Album: Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You

Relatively straightforward songs from the Southern Gothic star - with the emphasis on 'relatively'

This is a weird one: I do try and stay on top of pop culture, but for several years, Ethel Cain completely passed me by. You’d think I would have noticed a gothic bisexual Baptist trans woman achieving great enough success to be championed by Barack Obama, but no – until streaming algorithms put me on to her record Perverts, released earlier this year. 

Album: Olafur Arnalds and Talos - A Dawning

Shimmery, shiny Icelandic-Irish ambience steeped in beauty

Silken ambience is the name of the game on this set from Icelandic composer-producer Olafur Arnalds and dreampop singer Talos, aka Eoin French, who tragically died in August last year, aged 36. Arnalds completed the album after his death.

Album: Barry Can't Swim - Loner

★★★★ BARRY CAN'T SWIM - LONER Dive in to some sizzling summer dance music

Dive in to some sizzling summer dance music

Despite being Mercury nominated, Bazza’s hardly a household name. Nevertheless, his debut album When Will We Land was highly praised by those in the know. I am definitely not in the know and am more or less a stranger to electro stuff – it can often leave me cold (Guetta can get off, quite frankly). But I know a good tune when I hear it.

Album: Death In Vegas - Death Mask

★★★ DEATH IN VEGAS - DEATH MASK Electronic music perennial returns with an hour of deep techno illbience

Electronic music perennial returns with an hour of deep techno illbience

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away called the late 1990s, there was a scene known as “big beat”. It consisted of club culture sorts making music closer in flavour to rock, and easier to drink beer to than house and techno.

Album: Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke - Tall Tales

A toning-down leads to an opening up of new possibilities in a fertile collaboration

I’ve got an admission: I never really got Radiohead, in no small part because of Thom Yorke’s singing. I appreciate his technical abilities and songwriting, and that a lot of people find his anguish cathartic, but the more he goes for it the more I switch off.

Album: Tim Hecker - Shards

Finessed expressiveness as a compilation of soundtrack work coheres

The question of personality in abstract and ambient music has always been a fascinating one. Without conventional signifiers of expressiveness, and especially in the age of AI, it’s easy for people to think “a computer could have done that”. Indeed, there’ve been plenty of musicians from Brian Eno levels of prominence on down who have played with this, using algorithmic generation, anonymity and so forth as part of the project.

Album: Ethel Cain - Perverts

Cain’s new album is a far cry from her debut - and much more painful

Ethel Cain’s Perverts is a dark and experimental follow-up to her debut album, Preacher’s Daughter. It takes listeners on a haunting journey through unsettling soundscapes that blend elements of drone, slowcore and dark ambient music.

Albums of the Year 2024: Meemo Comma - Decimation of I

A concept album from the perspective of an infected planet provides succour and sustenance

I don’t really want to talk about this year. Genuinely.

It’s been so horrific on the macro scale with deranged Fascism and the effects of rampant and undeniable climate change looming everywhere you look – and on the personal level I’ve been been bombarded with all the inevitable, arbitrary slings and arrows that life can muster, from multiple bereavements on down – that I’d very much rather just neck a load of tranquilisers and fine wines and resolutely enter my hands-over-ears, “lalalala can’t hear you”, era.