• Angel Olsen – All Mirrors

    October 16, 2019 - By 

    Angel Olsen rarely shies away from making demands of those to whom her songs are addressed, seemingly with the aim of forging a sense of connection or wholeness through sheer will – not only with the addressee in question, however, but also with (or within) herself, and the world she inhabits. At her most confident, she issues imperatives that appear to be concerned less with whatever romantic situation is at hand, and more with a desire to give herself a voice when she feels most vulnerable, to be heard clearly just as emotional tumult threatens to drown out sincere efforts to…

  • Squarehead – High Time

    October 12, 2019 - By 

    It’s odd that so many of Ireland’s best and much missed bands have chosen the exact same time to make a comeback. Girl Band’s triumphant return four years after their debut and two years after their last live appearance may be the most notable, but forthcoming third albums from early 2010s Richter Collective stalwarts BATS and Jogging should be just as vital. Squarehead, meanwhile, don’t feel like they’ve ever really been away. Live shows have continued sporadically and new singles have slowly slipped out over the past two years, but it’s been a whole six since the band’s last full…

  • Gross Net – Gross Net Means Gross Net

    October 9, 2019 - By 

      Gross Net started life back in 2014 as a collaboration between Girls Names guitarist Philip Quinn and Autumns’ Christian Donaghey, crafting krautrock jams out of primitive drum machines and industrial guitars. However, Donaghey’s early departure has left Quinn to captain the ship alone, steering it in a more fully electronic direction. After two EPs, 2016 saw the release of debut full length, Quantitative Easing, on Belfast’s ever reliable Touch Sensitive Records. Now, as if to ease the pain of Girls Names dissolution earlier this year, album number two has landed on LA based label, Felte. While Quantitative Easing’s cold electronic pulse…

  • Dermot Kennedy – Without Fear

    October 9, 2019 - By 

    As Dublin’s Dermot Kennedy releases his debut album, Without Fear, it’s odd to think he’s already been performing to packed-out audiences for two years. For an artist who recently sold out the 5,000-capacity Brixton Academy in London without even having a UK single, and who has collaborated with regular Kanye West producer Mike Dean, you’d almost be forgiven for thinking of an album as an unnecessary afterthought. Nevertheless, Without Fear, released on UK major Island, puts Kennedy’s towering voice on full display with a collection of deeply personal, hip hop-infused pop songs ruminating on heartbreak, hope and healing. While it may be tempting to…

  • 65daysofstatic – replicr, 2019

    October 7, 2019 - By 

    65daysofstatic make music that speaks to our most elemental, human concerns. Anxious, urgent and vital, their sound narrows on a space between post-rock, cinematic and electronic worlds. replicr, 2019 arrives as a focused expedition into a dark and uneasy present. On this, their sixth album proper, the band collate their experimental interests – they soundtracked the 2016 videogame No Man’s Sky through algorithmic composition – with the feverish immediacy of their early records. Ultimately, the world of replicr, 2019 is unsettling in its realism. From the opening bars, we’re prepared for a bleak, industrial landscape – one which is built…

  • Girl Band – The Talkies

    September 27, 2019 - By 

    Like a bucket of red paint into white, Girl Band’s explosion in the Irish music scene half a decade ago proved a new year zero for the country’s underground scene. Their modus operandi was laid out with ‘Lawman’ and a simple, radical rework of Blawan’s ‘Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage’.  By the time 2015 debut LP Holding Hands With Jamie came out, they were primed for success. Eschewing the role of traditional rock instrumentation, it was seemingly the sound of four people left in isolation, handed a stack of experimental techno 7”s and traditional rock instruments, and…

  • Charli XCX – Charli

    September 25, 2019 - By 

    Charli XCX has become a pop touchstone, and the woman everyone is clamouring to collaborate with. In the last two years alone, she has worked with BTS, Diplo, Cardi B, Clean Bandit, and Taylor Swift – not to mention the artists she collaborated with on 2017’s Pop 2. Charli XCX is the benchmark of the late 2010’s pop; heavily influenced by contemporary dance music and produced in tandem with PC Music, it’s messy, fun, outrageous, and appropriately melancholic. Pop 2 was, rightfully, critically acclaimed. How does Charli compete? On collaborations alone, Charli is standout. The release of the album was…

  • Pixies – Beneath the Eyrie

    September 24, 2019 - By 

    Complaints about Pixies’ latter-day output – that is, their two LPs of post-reunion material, 2014’s Indie Cindy and 2016’s Head Carrier – have been plentiful, and loud: it’s not the same without Kim Deal, whose gifts for odd yet propulsive rhythm and sense of unnerving harmony had contributed so much to their sound before she left the band in 2013; it recalls too often Black Francis AKA Charles Thompson’s solo work, lacking the demented energy that defined their early material; the biblical, literary, and cinematic references, once deployed wittily, now sound laboured or even self-parodic. The criticism hasn’t been entirely unfounded. The urgency that infused their…

  • Lana Del Rey – Norman Fucking Rockwell

    September 22, 2019 - By 

    Norman Fucking Rockwell is a triumph in modern pop music. Lana Del Rey holds a mirror up to the fallacy that is the American Dream; the kind of idyllic, white picket fence visions of Slim Aaron and Norman Rockwell, after whom the album is named. Through the cynical narrative, narcotic-soaked sound and Del Rey’s acerbic character portraits, she warps these images and distorts the convoluted ideology that is the American Dream.  This grim satire glossed over with the subdued vocals and overall ethereal quality is an aesthetic Del Rey has been trying to achieve in her for several albums, most…

  • Iggy Pop – Free

    September 15, 2019 - By 

    At the end of 2016’s Post Pop Depression, his finest work since the 1970s, Iggy Pop tells us he’s going to Paraguay – to where “there’s not so much fucking knowledge”, “people are still human beings”, and he can “heal” himself, sick of political fearmongering, internet commentators, and cheating executives. Some took the promise of his disappearance – if not his mythical Paraguay – seriously, wondering if this was the last we’d hear from the Stooges frontman, who has now been releasing records for a half-century. Pop seems to have wondered the same himself, telling the New Yorker recently that he’d felt burnt…