PercThe Cut OffPerc Trax
Human voices fractured amidst metallic textures are a constant presence on The Cut Off. There’s something in the water at the moment that means ecclesiastical-sounding choral music is being used as a sonic hue all over the shop, including here on the anxious and prangy ‘Heartbeat Popper’, fractured voices in the midst of eddying rumbles and hums, as if a space army choir were rehearsing on a mission to the farthest realms of the cosmos. ‘UK Style’ sounds like a fashion branding bellend being chewed up by a sweat shop sewing machine. Yet Perc’s skill with tone and depth in the sounds he’s making mean this doesn’t just come across as mere “Makes U Think Yeah” critique of capitalism’s impact on the human blah blah, the sort of thing you might find in the more unimaginative realms of legacy industrial. Instead, there’s a real joy to how this music works.
Tony NjokuLast BloomPRAH
If you use Ableton, you will be familiar with the soundtrack to the search for the perfect sound: a middle C, hammered over and over by five billion different instruments. Narrowing the scope to a single category makes it no less overwhelming; peruse the options filed under ‘piano & keys’, and you will hear that fucking C note until it bores itself into your brain and you’re clamouring for something fresh. Then you reach ‘Childhood Home Piano’, and you stall when you hear the sample: a key, pressed in the distant vestiges of a memory, its grainy echo pulling you into an inexplicable warmth that compels you to sit in its sediment forever. On his new EP, Last Bloom, the way Tony Njoku captures the piano is like basking in that specific sample. He engineers the instrument to highlight the warm crackles of the keys, as though they’ve been baked into the music for centuries.
Charli XCXBratAtlantic
Two years on from Crash, an album that was at the most polished, mainstream (outright pop) end of Charli XCX’s oeuvre, we have Brat, her eighth record. She’s now into her thirties, a hardened veteran of a game that fetishises new teenagers (especially young girls) every month. Yet it was stupid to doubt her. There’s no let-up, no reconfiguring into a carpool lane. There’s nothing ‘mature’ about the sound of Brat, thank god. What she’s done (presumably freed from contractual pressure, though this is still a major label project) is re-embrace the skeezy late night clubland Charli, open the throttle and push the pedal to the floor. Brat feels years younger than its predecessor. From top to tail, emotionally, as well as in these mid-2020s dancehall dynamics, she smashes her surroundings apart. It’s an ‘unleash the beast’ kind of a record, especially in how it sold itself early doors.
Mary HalvorsonCloudwardNonesuch
Cloudward probably won’t jump out to familiar listeners of Brooklyn-based jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson’s previous albums as being particularly unusual in her catalogue. However, it’s probably the first where she sounds fully immersed in her band Amaryllis, which she originally composed music for in 2020 during the pandemic. Now, she finds herself still writing for the band, and the results are rich and increasingly organic-sounding. With the album a means to articulate the process of her band re-emerging after the pandemic, the cadence of the record seems to replicate the sound of the city’s life gradually blossoming out into the streets.
Richard TeitelbaumAsparagusBlack Truffle
Suzan Pitt’s 1979 film Asparagus is a surreal animated odyssey, like Georges Franju redrawn in the style of 60s underground comix. The soundtrack, by Richard Teitelbaum, is possibly even stranger: a shimmering, swelling Polymoog jam that drifts through twinkling tones like images from a dream. The composer himself apparently compared it to Ravel, but you’ll get closer if you try and imagine Suzanne Ciani and Terry Riley trying to reconstruct the haunting organ music from Carnival Of Souls. Somewhere amidst the cosmic soup you can also hear instrumental contributions from George Lewis, Steve Lacy. Steve Potts and Takehisa Kosugi, though not all of them are easy to discern. It’s a heady brew, but amongst the swirling suspensions and nightmarish fever dreams, there’s also this deep sense of yearning; a kind of cosmic oceanic feeling not a million miles away from early Tangerine Dream or Eberhard Schoener, and even, yes, a certain lush impressionism summoning up the horny spirit of Ravel.
Arab StrapI’m Totally Fine With It👍 Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore👍Rock Action
What if I told you that despite the album being called I’m Totally Fine With It 👍 Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore 👍 , it’s clear from both content and delivery that Arab Strap are not fine with it and very much do give a fuck? Would that shock you? Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton care – a lot. But then, they always have. Even at their most debauched, soaked in booze and self-loathing and hedonistic ennui, at the heart of it, they cared. That’s a huge part of what made even the bleakest of their pre-retirement tracks not just bearable, but compelling, affecting, endearing. Here, they care, so they regret; they care, so they fear; they care, so they hurt. They care, so they’re really pretty angry. Maybe angrier than they’ve ever been on record. They’re practically raging from the jump.
DJ Anderson do ParaísoQueridãoNyege Nyege Tapes
Often characterised by eardrum-punishing levels of distortion and rowdy vocal delivery, Brazilian funk has been gaining a wider, more global audience in recent years. Sitting at the more underground, less bass-boosted end of the sound is producer DJ Anderson do Paraíso, who hails from Belo Horizonte. Queridão, his first album, is a mind-bending trip through dissonant, macabre melodies and minimalist beats, its use of silence and space just as effective as everything that is actually present. With the help of a wide cast of guest MCs and vocalists, the producer builds a bonkers sound world that is part-haunted house, part-classical concert hall, with its employment of choirs, strings, bells and atonal pianos through the record. Queridão, its title a reference to his local status as the “dearest”, is a compelling, menacing listen unlike much else you’ll hear this year.
Schoolboy QBlue LipsTop Dawg Entertainment
Having opted to step away from the rat race of chasing Spotify streams and hype via an endless cycle of mixtape and album drops – this is Schoolboy Q’s first studio album in five years – Blue Lips was well worth the wait. The US rapper sounds more mature and self-assured than ever before as he reminds us of the promise that earned him so many fans when first breaking out on Top Dawg Entertainment, while also taking boldly pushing boundaries. There’s a deeply psychedelic, serene quality to much of the production (see cuts like opener ‘Funny Guy’, ‘Blueslides’ and the jungle-referencing ‘Foux’), tracks often flowing seamlessly from one to the other as Q flits between exploring the peaks and troughs of rap stardom, and the expectations that come with it, with frequently dizzying honesty.
M.L. DeathmanAcid Horse 23Tesla Tapes
Acid Horse 23, recorded at the three-day word-of-mouth Acid Horse event organised by tQ co-founder John Doran and Strange Attractor’s Mark Pilkington in a pub near the Alton Barnes White Horse in rural Wiltshire, is trippy in the literal sense, eclectic in its incorporation of shamanic Balearic beats and swirling samples; spectral psychedelic house music that takes you through liminal spaces and those where incompatible worlds collide. Occasionally the ever-building drones have a disconcerting effect akin to the eerie work of The Haxan Cloak, while with a sample of the writer Anaïs Nin reading from her diary, the recurrent line “I remember my first birth in water, I sway and float”, sounds beguiling and haunting. So too does the sound of the Acid Horse crowd, cheering in the background at the same moment.
Pet Shop BoysNonethelessx2 / Parlophone
What makes Nonetheless stand out is Neil Tennant’s thin but still lovely voice: an instrument of always-surprising emotional complexity. Over Chris Lowe’s oomba-oomba electro-thud and a complementary string section of ‘Feel’ he offers a series of confessions before the big one: multi-tracked Tennants intoning “I will never let you down!” Like hero Dusty Springfield, he can’t speak his mind without worrying if he fucked up. On closer ‘Love Is The Law’, his usual preoccupations coupled with a man’s normal anxieties about ageing produce a grand ballad that would make an appropriate career closer.
Goblin BandCome Slack Your Horse!Broadside Hacks
Recorded thanks to the generosity of friends with a start-up production company, you can feel a sense of urgency to this slender debut record, the sound of the London trad collective straining to demonstrate all of their many sides. An opening rendition of the country dance ‘The Black Nag’ has a lolloping intensity. ‘The Brisk Lad’ casts a deep theatrical gloom. A sprawling medley of ‘Birds In The Spring’ and ‘May Morning Dew’ is transfixingly beautiful. ‘Turmut Hoer’, recorded hastily by just vocalist Rowan Gatherer and violinist Alice Beadle while they waited for the rest of the band to arrive, and the old humorous song ‘Widecombe Fayre’, are joyously off-kilter. Lead single ‘The Prickle Holly Bush’, the best of all, reaches all-out glory by its final crescendo.
Helado NegroPhasor4AD
An oscillation between control and disorientation continues throughout Phasor (the album’s title refers to a numerical vector for oscillation in physics and engineering). Hewing closer to the former is when the record is at its strongest, exploring the world of a character seeking connection but far from reach. “Quiet light / Pushing too far / It’s all gone”, he sings on ‘Best For You and Me’ as a pretty, bright piano line circles a light-footed beat. In ‘Colores del Mare’, filtered and agitated drums, toy-keyboard notes and claps bounce around the mix like a ball around a box, rattling the surfaces, threatening their integrity. It’s one of his best works for a decade.
SenyawaVajranalaThe state51 Conspiracy
If Senyawa’s last record, 2021’s Alkisah, dealt with themes of power, its follow-up, Vajranala, is an attempt to understand the root of that power. The duo have always held an interest in the connection between humanity and nature, and on this latest record, in particular, they explore how, over centuries, the natural world has shaped our society, the knowledge systems from which power derives, and why that still resonates today.
Guðmundur Steinn GunnarssonStífluhringurinnCarrier
Each of the two movements on Stífluhringurinn, named after a hydroelectric dam in Reykjavík, has a four-part structure that gives each sound a moment of dominance, and the second movement reverses the order of the first because we should consider it to be walking down the other side of our initial ascent of the titular dam. The piece was written for the Caput Ensemble, a group operating at a very flexible size between maybe two and 20 players since 1987. Here, I think there are about a dozen musicians working with Guðmundur Steinn Gunnarsson’s graphic, screen-based, animated scores. Premiering in 2019, plans to record the work were frustrated by COVID-19 and a later, more granular and editorial version has emerged which has also allowed producer/engineer The Norman Conquest a little freedom to add some further finesse to proceedings too. The ensemble largely comprises strings (bowed and plucked instruments), brass, recorders and harpsichord, with some percussive sounds working around and within.
Harry Górski-BrownDurt Dronemaker After DreamboatsGLARC
Harry Górski-Brown plays several instruments on his debut tape, but leaves the songwriting to others: its first seven tracks are from the Scottish Gaelic folksong canon and the eighth and last is a live cover of ‘I Wanna Fight Your Father’ by Irish viral rap duo The Rubberbandits. In this, and by sprinkling moments of text-to-speech voice offering metacommentary on the album as it progresses, the Glasgow-based musician seems intent on having the ancient and the modern confront each other, with buoyant and bibulous results.
Beth GibbonsLives OutgrownDomino
Beth Gibbons, like a monk who repeatedly disappears and then reappears from sannyasa, is ready to give us the earthly understanding of our futility that we all need — her memento mori. Like the ferocious bitterness and dialled-up heat of Portishead’s second album, which countered Dummy’s icy, moonscape terrain, Lives Outgrown contains that same degree of emotional urgency. But it is less focused on the warped ways of the world and instead on the ways of the body and mind seen through the passage of time. It’s a hitherto unseen emotional cadence to Gibbons and it’s beguiling because it’s so personally revealing.
NaemiDust Devil3XL
Pulling together an array of influences loosely fixed around the ambient music world, as well as an extensive cast of collaborators, each new cut on Dust Devil, Naemi’s debut album proper, beckons us down a different curiously psychedelic avenue. Opener ‘It Feels So Good’, featuring a tantalising vocal turn from Erika de Casier, draws on tranquil ‘new age’ synths, while Perila guests alongside meditative emo guitar strums on LP highlight ‘Day Drifter’, one of the tracks here that perhaps best follows a standard ‘pop song’ structure. ‘Couch Angel’, another standout which welcomes Arad Acid and Huerco S. into the fold, harks back to reverb-drenched 90s shoegaze, all galloping drums and mumbled, buried vocals. With additional references to trip-hop, glitch-ridden IDM and lounge music following through the record’s remainder, Dust Devil is an unorthodox, but deeply comforting, listen.
British Murder BoysActive Agents And House BoysDownwards
These recordings on British Murder Boys’ debut album hit like the gut-troubling, sub-bass fists of a sonic pugilist. The battery of drums that comprise ‘It’s What You Hide’ gyrate like a wheel coming off its axis, and the rasp of blistered synthesis and chest-rattling bass beats on ‘It’s In The Heart’ are a joyous ode to military grade knob-twiddling. Their palette has changed a little though. ‘Killer I Said’ is a dubby affair that continues the conversation with Northampton’s Reducer. The viscous, gangster-limped cadence hauls itself into a space cleared by the snare’s reverberating “Kah” but it’s the hit of the low end that cements its place in your memory. High-pass filters are swung left and right, as if Surgeon has taken Adrian Sherwood’s mixing desk out onto the high seas.
PersherSleep WellThrill Jockey
From soup to nuts, the debut album proper from Blawan and Pariah’s Persher project is a curdled morass of spoiled riffage. A fucked, cursed, post-whatever-the-hell heap of derangement. Straightaway, Sleep Well is flat-out unhinged. That’s recognisable within seconds. But the real news here is that ‘unhinged’ is simply Persher’s baseline, their bare minimum. As the record progresses, their commitment to pushing beyond that – to pursuing maniac mode as a persistent escalating musical state of being – reveals itself layer by layer, track by track. It’s a hoot.
Jane WeaverLove In Constant SpectacleFire
Weaver’s latest album continues on from her recent work with an added introspective gravity. After the vibrant, kaleidoscopic arrangements of Flock and Modern Kosmology, Love In Constant Spectacle surprises with more subdued arrangements, peppered with acoustic instruments. She is hardly starting from scratch, incorporating hallmarks of her style to make the album feel like part of the arc her recent work has been progressing on. Her distinctive choices in drum styles – motorik versus jazz – continue to swap places throughout, and the palette of her synthesisers and guitar effects colour much of the album.
