Dry Cleaning – Loud And Quiet 155

Big Joanie, Bill Callahan, Sorry, Donna Thompson, Oliver Sim, Piglet, Show Me The Body, Flohio, Witch Fever, James Yorkston, Shit and Shine, Herva, Aoife Nessa Frances, Acid Klaus

issue 155

We’re back in business

Dry Cleaning

CHARLOTTE DOS SANTOS NEW ALBUM . VINYL + DIGITAL . 14.10.22

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, Ben Lynch, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan Wray, Dominic Haley, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hamza Riaz, Hayden Merrick, Ian Roebuck, Jack Doherty, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jessica Wrigglesworth, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Max Pilley, Michelle Kambasha, Megan Wallace, Mike Vinti, Nadia Younes, Nick Tzara, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Patrick Clarke, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Walton, Shrey Kathuria, Skye Butchard, Susan Darlington, Tara Joshi, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Tyler Damara Kelly, Woody Delaney, Zara Hedderman, Zhenzhen Yu Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Cielito Vivas, Colin Medley, David Cortes, Dan Kendall, Dustin Condren, Eleonora C. Collini, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Jake Kenny, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Kyle Johnson, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Nathanael Turner, Nathaniel Wood, Oliver Halstead, Owen Richards, Phil Sharp, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter With special thanks to Amy Azarinejad, Annette Lee, Chris Cuff, Chris Reeder, Dan Carson, Debbie Ball, Henry Turner, Marcus Scott, Matt Hughes, Matthew Maxey, Sean Newsham, Sinead Mills, Tom Churchill, Will Burgess, Will Lawrence The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2022 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Issue 155 The front cover of this month’s issue features seven people having the time of their lives in Southend-on-Sea. Four of them are the excellent south London band Dry Cleaning, who asked for roller coasters to be involved somehow, giving us the perfect excuse to return to the birthplace of Loud And Quiet – a town I’ve spent a lot of time slagging off, and just as much time persuading people to come and visit. Not even the riders of the Runaway Mine Train appear to be into it, although the challenge of reading Dry Cleaning is part of their unique appeal, even when sharing their inner thoughts is what they do so well.

Stuart Stubbs Big Joanie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Witch Fever . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Herva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Donna Thompson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Aoife Nessa Frances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Piglet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Shit and Shine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Flohio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Dry Cleaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Show Me The Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 James Yorkston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Acid Klaus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Bill Callahan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Sorry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Barely regal Following the death of the Queen earlier that day, the 2022 Mercury Music Prize ceremony was postponed on 8 September.

With a nominations list that included Loud And Quiet favourites Little Simz, Gwenno and Kojey Radical, it was set to be a big night for new and independent music, so although you can see their logic for pulling the event, it was sad to see it curtailed, so last minute that the guests were already in their seats.

Luckily, the real people’s princess was on hand to salvage something from the night. As many people’s favou-

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rite to win for her 2021 album Prioritise Pleasure, Rebecca Lucy Taylor – aka Self Esteem – spent the evening ensuring that the event’s considerable amount of food did not go to waste. Taking to Twitter she called for the meals provided to nominees and their teams to be distributed amongst those most in need, rather than simply binned as they would have otherwise been. By the end of the night, via a church, restaurant and homelessness charity, the food had been safely stored so it could be used to feed rough sleepers and unhoused people in the local area of Hammersmith, London. A new date for the Mercury will be announced soon.

photography by phil sharp

The Beginning: Previously DJ Leah Williamson

Holly Herndon

Fresh from bringing football home as the captain of the Lionesses, Leah Williamson turned her attention to music last month.

She contributed mixes to BBC Radio 1 and Apple Music, sharing the tunes that she loves the most, including bangers from Tems, Burna Boy, Radiohead, Arlo Parks and many more. Would it be insulting to call her the new Pat Nevin? Although he seems like a very nice man, it probably would, so we won’t.

Holly Herndon has started a new organisation “to help artists navigate this new AI era”. It’s called Spawning – a reference to the ‘AI baby’ the Berlin-based American artist, who holds a PhD from the Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics at Stanford, created for her 2019 album PROTO. In a Twitter post, Herndon wrote: “It will be chaotic and emotional, but ultimately I think that non AI artists need options to see themselves thriving in (and not steamrollered by) the AI art economy. Full announcement soon!” hollyherndon.com

The Vince Staples Show On September 7, rapper Vince Staples announced his forthcoming TV show for Netflix.

The Vince Staples Show, though a fictional comedy series, is loosely based on Staples’ upbringing in Long Beach, California. He’s teamed up with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris to make it, in which he also stars and will act as executive producer. He also recently tweeted, “Somebody tell Meryl Streep call me. I gotta script,” so hopefully that’s series two already sorted.

Fabric Originals The team behind legendary London superclub Fabric have launched an all-new record label. Alongside the Fabric Presents mix series and their excellent existing label Houndstooth (home to Scalping, Aïsha Devi, Throwing Snow, Lotic and so many other innovative artists), this is their third venture into recorded music, building up a formidable ecosystem of live, DJed and recorded electronic sound around the original club. The first release on Fabric Originals is a split 12” single from Eris Drew and Octo Octa, with more releases lined up from the likes of I. Jordan, Helena Hauff, Sherelle, LCY and DJ Bone. It’s all looking pretty impressive. We give it a year before Leah Williamson puts out a white label on there. fabriclondon.com

The Evolution of Black British Music Via their streaming service, My5, Channel 5 has released a brand new five-part documentary series called The Evolution of Black British Music. As the title says, it charts the development of Black British music across the decades, beginning with an episode on jungle and its emergence from the early-’90s rave scene, influenced by dub, techno and acid house. Subsequent episodes will explore genres and subcultures like UK garage, grime, road rap, drill, Afrobeats, UK funky and more, charting their ascent from the DIY underground to the highest echelons of UK popular music. All episodes are directed by Femi Oyeniran and Nicky Slimting Walker, and feature contributions from artists such as Goldie, DJ Ron and Fabio & Grooverider.

A proper examination of these cultural phenomena for a mass audience feels long overdue – to see a documentary of this scale and scope devoted to such subject matter is refreshing. channel5.com

illustration by kate prior

Power Up In partnership with the Arts Council of Wales, Power Up have launched a new scheme to help develop and elevate the work of Black artists in Wales. The organisation, which was set up in 2021 with the backing of the PRS Foundation, is “a long-term initiative designed and steered with over 80 Black music professionals, aimed at supporting 40 Black music creators and industry professionals per year. As well as providing grants and industry-wide support, Power Up will address anti-Black racism and disparities in the music sector.” As it focuses on Wales, Power Up will “bring digital masterclasses to Black music creators based in Wales and music creators and industry professionals based outside of London”, as well as begin “the process of setting up a Welsh Black Music Action Group. Formed as an outcome of focus groups, the action group will contribute to and drive the execution of the Power Up Movement in Wales.”

Coldplay × Partridge During their recent six-show residency at Wembley Stadium, Coldplay brought out a different weird and/or wonderful guest each night, from Craig David to Natalie Imbruglia to Stormzy, to, most unremarkably, Radio 1 DJ Greg James. They all paled into insignificance against the final show’s cameo, by Alan Partridge.

The North Norfolk broadcasting veteran and his legendary set of pipes took to the Wembley stage like a natural in a very fetching Snow Patrol satin bomber jacket, like the sports casual branch of the Pink Ladies, before joining Chris Martin and band in a spirited cover of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’. It was very silly, but also a bit of a laugh, and therefore the best thing Coldplay have ever done, ever.

Stuart Braithwaite Mogwai head honcho and stalwart of the British alternative rock scene Stuart Braithwaite has written a memoir. Spaceships Over Glasgow is out now via White Rabbit Books, and according to the man himself it’s about “my teenage idiocy, life in general, gigs and playing in Mogwai.” To promote the publication, Braithwaite is set to go out on a book tour around the UK, visiting independent book and record shops ahead of full band dates with Mogwai later in the year. whiterabbitbooks.co.uk

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The Beginning: You’re the Worst

Should Black Flag have made that comeback album? Obviously not Thomas Wolfe was one of the most popular novelists of his generation. Writing at the start of the 20th century, he sold more books than his contemporaries – Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Woolf – and was loved by critics. Today, he’s largely forgotten, except for one paragraph in one of his books, in which he wrote: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood… back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame… back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of time and memory.”

Wolfe didn’t realise it at the time, but this paragraph perfectly captures a problem that comes up again and again in popular music. You can’t go back home. And no matter how much artists try to recapture what is past, it isn’t possible. The reformation. The reunion tour. The comeback album. It just doesn’t work.

Need some examples? How about The Stooges’ The Weirdness? How about those tours where a band plays an album from 20 years ago in its entirety? How about anything released

by The Who since Keith Moon died (four albums and counting)?

“We couldn’t let the music die,” said Pete Townsend, explaining why the band kept going. And yet ironically, that moment – when you play as an act of preservation – is exactly when the music does die. Because music is supposed to be alive.

Otherwise, it’s just another nostalgic attempt to bring back the past and put it in the present.

Anyway, all this pretentious bullshit is just a way of me saying that this edition of You’re The Worst is about a band that tried to go home but couldn’t. Because we’re talking about Black Flag. And we’re talking about their 2013 album What The… A few biographical details to get us all up to speed: Black Flag were one of the pioneers of US hardcore punk, with a simple and direct style. Their first LP Damaged is a classic, while the five other albums they released in the eighties all have good moments. Their lineup changed a lot, but the classic format was with Henry ‘TED Talk’ Rollins on vocals and Greg Ginn on guitar.

When the band split up in 1985 Rollins was in his mid 20s, while Ginn had just turned 30. Their final album, In My Head, got good reviews – but it was probably the right time to call it a day.

They’d said what they needed to say and done what they needed to do. After that, Rollins went on to become a muscle man with a mouth, while Ginn raised a family and released a few solo records.

But like so many, Ginn found it hard to step out of the spotlight. As many people who experience fame – musicians, actors, athletes – find out, there’s nothing in normal life that quite matches up. The adrenaline rush of being on stage or on camera, the praise from fans, the feeling that your life has meaning… who wouldn’t miss all that? Struggling with this stuff is totally understandable.

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However, very rarely is making a comeback the right answer to that problem. If you’re an athlete, your body has aged.

If you’re an actor, you don’t fit the roles you used to play. And if you’re a musician, your perspective has changed. When The Who get up on stage and sing “I hope I die before I get old” while being, well, old… it just doesn’t make sense.

And so it was for Black Flag. Singing about TV parties, six packs and adolescent feuds worked when they were living it. But not once they were middle-aged men. Songs from What The… like ‘Down in the Dirt’, ‘My Heat’s Pumping’ and ‘Wallow in Despair’ aren’t exactly bad, but they just don’t feel genuine from 50-something dudes. That’s not to say middle-aged men don’t have anything to say, or aren’t allowed to express themselves (go and listen to Sleaford Mods) – it’s just that this isn’t what they should be expressing.

We’re almost out of space here, so I’ll just round up a few other key issues with the album. The artwork is terrible, and looks like something a teenage goth would sew onto their oversized jeans circa 1997. Rollins isn’t the vocalist on this LP, and his replacement Ron Reyes isn’t very good. And finally, it’s almost 45 minutes long, which is an insane length for a Black Flag album.

Now, is What The… the worst album of all time? No. But it does represent one of the worst tendencies in music: that urge to go back home. And for that alone it’s worthy of its place in this series.

(To his credit, Rollins didn’t get involved with this album at all. And he also didn’t get involved with the internal bickering that happened around the reformation, which saw two different versions of the band going on tour at the same time. Perhaps an even worse idea than making What The… in the first place.)

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

FMD NEW RELEASES

BENT ARCANA ‘Live Zebulon‘

Castle Face 2LP Space jazz jam sessions of a selection of songs from John Dwyer et al. albums Bent Arcana and Moon-Drenched

DICKON HINCHLIFFE ‘Leave No Trace OST’

Sutra Park LP First time ever on vinyl, the soundtrack to the 2018 film Leave No Trace by ex-Tindersticks Dickon Hinchliffe is a beautiful, somber soundscape that finds the composer matching the sparse, meditative story arc of the film with long, stringed pieces and spacey reverberations.

ORCHESTRA GOLD ‘African Psychedelic Rock’

ASTRID ØSTER MORTENSEN ‘Gro Mig En Blomst’

Orchestra Gold LP Fantastic Oakland, California-based ensemble ORCHESTRA GOLD offers up a kaleidoscope of sound deeply rooted in the Malian tradition while introducing a genre-bending nod to the future through their rare and artful fusion of African Psychedelic Rock.

Grapefruit LP Gro Mig En Blomst is at once wholly immersive and something quite rare—an infectious collection of essentially experimental music derived from familiar organic sounds stitched together with delicate, sometimes improvised music, poetry, and haunting folk melodies.

ZABRECKY ‘Seance! With Zabrecky’

WHITMER THOMAS ‘The Older I Get, The Funnier I Was’

In The Red LP The title of the green glow-in-the-dark vinyl record is not merely a title: it is the first step on a journey to exploring the spirit realm with Zabrecky as your tour guide—just in time for Halloween.

Hardly Art LP Musician/comedian Whitmer Thomas conjures the ennui of Bright Eyes, the barefaced storytelling of John Prine, the overstuffed lists of Fred Thomas, and the lackadaisical humor of Colleen Green.

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

The Beginning: Losing My Edge

We asked Oliver Sim what his favourite song is, really

Luke Cartledge: Hello Oliver. Let’s imagine you’re trying to impress someone with your extremely cool music taste. What are you pretending is your favourite song?

Oliver Sim: It depends on the company. Is this person a romantic interest, or not?

Luke Cartledge: If that helps you imagine you’re trying to impress me, yes.

OS: Hmm… maybe Cocteau Twins. Yeah, perhaps ‘Cherrycoloured Funk’ by Cocteau Twins. Like, it’s obscure, but not to the point where it’s alienating. And I’d say that’s a hot song as well.

LC: So what’s the flipside of that? The track that you don’t have any pretensions about, that you unironically love, but that if you were talking to someone hot and interesting rather than me, you’d probably make a joke out of.

OS: [No hesitation] ‘Happiness’ by Alexis Jordan.

LC: The one from American Idol. What’s so special to you about this song?

OS: I always feel like the best word is ‘activated’. I’ll always feel activated by a trancey, dancey banger, with a woman belting over the top. Much like many other gay men, that will always get me. It’s like a Eurovision winner.

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I guess it came out about ten years ago, so for me that was early 20s, and that’s a really exciting time. 21, in G-A-Y in Soho, walls made of TV screens playing music videos – this song epitomises that place to me.

LC: Do you have a specific memory of hearing it, or are we just talking about a general vibe here?

OS: Well, this was in my drinking days…

LC: Good start.

OS: …so I can’t remember specifics, but I can remember a feeling of pure joy and excitement when hearing this song, with a lot of the friends I used to run around with. And around then, when I was 20, 21, there was a real time and a place for shows like American Idol. Like, The X Factor was a real event each week.

LC: Here’s what everybody wants to know now: how do you think you’d do if you went on one of those shows?

OS: It’s an inside joke between me and Romy that we’d get knocked out in the first round – as in, way before you actually go in front of Simon Cowell or whoever. We 100% wouldn’t make it through.

LC: Because you’d be too shy and mysterious, almost like two members of The xx?

OS: Because we’re not belters! You’ve got to project to the back of the room. It just wouldn’t work.

LC: Speaking of belting, where do you stand on karaoke?

OS: I do karaoke now and then. What would be my song…?

I like a croon. I like to stick to what I know. There’s a really good song from Grease called ‘Hopelessly Devoted To You’…

LC: I see you’re really not trying to impress me now.

OS: We did karaoke at Romy’s hen do last year, and there were a few big bangers to do, but I stuck to crooning.

LC: Would you ever try ‘Happiness’ by Alexis Jordan?

OS: Ooooh, no! I’d never reach the notes – I couldn’t get through a verse, let alone a chorus. The instrumental for that song was given to Kylie Minogue before Alexis Jordan, and her demo is somewhere on the internet; I remember hearing it, and I looove Kylie, but she’s not a belter, so it just doesn’t hit as hard as a woman with, like, big pipes.

LC: When you were asked to think about this special song for us, were there any others in contention for it?

OS: The Saturdays have a song called ‘All Fired Up’, which again is just like trancey and intense, BPM never below 120, and I think Kelly Rowland definitely had a moment with Eurodance around that time.

I hope she wouldn’t mind me saying, but Romy is working on her record at the moment, and she’s going for Euro diva. Her reference points are things we both love and share, and she sent me a playlist of them and Sonique was on there. I think she’s gonna be my new diva, for fancy synths and a woman belting.

STELL A D O N N E L LY F LO O D 09.09.22

16.09.22

30.09.22

Okay Kaya

4th

November 2022

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Big Joanie A Black feminist punk band creating the space for people of colour to talk about ‘stuff’, by Michelle Kambasha Photography by Eleonora C. Collini

It’s no mistake that our interview with Big Joanie, the acclaimed feminist Black-British punk band who are about to release their second album, Back Home, should take place at Brixton’s Trinity Arms. A pub on a quiet road with mostly white clientele, it’s seconds away from the vibrancy of the district’s main high street. Sweet smells of Jamaican patties are overwhelming, Black girls with colourful braids meander through crowds of rushing Londoners, barbers excitedly converse with their customers as they whimsically shape styles into their thick afros.

Put simply, Brixton is a district known for its Blackness, and particularly associated with people who descend from the Afro-Caribbean Windrush generation, as well as a potent Black African community. The members of Big Joanie – bassist Estella Adeyeri, guitarist Stephanie Phillips and drummer Chardine Taylor Stone – come from these communities; since forming in London’s DIY punk scene in 2013, their shared manifesto has always centred this experience in one form or another.

Their debut album Sistahs, released via Thurston Moore and Prinze’s label Daydream Library Series in 2019, can be seen as a statement of intent. The striking album cover features Phillips’ mother and aunt on holiday in Wales; their smiles are infectious and afros unapologetic, but if you blink you’ll miss the union jack on the headboard of a shop in the backdrop. That flag is a totem that represents colonialism and displacement, but the joy teeming from their stature feels radical and rebellious, as though they’ve found home in a place that doesn’t really want them there.

Sistahs has a song called ‘Token’, featuring the lyrics “All my friends are white, don’t think it matters anyway, but you are different and you are special.” Just like Phillips’ mother and aunt in the cover art for that first album, Big Joanie’s intention has always been to highlight facets of Black experience that have otherwise been underplayed in order to imbue a sense of belonging.

Each member of the band grew up outside London, where there wasn’t much diversity in rock and indie, but Phillips says that “once we were in London and started the band, other punks of colour weren’t hard to find. The community was always there.”

— Bigger and louder — Big Joanie make space for punks of colour in an overwhelmingly white scene, killing the notion that Black interests are a monolith, and their DIY ethos, in the literal as well as musical

sense of that phrase, uplifts Black people who were already there but neglected because of the scene’s pervasive whiteness.

New album Back Home extends this. The difference is that it sounds bigger, much more urgent and laid bare. The album’s loudness in comparison to their debut record is the first thing that hits you as a listener, and this was intentional. The band have been inspired by the established artists that they’ve shared huge stages with as their support act, such as Bikini Kill, Skunk Anansie, Sleater-Kinney and British punk darlings Idles. “We didn’t want to make the same album twice,” says Phillips. Taylor Stone adds that having played larger stages they “wanted to be bigger and louder” in the studio: “I guess that means you end up thinking more ambitiously.”

“Sometimes in indie music, you can get a bit lazy when you record,” says Taylor Stone. “‘We can just record the live version and layer up some guitars.’” Yet for Big Joanie’s debut album, it had been more an issue of acquiring these instruments rather than any creative complacency. “We just didn’t have access to a lot for the first album; on this album we felt less constrained.”

“We realised that actually the possibilities of what we could create in the studio were limitless,” says Adeyeri.

“I got obsessed with the [’80s harp-shaped synthesiser] omnichord during the pandemic and eventually bought one off eBay. I love how lo-fi it sounds, almost like you’re trapped in a Nintendo 64,” says Phillips. Listen to ‘Count To Ten’ – influenced by Sharon Van Etten’s use of the instrument on her album Are We There?, it feels like a distant cousin to that album’s ‘Break Me’.

It was also important to them to make an intentional album, not something cobbled together. Sistahs wasn’t simply thrown together either, but this time they came into the studio more deliberately zeroing in on the shape and the form that the record would take.

“Some [artists] need to be better at editing,” says Taylor Stone, citing Drake as someone that maybe fails at this. “All great albums cherry pick their best songs.” But she’s keen to point out she doesn’t think all mega-artists fall short in this regard: “When Adele got rid of the shuffle capability on 30, so that fans could experience the form she wanted for the album, that was great.”

The sound of the album is perfectly entwined with its overarching themes. The simple idea of home can entice feelings of rage, pain, love and hope amongst other emotional states, but seeing through the lens of Black womanhood adds

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breakdown between someone who doesn’t understand the pain they inflict onto you. Salient to Londoners, ‘I Will’ tackles the millennial housing anxiety of skyrocketing rent prices, which ultimately leads to people disconnecting from the places they live in.

Other tracks take on figurative meanings – take ‘In My Arms’, a trudging post-punk song about dreaming of another life, tired by what comes with surviving in the UK’s capital.

— Their Brixton —

“Other punks of colour weren’t hard to find. The community was always there”

another facet to it. “We were ruminating on the idea of home and what it means, whether it’s here, in the UK, Africa or the Caribbean,” says Taylor Stone. Ultimately, their idea of home has to regard the UK, not just because they were born here, but also the complicated implications of colonial history. “Migrants came to this country because Britain came to theirs. They came to this country as children who are British, but also not.” In recent times, the systematic stripping of British citizenship of Windrush-generation people who arrived on this island as children is testament to this.

Largely though, the lyrics detail more universal themes.

Some deal with physical space. ‘Happier Still’ is about wanting “to break out of a depression and pushing yourself to feel better,” says Phillips. ‘Your Words’ is about a communication

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The invariable themes that Big Joanie tackles on this album may shock listeners – especially white ones – who expect them to sing songs that have ardent racial touchstones. While they talk about Black spaces in their literal sense, (“those places where you can have a chat’”), on Back Home those issues are not explicitly discussed.

“When we got together as a band, we didn’t really think about any particular way of speaking with the world,” says Taylor Stone. The emphasis is more so about safe spaces where they can just talk about “stuff.” ‘Stuff ’ is an operative word here: it could mean the depression expressed in ‘Happier Still’, or the conflict expressed in ‘Your Words’; these are emotions that are felt by so many people regardless of race.

The expectation that Black artists and creatives just discuss race is poignant, and actually proves the need for Black spaces where tears can be shed or laughs can be had. While sometimes well-meaning, the constant expectation of conversations about the trauma of racism can be jarring.

“People put that on us,” says Taylor Stone. “Oftentimes people say, [Big Joanie] is not what you’ll expect them to be. Well what do you expect us to be? We grew up listening to the same stuff you did, so we will be influenced by that also.”

In-keeping with the theme of home and space, white people don’t realise just how much space they take up, intentionally or otherwise, and they also occupy this space in relation to the pure, universal, widely-felt concepts that are detailed proficiently on Back Home. “We’re just who we are, we’re just human beings who experience some of the same stuff you do,” says Taylor Stone.

Shortly after this interview, Big Joanie will put on Decolonise Fest, a festival that highlights punks of colour from all over the world. Some of these bands are ardently political, while others, like Big Joanie do on Back Home, tackle ranges of emotion. Attendees will learn about the undeniable history of Black people within the alternative space and, crucially, they’ll feel it too. The point of the festival is to create a place for people of colour to feel at home and be heard, away from oppressive white spaces – to talk about stuff. In some ways Back Home is the mirror image of the festival, though that’s not to dissuade white audiences away from listening (“We don’t hate white people,” Taylor Stone laughs). It’s expansive, bold and varied; a testament to a band who, while sticking to their tenets of the DIY ethos, explore higher, wider planes. All the while, they’re grounded in a home that is both figurative and physical – their fantasy world, their Brixton.

“ENCHANTING, PSYCHEDELIC-TINGED POP” PITCHFORK AVAILABLE ON LIMITED EDITION DOUBLE LP CONTAINING SEVEN RARE AND UNRELEASED TRACKS OUT NOW

Witch Fever The horror, the horror,

by Hayden Merrick Photography by Derek Bremner

It’s easy to snub horror as something that only rears its maskadorned head once the leaves turn orange and smashed pumpkins decorate the streets; something dispelled by a simple flick of the light switch. The Manchester four-piece Witch Fever, however, are living, seething proof that horror is far from a seasonal gimmick. Rather, it lurks all around, and while our backs are turned, it is being harnessed to ground-shaking results.

“I’ve always found inspiration from horror imagery,” says lead vocalist and lyricist Amy Walpole. “It’s such a potent genre that can be really interesting to work with, because – when it’s done right – it does a really good job of highlighting or holding a mirror up to oppression in society, and to fucked up things that are actually happening that aren’t fiction.”

With their name referencing the Salem witch trials – drummer Annabelle Joyce is keen to situate them in relation to wider misogyny and the historical oppression of women – Witch Fever have spent six years honing their sound: punk rock that pits sturdy guitars against Walpole’s snarling, pitch-leaping admonitions. Within that time, Walpole, Joyce, guitarist Alisha Yarwood and bassist Alex Thompson have clawed their way up the DIY music ladder, steadily swapping microaggressions for milestones.

“There was one time, we got a text, and there was a band that started playing one of our songs at a gig, taking the piss out of us – that was fun.” Amy laughs wearily at the band’s early gigs while the four members were students at the University of Manchester: “People often underestimated how heavy we were gonna be because we weren’t all men,” she says, “and we would end up on lineups with three indie bands or pop-rock bands, and then we’d play and it would be so heavy that people would fucking leave the room – like, obviously.”

To an outsider, those experiences seem distant to the band Witch Fever are today, having toured Europe with IDLES, the UK with Cancer Bats, opened for the venerable My Chemical Romance, and brought their riotous doom punk to major festivals. Yet throughout it all a self-deprecating, humorous attitude is a constant throughline of their work, even if the music and visuals tend to scream ‘bloody murder’ rather than ‘lol at me.’

“We’re not writing with the intention of making a ‘hit’ or a hit album; we just write what we really enjoy,” Amy says of their forthcoming debut album, Congregation. They only had two weeks to make the record, but Witch Fever relaxed into the process

14

and trusted their abilities. As Annabelle explains: “Because we’ve been in the studio a few times, I think we were more confident. I think it flowed a lot easier than it had previously.”

Amy doubles down on their pragmatism: “This album was never about finding absolute perfection like [those] bands that spend months and months doing albums… It was about being comfortable with the fact that it is a short amount of time, and just trying to find something that represents the energy of the songs and how we play them live.”

Congregation succeeds in embalming the group’s live performance energy, but there’s also a different kind of energy – the energy and power in Amy’s lyrics. She wrings so much terror from a phrase as seemingly mundane as “Oh my, how you’ve grown,” leaving you to look back on your childhood with disgust. Thematically vulnerable confessionals such as these (‘I Saw You Dancing’) are counterbalanced by confrontational offerings: “I’ll break your nose if you try anything else/I’ll chew your head off,” she spits on ‘Snare’. By expounding both sets of demons, the band have armed themselves with a razor-sharp collection of songs – and a great deal of catharsis – with which to face the next milestone: going full-time.

“I just wanna quit my fucking job!” laughs Amy. “All I want is to be self-sufficient off Witch Fever – that’s it. I don’t wanna be rich; I just don’t wanna work in a fucking kitchen anymore.” The band’s ascendance is a question of when not if, of course – for the cursory attention we’ve lent to horror just isn’t going to cut it here. Witch Fever aren’t about to retreat when the light hits them.

Herva New sonic life forms from the quantum computer lab, by Luke Cartledge

By his own admission, Herve Corti really likes computers. By day, the Italian is a researcher at the University of Pisa, focusing on quantum computing, which he describes as “trying to solve problems that cannot be solved by classical computers”. By night, as well as being a family man – he has two young children – he makes music which tests the boundaries of what is possible from electronic sound, releasing his experiments as Herva via the legendary UK footwork and electronica label Planet Mu. Yet for his new album Seez, Corti took a step away from the computer screen and set about building his own hardware instruments for the first time. Unhappy with the capabilities of the gear he already had and unable to afford a whole new setup that could perform at the required level, he decided to simply make what he needed for himself.

“Everything started when I was trying to get the best out of my mixer,” he says. “I wasn’t happy with my old one – I wanted something that sounded unique, and I wanted to have a lot of headroom. But mixers are expensive, and at the time I wasn’t really able to pay for a high quality one, so the only solution was to build one from scratch.”

Surely that’s a pretty complicated thing to be able to do – especially on a whim? He reaches below his desk and holds up a pretty eldritch-looking hardware component, all over-

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sized potentiometers and serpentine wiring. “Well, I took the gamble and decided to take parts from my rotary mixer and design one from the beginning; it was a risk but I’m an engineer so I trusted myself to make the mixer that I wanted to have. It became quite a quest – I spent almost a year on it. There was a lot of soldering…”

From there the idea for Seez began to develop. Could Corti create a full album from instruments and hardware he made entirely himself? And more importantly, could he use this novel equipment to create something just as new and surprising in turn? “[Before making Seez] I almost quit making music for a year, because honestly, I didn’t add much,” he explains. “I wanted to explore new things – I am a guy that likes to change things often. And after my last latest album [2017’s Hyper Flux] I wanted to tear down the walls, I wanted to change everything. I had always used programmed sound, domain-related programming language for music production – Max MSP, SuperCollider, stuff like that. But the one I really loved was Csound, because when I was really young my father was using it to make some experimental compositions. And it was the perfect tool to make something from scratch. So I decided to build the machine.”

Again, his process was partly informed by necessity – “my own laptop, my old companion, isn’t powerful enough” to run the kinds of tracks he wanted to make. Yet by building the machine and using some basic (for him, anyway) programming through Csound, he was able to push through those limitations. One way he managed to do this was by programming his instruments in such a way that after a certain point they were able to generate sound themselves, his patterns triggering responses, his codes reproducing themselves into unpredictable new forms.

“Every track is like a separate piece of software, and you get this endless stream of music,” says Corti. “They have a basic structure, but [after that] I didn’t produce anything. I just wrote the software to generate these kinds of sounds. Then, it may sound a bit weird, but when I can see the track’s shape, I know it’s cooked. I don’t know if it’s synesthetic stuff but I have to see to understand – when I listen to a track and the shapes and colours become defined, now the track is done.”

The resulting album is a thrillingly uncanny record, one which may nod to the more untethered work of artists like Venetian Snares or Boards of Canada, but whose seeping, organic movements take it into different realms entirely. It’s an intricate yet strangely bulging, rearing thing, like a bizarre new life form conjured not from carbon but code and cable. From the computer labs of Pisa and Florence has emerged something strange and vital, with Herva as its benign Dr Frankenstein.

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Donna Thompson No pressure, with a DIY jazz-pop star, by Max Pilley Photography by Neil Thompson Just three years ago, Donna Thompson thought she would never get to release her own music. The South London singer and multi-instrumentalist had spent a number of years leading the R&B/indie outfit Lightboxes, but by 2016, it had become apparent that she needed to get out.

“I guess there was a situation with some people that scared me away from wanting to do music,” she says now on reflection. “Lightboxes was really fun – it was my baby and a lot of people got excited about the potential of things, but some of those people weren’t really willing to do the work. Crazy things happened, I just had to stop. The way I was made to feel was that I would never have any kind of success with music.”

Thompson is understandably wary about exploring the episode in more specific detail, but she does admit that the

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period following the end of the group, which consisted of more than two years where the music obsessive found herself with no creative outlet other than music teaching, was a major psychological roadblock.

“I’m still dealing with it, in a way,” she says. “It was a very hard time, I struggled a lot with my mental health. It just felt like the one thing I could do had been taken away from me.”

It was a chance meeting with Stephen Bass, the director of Moshi Moshi Recordings and owner of PRAH Studios in Margate, that eventually brought Thompson back into the active fray.

Bass saw one of Thompson’s first outings back on stage after the hiatus, performing as part of jazz artist Alabaster DePlume’s live band, and approached her with an offer to provide the conditions for an EP of original material. The results more than justify

Bass’ instinctive confidence in Thompson’s abilities: the fourtrack Something True EP, released in July on PRAH Recordings, is an astonishingly confident, texturally rich first statement, ordained with Thompson’s elegant, smooth vocals and a loose, sashaying classic soul polish.

From the moment Thompson set foot into PRAH’s Margate studio, she knew that the trauma of her previous experience no longer had a hold over her. “Before that, I felt like I didn’t really know enough about the industry to know where to turn to,” she explains. “And I’m still trying to learn that. But I feel like with PRAH, they are very understanding and they just want me to do good music, and there’s no angry, horrible pressure. Everyone is just really nice.”

— Creatives and arty people and musicians — Thompson is so effusively positive when she talks about music that it is impossible to imagine she ever could have left the industry permanently. Born in Enfield to a church minister father with a penchant for the bass and a singing mother, music positively oozes through her being. She speaks enthusiastically about a childhood immersed in her parents’ gospel and Motown records and being infatuated with lovers rock. She found an early affinity for the drums and still considers it her home instrument, but for both her and her two sisters, all music was made to feel within their reach.

Even in a household brimming with positive influences, there comes an age where the teenage instinct for rebellion takes hold, and for Thompson, like so many others, grunge provided that outlet, although the diversion was relatively short-lived. By the time she was packing her bags to head to the south of the city to study Popular Music at Goldsmiths in 2007, she had drifted back to the R&B heartland. University life, she found out, was the thing for her, rejoicing in the camaraderie of “creatives and arty people and musicians.”

“Going to Goldsmiths made me focus on being an artist, which I hadn’t really thought about before,” she says. “I was just singing in little bars and stuff, I just liked doing that. But suddenly when I was at uni, it was like, ‘Oh, I could do this!’”

Inspired by her teaching to probe more deeply into the social and political context of contemporary music, Thompson found that her own writing and creativity began to accelerate.

She started to play regularly with the renowned Exeter beatboxer Bellatrix, which in turn led to her establishing a friendship with DePlume, and subsequently the current relationship with PRAH. It is on ‘Matchstick’, a standout track on Something True, that DePlume’s prowling, bewitching sax lines match Thompson’s patient, quietly powerful vocals, blending into some alchemical new vision of a smoky jazz club scene, albeit driven by a razor-sharp, DJ Shadow-like drum pattern. ‘Come Home’, meanwhile, is a more densely-woven piece, with Thompson’s multi-layered, delicately-handled vocals offering a startlingly intimate, personal touch. Thompson makes a point of recording her vocal takes in her own bedroom to preserve that sense of the personal: “I just want people to feel at ease and calm, and in order to do that you have to really feel that and capture that

moment, and that just seemed to happen when I was at home alone”, she explains. When Stephen Bass asked her to just head into a studio and do her own thing, he could hardly have expected Thompson to be almost fully-formed from the get-go.

“I didn’t force anything to come out, it just came and I just layered it and layered it until it was done,” she says with disarming sincerity. “I was just thinking, how can I make something that I like and that involves my friends and the people that have been there for me in the past couple of years. I guess it was quite easy. I’m a person who doesn’t do well under stress, so I try to make things as stress-free as possible. It was about identifying things that stressed me in previous situations and just avoiding them.”

— Our little speakeasy — In as much as there was a gestation period for these tracks, it came during the breaks in lockdown. Hackney’s Total Refreshment Centre, a hub for creative minds in the city and an all-purpose event space and recording institution, became the site of regular jam sessions for Thompson and friends when circumstances allowed in 2020 and 2021.

“We kind of made TRC our little speakeasy,” she says.

“We’d go there and hang out, play music, get drunk and eat food, it was really nice.” It speaks to the all-inclusive, universally welcoming spirit of the place that after DePlume first introduced Thompson to TRC, she quickly found her own musical kindred spirits there, and continues to make new connections all the while, as well as brushing shoulders with scene-leading luminaries like Shabaka Hutchings.

With the release of Something True now behind her, Thompson’s confidence levels have never been higher. She talks contagiously about her plans for the second EP and beyond, but it is clear that it is not just the endless possibilities of the future that animate her, but the chance to finally put her own unmistakable stamp on her sound. After the negative experiences in her past of being let down by the visions of others, Thompson is keenly aware that there is now absolutely nothing holding her back.

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Aoife Nessa Frances

Sometimes words can limit things, by Zara Hedderman Photography by Donal Talbot 20

Sitting on the grass on a sunny afternoon in the leafy Iveagh Gardens, nestled in Dublin’s city centre, Aoife Nessa Frances lists some of the bands whose names were inscribed on the walls of her childhood bedroom: Nirvana, Deus, Eels, The White Stripes.

This train of nostalgia then takes us through gigs she attended as a teenager, from The Prodigy to Primal Scream, and festival appearances by James Brown, The Who and Kanye West long before he became the world-renowned figure he is today. It’s an eclectic assortment of artists to have played a part in Aoife’s formative years as she developed her musical taste, and a surprising selection considering her music today is so indebted to psychpop and avant-garde instrumentation from the 1960s and ’70s.

When we meet, the Dublin-born songwriter and musician is two months away from the release of Protector, her second LP and first since signing to Partisan Records earlier this year. Her 2019 debut Land of No Junction introduced her as an artist with great promise and garnered deserved critical acclaim. Since then, she’s had a busy couple of years filled with an intense touring schedule and time spent in seclusion writing material that would eventually become this stunning follow-up.

In the short distance between her debut and its successor, Aoife notes the considerable evolution – personal, professional – that occurred between releases and how it has affected her relationship with her debut.

“I feel so disconnected from [Land of No Junction],” she says with a hint of remorse. “I don’t know why that is exactly, because I’m really proud of it and I like the music. I just have no connection to it because I don’t recognise the person singing the songs; it’s a much smaller version of myself. It was my first experience making a record and being totally involved in the process. I learned a lot during that time but I feel so separate from it, whereas I’m excited to play Protector. I’ve learned to use my voice in a different way; or not in a different way, I’ve just gotten more confident at singing.”

It’s a confidence that hasn’t come easily. Across the afternoon, she tells me of the gradual steps towards overcoming stage fright and discovering something unexpected about yourself through songwriting. It’s apparent that her long standing passion for music makes it worthwhile though, helping her come through various personal challenges.

— Crying without crying — The stories Aoife shares about herself, especially her younger years, demonstrates a life informed by and immersed in music. She recalls how her mother played songs by Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell on guitar in the home; her father makes fiddles and has a great love of music and enjoys everything from traditional Irish folk to techno. As a child, Aoife went to violin lessons herself, but discontinued them following a difficult period in her life when her parents separated – she associated the violin with the memories of that time. A few years away from becoming a teenager, she forged a strong connection with a different instrument.

“I got an old guitar that couldn’t even be tuned properly,” she says. “My parents saw that I had a big interest in playing it

and they encouraged me to keep doing it. I did lessons, firstly with my parents’ friend Klaus who had also made my birth chart when I was a baby! I only figured this out years later. I still have it, and it was pretty spot on.”

In that initial period of picking up the guitar, she practised constantly and learned how to play her favourite songs, mostly

by Nirvana, including their cover of Lead Belly’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’. Once adolescence arrived, she began writing her own songs and finding her voice.

“I still have the first song I ever wrote saved on my private Soundcloud page,” she laughs. “It was a very powerful experience writing it. I was around 15. I borrowed my friend’s Swedish grandfather’s guitar and I thought it had these magical qualities to it. I played it for a week or two over Christmas and the song just poured out of me. It happened without me realising what I’d done. It was a very emotional experience; I wasn’t crying but tears were streaming down my face. That actually still happens to me sometimes. When I’m writing or figuring out melodies my eyes just stream. Again, it’s not that I’m crying but something is happening, it’s very strange. I feel like that’s an indication that something is meaningful to me when it incites that kind of reaction.”

Protector is filled with songs set in idyllic worlds decorated thoughtfully with lush orchestration and eloquent descriptions of half moon light and swimming off a remote western Irish island. The arrangements are endlessly enchanting, with heavenly flourishes of harp and an irresistibly smooth interplay of keys, strings and guitar that can lull you into a dreamlike state.

Yet when you delve further into the songs, the record’s serene sonic settings bear sentiments steeped in insecurities as Aoife navigates her way through self-discovery. It makes for a deeply affecting body of work given the candid revelations throughout, and the impact of Aoife’s words are all the more impactful delivered in her distinct, deep cadence, which holds the weight of experience of someone more than twice her age. She says that for this record, Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson was a reference point for how she wanted the vocals to be conveyed.

She tells me: “I really love the dry vocals throughout that album. That vocal style isn’t necessarily consistent throughout Protector, but when we recorded ‘Emptiness Follows’, for example, I was constantly like, ‘let’s make it sound louder and drier!’ I love when you can feel a person’s presence in a microphone. It’s an intense thing to do because you feel so exposed and vulnerable; you can’t hide behind reverb. I wanted that vulnerability to be expressed in how the vocals were recorded.”

That vulnerability is expressly conveyed across Aoife’s lyricism. “Truth be told / I’m afraid to be alone,” she sings within the first minute of the album’s sublime opening track ‘Way to Say Goodbye’. A few songs later, she poses the question, “Stranger, what am I worth?” on ‘Back To Earth’, a title which bears great significance since Aoife returned from months of touring that saw her open for The New Pornographers, Alex Cameron and The Weather Station. “I don’t think I was ready for the pace of just how busy I’ve been,” she admits. “I mean, I was ready for it in lots of ways, but when I got back from touring around North America last May I couldn’t land. I was on another

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planet until recently. I don’t know where I’ve been, to be honest.

I think getting back to the countryside has helped with feeling grounded again.”

— It’s intense — These days, Aoife is no stranger to the stage, but sometimes no amount of experience can make it easier for an artist to stand before a packed venue and expose the insecurities that inspired their art. “It’s intense,” says Aoife of performing her latest material to crowds, “but at the same time, I feel like the act of writing and recording songs isn’t complete until you share the work with the world. I do feel very vulnerable because even having to think about what the record is about in the lead-up to releasing it, you have to think about all these things. I found that really hard because I was almost trying to protect myself from oversharing. Talking about the album brings up a lot of stuff from when I was writing it. When it came to the time where I had to think about talking about Protector, I found I was putting up a massive wall and I didn’t want to say anything about it. Ultimately, though, I know it’s important to share my thoughts on things I’ve experienced because a lot of people navigate similar situations and feelings. I want people to connect and relate to the album, and I know everyone experiences things in different ways but, at the end of the day, we’re all human beings and yeah, the process of sharing these songs with people was the next level of getting to know myself, too.

“It’s really hard to explain things that feel so big,” she says. “Sometimes words can limit things. I like the idea of everyone having their own personal experience because it’s going to affect everyone differently when they listen. I’m never going to be able to fully articulate some of the meanings behind the songs

22

because I get anxious that it would limit how people interpret the material themselves.”

As the afternoon progresses and our time together comes to an end, the public garden becomes populated with people playing with their dogs and wandering aimlessly around the pitch where we’ve been in conversation. In between talking about Protector, we deviate with chat of podcasts and Aoife’s favourite cinematic subgenres – particularly movies about space.

We also talk about our patterns of listening to music and how it can be challenging to maintain a similar adolescent fervour for discovering new artists or albums in adulthood. “I go through phases of listening to a lot of music and then I’ll have periods of listening to the same albums all the time,” she says. “Just before I started writing Protector, I went through a big listening phase.

Before that though, I had a period where reading and music just went away for me and I lost touch with them. I’m never happy when that happens but I found myself really enjoying listening to music again when I found a Jim Sullivan record called U.F.O. in my house. He’s a really interesting character that just disappeared. He recorded this record and another one, too. The last person who saw him said he went into a motel and he was never seen again! Anyway, I had that album in my car and listened to it over and over again. That experience reminded me of being a kid, going to school with my Discman and bringing one CD and listening to it religiously.”

Things will always be changing – and that’s good,

by Skye Butchard. Photography by Jody Evans

Piglet Some bands are defined by their sound. Others are defined by how they make you feel. Charlie Loane is in the second camp with Piglet. There’s no one stylistic trait that can sum up what he’s doing. Part songwriting confessional, part bedroom pop experiment, Piglet songs actively shapeshift across their runtime. In our chat, Belle and Sebastian and Comfort come up as points of inspiration, two Scottish bands that sit at opposite ends of the indie accessibility spectrum; the latter he calls one of the best live bands going.

That musical fluidity can be heard in the many DIY bands Loane has been part of since moving from Belfast to London at the age of 18. There’s Speed Training, the freaky pop duo he formed with Caitlin Power, who he’s been writing with since childhood. There’s Leather.head, a tense and political posthardcore band who’ve released two frenetic singles this year.

There’s also Great Dad, his former group who focused more on the abstract fringes of production and songwriting. All of these collaborations have had their influence on this solo material.

Some members even pop up to play parts or to offer advice.

Despite these varied points of inspiration, emotional directness is the constant for Piglet. This is music that wastes no time in getting the point across. Take ‘It Isn’t Fair’, a song created in response to the inhumane waiting times and mistreatment faced by trans people attempting to access NHS gender services. Written five years ago when Loane was very much stuck in a certain part of that system, the song has only been properly finished since he has been able to spend some time away from that space.

“Coming back to it now feels really different,” he tells me.

“Since then, I’ve been seen by the GIC [Gender Identity Clinic].

I’ve had hormones and surgery through the NHS, and I’m just doing so much fucking better. I was in a completely different frame of mind. It was easier to record the song.

“Obviously with transitioning, it’s not ‘I’m going from A to B’. That’s a very reductive and bloody cis way of looking at things. But being where I am now in my life, it was easier to put the song together and think about the fun production ideas, and also just be well enough to commit to doing things, to take care of myself enough to work.”

— ‘Wah wah wah’ — Charlie Loane is frank and funny in conversation. He’s quick to self-deprecate, and tells me a couple times that some of

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his lyrics are shit. It’s also his first ever interview. Even here, like in the music, there’s an easy openness.

“I was initially going to rewrite pretty much all of the lyrics,” he says. “There were a couple of shit ones. There probably still are, but it’s out there now. I was going to completely rewrite the chorus because repeating ‘It Isn’t Fair’, I thought it came off whiny, [although] if there’s anything to be whiny about, this is appropriate.

“But I used to think it was whiny to the point that when I played it live in my old pop-punk band [Worm Hears], I used to sing ‘wah wah wah’, taking the piss out of myself a bit. I think I felt a wee bit uncomfortable standing up, where now I just feel like, ‘Fuck this’. Most of the time you’re playing to a mixed group of people and you don’t know how they’d react.”

Part of Loane’s frustration came from a want to express the nuance of a conversation that frequently lacks it when taken out of trans people’s hands. But it was his earliest songwriting partner, Caitlin Power, who helped him see the value in what was there.

“I wanted it to be more political, and make it clear that our struggles are connected, to talk about privatisation and all these other things. Caitlin, who I’ve been playing music with forever, told me not to do that. I’m actually glad I didn’t. It would have been wordy.”

The song was released through NTS’ Work In Progress programme. They helped to finance a great music video, directed by Harv Frost. The two met through a trans healthcare fundraiser set up by Frost. Proceeds from the single’s merch also go to We Exist, a trans hardship fund. Community action had been a clear throughline for Piglet.

“The government has completely failed us, so we need to step up for each other wherever we can, whether that’s donating money to fundraisers when you can or things similar to that. I’ve never really thought about it. It just seems like the natural thing to do. Everybody feels a lot of pressure to do something about how fucked up the world is. Giving money to charities is important and really helpful, but at the end of the day, we shouldn’t need to be doing this. People in the community shouldn’t have to be in that position.

“The more that we can fight towards not being in this position, the better. Creating systems like charities needs to happen, or else people are going to die. But it feels important that we push for systemic change. That’s across the board, that isn’t just about trans healthcare.”

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— Keep it simple — There’s a strong sense of community baked into Piglet.

Part of that comes from his time playing at places like South London venue, label and community hub Sister Midnight.

“They just do it all right in my opinion. They take care of the people there; they make sure that everybody is okay; they don’t take any bullshit; they make sure that everyone is as fairly paid as possible, and they’re really transparent. Whenever they were in the wee venue [a now-closed basement location in Deptford], there would be a bucket, and all the money from the door went to the bands. It was kept simple, and they are super encouraging.”

Loane counts himself lucky for the people who’ve supported his art like this. At the centre of that is a tight-knit collection of collaborators. Many of them can be seen in the nine-piece Piglet live set on YouTube. On ‘Dan’s Note’, Loane stops to thank the positive masculine role models in his life. Dan is the person playing the cello in that performance. On the song, he reflects on a letter left by Dan after Loane let him stay in his flat during a tough time.

“It was just so thoughtful. It wasn’t like ‘Love you, bro, thanks for doing me a solid.’ It was talking about the sounds of the trains outside, the books he’d borrowed. He’d popped some

“Now, I understand that things will always be changing, and that’s good. That’s the nature of it. If you’re queer, you’re not worried about fitting in to binary definitions of things, whether that’s relationships, gender identity, or sexuality. Growing up when we grew up, there was fuck all understanding of trans people, but there was also no understanding of sexuality and gender being a separate thing. I was trying to work out my sexuality, and I couldn’t understand what this fucking feeling was. I think because we conflated gender and sexuality when we were wee, it’s hard to figure them out at the same time. I lost a lot of time to that one.”

— Becoming adult — You get the sense from this new batch of singles that Piglet was always meant to be doing this, but Charlie Loane only found songwriting after other doors were closed on him.

“Previous to being 14, I had basically not been that interested in music. I was just playing football all the time. That was my sole interest. Then, as I got to the age of 11 or 12, I stopped being allowed to play on the boys team. I was a bit like, ‘What the fuck.’ There wasn’t loads of girls’ football either. I felt weird about that in some kind of abstract way. I had to just sit in my room and read and play music.

“Creating systems like charities needs to happen, but it feels important that we push for systemic change” quotes in it and spoke about the warmth of friendship. It was really beautiful and uninhibited. There was no facade in trying to act any kind of way at all.

“It reminded me of all the other moments I’ve had like that with male friends around me, and how lucky I am to have that. I’m so fucking lucky for the nice men in my life. It makes me a bit emotional, because I know lots of men who really struggle to express themselves emotionally or to know what’s going on with them. Quite often, because of the shape of the world, that ends up directly harming other people.”

Piglet was born out of good relationships like this. His first EP, Alex’s Birthday, came about when his friend Alex McKenzie asked him to play some songs for a birthday party, encouraging him to properly go for the solo stuff. McKenzie would later contribute saxophone to ‘Mill’, a brilliant track that turns Piglet’s musical shapeshifting into a powerful mantra: “Nothing feels as certain as a constant evolution and change.”

It’s a sentiment that captures the expectations placed on Loane as a trans person.

“For a long time, I felt like I needed to answer what kind of queer I am,” he says, “so that I knew, but more so I could explain it to people in a way they would understand. When I didn’t feel the same way as I did two years ago, it was like, ‘Oh god, I can’t come out again.’

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“The football thing was maybe the first of a handful of things where I realised that my life wasn’t going to be like the other guys on the football team. It wasn’t so much the sport, but this realisation.”

He learnt the guitar as a way into writing songs and formed a punk band with friends from school. The first song they played was a cover of ‘Banquet’ by Bloc Party. Charlie sang, because he “wasn’t good enough to play the riff ”.

“We’d do wee gigs at pubs and stuff. There were funny times of us trying to remain in the pub without being kicked out until our set, but getting fucking kicked out anyway. Lots of being underage, running around and trying to get away with shit.”

A decade on, Piglet has moved from dodgy pubs in Belfast to DIY basements in London, but the big difference comes in the community and collaborators he can confide in. Before our chat ends, he shouts out Sister Midnight’s crowdfunding campaign to turn the Ravensbourne Arms into a community-run venue.

“They’re not there to profit off the community – they’re a part of the community,” he says. An even easier pitch is that venues like that lead to music like his.

LAMBCHOP “yet another late-career highlight ... an album that is rich in ambition, scope and innovation, and for which genre categorisation feels utterly futile.”

THE BIBLE NEW ALBUM OUT NOW

“Lambchop's most eclectic album to date – an anything-goes explosion of creativity that rewards repeated listening …

Another late-career gem.”

9/10 UNCUT

“After three decades on a quest to close in on the mysteries of being human, Wagner’s perceptive edge hasn't blunted.”

MOJO

RECORD COLLECTOR

AU SUISSE

“Morgan Geist and Mike Kelley’s first outing as a duo takes in a broad sweep of early-’80s reference points – disco, new romantic, sophistipop – that come together in an opalescent swirl ... feels like a major step: a cohesive and original musical statement that builds on their prior work while breaking new ground for both of them” – 7.4 PITCHFORK

ZOUJ

AU SUISSE DEBUT ALBUM OUT NOW

“Existential love songs and synth pop serenades from nu disco heroes” – RESIDENT ADVISOR “The spirit of Metro Area lives on in Brooklyn Duo’s superior synth pop” – UNCUT

“Electronica Album Of The Month” – MOJO “Two of the savviest aficionados of contemporary American dance music, taking many of their previous musical cues and combining them with left-field pop and cosmic disco” – ELECTRONIC SOUND

METAL / TAGAT 2 X EP OUT NOW

“futuristic, surreal and synthetic post-hyperpop”

“Funk-filled and intoxicating”

“Zouj' gazes into pop's surreal future”

NME

XLR8R

CLASH

JUNIOR BOYS

WAITING GAME NEW ALBUM OCT 28

Junior Boys first album in 6 years finds them in a tender and contemplative mood. 'Waiting Game' is a gentle, world-building album which explores quiet dynamism, prioritising depth and detail over volume.

GOLD PANDA

THE WORK NEW ALBUM NOV 11

The long awaited fourth album from one of the UK’s most influential electronic producers is his most varied and surprising to date.

‘The Work’ evokes the emotive qualities that have defined his career to date whilst crystallising his ability to produce instant classics. Features the new single ‘The Corner’.

Listen wit’sh ihotl e

W W W. C I T Y S L A N G . C O M

Shit and Shine

Fuck all y’all, by Dafydd Jenkins As cut-and-dry as an email interview can be, there’s always a hint of disappointment when a subject would prefer to stay off the phone. This was the initial case with Craig Clouse, the animating force and sole constant member of Texas-based psych-noise project Shit and Shine. His answers might be a little better over email, he says, and I’m not one to push for FaceTime in this instance. In the past Clouse has been known to wear a terrifying rabbit head during live performances, while every other press photo obscures his face in one way or another – dark sunglasses, shadowy composition, long hair, a big hat. A quick Google search brings up very few examples of Clouse’s interactions with music publications altogether over his 30-odd year career – I can count three online, all years apart. It makes you wonder if publications simply haven’t been interested, or Clouse hadn’t been amenable to them (“Interviews? Uuggghhh,” the Q&A from 2010 reads). Given that few artists in the US avantgarde noise underground are quite as storied as Clouse, I figured it couldn’t have been the former. After all, he once called S&S his “fuck-all-ya’ll” band.

He cringes a little at that phrase: “I guess that’s where my head was at at the time!” In fact, despite a daunting presence to match his history of mining a particular vein of noise-laden music with S&S – as well as with noise rock groups TODD and USA/MEXICO, the latter of which features Butthole Surfers

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drummer and frequent collaborator Jeffrey ‘King’ Coffey – Clouse shows more than a little insecurity about the accessibility of his work. He seems a little off-base with its appeal, when in fact even a batch of unreleased songs he recently put on Bandcamp did numbers. “I thought they were ok-ish and shouldn’t just be scrapped,” he says. “Nobody would’ve cared anyway [he thought]. That’s purely a self confidence thing. I’m super hard on myself.”

Self-criticisms aside, Clouse has carved out a unique spot in experimental music, one where his most devoted listeners are less concerned about any thematic cohesion between records beyond where Clouse’s interests might lie. He’s certainly skilled to have been kicking about this long, but one of his most appealing traits is that he approaches music with the fervour of an enthusiastic amateur. “It’s the way my weird brain works,” he adds. “If I wanted to sit down and make a proper techno record, I probably couldn’t figure it out. It would sound techno-ish but not proper. There’s always something not quite right going on.”

It’s easy to see what he means: while every S&S release may have a vaguely psychedelic underpinning (though it’s “not trippy hippy” music, as Clouse is quick to point out), elements tend to collide in unpredictable and volatile ways, sometimes defined by the hardware and instruments Clouse is using at the time.

This means an album like 2020’s Malibu Liquor Store is likely

to shuffle dusty desert blues rock with the manic back-stepping energy of a D&B 12”, while others like 54 Synth-Brass, 38 Metal Guitar, 65 Cathedral throb and bristle somewhere between industrial electro and a beat tape that has been reconstructed after being run over by a tractor.

There are also those occasions where collaborators can influence the direction of certain releases, which casts Clouse less as the mastermind of S&S and more as a Mark E. Smithesque custodian of a lifelong project. In a discography full of music outliers, 2015’s Chakin’ is possibly the outlier. While Clouse has always “dabbled in jazz” since wanting to be a jazz guitarist in his teens, Chakin’ is a low key, In A Silent Way fusion era throwback, born out of beer-fuelled sessions in his shed with keyboardist friend Nate Cross. They called the sessions ‘Tuesday Jazz Chat’, inspired by Clouse’s admiration of The Fast Show’s jazz club sketches (“Niiiiiice”). “That’s another record that surprised me for the reaction it got,” he says. “I was sure I’d get roasted for making a ‘fake’ jazz record.”

Then there’s the expansive guitar dirges, the latest of which is 2022’s Phase Corrected, a solo record-turned-band effort thanks to “bad bass genius” drummer Adam Hatley, who also happens to be Clouse’s next-door neighbour. “Do anything you like,” Clouse told him, “but try not to play faster than 30bpm.”

These kinds of records have been a throughline of the S&S brand since the early days, and they’re probably the only good reason he can still be filed under ‘noise rock’ in most record shops.

— Easy to root for — It’s true that there are Clouse releases that feel like the products of happenstance and luck, an aspect he readily admits about 2018’s You Were Very High EP, something of a watershed moment for the majority of his current sound. After weeks of sitting at a sampler loaded with anything and everything – Black Sabbath, Rihanna, Prince, Steely Dan and a host of audio lifted from YouTube clips (“just search ‘grumpy grandpa’ – you’ll find my sampling material”) – the record’s two sprawling sides come together like a hallucinogenic sonic miracle, a reality where ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, ‘Black Cow’ and ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ are transmogrified into cops overseeing the arrest of a man destined to spend the night in the drunk tank on an episode of Road Wars. “I like the dialogue to be real,” Clouse says, speaking to his fascination with arguments and fights people inexplicably upload online, “and not all sort of um… positive cosmic decorations! That’s one thing [Editions Mego founder] Peter Rehberg pointed out when I started sending him music to consider for release. He always encouraged ‘less decoration’ which has been a hugely valuable piece of advice. That and to never worry about sample clearance. Ha ha!” Clouse counts ‘You Were Very High’ as one of his best recordings, and while it has the distinct whiff of an audio shitpost about it, sincerity comes before any ironic distancing Clouse may or may not have towards his material.

“Humour is totally crucial,” he says. “I was hoping people would be like, ‘Prince solo over Steely Dan?! Ha ha! YES!!’ Sometimes I want to throw in instantly recognisable reference points because it’s relatable, and just to bring a smile to people’s faces.”

The ways Clouse has tried to instigate that joy has changed dramatically in live settings – where his set-up is now “shockingly minimal and simple by choice”, he used to orchestrate a certain level of spectacle with an S&S show. “We used to rent a massive fuck off van and tour with at least four drummers and two bass players, plus somebody on electronics,” Clouse says. “We would travel with a huuuge backline of vintage orange amps and cabs. These days it’s just not practical anymore. The cost of renting a massive van and the petrol and road tax charges is insane, and finding accommodation for everybody. It got stressy.” It’s oddly refreshing to hear someone with a vision like Clouse’s run through the agonising cost of demonstrating that vision on stage, night after night. He embraces the malleability of his pared-back situation: “touring with four drummers meant just playing one or two ultra repetitive things every night. We had to stick with a certain plan. I loved that but right now I’m more interested in playing several pieces of music per show and having much more freedom.”

It seems like audiences don’t mind it either. A live video of ‘You Were Very High’ shot at Sonic Protest Festival 2019, performed by Clouse and Leon Marks (“if you see us as a duo, it’s usually Leon and I”) on drum pads, samplers and mixers in a palatial country house, elicits more than a few smirks among the audience. One guy – who doesn’t seem too far gone – starts throwing some shapes too. It bodes well for the latest S&S album New Confusion, a record that Clouse curiously dubs as being “listenable”.

“I don’t always want to make antisocial music,” he says.

“It gets to be so pointlessly miserable and self-serving.” It doesn’t necessarily start at that conventional level though – a stern therapist type says “you’re angry or annoyed” in a patronising, almost scalding way, as blown-out fuzz carves out wisps of rhythm like Faust heard through the static between stations on an ancient car radio. However, the bulk of the record has, in Clouse’s words, a twisted “yacht rock” vibe – it’s not unlike J Dilla when you think about it, such that the likes of ‘Miami’ and ‘Shipped’ wouldn’t feel too out of place on a beat tape. If Clouse set out to make an ‘accessible’ S&S release, mission accomplished.

Though the singular nature of any given S&S record is the element of surprise, the difficulties of being such a changeable act are not lost on Clouse. “Honestly, it can get frustrating because there are times when I’d like to have a go at playing it straight and actually fit into a certain genre for a change,” Clouse says. “I’d probably get booked to play live more if people knew exactly what to expect. But fuck that. I’ve embraced not understanding how to make proper music!” As it happens, Craig Clouse is more like an underdog sports team than he is the brooding individual I had anticipated – easy to root for. Even the thought of a ‘playing it straight’ S&S record emerging someday is enough to anticipate what comes next.

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Flohio 30

The risk and reward of a South London rapper,

by Hamza Riaz. Photography by Jonangelo Molinari

It takes a confident character to command a space with mere presence. Yet Flohio is able to do so both physically and in her music, personifying her 2018 track ‘Bop Thru’ as we rendezvous in the depths of Peckham, South London. Her debut album is a month shy of release at the time, and her exuberance circles around the room.

There is no method to Flohio’s madness. One day she is collaborating with Mike Skinner of The Streets, the next she’s laying vocals onto a Clams Casino beat. Belligerent flows, gaudy production and assured bars are staples of her malleable style, donned like a trench coat with countless pockets. Since 2016, she’s made instant impressions while working with likeminded individuals, making the BBC Sound of 2019 shortlist and performing on festival stages across the world. And the more you understand Flohio’s mentality, the more her young career makes sense.

Moving to Bermondsey, South London from Lagos, Nigeria at the age of nine, she had no problems adapting. “As a young kid coming into a new place, you just sit back and absorb everything,” she says. “You know when you’re just yourself and you don’t judge anybody else? Everyone just messes with that. It’s when you’re trying to be like other people and being a nuisance, then things become hard for you in life. I was always me and people came into my world.”

The new home embraced a young Flohio, born Funmi Ohiosumah, who instantly assimilated into a community defined by its schools, youth clubs and corner shops. “Bermondsey made me feel warm and comfortable,” she says. “I can go anywhere with a blindfold on and know my ends.” It’s no wonder Flo takes any opportunity she can to reference her postcode, SE16, including it in the title of one of her earliest collaborations with British production duo God Colony.

A relaxed household aided teenage liberation, growing up with a tight support bubble that allowed her to explore options of sports and graphic design before settling on music at the age of 14. “I’m a late bloomer, but even then I was told to do whatever I do to the best of my ability.”

Like many UK rappers growing up in the 2000s, Flohio’s eyes and ears were set on the hip hop trailblazers across the pond, introduced to the genre by 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. “It was just in my house,” she says. “I don’t know who dropped it, one of my cousins or whatever. I played it, said ‘This is crazy’, and thought it felt so cool.” She describes the iconic album cover – the gunshot effect across the abdominal; a symbolic triad of 50’s near-death escape, gangsta rap persona and hip hop breakthrough. “This was me already being into the culture, and then watching the movie on top of it made me love 50 Cent.” She references Eve’s Eve-Olution as another formative album, which preceded her cascade of interest in Lil Wayne’s rise. It’s artists like these that resonated with Flohio and made

her want to put an album together. But she first believed her career was going somewhere when she received her first writeup in 2015. “Before my first article, I was already taking things seri–,” she begins before she humorously ends that thought. “I lied, I didn’t take it seriously at all. I was going to say I did but I was still working and doing my internships, so I wasn’t ready to quit [and pursue music full-time]. But it was so good to start going to the studio everyday and trying to figure this shit out.”

Those studio sessions came alongside dozens of open mics and encouragement from her circle; an organic process that led to becoming labelmates with Little Simz.

Although Flohio grew up around the height of grime’s second reign, that’s not the kind of music she makes, even if her music has been regularly mislabelled as grime by the media. “I don’t know why people place me in grime,” she says candidly. I express the same sentiment to her, noting how her 2020 debut mixtape No Panic No Pain leans on a palette of industrial hip hop, trap and electronic. Upon me referencing her likeness to M.I.A., she immediately extends her fist out for a spud, appreciating the comparison that’s only been made for the second time in her career. “She’s somebody that is on my list to work with one day,” she says, prepared for the range of experimentation that could be achieved.

— Out of Heart — Flohio’s creative process involves much deliberation with close collaborators Speech and God Colony, handlers of the production duties for her debut album, Out of Heart. From fifty recorded songs, a lean twelve tracks made the final cut, which speaks to Flo’s selective nature when approaching both what sounds to explore and her album curation. “It’s easy to make what everyone else is making, but it’s not what I’m feeling.

That’s why I don’t like people sending me beats. I’m like, ‘It’s cool’, but I need to build from scratch so I can be more free. We just don’t know where the sound is going to go and that’s how I like it.”

Mood fluctuates throughout our day-to-day lives and Flohio expresses this throughout her debut. Tracks such as ‘Cuddy Buddy’ and ‘Peace of Mind’ inhabit the trenches of solitude, which lay a stark contrast to the ’80s disco opener, ‘SPF’.

“I have this whole Teletubby kind of shit, but then it goes into dark, evil Barney by the end,” she explains, using the childrens’ television characters to highlight the album’s range in tunes.

One of the last tracks to make the cut was ‘Grace’, which was reworked after visiting her auntie in Nigeria who later passed away from cancer. “I brought people into my mind with some of these songs. Don’t ask me to smile, there’s nothing good on this side right now. So I went into the studio, deleted the first verse and recorded a new one, then felt like it was ready.”

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In the age of streaming, lines between the classification of full-length projects are constantly blurred. With this in mind, I ask Flo what the difference is between a mixtape and an album.

“The difference is the honesty,” she says. “With a mixtape, you’re being more playful and showing your fun side. But with an album, you’re being truthful. It’s what people use to define you, so there’s almost no room for tomfoolery. You can say what you really mean.”

The whole concept of mixtape versus album parades our conversation as hip hop purists. Labelling matters to Flohio when it comes to projects, which is why critics dubbing No Panic No Pain as an album disturbed the spirit of her artistry. “That put me off reading reviews. I made it casually during lockdown in my bedroom. So I just carried on releasing music and taking thoughts

release a song then I’m not online for two days. I will let it do its thing then come and see it later.”

So the anxiety lies not within the studio, but in the reception and success of the material?

“I’m in my element when I’m creating the songs,” she says. “I just want to get a banging hook and a nice verse – that’s my risk.” At the same time, Flo is conscious of the elements that stray away from the fundamentals of the mainstream. “I just know there’s an audience for this kind of thing,” she calmly states. “Not everyone wants the same shit. That’s the reward in my mind, knowing I’m not the only one with this mindset.

There’s also the producers I’m creating this with. We’re all on the same page, and if that’s the vibe of us here there’s going to be 5,000 people out there on the same drums.”

Back in the day, Flohio could run trials of her music to all her friends. But she acknowledges life can be consuming. “We’re not young anymore. Of course when we were all younger, everyone would come with me to the shoots, everyone would be at the shows. We had time. But they have kids and stuff like that so it’s hard to catch them now.” In turn, it’s taught her to trust her instincts more, rather than seeking external approval for her music. Hence why after releasing a few EPs and one mixtape, Flo feels ready to swim to the deep end. “A lot of people said I could have released it [Out of Heart] two or three years ago. But I’m happy I did it now. I’ve learnt so much with my voice.”

— Alternative prime —

from my fans rather than these critics because you don’t get it.

You don’t follow the sound, you follow the other critics.”

To me, Flohio takes risks in her music, pushing the boundaries of UK rap into new territories. But she challenges that point of view. “I don’t see my music as a risk. I don’t think about the sounds I create as being different. It’s just natural for me.”

Risk is a concept we explore enough to mould into a philosophical debate, expanding beyond her own scope into the UK scene in general. “I would like to think everybody’s taking risks,” she says. “Even if you might think the artist is not brazen enough, it’s still a risk for them to go to that studio and put that song out.

I know some people would say, ‘Oh man, you didn’t even try’, but that’s them trying and taking a risk.”

So if the sound is not a risk, what aspect of Flohio’s music is? “The risk part for me is releasing the songs,” she admits. “I

32

After Out of Heart, an album with a single guest appearance, Flohio intends to branch out and collaborate with more peers in the UK scene. “Kwengface is someone I would like to work with,” she states, admiring the output of the South London drill star. “Why would you want to hear me on drill?” she asks.

“I’m no driller. I’d bring him into my world instead.”

Naturally, we circle back to the concept of risk. Flohio is receptive to the notion of her left-field tendencies, and she passionately raises the issues that are holding back alternative rappers from thriving in UK rap. She mentions peers that she admires, such as A2, Bakar and Little Simz, the last of whom took several years to receive her accolades. “I’m quite alternative and the UK don’t show love to alternative artists,” she says.

“They kind of put us on back burners. I think we just need a solid platform. That’s why artists like A2 aren’t flourishing the way they should be. We just don’t have that network. No one wants to take the risk. And I think the risk is so rewarding.” But Flo is ready to take action. “That’s my aim,” she affirms. “To create that platform sometime in the future, or be part of the people that open up that platform.”

As we wrap up our conversation, I ponder what her interpretation of an individual’s prime is, to which Flo has an answer locked and loaded. “You reach your prime when you reach your goals. I want to get into fashion and food. I want to create my own stuff, walk on runways and add more of me to the industry.”

Her eyes gleam with the ambitions held outside a solo career, ready to ascend beyond the jurisdiction of a futuristic, groundbreaking artist.

“I have this whole Teletubby kind of shit, but then it goes into dark, evil Barney by the end” 33

RACHAEL DADD KALEIDOSCOPE OUT NOW

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Reviews

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35

Albums

Loraine James — Build Something Beautiful For Me (phantom limb) The music of Julius Eastman is not a static thing. Though his pieces are now rightly preserved as important historical works, they were also made to evolve. He was active at the same time as other minimalist composers in 1970s New York, but his swirling and unsettled approach to repetition make pieces like ‘Femenine’ and ‘Gay Guerrilla’ feel far outside of that time. He referred to his practice as ‘organic music’ – an additive approach to composition, where all the information contained within a piece can be heard within the earliest sections. It grows from there, and still grows on today.

That’s a cold approximation of how his music can make you feel, though. Eastman’s compositions require deep effort and awareness from performers. Players are expected to listen and react to each other. The hour-long score for ‘Femenine’ only offers five pages of musical guidance. It centres on one melodic idea, formed of two notes, which players must improvise on as the piece rises and falls, constantly searching.

The compositional elegance of his work is matched with a wild emotional core that is just as multifaceted and impossible to pigeonhole. This is especially exemplified by his series of works made in the late seventies, whose titles remain controversial – ‘Crazy N*gger’, ‘Evil N*gger’, ‘N*gger F*ggot’, and ‘Gay Guerrilla’. These pieces drew focus to Eastman’s position as a gay, Black man living in an unwelcoming and often hostile time. The music contained within offers no simple platitudes or obvious symbols, but rather acts as a constant unravelling.

The act of reforming Eastman’s legacy took many years. He had become

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homeless by the time he died, and many of his manuscripts were lost. Fellow composer Mary Jane Leach spent years searching for recordings of his work.

She approached those closest to him to piece together his hidden archives. She followed a trail of lost performances, hoping that some works may have been saved. It would not be until 2005 (15 years after his death) that this material would become widely available. That material formed the three-hour compilation Unjust Malaise, which is now regarded as an essential within modern classical.

It’s been an arduous and necessary journey to cement Julius Eastman’s legacy. Crucially, his mischievousness and refusal to settle has not been forgotten. Instead, it’s been expanded upon by a generation of performers, inspired by the beauty and purpose of his work.

The music of Loraine James is similarly unstatic. That much is clear from her three dazzling solo albums, her surprising collaborations and her pivots to new sounds. Building Something Beautiful For Me is her latest pivot, a collection of electronic tracks reacting to and reinterpreting the work of Julius Eastman. It’s the meeting point of two creators celebrated for their artful imperfection.

Released on Phantom Limb, the project gave James the opportunity to connect with Eastman’s brother and fellow musician Gerry. She was afforded access to originals, midi stems, and a wealth of material on his musical ideas.

Rather than faithfully rebuilding his songs in the form of covers, James reflects on the deeper concepts at play.

On opener ‘Maybe If I (Stay On It)’, the playful melodic motif of the original is made heavier, repurposed into a fluid vocal cut. Somehow, it retains the ethos of the original. Stay on it. Explore it. Do it in the moment. There’s perhaps no beatmaker more suited to take on Eastman.

James’s approach to production has long been loose and instinctual. Her live kick and hi-hat patterns are the exciting improvised element that makes the song become a living thing.

Following on is ‘Perception of Me (Crazy N*gger)’, which brings the

comforting and dreamlike synthscaping of her Whatever the Weather project into a more muted and reflective mode.

What inspired it is an hour-long piece of shifting tension, so it’s initially surprising to hear these ruminating sounds used for something comparatively relaxed.

But like Eastman, James offers no easy answers, finishing her eight-minute reinterpretation with scrabbled drum loops and stretched piano chords.

‘Choose to be Gay (Femenine)’ shows its inspiration most clearly in its questioning title and deep atmosphere, but the bright, refracting bells and that enter half-way through create chills in the same way as Eastman’s original. The production is both still and unfixed, like drifting in space. The mood moves from mournful to tranquil with each new chord that presses down.

Loraine’s own experiences as a Black, gay musician play a subtle but important role in the sonic poetry of this song, as well as many others, but the album refuses to be just one thing.

In true spirit, ‘Enfield, Always’ jolts you out of pontificating too hard. Math-rock drum samples disrupt the initially peaceful bed of sleepy synths. The drum fragments become increasingly scattered as the synths rise up to become frenetic and overwhelming. It’s a busy crescendo made of just a few burning parts.

On Unjust Malaise, the record’s curators graciously leave in Julius Eastman’s introduction to his works at Northwestern University in 1980. Here, he candidly explains parts of his process, his use of racial and homophobic slurs, and his own feelings towards these titles. Hearing the artist’s voice is a blessing, and not just because it tells us more about possible readings of the work itself. It also brings us into his world for a moment. Loraine James does something similar on ‘My Take’, with a soft-spoken explanation of her musical motivations that’s as off-thecuff as anything else here. That it’s worked into such a gorgeous and uplifting track makes the moment even more powerful.

‘Black Excellence (Stay On It)’, is perhaps the record’s only misstep, in part because it lacks the distinction that

Albums James usually offers in abundance. It’s a solo synth piece, and an enjoyable one at that. The cut-off, decay and delay are all tumbled around in a way that’s always going to be engaging and satisfying for fans of this moving modular style. Still, what Craven Faults or Caterina Barbieri offer in melodic intrigue is missing. The occasional miss is sometimes the reality of doing a lot at once, as James is doing.

That bold, human touch is all over this record, and it makes for a captivating listen more often than not.

The decayed epilogue ‘What Now(Prelude To The Holy Presence of Joan D_Arc)’, is a study in elegance. A pitched piano sample is sculpted into a healing drone. Brief flashes of live piano come into focus, though it’s hard to know if James, Eastman or an anonymous performer are playing. A voice enters, and is gone before we recognise what it was saying.

“What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,” Julius Eastman said in a 1976 interview with Buffalo Evening News. Buffalo was the place where he spent the most stable years of his life. “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest,” he continues.

That quote has in some ways come to define his legacy. It’s perspective is undoubtedly a factor in his growing relevance, for a generation captivated by the story of this nearly forgotten musical history. But his legacy, like his music, will be ever-changing and never static. Musicians like Loraine James are ensuring it.

A funny thing can happen when the music from a great artist is played by another great artist. It can make you view both parties in a new way. Since her breakthrough record For You and I in 2019, Loraine James has reshaped how we view her, whether it’s through fluid personal statements like Reflection, new aliases, or silly EPs full of bangers titled after misspelt names. This new project manages to reshape two artists at once.

Building Something Beautiful for Me adds to a legacy by connecting it to another.

Rather than tidy Eastman’s music into a neat little box, she leaves it unravelled for the next person. 8/10 Skye Butchard

their ambition, but it’s also evident there are plenty of emotions on the line here.

With Save The Baby, Enumclaw admirably shoot their shot and I have nothing but respect for the self-belief that it’s taken. 8/10 Ian Roebuck

Enumclaw — Save The Baby (luminelle) There’s a certain bravery to be found in following your dreams, and it’s this spark of courage that colours Enumclaw’s swing for greatness in Save The Baby, their aspirational debut fulllength. Drawing on the classic romanticism of escaping one’s hometown – in this case Tacoma, Washington – the tight group of friends have produced a cathartic set of songs that soar beyond their simple rock structure.

Hailing from the home of grunge is no burden for Enumclaw who relish walking in the shadows of greats like Nirvana; indeed, they’ve coined the catchphrase “best band since Oasis” on recent merch. It’s tongue-in-cheek perhaps, but the Gallagher brothers’ journey to success from a blue-collar background mirrors this band’s desire to reach for the stars.

Frontman Aramis Johnson paints Save The Baby with personal experience. In his view, many young men like him in working-class Black communities feel they need to make it out of tough situations via sport or mainstream celebrity, but for him Enumclaw is the getaway car. “Hey! You’ve got one last chance, why not give it all that you can?”

Aramis sings plaintively on the album’s closing track, ‘Apartment’, reminding himself to pursue his goals with purpose.

The feeling is infectious.

Riding upon effortless, up-tempo riffs and baggy production from Gabe Wax (Soccer Mommy, Fleet Foxes), each track has a striking naivety that disarms and inspires in equal measure. Studio chatter and plain-spoken insights are left on the floor, providing intimate moments of relief that only add to the warmth. It’s clear the band are enjoying living out

Broken Bells – Into the Blue (awal) Brian Burton, the multi-instrumentalist better known as Danger Mouse, is one of modern music’s most collaborative souls, having released a myriad of celebrated projects with everyone from Karen O to the late MF DOOM. However, it’s when he’s in the studio with Shins vocalist James Mercer that the New York native seems to thrive and also be at his most comfortable.

Known together as Broken Bells, the duo’s sporadic discography marries pop sensibilities with the psychedelic and the alluring with the subtly sinister. Although nearly a decade has passed since their last collab, new effort Into the Blue feels as though it’s picking up right where the twosome left off, offering fans a familiar welcome.

From the moment that the solemn bridge of the excellent title track begins, there’s a grand, majestic tone in their delivery and the production that feels as though it can only come from two seasoned musicians such as themselves.

Echoing acts like Father John Misty and Pink Floyd, this atmosphere continues across the eight remaining songs, evoking a timeless quality.

37 The album has a wandering tendency to it that feels well suited for times of introspection, perhaps best exemplified on ‘Love on the Run’. The romantic, seven-minute track offers beautiful instrumentation that drifts into

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Albums a hypnotic outro, playing out like the soundtrack to a cinematic desert trip.

Despite living on opposite sides of America, Burton and Mercer really seem to be having fun indulging in their oldschool influences. Even if it results in a bit of a dad rock vibe, fans of the two veterans will certainly adore what they have on offer here. 6/10 Woody Delaney

The Big Moon — Here Is Everything (fiction) The Big Moon’s third album documents a period of intense change: a global pandemic, societal unrest and new motherhood. These may usually be triggers for intense anxiety and uncertainty but the London-based quartet have instead honed a spirit of musical optimism.

If 2020’s Walking Like We Do tipped them for pop stardom, Here Is Everything should see the Mercurynominated outfit finally reap the rewards.

Its 11 tracks have refined their killer pop instinct without sacrificing any of their earlier girl-gang charm. This crescendos on the sweeping ‘Wide Eyes’, which captures the giddy joy of friendship, while their ease with one another carries through to ‘Daydreaming’, which absorbs Haim’s summery sheen.

There’s also a newfound maturity to their outlook, with the band taking on production duties for the first time and recording in drummer Fern Ford’s home studio. It extends to the lyrics, with ‘This Love’ hymning the joys of quiet contentment within a relationship, while ‘High & Low’ addresses a newborn without tipping into syrupy sentiment (“I wonder if you can die from sleep deprivation?” wonders Juliette Jackson).

Pitched somewhere between Adele and The Last Shadow Puppets, this is the

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sound of four friends laying everything on the table. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Gilla Band — Most Normal (rough trade) In 2018, Low released Double Negative, an album that took people by surprise with its masterclass in deconstructing conventional song structures and utilising various devices to build texturally rich songs that provide a new kind of listening experience. It opened audiences to the idea of the studio being more than just space to record, but an integral ingredient in shaping the overall atmosphere of an album. At the time of that album’s arrival, Dublin-based noise-rock-meets-techno quartet Gilla Band (formerly Girl Band) were on the cusp of releasing their second LP The Talkies. It heard the group successfully play around with this concept of shading the arrangements with the space in which they recorded the material; which, on that occasion, was a historic mansion in Ireland. Subsequently, the essence of the estate is ingrained in that marvellous body of work; it’s eerie and unsettling, claustrophobic and cathartic.

Similarly, their third record Most Normal continues to expand upon the idea of making their music as multifaceted and multi-functional (more on that later) as possible. Recording began in December 2019 and, to further eradicate the pressure of working to the operating hours of a studio, the band invested in buying recording equipment to afford themselves the time and freedom to continue developing their idiosyncratic style. The result is a tremendous blend of the weird and sublime, from everyday annoyances with Ryanair to “shit clothes”, absurdist anecdotes and affect-

ing self-assessments (“There’s a point where I stopped being cute / There’s a full stop on my youth”) in singer Dara Kiely’s ever-engaging and entertaining lyricism which is perfectly suited to the densely layered soundscapes.

Now a decade into their career, the quartet set a solid (and loud) tone for their trajectory. It’s fascinating to see how promptly Gilla Band inspired a mutiny of budding musicians in their wake and how bassist Dan Fox has become a go-to producer amongst emerging bands in recent years. Musically, Gilla Band have always snarled and growled with the intensity of a dragon breathing fire in a fantasy film. Fantasy feels like one of the more appropriate terms to describe the feeling their music conjures; it’s impossible to not let your imagination go wild when taking in the wailing guitar riffs, submerged in a sea of distortion, or Adam Faulkner’s thunderstorm-like shattering beats. This penchant for noise remains intact across Most Normal, particularly when they unceremoniously announce themselves on spectacular, stomping opener ‘The Gum’, which thuds with great tenacity before shifting to a bizarrely sweet outro reminiscent of Daniel Johnston’s lo-fi instrumentation. As well as Johnston, there are instances where Most Normal heralds melodies and timbres from the most unlikely acts. ‘The Weird’, for example, feels like Gilla Band’s take on ‘The Rat’

by The Walkmen, while the influence of The Strokes’ earlier output is audible on the propulsive ‘Almost Soon’, the quartet taking us to places we weren’t prepared to venture. Elsewhere, and in some of the album’s most impressive and captivating moments, it’s impossible not to think of the aforementioned Low and their masterpiece Double Negative. See the crackling distortion on the mesmerising instrumental ‘Gushie’ – which also contains echoes of Stereolab or Broadcast in the rippling central motif – or the propelling effects that dominate ‘Pratfall’ before the weighty fuzz swallows the arrangement.

The prettiness underpinning ‘Gushie’ is still usurped by unrelenting tension and explosive release, both in the instrumentation and Kiely’s vocal perfor-

Albums mance, and that’s fitting: as well as an exercise in witty lyricism and inventive arrangement, this record is an exploration of sound design. Multi-functionality was mentioned earlier; this is unquestionably a record to listen to via headphones to fully absorb the intricate recording techniques employed throughout. Notably, the panning of Fox’s bass as it goes between left and right ears at a dizzying rate on ‘Backwash’ or the high-pitched frequency incorporated in the opening of ‘The Weird’, a sound Gilla Band fans will be accustomed to filling their ears when leaving one of their shows. Those frequencies, along with the abrasive hum that serves as a bridge between ‘Praftfall’ and closing track, ‘Post Ryan’ acts as a sort of endurance test to the listener. How much aural discomfort can you take before you have to step outside of this world and protect your senses? Across Gilla Band’s releases, this testing of the boundaries – both sonic and lyrical – often results in resonating material with the capacity to unify individuals who perhaps felt like they could never fit in, whether it was because of their clothes or unshakable insecurities. However, when you stick on your headphones and press play on this music, you cannot help but feel welcomed into their wonderfully strange world. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

Lady Aicha & Pisco Crane’s Original Fulu Miziki Band of Kinshasa — N’Djila Wa Mudjimu (nyege nyege tapes) For the best part of two decades, Fulu Miziki and the collective of artists and musicians around Pisco Crane have been creating innovative, challenging multi-genre sound that’s remarkable in

both its consistency and courage. In recent years, their work has finally been reaching audiences beyond their native Democratic Republic of Congo, and not before time; yet the complexity of the many different iterations and offshoots from the original Kinshasa six-piece have meant that the project has become a little distant from its founding members. Therefore this new album, N’Djila Wa Mudjimu, by Crane, Lady Aicha and the perhaps pointedly-named Original Fulu Miziki Band of Kinshasa may be understood as (amongst other things) a corrective.

Whatever the interpersonal issues lurking in the background, the record itself is excellent, with compulsive percussion, industrial groove and Congolese rock crashing into elements of spiritual jazz and post-punk to create something dynamic and vital. The production is clean and unadorned, perfectly capturing the essence of a living, breathing band teasing sound from each other with ecstatic precision. Snatches of melody dive and surface between the choppy waters of harmony and meter, giving floundering listeners something to grip; it’s a thrilling experience. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Daphni — Cherry (jiaolong) When Dan Snaith returned as Daphni after a fiveyear hiatus in 2017, there was no confusing the intent. He re-emerged with a stellar FabricLive mix and a solid second album in Joli Mai that underscored the project’s purpose – to fulfill his dancefloor-focused desires in a way Caribou couldn’t.

This time, that intent is less overt, and Cherry feels more exploratory and experimental. With no grander narrative powering these 14 tracks, it’s a more disparate listen, closer to the variety of

a Snaith DJ set than an album. The infinite loop of ‘Cherry’ feels like it’s stuck on repeat until a subtle, bending melody slides in to carry it home. ‘Mania’ starts out with a wonky, squelchy beat, but shifts through a few different acts to become the most Floating Points Snaith has ever sounded. ‘Take Two’ hits with big ’90s French touch vibes, riffing on the marching energy of Daft Punk’s ‘Revolution 909’ before ‘Mona’ punches in with punchy kick drum, and a bright, perky synthy hook to keep the energy on loop.

“There isn’t anything obvious that unifies it or makes it hang together…I just made it,” Snaith explains in the press release.

But even when he’s winging it, the highlights keep coming. 7/10 Reef Younis

Gold Panda — The Work (city slang) It’s been six years since Good Luck and Do Your Best, and Derwin Dicker, aka Gold Panda, is back to lead the renaissance of Soundcloud rap. Sort of. An unlikely curio of his Lucky Shiner period, he discovered his music was being used as rap soundtracks on the platform, and while The Work won’t be judged on whether a resurrection is successful, it’s an interesting reminder of just how versatile Gold Panda’s music can be.

At its best, there’s a warmth and comfort to those Japanese-influenced string arrangements and single, repeating loops. Admittedly it doesn’t scream rap backing track, especially when Dicker has managed to craft a sound that’s modest, lush and unerringly heartfelt over the last decade. Here, he effortlessly finds that richness again with twinkling melodies and stuttering loops on ‘The Dream’, the peaceful lapping patience of ‘The Corner’ and the soft pulse of ‘New

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Albums Days’ giving The Work a familiar groove.

‘I’ve Felt Better (Than I Do Now) adds a little bpm bass bump, but perhaps it’s ‘The Spiral’ and ‘Joni’s Room’ that showcase Derwin at his best, patiently spinning experimental compositions with the quiet contentment of an artist gradually getting comfortable with his low-key genius. It’s been too long. 8/10 Reef Younis

Zzzahara — Liminal Spaces (lex) Tired of playing in bands such as Eyedress and The Simps, Zahara Jaime started solo project Zzahara to explore different genres.

The L.A. songwriter and guitarist has used their newfound artistic control to springboard from their familiar postpunk into somewhat lighter, more indiefocused territory on their debut. The spidery, gothic vibe of The Cure is an obvious touchstone on opening track ‘G(url)’, which is densely layered with guitars and synth. As their emotional evolution unfurls over the following ten tracks, however, the downbeat tone assumes some light.

Detailing feelings of disconnection, lust, and queerness, they gradually strip away the barrage of shoegaze layers to uncover something simpler. This moves through the jangly guitar pop of early Smiths (‘Get Out of LA’), angular mathrock (‘Possessive’), dollops of ’80s new wave (‘Julia’), and ends with the dreamy synth wash of Beach House (‘It Will Get Better’); much of the new wave material calls to mind North London indie group Girl Ray. Yet while they inject a ramshackle charm that is sometimes more distinguished than their melodies, Jaime fails

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to bring a strong personality to Liminal Spaces. Without this character hook, and despite their lyrical confessionalism, much of the album is too generic to make a lasting impression. 4/10 Susan Darlington

A.O. Gerber — Meet Me At The Gloaming (hand in hive / father/ daughter) A.O. Gerber’s second album is a study in reflection. Dissecting her past and childhood, she picks apart the so-called good from the bad to discover the in-between, the grey area where most things exist. Exploring this twilight zone of memory, she asks her listener to meet her there with the same ‘take it as it is’ mindset. Meet Me At The Gloaming puts an avant-garde slant on indie songwriting and delivers a record of comforting ambient music. An autumnal release seems quite fitting; as the light comes in on this record at more and more of a slant, the evenings creeping in like an imaginary monster.

Confronting an unconventional upbringing, Gerber’s approach is not one of scorn or vengeance. Instead, ‘You Got it Right’ has a Studio Ghibli sense to it. The gentle piano and echoing vocals are bright and then break down into slowed drums and playful layered textures. The told-youso feel of the lyrics discuss how one can pander to others’ perceptions, but once you start to be associated with a certain quality, that’s all you really want to be.

Combining the earthiness of Adrienne Lenker with the tranquillity of Weyes Blood, Meet Me At The Gloaming emphasises the softness of indie rock. ‘Looking for the Right Things’ sees traditional harsh riffs replaced with filtered melodic plucking and ‘Just a Child’ lets strings take

the spotlight. Airy drums and grounding acoustic guitar make wonderful dancing partners to the orchestral guests.

Produced mostly in seclusion, Gerber took the time to think about the past. Not as something to fight against or construe into something different but to show the spectrum of memory and reality. Closer ‘Only Mystery’ beautifully captures the eye-opening experience it can be to distinguish what once was only right and wrong into the complexity of everything between. She asks “Was I good enough?” as a crescendo of synths, guitar and violin sparkle.

A guidebook for those experiencing personal transformation, Meet Me At The Gloaming sees A.O. Gerber join a lineage of female musicians who are reinventing what it is to be open and honest. Interweaving experience with emotion, Gerber looks at her reality without any harshness but with a gentle eye of acceptance. As its poignant instrumentation elevates her thoughtful lyrics, Meet Me At The Gloaming looks forward gracefully to the light of day rather than dwelling in the previous darkness. 8/10 Sophia McDonald

Plains — I Walked With You A Ways (anti) Watering the dead grass, driving the long and winding Texas roads, hanging up wet laundry on a clothesline with rusty pegs and looking out to the great expanse; there’s nobody around for miles. ‘Abilene’ focuses the debut album by Plains – a new songwriting collaboration between Jess Williamson and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield – magnificently. The lyrics ache for the simplicity of a coffee shop or a liquor store, while musically we waltz through the tired tropes of alt-country and ameri-

Albums cana that feel strangely rejuvenated here.

There’s a musical tug-of-war between sorrow and battered determination, and a melancholic ambition that distances the pair from their hometowns, in a mournful ode to the culture they’ve longed to break from: “Texas in my rear view, plains in my heart.”

It’s strange to hear these voices recontextualised, if only because Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud felt so grounded in home that moving that concept elsewhere underlines the escape for which I Walked With You A Ways is pining. You can feel the wind blowing through these songs, nodding to the melodramatic truisms of country music – the boy with no name, the last two on earth, your lover’s face in the sunset – in a way that makes it a vocal twang away from Alan Jackson.

“I’ll be a martyr to whatever your heartache will be,” they harmonise in ‘Bellafatima’, before glimmers of electric guitar encroach on the acoustic ballad ‘Easy’ like gently twinkling stars and the title track closes the album like a perfectly resolved book. 7/10 Nick Tzara

Special Interest — Endure (rough trade) The idea of fusing club music textures with rock songwriting is hardly new; from the earliest rumblings of no wave and post-punk in the 1970s onwards, adventurous artists have been tinkering with drum machines as well as guitars in the pursuit of some novel alchemy. Yet it’s rare to encounter a fusion of these aesthetics that’s as seamless, thrilling and physical as the one Special Interest manage to conjure on Endure.

Since they burst out of New Orleans in the middle of the last decade, the quartet of Alli Logout, Maria Elena,

Nathan Cassiani and Ruth Mascelli have been colliding industrial techno with elements of squalling noise-rock, whiteknuckle punk and sashaying disco with joyous abandon, creating a body of work in which instantly-accessible almost-pop like ‘(Herman’s) House’ coexists happily with red-raw expressions of queer rage (‘Don’t Kiss Me In Public’, ‘Head’).

Endure isn’t their debut album, but it is their first on a label with the reach of Rough Trade, and therefore exposes them to a bigger audience than ever. They are more than ready for this platform.

Opener ‘Cherry Blue Intention’ is a perfect Special Interest track, convulsing, visceral and hooky in equal measure, glimmers of bittersweet romantic exhilaration (“I’d say I love you but this summer tastes cherry blue”) poking through the gaps in the jet propulsion rhythm. Recent single ‘(Herman’s) House’ remains a floorfilling gem, and the hectic dirge of ‘Concerning Peace’ reassures the early heads that Special Interest are still more than capable of the brutality that both makes their heavier work more impactful and their occasional tenderness so cathartic. The likes of ‘Midnight Legend’ and epic closer ‘LA Blues’ bring the tempo down slightly like perfectly-timed DJ set breathers, keeping the band’s newfound scope firmly rooted in the club.

Perhaps what makes Special Interest’s brand of industrial dance-punk so successful, so infinitely distant from the worst post-acid house lad rave or pissweak mid-’00s indie disco, is their sense of political and social commitment, and a recognition that such commitments have always been central to the most important punk and club culture. Disco, house and techno are all inextricable from their roots in queer communities of colour; from day one up to now, punk and DIY cultures (at their best) have provided a much-needed haven for new forms of radicalism, anti-fascist organising and LGBTQ+ fulfilment. Although they’re understandably resistant to being pigeonholed as solely a “queer band”, a term they find imprecise and actively unhelpful, Special Interest are rooted in those spaces, those communities, and channel

them into their music with a depth and versatility that few groups can rival right now. Endure is their most complete work yet, and it feels like there’s so much more to come. 9/10 Luke Cartledge

Dungen — En Är För Mycket Och Tusen Aldrig Nog (mexican summer) Classic turntable-ism. Skittering drum and bass. Soothing melodicism. Muscleflexing swagger. Hushed contemplation.

Space jazz duets for fuzzed-out organ and kosmische synths. The list of components for En Är För Mycket Och Tusen Aldrig Nog suggests Dungen have worked up an acute identity crisis since 2015’s beautifully subdued Allas Sak and its instrumental follow-up Häxan (2016).

Songwriter Gustav Ejstes may have wondered whether newfound sobriety (the album title translates as “one is too many and a thousand never enough”) would blunt his creativity. The opposite has happened. Throughout En Är För Mycket Och Tusen Aldrig Nog, Dungen’s boundaries stretch like well-chewed bubblegum. Suddenly, the Stockholmbased quartet’s albums from 2007’s Tio Bitar onwards seem like a mere blueprint for a unique approach after 2004’s psychrock masterpiece Ta Det Lungt led to the risk of the band being pigeonholed as retro-heads.

The ensuing mash-up of all of the band’s eclectic influences is what the heavy-lidded pastoral balladry, looselimbed wig-outs and cosmic meltdowns of more recent Dungen albums have striven for: the striking juxtapositions ultimately cohere into an electrifying album that somehow sounds unmistakably like Dungen despite dodging the band’s usual moves. That the tunes are uniformly very

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Albums strong helps: it’s hard to decide whether the stately, quietly majestic slow-burn of ‘Om Natten’ or ‘Var Har Du Varit’ (an unlikely collision between drum & bass clatter and vulnerable introspection) presents the band’s recorded peak, with the joyously overdriven fuzz-fest of ‘Nattens Sista Strimma Ljus’ – which takes on the band’s early this-amp-is-onfire triumphs and wins – not far behind.

9/10 Janne Oinonen

HAWA — HADJA BANGOURA (4ad) At just 18 minutes long, you might expect HADJA BANGOURA to make a forceful statement of intent. It does – but what’s striking about the rapper, singer and model HAWA’s debut full-length is how gentle it is.

The album maintains a single soft, dreamy sound palette throughout, mixing R&B with indie, gentle shades of IDM and faded half-memories of New York drill. The consistency could get exhausting, but HADJA BANGOURA avoids this by constantly moving onto new ideas. Few of the tracks touch two minutes in length, and only one reaches three: ‘Trade’, which mixes sliding 808s with a garbled vocal sample and several layers of HAWA’s voice.

The shorter tracks rarely feel incomplete, though, and range from spare piano ballads (‘Progression’) to beats which wouldn’t be unfamiliar to Aphex’s Analord series (‘Ain’t U’). These are snippets not as a window into something larger or as a marketing tool, but as full artworks in themselves. It’s a bold approach to pop music, even in a time where all you need to launch a career is the right three-second snippet in the right TikTok – but sometimes a small

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statement is all you need to fill a room.

8/10 Alex Francis

PVA — Blush (ninja tune) If its critics are to be believed, post-punk is dead (again) – or so it seems. As British music looks to lampoon a fresh era of flat-footed Tory leadership, the frontline of sullenfaced guitar bands who once reared up against Brexit and nationwide austerity have looked a little tired of late, with such an inundated mass struggling to be heard over its own racket. The next generation of so-called ‘landfill sprechgesang’ have at times felt uninspired, but a few splintered outliers are doing well to reinvigorate its hackneyed clichés.

To be fair, PVA were never cut from quite the same cloth. The South London trio walked a well-trodden path as graduates of the Speedy Wunderground singles club, and later cementing themselves as key players amongst the well-documented Windmill scene, but have since joined a growing trend of indie bands in favour of defecting to a more electronic pulse – see Working Men’s Club’s Fear Fear and Squid signing to Warp. The band’s resulting debut Blush arrives as an album of compromise that strikes balance between machine-made currents and the visceral raw power of an intimate live performance.

If 2020’s Toner EP was a postpunk/techno fusion, Blush’s bed of acid and industrial-sized beats pushes PVA further towards the intersection of a traditional band set-up and the speakerstacked dancefloor. Everything around the music and emotion that surfaces feels upfront and present, like the songs are unfolding around you rather than through headphones or speakers.

Ella Harris and Josh Baxter get up close and personal with both detailing experiences around the conflict and contradictions that come with being caught between states. Saw-toothed industrial clanger ‘The Individual,’ and propulsive single ‘Hero Man’ relay musings over masculine and feminine egos and how each feeds into identity and the social constructs we build around ourselves.

Coming off as liberating as they are anxiety-inducing, each band member’s prickly introspections divulge some of their most vulnerable lyrics to date.

When it’s not glass shattering bass and techno, intimate whispers and expansive synthscapes show off PVA’s versatility on ‘Seven’, which features reinforcements from British-Nigerian electronic artist Tony Njoku. These warmer moments seem to encapsulate, but also deviate beyond Blush’s transitional temperament. Bubblegum pinks still morph into deep ocean blues, but the intensity of the motions of bending, stretching, and collapsing that sparked the energy into tracks like album opener, ‘Untethered’, is dialled down. PVA are writing club music to stay indoors to, keeping things insular without neglecting gleaming disco euphoria. 7/10 Ollie Rankine

Big Joanie — Back Home (daydream library series / kill rock stars) It’s been four years since London DIY punks Big Joanie released their debut album, and with their second full length record Back Home, the trio have morphed beyond the archetypal lo-fi punk of their early days, into a weightier force not bound by genre, but by ethos instead.

With the eerie neopagan folk of ‘Cactus Tree’ opening the record, Big

Albums Joanie are intriguing right from the start of their new album. Back Home investigates the different ideas of what the word ‘home’ could mean, especially to members of diasporic communities. A sense of displacement, of multiple belonging, is really felt in the threads of Back Home, the result often feeling more unsettling than it does assuring or comforting.

There are a handful of truly great songs on the record which stand out above the rest, especially in those moments when Big Joanie bring synths to the forefront of their songwriting more than they have done with previous material. Take the wavy trance of ‘Confident Man’, or the dramatic and dreamy ‘Your Words’ which tackle Talk Talk and Siouxsie Sioux-style theatrics. The album’s final track ‘Sainted’ is a true epic too, a dark and twisted fable that’s almost prog rock, with dancing synths that protrude through constrained vocals. It’s nearly five minutes long, and you don’t ever want it to end.

It’s in these compositions where Big Joanie’s virtuosity feels most coherent and exciting. Less punk? Sure, but capable of becoming real innovators of their craft with cross-genre appeal? Definitely. 7/10 Jasleen Dhindsa

Ezra Collective — Where I’m Meant To Be (partisan) It seems quaint now to think things were bad at the beginning of 2019, when Ezra Collective released their debut album You Can’t Steal My Joy; there wasn’t a global pandemic for a start, and even the most heinous, Tory boot-licker celebrant of austerity couldn’t have predicted the energy crisis we’re currently heading towards. Back then, London’s vanguard jazz act offered a white-hot emollient, a promise that

things can momentarily be fine if you’d only just dance it off. In 2022, it’s tempting to say, “not now, Ezra Collective!”

“Positive vibrations, you get me?” – that’s how they choose to open Where I’m Meant To Be, and with a steady looping parp on James Mollison’s sax, Ezra Collective prove themselves undeniable once again. ‘Life Goes On’ is a reminder that pop is at the heart of what they do – Sampa The Great, the first of the album’s many guest spots, sees to literally voicing that – but there’s a shifting in-the-room raggedness to Where I’m Meant To Be that makes things feel a little more volatile. Drummer-bandleader Femi Koleoso consistently finds cheeky ways of moving beyond the obvious, throwing tantalising pauses into the reggaeton rhythm of ‘Togetherness’, setting an emphasising rimshots just off the reggae down beat of ‘Ego Killah’.

There are cornball moments – Emeli Sandé delivering the line “Jump into the moment and make sure you make a splash” on the otherwise lovely ‘Siesta’ comes to mind – but Ezra Collective’s earnestness is still infectious. Don’t overthink it. 6/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Loyle Carner — Hugo (emi) Hugo starts with a bang. Opener ‘Hate’ announces a different Loyle Carner, driven by urgency and aggression. The South London rapper has become widely loved for his languid style of MCing, along with his low-key, jazz-infused production. ‘Hate’ jettisons these familiar tropes in favour of kinetic rhythms and lyrics that juxtapose Carner’s personal success with his myriad anxieties and fears.

This sharp opening is followed by the similarly energetic ‘Nobody Knows

(Ladas Road)’. The vibrant drums and layers of gospel vocals are lavishly invigorating, as is the teeth-gritted hostility in Carner’s voice. This expansive approach signals new territory for its creator.

Unfortunately, following the warm ‘Georgetown’, Hugo moves on from this exploratory mode and quickly settles back into a familiar shape. Tracks like ‘Blood On My Nikes’ and ‘A Lasting Place’ are Carner at his most sedate, occasionally so much so that their tone errs dangerously close to thin and inconsequential.

Hugo’s lyrics are, across the board, brilliant. There’s never any doubt that Carner is a brilliant poet and his insights on topics from family trauma to knife crime are expertly handled. However, his voice frequently fails to match the pathos and nuance of his intellectual insight. His lack of vocal dynamism on so much of the album means that his undeniable acuity often gets lost in a sleepy, placid haze.

Things pick up a little on the impassioned closer ‘HGU’, but Hugo is too often let down by Carner’s flat lack of expression.

5/10 Tom Morgan

Sun Arkestra — Living Sky (omni sound) When Sun Ra departed our Earthen realm in 1993, he left behind a legacy that burns brightly to this day. His galactic music, free-flowing jazz odysseys, continue to baffle and illuminate every new generation, and the cosmic realm that he created lives on in the work of artists across the genre spectrum.

He also, of course, gave us the Arkestra, one of the greatest groups in the history of music, recorded or otherwise. Emerging in tandem with Sun Ra in the 1950s, the amorphous ensemble are still going at lightspeed as they continue

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Albums even now to develop their interstellar jazz. Since the death of Sun Ra, the group have been under the stewardship of GOAT saxophonist Marshall Allen – a core member of the ensemble since its inception – who remains a real force with a horn in his hands at the age of 98.

So, of course, the Sun Ra Arkestra have nothing left to prove. And yet.

Their live shows remain intoxicating, ritualistic affairs and when they occasionally venture into the studio, they sound invigorated. New record, Living Sky, which comes quickly after 2020’s Swirling is testament to this. It is an all-consuming, sumptuous record, or to paraphrase Ra’s description of a different album: “Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy”.

It evokes the pretty and beguiling moments of the Arkestra’s back catalogue, far more than the bombastic and experimental. The twinkle-twinkle of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and the intoxicating planetes sauvage of ‘Lanquidity’. Opener ‘Chopin’ is this is in microcosm. An elegant reworking of one of the FrenchPolish composer’s preludes, dainty, romantic piano melodies form the track’s skeleton, as elephantine horns fade in and out of earshot, whilst ‘Wish Upon A Star’ is a shimmering version of the Pinocchio song in the same vein.

The compositions on Living Sky, a mixture of Sun Ra’s, Allen’s, and some relative standards, are patient affairs that build slowly to crescendos – each track is certainly a sprawl, but not a single one outstays its welcome. ‘Night of the Living Sky’ is astral swing music, punctuated by long, swelling notes on Tara Middleton’s violin and metallic ASMR percussion, whilst ‘Marshall’s Groove’ is a swaggering exercise in Twin Peaks blues wherein layers and layers of brass are slowly added to the whole until a state of total skronk is achieved.

Throughout Living Sky, Allen and his cohorts very deliberately do not reinvent the wheel. Instead, their objective here is a cohesive and beautiful record, a balm for the senses. A devotion to the eternal beauty of the universe. It is impeccably executed. Indeed, through the Arkestra, the legacy of Sun Ra lives

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on, and his star only burns brighter with every passing trip round the sun. 9/10 Cal Cashin

Sorry — Anywhere But Here (domino) I remember reading somewhere that being dumped can be as bad, if not worse than, a sudden bereavement. Everyone has had one of those sudden, awful breakups and can relate to the way that they completely dislocate you in time and space, turning once familiar faces and spaces into weird alien moments, filled with regret, loss and painful memories.

I’m still not entirely sure how they’ve done it, but this is exactly the sense of disorientation that Sorry have managed to bottle on their second record.

Written in the aftermath of a relationship, it’s a record that has sucked up the essence of the past few years into a strange musical time capsule. From the twisted, haunted-sounding indie pop of the opener ‘Let the Light In’, a song that sounds like a foggy memory of a disheartened 3AM exit from The Lexington, to the more subdued, dirge-like balladry of ‘I Miss The Fool’, this is an album that sucks up that feeling of being lost, discombobulated and suddenly estranged from everything that you once knew.

Admittedly, that all sounds pretty heavy, but Anywhere But Here doesn’t throw out the pop magic of its predecessor, 925. Recording for the first time as a fully-formed band, musically the album fleshes out Sorry’s sound even further, the addition of live drums and laidback drums adding a sense of urgency, warmth and depth to the North Londoners’ nowperfected formula.

Being honest, it’s probably a couple of anthems short of being a new Parklife,

but as both a collection of songs and a piece of psychogeography Anywhere But Here is truly impressive. This is Sorry finally shedding their bedroom pop image and embracing their destiny as an experimental and visionary indie rock band.

8/10 Dominic Haley

Daniel Avery — Ultra Truth (phantasy) The evolution of Daniel Avery over the last nine years has largely been an exercise in unerring excellence. After fully shedding his stopmakingme moniker with the release of his much-celebrated debut, Drone Logic, Avery has worked through brutal dungeon techno, drum and bass, drone, acid-dusted beats and ambient over the course of his four solo albums. On the latter, 2021’s Together in Static, he noticeably shifted to the heavier, denser, more ambient noise that also gives Ultra Truth its sonic heft. But where its predecessor felt a little soft around the edges, this fifth album bites.

Opening pair ‘New Faith’ and ‘Ultra Truth’ provide the soft lead with looping, lingering melodies and a massive sense of space before ‘Devotion’ submerges you in layer after layer of hypnotic breaks and static distortion that spiders out like cracks on a frozen lake – dark, deep, billowing sound designed to fill every possible inch. It feels like the selective extraction of almost a decade’s worth of work, Avery mining the dark corridors of his mind, and surfacing from the density with forgotten, foggy hooks. While you can hear and feel the odes to influences such as Deftones, Mogwai and David Lynch, ‘Higher’ is a relentless monster of rising synths, breathless breaks and thunderous energy, and ‘Chaos Energy’ is another full-blown detonation that rides

Albums a lava of static and ‘Firestarter’-esque smashes, gnashing and snarling before bursting into a starry end. Avery calls it “a fever dream of a record” and he’s right. It’s also another masterpiece. 9/10 Reef Younis

Junior Boys — Waiting Game (city slang) Jeremy Greenspan has a mixed few years. Since the last time Junior Boys reconvened for 2016’s Big Black Coat, the Canadian producer has seen his career flourish, collaborating on two albums with Jessy Lanza, building a recording studio in his hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, all while caring for and then mourning his father, The result of Greenspan’s reunion with his Junior Boys collaborator Matt Didemus for a few months back in 2020, Waiting Game is an exploration of both the lakes and waterfalls of Ontario and a meditation on bereavement inspired by Florian Schneider, Jon Hassell and McCoy Tyner. However, while the music might be more contemplative than previous Junior Boys records, the duo’s sixth studio album isn’t the doom, gloom and empty soundscapes you might expect. Keeping just enough of the pop and synth-pop sounds that have always laced their music, Didemus and Greenspan have created a pop record that glows like the light of a low-watt bulb; an impressionistic blending of late-night R&B and architecturalsounding electronica.

Mostly though, Waiting Game is an album that finds its stories in the experience of waiting. It’s a soundtrack to doing nothing, written to accompany early mornings and late nights spent in the eerie quiet of Hamilton searching for something, anything, to happen. The

effect is a musical equivalent of Edward Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks, a strange yet pensive study of disconnection in the heart of a city. 6/10 Dominic Haley

Flohio — Out Of Heart (awal) There was always a risk that Flohio might become the Dele Alli of UK hip hop; the South London MC has been the perennial one-to-watch since at least 2018. A wonderkid transforming beats by Clams Casino and Modeselektor into some of that year’s most urgent flows, single ’10 More Rounds’ fired her into a Boiler Room frenzy that looked all but sure to make her the next big thing. The uncanny thing with Flohio is that – unlike legions of hyped rappers standing with unfulfilled potential – it’s never been her who’s failed to deliver, only the response that’s failed to catch up. Her debut mixtape No Panic No Pain fell to the critics in the same way Black Midi are often criticised for being too virtuosic. What happens when you’re so good at the craft that some people think it appears disingenuous?

None of those criticisms can be levelled at her debut album, Out Of Heart.

It’s a collection of songs with as much heart as lyrical flair, where all of her vulnerabilities are out in open fire. ‘Grace’ is a melancholia carousel of the images that haunt her thoughts when she closes her eyes (“Don’t ask me where my smile is / I’m still inside my furnace”), while the closing track is both a love letter to family and a nod to how she hasn’t ‘made it’ yet despite challenging the norms (“I’ve been going against the grain / How we keep breaking these rules?”) Even in the poppiest moments of the album’s production, there’s a sinister edge waiting to cut

through. ‘2Hours’ centres the energy of her live show, with a beautifully tender feature by HAWA. And as for Flohio, if this isn’t the breakout moment that’s been prophesied for half a decade, that’s really our own problem. 8/10 Nick Tzara

Alvvays — Blue Rev (transgressive) Blue Rev ends with a rhapsody.

The angelic strings and choral vocals of closing track ‘Fourth Figure’ capture the album’s soul-searching tenor, its attempts to find harmony in a chaotic world.

For all its bright and confident veneer, Alvvays’ third full-length Blue Rev is primarily concerned with instability and the intangible. ‘After The Earthquake’ frantically flicks between memories, while ‘Easy On Your Own’ reflects on “wasting the best years of my life” and how to “gauge whether this is stasis or change”.

Alvvays’ anxious emotions are bolstered by potent imagery, as highlighted by ‘Easy On Your Own’s evocative “crawling in monochromatic hallways”.

Alvvays also conjure some sharp narratives that often possess a touch of the literary. There’s the nuanced escape fantasy ‘Bored In Bristol’ as well as ‘Pharmacist’, which drip feeds vivid details like a beguiling short story.

Musically, Blue Rev is as glossy and viscous as previous Alvvays releases.

Their jangly indie side shines through on ‘After The Earthquake’ and ‘Many Mirrors’, yet it’s the more ambitious cuts, like ‘Tile By Tile’ and ‘Belinda Says’, that stand out. ‘Belinda Says’ is particularly strong, cranking its instrumentation loud like an especially light-on-its-feet take on shoegaze.

Alvvays’ musical craft isn’t always the most singular, but its myriad layers

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Albums occasionally transcend the weight of their influences and become something potent and unique. These moments, combined with the consistently strong lyrics, make Blue Rev a small but compelling step forward for the band. 7/10 Tom Morgan

Bill Callahan — YTILAER (drag city) In The Philosophy of Composition Edgar Allen Poe stated the short story should be consumed within “the limit of a single sitting”. As per YTILAER’s press release, this “particular purpose” also informs the sequencing on Bill Callahan’s latest, and as Poe would have wanted, the introduction and conclusion bookend proceedings with distinction.

Opener ‘First Bird’ dawns delightfully, lyrically blooming into odes to familial bliss; “Shadow of my boy coming down the hall / And little sister’s palm is deep in his hand / And her feet don’t ever touch the ground / Because everybody wants to carry her around”. Meanwhile the set’s swansong, ‘Last One At The Party’, is an insouciant character assassination, with “If you were a housefire / I’d run back in for the cat”, being one of its many gleeful putdowns.

Sitting in the middle of the LP ‘Naked Souls’ allows the record’s ensemble cast to whirl into a maelstrom, with horns swirling between the beats of Jim White’s loose yet processional drumming.

Between its first and last bars YTILAER indulges in many of the idiosyncrasies that make Bill Callahan such an engaging songwriter. Now some four decades into his recording career, the Drag City stalwart’s baritone has ripened into a mahogany croon, whilst his lines either float with pathos (as on ‘First Bird’ or ‘Coyotes’) or are deliciously wry.

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‘Partition’ showcases the latter, as it looks askance at “the human condition”, likening us to no more than “big pigs in a pile of shit and bones”.

Elsewhere Drainface, with its description of “Eyes like retired hotel bedspreads / Done”, is imbibed with a pleasing nihilism that harks back to some of his earliest Smog cuts. The thrill of these darker impulses is reinforced against the cloying ‘Bowevil’ or the kitsch, and ultimately aimless, ‘Planets’.

If YTILAER is a short story then these chapters are skippable, but for the most part here is an analog delight, richly deserving in an hour of your time. 7/10 Theo Gorst

Dreamcastmoe — Sound Is Like Water (spectral sound / ghostly) The most common, and perhaps most tired, form of music criticism relies on halfarsed comparisons. That new band you love? They’re just [insert ageing shoegaze group from 20 years ago] on steroids.

That amazing new dance track? That’s just like [insert obscure Chicago house act] after one too many disco biscuits.

Thankfully, there’s a tonic to this shoddy practice. Sound Is Like Water, the latest project from Dreamcastmoe, renders this form of criticism obsolete.

The record is everything and nothing at the same time. At times it’s a dubstep album. At times it’s a hip hop album. At times it’s a drum and bass album. And if you listen hard enough, at times it’s actually a jazz album.

Truthfully, a record bursting with all of these sounds just shouldn’t work, and while at times he comes close to tipping over the edge (‘RU Ready’ in particular leans a bit too much on airy

R&B nothingness), on the whole Dreamcastmoe completely smashes it out of the park. The jump from the vampiric organs of ‘Novacaine’ to the motorik techno of ‘Cloudy Weather, Wear Boots’ should be extremely jarring, but somehow it all seems to make sense, as if these sounds were meant to be friends all along.

By absorbing every genre under the sun, Dreamcastmoe has managed to occupy a truly unique space. Sound Is Like Water is the sound of an artist taming genre, making bad music writing obsolete in the process. Not bad going really, is it? 9/10 Jack Doherty

Lambchop — The Bible (city slang) Artists have long found inspiration for music in religion, whether that’s through a band or album name that they probably just thought sounded a bit epic or more studiously observing the analogy of the sacred and profane through clever lyricism. In an early comment around their new album announcement, Lambchop overlord Kurt Wagner implied that he named his album The Bible so that it could act as one for spiritual people who don’t have faith. If that doesn’t necessarily make sense in the context of the songs he’s presented, it’s still quite a striking album name – and definitely a pretty good album.

The Bible opens expansively enough with the filmic orchestration of ‘His Song is Sung’, revealing a typically fragile Wagner singing “The room is warmer than it should be / The light in there was barely there” as his voice gradually becomes more contorted and processed, something he’s leaned into regularly since 2016’s FLOTUS. It does a good job of introducing the album before

Albums the onset of ‘Little Black Boxes’, a dense disco production that becomes stodgy and obfuscates itself as the vocals disappear into music that awkwardly implores you to dance without ever really convincing you it would be a good idea.

One of the album’s most striking and beautiful moments comes on the otherworldly ‘A Major Minor Drag’; a quietly devastating exploration of loss and grief. As with the other standouts on the album like ‘So There’ or the ambient lap steel of ‘Dylan At The Mouse Trap’, it reinforces the feeling that the best Lambchop songs are the ones you could only ever imagine them doing.

The use of powerful female backing vocals on poignant tracks like ‘Police Dog Blues’ or ‘Whatever Mortal’ against Wagner’s unconventional delivery leaves him sounding more hangdog than top dog, but that’s a role he excels in and has built his career upon: the introverted outsider who looks at life without embellishment or judgement, resigned to faithfully relating what he sees as he opens his curtains each morning. 6/10 William Burgess

Disq — Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet (saddle creek) Having unleashed their debut into the void of 2020, Disq’s second effort sees them generating some welcome noise. Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet is a many-headed beast, crammed with more feel-good guitar hooks than a campus radio frequency. The Wisconsin outfit run the gamut of slacker sounds, bouncing between ’90s touchstones like Pavement and The Lemonheads while stacking up harmonies that wouldn’t sound out of

place on a Poptopia! compilation.

Songwriting and vocals are shared among the band, giving the record a kind of breathless, hyper-saturated quality: everyone has the green light to exercise their weirdest impulses. While lead single ‘Cujo Kiddies’ might be the first gratitude journal about a rabid hellhound, ‘If Only’ bows to syrupy Americana influences, with a side order of supercharged screaming to even things out. Elsewhere, ‘Tightrope’ contains enough spellbound yearning to rival Weezer or Ozma. It’s like the whole band spilled their record collections onto the floor, then fought tooth and nail to get their favourites under the needle. Despite the medley of influences competing for air, Disq have wound up with an album that is seasoned just right, bracingly fresh yet as familiar as a dogeared reissue. Too many cooks have not spoiled the broth. 7/10 Orla Foster

Mykki Blanco — Stay Close To Music (transgressive) Ever-evolving, explorative poet, artist and musician Mykki Blanco’s third full-length studio album Stay Close To Music opens with the swirling ‘Pink Diamond Bezel’, which sees the Californian musician (reinforced by the able assistance of producer, multiinstrumentalist and longtime collaborator FaltyDL) fuse bubbling hip hop with gurgles of grunge, as multi-layered vocals intertwine themselves around each other, setting the precedent for the beatific, godly quality that so often pervades Blanco’s work.

The soft and poetic ‘Steps’, featuring Blanco’s fellow widely-lauded multihyphenates Saul Williams and MNEK, follows in similar style. Aesthetically,

these tracks sum up the general consensus of Stay Close To Music: a twisted and delicate fusion of experimental hip hop, outsider R&B, after-hours slow jams and leftfield indie-pop, unbridled in its approach to muddling sounds together.

‘French Lessons’, featuring Mercury Prize-winning artist ANOHNI and New York singer/cellist Kelsey Lu, is one of the album’s standout moments, a gentle, wandering track that instrumentally is somewhat reminiscent of the cosmic synth-funk of Kool and The Gang’s ‘Summer Madness’, or André 3000’s ’00s collaborations with Kelis and Gwen Stefani. Yet Stay Close To Music’s most powerful track comes in the form of the mystical dark electronica of ‘Your Love Was A Gift’, featuring NYC artist Dianna Gordon, who seems to effortlessly, and thus a little unfortunately, stand out over Blanco on the track.

R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe’s ghostly feature on the repetitive, tranceinducing ‘Family Ties’ is another grooving remedy akin to the more mellow work of Gorillaz. Yet this actually marks the point at which Stay Close To Music first begins to falter: subsequent track ’Your Feminism Is Not My Feminism’, featuring LA musician and DJ Ah-Mer-Ah-Su, had a clear vision of what it wanted to achieve, but falls short, in this case mainly due to the song’s trite and obvious lyricism.

Sadly, from there a pattern starts to emerge.

On that track, and the latter half of the record more generally, Stay Close To Music lulls into a rhythm that becomes tedious and undiversified, ultimately losing its sense of purpose and direction.

Given the inherent strength, inventiveness and power of Mykki Blanco’s artistry – as demonstrated for over a decade now via releases as varied and daring as 2016’s full-length-debut LP Mykki, 2021’s restless mini-album Broken Hearts and Beauty Sleep and 2012’s searing introductory mixtape Cosmic Angel: The Illuminati Prince/ss, each distinct and innovative – it’s a shame to see the admirable ambition of this artist, of this record, go without the fulfilment it so richly deserves. 6/10 Jasleen Dhindsa

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Albums Live THERE’S MORE FOR HEAVY MUSIC FANS THAN EVER

End of the Road Festival Larmer Tree Gardens, Dorset 1–4 September 2022

Appropriately for a festival which evolved gently from an informal Americana event, the team behind End Of The Road prefer to develop the festival slowly and carefully, fine-tuning and making incremental expansions. Over the years, more experimental music has found its way into Larmer Tree Gardens, as have more artists from around the world, broadening the scope of the art that’s on offer as a loyal fanbase has not only continued to grow with the festival but age with it too, bringing new generations in along the way with the help of extensive familyorientated areas. And so we arrive at EOTR 2022, and it might just be their best festival yet – but in the nicest way, that’s not really surprising.

The curation is excellent, the site beautiful, the subtle expansions perfectly judged. Indie royalty up top, DIY gems at the bottom with more or less every genre explored in inventive, inviting ways in between, it’s another wonderfully-

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balanced EOTR, familiar as a well-worn jumper but fresh enough to persuade the veterans to keep up with the cutting edge.

Here are a few of our key takeaways from the festival that closes out the season – TL;DR, we can’t wait for 2023.

If you’d said ten years ago that one of End Of The Road’s genuine highlights would one day be a brutally sludgy doom metal band, you’d have been laughed out of the craft ale tent. But that’s exactly what Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs [left] were on Thursday night, as they subjected the tender opening night crowd to enormous sheets of blazing, grooving noise. Matt Baty laps up the adoration with his trademark combination of metal god bravado and self-effacing charm (“This next one is about the utter thrill of ordering a takeaway – on a weeknight”) as his bandmates serve up riffs of Iommi-level force.

But the headbanger-friendly stuff didn’t end there. Sniffany & The Nits and The Chisel both delivered riotous sets of satisfyingly nasty hardcore, and the gothic collapse of Circuit Des Yeux’s performance in the Big Top could rival the likes of Chelsea Wolfe or Neurosis in its apocalyptic weight. Add in the moments when Deathcrash briefly morphed from Slint into Godflesh and that’s a lot of heavy bases very well-covered indeed.

THE EXPERIMENTAL NEW BOAT STAGE IS A REVELATION

PIXIES BROUGHT MORE THAN JUST INDIE NOSTALGIA

Not that it really felt like EOTR needed another stage, but the addition of The Boat as a more versatile expansion of the Disco Ship worked a treat this year.

Tucked away in the woods and therefore sheltered from the bleeding sound of the bigger stages, throughout the weekend it was an outpost of curious and exploratory new work, of the kind that wasn’t unserved in previous years but certainly benefited from a dedicated space. The likes of John Francis Flynn and Aga Ujma were enchanting on there, unfurling leftfield folk songs beneath the ferris wheel, and Jockstrap’s big Saturday night headline set was astonishing, even if you couldn’t get near it due to the sheer size of the crowd.

Although few would deny that Pixies’ best recorded work is some way behind them, Saturday’s headline performance on the Woods stage was an emphatic retort to any notion that they’re just phoning it in these days. Their playing is not only rivettight but bursting with energy and verve, and Black Francis can still fry his vocal cords like nobody else. It’d be dishonest to suggest that their newest material was greeted with as much excitement as the many treasures they salvage from their back catalogue, but when the set contains tracks like ‘I Bleed’ and ‘Hey’ you can forgive the odd (truly terrible) ‘There’s A Moon On’. And really, who can question a group capable of opening a set with inchperfect renditions of ‘Gouge Away’, ‘Wave

photography by parri thomas

Albums Live Of Mutilation’, ‘Monkey Gone To Heaven’ and ‘Debaser’? By the time ‘Where Is My Mind’ rolls around they’ve created the ideal big-name set for an event like this.

Thompson, Conrad Singh, Rosetta Carr and Metta Shiba). Their presence alone suggests that he can’t be too annoying most of the time; otherwise, why would they bother hanging out with him?

YOU’RE DOING VERY WELL PLEASE DON’T USE AN ALARM CLOCK AT A CAMPING FESTIVAL Manc jazz eccentric Alabaster DePlume [below] was a disconcerting presence throughout his set on The Garden stage on Saturday afternoon, flitting from spirit-channelling saxophone master one moment to ever-so-slightly creepy life coach the next. If you were in the wrong mood his earnest affect (it might just be how he is, but it’s hard to tell) could grate, all the cries of “You give me life! Thank you! YES! You’re doing very well!” delivered by a gangly, fixed-grin crusty hitting the wrong nerves. But most people seemed to be in the right mood – just tender enough from the night before to appreciate his weird reassurances, just tipsy enough from the first couple of earlyafternoon pints to be able to ignore any nagging inhibition. And whatever state you were in, his musical performance was utterly, unquestionably beautiful, buoyed by a superb band of compelling artists in their own right (Sarathy Korwar, Donna

Or at least if you do, please don’t sleep through it for three hours, keeping everyone else awake from 7am, shortly after they finally made it to bed. Admittedly, this one’s quite specific, but the Sloane Rangers camping next to us know who they are.

BLACK MIDI STILL DON’T GIVE A SHIT

They really don’t. From the vertiginous left-turns that pepper their arrangements – many of them at least semi-improvised – to their regular habit of pausing their set to read out the day’s football scores, Black Midi remain a band who do things entirely on their own terms. You can join in if you like, but they don’t particularly care. In a way, it’s heartening to see a

band like this simply get weirder as they get bigger, rather than reining themselves in for the more mainstream audiences to which they now have access.

Watching them headline the festival’s second-biggest stage on a Saturday night with the same casual, in-jokey virtuosity they’d be throwing around on a sweaty Tuesday at the Windmill is an oddly lovely experience; they simultaneously don’t take the music industry remotely seriously (correct) while displaying a level of technical skill and artistic invention that simply does not develop without genuine investment in their craft as musicians.

Here’s hoping they just keep getting more famous, more exhilarating and even more stupid with every passing year.

THERE’S ALWAYS ROOM FOR MORE DANCE MUSIC

The End Of The Road team don’t need our advice about how to book a festival, but one thing that was really noticeable this year was how many people were up for a rave after the bands finished. Ross From Friends and I. Jordan both provided leftfield house and techno thrills in the Big Top tent, benefitting richly from that stage’s meaty soundsystem, while earlier sets from the likes of Bristol dancehall force Grove (who also popped up for a late night surprise show in the Tipi tent) and Lynks brought the club to Larmer Tree. Again, it doesn’t need it, but if they’re looking to mix things up at any point, that’s one direction in which this festival could expand a little.

KARAOKE: PROBABLY DON’T?

Well, that’s how we feel about it in the cold light of day anyway. Everyone who threw themselves into the karaoke booth near The Boat did seem to enjoy themselves, but was it worth it for that sound that you made? Maybe it was, actually. See you for a pissed-up howl of ‘Dancing On My Own’ next year.

photography by sam walton

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FilmAlbums and Books

Hideous (dir. yann gonzalez) When Oliver Sim decided to make his debut solo album, he had a secondary goal in mind: he’d use it as an opportunity to make new friends. He’d always been a quality over quantity guy when it came to mates; the bassist and co-singer-songwriter of The xx – a trio so close (Sim has known Romy Madley Croft since he was 3 and Jamie Smith since school) that to call them “members” of a band feels like a massive understatement. But Sim needed more of these meaningful relationships, and he found them.

The album is Hideous Bastard, and it comes with a short film called Hideous, which premiered at Cannes and is now streaming on MUBI. Some of Sim’s new friends (John Grant, Elton John) feature on neither but supported him through making this deeply personal new work; others, like Jimmy Somerville, provided vocals for lead single ‘Hideous’ and also pop up in Yann Gonzalez’ (another new pal) film of the same name, painted head-to-toe in silver glitter and resembling Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine as a fabulously camp guardian angel.

Drifting through the mist holding a candelabra, with batwings on their headpiece, British drag queen Bimini introduces Hideous like a signpost pointing towards the various destinations of of the next 20 minutes. This is going to be over the top, theatrical, queer, surreal and hilarious. And in being all of those things – and so clearly centred in good old-fashioned horror (a lifelong passion of Sim’s) – Hideous is also as personal to Oliver Sim as Hideous Bastard is: a record about fear and shame; especially the shame felt by a young, gay man living with HIV since his late teens.

They’re heavy themes, but as Sim said on a recent episode of our Midnight Chats podcast, he had no interest in telling his story in an over-earnest way; he grew up a fantasy nut, and he wanted to bring

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showmanship to what is essentially this film about his life. So Bimini drifts off and the ride begins – part extended music video, part noir thriller, part fantastical monster horror with lots of blood and makeup and good laughs.

It’s a film of big brushstrokes and minute details, with Sim enjoying the silliness the most. In those incidents, under inches of prosthetics that are clearly inspired by Buffy The Vampire Slayer, he’s morphed into a demon who rampages around a television studio and slays soundman Jamie Smith with a boom mic (so much for old friendships). But it’s in his smaller moments when Sim really shines as a subtle and natural performer, channelling his horror hero Norman Bates, in a film that delivers its serious and personal message while not being afraid to revel in the ridiculous.

Stuart Stubbs

Industry of Magic & Light — David Keenan (white rabbit) With five novels published in the last five years, it can feel like unpigeonholable Scottish novelist David Keenan appeared as if by magic, and maybe there’s a touch of truth to that. Historically, in preparation for the most demanding of spells, magicians insist upon strict abstention: fasting, no narcotics and no sex. This keeps the body and mind clean for the ordeal it is to undergo. Keenan’s life prior to the release of his debut novel This Is Memorial Device (to which Industry of Magic & Light is a loose prequel) in 2017 was the ‘great preparation’ for what was to come.

Contributing to revered cult music monthly The Wire from 1996 to 2015, Keenan’s music writing was explosive, instructive and human. It would build wickedly to the publication of the perennially out-of-print England’s Hidden Reverse in 2014; a breathtaking non-fiction tome detailing the esoterically tangled paths

of prominent English experimental bands Coil, Nurse with Wound and Current 93.

This was still the ‘great preparation’. The abstention from fiction. A world before the showering of words. 2017 was the year of the flood. From there followed novels charting the fictional history of a 1980s post-punk band; novels set during the troubles; novels that become monuments themselves; novels about Leonard Cohen, miracle babies and phantom cuckrelationships. When it rained, it poured.

And his latest is perhaps his most tempestuous yet.

The Industry of Magic & Light is anchored in 1960s Airdrie, a workingclass town to the east of Glasgow where Keenan was brought up. A town on the cusp of possibility. The novel’s first part (titled ‘Light’) is told through a narrator who picks through the contents of an abandoned caravan that was home to one of the hippies of the era. Each item picked up is presented to the reader through an index-like telling: Alice Coltrane LPs, bags of mouldy KP peanuts and a slutty shampoo bottle all get a showing. It’s a psychedelic mind-palace of writing that vividly paints a picture of the eponymous The Industry of Magic & Light, a group of hippies running their own psychedelic light show at Airdrie’s ‘happenings’.

However, much like Vladimir Nabokov’s 1962 modernist masterpiece Pale Fire, the narrator’s neutrality corrodes.

His own affairs encroach on the historical documentation of the scene and it becomes clear he is looking for someone or something amongst this memorial detritus.

The barely definable second part of the book, ‘Magic’, dives head-first into that search. The entry-driven narrative melts gloriously into a tarot reading that tells the story of two unconnected souls lost in an unconscious zone (free of the laws of space and time) that could be the afterlife or perhaps a coma.

Told through a mix of symbolism, modernism and surrealism, The Industry of Magic & Light is truly unlike anything else.

A book that surfs time. Unputdownable.

Undefinable. At times unstomachable. And yet another piece of magic from the growing Book of Keenan. Robert Davidson

Midnight Chats a podcast from Loud And Quiet with: Aaron Dessner / Adam Green / AJ Tracey / alt-J / Alex Kapranos / Angel Olsen / Arlo Parks / Amyl & The Sniffers / Anna Calvi / Anna Meredith / Ashley Walters / Banks / Bat For Lashes / Baxter Dury / Bernard Butler / Biffy Clyro / Biig Piig / Billy Corgan / Billy Nomates / Benjamin Clementine Blanck Mass / Bobby Gillsepie / Brett Anderson / Cat Power / Cate le Bon Caribou / Carly Rae Jepsen / Casey Spooner / Courtney Barnett / Charli XCX Charlotte Gainsbourg / Chilly Gonzales / Chvrches / Craig David / Dave Okumu / Ed O’Brien / Fat White Family / Femi Koleoso / Flying Lotus Foals / Fucked Up / Gaz Coombes George the Poet / Georgia / Ghostpoet / Gold Panda / Graham Coxon / Gwenno / Haim / Hamilton Leithauser / The Hold Steady / Holly Herndon / IDLES / Interpol / Japanese Breakfast / James Acaster / Jarvis Cocker / James Righton / Jehnny Beth / Jesca Hoop / Jon Hopkins / John Grant / Johnny Marr / Josh T Pearson / Julia Jacklin / Julien Baker / Karen O / Kate Jackson / Kae Tempest / Kim Gordon / Kojey Radical / La Roux / Laura Marling / Loyle Carner / Lucy Dacus / Lucy Rose / Mac Demarco / Mark Ronson / Matt Berninger / Matt Berry / Metronomy / Mike Skinner / Mogwai / Nadine Shah / Novelist / Orlando Weeks / Peaches Perfume Genius / Phoebe Bridgers / Poliça / Ray Blk / Romy / Roisin Murphy / Rosie Lowe / Ryan Adams / Self Esteem / Serge Pizzorno / Saul Williams / Shirley Manson / Shame / Sharon Van Etten / Sleaford Mods / Slowdive / Squid / Stephen Malkmus / Stella Donnelly / St Vincent / Swet Shop Boys / Tame Impala / Tim Burgess / Toddla T / Thundercat / Vince Staples / Viv Albertine / Welsey Gonzalez / Yard Act

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Having become a big band by accident, DRY CLEANING are set to release Stumpwork, a second album that expands their unique sound into thrilling new territory. They spent a day in Southend-onSea with Sam Walton to make sense of how all this happened and explain how they’re never more authentically themselves than when making their strange, incisive music from all of our internal monologues.

Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins 52

H T Y M H R S 53

IN T

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TAUR ANT the Royal of

Hotel Southend, Florence Shaw is trying to order lunch. “Can I get the gnocchi?” asks the vocalist of Dry Cleaning, tentatively, after the rest of her band has gone for fish and chips all round, but apparently there’s none left. There’s a pause as Shaw, suddenly stressed, scans the menu again.

“Ok!” she says eventually, “I’ll get the scampi.”

“That’s a small plate,” the server advises, vacantly, “but you could get two?”

“Get two of them?” Shaw repeats, confounded, as if to check she heard correctly. “No, that’s crazy. I can’t get two small plates.”

Another pause, further frantic flipping through the menu.

Finally: “Oh well I’ll just have the fish and chips too,” she says, followed by a resigned shrug as if to say I suppose we’re by the sea after all.

As the server heads back to the kitchen, a round of exhausted laughter-sighs circulates the table to acknowledge the drudging familiarity of what just happened. But what stands out about this little exchange is not only the sense of huh, typical, but also just how Dry Cleaning it all is: there’s the bleakly funny, depressive hedonism of being taken out to lunch somewhere quite nice but not being able to eat what you want; the mundane but slightly rushed pragmatism in the face of an unrealised treat; the mustn’t-grumble British stoicism and the bathos.

Linguistically, too, phrases like “Get two of them? No that’s crazy” and “Two small plates” have the same humdrum rhythm and found-text banality as so many of Dry Cleaning’s cut-up lyric phrases, and hearing those words delivered in the same speaking voice that provides the band’s unique character, around a dining table, makes for an uncanny experience: in Shaw’s presence, it’s sometimes hard to work out what is just everyday speech and what is quotation, and with so many references to food in their debut album from last year, it wouldn’t have felt that weird if, faced with the absence of gnocchi this particular lunchtime, Shaw had gone off-menu and demanded a banging pasta bake.

And then there’s the fact that all this is happening in the once-pretty, now-neglected seaside resort of Southend-on-Sea. On what we assumed at the time would be the last bank holiday before Christmas, its inhabitants and visitors are wringing one last drop of summer from overcast skies with pints on the prom at 11am and buckets of candy floss for the kids. It’s the sort of environment that Shaw never describes directly in Dry Cleaning’s songs, but which acts as a sort of lodestar for evocations like “Emporio Armani builder / I see shit everywhere / Hustling / Deal-making on the train” and “I’m not here to provide blank / They can fucking provide blank” that are less photographs of the slightly aggy, resentful, argumentative but buttonedup mood of modern Britain, and more impressionist paintings of the same, with as much or as little detail contained in them as the viewer wishes to observe.

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What’s more, it’s not that Southend, or this hotel restaurant’s half-menu, or a greying August bank holiday on the coast of south Essex are unique triggers: as Shaw reluctantly chooses fish and chips for her lunch, it becomes apparent that Dry Cleaning’s appeal – both lyrically and in the way those lyrics intertwine with the frayed, insistent but also rather abstract instrumental accompaniment – lies in an uncomfortable universality. Not universal in the sense that horoscopes or, say, Coldplay are, with observations mild enough to map onto any situation, but in the sense that their songs rhyme and chime with the very condition of being alive in the UK in 2022: tired, disappointed and powerless, but also comforted, stoic and accepting; gallows humour, making the best of it, cracking on, enjoying the absurd in the absurdity, revelling in dissociation because, well, why not? By never writing in specifics about time, place or events, Dry Cleaning become accidentally applicable to everything, everywhere, all the time, and therefore the sound of that most inescapable space, one’s own internal monologue.

Not that that was ever the plan. “We don’t plan to do anything!” admits drummer Nick Buxton, midway through our conversation. “We didn’t even plan to be in this band! That’s sort of the story of Dry Cleaning really…” He’s right: Dry Cleaning’s story is indeed one of accidents and the embrace of randomness and ambiguity, and about a group of old friends whose (relatively) advanced years have allowed them to make music with utter selfpossession. The result is the story of a band putting the inside on the outside, making the private public, about how, consequently, Dry Cleaning are now living rent-free inside all of our heads – and why there’s no sign of them moving out any time soon.

— Should I propose friendship? — The origin story of Dry Cleaning feels fairly comprehensively told by this point, but a recap here for context won’t hurt.

Guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton had been bouncing around garage bands for the best part of twenty years when they decided to put together a new one in 2018, familiar enough by now with the way these things go to expect no greater success than simply having a bit of fun together and making some recordings to send to their mates.

However, when Dowse persuaded his non-musician visual artist friend Florence Shaw, who’d never been in bands, to join them on vocals, a eureka moment happened, and the quartet began attracting attention beyond their peers with their unusual combination of motorik, angry/weird post-punk and darkly comic collaged spoken-word lyrics.

Three years and a multi-album deal with the venerable 4AD later, their debut album New Long Leg was released and quickly feted as one of the best records of its generation; later this month, album two, Stumpwork, will arrive with the sort of anticipation that prompts music magazines to offer up their front covers and take them to Southend, and by then the band will be well into a world tour that will keep them on the road until at least April next year. It’s quite the development for a group whose initial aims were just, according to Dowse, “hanging out together, trying to recapture that early joy, keeping it nice and simple.”

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“The idea of having anything like this happening never arose,” he explains, referring to his current life of touring and recording, “because we’d already made our lives doing other things: Flo and I lectured together at the same place [Goldsmiths University], and Nick had a cabinet-making business…” Indeed, so humble were expectations of the band well into their initial liftoff phase that all four of them held onto their day jobs for as long as they could, even after signing a record deal, mainly because they liked what they did. “The feeling for us wasn’t like an ‘Oh wow we could be on the cusp of something really cool here,’” remembers Buxton fondly of the moment that Dry Cleaning’s rise started to feel inevitable. “It was more like a phobia. It was more like ‘Shit, I might have to quit my job to do this? I don’t want to fucking do that!’ because I really enjoyed my work.”

The sense that Dry Cleaning are grown-ups, then, is inescapable, and actually works hugely in their favour. For one, there’s a likeably lived-in, rounded self-assuredness to each of their personalities, with not a hint of the sort of messiah complexes or callow off-the-leash approval-lust often found in buzz bands 15 years their junior. “It’s not like we’re unambitious,” Buxton qualifies at one point, “but it’s maybe just that our ambitions are different from what they’d be if we were younger. I think maybe we’re ambitious less about being out-and-out successful, and more about satisfying ourselves creatively or making something that’s interesting.”

“And based on the evidence of what’s happened so far,” Dowse chips in, “it’s not a bad strategy. Y’know: trust the process, trust your band members who are all chucking in influences –” “And those contributions are also a result of being a little older as well,” adds Shaw. “Like, I definitely used to have the same music taste as all my friends when I was younger. But then you grow out of that, become more idiosyncratic, and grow your own world, and now I can bring it to the others.”

“And that’s perhaps the most essential thing about being in a band,” returns Buxton, “that you respect one another’s tastes. Everyone in Dry Cleaning brings really good stuff that opens up new avenues. I’ve definitely been in bands where I’ve hated other people’s music tastes, and that’s not cool.”

Talking about their writing process, too, it’s clear that years of experience with the frustrations of Being Creative – whether that’s in music or elsewhere – pays dividends in the studio. “I think having taught at art school helps because I know how to force myself and others to make things,” laughs Shaw about what she can offer to the writing room. “Like, even if I feel fucking terrible and I haven’t got any ideas, I can still do it,

which is so much of what making something creative as a job – which is what we’re essentially doing now – is about.”

Equally, a mature approach to listening and being openly self-critical plays just as important a role in making the songs as performing does, and there’s little preciousness involved in recording – another function of age, explains Dowse: “One thing I struggled with in earlier bands is the finality of documentation,” he remembers, “but over the years I’ve come to realise that it’s helpful to think of the record as just the blueprint. There’s a really good Ian MacKaye quote where he says the recording is the menu, and the live show is the meal, which is a really helpful way of looking at it.”

It all adds up to a realisation that Dry Cleaning simply couldn’t exist as a bunch of 21-year-olds – their tenacity, calm and slow-acquired wisdom is at the centre of what makes them such a good band, with their interpersonal interactions the key.

“The band is the relationships. That’s all you have, essentially,” acknowledges Buxton, “It’s the filter, again – it’s our collective taste and accumulated experiences, that’s what this band is, and I back everyone here.”

“And the strength of the band,” continues Dowse, “is that when all four of us are in the zone, it’s undeniable.”

In short, Dry Cleaning’s modest sophistication suggests a group far further into their lifespan than a single LP. Stumpwork, far from being a Difficult Second Album, is a demonstration of that maturity. Compared to debut album New Long Leg, it’s more layered, richer and more musically ambitious, with more unusual arrangements and song structures. Despite that, though, it also feels just as lean as its predecessor – another tribute to the way the band writes. “I think the goal when we write is always to keep it as short as we can,” explains Dowse, “so with the longer ones on the new record, that’s never self-indulgence. They had to be that long because that’s where the vibe was.”

Accordingly, it’s easy enough to plot from the early EPs to the first album through to the new one what Buxton refers to as “a story of everything slowly opening out.” Despite the increased sonic scope, though, Stumpwork has retained the band’s early insistence and drive, and is just as oddly addictive as New Long Leg, thanks mainly to Dry Cleaning’s not-so-secret weapon of Shaw’s vocal writing and delivery that resembles the contents of a wearily supersaturated brain turned inside out like a rubber jelly mould and plonked onto a countertop, in the plonking perhaps also showing us the insides of our own, too. Of all the lyricists working in pop today, the obsession that Shaw’s everyday prosody inspires seems unparalleled for a band Dry Cleaning’s size.

MY JOB TO T I DO QU O T TH I S ? ” E V A H T H “SHIT, I MIG 57

— No ‘la-la-las’ at the start — Since the first EPs arrived in late 2019, there’s been an ongoing treasure hunt for Dry Cleaning’s lyrics, the kind at which the internet excels (and props to the sleuths on Reddit, Genius.com and elsewhere for the following nuggets). For example, in Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words, published with money-spinning speed just six weeks after the Paris car crash 25 years ago, the chapter in which Diana recalls meeting Charles for the first time carries a sentence that starts “I remember being a fat, podgy, no make-up, unsmart lady…”, the guts of which would become the hook of New Long Leg’s third single. Similarly, the line “damp solutions since 1971” on ‘Her Hippo’ appears to be pulled from a sign above a shop called Tapco in suburban south-west London, and Dry Cleaning’s breakthrough song, ‘The Magic of Meghan’, features a first verse quoting the Sussexes almost verbatim from their engagement interview in 2017 as well as a headline on the Daily Mail’s Facebook page. Then there’s ‘Scratchcard Lanyard’’s anthemic “do everything and feel nothing”, an excruciatingly perfect nailing of millennial FOMO ennui that’s actually an unwittingly grim tagline for Tampax.

One of the appeals of this sort of cut-and-splat approach to lyricism is that when wrenched from their contexts, these found texts take on new resonance, or just become asemantic wordmusic, lexical jetsam as pleasing to the ear as the river of taut post-punk flowing around it. However, Shaw positions herself more as a curator than an exhibitor, eager to point out that the sources of these words are as poignant to her as their redeployment: “I find it quite moving, encountering things that some human somewhere has come up with,” she explains of her motivation, “especially when you get a taste of someone’s personality in a bit of copywriting – there’s something tragic but sweet about it sometimes, but then other times it’s just really funny.

How these phrases then go together in the songwriting is pure gut feeling: when we’re jamming, I’ll pick bits and bobs, and as I’m listening to what’s happening in the room I’ll try to speak a piece of the writing, bouncing off the rhythm and the mood of what the guys are playing.

“I can imagine that some people might find that pretentious,” she continues, “but if you know me, it’s not actually that weird, because I’m genuinely interested in that sort of stuff – it’s not like ‘Oh now I’m going to be a person in a band and do this weird thing’. I’ve always enjoyed listening to people talk – that’s just nice.”

On Stumpwork, there appear to be similar found-text detritus: among ‘Kwenchy Cups’ lines about water caterpillars and otters, a reference to “St Mark’s trousers” delivers (at time of writing) precisely one hit on Google, namely for Scotland’s Forvie National Nature Reserve blog about treasured local wildlife, and ‘Conservative Hell’ nabs the copy from a particularly crass bumper sticker for one bracing line.

However, after two EPs and an album employing this decollage technique, Shaw was eager to switch things up for the new record. “At the start of the band, I had all this stuff in my phone that I’d collected just for my own satisfaction, and that ended

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up being a huge part of it. But now I don’t collect in the same way,” she explains of how the lyric-writing process has changed for Stumpwork. “I think it’s more a confidence thing, and also a restlessness, too: I don’t ever find it that fun to do something the same way for a long time, so now it’s more entertaining to challenge myself to come up with things out of my own mind.

“Original writing was always a part of the words in the past,” she continues, “but it was more of a half-and-half split of made-up stuff and found text. On Stumpwork, though, although there are some lyrics from my original collection that I’m still using up – the odd word or two left over that I never quite found a place for – it’s a lot less now.”

This new writing approach makes for a subtle shift in the nature of the lyrics on Stumpwork compared to Dry Cleaning’s initial run. For one, they’re less singalong and slogan-driven than hitherto, meaning that the lines that inevitably worm their way into your ear feel even more redolent of how one’s own mind moves, and consequently that much stranger to have stuck there, like you’ve crawled inside yourself, Being John Malkovich-style. For another, it means that there’s more of an undercurrent of meaning, too – albeit more one that hangs in the air than dives down your throat – and less of a sense of randomness, something with which Shaw seems keen to engage.

“There’s a lot of different levels to this,” she says, cautiously, after pausing to consider the question of where on the spectrum of pointed to pointless she likes her words to sit.

“I mean, the lyrics are definitely not random, because a human can’t write random lyrics. There’s always going to be subconscious biases, or concern about the rhythm fitting, or you’re trying to say something personal in code, or something personal that’s on the nose. Or if it’s something observational, then that’s inherently political. But in terms of how meaningful the lyrics are, it depends on who’s listening too. It seems to me there are as many interpretations of our songs as there are people listening, and I’m not hugely keen to interrupt that. I don’t write thinking, ‘I really want this message to come across’, because then you wouldn’t be writing a song, you’d be writing an essay, and part of the beauty and the fun is that it’s ambiguous. What appeals to me most, though, is that I’m trying to be myself as much as I can in the writing, and if I think ‘Oh that might not make sense to somebody’, that doesn’t put me off.”

That aim for personal authenticity is striking, particularly for Shaw, who exudes such a strong persona in her performance of the words – a sort of wan, laconic dourness; a vacant, deadpan anhedonic sighing with theatrical tics thrown in – that’s at odds with the approachable, engaged, almost upbeat person sat across from me now.

Then again, she suggests, perhaps I’ve got it the wrong way round: “It’s more like the way I am in everyday life is a persona that I adopt,” she reveals. “This,” she looks me in the eye and makes a back-and-forth hand gesture to imply our current conversation, “this is the persona. To get through life and be social and perform everyday tasks, you have to put something on, and I think that the way I am on stage and when I’m recording the vocals is a more authentic me than who I am the rest of the time. Obviously, performance requires simplification, and I’m

“THE

WAY I AM ON STAGE AN W D HE NI ’M IS RE A M CO O RE RD AUT IN G HEN TI C M E ”

not sure I’d necessarily want to put every aspect of my personality out there, but making a private bit of my personality public in this way is an interesting thing that I can offer.”

That must feel quite vulnerable, I suggest.

“Yes! But it’s meant to sound private,” Shaw agrees. “I guess my thinking is that I’m not a performer, so what can I offer?

I can’t offer performing experience, I don’t have something I’ve thought up, but what I do feel is trepidation and nervousness, so rather than go to all the effort of covering that up, I just won’t, and instead I’ll just offer people a cathartic thing where I’m just showing myself, to a certain extent.”

The discovery that Shaw’s everyday life requires the kind of performance that renders her actual musical performance as paradoxically authentic feels revelatory to understanding a band like Dry Cleaning. After all, when I first heard New Long Leg, I eagerly described it to a friend as the sound of someone pottering around their kitchen alone, free-associating to themselves while 6Music played in the background, and what was so compelling about the album was how authentically reproduced that sound was, how closely representative it felt of my own cluttered train of thought, all non-sequiturs and buzz-phrases stuck on loop, punchlines unmoored from their set-ups and zinging comebacks to arguments arriving years too late.

With all that in mind, news of Shaw’s specific approach moves Dry Cleaning, at least in my head, from being a piece of arch-engineered art-rock to a place of radical honesty, something psychologically purer, and almost more compelling still. It crosses my mind to say something along these lines to the band while they’re in front of me, but, unsurprisingly, my social filter, my interviewer-persona perhaps, prevents it. How very Dry Cleaning.

— You didn’t necessarily feel — It’s impressive that a band with only one album and twenty-odd published songs to their name so far has so strong an identity as to already feel adjectival, for stuff outside of

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music to be identifiable as “very Dry Cleaning”, whether that’s the boring dystopia of crap marketing messages or the doomhumour of burnout brought on by an unmediated diet of city trudge and endless scroll. It’s even more impressive, though, when you realise that this isn’t even a band with much of a manifesto. Possession of a manifesto would suggest a sense of intent that Dry Cleaning have obviously never had, as well as a youthful idealism that was behind them long before the band was even born. Instead, you sense, this is just a combination of good luck and carefully honed creativity from a group of people who are expert-level world-builders.

At no point in our day together do any of them utter the awful rock quote cliche “We’re just making this music for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it, that’s a bonus”, but if they did, it would be easy to believe them, such is their impressively laidback, self-possessed response to unexpectedly becoming A Big Band, with top-ten albums and world tours. The trick to such level-headedness appears to be acquiring a deep experience of creative satisfaction that’s sufficiently detached from any notions of ‘success’ long before the three-album deals and magazine covers came calling, remembering that none of the machine surrounding their work is really that important.

“There’s a very high likelihood that at some point we won’t like our records anymore,” admits Dowse at one point, exemplifying their outlook. “That happens. We’ve spent the last twenty years making music that no-one likes, so we’re used to it!”

Equally, Shaw’s assertion earlier in the day, too, that “I don’t ever find it that fun to do something the same way for a long time” also seems as good a signifier as any of how the band see their future. More likely, however, given the group personality of Dry Cleaning, is that they’ll keep on slowly evolving just as they have done already, in the manner of John Peel’s description of The Fall, “always different; always the same”. Like a brain that never stops pulsating, full of memories and echoes but never repetition, or the almost comically overwhelming sense of inner-consciousness that they evoke so well.

THE BEST NEW MUSIC

V/A - SEX: WE ARE NOT IN THE LEAST AFRAID OF RUINS

JOHN CARPENTER, THE SOFT MOON CODY CARPENTER, AND EXISTER DANIEL DAVIES Sacred Bones Records FIRESTARTER (SOUNDTRACK) Sacred Bones Records

INDIGO SPARKE HYSTERIA

SYLVIE SYLVIE

The second instalment of carefully curated gems and nuggets straight from the infamous jukebox at Malcolm and Vivienne’s King’s Road SEX boutique.

The ominous and unmistakably John Carpenter score for the 2022 reboot of Firestarter based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. The soundtrack utilises some of the best elements of Carpenter’s famous musical repertoire whilst charting an exciting new territory.

The 5th studio album by The Soft Moon, ‘Exister’ is a post-punk industrial masterpiece featuring two dazzling collaborations with fish narc and Alli Logout (Special Interest) - all while retaining that distinct tone that is distinctly The Soft Moon.

Golden, timeless songs from Sylvie aka. Ben Schwab and friends, blissfully reminiscent of Laurel Canyon’s rootsy collaborative scene. Effortless, soulful and addictive.

Available on limited edition colour vinyl LP, and CD. Out 14th October.

Available on limited edition Crystal Clear vinyl LP at all good independent stores.

The sophomore album by Indigo Sparke is a sweeping work of reflective beauty, about being at the axis point inside of love, right at the edge of hysteria.

Produced by Grammy winner Aaron Dessner (The National, Taylor Swift), ‘Hysteria’ presents intense yet delicate vocals whilst ornate and instrumental flourishes perfectly compliment the mesmerizing, heartfelt songwriting.

Stranger Than Paradise Records

Another wild ride and a kaleidoscope of jukebox bangers from The Animals to Max Bygraves, Nico to Burundi Black, these tracks undoubtedly played a heavy influence on SEX’s customers’ young ears, many who would go on and change the musical world forever - Sex Pistols, The Clash, Chrissie Hynde, Siouxsie Sioux to name just a few.

V/A - THEO PARRISH DJ-KICKS

Sacred Bones Records

Full Time Hobby

Available on limited edition clear vinyl LP, and CD. Out 14th October.

Available on limited edition Transparent Cloud Clear vinyl LP.

!K7

PRESS CLUB ENDLESS MOTION

Hassle Records

ASYLUMS SIGNS OF LIFE

BRUTUS UNISON LIFE

AQUALUNG DEAD LETTERS

A Theo Parrish DJ mix is an intentionally rare thing. Thus DJ-Kicks: Theo Parrish could only be the outcome of his complete creative control. Theo once said, “my profession forces me to travel to faraway places.” It’s fitting, then, that his DJ-Kicks looks to the present and future of his beloved home turf, honouring its outsized incubation of essential American music talent. Theo signed all of the 19 exclusive tracks by producers, collaborators and instrumentalists; he also sequenced and recorded the final mix, and had creative direction over the artwork.

‘Endless Motion’ is the third album from Melbourne based indie punk band Press Club. A band that reject stagnancy. Constantly pushing to change and thrive in a scene that largely stays the same.

Written and recorded during the heart of the pandemic it’s a culmination of years of downtime and introspection, false starts, disappointment and bushfires.

Recorded at the legendary Rockfield Studios with genrebending Manic Street Preachers producer Dave Eringa, ‘Signs of Life’ is a record that evolves the Asylums’ sound once again while also still staying true to their roots. As well as their trademark manic rock sound this record also draws from the likes of R.E.M., The Magnetic Fields and The Beatles.

Available on limited edition Clear Curacao vinyl LP, and CD. Out 14th October.

Includes the tracks Scatterbrain, Understand the Psychology, and Instant Coffee.

Genre jumping Belgian post hardcore band Brutus release their third album ‘Unison Life’ on 21st October. This collection of eleven new avant rock songs, and one sound scape, sees the band steering hardcore’s endless intensity down fresh pathways. ‘Unison Life’ asks whether a life of contentment is a myth or a challenge; a delusion or a goal.

Aqualung - aka songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Matt Hales - releases ‘Dead Letters’, his first album in more than seven years, on 25th October.

The album sees Matt Hales reunited with some of the team behind the second Aqualung album, ‘Still Life’, for sessions at Real World near Bath. He plays London’s Bush Hall on 25th November.

Available on limited edition coloured vinyl, and CD.

Available on limited edition coloured vinyl, and CD.

Cool Thing Records

Hassle Records

Support your local independent retailer www.republicofmusic.com

Okey-Donkey

Real talk New York’s most uncompromising leftfield punks are back, more ferociously experimental than ever.

Show Me The Body sit down with Jasleen Dhindsa to talk about critical acclaim, studio construction and causing upset. Photography by Cielito Vivas

“In what way was Dog Whistle critically acclaimed?” anti-frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt riddles me over the other end of a Zoom call when I start to discuss the success of Show Me The Body’s previous album, released in 2019. Julian is joined by his fellow bandmates Harlan Steed and Jackie Jackieboy; Harlan and Julian are at their respective locations in New York, and Jackie is calling in from Massachusetts.

When I reel off the unanimous praise the experimental hardcore outfit’s second full album received (have a Google and you’ll see Dog Whistle’s 80 metacritic score) Julian quickly apologises, with the disposition of a mischievous teenager whose only intention is to cause havoc; more chaotic neutral than chaotic good. I’m slightly more at ease, but this is a man who has a reputation for being visceral and incautious, especially in his live performances. His latest reported antic was just this August, where he pushed a fan that climbed on stage into a stacked speaker set, causing it to fall over. The band posted the footage on their Instagram with the caption “NO DISRESPECT”.

Harlan quickly chimes in to ease tension, and continues to discuss how things have changed for Show Me The Body since their last record. “We were kind of forced to reconstruct our general schedule and structure for operating as a band. Everyone had to shut down, and we ended up building a recording studio [for] the last three years.”

The recording studio in question is part of the band’s CORPUS community, which is their network of like-minded artists and creative collaborators. The collective started as a means to facilitate a need within Show Me The Body’s community caused by the pandemic. Julian explains: “Rather than spending all the time in this studio, there’s no shows happening, [so] how do we do something that our community can benefit from on a convenient basis?”

This thinking branched off to create a mutual aid fund for New York artists; as live music dissipated and the wider industry was objectively unable to generate income, Show Me The Body knew they had to do something about it. “Like Young Lords [the civil and human rights organisation],” says Julian “ – they wanted to bring the community together and demand sovereignty in Puerto Rico, but the people said ‘Yo, we just need the trash picked up’. So it was all on a needs-based level. While doing that, not being on the road really gave us time to really hone in

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on building our own studio and a space where other other kids could come and benefit. The studio residency was really important to us, to build a place that we could feel comfortable in.”

The CORPUS studio was where Harlan and Julian created Show Me The Body’s latest album, Trouble The Water, alongside their new drummer Jackie who they met through several tours with Jackie’s other band Urochromes (previous drummer Noah Cohen-Corbett left at the start of the pandemic). Harlan says Jackie’s been “killing it” ever since.

“It’s about creating a non-physical thing out of a physical thing. Like a ceremony,” Julian says, going on to speak about the choice of album title. “When Harlan plugs in, Jackie gets his shit set up, and when I get my shit together, hopefully these are physical things that become tools for spell-making. There’s a real metaphysical reaction that happens in the room. We’re all Jewish and trouble the water is when Moses troubled the River Nile, he united the tribes of Judaica and united everybody. He created a spell. It’s also about creating family, creating ceremonies. It’s alchemy… how do we circumvent our general and current reality and make something more beautiful, more than we could imagine before? It reflects all of Show Me The Body’s lyrics – to make upset, to irritate.”

— Trouble The Water — Trouble The Water is the band’s most dynamic material in their decade-long career. While still hardcore to the bone, the production scale has been amplified and the addition of capricious synths throughout mirror the mystifying quality that is encompassed in everything the band does.

The album was written almost straight after Dog Whistle came out. “Julian and I were interested in keeping up the momentum of our writing after we made the second album,” says Harlan. “A few of the songs on the record came right off of Dog Whistle, and then naturally, the rest of them were formed during the subsequent years.

“We really re-examined our writing process with this record. Predominantly it was Julian and I writing together, because we were locked down and in the studio that we built, and then we got Jackie to join to help us record and finish writing it, which was really integral and wrapped it all together.

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The goal [with] pretty much every record we make is to push ourselves further and to become more like ourselves than we have ever been before on a record. We’re not really interested in participating in existing genres; more so we want to build our own sound and our own universe as a band. I think this record is probably the one that has gotten closest to doing it.”

The new album opens with the foreboding ‘Loose Talk’, led by the eerie and metallic clanging of Julian’s banjo. It’s one of the only songs he’s written in a stream-of-consciousness style. “I wrote the main riff just sitting in a room alone for many hours. It is literally an introduction to the record in that there is a call at the end that happens a couple times, which is the calling card for the rest of the album. Not only for us in general to lead with love and understanding and grace, but also to keep it serious as well. It’s love and respect, but come and fuck with us and see what might happen…”

Across the record the band push further into the realms of experimentation and ambition, too. Take the drone punk of ‘Radiator’, where synthesisers take up most of the space, a product of Harlan exploring electronic music more deeply in the pandemic. “We were really fortunate to have Will Calhoun from Living Colour on that song, playing timbales for the latter half,” he says, “and he’s the only featured artist on the record. I think the goal with that song was to create a paradigm shift in the contrast against a lot of the more full live band-sounding songs.”

“When we talk about genre, genreless, or whatever the fuck you want to say, a lot of our focus comes from keeping it in the vein of New York sound,” says Julian. “In New York feeling and that true spirit of the city in that lineage. [In] part of that song, there’s literal lyrics ripped from one of my favourite groups, which is The Persuasions, from their song ‘Don’t It Make You Want To Go Home’ [originally by Joe South]: ‘All God’s children get weary while they roam, don’t make you want to go home’. We also rip the title for the song ‘We Came to Play’ off the album by The Persuasions. So these are just part of the nods that we give to not just this city, but the New York sound and New York feeling.”

Harlan tells me that Trouble The Water was really a moment for Show Me The Body to approach making an album with “a lot more certainty and intentionality”, like on ‘Buck 50’, a looser prog rock moment on the record.

“There were a lot of ideas going around,” he says. “We were trying to make something that was more psychedelic, that referenced a lot of our influences growing up. It was also a song that when we wrote it, I don’t know if we even ever played it all together. We kind of just kept forming it. Julian brought the main demo to the table originally but we kept pushing it and pushing it in the production stages to get it where it’s at. I think it’s one of the cooler songs on the record for sure.”

“There’s a wonderful quote from the choreographer for Batsheva Dance Company, which is a Israeli dance company,” says Julian. “Something that he says is that someone may have a wonderful idea but if you can already see it in your head, it’s probably not so amazing. What is even more amazing is if you can find something together that no one person could see on their own. So hopefully, Show Me The Body songs are an amalgamation of what Harlan might see in a dream, what I might see in a dream, or Jackie might see in a dream. These are all three

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visions coming together to create a reality that is previously unseen by one human at all.”

“We’ve made it an incumbent upon ourselves to breach [our] roles with this record.” says Harlan. “Julian really grew into more of an engineer and sound designer, and [‘Buck 50’] was largely programmed and written by him in the electronic department, which was really cool. In the past when songs were coming together, Julian [would say] ‘The songs aren’t weird enough, they’re not experimental enough, you need to go make some crazy shit for these songs!’ What was great was he threw down in that department this time around. I think we all stepped out of our comfort zones and threw down in each other’s roles in some form or another.”

— Rise of the weird shit — As their cult-like status solidifies and wider popularity increases three albums in, a need for variability is ever more palpable within Show Me The Body, as well as beyond themselves and their microcosm of a shapeshifting New York. You get the sense that Julian could wax lyrical about it for hours, justifiably: this state and this city has been fundamental to the band’s entire existence.

“This city is always changing, always morphing, always becoming something new,” he says. “Part of how we feel about it is always trying to make something new, always trying to make something we have not seen before. That is both a nod to the lineage that we come from and that we exist within, as well as out of reverence to these originators. We want to add to that lineage and add to the conversation, into the vocabulary of what New York sound could be, what rock and roll music can be, of what hardcore music can be. We wish to add to this vernacular, to create new words, new sentences, that other children can then speak and create music with.

“When we started out, the response from a lot of people was, ‘Oh that’s pretty weird, we want no part of that weird shit!’ I think nowadays the conversation has very much flipped around, everybody wants a piece!” He stops. “But real talk: we had to create our own scene to exist in, and now that scene is very, very big, and there’re bands that have been born out of these things. There’re new performers that exist within it that are younger than us and I think it’s a lovely thing. The New York hardcore and punk scene is so much more multifaceted now. A lot of people in other places are used to a hardcore beat down show… I think that’s almost more of an uncommon thing in the city these days, which I’m very happy about.

“How we exist within our city, and our community, is not something extraordinary and very special. Anybody can do this, and anybody can move like this and think about music. This is not something that is groundbreaking. It’s a call to fuck with CORPUS, but also to build something of your own, with your friends, in your community.”

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Pursuits interweave With The Book of the Gaels, songwriter and fiction author James Yorkston has created a novel that fuses his many preoccupations in a style that is “beautiful, right?”,

by Tristan Gatward. Photography by Sam Walton

“My only preference is that I keep my hat on,” mumbles a tired James Yorkston, whose nine-hour journey from East Fife to the North Dorset border ends just as you’re sure he’d want it to: with a photoshoot. Dodging the meowing ostentations of peafowl and passers-by before this evening’s performance at End Of The Road’s Talking Heads Stage – a kind of amphitheatre at the edge of the festival, surrounding an intricate wooden platform that looks like the arched skeleton of a concert hall above a flock of well-lit trees in red and purple – he’s in remarkably generous

spirits for someone who’s travelled the length of a country. But who knows how he’d be without the hat.

Later that evening, he turns away from the audience that’s gathered in front of him, crammed along the hay bales and benches, to read a few pages of his new book, The Book of the Gaels, by a single light that lands just behind his head. “I’m not turning my back on you, you see, I just need to stand like this to read the page,” he says, turning his back on us. “Of course, I might turn my back on some of you in real life, and vice versa.”

But Jarvis Cocker likes this book, and Yorkston reads out his glowing foreword with a crafty smile flickering across his face like a faulty oil lamp; turn your back on him and you’re the one in bad company.

Gaels is his third book, his second of fiction following a “bittersweet slacker” debut Three Craws and his deadpan tour diaries It’s Lovely To Be Here, all interspersed amongst a steady drift of recorded music. “It’s a great creative release,” he tells me. “I mean, my music is mostly about my lyrics, but the freedom to explore longer stories with a book is a thrilling thing after so many years of writing albums. And if I’m not in the mood to continue on the book, I can just sit down and tinker away on the piano. The different pursuits interweave, but not in a way that worries me,” he smirks, “and there’s no real eye on getting to the charts or anything like that. I can do it all in a very relaxed fashion and not be too concerned.”

— The Book of the Gaels — His new book follows the story of two young brothers, Joseph and Paul, on the long, hungry road from West Cork to Dublin with their poet father, battling the relentless Irish cold for the promise of his work being published. The book begins with beautifully sprawling, gleeful passages of the same rain that gullies their travels later-on. They layer up jumpers and coats and head out to see the rainwater beating perfectly against the lough as though it were theatre, glowering at an interrupting motor like it were a chatting gig-goer disturbing the sheer sublimity of the performance, as they stand awe-struck.

“It sounds like a daft thing but [the only time a subject overwhelms me is] when friends have died, or when I’ve been going through wretched times with family illness,” Yorkston says. He pauses. “But that tends to be when I write anyway. I don’t mean I only write when friends die – that would be mental – I write when

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I’ve got something to write about. I’ve never been one to sit down thinking ‘ah, shit I need two songs today, what rhymes with squirrel?’ That’s never been my thing. I always wait until the thing comes and then I trust myself as a writer. And later on, when I’m not inspired, I go back and trust myself as an editor.”

As he says that, his eyes drift down to his own slightly weather-beaten copy of Gaels, where he’s scribbled out the two ‘The’s in black biro, so that the title now simply reads Book of Gaels. If one were to analyse it, there’d be cheap headlines about how the editing process is never truly completed for the restless artist; he’s not satisfied, even now. He’s drawn what looks like a cloud beneath the character’s feet on the front cover, too. He catches my seeing it and grins. “Oh, well that’s just nonsense, but fuck knows if I’m a good editor. I’m not exactly the Arctic Monkeys.”

Whilst that’s true, Yorkston’s been an Arctic Monkeys labelmate for the best part of two decades (he releases via Domino), conserving a career across music, fiction and even podcasting with his friend Stephen Marshall of Futtle (a nearby record shop and brewery), with an overriding sense of calm from the East Neuk of Fife. A relaxing conviction saturates his work; he has a small audience who value that determined integrity, and enough of them for him to sustain a living.

“I think if one is in a position where one can do art for a living then it’d be foolish to look elsewhere,” he says with real confidence. “The thing is that none of this matters: music, art, lyrics, books. None of it matters at all, so I’ve just got to do the things that keep me interested and make me laugh.” It figures; between the beautiful descriptions of Irish countryside and the tragic retelling of the family’s backstory are openly funny vignettes: the brothers Kevin (two brothers two years apart, each called Kevin), pathological nuns who eat cheese sandwiches in front of starving students, tragicomic narratives about drowning mothers, the father fabricating ghost stories to con some grannies out of a carrot sandwich.

“I love dark humour. It’s quite funny to see a guy trip on a banana skin, so I’ve always snuck those things in. Even the darkest passages are slightly amusing, but life is like that. I’ve been in some very dark places with friends, and you joke with them in their final moments of life because what the fuck else can you do? I’m lucky enough that no one’s going to be expecting me to keep everything light and mainstream and cheery. I can write whatever I want and I really feel that freedom.”

— The songs of The Book of the Gaels — Some of the most triumphant moments in Gaels happen around song, in performance and in passing it on, from the pub scene Yorkston reads out at End Of The Road that builds into an a cappella chorus of ‘The Stoutest Man in the Forty Twa’, to a scene where the children camp at a Stone Circle, accidentally overindulging in a special cake, to a dance of ‘The Rattlin Bog’. Just as Yorkston’s version of the old Northern English ballad ‘Little Musgrave’ has been entering his solo sets of late, he’s also recently worked with the folk revivalist collective Broadside Hacks, despite an historic aversion to being labelled with “the f__ word”.

“I kind of fucked up a thing I did for Broadside Hacks. It was shit and I shouldn’t have sent it to them,” he digresses. “I kind of ran out of time and regret sending it because they seem like decent people. But the track that Yorkston/Thorne/Khan did I thought was really good.” Yorkston’s work with Jon Thorne and Suhail Yusuf Khan has embraced its trad leanings recently, including a glorious Indian folk cover of the Rabbie Burns standard ‘Westlin Winds’ on their 2020 album, Navasara.

“Traditional music is a huge thing in my life. When Yorkston/Thorne/Khan started – not with the first album so much but with the second two – it gave me somewhere where I could work in traditional songs without it feeling a bit weird. When I started doing the JY stuff and it got called folk straight away, we were like ‘What the fuck is this, they’ve never been to a session in the buff, if they think we’re a folk band then they don’t know what they’re talking about.’ We kinda laughed about it – my band the Athletes and I – but then it happened more and more, and by the time Beyond The River [Yorkston’s second album – 2004] came out I felt like it was backing me into a corner, so I edged away from doing the traditional stuff for a few years. Now I’m doing it all the fucking time,” he laughs. “But YTK – that’s where I divert all that.

I’m learning some new songs at the moment, a version of Arthur McBride and a few other things.”

— The place of The Book of the Gaels — We end by talking about Yorkston’s early years in Ireland.

Just as its stories colour the entirety of Gaels, there’s a small history of Scottish folk musicians being captivated by the country – Dick Gaughan, Donovan and Bert Jansch only three scoring the fields of a shared Celtic tradition. “I just loved the traditional music here,” he says, “everyone from Elizabeth Cronin to Séamus Ennis. Planxty were a huge band of my youth, so Ireland’s always had a great attraction for me and nowadays there are so many amazing bands and incredible music and players coming through that I’m always interested.

“I’m like one of these terrible Americans that comes over to St Andrews and says, you know”– he mimics an accent that sounds more like Elmo than a well-meaning but annoying tourist, “‘I’m Scotch!’ – I mean, I’m aware of that. So many of my formative years were spent in Ireland getting up to all sorts of mischief. And growing up Catholic in a Protestant area, suddenly going to Ireland felt very warm and welcoming, even though I wouldn’t say I’m Catholic now in any way whatsoever.

But at the same time, it’s just a place I love. You don’t want to be one of these guys–” the accent returns – “I’m Irish!”

With the final exaggerated accent, he opens the book, with post-End Of The Road plans to record Gaels as an audiobook. It’s not something he’s done before, but he feels alright about it. He mock-breathes in, puffing out his chest and begins to read: “And soon the dark came and between the clouds the stars blurred out...” he smiles, looking up. “Beautiful, right?”

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As he releases his first album as Acid Klaus, Sheffield electronic maverick Adrian Flanagan shares his extraordinary life story of repeated tragedy, a shift in The Fall, drag queen putdowns and a song about You’ve Been Framed, by Daniel Dylan Wray. Photography by Owen Richards

Trauma FM and other stories “You find out who your friends are when you can’t wipe your own arse,” laughs Adrian Flanagan, aka Acid Klaus, as he recalls one of the many significant hurdles he’s encountered over his 20-year run of making outsider electronic pop music in Sheffield.

In this particular instance it was a bicycle accident. In 2008, after receiving his first ever PRS cheque (on the back of a single he’d released with Candie Payne as Kings Have Long Arms [KHLA]), he went out to buy a new bike.

“Ten minutes after leaving the bike shop I was to be found lying face down like a pregnant seal,” he recalls. “I was unable to get off the road, with both of my arms broken. My shoulder was so badly broken it was described by the doctor as being only seen in people who have been struck by lightning.”

Flanagan’s burgeoning music career looked to have hit a major wall. “After the first operation, I said to the specialist, ‘I play guitars and keyboards’, and he just looked at me and said, ‘Did you?’ I don’t think you’ll be able to do that anymore.’”

Ironically, the reason Flanagan had bought a bike in the first place was to get fit after spending years on painkillers, recovering after an utterly horrific car crash a few years earlier.

After playing a gig in Camden, he declined a Lauren Lavernehosted afterparty and instead hit the road to return to Sheffield.

“I took the front passenger seat and was a bit stoned, flicking erratically through the radio trying to find a pirate station,” he recalls. “I remember stopping at one station called Trauma FM then falling asleep. Next thing I hear was a ‘Shit, what’s that?’. I bolted upright and just remember seeing a car number plate flash up. Next thing I’m covered in blood and being dragged out.”

Two sisters had been to a rave, taken ecstasy and then tried driving back home. They stalled the car in the middle lane of the M1 and couldn’t get it going again, so left it in the middle of

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the motorway with no lights on. “Before we hit the scene of the accident a guy was driving up the middle lane; he saw their car last minute and swerved onto the hard shoulder but hit one of the sisters, which tragically killed her,” Flanagan says. “We hit their car and span around and hit the central reservation, smashing in the front passenger seat where I was sitting. My behatted head had gone into the windscreen and pretty much made a triangle of the dashboard. I broke my jaw in two places, tore my sternum, damaged my heart, lungs, legs and was covered in lacerations and bruises. I had a serious concussion for around six months. I spent 24 hours on a life support machine.”

Five nights later Kings Have Long Arms were due to play a headline show in Sheffield and Flanagan insisted they perform.

“I rang my band from a bed on the critical ward of the hospital,” he says. Half of them agreed and half said no way, he was too ill.

“I got driven to the back door of the venue at 1.30am. The other half of my band – that didn’t care about me as much – and a few members of Pink Grease I roped in were waiting in the wings. I staggered up to the mic like a dead man turning up to his own wake. After that I never tolerated any musician not turning up for a gig because they’ve got a runny nose or hangover.”

— Show-offs wanted — These stories are emblematic of Flanagan’s years of hard work, persistence and dogged determination to forge a life in music despite huge setbacks. His work stretches across countless bands, projects and monikers. These include The Eccentronic Research Council with Maxine Peake, their semi-fictional offshoot The Moonlandingz (featuring Lias Saoudi from Fat White Family), The Chanteuse and the Crippled Claw, electropop project International Teachers of Pop, the basement sleaze of Adult Entertainment, and now Acid Klaus, a solo project of

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squelchy acid-electro. His debut album Step On My Travelator: The Imagined Career Trajectory of Superstar DJ & Dance-Pop Producer, Melvin Harris, is released on November 18th on Yard Act’s ZEN F.C. label.

The album combines two things that Flanagan has long explored: a bold, rich-in-scope concept – see that album title – and a sense of inventive playfulness. These qualities stretch all the way back to early days of KHLA, which Flanagan used as a vehicle to make wonky electronic pop that was the antithesis to the seriousness of the time. After being given access to Dean Honer’s studio, a pivotal Sheffield artist, who Flanagan describes as a “synth yoda, and my sonic architect” who has “single handedly done more for me as an artist than anyone else”, he threw himself into a world of synths and electronic sounds. He managed to get The Human League’s Phil Oakey to collaborate on the infectiously pulsing single ‘Rock and Roll is Dead’ and soon things took off.

“I started getting lumped in with that awful electroclash scene,” he recalls. “I was Northern electro, trying to bring a bit of wit and entertainment to electronic music. A lot of that electroclash thing took itself far too seriously – too much frowning at laptops, flicking of fringes and PVC.” He went on a recruiting mission. “I took the piss out of all that by recruiting the biggest show-offs in the local clubs,” he says. “A group of non-musicians to back me up live whilst wearing only their underpants. I’d be headlining festivals with people like LCD Soundsystem in Paris by the banks of the Seine and encouraging mass congas with the beautiful people of Paris, whilst my daft mates would be dancing about dressed as bears or Egyptian pharaohs and Mexican wrestlers whilst pretending to play their keyboards.”

By this stage Flanagan had created a persona and look.

Permanently in a hat and dark sunglasses, his stage presence became equal parts agitator and entertainer; a kind of working men’s club turn who is as interested in synths and chaos as telling antiquated blue jokes. As all musical personas often are, it became something of a front to mask the things many of us struggle with: trauma, insecurity, over-sensitivity. And even though ego and swagger, and all the things that come with being a meticulously crafted music figure, are still alive and present with Flanagan on stage and in conversation, he’s decided to open up a little more today.

— Poundland iconography — We’re in a grey beer garden on a Friday afternoon in Sheffield, as hammering rain slowly fills the ashtray that Flanagan utilises heavily over pints of local ale. Aptly, he has brought a prop hat with him to symbolically burn for the photoshoot.

“When I first arrived in Sheffield, I didn’t really know who I was other than being a hypersensitive kid living in a brutalist and depressed landscape,” he recalls. “When I started working out who I was and what I wanted to do and opportunities started to arise, an element of creating a character to hide behind did come into play. To a degree I’ve hid behind that for a long time, like a protective shield. It’s not even that great a look, but it’s highly recognisable on Google Earth; it’s Poundland iconography.”

Perhaps before the hat acted as a shield, humour served the same purpose. “My dad came from a massive Irish family, 15 brothers and sisters, so from being a small child I’d always been around and subjected to that brutal Irish piss-taking humour,” he says. “Although I think my humour stems through personal consequence and seeing a lot of shit in my life… it’s the kind of gallows humour people who work for the NHS have.”

Before moving to Sheffield, Flanagan had been brought up in Salford. “I was born a hyper-sensitive sickling child with a Vimto red face, too many teeth and a lazy eye in Crumpsall Hospital, North Manchester,” he tells me. “The same ward where Myra Hindley was born apparently.” Typical of his aforementioned gallows humour, he describes his dad as “Salford’s answer to Josef Fritzl”; his parents split permanently by the time he was four years old.

School was tough and “riddled with abuse and trauma,” he says. “I hid behind humour and being the class clown. Making a whole room of people laugh was so infectious as for once in my life they were laughing with me, not at me.” He then went through an enormous loss. “My first ever best friend at school invited me to go to his dad’s work after school one day on a building site to go and play,” he recalls. “I ended up not going but he and some other kids did. They ended up fucking about on a full size JCB, digging sand, and somehow my friend ended up going

“My daft mates would be dancing about dressed as bears” under the JCB and it killed him instantly. I cried like a baby when I was told in school the next day. I hated school after that.”

Music became a solace. “I spent my early teens swimming in records by Elvis, Patti Smith, The Cramps, Nico and The Fall,” he says. “Whilst trying to teach myself how to play a guitar that my step dad gave me.” As an underage teen he played open mic nights in Manchester’s Gay Village. “I’d be playing to the bitchiest of drag queens, lesbians and gays, drug dealers, junkies and gangsters,” he recalls. “They, like me, were very much outcasts.

But my god the humour, the put downs. The heckles were character building to say the least, but it was all done with an equal amount of love and loathe.”

His teenage band pushed demo tapes through the letterbox of Mark E. Smith, who replied and invited them to support The Fall. Years later Flanagan was even briefly a member, standing in on guitar for a handful of shows over a six-month period.

“I call it my youth training scheme in rock and roll,” he says.

“Mark was a complete one-off. Literally one of the greats, my Jerry Lee Lewis.”

After Flanagan’s near-fatal car crash, he carried on with KHLA, writing a song about Lisa Riley, aka Mandy Dingle from Emmerdale. “It was about someone stalking Lisa and sending her loads of videos of himself falling over with the hope of getting on You’ve Been Framed and the coveted £200 fee,”

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Flanagan says. “Hilariously, years later when Lisa Riley was on Strictly Come Dancing she ended up doing the big Strictly arena tour across the UK and one of her routines was her dancing to a version of my song.”

Around this time Flanagan was also collaborating with Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce of The Smiths, and Denise Johnson (best known for her vocals on Primal Scream’s Screamadelica), as well as releasing music on A Certain Ratio’s label. When Flanagan joked to the local press that the track he was working on with the ex-Smiths members was called ‘Meat is Tasty’, it got reported on Morrissey’s fan site and he had death threats. “I was a bit nervous for obvious reasons, but no-one killed me,” he laughs.

Despite Flanagan’s first decade as an artist being a creatively successful one – on top of being filled with drama, pain, and more time in hospital than anyone deserves – things had never really rocketed off quite how he hoped. But it was in his second decade, from 2011 onwards, when things would really accelerate. “Meeting Maxine Peake was life-changing,” he says.

“We not only got on really well and are into a lot of the same things and share the same funny bone and political views, but she really believed in me and encouraged me to write and even said I was good. She’s a great actress. Up to that point, and after breaking both my arms, I was thinking maybe it really was all over. All it took was that little bit of generosity of spirit.”

— All the wrong people in a room together — The Eccentronic Research Council’s debut album, 1612 Underture, is an incredible piece of work based on the infamous Pendle witch trials. The backdrop of eerie soundscapes and pulsing electronics from Flanagan and Honer, along with Peake’s inimitable narration created a musical style and approach that was truly unique and that would become something of a template that was expanded upon across multiple albums. Most notably

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is 2015’s Johnny Rocket, Narcissist & Music Machine... I’m Your Biggest Fan; another brilliant, world-shaping concept record which features fictional band The Moonlandingz. This band came to life, with Fat White Family frontman Lias Saoudi playing the role of frontman Johnny, and became more popular than any other project Flanagan had been involved with. They recorded in New York with Sean Lennon and a bunch of guests, from Yoko Ono to Randy Jones of the Village People, with the latter performing on a glam stomper of a track called ‘Glory Hole’.

In 18 months, they’d gone from playing 150- to 1,500-capacity venues, but it was a chaotic group (the drugheavy, drama-filled exploits of the Fat White Family extended universe around this time are well-documented) and it soon came to an end.

“It was good it ended when it did,” Flanagan says. “Things were pretty dark in the background and though I was finally in a position of being in a great band, doing massive shows, getting something resembling a proper wage and seeing the world, it was important for both Lias and I to step away from it as it was a massive strain on our friendship, our minds and our livers.”

Although when pushed on some of the darker moments of the band, Flanagan would rather not go there. “It’s complicated,” he says. “There were people’s egos, my own included, drug addictions, mental health et cetera, and I just don’t want to make some kind of clickbait pull quote off the back of that. I remember my good mate, the producer Ross Orton, said to me, ‘Adrian, you have a really good knack at putting all the wrong people in a room together’, which is probably true. There were good times but the fictional live band thing was a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster.”

Two albums with International Teachers of Pop followed; there was plenty of touring, then more with Adult Entertainment, before leaping straight into this new solo album. It rounds off a pretty non-stop two decades that has faithfully continued, in its own unique way, Sheffield’s long lineage of pioneering electronic music. Surely, though, Flanagan must be exhausted.

“Though I’m physically falling apart and dying from the inside out, I still love and enjoy making music,” he says. “Some people get into music for fame, money, and groupies – and I’ve seen many big mouth lookers come and go – but I’m just a fan of music and people. You can’t beat getting in a room with some pals and making a fucking racket. That said, have I ever thought about giving up? Yeah, pretty much every 15 minutes.”

THE NEW ALBUM OUT 07.10.22

Final Third: In Conversation

I never want to leave A long talk with Bill Callahan, about nature, family and why humans are really not able to handle social media,

by Ian Roebuck. Photography by Hanly Banks Callahan

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Final Third: In Conversation “I watched The Crown, so I get it.”

Bill Callahan is empathetic on the day the news breaks that the Queen has died. We’re meeting to discuss Bill’s upcoming solo album YTILAER but naturally have been distracted by the UK headlines of the day. “She’s on the money right? Maybe people will be panicking it won’t be worth anything,” he smiles.

YTILAER is Callahan’s first album since 2020’s Gold Record, following a brief hiatus singing covers with Drag City friends like Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy; he’s seemingly enjoying being back in the saddle. Still based in Austin, Texas, the previously nomadic former Smog singer tells me it’s the longest time he’s stayed in one place.

“It’s changed an amazing amount since I moved here in 2004,” he says. “I have never witnessed a city exploding with the amount of people like this one has. It’s still retaining the parts I like about it, which is fine, just the traffic is much worse.”

He’s not smiling anymore. “One of the things I like the most about Austin though is the green belt which goes right through the city, a protected natural, hiking area where you can go and that’s not ever going to change – until they build a condo there.”

He delivers that last phrase in deadpan style, which I soon find out is his default setting.

Ian Roebuck: Bill, you have a wide and varied back catalogue, but this is the first piece of work that’s inverted letters to spell backwards. What’s taken you so long?

Bill Callahan: I think I’m getting to the end of my creativity and that’s all I could come up with. No, a few years ago I was doing some drawing and very casually wrote reality backwards – just like you see on the album – and I thought that could be something someday. It was when I made this record I realised it was the perfect time to use it.

IR: The album looks to address the current climate, socially and otherwise. You suggest society is still emerging from something – are we all in a fugue state?

BC: Definitely, yes, and I feel like a lot of people are just realising that things aren’t what they seem with the government and authority – and also just how thin our reality is. We never really know why we don’t tear each other apart like the chimps we are. I guess my whole worldview has been shifted.

IR: With this record you state it was necessary to rouse people. Can you explain what you are rousing us from?

BC: Well, I think there is kind of a mass hypnosis between the pandemic and social media; everyone was looking for someone to give us an answer. When this all started I also thought that pretty soon they would give us a good solution to all these problems but it never came. There was stalling for time and lying and all sorts of things that don’t make you trust you’re in safe hands. It was basically just chaos that I am reacting to.

IR: It’s been a while since we all looked each other in the eye. Are you enjoying being face to face once more?

BC: My pandemic was not that extreme, because living in Texas no one can tell us what to do. Also having kids, especially my boy who needs at least three different play dates a day with

at least three different people or else he goes nuts, I just maintained a normal life really. It’s nice not to have to wear a mask so much – that was driving me crazy – but I do know people who got super freaked out and didn’t see anyone for a year or more. That wasn’t my type of experience at all.

IR: There are horns, multiple instruments, even multiple singers on this album. Everyone will say this is an uplifting Bill Callahan record – are you ready for that?

BC: I expect that. Whenever I write a record I envisage the audience – what I need and what people need at that time. It just seemed the right time to make a record like this. Even now hip hop feels like ambient music, where it used to be this uplifting, power to the people type of thing. It doesn’t seem to be helping very much, to get us out of this moment you know, so I just wanted to make something that was really there, that you can’t ignore. Trumpets!

IR: And what was it like working with other voices?

BC: With social media, particularly Instagram, it’s all about you, one person taking pictures of themselves endlessly. I just thought it would be a better idea to get more people involved so it wasn’t just pictures of me.

IR: Your press release highlights this new record runs for exactly one hour. No more, no less. An hour these days feels like a long time for anything, right?

BC: I found it a little bit daunting myself, you know, when I got the CD test pressing. “I have to sit here for an hour and listen to this!” I don’t know, I am starting to think that the whole album thing might be a soon-to-be archaic form. Like a lot of things, recording analogue, making albums, not being on streaming for a long time, all those things I tried to hold on to because they were things I valued and they were things that other people seemed to value. I just don’t know how long that is going to last.

Eventually even I am going to stop caring about the album format and recording analogue.

IR: Does that make you want to cherish these things or jump into the future and see what is next?

BC: I am kind of torn, because I do believe that listening to something on record or tape gives back to me, but listening to digital I feel like something is being taken away from me in this weird way. At the same time music is supposed to change; we’re at a crossroads now and this is just the painful separation of the past from the present.

IR: Would it surprise you to hear that the new album got me moving? Could we see dancing at future Bill Callahan gigs?

BC: I think my music is oddly rhythmic; a friend of mine recently pointed this out and I said, “What are you talking about?”, but then I have been practising for some shows coming up and as soon as I start playing the songs I start moving. I don’t know where the rhythm is coming from exactly but I do think that it’s getting more and more like that as I continue to rehearse.

They will change even more as I bring the band in to practice… they’re getting even more danceable.

IR: We’ve got tracks called ‘Coyotes’, ‘Horse’, ‘First Bird’ and a bird is on the album artwork. Nature is never too far away on one of your records is it?

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Final Third: In Conversation “I just wanted to make something that was really there, that you can’t ignore. Trumpets! ”

BC: I am totally connected to nature and I use it as symbolism. I think that everyone can get down with that. Everyone has birds around them and things that grow; you know, it’s how I relate to the world and how I conceive of things, through natural images. I was out hiking today with my friend. Usually this time of the week we walk out and find a big rock to sit on, talk about stuff for a while and then walk back. It’s so hot at the moment so we walk like elephants. It gets pretty deep, we usually chat about creating, alcohol, whatever, and how to get through a day feeling good at the end of it.

IR: It comes off the back of your covers album with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. Did you enjoy that process and how did it feel returning to writing your own material?

BC: I was getting pretty sick of singing covers… not really.

At the time I didn’t want it to end as it was so productive, we even kept going after the release. We had a Scout Niblett cover after the record was done and we did some extra Jerry Jeff Walker covers; we had built up so much momentum. Every week there was a new backing track in our inbox and it was very challenging to put your vocals in last. I am used to putting my vocals in first so everyone else has to go around me and fit in with what I am doing, so it was basically the complete opposite of how I normally work, including recording in my bedroom. There is no money in covers though; it was nice to go back to my own work.

IR: There was a flurry of excitement when you joined Twitter in 2018 and you mentioned enjoying it at the time. What’s your relationship with social media now, four years later?

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BC: Well it was just an experiment. It looked like it could be fun, but I think I quit like a year ago now. I just got off as quick as possible. It’s an awfully dangerous thing – we shouldn’t be hearing those many voices, strangers. If you could ride a bus at rush hour and could hear everyone’s thoughts you would go fucking insane right, I mean you would probably be storming the White House. We didn’t think this through, the whole social media thing and if we can handle it. I don’t think humans can at all, to be honest – maybe we’ll evolve to handle it in 100 years.

IR: How is life treating you as a family man?

BC: The thing that I had always heard about having kids is that it’s 24/7, and I have always thought “Yeah, yeah I can handle that”, but you don’t really know until you do it. You think “Yeah that’s fine I will get up at 3am,” but it’s 24/7 and for the rest of your life. I have got a little girl now and she’s just the cutest kid that ever… actually I hope my son doesn’t read this. No, she’s adorable and my son is adorable. I think it makes you a more complete human, it opened up so many different rooms in me that I didn’t know I had, or didn’t ever go into.

IR: Finally, the final track on the new album is titled ‘Last One At The Party’. Is this a reference to yourself – are you that guy?

BC: I never want to go to the party but when I get there I never want to leave.

^un Waves Earth Patterns

deci us vo l. i

SARATHY KORWAR KALAK

“Earthbound and weather-beaten, yearning, devotional and rebellious” 9/10, Album of the Week Loud & Quiet

“A loose amalgam of England’s most troublesome, wayward and wanton musicians.

Decius come at you out of the dark” Iggy Pop

An Indofuturist recipe for curing historical amnesia

Out now

Out November 4

Out November 11 theleaflabel.com

Final Third: My Place

Knockoff hats and rose quartz crystals Indie innovators Sorry lay out some of their most treasured possessions inside their East London lockup,

by Dominic Haley. Photography by Sophie Barloc

“It’s a bit of a mess, I’m afraid,” says Sorry guitarist Louis O’Bryen as he stoops to move some discarded laundry away from the door. The band’s practice space-cum-lock-up really isn’t all that bad, and besides, if you’ve spent almost the entire summer on the road you can forgive them for not getting around to sprucing the place up a bit.

The reason Sorry have been so busy recently is the imminent release of their second album Anywhere But Here. Meeting O’Bryen and bandmate Asha Lorenz on a stormy Friday lunchtime, the slightly flustered-looking North Londoner explains that the pair have only just returned from a European press trip to promote the new record.

Asking how it went, O’Bryen simply smiles and shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he admits eventually. “Everyone asked the same questions, so it ended up feeling a bit whirlwindlike, if I’m being honest.”

A few minutes later, Lorenz arrives, and I get a few minutes to nose around the band’s studio as the pair frantically move things ready for us to photograph.

A small, wooden-walled room tucked off the road in one of Hackney’s last overlooked corners, the space seems quite fitting for a band like Sorry. A distinctly North London group, their sound is as experimental as the city they call home, throwing together influences as varied as trip-hop, ’90s alternative rock and early trap.

After a few frantic minutes the pair are ready to start.

Looking around the now straightened-out room, I ask what item they’d like to talk about first. This stimulates a spontaneous, almost cartoon-like ‘a-ha’ from Lorenz. She quickly ferrets behind the desk and returns with a rucksack. Seconds later, a random assortment of objects empties onto the studio floor.

“I grabbed a bunch of stuff when I was at home,” she declares triumphantly as the last knickknack hits the mat.

With everything now ready, here, then, are the contents of the bag.

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1 Digital dictaphone Asha: “I thought it would be cool for all of us to get dictaphones when we went to America. Sometimes when you’re on tour and driving for long periods it can get super boring, so I had the idea of recording the conversations we had with people along the way and listen to them in the van the next day.

It ended up being super interesting. I’d often forget it was in my pocket, so I ended up recording all sorts of random stuff. For example, we were in the smoking area before a show in LA and someone was telling us about the venue we were due to play the following night. I found it the next day and we opened that night’s show by playing this person’s description of the venue over the PA. It was halfway through when I realised that the person was in the front row of the show. So, yeah, you can do quite funny stuff with it.

Currently, the plan is to use some of the recordings in our music. We’ve been making some beats from some of the snippets.

Basically, it’s a method for stealing good ideas from other people.”

Final Third: My Place

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2 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

3 Atlanta Braves Cap

Louis: “I like this book mainly because of the guy’s backstory.

My dad recommended it a couple of summers ago and I still flick through it from time to time. The actual, real-life story of the writer’s life touched me at the time, and that’s stuck with me for some reason.

John Kennedy Toole wrote this book back in the ’60s and spent the rest of his life trying to get it published and ended up committing suicide because of it. His mum loved the book and lobbied companies to get it published, and eventually, after getting turned down again and again, got it made. It ended up winning a Pulitzer prize twenty years after the guy died.

The weird thing is that the actual plot of the book is kind of about this weird relationship between a son and his mother.

It’s a really funny book, and even if the author’s story is super tragic, you don’t read it feeling sorry for the guy.”

Asha: “I’m not sure why I own this. I think I got it because it had an A for Asha on it, and it had horns on it. Sorry was going through a devil phase at the time, but then we found out that Liz Truss was doing it, so we can’t go there. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but there’s a picture of her on Instagram dressed as the devil with a really odd caption underneath it. She’s written something like, ‘The weirdest thing about the devil is that you never know when it’s behind you.’ [Her actual caption is even worse: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist... #devilyouknow #theusualsuspect #happyhalloween] It’s random.

Anyway, I don’t wear this much these days, mostly because of Liz Truss and because I reckon it makes my ears stick out too much. Still, I suppose it’s a good hat to have around.”

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Final Third: My Place

4 Homemade heart t-shirt used in the video for ‘Key To The City’ Louis: “This is from our latest music video. ‘Key To The City’ is a break-up song so we wanted to wear t-shirts that somehow represented that. There’s really no more mystery than that. It turns out shirts with hearts on them are pretty hard to find, and that’s why we ended up making our own.

Look closely and you’ll notice that this shirt is actually a Kickers t-shirt. I’ve always thought that Kickers are good because they look cool and they’re super practical. They literally last forever as well. But, as I found out recently, sometimes they can mark you out as a target for 14-year-olds on buses. I was wearing some earlier this year and a kid made fun of me; he was like, ‘Why are you wearing those? You’re not going to school?’”

5 ‘Customised’ Fender Telecaster

Louis: “Oh god, I don’t know why I’ve kept this old thing around. This is my first… well, no… second electric guitar, and as a 16- or 17-year-old I thought it would be sick to graffiti ‘Help’ on it. This was the guitar I used at some of the first Sorry gigs, which is pretty embarrassing.

As you can see, I used gaffa tape to create a stencil and then spray painted over it, which made it sound quite bad. I was probably at that stage when I thought that Green Day and graffiti were really cool, but it hasn’t lasted; in fact, I remember immediately regretting it. I don’t even remember why I wrote the word ‘Help’; I was either referencing the Beatles or trying to say ‘Help! I’m depressed!’ Whatever the reason, it clearly didn’t work – no one has ever asked me about it or even brought it up after a gig.

Annoyingly, I can’t get it off either. Then again, maybe it’s good to have a reminder of your mistakes, if only to make sure not to do anything like this again. I still use this guitar on stage sometimes, but these days I make sure that my arm covers it when I’m playing.”

6 Knock-off FBI baseball hat Louis: “I don’t know if you know, but America can be quite scary.

We were there pretty recently and I have never really experienced culture shock like that. The people there are wacky and insane but also super interesting, and the culture just seems so different. You just can’t submerge yourself in it; we stayed there for a few months and still felt like we were on the outside looking in.

In the back of my head, I bought this hat to blend in a bit.

My idea was that people would think I was American if I walked around in this. Needless to say, it didn’t work. My housemate stole it and took it to Paris a couple of weeks ago, and people over there loved it. It does look really good on him.”

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Final Third: My Place “I don’t know if you know, but America can be quite scary”

7 Rose quartz

Asha: “This is a bit of a weird story. It used to be my sister’s but somehow I’ve ended up with it. I was having a mad mushroom trip where I thought I was dying, and her friend handed it to me, and it brought me back to life. As soon as I felt it in my hand I felt like my body had weight again. I still like to hold it in my sleep; it just makes me feel super happy.

I’m not into crystals and I have no idea what rose quartz is supposed to do; I just know that this has a good weight to it and a pleasing shape. Honestly, having it has measurably improved my life, even if I can’t quite explain why.”

8 The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli Asha: “This book is about physics. I never really knew anything about physics before I read this book, but now it makes me weirdly happy, mainly because our knowledge of physics is constantly expanding and we’re always discovering new things.

There’s one story which I like. It’s about how we still can’t measure or predict where a balloon will go. We know that there are atoms in the balloon and can guess how they’ll all bounce around and interact with each other, and we know that that will make the balloon fly around a room, but we still can’t predict the exact path of the balloon.

That correlates with our experiences as human beings.

We know the parameters of how we move but that explains very little about who we are and what we do. Whenever I’m stuck and thinking, ‘Oh, when will this end?’, I like to think about that. It makes me feel like I have a vivacity for life because things are never over.”

9 Wool cap with tartan ear flaps Asha: “This is my favourite hat. I think I found it in a charity shop and fell in love with it. That was about five years ago now, and if I ever lose this hat I’d be devastated. Even though the buttons are falling off these days, I still absolutely love it. I’ve actually had to stop wearing it because I’m too worried about losing it.

I have a strange relationship with hats; I tend to get a bit obsessed. I just can’t take them off. Even in the summer, I’d wear a wooly hat and end up sweating all day every day. I bought this hat to replace another one that I loved too much. I was wearing it on the tube one day and took it off to play some music over some headphones. Just as I got off the train and onto the platform I realised I’d left my hat, and I can remember turning around and seeing it lying on the seat next to the one where I was sitting, right as the train doors began to close. It was gutting but, looking back, I like the sense of closure. It’s like, ‘It’s gone, and I’m never getting it back….’”

10 Swimming goggles

Asha: “I just love swimming. I mean, who doesn’t? I’ve been a regular swimmer since I was small. My mum told me recently that the two times she saw a real change in me were when she took me to see School of Rock at the cinema and when I first went underwater. I mean, I still make music and I still go swimming a couple of times a week, so maybe she’s on to something.

For me, swimming helps me to let go of things. As I’ve gotten a bit older, I’ve learnt the importance of self-care; it’s just so important to look after yourself. Whenever I can’t get out to a pool for a protracted period I find myself going a bit unhinged. I tend to stick to local pools around London mostly. I like swimming in the sea, but you can’t really do that around the UK at the moment so I tend only to do that when I’m abroad or on tour.”

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I want you to start by NOT looking at this month’s sleeve.

Just look over there somewhere. Then, when you’re ready, steal a glance. A quick in and out. And again. Awaaaaaaay… quick look. Do it no more than fifty odd times and then answer me this without overthinking it: what’s the first word that comes to mind? The correct answer is of course ‘skin’, although I would have accepted ‘eyes’, ‘lips’, ‘chins’ and ‘horrible’.

The Miracle was Queen’s thirteenth album and their last that featured a photo of the band on its cover, presumably because… well… look at it. You just don’t let people operate photographic equipment again after they’ve done something like this with it.

‘Skin’ wasn’t the word Queen were going for at all.

They were aiming for something along the lines of ‘unity’ and ‘togetherness’, but make no mistake, The Miracle comes with winners and losers.

You’ll notice that Freddie gets two eyes, because he’s Freddie Mercury. Everyone else gets one, although there was talk of John Deacon getting no eyes and them Photoshopping on a third Mercury eye to cover his right eye – something that Deacon suggested himself.

As the member of the band in charge of the photo editing equipment, May was far more invested and called “end face” to ensure that his hair (which he incidentally referred to exclusively as ‘The Miracle’ from 1987-91) would receive the most sleeve inches. Roger Taylor – visibly fuming here – has never forgiven him. And neither have I.

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A group of Rod Stewart’s most ardent fans (‘Rodneys’, as they call themselves), are thought to have been left disappointed after they failed to convince Buckingham Palace to allow their hero to perform at the Queen’s funeral last month. Sources say that a letter was sent to the Palace confidently stating “it won’t be like last time”, presumably referring to the sandpaper-faced singer’s Platinum Jubilee performance, in which Stewart (90) sang two songs exclusively in a key that doesn’t exist. The Palace are thought to have ignored this and all follow up correspondence from the Rodneys, as they did similar suggestions from Robbie Williams fan, Robbie Williams.

How to tell if your local telephone box is taking the death of the Queen seriously enough

illustration by kate prior