QUINIE - SALLOW BUCKTHORN

2 May 2025

It’s almost obligatory to release a folk song on May Day, but here we are on May 2nd still bringing in the May! Enjoy Quinie’s evocative new single ‘Sallow Buckthorn’ out now. It’s a mesmeric sea of swirling sound and Scots poetry.

“Ye micht o thought the sallow buckthorn, Ne’er a hairst could hain” ("You might have thought the buckthorn would be so pale, that no harvest could hold it.”)

‘Sallow Buckthorn’ is featured on Quinie’s forthcoming album ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ out on Upset The Rhythm on May 23rd. Available to pre-order on LP with a risograph lyric print + magical book.

A PAINTING OF THE WIND

29 April 2025

Me Lost Me returns today with the second miraculous single from their forthcoming album ‘This Material Moment’ (out June 27th through Upset The Rhythm).

‘A Painting of the Wind’ is an astonishing song that we’ve loved in Jayne’s set for a while, it grapples with how artists try to express the inexpressible and how art is used as a means of escape and fantasy. The track is streaming everywhere now and is accompanied by this exquisite landscape portal of a video filmed at Raby Castle by Amelia Read.

‘This Material Moment’ can be pre-ordered on Bandcamp and our very own webshop too. We all love to be carried away!

QUINIE - COL MY LOVE

9 April 2025

Today we’re sharing another soaring single from Quinie’s new album ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ (out May 23rd). ‘Col My Love’ is the very first track on the album, and it’s a powerful song to sing, accompanied by some epic pipes too.

Quinie explains that the words “warn of the dangers of being close to the shoreline. I thought it would be a good fit with this footage of me and Maisie trying to navigate one of the challenges on one of our walks. Perhaps not quite as scary as being jailed on a cliff top, but nevertheless an adventure.”

PERFECT HIT! OUT NOW

4 April 2025

Buffet Lunch’s new album ‘Perfect Hit!’ is out now on Upset The Rhythm. This record positively zings in the sunlight, whilst its pleasingly imperfect pop songs dazzle to the same degree.

‘Perfect Hit!’ was recorded in the West Highlands, in the shadow of the UK’s Biggest Ben, during Leap Year week 2024. The lo-fi amblers built this album from bricks, ideas and plots, melodies and hooks, each stacked upon the other. It’s a proper expedition of curious turns and dizzy dimensions taking in parenthood, face tattoos, conkers and historical consciousness as subject matter.

This meandering masterpiece of observational charm and offbeat fancy is available to listen to digitally now, the stunning yolk-coloured 180g vinyl can be found in all the best shops and our very own website here.

Buffet Lunch will be performing for us in London next Friday (April 11th) for their album launch at The George Tavern, accompanied by Lerryn and Sassyhiya too. Can’t wait to hear these songs played live! Tour dates incoming:

09/04 - Delicious Clam, Sheffield

10/04 - JT Soar, Nottingham

11/04 - The George Tavern, London

12/04 - The Holloway, Norwich

03/05 - Settlement Projects, Edinburgh

24/05 - The Glad Cafe, Glasgow

ME LOST ME - 'THIS MATERIAL MOMENT'

28 March 2025

What a day to announce this breathtaking new album from Me Lost Me! ‘This Material Moment’, the fourth full-length from Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent, delights in songwriting, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully push the boundaries of genre. Today we’re sharing ‘Compromise!’, a stunning lead single concerned with the notion of ‘performing’ a life, rather than ‘living’ one.

Concerned with physicality, interpretations, and, yes, materiality, ‘This Material Moment’ is an album akin to rummaging through a box of long-forgotten trinkets. With each song, Me Lost Me unearths something and asks us to consider it from every angle.

‘This Material Moment’ will be released on June 27th through Upset The Rhythm, a limited 180g ‘brilliant red’ vinyl version is available to pre-order from all the best shops, and Bandcamp here.

WHITSUN SOUND

19 March 2025

'Whitsun Sound' by Buffet Lunch came out today! Another wizard single from the band's forthcoming album 'Perfect Hit!'. This track is all about hobbies, leisure-time, waiting and repetition.

Huge thanks to the fine people at Raven Sings The Blues for premiering the creeped-out video, made by the talented Joshua Roland.'Perfect Hit!' comes out on April 4th, we’re throwing an album launch in London on April 11th at The George Tavern too.

ACTUAL EARTH MUSIC

7 March 2025

Earth Ball just cracked the planet! ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ (out today on Upset The Rhythm) presents two caustic, zoned-out live sets from Canadian noise-rock entropy hunters Earth Ball.

Side A features Earth Ball live at The Fox Cabaret in Vancouver, supporting Wolf Eyes in 2023. Here Earth Ball whip up a vortex of thrashing wild energy, and the ecstatic release is off the charts. Volume 2 occupies Side B, showcasing a collaborative summit at London’s Café OTO last year. This recording features pivotal UK improv luminary Steve Beresford on piano and free-jazz phenomenon Chris Corsano on drums.

This is ‘Actual Earth Music’, sharing Earth Ball in their element as they conjure sound from the unknowing ether. ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ is out now digitally and as a limited 180g black vinyl pressing.

QUINIE - 'FOREFOWK, MIND ME'

4 March 2025

We’re so excited for you to hear Quinie's wondrous new album ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ (out May 23rd on Upset The Rhythm)! The first song from the album, ‘Macaphee Turn the Cattle’ escaped into the wild this morning, thanks to Klof magazine for premiering the video.

A singer working from the Scots song tradition, Quinie brings an approach that is both reverent and radical—exploring authenticity not as an exercise in preservation, but as something lived, questioned, and continually reshaped.

'Forefowk, Mind Me' can be pre-ordered as a 180g black vinyl LP w/ risograph lyric print. There’s also an option to order the LP with a stunning accompanying art book too!

Also… for those of you in London, we’re hosting a special launch party on May 30th at St Pancras Old Church.

RATTLE RELEASED

28 February 2025

Rattle’s entrancing new album ‘Encircle’ is released today!

With this hypnotic third album, Rattle have emerged from the chrysalis with four mutable songs of drum and vocal patterns. They build-up and disintegrate, existing in two places at once, tracing the circle’s edge. What a stunning achievement!

‘Encircle’ can be streamed on all digital platforms now, it is also available on vinyl (pink, black versions) and CD from all the best shops, as well as our Bandcamp and webshop here.

PERFECT HIT

25 February 2025

Buffet Lunch’s new single ‘Perfect Hit!’ is released today! It’s a snappy anthem of clunky guitar, casio wobble and percussive clatter. Teaming up themes like relationships, limbs and an actual swordfish sighting off the Scottish coastline (yes really), Buffet Lunch pack a wonky punch and are not afraid to modulate through multiple key changes.

The accompanying video was filmed on location in Portobello Town Hall where the band also shot the album cover for ‘Perfect Hit!’ - the album (out April 4th on Upset The Rhythm). Is this the birth of Nu-Music Hall? Glimpsed between long Edwardian red curtains? Quite possibly so! Now let’s learn the dance moves.

GET TECTONIC!

4 February 2025

UTR172 has just erupted! ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ presents two caustic, yet alluringly unreal live sets from Canadian noise-rock entropy hunters Earth Ball. Following on from the group’s head-turn of an album ‘It’s Yours’ (Upset The Rhythm, 2024) this new LP captures the band at the peak of their powers, playing live, composing spontaneously.

These two live sets demonstrate how intuitive and inventive the group are when they keep cresting the moment. This is ‘Actual Earth Music’, sharing Earth Ball in their element as they conjure sound from the unknowing ether. ‘Actual Earth Music - Volume 1 & 2’ will be released on Upset The Rhythm on March 7th digitally and as a limited 180g black vinyl pressing.

BUFFET LUNCH'S 'PERFECT HIT!'

29 January 2025

Well, I never! Art-pop amblers Buffet Lunch have embarked on their blue period. Released today, new single ‘Blue Chairs, Blue Floors, Blue Folders’ is the first track to sally forth from their forthcoming album ‘Perfect Hit!’, out on April 4th through Upset The Rhythm.

‘Perfect Hit!' is built from bricks, ideas and plots, melodies and hooks, each stacked upon the other. It is available to pre-order now on 180g yellow vinyl from all the best shops and our very own website here.

RATTLE'S RITUAL!

22 January 2025

Rattle return today with their hypnotic cascade of a new single 'Ritual'! 'Ritual' is a song of summoning, a waltz pulled out of the earth, a swirling mist and a spell spoken into a mirror.

Available now digitally and featuring on the duo's forthcoming album 'Encircle', out Feb 28th on Upset The Rhythm. Pink vinyl, black vinyl and CDs all available to pre-order from UTR and all the best shops.

2024 THANKS!

27 December 2024

Upset The Rhythm had a bumper year! We released eight diverting new records by The Pheromoans, Marcel Wave, Earth Ball, Parsnip, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, Normil Hawaiians, Robert Sotelo & Mary Currie and The Green Child. We also organised a tremendous 44 concerts, which we hope you found absorbing.

Giant thanks to all the artists involved and to all of YOU for supporting us through our many endeavours in music both live and recorded. Let’s make 2025 our best year yet!

UTR x

RATTLE RETURN!

25 November 2024

A band like Rattle know a lot about time, so the fact they’ve made the world wait six years for new music must simply be an exercise in delayed expectation, build-up and ecstatic release! True monarchs of the beat.

Upset The Rhythm are overjoyed to unveil today the band’s new single ‘Your Move’, a 15-minute hypnotic opus of boundless drum patterns and oft-wordless articulation. Minimal and magical in equal metre and measure.

‘Your Move’ features on the duo’s colossal third album entitled ‘Encircle’, out on Feb 28th through yours truly. ‘Encircle’ is available to pre-order now digitally, on CD, on 180g black vinyl and as a limited 180g hot-pink LP through all the best shops and our bandcamp & webshop here.

'LOOK FAMILIAR' OUT NOW!

15 November 2024

Today we released this stunningly elegant album by The Green Child! ‘Look Familiar’ draws heavily on a refined psychedelic pop, with Raven's scenically measured vocal often shadowing the ebb and flow, but the energy of having four people in the room resulted in making the songs more upbeat and multi-dimensional!

There are many standout moments across the album's ten tracks. 'Wow Factor' is a reverie of chiming guitar lines, dizzy, scurried melodies and floating centres. 'Arrows and Microtones' and 'Look Familiar' showcase The Green Child in a more reflective, expansive mode whilst ‘Private Laugh' comes alive with its crushed fuzz-guitar accompaniment and swirling synth eddies. This album sounds like constant renewal, never seeking comfort, its the sound of four musicians pushing each other to new heights.

‘Look Familiar’ is available now from all the best shops and our online store here.

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!

MOHAMMAD SYFKHAN is an Irish based Kurdish/Syrian singer and Bouzouki player. Mohammad’s own brand of ecstatic music takes elements from Middle Eastern and North African music to create an atmosphere of joy, love and happiness. Since arriving in Ireland, Mohammad has used the language of music to integrate into the local community by playing at private parties and concerts. He has been playing music since the 1980’s, while living in the city of Raqqa, Syria where he began working as a professional singer and started his own band, The Al-Rabie Band which played concerts, parties, weddings and festivals all over Syria. His debut album ‘I Am Kurdish’ came out on Nyahh Records last year. The Quietus explains further that “Syfkhan takes his domestic influences and fuses them with music from beyond those regions, from North African folk rhythms to Turkish psychedelia. It’s a glorious alembic not bound by borders, where Mohammad himself brings a cultivated exuberance to his playing that belies his vintage.”

SACRED PAWS were founded by the Glasgow duo of Ray Aggs (Trash Kit, Shopping) and Eilidh Rodgers (Golden Grrrls) who took their roots in the punk world and wound it together with myriad influences, from Afrobeat, through pop and post-punk, to create a glorious and unique hybrid. ‘Strike A Match’, the band’s urgent and infectious first offering, was released on Mogwai’s Rock Action label in 2017 and won the prestigious Scottish Album of the Year Award that same year. ‘Jump Into Life’, is the lush and layered new album from Sacred Paws, released on March 28th through Merge and Rock Action. Formed of eleven new songs, it takes the roots of the Sacred Paws project and breathes fresh life into it, blossoming into something both abundant and more colourful than has come before; a gentle skewing of their signature sound that feels wildly thrilling. Full of endearing energy, and buoyed by new sounds, textures, and character, ‘Jump Into Life’ is unafraid to reveal its warm and heavy beating heart, even with all the anxiety such a thing entails.

QUINIE will release her her third album ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ with Upset The Rhythm on May 24th 2025. This show is the album launch. The record is largely sung in Scots language, one of Scotland’s three official languages along with Gaelic and English. “Scots gives me a way of expressing myself which is connected directly with the landscapes I love. It brings the songs alive and it is a fascinating language. The name of the record is in Scots - Forefowk means the people who came before, or ancestors. When we say ‘mind me,’ we can mean a few things- remind, remember, watch over or care for me. The record explores how tradition needs to be constantly reconnected with, built upon, looked after, and shared.”

Quinie sings with a style inspired by Scottish Traveller singers. “I began singing unaccompanied Scots Song in 2015 after hearing Scots Traveller singer Sheila Stewart on the radio. Over the years I have met Traveller friends who taught me that settled people sharing these songs could contribute to raising awareness. Scottish Travellers are marginalised and discriminated against in modern Scotland, despite being custodians of so many of our important traditions. So I started to perform them and tell this story. From there I built on my repertoire and started writing my own songs”.

To develop this record, Quinie travelled across Argyll with her Horse. They went on a pilgrimage of sorts through the ancient landscapes of the West of Scotland to explore the interconnected relationships between people, ancestors, animals, and place. The album’s vinyl release is accompanied by a book and film, documenting this unusual research process. ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ was recorded in August 2024 at The Big Shed in Highland Perthshire with support from Creative Scotland. Quinie is accompanied by an ensemble of musicians: Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh (viola), Oliver Pitt (duduk, bouzouki, percussion), Harry Górski-Brown (small pipes, violin), and Stevie Jones (double bass, recording, and mixing). Each of these artists brings their own distinctive voice, bridging contemporary experimental practice with worlds of traditional and early music.

SOUND OF YELL is the solo project of Glasgow based musician, sound designer and producer, Stevie Jones. At times fronting an all acoustic collective of exploratory string and woodwind arrangements, in this instance Stevie will play solo fingerstyle steel string guitar, accompanied by tapes and synth. A serial collaborator, Stevie also plays with the New String Collective, Alasdair Roberts and Arab Strap (and of course, Quinie) and co-directs radio-art festival Radiophrenia.

HARRY GORSKI BROWN is a Glasgow-based multi-instrumentalist known for his innovative blend of electroacoustic and small pipes. In 2024, he released a tape with Glasgow label GLARC, Durt Dronemaker After Dreamboats, featuring settings of traditional Gàidhlig songs for voice, small pipes, and electronics.

ONE LEG ONE EYE is the project of Ian Lynch (founding member of Irish group Lankum) that explores submerged leylines of music and song, drawing on the raw aesthetics of black metal, noise and drone, while also being deeply embued with a sense of Irish history and myth.

Debut album …And Take The Black Worm With Me (released on Nyahh Records in 2022) is a slow burning suite of five expansive songscapes that has found its audience largely by word of mouth. Partly recorded in an abandoned Dublin factory where his father worked when he was a child, Lynch’s harrowing vocals are underpinned by vast pillars of uileann pipe drones, overlaid with effects and field recordings to conjure up a sound that is at once dark, mysterious and ultimately transcendental.

DAWN TERRY plays slow, melancholic, optimistic music for sad people. Based in Newcastle, she is a veteran drone artist, producing work that is heavy, dreamlike, open and hypnotic. Working for years as one third of drone band Bong, Dawn supplied heavy distorted bass and vocals. Bong are renowned for reaching beyond their metal roots towards a sound that incorporates the psychedelic and cosmic.

In her more recent solo work Dawn has turned towards acoustic resonances provided by accordion, hurdy-gurdy, and voice. Both cleaner and denser than ever before, Dawn is now producing large scale minimalist landscapes characterised by an austere openness, barely punctured by hypnotic drumming or slowly intoned vocals.

JOHN MAUS is a truly enigmatic musician. Broadly cut from the synth pop cloth, he’s fashioned the frosty minimalism of its fabric into a cloak of infinite meaning, genuine grace and absurdist humor over the course of four defining albums since 2006. His music is a highly mutable affair, whilst often described as retro-futurist on behalf of the 80’s drum machines and synth sounds employed, John’s music is more personal than the nostalgic re-tread implied. There’s a cinematic quality to his songs, with pathos conjured through propelling bass-lines, trailing arpeggios and of course his deeply resonant vocal. Moroder helped map out the territory but Maus is more interested in seeking cadence through his love of Renaissance polyphony and the experimentation behind post punk. It’s an amalgamation of musical ideas as radical as its intent.

Maus is a ‘man out of time’ trying to make sense of the inhumanity of our world through his mobilisation of the language of punk rock. His aim is true as he reaches for the seemingly impossible. It’s a want to emerge as part of greater multiplicity, to appear, to become, to connect that powers his songs and the man himself. It’s now been 12 years since the widely lauded album We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves (2011) appeared like a thunderbolt of maniacal energy and turned everyone’s heads. Now regarded an experimental pop classic, Pitiless Censors was a huge breakthrough for Maus as a recognised artist and led to a vast reappraisal of his past work. 2018 saw the release of his most recent work Screen Memories and its sister release Addendum. Screen Memories unfolds like a pageant, with its variety of songs tendering sunshine and shadow throughout. Maus is currently preparing a new album. (Photo by Paul Maffi)

DAVID GRUBBS has released sixteen solo albums and appeared on more than 200 releases. In 2000, his The Spectrum Between (Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Josiah McElheny, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, Jan St. Werner, the Red Krayola, and many others. He is a recipient of the Berlin Prize and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in Music/Sound, a member of the board of directors of Blank Forms, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.

Grubbs’ new album ‘Whistle From Above’, his first for Drag City in a decade, was released this February. It is a colorful, compulsive set of instrumental pieces in which David and his chosen collaborators interact amid the steady roll of an expansive landscape based in the hypnosis of David’s immediately recognizable guitar style.

DAILY TOLL are nestled between the sonic worlds of folk song story telling and off kilter, angular rock. They are a Sydney-based band born from a curious seed, the self taught project of artist Kata Szász-Komlós alongside Jasper Craig-Adams and Tom Stephens. Seemingly coming with an unmistakable charm and yearning. Mapping the band’s existence through their recorded output is to bear witness to the flux of three people learning to respond to one another and gently ossify into a collective vision. Early recordings reflect a band imagining themselves into being whilst new release, A Profound Non-Event (Tough Love), observes a clear shift in conviction.

GUY BLACKMAN is a songwriter’s songwriter. His deftly constructed songs deal frankly with issues of love, sexuality and commitment. If Serge Gainsbourg, Tim Hardin or Kevin Ayers wrote songs set in gay go-go bars or on adult camming websites, you might get close to an idea of Guy’s approach. ‘Out Of Sight’ is Guy’s first solo album in nearly 20 years (out June 13th), a belated follow-up to his well-loved 2008 album Adult Baby. Guy is also the co-founder of the very excellent label Chapter Music.

THE SPATULAS share a percussive, unshadowed presence, a steady, clear-voiced clop. Every note on their debut record ‘Beehive Mind’ (out now on PPM) is a little bit sad on its own but then they're organized in a way that you don't actually notice. The songs breathe in warmth and patience, they are immediate and sweet. And then they start to meander. To address the weight of the world without speaking of weariness. To march the song to breathlessness but loosen your grip when the band wanders. To tell all your secrets but shield your loved ones from vulnerability. To dress up in the charm and temptation of the pop song but maintain a core of peculiarity, of a single voice trying to navigate this world. This is the project of the Spatulas. Think of the few songwriters who know they’re the only ones in the world who could write their songs. The ones who sing in the confidence that the song couldn’t exist without them: Peter Jefferies, Jenny Mae, Ron House, Heather Lewis. Jonathan Richman? Put Miranda Soileau-Pratt of The Spatulas on this list. Miranda will be performing solo at this show.

DEERHOOF seem to thrive on collapse, so it’s simply amazing that this US/Japanese quartet is now celebrating their 31st year. Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t seen them live—the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. Each one discovers some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humor. Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom. This music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, carrying an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom.Deerhoof is defined by such paradoxes.

For this pair of shows in London, Deerhoof will be performing different sets each night, featuring material from ‘Noble and Godlike in Ruin’ (their 19th studio album) alongside epic tracks from their extensive back catalogue!

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.

THE CINDYS are a Bristolian outfit united through a shared love of Alex Chilton, The Clean and The Feelies. Birth child of Jack Ogborne (aka Bingo Fury) and with help from Naima Bock, Finlay Burrows and members of Belishas, the group fronts surrealist imagery and infectious hooks at a pace that’ll give you butterflies. Their yet to be released debut album was recorded across the west country, between the vault of the Cornish Bank in Falmouth, Rockfield studios in Wales and the cellar of legendary venue The Louisiana in Bristol throughout 2024. The album includes production and engineering contributions from Joe Jones (Aldous Harding, The Cure, Teenage Fanclub) and Sam Stackpool of Holiday Ghosts, who also features on guitar. The album can be expected later this year.

ME LOST ME delights in experimenting with songwriting and storytelling, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully weave together disparate genres, drawing influence from folk, art pop, noise, ambient and improvised music. In 2023 Me Lost Me released the critically regarded album 'RPG' and toured extensively in support of the release. On Me Lost Me's fourth full-length, This Material Moment - arriving on Upset the Rhythm on 27th June - she has created an "emotionally raw" album, her most honest and vulnerable yet. Me Lost Me presents sound reaching in opposite directions, straddling time towards the archaic and timeless traditions of folktales, and towards the possible and potential futures of pastoral Britain and the world at large.

Concerned with physicality, interpretations, and, yes, materiality, ‘This Material Moment’ is an album akin to rummaging through a box of long-forgotten trinkets. With each song, Me Lost Me extracts something from the box and asks us to consider it from every angle. "This is an album which uses words as a material, a playful tool for experimentation, full of metaphor, abstraction and analogies." Jayne says, "it has softness and anger, humour, hope and despair, intensity of feeling in all directions expressed as textures, objects, places."

‘This Material Moment’ was written and arranged solo, but played with a core band of John Pope on electric/double bass, Faye MacCalman on clarinet, and now with the addition of Ewan Mackenzie (Dextro/Pigs x7) on drums - bringing in live drums and electric bass for the first time. The album was recorded by Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle, who also worked on RPG.

THE SILVER FIELD is an Oram award-winning project built from the sound world of Coral Rose Kindred-Boothby. Voice, tapes, bass, samples, synthesis, strings, reeds, drums, small sounds, big sounds, sunlight, moonlight, a lot of water. Using her modular synthesiser and other self-built electronic instruments, Coral weaves together song-soundscapes, creating a rich and dream-like tapestry of sound that draws from folk music tradition, experimental electronics and psychedelia.

WALT McCLEMENTS is an accordionist, multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Los Angeles. His solo compositions focus on processed accordion, creating patient and emotional meditations that nod to drone and ambient music. His debut record, “A Hole in the Fence” was released in 2021 on American Dreams, and utilized a minimal palette of accordions treated through guitar pedals to create glacial soundscapes and odes to hidden worlds. On his latest record and first for Western Vinyl, “On a Painted Ocean”, he expands his sonic tools to include lush synths, droning pipe organs, and spirited horns, creating a vibrant journey from solitary stillness to community exuberance. The record also follows last year’s “Rain on the Road”, a collaborative album with harpist Mary Lattimore, released on Thrill Jockey.

Prior to releasing music under his own name, McClements has been a touring member of Weyes Blood, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and Dark Dark Dark, as well as leading New Orleans art-punk brass ensemble Why Are We Building Such A Big Ship? and one man band Lonesome Leash.

JACKEN ELSWYTH is a London-based folk musician, banjo player, and instrument builder. In her music making she is focused on exploring traditional tunes, developing extrapolations on folk styles and techniques, and investigating drone, ambience, and improvisation within and beyond folk music. Her debut album At Fargrounds (Wrong Speed Records, 2024) was described as a ‘folk-thesis for our times’ by The Quietus. Jacken also organises the Betwixt & Between split tape series, and plays in Shovel Dance Collective too.