Piccadilly Records' Top 100 Albums of 2023

Having exorcised their fascination with post-punk on 2021’s *Drunk Tank Pink*, shame evolves on their third LP—with an expansive mix of anthems (“Fingers of Steel”), rippers (“Six-Pack,” “Different Person”), and ballads (“All the People,” the Phoebe Bridgers-featuring “Adderall”) that, like the Pixies before them, delivers the twists and abrasions of underground music with the straightforward warmth of classic rock. To note that they wrote most of it in a couple of weeks (and recorded it live in the studio) would sound like a corny bid for the scruffy vitality of rock ’n’ roll, were it not for the fact that you can tell.

shame were tourists in their own adolescence - and nothing was quite like the postcard. The freefall of their early twenties, in all its delight and disaster, was tangled up in being hailed one of post-punk’s greatest hopes. In 2018, they took their incendiary debut album Songs of Praise for a cross-continental joyride for almost 350 relentless nights. They tried to bite off more than they could chew, just to prove their teeth were sharp enough – but eventually, you’ve got to learn to spit it out. Then came the hangover. shame’s frontman, Charlie Steen, suffered a series of panic attacks which led to the tour’s cancellation. For the first time, since being plucked from the stage of The Windmill and catapulted into notoriety, shame were confronted with who they’d become on the other side of it. This era, of being forced to endure reality and the terror that comes with your own company, would form shame’s second album, 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink, the band’s reinvention. If Songs of Praise was fuelled by pint-sloshing teenage vitriol, then Drunk Tank Pink delved into a different kind of intensity. Wading into uncharted musical waters, emboldened by their wit and earned cynicism, they created something with the abandon of a band who had nothing to lose. Having forced their way through their second album’s identity crisis, they arrive, finally, at a place of hard-won maturity. Enter: Food for Worms, which Steen declares to be “the Lamborghini of shame records.” For the first time, the band are not delving inwards, but seeking to capture the world around them. “I don’t think you can be in your own head forever,” says Steen. A conversation after one of their gigs with a friend prompted a stray thought that he held onto: “It’s weird, isn’t it? Popular music is always about love, heartbreak, or yourself. There isn’t much about your mates.” In many ways, the album is an ode to friendship, and a documentation of the dynamic that only five people who have grown up together - and grown so close, against all odds - can share. The title, Food for Worms, takes on different meanings when considered with the ten vignettes the band has painted for you across the record. That spirit of interpretation, to see yourself reflected within it, is conveyed through the cover art. Designed by acclaimed artist Marcel Dzama, whose style evokes dark fairy tales and surrealism, it’s suggestive of what’s left unsaid, what lies beneath the surface. On the one hand, Food for Worms calls to mind a certain morbidity, but on the other, it’s a celebration of life; the way that, in the end, we need each other. It also strikes at the core of shame itself. Since the beginning, the band has been in the business of finding the light in uncomfortable contradictions: Steen always makes a point of taking his top off during performances as a way of tackling his body weight insecurities. Through sheer defiance, they play their vulnerabilities as strengths. Reconnecting with that ethos is what hotwired the band into making the album after a false start during the pandemic. Without pressure or an end goal - just a long expanse of time - nothing would hold. Their management then presented them with a challenge: in just under three weeks, shame would play two shows at The Windmill where they would be expected to debut two sets of entirely new songs. This opportunity meant that the band returned the same ideology which propelled them to these heights in the first place: the love of playing live, on their own terms, fed by their audience. Thus, Food for Worms careened and crashed into life faster than anything they’d created before: a weapons-grade cocktail that captured all the gristle, fragility and carnal physicality that earned shame their merits. It was only right that shame would record the album entirely live for the first time. The band recorded Food for Worms while playing festivals all over Europe, invigorated by the strength of the reaction their new material was met with. That live energy, what it’s like to witness shame in their element, is captured perfectly on record - like lightning in a bottle. They called upon renowned producer Flood (Nick Cave, U2, Foals) to execute their vision. Recording each track live meant a kind of surrender: here, the rough edges give the album its texture; the mistakes are more interesting than perfection. In a way, it harks back to the title itself and the way that with this record, the band are embracing frailty and by doing so, are tapping into a new source of bravery. It also marks a sonic departure from anything they’ve done before. shame have abandoned their post-punk beginnings for far more eclectic influences, drawing from the tense atmospherics of Merchandise, the sharp yet uncomplicated lyrical observations of Lou Reed and the more melodic works of 90s German band, Blumfeld. In the past, their music had been almost clinically assembled, with the vocals and the band existing as two distinct layers. But Food for Worms, there has never been such an immediate sense of togetherness - and more than that, it was fun. Everyone chipped in on vocals; they made the unifying choice to sing, rather than the solitude that comes with a shout. Roles were not so fiercely defined, with Steen taking command of the bass guitar for the anthemic “Adderall”, devising a simple progression that bassist Josh Finerty would never dream of, pushing the album into new, unexpected places. “Adderall” staggers, feeling the weight of its own bones, evoking a certain desperation that comes with dragging yourself through an internal fog. Steen explains: “‘Adderall’ is the observation of a person reliant on prescription drugs. These pills shift their mental and physical state and alter their behaviour; it’s about how this affects them and those around them. It’s a song of compassion, frustration and the acceptance of change. It’s partly coming to terms with the fact that sometimes your help and love can’t cure those around you but, as much as it causes exasperation, you still won’t ever stop trying to help.” The album opens with “Fingers of Steel”, which is heralded with an airy piano section that plunges into nosebleed-inducing guitars like a mutant orchestra; it was completely transformed from its folk-indebted beginnings. It delves into the cyclical nature of friendship, which the title invites you to consider. “‘Fingers of Steel’ is about helping a mate and the frustrations that come with it,” shares Steen. “It’s coming to terms with the fact that people can’t be who you want them to be and sometimes there isn’t anything you can do to help, it’s their own thing they have to work out for themselves and you have to accept that.” But it wouldn’t be shame if there wasn’t a bit of theatrical flair, signed off with a smirk. “Six Pack”, with its psychedelic wah-wah grooves and frenetic guitarwork, sees Steen act as your spirit guide into a room where, within those four walls, your wildest dreams come true: “Now you’ve got Pamela Anderson reading you a bedtime story / And every scratch card is a fucking winner!” he howls. The song is a product of lockdown-induced cabin fever, and the absurd places our mind can wander when we are confined. It’s an anthem for newfound freedom: “You’ve done time behind bars, and now you’re making time in front of them,” Steen sings, with a showman’s grandeur. It’s time to make up for everything you’ve lost or wasted - and shame wants it all. Food for Worms also sees Steen deliver one of his greatest vocal performances which came from learning to lean into the vulnerabilities his lyrics portray, rather than deflecting them. “Orchid”, opens with the easy amble of an acoustic guitar, a different sound for the band which required careful consideration for how his voice would adapt to it. His vocal teacher, Rebecca Phillips, encouraged him to approach it unflinchingly. He recalls her telling him: “Anything that you’re singing is obviously personal, but a very male tendency is to detach from it and think of the melody, instead of what you’re saying.” It was this new technique that allowed shame to embrace the songs that dealt with a deeply personal subject: fear for a friend’s mental well-being. Steen’s voice paces with sleepless worry, guilt, frustration – and absolute tenderness. Closing track “All the People”, a great musical swell of brotherly love, haunts the mind the lingering words penned by guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith: “All the people that you’re gonna meet / Don’t you throw it all away / Because you can’t love yourself.” With that weight, there is a lightness to the song which captures the spirit of Food for Worms and all the thoughts that expression evokes, all that bittersweetness. And even if you can’t put those feelings into words, shame have found them for you.

Looking backwards and forwards all at once, drawing on influences from across every spectrum, 1982 is an unpredictable record that will reward a dedicated listener dozens of times over. Even by the band’s high standards - which includes a gleeful disregard for boundaries of style and genre, their eye fixed firmly on constant movement forwards - their latest studio album 1982 is multidimensional. Recorded by the core ACR line up of Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson, alongside Tony Quigley, Matthew Steele and Ellen Beth Abdi, it shoots off in every direction, whether via searing Afrobeat, mind-melting jazz breakdowns or moody electronic experiments. And the album title? Although 1982 might conjure memories of the year that saw ACR put out both the acclaimed Sextet and the cult favourite I’d Like To See You Again, it’s more of a playful red herring than an invitation to nostalgia.

“Almost everyone that I love has been abused, and I am included,” declares Arlo Parks with arresting honesty in the first lines of her second album *My Soft Machine*. Then, almost in the same breath, she adds, “The person I love is patient with me/She’s feeding me cheese and I’m happy.” It’s an apt introduction to an album that both basks in the light—as Parks celebrates the affirming joy of falling deeply in love—and delves into darkness. “The core concept of the project is that this is reality and memory through my eyes, experienced within this body,” Parks tells Apple Music. “From the loss of innocence to the reliving of trauma to the endless nights bursting through Koreatown to first kisses in dimly lit dive bars, this is about my life.” It’s all told, of course, with the poetic, diary-entry lyricism that made *Collapsed in Sunbeams* so special—and which catapulted Parks to voice-of-a-generation status. Here, Parks also allows her indie-pop sound to unfurl, with embraces of synths, scuzzy guitars (see “Devotion,” the album’s most electrifying and unexpected moment), jazz, gorgeous harmonies (on the sweet, Phoebe Bridgers-guested “Pegasus”), electronic music, and more. That came, she says, in part from the team she assembled for the album, who allowed her to be more “fluid” (*My Soft Machine* was worked on with names including BROCKHAMPTON producer Romil Hemnani, the prolific US songwriter/producer Ariel Rechtshaid, and Frank Ocean collaborator Baird). “The community that organically formed around the album is one of my favorite things about it,” says Parks. “I think there is a confidence to the work. There is a looseness and an energy. There was a sense of sculpting that went beyond the more instinctive and immediate process of making album one. I am very proud of this.” Read on for the singer-songwriter’s track-by-track guide to *My Soft Machine*. **“Bruiseless”** “This song is about childhood abandon and the growing pains. It was inspired by a conversation I had with \[American poet\] Ocean Vuong where he said he was constantly trying to capture the unadulterated joy of cycling up to a friend’s house and abandoning the bike on the grass, wheels spinning, whilst you race up to their door—the softness and purity of that moment.” **“Impurities”** “I wrote this song the first time I met my dear friend Romil from BROCKHAMPTON. My friends and I were party-hopping and every time we called an Uber it was a Cadillac Escalade, which we thought was hilarious at the time. This is a song that is simply about being happy and feeling truly accepted.” **“Devotion”** “Romil, Baird and I were driving to a coffee shop called Maru in the Arts District of LA in Baird’s Suzuki Vitara that I nicknamed the ‘Red Rocket.’ We were blasting ‘17 Days’ by Prince. The three of us decided two things during that 15-minute round trip: that we had to fully commit to drama and that we were a rock band for the day.” **“Blades”** “The reference to the aquarium scene in Baz Luhrmann’s *Romeo + Juliet* refers to the idea of looking at a person you once knew so intimately and something indescribable has changed—as if you’re looking at each other through ocean water or obscure glass.” **“Purple Phase”** “The guitars you hear on this song are Paul \[Epworth, the British producer who also worked on *Collapsed in Sunbeams*\] and I just improvising. It was the last day of a long working week, we were feeling free and connected and our heads were cleared by exhaustion—we didn’t even have the capacity to overthink. This song has one of my favorite lines I’ve ever written: ‘I just want to see you iridescent charming cats down from trees/Mugler aviators hiding eyes that laugh when concealed.’” **“Weightless”** “Making ‘Weightless’ was a defining moment in the album process. I felt completely unchained from *Collapsed in Sunbeams*. Anything was possible, Paul \[Epworth\] and I were just chaos-dancing around the room and giggling. This one is very special to me and gave me so much creative confidence.” **“Pegasus (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)”** “Of course ‘Pegasus’ features lovely Phoebe \[Bridgers\]. The inspirations for the sparseness melting into the light, dancy beat were ‘White Ferrari’ by Frank Ocean, ‘Talk Down’ by Dijon, and ‘Grieve Not the Spirit’ by AIR. This is the first song I’ve written being so candid about how tricky it can be to accept someone being unbelievably kind.” **“Dog Rose”** “The original demo for this song was recorded in a hotel room in Toronto. I had the idea for the riff in the chorus and I was lying wide awake at 3 am just letting it drive me insane. Then I got up and ran about 15 blocks, through parks and across bridges, to get my guitar from the bus and get the idea down. It was very dramatic.” **“Puppy”** “I had always wanted to capture that half-spoken, half-melodic cadence—kind of like Frank Ocean in ‘In My Room’—and I was so pleased when I achieved it. The fuzzed-out guitar-sounding instrument is actually this little synth that \[producer\] Buddy \[Ross\] has. We were trying to recreate the energy of \[my bloody valentine’s\] *Loveless*.” **“I’m Sorry”** “Garrett Ray from Vampire Weekend’s touring band is on drums and David Longstreth \[the lead singer and guitarist\] from Dirty Projectors is on guitar for this one. Sculpting the right sonic treatment for this song took what felt like years, but it’s definitely my favorite song on the record from a textural and feel point of view.” **“Room (Red Wings)”** “‘Red Wings’ is a reference to the book *Autobiography of Red* by Anne Carson. The main character has distinctive red wings; his home life is tumultuous and he finds comfort in photography and falls deeply in love with a man called Herakles. The fragility and heart-rending nature of this book mirrors the broken quality of the song.” **“Ghost”** “This is the oldest song on the record. I demoed it in the winter of 2020 in my childhood bedroom. At the core of the song is a sense of embracing help, embracing human touch, learning not to suffer in solitude, learning to let people in.”

*** OUT WORLDWIDE ON JANUARY 27th, 2023! *** London group The Tubs return to Trouble In Mind with their hotly anticipated full-length album entitled “Dead Meat”. The band were formed in 2018 from the ashes of beloved UK post-punk band Joanna Gruesome by former members Owen 'O' Williams and George 'GN' Nicholls. By incorporating elements of post-punk, traditional British folk, and guitar jangle seasoned by nonchalant Cleaners From Venus-influenced pop hooks and contemporary antipodean indie bands (Twerps/Goon Sax, et al). “Dead Meat” is resplendent in hi-fidelity strum & thrum, incorporating fleeting elements of post-punk and indie jangle, but the group’s penchant for trad British folk & Canterbury folk-rock takes a noticeable, caffeinated step forward. Echoes of Fairport Convention’s decidedly English chime cross swords with singer Owen Williams’ lyrics directing Bryan Ferry’s “thinking man’s libertine” persona into a more dolorous outlook. Many songs (like “Round The Bend” and “Duped”) soar with an urgent strum under Williams’ acerbic lyrics, recalling a younger fiery Richard Thompson. They languish in an aching, bitter resignation (of both the situations described & the protagonist’s place in it), particularly near the album’s second half. Others like the previously released “I Don’t Know How It Works”, “Two Person Love” and “Illusion” (re-presented here as “Illusion Pt. II” and all rerecorded from their original 7-inch versions) up the urgency, implying that the journey for the person described in each tune is not over & may be even more desperate than before. The band has never been tighter & more dynamic, often imperceptibly ratcheting up the tension, an extra guitar strum overdubbed, a barely audible organ/synth cranking under a chorus or bridge, or unexpected backups from current Ex-Vöid (and ex-Joanna Gruesome) vocalist Lan McArdle. The Tubs are poised to take over your stereo - there’s no point in resisting. “Dead Meat” is released on CD, cassette & LP (a limited “British Steel” silver vinyl version is available while supplies last) on January 13th, 2023.

Each album from Oneohtrix Point Never, the project of songwriter and producer Daniel Lopatin, is informed by an open-ended theme or prompt. This allows each release to feel tied to some general philosophy while still being wholly unique. On 2015’s *Garden of Delete*, he made songs built around made-up scrapped vocals from pop stars; 2018’s *Age Of* pictured a world gone insane, with nothing left but artificial intelligence to determine what cultural touchstones were deemed worth keeping. On his 2023 album *Again*, the artist once again concocts a daring concept, this time imagining the project as a conversation between his current and former selves. On the album he asks, “What’s worth keeping? What do we throw away?” Among the detritus that inherently comes alongside radical technological development, what will outlast us? Lopatin recruited a number of collaborators for the project, including Robert Ames, Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke, Xiu Xiu, and Lovesliescrushing. While they’re mostly disparate in spirit, each artist has at times toyed with the interplay between electric and acoustic clashes, which Lopatin highlights on *Again*. Gorgeously arranged string suites come crashing against grating synths on the title track; massive electronic drums launch Lopatin’s voice towards the heavens on “Krumville.” Acoustic guitar strums get similarly propelled on “Memories of Music.” Lopatin collides sounds from different eras of his discography, highlighting both the diversity of his work and the underlying ideas he returns to time and again. There’s no such thing as *one* Oneohtrix Point Never signature sound; Lopatin’s ear is too shifty, too excited by what comes next and how it emerges. His trademark is a hodgepodge of inspirations—from full orchestral symphonies to barely perceptible VCR buzz. On *Again*, Daniel Lopatin taps into all these worlds—the ones he has created and the futures he imagines—to capture a moment in time, before it shifts once again.

Death and Vanilla return with ‘Flicker’, presenting their unique pop music that defies categorisation. Housed in a beautifully austere post-ironic de-constructed sleeve; ‘Flicker’ is a modern reflection on these difficult times. World crises notwithstanding, they return reborn, re-arranged and revitalised after assimilating dub reggae, the motorik spirals of Can, the modal meander of Philip Glass and The Cure’s dreamier pop sounds; plus the twice removed symphonic ambience of Spiritualized and Talking Heads under heavy manners from Brian Eno. By osmosis their period of transition since 2019’s much darker ‘Are You A Dreamer?’ has hatched new eclectic electronica anthems riddled with melody lines, and layered for lush love. Forming in Malmö, Sweden, Death And Vanilla gravitated towards vintage musical equipment; from vibraphone, organ and mellotron, to tremolo guitar and Moog synthesisers. Soaking up soundtracks from the 60s and 70s, listening to library music, kosmiche, French Ye-ye pop and 60s psych, Marleen Nilsson, Anders Hansson and Magnus Bodin were fashioned by the city’s austere industrial past and flat pack present, and all in the shadow of the Orsesund Bridge that links their dreamworld to mainland Europe and a darker reality. “Deploying vintage instruments in their quest for melancholic utopia.” Electronic Sound Death And Vanilla at once sound like everything is possible; but nothing else at all. There is a flicker of hope for everyone.

No band could ever prepare for what the Foo Fighters went through after the death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, but in a way, it’s hard to imagine a band that could handle it better. From the beginning, their music captured a sense of perseverance that felt superheroic without losing the workaday quality that made them so approachable and appealing. These were guys you could imagine clocking into the studio with lunchpails and thermoses in hand—a post-grunge AC/DC who grew into rock-pantheon standard-bearers, treating their art not as rarified personal expression but the potential for a universal good time. The mere existence of *But Here We Are*, arriving with relatively little fanfare a mere 15 months after Hawkins’ death, tells you what you need to know: Foo Fighters are a rock band, rock bands make records. That’s just what rock bands do. And while this steadiness has been key to Dave Grohl’s identity and longevity, there is a fire beneath it here that he surely would have preferred to find some other way. Grief presents here in every form—the shock of opening track “Rescued” (“Is this happening now?!”), the melancholy of “Show Me How” (on which Grohl duets with his daughter Violet), the anger of 10-minute centerpiece “The Teacher,” and the fragile acceptance of the almost slowcore finale “Rest.” “Under You” processes all the stages in defiantly jubilant style. And after more than 20 years as one of the most polished arena-rock bands in the world, they play with a rawness that borders on ugly. Just listen to the discord of “The Teacher” or the frayed vocals of the title track or the sweet-and-sour chorus of “Nothing at All,” which sound more like Hüsker Dü or Fugazi than “Learn to Fly.” The temptation is to suggest that trauma forced them back to basics. The reality is that they sound like a band with a lot of life behind them trying to pave the road ahead.

Forget the mumbled vocals and air of perpetual dislocation—Archy Marshall is a traditionalist, albeit a subtle one. Like all King Krule albums, *Space Heavy* has its jagged moments (“Pink Shell,” the back half of the title track). But as a father on the cusp of 30, he seems evermore in touch with the quiet contentments that make our perceived miseries endurable: a long walk on a chilly beach, a full moon seen from a clean bed. His ballads feel like doo-wop without exactly sounding like them (“Our Vacuum”), and the broken sweetness of his guitars are both ’90s indie-rock and the sleepy jazz of an after-hours lounge (“That Is My Life, That Is Yours”). New approach, same old beauty.

**RELEASED 20TH JANUARY 2023**

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

Protomartyr’s slurred ramblings and miasmic clouds of guitar have always had a touch of the apocalypse in them, or at least of the decay that might lead there. The paradox is how the Detroit band manages to make that decay sound so grand. New Wave rippers (“For Tomorrow”) and leather-jacket music (“Fun in Hi Skool”), ’50s slow dances (“Make Way”) and jock jams for the recently undead (“Polacrilex Kid”): Where some post-punk bands lean into their artiness and Eurocentrism, Protomartyr sound like Midwesterners raised on arena rock and the looming intensity of Bible stories. “Welcome to the haunted earth/The living afterlife,” Joe Casey moans at the album\'s onset. He’s grinding his teeth under the bleachers as we speak.

After a long stint living in Australia, Zambian rapper Sampa Tembo returned to the country of her birth to make her second studio album. A swaggering celebration of self-love and cultural identity, *As Above So Below* sees Tembo incorporate traditional Zambian music as well as cutting-edge hip-hop and subtler stylistic cues from psych, blues, and folk. “It has the traditional spiritual elements,” Tembo tells Apple Music, “but then we are venturing off into worlds that are not considered Zambian music and we are creating a new genre, which is really exciting for me.” Setting out to smash preconceptions about African women, Tembo scoffs at the idea of staying in her lane on the Denzel Curry-featuring “Lane” and enlists trailblazing Beninese singer Angelique Kidjo to further lift the self-affirming finale “Let Me Be Great.” Tembo’s younger sister Mwanje also sings on two tracks, while Joey Bada\$$ adds his own spin to the theme of hiding one’s true self on the slinking, bass-blasted “Mask On.” *As Above So Below* even showcases some of Zambia’s native languages, reinforcing the central concept of embracing home. “There’s a vibration in language,” says Tembo. “That\'s why I’m very adamant of adding my language to the situation. You can’t change it. You can’t change it and you can’t fake it.”

The Icelandic avant-rock outfit Sigur Rós has been making music, in various arrangements, for nearly 30 years. Their debut full-length *Von* came out in 1997, and their breakthrough album *Ágætis byrjun* arrived two years later. The second project was the first to feature multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson, who, despite departing the group 15 years later, has always been seen as a critical piece of the magic. After their surprisingly dark and dissonant 2013 album *Kveikur*, the band took a break, focusing on personal projects and personal lives. But a series of casual jam sessions—from Iceland’s Sundlaugin to London’s Abbey Road—reignited their creative spark and resulted in *ÁTTA*, their first album in 10 years. The project, a collaboration with conductor Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra, is full of sweeping, mystical soundscapes that mirror the majestic vistas of the group’s home country. Although there is a lingering sense of apocalyptic foreboding—very likely a nod to climate-disaster-related doom—most of these songs are imbued with hope. “Gold,” a meditative vocal number bathed in pastel tones, seems to surround you, wide and warm, like arms in an embrace. “Andrá,” glacial and glowing, is practically a hymnal. Even the more mournful songs (“Skel,” “Mór,” and “Fall” are three) feel affectionate and tender—more like bittersweet love songs than sounds of alarm. For a band that has long been openly weary about the state of the world—a rage captured vividly on their last studio record—this project feels like a deep, cathartic breath, a tribute to the magnificent beauty that remains.

In early 2020, Alison Goldfrapp decided she needed to take a sabbatical. “I just stopped music,” she tells Apple Music. “I stopped making music, I stopped listening to music. I didn’t want to hear it. I went on a road trip on my own in New Mexico. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of driving and not listening to music. It was a real purging.” She returned to London ready to tackle long-awaited solo music away from the eponymous, beloved band she formed in 1999 with Will Gregory. “And then, of course, the pandemic happened,” she says. “‘Great,’ I thought, ‘now my bloody sabbatical’s going to go on for ages.’” Eventually, though, Goldfrapp reemerged with her “mojo back” armed with email addresses for potential collaborators. Another hiccup: Almost nobody replied to her messages. “I just think people can’t be arsed to read their emails a lot of the time,” she laughs. “The experience has made me really pride myself on getting back to people. But Röyksopp did reply! As did James Greenwood, who worked on Kelly Lee Owens’ *Inner Song*, which I loved.” After some exploratory work with Röyksopp, Goldfrapp got her sea legs, settled on an “atmosphere” and rules (“it had to be rhythm-based, and no real instruments allowed”) for a set that would become her “tribute to the dance floor.” Work with Greenwood ramped up between her home studio in London and his in Margate, and electro-pop icon Richard X was brought in to round off *The Love Invention*’s core. Below, Goldfrapp guides us through the exquisite, Italo-disco-inspired results, track by track. **“NeverStop”** “We start with the voice of the therapist—or the other part of your consciousness—asking you, ‘What the fuck? How do you see yourself? Where are you in all of this?’ So it’s a play. It’s about the idea of stopping and looking around you and appreciating what’s around you, because you’re going to be here for a bloody minute. So get on and enjoy it and feel the connection to your surroundings, to nature and what it is to be human—which is an ongoing theme that I’m fascinated by.” **“Love Invention”** “Early on I had this idea for this fantasy band, Dr. What and The Love Invention. That was going to be the idea for the album to form around. And then I thought, ‘Oh, it sounds like a psychedelic prog-rock band,’ so I toned it down a little. But he lives on here. Dr. What is this fantasy character who has created this wonder drug and machine, which enables you to experience the ultimate love experience, the ultimate euphoria, the ultimate sex, the ultimate everything. So this song is asking, ‘Is this real? Can this be real?’ It’s also a metaphor for some other consciousness.” **“Digging Deeper Now”** “This came out of a feeling that everything had changed—we had come out of various lockdowns, I had built my studio, I had changed, my body had changed, and I was overwhelmed by a feeling of ‘What’s next?’ I had taken my sabbatical and by that point I had reflected on a lot of things, dug deep and was ready for it. For this.” **“In Electric Blue”** “I worked on this one with \[longtime Bruce Springsteen collaborator\] Toby Scott. I went down to Brighton where he lives and I just started jamming. It’s quite daunting for me to work with new people at the beginning because I’m quite shy and I worked with Will \[Gregory, her Goldfrapp bandmate\] for so bloody long. But I like the energy of someone completely new. It’s all a bit uncertain and I like that tension. This song is about a ghost—about feeling someone’s presence and yearning for some precious time. It’s a romantic ghost story, essentially. I was fantasizing about being a teenager in some ’80s teen move in LA. It has a sweetness and euphoria to it that I really like.” **“The Beat Divine”** “The Italo disco influence across the record is particularly strong here. I felt a light go off when I tapped into that Italo disco feel. I wanted this song to have that Euro-but-New-York, light feeling to it. The song’s quite urban—I was really thinking about being in some big, noisy city.” **“Fever (This Is the Real Thing)”** “This was a tough one to penetrate. It’s quite a lot about climate change and about us humans being the fever. The germ. But it’s also a fever as in this frenzied feeling I was experiencing with the music—this frantic relationship I had with it. I would get so ‘What the fuck is this?’ and so wanted it to work.” **“Hotel (Suite 23)”** “This song is about me staying in hotels and the idea of transience. I stayed in a lot of hotels when I was going down to Margate to see James. I have a love-hate relationship with hotels, but there is a lot I love. It’s this place of fantasy, where you can be who you want to be and no one else is going to know about it. I love going to a hotel just to be on your own, too—this place to be lonely and indulge in that. So this is a humorous look at my feelings towards hotels—because I did stay in some absolutely fucking godawful places. Including one that I’m fairly certain was a brothel. And it didn’t even have a minibar.” **“Subterfuge”** “This has quite a different mood to everything else. I wanted it to sound really synthetic and glacial. I was really trying to find out what rhymed with \'subterfuge.\' I came up with \'centrifuge,\' as I always love a bit of science in there somewhere.” **“Gatto Gelato”** “I was very inspired here by catwalk walking. I did a lot of watching of strutting. Rhythmically, the attitude of it, the arrangements and production of a catwalk show. It was Richard’s idea to call it ‘Gatto Gelato’—it was a working title that stuck.” **“So Hard So Hot”** “James sent me this as a very skeletal thing, but I loved that bassline. I wanted it to have a tension and that burst of quite strident vocal—not monotone, but quite flat, quite direct. But I wanted it to then have this chorus that flew. It’s the idea of living your life in the sun and celebrating the moment.” **“SLoFLo”** “This is about something very specific and very personal, so I’m not going to say what it’s about. At one point I thought, ‘I want to put strings on this, real strings.’ And then I thought, ‘No, no, keep it all synth, keep it all fake.’ Nearly all the songs on the album—even though they’re very dance- and club-influenced—have a formal song structure to them, whereas this doesn’t. And it became the perfect album closer.”

“We have to be friends”—the first song written for *PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE*—had a profound impact on its author. “I was like, ‘What the hell is going to be this record? This is going to be my awakening,” Chris tells Apple Music’s Proud Radio. “The song was all-knowing of something and admonishing me finally to stop being blind or something. So I started to take music even more seriously and more spiritually.” Even before that track, the French alt-pop talent had begun to embrace spirituality and prayer following the death of his mother in 2019—a loss that also colored much of 2022’s *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*. But letting it into his music took him to deeper places than ever before. “This journey of music has been very extreme because I wanted to devote myself and I went to extreme places that changed me forever,” adds Chris. “An awakening is just the beginning of a spiritual journey, so I wouldn\'t say I\'m there, it would be arrogant. But it\'s definitely the opening of a clear path of spirituality through music.” After the high-concept, operatic *Redcar*, this album—a three-part epic lasting almost two hours that’s rooted in (and whose name nods to) Tony Kushner’s 1991 play *Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes*, an exploration of AIDS in 1980s America—confirms our arrival into the most ambitious Christine and the Queens era yet. The songs here will demand more of you than the smart pop that made Christine and the Queens famous—but they will also richly reward your attention, with sprawling, synth-led outpourings that reveal something new with every listen. Here, Chris (who collaborated with talent including superproducer MIKE DEAN and 070 Shake) reaches for trip-hop (the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Tears can be so soft”), classical music (the sublime “Full of life,” which layers Chris’ reverbed vocals over the instantly recognizable Pachelbel’s Canon), ’80s-style drums (“We have to be friends”), and the kind of haunting, atmospheric ballads this artist excels at (“To be honest”). Oh, and the album’s narrator? Madonna. “I was like, ‘If Madonna was just like a stage character, it would be brilliant,’” says Chris. “I pitch it like fast, quite intensely: ‘I need you to be the voice of everything. You need to be this voice of, maybe it\'s my mom, maybe it\'s the Queen Mary, maybe it\'s a computer, maybe it\'s everything.’ And she was like, ‘You\'re crazy, I\'ll do it.’” Chris gave the narrator a name: Big Eye. “The whole thing was insane, which is the best thing,” he says. “The record itself solidified itself in maybe less than a month. I was writing a new song every day. It was quite consistent and a wild journey. And as I was singing the song, the character was surfacing in the words. I was like, ‘Oh, this is a character.’ Big Eye was the name I gave the character because it\'s this very all-encompassing, slightly worrying angel voice, could be dystopian.” For Chris, this album was a teacher and a healer—even a “shaman.” “I discovered so much more of myself and rediscovered why I loved music so hard,” he says. “And it\'s this great light journey of healing I adore.” It also cracked open his heart. “This record for me is a message of love,” he adds. “It comes from me, but it comes from the invisible as well. Honestly, I felt a bit cradled by extra strength. Even the collaboration I had, this whole journey was about friendship, finding meaning in pain too. It opened my heart.”

Thebe Kgositsile emerged in 2010 as the most mysterious member of rap’s weirdest new collective, Odd Future—a gifted teen turned anarchist, spitting shock-rap provocations from his exile in a Samoan reform school. In the 12 years since, he’s repaired his famously fraught relationship with his mother, lost his father, and become a father himself, all the while carving out a solo lane as a serious MC, a student of the game. Earl’s fourth album finds the guy who once titled an album *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside*, well, going outside, and kinda liking it; on opener “Old Friend,” he’s hacking through thickets, camping out in Catskills rainstorms. There’s a sonic clarity here that stands apart from the obscure, sludgy sounds of his recent records, executed in part by Young Guru, JAY-Z’s longtime engineer. Beats from The Alchemist and Black Noi$e snap, crackle, and bounce, buoying Earl’s slippery, open-ended thoughts on family, writing, religion, the pandemic. Is he happy now, the kid we’ve watched become a man? It’s hard to say, but in any case, as he raps on “Fire in the Hole”: “It’s no rewinding/For the umpteenth time, it’s only forward.”

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

If Georgia’s 2020 album *Seeking Thrills* was about embracing hedonism and escape on the dance floor, its follow-up *Euphoric* is about, well, seeking new thrills. “The world changed in the two years after *Seeking Thrills* came out, and I was on a journey of redefining what escapism meant for me,” the London singer, songwriter, drummer, and producer (full name Georgia Barnes) tells Apple Music. “It was wanting to try and have new experiences and push myself into new realms.” It was also about cracking open her creative process after years of being her own sounding board. So she enlisted Rostam Batmanglij, the ex-Vampire Weekend member and go-to indie producer (HAIM, Clairo, Frank Ocean), who she’d first met at his Los Angeles studio in late 2019. “It was a boom moment,” remembers Georgia—and it’s not hard to see why: That day, the pair wrote “It’s Euphoric,” the opening track here. The song, like much of this record (which they worked on remotely during lockdown before reuniting in late 2021 and early 2022 in LA), represents a meeting of two musical minds. Georgia’s obsession with dance and electronic music fuses with the warm live instrumentation that has become Rostam’s signature. “What I saw as a cool inspiration was every era of dance music colliding,” says Rostam. “You have drum ’n’ bass, you have house, you have electronica. And I think as a co-producer, my role was to be like, ‘What if you play it on drums?’ And Georgia was kind of like, ‘Really, we could do that?’ I said, ‘Not only could we do that, but it’ll sound really good if we do.’” Here, you’ll also hear shades of shimmering early-2000s pop (the “Pure Shores”-like “Give It up for Love”), New Order (“The Dream”), MGMT and Daft Punk (“All Night”), and dub (the gorgeous “Keep On”). It’s an album that’s expansive yet intimate and immediate—and Georgia’s most pop-leaning moment yet. “I wanted a new experience, and I hope people listen to this record and feel inspired to take risks,” she says. Read on as Georgia and Rostam walk us through the making of *Euphoric*, one track at a time. **“It’s Euphoric”** Rostam Batmanglij: “I was the one who reached out to Georgia. I had heard \[the Mura Masa track featuring Georgia\] ‘Live Like We’re Dancing,’ and I was just amazed by it—I was so taken by her voice. It made me really curious to work with her, and the first day we ever met, we wrote this. Georgia had come up with the bass part on the piano, and then she said something like, ‘And then for the next part, what if you put in some chords that made it sound really euphoric?’ And as soon as she said that, I was like, ‘Well, what if “euphoric” was the lyric of the chorus?’ It was kind of a funny ‘the rest is history’ moment. It was definitely Georgia: She brought that lyric in just by describing what she wanted from the music.” **“Give It up for Love”** Georgia: “The demo was so inspired by William Orbit and specifically Madonna’s *Ray of Light* \[which Orbit produced\]. It was one of the biggest pop records and yet it sounds so left-of-center and dance-y. I was just really fascinated by it. Then it just so happened that someone from my label was in touch with him and said, ‘Do you want to go and meet him for a coffee?’ We ended up being in this café for four or five hours just talking about music. I told him I’d written this track and said, ‘It’s very inspired by your sound. Do you want to add some beats?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, sure. Send it to me.’ It was really amazing.” RB: “I felt certain it wouldn’t be hard to get the final vocals for this song, but Georgia was changing her mind about lyrics—and we had four days before she was getting on a flight back. This song crept up on us from feeling like it would be easy to finish to suddenly being like, ‘Uh-oh, what are we going to do?’ Both of us were throwing different lyric ideas back and forth and spent a few days being really hard on ourselves. But those are some of my favorite lyrics, the ones that we wrote really under pressure.” **“Some Things You’ll Never Know”** G: “The demo of this was a lot darker and a lot more minor. That’s maybe why it feels a bit more like *Seeking Thrills*, because it was clubbier. Rostam said, ‘Let’s experiment a bit with the chords,’ and I think that was a really important moment for us, because I could have been like, ‘No, you are not touching this.’ I’m glad that I was in a total mindset of just experimenting and listening to other people. Rostam could hear the disco side of this song and wanted to add in a mad disco line. And I was like, ‘Yeah, wicked. Let’s do it.’” RB: “We realized it sounded like Kylie, but we both liked it, so we did something right. The funny thing about this song is that Georgia fell out of love with it while making the album. But I never did. And when we finished it, she said, ‘I think that might be my favorite now.’” **“Mountain Song”** G: “A kind of underwater sound is Rostam’s characteristic, and coming out of water is also something that’s very popular in dance music. I love the water. I spend a lot of time when I can in the seas around the world if I’m touring—I often find it’s the most calming place to be in. And that definitely influenced the lyrics of ‘Mountain Song’—it does sort of feel like you’re in the water or swimming. We wanted this song to be a bit of a journey. What’s nice about this one is that it has it all: our influences and the visceral elements of the ’90s.” **“All Night”** G: “This is one of the songs I sent to Rostam during lockdown. I hadn’t written the vocals, just these chords, but I was like, ‘God, there’s potential in these chords.’ This is an example of us recreating a breakbeat through our own means.” RB: “This one is interesting because it sounds electronic, but there are a lot of organic things. Georgia is playing the Wurlitzer \[electric piano\] and the drums, and I did the synth line on an analog synth. So there’s a lot of stuff that’s real. The way we’ve mixed Georgia’s voice in there, it almost feels like a sample. There’s vocals on this record where I think we’re kind of blurring the line between a piece of source material and a Georgia vocal. We were trying to make a fun pop song.” **“Live Like We’re Dancing (Part II)”** RB: “I felt we needed one more song. I thought, ‘What if we just tried another take of this “Live Like We’re Dancing” and it could be the sequel?’ Georgia took some convincing. Our version turned out slower and, in some ways, it’s a risk to take a dance song and slow it down.” G: “Luckily we know Alex \[aka Mura Masa\] really well and he gave us the go-ahead. He was really excited. Actually, it’s all kind of down to Alex that we’re in this. So it felt really nice to have that part of the story on the record. Alex sent me an email saying, ‘Mine is the 11:00 pm version and yours is the 6:00 am version.’” **“The Dream”** G: “Before I’d made this record, I was in a relationship and it was kind of the first real relationship for me where I’d been like, ‘This is important.’ Then it ended. I had a really poignant dream about me and this person. I remember talking to Rostam about it—we were writing the basics of the song, and I thought, ‘Let’s make it about the dream I had.’ We were quite inspired by early New Order. It was a moment on the record to be a little darker, a little more punky perhaps. My mum hears this record as a love record. Perhaps it was, perhaps I’d just been through this breakup and was also exploring what I was doing in life.” **“Keep On”** G: “I’ve got a memory of me sitting at Rostam’s, writing and looking out over Downtown LA in the golden hour of sunset. I just felt really content and happy that I’d made the right decision. I was probably the happiest I had been in ages, just in Rostam’s room. I think this song reflects that.” RB: “There was a vocal part in the original version of this that Georgia brought to the studio, that sounded like ‘keep-ah, keep-ah,’ and I couldn’t tell what it was. Eventually, we decided it should be lyrics, and the first thing that came to my mind was ‘something tells me I should’ and then ‘keep on.’ So we recorded that with a handheld mic. We tried a blend of me and Georgia and, for whatever reason, the version where I sang, that moment of the song felt a bit different in a good way. It just felt more honest to leave it like that.” G: “There’s also sort of a Balearic influence on this track—I was listening to a lot of late-’80s Balearic music, which was a scene in Ibiza. A lot of it was played when the sun was setting—before the night begins. I really wanted a track that sounded like that on the record, and it felt like that’s where my head was at the time. The lyric ‘Can you feel my heart? It’s calling out for you’ was something I sang looking out at Downtown LA and I really did feel a sense of belonging. Also, we got to add a little bit of dub on this track. There’s a similar melody to ‘Give It up for Love’—I was writing both at the same time. It was definitely this breakbeat with chords over the top, sort of early-’90s Andrew Weatherall kind of sound. It’s simple, but there’s something very honest and classic about it.” **“Friends Will Never Let You Go”** RB: “This is the only song where I sent Georgia a beat and she came up with a vocal part. We did it remotely, before we officially started working on an album together, kind of Postal-Service-style. Then Georgia came in, and she pretty much had a song written. It was easy. I also liked where we put this on the tracklist. The album’s almost over, but we’re going to give you one more spicy, fast song. Then we’ll give you a comedown.” G: “I think it sounds like if Taylor Swift did a drum ’n’ bass track.” **“So What”** G: “One special thing about this song was writing it with Justin Parker \[the UK songwriter and producer who’s worked with Lana Del Rey, Rihanna, Bat for Lashes, and more\]. That was an example of being in a studio with somebody \[I\] had no experience with. Nothing. Hadn’t even met him. And it took a couple of days, but out of it, we had this really intense and emotional song. It was a real moment, because I was going through quite a hard time \[with\] loads of different things going on. I didn’t want to put any production to it; I wanted Rostam to completely take the reins and turn it into something. We were in the same room when we worked on it. I sat there watching him do his thing and I was completely enamored. He was just in his own world. Everything he was doing was so emotive and capturing the essence of the song. I texted my manager saying, ‘He’s a genius. I know this is the right decision. We are going to make something really special.’”

Angel Numbers is the latest studio album which was released on February 3, 2023.

“I needed my audience to see that Killer Mike is something that this nine-year-old kid created to be fierce and badass and protect him from any ill,” the artist born Michael Render tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “This is my come-home moment musically. It is gospel, it is soul, it is funk, it is hip-hop. And from a moral standpoint, I was taught morality through the Black Southern Christian church, which gave us the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement, which gave us some of the most beautiful music ever. And I feel like I\'m honoring that and I finally figured out my place.” Released 10 years after Run The Jewels transformed Killer Mike from a workaday regional rapper to the kind of guy holding public court with national politicians, *MICHAEL* is, on some level, a celebration of just how far he has come. But it’s also an exploration of the complex personality that got him there: the son of a drug dealer who needs to mourn his childhood but struggles to let his guard down (“MOTHERLESS”), the community leader trying to elevate youth while snapping back at the perceived narrowness of their politics (“TALK’N THAT SHIT!”), the middle-aged man finally reckoning with the collateral PTSD of Black life in America (“RUN”). “My mother and grandmother left me,” he says. “‘MOTHERLESS’ is about that and about the emptiness you feel, and as a human I feel like I\'ve lost something. But if all the electricity left tomorrow, there\'d still be trees moving, there\'d still be wind grooving, and that\'s all we return to. When you close your eyes, you listen to this record, this device ain\'t how you are hearing this song. These vibrations are how you\'re hearing this song.” There’s also “SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS,” which features fellow Atlanta legends Future and André 3000. “Artists love and respect one another,” he says. “The what, who\'s done what, it\'s literally the style. You just waiting to hear your partner\'s next style.” And on a production level, the sustained mix of slow-and-steady trap beats with gospel choirs and soaking-wet organs evokes both the humidity of his Atlanta summers and the blend of sacred and profane that has characterized Black pop from Sam Cooke to Kanye West. If he weren’t so smart and soulful, you might call him a crank. But he’s both.

“I’ve always liked the quote: “Sleep, those little slices of death - how I loathe them.” So reckons Matt Baty of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, vocalist and lyricist of a band as comfortable wading through the darker quarters of their subconscious as they are punishing ampstacks. Whether dwelling in the realm of dreams or nightmares, the primordial drive of the Newcastle-based band is more powerful than ever. Land Of Sleeper, their fourth record in a decade of riot and rancour, is testimony to this: the sound of a band not so much reinvigorated as channelling a furious energy, which only appears to gather momentum as the band’s surroundings spin on their axis. “Shouting about themes of existential dread comes very naturally to me, and I think because I’m aware of that in the past I’ve tried to rein that in a little” reckons Matt. “There’s definitely moments on this album where I took my gloves off and surrendered to that urge.” Whether this means Pigs, a band once associated with reckless excess, have taken a darker turn to match the dystopian realm of the 2022 everyday, is open to debate. The band themselves aren’t necessarily convinced; “Sobriety does funny things to a man” reckons guitarist Adam Ian Sykes wryly. “I know from my perspective, I was trying to write some much heavier and darker music” says guitarist and producer Sam Grant. “But this was an aim more as a counterpoint to earlier material, as opposed to any sort of political or social commentary. I still very much see these heavier moments as musically euphoric, and emotionally cut loose or liberating.” “For obvious reasons, the anticipation for the writing of Land of Sleeper was unlike anything we’d felt before” Adam adds. “These sessions were an almost religious experience for me. It felt like we were working in unison, connected to some unknowable hive mind.” The intensity of feeling is writ large right from the pulverising drive of opener ‘Ultimate Hammer’, and its rallying cry “I keep spinning out, what a time to be alive”. Yet, whilst ‘Terror’s Pillow’ and ‘Big Rig’ are rich with the band’s trademark Sabbathian power, there’s scope this time around that supercedes anything they’ve previously attempted. Matt’s duet with the traditional folk vocals of Cath Tyler on the closing lament ‘Ball Lightning’, for example, is one particularly potent illustration of their expanded horizons. In terms of emotional impact, a pinnacle on Land Of Sleeper is ‘The Weatherman’. Replete with devotional rapture and radiant intensity, the band’s attack slowed down to a mantric and mesmeric crawl, it marks a collaboration with the ululatory tones of Bonnacons Of Doom vocalist Kate Smith and a choir including Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington. The resulting tumult constitutes a sound not unlike The Stooges ‘We Will Fall’, reinvented and adrenalised as an invigorating sermon for the zeitgeist. “This one presented an opportunity for me to do something completely unbridled. I wanted to surrender to the weight of the song, so the lyrics came about in much the same way I imagine a frenzied artist might throw paint at a canvas.” relates Matt “I just wanted the lyrics to present an uncontrollable energy.” For all that the last few years have seen Pigs’ stature rise in the wake of triumphant festival slots and sold-out venues alike, this remains a band, consummated by bassist John-Michael Hedley and returning drummer Ewan Mackenzie, who are fundamentally incapable of tailoring their sound to a prospective audience, instead standing alone and impervious as a monument of catharsis. “Writing and playing music is often surprising and revealing, it can be like holding up a mirror and seeing things you didn’t expect to see” reckons Mackenzie. “For me, the darker tracks on the record hold in common a determination not to lose faith, despite the odds.” The better to unite slumber and waking, Land Of Sleeper is no less than an act of transcendence for Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - new anthems to elucidate a world sleepwalking to oblivion. ---

Post-humanism was a passion and a coping mechanism on yeule’s breakthrough album, 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, art-pop that escaped into the simulation and drew raw emotion from its artifice. Their third full-length finds the shape-shifting musician regaining their bearings as a human being, and trading short-circuiting electronica for the fuzzy sounds of shoegaze and ‘90s alt-rock. The effect is that of an AI yearning to be flesh and blood: “If only I could be/Real enough to love,” they sing over downcast guitar chords on “ghosts” as their voice glitches into decay. On the bleakly gorgeous “software update,” yeule fantasizes about a lover downloading their mind after their body is gone, over a swelling, reverberating wall of sound. There’s a tactile quality to the album’s digital processing reminiscent of ‘90s Warp Records staples like Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin, shot through with the melancholy that accompanies nostalgia for a time that’s long gone and barely remembered.