Sleaford Mods – Loud And Quiet 144

Albums of the Year, Arlo Parks, Black Lives Matter, Clipping, deathcrash, Erika de Casier, Goat Girl, John Cooper Clarke, Junglepussy, Riz Ahmed, The Story of 2020 in Tracks

issue 144

Sleaford Mods Things can’t only get better

The blood and guts spirit and devious charm is still present but has grown into something bigger, something deeper…

A claustrophobic, gnarly, but ultimately hopeful collection of 11 songs that capture shame at the peak of their powers and a peek into the mind of one of the UK’s most unique frontmen, Charlie Steen.

“Incendiary” Loud & Quiet

LP / CD / DIGITAL OUT 15 JANUARY 2021

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: B.A.M. Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Sub Editor: Alexandra Wilshire Contributing writers Abi Crawford, Al Mills, Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Dominic Haley, Esme Bennett, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayley Scott, Isabelle Crabtree, Ian Roebuck, Jamie Haworth, Jess Wrigglesworth, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Lisa Busby, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Susan Darlington, Sam Reid, Sam Walton, Tom Critten, Tristan Gatward, Woody Delaney.

Issue 144

If you ask yourself who’s making the most exciting music at the moment, the answer probably shouldn’t still be Sleaford Mods – but it is. We’ve wanted to put them on the cover of Loud And Quiet for as long as I can remember – it just hasn’t happened until now, which coincidently feels like the most perfect time imaginable. Still sounding like no one else – and still as angry, bleak and darkly comic as is only right – Fergal Kinney’s piece profiles Britain’s first properly post-2008 band, who haven’t dipped in the last eight years.

Maybe they’ll stop making so much sense once there’s something to smile about.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Stuart Stubbs

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

With special thanks to Alice French, Alex Putman, Annette Lee, Ben Harris, Keong Woo, Nisa Kelly, Jamie Woolgar, Joe Teilo Taylor.

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 2019 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

John Cooper Clarke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Albums of the Year 2020 . . . . . . . . . . 12 deathcrash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Junglepussy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Goat Girl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Erika de Casier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Arlo Parks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Sleaford Mods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Black Lives Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 10 year of Instagram & Music . . . . . . . 66 Riz Ahmed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Clipping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 The Story of 2020 in Tracks . . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Midnight Chat 100 On November 11th our podcast Midnight Chats reached its 100th episode, with Jarvis Cocker listing the 57 variety of Heinz products (“Salad Cream is ok, Sandwich Spread divides people – some people like it, some people say it looks like someone’s been sick on a slice of bread”) and sharing stories of past birthdays spent in a graveyard. When we launched the podcast in early 2016, it was a different time – an age of simpler concepts, before anyone’s dad had wrote a porno, before comedians knew what podcasts were. But our simple, increasingly thin premise

has served us well: a series of loose conversations like those you have beyond the end of the day, once everything else has been said, when you’ve probably been drinking. We wouldn’t be able to record the episodes at midnight, but we could at least publish them then, and make some murky sounding theme music that could pass as winding down. All 100 episodes are available on whatever podcast app you prefer, and on loudandquiet.com, including informal waffle with Kim Gordon, Karen O, Interpol, Angel Olsen, Mike Skinner, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Cat Power, Johnny Marr, Tame Impala and many more.

The Beginning: Previously Sleevenote by Tom Vek Alongside a new album called New Symbols, which dropped out of the sky on November 12, Tom Vek is taking on the iPod with a digital music player of his own. The bigger-than-a-CD-smallerthan-a-7-inch Sleevenote is a square devise designed with high definition album art in mind. It aims to go a bit further than displaying album sleeves a lot bigger when you’re listening to them on Spotify (although it will do that too), as it includes fully readable record inlays, liner notes and interactive track-listing artwork – the closest digital music is able to get to holding a record and poring over its design elements.

Vek needs 1000 people to back his kickstarter to put the Sleevenote into production. Full details are at sleevenote.com.

Ambient Flo Scottish DJ and producer Brian d’Souza – aka Auntie Flo – has launched a 24-hour ambient radio station, suitably called Ambient Flo. It’s a project that focuses on improving mental health mid-pandemic and creating a new revenue model for musicians underpaid by other streaming services. Each month, d’Souza and key electronic curators select 300 songs that will play an even amount of times over the following 30 days. All tracks have been carefully selected to fit within three different time zones (morning, afternoon and evening) which will play accordingly depending on each listener’s time of day. While Ambient Flo is a free station, any money pledge to it via its site is split evenly three ways, between the featured artists, d’Sounza and the other curators, and the station’s overall running costs. For an extra-blissed out experience, a second channel of birdsong can play over the transient tunes or simply by itself. Why would you listen to anything else right now? Tune in at ambientflo.com.

Paul!!!!

After 15 years of making Loud And Quiet – and five name-dropping him on our podcast – Paul McCartney finally asked us to interview him to announce the release of McCartney III. It wasn’t our first genuine World Exclusive interview, but it was probably even bigger than when we spoke with I Was A Cub Scout in 2006. When we posted it on our site on October 21, the Twitter comments spoke for themselves – “I think I’m going to have a heart attack”, “What a time to be alive”, “PAUL!!!!”, “I have preordered the album”. Not much about the quality of the journalism, but that’s totally fine and absolutely not why we do this.

Revisit our finest hour at loudandquiet.com.

Bandcamp Live If Zoom is the digital company that’s most thrived during the pandemic, Bandcamp is the one that’s most convincingly supported independent artists and labels. Their Bandcamp Fridays – where they waive their revenue share from records

illustration by kate prior

and merch sold on the platform one Friday per month – have so far banked $35 million for indie musicians, and now they’ve launched a live streaming service as virtual gigs look certain to stretch into 2021. Bandcamp Live allows artists to sell tickets to their living room concerts and also includes a virtual merch stand and fan-to-fan and artist-to-fan chat features. The ticket price set by the artist is what fans will pay, with no hidden costs.

Bandcamp’s cut is 10% of money earned, although, in a show of support that the company has become known for in 2020, all fees will be waived until 31 March 2021.

Save(d) Sea Change In another two-month period of independent businesses forced into launching Kickstarters to stay afloat, a successful one came from Totnes festival Sea Change, who raised the £25,000 they needed to clear their debts from this year’s cancelled event.

“The support and kind encouragement we received from all quarters was just euphoric,” says founder Rupert Morrison. “We can spend this next period of time really thinking about what we’ve achieved over the last five years and when and how we can return. Personally, I think 2021 is too much of a gamble for anyone but the financially super robust, so although we’re not counting something out, we’re more excited to wait and put some exciting new plans on paper for 2022 and beyond.”

Sweet 16, the podcast We’ve made our Sweet 16 column [on page 10 in this issue] into a podcast series especially for Loud And Quiet members.

Just like the in-print version, each episode is completely in the artists’ own words, as they recall where they were at the age of 16, what they were doing, and just how horrible it was. Guests in series 1 include Shirley Collins, Alex Cameron, Kelly Lee Owens, Kevin Morby, Jimothy Lacoste, Anna B Savage and Blaine Harrison. We’ve made our first episode, with Waxahatchee, available to all on loudandquiet.com. Become a Loud And Quiet member to receive the rest of the series and all future episodes.

Another Subculture zine swap Punk fanzine Another Subculture were ready for Lockdown 2 in the UK and gave fans of DIY culture something to do themselves.

Inspired by a similar project from Minnesota fanzine Dusty Digest, they announced a zine swap for the month of November. The rules were simple – create a fanzine about anything you wanted that fitted on a page of A4 paper (single or double sided) and email it in. At the end of lockdown they scooped everything they received into one collection that was then copied and sent to every person who’d contributed. There was no other way to receive the zines in the zine swap other than submitting your own work. Keep an eye on anothersubculture.co.uk for more creative projects from Another Subculture.

05

The Beginning: Alternate Realities

We were promised monkey butlers 2020 has not been a good year. Unless you’re one of those people who likes posting memes about what a terrible year it’s been. In which case, it’s been a very good year.

But don’t worry, this editorial is not going to be about 2020. At least, it’s not going to be about that 2020. Instead, we’re going to discuss the 2020s that never were – the ones predicted by people from the past that failed to come to fruition.

The ones where Keanu Reeves had the ability to store a truly un-phenomenal 80gb of data in his head. The ones where the world doesn’t even exist anymore.

Why are we doing this? To show you that the grass isn’t always greener – or if it is, it’s because it is made of plastic and all life on earth is extinct. So put down your memes, place your zeitgeist phrases in a locked box and enjoy feeling good again for a few minutes (or however long it takes you to read 740 additional words).

Let’s start with a point we already touched on – the fact that 2020 exists at all. We all know that that the Maya people predicted the world would end in 2012 – idiots! – but others guessed that the grand cosmic curtain would close in 2020 (I’m writing this in November, so apologies if you’re reading this and the world has since ended).

Among these was psychic Jeane Dixon, whose adherents included two US presidents – who, as we know, always have sound judgment. Dixon successfully predicted JFK’s assassination and the 1972 Munich massacre at the Olympics (if you can ever call such predictions “successful”). However, she also stated that a cure for cancer would come in 1967 and that we’d be riding around in nuclear-powered buses by now. Luckily the world ending is one she got wrong (except for herself, since she is in fact dead).

So, we made it. Hooray! But even if Dixon had been right, we might have been okay anyway – so long as we colonised the moon. And of course, according to science fiction, we did! There are some obvious examples, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, which made space flight seem like one long advert for modernist furniture, but let’s look at a more obscure effort: 1983’s cyberpunk novel Software.

If Software’s author – and man with the world’s most pornstar name – Rudy Rucker had been correct, right now we’d be in the middle of a war with computer people who colonised the moon. But while Rucker was slightly off on the computer war in space, he did say that all the baby boomers would be living fearful, empty lives in Florida (he made no mention of them voting for Trump). A war against computer people on the moon certainly sounds cooler than the Twitter war against idiots that many of us wage today. But would it be any more winnable? Perhaps not.

Maybe instead we’d be better living in the 2020 predicted by the RAND Corporation. In its 1967 report Predictions for the 21st Century, the think tank confidently stated “by the year 2020

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

it may be possible to breed intelligent species of animals, such as apes, that will be capable of performing manual labour.” They went on to suggest that we might have “a live-in ape to do the cleaning and gardening chores” and possibly even ape chauffeurs who would “decrease the number of automobile accidents.”

Now, here is a 2020 I can really get behind – one with monkey butlers, dog dentists and perhaps even pelican proctologists. Unfortunately, as most animal owners know, it’s impossible to get them to accurately defecate where you want them to, let alone have them operate heavy machinery. As it stands, we’ve yet to successfully breed humans who can do most jobs properly, so animal servants may have to wait.

All of which is to say that 2020 looks like a bit of a washout, even in alternate realities. So what does futurology – to give it its most wanky title – have to say about 2021? Step forward Johnny Mnemonic, the 1995 film with the helpfully hard to pronounce name (“Hey, let’s go to the cinema and see Johnny Moronic!”). Starring a post-Bill and Ted, pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves, Johnny Mnemonic is a film about a world where psychic couriers deliver information uploaded into their brains. The writers were a bit off with the amount of data computers would be handling by 2021, with Johnny’s maximum capacity a truly trifling 80gb (equivalent to streaming YouTube for about a minute). But while we might not have people carrying data around in their brains, we do have Deliveroo drivers, so that’s quite similar.

However, the internet in Johnny Mnemonic’s universe is an exciting mix of an MDMA trip and a laser show inside an exploding fireworks factory, whereas in our universe it is more like flicking through an endless set of uninteresting index cards inside the world’s most aggressive library.

So we don’t have dog dentists, space wars or a man who can carry a handful of JPGs in his head. And the world hasn’t been destroyed yet. But what can we learn from all this? Maybe that the future hasn’t been written yet, and that we can imagine – and create – whatever world we want, good or bad… or that monkey butler research has been grossly underfunded. Either is good.

07

The Beginning: <1000 Club

The dream worlds of Beige Monk

I didn’t expect this column series to be me writing grievance letters to Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek every month, but the company keep outdoing themselves in terms of uncomfortable business practices. This time around, it’s the announcement of a model worryingly close to pay-for-play. The streaming platform is asking record labels and artists to opt-in to a new service that will give their songs an algorithmic boost in the form of advertisements for new releases. The catch is that this will be in exchange for a reduced “promotional recording royalty rate.”

Spotify has already partnered with a handful of artists on Marquee, which sends notifications to listeners when artists release new songs or albums. Those participating include Justin Bieber and Lil Wayne, and we’re all familiar with seeing Drake albums egregiously plastered over the site. The company’s approach to fostering talent has always taken the form of a billboard more than a democratised platform for art, but the new model will see sponsored songs popping up in user’s playlists, on radio services and autoplay.

Streaming numbers are already tilted in favour of those with more money for extravagant marketing campaigns, but this is uglier. Making artists eat in to their already slim slice of streaming revenue for a greater chance of being heard is a blatant example of Spotify failing to understand their responsibilities to the artists they rely on to exist. It actively closes doors to those who don’t have the money to boost their exposure, those who are the foundation of their whole enterprise.

The aim of this column is to showcase great acts that could use a boost in streaming numbers, and here Spotify make it harder to recommend streaming at all. As Spotify gets greedier, Bandcamp is opening their arms wider, now offering artists on the platform a chance to host ticketed livestream events to keep their income stable through the pandemic.

Still, there’s no doubt that Spotify remains the dominant place for music discovery, and if we can make it a valid option for a few acts, it’ll be worth it.

This month, I’m ecstatically recommending Beige Monk (aka Shin Michæla Thmaist), whose giddy approach to psychedelic folk has been a source of comfort over the past few weeks. Her explorative albums take journeys through bizarre and obscured dream worlds, like personal excavations made fit for public consumption. There’s a scrappy demo-ish quality

that could well arise from bedroom production techniques, but she fully uses that to her advantage, leaning into on the autobiographical qualities of folk. Even the wild shots of noise and textural experimentation read like journal entries of emotional outpouring.

Their latest release, the wordily titled a recapturing of a dream in which i was thrown into the void where i stayed for an eternity before emerging in my ultimate form to play those who put me there in the game of 200​,000 rules (yes really) is the strongest collection so far, balancing sweet earworm melodies with a comforting atmosphere and crisp vocals. There are clear nods to the Microphones, Of Montreal and the current wave of queer internet pop music, but Beige Monk constructs a space wholly their own. ‘Message in a bottle’ harks back to ‘Space Oddity’ era Bowie with its acoustic approach to cosmic storytelling, but Thmaist is a very inward performer compared to her more boisterous influences. Her music feels like being casually welcomed into a dark inner world that’ll only reveal its warmth to those who settle into its oddities.

It’s easy to forget that one thousand is a pretty big number, at least when we’re familiar with seeing play counts stretch casually into the millions. The reality is that some onethousands are bigger than other one-thousands. A thousand passionate fans does a whole lot more than a thousand halfheard autoplay recommendations. Beige Monk has already been welcomed in by a small but passionate ecosystem of music fans online, the kind that made last month’s Speak and Spell Records happen. They are listeners who place community and outreach far above play counts. Their music tastes were always going to be too weird to chart, but certainly not too weird to love.

Right now, Bandcamp appeals to that demographic far better, by placing the creator firmly at the centre. Listening to Beige Monk in the past few weeks, I’ve realised that part of the reason why a low Spotify playcount stings is that those numbers are the only indication that there’s a real person at the other end of the speaker. It’s our only real metric to engage with other fans and artist themselves through the app. Getting Beige Monk over that first milestone might just convince new listeners to take this outsider art more seriously. The reward of a gorgeously realised dream world should certainly be an enticing one.

words by skye butchard. illustration by kate prior

The Beginning: Sweet 16

John Cooper Clarke says 1965 really was as good as everyone says it was

John Cooper Clarke [pictured far left]: It would have been 1965.

I was in Salford, Manchester. Just left school. It was an important year – I’d just started going into town. I lived very close to the centre of Manchester and me and my pals would walk it in there on a daily basis. We needed to get out of the house in order to swear and smoke cigs, and obviously trying to connect with girls.

I remember ’65 as being a very happy time. I’ve often said that politics has never impinged one iota on the way I live – not a bit except for that one period, that Harold Wilson period. Everyone was happy, it seemed to me. Since then it’s been downhill all the way. Life was improving on a daily basis, and there was no reason to think that this trajectory would ever be abated. Swinging Britain, Mary Quant, mods, Ready Steady Go. Social Mobility – that was the main thing, and it was even obvious while it was happening. It was a really happy time.

I was absolutely determined to become a poet. I’d had enough jobs even by then to realise that it wasn’t my idea of a great life. I’d be sending poems off to publishers, of which there wasn’t many. I thought my poetry was great and there was no reason why somebody shouldn’t publish it and it would sell shit loads of copies. There was no reason for me not to think this. I’m not one of these people that writes poetry for therapy or in the belief that it will make you and everybody that reads it a better person; I’ve always seen poetry as a branch of entertainment.

I got no encouragement in this, of course, from my parents or anybody else – for my own good, they advised me against this

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course of action, but I was convinced. I was emboldened because there had been renewed interest in poetry because of the career of Muhammad Ali, who we were all very interested in. And I had an inspirational teacher at school called John Malone. It was the only thing I liked at school – I hated the rest of it from the word go.

The first time I read my poetry in public was at a benefit for a left-wing magazine. I was sweet on this beatnik girl and she was performing in an upstairs room in a pub called The Castle, in the Northern Quarter. I told my dad that I’d done this public reading. “Well, anyone will employ you for nothing,” he said.

He was anxious that I shouldn’t get mugged off, and it sunk in.

I thought, well, who would my dad recognise as a potent symbol of a northern man being successful in the world of show business, and there was one guy I could think of – Bernard Manning, who was mainly known as a club owner then. I thought that would impress my dad, if I could get a couple of quid out of Bernard.

So I went to the Embassy Club in the afternoon and Bernard was there. I told him what I did and he said, “They don’t like poetry here, kid. Half of them can’t fucking read.” But I convinced him it wasn’t anything highfalutin by giving him two lines out of a poem I’d just written that I knew he’d like because it was set in a world that he knew, set in a Mecca ballroom: “When the ambulances came, she was lying on the deck, she fell off her stiletto heels and broke her fucking neck.” So he gave me fifteen quid for twenty minutes, which then was a weekly wage for some people. My dad left me to it after that.

as told to stuart stubbs

NEW ALBUM OUT

TH JANUARY

NEW ALBUM OUT 15TH JANUARY

Albums of the Year 2020 Our top 40 records of 2020, voted for by the contributors of Loud And Quiet

1. Jerskin Fendrix Winterreise (untitled (recs))

2. Kelly Lee Owens Inner Song (smalltown supersound)

3. Sparkle Division To Feel Embrace (temporary residence ltd)

4. Fiona Apple Fetch the Bolt Cutters (columbia)

5. Tkay Maidza Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2 (4ad)

11. Phoebe Bridgers Punisher (dead oceans)

12. Dua Lipa Future Nostalgia (warner)

13. Clipping Visions of Bodies Being Buried (sub pop)

14. Waxahatchee Saint Cloud (merge)

15. Keeley Forsyth Debris (leaf)

21. Delmer Darion Morning Pageants (practise)

22. Moses Sumney græ (jagjaguwar)

23. The Microphones Microphones in 2020 (p.w. elverum & sun)

24. Jockstrapp Wicked City (warp)

25. Adrienne Lenker songs and intrumentals (4ad)

31. Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu Renegade Breakdown (ninja tune)

32. Perfume Genius Set My Heart on Fire Immediately (matador)

33. Run the Jewels RTJ4 (jewel runners/bmg)

34. King Krule Man Alive! (xl recordings)

35. Sex Swing Type II (rocket)

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It’s that time of year again, when us and others like us (maybe even you) agonise over our favourite records released since January. Only this year is different, of course. Most of us spent a good chunk of 2020 listening to old albums we definitely knew we liked, just in case it was the last thing we heard. Against the odds, the pandemic was unable to kill off new releases, though, and after a few weeks of listening to Blonde and the first Jamie T album, new records soundtracked and saved our years with a heightened sense of connectivity; community clapping to the domestic theatrics of Fiona Apple, shuffling along Morrison’s grief conga to the horribly apt horrorcore of Clipping, finding a summer where there wasn’t one in Megan Thee Stallion’s mixtape of house party sex tunes.

There’s been something for every angle of 2020’s singular mood, from the records that seemed to predict social collapse and sound exactly like it (Protomartyr, Keeley Forsyth, Run the Jewels) to Hen Ogledd’s surreal adventures for a surreal time, to escapist pop masterpieces from Dua Lipa and Georgia, to the healing electronics of Kelly Lee Owens, Kate NV and Sparkle Division. They’ve all played their important roles through 2020, and now we’ve collected them all together.

Not wanting to make the exercise any more reductive than it already is, this year we’ve decided not to cram in what makes each of these records so special here. There is, however, a version of this list on our website with more information about exactly what each of them are, and why we love them.

6. Hen Ogledd Free Humans (weird world)

7. Moses Boyd Dark Matter (exodus)

8. Protomartyr Ultimate Success Today (domino)

9. Georgia Seeking Thrills (domino)

10. Minor Science Second Language (ad 93)

16. Sorry 925 (domino)

17. Riz Ahmed The Long Goodbye (mongrel)

18. Yves Tumor Heaven to a Tortured Mind (warp)

19. Crack Cloud Pain Olympics (meat machine)

20. Megan Thee Stallion Suga (1501 certified)

26. Skepta, Chip & Young Adz Insomnia (skc m29)

27. Caribou Suddenly (city slang)

28. Bent Arcana Bent Arcana (castle face)

29. Liv.e Couldn’t Wait to Tell You… (in real life)

30. Open Mike Eagle Anime, Trauma and Divorce (autoreverse)

36. Headie One Edna (relentless)

37. Beverly GlennCopeland Transmissions (transgressive)

38. Jyoti Mama, You Can Bet! (eone music / someothanship)

39. Kate NV Room For The Moon (rvng intl.)

40. Shirley Collins Heart’s Ease (domino)

13

It Takes Time Winterreise by Jerskin Fendrix is our Album of The Year 2020,

by Stuart Stubbs “Obviously it’s not a record that everybody is going to listen to and enjoy. There’s some level of difficulty that’s going to turn some people off… and turn some people on even more.” Joscelin DentPooley is as straight about his debut album as he’s always been about his good education and classical training in violin and piano.

Winterreise – released as Jerskin Fendrix in April – is named after an 1828 song cycle by Schubert and contains all the implied grandeur and ambition. It’s best to describe it as an experimental pop album – a dramatic, often unhinged breakup story that morphed into something bigger and weirder over the three years it took to make.

As it ricochets from baroque piano to electronic pop maximalism, from PC Music to Leonard Cohen to nothing but gargling space noises, it dares you to like all of it all of the time, and is ok if you don’t. It’s a dense, inventive, ugly, brilliant album, and I asked Dent-Pooley a few questions about it and his year to mark Loud And Quiet’s favourite record of 2020.

Do you even have a lasting memory of making Winterreise considering it was written over such a long period of time?

Yeah, the writing took place over a long time and coincided with a lot of larger points of my life, really. The older songs on there – ‘Depecc’, ‘I’ll Wait For It’ and ‘I’ll Clean Your Sheets’ – I wrote those in Iceland in late 2016. The first three are from New York in 2017, and the other four I wrote in England over 2017 and 2018.

So it’s weird to think of someone listening to it and thinking of it as an album, because for me it spans such a massive geographical space and time. I just hope that some of that scope transmits to anyone listening to it. It feels very big in my head, probably bigger than it actually is.

Were you aware that you were making an album, in that case?

Did Winterreise become the songs you had, or did you know from day one that you were making an album and it was just going to take as long as it takes?

It was more like the second of those. The concept of it being called Winterreise and ‘Manhattan’ being the first song and ‘Oh God’ being the last song, that was in place for a very long time. There were probably six or seven songs which would have been on the album at one point and I gradually wrote different ones, so there’s been a lot of editing and scrapping and redoing various bits.

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It suggests you’re an extremely patient person.

I think it’s in my nature to just take my time. If you’re a solo artist, the two main ways to go about it is the Bob Dylan route, where you push stuff out at a really quick rate, and the other end of spectrum is Joanna Newsom and Kendrick Lamar, people really taking their time… And that’s the other thing – I feel like it was a pretty good mechanism to wait so long, because after a year or two you can really tell whether you like a song or not. If you go back to a track with the exact same production, the exact same files, two or three years later, and you’re still excited by it, that’s a good test of whether it’s something worth putting out.

What type of record did you want to make?

I’ve always liked albums as a big emotional kind of thing.

Remember that Antlers album, Hospice? I remember listening to that when I was 13 or something, and I was like, ‘Oh shit’ – it just felt like a different thing. I’ve always loved shit around books and films, and my general temperament is being an album person, and making something that is big and heavy and impactful, rather than fun single, fun single, fun single. If I had it my way, you wouldn’t hear an ounce of it until you hear the whole thing – more of that longer, cinematic experience, I suppose.

What did you think people would make of the record, and what can you remember of the day it came out?

I’ve given up trying to second guess what people will make of it for a while. I have a very big lack of awareness of how something actually sounds, bizarrely, despite spending a lot of my time doing this thing. Stuff like ‘Onigiri’, at the time I didn’t see why that sounded any different to any of the top 40 pop shit. And ‘Black Hair’, that was written after I’d spent a lot of time listening to D’Angelo, and I thought, ah, this sounds like D’Angelo, and obviously it fucking doesn’t.

When it came out it was great. I didn’t mind too much about the lockdown release. I generally don’t like performing live, so I wasn’t massively gutted that I couldn’t tour it or anything. The amount of time I’ve spent on it, letting go of it was definitely a heavy thing, but I’ve had a great year. Out of all the musicians I know I’m definitely the luckiest one. A lot of my friends in bands have really suffered. I love being holed up in a room where no one talks to me, doing shit. That’s my favourite thing ever.

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

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

deathcrash When the mood of an entire year suits the sound of your slowcore band, by Robert Davidson.

Photography Jake Kenny

Everyone has become an expert in expecting the worst these last few months and London-based post-rock band deathcrash are no different.

Having finished recording their second EP, people thought my windows were stars, with Ric James in his East London Lockdown Studios (yes, it’s really called that) in mid-July this year, the quartet admit they were anticipating “having to beg people to buy our record”.

Of course, there were reasons to be concerned. There is barely any live scene to help promote them, their average song run-time of over ten minutes could appear daunting compared to the mountains of easily-consumable three-minute bangers out there, and the music itself can be best described as slow – really, really slow.

Despite things looking sketchy, something rather unexpected happened in September, with guitarist and vocalist Tiernan Banks recollecting, “As far as we were aware, no-one listened to our music, but then we suddenly sold out the EP [people thought my windows were stars] in 24 hours, and then the week after we sold out our gig [a socially-distanced concert at St Pancras Old Church] in less than a day too. So much changed in two weeks. It was just such a huge surprise.”

Since then, their three-track EP released through emerging London tastemaker label Untitled (recs) has been scheduled for a second pressing and recordstore.co.uk crowned it EP of the year. Not a bad lockdown’s work by anyone’s standards.

However, you get the sense that for deathcrash, a band of four self-declared introverts who met at Cambridge University, this all went slightly against the script. Bassist Patrick Fitzgerald half jokes, “We are riddled with insecurity. We laugh, but it’s true.”

This unassuming group never sought the limelight but can’t help but be bemused by how well their slowcore sound has synced up with 2020 – their sonic wave visualisations near-parallel the Daily Briefing charts we have been inundated with this year. “It’s funny that the world seems to have done a dramatic shift to suit our music a bit more,” says guitarist Matt

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Weinberger, and it’s not hard to see how the band’s pressurising songs, that build gently from a quiet whisper to a thunderous, unsustainable peak, could resonate in today’s world.

— Slow moving city soundtrack — Despite its near perfect fit, Banks clarifies that deathcrash’s sound wasn’t influenced by this year’s zeitgeist, asserting, “2020 has changed the circumstances of how people respond to our music, but we were always writing in this way.”

On the origin of their incremental sound, Weinberger notes that the band deliberately took the note less travelled in 2018 when they moved to London and entered its blossoming rock scene. “When we started playing music in London, there was a certain kind of music in vogue,” he says, “this quite aggressive, fast post-punk... Maybe that led us to make a slower kind of music.” Banks and Fitzgerald have first-hand experience of this, as former members of post-punk London bands Famous and Sorry, respectively. deathcrash’s sonic identity is equally distinctive, avoiding the scene’s typical influences of Nick Cave, Kanye West and David Bowie, drawing instead from a nestled nook of sound situated in Clinton-era America, with Weinberger detailing, “We found these ’90s American bands that had been swept under the rug somehow. There was a real joy in finding them and opening up this whole world. Like Duster, Bill Callahan, Bedhead and Sparklehorse. And [Slint guitarist] David Pajo has been a huge one for us.” people thought my windows were stars learns its lessons from the lo-fi dynamism of these artists who toy ingeniously with loud/quiet/loud tension and release: the very faint and the bloody obvious.

Drummer Noah Bennett rationalises, “You got to have the heaviness in there to make the quiet bits sound good. You couldn’t call them quiet bits if you didn’t have a few sections that are really in your face.”

Across the EP, the instrumentation slides from folksy acoustic strums to dominating power chords, from gentle hi-hat taps to stampeding toms, from mellow bass vibes to beefy plucks that signal impending breakdown.

The oscillation can be intoxicating, making the EP’s 40 minutes simultaneously accessible and complex, with Weinberger pinpointing their stirring, occasionally explosive music as sitting philosophically between “‘You can have it on in the background and it sounds really nice’, and ‘that in there not being a lot there, there’s a lot to focus on.’”

Accompanying the band’s tense, terse soundscapes, Banks’ teasing and suggestive lyrics float through the music’s incremental gear changes. Describing the lyric writing process Banks says, “They start out as specific things in my life and I try to make them more universal... Leaving room for interpretation.”

Throughout the EP there are loaded lyrical references to ‘sickness’, ‘falling ill’ and ‘wards’, part of a foggy contemporary narrative that never quite elucidates whether the ‘sickness’ is you know what or a spousal malady. It’s unclear during EP closer ‘Songs for M i-iv’ whether Banks’ tortured whisper of ‘Don’t

settle, come back’ is a heart-wrenching goodbye, a desperate plea to return or nothing at all.

Fitzgerald extols particularities of this quiet, reflective sound and interpretative verse possesses, asserting, “You get to have a relationship with that kind of music. I always try to find some sadness, darkness and beauty in music and I find that with slower or quieter music it feels easier for that to happen.”

— Never-ending hope — Like so many other questions posed by the pandemic, you wonder what will revert back to ‘normal’ and what will stay as it is when this is all said and done. I ask deathcrash whether there will be an audience for slowcore when London’s fast post-punk bands come roaring back to the eagerly awaiting boozers and bars?

Weinberger is facetious. “It would be great to have some kind of apocalypse next year too,” he says before Bank’s halfjoking, half-serious adds: “We got lucky with that this year.

Maybe when the [debut] album comes out next year, no one will care anymore.”

But behind the jesting, they are quietly optimistic with Fitzgerald affirming, “Our music speaks less to spectacle and more to the internal stuff. Maybe people have just slowed down and that resonates, but I would hope it would stay relevant to people beyond the lockdown.”

Truthfully, deathcash don’t require claustrophobia or gloom to shine. Despite being slow, contemplative and occasionally moody, their music is one fueled by wonder, possibility and intrigue, not negativity or pessimism. You feel it will be just as vital in a recovering world as it is in a suffering one.

Bennett qualifies this, mentioning that even in the midst of recording the EP’s epic title track on the eve of the first lockdown in March 2020 “hope was a word that I wanted to have included in the press releases, it’s what I get out of listening to our music.”

Fitzgerald nods, adding, “Sometimes it’s easier to take a cynical stance on things, but I think for us in expression and music, we will avoid cynicism. Hope is definitely a big part of the sound.”

Like one of their atmospheric comedowns, the interview peters out naturally from there. The four polite lads say their goodbyes and return to their East London flats. With the final breath of the interview devoted to hope, it seems about right.

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Junglepussy

People suck, by Katie Beswick Photography by Caity Arthur

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Shayna McHayle is Junglepussy, the straight-talking rapper who, when I ask her to introduce her latest album, JP4, for readers who might be interested to know more about the story behind the project, is silent for a very long time. Eventually, she exhales, laughs softly to herself and tells me, in clipped, serious tones, “You can say JP4 is pretty much uninterrupted expression from me, a super-talented Brooklyn artist.” It’s a totally Junglepussy answer, both in its brevity and in the self-confidence of its delivery. Like all good writers, McHayle wastes no words. And like all good rappers, she can really deliver a line. On her tracks, the slick sharpness of her flow works to present lyrics that are funny, mundane and heart-breaking in equal turns. On ‘Morning Rock’ she’s at a lover’s house the morning after an uninspiring night before, “What a waste of toothpaste,” she spits, “Brushing my teeth only to smile in your face.” The slow, surreal ‘Arugula’ sees her similarly confront a disappointing love interest: “Acting funny in front me round your work folk / You don’t miss me, you just know I want my back broke.”

She can’t help, she says, being who she is, no matter what anyone thinks of it. “I mean, it’s not even an attitude, it’s just how it is. It’s just how I am. It’s just innate. I just have to be me, and I know I cannot give people what they think [they want] of me. I just can’t. I don’t know how to. Even if I’m like, ‘oh that’s what they want’, I’m just so far away from that, always.”

McHayle tells me she has always had a strong sense of herself, and understood the image she presents to the world.

There was no choice but to embrace idiosyncrasies that made her the focus of attention as a teenager, both in her work and her personal style. “Anything I do you’re gonna look at regardless. I’m a tall black woman, whatever I do, whatever I put on, I’m gonna get stares. Am I just gonna hide myself so everybody doesn’t feel the need to stare?

“I really just had a good strong sense of self when I was younger,” she continues. “Always been super creative. I never felt, like if I would see a celebrity or watch award shows, I would never feel that those people were any different from me.

I remember always just feeling equally able to access the things that people try to say I can’t access. So, I always just felt cool, literally. In junior high I wore a uniform, but once I went to high school in Manhattan and I got to wear whatever I want, I had a red mohawk, I had blue a mohawk. I didn’t care about anything else, I just felt like a star already.”

Growing up in New York, I say, I imagine you weren’t alone in carving out an eccentric style for yourself. “This is like 2004, lower east side Manhattan,” she reminds me. “It wasn’t what it is now. Now is like so much, it’s even more… I don’t know.

New York always had style but now it has a lot more. Because of social media and stuff, people are exposed to so much more options. I used to get stared at sooo much in the street, on the train everywhere – when I was back home in Brooklyn, wherever. Like, stared at, harassed, called names. It was not a fun experience. And I remember earlier in college, I went to FIT and

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“You can say JP4 is pretty much uninterrupted expression from me, a super-talented Brooklyn artist”

studied fashion merchandising. And at FIT also like, nobody there had style. Everybody’s style was so trash, and it was just so sad. I remember being like, “We live in New York, this is FIT, and y’all coming to school in flip flops and skinny jeans. What?”

You get the sense that Junglepussy is used to people disappointing her. At one point during our interview, I ask how she chooses her collaborators (there are collabs on the new album with Gangsterboo and Ian Isaiah), and she tells me they have to have similar socio-political beliefs. Like, who? I ask. How would you go about assessing that? “I don’t know,” she sighs, as if she’s really had enough of my shit, and everybody else’s. “People suck in general.”

Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t been particularly phased by the pandemic and its attendant social restrictions. “I was never really social anyway,” she shrugs. “I guess when I was younger of course I used to go out and party, but as I got older, if I’m not having a show, or it’s not a friend’s show… you know I used to love to go to live shows. But now that’s not [an option], nothing much has changed, nothing much has changed except for the germs.”

So, you’re not in a hurry to get back to normal then? I ask her. The question seems to annoy her, and I guess I can see why, given the way the pandemic has exposed the injustices and inequalities we’ve all been living with for a long time, but especially Black Americans. “Get back to what?” She asks. “What was normal about before? I don’t know why everybody’s so obsessed with the past as if it was so beautifully perfect. We were just so oblivious to so much. I want to continue moving forward in the truth and uncovering all the truths we need to make this world a place where our children can live fruitful lives.”

And besides, she reminds me, there’s nothing she can do about a global pandemic except get on with her life. “I can’t let it consume me too much. I’m not trying to hide or run from it, but it’s important for me to build my own world, have my spaceship where I can go and get away. Like hell no I’m not going to be consumed by this and neither is my work – but, I’m not gonna hide or run from it. I am gonna be honest with my emotions, but this shit can’t consume me because it’s not my fault.”

— So, back to the album — JP4 is the super-talented artist Junglepussy’s fourth project, following the 2014 mixtape Satisfaction Guaranteed, and the albums Pregnant with Success (2015) and JP3 (2018).

But whereas those projects evolved fairly quickly, JP4 has had a longer gestation, developing over five years until finally, once the

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pandemic hit, McHayle had the time to bring the tracks together into something coherent. Still, although all the work on the album was recorded before this year, there are places where it seems to have been written from the perspective of right now. The opener, ‘Bad News’, might be an anthem for 2020, with its bleak, futuristic sound (“Looking back at my ass / Moving on / On my own, on my own, on my own… I got bad news / But it’s all true”).

Was it hard, I asked her, taking so long over this album?

“It didn’t take long,” she corrects me. “It didn’t take long at all.

There was no rush. No time limit. There were no consequences if I didn’t put it out. It was the right timing. Definitely.”

Yes, but in comparison to the other works, five years was a long time, right? She must have been writing this alongside those other works. Was that a challenge? “I was aware of it, yeah. As I’m making Pregnant with Success and JP3. Very much I was writing JP4 through experience, through living and recording things, but also feeling like it just wasn’t the time. It wasn’t the time to share it. But being very happy sharing Pregnant with Success and JP3 knowing that those were important moments as well. But also just giving JP4 that space to fill up that cup that I knew it would be.”

And was it the right decision? “I’m super proud,” she says.

“I’m happy to be sharing a body of work like this at 28 years old… in this climate. I think the world should be grateful as well, because it is a treat to hear something like this this year. It’s not easy being creative in this climate, but I just knew that I had to make something out of nothing. I had to make something without really knowing what would come of it and I’m happy I did.”

There are no nerves around the reception of the album either – at least, none McHayle is willing to admit to. “I really, I don’t know, I’m not really concerned with the music industry in the grand scheme of things. It’s like, if they don’t want to appreciate my art that’s fine. There’s so much more people that do.

And I find so much peace in just celebrating those people and giving my love to those people and to hell with everybody else.”

In any case, the promotion’s going to need to be pretty low-key, given the restrictions on live events right now. “We can’t plan something nobody’s gonna come to, right? People can’t come [to live shows].” The line goes quiet for a bit. “We’re all just waiting on the world to change, ok?”

Ultraísta Sister

Laura Marling Song For Our Daughter

Pottery Welcome to Bobby’s Motel

Fontaines D.C. A Hero’s Death

Chubby and the Gang Speed Kills

IDLES Ultra Mono

Emel The Tunis Diaries

Craig Finn All These Perfect Crosses RSD

Bombino Live in Amsterdam RSD Black Friday

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Goat Girl A house band for your contemporary dissatisfaction,

by Tristan Gatward.

Photography by Matilda Hill-Jenkins

In the gospel according to Goat Girl’s drummer Rosy Bones, tom yum noodles with shrimp are the best noodles in the world.

“You don’t have a microwave, do you?” L.E.D. (guitarist, Ellie Rose Davies) asks Rosy.

“Nooooooo-www,” comes the stretched-out reply, as they carefully ladle the noodles into a bowl from a big rusty wok balancing on the stove. “They’re not very hot,” says Rosy, pausing a little, placing a plate on top to trap in the remaining temperature, as they sit down to let Ellie make a cup of tea with an equally oxidised kettle.

The kitchen table is covered. Replica prints of the album artwork designed by lead vocalist Clottie Cream (Lottie Pendlebury)’s boyfriend are stacked next to a box of white label test pressings that the band have all personalised with characters from the record, pissing squatters and zoetropic goat heads.

Next to them, an ashtray sits by an open window, a share bag of chilli Wotsits, leftover daal and now Rosy’s noodles. “I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of these,” says Rosy, inhaling deeply.

“Tom yum shrimp. Zesty, creamy, slicey goodness.”

Ellie brings over some mugs, as Lottie and Holly Hole (bassist, Holly Mullineaux) sidle through from the living room, which has been newly decorated in pink and red drapes, bunches of dried flowers spray-painted in shades of blue, and just the one wooden satanic goat head on the wall. Their friend Flo, who designed the set and recently painted every surface in her own house, follows in and sits down at the table. “The band’s team currently think I’m a nutcase,” Flo laughs, “Only because I accidentally posted them my invoice instead of emailing it, and then next time we were speaking I broke my arm.”

She shows me her arm, still very broken despite being out of the cast, and in desperate need of re-breaking. She says she’s looking forward to reading all about it in this issue of Loud And Quiet.

Ellie’s moved back in with her dad in East London, and Holly lives north of the river, both having vetted off their manager’s suggestion that they all move here for lockdown.

The cupboard under the stairs was even cleared out in preparation, previously home to a ghost named Vera. I’m told she’s become quite a skimpy ghost in recent months, who looks a bit like Lottie. “Fucking sexy legend,” rebuts Lottie, rolling her tongue. “Big brrreasts.”

Lottie’s and Rosy’s house feels like some kind of homely Lynchian props cupboard – a staging area for the performative but acutely realised chaos and sociopolitical world of Goat Girl.

On the wall opposite the goat’s head is a framed picture of a horse called Petong, which the two bought from Deptford Market along with most of the other objects strewn around the room.

“I’ve even got one of those face masks now that looks like it’s got an air filter,” says Rosy. “But it doesn’t do anything. I’ve wanted one for so long, but it gets floppy on my nose.”

“What was her name?” Ellie interjects, mid-different conversation about the lead character in the music video they’ve just released for their new single ‘Sad Cowboy’.

“Just Wild Woman,” says Rosy. “They all have names.

There was Bow and Arrow Lady, Wild Woman… But she wasn’t that wild.”

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“No, but she became a bit wild when she started doing that…” Holly throws her arms above her head, mimicking the Wild Woman’s starring moment in the song’s instrumental break, where she flails her limbs about and leads a circle procession around a field. It’s like you’re watching a medieval summer fete through a thermal lens, where a well-meaning maypole dance coincides with an exorcism.

“Yeah, but it’s not like she said, ‘lovely to meet you all, I’m the Wild Woman,’” says Ellie.

“I was thinking about this,” Rosy stops. “It’s a very literal name… like, you know, in Shrek. All of the characters are called exactly what they are, you know?” Rosy starts listing the characters: “Donkey, Dragon…”

“Princess Fiona,” says Holly, smiling.

Rosy ignores her.

“I don’t know how they get away with that. It couldn’t be any other way, but they made a conscious choice to keep all those names.”

“Lord Farquaard,” says Holly.

— Mark Wahlberg’s fake dick — For all its surreal, very Goat Girl qualities, ‘Sad Cowboy’ marks a definite step away from 2018’s self-titled debut, where the songs rarely scratched three minutes in length, and the band saw themselves grouped with the swathes of fashionable post-punks, if only by virtue of their guitars, politics and association with South London, producer Dan Carey and the Brixton Windmill scene. In contrast, the new single is more of a head-on collision between Arcade Fire’s ‘We Exist’ and Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack. And as for the video, until the face off between Wild Woman and Bow and Arrow Lady, we’re following the showdown between a cowboy with a blue cloth over his face and a smartly dressed octopus man.

“We didn’t get to keep the octopus costume,” says Rosy, as Lottie recalls various actors who do get to take mementos from their big films, albeit in secret.

“Like Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights, where he took the fake dick that he wore,” says Lottie. “Yeah, he stole the prosthetic dick and has it framed in his house. It’s kinda weird, though, I mean, he’s got kids. Imagine sitting down for breakfast and saying, ‘look kids, this is the dick I wore in Boogie Nights.’”

You’d think a music video with this thriftiness in mind could be a good chance to make some practical additions to the house. Like a scene with a lifetime’s supply of Tom Yum noodles, or some new mugs. Rosy casts an eye over the current selection on the table – one plain, one branded with a slightly faded Liverpool crest – “You’ll never walk alone” – and one blue, with a picture of housemate Charlie’s dogs on it. They look up to the gap between the top of their kitchen cupboards and the ceiling, where a bucketsized blue and white striped mug sits, chipped by the very same dogs. “I just can’t bring myself to get rid of it,” Rosy says.

Lottie grins. “No, for the next video we’re inside a giant pink slug, shuffling across a beach.”

For an album loosely about losing a grip on reality, Goat Girl are the real thing, from the synth arpeggios that skelter

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around a lament of “the suits of today” in the brilliant album opener ‘Pest’ to the queasy, foggy riffs of ‘Jazz (In The Supermarket)’ written mid-heatwave in Dan Carey’s Streatham studio.

A plaintive, beatific melody numbly dispenses anti-depressants in ‘Anxiety Feels’ as the bleak garage-pop of ‘Bang’ willfully launches into hallucinatory escapism. On All Fours is an album rooted in contemporary dissatisfaction; it’s easy to become disillusioned, say the band, when you’re consistently being steamrollered with ever-increasingly ridiculous and dreamlike bad news.

“I really thought this when we had to write quotes for each of the songs,” says Lottie. “Each one was like ‘hmm, depression’ or ‘hmm, anxiety.’”

“But we have put a lot more thought into it,” adds Ellie, comparing it to the debut album that spiraled too quickly into the arms of eager music journalists. “We’re much more careful with how we’re framing these songs now. Even with the whole set design.”

“If you don’t take that control, someone else is going to frame it for you,” says Holly.

Lottie pauses. She’s someone who you feel would be very content for Goat Girl to write the songs and leave their involvement at that, without worrying about deciphering the art.

“I’ve never thought about it before as something that you really needed,” she says. “Like, before, I’d always think why does it matter how we look or what we say. And I still think that to an extent, but I suppose it’s nice to have something so consistent between the music, the art and the image.”

The cohesion within On All Fours is even more impressive with it being the band’s first fully collaborative album, mostly written last summer, and recorded over an intense week last October with Speedy Wunderground’s Dan Carey, while their songs changed and developed constantly around them.

“Yeah, I mean, we all wrote the first album, but I brought a song to the band and everyone would write their parts – we worked in that kind of way,” says Lottie. “With this album, we were still relying on someone bringing an idea, but that didn’t make a song.”

“And it was different people who brought the initial idea,” says Ellie. “We’ve all brought ideas to the table that have been the starting point for songs on this album, whereas on the last one the starting point always came from Lottie, apart from ‘Viper Fish’. But now someone might have had a demo or a bassline, and it takes a lot more time to figure out what we’re going to do with it together.”

“We still don’t really know what it sounds like,” says Holly. “There’s just so many different things and influences and genres within it, which I really like about it. All of the songs have a completely different vibe to one another.”

— MexicanCowboy gets it — Goat Girl’s eponymous debut was occasionally typecast straight from the Fat White Family school of sardonic pseudoaggressive-come-passive rock’n’roll, but the band counter that comparison. Scattered among the first album’s nineteen tracks are much less confrontational interludes, recorded a while after

the “song songs”, there simply to explore the sonic makeup of the band. The following Udder Sounds EP showed just how restless they were – Goat Girl covering Goat Girl – a bridge to On All Fours, obscuring the hooks in the hits to see in just how many ways their songs could exist.

“I feel like even when we were touring the first album, we kind of already knew we wanted to experiment with electronics, we just didn’t have the equipment for it,” says Rosy. If you caught one of their Windmill sets in the wake of penning a deal with Rough Trade, their vocal harmonies would be drowned in reverb, and feedback patches would interrupt spaghetti guitar sections. There were all the tells of a guitar band who wanted to go beyond their guitars. “But I didn’t know this album was going to sound like it does,” Rosy continues. “I didn’t know it was all going to be bangers. Hit after hit after hit.”

“We’ve all always had eclectic tastes,” adds Ellie. “When we wrote the first album, that post-punk sound was just the beginning of our rebellion in a way. It was the sound of going out and finding ourselves as individuals, at the pivotal point of becoming an adult. Or,” she corrects herself, “not being a child anymore. Just finding independence.”

“It’s quite nice to have this really different sounding album as well, I think,” says Lottie.

“When we wrote the first album, that post-punk sound was just the beginning of our rebellion in a way”

“With the first album I always saw it as something that wasn’t how it ended up being spoken about. It was always like ‘guitar rock’, or ‘women rock’, which was kind of bullshit anyway. Yeah, I dunno, there was this restrictive bubble we were put in that didn’t quite describe who we were or what music we were making. The sound was actually quite strange. Having two songs back to back called ‘I Don’t Care’ and both being, I don’t know, weird. There was so much going on with the guitars – strange rhythms, jazz chords, time signatures never stayed the same – we didn’t have the rock format that we were told we had. So this album doesn’t feel that shockingly different. Sure, it’s gone into a new sound, but it’s still based in that alternative mind.”

“But Nev on YouTube didn’t like the synths,” says Holly.

“He was not convinced” The YouTube comments have been a source of reliable entertainment for Goat Girl, ever since their armpit hair shocked primetime BBC viewers on Later… with Jools Holland.

“I like reading the sexist comments. I find them quite funny,” says Rosy, looking around at everyone else’s bemused smiles. “And sad,” they say. “I find them sad. But if I see something bad, I don’t know, it gives me fuel. One of them was like

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‘hairy armpits, oh my god. OH MY GOD.’” “And then the one below,” says Holly, “who’s like ‘c’mon mate, get in the 21st century, everyone has hairy armpits now.’”

“I like MexicanCowboy,” says Lottie, with a glow – a regular commenter on all of the videos. “Marry me, Lottie.”

She wraps her arms around herself. “Come to Mexico if you are reading this – Lottie for president!”

“I’ve always thought it could be fun to reply to people on my account, because it’s not actually me,” says Rosy, again to bemused smiles. “No really, I share my YouTube account with somebody I don’t know. It’s my email address, but there are these videos uploaded of a jumping dog. Someone’s speaking Spanish and filming their dog but uploading it on my account. Or maybe it’s their account. But it’s my email address. I don’t know who hacked who. Can two people have the same email?”

— Direct activism — Beyond all the party house surrealism, the stage names and battles between Octopus and Cowboy, if you were to have walked by the front room of this house in the depths of spring’s lockdown, you’d have seen a very direct image of activism through the window: Justice for Belly Mujinga, Trans Rights Now, PPE Not Profit. From the top window: Government Won’t Help, Community Will. They’d have bus drivers come around the corner honking their horns in solidarity, Lottie tells me, which felt like the only tangible resistance amid a domineering reality.

On the day I visited, the fallout from EHRC’s report on antisemitism in the Labour Party ended up with the controversial suspension of former leader Jeremy Corbyn.

“I feel like…” Ellie pauses, picking up one of the prints on the table. “Just looking at the On All Fours album artwork… that’s quite a political thing. That’s kind of how we see the world going, you know, this fucking crazy place where all this fucked up shit’s going on. That’s how the world can make your mind,” she laughs. “We’re all going a bit insane at the moment.”

“I think if you want to be politically active you need an escape as well,” says Rosy, “A place to recharge and find the energy to do all the things you want to do. Having different worlds in your head or a space reserved for imagining things and being creative is really important.”

“I find the two worlds merging constantly,” says Lottie.

“I can be an activist outside of Goat Girl but I can use Goat Girl as a platform to spread a message I think is important. The band isn’t the escape. I like that we can collectivise people in that kind of way. But also, I feel like I can express my agenda with a nuance. People can find the meanings for themselves. It’s a safe space for people to explore their own politics, more than a direction that says this is how you need to feel.”

As the album closes, there is one moment of euphoria – ‘Where Do We Go?’: a song whose climactic sci-fi synth swirls around Lottie’s heady vocals; it sounds like a call to arms.

“Oh no,” she corrects me. “That bit’s meant to be sad too.

The chords and the epic-ness of it all... I think it feels like you don’t know what to do with yourself, so you just cry. That’s the album in a nutshell.”

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ALBUMS OF THE YEAR - EVERY HOME SHOULD HAVE ONE

Yala! Records

COIL MUSICK TO PLAY IN THE DARK

DANIEL O’SULLIVAN & RICHARD YOUNGS TWELVE OF HEARTS

HAPPYNESS FLOATR

HINDS THE PRETTIEST CURSE

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The slow approach of Copenhagen’s best R&B, by Gemma Samways.

Photography by Gloria Berenice Moreno

Erika de Casier In an industry renowned for wildly hyping emerging talent and casting it out in the cold again in alarmingly quick succession, the quiet, unhurried ascent of Copenhagen’s Erika de Casier feels strangely comforting.

A word-of-mouth success, when her superb debut album, Essentials, came out in May 2019, there was no huge fanfare, no sponsored content, no big prize giveaway; just a small celebratory post on the singer/producer’s personal Instagram account featuring her holding a copy of the vinyl. Of course, you could attribute this minimalist marketing approach to the limited budgets that come with self-releasing records, but today the softly-spoken, alt-R&B singer confirms she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“Because it wasn’t like one day I had a thousand more followers or something, I’ve been able to answer when people have written me to say, I really like your album. And that has been really nice for me because I’ve been able to process it in a way that wasn’t unnatural to me. Because if I think it was just like, ‘Boom! Let’s go, world’, then where do you start?

“Also, I really like when I find a record by myself, like, ‘What’s this? Why haven’t I heard of it?’ That’s a very nice feeling and I think it makes you connect with the music more than if you saw an ad or something for it.”

Though de Casier’s quest to make meaningful connections is by no means unique, the manner in which this desire mirrors the music she makes definitely is. Synthesising influences from west coast hip-hop, trip-hop and ’00s R&B, Essentials’ slowburning productions still feel arrestingly intimate even though their appeal has proved far-reaching. Spending an hour with de Casier today, it transpires this mellow musical world is a fitting reflection of the gentle, unassuming manner with which she’s lived her life so far.

— Leaving Portugal — Born in Portugal to a Belgian mother and Cape Verdean father, de Casier was raised in the Lisbon suburb of Estoril until the age of 10 when her mother moved her and her younger brother to Ribe, a tiny Danish village just outside Aarhus. Understandably, de Casier recalls the shift in lifestyle as a shock. “It was, for me, a very visual change also because we came by train to Denmark and the nature is different, the temperature is

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different.” She continues, with a laugh, “It was raining when we arrived and I was like, ‘What is this?! Why did you move us here?’

“It was hard at first being taken away from my safety net and the whole Portuguese culture and put in this very small town in Denmark where people were maybe a little bit more reserved.

I think you accept change better as a child, maybe – you do ask a lot of questions but you do adapt easily. And I did do that but I also had a hard time understanding this feeling I had of not feeling as accepted as I did before.”

As de Casier explains, these outsider feelings ran far deeper than just her nationality or native tongue. “Me and my brother were the only kids that weren’t white in the school, so of course you’re easy targets for bullying. My self-image back then was not so good either, because if you only have friends with blonde hair and blue eyes, and your mom has blue eyes and blonde hair, then of course you’re like ‘Why do I not have blue eyes and blonde hair?’ And because my dad wasn’t living with us, MTV was the only place where I saw other black people, growing up, so that was super important.”

Reflecting on the period today, de Casier displays a complete lack of bitterness or remorse. “I can’t go back and change my childhood and I wouldn’t want to,” she smiles. “I’ve often thought how would I have been as a person if we had just stayed in Portugal? What would I have done? And I don’t think I would have ever gone into music. I think the experience of being isolated and having a lot of time for myself meant that creating became a way of dealing with all these emotions.”

— Finding trip hop — Like a lot of artists, it was a break-up that first moved her to write music. “Terrified” of playing instruments thanks to the disciplinarian teaching methods of the piano tutor she was briefly taught by as a child, at the end of high school de Casier taught herself to produce music on her laptop, initially just to provide a distraction from her heartbreak. Her passion snowballed from there, leading to her undertaking a Masters in Electronic Music, and joining hyped Aarhus house crew Regelbau, as one half of the Copenhagen-based, dark R&B duo Saint Cava.

When her band mate Andreas Vasegaard eventually moved cities, de Casier shifted her focus to solo productions and began laying the foundations for her debut.

Written over the course of a year, and co-produced with Regelbau’s Natal Zaks AKA El Trick, Essentials found de Casier mining her formative fascinations with Destiny’s Child, Aaliyah, Usher, TLC, and Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora, mixed with the textured atmospherics of Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky. “I don’t have a very powerful vocal and also I really like it when a vocal fits the music,” she explains. “So trip hop for me was an eye opener, in the fact you don’t have to be able to do all these technical things with your voice – it’s more about the expression.”

Breakout single ‘Little Bit’ illustrated this point beautifully, pairing a breathy top line with a hypnotic, G-funk-inspired groove hewn from harpsichord and Moog-style whistles. It was this song that prompted Dua Lipa to slide into de Casier’s Instagram DMs and confess herself a fan, leading to de Casier remixing ‘Physical’ back in March at the request of Dua’s management.

Having steadily built to this point, it does feel like de Casier’s career has now gone up another gear entirely. After around 18 months of private discussions, in September she announced her signing to 4AD and shared ‘No Butterflies, No Nothing’, the lead single from her as-yet-untitled second album. A burst of dreamy R&B embellished with celestial harp trills and elastic sub bass, the song examines unrealistic relationship expectations, and is accompanied by a soft-focus video pastiching the social formalities in costume drama.

“If I had to be honest, I got super cold feet when [the video] came out,” she laughs of her deliberately hammy acting in the short. “Because I was like, what did I do? What monster

have I created? It’s purposely kitschy so I hope people get that.

I hope I don’t become a meme or something.”

Though not necessarily sonically representative, she sees the single as being very much from the same family spiritually as the rest of the record, which was written throughout lockdown and is co-produced once more by El Trick. At the time of our conversation in October, de Casier describes the album as “90% done”, having just come back from a writing trip in Svartskog, near Oslo, where she shared a cabin with her musician friends Clarissa Connolly, and Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt of Norwegian techno duo Smerz.

“If you’re expecting Essentials you’re not going to get it of course, because Essentials is made,” she smiles. “I do think I’ve evolved, both skills-wise and in terms of the aspect of self-acceptance in the lyrics as well. I’ve written not only from personal experience but also included fantasies of how I would have wanted to react to a certain situation. So that’s been very inspiring actually, because instead of being like, ‘Ok I was a victim in this story,’ I’m like, ‘No, no, no – I ruled that situation.’”

As she explains, the real growth has come in her perception of her own capabilities. “More than ever, I have confidence in my songwriting and I trust my ideas. And I think being able to be comfortable while I am creating and releasing music is success for me, really. Like, I don’t have goals like, ‘By 2022, I want to play this arena’ or whatever. Not at all. It’s about being happy in the moment.” While everyone else is measuring success in streams, likes and shares, it’s heartening to see de Casier content to chart her own course.

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Arlo Parks

A young poet dissects her own feelings, by Jemima Skala.

Photography by Christopher Fenner

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Because of a wrong number mix-up, I’m ten minutes late calling Arlo Parks for our scheduled interview. While I bluster away with apologies, she’s understanding and sweet, putting me entirely at ease and so making an odd reversal in the roles of interviewer and interviewee. We go on to talk about this at length: Arlo sees herself as an empath, someone who is highly sensitive in identifying the emotions and pains of others and often taking these on themselves.

This goes some way towards explaining her music and the swell of popularity behind it. Her 2018 debut single ‘Cola’ was a stripped-back confessional detailing heartbreak and healing.

Parks performed her recent single ‘Black Dog’ at The Glastonbury Experience 2020 – one of the few artists to be invited to play at Worthy Farm this year – and it catapulted her into a wider consciousness. ‘Black Dog’ is Parks reckoning with the limits of her own ability to help those around her, the sparse instrumentations and near-whispered vocals creating an intimacy that draws her audience in, hoping for healing through identification.

“I was just always very sensitive to other people’s energies,” she says. “It really affected me, and I always had that urge to step in and do something, help them. It’s strange to explain, but even in a social scenario with somebody that I don’t know that well, I feel like I can read the micro-expressions on their face and see if they’re upset. It’s quite tiring, to be honest!”

The opening line of ‘Black Dog’ (“I’d lick the grief right off your lips”) is, as Arlo terms it, “dismantling that saviour complex, as it were.” She’s very open about her own shortcomings and lessons learned from them, saying, “It’s a lesson that I’ve learnt over time – that idea that you can’t save someone, especially someone that doesn’t want to be saved or has their own things to process. I’ve grown to see that although you can of course be a positive force in someone’s life and encourage them to help themselves, the change does have to come from within.”

This idea of being a positive force for change is what drives her music career. She became an ambassador for the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) over the first UK lockdown (“we really have to take care of each other”) and her upcoming debut album, Collapsed In Sunbeams, is packed full of little vignettes that verbalise interior mental struggles so that they become easier to bear. ‘Caroline’ narrates a fight between a couple that Arlo supposedly overhears at a bus stop; ‘For Violet’ is a heart-wrenching plea to a friend (“Wait, you know when college starts again you’ll manage / Wait, you know that I’ll be there to kiss the damage”); ‘Bluish’ is about the difficulty of setting boundaries with someone who refuses to respect them.

Her frank lyrics have provoked a strong reaction from fans; the comments on YouTube under the ‘Black Dog’ music video have people relating their experiences with suicidal thoughts, depression and the weight of Black masculinity.

“On one side of things, I definitely feel blessed that people feel they can approach me with the same emotional openness

that I approach my lyrics with,” Arlo measures, “but it can be difficult. I’m grateful that my fans feel like they can trust me to that extent, but sometimes I do need to set boundaries because everything that I read does weigh quite heavily on me. I’m quite sensitive.”

— Weight off my shoulders — This pressure to use her platform for the benefit of others was focalised this summer after the murder of George Floyd. As a Black queer person working in the music industry, Arlo says that she wanted to use her platform responsibly. “It was strange, there’s never been a moment like this where I’ve actually had a platform, so I just spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to express myself, and just mainly giving focus towards Black joy and Black artists I thought were cool and trying to spread awareness in that way.” She pauses. “It was hard for me, especially because people were looking to me for certain answers or wanted me to be a voice for something. As a Black person, it’s just my lived reality. This is just who I am and have been since I was born.”

Whenever she is working through knotty or uncomfortable feelings, like those that arose at seeing graphic images of Black people dying circulating the internet, Arlo says she turns to writing. “I’ve been writing ever since I could, and for me it’s a source of healing,” she explains. “It helps me dissect my own feelings; especially with painful ones, it gives me a sense of purpose to be able to turn painful or melancholy situations into something that could bring other people hope. It’s just my favourite, I just love words!”

Arlo mentions feeling energised by writing that she identifies with when she reads the works of Zadie Smith or Virginia Woolf. “There’s this sense of natural excitement and playfulness in the way that I approach writing, and after I’ve written a stream of consciousness I do feel like there’s a weight off of my shoulders, or it feels as though I’ve created something out of nothing, which is a beautiful thing.” She links this to her very instinctual writing process, which fed into her work on her debut album. “I very much just follow my impulses. The whole process of writing a song, for me, is just me bouncing around excitedly.

I don’t really sit down and sombrely ponder things. The energy carries into the music, definitely just because it’s very emotional for me. I’m literally riding emotional waves and strange impulses when I’m writing, and it comes from a very earnest place for me.

There’s nothing that’s really constructed or false, it’s just me having fun.”

— Collapsed In Sunbeams — When it came to making Collapsed In Sunbeams, Parks holed herself up in an Airbnb in Hoxton with her producer,

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“Sometimes I do need to set boundaries because everything that I read does weigh quite heavily on me” “incubated in the world of the record”, and managed to bash out an entire debut album over lockdown. She brought her teenage journals and notebooks to garner inspiration from, determining “which were the experiences that had shaped me and which were the traumas and the joys and the confusions that had marked my adolescence; that was the crux of the record.” She muses, “It was quite a free-flowing process, and most of the songs were written in a few hours, even an hour or so, and some of them were written and recorded in the same 24 hours. It was very much spikes of inspiration. That’s how I work, it feels like a lightning bolt strike. I rarely ponder over something for ages.”

In a sense, it’s precisely these strikes of inspiration that allow her to create work that’s relatively unbound from the confines of genre. Collapsed In Sunbeams carries elements of jazz, R&B, folk, indie and pop, which Arlo attributes to the mishmash of her parents’ tastes – her dad favoured Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk while her mum played a lot of Prince and ’80s French pop – as well as her own eclectic music taste, shaped by YouTube algorithms that led her to emo and indie music. I ask what her thoughts are on genre classifications, given that her work floats freely between them, and she says, “On one side of things, it’s useful in terms of providing a listener with the general world that an album operates in, but at the same time, all of my favourite albums are difficult to categorise in those linear formats. I don’t know what I would describe my album as if I were to say one genre. I guess maybe pop music?” She continues, “I’m pretty sure people have called my music every single genre, from indie folk to hip hop, so that makes me feel like I’m doing something right cos

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they can’t quite place it! There have been a few times when I’ve been put in the hip hop and rap category and I’m like, well it’s just not that, is it?” She then rattles off a scarily well-prepared list of her favourite genre-bending albums, including Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Portishead’s Dummy, Mama’s Gun by Erykah Badu and Syro by Aphex Twin. It’s an appropriate melting pot from which her own work has emerged.

Having made an entire debut album in the first UK lockdown, it’s more than fair that Arlo just wants to rest this time around. “I was giving a lot of energy out, so now I’m just trying to take it back in, to be honest,” she says. Reading is her primary way of doing this – she’s worked her way through Mrs Dalloway and Where The Reasons End by Yiyun Lee whereas during the first lockdown, she was reading heavy Russian literature – but she says she’s still keeping busy. “Keeping busy is taking care of myself,” she stresses. “If I just sit down, I will just not get back up for three weeks. I taught myself to DJ in the first lockdown, and this time I’m cooking, just making bread, making gnocchi, going for runs.” She laughs. “I don’t know if I’m being particularly productive, but just being active in some way makes me feel better. It’s just about trusting your body and doing what helps you.”

With a debut album campaign and a poetry collection in the works, she has much to rest up for. Talking to her, it’s a shock to remind myself that Arlo Parks has just turned twenty.

She displays a wisdom and a self-knowledge that takes most people a whole lifetime to come close to; it’s both intimidating and strangely heartening. If Arlo Parks is what the next generation of pop artists looks like, that’s a very good thing.

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Reviews Albums

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Albums

Black Country, New Road — For The First Time (ninja tune) In an interview from years ago, the comedian and occasional music journalist Stewart Lee bemoaned, or perhaps merely pointed out, a cultural phenomenon. He noted the glut of Scottish power-pop bands like Teenage Fanclub who perhaps wouldn’t have come into existence had a sudden influx of Big Star LPs not appeared in their local record shops during the late 1980s. Speaking to a distancing from the local, Lee claims that the current age of immediate information exchange causes the same thing to occur in an accelerated and diversified state, as ideas and genres are blurred by dissemination on a much wider scale, far removed from the source. It’s not a reoccurring past, more an ever-present present. While the Lee anecdote might be misremembered on my part – which seems strangely apt – it at least helps to situate an understanding of where Black Country, New Road are coming from.

Geographically at least, the septet are based in London, a configuration of musicians gathered under the New Weird Britain banner alongside the likes of Squid and Black Midi. They’re superficially a rock band, but one whose sound isn’t easily defined, because it seems to incorporate countless different styles, owing as much to many of the members’ classical, jazz and klezmer music training as it does to their willingness to embrace anything they’re keen on. Their sonicallysimilar former group Nervous Conditions – also hotly-tipped until multiple accusations of sexual assault were made against their lead singer Connor Browne in 2018 – were rumoured to be working with Brian Eno. For a better idea of Black Country, New Road’s sound, it’s fun to entertain the thought that Eno had his co-curated 1978 No New York compilation in mind

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when he first came across them, which featured the skronking mutant funk of James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and DNA. It speaks to a certain climate in popular rock music over the last few years where, much like the early days of post-punk, a kitchen sink methodology met with a postmodern regard for both high and low culture is exacerbated by the ease and accessibility of streaming platforms and online piracy. This has been the feeling of watching Black Country, New Road play, as well as listening to their debut LP, For The First Time. Daniel Dylan Wray’s summation in his L&Q cover interview with the group last year was a neat one: “the band’s approach […] feels like the formation of a new language; a distinctly Generation Z approach to musical overlap and hyper-awareness of the world around them as a result of a life lived in a forever switched-on digital age.”

But it’s a question worth asking whether Black Country, New Road would’ve happened at all were it not for the widespread re-appraisal of Slint’s 1991 post-rock benchmark Spiderland around 2005, and the rest of their minuscule but, as it turns out, highly influential output. Vocalist and guitarist Isaac Wood’s spoken deliveries are seemingly woven from the same fabric. Wood and Luke Mark’s guitar interplay, paired with bassist Tyler Hyde and drummer Charlie Wayne’s dynamic rhythm section, vaguely invoke 1990s Midwestern emo. Saxophonist Lewis Evans, violinist Georgia Ellery and keyboardist May Kershaw send the sound of the band into different dimensions entirely, plunging into cacophonous free noise and melodically shimmering finesse, whether the occasion calls for it or not. Still, there are many superficial similarities between For The First Time and Spiderland (ones that are not lost on the band, if the lyrics of ‘Science Fair’, their third single, is to be believed): both have six tracks, each of which nudge at or exceed the fiveminute mark; both are made by relatively young musicians; obvious comparisons aside, both sound new and modern for their respective times. Both also have

the veneer of ‘masterpiece’ about them.

For The First Time comes off as a wildly successful experiment and, much like Slint, it’s easy to wonder if Black Country, New Road will ever make anything remotely similar ever again. The closing track, cheekily called ‘Opus’, begs the logical next question: will they feel the need to make anything ever again?

Black Country, New Road must be aware of the immense pressure being exerted on For The First Time.

Heaped with praise after three singles, a wicked reputation as live performers and murmurs of “best rock band in the world” in the air, the group could’ve gone one of two ways with their debut; disregard your own hype, or face it head on. Clearly, they decided that the LP simply had to be a statement. To this end, ‘Opus’ acts as an expanded reprise of the opener ‘Instrumental’ – which at once recalls Eastern European klezmer music and a rock cover of an RPG battle theme – and ‘Track X’ is a gorgeous acid folk song crafted from pieces of melody and chord structures lifted from ‘Sunglasses’, giving off the ambition of Rush-flavoured multi-part suites without much of the pretence. While at times it could feel like a nagging lack of material, the self-referential musicality of For The First Time is neatly reflected in Wood’s self-referential lyricism. Passing references are made to fellow scenesters black midi, Jerskin Fendrix, Wood’s own Guest solo moniker and the near-constant cropping-up of that elusive “Black Country”, a reminder that, while the group are London-based, they are not necessarily a London group.

I’m left wondering what he means by it, and indeed what the band’s name refers to in the first place. Black Country; the region in the West Midlands, so-called for its centrality to the coal, iron, glass and steel industries in the early 19th century.

New Road; a provocation; a different way of being and progressing.

When Wood isn’t referencing himself or his friends, other figures and aspects of a wider culture pepper his prose – Kanye West, The Fonz, Nutribullets, six-part Danish crime dramas, sourdough bread, ‘thank u, next’ – in

Albums a way that might seem gauche to the average songwriter. But these are more than just empty “references, references, references,” as Wood puts it in ‘Science Fair’. The repetition signifies an emptying kind of fatigue but, like Slint’s weird fiction of haunted Americana, the speakers of Black Country, New Road’s tall tales invoke a colourful, lived-in world full of stuff, and yet are also plagued by loss – of people, places, culture and self – only half-understood through the media they consume. The surly, privileged brat of For The First Time’s sprawling, nine-minute centrepiece ‘Sunglasses’ – re-tooled and fuelled by menacing forward momentum, improving on the winning formula of its 2019 seven-inch version – grumbles about endemic declines in British industry and values in a way that is at once a caricature and also full of feverish, Joycean poetic cadences. Often the perspectival quantum leaps feel like all-too-intimate portrayals of Wood himself, wracked with self-critique and guilt in the search for an authentic self. “Why don’t you sing with an English accent?” somebody asks him on ‘Athens, France’. “Well, I guess it’s too late to change it now,” he concludes.

These songs feel very personal, pointed messages to former lovers and forgotten friends; fractal stories, always deeply-felt and engaging, whether we can tell what they’re directly about or not.

The losses felt across this album – some recognisable, others frustratingly lacking in discernible boogeymen – hold many mysteries as they play out across the dizzying comprehensiveness of the band’s music. What’s for certain though is that it feels like a fitting representation of living today. It’s becoming annoyed at Instagram ads that deign to represent your needs and wants. It’s a tacit reminder that genre doesn’t exist anymore – or rather never did. It’s history in the making, part two. It’s frustration felt at an American TV show for not representing your lived experience, and guilt on your part for not already living it. It’s Weezer meets The Fall meets Cardiacs meets Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West, written in a bedsit rehearsal space far from home; but it’s more than just “The world’s second-

best Slint tribute act”. It’s the dying of the light. Forget the best band in the world.

This feels like everything a rock band can do. 10/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Anna B Savage — A Common Turn (city slang) Debuts are daunting.

There are countless factors to consider when introducing oneself, including, crucially, how much of your identity (and inherent flaws) you’re willing to reveal to a faceless audience. In such circumstances, adopting a persona seems like an attractive defence mechanism to protect one’s ego. With A Common Turn, however, London-based singer-songwriter Anna B Savage leaves little to the imagination, with detailed insights into her insecurities and informative experiences which preceded this milestone. By the time we reach the album’s closing notes, Savage establishes herself as an engaging, endearing individual – someone you’d like to befriend.

Her deft lyricism, propelled by dexterous arrangements, which shift between sweetly plucked acoustic melodies and infectious industrial beats, shines across these ten tracks. Grounding these otherworldly compositions are universal themes spurred by heartbreak (“I wanted to text you but it would mean I thought about you”) and battles with self-confidence. Furthermore, her aptitude for storytelling is strengthened by marrying humour with nostalgia. Shuffling between Leonard Cohen and The Spice Girls, conjuring the image of a lingerie-clad Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and paying homage to a ceramic Owl mug crafted by Edwyn Collins, her cultural touchstones are farreaching. Such eclecticism trickles into her equally varied, alluring soundscapes.

A Common Turn is packed with rewarding melodic transformations.

‘Two’ and ‘BedStuy’ are fine examples of the artistry at play. Amplified by Savage’s exceptional vocals (her parents are classical singers), her distinct timbre bearing a likeness to both Anonhi and early recordings by Angel Olsen, it’s easy to find yourself completely enveloped by the breadth of the intricately textured instrumentation. In this regard, Savage – aided by William Doyle, who assisted with the album’s production – provides an exhilarating listening experience.

It’s unfathomable that such a singular artist should doubt herself on this accomplished debut, but by making her vulnerabilities visible, she breaks down the barrier between artist and audience.

Despite the ambitious sonic twists and turns – a driving force in the record’s foundation – it’s the impenetrable air of solitude in her performances which are most effective in captivating the listener. This is most keenly felt on ‘Baby Grand’ when she cups her mouth as though revealing a secret before the arrangement erupts.

Thoroughly modern in its makeup, A Common Turn is simultaneously reflective and rambunctious. Anna B Savage has made an outstanding first impression. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

Amirali — Trial And Error (dark matter) Eight years is a really long time in music. When an artist waits the better part of a decade between releases, they paint themselves into a corner. Either they come back with more 37of the same, a refinement of their sound, usually met with a shrug and a “That’s it?”, or they can take a gamble and do what Amirali has done – reinvent.

Those heading into the producer’s new album anticipating the funky four-to-

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Albums the-floor beats of his 2012 debut In Time will leave feeling disappointed. Trial & Error’s ambient, avant-garde soundscapes make for a less immediately gripping listen. Give it time, though, and its suffocating emptiness will enrapture you.

Being aware of Amirali’s journey up to now, Trial & Error sounds like a truer expression of himself. Its pared-back yet immaculately structured arrangements suddenly come into focus when you discover his background is in architecture.

His training as a classical pianist shines on tracks such as ‘A Fly In Your Tongue’ and ‘Vertigo’, where glistening keys poke through a haze of pads and distorted vocals, and particularly on devastating closer ‘Last Secrets’. Bereft of all but the subtlest electronics, it’s an appropriately stark note to end the album on.

As withdrawn as Trial & Error can sound at times, it never feels impersonal.

Rather, after eight years, Amirali has returned with an album that sounds like nothing else out there – an album no one else in the world could have made. 8/10 Alexander Smail

Nubiyan Twist — Freedom Fables (strut) Nubiyan Twist take a leap out of the densely packed crowd of UK jazz, soul and folk music collectives with Freedom Fables, a summation of the group’s talent that sees them elevated into the highest tier of their cohort.

The Leeds-conceived, Londonbased project’s third album traverses musical and social histories with lightness and dexterity, weaving nine tales of personal memoir into one long call for unity. ‘Buckle Up’ sees Soweto Kinch, the UK sax player and rapper, and Nubiyan’s resident vocalist Nick Richards communicate the importance of looking inwards to find the answers you need, while

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Kinch’s alto noodles rather than parps, as if rifling through his subconscious while millions of memories flash by at a speed too fast for his mind’s eye to keep pace with.

Just as easily, Nubiyan turn their hand to hip-swivelling Brazilian rhythms on ‘Keeper’, where regular collaborator Cherise’s hollers of “We fight the keeper of the keys” come off like a global call to arms, while ‘Ma Wonka’ features a guest turn from Ebo Taylor protégé Pat Thomas on vocals (the man often referred to as The Golden Voice of Africa) on a highlife track that could pass as the greatest dusty bargain bin discovery of your life.

The stylistic shifts don’t end there: ‘Flow’ is a tale of anxiety told with a jerky jazz-cum-R&B forward motion that calls to mind Esperanza Spalding and is the sort of track that could easily see Nubiyan reach new audiences with its more accessible arrangement, as does ‘24-7’, a smooth, smoky number with vocals from Ego Ella May that recently found itself making national radio playlists.

Album standout ‘Tittle Tattle’ is an attack on the crawling, pernicious power that gossip continues to cast over us, its soukous rhythms clashing with UK garage-like beats before it bursts into a spider-dancing sax funk breakdown.

There is no suggestion that the group have softened their edges or muted their ambitions; on the contrary, this would seem to be the record that has unlocked their most potent weapon, which is storytelling. 8/10 Max Pilley

DJ Earl — Bass + Funk & Soul (moveltraxx) This is an album about nailing the fundamentals. All the talk of impenetrability and high BPMs misses the cool confidence essential to footwork, the style on which DJ Earl cut his teeth. There’s

nowhere to hide when you’re working with constantly looped samples, classic drum machine sounds and your own ingenuity. Those beats have to knock; that crowd has to feel something. DJ Earl stays true to form here, and delivers one no-nonsense banger after another.

But there’s a surprising warmth and poignancy to his approach, welcoming newcomers in with gorgeous melodies and accessible grooves. ‘Baaaaaa’ sets the tone with its joyous horn lines and clattering hats. Each element is pristine and carefully rendered. ‘Ya Bish’ might intimidate with its incessant hook, but close attention is rewarded with a graceful build. Even the grittiest moments, like the R-rated funk on ‘Right Dere’, are offset smartly elsewhere.

The album’s most heartfelt track is ‘Shitz Aint Safe No Mo’, featuring Traxxman. As you’d expect, the two let the beat and its elegant samples do the talking – but when the beats are this good, it’s all you can do to listen and soak it all in. 8/10 Skye Butchard

Bicep — Isles (ninja tune) In the years since their self-titled 2017 debut, Bicep have firmly established themselves as a touchpoint for contemporary electronic music. With ‘Aura’, ‘Opal’ and the poignantly nostalgic ‘Glue’ now anthemic staples in DJ sets and record collections, Isles affirms that essential status as another landmark release.

From the slow-burn magic of ‘Atlas’ to the Xanax beats of ‘Rever’, Bicep artfully find ways of channeling nagging, wistful emotions – ostensibly the antithesis of the club – into progressive, exhaling euphoria. It’s what makes ‘Apricots’ feel like a warm companion to ‘Glue’ with its misty memories of big nights and lost days, balances out hefty

Albums bass rumbles with more meditative melodies on ‘Sundial’, and pushes ‘Fir’ into a more cosmic take on Tarot Sport-era Fuck Buttons.

And while they continue to perfectly capture the spirit of raves and summers past, what makes Bicep so continually satisfying is not just their editor’s eye for trimming sonic fat, but also their ability to throw up something a little fresher, as they do on the bass-heavy futurism of ‘X’. With its serious synth drama and echoing vocal sweetness, it’s a demonstration of the pair’s immaculate production sensibility, as well as the skillful reimagination of the trance, techno and prog house foundations that typically power their sound.

Still, when you’ve perfected electronic melancholy as effortlessly as they have, you earn the right to bathe in its bittersweet beauty, and Isles is another masterclass in musing over moments you didn’t even know you’d missed. 8/10 Reef Younis

Midnight Sister — Painting the Roses (jagjaguwar) Part of the reason for the prevalence of second-album syndrome is the tendency of artists to cram every good idea they have into their debut, just in case it’s the only chance they get to make a personal statement. In the case of Midnight Sister, a Los Angeles two-piece who turned in a beguiling debut in Saturn Over Sunset three years ago, the well has evidently not run dry; Painting the Roses is a delicate tapestry of high concepts, one that takes an appealingly lax approach to genre boundaries.

Singer Juliana Giraffe travelled to Argentina in order to reconnect with her roots during the writing of Painting the Roses, something that bandmate Ari Balouzian subtly reflects in his composi-

tions; he artfully inflects woozy opener ‘Doctor Says’ with a handsome, shimmering guitar, whilst on the experimental collage of ‘My Elevator Song’, noirish brass and strings clash with brooding synth work. It’s at those moments, where unlikely musical bedfellows are thrown together, that Painting the Roses is at its most engaging, with the more pedestrian likes of ‘Satellite’ and ‘Dearly Departed’ pleasantly evoking dream pop, but not in a manner that hasn’t been done better elsewhere. Intriguing, if not essential.

6/10 Joe Goggins

Arlo Parks — Collapsed In Sunbeams (transgressive) Arlo Parks was being touted as the spokesperson for Generation Z even before she announced the release of her debut album. If she felt any pressure to live up to that label, or the praise being heaped on her by everyone from Billie Eilish to Florence Welch, then it doesn’t show on Collapsed In Sunbeams.

It’s a confident, if perhaps musically safe, release that will help to cement her reputation for relatability.

As much of a hip-hop influenced performance poet as she is a singersongwriter, these twelve tracks are littered with pop culture references.

Twin Peaks, Robert Smith’s makeup and Sylvia Plath all make appearances in vivid lyrical descriptions of everyday life and emotions.

In a London accent that shares the unstrained lightness of Lily Allen, she reassures listeners that things will get better. “We all have scars / I know it’s hard,” she acknowledges on ‘Hope’, while on ‘Black Dog’ she tells a friend suffering from depression, “I would do anything to get you out your room.”

The music is as laidback as her delivery, blending R&B with jazz-

inflected pop and funk. At its sweetest, as on the Clairo-backed ‘Green Eyes’, she could almost be Corinne Bailey Rae with teenage hickeys. The only track to really challenge this smooth mid-paced confessional is ‘For Violet’, which recalls Portishead in its low trip-hop bass.

It would have benefitted the album’s low-key mood if a few more tracks had been willing to experiment but it still has a consistency that’s impressive in a debut. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Buck Meek — Two Saviours (keeled scales) A gentle Southern breeze sweeps Two Saviours, the new record from Buck Meek, Big Thief ’s resident, guitar-slinging Texan. As dulcet country strings dance like dust particles against the glaring sunlight, Meek’s words forge ornate talismans, each one a cherished memento from within the constant flux of pain, healing and discovery to have peppered his life so far.

Whilst his regular songwriting partner Adrianne Lenker continues to take time out in upstate New York, Meek finds himself looking inwards and revisiting his roots. Shacked up with his bandmates in an old Louisiana manor house, Meek’s songs are, like his stately surrounds, far beyond their years. His gentle wonderings about life, adventure and resilience in heartbreak are carried by the sort of wisdom often found with a much older head. He’s hardly ostentatious about it either. Although the song’s narrator runs into several roadblocks in ‘Second Sight’, any setbacks appear trivial behind the sprightly guitars and carefree choral hooks.

Perspectives are distorted on ‘Two Moons’, which is reprised to take on dual interpretations. It ties in nicely with Meek’s multidimensional sentiment that

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Albums human emotions transcend binaries, and the way in which we process pain and sadness should always be treated as such.

7/10 Oliver Rankine

Divide and Dissolve — Gas Lit (invada) You only need to glance at the comments below a Divide and Dissolve music video to see that they’re (ahem) divisive. There’s usually some grumbling about the drone aspect of their doominflected sound. “You must have a lot of hate in your hearts,” dismisses one commenter. “When do they stop tuning and start playing?” another asks, despite the fact that guitarist Takiaya Reed and drummer Sylvie Nehill’s approach doesn’t feel a million miles off anything Sunn O))) might do. Reed is Black and Cherokee, and Nehill is Māori. You connect the dots here.

Man-baby gatekeeping aside, Divide and Dissolve certainly offer something out of the ordinary. 2017’s BASIC and 2018’s ABOMINATION broke the mould of conventional metal with grainy production and clear anti-colonial, antiracist, anti-capitalist messaging that miraculously didn’t feel overly didactic. Their third LP, Gas Lit, holds on to the integrity of those past releases, but they’ve notably added a few extra weights to their crushing minimalism with more robust production and a renewed sense of abyssal hypnotism.

Much of Gas Lit sounds like continuous, viscous sludge (in a good way), occasionally broken up by chilling strings, woodwinds and a brief impasse into a deadpan poem-manifesto on ‘DID YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY’. There’s an overwhelming sense of solemn, restrained ceremony throughout, and yet none of it wears thin. The torrential outpouring of scorched noise

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on ‘IT’S REALLY COMPLICATED’ even makes incredibly oppressive music sound like enormous fun to play.

On that note, it’s worth remembering that, for every ounce of negativity in their comments section, there are twice as many that are overwhelmingly positive.

This group means a lot – they’re a tacit reminder that metal’s expressive potential is limitless. Fuck the man-babies: Divide and Dissolve the coolest thing to happen to metal since Deafheaven. 8/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Daniel Knox — Won’t You Take Me With You (h. p. johnson presents) Chicago-based crooner Daniel Knox has been around for some time, but 2018’s Chasescene was a critical high, on which Knox was lauded for his distinctive brand of darkly comic fables and bombastic baritone.

Owing to his storytelling mastery, on Won’t You Take Me With You we slip instantly back into his domain. And like returning to a favourite TV series reprised for another season, it feels as though we never left, with characters, storylines and relationships ready to be recommenced.

Opener ‘King of the Ball’ details our protagonist’s self-important demands and murderous contemplations, with a jaunty verbosity that recalls Rain Dogs-era Tom Waits. ‘Fall Apart’ sees Knox craft his most dejected character, as sombre piano and delicate strings accompany his description of a relationship at breaking point. His sonic palette also proves more expansive than before. The lounge jazz foundations of ‘Vinegar Hill’ are jestered

by Knox’s pompous vibrato and fraught brassy embellishments; the lengthy ‘Look At Me’ allows electric guitar fuzz and synthesiser melodies to create an imposingly decadent soundscape.

On this LP, Knox connects the dots between stories told past and present.

The indignation that fringed Chasescene seems to be replaced by an air of cathartic acceptance, perhaps indicating Knox is in a better place. Across this striking record, he proves he is beyond capable of producing excellence; his is a majestic body of work that demands repeat listening. 9/10 Tom Critten

Shanghai Restoration Project — Brave New World Symphony (undercover culture music) Much like the sleeve of their new record, the sound of prolific electronic duo Shanghai Restoration Project is surreal. Founded in the mid-2000s by Bad Boy Records producer Dave Laing and later joined by Sun Yunfan (who also designed the artwork), the multi-instrumentalists blend synths, samples, jazz-inspired percussion, improvised piano, altered vocals and more with a penchant for leftfield songwriting akin to acts like Toe or Battles.

Released just a year after their last project, Brave New World Symphony was conceived and recorded entirely in lockdown at the pair’s home in Brooklyn. The nine tracks that emerge are reflective and adventurous, purposefully using the freedom provided by musical experimentation to protest their sudden inability to physically move. ‘Involuntary Prophet’ acts as an initiation of sorts, the alluring atmosphere and hypnotic beats evoking a ritualistic rhythm, as if you’re being ceremoniously welcomed into the world of the SRP. ‘Present Continuous’ follows, and sees the twosome incorporate vocals as if they’re instruments themselves, and the pulsating ‘Night Odyssey’ is a highlight from the album’s latter half.

The playful tone continues elsewhere, like on ‘Positive Disintegra-

Albums tion’, the album’s longest track at seven minutes, which weaves in and out of synthy passages and jazzy piano escapades, but unfortunately comes off as meandering and slightly kitsch. But despite some lulls, Brave New World Symphony remains the sound of two artists finding joy in evading the predictable, expanding a vibrant musical universe that never takes itself too seriously. 6/10 Woody Delaney

Grandbrothers — All The Unknown (city slang) It’s hard to know how neoclassical will progress to neo-neo-classical when the genre’s forerunners have long since created their own instruments, let artificial intelligence take over the digitised sequencing and made a healthy living from the royalties of café playlists.

How do you uncover a cartographer’s curiosity when all of the world is mapped?

Tucking IDM and electronica in the branches of overgrown hedges and concert pianos in the depths of Berlin’s nightlife, All The Unknown nevertheless positions itself as a surprise, if just for placing of instruments where you don’t expect them. Entering their second decade of experimentation, the third studio album by slow-working duo Grandbrothers delves further into the same analogue-digital divide they’ve always reckoned with.

When they stay focused, the highlights are plentiful. From the propulsive tread of the title track to the soothing flow of ‘Four Rivers’ and its playful, minimalist introduction ‘The Goat Paradox’, All The Unknown has its rich and compelling moments. The sinking of stray arpeggios on ‘Auberge’ into a massage-table drone is the most magical sound Grandbrothers have yet made, and ‘Organism’ is a banger plucked straight from the greenery.

The punchlines-come-club-anthem-drops do wear thin in places. ‘Unrest’ spreads across a tired build, and piano loops become drawn out like jarring elevator music (albeit a pretty exciting elevator). It’s not quite the grand experiment they might think it is, but for the most part it’s a very good listen. 7/10 Tristan Gatward

Shame — Drunk Tank Pink (dead oceans) A lot has changed since Shame released their debut Songs of Praise in summer 2018. When the five-piece emerged they were heralded as Britain’s most exciting new band, this generation’s Great British guitar offering, and they seemed to relish the attitude, hedonism and chaotic live shows that came with that territory. Since then, the South London scene that the band are synonymous with has grown from relative obscurity to dominating the UK alternative charts. There are Speedy Wunderground features in the Metro, and any BBC 6Music listener worth their salt knows about the Brixton Windmill (although the legendary venue is still in dire need of support following the fallout from Covid-19). From the unfaltering math-rock of Black Midi to the use of brass

by Squid and Black Country, New Road, to Dry Cleaning’s blunt, spoken word vocals, ‘guitar music’ has diversified enormously.

Luckily for their fans, though, Shame seem to have resisted the temptation to change tack too much. On Drunk Tank Pink, singer Charlie Steen’s snarling vocal is as vital and fervent as ever, with plenty of the anthemic singalong moments they’re loved for. But their sound has doubtless been elevated, perhaps by a growth in confidence after the success of Songs of Praise. The guitars are just as turbulent, but their riffs are tighter and cleaner, particularly on recent

single ‘Alphabet’, and the excellent, Television-esque ‘March Day’. There’s no shortage of chaotic, moshpit-ready breakdowns (‘Water In The Well’, ‘6/1’, ‘Great Dog’), but there are also moments of calm, vulnerability, like the appropriately titled ‘Human, For A Minute’.

“I’m half the man I should be,” mutters Steen over a slow, sultry bassline, calling to mind a less cocksure Baxter Dury.

Album closer ‘Station Wagon’ is the best thing they’ve ever written; a track on which Steen’s energy simmers to boiling point, initially masked by melodic piano and then unleashed along with a wall of reverb and crashing drums.

With Drunk Tank Pink, Shame have achieved what many fail to: they’ve taken what works from their first album, and made it better. Despite the growing competition, it seems they might hold onto their title a little while longer. 7/10 Jessica Wrigglesworth

The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You (astralwerks) The Avalanches have always relied on other people’s music to showcase their creative vision. At their best, they deploy samples with unique poise (see all of their nearperfect debut), and utilise unlikely guest features (about half of their 2016 comeback Wildflower) to create a topsy-turvy world of melting genre boundaries and bizarro hooks.

The group’s new album, alas, is far from their best. Clocking in at 25 tracks and featuring almost as many guests, We Will Always Love You feels like a bloated Hollywood blockbuster, its high-profile cast trying to make up for a substantial lack of ideas.

Supposedly inspired by the romance between scientists Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, We Will Always Love You

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Albums drifts aimlessly through vague love songs with equally vague titles, only occasionally bumping into a hit. Despite the calibre of talent on this record – Neneh Cherry, Blood Orange, Rivers Cuomo, Denzel Curry and Karen O, to name just a few – the tracks all sound uncannily similar, awash with twinkling synths and “spacey” treated vocals. The Avalanches may be reaching for the stars with this album but We Will Always Love You rarely gets to cloud height. 5/10 Mike Vinti

Hilang Child — Every Mover (bella union) Back in the day, euphoria was just a feeling; a buzz you felt down the back of your spine after experiencing something special, vital and life-affirming, like cream of mushroom soup. At some point in the late 2000s, this all changed.

Without anyone realising, euphoria slyly morphed itself into a genre, one filled with reverb chambers, meandering whimpers and tear-soaked sincerity.

Through no fault of his own, Hilang Child has absorbed many of these hackneyed traits. Every Mover, his second solo album, is packed full of hopeful attempts at the epic. From the sanitised synths of ‘Good to be Young’ to the woozy collage of ‘Steppe’, the album tries and fails to force a state of false euphoria through the cracks of the genre.

Despite this, at certain points ingenuity shines through. The subtle psych of ‘King Quail’ drifts into an motorikinfused daydream, suggesting that Hilang Child has it in him to create a more naturally exhilarating sound. Unfortunately, these moments are few and far between.

For much of Every Mover, the listener is subjected to a collection of shimmering genre norms, suggesting that once it’s got a hold of you, ‘euphoria’ is hard to shake.

5/10 Jack Doherty

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Soho Rezanejad — Perform and Surrender (silicone) Copenhagen.

Vienna. Helsingør. Munich. Montreal.

Toronto. St Petersburg. Tromsø. Nantes.

In the halcyon days of 2018 and 2019, New York-born, Denmark-based polymath Soho Rezanejad toured the globe’s coldest cultural capitals off the back of her crystalline debut Six Archetypes. On tour, she would spend the day composing short but vivid pieces, vocalising musical ideas that soaked up the atmosphere and feel of these bold new environments. The results of her toils smatter Perform and Surrender, her latest album, which was heavily conceptualised on the road and completed recently in Copenhagen.

Shaped by her travels and the passing of a loved one, Perform and Surrender sees Rezanejad embrace a far more abstract sound. Throughout her career, she has dabbled in many different media: on her fantastic 2018 debut, she combined synth-laden pop ambience with glassy vocals that echoed Nico, whilst the two-part Honesty Without Compassion is Brutality saw her tamper more and more with translucent samples. Perform and Surrender fits more closely with the latter, as Rezanejad delves further into an increasingly intangible world.

It is an introverted work that is constantly toying with space and time.

Opener ‘Perform’ is a deeply claustrophobic number, as synthesiser glitches take a battering from the sound of a cold hibernal gust. Rather than being the album in microcosm, however, outside of this abrasive opening, Perform and Surrender is characterised by a certain endlessness; eons of space that stretch out eternally.

‘Surrender’ is a glacial sound collage that melds echoing drones with piano lullabies, birdsong and vocal cut-ups over 12 dizzying minutes.

Rezanejad’s voice becomes a clouded

layer that abdicates clarity rather than grants it. And rather than inviting you into her art, the creator keeps you always at a social distance.

Meanwhile, ‘Half the Shore’ is the album’s clear high water mark. It pairs Rezanejad’s croon with a plucked stargazing guitar that jovially nods to Slowdive’s Pygmalion. Slow and dreamlike, it evokes the feeling of loneliness in an unfamiliar city as it winds and peaks and troughs.

Throughout the album, Rezanejad’s voice is a point of intrigue. Where her early works are characterised by stark lyrical performances, the voice frequently becomes another layer here, a low-focus filter. The results are in no way diminished by this blur, though, and from the paranoid beginning to the elegiac and operatic curtain call ‘Sleepless Solitude’, Perform and Surrender showcases many sides of Soho Rezanejad, all of them deeply compelling. 7/10 Cal Cashin

Model 86 — Is Model 86 Dreaming of Being a Butterfly or is a Butterfly Dreaming of Being Model 86? (selfreleased) One thing that ties the monolith of electronic music together is that its fans love a good mystery. Daft Punk, Burial, Aphex Twin, SOPHIE, Actress and Deadmau5 all operate in wildly different artistic and commercial lanes, but all have succeeded by obscuring their identity. Anonymous producers and elaborate personas are built into the culture MODEL 86 that clearly loves. That much is clear from their giddy approach to beatmaking, that fuses unruly subgenres like wonky, plunderphonics and hyperpop together in colourful, vibe-oriented jams.

We don’t know who MODEL 86 is – they’re heavily pixelated in all marketing material. There’s a chance it’ll turn out to

Albums be Joe Goddard or someone. But the music on their debut album has the confidence to match their lofty myth-building. The opening run of ‘I don’t wanna go’, ‘AlldayAllday’ and ‘TRILL’ are brash club bangers that recall classic Hudson Mohawke and Flume without feeling stale.

Then there’s ‘So we’re here then’, a clattering mood piece that builds with glittery synth swells and sharp vocal cuts before melting into a gorgeous string outro. ‘Find My Feet’ marries both sides of MODEL 86 excellently, its funk piano breakdown cutting through the gloriously scatter-brained mix.

Many of the tracks here function as a showcase of ideas rather than fullyformed songs, which can occasionally lead to underwhelming endings. Still, Model 86 is brimming with ideas – their approach is anything but faceless. 7/10 Skye Butchard

Sigur Rós — Odin’s Raven Magic (krunk) Sigur Rós, the Icelandic quartet known for ethereal sounds and the use of classical and mystical elements in their music, were always meant to make this album. The eight long tracks beckon to the contrasting elements of Iceland’s nature: sunny, bird-filled skies and glacial majesty. Spring and winter commingle in this record, the land and its inhabitants at the will of Mother Nature.

Inspired by the Edda, two works of medieval Icelandic literature from the 13th century, Odin’s Raven Magic has existed in parts since 2002, but fans have only been able to witness it in short clips and partial tracks online. Now, the entire project is released as an album with the help of Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson and Steindór Andersen, chanter of Iceland’s traditional epic poetry known as rímur.

The album really exists as a complete project, but there are a few

tracks to look out for specifically. ‘Dvergmál’ builds the epic momentum of the record, blurring the lines between man and nature in what can only be described as a sweeping, cinematic homage to the band’s homeland. This track is followed by ‘Stendur Æva’, whose foreboding atmosphere is conveyed by heavy vocals.

Just as the Edda has been a part of Iceland’s history for centuries, warning people of a coming apocalypse and the freezing of their lands, so will this album become intertwined with Sigur Rós and the climate emergency facing our world – already felt keenly in Iceland, where glaciers are disappearing. “We are being warned again,” concludes Hilmarsson.

7/10 Isabel Crabtree

to experimental sound driving towards a common goal. Neither artist deviates much from the preoccupations of their back catalogues – Moran combining her trademark prepared piano with burbling synths and monstrous drones, Fernow locating harsh vocal samples and winding arpeggiation within gratuitously creepy atmospherics – but the familiarity of the textures here allows the listener an entry point into what might otherwise be a pretty intimidating release.

The cumulative effect is stunning, and hints that if these two were to work together more directly, rather than sideby-side as they do here, they could create something truly groundbreaking. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Kelly Moran & Prurient — Chain Reaction At Dusk (hospital productions) Since starting up Hospital Productions and first dabbling with noise and metal as a teenager in the 1990s, Dominick Fernow has been an extreme musician whom few could rival for consistent invention and transgressive practice.

His work as Prurient is transcendentally nasty, his techno experiments as Vatican Shadow lean and fearless, his many other monikers and side projects a collage of challenging sonics. With this in mind, Kelly Moran, though a very accomplished artist in her own right, might seem like an odd pairing for Fernow – they’re at different stages in their careers, and the aesthetics they work with contrast pretty sharply. Yet on Chain Reaction At Dusk, the split LP they began formulating during a tour together in 2018, the two lock horns in style with unsettling, beautiful results.

They take a vinyl side each, and their contributions run almost in parallel to one another, two distinct approaches

Khruangbin — Late Night Tales (night time stories) With Texan psychonauts Khruangbin at the helm of this Late Night Tales mix, you might assume that they’d stray away from the safety of their idiosyncratic sound that infuses funk and dub with a sprinkling of psychedelia. On the contrary, the band have dug even deeper into the sounds that inspire them, and present an intriguing collage of life around the world in hues of groove-inflected disco.

Conjuring the hazy essence of chilling out whilst the afterparty carries on around you, Brilliantes Del Vuelo’s ‘I Know That’ transports you to an undulating dub soundscape that feels as though it’s being projected through a vocoder.

Buried deep within the song is a sense of revelry; it’s like listening to a party through a wall and never being sure whether you’re at the heart of the action or idly observing on the periphery.

This relatable feeling is tangible throughout Khruangbin’s curation – from the nonsensical conversation on Justine

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Albums & The Victorian Punks’ ‘Still You’ to the mid-’70s cool of ‘Feel The Love’ (taken from the soundtrack of the 1976 blaxploitation film Black Shampoo), and even down to the sumptuous instrumental of their own cover of Kool & the Gang’s ‘Summer Madness’. This edition of Late Night Tales is evocative of the otherworldliness that Khruangbin tend to draw upon as they channel moments of bliss into their work. At times its unfamiliarity can feel disjointed, but overall it’s an ebullient celebration of music’s encyclopaedic nature. 7/10 Tyler Damara Kelly

Goat Girl — On All Fours (rough trade) As their self-titled debut showed, Goat Girl are one of the few British acts still capable of making guitars sound genuinely thrilling, with their dispatches from the frontline of being young, in a city and slightly sad.

In-keeping with their South London peers, they’ve embraced electronics on this record, and whilst – unlike, say, PVA or Jockstrap – those sounds aren’t front and centre, they’re leading down some interesting new avenues. Take the woozy ‘( Jazz) in the Supermarket’, with its nagging daydream synth line that suggests a recent interest in Broadcast. The relatively straightforward, dancefloor-focused ‘Sad Cowboy’, a brilliant disco-not-disco dirge, is tempered by a droll delivery that intelligently refuses to quite let it become a banger. ‘Anxiety Feels’ and ‘PTS Tea’ make lyrically explicit the powerful, fuggy melancholia that permeates the record, and opener ‘Pest’ continues the well-observed gender politics that were often the engine of their debut. The more experimental points, like the off-kilter Krautrock groove of ‘Once Again’, could be teased out more, but one suspects

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that this is the work of future Goat Girl releases. On All Fours feels like a transitional record, but in the best sense of that term. This band’s possibilities remain wide open. 7/10 Fergal Kinney

sub-aquatic apocalypse. On this album, with their trademark snarls and ferocious contempt, Viagra Boys succeed in rendering the personal political and the mundane absurd. 7/10 Rosie Ramsden

Viagra Boys — Welfare Jazz (year0001) “We wrote these songs at a time when I had been in a long-term relationship, taking drugs every day, and being an asshole,” Viagra Boys’ American-born frontman Sebastian Murphy explains of the band’s upcoming album, Welfare Jazz. “I didn’t really realise what an asshole I was until it was too late, and a lot of the record has to do with coming to terms with the fact that I’d set the wrong goals for myself.” That this thread runs throughout the 13-track album comes as no surprise.

Since their founding in 2015, the Swedish band have developed their own unique brand of post-punk arseholery, burying sentimentality beneath layers of faux machismo, neo-Dadaist protest and an inherently meta approach to musical satire. From their distorted EP Consistency of Energy (2016) and the stingingly scuzzy Call of the Wild (2017) to their live recorded Shrimptech Enterprises set, to their blisteringly piss-taking debut album, Street Worms, Viagra Boys’ music has always been genre-shattering and searingly derisory.

Welfare Jazz continues in this vein.

To a greater degree than ever before, it lays bare the band’s increasing concern with urgent contemporary issues; among them racism, classism, toxic masculinity and misogyny. While ‘Girls and Boys’ takes us on a surreal, saxophonesmattered tour of outdated gender roles, ‘Creatures’ uses squared-off synths and Mark E. Smith-inspired spoken-word social commentary to evoke images of

Femi Kuti + Made Kuti — Legacy + (partisan) The contemporary End SARS protests across Lagos come more than four decades after Fela Kuti’s Zombie album launched its musical uprising against the methods of the Nigerian militia, who responded by raiding his Kalakuta compound, burning down his studio and throwing his 77-year old mother out of a third-story window. They come four decades after Fela married 27 women on the same day, either for misogyny’s sake or to delegitimize the government’s claims that he’d kidnapped his backing band and dancers, depending on which sources you read. A life’s worth of rebellion assembles this kind of political nuance to a man whose influence seeps through Afrobeat and into the fabric of a country’s resistance.

Take the centerpiece of Tony Allen and Hugh Masekela’s Rejoice – a feverish, limbless hard-bop holding Fela’s legacy on the shoulders of a street parade: “Lagos never gonna be the same, never, without Fela!” He was Afrobeat’s originator, who mystified the concept of rebellion, combined the greatest freedom-searchers in Blue Note jazz with the euphoria of highlife and escapist groove of American funk, and peddled joy as an act of opposition. In parallel to Northern Soul’s takeover of postindustrial Britain, Fela’s rebellion mobilised a world whose resistance hit under the dense fug of igbo smoke, with a shamanic trance and an open invitation to dance away the hardship.

In the years since his death, Fela’s legacy has been joyfully upheld: his

Albums son Seun still fronts Egypt 80, Knitting Factory have meticulously reissued his solo archives and the legendary communal moments at the New Africa Shrine, while the likes of Ginger Baker, Questlove, Brian Eno and Erykah Badu have curated selections of his work alongside essays and political commentaries. As the archeological dig of a lifetime’s work continues to show the historical weight of Fela Kuti, Legacy+ adds urgency to the tradition – a double release as one, comprising Fela’s son Femi Kuti’s new album Stop The Hate and Femi’s son Made Kuti’s new album For(e)ward. It’s an instant masterpiece in supplementing the heft of a surname. The music isn’t Fela’s, but the feeling is the same, and the protest is current.

Stop The Hate is the literal father album of the collection. Lead single ‘Pà Pá Pà’ is a groove-filled checklist (“I want you to listen to me well”) and its scope is extraordinary. Femi calls for structural and social change in government; the need for clean water, safer roads and working electricity is demanded in the same breath as gender equality and continued resistance against corruption. Circular grooves lock on key lyrics: “Stop the hate” and “Stop the land grab” sound the visceral frontlines of protest, while the organ-laden, trumpetheavy ‘Na Bigmanism Spoil Government’ stands with a vicious, Fela-worthy critique of power.

Made’s contribution on For(e)ward swirls into the mental strains of resistance. The hypnotic locked groove – “free your mind and set your soul free” – picks up from the closing track of his father’s album, but the message after three minutes of mesmeric, sprawling futureAfrobeat holds a demand for freedom that you won’t find on Stop The Hate. Made plays every instrument on the album; ‘Your Enemy’ and ‘Higher You’ll Find’ become possessive with spiraling horns, instrumentals and brass cacophonies that conjure an internal Fantasia. As Tony Allen went on to reject lyrical content to find his loose-limbed percussive protest, For(e)ward conjures as much of a tempest with furious strums and astral horns as it does with words.

Subjects cross between albums; Femi’s ‘Young Boy Young Girl’ is the utopia that Made’s ‘Young Lady’ longs for, uncovering the sexual scandals at the University of Lagos. The wide-eyed circle jams of Made’s ‘We Are Strong’ look to solve the same injustices lamented in Femi’s ‘You Can’t Fight Corruption With Corruption’. The most striking moment in Legacy+ is Made’s monologue in ‘Different Streets’ to the somber effect of ‘Sorrow Tears and Blood’, ruminating on Fela’s message: “Grandpa was not predicting the future… we must now understand just how scary it is that we are facing the same problem from the ’70s, and think for ourselves how hard we must work collectively to be free.”

On their own terms, neither body of work is starkly more enthralling than its contemporaries. Yet what makes Legacy+ such a remarkable collection is how each album brings vibrance to the other and revitalises Fela’s archived resistance. There’s something in the family name that feels as vital now as it did forty years ago. 9/10 Tristan Gatward

Sleaford Mods — Spare Ribs (rough trade) It’s been nearly six years since I was first captivated by Sleaford Mods on Jools Holland. One man pressed the spacebar of a laptop and a gritty instrumental spewed out while he stood gently swaying with a pint in his hand. The other bloke cracked out fierce lines about being a jobseeker. In 2020 Sleaford Mods present Spare Ribs, a testament to the entirely contradictory facts that they’ve grown a lot, and yet changed so little.

The tone of the album is familiar: simple and sharp, humorous and humanistic. The fundamentals are that Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn care, and are increasingly frustrated that the

Conservative government don’t (“We’re all so Tory-tired,” Williamson says on ‘The New Brick’), and that a no-frills instrumental will act as a charmed canvas for their messages to be splayed across. For catchy melodies juxtaposed with crass and expletive-laden lyrics, one needn’t go further than the brutal ‘Elocution’, which sees Williamson proclaim, “I wish I had the time to be a wanker just like you / And maybe then I’d be somewhere lovely and warm, just like you”. It’s a tireless takedown of privileged politicians living in luxury as the country falls further into poverty, and sums up what Sleaford Mods do.

They’re most musical record yet, more adventurous instrumentation, as well as the vocal features of Amyl and the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor and up-and-comer Billy Nomates, add further excitement to what is a brilliantly by-the-book Sleaford Mods album. 8/10 Jo Higgs

Various Artists — PlanetMµ25 (planet mu) To mark 25 years at the forefront of leftfield electronic music, Planet Mu take a decidedly forwardfacing approach on PlanetMµ25, rejecting a rose-tinted legacy package in favour of highlighting both newer faces and familiar mavericks.

Footwork is prominent on the compilation; a fitting reminder of the label’s major role in introducing the Chicago sound to the wider world, most notably with the Bangs & Works compilations at the front end of the last decade. Pioneers DJ Nate and Jana Rush return with highlights, the former supplying a footwork masterclass further twisted by Basic Rhythm, and the latter demonstrating her invigorating disregard for the parameters of even the loosest of genres – the aptly titled ‘Mynd

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Albums Fuc’ is a melee of crusty game FX, unstable percussion and stunted loops barely holding together.

Elsewhere, Speaker Music and AceMo grapple with jazz elements on ‘Techno is a Liberation Technology’, with distant horns freely yearning atop stuttering percussion, quietly arresting in its understated complexity.

The brooding, chuggier cuts from Rian Treanor and Ital Tek also bring satisfying contrast to the more frantically-paced tracks, though they’re suitably abrasive in their own way.

Not every selection is forwardfacing in a radically new sonic sense, but the collection successfully presents the continued ethos of the label as a champion of a weirder, rawer approach to underground music. If this compilation shows us anything, it’s that the most important thing is what comes next. 7/10 Oskar Jeff

Puma Blue — In Praise of Shadows (blue flowers) It’s been long mythologised that Aphex Twin made his seminal ’90s albums in a haze of drowsiness, embracing sleep deprivation to unlock an electronic lucidity only found in the clouded mind.

London-based songwriter and producer Puma Blue achieves something similar with his debut, In Praise of Shadows, an album that channels his decade-long experience with insomnia, using it to craft a record that revels in the hypnagogic fuzziness we typically drown out with a cup of coffee or a run, but that Puma Blue, aka Jacob Allen, has learnt to live beside.

Across the album’s 14 tracks there’s a wonderfully bleary-eyed focus that ties together jazz, ambient, acoustic singer-songwriter and blues in one beautiful stretched reverie. Lyrics, instru-

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ments and vibes are painted across the LP’s emulsion, sketching foggy, nocturnal sounds that feel like they’ll be lost if exposed to the light of day. Lo-fi drumbeats or acoustic chords anchor most songs like a looping, recurring dream.

At the record’s end, you warmly recall the ephemeral vision of a violin in ‘Velvet Leaves’, the soft howl of the saxophone in ‘Already Falling’ and the echoing spectral shouts throughout ‘Bath House’, where Allen, lost in nostalgic déjà vu, wonders if “I’ve been here before.”

These tracks are wondrous, brittle things, ready to fall apart when you stop believing in them, and perfectly straddle the line between feeling unfinished and feeling never-ending, combing the ambiguity of night with the confidence of day.

8/10 Robert Davidson

The Body — I’ve Seen All I Need to See (thrill jockey) It may have taken two decades, but I’ve Seen All I Need to See might be the record that finds The Body come full circle. Since emerging from Rhode Island’s vibrant noise scene in the late ’90s, the duo has strayed as far afield as opera, classical, hip-hop and even contemporary pop; but, finally, they’re back to the sludgy, monolithic distortion of their early work.

That being said, I’ve Seen All I Need to See could never really be something as straightforward as a return to the symphonic, brutal metal of yesteryear. The Body have simply come too far and done too much to come back unchanged. Over the years, they’ve explored the very edges of noise, and even when they’re ‘stripping back’ they’ve managed to deliver a record that is so monumental in scope and precise in execution it’s genuinely awe-inspiring.

For one thing, the attention to detail is astonishing, with every harmonic layer

and piece of tonal interplay interweaving like a school of fish, creating an amorphous, shimmering mass. Although only eight songs in length, the LP captures an entire universe of sound, like a black hole compacting matter.

The effect, I imagine, feels close to watching the first atom bomb explode on the Trinity test site: a naked display of raw power that makes everything else feel insignificant in its wake. The Body may just have found the true sound of oblivion in all its stunning, horrifying beauty. 8/10 Dominic Haley

Yvette Janine Jackson — Freedom (fridman gallery) The sheer scale of Freedom, the new project from American academic and sound artist Yvette Janine Jackson, is breath-taking. The first piece, ‘Destination Freedom’, is built around three ‘scenes’ which overlap and play off one another, respectively set inside a slave ship, in the middle of an indeterminate journey, and in outer space. The second piece, ‘Invisible People’, is ostensibly a radio opera, but in practice it has more in common with the cut-up experiments of William Burroughs and the vocal loops of Steve Reich than anything you’re likely to encounter on Radio 4 any time soon.

Both pieces are dense, layered, and disorientating. Part historical study, part Afrofuturist counterfactual, ‘Destination Freedom’ seeks to provide an account of African-American life via marine field recordings, caustic electronics and a final, weightless sense of release; ‘Invisible People’ is a little less abstract – its samples of speech and commotion more easily interpreted, as its protagonists engage in the debate surrounding Barack Obama’s legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2015 – but no less complex, wrangling with a range of African-American perspec-

Albums tives on the president’s conduct. These samples are interspersed with passages of relatively straightforward jazz and gospel piano; brief, punctuating clips that undergird the diffuse ideas in play here.

Freedom is an uneasy listen, but one that feels essential in its challenge to mainstream liberal discourses of race and identity. It offers little in the way of solutions, instead asking new questions and problematising familiar ideas – for that alone, it is striking. 7/10 Luke Cartledge

Urban Village — Udondolo (nø format) If a Soweto taxi driver is playing your tune, you know you’ve got something right. Budding music producers in the township would often give their tracks out to local drivers, hoping they would spread their sound to passengers. This community hype around music greeted the arrival of Soweto-based band Urban Village.

Already attuned to the house and dance music of his generation, guitarist Lerato Lichaba’s ears pricked up at the more traditional Zulu sounds he heard being played by his older neighbours, and his sound morphed into something new.

Having lived through South Africa’s liberation from apartheid in the ’90s, Urban Village take pride in mining the cultural spaces that opened up as white minority rule finally ended.

The debut album Udondolo carries on the dialogue with their forefathers. It blends folk music, Zulu rock, Xhosa funk, mbaqanga and maskandi, overlaid with the soulful vocals that rang through their neighbourhoods.

The joyous track ‘Sakhisiwe’ – which translates as ‘to build a nation’ – is sung both in Zulu and English, capturing a shared rhythm that is carried across borders and states. Their subject matter is both specific and universally acces-

sible, our literal understanding buckling to the incredible power soul music has to convey a message. My highlight, ‘Ubaba’, honours the older generations, accompanied by a video spotlighting the many Soweto hostels which housed working black South African men during apartheid. Udondolo transports us through all the colours of Soweto, inviting us to walk together towards a united world. 8/10 Georgina Quach

Apifera — Overstand (stones throw) Although this is officially their debut, the four Israeli jazzers who comprise Apifera have hundreds of recording credits between them, something which fast becomes apparent on pushing play here: Overstand isn’t the work of wideeyed debutants eager to make their mark, but instead, it would appear, a comingtogether of accomplished musicians looking to show off – mainly to each other, granted, although the insouciance of much of their playing suggests they’re unconcerned if others listen in. Accordingly, entertaining widdly-widdly noodling abounds, predominantly in the form of psychedelic synth runs and twanging bass licks, around otherwise pleasantly simple song sketches, with emphasis firmly on technique over approachability.

When the quartet play more for the good of the song than their own reputations, though, as on the creeping ‘Yaki’s Delight’ and the antagonistic ‘The Pit & The Beggar’, an album of nicely contemplative cross-pollination starts to take shape, and ‘Pulse 420’ and ‘Notre Damn’ offer welcome warmth and abstraction absent elsewhere. However, most of Overstand drifts by as an exhibitionist’s dream, with songs servicing a demonstration of technical chops rather than the other way around. Sure, there’s nothing to actively

dislike, but given the personnel and abundant talent, it’s hard to not view this as an opportunity missed. 5/10 Sam Walton

James Yorkston and The Second Hand Orchestra — The Wide, Wide River (domino) A Scotsman goes to Sweden to record an album. He’s never met many of his collaborators, and they’ve never heard the songs they’ll be recording. He says ‘hello’, they say ‘hallå’, and they get to work. Three days later, they finish The Wide, Wide River, the latest release from prolific singer-songwriter James Yorkston. It’s a testament to the connective power of music – people who otherwise would be nations away bonding over a love of creation.

Two things are going on here.

Yorkston’s original songs – all vocal inflections and lyrical specificity – were all written before recording. Then there’s the Second Hand Orchestra, improvising as they go. Opener ‘Ella Mary Leather’ gives fractured details of a lost flame, Yorkston recalling trying to persuade a woman not to piss on her ex’s bags.

Who knows how that translated, but the orchestra understood the tone: uneasy, unstable and unrelenting. They provide instrumentation to suit, and that’s the album in a nutshell. It works on songs that worry (such as ‘Struggle’, an account of mental illness backed by these expansive high-pitched melodies). It works on songs that are ominous (like album highlight ‘A Very Old-Fashioned Blues’ with its shrieking falsetto warnings). It works on songs that ponder (‘We Test The Beams’ with its gentle floating ascents and descents). It just works. What would be a fun Yorkston album becomes something more due to the presence of the orchestra. We do amazing things when we work together. 8/10 Sam Reid

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LiveAlbums Streaming Hyperdub debut For You And I was a revelation, and she’s since followed it up with a series of essential EPs. Still, with a camera close to her set-up, we get to admire just how much improvisation and technique goes into her slippery and glitched-out IDM tracks.

She extends ‘Glitch Bitch’ into a dizzying showcase of her production abilities without sacrificing the hypnotic pull of the track. By the time it opens up into harsh digital noise and breakneck BPMs, she’s proven what the fuss is about.

Skye Butchard

Burna Boy Brixton Academy, London 18 November 2020 Loraine Jame, GLOR1A, DEMIGOSH EFG Jazz Festival 18 November 2020

Spectacular Empire has already established a distinct sound that combines bassheavy, monochromatic club music with heady introspection. But what perhaps makes Gaika’s artist collective stand out is its focus on community fundraising, Black representation and new models for the industry – the music and the message go hand in hand. It’s one of the reasons their live streams have stood out as highlights in this time of virtual concerts – we all have an increased awareness for the possibility of new ecosystems, the importance of championing DIY art from minority groups, and the power of fundraisers, but Spectacular Empire have been on this wave a little longer than others.

Their showcase with Between the Lines at the EFG Jazz Festival is an excellent demonstration of these ideals, and a great concert in its own right. It’s a triple bill made up DEMIGOSH, GLOR1A and Loraine James; three boundary-pushing acts with the flare to pull off the slightly awkward task of performing a set for a camera rather than a crowd.

DEMIGOSH’s style fits in superbly with the Spectacular Empire wheelhouse,

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taking an afro-futurist approach to classic pop and electronics. The Dublinborn act combines western indie influences with his Nigerian Yoruba roots. His reverb-drenched digitised vocal fills up the mix powerfully. This kind of woozy, dubbed-out autotune has become a familiar sound in recent years, but its DEMIGOSH’s charisma and songwriting ability that makes him stand out as fresh. His commanding presence over the multiple fazes of ‘LDMF’ reminded me of watching FKA Twigs in a cramped basement – the immense ambition is clear, even if the staging and budget isn’t available yet.

GLOR1A’s (pictured) performance is just as captivating and dramatic, despite the small scale. She fully embodies her songs; off-kilter R&B jams filled with textured production and jazzy vocal runs. She begins on the ground in a child’s pose, which again, takes guts when you’re on a live stream rather than seeing most of the audience in front of you. She sits up and sings “I’ve been praying” as twisted, noisy vocal layers cover her. It’s the perfect tone setter for a dark set that deals with paranoia, government surveillance and urgently modern takes on R&B archetypes.

Loraine James’ headline set then has a melancholic quality to it, in part because it should be a victory lap for an incredible breakthrough artist. Her

Performing a virtual gig live from Brixton Academy, Burna Boy radiates the jubilance of a musician who’s glad to be back where he belongs – on stage.

He moves around the space with a natural ease, his performance full of intensity but laced with his likeable cheek and charm – he’s a fantastic showman.

It’s easy to lose track of time as he covers everything from ‘Level Up’, the powerful, rhythmic opening to recent album Twice As Tall, to 2019 summer anthem ‘Location’, featuring Dave. He has the ability to create electricity and excitement without the energy of a crowd, which if anything, feels more special – as though you’re lucky enough to have been personally invited to watch an amazing rehearsal.

‘Another Story’ shines a light on the often-untold exploitation of Nigeria by the British government, masked under the ruse of democracy and Christianity. The stage is flooded with the bright green of the Nigerian flag – a colour that has become all-too-familiar in the light of the recent End SARS movement, which sought to disband a specific unit of the Nigerian police with a long history of abuse and injustice. Touching on these themes and showing the heart-

LiveAlbums Streaming breaking result of the British occupation, the set then transitions seamlessly into ‘Monsters You Made’. Against a stirring montage of child soldiers, Burna Boy’s delivery is heartfelt and emotive, seismic in scope but tender in execution.

Perfectly balancing some of his biggest hits with new material and providing a performance with political and social depth that remains upbeat and enjoyable, Burna Boy proves how vital he is. A masterclass, and one of the best lockdown sets of 2020. Sophia Powell

Shabaka Hutchings & Britten Sinfonia The Barbican, London 20 November 2020

All seriousness aside, this whole pandemic has felt a bit like a parallel-universe episode of Eat Well For Less. But instead of Gregg Wallace and that other bloke swapping out your Magnum ice-creams for a slightly cheaper, lower-sugar version, they’ve swapped a pulsating, emotional and in-person Shabaka Hutchings concert for a live-streamed one.

Well, like those Lidl own-brand choc-ices that save a whopping 68p a pack, this live stream experience offered something familiar, but also surprisingly fresh, engaging and genuinely moving. Part of an ongoing Barbican live stream series, this is

photography by mark allan

not a typical Hutchings concert. He is not surrounded by one of his flagship bands, but a sitting (socially-distanced) orchestra. He is not wielding his traditional saxophone, but a long, skinny clarinet. The setlist isn’t made up of distinct cosmic jazz voyages, but interpretations of American composer Aaron Copland and Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

The stream starts (sans Hutchings) with a stirring 30-minute performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring. It’s a delightful, dynamic piece full of jovial jaunts of sound, peppered with skips of flute, prancing piano and bouncing double bass that all melts into the soaring strings before floating up wonderfully to the empty hall’s ceiling.

In its wake, a coy Hutchings strolls to the front of the stage for his interpretation of Stravinsky’s three pieces for solo clarinet, which is intricate and outrageously fun. You marvel watching him up close and personal, as he frantically taps the keys with his long dexterous fingers, hearing his audible inhalation as the vein on his neck bulges bigger.

The solo itself bursts with a life-force that grips you through its sheer intensity and emotion.

After an insightful pre-recorded interview between the night’s conductor Geoffrey Paterson and Hutchings, the night’s finale sees Hutchings join the orchestra for a moving rendition of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. It’s a resplendent end to a night which goes

to show the benefits and variety a livestream can hold for someone as imaginative as Hutchings. Truly phenomenal. It’s a swap, Gregg! Robert Davidson

Dua Lipa Studio 2054 27 November 2020

As we moved indoors in 2020, sophisticated, high-calorie disco was there for us: Roisin Murphy, Jessie Ware, Kylie, even Sophie Ellis Bextor’s kitchen. No one with more success, however, than Dua Lipa. Holding her nerve against pressure to delay March’s Future Nostalgia, she was rewarded with a global smash, and tonight’s Studio 2054 is something of a post-Thanksgiving, post-Grammy nominations victory lap around a converted warehouse in a mystery location. The queer hedonism of Glastonbury’s Block9 was a noted influence on shaping Future Nostalgia’s personnel and planned stage aesthetic, but this isn’t quite what we get tonight – check the hazy, stylised VHS graphics and you realise that this is that oldest of things: a TV special.

Dua Lipa is expertly choreographed as we’re taken on a literal tour of the warehouse as well as a sonic joyride through 1970s disco, early ’80s boogie, house and – crucially – the fizzy ’00s imagining of disco as reinvention for global acts like Madonna and Kylie. FKA Twigs aside, the guest spots have a tendancy to fall flat; Miley vibing louchely via video link, the disembodied head of Elton John performing a context-free, copied and pasted minute of ‘Rocket Man’. It’s the extended club sequences that really delight; the Blessed Madonna standing in the centre of a roller disco playing it fairly straight.

For its flaws, Studio 2054 remains a bright, enjoyable romp, and one suspects that, even as the pandemic recedes, now that punters have got in the habit of forking out for major pop stars’ live streams, this probably isn’t going to go away, is it? Fergal Kinney

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FilmAlbums and Books

The Life and Dreams of Ergo Phizmiz (dir. iain chambers) You may remember Ergo Phizmiz from Loud And Quiet 138, talking about his 2018 album Fuck Men Winky Face. Or perhaps you’ve seen him in an arts space, a community theatre, or above a pub, in the UK or on the Continent, performing one of his – let’s say million – surreal DIY operas, about Chris Evans jumping out of a window, Michael Winner, or some sweary post-apocalyptic landscape.

Or you might know his radio plays. Or his collage work. Or his Aphex Twin covers album in the style of a vaudevillian orchestra. Or indeed, none of these. Because while there’s been no shortage of opportunity to experience something that’s been created by this avant-garde workaholic over the last 16 years, Dominic Robertson – as he was born – operates so far on the outer limits of music and theatre that you have to really know what rock to look under to find him wearing the giant paper mache head of a Baby King in an opium-inspired opera that parodies the internet (Gargantua – 2013).

Even though Iain Chambers has been filming Robertson for 10 years, his documentary is a short and suitably lo-fi one.

Full of handheld camera work and subtitles on the scenes filmed beside heavy traffic, The Life and Dreams of Ergo Phizmiz is a glimpse into a life of utter dedication to art; one that is either brave or very stupid, or both. As his subject’s marriage ends and a sparsely attended show in France peters out with bird calls to audience side-eyes, the hustle never lets up. It looks like hard work, and Robertson appears almost trapped by his compulsion to create. “If I’m not making something, I’m obsolete,” he says at one point – the man who, bullied at school, wrote 10 operas between the ages 11 and 15. It’s only a glimpse into Ergo Phizmiz’s world, but it’s all you need. Austin Laike

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Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing — Peter Guralnick (little, brown us) Factoids and trivia are a powerful currency in the economy of musical fandom. In this regard, few writers have such a rich understanding of American rock and roll as Peter Guralnick, music biographer par excellence. Guralnick wrote the definitive two-volume biography of Elvis Presley and, more recently, an excellent book about Sam Phillips, the man who discovered Elvis, Johnny Cash, and others. His new title, Looking to Get Lost, collects old and new profiles of his favorite musicians while making the case for the guiding principle of his career: that the best way to appreciate music is to understand the musician who plays it.

Guralnick is the guy who knows everything – the name of an artist’s high school P.E. teacher, seemingly every bar that played country music in Maine in the ’50s, the name of the receptionist at a recording studio seventy years ago.

This yields excellent, engaging results in Looking to Get Lost when the subject is a veritable icon (Ray Charles) or an especially exciting character (Solomon Burke). When Guralnick turns to less prominent figures, however, his style is put to an interesting test.

Take the chapter on Dick Curless, a relatively minor country singer best known for his 1965 hit ‘A Tombstone Every Mile’. This is the most recent piece Guralnick wrote, and it takes up 73 pages, more than twice as long as anything else in the book. In telling his story from birth to death, it shows a deep respect for his subject, both as a man and a musician.

At its best, the essay transcends Curless and serves as a compelling testament to the virtues of life as a working performer.

But the level of detail here can sometimes

transform an appreciative career retrospective into a catalog of gigs and studio sessions.

One suspects this results, at least in part, from a key facet of the way Guralnick works: to learn the most intimate details of his subjects’ lives, he gets to know them personally. He had ongoing relationships with most of the figures in Looking to Get Lost, whether through repeat interviews or a more social correspondence. More generally, he likes these people tremendously. As a result, there are no villains in Guralnick’s musical history, and it can get awkward when he gives certain artists a pass. He acknowledges the more uncomfortable parts of Chuck Berry’s and Jerry Lee Lewis’s careers, for example, but he doesn’t address them as thoroughly as one might like.

The biggest exception comes in the chapter on Elvis’s manager Colonel Parker – it’s the highlight of the book.

Parker, who infamously helped his client reach an unprecedented degree of commercial success, is a perfect Guralnick subject: an eccentric, influential personality in the close orbit of a major musical icon. But the real engine of this essay isn’t Parker, but Guralnick. In ‘Me and the Colonel’, he recounts the cat and mouse game he played while chasing an interview with the notoriously difficult manager. His pursuit of the man who “is not infrequently painted as the man who stole Elvis Presley’s soul” introduces the biggest dose of narrative tension to Looking to Get Lost.

‘Me and the Colonel’ reveals the irony that runs through this collection.

Though it’s a book about notable musicians, it’s at its best when Guralnick is a part of the action. At one point he explains his decision to write about people rather than music, writing, “It allowed me, in other words, to reflect the music without trying to dissect it.”

There’s a lot of cultural capital in the lives of the artists, but they’ve already given us their work, which so often speaks for itself. It’s possible that music might be best reflected through the people who hear it rather than those who play it. Colin Groundwater

Out Now CORNERSHOP

OSEES

CARLTON MELTON

Castle Face LP / CD

Agitated CD / 2LP

‘England Is A Garden’

‘Panther Rotate’

KELLEY STOLTZ

RIVAL CONSOLES

Ample Play CD / 2LP

‘Where This Leads’

VARIOUS

Agitated LP / CD

‘Articulation’

Erased Tapes LP / CD

‘Scarred For Life Vol: 2’

RICHARD NORRIS

BRIGID DAWSON & THE MOTHERS NETWORK

FLAMING TUNES

‘Ah! (etc)’

‘Music For Healing’ Group Mind CD

Castles In Space 2LP / CD

‘Ballet Of Apes’

‘Flaming Tunes’

Superior Viaduct LP

Coming Soon

NILS FRAHM

‘Tripping With Nils Frahm’ Erased Tapes LP/CD

Castle Face LP / CD

TALA VALA

MIRRY

HERE LIES MAN

Number Witch Records LP/CD

Dutchess Records LP/CD

Riding Easy LP / CD

‘Modern Hysteric’

‘Mirry’

‘Ritual Divination’

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

Something The most surprising thing about Sleaford Mods isn’t that they made it out of Nottingham’s skint fringes at all, but that they’re continually reaching new heights a decade on. In their home city, they look back at where it started and where it’s going next, with new album Spare Ribs, by Fergal Kinney.

Photography by Dan Kendall

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One weeknight in 2010, Andrew Fearn was DJing in the

main bar at Nottingham’s Chameleon – an independent venue minded to book acts deemed uncommercial or just unhelpful by the city’s live music establishment. One such act was Jason Williamson, who had been performing his act – a kind of sour, sweary spoken word over repetitive breakbeats – to about a dozen people upstairs. Nipping out for a post-match cig, Williamson overheard a piece of music Fearn was playing.

It was a remix of George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’, though Williamson wouldn’t have known that – Fearn, absorbed for most of his adult life on the skint fringes of electronic music, had recently got into taking instrumental B-sides of giant pop hits and rendering them unfathomable through looping, echo and effects. Williamson, impressed, walked over to the DJ booth and introduced himself.

A weekday in 2020, and Andrew Fearn and Jason Williamson are back at the Chameleon, showing me around the venue that would be the ground zero of their shared ambition over the last decade. The venue’s previous owner, the pair both laugh, used to decorate the space with his own paintings of the vulvas of his seemingly endless parade of glamorous companions.

Williamson declines a free pint; it’s the day before the November lockdown, and if the beer doesn’t go today then it’s down the drain. Accordingly, there’s a slightly frantic Christmas Eve quality to the city today, tempered only by ominous news reports glimpsed in shop window televisions and push notifications concerning the US presidential election, which had taken place the previous day. Williamson walks over to the red tattered rug on the Chameleon’s small stage and points out that it’s the exact same one from a decade previously. He stares at the stage a little, and then takes a picture on his phone. What went on here? What kind of coup must have been staged to transport Sleaford Mods from the outsider fringes to one of the most successful alternative groups in Britain?

We’re meeting as the pair are preparing the release of their new album in early 2021, Spare Ribs. To call it the sixth Sleaford Mods album is to do something of a disservice to their prodigious output – across eight years, that’s six albums and four EPs, nearly a hundred songs in total, not counting the five albums Williamson released one his own before meeting Fearn. Recorded in July, once recording became possible once again, Spare Ribs pushes their wilfully stark sonic blueprint into perhaps its sharpest, most pop form yet – even threatening anthemia on tracks like ‘Nudge It’. In a break from its predecessors, they’ve brought in collaborators from the Sleaford Mods extended universe – rising Nottingham songwriter Billy Nomates, and Amy Taylor of Australian punks Amyl and the Sniffers. One track (accurately, it turns out) portends a sticky end for one Dominic Cummings.

Another, over a terrific Weatherall drug chug, sees Williamson consider Elon Musk (“with a face that looks like beef ”), the guy from Idles (more of which later) and the spice epidemic. It’s also inevitably shaped by lockdown. As the world turned across March, the pair were touring in Australia – a string of US dates were cancelled, they both remember a lot of being bewildered in airport departure lounges.

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“We were kind of, this is bullshit,” remembers Williamson. “I just thought it was some government thing initially. I got completely conspiracy theorist early on! I stepped right outside of that once I realised.” Like many people, on returning home for lockdown Williamson experienced something he terms “a period of a lot of self-doubt with who I was.”

“My survival mechanism kicked in,” he reflects. “I just had to tell myself that this is it. Bye career. You’re looking after yourself and your family.” Some tracks for the record had already been written, and Williamson just kept writing.

“It was quite depressing queuing outside shops when that first kicked in. Though it was obviously the right thing to do it felt depressing. You noticed people’s behaviour in the queues, and their expressions – everyone looked really worried or disorientated. You’d hear people talking about it being immigrant’s faults, I could hear them saying that.” Two tracks on the album, ‘Out There’ and ‘Top Room’, are explicitly focused on lockdown, but something else happened during that time too. Exercising in the garden, Williamson suffered a back injury related to an operation he’d had as a child. “I’ve got a form of spina bifida which some top back surgeon sorted out for me when I was a kid,” he explains. “If not, it would have been a case of me being paralysed for life.” When he sustained his injury this summer, doctors initially struggled to understand quite what had happened, and how he could recover.

“It was all quite heavy, it got quite emotional actually.

So that filtered into the lyrics really. I just kept thinking about stuff.” Both ‘Fishcakes’ and the excellent single ‘Mork and Mindy’ came from this period of introspection – for the first time, Williamson writes about his childhood here.

“My mum had to take us to the chip shop when it was my birthday, because she just didn’t have any money. We were just sat in the chip shop, which I thought was great. And there was a couple of Christmasses where presents were second hand. You don’t mind, but you look back, now I’ve got kids, the guilt of my parents… I wanted to... I wanted to try and put the experience of being a kid in Grantham in 1978 into a song. It’s not woe is me, but I wanted to give a picture of it.”

Britain’s first post-2008 band A middle-aged woman holding a sign for a missing cat that she’s out searching for spots Sleaford Mods and walks over to them. “What are you doing back here?” It’s a fair question – Fearn and Williamson are posing against the primary school railings where, earlier in the last decade, they stood for the sleeve of Austerity Dogs. It’s a little like turning up at Abbey Road to find Paul McCartney sauntering across the zebra crossing. The school is on the corner of Tennyson Street – a slightly studenty, slightly gentrifying street of three-storey town houses carved up into individual flats, such as the top floor flat that Andrew Fearn previously rented. It’s a quiet street; electronic pop wafts out of a window, there’s little movement outside. It was here, on Fearn’s home setup, that the pair did most of the recording for Austerity Dogs, Divide and Exit and Key Markets. Williamson’s

“We’re kind of dispensable, aren’t we, in the name of profit. The way Johnson’s treated the pandemic, people have died willy nilly”

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visibly animated as he remembers the adrenaline rush of recording vocal takes and running down to the off-license over the road to buy cans of Heineken. A local musician lived underneath.

Perhaps it was envy, perhaps it was simply the noise, but during one late-night session, he stormed upstairs into Fearn’s flat – all spliff smoke and empty cans – unplugged the power and walked straight back downstairs without a word. “You wouldn’t mind going to work on a few hours’ sleep,” remembers Jason, who was then working at Broxtowe Borough Council as a benefits advisor at the time when Sleaford Mods’ unexpected crossover into the mainstream occurred.

From that point onwards, there’s been an easy tendency to categorise Sleaford Mods as a sort of necessary voice of protest against whatever injury Britain might be inflicting upon itself this time (austerity, Brexit, Boris Johnson, the pandemic response, take your pick – another will be on the way soon). It’s understandable, but it’s also a category error – Sleaford Mods are something far bleaker, far more nihilistic than that. We’ve listened to Jason Williamson’s worldview for a decade now, and the results are in. “Things aren’t getting any better” is how he terms his outlook today, “we’re not learning.” Instead, Sleaford Mods is about the pain in how it feels to be living underneath it all at this particular moment in time. What does that do to a person? It’s not an accident that their crossover moment occurred at exactly the same point at which the politically staid early 2010s catalysed into an era of fiery populism of left and right. Sleaford Mods did something similar – they were an aesthetic protest vote and, in many ways, Britain’s first properly post-2008 band. The album’s title track, ‘Spare Ribs’, touches on this. It’s an idea that Williamson has been chewing for some time – just as the human body can survive without a couple of ribs, he puts to me, capitalism is able to survive whilst writing off a good chunk of the population, deeming them expendable.

“We’re kind of dispensable aren’t we, in the name of profit, and that goes all sorts of ways. The way Johnson’s treated the pandemic, people have died willy nilly by him making silly decisions. Or people using terrorism for their own gains, which involves killing people. Our lives are constantly being forsaken for somebody else’s profit.” He returned to the idea a lot over lockdown – there’s a church at the end of his road, where the area’s sizeable homeless population gather to get food from a charity. Williamson and his wife are on good terms with many of them. “I’d buy fags for them,” says Williamson, “but it just got too bleak. You can’t do anything can you? You can’t take them home. They’d have a spice drop off on a Wednesday or Thursday, geezer comes up to the church with a big bag of it and dishes it out. And then they’re gone, it’s like something out of a George Romero film.”

Stood outside a high rise We walk through West End Arcade, where – happily – two music shops still advertise CDs, DVDs and cassettes, whilst new age hemp shops keep eccentric hours and shoppers can buy definitely, genuinely authentic signed photographs of Kylie Minogue, Elton John and Burt Reynolds. Some of Sleaford Mods’ fans could

even appear on this roll call; one of the stranger lockdown sights being Robbie Williams live-streaming from his LA home performing a spirited karaoke version of their 2019 single ‘Kabab Spider’.

Passing a vintage clothes shop, Williamson points out that this was likely the site of the first Sleaford Mods gig proper – Fearn initially hesitant to appear on stage with him until, he half-jokes, people actually started turning up. That Fearn stands on stage pressing play on a laptop has always been a huge red herring to his talent – working ideas from dub, post-punk, rave and leftfield electronica into a framework that remains minimalist, un-busy and like no one else. His dead-eyed loops – slightly paranoid, slightly aggro – sound like life as lived in modern Britain.

Is he ever bothered by the way his contribution can be slightly minimised? “In the early days yeah, it would get dismissed a lot,” Fearn agrees, “just seen as this punk poetry thing. It’s difficult.”

“It’s hard because from my point of view, Andrew’s so studied and the lanes he goes down are constructed in such an intelligent manner that a lot of people tend to overlook it out of laziness,” says Jason. “That and perhaps a bit of ignorance. You don’t have to know the tools he uses or the music he listens to to be mindful of the fact that there’s a lot of work that goes into it.”

The last year or so has involved no small amount of upheaval for the pair. In 2017, they signed to Rough Trade to release the album English Tapas. Their long-term manager, Steve Underwood, then convinced them to self-release 2018’s Eton Alive, resulting in them acrimoniously parting ways before the album even made it out. Sleaford Mods are now managed by Williamson’s wife Claire and have returned to Rough Trade.

An increasingly commercial prospect, larger labels were very interested that they were looking for a deal too. Williamson laughs remembering being flown to Berlin to meet an executive from a big label. “The way I see it,” the executive opened the meeting, “it’s you and Idles holding a mirror up to society.” He laughs. “I thought, I’ll buy you a coffee and you can fuck off.”

Over the past year, Sleaford Mods – alongside Fat White Family – have been public and trenchant in their criticisms of Bristol punks Idles, with Williamson terming the group, “cliched, patronising, insulting and mediocre.” Whilst this might look like indie handbags time, for Williamson it touches on important fault lines around not just class but the purpose of what they’re trying to do. Idles were vocal fans of Sleaford Mods, and you can hear some of Sleaford Mods’ ideas in Idles’ work, straightened out into a more traditional guitar lineup, with material that’s less descriptive and more prescriptive – more earnest, aiming to be relatable and for arms-in-the-air sentiment. Some of this is the inevitable problem of any artist being unable to control their influence – or, as Williamson puts it today, “seeing the ricochet of what we’ve done, but not done properly.” But it’s Idles alleged class appropriation that appears to vex him the most. The excellent ‘Nudge It’ on the new album – described accurately by Williamson as Wire meets Wu Tang – is a sustained diss at an unnamed media figure “stood outside a high rise trying to act like a gangster.” I ask about it.

“I don’t want to mention names,” Williamson assures me, “but that song is going on about the appropriation of class images.

And after being criticised more, they’ve learnt nothing about it.”

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“There’s this weird myth – the idea that we’re both really aggro, and it attracts those kinds of men, when really it’s not like that at all”

“If you don’t live on an estate, you can’t go posing in front of one,” says Andrew. “It’s not for you and it doesn’t represent you. And the opposite too, if you are from that part of London, if that is where you’re from, do it.”

“You can imagine the people living in them, and this tattooed dude coming along with a camera crew. Why bother?

It’s depressing – you surely can’t be that thick?” There’s a pause.

“We’re talking about Joe Talbot here, from Idles. His justification was that he likes brutalism – well that’s fucking convenient. If that’s the case, go to a different brutalist building. He knows what he’s fucking doing, he just isn’t aware of it and it’s enraging.”

Speaking to The Independent a few months ago, Talbot labelled Williamson “a fucking bully”, arguing that he’d “never once claimed to be working class.” Williamson sits back.

“I couldn’t understand why he said it, but he’s not aware of himself, so he takes it as if someone’s bullying him. I don’t know.

He likes to play the victim a lot that lad, doesn’t he? He’s a big old victim. I’m not having it really. This song’s called ‘Anxiety’, oh really, that’s convenient. Fuck off.”

Williamson confirms that ‘Nudge It’ is “dedicated to that cunt”, and also points to the track ‘Elocution’. “Him, and other people who would stick up for him who are just as creatively empty, they all stick together. ‘Elocution’ is partly dedicated to that, but also to this ongoing indifference with having to toe the line in the industry to keep going – networking, agreeing to do something you wouldn’t necessarily do but that if you did it you might get OK exposure. A couple of these people left a nasty taste in my mouth – they wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire, let alone worry about the state of independent venues.”

Andrew sits forward, smiling. “It’s not really my argument, so I tried to listen to it, and it’s just nothing. There’s nothing to like or to hate, it’s so bland. There’s just so much better music – it can exist but it shouldn’t be that big,” reflects Andrew. “There’s better things happening which aren’t getting the exposure. Look at JPEGMAFIA – it’s so weird and different, but it’s difficult for him to be part of any scene. It’s all a bit purist now – you used to get a mixture of like reggae and rock or whatever, where’s that? Stuff that mixes elements together and creates new music.

Everything’s quite racist and separating now.”

At the root of this seriousness of cause is probably the fact that Williamson had wanted success for most of his life. Now fifty, he’d spent his twenties and thirties in and out of fairly trad guitar bands with names like Meat Pie, being sacked from more jobs than you’ve probably ever had. Sleaford Mods is the kind of music you make when you’ve really given up on that success.

All that resentment and invective doesn’t come from nowhere, and he takes it seriously. There’s a revealing moment in Christine Frantz’s 2017 documentary on the band, Bunch of Kunst, where Williamson’s wife Claire tries to describe the younger man

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she remembered from around Nottingham: “I always thought he was going to be one of those people who’d just disappear off the radar,” she explained, “and you’d hear they’re just dead.”

A more complicated masculinity For just short of five years now, Jason Williamson has been free of the alcohol and drug use that had been a near constant feature of his life since his early twenties. Success had meant more money to withdraw from the cashpoint, and more opportunities at which to do so, and after a running jump at sobriety, the summer of 2016 had been marked by what Wiliamson terms “a series of really dark drug binges.” Uppers were the problem in general; specifically, cocaine.

“It was clear that I was going to lose my family if I didn’t stop,” he explains flatly. “I’d come to the final post of my drugs career.” He remembers being alone in his house, his family having moved out into a hotel, and emptying a bottle of Staropramen into a glass before pouring the rest down the drain, and at this point stopped drinking.

“Early sobriety was a bit like going through a mid-life crisis – my personal image was all over the place. I was a little bit lost but at the same time it was a massive relief. Morning times started to be particularly powerful emotional experiences simply because mornings were always a reminder of the state that I was in from the night before. Automatically I felt like I was gaining some resistance, gaining some new-found strength.” Williamson credits a support network of his wife and the psychotherapist he was visiting, but also the simple financial stability that had arrived for the first time in his life. “When you’re sober and on that winning streak it’s the race towards yourself that you’re concentrating on. You become quite selfish again, like you were when you were dependent on substances, but it’s a different kind of selfishness; one where you want to become realised, so to speak.”

“I think it’s interesting how it hasn’t really affected things,” says Andrew, “because it didn’t really affect him producing stuff and being so prolific – that’s been the reward.”

Creatively too, Williamson began writing with renewed insight on his own consumption, but also that of his generation, hurtling through middle age and unable to make sense of their continued consumption.

Whilst to the outsider there might appear something traditionally masculine, macho even, about Sleaford Mods (two blokes, the aggression, the nods to oi and the beerier end of punk) Jason Williamson can be claimed as an unlikely icon for a more complicated masculinity. Sleaford Mods are one of the most thrilling live acts on the planet, and as much as you can credit this to the straightforward rage of it all, it’s also the sheer, well, strangeness of Williamson’s performance. He pouts, gurns, waddles, slaps his

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head, adopts the hand gestures of a diva, dad dances – observe for long enough and you realise the whole thing is rather camp.

Over lockdown on Instagram, Williamson stands topless underneath an apron brandishing carrot cake or cinnamon buns and a leer that would make Nigella blush. “I like it, I like being camp,” he says, elbowing away an initial defensiveness. “I like dance.”

He settles in his chair a little, warming to his theme. “Unchoreographed, totally amateur dance. Stuff that doesn’t necessarily look slick but it works. If you’re halfway through a tour and you’ve got your dance sorted out, it’s quite liberating. I like bringing that to it. Camping it up and shaking your hips.”

“It’s very inverted though isn’t it,” says Fearn. “There’s this weird myth – the idea that we’re both really aggro, and it attracts those kinds of men, when really it’s not like that at all.”

“I like lad culture,” says Williamson, “not the misogynistic side of it but the creative things. The uniform, the music, the way that men hold themselves in all male groups. But it just got rinsed at the end of the ’90s – there was nowhere else for it to go. The

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misogynistic element I completely reject, but there’s still a lot to be said for the various UK subcultures, they really appeal to me.”

As the day ends, we make our way to JT Soar. A former fruit and veg warehouse, it’s now a (small) live music space as well as a recording studio upstairs, and it was here that the sessions for Spare Ribs took place. Still clearly enamoured by their process, ask them about any song and the first thing they’ll invariably tell you is just how quick the track took to write or record – a morning here, an afternoon there.

We haven’t really mentioned the US election, all quite glad to have a distraction, but I point out to Williamson that so far events have had a habit of vindicating his bleaker instincts.

“Will civilisation find a way out though?” he offers at one point, to nobody in particular. “I think so. Humankind might survive and move onto another level of its potential.” A pause. “But at the minute? No way, it’s getting worse. I’ve been at the bottom, I’ve had really rough times and I’m hardened to it, so I don’t mind saying it. I don’t think it’s going to get better.”

Thank you readers In March of this year it was looking like Loud And Quiet would not be able to continue in the wake of COVID-19. The reason we’re still around and able to venture into 2021 is completely down to the support of the artists we feature, their mostly independent labels and teams, and, most importantly of all, our readers, who’ve shown value in what we do by signing up to become members of Loud And Quiet.

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Precedented Times Six months after the murder of George Floyd, Jamal Guthrie looks back on the instant reaction of the music industry, where we are now, and the danger of reducing the removal of racism to a bureaucratic process

It became the cliché of the early pandemic, but it is incredible how much of life in late 2020 now feels normal. Quarter-full buses and trains seem normal. Deserted streets seem normal.

Even the daily COVID-19 updates seem normal. 300 deaths today, is it? That’s more or less normal compared to this time last week, I suppose. Day drinking, exercising out of boredom and Zoom after Zoom after Zoom all seem normal until we’re reminded that these are of course, let’s say it together now, “unprecedented times”.

One event, almost six months ago now, was very much ‘precedented’. The murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin and the state-led inaction was something very similar to events we’ve seen in some shape or form many times before. The reaction to it, however, was as impressive in scale as the crime itself was heinous. The protests and raw emotional pleas in the immediate aftermath by those most closely affected in Minneapolis morphed into global marches, dedicated TV debates, community-led statue topplings and a level of simultaneous introspection amongst almost all sections of society.

Public-facing institutions, confronted with their own sense of complicity in the creation of an environment where a police officer could feel comfortable spending eight minutes and forty-six seconds killing an unarmed citizen on camera, expressed their support for Black Lives Matter and turned the lens inward in a very outward way.

In sport, footballers, basketball players and F1 drivers now kneel in homage to Colin Kaepernick’s much-seen, largely unsupported 2016 NFL protest. In film and TV, the likes of Netflix removed shows that were deemed potentially offensive (shows like The Mighty Boosh, The League of Gentlemen and Little Britain, all of which featured white comedians in blackface), and created dedicated sections for Black-led stories. Fashion magazines were suddenly awash with Black bodies, faces and voices.

Some of these responses appeared clumsy at the time but we live in a world where every email and message we receive, or social media post we see, apparently demands an instant reaction and minimal critical thought. I wrote an article on my own platform, theRoute.co, in June decrying the lack of self-awareness in the music industry following Blackout Tuesday and #TheShowMustBePaused: here were corporations with storied histories, huge resources and departments dedicated to the welfare of all employees who still needed an extra day to think about the ways in which they may be able to do better, in an industry that has

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actively exploited Black musicians since popular music was first committed to wax around one hundred years ago.

In a segment on The Dick Cavett Show in 1969, Black American writer and activist James Baldwin delivered a brilliant rebuttal to Yale Professor Paul Weiss’s assertion that while there are some differences between Black and White existence, at the end of the day each person has their own choices and ultimately character prevails.

“I don’t know what most White people in this country feel,” said Baldwin. “But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions.”

This is a different country of course and a different time, but a look back through the comments on the hastily put out Instagram posts expressing solidarity with Black communities by the gatekeepers of the music industry tell their own story.

You will see a litany of incredulous replies from former employees of these institutions who had been mistreated because of the colour of their skin and were offered no protection at the time. The co-opting of the movement by these big businesses displayed the ‘flexibility’ of Rishi Sunak’s day-late and dollarshort winter economic policies, changing tack and putting out togetherness messaging after the tide of public opinion swung too far in the wrong direction.

Baldwin continued: “I don’t know whether the labour unions and their bosses really hate me – that doesn’t matter – but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against Black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates Black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to.”

Even now, it sounds familiar.

— Equality beyond a vacuum — Some of the anger on display on the streets and online in early summer wasn’t just directed towards George Floyd’s killer but towards the watching world, who needed to see this murder in order to finally sit up and listen to what people have been saying for decades.

We all know real change comes from the grassroots and that’s where encouraging work is being done currently. There have been a number of panel discussions and think tank sessions on racism in the music industry set up by numerous groups who

“Another stumbling block is that representational parity is in the gift of the gatekeepers – who are largely White”

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have had a long-standing commitment to improving diversity and equality. Many of the conversations have revolved around increasing representation behind the scenes.

Recent statistics revealed by the UK Music Diversity Taskforce show the position we’re in. Representation of Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities among those aged 16-24 in the music industry stands at 30.6% – up from 25.9% in 2018. The number of people from Black, Asian and other ethnic minority communities at entry-level has risen from 23.2% in 2018 to a new high of 34.6% this year. Representation of Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities at senior executive levels has gone from 17.9% in 2018 to 19.9% in 2020.

Improvements across the board here, however, systemic discrimination doesn’t appear in a vacuum and another set of figures illustrate this.

The latest figures for England and Wales show the use of stop and search by the police is at its highest levels for six years. Stops under section 60, where no reasonable suspicion is required, rose by 35% between 2019 and 2020 to 18,081, with just 4% leading to an arrest. In the same period, Black people were 18 times more likely to be stopped under section 60, according to an analysis of the official figures by the Liberal Democrats.

There is no way of separating those two elements. As increasingly similar as the Black and White British experience may feel in some instances, it remains markedly different in others, and it’s clear who is more likely to be stopped by the police regardless of whether they’re senior level at a record label or not.

It is not the job of the music industry to sort out those problems but there is a danger of reducing the removal of racism into a bureaucratic process; one that is fixated on numbers rather than people’s feelings and an evaluation of the wider context outside of the immediate work bubble.

For example, the experience will be different for the Black promoter on their way to deposit last night’s door money into the bank. They’re just as likely to be worried about being accused of stealing that cash as they are of being robbed by a stranger.

Take this further outside the bubble into everyday life, and it is different for a Black radio plugger looked at with suspicion on a countryside walk in a rural area, or a Black tour manager driving an expensive car around town, and it’ll remain different regardless of whether or not representation rises or falls by 12% in time for the next survey.

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These are hypothetical examples, but the recent very real case of Black barrister Alexandra Wilson, who was stopped three times on her way to court after being mistaken as a defendant, illustrates this point more clearly. Job status carries very little weight.

— Freedom to create — Another stumbling block here is that representational parity in this instance is in the gift of the gatekeepers – who are largely White. Even if we do get to a point where Black, Asian and other ethnic minorities are represented more proportionally across the sectors, there’s an emotional power imbalance that will be entrenched for a long time still to come. No one wants to be given a position because of the colour of their skin, just as the reverse is true.

Another line from Baldwin on Cavett goes like this: “I don’t want to be given anything by you. I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself.”

It’s worth noting that, since the murder of George Floyd, we’re early in this new collective process and we won’t see the true impact for years to come. There’s an argument to say that correcting the flaws in an unjust system needs to be artificial and potentially drastic. Can worries about overcorrection be put to one side in pursuit of the greater good?

At this point, the desire to create genuine pathways into the industry for people from marginalised backgrounds must be considered a positive step. The likes of Raji Rags, Women Connect, Native Management, Youth Music, Tomorrow’s Warriors and many others are providing training and mentorship to those who have previously been left behind. If people are given the tools, access and freedom to create their own institutions to stand alongside the traditional gatekeeper organisations then the aforementioned power dynamic changes.

This is not a new problem, and despite the breakthroughs and landmark moments we can identify throughout 2020, there’s unlikely to be an immediate set of ideas that’ll crack it.

It does seem more people are willing and determined to try, and that’s hopeful. As we look towards 2021, consistency of implementation, a holistic attitude towards the impact of new policies and true selflessness of individuals currently in power will be required.

POLIÇA

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Final Third: Infinite Login

Inside the grid 10 years of Instagram as the music industry’s best friend,

by Georgina Quach

“Bossin’ up”, wrote Snoop Dogg beneath his first ever Instagram post – a grainy shot of the rapper in a suit, dimmed by a sunset filter. This was in January 2011, when what would become the world’s most popular photo-sharing app had only just been born. With only a handful of employees in its early days, the app needed big backers to get it off the ground. Together with his company co-founder Mike Krieger, Kevin Systrom reached out to a curated line-up of content creators and pop stars. When not doing his computing homework, Systrom would fill his hours DJ-ing, sneaking into Boston clubs to try to open for established acts. Even from his own music-making circles he could understand the potential clicks, shares and profit that musicians could bring to a mobile app. Snoop Dogg was among the very first celebrities chosen to push the hype around Instagram. His first photo alone earned him 2.5 million followers.

When YouTube-discovered Justin Bieber joined the platform soon after, Instagram saw a surge of sign-ups, with each new post by the singer crashing the server. In the beginning, Instagram used musicians to boost its popularity. Nowadays, the roles have reversed. A new generation of artists is rising out of Instagram’s own success, garnering a following simply by filling up squares with fresh, pleasing content. Instagram grants musicians not only prime real estate to feed fans with material, but the algorithms ensure that they can reach a much bigger pool if they play their cards right. In the same way, the app has made it possible for fans to see, hear and even speak to their favourite artist even if they can’t make it to their live shows. We’re given backstage access to their lives, both in and out of the studio.

— The insider feeling — Since its launch in late 2010, Instagram’s meteoric rise has transformed our lives. A billion of us find ourselves endlessly scrolling through it every month. The pursuit for grid perfection has led to a boom in filter-inspired plastic surgery and queues outside Insta-worthy walls and bath-

rooms. We now reach for our cameras instinctively, and its constant presence in our pocket changes the way we move through the world. Instagram’s rush to the top made it enough of a threat to Facebook that the social network was willing to pay a premium for it. In 2012, just days after it launched on Android devices, it bought Instagram for $1 billion.

By the time Instagram hit 100 million users, businesses were vying for likes and followers on the ad-driven marketplace. Since then, Facebook has gradually been introducing Instagram features for direct buying and selling: last Summer, it launched “branded content ads”, which let brands promote influencers’ posts as actual adverts. In the latest app update, the heart-shape notification button on our home page has disappeared and been replaced by a shopping bag icon, allowing us to buy stuff without even leaving the app. With Snoop Dogg’s posts doubling up as adverts for energy drink brands, the music industry has been roped in too, charmed

by Instagram’s mass market. Perhaps Instagram’s biggest gift, though, has been how it’s given musicians new ways of controlling their personal narrative – how they and their art are seen and consumed.

The ability to upload simple montages of our lives has allowed Instagram to function less as a peer-to-peer communication service and more as a platform for independent publishing. When Instagram Stories arrived – a clone of Snapchat, the 2011 originator of disappearing photos – that personal narrative leapt from the screen. Suddenly, life is not meant to be lived, but authored. Followers can jump into a tour bus by flicking onto their favourite artist’s account, just as easily as switching television channels.

This insider feel to Instagram has never been more valuable than now, to a music industry confronted by a global pause on live events. Over lockdown, I’ve enjoyed watching musicians take requests from their living rooms, orchestras play to empty concert halls, and producers like DJ Premier and RZA battle one another beat-for-beat on Instagram Live. At a time when almost everything and everyone seems disconnected, there remains no shortage of intimacy across the airwaves, heightened by influencers abandoning the pixel-perfect aesthetic for a “getting real” approach. These stay-at-home recordings are an example of a kind of Instagram counterculture; one that works against the capitalistic gloss which the platform is known for – even if it is a trend destined to be exploited.

While the need to fit this new medium of performance can pose problems, some musicians have been inspired by it.

Instagram has let us inside superstar’s houses, but it’s also paved the way for more interactive artwork and videos that veer away from the conventional cinematic frame. Made for Instagram Stories, the video for Mark Ronson’s track ‘Pieces of Us’ combined stickers, polls and AR effects. The playful video follows a bored teenager who ditches a ‘romantic’ fish finger supper with her dad in exchange for a

Final Third: Infinite Login night out. Shot on mobile phones, the video was layered with preloaded effects in real time using Facebook’s Spark AR platform, instead of during post-production. Its premiere on Instagram Stories highlighted how these video-editing tools are available to anyone, anywhere. In fact, amateur fan artists have taken to the platform to share their love in the form of paintings, sketches or personalised Vans. Little Mix used a 17-year-old’s fan drawing for the official artwork of their 2017 single ‘Power’.

— Saviour and tormentor — Even in real life events Instagram is driving the thirst for visual novelty and creativity. Festivals and club spaces are facing up to the new Instagram reality, with some artists adapting sets to appeal beyond the dance floor. It made sense, then, that Instagram sought partnerships with big music festivals to capitalise on user content, putting up attendees’ photos on stadium jumbotrons. A quick search of the hashtag Coachella brings up 5.1 million Instagram posts. After all, documenting a moment is almost impulsive now, as though deciding not to would be going off-radar.

When the Danish prime minister took a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in 2013 alongside Barak Obama and David Cameron, the press was outraged. Photographic narcissism, critics suggested, is now everywhere. While the Prime Minister’s selfie was not representative of her funeral etiquette overall, it nevertheless signalled the encroachment of social media on our reality.

A UK survey in 2017 by the Royal Society for Public Health found Instagram ranked the worst social media app for young people’s mental health. While Instagram got points for teen self-expression and community-building, this figure was brought down by its link to high levels of anxiety, depression, bullying and FOMO. For Craig Evans, founder of Flying Vinyl, Instagram has been key to building the community which supports the company’s subscription service. “Looking back over the history of music, an artist’s image was so aggressively managed,” he says. “Now, fans want to consume every part of an artist’s life.” Fans of Lana Del Rey, who were curious about the marketing rollout for her new album, Chemtrails over the Country Club, took to Instagram to get updates first. The singer’s manager, Ben Tap, replied to fans by commenting back on her Instagram post: “Great art takes time to finish…

Lana is in control of her destiny and a true artist.” Evans acknowledges today’s expectation of musicians to be socialmedia-savvy has warped our ideas of success. “I know a lot of artists who have become slaves to algorithms,” he says.

“There’s a difference between listening to feedback [and] gearing your writing and creation around vacuous metrics of success such as likes, views and reposting of content.”

Under the current pressure on artists to upload music and social media posts more than ever, the dividing line between “art” and “content” is becoming increasingly blurred, as they occupy the same space.

While Instagram helps artists gain support from fans, its directness also lends itself to more urgent appeals to the community. In November, the musician Emo Baby opened up on her Instagram stories about the psychological and physical abuse she had suffered from her ex-boyfriend, the rapper Octavian. Instagram became the medium to paint their deeply traumatising relationship, although it should be noted that Emo Baby was forced to switch to Twitter after Instagram removed some of her posts due to Octavian reporting them.

Emo Baby posted on her account screenshots, videos and photos evidencing her allegations of domestic violence. Her fans followed this with an outpouring of love and support. “We are all here and stand by you!” one commenter wrote. Emo Baby’s post not only exposed a supposed remorseless abuser to Octavian’s fans and label – who subsequently dropped him – but it educated us all on the subtle, hidden forms of domestic violence which are harder to recognise. Everyone agrees that physical assault is wrong, but we don’t often see this within a context of escalating abusive behaviours – gaslighting, coercive texts, isolation. In any given caption, the familiar phrase “please share” creates ripples far beyond the normal realms of a single Instagram post. Emo Baby’s story asks the wider music industry to ask serious questions about their role in the safeguarding of women, who are too often subordinated to the reputation of its biggest stars. Behind the wall of perfectly staged photos, there are community-run Instagram accounts solely designed to call out abuse against women, acting not only as a platform to expose sexists and fetishists, but also to show survivors they are not alone.

Over the last 10 years, Instagram has seeped into our lives at every turn, and its rise has forced musicians and the worlds around them to think more carefully about their “aesthetic”. No matter how established they are, artists have forged communities via the platform, which lets them play to fans and engage in a dialogue simultaneously. Yet while Instagram has opened up a myriad of music career opportunities, that success is limited only to those artists who create art which complements the corporation’s click-based goals.

With real life congregations halted, the app has had to take on emotional, even therapeutic, roles which we may have once thought totally removed from it. In many ways, the pandemic is gearing up this young generation of artists for the kind of world they might live in, when flights become more expensive due to carbon tax and barriers like visas start posing more 67 problems for many who have grown up without that friction.

Final Third: In Conversation

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Final Third: In Conversation It’s Saturday night in London and I’m talking to Riz Ahmed on the phone. It’s morning in L.A. for him, and despite the early time he doesn’t sound at all groggy or lethargic. In fact, he sounds the complete opposite – his mind is sharp, fast and precise. Within minutes of speaking to him it’s no surprise that he went to Oxford University. He’s tremendously intelligent.

His brain whirs and buzzes with astute observations and ideas, but his thoughtful nature also means that he’s mindful when explaining his thoughts, making sure that you’re right there with him; communicating, interrogating and being curious about the surrounding world.

We’ve had to move our call forward slightly. Riz is an incredibly busy man and is in the middle of filming, and although it’s clear through our conversation that he’s had time to pause and reflect this year, I instantly think how much of that break must have been somewhat short lived for him. Here I am, with my life still moving slowly in the later months of 2020, but he’s once again juggling to fit everything in. And he’s good at it.

He’s had a spectacular year. Mogul Mowgli, a film that

he not only starred in but wrote and produced, is about to be released and has received sensational reviews, and his upcoming movie, Sound of Metal with Dakota Johnson, has also won over critics, creating a buzz at film festivals the year prior. With two such large pieces of work under his belt, it’s hard to comprehend how he’s also had the time to put out an album in 2020 and create a theatre performance of it with the Manchester International Festival (postponed due to COVID, now to be performed via a live stream on December 12). The album The Long Goodbye (originally released in March, with a deluxe reissue due later this month) is an accomplishment creatively, lyrically and sonically.

The fusion between hip-hop and elements of his Pakistani heritage perfectly assimilate to bolster its concept: it’s a breakup album with Britain, in light of its recent xenophobia and apathy towards immigrants in the UK. Here, Britain becomes Britney, Riz’s toxic ex who asks him to move in and do a lot of her work, before blaming him for things going wrong and asking him to leave again. Displaced, this album speaks to the many immigrants in the country, wondering what to do next.

The Long Goodbye In conversation with actor, rapper and writer Riz Ahmed, about the need to redefine Britishness and the importance of his underrated 2020 album,

by Sophia Powell. Photography by Tom Porter

SP: Hey Riz, thank you so much for chatting to me. To start off, how did you find lockdown?

RA: I think it was an intense experience. I think it was a difficult one, but it was also quite a privileged one in that I didn’t have to expose myself personally to risk in the way that so many frontline workers had to. It was also I think a time that was quite revolutionary in lots of ways – coinciding with the month of Ramadan, which is the month of revelation as well. Ironically, and I think it was a moment where a lot of us were forced to reassess what really matters. Sometimes it takes a lightning bolt like that to stop everyone in their tracks and get off the treadmill a little bit about what they’re actually chasing. And it felt like suddenly so many of the things that we constantly run around for suddenly revealed themselves to be so superfluous.

SP: It’s so true. One minute we’re in the rat race and then you suddenly realise you don’t need to be necessarily doing things that were really important before.

RA: Yeah, I guess on a personal level, are you making time for family? Are you making time for fame? Are you making time for your spirituality? The things that really matter are our interconnectedness with our family and our wellbeing. I guess the biggest revelation for us is something that we’ve always known, it’s somewhere in our DNA. It’s how we’re programmed; that we’re not individuals. We’re part of a society. We’re part of a community, we’re part of the human family. I wrote this piece in Vogue and it was kind of based around this idea that, you know, people were talking about it being apocalyptic and I was looking into this idea that the word apocalypse means a revelation. It doesn’t mean this kind of big catastrophic ending. It means revelation.

SP: So would you say then that the main revelations you had during lockdown were about spirituality and family?

RA: I guess it was just about what really matters. It’s the stuff you take for granted. The stuff that money can’t buy, that

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Final Third: In Conversation our society isn’t geared towards valuing. What is most fundamental is our connectedness. Our community, rather than our individualism.

SP: That’s a lovely and very true insight. Let’s talk about your album, The Long Goodbye. It’s a fascinating album showing your heartbreak and anger towards Britain for the way it’s treated its immigrants. Britain becomes Britney, a toxic lover that you break up with. Where did the inspiration come from to frame this specifically as a breakup album?

RA: There’s this very established tradition Awali and in Sufi poetry, whether it’s Rumi or Ghalib or any of those poets, to write love poetry to a beloved about heartbreak, but it’s actually a metaphor. One poem that was a big influence on me was this poem by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a Pakistani poet. He has a poem called My Love, Don’t Ask Me For The Love We Had Before and it’s an amazing poem because what he’s saying is, “Look, my love. We used to have puppy love, but I can’t go to that place anymore because I’ve seen too much. I’ve seen dead bodies stripped naked, half burnt, lying in the sewers. I’ve seen the centuries old conspiracies embroidered in our fate.” He’s saying to a woman, “Shit’s changed, I’ve been through some trauma.

I’ve seen some shit. The world is too much of a dark place for us to run around in puppy love with our eyes closed.” But what I realised after reading and rereading is he’s probably talking to his country. Faiz was someone who was heartbroken, to some extent, about where the country was going.

SP: Carrying on with the theme of breaking up with Britain, it seems to be an album that’s specifically come about in light of Brexit?

RA: It wasn’t just purely Brexit, but I guess that’s the event you could point out for crystallising a lot of things. It feels like the post-9/11 creeping wave of intolerance; a kind of a sea change in public discourse. Actually, you could see it as a change or you could say as a return to normality, outside of the kind of bubble of the nineties. Perhaps that was the anomaly, that kind of nineties era of, “Hey, let’s celebrate multiculturalism!”, then 9/11 dividing the world up again into this Us versus Them narrative.

Yes, it’s Brexit, but it’s bigger than Brexit. It’s something that’s happening around the world. So, yes, the album is very much couched in my personal experience, and in specific references of the British context, but it’s very much an album that speaks to this this kind of xenophobic, nativist tidal wave that seems to be sweeping the world; one that discounts the history of these very countries and the histories of immigration and colonialism that built these countries. And, is rejecting the people that really helped build these countries and made them what they were. I think it speaks to something that’s a bit more of a global disease right now.

SP: Yeah, I completely agree. I was going to ask if there was a specific moment where you had enough, where you felt driven to create the album, but it sounds like it’s something that’s more of a build-up?

RA: It is. It’s built up through my own body of work from my first track, ‘Post 9/11 Blues’. It’s built up through what’s been

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happening in the world, the news, my own personal experiences.

But I’ll point to one anecdote: I remember when I was having dinner with some people, a mixed group. We were talking about whether we should stay in the West and whether it would be safe; whether by the time of our kids and grandkids, they’d be cursing us like, “Why didn’t you leave?”. Are we at a turning point? And if so, actually where would we go? And so it kind of threw up three questions for me: 1) Where would you go? Where’s safe?

This is global. 2) Why should I go? This is my home. And 3) Isn’t it mad that we are saying this and that it’s not a surprising thing to say? The surprising thing around the table was that everyone was like, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking that.”

SP: It’s funny you’re saying that because I’ve even thought that myself as a person of colour. A part of the album that made me chuckle was when someone asks you where you’re really from and you say Wembley. With these feelings of disillusion and abandonment in terms of Britain, has it changed how you feel about your identity? Do you still feel very British?

RA: If I say I feel very British what does that mean? Does that mean, “Okay, so I love the Queen! I’ve got a Union Jack hanging up at home”? Or does it mean my favourite dish is chicken tikka masala and I go shopping on Southall Broadway?

All those things are British. I think our conception of what Britishness is desperately needs updating, stretching and reimagining to kind of align with the reality of what Britishness is and always has been. Britain has always been a patchwork; it always has been a nation of immigrants. It’s an island nation. The people who were here before the Celts, the Angles and the Saxons were immigrants. The first border patrol that was ever in England was a legion of North African troops fighting for the Italian Roman Empire. That was our first immigration control in this country, at Hadrian’s Wall, keeping the Scots out. I don’t see that I have to qualify. British, British Asian or British Muslim – Britishness should encapsulate all of that. It does encapsulate all of that.

SP: It’s interesting to see how you represent that very melting pot sonically within The Long Goodbye. It almost feels like a culture clash, but one that sounds and feels like harmony.

There are parts in Urdu and your mum even features on the album. Musically, was it easy to blend the cultures?

RA: It’s totally second nature and authentic to me. You know, we’re talking about how you build your own language. My past is haweli, but it’s also jungle. Both of them. My present is my Mum speaking in Urdu and it’s also music right now.

SP: Yeah, it feels natural to you, it just feels like your experience.

RA: Exactly. I think it’s just been about trying to find a producer who can understand that. And that has been Redinho for years now, from all the Swet Shop Boys stuff and The Long Goodbye. That’s been my key collaborator, someone with musical knowledge and curiosity, who understands me.

SP: The album opens with ‘The Breakup (Shikwa)’ – a fascinating track that lays the foundation for the rest of the album. In it, you speak about your Kashmir jumper being bloody because you’ve been split in half. I read this as signifying the

Final Third: In Conversation

“Our conception of what Britishness is desperately needs updating, to align with the reality of what Britishness is and always has been”

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Final Third: In Conversation

separation of India and Pakistan. Is that accurate? And if so, how have you seen the effect of that partition personally?

RA: Absolutely. There’s references to Kashmir, there’s references to partition. You know, it’s also about a sense of heartbreak that’s going on right now in real time. And so I guess what makes that history feel alive now is how we still haven’t really faced and reckoned with the legacy and reality of partition. There are no monuments to partition in the UK. Millions of lives were lost in the largest forced migration in recorded history. In terms of how it affected me personally, my family was from North India for generations. After partition, they left and became Pakistani – that’s the first kind of breakup. Then they left Pakistan to come to England – that’s the second breakup.

Now, is there going to be a third one? There’s a legacy of migration... there’s a kind of collective memory with immigrant populations: home is always someplace else. My ethnic group, Muhajir, basically means refugee. Urdu-speaking North Indian Indians who went to Pakistan after partition, that’s the name of our ethnic group. So it’s very much alive in our identity and our sense of always not feeling quite at home. And that’s a big part of what’s happening in Mogul Mowgli, this idea of the past is alive in us, for better and for worse. So we have to reckon with it, we have to look back if we want to move forwards.

SP: Let’s dive more into Mogul Mowgli. As well as starring in it, you’ve also written and produced it. It’s received amazing reviews at film festivals. What was the creative process like for you?

RA: It was very collaborative. It was myself and Bassam Tarik (director). We just had a really honest, free-flowing back

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and forth, and I feel like that kind of collaboration is rare but it’s also crucial, for me at least. It’s a super low-budget British film that we shot in, like, four weeks. It was hot, it was intense and we were doing a lot of rewrites as we were going because the film was evolving. It was a big learning curve for both me, as a producer and filmmaker, and for Bassam. From an acting point of view, it was quite emotional because I went to a very personal place, obviously in writing, and so in that sense, it felt vulnerable and exposing but also very freeing and very liberating.

SP: Would you say that the life of lead character Zed has any similarities to your own?

RA: Would it be hilarious if I said no?

SP: Not necessarily. I don’t want to assume.

RA: We’ve taken our own experiences and we’ve extrapolated from that, and of course, elements of the character might be larger than life, or maybe less self-aware in some cases and more in others, but yeah, I was at least a starting point for the character. I think with Zed, perhaps he’s focusing on the wrong things and he’s not perhaps totally self-aware about how his television success is really costing him. He thinks he’s in competition with everyone rather than realising we’re all actually a link in the chain, part of an ongoing conversation. And his realisation, like the coronavirus realisation we discussed, is that we’re not individuals and the stuff we’re chasing is misguided. I describe it, in a way, as a coronavirus film: you’ve got a workaholic who gets hit by a health crisis, gets locked down in purgatory in a hospital, and has to reassess what’s really matters to him – and he realises it’s his family and wellbeing. And that’s exactly what the journey has been for most of our society.

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Final Third: The Rates Each month we ask an artist to share the three musicians they think have gone underappreciated, and the three new names who they hope will avoid a similar fate. Experimental rap trio Clipping discussed theirs with Max Pilley. Photography by Cristina Bercovitz

Clipping When dealing with as challenging a group as Clipping, it feels appropriate to hold back any big assumptions about where their influences come from. The industrial hip-hop trio have clearly invested enormous time and intellectual energy in their work; to come in as an outsider and ascribe a specific masterplan to what they do seems a little forward, to say the least. And yet, in the case of the group’s 2016’s album, Splendor & Misery, the hesitation of some to describe it as an afrofuturist sci-fi song cycle became a frustration. “We have learned to not be coy in press releases anymore,” explains producer Jonathan Snipes.

“We used to be like, ‘We want this to be a discovery for the audience’, but now we’ve learned to just say, ‘THIS. IS. A. SCIENCE. FICTION. CONCEPT. ALBUM.’ We have to fucking spell it out.”

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So with that in mind, their most recent album, Visions of Bodies Being Burned, is a horrorcore album, just like last year’s There Existed an Addiction to Blood was. It finds Daveed Diggs, he of the original Hamilton cast and star of Black-ish, Snowpiercer and Blindspotting, drawing upon a dizzying list of horror film and music references in his lyrics while Snipes’ and William Hutson’s beats create an aura of menace, whether creepingly unsettling or outright violent.

For this month’s Rates, I asked each of the three members of the group to select two artists, one established and one emerging, that they feel have been most unfairly under-celebrated.

What followed was an outpouring of love for music of very different stripes.

Final Third: The Rates

TURF TALK Daveed Diggs: He came into local success doing hooks for E-40 songs, but he has an incredible voice. He’s a really good rapper and nobody ever really talked about that. I think a lot of folks who had their heyday in the hyphy era, the rapping was not what it was about, so no-one happened to appreciate people who were very good at rapping. And granted, this is within a very local scene anyway – I don’t know anybody outside of where we grew up who is a Turf Talk fan.

The Street Novelist, still I can listen to every song on that album. A few years later he put out an album called West Coast Vaccine that I don’t think you can even get on streaming platforms anymore, and it is so good. I’ve bought it, like, four times on CD. He was really street but he fit in with that hyphy-era ethos of just having fun, and bar-for-bar that dude could rap! He doesn’t put out much music anymore and I wish he did.

Max Pilley: Help describe for someone who grew up 5000 miles away what the hyphy thing was. Did it always remain hyper local to the Bay Area?

DD: The greatest national acclaim it reached was with ‘Tell Me When to Go’ [from E-40’s 2006 album My Ghetto Report Card], that’s probably the hyphy song that most people know, and that was the end of it really. 2000-2007 in the Bay Area was this time that was just different. I’m a little bit of a hyphy scholar, I probably think about it too much or reference it too much.

Kids in the Bay Area were always told they were too wild, they’re too bad and they’re dumb, and this idea of going dumb that we latched onto in the hyphy era was this thing that is common in disenfranchised communities, where it’s like, if you’re going to call me something, I’m going to flip that and make it beautiful. And so, we turned this idea of going dumb into something that referenced everything about how we behaved and how we acted. The music of that era was indicative of that, it was really silly. It was really fast-paced and it was fun. You would have these moments when you would be driving down the street and the right song would come on the radio and all of the cars would stop and everybody would jump out of their cars and start dancing, just in the middle of the street. It happened frequently.

People don’t understand this when I explain it to them, it feels like a fever dream or something. There was a unifying philosophy in the Bay Area, there was a culture that was all of ours, and not really anybody else’s, and we were very proud of it.

Rexx Life Raj DD: He’s another Bay Area cat. I think he’s great, he’s got an album coming out called California Poppy 2. Again, I like rappers, and he’s a really good rapper, but he’s also a great singer. His verses are sung like an R&B song but they’re written like rap songs. He’s got this great melodic sense that is super current and he’s one of these people that has the capacity to straddle this line. Every rapper sort of sings to a degree, but his singing is more interesting and his rapping is more interesting.

I think he’s a great writer and he’s a really nice dude, he’s one of those people that you want to win. That ‘Tesla in a Pandemic’ song that just came out is really good. He’s got it all.

MP: Is there any unifying strand through yourself and these two other Bay Area artists that you can identify at all?

DD: Yeah, definitely. Emphasis on the wordplay, emphasis on the slang, emphasis on the fun of it, too. Both of them, and us to a degree, are nerds about rapping. Those Rexx songs aren’t accidents, they don’t feel like they just happened, there’s so much construction there. For me, that’s one of the Bay Area through-lines – we’re a little obsessed with construction, I think.

William Hutson: There’s also a very specific thing in the Bay; there’s such an emphasis on ‘What’s your unique thing, what’s your unique voice, how do you rap differently to everyone else?’. Maybe I just don’t have the ear for it for other cities, but it feels like in the Bay Area everyone sounds all over the place.

Everyone’s looking for their own very unique take, and they do not want to sound like anyone else at all.

DD: Yeah that’s true, and it feels actually more true as time goes on. You can hear other scenes starting to sound more and more the same.

WH: It’s people with weird-sounding voices, that’s such a thing in California. Literally, the sound of their instrument is different.

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Final Third: The Rates

MIA X WH: Mia X went platinum [with her 1998 album Mama Drama], but I don’t know that people appreciated her at the time or if they appreciate her or No Limit [the label founded by Master P that released her music] anymore. Daveed was talking about our era being hyphy, but we were at high school at the boom of Cash Money, No Limit and that underground gangsta rap scene from Louisiana that completely took over. It’s hard to appreciate now thinking back that bus benches in Oakland would change every week, and it was whatever new No Limit album was coming out. And we were thousands of miles away from that, all the way across the continent. It was everywhere.

Mia X was this really interesting figure on the label as the only woman and definitely one of the stronger bar-for-bar rappers in the group. They had a bunch of excellent rappers – Mac, Fiend, Magic, Mystikal – but it was a time when there weren’t a ton of massively famous women rappers and I thought of her for this because of the explosion in the last couple of years of female rappers that are outselling every other rapper on the scene. A Cardi B album, a Megan Thee Stallion album, those are events in a way that other rappers’ records aren’t. And it just feels to me like Mia X was way ahead of her time, in that a lot of the stuff that she raps about is exactly like what someone like Megan is rapping about. Mia X’s first breakthrough record was a bounce record called ‘Da Payback’ in 1993 and it’s clowning on gangsta dudes about how they’re trying to spit game but she’s got more money than them and if they want to fuck, they’ve got to pay her, making fun of their dicks and all that stuff, and it’s exactly the same shit but it’s 25 years before and it’s fucking hard as hell. I just think she’s fantastic.

MP: There will be some people that are fans of yours that will be surprised that you’re so enthusiastic about gangsta rap, because for whatever reason people tend to think that artists only listen to things that sound exactly like them.

WH: Yeah, people think if you make a slightly weird version of a type of music, it’s the equivalent of saying that it’s bad music. As if we make noisy rap because we fucking hate rap and we’re destroying it and taking it down! That’s obviously not what we do. If you listen carefully to what we do, I think it’s very reverent. We are so specific in our homages and so open when it’s an homage.

DD: It feels like the longer we keep doing it, the more people settle into it. Some of the journalism around this last record seemed to finally start to acknowledge that we must love this stuff, I think partially because I packed in so many quotes.

WH: And these last two records, we explicitly said it was horrorcore and we listed Geto Boys, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Brotha Lynch Hung, these are our influences. This is our tribute to a completely underappreciated, forgotten, weird stepchild of gangsta rap that we have particular affection for.

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AHO SSAN WH: If he was literally the most famous, best-selling computer musique concrète performer in the world, he would still be globally massively underrated. It would be, ‘Oh, I outsold Peter Rehberg!’ I guess Tim Hecker would be maybe the biggest name he’d be coming for. No matter where he goes, I think he’ll definitely deserve more. I just listened to this record [Simulacrum, French composer Aho Ssan’s debut album, released in early 2020] a lot this year. There’s something about this type of music, it just works on me. There is a trajectory of French IRCAM and GRM musique concrète that just works on my brain and I listen to it all of the time. It just scratches a particular itch; it’s a certain timbre and logic that I can listen to forever and I’m always interested in it.

This first album by Aho Ssan is a particularly excellent and considered example of this. When Endless Summer by Fennesz came out [in 2001], it felt like the one album where someone had taken these sounds and made a record. That’s why it was a pop breakthrough album for that genre, and Simulacrum feels like the same thing to me. It’s got themes, things recur and come back, and it’s obviously very conceptually rigorous. This is a remarkable record and the next one is going to be better and the next one is going to be better. I hope he gets as much success as anyone in that world can possibly get – I hope he gets a really posh teaching gig in some department somewhere and gets to make all the music he wants and gets to live comfortably for the rest of his life off being an excellent computer musician!

MP: And for all the people who are confused with all your love for gangsta rap, they might be able to relax because this is probably what they imagined you were listening to instead.

Jonathan Snipes: It’s weird that we haven’t talked about that record, Bill, because it’s also one of my favourite records of the year. I’ve been listening to it all year non-stop too and I don’t think you and I have ever even talked about it.

Final Third: The Rates LIKE A TIM

AKEYAMASOU

JS: Like a Tim is one of the few artists that I have successfully and obsessively collected every record of. I think the first time I heard him was when I first discovered Reflex Records, the label that Aphex Twin had. This was in the ’90s when it was really hard for me to find out stuff, growing up in Riverside, Southern California, which might as well have been the Midwest as far as music stores were concerned. I found a Like a Tim remix record and I saw the Reflex logo in a clearance bin and I bought it. It was one of the first records that I can remember putting on and saying, “What the fuck is this shit, this is not music, this is so fraudulent, what is happening and how can things sound like this.” I became utterly obsessed with it and I listened to it over and over again to try to understand it. I kept buying his records as I would find them, because I just didn’t get them, and then it became some of my absolute favourite music.

Some of the early stuff on Djax Up Beats are just pretty straightforward acid tracks and then he gets into this period in the late ’90s where nothing is quantised, nothing’s in tune, it’s just these weird, loping, arrhythmic, a-melodic patterns with the most out of time drum fills and it’s so deeply strange. It sounds to me like caveman children banging on rocks, but with really expensive-sounding synthesisers, and it’s so funky and childlike and full of wonder. The idea you can take any strange synthesiser pattern and just do it over and over again and it becomes a funky dance loop that we have adopted in Clipping, I think that comes a lot from my love of Like a Tim. And I don’t know if any of them listen to this stuff, but the whole PC Music thing, I hear Like a Tim so much in A. G. Cook and SOPHIE and definitely in GFOTY’s productions.

JS: I don’t know how old he is, but it sounds quite young to me. It feels like somebody young and smart who has grown up listening to Autechre and Mark Fell and things like that and has just decided, “Oh, I’m just going to do the next thing”, it feels like the next sound. There are only these two records on Bandcamp and I feel like they were released on the same day and the track titles are just the dates that I assume the tracks were made. As far as I can tell, he’s only using a couple of Electron boxes to make this stuff and it’s so virtuosic and effortless sounding, and yet it’s so challenging and difficult and dense. There’s an effortlessness to it that I find really impressive and I’m so excited to see what he’s going to do next. In the way that some comedians are comedian’s comedians, this feels like a producer’s producer.

MP: Is it inevitable, because of what you do, to listen to electronically produced music with quite an analytical mind?

JS: Yeah, that’s always been how it’s worked. I think of something that Daveed said a long time ago, I forget what we were listening to, some rap song in the car, and he said, “This is like candy for me, I could just listen to this and consume this constantly, it just makes me feel good.” This Akeyamasou record, that’s my candy.

“Some of the journalism around this last record seemed to finally start to acknowledge that we must love this stuff, I think partially because I packed in so many quotes” 77

Final Third: Year’s End

Housebound sounds The story of 2020 in tracks, by Luke Cartledge We all know 2020’s been shit and weird. So that’s that out of the way. But it’s also been, if nothing else, pretty interesting, and full of great music, at least some of which wouldn’t have been made, or made in the same way, were it not for the (mainly horrible) events we’ve endured this year. This, then, is a reflection on all of that: the strange and excellent music that’s made 2020 somewhat bearable, and what the relationship is between that music and our melting brains.

January How did you spend your New Year’s Eve? I went to a Roaring ’20s-themed party, which seems fitting, really, considering the economic crash, civil unrest and creeping fascism that descended on the world as quickly as my hangover on the 1st of January. It’s like we’re doing a Weimar Germany speedrun. Cool!

The two tracks that I most associate with the beginning of this year are Keeley Forsyth’s gaunt, trembling ‘Debris’, and Dua Lipa’s euphoric ‘Physical’. They’re more or less polar opposites: the former a funereal, desolate piece, as scratchy and windswept

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as the Brontë uplands near Forsyth’s Yorkshire home; the latter an utterly derivative and completely irresistible hi-NRG banger – camp, knowing, saccharine, and bursting with hooks.

Lipa’s masterful disco-pop – the full album of which, Future Nostalgia, is some of the most nakedly enjoyable music I’ve heard in ages – and Forsyth’s spectral avant-folk gestured towards two competing visions of the year ahead. The day-glo salvation implied by a track like ‘Physical’ may not have been what anyone realistically expected out of 2020 in general, but it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to look forward to some hedonism, some collective joy, some fun, soundtracked by escapist gems like this. What we ended up with, of course, was much closer to the post-apocalyptic isolation and gloom of Forsyth’s ‘Debris’. Which isn’t depressing at all. Good song though.

February As frightening stories of the coming pandemic became increasingly difficult to escape, the UK government – and, to be honest, most of the public, including myself – bumbled along more or

Final Third: Year’s End less as normal. There were gigs to go to, pubs to drink in, friends to visit, and a horrible virus sprinting towards us across Europe.

Halcyon days.

After a steady climb since its December release, The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’ hit UK no.1, his first track to do so, despite basically sounding like the background music for a radio advert on GTA 4. Princess Nokia’s ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ was a much stronger two-minutes of childlike, Dr Seuss-themed hip-hop, just in time for us all to lock down and regress into rarely wearing anything other than pyjamas and mainly eating potato waffles. Or maybe that was just me.

March And then It Happened. As it became clear the previous strategy of talking over the virus wasn’t working and we probably weren’t going to simply defeat Covid-19 in the marketplace of ideas, the UK belatedly and clumsily locked down, pantsing the music industry in the process. Reeling at the flood of cancelled shows, haemorrhaging revenues and lost jobs, many of us turned back to old favourites to steady ourselves, including L&Q contributors: Sam Walton got back into the prescient eeriness of Radiohead’s Kid A; Skye Butchard kept club culture alive in their flat with the help of bangers from Addison Groove and DJ Swisha; Isabel Crabtree wandered around a deserted NYC with Hinds on full blast. For my part, I spent a lot of time listening to Burial’s early stuff and Interpol’s Turn On The Bright Lights, because I’m a miserable cliché.

Speaking of old favourites, on 2nd March indie rock’s favourite randy uncle returned from his retreat into the Derbyshire hills with a song that was, if anything, too timely.

Jarvis Cocker’s JARV IS project announced a debut album with ‘House Music All Night Long’ – six minutes of classic Jarvis, all slinky grooves and synthy melodrama – whose lyrics really did feel a little on the nose as we headed into lockdown. Lines like, “One nation under a roof ”, “This housebound sound is gonna set you free”, and “Lost in the light of the living room, adrift in a world of interiors, it’s serious” may have been written many months before the pandemic hit, but they couldn’t have been more apt. It’d be almost unbearable were it not interspersed with couplets like “Goddamn this claustrophobia, cos I should be disrobing ya”. Who else could get away with that?

energy, it pretty much summed up how we were all feeling as lockdown really began to settle in. You could say the same for Phoebe Bridgers’ skeleton-costumed folk-rocker ‘Kyoto’, albeit with the emotion dialled way up and the mania way down.

May The first weeks of May more or less picked up where March and April had left off, with moderately better weather. Grimes gave birth to her and Hank Scorpio’s first child, obviously called X Æ A-12, hot on the heels of her ‘Wonderwall’ cover from February, and we continue to bear down on the meme/life singularity.

In other rich dickhead news, Poundshop Machiavelli Dominic Cummings swept away the remaining few crumbs of public trust in the government’s pandemic strategy with the revelation of his trip to various County Durham beauty spots in the middle of lockdown. It’s important not to overstate the significance of his antics – spare us the howls of ‘hypocrisy!’ and ‘incivility!’ – in the face of far more deep-rooted and fundamental combinations of incompetence and corruption, but it really would help if the entire British ruling class wasn’t so desperate to wrap itself around the little finger of Comic Book Guy’s scrawny kid brother.

In the middle of the month, Aussie rapper Tkay Maidza returned after a quiet period with the astonishing ‘Shook’, a song and video so good that it made pretty much everyone else

April At the end of March, Boris Johnson tested positive for Covid, joining the ranks of rightwing leaders whose scoffing at the virus somehow didn’t protect them (as I write, I believe Jair Bolsonaro is currently battling his sixteenth case of the disease). As April began, he was admitted to intensive care, and the internet descended into a squabble about whether it was okay to indulge in some light schadenfreude at the illness of a man with – by this point – tens of thousands of deaths on his hands (spoiler: it is).

Charli xcx set the tone for April with ‘forever’: the first track from her lockdown project, recorded at home during quarantine. A weird mix of subdued emotion and glimpses of manic

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Final Third: Year’s End around look amateurish. We knew then that once we got back to printing the magazine she had to be on the cover.

Towards the end of the month though, everything changed: George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by police in Minneapolis, triggering the biggest uprising in recent US history and a wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the world.

June A full account of the (still ongoing) Black Lives Matter movement is far beyond the scope of this fundamentally silly little article, so I’ll let other people (including Jamal Guthrie on p62) pass comment on that. One of the essential audio documents of the period, though, was released just days after Floyd’s death: Run The Jewels’ RTJ4, led by superbly aggy singles ‘Ooh La La’ and ‘Yankee and the Brave (Ep. 4)’. The political significance of the record is self-evident, but back in the UK, it also took on a more personal meaning for our writer Gemma Samways: ‘Ooh La La’ was the first non-Disney song her two-year-old daughter properly got into. Start ’em young.

July In the context of so much pestilence and social unrest, many found Taylor Swift’s soft-focus indie record folklore a welcome reprieve, its cosy atmosphere and relative restraint pleasantly out of step with the tense mood of the time. Our writer Austin Laike described it as “about seven tracks too long, overly-saccharine and with a penchant for over-dramatics, but it’s pretty good”, which is fair enough. I personally always agreed with Neil Tennant’s superbly testy description of Swift, as “the Mrs Thatcher of pop music”; undeniably effective on her own terms, but a nailed-on reactionary. That said, ‘august’ is quite nice.

August Ah yes, the month of Eating Out that did not, in fact, Help Out. Restrictions in the UK were relatively loose at this point, and with the weather being comparatively warm, it felt semi-normal again for a while. Gobby new wavers Working Men’s Club capitalised on the country’s brief window of sun-dappled levity to unleash ‘Valleys’, a muscular bit of Hacienda-ready baggy-punk that harks back knowingly to the Second Summer of Love. It’s

“Can’t remember much about September. It was my birthday, and Pa Salieu put out a really good tune called ‘My Family’, which I believe is about that horrible Robert Lindsay sitcom”

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Final Third: Year’s End fitting, really: how better to recapture the spirit of 1988 than an illicit trip out to the hills, defying an increasingly authoritarian right-wing government with the help of a big bag of pingers and more than six mates?

It was also the month that 2020’s most inescapable song was released upon us: Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’.

It’s a good tune – but the beauty of its cultural impact was the way people reacted. The American right’s weediest galaxy brain, Ben Shapiro, performed an all-time classic conservative self-own by confidently announcing that his wife would consider having a ‘WAP’ a medical problem. Fellow feminism expert Russell Brand weighed in entirely unprompted, with a video entitled WAP: Feminist Masterpiece or Porn?, which was greeted by the derision it deserved.

The track also blew up on TikTok, becoming an ‘Old Town Road’-level sensation on the platform and further cementing the video-sharing network’s dominance over the music consumption of Generation Z. We also can’t talk about August without shouting out Headie One, who dropped ‘Ain’t It Different’ with features from Stormzy and AJ Tracey. It’s the tune that’s finally made him the breakout star of UK drill – a landmark moment not only for him, but the scene as a whole.

September Can’t remember much about September. It was my birthday, and Pa Salieu put out a really good tune called ‘My Family’, which I believe is about that horrible Robert Lindsay sitcom. Will that do?

October As the UK careered headlong into increased Covid restrictions as the death rate started to accelerate again, grime’s old guard stepped back into the frame like a reassuring hand on the wheel.

The new tracks from Dizzee Rascal, D Double E, and Ghetts all hit hard; tunes like ‘Don’t Be Dumb’ (Dizzee ft Ocean Wisdom), ‘IC3’ (Ghetts ft Skepta), and ‘Tell Me A Ting’ (D Double E ft Kano) are masterclasses in old-school grime. It’s telling that a near-20-year-old genre, when done well, still at least sounds so fresh and nostalgia-free. Whether it’s actually possible for it to escape that nostalgia is another question, but the scene’s constant churn and support of its up-and-comers does help stem the tide of sentimental repackaging.

At the end of the month, Black Country, New Road – arguably the most exciting new rock band in the world at the moment – dropped their long-awaited new single ‘Science Fair’, and it was as unhinged and brilliant as everyone had hoped. And things slightly began looking up.

for most of us, but at least they suggest that 2021 might be an improvement on 2020. Of course, the big news this month was Hollywood A-listers Ryan Reynolds’ and Rob McElhenney’s purchase of National League football club Wrexham AFC, as if acting out an It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode written and directed by Trevor Bastard.

At the time of writing, it’s still November, so it’s hard to say what the defining track of the month will end up being. Billie Eilish did put out a new one the other day though, ‘Therefore I Am’, which does all the stuff you want a Billie Eilish song to do – some nearly-singing, PS1 Music 2000 production, a general feeling that she can’t really be arsed. It works well enough overall, so I’ll put my money on that.

December Let’s have Black Country, New Road for Christmas No. 1 and be done with it. Roll on 2021, or at least fuck off 2020.

November Within the first few days of November, Donald Trump lost an election to another handsy septuagenarian in cognitive decline, and the first news of a viable Covid vaccine – still a few steps away from widespread availability – was announced by Pfizer.

Neither of these events imply an immediate change in fortunes

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I shouldn’t have to keep saying this, but I have not photoshopped this album cover – Chris Kamara’s second collection of Christmas songs (as in Chris Kamara sings the songs himself, out loud) exists and is currently available in your furthest away Sainsbury’s.

There are questions to be asked here, aren’t there?

Like: “Sorry, second?”, “Are there two Chris Kamaras, then?”, “Bollocks!”, “Not second though?” and “Can I use my Nectar Points in Tesco?”. The confusion is real, but the answers are: “Yes”, “No”, “I hear and respect you”, “Seriously”, and, “I’m afraid it will also be available in Tesco”.

Foreseeing the challenge of convincing shoppers that ...And a Happy New Year is a genuine product (tests have shown that 4 out 10 people still don’t believe it whilst listening to it), ‘Kammy’’s people have kept its sleeve simple, factual and – unintentionally – a little sad.

Kammy’s face is nice and big, quashing any idea that this must be another Chris Kamara and not the Medical Grade Rodney that presents Ninja Warrior UK and misses goals when commentating on football matches.

As it all starts to feel more real, the red and green colour palette might even attract some buyers before they fully notice that this is an album by Chris Kamara. The gift tag is the real stroke of genius, confirming and advertising that Kammy is a repeat offender, and his previous album went TOP TEN. And yet the branch it’s photoshopped onto is, inexplicable, of a fake Christmas tree. They wouldn’t even photoshop in a real tree branch!!! Mixed messages.

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100% Official I’m embarrassed to say that this year I’d thought I’d save a few quid by buying an UNofficial Cliff calendar from The Works. What harm can it do, I thought. 12 photos of Cliff is 12 photos of Cliff. He always looks good. Boy was I wrong.

The paper was very thin and cheap, and I was shocked to discover that April and June were photos of Lionel Blair, and August was Paul McCartney. I ordered this OFFICIAL calendar straight away and wish I hadn’t wasted my time and money before. The paper is very sturdy and it features photos of Cliff singing, playing guitar and staring. Tempted to keep it on Feb all year long. I’ve learnt my lesson.

Hide and Seek: ITV’s worst show yet

illustration by kate prior