Killer Mike – Loud And Quiet 159

Squid, Overmono, ANOHNI, Shirley Collins, Protomartyr, Feeble Little Horse, Enny, RP Boo, Julie Byrne, Waterbaby, Youth Lagoon, Cumgirl8, This Is The Kit, Soviet Bus Stops

issue 159

NOBODY’S UNDERDOG

Killer

Mike

THE NEW ALBUM – OUT NOW

the fully remastered re-issue out now

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, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jenessa Williams, Jessica Wrigglesworth, Joe Goggins, Jumi Akinfenwa, Katie Beswick, 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, Janne Oinonen, 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 Abigail Jessup, Aoife Kitt, Ben Harris, Ebi Sampson, Holly Young, James Cunningham, Jamie Woolgar, Kate Price, Landon Kovalick and crew, Marcus Scott, Rhonda Burnam, Sinead Mills, Tom Sloman, Will Lawrence The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2023 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Issue 159 I skipped breakfast the day I went to interview Killer Mike because we were meeting at midday and lunch was half mentioned the day before. We did not have lunch, unless you count half a bottle of bourbon as lunch, which I almost never do. Mike told me he only drinks with people he has a level of respect for, which I took as a massive compliment considering how sunburnt I was. And the fact that he’s been one of the best rappers in the world for the last 20 years, who this month puts his life story into his first solo album in 11 years, simply titled Michael.

Stuart Stubbs

Enny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Cumgirl8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Waterbaby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Feeble Little Horse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Julie Byrne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 RP Boo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Youth Lagoon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Overmono . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Killer Mike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Squid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 Zodiac and Soviet Bus Stops . . . . . . . 66 Protomartyr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 ANOHNI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Shirley Collins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

AI music The discourse around AI continues to be terrifying, intriguing and incredibly boring all at the same time. It does seem to be ramping up at the moment though: since the last issue of L&Q, we’ve seen numerous controversies and experiments which have prompted us to think that this probably is something we need to think carefully about, whether we like it or not (we don’t).

In April, major label UMG moved against an AI-generated track that mimicked Drake and The Weeknd with startling accuracy. ‘Heart On My Sleeve’ was made by TikTok user Ghostwriter

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(whose profile shows their head covered by a white sheet and silly sunglasses, which is good) and had racked up hundreds of thousands of Spotify streams by the time it was taken down.

UMG’s action was a significant moment in the industry’s relationship with this unpredictable new technology.

In May, Grimes followed up her 2020 “AI lullaby” by unveiling Elf.Tech, a new piece of software which allows you to create music in her voice. Artists can commercially release the results in exchange for half of any master-recording royalties. The results so far have obviously been rubbish.

The Beginning: Previously Independent publishing

Serge Gainsbourg

It’s been another tricky couple of months in independent publishing. We were extremely sad to see the excellent gal-dem call it quits, citing “difficulties we’ve faced in stabilising our position both financially and structurally”. They’ve been a vital platform for people of colour from marginalised genders over the past eight years, publishing really important work in challenging circumstances. Since the announcement of their closure on 31 March, they’ve published a directory of their contributors on their website and social channels – check out what they’re all going on to do and support them if you can. In slightly more heartening news, our fellow leftfield music publication The Quietus recently had to launch a subscription drive to shore themselves up. Happily, they’ve reached the number they needed for their immediate security, but more support for DIY publishing is always needed. The lesson here: support independent voices, or one day they’ll be gone. gal-dem.com

The Paris home of legendary French pop and chanson singer, actor and writer Serge Gainsbourg is set to open to the public. The house at 5 bis rue de Verneuil will accept visitors from September 20 and expects around 100,000 visitors per year. A museum to the singer will also open opposite the property with a bookshop and a cafe-piano bar, called ‘le Gainsbarre’.

Matt Hancock Just when you thought you couldn’t like him more, Matt Hancock shat himself in public once again, outside a gig in London.

According to Popbitch, the former Health Secretary with hours of parkour under his belt and gallons of blood on his hands tried to get VIP access to a recent Benny Sings show at KOKO in Camden.

Security promptly told him to fuck off to the back of the queue with everyone else.

Northern Soul In late April, Dazed wrote a report that found that Northern Soul – the enduring working-class subculture based around fast tempos, all-night clubs, high-energy dancing and lovelorn vocals – is making an unlikely comeback. Of course, some would argue it never went away (clubs across the UK have continued to host Northern Soul nights more or less continuously since the 1970s) but the appeal of the genre with under30s has noticeably increased over the last year, sparking talk of a revival. With groups like Deptford Northern Soul Club and Heart of Soul leading the way, it’s well worth looking up the new breed of Northern Soul events when you’re planning your next night out.

Jonny Greenwood Radiohead guitarist, member of The Smile and Hollywood score composer Jonny Greenwood has started a new venture: an olive oil business. He’s been living on a farm in Italy for some years now, and has apparently become addicted to “harvesting and pressing this glorious fruit” with his family and friends. Greenwood Oil is available for £60 per signed litre bottle. wasteheadquarters.com

illustration by kate prior

Printworks South London super club Printworks – the capital’s largest – closed on 1 May, making way for office space and luxury flats in another unsettling development in the struggle for viable UK cultural venues. Yet there remains hope for Printworks: as their closing party raged on, venue owners Broadwick Live announced that there is a provisional plan – informally agreed by British Land and AustralianSuper, who are in charge of the proposed redevelopment – to reopen in 2026. Simeon Aldred, co-owner and head of strategy at Broadwick Live, told The Guardian that he wanted to counter “the classic gentrification narrative [of] the last few weeks: terrible landlords closing you down, those kinds of negative vibes. But to be honest, British Land invited us in, [the creation of Printworks] was as much their idea as ours. So I want to give them some credit for that. We can’t announce that [the reopening] is definitely happening, we haven’t signed any contracts, but the shape of the principles for a deal are there, and we’re going to be putting in for planning permission in the next few weeks.” printworkslondon.co.uk

The Walkmen NYC indie rock group The Walkmen reunited for the first time in a decade last month to perform their 2004 classic ‘The Rat’ on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert – without rehearsing.

“Ever since we started The Walkmen, we’ve done everything by the seat of our pants,” they said in a statement. “We don’t ‘plan’ much. So during our Zoom ‘planning’ meeting, we decided the best way to play together for the very first time would be on national television without a single rehearsal.” Sounds like an anxiety dream but it worked.

UK nightlife x War Child More than 30 UK nightclubs and music venues agreed to donate a percentage of bar profits from the long May bank holiday weekend, as well as guestlist donations, to War Child in order to support the charity’s work to help children in conflict zones around the world as part of their Right To Dance scheme. Fabric, Corsica Studios, Phonox, EartH, Lafayette, TOLA, The Jazz Cafe, The Social, Brixton Electric, WIRE, Village Underground, Patterns and many more are among the clubs taking part in the initiative. War Child have also teamed up with Everpress and Indonesian artist Muhammad Fatchurofi to produce a limited edition ‘Dance For Good’ t-shirt, all of the proceeds from which go to the charity. warchild.org.uk

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The Beginning: Losing My Edge

We asked Kate Stables of This Is The Kit what her favourite song is, really LC: KS:

LC: KS: LC: KS: LC: KS:

LC: KS: LC: KS:

Hiya Kate. Not trying to be cool now please – what’s your actual favourite song?

I’m having a hard time choosing something that might not be cool. Not because I think everything I like is cool! But because I have a no shame policy. I love that James Taylor song, ‘Fire and Rain’ – that’s really cheesy…

I don’t know, that’s pretty credible I think. By the standards of this column anyway.

Well, I love the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Now we’re talking!

Is that worse than James Taylor? I have no idea.

It depends who you’re speaking to I suppose. But you’re speaking to me at the moment, so… yes.

When I was a teenager, I had all their albums up to Blood Sugar Sex Magik [1991]; I thought Anthony Kiedis was really handsome, and just really loved them.

Do you still stand by that now?

Well he’s perfectly fine-looking.

Sorry, I meant do you still have a soft spot for the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, their music doesn’t move me as much as it used to – when I was a kid, that early, punky stuff was really exciting. It doesn’t move me as much now, but I think they’re possibly even more likeable now than

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they were before because they’ve lived life and have experience; they’ve been through some fires, and have come out the other side, wiser, I think.

LC: Was there a song that particularly meant a lot to you?

KS: ‘Get Up and Jump’ – that was a track I loved. Their version of [Steve Wonder’s] ‘Higher Ground’ and [Jimi Hendrix’s] ‘Fire’, also brilliant.

LC: Are you into karaoke at all? Talking of performing other people’s stuff.

KS: I’ve only done it once. I don’t avoid it – I just never find myself in a karaoke situation. I’d love to do it with my sister, because I think she’d be really good at it. But this was at a party, and everyone was cheering the people doing the singing. I’d just met this really amazing musician and person I really connected with called Laura, and we really liked each other, so we were just like, “Let’s do a song together!”

We ended up doing ‘Man I Feel Like A Woman’ by Shania Twain, and everyone in the courtyard where this party was happening just turned their backs and sort of pretended we weren’t there. It was just the most excruciating tumbleweed moment ever – then someone else got up and did a Robbie Williams song and everyone cheered again.

I’ve always really fantasised about doing ‘Wonderwall’ at karaoke. But I know that it would be in the wrong key for me and I wouldn’t be able to sing it properly and it would be excruciatingly painful for anyone to listen to. But it’s something I just really want to do – really straining for the notes, like in church when you’re singing a hymn and it’s like, “Where do I go with this?”

LC: Is a lot of the stuff you’re talking about the music you got into as a teenager then?

KS: Yeah – that’s quite an intense age of musical absorption, listening to the Top 40 on the radio every weekend and stuff, and I had two big sisters who were a big influence.

One thing that really stuck with me was a tape a friend gave me when I was 11, which I listened to for years and years. I didn’t actually know what it was until later, but it turned out to be the Velvet Underground on one side, and then Lou Reed’s Transformer on the other. That’s definitely something that influenced how I wanted to play and how I wanted to write.

LC: That’s pretty cultured for an 11-year-old.

KS: I loved some pop music too. The Shaman, ‘Rhythm Is A Dancer’ by Snap!, all that ’90s dancey stuff. And I’ve always been a huge Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé fan – it doesn’t get much better than ’90s R&B does it?

words by luke cartledge

SHYGIRL

BRANDT BRAUER FRICK

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BECAUSE MUSIC

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OFF PLANET (OUT JUNE 16)

The Beginning: Bad Advice

‘Jai Paul’ on preparing for the apocalypse

Dear Jai. Absolutely love your work – you’re better at evading the oppressive apparatus of the state than almost any other British electronic pop producer from the last decade that I can think of. Tell me, what are the three essential items you need in your survival bunker that nobody ever mentions?

– Theodore K, Montana Great question. We all know about tins of beans, dynamo lights, crude weapons and stuff, right? But what nobody ever tells you is how bored you get in there – so what I do is take in a deck of cards, a Twister mat and as many issues of Viz as I can pack into a JD bag. And here’s a bonus: always pack one more pair of pants than you think you’ll need. It can get scary down there.

Hi JP. Did you go straight from the bunker to Coachella, or did you spend a bit of time reintroducing yourself to society beforehand, and are you back in the bunker now? – J. E. Hoover, via email I can neither confirm nor deny my whereabouts at any time. Sorry pal, that’s just a red line for me. I refuse even to say if it was really me up there at that stupid festival – you wouldn’t know either way would you? But I have been to an undisclosed part of the surface world recently, and all that fucking bunting in Tesco was enough to drive me back underground for centuries.

Not for me.

Jai, how do you not get really lonely, hiding away from the world like that? – J. Vernon, Wisconsin

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You’d be surprised at how much company I get. Loads of people come down here just to hang for a bit – big-room EDM lads mainly. There are some interesting combinations of folks who just want to get away from it all for a bit. You’d be amazed at what Deadmau5 can rustle up using only tinned food or how good Thomas Pynchon is at Twister.

Also, I’m not hiding from the world. I’m just waiting out the inevitable – not cowering away, just minding my own business. When it all goes to shit and you’re down to your last sheet of bog roll as the streets burn around you, you’ll wish you’d thought ahead like me. I’ve got a bidet.

What do you eat in an average week when you’re entirely self-sufficient, Jai? Have you had to learn to hunt? Basically I’m thinking of getting off the grid, but I really like a chicken parmo. – Frank Ocean, Stockton-on-Tees Ah yeah, you’re gonna have to wean yourself off the bechamel. I eat a lot of chickpeas and lentils, things that can stay in the cupboard for millennia, and Ryvitas – they do go off eventually but you can’t tell. Once a week I head out into the [redacted] forest, picking berries and edible leaves – I did a foraging course on Hackney Marshes once you know, it was lovely – and try to hunt some meat. It took me a while to learn to be honest – spent a lot of time with a goat in a headlock, working out what I was supposed to do next – but these days I’m pretty ruthless. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to kick the fuck out of a deer when you’re really peckish. Anyway, up the Boro and have a nice day.

illustration by kate prior

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Enny Common sense rap, by Hamza Riaz.

Photography by Henri Kisielewski “I USED TO think artists have five-year plans. But I think

perceptions change, and things that you want change.” For the pensive Enny, longevity is certainly on the cards – but it has to be on her own terms. We get to the bottom of what those terms are in the middle of a busy week for the Thamesmead rapper, who, at the time of our meeting, is gearing up for the release of her second EP, We Go Again. Yet it seems like just another day for Enny as we speak in East London’s Root 73 studio, where the bulk of her recording takes place.

Over the last few years, she has demonstrated the strength and effectiveness of a unique artist. Her breakout tracks speak firmly from the heart, championing local community and Black women while pondering the incalculable grey areas of adulthood. From her first SoundCloud freestyles onwards, Enny has established a niche that differs from the melting pot of many other rising UK rap stars.

At first, she wanted to be a singer. It makes sense once we delve into her church roots, growing up in a Christian household where the likes of Thankful by contemporary gospel duo Mary Mary were amongst the first records she heard. When gospel music wasn’t playing, her siblings would make mixes that would go on to shape her interest in grime and hip hop. Despite having shifted her focus to rapping since that time, Enny’s music still incorporates tender vocals and self-sung neo soul hooks.

“It’s like a lazy way of not committing to singing,” she says of this hybrid approach, which she partly developed during

secondary school with music-minded friends. I try to give her more credit on her singing than she’ll take; she can certainly hold a note, as demonstrated on more intimate tracks like recent single ‘Champagne Problems’.

Having spent her early years of music-making refining her voice, when Enny began putting out music officially and working with her close friend and producer Paya, she quit her job. “It felt more intentional,” she says. “Prior to that it was just about having fun and thinking, ‘I have a dream!’” Yet despite her humility, people had been aware of her potential for a long time already. At music school, one teacher wanted to take her talents and push her to play the keyboard. “I was learning to play off the feeling of music and sounds,” she says. “The next level to that would have been how to theoretically understand it.

So I think people saw I had potential to go there just from having the understanding of the ‘air’ of music.”

Once she’d landed on this sense of intention, with Paya by her side, her lyrical style evolved quickly too. Enny knows her way around a verse like a second home. The flows are crisp, the subject matter bold, raw emotion is rooted in the wet soil of hip hop. She proudly wears the title of ‘a rapper’s rapper’, though she is mindful of giving off a cocky impression. “I should probably should stop saying that,” she says. “When I say I’m a rapper’s rapper, I say that as a proper fan of rap lyricism. But it’s not to say that all rappers love me – it’s just something I really appreciate.”

Her material has widely been billed as ‘conscious’ and ‘political’; in reality, she’s just sharing what’s on her mind.

“Sometimes I feel like we have this thing where if someone calls you a conscious rapper you’ll be like, ‘I ain’t a conscious rapper!

They want to put me in a box!’” she says flippantly. To Enny, the content is not that deep; she references everyday matters that affect certain communities – she’s not out here breaking down metaphysical matters through her third eye.

“Consciousness is common sense,” she says. “The fact that people define consciousness as this whole other thing throws me off because it’s a basic concept. My manager sent me the definition of ‘conscious’ and it literally just means being aware of one’s surroundings. So yeah, I am aware of my surroundings.”

A

T THIS POINT, everything possible has already been said about Enny’s 2020 breakout single ‘Peng Black Girls’ featuring Amia Brave, and the accompanying remix with Jorja Smith. Instead of retreading old ground, I ask whether she feels the song is a classic yet, to which she has a humble reply. “I don’t know. I don’t know what a classic means. I don’t think it’s for us

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“The fact that people define consciousness as this whole other thing throws me off because it’s a basic concept”

to determine what a classic is, I think time defines what a classic is. I just feel it was a beautiful moment for me and for people.”

The song’s impact cannot be understated; it had an instant resonance with Black British women, and alongside Bashy’s ‘Black Boys’ and Dave’s ‘Black’ it makes a trifecta of essential, correlative statements, all released at similar career points by rising artists speaking to the various realities of Black British life. Enny is just glad it’s a song that came about organically and connected with its intended audience naturally. “Life will do whatever life’s gonna do,” she says. “I’m not going to try and make a song to cultivate this or do that. I just think it is what it is. I can just appreciate it for what it is, the message and what it’s done so far.”

Her upbringing in Thamesmead, south London was foundational to the person she is today. It’s where she formed her perspective on the world – but her views changed when she branched out of her home neighbourhood.

“I feel like I outgrew the ‘What ends you repping?’ part of my life,” she says. This is a counterpoint to the localist competitiveness that exists between north, south, east and west London, and which of the four makes the best music. Realistically, each quadrant of the city boasts talented artists. Representing the south, Enny mentions Stormzy, Ms Banks and Shaybo as leading torchbearers, and she deserves to be on that list too.

Time, place and age have come up as common themes in her music, namely in her debut EP, Under Twenty Five. Navigating adulthood is never easy; there’s no rulebook that can dictate where the tide will take you, particularly for the 20-or-so-yearold searching for their purpose in life. For Enny, it’s been no different, and having feared the pressures of turning 25 she has reached an eventual stage of acceptance of what getting older means to her. “I think we’re all at some point afraid of ageing,” she acknowledges. “But I don’t think about it anymore. The older I’m getting, the more I’m seeing the world in a different space. It’s like one of my glands has fully developed.

“I reckon if I wasn’t doing music, and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, I’d probably feel the pressures of 30 approaching,” she says, ready to welcome the decade everyone else seems to push away. “It just seems like something cool happens there! It’s inevitable. The only way to escape is by dying, so embrace it.”

E

NNY’S CATALOGUE UP to this point is limited, two EPs and some loose singles suggesting she’s particular with the material she puts out. It’s a testament to her perfectionist approach. Some artists riddle through 30-minute freestyles and

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sleep in the studio. Others, like Enny, are more calculated, with a distaste for hitting up the studio unprepared. She’s protective of her creative flow, opting for a natural, organic approach rather than chasing numbers and engagement, and racing to the bottom. I ask whether she’s planning to make an album – or whether she’s avoiding it.

“I used to feel like I’ll just do EPs forever,” she says. “Then I realised I’ll know when I’ll be ready to make an album.” The work that’s out so far feels like products of specific creative moments; brief snapshots of Enny’s thoughts and feelings in the present.

She refers to her latest six-track release, We Go Again, as a ‘care package’ rather than a mixtape or EP, a label that’s reflective of the project’s intimacy. She is clearly aware of the significance an album holds, and the way such a format must be executed.

This choosy nature stems from how personal Enny’s music can get. “I’m conscious of oversharing,” she accepts, acknowledging it comes with the territory of what’s true to herself. “It might be cringey to listen back and be like, ‘Why did I share that?’, but it was the only way I was going to put out music, so it’s either that or I put out instrumentals!” I wonder what it must be like for an artist to perform songs based on a contextual set of emotions.

What if those emotions expire and you’re left with songs out of touch with your current self? This is something Enny’s experienced more recently than I expected – with We Go Again. “When I listen to the songs on the project, I don’t relate to them any more.

Because it’s a period I’m no longer in. I’m about to find out what that dissonance is like when I perform them.”

Enny tells me she finds comfort in reclusion, and that the limelight is not an attractive prospect for her. It makes me question how that introversion affects her duties as an artist. “I don’t like being in spaces with people,” she says. “Unless it’s a big boy thing, I’m not gonna go. It just makes me anxious, and it’s the same faces and greetings. I’ve only got two more of those left in me.”

It’s a statement that circles back to her pure fixation on music.

Nothing can be forced in her process; she’d rather link up with just a couple of friends, act on impulse, and skip the industry politics.

Cumgirl8 Putting little toys into the world. And memes,

by Katie Beswick. Photography by Emmie America SINCE AT LEAST the 1970s, young, beautiful women have been reclaiming their sexuality and pushing back against patriarchal capitalism through the capitalist patriarchal mediums of commercial popular music and fashion. Cumgirl8, a New York based art collective, are the latest young, beautiful women to do so. Playing with the lines between self-expression and exploitation, the quartet (Lida Fox (bass), Veronika Vilim (guitar), Chase Lombardo (drums) and Avishag Rodrigues (guitar)) provoke and connect with their audience using a dizzying mix of sincerity and satire that feels utterly embedded in the memegeneration — much of it, in fact, taking place on Instagram, in the form of literal memes. Engaging with the work leaves you, like any good meme, a little off-balance — not quite sure if you fully get it: a feeling that spills over into our interview. “We met in the metaverse on a sex chat,” Chase, the band’s drummer, who does most of the talking, tells me.

“We kind of collided into each other, looking for likeminded friends. But that was like 8,000 years ago… so it’s been a long time coming.”I see.

“Then we started playing shows in New York City in 2019.

And, erm, here we are.”

Here is backstage at MOTH Club before an evening gig, trying on outfits sent over by the British designers 150mg. I’m conducting the interview from my bed, an in-person meet cancelled after the band got stuck at Heathrow, something to do with someone trying to bring a dog through customs. I’m not sure if this is the punchline to a joke I’m not getting, or if it really happened.

“Oh look,” Chase says, turning the camera around so I can see the other women, “Avi’s wearing some really shiny pants. Veronika’s a monarch butterfly. All of us have a desire to build a world around our attitude towards life: the way we carry ourselves through space; dressing up for any reason because it feels good. Those two tenets are pretty basic to what we do.”

Are those things not diametric opposites? The frivolity of fashion alongside radical open-heartedness seems like maybe a confused message?

“Ewww!” Chase screws up her face. “I hate that. I absolutely despise that idea. Frivolous? It’s freeing!”

“Right,” Veronika agrees, “I feel like dressing up is about owning your body, and embracing how you’re feeling any given

14

day. Clothes and music, creativity in general, is a great outlet on developing yourself throughout your whole life.”

Making and sharing clothes, collaborating on films and reels that they share online, Cumgirl8 is a whole process of expression and subversion, made difficult to promote by the fact the group have chosen a name that is deliberately and provocatively porny, meaning they are shadow-banned by radio stations, and rarely see their own name in print without asterisks. “We put little toys in the world, little assets, so people can be like, ‘This is cool, I want to hang out with this.’ I think that’s…what we do.”

‘Cicciolina’ is one such toy. Cumgirl8’s first single since signing with 4AD, the track celebrates Hungarian-Italian porn star Ilona Stoller at a time when the political power of porn stars is being driven home with Trump’s downfall at the hands of Stormy Daniels. The power of unashamed female sexuality sits underneath Cumgirl8’s philosophy, which they describe at one point as “sexploration”. I wonder aloud how women might ever disentangle themselves from patriarchy through sex, and whether bell hooks’ ideas about radical love might feed into where the group’s politics meet notions of openness and sexual curiosity.

“These are good questions,” Chase tells me. Veronika nods. “We’re here for questions.

We have the answers to everything, which is nothing. There are no answers. But we’re taking questions.” The next day, I receive an email: “The answer to your question about the point where ‘sexploration’ and our politics meet each other: is sincerity.

You mentioned All About Love by bell hooks, and yes absolutely radical love is at the front of how we operate. I think some of the things we say could be confused with being hyperpositive, but it’s not. It’s nearly the opposite. It’s honest and uncomfortable. We definitely operate in a space of discomfort and challenge people. Especially other women, ironically. And we challenge ourselves… to be loud and hot is not for the weak.

Still yet we’re white and femme. Look at the suicide rate of trans youth, trans black youth… we’re just touching the surface of powerful work. And we honour it deeply. We try to move the needle as much as we can. Not as thorough as bell hooks though.

We make squirt memes.”

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Waterbaby The sisters making an entire dream-pop universe,

by Zara Hedderman.

Photography by Olivia Brissett & Dante Traynor

“I THINK YOU could definitely say that we live in our art,”

muses Jessica Kilpatrick, looking at her sister and Waterbaby bandmate Martha as they sit side-by-side in their Peckham flat.

We’re speaking on Zoom ahead of the release of their transportative debut album, 22° Halo. “It’s 24/7,” she says. “I like the idea of your life being a performance.”

Their idea of life-as-performance feels somewhat apt after spending time with Waterbaby’s debut, as well as listening to their recent shows on online radio station NTS. In October 2022, the Kilpatrick sisters’ selection for their slot on The Early Bird show included a number of film scores from Angelo Badalamenti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mica Levi and Derek Jarman. It’s not surprising that they gravitate towards soundtracks, given the cinematic quality of their own music.

Jessica describes the different facets to film scores that have influenced their approach to constructing tremendously emotive and expansive sonic settings: “With a soundtrack, the music can be more freeform,” she says. “There are perhaps less rules; it’s not so structured so you can be more experimental. There’s also the way that the music can interplay with dialogue and script and how the music and the film can change each other.”

In the press material for the album, the Kilpatrick sisters joke about their reclusive formative years resembling the isolated Lisbon sisters of Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin Suicides. From an early age, Jessica and Martha spent their spare time indoors writing songs and making films. Their brother, on the other hand, channels his creativity through chess, as Jessica explains. “He’s got a photographic memory, which is so different to us, because I think we have kind of a disordered way of creating, but his is mathematical. Ours is just seeing where we go and end up!”

The sisters often go to magical places with their celestial compositions. Sonically, 22° Halo is densely textured with New Age synths and exhilarating electronic arpeggios, with their Grimes-like vocals soaring above. Across the album’s ten tracks (which they note should be listened to as one continuous and evolving work) there’s a great deal of artistic ambition within

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the arrangements. What Waterbaby have achieved with this introduction is all the more impressive when hearing about their early development and dedication to their music.

“When we were younger we had a family piano and we’d write songs on that,” says Martha, and as often happens during our conversation, turns to her sister.

Jessica continues: “We didn’t know anyone who did music so we didn’t have any reference as to how we would record anything. We just knew that we really wanted to do music. So in the early days of writing songs we were always thinking, ‘How can we actually record this?’. We had to just learn how to be really good producers by ourselves. We basically shut ourselves away for a few years – got our studio in Peckham, and finally had a proper space to make music. And it was so worth it because we really wanted to be the sole architects of our music. We wanted to be the ones who created all the sounds and visuals.”

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HROUGHOUT OUR CONVERSATION we return to the otherworldliness of Waterbaby’s music, which Jessica and Martha consciously tie down to reality with song titles like ‘Underwire Bra’ and ‘Supermarket’. “I think it’s finding the beauty in the everyday or even mundane,” Martha suggests.

“Then you can be transported into another world or universe by creating different textures and sounds from something that sounds otherworldly in the music, but then have something that sounds like a rubbish truck passing by within the same song. We really like having that juxtaposition.”

“Especially if your normal life is very mundane or you have a boring job,” says Jessica, “because then you can create this magical universe with your music. There’s also just so much stuff in the world that you can’t control, or people making decisions for you – at least you know you can have complete control of your musical universe. And like Martha was saying, when you incorporate the everyday stuff and make it into something magical, you almost have the power of your dreams.”

The new single

OUT NOW from the ‘Blueboy Must Die’ mixtape noromeworldwide.com

Feeble Little Horse Never follow your dreams, by Hayden Merrick.

Photography by Micah E Wood

“IT’S KINDA DINGY, but in a really charming way,” says Feeble

Little Horse’s vocalist Lydia Slocum. She’s describing Pittsburgh, her hometown; the humble rust belt city once the epicentre of America’s steel industry. In doing so she also summarises the irreverent noise she creates with her bandmates: guitarists Ryan Walchonski and Sebastian Kinsler, and drummer Jacob Kelley.

The foursome’s approach is a collision of modest ambition and diffidence bordering on indifference. “I think we’re from a generation that doesn’t follow their dreams like the last one did,” says Kinsler. The comment is so disarmingly sober that it’s funny, but he’s serious. “If we were born in the ’90s, we could be like, ‘Let’s make it happen! This is all I care about!’ But now it’s like, well that’s a pipe dream.”

The consolation is making art in a city that gets them.

Pittsburgh is similarly averse to the ostentation of LA and the urgency of New York, its glory days also in the rearview. “I wasn’t scared to share anything,” says Slocum. “I feel like people just want to be creative and have a good time. I think Pittsburgh is an easy place to be creative and embrace weird, grimy stuff.”

The latest slab of weird, grimy stuff is Girl With Fish.

Written, recorded, and produced without outside help – though

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Walchonski jokes that Kinsler’s surname is Sony – the band’s second album consolidates their USP of delicious disorder.

Glitchy, guitar-led songs explore abstract existentialism and dox ex-boyfriends (“You fuck like you’re eating / Your smile’s like lines in the concrete”).

Like the majority of GWF, ‘Pocket’ began as one member’s solo recording – in this case, Slocum’s – before the rest of the band convinced her to ‘Horse-ify’ it. “If the album was a painting,” she says, “‘Pocket’ is the palette where we were mixing everything together and then it dried and we were like” – she offers her hand, sheepishly – “well there’s also this.” A microcosm of the album, the track progresses from coy singsong to hellish shrieking; stroked acoustic to fuzz tornado. “It has everything; it’s all over the place,” Slocum admits. “Sometimes the issue is that things are too chaotic. Like, we need something to carry you through.”

Enter Sebastian Kinsler. In addition to contorting his guitar through effects pedals, Kinsler is the production wizard curating the tumult. He’s the kinda guy who lights up when asked about guitar tones (“The Blues Driver clips the Rat in the most awesome way!”) or layering vocal takes (“Elliot Smith was the dude behind that sound; he’d do two takes and hard pan them left and right!”).

His only hope for GWF? “I want people to be like, ‘Oh you don’t need to go to a studio to make music that sounds good and is fun to listen to. You can do it for zero dollars.’”

Each member’s contribution is unique and integral.

Walchonski effuses Band Dad energy. The oldest, and only member with a 9-5, he admits: “I just crave a middle-class existence. I’d like to own a house someday.” He’s similarly pragmatic about the band’s future, explaining, “If we make money, then that’s cool, but if we strictly rely on it to make money and to pay our bills, then it may not be as fun.” If that sounds too sensible, don’t worry: he admits he’d like to own the chilli suit from Nathan For You (“for personal purposes”).

Walchonski reflects on the fuel propelling the band from college-dorm goofing to noise-pop stardom: “We take a lot of sounds that are popular in their own right and kind of combine them.” Maybe the pedal-gazing racket is akin to that which catapulted Wednesday to junkyard royalty; maybe Slocum’s deadpan horsin’ around shares certain characteristics with the delivery of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw. But the combined result is all them.

Of the album’s closing track, Kinsler notes, “I think it’s a funny closer because it’s so crushingly sad. It’s such a sour note to end on.” As the distortion subsides, however, there’s a final sound: the metronome’s faint ticking, some indistinct chatter.

It’s a reminder: Feeble Little Horse made this themselves, on their time. It’s anything but sour. This is anything but the end.

CD/LP/DIGITAL - OUT NOW

Julie Byrne Love is not mortal,

by Michelle Kambasha.

Photography by Tonje Thilesen

JULIE BYRNE IS in southern New York State – specifically, Buffalo, where she’s visiting family in the hilltop home in which she grew up. Before she conducts this interview, she takes a short walk to break away from the hubbub of family life to the bottom of that hill where she’s met by a small portion of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It’s a train track that’s mostly barren save for the occasional freight train, transporting paper, coal, steel and the like.

Deserted train lines, surrounded by equally barren, unkempt patches of land (like we’re used to in the UK) can often feel ominous and dystopian, but in this case, it seems serene: birds chirp wistfully; sometimes, and suddenly, the sound of a gentle wind brushes against the microphone of her mobile. “I thought I’d come here to clear my head before our conversation,” she says. It’s her first interview for some time, and the first since the passing of her dear friend and long-term collaborator, Eric Littmann.

To describe this conversation as a ‘promotional’ activity for the contemporary folk songwriter’s latest and best album The Greater Wings (which follows acclaimed predecessors Rooms With Walls and Windows [2014] and Not Even Happiness [2017]) is difficult – inaccurate, even. Even calling it a conversation – an exchange of information between two people – seems limiting somehow.

Sometimes it’s what you don’t say that carries the most meaning; the silences that are often nervously filled but shouldn’t be. So in talking about the process of making her third album, her short and carefully considered responses, as well as the extended periods she spends pondering my questions, tell more that any explicit words could.

Despite the bulk of our often tearful interaction being about the passing of Littmann, the album isn’t about that; it’s not a concept album about sorrow. “Eric would hate for this to become an album that’s all about grieving and loss,” she says, “because that wasn’t who he was, you know?”

It could be described as an album of two halves, the first beginning loose and shapeless in 2017: “The first chords were written around then,” she says. Touring in support of Not Even Happiness set her back a little, and she restarted in 2019, with Littmann. First single ‘Summer Glass’ was written while Byrne was staying with him in his Chicago apartment, which also had a home studio. She’d take walks around Lake Michigan, “obsessively listening to the synth line,” which he had written

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“Eric would hate for this to become an album that’s all about grieving and loss”

and played. Recording then continued in New York, with Littmann bringing a portable recording setup in his suitcase, before moving again, this time to LA. Then in 2021, Littmann passed away – and recording ceased.

B

YRNE RETURNED TO the album in 2022, working through grief and her new normal, now with Alex Somers as producer, and other musicians who she’d worked intimately with in the past. It was a forced and unplanned adaptation, to say the least. Not only did she have to trust her instincts on how she’d expand her artistic vision, but to fulfil the one her and Littmann had shaped in those embryonic stages.

Yet The Greater Wings in an assured album. It details her journey through grief; the self-titled opener is nothing short of heartbreaking as she sings, “We hold the pact, forever underground / Still rising to sing.” But other songs reckon with other aspects of Byrne’s life. Take ‘Moonless’, an unabashed breakup song. “I’m not waiting for your love,” she sings, as the strings peak and trough; the track is built on the slow piano line (her first time writing on keys). It’s a song about relieving yourself

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from desiring an unrequited love. “Something I love about being a songwriter, especially as a queer woman,” she says, “is being able to have the last word in my work, becoming myself line by line.” She relishes this sense of agency.

“I’m always moving forwards and backwards – I mean, obviously, grief isn’t linear,” she tells me. Making the album forced her to carefully consider what life is about, what it once was, what it is now, and what it might be in the future. But while death is inevitable and unchanging, what it engenders is grief, and that is also something that is totally alive and animated. It has all the characteristics of living, breathing feelings: it’s hard, painful, stressful, inconvenient, distracting, permanent, life-altering, shocking. It walks, meandering its way through and within your life.

On ‘Hopes Return’ Byrne sings: “When words were just a reach for some truer knowledge,” because none of these descriptors of grief can do the weight of it justice; the ability to articulate it is probably one of life’s great mysteries. Despite the limitations of words, The Greater Wings is a true masterclass on the special power that artistry can have to articulate, even imperfectly, certain things better than any non-artist could. It’s an album to be filed alongside Sufjan Stevens’ meditations on Carrie and Lowell or Max Porter’s book Grief Is a Thing With Feathers.

Where it differs from those works is in its defiance. Byrne described The Greater Wings as “a love letter to my chosen family and an expression of the depth of commitment to our shared future,” adding that, “it’s a promise to live with the intention that I fiercely count my relationships with the people who are living and the people who have passed on.” Though her statement of her intention for the album is poised, she admits, “it’s hard for me to place [how I feel about it] right now… because it’s something that I’m trying to live out day by day.”

However, one thing is certain for Julie Byrne: “I refuse the idea that Eric is gone now and that a part of me is gone just because he’s gone. It has been my experience in [grief] that love is not mortal… I really do believe this.” In this sense, The Greater Wings is not a break away from her collaboration with Littmann.

The essence of what made people fall for Byrne’s previous music is still there – it’s a continued and concerted collaboration with him, unbound by mortality, against the conventional thought that life begins here and ends there.

“I still collaborate with my experience of grief for him,” she says. “The pain is still acute but the memories of him feel alive.” She talks about how she recorded some of her songs from Not Even Happiness in the same childhood bedroom she’s staying in now. She recalls the walks they’d take around the very same railroad that she’s sitting at in this very moment, where they’d dream about their futures. And that future isn’t dead. As she sings on The Greater Wings’ title track: “You’re always in the band / Forever underground / Name my grief and let it sing / To carry you up on the greater wings.”

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Beer// Books// Club// Cocktails// Culture// DJs// Exhibitions// Live Music//

27/04/23 10:08

Mapping out the evolution of footwork, one of the most radical dance music genres of the 21st century, with a true pioneer, by Oskar Jeff. Photography by Will Glasspiegel

RP Boo RP BOO OPERATES on his own terms. Alongside the likes of DJ Rashad and DJ Clent, he jumpstarted footwork, a genre of rhythmically complex dance music that originated in Chicago. The style went on to pique international interest in the late 2000s, and to this day he remains one of the most singular producers to emerge from the scene.

2023 sees the release of Legacy Volume 2 on Planet Mu, a compilation of classic tracks and lost gems. The project marks the ten-year anniversary of his first release with the label, who themselves helped introduce the sound to the wider world. I sit down with the man behind the moniker, Kavain Wayne Space, to discuss how it all came to be.

He has an endearing manner, enthusiastically regaling me with tales with a mixture of wisdom and wonder. He traces his introduction to Planet Mu back to DJ Rashad, who was a key instigator of footwork’s international spread via his extensive touring. “I trusted in Planet Mu, by way of talking to Rashad, Space explains. “He was one of the first people to talk to me about the label. He always told people about all the other producers in Chicago that helped birth this.” Rashad tragically passed away in 2014, but his influence continues to loom large over the wider electronic world.

Space’s debut album Legacy was released in 2010, a quasicompilation made up of old tracks and new, a defining document of early footwork. Legacy may seem a strange title for a debut full-length, but it was a sign of an industry playing catchup. The errant footwork scene had been active in the Chicago underground since the late ’90s, mutating from ghetto house, itself a localised, rougher evolution of the city’s more conventional house music.

The solo release was a follow-up to the first Bangs and Works compilations that Planet Mu had released in 2010, itself the result of the connection made between Rashad and label manager Mike Paradinas. The two releases compiled reams of unknown artists from Chicago, a densely potent display of the anarchic and far-reaching possibilities of the genre. High-speed syncopated kick drums batter unrelentingly, while percussive hits land haphazardly and gonzo samples are hacked at mercilessly. The result is often jarring, a polyrhythmic mass that often marries sparse instrumentation with dense composition.

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T

HE TRUE SUCCESS of Bangs and Works lay in its highlighting of the individualistic nature of each artist, representing a fertile scene that held endless potential. Amongst those included was RP Boo, who seemed to exist within his own reality altogether. One of the highlights of the compilation series is his track ‘Eraser’, which rightfully reappears as the opener on Legacy Volume 2.

The track exudes pure nihilism, assembled from a staggering sub-bass rhythm, rigor mortis drones and antagonistic taunts such as “no holds barred, eraser” and “fuck dat, burn them all”. Its forebodingly glacial pace is at odds with the frantic speed the genre is known for.

The vocals echo the fervent trash talk Space witnessed at the legendary Chicago dance battles in which the sound of footwork first began to take shape, notably at events like War Zone.

“There I met a whole set of West Side footworkers,” recalls Space. “Their style was crazy and I’d hear them talk crazy to each other. So I thought I’d make a track for them.”

The tone of the track seems to be a far cry from the man talking to me, beaming as he recounts its inception. But then

there’s more to the track than throwaway threats and doommongering. The key sample is a loop of Paul McCartney, lifted from the Wings hit ‘Live and Let Die’. Macca’s croon is audaciously cut-and-pasted across the track, ducking and weaving the goading vocal jabs. The overall effect is disorientating, hostile and hilarious. Space mentions that originally the track instead featured a sample from a track by The Police; nothing was safe from his sampler. Though by no means a template for the rest of his work, ‘Eraser’ carries the hallmarks that make him such an outlier in his field.

I ask Space where his irreverent approach to sampling comes from. “My advantage is that I’m older,” he answers.

“I was born in the ’70s, listening to the radio stations – James Brown, Earth, Wind & Fire, Led Zeppelin. Then as the ’80s rolls in: MTV. I’m just soaking it all up.”

It’s clear that there’s a respect for what he samples, though fortunately it’s the type of respect that still allows him to recontextualise sounds with reckless abandon. The humorous aspect of the results is not lost on him; if anything the audacity is another string to his bow. “I’d listen to the samples the hip hop producers were using – jazz, funk, rock. When it came my time to do it, I started pulling stuff out of memory lane. People were like, ‘How and why could he use this sample? And why didn’t I think about it first!’”

His time came during the peak of ghetto house, the streetlevel successor to Chicago’s greatest cultural export: house music. It was a stripped-back take on the original format; raw, direct and party-centric with vocals that veer from raunchy to downright vulgar. Space witnessed this transition first hand.

“I would say the birth of it was in the late ’80s, but it came into fruition in the ’90s, right after Cajmere [aka house legend Green Velvet] released ‘Percolator’.” He continues: “It was still so hidden underground. The tapes were flying around but to really hear it you’d have to go to the West Side of Chicago – a place called The Factory. That’s where people like Jammin Gerald, Houz’Mon and Quick Mix Claude were doing their thing.

Then on the South Side, DJ Deeon and DJ Milton were the heavy hitters.” Space wasn’t producing yet, but he began making his name as a DJ – “Believe me, I stopped every party I went to!”

As the ’90s rolled on, ghetto house began to stagnate.

“The tracks were getting very dry, and a lot of places had been shut down,” he notes. This saw a lot of the bigger names playing private raves, as well as being booked outside of the state. “But there was one place left, Club Cavallini, in the south suburbs of the city. That’s where the new generation went.”

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HAT NEW GENERATION included DJ Clent, who would

soon go on to form Beatdown House alongside Majik Myke and DJ Rashad. “I was the last person that he came to,” acknowledges Space, “but the next thing you know, we started doing parties and creating tracks.”

Space had begun producing prior to joining Beatdown, but it was with the crew that he created what is considered the first true footwork track: ‘Baby Come On’. It was a freak mutation that defibrillated a tired formula. The vocal is a loop of Ol’

Dirty Bastard’s feature on Mariah Carey’s track ‘Fantasy’. Space claims the idea was lifted from a radio DJ who he’d heard a few years before, beat-juggling the vocal back and forth on a pair of records. “It was the rhythm of the beat. It was distinct,” explains Space. “If you take out the sample and just let the beat roll, it was something totally different. Then with the sample on top, it starts to juggle.” It’s a polyrhythmic cascade that persistently threatens to fall apart, catching itself at irregular intervals that jar and satisfy in equal measure. It was also an intriguing invitation to the more adventurous dancers in the crowd. “It just drove people crazy,” he reflects, adding that, “from that moment, everybody started changing their route. It was our chance to be heard. They all took it and did their thing.”

The effect that these early tracks had on the crowd should not be understated. The spark that allowed the sound to grow was physical dancefloor combustion; as the music flourished, it soundtracked dance battles, with crews taking turns to showcase their unique abilities. The battles had existed prior to footwork, originating at underground talent shows separate from the regular clubs: “It was pure enjoyment. It went on for years, just people showing off their dance craft.” Eventually, as things progressed, the talent shows fizzled out and the battles shifted into the clubs. As the music developed, so did the dance, with emphasis on the lower body: the footwork.

On home turf, the sound and the bodily activity seemed inseparable. But when the music eventually went international, the dance didn’t get a plane ticket. Space himself was a dancer, and still to this day he’ll vacate the DJ booth to demonstrate his moves for the crowd. I wondered how this separation sat with the originators. “When I played my first festival, Unsound, I seen people jump, I seen them dance how they wanna dance, but I didn’t see the actual footwork. I wasn’t used to it. But I’ve accepted it over the years: I’m here to present the music.”

Interestingly, as the music found an audience outside of Chicago, a reverse situation happened, with some of the dancers themselves finding commercial backing work for big name pop acts. I ask how the scene is on the ground in 2023.

“It’s changed again,” he says. “There’s sponsorship.

There’s nationwide freeform dancing. They are seeing more opportunities. It’s changing for the better. They are learning to respect other dance styles.”

The scene as it was is undoubtedly a thing of the past.

Exposure leads to fragmentation but also evolution, and some of the most radical electronic musicians of the past decade have flourished from the footwork underground, with artists like Jlin abstracting the style beyond comprehension. Elsewhere, the genre has been fully ingested by the electronic zeitgeist, played alongside jungle and D&B on main stages by DJs like SHERELLE. ”It’s funny,” he says, “in Chicago, it was already a thing [to mix genres]. As long as the BPM could match, I’d play it! This is nothing new to us. I love it though!”

And what does Legacy Volume 2 represent, ten years on from its predecessor? “The reason why I’m where I’m at is that I’m not afraid to step out of the box,” he reflects. “To sit back and look at it presented [like this] – it shows my work has been accepted.”

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Youth Lagoon The resurrection of Trevor Powers’ buried project, following a devastating reaction to some over-the-counter medication, by Max Pilley.

Photography by Tyler T. Williams

IN 2016, TREVOR Powers voluntarily burned down his career.

After three successful album releases under the moniker of Youth Lagoon – three bodies of sensitive, delicate, homespun DIY art-pop that had made him a darling of the indie world – he had come to feel alienated by his own creation, and he made the bold decision to put the Youth Lagoon name to rest.

He immediately enjoyed the liberating sense of adventure that recording under his birth name allowed him, and his two subsequent albums are the work of an artist cutting free from his own shackles, rejoicing away from the gaze of an expectant fanbase. He was in a creatively fulfilling phase – until a routine visit to the doctor triggered a sequence of events that forced him to re-evaluate it all.

“He asked me if there were any weird sensations or anything going on in my body,” Powers recalls. “The only thing I had was this tiny pain in my stomach. I’d had it for a couple of days. In hindsight, I should have never fucking said anything.”

The doctor sent Powers to the grocery store to pick up some over-the-counter medication, but what should have been a standard reaction was anything but. As Powers explains: “It turned my digestive system upside down, it almost felt like the gravity had reversed. It turned my stomach into a geyser of acid that was shooting upwards.”

The reaction lasted for over eight months, coating Powers’ vocal cords in a mist of acid that rendered them unusable. Multiple trips to specialists and invasive medical procedures ensued,

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but no diagnosis or solution was forthcoming. Powers lost thirty pounds and was unable to speak, let alone sing. When his brother came to visit, they communicated by pen and paper and text messages.

Powers was in “absolutely god awful” pain throughout, so much so that he began seeing a hypnotherapist to deal with it.

There were knock-on effects on his eyesight, and his whole body would occasionally convulse in spasms. “It was so unbearable that it made my body feel like a prison,” he says.

Eventually, with the passage of time, Powers’ body began to return to normal, but the psychological effects were long-lasting. He had only intermittently felt any creative drive during the crisis; as he emerged from it, though, he found his perspective to be somewhat surprising.

“The experience ended up turning into something really powerful. It was really the greatest teacher I’ve ever had, because I had nowhere to go but internally,” he says.

Through a process of professional therapy, he began to question the decisions he had taken in his life, and rediscovered a love for his own work as Youth Lagoon that he admitted he had lost sight of. “That was really when the freedom started,” he remembers. “I decided I was going to take [the Youth Lagoon name], and bring it into the future, where I could morph it into whatever the fuck I wanted to morph it into.”

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HE RESULTING RECORD is Heaven is a Junkyard, released via Fat Possum on 9th June, the first Youth Lagoon album in eight years. It is an ornamentally fragile, intimate record where Powers’ trembling voice holds hands with plaintive upright piano notes and lap steel guitar licks, in what Powers himself describes as an “upside down Americana universe”.

The songs are bonded by themes of family, alienation and rebirth, where characters ponder their roles in the world, amid a backdrop of inner emotional turmoil. It might be too easy to assume that Powers was using the writing process as an attempt to process his trauma, but even he wouldn’t totally deny it.

“The album isn’t about this experience,” he says. “But at the same time, the album wouldn’t exist without it. All of the emotional fuel and ammunition was coming from what this whole thing had been.”

He began to rekindle his love for the constraints that recording as Youth Lagoon required, with an attention to relatively conventional song structures, or “lines in the road to drive between” as he puts it, as well as an attachment to melody, which throughout Heaven is a Junkyard are uniformly heart-rending.

As a lyricist, Powers has a poetic brio that can make locating exact autobiographical detail difficult, but when on ‘Idaho Alien’ he sings, “I don’t remember how it happened / Blood filled up the clawfoot bath / And I will fear no frontier,” we are listening in on something very real.

“It was written during the peak of my body feeling like a prison,” he says. “I was laying in the bathtub and I wanted to end it, because I felt like there was no escape. But rather than doing that, obviously, I just pretended that I did it. I gave myself a mini-death, and it felt like I had this rebirth. It was as if I’d

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killed off this part of me and now I had this other chance. I went to the room right next to the bathroom where my studio is and I wrote that chorus. So it’s a very non-fictional thing that lives in a fictional world.”

The album could have been forgiven if it had sought to dwell on the negativity, but Powers makes sure that as dark as things might occasionally seem at the surface level, the music is constantly seeking the light, its attention fixed on the end of the tunnel. The creative process, after all, did so much to bring him out of a dark place, an artistic escape hatch that now stands as a testament to him conquering the greatest challenge of his life.

Even from the album’s very title, Powers’ faith has played a pivotal role in this chapter in his life. He suspects his strict Christian parents are not fans of the Heaven is a Junkyard phrase, and while his own path has diverged from any such rigid religious stricture, he takes solace in the comfort that it brought him at his lowest points.

“There is so much out there that I don’t know,” he says.

“But I do know that there is something great and beautiful there on my walks, in my meditation. You can call it God or whatever you want, but I definitely feel it, to the point where when I’m in these places, especially if I’m just quiet in my room and I’m drowning out distractions, I can get to the point where I just start crying because I feel so much of this other veil there.”

It is typical of the richness of his self-reflection now that Powers is able to talk about the entire process with such insight and resolution, and he knows that the second phase of Youth Lagoon is primed to be more personally and spiritually fulfilling than anything he has done so far.

“After everything that I’ve been through leading up to making this album, I don’t want any of it to go out the window, just because I start getting busy. The most important thing to me is that the person I’ve become stays intact, and beyond that, I can keep adding onto what this identity is.

“I’m in a scenario where life looks different and feels and smells and tastes different, it all feels alive. And I don’t want to waste it.”

FLASHER TUE 30 MAY SEBRIGHT ARMS THE BIG MOON WED 31 MAYSOLD OUT ROUNDHOUSE ANDY SHAUF THU 1 JUNE HACKNEY EMPIRE

DOG RACE THU 9 NOV THE WAITING ROOM

GIRLPUPPY FRI 21 JULY FOLKLORE BOYGENIUS SUN 20 AUGSOLD OUT GUNNERSBURY PARK THE NATIONAL TUE 26 SEPSOLD OUT WED 27 SEP ALEXANDRA PALACE

BONNY DOON MON 23 OCT THE LEXINGTON

BLONDSHELL WED 1 NOV LAFAYETTE ART SCHOOL GIRLFRIEND THU 2 NOV ICA

CRUSHED TUE 18 JULY THE SOCIAL

SKINNY PELEMBE WED 11 OCT SCALA

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EGYPTIAN BLUE THU 9 NOV 100 CLUB BC CAMPLIGHT THU 23 NOV O2 SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE MOIN WED 29 NOV STUDIO 9294 YEULE MON 11 DEC OUTERNET LANKUM WED 13 DEC ROUNDHOUSE

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Overmono 30

After a decade’s tireless work in the underground the Russell brothers are ready to take their genre-blending club music up to the big time,

by Oskar Jeff. Photography by Khali Ackford

UK DANCE MUSIC has a thing for duos. From The Chemical Brothers to Bicep, something about a couple of fellas knocking heads behind some drum machines seems to rouse something in the collective consciousness. They break out of the sweaty clubs to conquer the airwaves, ravage festival crowds and soundtrack car adverts.

Why does it seem to be such a prevailing dynamic? Who’s to say? But one thing these acts certainly share is a knack for an accessible tune – an ability to create songs with enough club engineering to satisfy on any soundsystem, while universal enough to hum along to in the Co-op. It’s a delicate balance, and to achieve and maintain the level of artistic and commercial success is an impressive feat.

Overmono may well be the next act to join this lineage.

Their debut album Good Lies is fast approaching, to be released via XL, home to many a household name in electronic music. It follows several years of steadily-gathering momentum, which has seen a release on tastemaker label AD93, several more on their own imprint Poly Kicks and an eclectic Fabric mix.

Overmono are brothers Tom and Ed Russell, known as Truss and Tessela respectively. Both brothers have been highly active on the UK club underground for the past decade, with careers as successful as they are intriguingly separate. Ed found ground in the post-dubstep landscape with his volleys of breakbeat-driven club artillery, most notably 2013’s ‘Hackney Parrot’, an undeniable classic of the era that led to the brothers forming the aforementioned Poly Kicks. “My goal was to try and write records that would stop people in their tracks,” recalls Ed, the younger of the two. “If you’re in a club and you’ve been listening to music all night, I wanted to write the records that would be the one thing you’d hear and be like, ‘What the fuck was that?’

Not even necessarily [based on] whether you liked it or not.”

Truss, on the other hand, was a more techno-focused project. “I was just known for doing big distorted kick drums,” says Tom wryly, before zeroing in the impetus of Overmono.

“As much as I loved that sort of stuff, there’s only so much you can do with it really. It’s not the type of thing I want to do every single time I stand in the studio and it’s not the type of music I want to play every single weekend when I DJ.” Ed agrees: “I think we’d both reached the end of the road with what we’d been doing. We’re known individually for quite specific things, and if we veered outside of that people were sort of not interested.

We had quite broad influences, and we felt like creatively we had way more that we wanted to try and get out.”

These growing frustrations led to the brothers setting up camp in a studio together for a few days with the sole purpose of having a mess about. With that came the closing of that collab-

orative gap between the brothers, and the forming of Overmono.

The results from these early sessions formed the basis for their debut releases, a trilogy of EPs entitled Arla I-III released with XL across 2016 and 2017. They’re an eclectic sprawl of sketches that mirror the duo’s increased sense of creative freedom; a fizzy mixture of their own individual aesthetics and a signal of what was to come. “It’s not like we have some grand plan, you know,” Tom insists. “It was just a really natural thing. We went and made some music together without any preconceptions about what to make, what to do with it.”

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OR ALL THE talk of not having a grand plan, the brothers acknowledge that the possibility of an album had been spoken about since those early EPs with XL. Good Lies follows on from strides made in recent years, releases that had begun to evoke the widescreen euphoria of the summer main stage, building upon elements of two-step garage, trance, breakbeats and techno.

The album began taking shape around 2021, with its title track sparking the direction of the record. “I remember when Ed sent over the demo,” recalls Tom. “Instantly I knew it was the core of the album. We used that as an anchor to write the rest of the album around.” The track itself is all pining synths and understatedly emotive vocals, atop a rolling breakbeat and 4x4 kick. It also flirts with organ house, with an intermittent M1 bassline pulling everything down from the clouds and toward the dancefloor. Fundamentally, it’s gesturing towards pure pop.

I ask what it was about this direction that attracted them both.

“It was a bit more poppy than anything that we’ve done before,” Tom acknowledges. “I really liked the idea of exploring that a bit more. We always want to be pushing our sound forward, and that felt like a really exciting direction to explore.”

The track ends with a beatless coda, a Burial-esque turn that mines the vocal of its inherent melancholia, compounding it with longing synths that crackle away into the distance. The same approach is taken on the decidedly more muscular ‘Arla Fearn’, though this time it’s the organ house lead that is left in the ambient soundscape, deliciously detuned and hopelessly lost in the world. It’s a feeling that echoes across the record, a sense of desperate yearning that is a key principle to a lot of pop songwriting, be it contemporary rap, R&B, oldschool trance or sugar-sick garage, all of which appear as reference points throughout the tracklisting. I wonder how these more openly emotional textures informed the creation of the overall record.

“We ended up listening to a lot of Radio 1,” says Ed. “It was fascinating to connect again with what was in the mainstream,” adds Tom. “It was nice, because it was far removed

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from what we were doing in the studio. We started getting into a bit of US rap and stuff. There’s a lot of creativity, you could hear little bits every now and then – even songs that I don’t particularly like from an aesthetic point of view.”

I suggest that these disparate elements seem to have bled into the fabric of the album, especially on tracks like ‘Walk Thru Water’ and ‘Cold Blooded’. “I think we were inspired by a lot of those artists,” acknowledges Tom. “The fearlessness when it came to how their tracks would progress. It could be a four-minute track, starting at one point and then ending at a completely different point, but somehow it all makes sense. I really like that.”

“Then it all kind of gets looked through with the lens of all the shit that we’ve listened to growing up,” adds Ed. There are also the obligatory two-step garage whompers that have gained the pair a significantly wider following over the past couple of years. This includes ‘So U Kno’, which was previously released as a 12” on the pair’s Poly Kicks label, and fan favourite ‘BMW Track’. The earworm vocal loop on ‘So U Kno’ makes it the kind of track that could be gratingly irritating if it wasn’t so proficiently executed, efficiently tuned for maximum effect. It’s no wonder that both tracks became some of the most unavoidable club fodder of 2021. Fellow album track ‘Is U’ follows the same genealogy; El-B drums, bulldozer subs, with an intriguingly janky vocal sample from Tirzah smeared across the top, though it builds further with arpeggiators and synth swells that are sure to guarantee peak festival season ecstasy. Elsewhere, ‘Vermonly’ offers a quieter moment that brings to mind the work of Bochum Welt, or Aphex Twin at his more pensive.

It’s a subtle, yet evocative interlude, and one of several moments that reminds of the pair’s more left-field capabilities.

A near-constant fixture throughout the record’s varying moods and style is the use of sampled vocals. None of the voices on the record were recorded by the pair, instead they opted for late nights scouring the internet for suitable fragments. “It’s the sonic quality of samples,” answers Ed when I ask why they didn’t record any vocals themselves. “I think it’s the way you approach manipulating and treating them,” adds Tom. “Just from a mental point of view, it’s very different to if we’d had someone record a vocal that we’d written. It’s recontextualisation.”

I suggest that the vocals seem to become the focal point for the emotive thrust of many of the tracks; that particular sense of longing that lingers over much of the album. “One of the amazing benefits of sampling is that you’re able to express really big emotions,” says Ed. “Things which you wouldn’t feel confident enough to do yourself. Just a beautiful line or something. Maybe if you’d recorded it yourself, you might think think: ‘Is it too much?’

“But, I think in terms of longing, specifically, I don’t know…” he continues. “I just love a big synth that sounds like

it’s crying.” Tom laughs in the background. “Like this synth, the Deckard’s Dream, which is a CS-80 clone, it just always sounds really drunk or sad…”

In many ways this sums up the brothers’ approach best – a fascination with sound creation, be it synthesis or sampling, an unending urge to explore, build, replicate and adapt. Of course, the song is the goal, but the process is vital too.

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HIS JOY OF process extends beyond the studio; the pair consider their live show as the truest representation of the Overmono project. “We have quite defined roles,” explains Ed. “Tom does all the synths, anything musical. I do the drums and mangle a lot of the vocals.” Again, their treatment of vocals is broken down as an almost percussive element. “It’s just another instrument,” he clarifies. The show is constantly being tweaked

“I just love a big synth that sounds like it’s crying.

Like this synth that always sounds really drunk or sad” 32

as new music is made and additional equipment is acquired.

Interestingly enough, the live show harks back to another pre-Overmono experiment: “We’d started this pretty loose improvised techno thing called TR\\ER. It was all pretty chaotic at the best of times,” recalls Tom. “We learnt a lot though,” adds Ed. “Yeah that was a really big learning curve for us. Just the technical aspect of it, and the logistics of carting loads of kit around.”

“That shit’s really important to learn,” Ed agrees, reflecting on their current touring schedule. “You don’t want to expand without the consideration that you got to play live five or six times a weekend.”

The show has recently graced the deserts of Coachella, an experience that seems to have confirmed Overmono continued ascent on a global level. “I was ready to play to like 200 people,” admits Ed. “I’ve heard so many horror stories about English acts going over and playing in a big tent, and no one turns up. But we got there and it was rammed, and everyone knew the tunes.”

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times: a world where Skrillex, Four Tet and Fred Again can simultaneously whip Madison Square Gardens, Times Square and Coachella into a manic frenzy with one awkwardly-placed brostep tune.

“It definitely feels like there’s an appetite over there…” says Tom. “The EDM bubble burst and I think we are only now starting to see where that’s led to…” considers Ed. “I think especially live electronic music in the States. If you can put on a show, they really get it.”

During their time in the States, they performed a few guest DJ sets for The Chemical Brothers, seasoned veterans of large-scale dance theatrics. “It’s super impressive, and pretty awe-inspiring, seeing what they’ve spent decades working towards,” says Tom. I ask if they see a parallel between themselves and the potential career trajectory of someone like that.

“That’s the dream, right?” says Ed. “Yeah, that is the absolute dream. They’ve carved out their own world. Massive respect to them.”

I wonder if the brothers have felt the mounting weight of expectation that comes with all of this; the international live show, the increasing traction for their singles, and now, the impending release of an album with potentially huge commercial reach.

“I’m interested to see how it goes,” Ed responds nonchalantly. They do seem unfazed, but I question if they worry that the pressures they felt as young producers in the underground scene could surface ten-fold on a mainstream level.

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I’d love to have a big successful record though,” says Tom with a laugh. Ed interjects: “That kind of underground pressure that I guess you’re referring to, we didn’t have much of that when we started this project, compared to what we had before. I don’t think I’ve felt the weight of that pressure for a while anyway.”

Tom: “No, I haven’t either. When I was doing my solo stuff, the first thing that I’d always be thinking is, ‘What are my peers going to think of this?’ That would be a huge influence.

And it wasn’t always positive on the way I’d approach making music. Then of course, ‘What are my fanbase, or whatever, gonna think of it?’ Now, I think as much as possible, when we get in the studio, we’re making music for ourselves.”

Underground dance heads can be the toughest critics, and a wider audience is surely a good thing if the creative impulse is unperturbed. The album will be the first thing many people will have heard by Overmono – and that’s before you consider how many listeners will be familiar with their previous decade of solo work.

“That’s a nice feeling, I think,” says Ed. “It’s great, because it feels like it’s just the start.”

It certainly could be the start, but it’s been a long journey already. I ask Tom how it feels doing all this with his younger sibling, someone whose passion he helped nurture from a young age, with music recommendations, production advice and general enthusiasm.

“It’s just so nice to have come all this way. Back then, I guess I was teaching him, but most of the time it’s him teaching me these days. I remember one year I bought him a copy of Reason [production software] for Christmas or his birthday.

I remember saying to him at the time, ‘That’s an investment, consider that an investment.’”

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VMP ROCK. COMING IN JULY. TURN IT UP.

LOST SOUNDS FOUND

Reviews

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Albums

Speakers Corner Quartet — Further Out Than The Edge (otih) It’s no easy feat to sell out the Barbican, especially without having released an album, but that’s exactly what Speakers Corner Quartet did in 2021.

As a band, they may be relatively unknown, but as individuals – and as part of a larger South London collective – the tendrils of their influence are far-reaching. Made up of Raven Bush, Peter Bennie, Kwake Bass and Biscuit, the band have been playing together under various guises since 2006. They have arguably been the bedrock of the South London musical community these past 15 years with their frequent collaborators running like a who’s who of South London talent: Sampha, Coby Sey, Tirzah, Kelsey Lu, Leá Sen, Joe ArmonJones, Kae Tempest, James Massiah, Mica Levi and Shabaka Hutchings. These are the same names that came on stage alongside the band at the Barbican to rapturous applause. They are also the same individuals who feature on Further Out Than The Edge, the debut album by Speakers Corner Quartet.

Across 13 tracks, the band paint a canvas with a multitude of hues, never allowing themselves to be boxed into a single genre or sound. Throughout, the band holds space for each of its guests to flourish. Much like their live performance, people float in and out seamlessly, adding new colours to the palette.

The instrumentation and production throughout the album are floor-raising, capable of making each of the individual guests’ talents shine even brighter.

On the opener ‘On Grounds’, Coby Sey’s vocals nestle so deeply into the groove, it’s as if he’s being sucked into a riptide. Over a smouldering plucked double bass and gentle strings, Tirzah’s voice flows like smoke, shimmering

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softly on ‘Fix’. Leá Sen’s vocals on ‘Dreaded!’ are hushed and anxious, like a prayer. Sampha’s shimmering falsetto floats delicately on ‘Can We Do This’ while LEILAH lets her vocal range climb ‘Soapbox Soliloquy’ as if it were an obstacle course, her voice soaring above the production one moment before becoming skittish to reflect the drum rolls. Throughout the album, there is a pronounced melancholy that is as grandiose as it is intimate.

Further Out Than The Edge is the first release on Out There In Here (OTIH) records, a new label set up by Raj Chaudhuri and Kwake Bass; it’s a fitting note for a band who have taken unconventional turns at every opportunity to get here today.

The quartet’s names are scattered throughout seminal London releases, providing uncredited instrumentation at times on projects. Kwake was MF Doom’s drummer and a musical director for Sampha and Kae Tempest. Numerous artists point to Biscuit as the one who taught them how to DJ or produce, while he also holds his own on the flute. Double bassist Peter Bennie’s influence looms large while Raven Bush has played in a multitude of bands.

The band itself was formed in 2006 when Biscuit and Kwake met at the Speakers Corner jam night in Brixton.

“There was a call to loads of musicians,” Biscuit explains. “Loads of people turned out. What remained at the end of the jam was a cello, flute, double bass, and drums. And that was the kind of lineup.” Speakers Corner Quartet went on to release an EP in 2009, Further Back Than The Beginning; where most bands would follow it up with several releases, this group just kept rehearsing and rehearsing, while also playing to live audiences, refining their craft while helping elevate others. Members have come and gone but this iteration of the band has existed since 2011.

“The trajectory wasn’t to release music,” Kwake says. “We wanted to give people an experience that you could only have in the room.” Bush echoes him, stating, “There’s never been a rush as

we’re just happy being in a room together.

Playing instruments is just an extension of that and I think that’s what the community is all about, it’s just another part of the conversation.”

Throughout Further Out Than The Edge, there are harmonising vocals with the quartet playing double-dutch with the instrumentation: guests hopping in and out with ease as the band changes the direction of the ropes. It’s reflective of the larger South London community, an effortless melting pot of sound and personalities coming together to share a commitment to creativity. Over the years, the frustration the band felt at being unable to finish this project was outweighed by the love they felt for the wider community. Helping their peers and friends whose projects they strengthened grounded them as much as it inspired them. “It’s more about humbling the ego and being patient,” Bennie says.

Watching generational talents come into their own is inherently watchable, and it’s ever-present on Further Out Than The Edge. Take the standout track ‘Geronimo Blues’.

Recorded in 2017, both its production as well as the viscerally vicious words spoken by South London poet Kae Tempest reflecting the frustrations of a society focused heavily on capital gains, feel timeless. “We live in the thralls of a gaggle of demons / With horsey demeanour and outdated opinions / And they sit on their lawns with their thousand-pound picnics / Fresh from a hard day of speaking in tongues and murdering children / Cutting the funds to education and healthcare / They sentence our young to a lifetime of debt,” Tempest says over grand reflective strings and a pensively plucked double bass.

After spending a decade working on others’ music, whether Tirzah or Doom, Kae Tempest or Sampha, the Quartet found that the pandemic allowed them to fully focus on their material.

Working entirely remotely, they practised and recorded via the internet, building software and hardware to get the right sound for their album. It also allowed them to experiment with

Albums ideas: robots playing instruments, something they debuted surreptitiously at the Barbican show and hope to unveil properly in the future.

By the end of the album, hope shoots through. Lafawndah and Trustfall bring atmospheric vocals over upbeat production on ‘Behind The Sun’. There is a toe-tapping pace to ‘Shabz Needs Sun’ with Shabaka Hutchings’ melodic shakuhachi flute playfully carrying the song while ‘Karainagar’, an ode to Biscuit’s family heritage and dedicated to his recently deceased mother, sees Mica Levi featuring on the album’s closer and most solemn track.

A culture addicted to corporatised saccharine pop-infused chart-topping hits is fundamentally a broken one.

Without overtly attempting to, Speakers Corner Quartet has created a project that feels like the antithesis of that: prioritising purpose over spectacle, intention over the industry, all the while speaking their truth about the malaise and decay of a city they love. Further Out Than The Edge, a title coined by Tempest, is tightly melodic and luxuriously layered; instantly memorable without needing to be cheaply infectious, as it’s so gratifyingly hard to categorise.

Like a tidal wave building, Speakers Corner Quartet have been biding their time. Now, it feels like the moment for their talents to be finally public, to be realised. The wave crashes and Further Out Than The Edge marks the beginning of a new phase of their journey, a new circle whose dawn comes from the natural end of another. 9/10 Dhruva Balram

Bar Italia — Tracey Denim (matador) Officially, this is Bar Italia’s third album.

However, given that their first two slipped out unceremoniously on Dean Blunt’s World Music label and, combined,

wouldn’t even fill one side of a cassette, there’s a good case to be made for Tracey Denim being their de facto debut. It’s not just circumstances, either: Tracey Denim feels like a debut, too, brimming with the sort of boldly odd artistic poses that only a debut band can strike alongside a charmingly wide-eyed naivety.

What’s most striking about this record, though, is that despite working fairly tightly within the confines of idiomatic post-punk throughout, it doesn’t really sound like anything else in that bracket: opener ‘Guard’, with its childlike piano plonks over addictive, cut-up drums, offers simultaneous simplicity and complexity, and the looping montage effect of ‘Nurse!’’s disparate sections just slammed up against one another is startling. This production technique – with certain things in common with the Dust Brothers or Odelay!-era Beck – has real potency here, especially when the loops strip back to just drums and bass and are left to run, unadorned, serving Bar Italia’s clean, clever, wonky songwriting beautifully.

The album’s middle third stumbles slightly – another textbook tell that we’re in debut album territory – with the same ideas recycled and shuffled into decreasingly different iterations, but it’s nothing life-threatening, and the closing three tracks recover, hinting at grander things to come. It adds up to an internal contradiction of an album: curious, wrong-footing, and, on its frequent highs, deliciously compelling. 7/10 Sam Walton

Jam City — Jam City Presents EFM (earthly/mad decent) Last time out, Jack Latham aka Jam City was all in on the neon, pop-rock fantasy of Pillowland, pushing things to a wonderfully kaleidoscopic, chaotic place. But here on

Jam City Presents EFM there’s complete clarity: Latham set out to create an album for the club and absolutely nailed it.

In the release notes he speaks of nights in Liquid and Envy, Photek’s ‘Mine to Give’ and sticky champagne nightclub floors. Yet even with that sentimentality and nods to rites of passage for those of us of a certain age, Jam City Presents EFM is no nostalgia-heavy throwback; instead, it’s a work of gossamer production and low key summer heaters.

It opens softly with the glossy ‘Touch Me’ and its easy blend of pop, R&B and synth hooks while ‘Times Square’ is similarly understated, shifting to a minimal house beat and guitar line funk that’s like Daft Punk playing ‘Make Love’ at Jacques Greene’s house.

The guitars and synths that became such a feature of his previous work resurface here but take on fresh new forms.

On ‘Tears at Midnight’, Latham goes full Drive soundtrack with pulsing, spacious ’80s synth pop, slides into the gorgeous slow jam of ‘Do it’, and kicks up ‘Wild n Sweet’ into housey tones, perky synth and sweeping bass. But it’s standout track ‘Reface’ where everything truly comes together: a cranky, distorted UK bassinflected banger that opens with raining synth, drifts into dreamy guitar breaks and hits with a satisfying, face-screwing beat. Mission accomplished. 8/10 Reef Younis

Jenny Lewis — Joy’All (blue note) Largely written during a week-long workshop run by Beck, Jenny 37Lewis’ fifth album casts her as a hard-nosed Stevie Nicks. ‘Psychos’ and ‘Balcony’ have the wide-screen, soft-focus of ’70s Fleetwood Mac but there’s usually a bite in her lyrical specificity.

She may joke about being “a rock-

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Albums and-roll disciple”, with songs referencing AM Radio standards such as ’64 Malibus and John Denver, but this is a picket-fence America that, under its Nashville pedal steel and bouncing soul, is full of danger for teenage girls and where the essence of life is suffering.

The edge is easy to ignore given Dave Cobb’s production quality, which gives it a vintage classic rock vibe and captures the intimacy of a live band. This works particularly well on the stomping country-rock of ‘Love Feel’ and ‘Apples and Oranges’, which draw a thread to her Rilo Kiley days and make it sound like classic rock was always her destination.

If there are moments that slip close to cliché, such as the break on ‘Love Feel’ and the ’60s girl-group spoken word introduction to ‘Chain of Tears’, then it’s done with knowing intention.

This means that Joy’All is less about cynicism than the hardened will to survive.

7/10 Susan Darlington

Divide and Dissolve — Systemic (invada) The sonic and political anarchitecture of 2021’s Gas Lit saw Divide and Dissolve reach their widest audience yet with their bludgeoning-yet-beautiful battle cry against systemic oppression, skimming between the brutality of metal and the assuaging experimental soundscapes of classical leitmotifs and melodic refrains.

Sonically, new album Systemic largely represents more of the same as the duo set out to honour their core artistic intentions, but owing to the success of Gas Lit, this time round Divide and Dissolve seem more enabled than ever to express their profound intensity.

Looped and layered saxophones provide the bedrock for tracks like ‘Indignation’ that continually grow in ferocity, crescendoing in a fury of opaque guitar

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chords and cataclysmic drums. The slow march of ‘Derail’ and ‘Reproach’ display an unyielding emotional weight, one that saxophonist and guitarist Takiaya Reed says “is congruent with the message of the music, and the heaviness feels emblematic of the world’s situation.”

New ground is explored too. Album bookends ‘Want’ and ‘Desire’ stray further into electronic experimentalism than any of Divide and Dissolve’s other work to date, with circling melodies and synthesiser drones creating an atmosphere of yearning and upheaval without the need for earth-endingly heavy guitar or drum work. More traditional heaviness isn’t sidelined for long though: the Napalm Death-like blastbeats of ‘Simulacra’, for example, push Systemic into grindcore territory.

Most impressive here is the fact that the band have maintained an unwavering commitment to their sound and to their demands for Black and Indigenous liberation. That they’ve managed this whilst also furthering aesthetic possibilities and achieving such a visceral emotional affect through their music is remarkable; Systemic is one of the most vital, rewarding releases of this year.

9/10 Tom Critten

Mong Tong 夢東 — Tao Fire (guruguru brain) Mong Tong 夢東 are Taiwanese brothers Hom Yu and Jiun Chi, who carry their moniker through from a childhood nickname. Fittingly, its meaning is mutable from language to language: their hypnotic psych takes inspiration from anywhere and everywhere to build something constantly shifting and completely unique.

At their best, early in Tao Fire’s tracklist, the brothers throw everything at the wall in a hyperactive display of

technical prowess. ‘Tropic Sub’ channels Thee Oh Sees at their synthiest, Khruangbin’s guitar lines and ’80s Nintendo soundtracks, while ‘Areca’ blends industrial, sci-fi drones with vibrant riffs until eventually mutating into sampled drumming. The overwhelming creativity is spectacular.

‘Thung Beat’ takes an aggressive turn, and is all the better for it. Shrugging off the album’s initial dreamscape whimsy, the brothers dive headfirst into a punchier live setup. Originally combining crunchy percussion, upright bass and steel drum, and eventually ending somewhere completely unrecognisable and closer to footwork, it exemplifies the album’s heights. Its multiple pivots both within and between the songs lend an air of the best DJ sets. The tracklist seamlessly becomes a free-flowing and gloriously disorientating whole. In lesser hands it could be exhausting – Mong Tong 夢東 just about hold it together.

The album eventually starts to drag, seemingly empty of the invention that makes the earlier tracks such a thrill. Lacking urgency or innovation, the tracks edge into videogame pastiche, relying more heavily on straightforward synths and plodding rhythms. On the whole though, Mong Tong 夢東’s vitality is a treat to witness. 7/10 Jake Crossland

TEKE::TEKE — Hagata (kill rock stars) Prefacing Hagata, the followup to their critically acclaimed 2021 release Shirushi, TEKE::TEKE’s vocalist Maya Kuroki noted that the album’s title suggests “something present but also something left over from someone or something no longer there. It’s like waking up from a dream, or being connected to the other side of something.” There are numerous instances

Albums across these ten invigorating and immersive compositions where the listener is transported to another era (mostly the late 1960s) or even transposed into some kind of alternative reality.

The Montreal-based septet develop their tremendously colourful and expansive psych-rock arrangements with a variety of captivating tones from flute – a primary player on the record that shines particularly bright on the infectious opener ‘Garakuta’ and ‘Hoppe’ – which are complemented by a striking range of guitar riffs and tones which will make you think of anyone from Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, The Undertones and the unsettling tremolo on Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’.

TEKE::TEKE have poured their hearts and souls into Hagata. From start to finish it brims with personality and presents so many extraordinary moments, notably on the shapeshifting closer ‘Jinzou Maria’ which transforms from a song that could feature in a folkhorror into a sweet and wistful sedate pop melody. In all, this is an inspired body of work. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

Water From Your Eyes — Everyone’s Crushed (matador) Water From Your Eyes have earned a reputation for trolling by clashing dumb irony up alongside genuine sincerity and musically shifting between beauty and chaos at breakneck pace. Turning on their track record, Everyone’s Crushed, their first album for Matador, sees them transform delicate synths into industrial interruption and aggressive riffs into elegant hooks, in understated fashion.

Similarly to their post-pop internet contemporaries, they take all of music’s canon at face value, disregarding snobbish critics, and fashion it into something inno-

vative. While Jockstrap will pack songs with ideas, and 100 Gecs can pursue the joke over anything else, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos dial back to a more accessible balance. ‘True Life’ references an actual battle with Neil Young’s lawyer, but not to the extent that it overwhelms its glut of scuzzy, addictive melodies.

Where 2010s acts to whom lazy journalists might compare this group (Sleigh Bells, Dirty Projectors) spent their time adorning and complicating in the search for something novel, Water From Your Eyes instead dismantle and reassemble everything they’ve absorbed after a lifetime on the internet, and perhaps explain it best themselves on standout ‘14’: “I traced what I erased”.

Gorgeous strings are looped into a rare emotional respite from the havoc elsewhere, and Brown’s vocals are genuinely affecting even while invoking vomit.

‘Out There’ is another beguiling highlight – a phone-alarm synth regularly interrupting a kinetic and aggressive bass-drum groove – and captures the best of the album. Thankfully, Everyone’s Crushed isn’t pissing anyone off despite any trollish intention.

It’s honest, smart, refined – and simply excellent. 8/10 Jake Crossland

Craven Faults — Standers (leaf) The name Craven Faults comes from a formation of geologically significant crustal fractures across the Pennines. It’s an apt choice for the epic music contained on Standers.

If ancient rock formations were to develop an interest in sound production and gained access to a pile of Harmonia and Cluster vinyl, alongside a bank of analogue and modular machinery to realise their musical vision, the outcomes could well resemble Standers: vast, sturdy chunks of sound equipped with the majes-

tic, harsh beauty of desolate uplands, colliding, combining and reforming at an unhurried pace that offers a musical approximation of the glacial speed that the landscape around us shifts over the course of centuries.

Craven Faults’ 2020 debut Erratics and Unconformities (and series of early EPs) contained idle moments which suggested that the machines had been left to correspond with each other while the human(s) in charge of composition and production had popped out for a stroll.

(The musician(s) behind the project remains anonymous, which adds to the overall impression that these ageless, elemental sounds were dug out from the soil.) A more immediately alluring offering despite many of the tracks not thinking twice about hopping over the ten-minute mark, Standers is rife with rhythmic suspense and slowly evolving melodic build-ups – hooks, even – that are guaranteed to pull in and hold on to the attentive listener.

The result is a hypnotic, idiosyncratic gem. Much of electronic music is designed for dark nocturnal interior spaces. Standers is more evocative of a wind-swept ramble over steep hillsides in search of post-industrial ruins and ancient monuments. 8/10 Janne Oinonen

Madison McFerrin — I Hope You Can Forgive Me (madmcferrin) Music is in Madison McFerrin’s DNA. Her father Bobby is an acclaimed jazz and folk singer, who had a huge hit with ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’, and her brother Taylor is also in the industry. The former features on her debut album, which follows a series of well-received EPs. Starting her career a capella, she created a distinctive style of meticulously layered and self-harmonised vocals.

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Albums These ten tracks, on which she’s also producer and arranger, remain centred by what Questlove dubbed ‘soul-appella’.

‘God Herself ’, on which she’s accompanied by finger-clicks, takes in doo-wop, while ‘Goodnight’ collages silky vocals to mimic droning synths.

The album also expands on 2019’s You + I EP, on which she started to incorporate instrumentation. This creates the neo-soul of ‘Testify’ and ‘OMW’, on which her voice reaches an insouciant mid-range, alongside the chilled ’90s pop-soul of ‘Fleeting Melodies’. There are also touches of jazz, especially on ‘(Please Don’t) Leave Me Now’ and ‘Stay Away (From Me)’, which could easily fit into a Lauryn Hill set.

The fuzzy warmth of the album’s production gives it a retro vibe but the compositions, despite their nods to the past, are firmly rooted in the present.

8/10 Susan Darlington

Lunch Money Life — The God Phone (wolf tone) God isn’t dead. Or at least that’s what Lunch Money Life purport on their second full-length The God Phone, a densely-constructed concept album that tells the intricate story of a society both advanced and regressed by the emergence of scientific proof that God exists.

Not only is the narrative a departure from the world we know, but Lunch Money Life’s notoriously unfettered sound is dismantled and glued back together to produce an astonishingly fresh development that possesses a techno-spiritualcomplex at its heart.

The title track, featuring III Japonia whose vocals are either spoken, sung or rapped entirely in Japanese, is a dystopic dreamscape full of tension and intrigue. ‘Mother’ is a wild hyperpop banger infiltrated by a deep reggae-dub

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beat, and standout ‘Telecommunication’ is a baptism of electronic sounds given form by the cleansing vocals that seep through it, its affectation sitting uneasily with its artifice as it glitches into a blinding guitar solo.

Every madcap experiment the fivepiece throw out there pays off. In truth The God Phone is at its (relative) weakest when it strays into familiar territory for the band such as on ‘The Bishop and The Burner’, the sound merely menacing instead of mind-altering.

When The God Phone hits its frequently glorious heights, it’s not only a completely different beast to the Londoners’ debut album, but to anything else out there at the moment. A staggeringly confident and progressive second album that is a succession of silicone and sin, salvation and spectacle, the sublime and the simulacrum. 8/10 Robert Davidson

Kassa Overall — Animals (warp) Very few things satisfy quite like the seamless fusion of jazz and hip hop, when swirling sax slivers around silken beats, and the trumpets get a bit involved. Kassa Overall, the supreme beatsmith and bandleader hailing from Seattle, understands this perfectly. He spent the majority of the 2000s studying jazz at Oberlin and playing drums with big jazz names, but always harboured a hunger to produce hip hop.

Animals is Kassa’s third album, his first with Warp, and sees these influences stitched together perfectly on one complete patchwork. All jazz drama and velveteen underground rap, ‘Animals’ is a glittering record also littered by features from top names in both fields. A redeyed Danny Brown verse ushers in ‘Spinning Coin’, whilst some lively interplay between West Coast royalty Lil B and

Shabazz Palaces on closer ‘Going Up’ is just heavenly.

The record’s biggest tune, however, comes when Kassa keeps the mic to himself on ‘Ready to Ball’. A jazzrap zinger, full of vigour and vim and verve, the combination of pitched-up Quasimoto-style adlibs and spiralling piano is as perfect a cocktail as you’ll taste all year. Kassa finds himself in a bind trying to look after himself financially and mentally, at the same time, but on this track, and indeed the rest of Animals, these anxieties are cathartically transformed into something far more powerful. 8/10 Cal Cashin

ANOHNI & The Johnsons — My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross (rough trade) It’s head-turning, but returning to her ‘& The Johnsons’ suffix is also full of purpose, like everything ANOHNI does.

This original moniker was first adopted in the early ’90s, when ANOHNI was a member of Blacklips, a New York drag collective that operated far away from the ‘daylight culture’ of the city. Then, she was more drawn to freakish visual art and ragged live performance. The songs came after, out of necessity, when an increasingly hostile right-wing government gradually scrubbed and sanitised the queer nightlife that already existed on the margins. She looked to figures like Martha P. Johnson for inspiration, hence ‘the Johnsons’.

Martha P. Johnson was a secret knowledge then, even in queer circles.

Queer history wasn’t a given, and it still isn’t. At the height of the AIDS pandemic, as a culture began to vanish around her, ANOHNI was keenly aware of how easily the lives and art of marginalised groups could be flattened and forgotten. “People knew me to be a repository for a certain

Albums kind of information, especially information that reached back a little bit further into the imagination of a past,” she recounted to Art Forum recently.

On her sixth album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, ANOHNI reaches out to the past and the future simultaneously. There’s an emotional pureness to her songwriting, voice and lyrics that makes it feel as if the album is expanding through time as you listen.

Written and recorded with producer Jimmy Hogarth alongside a tight studio band, the record has a no-frills one-take quality of an older era. The rawness is needed for these personal documentations of communal life.

Where 2016’s Hopelessness used blunt and specific lyrical references to contemporary politics and its atrocities, this album is more guarded. She hugs her central subjects close to her chests like painful memories and lost loves.

Still, the instant emotional heft remains a constant. Like many of the best protest albums, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross is universal and multifaceted.

‘It Must Change’ blurs the lines between romantic love and political upheaval, all captured in ANOHNI’s commanding and vulnerable voice. She mirrors Gaye’s What’s Going On? in form, beckoning the audience to answer her question. What do you think is going on? What do you think must change?

“The truth is that our love will ricochet through eternity,” she sings.

‘Go Ahead’ follows with a clattering argument. She’s defeated rather than defiant. “Go ahead and burn me down / Go ahead, kill your friends,” she screams. “I can’t stop you.” Death approaches throughout the album.

Sometimes gently, as she looks back; sometimes with force. On ‘Sliver of Ice’, she stares into oblivion with the “taste of water” on her tongue. That feels like one of the more hopeful moments.

On ‘Can’t’, she’s swallowed by grief. The song is jubilant and raging, capturing the manic energy and denial that takes over in mourning. “I don’t want you to be dead,” she sings plainly, stuck on that thought as a band plays on.

It’s a powerful and honest performance, subtle sax and string lines softening the edges around her.

Then there’s ‘Scapegoat’, a masterful highpoint of her bold and uncomfortably frank lyrical style, in which she imagines killing an unnamed scapegoat.

It’s a queasy, slow-motion ballad that grows more anguished as it twists on. She lets herself become the villain and victim at once, through a ghostly, deadened vibrato. “It’s not personal,” she sighs.

You think of all the scapegoats similarly punished for existing.

Instrumentally, the record is reserved and tasteful, leaving space for the writing to have the desired impact.

Still, there’s interplay, cohesion and a sense of timelessness: the record would have had just as much power if ANOHNI were sitting at a piano 60 years ago.

Take ‘It’s My Fault’, an eerie song of the shared ecological guilt that we place on ourselves; its jazz and folk inflections evoke Simone and Mitchell.

The record’s final third is weighty and existential, especially ‘Why Am I Alive Now?’, which explores survivors’ guilt, geological decay and end-of-days panic. In the background of the record, ANOHNI sees herself joining her fallen sisters, fading before our eyes. There’s hope in the closing moments, where she acknowledges the power of being part of a queer lineage.

Pain colours My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, but there’s also an abundance of life, and an outstretched hand. ANOHNI documents it all, to nourish those who move forward. 9/10 Skye Butchard

RP Boo — Legacy Volume 2 (planet mu) It’s been ten years since RP Boo (Kavain Space) released his album Legacy

to a sublime, global-scale response. Since then, he has created prominent records like I’ll Tell You What and Established!, cementing his position as the godfather of Chicago footwork. His new album Legacy Volume 2 continues this excellent run.

It’s an anthology of tracks created over an extended period of time, inspired by words and sounds he found during his days and nights in Chicago. Opening track ‘Eraser’ positions us with a dark, dynamic, bass-line and vocals that really set the tone for the breezy marathon ahead.

Returning to his iconic, repetitive vocal loops and rhythmically syncopated drums he’s again able to produce a collage of multi-flavoured dancefloor numbers; ‘Say Grace’, for example, is filled with sharp-edged drums, choppedup vocals and atmospheric samples that create a story for its listeners. Pure artistry at its finest.

Legacy Volume 2 adds a more minimal yet playful filter to Chicago footwork than previous RP Boo albums, allowing the emotional and humorous samples of his vocals to take the front seat and challenging dancers to showcase their talent; see the way that ‘Pop Machine’ is built upon an accumulation of recorded cuts taken from and inspired by a day at work on a broken money machine.

An innovator inside and out, RP Boo has long had the ability to take selected recognisable samples and cook up a glorious, chaotic masterpiece; with Legacy Volume 2, he’s done it in style yet again. 8/10 Jazz Brown

McKinley Dixon — Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (city slang) Named after the trilogy of novels from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? is McKinley Dixon taking a beat, and a breath, after his intense, complex studio

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Albums debut For My Mama And Anyone Who Look Like Her. On first listens, Beloved! Paradise!

Jazz!? can feel like another rich, busysounding album, but repeat listens showcase the progressive intent Dixon wanted to demonstrate this time around. “I was making these really dense and chaotic songs, stuffing whatever thought I had into five-and-a-half minutes,” he shares in the release notes.

In Loud And Quiet’s review of that debut, we said that Dixon was “a string quartet away from baroque pop bedlam”.

But here he is, organizing a fleet of live instrumentation (from keys to strings to gentle bass) with a focus that refines and complements his powerful lyrical energy.

‘Sun, I Rise’ has the orchestral swells alongside Angelica Garcia’s deep, lustrous vocal but Dixon’s biting narration keeps it hard-hitting. ‘Mezzanine Trippin’ is more chaotic and desperate with a jagged staccato beat adding a Tyler the Creator ‘Yonkers’-era intensity. And ‘Run Run Run’ burns a bit brighter with crisp boom-bap percussion and twinkling piano lending the track a musical lightness that almost belies the seriousness of its gun crime commentary.

At this point, Dixon isn’t just an increasingly vital lyricist, he’s a conductor, arranger, and vivid storyteller who wonders and wanders but locks in with an instant, metronomic click. He might have been more selective here but his stories aren’t diminished for it. 7/10 Reef Younis

Mandy, Indiana — I’ve Seen A Way (fire talk) ‘The Driving Rain (18)’, the central track in Mandy, Indiana’s debut album, I’ve Seen A Way, is introduced by the sound of pouring rainfall. The listening experience, up to that point, had been so alien that I had to stop to understand

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if it was really belting down outside my windows. A mixture of house music and post-punk, with distorted vocals over vintage drum machines and a sonicscape that spans from the most obscure industrial sound to the lightness of yé-yé French pop, the Manchester outfit’s music-making crosses and destroys any possible boundary of genres and attitudes, creating a detonating new palette.

Recorded in a variety of unusual locations – Bristol shopping malls, Gothic crypts, West Country caves – the album is packed with novel acoustics which set its sound apart. Valentine Caulfield, Scott Fair, Simon Catling and Alex MacDougall have also spoken about the way in which they draw their inspiration from films where the language of cinema is disrupted, and masterfully apply the same treatment to their music. Adding another layer of exotic, unsettling mystery are Valentine Caulfield’s lyrics in her native French, whose delicate musicality clashes against the roughness of the sound. All this means that I’ve Seen A Way sets the bar pretty high for a debut. 7/10 Guia Cortassa

WITCH — Zango (desert daze sound) A group’s history can be inhibiting to a review, dictating the direction of the writing without focusing on the music at hand. This is especially true when tackling music by artists rediscovered after years in the musical wilderness.

Thankfully, Zambian icons WITCH make things incredibly easy.

Zango, their first album in over 39 years, follows their 2019 comeback documentary WITCH: We Intend To Cause Havoc and sees the group enter their second act revitalised, completely free from the weight of their past.

You’d forgive the legendary

Zamrock group for resting on their laurels, but Zango regularly treads new ground. The album is a far groovier monster than anything from their extensive back catalogue. ‘By The Time You Realize’ and ‘Avalanche of Love’ maintain their signature psych rock edge while keeping more than one eye on the dance floor, elevating the album above pure intrigue towards something that is genuinely exciting on its own merit.

The funk flows effortless throughout, resulting in an album tailor-made for late summer. The sunny day synths of ‘Malango’ scream September barbecue, while you can almost hear the ice lollies being cracked out underneath the William Onyeabor-tastic beats of ‘Streets of Lusaka’.

By keeping one eye on the future, WITCH have ensured they won’t be defined by their past. Don’t call it a comeback. Zango proves there’s a new chapter ready to be written by this lot. 8/10 Jack Doherty

Amaarae — Fountain Baby (interscope) Amaarae is taking a worldwide approach to pop on her record Fountain Baby, taking inspiration from every corner of the globe along with orchestral instrumentation and the hooks of classic R&B. However, the album’s aesthetic being stretched so thin has left the overall record at a bit of a loss.

‘Angels in Tibet’ seduces you with falsettos that lure you in and bass-tone whispers that make you lean even closer; soon, you’re under the hypnotic groove of Amaarae. There is a hint of PinkPantheress in the cutesy sound of some parts of the record such as ‘Co-Star’ and ‘Sociopathic Dance Queen’. This album already has 2023 written all over it; prepped and ready to be sped up for TikTok and

Albums to march around in platform Crocs.

The production is water-tight and the short tracks keep your attention as the sonic references bounce from Spain to Japan. It’s a genuinely global sound, and Amaarae is dancing to its inclusive beat.

However, Fountain Baby doesn’t sound timeless and it is against the clock as it braces itself for the next wave of pop as voted for by the relentless churn of the internet. Perfect for the present, this second record will be a reminder of a time in space but might not travel past the barriers of 2023. 6/10 Sophia McDonald

Protomartyr — Formal Growth in the Desert (domino) Protomartyr have now released six albums, but ‘The Author’, the penultimate track on their latest, Formal Growth in the Desert, must be their tenderest moment to date. Stripped of esoteric references, double speak or adoptive voices, it’s an ode to singer Joe Casey’s now-deceased mother. With a cracked and rasping baritone the vocalist barks out directives for the listener: take a seat, celebrate the lives of those who created us, and cherish those we love.

As the song plays out the band contort into a jittery and celebratory outro. It’s a surprisingly good fit for what often sounds like a post-punk function band, hired to play out the end times.

Those schooled in the Detroit fourpiece’s previous output will be familiar with Casey’s fine lyrical form and noteworthy delivery. The frontman swills his words around like they’re hard liquor; spitting some phrases out with contempt, whilst savouring other stanzas. Over album opener ‘Make Way’’s Spaghetti Western evocation of vast spaces, the vocals act as a comforting hand on the shoulder. The lap steel meanwhile ushers in new territory for the band.

Speaking ahead of the album Greg Ahee, guitarist and ‘musical director’, said: “People always talk about Joe’s lyrics as a narrative, like he’s telling a story, so it only made sense to use the music as you would in a film to elevate that story”. The story at the start of ‘Fun In Hi Skool’ is pure ominous dread. It’s all bovver booted menace with snatched vocals spitting the first syllable and snubbing the rest of the word. The impression left is of rage with an urgency. There’s a featherweight feel to Alex Leonard’s drums, lithely skipping in patterns like those The Raincoasts brought to Odyshape. The sound is of a band in perfect harmony, though the words are from a man in total despair: “I hope that you had fun in hi-skool / I hope that you had fun and didn’t know / The dark shit bad words foaming in your mouth.”

Now into their second decade, it’s interesting to note how the musical landscape has shifted since Protomartyr’s inception. In that time a doom-laden sprechgesang has gone from niche to du jour. In ‘3800 Tigers’, against guitars like furious pistons, Casey imagines his beloved Detroit Tigers as baseball world beaters. In this fantasy his team’s form, like their class, is permanent. Six records in, the same could be said for Protomartyr. 9/10 Theo Gorst

King Krule — Space Heavy (xl) King Krule, real name Archy Marshall, doesn’t burst back onto the scene. Rather, he sails in like a battle-worn Ulysses, guitar strings mouldy from moonlighting as an oar, his vessel sinking under the weight of the “heavy traffic in my brain”.

Space Heavy, his fourth album under the King Krule moniker, is another contemporary slice of British psychological horror. Monotonous, muted, and claustrophobic, the 15 tracks here unfurl

like a scroll to map the transit of dream to paranoia to memory, scribbled as always in Marshall’s dock-yard existentialism where death is but a “vacuum” that brings us together.

The album’s deepest point ‘Hamburgerphobia’ is a surprisingly intricate polemic; paralleling the emptiness of commodity with the formlessness of love. Possessing a Dostoevskian morality, its narrator slips into nihilism while eating a hamburger under the murderous gaze of a flock of birds. Fingers burger grease wet, love’s ghost enters his mind like a Trojan Horse; seeping through “the minutest miniscule gaps of time and space”, the traumatic love forever existing in a “fugue state”.

Its eeriness bleeds into the pathology of King Krule’s sound, a sort of rusted jazz which occasionally gives way to psychotropic-induced dreamy-trip-hop.

Like everything else on this disorientating album, it feels alive until the moment you realise it’s an apparition.

Primal, tense, and recursive, Space Heavy serves as another layer in the masterful and deeply unnerving project Marshall has embarked upon as King Krule. It’s an omnivorous sound that continues to eat up all the physical, mental and mythic space around us, growing more monstrous by the day. 8/10 Robert Davidson

Christine and the Queens — PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE (because) Christine and the Queens’ follow-up to 2022’s Redcar les adorables étoiles is conceived as “a prayer towards the self ” and, like its predecessor, makes for a dark, inscrutable listen. Still grieving his mother, Redcar’s (aka Chris) lyrics are strewn with references to angels, though it’s not explicit whether they

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Albums denote a benevolent or harmful presence.

It’s just as tricky getting a foothold on the music, which careens from wistful synths to drum and bass to prog to piano ballad.

Even when tracks like ‘Tears Can Be So Soft’ hint at R&B, they’re accompanied by basslines so dark and nihilistic they make you write off any hope of an afterlife.

Madonna also haunts several tracks, but don’t expect any pop escapism: the cyborg-ish spoken interlude in ‘Angels Crying in My Bed’ only augments the sense of alienation. Then there’s the bizarre sampling of ‘Canon in D Major’ in ‘Full of Life’ – a comment on the triteness of ceremonial music to mark the inescapable march of time, or just another bewildering twist? Lead single ‘To Be Honest’ offers a moment of relative clarity, with Redcar laying out the vulnerable sensation of experiencing life “Like a movie / Played by another star”. With his mother gone, Redcar must shed yet another skin and learn a fresh set of lines. PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE reckons painfully with loss, desperately seeking meaning as it thrashes towards the shore. An immersive if demanding listen, it positions death as the ultimate piece of theatre – and one which definitely won’t come with CliffsNotes. 7/10 Orla Foster

Daniel Blumberg — GUT (mute) The word ‘inspiration’ gets bandied around a lot in music. Most of the time, you can find it thrown about almost casually, lazily cataloguing the various references and touch points that help an audience connect to an artist. But, once every so often, a work comes along that does the word justice – something that channels raw emotion and says something profound about the human condition.

It’s not putting it lightly that Daniel Blumberg’s latest album, GUT,

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is one such work. Inspired by the intestinal disease that has plagued him in recent years, this is much more than a mere reflection of physical health, the six interconnected songs are an exploration of the relationship between the body and soul via thoughtful and heartwrenching balladry that captures the essence of pain, frustration and fatigue.

It’s an unflinchingly personal exploration of the physical and emotional turmoil that he has endured in recent years. Recorded in one continuous take, with minimal overdubs and manipulation, the more freeform compositions and improvised nature of songs act to intensify the hurt, almost wail-like vocals and result in an experience that is remarkably candid about the turmoil it represents.

Perhaps GUT’s greatest achievement, though, is that it captures a moment of true humanity, mapping both the beauty and anguish of life, even at the most difficult moments. It’s a record that invites you to explore the depths of emotion while asking the question of whether the things that don’t kill us truly do make us stronger. 8/10 Dominic Haley

Squid — O Monolith (warp) Inconceivably, Squid have reset the benchmark of their boundless creativity on towering new record, O Monolith, a sprawling endeavor that sees them scale new sonic breadth, experimenting, mutating and extending their many limbs in new directions.

Lyrically, Squid remain buried in cynical abstraction, writhing under the thumb of late-capitalist malaise, ecological existentialism and other worldly toil. A sense of hopelessness culminates when drummer and vocalist Ollie Judge, personified as a cabinet on ‘Overgrowth’, repeats sneeringly, “Are you a cynic, just like me?” Well, they definitely convince

us that we should be. After all, humanity is always leaning toward self-created entropy – “You’re dead if you float, and you’re dead if you sink” (‘Devil’s Den’).

Judge makes such a strong case of our inescapable nature, he renders the grungy life of a sewer rat (“If you had seen the bull’s…”) or that of mere furniture, far more appealing.

Clearly, Squid’s bleak heart is potent as ever, but the band’s motorik post-punk that has kept it pumping is no longer, as they’ve taken a daring, expansive detour in sound. Enlarged, proggy instrumental passages textured by hypnotic synths and wailing brass sections mark a significant shift from Squid’s usual groove-driven approach.

But they better frame the band’s pseudoimprovised style, giving meandering musical ideas more space to evolve and wander; there’s a lack of structure, yet the experience is far more arresting.

As the end of the world weighs heavy within the group’s chest, the restlessness of Bright Green Field is still present. O Monolith won’t have you surging toward the stage alongside others like some frenzied layered cake of bodies, but it will still move you, suspended in air as part of some weird seance instead, chanting the same fragmented words spoken by the amorphous voices of “If you had seen the bull’s…” This ever-evolving, multi-legged creature is a mere squid no longer. 8/10 Kyle Kohner

Jayda G — Guy (ninja tune) A tape whirrs, rewinding and fast-forwarding, searching for the man captured inside.

That man is William Richard Guy, Jayda G’s American father. He recorded these tapes in secret with her sister, for Jayda to discover when she was older. It was an act of preservation after he learned of the

Albums illness that would cut his life short before she would grow into adulthood. In them, he tells his story.

Now, the Canadian electronic artist honours him through song, weaving fragments of these tapes into an album that’s inspired by his life as a snapshot of Black America and familial love. Arriving not long after the breakthrough success of ‘Both Of Us’ mid-lockdown in 2020, which brought new fans, wider opportunities and even a Grammy win, the album also ventures into sleeker pop sounds and an upbeat palette.

But this more polished sound is often at odds with the deep and worthy story at the heart of the record. The tape recordings struggle to be made out as they clash with what surrounds them. While her last record, Significant Changes, used fittingly meditative deep house sounds to explore her blend of dance catharsis, Guy is lacking in sonic identity to give it weight. While tracks like ‘Blue Lights’ and ‘Scars’ are skillfully made pieces of dance-pop, they feel oddly functional given they were clearly made with love and affection. Part of this translation issue rests on Jayda G’s vocal performance, which is often muffled and disconnected. It’s a personal offering, and although that’s absolutely valid, perhaps it is one that will resonate more with its creator than with a general audience.

5/10 Skye Butchard

Hak Baker — Worlds End FM (hak attack) Nostalgia is a powerful tool.

Just glance at music’s cyclical nature and you can see there’s money to be made in the reminiscence game.

Hak Baker is the latest in a growing group of musicians to give the mid-’00s indie sound a whirl. His debut album, World’s End FM, takes a chunk of Jamie

T and Pete(r) Doherty’s cheeky chappy schtick and combines it with a thick glaze of scruffy pop sheen, resulting in a collection of songs that, while inoffensive enough, fails to truly tap into the spirit of the decade’s best offerings.

The slightly-too-earnest air surrounding ‘Bricks in the Wall’ and ‘Run’ exudes serious T4 on the Beach, trilby hat energy, doing nothing more than remind us that, despite how it might have seemed at the time, a lot of music back in the ’00s really wasn’t all that.

It’s a shame, as at times Baker hints at an enticing, more aggressive edge. The pointed, Mike Skinner-isms of opener ‘DOOLALLY (Unreleased)’ and the angular rock of ‘Telephones 4 Eyes’ offer a brief window to what he is capable of, but these darker moments are few and far between, for the most part Baker falls back on that signature indie pop sound that threatens to deceive.

With Worlds End FM, Hak Baker shows once and for all that, as enticing as nostalgia might be, things never sound quite as good the second time around.

The reality of the past is rarely as good as the concept. 5/10 Jack Doherty

Various Artists — Red Hot & Ra: Nuclear War (red hot) Sun Ra’s ‘Nuclear War’ might be the Jupiter-born free-jazz maniac’s most malleable tune.

Starting life in 1984 as the opening track on his album of the same name, there brimming with fucked-up be-bop modal slink, it was then reimagined four times over a single 40-minute EP by Yo La Tengo at the turn of the millennium, re-emerging as everything from onechord krautrock mantra to loose-limbed electronica deconstruction.

Now, twenty more years on, New York’s Red Hot Organisation, famous for

producing star-studded leftfield compilation albums to raise AIDS awareness (1993’s No Alternative, 2009’s Dark Was The Night, etc), have commissioned a parade of contemporary American jazzers to have their own pop at Ra’s mushroom-cloud-laying masterwork, with the likes of Georgia Anne Muldrow and Angel Bat Dawid each taking turns over a mesmerising hour.

If the prospect of 60 minutes of the same tune seems a bit much on paper, however, fear not: this is some of the most engaging, startling and imaginative jazz playing you’ll hear all year, full of exactly the sort of chaotic structure, mind-warping improvisation, eye-popping variety and inescapable groove worthy of the tune’s author. Muldrow first moulds the song into a sort of mournful G-funk elegy, then Bat Dawid goes full cosmic squawk for a three-movement, half-hour version that frequently gazes over the edge of madness. Philadelphia quintet Irreversible Entanglements (who feature Moor Mother among their number) steal the show, though, with a wild trip through free skronk, sarcastic marching band pageantry, and eventually a glorious post-hip-hop stride that feels, simultaneously, as strong as an ox and like it could collapse at any minute.

Collectively, the four interpretations here serve as a brilliant barometer of the vanguard of American jazz in 2023 – urgent, visionary, and (despite/because of the apocalyptic subject – delete as applicable) bursting with life. 9/10 Sam Walton

Tinariwen — Amatssou (wedge) On Amatssou, pioneers of what has been dubbed as ‘desert blues’ (though the term does little justice to the complex and diverse music of the Sahara) Tinariwen have written the soundtrack for a

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Albums world that still cannot shed its colonial biases towards ‘world music’. Driven by the political turmoil in Mali, Amatssou stands as a testament to the struggles of the Berber tribe against the Salafists.

With Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel featuring on two tracks and Fats Kaplin and Wes Corbett on banjo and violins, Tinariwen’s new album combines their signature guitar and percussion-based groove with American-style country.

Thankfully, the combination is not as much an Americanisation of Tinariwen’s Tuareg roots as it is an endearing and a complementary ingredient on the album.

Recorded in a makeshift tent studio in an Algerian oasis, Amatssou is perhaps Tinariwen’s second-most explorative work, after their 2019 album Amadjar.

From the get-go, it immerses you in a landscape rich with call-and-response chants and complex rhythms, thanks to the percussive flair of Said Ag Ayad.

The rhythm section on the album moves further away from the stereotypical ‘desert blues’ imagery; although the ghost of their 2017 track ‘Assàwt’ still lingers over ‘Anemouhagh’, the repetitive dynamics provide agile transitions between the varying moods of the album – from the bright nuances of ‘Kek Alghalm’ to the duskier overtones of ‘Nak Idnizdjam’.

On Amatssou, Tinariwen foregrounds the urgent threat to Tuaregs in Africa, inspiring more artists to join the rebellion. And in doing so, they remain loyal to their musical roots, despite the diametrically opposite geographies that coalesce on the album. 8/10 Shrey Kathuria

Arlo Parks — My Soft Machine (transgressive) Arlo Parks jumpstarts her new record longing to be “seven and blameless, going over the handlebars”. A born nostalgic, now she

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even misses pain: a good old-fashioned knee scrape instead of all this abstract dread. Still, given the well-documented anxieties of her generation, it’s fitting for an obsession with healing to gurgle through the music, her pain underwritten by beats so ferociously peppy they could be plucked from 1990s breakfast radio.

As on her debut Collapsed in Sunbeams, Parks’ soft, lachrymose voice turns stray lines into mantras, but she’s best when she ditches the meditation to pin down singular, piquant images: a “puppy dog trapped in a smoke-grey Honda”, the feeling of being “scared to speak as I catch a whiff of your rosehip tea”. For all the introspection, you don’t suspect her of navel-gazing. She unloads baggage on a one-to-one basis; like piercing eye contact in a crowded carriage, building intimacy by recognising the frailty in her peers, then throwing them a lifeline. She lets Phoebe Bridgers share the load on ‘Pegasus’ and drops it altogether on ‘Devotion’, a crunchy, carefree anthem to lust. Mostly though, the mood is mournful, Parks daydreaming about absconding the endless adult search for validation. “I just wanna eat cake in a room with a view,” she sighs on ‘Room (red wings)’. On ‘I’m Sorry’, things hit rock bottom when she admits finding it “easier to be numb” – surely a waking nightmare for an artist used to experiencing every pinprick of emotion on a vast scale. But for anyone who might relate, My Soft Machine is a lovingly compiled care package. Let’s hope someone’s boxing one up for Arlo too. 7/10 Orla Foster

Godflesh — Purge (avalanche) Godflesh, the underappreciated legends of British metal and industrial music,

have been crafting innovative and boundary-pushing music since their beginnings in an east Birmingham council estate in the late ’80s.

As the band’s ninth album and long-awaited follow-up to 2017’s critically-acclaimed Post Self, Purge has some pretty big shoes to fill. Described by the band as the spiritual successor to 1992’s Pure, on paper at least, this is a set of songs that revisit the group’s dalliance with ’90s hip hop and acid house, but it’s hard to tease these influences out on the record. Mostly, the tracks here sound like layers upon layers of muddy, compressedto-death guitar pressing down on some misguided turntable scratches. From opener ‘Nero’ all the way to track six, ‘The Father’, this is an album that has you feeling like you’re listening to outtakes from a mid-career Korn record or the soundtrack from a ’00s horror shooter.

Like a Lindt chocolate, though, there is a reward towards the end. Purge closes on a one-two punch that, while not climbing up to the heights of classic Godflesh, at least manages to recall the band at their inventive best. Closer ‘You Are The Judge, The Jury and The Executioner’ is the standout, a brooding slice of throbbing industrial electronica that becomes ever more horrifying and haunting as it builds.

Being generous, this is a record for the die-hards. However, in the grand scheme of things, it’s hard not to feel like Purge is a step backwards from the masterful intensity of Post Self. 3/10 Dominic Haley

Baxter Dury — I Thought I Was Better Than You (heavenly) Baxter Dury opens his seventh studio album with an existential crisis: “Hey Mummy / Hey Daddy / Who am I?” Immediately, he sets

Albums the tone for I Thought I Was Better Than You, a record that delves deep into Dury’s life and, crucially, how he has dealt with the complexities of having a famous parent: “Why am I condemned because I’m the son of a musician?” he ponders on ‘Leon’.

Dury isn’t the first songwriter to dissect the influence their parents had on their life but it certainly a fascinating concept when the work presented is a confrontation of the impact of having Ian Dury as a father. Now in his 50s, and only a few years shy of the age his father was when he passed away, Dury candidly expresses how it feels to be a “prisoner of famous parents,” and how it has affected his own lengthy career; he’s a musician with a wealth of ambition and ideas when it comes to his work that is sometimes disregarded by people expecting him to merely recreate his father’s material. “Even though you want to be like Frank Ocean / But you don’t sound like him, you just sound like Ian,” he intones on ‘Shadow’, one of the many highlights on the record.

Musically, however, there are traces of Ocean’s influence in the woozy production and pitched-up vocals on ‘Celebrate Me’. Working with producer Paul White, together they’ve crafted a broad work that encapsulates the many moods of Dury’s self-examination.

It should be noted that I Thought… serves as a companion piece to his 2021 memoir, Chaise Longue; the two share characters, and musically it complements the text very well. In this regard, the ten songs are often minimal in their design – an infectious foundational beat here, a bright piano chord there and a healthy dose of captivating guitar licks throughout. Dury’s languid delivery is often paired with (and sometimes takes a backseat to) a number of captivating female cadences, courtesy of Eska Mtungwazi, JGrrey and Madeline Hart which bring a great warmth to the rich textures swirling around ‘Leon’ and a gorgeous sentimentality to the emotive closer ‘Glows’. A rewarding listen that gives the listener a greater understanding and appreciation of Baxter Dury’s artistry. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

a songwriter who has the ability to convey his brilliantly absurdist musings with great sincerity; musically, too, his enveloping arrangements are abundant with style.

9/10 Zara Hedderman

Jeremy Tuplin — Orville’s Discotheque (trapped animal) It’s not often you come across an album that shifts between throbbing hair metal-like synths, sumptuous electronic beats and sweet acoustic guitar riffs with lyrics about being a “disco Shakespeare”, dreams and delusions pinned by Tarantino characters and regrets tinged with wit: “Could have stayed at home watching Strictly instead of having my heart destroyed”. It’s also impressive that this record, from Somerset singersongwriter Jeremy Tuplin, throws so much colour at the canvas, with all the individual strokes complementing one another to make a really captivating (and remarkably cohesive) body of work.

The overall concept of Orville’s Discotheque draws inspiration from the Ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the central figures roaming the expansive world that Tuplin has developed with his Sad and Lonely Disco Band.

Certainly, disco plays a significant part in the musicality of this excellent LP in its many stomping beats and vibrant synth arrangements. Yet, there are moments such as ‘Wonderful Time’ where chugging fuzzed guitar heralds Yo La Tengo met with Van Halen-like flashing synths; melding grunge with glitter. Elsewhere, Tuplin also engages with sentimentality on softer compositions ‘Love Town’ and ‘Devil Dances’.

Often, the combination of Tuplin’s nonchalant cadence and astute comical lyricism evoke Jarvis Cocker on the Strokesesque ‘L.O.V.E.’ and perhaps most effectively on the richly-textured highlight ‘A Dancer Must Die’, where the listener hangs onto his every word for the great rewards of lines like, “I thought I was invincible / But I’m just Leonardo di Caprio / A washed-up actor in that film about Hollywood”.

Orville’s Discotheque once again demonstrates Jeremy Tuplin’s dexterity as

Foyer Red — Yarn the Hours Away (carpark) There exists a paradox at the heart of Foyer Red’s music. Mechanically, ruthlessly impressive with its agitated rhythms and desire to duck, dive and deceive at every turn, it also has an almostnaive sincerity to it, its wide-eyed delivery captivating in its emotional directness. As with their debut EP, Zigzag Wombat, Yarn the Hours Away is twee as fuck, a glorious collision of free-flowing, filter-less observations and abrupt changes in tone and time signatures that is sure to force the most confused of jigs.

It comes as no surprise to read inspirations include acts such as Omni on Foyer Red’s Bandcamp page. The vocal pingpong between Elana Riordan and Mitch Myers on ‘Unwaxed Flavored Floss’ and interlocking instrumentation on ‘Barnyard Bop’ delight in their precision. There is also more than a touch of the intensity of Los Campesinos! on tracks such as ‘Etc.’, a song also boasting perhaps my favourite lyric on the record: “If nature is unjust, then change it if you can.”

Foyer Red’s ultimate USP however is their collective ear for a melody amongst the mayhem, with the closing two songs, ‘Big Paws’ and ‘Toy Wagon’, among their best. The former is replete with twists and turns each as lush as the last. ‘Toy Wagon’, which initiated the growth of the band as they searched for a guest vocalist, meanwhile adopts a softer, less frantic pace.

The apparent paradox is an illusion; this is up-front, earnest music for up-front, earnest hearts. Just don’t try and keep pace. 8/10 Ben Lynch

47

Albums Live

The Golden Dregs Village Underground, London 6 April 2023

The Golden Dregs arrive at Village Underground fresh off the plane from their US tour, having presumably fulfilled their mantra “to get away sometimes”, introduced to us from their first single, ‘American Airlines’, taken from their new record On Grace & Dignity.

Benjamin Woods (the Dregs’ frontman and songwriter) greets the audience with a modest “we thought no one was coming” before admitting that the last three months’ anxiety about an empty room was lightly “stressful”. Their opener, ‘How It Starts’, is charmingly accompanied by a few subtle amp adjustments, with the odd mic stand raised and then lowered again just to find the ultimate sweet spot. Woods eventually finds his stride sitting on top of a tall, monolithic monitor as he pours out the symphonic track ‘Before We Fell From Grace’ (luckily, the songs metaphor wasn’t enough to jinx his tentative position).

For such a wholesome bunch, perhaps more obviously suited to a large and leafy outdoors venue, it may initially seem like the Dregs had breached the wrong stage door. However, the large,

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dim lit chamber of the Village Underground is the perfect setting, large enough to produce a heart-warming echo yet intimate enough to feel like you are witnessing something totally unique and deeply personable. Such is my feeling from their standout performance of ‘Beyond Reasonable Doubt’, a dark horse off the record whose hair-raising harmonies are enough to send any audience member into a deep and inescapably cathartic slumber.

This is a group completely un-saturated by the constant camera flash or the press-branded microphone; The Golden Dregs emit a rare kind of purity. I can’t help but leave thinking I’ve seen one of the most exciting bands in the UK right now. Leo Lawton

Yo La Tengo London Palladium 14 April 2023

“In the past, this is where I would say something obnoxious like ‘Jeez what a dump’,” remarks Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, two songs into tonight’s first set, admiring the Edwardian grandeur of

the London Palladium. “But these days, I can’t joke about this sort of thing,” he confesses, acknowledging the ornate carved wood, stained glass and velvet drapes, and sounding genuinely awed to be playing in such an august old room.

But if Kaplan’s provocateur tendencies are showing signs of waning, then perhaps that’s fair enough: after all, 66 is a perfectly acceptable age to begin to mellow, and having led Yo La Tengo through well over a thousand gigs since 1984, there’s a sense too that he and his band have earned their stripes.

That’s not to say that this is some sort of victory-lap tour, though; tonight’s first set is almost entirely dedicated to the band’s latest record, with only a trio of deep cuts thrown in for balance, and even the second, normally slanted towards the band’s more famous, noisier songs, retains the feeling of three musicians pushing themselves and each other.

Sure, there’s a smattering of “hits” (such that a band with no discernable chart history has those), and ‘Autumn Sweater’ sounds as slinking and mesmeric tonight as it did 25 years ago, but the real joy here is in beholding such a rich tapestry of sound over the course of an hour: driftwood instrumentals like 1997’s ‘Green Arrow’ fade into the almost-groovy electronic manipulation of ‘Before We Run’, dainty melody (‘Big Day Coming’) sits alongside scabrous noise (the astonishing, extended version of ‘I Heard You Looking’, featuring some of the wildest and most expressive guitar playing you’ll witness anywhere in rock music currently), and yet running through the diversity is a sense of gently cerebral, idiosyncratically warm melancholy.

After they sidle back on stage for their now-traditional encore of cover versions, Kaplan tells an agreeably rambling story about Yo La Tengo’s first ever London show, at Camden Dingwalls, where there wasn’t time to rearrange the drum kit to accommodate drummer Georgia Hubley’s left-handedness, so they just played 20 minutes of feedback instead.

Ostensibly, the story is a tangential way of introducing their cover of Motörhead’s ‘Bomber’ (“This band would defi-

photography by tobias dwyer

Albums Live nitely have played Dingwalls,” concludes Kaplan), but it’s also indirectly revelatory of Yo La Tengo’s consistent approach over the past 40 years: then, as now, the band are creatively unruly but practical, utterly uninterested in people-pleasing yet joyfully inclusive in their bloody-mindedness, and bustling with melodies while always ready to unleash sonic hell.

Yo La Tengo have become one of the great modern alternative rock bands, and are only improving with age. Sam Walton

Dog Unit Servant Jazz Quarters, London 20 April 2023

It’s palpably mid-April. The seasonal showers and the initial whisperings of spring sunshine are struggling against the stubborn dregs of a perma-grim winter. Sheltering from the elements inside Dalton’s Servant Jazz Quarters are Dog Unit, a buzzy London four-piece promising “post-rock to dance to”.

The show is the latest in a series of ‘Dog Unit and friends’ collaborative events. Tonight’s guest is Alice Hubble, self-described as “one lady at home with an enormous collection of synthesis-

photography by sam walton

ers”, who also brought a friend along to wrangle the sizeable mass of Moog and Roland gear that engulfs the duo on stage. Following a set of synth-driven dub-psych, Hubble promises a “non-prog wig-out” between herself and tonight’s headliners. Donning custom boiler suits, Dog Unit enter the stage alongside Hubble and begin to experiment.

Collectively feeling their way through a seemingly improvised set, across a 30-minute span they transmute from quiet kosmiche to driving drone, employing early electronics of bands like Japan with the post-rock kraut inflection of Can. They pass lead lines around effortlessly with a palpable sense of enjoyment emitting from the stage.

Collaboration done, Dog Unit launch into their own set. They bring a workmanlike ease to their music; it’s serious and academic but approachable and unfussy. Deft percussion, deliberate guitar work and pulsating basslines are key throughout as the band deliver a set of both new and old material. Tried and tested tracks like ‘Absolute Unit’ and ‘Barking To Gospel’ offer a precise heaviness whilst new cuts like ‘John X Kennedy’ display the nimbler end of their sonic slant.

Tonight’s show proves that the buzz around Dog Unit is warranted and gestures towards larger stages; their

danceable post-kraut rock is piquant to even the most discerning ears whilst remaining approachable enough to please more laidback audiences. Tom Critten

Shit And Shine Cafe Oto, London 27 April 2023

2007 was a pretty momentous year for me.

Sick of working dead-end warehouse jobs, I moved down to the capital on the vague promise of better prospects and better parties. Fairly quickly, I found another dead-end job in a shoe shop and survived by sleeping on a lot of people’s couches.

In fact, London life kind of sucked, until a mate invited me to see a band they’d heard about called Shit And Shine. Dressed in plaid shirts and wearing little bunny ears, their sound was thunderous: a cacophony of rapid-fire hip-hop beats and samples ripped from Guy Ritchie movies. I left the gig feeling like I’d been let in on a secret.

Sixteen years later, here we are again. Backlit by a projected loop of ’80s TV shows, they deliver a set that is equal parts caustic and absurd; a madcap, almost-improvised free-for-all, with songs bookended by strange snippets of dialogue pulled from eye-rolling London gangster movies. It’s like no one knows how to take it, and as the first couple of tracks roll into one another, there’s a slight recoil from the crowd, the wooden chairs pushed back a few centimetres to make room for the sound. But then, slowly at first and then all of a sudden, the crowd click into gear, and as S&S relentlessly and methodically build their sound, the room becomes more and more filled with gyrating bodies.

Nothing can exist for a little under two decades and not change, and S&S have certainly evolved between now and that show back at the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes, yet the main takeaway from tonight is that they still have the same vibe, but a different, perhaps even perfected approach. Dominic Haley

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FilmAlbums and Books

Rye Lane (dir. raine allen-miller) Rye Lane opened in limited cinemas before being plopped onto Disney+ in record time, where I hope it gets passed around fans of genuinely not shit rom-coms. They do exist, y’know – the fans and the films, despite the best efforts of Netflix Originals and those daytime Christmas movies that didn’t exist three years ago; the ones that are on Channel 5 and Christmas 24 (ffs), and are American but set in a fictional European kingdom – usually called something like ‘Belgradia’ – where the princess is stranded because of I don’t know, and she bumps into (quite literally) a widowed father who looks like a piece of wood, with a horrible seven-year-old who just wants a mum… and so on. You know the story without seeing any of them, which, to an extent, is something you can level at all romantic comedies, but even the bad ones used to try.

If you’re thinking, “no they didn’t”, Rye Lane is almost certainly not for you.

It is, after all, 100% a romantic comedy, playing the romantic comedy game, albeit in a decidedly modern setting of young Black Peckham rather than early-30s west London, where blokes stutter women into bed, and where nobody is Black. That is, after all, what people mean when they label a rom-com “very British” – an imagined London where every day is the boat race.

Raine Allen-Miller’s feature debut takes its stylistic cues from Peep Show more than it does Richard Curtis, with plenty of POV close ups and such a liberal use of a fisheye lens that it does get a bit much at times. The story is a classic – of a heartbroken A. (Dom) meeting by chance an overly confident B. (Yas), who is probably heartbroken too, but is dealing with it by pestering A. for the remainder of the day, exploring where their obvious connection might lead to.

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Because Britain isn’t all posh guys tripping over walls to the sound of Texas, the lead characters of Rye Lane eat spicy pork in Brixton Village, break up over dick pics, duet Salt-N-Peppa’s ‘Shoop’ at karaoke and fall in love to a soundtrack from free-pop producer Kwes, with a helping hand from Tirzah.

As refreshing and overdue as the representation of Black communities in British romantic comedies is though, it wouldn’t mean much if Rye Lane wasn’t so genuinely funny. Not just rom-com funny; funny funny. And, of course, romantic, although that’s never a given. The story is true to the genre, with a frustratingly hurried finale, to be honest, but the connection between Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) can’t be bettered, as Rye Lane proves that love stories are timeless, but they need work to remain relevant.

Stuart Stubbs

The North Will Rise Again — Alex Niven (bloomsbury) The sheer volume of public discourse that has been devoted to caricaturing and generalising about the North of England over the past decade or more is almost impressive. From reactionaries like Matthew Goodwin to elected reactionaries like Keir Starmer, the effort to pander to the ‘legitimate concerns’ of the ‘Red Wall’ (a term that’s always been rhetorical rather than sociological) from across the public sphere looks not so much concerted as desperate at this point. In this context, Alex Niven’s The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands is a very welcome intervention.

Niven mounts a convincing argument that from the industrial revolution to the present day, England’s Northern half has consistently been a site of tech-

nological, cultural and political innovation, a heterogeneous region of possibility rather than the flat-capped, flat-vowelled lump that both its detractors and some of its more ostentatious ‘defenders’ might have you believe. In precise yet enthusiastic prose, he traces a lineage of radical Northern cultural and social production, from the Vorticist art movement’s infatuation with early-20th-century Newcastle through the modernist poetry of Basil Bunting and Barry MacSweeney, the futuristic urbanism of T. Dan Smith, the pioneering experimental sound of Delia Derbyshire, all the way up to more recent, familiar dissidence from the likes of Factory Records and Andrea Dunbar.

Perhaps the most powerful passages of The North Will Rise Again are its most intimate; as in his previous book, New Model Island, Niven has a striking gift for weaving his and his family’s personal experiences into a broader project of cultural and political critique. His late father gazing up at the great empty skies of the English-Scottish border country with German kosmische blasting through his headphones; Niven searching for countercultural profundity in ever-moreneoliberal Manchester; childhood trips to see his friend Jonathan at his eccentric family home near Hexham, during which the creative aspirations and dreams of escape that would drive Everything Everything, the band they eventually founded together, initially took root (only to be disappointed years later upon contact with the cold machinations of the 21st-century music industry).

If less tactfully deployed, these vignettes could dull the sharpness of the book’s overall argument, individualising rather than democratising the writer’s desire for a more dynamic understanding of the North. No such problems here: Niven maintains a clear sense of (leftist) political commitment throughout, much of his argument proceeding from the fundamental truth that England is one of the most regionally unequal nations in Europe and the social consequences of that inequality are as culturally complex as they are morally and politically unjust.

Luke Cartledge

THE BEST NEW MUSIC

DREAM WIFE SOCIAL LUBRICATION

VARIOUS ARTISTS WAVES OF DISTORTION (THE BEST OF SHOEGAZE 1990-2022) Two-Piers

THE BOO RADLEYS EIGHT

BORIS & UNIFORM BRIGHT NEW DISEASE

INDIGO DE SOUZA ALL OF THIS WILL END

The return of Dream Wife is a moment worth savouring, with the band in electrifying form with an entirely self-written and selfproduced third album.

Two-Piers, the label that brought you ‘Pop Psychédélique (The Best of French Psychedelic Pop 1964-2019)’, bring you ‘Waves of Distortion (The Best of Shoegaze 1990-2022), a magical journey through the history of the Shoegaze scene from its inception to the current exponents on the scene championing the sound.

A perfect introduction to all that is glorious and great about ‘Shoegaze’.

Where last year’s album, joyful in tone, yet brooding with heavyweight lyrical themes, came together as an exploration of the isolated ideas of each band member, new album “Eight” is formed of songs recorded purposefully to appear together on an album. There is also a greater depth of integration, which means that it’s more difficult to tell which member of the band the song originated with.

Two of the great mainstays of extreme music, chameleonic doom icons Boris and industrial punks Uniform have teamed up to create a juggernaut bursting at the seams with scathing vocals, monster riffs, and psychedelic rage. “the results are fucking fantastic” - Louder Sound

Includes tracks by Slowdive, Ride, Chapterhouse, Lush, bdrmm, Horsegirl, DIIV, Mogwai, Beach House, Galaxie 500 and more.

Available on Limited Transparent Red Vinyl at Indie Record Stores

Indigo De Souza announces her new album ‘All of This Will End’, the anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed 2021 breakthrough album ‘Any Shape You Take’, via Saddle Creek. ‘All of This Will End’ marks a warmer and unmistakably audacious era for her. It’s a statement about fearlessly moving forward from the past into a gratitudefilled present, and choosing to embody loving awareness.

The album is a raw and radically optimistic work that grapples with mortality, the rejuvenation that community brings, and the importance of centering yourself now.

Lucky Number

Hyper lusty rock and roll with a political punch, exploring the alchemy of attraction, the lust for life, embracing community and calling out the patriarchy.

With a healthy dose of playfulness and fun thrown in.

Boostr Records

Sacred Bones

Available on Limited Red Vinyl at Indie Record Stores

Saddle Creek

GREG FOAT & GIGI MASIN BCUC MILLIONS OF US DOLPHIN Strut Records

On The Corner Records

JIM LOVE MAKES MAGIC

JULIE BYRNE THE GREATER WINGS

ASH WALKER ASTRONAUT

UK jazz pianist Greg Foat has recorded prolifically in recent years including acclaimed albums Symphonie Pacifique (2020) and The Mage (2019).

BCUC take the world by storm with their mesmerising performances, winning crowds at festivals such as Glastonbury (West Holts), Roskilde, Dour, Worldwide, Womad, Fusion and Sziget to name a few, while collaborating with legends like Femi Kuti and Saul Williams.

Who is JIM?

American songwriter Julie Byrne returns with The Greater Wings, her first record in six years, out July 7th, 2023, on Ghostly International.

Four years on from his explorative third full-length ‘Aquamarine,’ Londoner Ash Walker returns with an equally ambitious follow-up, set for releaseon 30th June.

Navigating grief, intimacy, and transformation, Byrne widens her signature sound with synth, piano, harp, and strings, emerging with the most powerful, lustrous, and lifeaffirming music of her career.

Alongside a plethora of awardwinning collaborators and combining a dizzying array of sounds, ‘Astronaut’ hears Walker push his astral shower of rhythm and vibes to new heights.

‘Astronaut’ is the cosmic voyage and a rocket-powered masterclass spanning jazz, blues, soul, funk, and reggae.

Venetian electronic visionary Gigi Masin has enjoyed a revival in recent years through his Calypso album on R&S’s Apollo label.

‘Dolphin’ is Greg and Gigi’s very first collaboration together.

Recorded remotely during 20212022 and featuring Moses Boyd (drums) and Tom Herbert (bass), the album took shape through mutual compositions, gradually developed and embellished online.

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‘Millions Of Us’ is their first fulllength album and most ambitious work to date - distilling their magic on record.

A kaleidoscope of harmony vocals - as Crosby, Stills and Nash might have sounded with a funky back beat. Delicate acoustic fingerpicking, warmed by a swell of brass before a drama of electric unfolds. Guitar band music, delivered with the sensibilities of someone who knows how to make you dance. Sun-kissed blue-eyed soul, reminiscent of Ned Doheny, but emanating from a beach far from California.

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Night Time Stories

The

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Experience

Michael

It’s been over a decade since KILLER MIKE released a solo album, and he’s never put anything out as personal and potentially career-changing as the simply titled Michael. Stuart Stubbs travelled to Atlanta to meet the Run The Jewels rapper in the only city where his story could have taken place. Photography by Matt Swinsky

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T

hey’re queuing around the block at the Trap Music Museum in Atlanta. On a Saturday night, two hours before it closes, I thought I’d glide in, but that’s because I underestimated how this city feels about hip hop. It’s not as if the signs weren’t there: for a start, they have a trap music museum, founded, naturally, by T.I., who pioneered the subgenre in the early 2000s alongside other Atlantan rappers Gucci Mane and Jeezy. Inside is a faithful recreation of a ‘trap house’, complete with a grimy crackcooking kitchen and dealer’s living room. There’s a jail cell too, a walk-in closet of firearms and the pink Chevy from 2 Chainz’s ‘pink trap house’, which started out as a marketing stunt for his 2017 album Pretty Girls Like Trap Music only to become a local landmark. Other attractions include a themed escape room (Escape the Trap) and the TMM bar, a party spot where rappers and producers like to road test the tracks they’ve made in the neighbouring studios that day. Next door is T.I.’s restaurant, Trap City Café.

The party continues in every car that passes me on my walk back to my hotel, every vintage muscle car and sun bleached Prius shaking to a sound put on the map by Outkast in 1995. The East Coast-West Coast feud of the early ’90s had had no time for Southern hip hop, until André 3000 and Big Boi famously arrived at the Source Awards in New York that year.

To a hail of boos they collected the Best New Rap Group award.

Once they reached the podium, Dré took the mic and said: “But it’s like this though, I’m tired of them closed-minded folks, it’s like we got a demo tape but don’t nobody want to hear it. But it’s like this: the South got something to say.”

Atlanta hasn’t let up since. Outkast ran on rocket fuel and brought CeeLo Green’s Goodie Mob along for the ride. Crunk (another of the city’s inventions) bubbled up in the clubs thanks to Lil Jon, before Ludacris took it to charts around the world; T.I.’s and Gucci’s trap legacy hasn’t just lived on in Atlantans Migos, Young Thug and Playboi Carti, but in half the top 40 beats you’ve heard over the last fifteen years, from Lana Del Rey to Bieber, to Ariana Grande to, most notably of all, Drake, whose two collaborative albums to date have been with Future and 21 Savage, and not by coincidence. So when people say that Atlanta has become the centre of hip hop, it’s hard to argue against them, and easy to see why, in 2017, the city officially made 17 July ‘Killer Mike Day’, in honour of perhaps its proudest rapper, businessman and activist.

MICHAEL

I first meet Mike on the set of his new music video, for a song called ‘Motherless’ that will appear on his first solo album in 11 years, simply called Michael. A 30-minute drive south east from downtown Atlanta is plenty of time to reach Georgia’s golden countryside, and a traditional Southern house with plenty of private woodland and a big front yard. Mike ghosts onto the set

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after an hour of the crew calmly taking care of their own business to prep for the first shot of the day, involving two vintage cars in a field out back.

Today’s song is the emotional high point of Killer Mike’s most personal album yet; a tribute to his mother and grandmother, who died in 2017 and 2012. So he’s respectfully given plenty of space throughout the day, and when he’s not in front of the camera he does an incredible job of making such a big guy appear invisible. Or maybe the crew are just professionals.

He comes over to introduce himself and I tell him how much I like the album and the fact that this particular track – the record’s most tender moment – has been pulled out as a single.

He thanks me and says in a quiet and sincere way: “Y’know, people got into Pac for all sorts of reasons, but I loved Pac for ‘Brenda’s Got A Baby’… But it’s one thing to have a vision for this,” he says, nodding towards the crew and cameras and cars, “but to have a group of people help bring it to life, I just hope my mom can see it from where she is.” Before he’s called back to set he suggests that we meet at lunchtime the following day, at “some properties I’ve bought in the city.”

The VLNS Compound – a name Mike tells me with a devilish, loud cackle – almost takes up an entire block of industrial space in East Point, and will do once he acquires the remaining two end buildings. “I always thought villains drove the best cars,” he says as he shows me around, starting in the vast vehicle lockup that currently houses his ’72 Cutlass, ’74 Caprice and a modern muscle car, a red Dodge Hellcat. The shell of another that he bought from Big Boi is mid restoration in the corner, “and there’s a couple of Swiff ’s here too,” he says, pointing out an orange 1965 Buick that he bought for the Outkast DJ to repay him for some studio time he gave Mike when money wasn’t so good, which must have been quite some time ago. “So yeah, this is 12-year-old Michael’s head,” he says. “I own two thirds of this whole block, and we’re gonna transform this into a thinking and creative space. There’s gonna be a studio here, and shit like that.

Car storage, event space, living quarters.”

In a meeting room upstairs – full of toy cars to fit the smaller space – I ask Mike how he’s feeling after the two-day ‘Motherless’ shoot. “You get in the zone and you’re putting out fires on the first day, and it’s looking dope, visually,” he says.

“And then you leave and you feel it. You come the next day and you’re immersed in it all day because your nephew who’s playing your dad looks exactly like your dad, and the woman you cast as your mom as a teenager looks exactly like your mom. So all day it weighed on me. And not in a bad way. It was a heaviness but not a burden. I smiled and cried all day.”

Our conversation follows something of a similar pattern.

When we talk more about the women that raised him, Mike allows tears to melt in his eyes and roll down his face. At other times he gets real quiet and direct, and shows me how he can load a whisper with as much weight as one of his venting tirades; the type that has made him such an effective public speaker.

And when he laughs, which he does a lot, he nearly falls off his chair, flashing the smile that Kim Walton once told him she liked. “After Kim Walton said that you couldn’t tell me shit,” he booms. “That’s Kim Walton, the prettiest girl in third grade! I

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knew I was cool. I knew I was fly. I knew I was dope. Shit, motherfucker seen my wife!?” He roars with laughter even though he’s not joking at all.

SIR FRESH

Michael Render was always a confident kid, who was never embarrassed about his weight. He revelled in being “a chubby Run DMC”, and started rapping when he wasn’t yet a teen, calling himself Sir Fresh. He still remembers his first bars: “I am Sir Fresh / I am the best / I’ll rock your party from east to west / Might make you laugh, might make you sad / But when I brought the party you will be glad / I start empires…” he trails off. “Some other stuff from a 12-year-old’s ego.”

He says rap was his mother’s music first, who loved Kurtis Blow and Whodini, and had Mike when she was just 16. Her name was Denise and Mike says she was “deeply sensitive and an artist by birth who wanted to experience the world.” He makes no bones about the fact that she was a drug trafficker, who made the extraordinary, selfless decision to allow her mother to raise her son across town, as his grandmother, Betty, who’d been unable to have multiple children, wished. Mike spent weekends with his mum and discovered his own generation of rappers in an order of The Fat Boys (“I found them interesting cause they’re tubby little dudes but they were fresh as FUCK,” he shouts), Run DMC, Ice T, NWA and Scarface. “By then, I was like, ‘Nah, I’m gonna do this the rest of my life. I gotta find a way to do this.’”

When Mike told his fourth grade teacher that he wanted to be a rapper she told him he was too smart for that, and that he should become a pilot. “So at 15 years old I went and learned how to fly a plane,” he says, “from a man named Jim Berto.” (Names, I realise, are important to Mike, easily recalled from his past, and then shared, out of respect for the roles these people have played in his life.) “It was an enlightening thing because it taught me you can do anything you want to do – your mind is good enough to do whatever you want to do, but all I wanted to do was rap. I remember telling Miss Ely, like, ‘I still wanna be a rapper, Miss Ely, I had to come back and tell you.’ She was like, ‘Well, y’know baby, I know you’re smart and you have other options.’”

Sir Fresh first rapped to an uncle he idolised, as a way of being allowed to hang around with him and his group of friends, who were usually up to no good. Then he took it to school. Battling. “There was this dude from [performing arts school] Tri Cities called Daddy Ray,” Mike remembers. “He had a fucking cheerleading squad with him and it fucking pissed me the fuck off. Him and six other guys, like, ‘What’s my name?’

‘Daddy Ray!’ Y’know what I mean, he was good, and he was a showman, and it irked me. And it ended up with me and him battling, and it was a hell of a battle. Stylistically, I was in awe of him, like real shit, ‘cause he had convinced his boys to be part of it, to ooooh and arrrrr at him, and I knew it was a cheat code. It’s not his raps; his raps are regular as fuck! And I pivoted in the last round of the fight, like, fuck him, go for them. And it was some

“There really is the Norman Rockwell Americana vision of America. That’s what I live, only it’s chocolate. It’s just Black”

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real Eight Mile shit, where I picked off all his partners, basically saying: ‘You’re. A. Fucking. Bitch! You came as a cheerleader!’

And there was nothing he could do to regain the crowd, because it wasn’t about him anymore. I walked away that day understanding the importance of showmanship. You’ve got to put on a show… Shout out to Daddy Ray, though.”

A

s part of one display in the Trap Music Museum there’s a plaque that reads: ‘2003: Killer Mike releases Monster – the first attempt at a conscious trap album.’ “This is sex, drugs, rap and roll / Corrupt your soul / Pop your roll, dope some more / Throw your life away and smoke,” spat Mike on a debut that came after a decade of dealing drugs, that started when he dropped out of college after he got his girlfriend pregnant.

“Mama, I don’t wanna sell crack no more,” went another hook that everyone could sing along to. But Monster was also playful, hilarious and overloaded with swag, with Mike introducing himself on ‘Rap is Dead’ with the verse: “Fuck rap, rap’s near death, bloated and sick / Too many n*ggas still ride Big and Pac’s dick / Fuck that, next year, they more deader / And I write more rhymes, more deadly and more better.”

It all comes from Atlanta, he says, and growing up in a city

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where he’s not a minority; where his dad was a cop and his mother was a florist and a drug trafficker; where some of his neighbours were regular folk and others were Black millionaires; where mayors and doctors and lawyers and shop owners looked like him.

“I get misunderstood so much that I had to go and find out why people are misunderstanding me,” he says when talking about how other cities simply aren’t like his own. “Most Blacks don’t have my experience, and I had to start realising that you’re speaking to someone where your experiences are an idea to them. Even if you have Harlem in New York, you’re still a minority. Even if you have Compton, at one point you were a minority. When you look at Atlanta, not only are you dominant in numbers, you had your first Black millionaire [Alonzo Herndon] here over 100 years ago.

“There really is the Norman Rockwell Americana vision of America,” he says. “That’s what I live, only it’s chocolate. It’s just Black. So all of my heroes and villains look like me. If there’s a conservative, he or she is Black. If there’s an ultra liberal, he or she is Black. I don’t have to search for fairness because it’s already there. So other Black folks from other places think I’m speaking aspirationally, and I’m not. They think I’m talking ‘what if’, and I’m not. This is what I’ve grown up in, this is what’s produced me.

My grandparents migrated to this city for that opportunity. They produced a woman who bought her house at 19 and paid it off at 29. They produced three grandchildren through that woman – one sister graduated trade school as a beautician, the other sister graduated as an accountant, the dropout ended up being a fucking

millionaire rapper and businessman. You know what I mean? I don’t know ‘I can’t’, so I don’t operate from that space.”

Mike doesn’t judge anyone for dealing drugs, but is adamant that it needs to be a means to an end – invest the money you make into escaping the life, not relishing it. His art teacher, Mr Murray, who plays a role in the ‘Motherless’ video, taught him that (“I knew he was going to be a piece of work,” said Mr Murray when I asked him what he remembers of meeting a 13-year-old Mike for the first time), “and our principal, who I love and adore, Dr Samuel Hill,” says Mike. “A very disciplined man.” So Mike did stop dealing crack, and invested his record label advance for Monster in weed to sustain himself for the next year. His first royalty cheque from his 2012 album R.A.P. Music – his most successful solo album until Michael is released – went on a house that he and his wife still rent out. He also owns three barber shops in the city, called Graffitis SWAG, with plans to open more – a source of income that also provides employment and opportunity in the community. “I’m trying to think hyperlocally,” he says. “I don’t know if I can affect the world, what I do know is I can affect 10 people here, who can affect 10 more people here, and that can transform the here.

“That’s rap music!” he says. “What the fuck is going on on my block!? That’s how I knew what was going on in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Compton and Oakland and Huston and Memphis – rap is your newsletter. And after getting national acclaim and attention, the devil will coerce you, but fuck all that – I still gotta make sure I’m doing the right thing locally because this city made me!”

It feels like Killer Mike is always being asked: “Would you ever consider running for office?”, often delivered with a silently screamed “please”. If you’ve seen any online videos of him speaking at public meetings, letting councillors have it, or addressing protestors so emphatically and passionately in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, you’ll know why. But as good as Mike Render is at straight talking in forums where it’s needed and lacking the most, Killer Mike is an even better rapper, who’s had to be patient in getting his wider dues. Or as Kendrick Lamar put it on To Pimp a Butterfly’s ‘Hood Politics’: “Critics want to mention that they miss when hip hop was rappin’ / Motherfucker, if you did, then Killer Mike’d be platinum.”

“I care about the respect from other rappers because this is a fraternity; not everyone can do it,” he says when I ask him about his reputation as a rapper’s rapper, 20 years into his career. “That part of me is satisfied, but With. That. Said,” he says, thumping the table between us on each word, “Motherfucker, I’m better than these other motherfuckers that’re playin’ with y’all. That’s it! I don’t need to imitate this other shit because there’s something so pure in me it’s gonna connect.”

In 2012, R.A.P. Music took a repeatedly-punching-youin-the-face approach to that connection, and it took Mike to another level. On a record where R.A.P. stood for Rebellious African People, Killer Mike had never been a blunter instrument, his police-state anger simmering down as it peaked, just to make sure we heard him loud and clear when he plainly stated “I’m glad Reagan dead” on the album’s centrepiece; a track that

“In the first three hours that I got together with El-P I knew that, for want of a better word, I’m married to this motherfucker” dismantled the ex-President’s racist anti-drugs policies and his government’s role in the 1980s crack epidemic that ravaged inner city Black neighbourhoods.

Crucial to R.A.P. Music levelling up, though, was the fact that Killer Mike was no longer raging alone – for the first time he was working with Brooklyn producer and rapper El-P, whose bludgeoning breakbeats only goaded Mike into rapping meaner and harder, as the pair rammed their record down our throats.

Run The Jewels was essentially forged then and there – a main-stage spinoff that’s seen both rappers park their solo careers for the last decade and release four classic albums together, uniting hip-hop purists, hardcore kids, skaters and anyone else who appreciates a wall of death and the inclusive energy of Cypress Hill and Rage sharing a festival bill in the ’90s.

Mike says he can’t put his finger on what’s made RTJ such a hit, but he notes how powerful it is for an audience to see a Black guy and white guy doing it together, side by side. He also says: “In the first three hours that we got together I knew that, for want of a better word, I’m married to this motherfucker – I’m meant to be rapping over his shit.” And once they formed Run The Jewels proper: “I’m like, ‘Okay, this is the rest of my life. I’m a member of a rap group.’ I just knew my life had changed.”

14-TRACK MOVIE

All of this is in Michael. All of these people and moments and lessons. Denise’s sacrifice and Betty’s strength (‘Motherless’), Mr Murray’s lessons in taking care of your coin (‘N Rich’), Atlanta’s importance in a tempting tide of fame and adoration (‘Don’t Let The Devil’), the dealer who feels empathy for his customers and no small amount of guilt for what he’s doing to them (‘Something For Junkies’). Sir Fresh even gets a shout out on ‘N Rich’, and Mike’s ’72 Cutlass on the nearly dreamy ‘Spaceship Views’, featuring 2 Chainz. Other Atlantans rep the city with guest spots too: Andre 3000, Young Thug, Future, CeeLo Green – plus Ty Dolla $ign, Curren$y, 6LACK, and of course El-P. This is Killer Mike’s 48-year life laid bare over 14 soulful tracks that take a different approach to connection than repeatedly smacking you in the mouth. “I want people to understand that Michael is an experience,” says Mike. “I want people to listen to it, but I hope it strikes you as a movie. I hope you see the characters. Interestingly enough, that’s what Jay-Z said. I sent him the album much earlier – he said, ‘I felt just like I went to my cousin’s house.’” He pauses a second to pull up a text on his phone, then turns the screen towards me while we both read it

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back. From Jay-Z, sure enough, it reads: “I really enjoyed the album! Felt like I was at my cousin’s house watching a movie. I love the album title!”

Coincidentally, the first time I heard Michael it reminded me of The Black Album – in its cinematic scope as much as its biographical reflections. It even starts with a grand narration, not from Jay-Z’s mother, of course, but from Rico Wade, the Atlanta production legend who co-founded The Dungeon Family collective that Mike came up in, whose members include Outkast, Future, Cool Breeze, Goodie Mob and Wade’s Organized Noize production partners – the team that built hip hop in Atlanta. The track, ‘Down By Law’, is the movie in microcosm, and squeezes into it a ton of blink-and-you’ll-miss-em names and references that are about to be expanded upon through the remainder of the album: drug dealing, its guilt and the victims it creates; the rejection of materialism; the celebration of Black excellence, academics and activists; God; mothers; Atlanta; personal growth and specifically what it means to be man. The Dungeon Family box is ticked a second time by a closing verse from CeeLo Green, which catches up with a recurring B3 Hammond organ that gives the whole of Michael an undeniable Southern gospel feel. “The new Killer Mike show is going to be more like what it was like growing up in church with my grandmother, going to these revivals,” says Mike. “I would like for MTV Unplugged or something – that’s the experience I want for this time.”

Mike connects his phone to the giant speakers in the corners of the room and pushes ‘Down By Law’ through them.

As he raps along, pausing the track every few bars to explain them to me, it’s hard to tell who out of the two of us is enjoying the moment more. But it must be me. There’s an obvious question that hangs in the air, though – 11 years after his last solo album, why now for Michael? Or why ever? I don’t mean because Run The Jewels is flying, or because Killer Mike has made a name for himself as the rapper you can count on to shout in a cop’s face, but because all of this is so... personal.

“When am I going to write my great novel if not now?” says Mike, before taking a long pause and then continuing slowly and quietly. “I can get tired of being used by these Black bourgeoisie pundits as an example for their whipping post candidate because they side with their masters, or whatever it is,” he says; something he addresses on new track ‘Talkin Dat Shit’. “And part of me is like, ‘You need to know the n*gga you’re dealing with’. I went to a bourgeoisie Black college [Morehouse], just like you. I could have finished and can go back any time I want, just like you. I come from a working class, saltof-the-earth background, like many of you did. Let me make clear who the fuck I am before I get outta here. I am a proud Southern man. And I don’t care whether you’re white or Black, being a proud man comes with some thorns in those roses, and I’m going to make sure my story gets told right, because it’s not just my story, it’s a man’s story. It is a boy’s story. It is a young man’s story who gets a girl pregnant in his senior year of high school.” Mike’s voice cracks and tears begin to fill his eyes. “It is a father’s story, wanting to make sure his youngest son who suffers from a kidney disease gets a little life that his mother didn’t because she was robbed of the opportunity. It’s a story

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of Aniyah’s dad. So when I mention her name, or Mikey’s name, and say that their attitudes come from their grandmother, it’s real, it’s tangible.

“Y’know, all my children’s mothers were here in this building at the same time,” he says, as a line of tears now sprint down his cheek. “One called me who I’ve not always had a good relationship with. She called me and said, ‘I wanna thank you. I felt honoured and like a star.’ She didn’t understand that I was just a kid. I didn’t know any better. I was chasing a dream through drugs. I didn’t know how to treat her, that her soul and spirit needed care. And now I know and I’m capable of loving you. I had to learn. And these are the things that I needed to get out before I die. I don’t want somebody who don’t know me preaching my eulogy. Don’t bring no preacher here, just play my album.”

He leans back in his chair and dries his eyes and cheeks with a paper towel. “Oh man, sorry for letting that go on you like that,” he says, smiling broadly.

“It’s a record that humanises men, and humanises me,” he adds. “Because R.A.P. Music is still the superhero Killer Mike.

This time this is it for real. This is not a contrived character that makes the liberals comfortable; this is not a contrived character that makes people who feel you’re beneath them feel you’re somehow keeping it real. This is my naked soul.

“This is an experience that I don’t think anyone has heard on a record before. Because I’m nobody’s underdog.”

FIVE ANXIOUS MEN

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BRISTOL BAND Squid ARE ABOUT TO THE FOLLOW UP THEIR DEBUT ALBUM WITH A MASTERPIECE OF PARANOIA, INSPIRED BY FOLK, COMPUTER MUSIC AND POST-PUNK, AND TELLING TALES OF RATS, PLANE CRASHES AND BEING REINCARNATED AS BESIDE CABINET, BY ALASTAIR SHUTTLEWORTH. PHOTOGRAPHY BY SOPHIE BARLOC

On Squid’s second album O Monolith, the band’s avant-garde leanings serve a work of thrilling complexity and emotional range, exploring themes of paranoia and displacement. Presenting more expressive, inventive writing than their debut album Bright Green Field, it also takes place on a grander scale, featuring extra percussionists, woodwind players and a choral ensemble. Whilst Bright Green Field professed to take place within an imagined cityscape, O Monolith sends us hurtling through different settings, as well as far-ranging textures and moods. As guitarist Anton Pearson says self-deprecatingly: “It’s a mess, is what it is!”

Throughout O Monolith, Squid present an unstable relationship with their environment. Settings change dramatically, from a pre-industrial village in ‘Devil’s Den’ to a claustrophobic aeroplane in ‘Green Light’. Vocalist and drummer Ollie Judge imagines the world’s destruction in ‘Swing (In A Dream)’, and looks beyond Earth altogether in ‘After The Flash’: “Staring into the stars.” Guitarist Louis Borlase links this to the band’s “feeling of displacement” amidst the international touring following Bright Green Field. “There were times when it was intense being away, focusing on live music, then coming back and reconnecting with friends and family,” he explains.

At the heart of this shifting environment is a striking interplay between rural and urban imagery, demonstrated in ‘The Blades’ where crowds of people are imagined as blades of grass. Judge ascribes this to O Monolith’s creation at Real World Studios, nestled in rural Wiltshire, immediately after a tour of major cities across the US. “I think that’s the biggest culture shock I’ve ever had going abroad,” he says. “Everything’s ampli-

fied, and so in-your-face. Coming back to Wiltshire to record the album, it was like we wanted to be quite British and pastoral.”

Musically, this is reflected in the album’s mixing of cold, industrial electronics with sounds from folk music: woodwind, vocal harmonies and simple, warm guitar arrangements. This contrast is demonstrated by sections of ‘Siphon Song’, where group vocals and folk-facing guitars support a heavily processed lead vocal, singing “plastic in the wind.” Bassist and trumpet player Laurie Nankivell notes Adrian Utley and Will Gregory’s soundtrack to the 2017 film Arcadia as a reference point in this.

“In that piece of work, they draw a line between old Pagan folk traditions and modern hedonistic traditions of partying and stuff – I think that influenced the record somewhat.”

This complex presentation of environment forms the basis for striking insights in O Monolith, particularly in the closing track ‘If You Had Seen The Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away’, which explores our relationship with rats. “Wherever there’s large human populations, there’s large rat populations,” explains Pearson, who wrote this song’s lyrics. “I was thinking about that in a British context, and how they probably arrived when the Romans came.”

The others break into a chuckle at this, clearly still bewildered by Pearson’s level of rat-based knowledge, but he presses on with a grin. “There’s grey rats and black rats in the UK: one of them came with the Romans, and the other came with the Normans is what they think. Today, black rats are pretty rare but grey ones are everywhere.”

“It’s interesting that it’s grey squirrels and grey rats that prevailed,” Judge chimes in.

“I think they’re actually called brown rats,” Pearson corrects himself. “It’s interesting that they arrived when the Romans did, because Celtic languages would’ve started to decrease at that point.” This is presented in the fragmented lyrics, which describe the “death of the language.” While this enthusiasm prompts some gentle teasing, with Pearson’s bandmates calling him ‘Rat Boy’ later in our interview, it produces one of the album’s highlights: a towering slow burner, led by chilling whispered vocals.

Feelings of paranoia or fear might not necessarily be evoked by rats, depending on one’s sympathies for them, but certainly loom large throughout O Monolith. ‘Devil’s Den’ presents a witch-trial, while ‘Green Light’ centres upon fears about a plane crashing: “Where is the best place to sit if this all goes wrong?” When asked about this, Judge playfully gestures around the table to his “band of five anxious men.” However, he acknowledges the weight of these feelings in the years around the global pandemic, when O Monolith was being written. “It’s kind of impossible in the years 2020-2023 to not be afraid or paranoid about pretty much everything. I feel like you’re not normal if you’re not anxious,” he grins. “And if you’re not anxious, you’re a liar! Which is bad!”

REINCARNATED AS A BEDSIDE CABINET While the witch-trial and plane crash present fears of death, in O Monolith there are fates that are even worse. ‘Undergrowth’

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presents the idea of being reincarnated as a bedside cabinet, inspired by Josie Packard’s absorption into a cabinet in Twin Peaks. “In the third series, there’s a high-pitched whistle in the Great Northern Hotel, and there’s a theory it’s her,” Judge says.

This prompts his bandmates to call him a ‘nerd’ in chorus. “You have to do a lot to get called that in this band!”

Judge relates this fear to his feelings about performing in Squid. “Me and Louis were chatting about album reviews, and I think your art being received as mediocre is far worse than it being panned. I thought the same of the afterlife: if the afterlife is boring, that’s so much worse than being whipped and on fire.”

These weighty themes are supported by O Monolith’s remarkable scale relative to their debut album, realised with a cast of additional musicians. O Monolith features woodwind players, the choral ensemble Shards, and guest percussionists Zands Duggan and Henry Terrett: enriching the album with more complex, colourful arrangements than heard on the comparatively austere Bright Green Field.

“We were really keen, for the first time, to make the record sound like something that we wouldn’t be able to achieve with just the five of us,” says Borlase. “By bringing in Shards, the woodwind ensemble, Henry and Zands, we were trusting the amazing musicality of other musicians. When you’ve finished the songs, and this barrage of people come running at you to contribute, it also injects an element of unpredictability at the 11th hour.” The whispered lyrics on ‘If You Had Seen The Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away’ were, Borlase tells me, still being written the morning Shards arrived to record them.

One important element in the record’s palette is the Fairlight CMI: a pioneering synthesiser and sampler, adopted in the early ’80s by the likes of Kate Bush, Devo and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. Keyboardist Arthur Leadbetter was introduced to this synth by Real World’s in-house programmer Roger Bolton, after the group befriended him at the local pub.

“It looks like a filing cabinet. It’s not got a screen built in, so you have to plug in a monitor, and the screen is all black and white – like Pong or something,” Leadbetter explains. “We used the bank of factory sounds: the odd marimba, some choir

“If the afterlife is boring, that’s so much worse than being whipped and on fire” sounds, and the string hit at the beginning of ‘Undergrowth’.

It sounds so Kate Bush – you can get sample packs, but it just doesn’t sound anything like that,” he says. “You’re working with something that’s had such a huge part in the history of sampling, which we now just take for granted with computers; it’s nice to go back to basics.”

The Fairlight’s use supports a strange presentation of time in O Monolith. These warm, breathy textures are power-

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fully evocative of the early ’80s when this synthesiser was ubiquitous, interleaved with futuristic electronics and elements of the spidery post-punk that’s been dominating UK guitar music for the last five years. The lyrics also lurch backwards and forwards in time: in ‘Green Light’, the speaker is recalled from their aeroplane seat to memories of “Cracks of the door / Where the sunlight hits my skin.” Borlase attributes this sensation of time-travel to the album’s disjointed writing process.

“This album is track-by-track more disparate than Bright Green Field, and I think that’s got a direct relationship with the different places and times we were writing in. The music was written over a really disparate series of timeframes.”

This unusual depiction of time is nuanced by Squid’s embrace of ideas from folk music, which – by virtue of being disseminated, duplicated and modified through generations – might be seen to exist outside of time. “If the folk tradition is about the passing on of stories through word-of-mouth, that’s like the experience we had with Roger,” Judge suggests. “It all worked around the local pub, and him chatting with us about the Fairlight: it’s about as ‘folk’ as computers can get,” he grins.

“Cyber-folk!”

A SONIC BARBER’S POLE Beyond its scale and expanded palette, O Monolith also presents some hugely inventive songwriting, like album-highlight ‘After The Flash’. Featuring guest vocals from Martha Skye Murphy, its marching 5/4 arrangement builds towards a euphoric ‘Shepard scale’ performed on the Fairlight. This is an auditory illusion, in which a Shepard tone (a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves) moves up a scale while the higher octave’s volume decreases, and the lower octave’s volume increases: played in a loop, it gives the impression of a continuously rising scale, like a sonic barber’s pole.

“When I was younger, I used to play in an orchestra,” Leadbetter says of its inspiration. “One of our warm-up techniques was to play scales in harmony, going up and down. It ends up like an escalator, where everybody’s getting on but missing out a step,” he explains. “That section’s also an example of ‘black MIDI’, which is music you can’t play without MIDI.” “You’d need a lot more fingers,” Borlase laughs. “Dan Carey’s take was that it was like the camera tool of a dolly zoom, where you’re panning forward but zooming out.”

“I really wanted to re-do the vocal at the end of that track” Judge adds, claiming the take that appears on the recording was insisted upon by Carey, who produced the album, as he did Bright Green Field. “He said it sounded desperate, but in a good way. It’s definitely the most vulnerable thing we’ve done.”

This points to Judge’s adventurous use of his voice in O Monolith, leading the album with more varied, melodicallydriven and open-hearted performances than heard on Squid’s debut. While Judge’s fevered sprechgesang style from Bright Green Field makes its way into tracks like ‘Undergrowth’, other performances range from the inquisitive, intimate delivery on ‘Devil’s Den’ to the gentle, wearied croon on ‘After The Flash’.

“I just got tired of shouting really; cosplaying as a postpunk singer,” Judge claims. “It’s not really who I am, or we are.

We’re not really shouty people.”

Borlase ascribes the band’s previous use of sprechgesang vocals to contemporary trends in UK guitar music. “There was a moment, when we were making music in 2018 and 2019, when that was exciting. [Whereas] when we were making our first music, Ollie’s vocal was the most melodic aspect,” he says,

in reference to Squid’s lesser-known 2017 EP Lino. “It’s not an arrival – it’s more like a return.”

Most songs on O Monolith are sung from a first-person perspective, in which the speaker is trying to assess or make sense of a situation, from the cabinet in ‘Undergrowth’ to the dreamer in ‘Swing (In A Dream)’. However, these characters and situations prove to broadly emerge from secondary sources – in these two tracks the respective sources are Twin Peaks and Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Swing. Asked how much O Monolith reveals of Squid themselves, Judge suggests the record presents a degree of subjective experience regardless of what else fed into the writing. “My lyric-writing tends to be very oblique, and you don’t really know what it’s about at first glance, but I always know how I felt in the moment when we wrote something.”

“I can’t speak for everyone here,” Leadbetter adds, “but I put all of who I am into what I do musically. It’s a very emotional, invested part of my life – it means so much to me.”

This underscores the overall impression given by O Monolith: that in pursuing their experimental ambitions more fully, the group have produced an album of greater emotional depth.

From the trepidation of ‘Devil’s Den’ to the yearning desperation of ‘After The Flash’, Squid’s avant-garde sensibilities have been used to express a range of sensations. In this, O Monolith is not only thrillingly inventive, but wonderfully alive.

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THESE THINGS CANNOT BE REPEATED “You can’t have a road trip without music,” says Christopher Herwig. “When you’re driving for ten hours every day, for two weeks straight, you better have some good mixtapes.”

There are few who know the importance of this more than Herwig. For over twenty years he has been painstakingly and obsessively traversing the 15 countries which were once part of the Soviet Union on the hunt for one thing: bus stops.

From Ukraine to Uzbekistan, Armenia to far eastern Siberia and everywhere in between, Herwig has been photographing unique, strangely beautiful – and increasingly disappearing – bus stops from the Soviet era.

It has resulted in two books along the way and now a new documentary, seven years in the making. Soviet Bus Stops finds Herwig tirelessly tracking down leads, driving endlessly down perilously icy roads, shovelling snow out from submerged tires with his hands and attempting to communicate with confused locals in primitive Russian.

“Since no one has really done such an extensive collection before, there really isn’t a good archive or a database out there to base your searches on,” he says. “So, a lot of the bus stops you just kind of stumble upon.” But even stumbling upon them can take a huge amount of effort. “One of the keys is always just to get off the main roads,” he says. “Because typically on the main roads they would have been redone and all the old bus stops would have been torn down. It’s more the smaller communities in the country roads and out of the way places where sometimes

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there will be thousands of kilometres of literally nothing. Then it hits you, like, oh my God, how do I get out of here?”

However, after travelling over 50,000 km through this vast territory, Herwig finds that there’s always a pay-off with enough perseverance. “You may come to a section, just a mile or two, and every 200 metres there will be something new,” he says. “And it’s like, wow – it’s like an art gallery out here. There are no towns or anything, just these bus stops lined up every 200 metres. You think: how and why is this possible?”

For two decades, Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig has been documenting the idiosyncratic bus stop architecture of the former Soviet Union, capturing examples of unique and geographically-specific creativity emerging from right beneath the gaze of authoritarian power. A new documentary charts his extraordinary mission – accompanied by an equally extraordinary soundtrack that could not have been produced under any other circumstances,

by Daniel Dylan Wray. Photography by Herwig/Fuel Publishing

When he does land on a particularly special one, it’s elating. “It’s more rewarding because you really feel like you’ve discovered something,” he says. “There are people who want to be an adventurer or an explorer but then everybody is like, ‘Oh, you know, Everest has been climbed – everything’s been done.’

Well, there’s a lot of things you can do on a smaller scale that can still give you that sense of being an explorer, that you are discovering something. I can’t really think of a project that could beat one to death quite like this but still has the same level of personal enjoyment all these years on.”

The stereotype of Soviet architecture (which contains some truth, for civilians at least) is that it was often uniform and utilitarian rather than grand, colourful and unique. Like many things in the USSR, architecture and urban planning were strictly supervised by central government, but as Herwig says, “Sometimes the benign bus stops were overlooked.” As a result, hundreds of these distinctive bus stops are now to be found all across the former Soviet Republics. “Built by individuals who decided to follow their own artistic urges,” says Herwig, “they found a way of expressing local and artistic ideas, in this small form. Their bus stops were built as quiet acts of creativity against overwhelming state control.”

However, the sheer difficulty of finding these oftenremote bus stops was not the only hurdle in Herwig’s neverending quest; local people sometimes objected too. In the documentary he can be seen being ushered away impatiently,

almost angrily, by one market trader whose stall sits in front of the bus stop Herwig is hoping to shoot. “I kind of understand where they’re coming from,” he says. “I mean, the bus stops are run down or often someone has used it as a bathroom, they look kind of rough, they’re not in their best shape. Also, people don’t see it as part of a bigger collection, it’s always just been that one bus stop. So, for them, it’s like: this is definitely not special, this is just the bus stop.”

There’s often a worry that the photos are intended to mock or caricature the often desperately poor communities – the ‘poverty porn’ argument. “There’s always this fear from people,” says Herwig, “that when you’re photographing stuff that is old and broken down, you’re going to take the picture back to your own country and you’re going to show how poor and sad looking their country is. I have had that explained to me in those words. Even though I try to say I’m genuinely interested in the architecture and I think this is really beautiful, people often wouldn’t get it and I do find that quite sad and frustrating.” In some areas, the bus stops are actively disliked and frequently torn down.

There are of course other reasons why some may not have much love for the bus stops. While many are the work of individual artists and architects, some of whom Herwig tracks down in the documentary, some were seen as material expressions of Soviet propaganda. “When it comes to places in the Ukraine or Georgia, I can totally understand that people would want to tear

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them down,” he says. “When they see it, they actually just see the Soviet Union and think of the Russian Empire and occupation. So in that respect, I find the whole thing, all of this, really quite heartbreaking.”

Y

OU MAY BE reaching this point and thinking, “Yes, this is all well and good, but why is it in a music magazine?”

Well, the Soviet Bus Stops documentary also includes a uniquely musical element that is also rooted in discovering forgotten treasures of the USSR – in this instance the Latvian space disco outfit Zodiac.

Herwig found their 1980 debut album Disco Alliance in an old Moscow shop. From the hypnotic, chugging groove of opening track ‘Zodiac’ – think Kraftwerk meets Patrick Cowley and Cluster – he became besotted. “I felt a connection in that discovery process as I did with the bus stops,” he says. “The concrete nature of a lot of the bus stops, along with the utopian, futuristic, almost space themes that get repeated in the music – I just felt that this music fitted very well.”

Zodiac were formed by Jānis Lūsēns in 1979, who was then studying composition at the Latvian State Conservatory in Riga and called upon his student friends to flesh out the project into a band. Herwig tracked him down and asked if the music could soundtrack the film, and now a standalone soundtrack album has been put together. It includes 13 remastered versions of Zodiac’s Soviet-era works alongside new compositions written especially for the documentary.

While Zodiac may have been a golden crate-digging find for Herwig, having been previously unknown to him, in their own unique way this band were huge. While the name may not be widely recognised in the EU and US, during the Soviet Union they were monstrously big, with their debut album selling 20 million copies. For context, that’s roughly the same number as Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here or Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and only just behind Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?.

“We broke the old Soviet music traditions,” says Lūsēns, who worked in collaboration with his son Jānis Lūsēns Junior (who also translates for us) on the new project. “After that a lot of bands sprung up, looking for their own musical style.”

Making or listening to music could be a challenge during these times – especially if that music could be deemed ‘Western’ in any way. However, Lūsēns was inspired by the records that were slipping through the cracks. “The Soviet Union was behind the Iron Curtain at that time but records were imported here,” he says. “Sailors did it, and diplomats did. The discs thus found their way to record duplicators who made illegal copies and traded them illegally. It was all piracy.” There were three acts that really stuck out for Lūsēns. “I liked the melodism of Space, the atmosphere of Tangerine Dream and the image of Kraftwerk,” he says.

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Yet going into the studio and making electronic music was not straightforward in those days. “As we were living in a closed-off country, no foreign consumer electronics were available legally to us,” says Lūsēns. “Foreign synthesisers were imported by diplomats who sold them here for extremely high prices, which of course for us was not an option.” The answer?

To build something themselves “from available electronic parts from the Soviet army.”

A Latvian electronics enthusiast called Feliks Stagnevics created the first synth prototype for the group in this way.

“If in the United States this is done by numerous researchers and scientists with a lot of resources available, then here it was done by one person,” recalls Lūsēns. The result is a device that sounds like no other – because there literally is no other like it.

“These sounds cannot be repeated,” says Lūsēns. “This instrument is unique.”

With this distinctive sound, the band soon hit a nerve and began to blow up, releasing their debut album Disco Alliance in 1980. Their record sales were remarkable and they performed on television; their success was a minor miracle given the circumstances. “We need to understand that the Soviet Union was a closed-off territory with KGB agents and people who could snitch you out from every gathering,” says Lūsēns. “However, those who did not openly express any antiSoviet slogans or did not openly go against the regime were relatively left alone and just observed. Also, it was lyrics that were subject to censorship. As we had no lyrics, this really did not affect us.”

The result was a record rooted in distinctly Western sensibilities, playing in the homes of millions. “The phenomenon of this was the fact that the people were tired of the content of the Soviet popular music,” says Lūsēns. “We created a feeling that finally in Soviet music shops there is a Western album available.”

However, all the things you may associate with an album blowing up and selling 20 million copies – fame, wealth, glamour, worldwide tours – did not materialise. “There were offers from USSR concert organisers,” recalls Lūsēns, “but we were not allowed to leave our studies, because then we would have had to serve in the Soviet army – nobody wanted that. And all of the income from the record remained in the common treasury of the USSR.” The band continued to release music up until 1992 but never quite matched the success of Disco Alliance and its futuristic grooves.

For Herwig, he draws a parallel between the maverick designers behind his beloved bus stops and the woozy space disco that has come to soundtrack it. “Looking back you realise how really experimental Zodiac was,” he says. “Building a synthesiser from scratch because they couldn’t get a real one – that spirit of creativity, I thought was just a perfect fit.”

The Soviet Bus Stops soundtrack is out now via Fuel-Design and the documentary is screening at film festivals throughout 2023

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Final Third

The Rates: Protomartyr

Each month we ask an artist or group to share three musicians they think have gone underappreciated and three new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. Joe Casey and Greg Ahee from Detroit band Protomartyr discuss their selections with Theo Gorst

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photography by trevor naud

Final Third Ahead of the release of Detroit art-rock group Protomartyr’s sixth full-length record, the excellent Formal Growth in the Desert, I’m sitting down with vocalist Joe Casey and guitarist Greg Ahee to chat about six underrated artists both old and new. The eclectic choices they offer helpfully lay markers as to how the band have arrived at their distinct and densely layered sound.

From starting out on the Detroit house show scene, the band have evolved into a polished touring machine. Whilst his movements are clipped and deliberate there’s a remarkable and seething intensity to Casey’s performance style, while Ahee (along with bassist Scott Davidson and drummer Alex Leonard) is responsible for a sound that deals equally in dread and violence. In person, Casey and Ahee are remarkably approachable, conversational and engaging, and before getting on to their artist choices we touch upon their concerns surrounding the band’s viability.

“We got jaded with the grind pre-Covid,” says Casey, “and then sorely missed the grind when everything closed. Now things have opened again, we have to be careful not to get burnt out.”

In spite of this caution, the duo seem adamant that creating their latest offering was the only way to channel the difficulties presented by the last few years. The following selections from them go some way towards showing how they arrived at such a richly textured sound.

We start with their three new artists.

IMMORTAL NIGHTBODY Greg Ahee: Immortal Nightbody is this guy Sim (Jackson Jr.) and it’s entirely his project. I found him because my friend

Pascal was playing a show in LA and she posted that it was with Immortal Nightbody; I listened and thought, “Oh, this is interesting and weird”, and then saw that he’d released a ton of albums over the past two or three years. I fell down the rabbit hole really quickly and was listening to this a lot right around when we were finishing writing this new album. He’s awesome.

I love his type of outsider art where he can put out anything he’s feeling and change his direction constantly. He started off as just some weird rap, post-punk thing, but the last two releases have been intense industrial goth. We asked him to open up for us on our last US tour and he was great.

Theo Gorst: Speaking of rap, ‘Fun In Hi Skool’ (off of Formal Growth in the Desert) made me think of Billy Woods. The first two thirds of that song could be the backing track to a sparse and sinister rap track.

GA: That was intentional. I remember when we were finishing writing the album I drove to upstate New York to see a movie, and the hugeness of a couple of the trailers I saw beforehand – which had hip hop songs in – resonated. I thought, “I’m going to try and capture that bass, that heaviness, to see if it works with one of our songs”.

That’s how we got ‘Fun In Hi Skool’.

TG: Joe, I was reading that when you started the band your delivery was closer to rapping than singing. On ‘Polacrilex Kid’ (also on Formal Growth in the Desert) you seem to really lean into that.

Joe Casey: Yeah, but I was worried! When we were first working on that song I didn’t want to come across like [in now-clichéd golden-age hip-hop style] “Yo, my name is Joe!”. I’m glad it has the essence of [hip-hop] without aping or trying to copy anything. It has its own thing. There’s often nothing worse than a white guy trying to rap.

TG: The track is about your quitting smoking – has your voice changed since you stopped?

JC: I think it’s gotten softer. For this next US tour I promised my fiancée that I’m going to try and do it without smoking, but maybe by the end that’ll be what ruins my voice. Maybe that was the secret sauce – [cigarettes getting] that rasp going.

I’ve never had any problems with losing

my voice on tour… maybe that’s all the smoking and drinking.

GA: That’s a nice thought: “Maybe my worst habits are the ones that keep me going.”

DAY RESIDUE JC: Day Residue are a Detroit band. What I like about them is that they are almost an inverse Protomartyr, in that the band members are mostly old fellows – or guys like Greg’s age – and the lead singer is a younger woman. The guys (in Day Residue) started playing shows with us, and still have that same energy. They’re bringing their chops of being in bands forever, and she’s bringing her youthful energy. Her I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude is refreshing; it’s good to see a band like that thriving in Detroit. They’re currently recording and anything I can do to draw attention to them I’m keen to do.

ANADOL GA: When I first heard about this feature I was like, “I think she’ll qualify!” I honestly

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Final Third

“This eccentric fellow was in a prog band, wore bandages, made proto-dance music, and was able to tour with Gary Numan and with Iggy Pop”

know next to nothing about her, except that I love her music. I’ve been obsessed with it since I heard it. I’ve listened to her last two records on repeat. We were just in Berlin a few days ago [where Anadol lives, having moved from Turkey] and when talking to a label rep I was like, “Tell me everything you know about Anadol!” I can’t really find much info other than that the music is incredible, with these Arabesque layers mixed with this electronic sound. It’s beautiful and reminds me of the best techno to have come out of Detroit.

TG: ‘Eciflere Gel’ off Felicita [her second record] is an amazing track. I love the looped groaning that comes in on it.

GA: I know! I’ve no idea how she even created it, I thought it was all found sound and samples and synths and drum machines, but I saw there’s some session musicians playing, and then there’s obviously vocals too. It’s so rare I’ll hear a record and think, “What the fuck?” and be totally blown away by it.

JC: I gotta listen to this.

GA: The angle is to try and make something that has this effect on somebody, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get there. In the meantime, it’s so enjoyable to listen to this.

TG: Her songs sound like soundtracks, which is something you did before this record right, Greg?

GA: During the worst of the Covid depression – when I didn’t want to touch an instrument and didn’t want to think about music – I got asked to score a couple short films. I really only agreed to it as I needed money, but doing them was really exciting. Listening to music with that ear again and watching films to see how the score can elevate and move the story along was interesting. Then I made some score stuff that Joe can sing over that needn’t even be a Protomartyr album. I took that mental-

72

ity and folded it into the band’s dynamic. I didn’t know if it changed the songs all that much but scoring soundtracks changed my approach, and made me excited to write again. Hearing a record like Anadol was exciting to me.

was listening to Third Power and decided to look them up. I didn’t know they were from Birmingham, Michigan – which is just outside of Detroit – and then I saw the singer’s name was Jem Targal. I went back to Facebook and realised it was the same guy!

I don’t know if he added me by accident as I had never mentioned Third Power to press at that point. During Covid I was listening to Believe [their only album, from 1970] again and again, and was probably drinking a lot. So with liquid Covid courage I messaged him and when he wrote me back he was super nice and gracious. He sent me some unreleased stuff and we kept talking back and forth. It really meant a lot to me, but sadly he passed away a few months later. During Covid that was one of the only times I reached out to anyone, and I’m so happy I did.

THIRD POWER TG: They seem like the epitome of an under the radar older band. Released one album, then disappeared.

GA: Yeah! I remember hearing Third Power on [legendary New Jersey radio station] WFMU. It was the track ‘Lost in a Daydream’ and I thought, “Oh shoot, this song is amazing.” I didn’t know anything about them but got the record and was blown away.

I still don’t know how this happened, but around that time I got a Facebook friend request from this random guy. I thought he had a funny name, which was Jem Targal. I didn’t really think about it and left it in my requests and then several months later I

THIN WHITE ROPE JC: It shocked me that I didn’t know about Thin White Rope. They should be bigger and deserve a reappraisal. I found out about them when somebody posted a fanzine interview with Robert Pollard from Guided

by Voices which had his top 50 best records ever. There was the first Thin White Rope album there [1985’s Exploring the Axis]. I’d never heard this band, so I wondered why

Final Third they were on this list. I went and listened to it, and discovered the history of them, and realised it’s a weird pocket of music that doesn’t have that cache of other kinds of genres or periods of music.

Davis, California, where they’re from, is way different from what people think of as California. It’s up in the top of the central valley, kinda near Sacramento – it’s completely different from Southern California. [Thin White Rope] is desert music but not in that cliché style. I only found out about them after we had recorded the record, when we were trying to make a kind of a high desert sound. Listening to this I think Thin White Rope nailed it, they nailed that sound and feel. The frontman [Guy Kyser] has a gruff voice but is very melodic, it seems as time went on he got a little Tom Waits-esque, but I appreciate that melodicism for someone with such a low voice. It was exciting to discover a new band that I enjoyed so much.

NASH THE SLASH JC: What really drew me to this guy is that I feel this kind of character or personality no longer has a place in the modern music industry. This eccentric fellow was

in a prog band, wore bandages, didn’t play guitars but played mandolin or violin, made proto-dance music, and was able to tour with Gary Numan and with Iggy Pop. He had his moment in the sun before fading back into obscurity. He’s actually beloved in Toronto, there are murals of him there.

His covers of classic rock songs sound so modern and ahead of time; they use really interesting drum machines and the sound he gets from his violin and mandolin is really, really fresh. He made a dance song that was super popular in Poland, it was called ‘Dance After Curfew’, and at the time they had a curfew so it was tailor-made. I’ve watched a ton of YouTube interviews with him and it’s funny to hear such a rational voice coming out of such a strange-looking character.

It’s been said that I have no charisma on stage and I can definitely feel it. A lot of the time I feel like I’m doing the most extravagant gesture and I’ll see a video of it later and it’s the opposite. I get the feeling he had the same issue: “I’m not going to be doing much but if I look weird that’ll help.” He had practical reasons for being wrapped in bandages as he did a lot of soundtracks to silent films which he’d

then project behind him. He didn’t want to get in the way of the film so [with the bandages] he became the screen.

Gary Numan saw him in Toronto and said; “Right, you’re going to be the opening act on my tour.” Not many outsider artists get that bite of the apple.

When I heard about that I thought, “These are exactly the sort of opening acts we want!”

Exclusive to Loud And Quiet subscribers, this month’s limited edition flexi disc is ‘How He Lived After He Died [Live at Sugar Hill Supper Club]’ by Protomartyr

Theatre. That’s where I met Greg and where we first drunkenly discussed starting Protomartyr.

As far as this song goes, I can’t believe we bummed the crowd, ostensibly there to celebrate, with such a morose song. In retrospect, it was (and some say is) one of the “early not terrible” songs we had, so I suppose it was chosen for this reason. As much as I love the song, it is about my dear old dad dying, so I don’t like playing it too much nowadays. I hope you enjoy the song. I am confident that it just might magically transport you back to 2014 Brooklyn in the waning days of the American music business.

Joe Casey: This version of ‘How He Lived After He Died’ was recorded on a hot July night at the Sugarhill Supper Club in BedStuy, Brooklyn in 2014. We were at the end of a little tour opening for Parquet Courts and this was a “triumphant homecoming” for them about a week after their album Sunbathing Animal came out. It was sweltering, therefore it was one of the handful of shows where I removed my jacket. From the pictures of that evening, the jacket in question was my original tuxedo coat I purchased from a Goodwill for 10 dollars so I could work as a doorman at the Gem

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In Conversation: ANOHNI

In 2016 ANOHNI released Hopelessness, an album fundamentally about the climate crisis and the destruction of Earth. Seven years on, Greg Cochrane meets the New York-based artist to tell her how much their previous meeting affected his life, and to ask if anything has changed, beyond her transformation into a soul musician on new album My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross

There’s a book by Naomi Klein called This Changes Everything (2014). It’s about how when you immerse yourself in the history, injustice and the frankly terrifying absoluteness of the climate crisis – our own extinction event – it changes everything. You can’t go back. Can’t unlearn the unfolding reality.

People often talk about having a personal This Changes Everything moment. Mine came in 2016. Stuart (Loud And Quiet editor) invited me to interview ANOHNI, formerly Antony and the Johnsons, because I love her music, particularly her bombastic reinvention on Hopelessness, an album that featured collaborative input from producers Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke. Some of it was obviously about climate change (‘4 Degrees’, ‘Why Did You Separate Me From The Earth’) but it was also a collection about war, repression and surveillance.

I met ANOHNI in what she wryly described as the “sandwich room” of a high end central London hotel. I vividly recall walking back into the Loud And Quiet office later that day. “How was the interview?” said Stuart. I inhaled deeply, puffed air through my cheeks, raised my eyebrows and slowly nodded.

“It was… a lot.” Had I been conversing, or hit by an ideological juggernaut? To me, the conversation, majoring on the theme of climate, was an earthquake, the tremors of which I still feel now.

I mean, sure, I knew about global heating, I knew we were driving some animals and possibly ourselves to extinction, but we’ve got decades to get on top of this, right? Wrong. So wrong.

Less of a conversation, more of a personal reckoning. I felt naivety, guilt, dismay. Then positively fired up. In the days and months after our meeting, my stomach remained twisted and my brain kept circling: if everything is at stake, why doesn’t every-

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one know about this? Why isn’t it headline news? Or even news at all? I talked to friends. I talked to family. I even called up climate scientists and psychology experts to find out.

I started talking a lot more to musicians about climate. It turns out a lot of them were feeling the increasing urgency of this, but didn’t know how and where to surface those thoughts. People just like me, going through some kind of dawning, confronted with a million questions and scrabbling to find some agency.

Seven years later I’m looking back on all that’s changed. I started a venture that’s about exploring and working with people and voices in the fields of climate and culture. I started a podcast called Sounds Like A Plan (now three series in) about how the music community is responding to the climate crisis. I wrote for NME, Kerrang!, Alt Press, The Guardian and my beloved Loud And Quiet about the environment and music. I’ve interviewed Radiohead, Aurora and Brian Eno on the subject. Given lectures to journalists from countries around the world. Travelled to COP26 in Glasgow with my one-year-old son, and watched Greta Thunberg speak in an enraptured crowd.

This all came from Hopelessness, and a life-altering encounter. So as ANOHNI prepares to release another extraordinary album – her most accessible yet, rooted in soul music, called My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross – we got to meet again.

GC:

A:

Hi ANOHNI. The last time we met was momentous for me [outlines all the reasons above]. I want to pass on my gratitude for that.

That sounds wonderful. I can’t believe that it would be me, but I’m glad if I was in any way catalytic. What have

photography by anohni with nomi ruiz

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GC:

A:

GC: A: GC: A:

you noticed? How do you assess the last seven years in climate awareness?

Funnily enough, that was a question I had for you! It’s hard to give a holistic answer. We have come a way, but it depends on different geographies and demographics.

Speaking about journalism, I think some mainstream news outlets have put resources behind climate reporting, but I don’t think they’ve got to grips yet with how it intersects with everything. I think that’s the next piece.

I recognise what you’re saying. It’s as if there’s a safety in attempting to continue to compartmentalise something that’s actually all consuming at this point.

Yes. I’m frustrated that we’re not further along with that.

Are you friends at all with George Monbiot [British writer known for environmental coverage]?

I’m familiar with his work, but I’m not in touch with him.

Are you?

Not actively. I’ve had messages with him in the past. I hugely admire him. I think it’s important to try to stay in touch with other people doing that work for justice in order to sustain some kind of level of wellness.

You need support when you’re doing work like that, because it can be quite lonely, gutting work to do by yourself.

GC: Yes, some days working principally in climate can feel meaningful, and other days you feel like you’re not making any progress at all. The feelings are quite extreme.

A: The truth is that all of the gestures are meaningful whether or not they’re absorbed or seem to affect change. When you’re fighting a good fight. Just as in every example of courageous activism, there’s a lot of smashing your head against the wall. That takes a real toll on the provider.

It’s not necessarily like a sweet reward. Oftentimes, it’s a brutal response to a courageous gesture, and you just keep doing the work. Just make sure you have enough support.

GC: Yes, I’ve put the communications of people I admire into my network to help build resilience. That’s useful to me.

Anyway, I wanted to start by sharing my thanks.

A: It’s meaningful that you’d tell that to me. I’m just an artist.

You’re in a much more actively politically engaged field than I am. I’m more of a muse to the field that you’re part of, so if I can be of use then that’s my best foot forward, if

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GC:

I can be of support or use or inspiration to people who’re doing activism on the ground, then that’s the best possible application of my work.

I’m a huge advocate for how music can be a gateway into climate for some people. It’s underrated, and so full of potential. It engages people on a level that perhaps something like clean energy may not.

“With Hopelessness, I was sounding the bugle for people who felt the same way I did” A:

And yet clean energy and music are very much the same thing, as a pure form. There should be a musicality to clean energy. I know that sounds cheesy, but it should be embraced as like creativity and motion.

A lot of the ways that we’re led to engage today, and have been led to engage for decades, have been designed to alienate us from our physical form – from a visceral or physical understanding of what’s really happening.

Like, the way we as people consumed colonial goods from the colonies, whether it was sugar or tobacco, or gasoline or high tech. There’s this process of infantilisation. That it seems like it’s almost necessary for one as a consumer to almost blindly ingest the goods in a guilt free way. But also in an ahistorical way. You’re no longer aware of where the things that you’re taking into your body come from or you’re no longer aware of where the things in your life come from. Especially in England. There’s a big reckoning happening in England and across Europe about its dependency – like the foundational aspect of slavery on the wealth of Europe. Its position as a “first world” region, it was all about domination and colonialism. A lot of the children, especially after World War II, were reorganised to forget that narrative. We were raised to believe our parents were the heroes of the Second World War. And that barbarism has ended and that a new age of civility is reigning supreme and that we were weirdly ahistorical.

We were being raised on BBC programmes that told us we were innocent, and we weren’t really challenged on how did we get here?

Now it’s 30 or 40 years later and everyone’s really being challenged in England, really to a point where things are becoming super polarised.

It’s overwhelming in a way. Like, how we’re going to talk ourselves down off the ledge? Because, as a species, we’re really broken. That’s part of all of our bodies, metabolisms and biologies. It’s ancestral, ancient and it’s deep within us. It’s a huge challenge we were facing seven years ago and it’s even more of an obvious challenge now.

GC: We haven’t created the spaces to be able to hold these

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huge thoughts and conversations…

My friends talk a lot about how the language isn’t even there. There isn’t a semantic structure to support these neural pathways. We need to embrace people who have other ways of thinking and dreaming. Other ways of organising themselves semantically. Why aren’t we asking for more help from indigenous leaders to think about what’s really happening? To try to come to grips with a different strategy moving forward? Because, at this point, I’m not seeing a game plan on the table – and it’s been the same for 20 years. There’s promises and governments making gestures that are obviously hollow. But nothing is on the table that’s going to prevent a collapse of biodiversity.

I think we need to be reaching further out of our toolbox now. We need to be reaching with more humility towards people that have a different grasp or spectral understanding of what’s really happening. Not just physically but spiritually.

I’m talking about reaching out to indigenous communities all over the world to help us. The only two things that I can see that could be of any deep use to us is a dramatic shift in the number of women who are in systems of governance. And then even more importantly to restore to the high seats our people with the highest vistas of understanding, to a sustainable relationship to the rest of the natural world. To ask them now to be our teachers because that’s what we need. That’s knowledge that we eviscerated.

This is a pipe dream maybe but it’s still possible, because those people still exist. For as long as they exist there’s hope that we could make a shift.

I mean, you go to a Davos conference, and then they bring like a few people from the Amazon to just decorate the hallways while the corporations are in the back room making the most malevolent decisions on behalf of the planet.

GC: I went to the UN climate conference COP26 in Glasgow, in 2021, and it felt like that.

A: Our indigenous leaders are the people with the most insight. Westerners aren’t reaching to them for insight, they’re just reaching to them for news porn or whatever.

One thing that’s become clearer to me: with Hopelessness I was really railing against the machine. I really have to say, I feel so sorry for us now. I feel sorry for those men in power. There’s a tremendous poverty of the soul that I think many people in the white world experience now. An existential void. Lack of connection. A spiritual despair. A lack of understanding of who we are, and where we come from. It’s a terrible poverty and kind of a disease.

It’s not like 30 years ago when I was reading the articles by all the elders saying, “this is what’s happening” and no one was even listening. Everyone knows that this is like the end times. It’s not like we’re at the beginning of the end, we’re right in the very middle of it.

A:

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It’s not really a cause for shock anymore as much as it’s a cause for grieving now. Now is definitely the time to grieve. Now is the time to start crying. And for people to awaken to this crying feeling and to cry for the world and to stop what they’re doing and cry as much as they can. And to get together in circles and grieve. That’s power. Like, feel what’s really happening, even if it’s just grieving. Let’s do it as collectively as we can. There’s power, movement and collective agency in that.

GC: How did you feel about the responses the album Hopelessness elicited?

A: It was almost impossible for me to assess the impact that it had because I was in the eye of it. It was only in the years later that certain people approached me and said that was useful to them.

It was actually kind of a harrowing experience for me. Not that it was a particularly dangerous thing to do but I felt like I put myself quite far out. But I was extremely proud of it, and very glad I did it. I love all those songs. I thought maybe that I was doing more of an intervention but what I learned was that I was sounding the bugle for people that felt the same way I did.

GC: And how have your thoughts and feelings on this changed in that time?

A: It’s been a changing of gears: from attempting to address my complicity and being in an onslaught of confrontation, to sort of seeing this as a system of disease and illness.

That we’re actually in the grip of. Something that’s really grave. I saw the invention of a new word: neocide.

GC: Neocide?

A: It’s the genocide of future generations. I think it’s a really powerful word. And I think that depression, that suicidal depression, is considered an illness. In the medical field they can talk about it as an illness. I would say that we are in the midst, as a species, of a suicidal depression.

GC: Lyrically, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross connects

with me in many of the same ways as Hopelessness. Musically, it’s obviously different – a soul, folk album.

A: The sound of the record really emerged from the collaboration with a guy named Jimmy Hogarth, who’s the co-producer of the record. We were really compatible and had a really good time. It’s the first record I’ve ever made in London. It felt like a very English record to me in a funny way, although obviously really influenced by American music. It was a joyful record for me to make. It wasn’t a record I expected to make. I didn’t know if I was going to make any more records. This was sort of a boon.

GC: Do you mind telling me more?

A: I guess I had a bit of a dark night of the soul, and I wasn’t really sure if I was going to return to public engagement.

GC: When did you find yourself writing again?

A: It was incremental. It was mostly just the curiosity of the creative process. Now, this part, getting back into a public conversation, has its own challenges that I’m trying to move through. The music was made without so much thought about a conversation with the public. It was just made because I felt to make it.

GC: Why does it feel like an English record?

A: Because it was made with English people. A lot of it is built on English tradition and histories of English music. I was raised on English music. I was taught to sing by Boy George, Mark Almond and Elizabeth Fraser.

GC: Do you think you will perform these new songs live?

A: I don’t know this time.

GC: You’ve said a couple of the songs on the album are a response to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, 50 years on from its release. Were someone to do the same thing, responding to the songs on your new album in 50 years’ time, what type of conversations do you imagine them having?

A: Let’s say what I hope the conversation would be? I hope it will be a conversation about people in Europe figuring out reparation and forgiveness. How to forgive themselves, to create effective reparation for the rest of the world that they influenced and decimated.

And that we’ve begun to start reeling in some of the worst aspects of diseased systems that we’ve perpetuated around the globe. Through no fault of our own individually, but collectively from which we all benefit. That we figure out ways that ‘the West’ can be of service to the rest of the world in finding a sustainable way forward for all of us.

That we have a seismic change in our collective consciousness, that will inevitably include and probably be predicated on a shift from patriarchal to more matriarchal systems of governance. That means numbers – 70% of people in seats of power will be women. And men would find humility to follow their mothers and sisters and to trust their mothers and sisters to do what’s in their best interests. And that some of these men will be talked down off the ledge. That will be my dream.

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My Place: Shirley Collins

The folk legend shows us around her home in East Sussex, sharing her paintings, awards and presents from Stewart Lee, by Stuart Stubbs

As I approach the terraced cottage of folk legend Shirley Collins, the front door is ajar.

This is a road where children can still play in the street, she later tells me, as we look out of her front window at the valley view.

She has lived here for eight years, in the centre of Lewes, although the whole of East Sussex is Collins country, from her hometown of Hastings, where, in 1950, she wrote to the BBC to inform them that she was going to become a folk singer, to the furthest point west, Brighton, where she became the patron of Morris dancing group Brighton Morris 20 years ago. “I’m very proud of that,” she tells me soon after I arrive. “I love all things Morris-y.” She pauses and then laughs. “That’s Morris-y, not Morrissey.”

Collins is now 87; a traditional folk purist and lifelong expert who’s made it her business to unearth and share countless traditional songs through her recordings and performances. Perhaps we should expect nothing less from a key voice of the English folk revival of the 1960s and 1970s, who was awarded an MBE in 2007 for services to music, but Collins’ love and respect for her field and craft can easily feel unparalleled. Never mind her 38-year blip where, following the breakdown of her second marriage in 1978, she quite simply lost the ability to sing, for nearly four decades, her music career cruelly snubbed out at the age of 43, replaced by a love for hiking.

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Since her return to music in 2016 (she’s not sure how or why her singing voice came back – she just got sick of saying no to offers of shows), she has released two more albums, with a third set for release this month. “It’s my final one,” she tells me, sat beneath the painting she commissioned for the record’s cover art.

“Three of three with Domino [Records] – it’s been wonderful, and an honour.”

The album is called Archangel Hill, and, typical of a Shirley Collins record, is once again beautiful, warm, occasionally heart-breaking, and overflowing with history, made up of songs from traditional sources and favourite writers of Collins’ – a collection of miniature epics about soldiers, sailors, farmers’ wives and tornadoes. And there’s a highlight, too, in a live recording from 1980, of Collins performing ‘Hand and Heart’ at Sydney Opera House, featuring an arrangement written by her sister and musical partner Dolly.

“Dolly’s son was very young then, and she didn’t want to come,” she remembers, “but I had her there in spirit because I had her arrangements. It’s my favourite song in a way because the words were also written by my uncle Fred. It’s quite important to have stuff that really means something that you can leave behind.”

For the afternoon, Collins shares with me some of her most treasured possessions and the stories behind them, as welcoming, warm and modest as her

music has always been, but funnier and much younger-seeming in person too.

01 WILLIAM BLAKE ART I have two pieces of William Blake art, given to me by my darling Stewart Lee. Love him! He’s such a lovely chap, and I’ve met his wife now, Bridget Christie – she’s wonderful too. I first met Stewart a few years ago. My daughter went to St Edmund Hall [Oxford University] and Stewart did at the same time. They decided to have a folk club and asked me to go up and say “I open this folk club”. Polly came with me and Stewart Lee was there as well, so I met him there for the first time. He sang a song called ‘Polly On The Shore’, which came from a Sussex singer, George Maynard.

On the whole I don’t like how people treat English folk song, because they don’t understand it – this is not vanity really, because I’m of that generation who can appreciate how it used to be sung – and he sung ‘Polly On The Shore’ in the interval, because he wasn’t sure if he had the nerve to do it in front of the audience. So he was backstage, and it just made me shiver. It was so intense, just in how he got the absolute essence of it. I almost fell in love with him on the spot because he’d done it so well. It was the start of a beautiful friendship. Eventually I met Bridget, and – sorry, this all sounds so vain – she

photography by phil sharp

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“I can boast about some gigs, and that was one of them. And then you have an ice cream at midnight”

said, “When I heard the album I just had to go out in the garden and cry.” [Pause] It was that bad.

02 HEART’S EASE COVER PAINTING This is not the original painting from the cover of Heart’s Ease [2020], because I think Alex Merry would have kept the original. She’s the leader of a Morris dancing group called Boss Morris, and as an artist her work is used by Gucci, so she’s doing very well. And she’s a beautiful dancer, I must say. They performed with Wet Leg at the Brit Awards this year.

03 ARCHANGEL HILL PAINTING And this is the cover of the new album, which is called Archangel Hill. It’s not really Archangel Hill, it’s Mount Caburn, which is a few miles outside Lewes. This is the view from the back. But my stepfather, Bill Williams, back in the ’20s was a horse groom on a farm just along the coast from here and he’d ride the horses to the races over the hill. As he got older, and a bit loopy, like most of us do, he started to call

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it Mount Gabriel, instead of Mount Caburn, and then as the years passed it morphed into Archangel Hill. Which is a better name.

I loved the sound of it, so that’s what I named the album. It means a lot to me. I commissioned a local painter called Peter Messer to paint this for me. It was a bit more expensive that I thought it would be, but I gritted my teeth and paid up.

04 LAMBS IN SOFT SUNLIGHT Next to it is the only other painting I’ve ever bought – my first piece of art. I bought it in nineteen-seventy-something, to commit myself back to myself. Because my marriage had broken up, and I knew it wasn’t going to get back together again, and it was an act of defiance, in a way, to say, ‘Yeah, I can manage without you… if I get some sheep in soft light.’ I felt so proud bringing it home. I felt like a proper person who loved the arts.

05 AMERICAN FOLK ART I swapped this picture for a day’s work in an antique shop. I fell in love with it when

I say it. It’s American folk art, and she suggested I take that as my day’s earnings. I was thrilled to bits. And there’s a Staffordshire greyhound over there, and I got that for another half day’s work in an antique shop. And all this stuff is really precious. I find it impossible to throw things out, but I know I’ve got to start. You should see my study upstairs – there are files that go back to nineteen-sixty-something; my contract with PRS is 1961, I think. I’m sure I don’t need it anymore.

06 TROPHIES I have two of these awards, but this one was before I managed to start singing again, when Topic Records asked me if I’d like to do a compilation of the field recordings of the gypsy singers of England of the 1950s. Wonderful singers with wonderful songs. It was three CDs and won an award [from fROOTS magazine]. The other one I won the Album of the Year, for Lodestar, which was my first album back in 2016.

They’re very heavy awards, so if you’re going to do the same don’t give them out to weaklings.

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07 PENDERYN PRIZE Let’s boast for a bit. I won the Penderyn Prize for the book of the year [for her second book, 2018’s All in the Downs].

I couldn’t keep the whiskey because it was, like, 49% proof, and I don’t drink whiskey. Everyone else was quite thrilled to help me empty that, but I kept the box because it’s so handsome. They also give you a cheque for a thousand quid – lovely.

I didn’t share that amongst my friends. It probably paid off my overdraft.

It was lovely to get that, except in the audience the night it was presented, there was one very popular pop group who were up for the prize as well. They had a lot of support in the audience, and when my name came up it didn’t go down too well – it went a bit vociferous. But John Cooper Clarke was there and he said he liked me. It was lovely, and it’s surprising sometimes who likes your work.

08 VENICE KEY RING This is one of my absolute treasures. If I lost this I’d be bereft. It’s from St Mark’s

Campanile, the clock tower of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. I bought it in the shop at the top, with the Venetian lion, and that’s Saint Mark I guess, and I just LOVE it. I’d be heartbroken if I ever lost it. Venice is just a magical place.

I had a show called America Over the Water [2005], where I talked about the experience of being in America in 1959 recording in the Deep South, with music to illustrate it as well. It was a two-hander with my friend Pip [Barnes], who’s also in the Lodestar band [Collins’ backing band], and we played in Serrano in Italy. I hesitated about going, saying, “No, it’s just two of us talking with music in between. And it’s an Italian audience, so they won’t be able to understand us anyway.” And he said, “No, no, we want you anyway.” So we went and we played in a theatre that was played in by Mozart, and queues around the block were extraordinary; they had to open up balcony after balcony. They had a moving print-out of what we were saying, so the audience could read what we were saying. We were an absolute sensation. I can boast about some gigs, and that was one of them. And then you have an ice cream at midnight.

09 MORRIS ART My sister was married to a Morris dancer.

I’ve always loved Morris dancing. It’s the manliness of it, which is silly to say because a lot of people think of Morris dancing as just old men who can hardly get their feet off the ground, but with a great side it’s such a wonderful sight and experience. To have a team of twenty raise sticks with bells on their legs I’ve always found quite thrilling. It’s so English, and so despised by so many people, understandably in some cases, because it can be danced so feebly. But when you see the real thing, it’s just fabulous.

10 STARFISH FOSSIL Now have a look and see what you can see on there. You’ll see when you see it. Can you see a tiny, tiny starfish fossil? I was just laying on the beach letting stones run through my hand and there it was when I looked down. Isn’t it incredible?! It’s miraculous – a.) that it was there, and b.) that I would actually find it. I can’t part with it. I keep it in a pewter teapot… for some reason.

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Between the years of 2007 and 2015, one of the worst things about being a pop star was that Philip Green would open Top Man after hours and insist that you fill a bag with “anything you like.” No formal agreement was made, but it was heavily implied that everyone should leave with a least one bowtie, and that it was impolite to not take a couple of waistcoats off Green’s hot, damp hands. Then you had to wear your new clothes on TV and in photo shoots, and on the cover of album sleeves that will exist forever, where a confused and terrified member of your group lays across the roof of a telephone box in a tableau that unequivocally says ‘Take Me Home’, but only because the words ‘Take’ ‘Me’ and ‘Home’ are written above that tableau.

I’m not going to sit on the fence on this one – this sleeve is an insult to Green’s merchandise, which, itself, was an insult to all other clothing.

Unless that telephone box is on the edge of a cliff, Liam Payne needs to calm down. You’re on a telephone box, Liam – just hop back off! Is Louis Tomlinson getting on or just supporting Payne through his trauma? And who told Niall Horan to laugh at the blank ceiling of the telephone box like that?! Because someone told them to do all of these things, and how can you not be furious at that!? Someone was on this set, at this moment, saying “just hold that please, lads... That’s really nice!” Someone came up with Liam Payne on a telephone box for an album called Take Me Home, and they looked at all the photos they took and someone signed off on this one! And it sold 6m copies.

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Fans were left disappointed when it was proved that the person they believed to be Meghan Markle in disguise at the coronation was Hairy Biker body double Karl Jenkins from psych folk wizards Soft Machine, but a new rumour has now surfaced – that Jenkins and Markle are the same person.

Piers Morgan was allegedly spotted in The Ivy whispering “pass this on...” to anyone that passed his table for one, at a volume that could wake the dead. Sources say that when a waiter pointed out that Markle was born a full 9 years after Jenkins joined Soft Machine in 1972, Morgan hissed, “Typical woke reponse! Well, it’s still true because I said so.

So, Pass. It. On!”

Phoebe Bridgers would consider not guesting on an album if the project felt right

illustration by kate prior

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Out 09.06.23