October is the time of year at which I’m asked to start thinking about my ballots for our albums of the year list. And yet, the torrent of new releases flooding my inbox becomes all the more tempestuous. It’s hard, at times, not to get quite overwhelmed. The task of narrowing things down for this music of the month chart, then, has served as something of a calming exercise, filtering down just a fraction of that flood to reveal the pearls hidden within.
Everything you’ll find below, as well as all the other excellent music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will also be compiled into an hours-long playlist exclusive to our subscribers. In addition, subscribers can enjoy exclusive music from some of the world’s most forward-thinking artists, regular deep-dive essays, a monthly podcast, specially-curated ‘Organic Intelligence’ guides to under-the-radar international sub-genres, and more.
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Patrick Clarke
Albums
Oranssi PazuzuMuuntautujaNuclear Blast
Even for a band so prone to shapeshifting, Muuntautuja still feels difficult to pin down, feeling less like a metal record and more some unknowable Lovecraftian creature, dancing around the very peripheries of your simple human consciousness, flickering in and out of the shadows without ever giving you a proper glimpse at it. It’s a record of contradictions, in some ways – compared to the unfettered sensory overload of Värähtelijä, Muuntautuja feels almost understated. Yet it bristles with a subtle, serpentine intensity that’s just as attention grabbing as before, if not more so. The squelchy electronics that featured so prominently on 2020’s Mestarin Kynsi return here, but they too have shifted into even weirder forms.
Lechuga ZafiroDesde Los Oídos De Un SapoTraTraTrax
A large majority of contemporary dance music productions sound similar in terms of timbre due to their use of common sample packs, preset sounds and iconic analogue hardware. The fact that the Uruguayan virtuoso Lechuga Zafiro decided to start from scratch, inventing his own intercontinental sound palette from field recordings of animals, natural phenomena and inanimate objects via a painstakingly meticulous process, speaks volumes of his determination to create something idiosyncratic and otherworldly. Put simply, he’s transposed the idea of musique concrète into a club environment. A modernist drive for radical innovation permeates his debut LP, Desde Los Oídos De Un Sapo (‘From a toad’s ears’). It’s a monumental piece of ultra-modern club music, which unfolds as a kind of acid-fuelled soundwalk through his enchanting artificial jungle, where sounds behave as untamed goblins and sprites.
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 Connolly, a powerful and shapeshifting vocalist, 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.
MoinYou Never EndAD 93
Moin’s third full-length sees a sharp retooling of their arsenal, as they fundamentally alter the way they use the human voice. The album is rife with collaborations. Where before samples were murky, ambiguous and hard to place, the vocals here are the result of different artists and writers interpreting Moin’s cold world and embellishing it with their own words. Grainy, gravelly, gristly, this abstract rock record emphatically gives a musical vocabulary to the exhausted and confused. That doesn’t make it a dreary, miserable listen though. Far from it. From immensely satisfying Fugazi-like guitar licks, to powerhouse drumming that makes even the most abstract sections groove, You Never End is a liberating listen, and perhaps the most modern guitar album of the year.
Fievel Is GlauqueRong WeicknesFat Possum
Even the most seemingly conventional track on the album – the nostalgic piano ballad ‘Toute Suite’ – isn’t as straightforward as a cursory listen implies. Peering from beneath an undercurrent of flute are subtle percussion and acoustic guitar, cut through by a live wire of faint, harsh electronic noise. The songs on Rong Weicknes are also longer than the rapid-fire tracks of their previous two albums. Giving the songs space allows for tricks like the kaleidoscopic way instruments morph into each other. Without a frenetic pace to keep up with, singer Ma Clément also has more of a showcase for her vocals. Album opener ‘Hover’ shows the heft of her voice, while ‘Its So Easy’ suggests that Fievel’s songs could be carried by a chorus instead of improvisation.
Shovel Dance CollectiveThe Shovel DanceAmerican Dreams
They apparently approached this second album with the aim of it being more representative of their live shows, with fewer field recordings or forays into musique concrète, though we do begin with the life affirming clarion of birdsong. The melody of ‘Abbots Bromley Horn Dance’ offers a moment where beauty is attained, if only fleetingly, and we’re perhaps reminded what it feels like to be alive in such moments. The song is played annually at the Staffordshire village of the title, where residents take to the streets carrying reindeer horns as a hobby horse makes its way through the town. That fleeting ritualistic joy is tempered in a medley here, as the horn dance gives way to ‘The Worms Crawl In’, a none-too-subtle reminder that the danse macabre awaits us all.
Félicia AtkinsonSpace As An InstrumentShelter Press
Félicia Atkinson’s spoken word accompaniments to the tracks on her new album are Gallic and intimate. Her gently accented words slide close into your ears as she speaks, on opening track ‘The Healing’, about contemplation “standing but not facing completely what’s in front of me”. She talks over a lone piano playing a melancholy tune, the faint flutter of bird song, and the sounds made by a human rustling a sound recorder. Atkinson’s work is based around field recordings, which she makes in conventional settings – that is, outside the studio. But the album is also based around the piano, which Atkinson records on her phone, blending field and studio in a way that undermines standard musical practice and contributes to her unsettled, multi-faceted sound world.
Fergus JonesEphemeraNumbers
Scottish producer Fergus Jones’ previous work, mostly under the now-shelved Perko alias, has often had a meditative, downtempo bent to it, his productions frequently suited to the warm-up and cool-down hours of a club night, or the hazy comedown of the afters. On his debut album, Ephemera, he takes that angle to further, brilliant depths. Standout cut ‘Heima’, one of six collaborations on the record, sees Jones link up with two of the best artists currently exploring the intersection between ambient and club music: Huerco S. and James K. The result is an elegant, gorgeous track that is part trip-hop, part dubstep and affords James K’s dreamy vocal plenty of space to soar. Elsewhere, Jones subtly draws on classic hip hop on ‘Tight Knit’, a linkup with rappers Birthmark, ELDON and Withdrawn of Bristol’s Cold Light collective, and pairs Laila Sakini’s tender pop vocals with rolling 808s and weighty bass hits on ‘Can’t Touch’. Jones is just as comfortable working alone as he is with his cast of collaborators, though, with sparse, dubby cuts like ‘Stack’ and ‘Heap’ woven expertly into Ephemera’s running order.
Teho Teardo & Blixa BargeldChristian & MauroSpecula
“I fell into the pit of language,” sang Blixa Bargeld on Einstürzende Neubauten’s Rampen: apm (alien pop music) from earlier this year, and that couldn’t be any less the case on Christian & Mauro, the fourth album with regular Italian collaborator Teho Teardo. Bargeld soft cushions his way onto three accommodating tongues, commingling and interweaving in said pit: in his native German, his exemplary English and the lesser heard Italian, employing them interchangeably and relishing every last phoneme. The Neubauten frontman is synonymous with the clank of metal and violent whir of drill, but as we know, he’s also a renaissance man whose inimitable and unmistakable voice sounds just as at home drifting across an elegant string ensemble as it does a building site.
Tracks
HWI‘Humanly Possible’ (feat. Kim Hanjoo)SoundSupplyService
Woozy and frenetic, ‘Humanly Possible’, the title track from the new album by South Korean audio-visual artist HWI, judders between Holly Herndon-ish glitch and the squelchy post-dubstep sound of c.2010-era LuckyMe. The whole thing is a big swirly, crunchy maelstrom of sound just about held together by a beat that is equal parts baile funk and majorette drum corps.
Richard Dawson‘Polytunnel’Weird World
After the vast multi-temporal trilogy of Peasant, 2020 and The Ruby Cord and a bonkers collaboration with Circle, Richard Dawson’s new single turns all that energy back inwards. Just guitar and voice in the vein of early work like 2012’s The Magic Bridge, it explores the meditative power of gardening with a gentle beauty.
Jim Legxacy‘Aggressive’XL
The first proper preview to what is already one of my most anticipated releases of 2025 (forthcoming mixtape Black British Music (2024)), ‘Aggressive’ – with its tongue-in-cheek intro, sample of Chipmunk’s 2009 UK chart hit ‘Oopsy Daisy’, and typically on-point hook – is further evidence that Jim Legxacy is one of the UK’s most exciting rising artists at this moment in time.
Perfume‘Cosmic Treat’Polydor
Japanese post-shibuya-kei girl group Perfume celebrate their quarter-century with a typically portamento-heavy slice of futuristic technopop, so fizzy it will rot your teeth, but when it tastes this sweet….
Objekt‘Chicken Garaage’Kapsela
Channelling the 00s breaks and dark garage energy of producers like Si Begg and Horsepower Productions, Objekt’s first original music on his recently launched Kapsela label is a playful, precision-engineered club cut centred around an earworm of a melody.
Manic Street Preachers‘Hiding In Plain Sight’Sony
The second cut from the Manics’ forthcoming LP Critical Thinking is the band at their most melancholy, Nicky Wire (on lead vocals for the first time on a single, albeit with backing from guest Lana McDonagh) reflecting on middle age and nostalgia to a shimmering weave of guitars. As is so often the case, the Manics at their most melancholy is also the band at their most effective.
Jules Reidy‘Every Day There’s A Sunset’Thrill Jockey
With its restless swells, strange clatters, and plaintive vocal line, the new single from Berlin-based guitarist and occasional Claire Rousay/Oren Ambarchi/Andrea Belfi collaborator bodes extremely well for their new album, forthcoming in 2025.
