boygenius – Loud And Quiet 158

Yaeji, Mega Bog, James Holden, SQÜRL, Water From Your Eyes, Comfort, Yo La Tengo, Fran Lobo, McKinley Dixon, Robbie & Mona, Zulu, Lankum, Lucinda Chua, James Acaster

issue 158

boygenius S H A R E YO U R DA R LI N G S

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd 445 Hackney Road London E2 9DY Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Designer: Ed Seymour Art Direction: B.A.M. Contributing writers Alastair Shuttleworth, Alexander Smail, Andrew Anderson, Ben Lynch, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan Wray, Dominic Haley, Dhruva Balram, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hamza Riaz, Hayden Merrick, Ian Roebuck, Isabel Crabtree, Jack Doherty, Jake Crossland, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jenessa Williams, Jessica Wrigglesworth, Joe Goggins, Jumi Akinfenwa, Kyle Kohner, Leo Lawton, Max Pilley, Michelle Kambasha, Mike Vinti, Nadia Younes, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Orla Foster, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Walton, Shrey Kathuria, Skye Butchard, Sophia McDonald, Susan Darlington, Theo Gorst, Tom Critten, Tom Morgan, Tristan Gatward, Janne Oinonen, Zara Hedderman, Zhenzhen Yu Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Annie Forrest, Cielito Vivas, Dan Kendall, Eleonora C. Collini, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Henri Kisielewski, Jake Kenny, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Kyle Johnson, Levi Mandel, Mathew Scott, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Phil Sharp, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter With special thanks to Alex Cull, Amy Azarinejad, Ben Ayres, Ethan Beer, Kate Price, Natalie Quesnel, Matt Hughes, Nathan Beazer, Noam Klar, Rob Chute, Sophia Ikirmawi, Tom Sloman

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 2023 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Issue 158 The last time we ran an interview with boygenius we made it into a test.

Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers weren’t going to be together anytime soon (they rarely are, still to this day) so we interviewed them separately and cross examined their answers. That Mrs & Mrs quiz. It was fun, ok!? Forgiven or forgotten, four and a half years later we were invited to meet the band in New York, not to interrogate them individually this time, but as a group about to release their debut album and navigate a year of growing hysteria.

Stuart Stubbs

Robbie & Mona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Zulu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Water From Your Eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Lucinda Chua . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Comfort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Fran Lobo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Lankum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 McKinley Dixon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 boygenius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Yaeji . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 James Holden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Yo La Tengo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 SQÜRL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Mega Bog . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 03

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Black Country, New Road With a continual aversion to looking backwards, Black Country, New Road surprise released a concert film on 20 February that consists only of new material. Live at Bush Hall was recorded at the west London ballroom during three special performances in December 2022, with the band in different themed fancy dress for each of them: an ’80s school prom, a haunted pizza restaurant and the Somerset countryside.

Nine songs in 52 minutes – with an intermission that shows the band hand making the stage sets for each of the

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performances – the film provides many fans with a first look at how BCNR now line up without former singer Isaac Wood, who left the group in January 2022. His departure meant that they were unable to tour their second album Ants from Up There, although the band stuck with their 2022 festival bookings and pulled together a setlist of new material – the songs seen in Live at Bush Hall. Lead vocals are, for now at least, shared between bassist Tyler Hyde, pianist May Kershaw and saxophonist Lewis Evans. The film is available on the band’s YouTube channel and also received an audio release on 24 March.

photography by holly whitaker

The Beginning: Previously Hudson Mohawke

David Guetta

On Valentine’s Day, Hudson Mohawke resurrected his onceyearly slowjam series for all the lovers out there. He used to put out a mix on 14 February like clockwork, from 2007 until 2017. But then, silence. Perhaps it was a ten-year plan, people thought. Perhaps he’d given up on love. Or perhaps he’d found it. Whatever had gone on, 2023’s Chapter XII was wined, dined and heavily petted by fans around the world, billed by HudMo himself as, “maybe the worst one yet”. But he has said that about all previous mixes too. luckyme.net/slowjams

On February 8, David Guetta posted a worrying video on his YouTube channel, at the start of a month that would be dominated by opinions about ChatGPT and AI’s place in music and art. Guetta’s latest gift to a world that surely needs no more is a track he’s made using two pieces of AI software that deep fakes the lyrical style and voice of Eminem to impressive, shocking effect. The footage shows Guetta playing the song out to tens of thousands of people kettled into a show. Naturally, they’re screaming. Eminem is rapping a nonsensical but real-sounding hook about “the future rave sound”, only it’s not Eminem at all.

It’s definitely one of the most sinister AI experiments in music yet, and not just because David Guetta did it.

Yard Act

Clubbing in Berlin

Yard Act have finally vowed to stop touring and start making a second album, but before they do they’ll take up a five-night residency at The Brudenell Social Club in their hometown of Leeds this May, supported by a different comedian each night. The dates run 8-12 May, with Harry Hill, Rose Matafeo, Nish Kumar, Lolly Adefope and a surprise fifth comedian who’s reportedly coming out of retirement for the show (everybody’s saying it’s Bobby Davro).

Throughout February, the local government in Berlin started paying young people to go clubbing… Essentially. The introduction of the Jungendkulturkarte (the youth culture card) was met with great praise by all fans of techno, but especially those who live in the German capital and are between the ages of 18 and 23.

The initiative is aimed to help keep the city’s nightlife afloat postCovid and during the current crisis of rising living costs. Young people of the city could apply for a Jungendkulturkarte until the end of February, which comes with €50 loaded onto it and is valid until the end of April. While the card can’t be used at the bar, it is valid to gain entrance to a list of clubs, cinemas, theatre and even the opera.

Pharrell Williams Pharrell had an even stronger Valentine’s than Ross Birchard, when he was named the creative director of menswear at Louis Vuitton. The position was previously held by OffWhite founder and Kanye West creative director Virgil Abloh, from 2018 until his untimely death in 2021. Abloh was the first Black American to be the head of a French luxury house, and Pharrell is only the second. His first collection for the label will be shown in June 2024 at Paris fashion week.

Chumbawamba Although they disbanded in 2012, anarcho-punk group Chumbawamba became February’s most loved band when they turned down £30,000 for one of their songs (surely ‘Tubthumping’) to appear on a trailer for a new show starring societal-problemcum-plastic-farmer Jeremy Clarkson. Via Twitter, the band’s guitarist Boff Whalley said: “I can’t tell you how much satisfaction that gave us.”

Sister Midnight For the past two years, Lenny Watson, Sophie Farrell and Goat Girl member Lottie Pendlebury have led a campaign to create the first community-owed music venue in their local borough of Lewisham, south London. An empty pub called the Ravensbourne Arms has been their target since Watson’s community-facing venue and record shop Sister Midnight was forced to close during the pandemic. Since 2021 the campaign has raised a staggering £260k (thanks to 800+ local backers), and although the end of January brought news that the owners of the Ravensbourne Arms are ultimately unwilling to sell the property to Sister Midnight, the campaign has announced that a new venue has been secured – the derelict working men’s club The Brookdale Club in Catford. The new 250-capacity venue will include a community cafe and courtyard, and affordable rehearsal, recording and artist studio spaces upstairs. sistermidnight.org

illustration by kate prior

Loud And Quiet flexi discs For subscribers to Loud And Quiet, our previous issue of the magazine came with a special gift: a limited edition flexi disc of an exclusive new track by Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs. It was something we’d been planning for a long time, to thank our supporters and share a special piece of music that you can’t get anywhere else. We liked it so much we’ve decided to make it a regular feature of all full subscriptions. Each issue (including this one) will come with an exclusive disc from one of the artists featured within that issue, and together we’ll build a collection. You’ll be able to find information on any given issue’s disc alongside that artist’s interview, somewhere in the magazine. And it’s not too late to receive this month’s disc as well as future releases – we’re going to be pressing enough discs for all of our existing subscribers, plus 100 more for any new subscribers who fancy getting involved that month. loudandquiet.com/subscribe

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The Beginning: Losing My Edge

We asked James Acaster what his favourite song is, really LC:

Hello James. Let’s imagine that I’m a much more interesting person than I actually am, and for some reason you’re trying to impress me. I ask what your favourite song is.

What are you going with?

JA: Well, first I’d like to say that I don’t do that.

LC: Right.

JA: I just go with honesty every time. Maybe that’s the product of being a standup – the audience see through you whenever you lie anyway, whenever you’re being disingenuous.

I nearly said a song by Neutral Milk Hotel for this; there are so many times when I’ve said ‘Two Headed Boy Part 2’ by Neutral Milk Hotel probably is my favourite song, and there are loads of people who that would impress, but loads of people who’d think that was pathetic.

But ‘Ponyboy’ by SOPHIE is a pretty safe bet I think. She was a genius, that [2018’s Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides] was one of the most important albums of the last decade, it’s shaped the future of pop music and music in general, and it’s just an absolute tragedy that she didn’t get to completely fulfil all over her potential. But it’s a miracle, and something that I’m very grateful for, that she managed to make that album and have that impact.

That song is the pop single from the album if there is one, and among anyone who really likes music, you’d be hard-

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pressed to find anyone who’d tell you it’s shit. Even if they don’t like it they’d probably be like, “Oh yeah, that’s cool, we can’t really rip him for that”, even if they’re not into hyperpop. Whereas if you said you liked a song by 100 Gecs – which I really do – a lot of people might look down their noses at you a bit.

LC: It could be seen as a more ‘respectable’ version of the same thing, you mean?

JA: Yeah. That album is gonna last forever and ever, and definitely at the minute no one’s gonna disrespect it. But it’s not like I listen to ‘Ponyboy’ every day. I still have to be in the mood for it. Nobody’s watching Apocalypse Now every day of their life, but you might go through a phase of watching Happy Gilmore all the time.

LC: So what’s your musical Happy Gilmore?

JA: ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’ by Gotye. It probably isn’t my favourite song now, but I remember I lived in Brixton at the time and got home really drunk one night and it was just on my YouTube. I can’t remember how it came up, but in my drunken head I was like, “This is the most incredible song ever!!!” Then I remember spending the whole day with it on repeat on my headphones on my iPod, going around London listening to it over and over again. It’s just a pure pop song in a way you don’t hear that often.

I didn’t know that everyone was listening to it – I thought I’d discovered it. I didn’t understand algorithms at that point; that song had been thrown up on my YouTube recs because it’d gone viral, whereas I thought I’d discovered this random song. It turned out that there was already a backlash of like “Fuck this song”, and I was like, “Right, I’ve got into a really uncool song here.” It’s not one I stick my neck out for, like I might with some stuff, like ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. No one’s really knocking that. But if you say ‘Somebody I Used To Know’, they’re gonna go, “What are you, some fucking incel?” To be honest, I hate that I’ve given it to you and it’s gonna be in an article.

LC: Sorry. But has this ever come up? Have you ever mentioned that you like it to anyone else?

JA: Nope, that’s how embarrassed I am about it. But also I absolutely exhausted it within those 24 hours. I listened to it one day back-to-back, non-stop, and never listened to it again.

LC: Have you even heard it accidentally since?

JA: Not really – it doesn’t really get played does it?

LC: It’s like we all did what you did, and just rinsed it never to be listened to again.

JA: Yeah, we all overdid it.

words by luke cartledge

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The Beginning: Bad Advice

‘Taylor Swift’ on how to win at business

Hi Taylor. I’m a huge fan of yours and listening to your music has inspired me to start writing my own songs. As I’m only just starting out I’m finding it hard to get gigs. Is there anything more I can be doing? – Jenny Hampton-Smith, Bath Oh my god… [glares at assistant] Jenny! I’m a huge fan of yours! I can’t believe I’ve inspired you!? That’s overwhelming. Look, the truth is you don’t need to get your own gigs when you can simply jump on the back of someone else’s. I’ve started turning up to other people’s shows and simply running on halfway through and playing a song or two. Sometimes it’s not even a song by the band that are playing – I’ll just play one of my own. What are they going to do, Jenny? Make a scene and kick me off?! I don’t think so, Jenny. Give it a go, and if you can work out a way to get your merch on the table too, hit me up.

Hi Tay Tay! I love you so much and try to buy all of your records whenever I can, but I’m a little broke at the moment (because I’m 14) and my mum has said I need to choose just one of your new deluxe boxsets. Which one would you choose? – Carla Bacon, via email Hi bestie. I tend to receive this question quite a lot, so the good news is you’re not alone. And I get it! You want to support me, because you’re the best, but it can be hard when I want to treat my fans to so many special editions of my new album sleeve.

Let’s park the fact that your mum is presumably not 14 herself, and is most likely in a good position to not ask you to make such a stressful decision – it is what is it. So how about this: what I’m going to do is get my team to send you a big Taylor bundle, to

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thank you for your support! Tees, vinyls, hoodies, the clock, all of it. Sound good? We can then work out a repayment plan that works for you, at a discounted Swifty interest rate, of course. I’ve got you, Carly.

Taylor! I don’t mind telling you that I have run every business I’ve owned into the ground. I’m just not the type of guy to let it bother me, but how do you “shake off” those bad business deals that can leave others feeling guilty? – Philip Green, via email [Rolls eyes] I see what you’ve done there, Philip. Well, I [composes herself] shake it off with the help of my AMAZING friends who know the real Taylor, y’know? The goofball. Like, they were there for me when my new tour was TOO successful and the tickets sold TOO quickly. That was tough. Knowing people would miss out, and that we could have upped the price.

Hi Taylor. I’m loving how you’re rerecording your old albums that were sold from under you. Would you ever consider doing the same thing but with the albums of U2? I love their songs but it’s such a shame they’re performed by U2. – Tony Villiano, Cyprus Haha. This is such a cheeky question. I LOVE it. I’ve always been such a fan of U2. Like, obsessed! I’m a total dork! I’m going to message Bono about this one, for sure. Ha! … I mean, can you imagine if I actually did that!? … Ha!… It would kind of be hilarious… Very good. Very good question, that… [makes note to run the figures on such a project].

illustration by kate prior

Robbie & Mona Dreamlike pop music from an in-between space,

by Ian Roebuck. Photography by Tom Porter

“We live through it all the time, even right now,” says Ellie Gray. “It’s what you and I see but don’t necessarily notice because of habit.”

Ellie is trying to describe a surreal reality, when your life, indeed everybody’s life, takes on the hallucinatory quality of a dream. “Surrealism can be everyday as well, in the small things around us,” she adds.

“Just don’t call us surrealist,” interrupts William Carkeet, ‘Robbie’ to Ellie’s ‘Mona’. “We need to find another word for it.”

It’s easy to see how that word has been associated with them. As Robbie & Mona, Ellie and Will fall effortlessly between the cracks of existence, journeying through smoky jazz and bold electronics to enter an otherworldly space all of their own.

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“There is definitely an association with the ‘surrealist’ term which we don’t like, but analysing what dreams are and what is reality and those differences is a big part of our music,” says Will. “[‘Surrealism’] makes it sound such a cliché and like a fantasy,” laughs Ellie, with breathless emphasis on the fantastical.

I’m sitting in front of the enigmatic duo to discuss the release of Tusky, their extraordinary follow up to debut album EW. “It was our attempt at making a proper record this time,” explains Will. “The first was exploring what we could do together and was quite abstract, throwing loads of things at the wall and seeing what stuck. With Tusky I guess it’s an attempt to write actual songs and ballads. It’s a mixture of our tastes with the experimental side clashing with the ’80s ballads we love so much.”

“We’re like a sponge, and when you squeeze that sponge what comes out represents you,” counters Ellie, pleased with her analogy. It makes good sense as the two blend seamlessly together to create an original sound palette. “Ellie and I listen to all forms of music, from classical to noise to Drake, so all of these genres find their way into our ears,” says Will.

This astonishing range can be heard on their latest single, and album opener, ‘Sensation’, a seductive track whose lush soundscape is as delicate as it is epic. It’s certainly an ambitious statement to draw in the listener, and both Will and Ellie have gone on the record to say it acts as a hymn, praising the sensual feeling that music can have.

“I have recently been thinking about the territory of sound,” Will tells me. “The idea that the territory of silence is taken up by the church and God, so to be closer to God is to be silent. This track felt like an attempt to reform the territory of what sound can be, and take that back into the realm of art rather than God.” This kind of spiritual exploration is a pretty bold way to open your album, but it’s something Ellie wants to tackle in more detail: “I go through phases where you listen to music casually and generally like it, but then you listen another time and it really affects you, in a way that feels ineffable. Words can’t meet it – it’s just in you.”

The pair were moved so much by a Lou Reed bassline that it inspired them to write ‘Sensation’. “That power and way of moving you doesn’t have to be through anything dramatic,” says Ellie, “it can be through texture or a song, whatever really. It is our interpretation of what people who connect with their god might feel and we wanted to acknowledge that feeling.”

——— If Robbie & Mona’s debut EW was a remote, almost clinical record, then Tusky has a distinct sense of warmth created by live instrumentation and collaboration. “We were less like robots and more sentient and organic, much less shy to bring that forward,” Ellie recalls. “I have really enjoyed having Campbell Baum and Ben Vince as saxophonists on this record, I just think it brings something else to our world.”

Good friends Baum (from the band Sorry) and Vince (who plays with Housewives and Joy Orbison) bring a playful feeling of uncertainty to the album that Will was keen to capture. “It was improvised [in the studio] and then I would edit it to make it flow better. A lot of the album I would say is improv. It was nice to have friends on it – part of the reason we do that is that it’s a sentimental thing, more than practical. I mean, it’s convenient

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“When we play live we need it to be a specific way otherwise we get really upset. We need it to be dark, smoky, everyone needs to be fucking quiet!”

that our friends are great musicians, but it’s also to look back on in later years and remember, a frozen-in-time audio memory.”

Overall, Tusky feels like a constant unravelling of secret after secret, with Will extremely careful in his production and placement. “I’m glad you notice,” he laughs. “There is a very specific sample in the song ‘Tina’s Leather’, for example, but it’s a sample of something on a song that comes later on the album called ‘Mildred’. The chorus of ‘Mildred’ is sampled and fucked around with loads and when you listen to ‘Mildred’ it might make you feel like you have heard it before, almost like nostalgia. When I talk about it, it sounds really conceptual but when I actually look back at making it, it was more organic.”

Another exquisite detail is the feature of rap artist Monika (of London collective Nukuluk), also on ‘Mildred’.

“We love Nukuluk,” says Will. “They’re an amazing band, and every time we see them live when Monika does the screamy rap thing it really pulls on your heartstrings. It’s not like any rap I have ever heard before, it pulls you into that emotive world. It felt with ‘Mildred’ there was potential to have this on top – because of the BPM it’s kind of a drill track already, so I thought this could really work and bring some emotion that people wouldn’t expect.”

“It almost adds an eccentric turn that goes to another peak as well, takes you somewhere else,” Ellie continues as Will picks up again: “The unexpected is a wonderful thing to explore in audio terms, to catch someone off guard is an interesting thing to do. I am glad it comes off.”

Driven by aesthetics as much as sonic examination, Robbie and Mona’s distinctive handprints are across everything, from music videos to live staging and art direction. “We are control freaks,” chuckles Ellie.

Will concurs. “We can’t just let someone else do it – it’s pretty hard for us but we find we have to influence everything about our own work. When we play live we need it to be a specific way otherwise we get really upset. We need it to be dark, smoky, good sound, everyone needs to be fucking quiet! With our videos and overall look, we get pigeonholed as ‘Lynchian’ as well – and as soon as something gets labelled like this it becomes onedimensional and an audience may not take as much time with it, as they already have an exact notion of what it is we’re doing.”

Robbie & Mona do adore adore David Lynch, though, and also operate in a similarly transcendental space to the auteur director.

“In your lucid mind you can’t actually explore that [nonmaterial] reality as when you can when you are making art and music,” says Will. “Our work is an attempt to explore a dream state within a non-dream state – if you know what I mean.”

After spending some time with Robbie & Mona, I think I do.

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Exclusive to Loud And Quiet subscribers, this month’s limited edition flexi disc is ‘Tina’s Leather’

by Robbie & Mona Robbie & Mona: “The first initial spark of ‘Tina’s Leather’ came whilst we were sat on a beach on Ios island in Greece listening to the Betty Blue soundtrack

by Gabriel Yared. Ellie at this time wrote in her diary: The sparkle of the sea harmonises with a petrol glamour and a 1980’s mystery in the synthesiser. I want to make a song of this feeling.

“The story goes, Tina is a ghost, remembering her death where she jumped out the window during a holiday in Greece. We wanted to make a song which both lyrically and sonically told this story.

“It was the last song we wrote for the album so it kind of feels like it is the exploding dying star of the record universe.”

Subscribe to receive an exclusive flexi disc from us with each issue of L&Q. Sign up at loudandquiet.com/subscribe

FLOW FESTIVAL HELSINKI 11.–13.8.2023 “A FESTIVAL FOR ALL THE SENSES” THE GUARDIAN

+ MANY MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED

Zulu Hope in powerviolence from a hardcore band sampling Curtis Mayfield,

by Jenessa Williams.

Photography by Alice Baxley

Ever wondered what SZA might sound like hanging out in a hardcore bar? Or how the smooth tones of Nina Simone hold their own next to the abrasiveness of a guttural deathgrowl?

Wonder no longer. As mastermind behind Zulu, the hottest new hardcore band out of LA, Anaiah Lei is intent on proving that all of this music has equal artistic value, and that it can live together in holistic ways.

“This is where the irony kicks in,” he says with a laugh.

“While I’ve made this band in this image, it is still a heavy band; people mosh and get violent. But then in the midst of that chaos, I’ll put on a dancehall sample and people will still be like, ‘Oh snap’. You have a mix between these tough people that want to beat people up and these alternative kids that are totally new to the scene but love Zulu. I don’t know how it works, but somehow this band brings all kinds of people together.”

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To unite the masses Lei had to learn about cultural critique.

Where most kids discover alt-rock in a period of teenage angst, Lei’s parents were already well-versed in both reggae and punk, passing a sense of social consciousness down to their children.

“Punk kids grow up with a different outlook; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen little kids at local shows saying ‘I hate all fascists!’ before they even know what the word means,” says Lei. ”You’re radicalised a lot younger, you grow up aware.”

Having spent years on the road as a drummer in numerous bands – The Bots, Culture Abuse, Fireburn, DARE – Zulu began as an entirely solo work, a way for Lei to have a more empowered voice. Initially, he was aiming for a sound like “The Blue Nile, ’80s adult contemporary fusion. But I ended up landing on this variant of powerviolence.”

The appeal of powerviolence, Lei says, is its emphasis on pace: super-fast riffs into slower parts, loose structures and hyper-short songs: “A space where I could say what I wanted to say lyrically, without saying a lot.” Where Zulu do say plenty though, is in their samples, throwing in the kind of unexpected genre-shifts that force the audience to take pause, challenging the notion of borders and what is ‘expected’ from Black artists who sing about the politics of race.

“I’m a firm believer that individuals from our community shouldn’t have to be teachers to people,” he nods. “But at the same time as it being about avoiding limits, it’s just us bringing stuff in that we genuinely like: soul, reggae, R&B. Why not hit the boogie sometimes?”

With a live band now fully in place (Zaine Drayton on bass, Braxton Marcellous and Dez Yusuf on guitars, Christine Cadette on drums) Zulu’s debut album A New Tomorrow strives for duality, balancing open frustration with a sense of hope.

Inspired by the music video for A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Scenario’ (and featuring Soul Glo’s Pierce Jordan, Playytime’s Obioma Ugonna and noted Zulu fan, comedian Eric Andre) lead single ‘Where I’m From’ makes this message of celebration clear: “We been here / And we ain’t going nowhere.” Elsewhere, ‘Music To Drive By’ shapes big riffs around a Curtis Mayfield sample, talking about the normalcy of the drive-by shootings that Lei grew up hearing in LA. “It’s not a story you tend to hear outside of hip-hop, and even then people will say you’re trying to glorify it,” says Lei. “But there’s a lot of people killing each other even within the Black community, and a big theme of the record is the idea that we really need to come together and start somewhere.”

From here on in, Zulu’s fight for communal recognition should grow wings. Whether they’re moshers, activists or music fans simply curious to see how on earth this all plays out live, Lei maintains that this is a project for Black kids to see themselves in, to know that they are actively welcome in this scene.

“When I started this band it was a side project that I started alone, from a place of crippling depression, not really feeling listened to in the bands I was in. And now it’s the only band I play in that a lot of people like,” he smiles. “I’m hoping that years from now, people can look at Zulu in the same way I looked at Bad Brains. That would make me very, very happy.”

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Water From Your Eyes Modern compositions from a dark, silly New York duo,

by Tom Morgan. Photography by Ariel Fish David Lynch has developed a concept he calls “catching the big fish”. He imagines humans having an ocean of consciousness, within which ideas are like fish. The smaller ones live near the choppy surface, but deeper down, that’s where the prize catches are to be found. According to Lynch, finding your way to the biggest fish is a vital process for true artists to undertake.

Water From Your Eyes seem to effortlessly trawl the furthest depths. The New York-based duo boast a wholly unique musical approach, drawing equally from indie-pop, techno and modern composition, reeling in an endless stream of catches from the sea floor.

“A lot of what makes music like this work is creating a system or box to work within,” explains the group’s songwriter Nate Amos. Nate and his bandmate Rachel Brown are discussing their creative process with me from their Paris hotel room, midway through Water From Your Eyes’ recent UK and EU tour. “You have to choose at what point it becomes a limitation that’s helping you or is hindering you,” he continues. “There’s always this point where it switches from being kind of scientific to something you feel out emotionally or instinctively.”

Listening to Water From Your Eyes, you get an immediate sense of Amos’ and Brown’s skill at envisaging, generating and arranging seemingly disparate musical ideas in accordance with one another. The results are often disarmingly unpredictable, but make sense according to their own warped internal logic. The band’s latest full-length Everyone’s Crushed sees the duo delve further into abstraction. These nine tracks blow apart recognisable song craft conventions, a bedrock the duo then rebuild upon in their own playful image.

Most striking are the tracks that draw on modern composition, such as the album’s more experimental cuts like ‘Open’ and ‘14’. “I was doing a lot of experiments with serialism,” explains Nate. “My loose understanding of serialism is that it’s a system for writing atonal music that replaces keys. The idea is that you choose a series of numbers that represent parts of a scale, then create a series where no other note can be played until the rest have been played. That’s the only guideline. However, in most cases where I used it on the album I also broke that rule.”

This exchange encapsulates the duo’s personality. They tilt from serious and insightful to daft and self-deprecating in a dryly endearing manner. Asked to define their sense of humour, Rachel giggles before the two throw out various suggestions. Nate goes with “dry and dark” and Rachel suggests “dark but also really silly”. Rachel adds: “I feel like our sense of humour is tied to the sense of dread but also the lightness that exists in the world.

Something about existing right now is so odd. It’s really sad, but it’s also funny because there’s no reason it should be sad.”

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The sensation that the duo are describing is one of absurdity. Rachel’s lyrics traverse the feeling of living in a world that feels less understandable every day. Their cut-up, abstract words shift from irreverent to poignant to apocalyptic. Nate describes this gently cryptic approach as “impressionistic”.

“They’re not designed to be like ‘This is what this is about,’” he says. “Even the songs that are about something particular to us are ambiguous enough to mean something entirely different to someone else.”

Rachel is more enigmatic: “Even when things seem random, it’s not like they’re not tied together.”

This charming obscurity is winning the band swathes of fans. They’ve just supported Interpol around Europe and at the start of the year they announced that they had signed with Matador.

“We met them for the first time in December 2021,” explains Rachel. “We got coffee, then got coffee a few more times and started to wonder what was happening. Then eventually they said, ‘We want to work with you.’ That was crazy.”

Nate continues: “I think we both thought once it got announced it would sink in. But it still hasn’t, so I guess we can look forward to that whenever it happens.”

Following years of touring and a succession of increasingly sophisticated albums that has culminated with Everyone’s Crushed, Water From Your Eyes have more than earned their current dues. In our fractured world, their deft, oblique and kind music serves as both a cathartic parallel and an absurdist rebuttal to its nebulous uncertainty. Long may their trawling continue.

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A cellist’s commitment to growth, by Dhruva Balram.

Photography by Yukitaka Amemiya

Lucinda Chua “I like the symbol of the swallow as being this songbird that lives in the in-between,” singer-songwriter Lucinda Chua tells me on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon.

The 37-year-old multi-instrumentalist is talking about the name of her latest album, YIAN, due out via 4AD in March. YIAN doubles as both her Mandarin name and her Chinese grandmother’s name. Chua found that the more she dug into the meaning of the word the more apt it felt. “I started thinking about the swallow as migrating between these two landmasses,” she says, “and, maybe, for the swallow, home is in the sky, and if you can belong to the sky, then you kind of belong to everything.”

For Chua, this flitting between worlds is pertinent: she was born in Hammersmith to an English mother and a Chinese-Malay father, moving to Milton Keynes when she was 10. For her entire life she has been torn between identities and worlds and, being biracial, even caught between two separate migrant cultures, an even more specific niche within the diasporic experience.

She found solace in the cello, training classically before using an array of effect units to write ambient pop songs that are intimate and atmospheric. Initially, she was one half of the duo Felix as well as touring for artists, including FKA Twigs’s live band. It was when the pandemic struck and tours were cancelled that she initially sketched out YIAN. “Thinking about making

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an album really helped me with a sense of purpose,” she says.

To challenge herself further, Chua self-produced and engineered eight of the ten tracks on YIAN, an intentional decision for many reasons. “I think it was very important for me, on this record, to not feel observed,” she says. “I wanted to create my own language without someone classifying what I was doing.”

The result is ten tracks which wrap themselves around the listener, like a weighted blanket after a stressful day. A series of intimate portraits strung together to make a dazzling collage, there is a softness throughout YIAN: it is nourishment for the soul, a balm to heal oneself where intimacy and grandiosity meld themselves seamlessly. There is a magnetic, shimmering charm that underpins the lush melodies throughout the album.

The timbre of the cello is the fulcrum upon which the swirling instrumentation creates a dizzying effect. The recurrence of the yearning of a broken heart, a cry for a past lover emerges continuously. At times, it even sounds like an intimate conversation, with lines like “I don’t want to hurt you” sung softly on repeat. It feels as if her past as a photographer subconsciously plays into the creation of her music.

“I definitely think about producing in terms of what could be a wide shot and what could be a close-up,” Chua says. “The connection between photography, producing and composing is all about world-building: thinking about, like, ‘What is the story? What is the journey? What are the emotions that you want to share with people?’ And then it’s almost like the feeling drives the form.

“I didn’t expect for it to take me as deep as it did,” she says of the album themes. “Being biracial and having multiple heritages, but I do tend to talk about myself in fractions. It’s taken a lot of unlearning to be able to not do that.”

With the impending release of the album, Chua is both “scared and exhilarated”. “A lot of my life, I’ve been the ensemble player,” she says. “I felt very comfortable in that supporting role. And I felt very grateful to get to be part of [other people’s] journey, [but] it’s important that I get to expand the perception of what East and South-East Asian music sounds like – that it’s not necessarily a singular thing.

“I went into this album with questions of ‘Who am I? What does this mean? Where do I come from? Where do I belong?’” she says. “But, I feel like I’ve come out of making the album with just as many questions. I think it’s a commitment to questioning and learning and growing and being okay with that absence or, rather, that feeling of incompleteness, because maybe that’s the joy of being alive: being able to grow into that space.”

Comfort Beyond the rage of an experimental hip-hop duo,

by Alastair Shuttleworth The sister-brother project of Natalie and Sean McGhee, Glaswegian duo Comfort create agitated, bracingly experimental hip-hop. Over airless electronic beats – underpinned by Sean’s live drums – Natalie’s wildly expressive vocals explore themes of classism, disillusionment and her experiences as a trans woman.

The duo rose to attention with their crushing, Scottish Album Of The Year-nominated mixtape Not Passing (2019), followed by last year’s EP All Fears, Fully Formed. These records presented a unique musical voice – filleting ideas from punk, hip-hop and industrial in service to sharp political narratives. On their first official album, What’s Bad Enough?, this formula underpins a more emotive, expressive and colourful incarnation of the project. Giving greater quarter to their acerbic wit and latent pop sensibilities – at times eerily recalling the skittish electro of Paul McCartney’s McCartney II – this highly inventive release is also more open-hearted than the duo’s earlier, grittier records. “We feel everything,” Natalie says of the album’s emotional range. “We’re not just pissed off and raging all the time.”

Despite this evolution, Comfort’s music remains underpinned by urgent political messaging. This is seen in the album’s lead single ‘Real Woman’, exploring Natalie’s experiences of transphobia over a melancholic, gelatinous beat. “I feel like the more music we release the better I am at presenting honesty when it comes to my life,” she explains. “It’s about bringing a sense of levity to things, and a defiance.”

A towering lyricist, in this single Natalie balances selfempowering poetry (“I’m as ancient as the Earth; the hill you’re dying on”) with bitingly funny one-liners (“I’ve never had so

much interest in / What’s between my legs / But I don’t blame them at all / I think I’m fit as well”). Recorded in 2020, the song was released just one day after Westminster controversially blocked Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill this January, which would have made it easier to change one’s legal gender.

“It’s just unfortunate that the album’s about quite bleak subjects, and it’s just been getting more relevant,” she says.

The duo’s creative partnership has been uniquely shaped by their relationship as siblings. “The trust we have, the ability to lean on each other in harder moments – it just allows us to push each other further,” says Sean. “It takes any barriers away in terms of sticking to a genre or a certain instrument taking prominence – those conversations can create tension, but we’re comfortable having that tension because we’re family.”

At the band’s outset, Sean and Natalie were also new to their respective roles of drummer and vocalist, sharing the experience of finding their musical footing as novices. “Sean is the only person I’ve ever been on the same page as, musically,” says Natalie. “It just makes me feel grateful – especially for touring, because we have such a laugh all the time. It feels like you’re going on a family holiday.”

This hand-in-glove partnership belies one of Comfort’s most compelling characteristics: the manner in which Natalie’s twisting, yelping vocals seem to strain against the band’s rigid, mechanical instrumentals. Though rooted in hip-hop, Natalie’s performances are highly exploratory – occasionally recalling the contortions of Nina Simone.

“I feel like the human voice has so much expression within it,” she says. On album closer ‘Wild And Fragile’, presenting a bricolage of childhood memories and future aspirations, Natalie shouts, raps and sings. “There’s so many great noises people can make with their throats that don’t get used.”

——— In live performances, Comfort employ a bare-bones setup: Sean playing drums while Natalie sings, triggering backing tracks from her open laptop. Very occasionally, she will pepper the songs with synths by hitting letters on the laptop’s QWERTY keyboard. “I want the people who see us to feel like they can let loose – to feel liberated, into themselves, and into the vibe of everyone around them. I think the simplicity of the setup helps with that,” Natalie says. “I can emote, dance and feel the tunes, rather than have people watch me trigger everything on a sample pad – I just don’t think that’s very interesting. Also, I could not be arsed – QWERTY for life!”

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The playfulness of these gigs points to Comfort’s use of humour in service to weighty political messaging. What’s Bad Enough? is penetrating and acerbic, but can also be brilliantly funny. “Be the world’s first transgender drone pilot!” Natalie sings in ‘Normal Till It’s Not’, which skewers corporate exploitation of LGBTQ+ Pride events. “For a lot of marginalised people in general, humour is an arm of survival you develop,” she explains.

“In the past I’ve had therapists tell me I’m funny when I’m telling them really intense stuff – I’m not trying to be funny, it’s just how I’ve developed. It’s gone from a survival tool to a strength – when I encounter bigotry, I can also see the ridiculousness in it.”

From their first recordings, the political heft of Comfort’s music has been indebted to traditions in both punk and hip-hop.

“I always thought it was weird that hip-hop and punk started around the same time,” Natalie says. “If you listen to hip-hop from the 1980s and you listen to hip-hop now, it’s so different, but punk’s not really that different. Why not take that ethos of hip-hop – sample whatever you want, make the music however you want – and use it in a punk band?”

Of these two musical traditions, Comfort’s early records, Not Passing and the Built To Waste EP (2017), feel more readily aligned with punk. These records were noisier, more relentlessly

physical and – in their sampling and vocal performances – far less exploratory than What’s Bad Enough?. “That’s just the place I was at, and the sound we were making because we were getting our footing,” Natalie says.

“As our confidence has grown, those noisier elements have been toned down a bit,” Sean adds. “We started the band because of the message we wanted to communicate, which was anti-transphobia and other things we’ve discussed. Hip-hop was always our main influence – it’s just coming out more because we know how to get our message across more clearly.”

“It might not be as obvious right now, but we also like pop and R&B,” Natalie adds. “Really, we do want to be making pop bangers. I’m not a traditional singer by any stretch of the imagination, so you just need to find the confidence to be able to belt it out – we’ll get there.”

In What’s Bad Enough?, Comfort always seem to be exploring new ways to represent themselves (and their convictions) with greater nuance and sincerity. Building on previous records, they find a richer emotional range, sonic language and lyrical scope in this album: their finest work to date. “It feels like a starting point,” Natalie says. “It shows how ambitious we want Comfort’s music to be.”

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Fran Lobo

Topping up the good juice, by Jessica Wrigglesworth.

Photography by Gem Harris On a cold February night at Servant Jazz Quarters, an intimate venue just off Dalston’s Kingsland Road, fans and friends pack into the low-ceilinged basement in anticipation of Fran Lobo’s first London headline show since 2018. Flanked by an all-star band of collaborators including Marc Pell, Laura Groves, Lucinda Chua, Amy Fitz Doyley, Jemma Freeman, CJ Calderman, Aga Ujma, Pascal Bideau and Coby Sey, Lobo alternates between her seat at the piano and the front of the stage, where she bounces around and runs into the crowd, staring audience members down as she sings – equal parts R&B star and punk frontwoman.

The gig comes days after she released ‘All I Want’, Lobo’s first single since 2021 and her first through new label Heavenly.

“I hadn’t released music in a little while, and the headspace of putting a single out and then all the rehearsals, it was quite intense leading up to it,” the North London based musician tells me when we meet for tea at The Standard hotel a few days later.

“But the love of my friends and the musicians I was playing with was really beautiful and emotional. It felt like a celebration of our community, not just my show.” Watching the nine players interact on Servant Jazz Quarters’ tiny stage, these musical bonds were evident, as was the excitement and joy of making noise with friends. Lobo has performed with Groves and Chua as part of singing collective Deep Throat Choir, and often plays with the others at the semi-regular Desire Paths jam nights, held at the buzzy Soho basement bar Below, adding to the improvisational feel of her Dalston performance; the singers had only done one rehearsal together, the night before, whilst Calderman and Sey “just turned up on the night.” “Everyone’s so musical,” she assures me, when I ask how it all came together so quickly. “I

22

trust everybody that they’re not gonna mess anything up. There was a framework, but a lot of the moments were essentially improvised. I wanted the musicians to feel like they could have time to enjoy it as well.”

It was Pascal Bideau, the French musician and composer who performs as Akusmi, who was her first introduction to this world of experimental, left-field musicians. The pair met when Lobo was taking a free production course at the Roundhouse, which Bideau was tutoring on, and they’ve been firm friends and collaborators since. “He’s always the first person I show things to,” she tells me, whether it’s a music video or the latest mix of a track.

When taking the Roundhouse course, Lobo had recently graduated from Warwick, where she had studied Theatre and Performance. “I always enjoyed performing,” she admits. “I always loved being on the stage.” As a child growing up in Edmonton, north London, she was exposed to an eclectic mix of cultural references. “My dad liked to play acoustic guitar, and my mum used to listen to a lot of R&B and Bollywood songs. My older brother was really into music, and he actually studied music. He played guitar, but he’s like, very metal.” For her part, Lobo was “obsessed” with Queen, and watching music videos on cable TV. As she got older, she got into indie acts like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Fever Ray, and at university she ended up fronting a band: “Quite a fun, silly rock band.” After uni, having established that music was what she wanted to pursue but not sure how she was going to make it work, she began training as a teacher, and was working as a teaching assistant, taking production courses on the side.

“When I started doing music courses and meeting people, that was when I was like, ‘I really want to do this.’”

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In 2015, she released her first EP, Beautiful Blood, and has been putting music out ever since: at first a slew of self-releases, then two more EPs through tastemaking London label Slow Dance in 2020 and 2021, before being tapped by Heavenly. Her output through the years has been varied in genre, but defined by a unique approach to production, creating bold soundscapes that underpin often quite vulnerable lyrics. “Sometimes when I listen back I think, ‘Oh, poor little Franny’, ’cos every track is like struggling, struggling, struggling… I don’t think I’m doing it intentionally, I’m not like, ‘I’m going to make music that’s dark,’ it’s just how it comes out. But I think what I try to do a lot with the production is bring it into a different world.”

She still works as an educator, but now does so in a musical context, working to facilitate music workshops and classes for young people as well as adults with cognitive issues such as aphasia or dementia. It’s more than just a side hustle.

“It feeds me a lot actually,” she says. “It’s nice, because that’s the essence of what music is. We’re working with groups that are making music to express themselves, it’s the purest way of making music – that’s been nice to come back to this week, to get away from the music release world.”

I’m reminded of a similar sentiment Lobo expressed earlier in our chat, talking about singing with Chua and Groves, and how working on stuff outside of their artist projects allows them to top up “the good juice. Trying to navigate the industry side of things can get really draining. The joy of making music – it’s not about promoting yourself, it’s about making noise, communicating with each other.”

——— Despite her acknowledgement of the challenging aspects of commercially releasing music, Fran Lobo is unashamedly ambitious. An album is currently in the works now that she’s signed

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with Heavenly. “It’s always been a goal to see my record in the shops,” she tells me. “My dream when I was a young kid was: I want to be in a band, and I want to have a little van and we just go on tour. That’s my life, and even if I don’t have much money I’m living my dream.’”

Her dream goes well beyond straightforward album campaigns. In the past, Lobo has worked on installations: her piece Voicescolourmotion, a sound and light installation created with the artist Gawain Hewitt, was shown at the V&A and Snapes Maltings in 2019. The piece was a meditation on losing her voice a few years earlier, from pushing herself too hard.

“I was leading two choirs, doing lots of teaching and workshops, and doing gigs all at the same time. And going out all the time,” she recalls, telling me she’d like to make more such work.

“In an ideal world when I put out a project, I wanna have a launch show where there are installations and visual art as part of it.”

Another aspiration is to make her own films; she directed the video for ‘All I Want’, as well as doing all her own styling, which she describes as a “crazy experience”. The result is an impressive short which is as much early-2000s MTV as it is gothic thriller – Lobo lists Dario Argento and the Coen Brothers’ Macbeth as influences alongside Madonna, Kate Bush and Björk.

Like the track itself, the video takes a drastic turn at the last minute. After four minutes of sultry, eerie balladeering, Lobo cackles and the beat speeds up drastically, turning the song on its head completely for the remaining 40 seconds, as the camera spins and the lighting turns blood red.

This element of surprise and expecting the unexpected is a theme in Lobo’s work, which has never been easy to categorise or define by genre. “I like things where you’re throwing paint at something, it should never be like, ‘This is the song,’” she says with a glint of mischief in her eye. “I like challenging what you think the song should be – I’m not going to do what you think I’m going to do.”

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Lankum The tapestry we’re weaving, by Dominic Haley.

Photography by Eleonora C. Collini

The song ‘Go Dig My Grave’ has gone by many names over the centuries: ‘London City’, ‘Brisk Young Sailor’, ‘The Maid’s Complaint’, ‘The Butcher Boy’ and ‘Died For Love’, just to name a few. Originally thought to be popular with London street singers in the 17th century, the song is actually a jumble of floating verses, sets of standard refrains and stanzas, a lot of which show up in other traditional songs that have somehow coalesced over the years around a longstanding tragic narrative: girl meets boy, boy gets girl pregnant, boy leaves girl for another, girl takes her life in shame. The way the protagonist meets her fate can change drastically depending on which rendition you’re listening to, but the ending is almost always the same. A snippet of the suicide note left by the body, it goes something like this: Oh make my grave large, wide and deep Put a marble stone at my head and feet And in the middle, a turtle dove So the world may know I died of love “It’s certainly a dramatic song that doesn’t pull any punches” says Lankum’s Radie Peat as we discuss the band’s reworking of the classic ballad. The Irish group’s version of the song takes its cues from a variation recorded by Appalachian folk singers Jean Richie and Doc Watson back in 1963, which like many American versions plays down the narrative steps that lead up to the suicide and instead zooms in on the emotional anguish that form the climax.

“She delivers the lyrics in such a heart-rending yet quite disarming way, which gives the song an almost horror-like vibe,” Peat continues when I ask her what was it about Richie’s version that inspired the band to include an interpretation of it on their new album False Lankum. “Our approach is to take folk song and dismantle it; then reassemble it in a way that clarifies the emotional resonance at the heart of the song. While this version had this really wonderful contrast between the fairly light music and a really horrific story, I guess we wanted our version to leave you in no doubt about the tragedy that sits at the heart of the song.”

Lankum’s version of ‘Go Dig My Grave’ is wholly different to the gaudy tone taken by most other artists who tackle the lament. Beginning with Peat’s haunting solo vocals, their arrangement descends into a brutally raw melody, with stabs of mandolin, pipe and fiddle, the draw in and fade out like lanterns lighting the way down a dark, foreboding staircase. It’s a remarkably sombre and gut-punching piece of music, especially

for an opening single, but it’s also a song that typifies the sonic adventurism that Lankum have made their own; warping and mutating simple melodies into heavy, drone-like slabs of sound that push on the very boundaries of what could stylistically be called folk music. It’s also a single that perfectly illustrates the journey that Lankum have been on.

Formed in Dublin in the early 2000s around brothers Ian and Daragh Lynch alongside Peat and Cormac MacDiarmada, the band began life as a pure live act, performing in the pubs and clubs of their hometown and offering up a mix of traditional folk staples alongside their own modern, distinctly punk-inspired compositions. As time has gone on, though, the group’s magpielike tendencies have only increased, with elements of krautrock, psychedelia and drone music all finding their way into their sound.

“The idea of blending traditional and modern influences has always been an undercurrent to our music, since right at the very beginning,” explains Ian Lynch, recalling the band’s early days on Dublin’s live music scene. “I guess it just comes from the music we grew up with, we always had our versions of Christy Moore and Pogues songs – it was just something we felt that we had to do.”

“I think it also comes from a desire to upend what was already there as well,” adds in his brother Daragh after a thoughtful pause. “At school, the only experiences with Irish culture and music was always really naff; it all felt a bit too connected to this conservative, almost right-wing culture. It was only once we started to experience this kind of traditional music in different environments did we start to get a new perspective on it, and I think one of the ambitions for us as a band is to present all this music in a very different kind of way.”

——— Lankum have come a long way from the more traditional sounds and textures that typified their early records. While albums two and three further perfected the four-piece harmonies and luscious melodies that remain at the core of the band’s output, the release of The Livelong Day in 2019 saw them breaking out of the folk niche completely by reincorporating some of the more psychedelic and experimental influences that the group played with in their early days, bringing the kind of success and accolades that most band’s only dream of having.

Earning almost wall-to-wall critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, The Livelong Day won the 2019’s RTE Choice Music Prize (the Irish equivalent of the Album of the Year

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“I don’t think you should be setting out rules for yourself in any creative endeavour; there has to be this idea of free play”

Grammy) and saw Lankum netting a coveted top 10 spot on NPR’s Best Albums of the Year. Yet when I ask the band about all this success initially their response is to glance knowingly at each other and chuckle quietly like a group of anglers recalling the one that got away.

“Luckily, the pandemic happened almost immediately after we put the record out, so it all feels like a million years ago,” says Peat with a sigh of resignation. “So it’s never really cast any kind of shadow at all really.”

“If anything, the break actually did us a lot of good,” adds MacDiarmada, nodding enthusiastically. “In the past, we didn’t usually get a significant chunk of time to really think about our next step. Usually, we’re having to do everything in bursts because we’re touring or leaping from A to B and there’s never the time to give any conscious thought to what you could or might be doing. This time though, there’s been this break and a real chance to let the record breathe a bit.”

Ian smiles in agreement. “It also helps that we’re really good at not giving a shit about stuff like good reviews and bad reviews. We constantly practise not paying attention to what the music business is saying.”

Whatever the cause, False Lankum feels like another evolution altogether. Although the album’s tracklist continues in the now-established vein of mixing new material with reworkings of traditional songs, and the band roughly stick to the textures and instrumentation set down on The Livelong Day, Lankum find a new sense of grand narrative on the new LP, imbuing the material with an almost cinematic sense of scale.

However, when I try to poke into the idea that False Lankum is the group’s attempt at making a concept record, it quickly becomes clear that any through-line is actually more of a bug than a feature.

“To be honest, we don’t really think about what point we want to make or what tapestry we’re weaving with our music; that’s always been something for other people to think about,” says Peat when I ask if the band started with a thought-out plan for this record. “In fact, it’s very healthy that we don’t have a conscious process, I don’t think you should be setting out rules

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for yourself in any creative endeavour; there has to be this idea of free play so that you’re not judging yourself from the start.

Hopefully down the road it all makes sense, but that can never be the intention you start off with. Otherwise you’re limiting what you can do.”

MacDiarmada agrees. “The main difference with False Lankum is that there are these themes, but it only became clear that there was an ebb and flow in this record well after we’d finished recording and had started arranging. We only realised all these threads well after the fact.”

What’s not in doubt is that False Lankum is an incredibly well-crafted record from a band who are only just exploring the peak of their powers. Compared to its predecessor, the 12 songs give off an impression of a band becoming braver in their mission to dig out the emotional centre of their music. Leaning more into texture and tone than ever before, this is a record that often feels like a pilgrimage, travelling through bleak horror-movie darkness and climbing into beautiful, Eno-esque moments of pure light.

“It’s true that we never really plan anything out beforehand but it did become quite apparent quite early on that certain themes were emerging,” explains Cormac. “There wasn’t really any plan to bring together a collection of songs that would all hold together around some deeper meaning or anything like that, but sonically we’ve tried to create an album that takes you on a bit of a journey.”

Lankum aren’t spilling what that journey is or where it goes to, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the band have their sights set on some faraway places. The evidence is all there, the movement between light and dark. The choice to include songs like ‘Go Dig My Grave’ that crawl up and inhabit powerful emotions of grief, loss and mourning for the dead. It just seems logical to assume that, even if it’s only on some kind of subconscious level, the band are nudging people in a spiritual direction.

However, as soon as I put this to the them, the group are their typical mysterious selves, politely refusing to be drawn in.

“I guess that’s for other people to work out,” shrugs Ian, as an enigmatic grin spreads across his face. “Let’s just say that it’s a real mishmash of all of our internal manias.”

NEW ALBUM OUT 9 JUNE VINYL / CD / DIGITAL

McKinley Dixon

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A uniquely disciplined hip-hop artist who’s all about the tender moments, by Tristan Gatward.

Photography by Jimmy Fontaine Anything you’ll read about Chicago-based hip-hop artist McKinley Dixon will likely start with his assertion that Toni Morrison is the greatest rapper of all time. There’s a generosity with which he offloads the statement, and it makes a good headline: the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, a rapper? But there’s also a tenderness to it – he avoids making it sound like a passing comment, a comic thing said one time and dined on – which reads truer on each repetition, questioning the spaces drawn out in the dividing lines between rap, poetry and storytelling.

These questions have been dragged deeply into the genetics of Dixon’s work since his trilogy of Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?, The Importance of Self Belief (both mixtapes) and debut album For My Mama and Anyone That Look Like Her. In its standout single, ‘make a poet Black’, Dixon scuffles with self-doubt and the need to locate himself in the chaos of music, vocalising his confusion for the first time in the opening lines, some three projects deep: “Okay, so how this shit happen? Yo ass is now rapping / I guess we can make that work.” He derides a medium where immediacy is rewarded: “You not the realest, you know that, right? / They not gon’ feel this, you know that, right?” Whether this is inward or outward expression doesn’t really matter; without claiming any literary faculty or abstruseness, that the song is about death can be found in the rhyme scheme, its double entendres and absences. It was one of 2021’s best rap records; defining its terms doesn’t feel right.

“My mama loved Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan,” he says, explaining Morrison’s prominence in his upbringing. “It sort of naturally became this thing where that’s what I loved. It was a tradition in my household to learn a poem and pass it down. My grandmother knew this poem when she was coming up, and still remembers it to this day. My mother learned ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’

by Maya Angelou, and I had to come up reciting that poem too.

I knew that poem front-to-back when I was growing up. And I would read Toni Morrison – only the mainstream hits like Bluest Eye,” adding wryly, “that was all I had, you know.”

“There’s a lot of dope shit out there, but that’s the other thing about being Black,” he continues, grimacing as a child of the ’90s. “In 2008, what could I really be diving into wholeheartedly that wasn’t too complicated? I had other shit to do.”

There’s a physicality to these memories; the way Dixon ruminates on identity through these writers is filled with colour, and he’s delighted to speak to it. “These were the objects that my mama kept around. The stories my mother passed down.

I moved away from them as I was working out my own identity. I loved these authors but I couldn’t keep reading Bluest Eye every fucking six months. There’s sci-fi, there’s Octavia Butler, there’s so many other worlds to be built and so many

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suns to see. I wanted to see the sun from another part of the earth and I wanted to get into other shit.” He laughs at the failed attempts, leaning back in his chair. “Yeah, the other shit wasn’t that cool I’ll be honest with you. I came back to Toni Morrison obviously.”

While his own creativity was germinating, he used to work on a farm, which taught him another level of patience.

“I was just needing something to think on,” he says. “I wasn’t doing music at the time and I needed a place to just think. Make some money while not doing anything. My idea was to just pick berries for the first half a year,” he jests. “Whenever I see anyone pick any berries now, any fruit even, even in just a grocery store, a container, I just look at them and think, that’s not how you would pick them in the wild. That tub is not… you wouldn’t find that on a farm.”

Dixon has now moved away from the places of his childhood, if not from the inspirations his family passed onto him; routines and discipline linger. The morning sun is streaming through the windows of his Chicago apartment where he’s lived since last April; the early start is easy for him. “I’ve been waking up early all my life,” he laughs bitterly. “My mama wasn’t in the military, but she works for Amtrak, which is government-adjacent. I was waking up early – like 5am every day – from late elementary school through high school. It wasn’t like I was moving anywhere, she just taught me a lot of discipline and routine. This is how you get the day started and this is how you get the day ended. Routines that, at the time, you think ‘Why the fuck am I waking up at 5am? I can’t wear a white t-shirt to school, I gotta have my hair cut all the time.’ But, you know, you gotta contextualise it, that was New York in the ’70s, and now as an adult I can get up at 7:30am and I’m chilling. It was a place that inspired my outward expression now, as an antithesis of it, too. You can hear that I’m very arrangement-heavy, probably because of the discipline I approached things with when I was younger.”

——— Dixon’s new album and City Slang label debut, Beloved! Paradise!

Jazz!?, is explicit in its legacy, titled after – you guessed it – Toni Morrison’s trilogy of novels by the same name. “I really liked that title, not only in namesake, but that she as a Black person took her own styling of an older story – Dante’s Inferno – to make these three novels relocated in African American history.” This is McKinley Dixon’s own retelling of that story, “not in subject matter, I don’t really have enough dip on my chip to do that,” but in a spirit of manifestation. “She planned to make a trilogy,” he explains, “and I wanted to set a trajectory. You can be aware it’s a big target and it’ll take a long time to get to, but you can accurately aim. I’ve never faded away from my intentions.”

The album opens with a reading by poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib, stitching the first page of Morrison’s Jazz across a soundbed of ambient noise and space-age cinematics, surging between distorted synths and sci-fi sax, as indebted to the future as the past. “It became this afro-futuristic kind of thing,” Dixon says, “I wanted it to feel like Hanif was walking through the city like a narrator as these things were happening around him. But

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don’t make it 1920s,” he grins. “I don’t want to go all electroswing, you know. It had to be in this afro-futuristic timeline, not Baz Luhrmann’s Greatest Hits.”

When Dixon’s voice enters the record on ‘Sun, I Rise’, it would feel as lazy to reference Kendrick Lamar and Kamasi Washington’s symphonic fusion on To Pimp A Butterfly as it would be to ignore the touchstone. Dixon’s vocalisations of community, friendship and belonging spread lavishly over elevated orchestrations of pride and grandeur, discerningly theatrical, while his place within his own music is more tersely realised: “I became a better liar as I’ve gotten older / is it ’cause the tongue got sharper or ’cause my heart got colder?” His place within the community of DMV rap, too, informs the early part of the album. Death and gang violence permeate his work, but it’s seemingly apolitical; even at its most didactic peaks – its most dismayed and most grieving – Dixon’s interest in in the preservation of memories.

There’s perhaps no better example than the second single, ‘Tyler, Forever’, dedicated to the memory of a friend lost through gun violence. “He was born the same day as I was three years later in Jamaica, Queens,” Dixon remembers. “It was kismet meeting this person with the same interests and goals as I had. ‘Tyler, Forever’ is a celebration of his life, you know, even as people leave and change, it was a way for me to make those memories with him real.”

It’s an approach that Dixon applied to the lighter moments of the album, too. “The way I do it is experience small moments and be like, ‘I really like how this was done, I really like how this phrase was said, I really appreciate how this instance happened.’

And then I work on a way to describe that. There’s a moment where my partner and I went to a friend’s house. She was sweeping off the table and it was such a tender moment.” He raps the verse of ‘Dedicated to Tar Feather’, which that moment inspired, closing his eyes to relive the picture, energised. “You know, let’s just try to describe how the sun hit this spot real quick. That’s the conduit for moments like that. I’m not specifically talking about people all that often. Sometimes people think I’m talking about everybody, but there’s no way I’m talking about everybody. I don’t want to. Don’t look at me for that.”

The ancestry of Dixon’s music feels important. Another line in ‘Tar Feather’ – “Flowers don’t know my name” – appears to parallel Teller Bank$’s braggadocio chorus of ‘B.B.N.E’ from For My Mama (“Bullet holes don’t know your name, […] my gang don’t know your name”). Dixon beams. “That was actually purposeful, that juxtaposition between ‘B.B.N.E.’ – biggest baddest n***a ever – on the last album and ‘Tar Feather’ on this album. ‘Tar Feather’ is supposed to be the antithesis of ‘B.B.N.E.’. I think they come at the same point of the record, too, three songs from the end. ‘Tar Feather’ is honestly just about a previous time. Teller Bank$ will deliver a lightning strike verse directly to your heart, but ‘Tar Feather’ is destroying all that.

Like, ‘No, there aren’t these ideas of grandeur, or you being this person. This is a song where we can just talk. There’s no need for me to make this huge record.’” He pauses. “I had a feeling that I needed to put everything into For My Mama, you know, I needed it to be this thing. I needed to show I’m in hip-hop. I got Teller

on this song! The biggest baddest n***a ever! I’m trying to be like this. ‘Tar Feather’ is like, ‘No, dude, stop, you can hold back now, you can just exist now.’”

His existence now, in Chicago, is notably different to his existence in Maryland, Richmond and New York before. These places are all spoken of fondly for different reasons: Maryland for the early demos and ideas he created at his mama’s house; Richmond for college, where his equipment was set up perfectly, where songwriting and inspiration came easily, where he started seeing echoes of Toni Morrison in Jordan Peele, in Black horror films, in friends’ music free from the rigid structures of genres and scenes; college let him play house-gigs with Lucy Dacus as readily as other rappers. “There was a sort of slow motion to it,” he smiles, “there was a safety in how that city moved.” Chicago is the natural next step, he nods, free from pressure and the bustle of a city like New York. “I don’t ever have to go downtown if I don’t want to.”

——— I ask if there’s anything to the inversion of this album’s title, changing the chronology of Morrison’s novels Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, into Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? “I just thought it was cooler, honestly,” he smiles. “I mean, specifically if you go through Dante’s trilogy – I mean, I don’t actually know what his was because it’s not as cool as Toni Morrison’s – I think it is this mindset that paradise is the end to the whole thing. You start out,

you go through the chaos of jazz and then there’s paradise at the end. Whereas for me, I was like, ‘what if you start out, you have this high, and then this low, and that’s jazz?’ What if we actually have these moments at the end which aren’t bad, necessarily, just chaotic? We don’t know what to expect, life happens. That, or I thought it just looked cooler with the exclamation points at the end. Beloved! Jazz! PARADISE! Yeah, that don’t sound as cool.”

Dixon’s paradise has been set up perfectly. He’s widely slated as one of the year’s ones to watch, and increasingly unavoidable on daytime radio. He still doesn’t quite buy it. “I made the album in like eight months, shit was crazy,” he laughs.

“I mean there are definitely some great moments. On ‘Live from the Kitchen Table’, Ghais (Guevara) is incredible. ‘The Story So Far’, that was taken from The Importance of Self Belief” [a project he lovingly refers to as his “bastard middle child”] and then the title track, the album closer. I didn’t record it the same way I recorded For My Mama, so I’m really happy with how it came out. And the radio play would never happen with For My Mama, because those songs were long as fuck and recorded in kitchens and basements and refrigerators. But now I’m on the phone with Craig Charles one day. I had to go to his Wikipedia page, but dude, Craig Charles is dope. He’s like an equivalent to a Hollywood icon who came up in the time where the media was lawless, and you could do anything you wanted. You sort of know the whole world as you see it, you know. For me that used to be the States, Canada, Mexico. But now I’ve got Craig Charles playing me in Urban Outfitters.”

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Reviews Albums

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Albums

Yves Tumor — Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) (warp) It’s easy to indulge in cliché when writing about Yves Tumor. Their backstory spools out as a very particular, rarefied version of the classic rock’n’roll dream: the artist also known as Sean Bowie grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, a place they’ve since described as a “very conservative, racist, homophobic, sexist environment”, before escaping to California aged 20. There, they met fellow genre-splicer Mykki Blanco and eventually the kinds of people who’d guide them through the maze of the music industry over the subsequent decade. Since then, Sean Bowie has become Yves Tumor, living across the US and Europe before eventually settling in Turin, all the while releasing explorative, multivalent music and operating at the glamorous intersection of haute couture, fine art and experimental sound.

Yves Tumor has, therefore, been on a real ‘journey’, creatively and geographically; they embody the ‘chameleonic’ qualities of middlebrow icons like David Bowie and Radiohead; they are, if not exactly a ‘small-town kid done good’, certainly someone from a relative backwater finding international success via an uncompromising artistic approach. For better or worse, the story of Yves Tumor can be understood as the classic tale of the creative rebel overcoming the small-minded adversity of their origins: in this reading, a certain radicalism is present, partly due to the sheer imagination of Tumor’s music, but it’s individualised rather than counter-hegemonic, the character arc of an outsider breaking into the art world through a narrow gap rather than threatening its stifling traditional structures,

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its specifics perfectly compatible with the coffee tables of the streaming age.

In this way, it can sometimes feel like the narrative for Yves Tumor has been predetermined, precision-engineered to tick all the right boxes for a certain kind of ‘tasteful’ (to use a loaded word), middle-aged music fan. The cultural theorist Joe Kennedy captured this guy perfectly in his 2018 book Authentocrats: the kind of centrist dad who, far from being into Deep Purple and aviator sunglasses as a popular reading of that meme might have it, ostentatiously cultivates his love of Observer-approved good taste – Kraftwerk, the Giro D’Italia, the Liberal Democrats – while confidently dismissing anything that might be a little more antagonistic, awkward or even just flatly mass-cultural (“don’t encourage them, Jeremy!”). For all their frequentlyprofessed love of Aphex Twin, Green Man and “actually some really cool grime”, such people are just as susceptible to big choruses and conveniently primarycoloured stories as the Oasis fans they like to deride as, you know, just not getting how much better Pulp are when you really think about it. Less 6 Music Dad than Freak Zone Divorcee, this man (and it definitely is a man) has heard that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.

It’s not that Pulp and Kraftwerk aren’t any good, or that Yves Tumor solely appeals to the kind of people who think TV reached its zenith as a form with Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. But Yves Tumor is the kind of figure that it would be easy for certain gatekeepers to ruin for everyone else, declaring them a ‘real artist’ without unpicking what that actually means, while lauding this individual for their exceptionality while remaining pretty comfortable with the rules staying as they are for the rest of us. This is not an artist who ought to be reserved for the self-appointed pop intelligentsia, Sunday supplement-friendly subversion to be filed safely alongside Autechre and Sapiens. Yves Tumor is for everyone.

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

anyway, the most emphatic statement of that genuinely mass-appeal ambition from Yves Tumor yet. This is direct, maximalist pop music, bristling with ambition and as stylish in delivery as we’ve come to expect from Tumor.

There’s a temptation to write something along the lines of “Yves Tumor should be topping the streaming charts, filling arenas, headlining festivals”, etc. – but that runs a real risk of invoking our divorced friend again, sounding off about what he thinks his kids should really be into nowadays. With that in mind, all I’m saying is that if Yves Tumor did suddenly begin selling out football stadiums, I’d have no complaints. Imagine the chorus of a track like ‘Meteora Blues’ thundering across a crowd of thousands, the igneous bass bouncing around the flailing masses as the insistent vocal hook pirouettes overhead. Considering the runway-ready presentation of the Yves Tumor live band, it’s not much of a leap to picture them on such a stage.

Opener ‘God is a Circle’ is a scratchy uncut gem of sardonic melody and flickering noise, the implicit vulnerability of the lyrics (“Everything around us feels unclean / My momma said that God sees everything”) lent a sharp edge by a scorched guitar arrangement, adding up to a shivering, caustic whole that sounds like Suicide covering Elliott Smith. This is followed by ‘Lovely Sewer’, which may be Praise A Lord…’s most transcendent moment, with guest vocalist Kidä stepping into the limelight for a sunbeam chorus that throws the jagged contours of the track’s drill-tight production into gorgeous relief.

Like a lot of truly great pop, Praise A Lord… regularly flirts with the ridiculous. ‘Heaven Surrounds Us Like A Hood’ centres upon a cartoonish guitar riff of Faith No More proportions, while the open-shirted shredding that’s become a feature of Tumor’s gloriously OTT live shows manages to butt into more or less every track here. To be honest, there’s a slightly naff swagger to the whole thing, which would be unearned, Red Hot Chili Peppers-esque, were it not for the dark underbelly of the arrangements or the

Albums subversive intelligence of the songwriting. It’s all quite knowing, but never alienatingly so. Tumor even makes this artifice explicit on the fittingly-titled ‘Parody’, before getting to the heart of this record – this creative role – with a seemingly throwaway line towards the end: “A parody of a pop star / You behaved like a monster / Is this all just makeup… What makes you feel so important?” Here, they are acknowledging the essential theatre and surface of pop music; yet as they break the fourth wall in this way, we’re all invited to join in. The parody – the persona – is telegraphed for everyone, a whole track dedicated to making it clear; it’s not just for the handful of dickheads who’ve spent a lifetime reifying their position as ‘in the know’ to understand this music ‘on multiple levels’, or whatever.

Through all these clichés and this depiction of a particular kind of selfdesignated quasi-academic music fan, I’m aware that it’d be easy to accuse this review of anti-intellectualism or, frankly, projection. To rail against the gatekeepers of good taste while writing about music for a living is to skate on thin ice at best, and some of the worst people in the UK media (imagine the ground that covers) have forged disgraceful careers through attacks on sophistication, earnestness or knowledge, in doing so assuming the worst of ordinary people. So to be clear: intellectualism and scholarship are to be encouraged, and there’s nothing wrong with formulating your identity around the culture you love. But the tendency of far too many well-remunerated commentators to idealise one version of intellectual and artistic sophistication at the expense of any others, and to dismiss as inauthentic the efforts of the young, the working class and the marginalised to express themselves in new and creative ways (I’m borrowing heavily from Kennedy again here), is downright reactionary. And what’s so great about Yves Tumor is the way in which they show how silly such commentary can be without even trying.

On Praise A Lord…, Yves Tumor embraces the essential camp and superficiality of pop stardom with invigorating levels of both artistic invention and

inclusive sincerity. It’s a project of selfrealisation, the outsider becoming the star, but it’s also about you being able to do the same if you want to. The hooks are massive and plentiful (‘Lovely Sewer’, ‘Echolalia’, the careening, Dilla-in-space sample of ‘Purified by the Fire’); the lyrics expertly meld romance, reflection, queerness and candour (“Sweet boy / You know you look just like your mother / Sweet girl / She said I talk just like her father… For a moment we became each other”– ‘Heaven Surrounds Us Like A Hood’); the production is smart and questioning, throwing genres together with abandon; there are even a couple of uninhibited robo-rock bangers in which all thematic and stylistic constraints are chucked right out of the window (‘Operator’, ‘In Spite of War’).

It’s the work of an artist who is too restless, too ambitious, in some ways too pure, to be reduced to cliché, even if that cliché comes with the seal of cultured approval. This is cutting-edge pop music: nothing more – but what more could you want? – and certainly nothing less. 8/10 Luke Cartledge

Baba Ali — Laugh Like A Bomb (memphis industries) On transatlantic duo Baba Ali’s 2020 debut Memorial Device you got a vague sense of the Anglo-American grey zone that David Bowie and Iggy Pop inhabited when they were in Château d’Hérouville recording The Idiot, with the insidious Angloglam spectacle colliding head-on with the harsh American wasteland.

On Laugh Like a Bomb, Baba Ali return to intersect the alternative electronic sounds of London and New York in a far-reaching and deceptively deep second album.

Lead single ‘Burn Me Out’ is emblematic of Baba Ali’s unique sound, harnessing jazzy synths that are scratched through by edgy vocals that perfectly capture our mundane cognitive dissonance in a few bars of sound and evoke the distinct feeling of a mandatory work-life balance webinar you’re having to consume after hours. The LP blossoms, however, when there’s a full embrace of the two cities’ folie à deux, with ‘Anesthesia, Beverly Hills’, ‘A Circle’, and ‘Bankrupt Funk’ all despondent, dynamic and jiving fuckers that really strike a nerve.

Whereas Bowie and Pop found union nightclubbing in the decadent wreckage of dilapidated post-war west Berlin, Baba Ali instead find it zooming through these manic late-capitalist highfinance super-cities. A trashed disco-ball of a record that is both the come-up and the come-down. 7/10 Robert Davidson

Deerhoof — Miracle-Level (joyful noise) When you’re resolutely DIY and as prolific as a band like Deerhoof, eventually there’s nowhere to turn but the actual studio. Their first entirely recorded in a studio, and their first recorded in vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki’s native Japanese, shows the three-piece are still able to turn left in a career defined by left turns. That Miracle-Level is the band’s 19th in their 28 years and still innovative in theory is no mean feat – and there’s just enough intention to keep them sounding fresh.

The band funnel far-flung influences (they specifically cite Rosalía, Meridian Brothers and Mozart opera) into something more obviously them: needlepoint riffs, shifting time signatures and catchy vocal melodies. Seques-

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Albums tering lyrics from an English-speaking audience brings such quirks into clearer focus, levelling each instrument, with the tanged guitars and shuffling drums locking into kaleidoscopic patterns on ‘My Lovely Cat!’.

Despite the studio setting, it’s hard not to hear some songs as undercooked GarageBand demos. ‘The Poignant Melody’ is an accurate title, ‘Everybody, Marvel’ less so. The former is a pretty instrumental but not necessarily one that benefitted from a more sophisticated set-up, the latter eschews overdubs for an uncomfortable mix of wobbly vocals and discordant guitars. ‘Miracle-Level’, ‘Wedding, March, Flower’ and ‘The Little Maker’ reassuringly see the band charmingly slip into lower gears, quieter moments that give their wonky idiosyncrasies the space to breathe.

Ultimately avoiding repetition, Miracle-Level brings big-picture innovation, which just about filters down into the songs’ smaller details. It’s another album of Deerhoof doing what they do well. 7/10 Jake Crossland

Kara Jackson — Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? (september) “Every man thinks I’m his fucking mother,” bemoans Kara Jackson on ‘Therapy’, with the bluntness and sardonic wit that defines the Illinois musician’s debut album.

Recorded in her childhood bedroom during the pandemic, much of the material retains a lo-fi quality. Opening with the sound of a cassette being clunked into a deck, an acoustic guitar or simple piano note are often the integral backing. This is despite her subsequently reaching out to friends such as Nnamdi and Kaina to

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re-record the demos, shape the production and add strings to several tracks.

Largely sidestepping conventional verse-chorus-verse structure, there’s a focus on words that’s to be expected from someone who served as the third US National Youth Poet Laureate. Influenced by poets Sharon Olds and Lucille Clifton as much as Fiona Apple and Megan Thee Stallion, the arrangements shift around a world-weary delivery that was designed for cheap bars and cigarettes.

There may not be any big choruses, unless you count devastating one-liners that double as self-help manuals, but this music has substance. There are altcountry slide guitars on ‘Pawnshop’, jazzy piano ripples on ‘Free’, and ‘Dickhead Blues’ twists into a Broadway number halfway through. The astute use of instruments to emphasise lyrical delivery is typified on ‘No Fun/Party’, which turns on a knife edge from strings to sparse banjo for its dénouement.

A collection of songs about love and relationships, the album is also about self-discovery. She’s not far wrong when she has the revelation that, “I am pretty top-notch.” 8/10 Susan Darlington

Nabihah Iqbal — DREAMER (ninja tune) Ernest Hemingway’s suitcase of manuscripts misplaced in Gare de Lyon train station; The Righteous Judges, the stolen panel from the celebrated 15th century polyptych The Ghent Altarpiece; and the demos of the follow-up to David Bowie’s Blackstar. Art is inexplicably lost to the abyss at every turn. And in 2020, it was British electronic producersongwriter Nabihah Iqbal’s turn when her London studio was burgled – with two years’ worth of music part of the haul.

While the consequent album, DREAMER, feels its own construction, if one looks closely enough you can see the scars from the fire that consumed her lost music. Compared to her debut, DREAMER is more ruminative, more mature – but crucially more fragile.

The wondrous opener ‘In Light’ is led by a vulnerable feeling rather than anything resembling a beat. ‘Sweet Emotion (Lost in Devotion)’ erupts periodically in moody waves that portend an approaching non-event, much like the late great Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Arrival soundtrack.

Perhaps most surprisingly, there are times on DREAMER when the experimental electronic sound feels overridden by a Nick Drake melancholia.

While it does occasionally go so deep into sound that it stalls, the contemplative soft-focus of DREAMER is mostly a beautiful walk along a memorial shore “where time falls like rain”. 7/10 Robert Davidson

Skinny Pelembe — Hardly The Same Snake (partisan) Skinny Pelembe’s Dreaming Is Dead Now was a messy debut offering, and at best, a compelling collection of indie rock, folk and hip-hop.

However, it felt as though we didn’t get to know Pelembe too well. On that record, his voice took an auditory backseat, rendering him a nebulous shadow whispering mysteries rather than someone trying to convey something meaningful.

Thankfully, on Hardly The Same Snake, Pelembe places himself at the forefront.

His ghostly baritone still mutters with a haunting gravity to complement his sombre words, this time as he waxes poetic about discomfort in the present (‘Oh, Silly George’) while yearning for the

Albums unknown future (‘Don’t Be Another’) and moving on from the past (‘Hardly The Same Snake’).

Lyrics like “Warm, yellow memory foam, rising in my sleep / Bits of you, were poking through” from the title track prove that though Pelembe is shedding old skins for new, his poetic lyrical leaning will always remain, this time striking a more resonant chord as he pushes his voice toward centre stage.

Through Hardly The Same Snake, we can finally hear Skinny Pelembe, with a new level of heartfelt introspection that punches holes through the usual instrumental veil of murkiness. This is artistic growth, and a show of confidence as Pelembe continues to hone his unique style. 6/10 Kyle Kohner

Unknown Mortal Orchestra — V (jagjaguwar) While everyone was stranded in their old place due to Covid, Ruban Nielson decided to relocate from Portland to Palm Springs. Something there reminded him of his childhood, spent between New Zealand and Hawaii, following his parents as they worked as performers in hotels and resorts. Before the global lockdown, he flew his brother and bandmate Kody to California, and the pair started recording, immersed in that familiar environment. The two reminisced about the music that played when they were kids, and the yacht rock, West Coast AOR, ’80s pop and easy listening came together to form a soft shape around which to smooth the sharp edges of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s previous sound, adjusting the psychedelic, hard-rock and disco spikes in a soothing new palette.

Having to return to Hawaii for family matters, the Nielsons reconnected

with traditional hapa-haole music, letting all their past and history become the trait d’union for the record they were creating.

The result is V, UMO’s fifth record and their first double album. It’s unquestionably their best so far.

Playing with instrumental pieces and lyrics musing on mortality and humanity, the 14 tracks present a mature and balanced sound. Ruban Nielson’s signature filtered voice glides on a sea of guitar and synths without a crease, always in full control. An hour of music that gives the same satisfaction as reading an insightful book on a sun-kissed day.

7/10 Guia Cortassa

Yaeji — With a Hammer (xl) Cultural theory discourse in the 21st-century has been dominated by discussions around the ‘slow cancellation of the future’.

Neoliberal culture has rewarded marketfriendly revivalism and nostalgia, slowly hampering the conditions required to produce art that is shockingly ‘new’.

However, the internet’s ascent to global omnipresence is starting to shift the nature of this discussion. Yaeji’s With A Hammer is a shining example of a work that feels bracingly new in a way that only a richly-connected global culture could have generated.

Its blend of musical approaches as well as pluralistic embrace of identities (in this case Yaeji’s Korean-American heritage) is thrillingly realised. She interweaves Korean-language lyrics with others in English in effortless fashion, highlighted by ‘Submerge FM’, which fluidly shifts between the two as if flicking between browser tabs. ‘Ready Or Not’ goes further, turning its Korean-language lyrics into fractured blips that echo like a

whole new digital language of their own.

Musically, With A Hammer develops a similarly unique language. Taking cues from hyperpop, drum and bass, house and footwork, but in possession of its own sense of maximalist colour, the album moves according to its own unpredictable rhythms. Few tracks adhere to familiar structures or motifs, instead developing as their own independent entities. ‘Ready Or Not’ is especially engrossing, as are the glistening digital textures of ‘Done (Let’s Get It)’, and the Arthur Russell-esque reverberations of ‘1 Thing To Smash’.

Like A Hammer actually is all the more admirable for its accessibility.

Rarely does it feel challenging, even in its moments that venture furthest from familiarity. Its singular musical imagination and elegant blend of cultures, as well as its surprising accessibility, make Yaeji’s debut full-length a gripping, joyous riposte to those who seek to cancel the future. 9/10 Tom Morgan

B. Cool Aid — Leather Blvd (lex) Pink Siifu’s musical exploits over the past few years have been phenomenal.

The Alabama-born rapper has plundered his way through gristly post-industrial sound collages (NEGRO) and hazy indica rap (Bag Talk with YUNGMORPHEUS), striking gold every time. 2023’s first outing sees the multi-genre dabbler return to his project B. Cool Aid with Long Beach beat technician Awhlee, six years on from their debut project BRWN. Awhlee’s production oozes character; he effortlessly creates the record’s iconoclastic soundworld in the album’s opening motifs, with frequent help from jazz quintet Butcher Brown. Across

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Albums Leather Blvd his beats are G-funk mutations, wherein the gloss and glitz dialled up to the absolute movie maximum. Evocative Old Hollywood Strings and bustling high-end funk give the album the grandiose feel of a well-shot city out of the movies, whilst the A-list cast of features (often three or four per track) provide the album with a vibrant cast of characters.

Often the vocals match the glam, and this works brilliantly – Digable Planets’ Ladybug Mecca’s velvet bars particularly shine, whilst Liv.e frequently provides backing vocals that illuminate all of the space they inhabit.

But this B. Cool Aid record is even better when the vocals contrast the polish of the production. Siifu is Best Actor here.

He raps like he’s gnawing on something (compliment), all teeth and breaths.

Moments like opener ‘Welcome 2 Leather Boulevard’ and ‘Wassup’ are the best, as his goblin mode stylings forge a magickal Lynchian juxtaposition to the music’s majestic sun-soaked beats.

In the midst of a real hot streak, Pink Siifu cruises down a “Boulevard so hard they named that bitch ‘Leather’” with his pal Awhlee at the wheel. He shows no sign of slowing down. 8/10 Cal Cashin

Daughter — Stereo Mind Games (4ad) Physical distance is one of the central themes on Stereo Mind Games. This would once have defined the release through lovelorn moping, but three albums into their career Daughter have learned to counterbalance it with attempts to forge connections.

Their first release in seven years – excluding an instrumental soundtrack and Elena Tonra’s Ex:Re side-project –

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and on the surface nothing has changed.

The windswept Sigur Rós guitars, pregnant pauses of The xx and tendency towards shoegaze tastefulness are still present on the likes of ‘To Rage’.

Yet there are significant developments. 12 Ensemble, a London-based string orchestra, play on a handful of tracks, with the arrangements on ‘Be on Your Way’ suggesting they’ve been listening to Massive Attack’s Blue Lines.

Expanding the trio’s basic sound continues with the introduction of secondary vocal lines. A choir appears halfway through the trembling ‘Neptune’, its presence intentionally contradicting Tonra’s claim that “there’s no-one out there.”

There’s also a greater desire to experiment, with ‘Junkmail’ and ‘(Missed Calls)’ hinting at Alt-J and Radiohead.

The latter track is created out of a glitchy voice note from a friend to Tonra, impressionistic words surfacing through the mix. If it feels incidental, the voice notes on ‘Wish I Could Cross the Sea’ are more integral, where the desire to physically connect with relatives is contrasted by the limitations of technology.

These musical outliers, combined with hints of hope in connection, offer glacial progress for a band that have always eschewed the pressure for constant new content. 7/10 Susan Darlington

Baby Rose — Through and Through (secretly canadian) Through and Through is incredibly lush and pops with energy and swagger. The second record from Baby Rose (aka Jasmine Rose Wilson) drifts on dreamy guitar and rich vocals, luring you into a luscious sonic landscape. Built upon caramel-smooth bass sweet enough to sink your teeth into,

the production is incredibly cohesive and elevates Baby Rose’s vocals. Opener ‘Go’ is hypnotic: tender and impassioned, it sets the tone for the remainder of the bountiful album. Rose weaves her comforting voice through loops and twists of love lost and love found. ‘Dance With Me’ makes its simple request and again while the reverberating low-end has you swinging your hips to the romantic rhythm. The groove on ‘I Won’t Tell’ keeps you locked in the same wonderful sway and ‘Love Bomb’ acts as the perfect song to play secretly to your crush.

Leading the album out with heartwrenching ballad ‘Stop The Bleeding’ and the stirring ‘Power’, Baby Rose may need to leave the baby part behind, as this record shows considerable musical maturity. Sensual and incredibly satisfying, Through and Through spreads its tendrils and embraces you with lavish love. 9/10 Sophia McDonald

James Holden — Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities (border community) Turns out James Holden’s life didn’t work out how he’d expected. In the press release that accompanies Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities the Leicestershire-based producer recalls how he used to balance a clock radio on a wardrobe to “catch the faint pirate FM signals from the nearest city, dreaming of what raves would be like when I could finally escape and become a new age traveller.”

It makes sense that an atmosphere of hauntology looms over Imagine This.

His first solo outing since 2013’s The Inheritors, this is an album that’s half a conversation with his teenage imagination and half a musical ode to parties of

Albums yore; a beguiling mix of the fantastic and the familiar. Setting the scene with the cosmic pulse and euphoric birdsong of the opener, this record feels more like a mixtape than a musical album, sucking you ever deeper into a hypnotic world of pulsing bass and blissful noise.

At most raves, once you’ve gotten over the initial high, most people will struggle to hold on to the buzz for the full duration; luckily Holden, always a party guy at heart, throws in the odd pop hook or easy-going banger to keep things moving. It’s in these moments where Imagine This… really shines, with eerily sexy saxophone and slapped basslines dropping through the glare like a Roxy Music sample.

If this is truly the sound of all tomorrow’s parties, then you can count me in. 7/10 Dominic Haley

El Michels Affair and Black Thought — Glorious Game (big crown) Leno Michels’ love affair with R&B goes way back. Starting out as a player in The Mighty Imperials when he was just a teen, he’s been releasing his own music through his own outfit the El Michels Affair since 2005 and has cemented a reputation as one of the standard bearers bringing funk and soul to contemporary rap.

As you’ve probably guessed by now, Michel is an old-schooler at heart, and therefore any collaboration with legendary Philly rapper and Roots founder Black Thought was only ever going to go one way. Glorious Game is living proof of the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Recorded Bomb Squad style, with the group first jamming out compositions live and then returning to cut up and rearrange their own work, these songs

contort themselves naturally into all sorts of pleasing shapes.

The result is an hour or so of flawless flows set against a tapestry of jazzified loops and passionate breakbeats, all held together by Thought’s imperious sense of groove and timing. A portal through time back to the hazy days of early-’90s hip hop, it’s an album that stands shoulder to shoulder with the hazy effortlessness of acts like Stetsasonic, J5, and yes, The Roots in their early days. 6/10 Dominic Haley

Debby Friday — GOOD LUCK (sub pop) “Don’t you fuck it up / Give it what you got,” sings Debby Friday in the opening moments of her debut record, GOOD LUCK. The Nigerian-born, Toronto-based artist has produced a coming-of-age record that candidly deals with past mistakes as well as inserting positive affirmations to serve as reminders to continue growing as both a person and artist. In her lyrics, there’s evidence of a life lived and lessons learned, both in the personal and professional sphere. “You’re just a young girl / All alone by yourself in the city / Act like you don’t need help,” she intones, with an endearing vulnerability in her cadence on ‘So Hard To Tell’. A few songs later, ‘Pluto Baby’ ushers in a far more assured Friday whose unflinching presence is magnetic not only on this song but throughout the record.

Metallic timbres and industrial beats provide solid foundations to these ten instantly immersive and infectious arrangements. An overarching Y2K sensibility dominates some of the electronic elements woven into the defiant musical personality of the propulsive centrepiece ‘Hot Love’ and the pop-tinged

‘Heartbreakerrr’, which already feels like an instant classic designed to be sung late into the night. Elsewhere, Friday injects tonal variety towards the end of the LP with the sultry (and slightly unexpected) ‘What A Man’ melding a Cure-esque bass riff and a Slash-like solo within a nocturnal setting, yielding similarly magnetic results in the way these worlds collide in an Yves Tumor tune.

There’s an extraordinary elasticity across GOOD LUCK’s masterful production that makes repeated listens not just enjoyable but irresistible. Friday establishes a great sense of balance throughout the ten tracks. From the industrial, claustrophobic gloom of the album’s title track and ‘I Got It’ to the sweeter and more spacious compositions, Friday moves seamlessly through these deftlyengineered soundscapes. There’s always something new to hone in on and further draw you into this immensely multifaceted body of work that further illuminates her dexterity as a songwriter and performer. It’s in these moments, and her faultless portrayal of GOOD LUCK’s commanding protagonist, where we can see the artistic evolution since the release of early EPs Bitchpunk (2018) and Death Drive (2019).

If there’s only one thing to be said about Debby Friday’s poised debut it’s that she most certainly gave it all that she’s got. 8/10 Zara Hedderman

Terry — Call Me Terry (upset the rhythm) “Terry isn’t afraid to call the shots and Terry isn’t afraid to point the finger,” says this album’s promo material.

“Listen to what Terry has to say.”

Who the hell is Terry, though?

This mysterious Australian voice has

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Albums been outspokenly calling attention to all the flaws in the social and political system of his country ever since the release of his debut EP in 2016. He has done this by having an impeccable sense of style, music that is incredibly sincere, and a compelling mystery surrounding his identity. The mystery is working – for a start, we’re referring to a fourpiece band as ‘he’.

The latest instalment of this conundrum, Call Me Terry features handwritten artwork that includes images of buildings and landscapes from Melbourne and New South Wales adjacent to what initially appears to be only lyrics. If you pay close attention, you will see that the actual songs are preceded by captions describing the type of political fraud that location sponsored. Although you won’t hear those exposés in their songs, you will be completely taken in by their psychedelic indie-pop, which is garnished with the rawness of a practice band and creates a rich, long-missed sound where synth and strings abide by the adage that less is more. And more it is. 7/10 Guia Cortassa

Genevieve Artadi — Forever Forever (brainfeeder) Given that 2023 has already given us new records from the likes of Caroline Polachek, Tennis and U.S. Girls, we are hardy experiencing a dearth of what we might describe, for want of a better term, as avant-pop. Still, it’s difficult to categorise this sprawling new LP from Los Angeles natives Genevieve Artadi as anything but; a classically-trained jazz musician, she keeps that genre’s freeform fundamentals at the foundation of everything she does, whether that be as one-half of the adventurous indietronica duo Knower

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or on her last solo effort, 2020’s Dizzy Strange Summer.

Half of the 12 tracks on this follow-up, Forever Forever, were penned with big band in mind, before Artadi recorded them with a maximalist electronic palette; in its very arrangements, then, her jazz grounding is a key aspect rather than an affectation. The melding of the two worlds is an experiment that by turns enthrals and infuriates; when she really lets herself go, as on the epic, racing conclusion to ‘I Know’, you feel as if you’re hearing somebody crack open something thrilling and genuinely fresh.

Elsewhere, there’s a fixation on repetition and looping rhythms that works against Artadi; as the record progresses, it feels like something that stifles more often that it allows her to unfold her entire suite of ideas. Still, she stands alone stylistically – this is a beguiling addition to the year’s burgeoning complement of off-kilter pop albums. 6/10 Joe Goggins

Lucinda Chua — YIAN (4ad) Lucinda Chua’s YIAN combines orchestral melodies with an airy sense of hope. Exploring a new freedom, Chua’s first solo album feels delicate but gains strength throughout by pushing old reliances aside.

Despite her calling out to an unspecified ‘you’ throughout the album, the most important relationship on YIAN is between herself and her cello. The London-based artist tries to balance her breathy vocals with the penetrating bass notes and, often, this is a losing battle. Acting as the backing singer that steals the show, the stringed instrument complements Chua’s starkly emotive lyrics but drowns out the specificities of her vocals. However, during

songs like ‘Autumn Leaves Don’t Come’, where Chua lowers her voice down to the same depth, she gains some ground and captures your attention.

Elsewhere, there are moments of musical synthesis. The instrumental track ‘Meditations On A Place’ runs with the cinematic essence found on opener ‘Golden’. Experimentation creeps into ‘Grief Place’ where Chua exhibits her talent as a composer. A hint of London Grammar’s ambience can be heard in the melancholic piano found throughout the record. Although YIAN could have struck more of a balance between vocals and instrumentals, this a gentle, emotive debut. 6/10 Sophia McDonald

Desire Marea — On the Romance of Being (mute) At an all-you-can-eat restaurant there’s a basic, deadly important rule: Top your plate up, by all means, but make sure that you give yourself enough room for three or four returns to the buffet. That’s how you hit the sweet spot. Go hard too soon and you risk not getting your money’s worth. Try and push it past the fourth plate though and you will probably end up ruining your entire evening. Too much food consumed too quickly can bring on an overwhelming feeling of shame – not to mention stomach cramps.

Desire Marea’s second solo album, On The Romance of Being, brings this sort of overindulgence away from the buffet and into your ear canals, to mixed results.

It feels like an understatement to say that the album contains an absolute plethora of sounds. In theory, it contains everything you could possibly want: orchestral builds, free jazz drumming, heavy rock distortion, theatrical vocals, synthetic

Albums funk and even a smattering post-punk moodiness. Unfortunately though, as great as tracks like ‘Ezulwini’ (electronica-infused orchestral sad pop) and ‘Be Free’ (jazzy dance explosions) might promise to be on paper, in reality we’re left with an overwhelming mishmash of disparate sounds.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the album is that, despite the clashes in style, it never sounds chaotic. There’s an odd lack of danger on show that causes everything to appear extremely considered, even during Marea’s most freeform moments. In any other setting the rapid genre changes of ‘Banzi’ would be invigorating, but within the confines of On The Romance of Being the track feels expected and unexciting, rather than startling and fresh.

Despite all this, at certain points the album does somehow manage to pull it all together. The weird and wonderful Twin Peaks-isms of ‘Makhukhu’ in particular suggest that Marea’s experimentation can work in the right setting.

Unfortunately though, these moments are few and far between. For the most part we’re left with a collection of songs that just manage to miss the mark.

While it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer scope and sonic exploration on show, more often than not On The Romance of Being amounts to far less than the sum of its parts, proving that it pays to show some restraint at the aural buffet.

Four plates max, Desire. Four plates max.

5/10 Jack Doherty

London Brew — London Brew (concord jazz) 2020 saw plans topple like dominos: a series of half-century tribute concerts for Miles Davis’ seminal

1970 masterpiece Bitches Brew fell victim.

Perhaps luckily, the plans mutated into something much more fascinating. A vital artefact, London Brew is influenced as much by the new, anxious world it was born into as the album it eulogises.

The original Brew saw Davis feed his players sketches of songs, tasking them with riffing around his jumping-off points across three punctual sessions.

Here, Benji B takes on the role of Davis, cuing in samples from the original text, while a leading collection of London’s jazz musicians, including Nubiya Garcia and Tom Skinner, respond in real time.

Mirroring the strict schedule, the group captures the original record’s labyrinthine exploration across three sessions mid-pandemic. And while a keen ear may identify shared motifs, the real joy is in hearing the improvisational spirit pioneered in 1970 New York alive and recontextualised in 2020 London.

And London, as executive producer Bruce Lampcov explains in the liner notes, is as much a character featured here as anyone from the long list of collaborators.

The two opening pieces could soundtrack the city’s balance of threat and opportunity, ominous solos crescendoing into a violent and awesome explosion, and eventually calming into something gloriously predictable. This album is a photograph, not a painting, inextricable from a moment, and it crackles with a sense of place and time.

It’s transportive, hearing the players emerging from the fretful hibernation of imposed lockdown, shrugging off a wariness and burning through creative energy with thick squalls of noise. Ghosts haunt the record from multiple decades. The controlled cacophony, braced with nervous, competitive tension, slowly dissolves into something smoother. ‘Mor Ning Prayers’, a late highlight, opens with a charged guitar solo before precise drums and brass slip into a locked groove.

The artists behind London Brew pull apart their inspiration and reassemble it in the shadow of both the last 50 years and the last three, looking for meaning in its constituent parts and legacy as a whole.

Almost magically, it shrewdly captures an ever-shifting London at a very specific point of time. Davis would be proud. 8/10 Jake Crossland

Cloth — Secret Measure (rock action) A whispered delivery is always a gamble. Too quiet and you’re unemotive.

Too breathy and you’re monotonous. It’s a small miracle how dynamic and impactful Glaswegian sibling duo Cloth can be as performers, given how hushed their music often is. Paul and Rachael Swinton bring even more range and dynamics to their sound on Secret Measure, their first record working with an outside producer in Ali Chant.

Rachael Swinton’s vocal is clear and intimate, even when surrounded by a subtly busy mix of guitars, synths, harmonic pings and reactive percussion.

On ‘Ladder’, we hear every weary exhalation, as more layers are added. The enveloping and hypnotic atmosphere allows the songs to shine. Each small shift feels seismic: take the gentle guitar thrum that’s added just before the chorus of ‘Another’, or the use of a full kit to centre us on ‘Ambulance’.

Sometimes the melodies could be reinforced more strongly, like on the barely-there approach to ‘Lido’, which never resolves into a memorable phrase.

Still, even here, there’s a heartfelt approach to lyricism and pacing to keep the spell intact.

“We were just dreaming in time / Living in a ruin,” she sings on heavy closer ‘Blue Space’. It’s ambiguous enough to be haunting, and dramatic enough to connect. There’s a lineage of Glasgow bands finding power in the more desolate corners of alt-rock and electronica. It’s

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Albums fitting that Secret Measure releases on Mogwai-run label Rock Action, which has also been home to Blanck Mass and The Twilight Sad. With a record this fluid and chill-inducing, Cloth deserve to be in that company. 7/10 Skye Butchard

Benefits — Nails (invada) Teesside hardcore collective Benefits are angry.

Their debut album, Nails, makes that much clear. Rage explodes from every word frontman Kingsley Hall spits down the microphone: at the government, at empire, at the complicity of (some of) the public.

Formed in 2019, Benefits were initially aiming for indie-punk and a good shout (Hall has since described that early stuff as ‘IDLES-lite’), but over the past few years have evolved into an aggressive, mind-numbing group whose music is more performance art or political theatre than anything else. Noise is the foundation of this album, but the songs soon diverge from any discernible genre; rather, they are experiments in digital sonic creation.

The meaning and the message are clearly the motivating factors for Hall, and though this album will definitely not be to everyone’s taste, it’s clear that he and Benefits don’t care.

On several tracks here, Hall’s dedication to his mission is placed at the forefront.

‘Shit Britain’ is a meditation on the creeping, crawling nature of poverty, taking over people’s lives and motivation like an invasive vine growing over a dilapidated building. To create a rich portrait of the ordinary lives he sings about, the song is full of imagery: kebab boxes on bedroom floors, homeless crowds lying on street corners and the narrator’s pride caving in with his body (“Where is my puffed out chest?”).The imagery develops from the benign tedium

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of takeaways to the tortured hopelessness of abject poverty to which the public have become desensitized.

Another memorable moment is ‘Flag’, about which Hall has spoken publicly in some depth. Hall attributes the hatred and vitriol directed against immigrants in the United Kingdom to the British government and superficial nationalists, pointing to flag symbolism as one of the four horsemen of the fascistic apocalypse. Though the precise meaning of the song and clarity of lyrics are at times contested by the staticfilled instrumental arrangement, Hall’s anger comes through crystal clear. In a 2021 interview with NME, Hall says this ‘governmental strategy’ of aggressive flag displays is designed to keep people angry. The line between the anger Hall rails against and the anger he expresses becomes fuzzy, raising a question: what should people do with their anger? Benefits do not necessarily present any path towards a better world. As an expression of rage and emotional overflow, the album is undoubtedly, thrillingly effective; whether it risks losing listeners who don’t want to be lost in the quicksand of hopelessness, only time will tell.

Either way, creating this music for its own sake has clearly been cathartic for the band. On record, some of the tracks do hit a few of the same notes; yet a lack of rigorous direction in the occasional song might add to its live performances, allowing spontaneity and creativity in the moment as certain elements are left to chance. ‘Meat Teeth’ for example, explores a range of sound and acts as a sort of amalgamation of the rest of the album. Some of the beats are interesting, but in the final third of the song the lyrics are lost to a dizzying distortion that drowns out specific meaning somewhat.

Elsewhere though, the perfect balance is struck, allowing the lyrics to shine at the same time Benefits’ anger is also expressed through non-verbal means.

There’s an admirable confidence behind a creative, antagonistic project like this, expressing the frustration of the moment with such vehemence. More sonic variation and thematic nuance may

be needed to give Benefits the durability their principles deserve – again, a little more on their hopes for the future, rather than the sole focus on their anger at the present, would be welcome, and more compatible with a wider project for change – yet the creation of a record like this is a political act in itself; the labour that goes into realising an artistic project goes beyond mere self-expression and represents one way of questioning things.

The medium itself matters just as much as the message; this album is just the foundation for other political music waiting to be unearthed from Hall’s soul. 7/10 Isabel Crabtree

Blondshell — Blondshell (partisan) It’s hard not to be immensely charmed

by Blondshell’s razor-sharp lyrical barbs.

‘Sepsis’ opens with the laugh-out-laugh funny “I’m going back to him / I know my therapist pissed”, which is followed by the piercing chorus observation: “It should take a whole lot less to turn me off ”. These lines encapsulate the intelligent, pathosladen songwriting approach of the artist also known as Sabrina Teitelbaum. The 25-year-old’s self-titled debut is packed full of these unique and often-funny observations. ‘Joiner’ is a sharp portrait of a lost soul, someone who “buys drugs from guys in cars” and “watched way too much HBO growing up”. ‘Olympus’ is an honest vision of longing, envisioning an ex’s house that “still sounds like birds and smells like vodka”. These details are often startling in their lucidity.

Blondshell is on slightly less impressive footing with regards to its musicianship. Teitelbaum studied music theory at the University of Southern California, which is evident in the album’s

Albums clear confidence and harmonic acuity.

However, the ’90s alt-rock approach never really grabs you by the collar like her lyrics. The slacker trudge of tracks like ‘Olympus’ and ‘Tarmac’ is a little dull, while a few too many tracks use the quiet verse-loud chorus approach of Nirvana or Hole but without leaving much of an impact in the process. ‘Sepsis’ has a memorable chorus, yet there are too few moments across the album where the musical craft impresses with its individuality. It’s a shame, and an all-toofrequent problem in guitar music right now, that such potent lyrical observations are paired with arrangements that are so beholden to the past. 6/10 Tom Morgan

Wednesday — Rat Saw God (dead oceans) According to the Bible, “the eyes of the Lord are everywhere, keeping watch on the wicked and the good”, and on Wednesday’s fantastic new long-player Rat Saw God, drunken violence, drug use and casual flings play out under God’s constant surveillance. “Every daughter of God / Has a little bad luck sometimes”, repeats singer Karly Hartzman on the record’s midpoint ‘Bath County’. In this fully-realised reality little separates the “wicked and the good”. Luck is seemingly the dividing line, yet in spite of Hartzman’s caring delivery, luck is often in short supply.

The dispossessed characters within these walls play out like updated versions of those in Denis Johnson’s cult short story collection Jesus’ Son. Though unlike Johnson, Hartzman overflows with empathy, both for the location and the people within it. There’s a tactile use of description; light bleeds from the “neon sign at the nail salon”, and scent is

heavy with a “hot rotten grass smell”. The accompanying music is rusted and lurching, anchoring these recollections with a slide guitar yearning.

The most ambitious amalgam of words and music comes on early single ‘Bull Believer’, an epic that churns disorientingly. Towards the end Hartzman sings of a New Year party turned sour, her “never ending nosebleed” is matched as an equally thick homesick squall rages on.

Against her screams the ugly intensifies to create a crooked cathedral of sound.

Highlights abound elsewhere: the generous ‘Chosen to Deserve’ stomps anthemically and ‘Formula One’ swoons with tenderness. Now signed to Dead Oceans (home of Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski) Wednesday are well placed to reap the benefits of such a rich and riveting set.

God willing, they will. 9/10 Theo Gorst

Braids — Euphoric Recall (secret city) Braids turn accidents into assets.

On their fifth studio album Euphoric Recall, the Montreal-based experimental trio allow the incidentals of human touch to cohabit with cultivated musicianship and exquisite production. A candid chuckle tucked under a satiny groove; the comical screams opening the otherwise solemn ‘Left Right’ – these moments enhance the album’s sense of life and authenticity. In a genre flooded with vacant facsimiles, this is art-pop for the conscious and the imperfect.

Self-produced over 18 months in the band’s Toute Garnie studio, Euphoric Recall is more fluid than its predecessor, the 2020 LP Shadow Offering. There are enveloping instrumental passages. There are tracks that sound as though they’ve been carefully composed and then metic-

ulously deconstructed, leaving a rubble of looping drum machines and ASMR-esque synth sounds over which Raphaelle Standel-Preston’s distinctive vocal dances and meanders, surges and collapses. She sounds magical throughout.

If you turn your ears to one song, let it be ‘Apple’, an electrifying swirl of cosmic keyboards and compassionate harmonies that would enliven a club as it would aptly soundtrack a late-night visit to the drive-thru. Braids allow these contrasts – malleable as they are robust; dancey as they are meditative. Euphoric Recall is a perfect first taste for newcomers and the high-water mark for a band that knows exactly what they’re doing.

8/10 Hayden Merrick

Kele — The Flames pt. 2 (kola/!k7) Kele Okereke’s sixth solo album The Flames pt. 2 arrives as a response to 2021’s The Waves pt.1, an album that was written and recorded by the Bloc Party frontman in the pandemic. The Waves pt.1 saw Kele lost at sea, and this new release is the sound of him emerging from that disorientating feeling. Finding himself again in this renewed reality, Kele finds immediacy and intensity, inspired by the creative, destructive and allconsuming nature of fire.

The Flames pt.2 is an intensive, absorbing record, even in its more gentle moments, partly due to all sounds recorded coming from one instrument: Kele’s guitar. In setting himself the challenge to restrict himself in this way, he pushed himself out of his creative box; what has been created as a result is an album that is unarguably different and unplacable, much like his previous solo efforts. Opening track ‘Never

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Albums Have I Ever’ depicts uncouth desires to a soundtrack of looped, grating guitars at odds with soft vocals at the chorus, and it’s a formula repeated throughout the record despite how different all the parts may sound on the surface. Whether it’s a lo-fi hip-hop drum beat, a guitar refrain pulled from the indie sleaze heydey, lyrics that are observing a fantastical narrative or a saccharine personal confession, each unique characteristic that makes up a song on this album are like pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite fit together. Maybe they’re not supposed to, maybe they don’t want to – but you definitely notice. 6/10 Jasleen Dhindsa

Ben Gregory — Episode (transgressive) When one is building an episodic narrative, separate stories are stitched together. Episode, Ben Gregory’s debut solo album, his first offering of material since the disbandment of his indie band Blaenavon, documents different stages of a difficult time in his life in eight expansive sonic chapters.

These eight songs, penned over a ten-day period, capture Gregory in a state of rebirth. The writing process began whilst he was in recovery and rebuilding his mental health after receiving treatment in a psychiatric hospital. During that time, the physical and emotional act of even thinking about making music was too painful. The moments, then, when we hear Gregory sing, “I know it feels like nothing’s working out,” and “All you care about is progress” on the LP are all the more arresting. These sentiments stifle so many artists today when productivity is fundamental for online visibility and subsequent success – but it’s just not always feasible.

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An episodic structure is also applied to the timbral variety of each arrangement here. Ambition abounds from the offset, with a sprawling cacophony of textures amplifying the impact of ‘Storm of Conversation’, which then momentarily dissipates to incorporate some breathing room early on. It doesn’t necessarily set the tone for what’s to come, as Episode channels everything from indie rock (‘Manifest’) to electronicfocused arrangements spiked with lo-fi acoustic recordings (‘Smoke’). Gregory’s attraction to densely-textured arrangements perhaps yields its most rewarding results on ‘Blue Sea Blue’, and amidst the intensity of the tracklist are moments anchored by sincerity. ‘((fall away till morn…))’is one such instance, washing over the listener with melancholic piano and guitar notes offset by a twinkling xylophone accompaniment while Gregory recounts dental debacles incurred by blue Bacardi and his experience of watching Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting.

With Episode, Gregory demonstrates a wealth of ideas. Sometimes this can make for an overwhelming body of work when listened to from start to finish; instead, this record benefits from (and welcomes) bite-sized visits. 6/10 Zara Hedderman

The New Pornographers — Continue As A Guest (merge) Peel back the last twenty years and The New Pornographers are a snapshot of the sort of guitar music that was always going to be too cool for the skinny-jeaned bravado of ‘landfill indie’. The sort of band often pigeonholed by government-issue music journalism: sparse, sprawling, cinematic and introspective. You know the score. Back to

those heady days of ‘Pitchfork bands’ and Broken Social Scene. To a time when Arcade Fire still sounded fresh off the press and decades clear of putting out any millennial dad rock. Then again, maybe they always did?

TNP’s ninth album Continue As A Guest sits somewhere amongst their mid-’00s Canadian peers, minus any anthems for the out-of-touch adults of tomorrow. They hark back to a sound that’s difficult to pin down but still managing a timeless stylishness that has done well to outlive some of the journalistic clichés listed above.

Mostly written and recorded by bandleader A.C. Newman in his upstate New York home, Continue As A Guest gives us another lockdown album, albeit late to the party. Reliving days upon days of little to no human contact, TNP reacquaint us with a sort of benign reality. A perpetual limbo that’s void of evolution or progress. It seems hollow on the surface but Continue As A Guest does well to excavate the quiet meaning beneath. Evoking a warm acceptance in solitude and disconnect, its convincing proof of a band still delivering nuances as complex and relatable to the music of their heyday years before. 6/10 Ollie Rankine

Westerman — An Inbuilt Fault (partisan) Westerman is caught between a folk and a funk place. It’s slightly uncomfortable, but he’s hanging in there, just about.

An Inbuilt Fault, his second solo album, is full to the brim with groovy weirdness and echo-laden acoustic sincerity. While the two styles aren’t obvious bedfellows, at times Westerman does a surprisingly good job at making things work. The early-hours funk of ‘Give’ and

Albums ‘Help’ contain a deep underlying oddness that gives the album an enticing, if deeply unnerving quality.

Unfortunately, the strangeness doesn’t last long. Just as things start to get rolling Westerman ramps up the selfreflection, in the process removing the funk completely. In isolation, lead single ‘Idol: RE-run’ is a fine enough, if slightly overly sincere, piece of folky chamber pop, but placed in the middle of the album’s groove it becomes incredibly jarring, acting like a folky full stop to an otherwise wonderfully slanted nightmare.

This pattern is repeated throughout. Just as things get going Westerman reverts to a more ‘traditional’ sound. By doing this any momentum gained is lost completely, making for an incredibly jarring, if at times incredibly rewarding, listening experience.

While An Inbuilt Fault fails to free Westerman from the genre gap, it does at least show an obvious point of exit: tone down the folk and lean into the groove.

After all, nothing says freedom like a freaky old bass riff. 6/10 Jack Doherty

Nakhane — Bastard Jargon (bmg) Bastard Jargon was made in part to be functional. South African-born artist Nakhane wrote You Will Not Die as a personal excavation, unearthing grief and clarity from moments in their early life. They renounced their Christian faith and spoke of the trauma of conversion therapy. It was an expressive collection of songs, though ones that didn’t lend themselves to dancing in the mid-afternoon festival slots Nakhane would soon play.

Now, Nakhane starts with a sturdy percussive backing of programmed shakers and handclaps, building from

there. The result is a sleek, propulsive album that places pop thrills frontand-centre.

Still, Nakhane takes a sideways look at common pop tropes like sex and relationships, combining the personal and political. ‘Tell Me Your Politik’ with Moonchild Sanelly and Nile Rodgers cheekily explores the screening process of hooking up with someone who might have different political beliefs to your own. Frantic group chorus vocals nail the wry tone explored lyrically.

Occasionally, the record has a stiff approach to dance catharsis, which holds us back from fully giving into its charms.

‘My Ma Was Good’ stumbles on its rudimentary live piano passage, which feels at odds with the mechanical stomp of the drums.

The album is at its best when marrying its clever lyrics with a bold sound.

‘Standing In Your Way’ stands out with its panicked and corroded outro, where the glitz of the instrumental is crumbled into dust. When that dust settles, we have a sharp step forward for an ambitious songwriter. 6/10 Skye Butchard

Dave Okumu & The 7 Generations — I Came From Love (transgressive) Although I Came From Love is Dave Okumu’s first record with The 7 Generations, it is by no means his first rodeo. The Vienna-born, London-raised artist first made his name as one third of Mercury Prize-nominated experimental indie innovators The Invisible in the late 2000s, and went on to collaborate with everyone from Amy Winehouse and Adele to Shabaka Hutchings and Tony Allen, lending his many talents as a guitarist, composer, vocalist or producer.

In 2021 he released Knopperz, an instrumental album that was partially based on reworks of Duval Timothy’s record from the same year, Sen Am. Yet I Came From Love sees Okumu fully stepping into the spotlight as a solo artist for what feels like the first time – although his collaborative spirit remains, with contributios from the likes of Wesley Joseph, Kwabs, ESKA, Robert Stillman, Byron Wallen and Raven Bush, not to mention his friend and frequent collaborator Grace Jones, whose unmistakable voice punctuates three of the record’s 15 tracks. Also present is Tom Skinner (best known as a member of The Smile and Sons of Kemet) whose peerless drumming underpins an album which ties together moments of trip-hop, afrobeat, jazz and art-pop. It’s a record which is unflinching and uncompromising in its exploration of Blackness and what it is to be a person of colour in the UK and beyond in 2023. Okumu is almost academic in his approach, bringing in historical references alongside texts from British-Trinidadian poet Anthony Joseph as well as the French-Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire, whose term ‘negritude’ Okumu borrows for standout track ‘My Negritude’.

But while the record never shies away from the stark realities of racism past and present – on opening track ‘2 Things’ Jones recites a section of South Carolina slaveowner Elias Ball’s memoirs, while ‘Blood Ah Go Run’ takes the New Cross fire of 1981 (a suspected racist attack resulting in the deaths of 13 young Black people, all betweeen the ages of 14 and 22, and contributing to the death of another) as its subject matter – overall, Okumu’s outlook here is driven by optimism, Black pride and radical love, and the songs themselves seem designed to make you move. It makes sense that someone who has built his career on collaboration would be a staunch advocate for the power of collective action, and I Came From Love is a rallying cry; what makes its political and social qualities all the more engaging is the catchiness, verve and danceability of the music itself. 8/10 Jessica Wrigglesworth

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Albums Live to LEDs hidden in front of her chest.

Her bone-dry stage banter is deployed with similar nuance; when she makes the customary acknowledgement of Manchester’s musical influence, she says she feels she’s “standing on the shoulders of giants,” a wry nod to Oasis’ creative nadir.

Later, she jokes that she and her band are “about to start the rage portion of the set”; this is, of course, a set defined musically by the handsomeness of its measure and restraint. Quietly, though, tempestuous emotion runs deep beneath Weyes Blood’s songs; perhaps, next time, it really will bubble up to the surface. Joe Goggins

Weyes Blood The Ritz, Manchester 13 February 2023

The first half of Natalie Mering’s stage name is not pronounced ‘wise’ for nothing, it seems. Increasingly, it feels as if the rest of the world is beginning to catch up with an artist who had the direction of travel of the world around pegged some time ago; her debut headline appearance here in Manchester, in front of 80 people across town at The Castle pub, came the same month as the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency.

Then, out in support from 2016’s critical breakthrough Front Row Seat to Earth, Mering convincingly delivered that record’s sense of unsettling, doom-laden urgency, replete as it is with songs of loveridden desperation that sound as if they were written by somebody who knew at the time that, for the world as we knew it, time was running out. That aspect of the show was bewitching, but there was also something that felt innately wrong about hearing such powerful tracks, in a voice that sounds so authentically ’70s Laurel Canyon, performed in the back room of an old-fashioned Manchester boozer.

It was as if Mering had gotten badly lost on her way to somewhere that

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possessed rather more grandeur, like The Ritz’s ballroom. Tonight, she makes it here, last October’s fifth record And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow having finally connected her with a broader audience. It is probably no coincidence that her rapid ascent in popularity has occurred around the release of her first album since the pandemic made unavoidably real the kind of end-times themes she was riffing on on Front Row Seat and 2019’s Titanic Rising.

These latest tracks deal with, among other things, late capitalism, environmental anxiety and pervasive worries about technology’s relationship with the human condition; very much songs for the moment, then, which lends them a beguiling edge in the way that the themes contrast with the melodies, which evoke prime Joni Mitchell, and Mering’s voice, which at times sounds more like Karen Carpenter than Karen Carpenter.

The key to her appeal is tied up in that contrast between ideas and delivery, and it’s summed up most strikingly by the set highlight, ‘God Turn Me Into a Flower’, a soaring torch song set to visuals provided by Adam Curtis. She uses projections sparingly and cleverly; on the quietly devastating ‘Movies’, her dress appears awash with water, while on shimmering set closer ‘Hearts Aglow’, her own appears to do so literally, thanks

Black Belt Eagle Scout Night & Day Cafe, Manchester 24 February 2023

Katherine Paul’s third album as Black Belt Eagle Scout is a genuine contender for record of the year. Lots of factors come to position it as such – her startlingly effective marriage of indie rock guitars with the sounds of her native American heritage being the most obvious – but among the record’s most remarkable facets is the manner in which it rewards patience from the listener; its twelve tracks unfurl glacially, imbuing them with all the more power when they reach their cinematic crescendos. It’s fitting, then, in the spirit of good things coming to those who wait, that this is the first-ever Black Belt Eagle Scout show in Europe, almost a decade since Paul’s first release under the moniker, a self-titled EP in 2014.

After a beguiling opening set from new Electrelane/Wire crossover Memorials, Paul leads a four-piece live band to the stage at the still-embattled Night and Day for a set that leans heavily on The Land, The Water, The Sky, presenting it in a form that by necessity cuts away some of the accoutrements of the production on the studio version but, crucially, does not diminish the songs,

photography by neelam khan vela

Albums Live instead handing them a new urgency, with a sharper focus than ever not just on Paul’s vocals but on the full-blooded crunch of her guitar. It’s an approach that lends itself especially well to the pacier, more driving cuts from the album – ‘Sedna’ and ‘Nobody’ are both cases in point. The café is far from capacity tonight, with a couple of heavyweight clashes doubtless partly to blame (Dry Cleaning and Whitney are both playing within a mile). Those who turned out to finally welcome Black Belt Eagle Scout to this side of the Atlantic, though, may well have seen the most potent indie rock show in town. Joe Goggins

They Hate Change Peckham Audio, London 2 March 2023

This is the perfect venue for Tampa, Florida’s foremost UK bass connoisseurs They Hate Change. A low-lit basement in the bowels of South London, Peckham Audio is exactly the kind of club that so much of the duo’s favourite music developed deep within, its subs potent enough for the most brutal dubstep, its intimate stage ideal for getting up close and personal with a

photography by sam walton

frenetic MC. This part of the city, historically one of the most fertile breeding grounds for progressive dance music in the UK, has been altered almost beyond recognition in recent years, yet hearing sound like this in such a precision-engineered setting a stone’s throw from the site of so much underground history it’s easy to feel the resonances of that cultural heritage.

Dressed in matching, vaguely preppy outfits, Andre and Vonne bound onstage hungrily, firing out a volley of jittering 808s and dam-bursting low-end like an exceptionally well-drilled twoperson militia. Their performance is compact and efficient, their stage moves not-quite-synchronised, their bars smart and unrelenting as the instrumentals judder beneath. The bottom-heavy grunt of grime and dub anchors their arrangements, and the hyperactivity of jungle and hardcore propels the tumbling snares, but it’s not all UK-focused. The upward spiral of footwork also drives their looping, blooming beats; the deliberate stalk of Chicago drill frays their edges; the eldritch groove of Southern hip-hop informs their wide-eyed flows. This stuff is so rich, so dense with genre allusions and freewheeling ideas, that in lesser hands it’d collapse under its own weight; They Hate Change balance it all expertly.

By the end, Vonne is enthusing about their experience of UK culture so

far; this isn’t the giddiness of a tourist, but the warm glow of recognition. They Hate Change are right where they need to be tonight, and it’s a thrill to witness.

Luke Cartledge

Mui Zyu Servant Jazz Quarters, London 1 March 2023

What does it even mean to be British these days? It’s a question that has clearly plagued many in the media over the past five years. From the notion of a ‘Global Britain’ to the constant vague allusions to the ‘left-behind’ provinces of middle England, the search for a definitive answer has been fruitlessly arduous. In truth, modern Britain defies easy definition, and it’s in this complexity that its beauty lies.

Mui Zyu’s performance at Servant Jazz Quarters tonight provides a perfect example of that beauty. The set for tonight’s sold-out show is taken mainly from her debut album Rotten Bun For An Eggless Century and initially it all sounds warmly familiar. The lilting guitars, propped-up symphonic keyboards and sparse drums are reminiscent of classic Brit bands like Blur and The Smiths.

Yet as the set goes on, a distinctive Sino-British voice begins to inhabit these songs, framing universal themes of hope and anxiety through a perspective informed by the artist’s Hong Kong heritage. One track ends with a scratchy voicemail recording: “That was my mum,” she says with heartbreaking honesty. “This was one of the few times she said she was proud of me. I like to keep audio notes from Hong Kong...”

By the end, a sense of realisation and enlightenment spreads across the crowd like a pulsating glow. In a week when the government is trying to brutally judge who ‘belongs’ and who doesn’t, here’s a musical statement of common humanity. Dominic Haley

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FilmAlbums and Books

Enys Men (dir. mark jenkin) Following 2019’s Bait will have been a formidable task for Cornish director Mark Jenkin. A breakout success, albeit on a cult level, its distinctive treatment of the politics and aesthetics of his native region – one of the UK’s most misunderstood – positioned Jenkin as a vital new voice in 21st-century British film. He wasn’t entirely unknown in his field before, having worked on low-budget film and TV projects to quiet acclaim on and off since the turn of the millennium, but the reception of Bait was different, with several national and international publications naming it among the films of the year. No pressure on the follow-up, then.

Happily, Jenkin’s new film, Enys Men, both exceeds and subverts the expectations with which it arrives.

Although we’re back in Cornwall, this time on a remote island somewhere off the coast in the early 1970s, the setting is anything but familiar. We’re introduced to a wildlife volunteer (played by Mary Woodvine), staying alone on the island in a picturesque cottage a moorland tramp from the jagged cliffs down to the ocean. She’s there to monitor the condition of a rare flower outcrop over a set period of time – exactly how long becomes more and less clear as the film progresses – and when we meet her, her supplies from the mainland are beginning to run out. It’s not urgent, and she seems confident in her isolated situation – but that doesn’t mean we are.

Gradually, the film becomes a disorientating, non-linear procession of striking images. Cornwall’s industrial past and stark beauty are thrown together with the unravelling subjectivity of the volunteer like boats on a choppy sea. What’s perhaps most impressive is the way in which Enys Men manages to

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swerve the quickly-exhausted cliches of the recent UK folk horror boom – the selfserious hamminess of recent attempts to say something profound about the unheimlich nature of post-Brexit Britain through vague allusions to a fairly thinseeming ‘deep Albion’ or ‘English weird’.

At best, the recent work that draws upon such themes does manage to engage with at least some of the confused realities of this incredibly stupid country with a combination of black humour and genuine interest in the actual specificities of actual places; at worst, this trend collapses into reactionary generalisations and Wicker Man pastiches which caricature their subjects rather than reckon with them. Enys Men falls squarely into the former category. Luke Cartledge

The Art of Darkness: A History of Goth — John Robb (louder than war) Infamously, the title character of the 18th-century novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy isn’t born until halfway through the book. Well, in John Robb’s sprawling, vivid 600-page encyclopedia The Art of Darkness, it’s roughly 300 pages before we dive into what many consider the first goth song, the 1981 Bauhaus single ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’.

In this vast panoramic of gothic music, Robb charts the history of darkness in rock back to the United States at the death of the 1960s, when “the joyful Beatlemania screams were becoming darker and a general unease and disillusionment filled the air” as the country marched into the horrors of the Vietnam war. In this cauldron, Robb singles out three American bands that would forge the left-hand path towards the gothic sound: The Stooges, The Doors and The Velvet Underground.

Foreboding, atmospheric and arrhythmic, these bands laid the blueprint for the book’s principal focus: what would emerge across the water in the UK in the late 1970s and 1980s. To scale this occluded mountain and provide a summit’s view, Robb meticulously details and dissects a certain band or a geographical scene in each chapter. Conservative Catholic Dublin, the glamorous but dangerous eccentricity of Liverpool and the unofficial goth capital Leeds are just three of innumerable relics dutifully brushed clean by Robb’s clinical pen.

What distinguishes this genealogical history and makes it so fiendishly addictive is the simple authority of it. The writing is objective and efficient, but eternally persuasive. Robb, himself a part of goth’s history as vocalist and bassist for post-punk group The Membranes, knows how to zero in on the essence of any particular act. As a result, readings are continually disrupted in order to play one of the hundreds of bands Robb introduces us to on his obsidian odyssey. And whether it’s The Cramps, Sisters of Mercy, Adam & The Ants or The Birthday Party, every musician is treated with the care of a conservationist and the contagious zeal of a devotee.

However, where this book truly comes alive is through the plentiful quotes (typically from interviews conducted by Robb himself) with the key players of the scene. Interviews with artists as varied as Robert Smith, Siouxsie Sioux and Johnny Rotten elucidate the finer details of the time. The clubs, the record shops, the dress aesthetic, the drug problems, the dole and the bust-ups all add a darker shade to this black time-crystal when recounted by those who were in the thick of it and leaving their mark on music history, whether they knew it or not.

In The Art of Darkness Robb hasn’t only documented an entire scene but unveiled the collective unconscious of the ineffable sound, revealing the events and sounds that propelled the music to reach its inner darkness. In a contemporary culture that is once again re-discovering the darker side, this skeleton key to the mind’s crypt feels essential. Robert Davidson

THE WAEVE 27.03 - LAFAYETTE

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three women par tying 52

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AS boygenius, LU CY DAC U S, J U LI EN B A K ER A N D P H O E B E B R I D G E R S H AV E F O U N D A W AY TO SPEND ALL OF THEIR TIME TOGETHER AND M A K E A N A L B U M O F D E A D PA N H U M O U R A N D Q U I E T D E VA S TAT I O N . I N N E W Y O R K C I T Y, G E M M A S A M W AY S TA L K S T O T H E M A B O U T T H E G ROW I N G H YSTER I A A RO U N D TH E BA N D, T H E I M P O R TA N C E O F TA L K I N G S H I T A B O U T YO U R FR I EN D S, A N D TH E M U T UA L E N C O U R A G E M E N T T H AT ’ S G I V E N U S t h e r e c o r d .

P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y C I E L I T O M . V I VA S

rom Bartók to Billie Holiday, Tchaikovsky to the Beatles, Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium has played host to some of the most illustrious names in music. Located in Midtown Manhattan, the theatre’s interior resembles a luxury wedding cake: a vast expanse of pristine cream embellished with neo-renaissance cornicing, lightly dusted in gold. On the ceiling, a spectacular double halo of lights illuminates the sea of crimson velvet below, with four tiers of balcony seating and stalls stretching out before the famous Perelman Stage.

Tonight, the room is playing host to the 36th annual Tibet House US Benefit. Curated by Philip Glass – and featuring Laurie Anderson, Arooj Aftab and Bernard Sumner and Tom Chapman of New Order – the line-up reads like a particularly A-list episode of Later… with Jools Holland. It soon transpires its staging is similarly chaotic, with the event running approximately an hour behind schedule and artists often walking onstage unannounced. boygenius are one of the few acts to enjoy a proper introduction. Added to the bill just 24 hours ago, their first public appearance in almost half a decade has prompted a frenzied, last minute scramble for seats, with $35 tickets exchanging hands for ten times that amount. A day later, in a photo studio in the

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East Village following our shoot at Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn, the trio admit to having felt a little freaked out in the build-up.

“I was really emotional because I’ve been obsessed with Nina Simone’s Carnegie Hall album of late,” Lucy Dacus confides, sat on the sofa, sandwiched between her bandmates.

Julien Baker nods, confessing to having been “so stressed about doing my job that I couldn’t fully absorb that I was playing alongside living legends.” Meanwhile, Phoebe Bridgers was still semi-delirious with jetlag, having recently landed back in the US from Japan.

“Look at this photo,” she laughs, extending her phone to me. Taken pre-gig, it shows her passed out on the dressing room floor while Lucy smirks in the foreground. “With full make-up, I look like I’m in an open casket. And because Julien was playing piano, I was having Julien-fuelled dreams.”

Certainly there were no visible signs of unease as they stepped out onstage to play stripped-back versions of ‘Not Strong Enough’ and ‘Cool About It’ – taken from their long-awaited debut album The Record – for the first time. And despite the all-star bill, the supergroup proved one of the night’s biggest draws, eliciting excited whoops from an audience who had greeted every other

performer with respectfully restrained applause. Ultimately, once they started playing, they enjoyed the experience.

Less gratifying was the discovery that a group of particularly intrusive fans had tracked down their hotel after the show.

“They were like, ‘Don’t worry, you’re safe’,” Lucy shudders.

“And it’s like, ‘No, we aren’t: how’d you find out where we are?

That’s stalking. Don’t do this.”

Phoebe continues: “I mean, interactions with fans can be really sweet, especially when it’s a show like Carnegie Hall which might’ve been hard to get tickets to. But often there’s this weird thing where the rudest people bubble to the top, and the poor kid who just wants their record signed is too nice to ask. And so, while I’m trying to escape the fucking full-grown man who just grabbed me, I’m ignoring the sweet kid.”

— Totally artless — It’s fair to say a certain level of hysteria has surrounded boygenius ever since their formation. Five years ago they were all ascendant stars of the alternative scene, with the Tennesseeborn Baker and Richmond, Virginia-raised Dacus being the

most established, with two acclaimed albums each. By the end of 2018, the trio were being breathlessly billed by Vogue as “the Infinity War of female-led indie-rock outfits,” while their selftitled EP received widespread praise.

Objectively, it’s a collaboration that made – and still makes – total sense. Despite outgrowing their respective DIY scenes, they had each retained a fiercely independent outlook and an emotional authenticity, and that struck a chord with similarly principled, serotonin-starved audiences. Just as tantalisingly, interviews and social media interactions revealed that they didn’t take themselves especially seriously and seemed keen to distance themselves from the pedestal that fans were so intent on putting them on.

“It’s probably refreshing that we’re not character artists,” Lucy says when asked to summarise the appeal of boygenius.

“Because ultimately we’re talking to you now how we usually talk to each other. Even when I’m doing my own [solo] stuff, I present a curated version of myself – like, I pick one aspect of my character per album to share. But with this band it’s totally artless.”

It’s not hyperbolic to suggest that The Record is one of the most anticipated albums of the year. To some degree that

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“ if your friends aren’t talking shit about you, I don’t think they care about you ” demand can be explained by Baker and Dacus expanding their fanbases further off the back of their 2021 solo records Little Oblivions and Home Video. But the real responsibility for the band’s reach surely lies at the feet of Bridgers, whose second album was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon.

Unanimously agreed to be one of 2020’s standout records, Punisher propelled the Pasadena-raised artist into music’s A-list, resulting in four Grammy nominations, an offer to found her own label (Saddest Factory, home to MUNA) and invites to collaborate with household names like Paul McCartney, SZA, Lorde and The 1975. Just days after our interview Phoebe is named one of Time’s 2023 Women of the Year, alongside Cate Blanchett and Megan Rapinoe. This coming May she will open for Taylor Swift in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New Jersey.

Despite the difference in their public profiles, the power dynamic in boygenius appears impressively balanced. A friendship first and foremost, they’ve signed the contract by acquiring matching tattoos of a tooth and of a cluster of goblets, the latter inspired by the tarot card the three of cups.

“That’s based on the first tarot reading Julien ever got,” Lucy – the band’s resident tarot expert – recalls fondly. “We were all together and that’s the first card she pulled. Plus it’s three women partying. Friendship is the highest form of love and that felt like a sweet entry into that world.”

Having been raised in the world of evangelical Christianity, Julien was initially resistant to the idea of Tarot. “When you started doing a reading, I got up and sat in the tour van by myself because I thought God was gonna steal my soul,” she explains, totally serious.

“Does God do that?!” Phoebe laughs, incredulous.

“Yes! In [the book of] Samuel! But then I was like, ‘Alright, I trust you guys. I guess you can guide me through this.’

That was a fear that you guys helped me dismantle. Because by watching you engage with it, I realised that this was a tool for self-interrogation, not for summoning the devil.”

Within the band, all decisions are made democratically and affectionate ribbings are a big part of their social currency.

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“Roasting each other is an act of love,” Julien reasons, to the others’ approval. “If your friends aren’t talking shit about you, I don’t think they care about you.”

With Phoebe based in Los Angeles, Lucy in Philadelphia and Julien in Memphis, they largely stay in touch via group chat and FaceTime – a support network they all clearly cherish. “I can text cold something horrible that happened to me and not feel the pressure to look at my phone for hours,” says Phoebe.

“But when I do I’ll see a bunch of validation.”

Julien concurs: “It’s neat that we can confide in each other.

Because sometimes my sense of imposter syndrome makes me not want to talk about how excited I am about this with friends who don’t work in music. I’m talking to them like, ‘You gotta get on a plane super early and carry all this heavy equipment, so it’s not all fun.’ And having people understand it’s a job and that I’m dedicated to it is very important. But equally, with y’all I get to be like, ‘Shit’s so fucking sick!’ Like, in this band I get to be the type of excited and thankful that lacks decorum, especially when there are so many talented people in my life where our roles could have been switched in an alternate timeline.”

— Can we be a band again? — The roots of boygenius were laid in 2016, when Julien and Lucy performed on the same bill in Washington, D.C., followed

by Julien meeting Phoebe a month later. When a canny promoter booked all three to tour together in 2018, they decided to record a collaborative seven-inch, a creative experiment that proved so fruitful they emerged with their eponymous EP. By all accounts, the story behind The Record is similarly stress-free. Phoebe kickstarted the creative process just a week after releasing Punisher, sending a demo of ‘Emily, I’m Sorry’ to Lucy and Julien with the words, “Can we be a band again?” From there, the floodgates opened, with all three uploading demos to a shared drive, followed by two in-person writing trips – one in Healdsburg, California in April 2021 and another in Malibu in August of the same year.

Though carefully scheduled due to their individual work commitments, Lucy describes these retreats as anything but regimented. “We didn’t intend to work that hard,” she insists.

“If anything, the regimen would have included breaks and we didn’t allow ourselves those.” Julien expands, “We’d be like, ‘Okay, today is a chill day,” but then we could not stop thinking about the record. And it’s just nice to be around a bunch of people who are passionate about the exact same thing.”

After whittling down the demos from a pool of 25, the final 12 were recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in January 2022, with the help of co-producer Catherine Marks (Wolf Alice, Foals, PJ Harvey). Lucy specifically cites Marks’ work with Manchester Orchestra as a motivating factor for them initially reaching out, and Phoebe enthuses about her hands-on approach.

“She’s the kind of producer that immediately kicks off their shoes.

Wait, I’m gonna text her and tell her we’re talking about her.” She takes a group selfie of them all grinning, flicking Vs, and hits send.

Other key contributors included engineer and producer Sarah Tudzin (Slowdive, Weyes Blood), plus Jay Som’s Melina

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Duterte on bass. Melina will also appear as part of boygenius’ seven-strong touring line-up, set to be unveiled at Coachella in April. Given that their band name specifically mocks society’s tendency to unfairly exalt male creatives, the idea of boygenius assembling a largely female team for this album feels satisfyingly utopian. Today, they insist it was purely circumstantial.

“They are the best people we could think of,” says Lucy.

“Some days I’m like, ten-year-old me would feel that this is very important. But also there are days where I’m like, we’re doing press right now and it’s completely uninteresting that we’re women. Why are we talking about this?”

“Plus, it’s not a given that if you work with women you’re not also working with a bunch of assholes,” Phoebe grins.

“Fortunately, we picked a bunch of people who aren’t assholes.”

Lucy laughs. “Women can be assholes: there’s your pull quote.”

onically, The Record is a much richer, more ambitious collection than anything boygenius have produced previously, taking in widescreen folk-rock (‘Not Strong Enough’) and lowslung punk (‘Satanist’, ‘$20’), campfire folk (‘Cool About It’, ‘Leonard Cohen’) and string-flecked dream-pop (‘Revolution 0’), plus a swooning a cappella piece shaped around a lush threepart harmony (‘Without You Without Them’).

Though written by Lucy, Phoebe can take full credit for unearthing the latter. “I was like, ‘I want a song that’s like ‘Blue Velvet’.’ And Lucy’s like, ‘Oh... Actually I might have a song…’

And I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?!’”

“It was a washing the dishes song.” Lucy protests, smiling.

“There’s, like, this whole category of songs that I don’t show people.

And I didn’t think of that as a ‘me’ song because it doesn’t sound like what I do, you know? But Phoebe was like, ‘We have to do it.’ Plus, I like that it kind of picks up where we left off with ‘Ketchum, ID’ [from their 2018 EP]. So I’m glad you made us do that.”

This process of mutual encouragement is integral to the band. They’re the first to admit they’re one another’s fiercest supporters, to the extent they accidentally plagiarise each other on a regular basis. “I totally wrote ‘Garden Song’ the other day,” Julien tells Phoebe, who cheerfully bats back. “‘Revolution 0’ is basically me ripping off ‘Good News.’”

Jokes aside, all three songwriters boast instantly recognisable styles, as demonstrated by the triumvirate of singles with which they announced The Record. ‘Emily, I’m Sorry’ is quintessential Phoebe Bridgers, a slice of folky introspection that wouldn’t sound out of place on Punisher, while ‘True Blue’ showcases the quietly anthemic indie-rock that Lucy has made her calling card. Meanwhile, the buoyant ‘$20’ sees former hardcore kid Julien leaning into her love of riffing.

With most structures initially emanating from one particular songwriter, it does beg the question, what makes a track right for the band rather than remaining a solo endeavour? According to Phoebe, she relies on a type of benign Spidey-Sense. “I always know when I’m writing a boygenius song. Even with ‘Me And My Dog’ I was like, ‘I don’t think this is a solo record song.’”

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” Lucy is more specific. “A lot of times I’ll write a song for us in a different frame of mind, so you can be harmonising with me and saying something that’s still true for you. I don’t want to make either of you sing lyrics that don’t resonate with you.”

“I really struggle with that,” Phoebe says. “So much of my music is directly my point of view and so specific.”

“Totally,” Lucy nods, “I feel like on a lot of your songs we’re supporting…” “...like a chorus in a Greek play,” replies Julien, finishing Lucy’s thought. “We’re not a part of the action: we’re standing behind, commenting on or observing it. But these songs only exist because we made The Record. They’re an article of the endeavour rather than a pre-planned thing.”

Lucy takes the final word on the subject. “These aren’t solo songs that we donated to each other: we had to be together to make it.”

Lyrically, The Record treads a tightrope between deadpan humour and quiet devastation. The opening line of ‘We’re In Love’ sees Lucy resolutely opting for the latter, singing, “You could absolutely break my heart / That’s how I know that we’re in love.” ‘Leonard Cohen’ falls firmly into the former camp, delivering a frontrunner for lyric of the year in: “Leonard Cohen once said there’s a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in / And I am not an old man having an existential crisis / In a Buddhist monastery / Writing horny poetry / But I agree.”

“I think my songs have a theme of being known and feeling present,” Lucy reflects. “Because I don’t feel that at all points in my life, I’m expressing my gratitude for that.” Phoebe sees her contributions as aspirational; evidence of the very process of self-improvement. “Each of the songs I contributed have a vibe of me trying my absolute hardest to not float ten inches above my body at all times. And you guys have helped me with that, so it makes sense that it would make the album.”

‘Not Strong Enough’ is perhaps their most collaborative song: a patchwork of ideas in which each band member takes a verse, as Julien jokes, “boyband-style”. Musically, it’s also the

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album’s most uplifting moment, its bright melody providing a smokescreen for lyrics exploring panic attacks and low selfesteem. When I point out the deception, Phoebe laughs. “You know the meme of the pink house and the black house next to each other, where it’s like one is the music and the other is the lyrics?

That’s literally a couple miles from where we recorded our album.

We’ve been talking about taking a photo in front of it for years.”

— Share your darlings — After an hour in their company, it’s not difficult to see why boygenius are inspiring such levels of adoration. A tightknit gang of smart, talented, young songwriters, they’re the sort of band I wish had existed when I was growing up, even if I am battling to resist the urge to cast them as role models. After all, why should the men of rock be lauded for chaos while women have to be figures of unimpeachable virtue? When I mention the double standard, Lucy rolls her eyes.

“I remember when Phoebe did that Playboy article [in 2020]. People were texting me like, ‘I thought she was a role model for young girls?’ And I was like, 1. You can pose in Playboy and be a role model, and 2. When exactly did she sign up for that?”

“It is tight to me that you got texts and I did not,” Phoebe smiles. “I want to be scary. Like, as women or as queer people, we’re taught that anger is not useful and that forgiveness is the highest form of enlightenment. But I don’t think so. I think that I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to make everybody in a room feel ok when I don’t feel ok. It’s great to have boundaries. And as a band we’re all really good at protecting each other.”

Staying loyal to their DIY roots, boygenius are ultimately motivated by creating a community and enjoying the process of a shared endeavour. “Writing songs for this band is the opposite of saving your darlings for yourself,” Julien explains. “I want to bring the best possible offering to the band because it’s my favourite thing. It feels good to give the songs away.”

“Seriously, we have been looking forward to this time together for years,” says Phoebe. “This is the time we finally get to be around each other so we’re gonna enjoy it.”

stylist: lindsey hartman. stylist assistants: susan walsh, hannah nixon, amber simiriglia, sergio mejia. makeup: gianpaolo ceciliato. makeup assistant: vadee chun. hair: josue perez. hair assistant: ben martin

“ these aren’t solo songs that we donated to each other: we had to be together to make it

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On her debut album, With A Hammer, electronic pop innovator YAEJI is embracing her inner anger – but also so many other aspects of her personality and KoreanAmerican identity. Speaking to Skye Butchard, she goes deep on rage rooms, revolutionary rest and learning to love yourself. Photography by Dasom Han

Smash it up

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and

start again

“Do you want to meet the hammer?”

Yaeji walks off-screen smiling. Her small fluffy dog (possibly a Bichon Frise) is napping on the arm of a sofa, and perks its head up as the hammer comes into frame. It’s massive: a sledgehammer with a cute drawing of a face on it. She holds it with two hands and sits back down, resting it on her shoulder in an embrace. “Wow, so chunky,” she says, gently patting the hammer with her hand.

It’s less than a minute into our call and it’s clear how much fun Yaeji is having wielding a large weapon. For an artist capable of writing sensitive and thoughtful songs like ‘Waking Up Down’ and ‘Done (Let’s Get It)’, this might not be the first thing you’d associate her with.

When the Korean-American electronic pop artist first gained attention with a beloved batch of club tracks over five years ago, the soft deadpan of her vocal gave a sense of ease to what were often muscular, propulsive tracks. Now, she aims to be a strong, aggressive element within music which has shifted into subtler forms. She describes the Hammer/Yaeji contrast as a kind of cosplay.

“What would it feel like if I was carrying something like a sledgehammer, or a big bat, something that’s so obviously violent and masculine to someone like me, when I find that extremely uncomfortable?” she says.

This hammer has acted as a helpful prop, prompt, weapon and muse over the making of Yaeji’s debut album, aptly named With A Hammer. The debut tag is a funny one, given she already released longform material with her meditative mixtape What We Drew 우리가 그려왔, but the distinction is an important one for her.

“I waited this long to write an album because I wanted it to be a body of work that represented a thought or an intention.” she says. “I figured I need to write a narrative or build a world before writing the music. I know myself with how I create music, and it’s often so sporadic and so messy. It’s so in the moment, which I love, but it’s almost like I have very little control over it.

“The prompt I set up for myself when I wrote the story of this hammer is that it was birthed from my anger, for lack of a better word. And the journey of me and the hammer, going through experiencing things living our day to day lives, is what it looks like when anger is passing through me for the first time in a real way.”

When you think of anger represented through song, what comes to mind? You might think of metal vocalists, or pissed-off punk aggressors. You could picture Zack de la Rocha’s expletive-filled choruses, or N.W.A.’s blunt-force lyricism. No matter what, the anger is probably loud and obvious.

In contrast, the anger embodied on With A Hammer is subtle and internal. It’s more true to daily life because of it. Sonically, the album uses a warm and inviting approach, with slick melodies and spritely and delicate percussion soothing the knotted emotional subject matter.

“My whole life, I was thinking ‘I never get angry’,” says Yaeji, “or at least the anger that’s more visible or surface level, which is usually like a violent or physical expression, a masculine expression of it. That didn’t feel like me.”

Like it did for many of us, the forced downtime of lockdown gave her a chance to reflect on the way the world worked beforehand, and how she existed within it.

“A lot of the lockdown was me being forced to sit with all these experiences and emotions that were queued up. Because in my busy normal life I didn’t allow myself to process, and I would always look for distractions.”

First up in the queue was that feeling of anger. A cousin had told Yaeji about the ‘rage rooms’ that had caught on in South Korea – a service where you can pay to break objects in a room without any consequences. She tried it out in Brooklyn, curious at what she could get out of it.

“I think by the time she told me they had become illegal in Korea. But it was an interesting prompt to me because I feel like Korea is a very suppressed culture. You can feel it, even in how the language is constructed. There’s a lot of dancing around emotions, reading in between the lines and thinking more as a group rather than an individual, which innately involves suppressing some of your personal desires, reflections and emotions.

“Rage rooms came up in a culture like this, where you pay a set amount of money for time and specific objects you can

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break. Then, you’re carefully given all this safety equipment and a bat. There’s multiple cameras in the room and a timer. To me, that felt so controlled in a way that’s still suffocating.”

In the past Yaeji has admitted to intentionally mixing lyrics in Korean and English as a way of obscuring meaning. The new record instead shoots for honesty and openness through a narrative approach. These are songs about using anger as a method for self improvement or a tool to break down oppressive structures. Fiction has always had this power to connect, for her. She has to be careful about what she consumes, because it all feels so real to her. Still, that kind of approach can also act as a kind of safety barrier between you and the listener. When writing about such vulnerable topics, as an artist with an everincreasing public presence, that can be necessary.

“The narrative definitely helps build a little bit of distance and helps at least me compartmentalise it into a performance,” she says. “But inevitably, even though I had this fictional story, when it came to writing lyrics for the songs, it didn’t feel natural or right to make the lyrics be a continuation of the narrative. It had to come from a real place.”

“What would it feel like if I was carrying something like a sledgehammer, something that’s so obviously violent?”

— Music is like alchemy — Yaeji is wonderfully open and forthcoming given she’s speaking to a total stranger. We speak about the oddness of oversharing in these kinds of interviews, and she admits that the distance of a Zoom chat helps her settle into this sharing role.

“It’s actually been a bit tricky, because it’s the first time I put my face up on the album art,” she says. “I have so many photos and I’m doing all these music videos where I’m acting.

There’s a layer of separation in performance, but it still demands of me. Even in these interviews, it gets really deep and insightful, but I realise afterwards, ‘Wow, it had to be me’. I have to share about myself and go deep about my personal internal world. I’m pretty introverted. So sometimes it takes a second to process what just happened.”

We do eventually get deep. For one, what specifically is she angry at? There’s the constant pressure of oppressive societal structures put on everyday people, stripping away their freedoms in subtle ways. The low-level hum of anger she writes about is reflected here. That’s backed up by the album’s allusions to dreaming, as well as its use of silence and space, inspired by the

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American historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s idea of ‘freedom dreams’ as a framework for thinking through and around injustice.

“Resting is also resistance. Resting is also revolution,” she says. “Whatever you do with your day-to-day, that’s not on the surface seemingly political, is actually an act of revolution and resistance.

“The song ‘With a Hammer’, the lyrics sing about how he takes away the time and space for our freedom dreaming, which is abstract on purpose for you to interpret. The overarching idea is that he is the oppressor, that he is white supremacy, that he is society – all of these things that take away our time to rest, to heal and to dream.”

Part of this exploration stemmed from a course called Rhythm Race Revolution, which Yaeji took during lockdown.

It combined music and readings mostly from the perspective of Black musicians and other marginalised groups to show how these ideas can be explored sonically. Within it, she circled a note from her teacher: ‘Music is like alchemy’.

“That was the catalyst for this entire world with the hammer. Maybe a lot of things are actually like alchemy, and maybe we, who interact with music, art, emotions, and relationships, we’re actually just alchemists. Something like anger or joy can transmute into something completely different.

“In this story, my anger has turned into a physical form of a hammer that will – spoiler alert – at the end, transmute into something else that’s no longer a physical form. That’s really the magic of this fictional story, but also the magic that exists in real life, like in music when you and I interact with music as a listener and as a creator, there’s magic in it.”

The way Yaeji plays with genre and sound carries forward this alchemy idea too. Though she first gained attention as a more clear-cut house musician, with secret-weapon DJ tracks like ‘Raingurl’ and ‘Drink I’m Sippin’ On’, her music has morphed into something more singular and free. Many of the songs here blur the lines between pop song, dance track and diary entry. That freeness is something she’s experienced personally too.

“On What We Drew 우리가 그려왔, I started to see an inkling of how freeing music can can be. With this album, I’ve really experienced how liberating music is. It’s things that I don’t have words to describe. I keep a journal, which is a really good practice for me, because I grew up being used to censoring my thoughts and my feelings. In the journal I’m trying to pretend that no one’s ever going read it and just, like, no filter, right? [But] even that isn’t enough. On With A Hammer, some of those feelings and thoughts can actually be expressed sonically.”

— With A Hammer — Like all solo records, this album has been a personal venture, but it’s also one she’s been able to share with a closeknit group of friends and collaborators, who she’s been able to lean on for support. That’s true of its opening moments on ‘Submerge FM’, which begins with a gorgeous flute and synth passage built on a sample played by her friend Gabrielle Garo.

The moment came from an improvised jam that happened when

Yaeji reached out to her friends for inspiration.

“I gathered a bunch of session musician friends that are local to Brooklyn to a recording studio that’s run by a friend of a friend. It’s really cosy and vibey. The studio kind of feels like a cabin, and it has a backyard. It was very casual. I wanted to work with session musicians as I’d never tried that before. A lot of what I was listening to when writing this also was surprisingly not too dance music heavy, and not even fully electronic at times. I was curious, if I’m given samples of other instruments, what would come up?

“Instead of going to the internet and finding free sample packs, I wanted it to come from a meaningful place of people I actually know and care about…Whenever I was stuck with writing the demos, I just looked in that folder, and one day I pulled up Gabby’s sample of the flute. She was improvising on top of an old demo that I didn’t mean to use for anything.”

Yaeji often works with those she’s already close to out of a need for genuine communication and trust going in. The record is no different. Take producer Loraine James, who she met on a trip to London while going to see mutual friend Object Blue DJing. James reconnected with Yaeji on a visit to New York soon after. “We would kick it there,” she says. “Friendship through

music and seeing a friend in a different context always makes you feel a deeper level of connection,” she says. This made James a natural collaborator on ‘1 Thing To Smash’, where her smudged vocal contributions and tactile synth work match the mood perfectly.

“I asked her to do anything that you see fit, which is my preferred way of collaborating, because it takes a lot to decide if I want to let this person into this world,” she says. “It is such a personal process and creation. That’s why I usually work with close friends. But once they’re in, I want them to do anything they see as true to them. So that’s what we did.”

That feeling transfers over to the record’s other collaborations, such as K Wata, a member of her Slink NYC crew, or Enayet who she has worked with since the ‘Raingurl’ days and describes as an extension of herself. With the latter, she made ‘Michin’, the record’s most outwardly aggressive offering, and a true test of what she could achieve in that role. “‘Michin’ was the last track to be written, and I made that because the overall feedback I was getting from close friends when I played them the demo and explained to them that it’s about anger passing through me, was that the album sounds sonically very chill, for lack of a better word. They didn’t mean it in a bad way, but it’s not obvious anger. While I really liked that and it taught me some things about me, It made me question what would happen when I fully went for it.”

For every ‘Michin’, there’s a track like ‘Done (Let’s Get It)’, a heartwarming track whose video features Yaeji and her grandfather dancing through the streets in bunny costumes while she sings of breaking generational cycles. Even more affirming is ‘Pass Me By’, where Yaeji sings to an unnamed ‘she’.

“I left it more vague so it could shapeshift depending on who was listening at the time, but for me…” she says, politely shooting down a bad theory of what it could be about, “for me, at the time it was me recognising for the first time that the younger me has been with me this whole time. She’s been looking at me, but it’s taken this long to recognise her and look back at her into her eyes and acknowledge her.

“The ‘she’ when I was writing was younger me, and being grateful that she hasn’t changed, and that she has been so patient with me. It’s this beautiful relationship when you treat yourself as you would another person. That’s been such a powerful tool for me for healing and overcoming a lot of fears. Loving myself as much as I would a friend or family member, which comes so naturally to me. It’s so easy for me to express and give, but it’s been so hard to do that with myself. Calling her ‘she’ has done so many things for me.”

Anger is just one element of many on Yaeji’s new record.

Of course we want to see her smash shit with a hammer, but for every hint of frustration there’s a song about gratitude or selflove, and how that love links to a bigger picture. It’s also the kind of record that feels like a living entity, with just enough ambiguity to read differently depending on your own mood. It seems it’s that way for Yaeji too.

“That ‘she’ could shapeshift to be anyone else in my life, at the same time. We’re mirrors of each other”, she says, smiling just as widely as the face on her hammer.

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Danc—ing music

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From teenage raves in rural Leicestershire to the infinite possibilities of his contemporary work, JAMES HOLDEN has taken the scenic route to arrive at his unique position at the intersection of improv, electronica and jazz.

As he prepares to release his most ambitious album yet, he speaks to Sam Walton about shit clubs, lockdown tragedies and his concept of “dancing” music without donks.

Photography by Henri Kisielewski

“When I was a teenager, I was fully convinced I was going to buy an old army truck and just be a new-age traveller,” reminisces electronic producer-composer (and 43-year-old static homeowner) James Holden. With restrictive parents who prohibited Radio 1 and ITV at home, and inspired by the tales of free raves trickling through the morally panicked mid-’90s media that inadvertently made them sound like the most appealing adventures going, Holden became sure of his one true path. His mind was only further solidified when, aged 16, he started covertly going to hippie-run raves in community centres and forests in his native Leicestershire, long after the more headline-grabbing parties had been clamped down by John Major’s Tory government, but still where that culture endured.

“They were magic,” Holden remembers. “I mean, they weren’t ever as good as what I’d imagined in my head, because often the music was a bit shit and the DJ wasn’t very good at DJing, but they were still amazing: the vibe and the positivity was beautiful. You had space to dance, everyone was nice to everyone, everyone was looking after everyone, you felt like you were in a community, and those environments made the society.”

Of course, teenage dreams seldom come true, and Holden’s was scuppered only a few years later, after he wrote a whooshing prog house track called ‘Horizons’ in his university bedroom at the turn of the century. Picked up by a wheelerdealer label owner and thrust into the hands of superstar DJs, the single catapulted Holden out of Midlands woodlands and into actual clubs.

“I was told that Nick Warren was going to play ‘Horizons’ at Turnmills, so we went down and it was literally the least fun experience,” Holden recalls of one of his first times at a corporate nightclub. “Like, this is a club? It’s horrible! It was nothing like I’d imagined. I’d grown up dancing in the second room of Leicester crustie hippie things, half-chill-out deep house things just waving my arms around, and then suddenly you’re in Turnmills with really aggro people and shitty music and bad sound.”

As a result of experiences such as this and other assorted anhedonic glamour (“The complete horse muck of being taken out for dinner and eating fucking foam with Nina Kraviz,” he

offers, as another gleaming example), the rest of the 2000s found Holden gradually attempting to extract himself from clubland, starting with giving up DJing, self-releasing increasingly club-unfriendly records through his own label, Border Community, and forging collaborative links with experimental musicians. As a result, the most recent decade in his musical development has been a revelation: 2013’s The Inheritors now feels like a year-zero moment, with its welding of ecstatic jazz signifiers to analogue synth timbres to form something chaotic and beautiful, half-man-half-machine, and a record that then fed into ensemble playing with his quasi-improv band The Animal Spirits. Add work with the likes of experimental multiinstrumentalist Wacław Zimpel and percussionist Camilo Tirado, and suddenly we’re a long way – emotionally, physically, mentally, temporally – from Turnmills and trance.

“I’m so happy that I exited club culture, because it means I don’t have those traditions and value judgements and norms in my head when I’m writing anymore,” he explains, “and I can just write my concept of dancing music without the feeling that everyone’s expecting a donk!”

— High-Dimensional Space of All Possibilities — Why Holden’s early years – and his desire for delivery from donk domination – is important today, though, is because it feeds directly into the music he’s just made. He describes his new record, the trip-off-your-tongue Imagine This Is a High-Dimensional Space of All Possibilities, as “the record the teenage me wanted to make”. It’s full of that wide-eyed utopian– anarchist naivety and exhilaration he found at the community centre raves and, crucially, deliberately lacking much in the way of a drop.

“When I was first getting into dance music,” he explains, “I kept thinking the records were put together wrong: they’d have these beautiful melodies, and then suddenly in would come all these beats! It was always these beautiful melodic breakdowns followed by boring parpy beats, but I could’ve just lived in the breakdowns forever. For me, in dance music the rush comes

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“For me, in dance music the rush comes from the melodies, whereas the drop is fleeting” from the melodies, whereas the drop is fleeting, you’re disappointed almost immediately afterwards, and there are no more feelings once the drop’s happened.

I love texture and space, and as soon as you’ve got a big kick drum in there, you’ve killed that.”

And so it is that High-Dimensional Space is a nominally electronic record, but with precious little in common with a great deal of electronica: it’s a record that floats rather than hits, evokes rather than describes, full of potentials and paths untravelled, rendering it impressively moreish to listen to: there’s pulse and structure and propulsion from a start to an end – by no means is this ambient music – but tracks stay open-ended for almost their entire duration, rejecting obvious answers or compositional orthodoxy, simply becoming more detailed the more closely they’re examined, thus drawing in the listener.

Suddenly, the wordy title about multidimensionality makes sense, with the instruction of the record’s title rather revelatory after pressing play: “My music is all about the execution of a system,” he explains. “You set it up with a number of parameters, and it has a stable state, where it balances, and then it’s about nudging those parameters in different directions as it goes. So each song is a description of one journey through this parameter space that I’ve built, but there are all these millions of other journeys and dimensions that could’ve been taken, or are hinted at being taken. And that’s also what life is, so it feels like quite a rich metaphor for existence.”

Therein perhaps lies the record’s greatest appeal, and Holden’s real superpower: by resisting any didactic form that aims at specifics or certainties, and by constantly implying a foundationless chaos lurking one wrong turn away, his musical approximation of life assumes a strangely affecting veracity.

This isn’t music that’s telling the story of a life, but instead it’s simply holding up an audio mirror to the listener, acting as a sort of abstract metonym for life itself. It also, almost incidentally, just sounds beautiful.

The irony is, however, that High-Dimensional Space’s origins came about during a particularly bleak Covid lockdown when Holden’s dog was dying of cancer and he was plunged into a period of isolation. In a sense, this record is very much “about” those times, he says. But instead of trying to tell the story, like a dance-music equivalent of every country song about a passed pooch, Holden mined the feeling rather than

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the event, and explains why it was now, a quarter-century on from those teenage rave dreams, that he’s chosen to go back: “That period of being locked up was quite evocative of my childhood, which was quite locked down,” he recalls, with nicely accidental poetry. “So it definitely wasn’t a coincidence that I was referencing those feelings, and thinking about the kind of music I was secretly listening to back then, around the time of lockdown.”

— Going off on one — There’s a sense, then, that Imagine This Is a High-Dimensional Space of All Possibilities may indeed be the record that a teenage Holden always dreamed of making, but also one he only became able to create after taking this 25-year-long musical journey, that longway-round of creative self-discovery full of prog trance misadventure and computer-music revelation, joyful collaboration and tantalising mis-imaginings of clubbing drawn in rural Leicestershire from the breathless reporting of the London weekly music press.

“That’s probably true,” concedes Holden. “Although at least today the kids have Boiler Room, so they can see first-hand that clubs are shit,” he laughs. I ask him, jokingly, how much he’d need to be paid to return to the big-room DJ booth, but he’s far more interested in the infinite possibilities of reproducing HighDimensional Space live. “I’m actually working out the live set-up at the moment, and the software that I’ve written is really good for going off on one, so the songs have a lot of possibilities,” he says. “What I’m still not sure about is whether it’s going to drop.”

Realistically, I suggest, it’s unlikely, isn’t it? Holden agrees: “The most interesting sound in a record is obviously never the kick drum – ever. Even if a record is just the kick, the vinyl crackle is more interesting! The kick is just a marker – if you’ve heard music before, you know where the kick is going to be, so you don’t need to hear it to be able to dance to it.”

It was telling, earlier in our conversation, that Holden referred to the music he made as “dancing music”, not just dance music. That implies an activity, I suggest, and also a benevolence. “Yes! Music is an activity, not a product. It’s a social thing, and that’s why it’s evolved – it’s glue for people.

“Dancing music is anything with a pulse that hypnotises and lifts you off the ground,” he adds. In Holden’s teenage world, full of boundless utopian adventure and exhilarating radical freedom, there’s a sense that that hypnosis would ideally float on forever.

THE BEST NEW MUSIC

TELEMAN GOOD TIME/HARD TIME Moshi Moshi

‘Good Time / Hard Time’ is Teleman’s most dancefloorfriendly record to date.

Music and lyrical stream of consciousness entwined, the album makes sense of a world in chaos and its words of wisdom are a vital reminder that even when things seem heavy, life is precious.

“Quite possibly as good anything they’ve ever done, which is high praise because Teleman are great” Marc Riley BBC 6Music “An inspired return” Clash

ENTER SHIKARI A KISS FOR THE WHOLE WORLD

VARIOUS ARTISTS WAVES OF DISTORTION (THE BEST OF SHOEGAZE 1990-2022) Two-Piers

ITALIA 90 LIVING HUMAN TREASURE

HMLTD THE WORM

Two-Piers, the label that brought you ‘Pop Psychédélique (The Best of French Psychedelic Pop 1964-2019)’, bring you ‘Waves of Distortion (The Best of Shoegaze 1990-2022), a magical journey through the history of the Shoegaze scene from its inception to the current exponents on the scene championing the sound.

A perfect introduction to all that is glorious and great about ‘Shoegaze’.

Italia 90 release their debut album ‘Living Human Treasure’ on Brace Yourself Records. The London based 4-piece have released a number of singles and EPs since their breakthrough and have steadily built a cult following. Across the album, tracks from the band’s earliest days (New Factory, Competition) sit side by side with newer tracks.

A rock opera about human struggle; personal, spiritual and of individuals trapped inside systems of power that they cannot comprehend or change. Like the monsters of Greek myth, the titular Worm is a projection of inner demons to overcome; self-doubt, envy, hatred, depression. Life is beautiful. Let us cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence.

Let us find a way out of The Worm.

Includes tracks by Slowdive, Ride, Chapterhouse, Lush, bdrmm, Horsegirl, DIIV, Mogwai, Beach House, Galaxie 500 and more

Brace Yourself Records

Italia 90’s songs aim to be timeless. Like the painting on the album’s cover, which shows a crowd of people all facing away from the viewer, the idea of the collective takes precedence over the individual.

Lucky Number

Available on Limited Edition Pink Vinyl only at Indie Stores

SPENCER CULLUM SPENCER CULLUM’S COIN COLLECTION 2 Full Time Hobby

‘Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection 2’ sees the Nashvillebased musician step further from the pedal steel and towards centre stage. Released on the evergreen Full Time Hobby label, this new collection of tracks is a kaleidoscopic collection of folk, jazz, and pop, cut though with immaculately-rendered songwriting.

Features Caitlin Rose, Erin Rae, Yuma Abe, Dana Gavanski and many more.

BRAIDS EUPHORIC RECALL

THE LEMON TWIGS EVERYTHING HARMONY

ARXX RIDE OR DIE

So Recordings

THE DREAM MACHINE THANK GOD! IT’S THE DREAM MACHINE...

Modern Sky

Enter Shikari’s seventeen-year career thus far has seen them rise from teenagers touring the UK grassroots venues, to festival main stages and arena headliners worldwide.

Thank God! It’s The Dream Machine…’ is the hotly anticipated debut album from The Dream Machine. A self-produced collection of 12 tracks exploring everything from love and loss to angels, dogs and The Devil.

The album treads a familiar path of 60’s inspired pop anthems, psychedelic-tinged country, punk, doo wop and everything in-between.

For their fifth full-length, ‘Euphoric Recall’, Montreal’s Braids intuitively pursue the playful joy and spontaneity they’d been craving in the absence of live performances — the kinetic and exciting energy that’s become their superpower.

On ‘Everything Harmony’, the fourth full-length studio release from New York’s The Lemon Twigs, the prodigiously talented brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario offer 13 original servings of beauty that showcase an emotional depth and musical sophistication far beyond their years as a band, let alone as young men.

‘Ride Or Die’. It’s a phrase full of intensity and absoluteness – a commitment of unconditional, unwavering loyalty driven by love. As the title for the debut album from ARXX, coming out via Submarine Cat Records, it’s a fierce summary of their whole ethos and unquenchable passion for music. “There’s no option to give up,” singer and guitarist Hanni Pidduck explains. “If we give up, we just lose the most important thing for us.”

‘A Kiss for the Whole World’, the bands seventh album, is powered by the sun, the most powerful object in our solar system. It’s a collection of songs that represent an explosive reconnection with what Enter Shikari is. The beginning of their second act.

Available on Pink Sparkle Vinyl only at Indie Stores

“Liverpool’s premier psychedelic infused four piece” - Steve Lamacq, BBC Radio 6 Music “My favourite new band” - James Skelly, The Coral

Secret City Records

They abandoned strategy, burned it down, and realized their love record. Love, all of it; the unbound bliss, the budding impulses, and the messy imperfections, a supernova swirled up in a suite of bold, patient, symphonic pop songs surrendered to the present, Euphoric Recall.

Captured Tracks

Support your local independent retailer www.republicofmusic.com

Submarine Cat Records

The band will be extensively touring this year, including support shows with the likes of Yungblud and Gaz Coombes.

Final Third

The Rates: Yo La Tengo

Each issue we speak to an artist or band about the music they think either didn’t get the love it deserved when it came out, or just hasn’t had it yet. This time, Yo La Tengo frontman Ira Kaplan delves into his extensive record collection with Theo Gorst

Yo La Tengo fans might be aware of the (somewhat infamous) spoof Onion headline from the early ’00s: ‘37 RecordStore Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster’. From talking to Ira Kaplan I’d wager that his love for records both popular and esoteric would outdo the discerning tastes of any of the poor 37 (suspected) casualties. Along with bandmates Georgia Hubley and James McNew, the trio have been lovingly tweaking their own sound for decades, all the while adding to their growing list of cover songs. Fittingly, the day we spoke I’d received an email from the band’s mailing list announcing the 28th instalment in their marathon of requested, unrehearsed covers. Throw the band a title and there’s a good chance you’ll get a tune back.

Speaking to me ahead of their imminent European tour, Kaplan open up about the difficulties of picking setlists (“If fans go in wanting one song, chances are they’ll leave disappointed”) and the uneasy relationship he has with his time as a music writer (“So much stupid stuff came from my brain then”). After he’d exorcised these column-inch memories, we went on to discuss seven under-the-radar artists worthy of everyone’s consideration.

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photography by cheryl dunn

Final Third PORTUGUESE JOE

Ira Kaplan: Later in the interview we’ll be talking about NRBQ, who I’ve adored for a long time; at one point in my journalism days – which are not my favourite topic of conversation, and rarely do I initiate talking about them – I worked for a great magazine called New York Rocker. I proposed an article about NRBQ in which they would play records for me, and one of them was this astonishing record called ‘Teenage Riot’ by Portuguese Joe. From time to time we’re asked if there are songs we’d never cover, and I do think ‘Teen Age Riot’ might be the single most un-coverable song I’ve ever heard.

It’s completely out of control. If rockabilly were not in the name of the band [Portuguese Joe’s backing band, The Tennessee Rockabillys] I don’t think I’d ever be able to apply any genre to it. I would consider ‘Teen Age Riot’ to be the wildest record ever made.

a southern quality, like it’s a slower day.”

Did that ‘southern-ness’ affect the recording of the music you made out there?

IK: We’ll never know! I wouldn’t say consciously, but it’s possible. Influence is a word I tend to run away from, as I believe it’s all an influence. Everything seeps in, so in a sense I’m sure being in Nashville did have an effect. The one exception being that Electr-O-Pura [1995] was the first record we did in Nashville and many people said, “Oh are you doing a country record?” So when we went back for I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One [1997] we did think it would be a good experience to get a Nashville session musician to play on the record; to get that local experience. [Producer] Roger Moutenot lined up Al Perkins, which was better than we dreamed as we’re all such big Gram Parsons fans [whom Perkins played with extensively]. We thought we were bringing him in for one song, and then we learned the session had to be for a minimum of three hours, and there was no way it was going to take him three hours to record what we wanted. So we threw more songs at him and he ends up playing on ‘Moby Octopad’ in a way nobody expected when the idea was hatched. I guess that’s a specific influence Nashville had on it.

THE GLANDS

IK: They only made two records, and [after they split up] there was a box set that collected some of the stuff they were working on and hadn’t put out. The second record is just perfect. It does some combination of mystifying and interesting me how that LP is not widely considered one of the greatest records there are.

It’s just the way it is that some things hit a nerve while others don’t find their audience. I can’t imagine anyone hearing [their 2000 self-titled record] and not thinking, “I’ve gotta hear it again.”

Theo Gorst: You first met them in Nashville, where you recorded lots of albums. I once heard you say that The Glands “have

HYNOLOVEWHEEL

IK: This ties in with The Glands – such a perfect record. Angel Food start-to-finish is as great as they ever are. Somebody we toured with loved them and would talk about them all the time, to the point we were like, “I never want to hear this band”.

One day he put on a tape without telling any of us who it was. It was this off-kilter

pop band; I was really loving everything I was hearing. I thought, “Huh, I know what this is going to be,” and sure enough it was Hypnolovewheel. I was like, “Alright, you’re right, they’re great.” And then they played at Maxwell’s [in YLT’s native Hoboken, NJ] by coincidence a few days after we got home from tour, and I’ve been a huge fan ever since. I guess we became contemporaries after that.

COOPER-MOORE

TG: This guy seems pretty inspiring.

IK: He’s pretty amazing. I was a little nervous putting down a jazz artist as I was afraid my eloquence would plummet when I tried talking about jazz. I saw him playing in a trio at Club Tonic [in NYC] and Cooper-Moore was such a captivating presence, almost intimidating – he can do so many incredible things. I guess primarily he’s a piano player but he also makes his own instruments and will do these solo percussion sets by himself.

In preparation for doing this interview I was looking around to see his output and there’s so much… there’s no way to keep up. He’s in this group Triptych Myth and they’re such a versatile group; you don’t know what you’re going to get from song to song. He’s really special. I was also listening today to his work with the William Parker Organ Quartet. You can’t go wrong.

TG: Have you guys ever tried making your own instruments?

IK: I don’t think we have. [Friends of YLT] 75 Dollar Bill have – Rick Brown from that band has made a lot of horns and is quite adept at that. But I don’t think we have, other than taping a maraca to a drum-

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Final Third stick, which I’m not sure qualifies. I don’t think Georgia is going to be able to get a patent on that one.

75 DOLLAR BILL

TG: Would you ever cover 75 Dollar Bill?

IK: It’s hard to imagine. Although not long ago they were opening for Pavement, and Rick tested positive for Covid. One of the things that’s so special about them is that although they would describe themselves as a duo, they frequently play with other musicians in what they call their Little Big Band. They were going to do this show as a quartet with Rick’s wife Sue on bass, and after Rick tested positive Sue couldn’t do the show either, so Georgia and James [both of YLT] filled in. They’ve now been members of 75 Dollar Bill at a pretty high profile gig!

TG: Which record should people start with for 75 Dollar Bill?

IK: I Was Real [2019] is the double album they did, and it’s really spectacular. It’s all great though; they’ve put out a lot of live things on Bandcamp, and they’re definitely a group I could see every time they play. Even if they’re nominally doing the same song for one set and you’ve heard it before, it’ll be different.

unimaginable versatility and showmanship. I responded to them overwhelmingly the first time I saw them, in a way that was similar in intensity to the way I responded to The Kinks. It was just: “Wow this is the band for me.” It’s been fascinating for me how few of my friends feel that way about them. There’s people I know through going to see them, but it turns out they’re not for everyone. Darned if I know why.

The accessible record of theirs is At Yankee Stadium [1978], which has a couple of their greatest pop songs but it’s not as weird as their other stuff, where they go off on more tangents. If you want to hear them do something that should be impossible, like a heart-tugging version of a song

by Alvin and the Chipmunks, then that one’s on Kick Me Hard [1979].

They have this great song on Tapdancin’ Bats [1983] called ‘Captain Lou’ which they wrote about a wrestler who became their manager. What I’m about to say speaks to one of the reasons why they haven’t connected with more people: there’s a sense of humour to them which is easily mistaken for a lack of seriousness, which couldn’t be more wrong.

That ‘Captain Lou’ song? It’s so beautiful, you try and play it and it’s literally two chords being used in a deceptive manner.

It’s an amazing song to think about and it’s great if you just let it wash over you. And it’s about a wrestler so it feels throwaway in some ways, but is the opposite.

NRBQ

IK: I remember my introduction to NRBQ was going to a high school dance and a local band was playing songs that, for the most part, I knew, and then there were a couple that I had no idea about and I asked. They were doing NRBQ covers. Fairly soon after that I went to see them and it was just the combination of great songwriting, almost

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DR BUZZARD’S ORIGINAL SAVANNAH BAND

IK: Are you familiar with them?

TG: The one song.

IK: ‘Cherchez La Femme’ right? It was a

big hit record, which was kind of a disco song, or at least a disco hit. I find I end up gravitating towards people who create their own alternate world. A bit like 75 Dollar Bill, who have this group of people they’ll play with, and it feels like they’re a secret society. It’s a small society but unique, and with the Savannah Band they had that. August Darnell, who became Kid Creole, and his half brother wrote these songs together. You have to delve into their world to learn that – it’s not there on the surface.

‘Cherchez La Femme’ was on the RCA label. Then they made a second record which didn’t have a hit so that was it with them for RCA. They made one more for Elektra and then they went away for a while and the three remaining Savannah Band people did one more album that’s practically rockabilly, which brings us nicely back to Portuguese Joe. It’s a super cool, weird record, that I don’t think anyone heard. It’s highest on my want list of records and when it did come out Robert Christgau in the Village Voice compared it unfavourably to a test pressing he’d heard of the same record. One that had different songs, different mixes.

One time I asked him, “If you’ve still got this record, could you make me a copy? I’m dying to hear it. Because I like [their second album] Calling All Beatniks! just fine.” He said, “Oh yeah I’d be happy to,” and then discovered much to his surprise that he no longer had the test pressing. So I look on Discogs every now and again, but how many could there be?

I’ve still never heard it, but the Discogs page now includes the tracklisting so it’s out there!

TG: I had them in my mind as disco but they seem to encompass a lot more?

IK: They certainly do. There’s a whole show-tune and jazz side to them, ‘Cherchez La Femme’ isn’t actually so much an outlier but for some reason became a hit. Even then I think the first words are “Tommy Mottola lives on the road.” He’s a record exec, why they are signing about him is inscrutable to the likes of me! Even at their most accessible they were still insular. Why do some songs become hits and others don’t? I don’t know.

Final Third

In Conversation: SQÜRL

Having collaborated on films, soundtracks and EPs for many years, legendary director Jim Jarmusch and producer Carter Logan are set to release their debut studio album as experimental rock duo SQÜRL. As they return from touring a Man Ray-inspired improvisational show around the UK, they tell Ian Roebuck about their unique creative relationship

“I love New York in the mist,” Carter Logan tells me, decompressing after his morning run as we await his friend and collaborator Jim Jarmusch. The two have worked together across three decades now; with Carter as producer and Jim as writer-director they’ve released such acclaimed movies as Paterson (2016), Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and the fascinating Stooges documentary Gimme Danger (2016) to name a few.

However, it’s Logan and Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL we’re discussing today. An intriguing project that started in 2009 when the pair decided to create their own soundtrack to the feature The Limits of Control, since then SQÜRL has steadily evolved, much like their signature stacks of delay. Layers of mystery and texture have been added with every release, and there is an unpredictability to their output that continually draws the listener closer.

Their new album – and their first that is not presented as a direct soundtrack to a film project – Silver Haze continues to develop the sonic exploration of SQÜRL as they toy with the distorted sound that’s become their trademark.

As Jim joins we’re just chatting about their remarkable recent UK tour. “Sorry I’m late!” he says, excited to get started.

“What have I missed?”

IR:

CL:

Hi Jim. Carter was just telling me you are home off the back of touring live scores to four films by Man Ray. What drew you to Man Ray, and how was it received by the European audience?

Yes, we had three weeks doing something pretty special for us. It’s a project that we developed some years ago, but we do it very selectively, and up until now had only played

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it in the States. It went great, really beautiful theatres and was nice to have full houses to engage them with some psychedelics and surrealism.

JJ: We played EartH in Hackney, a fucked-up old theatre. The audience was appreciative; they seemed stunned for the first few minutes and then again afterwards. It is quite overwhelming, quite a trip we take them on musically, and of course with the films too. The reactions were good but people needed time to absorb and then decompress before reacting completely.

We have a long history of dealing with surrealism and we were led to these films by a friend of ours – the daughter of our film distributor in Paris who is a real cinephile.

She said, “You have to do Man Ray!” She was so adamant at the time, and you know what? She was absolutely right.

We really like the fact that they are not narrative films and more like cine-poems or whatever you want to call them.

CL: For us it is an immersive concert film, an art piece; we don’t expect people to react how they would to a gig, a bit more like a film. You need time to finish and let it wash over you.

There is a lot of fascinating imagery in the Man Ray films to process, and the sound that we create is very three-dimensional, because it involves a lot of drones and feedback – it’s really sound designing at the same time as it is music. It is a through-line in our music because we have already done so much scoring, and with film music there is an awareness of building space and working within it as well. We’re really sculpting what we do to each environment and each show.

photography by tom jarmusch

Final Third

IR: CL: JJ: IR: JJ:

CL:

I’m sad to have missed it.

We will come back and do a full tour of the UK. We’ll even do it in your living room.

Thanks Jim, I’ll set up the projector. Would there be a jump-off point to start watching Man Ray’s movies, for those who haven’t seen them?

I would suggest the most-known film, which is called The Starfish in English, because it captures all of his elements, but you could start anywhere. My favourite one is called The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice – it’s the one we play last and the longest one.

What is great about them, at least for us, is that we’ve seen these films hundreds of times but they continue to reveal new things, continue to trick us into thinking differently.

They defy linear memory, some of them have narratives,

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but they induce a dream state that musically we just try to follow as best as possible.

Surrealism embraced non-rational thought, semi- and unconscious states, even what we consider mental illnesses – so does psychedelia, in a different way – so our music is coming from an act of the 20th century and beyond. Mixing imagery from 100 years ago is very interesting and seems very logical – well, maybe not logical as the surrealists didn’t embrace that term, but appropriate for sure.

Let’s talk about your new album, Silver Haze. SQÜRL formed back in 2009 and have released various EPs and soundtracks since, but this will be your first full-length studio record. What’s taken you so long?

We don’t do anything by any explicit plan. In our world

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we do a lot of different projects, in both music and film, so it just seemed to fit with our timing. We had wanted to do a more studio-based recording with a producer involved, and then Carter had been guiding us towards Randall Dunn who we ended up just loving working with.

It just seemed like the right time. We’ve done full-length soundtracks of course before but all the SQÜRL stuff has been EPs. Things just kind of happen, we try to plan, but the best plans are no plans.

You called your producer Randall Dunn “the navigator of your musical boat”. That’s a nice way of putting it.

Well, he was a kind of navigator: he would oversee and guide us. We started by bringing him a lot of rough tracks that we had made. He had ideas right away. We were just seeing if he would be interested in this stuff but he was already making notes.

At the same time he could have turned around and told us we weren’t ready. He wants to get involved at a point where he can see a direction and once I felt that we had one, he kept us on the course.

Like Stephen O’Malley and Marc Ribot who we got to come play on the record; we love Boris too.

You both seem to thrive off collaboration.

Yes, being in a band and making films, from our perspective, require collaboration and openness and value placed on everyone’s individual role in that process. There are people who do these things by themselves but that’s not been our way.

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Anika are also on the record: how did that come about?

I don’t know why but I have had an aversion to male vocals in general. There are so many incredible female vocalists in all genres and so I am so drawn to them. We played at a Sacred Bones big anniversary concert with all these bands and we saw Anika play and we just fell in love with her approach to music. Charlotte is a friend and someone

“U2 play to a click track, never playing anything in a different way. I almost fell down – holy shit, that’s not rock and roll!”

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who I have always been taken by her effortless artistry as both an actress and a musician.

Do you give specific directions before you work with artists like this, maybe like you would with a film, Jim, or is it looser when you’re making music?

Well, we were asking Charlotte to recite the poems and not sing them so that was pretty straightforward; she had the

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music to get under her skin. With Anika it was more interesting perhaps as we had a few different ideas and she would give back different options. Recently we’ve been thinking it would be great to just let her do her own thing on our music though and not give her any guidance at all – we love her approach.

The spoken word is used very powerfully on Silver Haze and you’ve both said you are bored by auto-tune – why would you say that’s the case?

I don’t know, we just get tired of technology.

As much as repetition is essential in all forms of music, the beautiful thing to us remains the variations in those repetitions so that nothing is exactly the same each time. We’re not going to copy and paste a chorus or even a loop necessarily; we are manipulating and affecting the loop throughout.

I love electronic music and its history, but I also love computer-generated music when it’s an experiment. A friend of ours does photography; he had a job some years ago running the video screens for U2’s live show and he told us that because it’s all sync’d up they play to a click track, never playing anything in a different way. I almost fell down – holy shit, that’s not rock and roll! We were appalled; we realise big bands do this kind of thing, but come on! It was deeply offensive, musically.

The idea that The Edge, who can be an incredibly evocative guitarist, would play the same exact solo at the same time every single night is quite sad.

It’s pathetic!

We prefer the Frank Zappa philosophy. That’s really the spirit that we approach music with. It’s not rigid, it can grow and mutate as a form. Trying to replicate it exactly the same, searching for the perfect take, auto-tuning for example, it is just not interesting to us.

When I first brought guitar tracks to Randall, he would say, “I like this guitar line, maybe we should re-record it.” And I would say, “Oh god, I have no idea what I was playing then.” So a few weeks after Randall had been working on it he told me there’s no need to re-record anything, they’re perfect as they are. He had incorporated the damaged aspects of them into the music, which was very telling as a kind of artistry – almost like a painter who appreciates texture and imperfection.

I was going to ask you if any musical accidents made their way on the album but it sounds like they did…

Pretty much all of them. I don’t really practise playing guitar technically very much, I just plug it in and see what interesting stuff comes out. Almost everything I do has something accidental to it.

You take direct inspiration from the New York School of Poets with the track ‘John Ashbery Takes a Walk’. Would you say the album shares the same spirit?

The New York School of Poets are my aesthetic godfathers.

I studied with the great poet Kenneth Cooke, I studied with

photography by sara driver

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David Shapiro, I am close friends with Ron Padgett, I got to know John Ashbery a little bit, and of course Frank O’Hara is very important. All of these poets are very important to me as guides to everything I create. In the late ’50s Frank O’Hara wrote a little manifesto called ‘Personism’, and in it he says that when you create anything you should be directing it to one other person. If you’re directing it to the whole world it’s just too broad and egotistical in a way.

I’m paraphrasing but the idea is you make something and say it to one person. That’s always been extremely important to me, as well as the idea of making sure you are celebrating the creators that came before you and embracing them and embodying them. And never take yourself too seriously – the New York School always has humour in the poems, and experimentation.

CL: I didn’t have the benefit of having studied with those incredible poets, but that perspective has pervaded a lot of things I have made over the years. Particularly films or albums, I just make them for my friends – they’re the only people who really matter if they like it. Trying to have a sense of humour and humility is also something I have learnt from those poets; those are essential life tools I think, certainly as surviving as an artist. If you’re trying to appeal beyond what you know you have lost your whole footing.

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Then you become Bono… No, I’m only kidding – enough U2 jokes.

You might need a sense of humour for my next question.

Rolling Stone said you guys had “the best satirical use of an umlaut by a serious band”. That’s quite an honour – was there stiff competition?

They did give out quite a number of umlaut awards in that issue. We are not alone. I do appreciate that they understood where we are coming from with it. To be honest, most of the references that we’ve been inspired by that use an umlaut have a tongue-in-cheek element to them.

Motörhead, Blue Öyster Cult or Mötley Crüe weren’t overly serious about their spelling.

That’s true. You’re so unpredictable as a band – so what’s next for SQÜRL? In terms of live dates we’re going to have a record release show, but other than that we have a show in New Orleans at the Overlook film festival, which is a destination for horror fans worldwide. We’re going to be playing there as a tenth anniversary celebration of Only Lovers Left Alive, and we hope to do more surrounding that film. It’s something that’s really special to us having made both the film and the music. It resonates with a lot of people and has continued to grow.

I think you can tell by now we certainly don’t plan things – you can hear it in the record. There’s a track called ‘End of the World’; we had the instrumental track and whilst we were in the studio just mixing it and playing around with it I was sitting there writing this text, it just came to me out of the music, I just sort of drifted away and wrote it.

We never set out to do it that way; I’ve sketched out lyrics before while listening back but this was different, even the subject arrived without thinking about it.

Does music allow you that spontaneity, compared to a more rigid medium like film?

There’s a little less pressure. In film everyone is waiting to know what we’re doing next and how are we doing it, but of course you do different takes and try different things, it does have similar elements to making a record in a studio. My role is very different though – directing a film you become the navigator of the whole ship, and with music it’s more like collaborating with your other sailors, it takes pressure off for me. I love throwing things at Carter and Randall.

Oh yeah, I remember those lyrics [to ‘End of the World’] just fit. Because he was working in response to the music they just fit. It echoes the siren sound in the song, which is the Moog. I don’t think I heard the entire text until we started recording it though. He said, “I have this thing, I think it will work,” so we said, “Okay, let’s set up the mic.”

A couple of takes later, it was done.

I wonder if that’s how Bono does it.

Who knows.

No comment.

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My Place: Mega Bog

Erin Birgy shows us around her home in Los Angeles, where she performs her daily morning spell and lives with 200 cactuses, by Stuart Stubbs

Erin Birgy lives in a neighbourhood in north-east LA that she never thought she’d live in. “It’s so boujie and terrible, strollers everywhere,” she says of her first impression of her street. “It’s very quiet and all you can hear is lawnmowers every day, but there was a house open and I really needed a house.”

She had wanted to move out to the mountains, to Altadena where her best friend James Krivchenia lives (drummer with Big Thief and Mega Bog collaborator and co-producer). But some “pretty bad shit happened” at her previous LA home, involving a stranger in the house, so Birgy felt the need to have more friends close by. She has lived a more remote life with Krivchenia before, in New Mexico, where the pair rented a shack that was a fourhour drive from anyone else they knew.

Birgy is always moving around, and has been since her childhood in Idaho, where she grew up in a travelling rodeo, riding horses from school age like the rest of us do bikes, roping calves and mutton busting (bull riding for kids, with sheep). In her teenage years in Washington, shortly before she started her psych pop project Mega Bog, she wrote a column for punk magazine The Finger where she knocked on the doors of strangers with a box of tea until someone would let her in to interview them about their life. “It was really intense,” she says. “But, then, I wanted to be intense.”

She wrote her excellent new album End of Everything (out 19 May via her new

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label Mexican Summer) in a state of mind that its title suggests, with California was ablaze with wildfires, followed by the start of the pandemic. The death of musician David Berman in 2019 strangely resonated too, “and the everyday fascism that just sits on your face,” she says, “it got too much. There was just a lot of things in the air that summer which made me think we should all die; we should just be done; it’s time, and I should be gone as well. And just sitting with that feeling, not peacefully, but writing with that feeling and not wanting to do that – not wanting to cause an end, but feeling out of options in general.”

And yet End of Everything feels like Mega Bog at her most pragmatic – optimistic, even. It’s Birgy’s shortest album, its eight tracks propelled not by jazz-prog guitars as before, but fanfares of coldwave synths. “Even if we’re just dancing in that dark space, we will be dancing,” she says.

There are still similarities to the work of Cate Le Bon, Aldous Harding and US Girls, and we can continue to appreciate how Birgy has a knack for writing ambiguous alt-pop lyrics like few others who aren’t David Bowie can, but it’s the huffed melodrama of Future Islands’ that first comes to mind on End of Everything, along with Italo disco and even a touch of Tango in the Night-era Fleetwood Mac. It’s all underlined – but never overblown –

by Birgy’s gothic spirit and a love of camp horror that, halfway through our visit to

her house, compels her to run a bath and cover herself in a pint of fake blood.

01 BOOKS I have the house set up as a little library.

And I’m even working on this little compilation book just to give to my friends to contextualise all of these references I’ve been referencing throughout the last year. Books are just great and I don’t think I abuse them, but I used to just have a rainbow of 50 books open on the floor with me in the centre, so recently I got the coffee table to keep everything clean and to make sure that there aren’t books all over the floor tripping people up and getting water spilt on them.

I’m releasing my own book with the album [The Practice of Hell Ending]. It’s technically separate to the record but it’s a companion. When we were talking about what I wanted to do when I joined the label, Mexican Summer were like, “So what’s your big dream right now?”, and I was like, “Well, I want to write a bunch of books and I want to make a bunch of films.” We did a lyric book with the last album, Life, and Another, and I wanted to level up, so I was thinking I’d take some of the poetry I was writing when I was writing the songs and make that into a book. But when we were wrapping up the mixing for the album, and I went to Greece, something lifted. I was writing nonstop and ended up submitting

photography by emily malan

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“Bryan Ferry is just so hot! He presents the hottest person on earth, and I love that. Like, I can do that too!” a manuscript that was 200 pages. We cut it down to 80, and it’s great. It’s poetry and a couple of photographs that are aligned with the poetry. All after the music. The Practice of Hell Ending.

02 GIRLS AGAINST GOD

BY JENNY HVAL I’ve never worked with Jenny on a creative project but we talk a lot. We were pen pals through Covid having not met yet, and then she came to a show we played at a festival. We got close through letters and then met in the flesh. She asked me to give her her first tattoo. And then when I was having a hard time last summer in Greece I was like, “Um… can I just come to Oslo for a minute”, and we started watching Buffy and settled up. It was so healing because her home has a similar energy to what I feel in my home. She’s such a little horrific dude as well.

03 ROXY MUSIC MATCHBOOK I am very much a fan of both Roxy Music and matches. Brian Eno is huge. Just a

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very curious person who documents curiosity and his community pretty well too.

I’ve always really admired that, because my community and friendships are what make me. It’s always strange to see who wants the recognition, and who wants the recognition in this weird little bubble [of Mega Bog]. And then Bryan Ferry is just so hot! He presents the hottest person on earth, and I love that. Like, I can do that too! You just summon up all your best qualities and put them forward. I don’t like to do it absolutely, because I don’t want to hound through life, but some of those early live Roxy Music videos – they’re literally just wearing angel wings and capes. Fuck yeah!

04 WRITING DESK I spend most of my day at my writing desk.

I will have my coffee and walk over to the desk, and I have each notebook ready for different projects – journaling and poetry, video ideas, my thoughts about films I’ve been watching, structures and song, my Greek studies. I’m hyper organised and really take control of the space because that’s something I do have control over.

I do a little bit of everything I like to do within the day, although at the moment I’m working on the next record, so it’s mainly music right now.

05 CACTUSES When I moved to LA the second time, my friend Phil worked at the cactus store and I started visiting a lot. I have always gardened and loved it – it’s one of those amazing, connecting things you can do that also gives something to the world. I started to work at the store, and all the sick plants I would take home and put in my garden. That was my I-don’t-know-whatI’m-doing-during-lockdown project. And then I had to dig them all up when I moved here. It’s like 200 plants. It was kind of a feat. Cactuses are very present on a couple of songs on the album.

06 SKULLS The surface level explanation for the skulls is I got them when I was visiting some friends fairly recently. I’ve been heavily into the mortal explanation – I mean, death

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is around, but also non-literal deaths – so I have a lot of semi-campy Halloween shit all over. But we were making a video with these three skulls this week and I had this reminder of this internet boyfriend I had when I was 15, and it got really crazy. They were a lot older than I was too; we met on vampirefreaks.com, the goth live journal, and they ended up buying a train ticket to come and live with my mum and I. And he sent me his journal, every page covered in his blood. I also had a boyfriend at the time, so I was like, “Joel – who painted the new album cover, so it’s all still connected – I cheated with you on this guy who’s going to come live with us now and I’m very scared.” Anyway, I got these skulls and thought, “Where is that guy!?” I never heard from him again, but I named all of the three skulls that came in a bag after this person. They’re all Jonathan.

Jubilee, the Derek Jarman film, the other night. I have my mini film studio in the garage that has the weirdest shit in it. My friend Zach, who plays on the record, we did a little improv show the other night, synth John Carpenter style, and I said, “How should we make this presentable?

I think we should get IVs and be drawing each other’s blood and drink it at the end.”

I ran into the garage and got my fake blood and medical tubes and we just pretended in the end. I like props that gutturally represent human mortality. The video that’s about to come out is so funny to me – there are monsters and fog, and I’m just having a lot of fun with it. That’s my MO – I’m not trying to destroy people with the horrors of my story and narrative, it’s very playful, and you can have a stranger come over and take photos of you in your bathtub covered in blood.

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I’ve been working on these videos for the new album for a year now, which are slowly rolling out. A lot of the filming styles and references come from slightly campier horror films, like I was watching

I’m not sure I have a word for what I do, but a lot of spells I perform require candles of different colours. A spell or a prayer. I do that as part of my morning routine. So I have a lot of the black

candles out because they’re protective candles and I’ve been going deep into the horror world. I recycle all the wax too, and make more candles and do little carvings and cast them in silicone.

09 BASS GUITAR & LARIAT I bought this bass as a gift for my friend in Greece. My friend Johnny was like, “I think I’m a bassist. I’m pretty sure that’s for me. I love bass.” I said, “Oh, do you have a bass? Do you play bass?” and he said, “No, I never have.” So I bought this bass for Johnny. It’s fucking sick. I think I have a healthy balance of nerding out on guitars and instruments. Before I was doing music fulltime I worked in a couple of music stores, and I do have a deep appreciation for very cool gear.

And I’ve also got a lariat hanging up there, which is a rodeo rope. It’s not my childhood rope, but I got this one on tour, when we stopped in a place in Wyoming.

I was feeling very nostalgic and I think somebody asked if I could still do it. I was like, “Totally!”, so I had to buy it to prove it, and then we roped each other around the parking lot. I will forever be a cowboy.

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When I look at this sleeve, all I see is five young, brave men reinventing punk. Do you think every band in 1992 were bold enough to pose in front of a white background like this? Because they bloody weren’t! There is no greater challenge, no environment more exposing, than that white wall, and yet Take That backed themselves – and each other – to expertly deliver the message that needed delivering: “Take That & Party”. It would be a full five years later when the British public realised that “Take That & Party” – a phrase many had shouted aloud themselves or cheered when someone close by had shouted it – had absolutely no meaning behind it, and that power all came from five best friends for life daring to jump in the air against a white wall.

Clearly, this sleeve is all about balance. To dress the whole band in open leather waistcoats would have been gauche at best, and actually quite mental. You might be thinking that Jason, Howard and Mark drew the short straws, but looking at how happy “the bods”, as the trio still call themselves to this day, are, it’s clear that those waistcoats were in high demand. Gary – the weakest jumper of the band – will have been happy enough in his striped tee that set him apart from his backing singers, and even though Robbie was made to do the shoot in his own vest, the slimming effect is has as it merges into the background would have been a bonus that he would have no doubt pretended he knew would happen all along. And boy would he like to remind the others how he jumped the highest. He wouldn’t have let them forget that! Yeah, this one just works.

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When celebrity talent judge Ricky Wilson (50) was unmasked as the runner up in this year’s Masked Singer, fans were shocked. Wilson was a.) alive, and b.) had sung quite beautifully on his route to the final. Or had he?

Rumours have since been circulating that he might have had help from some of his celebrity pals, who took turns dressing up the massive bird to sing on ITV every week.

Some are convinced that he shared the gig with another member of his function band Kaiser Chiefs, who goes by the name Peanuts. Especially in the weeks he had tougher songs to sing that he pulled off. Luke Kook and both of We Are Scientists have also been linked to the scandal.

Reports surface that the ABBA avatars are no longer on speaking terms

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