Kim Gordon – Loud And Quiet 163

Ghetts, ML Buch, Yard Act, Nourished By Time, Nadine Shah, Lip Critic, English Teacher, Honesty, Chanel Beads, Gazelle Twin, Sheherazaad, They Hate Change, A guide to PRAH Recordings

issue 163

Kim Gordon

The art of distraction

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 Designer: Ed Seymour Art Direction: B.A.M. Contributing writers Alastair Shuttleworth, Alexander Smail, Andrew Anderson, Ben Lynch, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan Wray, Dominic Haley, Dhruva Balram, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hamza Riaz, Hayden Merrick, Ian Roebuck, Isabel Crabtree, Jack Doherty, Jake Crossland, Janne Oinonen, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jessica Wrigglesworth, Joe Goggins, Jumi Akinfenwa, Kyle Kohner, Leo Lawton, Max Pilley, Michelle Kambasha, Mike Vinti, Nadia Younes, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Orla Foster, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Walton, Shrey Kathuria, Skye Butchard, Sophia McDonald, Susan Darlington, Theo Gorst, Tom Critten, Tom Morgan, Tristan Gatward, Zara Hedderman, Zhenzhen Yu Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Cielito Vivas, Dan Kendall, Eleonora C. Collini, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Henri Kisielewski, Jake Kenny, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Kyle Johnson, Levi Mandel, Mathew Scott, Matt Swinsky, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Phil Sharp, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter With special thanks to Agnete Hannibal, Alex Cull, Ben Harris, Dan Carson, Jodie Banaszkiewicz, Kate Price, Matthew Aston, Matthew Fogg, Nathan Beazer, Noam Klar, Theo FabunmiStone, Zoe Miller

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 2024 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Issue 163 One of the reasons music interviews with Kim Gordon have always been so good is because she’s never considered herself much of a musician, even less a punk icon of her generation.

It’s always allowed her to bypass cliché and self-regard, which is how she’s approached her new album, it seems – a second solo record she’s called The Collective. In October of last year, Skye Butchard travelled to Paris to meet Gordon to discuss this intensely cool album, but also the phone addiction at the heart of it, and what does make Gordon a musician and icon after all.

Stuart Stubbs

English Teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 ML Buch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Sheherazaad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Honesty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Nourished By Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Lip Critic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Chanel Beads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Ghetts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Kim Gordon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 A Guide to PRAH Recordings . . . . . . . 62 Yard Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 They Hate Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Nadine Shah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Gazelle Twin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Jerskin Fendrix Having kicked around South London’s Brixton Windmill scene with his pals Black Midi and Black Country, New Road, composer and musician Jerskin Fendrix (real name Joscelin Dent-Pooley) became the first of his crowd to be nominated for a Golden Globe last month. A quiet figure who likes to take long periods of time on projects, it turns out that following the release of debut album Winterrise (the L&Q Album of the Year in 2020) Fendrix composed the original score for Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest movie (following the likes of The Lobster and The Favourite) Poor

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Things, in which Emma Stone stars as a reanimated Victorian corpse who runs off with a debauched lawyer (Mark Ruffalo).

Come the Golden Globe’s ceremony in LA on 8 January, Fendrix missed out to Ludwig Göransson for his work on Oppenheimer, as did another South London composer, who’s become more of a permanent fixture at such events for their original score work – Mica Levi (who was nominated for The Zone of Interest).

But award season isn’t over for Jerskin Fendrix just yet: his Poor Things score has also made the long list of BAFTA nominations, with the winner being announced on 18 February.

The Beginning: Previously Ghetts In mid December, Ghetts explained to fans why his new single ‘Laps’ wasn’t released with an accompanying video – he’d given the video budget to a local sports group, Newham and Essex Beagles Athletics Club. By choosing to spend the money supporting his local community, the rapper – who was born and raised in Newham – has covered the cost of annual memberships for 150 youngsters at the club that has been home to Mo Farah, Christine Ohuruogu, Daley Thompson, Iwan Thomas and Asha Philip. newhamandessexbeagles.co.uk

Burial The new year started with XL Recordings sharing a 14-second audio clip of what appears to be new forthcoming music from Burial, at 8am on 1 January. No information was given, but the visuals for the post had the XL logo laid over Burial’s. A second audio clip was posted via XL’s Instagram too. Burial has worked with XL before, collaborating with Four Tet and Thom Yorke on ‘Her Revolution’ / ‘His Rope’ in 2020, but until now his own solo material has been released via Hyperdub, which turns 20 this year.

Spotify Boring isn’t it, news about what swizz Spotify are now running?

But as the last edition of L&Q was arriving in stores, some clarity was given on rumblings of the company launching a new policy that – surprise, surprise – would hurt new and small artists most of all. On 22 November, the company confirmed that it would no longer pay any royalties on tracks that receive fewer than 1000 streams over the course of a year. Their official thinking is that these “tens of millions” of tracks generate on average just $0.03 per month. And due to a combination of minimum transaction requirements set by many labels and distributors, and bank fees, these nominal payments are often held by a third party and don’t reach the pockets of the uploaders anyway (all $0.03 per month). Collectively, however, all these tiny payments can make up $40 million per year, which Spotify says it plans to reallocate by increasing the payments afforded to eligible tracks (tracks that receive over 1000 streams within the year period). Spotify have also said they aim to “drive approximately an additional $1 billion in revenue toward emerging and professional artists over the next five years,” whatever that means.

Rough Trade Rough Trade – the record shop, not the record label – have announced that they’re opening a new store in Liverpool this year, and that it’ll be their biggest yet. In a space of 6,500 square feet, the store in Hanover Street will feature a bar and café (in collaboration with Signature Brew and Dark Arts, respectively), and a venue. Later in 2024 RT plan to open a store in Berlin, also.

According to Music Week, sales at Rough Trade increased by

illustration by kate prior

35.8 percent between 2021 and 2022, with the company posting revenue of £14.3 million. And it’s not often that an independent music company is as justly rewarded for what they do as that. roughtrade.com

M.I.A. Having found religion in 2022, it’s fitting that M.I.A. chose Christmas Day to release a new, free mixtape. Sixteen tracks long (including her most recent song ‘Free Pali’), Bells Collection features Skrillex, Blaqstarr and Troy Baker, and has been available exclusively from M.I.A.’s website ohmni.com since 25 December. Of the release, M.I.A. wrote: “I present you a gift from the East, star of wonder star of night. Beauty. Bright. Sacred.

Cosmic. Magnetism. A collaboration with God. Limited edition hear it only on ohmni.com. If you want to share this gift, click send, to your friend! Merry Christmas! Jesus saves.” ohmni.com

Pussy Riot In early December, Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova announced that the story of her activist punk group is being developed into a scripted TV series. Based on her forthcoming memoir, the show will feature the run-up to Pussy Riot’s famous “Punk Prayer” antiPutin protest at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, their arrest and jail sentence, and the subsequent Sochi Olympics protest. Tolokonnikova said in a statement: “I was a broke 20-year-old artist studying philosophy, he was one of the most powerful, wealthy and dangerous men on Earth. In 2011 I went against him, damn the consequences. After years of imprisonment, harassment, attacks, trauma I am ready to share this story. My dream is to see my country peaceful, democratic and diverse, where gay people are not being stoned to death. Is it too much to ask? Does it make me an extremist?”

Massive Attack Massive Attack have announced a huge homecoming show in Bristol, which will have the lowest carbon footprint of any show of its size. Taking place on Clifton Downs on 25 August, the group have collaborated with climate scientists and analysts from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. The site will be fully powered by renewable energy, no waste from it will be removed to landfill, and food options will be completely meat-free. It’s the latest green ambition from the band, who’ve become leading lights in putting on shows (and creating music) in a manor that cares for the environment. Robert Del Naja – aka 3D – says of the show: “In terms of climate change action, there are no excuses left. Offsetting, endless seminars and diluted declarations have all been found out, so live music must drastically reduce all primary emissions and take account of fan travel.” massiveattack.co.uk

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The Beginning: Losing My Edge

We asked Bill Ryder-Jones what his favourite song is, really LC:

Hiya Bill. Now, this feature often focuses on so-called ‘guilty pleasure’ songs – but you’ve chosen Underworld’s ‘Born Slippy’, which to my mind is pretty cool. Do you see it like that?

BRJ: Yeah. I mean, I don’t feel much guilt about music, but I could’ve gone with Bon Jovi if I was gonna do something like that.

LC: Go on.

BRJ: I just like Bon Jovi, man. There’s no reason why I should, but I do. I just think his songs are really catchy. Unashamed about it, you know – [Belts out the chorus of ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’] – I don’t know how he writes them.

Anyway though, with ‘Born Slippy’ I wanted to talk about why those opening two chords are so interesting. I was gonna remind myself of the interval this morning but my computer’s being an arse, give me a sec…

[The phone goes quiet] Hang on a sec.

[Shuffling, then some electric piano in the distance] Just working out what it is.

[The opening ‘Born Slippy’ chords drift down the line, distorted by the connection but unmistakable] So yeah, I like it when songs start with chords that I’m unfamiliar with, and that’s such a strange thing they’ve

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done there. It’s not crazy; but there’s an E flat major [plays it down the phone], then it goes to what you’d call a firstinversion B flat major [plays], but there’s this C, like a second. I’d never really heard anyone do that. It’s like ‘Unfinished Sympathy’, you just hear it and it’s like, “Well, that’s iconic.” To the point where I don’t really care what the song’s about – “Lager, lager, lager…”

LC: So that intro grabbed you immediately.

BRJ: Yeah, and it’s funny, because electronic music doesn’t usually touch me that deeply. I like the sound of it, but it tends to not be very melodic or harmonic – in my limited understanding at least. But I only heard ‘Born Slippy’ on Trainspotting, and it’s really rare for me to be like, “Fucking hell that’s cool” straightaway. I had to work out what those chords were – and I’ve recycled them a load of times.

Anyway, that Bon Jovi song where he’s singing about being a cowboy on a motorbike [‘Wanted Dead or Alive’] is equally as important to me. I was dead into Robin Hood [Prince of Thieves, 1991] when it came out, and Bon Jovi fits in with that Bryan Adams tune [‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’] from the soundtrack.

LC: Are you much of a karaoke guy? Because you’ve got some belters here.

BRJ: I’ve done it once. I try to avoid singing as much as possible.

LC: When you did do it, what was the song?

BRJ: I did the whole of the Grease soundtrack. Which is probably why I’ve never wanted to step back into that arena since.

It was at an ex-girlfriend’s birthday party, and I was like, “Right, you fucking shits” – you know when you’ve had a couple too many shandies – “who’s gonna be fucking Zuko? Because I’m Sandy. And Rizzo.”

LC: You don’t sound like the kind of person who cares what other people think of their music taste.

BRJ: Oh, fuck no. I don’t give a shit, it’s none of their business.

There’s too much guilt around – there’s that Peep Show quote, about feeling guilty about which pair of boxers you’re gonna wear: “I’m sorry, stripy blue, you’re just too tight.” Feeling guilt about something that makes you happy like that – it’s just a waste of time. Like, I fucking love Meatloaf. Whenever I hear Meatloaf, I’m like, “You clever bastard.” All that stuff reminds me of being in the car as an early teen when Oasis had just come out; back then I probably felt a bit guilty for liking ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’, but now… it’s not like ‘Live Forever’ is a better song than ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’ is it? I certainly wouldn’t say so.

Anyway, just make sure it’s clear that I don’t feel guilty about anything musical. Apart from one song of mine. I should never have written that.

words by luke cartledge

A unty of Indispensable lights fr Twenty Three...

OSEES ‘Intercepted Message’ In The Red LP/CD

THE SOUNDCARRIERS ‘Celeste’ Phosphonic LP/CD

PAT TODD & THE RANK OUTSIDERS ‘Sons Of the City Ditch

CARLTON MELTON ‘Turn To Earth’ Agitated 2LP / 2LP Ltd / CD

SONIC YOUTH ‘Live In Brooklyn 2011’ Silver Current 2LP/2CD

PENGUIN CAFÉ ‘Rain Before Seven’ Erased Tapes LP/CD

WOODS ‘Perennial’ Woodsist LP / CD

TITANIC ‘Vidrio’ Unheard Of Hope LP (Col)

CATATONIC SUNS ‘Catatonic Suns Agitated LP / CD

and heres s e delight f 2024 too...

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Dog Meat LP / LP Ltd / CD

The Beginning: Bad Advice

‘Rod Stewart’ on dressing for success

Dear Rod, I loved what you wore on the Hootenanny to ring in 2024. That silver and black striped suit was a touch of class, no matter what people were saying online. Where do you find such unique clothes? – Terry Higginbottom, Woking Cheers Tel, me old mucker. Jonathan Ross will kill me for saying this, but both of our wardrobes are made up almost exclusively from Top Man dead stock these days. Phil Green has been a pal for years, and when TM went down the swanny, me and Wossy helped him move all of his clobber into a Big Yellow Storage container by Heathrow, providing we could dip into it whenever we like. Johnathan found some swimming shorts in there that were a print of baked beans; I found that winning suit.

44” waist, 20” leg? Don’t mind if I do.

Dear Rod, Which of today’s younger rock stars do you think has the best style? P.S. You’re sexy – Jean Bachelor, Norfolk Hello again Jean. I think you might have asked me this at the meet-and-greet last week, but happy to answer it here too.

For me, it has to be Matty Healy. He’s a suit guy like me, but he also seems like a proper lad too, which is all part of it. He ate a whole hamburger on stage once, and I’ve heard he loves having sex. Imagine the two of us on a night out together! It’d be carnage.

Thanks Jean, love. Love to Brian.

Hi Rod, I’m going to my first wedding outside of Scotland this year. Do you think I should still go for the kilt like I was planning, or listen to my English pals who are saying it’ll pull

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focus from the bride? – Barry Campbell, Edinburgh Ahhh, Barry. A brother in arms! I was born just outside of Edinburgh, in Highgate, north London, so I can relate to this. I am very Scottish. And as a Scottish man who is Scottish, I have to say that it’s your duty to wear a kilt to that wedding. Pulling focus from the bride? Sounds like they’re jealous that you’ll be getting all the birds mate. A right clange magnet. Go for it son! But Barry, you know what a true Scotsman wears under his kilt, don’t you?

Hehe. Course you do. Hehe. Good lad, Barry… Pants.

Hey Rod, I went on 36 first dates in 2023 and didn’t get one second date. My breath isn’t great, but my clothes are worse. What should I wear to make the first impression I want? – Daniel, via email Well Daniel, the dating game has moved on a fair bit since I was cleaning up on that front. It’s all about bubble tea and axe throwing now, isn’t it? Clothes are timeless though, so what you don’t want to do is turn up in: a puffer jacket if you’re over 40 (which you are, Daniel), a tracksuit if you’re under 80 (hence Elton John), or a bloody Rangers shirt (Scottish football team, I think). Casuals is what I’m getting at here – consider your date to be a sex mission, so dress professionally for the job in hand.

What you need is a cracking suit, but here’s my tip, just for you, Daniel... You keep the jacket on at ALL times, but halfway through the evening you undo your tie and let it hang loose around your neck. Talk about ‘tell me you want to boff without telling me you want to boff’! Good luck Daniel. And do your date.

illustration by kate prior

Bill Ryder-Jones Iechyd Da “Iechyd Da is an album that confirms Ryder-Jones as one of Britain’s finest songwriters” 9/10 UNCUT Out Now – LP, CD & Digital

THE NEW ALBUM – OUT 23.02.24 LP / CD / DIGITAL 8/10 UNCUT

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English Teacher Made in Leeds, by Joe Goggins. Photography by Owen Richards The third single from English Teacher’s debut album, ‘Mastermind Specialism’, has Lily Fontaine quietly excoriating herself for her chronic indecision. She casts herself variously as a bride frozen at the top of the aisle, a child hopping off a slide half way down it and, in one line that spills out a clutch of potential career paths, a singer, a porn star, a writer and a thief. It is one of the record’s quietest and prettiest moments, and its tasteful blend of twinkly piano and arpeggiated acoustic guitar feel like a long sigh, like a lament, as if she’s forever resigned to being defined by her dithering.

She makes it sound like a bad thing, but on the evidence of this remarkable first record, Fontaine’s natural reluctance to choose a lane and stick with it might be English Teacher’s greatest strength. They have already made marked changes in direction during their still-nascent career, and they’ve also become adept at making diffuse influences meld together in a way that sounds instinctive. To write down the myriad musical gates that the album slaloms through is to paint the record as a rollercoaster ride but in truth, the journey is a pleasingly smooth one; its feels as if Fontaine’s vocals should be soaring one minute (‘You Blister My Paint’) and Sprechgesang the next (‘R&B’), like chaotic walls of guitar can stand next to swooning strings, and like the path between freewheeling pop-rock (‘Nearly Daffodils’) and soft, spacey synth (‘Sideboob’) is a logical one.

That last track offers a rare glimpse of English Teacher’s fledgling form; they began life in 2018 as Frank, a dream pop outfit named after, and occasionally sounding like the fictional band from, the 2014 film Frank. That in itself is instructive; the movie remains fiendishly tricky to categorise a decade later, having taken Frank Sidebottom’s fibreglass head and maverick heart and built a grimly comedic pseudo-biopic around them. Similarly, the band that are now English Teacher have taken myriad twists and turns of their own since they first came together at the University of Leeds, with Fontaine joined by guitarist Lewis Whiting, bassist Nicholas Eden and drummer Douglas Frost.

“The band that we were before, and the band that we are now, are so different,” says Fontaine; even since transitioning from the woozy stylings of Frank to English Teacher’s more experimental rock remit, the group have shifted shape before their listeners’ ears. “I think we’ve benefited from having time to figure ourselves out.”

T

HEIR RELATIVELY STEADY PACE of progression, which included a couple of stop-start years during the pandemic, has stood them in good stead, as has their grounding in Leeds, another aspect of the group’s palpably northern identity. Last year, Fontaine wrote an impassioned paean to the importance of regional scenes in protest of BBC plans to scale back their ‘Introducing…’ platform. “I think we had about five years of developing through the Leeds scene that brought us to where we are,” she says, “and that’s the reason we’ve gotten to this point. Being part of a scene that was supportive of us and helped us to grow, but also being able to work with organisations like Music Leeds, helping us to get PRS funding; that kind of stuff is what helps you build the connections that gets you to something like Later… with Jools Holland. We had great access to support and I think us getting to where we are now proves that it works, that keeping those things accessible in the regions is pretty vital.”

Sonically speaking, their early work was informed by the musical fashions of the time; the 2021 single ‘R&B’ sees Fontaine reckoning with her place in the overwhelmingly white male world of indie rock as a mixed-race woman, and takes its cues from the off-kilter post-punk of Black Midi and Black Country, New Road. “‘R&B was heavily influenced by that wave of bands from South London from 2018 onwards, which is fine,” recalls Eden, “but I think we boxed ourselves in, and ended up having a bit of an identity crisis. And it wasn’t that we wanted to stop making that kind of music entirely, but it’s only one type of sound out of a plethora of different influences, and we really didn’t want to be pigeonholed.”

It isn’t likely to happen on the basis of This Could Be Texas, a sprawling, genre-fluid record. Whilst Fontaine’s voice, both literally and figuratively, provides a cornerstone, the album feels free to wander between disciplines; Whiting recalls that ‘A55’, the closing track from their 2022 Polyawkward EP, was the moment the group realised they had broken beyond the selfimposed shackles of their oldest songs. “Here’s a direction we can really explore,” he recalls thinking. “There’s a lot of different elements, and the structure’s a bit irregular, and it’s got such a strong melody, and it seemed to go over really well, so it started to influence the songs that came later. And the culmination of that is something like ‘You Blister My Paint’, which Lily wrote years ago but we’d never figured out quite how to make it work, until we realised that having her play it solo on the piano was the

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“We had about five years of developing through the Leeds scene... and that’s the reason we’ve gotten to this point” most effective way of recording it. Putting her vocals through a tape machine and having some delay on them – those kind of experimental elements made it feel modern and up to date.”

W

HILST THERE ARE STILL FLICKERS of the English

Teacher of old on the record (‘R&B’ is included, while tracks like the epic centrepiece ‘Not Everyone Gets to Go to Space’ feature the same kinds of sweeping landscape changes as defined the likes of ‘Polyawkward’), the avoidance of leaning too far into their influences and the forging of their own lane, is key to the album’s success. “Realising we were starting to sound too much like Jockstrap and then changing it up,” says Fontaine.

“Nothing was off the table,” says Frost.

“And I think I’d had a bit of a concern that us having that mindset might be a problem,” adds Fontaine. “That maybe people would struggle to get into the music if it sounded different from song to song. It doesn’t fit into a particular niche, so who are we appealing to? We knew it wasn’t going to be that cohesive.”

“That still worries me a little bit with the album,” admits Eden. “When we were recording, it did feel at times like we were putting together pieces of random puzzles, and if it wasn’t quite working we’d rearrange them. But I’ve never been so proud of something. I think it’s turned out nicely.”

“I’d listen to it,” Fontaine deadpans.

Her lyrical style is the throughline that holds this eclectic bunch of songs together; consistently funny, vividly descriptive, and at once vulnerable and cutting. In the video for ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’, the spectre of Sidebottom is raised again, with its central character taking in the sights of the singer’s native Colne, Lancashire and the surrounding countryside from behind a papier-mâché head – fittingly, as the song nods lyrically to Emily Brontë and the Pendle witches, both from the same corner of the world.

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Sidebottom is actually a weirdly neat point of reference for Fontaine, because there are similarities between her and his creator, Chris Sievey – chiefly their shared fascination with the curious nature of everyday life. In their version of kitchen sink realism, there is a third tap marked absurdity, which is often the one from which poignancy most readily flows; Fontaine makes sense of the world with both rapier wit and, in places, violent metaphor (‘Broken Biscuits’). It marks the band out as one willing to reckon with sociopolitical issues, but Fontaine insists it’s a byproduct of writing from an honest place.

“I’m never aiming to do any one specific thing,” she says.

“I’m glad people definitely seemed to pick up on the observational side of the lyrics, because I like that kind of thing myself.

None of it feels intentional, though; I try to include humour because I think it’s a good way to explore different themes, but those themes just come from whatever it is I feel like I need to talk about. I’m always reacting, against something that’s happened to me, or maybe something I’ve witnessed.”

As they speak to me, the band are about to head to America for their first US shows in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, having just come off their first full UK tour – a sell-out. Anybody who caught a show would be able to attest to how far English Teacher have come as a live band; Fontaine has genuine presence about her now, and the musicianship is airtight. “Sometimes I wish I could redo our first impressions – go back and redo our first gigs, our first festivals, do them like we do it now,” says Fontaine. “But that would always be the case, wouldn’t it? We’ve definitely become better musicians.”

“I don’t want to speak for all of us,” says Eden, “but my confidence in us as a live band has grown massively, coming off this last tour. I think we’re going to be so much more comfortable expanding our live sound; the excitement levels for 2024 have really ramped up.”

ML Buch From Kalundborg with love, by Tristan Gatward.

In her Copenhagen apartment, Marie Louise Buch’s dog, a threeyear-old Labrador, distracts herself with a small plate of peanut butter. A juvenile sun hits the shelf beside her and then falters, briefly illuminating some well-read, slanting books about strange instruments. The quiet equanimity of the morning comes clearly through the computer screen.

ML Buch’s second album, Suntub, was released late last year, but ebbed unobtrusively into end-of-year best lists, unassuming but resolute. Recorded in Kalundborg, a small Danish city on the north-western coast of Zealand, it was deeply inspired by its environment.

“Mostly I was in my own company, or just with nature,” she explains of the medieval town. “I was dealing with feelings like connection and isolation, the need for intensity and euphoria, and shards of light and fire, and connections with something or someone. I was also just nerding out, you know, with weird ways of playing guitars.”

Her voice is gentle and contemplative, waiting to find the right words to describe her process before she speaks them. She smiles when she picks the wrong one, not wanting to sound “too dreamy” when recounting being awestruck by the horizon, or the water lapping either side of the Røsnæs peninsular.

“The thought of sitting in a studio in Copenhagen wasn’t appealing to me. I needed to get out. I needed to – ugh, it sounds – I needed to find my own voice.” She laughs, rolling her eyes.

“There’s just a lot of noise and distraction here, which I also love.

It’s a huge quality in a place if it can distract you. I just needed some different distractions. Maybe a little calm.”

For Buch, a remedy was to distance formality from the

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recording process, sitting in her Peugeot SUV, staring out at the ocean and playing early sketches from the stereo, tracking vocals above each instrumental. “It’s my favourite thing to look at,” she concedes. “The glints on the water. And the landscapes in the sky. It’s been inspiring to so many people for so long. It’s just an eternal, like a portal to some other place.

“What I miss most is just the sound of Kalundborg, you know. For about three years I went out and recorded the wind.

A lot of the music on Suntub has that. You might not hear it, but it’s in the depth and the detail. What’s important is how the sounds feel,” she stresses. “If I could add dimensions to a sound, that was something that interested me. Taking a sound and playing it back in a car, or through an amp in a big warehouse with a wooden ceiling, and recording it again.”

She took that process with her wherever she went, recording and re-recording in swimming pools, saunas, changing rooms and waterfront storage spaces. The results revel in total disorientation, where strata of sound drift with aimless intent, spot-lit and eclipsed layer by layer. And then, in each fracture comes a sticky-sweet pop song and a luminous invitation to float away on its surface and dive its depths.

“It’s so abstract what I’m going to say, but the material is both coming together and falling apart. I see it as a whole world where the individual pieces are tableaus floating in the air of a much bigger thing. And in these worlds, there are disjointed bodies and different textures and sounds, different types of lights and reflections and membranes and utterings. There aren’t a lot of narratives; it’s more descriptions of locations. I don’t know if that’s what anyone hears, but it’s like the whole album is a container of something. The lyrics are sort of hollow, like other little containers of you as a listener.”

“For about three years I went out and recorded the wind” At the same time, Buch stresses the craft of songwriting – the landscapes she creates are propped by melodies, and a lot of assembled material. “I’m curious to find other hierarchies. A guitar fill is sometimes as important as a vocal line,” she emphasises. “I have this human voice and it’s good for communicating something, but I love to communicate, and sometimes it’s best to give weight to other things. Suntub – how do you say it – it’s a composite. I’ve had a feeling of its parts for a long time, and then it became a fun chain of experiments. And now it’s an album,” she beams, happy as a Labrador with a plate of peanut butter.

“That’s crazy.”

Night-bound Eyes Are Blind To The Day The debut album out February 23 Vinyl / CD / digital On tour with Slowdive

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Sheherazaad The artist who retrained her voice to honour her South Asian heritage, by Guia Cortassa.

Photography by Zayira Ray

Sheherazaad is the epitome of the new generation of American artists who are reshaping the country’s musical and cultural landscape. Her forthcoming debut album, Qasr, produced by Arooj Aftab, is a celebration of her South Asian background; five minimal yet rich songs sung in Hindi and Urdu. “Growing up, it felt like the standard would always be the pretty, white, WASP family, blonde-haired, blue-eyed American girls in school who I always had in front of me in movies and listening to mainstream music – you would just see different versions of their faces,” she tells me from her place in the South Bay Area. “It was never in question that [this shift] would be the case. And it’s quite something. As much as I want to feel ecstatic about it, there’s still a lot of uncertainty.”

A native of San Francisco, before writing and recording Qasr, Sheherazaad embarked on a protracted journey to learn more about her identity, her ancestry, and her origins. “It’s fairly common with a lot of children who were born far from the motherland that their parents are from,” she says. “It manifests uniquely in every different community and culture. But a South Asian-American, diasporic sort of identity crisis is my specialty.”

She started singing at a very young age and went on to study American traditional music, while her parents introduced her to South Asian music. “They were hippies in the 1970s,” she says, “so they would go disco dancing and smoke weed. They listened to a lot of Carlos Santana, The Carpenters, Olivia Newton-John. I grew up listening to a lot of ’90s Bollywood music. So, there was more nuance, but that binary still holds to a degree. They call it the ‘third culture kids experience’: you feel like you’re occupying two different worlds, and there’s a split consciousness between your home and the outside planet. But as the world globalises and we all move around, I don’t know how much these stable, neat and tidy categories of identity mean anymore. I think I was more comfortable falling into that world of the in-between than panning hard left into things like English or American subgenres of art because I wasn’t being imposed upon.”

Sheherazaad found her niche in this transitional place, crafting a flawless blend of South Asian traditional music and Western folk-pop, with songs written and performed in Hindi

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and Urdu. “I knew that I wanted to write in Hindi and Urdu because that’s my ancestral language and connects me to my roots; singing in the colonial language is an emotive choice,” she explains. “I had that American Idol sort of pedestal: a very specific type of voice I was deeply immersed in and working towards, but it didn’t feel authentic. I didn’t look like one of those people who’s ever going to get a chance of really being taken seriously doing that. It felt fraudulent, so I stopped singing for many years. Discovering the British South-Asian counterculture and meeting Arooj Aftab just moved me to start contributing to this new wave of music. And that’s when I moved out of New York and came back to California, which is kind of a Mecca of SouthAsian classical music – [Indian tabla player] Zakir Hussein lives here, [Indian classical vocalist] Mahesh Kale, and my guru, Madhuvanti Bhide, who is a Hindustani classical musician originally from Pune, India.”

To find her authentic singing voice, Sheherazaad had to completely remodel her voice. “Often in South Asian music, the female voices are extremely pitched up,” she tells me. “We sound like crazy cartoons. That has a lot to do with men controlling the engineering aspects of music as producers, writers and arrangers. They write things to suit the male range; I wanted to write stuff that really encapsulated this lost identity as women. I feel that we are so weird, so twisted, and so connected. I had never heard that in Hindi music.” With her voice being her medium, this makeover sends a powerful political message. “It was kind of a process of, I would say, decolonising. It’s something that many of us are going through out here and everywhere, and it’s such an interesting act to recalibrate the voice. The voice is so sensitive, so intimate, so emotional, and so personal – more than possibly any other instrument that a person can play.”

And helping her achieve her unique sound is producer and neo-sufi pioneer Arooj Aftab, with a huge group of Arab and South Asian musicians. “I’ve noticed there is a very emergent solidarity between artists from those parts of the world; we have a shared sonic heritage,” says Sheherazaad. “Much of Indian music is influenced by music from the Arab world. There is pure musical synchronicity and synergy. Out here in the white gaze, we are all the same.”

NAILAH HUNTER THU 1 FEB HOXTON HALL DAMSEL ELYSIUM FRI 2 FEB THE OLD CHURCH STOKE NEWINGTON ONE WAY OR ANOTHER CRUUSH, SOMOH + AL COSTELLOE WED 7 FEB THE SOCIAL A. SAVAGE WED 14 FEB THE GARAGE GLASSER FRI 16 FEB ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH SAM EVIAN THUR 22 FEB HACKNEY OSLO ASTRID SONNE & ML BUCH TUE 27 FEB OUT SOLD WED 28 FEB ICA TATYANA FRI 22 MAR THE WAITING ROOM MARY IN THE JUNKYARD WED 27 MAR CORSICA STUDIOS

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Born out of a boredom of bands, by Daniel Dylan Wray.

Photography by Barney Maguire

Honesty “I was just like, ‘fuck music,’” says George Mitchell. “I was done with it.”

Mitchell is describing a state of deep musical ennui he was in a few years ago. Having left his previous outfit, the noisy yet melodic Eagulls, he felt that he had left his years of being in a band behind. “I had just been painting and then Peel and these lot got in touch and were like, ‘just come to the studio’. I’m glad I did.”

What materialised was a new way of working for Mitchell, Matt Peel, Josh Lewis and Imi Holmes. One stripped of typical band convention and untethered from past experiences. “We all came from a position of being jaded about previous band experiences,” says Lewis, “so it was nice to go into this and dispense with a lot of that stuff and those feelings, and it be more positive and collaborative.”

Honesty describe themselves as more of a collective.

There are no set rules or roles, and they are fluid with instruments and songwriting. “We wanted to create an ego-less situation to build music in,” says Mitchell.

While all of the members have been in previous Leeds bands, with Peel also a celebrated producer at Honesty’s studio, the Nave, it’s especially important for them to point out that this is not a continuation of previous music. “We didn’t want this to come across as like, ‘oh, this is Eagulls new project because it’s just not,” says Mitchell. “There’s no comparison to anything that we’ve done before.”

The results so far can be heard on the WHERE R U EP, with an album wrapped up and due for release later in 2024.

The music sits in a space between the club and solitary headphone listening; a place where dreamy soundscapes wrap themselves around beats as subtle melodies unfold. “We tend to always end up with a song but we always start from a really clubby place,” says Peel. Mitchell explains further: “Instead of it just being like linear dance music, it’s about putting more song craftsmanship into it.” Lewis then jokes it’s “halfway between the Brude and the club,” referring to Leeds’ indie gig venue the Brudenell Social Club. “But that’s the sort of music that

18

I am really drawn to,” say Mitchell. “Something that is about sticking your headphones on, swirling around, or being out and getting pummelled loud.”

The group refer to their music as “genre-less” but within this you’ll find touches of experimental pop, R&B, shoegaze, trip-hop and minimal electronic. One thing it’s definitely not is guitar music. “I’m bored of seeing the same five lads on stage with fucking guitars and leather jackets,” says Mitchell. “I’m done with that shit. It’s dead. It’s stale. I don’t really like going to live gigs because I just don’t have the brain ability for it, one minute in and I’m outside having a fag. The best shows that I have been to are more like clubby bass things or things that are just gonna smack your fucking chakras.”

The rapper Rarelyalways features on the EP, and the band has commissioned a remix by electronic artist Hagop Tchaparian; they like the idea of expanding deeper into collaboration outside of their core unit. “We do whatever we want, and bring in whoever we want from all different backgrounds,” says Mitchell. “The idea of it being so that we can spread out. Maybe artists can come to us and say, ‘I want an Honesty production’ and we could write and make things for other people.” Peel echoes that the plan is to not fall into familiar traps. “We just don’t want to feel like we’re this one band who do shows and release records,” he says. “We could do anything.”

The collective also have a pristinely planned visual campaign that is made with Brockhampton collaborators Uncanny, and they intend to lean into this with full force. “This is something that we talked about from the start, to make in tandem with the music,” says Lewis, with Mitchell adding: “Imagery is just as important as the music. We’re not ‘look at me people’. It’s more like, ‘look at what it is.’” Peel adds: “It’s that thing of not wanting to go to watch people but to go watch an art piece with music in it.”

There’re clearly bold plans and grand ambitions for the group, who are already signed to Partisan. “I mean, it’s early days but we’ll see,” says Mitchell. “It’d be fucking sick if we could do some of the stuff that I’ve got in my head.”

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Conceived, written and recorded during the COVID pandemic, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s posthumous album ‘King Perry’ was produced

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Swedish singer, multiinstrumentalist and composer El Perro Del Mar announces her first album in 8 years ‘Big Anonymous’, on City Slang. With this record, the shape-shifting artist goes places where few dare to venture: dialogues with the dead, musings on her own mortality, and reflections on the inner darkness that she’s inherited.

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Canadian/American poet, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Vera Sola makes timeless, mind-bending music, evoking comparisons to Nick Cave, Nancy Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey amongst many others.

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Her new album ‘Peacemaker’ will be out in February 2024 on City Slang.

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Black Grape could only have been made in Manchester. The swagger, fun and cryptic humour seem hewn from a city historian AJP Taylor once described as offering an archetypally different way of English urban life to London. Both Shaun Ryder and Kermit, came from edgy-but-cool parts of the city. Black Grape are widely regarded as one of the most innovative and iconic bands of the last twenty five years.

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Big Dirte3 Records

Undisputed UK music icon Dizzee Rascal returns with the electrifying new album “Don’t Take It Personal”, via Big Dirtee Records. Standing tall against his best work, the record is a potent reminder of how Dizzee’s legendary status came to be, capturing him in incendiary form as he flows effortlessly through a collection of distinctly UK genres with unrivalled ease. Dizzee’s latest body of work is yet another victory lap on what is one of the defining rap music legacies.

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The lifelong arm wrestle between head and heart sits at the centre of the third album from the Sydneybased Middle Kids. The trio of Hannah Joy, Tim Fitz and Harry Day (along with producer Jonathan Gilmore) take the bare-bones of indie rock and elevate their songs with astonishing and euphoric vocal performances and an incomparable pop-sensibility.

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Nourished By

Time 20

An underground R&B star takes his experimental sound to New York City, by Jessica Wrigglesworth.

Photography by Micah E. Wood

At the beginning of 2023, not many people could have predicted that in a matter of months Nourished By Time, the musical alias of Baltimore based Marcus Brown, would be one of the artists dominating the year’s Best Of lists, with his record Erotic Probiotic 2 (released through DIY London based label Scenic Route) selected by Pitchfork, Fader, Stereogum and Paste – not to mention this very publication – as a favourite. Brown’s star had been quietly ascending: his sets supporting Dry Cleaning on their US run last January got rave reviews, he featured on the latest Yaeji record, and tracks such as 2020’s ‘The Rainwater Promise’ and 2022’s ‘The Wall’ started to crop up on tastemaking playlists and NTS shows. By the time Erotic Probiotic 2 came out in April, the buzz was getting louder still, but it was an album that warranted (and far exceeded) the hype, marrying the catchiest of melodies with distinctly off-kilter production and Brown’s smooth, almost croonerish vocal. It’s a hard sound to pin down – Oneohtrix Point Never perhaps described it best as “Arthur Russell meets Daft Punk but deep R&B,” telling The New Yorker that Brown’s is the “only new music I absolutely swear is next level.”

Speaking to me in December from his home in Baltimore, in a brief break from touring with Vagabon, Brown is reflecting on his whirlwind year. “I haven’t had much time to really process anything that’s happening,” he says with a laugh. “I’m super grateful for it all. But it’s also happening pretty rapidly. I’ve got a booking agent – I’ve got TWO booking agents!” He’s excitable, goofy even, but also extremely eloquent, and in talking to him it becomes clear that his meteoric rise is far from accidental. “I always knew it was possible to have this success,” he says, “but I honestly thought I was gonna get it when I was like 50.”

Growing up, Brown’s parents were big lovers of music, in particular his bass-playing father, who he says “loves music more than anyone I know – his attention to detail, the way he listens to music, is so insane, it’s really cool to see. And then from my mom, I get my love for pop music and really listenable music – my dad is more like avant garde and jazz, so I have both of those in me. I think it’s really fun to challenge both, and kind of use them to validate each other.”

Now 28, in his late teens he left Baltimore to study at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music (other alumni include Big Thief, St Vincent and Arooj Aftab), having started playing guitar just a few years prior. Whereas making music had always come easily to him, he struggled with the didactic nature of the courses at Berklee. “I wasn’t very good at anything that required me to sit in a classroom and pay attention, but I was good at the songwriting classes. It was a very Taylor Swift-, John Mayer-, Bruno Mars-based program, and I remember very distinctly trying to piss the teacher off every time I wrote a song:

I was trying to either do the exact opposite of what the teacher asked for or, like, do something that I knew they wouldn’t like.

I was just trying to challenge that – like, what if we wrote about something really weird?” Only Pat Pattison, a professor specialising in lyric writing, appreciated his approach. “He encouraged me to be weird, just as long as it sounded good. He let me write songs about drinking Drano [a brand of chemical drain cleaner] and falling in love with mannequins and shit.”

Some of those songs still exist in the depths of Bandcamp under aliases like Riley With Fire and Mother Marcus, but these days Brown takes a slightly more considered approach to writing.

“I’m constantly changing the way I write, but I feel like now I’m more conscious of certain things… because this is a song that I’ll have to perform forever maybe, so I have to be a little bit thoughtful. I want to be known as a good writer. I try to write songs that I would want to hear and that I think the world needs. As an artist, I realised that I can add to the conversation, which is pretty cool.”

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QUICK GLANCE at Brown’s brilliant, stream-ofconscious X/Twitter account shows his willingness to add to the conversation. It’s refreshingly opinionated, on everything from music and politics to fashion and social issues, in a time where a lot of artists’ social media accounts are expertly managed to the point of being devoid of personality or wit. Does he worry he might have to start censoring it as his audience grows? “I already don’t put my real true thoughts on Twitter,” he says, “it’s just me kind of messing around. If it’s anything political, like me feeling a certain way or just being a leftist or a socialist, then I’m already aware there’s a ceiling there for me because I’m not a capitalist. I will say no to certain things because of who I am. And I think it’s important as I hopefully get more successful that I don’t lose the core of who I am just to make more money.”

That’s not to say he doesn’t have aspirations. As we enter 2024, Brown plans to move to New York, get an apartment with a friend and grow a strong creative network there. “That’s mostly what I’m focused on right now – building a community of people I can rely on and that can rely on me.” Longer term, his goals are equally simple, if a tad bizarre. “I just want certain things, like I want to be able to buy a house, I want to have fun, I want, like, a pet fox,” he deadpans. “You never know how it’s gonna happen.

In a way it’s kind of happening exactly how I want it to happen.

Like, the people who I want to sign to are the people who are wanting to sign me and the people who are liking the music are the people who I want to like the music; people who are reflections of me in all types of ways, which is really cool. I think that’s all I can hope for. And even if it stops tomorrow, I’m super grateful for it all.”

21

Lip Critic The NYC hardcore band playing techno clubs,

by Dominic Haley.

Photography by Jake Kenny

Stoke Newington’s Wetherspoons isn’t exactly what you’d call one of London’s top tourist attractions. Earlier, when I was putting it forward as a venue for our interview, I’d panicked slightly and described it to Lip Critic as ‘ basically Margaritaville, but more depressing and British’, and as we step through the doors on this cold November Thursday night, it appears I’m bang on. The smell of stale beer, Tikka Masala and B.O. mingle in the air while men silently stare into their pints or mechanically shovel money into several loudly glaring

22

gambling machines. It’s more post industrial hellscape than quaint London boozer, but the members of Lip Critic don’t seem to mind. Snatching up a menu almost as soon as we sit down, they pour over it like archaeologists discovering a long lost script. “Look at these prices,” exclaims Danny Eberle, one of the band’s two drummers. “You don’t get this kind of shit in New York!”

The band’s excitement is forgivable; after all, this is Lip Critic’s first trip to the UK, and understandably, they’re keen to take it all in. Formed in 2019, in the past four years the band has gone from conquering their neighborhood venues to becoming one of NYC’s most talked about acts, and they are now poised to branch out to a global audience. By all accounts, the last year has been their busiest yet, with the band hitting the road supporting Screaming Females and sharing the stage with IDLES on some of their recent US dates, and recently they signed with Partisan Records. They’ve done all this while confusing the hell out of everyone. Their sound is so hard to define that they’ve found the band playing hip hop nights, punk all-dayers and even the occasional techno club.

Everything has been happening so fast that it’s left Lip Critic still trying to process it. Asking them about their recent signing with Partisan, the band stares at each other and puff out their cheeks in disbelief. “I mean, it’s crazy, right?” Drummer Ilan Natter asks me. “It’s like PJ Harvey’s label!”

It’s not bad going for a bunch of kids just out of college.

“Connor, Ilan, and I were studying music. Danny was studying anthropology and journalism,” explains frontman Bret Kasner, recounting Lip Critic’s early days. “Danny and Ilan were in another band who had a show, and the bassist couldn’t show up, so they tried to salvage the gig by having Connor play bass and asking me to sing. I guess they thought it was funny. They had me just say stuff over the music; we were improvising; that was sort of like the start.”

These haphazard beginnings have evolved into their defining strength. Everyone brings something different to the table. Drummers Eberle and Natter hail from a raw hardcore foundation, reminiscing enthusiastically about their formative years playing high-school parties and gritty dive bars. Connor

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“Why would you even play a show if people didn’t move around? The whole point of music is to give people that feeling”

Kleitz, the primary sampler operator, subtly raises an inquisitive eyebrow at their anecdotes. Rooted in an art school background, his solo music on Bandcamp hints at a love for sparse techno and expansive electronica.

Kasner, on the other hand, occupies a space between these influences. A self proclaimed lover of Deerhoof and Skrillex, his primary goal appears to be igniting dance floors. “Why would you even play a show if people didn’t move around?” he shoots back when I ask him about his influences. “The whole point of music is to give people that feeling.”

W

ATCHING LIP CRITIC perform live, you can see what Kasner’s getting at. The band are unlike any other punk or metal act out there. Drawing from their foundation as an improv act, almost none of their songs follow an established blueprint or pattern. Some tracks have the dual drummers managing to sound like bass players and the synths sounding like percussion; others see the band playing off each other, like some weird jam band. The only thing that stays consistent is Kasner’s vocals of bizarre slogans and ironic statements barked out seemingly at random, turning every song into a hybrid of industrial noise, party-boy dubstep and the soundtrack to a Dance Dance Revolution game. Written down, it sounds more like a recipe for disaster than instructions for high-energy dance music.

Speaking with the band, the desire to constantly work and rework their sound stems from a determination never to be

24

boring. One of the main things that motivates Lip Critic is the need for entertainment – not only for the audience but also for themselves, and this runs through almost every facet of their music, from the complete lack of structure to the tongue-incheek delivery. “I’ve always felt that in music too many people worry about being uniform,” says Kasner when I ask them to explain where this instinct comes from. “Having your tracks on the record sound exactly the same as you play them live, having all your photos look exactly how you think you should have them to fit in with your genre or whatever.”

“It’s mostly an effort to give you a reason to come to the shows,” adds Eberele, only half joking. “You can listen to the record at 1000 BPM and it’s going to rip, for sure. But if you go to the show, we’ll play it totally different. We’ll have alterations to the original version of the song, some of which are like entirely new sections.”

Kasner smiles mischievously and nods in agreement.

“That’s always been so funny to me. I remember seeing a Skrillex set where he revved every song up to triple speed, almost as a statement about the fact that he was tired of playing the same song again and again every night. I mean, I’m sure that everyone else was probably pissed, but I thought it was so funny that people had come to hear these classic songs and they sounded completely wrong. I think it’s endlessly entertaining just to blow stuff up and try to put it back together rather than just stamp the same thing out repeatedly. But, hey, that’s just me.”

A

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Chanel Beads A screaming-in-your-face-in-a-dark-basement approach to sentimental collage pop,

by Colin Groundwater. Photography by Sam Walton

Shane Lavers wants to get up close. He likes small, dark venues; events that feel more like parties than concerts. “Ideally, we’re not onstage, we’re level with people,” the Chanel Beads frontman says. “The intimacy becomes like a release.” That release comes as his voice rises, singing louder and louder as he prowls the floor right in front of your face. “I’m addicted to screaming at people now,” he says with a laugh.

That unsettling but stirring vibe, equally intimate and aggressive, may surprise fans who discovered Chanel Beads on Soundcloud. On record, Lavers sings sweetly. His breakthrough single ‘Ef ’ sounds more like Animal Collective or Oneohtrix Point Never’s gentler work than HEALTH or hardcore. The music has grit, which comes from Lavers’ penchant for sampling lo-fi audio rips and taking unfiltered street recordings. With Maya McGrory and Zachary Paul, he makes eclectic songs that blend pop and sound collage; they sound like the soundtrack to a montage of every dream you’ve ever had. Their debut record arrives this spring via Jagjaguwar.

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T TOOK A LONG TIME for Chanel Beads to arrive at this

song and style. Lavers grew up in the suburbs of Minnesota, where his parents mostly played Karen Carpenter and pop country. He likes both, and recommends Brad Paisley’s ‘Ticks’ if you’re uninitiated to big budget country songs. His older brother listened to a surprising combo of crunk southern rap and Slipknot. So like many suburban millennials, his musical taste evolved out of the strange musical grab bags you used to find on torrent sites. Without the internet he never would have found crate-digger grails of strange New Age ambient – or Pet Sounds.

After graduating college, Lavers harbored loose ambitions of becoming a musician, so he followed a friend to Seattle, where he played a few basement shows in the local DIY scene in 2017. At the time, he was doing “a gimmicky sound collage thing, which is my favorite music.” But for those first few years, he felt adrift.

His one anchor was a job at the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library. “There’s this program in the US where every state has to have this kind of audio book or Braille programme for anyone who registers as having a sight disability,” said Lavers. (Fun fact: This is due to the 1931 Pratt-Smoot Act in the United States. There is no corresponding programme in the UK.) “You can qualify for this program, and we’ll mail you either Braille or this proprietary audio book format that mimics a cassette but it’s a USB. So for two years I was in this warehouse,

pretty much alone, in this big garage in downtown Seattle, and I would go through stacks of these identical… like eight-tracks, and you’d open it up and it would have this little USB thing and it would just have a serial number and say The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown.” The days were long. He’d print out 1000 orders, put his headphones in, and fill requests while listening to music for 8 hours. He loved it though, and considered getting a masters degree in library science.

Then, one night, he had a lightning-like epiphany at a late night jam session. “I joke about this with some people, where I feel like I was asleep my whole life, then I woke up at 26,” he said. “Halfway through Seattle I was like, ‘Oh wait, I should take charge of who I am.’”

The catalyst was something simple. He was in a room with another musician, who was telling him about something they were working on. Then they just… started playing it for him on a guitar. “If we’re in a room, and you’re a songwriter and you have a guitar, you can play me a song that you just wrote.

And I couldn’t do the same,” says Lavers. “I got an [Roland sampler] SP404 when I was 15, but I barely knew how to work it. So I just tried to teach myself to write songs,” he remembers. “That week, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna use this acoustic guitar to make some Steve Reich, Animal Collective pop thing.

I’m actually going to tune it, pick some chords and write words that could be clearly understood, read aloud, and I wouldn’t be embarrassed about it.’”

It was a call to get serious. “It sounds like this Wonderwall moment,” he jokes. But joke or not, Lavers threw himself into a more rigorous songwriting practice. He still worked with his laptop and sound collages, but he took a more intentional approach to lyrics and song structure.

Perhaps more importantly, he moved to New York (he had soured on Los Angeles after a disappointing internship a few years back). The members of Chanel Beads knew few people beyond each other. It took time to find a scene – and friends – but they were writing and performing wherever they could book a gig, and found an unexpected blessing: older musicians and DJs. “There were a few years we were starved for mentorship,” Lavers says. A little guidance went a long way.

That’s not to say it wasn’t hard starting out. “When we play live, it’s like the scariest way to play music, which is my cue to track. I have a microphone, and half the track I don’t sing.” He remembers an early show where half the set was pressing play on a really aggressive instrumental and he would walk around

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staring people down. “It sounds way more like performance art than it was,” Lavers says. “It was a nervous guy pacing, making eye contact with you.” You can imagine how that nervous energy developed into the intensity of Chanel Beads’ current live set.

‘Ef ’ changed things. Lavers started to notice the audience nodding back at him, even singing along when he performed the track. People also started to approach him at shows, making it easier to break into new scenes. But it also brought pressure. It took five years to write that song, now he thought, “Fuck, I got to write 10 more songs like that.”

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HAT’S NOT WHAT HE DID. Chanel Bead’s debut album

reproduces ‘Ef ’s uncanny pop in a few places – most notably lead single and album highlight ‘Police Scanner’ – but it wanders off on some weirder tangents, too, like on the album’s longest track ‘Coffee Culture’. That song is composed almost entirely from isolated samples of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Arguably, these are the two most different tracks on the record, and yet the things they have in common reveal a lot about what makes a Chanel Beads song: the crafty sampling, (Lavers talks about trying to “Trojan Horse” something into a song), the humming drone, a certain sentimental vibe that never becomes too treacly or trite.

That may seem incongruent with the image you have of Lavers’ live performance, the prowling and howling frontman

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who wants to get in your face. When Chanel Beads was testing out the material, they played it to the small dark venues Lavers loves, and, as expected, the sound got more aggressive. “The album is gonna come out and people are going to think it’s way mellower than that thing I just saw,” said Lavers. He’s right – it is.

That’s fitting, though. Lavers sees the loud live performances and carefully constructed recordings as two sides of the same coin. “Everything I was trying to do with the album was make this beautiful, shitty record,” he says.

The contradictions feel like a culmination. When Lavers woke up one day in Seattle and decided to get serious, he realized he had to work harder to get the sound (and the career) he wanted. That meant writing more sincerely, singing more fearlessly, and following his instincts more honestly. “I still don’t know what to do, and that’s why we play the way we play. It’s scary, and it feels like a challenge.” You can hear that spirit in ‘Police Scanner’: “You owe it to yourself / Gotta believe in something else.”

Back to the screaming, and keep all that – the contradictions, the convictions, the little bit of fear – in mind. Lavers takes his words seriously, he only writes them if he means them.

“Lyrically, how could you not say that as loud as possible?” he asks. “It’s almost like you’re in a fight with a family member and you don’t even know what you’re fighting about anymore. I want to scream, and I want to hug you.”

10 YEARS OF PRAH RECORDINGS 2013 - 2023 a a a h e v n h s d k i e r n a o i A y o o n f a N n D t k b r a e / l z c l a H l l D Fa ng / Ora e H a e rs g i / g t n i r u e n k e r L c c e v i i a t l y / s i r m M O n L B o / e lS p s v e u n Y h E i o K s m b r / r u C C a p s o n er / G eo Ro t / N i ve n B y L g c m a n i / n R o a fl a ff n a / r i t Th i o n m S z S C A o / e r l y P t o s o n r / n i d n o r i n T a o Ge d / H / M h / c m i s s n t R n m a u a l o n l Ho m l i n s r y C o / Robi S u o k Umla i u e o h / b s T h s r t e s a F / O n r t i M o a / h J N u s W rot d / r e e t a a u h a k h t m o o c j i a & C R N Yem Y prah.co.uk

Ghetts Find your purpose, by Katie Beswick.

Photography by Dan Kendall

Towards the end of our conversation, Ghetts leans towards me with an abrupt intensity. “Make sure you put in the stuff we spoke about at the end of the interview, yeah?” he says, “That stuff is more important than anything I’ve said about the album; that’s the message I want to get across.” We’ve taken a turn, at some point, towards the bigger philosophical picture, to the broader themes of life, death, love, parenthood and how to navigate them. The vital task, Ghetts emphasises, at a time when everything seems doomed, is nurturing our children’s natural ability to love, because they, after all, are the ones who might be able to sort out all the messes we keep creating. This, Ghetts stresses – love and focus and commitment to family – is what he is about: beyond the PR chat we’re having, beyond his new album, there’s an essential set of truths he feels a responsibility to communicate. “What I wanna say to people is: Find your purpose,” he nods, gesturing around his studio as if to indicate both that he has found his, and also that all this, the material stuff, is not it. “’Cos we’ll all just live and die chasing money without finding the purpose. And money makes people feel nice. But it makes people feel like they’re better than other people. And the truth is, as human beings, we all wake up tomorrow. And if we had to live as we’re meant to, and we was all equal, I’d be fine. I wouldn’t need any money to feel better than somebody else. Money enables me to live and have certain freedom that I crave... but in the midst of that, don’t forget what your actual purpose is. Like, what makes you feel like your soul is on fire? Because a lot of people, unfortunately, they never get to feel that.”

This introspective energy shot through with the wisdom of a newfound maturity is not as removed from the album as Ghetts implies. On Purpose, with Purpose announces its focus in the title and follows through on most of the tracks, reflecting an assured maturity that is a stylistic shift from previous work. As his publicist remarks, if Conflict of Interest (Ghetts’ hit 2021 record) might be classified as ‘revolution’, On Purpose, with Purpose is ‘evolution’. The fuel for this evolution is not only Ghetts’ inevitable growth with age (as one of the few rappers of his generation able to sustain a career across decades), but a renewed commitment to God, a strict routine that includes rigorous daily gym sessions, and a reckoning with grief.

Following the release of Conflict of Interest, Ghett’s beloved nan died. It was the first close family loss, and he was feeling it all through the process of developing On Purpose – uncharacteristically unable to work through the feelings in lyrics, as he normally might. “One of the most important people to me – and

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I couldn’t even really, I’ve never before got a place where I can’t articulate what I need to articulate. But I couldn’t really articulate that whole [experience in a] song,” he says. Instead, the enormity of the loss occurs across the album as a series of motifs and images, bleeding through the music in unexpected ways.

There is the recurring mountain imagery, which suggests the scaling of difficult emotions, but is also a more complex metaphor that’s bound up with a wider cultural and spiritual sensibility. The kung fu films he watched as a younger man, Ghetts explains, often included characters who would experience a hardship, and find themselves, beaten and blooded, on a journey to a mountain, where they would level up. “And so, from the start of when I’ve been emceeing, I used to talk about ‘going to the mountain’. A bunch of emcees have quoted me on that, from Stormz – loads of different people have spoken about the mountain.” In fact, he has even named the studio complex where our interview takes place, ‘Mount Excellence’, a homage to those kung fu movies, and a reflection of the fact the studio’s existence marks his own levelling up.

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ARLY IN ON PURPOSE, WITH PURPOSE is a sample of Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, where the imagery of the mountain suggests the possibilities and challenges of the civil rights movement. For Ghetts, however, it was the spiritual element of Dr King’s words, rather than the political message, that resonated. “When he was talking about he’s been to the mountain and God allowed him to – I just connected with him on a different level. And when he was saying about being ready to do God’s work, spiritually, that’s where I was at.

And I felt it was pretty cool that it tied in. I think they call the word serendipity. Everything just comes together.”

Elsewhere on the record, Ghetts grapples with the challenges that friendships undergo when you reach your 30s, and channels ‘Brenda’s Got a Baby’ on ‘Jonah’s Safety’ – both a homage to Tupac’s classic, and a response to his partner’s job as a social worker, which serves as a reminder of the daily struggles faced by many of those we exist alongside. If there’s a tonal misstep it is, for me, Twin Sisters, which involves some fairly standard unreconstructed grime misogyny (“I been fucking twin sisters they don’t make the same sound… you ain’t gotta move my head bitch, I know my way down”). I choose to go with a generous reading, and tell him it reminds me of how, even with therapy and the conviction you’re past the idiocy of youth, it’s easy to find yourself back in the old patterns, doing stupid things even

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“We’ll all just live and die chasing money without finding the purpose. And money makes people feel nice. But it makes people feel like they’re better than other people” 32

though you know better. “Yeah, facts,” Ghetts laughs. “I like that explanation a lot, I’m gonna use that in my next interview.”

The playing with nuance is also a theme, of course. This is evident in the early album promotion, in which culture wars slogans (‘Real G’s don’t participate in gender wars’, ‘We are in a time where people believe anything but the truth’) are writ large on posts hashtagged GIIG – and seem weirdly reductive once you know what’s on the record. But then, Ghetts explains, parodying the contemporary tendency towards reduction is important, because it’s a way to signal how complicated, nuanced issues can be made corrosive when simplified to appeal to our base emotions.

“I could see everything that’s going on. I could see most podcasts.

The usual subject, gender wars, male versus female. ‘Who’s paying the bill?’ Dumb shit like that. And I was just thinking, this is so not layered. Is this where everyone’s brains is? So I took what everyone’s thinking, and what I did was take some of the lines from the album and use them as placards. So I just thought, yeah, real men don’t take part in gender wars, that’s it.”

There’s a bigger stake at play behind the culture wars debates, Ghetts reminds me, and that is the way that extreme disagreement is used as a tactic of distraction, dividing us from one another and serving no purpose in terms of bettering anyone’s life in spiritual or material terms. “Cancel culture is like… I can put something out about you today and people jump on that bandwagon with no research at all. But your livelihood could be at stake from this information that Ghetts decided just to put out there right now. And that’s a dangerous thing. That is super, super dangerous. Now, are there some people that deserve to be cancelled? Of course there is. But it’s like everything, we can’t, just because somebody said this and everyone is controlled just by a flurry of emotions. Which brings me to, what I say is, ‘divided by race, divided by religion, divided we fall.’

Because the truth is this, we\re all poor. Do you know what I’m saying? So we spent all day arguing with each other while laws have passed. Yeah, laws are being passed while we’re arguing with each other – laws that don’t benefit none of us where we are. White, Black, Asian, what? It doesn’t benefit none of us. But we’re busy arguing about all of these different things.”

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HE EVOLUTION SHOWCASED in the album transcends

the content too. There is also an evolution in the sound and the skill of the lyrical composition, indicating how Ghetts is still pushing himself, despite his status as one of the OGs of the UK grime/hip hop scene. He cites Jay Z’s Fade to Black film as a huge influence, shaping his technique and approach to the writing process – he works entirely with a freestyle method, working out tracks over the mic, rather than writing lyrics down. “Fade to Black was the sickest thing I’ve ever seen a rapper do. And if I could accomplish half of what I’ve just watched… because I thought it was alien. Well it is alien, and just because I’ve learned to do it doesn’t mean it’s not. It takes a form of brain training.

Working your memory to be able to hold so many words that are just now available. But watching Fade to Black every day. Every single day watching and thinking, seeing Jay Z’s session with [Rick] Ruben, when he was making ‘99 Problems’ and thinking, ‘fuck!’. I just couldn’t fathom it. And then I started trying, and it

was like, one to four bars. If you can do four, you can get eight, sixteen, and so on.”

More recently, Ghetts tells me, he has turned away from hip hop and grime influences, and started studying other forms of music, in an attempt to keep improving. “I’m obsessed with being the best. I’m still obsessed with, like, being great at the art. At going on stage and people looking and thinking, wow, that was an amazing show. Not just because I’ve got great songs, but the show I actually put on, you can see that this is somebody that respects the art, that studies the craft. So I’ve been listening to a lot of people not from the genre, because I’ve grown up on those that are greats from the genre. Now, listening to people that I might have ignored when I was a bit younger, you know, I’m saying, wow, that song was just well written. Why did it connect like that? Super well written. Just trying to add that to my arsenal.”

Do you worry, I ask him, that this maturity might change your sound so much its turns your fan base away? “Nah,” he says.

“I feel like someone who they may consider the elder statesman has to lead by example. You’re not gonna get the 19-year-old version of Ghetts, or the 21-year-old version of Ghetts. That’s impossible for me to do. And I always say to people, isn’t what you loved about me that I was raw and authentic, unapologetically myself? And that’s what I still am. Because I’m talking about things that you might not have heard before. I’m talking from where my mindset is. And I hope to always reflect authenticity. That’s what I hope for, because that’s what really the genre is, you know – people that was coming up raw, authentic, and saying things that was relatable to the lives of those who are listening. And now, here we are. And if you don’t find [On Purpose, with Purpose] believable right now… it’s gonna be believable, that’s the bottom line. In years, or months, or whatever, you’re gonna come back, listen, and it’s gonna hit you like a tonne of bricks.”

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Reviews Albums

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Albums

The Smile — Wall of Eyes (xl) It’s wise not to get your hopes up when faced with a side project. For every horizonexpanding offshoot (for notable recent examples, see Revelators Sound System, the spiritual jazz-channeling instrumental excursion by Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor), there’s a swamp of reversealchemy ‘supergroups’ to wade through, seemingly committed to proving just how much the frequently silent ‘other guys’ standing in the shadows of the more prominent band members brought to the table.

Perhaps unsurprisingly considering the band’s sluggish ways (the best part of a decade has passed since 2016’s alluring, richly textured A Moon Shaped Pool), Radiohead are no strangers to side projects. Guitarist Ed O’Brien has released solo material as EOB and drummer Philip Selway has authored a few albums of singer-songwriterly material. Bassist Colin Greenwood has recently accompanied Nick Cave’s solo shows. Yet the expectations have inevitably escalated whenever primary songwriter Thom Yorke has ventured away from the main brand.

At their best (OK Computer from 1997’s, 2000’s Kid A and 2007’s In Rainbows all belong firmly on any list of must-hear albums), Radiohead have managed to combine an unstinting devotion to avoiding predictable formulas with genuine mass appeal, leading to such logic-defying spectacles as groups of drunken fans singing along exuberantly to the desolate coda of twitchy neo-prog epic ‘Paranoid Android’ at the band’s huge 2017 outdoor show in Manchester. The cubist angst of Yorke’s two solo albums of predominantly frosty electronica, however, have provided ammunition for naysayers who feel that Radiohead’s excursions away from their fairly conven-

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tional indie-rock roots or the widescreen, brooding ‘Pink Floyd for the 1990s’ artrock pomp have been at the expense of emotional resonance.

Even so, the emergence of The Smile via a stealth gig streamed as part of the online offerings by the 2021 Glastonbury Festival was greeted with the kind of frothy excitement that the actual outcomes would inevitably struggle to match. Starring Yorke and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood (who has kept busy away from the mothership as a composer of much-acclaimed film soundtracks, including such modern classics as There Will Be Blood) on multiinstrumentalist duty alongside esteemed Brit-jazz drummer Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet), The Smile may have been intended as a spontaneous congregation of likeminded musicians, but any chance of low-pressure experimentation and adequately adjusted expectations was instantly erased by the colossally weighty baggage of the Radiohead connection.

The Smile’s 2022 debut actually matched the inflated expectations. There are bands and artists whose new releases tend to get plenty of bonus praise thanks to past achievements, but A Light for Attracting Attention genuinely deserved its place on the podium of various Best of 2022 polls. Granted, the project’s name referred to the rehearsed rictus grin of a seasoned liar rather than genuine expressions of mirth, and the album was infused with alarm at a world stuck on a steep downward spiral, with the most unworthy of scum floating to the surface again and again; yet A Light for Attracting Attention ultimately reverberated with disarming pleas to break free from division-sowing distractions, alongside blasts of murky, loose-limbed funkiness, neither of which are qualities that spring readily to mind when the Radiohead catalogue is examined. If the general idea was to find creative freedom away from the most likely stifling weight of expectation that inevitably accompanies anything put out under the Radiohead banner, including songs as unabashedly aligned with the band’s classic templates as the unityyearning ‘The Same’ and the majestic

ballad ‘Free In The Knowledge’ probably wasn’t the most obvious way to go about it (especially given the involvement of Radiohead producer and ‘sixth member’, Nigel Godrich).

Despite a more pronounced interest in vibrant hip-shaking, considerable swathes of A Light for Attracting Attention could easily have been mistaken for a long-awaited (and more than worthy) follow-up to A Moon Shaped Pool. The Smile’s second album, however, succeeds in establishing a unique and coherent musical identity that doesn’t instantly resemble what its three authors have dabbled in previously. With Godrich again on board – leading to butter-rich textures and endlessly rewarding little aural coves of ricocheting sounds – Wall of Eyes seems intent on maximizing the potential of Skinner’s versatile and fluid jazz chops.

“This goes where it wants to be,” Yorke coos at one particularly tricksy polyrhythmic juncture of ‘Read The Room’, which certainly seems apt in the company of these eight multilayered, unpredictably unfolding tracks, often featuring the dramatic, lush swell of the London Contemporary Orchestra in a prominent role; at one point, it’s possible to hear Yorke mutter the beats to the exotic time signature on the vocal track, almost as if the trio themselves need some kind of a steady lodestar to anchor their more restless excursions away from conventional verse/chorus formulas.

If the highlights of its predecessor excelled in emotional directness and hunger for communication, Wall of Eyes ventures deeply into the murkily unsettling undergrowth of unease, paranoia and unexplained goings-on. Anyone who can reliably outline what these songs are about deserves a cash prize, but there are asides that seem to drip with the rancid stench of the recently confirmed unethical carpet-bagging of Covid-era elites: “All of that money, where did it go? / In somebody’s pocket?/ A friend of a friend,” Yorke sings towards the end of skittishly floating ‘Friend of a Friend’, his final “loose change” rising into an anguished wail. Led by Yorke’s piano, the track – one of the highlights here, with its echoes

Albums of ‘Pyramid Song’ – could be classed as a pretty ballad, were it not for the anxietyridden references to exclusive (secret?) parties and easy (public?) money being surreptitiously pocketed. “Let us raise our glasses / To what we don’t deserve/ What we’re not worthy of,” Yorke mutters on the title track – possibly the iciest cut in living memory to reference Brazilian samba rhythms, almost monotonous in its foggy detachment but lifted to nearanthemic heights by soaring strings that in this context sounds like an escalating panic attack, as canned mechanical laughter fleetingly enters the frame.

Built on a motif that sounds like a guitar string being detuned, the most appropriate adjective for the stunning nine-minute epic ‘Bending Hectic’ is dreamy, but this particularly vivid dream involves the driver of a car willingly steering off a cliff-edge, before the song crashes into a coda of sizzling, feedback-encrusted riffage via an excursion that (knowingly or otherwise) finds the hauntingly beautiful string arrangement climb ever upwards a la ‘A Day In The Life’. It says something of the trio’s dedication to a groove that even this endlessly innovative, disembodied slow-burn deconstruction of a rock epic manages to locate a deeply hypnotic pulse. Chased by fluttering flutes that resemble a restless ghost of a bygone spiritual jazz session, ‘Teleharmonic’ is even more impressive, the track’s unabashedly caressing beauty clashing deliciously with dark references to ‘payback’ and something (or someone) being manhandled and taken away by force, which seems all too horribly topical at the moment.

Less rewarding cuts, meanwhile, can suggest scraps of song ideas glued together with the adhesive of knotty time signatures, abrupt swerves in mood and texture, impressively evocative string arrangements and general air of dismay.

“Nowadays everyone’s for sharing,” Yorke wails on ‘Under Our Pillows’, faintly suggesting an uncle who struggles to see the appeal of social media, but the song’s unwieldy travels from a sweaty afrobeat/ post-punk hybrid to a Can-hued motorik chug and ultimately oceans of static hiss

never quite reaches the meaty potential of its individual ingredients. Neither this or the jagged math-rock odyssey of ‘Read The Room’ are actively bad, far from it, but the album’s musically trickier moments can bring to mind an advanced prog-jazz shredding session, where the musicians flash each other a satisfied grin whenever someone peels off a particularly tasty lick. The album extinguishes itself with ‘You Know Me!’, a flickering candle of a lullaby that is refreshingly hushed and direct after some of the hyperactivity that precedes it: faults and all, Wall of Eyes proves that The Smile are still the reigning champions of the side project game. 7/10 Janne Oinonen

Helado Negro — PHASOR (4ad) Any press release which lists Silver Apples, Ornette Coleman and Scott Walker as influences has my ear immediately. On Helado Negro’s latest album, we are thrust into an altogether unique narrative which doubtlessly leaves behind any other album of today – according to the artist himself, “PHASOR is magic. It’s music about seeing your aura and living inside of it. It’s music as landscaping.”

PHASOR is highly impressionistic, expressing both the nostalgia found within Helado Negro’s early childhood in South Florida and his current day-to-day life in Asheville, North Carolina. In fact, Helado Negro – aka Roberto Carlos Lange – never stayed in one place for very long, which might explain why the album can’t be pinned to a specific time or place. Its impressive sonic range is the product of this feeling of dislocation. The language on the record embodies the dichotomy between Lange’s Ecuadorian heritage on the one hand and his American citizenship on the other as he switches between singing in Spanish and English seamlessly,

almost without notice. Speaking about the album, Lange has said that “all we do is oscillate. Partners, friends, people, music, movies and animals. We all oscillate at different frequencies all the time, sometimes in or out phase with the world.”

PHASOR epitomises the ephemerality of being without conceding to nihilism. It is bright, utopian, and positively cybernetic. Indeed, Helado Negro is not moving against the current of contemporary pop culture, like so many artists often do, but instead uses it as a vehicle to explore his position in the world, without putting any pressure on finding somewhere to settle down. Quite simply, this is one of the richest listening experiences I’ve had for years; Helado Negro’s PHASOR is a triumph. 9/10 Leo Lawton

Kelly Moran — Moves in the Field (warp) Moves in the Field abandons Kelly Moran’s acclaimed work with prepared piano and instead finds her dueting with her Disklavier. Gone are the unpredictable percussive elements from earlier work, and instead, keeping up with her impossibly perfect partner pushes her abilities further than ever before.

The auteur’s spiralling patterns are transfixing, her motifs hypnotic and, on opener ‘Butterfly Phase’, not obviously assisted by a hypersensitive reproducing piano. The following track ‘Superhuman’ lives up to its name – the piece would require more hands to play than Moran alone possesses. The machine-like precision is astounding, and while it adds clarity in tone and method, human intention is generously written into the work too. Late highlight ‘Leitmotif ’ balances the technically brilliant toplines with a soulful and empathetic underscore. The tracklist walks the same fine line with hard-earned ease.

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Albums Part of the beauty of Moves in the Field is the elegance with which Moran establishes a synthesis with the instrument. Using the now infinite layers available to her as a composer, she crafts a curious spectre of human performance.

She finds inventive inspiration in the most obscure of places – this collection of delicate and deliberate compositions is another career high for Kelly Moran. 9/10 Jake Crossland

OMNI — Souvenir (sub pop) Cue an almighty sigh of relief: after nearly five Omni-less years, Frankie Broyles and Philip Frobos are back with drummer Chris Yonker for the release of their fourth album, Souvenir. The trademark choppy, mathematical precision that oozes so much effortless cool across their past three albums is immediately recognisable and as irresistible as always. For a band that has thrived on a glistening intricate minimalism, the introduction of a more layered instrumentation is a surprising gift.

Conceptually, the album is intended as an offering of self-contained audio objects: a chocolate box of different, individually-wrapped mouthfuls that complement one another. As singular as the tracks are, what they do share is an unrelenting dynamism that lies at the heart of every hard-hitting staccato beat. Each track is a slap in the face from the very beginning, and one you avidly encourage.

Their masterful guitar and bass interplay is particularly impressive on tracks like ‘Common Mistakes’, while the stunning ‘Plastic Pyramid’ demonstrates, for the first time, this interplay in vocal form. After touring together and becoming friends, Izzy Glaudini of synth-heavy rock trio Automatic makes an appearance as guest vocalist on three tracks. Inspired

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by a B-52’s or Nancy & Lee style, ‘Plastic Pyramid’ is an earworm that betrays not an ounce of audible effort.

Lauded by many as a band that completely transformed rock music, their latest contribution is a celebration of their skill as musicians. If there’s one thing that Omni excel at, it’s making technically complex, fast-paced precision slick, exciting, and look easy. 8/10 Natalia Quiros Edmunds

William Doyle — Springs Eternal (tough love) William Doyle’s latest album, Springs Eternal, interrogates the dangers and possibilities of climate change and ever-accelerating technological advances. He crafts his idiosyncratic art-pop – at times baroque, whimsical, or both – to serve his subject matter: his fragmented sense of self, fracturing under the weight of two existential threats.

Luckily, while that might sound overwhelmingly cerebral, an almighty number of bold hooks keeps the album accessible. Leaning into shortened attention spans, Doyle fluently weaves strings, synths and guitar into a modern tapestry, with the help of Mike Lindsay on production at his Margate studio.

And alongside its coastal origins, the language of water permeates the album (the title its most obvious surfacing). Rising sea levels and the deluge of information meet at the ocean, while Doyle splinters into a menagerie of characters. On ‘Soft to the Touch’, he’s a cowboy, replete with yodelling disruption to a synth-led lullaby – on ‘Castawayed’, he’s fingerpicking from a desert island.

The Radiohead and Robert Wyatt comparisons that follow Doyle fleetingly apply here too, his delivery recalling Thom Yorke’s keening pleas or lyrics channelling Wyatt’s eccentricities. For

the main part, however, he’s a singular master at work, bending form, lyricism and production to underline his prescient thesis. 8/10 Jake Crossland

Unknown T — Blood Diamond (island) Unknown T, real name Daniel Richie Lena, came to prominence in 2018 as the architect of UK drill’s first crossover hit ‘Homerton B’. The track squared off drill’s angular concrete and metal framing with Afroswing’s fluid and curvy dips to birth something fresh and infectious.

‘Homerton B’ was a reimagining of drill, focusing less on semi-automatic hi-hats and other heavy duty sounds, making room for Unknown T’s dynamic flow that’s nimble, full of acceleration, and percussive – drawing more parallels to golden-age hip hop rappers Rakim and Big Daddy Kane than anything from this side of the Atlantic or this side of the millennium. More importantly, ‘Homerton B’ offered a glimpse of something joyous in the bleak world of UK drill.

Dropped weeks before Notting Hill Carnival in 2018, it echoed throughout west London and pushed drill mainstream.

Unfortunately the joy for Lena would be fleeting. His ascendancy was cut short when he was arrested in 2019 and held in prison for nine months in connection with the death of student Steve Narvaez-Jara in January 2018, before being released and cleared in 2020.

Paranoia, which is drill’s most intriguing atmosphere, was now justified for Lena. The sound he tinkered with post-prison quickly began to reflect that. Lena dug deeper into the latter day sounds of Skepta, tapping into the Tottenham MC’s underdog psychosis mentality (as Skepta famously explained in a 25-minute YouTube monologue in 2014). A Kafkaesque hue crept into his

Albums lyrics, as if like Josef K Lena could be pulled before the courts once again and tried for all eternity. The music that Unknown T began releasing (his two standout mixtapes Rise Above Hate and Adolescence) increasingly mirrored his environment; weighed under by uncertainty and surveillance.

Songs about love felt like they could be about turf wars, songs about selling drugs focused on the guilt of poisoning your people, police sirens sounded like tolling church bells. It gave his version of UK drill a distinctly weird edge. The mystery would only serve to intensify UK drill’s inherent apocalyptic quality, a genre that rests on the harsh truth that while UK grime was birthed in the shadow of the rising skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, UK drill chokes on Grenfell Tower’s ashes.

Lena’s music grew more sorrowful, yearning for redemption, like smoke billowing towards the heavens.

With Blood Diamond, Unknown T’s debut album, it felt reasonable to assume that the young rapper would neatly package the sound he’s crafted up until this point, ready for more widespread listenership. The reality is far different; Blood Diamond is not a crystallisation of his sound, it’s a volcanic eruption.

Like his mixtapes and his existence, the central theorem of his debut album is evasion. Evasion from a standard sound, evasion from the police listening in to his music, and due to the trauma he suffered from being wrongly imprisoned, evasion from his past. When Unknown T’s fully unloads his flow, you feel like even his words are running.

From the cinematic opener ‘2023’ that has a grime riddim at its core, the doors are swung wide open. The album’s pacing and tracklisting buries one in an uneasy world, flooded by love and loss, swept along with ballads and street tales. Ruminative tracks such as the gospel-laden ‘Rain’ collapse into songs of clear African joy such as ‘PASSA’ before landing back into East London with the stand-out track ‘Adolescence’, a track cut with fellow rising star Digga D building upon the street mantra of “pain is the essence” which borrows the hook from

Giggs & Dubz’s 2015 underground road classic of the same name. The latter is which is one of the many homages (to Skepta, to Drake, and to Stormzy) that instils this record with a sense that it’s a passing of the torch.

What is most astounding is the sonic territory Unknown T covers. Blats of ammo dovetail into swoons of a sultry sax. Sweeping piano, chunky Weeknd-like synths, and swirling wind instruments bloom flowers in otherwise concrete skies. Moments of adrenaline give way to moments of movement. Despair turns to beauty, as this album is frequently beautiful. No more so than euphoric closer ‘Til We Meet Again’ that soars with sophisticated strings that Unknown T’s flow glides through, reminding us that “young days don’t last”.

This is a proper album. Built like an album. Complex like an album. Moreish like an album. More than being an album, this is one of a handful of masterpieces in the wider UK rap genre. Blood Diamond sits alongside Boy In Da Corner, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, Kala, Made in The Manor, Konnichiwa, and GREY Area.

While ‘Homerton B’ reimagined a genre’s sound, Blood Diamond has cemented an artist’s legitimacy; this is what UK drill has truly been threatening for years. 9/10 Robert Davidson

Daudi Matsiko — The King of Misery (really good) Daudi Matsiko knows how to conjure emotion out of silence. The British-Ugandan singer-songwriter can fingerpick with the folk deftness of Nick Drake but he rarely places it centre stage.

His words, which frequently address his mental health struggles, are instead the main focus on his debut album.

Tracks usually start and end with his whispered vocals, the instrumentation a

backdrop for his observations. On ‘Falling’ his vulnerable assertion that “I don’t want to be alone,” is mocked by barely-there guitar, his aloneness almost painful to hear in the instrument’s slow strum.

It’s a spiritual isolation he’s willing to break with equally devastating effect.

He draws on his community of musician friends – including Divorce’s Felix Mackenzie-Barrow and GoGo Penguin’s Nick Blacka – to add fragile cello, saxophone and backing vocals on several tracks.

The bridge between isolation and community is album highlight ‘Hymn’.

Opening with minimal backing, it slowly adds a shadowy female vocal, finger clicks and finally a mini gospel choir that offers salvation to his enquiry, “Am I too broken to believe / there’s any hope inside of me?”

The album answers a definitive no, the ten tracks offering hope to his listeners and – if there’s any justice – to himself.

7/10 Susan Darlington

Kali Malone — All Life Long (ideologic organ) To date, Kali Malone’s albums have felt more like commemorations of live events than free-standing musical objects. All Life Long, however, has a greater sense of its own agency than hitherto: the 12 pieces here, written for choir, brass ensemble or pipe organ, feature recurring patterns that echo off each other as the album progresses, and a single-sitting listening is rewarded with a sense of monolithic completion, and a consequently satisfying calm.

Also unusually for Malone’s work, melody and pulse are in (relative) abundance, leaving All Life Long occasionally resembling the distant evolutionary cousin of first-wave techno: the title track in particular, despite only being played on the organ, with no percussion, has a repetition and implied bpm that evokes

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Albums a darkened subterranean club, and it’s easy to reimagine the deceptively simple parallel chord progressions reproduced on burbling synths.

Elsewhere, though, in its stately, melancholic harmonic shifts, All Life Long is also reminiscent of ancient devotional music, encouraging a reflective stillness lightyears from any dancefloor, and often daringly so: when Malone leaves the final chords of pieces to play for extended durations (beyond three minutes in the case of ‘No Sun To Burn’), a hypnotic fog rolls in, creating a sort of radical depthlessness for the listener to investigate, or maybe space to reflect on the track just gone.

It makes for Malone’s least extreme and most welcoming album yet. Despite a potentially daunting 78-minute runtime, All Life Long is a surprisingly easy listen: inviting, contemplative and sonically rich, the sound of complexity unpacked for all to understand. 8/10 Sam Walton

Mannequin Pussy — I Got Heaven (epitaph) There’s a touch of every John Congleton producee in Mannequin Pussy’s latest album: Bully’s snarling bubble-grunge shout-sing; Ezra Furman’s gender-cognisant rock and roll anthems; Tegan and Sara’s masterful pop song construction. Enlisting Congleton for their first full-length in five years, the Philadelphia punk band has never sounded so red-hot and dynamic, their wake-the-fuck-up songwriting given a maximalist colour palette.

Far from one-note, I Got Heaven manages multiple moods and energy levels.

“What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch,” vocalist Marisa Dabice barks on the riotous opener, though a few songs later she’s come to a plaintive realisation that there are crucial gaps in her knowl-

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edge of a prospective bedmate. “I know a lot of things / But I don’t know you,” she coos as brushed drums and pretty percolating keys nestle underneath her.

This careful balancing of sweet confessionals and fired-up antagonism – “I’ve got a loud bark, deep bite” is another scream-from-the-rafters mantra – are what makes I Got Heaven so well-rounded; the band could simultaneously intimidate history’s meanest musical iconoclasts but are also in conversation with the Wolf Alice-on-Radio-1 kind of ‘punk.’

There are several examples of both, and of the bridge between them, but the best shot at pleasing everyone might be ‘Tell Me Softly,’ for which a blanket of fuzz-distortion is draped over the guitars and Dabice’s vocals. In the compelling bridge build, she asks, “What if one day I don’t love you anymore?,” part self-doubt, part reprimand.

Indeed, sentiments like these culminate in a record acutely focused on impermanence, and suggest why the band plays it as it lays – barking, biting, hurting, howling, and making space for those soft-spoken sweet nothings as well.

As if trying to erase her every previous doubt – and yet simultaneously cement this thesis – Dabice spends the climax of the album’s closer repeating the plea/ confirmation/warning that “Nothing’s gonna change”. Mannequin Pussy may not know if they’re coming or going. But whatever happens we’ll be following.

8/10 Hayden Merrick

Serpentwithfeet — GRIP (secretly canadian) Josiah Wise, aka Serpentwithfeet, is no stranger to making a statement. A torchbearer for showcasing and celebrating gay Black love, here he builds on the tender, loving representation of 2021’s Deacon adding in

moments to inject a physicality alongside the romantic vulnerability.

You feel it on ‘Damn Gloves’, the album’s tenacious, pheromone-filled opening track (“I just wanna keep grind, grindin’ on my nigga / Whatever’s on his leg, good god / It’s getting thicker”) and see it in the directness of its accompanying music video celebrating the spirit and intimacy of Black queer nightlife. Built on a foundation of crisp, sensual R&B, the rest of GRIP might not strike with the same overt carnal power but tracks such as ‘Black Air Force’, ‘Hummin’ and ‘Safe Word’ still find a supernatural blend of complexity, romanticism and evocation that ensure everything holds up.

‘Ellipsis’ is the highlight with Orion Sun’s star vocal turn adding a gentle caress. “When words fail / Ellipsis / Baby, come kiss me,” she invites before Wise’s own equally sublime vocals help to close out a track that’s not only the album’s standout, but likely one of the best slow jams you’ll hear all year. 6/10 Reef Younis

Brittany Howard — WHAT NOW (island) There’s a point on WHAT NOW, Brittany Howard’s long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s Jaime, where the Nashville-based, multi-Grammy winning singer-songwriter proclaims: “I am having the time of my life,” on ‘Another Day’. From the very opening moments of Howard’s latest release, this sense of joy and satisfaction is palpable.

WHAT NOW offers a kaleidoscopic palette of infectious instrumentation which sometimes incorporates luminous 1970s avant-jazz elements (‘Earth Sign’), Prince-like hooks (‘Power To Undo’) and velvety smooth vocals that give Smokey Robinson a run for his money on the alluring groove of ‘I Don’t’.

These are all classic and timeless influ-

Albums ences that have informed so many exciting contemporary artists, yet Howard also presents moments here that don’t feel a million miles away from the likes of the late and great Richard Swift and, unexpectedly, the enveloping polyrhythms of the excellent closer ‘Every Color In Blue’ wouldn’t feel out of place on a black midi release. While that might seem like a lot of external noise, Howard, taking control as producer of her second solo LP, demonstrates an extraordinary ear for texture and how to elevate the general mood. Here, she does this with deft drumming which pulses through the album, notably on ‘Red Flags’, introduces interesting woozy effects and within the myriad of wonderful tones throughout WHAT NOW, Howards anchors the album with the ethereal glow of singing baths which nicely tie all of the different strands together.

These 12 songs are commanding and coupled with Howard’s effervescence and formidable vocals make for an irresistible body of work abundant with personality. An awe-striking album. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

Folly Group — Down There! (so young) Folly Group’s debut album Down There! features a nefarious-looking cave network as its cover. Underpinned by 10 points that relate to London locations central to the album’s creation, its artwork and title invite you to step into an uncanny underworld of the familiar.

Opening with a gang vocal from all four band members, ‘Big Ground’ sends you plummeting to the subterranean depths of a complex musical world that is bound together by a dark playfulness.

Led by the group’s endlessly impressive percussive force, each track moves seamlessly from one carefully

constructed soundscape to another. The atmospheric worldbuilding that reared its head in their first EP Awake and Hungry (2021) finds itself fully formed and expansive; “It’s not about genre as much as creating your own cinematic universe,” lead vocalist and drummer Sean Harper has said. Only repeated close listens approach begin to reveal the subtleties and textures built into each track. Drawing from punk, dub, triphop, dance music, and traditional AfroCuban rhythms, the record fuses diverse reference points for an unsettling and confronting twist on the familiar.

The album is a soaring success in its approach to containing multitudes, gliding from the heavily electronic, to the guitar-driven, distorted and industrial. The addictive ‘East Flat Crows’ revels in lyrical and percussive dialogues melding vocalists and instruments which feel at once at home with one another and bizarrely alien. Slow burner ‘Nest’ is gleefully obsessive, while the jagged and curt ‘New Feature’ is a triumph in weighty electronic depths. Whatever’s Down There!, it’s got me hooked enough to want to burrow inside for a closer look.

8/10 Natalia Quiros Edmunds

LAIR — Ngélar (guruguru brain) To describe LAIR’s output as “earthy” would be an understatement. The Indonesian six-piece play music not only for the people, but on instruments fashioned from the soil of their hometown, Jatiwangi. The biggest producer of clay tiles in southeast Asia, this “terracotta city” has also been a forest, an outpost for Dutch colonizers, an artistic commune, and more recently the site of a gigantic Nike factory. With Ngélar, LAIR attempt to make sense of some of the different cycles of the landscape. Their previous

album, 2019’s Kiser Kenamaan, was a chronicle of everyday Indonesians living along the coast; fishermen, taxi drivers sweating in traffic jams, the buzz of a crowded street on election day. They continue the thread here, adding various cultural touchstones. Alongside psychedelic and funk elements, they’re on a mission to revive Panturan Tarling, a theatrical folk music style used for storytelling – and their songs are filled with tales of island life. Referencing the sugar plantations which exploited local land for profit, ‘Pesta Rakyat Pabrik Gula’ layers rallying choruses over guttural, urgent-sounding percussion.

The honking horns and lurching basslines of ‘Boa-Boa’ conjure the region’s oppressive heat. They’re also joined by multi-disciplinary artist Monica Hapsari for ‘Setan Dolban’, where she channels the mystery of harvest; her piercing, powerful vocal surely intense enough to coax shoots from arid soil. But overall this music concerns itself with community, rather than spirituality. The word Ngélar refers to troupes of musicians who would tradionally circle the village, playing songs to their neighbours. LAIR are doing much the same thing, even if these days, their patch might extend a little further than the factories of Jatiwangi. 7/10 Orla Foster

Nadine Shah — Filthy Underneath (emi north) “The band left hours ago, according to the work experience kid that I’m currently telling all my deepest darkest secrets to in a toilet cubicle.” So goes one of Filthy Underneath’s most powerful moments, anchored by the simple need for human connection.

The fifth studio album from Nadine Shah continues to demonstrate her strength as an unaffected voice of her generation. Much like the toilet cubicle

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Albums scene, Shah doesn’t shy away from confronting challenging experiences that have shaped her worldview and not feel the need to present these personal stories in pretty surroundings. As she relives the period of returning to her South Tyneside hometown to care for her terminally ill mother and the struggles she faced in her relationship, she reinstates her emotional strength with great impact.

Across Filthy Underneath, in both her distinct cadence and proclivity to be both vulnerable and forthright, she embodies a similar strand of empowerment as Tina Turner and Marianne Faithfull. The latter, in particular, resonates in songs like ‘Keeping Score’ and ‘Sad Lads Anonymous’. Musically, Shah seamlessly incorporates tonal aspects of the Iranian pop and Indian disco she found comfort in during this time with a rich palette of slick bass grooves, striking synths and a bustle of drums which effectively draw you into these deft compositions. Throughout, her magnetism is irresistible.

Informed by a dark and difficult period in Shah’s life and the allencompassing doom rippling through modernity, you cannot be anything but thankful for her beautifully unfiltered earnestness on Filthy Underneath. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

The Fauns — How Lost (invada) “Close your eyes,” comes the whisper of Alison Garner, crooning about slow motion, a sensitivity easier to identify with your eyes opened. It’s not a chorus, but she gravitates to the phrase again and again, each time plummeting deeper into a heady motion sickness, pitch black save for momentary flashes of synth and the whirring lights of background static. ‘Mixtape Days’, the opening track of Brisitolian shoegazers The Fauns’ first album in a decade, is

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named after vodka-fuelled Camden nights in the late 1980s, at the height of indie and new wave: “Seventeen years old, eyes obscured by hair, ripped jeans, pushing through the crowd, headphones on, lost in the delay.” It’s a rare example on How Lost where the four piece lingers too long on the absolutes within their lyricism.

They needn’t be so descriptive; when the album runs free, it’s a total dislocation of the senses, dripping with enough colour to obscure the straight lines erected around their abstracts.

‘Afterburner’ is a highlight, cramming digitised hi-hats and crashes around a kitsch gameshow riff, broken

by Garner’s Elena Tonra-like earnestness. ‘Doot Doot’, too, holds a magnetically quiet euphoria before folding into synthetic strings: exaggerated versions of this would have sports broadcasters on their knees. New wave sensibilities heightened – indicative of adding guitarist-come-acclaimed composer Will Slater to the line-up – hordes of seemingly disparate dots are connected with a strange alchemy. Side A is an occasional left turn to Enya and Sonique as readily as it recalls primetime Cocteaus, whereas Side B plays with an uncannily industrial brightness. It’s an unpredictably varied delight. 8/10 Tristan Gatward

Yard Act — Where’s My Utopia? (island) It’s said that you have a lifetime to write your first record but only 12 months to write the follow-up. Because of this, many groups start to second-guess themselves with album number two, throwing everything at a wall in the hope that something sticks.

This is exactly what Yard Act have done with Where’s My Utopia? The Leeds group’s second long player drips with experimentation. While the angular Fall-

isms of old are still there, on the whole the album is a much more expansive affair, and it’s all the better for it.

There are real flourishes of Gorillaz on opener ‘An Illusion’, while ‘Down by the Stream’ comes across as a sort of hip-hop Ken Loach vignette. Record scratches, DOOM-esque samples and spoken word breakdowns combine with baggy rhythms, resulting in the group’s most interesting – and aggressive – song to date.

Yard Act are at their best during these moments of genre fluidity. The album’s few low points come during the more “traditional” moments. ‘The Undertow’ and ‘We Make Hits’ suffer from their more ambitious surroundings, making perfectly serviceable post-punk seem unambitious and ordinary. Despite this, it’s hard to see Where’s My Utopia? as anything other than a resounding success. The album is a toybox of pop experimentation that hits much more than it misses. Turns out that the second album doesn’t have to be so difficult after all. 8/10 Jack Doherty

Bingo Fury — Bat’s Feet for a Window (state51) Bingo Fury, aka Bristol’s Jack Ogbourne, has been bubbling away in the background for a few years now. Launching his solo career during the first lockdown, his musical journey so far amounts to a handful of singles, EPs and appearances at live events (including Loud and Quiet’s Christmas party in 2022) and a slowly growing buzz amongst industry heads and music critics alike.

Though his recorded output barely covers a commute, the existing tracks showcase an uncanny ability to meld discordant, noirish jazz with a keen ear for melody and pop song structure, reminiscent of a younger and more rakishly handsome Tom Waits. However, nobody gets

Albums to develop forever, and there comes a time when an artist has to premier their work.

Fortunately, Bat’s Feet for a Window easily validates the time spent on its creation. Ostensibly a collection of downbeat piano-led ballads, it is pulled up by the raw power of inventive songwriting and a patchwork quilt of influences.

From avant-jazz and Silver Jews-like mellow pop to more esoteric references such as signwriting and London shopfronts, it’s a record that actively revels in the cognitive dissonance it stirs up.

Simultaneously comforting and unsettling, thoughtful yet deliberately absurd in places, Ogbourne skillfully threads these contradictions together to deliver an experience that’s both intensely surreal and powerfully evocative.

This might only be a debut album, but already it’s cementing Bingo Fury as one of the UK’s most exciting new prospects.

8/10 Dominic Haley

Idles — TANGK (partisan) The introspective and experimental places Idles went to on their last record, 2021’s CRAWLER, are not forgotten on their new full-length TANGK. However, instead of actively (and outwardly) trying to reach further into unknown realms, and prove the expansiveness of their ingenuity, the Bristol group have settled into a position that feels sincerely fortifying.

After the mood setting prelude ‘IDEA 01’, ‘Gift Horse’ comes swaggering in, harking ever so slightly back to the jaggedness of Idles’ early material, followed by the ice-cool, pared-back yet self-assured glitchy hip-hop of ‘POP POP POP’. Meticulously layered, crafted and sampled in its production, combined with Joe Talbot’s slick vocal delivery and lyricism, undoubtedly heralds the track as a real hallmark for the band’s career.

Idles fully lean into their softer side on TANGK, in a way they haven’t done before, with both grit and mercy. Talbot’s lyrical process mirrors the one he pursued on 2020’s Ultra Mono, only writing three verses to the songs that would become TANGK on purpose, prioritisng whatever came to him at the microphone in that moment. The immediacy born offers less room for overthinking, and perhaps a vulnerability that cuts a unique rawness and poeticism. ‘Roy’ is stark, imbued with soul, next to the gorgeous piano ballad ‘A Gospel’. Even ‘Grace’, with barely-there vocals and choppy experimental electronics, is reliant on the breathtaking melodies that Idles do so well on TANGK. Feeling feelings in the moment works for the most part on this record, but in others it feels careless and cocky.

TANGK seems to lose itself slightly towards the end, instigated by the kitschy garage rock ‘Hall + Oates’, which feels like a murky smudge on the beautiful bigger picture crafted by the impressive opening tracks. While Idles may never recreate the transgressive magic that they achieved with their first two records, TANGK has come ever so close with its joyous vulnerability and (mostly) compelling compositions. 7/10 Jasleen Dhindsa

The Body & Dis Fig — Orchards of a Futile Heaven (thrill jockey) Felicia Dorothea Herman’s Casabianca is a poem that sticks with you. Stretching out a moment in the Battle of the Nile, as the French flagship burns under a midnight moon, Herman’s work captures a moment of serenity in violence, her camera pointing dispassionately at the ship’s deck, focusing on the unmoving figure of a young boy frozen while the blaze slowly engulfs him.

As an image of impending doom, it’s stark, but it also chimes with the music of

The Body. Over 20 years, they may have dabbled with other moods and textures, but mostly, it’s been heavy, heavy, heavy.

Yet new album Orchards of a Futile Heaven finds the band expanding into new sonic territories, courtesy of their collaboration with Dis Fig, the alter ego of producer, DJ and artist Felicia Chen. Working hand-inhand with The Body, she not only pushes the sound into some of the most discordant places it’s been for a while but also brings a personal focus almost entirely new to The Body’s output.

Her vocals, written in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, hit like a punch in the gut. Adrift in the all-consuming chaos, her delicate, poised vocals sound like a person caught in the eye of a storm, clinging to life as wave after wave comes crashing down. The result hits the same as Herman’s poem. Like the observer at the Nile, you’re watching a person calmly standing there as the world around them disintegrates. The question is: are they calm because they’re resigned to their fate, or does that calmness just mask the fact that they’re scared shitless? 9/10 Dominic Haley

Vera Sola — The Peacemaker (city slang) “I see this record as a sort of topography of memory. It’s a collection of stories stitched together with that particular dreamlike quality which allows for disparate spaces to converge into a single scarcely knowable vastness.” So says Vera Sola of her sophomore album, The Peacemaker, released five years after her incredible 2018 debut, and the record is pretty well described with these words. With orchestral arrangements, excellent songwriting and an outstanding vocal delivery that masterfully combines influences ranging from Antonín Dvořák’s

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Albums ‘New World Symphony’, which explores American history and landscapes, to the rawness of Tom Waits in the 1980s, her Southern Gothic style now gains an even more dramatic dynamism.

Sola’s explanation of the title, that it has “a personal significance to my family lineage of old west gunslingers,” sets the mood once for the record. This time, she recorded the album in Nashville at the end of 2019 with the assistance of co-producer Kenneth Pattengale and a large group of musicians. In the years that followed, Sola let everything around her fall apart, which gave the eleven songs even more significance and gave her the space to reflect on themes like death and impermanence. Stories of love and sorrow, desperation and pounding hearts are woven together to create a stunning portrait, much as in a set of Chinese boxes. All of the stories are held together like tales under an ancient, black-andwhite circus tent by stabbing guitars and bass lines that sound like heartbeats. This is life, in all its wonder and terror. 8/10 Guia Cortassa

Future Islands — People Who Aren’t There Anymore (4ad) As many will be aware, Future Islands somewhat broke the internet with their 2014 Letterman appearance – specifically with vocalist Samuel T. Herring’s infectiously charismatic stage presence. With that performance, the band even baffled Glaswegian comic and James Corden despiser Brian Limond (“When I first saw them… I was worried for the cunt!” he famously declared on his Twitch channel) . And like Limmy, I’ve found it difficult to gauge whether Future Islands are the real deal or a kind of contemporary Spinal Tap. Having dug a little deeper into the band’s history with their new album People Who

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Aren’t There Anymore as my soundtrack, I’m still a little dumbfounded.

Contrary to how the album sounds, as it turns out, this record is in fact a set of very unlikely breakup anthems, all profoundly self-reflective. ‘The Tower’ is clearly a standout track for me with themes of grief and rebirth perfectly expressed through Herring’s crooning vocal hooks.

Although set in New York, ‘King Of Sweden’ refers to Herring’s time spent living in... well... Sweden, trapped in a broken relationship which he is determined to fix. There is this feeling of displacement running through this album which can only be grounded by Future Islands’ astonishingly tight rhythm section (William Cashion and Michael Lowry) coupled by the band’s iconic melodies indebted to keys/synth player Gerrit Welmers.

This is the first Future Islands record which really encapsulates their live energy and vocal unpredictability. I’d even go so far to say that it is only with People Who Aren’t There Anymore that we can fully understand the identity behind a group who have been playing for an astonishing 17 years. Whilst I may have previously dismissed Herring’s inflection as overly enigmatic, it’s clear that his voice is authentically wrestling with some of the most overbearing emotions. As he metaphorises in ‘Give Me The Ghost Back’, “I’m just an animal that strains against my line. I push and pull the cord, to make me feel alive.” 8/10 Leo Lawton

Lee “Scratch” Perry — King Perry (false idols) Lee “Scratch” Perry finished recording King Perry only days before his death in 2021, leaving the remaining production duties to engineer Daniel Boyle, with whom Perry had worked for the past decade. Knowing this, it’s tempting to try and spot which

tracks here are Perry productions and which are Boyle’s, partly out of nerdy curiosity but also because King Perry is a record of two rather distinct personas – one a sort of bouncy pop reggae full of pep and summery warmth, hi-fi presence and sparkle, the other something far darker and more cavernous encompassed by a sort of treacly foreboding.

Both styles have their moments: in the former camp, opener ‘100 lbs of Summer’ finds Greentea Peng’s smoky vocal perfectly complementing Perry’s more gravelly delivery while fat, rubbery horns offer charming buoyancy, and ‘The Person I Am’ is a sweet, rhythmically calm ballad that feels like an unusually mournful moment in the Perry canon. By contrast, ‘No Illusion’ has a hard-edged electro-ragga vibe that gives the whole record a welcome kick up the arse after a sagging middle third, and ‘Green Banana’, featuring a haggard Shaun Ryder and Perry exchanging entertainingly surreal lyrics, could almost be a great lost Leftfield tune, all slithering robofunk and heavy-heavy bass.

As Perry grew better known outside reggae circles from the ’90s onwards, he became increasingly viewed, and perhaps unwillingly so, as a comedy figure, a sort of perma-stoned dyedbeard Jamaican hippie–kook whose looks and behaviour drew more attention than his music (indeed, that has continued after his death: even his own PR team here seemingly gratuitously mention the producer’s “hallmark chaotic dress sense” and “notoriously eccentric” personality in the album’s accompanying blurb).

While that persona might have granted Perry increased exposure, it also unfortunately often somewhat obscured what a sonic master craftsman he was. Thankfully, though, King Perry largely sets the record straight in that regard: the album consistently sounds incredible, equally joyous and brooding, gossamer and allenveloping, all often simultaneously, a quality that more than excuses the occasional songwriting misstep. There’s little clowning, and much beauty – if this is to be Perry’s last work, it’s a fitting way to end. 8/10 Sam Walton

Albums

Real Estate — Daniel (domino) Real Estate have a comforting kind of sound.

It has persisted throughout their career, and their new album is no exception.

Lead single ‘Water Underground’ carries over the spirit of fun that was there in 2011’s ‘It’s Real’, the hit that catapulted them into worldwide indie prominence, to which I listened on vinyl again and again when it was released. 13 years on from that “uplifting tale of youthful innocence and budding romance” (according to Genius) Real Estate are more interested in “the unconscious, the mysterious part of your brain where creativity comes from,” as frontman and lyricist Martin Courtney has put it.

Daniel is their sixth and most mature album, yet it maintains a sense of youthfulness and spontaneity. Even when worry and discomfort make an appearance in the lyrics, which happens in tracks like ‘Haunted World’ and ‘Interior’ the delicacy of the guitars – which forgo the sharpest jangle in favour of silky slide sonorities – relaxes and lightens the mood. It’s a not-so-subtle influence of the place the band spent nine hectic days recording Daniel in: RCA Studio A in Nashville, particularly evident on the mellow ‘Victoria’ and its distant reminiscence of Link Wray’s ‘Fallin’ Rain’. After being forced to live apart for the past few years, Real Estate spent their time in Nashville in a shared rental and found themselves in a renewed domestic partnership which helped the group get closer and closer,.

While ‘Freeze Brain’ marks the highest point of this new adult sonicscape, taking inspiration from many eras of pop to create an almost flawless tune, it’s up to ‘Say No More’ to be the most classically Real Estate-esque track on the album, even though it has a touch of remotely psychedelic reverbs and effects

that remind us of Tame Impala’s best work – an impression that runs straight through the subsequent ‘Airdrop’.

Daniel is yet another development in the career of a band that can update and improve while staying true to their own style without diluting its character. Their guitars have a happy, resonant sound that’s a welcome balm in tough times; however, every now and then, they could benefit from a good jolt. 6/10 Guia Cortassa

Bolis Pupul — Letter to Yu (deewee) Such was the force of Charlotte Adigéry’s character on her remarkable 2022 collaborative record with Bolis Pupul, Topical Dancer, that the latter was never going to be front and centre, even though the album was very much a joint effort that saw the two Belgian avant-gardists meld their ideas to thrilling effect. Now, though, the producer is stepping forward with his own LP, one that maintains the inventive electronic flourishes that fans of his work with Adigéry will recognise whilst also heading in his own, deeply personal direction. Letter to Yu sees Pupul, born Boris Zeebroek, reckon with his East Asian roots and the way in which they have shaped him as a person and informed his work as a musician.

In listening to his beats in the past, it was always possible to get a sense of him blending East Asian influences (Yellow Magic Orchestra, in particular, hung heavy) with Western synthpop stylings. On Letter to Yu, though, that crossover is at the core of the record; it was inspired by a trip to Hong Kong to reconnect with his heritage after the sudden death of his mother and, sure enough, the neon pulse of Kowloon is readily detectable in the shiny electropop of ‘Completely Half ’, ‘Spicy Crab’

and ‘Ma Tau Wai Road’, as well as a standout track named after the bustling district itself. Elsewhere, he finds room for atmospheric reflection, especially on the gorgeously woozy closer ‘Cosmic Rendez-Vous’; it all adds up to an endearingly intimate album that captures the thrill of Zeebroek’s immersion in his ancestry. 7/10 Joe Goggins

Keyon Harrold — Foreverland (concord jazz) Seasoned American trumpeter Keyon Harrold cut his teeth with Chicago rapper Common at the turn of the century, joining him for his tour supporting acclaimed record Like Water For Chocolate. Performing those songs would expose Harrold to the genius of the Soulquarians, the collective comprising D’Angelo, Questlove, Erykah Badu, and J Dilla, who worked with Common on his album. A quarter of a century later, you hear the drip-down effect of that exposure, as the trumpeter’s now fully matured sound bleeds brass, beats, and ambient together in a deep, soulful transmission.

On Foreverland, his third solo album, Harrold maintains his melodious mix while drawing deeper on the fractured psyche of the United States. Title track ‘Foreverland’ feels drenched by a deluge of division, with the featuring Laura Mvula’s mezzo soprano stalked by a cloudy piano chord that’s only broken apart by Harrold’s sharp trumpet blares.

‘Pictures’ is a dirge for union, fueled by Harrold’s mournful notes that sound like one final look at a moribund love before merging with loneliness. Album standout ‘Well Walk Now (Perseverance)’ is a marathonic struggle. Like a wake, it’s pumped full of pathos and feels lighter at the end than at the beginning.

These winding and meditative tracks stacked up against the more poised

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Albums numbers such as hip-hop inflected opener ‘Find Your Peace’ (which features a philosophical Common) give Foreverland a delicious depth and a very 2024 edge.

Loose, tear-stained, but looking forward, Harrold’s record is a perfect entry point for those looking to enter modern jazz and a riveting listen for the already initiated. 7/10 Robert Davidson

Lime Garden — One More Thing (so young) Brighton’s Lime Garden spent their formative years experimenting with every genre from grunge to psychedelia, but it was a shared sense of pathos that finally tied together their different tastes.

Their debut cheerfully leans into impostor syndrome and rejection: “embracing your cringe,” as they’ve elsewhere put it.

Musically, it’s heavily influenced by 2000s acts like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, but channelling less hedonism, more daily grind. That doesn’t stop them embracing a playful, experimental side, with energetic use of autotune in ‘Pop Star’ and ‘Floor’; or reflecting wryly on their own experience as performers in ‘I Want to Be You’, which confesses to wanting to eclipse their heroes. The tempo wanes a little for ‘Pine’, a twitchy existential number: “Everybody wants to make it, yet no one seems to try / Scared of being forgotten, or scared to cry.” Equally, ‘Fears’ catalogues their every dread, from mortality to the trappings of success; the spiky discopunk sound replaced with a fluttering computerised melody, as though adulthood were a glitchy game to be completed with limited lives. That feels true of the album as a whole, its emotional honesty bumping up against the impulse to be fun and tongue-in-cheek. “Don’t treat it lightly, this love I feel” warns singer Chloe Howard on ‘It’. 7/10 Orla Foster

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Chelsea Wolfe — She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She (loma vista) I’m not sure if Chelsea Wolfe has ever been called the “Queen of Darkness” but after seven albums of doom-laden, dread-fuelled gothic folk, she’d at least be in the conversation. That isn’t to say all of her work exclusively plays out in the abyss, but it’s certainly a space Wolfe feels comfortable sinking into; and while She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She isn’t as metal-focused as predecessors Abyss or Hiss Spun, it’s still nightmarish in its heft and beauty.

Here, it feels as if Wolfe has taken stock, cherry-picking elements of her back catalogue – the breakbeat and electronics of 2013’s Pain is Beauty, the folkier elements of 2019s Birth of Violence, the heaviness of the aforementioned Abyss (2015) and Hiss Spun (2017) – to refine and balance what album number seven could sound like.

Where ‘Whispers in the Echo Chamber’ crashes and thunders with a guttural, shrieking metal breakdown, ‘House of Self-Undoing’ is an injection of amphetamine and humming, buzzing energy with Wolfe’s vocal sculpting its hurtled, speed percussion progress. Where ‘Salt’ is brooding and burdened, her voice floating somewhere in the void, ‘Place in the Sun’ puts it front and centre with the clashing, mordant thrums replaced by a lighter, brighter, tumbling backdrop.

Amidst the heaviness, it’s interesting to hear TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek’s fingerprints all over the album, with his ear for deconstruction a perfect counterweight to the lurching destruction. Industrial electro glitches dance around traditional melodies. Heavy guitars dissolve into trip-hop breaks.

Tracks loom and lurk then unexpectedly explode as Wolfe waits, wails, soars, shrieks, stalks and skulks, unburdened

and uninhibited by the density; the lighthouse in the storm, her voice snakes around the tension and turmoil, the sweet scythe carving through the darkness.

On ‘The Liminal’, she haunts the halls before suddenly coming through the walls. The ‘Unseen World’ is an Assassin’s Creed cutscene, all old world sweeping drama and crescendo rising. But album closer ‘Dusk’ is more of an expected slow and steady heave, its weight coming in waves of giant hooks and chord changes that fully lean into its place as a towering finale before drifting out to nothing. And then everything is quiet, almost too quiet, once more. 8/10 Reef Younis

Katy Kirby — Blue Raspberry (anti) In the growing list of Keeled Scales label graduates, Katy Kirby is making a case to sit at the head of the table. Her 2021 debut album Cool Dry Place nestled immediately among the year’s melodic best, its 30 minutes gentle but with an obtrusive sticking power to linger well beyond its runtime. Blue Raspberry finesses the anxious melancholy of that first attempt; it’s easy listening on the surface but negotiates a queer comingof-age into turbulent focus. She writes the giddy undulance of romantic love with such matter-of-factness that it’s more a doctor’s note than a new record, quickwitted and – at times – profound, turning heartache into diagnosis.

Named after the artificial flavour designed to sell snow-cones in the 1950s, with not a soft fruit in sight, Blue Raspberry is a manifesto for second guessing oneself. In the glossy centrepiece ‘Cubic Zirconia’, Kirby’s voice sounds as crystalline as the synthetic diamond the song takes its name from, assured of the value she’s ascribed (“You look like dollar signs… Why wouldn’t that be enough?”)

Albums But the same phrases tumble through ‘Salt Crystal’ with opposite inferences on selfworth, the metaphors a wry simplification of the mélange of humanity picked at, finding both beauty and deceit in artifice.

Lumbering tableaus continue – alternating between filmic and pedestrian – one moment, making out against the guardrails as the fly-by traffic blurs past with a chorus that lollops in like a speedbump, the next focusing on the order in which a partner adds packets of sweetener to their coffee mid break-up. The album’s strength is its overall lack of flourish: it’s an unceasing blend of boredom, charm and anxiety – and always innately human. 7/10 Tristan Gatward

Fer Franco — Ritos de Paso (selfreleased) A mastery of the Spanish language is probably not required to get a sense of what a record titled Ritos de Paso might represent for Fer Franco; it is, unsurprisingly, a coming-of-age affair, one that tracks the Guatemalan producer’s journey through a vibrant series of sonic landscapes and musical collaborations. He takes us around the world in the process, starting with the increasingly chaotic opener ‘Ya No Vivo Aquí’. What starts as a pulsing krautrocker with polished vocals from compatriot Mabe Fratti descends into off-kilter jazz-inflected freakout; it suggests an estrangement from his roots in the process – perhaps unsurprisingly, with the track’s title translating as ‘I Don’t Live Here Anymore’.

Elsewhere, Latin rhythms meet thumping techno on the atmospheric ‘Asumir Forma’, blissed-out ambience enters the equation in the form of the quietly unfurling ‘Eliminar Lo Innecesario’, and there’s even time for Franco to revisit Manchester, where he formed

part of the now-defunct shoegaze outfit Cosmos Collapse, by resurrecting an old vocal take from that band’s Gary Burton and building the gorgeous ‘Otras Voces’ around it. The sheer variety packed into just six tracks here suggests that Franco will not be easily boxed in moving forwards, but you get the sense that he is close to the sweet spot between meticulous songcraft and impressionistic flair.

8/10 Joe Goggins

Sheer Mag — Playing Favorites (third man) “It does exactly what it says on the tin.” It’s a phrase that’s often disguised as a compliment, but there are underlying negative connotations at play, a suggestion of limitations and external barriers that can’t be broken, no matter how hard the subject tries. While this is often the case, there have been a fair few instances of musicians creating greatness within self-imposed barriers – the Ramones drilling home that perfect punk sound and Bo Diddley tearing it up with that riff of his, proving that doing the obvious thing can be incredibly exciting.

Sheer Mag have taken note from history’s great repeaters. For the best part of the last decade the group have been honing their distinct rock and roll sound. Their third studio album, Playing Favorites, offers up more of the same, 11 tracks of fuzzed-up bar room riffs and scuzzy punk vocals in perfectly formed pop packages.

There’s just something incredibly addictive about the group’s determination to stick to their guns. Rather than coming across as lazy or tired, Sheer Mag’s longstanding search for the perfect guitar pop song is thrilling, making the whole record, and the band’s discography to date, feel like some sort of journey into the depths of riffdom.

Playing Favorites does exactly what it says on the tin, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that at all. 8/10 Jack Doherty

Ty Segall — Three Bells (drag city) The discography of garage-rock’s sickeningly prolific High Goblin, Ty Segall, is as vast and indomitable as anybody else skronking today. Contained within are delicate finger-pickin’ folk records, monolithic chunks of stoner metal, and demonic, fuzzy takes on garage rock. Perhaps the best recent jumping off point into his oeuvre, Three Bells is Segall’s 2024 offering, an album that fuses winding passages of meditative acoustic guitar with boisterous Sabbath riffs and some of his most focused songwriting to date.

A decade and a half on from his debut, Segall manages to effectively distill his own essence perfectly across Three Bells, the multi-instrumentalist remains enigmatic after all this time. He’s willing to push the boat out every now and again, like on the lysergic jazz-fusion cut ‘Denee’, fried krautrock number ‘To You’ and winding freak folk cut ‘Void’, but the backbone of the album lies well within Ty’s tilted garage rock realm.

Taking cues from 2022’s Hi Hello, Segall has his acoustic guitar at the ready for much of this album, and its sound on the whole is characterised by Segall meandering between acoustic mystère and electric devilry – the mangling of Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex and T. Rex, no doubt Segall’s key influence here.

At around an hour’s runtime, Three Bells is a long record, but each track yields something new. Apt, then; for as Ty Segall approaches elder statesman status, he too shows no signs of stagnating. 7/10 Cal Cashin

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Albums Live or older hits like ‘Bobby’, which gets the most enthusiastic singalong in a night full of them. Jessica Wrigglesworth

James Yorkston and Nina Persson Bush Hall, London 5 December 2023

Alex G The Triffid, Brisbane 10 December 2023

It’s a hot, balmy night at The Triffid in Brisbane and both Alex G and I are very, very far from home. Having spent most of the year listening to his latest album God Save The Animals, and failing to get tickets to his sold-out London headline show, I was happy to see that the Philly musician also known as Alex Giannascoli had an Australian tour that coincided with my own trip down under, thinking perhaps something familiar could jolt me out of the jet lag. It’s nice seeing shows in new places – it feels like a shortcut to finding likeminded people in the otherwise impenetrable network of a city.

The first thing I learn about Brisbane crowds is that they’re enthusiastic.

As soon as Alex sits at the piano to play the opening bars of ‘S.D.O.S’, the singalong begins, arms flailing in the air, and it seems that, tonight at least, the cliché of uninhibited Aussies rings true. That being said, Alex G’s crowds (no matter what continent they’re on) have started to get a reputation for raucousness – see the recent video of him ‘punishing’ a rowdy crowd with a 20-minute rendition of Billy Joel’s Piano Man, threatening

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“You wanna make it 25 minutes?” like an exasperated high school teacher.

It’s been a mammoth year of touring for Giannascoli and his band, and on their penultimate show of 2023, the mood is last-week-in-the-office-beforeChristmas levels of silly – there’s a fair amount of jamming and half-nonsensical stage banter be, and an extended bit about whether he’ll partake in that age-old Australian tradition, the ‘shoey’ (he doesn’t). It teeters on shambolic at times, but the songs themselves are so tight that he pulls it off. Not many artists could oscillate between delicate country music, pop punk, moody post-rock and hyperpop in one set as seamlessly as Alex G, and fewer still could hold an audience’s attention throughout. But over Giannascoli’s near 15 years making music, his already undeniable skill as a songwriter has only been honed. However he chooses to embellish them, his melodies are impossibly catchy, burrowing themselves deep in your psyche despite the vagueness – and often straight up weirdness – of the lyrics, so you find yourself chanting “Jesus is my lawyer” or “I have to put the cocaine in the vaccine” along with him, without questioning what on earth that means.

Ultimately though, it’s the simpler guitar led arrangements that have the biggest impact – of new material, like the stunning, Gillian Welch-inspired ‘Miracles’,

The annual James Yorkston Christmas show has become a sordid tradition amongst some: a travelling Christingle for the monotonous, from Newcastle to Stowmarket, wryly delivered by the East Neukian bard. On its London enterprise Yorkston’s solo material has dependably filled small rooms, but he returns this year to a bigger, more familiar place (Bush Hall) where he supported Cat Power 20 years ago. She sang that night with her back to the audience – let’s say to admire the 19th century architecture of the music hall. It hasn’t dissuaded a number of the crowd to stick out the two decades to see him again.

Whilst it’s less a Christmas show this year, now with The Cardigans’ Nina Persson performing songs from their collaborative record The Great White Sea Eagle, tinsel stripes the walls and the warm fug of mulled wine wafts through the room to a four-foot Christmas tree, blocking the accessible viewing platform.

The dynamic between the two performers makes it almost a cabaret; Persson’s beautifully barren delivery of Yorkston’s bruised songwriting focuses the many little comedies within. “’Tis the season,” Yorkston offers as the wayfaring stranger. “Do you do Christmas here? Cellardyke (the town he’s from in the East Neuk of Fife) is still under the control of Satan. If you want to celebrate Christmas you’ve got to go to the nearest big town, which is Edinburgh.”

The stories continue: he’s the great imposter in ‘A Forestful of Rogues’, the guilty friend in ‘Heavy Lyric Police’ (with chuckled apologies to Adrian Crowley for calling him “portly”), the anxious father in ‘Mary’, wanting to do parenthood

photography by hannah butterfield

Albums Live right, and, throughout, the superstar in a midlife crisis. Persson consoles him: “At least you’re not playing a Strat.”

Ending with ‘Sam and Jeannie McGreagor’ – a soap opera of a “hit” inspired by a park bench memoriam – the room has steadily filled for another year.

There’s life at every turn of phrase; ’til next Christmas. Tristan Gatward

English Teacher The Lexington, London 12 December 2023

“Thanks so much to End Of The Road for having us tonight,” beams Lily Fontaine.

“They’ve been so supportive of us since the start.” The English Teacher frontwoman cuts a contented figure during her band’s Lexington set tonight, as they headline the Christmas party hosted by End Of The Road festival (in partnership with some magazine called Loud + Noise or something). The Leeds group are recent signees to major label Island (setting them on the same trajectory as Yard Act, one of UK rock’s biggest success stories of the last few years), and are clearly teetering on the edge of a massive 2024; this relatively intimate, friends-

photography by sam walton

and-family style show in north London thus feels like something of an acknowledgement of what’s got them to this point, and a celebration of what’s to come.

Having enjoyed excellent support sets from EOTR favourites Modern Woman and leftfield songwriter Tiberius B – and loosened up by beery Yuletide cheer – the crowd are pretty rapturous by the time English Teacher come on, and they accept the love with the confident grace of a band who know they’re on the cusp of something big. They play their instruments like match-fit athletes, simultaneously sharp and fluid, a rocksolid rhythm section allowing for flourishes that are harder to identify on record to breathe in a live context. Even though occasional tracks feel a little underdeveloped, set highlights like ‘Good Grief ’ and ‘R&B’ demonstrate why so many people are so excited about the band: smart, punchy indie-pop that’s eccentric enough to make this band stick out enough to suggest genuine crossover potential. Really, though, the show is all about Fontaine: she’s a powerfully charismatic presence, equal parts superstarin-making and the funny mate who you can rely on to call out your bullshit when you really need it. In her, English Teacher have a figurehead who’s ready to take whatever the big leagues are about to throw at them. Luke Cartledge

Modern Nature Lewes Con Club 13 December 2023

The village hall aesthetic of Lewes Con Club, a not-for-profit venue a few train stops from Brighton, seems better suited to a scrappy DIY punk night (or midmorning yoga class) than to the concrète field recordings of Jack Cooper’s Modern Nature. The Essex-based composer has spearheaded numerous bands over the last two decades, notably indie rock darlings Ultimate Painting. But Modern Nature is different; their folky, jazzy ambient sonics occupy such a liminal, formless space that it’s difficult to believe it can even be played live. And although the band – a quartet tonight; guitar, double bass, alto sax, and drums – are absent their usual coterie of woodwinds and strings, their pared-back setup works because they use space to their advantage.

Tilt your head one way and it sounds like each instrumentalist is guided by free association, disregarding the rest of the group – the clusters of notes and cascading white noise of cymbals seemingly improvised. But then you notice how the saxophonist croaks out a melodic phrase and a few bars later Cooper’s voice climbs up to mirror it, and a few bars after that he tosses the potato back. And so on.

You notice the same bright augmented guitar chord – an anchor which its player mines for arpeggios and vocal counterpoints – and the repetition of certain words, like “murmurations” and “sun”.

But we – the audience – remain fickle. We like to tap our feet, to hear an accent on the beat. The crowd becomes animated whenever the drummer ceases cymbal aerobics and a tempo takes shape, sticks mercifully landing on snare, bassist reinforcing the harmonic root, Cooper digging into his guitar like in the old days. A handful of those moments pepper the show, one of which arrives during ‘Sun’. It’s the apex – an organic, orgasmic release. Everything comes together.

“Now you can clap,” Cooper jokes. And we did. Hayden Merrick

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FilmAlbums and Books

Saltburn (dir. emerald fennel) Saltburn can easily (and accurately) be described as ‘Brideshead Revisited meets The Talented Mr Ripley’. That really is all you need to get to grips with the premise of this black comedy psycho thriller about a posh-but-not-posh-enough boy who snakes and deceives his way into an aristocratic family, and eats it from within.

Although you could also add ‘…for the Euphoria generation’ if you wanted to get across how bluntly provocative Saltburn tells its tale (neither Evelyn Waugh nor Patricia Highsmith were from a time when any of their characters could confidently fuck a freshly dug grave in the pouring rain, or slurp jizz-infused dirty bath water from the plughole).

Emerald Fennell’s second movie (following 2020’s Promising Young Woman) follows the journey of Oliver Quick (played in chilling, reptilian fashion by Barry Keoghan), from friendless outcast at Oxford University to best friend and confident of the richest, most handsome boy of them all, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi, of Euphoria fame, no less). When Felix invites his common new pal to his family’s country estate for the summer, Oliver jumps at the chance, fuelled by obsession, a desperation to be loved, and, it soon turns out, something much darker. But fuck em! Right? Felix’s family instantly show themselves up to be the disconnected, condescending, rude relics of landed gentry that we collectively despise – they probably deserve this fly in their ointment.

It’d certainly be easier to get on board with that idea if Oliver Quick wasn’t the most repellent character at the feast.

Saltburn comes at a time when hating the super rich has turned into an entertainment genre of its own. But there’s a marked difference between it and shows like Succession and The White Lotus, where

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you hate all of the despicable characters equally until you realise you love them just as much, or you envy their lifestyles enough to endure their company if it allows you to experience a luxury resort for an hour. Those are New Money shows; Saltburn is pure Old Money – inherently more unfair, scruffier, out-of-touch and constantly creepy. You watch The White Lotus thinking ‘I wish I was there’, and Saltburn thinking, ‘Why does Oliver want to be there?’. And while you might eventually pity certain characters in Saltburn, the reason you’ll never love them like you did Tom Wambsgans or Roman Roy is because this really is a film without nuance. It’s a hoot, and should enjoyed as such – the jealously spiteful Farleigh is nothing but jealously spiteful, and the symbolism is just as tactless, like when the vampiric Oliver goes down on Felix’s sister Venetia while she’s on her period. Who’d want to be rich anyway? Austin Laike

The Singularity — Balsam Karam (fitzcarraldo editions) Swedish author Balsam Karam’s newest novel is an experiment in writing and reading.

Karam experiments with the limits of prose, pushing each sentence and chapter to its boundary, twisting and expanding the definition of each. It’s an experiment in picking out the narrative and distinctions between characters, to draw enough similarities while being able to distinguish one from another.

The Singularity follows two women with some overlaps: both are mothers, both have mothers waiting for them at home, both are refugees and outsiders where they live. Adrift in societies that have, to varying degrees, rejected them, the women may be similar,

but their differences are more stark. One lives with her handful of young children and elderly mother in an alleyway on the outskirts of an unnamed coastal tourist town. The other is a pregnant young professional just visiting for a business trip. The first woman searches for her lost teenage daughter, who disappeared from the seaside restaurant at which she worked nights.

The thoughts and memories of these two women intertwine and weave together to create one hefty, bleak story.

The younger woman, reeling from the death of her baby, recounts her painful upbringing as her family fled their (also unnamed) home in the midst of a conflict that would ultimately destroy their town and kill her best friend.

Karam’s writing is reminiscent of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance in its urgency, particularly when readers are sharing in the grief of the mother looking for her daughter. But while the writing is sometimes poetic, most of the startlingly spare novel proves to be disappointing. A clunky translation makes matters worse. The lack of distinction in the women’s voices turned out to be less compelling and experimental, more confusing and disorienting.

An inability to discern which memories belonged to which woman resulted in a lacklustre reveal of any interesting background information or action.

The Singularity is the story of what happens to people cut off from their homelands and transported to a new country and culture. An interlude showing the disappeared girl’s siblings fending for themselves in the rubble-filled alleyway they call home contrasts sharply with stories of the young woman’s childhood in her new home where, despite hardship, she and her family never starved nor lived on the streets. The message of the book may be deceptively simple – that family is important and needs to be relied upon through the troughs of life – but, the larger lesson readers glean is how despite their similarities, the circumstances of these women diverged further and further until they were unrecognizable to each other. Isabel Crabtree

THURSDAY 15TH

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FEE DÉ SUDS BLOGHAUS

FRIDAY 16TH

RAYNHAM, NORFOLK 15TH-18TH AUGUST

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SATURDAY 17TH

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ELIZA ROSE YUNG SINGH ONLY CHILD TADI THE GREAT

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SUNDAY 18TH

SBTRKT

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(DJ) CHARLIE DARK DOA LEAKE LEVI FRUITS MAFALDA PIOW PRINCE

FIND YOUR PEOPLE OUT IN THE WILD

A SOCIAY CONSCIOUS MUSIC FESTIVAL WITH WDLAND DINING, IERSIVE PERFORMANCE & WENE EXPERIENCES

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INHERENT

DEVICE

Kim Gordon is as addicted to her phone as the rest of us, in search for comfort in technology in a modern age of panic. It’s at the heart of her second, broken-beats album – the latest piece of work from a reluctant punk icon who’s never considered herself a musician. Skye Butchard travelled to Paris to discuss what makes The Collective such an appealing puzzle.

Photography by Cielito Vivas.

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“YOUR MIND WILL REJOIN YOUR BODY WHEN IT IS SAFE TO DO SO” — JENNIFER EGAN, THE CANDY HOUSE

It’s an unseasonably warm weekend for October in Paris. They’re it makes you want to start dancing.” Gordon is passionate and still wearing shorts and strappy tops on the metro. In an office in animated when talking about the people she’s worked with, and Belleville, Kim Gordon and I are comparing phone chargers. “I those that have inspired what she’s working on, so we start here.

“They’re some of the best dancers. They’re different charjust got this,” she says, pulling a magnetic power bank out of her acters, and Dimitri really wanted to make a piece incorporating bag and clipping it to her phone. “It’s quite the improvement.”

Phones naturally come up in conversation, given they feature all these different kinds of dances. One gentleman is from Africa prominently in the background and on the cover of her new [Salia Sanou from Burkina Faso]. He does his own choreography record, The Collective. For her painting of the same name exhib- and has his own foundation. He’s an older, more experienced ited at New York’s 303 Gallery last summer, an iPhone became dancer, and then there are these young dancers from all over. a stencil to cut holes out of a huge canvas. The vacuum of living [Marion Barbeau] was a prima ballerina for a few years at the Paris Opera and left to do more interesting things. It was fun online affects even her life.

“You’re kind of addicted – I am,” she says. “There’s this getting to know the dancers. Their moves are very interesting weird need to check in. Why is that? I’ll check in on the news. I and unconventional.”

I ask if her time with the dancers has influenced how she want more. I always want more of the news. I never feel like I’m done.” I ask if the new record is connected thematically to her views her live shows. “It was more that I used what I take from performing and gave it to them,” she replies. “I used to take exhibition at 303.

Martha Graham dance and some ballet. I did want to be a dancer “Less so than one would think. I was inspired by this book I was reading, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. It’s about at one point, but it’s a tough life. Being on stage is a little bit like this guy who rips off someone who developed an algorithm that moving through space. With the electric guitar, it’s very influchanges people’s minds, which isn’t too far away from how it enced by my physical movement in relationship to the amplifier.

Obviously, you can see that with feedback. I quite like that, and works.” She laughs a resigned laugh.

“He made this device that you send away for and plug into. always think about it if I’m doing solo improv.”

All the people who have joined, you can access their memories.

You are almost in their body, so you can feel what they’re feeling.

To do that you have to upload your unconscious memories, and ORDON’S RECENT VISUAL art and upcoming then you’re open to being manipulated and vulnerable. Using record express the state of panic that is living in the the information in devious ways, maybe.” present day. The album is told in surreal and personal More and more, there are people born into the world who vignettes, where she underlines the need to check in, don’t remember a time before phones took up a portion of our to find answers through technology, consumerism or anything attention span. Gordon is unsure of the exact point when she else that might provide some comfort. Like her first solo album, noticed that she’d become addicted. “Maybe when my friend 2019’s No Home Record, it does so through funny, non-obvious signed me up for Twitter or something. She said ‘You’ll feel lyrics and an emphasis on beats over songs. There are unexless alone.’” pected turns and lots of welcome weirdness. For Gordon, playing Like most people, Gordon doesn’t seem to enjoy talking music has been a means to an artistic end. about herself. When I ask her how she’s doing when she walks “More and more my art practice has merged. When I into her label’s Paris office (in excellent metallic trainers), she finished this record I felt like I forgot to make music,” she says. sighs. “Oh you know, lots of talking. A couple of photoshoots.” “I saw them more as little movies or something. You know, now She’s jovial and relaxed, but not excited for another chat. Given everyone is an artist. It’s ‘Prince the artist’, and that’s fine, but I she’s been answering interview questions since the ’80s, some don’t think of myself that way. fatigue is understandable. In this third appointment of the day, “It’s more like I’m a visual artist first who’s making music, another reason for her occasional distance comes up when we who’s writing, who’s making art. I don’t see myself as a musician. I get to a lyric on her new album: “Cement the Brand”. Is that never conventionally learned how to play music, I just fell into it. I something she’s been told to do before? have high regard for people who do that, I just don’t play that way.”

“Not at all, but I’m worried that I’m doing that. Is this doing The post-Sonic Youth side of Gordon’s career has found that? How do you promote yourself and not do that? Because you her returning more to her roots within the visual art world, albeit do want people to hear the record, but…” operating on the edges of both the mainstream music industry And Gordon has a lot that she can promote. As well as her and the art industry. record, she recently attended the Charleroi premiere of Takeme“I really tried to keep them apart for such a long time,” she home, a piece featuring nine dancers and five electric guitars and says. “Getting invited to these exhibits… there are these ‘musiamps, which she composed for and worked on with choreographer cians who paint’. That’s not my context.”

Dimitri Chamblas. It’ll tour Tijuana, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Gordon’s rejection of her status as an indie music icon New York and Paris. “It’s funny,” she says, “being around dancers, appears within this visual art, too. Last summer, she made an

G

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“There’s this weird need to check in. Why is that? I’ll check in on the news. I want more. I always want more”

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exhibition called Double Agent in Lausanne, Switzerland. At the entrance to the installation, she played a video of herself inspired by the Chantelle Acromen film Jeanne Dielman.

“The camera was always very static, and I was doing in-real-time activities like cooking, cleaning the bathtub, sleeping. I also had my guitar plugged in, but I was ignoring it, so it would just bang around.”

Her critiques and reflections on status also extended to the institution she was working in, Museum im Bellpark.

“It’s not like I’m an institutional critique artist, but it was very close to it. It was a mansion in a small park with the original mouldings and everything. It was owned by the city in the suburb outside of Lausanne. I spent a lot of time with the director and the curator-archivist.

“When I went for my site visit, I made a little film of them, talking about what they do in the building, and how they decide how to paint the colours – they were installing some photo exhibit at the time – as well as the history of the place, and how every so often the city decides if they want to keep it going as a museum. It’s publically owned. As I went around, under my breath I was saying ‘Master Bedroom’, ‘Children’s Room,’” she whispers, lifting an imaginary microphone up to her mouth.

THINGS THAT FUCK UP SOUND

After No Home Record, Gordon wasn’t sure if she’d make another solo album again, and she certainly wouldn’t need to given how much work she was already doing. “I think I just wanted to do at least one more. Maybe I was bored,” she says. Like that record, she worked with producer Justin Raisen on The Collective, with whom she’s formed a strong partnership.

“It just made sense. I wouldn’t normally want to just work with a producer, and our coming together was random and accidental.” The two met through Raisen’s brother, who happened to sit at a table next to Gordon when out at a restaurant. After chatting, he sent his brother’s information over via DM. “He knows what I like. Things that fuck up sound, invert the technology a bit. He’s good at that. He understands punk rock, and he knows where I come from, and what I’m going to bring. I like that he works with hip hop artists and makes beats.

I wanted to be even more beat-oriented with this record. So it’s really a true collaboration.”

The Collective is formed from broken sounds and bitcrushed production. Tracks like ‘The Candy House’ sound like jpegs that have been compressed and copied one too many times.

Gordon’s voice is a grounding presence throughout. (There is one other vocal contribution from the mysterious ‘Young Baby Goat’ – a “well-known rapper” whose identity Gordon keeps a mystery with a mischievous look when I prod.)

“It’s kind of cool to have a song that sounds more lo-fi. It’s more unexpected I guess,” she says. This brings us onto talking about the smoothing over of sound on streaming services like

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Spotify. For This Woman’s Work, the 2022 collection of essays ‘skirt’ is just a reference to dressing and fashions. Harry Styles Gordon edited with Sinéad Gleeson, her contribution was an – his stylist is reading the times, but also, nothing is ever new, it interview with her former Free Kitten bandmate Yoshimi P-We. just keeps coming back around.”

It’s an incisive look at what made Yoshimi interested in playing The Collective is a disorienting experience. Pieces of the drums in the first place. Gordon titled it ‘Music on the Inter- memory and fantasy coalesce. Gordon looked to her surroundnet has No Context’. ings and her background for inspiration, but just as often she “It’s useful if someone says, ‘Oh, you should check out this’, looks for an unexpected narrative hook. but there’s no information on Spotify about anything,” she says.

“I was looking non-typical things to write lyrics about,” “That’s kind of the reason it’s good to have books, magazines she says. “I would periodically ask a friend, ‘do you have and other ways you can access information if you’re interested. any song ideas?’ One friend said, ‘why don’t you write about If someone hears something on Spotify, and they’re interested, bowling trophies?’ I’m a terrible bowler. My memories of maybe they’ll delve into it. That’s what’s great about the internet. bowling are just hanging out at a bowling alley as a teenager. It Young kids discover music that obviously they didn’t grow up was ridiculous.” with. I used to love seeing young kids at a Sonic Youth concert.”

But it works. Bowling trophies become another trinket to What irks Gordon more than this lack of context is the search for meaning in, or a way to hold something over someone forced participation in branding that’s brought about by having else. ‘Shelf Warmer’ is another of these unexpected topics. On it, your music on Spotify. a tacky gift has a sinister intention.

“Nike can make a playlist, so you’re suddenly promoting “It’s more like a metaphor for getting a gift that had Nike by being on their playlist. You don’t get paid for that, and nothing to do with you, or it’s a gift of guilt, or something that that makes them look cool. Also, if you’re listening to a record, they want,” she says. “It’s something from a boyfriend who suddenly it’ll switch over to an artist they think is like that artist, wants you to like this certain thing.” and it’s not like you put on ‘War On Drugs Radio’, it just goes that Given her platform, and the theme of online life on her new way, and it’s often not the same. record, I ask if Gordon has had that happen parasocially, too.

“It kind of in a certain way has to do with what’s ‘punk’ “I mean, recently people found out my address and they and what isn’t,” she says. “You can’t really explain that attitude, sent me pictures to sign. There’s this weird guilty feeling if I because that’s really what it is. I’m not saying you need to be don’t but I don’t want to perpetuate this thing, so I’m kind of from that generation, Bill Nace who’s much younger than me [of paralysed. I can’t quite bring myself to throw them away but I Body/Head, Gordon’s active band project], we talk about that all also don’t want to send them a message.” She laughs, nervously. the time. He’s had arguments with people. You can’t explain it, “Don’t send me any.” you’re just not going to get it.”

COLLAGED INTO L.A.

K

IM GORDON CLEARLY enjoys playing a villain. You can hear that on ‘I’m a Man’ from the new record, where she performs a pathetic kind of masculinity. “I was “I’m not a huge drug taker, but I feel like I fantasise about it more supposed to save you, but you got a job / You got a degree than I actually do it,” Gordon says. “It’s kind of like a weird / And I’m a slob / You got an Audi,” she speaks in a deadpan. fantasy. Everyone is so escape-oriented now because the world “It was inspired initially by politicians like Josh Hawley, is so fucked up, that it’s a little fatalistic, but then I also want to who go around saying ‘feminism destroyed men and masculin- get into it and take as far as we can.” ity.’ Are you really that weak? You’re a white man in power. And The intense peak of The Collective is ‘Psychedelic Orgasm’, also just thinking about historically… I’ve always actually been which presents a bad-trip version of L.A. As well as exploring interested in masculinity, the fact that initially, you couldn’t read our need to escape from reality, it also highlights the placelessanything about it unless you read books about the gay scene in ness of the album. Gordon has now been back in Los Angeles, the West Village in New York. where she grew up, for over half a decade, and although she’s “It was kind of about how masculinity changed from the still heavily associated with New York, she hasn’t lived there ’50s and ’60s about being the protector and saviour, the John full-time for twenty years.

Wayne/Ronald Reagan era, and when that became obsolete, “It’s weird. I have such a connection to California and yet male identity became lost. Men became consumers, like women, I still feel on the edge of L.A. But that’s what I like about it, I and were advertised to, and that’s what the lyrics are about.” guess. My friend who moved from Chicago, when people ask There’s also a wink at Harry Styles on the sarcastic line “I him, he says, ‘I think I’m collaged into L.A’, and I think that’s a can wear a skirt”, a potentially provocative moment that doesn’t good way to put it.” seem to be linked to current culture wars that so often sucks up Gordon has moved around for most of her life. It’s fitting our attention on the internet. Instead, Gordon is looking further that the opener to her new album is framed around a packing back at the rock music iconography. list. Sometimes, the locations on songs shift halfway through, “Mick Jagger I think was the first rock singer to wear a such as on ‘Tree House’, a blast of guitar and voice that blends dress on stage, at Brian Jones’s memorial,” she says. “In a way, time-periods.

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“It’s more like I’m a visual artist first who’s making music, who’s writing, who’s making art. I don’t see myself as a musician. I never conventionally learned how to play music, I just fell into it”

it. Leaving her social presence to Instagram (“I try not to go on X or Twitter or whatever the fuck it is. It’s just stupid”), she posts occasionally about her work, her daughter or an absurd thing she’s seen while walking around.

“When I do get really angry, I do want to post something, usually something about politics. Generally, I try not to post too much. I think it can be obnoxious quickly. Just because you have a platform, doesn’t mean you should use it all the time.”

It’s the story of Kate Cox that has made Gordon want to post something today. Cox is a mother of two, who was 20 weeks “It was kind of about memory, going up and hitchhik- pregnant with a baby that would likely die during childbirth ing up to Big Sur with my friend when we were teenagers and or soon after, due to a chromosomal abnormality. “She’s in a doing wild things. The other part was because I was reading this lot of pain right now because of what’s going on with the baby,” Marguerite Duras book, The Lover. It takes place in Vietnam, Gordon says. “It could ruin her fertility chances as well as possiand it sort of reminded me of when I was 12 and 13 living in Hong bly other things.”

A circuit court judge had given the go-ahead for an aborKong, so coming of age, looking way older than my age. My tion, but the Supreme Court in Texas then rolled back this decimother allowed me to roam around in the streets. We lived out in the new territories which was British at the time. We went to sion. “It’s the most insane thing. That made me want to post something about it. It makes you give up, too,” Gordon says. school in town, and you had sailors leering at you.”

“People think that abortion is the only thing that’s going to help get Biden reelected. It really is the only thing that people ELEMENT will come out to vote for him on. I just feel like people who are OF pro-life are anti-women.”

DANGER Men in power and men struggling to maintain power loom over sections of The Collective. I’m interested to get Gordon’s “Every night the songs get a little more evolved, and the band’s more melded.” It’s December, and the dance piece Takemehome perspective on a new kind of man in power who has risen up has now had its shows in Los Angeles, New York and Tijuana. “It over the last 15 years – the tech CEO. Gordon, through her art, was interesting, and sort of like being a band on tour,” Gordon is someone who’s come to represent genuine artistic disruption, and figures like Elon Musk are quick to use the language of tells me.

The Tijuana leg especially sounds memorable. The disruption, in their own way.

“That’s the most interesting thing about him, I think,” dancers performed at Cine Bujazán, an abandoned art deco cinema, which has been converted by two brothers into an Gordon says.”But he’s also just a rockstar toddler too. He doesn’t arts and event space. It even has a small film school. Currently, seem like a very nice person. He has a huge ego and he’s power there’s no roof over it, and so the dance was outside on a make- hungry, and he’s one of those narcissist personalities like Trump that has a lot of charisma. shift stage. Gordon is excited when describing it.

“It’s scary how much power Elon Musk has over the “After the dress rehearsal, they realised that all this country, even as he does whatever he does to self-destruct in dew had fallen on the rubber mat that covers the wood part of the stage, and the dancers were slipping around. For the best different ways. But I don’t know, it’s kind of just an extension part of an hour before the performance they had to rip off the of corporations being the people who are really running the matting, paint a couple of the squares that weren’t black, dry it country. Tech people like Elon Musk becoming cultural personwith a hairdryer and all this stuff. It was still rough wood, so the alities is attractive to people, rather than a corporation.”

Often with Gordon’s art, she doesn’t have to explain it. dancers all wore shoes.”

During the performance, one dancer broke a square on You just have to get it. In interviews, she’s thoughtful, taking the stage with an energetic jump, leaving a crevice. “It all added time to form a thought before speaking. Figures like this are a this element of danger to the evening, which kind of inspired the subject where she’s more brash and matter-of-fact.

“People in America seem to always be looking for some dancers in a way,” Gordon says. “They were really super on fire daddy figure, or some rockstar to tell them what to do. I’m not that night.”

It sounds similar to how you might imagine things to go saying the whole country’s like that – the MAGA people obviduring Sonic Youth or Free Kitten shows in DIY venues, which ously are for one thing. They don’t care if Trump says he’s going Gordon agrees with. “At a festival, you don’t have time for to be a dictator for a day or whatever he’s teasing. They want soundcheck, and you think the worst is going to happen, and it someone who they believe is going to fix everything.”

Gordon is hesitant to being taken as someone with all the turns out to be an amazing show. You never know.”

We speak on Zoom in a follow-up chat. It’s only been two answers. Her rejection of the rockstar image fits in with how she months and it feels like we have a lot to discuss, both with her sees powerful men who gleefully accept that role. Instead, what work and with the world. Though Gordon speaks about that she offers artistically is something more relatable and genuine. need to be caught up with the news, she’s less quick to post about Pure panic.

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A GUIDE TO

PRAH Recordings 10 years of a label built on true artistic freedom and a slower approach to appreciating music,

by Stuart Stubbs Just as some people are destined to be in bands their entire lives, others are compelled to start and run record labels. Stephen Bass already had one (the beloved Moshi Moshi Records, which he’d co-founded in 1998) when he decided to launch another at the end of 2013. PRAH Recordings was born into a very different world to the one that Moshi Moshi was, but PRAH is a very different record label.

Moshi Moshi helped to launch the careers of Hot Chip, Kate Nash and Lykke Li throughout a decade when a seven-inch single from the right label carried substantial influence at indiefriendly manufacturing costs. By 2013, seven years after the launch of Spotify, everything was different, including Stephen Bass’s relationship to music as a whole. Punk rock and club music had always been his thing, but the accessibility of music through streaming had had a familiar, if counterproductive, effect – it had lost its value, and therefore its excitement. The efficiency in which new bands were being marketed at the time didn’t help, as Bass asked himself where all the mystery in music had gone.

He found the answer in east London’s contemporary classical and experimental scene, at DIY venues like Dalston’s Total Refreshment Centre and the little known Old Cholmeley Boys Club, where musician and teacher Steve Beresford would host a free improv night called Miss Havisham Presents in what felt like a living room.

“When I used to hear classical music I thought it was so boring,” he says. “And then I was hearing all of these contemporary classical artists and I just thought it was really exciting and thrilling. I started meeting all of these kids who trained loads and knew loads, and they were so much more bold and ambitious than hipster bands you’d meet around Dalston. It was like, ‘Oh, there’s all this music that makes me feel like all the music I like does – like punk rock or acid house.’ I thought: ‘I’ve missed out on this whole world of music because it’s been presented so badly.’ But any good music makes you feel the same inside.”

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Bass particularly liked how hard he had to work to first find the music, and then to get something out of. “It was more rewarding for it,” he says, “– to sit through a performance and wait to work out if you liked it, or find the bits that you did like.

Because it was at a time when we had access to everything.

Music was free for the first time and I had this thing that it was too easy. This was bothering me at the time.

“I mean, it wasn’t all great,” he says. “You’d go to something and people would say: ‘that was a bit challenging’, which I soon realised is a highbrow way of saying, ‘That was boring, wasn’t it?’” He laughs. “But some of them were so thrilling, especially at the Miss Havisham Presents shows.”

Through this new community, away from the structures he knew within the more promo-savvy world of indie music, Bass was introduced to Anna Meredith – a contemporary composer who had already had original pieces commissioned by the BBC Proms and broadcast to millions, but who also had an electronic side hustle going on. He signed her to Moshi Moshi, who to date have released two startlingly singular album’s of Meredith’s and a raft of her other projects, as she’s also stepped into the world of film scores (most notably Bo Burnham’s excellent 2018 movie Eighth Grade) and picked up an MBE in 2019. But Bass was discovering too many classical and experimental artists to sign them all to a label that already had its own, long-won identity. When he became just as excited by a young cellist called Oliver Coates as he was about Anna Meredith, he founded PRAH as “a desire to release something without the concern of if it will be commercially successful.”

PRAH has stuck to that ethos ever since the release of Towards the Blessed Islands by Coates, an eight-track album of repertoire, slow and minimal, featuring Coates’ cello interpretations of music by artists as varied as Max de Wardener and Squarepusher. Not a radio friendly unit-shifter. “I was lucky that the Oliver Coates record was really good, and really extreme,” says Bass. Together with a following release by experimental electronic artist Bryce Hackman (a house record called Fair) it perfectly set out PRAH’s stall, which can be loosely categorised as a home for contemporary classical musicians and electronic experimentalists working within ambient and minimal music fields; although, over time, PRAH has also released music from snotty punk band Sniffany & The Nits, art pop trio Pozi, and “post-clown” outfit Gentle Stranger.

What all PRAH artists have in common though, is a disregard for easily digestible (and easily definable) music, which is encouraged by Bass who says, “I wanted artists to be as free as possible.” PRAH has a luxury item to help facilitate that: a writing and tracking retreat in Margate called the PRAH Foundation – a creative space where artists (not just those signed to

Clockwise from top left: The PRAH Foundation in Margate, Group Listening, Oliver Coates, Donna Thompson, Falle Nioke, Pozi

the label – Giant Swan, Squid and Porridge Radio have all taken advantage) can hole up and work for free, undistracted by their everyday surroundings.

“It’s so much fun to do, and it’s really handy for the bands,” says Bass of the studio, which was as inspired by classical music retreats as it was Motown’s legendary in-house studio.

“The Umlauts, for example, someone from the Crow’s Nest at Glastonbury knew them, and he had one song – a demo of ‘Boiler Suits and Combat Boots’ – and I loved it, so I invited them to come to the studio. They didn’t have any songs at that point.”

Bass signed the collective as soon as they had more songs, which was by the time they left the foundation.

This old fashioned romanticism that most of us thought was no longer possible within the world of record labels filters through the PRAH aesthetic too. The Fraser Muggeridge cover design of that first release, Towards the Blessed Islands, was also adopted as the record label’s logo, while the sleeves of all releases (particularly their back covers) have a templated and cohesive feel, making them the sum parts of a greater collection. Bass’s inspiration was library music label Bruton Music, although what he’s created with PRAH is just as reminiscent of ideological greats like Factory, and as sure of its identity as its neo-classical and ambient peers Erased Tapes and RVNG Intl.

Ask him how PRAH Recordings is possible, as it sales into its 10th year and past its 100th release, and Bass will simply note how much fun it’s all been, facilitating those who gave him a new excitement for music. “It’s easier to not compromise these days,” he says when I ask him what his advice would be for anyone crackers enough to start a record label in 2024.

THE HISTORY OF PRAH IN 7 KEY RELEASES Oliver Coates Towards the Blessed Islands ( Released: 25.11.13 )

The very first release from the label, Towards the Blessed Island was ardently not the sort of thing Stephen Bass had been releasing via Moshi Moshi – a collection of minimal cello pieces that quickly had fans labelling Oliver Coates as something of a modern day Arthur Russell, while giving the label its perfectly architectural logo quite by accident.

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Stephen Bass: “Oliver was someone I was meeting at that time who felt different enough and that he had a breadth of music to release. And he was up for it. We worked together on how to make the record. He’s very particular, Olly. It was the perfect first release. I guess he’s a bit of a legend these days. I also think the second record [Upstepping] is really brilliant. Our fourth release was a cover that Olly did of ‘Another Fantasy’ by Bryce Hackford, which was on our second release. It was Olly making house music with his cello, and I think that made him realise he could make that type of music too, because he already had a very broad knowledge of electronic music. But he was the perfect first release, and it was fun trying to get fancy photos done. I always stole my photographers from Loud And Quiet actually, and it was fun to say to Olly that we’re going to do photos and release this like you’re a musician. Because that was the other thing: in the classical world it’s so different, on every level. And I could tell them that we don’t need to do things that way. It could be more fun.”

Group Listening Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1 ( Released: 04.05.18 )

Without chasing commercial success, PRAH found a little with this first collection by Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) and Paul Jones. As the title suggested, the duo chose a number of ambient pieces (by the likes of Brian Eno, Arthur Russell, Roedelius and Robert Wyatt) and performed them on clarinet and piano with very dreamy results.

SB: “I think it’s a perfect record. An amazing Sunday morning record. They just chose such brilliant stuff to play. I occasionally suggest stuff to them and my suggestions are never as cool. They live in their own little world, so I didn’t know most of the songs that were on that record. So this one was a real moment, and I’m so proud of it as a record. It was the first record where we pressed up 300 copies and it sold out and we pressed more. Can you imagine! It was a such a simple record to do.”

Pozi PZ1 ( Released: 05.04.19 )

London trio Pozi might be the most “indie” act on PRAH, combining the blunt drums and bass sound of Prinzhorn Dance School with a barked vocal that recalls the straight talk of Ian Dury. For Bass to have not signed them, though, wouldn’t have been a very PRAH thing to do. It is, after all, a label about music without rules, which is an ethos that can easily become a rule in and of itself if left unchecked.

SB: “This was the first record that went onto a playlist [at 6Music – the track ‘KCTMO’], and I’d say that Pozi were the first artists who were a bit outside of the brief, although they have an unusual set up, of drums, bass and violin. No guitar. But it was slightly broadening the brief for the label. I knew Toby from the band, who used to be in a band called Totem, who we’d released

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a single for on Moshi. He sent me the music and it was weird enough to be on PRAH, and yet was pop music in a way. But actually it’s a really political record that’s beautifully written, and really hard-hitting. It’s quite leftfield, obtuse music, and they’re really not compromising at all. I don’t know if you know but it’s all about Grenfell, and KCTMO is the council there.”

The Umlauts Ü ( Released: 11.06.21 )

The PRAH Foundation in full effect, The Umlauts are perhaps the label’s biggest return on investment where their creative studio in Margate is concerned. The Ü EP gave fans of the label something to truly dance about, as the art school four-piece (made up of members from the UK and mainland Europe) took the label into a world of industrial techno pop.

SB: “At Glastonbury I work at The Crow’s Nest. And Harvey that does that gave me a demo of ‘Boiler Suits and Combat Boots’, and I chatted to the band after that and they came to the studio. The Ü EP is a record where I had a very active role in corralling them into making an EP and putting something out. It’s a very satisfying thing as a label person or A&R person to get involved and encourage people to do things. Again, The Umlauts aren’t a contemporary classical thing in any way, but in my mind they’re very arty. They’re PRAH’s Velvet Underground, and you can hear that ‘Boiler Suits…’ is wild creativity. You can hear that they’re mucking about, and it’s better for it.”

Falle Nioke & Ghost Culture Badiare ( Released: 05.11.21 )

Falle Nioke – from the Republic of Guinea – and UK producer Ghost Culture released their debut EP on PRAH in 2020 (Youkounkoun), but it was on Badiare – and particularly the EP’s opening track ‘Leywole’ – where they really locked in. Another pair of artists where Stephen Bass first questioned whether this type of deep, pulsing music was right for the label, he decided it was, partly because it was his doing.

SB: “Falle feels like such an obvious key release, although we’ve released three EPs of his – Badiare is the most recent and features ‘Leywole’, which is one of those songs where I remember hearing the demo and thinking, ‘Oh my god, that’s incredible.’ And then it coming together and being brilliant when it comes out. That’s another playlist record, and I’m very proud of what he’s done. I knew his wife, and he’d moved to Margate from Guinea, and she told me he was a musician and that he needed some shows. So I introduced him to Alabaster DePlume and said he should come and play as his Peach nights [improv nights at London DIY venue Total Refreshment Centre]. I then introduced him to James Greenwood [producer Ghost Culture], and they made Badiare together. Maybe if I wasn’t there that wouldn’t have happened. And what more do you want on your deathbed?”

“Maybe if I wasn’t there that wouldn’t have happened. And what more do you want on your deathbed?”

Donna Thompson Something True ( Released: 22.07.22 )

The EP is something of the preferred format at PRAH, giving artists enough space to experiment without the pressure of feeling like they’re making their career-defining debut album.

Jazz drummer and singer Donna Thompson made full use of that support when she made the delicate four-tracker Something True after a time away from music. It added a leftfield R&B antistar to the label’s roster.

SB: “Donna is such a wonderful, musical being. I love being around her. I’d had a cancellation at the studio, and I’d probably seen her play with Alabaster DePlume, and I think I asked him, “Do you think Donna would want to go into the studio?” And he was like, “She’d love it.” I think she’s so brilliant, and I’m really proud of this release and how she’s growing in confidence. She could be so many things. A Minnie Riperton character. Or really psychedelic. Or really soulful.”

Tony Njoku Sketches & Noodles of Bloom ( Released: 14.07.23 )

Clockwise from top left: Towards the Blessed Islands; Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1; Ü; Something True; Sketches & Noodles of Bloom; Badiare; PZ1

If PRAH has been about one thing, it’s trying things out. Sketches & Noodles of Bloom could be mistaken as the demos that became Tony Njoku’s 2022 EP Our New Bloom. Instead, it’s the BritishNigerian artist breaking down songs from that collection (and others) into their raw, simple form, as if adapting them to fit the early days of PRAH, and putting himself in Frank Ocean territory in the process.

SB: “‘Lost Forever’ from this EP is almost the label coming full circle. I guess it comes back to ‘any amazing music will make you feel the same way’. And again, it’s just another place to experiment – the previous EP was much more Tony’s electronic side, but he’d play a couple of songs at the end of shows that were just piano, and they sounded so great. So I told him he should record more like that. Sketches & Noodles of Bloom came from that conversation. It’s my job to give artists like this the space to experiment. Music’s a serious business – even when it’s fun you’ve got to take it seriously. And you’ve got to give these people a chance.”

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TOP,

MINT,

BOSS, DAFT 66

On new album Where’s My Utopia? YARD ACT deconstruct their sudden success in a way that’s befitting of a band obsessed with trench coats and 50 pence pieces – by curbing their pessimism and embracing how fucking daft they are,

by Orla Foster. Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

James Smith is a man who knows his crisps. Or so he thought.

The Yard Act frontman has spent the last 15 minutes trying to remember a brand of ready salted he once ate in the ’90s. “It really freaked me out. It was the wrong colour but I can’t remember the name – it was the one that had a diamond on the front,” he broods, sitting in the Meanwood Tavern, Leeds, with bandmate Ryan Needham.

He’s talking about their new song ‘Blackpool Illuminations’, which tells the story of a six-year old Smith smashing his face on a window ledge in a Blackpool B&B. Though his dad bought some ready salted crisps to calm him down, things backfired when Smith noticed the packet was blue. Learning that crisp colour codes “aren’t gospel” was as much of a shock as all the blood, he says.

Yes, it was just a bag of crisps, but it fascinated Smith how trauma could isolate certain details so strongly, causing him to recall the day with much more significance than either of his parents did. “I’ve caught myself doing this so many times,” he says. “The same stories make sense until you start rehearsing them. You get better at telling them, but your version of reality is not how it happened.” It’s one of many moments on Yard Act’s new album Where’s My Utopia? that finds Smith second-guessing himself, trying to establish if he’s got the facts straight or been taken in by his own illusions.

Certainly, a lot has happened for Smith and Needham since forming Yard Act in 2019. Along with bandmates Sam Shjipstone and Jay Russell, they’ve enjoyed a wildly successful few years, including a No.2 album and Mercury Prize nomination – but success is something they’re still figuring out. “It’s been a learning curve, full of fuck-ups and wrong footings,” says Smith. “I feel like I owe everyone all the time for everything. But it’s good to be slightly submissive and fearful your career’s going to end at any moment.” Needham agrees: “I still half-feel like that. I’m waiting for everything to disappear.”

For now, though, there’s the new album to think about.

While debut The Overload took shape during lockdown, Where’s My Utopia? was written deep into an 18-month tour. Surprisingly, it became a more insular record. “Being a helpless observer manifested itself into the first album,” Smith says. “This time we’d turn on the news in a different country and realise we

couldn’t understand it anyway. So you tune out, get detached, and live in your own weird world.”

They worked with Remi Kabaka Jr. (Gorillaz), a longtime hero who encouraged them to indulge their wackier sides, bringing obscure records along to every session. As Needham recalls: “Remi’s main role was vibes. His energy really affected all of us. He gave me tons of confidence even just around the idea of being an artist or musician – I’m finally calling myself a musician because of him.” There was also the small matter of everyone being in the same room together, rather than trading audio clips via Whatsapp. “This time, me, Sam and Jay got so in each other’s pockets with playing. We just know intuitively what we’re all trying to do.” Finishing each other’s sentences? “Yeah!

But with a bass guitar.”

Smith and Needham share that intuition too. Before they were Yard Act they were two chancers piecing together song ideas on a laptop; a time they celebrate in boyband pastiche ‘We Make Hits’. While the song’s lyrics are more kitchen sink than NSYNC, that world-domination ethos associated with boybands somehow doesn’t seem too far removed from Yard Act’s own trajectory; normal guys transformed into “post-punk’s latest poster boys” overnight. They’re joking, though. “That one’s tongue-in-cheek, but it’s how we feel when we’re making tunes,” Smith says. “When it’s me and Ryan in the top room creating demos, we feel like we’re New Kids on the Block.”

Between them they’ve been in tons of bands, but Yard Act is the project they’ve poured their all into, and taken the most risks with. “Ryan has this voracious appetite for saying yes,” Smith explains. “The reason so much has happened for us is because Ryan chased it, embraced that ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ attitude. I’ve always been more reserved and less inclined to do things, out of fear. Whereas Ryan would drink confidence cans before emailing out Soundcloud links with 30 crap demos.”

“Yeah, I’d wake up hungover like right, let’s pop open my laptop and see what I did last night,” Needham adds. “Those 4am emails! Who even answers them?!”

Bill Ryder-Jones, as it turns out. He ended up producing debut single ‘The Trapper’s Pelts’. It marked Smith’s first attempt at the spoken word narratives he’s now known for, but that wasn’t planned. “Every other band I’ve been in I’ve had a

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guitar in my hand; all of a sudden I didn’t. The words became so all-encompassing they had to be spoken so they would melodically fit. I suppose that’s poor editing on my part.” Otherwise, the band’s set-up was dictated by whatever instruments they could squash into the back of a car. But even if the band’s postpunk sound came from necessity, it connected with listeners, and by 2021 Island was offering them a record deal. “We signed with a major label so I could feed my baby,” James reflects. “But it also means if we want a gospel choir and string section on the album, the label goes okay, here’s the money.”

Despite being suddenly better off, their approach didn’t change too much when recording their second album – it turned out cobbling together laptop demos hadn’t been a cost-cutting measure but their modus operandi. “We learned that four of us huddled around a computer was still just as fun. There’s no need to be primordial with your approach and play the same thing 32 times, you can just edit.” Many elements survived into album two: the disco-punk basslines, the samples, the sprawling monologues sparked by overheard remarks and stretched into full character studies. This time samples became a way of tethering themselves to life outside the studio – from the rapturous applause which kicks off the album, to Macbeth soliloquies and cut-glass British accents discussing current affairs. “Using samples and political references became symbolic – the outside world puncturing our reality,” says Smith. “A lot of the time we’d put samples in, write around it then pull the sample completely.

It became like a writing prompt, to build a song around a skeleton then remove the skeleton from the body.”

I’M JAMES, BY THE WAY Where their early songs featured recognisable antiheroes like the “school-of-hard-knocks” neighbour Graham in ‘Fixer Upper’, the voice on this record is more recognisably Smith’s, though he cloaks his confessions in humour. “You could go too far and descend into novelty at any moment,” he notes, “but that risk is what makes it exciting. It’s easy to be cool and aloof, to stare into the distance and play your no-wave chords, but to be honest about how fucking daft you actually are, it’s more vulnerable, and maybe that’s what resonates with people.” It’s the same whether he’s channelling his own insecurities or the rants of someone he met down his local. There’s surely an irony to finding your own voice through other people’s soundbites? “I think the funniest thing about all those characters is that they were me all along. The whole first album is about a man in his late 20s/early 30s who jacks in his ideals and dreams to become an estate agent. But the estate agent was me signing to a major record label. I just didn’t have the confidence to write as myself.”

So he wrote knowingly flawed characters, always intending their humanity to shine through the cracks. He’s not convinced he’s achieved this, or if listeners are interested in hearing both sides. “A lot of people want to cartoonize society and make it really black and white,” says Smith. “They want heroes and villains and clearly-defined lines in the sand. They want to remove the human element, they want caricatures.” But

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“TO BE HONEST ABOUT HOW FUCKING DAFT YOU ACTUALLY ARE, IT’S MORE VULNERABLE” Smith’s hard-bitten observations rely on a dash of romanticism; there’s a pathos to his portrayals of these slightly bigoted everymen dreaming of times gone by.

And then of course there’s Smith himself, who is nearly as nostalgic as the cranks he writes about. Like any millennial getting older, he’s charmed by memories of penny sweets, dial-up modems and all-you-can-drink indie discos, recalling the 1990s/2000s as an easier time. “We were very fortunate to grow up before the internet really took over,” he says. “You went out and you lived your life, you weren’t on camera or under scrutiny. The stakes are higher now.” Obviously, he stops short of thinking of his youth as a perfect era. “In a world that’s so uncertain I understand why people rely on nostalgia, and there’s nothing wrong with comforting yourself. But when you get lost in it and start thinking the past is how the future should work, it becomes dangerous.” It’s just one of many seductive illusions haunting Where’s My Utopia?, another being the idea that fame can solve your problems. Both Smith and Needham are acutely aware of how ephemeral success can be, approaching Yard Act with the discipline of a day job.

At times, Smith says, this doesn’t sit comfortably with being an artist. “People want a version of the truth that’s palatable and being a live band is a reflection of that. There are frustrations with not being able to be honest on stage because you’re trapped by job obligations to present a show.” Sometimes he feels more employee than frontman: “When people have paid to see you, you can’t let them down because everything revolves around money. It becomes supply-and-demand, customer service.”

Yet for Smith, the thought of becoming a swaggering prima donna is infinitely worse. He still tortures himself about a time he “threw in the towel” on stage in Bognor Regis, petulant with the audience and visibly irritable, an experience which

sparked the track ‘Petroleum’. “It was the second show of the day, start of January. We’d piled back in the van still exhausted by the year before – I was feeling like shit and trying to quit drinking. Then we got to this incredibly noisy venue with the green room vibrating. I just wanted fruit and vegetables, but someone appeared with a Papa John’s pizza and I was like, I DON’T WANT TO EAT CHEESE AGAIN!!! It sounds so bratty, but I let it get the better of me, and I ruined the show.” He may not have been hauled into an office, but Needham did take him aside for a heart-to-heart in the carpark. While Needham remembers the episode with amusement, for Smith it was a wake-up call.

He comes across as someone afraid of letting fame go to his head, a fear which plays heavily into the lyrics. The protagonist of Where’s My Utopia? is a kind of doomed man of the hour, showboating one moment, shooting himself down the next.

‘Dream Job’ tries to find words for his compromised relationship with the music industry, only to settle for monosyllables: it’s ace, top, mint, boss. After all, there’s no easy way to describe the strange twist of fate that takes a band from sipping cans in Meanwood to duetting with Elton John.

As well as this, they’ve seen their profile rise in the US, “enough to keep us going on weird holidays and wondering who’s got a gun in their pocket.” They’ve played The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and enjoyed slots at SXSW and Coachella, where Needham recalls watching Smith waltz obliviously past Keanu Reeves, his plate stacked to the heavens with lasagne, Caesar salad, burgers, chips and Mexican barbecue. Otherwise, they don’t seem especially starry-eyed about where Yard Act has taken them. “When you tour places for the first time, people tell you how much you’re gonna love it,” Needham reflects. “Then you get there and have a beer, eat some ramen, it’s all kind of the same really.” Smith agrees: “It’s funny when hosts say they’re going to take you to this amazing burger joint with plywood walls and craft ales and you’re like, we’ve got this in Leeds!”

DESPITE THE PESSIMISM If touring has any thrills left, surely it’s the feeling of victory that comes from winning over a new crowd, the kind with its arms crossed ready to hate-watch the hype band. At least in Leeds that’s something they no longer have to contend with. At home gigs Yard Act crank things up a gear, like the five-day residency they put on at the Brudenell Social in May: a kind of variety show crammed with comedians, fellow musicians and Chumbawamba singalongs. If their fame dissolved tomorrow, maybe they’d be happy as a Brudenell house band. Until then, curiosity drives them as much as ambition. “I’d love to headline an arena, not because I want to bask in that sense of achievement – I just want to see how it would translate,” say Smith. “How do you get there doing what we do? That’s what’s interesting to me. I couldn’t give a fuck about sustaining it.” Admittedly, with their 20s behind them, there are some parts of being on the road they’d rather not revisit.

“The kindness of strangers is important but it’s punishing. I don’t want to be broke, staying on student floors. I’m happy to go back to small venues as long as we can afford a Travelodge.”

So why, then, is this record so consumed with the fear of crashing back down to earth? No amount of cowbells or disco basslines can mask that dread creeping through Where’s My Utopia?, even if on the surface the songs feel as party-ready as Franz Ferdinand or the Rapture. Can you imagine if someone rewrote Stardust’s ‘Music Sounds Better With You’ but made it about “men whose fleeting failures were all they ever knew”?

That’s what ‘When The Laughter Stops’ sounds like. ‘The Undertow’ is like Pulp but with the hedonism switched out for guilt about providing for a family. “Well, jadedness is coming isn’t it?” Needham shrugs. “You’re only in the good bit for a short space of time.”

During our interview, Smith and Needham talk a lot about burrowing into their own psyches, hiding out in studios and avoiding the outside world. But with release date approaching (1 March), they’re aware it’s time to surrender the in-jokes to strangers, and steel themselves for criticism. “It breaks me when I see someone shit on us in the comments, it’s really crushing,” says Smith. “But fair fucks. I’m sure some people probably want to knock us down a peg or two, and it’s fine.” Needham chips in pragmatically: “This sounds like a get-out clause, but I’m completely happy with the record, I wouldn’t change it. If you have doubts and people pick up on it, that’s where it fucks you a bit, but I honestly feel like we did the best we could. It is allowed to be judged.”

Even if it’s rooted in pessimism, Where’s My Utopia? finishes on a more hopeful note. ‘A Vineyard for the North’ was written after Smith learned about French champagne companies snapping up acres of land in England. What feels like a sobering indicator of global warning is also a last-ditch call to adapt, because that’s the only option we have left.

Yard Act themselves didn’t expect to thrive. “For a long time I was dismissive of making music because it felt like it wasn’t a necessity, but the more I think about how it has saved my life, the more I realise it’s beyond food, shelter and water,” Smith says. “Security isn’t promised, so it’s important to be as present as we can and have hope in the unknown. Despite how high the stakes are, despite how harrowing things can feel, the future is unwritten.” After all, without that willingness to move ahead, life would just be one long blooper reel, playing all our worst moments on repeat.

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Final Third

The Rates: They Hate Change

Each month we ask an artist or group to share three musicians they think have gone under appreciated and three new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. Tampa hip hop duo They Hate Change discussed their selections with Theo Gorst

Tracking They Hate Change’s influences is like unspooling a tangled ball of yarn.

Their vibrant electronic hip hop defies easy categorisation and frequently darts in divergent directions, often inspired by British underground music, not all of it grime and rap. The self declared “musical omnivores” are prodigious sonic consumers and their new EP Wish You Were Here… revels in the duo’s eclecticism; starting with an ode to new-age minimalism before bursting into the hard edged and clubready ‘stunt (when i see you)’.

During my conversation Vonne Parks and Andre “Dre” Gainey are barely contained inside the screens of our transatlantic Zoom call. It’s best to imagine exclamation marks littering their heavily emphasised sentences, as they hit their three underrated older musicians before moving on to their new names.

CAMP LO D: The blueprint!

VP: We got into them really via another of the artists on The Rates, Curren$y. We were listening to him and he was talking about being such a big fan, and he rapped on one of their tracks and stuff like that. All through high school we were listening to Camp Lo’s debut album, Uptown Saturday Night, and just loving it, like, “Yo, this shit is fly, it’s fly as hell, it’s jiggy, it’s sick!”

They’re the illest.

TG: It seems like they were a big deal for

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Final Third you when you were making your debut, Finally New, and as much as channelling the sound you were channelling an attitude of theirs.

D: For sure. Even when we saw them in person; and we ain’t never think we would see them. They came to a brewery and played in Tampa and it was amazing to see the full on skill that was on display.

Just hearing ‘Luchini aka This Is It’ live, it sounded like the record. I mean the clarity… they’re gooood! They’re repping for each other and hyping each other up and that’s another thing me and Vonne took from them with what we do.

VP: Yeah we really like repping for each other. They’re a duo but a duo of actual friends so they’re mainly saying things to impress their friend. Or coding things in a way only you would understand because that’s an in-joke you’ve had for a decade, but it somehow makes its way into a rhyme.

If you listen to it and really break it down, and really break down the verses every time, every bar is like 13 or 15 syllables, on the dot damn near. Every. Bar. And it’s super encoded in this slang, and they’re storytelling at that. They have the diamond heist story thing, the ’70s lingo that they’re adopting, and they have 15 syllables coming at your head every bar.

It’s amazing they never had a gold single.

Certain stuff exists out there and isn’t served to a particular audience, so it doesn’t exist as there’s all these barriers to music reaching people. That’s what causes a situation like Georg Levin where the heads know, but not only the heads should know, cos it’s not heady music.

How many times have we put this shit in a DJ set, Dre? D: You’d have thought it was on Billboard’s top top 100.

VP: Almost every DJ set. And that’s in front of every crowd; whether it’s at the house shows for the punks or the wine bars for the stush uppity motherfuckers and everywhere in between; and everybody loves this shit!

Vocally too with Georg Levin, we feel he should get more credit. His voice is the voice of an era; you know when you hear that voice everyone’s dancing.

D: It’s high-fi music, music for the radiogram!

of a fucking nerd. Wild nerdy like, “Did you know this was fashioned after an Italian boot?” but Curren$y was rapping that way also.

D: The detail from Curren$y or even, like Rick Ross, is so vivid. They can paint a picture to you, even if you may not have [the item] you can feel it. So Curren$y is talking about Bapestas with the camel print before they put them in pictures, so you’re like, “Oh, I know that”.

VP: Exactly. Our spirit comes from there, for sure. It was one of the first places we were hearing it, or at least hearing it in that way. A lot of rappers get into the minutiae.

Jay-Z for sure can get into the microdetails of his Maybach, but Curren$y is getting into the micro-details of his shoe box. Or how he hangs up a bicycle on his wall; shit like that. We’re definitely inspired by that. As kids we were super geeked off of everything he was talking about and we followed him from there; everything he dropped we were on it. The day [third album] Pilot Talk actually came out we were just so geeked off of every moment. That track ‘Breakfast’; we could talk about that infinitely.

In a just world he would be whatever people consider to be “the top guy in the industry”, but equally he’s not starving. He’s still that guy. If you know, you know, even though everyone knows. It’s an interesting position to maintain. I think he might have invented that spot almost.

CURREN$Y TURICH BENJI

GEORG LEVIN VP: We first heard ‘I Got Somebody New’ a long time ago and it’s really sick. Why does Georg Levin have one album from 2003 and another from 2010? One joint from 2003 that’s better than any 2010’s disco funk revival attempt ever. You put that on the radio today and it would go nuts.

D: Unsung hero!

VP: He had a verse – it was a mixtape verse – from 2006 maybe, where he was rapping on ‘Dead Presidents’ with Lil Wayne and he had a line about going through a drive thru and telling the person at the window what sort of sauce he wanted. I was like, “Yo! Nobody is saying that in a song! Nobody is rhyming that way, he is the greatest of all time!”

That was around the time I moved into the apartment where I met Dre. We were super geeked off of sneakers and all these things Curren$y was talking about at the time. They weren’t super mainstream concepts yet. If you were reading sneaker blogs at this time you were kind

VP: Oh man, Turich Benji is new. You can’t necessarily say underrated yet cos he’s still active and he’s getting active.

We saw him at SXSW, he came out as a guest at another show and did a full split and jumped up from it like he was goddam James Brown. Obviously this is the guy.

D: It was amazing, like, “Yo, what the hell!?” He has a project called Basquiat, which is amazing in itself, and there’s this song ‘Gucci Slides’ that should be on Billboard, or whatever charts there are. It’s a jam. Recently he did a fashion show – around Cincinnati – and it seemed pretty cool, it definitely seems like he’s a hometown hero. He just released a joint project

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Final Third with Pink Siifu too.

VP: You see it live and you’re like, “Cool.

Get this motherfucker a truckload of money today.” That is our view and it’s maybe an idealist type of view of what people should receive in exchange for their creativity. This shit shouldn’t go unnoticed. It’s crazy, make it viral now; you want viral memes? This motherfucker is doing it now, talking about Tony Hawk and Gucci slides. Y’all are talking about ‘Taking a Walk’ to Poland and you got all the Spongebob memes and that shit, but this song is actually good! He luckily got people waking up, it’s not just for the heads, they don’t need to talk about it in a hushed voice. Nah, it’s up!

CAKES DA KILLA TG: Have you met Cakes Da Killa?

D: Ooooh yeah [chuckles]. Oh man, we were in New York’s Boiler Room and we knew Cakes Da Killa was gonna be there.

Cakes walked in; crazy outfit on and dancers behind him. I was like, “Vonne I think that’s Cakes.” [We] started busting out raps. Cakes was like, “Oh, you guys are for real.”

VP: Exactly. Cakes was giving us our props and we were like, “No, it’s you!

It’s you!” We started bringing up old ass songs and he started bursting out laughing and we were like, “You are the one.

Genuinely.”

[On his first record, Hedonism, there’s] ‘New Phone (Who Dis)’ which is aggressive stunt rap. It was like some shit we would have did, but we didn’t do it. Or some shit we would have wanted to do, but it wasn’t us. We were like, “Yo, somebody else is on this shit? Okay, cool!”

On that Svengali project there’s so

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many songs that would have smashed in a just world.

TG: What do you think prevents these tracks from being smash hits?

VP: I think the industry as a whole is fucked up. There’s an interview with Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney. She says that off of their first record [S/T] they had a regular split profit deal and off of that deal they were able to live on their own, and live a middle class existence. [All this] off of selling not that many records, like 10,000 records, because the industry worked a particular way.

The industry does not work that way anymore. A certain amount of people engaging with your music via critical acclaim doesn’t mean you’re going to make any money. You probably won’t make any money if all you have is that critical acclaim.

TG: To go back to Curren$y, he’s interesting because he has survived various eras of the music industry. When he started, in the mid noughties, there would have been that sustainable model but then he would have seen the internet bottom out the industry.

VP: Yup, the way the industry works now is, “What can you do for free? What can you do without seeing or wanting anything out of it?” So Curren$y does 7 free mixtapes and then he puts out a retail album and then another retail album and then more mixtapes and then a retail album, and then, and then, you know what I mean? High profile, high quality work and giving it away, and that’s cool and great for us the listener but you have to do so much of that before somebody is like, “Cool, you’re able to mobilise people around the free things you’re doing. We’ll give you a million dollars to do that for us.”

For some people – for us – that doesn’t quite sit right, to do hella work for free, only to mobilise the fan base for somebody else. But that’s how it works now, unless you’re a viral star. Do a bunch of shit for free or do a bunch of crazy dances.

TG: Have you found a way for it to morally work for you guys, or is trying to find a way around the current model a constant source of frustration?

VP: Morally, we have found a sustainable

way, but that does not mean to sustain us in other ways. We’ve done a shit tonne since 2022 and this is what it looks like with us standing by our morals. Imagine if we weren’t. I’m telling you, Theo, you would not believe the things that have come across our desk. You would not believe. We could be sitting here on a diamonded out Zoom call.

96 BACK VP: [We heard 96 through] Local Action Records and their subsidiary 2 B REAL. Being tapped into that and hearing this artist we were like, “Ooh shit, this dude is crazy, we hear everything else, but did you hear this guy?” This dude is shitting on everyone else, musically. This dude is insane. So that was a priority for us to link him up when we first went to Manchester, just as a fan. He dug our music too so we went to a pho restaurant for lunch. Then we went to his house and he’s showing us all his tracks.

D: We’re on tour with Shame, shaking from being tired.

VP: It was early last year and was our 7th tour in 12 months. We saw he had every track in his Ableton folder numbered, that was how he saved tracks, no names just numbers. We were like, “What? What do you mean?”

D: He’d got to 100124, 100145 and that was just from early in that year.

VP: Literally the number is 100324!

D: How can he remember certain things?

How can he remember which is which?

VP: 100324, that’s the track that became ‘Wallabies and Weejuns’ [last track on Wish You Were Here…]. He played that and 100326 for us, and Dre was like, “Put those together!”

51 Bingo Fury

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Final Third

In conversation: Nadine Shah

Forever an open book, Nadine Shah remains completely candid on her new, fifth album, Filthy Underneath. Written whilst in rehab, following addiction and a very public suicide attempt, she’s no less forthcoming in discussing her past few years with Jenessa Williams – the grief that devastated her, and the humour she clung onto

Warm from the very moment of introduction, Nadine Shah has always been one for calling things as they are. Dialling in from Ramsgate with a comedically-oversized mug of fizzy water in her hand, the Tyneside-born singer-songwriter instantly launches into anecdotes of interviews past, including her own pandemic-era Payback series, where she challenged the inherently one-sided power imbalance of the typical journalist-musician exchange.

“I find it quite impolite, actually,” she says. “I’m a big fangirl of so many music journalists; I’m like, yeah, ask your questions, but you have the better stories; can you just tell me some shit too?”

Over the years, Shah has built a Mercury Prize-nominated name due to her ability to take measure of the macabre, to use her commanding, theatrical voice to find flecks of humanity and nuance in situations that many of us struggle to confront. Interviews have normally been fun for her because of the nature of her music; there’s always been a way for her to “mine the humour in songs, or bring some lightness.” But with her new record, Filthy Underneath, she fears that levity might be a little more difficult, shaped as it is around the circumstances that culminated in a 2022 tweet which alerted people to her plans to take her own life.

“I initially dreamed of being an artist with mystery,” she ponders, a wry smile on her face. “But I think I ruined that a long time ago, well before that tweet.”

Through both a stay in rehab and time away from the industry, Nadine has thankfully found ways to keep going, to cultivate habits that allow her to live on a more even keel. But as she embarks on her own version of “starting again”, she shares an understandable degree of anxiousness about re-entering the public sphere, asking me to bear with her if she pauses to consider how she might want to talk her thoughts or creative process through. But within even a few moments of conversa-

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tion, it’s clear that she is someone who has come to know her own work with the same wit, courage and hard-won resilience that has allowed her to claw her way back from personal brink, spelt out in the album’s unflinching title.

“It’s the dirt under your fingernails, the stuff that you don’t see. It’s the person on Instagram, projecting the shiny life but suffering offscreen, the smile when there’s tears behind it,” she explains. “I wanted it to be quite plain speaking. I guess I always kind of am.”

JW: A lot has happened between 2020’s Kitchen Sink and now; more than would be fair or really appropriate for me to attempt to paraphrase on your behalf. How best would you fill newer listeners in on the context of your life over the last few years?

NS: I think I’m aware that now – because of the work I was forced to have to do on myself – that I’ve probably always had underlying mental health issues, but I’ve been able to mask a lot of them enough to get by. But in 2018, my mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, which was essentially a death sentence. She was my best mate, and so I dropped everything; I left London and I moved home to be with her straight away. She lived two full good years, and it was a real privilege to be able to spend that time with her.

She died a month after Kitchen Sink was released, and it was lovely that she was able to see that happen. But once she passed away, I didn’t have the tools available to cope.

I was heavily self-medicating with substances, and with Covid the normal avenues of grief were not available to so many thousands of us. We weren’t allowed a proper funeral, I wasn’t able to work and have the comfort of touring my

photography by phil sharp

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album and being with my band on the road. As I was isolated more and more, I got more and more unwell.

The substance abuse got worse and worse until my mental health was at enough of a low in 2022 that I decided to take my own life. It’s tough to talk about. But I’d planned it, and I’d written a letter, then at the last minute, I also did a clumsy tweet. I make jokes about it now, that I didn’t even spell it correctly. But people who knew where I lived saw it, an ambulance and police turned up to my door, and at that moment, it was really a relief of like, “I can stop pretending [I’m okay] now.”

My manager insisted on me going to rehab. I thought I would go for a week or two at most, but I stayed two months, I worked and I realised how poorly I was and I got better. And now I’m a better daughter, a better sister, all the rest of it. It’s constant work. Pain in life, unfortunately, is inevitable. But I feel far better equipped now to cope with

those things in a much healthier way than I would then.

JW: I’m incredibly glad to hear it. But as you say, it’s also important to recognise that rehabilitation and recovery isn’t a one-time fix – it takes real work and commitment to find ways to stay well.

NS: Oh yes. Sometimes that work is enjoyable, making sure you go for a walk that day, making sure that you connect with people and don’t isolate. These are beautiful things.

But I’m just far more aware now of how fragile the human mind can be. There are certain things in the industry that I know I will need to keep me well, and certain things that I know I can’t have around me. But you’re right; I’m still a work in progress, 100%.

JW: Do you think your awareness of those boundaries has changed the scale of what you want to achieve, careerwise?

NS: I mean, I never, ever wanted to be very famous. I’m quite

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Final Third comfortable with the level I’m at, kind of, you know, mediocre C-list [laughs]. But now, anything that makes me feel uncomfortable or kind of lowers my self-esteem – if I’m offered a certain spot at a festival and I believe I should be higher billed or paid better, for instance – I would say no to. Unfortunately, [artists] don’t always have that luxury, because of finances or whatever, but I think learning the power of no is a very important thing.

JW: You’ve spoken in the past about being somebody who is constantly writing. When did you realise that you were able to put some of these experiences to page in a way that might become a record?

NS: There are songs on this album that are incredibly graphic if you know what they’re about. ‘French Exit’ – I wrote that for myself when I was in rehab as a form of therapy and never intended it to be on the album, but there it is. I do worry about being seen as a ‘role model’; I don’t want to be a spokesperson on the subject of suicide. I’m not a medically trained professional – I’m just an artist who documents things, giving my version of events.

That said, I also really want to dispel the myth of the great tortured artist. I was so high and so unwell at the time of Kitchen Sink that there’s a lot of it I cannot remember writing. And that scared me, because it was my favourite album, and I thought well, I’ll never be able to write like that again. But I want to say to anybody; if you can write a good song drunk, you can write a brilliant song sober. I think people could look at me and go, oh, she needs this pain, because I wrote an album about the refugee crisis, my first album was about two of my close friends who took their own lives, and ironically, it’s then me ten years later trying the same thing. But then I wrote my new song ‘Twenty Things’ in the best place I’ve ever been, sober, out of rehab, with real mental clarity. And you know what, I’ll

“I re-taught myself to play my first album. Then I did my first ever sober concert in rehab” say it; if I don’t get an Ivor Novello nomination for that, I’ll be deeply upset.

JW: Rehab is quite an interesting environment for a writer in and of itself; being able to put so much time and concentrated focus into examining your experiences and emotions is a pretty powerful thing, whatever the circumstance.

NS: It’s kind of beautiful for that. I’d gone in deciding that I wasn’t even going to be a musician anymore – I was so embarrassed that people would know about what had happened.

But on the second day in rehab, one of the nurses showed

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me around the building, and was like, “Here’s the music room.” I walked in and I pissed myself laughing, because it looked just like a pub; dark wood mahogany panelling, red velvet seats everywhere. It was quite triggering. But I got so bored in there that it was only 10 days in when I started using the piano – I re-taught myself to play my first album, got my relationship back with that instrument. So then I did my first ever sober concert in rehab.

JW: Did the crowd go wild?

NS: Ha! Well, you know, they were also bored. They said they liked it; addicts do have a tendency to be great liars. But it helped me remember why I loved music, how it can nourish the soul. I got a massive kick out of that. Loved it.

JW: You’ve spoken about really wanting to emphasise a feeling of melody and movement on this record – what was the motivation there?

NS: I’ve always tended to underplay my vocal, only singing in my lower register and holding it back loads because I thought that was cooler. I’ve really fallen in love with singing again, and I push my vocals so much more on this album than I have on any of the ones before.

Melodically, all the rhythm comes from Ben Hillier, my producer and collaborator. He’s a drummer primarily, and then he’s a producer and all the rest of it, talented bugger. But we have very similar tastes, and the stuff that I was listening to at the time was very upbeat, and very rhythmic. Since my mum’s passing, it made me too upset to listen to music that was slow-paced or morose, and so a lot of the playlists I sent to Ben were disco. The song ‘Greatest Dancer’ came about because I was listening to a lot of glam rock. I use Sesame Street as a reference in my work a lot, and I wanted to push towards those kinds of childlike rhythms and melodies more than we ever had before. It feels very freeing, a massive release of sorts.

JW: You definitely get that Sesame Street feel from ‘Topless Mother’ – the word association in the chorus and the playful energy of the music video. Why did that song feel like the right lead single for this new era?

NS: There is something in the nature of that song which is very similar to another song I wrote called ‘Fool’. On the surface, it’s this very scathing description of a person I don’t like, but I’m also making fun of myself all of the time, being tongue-in-cheek. With ‘Topless Mother’, it was about a counsellor that I had in rehab. I had such a dislike for her; she had this technique where I felt like she would go in and she was trying to make me cry, and if she didn’t, it was almost, in my opinion, like she felt she hadn’t done her job properly.

As I learned later, a lot of counsellors in rehab are addicts themselves, who have worked damn hard to come through the traumatic experience of addiction. They’re incredible, but I was writing about her so awfully when I was in there, scribbling away in my secret diary. I really wanted to get inside her mind, pull out her dirty laundry.

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And when I left, I looked at what I’d written and I laughed, because I know that she was just trying to help me. I do firmly believe, hand on heart, that if she hears this song and knows it’s about her, it might make her smile. But it’s a very immature song; some people would just let that stuff lie, and some people write songs about it. I’m one of those arseholes who write songs about it.

JW: On ‘Twenty Things’, it’s clear that you were able to bond with the other residents, to reflect upon their stories alongside your own. As a lyricist, how do you strike this balance of writing about other people without overstepping?

NS: It’s definitely called Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous for a reason. These are very vulnerable people who I came to love and care about deeply, which is something I didn’t realise when I went into that place.

I was scared of the people I was going to meet. I hadn’t met, you know, heroin addicts before, or criminals – some people in there chose rehab over prison. But all I did was fall in love with everybody, and unfortunately, nobody warned me of how many of them I was going to lose. My three best friends from there are now dead, and I wasn’t prepared for that.

But then it was also a real privilege to walk and sleep and eat amongst those people. I’ve never laughed so much in my life as I did in that place. I can’t speak for

everyone, but a lot of us had been through similar things, really harrowing circumstances, and all of a sudden you’re in a space where you’re safe, being looked after, cooked for. It makes room for a lot of joy, in a weird way, and room to be childlike together. So I wanted to write about some of the experiences of those people, without giving away too much. I think if anybody knows anything about my past career, I’m not going to stop talking about stuff that I’m passionate about, and advocating for people in addiction will be something that I do speak about, trying to ensure that we have the properly funded avenues available to people from all walks of life.

JW: You’ve also been a keen advocate for Northern artists, which is why it’s so exciting that you’re releasing this album as the first signee to EMI North. Why did it feel like the right fit for you?

NS: I was worried about the criticism that I might receive from signing to a major. I was very critical of the majors during the streaming inquiry, and I felt very isolated and very alone amongst my peers when I did that. But I did it, and I don’t take any of it back. There were three heads of the major labels there, one of them being David Joseph from Universal/EMI. Major labels are complex things; there are some really great people working within them who genuinely love music, and there are some things about them that I hate.

But I wanted to get into the belly of the beast, so I said to David, prove to me why a major label should exist and why they’re so great; sign me. And a week later, he did.

As of January, I’ll be a permanent resident in the North East again, so it feels like the right fit to be on the imprint. I am an established artist, but they’re also coupling with many other companies like Clue Records in Leeds, Generator in the North East. So let’s see what happens, and let’s hope that it does affect some proper change and create more jobs in the music industry in Northern England. I’m excited to be a part of that.

JW: A new album, record deal and re-location are all pretty good ways to kickstart a new year. What else are you looking forward to in 2024?

NS: My biggest hope is that I get to play in territories we’ve not been to, see some more places around the US and wider Europe. There’s a curiosity that I always have; ‘will this work over there? Let’s have a go and see. But lots of touring in general – we start in January supporting Depeche Mode in Europe; it’s just been 10 years since I last supported them, which feels like a beautiful marker of sorts. I’m just going to be working my socks off next year.

Other than that, I’m really looking forward to spending more time in the North East. I found it very, very difficult to go back there once my mum had died; everything and everywhere reminds me of her. But my dad is there and I’m reconnecting with my old school friends; they remember me before all this bullshit, which has been really grounding. I’m excited to go home. It feels like it’s time.

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Final Third

My Place: Gazelle Twin

Elizabeth Bernholz welcomes us into the converted church she calls home to discuss the ghosts of her new album, Black Dog, and just how obsessed she is with Alien, by Stuart Stubbs

Elizabeth Bernholz shudders at the thought that Margaret Thatcher might have once been in her house. She’s heard that Thatcher’s father would have been at one point, as a visiting pastor based in the nearby East Midlands town of Grantham.

Converted churches like those that Bernholz lives in – this one a small isolated brick building on a patch of village green – come with such ghosts, which is essentially what’s brought us here.

Somewhere close by is a traditional red telephone box that someone dressed in a full length mourning veil when the Queen died, but Bernholz had grown wise to the conservative values of her neighbours long before then. She moved to the area in 2014, her sister having owned the church before her. Politically and culturally, it has very little in common with Brighton, where Bernholz started making industrial art pop as Gazelle Twin in 2009, but she realised just how out-of-step she was with the place when she looked for fellow Remain voters following the EU Referendum, and found none. Her fears and frustrations at Brexit became Gazelle Twin’s third album, Pastoral (2018); a protest record that slashed at British nationalism by climbing inside it, where mangled electronics and songs called ‘Better In My Day’, ‘Tea Rooms’ and ‘Jerusalem’ were as absurd and disturbing as they were sure of themselves.

The maniacal creature that Bernholz delivered Pastoral as (a permanently

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grinning Saint George’s Cross of a Morris dancer known only as The Jester) kept Gazelle Twin’s identity a secret, following her previous disguise for Unflesh (2014), where, looking like a David Cronenberg horror character, she performed in her old P.E. kit on account of it representing a time in her life when, relatably, she felt most “like a freak”. Apart from her bared teeth, her entire face was obscured then too, inspired by seeing the then masked Fever Ray performing in 2009.

Her new album, Black Dog, takes a different approach. It’s the first Gazelle Twin record where Bernholz is in plain sight (as you can see), and unlike Pastoral, it’s influenced by her childhood home as much as her current one. Her most down tempo and forboding work yet, it’s an (intensely dark) exploration into ghosts, not because she currently lives in a church, but because she believes her childhood home in Kent to have been haunted, including by a cone-headed presence that her and her family took to be a black dog. She was four when she first saw it and she’s been facinated by every angle of ghost ever since, “the entertainment value of it, the psychological stuff that might be going on that creates it, to even scientific explanations of it.”

For the past five years she has immersed herself in the paranormal, and in doing so also discovered a startling list of similarities between stories of hauntings and the physiological affects of PTSD

01

and depression. So that’s gone into Black Dog too. And her experiences of parenthood. And what her two sons’ memories might be of growing up here in this home. “I did start with ghosts but by then I realised it was about my own experience with anxiety and depression and fear,” she says as we make our way upstairs to the eaves of the church and into her small studio, where her Gazelle Twin archive is waiting for us to dive into.

photography by timothy cochrane

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01 VE-20 VOCAL PROCESSOR I’ve been using this vocal pedal since day one, to create all of the vocal effects that I do, live. It’s one of those pieces of kit that’s been just the thing I’ve needed.

There are loads of better pedals out there, but I’ve just stuck to this one. I don’t really nerd out on kit like some people do. I’ve got my Moog modular

synth there, and I love playing with it, but I prefer making real sounds and sampling them, and working with voice mainly.

When I started writing songs as a teenager, it was guitars and synths and overdubbing things of cassettes, and then I started to just listen to choral music and classical music, so I started making my own choral music layering up my voice. Singing in Latin! I was really into it. Seventeen/eighteen. I really

loved it and still do. That’s always been the bedrock of my music – choral music and harmonies.

02 HOBBY HORSE As I was building the Jester costume for Pastoral I was looking into all of those weird traditional costumes, with ribbons and maypoles and hobby horses. This

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04

03

05 06

“I didn’t realise this until years afterwards, but this is what I’m doing!

I’m just recreating Alien!! All of it” was an eBay find. It’s so creepy, with the wheel on the bottom and the little ponytail. It goes in the attic; I can’t have it out.

I don’t like it, but as soon as I had it, I felt like, ‘this is a weapon’.

03 BLACK DOG SUIT AND PASTORAL JESTER COSTUME The suit is what I’m wearing now for this tour. It was my favourite colour as a kid and I wanted to pick something that was slightly androgynous, with an ’80s feel, as I’m a child of the ’80s. The shirt was made from the fabric of my wedding dress. There a lot of stuff about my relationship in the album as well, that’s not explicit, and that’s something that’s very personal to me. I bought the suit new but wanted it to feel a bit ghostly, like it has been stuck in a cupboard, so I stamped it into gravel. I’ve really gone at it.

The Jester costume I made myself… as you can tell. I wanted it to be the football hooligan thing mixed with Morris dancer, mixed with jester. But it all started with the cap. That triggered the whole thing. I found it in a charity shop in Nottingham and I took a photo of myself

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with it on, and I was doing the Unflesh face [flashing a sinister, wide grin]. And I thought there’s something in this.

I’m glad the Jester has gone now.

I loved it at the time, because I felt like it was the perfect representation of the all the mocking and jibing and piss-taking that I wanted to do. I wanted it to be silly to some degree, but also menacing. But I toured it for a long time, and one of the reasons I don’t go back to playing old material on new tours is because I get really sick of it. But I’ll always enjoy looking at the pictures and the effect that it had. It was a fun part to play.

04 SCOTT KING POSTER One of Scott King’s other artworks is a photograph called The Thug From Accounts, and it’s like a waxwork or a mannequin in a suit, and this guy’s got his tie around his head – this business guy who’s turned into this tribal, roguish figure. It was something I kept going back to when I was transitioning from Unflesh to Pastoral, and I was reading a lot of J. G. Ballard about pockets of society that turn a bit feral and tribal. So I’ve followed

his stuff since then – and it’s all very sardonic and V’s up to the establishment, which is the stuff that I like – and I got this last year. It’s obviously a joke, but it’s kind of the antithesis of what all of my work is about – I’m constantly living in my bad memories and making art out of them.

05 WORRY DOLLS PROTOTYPES When I made Unflesh, in a series of photos I did I had some worry dolls [small Guatemalan dolls traditionally given to children to tell their worries to at night and place under their pillows]. I had them as a kid because I use to worry a lot. I thought I’d love to have some as part of Unflesh, as some merch. It never happened because I couldn’t get anyone to make enough of them for me, but I had a friend in Brighton who offered to make a few prototypes, and she did such a great job of them. Originally I had three, but I gave one to Cosey Fanni Tutti. She’s the only person who has one because she was so supportive of that album, and did a remix with Chris [Carter] for the remix version of the album.

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08 07 09

06 ALIEN COLLECTION One of my childhood obsessions was Alien and Aliens, which I watched way too young – like, age six, because I had older siblings. I absolutely loved it. Terrified, but loved it. All of the goo and special effects, and all of the music. I’ve pretty much been obsessed with it since, but most of these have been gifts over the last few years. I’ve never been a collector of things, and I’ve tried to make this look as adult as possible.

And if you look at the teeth of Alien and the cover of Unflesh, I didn’t realise this until years afterwards, but this is what I’m doing! I’m just recreating Alien!!

All of it. It’s all in there. I particularly loved the character of Newt when I was first saw it – this outsider kid. “Why can’t I be Newt and not have to go to school!?”

07 RECORDERS I don’t buy lots of gear, but I do like recorders. The big one [previous page] is just a bass recorder. I bought it for a film score that I wrote earlier this year, but

also to play The Mandalorian theme tune on. The recorder was the first instrument I learned, and I loved playing my recorder duets in assembly. I mean, it’s never going to sounds good with a whole room of kids playing recorders, is it? Kudos to the teachers that endure that. But it was my first introduction to performing and doing music publicly, and I’ve always loved early recorder music as well.

08 SWAZZLE This looks like a piece of thread but it’s called a swazzle. You know Punch & Judy? You know the voice of Punch? This is what you have to have in your mouth to do the voice of Punch. It’s on string so you don’t swallow it. You have to make it vibrate. It took me two weeks to get any sort of sound out of it. It’s a horrible thing to do. I used it on one of the tracks on Pastoral. I think it was ‘Jerusalem’. And there’s a phone call of me on the phone to the local council reporting an abandoned car, and in the background is this weird, ‘ah hahahaa’. I just wanted Punch in there basically, because it’s such a weird artefact of a long forgotten time.

09 BLACK DOG SKETCH This is the original sketch I did for the cover of Black Dog. And then I gave it to the amazing illustrator Craig Humpston to do his version of it. I had the thing in my head, and I’d looked at his work for inspiration of my sketch, and then I gave that to him. I wanted the dog to be crying but also angry. Angry and sad – all the emotions. And it’s got an ’80s feel again. I mean, the type is also Alien, isn’t it? God, I’ve only really got one thing, haven’t I? Inside the album gatefold is a photo of the house I grew up in – a Victorian farmhouse, similar in age to this house, but even more isolated. When I was four or five I shared a room with one of my sisters and I used to feel really scared in that room. I remember waking up feeling like I was being watched all the time. And I’d have terrible nightmares.

I have very vivid memories of looking down beside the bed and seeing a small black shadow, almost with a cone shaped head, moving around. Sniffing around, in hindsight. I wasn’t scared of that. That wasn’t the scary part. But in that house I had a feeling of dread, fear and curiosity.

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Rod Stewart and Jools Holland were in the St Paul’s branch of Café Rouge when they cooked up the idea of Swing Fever, so it seemed right that they would shoot its album cover there. Rod had had his old pal on the hook for years to collaborate on a record they could “make for no money”, and after treating him to beef bourguignon and more glasses of house red than Holland is accustom to, the boogie woogie overlord found himself agreeing to Rod’s latest scheme – “the album Robbie Williams made forever ago, but for, like, no money.”

The cover certainly came in on budget, on account of the pair turning up at the restaurant the following week just before it closed for the night. Once inside, under the pretense that they’d lost a cufflink there, they insisted that Rod be poured “a taster of wine that I can’t be charged for”, and that the waiter take a quick photo or two.

Both men exude their unique personalities that makes Swing Fever such an exciting prospect – shy Jools, in his sharp two-tone getup, happy to be in the background where he hopes we won’t notice the regret on his face of agreeing to the project; bold Rod, front and centre, with a look that defiantly says, “I’m not paying for this wine.” And for once, the power play works in everyone’s favour: Rod lifted Jools onto the bar to hide the shoes he was so jealous of, but he inadvertently made Jools taller than him in doing so. And while Rod insisted on his name being in a bolder, bigger font, Jools was only disappointed that his name couldn’t be smaller or printed in black. Just look at his face.

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Liam Gallagher is said to be denying that his new song with Seahorses guitarist John Squire has nicked its lyrics from playgroup banger ‘I Can Sing A Rainbow’. The Beady Eye star was allegedly overheard confronting local resident Oscar Jones (4) in a pub in Hampstead, saying: “That tune goes, ‘Red and yellow and pink and green / Purple and orange and blue’, mine goes, ‘Red and orange, yellow and green / Blue, indigo, violet’. Totally different!” Jones is said to have incensed Gallagher by turning back to his colouring almost as soon as he’d levelled his claim at the Britpopper. By the time Gallagher had Squire on FaceTime to help defend ‘Just Another Rainbow’, Jones had fallen asleep.

After 5 hours and 1000 takes, child gets his lines right for a cute viral moment written by his mum

illustration by kate prior

LAQ006-01 PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS Terror’s Pillow [Live at Blank Studios]

LAQ006-02 ROBBIE & MONA Tina’s Leather

LAQ006-03 PROTOMARTYR How He Lived After He Died [Live at Sugar Hill Supper Club]

LAQ006-04 SQUID Sevens [Early writing session, 2021]

LAQ006-05 THE DARKER THE SHADOW THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT [aka THE STREETS] Don’t Judge The Book

LAQ006-06 LANKUM Lullaby

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“IF YOU SUSPECTED THIS CURRENT WAVE OF IRISH GUITAR MUSIC HAD PEAKED WITH THE LIKES OF FONTAINES D.C. AND THE MURDER CAPITAL, YOU SHOULD THINK AGAIN” - NME