Jorja Smith said she named her new album Falling or Flying to describe the uncertainty she’s felt about her career following the success of her debut, the Mercury Prize nominated Lost & Found. Would her career fall to earth or keep flying higher still?
The music of Daniel Lopatin – AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – exists at the sonic/electronic vanguard. Were the likes of avant-gardists such as Iannis Xenakis, George Antheil and Edgard Varese around today, maybe even Stockhausen, they might dig what he’s up to.
Steven Wilson has merged various genres – metal, shoegaze, pop, dance, jazz – in his solo career without shrugging off the prog label he considers reductive. He hasn’t exactly jettisoned it with his seventh album The Harmony Codex, a collection of songs driven by programming and guitarwork that narrows the distance between the solo artist and the Porcupine Tree band leader.
Gregory’s Girl stands alongside Kes as one of the few films offering a realistic depiction of state school life. Director Bill Forsyth’s surreal flourishes delight without getting in the way: think of the penguin waddling along the corridors, or the young lad glimpsed smoking a pipe in the boys’ toilets.
It felt inevitable that Doja Cat would turn her back on being a popstar. The Californian rapper’s career has been shaped by her ambivalent relationship to fame and earlier this year she went as far as denouncing her previous albums as “mediocre pop”. She regularly gets into spats online, recently telling one of her own fan accounts that they should “delete the entire account and rethink everything.”
Animal Collective have been putting out albums of off-kilter and whimsical psychedelic pop, in various guises, for over 20 years. And while their 12th album together doesn’t exactly rock the boat and bring on a major stylistic change, it’s not really business as usual either.
Two years after the release of her rather flaccid Disco album and five since her somewhat inadvisable foray into country-ish music, 2023 has seen something of a return to form for Kylie Minogue. First there was this summer’s all-conquering single, “Padam Padam” – which even managed to persuade some national radio stations to rethink their policies on which tracks should be played on heavy rotation.
Had Devendra Banhart been born between 1940 and 1950, he’d likely be a household name. His output – very loosely – sits between Cat Stevens, Syd Barrett and Richie Havens, studded with a greatness not widely acknowledged. He had a spell around 15-20 years ago when he seemed about to commercially explode. That didn't happen but he’s settled to a solid career and done much gorgeous work since.
Nothing Lasts Forever opens with a drone, a weightless prologue of guitar feedback evoking the initial moments of the Buffalo Springfield’s “Everydays,” written by Stephen Stills and heard on his band’s 1967 second album Again. Teenage Fanclub’s 11th album ends with “I Will Love you,” a similarly gossamer reflection fusing the atmosphere of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe” and the cyclic rhythms of motorik.
It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already making an impact as a stage performer.