BenefitsNailsInvada
Nails‘ Britain is grotesquely detailed. These isles become “industrial wastelands” (‘Empire’) strewn with “stinking, broken relics” (‘Warhorse’): flags, crowns, kebab boxes and lager cans. Vocalist Kingsley Hall enhances this picture through repetition. Tattered, soiled flags appear in most tracks. Several references are made to a fetid smell, with ‘Flag’ declaring “this place stinks of old wars.” Entire lines from ‘Shit Britain’ are repurposed in ‘Traitors’, albeit with colourful tweaks: the former’s “red arrows screaming past” reappear on the latter as “spitfires.” The echo of John Cooper Clarke’s ‘Evidently Chickentown’ in Hall’s “clown-town” (‘Shit Britain’) points to a wider effect of this repetition: like Clarke’s world, Hall’s becomes crushingly, hopelessly immovable.
Aho SsanRhizomesOther People
Rhizomes is unlike most records. It can be experienced as a standard 10-track release or there’s the option to descend further into the undergrowth and discover recordings otherwise unavailable. Hidden tracks, extended editions and solo pieces await the inquisitive and you can even participate in the creative process yourself through the provided sample pack. The focus of this release is community. Growing and strengthening it. Like its title, Rhizomes is the underground stalk from which roots and shoots grow. What Aho Ssan and his accomplices (and they are legion – we also get Valentina Magaletti, Nicolás Jaar, Angel Bat Dawid, Nyokabi Kariũki, Lafawndah, KMRU, Richie Culver, and that’s barely the iceberg’s tip) have achieved here is a global community interacting, inspiring and collaborating across borders, across timezones, across cultural divides. And why should it stop once the fruits of their labour have passed out into the world? Rhizomes provides like-minded creators with the tools to expand upon its foundations.
YaejiWith A HammerNinja Tune
Yaeji’s on the move. With A Hammer sees the Korean-American producer leave her house roots behind for an incredibly satisfying blend of pop and R&B. The titular Thor-grade smiting tool of the cover – complete with cheeky graffiti face! – preemptively smirks at anyone preparing to call her voice diminutive. Her singing tones are as light as a breeze, and perfect besides, yet this music is heavy as all hell, an innovative rendering of anger transformed into perfect dance pop which, variously, brushes up against funk, ambient, acid house, jazz, drum & bass and synthpop. The hammer blow makes contact when the words hit home and woe betide those not fully braced.
Alexander Tucker Keith CollinsFifth ContinentSubtext
Fifth Continent (and the accompanying anthology, Fifth Quarter) is a vast, encompassing work grown out of grief and missed opportunities. It ties Alexander Tucker’s sonic language to Keith Collins’ carefully spoken words and also to the pens, prose and imagery of so many other collaborators, admirers and tQ regulars, including Jennifer Lucy Allen, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Stephen O’Malley, Simon Fisher Turner, Dan Fox, Barry Adamson and our own Luke Turner. But there’s another character that features heavily on this recording – that broad, pebbled cape on Kent’s headland, Dungeness: a place as inseparable from Derek Jarman as he was from Collins and whose shadow looms large over this sprawling package.
Hey ColossusIn BloodWrong Speed
In Blood‘s dreamlike opener ‘My Name In Blood’ hits us right off the bat with the image of “a halfway house, a figure on all fours,” and already we’re in sinister territory. What is this figure? A person? An animal? Something else? How did it end up there? The eldritch creep of the song’s crawling guitar riff gradually builds as Paul Sykes’ inimitable vocal soars effortlessly to an aching crescendo. Juxtaposition is clearly a prized weapon in the Hey Colossus arsenal and ‘I Could Almost Care’ moves us swiftly into driving, anthemic rock terrain. In Blood brings the ghostly and the haunted into uncannily modern relief, and never loses its sense of the physical. For Hey Colossus, it seems that the otherworldly provides a framework with which to navigate the ever-bloody mess of human living.
UKAEABirds Catching Fire In The SkyThe state51 Conspiracy
Like its predecessor, Energy Is Forever, Birds Catching Fire In The Sky is a noisy, heavily percussive, collaborative affair, enlisting six lyricist-vocalists and another six studio players in addition to UKAEA’s Dan Jones. But unlike its predecessor, which occasionally reached for the disassociated bliss of the rave, it never seeks to transcend the material reality of our world. Instead, “this one is slamming the present pretty hard in your face as we ratchet up the insane acceleration of everything on Earth,” says Jones. The title clues us in to the overall vibe.
Lisa O’NeillAll Of This Is ChanceRough Trade
Tradition and modernity, history and stories playing out in the restless now, the yearning for freedom and righteous anger at repression, are in constant dialogue with each other on All Of This Is Chance. It’s an expansive, widescreen record. While the title track creates a mood that gently percolates through the rest of the album, O’Neill never lets the bleakness win. Her songs have always told stories and been rich in detail, but this time around there’s more space in the arrangements.
Nabihah IqbalDreamerNinja Tune
Dreamer is a surrender to wide, blurry, technicolour horizons, as unreal and otherworldly as its name suggests. At its basic level, the elements are simple – indie pop, a little more shoegaze, a lot more trance – but extra waves of electronic wash and vocals so multi-tracked they’re choral, make it labyrinthine enough to get lost in. The lush near-seven-minute intro ‘In Light’ – its 4AD guitars shimmering with reverb, Iqbal’s “in light, you wake” mantra ever-circling – pulls you in and keeps you enveloped. Within, the benign tension is between sugar-sweet noise pop and trance house. The title track twinkles and swings, all gauzy and surfy, and the juddering ‘This World Couldn’t See Us’ is a delicate take on The Cure’s ‘A Forest’ (a song Iqbal’s covered live), but she’s frequently drawn to the rave. Remember Sunscreem? You can almost see the fractals and feel the whip of trustafarian dreads as ‘Sunflower’ wriggles along.
Lunch Money LifeThe God PhoneWolf Tone
A number of things about Lunch Money Life are indicative of a group that don’t take themselves too seriously. The name, for one, remains a bit lost on me. Their endless fusions and fissions of genres are incredibly mischievous, and every single release is supplemented by its own puckish lore – i.e. The God Phone soundtracks a lost film of the same name, and 2022’s ‘Jimmy J Sunset’ was inspired by a cease and desist letter from Nicolas Cage’s entourage. Beneath this facade though, Lunch Money Life are as serious as your life – the breakdowns, the riffs, the grooves, are so potent and so masterful. They scratch every itch so well. The God Phone is their most complete work to date. It simply sounds big whilst capturing the catharsis of their live shows and portraying a wildly inventive band reaching their absolute prime.
James Ellis FordThe HumWarp
On The Hum, the bass lurches and swaggers from one bar to the next, carving out the character of the record beneath the veneer of modular atmospherics and ethereal Frippertropnics. Tape loops are just as integral, with the title track and ‘Tape Loop #7’ like palimpsests surreptitiously left there to provide clues. There’s a persuasive uncanniness to this album, and you suspect it’s James Ellis Ford’s ability to shapeshift that makes him such a sought-after producer. He manages to imbue a sonic fluidity that invariably brings a touch of class to the projects he’s working on, though he’s not one for imposing recognised motifs or rebuilding from the bottom up. Such subtlety and nuance is atypical where superproducers are concerned, and even labelling him with such an epithet feels slightly daft.
MC YallahYallah BeibeNyege Nyege Tapes
MC Yallah’s ability to fluidly switch from one superb flow to another is unparalleled. All the evidence you need is in Yallah Beibe‘s first track, ‘Sikwebela’. Upon the call of a whimpering mallophone, she lures you in with a simple, standard flow – and promptly eviscerates the beat by rapping in double time. A pioneer of ‘Lugaflow’, or hip hop in the language of Luganda, Yallah is able to flourish her delivery with a nasal sneer unique to Luganda, or roll her tongue over a chugging industrial beat on ‘Moss’. There are flashes of other styles to dig into across the album too, from dancehall (‘Big Bung’ with Ratigan Era) to grime flows (‘Sunday’) and even a verse that briefly echoes Nicki Minaj (‘Yallah Beibe’). She never indulges too deeply in one genre – always resurfacing with her own personality and steady confidence.
ApostillePrisoners Of Love And HateNight School
Michael Kasparis is clearly no stranger to the charms of electronic pop music but the references on his third album under the Apostille moniker are increasingly more mainstream and diverse than on previous releases. Vestiges of pop songs ring consistently throughout Prisoners Of Love And Hate. Melodies and vocal lines dangle the carrot of recognition only to whip it away before any accusations of plagiarism have the chance to rear up. ‘Natural Angel’, for instance, with its striding 80s synth reimagining of Springsteen in ‘Born To Run’-mode contains the lyrics, “I’ll never forget the way you’re looking at me right now,” echoing both Chris De Burgh and Meat Loaf alongside a palm-muted throb. And Kasparis even has his own take on ‘Summer Of ’69’, looking back 20 years to halcyon days of being “free and forever” whilst riding a Eurodance bounce.
MoundaboutAn Cnoc MórRocket Recordings
On Moundabout’s second album proper, the setup of Paddy Shine on acoustic guitar, Phil Masterson on electric guitar, both on vocals, and sparse electronic accompaniment from an antique Hammond drum machine Shine found in his auntie’s attic, plus old analogue synth and field recordings, remains the same. This time however the pair push further out on tracks such as ‘Step In Out Of That’, which calls to mind Egypt-based free psych trio The Dwarfs Of East Agouza and reaches its apogee on the glorious, sunburst of New Weird Éirana, ‘Instinct, Eye And Mind’, which brings to mind Michael Chapman at his most ragged, as well as the borderless fourth world guitar peregrinations of Mike Cooper.
Gazelle TwinBlack DogInvada
On Black Dog‘s title track, Elizabeth Bernholz urgently repeats the lines, “I tell you this dream, this dream I had,” as if rummaging through old memories to unsuccessfully locate the exact experience. The measured clangs that walk you through the piece seem to be Bernholz herself, pacing in slow motion. There’s no big reveal – despite its momentary build up around the three-minute mark – the track structurally has us walking in circles. Phantoms serve as a black hole in the centre of the work, around which the album’s dread surrounds. It’s like she’s retracing and recording the atmosphere of her childhood house, the way that the dimensions of a space can create horror. Alfred Hitchcock did this by using camera perspectives that no human being would look out from, Bernholz does this, for example, on ‘The Long Room’ by using samples that sound like people talking, but from a distance or through walls – barely perceptible.
Annelies MonserMaresHorn Of Plenty
Mares exists in a hinterland somewhere between La Nòvia in France and Discreet in Gothenburg, and I don’t just mean because it’s from Belgium, which is literally in-between those two places. Sonically it draws on traditional folk styles, with occasional medieval-sounding melodies, but does it from a sometimes miserable, sometimes hopeful, but always fog-filled landscape where layers upon layers of haar-dense atmospherics are built from various drone-ish sources. It’s got a cover of folk standard ‘Sally Free And Easy’, which I guess is a manifesto for where it’s coming from, but its best moments are in the densest, most eerie sections, which come from a combination of keyboards, accordion and harmonium. ‘Shells’ is a macabre standout.
Lost GirlsSelvutsletterSmalltown Supersound
I suppose it’s wrong of me to include Lost Girls in the same continuum as Jenny Hval’s solo work. It is a distinct project after all. At the same time, separating the two feels like insisting that Grinderman and the Bad Seeds be discussed in isolation from one another. Although, I have always thought of Hval as a Cave-ian / no-wave-ian figure, and in that sense, fellow Lost Girls member Håvard Volden is not that unlike her Warren Ellis. Regular collaborators since Hval’s Rune Grammofon days, the two routinely bring out the best in each other, pushing one another deeper into new territory. With Selvutsletter, Lost Girls’ new territory is the pop nugget. With this record, the duo are proactively inserting themselves into a particular pop-music lineage, telling their own story, telling us where they fit. And like everything else they’ve done, it doesn’t sound limiting or calculated or agonised over – it just sounds vibrant and magical.
Shirley CollinsArchangel HillDomino
Shirley Collins’ soaring soprano always had the quality of unexpected music, like singing heard through an open window. It flew overhead: gorgeous and strange and necessarily borne away from us. To discover it on Archangel Hill, framed between recordings made over 40 years later, heightens the impact. It also accentuates the new contours her voice has taken on since that time. It now sits closer to the gravelly earth and closer to our ears, more intimate-feeling. With this third album for Domino, Collins continues to deliver on the title of that extraordinary record, Folk Roots, New Routes: finding old ways to look forward and new ways to look back.
L’RainI Killed Your DogMexican Summer
Described by Taja Cheek, AKA L’Rain, as something of an “anti-break-up” record, I Killed Your Dog sounds like it is more for things, than against. Explorations of different kinds of love, as well as different musical influences, are at the root of the record, as Cheek occasionally imagines conversations with her younger self (particularly on ‘Knead Bee’, which re-envisions Fatigue’s ‘Need Be’), playing the role of a witty, wiser, older sister. Duality abounds and contradictions reign, with the artist managing to create a world where all of this makes sense and sensuality. Part of the beauty of the record is that it resembles a sonic, thematic and emotional collage, a celebration of compelling sounds and sensibilities.
Philip JeckOxmardykeTouch
Oxmardyke came to fruition just before Philip Jeck’s untimely passing in 2022, during moments in which his pain subsided enough that he could work on his laptop. The music he makes here reflects his classic textural sound and collaborations like 2021’s Stardust, in which he distorted recordings made by Faith Coloccia that revolved around motherhood. To make Oxmardyke, he took the sounds Chris Watson captured – different bird calls and metallic screeches of passing freight trains – and toyed with them, ultimately creating eerie music. Jeck’s penchant for vivid sound bolsters Watson’s keen ear for the most affecting sounds of nature, unearthing the emotions hidden inside of them.
Babybaby_exploresFood Near Me, Weather TomorrowNo Gold
Each of the ten tracks on Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow seems to be guided by a magpie principle. The lyrics zoom in on the surrounding environment. There is a lot of observation caused either by boredom (“I left it there two hours ago and the gum is still sticky” on the opening track ‘Gum’) or mild frustration (“You talk so much” and “Now my best friend’s tongue is in my mouth / I twiddle my best friend’s tongue around my mouth / And you still talk way too much” on ‘Twiddle’). Musically, the album triggers contrasting associations. While the first seconds of the opening track misleadingly hint at the dream pop world of Maria Minerva, the rest of the track (and the album) is a bit harder to pin down. The most haunted parts allude to The Slits, X-Ray Spex and, more distantly, to Cath Carroll’s England Made Me.
