Support The Quietus
Our journalism is funded by our readers. Become a subscriber today to help champion our writing, plus enjoy bonus essays, podcasts, playlists and music downloads.
Catch up on our latest writing.
At this year's edition of Berlin Atonal, Maria Perevedentseva finds a festival packed with art installations and music ranging from the DJ-friendly to all-out carnage, which – having found its footing so spectacularly in recent years - seems not quite so sure what exactly its next step should be. (Photographs by Camille Blake)
John Doran goes to Krakow to throw darts with Leyland James Kirby and hear about Everywhere At The End Of Time, the grand farewell he has planned for his Caretaker project… A farewell which will take six albums and three years to conclude fully
In attempting to unpick the much-advertised gothic vampire horror of Jenny Hval's sixth album (and fourth under her own name), Suzie McCracken finds a much denser web of influence, connecting layers of ancient themes — from witchcraft to menstruation — with the pranksterism of conceptual art
Last week a group of London punks staged a gig on the Thames foreshore in a defiant statement of public rights over our land. Gary Budden argues that they're in a fine tradition stretching back through the ramblers of the Kinder Scout trespass and the 17th century Diggers - and that is a tradition we need to uphold.
Two decades since the release of their debut single, 'The First Big Weekend' – and 10 years since they called it a day – Arab Strap are back with a handful of reunion shows, and a new compilation. They give Nicola Meighan a guided tour of their favourite singles, furthest-flung rarities and bizarrest 'self-destructive ideas'
In the sixteenth full-length recording from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Luke Turner finds perhaps their most perfect musical expression of horror, its realism and sense of inevitability overpowering usual tendencies toward the baroque, and a powerful lesson in empathy
As ZZ Top take their live greatest hits album on tour, their lead singer and guitarist Billy Gibbons talks Kiran Acharya through his top 13 LPs, setting aside some of his more well-worn classics in favour of recent favourites
Laniakea’s debut album, a collaboration between Grumbling Fur’s Daniel O’Sullivan and Zu’s Massimo Pupillo, is devoted to the artist Ian Johnstone, whose untimely passing also saw the end of the London refuge where the LP was recorded. They tell Russell Cuzner how the life and location the record laments created an ascendant work at once both elegiac and joyous