A LONG BEAUTIFUL FLOWING CAPE

16 October 2024

The Green Child return today with the mesmeric, second track taken from their forthcoming album ‘Look Familiar’. Is there a better name for a single than ‘A Long Beautiful Flowing Cape’? Inspired by the media and online posturing this song unfurls with an infectious shuffling beat backed-up with a spry bassline. Shimmers of synth and twirling guitar tone provide a redolent vista for Raven’s vocal about distorted social contracts to flit through.

Available to stream everywhere now, ‘A Long Beautiful Flowing Cape’ is also accompanied by a visual treat of a video made by Wu Li Leung using early editing technology for newscasts. Too much!

‘Look Familiar’ (out Nov 15th) is available to pre-order now!

DREAM SONGS INDEED

04 October 2024

The sun is out! And so is this debut 7” EP from cosmic pop duo Robert Sotelo & Mary Currie!

‘Dream Songs’ is an archetypal meeting of minds, at once musing and magical. Robert Sotelo is a bedroom pop songsmith who lives in Glasgow. Sotelo has released six albums since 2017, three of which came out on Upset The Rhythm. He also performs in Order of the Toad, Dancer and Nightshift. Mary Currie is best known as half of touchstone DIY experimentalists Flaming Tunes, alongside Gareth Williams (of This Heat). Currie also performed in Officer!

‘Dream Songs’ is available now from all the best shops and our very own humble webstore here.

OUT TODAY - ORCHESTRA HITS!

20 September 2024

Ed Schrader’s Music Beat have knocked it out of the park with new album ‘Orchestra Hits’. These stunning nine new songs are packed with a ton of climbing bass grooves, percolating synth arpeggios and soaring vocals.

Ed Schrader’s Music Beat hover blissfully out their comfort zone here, writing songs that erupt with raw energy and cavernous emotional poetics. There’s is a Trojan horse style of pop music, what a joy to share this with the world! ‘Orchestra Hits’ is out now digitally and is also available on CD and transparent blue 180g vinyl too.

Order now

THE RETURN OF THE GREEN CHILD

5 September 2024

The Green Child re-emerge today with news of their sublime new album ‘Look Familiar’. Released by Upset The Rhythm & Hobbies Galore on November 15th, ‘Look Familiar’ documents the Australian band now that its grown into four people. Raven Mahon & Mikey Young are joined by Alex Macfarlane and Shaun Gionis on synth/guitar and drums respectively.

The Green Child still draw heavily on a refined psychedelic pop, with Raven’s hypnotic vocal often shadowing the ebb and flow, but the energy of having four people involved has made the songs more alive and mercurial.

Take a listen to first single ‘Wow Factor’ (out now), a reverie of chiming guitar lines, dizzy, scurried melodies and floating centres. ‘Look Familiar’ is available to pre-order now as a 140g, black bio-vinyl LP with obi-strip.

DREAMS SONGS & EXPECTATIONS

20 August 2024

Well this is a very special record to unveil! On October 4th Upset The Rhythm will be releasing a 7” EP from cosmic pop duo Robert Sotelo & Mary Currie! ‘Dream Songs’ is an archetypal meeting of minds, at once musing and magical. This 7” is the first pensive fruit to fall from the tree of their collaboration and today we’re sharing brooding single ‘Expectations’.

‘Dream Songs’ is available to pre-order from all the best shops and from our very own webstore here!

SPEAK OF THE DEVIL

16 August 2024

The Devil has all the best tunes! Ed Schrader’s Music Beat return today with vibey thrill ‘IDKS’, taken from their forthcoming album ‘Orchestra Hits’ (out Sep 20th on Upset The Rhythm). Double thumbs up to Tristan Wheeler for making such a wickedly FUN video!

‘Orchestra Hits’ is available to pre-order now!

ROMAN CANDLE

18 July 2024

Baltimore pop renegades Ed Schrader’s Music Beat return today with a rollicking new single entitled ‘Roman Candle’. It’s a driving powerhouse of nervy basslines, guitar glimmer and rabble-rousing vocals, taken from the group’s forthcoming ‘Orchestra Hits’ album, out on Upset The Rhythm (Sep 20th).

‘Orchestra Hits’ is available to pre-order now now digitally or on CD and as a limited transparent-blue vinyl version too!

SCREENSAVER - NEW SINGLE + TOUR

5 July 2024

What a fine day to share this new single from SCREENSAVER with the world! ‘Permanence’ is a terse thrill of a song, drawing on pent-up frustration and chronic intensity. ‘Permanence’ is out now digitally, including as this video that’ll make you wanna wield a baguette like a sword in future. Also just saying, not enough enough cat humanoids appear in music videos in general!

SCREENSAVER are hitting the autobahn in August, touring all over this Euro-portion of the globe, go see them if you can, their live show is wild! The band’s new album ‘Decent Shapes’ is out now on Upset The Rhythm too.

ED SCHRADER'S MUSIC BEAT

17 June 2024

Oh happiest of times! We’re unveiling ‘Orchestra Hits’ by Ed Schrader’s Music Beat today! ‘Orchestra Hits’ is the band’s first album with Upset The Rhythm in ten years, what? Time flies! The ever-evolving group have packed a ton of climbing bass grooves, percolating synth arpeggios and soaring vocals into these astonishing 9 songs, their best to date! We’re sharing first single ‘Daylight Commander’ here, part exercise in absurdity, part pop Trojan horse, enjoy!

‘Orchestra Hits’ will be released on Upset The Rhythm on September 20th and is available to pre-order now. The band are also hitting the road in the US/Canada later in the month with Future Islands so go witness the brilliance near the flame itself!

LOOM NO MORE!

14 June 2024

Massive moment today! Marcel Wave’s wonder of a debut album ‘Something Looming’ has unfurled into the world. These twelve immense songs are part trades club symphony, part itchy serenade and part wistful lament. Featuring the combined powerhouse talents of Sauna Youth and Cold Pumas players with the stunning addition of Maike Hale-Jones’ West Yorkshire brogue, Marcel Wave chronicle the hopes and dreams (often dashed) of the piping hot instant.

‘Something Looming’ is out now digitally and is also available on 180g black vinyl in all the best shops, including our own humble repository here.

Come join us tonight at MOTH Club in celebration of the record as the band, joined by The Pheromoans and The Plan treat us to a proper bash of an album launch.

PEG

5 June 2024

Marcel Wave’s stunning album ‘Something Looming’ comes out on June 14th, today we’re sharing pensive new single ‘Peg’. ‘Peg’ is an elegy for 1930’s actress Peg Entwistle and it’s accompanying vid is a technicolor tribute to her voiceless memory.

Come celebrate the release of ‘Something Looming’ with us at MOTH Club on Friday 14th June. Marcel Wave, The Pheromoans and The Plan will all be performing! Record launch o’clock!

EMPIRES INTO SAND

24 May 2024

Normil Hawaiians’ astonishing new album ‘Empires Into Sand’ is released today on digital platforms. CDs and LPs have arrived too, are they look / sound exceptional!

'Empires into Sand' is the first album of new material from Normil Hawaiians in 40 years. The group first refined their sound during the early 80s, hitting on a pastoral experimentalism that drew on ambient drone, motorik impulse and post-punk pep. 'Empires into Sand' came together in the familiar manner of their original three albums, with improvisation and nuance informing the blueprint of the tracks.

This is thought-provoking, boundary-bothering music. Honest in intent, a solidarity of vision. Listen and live! ‘Empires Into Sand’ is available to order from our webshop here.

PARSNIP - THE BABBLE & TOUR DATES

22 May 2024

Wow, this is the stuff that FUN is made of! Parsnip have an astonishing (and slightly psychotic) new video to share with you today for their latest single ‘The Babble’, they’re also coming on tour to Europe this October and playing London for us straight off the bat on October 1st at MOTH Club! You’re welcome!

Epic thanks to Puschen for whipping this tour into shape! Video made by Alex McLaren and filmed on the lands of the Wurundjeri people.

EARTH BALL - IT'S YOURS NOW!

17 May 2024

The sun has come out to shine on Earth Ball, check that spot-gloss on the sleeve!

Earth Ball’s immense album ‘It’s Yours’ is released today digitally and on this very fine crystal clear LP with printed inner sleeve, download card and accompanying painted art scrap from the band.

Musically this a mercurial record of energetic sax-flecked no wave spontaneity. Drums tumble over precipices, guitars grind along fluxing vortices and Jer & Izzy’s vocals usher wisdom and derision from the outskirts. Six mind-zapping transmissions from the Canadian underground trapped in aspic.

‘It’s Yours’ is available in all the best shops now, you can also pick up a copy from our webshop here ...or even better, grab a copy from the band directly when they tour the UK with Chris Corsano over the next fortnight:

May 20 - London - Cafe OTO

May 21 - London - Cafe OTO

May 22 - Manchester - White Hotel

May 23 - Bristol - Cube Cinema

May 24 - Shrewsbury - English Bridge Workshop

May 25 - Glasgow - Flying Duck

May 26 - Newcastle - Lubber Fiend

May 27 - Leeds - Wharf Chambers

May 28 - Nottingham - The Chapel

May 29 - Lewes - Con Club

STOP/CONTINUE

8 May 2024

Marcel Wave return with effervescent bop ‘Stop/Continue’ today, a punctual new single owing much to decaying industrial backdrops to childhood. ‘Stop/Continue’ dwells on derelict mills, spooling rivers and the unfaltering sweep of the second hand. We very much like songs with a heavy dose of rumination at UTR and if they come with a trippy video of waterways, tunnels and some dancing too, then all the better!

‘Stop/Continue’ is out now digitally, it features on Marcel Wave’s debut album ‘Something Looming’ out June 14th on Upset The Rhythm. Dive in!

MOON FM

30 April 2024

Moon FM is the scorching opening track of Earth Ball's debut LP 'It's Yours', out May 17th through Upset The Rhythm. The saxophone is searing hot here, pulling us through vortex after vortex whilst the drums pin down the momentum amid gauzily warped guitars. The accompanying video was shot by John Brennan from the band and features him walking backwards over the Cambie Bridge in Vancouver at twilight, only reversed so the traffic zips oddly backwards. Revel in it!

PARSNIP - OUT NOW!

26 April 2024

Greet today with Parsnip’s shining new album ‘Behold’!

The Australian group are an spirited ensemble, full of life, emotional complexity and humour. This has all contributed in making ‘Behold’ such a joy. This is their first album in five years and it’s a riot of dazzling performances and whip-smart DIY pop. Parsnip have made a record that drinks deep with wonderment and their vision is genuinely refreshing and at times devastatingly honest. We’re overjoyed to share it with you.

‘Behold’ by Parsnip is out now digitally and on crystal-clear vinyl through Upset The Rhythm. Our great mates at Anti Fade are releasing ‘Behold’ down under too. Parsnip will touring Japan next month and are also coming to Europe this October, watch out world!

NORTH ATLANTIC

25 April 2024

We’re sharing ‘North Atlantic’ with the world today! Another gem from the jewellery box that’s Normil Hawaiians first album of new material in 40 years. ‘North Atlantic' is the meditative closer on ‘Empires into Sand’ and features reworked drum samples taken from a short track called ‘South Atlantic’ from 1984 (Normil Hawaiians - What’s Going On?). Only this time the bass refrain is reversed and the song takes on an entirely new life with an uncanny string arrangement, birdsong and lyrics about impermanence, dream states and long shadows. Drink deep!

‘Empires into Sand’ will be released by Upset the Rhythm on May 24th.

EARTH BALL & CHRIS CORSANO ON TOUR

24 April 2024

The stupendous Earth Ball are touring the UK this May in support of their forthcoming album 'It's Yours', out May 17th on Upset The Rhythm. Best news... Chris Corsano will be keeping them company too. Both acts are playing all over the landmass, roundabouts and back again. Go see them live, they are A+ spectacular!

May 20 - London - Cafe OTO

May 21 - London - Cafe OTO

May 22 - Manchester - White Hotel

May 23 - Bristol - Cube Cinema

May 24 - Shrewsbury - English Bridge Workshop

May 25 - Glasgow - Flying Duck

May 26 - Newcastle - Lubber Fiend

May 27 - Leeds - Wharf Chambers

May 28 - Nottingham - The Chapel

May 29 - Lewes - Con Club

PARSNIP - THE BABBLE

11 April 2024

It’s time to start babbling with Parsnip, their incredible new single (out today) is packed with Kinks-ian panache and deceptive wordplay, beyond great! Their full album 'Behold' will be released on April 26th through Upset The Rhythm

MARCEL WAVE - SOMETHING LOOMING

4 April 2024

June 14th, what a prodigious day!

We will be releasing Marcel Wave’s inaugural album ‘Something Looming’, packed with eulogies for tragic actresses, ancient riverbeds and concrete obscenity. Marcel Wave (featuring members of Cold Pumas & Sauna Youth) are part trades club symphony, part itchy serenade and part wistful lament. This heady concoction of ‘Meades meets Pat-E-Smith meets Kirklees Borough Council’ will be formally baptised on stage at MOTH Club that very same day (June 14th) with an album launch (featuring The Pheromoans + The Plan), now on sale.

Check out their first single ‘Barrow Boys’, a raucous ode to the death of the docklands. Out now digitally and available to study in this suitably wavy VHS promo. ‘Something Looming’ will be released on June 14th by Upset The Rhythm and Feel It Records (in the USA). It is available to pre-order now on 180g black vinyl too.

PARSNIP - TURN TO LOVE

19 March 2024

Don’t turn back! Parsnip explode into colour, costume and creativity with their incredible video for new single ‘Turn To Love’. Out today digitally and featured on their forthcoming album ‘Behold’ (out April 26th through Upset The Rhythm). Blooming marvellous effort from the Australian DIY pop quartet!

EMPIRES INTO SAND

14 March 2024

Huge day today! Normil Hawaiians’ first new album in 40 years will be coming out on Upset The Rhythm on May 3rd. Titled ‘Empires into Sand’, the record is an incredible patchwork cloak of ideas drawing on ambient drone, motorik impulse, folk idiom and a certain cosmic uncanny.

A Windswept album recorded in a windswept Scottish coastal retreat, ‘Empires into Sand’ swims with short wave radio interference and overheard satellite transmissions. These are winding rivers of song, peopled with the displaced, determined, downhearted yet hopeful. Swirling atmospheres, field recordings, tape-looped drums, rapid synth flights and soaring vocals all abound in this echo from the now.

‘Empires into Sand’ will be released on gatefold LP, CD and digitally on May 24th, it is available to pre-order now from our shop now.

Lead single ‘Exiles’ is released today, exploring the continuous movement of human beings, check out the video for more sublime signs from the firmament.

DEAN SPUNT’s new album for Drag City is titled ‘Basic Editions’ (out Sept 27th). It’s an excursion in electronic sound that unpacks his fascination with language – in this case, the syntax of systems and processes. By turns meditative, compulsive and consumptive, Basic Editions distills a 64 voice module through a headfull of ideas – somewhat like pouring a cornucopia of possible ambient moods and EZ listening impulses backwards through a funnel, inspiring a deceptively absurd rainbow of soul to spray out the other end.

With this new release, Dean identifies his process as “using sounds, rather than making sounds”. This approach to music-making is a train of thought that’s been rolling out from the far horizon of the past for ages now – but for Dean, whose previous works within and without No Age depended on their making of sounds, it’s a fresh work stance. Given, however, No Age’s traditional further manipulation of their own sounds (via loops and treatments),'Basic Editions' delivers further unexpected hard-rights and lefts in the non-aesthetic aesthetic that has defined Dean’s path over the past two decades. Steering toward wacked digital soundscapes that bounce colourfully across the stereo azimuth, Dean creates a kind of post-ambient neo-exotica that hinges upon a giddy conflation of cosmic and comic.

GUESTS are Jessica Higgins and Matthew Walkerdine of Glasgow, UK, both formerly of the bands Vital Idles and Mordwaffe. They have been closely tied with DIY music, art and publishing for over a decade. Using (amateur) electronics, singing, speaking and field recording they make songs which blend the rhythms of popular music and contemporary approaches to collage, sampling, improvisation and repetition. As inspired by film and art as they are the legacies of twee underground and avant garde experimentalism, their loose, domestically twinged compositions explore feelings, atmospheres and moments which are hard to articulate and the quite literal notion of being a “guest”. “I wish I was special” is their debut record on World Of Echo and has drawn some comparison with the private musings of Flaming Tunes, Idea Fire Company’s domestic electronics, or perhaps even Annea Lockwood’s framing of emotional connection within avant garde structures.

M-G DYSFUNCTION is the music and art project of Fred M-G. M-G Dysfunction has previously shared the stage with acts such as The Bug, Marie Davidson, Caroline, Gnod, Divide & Dissolve and Meatraffle. M-G Dysfunction live shows combine musical influences from the likes of Dean Blunt and Death Grips with elements of stand-up comedy and clowning. Most recent single ‘Junglists Only’ came out in August 2024. The third M-G Dysfunction full-length ‘Mista Self-Isolation’ will be released before the end of the year.

URANIUM CLUB released their fourth album, ‘Infants Under the Bulb’, back in March this year through Static Shock Records and Anti Fade. The Minneapolis band recorded the album over the course of 2023 by long time collaborator Grant Richardson and is just as rampant and agitated as ever. Uranium Club once again win their dear listeners over with eccentrically wild guitar parts, revolving voices, elastic-tight drums and the addition of their very own Saints-styled horn section.

Lyrically, ‘Infants Under the Bulb’ opens up the history books of unsolved mysteries - unidentified, unsolved, unanswered subjects of suspicious acts or individuals across the last century. Who, what, when and where… but mostly, why? Ignorant humanity of earth orbits the sun once again. The Somerton Man, Bergmann, Bauby, Denton, phone phreakers, and just what is lurking behind the cosmic organ of The Wall? As always, the artwork was handled in-house by the Club and ambitious as ever. The spectacular cover shot captures a carefully coordinated event orchestrated by the Club to photograph a crowd of the local volunteers wearing ponchos standing together in an open field to make the shape of a giant spiral.

HYGIENE returned last year with their most urgent and essential recordings and not many bands can say that after 15 years. '15 Minute City' EP (Static Shock) is an absolute bundle of DIY greatness…it has the chaos and chorus of one the classic 70’s / early 80’s Swell Maps 7”s. ‘L.T.N’ is a robotic and stiff post punk song that doesn’t outlast it's welcome as it lasts just over a minute. Last track ‘Petrol’ is a childlike punk gem that gets stuck in your head after one play.

TARA CLERKIN TRIO are Pat Benjamin, Sunny Joe Paradisos and Tara Clerkin, three musicians involved in a number of cult Bristol bands over the years before confidently settling down in triangle formation. They are inspired by and borrow from jazz, trip hop, electronica, psychedelia & minimalism, twirling the non-pretentious strands of these threads together into a trippy green winged-cloak, adorning Arthur Russell and dripping in blue jam.

Their self-titled debut LP was released in 2020 and was a sleeper hit, coming in at 35 in the Wire's top 100 albums of the year and in Bleeps top 10. Their latest EP, ‘On The Turning Ground’, was released on World of Echo in November. Whilst their inspirations might be centreless, but the trio still possess a very obvious anchor in the form of their hometown. Bristol stands as a city of multitudes, heterogenous and vibrant in such a way as to allow it to renew and remake time and again. Tara Clerkin Trio drink from that same well, duly reflecting a rich musical heritage built on fwd-facing electronic subcultures and experimental urges. As such, ‘On The Turning Ground’ finds them subject to their own subtle internal evolution, the pervasive sense that you've caught them mid-bloom, on their way to becoming but never anything but themselves.

ABLE NOISE are an experimental baritone guitar and drum duo, based between The Hague and Athens. Through the use of voice, tape and alternative methods of playing their instruments, they create a minimal and visual musical performance. Their output is primarily focused on live concerts, letting their music be shaped by the physicality of their playing, the acoustic and aesthetic properties of the space, and the dynamics formed between themselves and their audience. Their recorded work relies less on their respective instruments, and more on an assemblage of field recordings, heavily processed instrumentation, and exploratory mixing techniques. They released their recorded debut in 2020 through the Glasgow label GLARC, and their next recorded work is due to be released in late 2024 through London label World of Echo.

CHRIS COHEN was always a quiet kid. In fact, this introversion was one reason he began playing music as a toddler—to communicate without speaking to identify with others without the direct representation of words. It has worked, too, with Cohen’s terrific stint in the mighty Deerhoof and his own captivating art-rock act The Curtains, preceding production and session work for the likes of Weyes Blood, Kurt Vile, Le Ren, and Marina Allen. Somewhere along that long way, Cohen started writing lyrics. He found that, though it didn’t come naturally, the process offered a new sense of self-discovery and reckoning, a way to see himself and the world from unexpected angles. His three twilit albums of casually complicated pop during the last decade radiated these epiphanies: handling family strife, navigating advancing age, and understanding social woes.

But Cohen has never had as much to sing so directly as he does on ‘Paint a Room’, his first album in five years and his debut for Hardly Art. If Cohen’s meanings have previously lurked inside the tessellated musical layers he built alone, they are newly clear and resonant here, animated and underscored for the first time by a band playing in real time. There is the endless miasma of state violence on the subversively melodious opener “Damage,” the existential exhaustion of modernity on the horn-traced jangle “Laughing”. With ‘Paint a Room’, Cohen’s music feels like a warm spring breeze, easy to love and gentle to feel. But it’s often carrying something heavy, as if blowing in from some unseen storm cloud.

LARGE PLANTS is the hauntological fuzz-rock project of Jack Sharp, former singer guitarist from psych-folk luminaries Wolf People. In 2022 the band dropped an acid-rock cover of Madonna’s ‘La Isla Bonita’ on the Ghost Box label, followed swiftly by their debut LP ‘The Carrier’, described by Shindig as “A succinct distillation of folk-rock magnificence”. Now a formidable live act, having toured with Mudhoney and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Large Plants are currently working on their third album.

XIU XIU is the conduit for the uncompromising and unnervingly personal musical works of Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist Jamie Stewart, plus a roll call of collaborators both in studio and onstage. Streaming forth a ceaseless torrent of releases, side projects, art offerings and extensive international touring since 2002, Xiu Xiu's music has veered from damaged avant-pop to artfully orchestrated rock, squalls of black-hearted noise and most bases around and between, ever served with a bruising honesty and intensity that has ripped out the hearts of a legion of obsessive listeners.

13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips (Polyvinyl Records) is the newest record from Xiu Xiu, but only on the face of it. Underneath that face, the sinews and struggles of a need that seeks to name itself over every record, and every song on every record, ever written by Xiu Xiu of course. Nine songs to seal the deal for those who will still listen to all nine songs, in order, because an album is a message that can’t be read piecemeal. Mixed by John Congleton with a band-directed dictum that he should feel free to both “go crazy” and if there was ever any doubt as to what that meant please, by all means “choose iconoclasm.”

EVICSHEN aka Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco. Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning.

JOHN LEE BIRD & FABRIZIO MODONESE PALUMBO present themselves as a queer duo of narrative words and soundscapes with an upcoming album featuring collaborations with Simon Fisher Turner, Xiu Xiu, Paul Beauchamp and Julia Kent and the recent EP “Some Time Spent There”, featuring actor/flute player Francesca Sebastian Puopolo, who also performs live with them.

Join us to celebrate the publication of Killed (of Kids) a book about the band Huggy Bear, written by the five members of the band. There will be readings from the book, activities, and DJ sets by members of the band.

Huggy Bear were a UK riot grrrl band that existed from 1991-1994. Outcast and outraged, they made a howling, squalling mess of punk, all the menace and freedom of flocking birds. The handful of records, zines, and memories that document this brief, bonfire lifespan sketch a blueprint for how to be in the world, for how to understand the forces of capitalism and patriarchy and capitulation and still resist. Huggy Bear were a group that let things be complicated, that considered themselves complicit, but never took that as a reason to surrender.

Killed (of Kids) is a book by the five members of Huggy Bear (published by Jabs, Jabs, Jabs and The Grass Is Green In The Fields For You). It reproduces all seven zines made by the band during their lifespan alongside photos, correspondence, flyers and ephemera from their three year existence. This archive is joined by new text drawn from two years of interviews with the band members, carefully assembled into an extensive dialogue about intention, surprise, distress, encouragement.

THE SMASHING TIMES are a psychedelic twee freakbeat group from a Baltimore basement. Instruments played by humans, bare feet touching the ground. Wrinkled button downs, sweaters filled with holes, music audibly and sometimes visibly made by humans. Can you change the strings on your guitar? Maybe, can you buy me dinner? Lock up your Rickenbackers, Thee Jasmine Monk is coming to town, can they stay on your couch? Recent album ‘Bloom’ was released by Meritorio Records, featuring fractious, chiming riffs and Dan Treacy meets Stephen Pastel style vocals and an impressive collection of genuinely memorable tracks. The Smashing Times’ new album ‘Mrs Ladyships and the Cleanerhouse Boys’ will be coming out on K Records in November.

The Smashing Times are your new favorite MOD heart throbs. Is there REALLY a new Merseybeat Revolution? How many times can you really REALLY watch The Blow-Up alone in your room? Why don't you venture out the front door and take a bite of the real thing? The Smashing Times are a mainstay in the indie pop underground. The group mistrals the new modern life perfectly, the sharper world.

RICHARD DAWSON has drawn so many long drafts from the whirlpools of Elemental North Eastern Archetypes, he may now be one himself. Fearless in his research and willingness to follow his inspiration, Dawson has created an impressive catalogue of music and storytelling steeped in both ancient myths and contemporary dread. A fog of sickness, trauma and mute inevitability inhabits his records and is often expressed in the havoc with which Dawson’s hands produce sounds from his long-suffering guitar, an instrument as bruised, individual and indefatigable as its owner.

Dawson’s forthcoming new album ‘End of the Middle’ (out Feb 14th through Weird World) is intricate, evocative, stripped-back, tactile and almost has the transportive ability to put you in the places and scenarios it describes. The album focuses around a family unit. “It zooms in quite close-up to try and explore a typical middle class English family home,” Dawson says. “We're listening to the stories of people from three or four generations of perhaps the same family. But really, it’s about how we break certain cycles. I think the family is a useful metaphor to examine how things are passed on generationally.”

The title of the new album End of the Middle is a suitably slippery contradiction, one that invites multiple interpretations: Middle-aging? Middle-class? The middle-point of Dawson's career? The centre of a record? Centrism in general? Polarisation? The possibility of having a balanced discussion about anything? Stuck in the middle with you? Middle England? Decide for yourself on February 14th!

NIGHTSHIFT are a Glasgow music collective whose new album ‘Homosapien’ just came out on Chicago’s Trouble In Mind Records. Notably, the band has lost some members, gained a new member & shuffled some roles; former drummer Chris White (Spinning Coin) is now on guitar. His distinctive playing delivers a countrified energy that is central to the album, leading the song structures into more succinct and colorful places, matching the upbeat and playful nature the band has always drawn strength from, only more so now under his stylish approach. Primary vocalist & keyboardist Eothen Stearn’s lyrical gifts illuminate the group’s output with an optimistic urgency that is unmatched. On ‘Homosapien’ she wears her heart on her sleeve, but even in the song’s darkest moments, the words create a sense of hope and potential.

MARY CURRIE & ROBERT SOTELO have a forthcoming 7” EP coming out on Upset The Rhythm this October entitled ‘Dream Songs’. Introduced via a mutual friend, Robert Sotelo approached Mary Currie (Flaming Tunes/Officer!) about collaborating on four songs he was constructing with Glasgow based producer/sound guru Joe Howe. Performing live with a set-up that will reconfigure these four compositions into a minimalist bass, drum machine and keys dynamic the duo (and band) will also look at recreating some cuts from the Flaming Tunes era also, focusing quite heavily on a anything could happen approach.

ANNELIES MONSERÉ has been playing music solo since 2000. Initially the music was piano-based and mostly instrumental. Once she ‘discovered’ her voice, vocals became a main focus. The early songs had very simple structures and melodies, and the words were sparse and introvert. Her debut album ‘Helder’ (released by BlueSanct) was described as “a delicate album, complete with beautiful cracks and loads of tape-hiss.” Recorded at home in Gent between 2016 and 2023, Annelies new album ‘I Sigh, I Resign’ (Horn of Plenty) retains the intimacy of previous LP ‘Mares’ with it’s close-mic’d keyboards and vocals that capture every breath. Folk and early music are at the core of her sound but the palette of piano, organ, bass guitar, cello, synth and drum machine make it very much a document of the here and now.

TRISTWCH Y FENYWOD are a Welsh-language gothic rock power-trio. Conjured from the experimental underground of darkest Leeds, the group channels songs of bog bodies, flickering landscapes and queer enchantment for dual-zither, bass and electronic drums. Tristwch y Fenywod (The Sadness of Women) are Gwretsien Ferch Lisbeth (Guttersnipe, Petronn Sphene), Leila Lygad (Hawthonn) and Sidni Sarffwraig (Slaylor Moon, The Courtneys). Formed in 2022, the music sounds like it could have been excavated from a haul of mouldering reel-to-reel tapes from the early 80s – like some recently rediscovered unholy grail of edgy, atmospheric, feminist goth. The dual-zither which leads their music is Gwretsien’s innovation, giving them a unique Celtic darkwave sound, but comparisons have also been drawn with The Cure circa “Pornography” and early Virgin Prunes. Their first record will be released this summer by Night School Records.

TRISTWCH Y FENYWOD are a Welsh-language gothic rock power-trio. Conjured from the experimental underground of darkest Leeds, the group channels songs of bog bodies, flickering landscapes and queer enchantment for dual-zither, bass and electronic drums. Tristwch y Fenywod (The Sadness of Women) are Gwretsien Ferch Lisbeth (Guttersnipe, Petronn Sphene), Leila Lygad (Hawthonn) and Sidni Sarffwraig (Slaylor Moon, The Courtneys). Formed in 2022, the music sounds like it could have been excavated from a haul of mouldering reel-to-reel tapes from the early 80s – like some recently rediscovered unholy grail of edgy, atmospheric, feminist goth. The dual-zither which leads their music is Gwretsien’s innovation, giving them a unique Celtic darkwave sound, but comparisons have also been drawn with The Cure circa “Pornography” and early Virgin Prunes. Their first record will be released this summer by Night School Records.

JAKE XERXES FUSSELL is a singer, guitarist and folk music interpreter who has distinguished himself as one of his generation's preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) "folk" songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia. By recontextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him. In all his work, Fussell humanises his material with his own curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways.

On his latest album, When I’m Called—his first LP for Fat Possum, and his first as a parent - Fussell returns to a well of music that holds lifelong sentimental meaning, loosely contemplating the passage of time and the procession of life’s unexpected offerings. The album was produced by James Elkington and mixed by Tucker Martine. In addition to Elkington, it features the playing of Ben Whiteley (The Weather Station) and Joe Westerlund (Bon Iver, Califone). Blake Mills contributes guitars on several tracks. Joan Shelley and Robin Holcomb provide backing vocals.

JENNIFER CASTLE is a Canadian songwriter, musician, and poet. ‘Camelot’ (Paradise of Bachelors), Jennifer Castle’s extraordinary, moving 2024 chronicle of the artist in early middle age, charts a realer, more rooted, and more metaphorical place than the fabled Camelot of the Early Middle Ages (or its myriad depictions), but it too is a space more psychic than physical. In Castle’s Camelot, the fantastic interpenetrates the mundane, and the Grail, if there is one, distills everyday experience into art and art into faith, subliming terrestrial concerns into sublime celestial prayers to Mother Nature, and to the unfolding process of perfecting imperfection in one’s own nature. Co-produced by Jennifer and longtime collaborator Jeff McMurrich, her seventh record is at once her most monumental and unguarded to date, demonstrating a mastery of rendering her verse and melodies alike with crisply poignant economy. For all their pointedly plainspoken lyrical detail and exhilarating full-band musical flourishes, these songs sound inevitable, eternal as morning devotions.

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE have built a prolific and diverse body of work over the last 20+ years. Ben Chasny's project is an experimental amalgam of new folk, drone music, percussion and strange textures, with Chasny delivering an outpouring of eclectic releases in the early 2000s for various small labels before finding a longstanding home on Drag City. In 2003, Chasny began an association with Comets on Fire, which led to him becoming a full-time touring and recording member of the band. After recording and touring extensively with Comets on Fire in 2004, Chasny returned to the studio and issued the moving and beautiful School of the Flower on Drag City in January of 2005. Sun Awakens and Shelter from the Ash arrived in 2006 and 2007. After touring and a break in 2008, Six Organs began what would become a prolific return to force, releasing a further 18 astonishing records up to the current time. First was the release of the sonically expansive - and very electric - Luminous Night, followed by the double-disc retrospective RTZ, both of which appeared on Drag City. Chasny also plays in 200 Years alongside Elisa Ambrogio (of Magik Markers), with Donovan Quinn (Skygreen Leopards) in the project New Bums, and is also a member of tightly-wound improv unit Rangda, accompanied by Sir Richard Bishop and Chris Corsano.

Chasny more recently developed a card-based creative system called a Hexadic for making music and released several related albums before resuming his primary project with new work like 2021's The Veiled Sea and the 2024 Shackleton collaboration Jinxed by Being. This year Six Organs also released a fully solo album Time Is Glass, which consists of haunted, unsettled rural folk sounds. With Time is Glass, Six Organs of Admittance is captured once again in the intricate tangle of the fretboards, soaring in open skies above. Like lens flare cutting through the speakers; spider-webs cracking the windshield that holds back all the onrushing reality. Blowing the dust away, cutting a new path for cognition.

CLEANERS FROM VENUS (Martin Newell joined by a live band) will be performing next spring in London on St Georges day no less. The group will be performing some classic Cleaners songs. Martin will be on guitar and piano - and talking. The band have drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, it will be special!

Martin Newell is a purveyor of ingenious pop music. His music is refracted from late 60s rock only shot through with invention from the rough-and-ready explosion of DIY tape releases in 80s Britain. As a songwriter, he’s right up there with Syd Barrett and Ray Davies, capturing a peculiar Englishness that’s very much his own.

Martin started his career in music aged 19 when he joined an Essex glam-rock band called The Mighty Plod as a singer and gigged in rough clubs, pubs and colleges for the next two years. In his early twenties he joined a hard rock/prog band from Ipswich called Gypp and gigged in the UK as well as touring northern Germany several times. In 1979, he won his first record contract and shortly afterwards his first single ‘Young Jobless / Sylvie In Toytown’ was released, first on an indie label and then with Liberty Records. In the 1980s he formed the anarchic and wonderfully offbeat Cleaners From Venus, who after much defiance of music biz convention, signed to a London record company and began making proper records which were well reviewed and well-received. He began co-writing songs with Captain Sensible in 1986, a relationship which endures to some extent to this day. In 1989 he and his friend Nelson, now of New Model Army formed The Brotherhood of Lizards, were signed to make an album and proceeded to promote it, touring the record by bicycle. This led to many TV appearances and some notoriety and amusement in the media. In 1993, with XTC's Andy Partridge in the producer's chair Martin made what was to become his most successful album ‘The Greatest Living Englishman’, hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as a rock classic. Over the last ten years Martin has continued to release exhilarating albums under his own name and as Cleaners from Venus, most recently a winsome new Cleaners album called ‘K7’ was released on CD and cassette.

A highly-entertaining live act, Martin Newell performs infrequently, refusing nowadays to tour at all. He has been the subject of a highly-praised documentary film Upstairs Planet (2019) which enjoyed premieres both in London and in New York. A second documentary The Jangling Man, the director James Sharp’s intimate portrait of Newell’s life and work, premiered in London and Los Angeles in October 2022.

THE GARDENERS are a jangle-pop inspired indie rock band hailing from London and Southend On Sea. Check out their sublime new single ‘Time to Breathe’ / ‘Sunlight’.

NAP EYES still bring to mind the bucolic ennui of the Silver Jews and Daniel Johnston’s jittery naïveté, but the sheen and maturity they boast lends a wide-angle appeal. Nap Eyes’ metamorphic fifth long-player collects a cache of nine fascinating songs recorded over the four years since their last album. ‘The Neon Gate’ (out now on Paradise of Bachelors) reveals classic touchstones (the uneasy interplay of physics and philosophy, perambulatory meditations, self-interrogating soliloquies, apertures of surreality, video games), but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisational composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date) and narrative and lyric formality, imparting the sense that Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.