• Snail Mail – Lush

    July 4, 2018 - By 

    Snail Mail’s Lyndsey Jordan has spoken about her frustration at the media’s lingering focus on her age and it’s easy to understand her consternation. Barely 19, the poison chalice of being a young female musician irritatingly ensures that her music is often viewed through a very particular lens and often described in qualified terms: “Full of potential rather than fully realised”, “Precocious rather than simply gifted” etc.  Bearing this in mind it’s important to break that pattern and clearly state plainly that Snail Mail has made one of the brightest, most insightful and coolly understated albums of the year – No ifs,…

  • SKIBUNNY Set For 20th Anniversary Show

    July 3, 2018 - By 

    Fire up the indie disco DeLorean: legendary Belfast DJ duo Tanya Mellotte and Mark Gordon AKA Skibunny will make their long-awaited return for a 20th anniversary show at Voodoo on Saturday, July 28. Back for one night only, the pair will DJ alongside an unmissable live set from Torgas Valley Reds/Backwater. Spinning the very best in indie rock, hip-hop, DIY, Krautrock, folk, northern soul, electronic and everything in between, Skibunny acquired nigh on mythical status in Belfast in the early 2000s. From secret shows to well-known guest DJs, aftershows and the sweatiest of most memorable nights, it brought out the very…

  • Florence and The Machine – High as Hope

    July 2, 2018 - By 

    Life is often polarised; Elation, devastation, swirling endlessly around us like the walls of a great hurricane. When we find ourselves in the eye of the storm serenity takes a hold, but with lengthened stays it can become stale, and we may once again crave to feel the chaotic winds around us. High as Hope, the fourth release from Florence and The Machine, is an intimate exploration of Welch’s most haphazard and vulnerable years, synchronised with homespun instrumentals and soaring vocals to magnificent effect. To reflect is to see, and in seeing we are immediately and irreversibly bestowed with responsibility.…

  • Nine Inch Nails – Bad Witch

    June 30, 2018 - By 

    Trent Reznor has been throwing shade at practically everybody on this most recent press tour. The Nine Inch Nails frontman has railed against Trump, Kanye and the contemporary state of music. At times, there have been well-formed ideas spoken with a confidence and authority that implies a level of consideration and forethought. At others, it’s amounted to little more than “Old man yells at cloud”. With all this bluster, the release he was promoting got lost in the fold. In fact looking back at this coverage, the most interesting aspect of this current mini-album, Bad Witch, is that it was, in…

  • Festival Mixtape: KnockanStockan 2018

    June 24, 2018 - By 

    KnockanStockan returns to the shores of Blessington Lake in Co. Wicklow across July 27-29 and brings with it the finest homegrown summer festival bill of the year. With exactly four weeks to go (nab your tickets stat) here’s some of our must-see acts at this year’s outing. Go here for the full line-up, info and to buy tickets

  • Nas – Nasir

    June 23, 2018 - By 

    Nas prefers a raucous homecoming to the sanctum of a rustic ski-resort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, it appears. Beneath a constellation of NYC lights, in the imperialistic surrounds of Queensboro Bridge — a staple of hip-hop iconography made famous by MC Shan in 1987 — lay double-decker speakers blasting amid a sense of godly reincarnation. It’s the first-listen party for Nas’s latest full-length record, Nasir. One time wunderkid, Nasir Jones, chose his city, his borough, to celebrate this album’s release; where he spoke, for the first time, his tightly-wound, unadulterated, street-scholarly truth. Where he first etched his name into hip-hop…

  • Lykke Li – so sad so sexy

    June 17, 2018 - By 

    Lykke Li knows how to write a pop song. We all know this – every nightclub still religiously plays the Magician remix of ‘I Follow Rivers’. What the Swedish songwriter really knows though, is a sad pop song. Her latest release, so sad so sexy is no different. This follow-up to 2014’s I Never Learn, which saw her swing more toward the acoustic side of things, dips instead into R&B and hip hop spheres and feels like a matured throwback to her debut album, Youth Novels, released a decade ago now. However, while it’s an evolved departure musically, lyrically, it’s…

  • Oneohtrix Point Never – Age Of

    June 9, 2018 - By 

    With his tenth dense and knotty release, Oneohtrix Point Never (AKA Daniel Lopatin) has constructed a lysergic, glitched out rebuke of internet culture, mapping out the deepest recesses of our often cracked and wildly over stimulated minds. Tackling themes of knowledge and truth in the Internet age, Lopatin takes his lofty queue from ’70s Prog to create a dystopian concept album wherein a singularity of artificially intelligent entities have become all knowing, absorbing the entirety of the world’s information from the internet. Of course, the Internet being the Internet, the information they have absorbed is riddled with inconsistencies, contradictions and…

  • Forbidden Fruit 2018: Monday

    June 6, 2018 - By 

    On the last day of the June bank holiday, also one of the hottest days of the year, a modest gathering assembled at Forbidden Fruit. The line-up for day three differed greatly from Saturday and Sunday’s bill, as it catered devotees of guitar-led indie-rock with Philadelphia based The War on Drugs headlining and veteran (and nostalgia inducing) acts like Spoon, Warpaint and Grizzly Bear performing, also. David Kitt, whose set predominantly drew from his most recent record, Yous, eased the early attendees into the day’s marathon of live music. His set-up was minimal; comprised of Kitt switching between acoustic and…

  • Father John Misty – God’s Favorite Customer

    June 5, 2018 - By 

    Nine years ago, Nardwuar The Human Serviette interviewed Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes and then drummer, Josh Tillman. The exuberant Canadian musician-turned-journalist acknowledged Pecknold’s penchant for performing in a seated position and commented that he had revived this style. Tillman, dissatisfied with the lack of attention, interjected, “I kind of resent being overlooked in this category because I also [perform] on a chair.” This casual exchange, small though it may seem, provided us with an early indication of someone unwilling to relinquish the spotlight. Nine years later, Josh Tillman’s ego abides. He’s transformed from the fabled “horny, man-child, Mamma’s boy”…