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New music reviews, as daily as possible. There is no new music for old men.
Bird In The Belly are an Brighton-based folk collective. Although you might have guessed that just from the band name. Their debut album The Crowing was released in March 2018. The album consisted of songs the band had found in archives and libraries, set to contemporary folk music by the band. I heard the single,…
They say that those who live outside the parameters of society know something about it that others don’t. I’m not sure I buy it anymore. I’ve spent the last few years in remote work—freelancing alone, joining remote teams, now teaching remote courses. I keep thinking I’ll find the angle that makes it work. I haven’t.…
TR Burge & The Temple are a Manchester-based band. They recorded their upcoming album, also called Godache, in Berlin. It is set for release on November 6, 2026. The band have a haunted, slightly Brian Johnstown Massacre vibe, they write gothic-inflected folk songs that feel deeply personal and slightly cinematic. Mark Lanegan is another influence…
Joe Goddard is best known as a founding member of Hot Chip, the optimistic mid-’00s floorfillers. He has a new record out on Permanent Vacation that blends folk, electronica, disco and house. The five-track EP shimmers, sounding like an afternoon at an Ibiza beachbar. But one that only you and a few people have found,…
Exhale – Sin Clair A door opens, a chair creaks, someone walks across a wooden floor in a second-floor apartment. A heartbroken woman mumbles out about heartbreak. Sounds of piano hammers shift uneasily in a damp-room. The song is, Exhale, one-half of Sin Clair’s debut double release: ‘Affirmations #2 / Exhale’. The pairing is an…
Music is the universal language. This phrase is a cliche for a reason. I don’t understand a word of this latest single, Vochy, from Dlina Volny. But I understand it is a song about hope, about raging against oppression, and about how fear can cloud out all those things. Originally from Minsk but now based…
With echos of Idles and Geese, Dublin-based Gurriers is a hard-driving, take-no-prisoners straight up rock band. Is this post-woke? Who knows anymore. But this is not a skinny-jeans and emotionally literate indie boy record. Anxiety is a constant hum throughout. It’s there in the lyrics and the wall of noise building up behind singer Dan…
For a brief period of time in the distant 2010s, a raft of east London bands centered around the Shacklewell Arms. Bands like Male Bonding, Veronica Falls, and Summer Camp produced reverb-heavy songs, full of melody; co-ed harmonies with echoes of darkness. Montevideo are a Toulouse-based band who sound like they came across an old…
The roads are slick with condensation, the sky a clear azure. The lido is crisp before 7.45 am, the sun not yet above the tree line. I change quickly and jump in without testing the water. Better not to know and get the shock over with fast. Head under, wonderful. Two lengths of breaststroke. Then…
I remember hearing this track for the first time at Club Sandwich in New Cross in 2006. We had no Shazam in those days. The only way to find out a track you heard in a club was to try and remember a snippet of the lyrics, something to Google later. I remember writing “who…
New York has a way of getting under your skin. I first visited in 2008 with my brother, Angus. Actually, that’s a lie, I came through New York in 2005 when I was coming back from Australia on my gap year. I landed in March with a suitcase full of clothes suitable for an Australian…
Francis of Delirium is the project of Jana Bahrich, a Canadian-born songwriter raised between Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and Luxembourg, who formed the band with American drummer and producer Chris Hewett. Bahrich’s songs lean into the emotionally-wrought, confessional vein of songwriting, similar to Lucy Dacus and Rufus Wainwright, but with a slice of LA-soaked sun, prescription…
Two teenage girls in the Waterstones branch of Hampstead on a Friday afternoon.“I feel like deep down you are a millennial.”“shut up.”“no, i’m serious. You have that millennial optimism.” Millennial optimism, don’t ever let it go. It runs through this 2015 track from cult favourites Frog. With echoes of Townes Van Zandt and Silver Jews,…
Westside Cowboy are a Manchester-based band who sound like they are from Tennessee. They won Glastonbury’s Emerging Talent Competition in 2025. Already, they are being spoken of as “the next big thing” in UK indie. A title that is sure to mean the backlash has already started. This is a sound that will appeal to…
When I first heard this song I assumed it was an old B-side from the ‘00s. Maybe an old Duke Spirit song. It has the fuzzed guitar and vocals of landfill indie (and that’s a term I use with love, not disdain). And it turns out the story behind this song is not far off.…
I’ve always struggled with the phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” because, particularly when it comes to today’s band, Twisted Teens, they do still, patently, still make ‘em like they used to. ‘When We First Met‘ is a barrelling, scuzzy, gem of a song. Part Americana-punk rock, part bluegrass, part old-school garage…
Walking home from Tooting Broadway station at 9.22pm on a Wednesday night. I saw Saoirse Ronan’s new film, Bad Apples in Soho (fantastic, dark-satire), listening to Emily Pilbeam’s BBC6 Music Introducing show, and this track by Theo and Sahra comes on. At first, I think the jazz intro is a bed beneath the interlude between…
Jai Cuzco is an Amsterdam artist based in Northern Spain. He makes long tracks built around piano and beats that would be categorised as “ambient chill music to work to” by an algorithm. I like these tracks because they are definitely not AI-generated. And, sometimes, I do need music to work to. But if you…
Sulaf is a singer, oud player and composer from Sudan. She went on a three-month residency in France and war broke out in her home country. She couldn’t return. The result was an album based on the Sufi poetry of her great-grandfather. “He was an ordinary Sudanese man, but he was like the sea: a…
Old bunting lies on Chillerton Road at 7am as I leave the house. “It’s going to be a wonderful day,” a middle-aged woman says to her daughter and her husband outside the Sainsbury’s on Mitcham Road. ‘Prepare To Meet Thy God’ is emblazoned in bold red type on a pale white background on the side…
Nate Amos is This Is Lorelei and an incredibly prolific artist I heard for the first time this week. His release schedule reminds me of demo-tape Ryan Adams in the early ‘00s. Sorry, there will always be an early indie-reference in here somewhere. But the songs are more ‘80s AM Ariel Pink and Feels-era Animal…
Elanor Moss tickles my nostalgia nerve and melancholy tendencies. It’s perhaps not surprising to learn Moss wrote this and the rest of her latest album The Knife, The Needle in a cabin in the Scottish Highlands. The song is tender but twists on a dark edge. There’s an eeriness to hearing domestic violence discussed in…
Hana Stretton is a British/Australian multi-instrumentalist. Nojiri 1993 is the first track from her new album tiarn. It is a series of loops around recorded nature sounds (bird song, fire, the desert at dusk). This track, and the whole album, presents like a collage or an impressionist painting. Her influences are at once broad (folk,…
After Another Sky broke-up, front-woman Catrin Vincent bought a cheap piano on Gumtree and self-recorded her debut solo record, Free. This track takes the Sufjan Stevens’ original and imagines Andrew Bird wrote the original and Nick Drake was on production duty. Vincent holds the essence of the song together, just barely, like a gossamer thin…
