Loud And Quiet 151 – Denzel Curry

Sasami, Powerplant, Alex Cameron, Cat Power, CMAT, Let’s Eat Grandma, Benefits, :3LON, Raveena, Grove, Destroyer, UK psych’s hidden history, A music fan’s guide to NFTs

issue 151

Denzel Curry The long game

IMARHAN ABOOGI OUT NOW

LOS BITCHOS LET THE FESTIVITIES BEGIN! OUT NOW

“A gripping body of work from the offset” – 8/10 LOUD & QUIET

“Britain's coolest new instrumental party band” –

“Tuareg rockers reconnect with the serenity and sadness of their home” – 8/10 UNCUT

“This is one ride you definitely won’t want to miss” –

“The music expands to fill the space” MOJO “They switch with ease from delicate balladry to full-on rock and roll” THE FINANCIAL TIMES

FAZER PLEX OUT NOW

“Savvy synthesis of normally disparate strains of Jazz” – 8/10 UNCUT “Great albums create worlds, not all of them play by the same rules, and that should be celebrated” – 8/10 CLASH “A tightly coiled, well-oiled machine” – MOJO

MOJO DORK

“armed with guitar, bass, drums and keytar, they’re inviting us over for a technicolour party and brewing a most entertaining punch.”

SHINDIG “Mixes Turkish psych, South American cumbia and surf-rock, sometimes with the poise of Khruangbin but more often with the tequila swagger of a Tarantino caper” – 8/10 UNCUT

KING HANNAH I’M NOT SORRY, I WAS JUST BEING ME OUT FEB 25TH “Inspired by Smog, noisy lo-fi 90s bands, and with a little bit of PJ Harvey thrown in for good measure” – DIY “Renegades, trading in sharp-toothed Americana and lo-fi, Naoughties- indebted indie” – THE INDEPENDENT “Threading the needle between PJ Harvey and Mazzy Star” – BROOKLYN VEGAN

Listen wit’sh ihotl e

W W W.CITYSLANG.COM

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd 445 Hackney Road London E2 9DY Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Contributing writers Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Andrew Anderson, Charlotte Marston, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Dominic Haley, Esme Bennett, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Isabel Crabtree, Ian Roebuck, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Mike Vinti, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Reid, Sam Walton, Skye Butchard, Sophia McDonald, Sophia Powell, Susan Darlington, Tara Joshi, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Tyler Damara Kelly, Woody Delaney, Zara Hedderman.

Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Charlotte Patmore, Colin Medley, Dave Kasnic, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Heather Mccutcheon, Jake Kenny, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Oliver Halstead, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter.

With special thanks to Aoife Kitt, Charlee @ 3’Hi, Chris Cuff, Dan McCormick, Duncan Jordan, Scott Kennedy, James Cunningham, Jodie Banaszkiewicz, Josh Cohen, Matthew Fogg.

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2022 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Issue 151 Zeltron, Raven Miyagi, Aquarius’killa...

Denzel Curry’s knack for a great pseudonym rivals that of our own Tony Soy, whom you may also know as Jenny Pencil, Clive La Bouche, or most hilariously of all, “Stuart Stubbs”. His new album Melt My Eyez, See Your Future, though, is 100% pure Denzel; a bracingly honest, explorative piece of work that’s his most impressive yet. A decade into a career at the experimental cutting edge of U.S. hip hop, Curry finally feels like he’s beginning to realise his potential – and as Max Pilley’s cover story so vividly describes, this is just the beginning.

Luke Cartledge

Destroyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 08 CMAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Benefits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Powerplant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Sasami . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 :3LON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Raveena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Grove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Denzel Curry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 UK psych’s hidden history . . . . . . . . 62 Alex Cameron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 A music fan’s guide to NFTs . . . . . . . 70 Cat Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Let’s Eat Grandma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

PJ Harvey One of the UK’s most distinctive, visionary songwriters, PJ Harvey, has announced a new literary project. Orlam is a narrative poem, and claims to be the first book-length publication to be written in the ancient dialect of Harvey’s native Dorset “in decades.”

The book focuses on “nine-year-old Ira-Abel Rawles, [who] lives on Hook Farm in the village of Underwhelem. Drawing on the rituals, children’s songs, chants and superstitions of the rural West Country of England, Ira-Abel creates the twin realm through which she can make sense of an increasingly confusing and frightening world.”

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It’s not Harvey’s first foray into the world of poetry; in 2015, she published her first collection, The Hollow of the Hand, in collaboration with photographer Seamus Murphy. It is, however, a product of an intensely creative six years for her, and arrives in the middle of an extensive reissue campaign for several of her albums, including Let England Shake (2011), The Hope Six Demolition Project (2016), and many more. Coming with accompanying contemporary English translations and, in the collector’s edition, Harvey’s own illustrations, it promises to be very special. It’s published by Picador in April. pjharvey.net

The Beginning: Previously PRS Power Up fund

Pirate studio scheme

British music industry body PRS has launched Power Up, a new initiative that provides funding for Black music creators and seeks to address racial disparities and imbalances in the arts sector. The application deadline for the current round of funding is 17 February, so quite soon after this issue is published – but with PRS describing Power Up as an “ambitious, long-term project”, there will be more opportunities to come. Find out more and apply: prsfoundation.com/powerup

Having established themselves as a chain of affordable rehearsal and recording studios across the country over the past few years, Pirate are launching another scheme to help support the work of grassroots artists. Applications are open now for the Project Fund, which will “provide opportunities for individual creatives or collectives to gain free access to Pirate’s studios to pursue a new or ongoing project.” pirate.com

Lady of the House Bristol exhibition Middlesbrough pressing plant The vinyl production industry finds itself in a curious state at the moment: while the medium is more popular than it’s been for decades, its sales outstripping CDs in 2021 for the first time in over 30 years, a combination of issues related to the pandemic, Brexit and industry inequality have contributed to serious problems with the vinyl supply chain. Press On Vinyl, a new pressing plant in Middlesbrough, seeks to rectify this problem by prioritising independent artists planning smaller vinyl runs, and sourcing their raw material locally. pressonvinyl.com

To celebrate International Women’s Day, women-led dance music organisation Lady of the House are hosting an exhibition at Bristol arts venue Lost Horizon between 8 and 12 March. The event will be focusing on the role of women in the history (and future) of club culture, and there’ll be art installations, workshops, a Q&A panel and more. They’ve also published a coffee table book on the same subject. ladyofthehouse.org.uk

Secretly Group sustainability Secretly – the parent company of a number of our favourite independent record labels and music organisations, including Secretly Canadian, Ghostly International, Jagjaguwar and Dead Oceans – has pledged to go ‘carbon negative’ by 2026, “accounting for [its] historical carbon debt by [its] 30th anniversary in 2026.” They’ll be achieving this by minimising their packaging, recycling old stock, switching to renewable power, investing in energy efficient technology, and more. Sounds like a plan. secretlygroup.com

Sophie Unbelievably, it’s a year since we lost Sophie, at the age of just 34. It’s fitting, then, that her incredible debut EP, Nothing More To Say, is being reissued on vinyl by its original label, Huntleys + Palmers. All proceeds from the reissue will be donated to the Scottish Trans Alliance, who do vital work support trans and nonbinary people in Scotland. sophiemsmsmsm.bandcamp.com

Former DJ becomes Jamaica’s first Olympic alpine skier Here’s a nice story: former DJ and Burning Man stalwart Benjamin Alexander is set to become the first-ever alpine skier to compete in the Winter Olympics for the Jamaican national team. He only took up the sport at the age of 32, and will be pitted against some of the world’s best skiers – but as he told Resident Advisor: “I’ve already got my gold medal, my gold medal was qualification. For me, it’s about participation and hopefully blazing a path, so the next generation of Jamaicans can do much better than I can.”

British Library Black music exhibition The British Library has announced a major new research project and exhibition on the history of Black British music. A collaboration with the University of Westminster’s Black Music Research Unit, led by academic and musician Mykaell Riley, it’s set to open in 2024, examining 600 years of African, Caribbean and Black diasporic musical influence on the UK. bl.uk

illustration by kate prior

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The Beginning: You’re the Worst

Is Metallica and Lou Reed’s Lulu really that bad?

Welcome to You’re the Worst, a new column that will reassess – you guessed it – some of the worst music ever made. Whether that means a brilliant artist’s lowest moment, a calamitous collaboration or a one-off acoustic atrocity, our goal here is to listen with clear ears. Are these scorned musical moments really as bad as everyone says or will we find some pearls amongst the rotting shellfish slime? Only time – and column inches – will tell.

We begin our series with two musical behemoths, who between them have produced (by my count) ten all-time classic albums. However, they’ve also served up several sides of utter shit – both regularly appear in “worst albums of all time” lists.

But it was when they combined their powers that they truly delivered their most despised and derided effort.

I’m talking, of course, about Lou Reed and Metallica, who came together in 2011 to create Lulu.

If you woke up on 31 October 2011 to the news that Metallica and Lou Reed had released an album, you would have been excused for thinking someone had put a hex on you. Surely the only explanation was that someone had placed the names of every overthe-hill artist into a hat, drawn two at random, and then forced them to record together at gunpoint (this would also explain that 2018 collaboration between Sting and Shaggy).

But could this be a case of two wrongs making a right, of a combination so crazy – peanut butter on a burger, drinking an espresso before taking a nap, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne’s marriage – that it might just work?

No. At least, not according to the music press. Pitchfork said it showed a “disregard for their fans and music in general,” while Consequence of Sound called it “a complete failure on every tangible and intangible level of its existence”. MetalSucks.net voiced what we were all thinking when they asked, “Are you fucking kidding us with this shit?”

Their animosity is understandable; between them, this super group had not one, not two, but three world class bastards (Ulrich, Hetfield and, of course, Reed). And the album is – wait for it – an hour and a half long.

But let’s not judge a book by the fact it was written by megalomaniac grandads and is a thousand-plus pages. Instead, let’s all listen to Lulu together. Are you ready? Okay, everyone press play… now. * listening in progress *

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Done? Good. Then we can start our reassessment – first with the negatives.

The lyrics. Yes, these are cringey, and in some cases just offensive. “A puny body and a tiny dick, a little dog can make you sick” is not a set of words that should ever be combined. Dicks get a lot of airtime on Lulu.

The music. Well, there’s lots of aimless metal jamming – the kind that you hear any time you walk along the corridor at a rehearsal space (why do metal bands practise so much more than everyone else?).

The singing. James Hetfield is at his most self-parodic here. You know exactly what I mean.

So the lyrics, the music and the singing all suck. Does this mean Lulu is the worst album ever? Not quite, because the whole just-so crazy-it-might-work thing does in fact come off in places. The riff on ‘Mistress Dread’ is so repetitive that you lose yourself in it, as though NEU! showed up to a gig and were forced to use ESP guitars and Hughes and Kettner amps; Lou Reed’s lyrics do in fact have some enjoyably nihilistic moments (“You mean zero to me, I’m a passionate-less wave upon the sea”); and the end of ‘Junior Dad’ (terrible song title) has an Eno-esque minimalist beauty.

I’ll say it now: I actually quite enjoyed listening to Lulu.

In that case, why was this album so panned? Well, there’s the bastard factor that I already mentioned (fuck those guys).

There’s the prejudice against people trying something new (just play the hits). And there’s also Western music’s bias against older artists (why aren’t they dead already?).

But mostly I think Lulu suffers because…well, who is it for? The Venn diagram of Lou Reed and Metallica fans is not a big pool of people, and those that do exist in that space (myself included) don’t get an awful lot from this project. It doesn’t have the pop-meets-art that marks out Lou Reed’s best moments.

And it doesn’t have the speed riffage that made us all (well, me) love Kill ’Em All-era Metallica. Maybe if they’d just done a bit more rehearsing, and a lot more editing, we could have had something that worked. But they didn’t, and we don’t.

In the end, Lulu is definitely not the worst album of all time.

I’m not even sure it’s a particularly bad album. But I won’t be listening to it again… and nor should you (okay, maybe the end of ‘Junior Dad’ just one more time).

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

Out Now

Out 25.02.2022 On tour with Mitski in Spring 2022

The Beginning: Sweet 16

Destroyer’s Dan Bejar at 16: “Showbiz seemed ridiculous, gauche, garish”

This is my school photograph. I thought the less people know the better! This picture was probably taken right around the time of my 16th birthday. I was in 11th grade, as they say in America.

I don’t recall a huge amount from that time but I remember the general fog that existed over my high school years which mainly consisted of not wanting to be there. Wanting to get out. Not looking the way I wanted to look, or not doing the things I wanted to do. Looking at that photo I’m shocked to see I had braces.

That’s kind of late in the game; kind of old to have that, right?

Otherwise, I’m smiling, which is strange. I’m sure the photographer asked me to do that.

I didn’t really like school. I liked English and I was already writing a lot back then. Although, no one in school or my teachers knew I was doing that. It was a secret thing I did. I was reading a lot, too. I guess you could say I was a precocious, inwardly pretentious youth. But, at the same time, I was still just trying to fit in on the outside. Trying to get through high school without getting chased.

Growing up, I didn’t like my hometown, in suburban Vancouver. I wanted out of everything. I wanted a different life.

Which is why music was huge for me. It was the biggest part of

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my inner life. Not that I actually did music during that period of my life. I didn’t really think of music as something I would try my hand at, despite the fact that I was writing constantly. Even then, writing came more naturally to me than music. Showbiz, especially, seemed ridiculous, too. It felt like something that existed in another world. The idea of getting on stage was outlandish to me. If I was being honest, I thought it seemed kind of gauche or garish. But I was obsessed with music.

I was 16 in late 1988 into 1989, which is probably around the beginning of the Madchester scene. I was really into that stuff. I was mostly listening to acts from overseas. Basically anything released by Creation Records; noisy yet melodic guitar music from the UK. The bands always sounded and looked cooler to me. I guess that’s part of the extreme disconnect I felt to my hometown. It couldn’t be more different than the world I imagined these bands coming from. Even though what I imagined was probably totally wrong, because I’m sure they have suburbs in England as well.

I didn’t have a lot of money to spend on music magazines but they were certainly how I discovered bands. It’s probably still the same today, but bands got cycled through really fast. A band would be huge and then all of a sudden the Milltown Brothers would never be heard from again. It was hard to keep up, but fun to try. That was mainly how you found out about interesting bands, aside from listening to college radio. However, college radio was more into American underground scenes and local music which I didn’t get into until a couple of years later.

It would have also been around this time when I first started going to shows. I either had a fake I.D. or I borrowed one from someone so I could see The Jesus and Mary Chain. I think that was when they were doing The Automatic tour in ’88 or ’89. That show made a big impression on me. Although, I got really drunk at it, so don’t remember too much. I wasn’t big into drinking, so I didn’t take much. I was just in party mode, I guess. Excited to have faked the bouncer and succeeded in getting into the venue.

Looking towards the future, back then, all roads were leading to me becoming some sort of academic. I was always geared towards that path because it’s the background my family had. I didn’t consider not going to university as a life option. I eventually dropped out of university. It took me a while to figure out I had no business there. So, I didn’t really know what I would do but I really got off on words; pushing them around a page. And I could do it by myself. I got a rise out of playing with language.

Which is something I do today, but in a different way. That was the only thing I felt really strongly about. Everything else was just vague ideas to get out into a world that seems cut off from you. If I could give my 16-year-old self advice, I would tell myself to lighten up and be more of a punk. That’s my advice to all 16-year-olds!

as told to zara hedderman

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info@fortedistribution.co.uk

CMAT A breathless meeting with the self-proclaimed girly girl who’s definitely Ireland’s best-ever pop songwriter,

by Tristan Gatward. Photography by Sarah Doyle

In a quiet corner of a West London café, a flustered Ciara MaryAlice Thompson rushes in with a spirit of warm chaos, 45 minutes after we’d planned, apologising as if she were late to lunch with one of the girls. She sighs, both exhausted and enthralled from her morning, explaining the drama that had unfurled on her journey in and the hypothetical [redacted] drama that she was sure would unfold later that day.

“I’m currently suffering a four-day hangover,” she says, standing up to order a coffee. “I had to get smashed last night, too – there was legitimately a very important reason for that, but I’ll tell you about it later. It’s been a hell of a 24 hours.”

CMAT has the impression of someone who is followed around by drama, for the good company if nothing else; it’s immediately infectious. A Nashville dreamer with a bubbling Dublin drawl, her initials swing around her neck in a swirly font like a forged Van Gogh painting at the end of a faux gold chain, over carefully clashing leopard print patterned shirts, a big furry hat in yet a third shade of leopard print, and a pink fleecelined dry robe that you’d more likely find on a wild swimming paddle boarder than an exuberant country singer. But while this metropolitan city spot has lacked CMAT’s eccentricity until her arrival, the bedlam seems to hug her so authentically that it barely warrants a second glance.

“I’m sleeping in the studio at the moment,” she whispers, theatrically. “There’s a mattress on the floor, and there are these two boys living there. It’s a boy house. Boy things happen in a boy house. But I found out the place I was staying in London wasn’t inhabitable two days before Christmas and had to move out because the mould was literally giving me a cough.” Her nose wrinkles, only admitting later that one of these unruly boys is her musical director. “He’s a whip cracker,” she nods. “One of the best guitarists I’ve ever met, and he’s teaching me how to play, but I woke up this morning, looked to my right and it was just filters and baccy. Le freak, c’est chic. But I used to shred when I was a teenager, so maybe that’ll return. Once you’ve stopped shredding it’s hard to go back.”

Where muscle memory has failed, CMAT compensates

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with an encyclopaedic knowledge of shredding guitarists in the Irish tradition, eyes wide as she regales her favourite Irish musicians as though their biographies were in front of her. “Phil Lynott for me is in the top five greatest pop songwriters of all time,” she says, resolutely. “Do you call it hair rock? His solo stuff is some of the most beautiful shit. The songs he released close to his death were the mushiest, Gilbert O’Sullivan-style pop music, but totally amazing.” She pauses, “I do also love Gilbert O’Sullivan. If Phil is five in the greatest Irish songwriters list, Gilbert is three.”

“Who’s number one?”

“Me.” Pause.

“You have to say it.” She breaks an uncannily straight face after a few seconds. “I don’t actually think that… No! Scratch that. I do. Gilbert, definitely. Phil Lynott, definitely. But in terms of pop songwriting, there’s a lot of people that go under the radar. There’s this guy I know called Luke who isn’t even doing music anymore. He’s in the top five. Then a lot of those ’70s cats. Obviously, they’re not writers, but the greatest pop act in the world is The Nolan Sisters. Undoubtedly. Their catalogue is belters the whole way through. Weird structures and performances. Unbelievable production. And they were in it for the girls – choreography, hair, makeup, glittery lights – everything I like about everything.”

It’s their trappings as much as their music that seals The Nolans’ place in CMAT’s history books. “Most people are shocked and appalled when I say Connie Nolan is one of my biggest inspirations, because they just think of her as a Loose Women panellist,” she says. “It’s mad the way musical careers go. Most of my favourite artists only made music for five or ten years and then did something completely different. Mind you, I’d love to be on the Loose Women panel. I love to complain, I love to be around the girls… I hate Janet Street Porter, though. I will happily go on record and say that I hate that woman and if she ever made an appearance I would do absolutely everything in my power to ruin her life verbally. I think I could probably do it.”

— Embracing the glitz — We talk about The Nolan Sisters for another ten minutes, as she dissects her favourite album All Together, eulogises the band’s “sexy rebrand” that ended as soon as it began and marvels at ‘Attention To Me’, a veritable country song “that sounds like a Dottie West fucking slapper,” or “groovy” to the untrained ear.

It’s been joked that the only difference between country music and rock’n’roll is the relationship between an artist and their hometown, and for CMAT it began in Cedarwood Green, two roads down from Bono.

“Oh, Bono’s number two,” she adds. “I think I’m one of the few people from Dublin who genuinely adores him. He’s so delusional about his abilities and his importance to the world that he just seems to be really happy, believing life circles around him.

And he’s nice to people as a result. He doesn’t have the capacity to be jealous because he really thinks he’s the best person in the world. That’s such a nice trait. I never met him, though.”

Her family then moved to a suburb in North Dublin called Littlepace, where she lived for the next ten years. “That was just cement,” she says. “It was really village-y. Everyone knew everything about each other. I had pretty a rough time there as a teenager, but it was all self-inflicted by being an emotional cow.

I had bad cystic acne from primary school, and really bad mental

health, weight issues – I pretty much spent 80% of the time alone in my bedroom with no confidence. But I was also really loud and annoying, so people couldn’t even feel sorry for me. I was really pretentious, too, a real fucking snob about music and culture.”

She recalls her meticulously thought-out first day of secondary school, having become obsessed with black-andwhite film from a television station that played ’40s Westerns in between the news.

“It still fucking haunts me. I even tried to learn how to do a Transatlantic accent,” she laughs. “We’d all been given a locker and I’d printed out a load of pictures of my favourite films, making sure everyone could see me stick them up. I wanted people to know I was different – I thought people would like that. But this guy walked up behind me and said, ‘Are you Róisín Thompson’s sister?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, and he literally turned around and announced to the entire hall: ‘Lads! Róisín Thompson’s sister’s a lesbian!’ And that was that. So those were my teenage years – me being insufferable and everyone hating me as a result. I maintain the fact that all my particular bullies were justified.”

The same bully is partially to thank for CMAT’s songwriting prowess, though, alongside Nickelodeon and a fierce competitive streak. “I’ve always just assumed I was going to be a popstar,” she admits, “but I didn’t know what songwriting was

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“Let me tell you something: I love musician beef, and I’m willing to start one at any given time”

until this TV show called Unfabulous starring Emma Roberts.

She was a 13-year-old girl who wrote 66 songs about her love interest Jake Behari – that was the theme of the show. I was in love with that boy who’d convinced everyone I was a lesbian, and I thought I could do loads better than 66 songs, so I got a guitar for Christmas and started writing all of these Taylor Swift country pastiches. Then when I was a little older, I started doing the same thing with Laura Marling.” The earliest examples of these songs can be found on a charity compilation CD made by her school, co-opted by a well-meaning dad who added country production, a pedal steel guitar and skiffle drums to her recordings. “I’m convinced that if I listened back now, I’d think it slaps,” she concedes, “but at the time I just remember crying thinking it sounded nothing like Katy Perry.”

Time’s a healer, and CMAT’s debut album sounds nothing like Katy Perry either. If My Wife New I’d Be Dead is the perfect conflation of glossy alt-country and freak folk – somewhere between Caroline Rose and Vashti Bunyan – ready for the barn dance while tipping its hat to the portrait tattoo of Judee Sill on CMAT’s arm. Her happy-sad stories of childhood have a life-affirming depth and resilience, while being addictive foottappers at their core. “You know how everyone has their teacher?

Mine was my old music teacher. She started giving me albums that I needed to listen to, telling me I was going to sing like the McGarrigle Sisters and write songs like Dory Previn. At the time I was performatively into Dad Rock – all girls who are into music go through that phase to prove they’re not like these other bitches – but I revisited Dory specifically a while later. Her, Judee and Connie Converse – they were all I listened to for years.”

A distinguishing factor of freak folk is the mystery and underappreciation that surrounded its luminaries, from the tragic disappearance of Connie Converse to Vashti Bunyan’s unknown successes. “The only reason this mystery surrounds them is misogyny,” she says. “These women only made one or two albums because they weren’t a sellable artist – they were women writing women-friendly music while being pummelled by everything in the industry. The only forms of truly acceptable femininity in music are androgyny and fragility.

“I do everything in my power to fly in the face of that.

Wearing a pair of ten-year-old brogues instead of glitzy makeup is annoying; I’m a girly girl. I love a bimbo. Bimbos are my life. When people started reviewing my music, particularly in England, the number one comment I got back was that I was novelty, and they don’t review novelty music. Obviously, there’s an element of humour to my lyrics, but I think the novelty is that I was being a girl. If Father John Misty released a song like ‘KFC’ it wouldn’t be dismissed, but I was because I did it with big hair while setting a man on fire in my music video. Same as Kirsty MacColl, she was dismissed as novelty for her entire career because she released one song with a chip in the title.”

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An early highlight on the album speaks to a similar feeling – a tongue-in-cheek ode to the film director Peter Bogdanovich, inspired by a podcast uncovering the importance of his wife Polly Platt’s role in his successes. “Literally, the film he’s most known for, The Last Picture Show – she basically made that film,” says CMAT. “She found the book, adapted the screenplay, scouted the location, oversaw hair, makeup, costumes and set design, while he was just plodding the shops.” Bogdanovich may have been listening. The day after this interview, it was announced that he’d passed away – a wary shuffle from CMAT’s mortal coil.

— The spectre of Miss Piggy — Beyond everything, CMAT’s greatest love is antiquing.

Her shoulder even once made it into an episode of Antiques Roadshow. “It’s been one of my most prolific and expensive pastimes over the last seven years,” she stresses. “I specialise in 20th-century knick-knacks, particularly really camp Charles and Diana memorabilia.” She proudly shows me her latest purchase, a black mug commemorating their wedding day, side-profiles rubbishly etched in gold leaf. “I also bought a Year 2000 edition of Miss Piggy, a plush Miss Piggy – a Disney World Store exclusive,” she beams. “If anything in a second-hand shop has Miss Piggy on it, it has to come home. That’s the rule. This one’s in bits – she is absolutely wrecked, her hair is manky and I love her.”

True enough, the spectre of Miss Piggy looms over every part of our conversation. As we talk about her desire to live in a place of her own, she stops to check if eBay has any Miss Piggy door knockers, detouring to place a bid on a toothbrush holder. The one current CMAT fan club has turned into a Miss Piggy meme page, and the snobbery that defined her teenage years now only comes out for the Muppets. “It’s a whole thing,” she promises. “And just so we’re clear, have I priced getting a muppet version of myself? Absolutely, yes, I’ve been doing it pretty regularly for maybe the last three years. The annoying thing is – I’m about to get unpopular here – a lot of artists do puppet music videos really badly. And it’s annoying because it’s oversaturated by people who don’t care about puppetry in the way that I do. They always get the cheap puppets and I can tell from a mile off.

“Let me tell you something,” she says, genuinely incensed. “I love musician beef and I’m willing to start one at any given time. And let me tell you why I love musicians beefing with one another. I know a lot of people think it’s not smart, it’s not clever, it’s not dignified – I disagree entirely. I think there has to be conflict because drama is the spice of life, so why not do it in an arena that’s so low stakes? Music doesn’t matter to the running of the world, and musicians should be fighting with each other at all times. Let me tell you, it would be a joy to make people angry over who I think has the worst puppet.”

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Benefits A real-time reaction to contemporary rot from a genuinely DIY outfit,

by Fergal Kinney. Photography by Eddy Maynard For Benefits vocalist Kingsley Hall, making music is about avoiding the worst, most complacent version of himself. “There’s this burning desire to not be silent about things,” he explains slowly over a Zoom call, with disarming sincerity, “to not just accept things. [To resist] this idea that I sit back, don’t get involved, let things run their course. And if so and so gets in, or if that’s my MP then OK, no problem! It’s kind of a desire to say something and get it out. If I stop doing that I end up sitting back and being this vacuous non-entity that sits there and waits for things to blow over.” A pause. “I’ve never wanted to be that. I’ve got this pent-up anger and desire to speak and to shout and discuss. But how do I translate that?”

Since forming in Teesside in 2019, Benefits have become that rarest of things: a DIY outfit that, from nowhere, were able to find an audience purely during the pandemic. Between Hall, synthesizer player Robbie Major, bassist Hugh Major and drummer Johnny Snowball, Benefits make – and self-release – sounds that blur the line between aggro punk, industrial, musique concrete and noise. The track names tell their own

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story: ‘Flag’, ‘Empire’, ‘Traitor’, ‘Meat Teeth’. Sleaford Mods have endorsed them; Steve Albini is a fan, writing on Twitter that “80s UK had two unrelated scenes that were a big part of my headspace, the Crass/Pop Group ranting lefty/anarchist punks, and Whitehouse/TG/Cabaret Voltaire pure noise.

Been a while since something evoked that era as effectively as this Benefits track.” Making smart use of social media videos, without any management or press, Benefits’ strength is in a direct, almost automatic, reflection of the present moment. Hall puts a premium on there being as little time as possible between writing and releasing. In both their rage and approach, it’s doing the work that major label post-punk revivalists often only pay lip service to.

Describing himself as massively nervous about the interview – it’s only his second piece of press for the Benefits project – Hall confesses to holding notes just out of camera in case he loses his train of thought.

“I have a problem remembering things and trying to be lucid or witty or anecdotal,” Hall smiles. “In the past, there

would have been the failsafe of having a drink, and I don’t even drink anymore, so that’s gone. If you’re in an indie band, which I have been, you can have the great fallback of being drunk.” In a previous life, Hall had been singer for The Chapman Family, an NME-tipped indie-goth outfit who split nearly a decade ago.

“I love guitars and I love bands and I love noise,” explains Hall of that time, “but I’d fallen out of love with it for a variety of reasons. Some health, some emotional, some psychological.”

Hall saw how much harder it was for his band – working-class, based in the North East – than for contemporaries with easier access to the capital and, indeed, capital. As with many survivors of ’00s indie, the fallout was personally painful. “When you’ve had this little song that’s taken you to SXSW or Japan, there’s a big comedown from that.”

Hall ploughed on, expecting a life outside of the music industry. He matured, he had a daughter, life happened. Something, though, began to change in 2019. What if he formed a band that, in its extremity, could be immune from the kind of experience he’d had in his youth?

“The point of the band at first was almost a punk rock thing,” Hall explains, “there’s a stage, shout and scream for twenty minutes.” At an early show – the last show before the pandemic hit – Hall remembers performing alienated even those close to him. “We had this track, this wall of noise with no structure, and I had two pages of A4 stuff to read out. We did that as the last song and the crowd universally hated it. People we knew and were friends of ours walked out, they said afterwards that it was a bit much for them. You had Robbie playing these keyboards with a pedalboard bigger than Kevin Shields, it was insane.”

— Need for speed — Lockdown was, for Hall, “this big opportunity to reassess.” White-hot punk rage was one thing, but Hall wanted to chase abstraction. “I can’t stand hearing recordings that are pristine,” he explains. “I can’t stand production values, I find them really boring. What I’m trying to do with my process, it’s more like an abstract painting.”

He began asking Major, Benefits’ synthesizer player, to send him over three or four electronic drone pieces. “They don’t have to match or be in the same key or tempo. They can be whatever they want. I will then take them and reconstruct them, mash them together. I want it to be like an abstract expressionist painting, as opposed to a pristine and hyperreal photograph. In art and in music, I couldn’t care less about that. I want things to be a mess and all intense.” The project began to change significantly across 2020 and 2021 (when I first emailed Benefits at the start of 2021, impressed with what I’d heard, Hall was already sheepish about the material that was online, knowing he was working on something more potent).

Benefits’ need for speed has already forced Hall to confront many of the dilemmas painfully familiar to independent artists.

“We’ve had people asking when we’ll do a vinyl release, but it’s no,” he explains. “Firstly, we can’t afford it. Second, there’s nobody banging on our doors to release this. The point of the band is to try and be this instant, instantaneous reaction to the

world around us, so if there’s a nine-to-twelve month delay on a vinyl release, I don’t see the point.” Vinyl, though increasingly imperfect due to global pressing delays and its environmental impact, is at least a revenue stream for artists who have faced two years of on/off live music lockdowns and habitually low streaming revenues.

“The point of our music is to be instant and it’s not really to be overanalysed in the future,” Hall outlines, “There it is now, listen to it now, the lyrics are relevant to the point of time that the music will come out at. We’re going to have to listen to a lot of releases in the next year that will all be relevant to the time that artists had during lockdown. Instead, we have the technology now where it can be that instant. The lyrics to ‘Meat Teeth’ were all written around Christmas, there’s even a reference to a Christmas gut in it, then in January we’ve released it. Look at ‘Traitors’ – I turned that around in two weeks from the point I started mashing it together on GarageBand to the video being up. The videos are the things that take the longest, and waiting for things to turn up on Spotify. It seems ridiculous. In the back of my mind, I’m trying to do these marketing release schedules. I find that fun, to be honest.”

As we conclude our chat, Hall points out that he’s been looking for inspiration in what strikes me as an unexpected place for an incensed DIY collective. Sir Mick Jagger. “I was watching a Rolling Stones documentary on BBC Four the other night; now, Jagger in the ’60s was a really interesting fella I think. He’s very eloquent. He starts talking about what the Stones are, and how the noise of that music, the pent-up anger of their live shows, it’s a reaction against older generations, disillusionment against older generations. I think there’s a similar thing now where there’s this frustration and disillusionment but it’s not about older generations. Older people are disillusioned, the middleaged are disillusioned. The only ones who aren’t frustrated is this bizarre, wealthy gentry.”

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From Wetherspoons to the dungeon and back again in the company of London hardcore’s weirdest band,

by Dominic Haley. Photography by Tom Porter

Powerplant Grasping a towel to cover a vest and a pair of Adidas joggers, it’s hard to tell if Powerplant’s synth player Cam Pickering is pleased to see me or not. Suffering from a case of tonsillitis and, frankly, looking more-than-slightly worse for wear, we’re on his doorstep to see if he’s up for being in the band photos. Either way, he invites us into the abandoned youth club that now serves as his home and his band’s nerve centre.

Inside, we’re ushered in to a former sports hall that is now an office-meets-studio-meets-living room. Instantly, the band are transformed into excitable 13-year-olds, running from wall to wall and snatching up various objets d’art as they pose for photographs. “Do you guys do many shows from here?” I ask Pickering as we both observe the chaos. “We used to,” he replies, “but we’ve only got the place for a year or so, so we’ve been keeping things pretty low key.”

Fifteen minutes later, we let Pickering return to his sickbed and head back around the corner to the local Wetherspoons, where the band plan on grabbing a bite to eat. Soon enough, a rather anaemic-looking pizza arrives at the table, and the band’s percussionist, Billy Trick, is wasting no time tucking into it.

“That’s one sad fucking pizza,” his bandmate Theo Zhykharyev remarks, leaning over the table and looking perplexed atthefluorescentorangediscthat’sbeenplonkeddowninfrontofus.

“Usually, they’re way shitter than this,” replies Trick, reaching for a slice. “I remember having a burrito in the ’Spoons in Elephant and Castle before I went to see the Oh Sees in like 2015. It was nice at the time, but by the time the show started, I kept thinking, ‘Something mad is going on in my stomach’.

Eventually, I walked out, and I was like, ‘I don’t feel good.’ Long story short, I ended up projectile vomiting on the way home.”

“Want to know my dad’s life hack?” asks drummer Lloyd Clipson, with a mischievous grin spreading over his face. You just know that this is an attempt to gross us out, and to his credit, he doesn’t disappoint. “My dad can’t taste or smell, so to get the most out of eating out, he puts loads of tartar sauce all over it, mainly because it’s the most chunky sauce that Wetherspoons offer.”

— Mayonnaise hardcore — Powerplant are an unlikely bunch to get your head around, and it’s not only for the mix of personalities. One of the most

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distinctive-sounding acts currently doing the rounds on London’s DIY scene, their sound is kind of like mayonnaise, blending a range of different, sometimes contradictory ingredients; on paper, it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does. They’re one of those bands who drive music journalists wild, mainly by not quite sounding like anything in particular. Should their reliance on electronics stick them in the electro-punk/cyber-punk categories, or does their driving sound nudge them towards the new hardcore scene?

Or maybe they’re closer to one of those Soundcloud microgenres with names like ‘egg punk’? Then again, who cares? Like every other band, Powerplant just want to make music that bangs.

“Powerplant is actually my second attempt at making music on my own,” Zhykharyev explains. “The idea was for it to be kinda fast and mostly synth-driven, textbook internet synthpunk. I guess it took some turns along the way. In the beginning, I did everything myself because executing and translating everything on my own was the most immediate way to make it work. I realised there were guys like Ty Segall and Jay Reatard who did everything or played everything themselves, and that sort of proved I can do everything on my own and I could just go and do it.”

As a solo artist, he released 2017’s Dog Sees Ghosts and Quiet at Night, both haunted garage rock records that are all stabbed guitars and reverb vocals. Zhykharyev is the first to admit that, at the time, he found the reaction disappointing – “I was literally like, ‘This is a joke – no one cares’” – but thanks to Harakiri Diat, a YouTuber on a mission to document punk in its strangest forms, things started to happen.

“I can remember getting this order in from Japan, which was insane, but I guess everyone’s famous online at some point someday,” he laughs. “If your length satisfies the algorithm, plus you have a cool cover, then you’re probably all set. Hats off to channels like Harakiri and Anti (formerly known as Jimmy) though, those guys have shown the way to countless classics at this stage by just accepting submissions and having great taste.

I’d say Diat at this point is the most trustworthy, go-to source of internet punk in a way that both feeds the community content and helps new people to find a footing. It’s hard to imagine a less connected world.”

The next milestone in the band’s development came when Zhykharyev moved into a South London houseshare with

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Clipson at the tail end of 2017. Clipson, a drummer, picks up the story.

“I was playing in a bunch of bands, and I can remember him playing me his stuff and just floating the idea of ‘Hey, it would be cool to see what this sounds like with live drums.’ I don’t even think there was any intention to play shows at that point – it was more an experiment to see what it sounded like as a band.”

“Meeting these guys came at the perfect time for me. I was kind of slowly thinking to myself ‘Okay, maybe it is time for other people to come in,’” adds Zhykharyev. “We kind of knew what each of us did and loved it from a distance. I think we just bonded over respect and appreciation for each other, and being in a band has been a good excuse to spend more time together. I think it’s really cool to have a group of people who all love the same stuff but don’t necessarily output in the same vein as each other; it almost always results in something different and special.”

Evolving his project into a fully-fledged band not only allowed Zhykharyev to concentrate on what he’s good at, but also brought new influences to the Powerplant’s sound. Clipson, Trick and bassist Karim Newble, with their backgrounds in the capital’s hardcore scene, brought thrashier elements, while Pickering has a more experimental has brought more atmospheric leanings and a new, more rounded approach to production. The result was 2019’s People in the Sun, a record that took the band’s original garage and psychedelic leanings but ramped the energy up as high as it could go. Taking the Ty Segall pretensions of the early EPs and twisting them into something akin to a modern-day UK Subs, it garnered instant critical praise and instigated a wave of hype that the band has been riding on ever since.

Adding new members also allowed Powerplant to plug directly into London’s emerging hardcore scene. Now, for guys of a certain vintage like me, hardcore was a scene that was almost pathological about genre lines, and it’s weird to think of a multifaceted, contradictory project like this being accepted into the fold; to their credit, though, the capital’s punk kids have taken the Powerplant under their wing, and they regularly share bills with more conventional hardcore acts like Chubby and the Gang, High Vis and The Chisel.

“I don’t know how we’ve ended up there, but I feel like being able to play with those guys has been a big advantage,” explains Clipson as we try to prise apart the mystery. “I feel like bands that aren’t into a specific scene end up doing all sorts of shit – like I know people who’ve done bands and end up playing these miscellaneous shows supporting some shitty band in someplace where

18

you don’t know anyone. So it’s been nice to have been able to put down roots in the hardcore scene, it’s like you turn up and there are all your friends, and everyone’s just stoked from the get-go.”

“I always say that we’re hardcore adjacent,” adds Zhykharev. “I dare not speak on the behalf of everyone out there, but everyone I’ve met has been a real human being while tolerating very little bullshit. It’s literally taken people’s youth to get it to where it is right now – a community of supportive, honest people with a backbone of labels, venues and collectives who are all looking out for each other. It’s taken years of blood and sweat – you’ve got to respect that.”

— The dungeon master — Don’t go thinking you’ve got Powerplant figured out though. Dungeon Synth, the band’s latest release, is something different entirely. Named after and inspired by the obscure death metal offshoot, it’s a collection of instrumental electronica written, produced and recorded by Zhykharyev during the last days of the 2021 lockdown. As of January 2022, the band has released two songs from what promises to be an 18-track opus, and if singles ‘Pixie GF’ and ‘The Wheel’ are anything to go by, it’s going to be pretty out there. If you can imagine Basil Poledouris’ soundtrack for Conan the Barbarian, crossed with the music from an old Commodore 64 game, you’re getting there.

Zhykharyev shrugs modestly when I ask what’s behind the sudden change in direction. “For ages, I’d been contemplating whether I should or shouldn’t genre-hop, and if this would be too silly to do after loads of punk records, but generally, I have a restless desire to intentionally do the stupidest play in any given circumstance. I’m not sure if this is some form of self-sabotage, but I just have to satisfy the urge. There was a bit of a back and forth in my head going, ‘Could I…? Lest…? Jest…? Perchance…?’

– and then it sort of happened. It’s actually been the most I’ve smiled in a long time, mainly because it’s such a great genre.”

But that’s not where the rabbit hole ends: the album also comes with Stump Soup, a Dungeons and Dragons campaign written to accompany the music. Enigmatically, Zhykharyev gives almost nothing away when I ask him for a few details of the plot. “Let’s just say it’s something that’s going to tick all the fantasy ‘sword and sorcery’ boxes, while also being quite ‘internet’. You’ll fight exquisitely-dressed rats, snort pixie dust, maybe kill an old man – but hey, it’s up to you! If you’re the right kind of a nerd, it’s going to be amazing.”

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Sasami Nobody, you suspect, ever ends up standing on the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska by accident. When the cover of Sasami Ashworth’s debut solo full-length depicted her doing precisely that, there was obviously a significance to it. A highly personal album, mired in sadness and defined by its frosty synths and desolate guitars, it was one on which you could almost hear the emotional ice getting thinner, as Ashworth sensitively unspooled her feelings and, in the process, thawed out her soul.

That was three years ago now. After the album met with glowing reviews, there were any number of directions in which she might have gone next – she’s a classically-trained, French horn-playing Los Angeles native who had already proven her pop chops and punk credentials in Cherry Glazerr, where singer Clem Creevy described her as the resident “synth queen.” It says a lot about her, then, that the path she’s chosen for album number two has led her to produce a ferocious rock record inspired by her teenage love of nu metal, one that features Dirk Verbeuren of Megadeth on drums and inspired Rolling Stone to dub her “the Satanic Brian Wilson.” “I have a very watery energy,” she says, at one point, over Zoom from her California home. She’s speaking in astrological terms, but it makes sense on another level – if Sasami was ice, then Squeeze is fire.

As if to underline the extent of the metamorphosis, the cover of the new record depicts her not as herself, but as the vampiric Japanese deity Nure-onna, who has the head of a woman and the body of a snake (more on that later). It’s a sharp sonic left-turn, but it’s been a long time in the making; Sasami, released in 2019, was largely written two years prior, much of it pieced together whilst on the road with Cherry Glazerr.

Accordingly, by the time she was at the back end of touring it in early 2020, she was increasingly bored with being a shoegazey singer-songwriter and, instead, was eager for chaos. “The shows were definitely ramping up.” she recalls. “Everything was getting heavier. The emotional place that I was in when I made Sasami was in the past, so I was ready to get into noisier landscapes.”

That was a road that could lead, for Ashworth, to only one place; a revisitation of the nu metal that had been both a vehicle and a salve for her teenage angst. “It’s incredible to think it now, but when I was in middle school, all of that was on Top 40 radio – System of a Down, Korn, Slipknot.” She’s right, of course; the latter, long before they were the polished arena titans they are today, appeared as musical guests on TFI Friday in 1999, meaning that a band at that point best known for setting each other on fire on stage reached a British terrestrial television audience of millions at 6pm on a Friday.

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“That was the mainstream around my pre-teen years. It was a sonic language I was very familiar with, and I just found it interesting, and kind of funny, how nu metal never really took itself too seriously – there was always this sort of clownish quality to it – and yet it’s tied to some very tumultuous feelings for me. I mean, your teenage years are the most emotionally raw of your life. You’re not really a kid, you’re not really an adult, you don’t have money, you don’t have resources, and everything feels like the end of the fucking world. So, even as a grown-up, those heavy sounds have an effect on me; going to a metal show can be really dark, and scary, and angry.”

All of those are appropriate buzzwords for Squeeze, an album both unflinching in its address of gruelling subject

For people who want to get heavy,

by Joe Goggins. Photography by Angela Ricciardi

nature, constantly shifting shape in a manner that Ashworth credits to thinking of albums in the context of her classical grounding. “Symphonic work is much closer to a [full] record than a song, because of the length of it. To me, you can make an album where everything’s cohesive, and flows really smoothly, the sort of record that puts you in a little bit of a trance because of the way it oscillates and undulates and lilts up and down. The other kind is what Squeeze is – like a haunted house or a corn maze, where there’s something different around every corner, and where by the end, the energy is a long way away from where you started, even if you keep coming back to the same themes.”

— Deeper into fantasy —

matter, particularly violence, and buoyant in terms of its spirit.

Ashworth calls this dynamic, which comes to define the album’s themes, “anti-toxic positivity”. “I know how I use other people’s music,” she explains. “It goes one of two ways; it’s either to turn around my mood, or go deeper into it. If you’re sad, you put on something upbeat to cheer yourself up, or you put on something darker to kind of embrace it. Making this album at a time that was so dark for mortal, societal and personal reasons, I chose to do something that would help people get further into their rage, and their frustration, and their sadness. It’s for people who want to get heavy, rather than people looking to brighten their day.”

Squeeze, therefore, is a searing listen, one that bubbles over where Sasami bubbled under, and that is mercurial in

Ashworth began work on the record in early 2020, meaning that the bulk of it came together in the eye of the Covid-19 storm, and was therefore never going to be something that she could have hived off from the outside world; the impact of the pandemic on Squeeze is a profound one.

“It was very much influenced by a year of quarantine, and watching society truly crumble in a way that was unprecedented in my lifetime,” she says. “It’s much less autobiographical than Sasami was. I feel like a novelist, and this is my first novel; the last album was like a bunch of diary entries. Or, you know, like I’m making a movie, and there’s something intentional to each scene; that’s a very different approach to making songs for yourself in the back of the van, on tour with another band.”

Ultimately, the nature of pandemic life was responsible for Squeeze’s main through-line, which is rooted in fantasy, the same way that Sasami was grounded in the reality of her situation at the time. “In quarantine, everything was fantasy, right? Nothing is based on anything that you’re actually fucking doing, because nobody’s doing anything. You’re not going out to shows, you’re not going to the movies, you’re not going to museums, you’re not meeting new people. So, instead, it all had to come from memory.

You can strive to keep touch with reality, or you can go deeper into fantasy, which is what I did – head into the darkness created by this void we all had in our lives. That’s why a lot of the ideas are about spinning out in isolation, longing for attention and connection.”

It was from quarantine that Ashworth found herself delving into both the political and social history of her ancestors, and their mythology and folklore, too. “My family is Zainichi – so, ethnic Koreans who were born and raised in Japan.” What she found, as she immersed herself in the culture and the

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complicated history of both countries more than ever before, fed back into the themes that were already taking shape as she wrote for Squeeze.

Of Nure-onna, whose form she assumes in the record’s artwork, she says: “My uncle was an anime artist, director and producer, so Japanese-style art was always in my family, and I grew up watching a lot of that stuff. I think it’s pretty natural that if you look at, like, Ariel from The Little Mermaid, and then at this ghostly character from Japanese folklore, it’s obvious I’m going to be drawn more to Nure-onna, partly because I see myself more in characters that look like me in an archetypal way, but also in terms of energy. There’s a complexity to characters like Nure-onna. If you look at the cover, the way the scales and the snakeskin are drawn is so beautiful, and yet the character has a really menacing energy, too – she would lure people to their deaths. There’s multitudes – within her, within me, within the album.”

The idea of cyclical violence is at the core of Squeeze, an album with a title that, again, Ashworth chose for its ambiguity: “It could mean an endearing, sweet hug, it could mean holding on tight to something in desperation, or it could mean something more sinister, as in to harm somebody.” Sure enough, the title track stares down the epidemic of male violence against women,

It brings her back, neatly, to just how multi-faceted Squeeze is. There’s myriad influences swirling around the nu metal nucleus – melody remains important, meaning everybody from Fleetwood Mac to Sheryl Crow echo in the background; meanwhile, there’s a place at the heart of the album for a scorching cover of Daniel Johnston’s ‘Sorry Entertainer’, which Ashworth says is “totally an underdog song, that fit in with the sentiment of the album.” There are moments of near-folky introspection, too, with Christian Lee Hutson and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits among the illustrious supporting cast of musicians she assembled.

“Everything’s connected, I think; all these disparate things have an effect on each other. That’s just being a human.

We try to compartmentalise things, and have everything in order, and project this onto that, but honestly, if you think about what an algorithmic society we live in now, all those algorithms are just based on basic human brain function. Everything you take in affects what you put out – music, history, art, whatever.”

Ashworth has already broken post-pandemic cover; she toured extensively across the U.S. last autumn with Japanese Breakfast, debuting the Squeeze live show, which, if amateur footage is anything to go by, does the record justice both in terms of the blistering translation of the songs to the stage and

“I wanted there to be theatricality to it; I wanted drama, I wanted whimsy, I wanted it to be bizarre. But, at the same time, I made a record inspired by nu metal” with a scintillating guest verse from London artist No Home the centrepiece. For Ashworth, the song is reclamatory.

“I was thinking a lot about appropriation,” she says.

“Violence against women – violence against marginalised people in general – is a theme that gets used all the time in music and art by the perpetrators of it. I wanted to take back some of that language, and use it to make something really gnarly and visceral – to claim those words and sounds that have been misused and create something really dark out of it for myself.

The song’s about the fact that violence creeps up on you in everyday life, whether you like it or not.”

Ashworth’s frenzied, magnetic presence at the centre of it all.

The return to the real world had her reflecting on Squeeze – had she achieved all she’d hoped to with it?

“I wanted there to be theatricality to it; I wanted drama, I wanted whimsy, I wanted it to be bizarre. But, at the same time, I made a record inspired by nu metal, which was always pretty tongue-in-cheek; I don’t think songs like ‘Skin a Rat’ are really very self-serious. I don’t know; I just remember tapping out drum parts with my fingers on GarageBand, not even knowing if they were physically possible. And now, I know they are – because the drummer out of Megadeth played them. On my record. That is fucking epic.”

— Everything’s connected — For Ashworth, this omnipresent violence was something she discovered in her research of her ancestry, and the history of the Zainichi people more broadly, in the making of the record. “I was doing a lot of study into the Japanese occupation of Korea, and how the relationship between Korean and Japanese people was affected by it – and specifically, the impact of that kind of Japanese militaristic complex on my family. And what I found was just how violent and murderous and imperialist it all was, and I had to sort through my own feelings on that – on how all of these really complicated histories weave together.”

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:3LON That raw Baltimore energy, by Katie Beswick Photography by Andrew Mangum

Picture a forest as the sun comes up. Trees with yellow-green leaves form a canopy. The air is thick, lush and damp after the rain. Rays pour through the trees’ leaves, dripping luminous pools of light across the forest floor. You look again. What seemed to be roots and vines are in fact, tangled masses of wires that have taken over, criss-crossing the ground and up the trees like weeds. Growing out of the wires are screens flashing neon forest colours, on and off, flickering in the branches. The light from the screens merges with the sunlight, so you can’t tell what’s nature and what’s man-made.

This is the image that experimental R&B artist :3LON (pronounced ‘Elon’ and using they/them pronouns) envisioned as they worked on their upcoming EP, due for release on their start-up label, PLUR.net, later this year. In ‘Quantum Leaping’, the first video from the project, dropped in January, :3LON appears bioluminescent, shimmering like the wings of a bird, or the scales of a tropical fish. Rather than work with a narrative arc, :3LON concentrated in this video on transmitting the mood underlying the song, connected to the wider concept of a sci-fi/nature mashup that had developed during the writing. It sounds, as we chat, like :3LON’s imaginary forest is something from the speculative stories of the eco-critic Donna Harraway – almost real, the promise of a better thing from the mess of now.

“I’m super interested in those moments in history when things have been forced to evolve,” :3LON says – the moments, they expand, when fish crawled out of the sea and started to walk. What we’re living through now could be, rather than total environmental collapse, another moment in the history of evolution. It’s a conversation that makes me desperate to hear the full EP, though it’s not quite ready yet.

This project, :3LON explains, is the culmination of a years’-long process that began as an attempt to capture the highoctane drag race aesthetic of the video game Midnight Club.

Over the years the writing has shifted into something softer and more emergent. As they listened to video game music, the breakbeats and “crazy techno” gave way to something else, “I just thought, I want to bring this energy, but also remain soulful

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and talk about something that’s sincere, like a sincere idea. I’d just put together a collage of ideas and mash them together and hope it was something I could do.”

“I was really going with that first idea – the video game – for a second,” they tell me, “but then I started realising that the songs I was writing were songs about robots. Like, how does it feel to be an artificial intelligence trying to be able to love a human? Or the idea of, ‘I jump to this dimension to find you?’

It’s actually more like a sci-fi kind of thing, more than just your average video game car driving scene. I started stepping back and seeing, just kind of seeing the full picture, with a bit of distance. And realising it was something different. I stepped back and just listened to what I was doing, and let it become its own concept. It became this futuristic world that I started building. I started thinking about these concepts, about this world that these songs could have a context in, and I was like ‘Ok well, it would probably be like a futuristic world that is still controlled by someone who is, you know, not in the best interests of everyone.’ So you know, what would that mean for us? And then I’d write more songs. It’s kind of just really naturally evolved into this thing. But at first I definitely wanted it to be this video game kind of sequence.”

Producing their own work was a chance for :3LON to develop a practice without the pressures of an indifferent and greedy industry. Everybody knows that signing with a major label is as much a risk as an opportunity – stories of musicians whose work is shelved pending release are rife.

“I was shopping my music around people and I really… it kind of got to the point where I wasn’t really releasing any music because I was shopping it around, waiting to see if anyone deemed it worthy of release or whatever. It basically got the point where I was like, ‘I don’t care.’ I honestly don’t care. I think that’s always a hindrance for artists, people always be like, ‘You have to be signed by a major deal or label or something to make art, or to make anything good’. And that’s not the case. You actually don’t need anybody. A lot of the artists I look up are people who started their own label…people doing their own thing.”

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As a teenager, :3LON listened to J*Davey – who signed to Warner Brothers through Prince’s imprint and were swiftly dropped. “And then they started their own imprint, and they started dropping all these crazy projects and I just got obsessed with them growing up. And also Robyn, she has her own label, Konichiwa Records. I love Robyn so much. I love Robyn. People like that, the cool, artistic underground people, they just release what they want. We can just release a bunch of weird content and… you know, just go to all these different places without someone telling me this is marketable, this isn’t marketable.” And even if you do secure a major release, the more people there are involved in a project, the less say an artist has over their own work.

— Bioluminescence — That lack of control is something :3LON experienced during the release of an earlier EP, which they’d put out with friend and fellow musician Schwarz. On that project they’d felt creatively compromised by the input of producers and the pressure to rush releases, “I kind of put it out way before I was ready to do it because I had all these other people telling me my deadline… just being like ‘No it’s good, let’s just do it.’ But it wasn’t really up to how I would have liked it. It’s just one of those things.

I didn’t have as much control over the songs I was writing…”

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We return to this theme of control a few times through the interview – and as we speak it starts to become clear why :3LON is more optimistic about the possibilities of technology for human futures than might be warranted by current scientific consensus. Speaking about their emergence through the music scene of Baltimore, the role of the internet in offering a platform for a whole ecology to flourish out of an advanced capitalist inequity becomes clear. “We just have so much talent here. It’s always been a place where people overlook us a little bit, no one knows what’s going on here and suddenly there’s all these artists coming out and people are like what? It’s been this way since I was a little kid. Always amazing DJs, artists, rappers. There’s hella creative energy here. And there’s a lot of raw talent – you know that raw energy, like it’s just this energy that’s distinctive to this whole country. I’ve travelled a lot of places and I’ve never encountered the kind of energy that we had here, in both good and bad ways.”

The Baltimore music scene, :3LON expands, just wouldn’t exist without the possibilities the internet offers to claw your way out of parochial obscurity. It’s virtual channel for all that raw energy.

“The internet changed so much. All that gatekeeping stuff. It doesn’t work anymore, I mean you can go down that route, but it’s hard for people to gatekeep if you out here pushing your stuff and hustling. You can just make a name for yourself. I think people have a lot of online cool presence in Baltimore now that’s allowing them to make a name for themselves, to radiate beyond the city, get other people’s attention. There’s not a lot of history here so you can do a million shows and not move on with your career. But everyone I know who’s popping off it’s been the internet, we’ve been really utilizing it.”

“The baseline in Baltimore is a lot of people have this scrappiness that is kind of inherent. I remember being a little child and they was teaching it to you – like you don’t ever back down. Don’t ever back down. And sometimes it can be problematic, but sometimes it can really focus you, like if you can learn to reprogramme that energy into something more productive then you can really just be a force. So, I feel like a lotta people here we don’t take no shit, and people love that.”

It’s that raw Baltimore energy, its own kind of bioluminescence, shimmering across the internet, giving audiences scenes they never knew they needed. And there’s :3LON, like the screens growing from wire weeds of that imaginary forest, entangled and flickering in a brave new world.

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DANIEL ROSSEN FRI 20 MAY UNION CHAPEL THE BIG MOON WED 1 JUNE O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN COURTESY (LIVE) TUES 7 JUN VILLAGE UNDERGROUND CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH THURS 9 JUN SCALA PARQUET COURTS THURS 9 JUN O2 ACADEMY BRIXTON ST VINCENT WED 29 JUN EVENTIM APOLLO HOLODRUM SAT 10 SEPT SERVANT JAZZ QUARTERS FRANCIS OF DELIRIUM WED 14 SEPT SEBRIGHT ARMS KIWI JR MON 19 SEPTSOLD OUT DALSTON VICTORIA TUES 20 SEPT THE 100 CLUB W. H. LUNG WED 2 NOV VILLAGE UNDERGROUND TARTA RELENA THURS 17 NOV ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH SQÜRL SAT 11 FEB 2023 HACKNEY EARTH BC CAMPLIGHT THURS 16 FEB 2023 O2 SHEPHERD’S BUSH EMPIRE

Raveena The R&B artist making sense of her own identity through the story of a 17th-century Punjabi space princess, by Jasleen Dhindsa. Photography by Furmaan Ahmed

Raveena Aurora is both creating and living her dream. Calling me from Los Angeles (where she grew up and still currently resides), she’s starting her day with a meditation practice – something that has even managed to make its way onto her new record, Asha’s Awakening.

The new album reaches its finale with a guided meditation crafted by Raveena herself, something she decided to do after being frustrated by poorly mixed, stock sound-based meditation tracks. “When I first started to get into meditation, guided meditation was a really helpful tool for me to just refocus and recenter myself, and understand how to tap into that soft and centered space,” she explains.

“Having a person in [your] ear, helping guide that relaxation is really powerful. I wanted to offer that to my fans and anyone who’s just starting to get into meditation or just wanting to hear someone in the background. It’s for a useful purpose, but then also in the context of the album, the context of the story that it tells.”

That context is vividly explorative, both musically and lyrically. Asha’s Awakening sees 15 kaleidoscopic tracks forging

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a beautiful, radiant melting pot of R&B, soul, jazz, pop and beyond, all woven together by Indian and wider South Asian influences, and a fantastical tale of a Punjabi space princess.

“Indian culture and Punjabi culture has always surrounded me whether I embraced it or not.” Raveena says. “I grew up in an immigrant family that had recently moved to America before I was born, and they were very in touch with their culture. I grew up around a lot of brown people, going to the Gurdwara [Sikh temple] all the time. So I was inundated and surrounded by that music, that celebration of colour and spirituality, that beautiful culture I’m so grateful to be part of.”

Since 2017, Raveena has been building her distinctive musical universe. Shortly after graduating from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts she released her critically acclaimed Shanti EP, followed by her debut album Lucid in 2019. Her records have amassed tens of millions of streams, even seeing her play at Tyler the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw festival, alongside collaborations with the likes of Vince Staples on her new album.

Although the new record is sprinkled with sounds from Indian culture, from solid dhol drums to stirring sitars (and even

a feature with famed Indian singer-songwriter Asha Puthli), Raveena has only just begun to fully embrace sounds from her heritage and using them as an overt influence.

“In terms of the music that I listened to in my formative years, that was a lot of American pop music, R&B, soul, jazz,” she says. “I was obviously surrounded by Indian music as well, but more in the home and it wasn’t what I was automatically going to. As an adult, I really felt after Lucid, which is such an R&B and soul-centred album, that it was now time to find the connections between this and the sounds that I grew up on.

Asha’s Awakening is that exploration of how to merge those two sounds together.”

Delving more into Indian music was a profound experience for Raveena. “The amount that I learned on this record about music was so beautiful. I was experimenting a lot with incorporating Hindi language into it; stretching my voice, trying to play with more Indian rhymes and verbs and being inspired by other South Asian diaspora artists [and] collaborating with them. I researched all the points where South Asian music intersected with the West [and] the two big time periods that I found very connected to were the ’70s in the early 2000s. I was listening to a lot of Alice Coltrane, The Beatles, RD Burman from the ’80s like his Bollywood soundtracks. Then the early 2000s, with M.I.A. and Timbaland and everything happening with the merging of R&B and and hip hop. As South Asian artists in the diaspora sometimes we don’t realise how much actual collaboration is happening over the course of history. Maybe because we feel so underrepresented. I think there’s a beautiful sound emerging between East and West, and I just wanted to add to that conversation.”

— Embracing imperfection — Raveena explains that while her debut album Lucid saw her deep dive into the jazz influences she grew up on and tried to emulate when she was learning her craft, from Billie Holliday to Ella Fitzgerald, on Asha’s Awakening she wanted to be more loose and experimental with her sound; citing influences all the way from Jai Paul to Solange, Missy Elliot to Nelly Furtado and Sade. However, the record’s unifying factor is the story of Asha, a 17th-century Punjabi space princess, herself.

The idea for the narrative came to Raveena during the pandemic; in creating this character and structuring the arc of the album around her, Raveena was able to break down preconceived notions of who she was as an artist, providing her with the same sense of freedom she felt when delving into South Asian music. “I think out of my boredom, this whole story of this Punjabi space princess came to me and I just ran with it,” she says. “I really connected to having a character for this album [and] I felt more comfortable breaking boundaries [and] breaking the idea of what genre I fit into. That was all possible because the character made it easier for me to even explore that. It made it less scary anyway…

“I just love world-building,” she continues. “I love having visuals in a specific universe, and love concept albums. I love when everything is tied together in some way through one

central story. The story of Asha is that she was a girl in Punjab in the 1600s, and she got transported to a planet where aliens taught her highly advanced spiritual teachings, and their whole planet runs on their advanced knowledge of how to tap into spirits. She comes back down to Earth because these aliens are very kind and gentle, and don’t have sex, music and the chaos of Earth. In her human form on this planet, she misses Earth, so she comes back down to Earth and attracts this cult following which leads to her demise. She realises that part of being human is being this messy, imperfect person. Like you can have 1000 years of meditation, but not escape the lessons of being human.”

“You can have 1000 years of meditation but not escape the lessons of being human” Asha’s Awakening is split into two halves: the first half is an explosive “assault on the senses”, seizing the upbeat, sensual and joyful; this is then bridged together with the more gentle latter half by the mystical interlude of ‘Arrival to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation’.

“What I talk a lot about on the first half was embracing joy, embracing sensuality, sexuality [and] queerness.” Raveena explains. “I have these tongue-in-cheek moments where I’m aware of Asha as a character, because I think that in ways the West expects South Asian people to be these spiritually healed people. That’s something I explore in ‘Kathy Left 4 Kathmandu’, just how much that trope was put on us. So Asha plays into the trope, but she’s also highly self-aware of what it is at the same time and how it’s so damaging. The second half is just one of my experiences with being survivor of assault and abuse, depression, an abortion… all these hard and sad life experiences that a lot of us go through.”

“I think my personal take away from the character and the story was just that, in my past healing process, I felt like this need to always be calm and always be reaching to that point of being at peace with everything,” she concedes. “Then at the same time taking on a lot of pain and not really advocating for myself or having boundaries. I think what Asha taught me is that you can meditate all you want but engaging in life is this messy, imperfect process, and I’m never gonna reach this kind of spiritual perfection, especially in one lifetime. You just have to embrace being this sexual, emotional, messy, imperfect human.”

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Bristol’s radical new voice in queer dancehall, by Oskar Jeff Photography by Khali Ackford

Grove 30

“It’s never been a conscious thing. It’s just needing to express whatever anger or resentment I’ve got piling up inside, and working out in what ways I can do that.”

I’m speaking to Grove on the nature of being a multidisciplinary artist. Seemingly as comfortable on mic duties as they are building beats, happy behind the decks one minute and then a magnetic presence centre stage seconds later, their blend of high-energy live performance, anarchic club music and socio-political lyrics have seen them as a growing force in the UK underground. The recent release of SPICE, an EP of unabashedly queer dancehall cuts, on Bristol’s DIY imprint Bokeh Versions has only helped raise the temperature. We sit down to discuss small towns, the essential value of community, and how it’s sometimes nice to be reminded of how little you know.

— Joyful inclusion — Grove’s first exposure to wider prominence was with the release of 2021’s Queer + Black, an entirely self-produced EP that, in their own words, “serves as an introduction to their experience of the world.” A clear statement of intent, the project exhilarates with its directness, be it the proud defiance of ‘Black’ or the playful yet subversive flip of dancehall conventions on ‘Sticky’, replacing the often macho, and occasionally deeply homophobic, lyrics often heard in that genre with something equally as sexual, but more joyfully inclusive. I ask Grove if this direct approach was intended from the beginning.

“I didn’t start writing it with an overarching concept,” they explain. “I wrote the last track ‘Black’ as a response to the Colston statue being dragged down and thrown in the river. It was a beautiful moment for lots of people of colour to see. That rooted a sense of blackness within the collection of songs. Then it dawned on me that the other songs are pretty gay. At the time I was reading a load of [Black liberation activist, radical feminist and legendary scholar] Angela Davis, and I was like ‘Oh, shit, this all kind of ties into that’. I hadn’t pieced it all together before. But really, these tunes are a statement of who I am, not necessarily reflective of everyone who’s queer and Black. It’s me really owning both my queerness and my blackness, two things that I’ve wrestled with my entire life, wondering how rooted I am in either community. This was my outward cathartic expression, telling myself ‘I am rooted in this, I am confident in myself ’. And I wanted to share that with the world.”

While lyrically weighty, the release still has one foot firmly in the dance, and it’s perhaps this combination that makes the whole thing work so well. Production-wise, the arrangements display a versatility that eschews rigid genre confines in favour of playful experiments with combative drum and bass breakbeats and blown-out club mutations. There’s also a clear embrace of pop sensibilities across the tracks, at points bringing to mind the vocal experimentation of Imogen Heap (on ‘Fuck Ur Landlord’) or the bashment-infused UKG of Ms. Dynamite. “[When I was younger] I was fully into pure pop music: Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Lana Del Rey,” they say. It’s an intriguing amalgamation that blurs the lines between the personal and

the political, and paints a vivid portrait of its author across just five tracks.

— Wrapped in bass — Though now Bristol-based, Grove grew up in the nearby town of Cheltenham, “known for horse racing and being full of posh people. Like, full to the brim,” Grove laughs. “But there’s a stark divide between people who have loads of shit, and those that don’t. In my early teens, everything about it just felt off. But I didn’t have the political language to really describe it.”

Likewise, as a creative hub, the town also proved uninspiring. “There were plenty of dude-y guitar bands, and not much else. I definitely didn’t see myself represented in the music scene there at all,” they explain. Besides this, Grove nonetheless engaged with the scene, joining a band and attempting to find a way to develop musically, adapting to what was available.

Through the years, this search shifted from guitar bands, to singer-songwriter, to open mic poetry; for many young people who struggle to fit into their surroundings while remaining true to themselves, it’s a familiar trajectory.

A formative guiding voice came in the shape of producer and community musician Malaki Patterson, creative director of Gloucestershire youth organisation The Music Works, which provides support for young people in the local area, allowing space to nurture talent where it may be lacking elsewhere. The two connected when Grove took a spur-of-the-moment audition for a folk group.

“I didn’t even listen to folk,” they admit with a smile.

He suggested they weren’t the right fit for the group, but that they should meet, and offered access to a studio to record some demos. After the initial session, Patterson saw potential in Grove, particularly their DIY approach.

“I’d been making songs on GarageBand on my iPhone. I brought them to the session and he was like, ‘What? You made this on your phone? We need to help you build this,’” they recall.

“He ended up taking me into the community studio, and gave me a laptop. He just gave me space.” Acting as a mentor to Grove from the age of 17, it’s clear the relationship had a lasting impact on them. “I’ve learned so much from him, not only about music, but about community values and skill-sharing. He’s doing so much work there for underfunded music. I want to give credit to those people and not to the rest of the town. It doesn’t feel like the rest of the town deserves it.”

Following this, things began taking shape; the space and equipment allowed for Grove’s rudimental iPhone sketches to build into more fully-realised productions. Around this time Grove also began working with frequent collaborator Diessa, another artist currently pushing forward-thinking sounds, with releases on labels like Edited Arts and All Centre. They worked under the name BAAST, creating what Grove describes as “dark, weird bass-heavy electronic music, with depressing lyrics reflecting where we were at the time.”

Alongside this, visits to Bristol became more frequent.

“I started MCing as part of this beatbox hip hop group in Cheltenham called 5 Mics,” Grove explains, “One of the members,

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Griz-O, would get invited up for grime nights in Bristol, at places like Cosies, these dingy, sweat basement clubs. So we’d do that every few months, just to hang out, and eventually I ended up hopping on the mic. I was never a grime MC, but I’d written loads of UK garage bars so I just sped those up a bit.

“That was super fun, and really emphasised the community aspect of Bristol. People care, and they are willing to embrace you, wherever you’re from, whatever you’re doing. As long as you’ve got a good energy about you, they are there with open arms, which is really lovely, and not something I’d experienced before.

“As well as doing that, I’d often go to gigs in Bristol by myself. I did that a fair few times and was never, ever disappointed. Going to things like the Teachings in Dub nights at Trinity Centre, just being totally wrapped in bass, which is a very blissful place. Big soundsystems like that just weren’t about in Gloucestershire, and I hadn’t necessarily been too involved in that world before. Experiencing these things, especially experiencing them alone, it felt very enriching. I think sometimes when you’re with your mates, and you’re getting mashed up, it’s a great experience, but you’ve got other distractions. But I was there fully sober, just absorbing.”

— Lifting the confines — A move to Bristol in late 2019 seemed inevitable, and ultimately the tight-knit community of the city helped continue creative growth.

“The confines were lifted,” Grove explains “I just tested the limits more, adding more grit. Performing to crowds who are all queer, for example, was a big, big change. Performing to crowds that gave plenty of energy back as well. That was like a huge change. A lot of my music that I made before was rooted in feeling isolated, and I think the sound very much reflected that. This was the fun side of my personality. Relating to people who are similar to me. I think that was a really big thing, feeling connected to people. It was just something that I didn’t know that I needed.”

Grove is quick to stress that this isn’t strictly a Bristol thing but also a wider realisation. “Through going to events in different cities [over the years] and feeling that sense of connectedness, I’ve discovered that there are people like that scattered all over the UK. The Pxssy Palace events in London, a club night for all femme people of colour, filling up a whole warehouse in London. It blew my tiny little Cheltenham mind – it was the first time I’d heard UK funky! At age 20! It’s good to be constantly realising all the shit you don’t know. I love reading more and realising I don’t know shit.”

The move to Bristol saw Grove connect with the sprawling mass that is Bokeh Versions, a label that consistently pushes the weirder sides of dub, industrial, dancehall and beyond. “I’ve enjoyed their output for ages, long before I came to Bristol,” Grove explains, “Then when I moved and started going to some of their nights, I realised what a solid crew it was. I just respect and appreciate them.”

Label owner Miles Opland reached out to Grove after being blown away by a live performance he’d seen, and soon the

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pair met up to chat. A lot of ideas were floated, but the eventual outcome was ‘SPICE’, released in late 2021. The project is a notably more collaborative affair than its auteurist predecessor, featuring co-production from Bokeh stalwarts like YOKEL and Robin Stewart of industrial duo Giant Swan. Deciding to swerve the ongoing vinyl backlog, the project was instead released with a limited set of homebrew perfumes developed by Grove and their partner EJ:AKIN. “We made it at home and it smells pretty good! And it doesn’t give you a rash!” they laugh. “We did a lot of research and testing. It smells like cinnamon, vanilla and black pepper. Very spiced.”

If Queer + Black was Grove’s introduction to the world, then what does its follow-up represent? “SPICE represents an exploration of sensuality through the medium of experimental dancehall,” says Grove, “and rethinking it from a lyrical perspective.” We zero in on dancehall as a genre.

“Growing up I was really drawn to both dancehall music.

[With dancehall] there’s the obvious problems with homophobia, but besides that, there’s also the fact it’s just so straight all the time. Like, don’t get me wrong, I love those artists who make those tunes, but what about if I want a song to catch a wine to in the club? Like I don’t wanna hear about ridin’ pon no cocky,” they laugh. “So, I wanted to make some gay dancehallinfluenced stuff, as both my expression and my protest against the norm in the music. But it’s a tough one, because it does feed into this feeling of being on the periphery of things. I imagine a lot of people who are Jamaican and like dancehall music might listen to that and not like it, and that feeds into the rest of my life of being queer. It’s hard to have conversations about that with the Black side of my family because of their very staunch religious views.” Does music allow them to express that stuff more easily? “Totally. But also, it’s not for them. That’s another thing.

I’ve just got to relinquish any sense of needing anyone to like anything. You don’t like it? It’s not for you.”

The next year holds many possibilities. A new joint project with Diessa sees release with underground label New Scenery soon, and the long-awaited vinyl release of Queer + Black is on the near horizon, featuring new additional tracks. Grove is also keen to evolve their live set-up toward a more fluid and improvisational approach: “Having backing tracks feels rigid, I’m not a rigid person. I want experimentation, I want improvisation. I want to have a conversation as opposed to a pre-written script. So I think just leaning more into that is what I want to do in the future.”

THE BEST NEW MUSIC

BEFORE BREAKFAST I COULD BE ASLEEP IF IT WEREN’T FOR YOU

THE CORAL THE CORAL (DELUXE ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

BODEGA BROKEN EQUIPMENT

THE BOO RADLEYS KEEP ON WITH FALLING

Multi-award winning BritishJapanese polymath Maya Jane Coles releases her eagerlyanticipated fifth studio album, ‘Night Creature’, via I/AM/ME. ‘Night Creature’ is the antidote to our collective recent experience, a slipstream into the alluring world that comes to life after dark.

LONELINESS. It’s a lucky soul who hasn’t experienced isolation over the past 18 months, and it’s a theme that runs deep across Before Breakfast’s debut album, ‘I Could Be Asleep If It Weren’t For You.’

The Coral follow last year’s universally acclaimed, Number 2 album, ‘Coral Island’ and visit the strange world where it all started. ‘The Coral’, first released in 2002, with the singles Dreaming Of You and Goodbye, landed a Mercury nomination and Platinum-certfication. Newly remastered, the album includes two, unreleased, never-beforeheard-tracks, as well as the band’s pre-album EP The Oldest Path, and a complete singles B-sides collection.

‘Broken Equipment’, the followup to the band’s acclaimed debut album, is BODEGA’s attempt to interrogate the external factors that make them who they are, propelling existential quandaries with tongue-in-cheek humour, highly personal lyrics, and irresistible grooves. The record was produced by Ben, art directed

by Nikki and mixed by Bryce Goggin (Pavement)

The Boo Radleys are back with a stunning new album.

YUMI ZOUMA PRESENT TENSE

THE DODOS GRIZZLY PEAK

WIDOWSPEAK THE JACKET

POP PSYCHÉDÉLIQUE (THE BEST OF FRENCH PSYCHEDELIC POP 1964-2019) - V/A

V/A - BLADE RUNNER: BLACK LOTUS OFFICIAL TV SOUNDTRACK

French Pop - music so effortlessly cool and hip you can’t help but fall in love.

Psychedelia - fuzzy dance floor music to lose yourself to. Put the two together and you have an intoxicating mix that is so lush and so perfect, and a sound that has helped soundtrack recent hit TV series such as The Queen’s Gambit, Killing Eve and The Serpent.

Set in 2032 - 13 years after the original Blade Runner and 17 years before Blade Runner 2049. Blade Runner: Black Lotus follows Elle, a young woman who seeks to exact revenge on those who have wronged her, to understand her own identity, and to uncover the mysteries of her past.

MAYA JANE COLES NIGHT CREATURE I/AM/ME

Polyvinyl Record Co

After Dinner

The Sheffield duo of Gina Walters & Lucy Revis recall how as single women they have seen major parts of their lives effectively being put on hold and investigate such themes through the telling of personal stories – fusing their classical knowledge and rich arrangements with a raw and honest expression.

Run On Records

Captured Tracks

Polyvinyl Record Co

What’s Your Rupture?

Two-Piers Yumi Zouma release their new album, ‘Present Tense’, a work they describe as “a gallery wall displaying those different moments in each of our lives. A process of curation, revisiting the past and making it relevant to the present.”

There’s a defiance heard throughout ‘Present Tense’, a refusal to bend to what might seem fated, communicated not only through lyrics but in the boldness of these arrangements, metamorphosing between tracks without ever losing momentum.

Two years away from the road gave Yumi Zouma a new appreciation for the friendship they’ve sustained and the opportunity an abundance of time off-cycle offered.

The Dodos are back with their brand new album ‘Grizzly Peak’.

Meditative and sometimes painful in its emotional excavation, over the course of ten anthemic, gorgeously rendered tracks, ‘Grizzly Peak’ reveals itself as that place band members Long and Kroeber were always desperately trying to find. Befitting a record that hits so close to The Dodos’ career-long goal, ‘Grizzly Peak’ also serves as a love letter to the fans who have devoted their hearts to Long and Kroeber’s music.

Widowspeak’s sixth LP shifts seamlessly between gentle, drifting ballads and twangy jams, built up from layered guitars, dusty percussion and ambling bass lines. ‘The Jacket’ is a wizened meditation on performance and past lives from a band who’ve seen their fair share, hitting their stride now over a decade in.

Available on Limited Coke Bottle Clear Coloured Vinyl.

Includes tracks by Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsbourg, France Gall, Gillian Hills, Stereolab, The Liminanas and Air.

Support your local independent retailer www.republicofmusic.com

Boostr

“The right kind of comeback” The Guardian “The Boos are lush and bright” Louder Than War The first Boo Radleys album since 1998, ‘Keep On With Falling’, is released on March 11.

Mondo

Grammy-Award winning singersongwriter Alessia Cara’s new original song “Feel You Now” leads the charge on Blade Runner: Black Lotus. The soundtrack’s original songs are co-written by Alcon Sleeping Giant’s Grammy®-nominated producer Michael Hodges. Even though this is a various artist compilation, there is a solid and cohesive through-line.

Reviews

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Albums

Nilüfer Yanya — PAINLESS (ato) From the opening track on PAINLESS, Nilüfer Yanya leaves us in no doubt as to her trajectory from here on in. This year, already, the west London singer and musician has been hitting list after list of artists to watch out for in 2022, climbing her way up the much-eulogised BBC 6 Music playlist and getting a sweet spot lined up at Coachella this year. Even Elton John is in on the hype.

If this sounds like a slightly anxiety-inducing start to 2022, it might well be, but Nilüfer Yanya seems to have been building towards this kind of exposure for years. Growing up a short walk from Sloane Square in Chelsea, west London, in a home filled with art and music, Nilüfer started to learn classical piano from the age of six-and-a-half. At secondary school, she joined a workshop where The Invisible’s Dave Okumu taught her guitar. At around the same time, on trips to visit her family in Penzance, she had free rein in her uncle’s recording studio, Riverfish Music. From the age of 15, she’d be inquisitively “checking out the guitars”, and her uncle, Joe Dworniak, the producer and former bass player with ’80s Brit-funk band I-Level, would teach her chords and rhythms, and help record some of her first demos.

After finishing school, and putting a few tracks up on SoundCloud, she was noticed by DEEK Recordings, signed to the Blue Flowers label and made her first EP, Small Crimes.

All clean guitar riffs, and strange, mercurial speak-singing, the EP was a promising breakthrough. Her vocals flit between a soulful croon and a gauzy staccato, taking aim at the stigma attached to people in the cycle of small-scale theft, by pointing to the legal amnesty that comes

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with the more heinous crimes committed by the state.

A year later, and her second EP Plant Feed led with a jazz-suffused sound, addng floaty sax from her collaborator Jazzi Bobbi, Rhodes piano and spacey guitar riffs. Her discordant vocals and cool knack for playfully building tension with her guitar earned her comparisons with south-east Londoner King Krule and the beginning of a series of big name support slots. Another EP Do You Like Pain? cemented her talent for building melodies that loop around your mind for days and led to support tours with The xx, Interpol, Mitski and Broken Social Scene, a place on the BBC Sound of 2018 list and a slot on the most sacred, most revered stage at a British festival there is: the Loud And Quiet stage at End of the Road Festival (lol).

The arrival of her debut album in 2019, Miss Universe, came with the kind of excited industry whisperings that are enough to make anyone feel nauseated and paranoid. A 17-track concept album, it was part punchy, hook-driven alt-rock, part slow-build sax, part Italo-disco-style beatdriven pop, all interspersed with fauxcommercials from a wellness company. It was quite the motley crew of genres and styles to pull together convincingly.

On her debut, Nilüfer’s lyrics delved into heartache, paranoia and existential dread. For all its playful hit-making adrenaline, what lasted longest in the memory was an acute sense of disorientation.

Her vocals both danced and lurched between hunger, desperation and remorseless self-assurance, as she toyed with resistance and release creating a mood of nervous anxiety. The album was evangelised by almost every major music site and broadsheet title out there, all homogeneously placing an excited question mark over where Nilüfer Yanya might take her sound next.

Three strange years later, her shoutily-titled second album PAINLESS marks a gear change. There’s less playfulness on this new record, and less still of the intriguing, scruffy strangeness of her early EPs, which with maturity could have led her sound more in the direction

of the lightening, eccentric unsteadiness, and embrace of discordance of Good, Sad, Happy, Bad. Instead, PAINLESS is slick and clean, suggesting more in common with the polished likes of Caroline Polachek.

Recorded between North London and her uncle’s Cornwall studio after Nilüfer’s 2020 return from a year-long headline tour of her debut, the album features Miss Universe collaborators Wilma Archer and Jazzi Bobbi, as well as Big Thief ’s producer Andrew Sarlow and DEEK Recordings founder Bullion.

With hook-driven vocals and melodic elements forming the album’s foundation, PAINLESS feels as if it has been built as a launchpad to reintroduce Nilüfer Yanya to a wider audience.

Perhaps thanks to the context of having been trapped indoors, the album’s narrative sinks further into a more acute excavation of her relationships and her interior world than she’s given attention to before. Album opener ‘The Dealer’ ventures into relationship breakdowns, with punchy, industrial drumbeats hitting against a reverb-heavy, Cardigans-esque jangly guitar riff, before an elastic bassline whips in. The intensity eases off and then builds back. It has a kind of Kasabian-like formulaic economy to it. This gives the space for Nilüfer’s icy falsetto to deliver one of her typically caustic lines: “I thought you were someone to rely on.”

‘L/R’ follows, with a drudging interplay between Nilüfer’s artfully stilted, gloom inflected chorus chant of “Left, right / Left right”, amidst drum machine beats, ’80s synths and heavy bass, all ricocheting around in a neatly coordinated military march. There’s an eerie slide guitar creeping in to underline her repetitious refrains about the deterioration of a long-term relationship and the identity crises that such decline can induce. ”Sometimes it feels like you’re so violent,” she sings, sounding frayed, before shrugging, “Whatever makes you happy,” and adding, “I don’t think I’ll ever know,” in a quiet falsetto. It’s infectiously morose, and she forces you to wallow in this flatness for the full track,

Albums barely letting up, the only respite being the sound of the saz, quietly peeking through the drudgery. It’s curious that this beautiful Turkish folk instrument isn’t given more airtime – Nilüfer says her dad played it around her during her childhood, and it has become “a step into the mostly undiscovered part of my identity.”

But maybe this is intentionally left as a quiet undercurrent, serving as a hopeful reminder that in the midst of existential dread, there are still parts of you that you don’t really even know yet, and it could be these parts of you that might give you a starting point to begin resenting yourself a little less.

Elsewhere, ‘Shameless’ is a selfloathing lament on the nauseating feeling of realising you’ve been unravelled by someone you know is a toad. And you still get a thrill when they call. In ‘Shameless’, Nilüfer’s vocals are multiplied and featherlight, as she asks “If this is enough / Why do I lie here / Left needing your touch?”. There’s a soft, ticking, metronome-like beat, hand clicks and gentle guitar riffs, and as on all of PAINLESS, it’s a melody that gets trapped in your mind.

For all its routine catchiness, there’s an unexpected moment, two minutes in, where the guitar and percussion drops away briefly and you hear Nilüfer on piano, playing beautifully, with a Duval Timothy-like bounce on the keys and a clarinet gently droning alongside it, before the percussion builds back in.

Amongst the patchwork of gloom and melancholy on this record, ‘Midnight Sun’ provides some respite midway through, with its lyrical mantra, which Nilüfer says can be used for people to pull themselves up from the brink. The succinct, t.A.T.u.-inspired ‘Belong with You’, has a repetitious refrain which rises to intensity before a grungy climax.

Nilüfer Yanya’s second album is full of radio-ready hits, each track masterfully twisted in a way that makes it almost impossible that you won’t find it floating around your mind days later.

It doesn’t always feel like Nilüfer’s attention has been on making a fresh attempt to mangle pop as inventively and freely as she has before, but the skills she has

mastered over the course of her career are on impressive display. 6/10 Cat Gough

Alex Cameron — Oxy Music (secretly canadian) It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote that “first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”. Clearly, Alex Cameron sees it as his mission to stretch that maxim to the absolute limit.

After years of trying to get my head around him, the approach I’ve landed on is to consider Alex Cameron musical persona as a combination of a Louis Theroux style documentarian and a semi-fictionalised Curb Your Enthusiasm version of a pop star. Across the previous three full-length albums, the Australian singer has taken it upon himself to become the Steve Irwin of male toxicity – unafraid of jumping straight in the swamp and climbing right up through the cesspit to show us around.

In that sense, Oxy Music doesn’t really deviate from the pattern set down by 2019’s Miami Memory. Of course, there’s been a pandemic since then, and while this record isn’t explicitly about Covid, it’s thematically inseparable from post-lockdown fallout, charting the descent from disinformation and isolation into narcissism, addiction and egotism. This ranges from the Alex Cameron of opener ‘Best Life’ – a guy trying to square his online and IRL personas – to the Alex Cameron of ‘K Hole’, a regretful sad sack mired in selfdelusion and chemical escapism.

As ever, though, the problems come when Cameron forces you to figure out whether he’s joking or not. Unfortunately, this tends to blunt the impact when he does

have something to say. It’s most acute on ‘Cancel Culture’, a song that attempts to wade into the minefield of cultural appropriation and how Westerners often borrow without understanding prior significance.

However, as soon as Cameron croons the lines, “Lily-white but I listen to hip hop, show me the crime? Says I can’t sing along, I even use the accents baby”, the meaning is blurred. It’s down to you to work out if he’s ripping the piss or siding with edgelords who spout this shit.

But then, that’s the point, right?

As a listener, you’re not supposed to know where you stand with Alex Cameron, and the fun comes from trying to figure him out. Oxy Music might head into some dark places, yet Cameron is only ever the tour guide, neither condemning nor celebrating the things that reside there. He simply lays it out, and it’s up to you to make up your own mind. 8/10 Dominic Haley

Sea Power — Everything Was Forever (golden chariot) Veteran British rock sextet Sea Power (formerly known as British Sea Power) are a loosely defined type of band. And Everything Was Forever, their eighth album, is a timeslipping type of record.

The ten tracks here unfold, almost unbroken, with a dreamlike momentum, laced with Sea Power’s distinct blend of stadium-sized weird rock, a sound that feels every bit as much U2 as it does Siouxsie and The Banshees. Throughout, the album’s texture radiates a delightful porousness, with a sense that anything can suddenly become central. A backgrounded keyboard echo bursts into a vibrant neon solo (‘Folly’), an allusion to Robert Smith’s vocals becomes a neartribute (‘Doppelganger’) and a maraud-

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Albums ing bassoon ends up stalking the entire album like a recurring dream.

The dream logic allows moments of abrupt recognition to seep through, such as in the gloomy post-punk of ‘Transmitter’, in which vocalist Yan admits that, “All of this used to mean so much to me / It doesn’t mean so much anymore” or in the bucolic ballad ‘Fear Eats The Soul’, in which it’s whispered “You know what I’m most afraid of? Finding out what I’m really made of ”.

‘Two Fingers’ is the album at its dreamy best. The six-minute odyssey awakens countless times, startled like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa into new realities. However, whether it’s trading in ascendant post-rock guitars, dockland ambient, or rousing choruses, the song rides the wave. Like the name-checked Cthulhu [the fictional deity written by horror writer H.P. Lovecraft], ‘Two Fingers’ feels like it exists outside normal space-time.

Everything Was Forever is less an album, more a vessel: a surreally radiofriendly meditation to swim within.

8/10 Robert Davidson

Basia Bulat — The Garden (secret city) Montreal’s Basia Bulat has long been one of Canada’s most distinctive voices. With a simultaneously expressive voice and cut-glass tone, she’s been a magnetic force in North America’s indie circles with a back catalogue of folk-influenced pop songs laden with sadness and wonder.

In an almost Taylor Swift-like move, her latest record is a collection of old songs reimagined. Finding herself with some unexpected downtime over the past year (I mean, who didn’t?),

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Bulat found herself meditating on songs of the past and contemplating how the meanings had evolved in the years since they were first recorded. Returning to the studio with Arcade Fire producer Mark Lawson and a handpicked group of chamber musicians, The Garden revisits material from all five of Bulat’s previous albums and attempts to find a new understanding of songs that were only barely understood when they were first written.

It certainly helps that the source material was strong in the first place, and this collection of reimaginings filtered through the string quartet arrangements

by Owen Pallett, Paul Frith and Zou Zou Robidoux – transforming what was once a collection of tender, self-contained folk songs into vast, cinematic landscapes.

7/10 Dominic Haley

Hinako Omori — a journey… (houndstooth) In Japanese-born, London-based artist Hinako Omori’s debut record a journey…, the artist offers a meditation on the healing powers of both nature and sound. Over the two-year period during which she recorded the LP, Omori would take regular trips to various landscapes, including the Mendip Hills, engaging in something akin to the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku (forest-bathing). These moments, and the field recordings Omori collected during them, formed a foundation for a journey…, which was also heavily influenced by her research into sound therapy (the deep listening exercises of Pauline Oliveros being a notable touchstone).

The end result is an album which feels as blissfully restorative as a walk in the depths of the woodland – exqui-

site calm punctuated by moments of dappled light. Omori’s siren-like vocals are reminiscent of Ana Roxanne or Julianna Barwick, and for the most part they float over the listener, blending into the overall soundscape. There are some exceptions to this, where her whispered words feel more like a chant or poetry, although on ‘The Richest Garden In Your Memory’, which takes words from the poem of the same name from Omori’s friend Emily R Grosholz, she eschews the hushed delivery for a more melodic delivery.

Hinako Omori has worked as a sound technician and producer, and she’s employed plenty of her technical knowledge on a journey…, experimenting with decibels and frequencies to optimise the listening experience, to actively soothe and relax the listener through sound. I won’t pretend to be an expert in oscillators or binaural beats, but just a few moments into ‘Spaceship’s Lament’, the album’s evocatively-titled opening track, I felt my jaw begin to unclench and my breath begin to deepen. By the end of closing track ‘Yearning’, I was somewhere else entirely. a journey… lives up to its title, and is another brilliant example of how reflective and nurturing art can be, even (perhaps especially) when it comes from a time of chaos and tumult.

9/10 Jessica Wrigglesworth

Caroline — Caroline (Rough Trade) When London’s mysterious Caroline first reared their heads above the surface, and ripples of the band’s debut offering ‘Dark Blue’ still wandered the corridors of the derelict swimming pool complex where the track had first been captured,

Albums all that remained non-negotiable was by no means is this going to be another meat-and-potatoes guitar outfit. Exactly two years on and this clouded sentiment continues to drape the band’s guarded reputation, with the arrival of their muchanticipated, talismanic debut album.

Born of hours upon hours of communal improvisation sessions, Caroline’s music is as comforting as it is unsettling. Writhing string arrangements routinely leap from backdrop as they vibrate and explode, like dust particles against the still air that surrounds them. Nestled amongst tactile interludes of violently plucked guitar strings, the sensuous ebb and flow of ‘IWR’ swings offkilter between something as physical as it is intangible, slipping fast and uncontrollably through outstretched fingers.

Throughout the fluctuating length of the track list, the band experiment with what they call “extreme closeness”, recording guitars as quietly as possible next to microphones with the gain jacked up to maximum. The effect brings Caroline into full swing, lodged somewhere between muteness and magnitude, with calling vocals appearing somehow disconnected and far away from the music itself.

It’s these considered quirks and blemishes that stand Caroline well north of their sparse-sounding counterparts as the band continue to throw more on the pile of unanswered questions. 8/10 Ollie Rankine

Isik Kural — In February (rvng intl) In this era of media overload, it seems as if many artists are forced to shout over each other in a bid to be heard. Istanbul-born songwriter Isik Kural, however, feels like he’s leaving his door ajar, quietly welcoming passers-by in from the harsh noise

outside. Within you’ll find a soothing environment made up of airy vocals, gentle nylon strings and chiming synth keys.

Described as a “photographer of sound”, he incorporates field recordings to add an ambient texture to his dream-folk style, feeling akin to acts like Lullatone.

Now based in Scotland, he’s offering his second album In February to the world, which feels perfectly suited for the arrival of spring. With most tracks under three minutes, there’s an inherent lightness to the listening experience, perfectly suited to the lullaby-like quality of the melodies. This comes through strongest on songs like the delightful opener ‘Pillow of a Thought’ and ‘Sevdiklerine’, while ‘Film Festival’ acts as a soft yet majestic farewell. Perhaps to some, Kural’s work may sound like background music, but there are few artists that could provide such a sweetly calming atmosphere while you go about your day. 7/10 Woody Delaney

Aldous Harding — Warm Chris (4ad) It’s a curious and lovely thing that Aldous Harding has become, in her own eccentric manner, something of a superstar in indie and folk circles. Her 2014 selftitled debut album hardly suggested global prominence for this enigmatic New Zealander: its beauty and skill were disarmingly clear, but it felt more like a cultish, newly-unearthed gem of a longlost folk tradition than the green shoots of a world-bestriding talent.

Yet here we are in 2022, with the Aldous Harding album Warm Chris among the most hotly-anticipated of the year. If 2019 album Designer marked Harding’s true breakthrough to a mass audience, having suggested but not quite achieved such a shift on her previous two

records, Warm Chris is a consolidation of that following. As on Designer, the songs here are lean and focused, the spiralling oddity of Harding’s early work not so much discarded as woven more tightly into the fabric of a more concise writing style. Tracks like ‘Lawn’ and ‘Tick Tock’ may be her most accessible yet, glittering nuggets of topsy-turvy melody and lighttouch percussion, each drum hit and piano detail skipping across the rest of the arrangement like a stone over a lake.

As charming as those songs might be, though, it’s when Harding is at her most unadorned that her writing hits hardest. ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’ and ‘Bubbles’ both present the artist in sharp relief, framed by sparse instrumentals which allow her remarkable voice the space to stretch and twist. And although there’s much to love in Warm Chris’s more full-throated moments, and it’s those which will doubtless continue to bring her the success she so richly deserves, it’s hard not to occasionally pine for the transcendental sparseness of her earlier work. Maybe that’s just me being a snob, whinging that my underrated favourite has broken through; but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. 6/10 Luke Cartledge

Luna Li — Duality (in real life) “I’m half-Korean and half-Canadian. Being mixed, it can sometimes feel like you belong nowhere. So I guess this album touches on this idea of finding your identity and a place for yourself in the world.”

From this premise, Luna Li wrote her debut album in a two-year span, working and recording in her bedroom.

Pressing play on Duality means being welcomed by a burst of psyche-

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Albums delic sounds, immediately giving way to a mellow, perfectly-crafted tune. Li was born and raised in Toronto, but having spent a year at music college in Montreal, she’s picked up some of local celeb Mac DeMarco’s jangly slacker rock tendencies – minus the over-the-top eccentricity.

There’s a delicate, sophisticated touch of what she defines as “dreamy rock” and “angel pop” in the ethereal vocals she delivers throughout the 13 tracks here.

A multi-instrumentalist, Luna Li played the guitar, keyboards, violin and harp on Duality, and was joined in this quest for (or exploration of) identity by some of the most interesting singer-songwriters around, with Jay Som, Serena Isioma and Beabadoobee contributing to a multicultural, gender-fluid exchange of different dualities and experiences enriching an already compelling discourse on belonging. If Mitski and Japanese Breakfast are no doubt among the major influences for Luna Li, she also lists Tame Impala among her favourite bands, and the psychedelic vibes of her music really do resonate with Kevin Parker’s venture, but with a renewed, widened vision, coming from an artist with the potential to become one of the most interesting voices of her generation. 7/10 Guia Cortassa

Don’t Worry — Remorseless Swing (specialist subject records) At the core of Don’t Worry’s second offering, Remorseless Swing, is an unshakeable sense of detachment. Musically, this is a band who are detached from the present day, insofar as the instrumentation routinely recalls aspects of Britpop, late’90s sludgy guitar tones and idiosyncratic indie-rock motifs of the mid-2000s. Even their lyricism wryly smiles in this direc-

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tion with a nod to Oasis (“Is it just me who hates me? Definitely, maybe”). Emotionally, too, they’re conscious of a universal detachment from the primordial desire to forge real life connections (“Our eyes are glued to our phones waiting for someone to say hello”), while the need to disconnect from one’s denigrating inner monologue (“It’s difficult to find a quiet place in any corner of my mind”) is more of a struggle.

Paradoxically, though, it’s that overarching sense of detachment which enables vocalists Ronan Van Kehoe and Samuel Watson to be completely unabashed in their assessment of modern society. In detailing the malaise of living in an era which relentlessly promotes productivity – and can often make those who don’t comply feel worthless – they starkly proffer the detrimental effects that can have on one’s well-being, as noted on ‘The Scythe’s Remorseless Swing’ and ‘What’s In A Name’.

Don’t Worry’s instrumentation is primarily indebted to the density and intensity familiar from acts like Weezer (particularly on ‘Boredom Abound’) and The Cribs. While the chugging guitar lines of ‘Every Corner’ or ‘Crushing Weight’ are undeniable driving forces, the finesses sentimentality permeating the closing triplet ultimately provides the LP’s emotional peak. 7/10 Zara Hedderman

Sea Change — Mutual Dreaming (shapes) Taking her name from her favourite Beck album, Sea Change has been a platform for singer and producer Ellen A. W. Sunde to remould the electronic genre into unique new shapes. Now unveiling her third studio album, Mutual Dreaming, the Norwegian artist has

crafted her most intimate and hypnotic body of work to date.

There’s a cohesive flow across the nine tracks that makes the whole record play out with a cinematic slow-burn quality, while Sunde chooses the perfect moment to lean into more intense grooves and beats. The thumping bass underpins shimmering melodies that sound like a shoegaze-informed strain of EDM. Amid all of this is her echoing vocals, which murmur like an apparition, bringing to mind artists such as Smerz, Sassy 009 and Kelly Lee Owens. It’s easy to get lost in the flow of songs like ‘Never Felt’ and ‘Night Eyes’ as they dissolve the threshold between melancholic and blissful into one single mood. By the time ‘Rituals’ closes the record, you feel as if you’ve been lulled into a nocturnal trance that you hope won’t end. 8/10 Woody Delaney

SASAMI — Squeeze (domino) Squeeze is partly inspired by the Japanese yōkai folk spirit Nure-onna. Literally translated as “wet woman”, the creature is a vampiric deity that lures victims with a small bundle that looks like a baby. If a good person holds the child, she spares them, but if a bad person discards the child, she traps and then kills them.

What drew SASAMI to the story was its multiplicity; how the Nure-onna can simultaneously be feminine and noble, yet vicious and deathly. Moreover, the album’s title can mean both a gentle or constraining action, and in all aspects of its composition, Squeeze is representative of this duplexity.

Squeeze takes elements of what came before on 2019’s self-titled debut and propels them forward, filling the more pedestrian gaps of that album

Albums with moments that spark a vengeful and empowering fire, and the same purgative release is also provided by the record’s calmer passages. Opening track ‘Skin a Rat’ couldn’t be further from what the L.A. artist is known for, ploughing ahead with complex industrial alt metal, whilst ‘Say It’ punctuates itself with harsh, Nine Inch Nails-worthy suspenseful electronics. These heavier aspects of the record are moreish, naturally feeding throughout its entirety, rather than feeling like an unwelcome surprise.

The pinnacle is reached on the absurd thrash metal cover of Daniel Johnston’s ‘Sorry Entertainer’, which rips fiercely through everything in its path – as it has every right to when it sounds this good (SASAMI even enlisted Megadeth drummer Dirk Verbeuren for several of these brutal tracks).

It’s not all heavy gloom though.

Oblivion is interwoven with more delicate moments that SASAMI built her name on, this time more triumphant than before.

There’s clamouring, feedback-laden indie-folk on ‘The Greatest’, and penultimate instrumental track ‘Feminine Water Turmoil’ feels both jarring and beautiful in its emotions, much like the folktale the album was inspired by.

Made with the intention of helping her audience to access and process anger, Squeeze is a remarkable album from SASAMI, full of eruptive contrasts and nuances that, for all the fireworks, are always true to her artistic vision.

8/10 Jasleen Dhindsa

Keeley Forsyth — Limbs (the leaf label) Debris, the debut album by actor-turned-avant-garde songwriter and performance artist Keeley

Forsyth, left quite an impression upon its release in early 2020. Skeletal, bleak, yet frequently transcendent in its cold, rugged beauty, it was the kind of record that sounds like little else before it, and which you then can’t imagine living without having heard it. Quite how one does justice to such a remarkable opening statement with a follow-up album is a mystery to me; but somehow, with Limbs, Forsyth has pulled it off.

Sonically, Limbs builds upon the most expansive moments of Debris and the subsequent Photograph EP – the beaconlike synths of the first album’s lead single ‘Start Again’ clearing a path for more innovation here – with arrangements that are somehow richer and equally sparse at the same time. These songs curl and shrug their way through loose, hanging structures, atop which Forsyth’s grieving siren of a voice flutters and twists; you can almost see her face contorting with emotion at each movement.

The name that gets bandied about most frequently in relation to Forsyth’s distinctive sonic palette is Scott Walker, and his influence is certainty detectable here, both in the shivering vibrato of her vocal and in a more holistic, affective sense; like Walker, Forsyth sounds unafraid to grasp the conventions of modern pop songwriting and turn them inside out, pushing the boundaries of her sound without entirely losing focus of the need to produce empathy and exhilaration in her listener. It’s an incredibly precise balance, and one which very few artists are able to strike.

Tracks like ‘Fires’ and ‘Bring Me Water’ are wounded, regretful and profoundly moving; later cuts like ‘Wash’ and ‘Silence’ feel more defiant in their austerity. All this is deepened by the clean, elegant production of Ross Downes and Forsyth herself, with Francine Perry’s unobtrusive mix providing the necessary space for these songs to breathe and stretch as they please.

Appropriately, the album ends with a song called ‘I Stand Alone’, which Forsyth really does – nobody else is making music, so spectral, elegant and bruised, quite like this. 9/10 Luke Cartledge

Various Artists — Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono (canvasback music) Plenty of preconceptions exist about Yoko Ono, each on a sliding scale of fairness. There’s the feeling that she’s not primarily a musician (not really true), that her predominant performance style involves screaming (arguable), and that, of course, she broke up The Beatles (definitely false – that was Paul). Perhaps the most pernicious one over the years, though, has been the idea that Ono is a chancer who rode on the coat-tails of John Lennon, and that her recording career would be nothing without him – and it’s this misapprehension that Ocean Child, a compilation of Ono songs reinterpreted by a motley gathering of modern-day indie glitterati, seeks to redress.

And broadly, it succeeds: although performance and genre styles shift throughout, the throughline of these 14 tracks is one of engaging songwriting, reflective and carefully interior lyricism, and a nagging sense of economical, nursery rhyme melody that would be beyond a mere Beatle-groupie who only knew how to yell. Highlights abound all over: Sharon van Etten’s ‘Toyboat’ is full of wistful sway, David Byrne’s ‘Who Has Seen The Wind’ creeps with appropriate aloofness, and Deerhoof ’s ‘No No No’ finds Satomi Matsuzaki – the only Japanese woman to appear here, disappointingly – channelling Ono’s angular eccentricities with defiant glee. Elsewhere, radical reinventions prevent this being pure hagiography: Thao’s ‘Yellow Girl’ is entirely stripped of the jaunt and jazz of the original, and We Are KING’s neo-R&B reimagining of ‘Don’t Be Scared’, originally rendered in cringy cod-reggae, becomes a far silkier and suitably soothing song.

Only Yo La Tengo attempt anything

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Albums from outside Ono’s ’70s and ’80s heyday, with a faithful take on 2013’s ‘There’s No Goodbye Between Us’, but it might also be the collection’s best moment: hearing a 60-year-old Georgia Hubley sing a (then) 80-year-old woman’s words of tired but undying love is a gentle revelation.

Perhaps what’s most charming about Ocean Child, though, is that although knowing the provenance of these songs makes them more satisfying, it is not a prerequisite to their enjoyment – and that standalone quality, free of any Lennonism, for or against, might be the best possible tribute to Ono’s singular songcraft. 8/10 Sam Walton

surprising. The usual kaleidoscope of influences and sounds distinguishing the artist’s sonic palette is present in the album, and his countertenor voice runs magnificently through the octaves to tell stories of addiction (“Broke up with the Dragon, but he’s chasing me” on ‘Gay Agenda’) and identity (“I’m not cisgender I’m not binary trans / I don’t wanna be a girl, I don’t wanna be a man” on ‘Cisgender’) even when the melodies fail to keep up with the high level of Bailey’s songwriting, as in ‘Marriage’. But even then, there’s more than enough to be mesmerized by in the multifaceted talent of this chameleonic artist. 8/10 Guia Cortassa

Shamir — Heterosexuality (selfreleased) At 27, Shamir is releasing his eighth studio album in six years, and the sixth self-released, after short spans signed initially to XL and later to Father/Daughter Records. Always keen to put his own life into his music, the Las Vegas singer/songwriter and producer this time took a decisive step forward, stating: “I think this album is me finally acknowledging my trauma. Everyone knows I’ve been through so much shit and I kind of just rammed through, without really acknowledging the actual trauma that I do feel on almost a daily basis.” (For those who don’t know, Shamir, a non-binary person of colour, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after a psychotic episode right after the self-release of his second album Hope).

Titled Heterosexuality, and with tracks bearing names like ‘Gay Agenda’ and ‘Cisgender’, it might be easy to guess the kind of trauma the musician is referring to – but, as is always the case with Shamir, the nuances are multiple and

x/o — Chaos Butterfly (precious metals) Vietnamese-Canadian electronic music producer, vocalist and filmmaker x/o came to recognition in 2018 with their entirely self-made debut EP Cocoon Egg, a deeply atmospheric, visually rich and ruminative project that begged to be listened to on a rainy Sunday comedown.

However, from the first notes of debut album, Chaos Butterfly, the progression in sound is evident. The pedestrian pace of Cocoon Egg is periodically swapped for something more unhinged, with ‘Red Alert’ and ‘Fight or Flight’ both dream-infused slow-mo’d bangers, full of breakbeats and unignorable choruses. Songs not to be saved for dark December evenings, but to be blared out of the windows of cars driving wet neon-lit streets.

Slower cuts such as ‘Initiation’ also stand apart from their earlier releases, with the arrangements feeling less reverent and more technicoloured, with expansive and melodramatic video

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game soundtracks (such as Square’s Final Fantasy X) a clear inspiration.

‘Final Wingspan’ in particular harnesses an end-of-level boss energy. However, despite the development in sound and the wider scope of experimentation, Chaos Butterfly still feels like it misses the final piece of the puzzle. Most of the music stays too close to centre, with undeniably impressive but even-toned arrangements becoming difficult to pull apart from one another like a pleasant but stodgy dessert. There’s little in the way of genuine chaos here (the 59-secondlong ‘Cyclone Season’ is probably the closest), nor anything as serenely fixating as a butterfly. Everything tends to sit in between. Whilethere is much to enjoy here, there’s still a level or two more to be added to x/o’s sound before it can truly fly.

6/10 Robert Davidson

Noon Garden — Beulah Spa (the liquid label) Beulah Spa’s opening moments are a lot like a delirious journey through an unfamiliar landscape: like a late-night train journey cutting through the country, or an empty, redeyed flight over sun-bleached sands. It’s Charles Prest’s inaugural outing under his Noon Garden moniker, and its glimmering, synth-heavy title track transports us deftly to his genre-hopping, kaleidoscopic world.

And, touching down on this outlandish new turf, the record traverses a rugged terrain of sound and style.

‘Decca Divine’ touches on the heady side of things – with grooving pop undertones and off-kilter synths that swirl against each other like a distant pull of coloured disco lights and hazy swells of dry ice – whereas the likes of ‘Desiree’ and ‘Dud

Albums Day’ opt for an edgier tack, with guttural guitars and a darker, deeper sense of multi-instrumentalism that feel a bit more like pages ripped from the straightup psych-rock book.

‘Budaiya’ is similarly jagged, but with a craggy 1960s-esque undertone that sees Prest tick another genre off of Beulah Spa’s expansive bucket list before the nine-second-long ‘Annapurna Guest House’ splutters out a pithy soundbite of gentler, folk-flecked rhythms. ‘Eye Jewel’ jolts in a different direction entirely with its meditative key taps and swirling artificial sounds dancing around one another like a drop of oil floating through water.

But, for all its multi-instrumental prowess and dexterous jaunts through genre, as the record draws to a close there’s an unshakable sense of something unfinished about the project as a whole.

Maybe its sporadic track lengths mean some of its ideas come across as halfbaked, or maybe its capers from dancey to docile and back again seem confused rather than cohesive. Prest has certainly carved out an enticing new landscape for himself with Beulah Spa but, as is often the case with newfangled ventures, it seems the Noon Garden world more broadly remains under construction.

6/10 Charlotte Marston

Bodega — Broken Equipment (what’s your rupture?) New York art punk crew Bodega made an impressive mark with their 2018 debut Endless Scroll, and follow-up Broken Equipment sees the same offbeat formula reinvigorated.

Broken Equipment in its entirety is very mechanical, feeling like there’s a thousand tiny unique parts ticking away, working together to make a record

with a consistently quirky groove. The genres explored are far more varied this time around, amped up in experimental but bonded together with a pack like mentality from vocalists Bodega Ben and Nikki Belfiglio.

The two of them take turns to deliver lyrical blows (and sometimes together), from the spitting indietronica of opener ‘Thrown’ to the ferocious punk rock of ‘Statuette on the Console’.

Lead single ‘Doers’ is simply ingenious; a Beastie Boys-meets-New Radicals throwback, it’s swaggering statement. Ben and Nikki are unafraid with their sociopolitical hot takes, millennials very much both in awe and horror at the state of the world and the depths of their own consciousness.

With lyrics rather than instrumentation or melody very much leading the way, there are points in Broken Equipment that feel tiresomely repetitive. The punchy choruses fail to match the intricacies of the verses; sometimes, this may be meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but it often smacks of negligence when considering how unusual everything else feels.

The unexpected acoustic delicacy of finale ‘After Jane’ however shows the band in a completely different light, offering muchneeded respite. 6/10 Jasleen Dhindsa

Destroyer — Labyrinthitis (bella union) Over nearly thirty years, Destroyer have carved out a singular niche. Able to transform seemingly at will, Dan Bejar is unique as a frontman in modern rock – if you can even call what Destroyer do ‘rock’ anymore.

Labyrinthitis, Destroyer’s 13th album, dances between ’80s-evoking anthems, moments of almost baroque jauntiness and near post-rock epics.

Throughout, Bejar’s lyrics are as cryptic and literary as we’ve come to expect, filled with evocative oddball imagery like “Ruff ruff says the beetle to the terrier”, and lines that balance grandeur and selfawareness such as “An explosion is worth a hundred million words / But that is maybe too many words to say.” The whole album has the quality of a medieval bard whispering secrets to you that it will take years to truly understand.

Across the album, there’s far more groove than recent offerings from Destroyer, disco-tinged drums marching under Bejar impish incantations, particularly on the second half of the record.

Where early tracks ‘Suffer’ and ‘June’ are dense and anxious, restless in their rhythms, ‘Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread’ is funky and salacious, and ‘It Takes A Thief ’ is a moment of percussive brightness. All told, Labyrinthitis is at once freewheeling and tightly wound, packed with grooves but often too anxious to settle into them for more than a minute at a time. 7/10 Mike Vinti

Babeheaven — Sink Into Me (believe) There is something intrinsically human about our desire for more than we are given. Whether intentional or not, we gravitate to things we can mull over; things that we can get lost in. On Babeheaven’s debut album, Home For Now, Nancy Andersen seamlessly flitted between the literal and the reticent with her lyrics, and the one constant was Jamie Travis’ airy instrumentation, with its hues of Portishead, Tirzah and Massive Attack. It was a dynamic that seemed unconstrained.

On its follow-up, Sink Into Me, Babeheaven juxtapose escapist instru-

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Albums mentals with literal statements on longing – whether it be for a person or a place. There are a lot of artists who see the second album as a way of moving forward from their debut, but for Babeheaven, their formula remains the same.

From the outset, their signature languid guitars and swelling soundscapes meld with Andersen’s airy vocals as they dance over the place in which time no longer exists when you’ve succumbed to your own thoughts. Yet where Home For Now felt like wandering into a daydream, Sink Into Me is reminiscent of those moments where you catch yourself zoning out.

‘No Breakfast’ signals a shift from the trip-hop sound which has a hold over the first half of Sink Into Me, but by the time it happens, it’s almost too late to be redeemable. We often lock our thoughts in a familiar place in order to stop ourselves falling face-first into a tricky situation.

Sink Into Me plays like the sonic embodiment of this act; you could say that Babeheaven are playing it safe and, as a result, falling flat. 5/10 Tyler Damara Kelly

and dreams of escaping the everyday to become a cowboy, CMAT still finds room to create an artistic space that’s all her own. Comedy and tongue-incheek theatrics play an integral part in her music, but blessed with a voice that sounds as Nashville as it does Dublin, and as Parton as it does Kate Bush, the one-two of vulnerability as humour is the emotional sucker punch that constantly delivers here.

‘I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby!’ laments urban isolation, the humdrum of the everyday and escapism, ‘No More Virgos’ digs into dating, mental health and the power of just being by yourself and ‘Lonely’ and ‘I’d Want U’ ring out like they’re from the backroom of a Deep South bar, all soul and sweet, sliding regret.

It makes for a debut packed with bountiful hooks, indie pop gems, a heady dose of Americana and a smirking sense of self. “It’s glam. It’s tacky. It’s beautiful. It’s fun,” according to CMAT. What more do you need? 7/10 Reef Younis

CMAT — If My Wife New I’d be Dead (awal) If albums can be understood as reflections of their creators, If My Wife New I’d be Dead is the absolute incarnation of its creator Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson. Packed with wit, energy and a spirited provocativeness, it embodies the personality of a young artist that’s playfully described herself as “​​ Dolly Parton meets Weird Al Yankovic, mixed with Katy Perry” and “like The Nolans making a record with Glen Campbell, covered by Paris Hilton.”

They’re interesting descriptions, but from songs about crying in KFC, a fleeting ’00s obsession with Boney M,

NAPPYNAPPA — On Da Mik Under Cozmik Lytz (bad taste) His style falling somewhere between spoken word and rap, NAPPYNAPPA exudes both the cool confidence of Kendrick Lamar and the lyrical playfulness of Brockhampton.

However, that’s where the similarities end when comparing On Da Mik Under Da Cozmik Lytz (ODMUDCL) to most mainstream hip hop. On his new album, NAPPYNAPPA follows a more alternative hip hop path, allowing the abstract, existential reasoning to take the lead.

Echoing with laughter, repetitious piano lines and sampled words of wisdom, the production veers into slicker

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territory than NAPPYNAPPA’s previous LP, 2020’s IFEELJUSTLYKTHEIRART. The driving force behind these ten tracks is NAPPYNAPPA’s unique voice, tapping into his perspective on capitalism, corporations and violence. Twisting over and back, the Washington DC’s rapper’s rhymes follow unusual patterns and keep the listener focused on what he has to say next.

What is lacking here is a cohesive sound, as the record bounces back and forth between the conventional and the experimental. There are catchy, highenergy tracks that could fit right in with the contemporary trap scene, alongside which the more reflective moments struggle, as a melody repeats over and over in the background. Although NAPPYNAPPA’s choice to ponder the universe and existence carries on as a theme, these multiple, differing soundscapes don’t overlap with the thoughtful lyrics. It sometimes feels like an opportunity has been missed to embrace a more cosmic sonic experience, one that would enhance the lyrics; the wandering basslines and filtered vocals don’t carry enough magic for ODMUDCL to shine. Here, the experimental direction NAPPYNAPPA is following feels less like the work of a pioneer than an artist wrestling with fractured ideas. 5/10 Sophia McDonald

Whatever The Weather — Whatever the Weather (ghostly international) From teaching assistant to one of the UK’s most interesting producers, Loraine James’ rise, like her music, has been anything but ordinary. At her best, when she’s pressure-testing genres and bleeding the edges – combining clubdriven sensibilities with stark, post-

Albums rave atmospheres or finding unexpected middle ground between the amorphous electronica and raw drill energy – from the glitchy to the rhythmic, the spoken to the subterranean, there isn’t much that doesn’t fall within her playground. It’s kind of why this predominantly ambient turn as Whatever the Weather makes perfectly imperfect sense.

Grounded in the concept of weather and temperatures, James uses degree measurements as a simple marker to let her process run unencumbered, allowing her subconscious to flow freely. It also proves to be an easy lead-in as a listener, setting the transportive tone that helps to give each track a subjective sense of time and place.

Opener ‘25c’ is all dreamy melody and soft focus, dancing heatwaves and a shady spot on a hot day, ‘0c’ pushes into Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92 with its scattered breaks and static flashes over chiming chords, and ‘2c’ builds a little drama with its intermittent threat of storm clouds rolling in. ‘17c’ is the real highlight, tempering percussive breaks with a pulsing suspension, finding that critical distance between structure and atmosphere. A bit like watching a city from a bus window with your headphones on, it’s all familiar time and space, just flowing differently; and that’s exactly what Loraine James does, whatever the name she chooses. 8/10 Reef Younis

Blue Lab Beats — Motherland Journey (decca/blue note) Few acts encapsulate the breadth of what’s been happening in London’s jazz and neosoul worlds as well as Blue Lab Beats.

The joint project of producer NKOK and multi-instrumentalist Mr DM has been

fizzing away in the underground for half a decade now, helping to further blur the lines between jazz, soul, Afrobeat, hip hop and electronica.

Their latest offering and third album, Motherland Journey, is their most ambitious to date, enlisting at least fifteen guests over seventeen tracks. There are contributions from London neo-soul stalwarts Tiana Major9 and Ego Ella May, a pair of infectious features from London via Accra’s Ghetto Boy and most notably of all, an appearance by the late legend Fela Kuti, whose estate are fans of the duo’s work.

The combined result of these wideranging features and Blue Lab Beats’ own sparkling instrumentation is a jazz fusion record that positively glows. ‘Labels’ is a knock-the-dust-off-your-speakers hip hop opener, quickly followed up with the one-two hit of ‘Blow You Away’ and ‘Sensual Loving’, both featuring Ghetto Boy on charismatic form. Fela Kuti turns up halfway through for the suitably Afrobeat-tinged title track and by the time things close on ‘Reflection’ the pair are layering sprawling guitar solos and sombre strings to melancholic effect.

Occasionally tracks blur together and the abundance of guests renders their impact less effective than it might be on a sparser record, but overall the rotating cast gives the project a feeling of a house band at the jazz club of the future; where all genres and grooves are welcome as long as they don’t disrupt the vibe.

8/10 Mike Vinti

Mattiel — Georgia Gothic (heavenly) The third album from Atlanta-based duo Mattiel is shaped by journeys. Georgia Gothic transports the listener into a dusky landscape, driving along an American

highway with no distinctive destination other than an intangible sense of liberty.

On Mattiel and Satis Factory, Mattiel Brown and Jonah Swilley approached their creative process as two separate minds, but Georgia Gothic sees the duo explore what it’s like to be one entity. As a result, the songs are not only cohesive and experimental, but expansive in their references. Mattiel’s musical DNA is rooted in ’60s rock and roll with a Southern edge, but they venture into folkier territory on ‘On The Run’, backyard blues in ‘Wheels Fall Off ’ and sleek indie which is reminiscent of Haim and The Kills with the lead single ‘Jeff Goldblum’. There’s even a conversational strut in Brown’s vocals on ‘Subterranean Shut-In Blues’ which echo the distinctly enigmatic tones of Mark Lanegan, and reveal a band who are set on trying out new techniques.

Perhaps as a nod to the way in which the songs were created, a lot of the lyrics speak to gaining a new perspective on the world; to finding new meaning in the mundane. Brown, at times, carries a sense of slinky nonchalance which grows in prominence as the album goes on, and it could be said that this newfound spirit is a result of shaking up the way the duo had previously worked together. By the time Georgia Gothic comes to a close, you’ve been taken to a defiant and confident point of redemption which simply oozes that carefree feeling you get when you’ve got the windows rolled down and the radio turned up real loud. 8/10 Tyler Damara Kelly

Huerco S. — Plonk (incienso) Over the last few years, Brian Leeds aka Huerco S. has become a central figure of ambient music’s new school, even as he’s receded

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Albums further into its background. His second album, 2016’s For Those of You Who Have Never – surely a ‘breakout hit’ if the genre has one – feels like a lifetime ago, a nuanced realisation of Leeds’ subtleties as a composer that still seems loud and brutish compared to the divine magic eye paintings of his more recent work under the Pendant moniker, released unceremoniously alongside the likes of Mister Water Wet and Serwed on Leeds’ own West Mineral imprint.

So, the most notable thing about Leeds’ fourth album Plonk is, fittingly for its title, percussion – not the stifled kick heard from outside of a club, but sharp, laser-focused hits and stabs straight to the ear holes. The opening tones of ‘I’ are the first strike in a flurry of tinny strings, accelerating and decelerating like so many attempts at starting a car.

Oddly, it allows for an accommodating way into the record, like enormous creaking gates into a world of twisted metal and scattered scrap. If you squint, there are some marvellous structures in there.

The episodic presentation of Plonk as a ten-part work – like so many sculptural studies in the same gallery display – plays well into the overlapping atmosphere of each track, such as in the pseudo-D&B arrangements and re-arrangements of ‘II’ through ‘IV’, each an amorphous Aphex/ Oval fugue given an analogue acid hue by the unpredictability of its ramshackle drum programming.

It’s tempting to think of Plonk as the Huerco S. ‘dance’ record, but it’s more like the elements of his past work have finally been galvanised into a levelled-up version of what we heard back in 2016.

This is evident even as the album slips back into the ambient mode towards the latter half. Stronger even than the luminous 11-minute closer is the penultimate song, a haze of beat poetry-meets-tone poetry which sees guest vocalist Sir EU sparring with the flow of Leeds’ prickly, abstract rhythm.

The gulf of difference between Plonk and what came before seems superficial at best – but the discreet parts that run the Huerco S. vehicle are still as intricate and beautiful

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when they’re strewn about the floor. Even as Leeds evolves as an artist, it’s encouraging to find that he’s still in hot pursuit of hypnotic transcendence via the scenic route. 8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Metronomy — Small World (because) Metronomy have been a part of the landscape for a generation now. The world has changed immeasurably since debut album Pip Paine (Pay the £5000 You Owe) first slithered quietly onto MySpace and LimeWire (I don’t know what those are, an old person told me to mention them), but, at least since breakthrough record The English Riviera Metronomy haven’t changed all that much; now, Joe Mount readies Small World, Metronomy album number seven, whilst continuing to refine his nostalgic and off-kilter brand of indie-pop.

Small World is inhabited by earworms, a sepia-tinged record that recalls loves and summers past. The analogue synths of ‘Good To Be Back’ glow with a golden warmth, and the languid guitars of ‘Hold Me Tonight’ echo like waves eternally crashing to the shore.

If these descriptions seem clichéd, it’s because those are the feelings that Mount tries and succeeds eerily well in stirring within the beholder – he lists memories of his parents’ music on long summer drives as a primary influence, and it really shows in each sun-kissed bar.

Fittingly, the most joy on Small World is found in its microscopic details, the moments with a precise curatorial touch leaving the best taste in the mouth.

‘I Lost My Mind’ sees a very ’70s soundscape fade-out transition seamlessly into a meandering piano solo, whilst ‘I Have Seen Enough’ ushers the album out to the

technicolour glow of a Hammond organ.

Once again, Joe Mount has made a good little album here. 7/10 Cal Cashin

Subjective — The Start of No Regret (three six zero) Subjective is a producer duo made up of Goldie – 1990s jungle pioneer and reality TV regular, resident of the idyllic island of Phuket, Thailand since 2015 – and a bloke named James Davidson, who puts out proggy, jazzy, and perfectly listenable drum and bass as Ulterior Motive from his house in Bournemouth. They made this, their second album together, online over the past 18 months, bouncing ideas across the timezones as the pandemic swept the globe, roping in various guest musicians – most notably neo-soul vocalist Greentea Peng and nu-jazz guitarist Tom Misch – along the way.

And the result is… fine, I guess? As with everything Goldie touches, it’s too long (even though 70 minutes represents comparative brevity against much of his discography) and most of the tracks feel like iterations of the same template, in which plastic soul diva vocals swoop over tasteful, identikit backing tracks seemingly built from bland Lego bricks of breakbeat and synth. Occasionally, something leaps out of the soup, propelled by force of either personality (the guests on central pair of ‘Crazy’ and ‘Breakout’ both inject a much-needed zing and vitality) or nostalgia (‘Sunlight’ evokes Goldie’s classic ‘Inner City Life’ rather poignantly, and then ‘Dollis Hill Rufige’ immediately afterwards goes full backto-’95 hardcore, with irresistible propulsion and grit), but the majority of The Start of No Regret is just too frictionless, directionless and edgeless to hook into

Albums anyone’s head. Nothing here is actively offensive, and much sounds technically well-crafted. What Subjective have overlooked, unfortunately, is much in the way of creativity. 4/10 Sam Walton

Kojey Radical — Reason to Smile (asylum/atlantic) “Previously, it’s been ‘I’m warming, I’m warming, I’m warming up.’ But I’m warm now – put me in the game.” That this is how Kojey Radical views his debut album relative to his already hugely diverting body of work comes as a surprise; his four previous releases had gradually introduced him to the listening public as a singular figure in British music.

Between his pointedly poetic approach to his lyricism and his deft blending of diverse, often disparate sounds, Radical – real name Kwadwo Amponsah – has stood apart from his peers from the beginning, a spokenword artist and illustrator with a firstclass degree from the London College of Fashion whose approach to art was already multi-disciplinary even before he’d begun to forge his own musical lane.

Never before has he seemed to pay much heed to traditional release models; he has, on paper, put out four EPs to date, all of which serve to show up what a misnomer ‘extended play’ has come to be, because most would consider them too long, all at around forty minutes each, to qualify as such. From the beginning, Radical has consistently zeroed in on both the personal and the sociopolitical – touching on social media and religion on first release Dear Daisy: Opium, then family and the African diaspora with 23Winters, before using In God’s Body to delve further into Black identity and then reflecting on

everything from depression to sexuality last time out, on 2019’s Cashmere Tears.

He’s slalomed through these ideas at such pace and with such intensity, ideas that he’s then refracted through the lenses of a host of different artistic disciplines, that you’d perhaps have been forgiven for assuming that the traditional musical delineation between the album as the real statement and the EP or mixtape as a place for experimentation as something that hasn’t been especially important to him.

And yet, here he is, positioning Reason to Smile not just as another set of songs, not simply another collection of thoughts and stories, but as game time – the moment he’s been putting in the work towards. He has a signature style by now, and we see that again on this album; similar motifs deployed differently. Themes can differ, but his analytical eye is the same. Nods to old influences and moves to break new ground seem to be rooted in the same basic passion for art. His embrace of collaboration feels as if it comes from the same place as his love of family and friends.

Like In God’s Body, Reason to Smile is tied together by a narration, but where it was provided by Michaela Coel back in 2017, reading a poem that Radical himself penned, this time it’s his mother, captured in candid conversation, acts as the storytelling glue as she reflects on her life, her move to England, her love for her son. It’s representative of the record’s pivot back to the personal in general; on closer ‘Gangsta’, for instance, he recasts his parents as the real rock stars for the sacrifices they made for him, whilst imagining his son as part of the same lineage both literally and figuratively (“If he got my pen, I bet he going platinum”).

On ‘Born’, meanwhile, he and Cashh spin unflinching recollections of a youth marked by poverty, lack of opportunity and immigration detention over blissfully breezy production in a manner recalling Nas and AZ on ‘Life’s a Bitch’, nearly thirty years ago.

Yet for all the tough subject matter, in affective terms this is an infectiously sunny album, which in and of itself ensures that Radical’s own space

is carved out, distinct from Dave’s darkness or Stormzy’s epic atmospherics. The swagger and conviction that this record oozes is all Kojey Radical’s own. 9/10 Joe Goggins

Beach House — Once Twice Melody (bella union) “We’ve spent a fuck-ton of time together these past three years, which is something a lot of people maybe couldn’t handle,” Victoria Legrand told me recently. “It’s a little bit masochistic.” Beach House’s creative process has always seemed like a particularly insular one, so one might imagine that avoiding contact with anybody from outside of their bubble might not have been a novel concept to them as they worked towards this eighth full-length, the first they’ve entirely self-produced.

It certainly seems to have been a fruitful time; the sprawling, 18-track Once Twice Melody has been drip-fed in four chapters and, curiously, feels alternately like it swings between some of their most experimental work to date – ‘Pink Funeral’ finds room for string-led drama, whilst ‘Sunset’ is led by handsome acoustic guitar – and some of the purest distillations of their hazy dreampop calling card, too, like the glittering, gently undulating ‘Over and Over’.

Alex Scally leans towards burbling synths over twinkly guitars, but as usual, it’s Legrand’s gloriously smoky vocals tying everything together. Beach House are never going to sound like anybody other than Beach House, but nearly twenty years since their debut, it’s nice to hear them spreading their wings entirely on their own terms, if a little self-indulgently.

6/10 Joe Goggins

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Albums Live Roger Robinson & The Black Space Quartet, with Floating World Pictures Cafe Oto, London 23 January 2022

Richard Dawson Roundhouse, London 20 January 2022

A short, stocky figure with shoulderlength grey hair, a casual T-shirt and baggy jeans walks onto the Roundhouse stage. His manner is cheerful and modest, yet carries a depth that gives him the air that he has something valuable to share.

Despite his unassuming appearance, through humble humour, selfdeprecation and contagious enthusiasm for his craft, Richard Dawson quickly manages to capture the hearts and minds of everyone in the audience. He opens the set with a twelve-minute telling of the unforgiving tale of the murder of Joe the Quilt-Maker (a well known fable in certain parts of Northumberland). The song is built from a timeless folk melody, of the kind one might expect to hear sung by a group of men in a country pub or sailors aboard a 15th-century ship. He tackles the song completely acapella – knees bent, eyes closed, right hand holding the microphone and left hand punching the air with the start of every line; he is hollering, his voice ringing loud among the circular room, his entire body involved in the act of singing. It is like watching a man in desperate prayer, yearning for mercy from an unforgiving deity.

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As the set continues, he uses guitar and electronics to embellish his sonic world with shades of postrock and folk-rock. The set becomes a celebration of juxtaposition, as lyrical themes oscillate between the delightful and the grotesque, the old and young, the mundane and the moving. Tales of ancient England melt into prosaic descriptions of modern Britain that every attendee here can relate to, with snapshots of five-a-side football, love heart emojis, Brexit, and fish and chips drawn into his songwriting.

There is almost an air of fear for him, as one might feel while watching a good friend expose his soul on stage. But somehow he manages to contain the audience, assuring us that he is in no denial as to his quirky nature, aware that his music is a “strong flavour”. And it’s true, it is. Its potency is almost unbearable at times. Yet watching a man in such a deep relationship with what he is hearing, as if in meditation, is an extraordinary and enticing experience, and it is difficult to draw oneself away.

There is no denying that Dawson is a master storyteller, with the ability to capture people in a hypnotic trance, suspended between worlds and ages.

As a performer, composer and creator, Richard Dawson gives any audience to his music a lesson in the art of depth, honesty and humility. Lila Tristram

Cafe Oto is exactly where you want to be on a wintery Sunday night in London.

Tucked behind the chaos of Kingsland Road, the Dalston venue glows with candlelight and warm lamps, as the regular crowd of music lovers gather round the wide performance area. On this particular Sunday, they’ve come to see the legendary British-Trinidadian poet Roger Robinson with his new ensemble, The Black Space Quartet.

Those lucky (or smart) enough to arrive early are rewarded with the first performance by Floating World Pictures. The new project formed by Snapped Ankles’ Mike Chesnutt and musician/graphic designer Raimund Wong, are releasing their debut album later this year on Friendly Recordings, promising a stellar cast of contributing musicians. If their collaborators at Cafe Oto are anything to go by, we’re in for a treat: with Alabaster De Plume joining on saxophone, Clementine March on bass, and Flamingods’ Charles Prest on guitar/ keys, they form something of a supergroup. Their mellow and meditative ambient music is punctuated by Wong’s samples, which echo the clever use of collage in his designs. An enraptured audience hang on every note as the group slowly build a gorgeous soundscape.

When Roger Robinson takes to the stage, I am somewhat surprised to learn that the other members of The Black Space Quartet are in fact three young musicians from North Wales. I am also surprised by his lyrics, which, compared to his previous, often deeply political poetry and music, focus primarily on that most universal of topics: love. Over the course of the performance, Robinson seemed to relay the breakdown of a relationship in a frank and visceral manner, pausing briefly to sip tea (which he pours almost ritualistically from a pot on stage),

Albums Live and banter with the audience. Where his earlier sonic offerings have leaned more toward reggae, dub and ambient music, these tracks are more R&B in feel, with a hint of lovers’ rock too, the dub influence still audible. If it’s less political than his earlier work, it’s no less powerful, and the band, made up of bass/synth duo LSN and vocalist Ruby Jones, are impeccably tight.

Jessica Wrigglesworth

Caroline Purcell Room, London 15 January 2021

The pamphlet for this evening’s show reads: “Today’s performance is an experiment.” Even for a band like Caroline, this is quite the mission statement. Already well-versed in using free-flowing improvisation as a means for writing music, the London eight-piece are tonight pushing this practice to its limits by ditching their regular setlist, leaving only a blank canvas to scrawl upon. Performing over the course of five hours, with audience members free to come and go as they please, Caroline will try to go beyond what we’ve come to expect from the live experience, exposing all aspects of the creative process by making something instinctive, unfiltered, and entirely new.

Even considering some of the familiar faces playing alongside them this evening – most notably Geordie Greep and Cameron Picton of Black Midi – it’s a deeply communal exercise, and one that contains no individuals. Sitting huddled on the dimly-lit stage, the band push each instrument to their playing limits, experimenting with pitch, tone, and tempo as they squeeze every sound from its source. With neither a place to start or finish, these unabbreviated passages of breathless drones and violent twangs combine and contort to finally peter out into muted phrases where, honestly, not much happens at all. It’s within these peaks and troughs that Caroline’s music truly breathes.

With members of the audience arriving during different intervals, the idea is that no two people share the same experience. These chance viewings culminate into moments unique only to those present – mine being when the band’s Jasper Llewellyn sits cross-legged at the front of the stage, reading and scribbling down notes from old books; they’re later revealed to be impromptu lyrics, as he begins to sound them out from it pages. Quite literally composing and performing music in real time before the audience’s eyes, it seems no task is too ambitious for Caroline right now.

Ollie Rankine

Glows, Lou Terry and Tiernan Banks The Windmill, London 19 January 2022

As part of their fifth birthday celebrations, the Untitled [Recs] crew (known for releasing music by Deathcrash, Jerskin Fendrix and more) have spent January and February taking over the Windmill for a series of Wednesday night gigs showcasing the label’s roster, with some friends thrown in for good measure.

Despite a last-minute lineup change

(sadly a common feature of gigs right now), the sold-out show is a testament to the Untitled crew’s impeccable taste.

A beautiful solo performance from Tiernan Banks begins the night, with the Deathcrash frontman’s usually muted vocals laid bare in the service of vulnerable, candid songwriting. While equally confessional, Lou Terry quickens the pace, bringing his humorous, often politically-tinged and at times raucous sound to the Windmill (he smiles wryly as he sings the lyric to closing track ‘Rowan’s Advice’ that references the time he was told not to “worry if the Windmill won’t give you a gig”). With the help of a full band, as well as the futuristic use of a MYO gesture control device, he creates a richly textured backdrop to his earnest and expressive vocals.

Glows – who had steps in to replace Horsey as headliner – ups the ante once more, with a high-octane performance which seems to transform the pub into a dark and sweaty basement club. The duo, consisting of Slow Dance co-founder GG Skips and audio-visual artist Felix Bayley-Higgins, bring a depth to their pulsating, hypnotic electronic music, which seems to oscillate between melancholy and ecstasy. In near-darkness, the pair layer synths, drum machines, guitars and Skips’ distorted vocal, coaxing the capacity crowd into a mesmeric trance.

Jessica Wrigglesworth

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FilmAlbums and Books

Licorice Pizza (dir: paul thomas anderson) Due to the vagaries of print deadlines and cinema release dates, the chances are that if you’re reading about Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza now, nearly two months after its cinema release, you’ve probably already seen it.

But just in case you haven’t, and are planning to, and are also the kind of joyless, filmcraft-allergic crybaby who only watches movies to find out what happens in the last ten minutes, then turn the page, as I’m going to reveal the ending of Licorice Pizza in the next paragraph.

Then again, if you are one of said spoiler-phobes, with laser focus on storyline and plot progression only, then the freewheeling, narratively chaotic and location/era/mood/character-driven Licorice Pizza – a sort of Boogie Nights without the sex, or Inherent Vice without the drugs, for Anderson comparisonists – probably isn’t the film for you anyway.

Sure, Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour) and potentiallyproblematic ten-years-older crush Alana Kane (Alana Haim, in her debut screen role) finally get together in the last reel, at least momentarily, and stroll off into the 1973 southern California sunset, but it’s also a self-consciously corny ending to a plot so throwaway that it’s as if Anderson is willing you to ignore it.

In its place, the joy of Licorice Pizza, and the closest it gets to a revelatory experience, lies in watching the different ways its characters react to events that come and go like a restless night’s dreaming, and what those reactions expose about age in relation to responsibility, love and the pursuit of excitement. The way Anderson arranges a company of bizarro characters – historical, invented and somewhere in between – to tease ideas of unreality, nostalgia and memory is similarly uncanny, with real-

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life celebrity spouses, still-going politicians and the rest of Haim all making cameos as not-quite-themselves.

Such slipperiness between the real and invented, the remembered and confabulated seems designed to mimic the wistful but unreliable middle-aged recollection of youthful whimsy and picaresque adventure, and consequently the film plays out as a sort of mirage – a southern Californian heathaze that obscures any narrative arc but whose spirit, blurry recall, and gambolling verve feels as warm and relatable as any more conventional coming-of-age tale.

Sam Walton

Devil House — John Darnielle (mcd) True crime author Gage Chandler gets a call from his editor at the opening of Devil House, John Darnielle’s new book. There’s a story to be told: in ’80s suburban California, two people wind up dead in a closed-down porn shop that’s been decorated with elaborate Satanic symbolism and named the Devil House. Suspicion fell on a group of misfit teens that had been hanging out there (an overachiever, a fuck-up, a homeless youth, and a goodhearted girl), but no one was charged.

Chandler’s editor wants him to write about it, telling him, “I feel like you’re the guy.” It’s the first of many meta moments in a multi-layered novel – because if Chandler is the guy for this story, so is Darnielle.

Now on his fourth book and his fourth decade as the leader of the Mountain Goats, Darnielle has a lane and Devil House is squarely in it. Few writers, be they lyricists or novelists, write about disaffected young people with as much

power and pathos. Mountain Goats fans, a fervent group, will recognize plenty of familiar themes and features. Troubled kids attracted to Satanism? Check.

Fantasy gaming references? Check. California lore? Check. Middle English? Also check. The teens in the Devil House feel like spiritual cousins of Jeff and Cyrus, the main characters of the Mountain Goats’ encore classic ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton’.

Devil House is more than fan service, though – it’s Darnielle’s best book to date, diving deeper into the complexity of storytelling that he explores in his novels. The best Mountain Goats songs are rich stories and character portraits that live in their own self-contained worlds. But it’s not easy to explore the responsibility and reliability of a narrator in under three minutes. In his fiction, however, Darnielle has the space to play freely with the relationship between authors, subjects, and readers/listeners. His book Wolf in White Van is about a play-by-mail game designer and his players. In Universal Harvester, a mysterious person splices extra footage into VHS tapes, forcing their own vision into films. And Devil House isn’t about Satanic murders so much as it’s about the process of writing about them.

The Devil House kids are the heart of the novel, but that heart is encased by Chandler in both the literary and literal sense. The book has seven sections, and portions about the kids are bookended by his research process and recollections of his first true crime book. As Darnielle deftly leads toward the murders and beyond, it becomes apparent that Chandler himself is making some big, bold editorial choices in his telling. After a grueling and gruesome career as a true crime writer, he’s realized that accuracy and truth aren’t the same thing, and that narrative power is a weighty responsibility. He wants to tell the story the kids deserve because he believes in treating them with care. Darnielle, of course, has been doing exactly that for over 30 years.

In Devil House, he shows off what his fans have always known – his greatest gift as a writer is empathy. Colin Groundwater

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Slow 52

Having spent a decade carving out a unique space for himself in the experimental underground of American hip hop, Denzel Curry is ready to break through to megastardom. His new album Melt My Eyez, See Your Future deserves to take him there – but it’s not been an easy journey so far, by Max Pilley.

Photography by Emily Malan

money

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On the evening of 2 September 2018, Denzel Curry scribbled down six words in his notepad: Melt My Eyez, See Your Future.

He didn’t exactly know what it meant, but the ring was pleasing. He had his sights fixed on creating his most towering record yet, an album etched across his largest canvas to date, and he felt that this would be a title grand enough to convey that magnitude, in the tradition of Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... or Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.

As it would transpire, Curry would make two more records between that day and the eventual release of the album he envisaged. Indeed, it was only upon completion of 2019’s Zuu that he returned to that page of his notepad and started to truly understand the meaning of those words he had so chaotically thrown down.

“It made sense more than it did before,” Curry says. “‘Melt My Eyez’ is a metaphor for things we choose not to see on a daily basis: we avoid people, we avoid the news, we avoid criticism, but most importantly, we avoid facing the truth ourselves when it’s right in front of us. ‘See Your Future’ comes from selfreflection and the realisation that I’m going to do something to better the world by letting them know that we are all the same and we can move forward in life if we don’t focus on the past.”

Melt My Eyes, See Your Future, coming this spring, is the record he’s been imagining all that time; most definitely Denzel Curry’s grandest statement, it’s a culmination of his decade at the spearhead of an underground rap movement that he has so often helped to define and evolve. It finds the Florida native breaking down the barriers he had previously used to protect himself, choosing now to speak honestly and candidly about his real life.

“Usually, when you hear my records, they are loud and aggressive,” he says. “Maybe a little out there and a little weird, and I would always hide behind a personality. This time, you don’t get a personality, you don’t get a Zeltron or a Raven Miyagi or Aquarius’killa. Ultimately, this album is about me, Denzel Curry. No alter egos, no nothing. Just Denzel Curry.”

Curry first started releasing his own music in 2011, quickly catching the attention of fellow Miami rapper SpaceGhostPurrp, who welcomed him into the Raider Klan group. Earl

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Sweatshirt was an early admirer of Curry’s mixtapes, and when Curry chose to separate from the pack and go it alone, he soon found his contemporaries lining up wanting to work with him.

Debut album Nostalgic 64 was met with critical acclaim in 2014, but it wasn’t until his taut, punk-inspired juggernaut of a track ‘Ultimate’ caught fire in summer of 2016 that Curry began breaking through to the next level. It coincided with the release of hip hop magazine XXL’s highly influential ‘Freshman Class’ cover that year, which saw Curry presented as a face of the new generation of rappers alongside the likes of 21 Savage, Lil Uzi Vert, Kodak Black and Anderson .Paak. Subsequent releases and collaborations with producer Kenny Beats have elevated Curry to the position he finds himself in today, as one of the most respected and eagerly anticipated voices in rap culture.

He built his reputation upon a confrontational, aggressive vocal style, typified on tracks like ‘Take_it_Back_v2’ and ‘Ricky’, but in truth he is a shapeshifter by nature, with that rare ability and emotional intelligence to apply himself to whatever tone, genre or energy a track requires. That talent flourishes on Melt My Eyez, switching from melodic sensitivity to political fury and a hundred shades in between at will.

“I realised I wanted to make the music I wanted to make,” he says, reflecting on the stylistic range of the album. “It didn’t matter what the beats sounded like, as long as people feel it and they fuck with it. I didn’t choose the beats because they’d be perfect to rap on, the beats were setting the mood. The beat would bring the emotion out of me. Once you feel it, you know.”

— Scaling up — It was a chance meeting with a future pop superstar that first instigated the musical shift in emphasis on Melt My Eyez. A fifteen-year-old Billie Eilish reached out to Curry, her favourite rapper, asking to come to one of his shows, and the pair struck up a friendship that would lead to her appearance as an uncredited vocalist on his track ‘Sirens’, from 2018’s Ta13oo, and her inviting him to be her opening act on her stadium world tour later the same year.

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“People can mosh all day, but that's venue stuff.

I want stadiums”

“It made me want to do bigger shows,” says Curry, “and I knew I couldn’t get that way by yelling. I knew I had to have bigger songs, something that people could enjoy. I wanted people to sing my songs this time. Yeah, they can mosh all day, but that’s venue stuff. I want stadiums.”

Hearing those words, you could be forgiven for expecting a mainstream-ised version of Curry on the new record, with the edges sawn off, but the reality is far from it. There is a sense of musical adventure to Melt My Eyez, an all-styles-welcome openmindedness that meets Curry’s newfound willingness to share his innermost truths; this is a project emblazoned with ambition at every turn.

“I had to ask myself some questions before I even got to actually making things,” he says. “How do I take this a step further and really make it radical? How will I make it different to my predecessors? What makes this different to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy? What makes it better than Nostalgic 64, Ta13oo or Zuu? Will this create a blueprint and legacy to follow?”

On that same momentous notepad, Curry wrote a list of styles that he wanted to incorporate onto the album: acid jazz, trip-hop, R&B, jazz, boom bap, drum and bass, jungle, funk, neo-soul, dancehall, punk and synthpop all made that initial list, and it is not a stretch to say that traces of all of them are evident in the final product. The eclecticism is thanks in large part to the parade of elite producers that Curry now has at his disposal, from Boi-1da and Powers Pleasant to Dot da Genius and his old Miami friends FnZ (aka Finatik N Zac).

Thundercat became a close confidante during the recording process, producing the track ‘Smell of Death’ and serving as a sort of personal counsel for Curry. “He’s a pretty out-there guy,” says Curry. “He made me feel more comfortable in being myself than anyone I’ve ever met. He made me feel that I could do anything if I just be myself, he made it comfortable for me to like the stuff I like.” The jazz influences continued with a lastminute appearance from the formidable Houston composer and arranger Robert Glasper, who produced album opener ‘Melt’

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and played keys on ‘Ain’t No Way’. “We were almost wrapped when he came in,” remembers Curry. “He’s that guy who you pass him the ball for the last shot and he makes it.”

Also adding their idiosyncrasies to the Melt My Eyez melting pot were his old friend, the freewheeling Kenny Beats, and JPEGMAFIA, one of the few collaborators that Curry was able to maintain close contact with during the pandemic, and who he describes as being “the most different out of all of them”.

“I take pride in learning from other artists, and I understand that flexibility is key,” says Curry. The result is an album with a sound palette that stretches the horizons and accentuates the importance of the subject matter.

Curry has included references to his own mental health struggles in his music in the past on occasion, including on ‘Clout Cobain’ from Ta13oo, but from the opening moments of Melt My Eyez opener ‘Melt’, Curry mentions having dealt with suicidal thoughts, a subject he later returns to on the track ‘Mental’.

“I was having suicidal thoughts, and I just didn’t want to live,” he says, referring to the period between his breakthrough in 2016 and the start of making this album in 2019. “My girl is actually the reason I got into therapy. I didn’t realise there is a lot of underlying trauma that I was dealing with, stuff with my previous life, childhood trauma. I didn’t know that was affecting me as an adult.”

Curry now believes that however uncomfortable it may be for him to talk publicly about it, there is genuine value to him sharing his experiences. “I felt like people needed to know who I was, and who I’m currently becoming. There could be someone else in this situation and when they hear me speak about my flaws – I’m not speaking about being perfect, because I know I’m not perfect – it can possibly help somebody else. That’s why it’s good to express yourself and that’s all I’m doing, I’m expressing myself to the best of my abilities. All journeys are non-linear, we all have ups and downs, and how we overcome them is the real, true good about life.”

He is quick to stress that his two-and-a-half years of therapy have helped him to gain perspective on his life, his work and his relationships, and with that newfound stability, he now has the strength to show this part of himself to the outside world.

— State of the nation — When he is not turning the spotlight upon himself, then he has plenty to say about the outside world, too. A trio of tracks on the first half of the album tackle a tranche of institutional political problems facing the US, from the state-of-the-nation address of ‘Worst Come to Worst’ to the direct response to the George Floyd riots on ‘The Last’, a track inspired by Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. The latter track funnels its commentary on racial inequality into a specific attack on the music industry in its second verse.

“The music industry is a bit colourist,” he explains. “A lot of the most seen, talented singers and rappers are light-skinned.

I see a lot of light-skinned women, like Saweetie, Doja Cat, Cardi B, just to name a few names. I’ve never seen a dark-skinned chick that blew up to that magnitude like them. Not to discredit

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them, I’m just calling it as I see it. I feel like the fame is a little bit colourist, if you think about it.”

The third in the trio is ‘John Wayne’, a track about police brutality. “It is on a scale to the point where I feel like I need to get a gun to protect myself from the people that are supposed to protect me,” he says. Tragically, it is a subject that Curry speaks about with personal experience. His brother Treon died as a result of complications after being tasered by police in 2014; furthermore, back in Carol City, Florida, Curry was a classmate of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old African American who was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012, causing nationwide protests and marches.

‘John Wayne’ is not Curry’s first excursion into these waters; during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, Curry and producer Terrace Martin released the searing, blistering ‘Pig Feet’, a track so devastatingly timely in its anger that it is incredible to consider that the track had been finished two years earlier. “It’s crazy, it’s like we kind of predicted the future,” he says, half-joking, half-exasperated.

“I understand that ignorance is not tolerable,” he says, “but if you don’t want people to be ignorant, you’ve got to educate them. I’m not saying I’m trying to save the world, I’m just expressing myself to the best of my abilities. I just want people to feel where I am coming from.”

Regime change at the top in the US is far from enough to assuage Curry of his disdain for the current plight of his home country. “When people start thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not going to just wait for the president, I’m going to be the change today’, that’s when everything will change. Until then, nothing will change.”

— Pace yourself — The new generation that Curry was said to represent in the middle of the last decade has often been lazily described, and often dismissed, as ‘Soundcloud rap’, a self-made, lo-fi form of hip-hop that gravitated towards woozy, ambient atmospheres and emotive, melodic vocals. In truth, Curry’s music was always an outlier among the group, having always had more to do with hardcore and drill than many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, he saw some of his peers such as the late XXXTentacion, a former housemate of Curry’s, shoot into superstardom in a short space of time, leaving Curry in a difficult position.

“I just wish my attitude would have been better,” he says.

“I felt like the world and all these artists owed me, but truthfully, they didn’t owe me shit. I was just dealing with my own depression at the time, which I didn’t know. I didn’t appreciate that moment and I can’t get those moments back.”

Along with embracing therapy, he credits taking up the martial art Muay Thai in 2017 with improving his mental state in this regard. The added perspective of having had a few years to reflect on the sudden impact of being at the centre of such a whirlwind has also helped him to realise that it is the long game that matters the most to him.

“I’m still here, still on the up and up. It’s like what Nipsey [Hussle] said, I’d rather get slow money than fast money, because

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with slow money, it’s going to always come in. Fast money, you get it one day and it’s gone the next day. I take pride in being the tortoise, because slow and steady does win the race. It’s about pacing yourself; a lot of these guys are burnt out because they didn’t pace themselves.”

“I had to make those records first to make this one, I had to mature first. Back then, I was still trying to be the man, trying to be like my peers. I wasn’t playing the game right, I should’ve just been myself the whole time. This is the overall theme of the album: me becoming a man and the future that lies ahead for me, good or bad. I turned 25 while recording this album, this is the age that Tupac died at. Reaching a quarter of a century is the primary focus, and dealing with the past along the way.”

The image of a man on a long quest to find out who he really is forms the basis of the video for the album’s lead single, ‘Walkin’, in which Curry is seen walking alone through a spaghetti Western landscape, like Harry Dean Stanton at the start of Wim Wenders’ cult 1984 road movie, Paris, Texas. Curry considers the video to be a trailer for the album at large, the message of the whole project in a snapshot.

Cinema has been a constant presence in Curry’s music since day one and Make My Eyez is no exception. One track is named ‘Sanjuro’, after the 1962 Akira Kurosawa jidaigeki classic, starring Curry’s favourite actor, Toshiro Mifune, whose name and work is woven through the album like gossamer thread.

“I watched a documentary called Mifune: The Last Samurai and it gave me the knowledge I needed to know that my records need to move. Art needs to have movement at all times,” he says. It bleeds into his other creative endeavours, too,

including a series of manga-inspired comic books that he and his friends work on during the creative process. The two pursuits work as respite for each other; at the first sign of burnout with his music, he turns his attention to the comic books, and vice versa, ensuring that his artistic drive never lulls.

It is the same desire to heighten his focus at all times that drove his decision to leave Florida and relocate to Los Angeles five years ago. “You eventually outgrow your city and if you don’t leave, you’re going to be stagnant,” he says. “Anyway, the majority of people I want to work with are out here. They weren’t in Miami, they go to Miami to get away from work!”

Muay Thai has taught Denzel Curry the importance of knowing when to strike, and judging by the enthusiasm in his voice whenever he speaks about Melt My Eyez, See Your Future, he knows that this time he is about to land a haymaker.

If there is any anxiety at all, it is just in the form of impatience that it has taken this long for the world to get to hear it. “I just want this material out, and I want people to listen to it. I’m not playing with nobody. Once they see the videos, that’s going to be the point where they see, I’m not like none of you.”

He pauses, and you wonder if the ‘you’ in question still refers to his peer group that he feels never quite granted him the credit that he deserved.

“This is the year when they’ll stop trying me and start respecting me,” he continues, his voice speeding up. “I know with this record, there’s nothing to worry about. They’re going to like this, there’s no hating on this.

“I’m pretty sure this is the one album that’s undeniable.

This is good. And I’m going to make a better album after this.”

“Slow money is going to always come in.

Fast money, you get it one day and it's gone the next”

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Semi-invisible Before shoegaze and acid house, a dysfunctional wave of British guitar bands were pursuing a psychedelic horizon all of their own – and then it all imploded. Exploring the intoxicating world of LOOP, Spacemen 3, squalling feedback and anti-performance, by Daniel Dylan Wray

“I’ve always been very vocal about not liking scenes,” says Robert Hampson of LOOP. “I have a dislike of pigeonholing and sticking a label on something. I didn’t feel part of anything.” A day later Pete Kember of Spacemen 3 says that, “we felt we were a little bit out on our own,” before Terry Bickers from The House of Love informs me, “in terms of a scene, I wasn’t much of a mixer – so I’m not sure if I am particularly qualified for comment.”

And so goes my attempt to explore and theorise an interconnected community of like-minded, and underappreciated, bands from the late 1980s, who together formed an important part of a burgeoning new musical movement. On paper at least, it seems like something was sweeping across British guitar music in the late 1980s. Following on from the backcombed metallic screech of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the amorphous textural clouds of the Cocteau Twins, and supercharged by a common love of 1960s bands, was a distinct group of bands loosely operating under a psychedelic banner.

While in some of the jangly, indie-ish, psych-ish bands you could detect the sounds of sun-baked LA or the melodic flair of The Byrds or Love, many other groups were looking to something heavier, grittier and darker – effectively eschewing the paisley in favour of leather and sunglasses.

“Psychedelic is a big word,” says Kember, chatting from Portugal. “I don’t like whimsical psych. We were more just a druggy band with some songs that were very psychedelically inspired. I always felt bands like The Stooges and MC5 were psychedelic.” Kember also credits AIP Records’ iconic Pebbles compilation series as “an education in more gritty psych”, after a mate got knocked off his scooter and used his payout money on the expensive imports.

For Hampson, the sole remaining member of LOOP – who are set to release Sonancy, their first new album in 32 years, in March – bands like The Stooges, Suicide and The Velvet Under-

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ground were a vital lifeline. “We were drawn to those bands like moths to flames,” he recalls. “There weren’t really any other bands to go to.”

Be it hard droning, grinding psych, more melodic stuff, indie-pop or pure bluesy retro-rock, the late ’80s saw a little wellspring of bands tapping into this world. Alongside LOOP and Spacemen 3, XTC frontman Andy Partridge’s fictional outfit The Dukes of Stratosphere had a self-imposed rule that they must follow the conventions of 1967 and 1968 psychedelia; there was Jim Jones’ early band Thee Hypnotics, as well as The Telescopes, The Chemistry Set, and Dr. Phibes and the House of Wax Equations (whose lead singer was later jailed for murdering his own mother); further into the mainstream, several Creation Records groups, like Primal Scream and The House of Love, more than overlapped with this world.

— Developing in isolation — Spacemen 3, formed by Kember and Jason Pierce (later of Spiritualized), were operating out of somewhere not exactly

renowned for being a cultural hub: Rugby, in Warwickshire.

“Why Rugby?” Kember asks himself with a bemused chuckle. “I don’t know. But we always felt that we were better off developing in isolation than being in a big city and part of some scene.”

After Spacemen 3’s first ever show, a friend told Kember he’d “never been more insulted in [his] life.” Kember adds: “A typical Spaceman 3 live show left to our own devices – and I know this because I edited one recently – was as much silence as it was noise. We’d play songs and then sit smoking and talking. I guess we felt if the audience didn’t give a fuck we didn’t. We were sort of an anti-performing band. We sat down with our backs to the audience, no lights on stage, just projections, semi-invisible.”

This didn’t initially endear them to people. “They were very confident, but no one else cared,” remembers David E. Barker of Glass Records, who put out Spacemen 3. “The music press certainly didn’t. My distributor asked me if I was ‘sure about this one?’ There was no real buzz in the UK until later.”

It was soon advised that the sitting down to smoke and talk for prolonged periods of time on stage ought to stop.

“Management were like: ‘What the fuck are you guys doing?’”

Kember recalls with a laugh. “They were like: ‘Cut all the fucking gaps out.’ When we did, I think we probably were one of the best live bands around.” The band evolved significantly over a short space of time. The initial fuzzed-out drones, featuring covers of heroes like The Stooges and The 13th Floor Elevators, expanded and developed, as gospel influences coalesced with the hypnotic pulses, blistering one-chord churns and druggedout grooves.

LOOP were also an incendiary live force around this time and were frequently rattling venues to their foundational core.

“Volume was important,” Hampson says. “Much like Swans, when it gets above a certain level all those frequencies create a symphony. I wanted that all the time, even if there was only a small crowd. We ruined many PAs back in the day. Most venues had incredibly inadequate sound systems and we gained a reputation very early on for either having venues close down due to noise, or just breaking the PA. The odd person will still come up to me and tell me that LOOP were responsible for their partial hearing loss.”

So, if there wasn’t much in the way of a scene or community at the time, did this mean there was competition?

“I’ve never felt any rivalry,” says Stephen Lawrence of The Telescopes. “We were all going for sensory overload in our own way. As for a scene, it was much wider back then, not just psych music but the whole DIY and independent scene in general.”

But there was more tension between LOOP and Spacemen 3. “I thought it was a weak move to be clearly very influenced by us like that,” says Kember of LOOP. “Robert [Hampson]was the assistant at the record company [Glass] so this dude knew us from our demos on. But they were a cool band – and I’m sure we were also more than a little disappointed that we couldn’t even get run over by the press, [while] they had two of the three front covers (NME, Melody Maker and Sounds).”

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Memories have perhaps become a little hazy over the decades here. LOOP were never on the cover of NME (nor Sounds as far as I can find), and when they did grace the cover of Melody Maker on 12 November 1988, they were followed a week later

by Spacemen 3. For his part, Hampson passes on the subject entirely. “I wish to not comment on that,” he says. “I don’t get involved in playground squabbles, and I’m getting to be an old man now. I just don’t have any interest in it, sorry.”

— Escape — While psychedelic music was once indelibly intertwined with hallucinogens – LSD in particular – with sprawling guitar lines unfurling in synchronicity with kaleidoscopic projections, by the 1980s, the British psych scene was less colourful and flowery, fuelled by paranoia-inducing bathtub speed as often as it was by prismatic acid.

“Spacemen 3 were a poly-drug band,” says Kember. “We weren’t just taking psychedelics, we were taking hypnotics, opiates, amphetamines – sometimes simultaneously.”

It was more of a backdrop than a driving force in LOOP’s world. “You don’t have to take drugs to make music,” Hampson says. “You don’t have to be on them to appreciate it. We took drugs, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. I probably would have taken them even if I was a dustman who listened to Kenny Rogers – which might be necessary if you have a thing for Kenny Rogers I guess. To be honest, I found all that really fucking boring.”

By 1988, numerous bands could be seen staring head down into a sea of pedals and creating squealing guitar feedback to hypnotise and obliterate audiences. But this was also the era of acid house. Despite their tonal differences, it’s not a stretch to draw similarities between the two: as well as sharing an emphasis on groove, repetition, immersion and drug use, both provided a mind-bending escape from the political backdrop of Thatcher’s Britain.

Was there much of a kinship between these worlds? Once again, Kember and Hampson look at things from completely different perspectives. “Yeah, for sure,” Kember says without hesitation. “It ticks a lot of similar boxes: minimalist repetition, often psychedelic, quite druggy. You couldn’t really not be influenced by it. Everyone I knew was, even people who had been punk kids. Everyone got into it on some level because it was this 3D experience because of MDMA being involved so heavily. It was an experience and interaction with music that people hadn’t had before.”

Hampson: “I hated [acid house]. The first thing that it did was destroy the live scene; there were very early curfews so promoters could cram a load of neds [a derogatory Scottish term, largely resigned to history, meaning Non-Educated Delinquents – equivalent to the similarly problematic ‘chav’] into the venue straight after and charge them £5 for a small bottle of water.

The music did nothing for me. No drugs in the world would have got me into it. I can only think of one positive that came from it, and it was short-lived, but it stopped a lot of violence. Even the meatheads loved each other for a while… until the heavy drugs took hold.”

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— Birds of a feather — Despite the differences between bands like LOOP and Spacemen 3, one thing that feels irrefutable is their impact and influence on the immediate wave of shoegaze bands that followed. Kember remembers My Bloody Valentine supporting them in 1987, and then again a couple of months later, and seeing a dramatic shift.

“Kevin [Shields] has said that Spacemen 3 changed the way they were doing stuff,” Kember said in a 2013 Electronic Beats article. “I witnessed that change. It was as though they had just flipped into this new mode.”

He continues today: “There was a clear, night-and-day shift between something like ‘Sunny Sundae Smile’ and ‘You Made Me Realize’. It was a quantum leap. I think they liked the energy of what we were doing and the ascending solo in ‘You Made Me Realize’, where it goes up the neck fret-by-fret, was one of my things that I used to do. But they’d deliver it in a totally

different way. The first time I heard it, I asked ‘Who wrote that song?’ and Kevin’s like, ‘I did’ and I was like ‘Come on, it’s a cover dude, that song is fucking ridiculous’. I mean, just, wow.”

Similarly, Hampson can see the blueprints they laid down.

“I think I can say – hopefully without sounding arrogant – that our influence was there,” he says.

The irony of this ‘scene’, perhaps better understood as a loose network of disconnected, disagreeable contemporaries, is that for all its members’ reluctance to associate themselves with one another, they all pretty much petered out and died together, as if taking a final bow hand-in-hand. All the buzz, hype, momentum and interest that they had carried with them into the turn of the decade (typified by the Creation roster or Thee Hypnotics being the first ever UK act signed to iconic US indie Sub Pop) was soon pretty much brought to a halt. LOOP, Spacemen 3 and The Telescopes all stopped within about a year of each other.

LOOP had back-to-back number ones in the indie album charts, with 1990’s A Gilded Eternity even breaking the top 40 in the UK charts. Did it feel like they were on the brink of something really big?

“Oh, I don’t give a fuck about that,” says Hampson.

“Never have and never will. That’s for critics to ponder on, I don’t care. I’ve never been one to make music to win prizes or bring untold riches. After A Gilded Eternity, I simply felt I wanted to go elsewhere and at that time it didn’t feel LOOP was

part of that thought process. I don’t ever dwell on whether that was a mistake or not, it simply was how I felt and I’m a creature of instinct, I go with gut feelings. Always forward is my motto.”

Spacemen 3 quickly followed, with Kember and Pierce’s increasingly tense relationship – resulting in a final album split to half a record each – soon becoming untenable.

There are many pioneering and brilliant groups from this era who get overlooked, with AR Kane perhaps being the most tragic example. Yet to paint the likes of Spacemen 3 and LOOP as forgotten underground groups, flagrantly ignored in favour of paler imitators (MBV not included), is somewhat disingenuous. Their legacy has been notable: Robert Smith handpicked LOOP for his Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre, big fans Mogwai invited them to play ATP, then ATP asked LOOP to curate an entire festival; even more prominently, Spacemen 3 have been namechecked and mimicked endlessly, especially around the psych resurgence of the early 2010s.

“Looking in the rear-view mirror, it’s funny how birds of a feather flock together,” says Kember. “Sometimes when they don’t even realise they’re doing that. A lot of my favourite bands were a dysfunctional bunch of kids who got together to try and vent some of their angst. That’s what we were, basically.”

There’s something cyclical about the nature of all these projects, made up as they are of loops, repetition, pulses, and extended grooves. LOOP are back with an album that, fittingly, picks up where Hampson left off, grinding out ferocious, metallic, crunchy slabs of driving guitar noise. Meanwhile, Spacemen 3 have found themselves back in vogue. Their track, ‘Big City’, released exactly 30 years earlier, played out prominently in the superb but cringe-inducing episode of HBO TV series Succession in which Kendall Roy hosts his own birthday party. The same track has also featured on The Simpsons, and was recently covered by LCD Soundsystem during their Brooklyn Steel residency.

So with LOOP an active force in 2022, The Telescopes releasing a constant stream of records since reigniting in the early 2000s, and Thee Hypnotics having recently reformed, is there space for the return of Spacemen 3?

“People always have this ‘Oh, it’d be so awesome’ attitude,” says Kember. “Maybe it would, maybe it fucking wouldn’t. I mean, did you see the Velvet Underground?”

Kember seems content with the legacy of the band as it is. “I’m touched. If someone would have told me way back then the way the band would be thought of over the years we would have just all laughed our heads off and said, ‘Whatever dude, you’re tripping harder than we are.’”

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Final Third: My Place

Singing and dancing for money Alex Cameron shows us around his place in Brooklyn – with a little help from his business partner, Roy Molloy,

by Colin Groundwater. Photography by Levi Mandel

A skip and a hop from the IKEA in Red Hook, Brooklyn, you can find the office of Cameron & Molloy Associates. This is the studio where Alex Cameron works and hangs with his saxophonist and business partner Roy Molloy. It’s also where he recorded his new album, Oxy Music, the first album he’s fully written and recorded in New York. That wasn’t the plan when he moved in there or so years ago, but a hell of a lot has happened since, and here we are in 2022, with Cameron eagerly releasing a new record and trepidatiously anticipating a new tour as Covid refuses to recede.

This album was written and recorded during the pandemic, but it’s not a pandemic record. Alex Cameron albums tackle themes, and Oxy Music takes on opioid addiction.

Inspired by the very real crisis facing millions and Nico Walker’s excellent novel Cherry, Cameron’s newest songs catalog the lived experience of substance abuse and their impact on human relationships. Whether he’s singing about filling prescriptions or navigating K-holes, he renders the impact of addiction in tangible, moving fashion.

Cameron is always careful not to speak for people in the circumstances he sings about. He clarifies that he is not necessarily an authority or a role model when it comes to the subject area of his songs. “But I will say that I think the record as a whole, what I wanted to do was give an indication that anyone who’s experiencing addiction, or alcohol or substance abuse problems, it’s much like puberty,” he says. “You go through it, it happens to you. You want it to be something that happened, that doesn’t exist anymore, but you’re left with elements from the experience that will never leave you. It’s something you have to learn to live with and grow out of, as opposed [to something] to put behind you and destroy.”

To write Oxy Music, Cameron pulled inspiration from the space and the objects around him. He equipped his studio with his favorite gear and stocked it with artistic grist for the mill. He and Roy Molloy gave me an exclusive tour of his studio and the objects that inspired his new album. His “office” is a testament to the way creativity feeds itself, yielding better ideas and better music at every turn.

 Prophet synths The Prophet synth is my favorite synth, so we have two Prophets here. I love the Rev 2 because I managed to get in touch with a guy in Germany who programmed all the original Prophet 5 sounds, so it operates basically as an original Prophet-5. And the LinnDrum, my favorite drum machine – I was able to get my hands on one for the first time during Covid.

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Final Third: My Place

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Final Third: My Place  Some very impressive suits I have two favorite pieces of clothing. One is Frank Sinatra’s smoking scarf, which isn’t here – I’ve put it somewhere much safer. And this is Dennis Hopper’s suit. I wear the shit out of it. I figure if it’s going to be Dennis Hopper’s suit, you should just wear it. John Richmond made it. It doesn’t really fit me, but I still wear it.

Roy Molloy: You’ve got this knack as well, Al, that even when a suit doesn’t fit you, it kind of does and doesn’t.

Yeah, I think that’s kind of my style, to wear clothes that don’t really fit.

These belts are just gifts. I don’t think I’ve literally handed over money for clothes in so long. I kind of have a rule with clothes and tattoos – it’s better if someone else makes the decision for you.

“This is Dennis Hopper's suit.

I wear the shit out of it”

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 Alan Vega collection I’m a big Suicide fan, as I imagine anyone who likes music is. This is an Alan Vega book that was given to us by Henry Rollins. It’s a collection of his poetry and lyrics and sketches, there weren’t many made. Henry asked me to be on his radio show when Miami Memory came out, so we went to LA and he took me to his house and showed me his massive collection of old demos and collector’s items, essentially. This Alan Vega book was a gift he gave me, that I chose of all the things he said I could have.

 Greer Lankton Masks This is a Greer Lankton doll mask, which is really important.

Greer Lankton is one of my favorite visual artists, [her] work hugely informed all the aspects of Miami Memory.

Final Third: My Place

 Singing and Dancing for Money This is important – it’s a DVD of a movie we made called Singing and Dancing for Money. We bad a bunch of these. It’s a really good movie! It’s on our Patreon.  Minolta camera I started taking pictures when I was a kid. They taught me how to use a dark room when I was 13 years old. This is a Minolta. We have hundreds and hundreds of Polaroids and travel with a bunch of different cameras, whether they’re instant photos or prints from film reels or digital.

 Roy Molloy and a rugby ball We watch Rugby League avidly, every single game of a round on a weekend, and there’s probably ten or eight games a weekend.

I just watched the Ashes. And this is important—I always try to have a Hi-Bounce ball. When I found one in Australia I was really happy, and then I finally found one here in a pharmacy.

RM: We try not to throw the ball around too much. The Hi-Bounce ball obviously [is fine] but I had to stop throwing the footy around because eventually I was going to break something.  NBA 2K21, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and assorted games and DVDs Most of this stuff comes from tour, whether we’ve got a Playstation in the van or Nintendo or something. Roy is quite a prolific streamer. [Ed note: find Alex and Roy on Twitch, streaming as CameronMolloyAssociates].

RM: I’ve got a Playstation at home. We took years and years off of gaming when we were trying to build a business. Then we got Miami Memory done and bought a Playstation.

It was like a decade of no gaming and then we said, “When we get this album finished, we’re going to get a Playstation.” We went to Best Buy and bought all the shit.

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Final Third: Infinite Login

Funge your own adventure A music fan’s guide to the weird and not-that-wonderful world of NFTs, by Andrew Anderson

We here at Loud And Quiet pride ourselves on our sceptical nature. When our humble magazine launched back in 2005, it was all the rage to wear Livestrong bracelets. We kept our wrists rubber-free. A few years later it was de rigueur to add kale to all kinds of culinary products. We said, “No, thank you.” We were even asked us to launch our own cryptocurrency, L&Qcoin. We politely declined.

But recently, everyone has started banging on about a new tasty idea, and we finally bit. They’re called NFTs, and if the hype of internet nerdjocks is to be believed, they are the best thing since Loosely Typed Variables (don’t bother looking this up). Could this be the trend for us? Will we become millionaires overnight, able to buy all the kale, motivational wristbands and cryptocurrencies that we originally missed out on?

Well, friends, we shall find out together, as we take a journey into the strange, divisive, stupid world of NFTs. From here on out this feature is a Choose Your Own Adventure special – and you have arrived at the first signpost.

YOU START READING AN ARTICLE ABOUT NFTS. DO YOU: A. Think, “I am sick of hearing about NFTs.” (Go to section #10) B. Wonder, “What the fuck is an NFT?” (Go to section #01) C. Say out loud, “I already own NFTs and I think they are great!” (Go to section #05)

Yes… what the fuck is an NFT? NFTs – or non-fungible tokens, to give them their full name – allow people to “own” digital things. For example, with an NFT you can own a digital piece of artwork, like a cat GIF, or even a PDF of this magazine. But unlike when you own a physical piece of artwork, and therefore it’s exclusive to you, the “exclusivity” of NFTs

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is pretty questionable. In a world of screenshots and Photoshop, NFTs, or something so similar that you can’t tell the difference, are rather easier to replicate than your favourite Cezanne. Obviously this changes somewhat if you’re working with an audio or video-based NFT – but there are still similar ways around the exclusivity. You could call it ownership for the sake of ownership; its value is (not technically, but effectively) arbitrary.

The other major use of NFTs is as a kind of digital ticket. You can create an NFT that gives the owner the right to come to a concert, to join a private online message board, or just about anything else.

As for how that ownership is decided, that’s controlled by something called blockchain. Blockchain is a code that keeps track of who owns something and, in the case of NFTs, allows the chain of ownership to be tracked. Each item (a jpg, a PDF, whatever) is tied to a single token, and they can never be separated. And while you’ve probably heard of the most famous cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the most common blockchain for trading NFTs is called Ethereum.

YOU COME TO THE END OF THE SECTION ON NFTS. DO YOU: A. Decide that you still don’t understand NFTs (Go back to the start of section #01 and read it again… only this time read it slower. Or wait until you’re less drunk/ hungover/stupid, and then reread it) B. Decide to buy an NFT (Go to section #08) C. Want to learn more about NFTs and how they’re used in music (Go to section #02)

NFTs have become best known for the crazy bubbles that have built up around certain digital art collections like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club (they are both as lame as their names suggest). But in music NFTs can actually be

Final Third: Infinite Login pretty useful. For example, an artist could sell 10 NFTs that give the buyers an exclusive acoustic concert in their own home. Or you could create an NFT that gives the buyer the rights to a percentage of the profits from your yet-to-berecorded album. There are other options too: Kings of Leon also went the whole hog and made an NFT album in 2021, the first band to do so; a few months earlier, Azealia Banks, never one to be outdone, made an NFT audio sex tape and sold it for $17,000.

Both of these examples aren’t really anything new: people have been offering exclusive content and crowdfunding albums for some time now. What is different is that by using NFTs the artist can guarantee themselves a percentage of all future sales of that NFT. So, in the digital ticket example, an artist could sell a ticket for £10, but with a clause that gives them 10% of any future sales. If the first buyer then resells it for £50, the artist will get an extra £5. And because this is all controlled by blockchain, it happens automatically.

YOU NOW KNOW HOW MUSICIANS ARE USING NFTS. DO YOU: A. Want to read what an expert thinks about all of this (Go to section #03) B. Decide to buy an NFT (Go to section #08) C. Ask “Could my band/solo project get rich via NFTs?” (Go to section #06)

“NFTs have the potential to be very useful for musicians because they can build a sense of community,” says maths researcher Andrea Baronchelli from City, University of London. “You can create special products for your fans and sell them in a way that can’t be counterfeited, like giving them access to a Discord channel where you interact with them, or selling exclusive backstage passes.”

He continues: “The best thing about them is that they’re easy to set up, and you get to keep all of the profits – minus a small listing fee. The blockchain means all of the admin is automated and it’s easy to keep track of. If you want to change a detail, like the number of NFT tickets for a certain event, all you do is change a single parameter.”

One of the big selling points of NFTs is the idea that they will democratise art, allowing artists more control over their careers. But, unfortunately, the reality can be somewhat different.

“When we analysed NFT markets we found that a small fraction of traders are making most of the money,” says Baronchelli. “This is probably not surprising – it’s the same situation that you get in the stock market. Really, you need to already be rich in order to make money from trading NFTs. “But this isn’t the fault of the technology,” he adds.

“The technology is actually democratic. The problem is that our society has existing structures that have just been recreated in the world of NFTs.” YOU ARE FEELING A BIT DEPRESSED ABOUT THE INESCAPABLE NATURE OF CAPITALIST SUPERSTRUCTURES. DO YOU: A. Proceed immediately to the end of this article, attempting to self-medicate with a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine (Go to section #10) B. Buy into the whole thing – after all, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em! (Go to section #05) C. Wonder if things could get even more depressing (Go to section #07) D. STILL ask, “Could my band/solo project get rich via NFTs?” (Go to section #06)

Congratulations! You are either a bastard, an idiot, or a combination of the two. There is a 1% chance you will become rich and a 99% chance you will help someone else become rich. You have appeased the gods of capitalism and served our technocratic overlords well. Please put down this magazine and proceed immediately to the CRYPTOCROM for your inculcation ceremony.

YOU HAVE NOW HEARD FROM THE EXPERT. DO YOU: A. Want to hear more from the expert (Go to section #04) B. Decide to buy an NFT (Go to section #08) C. Ask, “Could my band/solo project get rich via NFTs?” (Go to section #06)

Probably not. NFTs are just a new way of commodifying art. Yes, you can sell an NFT of a new song or an exclusive concert, but if no one wants to buy it then… well, you won’t make any money. Basically, we still live in an economy of attention, and so unless you can get people to look at what

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Final Third: Infinite Login you’re doing, you’re still going to be a starving artist, with or without NFTs. I’m sorry.

YOU HAVE HAD YOUR DREAMS OF UNTOLD WEALTH SHATTERED. DO YOU: A. Want a second opinion (Go back to sections #04 or #05) B. Decide you can still get rich by trading in NFTs yourself (Go to section #08) C. Give up (Go to section #10) D. Wonder if things could get even more depressing (Go to section #07)

Yes, things can always be more depressing. And so it’s time to talk about the energy impact of NFTs. In order to keep them secure, blockchains like Ethereum use complicated codes that require a lot of computer power. So, each time you make an NFT, you’re basically putting a bunch of pollution into the atmosphere.

Now, there is some good news. Ethereum – the main blockchain for NFTs – is changing to a new model that will use far less processing power. And other NFT blockchains like Wax and Voice are already carbon neutral. For now, though, the problem remains, and experts estimate that Ethereum has been responsible for releasing 96,200,000 tons of CO2 since it launched in 2015 (although this includes all Ethereum transactions and not just ones related to NFTs).

YOU ARE IN A VERY DARK PLACE. DO YOU: A. Get under a blanket in the foetal position (Go to section #10) B. Shout for your mum while rocking back and forth (Go to section #10) C. Decide to chase your losses – maybe you can trade your way out of this depression (Go to section #08)

Okay, so you want to buy an NFT – fair enough. Lots of people who are far smarter than you or I have done this. But there are some downsides you should be aware of.

First, there have been plenty of NFT scams, and there will be plenty more as people rush to try and get rich off them. For example, the Fame Lady Squad NFT was supposed

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to be raising money for feminist causes, and plenty of people got on board – the project took in some $1.5m. However, it turned out that the Fame Lady Squad was actually just two Russian guys who had faked the whole thing and then walked away with the cash.

Another issue is the minting of an NFT itself. It’s actually pretty easy to just steal a song someone else wrote (especially if it’s obscure) and turn it into your own NFT. Aggregator sites like SuperRare and Foundation claim they check the validity of all their NFTs, but really it’s hard to know for sure unless you speak directly with the artist.

And finally, NFTs are tied to the value of the cryptocurrency they work with. Most NFTs work on the Ethereum blockchain, but there are tons of other currencies that support them. However, regardless of which blockchain your NFT is on, if the value of the currency collapses, then your NFT is worth nothing. Think about that.

YOU UNDERSTAND THE RISKS INVOLVED IN NFTS. DO YOU: A. Declare that all this is nonsense and NFTs are the greatest thing ever (Go to section #05) B. Balance the risks, and decide there’s one place you can definitely invest your money wisely – Loud And Quiet (Go to section #09) C. Give up. Maybe there’s something good on Netflix? (Go to section #10)

Yes, NFTs are complicated and it’s hard to know who you can trust. But you do know you can trust us. Instead of a .jpg of a monkey with a cigar, why not just buy something from the Loud And Quiet shop? It might not be an NFT, but it’s guaranteed to lose you less money, and we’ll try really hard to make sure it’s not funged. Whatever the fuck that means.

You have completed this L&Q adventure. Please sit quietly and wait for the next edition to be delivered to your home or place of business.

A monthly record club from Loud And Quiet and Totnes record store DRIFT 12 new LPs with 10% off for L&Q Members in February’s collection

Find this month's collection at driftrecords.com/loud-and-quiet

Final Third: In Conversation

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Final Third: In Conversation A total original and seasoned re-interpreter of other people’s work, Cat Power is back with her greatest collection of covers yet.

Three decades into her career, songs like these remain a refuge for Chan Marshall, by Gemma Samways. Photography by Gem Harris

Every song a prism Chan Marshall is a born storyteller. It helps that she has a rich history, from her unconventional upbringing back in Atlanta to the storied career she’s pursued as Cat Power for three decades, while concurrently battling a barrage of afflictions, including addiction, depression and chronic illness.

It’s about much more than material, though. She’s a surprisingly great mimic, pulling out a plethora of pitch-perfect accents, from the laconic Aussie drawl of Bad Seeds man Mick Harvey, to the soothing Southern tones of her late grandmother.

She’s expressive, illustrating her anecdotes with mime, song and sudden changes in dynamics. Most of all she’s generous with her experiences, her thoughts, and her emotions, unafraid to revisit her darkest or most humiliating moments before a total stranger if she can reveal her truth.

This openness goes some way to explain why Marshall makes such a good covers singer. Her ability to imbue other people’s songwriting with fresh meaning is pretty unmatched by this point, as is evidenced by Covers, her third – and best – collection of recontextualisations so far. Source material ranges wildly, from contemporary pop and R&B (Lana Del Rey, Frank Ocean) to jazz (Billie Holiday) and rock (Iggy Pop, The Pogues, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). Perhaps most startling is ‘Unhate’, a reimagining of ‘Hate’ from Marshall’s own 2006 album The Greatest. Fleshing out the sparse arrangement of the original, the new version also provides some much-needed closure to what is a harrowing and very real tale of self-loathing.

It’s Covers that we’re here to discuss today, gathered in her low-lit bedroom at an East London hotel. Marshall has recently arrived from Paris, and she’s warm and welcoming, outstretched on the bed in a faded blue boiler suit, ripped at the armpit. She’s also a ball of nervous energy, lying down one moment, pacing the room the next, cigarette in hand. Declining the offer to lie down too, I sit cross-legged at the end of the bed throughout, occasionally making attempts to wrangle the conversation back to the record she’s promoting. Eventually I give up trying: the tangents are too good.

Gemma Samways: How was Paris?

Chan Marshall: Paris was great. I got to see all my best friends, except for one. I’m like a local band everywhere I go, because I started touring the world around 23. So, you know, I’ve made all these one-on-one friendships over that amount of time.

GS: I saw you attended Chanel’s Métiers d’art fashion show too. How was that?

CM: It was incredible. You walked through the building where you could see how they make the shoes with all the ancient shoe moulds. The guy’s showing how he flattens the sole, and another guy’s like [mimes hammering], with all these little tiny nails all around the sole. And he’s done it for so many years, the old guy. And then – oh my God – we went to this Atelier museum place and you got to walk by all those sample tweeds, all the different dips of leathers, all the fabrics… It was nuts.

GS: You were friends with the late Karl Lagerfield, right?

CM: Yeah, Karl was an awesome person. He was like Uncle Karl. He was like Santa in a way, because he was always super joyful. I mean, he’d get very serious very quickly but his greetings were always one liners, like so fucking hilarious. And he never laughed at his own jokes, which is the mark of a great comic. He was always original, and so generous. I could make him laugh too. I wasn’t afraid of him.

GS: How did you meet him?

CM: I met Karl on the sidewalk in New York: he just came up and told me a joke. I had to do press for The Greatest and I met Karl outside the hotel I was staying in. See, I had already released the record, but I was in detox and I didn’t get to do the first tour, so [the label] had me do interviews. Anyway, every day for a week, I would sit there with journalists and do the press, and in the mornings Karl would sit at the other end of the banquette with his whole team. And we would just bullshit the whole day, and it was really fun. That’s how we became friends.

GS: You’ve always had close links to the fashion industry, haven’t you?

CM: You know, my babysitter was [designer] Patrick

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Final Third: In Conversation Kelly. He was like my father figure when I was five or six, until he left Atlanta and got Marc Jacobs’ old job – the Perry Ellis design job in New York City. I remember my mom got a phone call, and she said, “Patrick is downstairs.” I ran downstairs and there was this huge stretch limousine, and then the window winds down, and Patrick’s like, “Heyyy!” He swings open the door and me and my big sister – she’s two years older – we jump in. I’d never been in a fucking limousine. And he’s just laughing, like, [affects camp Southern accent] “Come on girls,” and he opens a sunroof.

At the end of the street was my first grade school, and around the corner was a McDonald’s. We never ate at McDonald’s.

He took us through the drive-thru and we got a Happy Meal, and the whole time we were like a couple [of] little puppies, squealing and screaming, the wind in our hair. That was the last time I saw him in real life. When I was, like, 10 or 11, I was at a Supercuts [hair salon] and I saw him in a copy of Vogue and I was like, “Mommy, it’s Patrick.” He was holding the hand of Grace Jones, laughing. But yeah, it’s all art, you know? Music, poetry, fashion.

GS: Let’s talk about the new covers record…

CM: [Interjects] It’s a historic tradition of songs. Songs are passed down – that’s what we do as human beings. Songs are a huge part of our life, whether we speak the same language, whether we’re born in different centuries.

GS: And they have the power to pinpoint precise moments in your life too.

CM: Like prisms, right? Every song is a prism in which every person finds their reflection.

GS: Do you learn anything about yourself from the process of playing covers?

CM: I’m not sure if I learn anything about myself, but I definitely feel nurtured, healed, tempered, calmer. I may feel a little more understood by a… holy spirit vibe. I don’t know how to articulate it. I’m sorry, is it okay for me to smoke? [Lights cigarette] You know, you hear Bessie Smith [sings a line from ‘Aggravatin’ Papa’], or Eartha Kitt [sings the chorus of ‘In My Solitude’] and it’s some sort of emotional translation. Doesn’t mean I know myself any better but certain songs help me feel understood.

GS: On your previous two covers records, you reworked one of your own songs. This time, you’ve reinterpreted ‘Hate’ from The Greatest, under the title ‘Unhate’.

CM: [The original] song was about suicide. And after I got help, I was never going to utter those lyrics again… All of the albums I’ve ever done, I was always suicidal. You know, just really struggling with my mental health from trauma and stress.

Because people like me don’t ask for help.

GS: When you say people like you…?

CM: People like me have to push on through. We just got to keep fighting, you know. [Sighs] And then now, being able to identify my responses to certain feelings – you know, I had to learn how to sit with that feeling. To breathe and be like, “Ok, now I have to try to understand my fight or flight impulse,” you know? I gotta look at what made me feel that way? That’s what

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I needed to learn about myself. And I didn’t learn it through a song. I learned it through detox and working with a therapist.

GS: I love how with ‘Unhate’ you haven’t erased your experiences, but rather reframed them in the past tense to honour them.

CM: It almost feels primal. But, you know, we all make mistakes, we all do things we regret. And you know, the lesson isn’t the bad choices we make or the shit we go through: it’s how we adapt and get through it. And what we learn from it, and how we handle the next situation. The shit that happens to us that’s negative – that’s not the lesson. The lesson is how we grow when the shit hits the fan; how we handle the rough stuff.

GS: You cover Nick Cave’s ‘I Had A Dream Joe’. You go way back with Nick, don’t you?

CM: Yeah, I first played with him in Australia in 2001.

The last show [of the tour], I refused to meet him, because this is back when I was drinking way too much, managing my stress and heartbreak and my depression through alcohol. Which is something I always swore as a little girl that I would never, never end up doing. Ever.

So the last night of the concert, I’m terrified because I want to meet [Nick] so bad. And I’m friends with Warren [Ellis] – I’ve known Warren for fucking ever. But I’m fucking terrified to meet Nick. So I’m underneath the table, and there’s a tablecloth but it’s not long enough to hide me. I was completely wasted, just dealing with shit, but not dealing with anything at all, you know? Just trying to manage the thoughts of suicide.

Then I hear these feet. And I see the shoes and, thank God, whoever it is doesn’t see me. Then [adopts pitch-perfect Australian accent] “Chaaaan. It’s Mick.” It’s Mick Harvey.

And I was like, “Oh, hey man, what’s up?” And he’s like, “Come on darling, you got to come say hello to Nick.” And I was like [affects nervous stutter] “I, I, I will but…” He’s like, “Chan, it’s rude.” And then I was like, “Oh fuck, it’s rude? FUCK! Now I’m being mean to the guy?”

So I walk to the door and I see Warren, like, “Hello gorgeous,” and he’s making a green juice. Mick moves out the way of the door, looks at me and says, “Hey Nick, I got Chan here – special delivery.” [Laughs] And there [Nick] was, putting on a shirt that had already been buttoned up at the bottom. So his hands are above his head and he looks like one of those tube men that blow in the wind, and that made me laugh a little bit.

And then this black hair pops up through the shirt, he holds the shirt down and buttons it. And I don’t remember a single fucking thing he said to me but he just became someone that I was able to call a friend.

GS: Let’s talk about ‘Bad Religion’. It’s a song you’ve been covering in live sets for some time, right?

CM: Yeah, cause I’d been playing this song called ‘In Your Face’, which is basically about these white world leaders that ravage these countries all over the world. It’s called ‘In Your Face’ because in Buddhism karma is written on your face. So I kept singing the song on tour and I didn’t like the way it’s making me feel. There’s no resolution in that song, it’s just like a totem.

Final Third: In Conversation

“I met Karl Lagerfeld on the sidewalk in New York: he just came up and told me a joke" So one night, I was just like, [sings] “Taxi driver…” And I was just absolved: it felt like, now I can fucking move to that song and there’s no weight and my heart doesn’t hurt.

GS: The original version is inspired by unrequited love, and repressed homosexuality...

CM: [Interjects] And probably abuse and the way that the church has manifested itself into every social construct around the world.

GS: Were you raised religious?

CM: No, no, no. [Long sigh] I was quite ill when I was born. And for my mom it was a lot to handle, and I think she felt like she needed to look after herself. So she was missing for about four-and-a-half years and the woman who took me home was her mom. In her home, I was taught everything I needed to know: respect, patience, grace, dignity, honourability, trustworthiness, cleanliness, health, herbalism, cooking, reading.

She passed right before the pandemic – three days after her

birthday – and usually when I’m home I’ll pick up the phone and we’ll talk like best girlfriends. And she just always had, like, the best advice. So the whole pandemic, that phone just sat there.

But growing up, she’d read the Bible every night, and I always would snuggle with her. That’s how I learned to read, by watching her finger trace the passages. I learned to sing with her at church, because that’s the fun part of being a Southern Baptist: singing. I had always thought it was my dad that taught me to sing because he’s the musician – he sings cover songs for a living – but it was my grandmother.

GS: Are you passing that love of singing onto your son?

CM: It’s funny, I’ll be cooking and my son keeps saying, “Stop singing.” And that’s what my mother actually used to say to me. But when my son says it, he’s like, “Mom, stop singing.

Because you know how I feel about that.” I know, I know, I know... So I change the song and he’s like, “Mom, I said stop.”

He hates beautiful music, because he sees it makes me sad.

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Final Third: The Rates

Let’s Eat Grandma

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Final Third: The Rates

Each month we ask an artist or group to share three musicians they think have gone under appreciated, and three new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. This time, Jenny Hollingworth from Let’s Eat Grandma discusses the duo’s selections with Max Pilley

Listening to Let’s Eat Grandma’s music, it’s hard enough to get a grasp on the music that’s immediately in front of you, let alone try to parse out the countless number of influences and genres that have been marinating together in their minds in order for it all to have been made possible.

The Norwich duo of Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton, school friends since the age of four, release their third album Two Ribbons this April; another head-spinningly infectious concoction of twisted and mutated synth-pop, it’s as beguiling as it is irresistible.

In an effort to cast a spotlight on the inner workings of their creative minds, we have asked them to pick out six of their favourite under-appreciated artists, three of them from today and three from the past. Jenny Hollingworth guides us through their choices, ranging from ’70s Laurel Canyon to anonymous hyperpop, from Bristol trip-hop to East Anglian disco revival.

are a lot of people in the industry who don’t manage to get the amount of success that they deserve, but when you listen to such a unique artistic voice and so many amazing songs, she’s just totally up there with the very best.

MP: There’s something occultish about her as well, she seemed able to channel something that was invisibly scary and unknowable.

JH: She seems very strong-willed and very intense, in the best possible way. There are stories of her where she was like, “I don’t want to fucking open for anyone.” She gets compared to certain artists within that world, like Joni Mitchell, but she’s not really like that. She’s a bit more intense.

JUDEE SILL Jenny Hollingworth: I’ve just been really into the folk and folkrock stuff from the golden period, which to me at the moment is 1968-1973, there’s just so much good music from there. There’s a lot that I’m lucky to be delving into for the first time and it’s really exciting. I particularly enjoy music that has a transcendence to it, something quite spiritual – not necessarily in the actual religious sense, although in hers it kind of is. For me, a lot of music is about connecting to something more transcendent and she is one of the artists that does that the most for me.

Particularly with a track like ‘The Kiss’, which is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard. What I find interesting about it is that there is a very surface level reading of it of being about God – which isn’t really surface level – but at the same time she writes it so that it can be a love song as well. That’s not necessarily her intention; it’s almost undefinable, this feeling of love and transcendence in one track. And her delivery, she doesn’t overly hammer the emotions, she’s just like, “Yeah, this is just how it is.”

Max Pilley: Hers is an incredible story. She was surrounded by Laurel Canyon and unimaginable success, but it never happened for her and she just disappeared into heroin obscurity and died. It’s a real tragedy.

JH: It’s incredible. It’s not really shocking, because there

8485 MP: There is a whole folklore story attached to 8485. The story goes that the hyperpop collective Helix Tears captured a young punk singer in Toronto and implanted her with an AI bot and now she is a conduit for their music. Have I got that right?

JH: To be honest, it’s hard to know whether you’ve got it right or wrong! What I find interesting from being a proper PC Music fan, and of the beginning burst of this new musical scene, is it feels like 8485 and Helix Tears and artists like that are the new direction that things are going in. The collective element is

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Final Third: The Rates interesting. The fact that they’ll just collab and release a new song per week, it’s just so different to how a lot of other artists function.

I think having a whole fictional character, where nobody knows your name or your age or anything and you’ve got this whole backstory, it’s a really cool way of going about being a popstar. It’s the direction the industry is going in, in some ways.

What’s weird about it is that even though she’s this AI, all of the songwriting is so emotional and cathartic and that’s a weird crossover that I really like. Again, there’s quite a spiritual element to a lot of the songs, I think, especially on her Plague Town EP, which I particularly like. It’s just so good!

EARTHLING JH: When I was about 16, I had a massive trip-hop phase where I just listened to all of the classics. I get most of my recommendations through word-of-mouth; a lot of my friends are music mad and one of them recommended Earthling. To me they’re an amazing band with such an interesting sound. Even though it fits in with Portishead and Tricky and stuff, I feel like it’s even more spaced out and trippy. It borders on being quite bizarre!

It’s still one of those records that I listen to and I feel like I’ve been put in a completely different headspace. I’m always quite surprised by the fact that they’re not very well known at all, given the quality of the music. I think they had links to Geoff Barrow too, he worked on the record Radar, which is the one I really love. There are some really quite powerful songs on there – there’s one called ‘Planet of the Apes’, which seems to be about sexual abuse; that’s my reading of it, anyway.

MP: Would your trip-hop phase have overlapped with the time when you started recording with Let’s Eat Grandma?

JH: Yeah, I think that was after we finished recording our first album, I think we would have been putting it out at the time. It overlapped into making I’m All Ears, I think. It has definite second album vibes.

MP: Can you hear traces of artists like Earthling in I’m All Ears?

JH: I think so. The song ‘Snakes & Ladders’ was kind of ripping elements of it off, to be honest! Me and Rosa had to do projects delving into different genres and I picked trip-hop. We had to compose around that style and that’s where ‘Snakes & Ladders’ originally started out really, and then we just adjusted it into something more LEG.

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BERWYN MP: There’s something about his music where he’s letting you in so far that you know it must be authentic.

JH: I think the word is raw, definitely. Me and Rosa first saw him when we were watching the Mercury Prize coverage, so we were probably a little late to the party, but he really stood out. I’ve watched a few of his performances of the same song since (‘Glory’) and every time it’s a bit different in terms of where the emotional peak is. It definitely feels really raw and that he’s giving a piece of himself in every performance. It’s also quite confessional. I just think it’s powerful.

MP: When you listen to him, you just know that he can’t be faking it.

JH: And also the production’s just really good, he’s got an amazing voice and the songs are really good. Songs like ‘I’d Rather Die Than Be Deported’, they’re just really moving. I would say don’t change, Berwyn!

Final Third: The Rates “I think the new generation, which I just about count myself as part of, appreciate a performer that doesn’t play it cool” JEFF HANSON JH: Jeff Hanson is honestly quite a new one for me. With his voice – and not just his actual physical voice, although that is obviously a massive feature too – he gets compared to Elliott Smith a lot, which I can hear with some of the phrasing, but there is something about him as an artist that is unique and stands out still. His actual songs are just consistently really great, his songwriting is brilliant. When you have those rare attributes, it’s quite difficult to understand why he isn’t more well-known than he is.

MP: It’s another tragic story where he was getting close and then he died incredibly young [in 2009, aged 31].

JH: Yeah, it’s so sad. I just think it’s a real treasure trove of great songs. And getting to his actual physical voice, it’s just incredible. Even though it’s very high, it has a lot of emotional weight.

MP: He’s a great melodist as well, with just a simple vocal line he can conjure these incredibly moving melodies.

JH: I love the way that artists like him can use elements that are so simple and create something that’s quite emotionally and musically complex. In some ways, it’s quite a different approach to pop. When I’ve been making synth-pop tracks in the past, you build loads of simple layers to make something complex, but that’s a lot of stuff, whereas the melodies that someone like Jeff Hanson uses seem complex but actually they’re not.

MP: Can you imagine making a stripped-back singersongwriter-y type record yourself one day?

JH: I think I probably can, to be honest. ‘Two Ribbons’ from the new album is a bit like that. It interests me because it’s new and it feels challenging. It’s healthy to try new things.

VANITY FAIRY MP: First of all, what a great name. You guys have a great name as well, but Vanity Fairy is the band name of the year.

JH: Daisy from Vanity Fairy is our friend, she’s from Diss, which is near Norwich. She’s just got so much charisma and energy as a performer and as a writer. I’ve seen them live so many times, probably six or more, and every single time, I’m just like, “This is exactly where I want to be right now, this is the most fun I could possibly be having at a show.” It’s so disco, so fun, just really good pop songs. I think she’s really good on record, but live I think it’s even better. I’ve yet to be at a Vanity Fairy show where I haven’t ended up completely losing it, to be honest. I totally recommend seeing her live.

It’s basically Daisy’s project and when she performs live, she has backing tracks. Somehow I feel like if she actually had a band, it would almost be too much! She’s got so much stage presence and she’s got an amazing vintage wardrobe that she wears on stage. She did a show at The Amersham Arms in New Cross [South London] and all of the Goldsmiths students were there and they all absolutely loved it, it was just the right target audience. I think the new generation, which I just about count myself as part of, appreciate a performer that doesn’t play it cool in any sense and actually gives energy.

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Be Here Now: musically faultless, from ‘Magic Pie’ to ‘Yellow Submarine’, but what about that iconic cover!? It’s bamboozled fans and critics for a quarter of a century, who’ve often come to physical blows over the coded messages within it; what they could possibly mean, and whether or not the image was simply made up of random props that Noel Gallagher thought looked “gear”. There’s strong evidence for the latter, especially when you consider how the band were banging so much Cecil in ’97 that they forgot to put bass on any of the album’s tracks. Still, I’m a strong believer in the hidden messages theory, because a work of art this special simply couldn’t have come from chance.

No brainers include: the calendar featuring the date the album was released, the gramophone (the album was available to buy from HMV, and the record would play on a gramophone, minus bass) and the sinking Rolls (money).

The clock with no hands isn’t so tough either – sometimes, listening to Be Here Now, it feels like time has not just stopped but disintegrated altogether. We now believe that Bonehead playing a massive key was not a drug reference but a nod to his ironic nickname “Locks”, on account of his extremely thin hair, while sources say that Paul Weller insisted on his scooter being included so he could sell it to Ocean Colour Scene for double its asking price. As for Noel looking at a globe through a telescope, could that be a reference to ‘A Watched World Doesn’t Stop’, a track rumoured to have been eventually cut from the album due to consisting solely of a 20-minute guitar solo? I think so. Definitely.

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What a mug!

I bought this for my boyfriend Paul Chambers for valentine’s and CAN’T WAiT to give it to him. He’ll die! It’s a cute idea. You personalise the mug with your partner’s name and then list 3 things you love about them and then a cute “in joke” for the 4 star score rather than the full 5. The examples they give are “minus one star for snoring” and “minus one star for leaving the loo seat up”. So good! (and very Paul actually – it’s like sleeping with a pig). I’ve done him here though, and he’ll know it – he’s actually got an awful bum. Really flat. Horrible! This is the fourth mug I’ve bought from Mugsy Malone and the quality is alway fine.

How Otis the Aardvark looks at 45 is heartbreaking

illustration by kate prior

21 & 22 Feb Damon Albarn

Thu 14 Apr Grouper

Tue 22 Feb Manu Delago

Sat 23 Apr New Rituals: Ryuichi Kurokawa + Nkisi

Sat 5 Mar Songs in the Key of London Curated by Chris Difford & Nihal Arthanayake Fri 11 Mar Keeley Forsyth Sat 2 Apr Vashti Bunyan Wed 6 Apr Circuit des Yeux with London Contemporary Orchestra soloists

Artwork: Ben Connors

Thu 7 Apr Father John Misty

Fri 29 Apr Mica Levi Sat 21 May Hannah Peel & Paraorchestra Mon 23 May Novo Amor Thu 9 Jun William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops with the London Contemporary Orchestra

METRONOMY SMALL WORLD NEW ALBUM OUT 18TH FEBRUARY

EAT YOUR OWN EARS PRESENTS:

LIVE AT ALEXANDRA PALACE SATURDAY 7 MAY