It’s been another banner year for new, weird, British music, certainly from my vantage point, and I hope the five bimonthly columns I’ve filed during 2024 have introduced someone reading to something good. In addition to all the bands, projects etc getting their NWB due for the first time, a wealth of previous reviewees have continued on their golden path.
So if me trying to push 20 releases on you (ten reviewed before, ten not) isn’t tiring enough, be aware that The Pheromoans, Sly & The Family Drone, Gnod, Knifedoutofexistence, The Declining Winter, Nkisi, Krupps, Jacken Elswyth, Andrew Abbott, Low End Activist, Alabaster DePlume, Jabu, A’Bear, Laura Cannell, Still House Plants, Richie Culver, Dolmen Dweller, Memotone, Smote, Normil Hawaiians, R.E.E.L, Ultimate Thunder, Thraa, Food People, Dodo Resurrection II, Distraxi and NikNak have all released new jams since 1 Jan, and there’s some real fire in there too.
Yet, as one ponders 2025, not all is rosy. Until this year, NWB had only ever been published in a Britain governed by the Conservative Party, and many featured acts came of artistic age during this period. That changed in July, when Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour stormed to electoral victory with nearly 34 per cent of the vote, and in the months hence no stout-hearted Briton will have avoided being swept up in the wave of positivity that’s drowned this island like an abandoned climate pledge.
There’s a school of thought, supported by countless historical examples, that cutting-edge, confrontational music needs some sort of social adversity to thrive. To this end, as I look out into a United Kingdom – and a happily united one at that – whose subjects can risk a jig as they stroll the high street, knowing the sitting government are working in the interests of their wellbeing whether they’re a large or merely small business owner, I wonder: what now for the energy of anger? For weird music’s sake, then, let’s hope this moment will pass and these people reveal themselves as sociopathic, spite-fuelled genocidal vermin as soon as possible.
Noel Gardner’s top 10 New Weird Britain releases of 2024
DhangshaBroadcast Signal IntrusionBrachliegen Tapes
Aniruddha ‘Dhangsha’ Das’ second live-recorded album on the spin is a comprehensive reinvention of his sound, taking his passion for bass culture and tearing junglisms into deeper realms of rhythmic noise abstraction.
Dali de Saint Paul & Maxwell SterlingPenumbraAccidental Meetings
A radio session for the BBC’s Late Junction, though Penumbra is the unexpurgated version of what these two creative titans cooked up upon meeting for the first time. Voice and double bass parts looped and interwoven to rich and compelling effect.
Primitive Percussion Youth OrchestraWe Demand… Everything Now!Forged River
The eight children who appear in this iteration of the Todmorden-based PPYO are blessed with a great tutor – Mark Williamson, aka ambient producer Spaceship – but the free-beat wood-and-metal sounds are all the kids’ handiwork.
Dean Rodney Jr‘Dean TV Love Part 1’ / ‘Lady With The Cowboy Hat’Echoes In Time
London’s Dean Rodney Jr both fronts The Cowboys and records solo music at an unfathomable rate. Here is a mere two songs from that archive on lathe-cut 7-inch, both lyrically giddy with bar-crawling romance and musically bumpin’ in pitched-down electro style.
Liquid DnB-Like Ambient Grime 2Liquid DnB-Like Ambient Grime 2Sneaker Social Club
Luke J Murray, of Iceman Junglist Kru and other ventures, steps up with his goofiest alias yet. This 12-inch is a four-strong trippy blizzard of breakbeats, distortion, dark samplage and rotten eggs dropped on club dancefloors.
Black Hair Rolled In Dried BloodColder StarsSelf-Released
A little under an hour of truly frostbitten tones from the crypt: one of more than a dozen 2024 releases by Carl Fleischer under this pleasingly unsettling pseudonym, it brings dub and isolationism into the orbit of 80s style industrial clank.
LolinaUnrecognisableRelaxin
Brave new worldbuilding here from the producer once known as Inga Copeland, who recorded as Hype Williams with Dean Blunt. Unrecognisable introduces us to two fictional fashionable freedom fighters via nine tracks of dark synth, electro bass and rap drums.
Marcel WaveSomething LoomingUpset The Rhythm / Feel It
Greyly buoyant popped-up post punk with an eye for life as it’s actually experienced and absurdist scenarios of a Marcel Wave singer and sometime fiction writer Maike Hale-Jones’ mind. Takes the legacy of members’ ‘ex’ bands, Sauna Youth and Cold Pumas, to somewhere new and better.
DaastSS24Phage Tapes
The Manc dude behind Primitive Knot, Cromlech, Bone Pit, Skuul and some others keeps ‘em coming. Daast is him doing industrial techno with emphasis on the techno, a come-and-go aura of halftime drum & bass, and the sullen menace he’s established over a now-sizeable discography.
Harry Górski-BrownDurt Dronemaker After DreamboatsGLARC
“Songs from a long time ago sourced from various places,” is the tagline for this tape of electronically treated Gaelic folk from Glasgow’s consistently crucial GLARC label. They’re not wrong, but it’s so much more: droning, keening postmodern collisions of the trad and the avant where both parties trade the respect they deserve.
10 New Weird Britain releases that got away
BantuInstabilityDark Energy
Gary Stewart, aka Bantu, and Aniruddha Das (see number 10 on the previous list) are partners in sound going back decades. In the early 90s they made two nonpareil outsider acid house EPs as Ani-Roy and, most recently, Stewart passed over his set of deep, bleak dub/noise minimalist jamming to Das for editing and mastering. The result, nine-track tape Instability, teems with analogue chestplate-whackers and a way with process that compares simultaneously to early computer-lab electronic music, noise from the first flushes of the home synth era and the bleeding-edge digitalisms of now.
GUEBlue Fifty-TwoBlue Tapes
This release might be my favourite thing Jacken Elswyth has been involved with. She’s the E in GUE, who are completed by David Grundy and Laurel Uziell: this trio did collab on a tape in 2018, with Elswyth’s solo banjo on one side and Grundy and Uziell doing ambient noise on t’other. Here, all three are working towards the same goal of rustic aural enlightenment by means of the freest free folk conceivable. Dense banjo clusters cut through like metal talons, seasick plates of drone arrive with Grundy’s melodica and Uziell’s accordion, and over 55 minutes GUE land somewhere between Eugene Chadbourne, Pelt and Aine O’Dwyer.
Howie ReeveLeaf In FogRedwig / Bar Marfil / Innis Orr / UR Audio Visual
This winning ramble over jagged rocks by the Glasgow-based Reeve is, equally, testament to the international punk-not-punk community’s lines of communication and the weirdness old and new on tap in his home city. Reeve plays the acoustic bass, sometimes with lissom delicacy and other times like a post-hardcore pugilist, and sings socially sussed poetic songs of bathos and fantasy. As for his guest musicians, Andy Kerr – guitarist on most of the best Nomeansno records – plays on four songs, and Cathy Heyden and Lorenzo Prati make a smashing if brief sax duo on ‘Apotrope’. For fans of, wait for it, Dawson and Richard Dawson.
Jah WarriorDub From The Heart Part 3Partial
Steve ‘Jah Warrior’ Mosco releases his meditative dub productions at a brisk rate, with 2024 no exception, but usually as 45s: an artist album by the Manchester-originated, London-based artist is a rare event indeed. Dub From The Heart parts one and two were released in 1997 and 98, for context, and this ten-track addition to the series is a textbook example of the classic UK dub sound which Mosco played a healthy part in making flesh. Largely instrumental, with some tracks enlivened by introductory toasting by vocalists including Ranking Joe and Hughie Izachaar, DFTH3 is a luxurious suite of chiming melodies, spacious echo units and woodblock percussion.
J-WalkBroken BeautyBefore I Die
Martin Fisher, remaining member of former duo J-Walk, has been making records for about 30 years and seems pretty pivotal to the Manchester scene of yore containing the Fat City shop, Grand Central Records, Rae & Christian and what have you. Frankly, I tended to find that stuff a big snooze, so this current iteration of J-Walk is a turn up for the books: breezy DIY digidub on ‘Black Lion Passage’ and ‘African Custard’, an On-U Cabaret Voltaire in ‘Botox Fomo’, ‘Monotropicalia’s Balearic proto-dubstep. The back sleeve has a glued-on A4 sheet listing equipment used and advice on “how to make such a thing” in what might be a Desperate Bicycles homage.
The Living Rainbow, Sanctuary of PraiseThe Dusty Clock / SolaceINFOrmatiON!
Two projects fronted by Tom Bryant, who used to be part of Brighton post punk band Desire. His solo recordings as The Living Rainbow favour clandestine lo-fi shuffling over high volume or other rock aesthetics: on The Dusty Clock, ticktocky programmed drums meet gently gothic basslines, mid-80s jangle pop guitars, hypnagogic keys and Bryant’s halfway-to-a-croon vocal style. Sanctuary Of Praise, whose second tape album Solace was released at the beginning of 2024, are a band for the purposes of occasional live shows at least, although there are no credited names on the sleeve and the vibe is rather like an austere coldwave sibling to The Dusty Clock. In each case, though, something oddly compelling emerges.
TarTarDrowned By Locals
This six-track CD is the debut physical release by Blood Of Aza, a twentysomething electronic producer from Surrey who’s accrued a fanbase (including Aphex Twin, apparently) through posting grey market remixes and original compositions to Soundcloud. The music side of Tar is them, with the vocals undertaken by Warren Jones of Richmond noise-rap duo Prison Religion. Its first three untitled cuts are skin-peeling stuff, ramming Jones’ chaw-spitting apoplexy headlong into some sort of trap/gabber/hyperpop howl-y trinity. Those are followed by three remixes which harbour moments of relative placidity but go ballistic when NYC producer Ghozt and Shitney Queers – that’s Shitney Queers – get on board.
UEVPDUEVPDWorld Of Echo
Heavy contender for the bleakest LP of 2024 comes from Dominic Goodman, formerly one third of Mosquitoes. That group’s ‘thing’ was a disassembled type of rock music: as UEVPD, he severs any such tendencies and cocoons himself in a sort of blackened electroacoustic ambience. Eight untitled pieces combine synths and field recordings, treated in such a way as to hint at dub in its grimy crackle and droning low end, mnml techno in its stark quasi-percussion. If you’ve ever heard someone walking up the stairwell of a multistorey carpark and been struck by the pleasing acoustic properties, this album – especially its seventh track, which does indeed sound like that – is for you.
ZD GraftersThree Little BirdsHidden Mantra
More improvisers with initials! This time, ZD is short for Zac and Dave Kavanagh, who live in Birmingham and have also been hailed in NWBs past for their occasions of sludgy abandon as two-thirds of Haq 123. In that group, jazz was more of a threat than a reality, but on Three Little Birds, the second ZD Grafters CDR (format sidenote: there’s a vinyl version due on the Crackedankles label in early 2025), it’s been carried out. With Zac – a teen drummer with maybe a decade’s experience (!) – grabbing this first chance at free playing with both hands, Dave sets the bass tone to ‘brutish churn’, adds electronic frosting and an old pal, Riddell Thomas, on sax, dragging the results towards Zu and The Thing.
Various ArtistsWhen I SurviveWhen I Survive
Of the many Palestinian benefit compilations that have been released in 2024, I’d like to highlight this 38-song one on account of its featured acts’ proximity to this column. These include Tristwch Y Fenywod (and member-related project Hawthonn), Teresa Winter, Karl D’Silva, Michael Kasparis, Matthew Shaw, LASH – members of Es and Sniffany & The Nits – and Sunken Grove, aka Ellis Green of the Verdant Wisdom label. Other notable contributions come from Glasgow’s wavey indie trio S Antigone, Offa’s Dyke’s finest Krautrockers Moon Goose and the layered folk drone of Elspeth Anne. Proceeds from When I Survive will go to two displaced people from Gaza City, Yahya Al Hamarna and Yousef Abdellatif.
