Perhaps it’s just the way I’m feeling at the moment, but it seems telling that so many of my favourite records released this month capture a sense of overwhelm, whether Still House Plants’ transfixing and emotive deconstruction of the guitar-drums-vocals formation, Kiran Leonard’s bombastic tribute to the constant flux of London, or the vast ambition of Martha Skye Murphy’s new single, ‘Need’.
We are at that point in the year where 2024’s wider musical identity is beginning to take shape, and it seems as if, for me at least, it’s a year in which many of its most essential artists desire to fill every nook and cranny of their listeners’ psyches, their music coming like an incoming tide.
Below you’ll find our favourites from a particularly fruitful month. All of these picks, as well as all the other excellent music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will also be compiled into an hours-long playlist (also a bumper edition covering two months rather than one) exclusive to our subscribers. In addition, subscribers can enjoy exclusive music from some of the world’s most forward-thinking artists, regular deep-dive essays, a monthly podcast, specially-curated ‘Organic Intelligence’ guides to under the radar international sub-genres, and more.
To sign up for all those benefits, and to help us keep bringing you the kind of music you’re about to read about below, you can click here. And read on for the best of the best from April 2024.
Patrick Clarke
ALBUMS
Still House Plants – If I don’t make it, I love u
(Bison)
If I don’t make it, I love u often resembles This Heat’s Deceit via Hyperdub compilations and Tilt-era Scott Walker. The pitch-black industrial drumming and fractious guitar clangs elicit the measured brutality of Swans and the totalism of Glenn Branca, underpinned by the metallic hypnosis of New York no wave group Ut. It’s all these things rolled precariously into one, dismantled and reassembled by virtue of instinct and genuine emotional release. But the playful polyrhythms sound like an accidental scratch in the groove from Jeff Buckley’s Grace. You can feel a subconscious assimilation of early 00s R&B mixed with slowcore and Midwest emo. It’s comparable to a no-wave D’Angelo or Lauryn Hill. Still House Plants embrace, rather than shun, sounds absorbed from childhoods spent in working-class environments, integrating skeletal post rock with soul and jazz.
Hayley Scott – read the full review here
BIG|BRAVE – A Chaos Of Flowers
(Thrill Jockey)
Quietness is present on BIG|BRAVE’s latest album, A Chaos Of Flowers – the sparse ‘Chanson Pour Mon Ombre’ is the first time the band have employed acoustic guitar, and drums are more often scuttling brushes than big thumping stomps. As with their The Body collaboration, Robin Wattie’s vocals are clear and deliberate. There’s still plenty of loudness too, however. The songs swim among big dark waves of rumbling, lurching guitar. “We still had a wall of amps, we still approached things in the studio similarly,” Wattie says of the process of making the album. “But whereas with previous albums everything was full force as much as possible, bringing everything back and then full force forward again, this time there was no feedback, no heavy drums.”
Patrick Clarke – read an interview here
Einstürzende Neubauten – RAMPEN (apm: alien pop music)
(Potomak)
If Einstürzende Neubauten were waging a war against sleep back in the 1980s, then on their new studio album, they’re waging one against brevity. Rampen (apm: alien pop music) is a double album that’s almost prog-like in its dimensions. 2020’s Alles in Allem was compact and punchy, whereas here we have something sprawling and cosmic – or even kosmische – with a sense of stately grandeur that comes from hanging around for 44 years and defying incredible odds. If albums can be likened to novels then Rampen is a bit like Ulysses in that it’s nourishing, complex, thrilling and frustrating, and an absolute bugger to finish in one go.
Jeremy Allen – read the full review here
Dali De Saint Paul & Maxwell Sterling – Penumbra
(Accidental Meetings)
This was/is a scorching session, built around immersive and multi-directional tradeoffs of practice for voice and double bass. In terms of how Dali De Saint Paul uses said voice here, it feels crudely inadequate to describe her as ‘a vocalist’. She’ll sample herself on the fly, run a couple of pitch/tempo-adjusted loops over each other and render all this into the soundbed. Are her inflections, glottal stops etc de facto rhythms? Or melodies (for example the blithe whistling that features in the fifth of Penumbra‘s six untitled sections)? Could not the same be said for the string work of Maxwell Sterling, whose bass style is by no means anti-melody but often heavily textural, and perhaps echoing the free improv continuum? Certainly, this cleaves closer to an avant-chamber style than Sterling’s last collaborative release, with conceptual artist Tai Shani, and another project of De Saint Paul’s, Viridian Ensemble, shares some aesthetic ground with this album.
Noel Gardner – read the full review here
Kiran Leonard – Real Home
(Unsung Hunger / Memorials Of Distinction)
Real Home begins with ‘Pass Between Houses’, a great blast of discordant horns, beneath which there’s a gentle, but unnerving tick of a beat. The horns fade but the beat remains, above which the music builds from gentle arpeggios to a swooning and chaotic crescendo, the horns return, strings and a saxophone are introduced. By the dénouement there are sounds launching in every direction. The next song, ‘Theatre Of Change’ is a crescendo, starting plaintive but ending as a total overwhelming blast. Sometimes the record slows into a gentle wander – the solo piano ballad ‘Real Home’, or the 44-second folky sweep of ‘Treat Me A Stranger’ – but it flaneurs more than it meandres. There’s always a sense that a deluge of emotion and noise is right around the corner, the unabashed romanticism of ‘My Love, Let’s Take The Stage Tonight’ or a disorienting decay into abstracted noise that closes the final song ‘He Had Always Led’. Inspired by the Greater Manchester-born musician’s move to London, it captures the city’s great overwhelm in all its beguiling brilliance, volatility, fitfulness and flux.
Patrick Clarke
bbymutha – Sleep Paralysis
(True Panther)
Sleep Paralysis is an album that propels bbymutha forward, while casting an eye back to childhood memories enveloped by sleeplessness and ensuing turbulence. Sonically, it diverges from the rapper’s trademark expression, but only in its added sprinkling of 90s UK garage and other club music forms, the inspiration for which came from her time spent on tour in the UK post-lockdown. Tracks like ‘piss!’ and ‘tony hawk’ centre on a grinding garage breakbeat, ticking along under bbymutha’s confident Southern drawl, while the ominous melodies of ‘rich’ help to stretch out her incisive flow. Her lyricism is consistently playful and bold, best exemplified on the album’s mischievous finale ‘go!’, which sees her giving listeners a peek into her thoughts on intimacy and attachment.
Arusa Qureshi – read the full review here
Fat White Family – Forgiveness Is Yours
(Domino)
Despite the turbulence, Fat White Family have produced a fine album in Forgiveness Is Yours; containing some of their most ambitious and experimental music to date. Tracks such as ‘Bullet Of Dignity’ carry on the grubby disco chug of previous highs such as ‘Feet’, while ‘John Lennon’ sounds as if Fairport Convention went through an I’m Your Man-era Leonard Cohen phase and wrote songs about meeting Yoko Ono clattered on ketamine before becoming possessed by the spirit of a dead Beatle. The album’s opener, ‘The Archivist’, is delivered as straight poetry, with floating woodwind adding a strangely wholesome and bucolic feel as Saoudi delivers the grandiloquent spoken word track with a palpable smirk and wink.
Daniel Dylan Wray – read an interview here
Jane Weaver – Love In Constant Spectacle
(Fire)
Love In Constant Spectacle is an illustration of progress over reinvention. And in art, as in life, it’s maybe less romantic to steadily test and improve on yourself in incremental ways rather than making dramatic changes. There’s an allure to burning everything to the ground and starting over, but a constant re-examining of yourself and your work requires facing what you’ve done up to this point. Weaver’s own study allows her to consistently build on her body of work rather than just recycling it. And it’s invigorating to see an artist hit her stride more that two decades on from her first solo release.
Amanda Farah – read the full review here
Guests – I Wish I Was Special
(World Of Echo)
Guitars and drums seem to have been jettisoned on Guests’ latest record, with tumbledown analogue synths, watery dub bass and obscurely sourced field recordings ruling the school. ‘(something romantic)’, one of five tracks with parenthetic lower-case titles, is enlivened by what sounds like someone eating a pub lunch as someone plays the accordion nearby. At times, you may conclude that Guests are not only retaining minor flubs and in-studio flotsam for the finished recording, but placing it front and centre: in this, they have strong precedents in the musical canon of knowing outsider surrealists, The Shadow Ring being an obvious name to drop. I Wish I Was Special is warmer and more approachable overall, though, Higgins’ singing style sometimes lending a Young Marble Giants air.
Noel Gardner – read the full review here
TRACKS
Ibibio Sound Machine – ‘Pull The Rope’
A decade ago, ‘Let’s Dance’ was a core banger at tQHQ, and never far from my DJ bag; and even though the mere thought of dancing in 2024 brings on visions of a lengthy spell in hospital and an entire body plaster cast, new single ‘Pull The Rope’ manages to effortlessly summon a new wave/post punk adjacent Afro funk groove so persistent that it’s inspired me to update my will and sign a disclaimer with my chiropractor before shuffling back out onto the dancefloor.
John Doran
Wu-Lu – ‘Daylight Song’ / ‘Sinner’
2022’s Loggerhead was definitive proof that South London polymath Wu-Lu is one of capital’s most exciting young musicians. Forthcoming EP Learning To Swim On Empty is even better. These two early singles – moody, complex and hypnotic – are a taste of a mini-masterpiece. It’s time to start upping the hyperbole.
Patrick Clarke
Batu – ‘Sour 2 Taste’
The latest instalment of Batu’s ongoing series of single releases for self-established imprint A Long Strange Dream is an expansive trip through moody, Autonomic-era drum & bass and typically thrilling sound design ticks.
Christian Eede
Surgeon & Speedy J – ‘Spirit’
If, like me, part of your brain is still convinced that it’s 4am on a Sunday in 1994 and you’re in some poorly ventilated warehouse in the Netherlands coping with eyes that won’t focus on the address of your hotel scribbled on the back of a train ticket, with attendant rainbow of emotions spanning initial concern through eventual joy, then you too will probably enjoy this insouciant belter.
John Doran
Rich Ruth – ‘No Muscle, No Memory’
You wouldn’t guess that Rich Ruth – the experimental Nashville solo instrumentalist whose previous work has leant primarily on spiritual jazz, post rock and kraut – was embracing heavy metal on his forthcoming LP Water Still Flows, that is until four minutes in to lead single ‘No Muscle, No Memory’, where ferocious, reverb-heavy guitar weaves its way effortlessly into its magical, psychedelic sweep.
Patrick Clarke
BFTT – ‘Brian, lost Brian’
Bonkers club music in the ‘UK techno’ vein, primed to spin out even the most restrained, level-headed of 3am dancers. Fittingly appearing on an EP, titled Horsin’ Around! Yes Come On!
Christian Eede
Shit And Shine – ‘You Were Very High’
It’s the Feel Strange Hit Of The Summer. I’m going to skip straight over the cavalier samples currently making Rocket Recordings’ legal department break out into a torrid sweat and get straight to the VIBES which are f. strong on this reissue of a chopped & screwed hip house bass monster which originally saw light of day on Diagonal a few years ago. Did I mention that I played this to 90,000 people at Wembley while DJing with Steve Davis? [pulls out pipe, tamps down tobacco and goes on at great length…]
John Doran
Martha Skye Murphy – ‘Need’
Martha Skye Murphy’s new single is bursting at the seams with ambition, flittering between tenderness and total overwhelm, delicately arranged and yet brutal in its intensity. Sublime visuals that cast the musician alternatively as a debonair spy, a feral creature and a blind mole serve as manifestations of a psyche’s many faces, all hint at the push and pull between secrecy and revelation.
Patrick Clarke
Black Fondu – ‘SB 1 3’
Pristine and psychedelic IDM-leaning rap from a 20-year-old artist born in Accra, Ghana, now resident in London. Attention to detail and self-reliance in terms of audio and visuals gently suggest very interesting things to come.
John Doran
