with potentially decreased input into the music they accompany: “These four men behind me ask only that I sing.” “There’s something cringey or uncomfortable about being a group of guys in a guitar band, following a specific format that’s been done before, and the pressure to say something profound but also new,” Christodoulidis explains. “We thought we could make that the point.”

The wittiness of this premise reflects Pure Misery’s use of offbeat humour to further themes of sadness or insecurity.

‘Jeans’ places a narrator’s delusions of grandeur (“I don’t know fear”) in conversation with surreal examples of being humiliated: “I took my car for an M.O.T. / And they laughed at my jeans / And the size of my car!” Christodoulidis explains, “Jack and Ross’ idea was that it could be about a character who’s very pleased about winning a race – I thought that was really funny.”

By exploring the silliness of this, recounting an actual experience Patrizio had at a garage where they “laughed at his little car”, Christodoulidis arrives at a genuinely complex character.

While Pure Misery reflects on tangled personal feelings, it is bookended by songs that relate non-lived experiences.

‘Good Boys Remember Well’ and ‘Yeah, Mud!’ (Pure Misery’s only conventional indie track) respectively deal with accounts Christodoulidis read of a submarine disaster and a soldier dying.

Presenting these together, an interesting continuity is established between abstract psychological experiences and reactions to fixed material. As Patrizio says, “It’s quite nice that it goes from a frantic person telling you about themselves to frantically telling you about something they’ve found and responded to.”

Reflecting on Pure Misery’s release, Patrizio claims, “We’ve learned so much more about what Humour actually is, and what this band now is going to be.” While they may be aligned for a time with the homogenous ranks of British post-punk, Pure Misery shows Humour have the creative scope to far transcend them.

‘OGO’ sees Henwood lay down his pedigree as a premier saxophone riff-meister, a brass-wielding Angus Young, whilst Keary’s propulsive drumming sends O regularly into frenzy.

— O golly, O gosh, O boy, O wonder —

O A drums and saxophone duo building noise and momentum, by Cal Cashin “It’s a lot of pedals,” Joe Henwood says, reaching for a monolithic black box big enough for several dead bodies, “but also not enough.”

I am sitting in the Peckham Rye rehearsal space of noiserock duo O, and the saxophonist is taking me through the delays, the reverbs, the envelope filters and distortion pedals that really make his horn skronk. It could be the control panel for a light spacecraft, or the inner workings of Space Odyssey’s corrupt AI HAL, but instead it is the biggest pedalboard in South London. (citation needed) Across from me sit Henwood and his bandmate, the powerhouse drummer Tash Keary. O are an affable, charming duo, and sitting across from them and their array of rehearsal space houseplants you get very little sense of the mania and chaos of the group’s live exploits.

O just released their debut single ‘OGO’ via Speedy Wunderground, and look set to become the label’s latest alumni to break out. All blaring horns and thunderous drums, O make a helluva racket, a righteous maelstrom, with two instruments.

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O can perhaps be compared to contemporaries like Sons of Kemet, who mix their jazz training with thunderous songcraft to create music that is more about momentum and motion than melody and harmony. Indeed, despite connections in London’s fertile jazz scene, O have more in common with dozens of other genres than they do with jazz.

“I did a lot of stuff that I’d say was more in the jazz world,” Keary says, having cut her teeth as part of the Tomorrow’s Warriors initiative, an organisation focused on getting enthused minority players on stage and playing jazz. “While we’re inspired by jazz musicians, we write and make music in a way that is more akin to the rock and electronic stuff we listen to.”

“A lot of our songs come from ‘improvisation’, so they’re similar to jazz in that way,” says Henwood with a laugh, who himself has spent the last decade as part of jazz and afrobeat party outfit Nubyan Twist. “But when you think about it, ‘improvisation’ and ‘jamming’ are the same thing, aren’t they?

‘Improvisation’ just sounds more sophisticated and jazzy.”

Originally, Henwood and Keary had met and jammed together after a Tomorrow’s Warriors show in 2019, but avoided re-igniting their electric musical chemistry due to other commitments. “I enjoyed jamming with Tash so much,” Henwood remarks, “but we said we didn’t have time because we were in all of these other bands. Then the pandemic happened.”

O formed just before the pandemic, but didn’t start to play live until the Spring of 2022, which quickly led to the band’s biggest break to date. After their riotous second show ever, at The Windmill, Brixton, the band were approached for a support slot by local gods Black Midi, catapulting their sax-based noiserock to a new and receptive audience: “and we’re still riding that train,” laughs Henwood.

“At that point, we were still called ‘Toe’,” Keary says.

“Like ‘Tash and Joe’, because we’re shit at band names. But there’s another, great, Japanese post-rock band called Toe, and people would come to to our shows expecting to see them.

As if they’d flown over to play a one-off show at Paper Dress Vintage…”

“One guy came up to us after a show, and said: ‘you know there’s another band called Toe?’” Henwood laughs. “‘Well, I was here to see them.’”

“We couldn’t risk this going any further, so we changed it before the Black Midi tour,” says Keary, “got rid of two letters. O.” Alongside the music, Tash Keary is an accomplished juggler (“I think most drummers would be able to pick it up”), Joe Henwood is a dab hand in the kitchen, and the duo love to play video games of the Nintendo persuasion – in fact, an unreleased O track bears the name ‘Tom Nook’ after Animal Crossing’s malevolent racoon land baron. But it is for the music, and the music alone, that will see 2023 morph into the year of the O. O wow, O yes, O my god, O my word.

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Nia Archives The underground jungle DJ coming for your mum, by Oskar Jeff.

Photography by Cosmo Webber

Since its origins in the early nineties, jungle’s influence has intermittently infiltrated the mainstream consciousness. Be it undisputed anthems like M-Beat & General Levy’s ‘Incredible’ or the functionally sterile pop antics of Rudimental, turbo breakbeats continuously resonate with the British public. But as with much underground club music, it was predominantly faceless, save for the likes of Goldie – pioneers who transcended to household status through sheer personality. Often it’s this element that helps an artist puncture through to a wider audience.

Nia Archives looks to be on a similar trajectory; a DJ, producer and vocalist who’s cut her teeth in the underground scene for the past few years. Recent nods from the BRIT Awards and BBC Sound of... 2023 oll certainly suggest so, as does being the recipient of the first ‘Best Electronic/Dance’ award at the MOBOs late last year. She’s made a name for herself as a DJ deeply informed in jungle lineage, while often jumping on mic during her sets to sing over tracks taken from her self-produced EPs Headz Gone West and Forbidden Feelingz.

Ahead of the forthcoming Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall EP, I asked how her sound has developed. “Each project is kind a timestamp,” she explained. “The first project was made during lockdown, so it’s a lot more song-based. The second project was a more club-focused record, cos I knew I’d be playing loads of gigs and festivals.” I suggest that the new EP seems to segue these two approaches, with tracks like ‘That’s Tha Way Life Goes’ and ‘No Need 2 Be Sorry, Call Me?’ counterbalancing drum breaks with an almost singer-songwriter sensibility, finding neo-soul flavoured vocals at the forefront of the mix. “I guess so, [frenetic Brazilian-influence lead single] Baianá is definitely a DJ tool, while some songs I think I’m really gonna struggle to DJ”.

With these other elements gaining prominence with her music, I ask if the jungle influence will remain key going forward? “I hear what you’re saying,” she says. “It’s not the whole, it doesn’t describe everything that I do, but it is kind of the foundation of what I do. I think it’s important that wherever the music takes me to still have the roots in jungle. It’s real culture and a real community. I think most music is just on the internet, and it’s not tied to anything… It’s kind of weightless.

It’s so important to me, just to have that grounding, you know?”

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It’s clear that the influence of jungle extends beyond the purely musical for Nia. The scene has persevered on an underground level irrespective of throwaway chart D&B and so-called jungle revivals. Nia participated in the first year of the EQ50 mentorship scheme ran by scene stalwarts DJ Flight and Mantra.

“I’d only just released my first song,” she says. “My mentor was DJ Flight, who I was a massive fan of already. Her being one of the few black women in jungle, I really connected with her. It was just a really nice sisterhood to be a part of. They created space and representation for women and non-binary people in jungle, which is so male-dominated.” I ask how this compares to the wider music industry as her profile builds. “It can be quite shallow sometimes. I’m really happy with the friends that I’ve got and I’m quite secure in that. I’m quite lowkey, I hate all the fake stuff.”

All of Nia’s projects have been releases through her own imprint HIJINXX. “I’d definitely love to sign someone else to the label once I’ve kind of gone through this next chapter in my journey,” she tells me. I’d want to start off with one person and really mentor them.” When I ask her what the next chapter holds beyond the release of Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall, she simply says: “A lot of of touring.” Plus preparations for her debut album. “I don’t know what I want to say yet, but I think I know how I want it to sound. I can already hear it in my head.

One my favourite albums is The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. she only released one album, and that was enough for her. I want to put everything into this album, so that it would be enough if that’s all there is.” But her audience it bound to grow. “That’s interesting,” she says, “because I might be both some people’s introduction to jungle, or maybe nostalgic for more mature audiences who might have listened to it back in the nineties. I like the fact that my listeners are so broad. Your mum could listen to it, or your auntie or your little sister. I think that’s nice to see.”

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M(h)aol Comfort in noise, by Jasleen Dhindsa.

Photography by Becca Geden

Despite the band’s members being dispersed across Dublin, Cork, Bristol, London and Belfast, M(h)aol’s (pronounced ‘male’) complex take on punk has a unifying quality, their feminist politics and psychological subject matter feeling universally relatable. With 2021’s EP Gender Studies providing a quality introduction, M(h)aol’s debut record, Attachment Styles (named after the psychological term for the ways in which people form and maintain their personal relationships), sees the band grow further into their sound. It has been just short of a decade in the making – the band formed in Dublin in 2014, with lyricist and vocalist Róisín Nic Ghearailt largely influencing what the band

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address in their work, having completed a master’s degree in, you guessed it, Gender Studies.

“Róisín writes all the lyrics, and there’s a story running through the new album that’s partly personal and partly political, pushing forward things that we should talk about,” the band’s bassist and creative director Zoë Greenway explains.

“She has that knowledge and can identify gaps in what needs to be talked about or what people aren’t talking about.

“We were talking about attachment styles,” she continues, turning to the album name, “and [how] it’s a really good thing to bring into people’s minds… how your brain is func-

tioning and behaving, the relationships that it’s forming with people, and being aware of childhood trauma informing your adult behaviour… you have to be very honest with yourself.”

“Addressing any of those things is a lot of work,” fellow bassist and producer for the band Jamie Hyland adds. “I remember ages ago doing one of those online ‘What’s my attachment style?’ quizzes, and ‘anxious avoidant’, that was me! Shortly after making the album, there was this small running joke, like let’s all sit around and do our attachment styles…”

M(h)aol’s sonics lend themselves to their intense lyrics, with some undeniably weird moments crunching through their framework of punk, noise rock and electronica. “Trying to reinforce the impact we want the lyrics to have is maybe why it’s so noisy,” says Jamie. However, she says that there are intentional moments on the album that lean away from the aggressive noise.

‘Cowboy Honey’, for instance, is a gentle folk track featuring samples of an old piano soundboard that the band found outside their rehearsal studios. They call it the ‘horror piano’, and are repressing fits of giggles explaining its genesis; it does really sound like it was ripped from a textbook Halloween film soundtrack.

— The power of film… and bin lorries — The quirks that charge the band’s creations can be traced in part to their innate rejection of the status quo; instead of being influenced by specific bands and artists, Jamie states their influences are more unconventional, like the sounds of overhead planes or the brakes on a bin lorry. Zoë feels the same. “We got told to make a playlist of things that are inspiring us. When I was trying to think of what I want this to sound like, I couldn’t really think of anything, because I wanted it to be an expression.”

So M(h)aol is more of a broadly-defined art project than a specifically music-focused project? Zoë and Jamie agree in unison.

Zoë’s master’s in cinematography, for example, adds another expressive layer, which the band apply to their music videos.

“They basically just let me do whatever I want,” she laughs.

“I would be working in film if I wasn’t in the band. I studied film theory as well, so I’m just very conscious of how to present things visually. I’ll always try and subvert a vision, where I’ll just be creating different worlds for the songs to live in.”

One of M(h)aol’s most striking creations is the video for the guttural, cathartic punk track ‘Asking For It’, in which Róisín rages against rape culture on a windy coastline with waves crashing in the distance. “The song was based on a letter from a survivor, but it was actually filled with a lot of victim blaming,” explains Jamie. “When we recorded it, Róisín shifted the narrative to be more about healing.”

The video took them two months to make because they wanted its very personal message to be conveyed sensitively, taking potential triggers into consideration, with statistics on sexual assault appearing in the film between the powerful shots of Róisín.

“I got a lot of messages saying that it was cathartic, really helpful and a beautiful presentation,” Zoë says. “There was an anger being expressed that is not usually allowed to be expressed in situations like that. There’s a lot of silence around that subject

matter, so having Róisín shouting about it in the video and showing so much emotion was really powerful. It was based on how she sings it live and it makes me emotional every time she plays it, because she’s my friend and she sings so powerfully and I wanted to match that. Seeing that energy is like a protest. The message of it was, ‘What if you were locked inside your thoughts [and] something traumatic has happened to you?’ It’s really tough, but there is a way that you can heal and break through that trauma if you are gentle with yourself and take the time to listen to yourself.”

— How to make a debut album — Attachment Styles began to come together in April 2022, with writing and recording taking place in a small recording studio in Dublin.

“It was a very short period of time from conception to the recorded, finished songs – mixed and mastered,” Jamie explains.

“It was really interesting because when going in to record we did the EP in the same kind of way, where we went in for two days to record the five songs. Because I understand how music tends to be made I was very aware of the fact that to go into a studio with no songs written and to expect to have fully written, recorded and produced songs sounds like a big ask, but it worked out fine.

I was sceptical about doing it again for an entire album, because with an album it should be a bit more cohesive and a bit more like you’re trying to make a statement – you don’t really want any of that statement to be weak. I was quite nervous going in to try and put this whole thing together, because there was nothing really to put together. But we went in and took the instruments and went, ‘Is this the album?’ and by the end of May we were like, ‘Oh yeah that was the album, thank god!’” she laughs.

“It’s really tough, but you can heal if you're gentle with yourself” Since they first began releasing music, M(h)aol have done so via TULLE, a record label started by their drummer Connie Keane. “Connie started TULLE because she had been working with a bunch of different record labels and she was seeing how the music business was run and all the ways that she didn’t like how it was being run,” says Jamie. “She would rather not have to engage with any of that, so she started her own record label.

I know a lot of people that have become friends with their label heads and their team, but this is literally ‘our friend is our label head’, so in that regard it’s amazing. Personally and professionally, she has our best interests at heart. It is a little fun having the driving business force be part of the creative force, because creativity should not be tied to capitalist ideas, but it is definitely beneficial. Existing in capitalist society is a bit of a double-edged sword.” It’s a good thing, then, that M(h)aol have built themselves an armour thick enough to stand up to it.

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Lilo

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From Pop Party 5 to timeless Americana,

by Michelle Kambasha. Photography by Sophie Barloc

Sometimes the genesis of great music, and musicians by extension, comes with an early childhood pipedream. It has to be coupled with determination and the hard work that major players will always tell you is integral to success – raw talent alone isn’t enough – but sometimes, it’s something that slowly unfurls through a particular combination: growing passions, timing, friendships that are built on their shared interest and surprising realisation that you’re good at actually making music.

For Lilo, the folk duo comprising Winchester natives Christie Gardner and Helen Dixon, the friendship came first.

“Within our friendship group we weren’t best friends but we became that around about when the band formed. I don’t think that was a coincidence,” says Helen. Their passion for music grew separately but in tandem, eventually uniting them.

“I’d grown up listening to Pop Party 5,” continues Helen, referring to those classic pop mistakes from the ’00s, but it was when a friend’s mum made them a mix for End of The Road (their first gig outing as a group of friends) that opened them up to a new world. “I had no idea this all existed… people like Doug Paisley, Dan Mangan, Jeffrey Lewis and Mountain Man.” A festival committed to uplifting emerging talents, it was the perfect place for discovery and altered their perception of what music meant, forming the foundation of their personal tastes. Around this time, artists like Laura Marling were reaching prominence, and Helen and Christie also gained an affinity for anti-folk and contemporary Americana. As a result, in the belly of their teens they thought they’d give the music thing a go.

“We saw this competition in Johnnie B magazine for studio time at Abbey Road,” says Christie, “and [to enter] we wrote the world’s worst song.” She laughs, but that was the point, around age 14, that she and Helen started to take the band seriously.

Their music is a mix of the past and the present. Instinctually they’ll be labelled indie-folk, and that’s accurate (‘Beach (Real Love)’, for example, blends the suspense of Big Thief with the sensitivity of First Aid Kit) but what sets them apart from their contemporaries is a real understanding of Americanainfluenced folk’s lineage as a genre. Think Emmylou Harris’ soul bearing and the pitch-perfect vocal glide of Karen Carpenter.

The influence of Winchester is also present. “It’s tranquil, there’s a lot of nature – it’s the countryside and there are lots of hills,” says Christie. Their music almost provides a soundtrack to this landscape, calmness imbued in every sound and strum, and the status of Winchester as a notably old city, with inhabitation dating all the way back to prehistoric times, might have unconsciously had an influence on the agelessness of their sound. “Our music is definitely born from the present,” says Christie, “but it feels timeless and as though it goes back to the past – maybe primordial.”

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— Alone, together — Owing to their long-standing friendship, their creative process is built on implicit trust. Relationships, whether romantic or platonic, form the central themes of their songs, whether it’s tracks about the very friendship group from which their own relationship developed, or the more complicated ones that come about with age: “One song is about when a friend starts to date someone you just don’t like, but realising it isn’t your life or relationship – it’s about being there to catch them if they fall,” says Helen.

Unlike many duos and bands who treat their process like a communal brainstorming session for as long as studio time allows, Lilo mostly write separately. For Christie, instincts lead her writing, allowing her to free up both imagination and time.

“Christie’s writing process is unlike anyone I’ve ever met – it’s chaotic!” Helen says with applause. “I labour over things for ages, but Christie can sit down for a little bit and come out with a fully-formed song… It’s so rare to find someone like that.”

For Helen, the process is longer, a pattern of sticking ideas to the wall and waiting for the song to come to you. Christie equally admires this. “If you look at her notebook it’s pages and pages and pages of prose, which you then chip away at –

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like Michaelengelo chipping away at a sculpture – until you get something amazing. I’ve also never seen that before.” Though Helen’s process may take longer, it helps to unfurl feelings that weren’t immediately present. “I’ve had times where I’ve sat to write something and as we go through the process of putting the song together I’ve realised it’s not actually what I meant to say.

It helps me unpack things.” As a listener you wouldn’t be able to tell that their processes are so independent of one another. It sounds totally seamless.

Another piece of connective tissue for their music is their broader understanding about what it means to be artists. They left leafy Winchester for London to study arts subjects at university: History of Art, and French and Philosophy. It’s not these subjects directly informing their music (a university education isn’t a prerequisite for making great music) but it does give them a different kind of insight. Example: for Helen, who studied French and Philosophy, the overlap between art and music is instinctive, as opposed to an intellectual endeavour.

“The feeling of consuming something that you think is amazing across all genres of music is an instinctive response and how you receive it is personal,” she says. “I like what Leonard Cohen once said in an interview: ‘What makes a good song? I don’t know, and if I did know I’d write loads of them!’ Or something like that [laughs]. If you could engineer a response then you would, but you can’t. I do like that sometimes I don’t know why I like the things I do.”

But this offers up other complications. Some art is produced and engineered. “I don’t have a conclusion on if this is good or bad, but I think it’s interesting that if you compare the popularity of the Mona Lisa with popular music, the ability that we have to reproduce them has changed what they mean symbolically,” says Christie. Essentially, some people want to reproduce the popularity of the art rather than the art itself.

“I guess it’s how people compare pop music – music produced for mass interest – to independent or alternative music for people with niche interests,” she adds, the latter being viewed as more ‘authentic’.

Lilo see themselves as producing the latter; perhaps associated with this is a more acute fear of how their music will be received. “I have a firm belief,” Christie says, “that anyone can write a song, but the toughest thing about it is sharing it.”

Perhaps fears like this aren’t about the quality of the music.

The similarity between the “worst song in the world” they made all those years ago for the Abbey Road competition and their refined, mature music now is that what they think about those songs isn’t all that matters – it’s the pressure of what others think.

They shouldn’t have too much to worry about though.

Their (excellent) music is grounded in a healthily indie ethos, handled with care and intuition. Though their feet are firmly set in the London emerging music scene, their work’s pop sensibilities gesture towards a potential for breakthrough success and mass appeal. What won’t change is their commitment to their friendship, one that emerged slowly but was cemented by their love of music. They’re determined to make the kind of authentic music that inspired them to start all this in the first place.

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Kate NV How computer games and Japanese music have so playfully abstracted the Russian musician’s new album,

by Dafydd Jenkins. Photography by Jenia Filatova

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“I can’t access the wi-fi here, but I’ll just quickly show you where I am,” says the 4G-buoyed Kate NV, only momentarily appearing on screen before switching back to voice-only. She’s walking around inside what I would later find out is a recently completed building of Amsterdam’s University of Applied Sciences, a 25,000 square-metre structure with multiple floors and a vast, open plan central foyer. It has a glass grid ceiling that you can apparently see all the way up from the bottom floor, which is where Kate appears to be grinning from.

A former student of architecture, it isn’t completely surprising that such an impressive place would draw Kate’s attention whilst out on the road. She’s on the tail end of a mini European tour; a few shows in Brussels, Utrecht and Amsterdam.

She’s also made a pit-stop in Rotterdam to record a video for one of her other projects, Decisive Pink. Her bandmate, Angel Deradoorian, is roaming nearby, looking for somewhere to charge her phone. They’ve just seen Bones and All, a movie where Timothée Chalamee and Taylor Russell play a couple of cannibals.

Kate went in blind. “For me, it was too much,” she laughs. “My friends said, ‘well, it’s called Bones and All, what did you expect?’

I don’t know, maybe it’s an English saying…” As far as I know, I say, it refers to using every part of an animal for sustenance, like cooking the meat and using the bones for stock, that sort of thing. Grossed out, she cheerily suggests changing the subject.

A structural marvel and a movie about cannibals; it feels somehow fitting that, even though Kate NV is driven by a fascination for sounds both popular and mid-century avant-garde, we begin by talking visuals. Where her 2020 breakthrough Room for the Moon’s generous number of music videos recall the soft blurriness of 1960s-70s TV programmes from Europe and her native Russia – campy news broadcast (‘Plans’); stylishly choreographed commedia dell-arte clownishness (‘Marafon 15’); cat-costumed children’s afternoon theatre (‘Lu Na’) – one of the inspirations for the world of her new album, WOW, is decidedly more contemporary: early-to-mid-2000s video games. “I can probably say that it was the time I formed as a person,” she reflects, now nearing her mid-30s. “I recently got a Nintendo 3DS from a friend – I only play Super Smash Brothers, but all of the games look so great.”

Sure enough, the gently looped visuals of new track ‘Early Bird’ – a procession of low poly birds feeding their young across multi-

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ple branches of a jagged tree – brings with it a flood of gaming memories; The Sims, Nintendogs et al, their emulations of reality charmingly naive from the point of view of the polygon-wealthy 2020s. “They look stupid and unfinished,” Kate says. “But they’re perfect in their imperfection, you know?”

Unprompted, Kate brings up Katamari Damacy, a video game series in which you play as a small cosmic prince. Your goal: correct the mistake of your passive-aggressive father, The King of All Cosmos, who, by some act of hubris, has destroyed the stars and the moon. The method: rolling up, dung beetlestyle, everyday objects of increasing size, from push pins to entire continents, into clusters which are then made into brand new constellations. Though Kate and video director Vladimir ‘Vova’ Shlokov did not have Katamari as a reference, Kate expresses delight that its influence was apparent for the ‘oni (they)’ music video [WOW’s opening track], in which a low poly rendition of Kate, lifted from a previous video Vova made for her band Glintshake, struts across virtual rolling hills, as objects – guitars, traffic cones, beachballs, pink lawn flamingos – stick to her like lint on a jumper. “I’m sort of homeless right now and I have to travel,” she explains, unexpectedly linking her whimsical music video to her sub-optimal situation. “I just realised during this year that people have a lot of things, and you have to carry all these things with you wherever you go. It’s basically what we do during our whole lives – we just gather stuff, and then we lose stuff, and then we gather more stuff. We produce a lot of garbage.” The song’s lyrics, sung by Kate but written in Japanese by producer Takahide Higuchi aka Foodman, chime in staccato; “lost item roll / rolling on the roadside / vegetables and fruits / rolling on the roadside”. “It’s the weirdest way to collaborate with someone,” she says with a laugh, the irony of having one of the world’s most outlandish footwork producers write lyrics for a song being a vital part of the song’s appeal.

The link between Foodman and Kate NV is closer stylistically too, particularly where both artists’ approach to sampling is concerned. “There’s something about hearing voices being pitched very high and very low… that’s a part of me that’s very childlike. It makes me laugh.” Recognisable words are largely absent from WOW, and pre-lingual vowels and sampler-whirred utterances become as palpable as wooden or plastic tools, one more instrument among a polyphony of synthesisers and drum machines. I point out that much of her vocal shenanigans across the album brings to mind KK Slider, the troubadour dog guitarist and singer of Animal Crossing, who sings in a pleasantly alien autotune gibberish. As well as chopping up material on Ableton, Kate used a certain pedal to achieve interesting musical phrases, the now ultra rare Korg Miku Stomp, gifted to her by a friend, which imitates the clipped speech of the world’s most famous vocaloid singer, Hatsune Miku.

“Sometimes you don’t even need lyrics to understand what the author wants to tell you” 28

“I listen to a lot of music where I don’t understand the language,” says Kate. This has been the case for a number of years, informed by her friends from far East Russia who first got her into Japanese music and culture. “I remember feeling that I knew what these songs were about, even though I couldn’t understand the words. When I finally had a chance to check using Google Translate, I realised that I was able to correctly guess the meaning. Sometimes you don’t even need lyrics to understand what the author wants to tell you.”

— Tantalisingly illegible — Where Room for the Moon revels in protracting pop and new wave structures, WOW is more openly experimental and occasionally, tantalisingly illegible – a difference in Kate’s mind of being a “tracks record”, as opposed to being a “songs record.”

“It’s very toyish,” she says, bringing to mind the explorative playfulness of one of the album’s prime musical influences, Nokukazu Takemura. “It’s full of little details,” she adds. It’s all the more satisfying that both Room for the Moon and WOW were, in fact, made in tandem with one another between 2016 and 2019, and presented to label RVNG Intl. at the same time as a planned duology of form and abstraction.

Kate still has a bunch of tracks in her back pocket, but she’s having some trouble finishing anything lately. “I started making some new pop tracks in 2021, and I still can’t finish them. It’s just… not the right vibe for those sounds at the moment.” It’s difficult not to draw conclusions from current world events – the on-going conflict between Russia and Ukraine – given that Kate has been primarily based in Moscow.

Bouquet, an album of electronic improvisations she made with longtime collaborator Andrey Bessonov, was released in May 2022 to aid Helping to Leave, an organisation that aids people seeking evacuation from areas of military conflict. “It’s still insane,” Kate says. “It’s the least we can do to help people suffering from this crazy war.”

It’s well documented that Kate is a fan-disciple of John Cage; “he’s like a scientist,” she once said. “His approach to music and life in general is more like scientific research, and I’m trying to do the same.” With that in mind, Cage served as a focal point in researching this interview, and there’s one gem of a clip. Interviewed by Richard Kostelanetz, Cage is talking through one of his pieces, an aleatory text made using James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “we do good work when we don’t know what we are doing.” Kate thinks on it for a second. “In a musical context, you’re talking about improvisation, or like playing in a live setting. Because it’s happening here and now, in the moment, it’s super honest. When you start playing in a band, before your fingers have memorised your songs, you’re in a very raw, pure place. The imperfection at its core – it’s very interesting. I’m not Cage, but I think he was probably looking for that feeling all the time.” Trite as it is, it resonates when I listen to WOW, an album created from pieces of immediacy, arranged like bricolages across multiple levels of play. “The context is very important though,” Kate adds. “Like surgery or architecture… no, you need to know what you’re doing with those.”

Making era-defining slowcore at the edge of the world,

by Tristan Gatward. Photography by Kaye Song

Deathcrash On a crisp-cold December evening ducks line the towpath of Regent’s Canal and hop onto floating ice blocks with the strange regularity of hailed city cabs. It’s a fantastic scene to witness from the top deck of a slow bus navigating the diversions of East London: a fleet of glacial shapes drifting down the watery thoroughfare, rocking to-and-fro like an old pub table.

A few streets away in the low-glow cordiality of the Chesham Arms, London-based slowcore quartet Deathcrash nestle around a table, where the warmth takes everyone and their glasses by surprise. Bassist Patrick Fitzgerald works in a nearby café and passes around a stale end-of-shift croissant in a paper bag. “We’ve been told we’re a wintry band before,” says drummer Noah Bennett. “I was wondering if now’s the time people listen to us.”

Their debut album, bashfully titled Return, certainly fits the season: unhurried guitars skulk up to an echoing kick drum, and vocalist/guitarist Tiernan Banks’s muffled words nest into the small breaks of reverb like a fledgling bird. Their songs stroll gently across an hour’s pasture, unassertive but not without purpose. In its more laconic moments Return sounds like Slint’s Spiderland blasted through thin walls, only to rumble into billowing crescendos and unintelligible screams.

— Ctrl + F + Deathcrash — “There was this German review of the album that said, ‘put on Return, lie down in a dark room and wait until it hurts…’” laughs guitarist Matthew Weinberger. “Like shit, maybe we need to lighten up a little. December’s a weird month to be a band. The industry kind of shuts down, everyone does their end of year lists, we stop rehearsing at some point to hang out with our families…”

“We’re really very busy reading all the end of year lists,” Banks interjects. “It’s a journey, looking down, album by album, only to realise we’re in none of them.”

“You don’t have to read it album by album,” says Weinberger. “Ctrl + F + Deathcrash.”

“We didn’t make Loud and Quiet’s one either,” Banks smiles generously. “That’s fine. Let’s deal with that elephant in the room now. Although I think we made it into one of those lists, you know, albums you haven’t heard of.”

“It’s been a dry couple of months,” says Fitzgerald, seeming grateful for the pause. “We’ve finished recording the new album and just settled into everything. It’s been our first

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time off for a while and there’s no sense of massive pressure; we’ve got this show booked in for March (at London’s ICA), and we’re just slowly working towards things like that.”

There’s a tender self-depreciation between the four bandmates. Several times they remind each other to stop saying how badly they’re doing, if just because of tired comparisons with former South London contemporaries they’re apparently not keeping pace with. They’re not trying to. In an interview with Dan Carey a few years ago, Deathcrash were described as the weird, dark partners to the Windmill scene; they seem to enjoy working in their own lane.

— You can enjoy Deathcrash all year round — I first saw the band live at St. Matthias Church in Stoke Newington on a socially-distanced summer night, where the rain poured sideways and stern wardens refused to open the looming doors a minute early. Played in the dark with a solitary spotlight beaming down the middle aisle, it was a rare show that felt meticulously curated; venue, band and unrelenting wall-

of-sound becoming a single circumstance. The years since have taught them how to perform a little more, too, following a series of outdoor festival shows in the Netherlands.

“We thought it’d be a bit weird to be playing outside to all these people wanting to have a good time,” says Banks, “but it turns out you can enjoy Deathcrash all year round.”

“We came to appreciate the niche we fill at festivals,” adds Fitzgerald. “It’s nice to feel confident in that role, knowing that no one’s coming to us to have a dance.”

Their live run over last summer ended with a momentous set at End Of The Road festival, playing to their biggest crowd yet. After months of dodgy linechecks through headphones, filling kick drums with unsold t-shirts and compromising volume levels, it felt like a triumph of their newfound confidence, forgoing total perfectionism, instead playing loud and heavy among the low-hanging clouds of dry ice.

“Sometimes it feels like we’ve conned people into coming,” muses Weinberger. “Did they mean to be here? You can see people, but they’re not moving.” He crosses his arms and slides shoulder-to-shoulder with Noah. “It’s always like, fuck, I really hope they’re enjoying this.”

“The perfect show for us is complete silence,” says Bennett. “That was the crazy thing about End Of The Road: the moment in the set when it first went quiet, we all realised that everyone was actually listening. That was scary.”

“We still care a lot about where we play,” Banks emphasises, cautious to stress that they’re not abandoning churches for cider-sponsored stages at Richard Branson’s next soiree, “but it comes from a less anxious place now.” They remember the run of socially distanced shows they played in the aftermath of their breakthrough EP, People thought my windows were stars.

“I remember Geordie from black midi coming along to one of them,” says Weinberger. “He said something to Tiernan like, ‘yeah that was interesting. I don’t know if I liked it. I need to think about it.’ We called it the TV dinner tour, where people would get food delivered to their table. We’d be really going for it, building up to the perfect quiet period only for a waiter to shout, “burger and fries?” – it shattered the whole thing completely.”

“It wasn’t a burger; it was a dirty hot dog.” Banks shakes his head. “Yeah, that was bad.”

— Recording at the edge of the world — Deathcrash’s second album, Less, is set for release this March on untitled (recs). It was recorded over two weeks in the Outer Hebrides at Black Bay Studios – an old crab factory renovated into the most remote recording studio in the UK. “It wasn’t just on an island,” smiles Banks. “It was on an island off an island with 200 residents. There was nothing there.

It was amazing.”

It took them 36 hours to arrive, too, camping in the Cairngorms after a day’s driving, pitching their tents in a heavy storm while their amps stacked precariously against the sides of their van, under foggy peaks and aubergine-purple mountains.

“I don’t know how to express this in a way that doesn’t sound weird,” says Weinberger, “but it kind of felt momentous.

For us, at least, historic. Holing ourselves up in this place away from everything with the chance to record this emotionally raw album… We wanted to make it an occasion. Once we knew Black Bay Studios existed, we had to go there.”

“There was a chart on the studio wall of bands who’d stayed,” Banks grins, “a league table of who’d gone out swimming the most.”

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“Some of us went swimming every morning,” chimes Bennett.

“No, I want it going on record that we lost. We swam by far the least.”

“Anyone who did well on that chart is a slacker,” nods Fitzgerald. “We’re proud of our loss. If you’re swimming two or three times a day… I don’t want to cast any aspersions, but did you make a good album?”

The time out of water served Deathcrash well. Opening with the Caroline-like warm-up ‘Pirouette’, Less is a spectacular work of wrath and restraint. It’s both a steam train hurtling towards the mouth of a tunnel unsure of its exit point and the scenic rumble when it emerges into daylight. You can hear the lineage of ’90s DIY to maximalist post-rock – Sebadoh’s Bubble and Scrape to Chemikal Underground-era Mogwai – lurking in its silences. ‘Empty Heavy’ helixes thrash into an outro more closely approximating The Antlers, ‘Duffy’s’, ‘And Now I Am Lit’ and ‘Distance Song’ are tender moments of exhalation, while album standout ‘Turn’ transforms opulent instrumentals into domineering screamo, a confluence of claustrophobic guitars and vocals bending like trees over a fugitive melody.

Weinberger talks of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon – the feeling that something is happening more frequently than it really is – manifesting itself in their relationship with slowcore; their exposure to the genre has made the band see it everywhere lately, perhaps especially since the tragic passing of slowcore pioneers Low’s Mimi Parker. But in the UK, at least, few bands would be considered Deathcrash’s classmates – the mantle is theirs to carry. At the risk of hyperbole, Less feels as close to a definitive document of UK slowcore as you could hope for. Its sound is gently refined, yet still wanders undaunted into the sprawling nothingness. But it’s also the

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first time they’ve recorded music with any knowledge that someone will listen.

“I think the pressure of it all got to me sometimes,” admits Banks. “Previously we were deeply invested in Deathcrash in a private sense. But this was the first time we’d had to do the public and the private at the same time. We were recording vocal takes whilst we were booking shows. Like, what if we leave here and we hadn’t done it right?”

“It’s just that thing when you’re sitting in a studio listening over what you’ve done for the last eight hours, trying to figure out if any of this is good enough or not,” agrees Fitzgerald. “Sometimes we’d spend all day on a song and think ‘Yeah that’s it!’, then wake up in the morning and lose all faith.”

— Less is less — “We had the name for the album two songs in,” says Bennett. “Once we’d settled on it, it became clear that that’s what we were going to do with this record. A record of less.”

“The initial concept was just ‘songs for m, i-iv’ [tracks from People thought my windows were stars], but better,” says Banks.

Those four tracks were early standouts in their discography – sparse and gently building from soft acoustic guitars and cymbals to plinking post-rock, thick in the unresolved nostalgia of cult San Jose band Duster and their sideshow Valium Aggelain.

“It was a respite from doing Return, which felt heavy and long and hard,” explains Fitzgerald. “We just felt like there was no way we could make that album again. Less was almost like a defence mechanism. Just the four of us in a room making music with no pressure. But then you just start thinking, ‘Hang on, this is cool, let’s make it heavier.’”

“Yeah, what if we just… vrmmm.” Weinberger simulates

“We were really annoyed when we all sat down, listened back and realised we’d made another dark and heavy album”

a thrash chord, turning up the imaginary volume dial. Nobody said slowcore bands can’t air guitar. “The result is quite exposed.

They’re these tightly conceived songs just blasted out live into the uncertainty of the room.”

“Do you think it’s less chin stroke-y?” asks Banks. “Maybe it’s more emotionally immediate.”

“Well we went into it with the mindset of making a Deathcrash pop album,” laughs Fitzgerald. “I was convinced it was this emo pop record. Slow-mo.” [Reader, that’s slowcore-emo.]

Moments of Less are certainly as bleak as Return. Bennett shakes his head, smiling. “We were really annoyed when we all sat down, listened back and realised we’d made another dark and heavy album.” The ominous ‘Empty Heavy’ topples a gorgeous guitar riff into dense sludge with little warning; ‘Dead, crashed’ hurtles into post-rock-come-doom metal, while the one moment of confused optimism at the close of ‘Turn’ dissolves Banks’s ruminating refrain – “it hurts much less” – into a crumbling death spiral.

“I think there’s a lot more rawness in this,” reasons Weinberger. “Before we wanted to gesture at something, but Less is wanting to show the immediacy of what this shit feels like.

Everything we wanted from this record was a sense of place and purpose. When I listen to the album, I hear those two weeks. I hear the time and the place and the togetherness.”

— Sensationally slowcore — Everyone had their moments of personal reckoning at Black Bay, and found their own remedies; Patrick would go on runs with the band’s manager, Tiernan would walk up the road to the nearest rock and stand with his thoughts – a slowcore wanderer over a sea of fog – on an island with no paths, where it took an hour to travel a few hundred yards cross country. Noah swam.

“It was sensationally slowcore,” laughs Banks. “The slowest of cores. And the whole thing had this sense of occasion as a result for sure. Our music is always sincere; sometimes it’s sad, sometimes intense and sometimes frightening. But we had to live those things. It was good to have this place far away, not at all enmeshed with our real lives.”

“I think it’s music that naturally has this gestalt,” says Weinberger. “You know, it’s more than the sum of its parts.

You’ll only ever hear three instruments at a time, but the more you listen, the more it hopefully becomes this huge indistinguishable thing and you’re just left with an emotion.”

“It definitely requires a lot from people,” Banks says. He pauses. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

The band also brought their friend and artistic director

Kaye Song to the island, to create the artwork for Less in tandem with the album being recorded.

“She had designed this modular sculpture in London,” explains Bennett, “you could put it together in loads of ways.

Her and our manager Joe took this thing on a tour of the island and put it together in different spots. By its nature each time it’d take a slightly different form. At the end of each day we’d all have dinner and see where it had been… It started to take on its own personality.”

“It was awesome to have a second creative process happening alongside us,” adds Banks. “I think that really saved us from our own madness. Every night it was like a family where the parents get to listen to what the kids did at school that day.”

It gave them some element of perspective, too. When they’d had a difficult day, they’d see Kaye and Joe wearing longjohns and wetsuits, holding this sculpture in the middle of a lake.

The band had a go at assembling the sculpture once, too, which was pictured for the back cover of the album. “It was an absolute monster,” smiles Bennett. “It looked horrific.”

Lyrically, Less is an abstract search for self. “It was a time in my life when I was starting to wonder whether all these things that defined who I was in some sense weren’t all that good for me,” says Banks, stumbling a little. “To what extent, when you change your relationship to these things, what does that make you at the end? Pat’s good at explaining this. The location, the music, the lyrics, stripping it back, it’s all a response to what we’ve done before.”

“I guess when things are changing, you’re desperately trying to hold onto things too,” Fitzgerald clarifies. “It was just less. Not less is more, less is sometimes just less.”

“It’s just less,” repeats Banks. “A lot less. Less time, less money?” he laughs. “Less prospects for the future?”

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Reviews

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Albums

U.S. Girls — Bless This Mess (4ad) The upshot of living through this chaotic digital age is that if nothing else, we have a whole civilisation’s worth of music to delve through before the planet dies. You can hear this as a silver lining around Meg Remy’s long-running recording project U.S. Girls; though a sense of impending doom haunts her work, she’s in the habit of turning all the world’s ills into lovingly-crafted slices of leftfield disco, drawing from the annals of music history to create a strain of pop that is anything but disposable.

Originally from Chicago, Remy lives in Toronto these days, where she operates as a multidisciplinary artist, musician and writer. She’s a chameleonic presence, whose voice can encompass a range of textures, from sepulchral groan to spangled Ronette glamour.

In portraits, she stares at you fixedly with a blue-eyed, steely gaze, as if challenging you to cross her. The music can feel like that too. This is pop created to rail at injustice, to confront trauma and resist the sensation of being at the mercy of oppressive, failing infrastructure. It can also summon demigods like Prince, Blondie and Springsteen in the same breath as Greek mythology and Samuel Beckett.

For all its scope, though, Bless This Mess ended up being very much a housebound record, created under a strict set of parameters – lockdown, and giving birth to twins. And as Remy’s body adapted to pregnancy, so did her habits as a musician. She found she couldn’t breathe as deeply, so she changed the way she sang. Her body became yet another instrument; the props and paraphernalia of parenthood a new set of tools to experiment with. She samples a

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breast pump in ‘Pump’, which recreates a frazzled exchange with a nurse about how to get milk into a child’s tiny mouth.

Accompanied by a hefty bassline, Remy captures the absurdity of bringing more human beings into the world and having to coax them through basic functions.

The whole thing almost tips into parody, at least up until a gently-intoned outro about the mysterious connection between parent and child. Finally, she finds herself repeating the word “you” until it starts to lose all meaning.

This blurring of identities between parent and child might also be what inspired her to return to her own youth in the album’s title track, which dishes up the kind of Odeon blockbuster piano chords seldom heard this side of 1998. The overdose of kitsch starts to make sense once you watch the music video, which stars an earnest teen Remy serenading the camcorder, old footage manipulated to neatly sync up with the new lyrics. It’s a moment in which she can feel whole, recognising herself in her analogue reflection, still staring dead into the camera, still putting her vulnerabilities on show. Similar themes are taken on in ‘Futures Bet’: a reminder to be empathetic towards yourself, and to stop obsessing over whatever happened before: “Goodbye history! Why don’t we let it all be a mystery / That we never sort out?”

In Remy’s case, there’s plenty of history. Newcomers to U.S. Girls may be shocked when they first browse through their vast back catalogue, both at the scale of Remy’s ambition and, at times, the texture of the music itself. Debut release Introducing (2008) is made up of the kind of industrial noise and warped pedal loops that might sit naturally in the cold light of a gallery, but are slightly daunting for someone who has parachuted in expecting disco anthems.

With each album, however, Remy’s musicianship and lyrics have become less opaque, and more about putting a fresh spin on her own kaleidoscope of influences. With the kind of messages U.S. Girls want to put out, stealth has also been key: by embellishing her music

with elements of funk, hip-hop, glamrock, and deceptively glittery production, she can repackage fiery critiques of modern America under the guise of irresistible earworms. Or maybe it’s a way of peeling back the avant-garde, cerebral layer of earlier releases, and inviting listeners to experience the music with their whole being. To dance, rather than just chin-stroking over what it all means.

More evolution followed. 2015’s Half Free saw U.S. Girls enlisting other vocalists for the first time, which marked the start of a more communal approach. That album seemed to bridge the apparently divergent sides of Remy’s vision: though the foundations of the record remained as lo-fi and spare as a crackling tape deck, there were also discernible vocal melodies, gossipy phone interludes and macabre storytelling to match The Shangri-Las. In a Poem Unlimited (2018) brought this spirit of collaboration to new heights, with a whole jazz-funk collective appointed to bring each composition shimmering to life. Two years on, Heavy Light counterpointed disco hooks with barbed lyrics about early 21st century capitalism and the world’s imminent collapse. Despite the pessimistic outlook, she likened the process of making Heavy Light to that of a musical summer camp, with singalongs, camaraderie and everyone bouncing off each other’s ideas.

Bless This Mess was a far more isolated affair, though as someone who has always operated under a DIY ethic, that didn’t ruffle her much. But it got her questioning people’s desire to flock together in cities in the first place. She had been the kind of suburban teenager who grows up seduced by the fantasy of towering buildings and neon lights, only to arrive and find herself barely scraping by. Why bother? Once cities stopped performing any clear function during lockdown, she wondered if they even had a future beyond the hollow slogans of real estate. But as ‘So Typically Now’ makes clear, the answer to that disillusionment shouldn’t be simply fleeing upstate, as many of her well-off contem-

Albums poraries have done. Beyond its damning message, the track’s Italo-style hooks, billowy backing vocals and crackle of gated reverb nearly make you sad for all the house parties Remy’s ex-neighbours will miss out on by absconding to a soundproofed white-picket-fence life.

Elsewhere ‘St James Way’ also insists on making peace with your habitat, rather than getting enticed by property pipedreams: “I don’t want a castle, just a door to shut / She says finding food will be tough enough.”

Whether you’re in a high-rise or a converted farmhouse, staying home can nonetheless mean settling for a watered-down version of some experiences. ‘Screen Face’ takes the hackneyed theme of online dating and adds its own maudlin spin. Barely a flirtation, it plays out more like an elegy for the lost sensations of the pre-Tinder world.

There’s a gloomy romance in lines as clunky and matter-of-fact as “Your phone is dying, and I’m dying too”, highlighting the fact that no device can really be a stand-in for flesh and blood, and pawing at a screen won’t bring your object of desire any closer. Remy’s enthralment with synthetic surfaces carries right through to the use of midi instrumentation throughout the album: both a playful artistic choice and a nod to the simulated experience of making music far from the studio, with collaboration limited to email and her producer husband (Slim Twig).

For Remy, surfaces aren’t merely skin-deep. ‘Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo)’ is one of the album’s highlights: a plea from a rejected tuxedo to its owner, begging to be taken out on the town again and shown off. The sentiment will strike a chord with anyone who might have spent lockdown feeling like a tired garment, sighing over distant memories and struggling to find purpose in a closed-off, domestic existence. But it’s also a celebration of draping yourself in the most dazzling layers possible, which is Remy’s speciality. Best follow her lead and put on your bow tie tonight – even if it’s just to sit in your room spinning Prince records. 8/10 Orla Foster

John Cale — Mercy (domino) For much of Mercy’s duration, it’s as though John Cale is participating from a supernatural plain. This striking tonal sensibility welcomes the listener with the airy opener and remains for its entirety. The Welsh artist is enveloped by twinkling textures, the reverb applied to his vocals (‘Marilyn Monroe’s Legs (beauty elsewhere)’, ‘Noise of You’) further conjures a spectral image of our protagonist. Establishing such an engrossing atmosphere so early in its runtime is just one of Mercy’s many charms.

The imagery presented throughout Cale’s 17th studio album is fascinating; parties, poppies, rushing rivers, Marilyn Monroe’s legs. Coming from a figure of such innovation and influence as John Cale, fine combing his words to crack open any perceived cipher is akin to solving a Rubik’s Cube. A crucial recurring visual is snow. This seeps into the songwriting, from the inherent coldness emanating from the synths of ‘Noise of You’ to the frostiness in some of his lyrics which can be relentless, sometimes ruthless, but there is remorse. Take ‘Moonstruck (Nico’s Song)’ in which Cale sings about his former Velvet Underground bandmate. “So afraid of your own shadow / following close behind / How did you cover so much territory,” he wonders. The line, callous as it might seem, follows a plea for tenderness: “Please console me, yes please hold me/ I have come to make my peace”. There’s a duality at play, a person can hold two separate mindframes, exist in two worlds.

This juxtaposition is central to Mercy’s DNA. Cale makes couplets out of contradictory statements. After all, he opens the record with “Lives do matter / Lives don’t matter”. Aside from the

unwavering quality of the compositions (particularly ‘Night Crawling’, a Blackstar-esque ‘The Legal Status of Eyes’) and Cale’s faultless performance, the steadfast whomping beat anchoring the arrangements, keeping one foot firmly on solid ground, is an exceptional player within the LP. Seven of Mercy’s 12 songs feature guests (Weyes Blood, Animal Collective and Fat White Family) and while their contributions are minimal and mostly textural, it’s compelling to see two different generations come together with such ease. 60 years into his career, John Cale’s genius continues to thrive. 9/10 Zara Hedderman

Mui Zyu — Rotten Bun For An Eggless Century (father/daughter records) The opening track on Mui Zyu’s debut album is a gentle statement of intent. ‘Rotten Bun’ is influenced by the writings of Pu Songling and its dream-pop synth washes are broken by the weeping solo of an erhu, a Chinese two-stringed fiddle.

These set the scene for an album that explores and celebrates the Hong Kong heritage of Eva Liu, the woman behind the solo project who’s best known for fronting art-rock trio Dama Scout.

Across 12 lo-fi tracks she combines tradition with modern instruments and DIY recording sensibilities. This approach incorporates her father narrating a family recipe over a cheap drum machine 37 on ‘Ho Bao Daan (Interlude)’, and seemingly drawing on wuxia films on the drifting ‘Eggless Century’, on which her voice is blossom soft.

Her choice of instrument is knowingly used to complement her lyrics. The

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Albums droning ‘Paw Paw, inspired by her grandmother, features of an erhu, which her grandfather used to play. The heavily treated and cut up guzheng (Chinese plucked zither) on ‘Ghost With A Peach Skin’, meanwhile, is meant to emulate the fruit’s bruising.

This is experimentation largely placed within a familiar indie setting of fluttering keyboards and blownout drums, but Lui nonetheless approaches it from a singular angle. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Ruhail Qaisar — Fatima (danse noire) Situated in the harsh, mountainous Ladakh territory near Pakistan and Tibet, the North Indian town of Leh is mired in perpetual conflict and disputes. The debut full-length from Leh native Ruhail Qaisar deliberately puts us into this physical space by means of a challenging bombardment of grinding, ghostly approximations of the literal and psychic ambience of a singular part of the world.

As noise/sound collage albums go, Fatima’s nine tracks are all the more approachable and troubling for the clarity and precision of their arrangement. The standout ‘Sachu Melung’ pairs up what could be rocks falling or a fire burning with menacing bass and a high pitch noise that ebbs in and out of reality like an apparition. ‘Painter Man’ is similarly spectral, its heartbeat and reverberating noise eventually interjected by fleeting distortion and an indecipherable voice.

These tracks are deeply eerie and speak of a landscape (both physical and psychological) that is barren and haunted.

Fatima isn’t wholly consumed by darkness, however. ‘Abandoned Hotels Of Zangsti’ is a quiet synth piece that ends

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with gorgeous birdsong, approximating the atmospherics of the titular locations.

“Partition (From Astore To Leh)” is another droning ambient piece, one that walks the fine line between tranquillity and menace. These tracks make Fatima a more well-rounded and open-hearted proposition, as if, between all the grim decay and historical conflict, Qaisar sees glimmers of beauty; a lone flower on a scorched rock face. 8/10 Tom Morgan

Young Fathers — Heavy Heavy (ninja tune) Released into the heat swells of last summer, Young Fathers’ first new music in four years was a perfect point of re-entry. ‘Geronimo’ had braggadocio and submission in equal parts, hookheavy and self-described as “tenderness in toil”, the product of their searching in the dark for familiarity and inspiration as they remembered how to make music worthy of their discography to date. The eureka moment can be heard, cutting through the track’s ambience, exultant: “I’m on the verge of something divine that’s gonna keep me in line.”

The Edinburgh trio have covered a career’s worth of substance and style since their decade-old debut mixtapes.

Followed by a Mercury Prize-winning debut album, its universally acclaimed follow-up and a Scottish Album of the Year-winning third, the band’s cultural significance needs to be reinstated – in the simplest terms – as generational pop stars. Not, as some would have it, simply an experimental hip-hop group breaking conventions by not always rapping.

The bass grooves circling ‘I Saw’ map the alt-indie tribal incantations of Wild Beasts, while Kraftwerk lurks below the kinetic afrobeat of ‘Drum’. In

context, ‘Geronimo’ and ‘Tell Somebody’ are over-extended interludes or meditating sample-packs. Carouselling through neo-soul, electropop, granite-smooth R&B and divergent hip-hop with alarming conviction, Heavy Heavy perhaps most strikingly pulls the band members’ Nigerian and Liberian heritage into sharper focus, twisting worlds of sound into an immersive pileup of hi-fi foot-tappers.

Beautifully bookended by comparatively light-hearted Naija pop gems ‘Rice’ and ‘Be Your Lady’, the album’s outro gleefully swarms with voices cheering for space: “Can I take ten pounds worth of loving out of the bank please!” ‘Ululation’, too, is to-the-name jubilation. It makes a dazzling whole. There’s human sincerity in their wistful but major-key elation and heartache in its yearning; a brilliant return from a gold-standard band in UK music. 9/10 Tristan Gatward

Black Belt Eagle Scout — The Land, The Water, The Sky (saddle creek) This third album from Katherine Paul, who has been recording and releasing as Black Belt Eagle Scout since 2014, starts as it means to go on. The guitars on ‘My Blood Runs Through This Land’ burn with a sense of foreboding and the drums drop in and out, ratcheting up the tension in their absence and then lending to the sense of an epic to come when they return. It’s a suitably atmospheric kick off to an album rich with drama, one telling the story of Paul’s journey, in 2020, from her adopted home base of Portland, Oregon back to Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, her ancestral land on Puget Sound in Washington State.

Albums It would appear that she made two voyages in parallel, and presents them as such here; as well as following the road back to reconnect with her roots, one lined with the kind of natural beauty that a title like The Land, The Water, The Sky, she also walked a tumultuous inner path in terms of her relationship to her own mental health, at a time when a pandemic-stricken world was reckoning with its own trauma. Accordingly, we get moments that feel expansive, the sound of Paul’s horizons broadening as she imbues her indie rock templates with sounds from her native soil – ‘Sedna’ is a case in point, as is ‘Spaces’ – and others that are hushed, intimate and, as the album wears on, speak to a gradual reaching of a sense of peace with her place in the world (see ‘Treeline’ and ‘Understanding’). Closer ‘Don’t Give Up’ is the point at which the two roads meet, and by which we’ve heard Paul turn a turbulent few years into her finest body of work yet. 8/10 Joe Goggins

Rian Treanor & Ocen James — Saccades (nyege nyege) Following 2020’s hyperactive File Under UK Metaplasm, Rian Treanor’s latest project finds him collaborating with Acholi fiddler Ocen James after meeting at radical Kampala dance label Nyege Nyege’s studio. But to frame it only in terms of Treanor would do everyone involved a disservice: on Saccades, James’ one-stringed instrument pushes his collaborator into loosening his robotic focus, forced into responding with a freeform urgency.

Having searched for ways that his digital instruments could keep pace with James’ playing, Treanor uses physical modelling to build reactive and intuitive computer music around it. The push and

pull is palpable and, together, the two musicians build a collection of twitchy and curious tracks. ‘Rigi Rigi’ pairs vibrant dancefloor percussion with a fiddle melody to enthralling effect; ‘Casascade’ spotlights the deep emotion in James’ playing against complementary warm synths.

Initially only chirping and howling against Treanor’s hypnotic, metallic rhythms, an early pivot sees James and his instrument eventually bloom on highlight ‘The Dead Centre’. Looping strings reminiscent of composer Steve Reich meet blanketing drones, percussive shrouds and ringing bells, which help to elevate his passionate performance even further.

An aggressive remix from the legendary Farmers Manual caps the album with its only vocal samples and one last thrilling stylistic shift.

Like many collaborative efforts, the album occasionally feels unfinished but here it’s part of the appeal, the final result stitched with an energy both anxious and excited. Treanor and James inquisitively cover ground in all directions, never sounding stagnant nor outstaying their welcome: a revelation.

8/10 Jake Crossland

focal point, but SHOOK, by design, is also a more communal affair than much of their previous work. Ballasted by a host of guest vocalists, this album might be a love letter to and about Atlanta, but its energy and sprawling style owe as much to the procession of personalities it houses as it does to Algiers’ familiarly dynamic sound. ‘Irreversible Damage’ is intense and claustrophobic, building upon an edgy, sweaty momentum with a verse from the once-elusive Zack de la Rocha; ‘73%’ seethes with the chop shop guitars and frenzied, melodic neurosis of At The Drive-In; and ‘Cleanse Your Guilt Here’ puts a slower, Vicodin twist on Mos Def ’s ‘Ms. Fat Booty’.

It makes for a characteristically switch-the-radio-dial kind of listen, station-hopping through static. The soul and spoken-word interludes of ‘As it Resounds’ and ‘Born’ salve the dramatic Run the Jewels-does-gospel-energy of ‘Bite Back’ and the serrated punk punch of ‘A Good Man’. If previous Algiers albums were incendiary warning flares, Shook is more of a community firework display; there’s a little more joy and hope when the smoke clears. 7/10 Reef Younis

Algiers — SHOOK (matador) If 2017’s The Underside of Power was Algiers confirming their place as an angry, protest sound for restless days and nights, follow up, 2020s There Is No Year, as well as new album, SHOOK, represent something a little more subdued – a kind of consolidation of the forceful steamroller soul that powered their early sound.

Franklin James Fisher is still front and centre with the lightning rod energy, his unflinchingly passionate voice Algiers’

Quasi — Breaking the Balls of History (sub pop) Until recently, the term lo-fi conjured up thoughts of warped tape ramblings and walls of crackling treble.

Then one day, without any warning, the sands of sound shifted, and the term became all about chilled-out hip-hop and background beats. Breaking the Balls of History, the tenth album by Quasi, attempts to take lo-fi into its third era, one that, on the face of things, has nothing to do with either previous iteration of the sound.

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Albums In many ways, the high production values and wonky pop sensibilities of opener ‘Last Long Laugh’ pushes hard against everything that lo-fi stands for, yet somehow, due to Quasi’s endearing nursery rhyme innocence, the track ends up feeling bizarrely lo-fi in its delivery.

This surreal, almost counter-intuitive tactic is used throughout the album.

With any other band, tracks like ‘Riot & Jokes’ and ‘Doomscrollers’ would be thought of as pure psychedelic weirdness, but under the masterful watch of Quasi they are lifted above generic genre labels.

The duo’s unique lackadaisical playfulness pushes their music away from the normal towards something that is distinctly lo-fi in attitude, if not sound.

By doing this, with Breaking the Balls of History, Quasi have shown that these days lo-fi is nothing more than a state of mind. 8/10 Jack Doherty

Dioxide’ is a glorious rave centrepiece) but these songs are more hypnotic than amplified.

Without a new sound palette to explore, that baffling feeling is replaced by purposeful writing. Lyrically, Dreijer is wide-reaching, unafraid to say something ugly, outlandish or sensitive depending on the track. On ‘Even It Out’, they berate their child’s high-school bully.

On ‘Tapping Fingers’, they capture the private world you enter lying next to your partner before sleep. The through-line is a focus on love in all its forms. Closer ‘Bottom of the Ocean’ is the only underwhelming moment, lacking the direction of what’s come before.

Radical Romantics is elastic in its approach to love. Like all of Fever Ray’s best music, it’s deeper than it first appears on the dazzling surface. 7/10 Skye Butchard

Fever Ray — Radical Romantics (rabid) Karin Dreijer makes music that you feel before you understand. They can be brash and spontaneous. The wild performances on 2017’s Plunge were the first thing you noticed. But what comes next are the questions: “What did all that mean?”, “Why does this country make it hard to fuck?” Even at their most upfront, Fever Ray confounds, to the point that you might expect to be puzzled going into a new album.

Radical Romantics (their first in five years) is in some ways familiar territory. Songs like ‘Kandy’, ‘What They Call Us’ and ‘New Utensils’ are instantly gripping, but they’re also built on classic Fever Ray ideas – bright synth leads, fluid percussion, and plenty of space for Dreijer’s vocal. There are grooves (‘Carbon

Kelela — Raven (warp) The future has existed since the beginning of time; it’s a coherent understanding of the past that’s always being obscured and contested.

And it was like that when Washington DC-born artist Kelela emerged in 2013 with her CUT 4 ME mixtape. Even though nearly a decade has passed, that release’s sheer variety, ingenuity, and baffling brilliance of beats still feels of the future – a fully-formed memoryless cosmos of subtle intricacies, blown into life by Kelela’s seismic soprano.

Heavily informed and influenced by a host of perennially moribund genres, UK grime, dubstep, house, and techno chief among them, CUT 4 ME approached these styles like the Italian renaissance artists approached Greek

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antiquity in the 14th century, recognising their enduring truths and reconstructing them with a modern perspective.

Kelela, employed as a telemarketer before her career as a musician took off, recognised from the beginning that the music press would immediately clamour to stamp their own seal on her unnamable music. Like Adam sitting in the Garden of Eden, a coterie of music writers reeled off a host of labels for an already living thing, feigning their own sense of creation. ‘Future R&B’, ‘alt R&B’ and ‘glitchy R&B’ were all hastily thrown around, and the racist undertones they conveyed – implicit in their immediate, clumsy reach for more familiar Black musics and lack of serious intellectual engagement – became even more apparent when FKA Twigs’ very different strain of music was chucked in with Kelela’s. In the terminology of the incisive British cultural and social theorist Paul Gilroy, the industry essentially tried to ‘other’ them.

Kelela built upon the breadth of vision of her mixtape in the follow-up EP Hallucinogen and her utterly breathtaking debut album Take Me Apart, released in 2017. If the landscape of her musical genius was apparent from the start; then her debut LP interwove an entire ecology within it, with Kelela expertly deconstructing the forces, both expressive and oppressive, which move us through this life. Her majestic lyricism on tracks such as ‘Frontline’ and ‘LMK’ elevated songs to anthems, their intricacies slowly unveiled on encouraged repeat listens, with verses pumping like blood around the body and refrains dipping like sunsets.

These previous records pulled heartstrings and flooded the brain with surges of serotonin. On Raven, her latest album and first in five years, Kelela goes one step further and neurologically reengineers the listener’s temporal lobe.

What we witness across this spellbinding hour-long sophomore album is nothing short of an emergence of a singular lexicon, its own Big Bang of resplendent sonic epiphanies. Much here resembles and imitates the grandfathered-in platitudes of pop, soul, and

Albums R&B, such as the au fait acoustic intro to ‘Missed Call’. However, this innocuous note hypnotically contorts itself in a whole manner of ways before it settles as a leitmotif in a supremely complex drum and bass beat, recurrent and buried deep like a repressed trauma. Elsewhere, the titular track ‘Raven’ is a constellational survey of rhythms, tempos and airy transitions that is so intricately complete that you feel it continues to obey its own universal laws even when no-one’s listening.

If the sound is oneiric, eerie and, in Kelela’s own words, “submerged”, then the story that flows through is as surreal. In a stoic tone, Kelela chronicles a catatonic love that is “deeper than fantasy”. Throughout Raven, this love weaves in and out of a state of absence and presence like a love-drunk Jacques Derrida aphorism, with nothing existing outside the texts, calls and ghostings.

Like previous releases, there is also a cosmology to Kelela’s lyrics. If her mixtape and EP were extraterrestrial, her debut album tellurian, then Raven is nautical. This album’s lyrics drip.

The same liquid forces that make for a steamy romance that is “like a sauna” in ‘Contact’ reappear later in ‘Divorce’, this time dressed as a suffocating tidal wave that drowns her. In its consistency and exactness, with lyrics rolling into the next song, it feels like Kelela has penned her own symbolist poem to accompany her crepuscular sound. Truly lyrics writ on moonlit water.

If all this sounds off-puttingly dense or heady, then don’t worry – none of this obscures any of the overt pleasures this marvellous record gives to both the casual and deeper listener. Its tailend, in particular, is replete with eternally rewarding tracks such as ‘Enough for Love’, a towering pop single that briefly raises itself from the Indra’s net of beats to showcase Kelela’s supreme soprano in all its splendid and straightforward glory.

Raven sits on its own plinth. Unassociated with any genre past, present or future, it simply exists like a grand Kubrick or Tarkovsky film, where any

frame can be paused and in its stillness one can see the complexity of symmetry at play. 9/10 Robert Davidson

Shame — Food For Worms (dead oceans) The British music industry is an ever-winding Spaghetti Junction. A labyrinthine high-rise car-park. A sprawling library of buzzwords. And on their incandescent third record Food For Worms, British rockers Shame are transmitting deep from within its maze.

The ten tetchy songs on show here don’t run, but veer, bolstered by a new recording approach that is less compartmentalized and freer than the London quintet’s previous two records. Spiky guitars, thumping drums and full-bodied yells all merge aggressively without even a glance at the side mirror. Sprinkle in the band’s grander architecture regarding its song-structure and almost every track erupts into a seven-lane pile-up by its end.

However, buried beneath the swinging disintegration that is the soul of every song are the brittle bodies of words let out in berated breath by vocalist Charlie Steen who is seeking to free the Minotaur within his own mind, uttering lyrics so stripped back, that they start to show bone.

Tracks such as ‘Different Person’ revel in the cataclysmic dismantlement of sound while Steen neurotically instructs himself to “Buy blacker shoes / Cut shorter hair / Use bigger words like ‘debonair’”. It’s an intense dissection, but at its heart this LP is not a containment but a prison-break, which culminates in the bruising but liberating closer ‘All the People’ – a glorious light at the end of the tunnel.

Food For Worms is harrowing in its archaic meaning, derived from Jesus’ biblical ‘Harrowing of Hell’ where he descended to the underworld between his crucifixion and resurrection to bring salvation. Jesus died for our sins, but as the opening lyrics of ‘Burning by Design’ proclaims, Steen “sold my life for you”.

8/10 Robert Davidson

The Murder Capital — Gigi’s Recovery (human season) Post-punk is undoubtedly one of the most exploited genres of the last twelve years. The proliferation of acts and bands with rough vocals, spoken-word delivery, noisy guitars and hammering drums has been unstoppable throughout much of the US and Europe, and finding an outstanding quality in this mare magnum of feedback and guttural lyrics is nearly impossible.

Then, along came The Murder Capital.

Although the description of the band’s sound perfectly fits the one here above, there is something else about the Dublin outfit’s approach and songwriting that makes it distinctive – and superior.

Many factors contribute to this, from James McGovern’s training as a cellist and his desire “to fucking sing, to really sing” on Gigi’s Recovery, to the exquisite ear of the band, influenced by the best of ’80s pop and ’00s indie rock, for the melody that emerges between the lines. An unintentional concept album, this second record took the band two years to write and record, a time that was needed to balance out the rush with which they released their debut. The result is a suite of 12 songs, each tense and urgent in a different way, flowing without filler and bracketed by the new-age-informed opener ‘Existence’ and the final acoustic

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Albums ballad ‘Exist’. There are nods to Tears from Fears, winks to The Strokes, nudges to Pixies, and waves to Interpol, but above all, there is the discovery of an ideal sound that works magically between the four group members and gives back that magic to the listener. 9/10 Guia Cortassa

The Golden Dregs — On Grace and Dignity (4ad) Benjamin Woods, the multi-instrumental mastermind behind The Golden Dregs, spent the entirety of the pandemic shovelling shit on a lacklustre building site on the outskirts of Truro.

Perhaps somewould despairingly cry to mummy; in Woods’ case, his labours resulted in his third Dregs album, the astounding On Grace and Dignity, rich with lyrics like: “Building, buildings, buildings / And painted tarmac fields / Rows and rows of houses / Brick and mortar graves / Nothing ever happens” (‘How It Starts’).

Although this record’s polemical crosshairs may not wholly focus on new, groundbreaking social themes, for those repeatedly perplexed by the restrictions inherent in dogmatic consumer/corporate culture, or for those unsatiated by false idealisations of a halcyon day rendered inaccessible, On Grace and Dignity might be made for you. Equally, for those who can’t stomach the gravelly voice of late Cohen or Cash, find joy in something a little downbeat, or require a bit of a genre-bender, you might be advised to look elsewhere for your album of the year.

And to risk alienating the reader, if those reservations are a dealbreaker for you, then frankly, I want nothing to do with you. Sorry.

For me, On Grace and Dignity is a sensitively considered exploration of

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a very specific style which wonderfully expresses Benjamin Woods’ insular lockdown temperament. The combination of Phil Lesh sounding bass licks in ‘Josephine’, Roger McGuinn echoing riffs in ‘Vista’, and unconventional left to right panning across the record makes me wonder why the album displays all the signs of ’60s/’70s psychedelia whilst at the same time sounding absolutely nothing like it. On this record, Woods masters the ability to reference others without allowing them to become the sole identity of the music – a trap which many fall into. In On Grace and Dignity, we are left with a rich tapestry of allusions to those who trod a similar path, but in the end enough space is retained on the canvas for The Golden Dregs to develop fiercely in the future. 8/10 Leo Lawton

Gina Birch — I Play My Bass Loud (third man) On her debut solo album I Play My Bass Loud, founding member of The Raincoats Gina Birch proudly defies stereotypes. “I’m this old white woman playing my bass guitar out of my window,” she says in the record’s promotional material. “I just want to stick my head out and yell down the street: HELL, I’M HERE, AND I’M PLAYING MY BASS LOUD!” With weaving basslines, heavily processed vocals and dramatic, flavourful synths, the album takes us through a vivid political journey. In the opening of ‘Feminist Song’, dark, subtle synths make a bed for Birch’s voice, her serious, spoken tone almost in prayer for feminism. “Yes there are women in positions of power / And so many more in chains and drudgery / Raped / Abused / Tortured”. Here, Birch’s lyrics are

sickeningly visceral, leaving little room for interpretation. Elsewhere, on the record’s lead single ‘Wish I Was You’, overdriven guitars, crashing drums and a wonderfully catchy vocal line similarly get straight to the point.

Other songs, however, reveal a humorous edge. Birch’s voice darkly shouts “I will never wear stilettos” on the track of the same name, and there is such a comical aspect to this proclamation that it’s difficult not to smile when listening to it. That said, hidden under the humour, a powerful question is posed: “Can you run in them?” 6/10 Lila Tristram

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs — Land of Sleeper (rocket) Be warned: This is probably going to make a lot of people feel super old, but it’s been a decade since Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs first landed on the scene. In those ten years, the Newcastle band have changed massively, taking a scalpel to their own work, sweating off the long freakouts and reducing the lazy acid jams until all that’s left is a taut, well-honed machine that doesn’t fuck around.

Land of Sleeper, the band’s fourth record, could be a chips-on-the-table moment for Pigs. Unlike the preceding albums, the songs aren’t really pushing the envelope or messing with the established formula. It takes about 15 seconds for the band to drop in on opener ‘Ultimate Hammer’ and just like that, the band pick up almost exactly where they left off with 2020’s Viscerals. Thematically, though, the album feels like a change in tone, bleak in a way that previous records haven’t been. Pigs have always had a sense of darkness to them, but this mines new levels of existential

Albums dread, resulting in a few curve balls around the halfway mark. No more so than on ‘The Weatherman’, a menacing creeper that features vocals from Bonnacons Of Doom’s Kate Smith and choral flourishes courtesy of Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington.

All in all, Land of Sleeper is the sound of Pigs completing their development phase and emerging as something perfected and unique. 9/10 Dominic Haley

Various Artists — INSHA (naug) Reflecting on his own contribution to this excellent compilation of experimental sound from Nairobi, Joseph Kamaru (aka KMRU, whose 2021 album Logue is one of the most distinctive ambient records of recent years) comments on “what African music is imposed to sound like… a preconceived idea, discussed by the West.” His track on INSHA, ‘I Had The Impression’, explicitly seeks to push back against those preconceptions, its whirring, shivering textures both earthily specific to Nairobi and strikingly abrasive, resistant to easy categorisation; yet it often feels like the record as a whole is propelled by similar motivations.

From the plaintive expanse of Barno’s ‘Calm, Chaos’ to Nyokabi Kariũki’s gorgeous, spiralling ‘Anjiru’, the sheer breadth of timbre and style on this compilation is bracing, but it never feels disjointed or patchy. Perhaps that’s due to Kamaru’s careful curation of the tracks here, perhaps traceable to the compilation’s clearly-defined compositional process, which draws upon widely-used Kenyan methods of collaboration to bring together a wide range of artists in pursuit of something varied but cohesive. Whatever it is, the record flows

beautifully, never predictable, but never jarring; a project which doesn’t so much defy expectations as ignore them entirely.

7/10 Luke Cartledge

Laraaji — Segue To Infinity (numero group) New Age music has gone through a major reputation reboot in the last decade or so. For a long time, it was derided as purposely toothless man-made whalesong replication, made to accompany the self-absorbed scenes that emerged as the communal hippie dream of the ’60s curdled into cod-spiritual navel-gazing – and that’s not how it’s viewed any more.

Compilations of vintage cuts (notably Light In The Attic’s I Am The Center) have evidenced the artistic potential of meditative cosmic drifting.

Likeminded contemporary artists have underlined the close alignment between becalmed branches of modern electronic music and the ambient soundscapes of New Age. Laraaji – one of the genre’s seminal cult heroes – has been at the forefront of this revival.

Born Edward Larry Gordon, Laraaji studied composition and worked with the likes of Larry Mizell and Marvin Gaye before exchanging a guitar for an autoharp/zither (a 36-string traditional American folk instrument). Influenced by a keen interest in Eastern mysticism, the result was the open-tuned, blissfully rippling extemporizations that populate Segue to Infinity. The four-LP set combines 1978 debut Celestial Vibration (a perfectly apt description for Laraaji’s trance-inducing MO) with six side-long explorations from the same period, prior to Laraaji being spotted playing on the streets of New York by Brian Eno (who

promptly invited him to record 1980’s Ambient 3: Day Of Radiance), drawn from long-lost acetates spotted for sale on eBay. Segue to Infinity is essentially mood music, in the most literal meaning of the phrase. If one were to approach it in a mood for action, sudden movements and drama, and the slow-burningly stationary proceedings are likely to frustrate with their unhurried glide, with the same reverberating harp-like open chords repeating endlessly across a vast blank canvas. Go in with differently tuned ears, and alluringly hypnotic depths soon emerge from Laraaji’s deliberately restricted toolkit. The serene ‘Ocean’ has a gentle push and pull akin to waves lapping on a deserted beach during a particularly pretty sunset, while ‘Koto’ adds motifs from East Asian folk music to its rattling drones. Best of all is ‘Segue to Infinity’: as Laraaji’s rippling zither and an unknown flautist (recorded so closely you hear every breath) embark on an extended gentle joust for the spotlight, the track cultivates the same beauteous ebb and flow as the finest workouts of jazz musicians ala Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, musicians on a different stylistic path but sharing the same spiritually questing aims. 8/10 Janne Oinonen

Beqa Ungiadze — ს​ა​დ​გუ ​ ​რი ​ [Station] (spirituals) As the seemingly endless supply of half-arsed lockdown-core synth-and-field-recording albums starts to grate (not pointing any fingers here, I made one myself), it’s nice to be reminded of the boundless nature of ambient music when it’s made by someone with the talent of Beqa Ungiadze. In ს​ა​დ​გ​უ​რ​ ი [Station], the Georgian producer has

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Albums created something that feels free, open and generous; the perfect antidote to the Ableton bros who have spent the past two years deconstructing their comedowns and talking vaguely about ‘liminality’ or something.

Like some of the best ambient work of recent years, Station has a thick, almost translucent quality, allowing its listener to participate in its composition and recomposition in real time. New dimensions in tracks like ‘Time’ and ‘The Desert Full of Disgrace’ are revealed not only by repeated listens, but by the differing emotional states of their audience; they’re more ecosystem than static artefact. It’s introspective and occasionally melancholic, but never overbearing or self-serious; this is a record that feels as much about exploration and curiosity as predetermined profundity, the burbling synth loops and bumpy reflections of reverb subtly mapping out an entire landscape of richly-textured possibility.

The longer one spends with it, the more generative and vital it seems to become.

8/10 Luke Cartledge

Gorillaz — Cracker Island (parlophone) Damon Albarn was once a sort of King Midas, turning anything he touched into gold, both in the many musical outlets of his own, and as a guest or featured artist. Gorillaz were no exception.

Now on their eighth studio release with Cracker Island, the virtual fourpiece – founded in 1998 by Albarn and James Hewlett to exist as cartoons – try a change in direction with an album made up of ten potential floorfillers. And, whereas star-studding has always been a hallmark of any Gorillaz record, the impression is that Albarn’s gold touch has been

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reversed, with only the guests managing to add some spark to tracks that could easily be demoted to tracklist filler without their contributions to elevate them. It takes Thundercat and Bad Bunny to make the title track and ‘Tormenta’, respectively, songs to come back to – the latter unimaginable without the Puerto Rican rapper and definitely making the closing trifecta with the following ‘Skinny Ape’ and ‘Possession Island’ (featuring Beck, a lovely clash of accents, and a Mariachi band) the peaks of the record.

Mind you, Cracker Island is not a bad album. It would be dishonest to deny the quality of the songwriting, the arrangements and the engineering. Yet very little remains behind the pleasant, polished sound this time. We are far from the complexity and panache of Demon Days. But, perhaps, a collection of bangers for blasting in the car with the windows down is all you need sometimes.

5/10 Guia Cortassa

cism matching the tension of the music.

Though what’s being addressed is heavy in all aspects, there is still an unsettling, grooving dynamic underneath.

Several tracks on Attachment Styles feel like spoken-word pieces, which actively gives space for the spellbinding music to exhibit itself. Metallic guitars grate viscerally on ‘NO ONE EVER TALKS TO US’, with ‘THERAPY’ and ‘NICE GUYS’ featuring refreshing, understated time signatures (perhaps too rudimentary in parts).

Despite the lyrics, as important as they are, at times feeling almost too generalisable, Attachment Styles on the whole is an undeniably transgressive and complex record, where lyrics quoting Carrie Bradshaw swirl in ambient grunge (‘BISEXUAL ANXIETY’) next to disconcerting noise-rock (‘FEMME’).

Leftfield and perpetually interesting, this is the future of feminist punk. 7/10 Jasleen Dhindsa

M(h)aol — Attachment Styles (tulle) Although so much music of this genre comes from a place of the gritty and the guttural, out of the abundance of feminist punk, it’s rare to find an album that truly stands out beyond indisputable archetypes. Thankfully, on their debut record, Dublin group M(h)aol have produced a memorable effort that strives for more than sprechgesang and four chords.

Attachment Styles opens with ‘ASKING FOR IT’, which is imbued with an essence of The Slits. Chugging basslines, persistent drumming and unsettling guitars eventually crash into each other in an act of true visceral catharsis; it’s part-punk and part-hardcore, with the delivery of vocals and lyri-

Sam Goku — Things We See When We Look Closer (permanent vacation) Given the sheer inventiveness it took for Sam Goku to carve out his own sonic path on his debut album, it would have been a surprise if he did anything other than head further down it at full pelt on the follow-up. Accordingly, Things We See When We Look Closer takes the highly singular blend of traditional Asian instrumentation, strikingly modern electronics and Goku’s own field recordings, a combination he forged impressively on 2021’s East Dimensional Riddims, and cranks up the maximalism.

For the Munich-based Goku, this closer inspection of his own sound involves a doubling down on the high-

Albums tempo rhythms of his first record in some aspects – especially on the pulsating ‘Libellenflug’, and in the driving journey of ‘Mangrove Railways’. Elsewhere, though, there are excursions out into more atmospheric territory, with ‘Yellow River Drone’ rendered an incongruous album opener by its unsettling ambience and the spacey, low-key glitch of ‘Zoom Out’ and ‘Sky and Sand’ offering a chance for decompression before the pulsating closing one-two of ‘Silver Rushing Streams’ and ‘Life by the Pond’.

Goku’s refusal to stay in one stylistic lane may confound some, but he slaloms between them with real assurance. 6/10 Joe Goggins

Togo All Stars — FA (excelsior) Cyclical, inclusive and insistent, this is an impressively purposeful, well-realised record from Lomé collective Togo All Stars. The promotional material for the album nods towards the band’s geographical and cultural proximity to the Afrobeat and highlife scenes for which this region of West Africa is perhaps best known, and those influences are absolutely audible, the rhythmic precision of the former melding expertly with the slippery harmonics of the latter; but as that material also notes, this isn’t supposed to be a mere pastiche or tribute.

This multigenerational project – singer Aguey Cudjoe has been active since the 1970s and is now accompanied by players young enough to be his children – is explicitly designed to learn from its stylistic forebears but push towards something new; on FA, Togo All Stars perhaps don’t find themselves on entirely untilled soil, but certainly combine familiar textures in novel, exploratory ways.

The arrangements are rich and joyous, the rhythmic collages incredibly complex but never alienating or disorientated, the horn and guitar sweeps stately and fluent. The cumulative effect has as much in common with the cosmic groove of Funkadelic or Miles Davis’ fusion era as Togo All Stars’ closer geographical neighbours; FA is an adventurous, wholly contemporary record from a group who, at their most fluid, sound capable of anything. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Yo La Tengo — This Stupid World (matador) Yo La Tengo have always housed multitudes. They sound as confident with guitars turned up to tinnitus-inducing levels as they do singing after-hours ballads in tones softened so as not to wake the neighbours. Following on from the delicate brooding of previous record There’s A Riot Goin’ On, this latest set immediately marks itself as rougher, angrier and louder.

Eschewing the restraint that has largely characterised their post-millennium output, This Stupid World wastes little time in demonstrating fretboard fireworks. Giddying album opener ‘Sinatra Drive Breakdown’ starts with a sharp acceleration of guitars that screech like chicaning Formula One cars. Guitarist and singer Ira Kaplan’s strings are then bent into a different musical language; a shoegaze verse is coloured by drifting clouds of cobalt, swirling like ink in water.

Following track ‘Fallout’ has a graceful Yo La Tengo classicism, tidally swooning and addressing “time” whilst sounding utterly timeless. Elsewhere ‘Brain Capers’ throbs with a charged static.

It plays like The Velvet Underground’s ‘The Murder Mystery’ being fed through

a tumble drier on a particularly aggressive spin. “I remember the time,” Kaplan intones, though the memory doesn’t seem all that faithful, as shards of song fly around like false recollections grappling for attention. Through the fugue of headphone frying feedback a separate vocal track plays in each ear; “Mine is yours, and yours is mine” is the only perceptible phrase. Against the chaos it is a sweet reminder that Kaplan and drummer/ vocalist Georgia Hubley are an enduring couple of ’90s indie rock.

Meanwhile the record’s title track finds grandeur in ugliness, its chained and gurning percussion rumbling half a beat behind the vocals. The effect is of a giant engine labouring itself into action, in a very literal sense it sounds industrial, it’s bracing and thrilling too. Kaplan is joined by Hubley on vocals, and against the squall, the two gently bemoan the passing of time.

Since 2000’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out the Hoboken trio have tended to register their displeasure with the outside world by turning inwards; getting softer and quieter to counter an outside rage that becomes louder exponentially. Now as their lyrical focus turns to time and its steady march, resolution is wrought from noise. Its jagged edges are a reaction to the futility described in ‘Until It Happens’; “Prepare to die, prepare yourself while there’s still time”. What can one say to such nihilism? Call a spade a spade I suppose: This Stupid World indeed. 8/10 Theo Gorst

Ryuichi Sakatomo — 12 (milan) At 70 years old, and with over 20 albums and original works to his name, there isn’t much Ryuichi Sakatomo hasn’t done in

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Albums his storied career. An actor, producer, musician and composer, he’s won an Oscar, a BAFTA, a Grammy and a couple of Golden Globes for his film-scoring, composed the music for the opening ceremony for the 1992 Olympics, and pioneered the use of electronic music equipment like the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine.

But battles with cancer of the last eight years have also become part of Sakatomo’s life story, overcoming throat cancer in 2015 only to be diagnosed with rectal cancer in 2021. After returning home following an operation, he found himself reaching for the synthesizer.

“I had no intention of composing something; I just wanted to be showered in sound,” he said in the press notes. “I’ll probably continue to keep this kind of ‘diary.’”

The result is 12, recorded and written over the course of 2021 and 2022, each of the track titles reflecting the dates that the compositions were written. An album of instinct, habit and catharsis, these minimal, ambient, largely piano-led ruminations move in the subtlest of waves, so much so, at times it’s like they’re barely even there.

Opener ‘20210310’ manipulates wave forms and dead air in a way that’s deeply cinematic as opposed to overly musical, ‘20211201’ winds sparse piano around human breathing, and the sad, sloping melody of ‘20220302’ gently but intently fills every available second. A poignant, peaceful listen. 6/10 Reef Younis

Jonah Yano — Portrait Of A Dog (innovative leisure) Jonah Yano has slipped into the void. A perilous gap between genres has swallowed him

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whole, leaving him floating alone in a soft, vanilla purgatory.

On the face of it, Portrait Of A Dog, his second album, is full of everything we’ve come to expect from the frequent BADBADNOTGOOD collaborator. The jazzy keys are there, the echo chamber is in full effect and the ethereal folk undercurrent is raging, but scratch beneath the surface and it’s clear something is amiss.

Where in the past Yano’s sound came with a healthy dose of weirdness, this time out he’s playing things straight. While no one likes an artist to stand still, Yano’s decision to deliberately deconstruct his sound backfires almost instantly. ‘Haven’t Haven’t’ and ‘Call The Number’ are expectedly reverberated affairs, but without a touch of strangeness they fail to reach the heights of yore, leaving Yano grasping at the pleasant instead of freaking his way back to the top.

There are attempts to bring back the oddness. ‘Glow Worms’ and ‘Quietly, Entirely’ give off a faint whiff of the surreal, but it’s a case of too little too late; before you know it Yano finds himself sinking back down into the depths, bouncing slowly back and forth between genres with no escape in sight.

If there’s a lesson to be learnt here, it’s that you should never underestimate the power of weirdness. Without it we’d all be floating in a vapid latte afterlife, and who wants that? 4/10 Jack Doherty

Kali Malone — Does Spring Hide Its Joy (ideologic organ) Kali Malone has made her name by pushing right at the edges of what is traditionally considered music. Distinctly post-minimal in approach, her sound pulls apart structure, rhythm, and tone and often blurs

the lines between performance and art installation.

Does Spring Hide Its Joy represents some of her most ambitious work. A collaboration between herself, SUNNO))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley and fellow performer/programmer Lucy Railton, the nine-track, two-hour piece was written in and designed for empty concert halls.

As such, it’s a piece of work that feels almost sculptural in its sense of scope and purpose. Collapsing the notion of regimented song structure and linear composition, the music expands to fill empty space like a fog, moving unexpectedly and organically between cello, sine waves and electric guitar.

As this is music specifically designed to explore how sound interacts with space, in some ways putting Does Spring Hides Its Joy onto a three-vinyl was never going to do the work justice.

Try as I might, the experience of listening to it through headphones while lying on a sofa doesn’t hit in quite the same way as witnessing it echo out through an abandoned cold war bunker. My advice: try and experience it in real life first and buy the record in the gift shop. 5/10 Dominic Haley

Various Artists — Future Chorus (hypermedium and maenads) Curated by Royal College of Art researcher Eleni Ikoniadou, Future Chorus is an ambitious vocal-led project, aiming for nothing less than “a new voice speaking a nonhuman language”. In pursuit of this, Ikoniadou has compiled a range of non-verbal vocal sounds, alongside spoken word, cello and other timbres, and run them through a process

Albums of machine learning to create something uncanny and distinct. That material was then handed to a diverse group of artists – including Lafawndah, AGF, Harrga, Trustfall, Chino Amobi and Savvas Metaxas – to remix and rework as they saw fit.

The result is, perhaps predictably, unsettling and unknowable, each track diverging in style but overlapping in dissonance and abrasion. Its strongest moments are arguably its subtlest; for example, Harrga’s ‘En Nouts Vivants Les Morts’ is teeming with intricate detail, and when its arch spoken-word lead pauses for breath, we’re able to sink further into its shadowy depths. It’s not that the clear vocal is a problem as such; but on a record that seeks to push vocal textures into new territories, it’s nice to be able to look past the more familiar delivery and deeper into the new soil being tilled somewhere beneath. Future Chorus is full of these brief, set-back passages of richness and beauty, oases of harmonic light between the discordant murk and (sometimes overly) earnest readings. Best of all is the unheimlich openness of the final track’s final section, Savvas Metaxas closing the record with an expanse of glitched whispers and jittering strings which sound like rumours from the future. Quite whether Future Chorus archives its stated aims is unclear, but either way, there’s much to be gained from this project. 6/10 Luke Cartledge

dor – superficially feels of a piece with the three before it. In fact, it doesn’t seem too different to anything we might have loosely labelled ‘futurist dub pop’ over this last decade, at least since Standish/ Carlyon’s 2013 high water mark Deleted Scenes; minimally arranged, doused with reverb, and hyper-fixated on a kind of teenaged goth-phase gloom. If you’ve directed yourself to this review, you’ve most certainly heard this album a handful of times before.

But then, you keep coming back to something like ‘Ache’ – if only for the thrill of hearing the low organ dirge being sliced apart by Labrador’s pop-sensitive vocal and a wailing, ambulant siren. The album’s few guitar licks serve similar dynamic functions in other places, like on ‘Another Dream’, dovetailing after every floating beat. The drum rack feels pored over and tweaked to perfection – elegant, and not overegged – particularly on ‘Parallel’, which showcases Labrador’s hypothetical double life as a UK garagemeets-trip-hop cross-over producer.

Much in the way the project has presented itself across releases, Glimpse of Heaven is yet another cohesive Chasms album, proficient but not quite as clinical as that word suggests; it’s a neat, dark little world in which to spend 35 minutes, mellowing or wallowing, a fitting thing for a work best experienced on headphones.

Does it need to be any deeper than that?

6/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Chasms — Glimpse of Heaven (felte) It’s easy to dismiss an album like Glimpse of Heaven when you first hear it. The fourth album by LA-based project Chasms – and the first to effectively serve as the solo project of frontwoman Jess Labra-

Wesley Joseph — Glow (secretly canadian) Wesley Joseph eschews any conventional categorisation of his musical and artistic output, preferring to present his recorded work as fluid ‘projects’ rather than tightly-defined albums or

EPs. Delving into his latest offering Glow, there’s a varied, experimental style permeating the record, suggesting a mixtape-like quality. However, there’s enough here to cohesively tie the material together into an excellently comprehensive body of work, rich in ideas and unpredictable in its inventiveness without ever losing its cogency.

The Birmingham-born, Londonbased songwriter, producer and filmmaker is a magnetic force throughout.

Perhaps one of the most impressive elements of this release, aside from the energy ingrained in each of the arrangements, is the impact Joseph makes with a handful of tones. His artistry is assured; his vocal range and delivery is confident and commanding and those rich textures dress each sonic setting with great sophistication. Take the slumberous ‘Light Light’, illuminating its core structure with a beautiful combination of strings, dense beats and bright piano notes, or the trap-fused ‘Cold Summer’ which incorporates just the right level of darkness into the work.

This breadth is expertly expanded upon and maintained by the glimmering keys that set ‘Sugar Dive’ alight and take us to another celestial plain on ‘I Just Know Highs’; a Danger Mouse-esque production coloured with twinkling, celestial motifs. An exceptional centrepiece, the latter effortlessly transports audiences through its wonderfully lush, spacious arrangement.

There are moments where you cannot help but feel the influence of a figure like Frank Ocean, particularly in the vulnerability and tenderness of Joseph’s lyrical, compositional and production style Elsewhere, his infectious melodies hark back to elusive, genre-splicing artist Jai Paul, which is hardly surprising given Joseph’s longstanding collaboration with producer A.K. Paul ( Jai’s brother). Yet while those likenesses exist, Joseph has deftly cultivated a style and approach that is unmistakably and admirably his own. With the combination of this original voice and his strikingly versatile talent, Wesley Joseph is destined to flourish. 9/10 Zara Hedderman

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Albums Live drastic change in proceedings, but rather a confirmation that the performance would engage on various emotional levels rather than dwelling on the minimalism of the first 20 minutes. Alongside this, the backing visual by Nika Milano seemed to build toward a warm colour palette that gorgeously complemented the sound.

It is an engrossing and affecting performance. There is an intensity to it that only reveals itself when the piece suddenly comes to an end, and the absence of sound becomes almost deafening; a fascinating sensation in the ear like Sichuan pepper on the tongue. It’s another strong indicator that Kali Malone is one of the most engaging experimental artists working today. Oskar Jeff Kali Malone Purcell Room, London 3 Decembers 2022

In recent years, electro-acoustic experimentalist Kali Malone has become synonymous with her solo pipe organ work.

Her most arresting recording is 2019’s The Sacrificial Code, a haunting suite which moves along at a glacial pace, focusing the mind and giving each chord change a sense of emotional drama. The recording approach views the organ as not just an instrument but a breathing physical object, the sounds of the internal mechanics of the organ adding an intense intimacy. This was my personal introduction to her work, and its cylindrical chord progressions have remained with me more powerfully than anything else I can recall in recent times.

A recent live performance at St John’s Smith Square in London perfectly showcased these works on the built-in pipe organ of the high-ceilinged church, an unmistakable unity of space, concept and sound. But tonight’s gig at the Purcell Room is a different state of affairs. I approach it blind beyond the awareness that it is a collaboration with cellist Lucy Railton and Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley. As it begins, the musicians take their places, each collaborator on either

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side of the stage with their instruments, Malone standing centre-stage behind what looks like a mixing desk.

The music begins – a constant drone emanating from the cello’s broad, deliberate strokes – while O’Malley uses an e-bow on his guitar. The sound feels like a sustained mediation on a singular note, the instruments coalescing into a shared blur, oscillating as they dance ever so slightly around the held note. Malone seems to statically conduct the performance, working with tuned sine wave oscillators, a further layer to the densely warm drone, while occasionally taking notes in a pad.

The screen behind is a slowlypanning field of colour, a gradient moving vertically through the colour spectrum.

As a visual element it is at first underwhelming to the point of making the viewer almost unaware that it was intentionally part of the show. But this is a show that requires patience to appreciate. The first 15 or so minutes feel like an adjustment period for the whole room, performers and audience alike. It is just as you allow the sound to wash over you, and you finally come to accept the static nature of work, that things begin to change. There’s an energy shift from O’Malley which invigorates the performance, a possibility of forward momentum, an edge towards noisier climes, at which point I felt fully engaged. It’s not a

English Teacher The Castle Hotel, Manchester 17 December 2022

Those familiar with the live space at The Castle, which is the back room of a beloved old boozer, will know that 80 people constitute a packed-out crowd.

English Teacher have already enjoyed enough ones-to-watch coverage in 2022 to render this an intimate show by their standards, even with a date for their debut album still to be set, but the last-minute cancellation of what was supposed to be a triumphant end-of-year co-headliner with Manchester’s own Splint a mile away at The White Hotel has meant a last-gasp scramble to ensure that the Leeds outfit did not cross the Pennines in vain. With Splint out, local backup instead comes in the form of highly promising post-punk upstarts Duvet, who have already made blistering live sets like tonight’s their signature on the local scene, as well as Pyncher, a riff-happy alt-rock four-piece who, like tonight’s headliners, are already showing signs of genre fluidity in terms of their audible influences.

It bodes well for English Teacher’s 2023, meanwhile, that they are so readily being compared with such buzz

photography by pete woodhead

Albums Live bands as Black Country, New Road, Black Midi and Sorry. They also have heavyweight support slots under their belts, for the likes of Yard Act, Parquet Courts and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but whilst all of that stands to reason on the evidence of the blistering slew of new material aired tonight, particularly in its ambitious blending of styles, this is a band with an identity all their own, not least on account of singer Lily Fontaine’s piercing, witty lyricism and a thrilling willingness to wear a range of different musical hats all within the same song. They head into 2023 with considerable, and deserved, momentum. Joe Goggins

Mandrake Handshake YES, Manchester 15 December 2022

At the bottom of the stairs at YES is a neon sign that in no uncertain terms lets visitors know what to expect once they cross the threshold into the basement’s live space. “WEIRD SHIT”, read the glowing green tubes, and if you miss it on the wall you’ll have it stamped on your hand too, on the way in. A cursory glance over the listings for the smaller of the old auction house’s two live rooms reminds

photography by ian hanham

the crowd that what constitutes weird is open to interpretation, but few in attendance at this turn from Oxford’s premier psych outfit will be pointing to the sign and asking for a refund under the Trade Descriptions Act. Tonight’s show is ostensibly in support of October’s superb EP The Triple Point of Water, and whilst that forms the crux of the band’s set, there’s a sense of this being one long, sprawling showcase of the Mandrake Handshake sound, with songs segueing seamlessly into one another and an energy level that never drops below a krautrock bassline.

Some here might have caught the band’s show at Manchester Psych Fest in 2021 and remarked upon how clearly they take a lot of their cues from that day’s headliners, Stereolab, the interplay between multi-layered vocal harmonies and driving rhythm bringing to mind both that band and Broadcast. What Mandrake Handshake then do is suffuse that foundation with the spaciness of peak Spiritualized, the expansiveness of Spacemen 3 and the relentlessness of Can, while the crowding of the group’s nine-piece lineup onto such a small stage is somehow an appropriate visual representation of what is an occasionally chaotic sound.

Coming from a group wearing their influences so avowedly on their sleeves, this is a live show that still feels remarkably fresh. Joe Goggins

Stereolab EartH, London 2 December 2022

“I hope you get room for a little shuffle,” quips Laetitia Sadier to a tightly packed audience midway through the first of two sold out Stereolab gigs at Dalston’s EartH in early December. The band then launch into their ’90s hit ‘Miss Modular’, Sadier’s almost-monotone French language vocals sounding as nonchalantly cool as ever, which also gives the band a human warmth that renders their meandering synth pop more approachable and loveable. It’s a testament to the band’s innovative spirit that they remain so thrilling to watch over 30 years into their career, racing through a 15-track setlist with an excitable energy that sadly, for the most part, isn’t mirrored by the sedate, largely middle-aged audience. (Perhaps they are saving their dance moves for the following night, when the band programmed an upstairs ‘club takeover’ after the show, but for tonight, at least, they don’t need room for that little shuffle after all).

Despite their stillness, the crowd is clearly enraptured; evidence of the cult-like following Stereolab continue to foster, helped no doubt by TikTok and Spotify algorithms that are constantly introducing new listeners to their distinctive sound.

A lot of their best known tracks are absent from tonight’s set, but perhaps this is why they sound so fresh; they’re not just rehashing a ‘greatest hits’ set for the sake of money or ego, and instead play a mix of deep cuts and new tracks with a few bigger hits thrown in. Equally, they haven’t fallen into the same trap as some of their peers and tried to write new music which caters to the latest trends; 2022’s ‘Simple Headphone Mind’ and 2021’s ‘I Feel The Air (Of Another Planet)’ are as idiosyncratic as any other Stereolab track, and sit easily alongside classics like ‘French Disko’. This is a band that has always existed on their own planet, and it seems their gravitational pull shows no signs of weakening. Jess Wrigglesworth

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FilmAlbums and Books

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (dir. rian johnson) The lead-in to Glass Onion was long. So long that it now feels like it was due for release halfway through 2022. Wasn’t that when the decals started appearing on the windows of independent cinemas? When the buses started wearing it? I’d been meaning to see that, I’d think – hope it’s still showing, only to remember, once again, that it’s not released until December 23rd, if we’re all still alive by then. It was master marketing from Netflix who’d bought the second of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies for themselves – a campaign so visually glamourous, it’s stars in a tropical paradise that’s inevitable going to turn sour for at least one of them – and so much of it – that many started to re-evaluate how good the first film was.

Maybe the Knives Out franchise was a bigger deal than your previous enjoyment had allowed you to believe? Which isn’t to say that the original movie wasn’t an excellent, silly romp; it just never felt like it was going to become all this. That certainly won’t feel so surprising in the future.

Dragging the Agatha Christie whodunit up to the present day once again, Glass Onion is even better than the film it follows, with an equally starry (totally different) cast as before, spearheaded by the only returning character, Benoit Blanc: America’s Southern sleuth mastermind; a Poirot who looks sexy in a dorky, striped twinset, who’s ridiculous but fuckable, who looks like he used to be James Bond, because he did.

For this case, Daniel Craig’s Blanc finds his way into a private party on a private island with some of the worst one percenters we all know and hate: an entitled, controversial model/influencer (Kate Hudson), a meninist meathead streamer (Dave Bautista), a politician (Kathryn Hahn) and a few other less despicables

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who’ve made the mistake of sticking with their mutual old friend and tech billionaire thicky Miles Bron – the owner of the island and host of the weekend, played to narcissistic perfection by Edward Norton.

Type ‘Glass Onion’ into Google right now and on the list of ‘People also ask’ is: Is Glass Onion about Elon Musk? That’s how good Norton is as this idiot, and while the film is so enjoyably over the top that not even Musk could keep up with Miles Bron’s megalomania, so much of this otherwise old fashioned caper is rooted in life in 2022/23. That’s perhaps what makes it even better than the original Knives Out, set as it was in a traditional spooky mansion. Glass Onion is more modern, funnier, perhaps even smarter. A sure bet all along.

Stuart Stubbs

Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment — Philippa Snow (repeater) “[He] introduces himself in one langorous breath as ‘Johnny Knoxville, United States of America,’ as if he were not a man at all, but an extremely scruffy metaphor: a walking, talking, self-abasing national id,” writes Philippa Snow in the opening pages of Which As You Know Means Violence.

“Ultimately,” she muses a little later, “Jackass fitted into John Waters’ legacy as snugly as a Hot Wheels car into a stunt performer’s rectum.”

This searing meditation on violence, pain and the nature of art under patriarchal, racialised capitalism is bursting with zingers like this, as cuttingly hilarious as they are surgical in their analytical incision and both high- and low-cultural literacy.

That the Y2K haute-onanism of Jackass is connected so readily to both the trashy art-house camp of Waters and more

readily-acknowledged fine artists of selfabuse like Chris Burden and Ron Athey is typical of Snow’s rich, dialectical style. Her fascination with pain and violence is not just that of a sadist or voyeur (not that there’d be anything necessarily wrong with that in and of itself), but the strength of this book lies in the fact that her analysis isn’t merely rooted in abstract intellectual curiosity either; Which As You Know Means Violence is far too visceral to have been written by somebody whose investment in her subject matter is anything other than deeply-felt. It’s passionate and conversational, but never lacking in rigour, its insights cutting through the reader like a knife into flesh. “If seeing the inside of a good-looking blonde woman on the internet no longer holds much shock value, it is arguable that some shock remains when that inside is the inside of her left arm,” she writes of American content creator Paige Ginn, ‘the girl who fake falls’. This combination of bracing seriousness and exemplary comic timing is exhilarating.

Perhaps the book’s strongest passages are those in which Snow grapples with the stakes of the masochistic performances by which she’s so intrigued, whether they be the differing risks undertaken by white and POC artists interested in such work (quoting James Baldwin, she notes that “Caucasian people do not have the same historical relationship with pain as other racial groups”) or, in the emotive closing chapter, the impact that the literal immediacy of death, as experienced by the late artist and S&M enthusiast Bob Flanagan, who suffered from chronic-then-terminal cystic fibrosis, can have on one’s artistic and sexual relationship with pain.

At these points, Snow’s essential empathy is at its most apparent; for all the withering one-liners and theoretical zeal that propel her writing, this is at base a book about pain, sex, death and creativity – i.e. the basic fabric of existence. We all feel pain, we’re all impacted by violence, (although she correctly insists on variegating her analysis of the ways in which different people and different groups relate to those things); this is the most nakedly, vividly human book I’ve read in some time.

Luke Cartledge

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WHAT A NIGHTMARE

Over the past 10 years, metal band PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS have transcended their cult status while proudly sticking to their playbook of heavy doom rock.

Playing tour guides to Dominic Haley in their hometown of Newcastle, the band discuss how they became one of the UK’s most loved touring bands, the places that made them, and new, extra dark album Land of Sleeper.

Photography by Ellen Dixon 53

“WELL, THIS IS IT!”

exclaims Matt Baty, rocking back on his heels and throwing his arms wide like a Victorian engineer. It’s a grey December afternoon in Newcastle and we’re standing in front of a massive pile of red brick surrounded by a non-descript blue fence. “I’ll admit, it doesn’t look like much now,” laughs the Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs singer, “but this used to be the Star and Shadow, where we played our first gig.”

To the casual observer, we look like a group of men standing and staring at a mound of rubble, but this is, in fact, the second spot of a whistle-stop tour of the places of Pigs’ early years. The band have always been proud of their roots in Newcastle, but it’s only when we walk around the spots that formed the group’s early ecosystem that it becomes clear that when they speak about their hometown, they’re speaking about a very specific area. So far the walk between the bar where they hung out between practices, their first practice studios in the Biscuit Rooms and the site of the band’s first show has taken us all of about ten minutes, but the band have managed to pack in a lot of history nevertheless. From the story about how the thud of the gargantuan metal riffs ended up ruining a cocktail party that was simultaneously happening in their studios, to pointing out a nondescript piece of fence where a cop caught drummer Ewan McKenzie throwing a pizza crust and told him to ‘feed the rats’, it feels like every stretch of the Ouseburn river has a Pigs war story it could tell.

For now, though, we’re here. Six men stood in front of a building site listening as Baty regales us with the story of the show that started it all. Their first gig, back in 2012, was as the first support for Swedish psych band GOAT, on a bill that also included arthouse noise outfit BEAUTY PAGEANT. At the time, Pigs was a side project of sorts, with the various members more committed to playing in Ommadon, Blown Out and Khuunt; dark, emotionally brutal noise bands. According to the band’s retelling, they only played one song that lasted 15 minutes and most of the crowd didn’t pay that much attention.

In retrospect, it was a pretty momentous event for Pigs, and I ask the group if they ever thought they’d be where they are a decade later. Baty looks thoughtful for a second and then answers: “Y’know, I don’t think there was anything behind Pigs beyond being able to play this kind of place. For me, this was always more about seeing what we could do.” He continues: “I can remember in those early days thinking, ‘Imagine if we got to play with GOAT one day? Or play Supersonic festival. We’d have Gnod come through town, and we’d all think wouldn’t it be amazing to play a gig with Gnod? That was it, really. Somehow, we’ve managed to ping-pong our way into doing all these things that are on most bands’ bucket lists.”

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“The name is kind of a prime example of that,” agrees guitarist Adam Ian Sykes. “I mean, if we’d ever wanted to do any of this seriously, we wouldn’t have called ourselves Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. I mean, have you ever tried typing that out on a computer?”

While we’re talking about a pile of rubble, guitarist and producer Sam Grant is facing the opposite direction and is attempting to peer inside the building across the street.

He rattles the door a couple of times but it remains defiantly locked. It is the middle of a Thursday afternoon, after all.

Giving a collective shrug, we move off down the street but the sound of a key being turned in a lock stops us dead in our tracks. The door is now open, and a bearded, ponytailed man is standing at the entrance.

“Howee, lads. Do you want to come in?”

To call Little Buildings an intimate venue might actually be overstating it. Its website claims that its live room can manage 50-60 people, and now that we’re standing in the main room I’m struggling to see how; there’s barely enough room to place a sofa, let alone put on a gig. Somehow, though, a stage and full backline has been squeezed underneath the far wall, and in the opposite corner a sound booth has been tucked into a nook by the door. Gathered in the centre of the room, the members of Pigs look around like they’re viewing a gothic Cathedral while Allan Scorer, the owner, points out features like a proud homeowner.

It’s a place that holds a special place for Pigs, too. In a former incarnation, this warehouse- turned-venue was Grant’s original studio, Blank, and it was here that the band recorded their early singles and first two albums, 2017’s Feed the Rats and 2018’s King of Cowards. The band eagerly explore their former home, reacquainting themselves with spaces that once felt familiar. Explaining how the room we’re stood in used to be the studio, with all the recording equipment kept upstairs, the band make their way to the floor above to discover that their former office has been turned into a bar. Surveying the room, McKenzie lets out a sigh. “It’s weird being back here – it was basically our second home…”

— Feed the rats — Getting this brief glimpse into the spaces that birthed Pigs actually explains a lot about those early days of the band.

Splitting their time between here and the Biscuit Rooms where they had the run of their own unit, the band had space to write, rehearse and develop organically, without the pressure of booked-by-the-hour practices or snatched studio time.

It’s probably the reason why in those early days Pigs’ music was

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more free-form than it is today. Their 2017 debut album Feed the Rats, an intense blast of Sabbath-style noise, for example, clocks in at over 40 minutes across just three tracks. “We wrote using the toilet paper method,” explains Grant when I ask about how the band used their spaces in the early days. Pointing at the walls, he continues: “At the beginning, the idea was to create one massive song, where we could get on stage, play for 35 minutes and be done, with no stopping, banter or anything like that. We wanted these massive, sprawling songs that had a set of refrains that we’d keep coming back to, almost like a classical record. We didn’t have any structured songs per se – we just wrote riffs on bits of paper, stuck them on the wall and pointed to them when we wanted to go back to them. It was just a really good way to build a reference system.”

Saying our goodbyes to the building’s current occupant, we file outside to continue the tour. Heading down the hill towards a collection of industrial units and garages, the road cuts left and rises uphill, leading to a sudden rush of green space. The open terrain means that the group begins to split up.

Moving ahead, bassist John-Michael Joseph Hedley and Sykes are caught up dealing with some admin that is vexing the various members. With new album Land of Sleeper out in February, Pigs are due to fly to the States and are currently in the process of trying to sort out visas. It’s clearly a rolling headache that everyone is struggling with. “It’s just so bloody complicated,” says Hedley at one point. “It’s almost making me not want to go.”

Baty, Grant and drummer Ewan McKenzie hang back, and our discussion turns to the evolution of the bands. It’s a cliché that the output of most rock bands tends to get more and more flabby over time, but Pigs have taken their songs to the gym. A decade since the band emerged, unusually for a psychedelic band, their music has gotten more primitive over time. Starting with one short song amongst all the cosmic jams on Feed the Rats, the band have relentlessly edited their songwriting, so much so that most modern Pigs tracks are relatively taut, with their 2020 album Viscerals and upcoming album Land of Sleeper filled with songs that get the job done efficiently, the band’s aggressive slices of intensity having become their calling card. Grant is almost dismissive when I bring it up in conversation. “It was fully by accident, really,” he shrugs.

“We were really keen on signing with Rocket, and they were dead keen on putting the first couple of records out,” says McKenzie. “The only problem was that there was no track shorter than, like, eight minutes, so the first thing they asked us for was a shorter track or an edit that they could use for promo.”

He laughs. “You can’t just cut a three-minute song out of a larger one, so we went back and wrote that ‘Sweet Relief ’ track [featured on Feed the Rats]. I remember getting that riff and thinking, ‘Right, this is going to be our three-minute banger.”

“I was super resistant at first,” says Baty. “I can remember being really put out, all ‘But… that’s not us, that’s not what we do’, but in actual fact, it was a move that opened a lot of doors for us. Thing is, pretty soon, it was getting on the radio. I was like, ‘Holy fuck, how are we on the radio?’”

Pigs’ music – invariably rooted in heavy metal, doom metal and noise rock – could never be described as radio-

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friendly, yet the radio has actually been one of the key factors behind the band’s success. Early appearances on Shaun Keaveny’s BBC 6 Music breakfast show led to live sessions, which led to more gigs, which led to festival appearances. The band managed to find a small nationwide audience and built gradually from there, playing their heavy music in an accessible way.

Inhabiting a corner of music that is often known for over-serious personalities and an inflated sense of Am-Dram theatrics, there is something uniquely down to earth about Pigs. Their work is dark but weirdly funny. Their presentation style is mystic yet oddly relatable. It’s heavy metal without all of the associated baggage. They’re basically saying, ‘This is metal, and yes, you’re allowed to enjoy it.’

Putting this theory to the band, Baty flashes a grin like a kid whose hand has been caught in the biscuit tin. “I think that mostly comes from me as a frontman,” he admits eventually.

“In-between songs, I kind of feel like I’m bringing the energy right down, so to begin with, I’d just talk normally rather than doing the whole ‘How the fuck are you doing? Are you ready to BLEEED’ thing, and, actually, it works really nicely. In the midsized venues and the smaller venues, it kind of removes this barrier between you and the crowd. On the occasional times we’ve played larger venues, it does feel a bit weird, though, like muttering into the mic feels completely inadequate. I suppose if we ever eventually do a stadium tour, I’ll probably have to go full Freddy Mercury: you know – ‘Waay-OO, Keeeegan!’”

— Grand designs — Emerging onto a main road, we navigate a small, grassy verge and hop over a low fence to reach our final destination.

Once inside, the difference between the old and new Blank Studios is startling. All mahogany, high-end kit and comfortable, modern surroundings. Grant is keen to show me around, so as the bulk of the band heads off to make a cup of tea, he leads me into the main studio and talks me through his handy work. As it turns out, putting together a studio doesn’t just mean finding all the equipment and finding a space to put it in; Grant has built this place from scratch. Doing my best Kevin McCloud impression, I listen as he explains how he’s meticulously constructed the walls to maximise the acoustics, and worked closely with a local electrician to ensure that the amplifiers work just right.

When I ask him if he had any previous building experience, he just puffs. It’s truly impressive.

As we speak, Sykes joins us and idly presses the keys of an organ that has been slid up against one wall.

“That’s Liam Fender’s – Sam’s brother,” says Grant.

“He records here loads: he’s dead canny and really nice.”

“Oh yeah, does his music sound like his brother’s?” asks Sykes, barely looking up from noodling on his guitar.

“Not really.”

Catching up with the rest of the band, we reassemble in the kitchen. Stood around while the kettle boils, Baty draws my attention to a poster for Pigs’ new tour. “We’re getting a lot of grief at the moment because we’re mostly playing smaller places; like Lincoln, Portsmouth and Newport. People from Manchester

“IT’S ACTUALLY PRET TY MINT TO THIN K

THAT WE’V E FOUN D THAT HEAR T OF WHAT PIGS IS, AND THAT HEAR T IS STILL GROW ING”

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“WAT CHIN G MOST GIGS, WE’R E ALMO ST

CRAW LING OFF THE STAG E BECAUSE OF HOW MUCH WE’V E EXER TED. WE DON’ T DO ENCO RES, AND FOR A REAS ON”

have been giving us a bit of a kicking because we’re not coming to their town.”

Until a few weeks prior to my visit, Pigs had been holed up here putting the finishing touches on Land of Sleeper. The band’s fourth album and the first since McKenzie rejoined the band (he left after the band’s debut album in 2017), it’s a record that has seemed to solidify the two warring parts of the group’s collective nature. Sounding like a band who are comfortable in their skin, it’s an album that finds a balance between the trademark Sabbath-like intensity of the live show and their experimental, free-form approach to songwriting – their most complete sounding album yet.

Continuing our conversation as we move across the hall and into a blue carpeted control room, I’m surprised to find out that comfort and clarity is the last thing the band want in their process. “To me, this album has been reassuring to me because it shows that we’re not falling into a ‘paint by numbers’ approach to making music,” explains Grant. “It probably won’t do us any favours, as this is more of a dark, headphones listen than a party banger album, but it’s also empowering as a band. It’s actually pretty mint to think that we’ve found that heart of what Pigs is, and that heart is still growing.”

“It’s like The Blob, to be honest,” deadpans Hedley in agreement, referringtothe1988horrorclassic.“TheBlobabsorbseverything.”

Land of Sleeper has been one of the most relaxed recording experiences for the band so far. Written over a week-long retreat in Wales and recorded in the comfortable surrounds of Blank, it’s probably the least pressured Pigs have ever been. Somehow though, the album has turned out dark. It’s not just the intense doom of previous album Viscerals, but a weird, almost creeping, horror movie style of darkness. “The press release for the album starts with the Nightmare On Elm Street 3 quote for a reason,” says Baty, noting that while Land of Sleeper is not a concept album, dreams and sleep are references throughout. “There’re also recurring references to cycles,” he adds, “both beginning and ending – birth and regeneration, death and decay.”

Pigs have never been a political band and have never set out to reflect the state of the nation, but psychologically it’s impossible to cut yourself off completely from world events. The reality is that in some ways, the turmoil of the last

couple of years has probably manifested itself in this record.

“You see, I’m not totally sold on that,” explains Sykes, as we discuss the reasons for the band’s darker sound. “I think after such a comfortable experience recording the thing, we subconsciously wanted to make sure that the doom was still in there. I can remember being in Wales and being worried that this is going to turn out too nice. I was literally having anxiety about not having anxiety, if that makes sense.

“I also struggled with that,” nods Baty. “The recording process, it was going so fucking well, everyone was completely nailing it, we were going ahead of schedule, and the atmosphere was so relaxed. It sounded great. And that was worrying me. I was like, well, where’s the spanner in the works here? I was freaking out because of the complete lack of anxiety – it was absolutely insane. I was worried that we were being complacent and it was only until I got my turn to do the vocals that I remember a very distinct moment where I was like, Fuck. Like, I’m back. I’m doing this, and I think I can do this. Dare I say, I’m actually good at this.”

— The learning curve — It’s weird to think that a band who sound as well-drilled as Pigs are still on a learning curve. Admitting that they seldom listen back to their older work, the group are still keen to point out their strong sense of progression from album to album and how much they still have to learn as a band. The various members talk excitedly about the other projects they work on, from Rubber Oh, Grant’s upbeat, wonky pop outfit, to the sweeping electronica found on McKenzie’s solo project, Dextro, the group are unafraid to travel off down all sorts of creative avenues and musical alleyways. Richard Dawson is also an important touchpoint for the band, with Grant and Baty working closely with the local folk singer. Holding a position between mate, inspirational figure and pace-setter for the band, Grant explains the odd sense of synchronisation the group share with him. “Before [Pigs second album] King of Cowards, I’d just finished Peasant with Richard, and before Viscerals we’d finished 2020, and before Land of Sleeper we’d just finished The Ruby Chord,” he tells me. “To me, it’s always a humbling experience when you

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TERROR’S PILLOW LIVE AT BLANK STUDIOS Launching our new limited edition flex disc series, Loud And Quiet subscribers receive an exclusive live session version of new Land of Sleepers song ‘Terror’s Pillow’ with their copy of the magazine this month, recorded at Blank Studios.

Sam Grant talks us through the song, and this special version of it...

“I was really excited about this waltzy, almost classical feel it had going on, and was constantly trying to push that element more in the writing and production, hopefully giving it a less conventional rock/metal vibe. I like to think it has the air of an unreleased bonus track from Holst’s The Planets – though this is more an homage to the massive asteroid currently winging its way to Earth. Doing it as a live session also gave us the opportunity to really pull the tempo on it as well, giving it an alternative mood to the album version.

The nature of the track really suits both approaches, but for differing reasons.

This live version, in being slower, gets to be something a little more weighty and crushing – a bit more menacing. So I’m really pleased this one gets to exist too.”

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get to watch someone that’s as fucking good as that do what they do. You feel like a child, and in a lot of ways that’s a very healthy place to be.”

That final statement strikes me as a bit strange. If there has been one theme that’s surfaced over our afternoon together, it’s that whenever Pigs take a second to look back, they almost seem uncomfortable with what they’ve accomplished. After all, this is a band who have released three, soon to be four, critically acclaimed records, feature high up on the bills at festivals and sell out gigs regularly, yet there still seems to be some reluctance to accept that they’re successful. “Personally, it gets worse the more pressure we’re under,” groans Sykes when I ask where this imposter syndrome might be coming from. “The tight deadlines, the more people we have to play for, the worse it is. I’m like, ‘I can’t play guitar, but here I am, so here I go..’”

“Sometimes I reckon I hide behind it,” says Grant. “I honestly don’t think I’m all that as a musician and I’m using imposter syndrome to convince myself that I am. Working in a studio, man, every fucking day I get artists coming through and I’m constantly blown away by the talent of some people. I’m just like, man. And I’m also under no illusions because I can record myself and hear myself and just have it in a speaker, whether it’s vocals or guitar or whatever, and hold it against that. I know that, personally, my strengths lie in production. But as a musician, I’m not pulling all the tricks in the book.”

Thinking for a second, Baty has a more philosophical take.

“Part of this attitude fuels us in a way, especially in a live setting, because you’re kind of full of these thoughts of inadequacy, you know that you’ve got to go onto the stage and you’ve got to do everything. Just release absolutely every grain of energy that you have to make that fulfilling experience for yourself and for everyone. Watching most gigs, we’re almost crawling off the stage because of how much we’ve exerted. It’s cliché to say it, but everything is left on the stage. There is no more. We don’t do encores, and for a reason. It is all there.”

“It keeps you hungry – in a good way,” adds Sykes. “When it comes to music, I always overshoot. I always want to do something out of the box and then worry for the next two months that I can never play it again. That’s where the energy comes from. It’s like I am never fully prepared. I can’t play what I’ve written half of the time. And it’s that excitement that keeps me in a lot of time” Our short tour has come to an end and we return our cups and head back out onto the street to find, in our absence, that night has fallen and people are making their way home from work. As the band say their goodbyes and organise their next meet-up, the sound of an a-board being scraped into the street pulls my attention to a pub down the road. “You know what? We filmed our first video in that pub,” says McKenzie, who’s seen the same thing. “We needed to get something done quickly and we just went in there and asked. They were like, ‘No problem; when do you want to do it?’

“That’s the great thing about Newcastle, people want each other to do well. There’s so little bitterness; so little competitiveness. I think the reason why we’ve all stayed here is that, ultimately, it’s a pretty supportive place. People just want to see you do well.”

Subscribe to Loud And Quiet Loud And Quiet is powered by its readers who value indpendent music as much as we do. Subscribe today to receive our magazines, playlists, full site access, monthly vinyl discounts and this month’s limited edition Pigs x 7 flexi disc

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Why not?

As she releases her second album in|FLUX, Anna B Savage is ready to push herself further than ever before. She speaks to Jumi Akinfenwa about therapy, relationship anarchism and the freedom that comes with being single and melodramatic.

Photography by Phil Sharp

Ketamine. Psilocybin mushrooms. Bright lights, shining directly into your eyes. On the surface, it may seem like I’m describing a great night out; yet these items also form the basis of some of the more leftfield forms of therapy that have emerged in recent years, which I’m discussing with Anna B Savage.

“Apparently it is like the best thing ever. I’m desperate to do that,” she says, referring to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Though her own experiences over the past few years have mainly involved more conventional treatments, they have allowed her to embrace her more spiritual side. “If someone asked whether they could read my tarot a few years ago, I would burst into tears because I’d be so afraid,” she laughs. “Whereas now, I’m like, yeah, I wanna move my eyes to get rid of my trauma!”

Therapy has been an integral part of Anna’s creative process throughout the making of her second album, in|FLUX. Recognising that life and growth are non-linear helped to inform the wider themes of the album. “It has the flux of the old mental state that still feels very A Common Turn [her debut] – quite introspective and neurotic and nitpicky,” she explains, “but then also being able to level it out with this new state of being like, ‘That’s fine... It’s okay. Why not? Why not feel like that sometimes? But also I can feel a different way.’”

With tours with Jenny Hval and Father John Misty, a master’s degree in Popular Music Practice and wide acclaim for her debut album all behind her, by the time it came to working on in|FLUX, a different approach was needed for Savage to avoid

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becoming overwhelmed and succumbing to the pressures she put upon herself.

Starting her current therapy journey in January 2020, it was hard to shake those initial preconceived notions of what therapy is and who it’s meant to help. “I kind of went there being like, ‘I’m fine, there’s nothing wrong, there’s nothing that I’m really struggling with,’” she says, “but maybe it would just be nice to have a little bit of support.” With current NHS therapy waiting lists spanning several years, and GPs quick to prescribe a few sessions of online CBT to those with severe mental ailments caused by generational trauma and austerity, Anna is quick to point out the privilege of not only having access to therapy but also a good working relationship with her therapist. “I find myself saying that it’s frivolous and it’s navel-gazing. Whereas actually I think if everyone had access to therapy? Fucking hell, things would be so different.”

This emotional work and personal development can be heard throughout in|FLUX, often through its lyrical themes.

Take the lingering remnants of past romantic relationships on ‘The Ghost’, or the attempt at moving on when feelings aren’t reciprocated on ‘I Can Hear The Birds Now’; even in our modern age of oversharing, there is a sincerity and earnestness here that feels distinct. Part of this came from her daily ‘Morning Pages’ taken from self-help book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which resulted in a stream of consciousness that allowed Savage to trust herself and her own thought process. “It was so useful to be able to get that neurosis out, have it be seen and heard,” she

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says. “I still obviously second guessed everything I did because that’s just who I am. But it was a really, really useful tool to be able to access more of that trust.”

— Melodramatic Easter eggs — There is a distinct lack of polish on in|FLUX; a ‘take it as is’ approach which allows for new discoveries on every listen.

“There are some things that I’ve put in that no one’s ever gonna know about except for me and [producer] Mike Lindsay, which is really fun. I purposefully set out to make it quite a different experience from A Common Turn and I couldn’t have asked for a better collaborator. He was so positive and such a ‘Yes Man’.

Whatever suggestion I had, he was like, ‘yeah, let’s try it.’” One such Easter egg appears at the end of ‘Say My Name’, in which a sharp intake of breath is heard at the end, Anna trying to hold back tears whilst recording.

“I’m melodramatic as fuck!”, she cackles, and attributes to both of her parents being opera singers, a style of perfor-

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mance which takes pride in its theatrics. “I used to find it so embarrassing and I cry all the fucking time. But now I feel it’s my body showing me that I’m responding to something. It feels like a really important sentiment that I wanted to bring to the album. And it felt like a release to me.”

A rawness that is felt throughout the new album, these happy accidents point to a humanity within her music that Anna herself didn’t previously have access to – a complete willingness to be unapologetically herself, a person that she didn’t truly know or understand before. “I’m basically putting myself into this scenario where I trust that I will come up with something that is hilarious and absolutely terrifying and not really something I think that I’d ever done before.”

— In flux — With A Common Turn initially due for release back in 2020 but subsequently delayed until the following year, Anna found herself with more time to be creative and to learn – her

favourite pastime. “I knew that music wasn’t gonna happen in the way that music had been happening so I was a bit like, ‘Fuck, what am I gonna do? I’ve changed my whole life for this’.” Embarking on an Ableton course, which she was admittedly terrified of, she credits her tutor Brian (“he’s the fucking best”) with helping her tackle the behemoth. As part of this course, Anna had to create a new song weekly, one of which turned out to be title track ‘in|FLUX’. “It’s one of the only songs I’ve ever written that has no guitar in it, which is definitely my preferred method of songwriting,” she says. It’s a track that goes against convention throughout, perfectly evidenced by a sonic switch-up part way through which follows a “glam metal shouty bit”, and it’s a slight departure from the rest of the album, inspired by her love of dancing. “I’ve got too many weird time signatures and no through line of a fucking tempo,” she says. “I needed to try and work something out. So I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna make a song that people could dance to.’”

“Fuck it” is a sentiment that Anna seemingly adopts in her approach to just about everything nowadays. There’s the understanding that life is going to just do its thing so it’s up to us to find our own fulfilment within it. For Anna, much of this fulfilment came from being single despite the “insidious shit” in society that suggests that singledom is a miserable existence that you have to suffer through until someone’s son comes along to save you from eternal damnation. “It’s so good. I was just like, ‘I’m gonna move to Canada’, or ‘I’m gonna go to Ireland now,’” she says gleefully. “Just making decisions like that, not having to think about anything. It’s so weird that that feels like it is going against the grain in some way.”

Believe it or not, being single can be fun when you know who you are, what you want and how to ask for it. ‘Touch Me’ speaks of the joy of the slow burn; the beauty of the build and anticipation in a time where everyone’s in such a rush. ‘Pavlov’s Dog’ speaks of a positive and communicative sexual experience.

With many single women, particularly those dating heterosexual men, recounting their horror stories of emotionally unavailable Hinge matches who don’t wash their legs in the shower, it’s refreshing to hear someone suggest that sometimes casual sex can actually be quite…nice?

“I had some incredibly intimate, wonderful connections with people,” says Anna. “It fills your soul up. It’s so wonderful.”

The work of psychotherapist Esther Perel and her unpacking of eroticism as a practice that operates independently of intercourse served as inspiration here. “I think I’m completely obsessed with people, just that idea that you can have these connections with someone that only last for a certain amount of time, but for me anyway, they can really reboost my sense of self.”

It’s this self-awareness that has enabled Anna to maintain this mindset now that she is in a relationship, which she suggests with slight frustration undercuts her previous statements, though acknowledging that life’s contradictions are all part of what being ‘in flux’ is all about. You can be happily single but also want some company and a cuddle. You can be happily partnered and need some alone time. There is no either/or when in a state of flux. The flux, as I have come to understand

it, seems to consist of constant transitions mixed with pragmatism, which sounds chaotic in theory but in practice is the complete opposite. Simply put, Anna’s just going with the flow, which led her to a music residency in Canada in 2018 – one of 30 things that she hoped to achieve before her 30th birthday, and an experience she simply describes as “magical”.

Finding herself on the social periphery for much of her life up to this point, the 20-strong group effectively became a chosen family; one she pays homage to on tracks ‘Hungry’ and ‘The Orange’, the latter with a nod to American composer John Luther Adams’ ‘The Wind in High Places’, which was introduced to her by a friend out there. “I just wanted to write a nice song,” she says. “I listened to loads of podcasts about [Adams] and I just wanted to give some sort of nod to how moved I still feel by that whole experience.” On the track, Anna also reveals that she doesn’t “want kids or a partner” and that this is always met with disbelief. We’re often told who and what to prioritise and that the nuclear family is a goal that all of us will come around to eventually, and that anything that defies this is anathema. She aligns with the term “relationship anar-

“I’m basically putting myself into this scenario where I trust that I will come up with something that is hilarious and absolutely terrifying”

chist”, which sounds a little punk pastiche, but in reality is just more about not putting others on pedestals based on their relationship to you as opposed to their relationship with you. “It makes so much sense to me – giving your non-romantic and non-familial relationships the same gravitas as the romantic and familial,” she says, though she admits there is a “sadness” of not being able to see her “chosen Canadian family” regularly. “It drains a lot of energy for me trying to keep in touch on WhatsApp. But I do actually still speak to all these people, so it’s really love.”

Crediting this trip across the Atlantic with her ultimately being signed by her label City Slang, Anna is firmly where she wants to be on in|FLUX. “I think it shows off a bit of a different side of me, which feels more encompassing of who I am as a human,” she says. Yet despite the serious therapeutic undertones, Anna is ultimately quite laissez-faire about it, expertly mimicking the shrug emoji as a means of summing up the essence of the album. “It’s that feeling of – it’s not the end of the world. It’s fine. We’ll just move on to the next thing.”

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Back to work

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As they return with their sharpest, leanest album yet the ‘three Beyoncés’ of pioneering Edinburgh group Young Fathers discuss visibility, relationships and strife with Skye Butchard. Photography by Henri Kisielewski

Young Fathers never meant to take a five-year break between records. The goal was to use the energy from the Cocoa Sugar live shows as momentum for a whole new run of recording sessions. Family commitments and the pandemic got in the way, and the group found themselves coming back down to earth after a hectic few years. Graham ‘G’ Hastings had his first child.

Kayus Bankole used the time to travel to West Africa, while Alloysious Massaquoi reconnected with family and soaked up life’s mundane moments.

The group have just moved into a rehearsal space in Leith to get “match ready” for live shows, as Alloysious puts it. Graham welcomes me in with a handshake and a chocolate digestive from the cornershop. It remains half-eaten in my pocket during our chat. He apologises for the mess of wires and the cold of the unit. We sit underneath a plastic chandelier, which feels at odds with the group’s vibe (Kayus soon joins, while Alloysious meets later via Zoom). All three members admit they’re still figuring out what the live shows will be like after time away. They still need to learn the words. It’s been a while since some of the songs were written. Still, that danger has been central to their appeal since the beginning. They thrive on it.

“We’d walk into the studio, take our coats off and start playing something without even saying hello,” Kayus says on their close connection, even after time away. “I love these guys, but it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t have time for hello?”

“From there we’d just start trying ideas and seeing what sounded good,” says Graham. “That spontaneity is a big part of what makes us unique, and being able to be free with how you record was a big part of this record.”

“It’s a testament to how Graham set up the studio,” says Kayus. “You could go from singing to playing something really easily, so you could build on someone else’s idea and keep the feeling going. I love extreme frequencies – I used to say I want to hear all frequencies, all at once. It’s become a joke for us, because that would just be white noise. But the layering on the album does that too.”

“Sometimes there would be a weird element buried in there that you couldn’t hear, but if you took it out the track would lose something,” Graham adds.

— Heavy Heavy — Heavy Heavy is a fitting title for the new Young Fathers album. When you think of emotional heaviness, you think of being weighed down by depressive feelings. But that repetition of the word brings a playfulness to it, while adding to the weight. Like its name, the music is dense with sound and

feeling, all emotions pushed to the max. At just 30 minutes, it’s a short, sharp collection of tracks that have been whittled down to deliver the most impact. Young Fathers have always worked with a heady mix of minimal and maximal. Their return explores the extremes in both directions, finding common ground in how their separate perspectives come together. “We’re three different people. We’ve forged an existence together in terms of knowing each other since we were kids,” says Alloysious. “We have different opinions, but also we do agree on the root of what we’re trying to do. That’s what brings us together, us celebrating our differences. There’s democracy in the group as well.”

The songs were recorded in batches on the fly. Sometimes it wouldn’t be until the group came back to listen that they were able to piece together what a song was about. At the centre of it is a feeling of communal catharsis and capturing the magic in the room.

“We’d have listening days where you listen back to the songs a while after you recorded it,” says Graham.

“You’re never sure if the feeling is still going to be there, but ‘Shoot Me Down’ was one where that feeling was there.

That formed the centre of the record. We had that as the opener for ages. We really care about the album as a cohesive thing, so we spent more time arguing about the sequencing and the order. We recorded so much stuff. Probably about three albums worth that didn’t make it, but these were the songs that worked together and had that communal feeling.”

“I told you there’s three albums here!” Kayus shouts, echoing the passion and hearty disagreement that comes with having three equal voices in the room.

“We had debates and battles about what songs should be in and what shouldn’t be, and this one worked the best for the feeling we wanted to go for,” says Alloysious. “This has been the longest experience to date. Usually when we record, that’s it and we put it out… When you’re idle, people start being pernickety.

People start losing confidence and second-guessing stuff.”

“Eventually we decided to try ‘Rice’ at the start,” says Graham. It was the one that seemed to work everywhere. That’s a funny one, because when we showed friends and family, they weren’t sure it was ‘us’.”

The record is full of subtle surprises and subversions. ‘Rice’, like many other tracks on the record, is an upbeat, borderline cheery gospel-leaning song in a major key. Kayus and Graham laugh when I ask if the focus on major keys was intentional.

“We’re definitely not thinking about keys or anything like that. We play and figure out what it means after,” says Graham.

All three members lead in different ways, and reiterate that there’s little ego when it comes to who sings what part

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“Why have we never been played on Radio 1Xtra?

Am I not Black enough? Is our music not urban enough?”

or who’s the lead writer. Alloysious jokes that “there are three Beyoncés in the group.” It’s clear that he is the band’s biggest optimist. He has complete faith that they can take over the world. It’s surprising to hear that the break gave him pause on whether he’d want to.

“For me it’s been a whole process of finding that feeling again,” he says. “I have a love-hate relationship with music. I’m passionate about creativity in general, but when the rug gets pulled from under your feet with Covid, you start looking at art as redundant. They say: ‘Hemingway wrote this masterpiece, or Picasso painted this during a time of strife’. I don’t give a fuck about any of that. What matters? It’s all the interpersonal relationships that I have. Family, friends, people that you have in your ecosystem. Those are the things that matter. That’s the experience that went into the record.”

— Who do you think you are? — Anyone who’s seen Young Fathers live knows that they can shake you awake. Part of their approach has been to use doubt and fear to their advantage.

“I used to be confrontational with the crowd,” Graham says. “We used to play a game and see how long it would take for us to win them over. For years, we played to crowds who weren’t there for us, [supporting] people like Paul Weller or playing festivals. It wasn’t until Cocoa Sugar that really changed, and I

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realised people knew the songs and were with us right away.”

“You’re in a space and creating a moment that could easily be destroyed,” says Alloysious. “It’s a conversation with the audience. It doesn’t have to be said. Most of the way we communicate is non-verbal communication. That balance in-between space is the sweet spot where there’s jubilation. It’s almost spiritual… Sometimes people just need you to show them how to dance to the songs and they understand it.”

In the decade that the band have been working together, music has caught up to the kinds of things they believed in from the beginning. Rap, electronic and indie categorisations aren’t as rigid as they once were, and the underground and mainstream are more amorphous as labels as they’ve ever been. Still, the group have frustrations with how many barriers there are for artists who can’t as easily be quantified.

“For me, visibility is so important.” says Kayus. “We’re a multi-racial group playing music that I wouldn’t have heard when I was younger… Why have we never been played on Radio 1Xtra? Am I not Black enough? Is our music not urban enough?”

“It happens when we’ve played in America too,” Graham says.

“No one knows where to put us. We played a hip-hop TV show there, where it went well and the crowd loved us, but we didn’t get the call back.”

Later on, Alloysious passionately tells me that they should be considered alongside the Ed Sheerans and Drakes of the world, just to show people there are more voices out there.

Still, he can see the impact they’re having.

“Let’s call a spade a spade: music is all based on external validation. As human beings you need to be validated by your family or whoever else. But for me, if you pour into yourself, other people can be inspired by that. Coming to Scotland from a civil war as a refugee, you would never know. You’d never know what my mother especially has been through. Being alive is because of her and the sacrifices she made. It’s a bonus to do all that kind of stuff, so I’m not feart.”

Graham admits that when they started the group, it was a selfish endeavour. He didn’t realise the impact their music had on people until he saw it reflected at live shows.

“The diversity that you see at our shows in terms of ages, clothes, race, and everything proves what we do is good. Good music is good music.”

It’s fast becoming the go-to slur for any new artist who blows up ‘too quickly’ for some online communities and conspiracy theorists. But what does it really mean to be an ‘industry plant’, do they even exist, and if they do, does it really matter? Daniel Dylan Wray writes on rising distrust and the myth of authenticity

WHAT IS AN ‘INDUSTRY PLANT’ ANYWAY?

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With the start of every new year, the relevance of ‘ones to watch’ type articles arguably become ever more diminished. Predicting what’s going to be popular has always been a crapshoot, but during periods of relative stability in the music industry, some trajectories seem more inevitable and bankable than others.

Artists build momentum, grow a wider audience, get label backing and become an obvious and relatively safe tip.

However, getting experts to predict genuine breakthrough artists in the streaming and TikTok age feels bordering on antiquated, like trying to cast spells to summon gods. At a time when bedroom pop songs made by teenagers can blow up and go viral overnight, when Kate Bush can return to number one after 37 years because of music placement in a Netflix show, or cult Scottish post-punk outfit Life Without Buildings can rack up over 11 million Spotify plays because of a track being used on TikTok, it’s clear that much of the real power over what explodes, breaks through or sets the tone for the year lies with forces outside of the music industry itself. Where labels, press, radio and the like once laid down an agenda for the year, increasingly they are now responding to ones that have already been determined democratically.

Despite many labels’ growing obsession with TikTok and their attempts to penetrate and manipulate its output (Cat Zhang’s 2022 essay ‘TikTok Is Turning Music Marketing Into a Labyrinthian Game’ for Pitchfork is insightful on such tactics), predicting what will blow up in 2023 simply feels impossible. I mean, just look at all the backbreaking gymnastics people did to try and convince everyone, and themselves, that Indie Sleaze was going to be a thing in 2022, only for the biggest retro 2000s hit of the year to turn out to be, effectively, a novelty song: ‘Jiggle Jiggle’, a reworked rap from a Louis Theroux episode.

Yet still the lists and predictions come. For loose guidance, fun and genuine recommendations from individual music writers, they still serve a welcome purpose and can be a nice boost for emerging artists. The most prominent of these lists is the BBC Sound of… poll, which knocks up a ten-artist longlist at the end of each year, with a winner announced early the following one. The 2023 winner is FLO, with other nominees including the likes of Asake, Fred Again, Gabriels, Nia Archives and Biig Piig. This list was chosen by a panel of over 130 industry experts and artists.

With every fresh arrival of the BBC Sound of… poll, a wave of cynicism or criticism often follows. A regular objection is that the BBC – through its TV and radio channels, as well as music festivals – has the power to actually make these nominated artists relatively successful and therefore has some degree of control over the outcome of their predictions.

All the way back in 2008, The Guardian’s Kitty Empire wrote that the poll was “like a cold climate Mercury Prize shortlist” that “generates a lot of buzz and ripple, chiming as it does with the many other Ones to Watch features in print and online.

The cumulative weight of all this predictive text creates a selffulfilling prophecy. These tippable acts will often have tours booked and singles playlisted and a whole infrastructure of investment in place.” She concluded that “it all seems so preordained… the industry of tipping offers us a scripted musical

future. All this copy-cat consensus takes away choice.”

As alluded earlier, major criticisms of the list have frequently suggested it is too heavily weighted towards mainstream acts on major labels, and so safe horses with stacks of money and publicity teams behind them, who have already penetrated press circles ahead of time, are being backed over grassroots artists, never mind punts on some kid in a bedroom in Bradford knocking out mind-melting acid-donk or something. One A&R person, from one of the UK’s largest independent record labels, told me: “I didn’t even bother looking at BBC Sound of 2023. For the last five years it has been controlled by the majors.”

Despite the ability to clearly predict what is going to happen in the ensuing year slipping through the fingers of the music industry ever more in the social media age, such lists now seem to be less about meaningful power, prestige and prescience, and more of a desperate clinging onto the status quo; a last-gasp attempt to retain established order in a world where the unpredictable and chaotic reigns supreme.

However, while these same criticisms have been rearing their head year-on-year when the list is announced – and the idea that major labels have a potentially unfair influence over shaping hype and narrative is hardly new – what’s started to accompany them, and new artists as a whole, is accusations of being industry plants.

— “Where’d he come from?” — Wet Leg came runner up in the BBC Sound of 2022 poll, but along with their swift success came a torrent of accusations of being an industry plant. Their arrival, apparently from nowhere (the Isle of Wight), already signed to indie heavyweight Domino and with a remarkably fully-formed, infectious debut single – a rare beast that captivated TikTok-obsessed teenagers and 6Music-listening dads alike – seemed so perfect that it could only have been the workings of something more sinister, constructed and manufactured.

An ‘industry plant’ is largely accepted to mean an artist who presents themselves as being independent and doing things on their own terms, but secretly has the industry backing and money to fund them and to artificially shape such a narrative.

Its roots go back to the hip-hop world, gaining prominence a decade or so ago with people accusing the likes of Chance the Rapper of being such a plant; such was the speed and force of his ascent that many deemed it could only be the result of a carefully manufactured and label-backed move. Years later, in 2018, it was still something that he struggled to shake off. “One thing that presses me sometimes…” he told Pitchfork. “I got pretty thick skin but ni**as be trying to call me an industry plant.”

In the rap world, these accusations carry a particularly weighty punch. Given the significance of personal back story in many hip-hop artists’ work – often accounts of struggle, of grinding your way out of a troubled existence to a better life for you and your family – it’s seen as particularly offensive if you’re portraying yourself as busting your way up through the ranks without mentioning the industry coin in your pocket acting as

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a vital safety net. The fundamental issue here seems to be that not only are you being disingenuous or flat-out deceiving your audience, but you are trading off their sympathy – or worse, their empathy.

Over the years, this has gone from being relatively specific to the hip-hop world to becoming common across pop, indie and even punk, with the pop-punk outfit the Tramp Stamps being declared “the most hated band on TikTok”, such was the vengeful pile-on around them being industry plants. Since Lana Del Rey’s heavily criticised and stigmatised transformation around the release of ‘Video Games’, those who have been accused of similar transgressions include Billie Eilish, Halsey, Phoebe Bridgers, Clairo, Jack Harlow and countless others.

“I just want to hear the reasons why that’s said,” Eilish said in response. “I don’t believe in the industry plant bullshit because it’s actually impossible to make someone genuinely successful and it be fake. You can get famous and be fake but not have people cherish you and make art that is really good.”

Harlow responded by doubling down on his work rate credentials. “I did open mics, I did SXSW,” he said. “I did showcases with no one there. My first tour, I went to Madison, Wisconsin, and did a bar with eight people. If people didn’t see any of that, they’re like, ‘Where’d he come from?’” The Tramp Stamps were forced to make a statement, also taking a defensive stance, by stating: “You have gone to the ends of the fucking earth to shit on us, have told us to kill ourselves, and have used conspiracy theories on TikTok as a trend to get more views on your own videos. Fuck you. You don’t like our music? Don’t listen to it.”

Of course, nobody admits to being an industry plant, if such a thing were to even exist, because people have an instinctive response to defend their own hard work regardless of their background. Despite many people in the industry benefiting hugely from privilege or nepotism, they don’t believe that undermines or eradicates the hard work they’ve put in. It’s a bit like being accused of being a bad driver, it’s something people get passionately defensive about despite clear evidence to the contrary. Nobody wants to be seen as having had an easy or free ride, and of course people work hard regardless of how they got there in the first place. But this attitude creates blind spots, wilful ignorance, or even delusions, resulting in an industry that is frankly riddled with people from vastly privileged backgrounds who have convinced themselves its merit alone that has got them there (see also: the Conservative Party). A recent report in the UK found that the proportion of workingclass creative workers has shrunk by half, to just 7.9%, since the 1970s.

However, seeking justice and redressing inequality doesn’t necessarily seem to be the primary motivators for people leading these witch-hunt type investigations. When TikTokers dug up old tweets from a member of the Tramp Stamps using the n-word and seeming to suggest she supported Donald Trump, as well as the band’s guitarist having an old publishing deal with the label of alleged abuser Dr Luke, the greatest ire seemed to be aimed at the falseness of the band, their inauthenticity, being accused of “co-opting riot grrrl aesthetics”.

The anger and contempt seem more to do with the (admit-

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tedly horrible) marketing of the band, and what an insulting thing it is to try and present and package a shiny new pop-punk band to a young, smart and engaged audience who can smell insincerity and disingenuity a mile off. In the world of industry plant accusations, a perceived lack of authenticity seemingly trumps all in terms of offences – which seriously, and problematically, muddies the waters.

— Flat Earth for the TikTok gen — I use the above term witch-hunt specifically, because the overwhelming majority of artists attacked and accused of being plants are young women, the idea being that they are not capable of attaining talent, fame and success on their own at such a young age with no help and therefore are immediately suspect. For comparison, take Yard Act in comparison to Wet Leg – a band that is, on the face of it, just as neatly positioned to be met with these kinds of accusations. They formed at the same time (2019), blew up with a similar speed and trajectory with very little background in gigging and doing the circuit, both signed, both nominated for the same BBC Sound of… poll. Yet Google each band’s name followed by ‘industry plant’ and the difference is staggering.

“When it comes down to it, it’s just misogyny, isn’t it?” said Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale to Rolling Stone last year. Similarly, Clairo, whose lo-fi bedroom pop went viral and got millions of hits when she was a teenager, was bombarded with these accusations. By just 22, she had resigned herself to the fact that “what this industry does a lot is drain young women of everything until they’re not youthful anymore.”

The ‘industry plant’ phenomenon, which is largely driven

by TikTok sleuths, Reddit posters and YouTubers set out to uncover perceived holes or untruths in the stories of artists, shares an uneasy affiliation with many other traits of extremely online communities, in that they are ultimately peddling in conspiracy with little regard for the fall out. Tour support for Wet Leg, Declan McKenna, tweeted in February 2022 that “the ‘industry plant’ truthers are getting like flat earth for the TikTok gen”. While arguably less pernicious or dangerous than other conspiracist communities, a certain dogged determination to out so-called industry plants ultimately feels like a product of the same mindset; a world of misinformation and distrust that has seen many other online communities become radicalised to varying extents.

— Always factor in the algorithms — There are many reasons why ‘industry plants’ are a bogus construct. The first, most glaring, and unsurmountable, is that if there was some kind of ready-made, workable formula to break young artists into overnight sensations and viral megastars, then we’d be drowning in industry plants. That would be the de-facto industry method. Why waste time and money on the traditional A&R approach?

There are also some logical, infrastructural reasons for artists seemingly exploding from nowhere. On a basic level, a

“IN THE WORLD OF INDUSTRY PLANT ACCUSATIONS, A PERCEIVED LACK OF AUTHENTICITY SEEMINGLY TRUMPS ALL IN TERMS OF OFFENCES”

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global online fan community has the power to do that very easily, naturally and democratically. Changes to streaming technology in recent years may also be a major factor; in 2019, Billboard made changes so that streamed songs and albums were weighted more heavily in its chart data, which could result in unexpected anomalies appearing on those charts, as well as making it easier for unknowns to go viral and have hits. Similarly, the introduction of the auto-play function in 2017 by Spotify – which automatically plays music that the algorithm determines you may like based on pre-existing listening habits – has also resulted in unexpected megahits. This could explain why, for example, an obscure Pavement B-side, ‘Harness Your Hopes’, blew up out of nowhere and became their most popular track on the platform, currently having racked up nearly 89 million streams, despite zero effort by the band, label, or anyone else, to promote that song. If they were a new band, would they too have been deemed a plant?

Given that social media can make stars out of bedroom artists overnight, creating a pathway to success that has never felt more accessible or attainable to some young artists looking on, you can maybe also factor in jealousy or bitterness as a potential driver for some ‘industry plant’ truthers. There are also the numbers that come with ‘industry plant’ videos, often

to harness that same power negatively if things aren’t to their satisfaction. So, while a perceived lack of authenticity seems to be the fundamental underpinning to the rise of industry plant accusers – plus all the aforementioned pepperings of misogyny and conspiracy theory – the parameters and definitions of authenticity itself seem to be growing, and perhaps warping.

Authenticity in its most basic essence can, and arguably should, mean simply: be yourself. But in an increasingly hostile and ever-changing online environment, it can often mean: be the version of yourself that your audience wants, expects or even demands. Authenticity, in some instances, has been turned into a framework set by other people that artists are expected to squeeze into rather than one they shape and present to the public themselves. Ironically, this results in the polar opposite of authenticity and originality.

The modern-day demands for authenticity in this context have moved away from more traditional expectations. In a postpoptimism, post-genre landscape, it has seemingly moved away from established notions of musical authenticity, which have always been a flawed and dubious thing to attach to music. In a 2008 piece for The Guardian, reviewing the book Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity in Popular Music, the late writer Steven Wells decried that authenticity “is a conservative illusion

“WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO IT, IT’S JUST MISOGYNY, ISN’T IT?” SAID WET LEG’S RHIAN TEASDALE TO ROLLING STONE LAST YEAR racking up hundreds of thousands of views, creating an incentive to keep the conversation going, regardless of nuance, validity or accuracy. The 2021 documentary Cult or Commune: Inside ‘The Garden’ is a fascinating portal into this process and the mindsight of TikTok truthers, who set out to expose what they initially believe is a cult.

— The full package — All of this is playing out in a climate where the demands put upon artists by fans is ever-growing. A recent Vice article, ‘Why Do Live Music Audiences Suck Right Now?’, examined some of this entitled behaviour from fans who have been using artists’ shows as their own platform to gain online clout rather than attend the show on the artists’ terms. When Mitski kindly asked her fans to chill out on their phones during her shows, she received such a fierce backlash that she ended up deleting the original request. The fans won.

While online communities can harness the power to break artists or catapult them to another level of fame and notoriety altogether, in some instances that can come loaded with a certain sense of ownership or expectation in return. They are then able

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chased by unimaginative fools,” adding that “while the myth of the authentic has produced tensions which have created some fantastic music, it has led to far more mediocrity and awfulness.”

This shift and redefinition is largely a good thing, given that when stripped to its component parts, authenticity has historically been used to essentially refer to little other than earnest white blokes with guitars. However, the modern-day expectations around authenticity, while less rooted in musical purity, seem more centred on the individual and the cult of personality, which brings with it its own set of problems, leaving artists increasingly open to attacks if they don’t fulfil an oftenunreasonable set of criteria: hence the growing shrieks of ‘industry plant’. “We live in a world where it’s full package – how do you look, who are you dating, who is she?” the hugely successful R&B star HER, who has been perpetually accused of being an industry plant, told Vulture in 2021. “We’ve lost sight of what’s important, which is the music.”

Final Third: Cold Take

Don’t take this the wrong way What’s the silliest thing you’ve ever done on drugs?

According to Alex Turner, he hadn’t taken any cocaine when he made his speech at the BRIT Awards in 2014. Face contorting like an estate agent celebrating a particularly juicy con, pupils flaring almost as much as his nostrils, rambling about “that rock and roll” in that weird Partridge-goes-toVegas accent he adopted for a bit, the man was stone-cold sober apparently. Okay mate!

It’s a fun watch now, nine years on. Turner looks like a four-year-old’s drawing of Elvis doing a bad impression of Al Pacino, while his bandmates look like they’ve come in lastminute fancy dress as the Bad Seeds. Emeli Sandé, having just announced that the band have won Best British Album (for AM), looks pretty confused, but is certain that Turner is being a twat.

“That rock and roll eh,” he drawls, waggling his trophy. “It just won’t go away. It might hibernate from time to time, and sink back into the swamp…” He pauses for a gurn. “I think the cyclical nature of the universe in which it exists demands it adheres to some of its rules.” And so on, for really quite a long time.

“Thank you very fucking much for this,” he says, finally reaching some kind of conclusion. “I do truly appreciate it. Don’t take that the wrong way” – what way would that be Alex? – “Invoice me for the microphone if you need to.” He drops the mic. To be honest it’s more like a toddler throwing bread into a duck pond than a sign-off at the Correspondents’ Dinner, but it does give the ramble we’ve just witnessed its first bit of punctuation.

What’s interesting about the whole performance when we look back at it now, though, isn’t whether or not Turner had been hoovering up enormous rails of chop as if he was some kind of rock star or something, or whatever he actually said in his nonsense speech. It certainly wasn’t his little mic drop at

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the end. What makes it quite interesting to look back on now is what’s happened since, both to Arctic Monkeys and the music industry more widely.

I vividly remember the reaction to The Speech. “The fame’s gone to his head!” cried some. “He’s taken cocaine!” howled others, who’d clearly never been to a high-end awards show, glitzy music industry event or small-town Wetherspoon’s at 10pm on a Friday in their lives. It was almost as if none of these people had ever experienced sarcasm, parody or any humour whatsoever, and instead were expecting the frontman of a band called Arctic Monkeys – who’d just put out an album containing song titles like ‘Knee Socks’ and ‘Mad Sounds’ – to say something insightful when he’s in the middle of a big night out.

Firstly, let’s just put this in some honest context: we’re talking about a corporate-sponsored, old-school, major-label music awards ceremony here – there’ll have been dozens of people in that room, literally as he was speaking, making Turner look like a Dalai Lama-style paragon of sobriety and wisdom.

Also, awards ceremonies like this, whatever their other virtues, are extremely silly. In a way, it’s sort of weird that Turner’s speech stood out in its daftness – have you seen where he’s stood, the people around him, the fanfare he’s being garlanded by for having written some thinly-veiled metaphors for shagging?

Alex Turner did exactly the right thing, and had a laugh.

Did he believe that stuff about the swamp? Well yeah, maybe at the time, but I’m willing to bet he wouldn’t defend it as anything other than a hastily-prepared piss-take, a hamming-up of his post-AM showman persona, in the cold light of day. Just look at the other members of the band as he’s delivering his lines – their efforts to keep it as deadpan as they’ve obviously pre-agreed are constantly fraying at the edges, Matt Helders’ thousand-yard

Final Third: Cold Take

Reflecting on Alex Turner’s notorious BRITs speech as people continue to struggle with the concept of “having a laugh”, by Luke Cartledge

stare frequently threatened by Jamie Cook muttering to him out of the side of his mouth like a bad ventriloquist, or his own personal moments of “lol, fucking hell” clarity. (This is the same band who picked up a BRIT Award six years earlier, in 2008, all dressed in tweeds, pretending to be country squires, don’t forget.)

Since 2014, Arctic Monkeys have released two more albums (Turner has also contributed to another – a horrid Last Shadow Puppets record with mod goblin Miles Kane, at which point it actually did feel like the gak might’ve been getting the better of him). Both 2017’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino and 2022’s The Car see the band refining the same gag, leaning

“The fame’s gone to his head!” cried some. “He’s taken cocaine!” howled others into the hubristic excess of international stardom and pushing it right to the edge. Both records are comically decadent and syrupy, Turner’s vocals somehow more Sheffield and more LA than ever as Bond-theme strings flutter around song structures which almost play like half-jokes in themselves, half a bar away from making actual sense. With hindsight, that speech feels like the point at which this band, nearly a decade on from their last vomit in Tiger Tiger and realising they probably couldn’t pull off songs about taxi ranks any longer, decided to embrace their own absurdity. And that decision resulted in the most enjoyable work of their career.

As the music industry disintegrates around them, it feels like a bit more silliness might be useful. Everything’s so earnest; to be clear, earnestness in itself is no bad thing, and that horribly persistent Gen X affect of mocking, alienating or attacking people who actually care about stuff (Charlie Brooker banging his desk, the entire project of Keir Starmer, etc.) feels as tired now as it has been irritatingly smug for years. But you can care about real issues, try to address them and occasionally have some fun in the process. Yet the structures of the music business, in the UK and US at least, are increasingly dominated by tech billionaires with messiah complexes, heart-on-sleeve troubadours who’ve never written a hook or made a joke in their lives, private school leavers who honestly believe they got to where they are through the sheer force of their own genius, and the profoundly bald. Being daft in the face of all this doesn’t solve anything – but it does at least illustrate how stupid everyone else is being in their apparent sincerity. I’d much rather hang out with the lad who sings about “jet skis on the moat” in a Vic Reeves croon than the Sound of 2023 longlister who actually grew up speeding around on them.

Obviously, this isn’t the materialist, sociological analysis this stuff really needs, nor am I remotely saying that we need to listen to millionaire rock stars for the answers to our problems.

But it’s good to be reminded sometimes – like when you’re watching a silly lad from Yorkshire making his mates crack up with an over-elaborate gag on the UK’s biggest stage – that although most things are terrible, some things are great, worth celebrating, worth defending, worth making jokes about. It might be in front of millions at the BRITs, it might be when you’re checking out a new band; it might even be when you’re organising against your boss or landlord. Please remember to have a laugh.

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Final Third: In Conversation

Absolute doom,

very normal 78

Final Third: In Conversation Sleaford Mods are back with new album UK Grim, as bleak a record as they’ve ever made, and among the collaborators this time around is Dry Cleaning vocalist Florence Shaw.

With Fergal Kinney, both artists open up about their work, preoccupations and anxieties – and how their respective approaches overlap. Photography by Eddie Whelan

“In England,” warns Jason Williamson during the opening track of Sleaford Mods’ 12th album, UK Grim, “no-one can hear you scream.”

Though it’s a decade since Sleaford Mods’ breakthrough release Austerity Dogs, Sleaford Mods have never sounded quite so skeletal and haunted as they do here. The undeniable national decline tracked across those records is now complete. If you thought it was bleak last time, well – as our 2020 cover feature with the duo portented – it turns out that things can’t only get better. Happily, UK Grim is an album that continues to progress the group’s wilfully stark sonic blueprint, most notably on ‘Force 10 From Navarone’, which features a guest spot from London art-rock group Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw. Though Sleaford Mods may not always be known for their warm and hospitable attitude towards their contemporaries – check the violent fantasies on UK Grim’s absurdist ‘D.I.Why’, aimed squarely at postpunk acts and “white bloke aggro bands” that Sleaford Mods may or may not have influenced – Williamson is notably proud of collaborating with Dry Cleaning. On latest album Stumpwork, Shaw’s free-associating Rolodex of pungent imagery and anxious recollection made that record one of our albums of 2022.

Here, her laconic, deadpan sprechgesang is the perfect foil for Williamon’s chanted punk fury. In mid-December, I sat the pair down to discuss ‘Force 10 From Navarone’, the writing process, therapy, horror films and “adult Christmas.”

Florence Shaw: Have you had a haircut?

Jason Williamson: Yeah (runs hand across shaven head) I went to the barbers and he went, “This is really in fashion at the minute.” I don’t want anything in fashion at the minute! What you on about?!

FS: I bet that made you feel really stupid!

JW: I still tipped them like £10 because they’re really good. Ha. Fergal Kinney: You’ve collaborated for a new track on UK Grim, ‘Force 10 From Navarone’. How did you two working together come about?

FS: It was quite a while ago wasn’t it?

JW: It was an Instagram DM. I thought, “Should we do this properly, through managers?” Then I thought, “Fuck it.”

I heard the song, and it was quite apparent that your presence on it would be really good. Being as we were acquainted anyway through the tour, I didn’t have a problem DMing you and popping the question.

FS: Sometimes it being through managers it can feel more like the unknown. Or sometimes you can say a reply that’s really blunt and the manager makes it sound really polite [laughs].

That can be handy. But on this occasion? It felt very normal. A very normal request and very normal to say yes.

JW: Because we’ve been going for years and years you do get concerned that people are like, “Yeah, you’re okay but no.”

So I was extra chuffed when you said yes, as you can imagine.

FS: From very early on, when we put out our first EPs, we noticed that you’d put us on playlists that you’d made and that always felt like a big deal. In our band we always felt unsure if anyone would listen to it. We weren’t overly confident. We were confident that we liked what we did but in terms of an audience?

Not at all. So that was very exciting for us. We noticed you and Andrew would always do things to show support for us.

JW: It’s nice when bands come along that you really like, a lot of the time stuff doesn’t really click with you. Your EPs, it was prominent, but it was work-in-progress, without being insulting. I love stuff that’s slow burning, you can see it, and as a unit from a spectator’s point of view you come across as quite tight and definite. There’s lots of honest application going into it – do you know what I mean?

FS: That’s nice to hear, that something we’re trying to do

79

Final Third: In Conversation comes across. Because more than half the things I’ve made in my life haven’t come across at all! I’ll have made this drawing and thought everyone would be blown away by it, and people don’t really get what it means, so it’s nice to make something that strikes a chord with somebody.

JW: Your drawings are really skeletal aren’t they. You’ve got to look at it and figure out why you’ve done it. That’s what people do with art I guess. I’ve got some on my laptop though, I get them totally.

FS: I’ve probably got a short attention span for some things.

JW: Yeah, totally, I lose interest very quickly. Though over the years I’ve learnt how to water a song. Plant it, start watering it, start feeding it, a bit like a Christmas cake. If it’s not gelling straight away I’ve learnt to be more patient, to give them more time and not just bin them, which I used to do.

FS: I’ve honed this process where I spend five minutes on something and if I start to hate it I stop, and then I put it away and try again in about a week. In that way, I tend to work on songs for about a year, but obviously not a year. I’m popping in and out. I just start to totally tear it down and find everything wrong with it, which I need to fight in order to put things into the world. I used to think that something had to be really good to show it to someone. I learnt that if you wait to like something, you’re never going to show anyone anything.

JW: No, ever, ever.

FS: A lot of times I’ll share something with the world and I’m like, “I don’t know about this. I don’t know if I like this.” But at the same time it’s what I’ve made. It is what it is.

JW: What do you try to convey in drawings? Is there a general theme or are your individual pieces all differently themed?

FS: I think it’s the same as writing. This is maybe true of everybody but I’ve got an inner world, a way of seeing things – and I don’t mean in, like, an amazing way – just the way I interpret things, which is often wrong and different to more right-headed people around me. Doing drawings or writing is trying to externalise it, make something that feels like me – it’s quite insular really. Talking to myself, almost like a comforting thing. Sometimes tour can be not very creative and I find on tour I’ll start to get a bit bleak, and I figured it’s because you don’t make or do anything. Recently I’ve tried to do a drawing or talk into my phone. That really helps.

FK: Jason, are you able to be creative and write on tour?

JW: Sometimes, I wrote a lot of the new album on tour.

Lyrics anyway. If Andrew sends me music and we haven’t got to get up at 7AM and we can just chill in the room til midday, then

I might. If I don’t, I just end up watching horror films and it’s not productive. I’m useless at reading, I do read but I get through four or five books a year.

FS: That’s a lot for me, I’m terrible. I’ve felt very selfconscious about it since I was a kid, that I’m not a reader. I’m relieved to hear that you don’t read loads and loads.

JW: I think that I could gain so much by reading loads. I don’t know, you can have too much information sometimes.

Perhaps. If you want to polish yourself up on a subject fine, if you’re looking to win arguments on Twitter then I think that’s a problem [laughs].

FS: Somebody, at some point, gave me some advice that it’s possible to look at too many references, if you’re trying to be yourself in your work. If you consume too many things it’s confusing. I do find that. I’m too easily like, “This is really cool, I should make something like this.” I’m very susceptible to that way of thinking. It sounds borderline spiritual, but it’s about referring to your inner voice rather than too many other things.

JW: You can’t ignore that though can you, that approach.

FS: Have you always watched horror films?

JW: Yes. I don’t know why. The idea of utter dread and terror. Absolute doom. The best horror film ever is [1982 John Carpenter masterpiece] The Thing. That sense of impending dread, the fact you can’t do anything about it. It’s horrible, but totally enjoyable to see what kind of macabre, nightmarish thing reveals itself and reveals how it’s going to do away with you. Why did it come to that conclusion? What made it do that? I shouldn’t laugh! Stuff like that.

I also get really inspired by the mundanity of things around me. I really get into motorways, especially motorways in Europe. Looking at how people are in their houses, if I’m able to fleetingly look into a window. I really enjoy doing it. You feel like you’re part of everywhere.

FS: I’m a bit doomed in that I always feel perpetually not part of things. Probably, at a push, I feel part of my family. I did a lot of therapy for a few years. We talked a lot about being in or out, part of things or not part of things, feeling like an outsider.

We always came back to that subject. They decided it would help for me to think about being a visitor everywhere, to fret less about belonging or trying to belong, and just accept being a visitor. A mindset of being different is fine. And if you just act like a visitor or are a visitor in different situations then that’s kind of fine. Overnight I stopped worrying so much about not being in groups.

JW: Were you having that feeling of not belonging to something that had become obviously dominant?

“Over lockdown we started doing ‘Baking Daddy’, a video where I act like a weirdo in a pinny with nothing underneath, cooking. It’s the right side of weird” 80

Final Third: In Conversation

FS: Without realising, yes. I was getting stressed about not fitting in everywhere, I became really preoccupied with it.

Why do I feel itchy and weird in a group? Almost pretty much straight after is when I joined a band, which is obviously a group.

Which is weird. It’s nice because you’ve got a role, you know why you’re there. So touring can be more comfortable than being at home. I feel very relaxed being a visitor.

JW: It’s quite exhausting though. I get to the point where I feel quite bleak about it all on tour and you do devolve a bit. The conversations become more and more basic in their intelligence.

You’re in a van with four other people constantly. Do you carve out your own space in the van?

FS: It’s sometimes like a family where there’s a lot of friction, but then you do feel very bonded. It’s not like a friendship, though we are friends, it’s like this weird thing where you’re just linked forever. There’s a lot of love because you see each other at vulnerable moments all the time. Being nervous, being embarrassed, or meeting a hero of yours. Every five minutes something happens where you have to be vulnerable in front of people. How do your family feel about your work?

JW: “Are you famous, Dad?” No. “Are you a little bit famous?” A little bit. “Are you rich? My friends think you’re rich and famous.” Well, I’ve got a bit more money than I used to have [laughs]. I think it’s brilliant that they’re experiencing that when they grow up though, that’s the idea isn’t it? My dad was a paramedic, my mum was in and out of part-time jobs in shops, it’s nice to have this lift in your landscape as a kid. It opens up the idea, perhaps, of creativity. At the same time I think creativity came from circumstance for me. I do worry, perhaps, that they’ll grow up and view it as a career option, rather than something you need to do to get it out of you.

FS: You’re doing what you want to do, and I think that’s powerful from the child’s point of view. Even more so that you’re not rich. It’s a really unpredictable job, it’s not mega secure; it can obviously bring things that are challenging when you’re a kid, if you’re not earning a super duper stable wage. But then again, who is at the minute? The older I get, the more I think about my parents – I’m now the age they were when I was a kid. I think about what they were doing. Both my parents were artists and taught in art schools. It was a bit unpredictable at times but it’s very inspiring to me now. Their decisions were based on their gut feelings. I think I worry less now about having an unpredictable income than some people I know whose parents were really capital-P providers.

JW: Are they still teaching?

FS: My dad’s retired, but they both still make art.

JW: Did you learn a lot from them as a kid? Did it shape what you wanted to do?

FS: I always wanted to do what they did.

JW: I don’t think you could do anything else though.

You’re one of those people that walk it like you talk it, I think.

FS: Making things looks like too much fun. Coloured pencils everywhere, scissors, papers, glue. I’m not going to go, “Oh that’s not for me.” It seemed like a really obvious conclusion.

JW: And are you spending Christmas at home?

FS: With my mum, yeah, she lives quite near me. I don’t have kids so I’m in that zone where it’s just loads of adults.

JW: It’s different innit. It’s like a Pinter play innit, constantly. Adult Christmas.

FS: It can be really like that. It can get heavy.

JW: It’s good for boozing. When I used to drink I used to love Christmas. I’m just about to feed the Christmas cake with some brandy, it smells beautiful. Really cheap brandy. It smells gorgeous!

FS: Oh yeah, you bake don’t you.

JW: More so over the Christmas period yeah.

FS: In the nicest way… why did you start doing that?

JW: When I met [my wife] Claire she was like, “Why don’t you start doing some baking?” I was like, “Fuck off.”

When we first got together she’d come over to mine and she was quite clear that, like, “You’ve got to sort yourself out, why don’t you get some food in, cook me a breakfast, prepare that the day before, go and get your stuff.” So that’s what I’d do.

Bacon, eggs, whatever. Then she was like, “Why don’t you bake a cake?” I thought it was quite nice and soothing. There I was, baking Victoria sponges, lemon tarts, carrot cakes. That’s been a constant thing throughout now since. Over lockdown we started doing ‘Baking Daddy’, a video where I act like a weirdo in a pinny with nothing underneath, cooking. It’s the right side of weird [laughs].

FS: I have baked, but cooking is not my strong suit. I’m at my best making something up from what’s in the fridge.

JW: It was reassuring when you turned around in the studio and said, “I’ll eat anything.” I’m going to get some food, what would you like? I’ll eat anything. It was brilliant. [Laughs]

81

It’s 1986 and The Rolling Stones hate each other even more than usual. Charlie Watts is wading deeper into heroine addiction, Mick Jagger has released a solo album so embarrassing that Keith Richards has stopped talking to him, Ronnie Wood is characteristically oblivious to the fact that nobody can stand to be in the same room as anyone else, and all of them are sure that it was someone’s job to ask Bill Wyman to stop coming to work, permanently, again. Things are so bad Ronnie has been allowed to write some of the new songs and Keith has started singing them, even though everyone’s heard him sing before and know how it sounds.

Cursed to be in The Rolling Stones until death, splitting up is obviously not an option, so after scraping together 8 horrible songs and some covers, Keith faxes Mick at David Bowie’s weekly swingers party with a time and place for this photo for the sleeve of Dirty Work to be taken.

Once the 1980s were over, these colours were amongst those that were destroyed, but as someone who shops in Beyond Retro and wasn’t there at the time, naturally, I love them.

Jilted Richards doesn’t know it yet, but he’s been outfrontmanned by Jagger here. His plan was to ensure that the sofa was too big for one bottom but too small for two. He’ll take his seat on his throne and Jagger will be forced to hover awkwardly like Wyman. But Jagger’s polished a tod, sitting HALF on the floor and making sure his legs are wider than Richards without him knowing. In his yellow “lady killers”.

You can’t teach that. You’re either that guy or you’re not.

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Sources say that Brian May intends to “wear full chain mail” and “carry his favourite sword everywhere” as soon as he is knighted by King Charles later this year. The legendary guitarist, who used to be in a band called Queen, is thought to be saddened that his knighthood has only come now, as he’d been working on a Queen-related joke for his knighthood ceremony since 1992, which now doesn’t work at all.

Despite the disappointment, he intends to “take being a knight very seriously”, and is ready for “any quest” his King asks of him. Buckingham Palace have not responded to rumours that Queen Elizabeth II refused to knight May sooner due to conflicting opinions on the badger community.

Instagram user concerned that he’s married someone who is NOT his “best friend”

illustration by kate prior