Jockstrap – Loud And Quiet 154

Hudson Mohawke, Julia Jacklin, Khruangbin, Ravyn Lenae, Alex G, Sofie Royer, DoomCannon, Blood, The Comet Is Coming, High Vis, Coby Sey, CRUISE! The new DIY sound of Nigerian nightlife

issue 154

Jockstrap In perfect harmony

THE BEST NEW MUSIC

GARAGE PSYCHÉDÉLIQUE (THE BEST OF GARAGE PSYCH AND PZYK ROCK 1965-2019)

V/A MUSIC FOR THE STARS (CELESTIAL MUSIC 1960-1979)

THE CHARLATANS LIVE AT READING FESTIVAL 1992

BIBI CLUB LE SOLEIL ET LA MER

THE SOFT MOON EXISTER

Two-Piers the label that brought you ‘Pop Psychédélique (The Best of French Psychedelic Pop 1964-2019)’ bring you the second instalment in the series ‘Garage Psychédélique’. A thrill a minute dive into the world of Garage Psychedelic Rock.

Music For The Stars is a collection of songs that may lend themselves to the end of the night in headphones, laying back to watch the stars.

30 Years on from The Charlatans debut appearance at the Reading Festival comes a special Limited Edition pressing on coloured vinyl and CD of the bands seminal live set from Reading Festival 1992 recorded by the BBC.

The debut release by Bibi Club, is sun-kissed and wave-washed, shimmering and chic, a bilingual party overdue after two years that have felt (to everyone!) like winter.

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

Includes early singles Indian Rope, The Only One I Know, Then and Weirdo

Real-life lovers Adèle and Nico set out to create music that is intimate, honest, sparkling with an energy that animates even its quiet moments. It will remind you: if it’s not sunny here, it’s sunny somewhere.

Available on Crystal Clear Vinyl at all good Independent Record Stores

Two-Piers

From the Psych sound explosion onto the Underground club scene in the US and UK in the mid 1960s, to the current crop of exceptional bands flying the Garage Psych flag today, ‘Garage Psychédélique’ takes you on a Psych journey…..Sit back and enjoy the ride!

Two-Piers

Includes tracks from legends such as Willie Nelson, Lonnie Liston Smith, and Nina Simone, the English folk sound of Bill Fay and Kevin Ayres, the tortured genius of Tim Buckley, from the 60’s West Coast scene The Electric Prunes and the soulful beauty of Shuggie Otis.

Then Records

Secret City

Sacred Bones

GLORIA DE OLIVEIRA & DEAN HURLEY OCEANS OF TIME

CHARLES STEPNEY STEP ON STEP

KOKOROKO COULD WE BE MORE

JACK FLANAGAN RIDES THE SKY

SHEAFS A HAPPY MEDIUM

The spell-binding collaboration between David Lynch sound designer Dean Hurley and German-Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Gloria De Oliveira recalls the foundational dreampop of 4AD acts like Cocteau Twins and Lush and has the power to release its listener from the handcuffs of reality, however briefly.

International Anthem proudly presents ‘Step on Step’, a double LP collection of newly unearthed solo home recordings created by enigmatic producer, arranger, and composer Charles Stepney in the basement of his home on the Southside of Chicago during the years before his untimely death in 1976. Stepney is a greatly underappreciated figure… a genius relegated to the shadows.

The long awaited debut LP from Kokoroko on Browsnwood Recordings, ‘Could We Be More’ is an expansive and ambitious debut album that speaks to the force of Kokoroko.

The debut album from Jack Flanagan, currently best known for his work as a member of the Mystery Jets. ‘Jack Rides The Sky’ is a magical coming of age record that comprises of 12 tracks written over the last decade, some finished and some left as initial sketches of ideas. As brutally honest as it is escapist and romantic, ‘Jack Rides The Sky’ is a body of work that signals the arrival of a unique, poetic talent

Fresh from supporting punk icons The Buzzcocks on their recent UK dates, Sheffield quintet SHEAFS release their debut album, ‘A Happy Medium’.

Sacred Bones

Brownswood

International Anthems

His sound has been used by countless samplers in the hip-hop world including Kanye West, The Fugees, and MF Doom.

“A vital example of not only jazz’s new form but the shape of things to come for British music.”

- The Guardian “The album of the season” - ELLE

Modern Sky

Support your local independent retailer www.republicofmusic.com

Modern Sky

After releasing their debut EP ‘Vox Pop’ in 2020, the band scored a ‘Next Wave’ on BBC Radio 1’s Indie Show with Jack Saunders.

SHEAFS have supported acts such as The Coral, Squid, Idles, and The Amazons.

Available on Limited Milky Clear Vinyl

Contents Contact info@loudandquiet.com advertise@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet Ltd 445 Hackney Road London E2 9DY Founding Editor: Stuart Stubbs Deputy Editor: Luke Cartledge Art Direction: B.A.M. and Steph Roden Digital Director: Greg Cochrane Contributing writers Alex Francis, Alexander Smail, Andrew Anderson, Ben Lynch, Charlotte Marston, Colin Groundwater, Dafydd Jenkins, Daniel Dylan Wray, Dominic Haley, Fergal Kinney, Gemma Samways, Guia Cortassa, Hayden Merrick, Isabel Crabtree, Ian Roebuck, Jack Doherty, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jemima Skala, Jenessa Williams, Jessica Wrigglesworth, Jo Higgs, Joe Goggins, Katie Beswick, Katie Cutforth, Liam Konemann, Max Pilley, Megan Wallace, Michelle Kambasha, Mike Vinti, Nadia Younes, Nick Tzara, Ollie Rankine, Oskar Jeff, Patrick Clarke, Robert Davidson, Reef Younis, Sam Walton, Shrey Kathuria, Skye Butchard, Sope Soetan, Susan Darlington, Tara Joshi, Theo Gorst, Tom Critten, Tom Morgan, Tristan Gatward, Tyler Damara Kelly, Will Ainsley, Woody Delaney, Zara Hedderman, Zhenzhen Yu Contributing photographers Andrew Mangum, Cielito Vivas, Dan Kendall, Eleonora C. Collini, Emily Malan, Gabriel Green, Gem Harris, Jake Kenny, Jenna Foxton, Jody Evans, Jonangelo Molinari, Kyle Johnson, Levi Mandel, Matilda Hill-Jenkins, Oliver Halstead, Phil Sharp, Sonny McCartney, Sophie Barloc, Timothy Cochrane, Tom Porter With special thanks to Alex Cull, Aoife Kitt, Dan Carson, Dan McCormick, Genevieve Taylor, Isis O’Regan, Jay Singh, Morgan Davies, Natalie Quesnel, Rachel Campbell, Tom Churchill, Tom Sloman, Tomas Fraser, Will Lawrence The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2022 Loud And Quiet Ltd.

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

Issue 154 When Jockstrap first appeared in Loud And Quiet in November 2018 there were five of them and we all went for a curry.

They were making pop music that sounded like nobody else and we’ve followed them ever since, waiting to put them on one of our covers. This time it was breakfast; the music has evolved but is no less unique; and Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye no longer feel the need to bring their live band along – and not just because they don’t have one anymore. As Katie Beswick finds out, Jockstrap has always been the two of them, working for a singular sound.

Stuart Stubbs

High Vis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

DoomCannon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Blood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sofie Royer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alex G . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Coby Sey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ravyn Lenae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Khruangbin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Jockstrap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Comet Is Coming . . . . . . . . . . . .

Julia Jacklin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cruise: the DIY sound of Lagos . . . .

Hudson Mohawke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Cold Take . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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10 14 16 18 20 24 28 30 35 52 62 66 70 76 80

The Beginning: Previously

Since the last edition of Loud And Quiet

Village Underground x L&Q Since 2007, Shoreditch’s Village Underground venue has been one of London’s very best, with expert programming, a prime location and a great soundsystem. We’ve always loved going to shows there, so it was very nice of them to let us book three of our favourite new artists to play an L&Q party at the venue as part of their 15th birthday celebrations throughout September.

Topping the bill is the mighty Theon Cross; the South East London tuba wizard and collaborator extraordinaire who you’ll either recognise from his extraordinary solo project, his work

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as part of trailblazing jazzers Sons of Kemet or one of his many session gigs. His album Intra-I was one of our favourites of last year, and his live show is incredible; expect something special.

Also on the lineup are the excellent Lunch Money Life – a post-genre collective from Dalston who you may remember from last month’s magazine – and Donna Thompson, an improvinfluenced experimental pop songwriter affiliated with the dynamic Total Refreshment Centre scene. It’s all happening on 19 September, and it’s going to be really really good. You should come. 15.villageunderground.co.uk

photography by jody evans

The Beginning: Previously Midnight Chats Your favourite music interview podcast (that’s made by Loud And Quiet) returned in July. The latest series of Midnight Chats is now available to hear on your favourite podcast platform. With the likes of AJ Tracey, Squid and Japanese Breakfast among the guests, highlights include Michelle Zauner’s account of her night at the Grammys, Ollie Judge talking about NFTs in a Barcelona park and the inside story of Yard Act’s ‘grotesque’ chart battle tactics. loudandquiet.com/podcasts

Independent Venue Community The founders of Independent Venue Week have now developed Independent Venue Community – a new national initiative that encourages grassroots venues to engage with the communities around them by playing host to a range of daytime programming that’s specific to local needs. Initially, the scheme will focus on six specific areas: Early Years, Young People, the Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent, Mental Health and Wellbeing, LGBTQIA+, and Older Years. Industry figures like Nova Twins and Philip Selway are signed up to the project, with the former band its first ambassadors. Find out more and learn how to get involved at independentvenuecommunity.com.

to return in the future, pointing towards a positive new trend for the vinyl industry. unicef.org.uk / musicdeclares.net

William Doyle L&Q mainstay and consistently innovative artist William Doyle announced a new vinyl box set in July, of previously self- or unreleased ambient material. From his early days as East India Youth to his current mode of lush, pastoral songcraft, he’s always kept himself moving forward, so this feels like a rare, but welcome, moment of reflection. It’s all coming out via Tough Love Records in August. williamdoyle.bandcamp.com

Radio against the machine With industrial action getting more frequent and workers more strident across the world, staff at Vancouver’s KISS radio station recently staged one of the more unusual labour actions of recent times to express their displeasure at high-profile DJ redundancies. For several continuous hours whoever was in control of the broadcast played Rage Against The Machine’s ‘Killing In The Name’ on repeat in protest. A listener did call in to request a change; naturally, they didn’t do what they told them.

Liz Truss Harry Styles In by far the most important news since the last edition of Loud And Quiet, you can now study the life and work of Harry Styles at degree level.

No, really: Texas State University is set to introduce a course titled Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, the Internet and European Pop Culture in 2023, led by associate professor of digital history, Louie Dean Valencia. “We will be looking at all the music, film and products that Harry has released, as well as many of his favourite authors, including Susan Sontag, Rumi, Alain de Botton, Murakami and Bethan Roberts, to name just a few,” Valencia told Dazed. “The idea of the class is to not just learn about Harry Styles and his work, but also to look at the world he has come up in as a celebrity. We will look at issues that are important to him, such as sustainability, gender equality, feminism, antiracism, queer acceptance, and ‘treating people with kindness’.”

Pressing issues Music Declares Emergency and Unicef both kicked off their summers with limited-run series of special edition vinyl, raising money for their vital causes in the process. For the former, a world-first ‘plant-based bioplastic’ vinyl has been created for a decarbonised four-track compilation featuring Black Country, New Road, Bicep, Porridge Radio and Angel Olsen; for the latter, 16 classic albums are being reissued onto records that are pressed onto Unicef’s trademark sky blue, with LPs from artists as varied as Prince, Little Mix and Janis Joplin among the collection. Both runs were only available to purchase via charity raffles which will have closed by the time you read this, but they’re slated

illustration by kate prior

On 5 September, Liz Truss, Conservative MP for South West Norfolk and complete ghoul, may become the next Prime Minister of the UK following the resignation of fellow monster Boris Johnson. Yet her battle against haunted ventriloquist dummy Rishi Sunak has received its first serious blow: the revelation that, as an extremely right-wing 25-year-old in 2001, she admitted to having recently purchased Onka’s Big Moka, the debut album from post-Britpop turds Toploader. Will her campaign recover, and will Sunak’s private love of The Twang provide a similar electoral banana skin? We’re fucked either way.

Shreklife/shrekno/shrek-house, etc According to a longread in the New York Times, the latest craze in US dance music culture is the Shrek-themed rave. There was a high-profile party in Brooklyn hipster enclave Williamsburg recently, with hundreds of allegedly cool attendees getting clattered while dressed as the allegedly Scottish ogre, and at a massive one in Los Angeles a few months ago, genuine star of contemporary hip hop Rico Nasty turned up. The parties get started with DJs playing Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’, obviously, then dive into pop and EDM in earnest, because America’s relationship with big-room commercial dance music wasn’t weird enough already.

To be kept in the loop with alternative music headlines every week, sign up to our newsletter, Loud And Quiet Weekly, at loudandquiet.com

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The Beginning: You’re the Worst

Madonna’s MDNA: just say no, kids There are several ways you, as an artist, can make it into this column. The first is simple: record a very bad album. But that’s not as easy as it seems. For example, if you record something very bad, it might accidentally be so bad it’s good.

The second way is to record something that people don’t expect. Metallica and Lou Reed’s Lulu, which I wrote about in the very first instalment of this series, is an example of this. It wasn’t so much that the album was terrible, as that it strayed outside of what people expected. And since people often don’t like change, they didn’t like Lulu.

The third way is the easiest of all: record an album, but put in zero effort. And that’s exactly what Madonna did with MDNA in 2012.

In fact, Madonna’s career had been sort of stalled for a long time by that point. In the ’80s, you had classic Madonna: ‘Like a Virgin’, ‘True Blue’, ‘Like a Prayer’. Then in the early ’90s you had experimental Madonna: Erotica, Evita. That was followed by peak Madonna: Ray of Light and Music.

But after that, Madonna kinda lost her way. American Life was part of the post-9/11 Bush era where artists felt they had to be political, but often forgot to also write good tunes (The Flaming Lips’ LP At War With The Mystics being a prime example). Then Confessions on a Dance Floor had a great lead single (‘Hung Up’) that dwarfed the rest of the album. And Hard Candy is mostly remembered for Madonna’s appropriation of hip hop style rather than the music.

And then in 2012 came MDNA…and let’s focus on that title first. It’s sort of clever – the DNA of Madonna – but also a very annoying reference to MDMA. At the time Madonna was in her mid-50s and way too smart to be taking the most-least fun drug there is (well, aside from cocaine). It’s a very obvious grab for youth and coolness – rather like if your uncle asked if you wanted to “smoke a doobie”.

So that’s the title. And then there’s the music, and there are two things going on here. The first is that Madonna doesn’t seem to be trying very hard. Lyrics like “No one can put out my fire / it’s coming down to the wire” and “DJ play my favorite song / DJ turn me on” are lazy to the extreme. The song titles alone – ‘Gang Bang’, ‘Girl Gone Wild’, ‘I Fucked Up’ – express and extreme lack of creativity or care.

Her choice of producers affirms this laziness. The best Madonna albums have a single person at the head, and usually it’s someone out of left field. So for Ray of Light it was William Orbit, who was mainly known in electronica circles. For Confessions on a Dance Floor you had Stuart Price, who at that stage was still an indie darling rather than a mainstream name.

But on MDNA no one is in charge. Orbit produces a few tracks, as do a few Eurodance DJs like Martin Solveig and Benny Benassi. Really, it feels like Madonna is just downloading pre-

06

made backing tracks, rather than creating something with an original character. In fact, a lot of the album reminds me of Aqua (the group behind ‘Barbie Girl’) but without the campiness that made them so memorable.

Which brings us to the second main failing of MDNA: that Madonna is trying to copy other people, rather than creating her own thing. In this instance, Madonna is pretending to be Lady Gaga, but without the effort, wit and weirdness that Gaga brings to her work. Guest appearances by M.I.A. and Nicki Minaj only add to the sense that she’s trying to be something she’s not – like a rich person buying friends, rather than making their own.

But is this the worst album of all time? No – because it would be impossible for someone as talented as Madonna to do that. But it might well be her worst album, and I’d 100% recommend that you never listen to MDNA: it’s a cheap, synthetic drug, and it’s not been cut with anything good.

words by andrew anderson. illustration by kate prior

The Beginning: On Site

The official End of the Road 2022 Loud And Quiet field guide

Going to a festival at the best of times can be a bit overwhelming, but especially when it’s as stacked as End of the Road. The lineup is ridiculous, there are arts and crafts to do, there’s loads of lovely food and there are peacocks wandering about. Where do you begin with a weekend like that?

Well, fear not. As veterans of EOTR, we know how to enjoy it properly. So here’s our EOTR 2022 field guide – if you finish the weekend having caught a glimpse of all of these artists, weirdos and legends, you’ll have had a good time.

The Shovel Dance Collective procession Before their opening set on the Woods Stage, radical folk group Shovel Dance Collective will be marching, banners aloft, through Larmer Tree Gardens to gather their audience. You should be part of the congregation.

Across the site, then the Woods, Friday The silliest-sounding lineup of the weekend Joe and the Shitboys, followed by Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, topped off by DJs from some newsletter called Loud and Noise or something. They’re just making this bollocks up now.

Tipi, Thursday The cover stars of this magazine It’s an obvious one, but you really should see Jockstrap. They’re really, really good. Debut album I Love You Jennifer B is one of the most eclectic and invigorating records of the year, and their live show just gets better every time. Don’t miss it.

The Boat, Saturday That guy off Twitter You know the one who films himself in his flat in Deptford doing impressions of celebrities. No, not the posh one. No, not the one who always pretends to be a Tory MP. No, not the other posh one.

Yeah, the other one. The one who’s actually quite funny. Alistair Green, that’s it.

Talking Heads, Saturday

Ringo: Music Bingo in the Cider Bus We don’t know either tbh, but music, bingo and drinking are all nice and fun, so this will probably be worth a punt.

Cider Bus, Friday The L&Q stage 12 Always keen to make ourselves the centre of attention, we’ve commandeered the Big Top on Sunday and filled it with a load of our favourite bands, including Yard Act, SCALPING and Deathcrash. Look out for the nerds near the front – that’ll be us, so come and say hello.

Big Top, Sunday That naked man from last year You know the one who wandered across the Garden Stage area first thing each morning? Who looked a bit like Gandalf with his knob out? Was I the only one who saw him?

Anywhere, anytime Naima Bock in The Garden Once the nude wizard has done his rounds, you can safely re-enter the Garden for Naima Bock. Her debut album Giant Palm is a lush, understated gem – perfect for an afternoon set in one of EOTR’s most beautiful spots.

Garden Stage, Friday Wake Up Singing Can you think of anything better for your hangover than getting up to sing loudly with a load of strangers in a forest? Well, it’s there if you change your mind.

Wonderlawns, every morning The Chisel If Wake Up Singing doesn’t blow away the cobwebs, The Chisel will take care of that. UK hardcore punk from the DIY scene that gave us Chubby and the Gang, they don’t mess about.

Tipi, Friday

The EOTR curator’s day of cinema Founder and curator of End of the Road, Simon Taffe, has programmed Sunday’s schedule in the cinema tent. He knows his way around a lineup, and with the likes of Licorice Pizza and Summer of Soul among his selections, it’s guaranteed to be good.

Cinema, Sunday

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words by danny canter. illustration by kate prior

“For fans of Rudimentary Peni, Crass, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Screamers, Abwarts, Stooges and all things aggressively tilted towards your face.

You can lean back but don’t flinch…it’s a brief foray into the exhausting pogo pit so stiffen your back and jerk with your knees. Enjoy – JPD”

“Breathlessly brilliant stuff” **** MOJO

Out in all good stores Aug 12th Castle Face CD / LP / LP Ltd

UNDER SIDED

20 YEAR ANNIVERSARY REISSUE

Available as a limited edition 4LP Boxset that contains a couple of live/rehearsal CDs exclusive to this set, a big ole 24 page 12x12" booklet..featuring words and pics. A Slipmat, and some stickers.. in a numbered box!

Also available as a delicious double LP reissue..on colour in colour vinyl / in a big paste on gatefold.. nice..

And as a double CD with booklet.

Two rare live outings from the band in September.. don’t miss out!!

info@fortedistribution.co.uk

High Vis It’s shit, but we’ll get through it,

by Dominic Haley. Photography by Tom Porter

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It might have just gone lunchtime, but the Auld Shillelagh already feels like a furnace. Making my way inside the Stoke Newington pub, the two patrons sitting by the bar look as if they’re wilting; they wipe beads of sweat from their sets and sigh impatiently as the bar person waits to top up their drinks. I find High Vis singer Graham Sayle sitting towards the back. Unlike everyone else, he seems almost un-bothered by the temperature. Having spent the night at an NTS party near his home on Gillett Square, he simultaneously nurses a Gunness and a pint of coke. “It was a good night,” he says, smiling almost apologetically, “but I’m starting to feel it now.”

One by one, the rest of the band appear, grab drinks from the bar and join us at the table. As a group of people, High Vis are a diverse bunch. Sayle, with his calm, thoughtful Liverpool accent, cuts a very different figure to drummers Edward ‘Ski’ Harper and guitarist Rob Hammeren’s urgent Guildford tones or second guitarist Martin McNamara’s broad Southern Irish brogue. The one thing that they have in common is music. The band’s roots lie in London’s hardcore scene, a place that is going gangbusters right now. From the distinctively blue-collar sound of Chubby and the Gang to the more internet-inspired Powerplant, I don’t think there has been a time in recent history where so much variety has existed in UK punk.

“London’s always had its own thing going on,” says Sayle, flashing a gold-toothed smile when I ask about his experiences on the frontline of the capital’s hardcore scene. Moving to the city from Liverpool in the early 2010s, he’s witnessed the scene’s evolution over the past decade. “People tend to see hardcore as intimidating or unwelcoming, but on the inside, it’s not. I’ve always found that people have always been open to all sorts of different stuff because hardcore is just a set of rules we impose on ourselves. It’s down to you; if you want to break the framework, people will still accept it. Hardcore kids usually go with anything; they’re much harder to scare than most other people.”

Yet, even among a crop of bands falling over each other to push the genre as far as it can go, High Vis is a bit of an anomaly.

It’s not only their music, a frankly out-there melding of Judge style Youth Crew, Sisters of Mercy-like goth and ’90s Britpop but also their outlook that balances the positive vibes of ’90s hardcore with a more kitchen-sink sense of social realism.

High Vis never set out to mix Factory Records and CroMags, though; it’s just kind of happened that way. When I ask them about the inspirations behind the sound, the band just glance at each other and shrug. “It definitely isn’t anything selfconscious; we didn’t set out to be cool or have a really distinctive sound,” offers Hammeren eventually, still looking at his bandmates for validation. Getting a collective nod, he continues, “I think we’ve always been more concerned with the idea of playing music that comes from the heart. We’ve always believed that if the music sounds good, then it doesn’t matter where it comes from.”

“A lot of hardcore comes from just one emotion, and that emotion is anger”, agrees Sayle, jumping in. “It’s quite easy to hide behind that and say, ‘This is me; I’m angry all the time and not get any deeper.’ That’s fine, but ultimately when you start delving into the reasons why you’re so angry, you start needing to find other ways to express yourself. That’s where some of this

comes from, a need to bring other elements into the mix to be able to explore other ideas. It’s quite alien, and it’s quite scary, but personally, I think it’s a place that I needed to go to.”

— The dog hated it — As with so many punk bands, the seeds of High Vis are to be found in the demise of previous punk bands. In this case, the story starts at the end of Dirty Money, an old-school, politically-aware thrash hardcore band that featured Sayle as its lead singer. It was via one of the band’s tours in Germany that Sayle met Ski, a drummer and songwriter who was working on a new set of more gothy, post-punk-inspired songs and in need of someone to croon over the top. “At first, I was like ‘You what?’, laughs Sayle recalling the moment his bandmate pitched the idea to him. “But thinking back, it was clear I was looking to do something that wasn’t just hardcore. Back then, I didn’t really know what it was, but as it turns out, it was this.

“You know what? That’s what’s been really nice about it,” adds Ski. “I feel like the best music comes from people who don’t know what they’re doing; it means that you’re always on edge and finding things out as you go – you almost have to toe this line and play with a different level of energy or intensity. Doing this has forced all of us out of our comfort zones; none of us was fucking comfortable playing this type of music at the beginning.”

High Vis’s 2019 debut No Sense No Feeling captures the band in its early days. Determined not to be constrained by selfimposed genre rules and regulations, the record instead saw the band incorporating a range of other influences, producing a claustrophobic, almost paranoid collection of songs. Bearing traces of Bauhaus, The Cure and UK Subs, a style that Sayle describes as ‘post-industrial misery punk’. Written in the various members’ bedrooms and on a diet of the Chromatics, the Wipers and a parade of never-ending culture wars courtesy of the British government, it has a decidedly more frosty sound than the band has nowadays.

“A lot of those songs were written right at the start of the band, when we were still trying to figure things out,” says Hammeren as the band conducts an impromptu post-mortem on the record. “The period between 2016 and 2019 felt like such a chaotic time, and I think some of that got reflected onto the record. That’s probably the big reason why we ended up sounding so miserable.”

“I think we were really anxious, making that record; we weren’t really sure if we were doing the right thing or not,” adds Ski. “I think that’s why when you listen to it, the record sounds the way it does, it’s like manifesting our anxiety and stress.”

“That’s true,” Hammeren nods. “I think we have a lot more swagger these days.”

“You can’t say that you’ve got swagger!” chimes Sayle, affecting a pitch-perfect air of false outrage. “Other people can say that you’ve got swagger, but you can’t say it.”

Unfortunately, timing has not been High Vis’ friend. With No Sense No Feeling released in December 2019, the band played just a couple of shows before the whole world was shut down by coronavirus. Even though Ski and Sayle managed to get back

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“I was thinking, ‘This is fucking sick, it’s really taking off’, and the day after, we went into lockdown”

into the studio in 2020 and recorded the excellent synth-driven Society Exists EP, when the band talk about their early experiences, it’s hard not to detect a lingering sense of frustration. “I can remember playing one show at The Social and it going off,” recalls MacNamara. “I was thinking, ‘This is fucking sick, it’s really taking off ’, and the day after, we went into lockdown. It was like, ‘Thanks, life.’”

Despite an enforced period of inactivity, the pandemic doesn’t appear to have halted High Vis’ trajectory. As soon as it was safe to get back out there, the band started playing gigs, and they have built a solid rep as one of the UK’s most fearsome live acts. As with all the best punk acts, High Vis are at their sharpest when they’re on stage. Over the past twelve months, the band has developed a devoted following mainly due to a string of intense, small-venue gigs and a relentless live show that they’ve fined-tuned through relentless practice and attention to detail.

“It’s been fucking hard work, let me tell you,” explains Ski. “Sometimes we’ve played to one person and a dog, and the dog hated it, but we’ve all felt like it’s something that we need to do.”

— No finish line — Like everyone else, High Vis aren’t the same people they were before the pandemic. Blending, the band’s forthcoming new album, sees the band moving even further away from the hardcore blueprint. The first record that the whole band has worked on, this album finds the band throwing caution to the wind and embracing an ever-widening range of textures, stylistic flourishes and structures. Whether it’s the warm glow of ‘Shame’ or the lazy, almost C86-esque jangle of ‘Trauma Bonds’, this record is High Vis truly beginning to sound like themselves, fusing the street-wise punk of the capital’s punk scene with the psychedelic haze and melodic pop that typifies the North West’s indie scene. It could be the world’s first flower-core record.

Discussing the story behind the record, Sayle eagerly spells out how the roots of this new sense of direction connect to the aftermath of the band’s debut album. “No Sense No Feeling was a bit of an anti-climax, coming out when it did.

We just thought no one listened to it, and though ‘Oh well, we’ve done that, let’s move on, and then we didn’t.’ The Society Exists EP accurately depicted where we were at the time; hopeless, miserable, tired. I remember sinking a bottle of Johnny Walker while trying to do the vocals; it was fucking horrible.

“Then, halfway through the lockdown, we started to sort ourselves out,” he continues. “I started talking to people and began to stop being so self-destructive. It was like coming out from under a cloud, where we suddenly could be positive about the future; that’s when we started writing these songs.”

Interestingly, Blending adds dance-like elements to the High

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Vis formula. Throughout the record, songs build again and again and always feel as if they’re searching for an epic, almost euphoric conclusion. If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost say that the band were mining inspiration from Modjo and Roger Sanchez as much as Black Flag and the Stone Roses. Sayle’s eyes light up when I put this to the band. “Both myself and Ski really love dance music,” he beams. “I’ve always seen punk as a bit of a dirty little secret that I’ve kept separate from all my mates who I go raving with, and I wanted to make something that pushes those two elements together.”

However, Blending still keeps some of the grit and grime of the first record. In all their incarnations, the members of High Vis have gravitated towards a politically-conscious outlook, and this album is no different. The tunes might be more melodic, but the lyrics remain as sardonic as ever, with Sayle speaking frankly about the poverty, class politics and institutional neglect that still blight modern Britain. This time, the anger seems tempered by a sense of perspective and understanding. It’s a remarkable level of emotional maturity not seen on your usual hardcore 12” and delivers a record that can feel almost contemplative at times. A good example is the recent single ‘Talk For Hours’, a track that the band refer to as a sobering reflection on endless conversations without resolution. While the frustration is clearly still there, the song’s warm production and hopeful chord progressions give it a sense of commune. It’s a friendly hug in a song, a mate who says, “Yeah, it’s shit, but we’ll get through it.”

When I ask the band to tell me where they think this new outlook stems from, Sayle puts it bluntly, “I went to therapy.”

Upfront about a lifetime of unresolved shame and regret, the singer credits Ski, who recently qualified as a therapist, for pointing him in the right direction. “I think it’s really helped me to reflect on everything; what I want to do, what I want to be known for, what I want to put out into the world. It’s been amazing to finally have this time to think and discover the person I want to be.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m still working on it, but I’m in such a better place to talk about things,” he says as one of his bandmates hands him another drink. He pauses for a moment, taking a sip. “There’s no finish line, but at least I seem to be heading in the right direction.”

DoomCannon A seasoned jazz musician learning to be true to himself,

by Shrey Kathuria. Photography

by Denisha Anderson

Having refined a diverse range of artistic strategies and aesthetic textures during his time in numerous jazz-inspired outfits across the UK, including Project Karnak, Triforce and several more, South London producer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Dominic Canning tackles a range of social and political issues on his new album as DoomCannon, Renaissance. Although it’s his debut as a solo artist, Renaissance is arguably the apogee of Canning’s already-impressive career as a jazz musician. On this record, he assumes his role as a commentator uncovering social injustices through the lens of his Black British identity.

Renaissance collages a range of forward-thinking instrumentations, its atmosphere alternating between melancholia and reflection. It is an exercise in world-building, a sonic utopia devoid of the UK’s systemic racism and colonial legacy, and abundant with equality, humanity and community spirit. As an artist of colour who grew up dabbling in flute and percussion from a very early age and trained himself in piano as a teenager, DoomCannon finds it crucial to make musical work that challenges our existing systems of power. “[Renaissance] is London’s journey through the dark ages when trust in government is zero to one,” he says of his motivation for this record. “As a Black British artist, I always felt the need to comment on racism that prevails in London. Due to the lack of space in the scene, it has been challenging to get the right message across.” Much of the initial motivation for the record came from the global outcry at the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the subsequent mobilisation of the Black Lives Matter movement that summer. “Renaissance is about me reviving and finding myself as an artist [in that context]; about me fitting into these shoes and pulling on my experiences.”

As a session musician, Canning has garnered the attention of award-winning vocalist, Celeste, who invited him to become her musical director, performing live at the Brit Awards and later with Jools Holland. Having been a regular collaborator with numerous musicians throughout his career, it has been challenging for Canning to place himself at the centre of this new solo record. “It’s a process that has allowed a lot of learning and unlearning since 2017,” he comments. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Sons of Kemet, J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar, Canning’s songwriting is an expression of his frustration at police brutality against the Black community. Yet there

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is also optimism to be found on the album, embodied by a track like ‘Amalgamation’ embodies – which is also his favourite on the album. “[Although] I am terrible at naming songs, ‘Amalgamation’ [as a title] just felt right. The arc that the song took and how it developed just struck a chord with me.”

Canning is already held in high regard as a frontrunner in the much-feted London jazz scene, having toured as a member of Nubya Garcia’s band and curated a residency at legendary club Ronnie Scott’s. “The London scene is diverse,” he says. “But this diversity is getting increasingly overlooked. There has been a shift in the sound. [Most contemporary London jazz outfits] are sounding more refined, the production is superior. However, the leaning is not towards the African culture anymore. [My] past collaborations have allowed me to touch upon the politics and challenges of being a Black British artist but not address them directly. I feel this album has allowed me to be honest to myself.”

DoomCannon has a voice, and on this record, he is not shying away from amplifying it to narrate stories that matter.

Ever since the conception of this album, his key motivation has been “honesty – [this album] is my letter to London about how it raised me and shaped who I am today. It is a documentation of my thoughts that I have been struggling with for a long time now. I believe that in order to make an honest record, it is necessary to immerse yourself in the experience before making music or stories around it. It’s almost like therapy.”

Renaissance initiates a dialogue, providing a beautiful outlet of emotions. A beginning, not an end. A document of DoomCannon’s experiences since 2017, it aspires to build an accessible sound that narrates a profound message of equality and humanity on a global level. DoomCannon aims to be around for the long run, pushing boundaries and continually reimagining the sound of contemporary jazz.

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Blood Six punks, one house and the new normal, by Ben Lynch

For an act that relied on live shows not just for the thrill but as a sounding board for new material, an extended period of forced isolation for the post-punk sextet Blood may have proven fatal.

While being restricted to the Philadelphia home shared by all six members did prove disruptive, it seems however that the insularity may have also allowed them to grow.

Formed in Austin, Texas, in 2017 by vocalist Tim O’Brien, Blood found their feet amongst the thriving noise/punk scene developing there at the time. Initiated as a fresh project by Tim following years of playing in other local acts, early attempts to find new band members included searching via Craigslist, which is where Tim found drummer Tyler Wolff. The current iteration, which also includes Ben McCamman-McGinnis (guitar), Caleb Parker (piano), Julian McCamman-McGinnis (guitar), Nino Soberon (bass/cello) and Zach Malett (synths and saxophone), was landed on over the course of late 2018 and early 2019.

Calling from a sunny Memphis, in the midst of the band’s current U.S. tour around new three-track EP, Bye Bye, Tim nods to the “really supportive community” in Austin as key to Blood’s early development, with the live scene in particular integral to their sound and ethos. That influence is particularly notable on their debut EP, 2020’s Why Wait Till ’55, We Might Not Even Be Alive, four tracks replete with an atmosphere and ferocity that’s audibly been forged in the heat of a gig.

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Yet as the pandemic raged, the band began looking with increasing interest towards the East Coast, partly because it’s easier to tour there – the cities are closer together – partly because most of the members originate from that part of America.

In early 2021, the decision was made to move to Philadelphia and hole up in a house which also acts as their de facto rehearsal space and recording studio. A potential recipe for disaster, the band say that instead it forced them to reconsider their sound, and to approach their songwriting detached from the heat and the eyes present when on stage.

Tim says: “[We] became a lot more intimate, a lot more like a community and we started having mental health checkins, and became much more of like a band/co-living situation.

Through that whole time, through the pandemic, we’ve just been writing non-stop, recording non-stop, and have just gotten a lot closer and really changed our sound a lot through the pandemic.

Being closed-off from the world, and figuring out our sound, what turns us on, and what is interesting to us.”

The new EP, which came out in July via London-based label Permanent Creeps, is a big step forward both in its performances and songwriting when compared to their 2020 debut.

Opener ‘Money Worries’ is a caustic post-punk depiction of a letter Tim imagined sending to a previous landlord, written while in the midst of serious housing concerns, while closer ‘Borstal Field’ is a brooding and menacing piece about a kid spending time in prison, influenced by the novel Borstal Boy by Irish writer Brendan Behan.

The EP’s highlight, however, is its middle track, ‘Luck’.

An electric amalgamation of anxious guitar lines and an explosive, almost euphoric finale, it tells the tale, in Tim’s words, of “people’s sense of religiousness about musicians that they worship, and artists and idols”.

He continues: “I think there’s a growing sense of animosity towards celebrity, but what remains and has only gotten worse is people getting out of touch with themselves and with their friends and family and the people around them, and everyone associating by the reference points of famous people and strangers.”

With “two or three” albums worth of music written since Bye Bye was all wrapped up and finished, Tim and Zach say that the band’s aim now is to get a full-length out by next spring, schedules and global catastrophes permitting. Having lent into their ‘new normal’ and successfully found a groove as a new, more insular outfit, the pair say the group now just need to work out how to assemble what they have into something coherent.

“Even if it just ends up being eight songs or something,” said Tim, “it’s really about assembling something cohesive, and together, that we’re proud of.”

Featuring tracks by

Between the Music Volume One

Captain Beefheart Blaze Foley Chuck Jackson Link Wray Michael Hurley and many more

A flawlessly curated compilation of hidden gems – presented by End of the Road Festival Out 16.09.22 – Released on End of the Road Records – Double Vinyl and CD pre-order: endoftheroadfestival.com

Sofie Royer

A harlequin pirouetting through New York, Paris and Vienna, by Tristan Gatward. Photography by Kyle Keese Sometimes, it feels like it’s Sofie Royer and her keyboard against the world. She’s been a concert violinist, a DJ, a founding member of Boiler Room and a music industry executive for her current record label Stones Throw; to brand her a modernday renaissance woman feels like a short sell. Now, she’s a singer marauding in Pierrot makeup – a paper white face and apple red cheeks – performing a wretched waltz through Viennese squares, Parisienne streets and New York dive bars along to songs about debts accrued at racing tracks, assuasive colours on a paint chart and the steadily-snowballing police state.

Her delivery is almost karaoke-like, the moment your favourite sitcom protagonist breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to you, both jarring and mesmerising. Sofie’s selfproduced debut album Cult Survivor had the same taking-themic approach; it’s like listening to half an hour of a friend’s

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well-told stories of surreal heartache, feeling unsure as to whether to chip in. Two years later, on her new album Harlequin’s lead single, she’s getting married to the music video’s director within the music video. All the while, the two apples on her painted white cheeks make her look like a mechanical ballerina from an old-fashioned toy box.

“I feel more protected when I put the make-up on,” Sofie says, sitting on the floor of her mother’s house in the Alps, nestling against the foot of the sofa. “It’s a nice way for me to be able to separate being on stage with real life. There’s something really interesting to me about performing and being able to convey so many emotions at once. I was bored of the traditional way in which musicians would perform as normal musicians, you know, without any theatrics.” She pauses on her words a little. “I think I’m more interested in marrying these different disciplines as an

artist and conveying that in my performance. Not just standing there mumbling words into a microphone. I think that would really bore me.”

It’s a look that’s gone beyond her album artwork; she’s adopted it on stage for the few occasions that she’s managed to perform between lockdowns. “I think what’s interesting to me, not only about the character of the Harlequin but also about the Pierrot – the sad mime, the clown – these figures and archetypes kind of embody both the trickster and the pantomime. You know, you can be this entertainer but you’re also kind of a swindler, there’s a bit of mischief. Pierrot’s maybe the sad clown and Harlequin’s the cheat. I really do identify with them both. I think the interesting thing about it is the duality. But a large part of why I choose to do it like this is also just to entertain myself,” she laughs.

Her philosophy is such: a wrangled self-assurance that twists its way through the most ordinary anxieties. Her music is a constant coming-of-age that plaits the assured indestructibility of youth with a torrid navigation of its undulations; she fondly refers to it as the Holden Caulfield-ification of her existence. And these contradictions that live within the faces of sad clowns, depressed entertainers, bards of the bedsit and poets of pessimism are contradictions that live freely in Vienna, too. Sofie’s spent many of her formative years there and is based there now, studying Psychology, Philosophy and English as a Teaching Degree, and painting at the University of Applied Art. “I really enjoy living in Vienna,” she says. “I think there’s some semblance of being creative without having so much external pressure. There’s less of a scene there, especially musically.

I don’t have a lot of peers in Vienna, which has its upsides and downsides. I’m able to develop in my own direction… these past four years have been significant for that. Without having the outside influence of where I used to live: Los Angeles or London or New York or Paris. But I have enjoyed being in Paris more recently and being able to work more there too.”

My own familiarity with Vienna doesn’t extend beyond a couple of casual visits, stuck in the sickly glaze of Mozart and Klimt honeypots, a Leonard Cohen song that cites ten pretty women and a tree where the doves go to die, and a lost memory of Adam Baker stealing my Viennese whirls in Year Two. “For sure it’s haunted by its traditions and its history,” Sofie says, “but I really enjoy Arthur Schnitzler, Thomas Bernhard, and a lot of significant authors that I think have really mined the Austrian tragedy over the years. It’s an antiquated space but there’s a lot of interesting information and history to delve back upon. You get the tourist exploits, sure, but it’s like going to London and seeing the Queen and Buckingham Palace.”

A lot of the songs on Harlequin are grounded in place and experience. ‘Love Park’ is a park in Philadelphia, ‘Feeling Bad Forsyth Street’ is set on Forsyth Street in New York. “I think beyond just Vienna I write songs as a means of dealing with experiences I’ve had,” Sofie says, “they’re here and they’re there but they’re always somewhere.” As a polymath, Sofie has had to redefine her own space, too. She’s said previously that she’s never thought of herself as a singer in the way that a lot of pop stars are singers, but laughs when I bring it up.

“I guess I really have to pack that sentence up and never say it again,” she beams. “We’re two records in and I keep telling people I don’t even sing. I think it’s because I feel like a musician first and foremost; I didn’t grow up singing much besides in church and the choir, but I was never a soloist. My primary access to music was as a violinist from a really early age. To then just be called a singer-songwriter almost doesn’t do my history and dedication to music justice, because I know a lot of singers who don’t play any instruments, don’t write their own songs, don’t produce their own music. I think I might have felt a little reticence there. But it might be time to retire that given it is what I’m doing on stage.

“I had a show of paintings in Salzburg a few months ago,” she adds. “When I was making a lot of these paintings, it almost felt like the more clarity one has in their art, the more that almost slips away in what we think of as reality. This ability to be able to express yourself, to tap into what it takes to be a creative, definitely comes with a price. Honestly, what the hell am I doing sometimes?”

It’s not a rhetorical question so much as it’s a genuine wonder. But what she’s doing is distorting a tradition of leftfield pop music in a way that feels genuinely timeless. Harlequin is an alt-pop masterpiece in the least dramatic sense of the overused word; at times it conquers the wistful surf-rock of George Harrison, yet still confounds the void between the New Romantics and reappraised sophisti-pop with all the character studies of Jane Birkin.

“That’s the one thing I really do stand behind with the music I’m making,” she says. “I’m not necessarily trying to make music that’s for today. I want people to listen to it in three decades and it still bangs like Steely Dan or Todd Rundgren. I really just want to make beautiful pop songs.

“That’s the whole thing about being a musician, why it’s so nice to hear you say that in Sofie and her keyboard against the world, I’m winning the fight… because I don’t necessarily feel that way. I don’t even mean to sound jaded but it’s kind of a burden. I work to supplement my income. I am a really Sensitive Sally. I need more downtime but I don’t even know if that’s true because I work so much. And when you’re in the thick of it, you never know how it appears externally.” She lets out a prolonged sigh, which melds into a smirk, as if hearing her grievances for the first time. “To me, I’m just thinking that this is the weirdest struggle I’ve ever had, you know. Taking all this burden on for what? To be a clown on stage? It makes me well up thinking about it. Sometimes I lie in bed at night with total anxiety thinking I’m sacrificing a regular life just to be a clown? But then you do have affirming moments… When I’m on stage performing, it’s maybe the best thing ever.”

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Keeping it rough around the edges, by Jessica Wrigglesworth.

Photography by Cielito Vivas

Alex G Throughout Alex Giannascoli’s extensive body of work – nine albums in 12 years to be exact – the 29-year-old Pennsylvanian artist has had a knack for writing nuanced and memorable characters. The people who inhabit, narrate and sometimes title his songs – Mary, Harvey, Gretel, Sarah, Bobby, Sandy – feel intimate to the listener not because they’re fully drawn, but rather because Giannascoli (better known as Alex G) hones in on specific details and desires, tricking you into thinking you have the full picture, when in reality, you have a snapshot of a person who may or may not even be real.

It’s a device which, intentionally or otherwise, has meant that despite his prolificity and increasingly devout following – the Alex G subreddit has nearly 12,000 members – Giannascoli is still quite an enigmatic figure. Speaking to me over Zoom (camera off, as specified before the call) from his home in Philadelphia, he is friendly yet reserved, and I get the feeling he much prefers making music to talking about it, or doing pretty much anything else for that matter, as those nine albums – along with a movie soundtrack, plenty of demos and collaborations with the likes of Frank Ocean, Ryan Hemsworth and Oneohtrix Point Never – attest.

“I do think about stopping often,” Giannascoli tells me, when I ask if he ever takes a break from songwriting, “but I think it’s almost like an addiction or something – the affirmation

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that music gives you is pretty addicting. Every time I think of stopping, I get an idea for a song and I feel kind of compelled.”

Does the affirmation come from others, or is it a personal thing? “It definitely doesn’t come just from me, I think it comes with putting it out and showing it to other people and having people say, like, ‘good job’ or having people clap,” he laughs, but notes that he tries to avoid reading about himself on the internet. “I’ve been making an effort to not look at stuff online, because the negative things are not worth thinking about.”

Giannascoli’s early output epitomised the lo-fi, ‘bedroom’ aesthetic which was burgeoning at the beginning of the last decade, as sites like SoundCloud and Bandcamp made it easier for DIY artists to share their work with a wider audience.

Growing up in Philadelphia, his older siblings had first introduced him to alternative music.

“My older brother is really musically gifted. He brought a lot of instruments into the house when I was kid and my older sister also listened to a lot of music, and turned me on to a lot of artists that were doing things that were a little more underground or DIY or something, making music in a way that wasn’t really professional or produced. So it made me realise how I could maybe fit into that world.” It was his sister (Rachel Giannascoli, an artist who also makes the artwork for Alex G’s records) who played him Modest Mouse, a band which became a key early

influence. “That was one of the first bands I really fell in love with,” he says. “I still like them a lot, but especially as a kid, they have such a chaotic style, it’s kind of inspiring – because I didn’t really know how to play guitar that well, but I could make music that sort of fit that vibe. It was really rough around the edges, you know?”

As a teenager he formed a band with some friends, Sam and Colin Acchione (the former still tours with him to this day) and began to play regularly in local venues, all the while working on solo stuff in his free time and recording it on his computer.

“We played a lot of shows,” he recalls. “And that was how I became more entrenched in the Philadelphia music scene, or at least my local scene, and I would give out CDs at the shows and stuff like that.”

I wonder when he first became aware of the traction his music was getting outside of this tight-knit Philadelphia scene and he is characteristically humble. “I guess maybe the album DSU was the first time I felt like it was, and even then I wasn’t sure how far out I was getting because we played in Baltimore and New York, which are pretty close to Philly. As far as I knew, it was like people just in those cities buying or listening to the stuff, but it was the first time a record label put out any of my music, and it was this small label called Orchid Tapes based in New York.”

In fact, DSU, which came out in summer 2014, reached a lot farther than Baltimore – Pitchfork gave it a very respectable rating of 7.9, calling it “worthy of its moment”, and when Lucky Number put it out in the UK later that year, The Guardian published a 4-star review comparing Giannascoli to Pavement’s

Stephen Malkmus. At this point, he was 21 and a college student, taking English Literature at Philadelphia’s Temple University, a degree he completed despite his growing status as “the internet’s secret best songwriter.” His love of fiction is well documented; in the run up to his last album House Of Sugar, he had a quote from Donna Tartt’s 2014 Pulitzer-winning coming-of-age novelThe Goldfinch on his website. Currently, as he prepares to release his next album God Save The Animals, there’s a picture of one of Joy Williams’ Ninety-Nine Stories Of God titled ‘A Little Prayer’, a parable of sorts which hints at where the album’s title might have come from. Given his obvious love of writing and propensity for storytelling, I ask if he ever writes fiction, and he says he does, but has no plans on sharing it any time soon.

“I always try but I’m so bad at it. It’s not as easy as writing music because I guess with music you can leave a lot for the listeners’ imagination. There’s a really strong technical craft in fiction writing in addition to just the creative aspect of it, and I just don’t have that technical skill, but maybe one day.”

As well as Joy Williams, Giannascoli credits the contemporary folk musician Gillian Welch as an inspiration for God Save The Animals.“That was an artist that I newly discovered when I was making this record and, and I just really fell in love with her stuff. I feel like her influence is pretty apparent, at least to me, on songs like ‘Mission’ or ‘Miracles.’”

On both tracks, you can feel the significance of Welch’s impact in the arrangements – bluegrass-y guitars and strings, as well as the high-pitched harmonies – even if some of those elements were already integral to the complex, multi-timbral makeup of the classic Alex G sound.

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— Jesus is my lawyer — In many ways, God Save The Animals is a quintessential Alex G album, filled with songs that earworm their way into your brain until you feel like you’ve heard them forever, and offkilter subjects approached with specificity and ambiguity at the same time. It’s by far the cleanest sounding thing he’s ever made though, having been recorded at various studios and produced in collaboration with various sound engineers. There’s also a sort of overarching theme, namely faith and religion, which sets it apart from Giannascoli’s previous releases, although he says this is less of a conscious decision than an accidental one.

“I wrote a bunch of songs over the course of a couple years, and then sticking them all together, I realised there was kind of a theme, but it wasn’t really a decision. And I’m not sure if there’s a real unified message or anything, it just sort of happens to have that imagery pop up, I guess.”

Religion does crop up throughout the record, and not just in the title. “People come and people go, but God with me he stayed,” Giannascoli sings on album opener ‘After All’, and later, on ‘S.D.O.S’, comes the line “God is my designer, Jesus is my lawyer,” followed by tracks titled ‘Blessing’, ‘Miracles’ and ‘Forgive’. The recurring references to God and faith could be seen as surprising for an artist who has never appeared to be particularly pious; sex, drugs and violence have been regular themes in his work, and continue to crop up in God Save The Animals. But Giannascoli tells me he’s not religious himself.

“I don’t have a strong sense of religion, because I wasn’t raised religious, but I guess it’s something that started to become interesting to me in the past few years. It’s always been interesting to me, but maybe Christianity in particular, started to interest me. I guess some people close to me have recently either found religion or have started to have serious thoughts about religion. But it’s not something that I personally practise.”

God Save The Animals isn’t the first release Giannascoli has put out in 2022. His fans were thrilled when, almost three years after his 2019 record House of Sugar – the longest period without an Alex G release since he started making music – it was announced that he had written the score for We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, the Jane Schoenbrun-directed horror movie about a teenage girl who gets wrapped up in a bizarre internet challenge. Schoenbrun has said that she was listening to a lot of Alex G whilst writing the film, and his slightly jarring tone matches her eerie, off-kilter aesthetic perfectly. I ask Giannascoli if he had a brief for the score, or whether Schoenberg left him to it. “[She] reached out and just asked if I’d be interested, and sent me the movie, which was mostly edited, and I really liked it.

So I said I was down, and then for the next month or two, I would just go scene-by-scene and she would give me tonal guidelines, like ‘This scene is suspenseful’, or ‘In this scene, the music should be happy’. It was pretty collaborative with the director – I would send her something, and she’d say whether it was on the right track or not, and I’d change it according to what she said.”

Would he do another film score? “It was a lot of work,” he says. “But I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed the regimented structure

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where I would just sit down every day and make something and I wouldn’t have to wait for my own ideas to come because the director already had the ideas, and it was just up to me to make the simply make the music, you know, not have to worry about lyrics, et cetera.”

He echoes this sentiment when I ask him about his collaborations with other musicians like Oneohtrix Point Never and Frank Ocean (as well as contributing to Ocean’s Blonde album, Giannascoli has played in his touring band).

“I love when other people need me to do something,” he laughs, “It’s nice, because it’s just helping them accomplish whatever they want to accomplish. And I’m happy to use whatever I know to help them with that.”

Given his openness to collaboration, it’s interesting that no one – other than his partner, the violinist Molly Germer – has ever featured on an Alex G track. “I guess I don’t see the reason for it in my own stuff,” he tells me. “Because when I’m making something I kind of know what I want to do with it, so I don’t have a reason to reach out.”

Despite his audience growing exponentially, he’s still making music in the same way as he always has. “I think my approach has been pretty much the same,” he admits. “I approached it from the beginning with the idea that people would be listening, you know, whether it’s a mass of people or just a couple of people.” It’s this quiet confidence that has perhaps made Giannascoli one of the most prolific and singular artists of his time, and endeared him to so many people.

OUT 23.09.2022

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Coby Sey

Post-grime, post-punk, people power.

Words by Luke Cartledge, interview conducted

by Mike Vinti, photography by Eleonora C. Collini 24

He says it himself: Coby Sey isn’t afraid to take his time. His debut album, Conduit, has been five years in the making, and he’s deliberately avoided committing to music full-time for most of that period, so he can keep his passion for it pure. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been busy.

The obvious place to begin a discussion of Coby Sey’s work is with his collaborations. From Mica Levi to Kwes via Klein, Kelly Lee Owens and Kevin Martin, Sey has been a consistently innovative figure on the experimental fringes of London’s underground music scene for several years now. He plays in Tirzah’s live band as well as working closely on her records, and has contributed vocals and production to records by the likes of Babyfather and Cosha. He’s also worked extensively on film scores, most notably for Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Small Axe anthology in 2020. Around his day job as a web developer and designer, those projects have kept him more than busy enough for the last few years.

“I’ve been working on this album for quite a while, but I [also] haven’t been working on it,” he says. “I mean, I started working on it in 2017, but I’ve taken five years, because I was busy working with other people for their projects. That’s pretty much the reason why it’s taken this long. But you also have to recognise the realities of attempting to work as a musician or within the arts. In London, in the UK. It’s not easy. We reside in a society that isn’t set up for finding another way around the whole nine-to-five office job.”

On Conduit, the influences of all of Sey’s activities – professional, personal, musical – are clearly audible. The restless energy of the whole project is consonant with the rhythm and physicality of city life, evoking ideas breathlessly finished off before running for the bus to work; Sey’s aesthetic curiosity is reminiscent of his many experimental contemporaries; the complexity and cohesion of the record is testament to the amount of time and care that’s been invested in its creation.

Sey is very conscious of the way that his life and experiences seep into his work. “I think that kind of awareness comes from me just being really into music and being into people,” he reflects. “Not only being into the music, but knowing how people perceive music. Whether it’s from an artist’s point of view, a producer’s point of view, or an audience’s point of view – I’m genuinely interested in that. We don’t live in a vacuum, so there’s always going to be some sort of dialogue between all those different parts [of life]. You can’t have one without the others.”

— Deep dive — Conduit draws upon a rich lineage of British music, from post-punk to grime via off-kilter, Aphex-y electronica. Yet more than British more widely, much of Sey’s work feels hyperlocal, focused intently on Lewisham and the South East London suburbs where grew up. The dense-yet-sprawling nature of that

part of the city, from the modernist estates of Peckham and Deptford to the tight cul-de-sacs of Bellingham and Catford, looms heavily over this music; Coby Sey is audibly engaged with his home turf.

“No doubt,” he nods. “It’s interesting – I always wonder whether to describe myself with an adjective or a noun. Something like ‘British’ is a broad term – it can mean stuff that we love, it could mean stuff that we hate. It raises interesting questions: like, okay, what is British music? What is music that couldn’t be made anywhere else but the UK? “But I’m easy with that side of things. I think I’d be more interested to know what other people’s definitions of that stuff are about. It would be disingenuous, it’d be a bit of a lie for me to not sort of recognise that [other people have different perspectives] as well. Because it’s not just British music – like I’m in London, but I’m of Ghanaian heritage as well, and even within London, it’s a big place, with north, east, south, west, southeast, south-west, it’s specific. You can always narrow it further, do a deep dive.”

The genre tag that gets thrown around the most when Sey’s work is discussed is ‘post-grime’ – and that’s geographically and culturally specific too. Just as the original grime movement was intimately connected with the shifting character of the estates of Hackney and Tottenham, much of the music that has followed in its footsteps, including the related but divergent strands of UK drill and afroswing, is tied intimately to its surroundings. Look at how inseparable 67 are from their Brixton Hill roots, or Novelist’s crew The Square, so vital to the resurgence of grime in the mid-2010s, were from Lewisham.

Coby Sey is doing something different to those groups, but he’s drawing upon many of the same fundamental influences, and his work is just as inextricable from its physical setting.

“There are some musicians within what we know as grime that I’m really into – like Kano is one of the most important ones for me,” he says. “The Butterz crew, I think they’re great; D Double E, of course. But would I consider myself post-grime? I don’t know. I like that it reminds me of post-punk, you know, because grime and punk have been compared for a long time.

It’s almost like comparing your Joy Divisions and your Certain Ratios to, like, The Clash. You can see the link but you can hear the difference in their intentions and what they’re inspired by.

But it’s one of those things – it depends what side of the bed one wakes up on, whether you see it as a benefit or as a hidden hindrance. It changes all the time for me; I think the key thing for me is to not be completely oblivious to it, but not to feel like I have to typecast or limit myself.”

Many of the artists Coby Sey mentions here could be understood as part of the ‘musical lineage’ he explicitly talks about in the press materials for the album. When asked to go into more detail on what he means by that – on who is part of that lineage, and how the tradition is passed along – he’s very forthcoming.

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“I’ve always been a bit of a weirdo. To know that other people are into the same sort of thing is such a good feeling”

“I think of Tricky, I think of Cocteau Twins, MBV. I think of what my mates have created in recent years – Mica [Levi], my brother, Kwes. And going back further, the stuff I was into through my teens, that questioned what I was involved in then, like Miles Davis and Meshell Ndegeocello. I’m definitely aware of the weight that comes in releasing an LP. And for me, it’s about continuing and honouring a legacy.”

— Pick your battles — The interview is conducted right in the middle of the UK government’s summer 2022 collapse, following an overdue resignation from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, so naturally, the conversation turns to the state of the country.

“What a mess,” he laments. “But these problems were there even before 2010 [the year the current period of Conservative rule began]. It’s just exhausting, exasperating.”

Does he see a way back? A bright future for ordinary people in the UK? “Yeah – I mean, I have to. And what I mean by that is that it’s something that we have to take on ourselves, because we all have a stake in this matter, even if it feels like we don’t. To me that means people power. I like to think I allude to that and talk about it in my own way on the track ‘Onus’; maybe other tracks on the album too, like ‘Permeated Secrets’ and ‘Dial Square (Confront)’. But I’m also mindful that that can mean different things to different people, depending on their headspace, depending on what they can do. Especially being somewhere where there’s a lot of pressure to survive, to make ends meet. I sort of think all of it can count in some way, and ultimately it’s about being aware of our ability to change things, and to find a way to be perpetual and persistent.

“And I have to admit, like, I did buy a bottle of Coca-Cola yesterday. Did I need it? Probably not. But me choosing not to purchase that, I think that’s a way of helping – you’ve got to

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pick your battles. And just knowing that every little decision that we take, however small or large, it counts. So it’s good to be aware of that and see how that can help change things, and sort things out.”

He’s reluctant to be too prescriptive about how his fellow artists and musicians could be part of those changes. “I’d say ‘can’ rather than ‘should’. But you can literally do anything. But I think reflecting what’s within them as well as around them; some people are able to do both, some people just one or the other.

Being aware of that, and knowing that people are listening.”

With the new album coming out on leftfield label AD 93, and many of his projects occupying an experimental space far from the glare of the most nakedly profit-driven, exploitative parts of the music industry, it feels like Sey is secure enough in his niche to decide for himself how he wants to improve the world around him, even if he’s less comfortable telling others what they should be doing. Conscious of the relatively challenging nature of his music (“I know it’s not Ed Sheeran or Ariana Grande”), he seems content to maintain a cult following, at least for now. But he’s also frank about the fact that that’s the result of his natural inclinations rather than a conscious decision.

“I’ve always been a bit of a weirdo. I’m attempting to say it as it is and be positive!” he clarifies quickly. “When [London independent radio station] NTS started, it grew out of a night called Nuts To Soup, and I remember when I found out that Nuts To Soup were starting a radio station, I breathed a sigh of relief that this was an outlet for people who were just as supercurious as me about music from wherever. To know that other people were into that sort of thing was such a good feeling. As to whether something gets more well-known – you know, whether I have a cult following or a bigger following – it’s not something I’m specifically aiming for. But if it did, I’d just be like, ‘Wow…’”

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Ravyn Lenae

The next version of the here and now, by Sope Soetan.

Photography by Sophie Barloc

There has long been a tradition of avant-garde Black women using music as an avenue to curate worlds of their own design.

In 1997, Erykah Badu would introduce us to Baduizm, a haven designed to get one high and be reminded of their divine purpose.

Ten years later, Janelle Monae transported her audience to a planet named Metropolis, an industrialised dystopia enforcing a quell on queer love and self-expression. Fast forward to 2022, Ravyn Lenae is picking up the mantle with Hypnos – an esoteric universe where all its inhabitants operate under a dream-like state of mind.

Hypnos is the culmination of Ravyn’s fascination with astronomy, the cosmos and the extra-terrestrial coming together as a fully-realised concept. Since the dawn of her career with 2015’s Moon Shoes and 2017’s Midnight Moonlight, the moon, the stars and the galaxies have been a key motif across the majority of her output.

“I don’t know where it came from, but I have this really big fixation on whatever is up there. Whatever our eyes can’t see and our skin can’t feel,” she says. “I try to go to those places when making music, because as people what raises our curiosity the most about life is what happens afterwards.”

That fixation has contributed significantly to the establishment of her signature sound. ‘Everything Above’, ‘Unknown’, ‘Thirst’ and ‘Something in the Air’ were early examples of tracks that sonically seemed to exist in a dimension untethered to time, space and matter, but it is on ‘Deep In The World’, from the new record, which sees Ravyn most successfully conjure a feeling of supernatural transcendence.

With its celestial and sparse production helmed by chief Noname collaborator Phoelix, and Ravyn’s satiny delivery, ‘Deep In The World’ is an aural representation of life on an undiscovered planet. “I wanted that song to feel like a shrooms trip, where you are in the next version of whatever the here and now is. Imagining a topsy-turvy world where things are slightly off, but still feel beautiful with the ability to breathe underwater.” As the song most harmonious with the album’s concept of euphoria, it lyrically advocates mindfulness. “That song is about tapping into my full potential as a being. It’s an ode to Earth, myself and the spirit. Being thankful for life, water, air, love, and music.”

Although it’s remarkable that common threads across Ravyn’s back catalogue can already be charted, it’s very important to note that Hypnos is her long-awaited debut album. At a mere 23 years old with four acclaimed projects to her name and tours with Noname and SZA under her belt, Ravyn Lenae is already closing in on nearly a decade in the industry. Yet in some ways it still feels like we’re at the outset of her career, with

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the prospect of what she’s fully capable of still years away. It’s a testament to how the lofty expectations surrounding a debut album have considerably lessened over the past decade. Rather than symbolising the definitive arrival of an artist fully primed, they’ve now become another building block in their journey as they continue to find themselves.

It’s a sentiment that Ravyn recognises when asked why she’s only now releasing a full-length album, noting that after the breakthrough that came with ‘Sticky’ and the Crush EP in 2018, its follow-up couldn’t be another short project. “I knew after the Crush era started to simmer, that the next thing I did had to be an album.”

— Like family — Hypnos reunites Ravyn with The Internet’s Steve Lacy, who produced the entirety of Crush. Their impeccable chemistry is in full force on ‘Cameo’ – a masterclass in raw and unadulterated punk-funk. The energy in the studio when the song first came to be was so potent that Ravyn momentarily underwent an out-of-body experience: “Once Steve put that bassline down, the whole room just felt like it was sizzling and levitating.”

With Lacy contributing a further five tracks to the album, it’s evident that he’s become one of Ravyn’s core producers.

Though Ravyn has occasionally worked with other producers, the lion’s share of her work has been the result of a strong partnership she has formed with Monte Booker. Indicating a preference to maintain a relatively self-contained creative unit, governed by authentic relationships, as opposed to someone’s perceived currency or status. “I’m not the type of musician that can just session around with random people. It’s a very intimate thing for me, an energy exchange that I take seriously. I’ve now built a trust and friendship with Steve and, like Monte, he’s become family.”

Booker is responsible for what triumphantly stands tall as the album’s shining star, the delightfully eerie, unorthodox ‘Venom’. Worlds away from anything Ravyn and Booker have previously done, it pulls pages from a plethora of dissonant songbooks, marrying together the progressive funk sounds of Funkadelic, Prince and Outkast, the foreboding synth-pop of Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Eurythmics with soundscapes characteristic of alternative R&B pioneers J*Davey. “It feels like a lot of different things at once, yet it sounds like something that’s never been done before. I wanted something that felt very femme fatale and cinematic but still very punk and grungy.”

Ravyn has always remarked that most of her songs aren’t personal; they’re more like the manifestos of the fictional characters she’s created to express whatever a song is calling it to do. ‘Cameo’ and ‘Venom’, like ‘Recess’ and ‘Deep In The World’, certainly follow in this vein, but there’s a greater sense of sexuality and femininity that clearly picks up where Crush left off, suggesting that the lines between her reality and creative license are being blurred. “The way I write music has become way more vulnerable than it would have been a few years ago. What you’re getting now is definitely Ravyn Lenae. I’m getting older and starting to experience certain things whether it be with myself,

men or even family. It’s only natural that the songs start to cover all that.”

The spiritually uplifting ‘Inside Out’ in particular is a marker of that veil being lifted as she continues to grow into her womanhood. As well as anecdotes about sex and relationships, she highlights the growing pains that come with inevitable periods of insecurity and internal skepticism. Echoing the emotional properties of gospel-laced ballads like Mariah Carey’s ‘Butterfly’, ‘Inside Out’ is a powerfully affirmative tribute to self-love.

Ravyn’s brilliance as a songwriter is most apparent on this track as it draws on ideas pertaining to familial history and the power of given names; she illustrates the need to keep pressing on in a way that recalls Janet Jackson’s anthem of Black solidarity, ‘Can’t Be Stopped’.

“That song serves as a love letter to who I am and the people I come from,” she says. “[It’s about] putting some respect on my own name, especially as a Black person where it feels like the world wants to humble us all the time.” These notions are further explored on ‘Where I’m From’ featuring Mereba, a rootsy folk track grappling with the singular experience AfricanAmericans know all too well – that of not knowing the origins of their cultural bloodlines and heritage.

Asked why she specifically sought out Mereba to join her, she explains: “Her father is Ethiopian, but she doesn’t know the lineage of her mother. It was cool to have that perspective of knowing half of where she comes from but still yearning for that sense of the unknown that many African Americans experience.” While themes of lineage are central to ‘Inside Out’ and ‘Where I’m From’, in a more abstract way they were crucial to the very existence of Hypnos as a whole. Janet Jackson, Kelis, Destiny’s Child, Deniece Williams and Minnie Riperton have all been cited by Ravyn as part of the genealogy that influenced the look, sound and feel of the album – and she doesn’t feel that it does a disservice to her own uniqueness to acknowledge that.

“I’ve found people get weird about stating the people they’re inspired by, but I think it’s a beautiful thing when you have such an amazing, strong pedigree of Black women who paved the way. Knowing our history and looking to that to inform what we have now is so important as an artist.”

The chamber and orchestral soul Minnie Riperton created with Charles Stepney on her 1970 album Come To My Garden abundantly looms over Hypnos’ closing track, ‘Wish’.

“When I wrote it, it felt like Minnie but also that climax in a Disney movie where everything is revealed to the main character. When they can see all the lessons they’ve learned on their journey.” The ballad’s theatrical properties with its graceful and lush string ornamentations deliberately ends with what classical music specialists would call an imperfect and abrupt cadence. “I approached that song like it was the end of a journey, but with the promise of another. That’s why the song never really feels like it’s complete.”

That’s appropriately symbolic of what Hypnos represents at this stage in the story of Ravyn Lenae: a massive leap into unknown territory, her wings growing on the way down in the knowledge that there is more for her to yield as an artist and a woman.

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Let’s call it Earth music, by Michelle Kambasha Photography by Kyle Johnson

Khruangbin Khruangbin call from Boise, Idaho. It’s a state known for its beautiful, vertigo-inducing mountains, a neverending landscape, and of course its agriculture – it’s the number one producer of potatoes in the United States.

It’s fitting that this evening they will play a sold-out show at the city’s Botanical Gardens. Most touring bands are used to playing grubby-cum-charming purpose-built venues and live on the diet of hummus, carrot sticks and other miscellaneous crudite; not so glamorous. It’s important to earn these stripes – Khruangbin still play venues like this – but gracious to be afforded a welcome break from them too.

After all, they’ve just returned to the USA from Europe where they played and litany of sold-out headline shows and standout festival performances at the likes of Spain’s riotous Primavera Sound, Glastonbury’s rural farmland and as headliners at Cross The Tracks, held in Brixton, London’s populous, multi-ethnic epicentre.

“The festivals were highlights of the tour, everywhere had a different vibe and [Cross The Tracks] was way bigger than I thought it was going to be!” says lead singer and bassist Laura Lee, in-keeping with her air of humility. “Touring will always be hard in some sense, but if you’ve paid your dues it does get nicer,” adding once more: “[Boise] is gorgeous.”

In the past few years, Khruangbin have gained legions of fans around the world. Having released their debut album The Universe Smiles Upon You in 2015, it was the second album, Con Todo El Mundo (2018), released on the hugely successful independent label Dead Oceans, that truly caught the attention of music fans worldwide. Their next releases, Morchechai (2020), and most recently two collaborative EPs, Texas Sun and Texas Moon, with neo-soul artist Leon Bridges (an ode to the artists’ home state), charted in the top 50 both the UK and US. It marked a culmination of supernatural talent and ten-plus years of hard graft.

It’s not so often that artists like Khruangbin, reach these commercial inclines. Often described as ‘world music’ (more on that controversial term later), they genre-blend generously merging influences from Thailand (in their earlier music), Korea and the 1960s and ’70s psychedelic funk of the States, the latter being evident in their breakout track ‘Everyone Finds the Third

Room’. Part of their success may be down to the fact that they’re not intimidating; the reputation of musicians and fans with such far-reaching knowledge of subversive genres is that they’re High Fidelity-style know-it-alls who like testing your knowledge and disposing of folks who can’t reach the mark. But Khruangbin’s mentality feels more ‘come one, come all’; they’re not just musicians, but willing, welcoming and persuasive educators. It’s a mindset that runs through the fabric of the band, which is what makes them so convincing.

“Each one of us has knowledge of specific genres of music,” says guitarist Mark Speer, the band’s crate-digging obscurity specialist. “Then there is a Venn diagram where all of these things come together.” This is the key to Khruangbin – their differences in taste, personality and even opinion enhance the variety in their music. It feels like a no-judgement zone; it’s apt that before they were a band they were friends, laying a foundation to comfortably explore with one another.

“It’s not anything that’s forced, it’s by design,” says drummer Donald ‘DJ’ Johnson. Naturally then, this unforcedness emanates to audiences – and that is intentional. “We use the difference in us as a band to bring together differences in our audience,” says Johnson, noting that their audience intersects in multiple diversity lines from age, sex, race and culture.

— You know what to do — All this leads us to how Ali, Khruangbin’s new collaborative album with Vieux Farka Touré, came to be. The son of the revered Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who passed away in 2006, Vieux was looking for the perfect collaborators to continue spreading his father’s work.

At the peak of his influence, Ali was dubbed the African John Lee Hooker, integrating African American Mississippi blues with the language and style of Malian music to create what came to be known as desert blues. Now, Vieux is a musician in his own right, but for years he was reluctant to become one, wary of the weight of expectation.

“It’s difficult to follow in the footsteps of someone who has been to the top of the mountain,” he told Songlines earlier this year. Developing the confidence and forging his own identity

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produced fruitful results which earned him his own sobriquet: The Hendrix of the Sahara. The pipeline from John Lee Hooker’s blues to Jimi Hendrix’s rock and roll is apparent, but the distinction between the two artists resulted in Vieux being respected in his own right, and sealing the approval from the public he so craved.

Vieux’s vision of Malian music was always steeped in sky blue thinking with a view to globalise it. He chose to use the Western artists as a vehicle to spread the music of his people. He performed with Alicia Keys and Shakira at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa (though socio-political allegiances like these have a short shelf life), and has since worked with the likes of Dave Matthews and John Schofield.

Now 40, he’s in the mood for retrospective thinking, and he’s not the only one who has been. In the past decade, the appetite for African music has grown exponentially in the west. Of course, legacy African artists like South Africa’s Miriam Makeba and Nigeria’s Fela Kuti, and Ali himself, have reached a certain level of notoriety and recognisability outside Africa (the former partly due to her marriage to the African American civil rights activist and leader of the Black Panther Party Stokely Carmichael), but better accessibility – mediated via online exposure, regular collaboration and constant work – has accelerated this recognition in the past couple of decades. Think Damon Albarn’s Africa Express, the unlikely surge of the music of William Onyeabor in 2014, Tinariwen, and labels like Awesome Tapes from Africa.

Jumping on this wave, around 2019, Vieux sought to reinvigorate his father’s legacy. The record would always be a twoartist collaboration album, but with who? Off the back of Con Todo El Mundo, Khruangbin had begun playing to larger and larger audiences and had caught the eye of Vieux’s manager.

On top of their success, crucially, they are a young band, with a viable currency that appeals to a younger audience, unlike the more established artists he’d worked with before. After seeing them live and being impressed by their musicianship, he was sold. “I was impressed by their London show and their ability as musicians. I knew we’d make a special record together that honoured my father.”

Khruangbin agreed: there was a sense of importance in doing the record, and fitted with the ethos of the band, it felt like them. It’s not that there wasn’t slight trepidation; in fact, ironically there was a sense of imposter syndrome most often felt by those like Vieux who don’t ‘fit’ into the image of the western world, was teeming within them. “He works a lot faster than we do” says DJ, “and we’d wonder ‘Did that sound ok? We only did two takes!’”

At times he’d hand the baton over to them and say, “You know what to do”, and they’d covertly look at each other with question-mark eyes. Vieux’s take on recording is endearing, showing the trust he had in the band as artists even when they may not have felt it internally. “We would play around a little bit with it, then push record and voila!” he says.

If the record is anything to go by, they certainly did know what to do. Put simply, Ali is a stunning body of work. Lead single ‘Savanne’ has an air of suspense; the track’s smoothness goes through your body in the form of a deep bassline, meander-

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ing guitar and the gentleness of Vieux’s sung and spoken words.

Vieux’s particular favourite interpretation on Ali is ‘Tongo Barra’. “It is so funky and different from the original, and such a nice blend of Malian and American style” The album does feel like a harmonious and synchronised blend. Despite the obvious distinctions between the work of Khruangbin, Vieux and Ali’s work, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell where these musicians as individuals begin and end.

This sense of harmony is an extended metaphor for how both Khruangbin and Vieux want Malian, African and other forms of music to meld: they want to make world music, that is actually world music, in that it’s experienced as something that is expansive rather than cordoned off to wily white record collecting obsessives or oxymoronic ‘world music’ categories in major American award shows.

“It’s an old and dated term,” says Vieux. “I mean, my music is much more closely related to American rock, blues and funk than anywhere in, say, parts of Asia and even parts of Africa. Either you should just call music, music or be more specific as to where it’s from – [otherwise] it disrespects the diversity of music outside of the west.”

Despite this suggestion, Vieux adds that he doesn’t really know the solution to this linguistic problem, but as westerners themselves (though the members of Khruangbin are diverse in their own right), they’re doing their bit to make sure artists that they work or come into contact with are properly credited. They use their significant platform to shine a light on talent from around the world; for example, the album artwork for Ali is by Malian artist and contemporary of Ali, Abdoulaye Konate.

We speak a little about the recent successes of commercial African artists like Burna Boy, Tems and Uncle Waffles and Hispanic artists like Bad Bunny and Ozuna – is this perhaps a sign of progress?

“It does feel like everything is slowly opening up,” says DJ, “and people are realising that there are gems everywhere.”

In their own discussions, Khruangbin have changed the expression of all music to ‘Earth music’, a term that may appear similar to, but crucially doesn’t have the baggage of, ‘world music’. “It’s Earth music because we’re all here,” Lee exclaims.

You don’t have to physically be there to feel and be moved

by Earth music; the beauty of it is that it entices curiosity far greater than the arbitrary labels that have far too often divided and dampened how we experience culture. After our interview, Khruangbin will go on to play their brand of Earth music in Idaho, greeting an audience which has been relatively underexposed to non-western artists. When they tour Ali across the world with Vieux, they’ll introduce the masterful work of one of Africa’s most lauded musicians to a variety of people who will experience the essence of music before its genre, and hopefully find something that resonates with them in spite of the distance and time.

“My father was a very important figure in Mali. He is a big source of pride and inspiration for the people there,” says Vieux. “My responsibility is to take care of his legacy and move it forward to the next generation and I hope that with Khruangbin, I can spread it even further around the world.”

“We use the difference in us as a band to bring together differences in our audience”

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Albums

Rina Sawayama — Hold The Girl (dirty hit) It seems inevitable that we might try teasing out autobiographical details from a Rina Sawayama record. The artist has continually fashioned narratives about familial strife, sexuality, race and identity into some of the best music categorised under the hyperpop banner, garnering collaborations with artists as diverse as Charli XCX and Elton John – but the run-up to the release of her second album, Hold The Girl, has found her being a little more elusive. “For me, it’s important that the listener is able to listen to it as a pop record first”, she told Rolling Stone, “and then, when I’m ready, I think I will be able to talk about what it’s actually about.”

To that effect, the album is certainly very easy on the ears. Hold The Girl is another unabashed pop record, created in the image of 2000-2010s chart music.

While it should be said that Sawayama, as well as her co-producer Adam Crisp (aka Clarence Clarity, a hyperpop picaro in his own right), are highly competent songwriters, a more insipid read of the Sawayama project might call it an elaborate exercise in TRL-core – which is to say, empty nostalgia. Since her debut SAWAYAMA hit, countless reviews have noted fitting comparisons to artists as stylistically diverse as Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, Evanescence and Linkin Park. Though at the time, particularly if like Sawayama you are now between the ages of 28 and 32, the landscape of music could often be very weird, unrestricted by genre to the point where these acts could easily share the same prominent airtime on MTV without much complaint from a listening audience. As an artist, Sawayama either revels in the contrast of nu metal riffs and sugary-sweet hooks, or is simply unbothered by the distinction; it’s just what pop music is, and has been

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for decades. What’s more, it’s a fascinating proposition of what pop music could sound like going forward, if music streaming has indeed eliminated labels and borders altogether and replaced it with a voracious magpie approach to listening.

The first taste of Hold The Girl fits the bill in that regard. Its first single ‘This Hell’, a song which whole-heartedly embraces the queer club night aesthetic, draws on the deceptive nature of Sawayama’s most striking work, steeping itself in ironic reference until it breaks through into sincerity again. You could almost run down the song like a checklist of queer-coded pop: digital church bells inspired by Steps’ ‘Tragedy’ (if not perhaps directly sampled from the song itself); allusions to how the press played fast and loose with the lives Britney, Lady Di and Whitney; a down-the-barrel Paris Hilton quotation (“That’s hot”); and most barefaced of all, Shania Twain’s immortal “Let’s go girls”. What’s chintzy or cheesy about pop music is duly weaponised into a cornucopia of defiant joy, slyly winking at conservatism as if to say, if heaven is real and not meant for the likes of us, we never wanted admission anyway.

But ‘This Hell’ belies what the rest of Hold The Girl is really like – which, compared to SAWAYAMA, is a little more subdued on its face. Her debut was a touch more bombastic, more saturated, but surprisingly the more measured tone of Hold The Girl is not to its detriment.

It feels more mature and introspective, a heady cocktail stilled, its flavour nonetheless just as outlandish and refreshing.

The topic of religious persecution pops up time and time again, another animating force added to Sawayama’s vibrant pop memoir. ‘Holy’ channels Cascada-esque Eurodance with a thunderous percussive run and a rousing chorus (“I was innocent when you said I was evil / I took your stones and built a cathedral”). On the other end of the artist’s sonic spectrum we have ‘Send My Love To John’, a Swiftian bit of acoustic guitar-led storytelling – Taylor Swift’s Folklore seems to have been an inspiration – told from the perspective of

a remorseful parent, belatedly trying to make amends with their queer child after disowning them for their sexuality. It’s an interesting switch-up of the paradigm, her past paeans to pastoral care among queer communities like ‘Chosen Family’ happening somewhere just off-screen from a very different narrative about coming to understand a loved one’s needs and desires when it may already be too late.

‘Forgiveness’ offers an ambiguous retort with an orchestral pop swing, and yet another massive chorus – “Sometimes I blame you, sometimes I don’t / Sometimes it flips so fast I don’t know”.

The messy religious themes of guilt, selfloathing, soul-searching and acceptance all across Hold The Girl may resonate with anyone brought up feeling at odds with the culture surrounding them, whether in the shadow of the church or not. The album begins with ‘Minor Feelings’, a song which speaks to this kind of displacement with more universal language that, not unlike the SAWAYAMA opener ‘Dynasty’, neatly acts as an overture for what’s to follow: “All my life I’ve felt out of place / All my life I’ve been saving face / All these minor feelings are majorly breaking me down”. The music itself crashes around these revelatory statements, Sawayama’s vocal interwoven with an autotuned double. There’s a grand, pained, cathartic drama to it all; a transformative event that shunts your entire life into context.

If Sawayama’s work has always been a loving meta-commentary on the liberatory nature of pop music, Hold The Girl feels like her most genuine statement of that fact. The therapeutic unpacking that occurs across the album is a reminder that, for many of us – Sawayama included, I suspect – pop music offers a stage on which you are permitted to imagine yourself as someone other than what society expects you to be. Hold The Girl is a phrase that feels especially instructive when placed in the context of the song of the same name: “Teach me the words I used to know / Yeah I forgot them long ago,” sings Sawayama over a rumbling organ drone, which eventually bursts into grooves of R&B acoustic guitar and

Albums spacey disco swells. Embrace the openness you lost, she seems to say, and never lose it again.

Even where conflicts of faith are not directly presented across the album, the desire to break away more broadly still features prominently, offering some of the album’s highlights. Unlike the debut, nu metal-inspired tracks make a brief but heightened appearance with the likes of ‘Your Age’, an industrial rock send up that sounds a little like ‘Closer’

by Nine Inch Nails, more concerned with the “parents suck” strain of ’90s metal culture than it is about animalistic sex.

Its main takeaway is a sense of heretical fun. ‘Catch Me in the Air’ brushes against high school radio rock parody in the vein of Kelly Clarkson or something that could’ve been performed in The Bait Shop venue on The OC, which Sawayama absolutely sells as big dreamer anthem – “Hey there little girl, don’t you want to see the world”. ‘Hurricanes’ feels twinned with the song in tone and atmosphere, like a cut from a particularly fruitful writing session, wielding yet another stellar chorus played out against sideways rain guitars. It’s another example of the excellent production at Sawayama’s disposal, at once gut-wrenchingly nostalgic and yet somehow much more than that – it feels like a rare treat to hear something so unapologetically uplifting and so devoid of market cynicism.

Sawayama may not be ready to speak on what Hold The Girl is “really about”, but in many ways it speaks for itself – and in big, bold language at that.

It follows the ebb and flow of a productive therapy programme – a little storytelling, some role-play, revelations big and small – exploring less a single trauma than a neural network of nodes overlapping and responding to one another. For Sawayama, the sounds of pop’s past and present provide a handy tool for mining personal histories, their vocabularies of youthful angst and escape re-contextualised into profound statements of selfdiscovery. Pop can be about as ‘dangerous’ as conservative mindsets believe it is – at its very best, it can poke and prod at institutions and societal inventions taken as

innate, and often, you don’t need to sit with it for very long to understand what it’s getting at. 9/10 Dafydd Jenkins

Various Artists — Cruise! (moves) There’s something exciting happening in Lagos. Not that that’s new – over the past decade in particular, the Nigerian capital has consistently boasted one of the most exciting, innovative new music scenes on the planet, with the unmistakable influence of Afrobeats over some of the biggest pop tracks the world over testifying to the international appeal of the city’s creative vitality. But it’s not just about the elegant hooks and bubbling rhythms of Burna Boy, Wizkid and Tems; in recent years artists like Boj and Cruel Santino have been developing the silky, sophisticated aesthetic of alté, and are increasingly garnering global attention for their work.

But back in the grassroots venues and parties of Lagos, another new genre is hot on the heels of such world-bestriding forebears: freebeat, also known as cruise.

It’s much more frenetic, aggressive stuff than a lot of recent Nigerian music, not only grounded in the DIY club culture of the capital, but continuing to be heavily focused on it too. This is music for tight, kinetic dancefloors, not arena shows or restaurant playlists, and much of the best of it is gathered onto this new compilation from Moves Recordings, a subsidiary of Marathon Artists A&R-ed by DJ and writer Ian McQuaid. Tracks from the likes of DJ Slimfit, DJ OP and DJ Stainless showcase the scene’s hectic, invigorating sound, which takes in elements of gqom, techno, amapiano and more, resulting in a battle-ready approach to percussion, bass and sample processing that’s entirely distinctive. To these ears, the sound that these freebeat tracks most often come closest to, perhaps more in attitude than

timbre, is the fidgety, dislocated groove of Chicago footwork, as peddled by the likes of RP Boo, Jlin and DJ Rashad. As soon as you feel you’re starting to understand the shape of this stuff though, it spins off in another direction entirely. As Skye Butchard’s deep dive feature into the scene in this issue demonstrates, there’s something special about these artists and what they’re doing right now, and Cruise! is an excellent introduction. 8/10 Luke Cartledge

Whitney — SPARK (secretly canadian) SPARK was built from more than just a burst of inspiration. Holing up in a Portland bungalow, Chicago duo Whitney rode the wave of their changing lives, with the passion to watch their past burn only to rise from the ashes as the motivating energy behind their third album. Their pop-focused sound is interlayered with folk and electronic elements that create a landscape record, a piece of work that lets simple beginnings shine through.

Their reflective lyrics carry a Rex Orange County-esque sense of emotion, and the falsetto vocals could fit right in with a new Unknown Mortal Orchestra record. Yet it’s the mixture of pop and lo-fi rock that melds the 12 tracks together. Waxing and waning with strings throughout, a dreaminess cuts through ‘MEMORY’; there is a simplicity to Whitney’s hooks which you can’t fault.

A sunshine atmosphere is the result of this, and you can picture yourself driving down the highway on ‘NEVER CROSSED MY MIND’, which feels like a sister to the bass-heavy ‘REAL LOVE’.

This uplifting, Doobie Brothersstyle approach continues in the record’s second half. ‘LOST CONTROL’ bounces along with a groovy bass and the wavey harmonies add a certain sheen. Floating

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Albums along with soothing melodies on ‘TWIRL’ and ‘HEART WILL BEAT’, the band draw close to the burning flames of their changing lives with their more laidback tracks.

Whitney have created an album that’s a neat document of what two friends can make in challenging times (even if it does come across as a bit cheesy like on ‘BACK THEN’); they’ve emerged from the smoke with a gleaming record. 7/10 Sophia McDonald

Roska — Peace (rks) Roska doesn’t put out many albums; he’s far too busy being a scene unto himself. Peace, his latest full-length, has arrived almost four years since his previous effort but judging by the quality of the output, the South London-based producer has put every second of the long gestation period to good use.

Peace is the product of an artist both returning to the club-friendly sounds of his younger days and looking for ways to push the genre forward.

Moving to the heartbeat of UK funky, with its four-to-the-floor drumbeat and Latin-style flourishes, the 12 tracks add layers of influences, guiding you Sherpalike through the intricacies of the modern British dance scene.

In lesser hands, this could end up being a bit confusing, but Roska’s genius has always been his ability to identify new flavours and add them to his sound.

Each track is like its own mini-masterpiece, so much so that it’s hard to pick a highlight. Gun to my head, I’d probably point towards ‘When It’s Gone’, a smoothed-out soul tune that features long-time collaborator Jamie George on vocals and recalls the Craig David and Artful Dodger team-up of yesteryear.

Then again, ‘Tumbling Down’ might just edge it. Featuring EMZ and Syren Rivers,

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its sunset, Balearic-style beats, and disco structure gives it the air of some long-lost off-cut from a Daft Punk record.

It’s been a while in the making, but with Peace, Roska may have delivered one of the most complete UK dance records of the last few years. Trust me – don’t sleep on this one. 9/10 Dominic Haley

Szun Waves — Earth Patterns (the leaf label) Szun Waves, the trio formed of analogue synth wizard Luke Abbott, Portico Quartet saxophonist Luke Wylie and drummer Laurence Pike, founder of Australian jazz experimentalists Triosk and currently of Liars, recorded this, their third full-length release, across three intense days of improvisation at the end of 2019, right before the youknow-what got in the way of them finishing it. Nearly three years on, and with help from label boss James Holden to get the record over the line, Earth Patterns clearly benefits from its slow gestation: where previous Szun Waves records have felt like snapshots of performance with an almost documentary approach, Earth Patterns has the kind of definite, deliberate form and atmosphere – earthbound and weather-beaten, yearning, devotional and rebellious – that tends only to arise from taking extended time to listen and sculpt.

It’s all the more persuasive as a result: the group’s trademark film-scoresoundscapes-with-free-jazz-overtones remains, but now that character oozes right across the seven tracks here, during which music feels rattled and shaken out of its instruments rather than just played, and a murky, exterior quality accordingly endures: this is music for the outdoors and dusk, with all the associated perceptual strangeness that goes with it. Wylie’s sax frequently resembles a soprano voice,

simultaneously shrieking and still, and Pike’s percussion rustles and glints like branches on the breeze. Timbres of an upright piano on ‘In the Moon House’ offer a concrete sense of place, and the thunderously brooding closer ‘Atomkerne’ offers a rather thrilling climax to a record otherwise full of simmer and shimmer, meticulously crafted for maximum impact. 9/10 Sam Walton

TSHA — Capricorn Sun (ninja tune) TSHA has been hard to miss these last 18 months, bouncing around various sets with the kind of sunshine energy you just want to bask in front of, and Capricorn Sun is a testament to that unabashedly bright, optimistic spirit. It’s there on ‘The Light’ with its sweet, soulful power vocals, soft steel drums, and dubby switch; on ‘Running’ with its reverbheavy guitar and big melodic swell; on ‘Power’ as it comes to life like one of her sets – all samples, funk and giddy breaks.

But TSHA is far from being one track. On ‘Water’, she pays tribute to Malian Griot singing, chopping it up with synth and rhythmic changes of pace. The pleading ‘Giving Up’ captures a strained period in her relationship with partner Mafro (who also features on the song) and reels you in with amen breaks and pitched falsetto. And ‘Time’, with its skittering layers of percussion and lo-fi vibe, starts out a little Four Tet, a little Bonobo, before slinking into one of the most satisfyingly low-end grooves you’ll hear all summer, and then kicks on into an acidinflected extension with a smooth, almost understated magic. If you aren’t hooked by this point, ‘Dancing in the Shadows’ moves in with a Jamie xx ‘Gosh’ liveliness before setting off for the stars in search of Underworld and The Chemical Brothers in an ambitious, accelerated rocket

Albums ride through British dance music’s past, present and future. TSHA’s just out here reimagining all of it, and it’s a truly joyous thing to behold. 9/10 Reef Younis

Ruby Goon — Brand New Power (phantasy sound) Sometimes you cook a meal and it’s just a bit… off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but the taste just isn’t right. All the ingredients are in there, you followed the recipe to the letter, but yet, there’s something missing.

A mysterious, delicious addition that would elevate the meal to new heights.

Brand New Power, the debut record from psych-popper Ruby Goon, suffers a similar fate. The album everso-slightly misses the mark at every turn, resulting in a perfectly pleasant, if slightly frustrating collection of songs that flatter to deceive time and time again.

On paper, opening track ‘The Globe’ should be a home run. A weirdo, tremolo-infused ditty? What’s not to love? Unfortunately, the reality is much more beige. By leaning too heavily into modern psych quirkiness the track ends up embodying the painfully twee underbelly of much of the genre; nobody wants that.

From here the album slips into a mediocre holding pattern. The almostthere pop of ‘The Tide’ and ‘Spicy Space Pasta’ are pleasant-enough affairs, but deep down you below the wonky trembles you can’t help but notice the distinct lack of that special something. A noticeable hole that demands to be filled by a sound other than pure funk nothingness.

To his credit, Ruby Goon is aware of this issue and seems determined to address the deficiency. The blues-infused ‘Leech!’, and the wild punk-funk of ‘Movie Groovie’ offer up a new spin on

his sound, but unfortunately the problem persists. While these tweaks offer a pleasant distraction from the issue at hand, they don’t resolve a thing. If anything these musical detours end up accentuating the mystery.

In the end, what we’re left with is a perfectly passable slab of psych-adjacent pop. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can’t help but feel that Brand New Power could have been so much more. Maybe Ruby Goon will find that missing ingredient next time out. 5/10 Jack Doherty

Sampa the Great — As Above, So Below (loma vista) There’s a slight Sasha Fierce vibe to the concept behind Sampa Tembo’s latest album as Sampa the Great. Described as uniting her outside self (As Above) and inner self (So Below), the album is an exploration of identity in the truest sense, rooted in reality and fantasy. Rather than Beyonce’s Sasha, though, Tembo’s alter ego is Eve. The character represents Tembo’s ideal self and is channeled throughout the album but, unlike Sasha Fierce, Eve never explicitly takes over; manifesting only in mind and spirit.

Written after relocating back to her home country of Zambia from Australia during the pandemic, it’s the celebration and appreciation of Tembo’s African heritage that is the album’s guiding force and it’s as authentic as it can possibly get. Tembo co-produced the record with Zambian producer Mag44 and collaborated with legendary African artists, including multi-Grammy-winning Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo and Emmanuel ‘Jagari’ Chanda of Zamrock band WITCH. Single ‘Never Forget’ pays homage to Zamrock – a genre combining

traditional Zambian music and psychrock that emerged in Zambia in the 1970s – and features Tembo’s own cousin Tio Nason and her sister Mwanjé.

As Above, So Below feels like Tembo at her best and most confident, free to make the music she’s always wanted to make with the artists of her choosing.

It’s a rich, vibrant and carefully-curated record that successfully reveals the many sides of Tembo’s personality. 8/10 Nadia Younes

Sudan Archives — Natural Brown Prom Queen (stones throw) Back in 2019, Brittney Parks, better known as Sudan Archives, had a big breakthrough.

A violinist since an early age, she became famous for her live-recorded looped strings, and confirmed her talent with her debut album, Athena, written from the point of view of a divine creature floating above the world.

Now, back with her sophomore work Natural Brown Prom Queen, Parks leaves the supernatural powers behind to become Britt, a not-so-fictional alterego, described as “the girl next door from Cincinnati who drives around the city with the top down and shows up to high-school prom in a pink furry bikini with her thong hanging out her denim skirt.” And more, “Natural Brown Prom Queen is about discovering your worth, and manifesting a life around that understanding. It’s about making progress – as a Black woman, as a partner, and as an individual.”

The call for a strong change, though, hasn’t been quite enough to make an equally strong album. Although there are tracks that mix impeccable production with a powerful message – as the title track, ‘Selfish Soul’, or ‘Homesick (Gorgeous & Arrogance)’ – there are

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Albums some, like ‘Ciara’, which fail to convey their meaning and turn into preposterous, almost caricatural fictions. And it’s a pity, because where lyrics are weak, the solid sound and superbly-crafted beats that distinguish this album and mark a significant step forward from Athena feel like a lost opportunity. 5/10 Guia Cortassa

Kiwi Jr. — Chopper (sub pop) Slacker rock has a shelf life – a surprisingly short one. Plaid-flavoured riffs are all well and good at first, but before long you find yourself slouching towards the pits of nostalgia with nowhere left to turn.

Kiwi Jr. are all too aware of this and are hellbent on doing whatever they can to avoid the unfortunate, fuzzy abyss.

Chopper, their third album in as many years, sees the group resetting their posture with ten tracks of surreal summer pop. The sun-drenched synthesisers of opener ‘Unspeakable Things’ showcases this change perfectly. Kiwi Jr. in 2022 are all about the melodies. An overwhelming, keyboard-driven glaze engulfs the band’s signature guitar hooks from the very first second, giving a refreshing, skew-wiff spin on a well-worn sound.

This new tone drips its way down the album, allowing the group to pull away from their past without losing their edge. ‘Night Vision’ and ‘Downtown Area Blues’ rumble along like the bastard lovechild of Jonathan Richman and Julian Casablancas, while the almost sinister Game Boy-isms of ‘Contract Killers’ show that, despite their new tuneful nature, Kiwi Jr. can still hang with the weirdos.

Even during their more old school moments, Kiwi Jr. manage to expertly swerve the threat of retro doom. ‘Clerical Sleep’ combines the sound of Kiwi Jr.’s past and present without ever slip-

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ping into the generic. The track is young, dumb and fun in the best possible way.

Replacements-infused aggro meshes perfectly with ice-cream-van keys, highlighting just how far the group have come in a few short years.

With Chopper, Kiwi Jr. have managed to extend their shelf life indefinitely, showing the world that they’re much more than mere slacker rock pretenders. 7/10 Jack Doherty

Coby Sey — Conduit (ad 93) Coby Sey’s name might be familiar as a crucial collaborator to Mica Levi and Tirzah, but his full-length debut reveals an entirely singular character. Conduit is a sonic outlier that sits on the fringes of grime, dub and jazz, wherein darkness and claustrophobia are often placed alongside moments of transcendence by a wunderkind producer. It is a bold contortion of its constituent parts, diverse and fresh from the very first confrontational vocal loop to the album’s piano-laden anti-ending.

Sey’s vocals – free-flowing passages of spoken word – guide his compositions, but the focus here is very much on the textural passages that envelop them. An imperious producer, the Lewisham native has constructed eight singular passages across the record, ranging from deconstructed grime and nocturnal ambient cityscapes to sprawling eldritch jazz.

‘Night Ride’ is a bioluminescent adventure in dub-techno, all TV static and 404 error codes, whilst opener ‘Etym’ begins with brazen bars – isolated vocals – before Sey’s voice is engulfed by a technicolour wall of glitching sound.

The best moment comes on ‘Response’, a ten-minute sprawl at the back end of the album. The unheimlich squalls of maltreated saxophones create an atmosphere of eeriness, which

only builds as reverb-laden beats and distant strings bleed into the fray.

“Active… active… ACTIVE,” Sey growls at the track’s peak, which is like Twin Peaks S3E8 made audio. This darkness, however, is quickly alleviated by the next track, misty-eyed closer ‘Eve (Anwummerɛ)’, a sparse, infinite piano meditation, coloured with the calming sensations of rainfall. Perhaps, these two pieces are ‘Conduit’ in microcosm – claustrophobia bubbles away throughout, but beauty and transcendence is never far away. 8/10 Cal Cashin

Lamin Fofana — Ballad Air & Fire / Shafts Of Sunlight / The Open Boat (black studies) Over a trilogy of albums released in quick succession, the artist Lamin Fofana has built a deeply thoughtful body of work which explores themes around the African diaspora, migration, and the occidentalisation of music theory. The Sierra Leonean musician and producer has chosen a piece of prose to accompany each part of the triptych; on the first, Ballad Air & Fire, he quotes the poem of the same name

by Amiri Baraka: “All the civilizations humans have built / (speed us up, we look like ants) / our whole lives lived in an inch / or two. And those few seconds / that we breathe / in that incredible speed / blurs of sight and sound / the wind’s theories.”

On the record’s two tracks, which act more like soundscapes, Fofana plays with white noise and long, pregnant pauses punctuated by distant instrumentation, emulating Bakara’s reflections on time and how subjective its passage can be.

The second release, Shafts Of Sunlight, is pitched as a response to the “violence and brutality of classical music theory and European imperialism and expansionism”. Part of Fofana’s

Albums approach seems to have been to eschew conventional melodic structures or tropes and instead create a sparse yet ambient sonic landscape.

The third and final record of the trilogy, The Open Boat, is the most evocative. The text Fofana has chosen to accompany it is taken from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage, a reflection on the line that can be traced between the Caribbean Islands and Africa historically, geographically and meteorologically. The frenetic drum beat on ‘Prelude (Sea Green Sea / Sidewalk of Clouds)’ is perhaps the most engaging moment in the series, adding a sense of urgency that the rest of the tracks (probably deliberately) lack. This is a project best treated as a piece of art that requires real focus – to a passive listener, the nuance may be lost among the white noise. 6/10 Jessica Wrigglesworth

Gabe Gurnsey — Diablo (phantasy sound) On his 2018 debut, Physical, Gabe Gurnsey was all about the blearyeyed climax to a woozy night out. Back then, his first act was to find some separation between himself and the bludgeoning industrial sound of former band, Factory Floor. The outcome was a pretty masterful combination of lustful intensity and austere cool that made that first album such a sleek, sultry listen.

Diablo continues to play in that physically-charged territory, but it’s less relentless, finding a rhythm in Gurnsey’s drum-honed muscle memory that allows for a little more of the Temazepam dreaming, red light melancholy to seep and contort around the unadulterated electro of the album’s 10 tracks.

Opener ‘Push’ pulls in all of the elements straight away with a clean beat, soft pads, bursts of synth and

plenty for longtime collaborator Tilly Morris to weave her icy vocals around.

It’s measured and clinical, but there are also a few flickers of flamboyance; it’s like Pet Shop Boys driving Knight Rider with Ladytron voicing Kit. ‘Hey Diablo’ hits a little more directly with Gurnsey’s vocals assuming the kind of electro cool Tiga has spent most of his career making look and sound effortless, whereas ‘You Remind Me’ pulses and throbs on a descending, dubby rhythm made for endless autobahn night drives.

At this stage, Gurnsey’s pretty much established his signature sound, finding the critical distance between icy detachment and hook-driven melody.

Steady, sexy, and a little menacing, Diablo is another unerringly glossy success. 9/10 Reef Younis

Oliver Sim — Hideous Bastard (young) Given his legendary status, it’s surprising to learn that Jimmy Somerville was ashamed of his voice in his younger years. That piercing countertenor wasn’t heard as angelic, but unmasculine, a quality to be rejected. Now, he fully adopts that guardian angel role for Oliver Sim on ‘Hideous’. “Be brave, have trust / Just be willing to be loved,” the angel calls.

Sim’s vocal is in conversation with Somerville’s throughout Hideous Bastard, shrinking into a guttural, dissociated rumble. “Voice fell down a couple of octaves / so far down I thought I’d lost it,” he sings on ‘Unreliable Narrator’. Sim presents himself as full of that shame – shame in his sexuality, in his positive HIV status, in his body.

Like many queer artists before him, he finds a way out of this shame through self-deprecation and an unapologetic reclamation of what might make him sick

and perverse in the eyes of homophobes.

Take the music video for ‘Hideous’, where Sim literally monsters himself during a sad and funny trip through a sex club in the netherworld.

The resulting album is a heartfelt journey towards self-acceptance, told through raw, minimal inversions of the classic pop sounds Bronski Beat pioneered decades ago. The record’s success comes in that slow-burning move to honesty.

On ‘Romance With A Memory’, the inherent silliness in his rumbling vocal masks a vulnerable acknowledgement that he can’t open up to partners; but later on the record, when Sim’s voice is unaffected, we can feel how exposed he is. ‘Saccharine’ is an open, earnest ballad, with no barriers in between Sim and the truth: “The moment I got that taste I felt naked and afraid / I’m right back to sugar-free with my heart under lock and key”.

The record’s final trio of songs underline Sim’s self-acceptance with joyful melodies and peaceful repurposings of the signature club-influenced sound of his band, The xx. ‘GMT’ opts for comforting warmth and humble verses, in a snapshot of Sim’s life improving in the everyday. ‘Fruit’ follows with a dramatic call to “take a bite” of what he’s been missing out on, complete with Somerville on backup vocals. It’s camp, overreaching, and exactly what this story needs. Then, on ‘Roll the Credits’, he’s back to being a horror film villain, happy in the role he was born to play. 8/10 Skye Butchard

NNAMDÏ — Please Have A Seat (secretly canadian) Nnamdï Ogbonnaya is a restless soul. In parallel with a solo career the Chicago multi-instrumentalist has drummed in math-rock band

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Albums Monobody, played bass for indie outfit Lala Lala, and is co-owner of Sooper Records.

He’s equally restless when it comes to his own output, with past releases including a punk EP and a jazz tribute to Looney Tunes composer Carl Stalling.

His sixth album, Please Have A Seat, also has a loose concept: to make every track hummable and pop-focused, which left him pondering the nature of success and its potential trappings.

It’s a conundrum explored most directly on ‘I Don’t Wanna Be Famous’.

Although not the album’s strongest track, it is one of its most straightforwardly commercial. There’s an intentional irony in how he uses this hip hop backdrop to nimbly rap about the perils of fame: “I just want a million new fans and plays / Then I wanna ride that massive wave / Blowin’ all the money on diamonds.”

It’s one of many vocal personas he adopts across the genre-fusing tracks. Elsewhere he moves onto autotuned R&B (‘Armoire’), psych and hardrock (‘Dibs’), gospel (‘Dedication’), and prog-opera (the Queen guitar break on ‘Anxious Eater’). He even finds the energy to produce two parodies of ’50s furniture adverts, which are inserted towards the end of ‘Grounded’ and ‘Dedication’.

Performed with a couple of frequent collaborators, his production and stylistic tics manage to create unity across the multi-genre record. Despite this, listeners should only take a seat at his table if they enjoy tapas. 7/10 Susan Darlington

with Peter Kember aka Sonic Boom (formerly of Spaceman 3) to make music that allowed them to indulge in their enjoyment of listening to old records.

The pair met via MySpace while in different parts of the world; now both reside in Portugal, and since 2011 their friendship has blossomed into a prosperous musical partnership.

In many ways, Reset is a call for getting back to basics. Sonically, Kember and Lennox utilised the foundations of rock and pop from the 1960s as reference points for these nine iridescent arrangements. This is felt across the record from ‘Gettin’ to the Point’s’ the looped sample of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Three Steps to Heaven’, incorporating a wall of sound sensibility across ‘Livin’ in the After’ as well as taking a leaf from the the likes of The Everly Brothers and The Beach Boys with their approach to layered vocal harmonies (‘In My Body’). The lightness of the palette makes for an enjoyable listening experience, often picking up where Person Pitch and Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (co-produced by Kember) left off.

Beneath the buoyant textures however are lyrics weighted by doom and dread. “Fallen so deep, I’m gonna drown, drown, drown,” Panda Bear intones in his inherently melancholic cadence on ‘Whirlpool’. The duality of the lyrical themes and carefree musicality coupled with the contrast of Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s performances are integral to Reset’s success. 7/10 Zara Hedderman

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom — Reset (domino) It’s only been six months since Noah Lennox released Time Skiffs with his Animal Collective counterparts and he’s already returned with Reset. For his latest Panda Bear offering, Lennox united

Perera Elsewhere — Home (friends of friends) Sasha Perera’s first album in five years is an exploration of what home means to a nomadic, shapeshifting artist. Perera Elsewhere plants her roots not in a physical place, but in her music,

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and in herself. Sonically, the record is a playful synth-led search for the borders of her sound. Warped drum fills, smothered trumpets and far-off piano keys become a home to return to over the course of the record. Instrumental tracks like ‘Stranger’ and the two-part ‘Der Wurm’ are vivid and satisfying, ultra-modern and somehow outside of time.

The rest of the record reshapes these elements into slippery alt-pop songs. Perera uses these songs to work through the instability of our current moment, ‘Heatwave’ and ‘Travel Lite’ use mantra-like choruses to centre themselves, and grow easy to love with each repetition. Of these vocal-driven songs, ‘Early’ and ‘Who I Am’ feel less tangible and at a distance from the listener thanks to queasy vocal effects and cryptic lyricism. They expose a potential problem in building a home within yourself. At some point, you begin to lock other people out.

Still, Home remains an adventurous and worthy trip from an exciting musical polymath. 7/10 Skye Butchard

Meechy Darko — Gothic Luxury (loma vista) Solo material from Flatbush Zombies was inevitable. The close chemistry of the group has been central to their appeal since Better off Dead released nearly a decade ago, but so has the distinct charisma of each member.

We’ve long wondered what each artist could achieve on their own.

Gothic Luxury grants that space for Meechy Darko. He loses none of his wild delivery when going solo, approaching each verse with that distinctive rasp, and his eccentricities are streamlined into the form of a traditionalist East Coast hip-hop record. It’s a classic tale of a lavish lifestyle being used to mask depression, paranoia and death wishes. ‘Get Lit

Albums or Die Tryin’, and ‘Henessy&Halos’ strike that balance between white-knuckle panic and unflustered arrogance.

His stream-of-consciousness bars are grounded by a cinematic palette of horror movie strings and beats that earn the decadence of the album name. It’s a smooth and consistent sound that often complements the edge of Darko’s delivery, though the generic trap excursions on ‘Never Forgettin’’ and ‘Prada U’ do flatten his craft.

The tone is frank, whether Meechy is feeling reflective or pugilistic. Often the two exist on the same song. On ‘The MoMA’, he moves from mourning dead loved ones to joking about having sex with a girl who’s into S&M. That approach leads to some clunky lines, like on ‘What If?’, where random high thoughts about reality being a simulation, or JFK being spared in a different timeline, are listed alongside hard-hitting lyrics that could have been full song topics.

The record is at its best on tracks grounded in a single feeling, like ‘Kill Us All’ or ‘Lost Souls’ with Denzel Curry and Busta Rhymes, which deal with systemic oppression and its internal effects respectively. They underline that Meechy Darko can be one of the most emotive rappers in his field – something Flatbush fans have known all along. 6/10 Skye Butchard

Li Yilei — Secondary Self (ltr) There’s a song on Secondary Self, the third record from Chinese-born London-based multidisciplinary artist Li Yilei, entitled ‘Bird Box’, that encapsulates the mood of the overall album. Stabbing synths, tetchy electronic effects and the sharp chirping of birds conjures an inherently claustrophobic atmosphere which remains for its duration. The space within this record is an impenetrable fortress which contains

multitudes. It’s one that requires the right environment when experiencing it, because it has the capacity to reveal new elements with each return.

Striking – if not more than a little anxious in its essence – Secondary Self exists more so as an immersive work of sound design than a commercial release for passive consumption. Incorporating anything from pleasant field recordings to the chugging rhythm of a machine in operation (‘Mosquito Alarm’), there’s a push-pull dynamic between the natural world, its healing and soothing tones, and the greyscale agitation of industry.

‘Murmur’ is one instance where these worlds collide. At almost ten minutes, this multidimensional song opens with an extended looped piece of rewound instrumentation which is dispersed later on by whale-like calls (summoning a likeness to the opening of Kate Bush’s ‘The Saxophone Song’) guiding the arrangement to a luminous climax.

Like many avant garde works, the brilliance of Secondary Self will only be truly unlocked by the inspiration and engagement of its audience. There’s an unlimited range of visuals and memories that can be stirred by certain movements, each listener bringing something new to the record and taking something different away from it. 7/10 Zara Hedderman

The Black Angels — Wilderness of Mirrors (partisan) It’s been almost 20 years since The Black Angels ignited a psychedelic revival in the prolific Austin, Texas music scene. Drawing inspiration from The Velvet Underground, band members Alex Maas, Christian Bland, Stephanie Bailey and the galaxy of musicians orbiting around them built a steady circle of players and listeners that became wider and wider in time, even-

tually coalescing into the Reverberation Appreciation Society, known for a string of record releases and psych festivals.

Despite their deep involvement in the arts and music industries, The Black Angels have released relatively few of their own albums during their 18-year career – this new Wilderness of Mirrors being only their sixth, coming after a silence of five years. Inevitably inspired by the “overall insanity” (Maas’ words) that shook the world over the last few years, Wilderness of Mirrors truly feels like a huge step forward in the band’s approach to music.

Loosening the tight grip of their mindaltering sonic palette, always packed with fuzzed-out guitars and countless layers of echoing instruments, without losing their signature sound and vibe, this time they allow for stripped-down songs to enter the tracklist – see ‘100 Flowers of Paracusia’, a remarkable example of the band’s ever-strong songwriting. There’s even space for a guest voice to sing on the album – that of Thievery Corporation’s LouLou Ghelichkani, with her French contribution to ‘Firefly’. Wilderness of Mirrors is a glorious comeback for a band who shaped the contemporary take on a past sound without feeling outdated. 7/10 Guia Cortassa

Ezra Furman — All Of Us Flames (bella union) You may remember Ezra Furman from such extolled television dramedies as Sex Education, for which she composed a soundtrack as coltish as it was transcendent – perfectly encapsulating the potency of adolescent love, libido, and loss. But Furman’s raucous, uplifting pop has a rich existence outside the four walls of Moordale. In fact, All Of Us Flames is album number nine(!), if you include three she made with backing band the Harpoons. Where its predeces-

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Albums sor Twelve Nudes spat on oppressors with spiky punk, All Of Us Flames utilises a palette more akin to The Replacements taking on Freddie Mercury, interrogating identity, modernity, unity, and the neverending end of the world.

Between the quiet nights on Main Street, character vignettes (“Stephen who stands out on Belmont most days with a trench coat and a bottle of booze”), and plans to “run away into the sun”, Furman is like the Springsteen of the LGBTQIA+ community – the authority on demented optimism from the gutter of adversity.

But reducing All Of Us Flames to train tracks, sunsets and Beat Generation hedonism misses the point. This isn’t a Craig Finn record; it’s a “first-person plural one”, as explained in the press release. Incisive think points are posed throughout. “What do your rainbows do?” she asks fairweather allies on the understated denouement ‘Come Close’.

The most affecting moment is when she yearns for “the teenage girl I never got to be”.

Furman channels just about everything into her most ambitious collection of dirt-pop brilliance. It sounds ready to change the world, but all it needs is to reach one teenage flame with the will to undress their future. 8/10 Hayden Merrick

Animistic Beliefs — Merdeka (naafi) Rotterdam’s Animistic Beliefs aren’t aiming small. Made up of producers Linh Luu and Marivin Lalihatu, their stated aim is to create a whole new musical creole by filtering the hard techno and industrial sounds of the Netherlands club scene through the lens of their Vietnamese, Moluccan and Chinese heritage.

With Merdeka, the pair are throwing caution to the wind. Using Western

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dance music as a jumping-off point and incorporating more overt South East Asian influences, this album breaks the mould of electronic music and dares us to follow it into some weird and exciting sonic territory. When it works, it works – ‘To Dream About Water’ is a thrilling slice of experimental dance that fuses Detroit-style techno and with the Asian touchpoints mentioned above.

However, the album’s moments of genius are often tempered by creative missteps. The transitions between moments of ambient serenity and beatdriven dance arrive like some flipping the station, and the less said about ‘Goblins Caught on Camera’s 2 Unlimited-style synth stabs, the better. Still, the odd stumble is par for the course when you’re trying to curve the trajectory of dance music in a totally different direction. Merdeka might not be the most polished album, but it shows the world that Animistic Beliefs have way more good ideas than bad.

5/10 Dominic Haley

Makaya McCraven — In These Times (xl recordings) Beat technician Makaya McCraven is far from simply a virtuous performer with the sticks in his hands. The New Jersey-born, Chicagoraised drummer is also a real maestro behind the desk, a character as comparable to Madlib or Dilla as he is to Art Blakey or Max Roach. 2020’s reworking – nay, reconstruction – of Gil Scott Heron’s final album We’re New Again breathed life eternal into one of the greats’ curtain calls, whilst last year’s Deciphering the Message saw him rework gems from the Blue Note catalogue into a masterwork in his image.

While the qualities of these efforts have been absolutely undeniable, it’s very exciting that what we have with new

album In These Times is a project that is entirely of Makaya McCraven’s conception; a passion project that’s seven years in the making, running in the background during all of his other ventures, wherein McCraven musically bears all. And it’s beautiful.

Collaborators like Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and harpist Brandee Younger of course leave a distinctive mark, but this record is about the full, cohesive sound of every part working in tandem to realise McCraven’s creative ideals. Indeed, McCraven is always keen to express the joy that his virtuoso partners bring him, but his nimble production work, emphasising every single note, is the glue that binds this LP together.

Melodies cascade upon melodies, each track is a profoundly luscious composition. The title track combines a sweeping string lament with the heavensent flickers of the harp, whilst ‘This Place That Place’ sees the ensemble construct an elegant cathedral in luxuriant brass. In These Times is a sumptuous record that really cements Makaya McCraven’s place at the vanguard of worldwide jazz. 9/10 Cal Cashin

Crack Cloud — Tough Baby (meat machine) Tough Baby is a chaotic melting pot of influences and genres entwined together as if by magic.

Crack Cloud’s sophomore album sees pop culture as an altar at which to worship; thrusting us into a mosh pit of noise, the record is incredibly sonically agitated as it bounces in multiple directions.

The record’s opening message is a recording from frontman Zach Chou’s father Danny. He tries to give some honest inspiration, nonchalant description of how music can be the outlet of

Albums your dreams if you make it. Those dreams come true with a cinematic Disney break in the middle of Danny’s monologue. As his Canadian tones slip back through, the album’s loose, cacophonic tone is set. This magical quality, sparkling with tambourines and xylophone, is found again in ‘Costly Engineered Illusion’.

Too many cooks don’t spoil the broth on Tough Baby. You can feel that grandiose influences have been brought to the table. Springsteen’s brass, The B-52s’ tremulous singing and Bowie’s performativity work their way in, as bars of heavy rock are pushed into the realm of ’90s dance music (featuring kazoo) in the transition from ‘Criminal’ to ‘Afterthought’.

Crack Cloud can’t sit still, and for good reason. This record is aggressively cathartic and sees this collective pushed to its limit. Alternative rock, pop and indie push their way to the front; once you get into the rhythm, get ready to be thrown into another whirlpool of sound.

7/10 Sophia McDonald

Danger Mouse & Black Thought — Cheat Codes (bmg) Danger Mouse loves collaboration. By diving into the pool of soul, pop, rap and rock he’s helped take some of the biggest names of his generation to the next level. However, as intriguing as some of these detours have been, you can’t help but feel like it’s time for Danger Mouse to focus on himself for once. By genre-hopping throughout the 2010s he’s ended up in a weird state of limbo.

Cheat Codes, his first record in collaboration with The Roots’ Black Thought, addresses this issue head on.

The album sees both artists return to their stylistic origins with 12 tracks of widescreen hip hop delight.

There’s no messing around, with the duo attacking the album as if it’s their last. In just 38 minutes we’re taken from the soul-infused ‘Sometimes’, to the ridewith-me funk of ‘No Gold Teeth’, right on down to the sonic heatwave of ‘Violas & Lupitas’, proving that not all albums have to run longer than a feature-length film.

As you’d expect, they rack up one hell of a guestlist along the way. Raekwon, Michael Kiwanuka, Joey Bada$$ and Run the Jewels stop by for a verse or two, but as great as these moments are, they are all overshadowed by one man. MF DOOM descends on top of ‘Belize’ like a true champion. Unlike the vast majority of posthumous guest spots, his addition truly elevates the track to a higher plain, giving the track a distinct B-movie feel.

Cheat Codes is a timely reminder of what two great hip hop minds can achieve when they put their heads together. Don’t call it a comeback. This is the start of something new. 8/10 Jack Doherty

Various Artists — Blue Note Re:imagined II (decca) The inaugural Blue Note Re:imagined was as welcome as a compilation could be in the post-We Out Here age of well-foraged jazzlands; South London was a ground of such ceaselessly ostensive acclaim, new standards and improbable knockouts that it was only a matter of time until the music industry’s old guard chomped at the bit.

But even the greatest cynic couldn’t deny that the label’s letterheads suited the likes of Shabaka Hutchings and Nubya Garcia – innovators whose compulsion and prolificacy spoke to a new age of artistry just as free jazz did at the birth of Impulse! Records. Re:imagined was more than a languid market grab or middle finger to Gilles Peterson’s bank account;

it was a moment that the conversation became elevated from the insoluble tag of ‘up-and-coming’ to a sincere recognition of new modern jazz greatness. But good things end.

Other than a few standout moments on Re:imagined II, the genesis of the compilation’s franchising is an instant dilution of everything that worked before.

The curation is stretched, the players less a part of a palpable and bubbling scene, the invisible hand of boardroom executives more discernible. Genuine musical intrigue and interpretation goes side-toside with your local café’s afternoon playlist one too many times for Re:imagined II to hold weight. Take the unconditional highlight in Theon Cross’ tuba rendition of Thelonious Monk’s bebop standard ‘Epistrophy’: an eerie jurisdiction lugs through Monk’s atonal brassy knots whilst both author and improvisor can be distinguished with alacrity. But by this point, we’ve just had two twee covers of Norah Jones, and now it’s time for a cover of a cover of ‘Harvest Moon’. 5/10 Nick Tzara

Alex G — God Save The Animals (domino) Now on his ninth album, and fourth for Domino, Alex G (real name Giannascoli) continues to trade in a rock classicism that’s been hijacked by Garageband trickery. Giannascoli takes cues from American indie rock prime cuts – think the candour of Elliott Smith and a Meat Puppets crookedness – yet is also enthralled by the possibilities of technological subversion. Like A. G. Cook, his songs often hang on the tension and disconnect between sheen and dissonance.

Speaking of which, hyperpop gets an airing on ‘No Bitterness’, a number that begins ruminative and acoustic before crackling into a revved-up frenzy. It pres-

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Albums ents indie rock dressed in a modern garb – not one ensnared in retromania – and in so doing distils Alex G’s unique appeal.

True to form his trademark postinternet genre-hopping is correct and present on God Save the Animals. On the cosplaying industrial rock of ‘Blessing’, dread slowly rises as lock-jawed grunts tell premonitions of environmental collapse; this over imposing waves of murky static.

That the track is followed by the nonchalant charm and house band ease of ‘Early Morning Waiting’ is a jarring thrill.

‘Runner’ too has an easy-going approachability, and likewise reclines into a wistful vista of alt-country licks.

Yet the tonal shifts that mark his records don’t cohabit on God Save the Animals as easily as they have in the past. ‘S.D.O.S’ tentatively leans into the insular dread that permeated his recent soundtrack work to We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, yet is too tentative to convince. Meanwhile, ‘Immunity’ feels like a placeholder, anonymous with its automated vocals. God Save the Animals is a typically idiosyncratic set from an artist ploughing his own furrow, but it doesn’t entirely fulfil his considerable promise. 7/10 Theo Gorst

Yeah Yeah Yeahs — Cool It Down (secretly canadian) It’s been a turbulent time for fans of 2000s indie rock over the last decade. Many of the genre’s former giants have broken up or, worse, succumbed to the forces of cringe.

Luckily for us all, Yeah Yeah Yeahs have taken the last nine years off, and they’ve been taking notes. While their former peers have been selling their souls for bad drawings of monkeys at NFT festivals (looking at you, James ‘Losing My Edge’ Murphy) or doing whatever it is Arcade Fire think they’re playing at these days,

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Karen O and co. mostly stayed quiet, popping up here and there to periodically play festivals and remind everyone how great ‘Maps’ is live.

Now though, the band have made their full return with their fifth album, Cool It Down and thank Karen O’s fringe, they’re in fine form. Clocking in at just eight tracks and little more than half an hour in length, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ return from hiatus is punchy, tight and totally filler-free. Every moment on this record feels deliberate, every beat and note precision engineered for maximum impact.

Take opening track and lead single ‘Spitting off the Edge of the World’, featuring Perfume Genius. A languid, woozy climate crisis anthem that manages to capture the lingering sense of doom felt by so many – as I write this, the UK is poised to hit temperatures that it really shouldn’t be hitting – and the righteous and wholly necessary anger of Greta Thunberg’s generation towards the inaction of those who have squandered their chance to do something about it all.

An added bonus: Mike Hadreas and Karen O sound so good together I’d be happy if they sang the rest of the album as duets.

Elsewhere, on tracks like ‘Wolf ’ and ‘Burning’, guitarist and keys player Nick Zinner once again demonstrates his ability to capture all the sultry gloss of the ’80s without sounding dated. The synths stab like diamond-encrusted knives and every other guitar riff sounds like it should be soundtracking a shot of someone riding a motorbike through the desert. This is Yeah Yeah Yeahs in their full floor-filling ‘Heads Will Roll’, ‘Sacrilege’ pomp. Those seeking subtler moments won’t be disappointed either: ‘Blacktop’ is a post-punky sing-a-long that perfectly showcases the tender side of O’s every dynamic vocal range, while closer ‘Mars’ is almost lullaby-like in its simple loveliness.

Admittedly, Cool It Down is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Yeah Yeah Yeahs – the sound broadly harks back the glittery new wave of It’s Blitz!, with shades of other previous records like Fever to Tell and Show Your Bones thrown in for good measure. Yet

this album doesn’t feel dated or nostalgic; instead, it comes across a band who know their lane and are speeding down it, pedal to the floor. 7/10 Mike Vinti

White Girl Wasted — White Girl Wasted (daupe!) It doesn’t matter what you’re flogging, scarcity creates value. Just ask Brighton’s Daupe! Media.

Known for its physical-only releases, with artists maintaining full ownership of their music, the label’s unofficial ‘quality not quantity’ slogan has cultivated a cult-like community of hip hop heads who have become synonymous with crashing Bandcamp each time the latest limited vinyl or cassette drop hits its digital shelves.

Label boss Lawrence Lord, aka The Purist, is a musical conservationist of sorts. In the age of all-you-can-eat streaming, the knowledge that hordes of fans are still flocking to cough up 20 quid for an album is good news for the preservation of value in music. His belief that music should go beyond what is expected to look, feel, and sound special is what distinguishes Daupe! apart from Spotify’s monthly £9.99 subscription fee.

Responsible for some of the most recognisable tracks by Action Bronson, Danny Brown, CASisDEAD, Freddie Gibbs and Loyle Carner, Lord returns to the production desk alongside underground Birmingham rapper Sonnyjim for one of Daupe!’s most anticipated projects to date. Enter, the powdered nose of White Girl Wasted.

Just a quick glance over some of the featured artists is enough to steal your attention. The pair’s debut moniker calls in beat-making reinforcements from Madlib on the trip-inducing ‘Does Mushrooms Once’, and even some posthumous bars from the late MF DOOM on ‘Barz Simpson’. Lord’s lo-fi, sample-hungry

Albums production is riddled with slick, baggy beats and stories of 4AM debauchery as he weaves together a selection of wellreferenced internet memes that reminisce over Leo Dicaprio’s Wolf Of Wall Street penchant for top-of-the-range quaaludes and Paris Hilton’s sheepish court confession over cocaine possession.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise, Daupe! is known to wear a wry smile around drug use – one of The Purist’s previous LP drops featured a Pyrex kitchenware-inspired cover with a home cook’s instructional recipe on how to knock up crack cocaine detailed on the inner sleeve. Similarly brazen easter eggs litter the lyric sheet on White Girl Wasted. Be warned, copies usually sell out in minutes, so count yourself lucky to get your hands on this one. 8/10 Ollie Rankine

Pixies — Doggerel (bmg) In the press release for Pixies’ new record Doggerel, the band’s inimitable vocalist andguitarist Black Francis is quite clear. and admirably ambitious, about the direction intended with the album. “We’re trying to do things that are very big and bold and orchestrated,” he said. “The punky stuff, I really like playing it but you just cannot artificially create that shit. There’s another way to do this, there’s other things we can do with this extra special energy that we’re encountering.”

Given Pixies’ output since their reformation in 2004, Francis’ words hardly instil much optimism. 2014’s Indie Cindy was an absence of ideas, a numbing disappointment that, even with the 21-year lag since they initially broke up in 1993, felt disorientating given the stellar calibre of their work during phase one. The dismay was only compounded by the band’s assertion that Indie Cindy was a direct continuation of their final

pre-breakup albums, the adventurous one-two of Bossanova (1990) and Trompe Le Monde (1991).

Head Carrier (2016) was a little better, and so again was Beneath the Eyrie in 2019, Pixies’ last release ahead of Doggerel. Perhaps it was the growing influence of bassist Paz Lenchantin, who, having joined for Head Carrier, undoubtedly brought a freshness and a rejuvenated energy to what was, sadly, becoming a tired outfit. The record even contained a few bangers, most notably ‘On Graveyard Hill’, a rare occasion in the past few years where Pixies have managed to bridge the gap between where they were, and where they want to be.

So given how tepidly attempts at experimentation and reimagining their sound has gone so far, it’s fair to say that Doggerel didn’t land with the expectation typically associated with one of the most influential alternative bands of the late 1980s and early ’90s. The first thing to say, then, is that this is the best Pixies record since they’ve reformed. Across Doggerel’s 12 tracks, Francis and co rip through a range of styles, from furious grunge to acoustic pop swoons, often, if not always, with a gusto that on occasions almost gets you feeling excited again. You could describe some of it, even, as big, bold and orchestrated.

Things kick off simply enough with the punchy ‘Nomatterday’. While hardly the band’s most impactful album opening track, its lack of frills and strong-enough chorus make for a decent start. Elsewhere, the titular song pairs a spaced, desert-rock vibe with some cookie-cutter, if nonetheless oddly entertaining, notions of a life of nomadic wanderings (“On the road to somewhere, on the road to nowhere / It’s the same to me”).

The song also gives guitarist Joey Santiago one of his first two Pixies songwriting credits, contributing the lyrics, while also writing the music for the excellent ‘Dregs of the Wine’. Alongside tracks such as the tender folk piece ‘Who’s More Sorry Now?’, there is a distinct impression that Pixies are displaying an intention to continue searching for a new space in which to belong.

As was the case on previous releases, such as the aforementioned ‘On Graveyard Hill’, some of the best moments on Doggerel however come when the band continues to draw on their mighty back catalogue, while retaining their presence firmly in the present. Most notable here is ‘Get Simulated’, an absolute ripper of a tune on which Francis’ largely restrained vocal performance is matched effectively with instrumentation similarly paired-back and considered. Continually threatening to burst from its meticulous, contained structure, it never does, leaving its listeners desperate for more without feeling at all stood up.

But this wouldn’t be a typical postreformation Pixies record if it represented a totally smooth transition from their patchy recent past into whatever it is the band are now aiming for. ‘Vault of Heaven’ struggles to get out of first gear, as both the storytelling and the performances languish and falter with little aplomb. ‘You’re Such a Sadducee’ is the worst thing here, if only for Francis’ offensive rhyming of “sadducee” with “sad to see”. Attempting to be disarming and irreverent, it instead feels contrived and performative, and very much not in keeping with what, at times, makes Doggerel tick.

Given their recent run, the prospect of a new Pixies record that could be worth more than a handful of listens seemed fantastical. Beneath the Eyrie may have felt like a step forward, though context is key; if stood up against much of their earlier work, there’s no real comparison to be made.

Yet although it still fails to scale the unassailable heights weary fans yearn to believe the band are still capable of reaching, Doggerel is another step again which manages to restore some credibility to the idea that Pixies aren’t just worth seeing for their back catalogue. Though far from the end product, it does do that one thing which for a few years it was feared may not have been possible – it instils hope.

Hope that, perhaps, that this most significant of bands has some future yet. 6/10 Ben Lynch

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Albums Live ‘Funeral’, “I actually think it’s much cooler to be happy.” That’s what really strikes me about the show – how gleeful it is, and the feeling of warmth and acceptance that permeated the night, and the genuinely diverse audience.

Make no mistake, this is a rock show, but as the set bursts into faux flames and the audience screams along to the climax of rhapsodic closer ‘I Know The End’ there is no aggression, just unbridled joy. Tonight proves it: Phoebe Bridgers is a generation-level rock star.

Jessica Wrigglesworth

Ghetts Somerset House, London 14 July 2022 Phoebe Bridgers Brixton Academy, London 26 July 2022

From the moment Phoebe Bridgers walks onstage for the first of four sold-out Brixton Academy shows, her command of the heaving – and notably young – audience is unfaltering. Only the most accomplished performer could open with their two best-known songs and then continue to build momentum throughout the set.

For the crowd though, every song feels like her best-known, and from the first note of ‘Motion Sickness’ they sing every word back to her.

It’s funny to think that the last time Bridgers played in London she was something of an indie darling; someone well known to the kind of people who read this magazine but not the wider public. That all changed with her second album Punisher, released in 2020. One of the things that endeared her to her new fans was the candidness with which she talks about her experience as a bisexual woman, a survivor of abortion and sexual assault. “This one’s for all the dads,” she quipsbefore playing ‘Kyoto’, a track about her complex relationship with her own father, which includes the line: “I’m going to kill you, if you don’t beat me to it”.

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Later, she speaks about her experience of abortion in light of the horrific overturning of Roe v. Wade, before ‘Chinese Satellite’, a song which questions Christianity and evangelicalism. “This one’s for the gays,” she says before ‘Graceland Too’, which with its refrain of “She could do anything she wants to do” has become a sort of survivors’ anthem, and as the crowd yells “Says she knows she lived through it, to get to this moment” the feeling of catharsis is palpable, as it is when the entire audience joins in on the ‘Scott Street’ line “fuck the cops”.

Her performance is bolstered by hugely ambitious set design which transforms the stage from song to song; a twinkling sky for ‘Chinese Satellite’, a majestic cathedral for ‘Funeral’, a hazy sunset for ‘Smoke Signals’. For ‘The Moon’, there is a giant glowing moon behind her and she stands on a podium, just a silhouette. The gothic theme which she’s embraced since her first record, Stranger In The Alps, is ever-present too, in the skeleton themed outfits worn by Bridgers and her band, as well as countless fans who have clearly lined up since early afternoon and made a beeline for the merch stand.

But although she has become a poster child for ‘sad girls’, Bridgers is quick to point out that sadness isn’t something to aspire to. “There’s nothing cool about being sad,” she says before

Ghetts used to be a forgotten godfather of grime. There’s always been Dizzee and Wiley, and Kano and Skepta, and, more recently, D Double E has been getting the respect he’s been owed. Ghetts felt like the unsung originator right up until last year’s Conflict of Interest LP – his best work yet, which charted at no. 2 after an unexpected battle with the even more unexpected Mogwai. His crowning moment though, was his last London show, where he was endlessly joined by the biggest names in UK rap, including: Giggs, Stormzy, Kano, Dizzee Rascal, Emeli Sandé, JayKae, Pa Salieu and Backroad Gee. Of course Somerset House is hoping for some of that tonight, but Ghetts is smart to not repeat the same trick twice – those guests that night were there in celebration, not out of necessity, and in the regal courtyard of Somerset House, Ghetts proves that he alone can be the show.

It’s a performance of two halves.

The first gives us the rapper at his most thoughtful and low key. The sun is setting and no one is in a rush to lose their minds. The mood is perfect for the slow roll of ‘Crud’, ‘Hop Out’ and ‘Fire and Brimstone’. “I’m overwhelmed,” he says, noting the crowd of all ages and

photography by burak cingi

Albums Live races stood in front of him. Then he takes things down a further couple of notches still, performing ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Black Rose’ from a stool while his live band get a chance to shine.

It’s all very Somerset House (and very nice thanks to his easy flow) until the sun disappears and the tone 180s. It’s as if Ghetts just opened for himself as the crowd comes alive for ‘Know My Ting’.

He doesn’t surpass the aggression of ‘Artillery’ as his fiercest delivery tonight (because it’s practically impossible); the garage beat of ‘Good Hearts’ is the most fun; older tracks ‘One Take’ and ‘Who’s Got A Problem’ tie for the loudest shoutbacks as the party takes off.

This is what Ghetts does. He’s been doing it all for years, and now everybody knows it. Stuart Stubbs

Squid Somerset House, London 8 July 2022

The Somerset House Summer Series is back after a two-year break. Originally home to Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, the site now sees a very different set of human activity. A stage is erected in the centre of the quadrangle, creating a festival-esque open air venue, overlooked

photography by brittany queen

by grand windows and stone columns.

For eleven balmy evenings, the old palace becomes host to a range of British music.

Tonight it’s Squid, the Bristol five-piece band who continue to go from strength to strength following the release of their debut album Bright Green Field last year. It’s an unusual set up, with lead singer and drummer Ollie Judge sitting centre stage, his bandmates on each side. As though on a throne of metal, he is a charismatic presence, alternating impressive drum fills with neurotic vocals. Eyes closed, tongue escaping from his mouth in a twisted smile, he is the driving force behind the chaotic, surreal character of Squid’s sound.

Over the course of the set the band of multi-instrumentalists switch roles as though in a game of rounders. Even lyrics are relayed between two or three players. And yet, for this special show, more musicians are brought on stage: a second trumpet player appears during ‘Documentary Filmmaker’, creating a gorgeous, silky brass polyphony; Martha Skye Murphy arrives for ‘Narrator’, which builds over eight minutes into a chaotic symphony of wild screams and operatic cries, part animal, part human.

Despite its royal lineage, the crowd are unafraid of letting go in this setting.

Bopping heads morph into a wild mosh in the last of the evening light; bodies writhing together, as anarchic and animalistic as the music itself. Lila Tristram

Been Stellar Green Door Store, Brighton 26 July 2022

Tucked under the arches of Brighton’s central station, Green Door Store eschews the forced cool that characterises some of the city’s nightspots.

With its uneven cobblestone floor, slaphappy decor and illustrated rats on its plastic cups, the converted railway yard embraces an anachronistic, unglamorous side of urbanism. It’s the perfect place to showcase New York-based Been Stellar, whose murky noise-rock projects the same disaffected energy as quintessential NYC records such as Daydream Nation.

Indeed, the band are from the same disillusioned middle class as Sonic Youth et al., but now that class operates alongside superlative wealth rather than the destitution of New York in the 1980s.

After local support from Strokesesque rock-and-rollers Shady Baby and dreamgaze quartet She’s in Parties, Been Stellar envelop the packed room.

Flanked by matching Jazzmasters, frontperson Sam Slocum deals out shoutsung reprimands of his city, its people and his general disdain for modernity.

“New York, New York, start again, start again,” he wails on the opening track as his band – guitarists Skyler St. Marx and Nando Dale, bassist Nico Brunstein and drummer Laila Wayans (if only all bands had such good names in them) – find their feet and ease into the jolting rhythms and loud/quiet fluctuations. The moody post-punk cut ‘Manhattan Youth’ passes similarly. But ‘Kids 1995’, an ode to Larry Clark’s documentally Kids (“Lord of the Flies with Skateboards”) is the melodic apogee, Slocum’s voice a tender lilt that intensifies as the song progresses.

Unconcerned with crowd participation or presenting a cohesive aesthetic, Been Stellar’s vibe is aloof yet unfussy.

They’ll soon return to Bushwick for a wellearned break; for all its complications, the city is home, a partner in creation, a sixth member whose energy they can’t help but share. Hayden Merrick

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FilmAlbums and Books

Girl in the Picture (dir. skye borgman) In a climactic moment of Girl in the Picture, Netflix’s latest true crime feature, former FBI agent Scott Lobb describes his breakthrough with the monster at the heart of the film: “He was emotional, and that’s an opportunity to me.” It’s a line which reverberates around this whole film.

It’s difficult to strike the correct tone when discussing a movie like this; its subject matter is too sensitive, the pain too real for the people involved. So, to be clear from the beginning: Girl in the Picture is, at base, a competently-told and utterly devastating story of murder, sexual and physical abuse, kidnap and cruelty of staggering proportions. The victims of that abuse deserve nothing but sympathy, as well as the constructive rage that’s required to prevent such horrors unfolding again. There’s no ‘but’ coming here – that’s just true.

It is also – and this isn’t a ‘but’, because both of these things can be true at the same time – a film that, regardless of its creators’ intentions, feels oddly devoid of that sympathy or that rage. In a 2021 article in the Los Angeles Review of Books entitled ‘The Genrefication of Tragedy’ – a title I initially misread, or perhaps just read, as its author intended, as ‘The Gentrification of Tragedy’ – the writer Gabriella Gage pointedly describes the true crime genre as “A closed casket. A superficial barrier. Murder isn’t meant to be watchable.” Girl in the Picture progresses with narrative deftness and technical accomplishment, and it’s not that it’s not compelling when taken on those terms, but it’s an uncomfortable viewing experience, and not just because of the grisly details. This isn’t meant to be watchable.

This is a film populated by real people, real families. And they’re crushed.

Failed by the state, by the police, by their

50

communities – sometimes even by each other. The murdered young woman at the centre of the story suffered extraordinarily, but so did almost everyone else we’re introduced to, including those who participate in the film, often visibly traumatised.

And we’re just sat there, voyeurs, consuming their pain for entertainment.

It’s not that one should never make art or tell stories about traumatic subjects, or that those people who go through such traumas should not be allowed a platform for their experiences. But the ubiquity of true crime as genre, as commodity, feels different; this is stuff made for a mass market, produced with industrial regularity for the ‘true crime, glass of wine, bed by nine’ audience, and it increasingly feels like the attention that each individual true crime artefact attracts has less to do with its artistic or journalistic craft, or even with the lessons we could perhaps learn from such events, than the sheer depravity of the abuses committed. Girl in the Picture is the latest off the conveyor belt; its broken subjects deserve so much more.

Luke Cartledge

Flower Factory — Richard Foster (ortac) Is there anything as truly unknowable as The Netherlands? Having lived a 20-minute drive from its border for nearly a decade, having taken countless trips to all its corners, and even having learnt its language, it has never ceased to be a mystery to me.

At times, I even doubt the country’s existence. A tulpa of tulips, tall people and THC. Thankfully, Britain’s premier rebellious cultural and contemporary music writer Richard Foster is at hand to not only vouch for its existence but shed light on its inner mechanics. A Dutch resident for over two decades, he is our sole hope to cut-open

this sous vide slab of land.

The premise of Foster’s debut novel is simple. It recounts the story of an unnamed 20-something British male who hops the North Sea to take on seasonal-work in (you guessed it) a flower factory in the year 2000. In the book’s four seasonal sections, Foster’s narrator reports his new surroundings: the odd-ball characters he meets, the caravan park he lives in, the strangers’ houses he wakes up in and the factories where he works.

While the plot is easy to summarise, the book’s micro-dosing, shape-shifting style is anything but. The exploration of Dutch squats, bars and moribund cultures evokes infamous London underground fanzine Savage Messiah. The tragicomedy of the workplace and its fragile politics conjures up John Kennedy Toole’s cult-classic The Confederacy of Dunces, although it’s the wistful melancholy of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road that is the dominant vision here.

Gallivanting all over The Netherlands via subsidised train, mixing it up with anonymised characters such as ‘The Welsh Poet’ and ‘Lady Hedonist’, discussing music over drinks and weed while border crossing checkpoints transition to ghost stations in the background; Flower Factory’s time and place can feel beatific.

Unfortunately The Netherlands of 2000 shares its DNA with the illusionary post-war America that Kerouac watched rot in front of his eyes. The European project barely survives the 18 months the book covers. Dutch suspicion of the Euro dampens the sense of union, the narrator’s co-workers start to discuss David Icke’s conspiracy theories, and Dutch bar staff tell of the insidious restrictions that are flattening Dutch culture. The book’s full-stop is the events that took place on 9/11.

To label Flower Factory a fictionalised memoir or a roman a clef or travelogue or even a mix of all three would do it a great disservice. Like much of Foster’s work for The Quietus and Louder Than War, this book eschews forms and genres to uncover a much-more oddly-shaped, less obvious but more resonant tale. Flower Factory is a piece of history in the Tolstoyan sense and a crucial text to understand Europe’s hidden reverse. Robert Davidson

Final Third:

52

SINGULAR SENSATIONS

With its fidgety production, elegant hooks and seismic ambition, nobody is making pop music quite like Taylor Skye and Georgia Ellery right now. As they prepare to release their debut album as Jockstrap, I Love You Jennifer B, they speak to Katie Beswick about classical training, GarageBand dubstep and their unique, harmonious partnership. Photography by Sophie Barloc 53

“FOR A LONG TIME, I COULDN’T MAKE MUSIC,” Taylor Skye tells me over breakfast in an East London café. “I was introduced to the composer John Cage at music college and it just changed my perspective on things.”

He pours a cup of tea from a pot, taking a sip before he continues. “You know, lots of John Cage pieces are about listening to the sounds around you rather than making your own music, and I was convinced that was the best way to live your life.” He puts his fork down and grins. In the background there is the hiss of steam from a coffee machine, the clatter of cutlery against crockery, the low mumble of other people’s chatter and the grinding of wheels from traffic moving on the tarmac outside the open café door.

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Taylor Skye is an electronic musician and producer, one half of the duo Jockstrap. I have met with Taylor and his bandmate, vocalist and lyricist Georgia Ellery, to discuss the release of their debut album, I Love You Jennifer B. This eclectic collection combines ethereal vocal and lyrical experimentation with a popinflected electronic production that is at once very similar to other things (there are faint traces of something like Madonna, Skrillex, Lily Allen, the poems of Sylvia Plath, a Pixar movie score), and yet also absolutely nothing like anything you’ve heard ever before.

This particular style is something the pair have honed to growing acclaim in a series of tracks and EPs since they began

linked together by the fact it was me and Taylor collaborating, which creates this thing which is singular.”

Taylor nods. “Yeah, there’s nothing else really to it, to be honest. It’s just quite simple.”

The pair met at Guildhall, finding mutual admiration in one another’s approach and taste after taking a composition class together. They had a shared love of James Blake and would hang out at the college nightclub, eating sweets and DJing.

Georgia had heard some of Taylor’s music on clips he would post to Facebook, and eventually sent him a track she’d been working on herself. Taylor was immediately drawn in. “I thought, ‘This is really great. I’m going to work on this.’ And we sent it back and forth a few times and then we immediately started to think about playing live.”

“Yeah,” Georgia nods, finishing her own breakfast as the waitress clears our plates. “We’d both been in bands growing up, so it felt exciting to then be making this into a band.”

“We lived very close to each other for a bit,” Taylor explains, “and we decided to get our friends involved in this band we were playing live with, and it all just happened. We were both looking for something. I think we both wanted to start putting stuff out in London, and we had a similar drive. And that was the start of everything.”

“Now,” Georgia says, “we go mostly to mates’ gigs – it’s bad really, because you go to music school, and firstly you go to loads of gigs and listen to music that you’ve never really seen…”

The gigs they’d attend at music college, Taylor tells me, weren’t only about accessing new music, but networking and career building too. “I would go to every single gig I could possibly go to, to try and make it happen. I would bring CDs to every gig I would go to, so I think even then we were going to gigs but for a reason. We loved music. But the main thing I enjoyed was going to club nights honestly.”

“So we made a song, which didn’t take very long,” continues Georgia. “And somewhere along the line someone had said ‘make sure you have some visuals for your song, because it will do better.’ So, we made a music video. Just by ourselves. I directed it and everyone who was going to be in the band was in the music video. And doing everything for free. We put together this package and released it on YouTube…”

“And this little blog liked it…” say Taylor. “I think we decided to do a gig at the Old Blue Last at some point around that time. And then we just carried on.” their collaboration while studying at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where they took different pathways on the elite and highly selective Bachelor of Music programme, graduating into a pandemic. The different sensibilities nurtured by their disciplinary specialisms (Taylor took electronic and produced music, while Georgia – who is also a member of Black Country, New Road – specialised in jazz violin) create a unique approach to collaborative composition.

“It’s why the songs turn out so singular,” Georgia tells me. “And we knew, while we were working on this album, from having collaborated on our other EPs, we knew what was coming, which was going to be a really eclectic selection of songs, but all

— Cool fusions — The songs, Georgia tells me, have always begun for her as deeply personal poems, often reflecting on a particular relationship or person. She writes alone before setting the lyrics to music and sending the track over to Taylor, who adds harmony and intervenes in the composition. For I Love You Jennifer B, they occasionally worked differently, with Taylor sending over an instrumental to which Georgia would respond through lyrical interventions.

“With poetry you can enhance the abstractions,” she explains. “What you make with poetry, what you’re trying to

55

“TAYLOR’S

PRODUCTION IS VERY EMOTIONAL”

say, with harmony you make more of it. You give a line a different meaning with a harmony. So that’s what I enjoy, because you can further abstract the words you’re trying to say with harmony and melody. That’s the same each time, except when it’s Taylor sending things over, because then it starts with the harmony, the beat already as it is, so I have to work… and that was a little bit trickier this time, because I had to learn how to do that, to use harmony or use the music in my favour.”

Taylor’s approach is instinctive, responding to the tracks his collaborator sends him through attention to the sound.

“Although I love lyrics, I don’t really listen to lyrics at first when I listen to music,” he says. “And with Jockstrap music, I often don’t pay attention to lyrics. I mean I do, eventually, but to me the lyrics aren’t going to change, that’s been done, so I listen to the sound and just start work immediately. If Georgia’s got something in mind specifically, I’ll listen to that, but it often works best if we don’t talk too much while we’re working on it. Because I connect so much with Georgia’s music, I feel different things

56

at different points and I just put those in, basically. I have my own influences at the time, and they come out. That’s it really, sometimes it’s done within one session of making it, sometimes it takes ages to do it. For me it’s a sound-focussed thing because that’s a huge part of music in general.”

“Taylor’s production is very emotional,” Georgia tells me, “and that gives me something to hook onto. Especially ones where he has begun the track, there’s this feeling, which happens in music that I really like… we can change up the structure if something happens lyrically, if a lyric doesn’t fit, or we run out of lyrics. For one album track, Taylor sent over the beat which didn’t have any harmony in it all, the harmony comes in halfway through, but listening to that by itself, it’s very dark and you can hear it. I wanted to put a hook which is a spoken-shouty thing, which is just visceral, that lifts it, so that was a way in which I could use the harmony to change and make decisions about the album sound.” Partly, she says, the eclectic nature of the album is driven by the divergences in their music sensibili-

57

ties. “We wouldn’t ever sit down and listen to an album. We’ll be into our own stuff at different points and that’s usually when the cool fusions happen – when I’m into one thing and Taylor’s into something completely different and they merge.”

— Jazz and dubstep homeschooling — Before we get to the album, let’s rewind, because it’s clear, as the pair chatter over the cacophony of the café about their approach to music, that the sounds they create together are also the product of singular, and in some respects, unusual childhood influences and musical experiences. Georgia was raised in Cornwall, and, having been gifted a violin for her fifth birthday, began classical training. She found the classical approach to music uninspiring – practising alone was a slog, and solo recitals left her feeling exposed.

“And then I got into some orchestras, into some string orchestras, and I really enjoyed that. There was the collaborative aspect, making music with people. As soon as there was someone else playing duet with me, I really enjoyed that. And then when I was a little bit older, I started going to raves and I loved it. I discovered dance music. My dad had quite good taste; he played dance music in the car, so that was, like, British ’90s trip-hop and rave music. That’s where that came from. But my mum played lots of Irish music. We went to [Peter Gabriel’s international arts festival] WOMAD every year, so I listened to lots of different music. I was interested in music from all over.

I had broad musical taste. And then I decided I wanted to go to jazz school. So, I listened to lots of jazz music for a year. I didn’t have any lessons or anything like that, I was copying, which is what you do in jazz anyway. That’s how you learn: you listen.”

Violin was, she admits, an unusual choice of jazz instrument, but it enabled a certain amount of experimentation. “I mean it’s a beautiful instrument classically,” she laughs. “So feathery and lush. But paired with drums it struggles, and bass, and as a solo line instrument. I think I grappled with the sound of it, I tried it really electronic, I tried it with pedals, but really what worked was playing with a line-up of other string instruments and playing music it suited a bit more. Afro-Cuban music it works really well with, Brazilian music; a violin works well in a jazz café setting as well. But not straight-up bebop.”

Taylor meanwhile came to composition through music theatre – his parents were West End performers. “They were in Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, all the Andrew LloydWebber things. My dad did a stint of the roller skate one… Starlight Express, toured to Germany.” Taylor played piano as a child, but, like Georgia, didn’t particularly enjoy the process of classical tuition. “And then I went to see Stevie Wonder. He was the first artist I ever saw live. My dad bought tickets for me and him to go and see him in London, and that changed my perception.”

Music became an all-consuming pastime at that point, and when he was gifted a second-hand Mac computer by his father, Taylor began working on composition for hours each day.

“Before that I was playing Call of Duty and stuff, but I stopped doing that – literally overnight. I’d go to these GarageBand workshops at the Apple Store… that was around 2009 or ’10.

And around then is when I started listening to dubstep. I was about 11 or 12, so I couldn’t go and see that music, but there were just certain songs – like ‘Cracks’, a Flux Pavilion remix. It just made me want to start making music and spend the next few years just learning how to produce. And I had these monikers, these dubstep monikers that I took really seriously, playing these gigs around Leicester [near where I grew up]. I recently went back to dubstep… I think it’s very moving, and it’s how I learned how to make music. The producers who make that are so talented, they produce, mix, write, everything, and it sounds really, really intense, so it’s a really good way to learn how to make music.

“Recently, I’ve just been into songwriting. For both of us, Georgia and I, those things have always been our lives. I’m just turning into my dad basically. He was such a big Bob Dylan fan, and I just wasn’t interested [when I was younger] but my parents have really influenced my music taste now. And they were so supportive of the music I liked. My mum would drive me down to London to go and see Flux Pavilion at the O2.

My dad bought me the James Blake album. Just lots of really great memories.”

— This is a job — I Love You Jennifer B, like the duo’s earlier music (most notably their 2020 EP Wicked City), spans a range of influences that encompass their personal music histories. The pair worked at this debut for two years, signing with Rough Trade some way through the process. The album deal feels like something of a full circle for the Jockstrap project. The A&R at Rough Trade was the first person in the music industry who had ever approached the pair to discuss music.

“It’s nice to come back around to them,” Taylor says. “Our manager was just doing what everybody does, which is sending stuff out to different people. And Rough Trade were the last people we sent the music to, I don’t know why. They really liked the music when we played it to them. You’ve just got to go where your gut is.”

The aesthetic of Jennifer B channels the theatrical energy of music theatre combined with the improvisational spirit of jazz, and this is reflected in the visual and atmospheric language of the music video for recent single ‘Concrete Over Water’. This whimsical, harlequin inspired production, for which Georgia worked closely with director Eddie Whelan to create a holistic world populated by complex and carefullydrawn characters, epitomises the distinct style for which the duo are becoming recognised. Unlike much recent music, the album appears unaffected by the specific conditions of the pandemic and the myriad wider socio-political disasters, and is deeply rooted in form and emotion, in a way that manifests as timeless.

“I think we would have made this no matter what,” Taylor tells me. “I don’t think [the pandemic] changed the music we’ve written. I’m not that, personally, motivated by specific things in the world, especially with music. Obviously, everything affects your music so I don’t have much of a choice, because it will do.

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But although during the whole process we were dealing with that, we weren’t really… it just sounds like what I thought it would sound like. It just took a bit longer, because things took a bit longer.”

“We’d never done anything so long – I found that was a challenge,” Georgia adds, “trying to hold all the songs in my head at the same time. I was determined to have a concept at the beginning.”

“I’m less into that,” Taylor says. “Georgia’s more into that, so we had to compromise. We had different things we wanted from the album. I’m less fussed. When I listen to music, I listen to it in the moment, I don’t think about context too much.

And we didn’t want that. We wanted a bangers sort of thing – I mean,” he laughs, “we haven’t done that either.”

Perhaps the whimsical solemnity of some of the album tracks comes from the isolated manner of their collaboration, and its concurrent intensity. I do wonder how this duo, at the cusp of adulthood, have managed to navigate an intense and sometimes lonely collaboration with any semblance of social life.

“We feel like we’re working all the time,” the pair say in unison when I ask about how they manage to juggle an all-consuming collaboration, other music projects and a personal life.

“We’ve got quite a good work ethic,” Georgia says.

“Music is our social life, our personal life, everything. Obviously, you know when you’re working and not, but we feel like we’re working a lot at the moment.”

Taylor shrugs. “It’s pretty half and half. Isolating when you’re not on tour and exposing when you’re on tour. That’s how I feel.

We don’t see many people when we write music. And I do it in my bedroom as well so it’s very much… cool.”

I wonder if there’s a temptation to let loose and party now that the hard work of the album is over, and with a tour spanning the UK, Europe and US on the horizon. Then again, maybe the pitfalls of rock and roll excess aren’t all that luring for musicians genuinely driven by the music, and raised in the self-care generation.

“We’re quite sensible people,” Taylor says, “We’re both quite good at being aware of taking care of ourselves. We get massaged, we have steam rooms. It’s almost like music – it’s not a choice really. We’ve been like this since we met each other.

We just need this to survive. We don’t really drink that much on tour. It’s not anything weak, it’s just that we’re into taking care of ourselves.”

Georgia sinks back in her chair. “I figured out really early on that I couldn’t cane it in the way I thought I would on tour. And I would really land in a mess if I did. It’s a job. Very quickly I was like, ‘Alcohol backstage? This is a job!’ It’s a lot more sustainable and enjoyable now.’

The light changes outside and we head into the street. “I can see why you’d do it,” Taylor says, of the temptations to go wild. “I felt that on the last tour. I found it very difficult to relax after each gig. I mean I’ve never taken drugs, so I don’t even know what that’s like, but I empathise with people who do it.

There’s a reason why it’s happened forever.”

“WE WOULD’VE MADE THIS NO MATTER WHAT. I DON’T THINK THE PANDEMIC CHANGED THE MUSIC WE’VE WRITTEN”

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Expand your horizons

62

Nearly a decade into their career as London future-jazz trailblazers The Comet Is Coming, Shabaka Hutchings, Betamax and Danalogue have never been more adventurous. They dive into their new record, their many other projects and the terrifying potential of artificial intelligence with Max Pilley. Photography by Jody Evans

The Comet Is Coming have delivered the album title of 2022: Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam. It is a phrase that gets straight to the heart of the group’s essence, balancing a sense of ecstatic energy with a spiritual bent that encourages its audience to throw down the barriers of their mind and embrace life’s full capacity.

It is not just a collection of buzzwords that the London jazz leaders have chosen for the name of their third album, but more an attempt to offer context for the music that lies within.

As they established on Channel the Spirits (2016) and Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery (2019), the trio have a freewheeling, formless sense of expressing themselves that is rooted in a culture of improvisation, where songwriting and structure are secondary to mutual understanding and exploration.

“An expansion beam is something that broadens your horizons,” explains Shabaka Hutchings, the band’s virtuosic saxophonist and one-man walking music industry. “If you have more information or more knowledge, you enter another dimension of understanding. The music is a way of expanding your dimensional awareness of the possibilities of music: commercial, but not commercial; exploratory, but not too exploratory.”

Hutchings, who for The Comet Is Coming purposes goes

by King Shabaka, is joined by Danalogue (aka Dan Leavers) on keyboards/synths and drummer Betamax (Max Hallett), with the latter two also serving as the group’s in-house producers.

The trio, it would be fair to say, are firmly united in their vision for the band’s work.

“People often talk about music as a language,” says Hallett.

“But here we are seeing it as an ancient technology that has the power to affect the mind and change the perception of reality.”

“It’s like we’re doubling down on the idea that we’re using music as a tool to change your brain state,” adds Leavers.

“We tend to have these really intense gigs, so with this record, we wanted to unite the live sound and the studio sound a little bit more.”

Their words brim with the same artistic idealism that animates them both on stage and in the studio. This album was recorded via the method that they now call their own: a few days of unplanned, longform sessions of improvised playing, followed by several months of arduous post-production work.

In this case, nine hours of raw music were wrangled and whit-

tled until 45 fiery, compact minutes of feverish intensity and vivacity remained.

“We record in a slightly backwards manner, where we almost write the music after we’ve recorded it,” says Leavers.

“Sometimes for a track that ends up being four minutes long, we may have played it, or played an improvisation that included those moments, for half an hour. It’s like sampling yourself in a way.”

If it sounds like a challenging process, it most definitely is. Sifting through the mountains of raw materials to find, as Hallett calls them, “the moments when the energies and magical, colourful collisions happened”, is labour-intensive, but the painstaking work more than pays off with the end result.

“I always loved this Aphex Twin quote,” says Leavers.

“Someone asked him how he knew when a track was finished, and he said, ‘When I hate it’. That quote makes complete sense to me. It tells you that you have to work on something really fucking hard and long. If I’m still enjoying a track, it’s like, well, maybe I need to give it some more work.”

The group’s trademark bombastic, spiritual jazz-referencing dynamism is at full tilt on tracks like ‘Code’ and ‘Pyramids’, while their muscularity has never been more aggressively on display than on ‘Angel of Darkness’, where they hit a deep, bluesy groove that Hutchings digs twice as deep with his manic, shovelling sax shrills.

For the first time, the band left London’s legendary Total Refreshment Centre studios and relocated instead to Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire, which Leavers describes as “the most beautiful studio I’ve ever been to.” It is a measure of the band’s evergrowing confidence that they were able to take the move in their stride, while Leavers’ experience producing for artists including Snapped Ankles, Alabaster dePlume and Flamingods has only enhanced his sure-footedness at hunting down the particular sounds that he wants from The Comet Is Coming.

— The scene is a construct — It will have escaped nobody’s attention that The Comet Is Coming have been hovering around the epicentre of the booming London jazz scene since first coming together in 2013.

Hutchings has been the unelected ringleader of the movement,

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“Someone asked Aphex Twin how he knew when a track was finished, and he said, ‘When I hate it’. That makes complete sense to me” stemming not just from his work here, but also as co-founder of Sons of Kemet and his own band, Shabaka & The Ancestors.

If that wasn’t enough, he also released his first full-length solo album, Afrikan Culture, earlier this year. If anyone understands the allure of being immersed in a community of like-minded creatives, it must be him.

“The scene is a construct that people decide to use to describe multiple processes happening,” says Hutchings.

“Processes of different musicians having creative experiences together and delivering those to an audience. If everyone in that scene has an energy that says we want to keep making creative music, then it’ll keep going forward.”

Thanks in no small part to The Comet Is Coming, there is no sign of the scene slowing; indeed, Leavers sees the future as being very bright. “I think there’s going to be a second wave where things evolve and go pretty leftfield,” he says. “Players can play in lots of different outfits and combinations and that’s a good way to create lots of new mutations, like in DNA.” The group point to new voices like Nala Sinephro, the Caribbean-Belgian composer and musician signed to Warp, whose debut album Space 1.8 in 2021 featured London jazz luminaries such as Nubya Garcia and Eddie Hick, as being emblematic of the way the scene is heading: jazz in philosophy, if not exactly in sound.

“The great thing is that you just never know what the next thing is going to be,” says Hutchings. “There are always going to be people who have different solutions to the problem of how to keep vitality in music and how to express ourselves. It’s exciting to know that in five years, or even two years, there are going to be younger musicians that have new ways of expressing themselves. Obviously, I’ve got a particular language or way of playing that I’ve developed over the years, so someone might be listening to that and then start from that point and go forward.”

Hutchings is acutely aware of the scale of his impact, even if he is too modest to address it directly. As a graduate of the education and development organisation Tomorrow’s Warriors, which has also given breaks to the likes of Eska, Moses Boyd and Soweto Kinch, he now sees the value of investing in the future generations, too, and takes time to enthuse about the 14-year-old bassoonist Nahuel Angius-Thomas, a recent Tomorrow’s Warriors signee, who Hutchings describes as “jaw-droppingly amazing.”

Hutchings’ own career has always seemed eye-wateringly stressful to outside observers, balancing his three bands with his solo work and frequent collaborations. “This is what I will be doing for as long as I have the energy to do it,” he tells us, but the interview takes place only a few weeks after he publicly announced that Sons of Kemet will be “closing this chapter of the band’s life for the foreseeable future”.

“It’s not necessarily hard to manage,” he says. “It just meant that I was really busy. When I finished touring with one group, I’d go and tour with another one. But I’ll probably ease up the amount of gigs that I do from 2024 and focus more on my own

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music. I’ve got a solo record coming out that year that’s mainly based on clarinets and flutes and stuff like that. It’s going to be quite a big change. For one, I’m going to be 40. It will be a shift away from the saxophone as the dominant form of expression.”

Hutchings is quick to point out that his passion for music is undimmed, but it is clear that he is approaching a new phase of his career. “I am falling out of love with the saxophone. It’s a bit clackety and you’ve got to use reeds which slowly deteriorate whenever you use them. But it does fulfil a good purpose and it is loud, which is handy for groups like Comet, who are also very loud. But yeah, nothing can go on forever. It’s not like you fall out of love with the saxophone and that’s it for the rest of my life.

You’ve got to have phases of stepping back and going forward.”

It goes some way to explaining the prominence of flute on Afrikan Culture, specifically the shakuhachi, a Japanese variety of the woodwind instrument that Hutchings shares a passion for with Hallett’s father, who even gave Hutchings some lessons.

The shakuhachi appears on Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam too, thanks to some judicious auxiliary additions from Hallett and Leavers.

— Everything integrated — Production duo Hallett and Leavers have their own musical life outside of the band, in the form of the Soccer96 project that they began shortly after meeting in Brighton over a decade ago. It leans into the futurist, space-age synth aesthetic that is another key ingredient in The Comet Is Coming, with Leavers in particular fascinated by the digital palette.

“I got really into studying the singularity and AI,” he says, reflecting on the release of Soccer96’s recent album Inner Worlds. “I listened to a lot of engineers who are making the AI talk about how best to guide the intelligence-learning process to try to make it the best possible situation for us. I got really into the sound of vocoders and singing through synths, especially choir synths.”

The latter make their way onto ‘Code’ too, to haunting effect. “It sounds like the technology is trying to approximate humanity. It feels very resonant at this time, when everything is becoming integrated and we might have Neuralink inserted into our brains in our lifetime,” says Leavers, with a smile that barely conceals his anxiety.

For now, there does not appear to be any danger of the curtain coming down on The Comet Is Coming like it has done on Sons of Kemet. The band have already begun discussions about their next project together, and a major world tour awaits them after the release of the new album. They’ve worked hard to expand their own horizons; now it’s over to us.

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

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The quiet things out loud Julia Jacklin took a year out from music after her last album left her burnt out by human feelings. Her follow up, PRE PLEASURE, finds her singing about platonic relationships and sex, inspired by the pop music that makes you feel like a kid again, by Stuart Stubbs.

Photography by Nick Mckk

When Julia Jacklin appeared on the cover of Loud And Quiet in February 2019, our interview had taken place four months earlier, before her second album, Crushing, had even been announced. She was going to take it easier this time, having toured her debut, Don’t Let The Kids Win, into the ground, taking herself with it and speaking to every known journalist along the way. “Yeah, that didn’t happen,” she says with a laugh today. “I think during Crushing I thought, ‘I’m only going to be young once. And I’m only going to be making music that people give a shit about for a small amount of time. Just say yes to everything.’ I did do that and it kind of fucked me up a bit to be honest.”

Shows supporting that album were eventually winding down when the pandemic drove a nail into the last few and forced an ending. After that, Julia didn’t even listen to music for a full year.

It wasn’t only the intensity of schedule that took “a weird toll” on her; there was also the intensity of the work itself.

Crushing is a heavy indie folk record: a heavy listen, heavier to have written, and – well – crushing to perform every night for a straight year, only to then talk about it throughout the days.

It was a record that would have struggled to be more candid, predominantly detailing a real life breakup and exploring every meaning of its title, from ‘crushing’ as extreme disappointment to the exquisite agony of infatuation and crushing on someone you hope to one day love and be loved by, down into darker regions where a close friend dies from a long illness. And it was all delivered in an almost uncomfortably close manner, with Jacklin maintaining eye contact and leaving no word open to misinterpretation.

She’s now at the bottom of the mountain again, with a new album to release and good intentions in place. Her third record is the excellent PRE PLEASURE. The title, she says, is an acknowledgement of how she’s spent a lot of her life working hard in preparation for an illusive period of enjoyment that’s forever in the future.

“I don’t want this to feel like ‘the power of now,’” she says, “because it’s the most cliché thing in the world, but you only have this current moment. Each year I think I understand that

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more than I used to. The last chunk of the Crushing tour I finally got to this point of, I actually have to enjoy these shows. So much of this industry is ‘we’re building’ – ‘we’re building your profile, you’re an up and coming artist’. You’re forever an up and coming artist. But that’s kind of not true. Where I’m at [in my career] is pretty special, and I’m definitely trying to approach this next touring chapter as, really enjoy this and don’t think of it as work towards making sure the fourth record is really the one… But we’ll see.”

— PRE PLEASURE — PRE PLEASURE was recorded in Montreal in a similar manner to Don’t Let The Kids Win and Crushing, which is to say it was completely different. With every new record, Jacklin chooses a new producer and a new location, books the studio far in advance and then prays she’ll have an album ready to go by the time she gets there. She never does, but she always has some of it. She spent two weeks in an apartment in Toronto, “in a fever dream of stress… but it was beautiful. I was trying to pull together all of my ideas,” she says, “as much as I could.”

She blu-tacked reams of butcher paper to the walls, covered in lyrics and ideas. Once recording had begun, when she’d run out of songs she would write in her apartment at night again and bring something new in the following day, to work on with her Canada-based live band. It was the first time she wrote not on guitar but a Roland keyboard, enjoying the sparseness of simple chords and its built-in backing tracks.

She says: “The biggest thing was I wanted it to sound more joyful than my last record. I wanted it to feel a little less heavy. I wanted to make some music that was going to make me feel some sort of joy. Crushing was sad to play every night for two years. Just for myself, and for the crowd, I wanted some more generous sounding music to throw into the set.” She pauses.

“Yeah, that’s the main word – generous.

“But I knew the lyrics were always going to be what they were – I wasn’t going to write joyful lyrics because I don’t know how to do that yet… or, no, it’s just not my style. But I was trying very hard to explain to everyone that the album retained dry

vocals and scrappy elements but had more pop sensibilities.

Constantly keeping that in mind whenever the record started to go sad words sad music.” She raises her arm up and slants it downwards. “I think I achieved it on 75% of the album,” she estimates with a laugh.

It’s a throwaway percentage that feels somewhat true: of PRE PLEASURE’s ten tracks, its two most minimal and slow, ‘Too In Love To Die’ and ‘Less of a Stranger’, pack similar gut punches to those found across Crushing. The remaining 5% is for fans to debate, as I’m sure they will.

Elsewhere, as Julia says, she’s kept a lightness of touch in the music, turning a song about young, vulnerable sex into a sparkly glitter ball moment on ‘Ignore Tenderness’, giving us unmistakeable grunge pop on ‘I Was Neon’ and revelling in quiet-loud-quiet joy on ‘Love, Try Not to Let Go’ – a song about an overwhelming desire for love that’s echoed in the rushes of distortion, which definitely weren’t on offer the last time you saw Julia Jacklin live. Even ‘Magic’ – another exploration into what sex is really like for most of us – peaks triumphantly after a

spidery, skewed guitar opening that sounds like ‘Heroin’ by the Velvet Underground.

“I wanted to sing about relationships in my life and make it very obvious that it wasn’t romantic,” says Julia. “That’s something I’ve written about in the past but those relationships are a lot harder to write about. And it’s hard to make it clear that they aren’t romantic songs. I think familial platonic relationships and sex were two things I was exploring at the time with songwriting. But I guess it’s just what was going on.”

Crushing had a couple of these songs too, but they largely got swept up in the breakup album narrative. ‘When The Family Flies In’ could be (and often was) read as mates being supportive after the end of a relationship, but it was actually about a close friend of Julia’s dying of cancer; ‘You Were Right’ was a message to an ex, but it was for an ex-friend, not an ex as we tend to know them in pop music.

“Friendship breakdowns are so intense in a way that’s hard to write about because we don’t have much language around it, and we don’t have much ceremony,” Julia says, noting

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“I feel like the world would be slightly nicer if we broke up with our friends” that she called the final track on the new album ‘End of a Friendship’ to avoid any confusion around what it’s about. It’s a perfect closer; the Twin Peaks score with an orchestral arrangement from Arcade Fire’s Owen Pallett. “I feel like the world would be slightly nicer if we broke up with our friends,” says Julia. “I feel like people are slightly haunted by old friendships because there is no closure.”

— Real human connection — People ask Julia about her songs a lot. In a borderline invasive way. What are they about and did this thing really happen to her? She accepts that it’s partly down to the music she makes

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(folk rock that’s known for its emotional charge) and how her songs are presented (autobiographically, with the vocals high in the mix and poured straight into your ears), but while it’s what makes her music so powerfully relatable, it doesn’t make it any easier. The questions come from fans and journalists, and while I try to avoid going down that road, I fail at least once, even if I ask my question reversing up the street.

The song I want to know about is ‘Moviegoer’, perhaps my favourite song on PRE PLEASURE. It leaps out from the record as the one track that doesn’t appear to feature Julia or her life experiences, but rather tells the tale of a Hollywood film director and a fan of the movies. I offer her my interpretation of the song for her to tell me how wrong I am, if she wishes. And

I am wrong. I took this brilliant (quite misanthropic) song and boiled it down to an allegory of loneliness, and how it fits us all the same, whether we’re the millionaire director or the average person watching his film.

“Ooh, I like that,” she says because she’s a nice person.

“That’s pretty close.” Then she goes on to tell me what the song is really about: “That’s one I’m actually still trying to figure out.

Like, what the fuck did I make?! That song is a swirl of so many things. I was quite angry when I wrote it, which you can tell from how the song sounds. It was a crushing realisation that maybe making and consuming art actually doesn’t make us any happier or feel connected to people in the ways we all like to say it does.

I don’t want it to be too pandemic-y, but I’m sure it was exacerbated by that time of how much people were talking about how important art was to make and consume so we could all feel connected during the pandemic. I was so irritated to hear that all the time because, without sounding too cheesy, I think lots of people actually want real human connection, and to be understood by the people in their lives. Y’know, after I got out of that feeling I do appreciate that music does play a role in lots of things and can be very useful, but at the time I was very aware of the limitations of art and that you can’t expect it to fill the void of living in the world we’re living in right now.”

Julia’s answer reminded me of one of the things I’ve always liked most about talking to her about her records. She calls out the things that most indie musicians don’t, and she is loath to talk about what she does in a grandiose way (although I’d argue that that’s for the rest of us to do). She doesn’t consider herself special, even if her talent is. And when I ask her if she’s ever pulled back from including any feelings or experiences in her music, wanting to go there but finding it too much, she says: “It really depends. I never want to be cruel to anyone. There’s definitely a lot of stuff I’d never say out loud. I’m sure we all have that – real gritty shit. I think I’m more wary of being put in a confessional lady singer-songwriter thing. That’s probably what stops me more, rather than caring about being open. I just don’t want to be a cliché. And I do sometimes question how it’s expected of women to be a bit more open hearted and rip-yourself-apartand-present-it and that’s the only way people will care about your humanity. And I question if I’m playing into that, and that it’s not helpful to me or the world. But I think why it doesn’t bother me most of the time is I know now that most of my thoughts and feeling are shared. One beautiful and hard thing about getting older is realising how much you’re not special at all. Like, every feeling and thought you’ve had has already been had. That can be pretty devastating but on the other hand it’s humbling. Me singing this stuff doesn’t feel that special because I know it’s not a unique thought.”

— Written by aliens —

is pretty intense. I try to find joy in music from just listening to music now. That will eventually lead me back to the joy of making music.

“The indie world is a churning beast of so much stuff,” she says. “I’ve always been very up to speed and I got exhausted by it and just wanted to listen to big feelings with big music.”

The three songs she first returned to were ‘Never Too Much’ by Luther Vandross, ‘Because You Loved Me’ by Celine Dion and ‘Because It’s in the Music’ by Robyn, “songs that sound like they were written by aliens, because they don’t include any of the mundanity of everyday life.”

“I think I was a bit burnt out by human feelings,” she says, “and I was trying to get over myself a little bit. You can get so concerned with being cool – being cool online, and making music, and being irreverent – and listening to Celine Dion, she’s taking it super seriously and not pretending that she doesn’t give a shit, which is the indie brand – to not give a shit while actually giving so many shits.”

Julia grew up with that Celine Dion track, which “sounds like a warm bath”, having heard it on her dad’s 1997 Grammy Winners compilation CD when she was seven. Robyn is of course a more recent discovery – Julia saw her perform at Austin City Limits in 2019. “It was just the best thing I’ve ever seen,” she says. “I felt so much joy and I felt like I was thirteen again, which is so beautiful because that’s one of the saddest parts about growing up – you don’t have that unadulterated joy from music as much. But I saw Robyn and it made me feel so good. I think I’d forgotten what pure joy felt like when watching music. And how that is super valuable. Like, people always say, ‘Julia’s releasing a new song, get ready to cry,’ which is nice because I know it’s referencing it bringing out an emotion, but I think people can put more weight on that because it’s dark and real, and maybe not put as much value on someone who just makes you so happy and joyful. It was super inspiring.”

We spoke about similar feelings when Julia came on the Loud And Quiet podcast at the end of 2019. Talking about her teenage self she said: “I just remember feeling so much. I had my JVC CD player and I’d turn that up, lie on my bed, thinking I would die of feelings.”

I ask her how she is now in comparison.

“I think I’m worse. When I was younger I had all of those feelings but I was very shy and I didn’t have an outlet yet. I wasn’t a musician and I couldn’t put it all in songs. I was feeling lots of stuff and you’re kind of learning in what environments you can let it out. I now have a job that literally is about saying the quiet things out loud. Which is so great in many ways. But then you get to the point where you think, oh, there’s definitely another step after the point where you can say everything out loud and put it on paper and write lots of songs… I don’t know what I’m trying to say, but yes, I’m exactly the same.”

A year after the Crushing tour finally came to an end Julia started listening to music again. “I love music, but it’s pretty stressful,” she says today. “Making a record and putting it out

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CRUISE! The new DIY sound of Nigerian nightlife

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Thanks to the likes of DJ Cora, Slimfit and DJ Stainless, the Lagos cultural underground is alive with a cutting-edge new club sound.

Skye Butchard investigates the scene’s rapid evolution, speaking to some key players as cruise (aka freebeat) goes global A new genre of homegrown electronic music is forming in Nigeria – so new that no one has settled on a name yet. Some are calling it ‘freebeat’. That’s how producers tag the beats when posting them on local blogs (which are also full of bootlegs and unofficial mixtapes) but that’s just because they’re free mp3s.

The other name floating around is ‘cruise’, a descriptor which emphasises the freewheeling and joyful nature of the sound. Producers like DJ YK, Slimfit and DJ Stainless are some of the pioneers in this fast-moving and chaotic scene. Part deconstructed amapiano, part meme music, its creators bring the no-nonsense energy of ’80s Chicago house, and jack up the tempo for street dancers.

“Most people in Lagos are ‘cruise people’,” says cruise producer DJ Cora. “They love to laugh, they love to dance.

They want to hear things that make them laugh, dance and scatter body.”

“It was ostensibly stuff that people were putting out there for vocalists and rappers to jump onto,” explains Ian McQuaid

of MOVES Recordings, who are helping to document this scene through a compilation release. “More often, the dancers were downloading this stuff and then speeding it up, putting on TikTok and making dances. Within a couple of months, producers were putting out records that were reflecting the speed of the dances themselves. You could see this virtuous circle was being created on social media.”

As part of a label that specialises in showcasing undervalued strains of dance music from across the globe, the sound instantly caught McQuaid’s attention. To state the obvious, cruise is incredibly distinct and ear-grabbing. Low bite-rate samples are triggered and retriggered over hectic but minimal instrumentals. Songs are often just a couple of minutes, and follow no traditional pop format. They operate more like on-thefly DJ cuts, uploaded directly from a cracked version of FruityLoops. When McQuaid reached out to his contacts in Lagos, the impact of this sound became obvious.

“It turned out that on an underground level, this thing

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DJ CORA

was blowing up massively,” he says. “For me it was the first example of what you could call a homegrown Nigerian techno sound.” There’s a practical reason for the frantic nature of the beats, too. Just take the incessantly looped producer tags, which were borne out of necessity, but now feel like a built-in feature: “All of the producers now know that they break their tunes on TikTok,” McQuaid explains. “Audiomack is another big platform for it. The reason it goes on there, and the reason you’ll hear producer name tags all the way through the tunes, is that there’s a lot of scurrilous behaviour that goes on. The dancers are not tagging the producers when they upload it, because they’re trying to build their own brand. As a response to that, as a producer, the only chance you’ve got of people knowing that you made this tune is if you hammer your name tag all over it.

“That’s a very pragmatic way to ensure that you get the attention that you want. That’s an example of it quite clearly affecting the content of the music by responding to the form and the way it’s being shared.”

“It’s important because when I first started making beats, my beats were popular but I wasn’t getting any recognition,” agrees another cruise producer, DJ YK. “I made the viral ‘Ogo Agege’ beat but many people don’t know because my tag wasn’t on it, so artists just took it and were making their own songs

“In many cases, the stuff that’s seen as the most throwaway in society often goes on to define it” 72

from it. A friend of mine noticed and advised I start adding these skits to it so that there’s no space for anyone to record over it, and over time people fell in love with it because they find it funny, entertaining and it makes them dance. Now it’s my signature as it distinguishes me from other people.”

The conversation between producer and dancer has led to an exciting evolution in how cruise sounds. Producers work at a flat-out rate, throwing everything at their beats to see what will catch on with the dancers. This reveals that people’s tastes are often far weirder than slick pop producers estimate.

Take DJ Stainless’ ‘No Comment Freebeat’, a borderline atonal one-note jam that rides a midi guitar into oblivion for over three minutes. Whatever sticks for one producer ends up influencing the freebeats that get posted on TikTok for the next few weeks.

“I draw inspiration from Instagram and other social media sites,” explains DJ Cora. “People keep tagging me on these videos and sending these memes to me and they’ll say, ‘Can you add a beat to this so we can dance?’ Once I get the vocals, it takes me an hour or two to get a beat ready. The inspiration comes from the vocal, if it’s the kind of vocal that suits makosa, I’m going for makosa production, if it fits street I’m going to do street vibe, if the vocal fits amapiano, I’ll do amapiano vibe.”

DJ YK’s process is similar. “TikTok is where my sounds do the best. As creators use my sounds, they spread fast.” Like Cora, he makes his beats fast too. “Say about 15-20 minutes.”

— Throwaway luxury — The rapid creativity of cruise has been the biggest hurdle for MOVES, as they release the first international compilation of cruise beats as a four-part EP series. Nevertheless, documenting

DJ KHALIPHA

the early days of this movement has been a rewarding task.

“We’ve signed some stuff that’s going to be coming out six months after you’ve signed it, which is crazy when things are moving so quickly,” McQuaid says.

That’s made even more of an issue given the EPs will be releasing on vinyl during a time where pressing plants are badly falling behind on orders. The incongruity of capturing such an intentionally disposable and digital sound on record was too good to pass up on, though.

“We wanted to print on vinyl because we wanted to do this kind of ludicrous thing of taking this ‘throwaway’ sound and putting it on a record. Vinyl is a ridiculous format – it’s an antiquated luxury format, which I quite like. But I liked the wrongheadedness of taking this complete throwaway thing, which in some cases it’s just mp3s without any real project files. ” Cruise is not yet in its final form, and there’s no way of knowing where it’ll end up. “I’ve no idea where this thing will be in six months’ time,” says McQuaid. “It’ll probably be growing and spreading. I’m also aware of the distorting lense of bringing foreign money into stuff. It’s like quantum physics; when you measure something you change its position.

“I don’t want our presence to have a distorting effect in a negative sense. I want to be able to support people to grow in the way they would have done naturally, and like the best scenes, they tend to grow outside of the limelight to get to a solid place before they blow. I know it’ll change. I think it’ll grow first before you see the changes, but it’ll be driven by what people start dancing to.”

“I see it as a new thing,” says DJ Cora. “I can say I’m the first of the DJs that started cruise, I see it as something that people hadn’t really indulged in when I started. Once I started it, I saw a lot of attention, a lot of opportunities. That was when I became conscious of what I was doing.”

In the beginning, McQuaid and MOVES reached out directly to artists on social media. Some of the download links even had phone numbers attached. That led him to artists like Slimfit. Next was DJ Cora’s manager. Some were harder to find than others, like DJ YK, who has since become one of the most prominent figures within the scene.

Soon, he was building relationships via WhatsApp, and setting up cross-continent meetings with producers and their managers. This unorthodox approach wasn’t without its problems.

“There’s a lot of culture clash. None of these people have had any kind of experience of mainstream DSPs [streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music]. There’s a lot of distrust.

There’s a lot of people thinking that you’re scamming them.

Sometimes it’s good, because you get challenged on a lot of basic stuff that you just take as read. If someone says ‘Why is it like that?’, you have to think, ‘Well, why is it like that?’ If it doesn’t make sense and they want to change it, you think, ‘You’re right, I’m wrong, let’s change it.’”

This fluid, non-traditional approach mirrors how exciting it is to follow the music itself. The artists and the label have been

keen to use the immediacy of the platforms they work on to their advantage, spotting gaps that antiquated parts of our industry simply don’t see.

“The technology has enabled us to speak and engage with so much more immediacy. I can phone someone up at any time - or more realistically they can phone me day or night, which is what often happens. We’ve got tunes now where people have been Whatsapping demos and slapping a verse on in one place, and sending it onto the next place. For me, there’s a new route that completely circumnavigates all the traditional structures of power and control that are largely in a very small group of companies. We’re finding ways to work around that and hopefully give artists better deals using the tools that we have.”

Here we can see that cruise is part of a bigger conversation, in which artists on the outside aren’t let in until it’s over-

DJ OP DOT

whelmingly obvious that their sound is part of the current landscape. At that point, they’re exploited, their sound diluted, and the money often wasted.

“Everything is still done in the same way.” McQuaid says.

“It’s unconscionable that a label can take an 85% cut of someone’s money. That only made sense if you were making physical products and you controlled all the distribution systems.

How the hell was someone going to get a record in Taiwan from Hull without a huge machine behind it? Now, I can do that with a Tunecore account. What the majors have done is started ramping up video budgets to justify this huge swinging amount of royalty rate, to tell artists who’ve got to be on this level which makes it beyond the reach of most people. That’s bullshit. You don’t need that.”

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In Lagos, that process has resulted in a divided culture, where those without lavish lifestyles on the Island (aka Victoria Island, an exclusive, affluent part of Lagos) don’t have music that’s about their own lives. After the Afrobeats explosion around artists like Burna Boy and Wizkid, huge production budgets became a selling point for many artists, promoting an unattainable lifestyle that alienated some of its listeners. Cruise is in some ways a response to that. Like the familiar narrative of the original punk scene growing out of a desire to subvert a bloated and expensive prog-rock market, cruise has developed out of necessity and community spirit.

“It’s created a void where this music has come in to fill,” says McQuaid. “It’s cheap. It’s very DIY. Anyone can make it with a shit laptop and a rip of FruityLoops. It’s found a gap where people actually need something that reflects their lives, as opposed to the aspiration of the mega-rich. There was a big gap where the scene was providing what people needed.”

The filling of that gap can be seen in real time at New Afrika Shrine, a venue co-managed by Femi Tuti. Unlike many other club venues that cater to high earners, the Shrine has an open door policy that makes it accessible to working-class people who are frequently priced out of other live music venues. At the club’s afterparties, venue goers started requesting sped-up amapiano, and eventually, original freebeat tracks. That sound began to bleed into venues elsewhere. Now, a rural and unpretentious street sound is beginning to take over Lagos.

This has also led to smash crossovers, like Portable’s ‘ZaZoo Zehh’, produced by P Prime. Prime made the smart move to reign in some of the wilder tendencies of the sound, sculpting into a more accessible form, and the results have pushed cruise into the mainstream. Hybrid forms of cruise seem to be popping up everywhere.

DJ YK

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— No rules — “What makes this exciting to follow is that it is driven by people’s burning desire to make music, outstripping the technical requirements that might hold them back,” says McQuaid.

“It’s is comparable to the early house music scene, or the early grime scene, or jungle, hardcore, or jersey club – any of these really exciting dance music scenes. There’s always been this incredible creative moment where there’s no rules. No one even knows what it’s called. The people making this, they don’t think there’s any sort of reward attached to it. They’ve not come from that position. They’ve come to get these tunes out to dancers.

Quite a lot of them are erratic people. There’s a certain wildness in it. I find that incredibly exciting because it’s music where as much as possible, the distorting influence of commerce has been minimised.”

At its heart, cruise is a vehicle for a constant stream of bangers, simply because that matters more than anything else to the people making it, and the dancers dancing to it. What’s notable is that many of these songs are constructed like punchlines. DJ Cora’s Street Virus mixtape ends in a flurry of fart samples for no other reason than it’ll make people chuckle. Even in the most serious and substantial examples of a cruise song crossing over, there’s a sense of fun that permeates everything.

In a recent mix for CRACK, DJ Cora was given the task of representing cruise on an international platform for the first time. His mix is a giddy and energetic journey through the various strains of Nigerian street and club music, not discriminating between afrobeat, amapiano or any other related sound that you might hear when walking through a neighbourhood in Lagos. It’s an ideal entrypoint for anyone interested in the genre.

“I want people to be familiar with DJ Cora, to associate DJ Cora with cruise when they hear it,” he says when we mention the mix. “Cruise is happiness. Cruise is what will make you happy.

When you laugh you’ll be happy. When people hear DJ Cora they’ll hear happiness; DJ Cora is happiness; DJ Cora is cruise.”

Just like the Cruise! EP series, his mix highlights the conversation happening between creators, and between the audience editing the tracks for their own purposes. There’s a sense of healthy competition within the scene which makes it exciting to follow - even with all the ripping off and unofficial uploading that goes on.

This is a crucial turning point for a genre that, in places like the UK, might be dismissed simply for the cheap-looking single covers and its freebie delivery; yet to do so would be to miss out on music that’s hard to listen to without beaming.

“I honestly wish I could take my sound more than Nigeria,” says DJ Cora. “I want to travel to more countries, maybe Kenya, so I can use their shit, what’s trending there, for cruise. I’m sure they’ll love it.”

“In many cases, the stuff that’s seen as the most throwaway in society often goes on to define it,” McQuaid says. “I’m old enough to know that when things are demonised as useless crap in the mainstream, we should be paying attention to it.”

augoct

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lanzaroteworks.com—@lnzrt

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Final Third: In Conversation

Hedonism vs Uncle Sam Having been one of underground electronic music’s most influential producers for over a decade, Hudson Mohawke is back with his long-awaited new solo album, Cry Sugar. He speaks to Oskar Jeff about settling in Los Angeles, shit hitting the fan and how important it is to remember to have a fucking laugh.

Photography by Emily Malan

Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke’s production style has had an inarguable resonance across music culture over the last decade. Alongside the likes of Rustie and SOPHIE, he pioneered a form of synthetic, crystalline club music that has permeated everything from era-defining pop, to mainstream rap, to the avant-garde fringes of electronic music.

His catalogue runs deep. The trap-indebted party starters of TNGHT (alongside fellow producer Lunice), set alight festival moshpits and student parties alike; he helped sculpt some of the most singular rap releases of Kanye West’s career (chiefly the monolithic Yeezus).

For his latest solo offering, Cry Sugar, he returns once again to Warp. Another dose of ballistic bassweight and saccharine melodics, as razor-sharp as it is perplexingly off-beat. We discuss how a relocation to America, amongst other things, has helped shape his latest bout of sugar sickness.

Oskar Jeff: How are you feeling about the new record?

Hudson Mohawke: I feel pretty good. I feel a little trepidation, and I think that’s healthy to be honest.

OJ: How are you feeling compared to this time seven years ago, when you released your last solo album?

HM: With that last project I was so burnt out doing live shows. I really wanted to make an album that was not clubfocused at all. I was just tired of it, I’d been doing 30 festivals a summer for the last six years. I still really like that album, but I hear that it was a reaction to the situation.

OJ: You’ve said Cry Sugar is influenced by America, or the idea of America – could you expand on that?

HM: I’d been coming to America for years for work, but

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it was still a culture shock moving here. It’s so vastly culturally different from the UK in a way that is quite jarring. It’s somewhat amusing, but also deeply disturbing at the same time.

OJ: What brought you to America?

HM: It had been in the back of my head forever. My dad’s from LA, and I moved over with a girl I was going out with.

That was the catalyst for it. This was around the end of 2016; I’d moved to London in 2008. There were a couple years where I was going back and forth to Amsterdam. But for the most part, I’d been in London for the best part of a decade. I loved it there, but I knew it was always going to be there. I was nearly 30, I knew if I didn’t take the chance, it might never happen.

Coming to terms with the vastness of America, after feeling like the UK was the centre of the universe, I think I realised that, despite the vastness of it, it’s also a pretty insular place. There’s not a lot bleeding in from other cultures really, on the level of the average person on the street. I love it now, but I had extended periods of time thinking, “What have I done?”, [feeling like] I don’t want to go back to London, but I don’t know what this place is. It’s just fucking weird. It just takes a while to adjust.

It’s kind of what we reflected in the artwork: hedonism vs Uncle Sam. Just like a collapsing society. I think having been here the last few years when shit has been hit the fan every fucking day. A lot of what ended up being on the record was me finding a bit of relief from that.

OJ: It’s certainly there in the music. Something like ‘Dance Forever’ has a real deranged hedonism to it, like someone on their deathbed forcing themselves to dance, the ceaseless quest for euphoria to the end. It comes back to that idea of America again – “We’re gonna go off the cliff, but it’s full-speed in a sports car.”

Final Third:

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Final Third: In Conversation HM: [Laughs] Yeah, absolutely. But, I’m always reluctant to say what exactly an album is about. That’s for people to decide for themselves.

OJ: There’s a feeling of intentional disjointedness to the album’s sequencing, with frequent emotional curveballs and stylistic U-turns. On ‘Some Buzz’ there’s an unexpected extended ambient end which then leads into the Todd Edwards-style UKG of ‘Tincture’. It doesn’t compute in a conventional sense.

HM: It’s intentional in a sense. As a listener, my favourite shit is always unexpected. That’s what gets my attention personally. Again, it goes back to how I like to sequence a DJ set. I like to have sections that are almost palate cleansers, after moments where it’s been quite intense. Also it’s sort of a reflection of attention span; on previous records I’ve been reluctant to expand on the same idea for more than a minute.

I think that the flipside of that, is you see a lot of people intentionally making background music for a lobby or an office.

Something that doesn’t ask any questions, doesn’t really demand

your attention at all. That seems to be the way a lot of people are consuming records. It’s in the background while you’re doing your fucking spreadsheet or wherever. I think the point where I’d be alright to do that is when I’ve sort of given up.

OJ: The press release for the album says it’s a reaction to “stifled traditional chin stroking poe-face genre studies of UK club culture.” Does that feel more prevalent now?

HM: I don’t know that anyone has a better, more established scene of underground electronic music than the UK does.

But I’ve always felt there’s not a lot of joy in it, it’s just kind of a bit drab. Again, it’s probably from me being obsessed with happy hardcore and jungle, where I’ve always thought there’s a way to be direct and balls-to-the-wall about things, without that necessarily meaning it’s ‘cheesy’.

OJ: Do you think it’s almost about how journalists and academics are writing about club culture, and how that’s almost becoming self-perpetuating within the music?

HM: Yeah, there’s probably an aspect of that. There’s a

“You can have whatever opinions on Kanye as a person, but there isn’t an artist at that level who is willing to make the stuff he does”

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Final Third: In Conversation

real tendency to over-intellectualise club music.

OJ: It’s almost like people are trying to work out where they stand in the lineage of British dance music before even putting the USB into the fucking CDJ. An ultra self-awareness of where you might fit within the grander narrative, rather than just having a fucking laugh?

HM: Yeah, that’s probably a pretty astute way of putting it.

OJ: There’s also the thing of younger people getting sold this false nostalgia for a period that they didn’t experience, such as rave or garage. I sometimes feel like it comes at the cost of people feeling like it was better than what they have now.

HM: Yeah, that’s part of it. It’s funny, actually, I did this little party at the end of last year. It was me and Dougal [veteran happy hardcore DJ]. It was pretty fun. And I remember him saying, like, “Oh, this is exactly what all the old parties were like.” These things that I’d idolised, and it kind of threw me off.

OJ: Yeah that’s the crux of it, it’s as shit or as good as it’s ever been.

HM: It’s the same thing.

OJ: How did you first get into dance music?

HM: Two of my cousins always had [techno and hardcore dance compilation series] Helter Skelter and Thunderdome tapes. I was around 11, part of the fascination was in having no context for what this is. I knew nothing about it, but I knew I loved it.

OJ: If you hadn’t had the success you’ve had, do you think you’d still be making music?

HM: I think about this a lot. I’ve been very fortunate. I very much was the guy being told by my parents, “You’ve got to get a job, or you’re out of the house.” Playing music at 2AM when they had work the next day. It’s the only thing that I really love doing.

I was in Glasgow recently, and the Numbers label guys had been doing a course for young people, and I went and spoke to them for an hour. Each of them had put on their own club night, and I was saying to them, these are the moments that stay with you. When you see your first 150-cap club full for your event, that stays with you forever.

OJ: How has your collaborative work influenced the way you make music?

HM: For the majority of my career, I would have considered myself to be like a very poor collaborator. I just didn’t have the skillset to work well with another person except for Lunice.

But being in the US, collaboration is how things are done.

OJ: An album like Yeezus, which you worked on, sounded like an incredibly open-source production; was that a freeing way of working, or was it a struggle?

HM: I think I struggled with it for a period, because my only experience really was releasing things where I had the final say. There’s a learned aspect of being okay with the idea of something that you worked on sounding totally different from how you had heard it originally.

OJ: If you were to listen back to Yeezus, would you be able to distinguish your contributions or is it a blur?

HM: Yeah, there’s parts dotted all over it. I think my credit is ‘creative consultant’ or something. Working on particular songs but then bringing a kind of palette to the project. It’s a dream come true to work with an artist that’s at the top of their game but you don’t have pre-defined lines of radio hits or singles. That’s rare.

Last time I was with Kanye was just before the pandemic.

You can have whatever opinions on him as a person, but there isn’t an artist at that level who could make number ones, but is willing to make the stuff he does. He’s written the book from scratch like eight different times.

OJ: Lastly, you’ve said collaboration reminds you to never stop learning, but you’ve held a commitment to using FL Studio [a legendary, yet divisive DAW] throughout your career…

HM: Ha! OJ: Why is that?

HM: I think it lends itself very well to getting ideas down really fast. A lot of people have this love-hate relationship with it, because it’s so great in so many ways, but there’s so many glaring shortcomings at the same time, where you have to figure out a way to make it work for you.

It’s funny, I was having this conversation with someone from FL recently. They were talking about the guys who had developed it having a chip on their shoulder about the fact that they’ve never had a good copy-protection system, so everyone’s always been able to pirate it. But the reason that the biggest club records that move culture are made on FL is because it’s accessible to everyone. You can’t buy exposure like that!

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Final Third: Cold Take

Imagine there’s no annoying celebrities – it’s really hard to do For our latest Cold Take nobody was holding their breath for, Andrew Anderson dissects exactly why that ‘Imagine’ cover

by Gal Gadot and co at the start of the pandemic was so grating

STATEMENT OF OPINION #1 The McPizza. Vodka Revolution. MP Michael Gove. There are some things that you just know are wrong. You see them, and you think this is wrong. You could call it intuition, you could call it gut feeling…or you could even say it is part of our collective human consciousness…that, as a species, we have a shared understanding of what is conclusively and absolutely wrong.

The examples I give above are obvious ones. Of course, McDonalds should never make pizza. Of course, Vodka Rev is a terrible place to be. And of course, [insert horrible description of MP Michael Gove here], MP Michael Gove.

STATEMENT OF FACTS On 9 October, 1940, John Lennon is born. 16 years later he forms the Beatles.

John Lennon leaves the Beatles in 1970. He records the song ‘Imagine’ in 1971. He releases it as a single and includes it on an album of the same name. The song is in the key of C. In December 1980, New York City, Mark Chapman shoots John Lennon four times. A doctor pronounces Lennon dead 25 minutes later. Lennon has a net worth of USD200m. There were 1,821 murders in New York City that year.

On 30 April 1985, Gal Godot is born. She becomes an actress and model.

In 2017, Gadot appears as the title character in Wonder Woman. The film earns USD822m. Gadot receives USD300,000.

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In late 2019, a new strain of coronavirus spreads rapidly across the world. It passes easily from person to person, and has a high mortality rate. It is named Covid-19 – the 19 signifying the year of its discovery.

Covid-19 kills more than 4,000 people in New York City in 2020. 468 people are murdered.

On 12 March 2020, Gadot decides to self-isolate.

On 18 March 2020, Gadot releases a cover of Imagine on the platform Instagram. The cover includes 23 other celebrity performers. Like the original, it is in the key of C. Many of the performers are invited to take part by actor and comedian Kristen Wiig.

In an attempt to control the spread of Covid-19, New York governor Andrew Cuomo announces a statewide lockdown. The lockdown begins on 20 March 2020.

Gadot’s ‘Imagine’ video receives 10.6m views. Viewers leave over 50,000 comments.

STATEMENT OF OPINION #2 Not every example of wrong is as obvious as a McPizza. In fact, some seem mundane, yet trigger an intense public reaction. They are labelled wrong with the same surety as MP Michael Gove.

This contrast between their mundanity and the visceral reactions they inspire makes them interesting to study.

Gal Gadot’s ‘Imagine’ video is such an item. Because, on the surface, Gadot was trying to do a nice thing. People like

Final Third: Cold Take celebrities. People like John Lennon songs. So, she gives them a John Lennon song performed by many celebrities. Where’s the problem?

WITNESS STATEMENTS (in chronological order) “‘Imagine’ is anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, but because it is sugarcoated it is accepted.” – John Lennon “You know this virus has affected the entire world, everyone.

Doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, we’re all in this together.” – Gal Gadot “You-hoo-ooo-argh!” – Sarah Silverman “If you’re thinking that dying is bad, here we are singing imagine.” – @ayi.oglu.ayi “You might say that every crisis gets the multi-celebrity carcrash pop anthem it deserves, but truly no crisis…deserves this.”

– Jon Caramanica, The New York Times “You should not have to apologize for lifting people up with song! Your intentions were right and your heart was in the right place.” – @dream._non._stop “It’s funny because she [Kristen Wiig] emailed me after and she was like, ‘I’m so sorry’. It was well-intentioned, but like, yeah, a little tone-deaf. It really came from a nice place I think.”

– Sarah Silverman STATEMENT OF OPINION #3 Unfortunately for Gadot, the collective consciousness immediately labelled her ‘Imagine’ video as wrong. Thousands posted negative comments. It became a PR disaster for her and the other performers Gadot later apologized, as did several others involved in the video.

So, why was it that people immediately hated this song?

How did so many understand that it was wrong?

It is because the song has always been wrong. It just took this new context to highlight quite how wrong it is.

STATEMENT OF OPINION #4 ‘Imagine’ has a great melody. John Lennon’s voice is expressive as always. The piano riff sticks in your head the moment you first hear it. The song also has a nice sentiment; it would be nice if we all lived together in peace, and shared everything.

But it’s one thing to say something nice, and another to say it in a way that both makes sense and rings true. I can tell MP Michael Gove I love him, but unless I’m also a [insert second horrible description of MP Michael Gove here] he won’t believe me. I can write “beauty is truth, truth beauty”, but without Keats’ surrounding poetry the statement itself is banal.

I can even serve you water, flour, yeast, curdled milk, tomatoes, onions, salt and basil, but unless I cook them in a certain way, they won’t form a pizza (not even a McPizza).

And so it is with ‘Imagine’. The ingredients are right, but the result is wrong.

And we all know it is wrong. John Lennon can’t sing about possessions and peace while being one of the world’s richest musicians and a documented domestic abuser. Or rather he can, but his statements won’t ring true. ‘Imagine’ is really no better than a motivational poster in an office.

STATEMENT OF OPINION #5 And so what is true of Lennon’s original is also true of Gadot’s cover – except more so. Rich people singing about no possessions is fake. Rich people singing about peace from the comfort of their luxury bunkers is fake.

This is not to say that Gadot was not sincere. Or that sincerity is a bad thing. But I am saying it is wrong for celebrities to sing “Imagine there’s no heaven” while thousands die of a new illness. That’s just obvious. And we all knew it was wrong.

STATEMENT OF APOLOGY “It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing. It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye, right?” – Gal Godot STATEMENT OF CONCLUSION ‘Imagine’ was wrong in 1971. It was more wrong in 2020. Gal Gadot is not wrong. John Lennon is probably wrong. McPizza, Vodka Revolution and MP Michael Gove remain wrong.

STATEMENT OF WRONG LYRICS (abridged) Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion, too Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man

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One of the curses of being really famous is that your fans insist on sending you all sorts of shit they think you’ll like.

Not things they’ve bought – things they’ve made. Really shit pictures, usually. Of your own face. Fan art. 99.9% of it is destroyed by a handler before it gets anywhere near the intended victim – the other 00.1% Ringo Star is using for the cover of his forthcoming third EP, which I’m happy to report he’s called EP3.

To be fair to Ringo, record titles can be time consuming to come up with, especially when you have four new songs to write for the release. And Ringo’s worked at such a pace that he’s managed to get this collection together just one year after his last EP – so naturally, the cover art had to take a back seat, and I think picking his favourite piece of fan art for the job is actually a very smart move. It’s just good time management.

This is a single frame from an entire graphic novel about the ex-Beatle entitled ‘One Ringo to Rule Them All’ – a story that parachutes Starr into the world of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (I mean, it makes sense), but is set in space (again, it ultimately stands up). As we only have this frame to go on after the rest of the manuscript “fell into a shredder”, we have to assume that the circle in the background is the Eye of Sauron. That’s Ringo in the foreground, illustrated from his 2019 headshot postcard, which he always has on him to make fans go away. Those cards are paying for themselves here, lightening Ringo’s heavy workload and deflecting from the music of EP3, which is by Ringo Starr.

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Overheard backstage at Glastonbury 2022, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher (55) apparently got in a blazing row with quiz show guest David Mitchell (48) after known pedant Mitchell tried to pull up the ‘Parklife’ singer on one of his most famous lyrics. Mitchell alledgedly took Gallagher to task on his line “Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball”, saying it “doesn’t make sense” and is “contradictory” as he jeered with ally Lee Mack. Gallagher calmly shot back with: “how many cannonballs have you seen with legs then?” to which Mitchell had no reply. Victoria Coren Mitchell is thought to have distanced herself from her husband, who may never work again.

He had no idea why the crowd was laughing (for his entire life... up until his massive cardiac arrest)

illustration by kate prior

DEBUT ALBUM 30.09.22 PRINTWORKS, LONDON - 01.12.22