Louder Than War Albums of the Year 2021

On their seventh album, French prog-metal stars GOJIRA take a very different lyrical tack than the one they explored on their previous album, *Magma*. “There was a lot of pain and grief attached to that album, from the whole experience of losing my mom back in 2015,” vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier tells Apple Music. “With *Fortitude*, we had the desire to fill the album with more joy, even if it doesn’t come across as joyful music.” With its themes of civil disobedience and environmental awareness, *Fortitude* takes Magma’s inward gaze and turns it outwards. “*Magma* was very personal and intimate,” Duplantier offers. “*Fortitude* is more oriented toward the world and politics.”Below, he comments on each song. **“Born for One Thing”** “This is about facing the fear of death. At a certain age, there’s a consciousness in all of us, a clock ticking—a countdown to the great unknown. It’s a reflection based on some books I read when I was younger about Buddhism and these philosophies that teach how to be at peace with oneself and meditate on the essence of being. That’s something we’re losing a little bit in society. Instead, we worry about the things that we want to hold on to in case the world goes to shit.” **“Amazonia”** “The intro and outro riff sound very much like Sepultura’s ‘Roots Bloody Roots.’ We don’t hide from the fact that we are huge Sepultura fans—our first show was mainly Sepultura covers, believe it or not. They’re a Brazilian band originally, and they also were working at raising awareness about the Indigenous cause. So the proceeds from this song are going to launch Operation Amazonia, as we call it, where we’re going to ask our musician friends to donate instruments for an auction. The money will go to an NGO based in Brazil called APIB—it’s the largest Indigenous-owned NGO—to support the Indigenous peoples and protect the rainforest from big corporations.” **“Another World”** “We wrote this song in one day, whereas some of the others on the album took three years. The lyrics come from a feeling that the world is completely screwed, so I feel sometimes that I want another world. The video we made for it is supposed to be ironic and funny—four dudes that play in a metal band build a rocket together and travel through a wormhole to the future. It’s sort of a funny remake of *Planet of the Apes*. But the animation was so well-done and classy that it somehow lost a little bit of the humor that was intended.” **“Hold On”** “It’s one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and I was struggling to come up with lyrics. I had already written about things that really matter to me, like civil disobedience and the Amazon. But I really loved the music for this, so I absolutely wanted it on the album. At some point, I was really depressed and about to give up and I decided to just fucking let it out. I was feeling overwhelmed by life, and I had this vision that life is like an ocean and we need to hold on to something because waves are crashing on us. Then it started to flow and I found my voice for this song.” **“New Found”** “For this, I had the title before doing the lyrics. But the main thing I wanted to talk about in the song is finding the thing that gives a new meaning to your entire life. Having kids is a big one. When you understand something about yourself deeply and think, ‘Okay, this is who I am,’ you get to know yourself a little better.” **“Fortitude”** “Fortitude is the underlying idea throughout the whole album. It’s a mantra. It’s something that is addressing the universe and the stars and the planets when I sing, and maybe an alien consciousness or whatever there is up or down there—spirits, guides. It’s like a prayer. It\'s the thing that sums up the entire album, but very personal. The more you’re honest with yourself, with your heart, the more people are going to feel it.” **“The Chant”** “This is a leap from the metal songs to a weird, Indigenous type of rock song. There’s a change of tonality also. The beginning of the album is a G, and then towards the end it’s a C. As the intro to this song, ‘Fortitude’ is something that orients your ear towards another field of notes, so it’s preparing the brain to make room. When ‘The Chant’ hits, it feels two times harder and stronger than it would be if it was directly after another song. It’s a mantra with an intention of unification through peace and strength, something that the human race needs a lot.” **“Sphinx”** “There’s a lot of our roots as a death metal band coming through here, and a little bit of a Metallica vibe at the beginning with the buildup on the toms. So it sounds old-school but also modern, because we have these intricate things with the whammy and all that stuff. Lyrically, I’m very fascinated by the Sphinx. Some Egyptologists say that the Sphinx is actually pre-Egyptian, that it’s much older than we think and was maybe built by a different civilization. So I wrote a song about how the Sphinx is witnessing the rise and maybe the fall of our civilization, and it’s surviving us all.” **“Into the Storm”** “This is about civil disobedience, a subject that is very dear to my heart. If you\'re a good citizen and you believe in communities and in people, you have to disobey sometimes. We have to bend the rules because some of the rules are ridiculous and unfair. We are creating the rules and laws of this world, not the other way around. Of course, I\'m not calling people for a riot or whatever. What I\'m saying is that it\'s important to question things and to realize that it\'s not because society is telling you to do something that you should necessarily do that.” **“The Trails”** “It’s like a blurry dream—a poem with soothing music. We always have this toward the end of our albums, because we can’t help but experiment. I could easily do a side project or a solo career to express some of the stuff that is not metal, but I choose to focus on the band and turn GOJIRA into a weird beast that has several faces. I think ‘The Trails’ is a more subtle side of us, but it’s actually very technical. It’s maybe the hardest song to play on guitar on the entire album, but it’s also the calmest.” **“Grind”** “Of course, we love to grind. I don’t know if there’s anything better in this world than playing a riff with a drummer, just grinding it. Lyric-wise, I’m talking about transcending ourselves and overcoming our problems. We have the power. We can change things. We can bend laws. We can break walls. But we also have our routines—wake up, wash the dishes, go to work, make money. You have to surrender to that clockwork grind in order to find freedom. So do your dishes, motherfucker. You’ll suffer less tomorrow.”

Close to a year before Kiwi Jr. recorded their second LP, vocalist/guitarist Jeremy Gaudet had figured out a system to get their songwriting done more efficiently. “I had this big binder, like a Five Star binder that you would have for school, and we called it the LP Two Bible,” Gaudet says. “Any time any of us at practice, or outside of practice even, had an idea, we would say, ‘Oh, yeah. Put it in the bible.’ Then by the end of it, before we go to record, we have this binder full of so many ideas and lyrics that we can just constantly reference.” With that plan in mind, the Toronto indie rockers wanted to return to the studio quickly after the full rollout for 2019\'s twice-released *Football Money*—even if unable to test many of the songs live due to lockdown restrictions. Despite the setbacks, the band carried through with another crafty blend of jangling hooks and effervescent melodies—and even a few guitar solos for good measure—alongside Gaudet’s witty, often humorous and highly specific narratives. “It wasn\'t the easiest environment, but the pandemic did allow us more time because we had to delay the initial sessions,” Gaudet says. “We\'re really trying to create something in the studio that sounds how we hope it will sound whenever we\'re able to play live again.” Here, Gaudet and guitarist Brian Murphy walk us through every song on the album. **Tyler** Jeremy Gaudet: “As soon as I had the demo for it, we all agreed this would be a wicked lead-off track for the second record. There\'s a lot of stuff going on that\'s packed into a two-minute song. I think I had the opening lines first and then I started thinking about writing from a character\'s perspective. I knew that if I was going to use someone\'s name, I wanted it to be a name that I couldn\'t think of any other songs that had that name used before. Tyler just popped out. It\'s one of those funny names like Kyle or something where, really, only in your life, you meet people with those names that were born in the \'80s onward, right? It\'s super limited to our generation, I feel like.” **Undecided Voters** Brian Murphy: “It’s probably the oldest song on *Cooler Returns* that wasn\'t around during *Football Money*. We got chances to play it live a lot, which was good to test it out and see what arrangement ideas were working and what wasn\'t and to see crowd reaction to a song that they\'ve never heard before. If they react well, then that\'s obviously a good sign.” JG: “I knew I wanted to write something set in a school. My friend was talking about how the Glasgow arts school burned down twice, and so I was looking into that and I was thinking how dramatic that is for a small place like Glasgow. Then I started to think this whole idea of school rivals within a school, like rival classmates, and I started to think about that movie *Election*, the Reese Witherspoon one. In this day and age where everyone is super woke, how could you possibly be undecided in 2020? That\'s kind of meant to be leveled as like an insult or something.” **Maid Marian’s Toast** JG: “The song is looking at people working restaurant jobs and half the people wanting to burn the place down. Musically, I was definitely thinking about two things. I specifically remember thinking about the Wallflowers, like *Bringing Down the Horse*-era The Wallflowers, and also there was like an Orange Juice or a Pastels vibe, some of that early-’80s or mid-’80s Scottish rock.” **Highlights of 100** JG: “This is the second song we\'ve had called \'Highlights of 100\' just because I really like the title. There\'s a lot about film in this song. Throughout the whole outro, you\'re getting this story about being on a film set and there being different mini universes everywhere. I was probably influenced by that Tarantino movie that came out \[*Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*\] where they\'re constantly on set and they\'re in Western gear.” **Only Here for a Haircut** JG: “This song is a true story about how I went to a friend\'s house to get a haircut from his girlfriend because she used to cut all of her friends\' and his friends\' hair for free. It was just a fun neighborhood thing that she did. I went over there and my friend, the boyfriend, was not home. I felt something really awkward was happening. The movie *Tomb Raider* was on TV. Then I found out via text, like mid-haircut, that they had broken up and I was just like, \'What am I doing here? This is a terrible feeling.\' That was the initial germ of the idea.” **Cooler Returns** JG: “This is one where we had the instrumental for a long time and I had no idea what I was going to write this song about. The lyrics really came together in piecemeal over a year. It wasn\'t one like \'Maid Marian\'s Toast\' where I just sat down and wrote it, or \'Dodger\' is another one that we\'ll get to where I just write that song. I had to pick at it for a while because the phrasing is a little bit off, because you\'ve got that stop-start-y main riff and rhythm that you have to follow in the verses.” **Guilty Party** BM: “This is one we played for probably over a year live and it always went over well at shows, which is a good sign. Like I was saying, if no one has heard it before and they react to it well, then it\'s usually a good sign. We had the arrangement pretty close. We didn\'t have to fight with it too much. We were really going for an XTC thing on the bridge. I don\'t know if we got it or not.” **Omaha** JG: “This one I wrote the lyrics first. Not all the lyrics, but a very specific idea of what they call the Woodstock of capitalism, this huge shareholders meeting in Omaha that they have in these coliseums or big arenas and people from all over America and Canada go to—and all these business people and investors attend meetings and have lanyards. I was thinking, like, ‘Wouldn\'t it be cool if there was a movie or a story about two people meeting at such a terrible-sounding event and having an affair or something? Almost like an \'80s Michael Douglas/Adrian Lyne kind of thing.” **Domino** JG: “This or ‘Nashville Wedding’ would be two of the oldest Kiwi Jr. songs, period. Nothing\'s changed really except for some of Brian\'s guitar flourishes, and the length of the intro and outro have been shortened a bit. There would probably be some people who have a demo MP3 of this somewhere from 2016, because it used to be on SoundCloud before we had any fans. Then we tracked it for *Football Money* and it just didn\'t quite work. And so we said, \'Okay, we finally have to nail it this time,\' because it\'s been a live fan favorite for a while. The lyric of this one has a little to do with listening to true-crime podcasts and the news and everything trying to scare you and living on a bad corner, which I do, and just the idea of an unknown and just learning to live with it.” **Nashville Wedding** JG: “The lyric is about as straightforward as you\'re going to get from me about just crashing somebody\'s wedding. It had a different title, and then in the studio we decided to call it as such because a) we use a lot of Nashville guitars on it and b) one of our friends got married in Tennessee recently and the chorus references Tennessee. I had to assure her that this song about having a miserable time at a wedding was not about her wedding. I had to write her an email before the album came out. I was like, \'Hey, you\'re going to hear something. It\'s not about you.\'” **Dodger** JG: “This song is not about sports at all, but I thought that somebody who is living in the past and somebody who is moving on to the future or the present could really be represented by somebody who is still wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers hat or waiting for the Dodgers to move back to Brooklyn compared to somebody who is not worried about living on the Pacific West Coast and loving life. It\'s as simple as it gets, really. Lyrically, there was so many sports references all the time. Like we\'re a total jock band. LP three is going to be called *Jock Jams*.” BM: “Hopefully, we get to open for AC/DC someday.” **Norma Jean’s Jacket** JG: “I\'m quite pleased with this one. This is about as throwback rock ’n’ roll, rootsy \'70s rock ’n’ roll as we get. Definitely a lot of Rolling Stones—attempted vibes. There\'s also something about this one that I think is funny. Every chorus starts out with me really over the top, sincerely singing the words \'heartache and sorrow\'—which is so off-brand for our band. Sometimes we try to go for laughs too much and then realize that not everyone is looking to laugh when we put on a record.” **Waiting in Line** BM: “I remember we had a team meeting over the Jesus shirt lyric on this one. There was a few different options for what kind of shirt is this person wearing. I do remember the four of us all huddled and you were like, ‘Okay, what\'s it going to be? We need to decide right now.’ I was picturing it as one of those sort of dumb T-shirts with Jesus giving the thumbs up or whatever that Urban Outfitters used to sell. That\'s how I pictured it.”

“As far as the actual musical experience of the record, I really hope that it is a rollercoaster,” Amigo the Devil, the nom de plume of artist Danny Kiranos, tells Apple Music. “And I hope it\'s somewhat confusing.” Confusing listeners isn’t a typical goal for a musician, but Kiranos’ music is anything but typical. Following two albums in 2018—*Volume 1* and *Everything Is Fine*—*Born Against* takes the dark, imagistic tendencies of Kiranos’ earlier work and fine-tunes it with an eye toward asking big questions alongside minimal, often unorthodox instrumentation. “I hope that the album really allows people to realize, ‘All right, it\'s okay to question things,’ that blind faith might not be the best vessel to be a true believer.” Below, Amigo the Devil walks Apple Music through several of *Born Against*’s key tracks. **“Quiet as a Rat”** “When it began, it was a slow, fingerpicked ballad-style song about faith and doubt and all that. And to be honest, I kept playing it and playing it and it just didn\'t sound like it fit the actual concept that I was trying to portray there, the emotive nature of it. I figured it needed to be more cut and dry, and just, ‘Here\'s the imagery. Here\'s the question.’ And I think it ended up being one of my personal favorites on the record, only because it does have that inquisitive, almost whimsical sonic palette with these really, really dark, fable-based tales, essentially.” **“Murder at the Bingo Hall”** “We sat down at the end of it and we go, ‘All right, let\'s try something weird. Let\'s pull back everything and leave three instruments, whatever is necessary, only what is absolutely necessary.’ And so it ended up being the acoustic that you hear, the organ on top of it, the drums. And to be sure, there is a little bit of piano in there. But for the most part, it is just those three instruments.” **“Better Ways to Fry a Fish”** “So, the song right before it, ‘Drop for Every Hour,’ is the original concept of ‘Better Ways to Fry a Fish.’ Those two are linked, essentially. And when I was writing the original ‘Better Ways,’ which became ‘Drop for Every Hour,’ how I felt about it, it was too fun of a title to use for such a serious-esque song. So I ended up cutting up all of the graphic nature of ‘Drop for Every Hour,’ keeping the emotional aspect of the storyline. Then, ‘Better Ways to Fry a Fish’ ended up being almost this old TV show/Bob Wills-esque homage that is the physical aspect of the ‘Drop for Every Hour’ story. And I wish it was a little longer, because I ended up really liking how it sounded.” **“Another Man’s Grave”** “There are two songs on the record that are very, very explicitly personal, where there\'s no external narrative. They\'re very much a ‘this is how I feel’ kind of thing. ‘Another Man\'s Grave’ is one of them. And the first demo I had of that was the same exact guitar melody, same picking pattern, except the instrumentation behind it was a lot darker. And I wanted to have a little bit of a hopeful sound to it, a little bit of an uplifting nature, which is where the bells and things like that came into play.” **“24K Casket”** “So that Lamborghini line \[‘It seems a lot more comfortable to cry in a Lamborghini’\] is actually something my mom used to tell me when I was growing up. She was always very, very supportive of music, but anytime I wanted to do something that was just not going to advance my life, and I\'d be like, ‘I don\'t care about money, blah, blah, blah,’ she would always throw that line out, in Spanish, of course. Her version was a Ferrari, but in the song we swapped it out because ‘Lamborghini’ made more sense.” **“Letter From Death Row”** “That was definitely one of those sitting-there-staring-off-into-the-nothingness moments, just going down the spiral, wondering about humanity and all that. With a huge rise in serial-killer culture on Netflix and all that, there\'s an intrigue for people who have a lack of empathy or a lack of social acceptance, a lack of humanity. How would a person that\'s about to die on death row respond to still being in love with someone? Whether they loved them back or whether that connection is reciprocated or one-way, it doesn\'t really matter. I started asking myself those questions and then I tried my best to put myself in those shoes, not that I think anyone ever can unless you\'re there.”

On June 4th 2021, Night Beats – the Texas-born brainchild of Danny Lee Blackwell – will release their fifth full-length, ‘Outlaw R&B’, via Fuzz Club Records. The album arrives following the 2019 ‘Myth of A Man’ LP (produced by Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys and released by Heavenly Recordings) as well as last year’s ‘That’s All You Got’ 7”. Made during the height of the California wildfires (where Blackwell currently resides), rioting in the streets and a nation in lockdown, the raucous technicolour rock’n’roll of ‘Outlaw R&B’ is a call to rejoice in some sorely needed post-apocalyptic hedonism. Blackwell says of the album: “Outlaw R&B is music for the borderless, the free, the outcasts and the forgotten. The outlaw is the runner. Those whose minds aren't sold by perfect pitch and clean fingernails. Through this medium you can escape the confines of mental feudalism and bask in the euphoric glow of psychedelic R&B.” Where the last Night Beats LP was a distinctly polished and soulful affair, ‘Outlaw R&B’ sees the band return to their natural habitat: riotous, acid-fried rock’n’roll to lose your head to.

10 inch 9 track extended vinyl-only long player on Violette Records-released may 2021

8 tracks, 10 inch flo green vinyl with 12 page lyric booklet. First 100 copies come with stuff.

Dinosaur Jr’s bassist embraces indie rock roots in a solo return.

After the release of 2018’s *Wide Awake!*, Parquet Courts guitarist Austin Brown was feeling the effects of nearly a decade of touring and recording. “To be frank, I was a bit disillusioned with music in general,” he tells Apple Music. “There was this exhaustion. Maybe I was just a little bit bored with the state of rock music or indie music—it was a hard world to relate to, and I’m not sure we ever did. But I wanted to figure out a way to reject ideas of whatever was being pushed as culture, and I wanted to do it in a productive way by offering up something better.” That something is *Sympathy for Life*, his Brooklyn outfit’s seventh full-length. In an effort to branch out both musically and socially, Brown became a member of The Loft, New York’s longest-running (and most influential) underground dance party, ground zero for disco in the 1970s. While there is still plenty of rock to be found here (see: the hypnotic crunch of “Homo Sapien”), it’s often braided together with elements of dance music, in the spirit of Talking Heads, Happy Mondays, and Primal Scream. The emphasis was on rhythm, the goal to write songs a DJ could easily unfurl at a party. And to get there, they largely switched up their lyrics-first approach to writing, recording and editing together long stretches of improvisation. “We’ve been together for 10 years now,” Brown says. “One of the biggest influences on the sound of the record is us utilizing that. Our biggest asset and our best instrument is just us, playing together as a band.” Here, Brown guides us through songs from the album. **“Walking at a Downtown Pace”** “Every day in the mix session, we would spend a few hours just on this song, listening to the drums and moving stuff around, finding that sweet spot—what makes you move and what doesn\'t. We really wanted a song that a DJ can play at a party, and that\'s why we really needed to get the kick drum to hit, the snare drum to really be on that right beat. It was important for us to have that crossover feel, between rock and dance. But in trying to find what that would mean for us, it felt like a really important song for the band and for the record.” **“Black Widow Spider”** “A lot of the songs were cultivated from improvisations, and this is one of them. That guitar sound is super unique, and it\'s integral to this sound on this record. We fed Andrew\'s \[Savage\] rhythm guitar—and I think maybe the lead guitar as well—through the MS-20 synthesizer. I had this space station dub set up, where I had a 16-channel mixer, five synthesizers, but then also effects like tape echo and the harmonizer—the one that you would hear on David Bowie\'s *Low*. It\'s this vintage 8-bit digital pitch-shifting thing that I just am obsessed with.” **“Marathon of Anger”** “It\'s about living in quarantine during Black Lives Matter and just all of the things that were happening around that time, but also looking forward to what happens next. It\'s about getting to work to make the change that we need to see collectively in our personal lives and in our community. And right now, this is the marathon of anger, but what happens next? You can\'t just be angry, there has to be something that comes after this.” **“Just Shadows”** “Within the band there\'s been an ongoing conversation about recycling. And I guess this song is sort of summed up by that conversation for me: It just gets really frustrating when you\'re in your kitchen being like, ‘I\'m not really sure if this is recyclable, but I feel like if I don\'t do this right I\'m a bad person.’ And the rules about recycling are honestly so confusing, and they\'re put onto us as individuals, rather than the corporations which are literally making the products. The song lists the ways that we have these false choices about doing the right thing, how we find the things that are good for us, how do we know what\'s good for us or good for the world, and have these choices put in front of us that don\'t always make sense.” **“Plant Life”** “The word that \[producer\] Roddy \[McDonald\] used to describe it was ‘Balearic.’ It hit all these notes, and I had them build this up to be this Mediterranean island vibe, a Grace Jones ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ kind of groove—more of a feeling or a mood. It’s like a sunset or a sunrise, a song that you could play on the beach during that time, but at night or in the morning. That late-’80s rock-meets-dance in England vibe: It was never about hard acid house. It was just about this mellow groove. It helped these guys that were in rock bands understand that transition between what can we do to integrate ourselves into this new rave world, this dance world. ‘Plant Life’ is probably the most pure expression of that on this record.” **“Application/Apparatus”** “The lyrics are sort of about this conflict between a person versus the robot algorithm takeover. I feel like the music really matches that in quality—it’s very electronic, robotic, a really direct expression of the lyrics. That song is sort of this total package, a complete circle of aesthetic and lyrical content and deeper meaning.” **“Homo Sapien”** “This is a song that Andrew brought fully realized. At first, it was the kind of track I was trying to avoid on this record—just more of a rock song. But the more that we worked on it, the more I thought, ‘This is actually cool and it fits in aesthetically.’ It feels like one of our more accomplished high-energy tracks. It\'s not beating you over the head with speed or anything—it’s got a groove to it. But the sound of all the guitars and everything just feels like it actually expresses the energy in an intuitive way that we haven\'t always had. It growls and snarls and just feels very primitive and caveman. But in a way that\'s got swagger to it, which I can really appreciate, because I\'m just getting a little old for that finger-wagging kind of punk.” **“Sympathy for Life”** “I was really obsessed with the intersection between Afrobeat and dub when I was thinking about songs for this record—really into polyrhythm and really wanting to incorporate that. I worked really hard, ended up in some pretty funky zones that were really, really hard to recreate live in the studio.” **“Zoom Out”** “It was really inspired by being at some of these parties that I\'ve been going to—dance parties and disco parties, the experience at The Loft. That song is more about the joy that you can experience through community, what you have when you take materialism out of your relationships.” **“Trullo”** “I think this is maybe my favorite song on the record. It’s another one that was cut up from a long improvisation. It’s a very sample-heavy track. I put in a guitar solo that came off of the song \'Bodies Made Of,’ off \[2014’s\] *Sunbathing Animal*. And there\'s some other hidden samples in there as well that I can\'t even remember. It’s about living inside of a house in the shape of a head, kind of like living in a skull.” **“Pulcinella”** “Pulcinella is this creepy Italian clown, or a masked figure sometimes appearing as a clown. It’s playful, it\'s kind of scary, it\'s sort of like a visual or a metaphorical antagonist for themes that pop up throughout the album. The lyrics I always come back to are where it talks about carrying a chain, because I think that carrying around a relationship\'s worth of experiences or a life\'s worth of experiences can get quite heavy and burdensome when you\'re trying to connect with people. The thing that I love about this song is how naked it feels, especially considering the production on a lot of the other songs. It felt like a sensitive way to close out the album.”

Having originally been born as a solo drum machine project by Bert Hoover, Hooveriii (pronounced "Hoover Three") has now evolved into it's true final form - a six member band adept at creating their own brand of psychedelic space rock. And after almost a decade in, the band is set to release their sophomore album and debut for The Reverberation Appreciation Society, Water For The Frogs. Influenced by Iggy’s The Idiot, Bowie’s Berlin records, and Soft Machine, the LP sees the band creating their own version of prog rock, circa 2021. In 2019, Hooveriii took their live show to Europe for the first time. Bert Hoover shares, “seeing all the old cities and beautiful landscapes while becoming closer as a band had a huge impact on this album. A lot of our favorite music came from the Krautrock scene in Germany from the late 60's-70's, and when we had a day off in Furth, Germany, we spent most of it writing the record,” he continues, “we were able to rehearse in an old German bunker that has been converted to rehearsal space. It definitely had a strange energy that helped give this album light.”

DARK MUSIC FROM A WARM PLACE What happens when a classically-trained violinist explores the more twisted neighbourhoods of alternative pop? The work of Erica Nockalls provides the searingly accurate answer. If her albums Imminent Room and EN2 showcased her baby-sweet but barbed worldview, then new set Dark Music From A Warm Place takes that genre-neutral template and drowns it in honey-flavoured acid. Her songwriting is removed from the pop norm: Emotionally derelict, and melodically unsparing. This album is a tale of release and re-appropriation of oneself, a call of empowerment. Dark Music From a Warm Place was conceived during a sad summer spent in Spain, then latterly mixed and produced in 2021 by Jean-Charles Versari in Paris, France. Gritty drum machines, generous synths, cutting tones mixed with unusual violins and glass-sharp vocals: ‘Pesante’ melodies meet modern anthems. Erica Nockalls’ conservatoire training as a violinist and vocalist are evident, but not defining. She chooses danger and experimentation with her violin, making it a tool of creation, rather than accompaniment. Blunt. Honest. Generous. There’s a lid boiling on her British reserve. “Elegant, experimental and atmospheric. Lynchian soundtrack at times. Excellent weirdy noises, wondrous violin and great production. A cracker LP.” - The Shend www.ericanockalls.com

DERITEND owes its title to a historic industrial area just outside Birmingham town centre first mentioned in 1276, a few miles from where Gary and I grew up. The mysterious iconic name was a bus route terminus and has a strong emotional connection, evoking the nervous excitement of those long rides into town on our way to Barbarellas. But it conveys so much more: Deritend is an album that reflects on the past, speculates on the future, but for the most part is fairly and squarely a comment on the lives we are living now. The ominous pile of rubble featured on the album cover could be a metaphor for a long gone, mythical Deritend, a long lost youth, but also renewal, acknowledging the past, but clearing the way for a brighter (or not so bright) future. On our last visit to Birmingham, Gary and I both saw this huge, monolithic rubble pile on the approach to Deritend and it spoke to us somehow. It's a powerful and intriguing image that does somehow encapsulate the past, present and future. Cult Figures second album DERITEND is released on Gare Du Nord Records. Our 2018 debut, THE 166 PLOUGHS A LONELY FURROW, was comprised of tracks written in our earlier incarnation between 1977 and 1980, and recorded in the 21st century. DERITEND draws a line under the past – all eleven tracks composed and recorded since our 2016 comeback – simultaneously reflecting a maturity gained in 40 years of life experience, whilst still embracing the accessible three P’s of the early days – punk, pop and psychedelia. The album was recorded at London’s Toerag Studios with Liam Watson, and Woodbine Street Studios in Leamington Spa with John Rivers, who subsequently mixed all the tracks from both sessions. The final mixes were completed in less than a fortnight before the first 2020 lockdown.

The solo album from Evil Blizzard's Filthydirty released on vinyl June 2021. This album initially was unused Blizzard songs that weren't really suitable for the band. Some didn't work out at all, others disfigured into some tracks here. Other disasters belched themselves out as the process unfolded. Original recordings range from 2015-20 but the album itself was recorded in the midst of the claustrophobia and paranoia of Spring 2020. Please note all tracks produced, recorded and mixed by Filthydirty, so in places this could be described sonically as 'enthusiastic'. The professional company who mastered this said certain songs were 'as loud as it's possible to be while still sounding like music' which will do for me. So in those bits where you think "Is it supposed to sound like that?" the answer is "Yes." Cover photograph 'Sundown Depot' by Richard Hector Jones, used almost with his permission.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums are typically accompanied by a collective ideological statement of intent from the Montreal instrumental ensemble. And coming in the midst of a pandemic that has greatly magnified the societal inequalities they’ve always railed against, the missive/press release that accompanies *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* practically reads like a ransom note, with calls to “take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise” and “tax the rich until they\'re impoverished,” among others. But where they were once the doomsday prophets of pre-millennium post-rock, the band\'s response to the intensifying turmoil of 21st-century life is to radiate an ever-greater degree of positivity through their music. Godspeed\'s seventh album adheres to a similar structure as their post-reunion releases (with two mammoth, multi-sectional movements each flanked by a shorter piece) while tapping into a similar spirit of hard-fought perseverance. However, *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* is distinguished by its heightened sense of clarity and levity. In contrast to the sustained, swelling drones of 2017’s *Luciferian Towers* and the defiant doom-metal behemoths of 2015’s *Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress*, this set’s opening four-track suite gradually blossoms from a minimalist, militaristic march into a delirious orchestral swirl, before entering an extended comedown jam that suggests ’70s Floyd jamming with Crazy Horse. The equally expansive companion piece (spread over tracks 6 and 7) likewise travels from desolate valleys to staggering peaks and back again, but rallies for a triumphant victory-lap gallop that could very well count as the most elating piece of music this band has ever produced. Even the brief meditative ambient symphony that closes the record is embedded with inspirational energy—it’s called “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN,” so consider *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* a sonic premonition of the better, more humane world that awaits us on the other side.

‘Little Eden’ glows with vintage McCartney-esque couplets before rolling out a chiming signature riff on ‘As I Lay Down To Die’ and adopting Jimi-like phrasing on ‘And Away We Go’. “Harking back to the liberating songcraft of The Beatles, but with a jagged edge.” Classic Rock A psychedelically-hewn panoramic take on brutalism Britain punctuated with pure pop melodies and beautifully-observed English melancholy. This is an album that rekindles your love of music – from the harmonies that are oh-so Teenage Fanclub and Lemonheads, to the grunge and awe of Dinosaur Jr. “Still mixing pop, punk and psych to giddy effect.” The Guardian There’s perspective and retrospective tale-spinning where we wait “for the wonderful world to come” (©‘Start Burning’), an imaginary future soundtracked by the spirit of Arthur Lee, brought into focus with witty wordplay on songs that are littered with spine tingling guitar breaks. Just what you want from “the E17 psych guru.” MOJO A brand new album from national treasures The Bevis Frond.

FASTER AND LOUDER BLOG USA (Lord Rutledge) one of the year's most essential punk rock long players. LOUDER THAN WAR – UK (Ryan Walker) A bestial blitzkrieg of proto-garage sonic-noise hostility i-94 Bar – Australia (Patrick Emery) There’s nothing nice and comforting about the cut, thrust and gut-stabbing fuck you of Blowers. And that’s just why it’s so vital. Beat In My Bones - UK (Olivia Cellamare) It’s rowdy, raw and filthy. Everything a great record should be. Brian Foss, KEXP - USA 'Fuck, right now this is on my short list for best of 2021! ' A rough and raw shot of garage punk from down under, BLOWERS’ self-titled debut album features a three-pronged vocal attack delivering songs themed around giving zero fucks. The album comes out March 1st on 12” limited edition vinyl via Spooky Records (Australia) and Chaputa Records (Portugal). From opener ‘Ripped’ through to tracks like ‘Waste of a Man’, ‘Eat It Up’ and ‘Too Old For This Shit’, it’s 15 tracks full to the brim with expletives, sick humour and fast guitars. Recorded by the band, then dumped onto an 80s Tascam 4-track, the album was mixed and mastered by Mikey Young. From the sick minds of Kit Convict (Kit Convict & Thee Terrible Two/ The Kits/ The Spasms), Andrew Porter (The Bowers/ Cakefight/ Brat Farrar), Shannon Aswell (The Reprobettes/ Juliette Seizure & The Tremor-Dolls) and Pip McMullan (The Exotics/ Wrong Turn). So far, they’ve shared dive bar stages with Sore Points, The Cavemen, Salad Boys, Jackson Reid Briggs & The Heaters and Stiff Richards. If you dig Wipers, The Reatards, Wet Ones and The Spits, then this one’s for you. So damn fast, so damn raw, so damn rude, so damn good.

Nearly 20 years after they first played together as teenagers just outside of London, TV Priest began writing their debut album. “It was probably just a way for us to be with each other again in a space that wasn\'t the pub for someone\'s birthday,” frontman Charlie Drinkwater says of reuniting in their thirties, in 2019. “I think some artists get to that honest place quite young. But I think it took us having some life experience—having personal setbacks, having joy—to get to a place where I feel like we had something to say and something to write about.” Recorded before the global pandemic, *Uppers* is a set of alternately heartbreaking and hilarious post-punk, as Drinkwater and his bandmates—guitarist Alex Sprogis, bassist/keyboardist player Nic Bueth, and drummer Ed Kelland—barrel through the beauty and many indignities of modern adulthood with all the urgency of a much younger band. “It\'s a time capsule for me,” Drinkwater says. “Hopefully it speaks to this moment, and to people who feel potentially the same way as I do. Like this weird totem to a really fucking weird time.” Here, Drinkwater guides us through the album track by track. **The Big Curve** “I think it\'s relatively direct in terms of its intention as a song. It\'s got a groove to it. It was one of the songs that we wrote on the record that was like a bit of a breakthrough song for us in terms of just letting it live and breathe and just kind of be a bit sprawling. It\'s about your place in history, this idea that somehow human endeavor and human work corresponds with the progression of time, which, you can see that that isn\'t necessarily the case. It\'s not always up.” **Press Gang** “My granddad has had a very big presence in my life. He had the fucking maddest life that anyone\'s ever had. He left school at 13, was a dirt-poor working-class South Londoner. He got a job as a messenger boy in Fleet Street, would run between the newspaper offices and the photography agencies. At 18, he became a photographer. He did five tours of Vietnam, covering that. He was in the Six-Day War. He was doing the Angolan Civil War, the Biafran War of independence. He took pictures of The Beatles, Brigitte Bardot. He was maybe naive in a lot of ways about how his work would be used, but he was very honest. He really believed that what he was doing was like holding up a mirror to the world, showing truth to power. He believed in the idea of truth, and over the last couple of years, my belief in that was rocked by a lot of events. But I think more than ever, the truth matters. This is not an easy song, because it has to balance the feelings that I have about what he taught me and what I see.” **Leg Room** “‘Leg Room’ refers to the leg room in a cinema, actually. Where I studied in London, my university, used to be right in the middle of Soho and the West End, which is ‘Theatreland.’ It’s a bit abstract, probably a bit more like a paintbrush in terms of it\'s trying to set the scene and tone more than anything else. I remember Black Francis saying that Pixies lyrics have meaning, but more than anything, they have a visualization. That whenever you hear it on the radio, or you hear it on a record, the thing that jumps up first is the weird visuals that it puts in your head. I think that this song was exercising that as well.” **Journal of a Plague Year** “Alex wrote most of those lyrics. He’d read \[Daniel\] Defoe\'s *A Journal of the Plague Year*, which is a sensory account of the plague in London, talking about how London emptied out. It was like, ‘This would be a fun, interesting exercise, to write a song about what would happen if there was a plague again.’ And then six months later you\'re like, ‘Fuck.’ We did actually have a discussion about whether or not we should put it on the record. I think we sat with it for a minute and were like, ‘No. Maybe it\'s good. Maybe it offers a take on it in a different way, rather than just like, ‘We\'re all in our houses.’” **History Week** “The album is supposed to be listened to as an album—probably a really stupid thing to do, now that you\'re just streaming. There\'s a purpose to the fact that the first three songs are very intense punk songs. There\'s a reason why they come at the start, and then the record starts to open up as it progresses. This is a purposeful intermission.” **Decoration** “That first line is an in-joke. It was from a TV show called *Britain\'s Got Talent*, a misremembered quote from Simon Cowell. One year, the winner was literally a dog that can jump over itself: Pudsey the dog. And there\'s this quote—that I can’t find now—where Simon Cowell goes, ‘I\'ve never seen a dog do what that dog does.’ And it became this running joke, something we’d say anytime someone did something that wasn’t particularly impressive. I’d completely fucked the vocal take in the studio, and I think I said that about myself, and Ed was like, ‘That\'s a great opening line.’” **Slideshow** “This is about our relationship to technology. I think anyone can write songs that are just ‘iPhones are bad.’ But I\'m complicit in it all the time. I fucking doomscroll forever. It’s a bit of an uneasy balance. That song is calling myself out, in a way. It really came alive, I think, in the studio. That was a bit of a breakthrough for us in terms of Alex\'s guitar playing. Alex Sprogis by nature is quite a precise person, like an engineer, but he\'s going against his instincts there to play like that, which I think gives it this element of tension.” **Fathers and Sons** “That was written when I was in a B&Q—which is a huge hardware store—buying some wood to fix a fence. I sat in my car and I was like, ‘This is what I did with my dad on so many afternoons, and now I\'m a dad, doing the same thing.’ It’s about a particularly British male sensibility, the way that men talk to each other. If I meet a guy for the first time, the first thing that they’re going to ask me about is football. I think this song was written about me trying to talk to my son in that way as well.” **the ref** “I think that\'s the sound of a pneumatic drill outside our studio. It\'s also got a bit of the tube in there, some traffic. It’s supposed to be very interruptive. It\'s supposed to take you out of the record and put you in a place. A physical place, rather than a sensory place.” **Powers of Ten** “Before we did this, I was working at a big record label as a designer. And this song is about what corporations do to people, including me. It\'s about the pursuit of something that you never even thought you wanted. I think corporations breed a certain competitiveness, and it bred something in me that was not nice. I think something that I struggled with was I was working ostensibly in a place that was supposed to be creative, and it didn\'t engender any form of creativity, at all. To be creative is not to compete with people. I don\'t find that. I find that my proudest moments of creativity is when I\'ve collaborated with someone, and shared an idea, and a space, and a feeling. Those are the things that made me get out of bed in the morning, and made me excited.” **This Island** “It’s about nationalism, and it\'s about being in a country that you don\'t really recognize anymore. I don\'t think that\'s only about the process of Brexit, or the Brexit decision. I think it\'s about the things that it unleashes. In a lots of ways, England has a fucking superiority complex. The war is constant; you cannot escape it. It’s fucking spitfires over Dover and Churchill and D-Day. I got a fucking email from the butchers on Remembrance Sunday, being like, ‘10% off: Remember our troops.’ What? Fucking celebrate the horror of the Somme with a fucking leg of lamb? I\'m proud to be a British person; I\'m proud of many, many things of my history. I\'m proud of the fact that we have a history of multiculturalism. I\'m proud of the fact that we have a history of many, many different things, but what I am not proud of is this belief that we are somehow better than other people.” **Saintless** “It was a hard song to sing. It\'s about my little boy being born, and about my wife. We had a shocker, and my wife was really, really unwell. I was suddenly left in an operating room with a newborn baby, while she was rushed to emergency surgery. It\'s one of the only times in my life I just didn\'t know what to do. I felt completely helpless and confused and overjoyed—but terrified. Terror, sheer terror. It’s about plans changing, about being hopeful for the future as well as being scared for it, about being fallible. The main line of the song is ‘We\'re no saints, but that\'s okay.’ I probably will let my son down at some point, because I\'m a human being, but I\'ll make it up to him. I’ll always be there.”