SenyawaVajranalaThe state51 Conspiracy
Vajranala is a masterclass in tension-building. It’s a journey that leads to ritualistic experiences, with subtly constructed lyrical structures on one hand and rapturous, predatory, and trance-like motifs on the other, often based around Wukir Suryadi’s homemade bambuwakir, a percussive and stringed instrument, that drives the duo’s music, creating an intense sonic experience. Senyawa’s music is a unique blend of traditional and modern elements. But on Vajranala, instead of synthesis, they extend their musical language by juxtaposing droning passages with rapt, ecstatic motifs, muttering, singing, and shouting. They seek catharsis in new forms of ritual by building this kind of modern heavy ritual in a dense, rapturous sound on the borders of what is traditional, what is metal, what is subtle, and what is rapture, showcasing their innovation and creativity.
Jane WeaverLove In Constant SpectacleFire
Jane 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.
Water DamageIn E12XU
Water Damage might baulk at the idea of being called a supergroup – as opposed to just a bunch of pals from the Austin, TX music underground, who like to get together and jam out Faust IV-heavy, Tony Conrad-inspired circular hypno-riffs – but super they are: supernormal, supertranscendent, supermesmeric purveyors of the supertrance. File proudly next to France (the band).
Chrystabell & David LynchCellophane MemoriesSacred Bones
Lyrically, the ten songs on Cellophane Memories are made up of moments and reflections – usually romantic, frequently mundane (“For dinner it was meat and potatoes / I went bed early”). But where the duo’s first album together, 2011’s This Train, was a relatively conventional dream pop record, all smokey vocals, oceans of reverb, and languorous guitar licks; Cellophane Memories is harder to get a grip on. Chrystabell’s vocals, previously the unambiguous focus of every song, are here layered, cut-up, and reversed, often to the point where they become indecipherable.
Wu-LuLearning To Swim On EmptyWarp
There’s an overwhelming feeling of emptiness that many of us can relate to at the moment – a feeling that weighs heavily in the context of surrounding events, becoming our everyday experience. It’s somewhat normal to be furious yet numb; profoundly sad yet totally void of the appropriate response mechanisms. In both the title and contents of his new EP, South London vocalist and musician Wu-Lu has managed to capture this emptiness, as well as the corresponding impulse to push through and find something to grasp firmly with both hands. Learning To Swim On Empty is intimate in its writing but the recurring motif of water and of drowning and floating which runs throughout makes it a record that holds both listener and artist close, in a compelling way.
Lorenzo AbattoirMess (Akt IV)PLANAM
Lorenzo Abattoir is a sound artist from Torino who has spent the past couple of years engaged in an intense study of what he refers to as “three key concepts for the artist: breathing, amplification, and movement” (as per the album’s inner sleeve). This is the fourth “act” of that study, which began with Flag Day Recordings’ Disincarnazione in 2023. From the very beginning, it is a seriously intense listen. The word “immersive” gets bandied about a lot in music writing these days, but Mess (Akt IV) is a positively engulfing experience. Which is to say that putting it on feels rather a lot like being eaten.
Roc MarcianoMarciologyPimpire International / Marci Enterprises
No stranger to a self-referential album title – see Marcberg, Marci Beaucoup, Mt. Marci and other releases – cult underground rapper Roc Marciano’s latest project is an enthralling trip through lo-fi, low-key beats and his typically laidback, gruff vocal delivery. Like many of his past records, much of Marciology is produced by the rapper himself and folds in samples of, or references to, old jazz and soul records, while the sinister callback to classic Memphis horrorcore instrumentals on the self-titled opening cut is instantly absorbing. Tracks like the Blaxploitation-soundtrack-referencing ‘Goyard God’ and subtly eerie ‘Gold Crossbow’ underline just why Marci is credited as one of the most influential underground hip hop figures of the past decade or so. Perhaps with the release of Marciology, it’s about time he got his flowers more widely.
Eric Chenaux TrioDelights Of My LifeConstellation
For Delights Of My Life, Eric Chenaux is joined by fellow Canadian musicians Philippe Melanson on electric percussion (Bernice, Joseph Shabson, U.S. Girls) and longtime collaborator Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ, as the trio expand the palette of the lead musician’s oddly welcoming strangeness with loose, wandering experimentations and open-ended structures, holding time in newfound ways. Often bleary-eyed, slow and sleepy, it’s the audio equivalent of hitting the snooze button on your phone’s alarm clock as you slip back into a dream state, drifting into a world beyond temporal constraints where that precious thing – time – is immaterial, giving yourself permission to just be.
Arooj AftabNight ReignVerve
The title of Arooj Aftab’s latest album might suggest we’re about to plunge down the tenebrous spiral staircase of the soul. But there’s also a lightness of touch that infuses Night Reign, even lifting us up at times. These are deep, emotional, sometimes bruising songs, though the insinuation of total darkness belies the exquisiteness of its spiritually rigorous forty-eight minutes.The darkest hour is just before dawn, goes the old proverb, and at the conclusion of songs like ‘Last Night (Reprise)’ or ‘Na Gul’, there’s a sense of emerging into a new day following a passing storm, where the senses are awakened and everything feels fresher and more alive. That’s not to say there’s no mournfulness. ‘Saaqi’ is a soundscape rendered almost funereal with Aftab’s rich, dolorous tones stretching it out into infinity, but Night Reign is more crepuscular than anything, where night and day come together, and sex and death are never far removed from one another. Her cover of ‘Autumn Leaves’ exemplifies that smoky, jazzy, sensuous danse macabre.
XylitolAnemonesPlanet Mu
It’s apt that Anemones looks to the lithographs of early biologists to communicate its ideas. Those images contain both discovery and a sense of an ancient throughline. Opener ‘Rosi’ introduces this aquatic world with squiggly percussion, deep bass and spliced loops. It creates images of bustling colonies of fish, or time lapses of primordial organisms gradually growing features. ‘Jelena’ balances languid atmosphere and speedy rhythms, its breaks cut up over patient pads. Those pads glitch and squeak when they’re played solo at the end. Like much early jungle, its base elements are no less cosmic when cobbled together from what’s lying around. Crucially, though the record uses elements that have existed since the early 90s, it remains forward-looking rather than doggedly nostalgic, as “revivalist” jungle and hardcore can sometimes be.
ErosYour Truth Is A LieDownwards
Your Truth Is A Lie is basement music. It crackles and creaks with metal clangs and unanswered doors buzzing obnoxiously. ‘Let Love Decide’ throws in mouth-wet splats, and digital spills atop brutal thumps as O’Connor intones the Jhonn Balance-esque phrase “I was betrayed by agents of beauty”. This goes straight into ‘Healing Waters’ ventricle-spasming pace, complete with guitar shrieks and a touch of Underworld in the vocal delivery. With its practically anthemic call of “This is the sound, this is the place, rise up, rise up”, it’s the most straightforward ‘song’ on the album.
Elijah MinnelliPerpetual MusketFatCat
On Perpetual Musket, Elijah Minnelli has ostensibly arranged four folk songs to be performed by reggae vocalists on the A-side, with dub tracks on the flip. The anti-war song ‘Vine And Fig Tree’, which originates in the Old Testament, is handed over to the legendary Little Roy. Contemporary dancehall star Shumba Youth transforms ‘Soul Cake’ – a song from an All Souls tradition once common in the British Isles, where poor people would go door to door, singing and praying for the dead in exchange for food – into a nimble earworm. Earl 16’s stark version of ‘Lifeboat Mona’ – Peggy Seeger’s composition commemorating the sinking of a lifeboat in 1959 and the death of its entire crew – comes with a stamp of approval from Seeger herself, who calls it, in all caps, “JUST RIGHT”. Bristol newcomer Joe Yorke’s brings a sublime falsetto to ‘The Wind And The Rain’, from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
MilkweedFolklore 1979Broadside Hacks
Folklore 1979‘s lyrics are lifted almost entirely wholesale from an issue of The Folklore Society’s academic journal, which Milkweed came across when a fan – who, incidentally, makes wands for a living and who they’ve never seen since – dropped a tote bag full of issues round their home. They picked one at random, chopped it up and put it to weird earworm melodies, fed it through a meat grinder of experimental production, and ruthlessly edited it down to just over ten minutes of running time. Occasionally, the album evokes experimental hip hop as much as it does folk music, although they outright reject any comparisons. They, for now, have coined the term ‘slacker trad’.
NaemiDust Devil3XL
Pulling together 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 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.
Einstürzende NeubautenRampen (apm: alien pop music)Potomak
If Einstürzende Neubauten were waging a war against sleep back in the 1980s, then on their latest 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.
RóisMo LéanSelf-Released
With its bursts of crystalline electronics, darkwave-inflected synths, quaking basslines, industrial beats, tolls-for-thee bell chimes and cold vocal distortions, there is plenty of gloom to be found on Mo Léan, and yet this is only one small part of the record’s emotional scope. For a powerful and shapeshifting vocalist like Róis, real name Rose Connolly, death can be a time of unvarnished beauty, too – explored best on her deeply moving rendition of the hymn ‘Oh Lovely Appearance Of Death’, where her voice cuts sharply through drifting ambient backing – and even of humour; on ‘Death Notices’, she plays the role of a newsreader, their broadcast bookended by a warped theme tune, announcing in deadpan that sadly, today there are no death notices at all. It’s one of a series of short interludes across the record – the rest of which are called ‘Angelus’ after the devotional bells broadcast on Irish television and radio at 6pm each day, directly before the evening news – where the record’s incredibly deft touches of production are best felt.
William DoyleSprings EternalTough Love
Springs Eternal is perhaps a more immediate record than past William Doyle efforts. It’s certainly more earnest (and his work has been increasingly so since 2021’s Great Spans Of Muddy Time). Vocals sit higher in the mix than ever, instrumentation is bright and forthcoming rather than buried within itself, and there’s an emboldened feel to his lyrical tone. “You could have it all if you want,” Doyle teases on ‘Surrender Yourself’, a mathy lump of 00s indie rock that imitates an advert for an off-world escape plan (“Do you want to augment it with us?”) as bending guitar notes scrape the bottom of the song. ‘Eternal Spring’ opens like the nightmare-funhouse bounce of Billie Eilish’s ‘Ilomilo’, but swaps its sense of submersion for a more reserved new wave bop, with straight acoustic strumming patterns and a pretty hook floating above Doyle’s strut.
Bill Ryder-JonesIechyd DaDomino
Like its predecessors, Iechyd Da is thematically centred on The Wirral, and because it was made during the pandemic, when he rarely left the town, the relationship between it and his work became even more tightly intertwined. It contains ‘A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart Pt. 3’, a sequel to the two-part composition Ryder Jones’ 2013 debut album proper was named for, and a number of more subtle lyrical easter eggs. Specific characters who he wrote about on the first album reappear on the second – such as the Anthony of Iechyd Da’s ‘Thankfully For Anthony’, the same as the earlier LP’s ‘Anthony & Owen’.
The Body & Dis FigOrchards Of A Futile HeavenThrill Jockey
The Body largely hold off on their bludgeoning sludge on this first-time collaboration with Dis Fig, with the chilling use of negative space making proceedings sound even more catastrophic when Chip King’s thunderous guitar does come crashing in on the oddly anthemic ‘Holy Lance’. Both acts complement each other perfectly, making this record feel like more than the sum of its parts. Much like The Body’s recent record with BIG|BRAVE, it’s amazing how fully realised Orchards Of A Futile Heaven is – though they might be on opposite ends of the spectrum sonically, it’s clear a lot of work has gone into sequencing each so they flow as satisfying albums, and having the eviscerating nine-minute techno nightmare of ‘Coils Of Kaa’ lead into the emotional gut-punch of ‘Back To The Water’, as Dis Fig howls “I miss you” like Björk having a panic attack, ends this one on a particularly powerful note.
SealionwomanNothing Will Grow In The SoilThe state51 Conspiracy
Dark fables of sex and death offer a useful place to start with Sealionwoman. A London-based duo of vocalist Kitty Whitelaw and double bass player Tye McGivern, this pair are doing something entirely new by tapping into a rich seam of traditional folk. Their first album, 2018’s Siren, was all at sea, and set adrift, if you will. For the followup, Nothing Will Grow In The Soil, they’ve crawled onto the dark, desiccated land, and everything is firmer, harder, dryer.
