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Over the coming weeks, we’re going to be heading down into the nearer regions of The Quietus’ archives to bring you some of our favourite editorial of 2024. It’s been a big year for tQ, with a new site – indeed, this new Portal archive discovery tool – and we’re very proud of what we’ve been publishing on it. In the first part of our Portal look back on the year, we’ve got interviews with Album of the Year chart toppers Ex-Easter Island Head, runners up Tristwych Y Fenywod, and Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson. There’s a Baker’s Dozen with Mabe Fratti, the reissue of the week review of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s Souvenirs, Jude Rogers’ Black Sky Thinking essay on why we’re culturally so obsessed with Threads, Ed Gillett on why expensive Night Czars and other gimmicky initiatives won’t save club culture, and Audrey Golden remembers Yasmine Lakhaney, the UK’s first female bouncer. There’s also our Anniversary look back on Sade’s Diamond Life & Sophisti-Pop. We’ll be back net Monday with the second recap of the best on tQ this past year.
Iron Maiden's larger than life frontman talks to author John Higgs about magical practice, the hallucinatory mandrake root, how to survive a rough childhood and why William Blake is an artist we should look to for inspiration. All photographs by John McMurtrie
Featuring members of The Courtneys, Guttersnipe and Hawthonn, Tristwch Y Fenywod are the Welsh-language gothic band set to release one of this year's best debut albums, says Patrick Clarke ahead of their appearance at Supersonic in Birmingham
Following new album Sentir Que No Sabes and ahead of her guest curation at this year’s Le Guess Who?, Mabe Fratti takes Laura Snapes through thirteen favourite records spanning her Central American adolescence, cult dream pop and French post-punk Zeligs
As London's Night Czar Amy Lamé leaves her job this week, Ed Gillett investigates her failures and successes, the increasing politicisation of her role, and whether alternative approaches offer any chance of doing better
Beautifully intimate home recordings made by an Ethiopian nun reflecting on the idea of exile in the 1970s and 1980s, probably never intended to be heard by anyone but herself, have taken on an astounding universality in 2024, says Jakub Knera
'Thread head' Jude Rogers has spent decades in thrall to the notorious nuclear war television drama as well as recent months researching and writing a new BBC Radio documentary on it. Here she writes about being a member of an international community of fellow, often neurodiverse, obsessives who find companionship within the horror of its devastating frame
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