DIY, March 2023

SLEAFORD MODS

BLACK HONEY

MEET ME @ THE ALTAR

REBECCA BLACK & MORE

MARCH

Question!

It's the 2 0th anniversary of Fall Out Boy's debut this year - but what were Team DIY all doing back in 2003?

SARAH JAMIESON • Managing Editor

While I would love to be able to say I was putting ‘Take This To Your Grave’ on repeat, in reality, it was probably more like Busted’s ‘A Present For Everyone’. I did own a minidisc player though, and they were obviously the height of cool…

EMMA SWANN • Founding E ditor

This! Just with zero resources and almost none of the web’s mod cons, like YouTube… (Oh, and pretending to study at uni.)

LISA WRIGHT • Features Editor

I would cite 2003 as the all-important 14/15-year-old transitional year when this little dweeb went from ‘listens to the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack all the time’ to ‘listens to The Libertines all the time’. And I’ve never looked back…

LOUISE MASON • Art Director

Pretending I could play bass, starting too many bands, listening to Moldy Peaches and dreaming of the job I have now.

ELLY WATSON • Digital Editor

Probably rewatching The Lizzie McGuire Movie for the tenth time. A modern classic. #TeamGordo4ever

Editor's Letter

For the better part of twenty years now, Fall Out Boy have been at the forefront of the rock scene, continually pushing the genre into new spaces all while building their empire at the same time. Now, as the quartet gear up to release their first album in five years - the magical 'So Much (For) Stardust' - we caught up with the band's Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump for our March 2023 cover feature, to find out why now was the right time for their return.

Elsewhere this month, we head to Nottingham to talk 'UK GRIM' with Sleaford Mods, dive into the more reality-grounded new album from Black Honey and go full on Disney-pop (yep, you read that right) with Meet Me @ The Altar, in aid of their brilliant debut. And if that's not enough to get you in the mood, we've also got reviews of some absolutely massive new records - slowthai, we're looking at you! Just read on...

Sarah Jamieson, Managing Editor

Listening Post

ARLO

PARKS - MY SOFT MACHINE

Steel yourselves, oh excitable music fans, for a frankly ridiculous couple of months of releases: Lana, Miley, boygenius… it’s all just a bit much tbh. Nestled right up there with the best of them comes the hugely-anticipated second from Mercury-winning Arlo Parks and, if you’re looking for a record that retains the intimacy but explodes it into new realms of ambition and immediacy, then look no further…

INDIGO DE SOUZA - ALL OF THIS WILL END

If we were betting people, we’d be putting a few pennies on Indigo de Souza’s forthcoming third (due next month) to be the album that pushes the Asheville singer into the next tier. In the space where nuanced, hilarious, clever storytelling meets grunge riffs and idiosyncratic pop ideas sits ‘All of This Will End’ - proof that three is, indeed, the magic number.

ARIANA DEBOSE’S BAFTA RAP

Because every writer will have had a moment where they gave up and just wanted their protagonist to “do the thing”.

Black Honey by Louise Mason

Contributors Adam England, Alex Cabré, Alisdair Grice, Bella Martin, Ben Tipple, Beth McConnell, Carolina Faruolo, Emma Wilkes, Ims Taylor, Katie Macbeth, Louis Griffin, Louisa Dixon, Marianne Eloise, Matthew Pywell, Max Pilley, Mia Smith, Neive McCarthy, Otis Robinson, Rhian Daly, Sean Kerwick, Tom Williams, Vendy Palkovičová.

IN THE STUDIO WITH…

“There’s [been] opportunity for it to be more weird and wonderful and a bit more eccentric in the choices we’ve made.”

Setting sail to the Isle of Wight’s remote, residential Chale Abbey Studios to lay down solo LP3, Orlando Weeks

Words: Lisa Wright.

Of course, this is not the case. Since leaving his first band, Orlando has been consistent and consistently well-received in his solo music-making, releasing The Gritterman audio-visual project back in 2017 before embarking on a prolific solo career that birthed debut ‘A Quickening’ in 2020 and ‘Hop Up’ the year after. More than many artists, the leap from Album One’s more hushed introspection to Album Two’s brighter strokes and now, from the tracks of Album Three we hear today, an evermore varied and fun palette show someone audibly growing in real time. Where ‘A Quickening’’s pianos and introversions felt like a direct reaction against his old work, over time Orlando has allowed the hooks and the pop to step further back in; this time, he’s reuniting with his old friend, the guitar.

“Yeah, man! And an acoustic guitar as well, which I had wrongfully pigeonholed before. But it’s great! It does so many things! Turns out they were right!” he chuckles. This whole set up - recording with a group of musicians for a very communal two weeks of live tinkering - also feels like something that might not have appealed a couple of albums back, we suggest. “I’d been in Maccs for so long that all of that language that you develop as a group of people that make stuff together is only so transferable,” he replies. “Your confidence ends up being quite bound in that group experience, so I think I wouldn’t have had the guts to do this straight away. I think maybe I just needed a bit of time to feel like I could be in charge of making a record where it’s expensive to rent a place, to pay musicians, to have a label taking a chance on you and on your career that the next iteration of what you make feels NEXT enough…”

he Isle of Wight is home to many things: the UK’s buzziest band in yonks; a festival at which Pulp share a stage with Sophie EllisBextor; a pub featuring an effigy of someone being burnt at the stake (trust us, we saw it with our own eyes) and, for a brief period at the end of January, a gang of musicians helmed by Orlando Weeks, who’ve decamped to the Isle’s rural Chale Abbey Studios in pursuit of Album Three.

Written predominantly over the last four months since the singer relocated with his family to Lisbon, demoed with his live band in a concise December practice period and recorded under the Abbey’s high-beamed ceilings over the past two weeks with the same group, it represents the first time since leaving The Maccabees that Orlando has embraced something of a band dynamic. Helmed by producer Sergio Maschetzko - the man behind the decks of Black Country, New Road’s ‘Ants From Up There’ - the experience, he says, has been a rewarding one.

“I wanted the challenge of writing for musicians to play it rather than finessing midi parts,” he explains, sat on a bench in the winter sun as the Abbey’s resident chickens putter by. “On [second album] ‘Hop Up’, I felt so liberated to try and write pop-structured songs - whatever pop is - and I felt that the accessibility of it and the immediacy of it was really uncomplicated and hopefully just a nice, satisfying boost of something. And so I guess this is trying to take pop structures, but I want them to feel like they have enough uniqueness and enough of a story in them that they’re fun to listen to… a couple of times,” he says emphasising the ‘couple’ as though repeat plays of his music are a novel idea.

GTiven that, when DIY joins Orlando, he’s on the final day of a two-week run with the clock ticking down before everything gets packed away and LP3 is - in its majority statedone, the musician seems remarkably relaxed. Half his band are playing backgammon in the kitchen; when it comes time for a tea break, we’re festooned with a slice of homemade carrot cake from a previous night’s birthday celebrations. The mood, he says, is pretty calm because of the sheer volume of prep that had gone into the tracks before they arrived - a fact that also allowed the songs to individually bloom and grow in nuanced new directions during the last fortnight.

“Being really tight with the songwriting has meant that there’s opportunity for it to be more weird and wonderful and a bit more eccentric in the choices we’ve made,” he nods. “I’m loath to give credit to all the people who used to say when I was first trying to write songs, ‘Oh if you can just play it on a guitar then it’s probably a good song’ when I’d be like, ‘Oh, piss off’. But annoyingly it’s sort of true. And whether or not it makes for a better song, in this instance it’s afforded me more experimentation.”

Today, we hear five of the new tracks - all of which occupy largely different sonic spaces, creating easily the most diverse collection the singer’s made to date. It sounds exciting because you can hear that he’s excited by it. “Other than small changes, I’m in. I think they work,” he smiles: about as bold an assertion as you’re likely to get from him that what he’s made is actually rather good.

At one end of the spectrum sits ‘Good To See You’, the most overtly buoyant pop track he’s put his solo name to, complete with warm group vocals that he fondly describes as “a lot of caterwauling from a bunch of slightly boozy midnight boys”. At another end is ‘Going Pro’ with its dark strings and whispered

has roped in some pals and is pushing the boat out.

“wake up”s - an atmospheric soundtrack made for woodland walks in the morning dew. ‘Sorry’ glitches to its conclusion in a whir of electronics; ‘Best Night’ feels understatedly grand, full of circular sparkling synths and sampled speech, while ‘You’ is a widescreen devotional love song that nods to jazz in its arrangements.

Best of all, meanwhile, is ‘Dig’: a krauty, psychy motor of a song with Orlando’s vocals hushed intimately into the mic as the band wig out around him. “I thought I had an idea for the follow up to Gritterman which was a play on [nursery rhyme]

‘There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly’, so I’d written the music for that thinking, this makes sense?!” he laughs. “Then I re-found this demo and it became ‘Dig’. We tried the vocals [in that way] one night here, and I think it totally sells the song.”

Lyrically, too, the musician’s as-yet-untitled third hangs a little left from the overarching theme of new parenthood that filled his first two. Love is firmly still in the air, but this time round it’s a wider sense of contentment that sits at the album’s core. “I think this is a

’Gram on the

These days, even yer gran is posting selfies on Instagram. Instagran, more like. Everyone has it now, including all our fave bands. Here’s a brief catchup on music’s finest phototaking action as of late.

was

romantic record. We live in Lisbon now which is a big change, and I think just being together and being in love with the city and having made a big move, it’s celebrating that - just general wellbeing and being a bit more at peace,” he says.

There is lots, indeed, for the musician to feel at peace about. Having made the leap from the first phase of his musical life into a successful solo career, now seems to be the time when Orlando Weeks is loosening his shoulders, settling into the role and really having fun with it. “It’s extraordinary how long in the tooth I am to be having certain epiphanies,” he laughs of the journey towards his newest creation, “but in a way being a slow learner has its benefits… Not bored! Still astounded by quite basic stuff! Woah!” DIY

spotted

Believe it or not, musicians sometimes do normal things, too. They get lost, buy milk and catch buses – all sorts. This month, we clocked a fair few of them roaming around… Holly Humberstone hopping on the London Overground; Aisling Bea and Francis Bourgeois the train man having a catch up at the Universal Music BRITs afterparty; Mura Masa hanging by the bar at our final DIY Hello 2023 showcase; Greg James getting hounded by everyone on his way down to the tube after the BRITs.

The secret to Hayley’s luminously glowing locks

not what you might have guessed… (@yelyahwilliams)

It’s giving Dr. Black in the parlour with the candlestick. (@lewiscapaldi)

True superstars coordinate their outfit to the car seat. (@ashnikko)

“I wanted the challenge of writing for musicians to play it rather than finessing midi parts.”

BRAND NEW EYES

“The biggest mistake was the period of my life where I was so afraid of what people thought that I just didn't do anything at all.”

DIY

in deep

More than a decade on from the viral track that first made her name, Rebecca Black is no longer just the ‘Friday’ girl - she’s ready to take on the pop stratosphere every day of the week.

Words: Elly Watson.

Rebecca Black is crying on stage. Stood in front of a sold-out crowd at London’s Heaven, the iconic LGBTQ+ venue is packed with 1,000 adoring fans, all waiting in anticipation of her biggest headline show to date - which also marks the release day of long-awaited debut album ‘Let Her Burn’. It’s understandable, then, why emotions are running high. “Six years ago, I couldn’t sell eight tickets to a show,” Rebecca tells the crowd through tears. “Thank you for sticking by me, even when it was uncool.”

It’s true: being a Rebecca Black fan hasn’t always been an easy ride. Long before her rebirth as a hyperpop cult hero, Rebecca was best known as “the ‘Friday’ girl”. You already know the song; it’ll probably be stuck in your head for days just at that brief mention. The chipper 2011 viral hit urged that we “gotta get down on Friday”, and quickly propelled the then-unknown teenager into the spotlight - with good and bad consequences.

‘Friday’ saw Black work with LA songwriting firm ARK Music Factory, with the entire recording process and music video shoot coming to a minimal $4,000. Its release wasn’t exactly anticipating big things, but ‘Friday’ soon picked up major traction online, reaching the UK Singles Chart, going gold in the US and racking up over 160 million views on YouTube to date. “I was literally a kid being a kid, and not ready to pursue a career,” Rebecca reflects now, a few hours before her London gig.

At the time, many labelled ‘Friday’ as “the worst song ever”, with Black branded as a “YouTube laughing stock”; the backlash was personal. When everyone suddenly knew her name, Rebecca found herself subjected to vile comments and online hate from what felt like the whole world. She stopped going to public school and opted for home-school to avoid the groups of kids laughing at her in the hallways. “When everything changed after the reception and just how big everything got, I had to [navigate] still being a child in a place full of adults,” she says, “where everyone is trying to make decisions for you and trying to tell you what you’re supposed to be, and you also have the rest of the world telling you that you’re an idiot for what you do.”

In the years that followed, Rebecca took her time doing “a lot of non-fun work” on herself and starting therapy. At one point, she was close to applying for a job at the US thrift store Buffalo Exchange because she was so unsure as to whether she wanted to continue pursuing her dream. “I was traumatised after that first experience,” she emphasises. “I think the way I knew how to cope as a kid was like, ‘Oh, well, I just won’t fail again. I’m just not going to put myself out there, I’m not going to do anything that is going to upset people, and that’s how I’ll find peace’. But that’s

THIS MONTH IN MUSIC ...

MARCH 2010

Five and a half years since the most combustible band on the circuit finally blew themselves up for good (or so we thought…), on 31st March 2010, The Libertines gathered a gaggle of press to North London’s Boogaloo pub to announce their reunion.

just so not true! Because then you live the most bland, boring life that you could ever live because you’re so concerned with other people.”

Often finding herself questioning her character and what she should be doing during those years, Rebecca now admits, “I made a lot of mistakes. I worked with a lot of people who, even if they had my best intentions at heart, had no idea what the fuck to do with me.” She continues: “The biggest mistake I ever made was the period of my life where I was so afraid of what people thought about me that I just didn’t do anything at all. I just wanted to be liked, because that felt safer than potentially being hated by everybody again.”

Attributing a lot of her growth to the work of her therapists, Black began to realise that she had to face the shame that she felt from her teenage years head on. “The issue is not who I am intrinsically, the issue is just like, ‘You had a shit go’,” she shrugs. “I think that truly is the thing that holds so many people back and still probably holds me back in certain ways. You know, the fear that we develop around the things that we feel ashamed of.”

Things soon came to a junction in her life. “I think if there was a pivotal moment,” she muses, “it was whenever I finally understood how to trust myself, and could understand that I don’t want to live for the rest of my life feeling like I’m picking up pieces of my past. I’m just gonna move forward.”

It’s this resilience and a determined effort to finally accept herself that has seen the singer emerge triumphantly as Rebecca Black 2.0. Rather than cower behind the song that had defined her for so long, she decided to embrace it and boldly reinvent herself. In February 2021, to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of ‘Friday’’s release, she dropped a hyperpop remix of the track produced by one of the zeitgeist genre’s big names, 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady, and featuring impressive guest appearances from Big Freedia, 3OH!3 and Dorian Electra.

A chaotic but wonderful glitch-pop reworking, the remix allowed her to finally reclaim the narrative and re-introduce herself to the world once again. “I knew I wanted to kind of reinterpret it in my own way and do something fun with it,” she smiles. “I mean, it’s fucking awesome that people come to the shows and not only do they know that song, they clearly resonate with that song in a new way and in a different way and celebrate that song. It doesn’t feel so isolated to this thing that was always an elephant in the room, or like a sign on my back. It’s like this led me to where I am now.”

‘Let Her Burn’ is out now.

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

Pete Doherty, Carl Barat and co would play main support to Arcade Fire at that August’s Reading and Leeds festivals; “Four months is a long time for The Libertines, so whatever happens, happens,” caveated Barat in perhaps the least hopeful speech in reunion history before the band played an impromptu guerilla set, just like the good old days…

THEY SAID WHAT?!

“All Access Backstage Pass (roam freely backstage Camden Assembly)... Backstage Rider Access (inc charcuterie board)... Two (2) show posters…”Some of the, ahem, ‘treats’ you could nab if you purchased The Big Mess Package from The Academy Is… for their 400-capacity pub show. The price, you ask? A very normal and not utterly, piss-takingly insane £1,010 of course! We guess they did put the clue in the package title.

Photos: Carianne Older.

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

MEN VS MACHINES

On third album ‘Divine Machines’ Brighton’s DEMOB HAPPY are pushing themselves in all directions with an unashamedly behemoth psych-rock-pop record that questions the status quo and asks The Big Questions. To introduce it, we sent frontman Matthew Marcantonio some big questions of our own. Tonight Matthew, we’re going to be… very excited about Demob’s return.

It’s been five years since second album ‘Holy Doom’. What have the last few years been like for you?

Difficult like everyone else, but with dizzying highs as well. We toured that record so much - four US tours, three UK tours, one EU tour, all in 2019 - that we were knackered by the end and we needed a bit of time off. The world obliged of course, in the worst way, but still it gave us some breathing room to get things right.

When did you start work on ‘Divine Machines’?

February 2020 was when we started demoing and performing our usual hibernation routine in the Welsh countryside. Then when lockdown came, I took those sketches and, with the luxury of time, turned them into the record for the most part. But we wanted to polish them up and enjoy recording them properly as a band, so given the chance to go back into the studio in May 2022, we chose to. We made this mad hybrid of a record, with all the charm of the demos, the magic that you can never really replicate in the studio, but with all the bells and whistles of being in a proper space, performing together.

You’ve said that you wanted to write about “inspiring the change” on this record. Tell us a bit more about that.

I think the world is as bad as we allow it to be. I’ve always been interested in the corruption of the world, the tendrils of which sink very deep, but I’ve come to realise that in reality no amount of social revolution will ever actually stick while the people themselves are unwell. So we need people to recognise, truly and honestly, that it’s their responsibility in this collective conscious soup we are all a part of to own their own shit.

What other themes or stories inspired you when writing the record?

The record has a very grand feel to it, there’s a scope to a lot of the songs. They’re not epic, they’re just expansive in that Pink Floyd way, and it conjured in us this slightly uneasy but exciting feeling of a dystopian sonic aesthetic, alongside a utopian message.

How would you characterise your change in approach between albums?

I think musically we’ve let ourselves relax a bit and let our defences down. I’ve observed in myself a cynical selfmonitoring of what I think is acceptable from my writing, and this has its roots in many things. But it feels like - and this is an ongoing progression I’m sure - but I just give less of a fuck what people think every time I write something new. And then I felt this beautiful feedback, where the people whose opinions I cared about most would respond better the more vulnerable I was, and this was a revelation to me. I’m slowly letting the world into my world, which I’ve always kept precious and hidden.

Can we expect any surprises on this album?

I think so. It’s an evolution of our sound and our writing, but I know our DNA runs through it so [fans will] be surprised but they’ll feel safe. The beating heart of what we’ve done and will always do is there, it’s just a bit wider in scope, in sound, in harmony and in emotion.

‘Divine Machines’ is out 26th May via Liberator Music.

As well as sponsoring the 2022 Mercury Prize, FREE NOW have also teamed up with Music Venue Trust to provide some well-needed support to Grassroots Music Venues across the country, underwriting 120 gigs until the end of April 2023. Here, we’re highlighting just a couple of the gigs that are happening over the next month and beyond…

WARMDUSCHER

The Windmill, London

1st & 3rd March 2023

Fresh from sharing their new track ‘Love Strong’ at the end of last month, the London band will be returning to their spiritual home for a handful of intimate shows, to help raise funds for their upcoming trip to the US for SXSW.

NADINE EL ROUBI

Bush Hall, London 20th March 2023

Having released her five-track EP ‘Triplicity’ back in October, Sudanese singer Nadine El Roubi will be offering up her slick and shimmering blend of hip hop and rap at the iconic West London venue later this month.

ROMARNA CAMPBELL

Matt & Phreds, Manchester 9th April 2023

With a few performances under her belt already this year - she played the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room last month - the jazz drummer, producer and composer will be offering up a taste of her new album at this Manchester show in a few weeks.

LANA DEL REY A&W

Beginning as the sort of ballad Lana’s become particularly fond of, dominated by little else than her lilting voice and an urgent, repetitive piano line, across ‘A&W’’s sevenminute runtime it expands into one of her most definitive statements to date. The first part, ‘American Whore’, is an incisive inquiry into its titular archetype - culminating in the tragic line, “If I told you that I was raped / Do you think that anybody would really think / I didn’t ask for it”. Around the four minute mark, that fades out and an imposing trap beat enters the equation. What follows is one of the most delightfully batshit musical moments from the singer thus far: a fusion of trap beats, mellotron and synths backdrop mysterious tales of “Jimmy” - a recurring character in her universe. Who exactly is Jimmy and what is his relationship with Lana? That’s unclear, but Lana has one message for him that’s anything but: “Your mom called / I told her / You’re fucking up big time!” (Tom Williams)

BALMING TIGER Trust Yourself

Positivity in song form is a tricky one. Go too far one way and you’ll end up sounding like the sonic equivalent of a not-so-gentle man of a certain age gruffly muttering “cheer up love”; swerve the other and it’s Robbie Williams’ much-maligned ‘I Love My Life’. Worse still, make like Pharrell and usurp Baby Shark to become every preschooler’s repeat listen. South Korean collective Balming Tiger, however, have nailed it on ‘Trust Yourself’. Maybe it’s the grungy guitar sounds that occasionally peek through. Perhaps it’s the underlying assumption that from the outset we do not, in fact, trust ourselves. It could even be that the bouncy bassline, in its more-than-a-passing-resemblance to ‘Deal Wiv It’ makes the track immaculately paced for summer festival, pints-in-the-air singalongs. Because 2023 is already gonna have to work hard to beat this immediate earworm of a chorus. (Emma Swann)

SQUID Swing (In A Dream)

The first preview of upcoming second album ‘O Monolith’, ‘Swing (In A Dream)’ sees Squid return rejuvenated. Tense and claustrophobic, the track was inspired by a dream had by the band’s frontman Ollie Judge, which featured Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s painting The Swing. A daunting, anxious retelling of the occasion while also nodding to the climate crisis, ‘Swing (In A Dream)’ remains true to Squid’s essence while also presenting a darker and domineering sound. (Katie Macbeth)

CHVRCHES Over

While the themes of previous album ‘Screen Violence’ saw CHVRCHES dealing with the more fantastical end of fear’s spectrum, it’s on their newest track - and standalone offering - ‘Over’ that the trio begin to bring the dread of the present world back into focus. As ever, soaring electronics and glistening synths back the kind of earwormy chorus you’ll be singing for days, while its shadowy message of compassion fatigue, doom scrolling and societal failures (“I try my best to turn down the noise / And I tell myself that boys will be boys / It's getting harder to breathe / So, baby, put me to sleep / Till it gets better”) sneakily gets its hooks into you. Forever experts when it comes to creating that eery brightdark dynamic, CHVRCHES have nailed it again. (Sarah Jamieson)

HAVE YOU HEARD?

PINKPANTHERESS & ICE SPICE

BOYS A LIAR PT.2

A collaboration you didn’t know you needed - yet one that makes so much sense - has arrived in the form of ‘Boys

A Liar Pt.2’; a joining of forces between PinkPantheress and current it-girl, Ice Spice. Produced by PinkPantheress herself alongside Mura Masa, the track calls out an unfaithful man who keeps leading girls on, while sonically transporting listeners back in time to the 2000s. Feeling more like a conversation between two best friends with different opinions on dating, Ice Spice’s casual, confident rhymes mould with ease around the hypnotic vocals of PinkPantheress. (Katie Macbeth)

RECORD ON the

On The Record is a chance for DIY’s esteemed writers to wax lyrical about the subjects close to their hearts and populating your timelines. This month, Rhian Daly on the reunions proving that, often, the algorithm doesn’t know best.

If your For You Page is anything like mine, any time you open up TikTok you’ll be greeted by a ream of budding artists sharing their latest creations – and almost all of them are sassy kiss-offs to exes and bad men. Often, these songs are set to gleaming, infectious pop hooks or, sometimes, big rock riffs. Regardless of genre, TikTok has decided I and many others want an algorithm full of tracks just like this.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se – who can say no to a bit of feisty pop attitude? – but there is a point where it begins to feel monotonous. It’s understandable, of course, why new artists might opt to make something algorithm-friendly; the music industry is broken and it’s increasingly hard for anyone to make a decent living off of music. But taking the commercial route isn’t the only path to becoming important and influential, as a wealth of recent reunion announcements show us.

Later this year, Kathleen Hanna’s feminist electro-rock trio Le Tigre will reunite after 18 years, while New York anti-folk troupe Moldy Peaches – a band best known for asking ‘Who’s Got The Crack?’ –will play their first shows in two decades. Both are prime examples

of what you might call “anti-algorithm” bands: acts that don’t fit into social media’s trends, their big, unique personalities so distinctly their own it would be impossible to accurately recreate them. They were messy (Moldy Peaches), uncompromising (Le Tigre) and thrillingly uncommercial, flying freely outside the status quo.

You could say the same, too, of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who released their first album in nine years last year. Karen O, in particular, had teenage me in a headlock precisely because she wasn’t a shiny, polished pop star; instead, she inspired me to stomp around my small town with one mesh glove, electric blue eyeliner and a chaos of clashing patterns on my body. Her songs still contained sassy kiss-offs to exes and bad men, but they felt so inimitably hers that you knew who was behind them instantly – not something you can necessarily say about some of the acts dominating our apps right now.

This isn’t a moan about how music was better back in the good old days – just read DIY every month for proof that there’s still plenty to be excited about – but a friendly plea. Don’t smooth off all your edges. Don’t just follow the crowd. Embrace what makes you different and put it unapologetically front and centre. Your music –and the music world – will be better off for it. DIY

“Le Tigre were thrillingly uncommercial, flying freely outside the status quo.”

FESTIVALSFESTIVALSFESTIVALS FESTIVALS

Things are finally beginning to warm up, so there’s no better time than the present to start getting prepped for a summer filled with live music…

Wake Up!

Alex G, Black Country, New Road, Viagra Boys, Los Bitchos, Warmduscher, and O. are some of the latest artists to be confirmed to play at this summer’s Wide Awake

The South London festival - which takes place in Brockwell Park on Saturday 27th May - has already confirmed the likes of Caroline Polachek, Gilla Band, Shygirl and Jockstrap, and will now also play host to Tirzah, Civic, Wasted Youth, Clamm, and Jjuuujjuu

Wide Awake have also confirmed that political and social activists Hate Zine will be hosting a series of workshops and panels across the fest, while the London Brewers’ Market - as managed by Five Points Brewing Co - will be returning to the site.

Well, Y Not?

A Bloody Good Time

Shame, slowthai, Anna Calvi and Baxter Dury are just a handful of the artists confirmed to play at this year’s edition of #mybloodyfestival in Lithuania.

Taking place from 16th to 18th June 2023, the current line-up also features the likes of Bombay Bicycle Club, Squid, Sorry, Talk Show, Working Men’s Club and many more.

The event, which took place for the first time last summer, will take place at Lukiškės Prison 2.0 in Vilnius, Lithuania - a former prison has since been transformed into a hub for music, modern art, design and culture - and tickets are on sale now from €120.

Live & Kicking

Having already announced headliners Two Door Cinema Club and other acts including Everything Everything, The Big Moon, Black Honey, CMAT, Panic Shack and Prima Queen, Live At Leeds: In The Park have welcomed even more names onto their 2023 line-up.

Taking place on Saturday 27th May at Leeds’ Temple Newsman Park, the festival recently confirmed new additions including Crawlers, Cavetown, Rose Gray, Opus Kink, Gengahr, Bully, DEADLETTER and Priestgate, and now they’re welcoming Maximo Park, Kate Nash, Lottery Winners, James Marriott and Medicine Cabinet to the bill.

The event takes place over five stages, and tickets are available from £60 now.

FESTIVAL News In Brief

Heading back to Brighton from 11th - 13th May, THE GREAT ESCAPE have announced even more acts joining this year’s festival. Among the new names announced today are The Big Moon, Sad Night Dynamite, Willie J Healey, Lime Garden, Caity Baser, and English Teacher

Rina Sawayama, Caroline Polachek, Young Fathers and Paolo Nutini are some of the new artists confirmed to appear at OPEN’ER this June. The Polish event - which has already announced Lizzo, Arctic Monkeys, Kendrick Lamar and many more - takes place from 28th June - 1st July.

Stormzy is the latest act to join the line-up for this year’s ROCK WERCHTER Taking place in the Festivalpark in Werchter from 29th June2nd July, other acts on the bill include Arctic Monkeys, The 1975, Fred again…, Christine and the Queens and Lil Nas X

slowthai, Shygirl, Ben Howard, Caroline Polachek and Perfume Genius are just a handful of the latest acts to be confirmed for this year’s edition of POHODA . The Slovakian event takes place at Trenčín Airport on 6th –8th July this year.

While Pulp, Paolo Nutini and George Ezra are set to top the bill, LATITUDE have announced even more acts who’ll be joining them from 20th - 23rd July for their 2023 edition: Yard Act, Confidence Man, Mimi Webb, Dry Cleaning, The Murder Capital, and flowerovlove will all appear at the Henham Park event.

Bombay Bicycle Club, Kasabian and Royal Blood are three of the headliners for this year’s Y Not, while other acts appearing on the bill include Everything Everything, Maisie Peters, The Murder Capital, Wunderhorse, Crawlers, Beabadoobee and Rachel Chinouriri

“Thank you to everyone who joined us last summer for what was our best event yet!” Managing Director Jason Oakley has said. “We were so excited to be back, and can’t wait to do it all again this year. The support from festival-goers has been amazing, and we look forward to seeing you all in the rolling hills of the Peak District!”

This year’s edition of Y Not is set to take place in Pikehall, Derbyshire from 28th to 30th July, and tickets are on sale now.

The Strokes are set to headline one night of this year’s ALL POINTS EAST

The legendary New York outfit will return to London’s Victoria Park on 25th August with a packed line-up including Yeah Yeah Yeahs, girl in red, Amyl and The Sniffers, Angel Olsen, and black midi

MAISIE PETERS PARKS ARLO

49TH & MAIN AGGRASOPPAR

ANNA ERHARD ASTRØNNE ARXX

AZIYA

BIG WETT

BRADEN LAM

ÁINE DEANE ALICE LOW CEEOW

ALIENBLAZE

ANTONY SZMIEREK

BELLAH

CAM KAHIN

AMY ROOT

BILLIE MARTEN BLONDSHELL

CAITY BASER

CATHY JAIN

BER CIEL

BIBI CLUB

BLUEM

CALUM BOWIE

CHALK

DAVID KITT

ELIZA HULL

ENGLISH TEACHER

ETHAN P. FLYNN

FEET

GERMEIN

CUMGIRL8 GHOST

DAUDI MATSIKO

DEKI ALEM

ELLEN FROESE ENUMCLAW

ELLUR

DIVES

ETHAN BORTNICK

EUGENIA POST MERIDIEM

WOMAN

FARCE

GIRL AND GIRL

HANNAH GRAE

HUMOUR

JACOTÉNE

JERICHO NOGUERA

JULIE PAVON

KOMPARRISON

CUCAMARAS LUCI

GIRLS OF THE INTERNET LEMONADE SHOELACE

JAMES ELLIS FORD

JESSICA WINTER

JIM E. BROWN

KATIE GREGSON-MACLEOD

KATIE TUPPER

LAMBRINI GIRLS

KING STINGRAY

LANA LUBANY

MARIANNA WINTER

MELIN MELYN MESTIZO COLLECTIVE

MICKEY CALLISTO

NEY LIQA

PILLOW FITE

MILANOSPORT

NOWSM

POZI

MARYSIA OSU

MEYY

OSCAR BROWNE

PPJ

RIANNE DOWNEY

RUTH LYON

SAM AKPRO

SEB LOWE

NELL MESCAL

PHOEBE GO

REDOLENT

ROSELLAS

SAD NIGHT DYNAMITE

SAMMY COPLEY

RUM.GOLD

SAIMING

SANS SOUCIS

SEIGFRIED KOMIDASHI

SERAPHINA SIMONE

SHE’S IN PARTIES

SLANT

SHANGHAI BABY

SHELF LIVES

SOMADINA

SPANGLED

SONGØ

STACEY RYAN

STRAWBERRY GUY

TASMAN KEITH

TERRA KIN

THE CHASE

SKAAR

SEB

SKINNER

SORCHA RICHARDSON

SUPERJAZZCLUB

THALA

SYLVIE

TEEN JESUS AND THE JEAN TEASERS

THE BIG MOON

THE DREAM MACHINE

THE FLORENTINAS

THE JOY HOTEL THE LILACS

VICTOR RAY

ULA

VACATIONS

WILD HORSE

THE FACADES

THE HEAVY HEAVY

THE LAST DINNER PARTY

VENBEE

WILLIE J HEALEY

WITCH FEVER YOT CLUB YUNÈ PINKU

STONE STORRY AND MANY MORE

“I see your one eye Rebecca Black, and I raise you…”

NuhaRuby Ra

Leaning into her most honest, primal self and recruiting an increasing tribe of supporters as she goes, Nuha Ruby Ra is testament to the power of true individuality. Words: Lisa Wright. Photos: Louise Mason.

A certain degree of gracious humility might be de rigueur for a rising artist talking about their increasing successes, but when Nuha Ruby Ra says that the last twelve months have exceeded her wildest expectations, you can tell she’s not just playing for compliments.

Influenced by Nick Cave’s discordant first band The Birthday Party and German experimentalists Einstürzende Neubauten, the London artist makes hypnotic, uncomfortable, hyper-sensory music that’s about as far away from an easily-quantifiable Spotify playlist category as you can get; on stage, she prowls the space performing to a live-recorded backing track, dressed in leather with a painted N slashed where a third eye might sit. An obvious choice for a mainstream audience, Nuha most certainly is not, and yet in recent months, she’s found herself on a steady stream of high-profile tours, handpicked to support the likes of Yard Act, Viagra Boys, Warmduscher and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. This month, she’ll step it up another notch, joining Self Esteem on her sold-out victory lap.

“I really would not have expected in my wildest dreams that people would connect with the music I’m doing on the current scale of things. It’s already exceeded all expectations. I thought if I was lucky I’d be some niche small, small thing, but it’s given me some genuine hope and belief in people seeing things outside of the norm,” she begins, sat next to a rail of outfit choices that include a vast array of red and black cowboy boots and coats, alongside a black bunny mask procured from a Hamburg sex shop. “Something I get from people at shows is, ‘I’ve never seen, heard or experienced anything like this before but it’s inspired me’. I think it’s a new thing for a lot of people but they seem to be into it. I think what helps is that I’m really not putting anything on. I’m very honest when I’m performing and maybe that travels through somehow. It never comes from a place of antagonism.”

Though, on a surface level, the music Nuha makes exists in an uneasy space that refutes ideas of what should be palatable - both musically and lyrically - she baulks at the notion that any part of what she does would be seen as playing a character. Instead, music is a space to let all the shadow parts come to the light, leaning into the angry, sad,

sexual sides of herself and pushing them to the fore. “I’ve found a place where I can let out these parts of me and these ways of being. It’s not a persona, it’s kind of the most real me [there is],” she says. “When I was younger I was exposed to pop music and bands where everything was quite ‘correct’ in terms of song structures, and people singing ‘well’ in inverted commas. Then when I came across bands [like Neubaten] I just felt like it was giving across a feeling that wasn’t about perfection, and feeling over perfection remains the most important thing to me.

“I’m lucky enough to be able to write songs and go out and perform them, and that helps shed a lot of trapped emotions,” she continues. “I scream on stage in some of the songs and those screams are a fucking godsend. There are so many times when you need to be a bit primal in life but you can’t go and scream in the street or people think you’re crazy. Recently in ‘Run Run’ I’ve started saying to the audience, ‘This is your space to scream if you want to scream’ and some of the shows people have really let rip! It’s like a little help group.”

This month, the group will receive a new text in the form of ‘Machine

Like Me’ - six strangely mesmerising, sometimes jarring yet consistently playful tracks unlike anything else around, that push Nuha’s selfsufficient polymath ethos even further. Having pivoted from her punk band roots to perform with nothing on stage aside from a backing track and herself (“I found myself performing in a really different way because the connection is just between me and the people at the gig”), and having directed her own recent videos on top of designing and making her own DIY merch, now Nuha is playing almost every instrument on the record herself too.

“It’s just this massively narcissistic thing where I do everything myself!” she cackles. “No, but with every record it’s just what I feel like doing at the time. On the first EP I wanted to have the role of the singer because I’d never had that before, and then with the new one I wanted to be like, could I basically create what sounds like there’s a good band here but I’m playing everything? It’s all just play to be honest, and seeing what might be fun. So for the one after that, I really don’t know. I just tend to see what I want to do at the time and where that takes me.” DIY

NEU

“I really would not have expected in my wildest dreams that people would connect with the music I’m doing on the current scale of things.”

With a gripping line in cold musicality and an obsession with Alan Turing, Jojo Orme is creating her own enigma code with every new Heartworms release. Words: Louis Griffin. Photo: Camillie Alexander.

Jojo Orme is rising out of a freezing cold lake. The singer behind Heartworms - the latest buzzy signing to Speedy Wunderground – is clad headto-toe in antique military gear, and flanked by her very own regiment in the black-and-white video for ‘Retributions of an Awful Life’. It’s quite the entrance. “I'm not a good swimmer, and I don't like cold water - especially if you're in full military gear,” she grins. “But the thing is, the whole music video is my idea because I was like, ‘I want to fight the fear, I know I can do it, and when I do it I'll be so happy with myself’. We had to do that three times, and the last time I just started crying, but I was so happy because I did something that I never thought I'd do. Welcome to Heartworms!”

It's a fitting opening statement for her debut EP, ‘A Comforting Notion’, and neatly reconciles many of the idiosyncrasies that punctuate Orme’s music. Her obsession with military iconography, for a start, has a far quainter origin than the imposing lake-filming might suggest. It turns out Jojo is a regular volunteer at RAF Hendon – cleaning the aircraft, no less. “I read The Code Book by Simon Singh, and got into Enigma, Alan Turing, Bletchley Park. It kind of spiralled from there. I used to live in Harrow, and I found out that I was living near RAF Hendon. I called them up, and from then on I was just completely obsessed with it.”

She’s clear though – Heartworms might be a vessel for her day-to-day fascinations, but it’s by no means a static thing. “I'm not gonna do the military thing forever, I know that. But I wanted to do it because I wanted to show myself, my passions. Heartworms is quite theatrical, but it's not fake. I'm not faking it. It’s really me, but stronger.” She pauses to chuckle. “At the moment I'm changing my aesthetic more to a leathery, Sisters of Mercy kind of style, because I love it - and it's annoying wearing a hat all the time.”

The EP seems like the perfect jumping-off point for Heartworms. It announces its arrival with cold drum machines and sparse, almost Cure-like guitar on ‘Consistent Dedication’: a forbidding, brooding opening, accelerating to Orme’s screaming crescendo. Produced by Dan Carey – “The only person in the whole world at the moment that I will let change something” – Heartworms’ monochrome landscape feels completely reflected in the austere music on record. ‘A Comforting Notion’’s title feels far from apt. “Yeah, it's not fucking comforting at all!” Jojo laughs. “It's dark, it's driving, it's also very vulnerable. It's quite hard to feel relaxed listening to it, but I want that. I don't think I'll ever write anything like it again. I've tried, and I just don't think I can.”

Orme has no interest in looking backwards, though; with her first body of work still to be released, she’s already ticked off several milestones. Last autumn, Heartworms supported Sports Team at the Roundhouse – the venue where Jojo previously worked in the cloakroom. “Every time, I’d be standing right in the middle of the balcony watching, like, ‘I can imagine how they feel!’” she recalls. “There’s so many artists I’ve seen there. I lined up for six hours to be at the front to see Interpol. I tell you what, it's something I've always wanted. And then I did it!” Already making a concise and impressively-realised artistic statement, it doubtless marks an early notable achievement of many. DIY

NEU

“It’s quite hard to feel relaxed listening to [the EP], but I want that.” - JOJO ORME

DAMEFRISØ R

BRISTOLIAN INDUSTRIAL NOISEMONGERS. Where early single ‘2-HEH-V’ introduced Bristol sextet DAMEFRISØR as a mild head-fuck of a proposition - robotic intonations underpinning shoegazey sweeps, repetitive synths and more - on recent debut EP ‘Island of Light’, they’ve cemented this sonic clash as their most intriguing calling card. On it, hefty guitars rub up against ravey electronic beats with vocalist Kazhi Jahfar adding some doomy goth noir to proceedings. If you pressed play on all eras of The Horrors at once, the result might sound a bit like this.

LISTEN: ‘Island of Light’ is fresh off the presses.

SIMILAR TO: Standing in the middle of the rock tent and the dance tent and letting both seep in.

SPIDER

A 22 YEAR OLD MULTI-HYPHENATE WITH A COMMANDING MESSAGE.

Safe to say that most people aren’t usually too fond of eight-legged creepy crawlies but there’s always exceptions to be made: it’s more than worth it for this 22 year old. Originally from Dublin but having recently relocated to South London, she’s already released a potent debut EP (last year’s ‘C.O.A.’) and found herself nestled amongst creative community Loud LDN Collective. And judging by her most recent releasethe gut-punch of ‘America’s Next Top Model’ - there are much bigger things to come next.

LISTEN: ‘America’s Next Top Model’ melds together hip hop rhythms and gnarly guitars to powerful effect. SIMILAR TO: Your new favourite musical hero.

SIR CHLOE

VIRAL VERMONT GUITAR HEROES GEARING UP FOR THEIR DEBUT.

2020 EP ‘Party Favors’ may have introduced Vermont’s Sir Chloe to a certain portion of the social media-loving internet, but with forthcoming full-length debut ‘I Am The Dog’, there’s no reason why every human and hound shouldn’t be on board. Nodding simultaneously to a Mitski-like sense of the idiosyncratic, with some grizzled Hole riffs, a splash of St. Vincent cool and all sorts more thrown in, Dana Foote and co are onto something very, very exciting.

LISTEN: Recent single ‘Hooves’ is your first taste of the LP.

SIMILAR TO: America’s answer to Wet Leg.

Recommended

HARRIETTE

NEU

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THE COOLEST NEW KID ON THE COUNTRY SCENE. “My parents always said I should do music, but I hate authority,” Texas-born, Brooklyn-based artist Harriette once said. Thankfully for us, she decided that her ‘rents might be on to something, and now she’s emerged as one of the shiniest new stars in the country music scene. Pairing compelling lyrics with Western grooves, Harriette’s music has been described as “Clairo-via-Nashville”, and upcoming debut EP ‘I Heart The Internet’ is further set to cement her rising star potential.

LISTEN: ‘Goodbye Texas’ is a heel-clicking ode to leaving home.

SIMILAR TO: Pop melodies injected with some magnetic Southern charm.

ALICE LOW

AVANT-GARDE POP IN ITS MOST INTRIGUING FORM.

If you’re looking for more concrete proof that Alice Low and her offkilter pop gems should be on your radar, last year she was hand-picked as one of three artists to win the Triskel Prize, an award given out to artists in Wales destined for big things. A fun extra addition to her mantlepiece, Alice’s genre-defying, emotion-fuelled songwriting is more than deserving of the accolade. Inspired by the experience of her transition, her compelling tracks see her challenge gender norms and conventions within her pop music. "My work took on a new singularity, something more dynamic, more engaging, and totally mine,” she explains.

LISTEN: The shimmering soundscape of ‘Show Business’..

SIMILAR TO: The perfect kind of unpredictable pop.

Night Three

Another Tuesday night in January, and yet another snaking queue eagerly waiting outside of East London’s Old Blue Last to watch some of the buzziest new acts about. Having already boasted a raucous set from Glasgow’s VLURE, and a more chilled affair via Surya Sen; this time around it’s non-stop good vibes with guitar-driven bands.

Hailing from Brighton, Ciel raise the bar from the start. Led by Michelle Hindriks’ vocals, gig nerves quickly make way for dreamy grunge-pop, as the group settle to deliver a stirring set of alt-pop gems. Previewing a yet-to-be-named new song which finds Michelle asking “Why do you adore me?”, the trio perform tracks from this year’s debut EP ‘Not In The Sun, Nor In The Dark’, with highlight’s coming from thrashing ‘Far Away’ and rousing closer ‘Baby Don’t You Know’.

Next up and fresh off of the car trip from Nottingham, four-piece Divorce take to the stage. Made up of members from groups including Do Nothing, the melodies and harmonies from vocalists Tiger Cohen-Towell and Felix Mackenzie-Barrow conjure up folk-leaning sounds that instantly draw the crowd in. Think Charlie Fink and Laura Marling back in the day, but with a bit more edge. Cathy Jain arrives next, armed with her gorgeous dream-pop songs. Finding it slightly hard to raise her voice above the murmurs of the people at the bar crammed in ready for the night’s headliner (we see you Mura Masa!), those more preoccupied with grabbing a pint are missing out as Cathy showcases her warm and inviting pop songs from latest EP ‘spacegirl’ and beyond.

While technical difficulties lead to a late start from tonight’s headliner, even a dialled down bass can’t hinder Gretel Hänlyn. “Sorry it’s a bit vanilla,” the West Londoner smiles, before a shout quickly replies from the back: “I love vanilla!” With the busiest and most adoring crowd of the night, hands are up in the air pretty much as soon as she steps on stage, her lyrics are all yelled back, most notably in ‘Motorbike’’s chorus “Hey, you’re not being loud enough!” where the stans at the front prove that they clearly can be. Giving us a sneak peak of a new song “about naughty horrible boys” from new EP ‘Head of the Love Club’ (see p62), she’s quick to promise it’s the only taste of new material.Her striking vocals ring out over songs ‘Today (can’t help but cry)’ and ‘Apple Juice’, showcasing what a powerful and compelling performer she is. “I think we’re gonna be really big in 2023”, she tells the crowd before stepping off the stage. We can’t help but agree. (Elly Watson)

Night Four

Warming things up for this final Hello 2023 show are the woozy musical stylings of Stockholm’s Stella Explorer. While admittedly, most of her offerings this eve aren’t out in the wild just yet, there’s still something intensely captivating about her bubbling set. While a cribbing of Supertramp’s ‘The Logical Song’ comes early on - blended brilliantly into a haze of synths - it’s the deft but dark sounds she produces which really draw you in deeper.

Amping things up in a different way entirely are tonight’s next act Uh. Diving into a veritable treasure trove of synths and samplers, with wires and dials exploding across the table poised centre stage, the pair soon transform into sonic magicians, conjuring up a delicious chaos - not too dissimilar to the likes of Fuck Buttons - that comes pierced with Fionnuala Kennedy’s hypnotic vocals. A set that’s as intense as it is exhilarating, it’s little wonder the Old Blue Last feels particularly stunned after they exit the stage.

There’s no time for a breather, though; the sleek and sexy electro-pop of Jessica Winter quickly transforms the room into more pulsating club than sonic science lab. Her second DIY live appearance in as many months, the Class of 2023 star uses tonight to both showcase her career highlights thus far (the sparkling ‘I Think You’re Gonna Hurt Me So Bad; the pulsating stomp of ‘Sad Music’) while firmly looking forward to her forthcoming EP ‘Limerence’, with delicious cuts ‘Choreograph’, ‘Funk This Up’ and ‘Clutter’ all working to illustrate the far-reaching, but glittering, corners of her sound.

As for the evening’s final act, it’s another sonic switch-up, this time courtesy of South London producer Saint Jude. Having been forced to pivot away from the dance world after being diagnosed with severe tinnitus as a teenager, what was once club culture’s loss is now firmly our gain; his lo-fi offerings murmur with a reflective but powerful friction. Airing cuts from his recentlyreleased album ‘Signal’, he sets his stall somewhere between King Krule and Loyle Carner, providing an eloquent but striking note to end on. And with that, another January bites the dust; we’ll see you in twelve months’ time… (Sarah Jamieson)

Welcoming in the new year with a little help from DIY, the Old Blue Last, FairSound and a heap of future stars-in-the-making.

UH

JESSICA WINTER

SAINT JUDE

Gregson-MacLeod

It’s six months on since Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s life was completely turned upside down, and she’s still not quite got her head around it. “I don't think I'll ever process it, you know?” the singer nods. “I don't think it'll ever make sense to me.”

The larger-than-life story she’s referring to is the sort of thing usually reserved for the plot of Hollywood teen movies, or the most ambitious of daydreams. Back in August last year, the 21-year-old was at her family home in Inverness - on summer break from the History degree she was studying at Edinburgh University - when she uploaded a short clip of her most recent song to TikTok, before heading to bed. Inspired by a recent and unexpected run-in with an ex, ’complex’ was a gorgeous but wounded look at what could’ve been; equal parts reflective and irreverent.

By the time she woke up the next day, the clip had gone viral. While the likes of Joe Jonas, Gracie Abrams, Lennon Stella and dodie had all left comments of support, Camilla Cabello, Finneas and King Princess were just a handful of the artists already covering the track. Since then, the video alone has racked up over eight million views, while Katie has gone on to record with producer Greg Kurstin (most famed for his work with Adele), and signed to major label Columbia.

“I mean, it was… It was just an absolute…,” she starts, still clearly finding it hard to fathom. “Now and again I have moments where I’m going about my day, and my life looks completely different. You can't really pay too much mind to it in that moment though, because then you won't be able to, you know, do anything!” she laughs. “But I'll never process it. It'll probably just always be the absolute craziest couple of weeks of my life; the shift was astronomical. Now I just have moments where I'm in my little flat and it's all bizarre. I should be at uni right now! I feel like I'm missing classes or something...”

You get the sense, however, that no matter what had unfolded that fateful August night, Katie would still be just as committed to a career in music. Having released her debut EP ‘Games I Play’ back in 2021, her life back then revolved around uni, working in her local coffee shop, and nabbing as many support slots as she could.

“It was always what I was going to do. I was always going to be working as a musician,” she says. “I was committed to the grind!”

Now, in 2023, her focus is very much on the next chapter of her story. Back in December, Katie released her second EP - the beautiful ‘songs written for piano’ - which was built around the feelings and emotions of ‘complex’, and also featured Matt Maltese collaboration ‘white lies’. “I was a huge fan of Matt,” she proffers. “I remember listening to ‘Bad Contestant’ and ‘Krystal' so much when I was in the first couple years of uni.” But, she adds, her next move will feel different again: “That EP had the purpose of contextualising ‘complex’, and just laying out a few songs that I felt represented their own point in my songwriting journey. It was important to honour that moment, but in a way that was a full stop up on the past few years.

“I definitely just wanted to go into this year - and the next period of writing and releasing - with a bit of a fresh start,” she nods. “I think that the songs I'm working on are going to sound very different but I think that the storytelling will be at the forefront and be the essence of it. What's happened over the past while has really led to me developing as a writer, with just having so much to process. So, right now, it's kind of about going back to [asking], ‘What do I want to make and who do I want to be?’” DIY

From playing in folk bars in Inverness, to working with Greg Kurstin in LA; meet the 21-year-old songwriter whose entire life changed overnight.

Words: Sarah Jamieson.

Photo: Megan Henderson.

“I have moments where I’m going about my day, and my life looks completely different.”

Buzz Feed

OBROTHER!

Fresh from appearing in our Class of 2023, Brighton’s Opus Kink have announced plans to share a new EP later this year. The sextet are set to release ‘My Eyes, Brother!’ on 19th May, following on from last year’s ‘Til The Stream Runs Dry’.

“Our new EP is a loose collection of dream and nightmare sequences,” the group say. “The narrators, proudly unreliable, don their various faces with much bad taste. The bad friend, serial progenitor, shame-wracked voluntary celibate and love-wracked ex-pimp are reading Ecclesiastes on Goodreads together. Their tummies are funny. They are asking themselves, as we ask our own selves: how to defecate up the walls, find our reflections in car windows, stop to tongue-kiss those reflections, run away in grief, break our teeth on a handrail, crawl home to a locked door and somehow still feel sexy?”

The band have offered up a first taste of the new release in the form of its lead single ‘Dust’ - head to diymag.com to hear it now.

WINGS OF A DRAGONFLY

French-born multi-hyphenate Léa Sen has confirmed plans to follow up her 2022 debut EP with a second part next month. ’You Of Now, Pt. 2’ is due for release on 21st April via Partisan.

The five-track EP comes previewed by her new single ‘Dragonfly ʚĭɞ’, which she herself has called “a byproduct of me being so fed up with myself and my indecisions and stuck in endless internal quarrels. The music video and artwork were directed by Constantine//Spence, they created these beautiful worlds that clash with each other. In the world of fire, I’m being followed by an entity, it represents that other side of me that I’m struggling so much to match with.”

Watch the video over at diymag.com now and see her live alongside Nick Hakim, who’s set to play four European shows - including a date at London’s Forum - later this month.

A WANDERING MIND

Set for release on 26th May, South London songwriter Lola Young has announced her new project ‘My Mind Wanders And Sometimes Leaves Completely’.

“It’s my journey towards being a woman and figuring out who I am,” Lola says of the record, which she’s previewed with new track ‘Annabel’s House’.

The project - which is ten tracks in length - is also set to feature the single ‘Stream Of Consciousness’ which Lola dropped last year. “It’s a contemplation of who I am, my insecurities, the mistakes I have made and what I’ve learned from them to grow into the young woman I am becoming,” she said. “‘Stream of Consciousness’ is an introduction to my new sound; my upcoming music feels like I’m channelling a depth of creativity I’ve never accessed before, and I’m excited to share with everyone.”

THE PLAYLIST

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

KING ISIS - IN MY WAYS

Hailing from Oakland, King Isis - the latest signing of Dirty Hit and indie imprint No Matter - are making their introduction with grunge-infused indie banger ‘in my ways’. Exploring “being stuck in a cycle of your own creation”, it doubles as the first taste of their new EP ‘scales’, which is due out at the end of this month. All fuzzy guitars and powerful vocals, ‘in my ways’ is how an intro should be done.

CIRCE - UNDONE

In Ancient Greek mythology, Circe would transform her enemies into animals. Fast forward a few thousand years and her London-based namesake, you sense, would be quite up for doing the same. Warped and hypnotic, ‘Undone’ takes a Goldfrappesque approach to siren-like pop, fusing the sweet and the poisonous into a heady, intoxicating whole. “I read the essay title, ‘Femininity weaponised: a history of women with swords in art’ and copied it down with a note to myself - ‘Circe needs a sword’. ‘Undone’ is the final form of that sword,” she says.

MOREISH IDOLSNOCTURNAL CREATURES

“Nocturnal creatures can teach us to be more observant, in case they dig up your treasure and bury their bones,” say South Londoners Moreish Idols about their first new track from a recent session with Speedy Wunderground’s Dan Carey. Its jangly, arty indie-pop twists and turns across five minutes, and there’s a bit of saxophone in there too: the ideal accompaniment to Jude Lilley’s vocals. ‘Nocturnal Creatures’ is hectic at times, but in the best way – a captivating listen.

LANA LUBANY - POINT OF NO RETURN

Having introduced a long-overdue Arabic-speaking voice to western pop via early singles ‘The Snake’ and ‘Sold’, Palestinian-American Lana Lubany’s mesmeric, bilingual latest goes some way to cementing her increasingly singular corner of the hype market. Deftly plucked Spanish guitars and cooing, hypnotic vocals form the backbone of a track that embraces her musical heritage whilst also nodding to modern master of intimacy Billie Eilish and a similar push-pull of softness and tension.

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ALL THE BUZZIEST NEW MUSIC HAPPENINGS IN ONE PLACE.

AFTER FIVE YEARS AWAY, AND FOLLOWING THEIR MOST POLARISING ALBUM TO DATE, FALL OUT BOY ARE GOING BACK TO THEIR ROOTS WITH ‘SO MUCH (FOR) STARDUST’: AN ALBUM THAT EMBRACES THEIR ORIGINS WITH THE OLDER, WISER HEADS OF SEASONED PROS. Words: Marianne Eloise. Photos:Pamela Littky.

STRENGTH

CORE STRENGTH

“IN A WORLD OF INAUTHENTICITY, AUTHENTICITY CUTS THROUGH.” - PETE WENTZ

peak to Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz about Fall Out Boy’s new album ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ and you’ll get conflicting reports as to whether the record was, for a period, even going to exist. It comes over five years after ‘M A N I A’, their experimental seventh record, making this the longest break in the group’s history. Frontman Patrick, who started writing not long after ‘M A N I A’, insists that break wasn’t intentional; “I wanted to take a little break, but for us, that’s usually months. It wasn’t a big deal,” he begins. For bassist and chief lyricist Pete, however, the pandemic had complicated things. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep doing this,” he counters. “I became a pandemic baby, I was so nervous about leaving the house. When you're with your family, you become a wolfpack. If I was going to leave my family and my house, it had to be for an important reason.”

“I can vouch for that anecdote. Pete sent me so many texts like, ‘I don’t know that I want to do a record’,” says Patrick. But soon he gave Wentz an all-important reason: he’d started to write an album that could drag his bandmate out of that deep hole.

“I didn’t believe him, because when he and I get excited about something, it’s gonna happen,” Patrick continues of that jeopardy period. “I started to get excited and I knew he was going to get excited. If you build it they will come.”

Though it took Wentz longer to come around, he says that the record benefited from this break. For ‘So Much (For) Stardust', Fall Out Boy wanted to bring it back to basics - or as close to basics as a band so fond of an orchestra can get. They returned to pop-punk mecca label Fueled By Ramen, and got back in touch with Neal Avron - the producer they’d last worked with on 2008’s ‘Folie á Deux’.

“It took a long time to get Neal locked down because he doesn’t [produce] much now. He’s a multiGRAMMY-winning mixer,” says Patrick. But, with 15 more years of musical evolution and education behind them, Stump was keen to show Avron what the band could be capable of. “I didn’t know anything about horn arranging when I was 23. Now I

Sknow quite a bit about it, and I was able to bring that to the record and to Neal,” he continues. “I didn’t want to push any specific musical agenda in terms of how [the album] should sound; I wanted to see how the cards fell. I knew that we were such a different bunch of people at this point.”

With regard to the shift that happened once the producer was on board, Stump references film director Sidney Lumet, who once said that you need everyone on a production to feel like they’re making “the same movie”. With Neal Avron, every member of Fall Out Boy was making the same album. “‘M A N I A’ was a really big experiment and I loved making it, but it didn’t have a central producer,” says Patrick. With one in place, they found a missing cohesion. “We could throw anything at him and he was still in the centre, pulling those ideas down to where it all makes sense.” Wentz adds that going back to Avron felt like a homecoming. “It’s like going back to your childhood bedroom, but you know you can go downstairs and drink a beer in front of your parents,” he laughs.

The record came together faster than anyone was anticipating. Flying to LA, in theory just to lay down some initial demos and test the waters, the band immediately found things clicking into place. “That week and a half was so remarkably productive. Some of the songs that ended up on the record were almost completed in that one session,” says Stump. “It was supposed to be us just testing it out, but we came away with almost half of the record completed in one week. That was a big turning point.” The rest, meanwhile, was recorded in the second half of last year, coming off the back of Hella Mega: their monster tour with Green Day and Weezer. “If you’re playing baseball stadiums sandwiched between these two iconic bands, you better put out a good album,” says Wentz. “That experience sharpens the art.”

‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is a true homecoming for Fall Out Boy. On it, they eschew the pop simplicity of 2013’s ‘Save Rock and Roll’ and the chaotic experimentalism of ‘M A N I A’ in favour of something that hits older touchstones without falling victim to nostalgia. It’s a big record, full of orchestras, rock guitars, horn arrangements and the wide range of musical references you’d expect from

“I WANT TO BE A BETTER WRITER OR SINGER, AND THAT’S SOMETHING YOU CAN DO FOREVER. YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BE THE COOL, YOUNG, SEXY THING FOREVER .”PATRICK STUMP

a group of guys with such diverse tastes. The tracks feel touched by influences ranging from ‘70s pop to Danny Elfman to Fiona Apple to ‘80s movie soundtracks, with just enough film references thrown in to make the whole record feel like only one thing: a Fall Out Boy album. The most notable shift, and one older fans will be grateful for, is the return of those verbose lyrics that made the band simultaneously the subject of so much mockery and adoration.

Memes about Stump’s voice, or his difficulty cramming Wentz’s lyrics into a singable form, abound. Mishearings of Fall Out Boy songs - particularly on second LP ‘From Under the Cork Tree’- litter the internet. It got to a point where it really affected the vocalist. “Fall Out Boy being difficult to understand became such a meme and it hurt my feelings, I really internalised it,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, I’m a bad singer and no one can understand what I’m saying’.”

FIELD OF DREAMS

Every single Fall Out Boy record is full of movie references, and ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is no exception. While Reality Bites is at its centre, 1989 Kevin Costner sports classic Field of Dreams is its optimistic counterbalance.

“I think about that moment in Field of Dreams where he’s like, ‘I never got to know my old man until he was old and he never did anything crazy, so that’s why I built the baseball field in the cornfield’,” says Wentz. “I think it’s our responsibility as someone who puts something out in the world to make the world a little bit of a better place and to make people react to that.”

Stump, who first auditioned to be in Fall Out Boy as a drummer, says that the unintelligibility is in part because he wasn’t originally a singer by trade. Despite having one of the clearest, most impressive voices in alternative music from 2003’s ‘Take This to Your Grave’ onwards, he says that he didn’t know how to sing. “I was a drummer and occasional multi-instrumentalist,” he explains. “Pete and Andy [Hurley, drums] were in real bands that really toured, which was legendary to me, so I wasn’t taking the band very seriously. I was like, ‘They’re going to go off on tour. This is really fun for me, but for them it’s a side gig’. I didn’t know what I was doing and I was trying to not get too

emotionally invested. I thought there’s no way this is going to last.”

However, after signing with Island for 2005 breakthrough ‘From Under the Cork Tree’, it became clear that Fall Out Boy was more than a side gig for four hardcore boys from Chicago. With Wentz writing all of the lyrics for that album, he and Stump started getting into arguments about what it was humanly possible to sing. “There are a lot of parts where you can hear the push and pull. There are some lyrics where Pete was like, ‘No, it has to be this word’. I’m like, ‘There is no physical way to sing that word in this many syllables in this many beats’. You’re also trying to bend it so it rhymes, even though it doesn’t. Those vowels get very mushy,” he says. It’s, of course, most audible (and memeable) on ‘Sugar We’re Goin’ Down’, but there’s a charm to their style that touched a generation of teenagersa charm Stump hears now. “It’s interesting hearing the thing form and come together,” he says.

It’s the memes, in part, that necessitated the lyrical simplicity of Fall Out Boy’s post-hiatus records, from ‘Save Rock and Roll’ until now. “I started pushing for more streamlined choruses that were easier to sing and easier to discern,” Patrick explains. “[With this new album], our manager sat me down and said not to do that.” Indeed, it’s clear from ‘So Much (For) Stardust’’s first single, ‘Love From The Other Side’, that the band are shunning the simple choruses of recent years in favour of the verbal dexterousness of old. Wentz references The Avengers: “It was like when Captain America is like, ‘Hulk, smash!’ Let Patrick out of the cage! Patrick, you’re free! Be Fall Out Boy!”

“FALL OUT BOY BEING DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND BECAME SUCH A MEME AND IT HURT MY FEELINGS, I REALLY INTERNALISED IT.”PATRICK STUMP

While the pair do still go back and forth on what it’s possible to sing, they’ve found a middle ground. “Pete is very precious, it’s like The Princess and the Pea,” Patrick says. “He’ll send me these lyric sheets and I’ll change three words to make it fit. He’ll hear it and be like, ‘I got to change those words, I messed it up’. You don’t remember that you didn’t do it, but you know it’s not right.”

20years deep into working together, both Stump and Wentz are candid about how much they used to argue. But it seems almost funny to them now, like they’re looking back on two fiery kids. “There’s something to be said about how, on the earlier records, we fought. I can hear this fighting, and the push and pull in the songs - and that does make for great art, but 20 years later it doesn’t make great art. You’re just two assholes,” says Wentz.

With age has come understanding and a way of working together. Fall Out Boy is still the core four-piece unit it’s always been, and it’s clear that they’ve found a secret to longevity that many bands have not. “Having that trust there allows you to make art in a different way. Going ‘Fuck you, fuck you’ - it’s not sustainable. It ends up being bitter,” says Pete. “So I appreciate that there’s this trust there now.” Patrick adds: “It amazes me when I talk to other bands. Everyone’s got complaints, but the tenor of it is very different when you hear us complain about each other now, because we’re still good friends and we enjoy each other’s company. Sometimes you’ll be out to dinner with another band and you’ll be like, ‘My guy does this’, and they’re like, ‘Don’t you hate him?’ Like no, actually. It’s possible to not have egos and get on pretty well.”

They attribute at least part of that to getting older and becoming parents. With less time to get anything done, they need to be “laser-focused” when rehearsing or recording. “Time away is so important and so much smaller. In some ways I feel like it streamlined the art,” says Wentz. But in part, at least, their continued kinship is due to a lack of ego that takes down so many other bands. Stump puts this down to their pasts in the hardcore scene. “There would be moments where if somebody had the part, they just played it. It didn’t matter what the so-called line-up was. We have the line-up on the record, but there are times where we’ve switched that up because, like, ‘You play it faster, you just do it’. I think that sets a tone for the whole ego thing. That was something, Pete, you really taught me,” Stump says to his bandmate. “If you can play it faster or if you have the groove, just play it. We’re all working towards the vision.” Even on ‘...Stardust’, they’ve switched up who plays which guitar parts. “If we’re gonna fight about this chord or this lyric, we’re never gonna get anything done,” the vocalist shrugs.

Wentz cuts in to make a characteristically niche sports reference. “In the late ‘80s, the hockey team the Redwings imported these Russian players, and they were unbeatable for two years because they play a different style of hockey which is called ‘In service of the puck’. Your job is to help get the puck down to the goal. We try to always operate like that with Fall Out Boy, but this record is the truest spiritual sense of that,” he says. “If you just want attention, you’re going to have it sometimes and you’re going to not have it sometimes. It’s inevitable that at some point you’re going to lose,” adds Stump. “I’m not a competitive person, I never have been. I can’t care enough about winning or the idea of defeating somebody else. But I’ve always been competitive with myself. I want to be a better writer

or singer than I was yesterday, and that’s something you can do forever. But you’re not going to be the cool, young, sexy thing forever. There’s definitely a time limit on that.”

Despite ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ in many ways bringing Fall Out Boy home and back to basics, the band’s eighth is still full of anthemic songs that seem primed for an audience to sing back at them. However, they have a different texture than the stadium tracks on ‘Save Rock and Roll’ or 2015’s ‘American Beauty/American Psycho’ - in a large part down to the more personal nature of the record’s lyrics, which explore neuroses, heartbreak and pandemic anxiety.

“Lyrically, it makes more sense to go deeper now. You go deeper with people, and those people care more, and it makes it that much more anthemic because they believe what they’re singing,” says Pete. An anthemic song doesn’t need to be a general one; if you have a room of 10,000 people singing something that they each personally relate to, it’s going to feel that much bigger. “If it were something you could contrive, you would make the song that was the most palatable to the most people,” he agrees. “But when you get in that cycle, you start to shave off the edges and the identity of it.”

With the album still not out in the world when we talk, neither musician knows what the response to it is going to be. They liken the wait for reaction to lots of things – wine that’s gone bad in the bottle; a dead cat in a gift box – that a person might not like to open. But, if the response to ‘Love From The Other Side’ is anything to go by, they don’t have much to worry about. “I was totally taken aback,” says Patrick. “I was like, ‘This song is too weird, the lyrics are too big, I have an orchestra’. I thought this is going to be a fun song for us, but I don’t know that the audience is going to go for it. But the response has been overwhelming, and I think it goes to show that honesty does better.” Wentz agrees: “In a world of inauthenticity, authenticity cuts through.”

The build-up to the announcement of ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ and the release of ‘Love From The Other Side’ included the band sending out postcards from ‘pink seashell beach’. It’s a reference to Gen-X movie Reality Bites, a pretty nihilistic reference for such a cute image. The album itself features Ethan Hawke’s speech from the movie where he realises that life is essentially meaningless - something Wentz has struggled with. “Every Fall, I get a weird matriculation, like my parents are older, I’m older, my 14-year-old will be moving out soon. Thinking about time speeding, I thought about that specific clip a lot because there’s a danger of going,

‘What’s the fucking point of any of it?’ That's a scary thought. It’s easy to think, ‘We’re in a slow march to the end’,” he says. But this record is a way of working through that nihilism and shaking things up. “You have to do something to break out of that. You have to do something that’s a little bit crazy. You have to sing in the band instead of playing drums. We had to work with Neal again.”

And so, the biggest secret to holding it together after so long, it seems, is as simple as just getting along; as just being a band. “I needed to write with Patrick again,” Wentz considers of fighting the fear and getting back in the ring. “I felt a little shellshocked and wanted to be in my house, but when we’ve gone to play shows since then, we go out and we eat together and hang out. You have to do these things instead of sitting in a hotel room and pondering your inevitable death.” Stump interjects, laughing: “Doesn’t that sound like fun? That’s not your weekend plan?” That push and pull, finding a middle ground between nihilism and optimism, is both the spirit of ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ and of Fall Out Boy as a whole. Long may it continue.

‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is out 24th March via Fueled By Ramen. DIY

COMING DOWN FROM MANIA

Fall Out Boy’s 2018 album ‘M A N I A’ was perhaps the most polarising album of the band’s career. Pete and Patrick look back on their seventh child…

Pete: When we were making ‘M A N I A’ and putting it out, I knew it was going to be a tough one. I think we’re saying important stuff and I know the songs are important, but you can only do that once.

It’s unsustainable. I knew at the time.

Patrick: There’s this drink in Chicago called Jeppson's Malört that’s a rite of passage. It’s very unpleasant, but after you have it, you’re like, I did it! I feel like ‘M A N I A’ was that in a lot of ways. I love ‘MANIA’. I love a lot of the things people don’t like about it. If we were going to do that, I almost regret not going even further. It should have been all ‘Young and Menace’.

Pete: ‘M A N I A’ is a frustrated record that comes from a frustrated place, and it was the hard reset that allowed us to make this record.

“THE PUSH AND PULL IN THE EARLY SONGS MAKES FOR GREAT ART, BUT 20 YEARS LATER IT DOESN’T MAKE GREAT ART. YOU’RE JUST TWO ASSHOLES.” - PETE WENTZ

BURSTING THE

“[Being in a band is] harder than I ever, ever could have planned, and in ways that I would never have imagined.”

- Izzy Bee Phillips

Black Honey have been masters of escapism since their very beginning. Creating cinematic, fantastical worlds that eschew the imagery of the Brighton seaside environment they spawned from, they’ve instead favoured palm trees, symbols of vintage Americana, and the feeling that you’re only ever a few steps away from being in a Tarantino movie. That is, until now.

This time however, on the quartet’s third album ‘A Fistful Of Peaches’, that glitzy, glamorous bubble is bursting; its protective shield giving way to the harsh realities of everyday life. “I’m kind of bored of the whole fantasy Palm Springs thing,” frontwoman Izzy Bee Phillips explains, sitting in a green room in Mannheim, Germany. “Let’s have the story about walking through Tesco and having an argument! That can be as glamorous and fantastical as painting an entire magical universe with swimming pools and flamingos.”

“With the other two albums, we were creating a world around that album, whereas this is the first time where maybe the world we’ve created is actually the one that we live in,” nods guitarist Chris Ostler, sat to her right.

‘A Fistful Of Peaches’ might have both feet firmly in reality, taking listeners deeper than ever into Phillips’ personal experiences and struggles, but it’s far from grey and gloomy. It fizzes with an effervescent glow throughout, songs like ‘Up Against It’ and ‘OK’ gleaming with the energy and euphoria of indie disco favourites. “There’s still a bit of sparkle and elements of cinema, but it’s less [about] taking on the identity of a character in a movie and much more about trying to elevate what I’m really feeling, and voice something that would be scary or intimidating,” Phillips adds. “I think there’s still fantasy in all music, even people that write about real deal shit; even the Sex Pistols were making some sort of rogue glamour out of something that feels like day-to-day.”

Step behind the sheen, though, and Black Honey’s new odes to their day-to-day are devastatingly raw and vulnerable. ‘Heavy’ details the impact of grief, while ‘Out Of My Mind’ explores Phillips’ dissociative experiences. At the time she was writing these songs, she was going through intensive therapy – something that, despite knowing that it’s good for her in the long run, she despises. “It feels like doing the dishes or like a really horrible chore that you’re literally doing everything in your power to try and avoid,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’s still really exhausting and draining, and feels like the slowest, most expensive baby steps of all time towards managing myself better.” At some point, therapy began to feel necessary – a better option than her past coping method of “getting blind drunk to avoid my feelings and being destructive in the most hilarious way possible”.

THE BUBBLE

finds Black Honey backing themselves and ready to face anything.

Words: Rhian Daly. Photos: Louise Mason.

After she began the process of trying to heal, Phillips’ songwriting changed in response. “I can feel when I’m trying to deflect something that my brain naturally wants to talk about, and then I can actually be brave enough to be like, ‘Well, why don’t I talk about that actually really horrific, hard thing?’” she explains. She points to a song like ‘I’m A Man’, which finds her processing her own experiences of sexual assault by embodying the character of a male sexual predator. “The funny thing about that one is it’s so jolly, and no one really catches the fact that it’s making a satire of consent – the literal intro of it is us chanting the word ‘consent’. We came out of writing that one like, ‘That was a heavy day’, but then all our mates who hear it are like, ‘This is fun!’. You can be a lot more honest in songs, I’ve realised.” “I know you came out of those sessions drained,” Ostler says to his bandmate. “It was almost like the sessions were like therapy, in a sense.”

Often, there’s almost an expectation on songwriters and artists in any medium – particularly female ones – to cannibalise their own lives for their art, wringing the life out of every experience,

Lip-sync For Your Life

Izzy talks being out-lip-synced by Drag Race’s Dakota Schiffer on the ‘Heavy’ video.

Izzy: “I am shit at lip-syncing. I’ve never claimed to be good at it, but Dakota came in and the first take was double time. She nailed every word and everyone just looked at me and laughed. It was so impressive, but to be fair, you have to be a genius at lip-syncing to survive Drag Race. Watching her on the telly, we were just so proud – she’s a little angel.”

anecdote and feeling, and putting it on full display for the world to judge and tear apart. “I do see why people feel like that, and I do think about how that could be the case with songs like ‘Corinne’,” Phillips says, referencing one of Black Honey’s first singles - a track detailing the deterioration of a female friendship. “But I think a lot of that feeling depends on what and how you’re processing stuff – for me, it was a mixture of being in the intense depths of therapy and thinking, ‘What words do I need to leave this planet knowing that I’ve said?’ I don’t see the point of just a twinkly pop ditty anymore.”

For the musician, a part of her life “being eaten by the cannibal” feels inevitable because “that’s the whole point of art”. “It’s just a way of trying to process where you are at the time,” she reasons. “Even now, when I look at these songs I do think, ‘Oh wow, I was really sad’. It’s nice to be in a place where I’m looking back on them and being like, ‘I was really sad and actually I’m happier now’. I already look back fondly at the songs like they’re a little sister.”

Right as Black Honey are leaving their fantasy worlds of escapism behind, so too is the illusion of band life as a glamorous world of excess and unbridled fun being torn down. Making a living from music is becoming increasingly trickier, tours are being cancelled left and right due to rising costs and the cost of living crisis, and the whole thing feels like

much more of a slog with far less reward.

“I’m so glad you brought this up,” Phillips says, becoming so animated the proppedup phone she and Ostler are speaking to DIY through begins to wobble. “It’s like everyone’s been in a secret truce for 10 years about pretending to keep the illusion alive.” She reels off a list of things bands are not “supposed” to talk about: day jobs, the reality of touring, essentially anything that makes them seem real. “But we ARE struggling; I would never go back [to the beginning] and tell myself how hard things are still because I just wouldn’t have fucking done it. It’s harder than I ever, ever could have planned, and in ways that I just literally would never have imagined.”

Although Black Honey’s tour schedule can often look gruelling to an outsider, Phillips notes that it’s nothing compared to what some other bands who’ve blown up recently are up to. “I look at Wet Leg’s touring schedule and I feel a bit sick. We’re not in psychotic demand like some of those guys, but some of those things they would really struggle to say no to because you’ve worked up to this point for your whole career – I’d be scared to get more successful for that reason,” she continues. “I don’t know if humans are programmed to cope with the way that these demands are put on them.”

Yet despite all the stress and struggle that the music industry and the political decisions that affect it so severely bring

“I don’t see the point of just a twinkly pop ditty anymore.” -

- Izzy Bee Phillips

to their door, there’s no chance of the band giving in. “I feel like if we were going to be broken by something, it would probably have broken us a long time ago,” Phillips smiles.

“The biggest thing for me is going on tour, meeting fans, seeing people’s reactions to the songs and being on stage with my three best friends playing music that we’ve written,” Ostler says of what keeps him in the game. “It’s still the best feeling in the world. That doesn’t go away and, especially after Covid and not being able to do it for so long, I cherish every gig.”

While the whole world went through the collective wringer over the last few years, Black Honey had their own world-upending problems to get through too. In February 2021, Ostler started having problems with numbness in his limbs and, eventually, went to hospital. He didn’t think too much of it, until a doctor told him he had a herniated disc compressing on his spinal cord and he urgently needed emergency spinal surgery. “If it went wrong, I could have been paralysed from the neck down,” he explains. “It was like my whole world exploded – it was so mad, I couldn’t really comprehend it.”

Two years later, the guitarist is doing much better, although he says he still has “up and down days” and needs to get treatment every now and then. The experience has changed things for him and the whole band. “It’s given us more to be grateful for,” Phillips says. “We still have petty arguments, but I think we’re much more able to rise above the nonsense and bullshit. Once you have bigger problems, you’re like, ‘OK, let’s just stop arguing about this fucking thing and just appreciate that we’re here together and still standing after what happened’.”

“We’re back to our true selves, just doing what we love,” Ostler nods. “It’s just us in a room doing this without any outside expectations or goals that we want to achieve.” Don’t take that to mean this era of Black Honey is about sitting back and meekly letting life happen though. “I’d almost say it’s made us more ambitious,” the guitarist says. “We’ve gone through all that shit, why stop there? Let’s just fucking go for it.”

‘A Fistful of Peaches’ is out 17th March via FoxFive Records. DIY

“This is the first time where maybe the world we’ve created is actually the one that we live in.”

- Chris Ostler

Black Honey: they’re no easy targets.

Putting the personality back into pop, Caity Baser is the future superstar you’ll wish was your best mate.

Interview: Max Pilley. Words: Lisa Wright.

aity Baser isn’t normally one for prolonged silences - or silences of any length, really - but if you’d have spotted the 20-year-old singer at this year’s BRITs, sat on a table with Matty Healy a stone’s throw to her left and Maya Jama to her right, you might have thought the gregarious popstar-in-waiting somewhat reserved.

“When the music was going on I was alright, but the rest of the time I felt really weird, like how on earth am I here?! I was just sitting there, which is very rare for me because I’m quite an erratic person and I talk all the time. But as the night went on I thought, ‘I’m meant to be here and I need to own this’,” she recalls, dialling in a few days after the ceremony from her management’s Piccadilly Circus offices. “I wanna be there next year performing, so it was a spoon-feed of what I could have and what I could be. I visualise everything, so maybe the reason I was so quiet is because I was scheming everything in my brain… In the end, though, I was running around the afterparty in my socks because my feet were hurting so much; it was iconic.”

Born in Southampton - a town and a youth experience that she “hated more than anything in

Today’s chat lands just ahead of the release of Baser’s debut EP ‘Thanks For Nothing, See You Never’: a milestone that she says “makes [her] want to smash something in a nice, happy way”. Full of sweary, sassy tracks that tackle love and sex with a cheeky, observational eye, it’s garnered the singer easy comparisons to Lily Allen and Kate Nash - a generation of pop stars who prioritised personality over perfection - but Caity is keen to be seen as her own entity. “I do love their music because they’re so honest and rude and cheeky and that’s what I’m like,” she says, “but they’re not who I wanna be. I just wanna be me.”

Having grown up in a household soundtracked by the all-time greats (Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Fleetwood Mac, The Carpenters) and citing the likes of SZA, Doja Cat, Aitch and Stormzy as current loves, Baser’s palette is clearly different from the indie-leaning sensibilities of her ‘00s forebears. What connects them, however, is an attitude that stands out from their peers. “I just think, in a world of so many things going on, you have to do something a bit different, or just be honest in your music,” she shrugs. “I find it so hard to dress something up or make it sound metaphorical or poetic. I’m just like, ‘Here’s what’s happened: beginning, middle, end! Here’s how I feel!’

"I feel like my fans are all my mates and I wouldn ' t hide shit from my mates."

The road to Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s fifth album ‘V’ is one littered with palm trees. Where lead single ‘That Life’ quickly swept you away to warmer climates with its breezy guitar ripples and poolside sense of chill, the record it’s housed within comes as an audible bi-product of Ruban Nielson’s move to the desert city of Palm Springs.

After more than a decade of touring and releasing music, the creative genius behind the band had found himself with an urgent need to “hibernate”. “My health was pretty bad and I couldn’t keep touring and touring because I felt like I was kind of killing myself,” Nielson begins, joining DIY over the phone during a trip to Portland. Soon after his rest period began, however, Nielson’s priorities would shift again due to an illness in the family. What started as a self-enforced time for repair became a stretch spent splitting himself between Palm Springs and Hanoi in Hawaii, where his relatives are based. Out of this time came one of the most personal albums the musician has penned to date.

Moving to Palm Springs, Nielson explains, brought up important memories of his childhood, which was partly spent following his entertainer parents as they performed across the Pacific and East Asia - an upbringing Nielson describes as “sort of bohemian”. “When you’re growing up, you don’t think of your childhood as being different from other people’s,” he says. “But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised that my siblings and I grew up in a pretty strange environment.”

With the hedonistic lifestyle that surrounded him normalised, partying and drugs were not uncommon sights for a young Nielson. “Me, my brother and my dad, when we were growing up we had a pretty troubled relationship, and my dad got sober when I left home,” he explains. “He was always a heavy drinker and drug user, so that shaped a lot of how my brother and I grew up.” On ‘V’ however, you’ll find Nielson’s dad credited for playing the saxophone and flute alongside credits for his brother and frequent collaborator Kody: a family affair that also stands as proof of their healed relationship.

“It’s nice; we have something to prove to ourselves that things came out alright,” he nods of the new record. “It’s like a way of repairing the stuff that happened in the past by having these little victories and spending more time together in a more functional kind of way”.

PASTIME PARADISE

It’s this fusion of past and present that fuels much of ‘V’. With Nielson’s heritage split between Hawaii and New Zealand, spending more time in the former led him to lean further into his roots.

Throughout the album you’ll hear occasional elements of HapaHaole music (which translates to ‘half-white’), with the style featuring most prominently on ‘I Killed Captain Cook’, where the slide guitar most associated with the island instantly evokes a sense of tropical escape.

The song is my reinterpretation of slack key guitar and Hawaiian music, and a piece of Hawaiian culture that stands alone,” Nielson says. The song itself was written about the British coloniser James Cook, who charted in New Zealand and ultimately ended up meeting his end in Hawaii. “Bringer of death and disgrace to the ancestral place,” you’ll hear in Nielson’s signature lo-fi, coarse vocals.

A story that tracks his heritage on both sides of the world, on the surface it has a strong anti-imperialist message but don’t read too far into it. “I don’t think it is political, I just think of it as a song from my mother,” he shrugs. “I suppose in some way I’m seeking approval or trying to rejoin this culture that I grew up far away from…”

Throughout the history of UMO, Nielson has been keen to distance himself from political meanings even though songs such as ‘American Guilt’ and ‘How Many Zeros’ may seem that way when taken at face value. Instead, he’d much rather you read his work with a lot less

PARADISE

AFTER A WELL-EARNED REST, UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA’S FIFTH ALBUM ’V’ IS A DEEP DIVE INTO RUBAN NIELSON’S ROOTS.

Words: Matthew Pywell. Photos: Juan Ortiz Arenas.

“AS I’VE GOTTEN OLDER, I’VE REALISED THAT MY SIBLINGS AND I GREW UP IN A PRETTY STRANGE ENVIRONMENT.“ - RUBAN NIELSON

seriousness. Take new track ‘Guilty Pleasures’, which includes the awkwardly funny line, “You were hotter than a cheap old laptop”.

The humour found in Nielson’s lyrics is one of the band’s most understated qualities. “I find it offensive when people try to claim that there’s something solipsistic or serious about my music,” he says.

“Sometimes, when people don’t understand my sense of humour, I just think this person must not be in as much pain as me because they don’t need to laugh as much as I do.”

However, humour isn’t the only misconception about the band. It’s all too easy to think of Unknown Mortal Orchestra as a solo project, where Nielson tinkers away in a basement experimenting with sounds as if he’s trying to bottle lightning. But this air of singularity isn’t true. Alongside his family members, Jacob Portrait is still heavily involved in making the songs come to life. In fact, Nielson believes that he is moving in the opposite direction to Tame Impala - a band often cited as being in a similar realm to his own.

“At one point, Kevin Parker decided that he wanted to be considered the sole

creative force behind Tame Impala,” he suggests. “[Whereas] I’ve been saying, ‘Oh actually, it’s me and my friends’ because I don’t want to succeed alone. It’s hard because I’m quite introverted, but it’s very important to me that I create with people.”

Rather than prioritising art over everything, for Nielson the act of creating music stands primarily as a way to help process what’s happening in the rest of his life. He believes that you have to live in order to create. “The only reason to make art is to document life; if there’s no life there, it becomes harder,” he says. The last few years may have meant that Nielson had to really lean into this theory and put family first, but these lessons have oscillated deep into the fabric of ‘V’. “I’ve always realised that the meaning comes later,” he says of his music. “What I think I’m making is this surreal, abstract stuff that people aren’t going to understand. Then I start to understand that what I’ve made is actually quite confessional and not surreal at all, like [the songs are] actually embarrassingly explicit.”

There is still escapism and abstraction to be found in the grooves of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, with the disco-funk ‘Meshuggah’ serving as a reminder of Nielson’s knack for making his guitar sound as if it never originated on Earth. But on ‘V’ he’s also written an album that dwells where the people - where his people - are.

‘V’ is out 17th March via Jagjaguwar. DIY

“I find it offensive when people try to claim that there’s something solipsistic or serious about my music.“- Ruban Nielson

Ask your typical pop-punk band for their influences and their answers will largely be similar: Green Day, Blink-182, Sum 41, and the list goes on. US breakthrough stars (and recent DIY Class of 2023 inductees) Meet Me @ The Altar, however, tend to answer rather differently. Raised by the pop-rock powerhouses of the late 2000s, the trio found inspiration for this month’s debut album ‘Past // Present // Future’ in women with huge voices and massive choruses to match.

“It wasn’t ‘til we started writing this album that we realised how much the music [you hear at] an early age influences you, even subconsciously,” says the band’s vocalist Edith Victoria. “When we were trying to figure out what we wanted this record to sound like, we always found ourselves going back to those songs from our early childhood.”

Another pivotal part of the trio’s childhoods was the Disney Channel, whose

Interview: Emma Wilkes.

straight-to-television films often featured a catchy, guitar-driven soundtrack. Although the songs might not have been taken as seriously because they were tied to the home of Mickey Mouse (and, arguably, were marketed largely towards young girls), listen again and it becomes obvious that they were never called for what they were: pop punk to the core. MM@TA also paid homage to this part of their musical upbringing even further by enlisting the services of producer John Fields, who had previously worked with Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers.

It's a style the band have coined ‘Disneycore’, filled with the cosy warmth of late noughties nostalgia, but still maintaining a shiny, modern sound. We asked Edith, guitarist/ bassist Téa Campbell and drummer Ada Juarez to share the tracks from their own past and present that have influenced the future of the band.

‘Past // Present // Future’ is out 10th March via Fueled By Ramen. DIY

WELCOME TO

Interview: Emma Wilkes. Photo: Ben Bentley.

Kelly Clarkson ‘Walk Away’

Edith: This was a song that I forgot about, but then recently found again because I was looking through a load of [old music]. She’s just such an incredible vocalist. She’s one of my favourite vocalists and always has been, and [‘Walk Away’ is from] my favourite Kelly Clarkson era [2004’s ‘Breakaway’].

Everlife ‘Go Figure’

Edith: ‘Go Figure’ was my favourite movie for the longest time, and Everlife had a whole soundtrack CD and I played it over and over again. Writing this record, we found it again, and it’s like a big nostalgia hug. It uses an Ebow and that’s a big reason why it sounds so nostalgic. We used an Ebow on our song ‘Rocket Science’ and it has the same type of happy feeling. Ada: “It adds so much emotion to it. [It feels like] you’re part of the song and you’re crying at the end of a Disney movie.

Demi Lovato

‘La La Land’

Ada: I'll never forget when I first heard that song, and it blew my mind because it was a Disney song. A lot of people may immediately think a Disney song [would be] pop and kind of boring and basic. But ‘La La Land’ is so complex for some reason. I don't know why - the drumming goes crazy, and Demi is just singing their heart out. I feel like the energy in that song is something I always channelled into [music] when it comes to how energetic it is, the vibe of it, how it's so catchy, but yet still technical.

Katy Perry ‘Waking Up In Vegas’

Ada: Why is that song so good! She put something in that! I think a lot of our songs have the same vibe as that. I feel like we are giving pop-rock anthems. I think she was inspired by the same people as us, she just went down a more pop route as time went by. In an alternative universe, Katy Perry would be a hardcore artist today.

Jonas Brothers ‘Hold On’

Téa: I remember watching the premiere of [Disney Channel TV film] Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board and ‘Hold On’ was used in it. I was like, ‘This song is bumping!’ It just has all the dynamics – it’s stoppy in the verses but has a driving chorus. We've always loved them. We were fortunate enough to have this album be produced by the same producer [John Fields] who did that stuff. That was really cool.

P!nk

‘U and Ur Hand’

Edith: I think we were all too young to understand what she was talking about [when we first heard the song]. It’s very much a feminist anthem - she's just talking about being at a bar, just trying to have fun when these dudes keep hitting on her, and she’s like ‘Go masturbate because I'm not gonna do anything to you’. We went into a session and wrote a song that was P!nk-inspired because we loved her so much, and we wrote ‘Thx 4 Nothin’. She is a natural born rock star, and that song is so timeless.

Hilary Duff ‘Little Voice’

Edith: She was a rockstar. I just love the rockstar era of certain artists because they really killed it. The same writers who did ‘Go Figure’ actually did that song and it’s just really good writing – it’s super simple, but it's so simple that it feels familiar, and everyone can understand it.

Christina Vidal ‘Take Me Away’

Téa: We were four years old, having our minds blown [by that song]!

Edith: [Original artist, Lash] blocked Freaky Friday from being able to put it on Spotify because it got so popular and not because of them. It’s just funny.

Téa: There's something about that riff that is just absolutely insane. I wish I wrote that. It’s just so good, and it's not the conventional four-chordsand-repeat; it’s a breath of fresh air almost. And we just love that song so much. When we’re on tour, it gets us hyped.

LISTEN TO THE FULL PLAYLIST OVER ON SPOTIFY.

TALKING ‘BOUT THEIR GENERATION

Rather than reinvent the wheel, SLEAFORD MODS have spent a career whittling it evermore to their own shape. ‘UK GRIM’ is its most fully-formed incarnation yet: rolling the band further down their own inimitable lane. Words: Lisa Wright. Photos: Louise Mason.

Sleaford Mods’ bearded beat-maker Andrew Fearn is sitting on a bench, just around the corner from the band’s Nottingham studio HQ, trying to make a point about pop music. “Who’s the ginger guy?” he questions, scrabbling in the back annals of his brain as we suggest Ed Sheeran and bandmate Jason Williamson breaks into laughter. “Yeah, all that kind of shit. He’s just making escapist pop tunes, and that’s what we’re faced with because that’s what sells. It’s the opposite end of what we’re doing, so it’s surprising that anyone even likes us…”

If the discrepancy between Sheeran and Sleaford Mods’ antagonistic, minimal, political, electronic punk hybrid hardly needs highlighting, then the greater point Fearn is making is clearly about the perhaps surprising trajectory of the duo themselves. Since releasing breakthrough seventh record ‘Divide and Exit’ in 2014, the band’s popularity has grown steadily, album upon album. 2021’s ‘Spare Ribs’ brought with it a UK Top Five chart placing, an Ivor Novello nomination and their biggest live shows to date - culminating in a gigantic hometown gig at Nottingham Motorpoint Arena and a London festival headline; for a band who sound like the absolute opposite of the mainstream, Sleaford Mods have increasingly begun, through no real inclination or acquiescence of their own, to infiltrate it.

“I was rehearsing yesterday and I thought, why do people like this singing? Regardless of Andrew’s music, which is very good, why do people like this fucking blunt, rank, local dialect? This growly bullshit?” says Williamson. “I got quite down on it because I can’t be anything else. When I’m on stage, I can’t walk around and pretend; you’ve got to be yourself and everything you’ve been brought up with, everything you believe in, comes out. It keeps feeding it.

“I’m aware of the fact that I live in a nice leafy suburb of Nottingham now, and I’m a lot happier [these days], but I think if you experience what it’s like to be at the bottom then it always stays with you,” he continues. “It might not, some people it doesn’t, but with my lyrics it’s stayed with me, and the idea of the reality and the truth of the world peppers everything.”

Indeed, though they note an increased appetite for collaboration and “slightly better quality, more variation” in their production over the years, Sleaford Mods’ greatest skill has been in understanding the value of being resolutely, steadfastly themselves. Fearn still handles all the production; the band are still based out of an ex-fruit and potato merchants building in the town where they met. This month’s new album ‘UK GRIM’, meanwhile, tackles Williamson’s go-to topics of social turmoil, political fury and the conveyor belt of hopelessness that constitutes our modern news cycle with his customary mix of

"I THINK IF YOU EXPERIENCE WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE AT THE BOTTOM THEN IT ALWAYS STAYS WITH YOU.” - JASON WILLIAMSON

“A LOT OF ROCK MUSIC IS MEN LIVING IN A VIKING FANTASY WORLD, AND THIS IS THE OPPOSITE

anger and hilarity. Their concession to anything resembling publicity ‘theatrics’ this time around is a mural of the album sleeve, painted by a local graffiti artist on the side of a Nottingham backstreet wall, with their faces purposefully melted and unsettling.

“We’ve nurtured our own sound, and that’s something we’ve got going for us. A band like Mogwai are brilliant because they just do what they do. I asked a friend which Mogwai album I should buy and he said, ‘Just buy one, they’re all the same’,” says Fearn as Williamson chuckles: “We’re a bit like that, aren’t we!” “They’ve got their own sound so they can do that. They can say, ‘Fuck you all; we’re not gonna subscribe to whatever you think and we’re just gonna do our music’,” Fearn continues.

“I think Andrew’s music is wild; it’s an untainted forest that grows in whatever direction it wants to,” Williamson grins. “There’s nothing wrong with getting other songwriters and producers in if that’s what suits the artist, but a lot of the time it doesn’t. They just do it because they don’t have any fucking ideas.”

Ideas and opinions are something that ‘UK GRIM’’s lyrics clearly aren’t lacking. “It’s not enough to just shout, ‘Boris is a cunt! Boris is a cunt!’” the vocalist barks with a customary Sleafords delivery. Pause. “I mean, it’s got a ring to it…” From the petty thievery of ‘Tilldipper’ to ‘Right Wing Beast’, which speaks to a society slowly eating its own tail, the singer’s pen is a sharp as ever and none more so perhaps than on ‘D.I.Why’ - not, thankfully, a treatise on this particular publication but on Williamson’s online tiffs with a certain type of holierthan-thou punk band. “That’s just me slagging people off, and I’m not right and I’m not wrong,” he shrugs. “There’s too much of this earnest, ‘We need to pull together to do this’ bullshit, and as soon as some of these people get integrated into the industry then it’s largely forgotten.”

Though Sleaford Mods evidently don’t pay much heed to awards ceremonies and chart placings, the fact that their journey towards recognition has been infinitely lengthier, more hard-fought and often less rewarded than many of their peers clearly still smarts. Williamson recalls finding out that 2015 LP ‘Key Markets’ had missed out on a Mercury Prize nomination. “I was fucking fuming. And they filleted Slaves in at the last minute; I was really fucking mad,” he says, calling back to numerous interviews around the album in which he’d claimed the Tunbridge Wells duo had ripped off their sound.

Even now, despite objective public popularity and critical acclaim, Sleaford Mods’ trophy shelf is largely empty. Why, we ask, do they think that is? “Because we’re too abrasive still for some people. Because we don’t fully play the game, and also because we’re quite original. Most bands that get inducted into nomination lists or accepted into the top tier hierarchy - GRAMMY nominations, larger arenas, headlines blah blah blah - are still very much clichéd outfits,” the vocalist replies. “It’s frustrating sometimes because obviously what we’ve done is so apparent in people’s work and they, for some reason, have become a lot bigger, quicker.

And some of them have a massive machine behind them and others haven’t, but the more I learn about this job, the more I realise that a mass audience just wants a relatively simple message.”

In some ways, what Sleaford Mods do IS simple. ‘UK GRIM’’s title track kicks off with staccato barks and ominous, repetitive beats; ‘Don’ utilises a drum machine and a skeletal riff that sounds purposefully tinny; ‘Tilldipper’ is predominantly based around two notes. Throughout the record, Williamson cuts an angry figure, raging at the outside world and at himself with titles such as ‘Smash Each Other Up’ and ‘On The Ground’ - tracks that he says manifested from a lot of “violent fantasies” dreamt up at the tail end of lockdown, when frustration was at an all-time high.

“There was a lot of daydreaming, a lot of fantasies about people that were annoying you online, or people that you’d come across when you walked out the house - which for me was a result of being pent up, stressed, having a lot of anxiety,” he recalls. “I started to realise, ‘Oh, this is anxiety. This is what that is’. Whereas before I’d never really identified with it. There’s a lot of that in there.”

‘UK GRIM’ is undoubtedly a furious record, filled with aggression and tearing its hair out at the state of everything including themselves. But within its 14 tracks are also moments of vulnerability and selfanalysis nestled within the dry wit and one-liners - nuances that, they explain, are sometimes lost in the public perception of their band. “Men don’t deal with things very well, they don’t talk about things, which is one of the things that’s great about what Jason is doing: he’s actually exposing himself lyrically in a way that’s probably relatable to a lot of people,” says Fearn. “And because it’s put in an artistic way, some people might think it’s naïve, but there’s probably men that get a lot out of it because instead of having ‘men sessions’ which is never gonna happen, you can hear someone talk about it instead of whatever Metallica talk about…

“A lot of rock music is men living in a viking fantasy world where they all think they’re Thor, and this is the opposite of that,” he continues. “There’s a lot of naïvety about what me and Andrew are and what we represent, which is just normal life,” Williamson shrugs.

Far from the extremities associated with your average punk rock cliché, these days Sleaford Mods’ life is even more normal than most. Williamson has been clean and sober for seven years, his wobbles now directed towards a lockdown habit of buying expensive secondhand casualwear that “got a bit obsessive” and is documented in new track ‘Pit to Pit’ (“Hide it in the wardrobe/ My partner thinks I’m being secretive and I am…”). Every day, he tries to get up at 4.45am to get to the gym for 6am; “If I’m in bed by 10pm,” he says, “I feel great.”

Sleaford Mods began amongst far darker scenes, where art and substances were the only salves for a life that the vocalist describes as “not fucking destitute, but we didn’t have a lot”. When the duo talk about their background still permeating everything they do, it’s because those memories of struggling and self-medicating against a government that continues to do the most vulnerable people wrong are still visible, littered along the streets they walk down daily - albeit it from a healthier place that they’ve tenaciously fought tooth and nail to reach. Both now in their fifties, it’s been a long road.

“I do think about the fact that we’ve made our way out of it in a way. It’s hard not to,” Fearn muses. “I literally was thinking yesterday that the fact that we make money from art is a privilege. But then I’ve worked really hard to make it happen, doing loads of shit part-time work to have time for music; I sacrificed a lot of living. People that get on a treadmill of working six days a week so they can eat out and drink out and consume, which is just that hamster wheel - it takes a lot of effort to think, ‘No, I’m gonna go completely against the grain to not even think like that’.”

“We didn’t have anything; we had fuck all. I regret taking drugs, and the only reason I don’t regret it is because it led to meeting Andrew and forming Sleaford Mods,” Williamson says firmly. “But I’m a big believer in the idea that you can pull it back and get better.”

‘UK GRIM’ is out 10th March via Rough Trade. DIY

OF THAT.”ANDREW FEARN

- JASON WILLIAMSON

“I THINK ANDREW’S MUSIC IS WILD; IT’S AN UNTAINTED FOREST THAT GROWS IN WHATEVER DIRECTION IT WANTS TO.”

AN ALBUM OF BOLD CHOICES.

UGLY (Method)

Historically, when a beloved artist has announced something of a swerve in direction, the response from long-term fans is split. When Alex Turner opted to open the lounge door into Arctic Monkeys’ suave era, a decent portion of indie diehards checked out of the Tranquility Base Hotel; when Bob Dylan dared plug in his guitar for the first time, he was famously booed by supporters who hadn’t signed up for this sort of newfangled tomfoolery. And though Northampton boy slowthai has always had a punk side to him - his pair of collabs with Mura Masa (2018’s ‘Doorman’ and the following year’s ‘Deal Wiv It’) and Gorillaz team-up ‘Momentary Bliss’ providing some of his most memorable moments - until now he’s been largely associated with the hip hop world.

In the run up to third LP ‘UGLY’, however, Ty has been heralding the release as his ‘alternative’ album. “This album was me trying to emulate the spirit of the brotherhood ethos that bands have,” he declared upon its announcement. ‘UGLY’’s cast of co-conspirators cement the idea: where 2021 predecessor ‘Tyron’ featured the likes of Skepta, A$AP Rocky and Deb Never, ‘UGLY’ brings in Fontaines DC, Jockstrap’s Taylor Skye and Beabadoobee guitarist Jacob Bugden. If there was any last question over slowthai’s intent, omnipresent producer and Speedy Wunderground head honcho Dan Carey is helming the desk.

Clearly, it’s an itch the musician has been wanting to scratch but, more than that, his new embrace of throbbing punk bile and melodic melancholy is the perfect vehicle for an album rooted in neuroses and introspection. Undoubtedly, the delivery might not be all his old fans’ cup of tea, but ‘UGLY’ arrives as slowthai’s most exploratory, varied and exciting body of work yet. Opening with the juddering electronic panic attack of ‘Yum’ - all heavy breathing, stream-of-consciousness lyrics about therapy and pulsing, PVA-like beats - it sets the scene for an album of bold choices. ‘Fuck It Puppet’ is a paranoid, twitchy conversation with the devil on his shoulder and ‘Wotz Funny’ comes on like ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ 2.0, whereas ‘Falling’ is an epic slowburn of catharsis; ‘Never Again’, meanwhile, begins with the crackled croon of Ethan P Flynn before Ty reflects on the jarring 180-turn his life has taken like a next-gen Mike Skinner.

Indeed, if there’s a holy trinity of influences that seem to preside over ‘UGLY’, it’s Skinner, Ty’s pal Damon Albarn and the people’s poet Jamie T. ‘Feel Good’’s sing-song irony feels like something Gorillaz would get animated about, while the album’s Fontaines-featuring title track builds the band’s shoegazey guitars around meditative, lyrically-dextrous verses and a pained howl of a climax. But really, slowthai’s newest is the work of an artist clearly more excited than ever about what he himself can do now he’s booted his own doors wide open. ‘UGLY’ is a beautiful thing to behold. (Lisa Wright) LISTEN: ‘UGLY’, ‘Yum’

 CAROLINE POLACHEK Desire, I Want To Turn Into You (Perpetual Novice)

You’ll be hard pushed to find an album that sounds anything like ‘Desire, I Want To Turn Into You’, the seventh release by alt-pop empress Caroline Polachek, and the second under her own name. Built around the unmistakable concept of spiralling, it leans further into the traditionalism that underpinned the more folk-inspired parts of 2019’s ‘Pang’, pairing her distinctive style with an onslaught of curveballs that cover everything from classical Spanish to award-winning bagpipes. Look no further than the Grimes and Dido featuring ‘Fly To You’ - a swirling trip hop fantasy - for a small glimpse of Caroline’s beautifullycrafted, wide-cast net. Produced alongside Danny L Harle in a series of small rooms, ‘Desire…’ walks its own path from the otherworldly beginnings of ‘Welcome To My Island’, with the outright pop of ‘Pang’’s ‘So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings’ submerged into the rhythm of ‘Bunny Is A Rider’ and the industrial disco of ‘I Believe’. The softer one-two of ‘Hopedrunk Everasking’ and ‘Butterfly Net’ mirror their titles with folk-adjacent beauty. Each touch on conventional styles but make a deliberate leap sideways into the new; a pattern that has underpinned both Caroline and Danny’s pivotal careers. ‘A Crude Drawing Of An Angel’, both a song title and a subtle depiction on the album’s cover, offers an accurate insight into ‘Desire…’, a record that creates ethereal beauty through spiralling tones and that deliberately reaches a little to the left of perfect. It embraces the unconventional with resounding ease, finding its voice in the skilled hands of two of pop’s most forward-thinking pioneers, both busy rethinking just what it can be. (Ben Tipple) LISTEN: ‘Fly To You’

A RECORD THAT DELIBERATELY REACHES A LITTLE TO THE LEFT OF PERFECT.

ALBUMS

 100 GECS

10,000 gecs (Dog Show / Atlantic)

 KALI UCHIS

Red Moon In Venus (Geffen)

“It’s Valentine’s like every day,” sings Kali Uchis on the infatuating ‘Endlessly’, a lovey-dovey funk track that summarises this swoonworthy third studio album. “Love is the message,” she says. During a romantically paced narrative of rose-tinted infatuation, Kali portrays a lovestruck protagonist over gentle R&B and neo soul, with whispers of bossa nova and soft pop – really, doing what she does best. The angelic ‘Worth the Wait’ - which features a guest spot from Omar Apollo - follows the effervescent ‘I Wish You Roses’, while later, the sensual disembodied voices of ‘Como Te Quiero Yo’ and dreaminess of ‘Hasta Cuando’ conjure lovesickness and romantic euphoria until heart-shaped chocolates and pink faux-fur cushions sprawl across the image of a Valentine’s suite. Largely, the record is gentler than the Kali we know from previous endeavours, with a little less liveliness than usual, but in slowing things down her velvety vocals become hypnotic, and its romantic lo-fi beats appear all-the-more colourful. A few smokier moments of trap pop elsewhere add attitude (see ‘Moral Conscience’ and ‘Deserve Me’ with Summer Walker). Ultimately, Kali’s intention to create a timeless album about love is met with expected ease. (Otis Robinson) LISTEN: ‘Worth the Wait’

In the eight years they’ve been creating music together, Dylan Brady and Laura Les’ 100 gecs has become almost synonymous with the word hyperpop; the mere mention of their name conjuring thoughts of pitched-up autotuned lyrics, chaotic production glitches and insanely catchy pop bangers. When debut album ‘1000 gecs’ crash-landed back in May 2019, it catapulted the duo from online buzz to mainstream consciousness, racking up millions of streams, with the tree on the record’s cover even becoming a go-to fan hot-spot. Although not all of the reactions were entirely positive (Laura told us back in 2020 of an interaction with a gig onlooker: “They held Dylan down and were like, ‘Come here, come here. You fucking SUCK!’”), it’s hard to deny the impact gecs have had on pop, the pair having teamed up with some of the genre’s biggest leftfield names (AG Cook, Dorian Electra, Charli XCX) for 2020’s remix album ‘1000 gecs and The Tree Of Clues’. Nearly three years on, Dylan and Laura are set to cement their place at the forefront of pop’s boundary-pushers.

Initially set for release early last year, at the time Laura described ‘10,000 gecs’ as “10 times as good as the last one”. She’s right - and not just in reference to the album title. ‘10,000 gecs’ is a thrilling ride from start to finish, catapulting through genres across 10 unrelenting and imaginative bangers. From opening with the iconic THX movie intro before descending into a thrashing guitar solo on ‘Dumbest Girl Alive’, the pair never take their foot off of the accelerator. ‘757’ and ‘Mememe’ are both glitch pop-leaning earworms, while ‘Hollywood Baby’ and ‘Billy Knows Jamie’ see the duo incorporate rock elements to form mosh-pit ready anthems, Laura even flexing her screamo vocal chords at the latter’s end. Never taking themselves too seriously, ‘Frog On The Floor’ could almost be a children’s TV show theme tune as the pair deliver an ode to the titular amphibian (“I heard you met my friend the other weekend / Heard he was telling croaks at the party”), while the seemingly-poignant ballad intro of ‘I Got My Tooth Removed’ opens with the lyrics “You were tough, unforgiving, made me cry all the time”, it quickly twists into a brilliantly batshit tale about dental problems. It’s a mad mix of genres, themes and sounds; throughout ‘10,000 gecs’, Dylan and Laura throw out pretty much everything possible. While on paper this approach probably shouldn’t work, gecs have already proved that it does and on ‘10,000 gecs’ they’ve done it once again. (Elly Watson) LISTEN: ‘Dumbest Girl Alive’

MIMI WEBB

Amelia (Epic)

After a rapid breakthrough, and with production credits from the likes of Corkut (Ava Max, The Weeknd) and Stuart Price (Madonna, Dua Lipa, Kylie Minogue), there are high expectations for Mimi Webb’s debut. And there’s no deficit of fun, hairbrush lip-sync anthems on ‘Amelia’: assertive opener ‘The Other Side’ rides the synthy zeitgeist as she deals with a break-up, and cutesy late-‘00s radio earworm ‘See You Soon’ sees the singer come to terms with it. Meanwhile, the familiar balladry of ‘Roles Reversed’ and ‘Last Train to London’ capture the existentialism that accompanies young love. Occasionally, though, this is a record which suffers under the constraints of its reliable mainstream pop architecture. Thematically, there’s little beyond the uninterrupted post-break-up-self-discovery narrative, while the album’s nearconstant punchy pop hits leave a slight concussion. Those expectations built by her collaborators - who aided artists like Dua and Kylie in carving revered pop niches - weigh detrimentally on the record: it doesn’t push itself nearly as far. Yet, undeniably, it’s a dependable, invigorating debut (chock full of unforgettable earworms) and its strengths lie in its biggest moments: particularly, those with

 MEET ME @ THE ALTAR

Past // Present // Future (Fueled By Ramen)

Meet Me @ The Altar are as nostalgic as anyone. With the cost of living rising ever higher and a climate crisis rearing its ugly head, who could be blamed for evoking a rose-tinted view of a simpler time? On this long-awaited debut, the trio rewrite the meaning of pop-punk revival, employing the sounds of the latenoughties Disney Channel alumni as a springboard and leaving the Blink-182 copycats in the dust in the process. It’s a smart move, lending the likes of sassy

ALBUMS

UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA V (Jagjaguwar)

The chemical constitution of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s sound is a potent one - equal parts crunchy drums, twangy psych-guitar and Ruban Nielson’s gloriously husky vocal. It’s a warm fuzzy world which is further traversed across ‘V’, their first proper studio album since 2018’s ‘Sex & Food’. Billed as a double album, the tracklisting is well paced, with instrumental tracks cleansing the atmosphere at regular intervals - ‘The Widow’ is propelled by chugging guitar before splintering into a soul-flecked breakdown that’s rounded off with a sax solo. It’s an album of well-connected multitudes. While also containing some of the outfit’s most wig-out material, it also contains some of their best straight-forward pop songs - ‘That Life’ featuring a sunny guitar lead, ‘Weekend Run’ with its irresistible lyrical hook, and highlight ‘The Beach’ architected by a fantastic tumbling funk-guitar sequence. While occasionally the shared DNA between songs makes it a little hard to orientate yourself, it’s an enjoyable album to get lost in. Nostalgic images of Ruban’s childhood on the road with his parents slip into frame and are well-lit by its warm sonics: “Do you ever look back at me in the rear view?” he asks. While ‘V’ has the tendency to revisit some familiar ground, it achieves what the best double albums do - plants solid gems along the road, envelops the listener with clever sequencing tricks and builds a whole world to roam. (Sean Kerwick) LISTEN: ‘The Beach’

‘Say It (To My Face)’ and the adoring ‘Kool’ a shot of pop-rock sweetness that never even threatens to become sickly. Elsewhere, ‘It’s Over for Me’ blends MM@TA’s heavier past and poppier present into a spiky package meant for dancing away the angst to, while ‘Thx 4 Nothin’’s carefree groove has fascinating shades of 2010s P!nk that sound like they were always meant to belong. Indeed, ‘Past // Present // Future’ does what it says on the tin in a masterful way, melding the influences of the past into something that sounds shiny and modern, and achieving the rare feat of making pop punk still sound distinctive. (Emma Wilkes) LISTEN: ‘Thx 4 Nothin’

ACHIEVING THE FEAT OF MAKING POP PUNK STILL SOUND DISTINCTIVE.

ALBUMS

 YVES TUMOR

Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)

(Warp)

Much like its elongated and frankly bemusing title, ‘Praise a Lord...’ is a reflection of Yves Tumor’s unknowing. Chewing on the words “There’s parts of me I still don’t even know” on breakthrough single ‘God Is A Circle’, it’s apparent that Yves inhabits a spectral plane, one that eschews them from simple, throwaway labels. The shrewd pop outsider has long fluctuated between power pop, trip hop and glam metal, but on ‘Praise A Lord…’ they flip the script, reinventing themself as a songwriter by stripping back their usually swelling instrumental cushion and incorporating Americana (’Meteora Blues’), post-punk (’Operator’) and far more comprehensible lyrics than those on 2021’s ‘The Asymptomatical World’. Their blunt, affecting lyrics on ‘Praise A Lord…’ separates them from other leftfield pop acts, somehow creating grounding, brutal love songs amid the flurry of dance-pop and industrial noise. Over the last half-decade, Yves has carved out their own, trailblazing sound amid the racket of modernity and it truly feels like an awakening. Trapped somewhere between visceral punk, Oneohtrix Point Never and Dean Blunt, ‘Praise A Lord…’ is in fact like no other. (Alisdair Grice) LISTEN: ‘Meteora Blues’

IT TRULY FEELS LIKE AN AWAKENING.

 TECHNOLOGY + TEAMWORK We Used To Be Friends (Good Way)

If there were such a thing as analogue AI, it might birth something like Technology + Teamwork. The debut from the pair – Sarah Jones and Anthony Silvester, who previously collaborated as part of late-‘00s post-punk outfit XX Teens (and if that first name sounds familiar, yes it’s she of New Young Pony Club, and most infamously, the powerhouse drummer behind Harry Styles’ live presence) – is both weathered and chrome, like lost tapes spanning decades of genre, gathered by a time traveller and burned into an alien Walkman. It’s bravely ambitious, if a little difficult to pin down, never sticking around at its destinations for long. There’s throwback funk on ‘You Saw Something In Me’, which at its chorus shirks into baroque-pop. Later, ‘Moving Too’ throws hyperpop at the wall to see if it sticks, while ‘Amsterdam’ is a crackling horror video game theme. Then there’s the instrumental ‘Oh Oh’, a sci-fi scene-setter with hints of SOPHIE, and the David Bowie-adjacent outro ‘What A Year’. At first it’s a lot, but once the whiplash settles, its intentions are clear: to experiment with improvisation, uncertainty, randomness and rule. Stand-outs include the very filthy, leathery ‘And So…’; ‘Big Blue’, another funk hit with an icy, modern twist; and its title track, a massive, celestial, existential banger. Although a little anxious to settle, ‘We Used To Be Friends’ is nevertheless fearless and irreverent, and in many ways, totally ahead of its time. (Otis Robinson) LISTEN: ‘We Used To Be Friends’

 DEBBY FRIDAY

GOOD LUCK (Sub Pop)

That Debby Friday’s musical roots are in the club is immediately evident on this debut album, the title track opening with an industrial beat that’s sticky, sweaty and definitely underground. “Don’t you fuck it up,” she repeats, almost as if a message to herself as well as the dark void. The Nigerian-Canadian shows a skilful way with textures across the record’s ten tracks, whether via voice (the coquettish irony of ‘So Hard To Tell’, the pitch-play of ‘Safe’, the jazzy elements on show in ‘What A Man’) or electronics. ‘I Got It’ clamours into view and doesn’t let up, its line of “Let mama give you what you need” emerging all-powerful. ‘Heartbreakerrr’ juxtaposes playground melody and gritty delivery, while ‘Pluto Baby’ bears more than a passing resemblance to the take-no-shit Beyoncé of ‘Formation’ with its musical and vocal ferocity. ‘Good Luck’ is undoubtedly at its best when Debby is going full-pelt to evoke those early-noughties electroclash moods, but there’s barely a misplaced beat throughout. (Louisa Dixon) LISTEN: ‘I Got It’

ALBUMS

RECO MMEN D E D

Missed the boat on some the best albums from the last couple of months? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

 KELE

The Flames pt. 2 (KOLA / !K7)

If 2021’s ‘The Waves pt. 1’ reflected Kele Okereke’s navelgazing, introspective side, then ‘The Flames pt. 2’ - by name, a sequel to that record - is his extroversion at work. Weaving a path between his internal dialogue (’I’m in Love

With an Outline’ detailing the development of a crush in a supermarket), unfiltered observations (’True Loves No Death’; ‘Her Darkest Hour’) and controlled fury (“I’m breathing fire / I’m taking names,” begins ‘Vandal’, an undeniably funky track with the kind of insistent drumsand-bassline combination that James Murphy would tap a toe to), Kele’s stories are vivid. He uses minimal instrumentation - it’s just him, his guitar and a drum machine throughout - the sometimes simple nature of which adds a playful tone to his tales, however dark. It also creates a sense of claustrophobia at points, most effectively via ‘He Was Never The Same Again’, a stabbing, discordant guitar and ominous bassline ideal for the song’s lyrics: “It plays in his brain / Over and over again.” Kele surely never intended ‘The Flames’ to be an easy, simple listen: for a one-man show, there’s a lot going on, both in and outside his stream-of-consciousness narrative. And on that, it achieves its aims; it’s uneasy, skittish, unsure of itself one second, strident the next. If the limited sonic textures are intended to evoke that sense of taking the same route on one’s once-daily walk, it works, but it could do with a bit more variety. (Bella

Martin)

FALL OUT BOY

So Much (For) Stardust (Fueled By Ramen /

Elektra)

YOUNG FATHERS

Heavy Heavy

The trio’s return is unique, raw and totally joyous.

LISTEN: ‘He Was Never The Same Again’

 M83

Fantasy

(Virgin Records France)

At one end, M83 is the massive synthscape of ‘Midnight City’, a track with almost ten times the audience of anything else from his two decades of releases thanks to its many television appearances. At the other, it’s the ambient-adjacent solo project of Anthony Gonzalez whose smaller sounds have soundtracked the big screen. That ‘Fantasy’ was recorded with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Wolf Alice, Paramore) alongside M83 multi-instrumentalist Joe Berry does indeed give that “band feel” he was after: there’s a rhythmic immediacy to the likes of ‘Sunny Boy’ and ‘Oceans Niagara’, a ‘70s soft rock lilt to ‘Radar, Far Gone’, ‘Deceiver’ and a pervasive warmth that’s only punctuated by ‘Amnesia’, a track which - with its ‘Atmosphere’referencing opening and hollow guitar sound - is as if Joy Division were also joy by nature. Elsewhere ‘EIGHT’ takes on a disco hue with a decidedly funky bassline, while ‘Us and the Rest’ makes like Bon Iver-doing-Twin Peaks, building to a subtle-yet-epic conclusion. Like many other soundtracks, ‘Fantasy’ creates a mood - nostalgic; euphoric - and there’s a clear thread throughout that ties these thirteen tracks together. But soundtracks are also often intended to feature in the background, and ultimately ‘Fantasy’ too easily fades into one.

(Louisa Dixon) LISTEN: ‘Amnesia’

JESSICA WINTER

Limerence

Musical Picasso: vibrant, paradoxical, and all-in-all exuberant.

MIU ZYU

Rotten Bun For An Eggless Century

All the intimacy of bedroom indie with the stained-glass sublimities of dream pop.

To think of Fall Out Boy as the elder statesmen of an entire genre might seem particularly strange to those who’ve followed their twenty year career so far, but their far-reaching influence on the rock scene they’ve helmed since the early ‘00s is unquestionable. Across seven albums, the quartet continued to rally against stereotypes, in search of a continually fresh and creative approach to their brand of pop-imbued punk. Whether enlisting Elton John to appear on 2013’s ‘Save Rock and Roll’, or Wyclef Jean and Lil Peep on tracks from ‘Believers Never Die (Part Two)’, they’ve always been a band with a plot twist up their sleeve. So, in 2023, with their latest full-length - and first in five years - there’s something intensely satisfying about the self-belief they seem to have struck on here.

Sounding closer to a continuation of their 2008 record ‘Folie à Deux’ than 2018’s hyper-slick ‘M A N I A’, there’s a return to the bold, luscious pop-rock that they honed early on. From the emotive strings that make way for powerful guitars on opener ‘Love From The Other Side’, to the soaring stadium-sized chorus of ‘Heaven, Iowa’; the James Bond-ish drama at the close of ‘I Am My Own Muse’ or the way that Earth, Wind & Fire’s insatiable funky stomp is all over ‘What A Time To Be Alive’, this sounds like a band content and confident to really be themselves. Even Pete Wentz’s spoken word monologue on the albeit strangely-titled ‘Baby Annihilation’ feels to mirror the fraught outro of ‘Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying’; this time, it comes with a more world-weary narrator, but it's both a poignant statement and an apt nod to their past. An album that exudes charm and euphoria, while still very much being Fall Out Boy’s DNA, ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is a real joy. (Sarah Jamieson)

LISTEN: ‘What A Time To Be Alive’

X-RAY VISION ALBUMS

Karin Dreijer has been making futurefacing pop over three decades. Here’s a brief look at just some of their key works.

THE KNIFE

Heartbeats (2002)

An obvious place to start, The Knife’s breakthrough track and lead single from second album, ‘Deep Cuts’. Back then, a track still gaining momentum after two years meant a whole re-release, which this got in 2004. The song reached the UK Top 10 in 2006 following its cover by fellow Swede, José González.

THE KNIFE

Silent Shout (2006)

After earning cult success, The Knife could’ve leaned towards their Scandipop siblings. But when winning Pop Group of the Year at the Swedish Grammis in 2003 they sent members of art protest collective, Guerilla Girls to receive the award. And this title track from their 2006 third album is just as icy cool as what came before, using its hypnotic synth sprinkles for a hook in a similar way to Grimes would later do.

Fever Ray

If I Had a Heart (2008)

Almost a complete 180-degree shift from the colourful ‘Heartbeats’, the drone-like, hypnotic nature of this track, from Karin’s 2009 self-titled solo debut, saw it used for the title track of 2013 historical drama Vikings, as well as further TV appearances, in the similarly dark Breaking Bad, Misfits and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Fever Ray

The Wolf (2011)

You’d be forgiven for not having seen the film this was written for, 2011’s Red Riding Hood: it was ranked among the year’s worst releases. A shame, as ‘The Wolf’ makes the most of Karin’s unhinged howl, the swirling layers of instrumentation gradually building around it to (quite appropriately, at least in the fairy tale itself) incite fear.

 FEVER RAY Radical Romantics (Rabid)

Despite bearing a jarring resemblance to the character Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show on the album’s sleeve, Fever Ray’s latest record is the antithesis to the ostentatious theatrics of the show, stripping the eccentricities of human behaviour to its bare bones. On ‘Radical Romantics’, Fever Ray (aka Karin Dreijer) reunites with former Knife bandmate and brother Olof Dreijer, among collaborators from a wealth of backgrounds, including Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Portuguese DJ and producer Nídia, and experimentalist Vessel. Their first record in five years, Karin taps into a wealth of milieu; from the bizarre world-building of The Knife and its associated mythology on ‘Bottom Of The Ocean’, to tribal girl-pop on ‘Shiver’ and the candid love song of harpsichord synth-pop moment ‘Carbon Dioxide’. It soon unfolds that the string holding each track together is the existential concept of love, or at least what Karin perceives as love. ‘Kandy’ grasps at pragmatism and primitive feelings within relationships

(“Simply wood and fire / Lovelier than diamonds”) while ‘Tapping Fingers’ explores late night hookups in Karin’s enunciated style.

On ‘Radical Romantics’, Fever Ray posits the idea of love as an imperative condition for human function, and probes into both its darkest corners as well as the simple, mortal desire for affection, producing a fascinating study of electro-pop in the meantime. (Alisdair Grice)

LISTEN: ‘Carbon Dioxide’

 SLEAFORD MODS UK GRIM (Rough Trade)

When it comes to Sleaford Mods, listeners generally know what they’re going to get. Over Andrew Fearn’s minimalist keyboard beats, Jason Williamson shouts about the pressing sociopolitical issues of the moment with his trademark level of snark. This has been the setup for about a decade now, and it remains effective. Their sound can, though, get a bit samey, but ‘UK GRIM’ - at least partially - mixes things up. Take closer ‘Rhythm Of Class’ as a case in point. It sounds different to anything they’ve done before, starting off almost as a pastiche of goldenage hip hop, before moving into more melodic synthpop territory. ‘Force 10 From Navarone’, already released as a single, is a highlight and the inclusion of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw is an absolute masterstroke; her voice accompanying Andrew’s beats perfectly. It’s almost a shame that she doesn’t appear elsewhere on the album. Elsewhere, Sleaford Mods don't exactly go in for subtleties; the likes of ‘Right Wing Beast’ and ‘Tory Kong’ wear their politics on their sleeves (or, should we say, on the nose). “You’re all getting mugged by the aristocracy,” sings Jason, “You’re all getting mugged by the right-wing beast.” “Levelling up like a Tory twat,” he offers on ‘Smash Each Other Up’, always one for a topical line. ‘UK GRIM’ manages to showcase a sonic evolution while staying true to classic Sleaford Mods. They aren’t going to be for everyone - and this might not be a record that converts new fans in their droves - but pre-existing fans should be happy. (Adam England) LISTEN: ‘Force 10 From Navarone’

A FASCINATING STUDY OF ELECTRO-POP.

H.

GIGI MASIN

DAVE HAUSE

FEEL

CRYSTAL TIDES

THE SOUTH LONDON SOUL TRAIN

12 YEAR SPECIAL

AMAHLA

FEEL IT

SUPA DUPA FLY

MIKE & THE MOONPIES

JACOB LEE

ALBERTA CROSS

IYAMAH

FEEL IT

FAITH’S EASTER SPECIAL

STONE

STONE

JASMINE JETHWA

SOFTCULT

FEEL IT

MORGANWAY

GRACE CARTER

WHENYOUNG

FEEL IT

IST IST

KINDRED SPIRITS

GEMMA HAYES

NATALIE BERGMAN

KIM CHURCHILL

FEEL IT

NOW EX

TREVOR NELSON’S SOUL NATION CLASSICS

 FIDLAR That’s Life

(self-released)

Each of FIDLAR’s full-length albums have managed to try new musical hats on, while maintaining the same euphoric rock essence that made ‘Cheap Beer’ such an instant breakthrough for them back in 2012. The self-titled debut from which that came was rough-around-the-edges garage punk, unabashedly hedonistic, its 100 mph pace matched by the apparent need of frontman Zac Carper to verbalise every single one of his thoughts at once. 2015’s ‘Too’ swerved away from lo-fi into some truly huge moments: when ‘Punks’ hits, it truly hits. Zac’s lyrical view turned inward, and darker: affordable beverages became ‘Overdose’, ‘Sober’ and ‘Stupid Decisions’. Then with ‘Almost Free’ four years later, they tried all manner of sounds: hip hop by way of Clash references; the scintillating noise-punk of ‘Nuke’ and ‘Too Real’, and the self-aware sadness that contrasts with the upbeat nature of ‘By Myself’. At no point during this, though, have they ever sounded like anyone but FIDLAR.

Being an EP, ‘That’s Life’ could have been a selection box; the now-trio of Zac, Max Kuehn and Brandon Schwartzel testing the waters to see which of their future paths to follow. And yet, while each offers something a little different from the other, the six tracks here show complete coherence. Opener ‘Centipede’ picks up one lyrical thread, an early salvo proclaiming “I’m sober / Not even amphetamines,” while making smart use of Beach Boys-via-Weezer backing harmonies and Pixies-like guitar squall: plus, the chorus is huge. Their crossover moment comes this time in the form of ‘On Drugs’, and another giant chorus, gang vocals interpolating Basement Jaxx’s pressing question: “So stop asking me / Where’s your head at?”. It’s still single ‘FSU’ that really gets the adrenaline going, though, its heavy, sludgy riff an ideal conduit for the feeling of just needing to do something. Or, to paraphrase, fucking shit up for fucking shit up’s sake. The only flaw in this EP is that it’s not twice as long. (Emma Swann) LISTEN: ‘FSU’

 CAITY BASER Thanks For Nothing, See You Never

(EMI / Chosen)

Back in the mid-’00s, Lily Allen made waves with her personality-pumped pop, simultaneously skyrocketing the popularity of pairing prom dresses with trainers, and bringing lyrical wit to the fore. There’s more than a hint of this quintessential Lily magnetism within Caity Baser’s ‘Thanks For Nothing, See You Never’, a collection of six infectious pop songs soundtracking Gen Z life. Catchy upbeat opener ‘Pretty Boys’ laments fit boys not having much to say (“Don’t care about your feelings / Just get under the covers”), standout track ‘X&Y’ looks back at past lovers and red flags (“You’re a loser / Why’d I pursue ya? I blame the shots”) while closer ‘2020s’ finds Caity navigating life in 2023 (“Just a girl in my 2020s living life in the 2020s”). All driven by Caity’s larger-than-life personality, with a wink and a nod she has tapped into what it’s like to be figuring your shit out as an early adult. (Elly Watson) LISTEN: ‘X&Y’

 GRETEL HÄNLYN Head Of The Love Club (VLF)

The Londoner’s second EP, there’s a lot about ‘Head of the Love Club’ that feels like Gretel Hänlyn still trying things out for size. The cap fits best when she’s amalgamating all her ‘90s influences. Opener ‘Dry Me’ evokes self-titled-era Blur in its guitars while, vocally, her low register and careful enunciation brings to mind Sleeper's Louise Wener - albeit playing with emphasis in a Sparks-like manner. ‘Wiggy’, too, fuels the alt-rock fire with its galvanising guitar sounds and crashing drums that pair so well with her voice. Once the distracting first minute is out of the way, the title track gives us a hint of Hole, and closer ‘Today (can’t help but cry)’ showcases a Dolores O’Riordan lilt. Which is all to say, these aspects complement Gretel’s songwriting and natural sound perfectly: there’s enough of each to excite, but not so much of any to sound revivalist, or pastiche. Which is why it’s a shame that the potential of ‘King of Nothing’ - the strongest song on the record, and a live standout - is all but lost among its muted drums and tempered guitar. (Emma

Swann)

It’s been a while… What’s new where you are?

It’s pretty much all the same. Gas is more expensive. Eggs are more expensive. People still don’t use their turn signals [he means indicators - British Ed].

You’ve always switched things up a little sonically between records, what was the thinking beforehand in this regard?

You get bored doing the same thing over and over again: why make a song or record we’ve already made? We’re just wanderers in the sonic universe, man.

What did working with Dave Sardy bring to the songs?

His ears are crazy - like superpower status - for tuning, and frequencies, and tones. It’s kinda freaky actually. We pretty much had the songs all worked out for the most part, but he made them sound HUGE!

…and recording at the iconic Shangri-La studio. Which of the (many) records made there did you hope to capture some stardust from?

Definitely Adele’s ‘21’.

Why an EP as opposed to a full album?

We just wanted to put something out there. It had been a while [four years since ‘Almost Free’] and we had this batch flushed out. It felt like a complete set of music.

How much do you think all the sand on the beach would actually cost? Which beaches would be more (or less) expensive?

I mean, with inflation being what it is, it’s definitely not a buyer’s market. I’d wait a couple years till the market stabilises. I’m sure you could still get Venice Beach sand pretty cheap if you know the right people.

LISTEN: ‘Wiggy’

 COWBOYY Epic The Movie (Nice Swan)

“So many mullets in the room, I can barely even breathe / And no I’m not a fucking black midi rip off,” despairs cowboyy vocalist Stanley Powell on ‘Algorithmic’ as some noodly riffs continue in the background before the punchline: “And who’s doing guitar solos? Not you!” If a decent way to figure out what you are is to first ascertain what you’re not, then the young quartet’s debut EP knows that, first and foremost, it does not want to be lumped in as another post-punk, post-Windmill band, no thank you sir. True, Stanley is a fan of the omnipresent sprechgesang (the garbled vocal of opener ‘Gmaps’ admittedly calling to mind a touch of the Geordie Greeps - soz), but that’s largely where the comparisons end. Instead, ‘Tetris’ is as mathy as the game it speaks of; the aforementioned ‘Algorithmic’ is full of scrappy, OTT guitars and Art Brut-style hilarity, while closer ‘Nothing’ brings to mind Los Campesinos! at their most slow-burning.

(Lisa Wright) LISTEN: ‘Algorithmic’

Bassist Brandon Schwartzel fills us in on working with producer Dave Sardy, their favourite ShangriLa studio recording - and the idea of actually buying all the ‘Sand on the Beach’.

 GRANDMAS HOUSE

Who Am I (Brace Yourself)

On their latest EP, Grandmas House are shouting as loud as they possibly can. While the trio are arguably best heard on stage, ‘Who Am I’ makes a decent attempt to seize on that same energy. Feverish but shiny, pierced by scrawling guitars and frenetic drums, it’s packed full of questions: ‘How Does It Feel?’ a particular highlight. A call-and-response between angsty French and English verse, their collective voices are like fine elastic; stretching but never snapping. The closing, title track continues to plead for tricky answers, driven by a bubbling, queer anger. They show that it’s just as punk to be vulnerable, and switch effortlessly between questioning both us and themselves, in a way that’s strikingly intimate, transparently weaving lyrics about mental health and relationship struggles. They’ve perfected their sonic recipe just like Grandma used to make: filling, always delicious, and impossible for anyone else to recreate. Yet, however impressive, this EP still feels like simple muscle-flexing for the band – once Grandmas House figure out who they are completely, their next punch will be a knockout. (Mia Smith) LISTEN: ‘How Does It Feel?’

ABSOLUTE (BEHIND THE) SCENES!

The Backing vocals at the end of ‘Desire’ were added in the spur of the moment! A great part of recording is being able to listen back to a song and experiment with harmonies, extra riffs and vocals.

 BLACK HONEY A Fistful of Peaches (FoxFive)

Following 2018’s self titled debut and ‘Written & Directed’ three years later, ‘A Fistful of Peaches’ - Black Honey’s third album - is one to cement the group’s place as a cult indie rock act. It kicks off in lethal fashion, ‘Charlie Bronson’ propulsive and energetic, already begging to be a future live favourite. ‘Up Against’ similarly shows real energy, while ‘Heavy’ lives up to its name with a more aggressive sound. ‘Nobody Knows’ takes from goth and grunge, a new palette for the band, but one they appear to slip into seamlessly. These moments are balanced out with some more melodic, stripped-back numbers: ‘Out Of My Mind’ is built around Izzy B. Phillips’ vocals, ‘Rock Bottom’ is driven by a lively, propulsive bassline, while ‘Cut The Cord’ shows a more pop-tinged outlook. A key part of the record, too, is Izzy’s lyrics - being even more open than on the group’s previous releases - lending it a greater intimacy. It marries the group’s sound to great effect; “Lay me down with Marilyn / Rest in peace and rise again,” she sings on ‘Charlie Bronson’, while ‘Heavy’ admits “I feel so heavy / Don’t think I can fake it anymore.” This openness reaches its zenith on ‘Out Of My Mind’: “I blame myself, all I want to do is get out of my mind / Keep wasting my life.” On ‘A Fistful of Peaches’ Black Honey have doubled down on what’s worked for them to date, while offering a glimpse at potential future directions. (Christopher Connor) LISTEN: ‘Charlie Bronson’

 BABYMETAL

THE OTHE ONE

(Cooking Vinyl)

energetic.

While their music largely sits at a crossroads between metal, EDM and sugary pop, Babymetal’s commitment to a concept is one to rival any self-indulgent ‘70s prog act. Acting on instructions from a Fox God that are conveniently passed on via producer Kei ‘Kobametal’ Kobayashi, ‘The Other One’ is presented as ten rediscovered songs, each representing a parallel world. To the relief of most, embracing the now-duo’s lore isn’t a prerequisite to enjoying their output: the riffs, choruses and beats are all big enough to do the talking. If that sounds a little Eurovision in its mix - even before their theatricality comes into play - then see ‘Believing’, where there is what sounds curiously like a t.A.T.u interpolation. Their own mix, however, comes across best on ‘MAYA’, where its big pop moment - a call-and-response sung partially in English - is complemented perfectly by its face-melting guitars. Opener ‘METAL KINGDOM’ owns its American radio-friendly “woah-ohs,” and dance-like breakdown, while ‘Mirror Mirror’ plays impeccably with light and shade, and ‘Tiime Wave’ brings in a four-to-the-floor beat while never losing any of its hard rock edge. It’s not all pulled off, though; the electronic beat of ‘METALIZM’, with its winding guitars and chanting vocals echoing their melody verbatim, comes over a little too recent-era Muse than anyone needs. But what, on the surface, is mostly a fun, noisy collection does also offer an infinite rabbit hole to dive down. (Bella Martin) LISTEN: ‘MAYA'

A peek inside the studio with Grandmas House when they recorded ‘Who Am I’.

Listening back to our mixes for the first time was super rewarding! And there was a cheeky studio dog called Harry who got extra excited about the tracks.

Vocals are sang over the top, once we have our instrumentals down. We were stood in different corners of the room, all facing each other, screaming the lyrics together. Again we feel this really keeps the vocals powerful and

 NUHA RUBY RA Machine Like Me (Brace Yourself)

Growling into life with menacing vocals and bass drones, Nuha Ruby Ra wastes no time here in making herself heard.

‘My Voice’ is a call to arms - an establishment of who she is, what she’s capable of and exactly what she has in store for the rest of this six-track EP. ‘Machine Like Me’ is an apt title for the thrumming beast that Nuha Ruby Ra unleashes. It hums with a driven, relentless need to express a quiet, confident energy that emerges with each crawling track. It’s a noisy, explosive collection, but one embarked upon with composure and a winking calmness. It’s Nuha that exists in the belly of this dragon that she createsswirling, twisting, breathing a ferocious fire that rushes through each snarling moment. ‘Slicer’, in all its chainsaw-wielding glory, is perhaps a summation of what is at the EP’s heart, as barbed-wire witticisms and shapeshifting vocals dominate. It’s vicious but in an eerie, disorienting way. Elsewhere, ‘Rise’ embraces the loudness, fizzing with life, distorted and sparking against Nuha’s steady vocals, before reaching a formidable point where all gives way to a howling pursuit of release. A desperate and determined clamber to the top, with all the pain of that journey on full display, by the time ‘Machine Like Me’ draws to an end, it feels like Nuha Ruby Ra is able to secure that relief. Scratches and all, the choral closing statements of ‘You Never Know’ are a final mocking goodbye. With her latest release, Nuha Ruby Ra paints a mighty figure. (Neive McCarthy)

LISTEN: ‘Slicer’

 PRIESTGATE

One Shade Darker (Lucky Number)

EPS, ETC

If 2022’s ‘Eyes Closed For The Winter’ earned Priestgate a spot on the indie festival circuit, then EP ‘One Shade Darker’ asserts their voice as considered songwriters. A far cry from their visceral, immersive performances that see vocalist Rob Schofield contort his expression and body in a hundred different ways, this EP doles out ounces of barefaced dream pop that has the capacity to upend, abandon and redefine the ‘young Yorkshire band’ zeitgeist. Led by Rob’s pensive performance, Priestgate embrace creeping synths on ‘Lucifer’, while intro track ‘Some Things Never Change’ has the kind of indie pop relatability that put Spector on the map. These drifters have long danced around the stories of youth and their Driffield home, and despite this EP not having the hit factor of 2020’s carefree ‘Summer(air)’, it shows a steadiness that sees them battle with hometown attachment (’White Shirt’) and showcases a new shade of their being. (Alisdair Grice) LISTEN: ‘Some Things Never Change’

 SOFTCULT

See You In The Dark (Easy Life)

Canadian twins Mercedes and Phoenix Arn-Horn’s poignant messages spread well beyond their music, cultivating an online community offering a safe space for fans to discuss everything from cinema to traumatic experiences. That togetherness is fostered by the pair’s lyrical openness, with ‘see you in the dark’ delving into loss of identity (’One Of A Million’), self-sabotage (’Spoiled’), and a dangerous rise in toxic masculinity (’Someone2me’). It’s ‘Dress’, a scuzzy guitar-drenched response to assault and harassment, that projects the fury most succinctly; “I’ll never be the same again,” the duo exclaims somewhat hushed under dense shoegaze, leading to a visceral outpouring in the track’s closing moments. Most of the palpable anger is reserved for these momentary crescendos that rise out of comparably calm soundscapes, ones in which the powerful words sometimes get a little lost. The gentle ebb and flow in part mirrors the subject matter’s dark inevitability, but it’s in the louder moments where Softcult’s message breaks through most, not least as ‘Someone2me’ builds to its nauseating climax. Here, the ferocity of their sound joins with the safe community they have been nurturing, as uneasy and unsettling as it should be. (Ben Tipple)

LISTEN: ‘Dress’

A MASTERCLASS IN MAKING AN ENTRANCE.

ComingUp

The trio’s third is set to be “hyper lusty rock and roll with a political punch”. Out 9th June.

 HEARTWORMS A Comforting Notion (Speedy

Wunderground)

’A Comforting Notion’ might be culty London label Speedy Wunderground’s most commanding and fully-formed release yet. On her first project as Heartworms, 24-year-old Jojo Orme is an unflappable presence at the helm of a barrage of slick, sludgy goth rock, mesmerising from the first murmuring synth of ‘Consistent Dedication’. It’s a masterclass in making an entrance; in little over two minutes she cranks her vocal up from a childlike whisper to damn near screaming the house down. Spindly guitars and a shuffling drum loop make for sinister, intoxicating undertones, evoking Joy Division or Bauhaus with a fierce modern twist. Depeche Mode and Jojo’s interest in aviation history (she recently became the first musician to collaborate on a release with model-makers Airfix) echo through jittery centrepiece ‘Retributions Of An Awful Life’. As it thunders along with military precision, Jojo sounds utterly in control, at the eye of the metallic storm of her own making. Cure-y closer ‘24 Hours’ underlines the fact that Heartworms are one to keep a trained eye on, its rumbling outro an omen not for an oncoming rapture so much as the arrival of a Seriously Fucking Cool new artist with vision and formidable talent to her name. (Alex Cabré) LISTEN: ‘24 Hours’

The angular noiseniks follow up celebrated 2021 debut ‘Bright Green Field’ on 9th June.

The introspective indie singer-songwriter will release this second album on 5th May.

JESSIE WARE – THAT! FEELS GOOD!

Our Jess is obviously a big fan of punctuation, this being the followup to ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’. Released 28th April.

WESTERMAN – AN INBUILT FAULT

DREAM WIFE – SOCIAL LUBRICATION

SQUID – O MONOLITH

CAROLINE POLACHEK

Hammersmith Apollo, London. Photos: Vendy Palkovi č ová.

It isn’t often you’re handed the opportunity to witness a star at the peak of their fame. From Nirvana’s monumental Reading Festival 1992 set to the legendary moment Queen rolled out ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ during 1985’s Live Aid, both these moments now stand in time as capturing artists at their most creative, and well… their best. Memories that are held on to like heirlooms of the past, stories passed on to younger generations, amplifying their magical quality.

Tonight, it’s hard to not align these feelings with Caroline Polachek. Backlit by a dozy warmth of savannah-toned lights with a slick latex body suit wrapped around her, it feels like the whole world is behind the singer.

The performance at London’s Eventim Apollo (moved from Brixton’s O2 Academy) coincides with both Valentine’s Day and the release of latest album ‘Desire, I Want To Turn Into You’. There’s a palpable air of celebration, with the crowd’s extended, capsizing cheers following the buoyant, glossy introduction of ‘Welcome To My Island’.

Despite the Hammersmith stage dwarfing Caroline and her minimal live band, she appears to own the space, strutting muscularly from left to right, gyrating and gesticulating to the pulses of her unconventional power pop. It becomes clear, as she bounds dutifully into 2019’s ‘Hit Me Where It Hurts’ and the newly-released ‘Pretty in Possible’, that she is revelling in the gravity of her situation. But after a brief foray into assorted tracks from both the new record and 2019’s ‘Pang’, she hits her stride the instant the bubbly synth from ‘Bunny Is A Rider’ teases the beginning of the lauded track: since its release back in 2021, the track has gone on to gain a near-religious following.

As the night moves, she dances through a flurry of backdrops, eventually playing all twelve songs from the just-released record. The audience matches her mood, with highlights including the stripped ‘Crude Drawing Of An Angel’ and ‘Fly To You’, a cerebral drum and bass track that features both Dido and Grimes on record. The bagpipe interlude of ‘Blood and Butter’ is accompanied by the mellifluous Brìghde Chaimbeul, fawning and falling with the rise of Caroline’s stunning vocal range.

We are teased with an encore fake out as the singalong hit ‘So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings’ plays out, the audience jubilant in celebration, some attendees embracing their loved ones on this unconventional Valentine’s occasion. Caroline leans into this love song she’s created for the oddballs, lacing the words of the chorus (“I get a little lonely / Get a little more close to me / You’re the only one that knows me babe”) with a little more pluckiness than usual. Bravely, the post-encore Caroline (now in a floaty red cowboy get-up) closes the show with the dense Daniel Avery-hearkening ‘Smoke’; the penultimate track on ‘Desire…’, which despite being only hours old, goes down a dream-pop treat. (Alisdair Grice)

THE MURDER CAPITAL

The vaulted windows and grand, industrial-gothic architecture of Albert Hall are already at odds with the Goodnight Moon-like comfort of The Murder Capital’s backdrop. There’s a bit of an unnerving, childlike apprehension in seeing the cosy colours against the room’s stark stone and metal, but it couldn’t be more suited for the thriving juxtaposition the band are about to cultivate onstage. “Existence fading… existence fading” booms around the room and cuts through the chatter, turning up the intensity - which rarely subsides. Even through the reverberating magnitude of ‘Existence’, there’s a gleeful mood to the audience; as recent album 'Gigi's Recovery''s most upbeat number, ‘Return My Head’ is rolled out early, the first tentativelylobbed pints begin to fly. And during ‘More Is Less’, frontman James McGovern flings himself onto the top of the crowd to be tossed about: the first time the energy feels like it’s writhing in the crowd rather than politely, interestedly watching.

Throughout the show, cuts from ‘Gigi’s Recovery’, although more commanding in many ways, are met

with more passive observation than the songs from 2019 debut ‘When I Have Fears’. Still, the frontman is magnetic to observe at work; it takes no more than a wordless point and frown upwards to get those up on the venue’s mezzanine on their feet and moving. He embodies the restraint that makes The Murder Capital’s newer cuts so vicious, relying on his rattlesnake tambourine and unbothered head bob for theatrics as he delivers the melodrama in his ardent baritone. ‘On Twisted Ground’ could have been the apex of the show as it grows to its peak. But instead, it’s slightly lost in chatter that doesn’t quiet down: what should have been a bewitching moment, The Murder Capital silhouetted in scarlet and silence, becomes an interval rather than second-act showstopper. But there’s no doubt that by the end of the song, as The Murder Capital remind those talking that they make the noise, loudly, insistently, and viciously, the conversation is no more. This formula repeats itself effectively: the onslaught of ‘The Lie Becomes The Self’, ‘Green & Blue’ and ‘We Had To Disappear’ all slowly burn up to howling peaks. Sprawling epic after sprawling epic, they push tension against attention spans with remarkable control. (Ims Taylor)

Albert Hall, Manchester.

Photos: Carolina Faruolo.

NON-STOP GOOD VIBES THROUGHOUT.

METRONOMY

CARLY RAE JEPSEN

Dancing across the stage in a pink leotard that Dua Lipa is surely gonna be desperate to cop, Carly Rae Jepsen gets straight down to business, delivering a 23-song set that sees the star prioritise playing banger after banger as opposed to getting distracted by lengthy spoken track intros. Like Carly Rae Jepsen At Her Very Best, if you will.

Diving into tracks that span her decade-long career, Carly dazzles as she commands the stage with a performance that’s non-stop good vibes throughout, flowing across the full spectrum of pop: a clubready hit here, a power ballad there. Kicking things off with the opener to her latest album ‘The Loneliest Time’, the power-pop of ‘Surrender My Heart’ sets the bar for the rest of the performance.

‘EMOTION’’s ‘Run Away With Me’ gets the crowd jumping along before glitzy ‘Julien’ has arms waving in the air. Carly tells the crowd that the titular boy “turned out to be a dick”. “You’re legally obliged to sing along to this song,” she grins, launching into 2012 breakthrough single ‘Call Me Maybe’, as the first of the three confetti canons that will go off tonight explodes bright yellow into the air.

Throughout her performance there’s a palpable sense of the freedom that her music conjures. Groups of friends serenade each other to tracks like ‘Western Wind’ and ‘Your Type’; screams of recognition ring out in the opening chords to iconic tracks

like ‘I Really Like You’ and ‘Boy Problems’, and urges to dance along are obliged with carefree abandon during the anthemic club-tinged moments like ‘I Didn’t Just Come Here To Dance’. It’s impossible not to smile as Carly enthrals with her euphoric pop, and it’s clear she’s having the time of her life too, her joy palpable as she reaches ‘The Loneliest Time’s now viral line: “I’m coming back for you baby, I’m coming back for you!

SETLIST

SURRENDER MY HEART

JOSHUA TREE

RUN AWAY WITH ME TOO MUCH JULIEN

TALKING TO YOURSELF

EMOTION / FAVOURITE COLOUR

CALL ME MAYBE STAY AWAY BENDS

WESTERN WIND

SO NICE

I REALLY LIKE YOU WANT YOU IN MY ROOM YOUR TYPE

BOY PROBLEMS NOW THAT I FOUND YOU

I DIDN’T JUST COME HERE TO DANCE THE LONELIEST TIME WHEN I NEEDED YOU GO FIND YOURSELF OR WHATEVER BEACH HOUSE CUT TO THE FEELING

Stripping things back as she re-emerges for the encore, Carly and her guitarist draw up chairs closer to the front of the crowd to deliver a gorgeous acoustic rendition of ‘Go Find Yourself Or Whatever’. A momentary breather before closing the show with a bang, the anthem to red flags ‘Beach House’ follows with a fun-filled sing-a-long, as Carly’s band join in on the song’s bridge, each of them delivering the tongue-incheek lines: “I got big plans to take care of you, I just need to borrow ten thousand dollars / I got a lake house in Canada, and I’m probably gonna harvest your organs”. By the time the huge ‘Cut To The Feeling’ rolls around as her final song, there’s not a body in the room not dancing along to the track’s massive chorus, and Carly’s invitation for a night of escapism has definitely been fulfilled. As she bounds around the stage soaking in the final moments, she’s handed an inflatable giant sword which she triumphantly thrusts above her head. Just in case you had any doubt that she slayed… (Elly Watson)

W

hen Joe Mount first released purposefully ramshackle, largely instrumental debut ‘Pip Paine (Pay The £5000 You Owe)’ back in 2006, in his dizziest dreams he probably wouldn’t have believed that, nearly two decades on, his band would have become not only beloved alternative music mainstays, but something of a mainstream success story. And yet tonight, Metronomy are in the belly of London’s fanciest new venue HERE at Outernet, making an underplay stop-off at the none-too-tiny 2,000-capacity space at the behest of the BRIT Awards and their annual War Child charity gig series. Toto, we’re not in Totnes anymore.

In that time, Mount has grown from a solo artist with a penchant for low-budget synths to a thirtysomething father, fronting a five-piece band. All stages of this evolution get their time tonight - although we’d argue that under-represented second album ‘Nights Out’ deserves more minutes in the spotlight. Nonetheless, despite the slight puzzle of stitching together nocturnal, pingersappropriate instrumentals (’The End of You Too’), jaunty pop bops (’Salted Caramel Ice Cream’) and contemplative, newer slowies (’Loneliness on the Run’), Mount and co weave around their back catalogue with confidence, the throughline of sheer winning charm at their core.

Though they remain most known for ‘The English Riviera’’s hooky, irrepressible synths (biggest hit ‘The Look’ comes preceded by a hilariously overblown operatic intro c/o keyboard player Oscar Cash), tonight’s setlist highlights how the band have largely emerged out of the night time ambience of the club and into the sunlight. Opener ‘Love Factory’ is pure, blissed-out warmth; ‘It’s Good To Be Back’ throws a wink out with its overt technicolour buoyancy, whilst old favourite ‘Love Letters’ makes for a joyful encore.

Nestled within their mix, the more anxious likes of ‘The Light’ and classic anarchic set-closer ‘You Could Easily Have Me’ feel like echoes of their former selves given a victory lap from the comfort of a present where Metronomy have little left to prove. He might not have predicted he’d ever be here, but Joe Mount’s become something of an indie treasure - long may it continue. (Lisa Wright)

HERE at Outernet, London.

Photo: Beth McConnell.

Alexandra Palace, London. Photos: Alex Kane Perkins.

Porridge Radio

A once-in-a-lifetime dream gig, designed and curated this month by JAKE SHEARS!

VENUE: THE MOJAVE DESERT IN SPRING

I do this thing with my friends that we started a few years ago where we all chip in and get an insane sound system and lights, and there’s about 60 of us who go out in the middle of nowhere on public land in the Mojave and throw a party for ourselves. It’s an amazing spot; you can see the stars, and there’s no one else around so we’re going there.

SUPPORTS: THE ORB AND TANGERINE DREAM

[I want to start with] music where you can lay back and you don’t even have to be looking at the stage - in fact, it’s probably preferable to turn your lawn chairs and look at the sunset. Tangerine Dream has gone through many iterations but I’d pick the line up right now because their most recent record ‘Raum’ is their best in decades. Then The Orb would be on with some beats starting to kick in, some samples, some chatter in the air; things are starting to get trippier and a little weirder. There’s some bonfires going and people are up on their feet.

HEADLINER: APHEX TWIN

At certain times in my life, it’s really hard for me to watch people perform; I just wanna be on stage, and I’m cranky because I’m not. But as a participant, Aphex Twin is one of my favourite artists who I’ve listened to for the majority of my life. His music works for me in so many different ways, but I would imagine the gig building into something really intense and brain-frying. Aphex Twin has brought his own production; I’m imagining some screens floating down from the sky, we don’t know where they’ve come from but there’s some big budget production that takes the gig into total apocalyptic, brain-scrambling good times.

WHO ARE YOU GOING WITH?

The people [I go out to the desert with], we’re called NPR - Non Profit Rave - and it would be us. The crew consists of electronic nerdy gay guys and some queer folks; there’s a few emotionallyvulnerable straight guys, and some amazing women. Hopefully there’s some really cute guys out there as well, some surprises. A friend of a friend who’s really hot but super sweet and arrives in a helicopter.

WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?

There are looks, and the looks change throughout the night depending on temperature, how people are feeling, what they’re listening to… But significant looks are encouraged. At sunrise, that’s when you get the real fineries out - the lacey umbrellas and anything that’s got shimmer and reflects light. That’s the time for going all-out.

WHAT ARE YOU DRINKING?

Definitely just not booze. Doing some at sunrise is good, but I feel like drinking through the night can make you sleepy... Maybe some Red Bulls... Water... Lots of water…

IS THERE AN AFTERPARTY?

The afterparty is a DJ line-up that we’ve made. It’ll be so intense after the audio assault of Aphex Twin, so we’d start out with some gorgeous disco - a full palate cleanser - and then build it back up. There’s probably a lot of Italo at sunrise; lately I always play this Italo cover of Chris Isaac’s ‘Wicked Game’ called ‘Synthetic Sax’ and it’s got the sax doing the melody line in it. It’s the best sunrise song of all time, as far as I’m concerned.

ANY OTHER REQUESTS?

I’d love it if Roísín Murphy just casually showed up. A friend brought her along, and everyone’s freaking out that she’s here and it’s so exciting, but she’s just having the time of her life and here to rave.

‘Last Man Dancing’ is out 2nd June via Boys Keep Swinging Inc.