‘Miss America’, the centrepiece of Jennifer Walton’s stylish, painful debut record, sits us down in a hotel room near JFK airport, watching on as Walton learns that her father has been diagnosed with cancer. The Sunderland-born musician had been touring the US for the first time, drumming with indie band Kero Kero Bonito, and now grief greys everything out. Faltering piano and hushed strings accompany gothic dispatches from the tour van: “Cattle farm and broke down shack / Strip-mall, drug deal, panic attacks.”
Walton’s gentle vocals are deadpan, with the record’s tension brought by her penmanship (encompassing fiction, folksy sayings and blunt diary entries) and her sharp, surprising maximalism. Few songs this year have…
Category: art pop
The typical Macy Rodman LP is a sprawling codex of meta-references, in-jokes, and cultural critique couched in accessible synth-pop. Though there’s a common thread of danceable retro pastiche running through her discography (revealing a particular fondness for Haçienda-era New Order and the Day-Glo kitsch of late-aughts club music), albums like 2019’s Endless Kindness and 2021’s Unbelievable Animals were clearly composed with close listening in mind. Beneath the cybernetic sheen, there’s goofball parody, meticulously detailed confessional writing, and an enthusiasm for genre-agnostic experimentation. On her latest full-length outing, SCALD, her fascination with filmic femme fatales adopts a harder-edged sound that pushes her songcraft into weirder — yet no…
Jeff Tobias wrestles a frantic saxophone in psych-jazz Sunwatchers and a subtle bass counterpoint in serene and minimalist Modern Nature. Here in a solo project, he splits the difference, amping up indie melodies with proggy, jittery, staccato arrangements, and reinforcing dystopian scenarios with enticing, nearly pop tunefulness.
One Hundredfold Now in this Age takes a strong political stance, but sweetens the polemic with indie drift and dream. “End It,” allow only a brief interval of synth-and-strings shimmer before unspooling its insurgent chorus. “Burn the American flag, one hundred times a day,” Tobias croons, his tone unbothered, his message aflame, as a glittering fusion jazz fanfare goes off in his wake. The song was inspired by American…
Titling her new EUSEXUA companion album Afterglow might have suggested that FKA twigs was set to use her second album of 2025 to take things from the pulverising, euphoric beats of the club towards contemplative, hazy conversations back at hers for the afters. Press play on opening track ‘Love Crimes’, though, and it seems she has simply stepped outside for a cigarette break, before returning inside to be smacked in the face with techno bass even harder and more ferocious than anything on the first album.
Inspired by her experiences clubbing in Prague while filming for The Crow, EUSEXUA was a dazzling techno-pop reinvention for twigs, with both her most sugary pop hooks and hardest beats. Across her first two albums, LP1 and MAGDALENE…
DOGA, new studio album by Juana Molina, the eighth full-length of her career and her first album of new compositions in eight years.
For DOGA she has been trying to master the furiously difficult world of analogue synths, hunching over instruments that resemble old-fashioned telephone switchboards to invent sounds that don’t rely on pre-programmed waveforms. She recorded everything she made but became overwhelmed by the hundreds of hours of tape. It prompted her to work with a producer, Emilio Haro, for the first time since her debut. DOGA is deeper and more spacious than its predecessor, with synthesised orchestral touches: the guitars on ‘Miro Todo’ (I See Everything), says Molina, sound like violins that “are somehow out of…
Marta Forsberg’s new record Archaeology of Intimacy is something of a surprise. Things are kept short and simple, and sometimes ever so slightly sharp. Forsberg’s languorous, quietly investigative style is now attuned to a trickier yet still seductive line of attack.
The listener’s relationship with Archaeology of Intimacy soon becomes very clear: we are here to be still, and actively listen to these quiet but often surprising songs. This injunction is not a bad thing – a lot of what makes this album so moreish is only revealed with patience and attention. Archaeology of Intimacy is not demanding your opinion. But neither should it be consumed piecemeal or in passing.
The opening two tracks are there to call us to…
Anna von Hausswolff’s sixth studio album is being trailed as the 39-year-old Swede’s pivot towards pop, which you could say is all relative. For the last decade, Von Hauswolff has dealt in music that is solemn, echo-laden, heavy on the drone of her beloved pipe organ and fully deserving of the adjective gothic.
Her work has elicited comparisons to Nico and Diamanda Galás; 40 years ago, it might have been packaged in a hauntingly abstract Vaughan Oliver sleeve and released on 4AD. She has collaborated with Swans, Sunn O))) and the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room. Her last album, 2020’s All Thoughts Fly, was a collection of instrumentals, recorded on a replica of a 17th-century German baroque organ in a church in…
With Fur & Gold, Bat for Lashes – aka Natasha Khan – brings a fairytale quality and air of mystery to her music, performing a delicate balancing act between everyday emotions and the power of fantasy. As the title suggests, there’s something gorgeous but raw about her songs, which fly from spare British chamber folk to shades of lavish rock, pop, and dance as she throws herself into stories that update the traditions of other iconic female artists. She’s a warrior princess of the moors with only her steed to keep her company on “Horse and I,” a song whose dramatic sweep would do Kate Bush proud; on the fable-like sensual duet “Trophy,” Khan sings “creatures of mercy/shoot them down and set me free” with Björk-like urgency. Despite Fur & Gold’s unabashedly mystical vibe, Khan emphasizes…
Recorded in Lisbon in 2023, ‘Cornucopia Live’ documents Björk’s expansive tour, presenting high-quality live versions of the album’s best tracks alongside updated fan favorites like ‘Isobel’ and ‘Pagan Poetry’.
Björk has always gone all-out on her live productions, and ‘Cornucopia’ was her most monumental tour yet, billed as an attempt to unite her various interests – nature, technology and sound. She directed the ambitious event herself of course, but brought in help from James Merry, and had Andrew Thomas Huang, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Pierre-Alain Giraud, Nick Knight, Tobias Gremmler and Warren Du Preez & Nick Thornton-Jones along for the ride. There’s a filmed version recorded beautifully by cinematographer…
Have you ever stuck your head inside a speaker just to see what it feels like? That’s SCALER’s Endlessly. It’s ugly-beautiful, claustrophobic, and oddly addictive once your ears give in to the ringing. At times it hums like a neon sign at 3am, glowing cold against the silence of a deserted street. At others it comes down like a barricade, as if the band have taken over a derelict building and refused to let go.
SCALER are inseparable from Bristol’s heritage, and Endlessly wears that DNA with pride. The album is heavily inspired by the city’s cornerstones – trip-hop’s brooding atmospherics, drum’n’bass’s precision breakbeats, the noise scene’s corrosive edges, and the experimental pop underground’s knack for reshaping familiar forms. SCALER’s brand of experimental dance…
With his score for Yorgos Lanthimos’s gothic fantasies Poor Things and Kind of Kindness, Joscelin Dent-Pooley (aka Jerskin Fendrix) has proven that his skills in sonic storytelling are excellent. His quirky and elaborate instrumentals capture the restless nature of the former’s protagonist, Bella Baxter, a woman with the transplanted brain of an infant, who explores the good and bad of the world.
Composed largely between the artist’s film score work, Once Upon A Time… In Shropshire is an attempt to soundtrack Dent-Pooley’s own life story. Raised in the West Midlands, the songs are infused with references from his formative years, restoring the memories in detailed lyrics on the opening ‘Beth’s Farm’: “We kiss beneath the apple tree…
Best known for the intricate guitar-work which guided the warm, woody folk-rock of her 2022 Grammy-winning album Revealer, Madison Cunningham opens her latest project Ace instead with swathes of rippling piano.
The instrument is the main protagonist across the record, pairing sweetly with the Californian musician’s crystal-clear vocals on tracks like lead single ‘My Full Name’, which recalls the intimate art-pop of Regina Spektor.
Elsewhere the album is more fluid and impressionistic, piano swirling restlessly amongst moody clarinet and strings. Songs shift like the weather, disintegrating into choppy rhythms and murky chords before cohering into choruses again, echoing Cunningham’s lyrical…
…features a brand-new song titled “Decoy” as well as demos of “Cosmic Joke” and “Truth.”
“Enter the room of nothing / Enter the room of me,” sings Haley Fohr on ‘Skeleton Key’, backed by the buzz of organ and electric guitar. She towers above, her voice theatrical and macabre, a quality that’s always been there in her contralto delivery, but never as bombastic.
That room could be the basement studio in Chicago where Halo On the Inside first took shape. For eight months, she locked herself away there, embarking on long, late-night writing sessions. Like the record’s cover, she existed in a vacuum, exploring new sounds, synths and parts of herself. Time and place get wobbly when you’re up all night on your own in a windowless room. Fohr found…
Picture yourself in a field near a river, where the rolling hills and life are wistfully outlined by somebody quite quirky. That’s Crayola Lectern perfectly described.
Disasternoon is the third album from Crayola Lectern, the band that serves as the mouthpiece/outlet for musician and producer Chris Anderson. He’s joined by drummer Damo Waters and Alistair Stracham who provides his woodwind expertise. Anderson has had an intriguing career up to this point, with stints in Spiritualized, Peter Buck’s Departure Lounge, and ZOFFF, he’s also had musical dalliances with members of Cardiacs, Damo Suzuki and Drum Eyes, amongst others.
It is with Crayola Lectern that he seems to have really found his place however, and…
Chance happenings sometimes take music to the right place. For Spanish-German, Cologne-based singer-songwriter Wolfgang Pérez that place is his new succulent album Só Ouço out now via Hive Mind Records. Two albums into Pérez’s pop fusion experimentation, Who Cares Who Cares from 2021 and last year’s Ahora, the thrilling tones of Música Popular Brasileira were already oozing through his work. Then, while studying composition in Rio his interest went beyond watching, listening and learning. He jammed, he formed a band, they played shows and at one gig his tunes caught the ear of Angelo Wolf, sound engineer connected to Rio’s recent resurgence as MPB central (e.g. Bala Desejo, Dora Morelenbaum, Ana Frango Elétrico et al). From here the momentum…
Hot on the heels of that ace blink-and-you’ll-miss-it electroacoustic set Turn Liquid Into Dust, Home dissolves Ziúr‘s paradigm yet again. If you’re expecting an extension of 2023’s Hakuna Kulala-released jazz-punk explosion Eyeroll, you’ll be surprised – Ziúr brings back Iceboy Violet and Elvin Brandhi, but that’s really where the similarities end. As the title suggests, it’s an exploration of the meaning of “home”, and for Ziúr that’s Germany, a country she’s had a tense relationship since she was a teenager, obfuscating her connection for years. Singing, sneering and vocalizing over almost every track, she opens up fully, choosing to use English mostly, but also writing lyrics in German for the first time, which is the real revelation. If you’ve been following her material…
In just five years, Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti has become one of experimental music’s biggest names. In addition to her spellbinding solo releases, she is an eager collaborator, working with the likes of Efterklang, the improv quartet Amor Muere – which she co-founded in her adopted home of Mexico City – and with her romantic partner, guitarist Hector Tosta, as Titanic. On the latter’s superb 2023 debut, Vidrio, they pioneered a genre-agnosticism that veered from squealing free-jazz saxophone to hammering drum grooves and aggressively processed cello, always anchored in Fratti’s soaring falsetto. It heralded the arrival of a group who embraced experimentation as much as earwormy melodies.
On Hagen, the duo double down on their…
As an artist who tries to present your art in more forms than one, there are so many obstacles in front of you, particularly if you try to present a certain concept or concept through it. It not only requires a ton of talent but also hours of hard work to make something sensible out of it.
Producer, singer, rapper, and visual artist Quadeca is one such artist who started out by presenting his work through YouTube, whose previous work which slowly took him to a spot at last year’s Coachella Music Festival. Now, Quadeca is coming with his latest concept album and a feature film Vanisher, Horizon Scraper, through which he presents a concept, as he puts it, “about a man who sets sail alone in search of freedom but is unknowingly drifting toward destruction”.
Such is the diversity of David Byrne’s projects since Talking Heads’ split in 1991, it can feel like no possible new endeavour is too far-fetched. Now that American Utopia and Here Lies Love have finished their runs, maybe it’s time for a Broadway musical about the turbulent childhood of Tristan Tzara? Or else an art photography book of textile factories in South Carolina? And surely there’s an album of New Orleans bounce to be made with Diplo and Big Freedia, and possibly a weekly column of recipes for the New York Times?
The fact that none of these options seem particularly outlandish makes the relatively straightforward nature of his latest release all the more remarkable. Byrne’s first studio album since 2018’s American Utopia,…
From El Boraro, the vampiric demon on 2018’s Anticlines, to Petra, the alien observer of 2022’s ¡Ay!, Lucrecia Dalt often uses fictional personas to explore complex themes and emotions in her work. However, with A Danger to Ourselves, she sheds the chrysalis of these alter-egos to emerge with her most personal record yet.
The title, borrowed from David Sylvian’s lyrics on opener cosa rara, hints at the album’s preoccupations; emotional volatility, self-sabotage, and the uneasy pull between intimacy and annihilation. It’s Dalt at her most exposed, and somehow, her most inscrutable.
On ‘divina’, you sense this newfound vulnerability as she sings about improbable love against a backdrop of staccato piano and the sharp,…
An utterly abysmal set of reverb drenched mediocre songs. Those R.E.M. covers are so catastrophically tone-deaf it’s a wonder Michael…