With her 13th studio album, Heather Nova delivers what you might expect from one of the 90s' most distinctive alternative voices – though longtime fans of London Rain will find she's meandering down a sandier path.
Sinister Grift is Panda Bear’s first album since his 2022 Reset collaboration with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom. Anyone anticipating any lasting influence from working with Rugby’s premier psychedelic adventurer, however, is going to be sorely disappointed.
While discourse on many topics grows toxic and polarised, it’s the voices who speak plainly about the reality of everyday lives that provide some sanity and make us feel heard. Enter Sam Fender, whose straight talking and pride of his working-class roots has seen him emerge as a figurehead for the younger generation, who at times feel unheard and underappreciated.
Canadian singer Basia Bulat has tried on various musical hats during her career but is most associated with singer-songwriterly folk-pop. Her last album was the melancholic, string-swathed The Garden but with Basia’s Palace, her seventh album, she seems in a jollier frame of mind. She has veered into overtly electronic pop before, especially on her 2016 album Good Advice, but this time it’s a bubblier, warmer version. Then again, these nine songs still find room for heartache.
In Jewish folklore, a golem is an inanimate clay figure, brought to life when a magic word is placed inside its mouth. Piotr Szulkin’s dark 1979 film debut makes reference both to this legend and to Gustav Meyrink’s unsettling 1914 novel, moving the action forward from the latter’s fin-de-siècle Prague to a geographically non-specific dystopian future.
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.
Park Jiha is a super-talented and gloriously inspired Korean multi-instrumentalist. Her new album follows Philos (2018) and The Gleam (2022) and continues to mine a rich vein of Korean tradition, which she filters through a contemporary aesthetic. This isn't fusion, but the wonderfully original and beguiling exploration of a musical world in which sound, timbre, and form evoke the world of nature.
After more than 10 years away, Rizzle Kicks are finally back, and it feels long overdue. Their music was a huge part of my childhood – soundtracking summer days, parties, and just about any time I needed a pick-me-up.
This album is SHORT. At 27 minutes and just five tracks, one might wonder why Julienne Dessagne (this is a solo act) didn’t call it an EP. But maybe this is a good way to go in the trenches of the modern attention wars. It set me to thinking about two recent-ish albums that have become fabourites: Earl Sweatshirt’s 24 minutes of rap introspection SICK! from 2022, and last year’s Rosenhagtorn by Isabel Gustaffson-Ny, a sub-18 minute wisp of puzzling, barely there jazz-folk abstraction.
Manic Street Preachers’ earnest and literate pretentiousness is both their Achilles Heel and their superpower. Their greatest songs are amped by full investment in whatever awkward path they’ve cussedly marched down. At these times, their ever-vaunted love of fist-pumping classic rock lives up to itself.