DIY, June 2024

FOUNDING

Emma Swann

MANAGING EDITOR

Sarah Jamieson

FEATURES EDITOR

Lisa Wright

DIGITAL EDITOR

Daisy Carter

DESIGN

Emma Swann

CONTRIBUTORS

Adam England, Ben Tipple, Brad Sked, Chris Taylor, Drewbyy, Emily Savage, Eva Pentel, Jack Butler-Terry, James Hickey, Joe Goggins, Leah Lombardi, Lindsay Melbourne, Louis Griffn, Matt Brown, Matthew Davies Lombardi, Matty Pywell, Niall Doherty, Otis Robinson, Rhys Buchanan, Sinéad Grainger, Sophie Flint Vázquez.

EDITOR’S LETTER

The sun fnally seems to peeking out from behind the clouds, and we’re hoping that we’re due a heatwave soon (wink wink), so who better to recruit for our latest cover than the kings of Summer themselves, Glass Animals! To say that their story has been a ridiculous one is putting it lightly, and we’re thrilled to be welcoming them back to DIY’s cover in celebration of their fourth album ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’.

Elsewhere, it’s a big one for DIY faves: we dig into Alfe Templeman’s experimental new chapter, head down to South London to chat Goat Girl’s new album, and get ready to be catapulted into the cosmos for Lava La Rue’s debut. Plus, returning indie champs Los Campesinos! get us excited for their new album AND this month’s Euros. What’s not to love?!

Sarah Jamieson, Managing Editor

NEWS

Back with ‘All Hell’, their first new album in seven years, Los Campesinos! aren’t just rejoining the race, they’re also trying to reroute it from within. Words: Lisa Wright.

t’s gonna be interesting timing,” muses Los Campesinos! frontman Gareth David. “The general election is on July 4th, then the week after that it’s the European Championship fnal, then the week after that our record comes out. So it’s Week One: Tories out. Week Two: England wins the Euros. Week Three: Los Campesinos! album. For a certain type of person – and when I say a certain type of person, I mean me – that’s gonna be a hell of a July!”

The left-wing politics / football / emo-adjacentindie trifecta might be a relatively specifc axis, but it’s one that Gareth and his band have built a nearly two-decade career on, garnering the loyalty of that ‘certain type of person’ like few others in their peer group. Back in February, LC! played London’s Troxy – the largest headline show of their career – and sold it out in two days; having announced new album ‘All Hell’ – their frst new music in seven years – at the gig, the ground swell of excitement among fans feels genuine and tangible.

“We’re an anomaly in terms of how people respond to us, and it’s really nice to feel like we occupy a space that isn’t within the music industry proper but is something that we’ve curated ourselves over time,” Gareth suggests. “Every time we come into a new project that we’re doing, be it a record or a reissue or a live show, we always think maybe we’ve gone too far. But then the kindness we get back from our audience is like… shit, maybe we can keep pushing it.”

As conversations rage on around the viability of a career in music for anyone not operating in the major label-backed top tier (Los Camp!, Gareth notes, do not even take their Spotify earnings into consideration as an income source; “When it comes through every couple of months it’s like, ‘Oh great, we can have a nice meal out with that’”), the band have taken steps to put some power back in the hands of themselves and the people that actually give a shit. ‘All Hell’ will be self-released on their new label Heart Swells; the band, meanwhile, are aiming to do everything as ‘direct to fans’ as they possibly can – circumventing the usual protocol and announcing and dropping everything via their newsletter frst, relying on old-fashioned fan power and word of mouth. As a recent email

missive states: “We’re fed up of being dictated to by billion dollar platforms and a messed-up algorithm.”

It might seem revolutionary in 2024, but if anything it’s a return to the fan club mentality of a pre-social media age. “Everything is art against the algorithm these days – you’re trying to cut through with the positive stuff you want to give to people, but you’re at the mercy of big business,” Gareth says. “Whereas what works for us is fostering this community and saying, ‘If you like us, tell your mates. Send them a playlist of your favourite LC! songs. Buy an extra ticket to the gig and say, ‘You’re coming with me’. That’s the way we’ve continued to grow and it fnds us somehow in a situation where we’re more popular than we ever have been since the start.” he frst golden nugget to emerge from this new mentality was actually two.

After a seven-year dry spell, the “soft, contemplative” ‘Feast of Tongues’ broke the seal last month to announce their new material, joined just two days later by a second offering – the “straight-up pop punk-esque rager” of ‘A Psychic Wound’. Pop punk, as it turns out, is frmly on the table for the band’s newest. “They’re not dirty words to us and as you get older you learn to police your tastes less and just enjoy what you enjoy,” Gareth says. “Jason [Adelinia] our drummer is the biggest Blink-182 fan you’ll fnd, and all of us are

into your traditional Midwest emo but also My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy and that stuff.”

On both tracks, Gareth’s vocals are used in new, more traditionally ‘singer-y’ ways that he attributes to bandmate and producer Tom Bromley pushing him – or, rather, pulling him back. “It’s my instinct in the studio to sing like I sing live, and live there’s an element of having to carry the show. When I’m on stage, I am the most important person in the room at that point and that’s an egotistical thing to say but it’s the truth and I acknowledge that,” he chuckles. “But in the studio this time, I tried not to think in that way and when I was singing more quietly – which is probably just at a normal volume rather than shouting – it really did allow me to sing ‘properly’. A few fans were asking, ‘When did Gareth learn to sing?’ I’ve always been able to sing, I was in the school choir! I’ve just never really needed to before.”

Still “always in each others’ lives” despite not having written together for the best part of a decade, ‘All Hell’ doesn’t sound like a band forcibly re-oiling the machine as much as just hopping back on it. The point of view is different, older – as it only ever could be – but the rallying chemistry is still fully present and correct. “It doesn’t feel like coming back, it feels like we fnally got round to doing the recording part of being mates,” Gareth says. Part of the reason it took so long, then, was more down to their perception of the world and their place within it.

“We’ve never wanted to be a legacy act or a nostalgia thing; we don’t feel like that and we don’t want to be perceived as that.” – Gareth David

“I think there was probably an element of not really knowing what the need was for us. We’ve never wanted to be a legacy act or a nostalgia thing; we turn down quite a lot of festivals that are clearly booking us in that way because we don’t feel like that and we don’t want to be perceived as that,” he continues. “But then seeing how we’ve been an infuence to [newer] bands made me realise that there’s not really anyone that does what we do. The music we make has always been uncool, but it’s big in scope and we’ve never really changed in that respect. I feel like there’s a real space for us and we’ve perfected what we’re doing now.” f perfection can be measured in wordplay – and here at DIY HQ, we frmly subscribe to this theory – then ‘All Hell’ is up there with the best of them. From ‘Holy Smoke (2005)’’s CSS pun (“Nowadays it’s Live Laugh Love and listen to Death From Above”) to ‘Clown Blood / Orpheus’ Bobbing Head’ and its “puppet masters” and “Muppet pastors”, across the record you can practically hear the satisfaction at landing the gag. “I like gags in music,” Gareth nods. “I like punchlines in music. You’ll stumble upon lyrics where you think, ‘Oh god, am I gonna do that…’ but you have to because sometimes the song demands it. I think a lot of people are too resistant to it, but I like putting jokes in songs.”

As a lyricist who happily states that he “never writes for fun” (“These are the frst songs I’ve written in six years,” he shrugs), these moments of levity became an integral tool within a record that often found itself rooted in the sort of heaviness that you might expect from an album entitled ‘All Hell’. Acutely aware of his own privilege as a “white, cis-gendered man who is straight, who lives a comfortable life and has a house, is fne for money”, Gareth found himself writing still-personally but also about the world at large; of this hellish dystopia on earth.

“It’s a very insular record as always, it’s a record that’s about the experience of being me, but more broadly it’s about living through this modern time where the world is awful, we’re all depressed, we’re all uncertain about our futures and the future of the world,” he says. “But within that we continue to exist and live our lives, and that’s what the album is rooted in. The frst line of the album is about pooling all your pennies and the last line is about fnding two pound coins. There’s a lot of cause in the record for solidarity and working with each other against the evils of the world, and the fact that those pools of pennies have become pound coins by the end is perhaps a glimmer of hope.”

Indeed, there’s much hope to be gleaned from Los Campesinos! right now. That they’ve made a long-awaited new album that many thought might never appear; that a band who’ve never had their ‘objective commercial moment’ can still go from strength to strength; that they’re trying to change the game to bring it back to them and the fans. Gareth, however, also has another hope…

“OK, what we actually need is: Tories out, then England LOSE the Euro’s fnal which makes people angry and they channel their rage into applying pressure towards the new Labour government, and then the LC! album comes out which really blows a fre underneath it all,” he decides, returning to his big July plans with a grin. “Then the revolution comes – and THAT’S the Los Campesinos! three-point plan for a socialist utopia.” Seems easy when you put it like that.

‘All Hell’ is out 19th July via Heart Swells. DIY

“The world is awful, we’re all depressed, but we continue to exist and live our lives, and that’s what the album is rooted in.” – Gareth David

THE SOUND OF GLASGOW

Catch Twin Atlantic on their UK tour in November celebrating their brand new album Meltdown, out 9 August

Highlights from Brighton and The Great Escape 2024

It’s been a debate-provoking start to 2024’s festival season. Back in March, SXSW was subject to mass boycotts over its sponsorship ties with the US Army, while in the months following, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign focused its attention on Brighton’s The Great Escape due to their affliation with Barclays and claims they have “fnancial ties to companies producing weapons and military technology used in Israel’s attacks on Palestinians”.

While the annual new band festival still took place last month with many artists choosing to continue in their booked slots, others including SOFT PLAY, Lambrini Girls, Alfe Templeman and more opted not to play at all. A proactive new strand of unaffliated showcases hastily emerged, meanwhile, popping up in venues and bars to host artists outside the banner of the main festival.

It’s with this spirit in mind that we look toward the brilliant artists that we saw across all the venues in Brighton – both offcial and unaffliated. While the presence of the debate is not to be overlooked, as a magazine trying to shine a spotlight on emerging talents and uplift them wherever possible, we’re also choosing to focus on the quality of music that made its way throughout the city over these three days: a sky high bar that’s thoroughly deserving of your ears. Here was the best of it.

Words: Daisy Carter, Lisa Wright. Photos: Emma Swann.

ANTONY SZMIEREK

That Manchester’s Antony Szmierek walks onstage to Robert Miles’ trance classic ‘Children’, greeting the crowd as if he were playing the Haçienda not on-the-pier venue Horatio’s, is an apt encapsulation of the roof-raising performance that follows. Spending more time balanced on his monitor than he does with two feet on the ground, Szmierek has the adoring crowd utterly in the palm of his hand, taking us from heady euphoria (a cracking cover of Happy Mondays’ ‘Step On’) to tender refection with ease. He ends with ‘The Words To Auld Lang Syne’, its sentiment of interpersonal connection feeling all the more poignant this weekend. As he says: “Big respect to everyone who didn’t make it; big respect to everyone who did”.

JAYAHADADREAM

Down on the beach, Cambridge-via-Nottingham rapper and sometime singer JayaHadADream takes to the stage with all the understated swagger you’d expect from Glastonbury’s 2024 Emerging Talent competition winner. With a tight, witty, coolyconfdent fow, she’s resolute about honouring her working class, Jamaican-Irish roots. But there’s also a sense of playfulness to proceedings: ‘Butthurt Men’, a track performed over a different backing each show, is this time aired via a gun-fnger grime beat, while latest drop ‘Twiggy’ features choice references to Patrick Bateman, veganism, and the iconic ‘60s model.

JAYAHADADREAM

ANTONY SZMIEREK

FRÄULEIN

It might be a fairly spontaneous unoffcial show, but word has clearly spread about Fräulein’s set at The Mesmerist and it’s not hard to understand why. Though the Irish/ Dutch outft earn comparisons to ‘90s fgureheads like PJ Harvey and The Breeders, Joni Samuels and Karsten van der Tol equally possess the dynamic range and melodic softer edges of more modern groups such as early Wolf Alice. Live, there’s a special, White Stripes-like magic that comes from their partnership too; the fullness of sound is such that you almost forget there are only two people on stage, and the result is so much more than the sum of its parts.

COSMORAT

Bringing the party to a free all-dayer at Unbarred Brewery Taproom, Cosmorat frontperson Taylor Pollock’s bouncing, Duracell bunny energy is infectious, her seeming nonchalance belying the band’s considerable command of ripping riffs, drum pad wizardry, and a smorgasbord of vocal styles – with guitarist Olly Liu’s wild yelps and impressive falsetto proving the perfect foil to Pollock’s suckerpunch delivery. For an outft who could reasonably still be fnding their groove – their debut EP ‘Evil Adjacent’ landed just two months ago – Cosmorat’s sheer range is remarkable.

ELLIE BLEACH

Southend-born Ellie Bleach deals in the sort of witty, narrative-driven piano melodrama that made Matt Maltese’s early work so immediately compelling. Recent EP ‘Leaving West Feldwood’ set itself in a noirish fctional town full of choice characters, and while her on stage set up – a fully feshed-out gang of fve – resembles more of a traditional indie band, there’s no doubt that Bleach’s wry tales and performative fourishes are the focus. In a midafternoon pub set at The Hope and Ruin, she’s magnetic; put her in her natural setting (jazz bar, candles, velvet), and she’ll be a star.

THE NEW EVES

Across a weekend of eclectic talent, there’s no one that sounds even remotely like The New Eves. A quartet that would fnd a natural home among the heady pagan mysticism of Glastonbury’s Stone Circle, they come armed with, among other instruments, a cello and accordion; musically, they’re somewhere between a psych wig-out, a trad folk jam, and a four-part chanty summoning. As an allfemale four-piece that probably own a fair amount of lace and paisley in their wardrobes, inevitably various industry bigwigs will be trying to turn them into the new Last Dinner Party. Ignore those guys: The New Eves are entirely their own thing and all the better for it.

WUNDERHORSE

Thursday night’s de-facto headline slot falls into the hands of Wunderhorse who, having announced second album ‘Midas’ earlier the same day, use their return to the festival to rip into a set majority-flled with new wares. Of course, Jacob Slater and co are further on in the game than most this weekend. But it’s nonetheless notable just how viscerally massive they sound these days – Slater’s ragged vocals unleashing like a young British Kurt Cobain (not a comparison we use lightly) as the janky guitar stabs that open new single ‘July’ give into gargantuan sledgehammers of noise. Old favourite ‘Teal’ is a reminder of how gut-wrenching Slater’s storytelling can be at its best but, gauging by tonight, Wunderhorse mk II is set to be a gnarlier beast.

JACOB ALON

With no released music to his name, Scottish singer-songwriter Jacob Alon is the defnition of a festival wildcard that comes up trumps. Playing up at the altar of the One Church, there’s a tenderness and fragility to their wares – something akin to the heartbreaking delicacy of early Perfume Genius –that entirely suits a setting such as this. And when they take a portion of the set to explain their decision to play despite the boycott, using the platform as an entirely new artist to read out facts and stats about the war, it’s a fttingly thoughtful way to address the situation from a musician for whom compassion is clearly key.

KNEECAP

The rise and rise of Belfast trio Kneecap has been one of the last year’s most delightfully disruptive narratives; as they take to Chalk for a muchanticipated Friday night turn, they’re simultaneously awaiting the release of a Sundance Film Festival award-winning biopic, and the results of a lawsuit against the British government. It’s a backdrop that’s made forthcoming album ‘Fine Art’ all the more talked-about, but live, the trio remain a whirlwind of drug-referencing, party-starting abandon: you can’t spell hype without an E, after all. Like an unfltered, Northern Irish Beastie Boys, you can take Kneecap purely on the level of anarchic musical fun – of which there is much to be had – but the group are as much about the politics as the pingers. In truth, we’d expected some sort of incendiary protesting display. We get an actually quite reasonable speech (“We live in Northern Ireland which is still occupied, and so is Palestine…”); maybe Kneecap aren’t all about the shock factor.

FRÄULEIN

WUNDERHORSE

ELLIE BLEACH

in deep

DIY In Deep is our monthly, online-centric chance to dig into a longer profle on some of the most exciting artists in the world right now. Remi Wolf’s debut introduced the Californian singer in a blaze of eye-popping, sweary, technicolour glory. On second album ‘Big Ideas’, she may have refned the methods, but the message is unapologetically still all her. Words: Lisa Wright.

It’s approximately 7.45pm in the cavernous surrounds of London’s O2 Arena, and Remi Wolf is warming up the crowd for Olivia Rodrigo with a just-released new song, ‘Toro’. “This track is about the biggest crush ever,” she grins before digging into the track’s slinky, bouncing funk. Wolf is midway through a 20-date arena run in support of the pop megastar and, in all ways, she understands the assignment. There are Freddie Mercurystyle call and responses; there are group ftness crowd participation exercises; there’s a giddily-received cover of Amy Winehouse’s take on ‘Valerie’. By the end of her 30 minute slot, the 28-year-old Californian has delivered a masterclass in how to turn your support booking into a sea of converted fans: one key lesson of which is ‘know your audience’.

Fast forward a week, then, to Remi’s own London headline show at Electric Brixton and another ‘Toro’ outing. “I’ve been touring with Olivia Rodrigo and I’ve been having to say this song is about a big fat crush,” she declares, “when it’s actually about having sex in a hotel room with a guy with a big penis.” Cue wild whoops and cheers from the assembled crowd of late teens and early twenty-somethings that loudly sing back every lyric like their extremely racy bible.

It’s lucky that the specifcs of ‘Toro’’s content likely passed the majority of the O2’s pre-teens by; as is now customary for Wolf, it’s not a track that holds anything back. “Yeah, I’m drooling like a rabid dog / Yeah I’m screaming out, baby now, hold me down / Give me what I want,” she sings at its very literal climax – voice climbing octaves in tandem. “When I was writing that song, I was like, ‘Holy shit, is this too much?’” she chuckles, sat the following day in a hotel coffee bar. “But I think that fear of it being too much kind of pushed me to put it out and go there. I was horny. There was a penis. And that’s what was happening!”

Since emerging with a trio of early EPs, followed by 2021’s debut LP ‘Juno’, Remi has carved out a corner of the music world with a population of one. There are other bright, effervescent singers who might sit adjacent; you can imagine her sharing fans with, for example, fellow Rodrigo tour support Chappell Roan. But Remi is, as she puts it, “a straddler”. She’s someone who can win over a mainstream pop audience, and also click entirely supporting Paramore (as she did at the end of last year), yet her multifaceted parts only make total sense when she’s able to show them all in front of her own people, people who she suggests are “young, queer, colourful, fun, don’t take themselves too seriously but also do, probably mentally ill… People like me?”

her love for an unfltered lyric make her a go-to artist to soundtrack chaotic good times. But Wolf has always been open about what lies beneath, and it’s with the onus on uniting these two sides – the fun, the fings; the fears, the frets – that second album ‘Big Ideas’ arrives. “I wanted to be more honest about the realities of my life and lift a screen for myself in the writing process,” she says. “I was pushing myself to let more through. Not that in my other songs I didn’t, but it was in a different way – I would create all these little brain worms in my head that described how I was feeling but in a way that only I could decipher. [Whereas now] I keep lifting screens and I’m trying to get closer to putting my feelings on paper in a way that’s understandable to everyone.”

Where ‘Juno’ was riddled with a host of ‘did she actually just say that?’ lyrics (‘Quiet On Set’’s “eating my ass like a human centipede” chief among them), ‘Big Ideas’ is less quote-unquote ‘shocking’ but more sensory, creating an evocative series of snapshots that piece together a two year period spent on and off tour, living life in a whirlwind of experience. “With a lot of songs on the record I wanted to put you there with me rather than me painting this almost unimaginable, surreal vibe,” she explains.

Writing while in the middle of it all meant that there was no time to over-analyse what she was feeling. “I would go out, ingest all this info, do a bunch of shit, and then come back and write it all down and then do it all again,” she says. “I loved it because it didn’t allow me time to think, and when it comes to writing and making art for me, thinking is kind of the devil – that’s where I get lost in all my anxieties and neuroses. Whereas this process kept me really present and intuitive and grounded in the moment, expressing exactly what I’d seen and synthesising it all right there instead of having all this time to ideate on concepts.”

When it comes to writing and making art, thinking is kind of the devil.

Speaking to DIY around the release of ‘Juno’, Wolf talked of the discrepancy between her public persona and reality. “I think people see my music as a beam of light,” she suggested. “It’s just such a difference to what’s actually going on in my life.” Today, she happily states that “this is the frst time probably in the past seven or eight years where I haven’t been depressed, which is awesome”. But even aside from this recent personal progress, everything about ‘Big Ideas’’ instinctive inception was rooted in lifting the veil. “I think I am trying to close that gap because, in that public perception of me, I think I felt misunderstood. But then I was a baby [when I wrote ‘Juno’],” she shrugs. “I’m growing and it took me to new places this time.”

Read the full interview at diymag.com/remiwolf ‘Big Ideas’ is out 12th July via Island. DIY

NO FILTER

On the surface, her hyper-extroverted stage performance, stylistic wrangling of psych, pop, funk and more, plus

IN THE STUDIO

alt-J’s Joe Newman

Descending onto the Ivors red carpet, the frontman whets our whistle for an incoming solo project.

It may only be a little over two years since alt-J released fourth album ‘The Dream’, but there’s no rest for the wicked, and vocalist Joe Newman is already working on something tantalisingly new. “We’re taking a bit of a break from the band. We’ve all got families now, so we’re doing the family thing, but I’m going to be doing a solo project,” he tells us, chatting on the Ivor Novellos’ red carpet last month, before presenting the award for Best Contemporary Song.

Set to see him explore more of an Americana and Motown vibe, he’s been piecing the project together at a more rapid rate than usual, with the help of producer Carlos De La Garza. “I’ve been going to LA to work with Carlos, who just won a Grammy with

PIRATE HIGHLIGHT!

Pirate Studios is a community of 24-hour spaces that spans over 700 studios worldwide – so whether you’re a producer, vocalist, DJ, band member, dancer or podcaster – they’ve got you covered.

What’s more, every month, we at DIY will be shining a light on just a few of the ace artists who grace their studios as Pirate Ambassadors. Check them out below.

JAYAHADADREAM

the newest Paramore album [‘This Is Why’],” he continues. “We really get on, he’s such a great guy and he’s a really talented musician. He’s got a wonderful ear and is a phenomenal producer; we’ve been having some really great times together. We’ve been taking it song by song and I think next year we might release something.”

The frst real time Newman has worked away from alt-J since their formation back in the late 2000s, unsurprisingly, it’s been a little odd adapting to not having his bandmates around. “It’s a mixture of emotions really,” he nods. “It can be quite daunting, and you realise just how good you were at delegating roles to each other: Gus [UngerHamilton] would be the broadcaster, Thom [Sonny Green] would be the mysterious drummer, and I’d be the writer at large. Now I have to try and do all three of those roles, and it’s a new experience.” New though it may be, however, Newman is clearly embracing the challenge: “I’m ready for it and I’m really excited to release music in my own name,” he says. “I’m really proud of what I’m doing and I hope that our fans will take the leap of faith and listen to what I’m doing too.”

“I’m really proud of what I’m doing and I hope that our fans will take the leap of faith and listen to what I’m doing too.”

It’s been a big few weeks for Jayahadadream; not only has the rapper bagged a spot at this year’s Glastonbury as the winner of its Emerging Talent Competition, but she also recently took to the Pirate Stage at The Great Escape, too – more on that on p10! It’s little wonder that she’s also been tipped as a Pirate Resident Artist too. “I’ve been going to Pirate for years, so it’s really nice to be supported by them,” she said in a recent interview. “I literally go to Pirate three or four times a fortnight, so I really appreciate it!”

PHOEBE HALL

Another of Pirate’s Resident Artists, Phoebe Hall has just shared her new EP, ‘Stop Before It Starts’, which perfectly illustrates her multifaceted take on shimmering indie-pop. From the Christine and the Queens-esque vivacity of ‘Codependent’ through to the more tender, laid-bare admissions of ‘Guilt Complex’ and ‘Naked’, it’s a release that manages to show both the scale of her ambition and her knack for stripping things back.

KAISHA

If smooth R&B is more your thing, then Kaisha will absolutely be up your street. Last year’s ‘Nine Yards’ EP saw the Malasian-born, Brightonperfectly with her honeyed vocals and open lyrics, while more recently, she’s teamed up with dance artist Douvelle19 on the deliciously heady ‘Skin to Skin’. Expect to see more from this Pirate Resident Artist very soon…

Like the sound of what Pirate Studios do? Head over to pirate.com now to book a studio and discover more.

Joe with alt-J.

FESTIVALS SUMMER LOVIN’

We’re in the thick of it now! Festival season is well underway and, thanks to a nice dose of sunshine and some cracking events (more on those from p63 onwards!) in the past few weeks, we’re raring to go. Unsurprisingly, Glasto is high on the agenda this month, but ahead of then, we’ll be warming up in the only way we know how: by getting out there and checking out even more music. Come join in the fun…

BRIGHTEN THE CORNERS

14th – 15th June, various venues, Ipswich

Set up by not-for-proft organisation Sound East CIC with a mission to help put Ipswich on the map as a proper music destination, Brighten The Corners isn’t just a festival with a noble aim, but it’s got an ace line-up too. Taking place in various venues across the city, this year’s event – which was formerly known as Sound City Ipswich – will be playing host to more established acts such as shame, Ibibio Sound Machine, The Mysterines and Theon Cross, while also staying true to its tastemaker roots, with new artists like mary in the junkyard, Trout, Man / Woman / Chainsaw, C Turtle and Grove all appearing across the weekend.

Another of the newer names gracing this year’s bill are London trio Ebbb, who will be releasing their debut EP ‘All At Once’ around the festival. Ahead of their visit to Suffolk this month, we caught up with the band to chat about developing their live reputation, their forthcoming EP, and what punters should expect from their festival set…

Q&A

Ebbb

As a band, you’ve not been together all that long. Can you tell us a little about how you met one another and decided to begin Ebbb?

We all moved to London from different places to make music. We met on the London band circuit and played shows and supported one another. I (Lev) played guitar in bands and started doing some electronic production during lockdown, as a move to gain more independence when the future of live music was up in the air. In early 2023, I asked Will to sing vocals on some of the tracks as I was always a fan of his voice, and so the project started life as a bunch of recordings. After we’d got a load of songs down we brought in Scott on drums, as we’ve been playing together for a few years in previous bands.

Rather than go straight into releasing music, you’ve built up more of a reputation by playing live frst, and didn’t have too much of a presence on social media; was that a conscious decision, or one of necessity?

You’re about to release your debut EP ‘All At Once’. What were you inspired by when making the EP?

The songs that have made it onto the EP were songs we recorded before there was any fxed plan or campaign to release music, so I guess they came from a kind of innocent, care-free place in which we were just enjoying the newfound creativity that came with the project. We’ve chosen songs that we feel represent a full spectrum of who we are as a band, and which delve into quite varied musical territory that we will continue to explore with future releases.

You’ll be playing at Brighten The Corners fest in a few weeks – what should people coming to see you expect from the set? Are you going to try and watch anyone else playing across the weekend?

There’s quite a big distinction for us between the live set and the recordings online – the added live drums create an intensity that perhaps people aren’t always expecting… Then, we’re excited to see mui zyu again (who we saw in Leeds a few months back), Theon

Photo: Vasilisa Skasca

ROCK IN RIO LISBOA

15th – 16th June & 22nd – 23rd

June, Parque Tejo, Lisbon,

Portugal

Festivals don’t come much bigger than Rock In Rio Lisboa. For the European outpost of the legendary Brazilian event (from which it takes its name, as you can probably guess), 2024 is set to be quite the occasion: not only will they have some of music’s biggest names heading to Lisbon this month, but the festival is also turning the big 2-0, and celebrating its twentieth anniversary!

Having frst begun after Rock In Rio launched in the Portuguese capital back in 2004, their City of Rock has welcomed over three million people over its previous nine editions, with the tenth set to take place this year, with each night curated especially to cater to fans of a particular genre. Here are just a few of the stand-out names that will be performing across the festival’s two weekends this month…

LAUREN SPENCER SMITH

16th June

The story of British-born, Canadian songwriter Lauren Spencer Smith really is the stuff dreams are made of; from rising through the ranks on American Idol just four years ago, through to bagging over 400 million streams (yes, you read that right) on her breakout single ‘Fingers Crossed’, her career so far has been truly remarkable. What’s more, she’ll be showcasing tracks from her multi-platinum album ‘Mirror’ this month, when she plays alongside another musical behemoth, Ed Sheeran.

EVANESCENCE

15th June

Goth-rock titans Evanescence are no strangers to Rock In Rio; in fact, they played the inaugural edition of Rock In Rio Lisboa back in 2004, right after their huge album ‘Fallen’ was released the year prior. This summer, they’re set to get crowds warmed up for the Scorpions on the event’s opening day, and when they rip into ‘Bring Me To Life’, it’s sure to be one of the biggest singalongs of the whole event.

JONAS BROTHERS

22nd June

Needless to say, Joe, Kevin and Nick don’t need much in the way of introduction, but their headline slot at this year’s Rock In Rio Lisboa has taken on an extra sense of gravitas in recent weeks. Sadly, the UK and European leg of the band’s current world tour –in support of last year’s succinctly-titled ‘The Album’ release – was recently postponed until later in 2024, making the Lisbon event the frst chance fans will have to see them in action on this side of the Atlantic; something we’re sure a lot of people will be very excited about…

DOJA CAT

23rd June

One of the biggest names in rap right now, Rock In Rio Lisboa will be drawn to a close with the explosive wares of Doja Cat. Currently out on the road in support of last year’s album ‘Scarlet’, if her recent turn at Coachella is anything to go by – where she stole the show in a furry of blonde wigs, before taking a solo jaunt in a mud bath – the Californian’s set will be one to remember.

Head to diymag.com now to fnd out more about Rock In Rio Lisboa’s 20th anniversary, and what else will be happening across the festival.

FESTIVAL NEWS IN BRIEF

Open’er (3rd – 6th July) have announced even Charli XCX and will both play the festival this summer, while has been confrmed as the event’s fnal headliner.

Loads of acts have been added to the line-up for this All Point East (16th – 25th August) shows, The Kills (who’ll play alongside LCD Soundsystem), Suki Waterhouse (at Mitski’s Everything (who join the Death Cab For Cutie / The Postal Service bill).

Comedian Stewart Lee is set to curate the Komedia stage at the inaugural edition of Brighton Psych Fest (30th August), with The Physics House Band, The Bevis Frond, Eliza Skelton, Alison Cotton and Secluded Bronte all joining his bill.

The frst round of artists have been announced for this year’s S n (17th – 19th October): English Teacher, Hannah Diamond, mary in the junkyard, Wu-Lu and Porij are just some of the acts who’ll be playing the Cardiff weekender this year.

Pitchfork Music Festival London (5th – 10th November) has announced its second wave of acts, with Charly Bliss, Alice Glass, Jessica Pratt and black midi’s Geordie Greep all set to appear at the multi-show event later this year.

The Vaccines, Lynks, Lambrini Girls and Overmono are some of the latest names to be added to the bill for this year’s Iceland Airwaves (7th – 9th November). They’ll join the likes of Shygirl, Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul and Mandy, Indiana at the Reykjavík event this year.

NEU

New bands, new music.

The guitar polymath is redefning what it means to be a modern pop star on debut album ‘American Hero’. Words: Emily Savage.

Towa Bird

“W

aterfall, super soak / Do or die, crazy,” bites Towa Bird in ‘Drain Me!’ – the unfettered, sapphic anthem that sent TikTok into a frenzy back in October. It’s been merely a year since her debut single – last April’s ‘Wild Heart’ – and yet the British-Filipino musician is already becoming the queer representation that she wishes she’d had growing up.

Born in Hong Kong, before spending much of her childhood in both Thailand and London, Towa’s early life saw her move between different countries and schools, all while coming to terms with her identity. It was the sound of her dad’s classic rock records, however, that remained a constant. With The Who, Pink Floyd, and The Beatles soundtracking drives to school each morning, Towa’s admiration for timedefying guitar music grew from a young age. After picking up her dad’s slightly disfgured three-string guitar at twelve-years-old, it quickly became a vessel for her own self expression.

“It’s tough enough being twelve anyways, just kind of like coming to terms with my sexuality and other parts of myself,” she begins. But, faced with feeling isolated from those around her, the instrument was a source of comfort and consistency throughout her childhood. “Like, I have this one thing that I know I can always rely on,” Towa nods, “which is music.”

Having studied music at Goldsmiths, and later played as a touring guitarist with Cassyette, the hesitancy to launch her own project nonetheless remained into adulthood. “I never saw myself in this position. As a woman and as a queer person, you’re constantly being told you’re not allowed to have that dream,” she explains. “You can help people, but that’s not going to be you and there isn’t space for you in this scene.” It would take the encouragement of Towa’s close friends who saw her potential as a soloist to push her into the spotlight. “I just had to have someone be like, ‘You can do it!’” she says.

Now, with an emphatic stream of singles, tours across the US and Europe alongside Reneé Rapp, and nods from the likes of Willow Smith and Tyler, the Creator to her name, it’s a statement that is certainly ringing true. With a TikTok fan base of over one million and counting, Towa’s rule-bending pop vision has already been eagerly received. “To me it means that there’s a niche or there’s this space because the demand is there for it,” she refects on her rise to internet stardom. “I think people want queer music. I think people want guitar and band music again.” And it’s the integration of these worlds that sits at the forefront of her upcoming album.

The title alone, ‘American Hero’, prompts questions. Far from ftting the stereotype of “a 6ft4 Chris Pratt, blonde hair, blue eyes dude – macho, big muscles,” Towa leads with striking candour as she deconstructs what it means to be an American hero in the modern day. “Maybe I am the new American hero, as an immigrant, as a non-citizen, as a queer person, as a person of colour?” she refects. Embracing the intersections of her identity, the album fnds the 25-year-old carving her own path amid an ever-changing landscape. “Maybe I’m part of

this new wave of heroism that looks different to perhaps what we would have seen previously?”

Written over the past two years, Towa’s debut captures the period of acclimation surrounding her move to Los Angeles from London. Across the 13-track record, themes of queer love and celebration are placed alongside the mental turmoil of being catapulted into the limelight. “It feels like a proper introduction to me because this album is kind of a Towa 101, where now fnally people will actually be able to hear and see my perspectives through my art,” she says. From the anticapitalist rage of ‘B.I.L.L.S’, to the carefree hedonism of ‘Ew’ and acoustic sombreness of ‘A Party’, Towa embraces the full spectrum of emotional experience.

Leading with her electrifying riffs and signature shreds, the album brings the brawn of classic rock guitar to Towa’s own brand of alt-pop. “In pop music, the lead vocal is always the hero,” she suggests, whereas ‘American Hero’ strives to challenge this dynamic. The multi-instrumentalist’s self-proclaimed “fuck-off guitar solos” hold as much importance as her huge choruses. “I feel as though it’s the closest thing to emulating a human voice in the way that you can play it,” she continues.

This synergy between Towa’s “physical voice” and “guitar voice” is equally one that characterises her live performances. “For me, it was really important to have the album feel really live and for people to listen to it and be like, ‘Oh, I want to go to that show!’” Towa notes. And indeed, since forming her own band at the age of fourteen and playing gigs at dive bars and street festivals, the euphoria of being on stage has continued to shape her sound. “I hope that I can harness some of that energy, put it into these records, and maybe translate some of that whole feeling to whoever consumes it.”

Having grown up with few artists like herself to look up to, Towa is among a new generation of musicians occupying the spaces that they wished to see when they were younger. “The industry and the rest of the world are allowing space for queer artists, specifcally lesbian artists, to be part of that mainstream wave,” she smiles. With Chappell Roan, boygenius, MUNA and Reneé Rapp all riding high, Towa is in good company. “It feels really cool to be part of the Lesbian Renaissance,” she laughs. DIY

“Maybe I am the new American hero, as an immigrant, as a noncitizen, as a queer person, as a person of colour?”

Malice K

“I’m not an indie artist. I’m a fuckin’ rockstar.”

Carving his path in the cracks between genre, NYC-based Malice K is rejecting so-called scenes and polished production in favour of strikingly visceral storytelling. Words: Daisy Carter. Photo: Emma Swann.

“When I came to New York, I started having this gravitational pull [towards] this white, upper middle class indie kinda thing. And that was a really existential change for me because I just thought: ‘This is super lame’. I’m not an indie artist. I’m a fuckin’ rockstar. I hated that.”

Much like the post-pandemic phenomenon of any guitar band within a 50-mile radius of Brixton being slapped with a ‘post-punk’ tag, the past few years’ supposed indie sleaze revival had gained something of a chokehold on the scene’s spiritual home of NYC – something that alternative polymath Malice K was none too happy about being dragged into. Alex Konschuh, as he’s otherwise known, is speaking to DIY the day after kicking off his European tour at London’s Sebright Arms (where, he tells us, one crowd member was proudly sporting homemade Malice K merch), and it’s not hard to understand why he found such a lack of nuance frustrating.

Both his previous projects – 2020’s ‘Harm or Heck’ and 2022’s ‘Clean Up On Aisle Heaven’ – and his upcoming third outing ‘AVANTI’ (touted as his

debut proper for logistical reasons, but which Alex personally sees as LP3) are refreshingly liminal. The latter runs the gamut from tender acoustic cuts and ‘70s golden era pop (‘Songs For My Baby’, ‘Radio’) to moments of visceral, Nirvana-adjacent grunge and howling disarray (‘Halloween’, ‘You’re My Girl’). Why, then, does he think he suffered so much easy, sleazy pigeonholing? “I play guitar, so I’m automatically seen as ‘indie’,” he shrugs. “But I wasn’t playing shows for six months or something, because I wasn’t gonna get on the bill with any of those people. I just found so much of that scene to be super naive and oblivious to the actual world.”

Instead, Alex views his Malice K output as embodying “more of a maverick kind of style”; having left a like-minded community of fellow creatives in LA (an artist collective dubbed Deathproof Inc.) to move to The Big Apple, he was soon forced to carve out a niche that was entirely his own. “When I was in association with something that was bigger than me, I was kinda being handed my audience, you know?” he explains. Now, he’s as comfortable playing an acoustic night as he is a trap show or a punk gig, but these chameleonic credentials come with an intrinsic element of loneliness, too. “[Malice K] has enough

reach that it can kind of belong to everything,” Alex muses. “Which makes it diffcult, because then it can also just as easily not belong to anything.”

Less jack of all trades and more master of one, through Malice K, Alex has found himself “being more transparent and not trying so hard to create this version of myself that I wanted to be”. As a selfconfessed shy person, such sincerity doesn’t always come easily; his habit of leaking projects to “try to get gratifcation for something that isn’t fnished” ultimately “dwindles [his] own self-confdence”, while starting afresh in New York as labels scrambled to sign him presented its own crisis of identity (“I’d only ever written music and made art, and now I was talking to lawyers. It was like, ‘I’m not living anymore’,” he affrms).

Nevertheless, Alex has channelled this tumult, both internal and external, into ‘AVANTI’ – an album that, unbeholden to the stylistic constraints of a particular sound or scene, sees Malice K seize upon something truly singular. DIY

Nxdia

The Mancunian riser proving that it was never a phase, mum.

Bringing the sonics of ‘00s pop-punk bang up to date via English/Arabic bilingual expressions of coming-ofage angst and queer desire, Nxdia is setting to rights the marked whiteness and heteronormativity that characterised that scene frst time around. Recent singles ‘She Likes A Boy’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body’ have popped off online, heralding the start of an electrifying new chapter for the Egyptian-Sudanese trailblazer.

LISTEN: ‘Jennifer’s Body’ is a heady gothic banger.

SIMILAR TO: If Avril’s ‘Girlfriend’ was really a sapphic love song all along.

ratbag

Creepy? A little bit. Creative? Undoubtedly. Compelling? Absolutely.

The Dare

New York’s most polarising indie sleaze revivalist.

Depending on who you ask, The Dare – aka New Yorker Harrison Patrick Smith – is either the city’s most exciting new artist or a scene kid joke gone too far. His debut EP ‘The Sex’ harks back unashamedly to peak electroclash indie sleaze (think Does It Offend You Yeah? or The Teenagers), while his Freakquencies parties have become a cult hotspot, so much so that Charli XCX popped up at one as part of her ‘BRAT’ promo tour. Is it a hedonistic call to arms, or a pre-woke throwback that should be left in the late ‘00s? At the moment, we’re going for the former but let’s see…

LISTEN: ‘Girls’ is both The Dare’s biggest banger and biggest cause of outrage.

SIMILAR TO: Marmite.

An artist in practically every sense of the word, ratbag’s immersive, fully-realised creative vision spans sculpture, videography, claymation and drawings, all in addition to her grungy, magnetic art-rock. Last year’s debut EP, ‘why aren’t you laughing?’ introduced us to her monstrous cartoon bandmates; now, she’s in the middle of sharing live performance videos for its four tracks, each set in a different one of their unsettling, vaguely threatening habitats (take your pick from a junkyard, grove, cave, or swamp).

LISTEN: EP cut ‘exit girl’ could be the theme of a deliciously distorted circus parade.

SIMILAR TO: Gorillaz on acid is maybe the closest comparison, but the characters and colour of ratbag’s visual world are entirely her own.

The Itch

Simmering party starters bringing a new strain of synths to the capital.

Born from the ashes of South London’s Regressive Left, The Itch already have skin in the game when it comes to alternative dancefoor earworms. Under their new guise, however, Georgia Hardy and Simon Tyrie are steering the ship into ambitious new waters that, on debut single ‘Ursula’, add nods to Depeche Mode and the more brooding side of the ‘80s to their LCD Soundsystem meets Talking Heads niche. Where they truly thrive, meanwhile, is live; their recent headline at London’s The Social was a cowbell-toting party of joyous proportions.

LISTEN: ‘Ursula’ is a seven-minute homage to science fction author Ursula K. Le Guin.

SIMILAR TO: South London’s answer to LCD.

Nieve Ella

The West Midlands singer serving up vulnerability with a hint of grunge.

Despite having only frst picked up a guitar back in 2020, the trajectory that Nieve Ella has been on so far has been truly wild. From launching her debut EP back at the start of 2023, through to bagging over 6.5 million streams in the time since, her confessional, ‘90s-fecked offerings have certainly caught fans’ ears. Now, with a series of high profle support slots (with Dylan and Inhaler) under her belt, and a summer of festivals on the horizon, her star’s sure to ascend even further.

LISTEN: Recent single ‘The Things We Say’ is a scuzzy but tender ode to the harder moments of friendship.

SIMILAR TO: The ‘90s sensibilities of early beabadoobee meeting Nell Mescal’s vulnerability.

MRCY

A collaboration between two established behind-thescenes fgures, with MRCY, Kojo Degraft-Johnson and Barney Lister are stepping into their own spotlight. Words: Matty Pywell.

“The North of England has a lot of soul about it.” – Barney Lister

MRCY is the soulful collaboration from two minds who have found an outlet for their most authentic work to date. Both musicians have established skin in the game; producer Barney Lister is a two-time Ivor Novello nominee who has worked with Obongjayar and METTE, while vocalist Kojo Degraft-Johnson has sung with stars including Little Simz. Having connected during lockdown, however, the evident ease of their rapport can be heard all over the warmth of their recent debut project ‘Volume 1’. “The kind of fun we have and the fact we have a similar energy makes it a joy,” Lister says.

Despite their different backgrounds (Degraft-Johnson grew up in South London, Lister in Huddersfeld), their shared love of Motown and Northern soul immediately proved ripe common ground. Lister explains how his hometown opened his eyes as to why these genres are still so popular in the North. “The North of England has a lot of soul about it,” he suggests. “I’m from a very white place and I think Black music has a draw because it’s unique and it feels like you can live in that world. I love the heart of the music, the honesty, the emotion. That, to me, is genius.”

Degraft-Johnson, meanwhile, found his voice and his love of soul in church. “I didn’t realise how odd it was to go to two different types of [church],” he notes. “My mum’s church was a very different energy to my dad’s. Having both of those sounds was imperative to my ear and it made me explore a lot of different kinds of music.” ‘Volume 1’ is what the pair have to show for their combined passions rolling into one: a project dominated by a sleekness that switches between gospel sounds, soul and soft psychedelics. Within this, Degraft-Johnson’s vocals cut through, establishing him as an engrossing storyteller who uses narrative to refect deeper into his sense of self.

Lister explains that the name MRCY represents how music can set us free. Throughout ‘Volume 1’ the duo sing of their doubts, their worries and the losses that they’ve experienced along the way. However, allowing yourself to be a dreamer is a theme that pops up throughout and, for Lister, it rallies against the expectations of young men, especially from the North. “I’m a short, blonde guy from Yorkshire and I’m living in London which, when I was younger, seemed impossible to me,” he says. “I’ve had people tell me I can’t be on the front of a magazine. Don’t ever put the aspersion on me because if you can dream you can make it happen.”

MRCY, then, is a space for the pair to emphasise who they really are. “My favourite thing about music right now is being able to talk about who I am as a person,” says Degraft-Johnson, “and to be able to have MRCY as evidence for that.” DIY

Photo: Ben Quinton

Bikini Kill

SUN 16TH JUN THE CROSSING, BIRMINGHAM

Nils Frahm

Jessica Pratt Amanda Bergman

THU 6TH JUN UNION CHAPEL

FRI 7TH JUN EARTH THEATRE TUE 11TH JUN THE SOCIAL

Mannequin Pussy Mannequin Pussy

Bikini Kill Bikini Kill

WED 12TH JUN ROUN D HOUSE THU 13TH JUN O2 ACADEMY LEEDS

Ceremony

Ty Segall

THU 11TH TO SUN 14TH JUL (6 SHOWS) BARBICAN CENTRE

22ND JUN THE GARAGE

The Magnetic Fields THU 27TH JUN UNDERWORLD

SAT 31ST AUG

SUN 1ST SEP BARBICAN CENTRE

Wednesday Lola Kirke THU 20TH JUN SCALA

Sheer Mag GHOST WOMAN

14TH JUN O2 ACADEMY GLASGOW

War On Drugs SUN 11TH AUG LAFAYETTE THU 8TH AUG THE DOME

10TH SEP SCALA

King Hannah Porches Sam Akpro

AUG

WED 25TH SEP RICH MIX

Caroline Rose

2ND OCT HEAVEN

19TH OCT MILTON COURT WITH LONDON CONTEMPORARY ORCHESTRA + RIVAL CONSOLES

Cola Alexandra Streliski Julia Holter Karate TR/ST Daniel Norgren mui zyu MJ Lenderman & The Wind

3RD OCT CORSICA STUDIOS

The Buzz Feed

The Crowned Witch

Ouija-pop provocateur Bambie Thug has announced plans for a huge UK and European tour in support of their most recent single ‘Crown The Witch’. Doubling as the track they recently performed at Eurovision, it marks their frst new material since the release of their 2023 EP ‘Cathexis’.

Set to kick off at the end of August, Bambie’s upcoming tour includes a staggering 28 dates across mainland Europe; it’ll start in Brighton (30th August), followed by four additional UK shows – including their biggest London show to date at Heaven (5th September) – before making stops in 16(!) different European countries along the way. The whole thing will then draw to an epic close with three shows in Ireland, the fnal of which will mark a homecoming for Bambie, at Cork’s City Hall (7th November).

“I’m so excited to bring Ouija Pop to so many countries on my frst ever headline run with ‘Crown The Witch Tour’,” Bambie has said of their upcoming shows. “Expect magic, music and more. Look forward to welcoming you into the coven.” Head to diymag.com for more details.

Sound Of The Neighbourhood

Having hosted a number of events in London and, more recently, Brighton, SON Estrella Galicia have now announced plans for a two day event in the capital this June, dubbed the ‘Soundhood Hackney’ micro-festival.

Combining live music from buzzy new acts with a celebration of beer culture, street food, and sustainability, ‘Soundhood Hackney’ will come to Paper Dress Vintage on 13th June to showcase sets from Sheffeld’s Gia Ford, Brighton band Plantoid, and the evening’s headline act, Sworn Virgins. The following day, meanwhile, will see Cosmorat, Gallus, and bill-toppers DITZ take to the stage at Hackney venue Two Palms, while free-to-access DJ sets from Jawa Jones, Harry James, and Kyri R2 (13th June) and Mondowski and Jeff Higgins (14th June) are also set to take place throughout the event.

What’s more, ‘Soundhood Hackney’ promises to keep a focus on sustainability and community at its heart; SON Estrella Galicia will be putting on beer tasting and sustainable fashion workshops on 13th June, as well as working with local vendors Yellow Garble and Food Fight to provide punters with the necessary fuel to keep them dancing all evening. Tickets are on sale now.

Nothing Matters

Best friend duo Dolores Forever have announced plans to release their debut album this summer. The band – comprised of Hannah Wilson and Julia Fabrin –will release their frst full-length, ‘It’s Nothing’, on 20th September.

Alongside the news of their forthcoming record, the pair have also shared another cut from it; this time in the form of “sad banger” ‘Go Fast Go Slow’. “This song is somewhere to place our female rage,” the band have said of the track. “It explodes with a lifetime of frustration about being objectifed, limited and defned by our gender. Feminism is far from completed and we’re ready to shout about it.” Check it out over on diymag.com now.

The two-piece’s latest single is the third cut to be taken from their debut, and follows previous releases ‘Someday Best’ & ‘Why Are You Not Scared Yet?’. Speaking of the album itself, the pair have called it a “punchy indie-pop record about feminism, friendship and navigating a messed up world. It blows our minds that the music industry is obsessed with hearing from people who are just 21. As we’ve gotten into our thirties, we have so many more stories, and so much more to say.”

THE NEU PLAYLIST

Fancy discovering your new favourite artist? Dive into the cream of the new music crop below.

Chloe Slater – Price On Fun

Following viral single ‘24 Hours’, the Manchester-based singer-songwriter once again teams up with her favoured producer Jack Shuter, for a track that’s an unapologetically noisy mix of punchy drums and boisterous guitar lines. An intense yet simple blend of instrumentation, the track still flls a huge space with little effort, all the while allowing room for Chloe’s half-spoken, half-sung vocals to glide easily on top. (Kyle Roczniak)

Sunken – Charm

‘Charm’ sees London-based outft Sunken combine grunge and dream-pop infuences to create an expansive soundscape that’s both immersive and provoking. Starting almost imperceptibly, the song rises subtly higher from the darkness, driven at frst by whispery vocals from Poppy Billingham, but soon bolstered with shoegazy guitars, an incessant bass, and trippy beats. There’s no ultimate climax or drop, leaving the listener feeling both lulled and unsettled. But, like the spread of grey dawn, there’s a sense of inevitability and unstoppable force. (Phil Taylor).

Welly – Soak Up The Culture

Described by the band themselves as a cut that flls the gap in the market for a ‘gap-year themed song’, Welly’s ‘Soak Up The Culture’ takes listeners on a whimsical journey through the experiences of British tourists abroad. With a colourful array of characters thrown into the mix, from the upper class on ski trips to those who are hesitant to try out local cuisine, the track captures a Brit’s desire for escapism and a glimpse of sunshine. Combining art-pop and electro-chaos, it’s the second showcase of a sound that is truly unique to Welly. (Katie Macbeth)

Meg Chandler –Mediocre

“Spiders in my room are doing better than me” is the somewhat unusual confession that opens Meg Chandler’s latest. Led by the thought-provoking introspection that has become a guiding thread throughout her work, ‘Mediocre’ takes the lingering fear of underachievement and wraps it into a glistening indie-pop package. With graceful vocals foating above an intricate blend of warm folk instrumentals and vibrant melodies, it’s a nod to the Shropshire songwriter’s eclecticism. While lyrically the track may be battling with mediocrity, Meg has already proven that she’s far from it. (Emily Savage)

Photos: Becca Geden, Emma Swann, Francesca Allen

UP UP and AWAY...

The unexpected, stratospheric success of ‘Heat Waves’ elevated Glass Animals to music’s A List, putting Dave Bayley in the eyeline of everyone from Elton to Lana. But it would take an existential crisis at the top of a mountain to set him back on course to ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’: an album about love, space and everything in between. Words: Niall Doherty. Photos: Drewbyy.

omewhere along the way to his band becoming the biggest British overseas success story of modern times, Glass Animals’ frontman Dave Bayley lost himself. It didn’t help that everything felt like it was happening to the singer, songwriter and producer twice-removed. That the Oxford quartet had released their third album ‘Dreamland’ slap bang in the middle of the pandemic in August 2020, unable to savour any sort of tangible satisfaction at seeing their music take its frst steps into the wild, was phase one in Bayley’s identity crisis. Phase two came when they did fnally tour the record, fnding themselves under strict Covid protocols that meant they couldn’t see anyone outside of their touring bubble. Bayley would sit on the bus, watching giddy fans making their way into venues, go onstage, play the gig, get back onto the bus and watch videos on his phone of what an amazing time everyone else was having.

All the while, he kept receiving emails and WhatsApps flled with the growing statistics surrounding a mournful, affecting synthpop number from ‘Dreamland’ titled ‘Heat Waves’. Built around a syncopated groove, minor chord guitar pattern and an impossibly infectious hook, ‘Heat Waves’ was going interstellar, racking up streaming numbers topping a billion and eventually going to Number One on the Billboard Hot 100. But here was Bayley being forced to keep the outside world at arm’s length. He thought that maybe going to the GRAMMYs, where Glass Animals were nominated for Best New Act in 2022, might help him snap out of it but he got Covid and spent the ceremony seriously ill in a hotel room. Still no reality check. Was any of this really happening?

“I had this huge detachment from the world and from the album itself, which is strange because it’s your baby, your child,” says Bayley. “I felt like I was watching this other life.” He’s sat on a sofa inside his east London studio, his dog Woody sound asleep next to him. “He’s pooped, we went on a long run this morning,” Bayley explains. It’s a lovely sunny Monday morning in late May but you wouldn’t know that. Daylight does not make its way into Dave Bayley’s studio. “It’s a black hole of time in here,” he smiles.

Perhaps that’s why he opted to keep set hours of 10am to 6pm during the two months that he made Glass Animals’ excellent new album ‘I Love You So F***king Much’ here: a record that melds the lithe, left-of-centre indie-pop of their previous output with expansive sci-f atmospherics and shoegazing-in-space guitars, and one that they’re preparing to release into their most hungry-for-it fanbase yet.

“Ialwaysfeltveryselfish

Four friends who met at school in Oxford, Glass Animals formed in 2010. Depending on how you look at it, they’re a band in the lineage of groups from the city who do inventive, forward-thinking things with guitar music, or an experimental pop outft who sometimes dally with artrock. Or both. They’re pretty much a Venn diagram for how to make it as an artist in 2024. They emerged through the old-world process of releasing records and playing live in everbigger venues, amassing diehard fans on the way, but they’re also a TikTok and social media phenomenon who have done the unspeakably un-indie-rock act of having a gigantic smash hit.

At their centre is Bayley, a creative dynamo who was born and raised in the US and moved to the UK as a teenager. The rest of the band (guitarist and keyboardist Drew MacFarlane, bassist Edwin Irwin-Singer and drummer Joe Seaward) do play their part on Glass Animals’ albums but it’s mostly all Bayley, who also writes and produces. The songs on the new record are rooted in the unsettling disconnection that Bayley felt around the success of ‘Dreamland’, a period that culminated in the 35-year-old experiencing what he describes as an “existential crisis”.

“I was in this very weird place where I’d lost my footing in the world,” he continues. When touring had ended, Bayley had a fre in his belly, fuelled by the feeling that he had a lot of lost time to make up for.

“I was like, ‘I need to do everything I can to catch up, I need to go through every open door’,” he says. “Because it opened a lot of doors, that record, there were a lot of opportunities on the table –working on other people’s records, working on flm music, working with other writers and producers. I was like, ‘I’m gonna do all of it’ and I don’t think I took the time to re-ground myself at any point.”

He co-produced Florence + The Machine’s jubilant 2022 album ‘Dance Fever’, worked with Hans Zimmer protégé Henry Jackman and pinballed from writing room to writing room in LA, collaborating with Rihanna and Travis Scott foil Starrah. He also went into the studio with Elton John (more on that later), but it was an era of rampant productivity built on unsteady ground. Bayley would have to come back to base at some point, and he was eventually forced to.

“I got Covid again and got stuck in this house that I’d rented,” he states. “It was an amazing Airbnb that was very cheap to rent and I found out why when I got there – it was kind of falling off a mountain. Beautiful view though! I was forced into this isolation, fnally. I guess I had been putting off spending time alone and thinking about why I felt so detached and strange. I was locked in this house and there was this massive storm, I could see landslides happening, and this existential crisis really blossomed, like, ‘What is the point of all this?!’”

Fate’s scriptwriters had given Bayley a doozy. After all, if you’re going to embark on a night of hefty contemplation about fame and success and the meaning of life, then do it properly – do it in a plush pad threatening to topple off the top of a mountain overlooking Los Angeles while a big fuck-off storm rages outside.

The next morning, the house was still standing and so was Bayley, now with an idea about how to fnd his way out of the fug because he’d worked out what had got him into it in the frst place. “I think it was a lack of realising what life is really about,” he says, “and losing that sense of what’s important to me in life.”

What followed was an intense, chaotic period where the songs came fooding out of him. “I spent about two weeks going deep into my own mind-hole,” he says. “It was all systems go, just coming out in this vomit. I ended up writing about 50 or 60 tracks.” He emerged with the beginnings of a record where he wanted to wrap the theme of love around the concept of space. “I used the universe to juxtapose these really loving moments,” he says, before reconsidering himself for a moment: “I say ‘loving’ and people would probably take that in a positive way, but throughout the record it explores all the different

DaveBayley

sides of love and sadness and loss. It’s trying to fnd beauty in those things too.”

. ” –

The record begins with a breezy, strummed number called ‘Show Pony’ - one that sounds a bit like Beck, if he dressed up as a cowboy. Of all the tracks on ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’, these lyrics mean the most to Bayley, acting as a sort of taster menu for all the emotional places that Glass Animals’ fourth album is going to take you. “Everyone’s blueprints for love are the relationships that they witness growing up,” he says. “Even if you don’t realise what love is at that point, you’re still forming your own idea of it. The intention of ‘Show Pony’ was to say, ‘This is the experience, this is the blueprint that I had – and it’s not necessarily about one relationship, that song. It’s an amalgamation of everything I witnessed growing up and, thinking back about it, this table of contents showing all the facets of love.”

He'd wanted to make what he calls “a space record” before but he’d always end up with sonics and songs that sounded too icy and lacking in emotion. Here, he cracked it, melding the idea of space’s abyss with the widescreen panoramas you’d see in a Western flm. It’s why the cosmic maximalism of recent single ‘A Tear In Space’ begins with sweeping strings that resemble composer supreme Ennio Morricone. “That was a big infuence,” says Bayley. “It’s why there’s a lyrical reference to The Good, The Bad & The Ugly in ‘A Tear In Space’ too. There’s a lot of space sounds on this record, but also the vast expanses in those old Western flms defnitely have that, searching those huge vacuums of space.”

Bayley is affable company. There is defnitely a vibe of studio boffn about him in the way his eyes light up when he talks about musical equipment, and you suspect if you were friends with him, you’d never need to take your MacBook to the Genius Bar again. But there’s also something refned and worldly about him too. He has the air of someone who could make you a really good cocktail: fresh ingredients, refrigerated to just the right temperature, excellent glassware. “Hey, have you tried one of Dave’s Ramos Gin Fizzes?” That sort of thing.

He's a restless spirit. The worst thing you could say to him about his music would be, “It sounds the same as the last one.” “I can’t think of anything more boring than repeating yourself,” he declares. “I think when you stop taking risks and stop trying to do something different and just start treading water, why bother?” He would rather make music that elicits passionate reactions: “If someone says it’s shit, that’s cool. At least I made them feel something.”

The disarray in which he wrote the songs that make up ‘I Love You So F***ing Much’ was followed by a period of order and routine when it came to refning them. It’s no surprise that Bayley makes music that interpolates electronic pop, R&B, alt-rock, anthemic indie, tropical beats and sumptuous psychedelia – his upbringing similarly took in many different scenes and sounds. Allow him to paint the picture of what his accent sounded like when he arrived on British shores aged 13: “I’d grown up in Massachusetts, which has quite a strong accent, a really intense north-eastern accent. And then I moved to Texas – very strong accent – and my dad is Welsh and he spent a lot of time in New York so I had a New York accent as well. I came to England and went to school and they were like, ‘What are you?!’ I pushed a reset button and went for a very neutral accent.”

He has different studio temperaments for different occasions. Working on Glass Animals’ music on his own, he says he’s very erratic. “I try a lot of things very fast and throw a huge amount of things away and I talk to myself and say, ‘That’s fucking shit!’,” he laughs. He was reassured when working with Elton, realising the Rocket Man works in exactly the same manner. “He does that and it was so funny,” Bayley recalls. “He didn’t have that selfconsciousness that I have so he sits down and plays something and goes, ‘That’s fucking shit!’ I’m like, ‘That is exactly what I do!’” The music they worked on is yet to be released but he says it was an

amazing experience. “He’s just a genius and to be able to learn from that was priceless. I’m very thankful to him.”

He taps into a different side of himself when he’s producing other artists. Looking back to the work he did with Florence on ‘Dance Fever’ (Bayley produced half the record, with Jack Antonoff handling the other half), he says his job was to “facilitate and support her in every way possible”. “She’s a genius, she can do it on her own, she doesn’t need me there, but I am there to help and to push when she asks for it,” he says. “I think sometimes you get on a level with someone where they’re comfortable throwing down the ideas and slightly letting someone else be the sieve and the organiser, so I’m sitting there trying to organise all these ideas she’s throwing down in the most effcient and wonderful way possible.”

At a few years’ distance, Bayley still looks back on the ‘Heat Waves’ phenomenon as a surreal experience, but one with two notable takeaways: frstly, that it was a song he’d written and produced all on his own and, secondly, that it was one of his most candid efforts. “It was probably the most honest song I’d done up to that point in writing and it was encouraging for that reason,” he says of the track, which explores loss and nostalgia. “I always felt very selfsh writing personal things, it’s the household I grew up in; ‘Don’t talk about how you’re feeling and get on with it’. Now I’ve realised it’s OK, now I’m whining all over the place! I fnally made the connection that it’s not so selfsh, it’s actually that there’s a selfessness to it, you’re donating a piece of yourself.”

As well as the song prompting both Florence and Elton to get in touch, Bayley also heard from Lana Del Rey, another of his idols. “Lana is a big songwriting hero of mine,” he says. “Those people have all been so amazingly kind about something I never expected anyone to be kind about. It’s wonderful.”

‘Heat Waves’ became one of those once-a-decade tunes that managed to seep in everywhere: in clubs, on the radio, on video games, in gyms. The weirdest place that Bayley saw it was when someone sent him a video of the track being played at a primary school fun day. It was going off.

“These kids were just losing their minds to this song, all screaming at the top of their lungs,” he marvels. “I thought it was absolutely hilarious.”

Recently, he arrived at a friend’s house at precisely the moment the pal’s 12-year-old and her posse were doing ‘Heat Waves’ as their karaoke selection. “They were all screaming it and I was like, ‘This is too weird’,” he laughs. “They passed me the mic and I was like, ‘No fucking way!’”

Perhaps one aspect of ‘Heat Waves’’ success is how it fies in the face of most huge pop songs over the past few years. There’s nothing muscular and immediately grabbing about it. If anything, it sounds like it’s about to fall over, its hypnotic spell only really kicking in after a few listens. Bayley thinks there’s a lot of pop music being made at the moment that’s built on making an instant impression. “There’s a lot in the world that’s surface at the minute, a lot of very quick, very fast dopamine hits, a lot of fast gratifcation, and I think music that is made for that is often lacking that depth… it might not stand the test of time,” he says.

As for bands starting out, he says they need to spend time honing their craft. “They need to play live a lot,” he says. When it’s put to him that the pipeline of small venues to play is ever declining, he says he knows it’s getting “very tricky” out there but he’s heard enough new bands recently to make him excited about the next wave of emerging artists. He’s an optimist. To prove it, he gets out his phone and scans his current faves. “I’ve been listening to Lip Critic, fucking brilliant, diving back into Amaarae, Blondshell – banger,” he says. “Royal Otis, BERWYN, Blessed Madonna, new Little Simz’s record, this artist called Ali, John Williams soundtracks, I’ve been listening to Monobloc and Suicide too.”

And then, of course, there’s his own record as well. Perhaps Bayley will be in a better place to savour the inevitable success this time. What he needs to remember, he says, is to put some me-time in among all the star-studded collaborating. “I love those offers. I love

helping people with their records, I love writing with people,” he says. “I’m never going to say no to it, I’m just gonna make time to learn stuff on my own as well. I don’t think I’m particularly good at opening up in front of other people, and that’s what I need to make time for – to go into that place which I’m only really comfortable doing on my own.”

Bayley recently moved to a house on the outskirts of London, a place where he can shut himself off from the world and work on music by himself, the antithesis of the house on top of a big hill in LA. He got through the storm, though. Dave Bayley lost his footing there for a moment, now he’s got his swagger back.

‘I Love You So F***ing Much’ is out 19th July via Universal. DIY

ThreeInanimate Objects ...

...that Dave Bayley Loves So F***ing Much

HIS HOFNER 500/1 BASS GUITAR

I’m going to go for something slightly nerdy. I love the two Hofner guitars I have – one’s a bass and one is a normal guitar. I’ve had them for a long time. It’s the same type that Paul McCartney used to play, or does still play, a Hofner 500/1. I write a lot of things on it. I write mainly on that bass guitar.

HIS SUPER CHEAP, SHIT GUITAR

I have another acoustic guitar at home that I bought for a fver at a market when I frst started playing. It was a super cheap, really shit guitar that doesn’t even have a brand and I’ve written 75% of our songs on it. If it doesn’t work like that with you and a guitar, then you’re fucked. I’ve learned my lesson, the chords have got to be really solid.

HIS NEW HOUSE

I just moved house and I love my house. It’s basically a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. Woody loves it there and I fnessed a lot of the record in that house; it’s very peaceful and there’s no distractions. Phones don’t even work there, it’s got a metal tin roof so there’s no phone signal which is great and it’s got a bit of land so Woody can run around while I listen to records.

“ There’s a lot of v

EURO PEAN UNION

Having upped sticks to Lisbon, establishing a family and artistic base that’s allowed him to be more creative than ever, ‘LOJA’ is the sound of Orlando Weeks relaxing into a new era.

Words: Louis Griffin.

EURO PEAN UNION “I

mean, it’s really quite beautiful…” Orlando Weeks smiles. “I was going to sugarcoat it a little bit, but no, it’s gorgeous.” The softlyspoken singer is describing his adopted hometown of Lisbon, a place that seems almost like a character on new record ‘LOJA’. The album takes its name from the Portuguese word for ‘store’ – inspired by an art studio he set up in a shopfront there – and you can practically hear the city in its eleven songs, with their echoes of soaring towers and coastal breezes.

‘LOJA’ feels like a natural progression of Orlando’s solo sound, following the dissolution in 2017 of the band that defned the frst half of his career.

‘A Quickening’, his frst post-Maccabees effort, was a soft, altogether gentler album, exploring the birth of his son via futtering synthesisers and hushed songwriting. Its successor, 2022’s ‘Hop Up’, ventured into a glossier, primary colour world of ‘80s-infected art-pop.

Orlando, though, isn’t just a musician, but a visual artist too; he studied illustration at art college, and makes all of the accompanying graphics for each of his records. It’s a practice that has come to defne the way he lives, not least via his current Portuguese base. “We don't have a big apartment,” Weeks explains, “and I make lots of stuff. So we found this – it was being advertised as a shop – and I just went and had a look, and I thought it would be great. I was out of everyone's hair, and I could make all my prints and paintings and drawings. It's the frst time I've ever had a studio. It’s totally invigorated my desire to make visual work that needn't be anything to do with a record, and just so happens to be relevant to it, rather than tailor-making stuff specifcally to an album.”

When he talks about his current life, Orlando seems to almost visibly relax, smiling at his own fortune to be somewhere so in tune with his creative output. “It's been an amazing change. I feel it's done me wonders, in all sorts of ways – and I have my partner to thank for that, almost entirely,” he says. “There's a song on the record called ‘You & The Packhorse Blues’ that’s about how I am comfortable admitting that I am essentially a packhorse. I'm good at carrying stuff and I can be motivational, but I am a poor organiser and quite easily get stuck in my ways. So if it wasn't for her saying, ‘We’re going now, we’re moving, it’s going to happen’ and kicking me into gear, then I don't think it would've happened.

“The energy that you get from new love is extraordinary.”

Genuinely, every day I fnd a reason to count my blessings.”

His son, too, has been giving him an unsurprisingly new way of looking at the world and his surroundings. “I'm in this new place, and I'm besotted with it, but I'm also seeing it through his eyes, watching him,” he enthuses. “We live really close to the Gulbenkian museum. The gardens are amazing and, on my own, I would fnd them a very nice place to spend time. But the way that he approaches them is that they have magic. So then I feel I want to buy into that, and I'm pulling that rareness of feeling into the way I write the songs. It's all just part of the fervour of all this newness, and play. I found this when my son was born actually, that as exhausted as you are, the energy that you get from new love is extraordinary. I felt the same thing about this new place. I felt energised, and receptive.”

Photo: Miguel Alves

It would be another new environment that would then go on to shape ‘LOJA’’s fnal form. Having originally conducted sessions with previous collaborator Nathan Jenkins (otherwise known as the producer Bullion), Orlando then headed to the Isle of Wight’s residential Chale Abbey Studios with producer Sergio Maschetko – who recorded ‘Ants From Up There’ by Black Country, New Road there – and a handpicked live band of musicians. The album certainly has the feel of being the work of many hands – far more so than Weeks’ unmistakably solitary previous albums. “The goal that I set myself originally was for it to feel a lot more like a band in a room,” he explains. “But to make a great record as a band playing in a room, you need to be a really great band.”

Orlando had assembled a collection of brilliant musicians but, having never played together before, they perhaps weren’t a great band yet. “I think we just bit off more than we could chew, initially, and so that meant the manifesto for the record changed,” he continues. “It wasn't gonna work as a band in a room in a space and a time; it needed to be a bit more produced. I'd come back to Lisbon by that point, and I was living with the recordings and feeling like it wasn’t holding together as a record. Then hearing Ben Howard’s [Bullion-produced] record come out I just thought, ‘Why am I not re-approaching Nathan to help me fnish the record?’”

The move back towards something resembling a band dynamic feels like a big shift in his solo material. Following The Maccabees, it seemed as though he was trying to distance himself from that way of writing, whereas now there’s a feeling that he might have made peace with returning to musical collaboration. “Yeah, I think that’s not far off,” he nods. “A responsibility I felt out the back of it was if I’m not gonna be part of a band, then I have to make things that are so specifcally ‘me’ that there could be no grey area. I'm defnitely more at ease, and feel less like I need to make music that is specifcally

not anything of the same world, to my ear, as The Maccabees inhabited. I don't need to be so obtuse.”

In a fan Q&A ahead of the record, Orlando was asked if he’d ever consider playing his old band’s songs live again – and, surprisingly, said yes. How does he feel about returning to that material? He smiles. “I would only ever do it if I felt like it would be a good idea, and I’d asked the other boys if they minded, and they didn’t, and so I’ll try it. I may only do it once, but it might be a pleasure, and then I’ll think about whether I want to do it two nights on the bounce, or three nights, we’ll just see. It’s nice not to feel like something is closed off, anyway.”

So where next for him as a solo artist? ‘LOJA’ has moments of grit among the refned, tasteful songwriting that has come to embody Orlando’s solo career – not least in highlight and recent single ‘Dig’, featuring Wet Leg’s Rhian Teasdale. His intention going forward, he suggests, “is still to remove more gloss, eventually. But once you’ve had a bit of gloss, it's quite hard to turn it down!” he laughs. “I think I still want to try and make a record that sounds like, maybe not a band, but me in a room, or a recording that happens in a space. I’ve not managed that yet, and that is worth pursuing I think.”

The overwhelming sense, talking to the musician, is of a man at peace with his surroundings. He jokes that he’s “gonna get some points on the tourist licence”, but he’s at pains to point out his sincerity when talking about the city he now calls home.

“Lisbon has a lot of absurd grandeur, but it isn’t a place that feels stuffy to me,” he says. “So you have this quite vibrant human experience next to really insane, overly embellished [architecture]. It has amazing Metro art in all the stations. People get quite snooty about that kind of thing, but I love it. Maybe if I’m here long enough I’ll get to do some tiles in one of the stations. We’ll see.”

‘LOJA’ is out now via Fiction. DIY

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

There are lots of voices alongside Orlando’s on ‘LOJA’ – here’s a guide to who’s who:

RHIAN TEASDALE

Rhian from Wet Leg is the foil to Weeks’ pleading protagonist on thumping lead single ‘Dig’ – Orlando says the track is about an “under your breath half-argument”. Her day job with one of the biggest indie acts around needs no introduction, but neatly she hails from the Isle of Wight, where the bulk of ‘LOJA’ was recorded.

TONY NJOKU

Tony’s appearance on ‘LOJA’ follows his EP ‘Last Bloom’ earlier this year, and his guest turns on albums from the likes of Metronomy and PVA. The British-Nigerian songwriter was raised between London and Lagos, and delightfully enough he blended a tie-in Last Bloom perfume to celebrate his EP’s release.

KATY J PEARSON

Katy is one of the leading lights of the folk revival in the UK at the moment, and has just announced a new album herself. ‘Someday, Now’ will be her third LP, but most recently follows her re-scoring of The Wicker Man alongside acts like Drug Store Romeos, H Hawkline and the aforementioned Wet Leg.

“I feel less like I need to make music that is specifically not of the same world as The

Photos: Miguel Alves, Sarah Louise Bennett

“There’s no self-fulfilling hype on the New York scene, nobody will pay attention to you unless what you’re doing is actual quality.”

– SKYLAR KNAPP

pebble’s throw from Brighton’s seafront, inside a darkened sticky club usually reserved for drag and cabaret nights, Been Stellar are blazing through a set of epic proportions. True to their recorded output to date, the NYC gang manage to summon an entire spectrum of human emotion as they ficker between moments of intimate beauty and feral yet calculated noise.

It’s not exactly hard to see why they’re the talk of the festival at this year’s The Great Escape. With a queue snaking around the block outside and the venue loaded way over capacity, there’s an air of genuine excitement behind the band that suggests more than the usual hype machine. For their part, however, the fve-piece are reluctant to rely too heavily on industry buzz. “That was so cool and we love Brighton but we don’t really take it as a victory,” says guitarist Skylar Knapp, absently stirring the ice cubes in his glass of coke in a nearby beer garden later on. “What we’re really proud of is selling out the three headline shows we’re doing around it; that’s more of a marker of where we’re at right now.”

It’s smart that all eyes are focussed on the job still ahead. The quintet of close pals – completed by Sam Slocum (vocals), Laila Wayans (drums), Nando Dale (guitar), and Nico Brunstein (bass) – have just rounded off a major tour supporting Dirty Hit label mates The 1975 in arenas across Europe, while later in the year they’ll open for Fontaines DC across a mammoth run of dates in the US. It might sound glamorous, but facing up to the demanding realities of life as a hard-touring band has left little time for back-slapping.

“It’s been a shit ton of stress,” laughs Skylar. “We’re driving ourselves around, so we’ve had zero time and a lot of work but it’s been fun. We love playing together and it’s always a privilege to tour around here, but there hasn’t been a chance to stop and smell the roses yet. It’s not really the way we operate – celebration and things like that don’t come easy for us. We’re proud and fulflled but we’re always conscious of what we have to do next.”

Perhaps, then, Been Stellar’s champagne moment will come with the arrival of their debut album ‘A Scream from New York, NY’ later this month. A visceral and explosive listen that lives up to its namesake, it sees the band mature from their former shaggy grunge-rock roots that channelled hometown heroes like The Strokes and Interpol into something that’s truly their own – one that arrives, as Skylar puts puts it, as “a coalescence of noise and expressions from the city”.

Whatever they might think of the buzz around their band, the truth is that Been Stellar have earned it the old fashioned way: through cold, hard graft, as a gang of best mates piling into a van and flling up the tank. The guitarist – the chattiest of the band by far – explains they never really had another option. “We didn’t have a massive viral moment or anything like that. There’s no selffulflling hype on the New York scene, nobody will pay attention to you unless what you’re doing is actual quality. It never really occurred to us that we needed to meet these people or tick these boxes to get into the industry; we didn’t know that existed. We know how to make music and to play shows and that’s the way we had to do it.”

This outlook is writ large across the surface of ‘A Scream From New York, NY’, on which they roped in Speedy Wunderground’s Dan Carey (black midi,

BEEN STELLAR might well be New York’s next great guitar band, but heading into debut ‘Scream From New York, NY’, they’re moulding that term into a new shape.

WORDS: Rhys Buchanan. PHOTO: Emma Swann.

Fontaines DC) to helm the desk. Sam says the sought-after producer was central in capturing that live dynamic. “He likes things to hit you over the head real hard and he really brought that out in us,” the vocalist nods. “Our writing process doesn’t include a computer until the fnal stages; if we’re in a live setting it really just fows out of us.”

What sets Been Stellar apart is their ability to offset often bruising elements with something vulnerable and tender. “We just wanted to demonstrate intense emotions, whether they’re angry or really sentimental. We had to justify the epicness of the songs we were writing,” says Sam. “I think by taking the music and lyrics to new depths emotionally, it made us do that – it’s very earnest and clear in what it’s saying. Back in high school the lyrics were just something we shit out at the end. Now it means so much.”

“For me, they’re a bunch of little vignettes that are really personal to us,” Skylar agrees. “In NYC there’s a smug coolness in having your lyrics be purposefully dumb but I’ve never understood why you wouldn’t put everything into it because the words are what stick with me the most. That’s what makes it timeless to me and I think a lot of people are really afraid of letting themselves be vulnerable with that kind of thing.”

With its knowing title, their debut is unmistakably a New York record, littered with references and nods to the city that birthed it. It’s the common ground on which the band was built after they descended there from different parts of America and even Brazil. “The common language we spoke was that we were all in New York at the same time,” says Skylar. “We’ve been together non-stop from the age of eighteen – it’s a very unique thing that not many people experience.” ”It’s a very beautiful thing that we’ve grown up together,” agrees Sam. “It’s very special to have this extra family that you go through life with.”

It might feel like they’re already winners, but Been Stellar are still daring to dream big. “I want to win a fucking GRAMMY or something. We wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t have total faith and commitment to it,” Skylar affrms. “I don’t think any of us are in this to not become a big successful band that people really love and remember for a really long time.”

‘Scream From New York, NY’ is out 21st June via Dirty Hit. DIY

st rshaped 

H E ’ S G O T S O U

ARMED WITH AN ALL-STAR CAST OF PRODUCERS AND A ZEALOUS APPETITE FOR EXPERIMENTATION, ALFIE TEMPLEMAN’S ‘RADIOSOUL’ MARKS A BRILLIANT (AND SOMETIMES BONKERS) NEW CHAPTER FOR THE PROLIFIC MUSICIAN.

WORDS: SARAH JAMIESON. PHOTOS: EMMA SWANN.

“W

here’s the pineapple? Where are the peas?!” Alfe Templeman quips midway through our photoshoot today, in a neat but niche callback to the chaotic food-based theme of DIY’s Class of 2020 issue –one which saw the singer get a little too familiar with some petit pois. Not just a nostalgic throwback to an arguably simpler time, it’s also a zippy reminder of just how prolifc Alfe has been across his career so far; now aged 21, he’s already something of a veteran of the UK indie scene.

Having frst appeared in the pages of DIY aged 15, around his 2018 ‘Like An Animal’ release, since then Alfe has offered up seven EPs, one mini-album and is about to move onto his second record proper. It’s enough to make anyone feel ready for a kip, and yet, nine days ahead of new album ‘Radiosoul’ – his Spotify account is helping him to count down, he confrms – he’s raring to go.

“I’m trying to remember whether, last time I released an album, I was more nervous…” he ponders. “I know I was just as batshit!” he chuckles, before settling on a stance: “I think I’m more excited for this album because it defnitely sounds more like me. I’m gonna be more offended if someone doesn’t like it because I’ve defnitely put more effort into it. It’s more personal, so I feel like I take the pressure more personally.”

Spend any time at all with Alfe and it’s clear that, while he does possess the typical fzzing energy of someone not too long out of their teens, there’s a wise, old soul tucked in there too. The appropriately-titled ‘Radiosoul’ arrives as a prime example. Landing just two years after his debut, 2022’s ‘Mellow Moon’, it’s a record that constantly surprises, leaning closer to the more striking, classic sounds of his personal infuences (Todd Rundgren, Rush, Chuck Berry and more all get a look-in) than the indie-pop label he’s been stickered with thus far.

“I love when artists can have complete, amazing visions and know exactly what they want to do. I really respect that. But for me, I’m just too all over the place,” he says. “I think this album’s [been] a really good way of testing the waters for that in a way. I’m still fnding my feet, and fnding my sound. With this record, I wanted to go to as many different places both to see how other people respond to it, and because I felt naturally that this was what I wanted to do. I’m still having the blur where I don’t

know exactly where I’m going and I think that makes it more exciting.”

It’s this hungry energy that fows through ‘Radiosoul’ in a way that feels familiar but fresh. Where ‘Mellow Moon’ packed in woozy moments and catchy hooks, Alfe’s latest pushes even further at his own sonic boundaries, creating an aural magic eye puzzle of an album that’s altogether more psychedelic and technicolored. But, despite the bold, experimental spirit at its core, the record began in far more tentative fashion.

“I had a really busy year in 2022,” Alfe begins. “I played like, 100 shows and during the whole tour, I found it really diffcult to write and record music. With writing, it was just very hard because I was anxious about the shows, and I couldn’t really separate my mind to go into that mode. Then, when I came back, I was making things at home, producing things back in my bedroom as if I was back in the pandemic almost – being at my parents’ home in Bedford, and just going to my studio in my room. But I’d make things and be a bit underwhelmed by them.”

After a somewhat unsuccessful meeting with his label, Alfe realised he was “very confused and didn’t really have a vision” of what would come next. His

“I GOT TOGETHER WITH NILE RODGERS BECAUSE CLARA AMFO SAID I WAS GOOD AT RIPPING HIM OFF ON THE RADIO!”

U L !

go-to production sounds were lacking the freshness he was craving, and so, instead of labouring the point, he decided to change tack entirely. “I went to the States to see Oscar Scheller, and I was lucky enough to reconnect with Nile Rodgers, who I got together with because Clara Amfo said I was good at ripping him off on the radio and that I should write a song with him,” he laughs. “I was like, ‘No way is that gonna happen’ but he hit me up and that was really cool.”

During those two early sessions, Alfe also began to realise that perhaps his next project shouldn’t have him behind the production desk, either. “I was having good musical ideas in terms of what I wanted to write, but whenever I sat down at a laptop, everything fell a bit fat and I couldn’t seem to execute it the way I wanted to,” he continues. “I decided to put together a small list of people that I really admire from other albums, and ended up just knocking out the rest of the album with the people that were on that list.”

With the back of the new album broken via his trip Stateside, Alfe’s newfound taste for collaboration soon yielded him the freedom to explore more unconventional corners of his sound. Having recruited an all-star cast of producers including Karma Kid [shygirl, Hak Baker], Will Bloomfeld [MNEK, Little Mix], The Vaccines’ Justin Young, and Charlie J Perry [Jorja Smith, Pip Millett] to name but a few, he found himself learning a variety of new sonic languages along the way, embracing different textures, dynamics and structures. It was connecting with producer du jour Dan Carey, though, that transformed his outlook the most.

“I think going to Dan’s studio just changed my life in a lot of ways,” he smiles, nodding to the fact that he’s also recently moved to South London from his family home in Bedford. “After coming out of a

session with him for the frst time, you never really think about music in the same way. I don’t know how to explain it; the way he creates things is so unique and so interesting to me. It’s all about experimenting with little musical exercises, like, can we make a drumbeat that almost makes you feel sick, but still feels good?! That kind of thing.” And did he manage that? “Yeah! [It’s on] the last song of the album, called ‘Run To Tomorrow’, and at frst, it was so disorientating to me. It made me feel really on edge.”

It’s these delightfully odd moments on ‘Radiosoul’ that often shine brightest: take the skittering Daft Punk-esque intro of ‘Drag’, or the mesmerising, almost monotone chorus of recent single ‘Beckham’. Yet, for all its unsuspecting confdence and swagger, Alfe’s second is also a record that deals in the transience of our late youth, and embraces the shifting voice of its narrator.

“I can see it as being quite a dividing album in a lot of ways, and I’m fne with that,” he nods. “I’m proud of it, and happy with it, and I feel like the people that will stick around to listen to it are the people I want to listen to my music, you know? They’re the ones that really understand that I’m shapeshifting quite a bit, and I can’t really stay still too much. That’s the main thing: it’s a bridge to what’s yet to come. I’m halfway on the bridge, stumbling around, just trying to get to the other side.”

‘Radiosoul’ is out now via Chess Club Records / AWAL Recordings. DIY

TA L K I N G N O N S E N S E

‘Radiosoul’ doesn’t just see Alfe heading into fresh sonic territory, it also marks a new, more revealing lyrical chapter for the songwriter. He tells us a little more about his transparent new approach.

Absolutely! Five years ago, I was just singing about circles! What was I even singing about?! I’m so fed up of being nonsensical. I very much want to write things that I can go back to and say, ‘Oh that’s where I was exactly in that moment’. I’ve always wanted to document my life through EPs and albums, but I feel like with this album, it actually really is doing that. ‘Mellow Moon’ did it a little, but more so with just being a pandemic album. In the pandemic, we weren’t really doing much, so what am I actually singing about? I don’t know, just being stuck inside! Now, no one wants to fucking talk about that anymore! With this album, it’s about what happens after coming out of it, and saying ‘I’m a bit fuzzy’.

“I CAN SEE IT AS BEING QUITE A DIVIDING ALBUM IN A LOT OF WAYS, AND I’M FINE WITH THAT.”

The New Album Out Now

for betteror worse

Having collectively weathered a series of signifcant personal storms, London now-trio Goat Girl are once more on solid ground. New album ‘Below The Waste’ sees them digging through the debris and laying the foundations for an expansive alternative future.

Words: Daisy Carter.

Photos: Eva Pentel.

n the grand scheme of things, three years away isn’t a long time.

But for Goat Girl, the road between 2021’s ‘On All Fours’ and their imminent third LP, ‘Below The Waste’, has been a lengthy one.

Aside from the ubiquitous, pandemicshaped shadow that lingered over their sophomore release, the South London cult favourites have themselves navigated serious challenges –not least of which was when their now-former guitarist, Ellie Rose Davies, received a cancer diagnosis. Ellie made the decision to step away from the band just before they recorded ‘Below The Waste’, leaving the remaining members

– vocalist / guitarist Lottie Pendlebury, bassist / vocalist Holly Mullineaux, and drummer / vocalist Roo Jones – as a trio for the frst time.

“It was strange at frst,” Lottie begins today of the dynamic shift. “But it felt kind of natural for it to happen at that point. And because there were fewer of us, it kind of opened up more doors for us to swap instruments around – essentially, there was more space within the music to fll, so we had to be quite creative with how we were going to fgure that out.”

Holly agrees, noting that “when someone leaves, you naturally assess your own position within what you’re doing, and we did that and came to the realisation that we were all really motivated to fnish this record. It kind of galvanised us to make it work in this new way.”

We’re speaking on a typically miserable May day, hunkered down in one of the band’s favourite Deptford haunts before they good-humouredly brave the drizzle for this afternoon’s shoot. And indeed, despite shrinking in size, Goat Girl have never sounded fuller. Working alongside John ‘Spud’ Murphy (Lankum, black midi), they revelled in a sense of creative freedom born from a relative absence of time pressure or external expectation.

“With the last record, I felt a little bit more on-edge about lyrics,” says Lottie, “and there’s a whole different psychological approach you have...” “The diffcult second album,” deadpans Holly, nodding sagely.

This time around, however, all bets were off. Having signed with Rough Trade for three albums,

they elected to treat ‘Below The Waste’ with the maximalist attitude of those whose future is unpromised, adopting an approach Lottie sums up as simply: “Let’s just do whatever we want”. In practice, this translates to a record that nods to noise-rock, folk, synth-pop and more, with its 16 tracks clocking in anywhere from sub-30 seconds to over six minutes. There’s a veritable orchestra of instruments on display, largely played by the band themselves (violin, banjo, taishogoto, Mellotron, organ and more all enrich the album’s collagic sonic landscape) and some of its most compelling vocal moments are bolstered by a choir comprised of Goat Girl’s family and friends.

There is, we suggest, a sense of tentative optimism to the project; where their 2018 self-titled debut was jagged and raw, capturing the zeitgeist of the Windmill scene’s frst wave, ‘Below The Waste’ imagines alternative futures, using contrasting motifs of human consumption and the natural world to explore concepts of greed and consumerism, adaptability and resilience. “I think it’s a bit more nuanced in its approach to talking about things,” affrms Holly. “The frst record was super angsty, very young and full of rage, but I feel like this is more confdent and self-assured. There are still visceral moments within that, but it’s just done in different ways. Sometimes something can be shouted and be really direct, sometimes it can more subtly expose the absurdity of the situation we currently fnd ourselves in.”

“Hope is a very important revolutionary tool.”

– Roo Jones

Inspired by both the magical realism she was reading, and the dystopian surrealism of the lives we were all living, during lockdown Lottie was drawn to “the unnaturalness of nature that exists in a city”. She explains that “being close to nature, but not really being able to experience it, kind of means that we have this weird, distorted relationship with it.” On ‘Below The Waste’, this sense of the uncanny is manifested throughout: it’s in the tape-bent bird chirps that introduce opener ‘reprise’ and in the industrial sonics of ‘where’s ur <3’, while lyrically, ‘play it down’ speaks to notions of socially-enforced suppression compared to nature’s unbounded power.

Especially given the current bleak state of things (our conversation spans the BDS movement, the music industry’s monumental wealth disparity, Lottie’s work with the grassroots venue-championing Sister Midnight project and more), retaining belief in the possibility for change is paramount. “Hope is a very important revolutionary tool,” says Roo. “The way to break people’s spirit is by making them feel like they don’t have any power, but knowing that you do is a great step in getting towards where you want to be.”

Indeed, over the past few years, hope is something that Goat Girl have learned to hold close. “We’ve had a lot of obstacles,” Roo acknowledges, exchanging

a small, knowing smile with their bandmates. Holly nods: “As a band, and as friends, we’ve just been through so fucking much. Els was sick; I basically went through domestic abuse for a long time and had to move out of London to get away from it; there are tracks on this album about Ro’s struggles [with substance abuse and addiction]. I think that’s one of the reasons that maybe [releases] take so long with us – the band is important, but we’ve all got to make sure we’re okay as people and as friends frst.” She pauses. “I’m so proud of us – I think we’ve done really well to be where we are now.”

Within ‘Below The Waste’’s immersive 16-song run, the three tracks that explore the band’s different perspectives on Roo’s addiction and recovery are poignant standouts; collectively, they’re the most vulnerable, and the most powerful, that Goat Girl have ever been. ‘words fell out’ and ‘take it away’ (Lottie’s and Holly’s respective offerings) are achingly tender, encapsulating the pain and relative powerlessness of watching a loved one lose themselves. ‘tcnc’, meanwhile – which stands for ‘take care, not crack’, a mantra their mum came up with – is Roo’s own take on their experiences, its claustrophobic intensity and incantation-like lyrical delivery creating a sucker-punch rallying cry for

“As a band, and as friends, we’ve just been through so fucking much.”

– Holly Mullineaux

recovery. “Not gonna crack like that / Already had a spat with crack / Never go back / Put my gears in whack and charge / Full steam and attack,” they spit. Having this tripartite narrative woven into the album was entirely unintentional, merely a product of the band writing about what they were going through at the time, and Roo themself was initially unaware of the other tracks’ subject matter. In fact, they only discovered what ‘words fell out’ alluded to when the trio were discussing the LP’s running order, and Holly made an offhand comment about thematic links. “You kept that one quiet, didn’t ya!” Roo teases Lottie. “I was playing it at you for ages as [Lottie’s solo project] mushy p,” comes the reply. “Oh yeah,” Roo laughs, “and I was like, ‘I love this song!’”

In this way, these tracks are particularly polymorphic; as well as being vignettes of a deeply diffcult time, they’re also evolving with the band, taking on new meanings and associated memories as they’re recorded with and performed alongside the very people they concern. “I knew I wanted to write about the experience, but at the time all we could focus on was helping Roo get better,” says Lottie. “And so it was a cathartic experience to actually debrief with myself through music. Because when you suppress those feelings, it’s really hard to unearth them again, but music and writing has that power of freeing it from you.” Roo gives an impish, slightly ironic grin: “It was good material – yoouuu’re welcome!”

Wide-eyed and open-hearted, ‘Below The Waste’ truly pushes the envelope of the band’s prior experimentation. It takes in light and dark, yes, but also buried beneath the intricate layers is a more elemental foundation. Earth, fre, air, water. Rock, mud, blood, feather. In their thematic and compositional rejection of oppressive structures, Goat Girl tap into something primal, fooring the listener not with sheer force, but with faith – in the future, and in each other.

‘Below The Waste’ is out on 7th June via Rough Trade. DIY

space

“The moral [of ‘Starface’] is that the tenderness we should have for each other is the answer to all of our problems.”

space jam

Lava La Rue’s debut has been a long time in the making, but arriving in a spaceship full of sci-fi fantasy and wild ambition, ‘Starface’ is the sound of an artist fully coming in to land.

Words:LisaWright.

No matter where Lava La Rue had grown up, you get the feeling that the 26-year-old creative polymath would never have turned out boring.

But if the frst key to inspiration is access, then from their earliest days they were drenched in it, soaking up the bustling multicultural sounds and scenes of West London, with their own diverse family background (a Black British mother, Latvian father and Jamaican grandmother) at home too. They recall playing gigs at community festivals in a punk band aged 11, and being snuck into squat parties and raves not long after. Before most people had taken their fake IDs to the local for a nervous frst Malibu and Coke, Lava had already experienced a cultural smorgasbord.

“Now, being friends with people from the middle of nowhere, it makes me realise how much I grew up around loads of creative subcultures. But I wouldn’t say I took it for granted; I always wanted to get involved with stuff,” they begin, Zooming in from their bedroom where framed flm posters cover a bright yellow wall. “I’d be annoyed when I was too young to go to stuff ‘cause that’s where all the cool cats were: gigging and doing vinyl sets and playing rocksteady and having independent pirate radio stations. There was just loads. Even now, if you walk down Portobello Road on a Saturday at 12pm, there’s Portobello Radio and people doing DJ sets out the shop fronts. It’s more than you could possibly need to be inspired as an artist.”

All this youthful exposure is likely one reason why their debut – the 17-track, high concept sonic odyssey of ‘Starface’ – does not sound in any way like the tentative frst steps of a new artist fnding their feet. It’s huge in scale in every way – from its pick’n’mix approach to infuence, through its wide-ranging array of cross-cultural collaborations, to its entire double-layered narrative of a queer alien falling to earth (or, as they’ve previous called it, “a lesbian Ziggy Stardust”).

Having frst released as Lava back in 2018, they describe the interim years as “like going through puberty, fnding your identity in public”. ‘Starface’, then, is about as clear an expression of the result as you’re likely to hear from a debuting artist this year.

But while Lava cuts a singular shape across the record and beyond, the importance of the network around them is evidently integral to everything they do too. If it began as a kid seeing the sheer breadth of inspiration the world had to offer, then it was cemented in college when they met the people that would go to form the

prolifc NiNE8 Collective alongside them. “The frst day of college, I sat next to Biig Piig in class, and Mac Wetha was two seats down from us, and this year it’ll be 10 years since we frst met,” they recall. NiNE8 has gone on to birth buzzy stars in the above trio and more; together they still regularly throw events and work on each other's projects (‘Fluorescent / Beyond Space’ on Lava’s record features the group). The key, they suggest, is in the support network of equals they’ve built.

“If you look at NiNE8 as a collective, we’re all very different in terms of how we dress and our backgrounds, but we all get along because we’re friends on a values and personalities level as opposed to an aesthetics level,” Lava nods. “So because of that, it means we all make very different music which is cool. But also I actually think that when you have a group where everyone looks and dresses the same, there’s always one person who becomes the face of it. With NiNE8, we’re like The Avengers. Everyone has their own solo origin story, but when everyone comes together it’s really exciting.”

With Lava’s own origin story encompassing such vibrant and exploratory territories, it makes sense that ‘Starface’ arrives as their fantastical Avengers-style alter ego – albeit one sent to spread love rather than fght crime. “Lava is quite nerdy and someone who puts their head down, whereas Starface is this larger than life character,” they begin. “Growing up, those types of musicians were the ones I really got sucked into – the Princes, the Bowies.” A character and a plot that grew over several years of slowly piecing the record together, the aim was to create a technicolour narrative upon which to hang Lava’s own thoughts and experiences. A visual director as well as a musician, their flm brain was working on the project in tandem. “It’s what every great writer or screenwriter does – you take something you went through and then apply it to the character so it can apply to everyone else,” they note.

We’ll handover to them to outline the plot: “It’s about an alien who comes to understand why humans are so self-destructive, and in the process of doing that they become a bit like that themselves through falling in love in a somewhat toxic relationship. The moral is that the tenderness we should have for each other is the answer to all of our problems. Starface comes to earth looking for this big convoluted answer to report back to the mothership, when actually it’s something much simpler, which is that we’re all just scared and everyone just wants to be loved. We all just have weird ways of trying to achieve

“With NiNE8 Collective, we’re like The Avengers.”

that love – be it through respect or sex or money –but at the end of the day, people just want to feel accepted.” Dressed up in fantasy and fun it may be, but it’s a narrative that doesn’t take too much unpicking to transpose onto the modern, divided world – one where practising compassion and empathy feels like the most crucial act of all.

The video for recent single ‘Humanity’ fnds Lava prefacing the track’s woozy tenderness with a clip of them addressing the crowd at a previous gig: “Be very sceptical of anyone who promotes the narrative that in order to care about the humanitarian rights of one group of people, that means you don’t care about another group of people. There are enough resources in this world for everyone to have basic human rights.” Meanwhile, when it came to stitching together the portraits of modern humanity that fll the rest of the video, they sent out the bat signal to their fan base: the Galactic Alliance of Extraterrestrial Space aliens – also known as the GAES.

“The whole concept of the GAES is something being accidentally gay. It’s the Galactic Alliance of Extraterrestrial Space aliens that just happens to be GAES – whoops!” they laugh. “That’s why a lot of the music is like that as well. ‘Love Bites’ is about being in a throuple situation where you’re the extra person, and it just so happens to be a really lesbian song –

Collaboration Nation

Across ‘Starface’, Lava enlists a globetrotting list of collaborators, from Audrey Nuna, Bb Sway and Yuné Pinku to their own NiNE8 Collective pals. They tell us more about the selections.

“I was just self-indulgent in that I listen to so much music from so many different countries and, just because I’m a British person making technically a British record, why should that stop me from getting a K-pop artist or a Chicano artist or a Korean-American artist? I love the scenes in all of these different pockets. My favourite thing to do on the internet is wake up and discover a whole new subculture in a city. Like OK, I wonder what the liquid drum n bass scene in Leeds is doing right now? What’s post-punk in south Edinburgh doing right now? You can just go online and see what they’re up to and what they did last weekend. I love it. So why not apply that to making a record too?”

whoops! It’s a part of my identity and it’s the only way I would know how to write about romance.”

With much of Lava’s identity existing in the intersection of marginalised voices – a Black, queer, non-binary artist operating in a largely indie-alternative sphere – they approach everything with the same attitude as that of NiNE8: one that suggests we’ll get a lot further if we seek out the commonalities rather than focus too much on difference. “Being someone who is Black and queer, I see nights that are just exclusively for Black and queer people or just regular nights which are not diverse at all,” they say. “For me, I love having things that really feel like more of a bridge where it’s not like, ‘Here’s your space and here’s the space that’s normally there’. I want to open the conversation so it’s all mixed. That would be ideal.”

They point out that, while online conversations around access have doubtless come on leaps and bounds (in their own bubble at least), there’s still a long way to go to move those conversations IRL. “Some of the best places [in London] to fnd great bands in the alternative world are the Windmill or the George Tavern and these are venues that are right in multicultural hotspots. Brixton is such a multicultural Caribbean hotspot; where the George Tavern is is full of the South Asian community,” they point out.

“But the moment you walk into those venues, you’re just surrounded by straight white people at an insane level. It doesn’t even make any sense because the areas that these spaces are in are so not that.”

‘Starface’ and its author, then, are on a mission both intergalactic and earthly to promote a more open-minded, open-hearted way of being – a boundaryless approach to life that extends to Lava La Rue as a multi-disciplinary umbrella project and beyond. Alongside the music, Lava has concep-

tualised and directed all the videos for ‘Starface’, embracing an aesthetic that’s part “‘70s / ‘80s psychedelic” and part “2000s 10th Doctor Who”; last year, meanwhile, they were the creative director for Wet Leg’s madcap, morris dancing BRITs performance – a new string to their bow that they’re keen to pursue.

“The person I reference is Donald Glover and the way he’ll do a feature flm, then dip into TV, then drop an amazing psychedelic Black rock album, then be in a hip hop thing. He’s an all-rounder who likes to do it all but also has a quality level for everything they do where you can see the time and thought put into it,” they enthuse. “That’s the closest example of how I aspire to live my life.”

It’s a lofty aim but it’s also one that seems entirely plausible. Lava already has plans for an “immersive, larger than life” stage show for the ‘Starface’ tour, where gig-goers will be encouraged to cosplay as characters from the album. Following on from their inaugural day festival at Fabric, NiNE8 will be levelling up with an even bigger event at London’s The Cause later this year, while Lava notes that, when it comes to directing, unlike music it’s an older person’s game. “It’s a totally different world,” they nod. “Being young and new is like, you’re an idiot, you don’t know anyone. The older I get, the more respect I’ll get.”

As today’s chat rounds off, talk turns to the soundbite-driven culture of modern music making. Lava’s response might technically be towards that, but it also seems like an apt summary of their attitude as a whole: “I get it and I respect it, but I crave the opposite.”

‘Starface’ is out 19th July via Dirty Hit. DIY

“The way Donald Glover will do a feature film, then dip into TV, then drop an amazing psychedelic Black rock album – that’s how I aspire to live my life.”

REVIEWS

This month: Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Goat Girl, Kneecap and more.

’m famous but not quite,” proclaims Charli XCX over the unique balladry of the disarming ‘I might say something stupid’, a moment that immediately dispels the notion that ‘BRAT’ – the singer’s sixth studio album – is going to play out like any other club record. It’s an incredibly ftting statement for an artist who hit the top of the charts with 2022’s ‘CRASH’, landed a track on pop’s soundtrack of the decade for Barbie, yet whose affliations with the comparably underground and now defunct label and collective PC Music and their shared love of musical unpredictability defne them far better. Charli may have faced a fork in the road with ‘CRASH’ propping open the door for pop megastardom, but ‘BRAT’ unfolds as an unmistakable representation of her very core; an exhilarating ode to the multiple facets of club culture that have formed the foundations for everything Charli has become over the best part of two decades.

As she sings “sometimes I just want to rewind,” over an unapologetically heavy digital soundscape, her mutually shared debt to pioneering producers and friends AG Cook and Danny L Harle shines brightest. ‘So I’ takes every page from the rulebook that iconic musical powerhouse SOPHIE so brilliantly ripped up prior to her untimely death in 2021 for what is one of the most ftting posthumous homages in recent memory, Charli landing a complex balance between celebration of sound and lyrical heartbreak: “You always said it’s ok to cry, so I know I can.” This candour sits alongside the album’s heaviest calls to underground dancefoors – ‘Club classics’ and ‘B2b’ – which, at opposite ends of the record, pull a thread from the past to the present, the latter living up to its name with jarring precision. Yet even in these moments, Charli sends her vulnerability frmly to the forefront. “I don’t want to feel fearless,” she sings on a record that – at least musically – presents her as just that.

The album is fundamentally bookended by love letters to raves and everything that comes with them, the thunderous ‘365’ pushing opener ‘360’ to levels set to make any heads with a conservative mindset spin. And that’s the real joy here: it’s hedonistic to a tee, and an exhilarating ride through the highs and lows of going ‘out out’, be that the fundamental friendships and relationships that are formed and lost, putting the world to rights in the dark corners of clubs, or the pure ecstasy of an unrelenting dancefoor. Whether ‘BRAT’ will ultimately push Charli XCX into mainstream pop’s top tier still remains to be seen, but it absolutely guarantees the best night out of your life. Ben Tipple

LISTEN: ‘So I’

The best night out of your life.

BILLIE EILISH

HIT ME HARD AND SOFT

Darkroom / Interscope

Across the album’s satirical noir-pop cut ‘THE DINER’, Billie Eilish steps into the shoes of her stalker. “I saw you on the screens / I know we’re meant to be,” she sings over a warpy teen-horror-fick score, “I’m waiting on your block / But please don’t call the cops.” It’s unclear whether the song is based on fact or fction – there have, unfortunately, been multiple real-life instances for the singer-songwriter to reference – but on the seventh track of third record ‘HIT ME HARD AND SOFT’, almost ten years since she started, the 22-year-old is making crystal clear the parasocial nature of her career. It begins earlier, on ballad opener ‘SKINNY’, where she hints at the toxic public commentary regarding her body: “People say I look happy / Just because I got skinny / But the old me is still me and maybe the real me,” she rebuffs. Submerged within the public eye, stalked, physically self scrutinised –with a love life narrated by tabloids and stans in equal measure – ‘HIT ME HARD AND SOFT’ sees Billie crash through her early twenties, confessing the day-to-day horrors of the consumed female celebrity through vivid lyrical confrontation.

Queasily and meticulously produced once again by brother Finneas, the record’s edge not only lies in its poetic divulgence, but within – as is typical with the sibling duo – a resistance to the bitesize, plucky contemporary. Sonically, Billie’s abrasive pop rebels in new ways, lengthening tracks by the double, partitioning others and emboldening the intricacies of their collaboration tenfold. It’s cut with a rustier, more mature blade, moving from the leathery arena rock of ‘THE GREATEST’, to the sun-kissed, ribcage-rattling bass plucks of ‘CHIHIRO’ and ear-ringing electronica at its end, and fnally to an alt-trap bridge followed by strings on fnale ‘BLUE’. It darts between ideas that lie leagues apart yet remain consistent: see queer, vampiric big-pop hit ‘LUNCH’, via the cinematic, continental ‘L’AMOUR DE MA VIE’ and its fdgety hyperpop secondhalf, or the romantic blue skies of the Clairo-like ‘BIRDS OF A FEATHER’ that precede the weighty, plunging rustic guitar of ‘WILDFLOWER’, for example. It’s paced cinematically, with a lush diversity and vibrancy of sound not seen before from Billie. And, in pushing the boundaries of her monolithic artistry, ‘HIT ME HARD AND SOFT’ sees her hitting somehow even higher highs. It’s her best yet, and an affecting sign of the times. Otis Robinson

LISTEN: ‘Lunch’

Her best yet, and an afecting sign of the times.

 GOAT GIRL Below The Waste Rough Trade

A band for whom politics and activism have always been an integral part of their collective identity (for no greater reason than simply because their eyes are open to the fuckery of the world around them), Goat Girl are, on their third full-length, broadening their horizons ever further. And having done so is no mean feat. Since their 2021 second album ‘On All Fours’, the quartet have become a trio, and have between them faced signifcant personal obstacles; had they consequently sought solace in the familiarity of their South London post-punk roots, you could hardly have blamed them.

Instead, though, ‘Below The Waste’ presents something altogether more interesting. Weaving feld recordings of animal noises, rainfall, and laughter into a rich instrumental tapestry, the project is an intricately layered exploration of the push and pull between an idealised natural world and our destructive urban realities. “Cash machines in overfow / All the parks are left to grow / From the seeds / We have sown,” croons Lottie Pendlebury atop the swirling textures of ‘perhaps’ - a sort of ecologically-minded take on the utopian optimism of ‘Imagine’. There’s something eerie and almost primordial about the instrumental ‘jump sludge’; bedroom pop-adjacent single ‘motorway’, meanwhile, is more grounded in the quotidian, fnding comfort in the liminal space between origin and destination. Shorter interludes of airier sonics (namely opener ‘reprise’, ‘prelude’, and ‘s.m.o.g.’) offset the LP’s sometime density, but when Goat Girl permit themselves the space to fully unfurl - as on masterful, six-minute closer ‘wasting’ - the results are utterly immersive.

And, for all its outward-looking sensibilities, ‘Below The Waste’ is still a markedly personal offering, considering not just the relationship humans have with the world, but those we have with each other. The trifecta of tracks which deal with drummer Roo’s experiences of addiction - ‘words fell out’, ‘tcnc’, and ‘take it away’ - are each stunningly potent in markedly different ways, ultimately highlighting the signifcance of resilience and mutual support as a means of refashioning ourselves in a new, better image. Daisy Carter LISTEN: ‘tcnc’

Photos: Harley Weir, Petros, Eva Pentel

ZAYN

Room Under The Stairs Mercury / Island

On fourth record ‘Room Under the Stairs’, Zayn ditches his infamous boyband persona of mystery in service of a “raw, honest” entry. And apparently inspired by the pastures of rural Pennsylvania, where quietened celebrity, newfound parenthood and heightened rumination has ushered in dusky songwriting, ‘Room Under the Stairs’ starts strong. Soulful resolve solidifes the diversity of his angelic singing chops across ‘Grateful’, ‘Alienated’ and ‘My Woman’, while country pop ode ‘Stardust’ has enough emotion to choke the hardest of hearts. Indie rock cut ‘Gates of Hell’ is certainly inspired, if not paint-by-numbers, while later, possessed by the spirit of soft-rock Americana, an odd American twang overcomes the singer, suggesting a seedling desire to step outside the box, albeit prematurely hatched, in resistance to his R&B roots. But those longstanding sensibilities can’t help but creep back in – see the soft-pop of ‘What I Am’; the long falsettos of ‘False Starts’; the trickling, buttery vocals of ‘Something in the Water’; or even the strange, confused combination of soft-rock and R&B on ‘Fuchsia Sea’ — that, by the record’s end, start to feel missed. Zayn’s fourth is admirable in its emotional mining, is rich in execution and soul, and indeed his brain-scratching melodic riffs will have die-hard fans blushing – but even on this, the treading of the long-trodden, stripped-back, ex-boyband desire path leaves the record wanting for just a little more sparkle. Otis Robinson LISTEN: ‘Stardust’

ALFIE TEMPLEMAN

Radiosoul

Although only 21, Alfe Templeman has been a frm fxture on playlists and festival lineups alike for some time now, having cemented his status as the wunderkind of indie pop with buoyant early EP cuts like ‘Circles’ and ‘Happiness in Liquid Form’. Even then, there was a sense that Alfe possessed a certain je ne sais quoi that distinguished him from his more run-of-the-mill pop peers, and on second album ‘Radiosoul’, he deftly proves that those credentials are well warranted. The product of a period of considerable fuctuation and personal growth (starting to live independently from your parents is a big shift for anyone, let alone when you have touring burnout, social media overstimulation, and mental health challenges to contend with), the LP is accordingly explorative, taking in the high art-pop of Scissor Sisters (‘Eyes Wide Shut’; ‘Drag’), the sun-drenched indie of Declan McKenna (‘Vultures’; ‘Hello Lonely’), and the club-ready disco of Nile Rogers (quite literally – ‘Just A Dance’ features guest guitar playing from the funk legend himself). Elsewhere, the infuence of Alfe’s other collaborators – including The Vaccines’ Will Bloomfeld and Justin Young, and cult producer Dan Carey –come to the fore, with ‘Beckham’ showcasing crunchier textures and his knack for an earworm hook (“Sutton, Bexley, Tooting, Earlsfeld / Streatham, Peckham, David Beckham” is ripe for a festival feld call-and-response singalong). Here, maturity doesn’t entail dourness or restraint, but rather open-mindedness and a joyful self-confdence. A technicolour triumph that’s his most ambitious, maximalist, and forward-facing work yet, ‘Radiosoul’ shows Alfe Templeman to be not just ‘good for his age’, but an assured, fully-formed artist capable of holding his own beside some of the industry’s best. Daisy Carter

LISTEN: ‘Just A Dance’

 KNEECAP Fine Art

Heavenly

If the conservative press are to be believed, then Kneecap are a danger to society – a trio of balaclava-clad ne’er do wells who want to bring down the United Kingdom itself. Dip into debut album ‘Fine Art’ at certain choice intervals, and you imagine the detractors would happily double down on their ire; littered throughout are the sounds of loudly sniffed lines and the wayward background noises of a heavy night down the boozer. One song is called ‘Rhino Ket’. Take a step back (or, conversely, dive in fully), however, and ‘Fine Art’ is, in its own warped way, as its title suggests: a fully-immersive, conceptual production that, much like their recent Sundance awardwinning biopic, is far, far too clever to just be the work of three miscreants. Set across a hedonistic night at fctional pub The Rutz, a cast of feeting characters drift in and out, from Lankum’s Radie Peat, who sings ‘3CAG’’s traditional Irish opening, to Fontaines DC’s Grian Chatten, who props up a barstool on the bottom-of-the-pint anti-anthem ‘Better Way To Live’, to a series of skits that link the action throughout – best of which is the gap yah music industry exec that pops up on ‘KNEECAP chaps’ (“I LOVE your accents… by the way, I’m English”). Sometimes you almost forget you’re listening to an album and not a radio play, but there are standalone gems here too. High energy d’n’b highlight ‘I’m Flush’ or the wild-eyed rave of ‘Rhino Ket’ will make for rowdy additions to the proven carnage of their live shows, while the fute trills of ‘Drug Dealin Pagans’ or the Streets-adjacent, gospel-backed fnale of ‘Way Too Much’ show there are layers to their outlook too. Really, however, ‘Fine Art’ should be viewed much like any great work: as a whole. And as a whole, it’s totally unique, totally committed and totally thrilling – just don’t tell the government. Lisa Wright LISTEN: ‘I’m Flush’

KATE NASH

9 Sad Symphonies

Kill Rock Stars

As oxymoronic as its title, Kate Nash’s ffth record is a placeless and timeless cinematic fantasia, where her staple, comedic, British melodrama tumbles through whimsical compositions, big-screen Gilded Age strings and a sprinkling of raw ‘00s American folk. Dreamily affected by the boldness of the Hollywood aesthetic, ‘9 Sad Symphonies’ was forged from years spent between London and LA, yet the two infuences never clash, moving instead gently around one another. It’s not shocking, for example, when the prestige period drama violins and country fddles of ‘Millions of Heartbeats’ move through the garage beats and Clean Bandit-esque strings of ‘Wasteman’ or the poetic New England pastiche and blood-soaked romance of ‘Space Odyssey 2001’. Meanwhile, where Kate’s familiar melancholia and knack for indie rock pairs well with the transatlantic aesthetic, expected British humour bleeds throughout: “You’re bread and honey / And I’m the bank,” she sings lazily on ‘Vampyre’, voice drawn out over tambourine like a drunk Western: “The priest caught you in the church while you were having a wank.” Though her ffth strays massively from the wiry harshness of earlier material, it keeps close a failsafe songwriting scaffolding and off-piste love-song sensibility, backed by lonely strings that are as devastating as they are triumphant. Here, she’s cracked the code: ‘9 Sad Symphonies’ is an album of time-travelling ‘Merry Happy’-ish fables, where Kate paints the British woman in an Americanised world, making romantic strife a cinematic epic, effortlessly capturing and healing the hyperbole of her heart, a needed return from Britain’s most emotionally deft and comedically deadpan pop artist. Otis Robinson LISTEN: ‘Vampyre’

13TH JUNE 2024

04:30PM/ WELCOME AT BBE RECORD STORE

06:00PM/ EVENT IN PAPER DRESS VINTAGE

DJ SETS

JAWA JONES/ HARRY JAMES/ KYRI R2

LIVE SHOWS

SWORN VIRGINS/ PLANTOID/ GIA FORD

11:30PM/ AFTERPARTY WITH ED VON BALHAM DJ SET AT TWO PALMS

TWO DAYS OF MUSIC, BEER, FOOD AND WORKSHOPS

14TH JUNE 2024

05:00PM/ PREPARTY WITH JEFF HIGGINS DJ SET + BEER WORKSHOP AT PAPER DRESS VINTAGE

08:00PM/ EVENT IN TWO PALMS

LIVE SHOWS

DITZ/ GALLUS/ COSMORAT

DJ SETS MONDOWSKI/ JEFF HIGGINS

ALBUMS

AURORA

What Happened To The Heart

Decca / Glassnote

“What is life worth living if you don’t bleed for anything?” sings AURORA on the Kate Bush-like ‘To Be Alright’. It’s the type of plea that populates the singer’s fourth album, whereby hurt is both resisted and overwhelmingly embraced. As ever, she’s visceral in her depictions: “Your blood / Do you feel it travel in and out of your heart? / Needles stitching up the big holes?” she asks on the antithetical happy-go-lucky indie pop ‘Your Blood’, whose preppy electric guitars and queasy, hopelessly romantic melodies call to mind The Cardigans. Then, on the astutely poetic ‘The Confict of the Mind’, she pleads with a lover to open up. “Only when I see you cry / I feel conficted in my mind / It flls my heart up and it breaks me at the very same time,” she echoes. For the frst half of the record, AURORA, post-breakup, speaks all things left unsaid, closing the door but not without mourning: “We’re good people and we both deserve peace,” she sings on ‘Some Type of Skin’, before howling “My God! It’s a lot!/I’ve got to build some type of skin!” But the heart does not ache only for romance, and any acquired armour is ditched for catharsis. She then turns to spirituality, whereby the organ is treated instead as a cerebral entity that leads with poetic, connected complexity. ‘The Dark Dresses Lightly’, an anthemic pop horror cut, ushers this change. Her claustrophobic post-breakup gaze turns outward, flled with anguish, rage and resentment at an emotionally out-of-touch populace: “All this fear, it’s contagious,” she sings. Via celestial ‘80s disco and synthpop, clubby trance and electronica, she captures the pandemic of human arrogance and avoidance: on the arid ‘Starvation’ she asks “Why do we have to die for us to see the light? / We hunger for love,” working both romantic metaphor and critique of inequality. Later, on the twangy, guttural ‘My Name’, tired of unhealed trauma and collective ignorance to environmental overconsumption, she reminds the listener, “You eventually will be eaten by yourself,” closing the section with apocalyptic earthly rave on the inventive and rowdy ‘My Body Is Not Mine’. Monolithic in nature, the world-building on ‘What Happened to the Heart?’ makes a bleeding heart – both for self and the earth – appear rapturous and unfathomably healing. Otis Robinson

LISTEN: ‘The Dark Dresses Lightly’

 THE MYSTERINES Afraid

Of Tomorrows

Fiction

For anyone who thought that - fresh from bagging a Top Ten spot for their 2022 debut - The Mysterines would return with something more immediate, you couldn’t be more wrong. Instead, their second record is a gloriously dingy affair, dwelling in the deepest, darkest crevices of the mind. Much like its title suggests, here, frontwoman Lia Metcalfe sounds like she’s unravelling, with her lyrics diving into the paranoia-tinged corners of anxiety and addiction. Opener ‘The Last Dance’ casts a foreboding shadow on the record from the off, further amped up when a vulnerable yet demented-sounding Lia begins its scratchy, whispered outro (“Unholy kind of accidents / Happen when / The puppet cuts the string”). Elsewhere, ‘Another, Another, Another’ possesses a Placebo-ish swagger, before ‘Tired Animal’ slinks into view, slowly dialling up the album’s tension. It’s not all darkness, though; the acoustic-backed ‘Hawkmoon’ provides a sense of fragile levity (soon exploding into a vivid, full-bodied instrumental), while ‘Sink Ya Teeth’ is as close to a vibrant banger as they’re willing to go. Their closing one-two of ‘So Long’ and ‘Afraid Of Tomorrows’, meanwhile, brings things to a bittersweet but somewhat hopeful close. The quartet may have bucked expectations here, but in venturing into the shadows, they’ve made their boldest move yet. Sarah Jamieson LISTEN: ‘Tired Animal

DEEP

There’s A Big Star Outside

Submarine Cat

While over a decade has passed since Swim Deep released debut ‘Where The Heaven Are We’, there’s a lot on this fourth full-length that brings to mind that record’s hazy, dreamy indie sound. It’s a pretty record. Opener ‘How Many Love Songs Have Died In Vegas?’ sounds like their 2013 track ‘Soul Trippin’ by way of The Cranberries’ ‘Dreams’. ‘Robin’ has shades of Oasis’ ‘Cast No Shadow’, while the intriguingly-titled ‘So Long, So Far (Marble-Bellied Baby)’ is full of lush guitars and dreamy vocals. Largely eschewing the krautrock and synth pop they’ve experimented with in the years since their buzzy introduction, ‘There’s A Big Star Outside’ isn’t one for the raucous live arena; tracks like ‘These Words’ and the mellow closer ‘Fire Surrounds’ have a gorgeous quality to them that lends themselves well to solo enjoyment. With that in mind, it’s also unlikely to draw in too many new fans. But for those indie kids who grew up with them, this introspective Swim Deep will feel just right. Adam England LISTEN: ‘These Words’

PEGGY GOU I Hear You SO Recordings

Without a doubt, since the mid 2010’s, Peggy Gou has become one of dance music’s biggest names, bolstered by a run of stellar EPs and the Glasto 2017 ‘Peggy Shoe’ craze. Since then, these releases’ airily zestful tracks - including ‘Starry Night’, ‘It Makes You Forget’, and 2023 earworm ‘It Goes Like (Nanana)’ - have become widely recognised iconic tunes. Now comes her long-awaited debut album, ‘I Hear You’. It’s self-confessedly ‘90s-infused and, besides the contemplative opener ‘Your Art’, ‘Back To One’ and ‘I Believe In Love Again’ make noticeable nods to the era. Moving onwards into the Balearic, beat-driven ‘All That’, we start to hear more of Gou’s signature sound, and ‘Seoulsi Peggygou (서울시페기구)’ acts as a housey, acid-infused crux point. ‘Purple Horizon’ harks back to the sun-drenched waviness of Happy Mondays and Primal Scream, meanwhile the vibrant keys and elevating trance of closer ‘1+1=11’ makes for a swelling banger that aptly ties up the album’s build. Throughout ‘I Hear You’, there’s a clear intention to create something beyond what Peggy Gou is typically renowned for, yet it doesn’t always quite hit. The album has been intentionally crafted to venture into new areas of inspiration, largely realised via the nostalgic sounds of the ‘90s, yet instead of creating something potently new and novel, these efforts often land slightly fat. ‘I Hear You’ is a well-produced, accessible, record that no doubt will get people moving. As to whether it will stand the test of time, let’s hope ‘It Makes You Forget’ doesn’t also act as a premonition. Matt Brown

LISTEN: ‘1+1=11’

 BEEN STELLAR

Scream From New York, NY Dirty Hit

From the get-go, Been Stellar have made it clear that they are here to rock the boat. Their self-titled EP was met with critical acclaim, and only a handful of bands can say they’ve supported the likes of shame, Fontaines DC, and The 1975 without doing so much as releasing their debut album. Now, the release of ‘Scream From New York, NY’ proves that the NYC-based band are more than just a feeting fad. The album is captivating from the get-go, with the eerie, haunting bassline and resounding drums that open ‘Start Again’ setting the scene for the 10-song frenzy that awaits. Vocalist Sam Slocum repeatedly pleads over a roar of guitars, drums and bass: “New York is wasted, start again” until the song reaches a deafening crescendo. A similar build-up and release takes place on ‘Passing Judgment’, a driving post-punk number where the pressure builds in its choruses like pistons, only for it to be unleashed through sprawling, fery instrumentals. Like New York, the album is a melting pot of infuences, with relentless, furious tracks such as ‘All In One’ or ‘Passing Judgment’ contrasting with the rueful ‘90s-inspired dream pop found in ‘Pumpkin’ or ‘Takedown’. But despite its multiplicity, a common thread ties ‘Scream From New York, NY’ together: its busy instrumentals invite you to lose yourself as if you were wandering through the very streets that inspired the record. ‘Scream From New York, NY’, is at once a chronicle of the harsh, unrelenting mechanics of New York but also an ode to the emotion and human connection that exists below the city’s cold, uncaring surface. The album will chew you up, spit you out, and disorient you, and once you’re back out, withdrawals from the pandemonium will make you want to do it all over again. Sophie Flint Vázquez LISTEN: ‘Passing Judgement’

ALBUMS

WeirdOs

Speedy Wunderground

O. may seem like a strange concept on paper, but the ingenuity and imagination of drummer Tash Keary and baritone saxophonist Joe Henwood knows no bounds. Debut album ‘WeirdOs’ cements the pair as one of the UK’s most intriguing newcomers.. The record is pretty succinct at under 40 minutes, but the twists and turns it takes give it staying power. From the fdgeting dance catharsis of ‘176’ to the neck snapping heft of doomy closer ‘Slap Juice’, Tash and Joe use an arsenal of pedals and styles to steer clear of preconceived notions of genre. Jazz, punk, jungle and dance all cavort together with a healthy respect for one another; nothing is snuffed out or overpowered, even when everything seems to be played with incomparable energy and passion, such as on the pounding ‘Green Shirt’ or the discomforting ‘Wheezy’. In short, this album drips with irresistible swagger. Jack Butler-Terry LISTEN: ‘Green Shirt’

Eels Time!

E Works / Play It Again Sam

Long-time followers of Eels will know by now that their records generally fall into one of two categories; there’s rock Eels, uptempo and boisterous, and gentle, contemplative Eels. The title of this ffteenth studio album, ‘Eels Time!’, suggests the former, but is actually much closer to the latter; in fact, it might be their softest-sounding in a decade, since 2014’s handsome, self-excoriating ‘The Cautionary Tales of Mark Oliver Everett’. Frontman E goes easier on himself this time around, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the record was made in the same year that he had life-saving open heart surgery. There are refections on death, as you might expect, particularly the ghostly ‘We Won’t See Her Like Again’ and the softly anthemic ‘If I’m Gonna Go Anywhere’. If there’s a primary thematic throughline, though, it’s the maturity that comes with middle age and – more than anything else – love. E has mellowed considerably over the years – even one of the noisier tracks here, ‘Goldy’, is an ode to his goldfsh – and it’s never more obvious than on simple, melodic love songs like ‘I Can’t Believe It’s True’ or ‘Song for You Know Who’, which wouldn’t be quite as moving without the context of it being the same guy who stared into the void on ‘Electro-Shock Blues’. ‘Eels Time!’ is arguably a touch one-track, and more casual fans may pine for the sonic diversity of ‘Souljacker’ . Those who love E at his most contemplative, though, will fnd plenty to like. Joe Goggins

LISTEN: ‘I Can’t Believe It’s True’

WALT DISCO

The Warping Lucky Number

As a phrase, ‘The Warping’ encodes notions of metamorphosis, fuidity, and distortion – an apt title, then, for Walt Disco’s second offering, which sees the Glaswegian quintet explore profound questions of gender identity and selfconcept over 12 tracks they have termed “our most biographical body of work yet”. While their 2022 debut ‘Unlearning’ saw them arrive armed with an already compelling and highly distinctive sound, ‘The Warping’ pushes the envelope even further: orchestral fourishes of woodwind, brass and strings raise cuts like ‘Gnomes’ and ‘Weeping Willow’ to gilded heights of operatic grandeur; while elsewhere, groove-laden guitar lines and more industrial textures are given the foor (‘You Make Me Feel So Dumb’ and ‘Black Chocolate’ respectively). Addictive hits of glam rock and New Romantic synth-pop may be the band’s bread and butter, and they’ve certainly not abandoned their roots – ‘Come Undone’ is a sad banger that could easily go toe-to-toe with the best of Depeche Mode, and the triumphant ‘The Captain’ is how we imagine it might sound if Bowie had a jig with ‘90s Britpop types James – but it’s often the more sonically understated cuts that pack the heftiest lyrical punch. Take ‘Jocelyn’, named after vocalist Jocelyn Si, which is both deeply moving and life-affrmingly rousing; or the title track, on which feelings of gender dysphoria are most candidly expressed (“My jealousy / It’s surrounding me / Tearing me apart / It looks to steal the air I breathe / I love envy / And it’s corrupting face / Taunting me to dream / Of things I wasn’t born to chase”). Camp but never cliche, paying tribute to their forebears without straying too far into pastiche, ‘The Warping’ is Walt Disco’s testament to the glorious multifacetedness of existing beyond the binary. Daisy Carter

LISTEN: ‘The Captain’

Tackling themes from gender dysphoria to work-life balance across ‘The Warping’, it’s a multi-faceted and tight-knit Walt Disco that headed into Album Two, as vocalist Jocelyn Si tells Joe Goggins

Did you approach ‘The Warping’ differently from ‘Unlearning’? I think so. Because there’s an obsession with being the newest, buzziest band, when you have to enter the next stage, it’s really nervewracking. We’re still young, but we knew people would have certain expectations of us now that we’re not totally unknown, and we were writing a wee bit with a nervousness about us. I think ‘Gnomes’ is slightly in reference to that. So, I think some of the record is a reaction to ‘Unlearning’, and some of it is us wanting to prove to people that we’re a band who can actually sound like a band. I really believed in how good the rest of the group are as instrumentalists, and we’ve shown that on the record. Finlay [McCarthy] is on everything from xylophone to guitar, and Jack [Martin] is such a tight drummer, but an amazing lyricist, too. We wanted to write songs that showed that off, showed people a new side to us.

There seems to be a real synergy between the members of the band on this album – you wrote songs individually, but the same themes keep cropping up.

Defnitely. A song like ‘Gnomes’, that’s ostensibly about a fctional character who’s found fame and they fnd it hard to balance that with their home life, and it causes relationship problems. And that was partly about other members of the band, and it was partly about my own life when I’d struggled with that balance. And songs by Jack like ‘Pearl’ and ‘You Make Me Feel So Dumb’, are about being away from home a lot, or being at networking events and feeling out of place. And they were coming from his perspective, but the lyrics related the way the rest of us felt about those things as well. So, I think the sheer amount of time we’ve spent together over the last few years has infuenced this record.

How important was it to explore themes of gender dysphoria on songs like ‘The Warping’?

Very. The title track was one of the frst songs written for the album, and it was a hard one to get right. I’m really proud of the lyrics, they very accurately convey how I feel, and they’re about gender dysphoria, but they relate to other themes on the album, because dysphoria is made more diffcult by other problems that I have. Like, I fnd myself feeling jealous of other bands writing songs I wish I’d written, and I think I wouldn’t feel like that to the same extent if I was feeling more comfortable with myself and my gender. And ‘The Captain’ is a meta song, it’s a fctional story, but there’s some serious undertones about toxic masculinity and climate crisis and the links in between. I feel like I’ve said these things in a way that’s true to me, in the way that I should be saying them.

Gilded heights of operatic grandeur.

TOWA BIRD

American Hero PIAS

As long as pop rock has been a genre, waves of artists have offered themselves up as examples of how the two constituent parts are hard to balance. There is no simple way to maintain both the trend-setting fuidity of pop and the iconoclastic hard edge of rock, no matter how many faintly distorted guitars are on your boy-meets-girl ballad. With Towa Bird’s debut ‘American Hero’ comes the promise of something that manages this dichotomy: she’s both a purveyor of sensitive queer love songs and an accomplished guitarist adept at rocking out. Her vision is frequently crystal clear: ‘Last Dance’ borrows the sounds of 2000s radio rock and twists them around an endearing letter to friendship, while ‘This Isn’t Me’ uses a brash drum beat to underpin one of Towa’s more bittersweet choruses. But this is an album plagued by faccid production: ‘Boomerang’, for example, comes close to being a thrashy, fun hit, yet leans towards anonymous advert rock, while ‘B.I.L.L.S’ has precedents in live versions of a big presence, yet dissolves under its own weightlessness. Towa shows a lot of promise on ‘American Hero’, but this is a record which doesn’t quite know how best to use her strengths. James Hickey

LISTEN: ‘Last Dance’

JOHN GRANT

The Art Of The Lie

PIAS

The genius of John Grant has always lain in the way the 55-year-old splices together humour and pain; musical buoyancy and lyrical wretchedness (or, sometimes, vice versa). Born into a heavily religious family where he was told that homosexuality was a fast track to hell, much of his output since has danced through the resulting agony, making warped magic out of the wreckage – and on sixth solo album ‘The Art Of The Lie’, this duality is in full fow. More than ever, it’s a record musically cleaved in two. You have the twitchy ‘hits’ – the ‘80s, vocoder-doused funk strut of opener ‘All That School For Nothing’, or the sassy wobbles of lead single ‘It’s A Bitch’ – but they’re directly juxtaposed with moments of total devastation. On the heartbreaking pseudo-duet (singing pitch-shifted with himself) of ‘Father’, Grant laments that he “couldn’t be the man that you always hoped I would become”; ‘Daddy’, meanwhile, is written from a child’s eye view, a sad, elegiac piece in which he sings that “what I am is a sin”. It is often, understandably, an extremely heavy listen, but just as he’s pulled you in, Grant will spit you out again with a piss-taking skit (‘Twistin Scriptures’) or a clever one liner. ‘Meek AF’’s play on the biblical notion that the meek will inherit the earth (“You think you’re one of the sheep / But you also think that you’re the GOAT”) is classic him. ‘The Art Of The Lie’ won’t act as an accessible gateway into John Grant’s catalogue, but for those already sold, it’s a deeper excavation into the mind of the man. Lisa Wright LISTEN: ‘All That School For Nothing’

 FLORRIE

The Lost Ones

BMG / Xenomania

‘The Lost Ones’ has been a long time coming. After some behind the scenes action as Xenomania’s in-house drummer, Florrie burst into the 2010s with her own string of pop bangers. This was a star in the making. And then she vanished – pop’s fckle, whirlwind nature striking again. Not content with leaving her story there, debut album ‘The Lost Ones’ is Florrie’s resurrection. But this isn’t the same Florrie. After setbacks, heartbreaks, and refection, ‘The Lost Ones’ feels a far cry from the rapturous ‘Left Too Late’. But it’s almost to the record’s detriment. What felt so exciting about her early singles was how unpredictable they could be – a disco ball rattling around in a mine cart. Here, everything feels a little too polished, the edges sanded down a little. There’s no denying Florrie’s songwriting and vocal talents. The longing drips from every word on ‘Kissing In The Cold’, while the euphoric ‘Looking for Love’ brings glimmers of that crying-in-the-club energy. But the production, trying but struggling to capture the Max Martin and Denniz Pop magic, makes many tracks feel indistinguishable. There’s very little in the way of surprise. ‘Get You Back’ does break free of that, as spiky and fun as any of her early 2010s singles. And, with its lively percussion and Florrie’s voice in total command, ‘If It’s Been A Hard Night’ offers plenty more of the old Florrie. But the problem is compounded by the appearance of ‘I Took A Little Something’, a re-record of one of those early tracks. It bursts with energy from the get-go. Shimmering, intoxicating, pure pop, still flled with all that emotion. By placing it in ‘The Lost Ones’, it’s a reminder of how great she can be at fnding that sweet spot where both crisply-defned emotions sit side-by-side with out and out bangers. But in the same breath it also spotlights the vibrancy that’s missing. The razor sharp emotions, wielded with such skill, are still here, but that heady, exhilarating sound seems to have been lost along the way. Chris Taylor

LISTEN: ‘Get You Back’

BAT FOR LASHES

The Dream Of Delphi

Mercury KX

Even if you headed into this sixth studio album from Bat for Lashes without any knowledge of the circumstances of its production, a cursory glance over the track listing would quickly give the game away. The Dream of Delphi is named after Natasha Khan’s three-year-old daughter and sees her navigating motherhood, as song titles including ‘Letter to My Daughter’, ‘The Midwives Have Left’ and ‘Her First Morning’ suggest. This is a chronicle as much of Natasha’s own rebirth as it is the actual birth of her frst child, as she takes the opportunity to perform a musical reset after venturing into poppier territory than ever on her last album, 2019’s ‘Lost Girls’. The results are glorious; in going back to basics and embracing minimalism, Natasha has made her best record in over a decade. With the piano at the record’s core, she processes the emotional maelstrom of early motherhood with palpable tenderness. There are moments of swooning beauty (‘Christmas Day’, ‘At Your Feet’), and sparse nervousness (‘The Midwives Have Left’), as well as unbridled joy (‘Delphi Dancing’). In among it all, there is still room for experimentation, with groove-infused pop on ‘Home’ and a moody, Lynchian atmosphere suffusing ‘Breaking Up’. If there was a sense that Natasha had perhaps lost her way slightly on the conceptual likes of ‘The Bride’ and ‘Lost Girls’, she fnds her feet again magnifcently here, with simplicity key; the lyrics, the melodies, the gorgeous intertwining of piano and synth. Joe Goggins

LISTEN: ‘Delphi Dancing’

Her best record in over a decade.

POND

Stung!

Spinning Top

The sun-baked, psychedelic carnival that is Pond clearly shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. Opener ‘Constant Picnic’ meanders towards the ethereal with a surreal, synth-disco-pop ballad that’s an ideal summer soundtrack, while their signature colossal, kaleidoscopic riffs are showcased in ‘(I’m) Stung’ and ‘Neon River’. The band’s psych is intertwined with space rock for ‘Edge of the World Pt.3’, its cinematic sorcery at points veering towards acid-jazz. There are foating futes, and some heady, almost droney synths that would ft right in on Dune flmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s work, while moments of mammoth cosmic-psych invoke their best pal Kevin Parker. It’s not all psychedelia though; Pond also channel their inner George Clinton, along with a Prince-esque falsetto on ‘So Lo’, bringing the party with some heady, groove-laden space funk. Clocking in at 14 tracks, the Perth outft here manage to blend evolution within their artistry, while still keeping in touch with their otherworldly roots. Brad Sked LISTEN: ‘Edge of the World Pt.3’

 COLA

The Gloss Fire Talk

EPS, ETC*

*anything they refuse to call an album.

SOPHIE MAY

Deep Sea Creatures self-released

Sometimes, a lyric will bite the bullet in a way that you can’t help but admire for ‘going there’. Sometimes, as on the gently-cooed ‘Tiny Dictator’, the ‘there’ that they’ve gone to is a place so eye-poppingly, what-did-you-just-say bananas that it’s a toss up between giving the author a standing ovation and an intervention. A dissection of chaotic intrusive thoughts, if there was any further proof that Sophie May was cut from a different cloth than most of her singer-songwriter peers it’s in this third LP offering: “Can’t have sex without thinking of my own mother’s face / Can’t get drunk, what if I black out and fuck everyone? / Oh god, what if I’m a paedophile?!” Just another TikTok bedroom star, May most certainly is not. Crucially, however, these moments that push a knowing kind of (over) honesty are wrapped around a truly classic ear for melody. ‘Marianne’ nods to the Faithfull of its title, while the slight country lilt of both that and ‘If I’d Never Been Born’ fnd closer peers in the likes of Weyes Blood and Angel Olsen than her youthful UK compatriots. Lead single ‘Brian Cox’ features an unlikely cameo from its scientifc namesake, while the heartbreaking simplicity of closer ‘Just Want You’ is, to these ears, objectively perfect. On ‘Deep Sea Creatures’, Sophie May is doing everything differently and everything right. Lisa Wright LISTEN: ‘Just Want You’

PHOEBE GREEN

Ask Me Now

The Green Dream Machine

Born from the ashes of Canadian post-punk band Ought, at times Cola do sometimes feel like a continuation rather than an evolution. The guitars are just as precise and nervy, and Tim Darcy’s poetic drawl is still ever present, but they offer a surprising warmth in contrast to the slowburning tension of their previous outft. ‘The Gloss’, like ‘Deep In View’ before it, gives a glimpse into the sunnier side of the frontman’s mind. It’s still one full of unease and angst, the weight of modern society bearing down. “What makes you satisfed?” he questions on ‘Reprise’. But now there’s a hopeful romanticism underpinning everything. “I’m a lame horse / With an optimistic mind,” he sings on the jittery ‘Albatross’, now not content to simply accept his lot. Even in ‘Reprise’, the frenetic guitars that begin the track give way to a much brighter sound by its end.‘The Gloss’ has more in common with turn-of-the- century The Strokes than it does The Fall - a case in point being the undeniable indie disco vibes of ‘Pulling Quotes’. But there’s also a new beast bubbling beneath the surface that we begin to see glimpses of. ‘Bitter Melon’ is the album’s spellbinding closer, all loose percussion and feedback hum that sings of drummer Evan Cartwright’s jazz background. ‘The Gloss’ might not hold a candle to the Television-esque majesty of ‘Sun Coming Down’ - an era frmly in their rearview mirror - but it shows that, together, Darcy’s wit, Stidworthy’s precision, and Cartwright’s skeletal rhythms create something special. It’s not quite a reinvention, but they’re still seeking new horizons. Chris Taylor

LISTEN: ‘Bitter Melon’

In the two years since the release of her proposed breakthrough album, Phoebe Green has parted ways with her former record label and set up on her own, teaming up with songwriter and producer Steph Marziano on a swirling four-track independent collection that veers sharply away from the atypical bedroom pop laid out on 2022’s ‘Lucky Me’. Instead, ‘Ask Me Now’ leans into prominent synths and delicate vocal distortion, driven by a wayward melancholia that lays the foundation for some of her best work to date – not least the slow dance disco of ‘Embarrass Me’ or the haunting reservation of ‘I Could Love You’. Opener ‘Relevant’’s admittedly catchy near-bubblegum pop aside, the three remaining tracks deliver a maturity unseen since Phoebe’s 2021’s aptly titled ‘So Grown Up’. The production adds a new depth, sitting somewhere between Robyn’s most affecting work and hazy early mornings in European warehouses. It’s pop with the alternative ramped all the way up, both a reintroduction and a welcome ellipsis in a career that – based on this – is ready to step right up come studio album number two. Ben Tipple LISTEN: ‘Embarrass Me’

Sink Or Swim

Submarine Cat

Coming in at seven songs and three interludes, ‘Sink or Swim’ offers treats both raucous and rowdy, but still maintains an easily connectable emotional thread. The fuzzy riffs of ‘Wait And See’ are gloriously uplifting but nevertheless retain a sense of danger, and ‘Last Drop’ feels so DIY garage-rock that it can only come from a band ultimately still in their infancy, yet still hints at fantastic things. The individual performances of Joni Samuels on vocals and guitar, and drummer Karsten van der Tol, are both impassioned and elastic, nowhere more so than on the exquisite ‘Feeling Good’, which opens delicately in the vein of Mazzy Star before blossoming into a head-banging feast for the senses. ‘Sink Or Swim’ sees Fräulein sounding urgent and huge, ripe for sweat-soaked club rooms, but on this evidence, they’re also clearly ready to make the move to larger stages.

Jack Butler-Terry LISTEN: ‘Feeling Good’

A handy lil’ list of albums worth getting excited for.

JAMIE XX

In Waves

Hard to believe it’s been a whole nine (9!) years since debut solo outing ‘In Colour’. Jamie’s second is out 20th September.

WUNDERHORSE

Midas

Jacob Slater’s gang of indierockers follow up 2022’s ‘Cub’ with this “very raw” second full-length set for release on 30th August.

BEABADOOBEE

This Is How Tomorrow Moves

The third album cliche is roping in a string orchestra. Bea here hot-footed it to Malibu with Rick Rubin (casual). Out 16th August.

FAT DOG WOOF.

The canine-themed hype machine rolls on (at least until 6th September, when this debut album hits shelves). COMING

LIVE

SETLIST

Quaranta Tantor

Ain’t My Concern

Dark Sword Angel Lie4

Monopoly

Smokin & Drinkin

Steppa Pig

Garbage Pale Kids Burfct!

Orange Juice Jones

God Loves You

SCARING THE HOES ReallyDoe

Ain’t It Funny

When It Rain

Dirty Laundry Grown Up

SideB (Dope Song) Attak

DANNY BROWN

O2 Ritz, Manchester

Photo: Leah Lombardi

With its sprung foors and dramatic backdrop, tonight’s former ballroom in Manchester makes for the perfect environment for Danny Brown’s fans to fnd their own relationship with his characteristic frenzy. And after 2023 boasted not one but two headline albums - solo effort ‘Quaranta’, and ‘SCARING THE HOES’, the product of his super-duo collab with JPEGMAFIA - Danny is almost overloaded with new songs that an expectant audience are excited to hear. After introducing himself with a trademark giggly “Hi I’m Daniel!” he rips through a four track run, all picked from ‘Quaranta’. The set, it emerges, has been neatly portioned into distinct eras, allowing the nuance and dexterity of his later albums to sit comfortably alongside the excess and intensity of the good old days. Dipping into the iconic and skittering ‘Lie 4’ and ‘Monopoly’, it’s obvious that between the shoutout lines “Nah, literally, shit on your mixtape!”, the furious bouncing, and the pulsing strobe, no one is going home with anything left in their fuel tank.

From the frst bars of ‘Steppa Pig’ there’s an electricity in the room that’s unmatched, as everyone is given their frst live taste of ‘SCARING THE HOES’. Spat out at a breathless intensity, the songs are made even briefer and knife-sharp with JPEGMAFIA’s verses left out, landing somewhere between a medley and a blazing inferno of off-kilter partystarting rap at its fnest. The group’s anthem, ‘SCARING THE HOES’ manages to receive one of the most wristbreakingly fast handclaps to offer up one’s arms to.

It’s breathless, reckless and impossibly fast throughout. Curated and choreographed by Danny, with his two tone red/green closely shaved head, sunglasses and leather and PVC outft, at points the whole event looks more like an anime still than any average gig.

‘Ain’t It Funny’ later creates a grinding mosh in between its neon strobes, like a melee in a cyberpunk bar. A small island of calm and restraint is found in the last song of the set, ‘Grown Up’, a celebratory and uplifting inclusion with its refrain of “Whoever thought I’d be the greatest growing up?”.

Not one to fnish without an ear-perforating bang, Danny has his fnisher fully in mind.

From the piercing alarm opening notes, his collaboration with Scottish producer Rustie, ‘Attak’ is instantly recognisable as one of the seismically devastating tracks of the 2010s. Raising into a stomping, shouting, ferocious crescendo, the set ends on the biggest knockout blow of all.

At one point Danny apologises for not going quite as hard as he once did, “I’m 40 years old! I don’t drink, I don’t smoke… one year sober!”.

The sweat drenched crowd responds with one of the loudest cheers of the night. As one of the most unique, creative, infuential and genuinely likeable voices in rap for nearly a decade and a half, not a person in the room would change Danny Brown for anything. Matthew Davies Lombardi

OLIVIA RODRIGO

The O2, London

Photo: Emma Swann

From the moment you step into London’s O2 Arena, there’s no question as to which pop megastar is currently in residence. They’ve rolled out the purple carpet, while the same signature hue can be seen everywhere, each uniform-wearer attesting to the sheer devotion that Olivia Rodrigo has instilled in her legions of fans (80,000 over four nights, just in London).

While it’s no new thing for a top tier pop star to incite this kind of fervour, there’s something about Rodrigo – now two albums in and still only 21 – that feels more authentic than many of her more meticulously-curated peers. Though tonight’s show is an absolute capital letter Big Pop Spectacle, replete with backing dancers, star-shaped confetti cannons, and a giant crescent moon that the singer sits atop of, fying over the crowd like a sassy Tinkerbell, it also makes consciously interesting, slightly more edgy choices. The dancers lean towards the interpretive, adding eerie, shadowy silhouettes to ‘traitor’ and forming a clever human clock face around the singer on ‘lacy’. A camera placed under the stage allows for Rodrigo to loom into it, adding a cheeky, bratty, confrontational layer to ‘obsessed’, while the choice to utilise an all-female backing band lends a girl gang sense of fun to the atmosphere on stage.

There’s no question that Rodrigo has been racking up the hits since emerging with breakthrough ‘driver’s license’; last year’s single ‘vampire’ alone has reached nearly a billion streams in less than a year. But as she serves up both of those massive tracks alongside stomping opener ‘bad idea, right?’ within the frst 20 minutes, it’s a brilliantly audacious acknowledgement of just how much she has in her arsenal. Recent ‘GUTS’ bonus tracks ‘obsessed’ and ‘so american’ land as two of her biggest crowd pleasers, while throughout, the screams resonating around the arena are at One Direction levels of tinnitus-inducing.

There are loose sections to the show that culminate with the massive video screen – often used to pan to squealing members of the crowd, American sports cam-style – erupting into fames as Rodrigo re-emerges, red leotard on, for a fnal bangers fnale that begins with ‘brutal’. She ends the main body of the set with the tongue-in-cheek fip of ‘all-american bitch’, its eye-rolling faux-choral section perfectly offset with the cathartic guitar purge of its chorus, and then it’s a closing one-two of ‘good 4 u’, ‘get him back!’ and we’re out.

That over 100 minutes, the energy almost never dips is testament to a pair of records in which almost every song is a hit; in a 23song set, she plays almost everything she’s released and rarely misses. But more than just the ability to write a winner, tonight underlines the exact space that Olivia Rodrigo occupies in the top pop landscape – one brimming with personality and fun, but that still revels in the messiness of youth even within such A-list arena polish. Lisa Wright

LIVE AT LEEDS IN THE PARK Temple Newsam, Leeds

Photos: Lindsay Melbourne

Where Live at Leeds’ winter multi-venue incarnation largely leans towards new artists and spotlighting the future, over at its spring green-felds sister event, Live At Leeds In The Park, the graduating indie classes of the last two decades are gathering for a Northern knees-up. Beginning the afternoon with an early contender for the day’s most ferocious, vital set are Sprints. “We’re from Dublin and we’re gonna show you how to drink properly,” declares vocalist Karla Chubb with a glint in her eye. “It’s only gonna get sweatier from here.” From the metronomic prowl of ‘Ticking’ to the furious snarl of ‘Up and Comer’, cuts from superlative recent debut ‘Letter To Self’ are delivered like cathartic sledgehammers of noise.

Over on the DIY stage, fowerovlove might only just be of legal drinking age, but her hyper-relatable tales of matters of the heart are already fnding her loyal fans. There’s a cover of ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’ to keep the festival spirits up; ‘a girl like me’ is dedicated to “anyone who has a crush where you’re not sure if they like you back.”

You have to feel for Corinne Bailey Rae on the main stage. Forced to contend with a double whammy of challenges, she’s hit with persistent technical issues and an audience who seem to only want her old ‘Put Your Records On’-era hits as opposed to the (far, far more exciting) ‘Black Rainbows’ set that she’s currently touring. She begins by explaining the rich Black historical background behind the record, but even to a hometown crowd it falls somewhat predictably fat in an afternoon festival environment – a true shame.

Melanie C fully understands the assignment today. She dishes up a Spice Girls megamix, always-iconic Bryan Adams collab ‘When You’re Gone’ and loads more, thus putting a good case forward for the idea that every festival should have a 5pm Spice pick-me-up.

Back on the DIY stage, we’re given an IRL encounter with the internet buzz of Good Neighbours. With second single ‘Home’

already a bona fde hit, they could easily be playing catch up to their own hype, yet there’s an immediate warmth to their Yeasayer-like, ambitious indie-pop.

Up on the hill of The Temple stage, Mystery Jets might cut a different shape to their early days, but though only frontman Blaine Harrison and drummer Kapil Trivedi remain from the original line up, it’s a cast iron back catalogue they’ve built up over the last two decades. A one-two of ‘Two Doors Down’ and ‘Young Love’ might be the pints aloft sing-along of the set, but it’s in the gut-punch anthemics of closer ‘Someone Purer’ that we’re reminded of the particular axis of wide-eyed emotion and gutsy melodic chutzpah that the Jets have always been kings of. Nestled in between, they debut an unnamed new song that shows that knack is still in full fow.

And while The Kooks are left to battle against the wilds of an unholy downpour on the main stage, it’s hometown heroes The Cribs who close our day with a perfectlypitched setlist that celebrates undeniable, longstanding hits (‘Hey Scenesters!’, ‘Mirror Kissers’) and deep cuts (‘To Jackson’, the Steve Albini-dedicated ‘Give Good Time’) to a crowd that’s loyal to every note. Well into their third decade as a touring band, the Jarman brothers still throw every ounce of their being at the stage, throats ripping at the vocal peak of ‘Cheat On Me’, guitars ringing out into the confetti-clad sonic ascension of closer ‘Pink Snow’. If Live at Leeds In The Park is a celebration of both the city and the joy of a gang of musicians, making a triumphant noise, there’s no-one who could do them prouder than The Cribs.

Lisa Wright

FLOWEROVLOVE

THE CRIBS

WIDE AWAKE

Brockwell Park, London

Photos: Emma Swann

The late May bank holiday is now a doozy for one-day festivals with parks, felds, and innercity venues the country over ushering in the start of summer proper with warm tents and even warmer beer. And for Wide Awake’s fourth outing, sprawling psych-rock has its moment – quite literally – in the sun, as hordes of dedicated fans descend upon a cloudless South London for King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s bill-topping turn.

The crowds are there from the off, with a hearteningly large number turning out early to catch Brighton quartet The New Eves As we’ve come to expect from the singular newcomers, theirs is a captivating set –incorporating contemporary dance, eerie three-part harmonies, and an expansive instrument rotation, it could as easily belong in the context of a stone circle summoning ritual as it does in this intimate tent.

At a Lambrini Girls show, movement is one thing that’s never found lacking, and the band’s riotous performance on the (admittedly bizarrely named) Disco Pogo stage is as kinetic as predicted. Ringleader and vocalist Phoebe Lunny sets the tone from the off – “I don’t bite… but I will jump on you,” she warns, pre-crowd surf, from the middle of the rabble – before using her platform to speak on issues including transphobia, lad culture, and the ongoing genocide in Palestine between the band’s blistering cuts.

Over on the main stage, cult favourites Dry Cleaning are peddling their distinctive post-punk wares, and though there’s a central pocket of people clearly revelling in their stream-of-consciousness surrealism, it’s a set that ultimately proves to be a bit of a Marmite offering, Florence Shaw’s sprechgesang, off-kilter monologues

perhaps more suited to the cocooning acoustics of a tent than this somewhat muted, open-air set up.

Belgian duo Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul are in their absolute element however. Strutting around the festival’s biggest stage with an equally sizeable grin, Adigéry seems positively giddy at the early evening turnout, and the BSL interpreters, who are present and projected on screen for each of the main stage’s acts, can’t keep themselves from dancing.

Though clashes are always a necessary evil when it comes to festivals, you can’t help but pity any act whose stage times match those of the mighty Young Fathers. Armed with their Mercury Prize-shortlisted 2023 LP ‘Heavy Heavy’, they’re nothing short of mesmerising. In an ever-increasingly saturated sonic landscape, the authenticity, originality, and unbridled joy they bring to performance remains unmatched.

As night falls in earnest, the self-coined “weirdo swarm” of King Gizzard enthusiasts are fnally rewarded for their patience, and the notoriously prolifc Aussie outft walk out to rapturous reception. Pints are sent fying as 2019 cut ‘Planet B’ is met with the biggest mosh pits of the day. It feels like a triumphant moment of connection between the band and their dedicated fans – one which is matched, albeit in the most unlikely of ways, by Wide Awake’s second stage headliners: the all-star cast of Byrne’s Night , London’s premier Talking Heads tribute act. Featuring musicians from bands including Fat Dog, Human Interest, Fräulein, Squid, Porridge Radio, and Black Country, New Road; plus guest vocalists like Cole Haden (Model/Actriz), Asha Lorenz (Sorry), Lynks, BODEGA, Charlotte Adigéry and more, the all-singing, all-dancing, all running-on-the-spot ensemble is a glorious celebration of Stop Making Sense, silliness, and the communal sensibilities of London’s music scene.

SLAM DUNK Temple Newsam, Leeds

Photo: Sinéad Grainger

It’s an unfortunate start for the northern outing of Slam Dunk, with organisers forced to close the car parks and to issue divisive safety advise following a deluge of rain in the lead up to the event. Today’s weather is no different, as the main site is held while production trucks make their best efforts to clean up after yesterday’s Live At Leeds event. It’s a necessity that sits at odds with the vast improvements the festival has made ahead of time, stripping back on the chaotic ambition of its event last year with a more appropriate number of stages, artists, and perhaps more importantly, facilities.

Those who do manage to gain access to the site are met with perhaps one of the best outings for the festival since its move from its university home. The infallible formula remains; each stage largely hosting a specifc genre of music, from Go Pro Stage’s heavier variants to Monster Energy Stage’s traditional punk and ska. The main Slam Dunk Stage welcomes the biggest name on the bill, topped by what is deemed as You Me At Six’s fnal festival performance.

YMAS frontman Josh Franceschi joins The Blackout on stage during their fun-packed set, much to the delight of onlookers who switch to deafening screams. The Blackout’s own Sean Smith is having the time of his life, and ultimately returns the favour by stepping onto the main stage for guest vocals on ‘The Consequence’. The festival’s second stage also witnesses Holding Absence frontman and vocal powerhouse Lucas Woodland fronting British legends Funeral For A Friend, since the departure of longtime vocalist Matt Davies-Kreye. At the risk of being blacklisted by British emo royalty – it’s the best the band have sounded in years.

Head Automatica almost single-handedly bring out the sun for a long-awaited rendition of ‘Beating Hearts Baby’, oddly placed as their penultimate song but certainly not impacting on the force of the band’s full set. Daryl Palumbo bounds around the stage with an infectious energy that more than makes up for the occasionally shaky delivery. It’s a showmanship masterclass matched by The Wonder Years’ Dan Campbell, who – while headlining the Key Club Stage – thanks professional wrestling for his command of the crowd. Rousing closer ‘Came Out Swinging’ goes down as one of the festival’s musical highlights.

For their fnal festival appearance, the aforementioned You Me At Six power through a career-spanning 18 tracks, showcasing the breadth of their catalogue to a huge festival crowd. It’s a ftting end to an illustrious festival career, back in the city and on a vastly-expanded version of the event where it all started. As the end of set-closer ‘Beautiful Way’ rings out, it’s a full circle moment for both the band and their hallowed ground, at once the end to their combined journey and a nod to the continued legacy that Slam Dunk Festival enjoys. Ben Tipple

Indeed, the latter is an ethos that’s aimed for – and largely achieved – by Wide Awake as a whole, and is something that even cutting the sound midway through the collective’s set closer ‘Once In A Lifetime’ can’t (entirely) ruin. Daisy Carter

YOUNG FATHERS

KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD

EBBB FRI 14 JUN CORSICA STUDIOS

LOREN KRAMAR TUE 18 JUN THE GRACE

FAT WHITE FAMILY WED 19 JUN TROXY

JASMINE.4.T WED 19 JUN THE WAITING ROOM

OKAY KAYA SUN 23 JUNE MOTH CLUB

CRUSHED TUE 25 JUNE WINDMILL BRIXTON

THE GARDEN 25 & 26 JUNE HEAVEN

BOECKNER THUR 27 JUNE OSLO HACKNEY

THE NATIONAL FRI 5 JUL CRYSTAL PALACE PARK

EZRA FURMAN TUE 16 JUL WED 17 JUL UNION CHAPEL

FUTURE ISLANDS SAT 27 JUL CRYSTAL PALACE BOWL

LIFEGUARD SUN 28 JUL OSLO HACKNEY

GIRL AND GIRL TUE 3 SEP GEORGE TAVERN

JUNGLE

THU 12 SEP THE O2

ISOBEL WALLER-BRIDGE SAT 14 SEP ICA

LAURA MISCH THUR 19 SEP UNION CHAPEL

COSMORAT THU 26 SEP ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH

SAM EVIAN FRI 27 SEP LAFAYETTE

MARY IN THE JUNKYARD THU 3 OCT ICA

MOIN 17 & 18 OCT ICA

LANKUM SAT 26 OCT EVENTIM APOLLO

THE ORCHESTRA (FOR NOW) MON 4 NOV ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH

GLASS ANIMALS THU 7 NOV THE O2

IDER TUE 12 NOV HOXTON HALL

YAYA BEY MON 18 NOV LAFAYETTE

W. H. LUNG THU 21 NOV ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL

KAI BOSCH FRI 22 NOV COURTYARD THEATRE

GOAT GIRL THU 28 NOV HEAVEN

PALACE SAT 30 NOV EVENTIM APOLLO