DIY, June 2023

KILLER

and the

Question!

Last month, DIY threw a frankly ridiculous party for James Acaster’s Temps album launch which saw Finn Wolfhard and Paul Rudd - yes, Actual Paul Rudd - in attendance. Who else, however, would we want to put on our own personal party guestlist?

SARAH JAMIESON • Managing Editor

I’m still on a bit of a Succession comedown, so Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook would have to be in the mix, maybe with a bit of Paul Mescal for good measure.

EMMA SWANN • Founding E ditor Harry Styles and Lizzo for BRITs 2020 laughs, then Adele for her and Lizzo’s 2023 GRAMMYs antics in turn.

LISA WRIGHT • Features Editor

The entire cast of The Offce US, in character, please. Also maybe at the end, I would be presented with my very own Dundie Award for throwing the best party.

LOUISE MASON • Art Director

Rik Mayall, the whole of the Mighty Boosh, plus Julia Davis please. And Miranda July of course. It shall be an animal themed dress code and I will be a puffn.

Editor's Letter

Over the course of over twenty years now, Killer Mike has not just become one of the most ferce and formidable voices in rap but in the wider sociopolitical landscape. While previously, we’ve welcomed him to DIY’s cover alongside his partner-in-crime El-P (as the ferocious duo Run The Jewels), this month we’re honoured to be welcoming Mike back to celebrate his deeply personal solo record ‘Michael’.

Elsewhere this month, Fontaines DC’s Grian Chatten gives us a glimpse into his new solo outing, we meet pop’s most bewitching act Maisie Peters and we limber up for Dream Wife’s electric third album. Plus, we give you the full report from Blur’s tiny reunion shows last month; be still our beating hearts…

Sarah Jamieson, Managing Editor

Listening Post

BLUR - THE BALLAD OF DARREN

We’ve heard it, and it’s a corker. Proving that you can grow old gracefully whilst still fnding new ways to polish up the sparkle that made you so beloved in the frst place, Blur’s incoming ninth fnds Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave on fne form - with a couple of non-ballads thrown in there too (soz Darren).

JACOB SLATER - PINKY, I LOVE YOU

Having successfully cantered to the front with Wunderhorse, now Jacob Slater is back with a solo record under his own name. Where his equine debut prioritised Springsteen-esque Americana and feshed-out band tunes, ‘Pinky, I Love You’ is sparse, acoustic and Elliott Smith-like in its fragility.

ARCTIC MONKEYS - WHATEVER PEOPLE SAY I AM, THAT’S WHAT I’M NOT

A happy Monkeys month, to all who celebrate! Touring throughout June, with a pair of 60,000-capacity London shows and a cheeky little Glastonbury headline to cap it all off, Alex Turner and co are bringing the big guns for this stadium run. Kicking off the frst of their UK dates with a rarely-outed ‘Mardy Bum’? Don’t mind if we do!

June playlist

Scan

Photo: Louise Mason

Contributors: Adam England, Bella Martin, Ben Tipple, Charlie Harris, Cordelia Lam, Ed Lawson, Elvis Thirlwell, Emma Wilkes, James Hickey, Jenessa Williams, Joe Goggins, Kate Brayden, Louis Griffn, Louisa Dixon, Matthew Davies Lombardi, Neive McCarthy, Nick Levine, Otis Robinson, Sam Davies, Shervin Lainez, Tyler Damara Kelly.

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Flying

Words: Elvis Thirlwell.

ollowing the global success of Fontaines DC’s third album ‘Skinty Fia’ just last year, and ahead of the band’s mammoth 30-date US tour this autumn supporting Arctic Monkeys, few could have anticipated the news of a solo record from the band’s talismanic frontman Grian Chatten - or for it quite to sound quite as fragile and exposed.

More Donovan than ‘Dogrel’, ‘The Score’ offers up a strikingly pared-back sound; all acoustic guitars, romantic string arrangements and whimsical melodies. A far cry from the bedevilled yet empowered shaman of Fontaines fame, soothsaying in the heated crucible of rock‘n’roll rage, Grian Chatten the solo artist comes across like some Marty Robbinstype folk troubadour, cast adrift in the barren wastelands of bleak consciousness, chowing down on his hard luck stories.

Venting the exhaustions of heavy workloads and relentless touring schedules, album ‘Chaos For The Fly’ is, in one sense, a cathartic expulsion of all the darker aspects of fronting one of the fastest rising rock bands to emerge in the past fve years.

“There was an end-of-my-tether kind of feeling on the last American tour,” Grian confesses of the songs’ conceptions.

“There were things in my personal life that were fnally starting to really disintegrate as a result of not really having a consistent life anywhere, nurturing my relationships with my family or my friends. So there were a lot of dark moments of isolation with nothing but a guitar, and I think I became a bit obsessed with digging into that sense of despair to be honest, in a kind of selfindulgent way. And in order to contextualise the way that I was feeling, in lieu of probably a social life or friends or a therapist, I think the songwriting became really important.”

Much of Grian’s lyricism across the album represents his bleakest to date. Profuse with distrust, doubt and misery, if he’s not justifying his life of loneliness on ‘Faerlies’, or gloomily heralding a ‘Season For Pain’, he’s wrangling with an allconsuming misanthropy, as on world-weary piano ballad ‘All Of The People’; “People are scum / I will say it again / Don’t let anyone tell you that / They wanna be your friend,” goes one choice couplet.

Was there any reluctance in immortalising such pessimistic sentiments on record? “When I was recording and putting the album together, I was thinking to myself, ‘Is anyone going to care about how I feel?’” he answers. “It’s so heavy on the feeling on this record; [the songs] came from a place of real depression. I’m sure there's going to be some people that are going to be able to relate to it, but at certain points I did feel like, ‘Am I making

Fsomething that's oppressive?’ You know what I mean? But it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because I still feel like it had to be made for myself.”

It’s this fearlessness and drive towards honesty of expression which itself speaks to certain burning ambitions kept slightly more quiet until now. Speaking from his new “gaff” in London, and having been pulled away from a “new tune” he was working on in his already-set-up home studio, Grian describes how the concept for a solo album predates many of the songs within the record itself, which can all be traced back to one moment of inspiration.

“I had the notion of the idea probably towards the end of lockdown, when I was spending a lot of time on my own, by the sea, back in the town [Skerries] I’ve lived in since I was twelve,” he explains. “Being surrounded again by the docks and the bobbing boats and the casinos and the kind of lapse around the town, the drudgery… It was one night when I was walking along to what we call the Stoney Beach. I was seeing the lights refected off the water and stuff, and I had an idea for the track called ‘Bob’s Casino’ on the record. It kind of came to me relatively fully formed, with all the string arrangements and the horns and everything, and the vocals and stuff. And I just thought, ‘I wanna complete this myself’.”

The song in question also provides the album’s most surprising moment. A chintzy swung rhythm bedecked with horn parts so bright you can see the sunshine glinting off them, ethereal guest vocals from Grian’s partner Georgie Jesson also add another layer of grace. The whole thing sounds not only like an unsettlingly pristine Lynchian fever dream, but also like nothing the musician has ever put his name to thus far.

Undercutting the aforementioned narrative of emotional catharsis is also this sense of escapism and childhood revelry, of Grian returning to his roots. What’s amazing about ‘Chaos For The Fly’ is how unashamedly pretty it can be. There are panoramic excursions into psych-pop and even ‘90s trip-hop here (“It was defnitely a joke at frst!” he says of the latter); recorded in partnership with longtime Fontaines collaborator Dan Carey, this contrast between the light and dark formed part of the record’s design from the get-go.

“I certainly listen back to the record now and I’m like, ‘Fuck man, it’s so bright like, you know?’” Grian says. “We really wanted it to feel like it was all taking place more or less in a casino. Some songs are kind of inserted into a tape player, like a cartridge, or a simulation. They have this kind of ‘80s, hyper-real compression and brightness to them. That was one of the things that we used conceptually to make the album sound a bit more comprehensive.”

Not content with fronting one of the breakthrough bands of the decade, Fontaines DC frontman Grian Chatten is now channelling his prolific creativity into a new solo album: ‘Chaos For The Fly’.

“I listen back to the record now and I’m like, ‘Fuck man, it’s so bright’.”

Carey’s Corner

Producer Dan Carey gives us a glimpse into how ‘Chaos of the Fly’ came to be.

Are there sides of Grian that came out that felt different to previous times working together?

Musically when you’re making a solo record you don’t need the agreement of a whole band, so there are parts of this record that describe some strange corners of Grian’s mind. I remember being taken aback when he played me the demo of ‘Bob’s Casino’; it would have been hard to get fve people to agree on that!

What is it about Grian as a songwriter that most excites you?

Everything he writes contains layers that only become apparent once you’ve studied it. All his lyrics get more interesting the more you think about them.

Is there a favourite track or moment on the album that encapsulates it for you?

When we were recording ‘All of the People’, we originally were doing it on guitar but it wasn’t sounding right. Suddenly Grian asked me to play it on the piano instead. We left the tape running and moved the mic to the piano and did a take - piano with vocals together. Because I’d never played it before, the piano playing is very hesitant; there’s one chord near the end that’s really late because I had to try and think what it was, but we used that take and it now sounds like it was meant to be like that. I guess that encapsulates not the aims, but the nature of the recording.

It’s perhaps an unexpected set of inspirations; one flled with leftfeld moments that might surprise some of Fontaines’ more die-hard fans. Grian, however, isn’t worried. “Honestly, I think Fontaines fans will probably like it as a sort of spin-off,” he says. “Even though there are big arrangements in the sense of the strings and the horns, I still feel the whole thing is ‘in the pocket’ in a way that it doesn't try to stand over the Fontaines material too much. I think it still feels compact and secure in its own kind of casing, and its own packaging. I'm by no means shooting for the fucking stars with this record. I'm not even touring it. I'm not trying to get a Number One record or anything like that.

“I do think that, for me as an individual, it's really important for me to establish a line of work that exists beyond Fontaines DC,” he continues. “Probably for the rest of time, in some form or another. Whether it be Grian Chatten, or another group, or just working for other people. To be honest with you, I think either way, I’m probably going to die with a fucking load of albums under my belt. I don't think that one vehicle is enough for me in this day and age; there’s too many songs living and dying inside of me. I think I heard Mac DeMarco saying something similar when he released that fucking 199-track

album, y’know?”

Ultimately it’s clear that, while Grian is keen to trailblaze a pathway of his own, the ambitions he holds with Fontaines remain very much intact. Channelling these urges into new projects almost feels like a compulsive act of creative preservation - speaking of which, what do the other members of Fontaines DC think of his solo endeavours?

“When it comes to this kind of thing, we’re preposterously Irish about expressing our feelings to each other!” he laughs. “I don't think they've really heard it before, but I haven’t sent the record to anyone. I saw them the other day and they’re like, ‘Man, I’m loving the two tunes you put up!’ They’re getting into it at the same rate as everyone else really.

“They’re very supportive though,” he continues. “I think they know how much I write, and the song turnover is a bit high for one band. It’ll be a good thing for the band I think, in the sense that I don’t think I'll be trying to hang on to songs that I believe in from two and a half years ago, trying to justify their position on a new Fontaines record. It would help the process be a little bit more fresh - an ‘in one fell swoop’ kind of thing - which I think is probably healthier.”

‘Chaos For The Fly’ is out 30th June via Partisan. DIY

Legend of the Month Bill Murray

We’re bringing back an old DIY Magazine staple for one month and one reason only: because spotting the man, the myth, the legend Bill Murray at Mighty Hoopla could only elicit this level of props. Among a line upAqua! Natasha Bedingfeld! Samantha Mumba! - that made a strong argument for the last 20 years being an entire fgment of our imagination, what on earth was Bill there for, you may ask?

Well reader, he was there playing chaperone to some of the younger Ghostbusters cast, who needed an adult with them to access the festival. Not all heroes wear capes…

’Gram on the

These days, even yer gran is posting selfes on Instagram. Instagran, more like. Everyone has it now, including all our fave bands. Here’s a brief catch-up on music’s fnest photo-taking action as of late.

CMAT had only just caught up on the whole Taylor and Matty news. @cmatbaby

The Last Dinner Party: a buzz band, through and through. (@thelastdinnerparty)

“And this is not my beautiful dog!” (@yelyahwilliams)

I don't think that one vehicle is enough for me - there’s too many songs living and dying inside of me.”

C☺MING

Playing their frst show in eight years at Colchester’s tiny Arts Centre - the town where it all began, way back when - BLUR are back, and with Darren in tow.

Words: Lisa Wright.

“This is our frst time playing at this venue,” begins Damon Albarn, addressing 400 sweaty and elated punters who have managed to nab tickets for Blur’s inaugural tiny warm up show at Colchester Arts Centre. “I’m sorry it took us so long…”

It’s been more than three decades coming: a return to the town where Damon, guitarist Graham Coxon and drummer Dave Rowntree frst met before graduating - alongside bassist Alex James - to music history’s top tier. Kicking off a short run before the band embark on a series of mammoth summer dates including two nights at London’s 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium, these gigs also come buoyed with an unexpected announcement; as well as gearing up for their frst live shows in eight years, the quartet have also been secretly squirrelling away in the studio. Ninth album, ‘The Ballad of Darren’, will be released on 21st July.

It’s a record, they explain during a Q&A among the display cabinets of Colchester Castle shortly before stage time, that came about in as off-the-cuff a way as it’s possible for a band of Blur’s stature to operate. “We fnished the record two weeks ago. The whole point was, how can we be a band again unless we make music that’s new and true to where we are as human beings now?” says Damon. “So that’s what we’ve endeavoured to do.” First single ‘The Narcissist’ - a rousing and sentimental mid-tempo comeback that arrived the day before - was only fnished eight days previously.

“I thought, I’m not gonna tell anyone but it’d be great if we made a new record, so I did all my demos on the last Gorillaz tour in hotels and venues and a lot of dodgy conference rooms,” the vocalist continues. “It was the only way I could do this, to be totally divorced from all the [pressure] that making a new record would have, and just not think about it, just work hard.”

Tonight, that track receives its live debut alongside one other newie, ‘St. Charles Square’. If ‘The Narcissist’ veers towards Damon’s more tender, melancholic side, then ‘St. Charles…’ shows Blur haven’t

All The People…

SETLIST

ST. CHARLES SQUARE

THERE'S NO OTHER WAY POPSCENE

TROUBLE IN THE MESSAGE CENTRE

CHEMICAL WORLD BADHEAD BEETLEBUM

TRIMM TRABB

VILLA ROSIE

COFFEE & TV OUT OF TIME

END OF A CENTURY PARKLIFE TO THE END

OILY WATER

ADVERT SONG 2

THIS IS A LOW GIRLS & BOYS THE NARCISSIST TENDER FOR TOMORROW THE UNIVERSAL

People…

lost their scrappier edges; full of Graham’s classic tearaway fretwork and vocal howls, there’s a youthful glee to the track that’s entirely in keeping with the mood of the evening. Ripping through a setlist that includes never played before oldies (‘Villa Rosie’), stormy fan favourites (‘Trimm Trabb’), a hefty whack of ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’ classics as the record celebrates its 30th birthday, and hit after hit after hit, Blur are clearly revelling in the joys of their inimitably winding back catalogue as much as the feverous pit in front of them.

“This time we stripped it really back to basics with just the four of us and Mike [Smith, longtime collaborator],” says Alex of the album’s recording process. Damon picks up: “That’s how we wanted to play live [as well]. We imagined it as us at our purest and most uncomplicated: the original intention, not the one you get carried away with when you become a big band. How we play tonight is kind of how we’ll play at Wembley, although presumably it’s going to be a bit better by then. But the intention is exactly the same, whether it’s here or there.”

“A bit better”, you sense, refers to the fact that the band have only been rehearsing for a fortnight. But it’s exactly this sense of looseness that makes tonight’s show such a dizzyingly excitable spectacle. Despite the fact that Blur are one of the most successful bands of their generation; despite the fact that the run of songs tonight is ludicrous in its hit power (‘Coffee & TV’, ‘Out of Time’, ‘End of a Century’, ‘Parklife’ and ‘To The End’ come one after another in a fve-song blast), there’s still a winking cheekiness that’s present every time Damon swaggers around the stage or Graham delivers a customarily bratty backing vocal. Even though several decades have passed since the musicians were frst kicking about these Essex streets, you can still see the exact dynamic between them that’s always been there.

“What I’m most pleased about with the new record is just how relaxed it all sounds. It just sounds really comfortable and not trying too hard. There’s an effortlessness to it,” Alex begins when asked about Blur’s incoming latest as his bandmates immediately start picking the idea apart. “Speak for yourself…” Damon says, arms folding in mockindignation. “There’s some INCREDIBLY diffcult guitar passages,” Graham pipes up. “And oh, the WORDPLAY!” the frontman chuckles.

If ‘The Ballad of Darren’ has anything like the easy rapport that comes from the band’s frst show back, then safe to say Blur’s legacy will be in safe hands.

‘The Ballad of Darren’ is out 21st July via Parlophone / Warner. DIY

B re a kgni

“Being quite androgynoussounding gave the impression that I was this mysterious loner sequestering in my bedroom.”

DIY In Deep is our monthly, onlinecentric chance to dig into a longer profle on some of the most exciting artists in the world right now.

Returning with second album

‘In The End It Always Does’, The Japanese House’s Amber Bain is forging a new future based in confdence and selfexploration. Words: Jenessa Williams.

The Circle DIY in deep

hen a romance comes to an end, it’s often tempting to ponder the cyclical nature of things; to try and pinpoint the exact moment when old habits started to repeat themselves. When you’re a musician, though, it’s even easier to dwell on the ‘what ifs’ and to think about what you might lose - or gain - from the creative stimulation of heartbreak.

On the eve of her second record ‘In The End It Always Does’, Amber Bain - otherwise known as The Japanese House - is considering her process, positioning herself within the hand-drawn, infnite circle that adorns her album’s artwork. “Both times I've fnished an album, I’ve been at the end of a relationship,” she says, calling in over Zoom. “It just makes you wonder: is this just what I do, or is it completely random timing? Would I even be able to fnish a record if I wasn't at the end of the relationship?”

Her camera isn’t on - a move you might initially interpret as symbolic of the mystery that made her early name. But as she quickly explains, she’s not trying to be distant. She’s actually just preserving her internet connection as she roams around Chicago, keeping up a running commentary of every cute dog she sees on her walk. It’s an intimate conversation, and yet innocuously so; much as with her music, Amber is happy to talk with sociable specifcity, a far cry from the reluctant pop star that she’s often been painted as.

“Being quite androgynous-sounding just gave the impression that I was this mysterious loner sequestering in my bedroom,” she laughs. “But I’ve never been an introvert. It's funny, because if you see a painting or read some poetry, you can appreciate that without the context of the creator. But with music, it seems really important that people know basically everything about you, and some people are still confused. I will often see comments on my music videos like, 'Is this a girl or a boy?’” Her shrug is nearly audible. “I mean, you tell me…”

Certainly, the early ambiguity of The Japanese House played a massive part in Amber’s breakthrough, with endless rumours swirling as to who and where this celestial indie pop could be coming from. At frst, listeners thought that it might be a side project of The 1975’s Matty Healy. When it turned out that the haunting, multi-layered vocals were actually the work of a 21-year-old blonde from Hertfordshire, the blogosphere went wild, leading to a Dirty Hit signing and a close-knit production relationship with Matty and fellow ‘75 member, George Daniel.

Looking back on her origins now, Amber describes her signature autotuned ethereality as something of a happy accident. “When I’m in the initial stages of writing, I like to get things down quickly, so I’d just sing something and

Tbe like ‘Cool, whack autotune on it for now while I work it out’,” she explains. “But then I realised that the only other person that people could compare me to was Imogen Heap, repeatedly. So I thought, well, this must be kind of original.”

Though she’s proud of what she achieved on her early EPs and 2019 full-length debut ‘Good At Falling’, Amber had long been feeling a creeping desire to do things differently, to “leave that specifc electronic synthy thing behind”. “Maybe it’s just getting older, but now I'm much more about the message, or some really intricate instrumentation. I'm enjoying the performance side of the production now, rather than just a quick vibe.”

Long-term fans needn’t worry themselves about radical reinvention though; she’s keen to state that the change on her new record isn’t “crazily different”, just a case of learning to be more upfront. “Both in my vocals, and in the fact that the lyrics are pretty on the nose,” she elaborates. “It’s probably why I fnd it hard to listen to my old stuff sometimes, because I can hear that I'm shying away a bit, not being completely honest lyrically, or barely hearing what I’m singing. I just feel a lot more confdent now. And I think I like myself more. Which never hurts!”

Liking oneself isn’t always easy to achieve in the tumultuous years of your earlyto-mid twenties, but from the moment you hit play on ‘Spot Dog’ (a chaotic reimagination of one of Amber’s exes’ favourite songs, the 101 Dalmatians theme), the new-found conviction of The Japanese House is truly striking. It’s not just in the clarity of her vocal, either; where the melodies of ‘Good At Falling’ often felt like meditative lullaby, its follow-up has a brightness and detail that boldly flls what might once have been left as liminal space. Any Imogen Heap comparisons should shortly be put to bed — if anything, this record feels closer to Caroline Polachek via fickers of Phoebe Bridgers, MUNA and even Haim, fnding an infectious balance between melancholy and optimism.

‘Sad to Breathe’, the lead single, breaks its heart over an exhilarating indie pop BPM, while even tragic album closer ‘One For Sorrow, Two For Joni Jones’ resigns itself to the peace of romantic solitude, embracing the company of Amber’s pet dachshund: “Sometimes I think without you / Life would lose its bones / But really, day to day, I’ll still just be walking in the park with my little Joni Jones”. “My other dog Calvin probably thinks I’m being a traitor,” she says. “But that’s another thing that happened; Calvin now spends most of his time with my dad, because him and my ex’s dog didn't get on. He’s living his dream life now, but it does make me sad. Sometimes things just don't work out.”

‘In The End it Always Does’ is out 30th June via Dirty Hit.

Read the full feature at diymag. com/thejapanesehouse. DIY

Photo: Shervin Lainez.

And that’s what we call light entertainment.

CMAT HAVE FUN!

A kiss-off anthem of the jauntiest calibre; ‘Have Fun!’ wears its sarcasm on its sleeve, from that eye-roll of an exclamation mark outwards. A thoroughly hoe-down affair that should, by rights, have people line-dancing across the summer’s felds, it’s like Scissor Sisters’ ‘Mary’ by way of Dolly Partonwith just as much sass as both of those ideas might suggest. “You did me wrong and lost out / I’d wonder what you’re up to now but I don’t care,” she sings whilst having, undoubtedly, more fun than any loser ex could possibly hope to achieve. (Lisa Wright)

HAVE YOU HEARD?

BLOC PARTY FEATURING KENNYHOOPLA Keep It Rolling

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE Emotion Sickness

Marking the band’s frst new material since 2017’s ‘Villains’, Queens of the Stone Age have ushered in their newest era in typically hefty style. On ‘Emotion Sickness’ - not an ode to Phoebe Bridgers, as it turns out - the band return with their signature mix of muscular riffs and swaggering vocals sounding as delicious as ever, but this time, an ELO-tinged chorus lifts things to another funky level. It’s giving ‘Era Vulgaris’ vibes and we’re here for it. (Sarah Jamieson)

When KennyHoopla released single ‘how will i rest if i’m buried by a highway //’ in 2020, there was just one name on listeners’ lips, its combination of math rock, og ‘70s post-punk and that disinterested delivery more than recalling a certain London-based foursome’s earliest work: that he’s actually teamed up with Bloc Party for ‘Keep It Rolling’ now is sonic kismet in action. It’s a welcome showcase of both acts’ more considered sides that refects their earlier selves but doesn’t feel like an attempt to rehash old ground. Between this and Bloc Party’s recent love from genre titans Paramore, who’d have guessed the prime benefciaries of the pop-punk revival this side of the Atlantic would have been an act who, during its frst reign, were its polar opposite?! (Emma Swann)

BE YOUR OWN PET

Worship The Whip

On one hand, a deliciously spiky ode to the pleasures of the sexual underbelly (complete with latexwearing cover art); on the other, a take down of authority fgures wielding their own powerful whips to keep the people down, the second track from Be Your Own Pet’s comeback album ‘Mommy’ shows that 15 years away has done nothing to dampen their vitality. With stalking bass, explosive guitars and snarling vocals c/o Jemina Pearl Abegg, ‘Worship the Whip’ picks up from the ‘00s indie-punk dance foor BYOP frst came from and makes it sound thrilling all over again. (Lisa Wright)

PIRI & TOMMY VILLIERS nice 2 me

Following on from the release of last year’s ‘froge.mp3’ and February’s hyperpop-drenched single ‘updown’, piri & Tommy Villiers are back with a new feel-good offering that bears a simple message at its heart: just be nice, alright? Inspired by what piri calls a bit of an “obvious” sentiment, there’s no beating around the bush with ‘nice 2 me’. “I’m not hard to please / Can’t you just be nice to me?” goes the sugary chorus, atop skittering beats, in what’s sure to be a massive singalong anthem this summer. (Sarah Jamieson)

I’m not ashamed to say I roared like a football fan when I read that HMV is returning to Oxford Street. The iconic music retailer has been absent from London’s most famous shopping destination since February 2019, when its fagship store was closed along with 26 other HMV outlets across the country. There had been an HMV at that location since 1921, but for the last four years it has played host to yet another American sweet shop. Out went Eminem and Swedish House Mafa records; in came endless packets of M&Ms and Swedish Fish. But now, in a cute full circle moment, HMV is reclaiming its original home. Welcome back, lads!

When I was a teenager growing up just outside London, my favourite weekend treat was to jump on the train for a day of record shopping. My best mate James and I would hit up Berwick Street in Soho for an hour or two of crate-digging, but only after we’d visited both – yes, both – of the big HMVs. Back in the early noughties, there was another, even larger branch located at 150 Oxford Street; this was where most pop stars and indie bands came for signings and in-store gigs. I have especially fond memories of watching Charlotte Church perform there in 2005 during her short-lived pop era; even now, 18 years later, I think of ‘big HMV’ whenever Chazza belts out the line "I need professional heeeeeeeeeelp!" on ‘Crazy Chick’.

Back then, it was easy to perceive independent record stores as more authentic – a place for “real music fans” – and ‘big HMVs’ and Virgin Megastores as corporate and soulless. As CD sales dwindled in the face of stiff competition from downloads, they seemed to

stock ever more DVDs, video games and random tat. But now, with fewer music shops of any description on the high street, I realise how vital and exciting those big boys were. Your local indie was the place to go for obscure 7” singles, but a big HMV always had you covered when you wanted an import-only CD by an American act who’d yet to break the UK. Remember, kids, there was no such thing as Spotify back then.

Big, accessible high street record shops are still just as important now. If you’re a kid from a small town venturing into the towering aisles of a record shop for the frst time, chances are the familiar faces on the HMV shelves will feel way more welcoming than the obscure neo-jazz aisle in the cooler indie shop. And even though it was more mainstream, the sheer range of music on display at a big HMV was always dazzling. It's tough to say which was more fun: browsing the £5 sale section for bargains, or sneakily moving your favourite singer’s latest album to a better position on the ‘new releases’ stand.

Of course, there is another retailer now that offers even more physical product than a big HMV: Amazon. With this in mind, I’ll end by quoting from two very wise women. First, Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got ‘til it's gone?” And second, Kylie Minogue: “It's true what they say – it's better the devil you know.” So, welcome back to Oxford Street, HMV, and let's hope you have artists queuing up for in-stores once again. Can anyone see if Dua Lipa is free? DIY

“I roared like a football fan when I read that HMV is returning to Oxford Street.”

On The Record is a chance for DIY’s esteemed writers to wax lyrical about the subjects close to their hearts and populating your timelines. This month, Nick Levine on why we should be welcoming the return of HMV’s fagship store with open arms.

IN THE STUDIO WITH…

VAGABON

Recruiting Rostam Batmanglij to put the fnishing touches to it, Laetitia Tamko is looking to the dancefoor on third record ‘Sorry I Haven’t Called’.

Words: Nick Levine. Photos Max Knight.

Vagabon thought she had fnished her upcoming third album, ‘Sorry I Haven’t Called’. The New York musician born Laetitia Tamko was ready to get the record mixed when Rostam Batmanglij, the former Vampire Weekend star turned pop magician who has worked alongside the likes of with Carly Rae Jepsen, Clairo and Haim, sent her a DM. After accepting the invitation to swing by his studio, Laetitia played him a couple of tracks, including her balmy recent single ‘Carpenter’, then received an offer she couldn’t refuse.

“He was like, ‘I have to work on that song!’” she recalls. “So we worked on ‘Carpenter’ together, just adding some fnishing touches, and then he said: ‘You know, I think I can help you fnish this album in a way that you could feel good about’.”

Though Vagabon admits that it “almost felt a bit too serendipitous” for Rostam to reach out just as she was approaching the fnal hurdle, saying yes was ultimately “an easy decision.” His passion for the music was palpable and, because she had spent so long with the record, “there was no way it couldn’t have me all over it”.

Vagabon describes Rostam’s contributions to the fnished album as “a series of small changes that amounted to something big.”

On ‘Carpenter’, for example, he suggested adding a swirling guitar line to the outro and swapping a pre-programmed beat for live drums including real congas. “I feel like these songs have always been special,” she says, “but one of the cool things to come out of Rostam coming on board is that the recordings feel just as special [too]. I really wanted the recordings – as well as the actual songs – to stand the test of time.”

Along the way, the two musicians fell into a comfortable creative rhythm. “He works very effciently, which I appreciate,” Vagabon says with a laugh. “He’s also really honest – and I’m really, really honest.” This mutual candour proved crucial to punching up the production as much as possible. “I can trust him to tell me exactly what he thinks, and I have enough confdence in my ability to not, you know, spin out from feedback,” she says. “And I think that’s why it worked so well.”

When ‘Sorry I Haven’t Called’ drops in September, it will have been almost four years since Vagabon’s last album, which was self-titled. Though she didn’t plan to leave such a long gap, she is happy with how things panned out. “I didn’t apply too much pressure on myself,” she says. “It feels like I needed every bit of that time not just to make this album, but [also] to live a life and be a person outside of my output as a musician.” Because without that lived experience, she would have nothing to write about? “Exactly!” Vagabon replies. “I mean, if the pandemic’s taught us anything, it’s that placing all that value on what you do [for a living] can be kind of complicated.”

Released in October 2019, the singer’s eponymous second album expanded the guitar-based palette of her debut, 2017’s ‘Infnite Worlds’, with fecks of electronica, new wave and house. Third time around, meanwhile, the galvanising pulse of the dancefoor was even more of a pronounced infuence. “I knew I wanted to draw from house and club music, especially because I’ve been learning how to DJ,” she says. “I wouldn’t say I’ve made a dance record by any means, but I wanted it to be suggestive of those things.”

In places, the album certainly captures the spicy spontaneity of life after dark. “Made out with your best friend, and he loved it,” Vagabon sings over a sultry beat on ‘Made Out with Your Best Friend’. “For better or worse, it’s just a very real thing,” she says of the lyric, which came out during a “stream of consciousness” in the vocal booth. “Like, it’s an

insane thing to say, but I thought that if I was enjoying it that much in the studio, then other people would enjoy it that much too!”

On that track, Rostam encouraged Vagabon to sing in French, her frst language, for the frst time since ‘Infnite Worlds’. Overall, she describes the album as more “confdent and self-assured” than her “introspective” previous releases. What prompted this new-found confdence? “Well,” she says, “I think the most simple answer is that I was experiencing grief. My reaction to losing someone was complex, but one of the branches of my reaction was [realising] that I don’t have time to be self-conscious any more.”

Working on this album with Rostam and other close collaborators has also changed her attitude somewhat. “It’s made me realise that the beauty of music is sharing it not just with listeners, but also with other artists,” she says. “It’s expanded my world for sure, and I’m such a better producer and writer because of it. So I will defnitely be doing more of that in the future.” DIY

“The beauty of music is sharing it not just with listeners, but also with other artists.” - Vagabon

FESTIVALS FESTIVALS FESTIVALS

21st - 25th June, Worthy Farm, Pilton

If there’s one festival that needs no introduction, it’s this one. But let’s give it a go anyway: this year, the hallowed hills of Glastonbury Tor will once again play host to some of the world’s biggest and most brilliant acts, including the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Lizzo, Lana Del Rey, Lil Nas X, Queens of the Stone Age, and - of course - the fnal show of Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour. No, you’re welling up!

Glastonbury SOUNDS SUMMER OF THE

As we get ready for the annual pilgrimage to Somerset for another huge weekend of music, art and everything in between, we caught up with our Class of 2023 cover stars - and fest frst-timersCrawlers to fnd out how they’re feeling about popping their Glasto cherry this month…

Q&A CRAWLERS

Hello Crawlers! Who are we speaking to and how’re you doing right now?

Hey there! It’s Harry speaking and I’m doing spectacularly. Just fnished at the practice room for a load of shows we got coming up this weekend and the blood is pumping.

It’s been a little while since we last spoke; what’s new in your world right now?

So far this year has been a fair bit more chill compared to last year. Last year was tour after tour, laying the foundations and putting in a lot of work to set the tone for the rest of our career. So far we’ve been in and out of the studio a lot in 2023 which has been a lot of fun and super exciting!

Festival season is well under way and you’ve already played a few; how’s it been getting back on stage and in front of your fans? Have there been any highlights so far?

Honestly, we’d almost forgotten that playing live is the best part of the job! We’d done it so much last year that we were itching to get back in the studio to make something new. Now that we’ve been working

on new music, we completely forgot how good it feels to play live again! It’s like all of that built up energy is coming out this summer and it’s gonna make for some amazing festival sets.

In not too long, you’re going to be playing at Glastonbury for the frst time! What was going through your minds when you got booked for it? We honestly can’t believe we’re playing it already and we don’t even have an album out! Not many artists can say that so we know full well how fortunate we are! None of us have been to Glastonbury so we don’t know what to expect but we know it will be amazing. It’s also my birthday the day after we play so I’m hoping we stick around for a little while.

Is there anyone else on the Glastonbury line-up you’ll be trying to see? Got any tips for others heading to the festival this year?

I hope we’re still there when Lil Nas X plays. I feel like if you’re at a festival where an artist as big and as current as him is playing and you don’t go see them you’re actually insane! Even if that genre isn’t really your kind of thing, you could be missing an important

Festival Season 2023: so far, so stunning. We’ve already been by the seaside and headed into the cities for a slew of events, but now it’s time to the biggies: we’re off into the felds of the UK and beyond… First up, a trek to Worthy Farm for arguably the world’s most famous fest, before we head to Europe (or more specifcally, Poland and Belgium) for some equally hefty bills. So go grab your sunnies and join us for the ride…

moment for the industry. You don’t want to be telling your kids that you were at Glastonbury that year and didn’t see someone of that calibre when they were in their hay day. If my parents were at Reading festival when Nirvana played and they didn’t go, I’d slap ‘em.

And can you give us any hints of what’s to come next from the Crawlers camp…?

We’re still working on something really, really special that’s gonna blow people away: and I mean that. I don’t want people to think I’m just giving a generic answer like “Big things coming soon” or whatever, but when the Crawlers’ debut album fnally comes out, we want everyone to be genuinely astonished at what we can do with our sound.

28th June - 1st July, Gdynia-Kosakowo Airport, Poland

Storms may have dampened last year’s proceedings a little but Poland’s four-day musical feast is back with a vengeance this summer; nestled next to big-hitter headliners like SZA , Kendrick Lamar and Lizzo come DIY faves such as Christine and the Queens and Rina Sawayama, alongside bright and sparkly newcomers like PinkPantheress and Lovejoy

Offering up a decidedly different musical fare, Los Angeles post-hardcore quintet Touché Amoré will be making their frst trip to the festival this month; ahead of their spot, we chatted to frontman Jeremy Bolm about what’s to come…

Earlier this year you played some special shows in LA to celebrate the band’s 15th anniversary - how did they go?

They went great. It’s near impossible not to embrace nostalgia like the rest of the world - we’re just as guilty of it as anyone else. With the last few years being as diffcult as they were, you can’t blame anyone for wanting to live in the past. There’s a fne line between celebrating and capitalising; I think we toe the line okay enough. It’s nice to be refective of past accomplishments if you still stand behind them and aren’t doing it specifcally for fnancial gain. We played four of our fve records in full and it was rewarding to perform songs we never play and have them be met with an enthusiasm we’d never felt for them before.

It’s now been a couple of years since your most recent record ‘Lament’ was released; how do you feel about the record with a bit of distance to it now? We’re all extremely proud of that album. I think it’s our collective favourite. It gave us the opportunity to explore new songs and work with Ross Robinson who really taught us a lot about ourselves and what we could accomplish.

Open’er Q&A TOUCHÉ AMORÉ SOUNDS SUMMER

You’re gonna be returning to the UK and Europe in a few weeks for both festivals and club shows; what’s your favourite thing about those two, very different kinds of shows?

Club shows will always be preferred: the intimacy and connection. Festivals provide decent catering and a larger opportunity to see artists we may be fans of where we otherwise wouldn’t have that opportunity, so from a music fan standpoint, festivals are cool for that. Performing at them is not my favourite… The distance from the audience, the sound on stage, playing in the daylight, trying to win people over, etc. Gimme a club any day.

You’re heading to Poland to play at Open’er festival; what are you looking forward to about visiting?

Our best friend in the world - who is also our tour manager and driver when we come to Europe - is from Poland and has always told us about how amazing the festival is so after years of hype, I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be honest I’m pretty unfamiliar with the people on our stage aside from SZA and Machine Gun Kelly. I’ll look forward to walking around and hearing new music.

Rock Werchter

29th June - 2nd July, Festivalpark Werchter, Belgium

Belgium’s biggest music festival, this year’s event is set to play host to just about every big artist going right now; from Arctic Monkeys to Fred again.., Rosalía to Lil Nas X, there’ll literally be something for every fan of music in the town of Werchter later this month.

What’s more, Aussie quartet Body Type will be trying to watch all of them, as they return to Europe to mark the release of their new album ‘Expired Candy’ this month. We caught up with the band’s Sophie McComish and Cecil Coleman ahead of their mammoth fight over...

Q&A BODY TYPE

You’re about to release your new record ‘Expired Candy’how are you feeling about it all?

Sophie: I’ve just started a book about Greek mythology (Mythos by Stephen Fry, know it?) and it’s the beginning of existence, Gaia has just defeated Ouranos, Kronos has received a profound warning about being overthrown by his forthcoming offspring Zeus, and sexy Aphrodite has risen from the foamy white sea. Big thrilling stuff. Maybe this little record isn’t of quite as mythic proportions but I’m ready for the album release odyssey.

Can you tell us a bit about what went into making the new record? Did you have a particular statement of intent?

Cecil: I feel like this record both took forever to make but then was fnished in no time at all. We honestly started writing some of the tracks as soon as album one was completed in 2020. So while we waited agonisingly (but patiently) for that to be released, we kept on working on new music right up to the frst day of recording for this album… ‘Expired Candy’ covers a lot of ground. Through the multiple lockdowns, Body Type was

defnitely a creative escape, which is probably the reason as to why this record has a slightly sunnier disposition compared to ‘EIDBNS’…just dreaming of something, anything! The infuences on the record vary for all of us, but I can confdently say there’s some Tom Petty, some Pixies, bit of Pavement, bit of B52’s…

Sophie: I don’t really have any control over what I’m writing about or what comes out. I wish I did tbh - the idea of writing with an intention in mind sounds organised and logical in a way that soothes my quadruple Virgo way of being. I’m always trying to push myself though, all of us are in fact - with how we structure songs, what we’re doing technically, and in terms of honing in on the ever-elusive hooky chorus. I guess this record is the sum of that pushiness?

You’re also heading back to the UK and Europe towards the end of June - how are you looking forward to the shows?

Cecil: I am so excited to come back to the UK and Europe. I’ve honestly been waiting for this moment since the day we left in 2019, haha! To be playing festivals like Rock Werchter and Roskilde is just an absolute dream. To be honest, I think my favourite part of a live BT show is watching the chaos unfold when Annabel, Soph and Georgia decide to shred it up. Maybe there’ll be a fy kick, maybe water will be spat at me… they keep me guessing.

Sophie: Playing live is euphoric. It’s the best thing in the world. Connecting with my best friends in such an adrenaline-fuelled way, and showing the audience what that looks and sounds like. I still pinch myself that it’s even a reality that we get to fy to the other side of the world to play our music. Feeling very very lucky.

When it comes to playing festivals, do you have to do any sort of preparation for playing such different kinds of events compared to regular shows?

Cecil: We defnitely take the bull by the horns for a festival set! Wall to wall rock. Gotta keep the toes tapping. We always plan some smart water breaks though, that’s a necessity.

Sophie: Serious vocal warm ups. Appropriate amount of nerve-easing tequila. 20 star jumps. Everything extra loud. Minimal banter for maximal setlist. Long lead for big stage - I always forget that. Max Grip .88 picks for the extra sweaty fngers. Actually I just use them every time - sponsor me

Dunlop? And, remain chill when you walk past such icons as Damon Albarn backstage…

You’re playing at Rock Werchter over in Belgium too; which other acts will you be trying to watch when you’re there?

Cecil: I’m truly hoping to see Iggy Pop, Weyes Blood, King Princess, Stormzy, Rosalia, Christine & The Queens.. There’s too many.

Sophie: We’ve come all the freakin’ way from the other side of the world!! It’s a long way, baby. No one here ever gets to see us play jetlagged, you guys are getting a VIP experience. Seriously though, we are all so excited and it’s going to be so special. Aching to see Lil Nas X, Rosalia and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Festivals News In Brief

New York queer icon King Princess has been announced to play on the fnal day of Lisbon festival NOS Alive (6th - 8th July). She joins the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Angel Olsen

Self Esteem has been confrmed as the fnal headliner for this year’s Green Man (17th - 20th August). Other acts added to the bill include Mandy, Indiana, Oscar Lang, Mary in the Junkyard and Nuha Ruby Ra

Reading & Leeds (25th - 27th August) have announced a fresh wave of over twenty names for their 2023 edition, including the likes of Panic Shack, Lauran Hibberd, Mae Stephens and James Marriott

Bristol’s FORWARDS (1st - 2nd September) has announced its second wave of acts. Joining headliners

Aphex Twin and Erykah Badu are the likes of Grove, Ezra Collective, Gabriels and Obongjayar, among many others.

FESTIVALS FESTIVALS FESTIVALS

Bombay Bicycle Club, Sprints and Faux Real are just a few of the acts that have joined the line-up for this year’s Iceland Airwaves (2nd - 4th November). They’ll join the likes of Yard Act, Balming Tiger, Lime Garden and Squid at the Reykjavík event.

The

Tour, 2023

Thu28Sep:Bristol,Thekla

Fri29Sep:Leeds,BrudenellSocialClub

Sat30Sep:Shefeld,Leadmill

Sun01Oct:Newcastle,Boilershop

Mon02Oct:Glasgow,StLukes

Tue03Oct:Manchester,Gorilla

Thu05Oct:London,Koko

NEU

Militarie Gun

Ask Militarie Gun’s Ian Shelton what originally drew him to hardcore music and his answer is a simple one. “The anger,” he nods. “I’m a very angry person in all honesty, and I think that there’s a level of being able to say brash but true things in punk music that is not the case in a lot of other genres. I think it’s the ability to say truly whatever you want and it has a home - there’s a kind of preoccupation with being messed up, and that being messed up is all right.”

Take one listen to ‘Do It Faster’ - the lead track from the band’s forthcoming full-length debut ‘Life Under The Gun’ - however, and you might be surprised. Against a backdrop of razor-sharp guitars and taut drumming comes a glistening earworm of a chorus that transforms the agitated sentiment of its lyrics into an anthemic rally call to stop wishing life away and begin embracing it. And therein lies the beauty of the Los Angeles outft; while their roots may grow from the more aggressive side of the genre, their mission statement - of blending vulnerability with melody via a punk guise - marks something of a departure from the norm.

“Now that Militarie Gun exists, I’ve just tried to fnd a way to make those messed up, crazy [lyrics] more catchy,” Ian explains, speaking midway through a UK live run that began at The Great Escape and will go on to Outbreak and 2000trees festivals, all before July. “I want to still say crazy things, but I want to get it stuck in people’s heads. That’s the goal: to fnd a way to say the most absurd and true things that I can in the catchiest way possible.”

Born in the midst of the pandemic, the project was frst and foremost a way for Ian to keep busy after his other band - Washington outft Regional Justice Center - were put on hold, and his work directing music videos for the likes of Angel Du$t and Drug Church dried up. “The anxiety of the pandemic was a huge force for it, because everything in life ceased to exist; there was no work, there was no touring, no nothing. And so the only thing I did was go and make a song each day. Some days, the songs were terrible; some days, the songs were good, but I had the time to learn.”

Instead of dashing off a few tracks, booking a show and starting to play them live - arguably the more tried-and-tested route for punk acts - he was

forced to continue working, learning and refning as he went. “That resulted in writing 20 or 30 songs in a year, and then only releasing the best of those,” he says. “The songs came frst.”

Putting in the time would soon pay off. When the band - completed by guitarists Nick Cogan and William Acuña, and drummer Vince Nguyenplayed their frst live show together months later, “people sang along”, Ian notes. “It was the best feeling on earth to know I didn’t waste the last two years. It was really reaffrming. Then on our frst tour we did 50 shows,” he pauses for effect. So, back in at the deep end, then? “We wanted to get better,” he laughs, “and that was the only way of doing it.”

It’s this level of work ethic that’s bled into every corner of Militarie Gun so far. Even as the band worked in the studio on their previous release, 2021’s dual ‘All Roads Lead To The Gun’ EPs, Ian was looking ahead to what would come next, turning his attention to “cleaning up the vocals” in aid of creating their intensely catchy sound. “It was important for me. The music I love is catchy, so it was just like, ‘Alright, how do I do that?’ It was my obsession for a year-plus,” he says. “I started delivering weed during the pandemic and I drove around for eight to twelve hours a day, only listening to the music and singing along to the demos. That was a process of learning and getting better.”

On ‘Life Under The Gun’, their honesty-meetsearmworms mission statement rings truest. While the subject matter deals in unequivocally challenging topics, channelling the more vulnerable approach Ian thinks is so important, the tracks are backed by a melodic approach which gives even more power to his lyrics. “Emotionally, on the record, I really wanted to take an honest look at the culture that we’re coming from, which I think is very much a culture of unkindness surrounding the concept of making mistakes in your life.

“I’ve always been one to forgive, and I have defnitely wronged others in life and others have wronged me. So, in a moment where it seemed like everybody was pointing the fnger at other people, I wanted to look at myself and admit to shortcomings, and just unpack why I am the way I am,” he says. “Taking an honest look at the concept of interpersonal relationships and abuse was a very important aspect of the record to me, and I think I did that. I’m very proud of it.” DIY

“The goal is to fnd a way to say the most absurd and true things that I can in the catchiest way possible.”Ian Shelton

Ahead of the release of their debut proper, meet the Los Angeles punks using vulnerability and melody to ring in a new era of hardcore. Words: Sarah Jamieson.

Photo: Emma Swann.

“Look at what I’m doing Mummy, look what I’ve achieved / Transforming the body you and god gave me,” croons Cardiff-based Alice Low on the brilliantly baroque ‘Show Business’. The frst track written for the musician’s recent EP ‘Transatlantic Sugar’ just as she was about to begin her medical transition, it acted as the initial spark for a record that explores all the fears and fantasies Alice was confronting each step of the way.

“I was getting registered to start hormones with the worry of, what will happen? How will I change and how might I feel?” she recalls. “Some of the songs are defned by those frst couple of months on hormones where my whole emotional ecology is shifting and I’m becoming a new person but with the memories of this other person. I think of that record as being sung by a man still and I like that. That pathetic bravado of male music, all of that showboating and grandeur and confdence that’s pretty unfounded - there’s a lot of that in there…”

With an overtly theatrical stage presence that draws infuence from greats such as David Bowie and Kate Bush, Alice’s music is full of contradictions - playing with character and gender performance and entwining pain with a sense of purposeful, overblown bombast. It’s intensely vulnerable but with its chest puffed out; the idea, she states, is to “extend an olive branch to the audience” with the hope of fnding communal empathy.

“Being trans in the UK sucks. My daily life is pretty much defned by ridicule and hatred and rejection,” she says. “It’s depressing, but there’s a lot of ways in which

my experiences are similar to everyone’s. Pain is relative, so if I can express my pain in a way that reaches everyone, that’s universal, then maybe that can help people understand more of what it’s like to be trans. It’s a beautiful thing when you look out in the audience and see cis people crying about girl dick - it’s great!”

Prolifc since her teens (“The released music is probably 1% of all of my work”), her embrace of the Cardiff scene combined with a greater impetus to share her story has pushed Alice to step into the spotlight. It’s a place she’s so clearly meant to be. “When I was young and I frst started performing, I found it totally emancipating. Every day I would be so inside myself and small and afraid of everyone, but then when I frst got on stage I was like, ‘Ah! My mic is louder [than them]’ and something just sparked,” she recalls. “I’ve always performed like that; I just like to really reach people. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but music at the moment seems very interested in stuff like the price of milk. There’s not a lot of metaphor and subtext and these things that can really make a song last forever. You can sing about austerity without saying that bread’s expensive now, but it just takes a little more effort…”

Putting in the effort and hoping that the world responds in tandem, Alice Low is an entertainer with purpose. Her current music cuts an old Hollywood silhouette, but beneath “the strings and pianos and fourishes and drama” there’s a burning desire to simply be understood. “Once I came out I thought, ‘OK, I’m feeling a lot more secure in myself personally, but now the world is agitated by my presence’. It instilled me with a sense of purpose, that there’s a reason to do this now in a more public space,” she says. “Before I was happy to be really private and just put a record on Bandcamp, but now it’s like, ‘OK go out into the world as Alice and show people what a really domestic and internal trans life feels like’. It’s given me direction.” DIY

Exploring the trans experience through theatrical songs of pain and perseverance, the Cardiff-based musician is a magnetically exciting new voice. Words: Lisa Wright. Photo: Louise Mason.

“If I can express my pain in a way that’s universal, maybe that can help people understand more of what it’s like to be trans.”

SAYA GREY

DIZZYINGLY DENSE IDEAS, FILTERED THROUGH INNOVATIVE NEW EARS.

Making her live debut as part of Primavera Festival, the bold choice of opening statement says two things about JapaneseCanadian Saya Grey. One - she’s not afraid to make confdent, unusual choices. And two - her recorded output is already pricking up all the right ears. Recent Dirty Hit debut ‘QWERTY’ was recorded during a period of intense isolation and, says Grey, fnds her putting “1000 personalities in one song”. They’re all wildly different - from woozy trip hop beats to intense proggy riffs - but Grey has an ear for curation that’s evidently highly skilled.

LISTEN: ‘QWERTY’ opener ‘DIZZY PPL BECOME BLURRY’ is an entire trip.

SIMILAR TO: The sort of new artist you imagine fka Twigs would get behind.

YUNÈ PINKU

THE IRISH-MALAYSIAN PRODUCER AIMING FOR THE STARS.

Having frst broken through with the fdgety, garage-fecked ‘Laylo’ back in 2021, things have taken an altogether more intergalactic turn for Irish-Malaysian producer yunè pinku in the past two years. Her brand of quietly brooding dance music - “for introverted ravers”, as she’s said before - has, more recently, transformed into the glossy, otherworldly offering of April’s six-track ‘BABYLON IX’: an EP inspired by a rave in space which shows off an even more polished side to her talents.

LISTEN: ‘BABYLON IX’ is a rich, multi-dimensional listen with ambition to boot.

SIMILAR TO: An end-of-the-night soundtrack you’ll never forget.

PICTURE PARLOUR

THE SWAGGERING QUARTET CHANNELLING THAT ROCK’N’ROLL…

Having frst begun writing together during the pandemic (their frst Instagram post reads, “Swipe to see the reality of long distance band practice”), the gestation period of Liverpool’s Picture Parlour may have been a lil longer than your average four-piece, but a series of buzzy gigs and some early Arctic Monkeys comparisons are already proving that the wait was worth it. Last month, they won crowds over at Brighton’s Great Escape with their swaggering, melodrama-tinged rock and, luckily, there’s much more where that came from…

Listen: By the end of the month, there’ll be a single to dig into, so hold your horses!

Similar to: Katherine Parlour’s crooning sits just the right side of Alex Turner on a good day.

RecNEUommended

MISS TINY

EVERY POST-PUNK NERD’S DREAM COME TRUE. The pairing of Speedy Wunderground head honcho Dan Carey and Warmduscher vocalist/ drummer Ben Romans-Hopcraft, Miss Tiny is a match made in post-punk heaven. Famed for his spontaneous recording process, there’s only one rule to Miss Tiny: either you like it, or you let it go. The result is an upcoming EP, ‘DEN7’, that’s the result of years of improvisation. ‘The Sound’ is a straightforward, sour indie rock cut, but it’s on ‘The Beggar’ where they shine hardest, amongst trepidatious guitar riffs and some increasingly exasperated drum work.

MARY IN THE JUNKYARD

SOUTH LONDON LIVE CIRCUIT REGULARS WORTH KEEPING AN EARLY EYE ON.

When troll Twitter threw its toys out of the pram about the ‘legitimacy’ of The Last Dinner Party, a series of lo-f early gig recordings still available on Youtube proved they’d been building a live following for a good while. The same, you sense, could happen to Mary in the Junkyard. They’ve yet to release a single but, having knocked about Brixton Windmill for the past year, their hypnotically rousing tunes (think Drug Store Romeos mixed with ‘00s indie types Larrikin Love) have already found them pulling sizable crowds at The Great Escape and beyond.

LISTEN: Pop over to YT to fnd a couple of full live sets available for consumption.

SIMILAR TO: A beautiful dark twisted fantasy.

LISTEN: ‘DEN7’ arrives in full on 21st July. SIMILAR TO: A far more fun, accessible band than you might expect from a total studio obsessive.

HOP ABOARD

Burnley quintet The Goa Express have announced plans to release their much anticipated self-titled debut this October.

Recent releases ‘Good Luck Charm’ and ‘Portrait’ are also set to feature on their debut full-length, which will be ten tracks in length. Alongside the news, they’ve also shared their latest single ‘Talking About Stuff’; the music video for which was flmed at their homecoming show at The Golden Lion in Todmorden.

Speaking about the song, the band have said, “Sometimes, you end up feeling down on your luck and then all a sudden you make the call to get the hell out of somewhere. And, out of nowhere, you meet someone and you end up getting lucky again.” Check it out over on diymag.com now.

WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE?

BRIT-nominated artist Cat Burns has released a new track titled ‘you don’t love me anymore’.

Her latest offering follows on from March’s ‘live more & love more’ as well as her previous ArrDee collaboration ‘Home For My Heart’.

“It gently speaks about a fear loads of us have in relationships where we’re worried our partner may wake up one day and no longer love us,” says Cat, of her latest track. “I truly hope this song brings comfort to anyone going through this exact thing right now.”

Check out ‘you don’t love me anymore’ over on diymag.com now

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

Class of 2023 star Jessica Winter and Dan Carey’s new project Miss Tiny are set to play the third edition of SON Estrella Galicia’s pop-up London events later this month.

Having previously played host to the likes of Dream Wife and DEADLETTER, the independent Spanish beer brand Estrella Galicia will be returning to Paper Dress Vintage in Hackney with Spanish band Playback Maracas for a night of great music, beer and food, as part of their mission to bring a taste of their ethos to the capital.

There’ll also be a host of other fun things happening, including DJ sets, workshops from the beer brand’s experts, and a collaboration with an artist focussed on celebrating the brand’s Reduce, Re-use and Recycle mantra.

The event will take place on Thursday 15th June and will kick off from 6pm. Tickets are priced at just £15 and are available now via DICE.

Brought to you as part of our partnership with SON Estrella Galicia.

THE PLAYLIST

Every week on Spotify, we update the Neu Playlist with the buzziest, freshest faces. Here’s our pick of the best new tracks:

WILLOW KAYNE - COLA HEAD

London-based Willow Kayne has fnally dropped the long-awaited ‘Cola Head’, a song so addictive that she parted ways with her old label after begging to release it. But it’s Willow who’ll have the last laugh; ‘Cola Head’ is the Y2K anthem we’ve been waiting for. From the offset, Kayne hints at an illicit cross-continental affair, until she unveils that the partner is actually Snow White. Well, not that one... The Neptunes-inspired ode to cocaine we never knew we needed, ‘Cola Head’ is cheeky, fun and dripping with sass. Much like its subject matter, it’s sure to blow up.

LIFEGUARD - 17-18 LOVESONG

‘17-18 Lovesong’ opens with a deluge of noise and doesn’t let up till the end. A headspin in 5/4, the track is built around layer upon layer of refective, intense sound, beginning with a ticking cymbal and keening guitar alongside the hypnotic repetition of “S E N S A”, before the track’s denouement. The layers build to a cacophonous, circling climax, guitars giving way almost completely to a vocal refrain of “rave, talk, talk” before re-entering one by one until Lifeguard drown us in dizzying energy.

AL COSTELLOE - SO NEUROTIC

Moving past the doe-eyed, girl-meets-boy narratives of former band Big Deal, Al Costelloe fnds unexpected inner peace in the realisation that anxiety is genetic. With vocals that fall somewhere between sunny and subdued, she refects on the epiphany that the whole time she fretted about her tendency to overthink, it was already nuzzled deep in her DNA – and out of her hands. While the song may celebrate losing a little personal agency, this is the sound of an artist taking control of her creative path, swapping sleepless nights for a soothing slice of indie-pop guaranteed to unknot the shoulder muscles of worriers everywhere.

COLE BLEU - IS IT COOL 2 B FRIENDS?

Cole Bleu’s latest is a playful pop offering of the sort we’ve come to know and love from her – but this time she’s dialling up the magnitude. With grungy guitar interjections punctuating her deadpan, sugar-sweet lyrics, ‘IS IT COOL 2 B FRIENDS?’ delivers its choruses with an assuredness that yearns to be yelled back at her in 1000-cap rooms. It helps, too, that she taps into that familiar anxiety of not quite knowing how to handle a situationship after the fact in such a dreamy way.

Want to stream our Neu playlist while you’re reading? Scan the code now and get listening.

All the buzziest new music happenings in one place.

McKinley Dixon NEU

Only now, coming into the release of his fourth studio album ‘Beloved! Paradise!

Jazz!?’, is McKinley Dixon making his UK breakthrough. May saw rapturously received shows in London and at The Great Escape, as well as heavy rotation on the airwaves; for the Maryland native, the steady rise to prominence suits him. The smart musical construction of his work, which lies somewhere around the intersection between hip hop and jazz, suggests a meticulous nature, as does the execution of his elegant, literary lyricism.

Which is not to say that his music lacks urgency. On his newest, McKinley sees himself as having picked up the baton from his idol, author Toni Morrison, who he once described as “the greatest rapper ever”; he’s named the album after the trilogy of novels she released between 1987 and 1997. “I was inspired by the way that she captures the human conditions and the complexities of people,” he explains. “She’s really good at talking about the love and the horror right in the same verse, which is brilliant. As a rapper, it’s something to aspire to. She found a way to communicate how hard it is just to exist as a human being, which is something a lot of rappers do; it’s just that I’m trying to do it with more of a literary eye.”

Accordingly, the ten tracks on ‘Beloved!

Paradise!

Jazz!?’ wind their way through the Black

American experience with thrilling ambition, drawing parallels with Greek tragedy, nodding to afro-futurism and incorporating gospel elements. As is his calling card by now, there’s deep introspection too - especially on ‘Tyler, Forever’, an unfinching portrait of grief. Tying it all together is McKinley’s thrillingly broad blend of sounds, which he takes to new heights this time around.

“Jazz is kind of my own soundtrack, something I can talk with, rather than talk over,” he says. “I think, because it’s not locked into a certain rhythm or form, I’m able to change the infection of my voicebe louder, be quieter, be more vulnerableand it isn’t weird when any of that happens, the way it would be if I did that over a trap beat, or if I just dropped a saxophone over a classic hip hop beat. That’s why jazz is my backdrop; I think I’ve always taken more inspiration from how artists talk and how they hold themselves on their records, rather than the actual sonic side of it.”

His last record, 2021’s ’For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her’, was an intense affair that he describes as “expelling trauma’’; ’Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?’, though, should be interpreted more as “a celebration of life”, as he resists the idea of his albums being deemed deliberate political statements. “It can’t really be ignored how Black music, and specifcally rap music, is intrinsically tied to being ‘trauma music’ for people who are watching on,” he refects.

“The two albums before ’For My Mama…’ were vibrant, beautiful albums in the way they talked about life, and then ’For My Mama…’ came out and got so much more acclaim - but at what cost? Because I was just existing; I wasn’t consensually politicising my life. That’s why I’m trying to make music that’s for me frst - because if you do that, you don’t have to worry about what’s coming next.” DIY

The jazzindebted bookworm and Maryland rapper making long-overdue waves on UK shores.

Words: Joe Goggins.

Photo: Emma Swann.

“I’ve always taken more inspiration from how artists talk and how they hold themselves on their records.”

feeble little horse

Preparing to unleash new album ‘Girl With Fish’ on the world, the Pittsburgh noiserock group are on the rise but staying frmly grounded. Words: Kate Brayden.

“Ryan [Walchonski] and I have really similar music tastes, which is why we started writing together,” vocalist Seb Kinsler recalls of feeble little horse’s beginnings alongside his fellow guitarist. “Then when Lydia [Slocum, bass/ vocals] joined the band, she weirdly knew about all of these abrasive, underground bands. She listened to every single name we’d bring up. Jake [Kelley] has all of these different drum infuences which work really well. Music is the one thing we all love.”

Since their inception in early 2021, the four-piece have released EP ‘modern tourism’ and a full-length

“A lot of the writing of the new album happened before we were even with Saddle Creek,” Lydia offers. “It’s not like we changed a lot and then wrote ‘Girl With Fish’. I don’t think the album as a whole shows a huge difference in the band. The songs aren’t chronological.”

Getting their start performing basement shows in the student areas of Oakland in Pittsburgh, it’s a grassroots scene that’s nurtured them well. “When I frst got to Pittsburgh, I really found a home in the DIY scene,” Jake muses. “I found a community that I really belonged in and enjoyed being part of. It’s strange being mentioned at the forefront of articles focusing on the area’s local bands. They’re amazing.”

“To me, it’s like one big family,” Lydia, the only native of the city, nods. “There’s so many different kinds of music coming out. There’s low expectations here, in a way. In New York or LA, there’s such glamour and pressure to ‘make it’. But in Pittsburgh, it’s just about making music the way that you want to, and maybe you can perform it. It’s a precious gem that still genuinely cares about art and culture and history. It’s such a rich place that hasn’t been exploited yet. I just want it to always stay that way.”

album, ‘Hayday’. They’ve since signed to Saddle Creek - the label that brought Bright Eyes and Big Thief to prominence, and one that could feasibly push them into new leagues of popularity - however not much has changed about their noise-pop-indie-rock sound nor their laidback dynamic in the run up to new LP ‘Girl With Fish’. That’s just how they like it.

Though ‘Girl With Fish’ pushes the quartet into bright new realms, pushing their evocative blend of surrealist lyricism and walls of warped noise to new levels, the same can be said about the band. “It’s so unrealistic for a band of four to make a living out of doing this full time,” Jake posits, confrming they’ve no intention of giving up their day jobs or studies. “One of the things we talk about a lot is how music is just an escape. If we were putting all our effort into this and relying on it for income, it would get mad stressful. feeble little horse would become just a way to make money. That lifestyle would take away from the magic.” DIY

“We talk a lot about how music is just an escape.”

- Jake Kelley

After a decade of Run the Jewels, “Killer” Mike Render tells his origin story in the shape of a new solo album. This is how he became the most political man in hip hop.

Words: Sam Davies.

Photos: Shervin Lainez.

Filler Filler

It was 29th May 2020. Killer Mike was eating fsh sandwiches outside Bankhead Seafood, not long after buying the restaurant with his friend and fellow Atlanta rapper TI. Joints were being passed around. The New York rapper Noreaga was there popping a bottle of Moët. “I was having a typical rapper day,” says Mike.

Then TI received a phone call from Keisha Lance Bottoms, Mayor of Atlanta. People were protesting in the city, outraged by the recent murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the peaceful demonstration was starting to turn. Mayor Bottoms appealed to TI for help, explaining that she would have called Mike but didn’t think he’d say yes. “I was like ‘Sheeeit…’” Mike remembers. “‘They right!’ And I got back to smoking and eating fsh sandwiches.”

But TI persisted, eventually deciding he would only lend the Mayor his support if Mike did the same. “So what the fuck I’m supposed to do?” asks Mike. “What would you do if yo friend say, ‘Well if you don’t go, I’m not gone go’? From where I’m from, you man up and you go with your friend. Even if you got half a pound of marijuana in your truck.” Mike made it to City Hall and delivered a tearful, gut-wrenching speech asking Atlantans not to burn down their own city. Speaking on Mike’s podcast Love & Respect, Mayor Bottoms called it “probably one of the most impactful speeches of the last 50 years.”

This is Killer Mike: a beloved hip hop man who loves everything about the rapper lifestyle, bleeds Atlanta blood and has friends throughout the rap community. But also a political leader, a fgure of hope in a country more divided than ever, a friend of Bernie Sanders and devout student of history whose public missives are broadcast on headline political television programmes like Newsnight and 60 Minutes.

Now 48 and more than 20 years into his music career, Mike is taking time off from Run the Jewels - his hell-raising double act with NY rapper-producer El-P - to bring us ‘Michael’, a solo album detailing how he went from a working class kid in the west side of Atlanta to the most politically active rapper in America. It’s an album album, carefully considered where his RTJ work is rough and instinctive. And the story it tells is worthy of a motion picture.

“T his shit is so Atlanta,” Mike declares at the end of ‘Down By Law’, the record’s opening track. “If you see Black people in the media, they talk from the perspective of a minority, right?” says Mike today. “Black people who grew up in New York, a minority; Black people who grew up in Los Angeles, a minority; even places like Miami, a minority. I didn’t grow up with that perspective. I grew up in an all Black neighbourhood, that was all Black on purpose.” He talks and talks about Atlanta, mentioning his working class grandparents (a nurse and a dump truck driver), wealthy Black business owners from the area, Atlantan civil rights heroes like Joseph Lowery, James Orange and Martin Luther King, and other “salt of the earth Black folks” he grew up with.

One such person was his mother, who comes up a lot on ‘Michael’ and throughout Mike’s discography. “In loving memory of Druzella Denise Clonts,” reads a message at the end of the video for ‘Motherless’. Denise had Mike when she was 16, and Mike and his two younger sisters were raised by their grandparents. But his mother was a huge part of Mike’s life. “She was my girl,” he says. “She was so close in age to me that we had, at times, more like a big sister / little brother relationship.”

The ‘Motherless’ video’s prequel ‘Don’t Let the Devil’ takes place at a raucous party flled with smoke, drinks and card games, modelled on his mother’s basement. “In the spirit of OG Mama Niecy’s Friday night get downs,” reads a message. So who was his mum? “She was a queenpin,” says Mike. He uses this word as the feminine form of ‘kingpin’ (the term also cropping up on ‘Promise I Will Not Lose’, from his 2006 mixtape ‘I Pledge Allegiance to the Grind’), and he prefers it to ‘gangster’. “She did a couple gangster things,” he caveats nonetheless. “I saw a guy try to rob her once, and her stab him the fuck up and still take us to school. But she wasn’t out there fghting guys on a daily basis or doing dumb shit like letting off shots.” Denise was a forist, arranging fowers for the Christmas trees of local athletes’ wives and mothers. “My mother was approached by white middle class women that she was working for, and they would ask her for coke,” says Mike. “This was the ‘80s, everyone was doing coke. She knew some coke dealers, so she hooked up a couple of ladies. Before you knew it, it turned into a thriving side business.” He remembers watching the news once, two weeks before his 15th birthday, and seeing a man and woman arrested trying to buy 10 kilos of cocaine. It was Denise and her new boyfriend (he took the hit; Denise got off).

“Even if I move a thousand miles away, I will make sure the west side of Atlanta remains a place that Black children can go and feel complete.”

“I’m aggravating shit out of El-P.

‘Hey man, let’s do I’m in rap animal

About a year later, Mike experienced the cocaine era frst hand. On new song ‘Something for the Junkies’ he raps: “Man, I was geeked once / Man, that was no fun / I had to call mom / Because I am Denise’s son.” The line refers to a time when, aged 16, Mike and his friends snuck into local strip club, The Foxy Lady. “So we’re in there and we’re smoking with guys we don’t know,” Mike says. “Just stupid shit you do as a kid, tryna be more of an adult. Then my heart started pumping like it was jumping out of my chest.” His friends took him outside and found a gas station with a payphone. “I don’t know who else to call, but I knew my mother knew what to do.”

Denise told Mike’s friends to go into the gas station, get him some bread and some milk, then come home, which they did. “I’m thinking I’m in big trouble, I’m thinking she’s gone lose her fucking mind cos I’ve snuck in the club and got high,” Mike remembers. “And she just laughed, pulled me into her bosom and says, ‘You was just geeked, son’.” As Mike explains, ‘geek joints’ were introduced to Atlanta by Miami dealers who liked to sprinkle cocaine into their weed. Being slipped one unawares at 16 was enough to put Mike off ever getting into coke.

“A record like ‘Something for the Junkies’ has never been made before in rap,” Mike says. “There’s no one showing true empathy for those with addiction.” He remembers his grandparents having to board up their windows with burglar bars, “because the same people who had been your neighbours from a few streets back just a year ago had become addicts and started breaking into houses.” By the age of about 17, Mike was a drug dealer himself. He worked at UPS and a few other odd jobs too, but dealing was a good source of income. “I wasn’t gonna drop out of school and make it my job, but if I had a prom coming up, I wasn’t gonna have to ask my grandparents for no money,” he explains. “I knew I could get out there and get a couple thousand dollars.”

Mike got his name while rap battling as a teenager, when an Atlanta DJ called Double D heard him spit and announced “this kid’s a killer”. Mike then got into Atlanta’s preeminent art school Morehouse College (alumnae include Spike Lee, Samuel L Jackson and Martin Luther King), where he met Teeth Malloy of production crew the Beat Bullies, who introduced Mike to Big Boi - one half of OutKast.

Mike was in the studio with Big Boi and André 3000 as they recorded their second album ‘ATLiens’. “I remember hearing that record as they were working on it and just being absolutely blown away,” he says. “Like, ‘Oh my fucking god, this is gonna change the sound of Atlanta’.” OutKast paved the way for the city to become the hip hop capital of the world, birthing TI, Ludacris, Lil Jon, Waka Flocka Flame, Future, Young Thug, Janelle Monáe, Gucci Mane, Lil Yachty and a million others. Mike rapped verses on OutKast songs like ‘Snappin’ & Trappin’ and ‘The Whole World’ (which won a GRAMMY), then signed to Aquemini, OutKast’s Columbia Records imprint.

His debut album, ‘Monster’, was released in 2003, reaching Number 10 on the Billboard Hot 200, yet the period was still one of frustration. In the era of 50 Cent, Eminem and Dr Dre, and not long after Biggie and 2Pac - artists whose albums went platinum, at least - Mike never got suffcient backing from the label. “My record pops up and most of the staff there is tryna convince me to change my name from Killer Mike,” he says. “The same people that was like, ‘Man, this is never gonna work’ came up to me a year or two ago like, ‘Damn, we was wrong’. I was like ‘Yeah, I know. I knew y’all was wrong’.”

Prove them wrong he did, but it took a while. He left Columbia and spent the 2000s releasing a string of underrated mixtapes, during which time he momentarily fell out with André and Big Boi. “It’s not easy helping an artist discover how to tap into their thing,” Mike says. “It takes a lot of time. And they’re artists themselves, and they’re focusing on not only growing the OutKast brand; André at that point - I realised in retrospect - was fguring out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.”

OutKast released their fnal album ‘Idlewild’ in 2006, after which André 3000 all but exiled himself from the studio, limiting his musical output to occasional, precious guest features on other artists’ songs. There’s one on ‘Michael’, called ‘Scientists & Engineers’. “I been tryna get a feature with him for over 10 years,” says Mike. “I ask [on] every Run the Jewels record. Usually he’ll say, ‘Send me the record.’ He’ll listen to it, and he’s like, ‘Man, y’all shit jamming, y’all shit hard as fuck… but this record ain’t for me’.” This time, however, Mike invited André to listen to the album with

aggravating the El-P. Like, do ‘RTJ5’. mode .’’

Black people in the media, they talk from the perspective of a minority, right? I didn’t grow up with that perspective .”

him. “He pulled up, listened, and again he was like, ‘Shit hard, Kill… can I send you suttin’ tomorrow?’ He sent back like, 10 records and said ‘Pick what you like’.”

Mike says he and André recorded another song that’s “like, 11 minutes long and absolutely crazy”, the release of which is TBD. “I don’t bother ‘Dre with the whys,” he adds. “I just let him know, if you ever wanna drop a solo record or an OutKast record, the world would love it.” For now we’ll have to content ourselves with blue-moon André sightings like on ‘Scientists & Engineers’ where, in between ambiguous lines about petrol prices and cutting his “corner lips” on crisps, he drops the poignant line: “Hope I’m 80 when I get my second wind”.

ike’s career has enjoyed one of the most fruitful second winds in the history of hip hop. After several mixtapes, he released album ‘R.A.P. Music’ in 2012, produced entirely by El-P - a denizen of the underground scene, semi-known as a member of 1990s trio Company Flow. ‘R.A.P. Music’ is a classic; a confederation of supercharged beats and politically anarchic raps delivered with the ferocity of a polar bear waking up from hibernation. Among its many highlights is the controversial single ‘Reagan’, a fery critique of the president Mike grew up with, containing lines like: “Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor / Just an employee of the country’s real masters / Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama / Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters.”

It prepared the ground for four Run the Jewels albums, each of them more successful, more timely and more artfully, politically brutal than the last. Mike and El released ‘RTJ4’ two days earlier than planned, inspired by the protests sweeping the world in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, reaching Number 10 on the Billboard 200 (his highest charting album since ‘Monster’) just a week after Mike’s speech in Atlanta.

At this point it should be stressed that not everyone likes Mike. He often splits opinion with his outspoken support for the second amendment - guns - and his speech in 2020 drew the ire of some who thought him wrong to condemn Atlantan rioting. But put this to Mike and he’ll only double down. “So you’re driving to your speech like, ‘Oh boy. Shit,”

he begins. “You walk in, see policemen lined up left and right, ready to go in - violently if need be - to disperse this crowd. You see their Black female mayor telling a white female police chief, ‘STOP it. Don’t you do anything yet, until we have an opportunity to speak.’ I saw a lady being a total badass in that moment.”

He remembers police offcers, knowing Mike’s dad and cousin were both in the force, pleading with him to say something so they wouldn’t have to resort to violence. “I felt compelled as the son of this city,” he says. “I felt compelled as a product of my grandparents’ household. I felt compelled as my mother’s son to do what was right in the moment. I didn’t wanna be there; I wish you motherfuckers that criticised me could have made the speech. I woulda rather eat fsh sandwiches, smoking marijuana, drinking Moët with Noreaga.”

MHe’s not done. “That speech was not special because it was a rapper, was not special ‘cause it held a lot of truth. That speech was special because my grandmother…” - his voice cracks - “prepared me for that moment. She prepared me for that moment when she took me to city council meetings as a child and complained on behalf of poor people. She prepared me for that moment when she let me know that, morally, you have an obligation to the community you live in, even if you don’t live there anymore. Even if I move a thousand miles away, I will make sure the west side of Atlanta remains a place that Black children can go and feel complete, to know that they are competent to be confdent to be leaders.”

At risk of ending on a teary note, there’s enough time to ask Mike about the chances of an ‘RTJ5’. “In my mind, we’ve already started ‘RTJ5’,” he says. “I’m aggravating the shit out of El. Like, ‘Hey man, let’s do 5’. I’m in rap animal mode.’ I would like ‘RTJ5’ to drop with a movie, like the Blues Brothers.”

In the recent third season of hip hop sitcom Dave, rapperprotagonist Lil Dicky visits an Atlanta strip club, meets Rick Ross, and asks him about Killer Mike. Ross gives possibly the most astute summary of Mike anyone’s ever stumbled upon: “He one of those smart motherfuckers. Connected in the community-type shit.” Damn right.

‘Michael’ is out 16th June via Loma Vista. DIY

“ I been tryna get a feature with Andre 3000 for over 10 years.”

“It’s such a privilege to be able to work closely with and learn from somebody like Ed Sheeran.”

WICKED GAME

The sun glints through the window of Maisie Peters’ London home, where the 23-year-old is sitting on the sofa wearing a jumper emblazoned with a pint of Guinness. “The living room needs to be tidied,” she remarks, peering at it from behind her phone. “I’ve just come off touring for the last few months. I’m getting back into my life a little bit…”

The calm and still of this setting feels like a rare moment for Maisie. She spent the frst few months of 2023 headlining shows around the world, and much of the year before playing stadium tours supporting Ed Sheeran. There’s more to come, too. Her second full-length album ‘The Good Witch’ is out this month, and she’ll spend the summer playing shows in the US as well as making her Glastonbury debut on the Pyramid Stage.

However, the singer states, “it’s been a time of extremes. Real highs and lows.” Last year, amid the spate of show runs, Maisie found herself upended by an emotional break-up, the turbulence drawing her back to that central instinct that has guided her through her whole life: writing music. Growing up in a small town in West Sussex, she began writing songs as a child and honed her performance skills busking on the streets of Brighton. Her early songs were portraits of life and love, her 2017 hit ‘Place We Were Made’ equal parts a love letter to, and indictment of, growing up by the sea. “We were made by the late nights and fres on the beach,” she sings. “All we talked about was leaving.”

Maisie began sharing original songs on YouTube in 2015, a heartland time for the site when creative self-expression and discovery felt like a free-for-all. Armed with her acoustic guitar, she posted homemade videos from her bedroom, sat on the staircase at home or at the kitchen table, sharing intimate, lived-in vignettes of her young imagination and ambition. “Music really took off for me in 2015, which already feels like a lifetime ago,” she recalls. Her current manager discovered her YouTube channel, and she signed her frst

record deal while still in school. Two EPs later and in 2021 Maisie released debut album ‘You Signed Up For This’, while newly signed to “friend and mentor” Ed Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man imprint.

“It’s such a privilege to be able to work closely with and learn from somebody like Ed,” she says. “He is truly the greatest example I know of grace, humility, work ethic and good humour. He’s lived a lot and been through a lot.” At Maisie’s invitation, he contributed vocals and guitar to ‘Want You Back’ on ‘The Good Witch’. “He learned all the lyrics, harmonies and guitar parts. For the hour and a half that we were recording, he made it feel like the most important thing he had ever done,” she fondly recalls.

Maisie describes her second album at intervals as “my blood on the page,” “a true chronicle of my life in recent history,” and “my own twisted version of a breakup album.” The concept of ‘The Good Witch’ emerged from the immersive emotional universes the singer found herself building to process her recent life experiences, as a symbol of the power she was fnding in telling her story faithfully from her own perspective and nobody else’s. “This album was my way of taking control of a tumultuous time,” she nods.

“There’s a unique kind of power in writing music,” Maisie continues. “Kind of like playing with fre. You’re taking real life and melting it down to make something new and beautiful. I always joke that you can use that power for good or for evil.”

It’s not about catharsis, though. She isn’t writing music for any kind of release. “One of my pet peeves is getting asked whether I write music for catharsis,” she says. “I wonder if it’s a female thing? Like, why do people think that all women write music to deal with some kind of deep emotional strife? Similar to when a female author writes a novel, the main character has to be some autobiographical version of her.

“I think I write music for documentation,” Maisie continues. “I have a real obsession

ON SECOND ALBUM ‘THE GOOD WITCH’, MAISIE PETERS IS OPERATING AT THE HEIGHT OF HER POWERS. Words: Cordelia Lam. Photos: Louise Mason.

and addiction with recording and chronicling things. The older I get, the more desperate I am to make songs as timestamps of things that have happened. It can even be something small, like having a crazy night out or meeting someone.” She turned one such moment – meeting a friend’s sibling at a party for the frst time – into 2022 hit ‘Cate’s Brother’: an unabashed, eyes-wide-open crush fest featuring lyrics like, “And my heart went ‘Love him, he’s the one, and we shall wed’.” Maisie debuted the track while on tour with Ed Sheeran and found lightning in a bottle. It played to a rapturous reception across stadiums worldwide, kicking off a period of giddy, feverish fandom that she affectionately calls “feral girl summer”.

And it’s that same spirit of saying the damn thing out loud and standing by the consequences that she now carries into ‘The Good Witch’. Overcome by the compulsion to commit her experiences of the past year to memory - “To get it down and make it into

Peters the musician, to say the things that Maisie Peters the person wouldn’t be able to express in her real personal life,” she explains. “I sort of went, ‘Well, fuck it then. Let’s lean into the destruction.’ Let’s tell these stories exactly the way I experienced them.”

Treading more heavily through the contours of her emotions, on LP2, Maisie writes with a steely precision; forthright and unfinching. The result is an album that’s deliciously honest. On ‘Body Better’, she dares to showcase post-breakup jealousy at its most superfcial and petty, with lyrics like “Has she got a better body than mine?” and “Was I just an idea you like? A convenient use of type with obedient blue eyes”. Meeting us later in the healing process, ‘Lost the Break Up’ indulges in the fantasy of running into your ex when you’ve really, properly moved on, and plays through the exquisite pleasure of showing them what they’re missing with the impossibly amazing life you’ve built without them.

Inviting her audience fully into the universe of ‘The Good Witch’, Maisie has shared stories, tarot cards and solidarity with fans online, creating a sisterhood – or perhaps more fttingly, a coven – around defant honesty and self-acceptance.

“Because I came from YouTube, the act of sharing and posting music has always been sort of inherent in what I do,” she says. “I

something” - Maisie doubled down on the creative vision of a good witch as the narrator for the project. “The idea of the ‘good witch’ is power, it’s destruction, it’s femininity,” she says. “Those themes all feel very relevant to the album and who I was when I was making it.”

She considers the history of the ‘witch’, the archetype of a woman punished for the heresy of rebelling against society’s expectations. “I felt such liberation and freedom in writing this album as ‘the good witch’. I felt empowered, as Maisie

feel such a strong sense of community online, especially in the smaller, singer-songwriter corners of YouTube that I came from.

“I’m glad that I began where I did,” she continues, refectively. “I was born from an online world, but I now exist in a different one, where TikTok and Instagram and basically being extremely online are all part of the puzzle.” That’s not to say she doesn’t readily identify this way. “I was with a friend, [jazz musician] Laufey, this morning, and we were talking about how we’re the most chronically online bitches in the whole world,” she laughs. “I mean, my Twitter is 10 years old and I’m 23. Riddle me that!”

Maisie describes ‘There It Goes’, the album’s penultimate track, as “the closure zone” - an excerpt of “the good witch’s parting words.” “The love we had was covered in snow / I had to let it go”, goes the chorus; it’s a song about leaving things behind and coming back to yourself at the end of it all.

“I turned in the album in December, the same night that there was a crazy snowstorm in London that came out of nowhere,” Maisie recalls. “I had gone into my room to read and had the blinds closed. When I woke up the next morning, I looked out my window to see London absolutely blanketed in snow, just like the lyric I had written. It felt really beautiful and full circle,” she says, smiling. Full circle indeed. Witchy, even.

‘The Good Witch’ is out 16th June via Gingerbread Man / Asylum. DIY

“There’s a unique kind of power in writing music - kind of like playing with fre.”

Who said Maisie was an easy target…

OMEARA

KATE NASH

NICOLE ATKINS & JIM SCLAVUNOS FEEL

SILVERTWIN

SUPA DUPA FLY

INDIA SHAWN

BEAVERTOWN: SUMMER FREQUENCIES -

ENGLISH TEACHER + PYNCH + HALF HAPPY

MILES FROM KINSHASA

DEBBIE

FEEL IT

KINDRED SPIRITS X FAITH

OLD DIRTY BRASSTARDS

CLEOPATRICK

TINY HABITS

MNELIA

FEEL IT

MIDLAKE

STEPHEN SANCHEZ

BETH MCCARTHY

AMANDA SHIRES

FEEL IT

G4 BOYZ

THE SOUTH LONDON SOUL TRAIN

L DEVINE

TOUCAN

FILIPE MANU

BEAVERTOWN: SUMMER FREQUENCIES MADELINE EDWARDS

TREVOR NELSON’S SOUL NATION

BEAVERTOWN: SUMMER FREQUENCIES

FEEL IT

HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF (DUO ACOUSTIC)

OSCAR LANG

THE SOUTH LONDON SOUL TRAIN WITH BROKEN BRASS ENSEMBLE (LIVE)

CHRISTIAN LEE HUTSON

Re d

“I’m not doing this for the male gaze; I want to see myself as a sexual creature for myself.” - Rakel Mjöll

Janet Jackson at the Superbowl, but make it punk.

hen DIY catches up with the indomitable Dream Wife, it’s the day after the release of the trio’s latest single, ‘Who Do You Wanna Be?’. A direct attack on capitalism and false activism, the ethos of the song is about building communities and looking at ways people can collectively make a difference in a world that often seems to be out for blood. “It’s just soul-sucking nonsense, living in a capitalist world that is consuming everything around us,” vocalist Rakel Mjöll explains. “Especially now, as we’re in a cost of living crisis. In London, it’s incredibly important to unionise - to be there for a community instead of trying to perfect a version of yourself.”

Dream Wife are a band who, from the beginning, have been trying to set the world right. Their music has always had a political edge, stories told through the perspectives of people whose voices are often suppressed in favour of the patriarchal boys’ club. Across two previous albums - a 2018 self-titled debut and 2020’s ‘So When You Gonna…’ - and heading into a forthcoming third, they’ve continuously rallied against this, tearing up the rule books and offering a platform to female, trans and non-binary artists via tour support opportunities and donating a portion of previous album proceeds to charities including Black Minds Matter and Gendered Intelligence. If you want to see a change, Dream Wife understand that you have to put the work in. “To expect that you can do this all by yourself is very unreasonable thinking,” Rakel says.

The recent discourse around so-called ‘industry plants’ - with artists such as Wet Leg and The Last Dinner Party most visibly in the fring line - is, they say, yet another example of the patriarchal dominance still prevalent. “The reality is that the industry is predominantly run by white, middle-aged men,” guitarist Alice Go explains. “The people in positions of power to even make the decisions of who the industry plant is are these men pulling the strings and being puppeteers. If you fipped that so there were more women, non-binary and trans people in those positions of power, the whole concept of an industry plant might feel different, because like the idea of a woman planting another woman to headline a festival would be an empowering thing.”

The whole argument comes back to people being pitted against each other, rather than trying to fnd unity. ‘Leech’ – the frst single to be released from third album, ‘Social Lubrication’ – is feral and unapologetic as it calls out double standards and demands empathy. On it, Rakel practically seethes: “Fuck those you who call themselves a friend and don’t lift a fnger / Fuck that WhatsApp group where they got points for nailing a fresh-faced singer.” She’s deservedly angry, and done with playing the nice girl.

On third album ‘Social Lubrication’, Dream Wife are stoking the fres with political punk and a healthy splash of sexual healing. Words: Tyler Damara Kelly.

Red is the chosen palette for ‘Social Lubrication’. It’s a colour that embodies rage and danger, but also passion, lust, and confdence. While Dream Wife maintain their political prowess on songs such as ‘Social Lubrication’ and ‘Kick In The Teeth’, there’s a heavy dose of sexual energy. Quite frankly, the trio are horny, and not afraid to admit it.

Rakel’s lyrics conjure vivid images of tangled limbs and heady, euphoric moments. “I’ll romanticise the outlines of your spine, as you lie on the tatami mat with your head between my thighs,” she sings on ‘Mascara’, while ‘I Want You’ is as direct as its title suggests: “I want you to slide my fngers down below your waist / Our bodies longing so let’s make haste / I want you to forget the time and place”. Meanwhile, the album’s penultimate song, ‘Honestly’, is where the sexual tension builds to boiling point.

Written as an ode to Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’, Rakel uses the hazy, somnambulant soundscape to describe an orgasm, with breathy vocals that are drawn out and intoxicating. “I remember hearing ‘Glory Box’ when I was a young teen and, for me, it was a bit like a sexual awakening,” she recalls. “It’s very orgasmic, and I really wanted to channel that similar kind of sexual awakening. In that, too, is the female gaze. I’m not doing this for the male gaze; I want to see myself as a sexual creature for myself.”

Being sexually liberated is a political statement in itself. Across the record, Dream Wife discuss ageism, bisexuality and polyamory, while ‘Curious’ was inspired by Rakel’s grandmother. “There’s a line that says, ‘You’ll all be middle aged men one day / And I’ll be a middle-aged dream wife’. It’s talking about ageism, but also celebrating your own sexuality at various ages,” she says. The song also uses pronouns for the frst time, which is something Dream Wife have tried to stay away from in the past.

“It has been quite deliberate, lyric-wise, not to use ‘he’ or ‘she’ in any of our albums,” Rakel explains. “Bella [Podpadec, bass] is non-binary and there are non-binary people in our community. Songs are a shared experience, and it's much nicer when you keep that open. The use of ‘they’ goes through the whole track, because it’s important to include it.” She then recounts the frst time when she played a friend recent single ‘Hot’ and he misheard the lyric, “hot theys in bands” as “hot gays in bands”. “I was like, ‘You’re not wrong! I love that you heard that because it’s defnitely correct as well’,” she laughs.

‘Social Lubrication’ was written in 2021 when festival season began and, thriving on that combustible energy, it contains an urgency that feels infnite. Live shows are integral to Dream Wife: it’s what brought them together in the frst place, and it’s at the heart of their forthcoming album.

Alice was at the helm of production duties for the frst time since their debut EP and, inspired by that intense run of shows, she wanted to capture the band’s raw energy on record. “It’s just three instruments – guitar, bass, drums and vocals – taking it back to that punk setup and keeping it as raw as possible,” she says of the ethos of the album. “It’s capturing the element of playing together and not perfecting it. Not necessarily having to fx things because, often, whatever you think is a mistake is actually a magical moment.”

Those magical moments are something the band clearly still treasure. For DIY’s photoshoot, they’re back in Brighton at the university that frst brought them together and the feeling of how far they’ve come is tangibly in the air. “We all made the band as something funny to sort of distract us from uni,” Rakel says. “It felt quite sentimental to go back there and see that nothing had

changed.” “I think the people that we were then, would all be really proud of where we are now,” Alice adds.

Being in a band that’s based upon friendship and community is something that all three members of Dream Wife wanted when they were teenagers. The band who inspired this craving was Le Tigre, who they’ll be supporting on tour this month. “For me personally, growing up in the countryside, I remember listening to Le Tigre when I was a young teen and feeling kind of lonely and being like, ‘One day I’ll fnd my people’,” remembers Alice. “Le Tigre was an anthem for that hope.” “They were a band who were mixing rock with this kind of weirdness, and not being too cool. They showed queerness, having a nonbinary member and playing with gender roles – few bands were like that when we were younger,” Rakel nods.

Putting a spotlight on gender imbalance, calling out the patriarchy, and rallying for female empowerment and sexual liberation is all political. But, as Alice notes, there’s also a political nature in just living your life freely and having a great time doing it. “As people, as individuals, and as friends, we have so much fun together,” she smiles. “If our band can encapsulate that, and if everyone that comes down to our show can scream ‘Hot’ at the top of their lungs together with us, it’s all so silly. That statement of having a good fucking time is so important.”

‘Social Lubrication’ is out 9th June via Lucky Number. DIY

“I think the people that we were [at the start] would all be really proud of where we are now.” - Alice Go

WHERE THE LIGHT GETS IN

Following a string of upheaving life events, Protomartyr are starting to relish the hope from amongst the gloom.

Words: Louis Griffn

"The older you get, the closer you get to death, and you have to deal with it your own way."

- Joe Casey

Well over a decade in, Detroit punks Protomartyr - a band used to being decidedly out of sync with the wider music landscape - have found themselves suddenly, unintentionally within the zeitgeist.

Hallmarks of the recent post-punk revival can be found all across the band’s catalogue. A singer who doesn’t actually sing? Check. Grinding, melancholy yet ear-worming guitars? Check. Album titles that feel worthy of academic inspection? Check, check, check. The only trouble is, Protomartyr have been doing this the whole time.

Far from stale, however, even on sixth studio album ‘Formal Growth In The Desert’ Protomartyr are still fnding ways to evolve, much as the title implies. This is a set of songs that are altogether more complex than what has come before. They don’t ft easily into boxes; there’s grief here, but also more optimism than frontman Joe Casey has ever sunk into lyrics. There are pummelling moments, but it all opens with a beautiful, soft melody from guitarist Greg Ahee (also on co-production duties for the frst time). Indeed, that opener, ‘Make Way’, holds the keys to the record in its fnal lyrics: “Make way for tomorrow”.

This is a record inspired by, and defned by, three huge events in Joe’s life – two bleak, and one euphoric. His mother passed away after over a decade of battling Alzheimer’s; his family home was repeatedly broken into until he had to sell it and leave; he became engaged to his fancée. Echoes of these moments are felt all over the album, and they’ve left a profound effect on him.

It’s hard to know where to start, but burglary is such a specifcally unsettling crime that it feels like a pivotal infuence – it’s a profound loss when a space that was once safe is left entirely vulnerable and exposed. Joe nods. “The house kept getting broken into - four times in two weeksand each time they would go through a different part of the house and pull out things. They didn’t steal much, because there weren’t many things of value in the house moneywise, but they did dredge up old memories, and things from before I was born.”

Homes become more than just a place where we live. They contain echoes of us, of who we are, and of what we’ve done while within those four walls. “I did realise when I fnally moved out, [that] I had been drawing a lot of the artwork, a lot of thoughts, from things in the house. My parents grew up during the Depression - I called them happy hoarders. It was 60 years’ worth of stuff,” he explains. “So I can thank [the thieves], a little bit, for forcing us to close that house down, because there was no way that I was going to be able to maintain it. It was an albatross around my neck, almost a museum to my parents.”

It’s interesting how quickly the conversation turns from the emotional to the political. Both Joe and Greg can’t help but view their experiences through a wider societal lens. “‘We Know The Rats’ is directly about it,” Joe nods, “because I was mad at the thieves, so I called the cops, and the cops never came. Over the phone they were very derisive, and they basically blamed me for not having a gun. Then I started thinking, well, why does the thief rob my house? He needs money. Why does he need money? Well, all the houses on the street [have been] sold to a corporation,

and the corporation gives it a cheap fx-up, and raises the prices more than people can afford. I started realising that the real rats are the people in charge. So it went from me being very sad about myself, to being angry about the state of the world, pretty quickly.” He pauses, and breaks into a half-grin. “I no longer am mad at the guy that broke into my house.”

The other loss in Joe’s life that informed the record was the death of his mother, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s. Death has been an infuence on the band since its inception - his father’s passing in 2008 was one of the events that resulted in Protomartyr forming. “It was an impetus for me to be like, ‘Boy, life is very short. I should at least attempt to try and do something fulflling for myself, because who knows when you’re gonna go’,” he explains. “It hit my mom pretty hard, my dad’s death, and soon after she started showing the frst signs of Alzheimer’s. So, she never really got a sense - maybe thankfully so - that I was in the band. She did go to a show once; I don’t know if she knew what was going on, but I think she had a good time.”

When a loved one has been ill for a long time, there can be some small solace in their suffering ending. “When my dad died, I was very depressed and full of anger,” Joe nods. “When mom died, I was very sad, but instead of going through that whole process again, we actually felt relieved that she was at peace. So the outcome was, ‘Well, she wouldn’t want me to be walking around with sadness, I need to brush it off.’” He stops to consider. “There’s nothing worse than watching someone that you love, so full of life, lose themselves. It really makes you question a lot of things. So instead of harping on, I fgured, ‘Well, she was a very happy person, and she’d probably want you to continue that way.”

Helping him attempt to do so is his new fancée, who has now relocated to Detroit. All things considered, has this made for the frst optimistic Protomartyr record? “Well, the older you get, the closer you get to death, and you have to deal with it your own way,” Joe replies. “You go out to the desert, and you see this rock that’s been there for thousands of years - time moves much slower for the rock than it does for us. The seasons change, and every year I’m

astounded when the trees start blooming; in Detroit, everything dies, and then it comes back.”

So, where next for the group? A band that started out resolutely out of step with what was in vogue (a cursory glance at their contemporaries in 2009 reveals a landscape of Beach House and Vampire Weekend, a far cry from Protomartyr’s squall) have found themselves following a fashion, and their once-nihilistic frontman is now talking about making the most of your time on Earth. Joe laughs. “I don’t think we’ll ever be 100% optimistic. But the journey from the dark place to some sort of hopefulness and love and connection does make me look forward to what the hell the next one is going to be about.” He pauses, chuckling. “I hope it’s not my divorce record. That’d be terrible…”

‘Formal Growth In The Desert’ is out now via Domino. DIY

"I started realising that the real rats are the people in charge."

- Joe Casey

“It’s more Biggie Smalls than Mark E Smith.”

Two pints deep and basking in the heat of spring’s frst truly sunny day on a pub bench a stone’s throw away from his West London riverside fat, Baxter Dury has - after 40 minutes of amusing wrangling - come to something of a conclusion: “I don’t know if it means anything? I think I’m just talking…”

It would be easy to assume that ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’, an album whose frst words question, “Hey Mummy, hey Daddy / Who am I?” and that comes swiftly on the heels of recent childhood memoir Chaise Longue is, in fact, loaded with meaning. Throughout its woozy recollections and warped snapshots, Baxter mines his past for tales that veer between the sensational and the strangely sombre. On ‘Shadow’, guest vocalist Eska Mtungwazi trills a sing-song backing vocal that cuts to the core: “No one will get over that you’re someone’s son / Even though you want to be like Frank Ocean / But you don’t sound like him, you sound just like Ian.”

However, the way that potentially devastating line is delivered - “Like a ‘50s American toothpaste advert, because you can’t sing those lyrics normally,” he notes - says as much as its contents. It’s quite a sad song, we suggest… “But it’s also really taking the piss out of myself,” Baxter laughs. “It’s sort of sad but also… everything’s fne!”

Everything, for Baxter Dury, is largely fne. Seven albums into a career that’s seen him develop a singular niche of highly evocative storytelling flled with murky characters and endlessly entertaining wordplay, the 51-year-old has outgrown the shadow of his family name to become a cult hero in his own right. He’s BFFs with Jarvis Cocker, recently collaborated with producer du jour Fred again.. and is, in person, naturally hilarious and ridiculous, stripping down to a vest for today’s

photoshoot and referring to himself as Buff Daddy (Sean Combs, eat your heart out).

The tales that populate his latest, then, he sees as simply source material: his sources just happen to be a little bit more out there than most. “I don’t necessarily live a life where I’m generating much drama. It’s quite couscous and avocado and streaming subscriptions, so I had to reference something,” he says. “From the start I talk about my parents, but it’s actually not about that, it’s just about being brought up in a certain way. The privilege wasn’t because Dad was famous; he hated being famous so it didn’t really bring much except that I live in a gaff overlooking the river which I have to pay a shitload of money for. But I think there’s another privilege that’s even more important, which is that I grew up around people that took opportunities to follow their artistic way of life and that was really important. I wouldn’t have been able to survive just being someone famous’s son because you perish.”

Ïf the nepo baby argument is one that shows no sign of exhausting itself, then it’s one that, unsurprisingly, Baxter has opinions about. He is, he decides, “a bit of an economic nepo baby”. “In the sense that I’m not a good catch,” he riffs. “If someone caught me they’d just be like, ‘Oh fuck that one. Put him over there for a while…’ I’m not guillotined for it publically, I don’t think.”

If anything, Baxter represents the fipside of the conversation where, sometimes, the weight of a surname can be a challenge in itself. “I think anyone that follows in their parents’ footsteps, especially musically, it’s 99% perilous and you’re never gonna survive - mostly because they’re an obvious mutation of their parents and maybe they sort of deserve what they get in a way,” he says. “But if you do survive it then that journey alone is

Whether supremely personal, not that deep or a little bit of both, Baxter Dury’s latest ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’ comes as his most lyrically intriguing yet.

Words: Lisa Wright. Photos: Louise Mason.

Jüdgë &DürÝ

diffcult enough. And either the music’s good or it isn’t, and people aren’t stupid enough to think that it’s inherited.

“I’m sure I’m in music because Dad was in music, but then I’m sure that I’ve got quite good at it,” he shrugs. “To be successful in music, you just have to be quite good eventually. Usually, attention highlights how bad you are quite quickly. For sponsorship deals alone, you can be quite symmetrical looking because your family has a sort of symmetrical DNA and that’s quite advantageous. But we didn’t have that. We were a long line of potato-faced people, so that was never really relevant…”

What he has brought through into his own art, however, are the extreme, often wildly juxtaposed experiences that his youth afforded him. As such, ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’, with its expressive delivery and vivid picture-painting, comes off at times like a strange, hazy play. On lead single ‘Aylesbury Boy’, he’s snaking round Chiltern Firehouse among “the posh kids [that] say yah”; ‘Leon’ tells the story of when Baxter and a childhood friend got arrested for stealing sunglasses from Kensington High Street; later, on ‘Pale White Nissan’, “large men” populate the scene “throwing chairs out of windows”.

“It’s like West London-side Story,” Baxter quips. He’s got other analogies, too. On more than one occasion he compares his latest to the story of Pinocchio while, when we mention the different affectations and voices that populate his vocals this time, he has another idea. “You know the flm Beetlejuice, where he pops up outside the animated house?” he grins, sans striped suit but nonetheless evoking the parallel disarmingly well. “I was thinking of it like that as an alter ego, a bit uncontrolled, and then it suddenly calms down and it’s a bit sentimental. It was just a very short collection of moments - like a very pretentious concept album. Like Pinocchio.” There we go.

Åside from fction’s most famous fb-teller, it’s some altogether more real characters that were at the forefront of Baxter’s mind this time around. Having grown up listening to hip hop, he speaks with audible admiration and excitement for the way Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator have blown apart the genre into something entirely new. “It’s not even really hip hop anymore; it’s manifested into something so complex. It’s such open-ended music now,” he enthuses. As a lover

Søüth øf thë Børdër

For his latest, Baxter ventured out of native West London and let the spirit of the South seep in.

“We made the album in Deptford with Paul White who’s a hip hop producer and he was just surrounded by different people. I got out of West London and there were just different people around. JGrrey is on it a lot and she just badgered me to come sing on it; she’s from round the corner in Deptford and she just rolled up and took the piss out of me for being posh. I was eating some sort of Japanese organic snack and she was funny and did her own thing. Eska Mtungwazi sings on ‘Shadow’ and she worked in the studio and was just amazing. It soaked up a bit of the area; it got out of here. It’s less indie.”

of language, it’s these artists who Baxter feels most inspired by. “The words are important,” he says. “It’s trying to fnd a bit of a melody in the way [I deliver it], which is why I was thinking about those rap records because beat poetry or poetry are all too dense and rich for a song.

“That’s why I like rap music; they’re really clever and there’s a sort of natural melody to an American accent and the American experience whereas the English accent - which is informed by the English experience - is so fat because we queue up and we’re neurotic,” he continues. “But then also I think it’s music that belongs to people for a reason so you mustn’t try and harness it; you should admire it from a distance.”

He’s painfully aware to caveat that, sitting on the Thames supping an afternoon lager, he is not drawing any parallels to those artists (“I don’t have the right to even begin to venture into that world, but I just kind of like a bit of that - it’s an energy,” he says). But still there’s something about Baxter’s latest, with its explorations into his personal history and delight in the possibilities of language, that makes as much sense sat next to hip hop as it does the more indie circles with which he’s more normally associated.

“I don’t really listen to The Fall. I’m sure they’re good but I’ve never listened to them so there’s nothing about anything I've ever done [that comes from that],” he says. “I guess I’ve become confdent enough to just talk like the way I do on record, and the traces of hip hop are probably invisible to most people but they’re meant to be in honour of that more than they are The Fall. It’s more Biggie Smalls than Mark E Smith.

“I think as you get older you might distance yourself from more of what you originally loved; that’s the danger of getting older, that you’re less likely to

“The danger of getting older is that you’re less likely to fight for what’s original.”

fght for what’s original,” he muses. “Musically, you can get quite bad. So I really try to make it interesting, and I can afford to because I don’t really want to be… What’s the question?” He stops, suddenly aware of not entirely knowing where he’s headed. “I’ve just gone into the pints…”

If we’d hazard an end to the sentence, we’d say perhaps that Baxter doesn’t really want to be famous in the way that he saw frsthand as a youngster. He would like, as he readily admits, for “people to pay me huge premiums for playing, so I want the music to be as good as it can be”, but he’s also quite content sitting in the niche that he’s carved out for himself, telling his stories, keeping things interesting.

There are all sorts of conversations that ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’ provokes: about the pleasures and pitfalls of growing up in such a chaotic situation; about whether you can really be considered that privileged if you were given “£50 to buy an Evening Standard and kept the change, but then I didn’t see my dad for fve years and I lived with a drug dealer that died while taking me to school.” There’s no real answer, it’s just Baxter’s life. “As Dad said to me at a young age,” he shrugs: “‘You’re not working class, you’re not middle class, you’re arts and crafts and you always will be’.”

‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’ is out now via Heavenly. DIY

“Either the music’s good or it isn’t, and people aren’t stupid enough to think that it’s inherited.”

Baxter’s new vape was a bit OTT.

As densely claustrophobic as it is endlessly sprawling.

The otherworldly vortex of sound that King Krule, real name Archy Marshall, has been busy honing over the best part of a decade gives immediate accuracy to the title of his fourth studio album, ‘Space Heavy’: a record as densely claustrophobic as it is endlessly sprawling. Initially concocted on countless train journeys between his two bases of London and Liverpool, its themes have since taken on minds of their own, giving rise to the minimalist shudders of the largely instrumental ‘When Vanishing’ and the unexpected yet welcome vocal collaboration on ‘Seagirl’. They quickly cut through the deliberate drone of Archy’s orchestration that pushes the boundaries of spoken word, contemporary jazz and indie rock, unfolding as more of an arthouse production seemingly ready to offer more serious concert halls their bleakest performances yet. It’s heavy in atmosphere and tone; think David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ or Nick Cave if he’d spent a few hours drinking with Squid, offering a constant stream of musical intricacies that not only surprise but pull everything back together with unique precision. Ten years in, it’s unmistakably King Krule, yet somehow even broader, denser, and crucially more enticing than what has come before. (Ben Tipple) LISTEN: ‘Pink Shell’

 Squid

O Monolith (Warp)

If debut ‘Bright Green Field’ offered the quintessence of spiky, angst-ridden urban paranoia, Squid’s second outing ‘O Monolith’ escapes into the freshness of countryside air and vents all its frustration there instead. Reunited with Dan Carey’s production talents - and John McIntyre of post-rock legends Tortoise handling the mix -  the quintet upped sticks to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Wiltshire studios and dutifully embraced all its natural wonders. Accordingly, this latest harebrained scheme is imbued with an otherworldly folk cultishness, with group chants and woodwind fgures adding pastoral fair. Song titles come imbued with occultic associations - ‘Devil’s Den’, ’Green Light’, ‘Undergrowth; indeed, the tortured refrain of the latter (“Undergrowth, consume me”) might act as the LP’s slogan. Adding to this air of intimacy and exposure, vocalist Ollie Judge shifts away from the eye-boggling yelps that made the band their name, singing instead with pained melodic yearning. While, at its core, ‘O Monolith’ retains that signature post-punk fex - guitars interlocking in askew time signatures like the workings of a Swiss watch - everything here has been given room to expand, songs drifting from dreamy ascension to full-blown rock revelation and back again. An album of immense power and conviction. (Elvis Thirlwell) LISTEN: ‘Undergrowth’

An album of immense power and conviction.

 Dream Wife

Social Lubrication (Lucky Number)

While the so-called indie sleaze revival amounts to very little at all, it does give a good jumping off point for Dream Wife’s third album. Not the oversaturated images of inebriated indie A-listers the internet would have you believe it was, but the wholehearted embrace of the sticky, sweaty, lust-fuelled dancefoor. ‘Social Lubrication’ sees the trio loosening up and letting go, resulting in a record that’s both a progression, and that shows off wonderfully just what made them so exciting to begin with. There’s a knowing wink from the off, opener ‘Kick In The Teeth’ nailing a wiry guitar line and disco beat while Rakel Mjöll wryly quips, “Lolita’s all grown up now / Who knew?”. ‘Hot (Don’t Date A Musician)’ brings a giggle too, while ‘Leech’ and ‘Who Do You Wanna Be?’ continue the band’s thread of delivering important messages. The title track offers both a giant riff and an even bigger disco chorus - think ‘Parallel Lines’-era Blondie with added Kathleen Hanna - while the epic ‘Mascara’ tells its late-night tales so vividly as to incite nostalgia for venues never visited. The sensual ‘Honestly’ simmers for four-plus minutes of intense eye contact (it’s here, perhaps, where guitarist Alice Go being on production duties has most impact; should there be a sonic take on the flmmaker’s female gaze, this is it), while the record’s themes seem to culminate in the pure pleasure of ‘I Want You’, a message as direct as its title, delivered via riotous garage rock riffs bringing it all full-circle. (Emma Swann)LISTEN: ‘I Want You’

 King Krule Space Heavy (XL)

Foo Fighters

But Here We Are (Roswell / Columbia)

Foo Fighters’ story has become devastatingly cyclical. Their very existence is down to loss, having risen from the ashes of Nirvana after Kurt Cobain’s death, but 28 years later, they faced a loss of their own in the form of Taylor Hawkins’ untimely passing. And yet, ffteen months on, they’re still standing. Equally cyclical on their tenth album is its sound, harking back strongly to the Foos’ earliest days with more immediacy than their previous few records, but it’s just as rich, especially where Dave Grohl’s drumming is concerned (unmistakably seeming like an urgent search for catharsis). There’s plenty of stadium-ready gold - opener ‘Rescued’ is made for screaming to the sky, while ‘Under You’ takes fight without feeling weighed down by its grief. But as time goes by, Dave burrows deeper, painting pictures in crushingly direct words (“Are you well? I can’t tell / Do tell,” he asks on ‘Beyond Me’), reaching a harrowing nadir on ten-minute ‘The Teacher’ as he screams “Wake up” over guitars squalling in alarm. The funereal, fragile ‘Rest’ is similarly unsparing – “You can rest now / You will be safe now,” he murmurs, signing off on an album that will follow you for hours, if not days. (Emma Wilkes) LISTEN: ‘The Teacher’

 Protomartyr

Formal Growth In The Desert (Domino)

“Can you hate yourself and still deserve love?” asks the tender yet acerbic Joe Casey, repeatedly, as he ends ‘Polacrilex Kid’. It’s a lot to ponder, but Protomartyr have never been the band to avoid delving into the philosophical. Six albums in and without ever relenting in quality, intensity and sheer abyss-like emotional depth, this Detroit foursome own such a space in the intellectual, nihilistic end of post-punk that they might as well charge rent to anyone else who dares to cross that territory

Like a melee in a ballroom, Protomartyr’s balancing act between decay and rebirth, love and hate, takes on an even sharper focus here. Touching on so many emotional themes that could swamp another album - his engagement; the death of his mother; leaving his childhood home after a series of breakins - Protomartyr are uniquely equipped to express and elucidate in the most compelling of ways. They retain their characteristic dissection of contemporary America too - ‘Let’s Tip the Creator’ skewers the billionaire magnates, ‘Fulflment Center’ the gig economy and ‘3800 Tigers’ might be the frst extinction and baseball themed song. It’s defnitely the most catchy.

The band remain successful at fnding lush nuances in their well-established formula and ‘Formal Growth in the Desert’ packs more hooks than any of their albums since 2015’s ‘The Agent Intellect’. Closer ‘Rain Garden’ addresses the earlier doubts, fnding anyone deserving of love who works for it, in a cautiously optimistic, delicate croon of “Love has found me,” fatefully blissful and moving.  For an act who have spent so much time contemplating their worth and their place, thirteen years into this journey they’re only going from strength to strength. While they’re one of the most expert chroniclers of our modern misfortunes one thing is obvious - we’re lucky to have Protomartyr. (Matthew Davies Lombardi) LISTEN: ‘Rain Garden’

 McKinley Dixon

Beloved! Paradise! Jazz?! (City Slang)

Sometimes, it’s perfectly fne to judge a book by its cover. Or its title: ‘Beloved! Paradise! Jazz?!’ takes its name from a trilogy of novels by American author Toni Morrison. And not only does McKinley Dixon’s lyrical dexterity and his ability to paint pictures with words make the record one arguably worthy of such literary pedigree, but the words themselves go some way to show what he’s included on it, juxtaposing compellingly-delivered tales of contemporary life with lusciously-arranged jazz instrumentation, as warm, inviting and smooth as his stories occasionally turn unforgiving. The hook of ‘Run, Run, Run’ sounds so instantly classic as if having been rediscovered via a vinyl deepdive while the hint of drum’n’bass to its skittish beat shows that while taking cues from the past, it’s not in thrall to it. The dream-like brass that introduces ‘Tyler, Forever’ is bookended by the swooping strings of ‘The Story So Far - Interlude’, as cinematic themselves as the album is as a whole. It’s all gorgeously rich in both sound and delivery. (Ed Lawson) LISTEN: ‘Tyler, Forever’

 Killer Mike

MICHAEL (Loma Vista)

That Killer Mike is a skilled storyteller - both lyrically and otherwise - is not, by now, news. Yet there’s something about the vignettes he paints on ‘MICHAEL’, his frst solo album since 2012’s ‘R.A.P. Music’, that suggests that while he’s seemed an open book so far, there’s still plenty for him to reveal. At the core of the record - which, as its title suggests, shows the rapper as the man rather than the moniker - sits ‘Motherless’. Built around perhaps the unlikeliest of hooks, the starkness of its lyrics shocks, awes and tugs at the heartstrings all at once while, by the end of the song’s runtime, it nonetheless proves an earworm. Elsewhere, he fnds sonic gold in stories of teen pregnancy (‘Slummer’), the vista from his barber shop (‘Something For The Junkies’) and navigating the world post-fame (‘Scientists & Engineers’, which also boasts the talents of fellow Atlantans-made-good, André 3000 and Future). Its most immediate moment may come via the El-P featuring ‘Don’t Let The Devil’, with its musical bombast and Mike as most have heard him until now, but this is a sonically rich record that is likely to reveal yet more on each listen. (Ed Lawson)

LISTEN: ‘Motherless’

ALBUMS

 Bully Lucky For You (Sub Pop)

If, as Radiohead infamously once decided, anyone can play guitar and, as midwives worldwide are able to attest, the vast majority of us are born screaming, two deceptively more diffcult things to do are to convey emotion in song and write big pop choruses. Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, thankfully, is pretty good at all four, and on fourth record ‘Lucky For You’ does so in spellbinding fashion. It’s an emotionally raw record from the off. Opener ‘All I Do’ makes like the journey its lyrics describe (“Drove up to Chicago just to talk to you...”), its series of erratic couplets punctuated by shifts in vocal tone as if to echo a teary stream-of-consciousness with realisations being made in real time, from the pause before the repeated “I wanna feel the way I used to”, to the exasperated “I’m done”, to the restraint of the middle eight jolted away by the full-throttle, distorted roar of “I’ll never get fucked up again.” But it’s every bit as powerful musically too. She navigates the depth, range and often scattershot appearance of emotions that surround loss (the album is dedicated to her late dog, just to add to any tugged heartstrings), using her voice in more varied ways than ever. There’s Sonic Youth-style layering met with spoken word on ‘A Love Profound’, and a call-and-response with herself on ‘How Will I Know’; throughout, she somehow ticks off the stages of grief via earworms. On the grungey, Soccer Mommy-featuring gem ‘Lose You’ and swooning ‘A Wonderful Life’, it’s sadness; ‘Days Move Slow’ arrives for denial, and ‘Change Your Mind’ for bargaining, while anger is both directed inward (the baggy-infuenced ‘Hard to Love’) and out (‘All This Noise’ seethes at the state of the world outside as she sings, “Jesus won’t save the polar bears or halt the melting ice / But he’ll give you an excuse to shame and take our bodies’ rights”). A near-perfect album if there ever was one. (Emma Swann) LISTEN: ‘How Will I Know’

 Ezra Williams Supernumeraries (AWAL)

This debut from Ezra Williams follows a growing buzz, the Irish singer-songwriter having made their name (which was, for a while instead Smoothboi Ezra) with intimate, confessional songwriting at a time when it was arguably most needed. ‘Supernumeraries’, named for their medical excess of teeth as a young child is ostensibly a coming-of-age record, both by virtue of Ezra’s age (still just 21) and its protagonist’s wish to detail the world as seen through the eyes of a non-binary autistic person. And indeed, there’s a sense of journey: opener ‘Skin’ begins sparsely, its strummed guitar and Ezra’s vocal front and centre, almost claustrophobic. The record ends with a cacophony of screaming and wailing guitars fading into the distance as the six-minute ‘Seventeen’ offers gnarly, expansive sonic catharsis. But it’s the smart juxtapostions that set ‘Supernumeraries’ above; the wholly dark refrain of “Why can’t I change?” that peppers ‘Deep Routed’ is delivered via sweetly harmonising layered vocals, while the crescendo of ‘Babyteeth’ - “I don’t feel as sad as I used to” - is as angsty as the record gets. Both methods only make Ezra’s message hit harder. An emotionally-wrought debut that fnds release if not resolution, it should more than continue the buzz. (Bella Martin) LISTEN: ‘Babyteeth’

 Maisie Peters

The Good Witch (Gingerbread Man / Elektra)

Whizz through the list of Maisie Peters’ achievements in the last three years and it’s enough to provoke a touch of vertigo. At present, she’s got a show at London’s Wembley Arena in her diary and half a billion Spotify streams under her belt, even before the release of her second album; with ‘The Good Witch’, however, she’s sure to climb to even dizzier heights. Building upon her penchant for telling tales of ghosting and heartbreak with a keen - but relatable - eye for detail, Maisie’s second album picks up where the sugary pop of her debut left off, but this time, things are even more cohesive and polished. The album’s title track shimmers with an apt self-awareness; there’s a delicious Shania Twain-ish swagger to ‘You’re Just A Boy (And I’m Kinda The Man)’; ‘Two Weeks’ is the kind of refective prayer to the not-so-distant past that every girl has murmured in a darker moment. A glorious running of pure pop’s emotional gamut, ‘The Good Witch’ is an accomplished, bewitching listen. (Sarah Jamieson) LISTEN: ‘The Good Witch’

 Baxter Dury I Thought I Was Better Than You (Heavenly)

How did things begin with this record? Did you have much of a game plan going in?

It began in a similar way it always does, with me writing and recording a bunch of demos. There’s not much of a game plan before I start writing. First I see what I’m writing about, how it sounds, how I feel about it and then from there I decide what I think the next best steps should be for those particular songs.

What were you feeling inspired by going into the record?

Oftentimes documentaries can be pretty inspiring depending on the story line and I spend a good amount of time thinking and learning about animals, they are very interesting to me so I guess by way of that then they inspire me as well. After I lost my dog of 13 years the whole record pivoted and surrounded that, she was my best friend and my closest companion. It was just the two of us for so long and she made me feel truly accepted and less alone. She died about a month or so after JT [Daly, producer] and I met up and worked on a few songs together so after that she was all I wrote about, she was all

that was on my mind and really still is. This is the frst record I’ve ever released without her.

Did you have any particularly meaningful anecdotes from making the record? Or are there any tracks you’re specifcally proud of?

I would say ‘All I Do’, ‘Days Move Slow’, A Wonderful Life’ and maybe ‘A Love Profound’ are my top favourites.

What do you think wanted to explore lyrically with this album?

I think it’s easier for me to communicate through writing music than trying to be understood by another person through a one on one conversation. Sometimes I don’t have the right words to describe certain ways that I’m feeling and I feel a sense of freedom when I write, it doesn’t really matter if anybody understands exactly what I mean. If anything it’s even better because they may fnd their own personal way to connect to the lyrics in a way that speaks more directly towards them or their situation and in the end it’s a win win because we are a little less alone together.

“Hey Mummy, Hey Daddy / Who am I?”, asks Baxter Dury on ‘So Much Money’, kicking off his new album ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’. It’s quintessentially Baxter, the 51-yearold now on his seventh album, and sets the tone for the rest of the record, on which he revisits his childhood and his efforts to fnd a place in the world, in what is almost a companion piece to his 2021 autobiography Chaise Longue. His delivery slots in quite nicely with the recent post-punk revival, as does the often minimalist production –there’s a hip hop infuence too, refecting the music he listened to in his youth. There are guest spots; neo-soul artist JGrrey, singer-songwriter Eska, and frequent collaborator Madelaine Hart all make an appearance. ‘Pale White Nissan’ is an instant earworm, in which Baxter thinks back to his experience of being driven to his private school by a “drug-dealing henchman” – also referenced in ‘Aylesbury Boy’ – and it’s followed by the groovy ‘Shadows’. Here, he looks at what’s it’s like to be under the shadow of a famous parent: “Even though you want to be like Frank Ocean / But you don’t sound like him / You just sound like Ian.” In an era of nepo baby discourse, it would be all-too-easy to write Baxter off – his father was a punk legend, after all. But it’d be a disservice; ‘I Thought I Was Better Than You’ proves a valuable insight into who Baxter Dury is. (Adam England) LISTEN: ‘Shadows’

Ahead of the release of her latest album ‘Lucky For You’, we caught up with Bully’s Alicia Bognanno to fnd out how the record came to life. Interview: Sarah Jamieson.

Albert Hammond Jr

Melodies on Hiatus (Red Bull)

Though its obtuse title might be something of a misnomer - while bandmate Julian Casablancas’ extra-curricular work has always tended towards the avant garde, Albert Hammond Jr can never resist a bright guitar line - ‘Melodies on Hiatus’ is undoubtedly a mixed bag when it comes to the calibre of earworms contained within. For a start off, at 19 tracks and with the prerogative of recording a demo and then “just leaving them like that,” there’s an innate quality control flter missing here; where the distinctly Strokes-y melancholy of ‘Dead Air’, or the darker stalk of the Matt Helders-featuring ‘Thoughtful Distress’ succeed, others (‘Home Again’, ‘Old Man’) are throwaway jangles that feel like AHJ-by-numbers. There are moments, such as the warmly infectious ‘818’, when he captures the wideeyed magic of early solo debut ‘Yours To Keep’, but there’s also a reasonable amount of fller; demos that maybe wouldn’t have made it past Round Two had they been put to the test. (Lisa Wright) LISTEN: ‘Thoughtful Distress’

 Christine and the Queens PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE (Because)

On ‘PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ - the second, third and fourth parts to 2022’s ‘Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)’ - Chris reembodies his concept character, Redcar. Following his mother’s death in 2019, Chris’s fourth full-length devours omnipresent grief, squelching its teeth into and reemerging from it like a worm into an apple, colliding with undiscovered seeds of pain to craft a musical bildungsroman of loss, divinity and rediscovery. Across 20 pop operatic tracks, Redcar undergoes euphoric devastation and metaphorical death, entering the brightest light with all the profound ecstasy of Prior’s visions in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the play from which the album takes inspiration. This approach positions reality as narrative arc, wherein the performance of succumbing to pain is to fnd peace and rediscover joy. Take ‘Tears can be so soft’, a Marvin-Gaye-infused musing on the cathartic power of sobbing: “Tears can be so good for those who dive in them […] Let them roll on your face, girl,” he sings. Concurrent with the dramaturgy, Chris sets the bar high: the record’s brilliance lies in an innovative ocean of modern opera, blending elements of soul, pop, trap, R&B, drum ‘n’ bass and musical theatre. The presence of hip hop producer Mike Dean on the album lends a post-pop sound. On ‘PARANOÏA…’, modernity is conjoined to high art, an affnity for which reaches caricaturist highs on the transformational, visionary ‘Full of life’, which samples German composer Pachelbel. Meanwhile, the disembodied voice of Madonna across three experimental tracks paints a lucid picture of the artist as an embodiment of consciousness, motherhood and God (see triumphant standout ‘Lick the light out’). Pop music, then, becomes religious, while the meshing of anachronistic art, music and pop culture deities crafts beauty from the seemingly disconnected: transcendental poetic art pop sculpted - chiselled, in fact - from rapturous spirituality. A far way away from debut ‘Chaleur humaine’, yet just as unafraid, ’PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ is like no other exploration of grief - a new magnum opus. (Otis Robinson) LISTEN: ‘Lick the light out’

 Jenny Lewis Joy'All (Blue Note / EMI)

For many, approaching their ffth solo studio album – the follow-up to their most critically celebrated across all their musical endeavours – would be a complex affair. For Jenny Lewis and ‘Joy’All’, it all came together remarkably quickly. Daily group writing sessions with Beck instigated by the pandemic spawned a signifcant portion of the record, and production materialised with a chance encounter with country legend Dave Cobb. Primarily recorded with a live house band, it was locked in across a couple of weeks, give or take. That process instils the record’s DNA, a choppy but accomplished foray into Nashville’s wide range of sounds, continuing Jenny’s legacy as a standout musician skirting along the edge of the mainstream. Who else would be asked to support global megastar Harry Styles on the stateside leg of his tour, far removed from his loyal fanbase but welcomed with open arms.

Any pop infuences picked up on the road are few and far between on ‘Joy’All’, instead the album blossoms out of the whirlwind live performance setting. Each track conjures up dusty Nashville bars, from the spoken word sandwiched between a lament to love on album closer ‘Chain Of Tears’ to a knowing play on country cliches on Jenny’s exploration of happiness in her forties, ‘Puppy and a Truck’. That it’s a heartfelt homage to the genre is immediately clear from the record’s cover, a deliberate call-back to some of the scene’s greats, and ‘Joy’All’ pairs this with notably contemporary lyrics. “I’m not a psycho,” Jenny sings on the opening track, “I’m just tryna get laid.” Her subsequent self-labelling as a rock and roll disciple tells you all you need to know.

Having spent time with cult indie heroes Rilo Kiley, and preparing to return with The Postal Service for the 20th anniversary of ‘Give Up’ alongside a lengthy flm and TV career and a handful of high profle late night talk show performances, Jenny Lewis has consistently firted with mainstream success. Whether ‘Joy’All’ opens that door, and whether that’s even the intention, remains ambiguous, but in its wild, country-tinged erraticism it presents Jenny Lewis as she has always been, with music and its legacy running freely through her veins. (Ben Tipple)

LISTEN: ‘Psychos’

Militarie Gun

Life Under The Gun (Loma Vista)

While their 2021 set of EPs (‘All Roads Lead To The Gun’ and ‘ARLTTG Part 2’) saw Militarie Gun mark themselves out as a bold new addition to the Californian punk scene, it’s on their debut proper that their vision seems that much more crystalline. While their previous release was led by the more classic hardcore vocals of band leader Ian Shelton, on ‘Life Under The Gun’ the band seamlessly permeate heavy instrumentation with delicious hooks, resulting in a potent balancing act of grit, vulnerability and melody. A fresher and more enthralling take on the genre, ‘Life Under The Gun’ manages to evoke a sense of considered familiarity - nodding to punk classics such as Fugazi, Operation Ivy, and even, at times, Green Day and blink-182 - while still feeling fundamentally rooted in the present, with the likes of ‘Do It Faster’ and ‘Big Disappointment’ sure to become cathartic anthems in the not-so-distant future. (Sarah Jamieson)

LISTEN: ‘Big Disappointment’

 Geese

3D Country (Partisan / Play It Again Sam)

New York City has often provided a home to the freaks, and right now Geese are doing their best to establish that reputation for themselves. Having released one of 2021’s buzziest debuts, they’ve abandoned their previous sonic palette in pursuit of pure experimentation. On '3D Country', there are traces of the discordant post-punk they are known for, but this time far removed from any cliche of the modern genre. '2122' has as much to do with Led Zeppelin or Creedence Clearwater Revival as it does Shame or Squid, and seven-minute epic 'Undoer' twists between a Stranglers bassline and Ramones power chords. There is nothing predictable about this album: 'I See Myself' is a soulful ballad that shows Cameron Winter's voice as an underrated powerhouse, while 'Crusades' is a delight of Strokes-meets-Supergrass pop writing. For many bands, confdence means being able to be yourself uninhibited, but on '3D Country' it seems to be the bravery to explore the unknown. The price of this is that the album suffers from a few rough patches, but Geese have freed themselves from all expectations, which is a rare feat for a second album, and worthy of praise.

(James Hickey) LISTEN: 'Crusades'

WAITING FOR THE RAIN TOUR

Gengahr

Red Sun Titans (Liberator)

On ‘Red Sun Titans’, indie legends Gengahr fnd themselves revitalised. From the very frst word uttered on opening track ‘Alkali’, a light-hearted breeziness takes hold. Frontman Felix Bushe’s vocals practically foat along, entangling themselves with crawling basslines and bouncing percussion. ‘A Ladder’ grooves and sparks along, while ‘In The Moment’ demands to be in the present in a particularly dreamy moment. They exist in that kind of unusual juxtaposition a lot on ‘Red Sun Titans’; deeply in the here and now, glancing around with childlike wonder, whilst also leaning into fantasy and what might come next. It’s a freeing version of the band, but one more driven than ever. ‘White Lightning’ is a particularly strong moment, fzzing backbeats transforming the track into the ideal summer groove. Much of the album goes hand in hand with that – a soundtrack for sunny. For every morning that inches closer to that feeling, Gengahr have a thoughtful, giddy on life track to go along with it. ‘Red Sun Titans’ is a spirited, sun-soaked journey. (Neive McCarthy) LISTEN: ‘White Lightning’

 Tigercub

The Perfume of Decay (Loosegroove)

Newly signed to Loosegroove Records - the label of Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard - it’s fairly easy to see what the legendary axeman might like in Brighton trio Tigercub. Fond of a walloping, gnarly riff, when the bass kicks in on the chorus of ‘Play My Favourite Song’, or ‘You’re My Dopamine’ swaggers in quietly massive fashion before blistering into a dark explosion of a climax, you can imagine these songs being blasted across festival felds and warming up a PJ crowd a treat. Really though, Tigercub’s third LP has more in common with Queens of the Stone Age or even Nine Inch Nails - bands that tap into their purring, feminine side a little more - than mere grizzled rockers. ‘Swoon’ balances nasty bass growls with the falsetto faints of its title, while ‘The Dark Below’ nods to Queens’ live favourite ‘Millionaire’. Even when they’re going full noodle Muse riff on the album’s title track, there’s still an all-important wink to be found. (Lisa Wright)

LISTEN: ‘Play My Favourite Song’

 Body Type

Expired Candy (Poison City)

There’s one particular lyric in this, Aussie indie rockers Body Type’s second album, that sums up that sums up the quartet’s specifc brand of exuberance: “You make me feel like the weekend.” Cues are taken from across the indie spectrum: guitar lines echoing those of Pixies (‘Sha La La’) and The Strokes (‘Anti-Romancer’); vocals bringing the likes of Alvvays or even Scottish outft Camera Obscura to mind (‘Beat You Up’, ‘Tread Overhead’); a joyous gang mentality that rollicks through opener ‘Holding On’ and ‘Weekend’, where harmonious backing vocals and a pure pop sensibility combine in a manner not unlike how The Big Moon won the world over with their debut. Which is all to say ‘Expired Candy’ is a whole lot more fun than its sour, stale name might suggest. (Bella Martin) LISTEN: ‘Weekend’

 Jake Shears

Last Man Dancing (Mute)

If ‘Too Much Music’ were to subject itself to a TikTok-style ‘things… that just make sense’ montage, the resulting footage would feature the record’s entire twelve-song track list. Take its title alone: Jake Shears has done more than enough to date to indicate he’d never be the frst to leave the dancefoor. Then, as quickly as you can muster the thought that the opening one-two is using a similar sonic palette to one famously showcased by one pintsized Aussie pop queen, there Kylie appears, as a shimmering presence on ‘Voices’. Like one imagines a night out curated by the Scissor Sister himself, cues shift from pure pop disco to ‘80s maximalism (the almost-instrumental ‘8 Ball’ makes like an extended 12” remix). ‘Devil Came Down The Dancefoor’ sees Amber Martin marry a hook that could’ve been sampled in many a turn-of-the-millennium radio smash with a decidedly 21st Century lyric: “I won’t play the fool / For no basic man,” while Jane Fonda appears in almost robotic (and, naturally, iconic) form on ‘Radio Eyes’ as if to highlight the record’s role as sonic voyage. The sum of its parts, then, which is no bad thing. (Louisa Dixon) LISTEN: ‘8 Ball’

ALBUMS

ComingUp

BE YOUR OWN PET -

The returning Nashville punks will follow their recent live shows with this on 25th August.

Wallice

Mr. Big Shot EP (Dirty Hit)

The twinkling that opens this EP is deceptive: ‘Best Friend’ quickly explodes against a wall of guitars and swelling vocals – almost like a warning. Don’t assume anything about what comes next. Wallice fits between wry lyrics delivered with an eye roll to anguished expulsions of emotions, between quiet strumming and pure shredding, moving so quickly it’s hard to keep track of, but even harder to turn away from. ‘Loser at Best’ is all strop, in the most cathartic way possible. Elsewhere, she’s all upbeat head bops and self-refection. ‘Prepaid Wireless’ is the standout – a rush of longing and loss with a thrumming guitar line that the track’s tension seems to curl desperately around. It buzzes with anxiety at times, but equally bounces with ambition. From laughably resonant lyrics (“I’m feeling good / Think it’s time to self-sabotage”) to larger-than-life guitars, ‘Mr Big Shot’ cements Wallice as a force to be reckoned with. Her tracks crash into life, and by the explosive, futuristic fnale of ‘disappear’, it becomes clear her hard-hitting but thrillingly witty tracks are one of a kind. (Neive McCarthy) LISTEN: ‘Prepaid Wireless’

The Southampton gang will release their third album on Friday 13th (October).

The Londoners’ second album is set for release on 29th September.

Their frst album since 2018 will be out on 1st September.

KING NUN - LAMB

MOMMY

CREEPERSANGUIVORE

SPEEDY ORTIZRABBIT RABBIT

LIVE

THE GREAT ESCAPE

Various venues, Brighton. Photos: Emma Swann, Louise Mason.

As with every year at The Great Escape, there’s so many new artists and so little time. One moment you’re settling in to catch your frst seaside show, the next you’re 30,000 steps a day down and about to get turfed unceremoniously back onto a train. Thankfully, however, in the interim hours we managed to catch all manner of wildly exciting new talents - from shouty punks to pop perfection and everything in between.

THURSDAY

Further cementing the rule that every Australian band must contain at least one mullet, Girl and Girl’s curly-mopped frontman Kai James makes for a warmly approachable presence to ease us into The Great Escape’s opening afternoon. Channelling a rockabilly Parquet Courts vibe that’s more pleasingly scrappy than their recorded wares may suggest, James is also in possession of the sort of immediately recognisable vibrating vocal wobble that’ll keep them apart from the pack. Sometimes at The Great Escape, a venue can truly make or break an act’s performance; for Benefts’ imposing frst appearance, performing against the backdrop of Brighton’s One Church feels entirely ftting. From the moment that the band’s frontman Kingsley Hall sets foot on stage, the room is transfxed, with his formidable narration - which swings from beat poetry-like cadence through to scorched, propulsive growls - sounding truly mighty in a space like this. For the faint-hearted, this is not.

While Cardiff-based Alice Low’s theatrical performance style - all exaggerated gestures and overblown fnger-pokes at masculinity - would be far more suited to literally any other space than the pub back room with a neon yellow Ticketmaster sign that she fnds herself in, the musician’s utterly magnetic presence still rings out. In the mystical sonic realm where Kate Bush and David Bowie meet, Low’s songs - sometimes humorous, often moving tracks that discuss her transition with openness and nuance - are truly special things; fragile yet antagonistic, provocative yet pained. Entering the weekend with just one single and more hotly-debated press inches than most bands a hundred times longer in the tooth, it’s of little surprise that the queue snaking around Chalk for The Last Dinner Party’s set is a hefty one. For those lucky enough to squeeze in, however, the quintet are more than a match for the naysayers, delivering a set flled with drama, dynamics and oodles of fun. Closer ‘Nothing Matters’ might be the only released track, but there are plenty of obvious singles here - ones that veer from Florence-like swoops to weird, Sparks oddities. TLDP can sleep soundly knowing they’ve got the arsenal to prove themselves worthy and then some.

Where, on record, Heartworms’ Jojo Orme cuts an intimidating fgure clad in military garb and unleashing slicing, icy missives, on the TGE Beach Stage she leads a set that has more in common with a thumping Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style mid-’00s indie disco than just another night at Brixton Windmill. It’s still effortlessly cool - tracks from recent debut EP ‘A Comforting Notion’ propelling forward with zero fat on their thundering bonesbut it’s also aimed very much at the dancefoor. Heartworms might be the best thing we saw all weekend: there, we said it.

Effortlessly cool.

Heartworms

The Last Dinner Party

Alice Low

Benefts

Girl and Girl

FRIDAY

Liverpudlians STONE may be claiming jetlag when they take to the Amazon New Music stage in the early evening on Friday, but their brand of scuzzed-up carnage seems all the more brilliantly unhinged for it. Balancing the kind of swagger that ‘90s Britpop stalwarts would be envious of with potent, poignant statements (‘Money (Hope Ain’t Gone)’ stands out as an evocative highlight), theirs is a performance that already promises big things.

The new project from Maccabees brothers Felix and Hugo White, with third sibling Will sandwiched in the middle and all sharing vocal duties, there’s no band at TGE who look as genuinely thrilled to be here as 86TVs. Musically channelling the more high-spirited, rousing end of their former band’s canon, with plenty of hooks to spare, it’s the sheer joyful energy being emitted from the stage that’s truly infectious. It’s good to have them back.

Despite releasing their frst song just a few days prior to their slot at The Great Escape, by the time that Dumb Buoys Fishing Club take to the stage at Horatio’s - as part of DIY’s takeover of the stage on Friday night - the room is already packed out. It’s little wonder as to why; the collective - led by musicians Dan D’Lion & Havelock - might be a bit of a mysterious prospect but they certainly know how to have a good time, their blend of commanding but hooky hip-hop whipping up a storm in mere moments. Throw in a bucketload of sea-related references and an appearance from Brockhampton’s Merlyn Wood and you’ve got one of those sure-fre wish-you-were-there sets.

That China-born, LA-based Alice Longyu Gao has bothered to cart a full-sized harp onto the stage despite playing its wares for approximately 12 seconds in the whole set is indicative of the PC Music-adjacent musician’s commitment to total wild creativity. Dressed like a bride, tottering around like a music box ballerina before unleashing an unholy scream, her music dips one hand into hyperpop, one into metal, and blends the whole thing into a truly uncategorisable (but wildly entertaining) whole. 15 minutes into her set and she’s already fucked off. Sure.

Taking to the stage of Hope and Ruin at 1am, having only just performed another set two hours previously, you’d have forgiven buzzy South Londoners Fat Dog for being a little sleepy. This lot, however, probably haven’t slept in several years - and it’s the wired, chaotic energy of the permapartying that arrives to turn the upstairs room into one big mosh pit. Like a klezmer band who’ve taken all the drugs in the whole of Glastonbury, Fat Dog are as wild a live prospect as the rumours suggest; that their drummer plays a decent portion of the set sporting a horrifying latex dog mask only adds to the vision of total mad abandon.

SATURDAY

The new project of Ben RomansHopcraft - formerly of Childhood - and super producer Dan Carey, Miss Tiny could so easily have been a chin-scratchy riddle of technical trickery. Instead, crammed onto the foor of Shortt’s Bar for Heavenly Records’ showcase, it’s all sorts of fun; needling riffs and loose, swaggering drums acting as the bedrock for songs that are meaty rather than muso, and clearly designed with the joys of playing live in mind.

Entering TGE with a fair whack of hype behind them, Picture Parlour sound so much like ‘AM’-era Arctic Monkeys on their Sunday afternoon set, it’s like being in the Upside Down. Led by suited and booted singer Katherine Parlour, there’s an immediately recognisable familiarity to how the vocalist’s strong croon wraps itself around strange phrasings and words that shouldn’t fow together but do; it is not hard to see where their primary infuence comes from. They wear it well, however, and there are undoubtedly tunes. When PP bring more infuences into their arsenal, they’ll likely be even better.

So good we watch him twice, Chicago rapper McKinley Dixon already feels like a talent that could go truly stratospheric. With the sort of rapidfre fow that King Kendrick himself would tip a hat to, and a canon of tracks - some taken from forthcoming LP ‘Beloved! Paradise! Jazz?!’ - that bring in the freeform musicality of that genre but inject it with intensity and struggle, both times Dixon is absolutely on top of his game. The murmured praise that’s audible among the audience throughout shows we’re not alone in our excitement. (Lisa Wright, Sarah Jamieson)

Picture Parlour

86TVs

Dumb Buoys Fishing Club

Alice Longyu Gao

McKinley Dixon

Fat Dog

WIDE AWAKE

After last year’s split live music and electronic days, Wide Awake 2023 sees a unifed one-day line-up that covers a very broad church indeed, but essentially charts a path through some of the most exciting music being made away from the mainstream. Caroline Polachek’s avantpop commands the headline slot, with everything from the garage rock of Thee Oh Sees to the inside-joke electro of Two Shell occupying the lower tiers.

Queues form under a sweltering bank holiday sun - already a recipe for delirium, and the masses gathered refect the diversity of the bill: low-rise jeans and stick-and-poke tattoos representing Caroline’s contingent; knowing band t-shirts and tote bags for the Windmill crowd.

The day bolts out of the gates with a set from Canadians Cola, the surviving incarnation of cult rockers Ought. Sounding much like if the paranoia levels of early Strokes records were dialled up to the max, the band are old hands at handling a fairly static midafternoon crowd, and despite the reluctance to move, there is a taut atmosphere in the tent nonetheless.

Meanwhile outside in the oppressive heat, Model/Actriz are certainly managing to provoke movement. Snotty New York upstarts, they recall a blend of HMLTD and Crack Cloud, all echoing percussion and metallic riffs. Vocalist Cole Haden (the only member of the band not clad in a vest) is incapable of remaining still, writhing his way through rhythmic, feverish dancepunk. Commanding the attention of a sizeable crowd, it’s hard not to feel that they’d earned their place on the ones-to-watch lists they’ve been on since this year’s SXSW.

A headlinercompellingand a popfeel-good genius.

Away from their clattering drums and through a grove of trees comes the towering main stage, and purveyor of warped Americana, Alex G. In a rare UK festival performance, he airs cuts from ‘God Save The Animals’ and ‘House Of Sugar’, his heart-onsleeve melodies carry across the feld un-dampened by shoddy outdoors sound. Slightly misguided forays into autotune aside, his set provides a very accomplished mid-afternoon resting point for the festival, and a duet with Caroline Polachek on ‘Mission’ feels like a very special moment.

The next must-see set proves to be the festival’s frst overbooking – Jockstrap’s crowd manages to spill out of the tent they were playing with ease. The duo thrill as ever, with the right balance between remixing their hits and smashing them out of the park – you can hear a pin drop during the opening moments of ‘Concrete Over Water’, while the chopped club beats of ‘50/50’ inject more than enough energy to keep the set moving through its fnal act.

It's golden hour when Black Country, New Road hit the stage. It’s the frst time the reshuffed band are performing their new setlist to an audience already familiar with it. It’s mesmerising; the audience participation during ‘Up Song’ and ‘Turbines / Pigs’ bringing a communal and deeply emotional edge to the already heart-rending songs on display. Indebted more to musical theatre than the MOTH Club, they quietly beat out the techno beats threatening them from other tents and leave the giant crowd thoroughly awed.

The thrill of Daniel Avery’s trademark drones and shattering four-to-the-foor rhythms is then accompanied by an impressive AV backing, resulting in a real feeling of transformation - the Snap Crackle & Pop stage feeling elevated into a communal rave. Choice cuts from latest LP ‘Ultra Truth’ brush up against brandnew remixes and dubplates, resulting in a headrush of stimulation – it’s really hard to avoid the feeling that he’s at the start of a meteoric rise.

The true must-see set of the day, though, is undoubtedly Caroline Polachek. Following a rave-review run of her ‘Desire, I Want To Turn Into You tour’, her Wide Awake set serves as her frst ever festival headline, a fact that was not lost on the singer. The main stage is transformed into a kind of alien desert landscape. She begins with the monolithic ‘Welcome To My Island’ – surely one of the pop songs of the year – as the sun dips below the South London skyline. Caroline whirls and feels her way through her set in an entirely natural way, while her audience is enraptured. All the while behind her the set rushes between crashing lightning and erupting volcanoes. A compelling headliner, but also a feel-good pop genius – the undeniable whistles of ‘Bunny Is A Rider’ sends the crowd off into the night, with the frst day of summer well and truly arrived. (Louis Griffn)

Brockwell Park, London. Photos: Emma Swann.

Caroline Polachek

Black Country, New Road

Jockstrap

Model/Actriz

LIVE AT LEEDS

Since 2007, Live at Leeds has been a vital event for music fans to discover their next favourite up-and-coming artist. Championing the local scene, smaller acts, and independent venues, the festival has earned its reputation as a fundamental occasion within the musical calendar. Today, though, rather than queuing and cramming into a tiny city centre venue, festivalgoers are heading to Temple Newsam Park for one day only. Boasting fve stages, an impressive host of artists and twenty-three degree weather, the second incarnation of Live at Leeds in the Park is set to be a celebration.

Opus Kink don’t waste time in trying to prove that. Their dedication to being one of the most interesting acts on any line-up makes them deserving of a prime-time spot, rather than the just-after-doors slot they have today.

Mid-afternoon sees the peak of the Cockpit Main Stage. “This is a love letter to girls,” declares Black Honey’s Izzy B. Phillips before the band plunge into their hazy breakout single ‘Corrine’, in which the band’s distorted guitars and ’60s-inspired surf pop vocals lament the break-up of a female friendship. ‘Heavy’ receives an elated sing-along from the crowd, meanwhile the sordid ‘I

Like The Way You Die’ transforms the band into something else entirely:

deliciously wicked and syrupy sweet all wrapped in one.

The Cockpit teeters off after Kate Nash’s enjoyable, if slightly underwhelming set, but DIY’s stage eagerly overthrows with a line-up that’s eclectic and expansive. ‘Salivate’, Sir Chloe’s chugging, sleazy lead single from their newest output ‘I Am The Dog’, sees frontperson Dana Foote mesmerise the crowd with a fawless vocal performance. Their single ‘Michelle’ - a bewitching slow-burning track that went viral on TikTok - inspires a hearty singalong from the Crawlers and Cavetown fans who have been frmly planted at the DIY barrier since gates opened.

Their hours spent waiting are worth it, though. Between Holly Minto’s quick-witted quips and the band’s devastating alt-rock, Crawlers are endlessly engaging. They don’t leave you much room to be neutral. After some technical issues Minto laughs: “Well! That guitar was less in tune than my nan at karaoke!” and then boom: ‘Come Over (Again)’ - a song that makes you want to fall to the foor and cry. Purgative, powerful and down-right impressive, the Liverpool four-piece are really something special - it’s no wonder why they’ve already inspired a dedicated cult following.

Great lyrics and good rock music aside - they also look like they’re having the time of their lives on stage, exuding a joy that’s quite irresistible.

It’s CMAT, however, who eclipses the

entire line-up. Camp, colourful and cleverly written pop melodies all over. Opening with ‘Lonely’ and then diving straight into ‘I Don’t Really Care For You’, she has it all: choreographed dance routines with her keyboardist, a firtatious Irish wit (“This next song’s a banger…but it’s only for gay and Irish people!”) and a vocal range that is so impressive it’s hard to believe it’s coming from someone who’s dancing like an old puppet one second and then lying down and kicking her feet the next. When she accidentally breaks her guitar (and steals Crawlers’ for the rest of her set, in a proud example of “longstanding Scouse and Irish solidarity”), she laughs it off and invites the crowd to join her in the silliness of the situation. CMAT uplifts her uniquely brilliant back catalogue of Irish countrypop by having such a charming onstage presence.

Closing the festival is indie heavyweights Two Door Cinema Club. As the sky turns pink they thrash through old album tracks and new singles alike; a tight musical unit who jump from song to song without a moment to catch your breath. Live at Leeds in the Park did exactly what was needed of it: it was fun, it was hot, and if you hung around those smaller stages, there were plenty of freshing, intriguing acts to see.

(Tilly Foulkes)

Temple Newsam, Leeds. Photos: Charlie Harris.

Black Honey

Crawlers

VENUE: MOUNT VESUVIUS (OR VE-SUSHI-US)

I want it in the centre of Mount Ve-sushi-ous - is that how you say it? No, it’s Vesuvius; sorry, I’ve got raw fsh on my mind. It’s the one that’s not as famous as Pompeii and some great concerts have been held in the ruins of Pompeii so it feels beftting of Yard Act that we’d do it in the slightly lesser known one. I’d also get the name wrong on the poster. And it’ll exclusively have maki for four days with no fridge so on Day Four it’s just cooked.

OPENER: SMOKEY ROBINSON AND THE MIRACLES

I wanna see Smokey circa ‘67 performing cuts from their lesser known record ‘A Pocketful of Miracles’. I love the way those old Motown records sound and the way a voice can just drip into your ears. He’s doing the legend’s slot at the start of the day.

SUPPORTS: AN ENTIRE FESTIVAL BILL

I’ve got fve more supports: The Art of Noise would be quite interactive, then it goes into The Slits who I love and I want them to play ‘Cut’ in its entirety. Then we’ve got Pharoah Sanders, who’s a sax player who played with John and Alice Coltrane - I saw him in a 300 cap room in Leeds a few years ago and it was transcendent. That’s a reset before Yeah Yeah Yeahs; I remember seeing them at Leeds Festival in 2007 when ‘Show Your Bones’ had just come out and I was in total awe. Karen O is one of the greatest frontpeople of all time and the whole band’s just so exciting. They’re swiftly followed by De La Soul, who I’ve spent a lot of time listening to recently and they’re masters of working a crowd.

HEADLINER: NEIL YOUNG

He’s gonna play a four hour set, opening with an hour of Crazy Horse. Then he’s gonna play ‘On The Beach’ in its entirety and dedicate it to me, and then ‘After The Goldrush’ in its entirety, and then another hour and a half of Crazy Horse jams. Then after four hours, in a plume of weed smoke, he’ll disappear into the distance.

LATE NIGHT SET: THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS

They’ve opened the exits and put the lights on in the carpark of Mount Ve-sushi-ous, so if you want to leave, you can. But for the party hard-ers, The Chemical Brothers are on. It’s a secret set so only those in the know, know.

WHO ARE YOU GOING WITH?

I’ll take my wife because she never gets to go out anymore but I don’t know how happy she’ll be about four hours of Crazy Horse. I think there’s actually something on this line up for each of our band members. Jay would love The Chemical Brothers, Chris who plays sax and keys for us live would love Pharaoh Sanders, Ryan would love Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Sam would be incredibly happy with Smokey Robinson.

WHAT ARE YOU DRINKING?

I gave up drinking a few months ago and I couldn’t have done it without non-alcoholic Guinness. I’m drinking about eight of them a night which really highlights that I had a problem! So this festival is sponsored by Guinness 0% and that’s all anyone’s allowed to drink, but the festival is absolutely rife with good drugs.

ANY ADDITIONAL EXTRAS?

Scrap the sushi, I want the food to be dumplings and banh mi sandwiches. A banh mi sandwich is the ultimate durable, portable, mess-free, healthy food and I’m obsessed with them. Also I want an exhibition on the history of Jim Henson and The Muppets. It’s not a children’s festival - children aren’t allowed to come - but I love The Muppets. I used to buy the action fgures from Warrington Market and when they stopped selling them there I started importing them from America on eBay and spending daft money on them. I fnd The Muppets so comforting, so funny; I just enter another world whenever I watch anything Jim Henson does.

A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME DREAM GIG, DESIGNED AND CURATED THIS MONTH BY… YARD ACT FRONTMAN JAMES SMITH!