Piccadilly Records' Top 100 Albums of 2019

W. H. Lung’s arrival at their debut album has been less conventional than most. A trait shared with the music they make, which weaves between shimmering synth pop and the infectious grooves of 70’s Berlin. The band never had any intention of playing live when forming, aiming instead to be a primarily studio-based project. That approach was challenged when they released their debut 10” ('Inspiration!/Nothing Is') in 2017, which meant that they were quickly in demand. Booking requests started to flood in and W. H. Lung found themselves cutting their teeth on festival stages that summer. Though whilst some new bands may have let that interest change the course of the project, W. H. Lung stayed true to their original reticence and worked mainly as a studio band with their formidable live shows kept sporadic. W. H. Lung have allowed this album to naturally gestate over the course of two years . The result is a remarkably considered debut - the production is crisp and pristine but not over-polished, the synths and electronics radiate and hum with a golden aura and the vocals weave between tender delivery and forceful eruptions. There is a palpable energy to the songs, as experienced in 10 glorious minutes of opening statement 'Simpatico People'. “I think it’s important to erase the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture,” states Joseph E. This colliding of worlds not only exists in the potent mix between whip-smart arrangements, lyrics and seamlessly danceable music but also in the fact that they are named after a cash and carry in Manchester. As Tom P. explains, “I thought it was funny juxtaposing those kind of austere associations with W. H. Auden and other initialed poets, writers, artists, etc. with the fact that it’s really just a Chinese supermarket.”

Vanishing Twin is songwriter, singer and multi-instrumentalist Cathy Lucas, drummer Valentina Magaletti, bassist Susumu Mukai, synth/guitar player Phil MFU and visual artist/film maker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion; and on this album they have made their first artistic statement for the ages. Some of its great power comes from liberation. The album was produced by Lucas in a number of non-standard, non-studio settings. ‘KRK (At Home In Strange Places)’ summons up the spirit of Sun Ra’s Lanquidity and Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio was simply recorded on an iPhone during a live set which crackled with psychic connectivity on the Croatian island of Krk. The magical Morricone-esque lounge of ‘You Are Not an Island’, the blissed-out Jean-Claude Vannier style arrangement of ‘Invisible World’ and burbling sci fi funk ode to a 1972 cult French animation, ‘Plane te Sauvage’, were all recorded in nighttime sessions in an abandoned mill in Sudbury. The only two outsiders to work on the recording were ‘6th member’ and engineer Syd Kemp and trusted friend Malcolm Catto, band leader of the spiritual jazz/future funk outfit The Heliocentrics, who mixed seven of the tracks (with Lucas taking care of the other three). Vanishing Twin formed in 2015 - their first LP, Choose Your Own Adventure, which came out on Soundway in 2016; followed by the darker, more abstract, mostly instrumental Dream By Numbers EP in 2017. The band explored their more experimental tendencies on the Magic And Machines tape released by Blank Editions in 2018, an improvised session recorded in the dead of night, offering a glimpse into their practice of deep listening, near band telepathy, and ritually improvised sound making. These sessions formed the basis of The Age Of Immunology.

Shana Cleveland has been beguiling listeners for years in her role as the superlative frontwoman for elastic surf rockers La Luz. Now Cleveland is evolving her sound on the new solo full-length Night of the Worm Moon, a serene album that flows like a warm current while simultaneously wresting open a portal to another dimension. As much a work of California sci-fi as Octavia Butler’s Parable novels, Night of the Worm Moon incorporates everything from alternate realities to divine celestial bodies. Inspired in part by one of her musical idols, the Afro-futurist visionary Sun Ra (the album’s title is a tip of the hat to his 1970 release Night of the Purple Moon), the record blends pastoral folk with cosmic concerns. Cleveland dreamt up this premise while living in Los Angeles, a city where--as deftly explored on La Luz’s recent Floating Features--reality and fantasy casually co-exist. One particularly evocative scene laid the groundwork for Night of the Worm Moon’s psychedelic undercurrents. As Cleveland tells it, “Shortly after I moved to Los Angeles I went to a hip hotel to watch a poolside screening of a documentary about a local alien-worshiping cult. Out front celebrities were getting out of the backs of cars and rushing past autograph hounds into some roped-off room where a secret dinner was about to commence. In the lobby a woman was being paid to exist inside a glass box. [Then] a car dressed as a spaceship pulled up in front to release 30 white doves into the sky above Sunset Boulevard.” Appropriately enough, Night of the Worm Moon was recorded during a rare cosmic occurrence: 2017’s solar eclipse. “We took a break from recording during [the] totality and looked at the sun's image through a piece of cardboard projecting onto a garbage can,” Cleveland says. “When we came back inside the studio was covered in dozens of tiny crescent suns, refracted from a mirrored disco ball that [engineer Johnny Goss] had hanging in a window.” Abetting Cleveland during the recording process was a familiar gallery of co-conspirators: multi-instrumentalist Will Sprott of Shannon & the Clams, original La Luz bassist Abbey Blackwell, Goss, pedal steel player Olie Eshelman, and Kristian Garrard, who drummed on Cleveland’s previous solo effort (with then-backing band The Sandcastles), 2011’s Oh Man, Cover the Ground. But whereas that album was internal and contemplative, Night of the Worm Moon occupies a different, vibrant kind of headspace. UFO sightings, insect carcasses, and twilight dimensions are all grist for Cleveland’s restless creativity, and they and other inspirations collide beautifully on the album’s 10 kaleidoscopic tracks--a spacebound transmission from America’s weirdo frontier.

Following their hotly tipped 2018 debut album “On” – Altın Gün returns with an exhilarating second album. “Gece” firmly establishes the band as essential interpreters of the Anatolian rock and folk legacy and as a leading voice in the emergent global psych-rock scene. Explosive, funky and transcendent. The world is rarely what it seems. A quick glance doesn’t always reveal the full truth. To find that, you need to burrow deeper. Listen to Altın Gün, for example: they sound utterly Turkish, but only one of the Netherlands based band’s six members was actually born there. And while their new album, Gece, is absolutely electric, filled with funk-like grooves and explosive psychedelic textures, what they play - by their own estimation - is folk music. “It really is,” insists band founder and bass player Jasper Verhulst. “The songs come out of a long tradition. This is music that tries to be a voice for a lot of other people.” While most of the material here has been a familiar part of Turkish life for many years - some of it associated with the late national icon Neşet Ertaş – it’s definitely never been heard like this before. This music is electric Turkish history, shot through with a heady buzz of 21st century intensity. Pumping, flowing, a new and leading voice in the emergent global psych scene. “We do have a weak spot for the music of the late ‘60s and ‘70s,” Verhulst admits. “With all the instruments and effects that arrived then, it was an exciting time. Everything was new, and it still feels fresh. We’re not trying to copy it, but these are the sounds we like and we’re trying to make them our own.” And what they create really is theirs. Altın Gün radically reimagine an entire tradition. The electric saz (a three-string Turkish lute) and voice of Erdinç Ecevit (who has Turkish roots) is urgent and immediately distinctive, while keyboards, guitar, bass, drums, and percussion power the surging rhythms and Merve Daşdemir (born and raised in Istanbul) sings with the mesmerizing power of a young Grace Slick. This isn’t music that seduces the listener: it demands attention. Altın Gün – the name translates as “golden day” - are focused, relentless and absolutely assured in what they do. What is remarkable is the band has only existed for two years and didn’t play in public until November 2017; now they have almost 200 shows under their belt. It all grew from Verhulst’s obsession with Turkish music. He’d been aware of it for some time but a trip to Istanbul while playing in another band gave him the chance to discover so much more. But Verhulst wasn’t content to just listen, he had a vision for what the music could be. And Altın Gün was born. “For me, finding out about this music is crate digging,” he admits. “None of it is widely available in the Netherlands. Of course, since our singers are Turkish, they know many of these pieces. All this is part of the country’s musical past, their heritage, like 'House of The Rising Sun' is in America.” As Verhulst delves deeper and deeper into old Turkish music, he’s constantly seeking out things that grab his ear. “I’m listening for something we can change and make into our own. You have to understand that most of these songs have had hundreds of different interpretations over the years. We need something that will make people stop and listen, as if it’s the first time they’ve heard it.” It’s a testament to Altın Gün’s work and vision that everything on Gece sounds so cohesive. They bring together music from many different Anatolian sources (the only original is the improvised piece “Şoför Bey”) so that it bristles with the power and tightness of a rock band; echoing new textures and radiating a spectrum of vibrant color (ironic, as gece means “night” in Turkish). It’s the sound of a band both committed to its sources and excitedly transforming them. It’s the sound of Altın Gün. Incandescent and sweltering. Creating the band’s sound is very much a collaborative process, Verhulst explains. “Sometimes me or the singer will come in with a demo of our ideas. Sometimes an idea will just come up and we’ll work on it together at rehearsals. However we start, it’s always finished by the whole band. We can feel very quickly if it’s going to work, if this is really our song.” Just how Altın Gün can collectively spark and burn is evident in the YouTube concert video they made for the legendary Seattle radio station KEXP. In just under 20 minutes they set out their irresistible manifesto for an electrified, contemporary Turkish folk rock. It’s utterly compelling. And with around 800,000 views, it has helped make them known around the world. “It certainly got us a lot of attention,” Verhulst agrees. “I think a lot of that interest originally came from Turkey, plenty of people there shared it.” That might be how it began, but it’s not the whole tale. The waves have spread far beyond the Bosphorus. What started out as a deep passion for Turkish folk and psychedelia has taken on a resonance that now travels widely. The band has played all over Europe, has ventured to Turkey and Australia and will soon bring their music to North America for the first time. “Not a lot of other bands are doing what we do,” he says, “playing songs in that style and seeing folk music in the same way.”

It was on a mountainside in Cumbria that the first whispers of Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album poked their buds above the earth. “There’s a strange romanticism to going a little bit crazy and playing the piano to yourself and singing into the night,” she says, recounting the year living solitarily in the Lake District which gave way to Reward. By day, ever the polymath, Le Bon painstakingly learnt to make solid wood tables, stools and chairs from scratch; by night she looked to a second-hand Meers — the first piano she had ever owned —for company, “windows closed to absolutely everyone”, and accidentally poured her heart out. The result is an album every bit as stylistically varied, surrealistically-inclined and tactile as those in the enduring outsider’s back catalogue, but one that is also intensely introspective and profound; her most personal to date. This sense of privacy maintained throughout is helped by the various landscapes within which Reward took shape: Stinson Beach, LA, and Brooklyn via Cardiff and The Lakes. Recording at Panoramic House [Stinson Beach, CA], a residential studio on a mountain overlooking the ocean, afforded Le Bon the ability to preserve the remoteness she had captured during the writing of Reward in Staveley, Lake District. Over this extended period a cast of trusted and loved musicians joined Le Bon, Khouja and fellow co-producer Josiah Steinbrick — Stella Mozgawa (of Warpaint) on drums and percussion; Stephen Black (aka Sweet Baboo) on bass and saxophone and longtime collaborators Huw Evans (aka H.Hawkline) and Josh Klinghoffer on guitars — and were added to the album, “one by one, one on one”. The fact that these collaborators have appeared variously on Le Bon’s previous outputs no doubt goes some way to aid the preservation of a signature sound despite a relatively drastic change in approach. Be it on her more minimalist, acoustic-leaning 2009 debut album Me Oh My or critically acclaimed, liquid-riffed 2013 LP Mug Museum as well as 2016s Crab Day, Cate Le Bon’s solo work — and indeed also her production work, such as that carried out on recent Deerhunter album Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? (4AD, January 2019) — has always resisted pigeonholing, walking the tightrope between krautrock aloofness and heartbreaking tenderness; deadpan served with a twinkle in the eye, a flick of the fringe and a lick of the Telecaster. The multifaceted nature of Le Bon’s art — its ability to take on multiple meanings and hold motivations which are not immediately obvious — is evident right down to the album’s very name. “People hear the word ‘reward’ and they think that it’s a positive word” says Le Bon, “and to me it’s quite a sinister word in that it depends on the relationship between the giver and the receiver. I feel like it’s really indicative of the times we’re living in where words are used as slogans, and everything is slowly losing its meaning.” The record, then, signals a scrambling to hold onto meaning; it is a warning against lazy comparisons and face values. It is a sentiment nicely summed up by the furniture-making musician as she advises: “Always keep your hand behind the chisel.”

The artwork for the vinyl edition of Stars Are the Light comes in four different color schemes, which will be randomly selected for each order. The CD has another color scheme altogether. Catch ’em all! Stars Are the Light, the luminous seventh album by the American psych explorers Moon Duo, marks a progression into significantly new territory. From a preoccupation with the transcendental and occult that informed Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada’s guitar-driven psych rock, and reached its apotheosis in the acclaimed Occult Architecture diptych, Stars Are the Light sees the band synthesize the abstract and metaphysical with the embodied and terrestrial.  Says Yamada: “We have changed, the nature of our collaboration has changed, the world has changed, and we wanted the new music to reflect that.” Branching out from Occult Architecture Vol. 2, the album has a sonic physicality that is at once propulsive and undulating; it puts dance at the heart of an expansive nexus that connects the body to the stars. These are songs about embodied human experience — love, change, misunderstanding, internal struggle, joy, misery, alienation, discord, harmony, celebration — rendered as a kind of dance of the self, both in relation to other selves and to the eternal dance of the cosmos. Taking disco as its groove-oriented departure point, Stars Are the Light shimmers with elements of ’70s funk and ’90s rave. Johnson’s signature guitar sound is at its most languid and refined, while Yamada’s synths and oneiric vocals are foregrounded to create a spacious percussiveness that invites the body to move with its mesmeric rhythms. With Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Spectrum) at the mixing desk in Portugal’s Serra de Sintra, (known to the Romans as “The Mountains of the Moon”) the area’s lush landscape and powerful lunar energies exerted a strong influence on the vibe and sonic texture of the album. On embracing disco as an inspiration, Yamada says, “It’s something we hadn’t referenced in our music before, but its core concepts really align with what we were circling around as we made the album. Disco is dance music, first and foremost, and we were digging our way into the idea of this endless dance of bodies in nature. We were also very inspired by the space and community of a disco – a space of free self-expression through dance, fashion, and mode of being; where everyone was welcome, diversity was celebrated, and identity could be fluid; where the life force that animates each of us differently could flower.”

PORTICO QUARTET Memory Streams Gondwana Records GONDCD034 / GONDLP034 – CD//LP//DL – released 04.10.19 “Portico Quartet stake claims to territory occupied by Radiohead, Cinematic Orchestra and Efterklang”. The Guardian ***** Portico Quartet return with Memory Streams, their fifth studio album and one that continues the journey that first started with 2008’s Mercury nominated debut Knee Deep in the North Sea. It’s a creative path that has seen the band embrace new technology and explore ambient and electronic influences alongside minimalism, jazz and beyond. It is a process that has encouraged change. Each album has seen the band expand its palate or explore new trajectories. From the gentle charm of their breakthrough’s inimitable mix of jazz, world and minimalist influences, to the tight-knit brilliance of Isla, the electronic infused eponymous Portico Quartet to 2016’s return Art in the Age of Automation (the band’s most electronic statement to date) they have never been a band to look backwards. Each record has been its own world, its own statement and offered its own meaning. It’s the mark of a band that has always both stood apart from any scene and been prepared to challenge its self and find new things to say and to push the limits of what they could do. It is an approach that has encouraged the band to plough their own furrow. Drummer Duncan Bellamy notes that “For better or worse I think we have always been quite an isolated band. Perhaps that comes from never feeling like we really belonged to or fit in to a scene when we first started making music” While for saxophonist Jack Wyllie “ I feel more connected to other musicians these days and those relationships influence the sound we have in some way. But I wouldn’t say we feel a part of scene, it still feels quite out on its own, which is cool, because it helps the music feel unique”.
 The band’s new album, Memory Streams is part of the same continuum and yet, as the name hints, there is a sense here of a remembering, shards of past influences, hints of ideas re-forged. For Wyllie, Memory Streams “feels in some ways about the identity of the band, about the records we’ve made before, and the memory of them” whereas for Bellamy it suggests “a torrent of imagery, accessing and reliving archived memories, perhaps not even your own”. Sonically, the album embraces the classic Portico Quartet sound pallet of drums, saxophone, bass and Hang-Drums, but nonetheless the sound has modulated, become more modern, whilst still channelling the beauty and mystery which has always marked the very best of Portico Quartet’s music. It’s the sound of a band at ease with its self who after a dozen years of recording and playing together are able to simultaneously explore and embrace their own identity. Memory Streams also marks a return to a more predominantly band orientated sound than AITAOA and its partner release, the mini-album Untitled. Bellamy says “we wanted to create something that had texture, fibre and space to it. Something that felt vivid, real and alive”. During recording the band re-amped a lot of the sounds on the record, a process which lends a sense of depth and spaciousness to the sound. Wyllie adds, “We tried to reduce the pallet to what really identified the band and also as a way to help us write - it’s not easy if you have unlimited possibilities. But it was also was an interesting challenge as it was about writing something new, that felt like a development, whilst also drawing on the past”. Memory Streams opens with With, Beside, Against which has an expansive, quietly unfolding quality that makes it the perfect album opener and was also one of the first tracks they wrote for the album. Signals is a creeping, mysterious track that captures the spirit of the record. It’s hypnotic, rolling quality builds throughout with shades of a classic Portico Quartet tune but with a ‘tougher’ edge. The outstanding Gradient is a more produced piece. Mixing lo-fi and beautifully recorded acoustic parts together it grows from a simple, repeated Hang-Drum motif, outwards into a searching hypnotic crescendo. Ways of Seeing is a synthesis of minimalism and more dancefloor-oriented rhythms. A lone pulse from the drum machine cuts through a haze of chiming, swirling Hang-Drums and pads built from shards of looped saxophone. Memory Palace is a distant echo of the motif from Gradient, and is a bare, slow piano piece shrouded in a mist of saxophone noise. The punchy Offset is all about motion and tension and Bellamy’s drums pound in response. Dissident Gardens is an intricate, hypnotic track in 3 parts. Almost prog like in rhythm but has a strong minimalist element to it with Farfisa organs as the repetitive top lines. Double Helix begins with string swells, it stops and jolts as if someone is switching TV channels before locking into a deep groove. The beautifully sparse, emotional heft of Immediately Visible sits in a powerful lineage of Portico Quartet tracks such as Line, Rubidium and Beyond Dialogue. It was largely improvised in the studio and offers the perfect ending point for the album with its sense of journey and deep well of feeling. An album that locates their music in an age where we have unfettered access to a vast and ever expanding archive of imagery and ideas, Memory Streams both embraces and builds on Portico Quartet’s own unique music and legacy and locates their music firmly in the present. Live Dates: 15 Sept Eilan festival, Terschelling NL 23 Oct La Gaite Lyrique, Paris FR 24 Oct Le Brice Glasse, Annercy FR 02 Nov Barbican Centre, London UK 13 Nov Super Sonic Jazz, Amsterdam NL 21 Nov Le Roma, Antwerp, BE 27 Nov Heimathafen, Berlin GE 
 www.porticoquartet.com www.gondwanarecords.com All prices shown are “NET of VAT” (Value Added Tax). VAT will be calculated and added at the checkout. You will be charged the appropriate rate which will vary depending on the country. This release was uploaded at 24 bit / 48 kHz and available in FLAC, WAV, AIFF or MP3 and available in FLAC, WAV, AIFF or MP3.

Serfs Up! is a lush and masterful work, lascivious and personal - a triumphant return.

The Cinematic Orchestra are back with a definitive new album that explores a timeless question of vital importance in 2019 - what to believe? Founding member Jason Swinscoe and longtime partner Dominic Smith have enlisted album contributions from collaborators old and new: Moses Sumney, Roots Manuva, Heidi Vogel, Grey Reverend (vocalist on Bonobo’s 'First Fires’), Dorian Concept and Tawiah (Mark Ronson, Kindness), Miguel Atwood-Ferguson (Flying Lotus, Anderson Paak, Thundercat, Hiatus Kaiyote) features on strings and photographer and visual artist Brian “B+” Cross collaborated with Swinscoe and Smith on the album’s concept. The record was mixed by multiple Grammy winner Tom Elmhirst (David Bowie, Frank Ocean, Adele) in Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Electric Lady studios. The album artwork comes courtesy of The Designers Republic™ (Aphex Twin). The album announce is marked by the general release of new single ‘A Caged Bird/Imitations of Life’ featuring Roots Manuva. The track, revealed via an innovative website only accessible on offline devices - a paradox illuminating the album’s core question of what to believe, was available initially on 12" in independent record stores and sold out in a matter of hours. The artists first collaborated in 2002 on fan favourite ‘All Things to All Men’, 17 years later the partnership has lost none of its urgency and searing insight as Roots Manuva laments how our “situation is strange to us, stranger things are claiming us” over a pounding, hypnotic rhythm section that concedes to the choruses’ soaring strings. In 2019 it is easy to see the bands influence, jazz is all around us, London and LA have recently produced scene’s more prolific than anyone expected; Kamasi Washington has been nominated for both Grammy and Brit Awards, Sons Of Kemet a Mercury Prize, BADBADNOTGOOD provide jazz soundtracks to high fashion shows and Kendrick Lamar has put the jazz palette at the top of the charts. When The Cinematic Orchestra released their critically acclaimed debut album “Motion” it helped pave the way for this moment, incorporating as it did an interpretation that had been lacking in the oeuvre and encouraging a new generation of musicians to break rules. “To Believe” doesn’t shy away from this ethos - its articulation of the band’s unique sonic language, encompassing not only jazz but the sort of transcendental orchestration combined with the elegant electronics of artists like Ólafur Arnalds and Floating Points, artists they have helped forge a path for, has never been more cohesive and compelling. Since “Motion”, The Cinematic Orchestra have sold hundreds of thousands of albums, generated almost half a billion streams and enjoyed critical support from the likes of Pitchfork (8.6 for second album “Every Day” which featured two collaborations with legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago singer Fontella Bass), The Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, Resident Advisor, Fader, Mixmag, NME, Crack (whose Simple Things festival the band headlined in 2016), Rolling Stone, Gilles Peterson, Benji B, Jason Bentley, Zane Lowe, Annie Mac, Lauren Laverne, KCRW and Mary Anne Hobbs. ‘To Build A Home’ has been synced to dozens of films and TV shows including the Orange Is The New Black finale and This Is Us, adverts include Burberry, Armani, Nike and Apple. The ‘To Build a Home’ short film was directed by Andrew Griffin and stars Peter Mullan (Trainspotting, Harry Potter). The band have also been touring, consistently performing to larger and larger audiences and selling out the likes of London's Royal Albert Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Rome’s Auditorium Park Della and the Sydney Opera House. Coachella, Glastonbury, Fuji Rock, Montreux and Sonar have all played host to the band’s much loved live performances. Beyond the obvious they have also appeared at the Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Awards for Stanley Kubrick and New York’s Summerstage with the legendary Majavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin, they curated a series of events at London’s prestigious Barbican Centre featuring commissions from the prodigiously talented Austin Peralta (RIP) and seen the likes of Dorian Concept, Thundercat, Moses Sumney and Gilles Peterson support them on stage over the years. They scored Disney’s feature length nature documentary “The Crimson Wing” including the track ‘Arrival of the Birds’ which featured in the closing scene of the Oscar Winning Stephen Hawking biopic "The Theory of Everything". They also released a Late Night Tales compilation featuring music from Flying Lotus, Burial and Björk. It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 years since The Cinematic Orchestra released their last studio album, “Ma Fleur” in 2007. Did you achieve what you hoped to in the time since? 12 years from now will be 2031. What will you do before then? We are powerless to answer of course, mere passengers in our own existence, improvising as events deliver themselves into our lives, struggling with the question - what to believe? Births, deaths, success, failure. Money, drugs, temptation, rejection. Trump, Brexit, fear, hope. Art, relevance, pressure, belief. It’s this that accounts for the past 12 years for The Cinematic Orchestra, it’s this that characterises the process of recording the new album and it’s this that has been distilled into a work that is not only their best and most definitive to date but by asking these questions it’s also that which best reflects the great beauty in life.

NEW: AWVFTS X DAVY EVANS: LIMITED-EDITION PRINTS: awvfts.com/shop/ Purveyors of contemporary ambient and electronic inspired music, A Winged Victory for the Sullen make a bold return on new album “The Undivided Five”. The pair, made up of Dustin O’Halloran and Adam Wiltzie, have created iconic film scores and forward-thinking ambient groups, releasing a series of game-changing records for Erased Tapes and Kranky. On “The Undivided Five” they rekindle their unique partnership for only their second piece of original music outside of film, TV and stage commissions, creating an album that channels ritual, higher powers and unspoken creative energies. Their fifth release (following their debut album, two scores and an EP), they embraced the serendipitous role of the number five, inspired by artist Hilma af Klint and the recurrence of the perfect fifth chord. This album sees them create bold new work built on their foundations in ambient and neoclassical. Since their 2011 self-titled debut, the duo have emerged as part of a much-lauded scene alongside peers like Max Richter, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Tim Hecker and Fennesz. Their 2014 album “Atomos” was the product of a commission to score a new performance by Royal Ballet choreographer Wayne McGregor, while 2016’s “Iris” was the score for director Jalil Lespert’s thriller, “In the Shadow of Iris”. They count the likes of Jon Hopkins among their fans, who included ‘Requiem For The Static King Part One’ on his 2015 Late Night Tales compilation. They composed the score for Invisible Cities, a specially-created performance to herald 2019’s Manchester International Festival, and have played some of the world’s most celebrated venues, including a sold out Boiler Room performance at London’s Barbican, and a 2015 BBC Proms show curated by Mary Anne Hobbs at the Royal Albert Hall. They were first introduced by mutual friend Francesco Donadello in 2007, a close collaborator who’s gone on to mix all of the AWVFTS records. O’Halloran launched his reputation with two acclaimed solo piano albums, attracting the attention of director Sofia Coppola, who asked him to score her 2006 film Marie Antoinette, and he has since won an Emmy for his 2015 theme song for Jill Soloway’s Transparent series, and been nominated for an Oscar and Golden Globe for his 2017 score with Hauschka for Garth Davis’ Lion. Wiltzie, meanwhile, founder of iconic drone outfit Stars of the Lid, has scored Hollywood films including Kevin MacDonald’s “Whitney”, Jake Scott’s “American Woman” and collaborated with Jóhann Jóhannsson for 2014’s The Theory of Everything. This album sees them pay greater heed to the small details in their sound than previously, something they say has been encouraged by the move to a new label. It’s been their first opportunity since their debut to create something that’s solely guided by their ideas, and it represented an opportunity to call back to that first outing while also building on the various ways in which they’ve grown. “We understand that times have changed,” they say. “We have evolved, but we also didn’t want to forget the beginning.” They channel influences such as Debussy, nodded to in the opening track, whose big chords and complicated arrangements inform a lot of their approach – parts that sound simple but require great skill to execute. Likewise, the artist Hilma af Klint – one of the first abstract Western artists – informed their ideas about drawing on spiritual influences to shape their work. “It’s like an invisible hand guiding things,” they say. The start of recording sessions for the album were marred by the death of one of their closest friends. Within weeks after the funeral O’Halloran found out that he would be expecting his first child, and it was soon after that a visit to see the art of af Klint brought home a profound realisation of life, death, the afterlife, and the spaces in between. She belonged to a group called "The Five", a circle of five women with a shared belief in the importance of trying to make contact with spirits, often by way of séances. This chimed with the duo’s unspoken approach to collaboration, and nudged them to return to their writing process centered around the harmonic perfect fifth; the five senses, the divine interval – The Undivided Five. The album was also shaped by the breadth of locations in which it was created, helping to shape its nuanced sonics. In addition to O’Halloran and Wiltzie’s respective Berlin and Brussels studios, the record took shape across six different sites. They recorded orchestral samples in Budapest’s Magyar Rádió Studio 22, re-recorded album parts in Brussels’ Eglise Du Beguinage’s unique, reverb-heavy surrounds (where Wiltzie has performed with Stars of the Lid and, in 2018, organised a tribute concert for Jóhann Jóhannsson), experimented with overdubs in Ben Frost’s Reykjavik studio, and recorded grand piano parts in a remote woodland studio in northern Italy. The duo pay close attention to the micro-level of sound, and each of these places was chosen for the qualities which could enrich the finished product. And it’s in Francesco Donadello’s studio in Berlin, where all of the previous AWVFTS material has been mixed, that the album was run through the studio’s analog board, binding the record’s different parts together. It was their connection to Jóhannsson which partly shaped the direction of their new album. They were asked to create a remix for him, which he heard before his death in 2018, where they unlocked a new process in terms of how they work. They recomposed the strings, using modular synthesis, old synths and string and piano arrangements, a method they applied to album opener ‘Our Lord Debussy’. “It’s about going into the DNA of music and taking different strands,” they say. The album is their debut for Ninja Tune, and comes as change is underway for O’Halloran, moving from Berlin – hence the title of ‘Keep It Dark, Deutschland’ – after a decade in the German capital. He’s headed to Iceland, the country where the pair shot their latest press photos and which is an important locale for both of them. The wide-spanning connections which have shaped the record are testament to their deep roots as artists. This album’s powerful energy is driven by the deep-rooted bond between them.

The Atlanta band’s eighth full-length finds iconoclastic frontman Bradford Cox and co. shrinking their typically ambient-focused sound, with relatively compact guitar-pop gems alongside haunting, weightless-sounding instrumentals. Featuring contributions from Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley of garage-popsters White Fence, *Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?* diverges from the deeply personal themes of previous Deerhunter albums, zeroing in on topics ranging from James Dean (“Plains”) to the tragic murder of British politician Jo Cox (“No One’s Sleeping”)—but the spectral vocals and penchant for left-field sounds are well accounted for, as the album represents the latest strange chapter in one of modern indie rock’s most consistently surprising acts.

On her fifth proper full-length album, Sharon Van Etten pushes beyond vocals-and-guitar indie rock and dives headlong into spooky maximalism. With production help from John Congleton (St. Vincent), she layers haunting drones with heavy, percussive textures, giving songs like “Comeback Kid” and “Seventeen” explosive urgency. Drawing from Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams, and fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, *Remind Me Tomorrow* is full of electrifying anthems, with Van Etten voicing confessions of reckless, lost, and sentimental characters. The album challenges the popular image of Van Etten as *just* a singer-songwriter and illuminates her significant talent as composer and producer, as an artist making records that feel like a world of their own.

“There was no road map for this whatsoever,” Karen O told Beats 1 about her far-out collaboration with Brian Burton, the Grammy-winning producer known as Danger Mouse (Beck, Gorillaz, Broken Bells). Such stylistic freedom may have felt new for the singer, who has spent the past two decades fronting the New York rock trio the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But after concluding her label contract and, in 2015, giving birth to her first child, she suddenly faced a blank canvas—a fresh start that pushed her in a new direction: “Brian and I realized that we had a similar love for \'90s R&B dance music.” Colorful, funky, and experimental, *Lux Prima* is a vision quest of distorted synths and lo-fi atmospheres littered with left turns: the spoken-word mutterings on “Drown,” the combative chants and howls on “Woman,” the disco-fied seduction of “Leopard’s Tongue.” On the gauzy, groovy “Turn the Light,” she mixes Donna Summer escapism with off-kilter soul. “Starry, starry night/This is how I want to live,” she sings in a weightless whisper. “Gonna lay me down in love/I got so much more to give.” “We were making an album we were trying to listen to as opposed to making an album that we wanted to play,” Burton said. “So that\'s kind of how we made the record.”

Making a debut album was a bruising experience for Dublin post-punk quintet The Murder Capital. “I didn’t know you could experience such a range of emotions in a day, every day,” singer James McGovern tells Apple Music. “I could feel utter despair, thinking that it was just not going to happen, it’s completely run ruin and it’s gone. Then, 20 minutes later, it’s genius and some new thing comes in and it’s just an overwhelming experience.” Recorded in London with storied producer Flood, *When I Have Fears* is as stirring to listen to as it was to make. Twisting through emotions that run from throbbing-temple rage to tender reflection, it’s an absorbing account of, among other things, isolation, grief, and a fading sense of community. Here, in a track-by-track guide, McGovern recalls the sleepy boat trips, stunned silences, and angry farmers that helped create the album. **“For Everything”** “This ended up being the opener because it feels very cinematic and we are all cinephiles. Also, the opening lyric seems, for me, like the right initial imprint on the floor. I wanted to go away on my own, so I looked for the cheapest flight I could find and went to Oslo—without looking at the price of stuff in Oslo. So I got this hostel for five nights and ate very rarely. I went around writing. I deleted everything off my phone and left. I left the world for five days, which was unbelievable. I went on a boat trip with some fjords and wrote it on that—there are a lot of little references to things I saw. I wrote a quick poem and then fell asleep for the entire boat trip that I paid 40 quid on.” **“More Is Less”** “In that incubation period in the very beginning \[of the band\], everything was just getting thrown in so quickly. If we played two shows a month, there might have been three or four new tracks in each show. I think ‘More Is Less’ was the first time we were like, ‘Oh, we’ll keep this.’ It sounds like it was written in a time of urgency, like I was fed up with something. I think your environment, politically and socially, naturally bleeds into you. It affects your mood and your view of yourself and the world. Even though it wasn’t that long ago, I feel like it was really naive at the time—but in a beautiful way.” **“Green & Blue”** “We were going through a pretty heavy drought in the writing room. I saw an article about \[American photographer\] Francesca Woodman and showed it to the boys. Everyone was hit in the chest by it, maybe even moist at the eye. There was something so alive about the way she depicted isolation. And something going through the record is this idea of isolation within a community, or the absence of fear giving love and the absence of love giving fear. We watched her documentary and the next day ‘Green & Blue’ just fell out.” **“Slowdance I”** “We got this cheap Airbnb in Mayo to finish writing. We actually had to move because a farmer threatened to shoot us for the noise. But in that first house, we wrote ‘Slowdance I,’ ‘Slowdance II,’ ‘Don’t Cling to Life,’ and something else. We were going in to record on March 2 and we went into that house on January 2, so that’s how up against the ropes we were. ‘Slowdance I’ came together over that bassline. We were fighting against keeping it at that tempo, going, ‘Don’t speed up, don\'t speed up.’ It was like pulling a rope at a mooring—it’s not giving way. We thought, ‘Maybe this is the way it should stay.’” **“Slowdance II”** “Part II was being written as a different idea. I named it that day, and then it very much became its own thing. Giving it that name became a visualization thing for us, imagining people moving to this track, that flow of the body. We love the idea of having something that just flows into the next thing. It just became this lotus flower or this opus. Lyrically, it became about disassociation somehow.” **“On Twisted Ground”** “My best friend took his own life and I couldn’t write about it for ages. When you’re writing about something so overtly personal, you can’t let anything go. It just has to be perfect. It was one of the hardest nuts to crack in the studio. Eventually, Cathal, our guitarist, just said, ‘Fuck everything: James and Gabriel \[bassist\] go in that room and play it alone.’ Immediately after we played it back, there was this crazy five minutes of silence. It was just so intense, like it was vibrating through you. Flood said he had never experienced anything like it in the studio before. Then we had this chat about how personal grief feels, and how hard done by you feel by it because your love for that person and their love for you is specific to you. No one else had that. It’s not a thing that gets better or worse or this bullshit of ‘it gets easier after time.’ You’re just like, ’I’m trying to fill my space with more positive things around that hole that will be there forever.’” **“Feeling Fades”** “We played the Sound House in Dublin. I came off the stage, went for a cigarette in the smoking area, and just started writing this poem to occupy the mind, because the feeling you get after getting offstage is weird. That’s reflected somewhat in the lyrics. It was also wondering if our generation is being robbed of a sense of community by whatever this natural evolution of technology and society is. I don’t want to be stuck in the past, but it feels like that sense of togetherness, that knocking over to a friend’s house, you have to *talk about* it now for it to exist. Humans still love each other just as much and are trying to understand each other better than ever, but something about the disassociative nature of technology is sort of harrowing. I just wanna hang out with people, you know?” **“Don’t Cling to Life”** “Gabriel’s mum became severely unwell, and she actually passed away within the first two weeks of recording. While this was going on, we discussed that idea of songs like ‘Perfect Day’ or ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart,’ where it sounds happy but it’s completely not. Gabriel came into the house \[in Mayo\] and he was like, ‘Let’s just write something we can dance to.’ It was quite a tough nut to crack because it was veering more to the pop side of things than to anything we had written before. I like the possibility it gives you for juxtaposition: It doesn’t have to be really dark, it can be really hopeful as well—it just depends which way you play the words in your mind. You can go to it for anything.” **“How the Streets Adore Me Now”** “That was one that wasn’t written \[before going into the studio\]. Cathal had this droning, repeated piano idea. He was playing it on an old upright, and I remember just flicking through my journal and finding this poem. I sat in next to him and we figured it out and had it recorded within an hour. When we listened back, we were all like, ‘Holy fucking shit.’ Flood was like, ‘You’re not going to touch that.’ I think it is my favorite song.” **“Love, Love, Love”** “We decided, pretty quickly, that this was going to close the record. It was very important for us to have that. It was imperative that there was a narrative, there was a feeling of where do we bring you now and where do we go next and how are you left and are you being challenged? We look to people like Alexander McQueen, who said, ‘If you aren\'t affected by my show, then I haven\'t done my job.’ Sometimes music or art or theater should be making you uncomfortable. It should be confronting you with something, then almost immediately comforting you and all those things. ‘Love, Love, Love,’ I find, does that. It’s also satisfying to finish an album saying, ‘Goodbye, goodbye.’”

In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.

In the middle of writing his sixth album *Flamagra*, Steven Ellison—the experimental electronic producer known as Flying Lotus—took up piano lessons. “It’s never too late!” the 35-year-old tells Apple Music. “It\'s always nice to have someone checking your technique and calling you on your bullshit.” For the past decade, Ellison’s primary tool has been his laptop, but for this album, he committed to learning each instrument. “It actually made me faster,” says the artist, who is a product of LA’s beat scene and the grandnephew of John and Alice Coltrane. “Suddenly, I could hear every part.” Inspired by the destructive wildfires that swept California\'s coastline and the deadly 2016 Ghost Ship fire, which broke out at a warehouse in Oakland, *Flamagra*—a jazzy, psychedelic concept album that spans 27 tracks—imagines a world in which Los Angeles was lit by an eternal flame. “One that was contained, and good,” he says. “How would we *use* it?\'\" To explore that heady framework, he tapped some of pop culture\'s most out-of-the-box thinkers, including George Clinton, David Lynch, Anderson .Paak, and Solange—all visionary artists with specific points of view who, Ellison knows, rarely do guest features. \"The fact is, most of these artists are my friends,\" he says. \"I like to do things organically. That\'s the only way it feels right.\" Read on for the story behind each collaboration. **Anderson .Paak, \"More\"** \"I first met Andy a long time ago. He\'s a drummer and grew up around Thundercat and Ronald Bruner Jr., two amazing musicians Andy was probably inspired by. So I chased him down and we recorded the demo to \'More.\' It was dope, but it was never done. There were things both of us wanted to change. For years I\'d run into him at parties where he\'d be like, \'What\'s up with the song, man? Is it done yet? Why ain\'t it done yet?\' It became this running joke with his big ol\' toothy smile. Then, finally, we got it done. And now we don\'t have nothin\' to talk about.\" **George Clinton, \"Burning Down the House\"** \"I made this beat while I was in a big Parliament phase. One day, George came through and I threw it on. We sat next to each other working on it—the lyrics, the arrangements. And even though he\'s so brilliant, I was able to help fill in little gaps that made it work with the album\'s concept, so it was truly collaborative. It also gave me more confidence writing lyrics, which isn\'t something I normally do that often.\" **Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon, \"Spontaneous\"** \"I\'d been trying to work with Little Dragon for forever. We\'ve always been playing similar shows, passing each other at festivals, being like, \'We gotta do something! We gotta do something!\' Finally I was like, \'I\'ma reach out and get this poppin\'.\' The song was actually one of the last to get added onto the album.\" **Tierra Whack, \"Yellow Belly\"** \"Honestly, I was just a fan of hers from SoundCloud. Then, one day, Lil Dicky came over to play some music and brought her along. He didn\'t really give her the proper introduction. He was just like, \'This is my friend Tierra, she makes music.\' She didn\'t say much, but she was cool and we were vibing out. A couple hours later, Dicky was like, \'Okay, wanna listen to some of this Tierra Whack music?\' I was like, \'Wait a second, you mean, you\'re the—oh my god! I know all your songs. I mean, you\'ve only got two of them, but I know \'em both!\' I super-fanned out.\" **Denzel Curry, \"Black Balloons\"** \"The thing I love about Denzel is that he\'s got so much to prove. He\'s got a fiery spirit. He wants to show the world that he\'s the greatest rapper right now. I love that. But the difference is that he actually comes back better every time I hear him. He\'s putting in the work, not just talking shit. He cares about the craft and is such a thoughtful human. So there\'s an interesting duality there. He\'s got the turn-up spirit, but he\'s very conscious and very smart.\" **David Lynch, \"Fire Is Coming\"** \"This album has a middle point—like a chapter break moment—and David Lynch couldn\'t have been more perfect to introduce it. You know, initially I thought it should be a sound design thing, something weird and narrative and unexpected. I wasn\'t thinking about chopping David Lynch on the beat. But when I sent them a version that was basically atonal jazz—you know, weird sounds—they hit me back like, \'Hey, so we think this would be so cool if it had that Flying Lotus beat!\' I was like, \'Oh, all right, okay, I got you.\'\" **Shabazz Palaces, \"Actually Virtual\"** \"This one is special to me. He came out to my house, stayed in my guest room, and we worked on songs for three days straight. And the truth is, we made so much stuff that we forgot about this track. When I found it later, randomly, I was like, \'What the fuck is this? It needs a little TLC, but man, it could really be something.\' After I spent some time on it and sent it back over to him, he just goes, \'That\'s hardbody.\' Such an East Coast line.\" **Thundercat, \"The Climb\"** \"The thing is, Thundercat is on every track. He\'s pretty much playing on 90 percent of the album. But this is the only one he\'s singing on. We started this song the way we start everything: frustrated and depressed about the world, knowing we want to make something that reminds people that most of the chaos out there is just noise. Be above all that shit. Be above the bullshit.\" **Toro y Moi, \"9 Carrots\"** \"Toro is the person I always wind up in vans with at festivals. Somehow, I always wind up in the van with Toro. We play a lot of the same shows, we get picked up from the same hotels, and he\'s just always in the van, or on the plane, things like that. Over time, I guess I started to feel a kindred spirit thing, even though he\'s someone I don\'t know too well. But finally we were like, \'We gotta make something happen.\'\" **Solange, \"Land of Honey\"** \"I\'d been trying to make this song happen for a long time. We initially started it for a documentary film that didn\'t pan out. But I really loved the song and always thought it was special, so I kept on it. I kept working on it, kept to trying to figure out how to tie it into the universe that I was building. Eventually, we recorded it here at the house and just felt really organic, really natural. She\'s someone I\'d definitely like to keep working with.\" **Honorable Mention: Mac Miller** \"A couple songs on the album, like \'Find Your Own Way Home\' and \'Thank U Malcolm,\' were inspired by Mac. \'Thank U Malcolm\' is special to me because it\'s my way of thanking him for all the inspiration he left behind in his passing, and for all the fire he inspired in me, Thundercat, and all of our friends. He made us want to be better, to let go of the bullshit. And now, you know, none of us are out here experimenting with drugs or anything. That\'s largely because of him. After he left us, everyone was like, \'You know what? Fuck all that shit.\' In a way, in his passing, he\'s got friends of mine clean. He\'ll always mean a lot to me.\"

Nérija is Nubya Garcia (tenor saxophone), Sheila Maurice-Grey (trumpet), Cassie Kinoshi (alto saxophone), Rosie Turton (trombone), Shirley Tetteh (guitar), Lizy Exell (drums) and Rio Kai (bass). Blume is a truly breath-taking collection of compositions that perfectly encapsulates everything Nérija. Vibrant, engaging, infectious and truly current, Blume takes you on a sprawling wonderful journey, arriving at what is a majestic body of work of their personal and collective experiences and inspirations over the last half decade or so.

Ezra Collective ‘You Can’t Steal My Joy’ (Enter The Jungle) You Can’t Steal My Joy is an exuberant, defiant debut album that’s destined to cement Ezra Collective’s status as one of the UK’s most exciting groups. The record features friends and fans, Loyle Carner, KOKOROKO and Jorja Smith, and is preceded by lead single and full-blown banger, Quest For Coin. Ezra Collective are five young Londoners; bandleader Femi Koleoso (drums), his brother TJ Koleoso (bass), Joe Armon-Jones (keys), Dylan Jones (trumpet), and James Mollison (saxophone). The band’s incredible musicianship and spirited, inclusive approach to music - which draws on afrobeat, Latin, hip-hop, grime and more - has seen them break out beyond the thriving UK jazz scene. Ezra Collective’s 2017 EP, Juan Pablo: The Philosopher, won ‘Best Jazz Album’ at Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide Awards and the band picked up ‘Best UK Jazz Act’ and ‘Live Experience Of The Year’ at the 2018 Jazz FM Awards. They played Quincy Jones’ birthday party and recently completed a mosh-pit-filled and completely sold out UK tour before headlining Winter JazzFest in New York. Ezra Collective’s forthcoming gigs include All Point East, Lamar Tree and Green Man festivals and full headline tour of the UK culminating at The Roundhouse in London for November 2019. "Growing up as young people in London has challenges but, rather than focus on all the negativity surrounding us, we’ve decided to focus on the positives”, explains Femi. “You can steal a lot of things from us - our ability to travel freely, our access to education, our right to a level playing field, even our ability to live life at its full potential - but as long as we don’t forget our core truth, You Can’t Steal Our Joy.” Ezra Collective bring the fire on a stunning debut album // Crack Thrilling and vital /// Q A real coming of age /// MOJO An urgent, free-wheeling bundle of fun /// NME Ezra Collective have marked themselves out from the crowd with their genre-bridging prowess /// The Guardian the sound of London in 2019 distilled and put down on record /// Clash At the heart of a bubbling scene without a point of entry for many, Ezra Collective stand with their arms wide open /// Loud & Quiet British rave-jazz moves onwards and upwards /// The Observer Potent, rebellious, and uplifting /// Dork There is a lean exuberance to this band that demands a dancing response /// Rolling Stone One of the liveliest groups to emerge from London’s jazz renaissance /// New York Times

The cover art for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ 17th album couldn’t feel more removed from the man once known as a snarling, terrifying prince of poetic darkness. This heavenly forest with its vibrant flowers, rays of sun, and woodland creatures feels comically opposed to anything Cave has ever represented—but perhaps that’s the point. This pastel fairy tale sets the scene for *Ghosteen*, his most minimalist, supernatural work to date, in which he slips between realms of fantasy and reality as a means to accept life and death, his past and future. In his very first post on The Red Hand Files—the website Cave uses to receive and respond to fan letters—he spoke of rebuilding his relationship with songwriting, which had been damaged while enduring the grief that followed his son Arthur’s death in 2015. He wrote, “I found with some practise the imagination could propel itself beyond the personal into a state of wonder. In doing so the colour came back to things with a renewed intensity and the world seemed clear and bright and new.” It is within that state of wonder that *Ghosteen* exists. “The songs on the first album are the children. The songs on the second album are their parents,” Cave has explained. Those eight “children” are misty, ambient stories of flaming mares, enchanted forests, flying ships, and the eponymous, beloved Ghosteen, described as a “migrating spirit.” The second album features two longer pieces, connected by the spoken-word “Fireflies.” He tells fantasy stories that allude to love and loss and letting go, and occasionally brings us back to reality with detailed memories of car rides to the beach and hotel rooms on rainy days. These themes aren’t especially new, but the feeling of this album is. There are no wild murder ballads or raucous, bluesy love songs. Though often melancholy, it doesn’t possess the absolute devastation and loneliness of 2016’s *Skeleton Tree*. Rather, these vignettes and symbolic myths are tranquil and gentle, much like the instrumentation behind them. With little more than synths and piano behind Cave’s vocals, *Ghosteen* might feel uneventful at times, but the calmness seems to help his imagination run free. On “Bright Horses,” he sings of “Horses broken free from the fields/They are horses of love, their manes full of fire.” But then he pulls back the curtain and admits, “We’re all so sick and tired of seeing things as they are/Horses are just horses and their manes aren’t full of fire/The fields are just fields, and there ain’t no lord… This world is plain to see, it don’t mean we can’t believe in something.” Through these dreamlike, surreal stories, Cave is finding his path to peace. And he’s learned that he isn’t alone on his journey. On “Galleon Ship,” he begins, “If I could sail a galleon ship, a long, lonely ride across the sky,” before realizing: “We are not alone, it seems, so many riders in the sky/The winds of longing in their sails, searching for the other side.”

A raw and scintillating state-of-Dublin address.

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Crush will be released on 18 October on Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement he has shared new track 'Last Bloom' along with accompanying video by Hamill Industries and announced details of a new live show with dates including London's Printworks, his biggest headline live show to date. The best musical mavericks never sit still for long. They mutate and morph into new shapes, refusing to be boxed in. Floating Points has so many guises that it’s not easy to pin him down. There’s the composer whose 2015 debut album Elaenia was met with rave reviews – including being named Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ and Resident Advisor’s ‘Album of the Year’ – and took him from dancefloors to festival stages worldwide. The curator whose record labels have brought soulful new sounds into the club, and, on his esteemed imprint Melodies International, reinstated old ones. The classicist, the disco guy that makes machine music, the digger always searching for untapped gems to re-release. And then there’s the DJ whose liberal approach to genre saw him once drop a 20-minute instrumental by spiritual saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in Berghain. Fresh from the release earlier this year of his compilation of lambent, analogous ambient and atmospheric music for the esteemed Late Night Tales compilation series, Floating Points’ first album in four years, Crush, twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again. A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism whose title alludes to the pressure-cooker of the current environment we find ourselves in. As a result, Shepherd has made some of his heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ (Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Track’), but there are also some of his most expressive songs on Crush: his signature melancholia is there in the album’s sublime mellower moments or in the Buchla synthesizer, whose eerie modulation haunts the album. Whereas Elaenia was a five-year process, Crush was made during an intense five-week period, inspired by the invigorating improvisation of his shows supporting The xx in 2017. He had just finished touring with his own live ensemble, culminating in a Coachella appearance, when he suddenly became a one-man band, just him and his trusty Buchla opening up for half an hour every night. He thought what he’d come out with would "be really melodic and slow- building" to suit the mood of the headliners, but what he ended up playing was "some of the most obtuse and aggressive music I've ever made, in front of 20,000 people every night," he says. "It was liberating." His new album feels similarly instantaneous – and vital. It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together. It draws from the "explosive" moments during his sets, the moments that usually occur when he throws together unexpected genres, for the very simple reason that he gets excited about wanting to "hear this record, really loud, now!" and then puts the needle on. It’s "just like what happens when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it's going all over the place," he says. Today's newly announced live solo shows capture that energy too, so that the audience can see that what they’re watching isn’t just someone pressing play. Once again Shepherd has teamed up with Hamill Industries, the duo who brought their ground-breaking reactive laser technologies to his previous tours. Their vision is to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. This time their visuals will zoom in on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and flowers or rainbow swirls of bubbles might move and morph to the kick of the bass drum. What you see on the screen behind Shepherd might "look like a cosmos of colour going on," says Shepherd, "but it’s actually a tiny bubble with a macro lens on it being moved by frequencies by my Buchla," which was also the process by which the LP artwork was made." It means, he adds, "putting a lot of Fairy Liquid on our tour rider".

For Allah Las' fourth album, LAHS, the Los Angeles quartet turn their collective gaze toward unknown horizons. A record that prefers travel to time, LAHS transmits from a place not found on any map. While the West Coast mood and melodies from their previous work remain, LAHS looks through a wider lens, exploring the exotic, exciting essence of global folk, soul and downbeat.

When Francis Lung describes his new album as sounding “like a short Mancunian boy single-handedly trying to incite Beatlemania” he’s really not too far wide of the mark. Released later this Summer, Lung’s much-anticipated debut album ‘A Dream Is U’ is both bold and enthusiastic, a kaleidoscopic journey informed by the greats but also one that is wonderfully enigmatic, the sound of a multi-instrumentalist tying together all manner of influences into one beautifully cohesive album. Following on from the home-recorded Volumes 1 + 2 EPs, which contained titbits written during his time in Wu Lyf, ‘A Dream Is U’ is the first fully-realised Francis Lung record, a studio undertaking brought to life with producer Brendan Williams (Dutch Uncles, GoGo Penguin), a colourful patchwork of vision and ingenuity. “Before we started recording I knew exactly what the arrangements were in my head” Francis says, reflecting on the time spent devising his new work. "It was kind of my mission to capture everything as it was in my imagination”. A beautiful amalgamation of instruments, ‘A Dream Is U’ might fit neatly into the classic pop drawer but it comes with all manner of decoration, from violin and viola, to cello and saxophone. Writing for strings for the first time, Francis was inspired by the likes of Michael Brown (The Left Banke) and Robert Kirby (Nick Drake) and the parts are played by two members of the Hallé Orchestra, while the saxophone was played by Manchester’s jazz saxophonist Sam Healy. “He mostly played stuff I'd written for him,” Francis says, “but the solo at the end of The Lie is all him, with me in the studio trying to direct him by jumping around and waving my arms!” Initially conceived to outline the different stages of a relationship, from heady early excitement to bitter fall-out, the finished product is intact an assortment of sentiments, scattered like puzzle pieces from an overturned box. “The problem with that theme is that it was too cut & dry and unrealistic,” Francis says now. “You can have all of those feelings in one day in no particular order. It’s more human to me that emotions can come at any time, without any real resolution. I wanted the album to reflect that sentiment.” The new album is opened and led by ‘I Wanna Live In My Dreams’, a dazzling burst of Ronettes-inspired pop music, a love letter to sleeping, but also a song that buries allusions of real-world melancholy under its jubilant exterior, calling to mind the likes of Stephen Merrit, or later-day Elliott Smith, and their ability to shape moments of sadness into something strikingly pretty. “Songwriting is a bit like writing jokes, you have a setup and a knockdown,” Francis says. “But I really, really want to make music that makes people feel better, not worse. So I’m trying to push that line.” If that introduction was somewhat understated, the rest of the album isn’t afraid to delve into more mosaic territory, pulling in influences as far-ranging as Big Star and The Beach Boys; Guided By Voices, Olivia Tremor Control, Apples In Stereo. It’s not just a collection of straightforward love songs either. Companionship might be the central weight here but it’s presented in myriad forms. ‘Comedown’ for instance, tells a complex narrative of two people’s drug dependency, and the validation they find in each other’s abuse, alongside gentle piano lines and stirring strings, while ‘Up & Down’ is breezier affair on the surface but actually tells a bipolar love story, chronicling the relationship between two lovers with manic mood swings, the track itself swinging between tender verses and a dramatic chorus. Touching upon the universal themes of addiction, faith, and love in all of its confusion, ‘A Dream Is U’ is a collection of characters and stories that plays out something like a Harvey Pekar comic strip; an obsessive chronicle of daily lives twisted into new shapes by the unique mind and manners of their narrator. With flashes of striking colour and an ever-present wry smile, Francis Lung has created a debut album that drifts between simple acceptance and exuberant yearning for more. “My favourite part is when it talks about escaping to another universe,” Francis says of one song in particular, Unnecessary Love. “Although it’s a doomed and impossible dream, it’s amusing to me that if we survive long enough it could be a real possibility.” Perhaps the key to the record, in fact, can be found in its closing track. Written on a toy piano found in a charity shop, ‘The Lie’ is a boldly stirring pop song, projecting Francis’ own statement of intent, to find a way through the fogginess of self-struggle, to accept ourselves as we are. “I don’t like shouting all my lyrics,” he says, “but it feels like 'If you could accept yourself you'd be happy' is a good one to shout. I don’t want to oversimplify the solution to anybody’s struggles but I know that learning to accept myself would help me no end.” At times boisterous and radiant, elsewhere contemplative and brooding, ‘A Dream Is U’ feels like being awake in dreams, like stepping outside of the daily rotation; like shadows leaving their dancing bodies to waltz away to their own tune.

Abandoning their debut’s mellow indie pop, London trio Girl Ray—inspired by Ariana Grande and Drake—goes full-on pop on album two. Nobody will mistake *Girl* for the next *Take Care*, although it’s better for it. They try out Destiny’s Child-style recriminations (“Keep It Tight”), dreamy evocations of solitude in the vein of Solange (“Let It Go”), and even a muted dembow stutter (“Because”), asserting their identity via dusty analog production (hear the flute trills on “Go to the Top”) and singer Poppy Hankin’s lovely, nervous voice, which is often caught in the throes of anticipation. Their charm underpins a surprisingly convincing about-face.

High quality, timeless pop songs weren’t always created in offices by handfuls of writers and marketing teams and then farmed out to the highest bidding singers. Once upon a time they were written and recorded by artists – George Michael, Prince or Kate Bush for example – who wanted to use the universal, happy medium of pop music to put across joyous, accessible messages of love, friendship and life to the world. And that’s what Girl Ray have done. They’ve done far more than just “go pop.” To have the confidence to totally change one’s creative output is something so few artists manage, but they’ve nailed it. Back in 2017, the band Girl Ray released Earl Grey: a debut album of expertly-crafted, sweet, hummable songs about longing, friendship, self doubt and contemplation. It was a success. “With Girl Ray, we knew we had found something special,” says Stephen Bass who signed the band in 2016. After their tour rolled to a stop and Girl Ray’s members Poppy, Sophie and Iris floated back to earth, taking up employment in shops and restaurants. They hung about listlessly, struggled with bouts of feeling a bit shit and saw each together ritualistically despite not creating much music. Poppy started writing some new songs for their second record much like the sweet odes to longing, love and friendship on their debut. But the vibes just weren’t there. It was Ariana Grande’s explosion into pop culture that kickstarted a new era for Girl Ray. “Thank U, Next came out and that kind of changed everything,” Poppy says. That, combined with Ari’s ballad of self-love and the party vibe they witnessed when touring with US band Porches (“their live game was so fun and super synthy and so danceable,” Sophie recalls. “It looked like much more of a party,”) led to the band beginning to wonder if they could try their hand at making their own pop. After that realisation, everything clicked into place. Poppy began experimenting with writing songs over beats. “I had to start learning how to write on a computer, using keyboards, and that made everything sound more pop,” she explains. The songs poured out. A collection of shimmering, foot-tapping, sparkling pop bangers. It’s unmistakably Girl Ray, but with added synths. If Earl Grey was a hot cup of tea and a cuddle on the sofa, Girl is being in a cab with the windows down on the way to a beach bar for sundowners. It’s the sun kissed excitement of Rihanna’s If It’s Lovin’ That You Want, combined with the eye-rolling, impenetrable sardonic humour of a girl gang. Among the grin-inducing, trepidatious and intensely courageous R&B-style tracks on the album are beautifully composed piano ballads steeped in the sadness and unrequited love that made Earl Grey feel like a knowing look from an old friend. The band took the demos to Ash Workman at Electric Beach Studios in Margate. “He has more of a pop background [Christine and the Queens and Metronomy] which is exactly why we wanted him for the job,” Poppy says. “We didn’t have to compromise with him, he just got it straight away.” Ash listened to the demos and was keen to help them produce a record that sounded something like “70s Drake.” The band were slightly confused by this, so they stuck pictures of Ariana around his mixing desk to remind him of his raison d’être. Even though Girl sounds a little like a cross between the Love Island soundtrack and The Power Out by Electrelane, it’s almost genre-less. Girl Ray have created something beautiful that hasn’t been seen for a long time now: expertly-crafted pop created by dedicated artists on a mission to make music for people to really enjoy. Music that doesn’t look to confuse or patronise. Music to fall in love to, to dance to. Songs you’d want to send to your friends. “Pop is so fun and universal, even if you’re a super muso nerd who’s into Elliot Smith you’re still going to love hearing a bit of Whitney Houston and that’s really appealing to me,” Poppy says. “If you hear a good groove you can’t not boogie, and we want our shows to be more of a party and for it to be more feelgood music.” “With this new set of songs they have been brave enough to completely change their sound rather than playing it safe yet still remain unmistakably themselves,” says Stephen. “A bold move perhaps, but a sign of that desire to push themselves that only the best artists have.”

In 2017, *Yesterday’s Gone* established Loyle Carner as one of hip-hop’s more soul-baring, confessional songwriters. “I had to do a lot of work on myself,” he tells Apple Music. “I asked myself questions: Some were scary, some were cool.” We meet the south Londoner in a typically reflective mood on his intelligent, compelling, and jazzy second album. This time, however, he’s zooming out. “I’m happier in myself, which means I\'m able to look at what\'s stressful in the rest of the world around me,” he says. Explore these reactions with Carner’s track-by-track guide to *Not Waving, But Drowning*. **“Dear Jean”** “I was moving out, I’d fallen in love, and my mum was finding it tough—as was I—for us to not be as close anymore. This song was just for us, but it was important for me to have it on the album once I made it. It was just something to keep her going, and me, to be honest.” **“Angel”** “The lyric ‘Like the fire needs the air/I won’t burn unless you’re there’ means a lot to me. It\'s from a 50 Cent tune \[‘Hustler’s Ambition’\]; the sample\'s incredible. It’s about people who hate you or you hate. You need them to stick around because they’re your angels that keep you working hard. If it isn’t to support your family, it\'s to prove to people who think you\'re shit that you\'re not.” **“Ice Water”** “I was in a taxi on the way home from the single premiere of \'Ottolenghi.\' The song came on and \[I recorded on my phone\] the driver saying, ‘What do you think of this?’ I\'m not really in the habit of telling people that I make music, but I said it’s my song. It came full circle because he told his son—who’s a fan—he was with me. What you hear is me and his son talking and it going back to the song on the radio, which is cool.” **“Ottolenghi”** “I was reading one of \[Yotam\] Ottolenghi\'s cookbooks called *Jerusalem*. There\'s an issue at the moment with anti-Semitism through the context of Syria. I\'m on a train and this guy says, ‘You can\'t read that Bible around here. There\'s no Jews here.’ I said, ‘Dude, chill. I\'m not a Jew, but what if I was? It’s a cookbook.’ I text Ottolenghi the other day when I saw one of his recipes. He\'s been a hero of mine for a long time because he\'s a great chef. To be cool with him is a mind-blowing thing, so I don’t take that for granted.” **“You Don’t Know”** “Rebel Kleff \[the London rapper and producer\] is who \'Krispy\' is about. We hadn\'t made a song together for a long time, and it was important for me just to have him as a part of the album. He sent me the beat with this verse I\'d written ages ago about being treated badly by girls. Although that song doesn’t sum up how I feel now, it\'s very important because it was the first steps to rekindling our bromance.” **“Still”** “This is one of my favorite songs. The reason that I was able to woo my missus is because I have ADHD and that\'s who I am. In the same breath, it\'s the thing that gets me in trouble the most. Not just with her, but all the time. It is the best and worst thing about me, because without it I wouldn’t be in love and happy but maybe I wouldn\'t also be stressed out at other times.” **“It’s Coming Home?”** “My mum recorded this. It was a beautiful time. Me and my missus were living at my mum’s before we moved into our new place. All the people I loved most in the same house: my little brother, mum, and missus. It was the perfect summer. What summed it up the best was that we would all come home and watch the football together.” **“Desoleil (Brilliant Corners)”** “It was a pleasure to spend time with Sampha. It was the first time I\'ve been in the studio with someone I was a big fan of and felt like I earned my place there. It\'s a song I can put on anytime and think, ‘Yeah, I\'m proud of it.’ That\'s all that matters, because if people hate it—which they might—at least I know I like it. Which is half the battle sometimes.” **“Loose Ends” (feat. Jorja Smith)** “I met Jorja a long time ago when I was out at some bar. It\'s been special to see her do so well because she\'s talented and definitely deserves it. We\'d been talking about it for years, but every time I was a bit busy or so was she. Now, she\'s *crazy* busy and, like, yeah, cool, I\'m a superstar, but we managed to finally link up. She\'s got a lot of soul for a little lady.” **“Not Waving, But Drowning”** “My granddad had a poetry book by his bed, and when he died it got passed to me. He used to write late-night thoughts in it. One said, ‘Am I waving or am I drowning?’ and it meant something to me. I searched for it and found it was his line but inspired by a Stevie Smith poem. It\'s about a guy who cries wolf: When he\'s waving from the sea, everyone on the beach is just used to him showing off. Then he drowns because he\'s actually asking for help. I related to that. I\'m definitely not a big success—and that\'s cool with me—but I think people look at me and say, ‘Look at this guy, with his Mercury and BRIT nominations and big house and beautiful girlfriend. He thinks that he’s this and that.’ But really, I still don\'t know if people are going to like my next tune or if I\'m going to be able to pay my mum\'s rent.” **“Krispy”** “I\'m in the lane of thinking that men and women are equal and exactly the same, but I think men are pushed into a box sometimes and find it very difficult to talk about their feelings. Rebel Kleff and I fell out of contact. We went from making money together to me doing more and him doing less; it began to grate on us both. A lot of times I went to tell him how I felt and bottled it, so I figured if I could send a song to him, I wouldn\'t have to be there and he could understand. He was supposed to write back, but he didn\'t. For the verse where he doesn’t, there\'s an old military flugelhorn which you\'d use when there\'s a fallen soldier. We\'re in a better place now.” **“Sail Away Freestyle”** “I was just really stressed about money—which I usually am—but more so than usual. Jordan Rakei put the beat on and I just started freestyling. This verse came up out of nowhere from the top of my head. Then I had another verse I\'d written a while ago—it was one take.” **“Looking Back”** “It\'s mad, but Benjamin Zephaniah said probably the coolest thing to me about this tune. He said, ‘This is your black consciousness music.’ Being mixed race and raised by my mum—who’s white—I don’t know if I ever really had a black conscious before. I wanted to, but I didn’t know if I was allowed to have one. This album I was thinking a lot more about what it is to be mixed race. Being too white to be a black kid and too black for a white kid at school, it’s something I think about a lot, and it was time for me to put it down on paper.” **“Carluccio”** “Antonio Carluccio is one of my heroes. At a time when my stepbrother passed away and my dad had left—I was devoid of male role models. I was looking everywhere and found myself watching gangster films like *The Godfather*. They had these Italian guys with good family values but they also knew how to be the man of the house. He ticked all the boxes for me: being a chef and Italian—but without the blood and guts. He gave me the philosophy I needed as a grown man trying to find a place in the world. On the day he died, I had an argument with my missus. Just a small one, but I was like, ‘Yo, I can\'t lose you the same day that I’ve lost Carluccio or I\'ll be fucked.’” **“Dear Ben”** “The last track is my mum saying bye to me but also saying hello to my missus and what\'s to come next, like kids and all the exciting things that happen when you\'re in love. It\'s not necessarily a feel-good album, but it\'s an optimistic album. In my eyes, that\'s much cooler than a happy album, because happy is corny anyway. I’m hoping when people hear it they relate and it will make them call their mums to say \'I miss you.\'”

U.F.O.F., F standing for ‘Friend’, is the name of the highly anticipated third record by Big Thief, set to be released on 3rd May 2019 via 4AD. U.F.O.F. was recorded in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios.  In a large cabin-like room, the band set up their gear to track live with engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who was also behind their previous albums.  Having already lived these songs on tour, they were relaxed and ready to experiment.  The raw material came quickly.  Some songs were written only hours before recording and stretched out instantly, first take, vocals and all. “Making friends with the unknown… All my songs are about this,” says Lenker; “If the nature of life is change and impermanence, I’d rather be uncomfortably awake in that truth than lost in denial.”

“How people may emotionally connect with music I’ve been involved in is something that part of me is completely mystified by,” Thom Yorke tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Human beings are really different, so why would it be that what I do connects in that way? I discovered maybe around \[Radiohead\'s album\] *The Bends* that the bit I didn’t want to show, the vulnerable bit… that bit was the bit that mattered.” *ANIMA*, Yorke’s third solo album, further weaponizes that discovery. Obsessed by anxiety and dystopia, it might be the most disarmingly personal music of a career not short of anxiety and dystopia. “Dawn Chorus” feels like the centerpiece: It\'s stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful with a claustrophobic “stream of consciousness” lyric that feels something like a slowly descending panic attack. And, as Yorke describes, it was the record\'s biggest challenge. “There’s a hit I have to get out of it,” he says. “I was trying to develop how ‘Dawn Chorus’ was going to work, and find the right combinations on the synthesizers I was using. Couldn’t find it, tried it again and again and again. But I knew when I found it I would have my way into the song. Things like that matter to me—they are sort of obsessive, but there is an emotional connection. I was deliberately trying to find something as cold as possible to go with it, like I sing essentially one note all the way through.” Yorke and longtime collaborator Nigel Godrich (“I think most artists, if they\'re honest, are never solo artists,” Yorke says) continue to transfuse raw feeling into the album’s chilling electronica. “Traffic,” with its jagged beats and “I can’t breathe” refrain, feels like a partner track to another memorable Yorke album opener, “Everything in Its Right Place.” The extraordinary “Not the News,” meanwhile, slaloms through bleeps and baleful strings to reach a thunderous final destination. It’s the work of a modern icon still engaged with his unique gift. “My cliché thing I always say is, \'You know you\'re in trouble when people stop listening to sad music,\'” Yorke says. “Because the moment people stop listening to sad music, they don\'t want to know anymore. They\'re turning themselves off.”

Zambian-born hip-hop artist Sampa the Great (born Sampa Tembo) is based in Australia, but don’t call her an Australian rapper. “That’s not completely getting who I am,” she tells Apple Music. “Zambia is a part of my identity, and I wanted to show that story.” Her flow is as polished, exciting, and rich as the production, and her lyrics are poetic, clever, proud, and deeply, necessarily truthful. Tembo’s debut album isn’t just an introduction to her story, it’s part of it. And when she visited her home to perform for the first time, it changed her story altogether. “For me, I was the person who *had* a place to go to, a home to go to,” she says. “I was writing from that perspective until I did my shows there. People would say, ‘You know, you kind of sound different. You sound a bit watered down. You haven’t been home for a while, your accent has changed.’ It put me in this funny place. It hurt. I felt like I was finally home, but the people from home were like, ‘You’re not from here.’ And so it really opened me up to a part of my own life that I didn’t think existed. And it made me understand the emotions that come out of those circumstances for others—there are a lot of people from where I come from who *can’t* go home.” Read on to learn more about the stories behind some of her favorite tracks on *The Return*. **“Mwana” (feat. Mwanje Tembo, Theresa Mutale Tembo & Sunburnt Soul Choir)** “It’s the first song you hear on the album, on my journey. It’s literally my return home, physically, but also spiritually. My sister and mum are on the song, and it’s the first time I’ve ever done a song in Bemba \[the Bantu language spoken by Sampa’s family\]. The album is supposed to be about reassuring yourself of who you are, where you’re from, and how to navigate that, and this is such a special song to me and for the album. And the Sunburnt Soul Choir are amazing. Their voices are beautiful. I love the level of connection there.” **“Freedom\"** “It’s very important to me to talk about the risk that artists take. Everybody knows the artist through their songs, but they don’t know the artist *behind* the music. It’s important for me to highlight that sometimes the business, the money, and the hustle to put your music out there and earn a living can give you some compromises. ‘Freedom’ is me expressing how, as a young up-and-coming artist, it’s so important to know who I am and to not compromise that.” **“OMG”** “‘OMG’ reminds me of home and the music that I heard when I was young. Homesickness was getting in the way of me being content with everything that was happening professionally. Hearing my music is on a radio station \[in Australia\] is beautiful, but it’s not personally reaching me because I didn’t grow up here. It was different when we did go home. I was interviewed by a rapper I listened to when I was younger, who I’d wanted to meet as a child, and then the radio station by my high school played my songs. I don’t take \[being in Australia\] for granted, but I also know that my inspiration, all my music and artistry comes from my home. So to be able to bridge those two—who I am and where I’m based—has made me more assured of who I am.” **“Final Form”** “‘Final Form’ shaped the sound of the album. It’s very cinematic. I felt like I was bringing people into a movie of my life. I’ve not fully told my narrative or my story, and the problem with that is then the story is created for me, instead of the other way around. So I’m showing you where I’m from. In the video, I show you my parents, the school I went to. Whatever you create out of that, that’s your business, but this is my story. I needed to create that musically and visually.” **“The Return” (feat. Thando, Jace XL, Alien & Whosane)** “We broke down in the studio while recording this. It’s such a vulnerable, special song, because of the perspectives it brings to the forefront, stuff that I didn\'t write. Everyone on the song is speaking from their individual perspectives, their lives, and how they’re affected by the places they stay in. What I know to be true is that your real home is your soul. Your body. For people who can’t go home, that’s their alternative. They have to call a place that’s not really their home, their home. ‘The Return’ talks about getting to the crux of who you think you are and where you think your home is, and trying to recreate that within yourself. We really broke down, but we let the world hear how vulnerable and scared we are. That’s what I love about it.”

Sampa The Great creates a sense of home on her debut album - “The Return”. A characterful record, its reference points range from classic hip-hop to ancient Southern African sounds. Built on four years of personal and musical soul-searching, it’s an assured statement, the product of meaningful musical connections and of Sampa having to redefine her self-identity away from the comforts of family and old friends. The album follows the recently released single ‘Final Form’, which was hailed as Zane Lowe’s ‘World Record’ and received incredible support from the likes of The Guardian, OkayAfrica, The Independent, Clash, gal-dem and many more. It was also the #1 Most Played track on Triple J the week of release, and received love from Ebro Darden (Beats 1 / Hot 97), Annie Mac, Mistajam & DJ Target (Radio 1), Gilles Peterson & Lauren Laverne (6 Music), Jason Kramer & Anthony Valadez (KCRW), John Richards, Larry Rose & Atticus (KEXP), and more and more. On “The Return” Sampa has enlisted a string of esteemed collaborators and peers to create the album. Mixed by Jonwayne (of Stones Throw notoriety), MsM (Skepta/Boy Better Know) and Andrei Eremin (GRAMMY-nominated engineer for Hiatus Kaiyote and Chet Faker), productions are by Silentjay, Slowthai producer Kwes Darko, Clever Austin (Perrin Moss of Hiatus Kiayote), Blue Lab Beats and Syreniscreamy. The album also features collaborations with Ecca Vandal and London jazz collective Steam Down. Many of them are the fruits of the network Sampa has built since first making waves in 2015 - following time spent studying in San Francisco and LA - as a new arrival in Sydney’s hip-hop and jazz freestyle nights. Since then, she’s performed with Denzel Curry on his breakout track ‘Black Balloons’ for Triple J’s ‘Like A Version’, and toured globally, supporting the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Ms. Lauryn Hill, Thundercat, Joey Bada$$, Hiatus Kaiyote, Noname, Ibeyi and Little Simz. Following recent live performances at Glastonbury, Love Supreme Jazz Festival, Dark MOFO (Tasmania - alongside FKA Twigs, Kelsey Lu, Nicholas Jaar), Down The Rabbit Hole (Netherlands) and a headline show at Hip-Hop Collection (Paris) - Sampa plays alongside Sons Of Kemet at Somerset House on 13th July, before joining Burna Boy - recent recipient of the BET Best International Act award - in New York’s Prospect Park on 19th July plus headline solo shows at Elsewhere in Brooklyn on 18th July and Gold Diggers in LA on 22nd July. She returns to the EU in November for a headline tour that includes XOYO in London, as well as stops in Manchester, Bristol, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin and more.

In 1999, Steve Mason was becoming as noted for his self-sabotage as for the cosmic, folky magic he was making with The Beta Band. With the group’s next-big-thing status rapidly escalating in the UK, he gave interviews dismissing their imminent debut album as “f\*\*\*ing awful” (it wasn’t). Twenty years later, he’s finally inclined to play a few notes on his own trumpet, describing the fourth album under his own name as his first “legitimate record.” While that’s harsh on his other, excellent solo releases, his confidence in *About the Light* is well-founded. With his usual restlessness and daring, he’s made his most optimistic record, embracing the peace he’s found since 2010’s moving *Boys Outside* documented his debilitating depression. Here, Mason emerges from insularity to seize the day on the title track’s country-fried blues before declaring, “She has brought the lights, I see/I won’t look back/That’s not for me” over the urgent soul-funk of “Stars Around My Heart.” Even contemplative moments, such as the gently psychedelic “Fox on the Rooftop,” emit a sense of playfulness and liberation. *About the Light* is further evidence that Mason possesses a rare combination of adventure, honesty, and skill as a songwriter. This time around, he might even agree.

Beats: Track 1 - Skywlkr Track 2 - The Purist Tracks 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 12, 13, 15 - Mono En Stereo Track 5 - Oh No Track 6 - Mono En Stereo & Your Old Droog Track 14 - Quelle Chris

We live in divisive times. Multiculturalism rises hand-in-hand with racial tensions, and politicians seem powerless to even bring people within earshot of their convoluted message. It’s time for a different perspective. On his second studio album, More Arriving, Sarathy Korwar blasts out his own vibrant, pluralistic missive for the world to hear. This is not necessarily a record of unity; it’s an honest reflection of Korwar’s experience of being an Indian in a divided Britain. Recorded over two and a half years in India and the UK, More Arriving draws on the nascent rap scenes of Mumbai and New Delhi, incorporating spoken word and Korwar’s own Indian classical and jazz instrumentation. This is a record born of confrontation; one for our confrontational times. With this album, Korwar expands his politicised narrative to envelop the entire diaspora. “This is a modern brown record. The kind of record that a contemporary Indian living in the UK for the past 10 years would make,”Korwar says. “This is what Indian music sounds like to me right now.” It all begins with the title: “More Arriving comes from the scaremongering around Brexit,” Korwar says. “It’s a tongue-in-cheek play on the fact that there are more people coming and you’ll have to deal with it!” Through this defiance, Korwar takes clear pride in the knotty mix of his identity – harking back to the new India of the Mumbai hip-hop kids, as well as identifying with London’s cultural diversity. “I want the idea of brown pride to come through,” he says. “My voice is one amongst a thousand, but this record is a snapshot of something much greater than myself. It’s the chance to send a message.

When David Berman disbanded Silver Jews in 2009, the world stood to lose one of the best writers in indie rock, a guy who catalogued the magic and misery of everyday life with wit, heart, and the ragged glory of the occupationally down-and-out. After a 10-year break professedly spent reading books and arguing with people on Reddit, Berman enlisted members of the Brooklyn band Woods to back him on *Purple Mountains*. Berman’s pain had never been laid quite so bare, nor had it ever sounded quite so urgent. “I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion,” he sings on the swaggering “That’s Just the Way I Feel.” “Day to day, I’m neck and neck with giving in.” And “Margaritas at the Mall” turns an ordinary happy hour into a jeremiad about the cold comforts of capitalism in a godless world. That the music—country-tinged indie rock—was as polished and competent as it was only highlighted Berman’s intensity: less a rock singer than a street preacher, someone who needed to avail himself of his visions stat. But even at his most desperate, he remained achingly funny, turning statements of existential loneliness into the kind of bumper sticker Zen that made him seem like an ordinary guy no matter how highfalutin he could get. “Well, if no one’s fond of fuckin’ me, maybe no one’s fuckin’ fond of me,” he sings on the album-closing “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” sounding not all that far off from the George Strait one-twos he reportedly loved. Above all, though, his writing is beautiful, attuned to detail in ways that make ordinary scenarios shimmer with quiet magic. Just listen to “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” which turns a quiet night in a big city into an allegory of finding solace in the weather of what comes to us. Shortly after the release of *Purple Mountains*, Berman died, at the age of 52, a tragic end to what felt like a triumphant return. “The dead know what they\'re doing when they leave this world behind,” he sings on “Nights That Won’t Happen.” “When the here and the hereafter momentarily align.”

David Berman comes in from the cold after ten long years. His new musical expression is a meltdown unparalleled in modern memory. He warns us that his findings might be candid, but as long as his punishment comes in such bite-sized delights of all-American jukebox fare, we'll hike the Purple Mountains with pleasure forever.

A successful child actor turned indie-rock sweetheart with Rilo Kiley, a solo artist beloved by the famed and famous, Jenny Lewis would appear to have led a gilded life. But her truth—and there have been intimations both in song lyrics and occasionally in interviews—is of a far darker inheritance. “I come from working-class showbiz people who ended up in jail, on drugs, both, or worse,” Lewis tells Apple Music. “I grew up in a pretty crazy, unhealthy environment, but I somehow managed to survive.” The death of her mother in 2017 (with whom she had reconnected after a 20-year estrangement) and the end of her 12-year relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice set the stage for Lewis’ fourth solo album, where she finally reconciles her public and private self. A bountiful pop record about sex, drugs, death, and regret, with references to everyone from Elliott Smith to Meryl Streep, *On the Line* is the Lewis aesthetic writ large: an autobiographical picaresque burnished by her dark sense of humor. Here, Lewis takes us through the album track by track. **“Heads Gonna Roll”** “I’m a big boxing fan, and I basically wanted to write a boxing ballad. There’s a line about ‘the nuns of Harlem\'—that’s for real. I met a priest backstage at a Dead & Company show in a cloud of pot smoke. He was a fan of my music, and we struck up a conversation and a correspondence. I’d just moved to New York at the time and was looking to do some service work. And so this priest hooked me up with the nuns in Harlem. I would go up there and get really stoned and hang out with theses nuns, who were the purest, most lovely people, and help them put together meal packages. The nuns of Harlem really helped me out.” **“Wasted Youth”** “For me, the thing that really brings this song, and the whole record, together is the people playing on it. \[Drummer\] Jim Keltner especially. He’s played on so many incredible records, he’s the heartbeat of rock and roll and you don’t even realize it. Jim and Don Was were there for so much of this record, and they were the ones that brought Ringo Starr into the sessions—playing with him was just surreal. Benmont Tench is someone I’d worked with before—he’s just so good at referencing things from the past but playing something that sounds modern and new at the same time. He created these sounds that were so melodic and weird, using the Hammond organ and a bunch of pedals. We call that ‘the fog’—Benmont adds the fog.” **“Red Bull & Hennessy”** “I was writing this song, almost predicting the breakup with my longtime partner, while he was in the room. I originally wanted to call it ‘Spark,’ ’cause when that spark goes out in a relationship it’s really hard to get it back.” **“Hollywood Lawn”** “I had this for years and recorded three or four different versions; I did a version with three female vocalists a cappella. Then I went to Jamaica with Savannah and Jimmy Buffett—I actually wrote some songs with Jimmy for the *Escape to Margaritaville* musical that didn’t get used. We didn’t use that version, but I really arranged the s\*\*\* out of it there, and some of the lyrics are about that experience.” **“Do Si Do”** “Wrote this for a friend who went off his psych meds abruptly, which is so dangerous—you have to taper off. I asked Beck to produce it for a reason: He gets in there and wants to add and change chords. And whatever he suggests is always right, of course. That’s a good thing to remember in life: Beck is always right.” “Dogwood” “This is my favorite song on the record. I wrote it on the piano even though I don’t think I’m a very good piano player. I probably should learn more, but I’m just using the instrument as a way to get the song out. This was a live vocal, too. When I’m playing and singing at the same time, I’m approaching the material more as a songwriter rather than a singer, and that changes the whole dynamic in a good way.” **“Party Clown”** “I’d have to describe this as a Faustian love song set at South by Southwest. There’s a line in there where I say, ‘Can you be my puzzle piece, baby?/When I cry like Meryl Streep?’ It’s funny, because Meryl actually did a song of mine, ‘Cold One,’ in *Ricki and the Flash*.” **“Little White Dove”** “Toward the end of the record, I would write songs at home and then visit my mom in the hospital when she was sick. I started this on bass, had the chord structure down, and wrote it at the pace it took to walk from the hospital elevator to the end of the hall. I was able to sing my mom the chorus before she passed.” **“Taffy”** “That one started out as a poem I’d written on an airplane, then it turned into a song. It’s a very specific account of a weekend spent in Wisconsin, and there are some deep Wisconsin references in there. I’m not interested in platitudes, either as a writer or especially as a listener. I want to hear details. That’s why I like hip-hop so much. All those details, names that I haven’t heard, words that have meanings that I don’t understand and have to look up later. I’m interested in those kinds of specifics. That’s also what I love about Bob Dylan songs, too—they’re very, very specific. You can paint an incredibly vivid picture or set a scene or really project a feeling that way.” **“On the Line”** “This is an important song for me. If you read the credits on this record, it says, ‘All songs by Jenny Lewis.’ Being in a band like Rilo Kiley was all about surrendering yourself to the group. And then working with Johnathan for so long, I might have lost a little bit of myself in being a collaborator. It’s nice to know I can create something that’s totally my own. I feel like this got me back to that place.” **“Rabbit Hole”** “The record was supposed to end with ‘On the Line’—the dial tone that closes the song was supposed to be the last thing you hear. But I needed to write ‘Rabbit Hole,’ almost as a mantra for myself: ‘I’m not gonna go/Down the rabbit hole with you.’ I figured the song would be for my next project, but I played it for Beck and he insisted that we put it on this record. It almost feels like a perfect postscript to this whole period of my life.”