DIY, August 2021 by DIY Magazine

DIY

ISSUE 110 • AUGUST 2021 DIYMAG.COM

CHVRCHES FOALS JUNGLE INDIGO DE SOUZA GRAHAM COXON

HE’S ALRIGHT,

JACK

HANGING OUT WITH BLEACHERS: THE MOST IN DEMAND MAN IN POP 1

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Photo: Jonathan Dadds

Note: this is the level of excitement you should all have when opening your new issue of DIY.

HELLO

AUGUST Question! In the spirit of cover star Jack's impressive musical network, who would be Team DIY's dream collaborations? SARAH JAMIESON • Managing Editor In the interest of staying 110% on brand, if Hayley Williams could just do a collaboration with Manchester Orchestra, I would probably be content forever. EMMA SWANN • Founding Editor Let Mark Ronson dive down a deep disco hole for a few months, then emerge to tease out the barelyhidden Saturday Night Fever from Harry Styles. LISA WRIGHT • Features Editor Much like with cooking, the trick to a delicious union is in mixing the sweet and sour. With that in mind, I reckon Grimes' vocals and a Nine Inch Nails meaty riff could be something pretty damn tasty. LOUISE MASON • Art Director In an ideal world Tim Key would be Matt Berninger's lyricist on the next National labum. ELLY WATSON • Digital Editor Not sure if a Miley Cyrus and 100 gecs collab would necessarily “work”, but inject it into my veins nonetheless.

Listening Post

Editor's Letter

Ever since Bleachers burst into life with the iconic ‘I Wanna Get Better’ all the back in 2014, hordes of fans - ourselves at DIY included - have been hooked in by Jack Antonoff’s redemptive and euphoric take on pop. Funnily enough, we were not alone: over the best part of a decade, he’s crafted quite the CV, scoring Grammys and producing some of music’s biggest stars, all while releasing his own records. So, it’s an absolute pleasure to welcome Bleachers to the cover this month, to talk about his home of New Jersey (obv), overcoming the harder moments in life, and his brilliant new album ‘Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night’. Elsewhere this issue, we’ve got some other juicy features to get your teeth into! We delve into the intriguing new project from Graham Coxon, get all dark and dystopian for Chvrches’ new album ‘Screen Violence’, and reunite with Jungle, ahead of their sure-to-be-massive run of Brixton shows. And talking of live shows… they’re officially back! We get ready for Foals’ return to the stage by having a natter with Yannis Philippakis, and let you know exactly what went down at Latitude last month. Now, just turn the page and get stuck in… Sarah Jamieson, Managing Editor

SLIPKNOT - IOWA The sad news of the metal titans’ founding drummer Joey Jordison’s passing hit shortly before sending the issue to print, so needless to say their 2001 chart-topper has been blasting us through to deadline. DIY’S OWN ‘IS THIS IT’ TRIBUTE Without hyperbole, there’s literally no chance DIY would even exist without The Strokes and their incendiary debut ‘Is This It’, so to celebrate it turning 20, we got a bunch of faves to cover the record. Feast your eyes and ears at diymag.com/ isthisit. SLEIGH BELLS - TEXIS If it’s all about the riffs this month, few are quite as gnarly as those from the six-string of Derek Miller, and he and Alexis Krauss’ forthcoming fifth full-length sees them back to their noisy, blistering best: air guitars and screams at the ready.

ISSUE PLAYLIST

Scan the Spotify code to listen to our August playlist now.

C O N T E N T S 4 DIYMAG.COM

N EWS 6 BI G RED M ACHINE 1 0 F OALS 1 4 MATT M ALTESE 1 8 BAXTER DURY 2 0 HALL O F FAME N EU 2 4 ORLA GARTLAND 2 6 MEET ME @ THE A LTA R 2 8 P ORIJ 3 0 SPENCER. FEAT URES 3 2 BLEACHERS 4 0 GRAHAM COXON 4 4 I N DIGO DE SO UZA 4 6 J U NGLE 50 CHUBBY AND THE GANG 5 2 CHVRCHES R EVIEWS 5 6 ALB UM S 6 8 L IVE

Shout out to Electric Lady Studios, all the incredible acts who took part in our 'Is This It' 20th anniversary covers album - watch at diymag.com/isthisit now!, everyone involved with the Twitch There Is Light streams, Pooneh for flying across America for us (once again), and big props to Latitude for resurrecting the festival dream once more.

Founding Editor Emma Swann Managing Editor Sarah Jamieson Features Editor Lisa Wright Digital Editor Elly Watson Art Direction & Design Louise Mason Contributors Alex Cabré, Aliya Chaudhry, Bella Martin, Ben Jolley, Ben Lynch, Ben Tipple, Charlotte Gunn, Eloise Bulmer, Elvis Thirlwell, Emma Wilkes, Flo Stroud, Georgia Evans, Ims Taylor, Jack Doherty, Joe Goggins, Jonathan Dadds, Louis Griffin, Louisa Dixon, Max Pilley, Mia Hughes, Pooneh Ghana, Sean Kerwick, Seeham Rahman, Will Richards, Will Strickson. Cover photo and this page Pooneh Ghana For DIY editorial: info@diymag.com For DIY sales: advertise@diymag.com For DIY stockist enquiries: stockists@diymag.com All material copyright (c). All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of DIY. Disclaimer: While every effort is made to ensure the information in this magazine is correct, changes can occur which affect the accuracy of copy, for which DIY holds no responsibility. The opinions of the contributors do not necessarily bear a relation to those of DIY or its staff and we disclaim liability for those impressions. Distributed nationally.

THE MERCURIAL MUSICAL MIND BEHIND: TEST ICICLES · OUTER LIMITS RECORDINGS · MATRIX METALS WINGDINGS · THE SWEETHEARTS · YOGA · MELT · EXPLORERS BLUES RUNNER · CURSE · FLASHBACK REPOSITORY

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NEWS

Strength In Numbers Aaron Dessner and Justin Vernon’s second album as

Big Red Machine is an ode to the power of collab-

oration, seeing the duo confronting mental health, loss and change with the help of Taylor Swift, Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, Sharon Van Etten and more. Words: Will Richards. Images: Graham Tolbert.

getting towards the end of work on their second album as Big Red Machine when the pandemic hit early last year.

is,” Aaron states, noting that the looming pandemic outside the studio doors added to that feeling of being separate from the real world. “It felt like the world was standing still and time had stopped,” he reflects. “It really felt like this weird life raft, and we were adrift somewhere outside of the music industry.”

Decamping to Texas, the duo were indulging themselves in their loose, improvisational side-project, which has so far spawned a self-titled debut and allowed them to break free from their more structured existences as members of The National and Bon Iver. What happened to the pair since then, however, feels like somewhat of a fever dream, even for two of indie rock’s most beloved songwriters.

Fundamentally, he explains, the process boiled down to a simple idea: “Let's just make something that we love.” “It felt very similar to how the artists that I've known in more indie worlds work, like how The National tries to climb a mountain every time we try to make a record. We feel like we might not get to the top, but we do in the end. It felt like I’d been preparing for that work my whole life.”

Back in July, Taylor Swift released surprise lockdown album ‘folklore’, co-written and produced by Aaron and featuring a duet with Justin called ‘Exile’. With the creative juices flowing out of control, another album then followed - December’s ‘evermore’ - instantly elevating the former to one of the most sought-after producers on the planet.

Now, the pair’s fruitful collaborative streak continues on ‘How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?’, this month’s second album from Big Red Machine. While the upbeat, glitchy ‘Renegade’ feels like a sibling of ‘evermore’ highlight ‘long story short’, on ‘Birch’, Taylor sits in the background, assisting Justin on a slow and sombre cut.

“With ‘folklore’ and ‘evermore’, we wrote almost 30 songs, and when you work that hard and you go through that process, you invariably come out of it in good shape,” he says. “I was learning a lot from her, from her acumen and the way she works. She’s just very down to earth and kind, and absurdly talented in a very visceral way.”

aron Dessner and Justin Vernon were

The songwriter and producer speaks of an “electricity” in the room when an idea came together between himself and Taylor, one that “didn’t feel any different than any other creative situation with artists”. “I was just really moved by what was happening, and encouraged by how lovely and hardworking she

he origins of Big Red Machine can be traced back to 2008, when Aaron and Justin wrote a song that ended up becoming the name of their project. The improvisational track, and the band that spawned from it, was an invitation for the pair to lose the inhibitions and creative structures they might use with their other bands, instead following pure feeling. The duo’s 2018 self-titled debut stayed true to this philosophy; while Justin’s instantly recognisable voice and Aaron’s gorgeous, dusty production were still identifiable, the record allowed them to stray off into lesser-travelled paths, indulging their instinctual tendencies and the improvisational nature that defined the origins of the collaboration. While Aaron says that ‘How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?’ is far more of a structured record than their debut, the idea of using Big Red Machine to step out of the box and explore sounds, feelings and ways of working that they haven’t allowed themselves to do before remains strong on Album Two.

“Having an open exchange of ideas leads to growth, as opposed to falling in love with your own shadow all the time.” – AARON DESSNER Over the past decade and more, The National and Bon Iver have travelled from self-contained bands to collaborative tour-de-forces, expanding their creative process to include a small army of regular collaborators. Among those who worked on the new album alongside Dessner, Vernon and Swift are Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan, Anaïs Mitchell and Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold. Though principally the project of the two core members, Big Red Machine’s second era is defined by its sprawling cast of contributors, who reworked parts of the songs themselves and created an interweaving universe.

“[‘folklore’] felt like this weird life raft, and we were adrift somewhere outside of the music industry.” –AARON DESSNER “Maybe it's because I'm a twin, or just a born collaborator, but I tend to feel like having an open exchange of ideas leads to growth and to things getting better, as opposed to falling in love with your own shadow all the time,” Aaron says. While Big Red Machine sees the pair’s musical friendship group getting bigger, this support network also allowed Aaron to step out alone, singing lead vocals on three tracks for the first time ever. The most striking instance of this is ‘The Ghost Of Cincinnati’, a hushed, Elliott Smith-esque solo effort from the songwriter and producer - a song about “someone who feels like a ghost, stalking the streets of their hometown, interrogating the past and contemplating their fate”. Of his previous reluctance to step up to the microphone himself, Aaron offers: “It's hard when you're in a band with someone that has a big, charismatic, special voice like [The National frontman] Matt [Berninger]. With Justin and Taylor as well - all these incredible singers - I think I was insecure, and didn't really think of myself as that person. “I think what I've been finding more recently is that it's actually important to hear what's in my head and let it out,” he adds, cutting to the core of what Big Red

Machine is about: a project that sees friends helping friends to confront their demons through strength in numbers.

aybe the biggest step forward on the new album, though, is on the song ‘Hutch’, written by Aaron about his late friend and Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison, who died by suicide in 2018. It’s a song of sadness, but one that brings hope and resolution too, as an army of voices (Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan and Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond) rise alongside him and a grand, sweeping instrumental. “He's the second friend that I lost that way, and I was just really very sad about it,” Aaron reflects. “The music I was playing felt like it was very sad, but almost had a slightly spiritual quality. “We've all contemplated that fate or sometimes feel scared of depression. It's easy for anyone to slip into a tailspin,” he continues. “There’s also just this feeling of thinking what could you have said, or could you have asked more often how someone is? You’re searching for remedies, and it was heavy.”

and resolution. To him, across the track’s creation, it became somewhat of a “communal hymn”. “It's important to remember these things, and the album to me does shine a light on that,” he adds. “Mental health is something that’s been an issue in my life and in my friend’s lives, so if you’re hearing that song in there, it means something.” The album’s title, ‘How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?’, feels like a question answered through the subsequent record, and an idea that spurs the music on and beckons Aaron and Justin forwards into the future. An album that seems to say, make the most of the time you have, create meaningful work and form lasting relationships along the way. ‘How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?’ is out 27th August via Jagjaguwar / 37d03d. DIY

‘Gram on the

These days, even yer gran is posting selfies on Instagram. Instagran, more like. Everyone has it now, including all our fave bands. Here’s a brief catch-up on music’s finest photo-taking action as of late.

Aaron says he wouldn’t necessarily have included ‘Hutch’ on the album if it didn’t feel tinged with hope

Has Billie’s new era got us hooked? Corset has! (@billieilish)

Guitar hero, fashion icon, coach of a 1970s basketball team - is there anything Annie Clark can’t do? (@st_vincent)

Penny (farthing) for your thoughts, Tyler? (@feliciathegoat)

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SaddleUp NEWS

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After a long year of sitting on the sofa, Foals are finally getting back to where they belong: ripping it up on the big stage once more.

NEWS

Words: Lisa Wright. Photos: Emma Swann.

aving released the two most successful albums of their career (‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost’ parts 1 and 2) within the space of seven months, fitting in a world tour, a casual two-night, 20,000cap London stop off and a Glastonbury secret slot destined to go down in the history books along the way, you can forgive Foals’ Yannis Philippakis for spending the first part of last year’s nightmare vacation doing pretty much fuck all. “It’s great if you were being productive and felt this urge to create, but there was this strange expectation that because you’ve got all this time, everyone should write their version of The Great American Novel. And personally, I didn’t feel any inclination to write at the beginning of lockdown at all. I just wanted to sit on the couch in my pants for a while,” he shrugs.

world, out of the house and into the studio again for two reasons. Having rediscovered their creative juices as the past year trickled along, Foals are already back at it and working towards LP7. “I don’t want to give anything away because it is pretty early, but this is the most excited we’ve been for a while - I know everyone’s excited when they’re making new music, but we’re feeling the freshness,” Yannis says. For now, he’s giving nothing away aside from the fact that it’s sounding “quite different from where [they] left off on the last record” and that they’re approaching the process from a different angle to last time, when they kept everything in-house with the frontman taking the production helm. “Suffice to say it’s exciting and it’s got some swag to it,” he teases. More concrete, meanwhile, is this month’s All Points East headline show which will see the band decimate London’s Victoria Park in front of 40,000 hungrier-than-ever punters. If a Foals gig on a normal day is one of the more feral, visceral ways to spend an evening, then this one might well rattle the earth’s core.

There were a few early forays into embracing new pandemic possibilities: Instagram Live parties where the singer would dig back through the band’s sonic vaults, playing unreleased demos and reminding himself of the “small revolutions in [their] sound” that have kept Foals propelling forward over their 15-year tenure. “I think maybe there’s some unfinished business with some of those older ideas, where actually I’d regret it if they didn’t get completed,” he notes. But for the most part, Yannis clocked off social media, bored of watching the endless “productivity party” on his timeline, and took stock.

“I can’t imagine that there’s been a pre-show build up like this at any time before. It has the potential to be one of the most powerful shows we’ll ever play: London, home town show, after a pandemic winter and a difficult-to-say-the-least time for everybody,” he enthuses. “We definitely had gotten maybe a little soft around the middle at some point last year, but now we’re getting spry again and ready. I think it’s gonna be such a release for everybody. I think it’s just gonna be euphoric from the moment we start to the end.”

“It’s been good for me not to be in contact with the wider world for a bit. I was reading, and being a bit more boring at home, keeping a low profile, causing mischief on a smaller scale,” he chuckles now, speaking from a rehearsal room just outside Bath. “It’s surprised me how easy that’s been. I think it probably did our bodies some good too, slowing down for a bit, being at home…”

Despite ‘ENSWBL Part 2’ never really getting its dues on the live stage, Foals are drawing a line in the sand and moving forward. They won’t be treating this summer’s outings as a delayed album tour; we’ll be getting pure greatest hits. “It’s just gotta be a celebration of live music and of each other, and putting out a massive positive energy from the stage,” he grins.

Now however, the band are fully reimmersed in the

And having taken a lengthy, enforced break from the crowdsurfing, moshpit-inducing cathartic purging that they do best, the positive energy emanating from All Points East’s main stage come sundown is going to be mammoth. You’ve missed it, we’ve missed it, they’ve missed… “It’s got to be hearing applause, surely? I’ve not heard any applause in a long time,” Yannis jokes of the last 18 months’ live music-less void. “I tried to construct a mini applause factory in my head but it’s not the same - it’s definitely time to hear some applause.”

“All Points East has the potential to be one of the most powerful shows we’ll ever play.” -

Not long to wait now... DIY

Yannis Philippakis 11

Festivals are officially back on the agenda! Now’s your chance to get reacquainted with some of the best on the way this summer...

Festivals

Declan McKenna returns to Reading & Leeds with not only second album ‘Zeros’ still freshly in tow - but brand new single ‘My House’. He talks chaotic festivals past, curiously specific new skills and what’s behind that latest release. How was it to be back in a festival field at Latitude last month? It was just so immersive! It really felt like nothing existed but the festival site. I’d been excited for it for weeks and was so anxious it would slip away but I think, like many people there, it added a sense of unity and excitement that this was real for even a few days. It was nice to just feel excited to be in that environment like it was the first time. The idea of a festival wasn’t just going through the motions as a musician after the past year - it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in fucking ages! Running around and engaging in pure nonsense to live music for three days, it was its own alien spaceship. Our gig was class too, so nice to see people losing their minds to songs that we’ve never played before. I didn’t really take it in ’til after, but it was epic. You've not long released new track 'My House'. What can you tell us about it? It came about from me just trying to entertain myself in March last year. It’s simple and direct and was largely recorded at home. I think I like the idea, moving forward, about engaging further with all the quirks that make up the way I make music at home and this was an example of that that just felt perfect to drop this summer. It still makes me so happy hearing it. The message is just about finding ways to feel and share love in distanced or isolated times; it’s familiar for me, and it just kind of sits as a reminder to find someone to talk to every day and find ways to keep positive and excited even just a little bit.

Photo: Jonathan Dadds.

...and where did the inspiration for the video come from? I’ve been talking with Jake Passmore about making a video for a long time, he’s a long-standing collaborator artistmusician-director who wrote ‘You Better Believe’ with me for my album ‘Zeros’

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and also has featured in music videos with me before. We wanted to have me alone sailing at sea and connecting with and embracing the challenges of it all, and eventually making some friends. We wanted to make something where we could utilise Jake’s talent for creating and designing creatures and we had an amazing team of his friends help put it all together. It was a really lovely and intimate way to go about making a video which can be hard to convince the powers that be to let you do, but we were all so happy with it. Is it the first element of something more to come, or standalone? I have no idea, probably standalone, I like standalone stuff right now. I have so many ideas. I think my next album will probably come about from me just realising I’ve written an album and taking about a month to just finish it off, there’s so much already there that’s already halfway produced from just digging in at home. What else have you spent the last 18 months or so spending your time doing? Any new hobbies or habits we should know about? I got back into football majorly, watching and playing, when possible. I just used to play and watch football at least every other day when I was younger, there’s something about competitive sport that’s just so important for my sanity. It’s a way to get angry and get your head fully engaged in something, but at the end you just leave and that’s it. I’ve also taken a particular interest in juggling and can now juggle four bottles of Buckfast whilst roundhouse kicking a can of Lilt off my own mum’s head. It sort of felt like there was no end of summer last year with no Reading & Leeds - do you have any particularly strong memories of the event? Absolutely losing my tiny mind to Foals and Disclosure a few years ago; having only 17 songs saved on my laptop for my silent disco set vs Blaenavon and playing ‘You Can Call Me Al’ twice; crowdsurfing in my Shrek sack dress on the Radio 1 stage at Reading - this is NOT safe to do - and getting told off for climbing the rail on stage at Leeds - there’s never a dull moment. What would be your ultimate thing to happen during your Reading & Leeds set? Lewis Capaldi to come on and sing ‘Brazil’.

Festival

NEWS IN BRIEF

Updates from more live music shenanigans planned for 2021 - all together everyone, fingers crossed...

GREEN LIGHT

The lineup for this year’s Green Man (19th - 22nd August) has been revealed, with Little Dragon, Caribou, Mogwai and Fontaines DC headlining the event, which takes place in the Brecon Beacons in Wales. “There's a kind of magic about Green Man - both that I've experienced myself in the past and that I hear about from friends who go every year,” says Caribou’s Dan Snaith. “I feel very lucky that we're going to headline this year.” Thundercat, Goat Girl, Georgia, LUMP, Big Joanie, and Greentea Peng are also among the artists set to appear.

(DON’T FEAR) THE REEPER

Hamburg inner-city event Reeperbahn Festival (22nd - 25th September) has confirmed its plans to take place inperson this year. At least 35 venues in the city’s St Pauli area will host artists across the week, and artists set to appear include Lauran Hibberd, Another Sky, Talk Show, Sinead O’Brien and Nabihah Iqbal.

FLIPPING THE IP-SWITCH

Working Men’s Club, The Goon Sax and deep tan have been added to the bill for Sound City Ipswich (1st - 2nd October), joining the likes of PVA, Porridge Radio, Katy J Pearson, The Goa Express and Billie Marten at venues across the city.

PITCH PERFECT

Mykki Blanco, Iceage, Nilüfer Yanya, Tirzah and Charlotte Adigéry are among the acts playing the inaugural Pitchfork Music Festival London (10th - 14th November). Events will take place across venues including the Roundhouse, Southbank Centre, Fabric, and Village Underground.

THE NEW ALBUM 13 AUGUST 13

In the Studio with…

Matt Maltese

The cult balladeer-turned-viral star is back at it for incoming LP3. Words: Elly Watson.

ou may already be familiar with some of the unexpected sub-genres on TikTok: DivorceTok / FrogTok / MalteseTok - but there’s another craze sweeping the app at the moment that’s perhaps even more unlikely. Currently racking up video after video (at one point entering the worldwide Top 100), Matt Maltese and the irresistible chorus of his 2017 ballad ‘As The World Caves In’ have fully cemented a new subculture: Maltesetok. “It’s pretty crazy,” Matt laughs. “It’s just very surreal and bizarre isn’t it, having a chorus sung by lots of people. I think the nature of TikTok is that something goes viral, and then it goes even more viral, and I keep thinking, ‘Why isn’t everyone sick of it already?!’. They don’t seem to be yet, so we’ll see how long that train goes!” When he’s not basking in his newfound social media fame however, Matt has spent the last year penning new tracks, both for himself and alongside musicians such as fellow South London resident Joy Crookes. “I think I realised more than ever that I just need writing so much,” he smiles. “It doesn’t really feel like it’s a choice anymore, I just really need to write songs!” That need has resulted in his

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eagerly-awaited third album, ‘Good Morning It’s Now Tomorrow’. Finished towards the end of last summer, he decamped to a studio in Eastbourne with producer Tom Carmichael, who also worked on 2018’s ‘Krystal’, and some bandmates to give the record its final flourish late last year. “It was just a really bizarre two weeks in December, sort of right at the edge of lockdown,” he recalls. “It felt like a holiday! As hard work as it was, it was so joyous to be around people like that, and to be making music by the sea. It was just ridiculous. I mean, the sea was fucking awful, it was so cold. I spent five minutes in it and I just couldn’t feel my feet for like, two hours!” Sharing two singles already, ‘Mystery’ and ‘Shoe’, he’s hoping that his third fulllength will provide a place of comfort to people after the year we’ve all just gone through. “It sounds quite hopeful for how hopeless everything was,” he notes. “I just had this thing in me that I wanted to write songs that were peaceful and made me feel more peaceful. The record - although it’s definitely dark and melodramatic at times - a lot of it is about trying to be OK with things. It’s almost like the songs were what I wanted to be at times.” ‘Good Morning It’s Now Tomorrow’ is out on 8th October via Nettwerk. DIY

“I wanted to write songs that made me feel more peaceful.”

THE DEBUT ALBUM FEATURING “STUCK”, “21ST CENTURY HOBBY”, “WRITE ME A LETTER” & MORE

NEWS When Shygirl requested a rampant rabbit, this wasn't quite what she had in mind…

SHYGIRL FEAT. SLOWTHAI BDE

With its Urban Dictionary definition stated as “if you have confidence, but aren’t cocky about it”, ‘BDE’ (that’s 'big dick energy', duh) is something that South London’s Shygirl has buckets of, and it’s no more evident than on her newest single. Linking up with slowthai for the track (himself no stranger to a little self confidence), the bassheavy sex jam sees Shygirl and Ty trading raunchy lines about getting it on: “Read my lips / I need a big dick boy / Ain’t no body slanging it right”. Pairing razor-sharp lines over pulsating backing, if you’re looking for a new millennial mating call that doubles as one to get down to on the dancefloor, look no further. (Elly Watson)

AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS Guided By Angels

Like with anything, discussing bands is a matter of context, and so while Amyl and the Sniffers’ comeback track is - for them - a slightly more refined affair, that’s not to say that singer Amy Taylor sounds anything less than a feral wildcat trying to punch her way out of a cage. Still, there is something a little more polished to the guitars that stab throughout ‘Guided By Angels’, the rowdy recorded-in-a-cupboard feel of the Sniffers’ early material given an injection of, well, most likely cash. It suits them though, allowing Amy’s wildeyed declarations of “I’ve got plenty of energy” (no shit, Sherlock) to sound even more passionate within a stronger framework. (Lisa Wright)

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FR ANK CARTER AND THE R ATTLESNAKES Sticky

Frank Carter has truly returned. The title track from his upcoming fourth album with the Rattlesnakes is a characteristically abrasive offering, brimming with grooving bass and spiky guitar, while harnessing all the catchiness of a pop hit. Frank encapsulates the emotional comedown “after midnight in the city” with candid, witty bluntness that never feels heavy-handed, sugarcoating nothing: “I go where monsters dwell / Dancing like a madman through a personal hell.” Paired with jiving punk, it’s a song made for acknowledging your pain and dancing through it anyway. Angst has never sounded so fun. (Emma Wilkes)

CAROLINE POLACHEK Bunny Is A Rider

An escapist pop bop of the highest order, Caroline Polachek has reunited with Danny L Harle for a post‘PANG’ instant hit whose arrival is perfectly timed for a summer heatwave. With a synth whistle intro and stickin-your-head chorus, as well as a suitably slippery bassline perfect for finally getting back to the dancefloor, it proves once again why they are a match made in music heaven. As if that wasn’t reason enough to have it playing on repeat, there’s also an unexpected star of the show: Danny’s baby daughter, who makes her debut - downright adorable - vocal cameo. (Ben Jolley)

CONAN GRAY People Watching

Bittersweet and introspective, ‘People Watching’ tells of Conan Gray’s experience with the all-too-familiar balance of loneliness and longing. Conan’s wallflower style lyricism and knack for storytelling is apparent throughout the song (written with Julia Michaels), the words inspired by conversations he overheard whilst people watching couples in his university cafe. Although hopeful, Conan also wears his heart on his sleeve as he reflects upon his tendency to “cut people out like the tags on my clothing” - all making for a wholly immersive and emotionally honest listen. (Flo Stroud)

£30+BF

Across Wakefield City Centre

The Futureheads Glasvegas The Anchoress The Lovely Eggs Beardyman She Drew The Gun Brix & The Extricated Lanterns On The Lake Roddy Woomble Beans On Toast Big Joanie Peggy Sue Hands Off Gretel Mush Low Hummer BDRMM The Lounge Society Too Many T’s

ACCE

25 September

0 SE PT 2

Venus Grrrls / Katie Spencer / Hadda Be / Galaxians / Crake Home Counties / Sunflower Thieves / Langkamer / Treeboy & Arc Knuckle / Mt Doubt / Weekend Recovery / Jodie Nicholson / Adore//Repel In The Morning Lights / Priestgate / Reardon Love / Hannah Willwood Cowgirl / Lemon Drink / Mayshe Mayshe / Mt Misery / ODAS The State Of Georgia / The Bleeding Obvious / Georgia Meek / Rumbi Tauro The Wind Up Birds / La Rissa / August Charles / Bunkerpop / JJ Swimsuit Macroscope / Dear Friends / The Last Programme / Dan Greaves Chloe Juliette Beswick / Emily Parish / Brad Jack longdivisionfestival.co.uk

NEWS

What’s The Story (Baxter Dury)? Judging by 2021’s incoming selection of memoirs, it seems that many of music’s great and good spent their lockdowns doing more than just completing Netflix. As he releases madcap autobiography Chaise Longue into the world, we check in with Baxter and round up some of the other musical tomes hitting shelves… Hi Baxter! We’ve read Chaise Longue and it’s wonderfully insane but also a bit sadder than perhaps expected? Everyone’s said that. I think it just came out in quite a primitive way, and I went with its primitiveness as opposed to trying to control it and make it literary. I hate bad writing - you know, ‘I am a man with a quill’ - so I tried to not make it like that. It feels like it was written on the side of a prison wall. Are you the kind of person that keeps diaries to refer back to? My life is a diary - Baxter Diary - and also when you’ve got a famous father, there’s a lot of information around that you’re reminded of anecdotally because there’s a film, a documentary, a play... When it’s my memory vs folklore vs truth, if I thought the story was good but it couldn’t be absolutely verified, I still put it down. The fact that I was born to dad playing ‘Johnny B Goode’ in a band has been told a million times to me, and some people said it was just dad bullshitting, but fuck that, it’s staying - it’s great. My sister got pissed off because some of the details aren’t quite accountable. She’s not even sure there was a chaise longue in our house. You were living back at your childhood flat while writing it, how was that? Well I’d talked about writing a book but hadn’t, and had basically just manipulated myself a book deal and was

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Photo: Ed Miles

bullshitting. And then under the harsh conditions of having nothing else to do [during lockdown] and living in the house, I thought I absolutely just have to do this. I was so desperate, and I was going to get any form of helicopter assistance - one of those dudes that come in and write your book for you, Captain Ghostwriter but they didn’t even answer my phone calls, which in hindsight worked. I was left to make my own fire and kill my own rabbit. Your childhood comes across like a balance between craving chaos and normality... I definitely bounced off the chaos for a while, and that’s in me, there’s a bit of me that’s ‘Come on then, let’s go’ and [wants] conflict. But maybe because of living with someone so colossally mad as the Sulphate Strangler [Ian Dury’s friend and Baxter’s sometimechildminder], who was doomed in a way, I never went into any form of extreme drugs or anything. But there’s a bit of me that still wants to nick exhaust pipes. The book doesn’t really answer anything or pose any questions, and I don’t know what it means, but I came out of it with a lot of respect for my parents because they really tried.

“[Chaise Longue] feels like it was written on the side of a prison wall.”

-Baxter Dury There’s a great story about bursting in on a man in the bathroom with his balls out, playing the didgeridoo. That sort of stuff happened every other day, really. So many things happened like that, that it was quite normal. It was very cheerful a lot of the time, really very jolly. Do you think the book will be shocking to people? I wrote it because I knew it must be, and I sort of wanted to qualify my bullshit, and test if the tales I’ve generated for years and years were true or not. And I probably just created a whole new manifesto of bullshit but there we are! Now I can really go to town! Chaise Longue is out now via Corsair Books. DIY

Fill Your Shelves Michelle Zauner Crying In H Mart Following the release of this year’s critically-acclaimed third Japanese Breakfast album ‘Jubilee’, Crying In H Mart is finally also available in the UK this month. An autobiographical exploration into cultural identity and grief, Zauner’s debut has already landed her on the New York Times bestseller list. (Out now via Picador) Jessie Ware Omelette As well as being a BRIT-nominated pop legend, Jessie Ware also indulges her love for food on podcast Table Manners, and it’s this need for nourishment that forms the backbone of recent book Omelette - a likeable, lighthearted look back at her most memorable days and dishes so far. (Out now via Hodder Studio) Bobby Gillespie Tenement Kid Following the early days of the Primal Scream frontman up until the release of seminal 1991 album ‘Screamadelica’, Bobby’s tales of breaking out of working class Glasgow into the big time are just the sort of inspiration we all need to move our arses after 18 months of fuck all. (Out 14th October via White Rabbit) Dave Grohl The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music Well this one’s gonna be dull, isn’t it. JOKE. Having been in two of the world’s most successful bands, ol’ Davey G is hardly likely to be short of stories; here, he finally lets us in on them, “shed[ding] a little light on what it’s like to be a kid from Springfield, Virginia, walking through life while living out the crazy dreams I had as a young musician.” (Out 5th October via Simon & Schuster UK)

SONG WARS! THIS MON TH:

‘PEACHES ’

The Presidents of the United States of America VS Justin Bieber Of all the words in all the world, sometimes artists just plump for exactly the same ones. But which of these identically-titled songs is technically, objectively the winner? Ready, set, FIGHT!

THE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Year released: 1996 How has it aged? The sort of song you probably know even if you don’t think you do: it’s a sneaky, peachy cult fave. What’s it saying? Who knew the lyric “Peaches come from a can / They were put there by a man” could be such a belter? The Presidents’ slacker classic uses this most innocuous of fruit as a metaphor for yearning for a crush (supposedly): it’s a level of distinctly un-2021 sweetness - pun intended - that we can get on board with. Banger rating out of 10: You can def have a mosh to this one, so it gets a solid 7.5.

JUSTIN BIEBER Year released: 2021 How has it aged? Well it’s only been out since March so we can’t know for sure, but we’d take a fair stab at saying Bieber’s ode to wifey Hailey won’t be challenging the ‘greatest love song’ lists any time soon. What’s it saying? He got his peaches out in Georgia, and his weed from California. And while Justin clearly knows his way around a map, his mostused direction is always the obvious one: ‘Peaches’ sounds like Bieber 101, which is to say it’s… fine? Banger rating out of 10: Soz mate, we’re not Beliebers. This gets a generous 4.

RESULT:

A clean sweep by The Presidents of the United States of America, who must be secretly thankful that they decided to call it a day in 2016 just before their name took on a WHOLE new meaning.

Felix White It’s Always Summer Somewhere: A Matter of Life and Cricket Since The Maccabees called it a day in 2017, guitarist Felix has split his time between founding and running Yala! Records and delving into his longterm passion for cricket. Here, he looks back at his life through the lens of both: reflecting on the passing of his mother, the band’s much-loved tenure, and his little-documented relationship with Florence Welch. (Out now via Cassell)

NEWS

ame F OF

Amy Winehouse - ‘Back To Black’ A decade since her untimely passing, Amy Winehouse’s tour-de-force second record still stands up as the peak of a truly once-in-a-lifetime talent. Words: Max Pilley.

FACTS THE

Released: 27th October 2006 Key tracks: ‘Tears Dry On Their Own’, ‘Back To Black’, ‘Rehab’ Tell your mates: The iconic funeral scene in the ‘Back To Black’ video was shot at Stoke Newington’s Abney Park Cemetery; after her passing, the gravestone bearing ‘R.I.P The Heart of Amy Winehouse’ was edited out.

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As anyone who’s seen the grainy footage of an 11-year-old Amy Winehouse singing songs from the musical Grease can attest, the Londoner always stood a pretty good shot at serious stardom. But hers is far from a story solely about raw talent. Her one resounding, complete artistic statement, ‘Back to Black’ released five years before her death aged 27 - is the twelfth bestselling album of all time in the UK (only Adele’s ‘21’ has outsold it since), and yet its legacy is tangled in the shifting tides of social change and the cult of celebrity.

Too often lost in the conversation is the staggering beauty of Amy’s lyricism. Seemingly tortured by her own fatalistic romanticism, her words can lay hidden behind her idiosyncratic intonations, but often they hide philosophical revelation: “Though I battle blind / Love is a fate resigned” from ‘Love is a Losing Game’, or “All I can ever be to you is the darkness that we knew / And this regret I’ve got accustomed to” from ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’. While Pete Doherty and Alex Turner were being hailed as the new laureates, Amy was out-writing AND out-selling them.

Albums this ubiquitous are rare indeed, familiar to enough people that even their least well known tracks have their own legacies. The music it contains tells us little about 2006, drawing deeply instead from the rhythm and blues of a different place and time, and transporting it to Amy’s lived experience of Camden at the height of indie landfill and nu rave (breathtakingly, the album lost its fight for the Mercury Prize to Klaxons’ ‘Myths of the Near Future’). Building on her smokey, Dinah Washington-indebted 2003 debut ‘Frank’, Amy and producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi brought in flavours from doo-wop, ska, Sam Cooke and The Shangri-La’s, cooking up a new mutation of classic songwriting that teases at your expectations, subverting the form just to challenge your ear into taking the next little leap.

And yet, the tabloid dimension to her life dominated the cultural conversation. As the montage of television ‘entertainment’ clips in Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy shows, few can claim not to have been in some way complicit in the vindictive, misogynistic way in which vulnerable women in the public eye were treated during this period. While some progress has been made in the decade since her passing, it’s bittersweet to observe the near-unanimous adoration Amy’s artistry and ‘Back to Black’ in particular now receive. Material this special will always win in the long run, and we can only wonder what more daring and experimental forms her work could have gone on to take. But there could surely never have been a more popular, more complete or more relatable Amy Winehouse record than this. DIY

IN PRINT. EVERY MONTH. DIYMAG.COM/SUBSCRIBE

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18 DIFFICULT MONTHS FOR THE LIVE MUSIC INDUSTRY £250,000 WORTH OF BEER GRANTS PLEDGED TO HELP SAVE INDEPENDENT VENUES 35 PIONEERING, SOCIALLY-DISTANCED & SOLD OUT BREWERY GIGS 12 OUT OF WORK MUSICIANS HIRED TO SERVE & DELIVER BEER 2 LIVE NEWS APPEARANCES TO FIGHT FOR THE LIVE MUSIC INDUSTRY 1 STAGE HOSTED AT A PILOT MUSIC FESTIVAL 0 LOSS OF ENTHUSIASM FOR DEFENDING LIVE MUSIC …IN FACT, WE’RE JUST GETTING STARTED

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I’ve released music for so long, but for so many of these years I was in the garage!" 24 DIYMAG.COM

ORLA GARTLAND

The Dublin-born London-based artist is channelling the past six years into a debut album that cuts to her core. Words: Elly Watson.

“The best piece of advice I’ve ever got was that, as an artist, [you should] think that you’re travelling along like a car,” begins Orla Gartland. “You’re travelling as a car, and managers, labels, publishing deals, all these bits, think of them as travelling under you rather than being the things that block you. Sometimes you can be moving and it’s a bit slow, and other times you’ll jet forward…” According to her analogy, slow and steady might win the race, but after nearly 10 years in the game, Orla is now ready to kick things into high gear.

First learning how to play “jigs and reels” on the fiddle - “Super Irish!” and moving on to guitar aged 12, the Dublin-born singer began busking with pals, including folk duo Hudson Taylor, when she was a teenager. “I think it was quite a humbling way to get into it, and I learned so much from the two boys in that band,” she reminisces. “They moved to London to find a manager and I just followed them because they were the only friends that I had who played music. Sometimes it’s that simple! All you need is someone that you can see, that is just in reach, that’s doing it, for it not to feel so abstract.” Arriving and finding herself in a community of fellow musicians who took her under their wing, Orla spent the next few years uploading covers to YouTube, honing her production skills and waiting for the pieces of the puzzle to fall into the right place. “If you think of a traditional band that meets in school, they practice, in theory - this is very cliche - but they practice in the garage for years,” she notes. “I’ve released music for so long, but for so many of these years I was in the garage!” After years tinkering away behind the scenes, however, Orla’s long awaited debut full-length, ‘Woman On The Internet’, arrives this month. Holding out to create something inherently and unashamedly her, the record finds Orla exploring her own story across 11 folk-tinged, alt-pop gems that she also co-produced. Pulling inspiration from her favourite albums - marking Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Stranger In The Alps’ as a “perfect” example - she explains that she wanted to craft a record that would mirror a collection of stories from one person, locked together by a certain moment in time.

“I feel like I have more to say now,” she explains. “I think there’s a lot of pressure, especially on young girls in music, to be super young and be doing stuff. ‘Billie Eilish is 13, get on it quick!’. It just took me a while to get where I felt that I was good enough for a full-length. “My last EP was about a break-up which I’d avoided for a long time because I was like, ‘What a like, duh thing to write songs about’,” she continues. “But then I went through a break-up and understood why break-up songs are so good. I was glad that I got that out of my system, because selfishly I didn’t want my album to be about anybody else. I wanted it to be my stories and my point of view. And I didn’t want it to be sad!” From exploring identity on ‘Pretending’, to toxic masculinity on ‘Zombie’, to wanting to initiate a Freaky Friday-esque body swap on ‘More Like You’, ‘Woman On The Internet’ finds Orla continuing on that journey of self-discovery. “I think 19-year-old me moving to London, if I’d have known it would take me six years to get my debut album together, would I have been disheartened? Probably!” she smiles. “But I think I’m better off for it, and I think the music’s better off for it. ”I just wanted to make something I was proud of,” she shrugs. “It’s so cheesy, but it’s really easy to make music that you don’t care about, which is really sad. I have so many friends that, for whatever reason, have made something that someone else wants you to make, and that’s just so sad to me. I just couldn’t do it.” Now, with an album that finally feels truly authentic in her grasp, Orla is also eager to give back to the fans who have been there since her early YouTube days. “I’ve been shocked at how patient and loyal they’ve been,” she beams. “So it feels good to be like, ‘Finally! Here you go!’ “It makes me feel like an album artist,” she continues. “When you’re in the EP space it feels like always the bridesmaid, never the bride. You’re never quite there. But now that I am in that space, thinking about Album Two and Three, even in a really broad way, is not that scary. I think it’s good for me and levels me up in my head. I think I’ve finally made something that I’m happy for other people to hear, you know?” DIY

MEET ME @ THE ALTAR neu 26 DIYMAG.COM

Meet the pop punk trio reinvigorating the scene and pushing it forward into an entirely new era. Words: Sarah Jamieson. Photo: Jimmy Fontaine.

It may be a little strange to think that, in 2021, pop punk is experiencing a new moment in the sun, but here we are. And while Travis Barker is collaborating with new artists like KennyHoopla and WILLOW, and Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘good 4 u’ has given Paramore a whole new lease of life on TikTok, there’s one new band in particular who are ushering in a new era for the genre. “First and foremost, it was just the music itself,” begins Meet Me @ The Altar’s Téa Campbell, when asked what exactly drew the trio to pop punk to begin with. “It’s super fun and makes you want to jump around and stuff, which is what we love to do. Then there’s also the whole culture of Warped Tour; everyone would be crowdsurfing and I feel like more people are willing to let loose at a pop punk show.” Formed in 2015 after Téa linked up with drummer Ada Juarez online (Téa hails from Florida, while Ada was living in New Jersey), the band soon recruited vocalist Edith Johnson from her home in Atlanta, and began working remotely. “It’s just the Gen Z in our blood!” laughs Edith, on meeting her bandmates via YouTube. “It was like, we have the internet, why not use

it?” confirms Téa. “We couldn’t really find people in our areas who played music, or even listened to the type of music we listened to, so we didn’t let that stop us.” Unsurprisingly, the trio emanate a bubbly sense of excitement about their achievements so far. From being recipients of Halsey’s recent #BLACKCREATORSFUND, to being signed to legendary pop punk label Fueled By Ramen (“Getting signed to FBR was the end goal for us; we just didn’t know it was gonna come that soon!” laughs Téa), there’s also a sense of genuine determination that lies beneath their success: to help open up a more inclusive and diverse scene for future artists and fans. “Ever since we first formed, we just saw where the band was gonna go,” Téa confirms. “The plan was always to be the biggest band in the world, so that we could be that band that we ourselves didn’t have growing up. We were aware that there was no one else out there that looked like us.” Now, with EP ‘Model Citizen’, they’re ready to lead by example. "It felt super normal because we had been talking about it and thinking about it for the entirety of our band,” Téa nods. “We’ve been mentally preparing ourselves for this role this entire time, so we’re ready to go.” DIY

We were aware that there was no one else out there that looked like us.” -Téa Campbell

TERRY PRESUME

The Nashville-via-Florida newcomer giving a kaleidoscopic take on pop.

LIME GARDEN The spiritual successors to

RECOMMENDED

Britpop’s finest females.

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WET LEG The buzziest 3:16 of the year so far. “Is your muffin buttered? Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?” You might not have predicted that a song that quotes Mean Girls before going on to repeatedly eulogise a piece of furniture for around 20 lines would become the breakout alternative buzz hit of the summer, but what Wet Leg’s debut ‘Chaise Longue’ lacks in lyrical variety (“On the chaise longue, on the chaise longue, all day long…”) it more than makes up for in perfectly awkward, insatiable magic. LISTEN: That’s all they’ve got so far, but MAN, what an intro. SIMILAR TO: A sassy chick flick take on post punk.

While the ‘90s most notable Y chromosome-holders can count many later bands as audibly in their debt (Superfood, Sports Team, basically anyone from Manchester), there are far fewer modern artists who’ve nodded to Elastica, Kenickie, Sleeper and the ladies of Britpop. Enter Lime Garden, who’ve even decided to name their latest banger ‘Pulp’, just so you know which decade they’re in thrall to. We wanna be in their gang. LISTEN: All four current tracks are bangers, but ‘Surf and Turf’ will have you hairbrush singing in no time. SIMILAR TO: If Justine Frischmann and Black Honey’s Izzy B. Phillips joined forces.

Coming from the same Florida scene that birthed fellow genre-blurrer Dominic Fike, and finding his creative flow in the city of Nashville that he now calls home, Terry Presume is the latest multi-talented artist shaking up the modern pop scene. With only a handful of singles currently out in the world, each shows Terry’s unique view on the universe. Proclaiming in the comment section of debut ‘Did Me Wrong’ that “music will never be the same again after I’m through with it”, it’s hard not to be slightly swayed. LISTEN: Debut project ‘What Box?’ is sure to solidify him as pop’s most refreshing new voice. SIMILAR TO: The successor to Dom’s pop/rap throne.

JOHN GLACIER

An otherworldly London talent making her way from the underground into the spotlight.

AZIYA

Already a known-figure within London’s underground music scene, Hackney’s John Glacier is ready to shed her mythical reputation and grab the attention she readily deserves. Armed with a debut project produced by tastemaker Vegyn, her ethereal take on rap sees her blend slick lyrical flows with emotive backing beats, conjuring tracks that are just as compelling and confounding as herself. LISTEN: New project ‘SHILOH: Lost For Words’ may easily result in that exact same reaction. SIMILAR TO: The rap equivalent of seeing a UFO.

Riff-loving Londoner in thrall to indie rock’s finest. A look through 21-year-old Aziya’s ‘Osmo-Sis’ Spotify playlist will tell you most of what you need to know about the budding guitar hero: from Jimi Hendrix to Wolf Alice, Ty Segall to The Strokes, though the young Londoner’s palette is broad, she clearly worships at the altar of the six string. Recent debut EP ‘We Speak Of Tides’ speaks to that idea too, her accomplished vocal soaring atop riffs and grooves that show she’s clearly a scholar who’s soaked in her music history lessons like a sponge. LISTEN: ‘Slip!’ is as slinky and unpin-down-able as its title. SIMILAR TO: Deap Vally’s younger, more commercial British cousin.

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PORIJ Porij: they’re in pole position.

The Manchester gang, taking dance music to new places. Words: Seeham Rahman.

Final mix checks in the Maccies drivethru, warm, flat beer before a gig, and ‘Original Nuttah’ amplified by a makeshift Pringles can speaker: the ‘normal’ world of Manchester quartet Porij might not be a glamorous one, but it’s one they can’t wait to return to. “During the pandemic, a lot of our income completely dried up, but we're quite lucky in the fact that we're so DIY everything!” vocalist and keys player Eggy explains after sipping their coffee. “We’ve organically always enjoyed working with what’s in front of us. We’re very much a ‘do’ [rather than] a ‘think’ group.” “Like our record label [Oat Gang Records], which arose purely because Distrokid needed a label name so we could release shit ourselves,” drummer Tom continues. “Even our band name! James [Porij’s bassist and keys player] said it was just something to get out of the way. So, we picked Porij - and spelt it the way a fiveyear-old would!” It’s this homespun yet confident attitude that’s precisely what makes the genremelding dance band so enticing. Forming a tight-knit friendship during their time studying at the Royal Northern College of Music, their similarly idiosyncratic music tastes fused together to form their quirky, self-proclaimed ‘Oats’ sound. As a band who makes dance music, it’s not shocking then,

!"#$%&$'()$*+,&-.+)-/0$/-*$0+,+'$ #)12.&03$("&-$#)1$"/4&$'"&$/%+0+'#$')$ *)$,)2&56$7$899# 28 DIYMAG.COM

that their work is surreal and funky like no other - swimming between sweet pop licks to groovy rhythms that will egg on some skanking. “We just listen to bare music!” guitarist Tommy exclaims. “And we also play instruments, so including them into the electronic aesthetic is always quite mind-bending, but very fun.” This diverse yet effortlessly danceable sound is excitingly showing up not only in September’s debut EP ‘Baby Face’ - but also live, from their ravefilled home of Manchester to across the UK. “Manchester was the first place I felt like we could get involved in a scene that had a reputation for bands that you can dance to,” Tommy explains. “It's been such a pleasure to now be able to add something to that.” Still, while their EP’s title points to a band embracing their youth and holding a carefree, feel-good energy, Porij’s music is artfully sparking important conversations and deepdiving into personal difficulties too - despite its ability to make you move your feet. On previous single ‘Ego’, for example, Eggy shares their difficult experience with light and dark, and recent track ‘Nobody Scared’ touches on gender-based violence and Reclaim the Night marches. “I think we would never shy away from being political, even if it isn’t our sole purpose,” Eggy explains. “It comes down to not being afraid to show depth. I just think, why be two dimensional and limit yourself when you have the ability to do more?” And ‘more’ is precisely what Porij are and intend to continue doing. Their advice to their younger selves is still what they’re preaching now: “Make big, dirty tunes. Have a blast. And hopefully you’ll be alright.” DIY

All the buzziest new music happenings, in one place.

THE

Photo: BLACKKSOCKS

BUZZ FEED

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PLAYLIST

Every week on Spotify, we update DIY’s Neu Discoveries playlist with the buzziest, freshest faces. Here’s our pick of the best new tracks:

,*)%&'/-"%&'/-"2% +*3 Despite their youngest member being literally 10-years-old (feeling decrepit yet?), The Linda Lindas are already packing a mighty feminist punch. They’ve opened for Bikini Kill, played on the soundtrack for Amy Poehler’s Moxie!, and now their latest ‘Oh!’ lands as 2:30 of pure Runaways-style badassery and gang chants. Legends in the making.

!"#$%%&'() South Korea-born, LA-based Park Hye Jin is gearing up for the release of next month's debut 'Before I Die' - due 10th September via Ninja Tune. Following on from last year's 'How Can I' EP and collaborations with Blood Orange and Clams Casino, it marks the next big step from the multi-hyphenate producer-rapper-DJ. Can't wait? Listen to latest single 'Whatchu Doin Later' on diymag.com now.

*+,%-"./ Last month’s NEU star Priya Ragu has announced forthcoming debut mixtape ‘damnshestamil’ - set to drop in mere weeks, on 3rd September. The release comes preceded by new single ‘Kamali’, which hones the singer’s increasingly singular ability to mix the music of her Sri Lankan roots with modern pop and R&B. Of the track she states: “Growing up, we look at the world with curiosity and envision infinite possibilities without any limitation. For a lot of us, these possibilities and dreams get blurry by the way the roles of men and women are dealt out. [But] if we can birth life, imagine what we can create if we are fully off the leash?! With this song I want to be another crack in the cycle, so that one day we can fully break it together.”

-#"0%#"1) Following the success of debut single ‘Mine’ earlier this year, NYC art punks Gustaf have revealed details of their forthcoming LP. ‘Audio Drag for Ego Slobs’ will be released on 1st October via Royal Mountain Records, just in time for their jaunt around the US playing support to IDLES. The latest taster of the record comes from streamlined, propulsive new single ‘Book’, which “celebrates the inner struggle and chaotic reasoning of deciding whether you're better off being ahead or simply being a head”. The eternal question… Listen to the track on diymag.com now.

$)0 *)42*"5 “Singapore! Malaysia! Kuwait! Berlin!” The debut offering from Brighton septet KEG might double up as a cruel list of places you still can’t visit, but by the time the wonky synth pings and general ramshackle fun of ‘Heyshaw’ reach their final madcap destination, you’ll feel like you’ve been on a journey nonetheless. Probably the sort where you lose your passport and end up being told to squat and cough by a policeman.

("$)%,6#'/2 ,"&$'/0%!#+!*),2 Taking LCD Soundsystem’s knack for a propulsive dancefloor groove, Squid’s brass-parping eccentricities and a near-obligatory sneered Mark E. Smith vocal, the first half of Fake Turins’ latest is like Alternative 2021 potted into 180 seconds. It’s in its second portion, with gang shouts, falsetto trills and a closing minute that nods to ‘Antidotes’-era Foals, that ‘Talking Prophets’ gets interesting, however.

5++7)% ,6%)2%.+' Like a shot of indie-fuelled adrenaline, the striking opening chords of Wooze's latest will instantly have you hooked. Part glam-rock, part psych riffs, part ‘80s-infused wonk-pop, 'Tu Es Moi' is an infectious gem from the British-Korean duo that'll have you bopping along before you know it.

Want to stream our Neu playlist while you’re reading? Scan the code now and get listening.

SPENCER. A multi-talented producer and artist causing a stir from jazz camp to NYC. Words: Elly Watson. Photos: Matthew Klahn.

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The future can never be certain, but when your middle name is a homage to one of the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz, there’s a reasonable chance that sooner or later you might have the inclination to follow in their musical footsteps. Such is the case for Spencer Miles Allen, better known as Spencer. With a nod to Miles Davis - the namesake in question - Spencer. grew up playing piano and surrounded by music, but it wasn’t until his mum “forced” him to join jazz band and attend jazz camp during his middle and high school years that everything clicked into place. “I realised how much I loved music, and how many different avenues there are for performing - not just being in jazz band or in orchestra or something,” he recalls. “I just realised I wanted to start learning more about music.” Self-taught on guitar and bass, alongside his go-to trumpet, Spencer. started making beats in freshman year and began flexing his musical muscles, forming a seven-person-strong band with all his pals. “I was playing trumpet and I realised I couldn’t play all the time,” he says. “You know, when you’re playing bass or drums or guitar or piano, you’re playing the whole song. But when you play the trumpet, you’re not playing the whole song. Sometimes I was just standing there like, ‘Dang’. So I picked up the bass!” The lightbulb moment - or, as Spencer. says, “lightbulb half on” moment - to throw himself fully in came at college when he started singing. “There’s a song called ‘Better Things’, which is the first song I put out and first song I ever made where I’m singing,” he recalls. “I had a girlfriend and we were doing long distance, and we broke up in my first year in college and I decided to make a song about it. Coincidentally, the same summer I started smoking weed. I was definitely really inspired by that, I guess. And I decided to try and make something new.” Continuing to experiment with sounds and pulling from a broad range of genres, Spencer. has now crafted debut album ‘Are U Down?’ - set for release next month. A

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collection of shapeshifting bops about love and relationships, it’s a release that pulls directly from his own experience. “I’ve been seeing this girl for four years and it’s long distance - she’s in [Washington] DC and I’m in New York. A lot of the album’s themes are about being lonely and the miscommunication of long distance and going back and forth, feeling like somebody’s there, then feeling like somebody’s not there,” he explains. “When somebody’s not in front of you, you can forget about them and that can go both ways.” Album track ‘After The Show’, which features Thea from Becky & The Birds, “displays this the best”, Spencer. says. “It’s like a quarantine song. I imagine it just being us on the phone, talking back and forth, going off each other’s melodies, being like, ‘I miss you’, just that longing. There’s a lot of themes like that - extreme highs and lows - that describe what this relationship has been to me at different points.” And what does his girlfriend think about the record? “She likes it!” Spencer. smiles. “She really does like it. She’s excited for all of it. I’m just expressing emotions through song, which is one of the best ways to do it for me.” However, even more so than pulling heartstrings with his lyrics, Spencer. is hoping that the record’s musical flair and finesse strikes a chord. “I’m a producer first; I think that sounds are the coolest thing,” he explains. “I just wanted to showcase a lot of different styles of production that I can do. There’ll be an indie rock song with a popR&B song right next to it on the record. When I listen to an album I want to be like, ‘Oh my god how did they do that? This is the coolest thing’. Production’s my shit, so I hope people appreciate the production and it sticks with them and lives in people’s heads, you know? I want people to take their time with the album, in the way that I took my time to make it. “I have been noticing in the last year, the biggest compliment people give to me is that I’m underrated,” he muses. “I think what I want this album to do is take me out of that box. I want people to be like ‘Oh Spencer.? Yeah, he’s good’. And everybody knows it. That would be cool. I just want to be rated!” DIY

I’m a producer first; I think that sounds are the coolest thing.” 31

JERSEY 32 DIYMAG.COM

Jack: BOY Hanging out with Bleachers, the most in demand man in pop

You might not know much about Jack Antonoff himself, but you’ll know exactly what’s on his CV. Stepping out from behind the production desk and back behind the mic for the newest Bleachers album, we meet the most in-demand man in pop to find out how it all went so right. Words: Charlotte Gunn. Photos: Pooneh Ghana.

find it annoying when people are like, ‘You're SO busy...’”

Jack Antonoff is sitting in front of a huge mixing desk at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, repping a T-shirt emblazoned with the legendary establishment’s logo. ”It’s like, maybe you only just know about these three records that are coming out this summer! And maybe you have no idea how long they took!” The three records he’s talking about include Lorde’s eye-wateringly-anticipated new album ‘Solar Power’, Clairo’s recently-released second LP ‘Sling’, and his own, justreleased Bleachers record, ‘Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night’. And that’s not even the half of it. As frontman of Bleachers, the 37-year-old writes anthemic songs about sadness and trauma. As Jack Antonoff the producer, however, he is somewhat ubiquitous, having worked on some of the most successful and critically acclaimed alt-pop albums of the last five years: Lorde’s ‘Melodrama’, Taylor Swift’s ‘folklore’ and ‘evermore’, Lana Del Rey’s ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell!’ and ‘Chemtrails Over The Country Club’, and St Vincent’s ‘MASSEDUCTION’ and ‘Daddy’s Home’. They are the type of albums that, put simply, change lives, swathed in raw emotion, beautiful storytelling and unexpectedly personal self-analysis from some of the most noted women on the planet. Jack meanwhile is no stranger to a little introspection of his own. ‘Take The Sadness Out of Saturday Night’ is a record about framing life through the lens of the bad things that happen to you - and the danger of doing that for too long. “My work is never comfortable,” he says, prodding at the bridge of his glasses. “That’s the best way I can describe songwriting or production - you’re grabbing at things you don’t know, which is very uncomfortable. You don’t write songs about things you know, because that would be boring, right? So you write songs about

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" Lorde has been one of the most incredible creative relationships in my life. She’s amazing.”

the quiet voices, the ones you can hear shouting in the distance, the ones that make you go: ‘What is that?’”

he Antonoff family know the weight of life-defining loss. Jack’s younger sister Sarah passed away when she was 13 of brain cancer, when Jack himself was just 18. It is a relentless kind of trauma, a grief Antonoff has dissected both privately and through his work on two previous Bleachers albums. But where before, that loss was palpable, spilling out through his songs (see: debut album ‘Strange Desire’’s ‘I Wanna Get Better’, and 2017 follow up ‘Gone Now’’s ‘I Miss Those Days’) this time, he’s asking: What would happen if everything WASN’T defined by that one tragic event? “When my sister died it did this thing, which I'm really starting to realise now, where because it's such a massive life event, you become a genius in one language - maybe it's grief - and such an infant in others,” he explains. “So if you feel like shit, if you have panic attacks, if you're bad at relationships, it is all because this thing happened. And so you don't get to discover yourself outside of it.”

°°°°°°°°°°° Jersey? Sure. The main man picks his three top tips for where to visit in the big NJ.

Holiday snack bar on Long Beach island. Best fries in New Jersey.

Literally any diner anywhere in any part of NJ. Because we invented diner culture

Razza in Jersey City. Best pizza in the world. Just a fact.

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It feels like quite a seismic realisation for someone who has lived with that burden for almost two decades. “You just get to a point where you’re there, and you’ve got all this baggage, and you can’t quite fit through the doorway,” he explains. “So you say, ‘OK, I’ve talked about grief forever, maybe there are other things that are worth looking at, that I’ve missed because I’ve been so obsessed with this big thing’.” ‘Take The Sadness Out of Saturday Night’, then, is an attempt to get through the door, to see the world - for the first time in a long time - unclouded by that pain, even if just to make space for some of life’s other shitty experiences. Album opener ‘91’ is a track set in a time before the loss of his sister. It's a song that acknowledges that perhaps things weren’t perfect, even then. Somewhat surprisingly, its co-writer (one of many on this record) is British author, Zadie Smith. The pair met in New York, where Smith lives and lectures at New York University, and they got to talking. “I had never worked with someone who didn't write within music, but all of a sudden, when playing it to her, I thought, ‘She can help me frame it’," Jack says of the collaboration. "She did a beautiful job and, you know, it's one of my favourite songs I've ever made.” With collaboration and symbiotic relationships at Jack’s core, the guests on ‘Take The Sadness…’ breeze in and out, hidden in the liner notes, adding an idea here or there. Lana Del Rey co-writes on one song (‘Don’t Go Dark’); St Vincent sings backing vocals and produces on another (‘Stop Making This Hurt’), and Jack’s hometown hero, Mr Bruce Springsteen, joins him for gravelly love song ‘Chinatown’. Growing up in New Jersey, Springsteen was a huge influence on a young

Antonoff - something that’s felt in the specificity of characters he details in his own songs and, arguably, those with Taylor Swift too. The Jersey boys have become firm friends over the years, and ‘Chinatown’ reportedly came together naturally; Jack played it to Springsteen while at his house, and Bruce decided to lay down a verse. But as much as Antonoff professes not be starstruck, does the weight of making a music video with your idol never cause a few ‘what the fuck?’ moments? “Honestly, Bruce is just my guy, he’s my friend, he’s the best. And he’s kinda just as advertised,” he insists. “It’s not weird because [his influence on me] is an open dialogue. It’s easy to be disarmed by people who aren’t projecting the mythology of themselves but are just real. That’s true of all the artists I work with.” OK, but does he think it’s weird that you dress like him though? “Dress like him?" asks Jack, wearing one of his rotating combos of white tee and stonewashed denim (sound familiar?). "I think I dress like Rick Moranis in Honey I Shrunk The Kids, so I don’t know if that plays...”

ack Antonoff has been writing songs for 26 years. His first, a little ditty called ‘Last Week’s Lunch’, penned at age 11, was about discovering a forgotten sandwich bag in your locker. “It wasn’t my finest work but it was well-received,” he quips. “If I had to really consider it, maybe it was a bit of a meditation on something going bad - something prepared by one’s mother, you know? Something maternal going wrong? Which I guess are concepts I’m still digging into in some way.” At school, he became immersed in the New Jersey punk scene, forming Less Than Jake and NOFX-leaning band Outline with some classmates. At that time, music for Jack was all about community and "finding your people" - whether they turned up to the shows or not. New Jersey and its unique sensibility has always been a huge influence on his sound. “It’s a very specific thing,” he explains. “New York and New Jersey are staring at each other - or rather, New Jersey is staring at New York and New York is staring at itself - so it's the ultimate life outside the party, the ultimate younger brother, and it creates so much devastation and hope.” Outline hit the road during Jack's late teens and early twenties, booking their own shows, searching for “their people” in towns across America. Next, came a new band, Steel Train, and his first foray into being a frontman. From there, he joined Fun. as guitarist and drummer, and soon came to know huge chart success with supermassive pop song ‘We Are Young’. The idea for

“[I] write songs about the quiet voices, the ones you can hear shouting in the distance, the ones that make you go:

‘What is that?’ ” 37

Jack In Numbers

Antonoff-run music festival, Shadow Of The City, an annual New Jersey event

Grammy nominations

Albums produced

Dates on Bleachers upcoming North American tour

2013

The year Jack first worked with Taylor Swift

911

million

Views on the video for Fun.’s ‘We Are Young’

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Bleachers came while on the road with Fun., inspired by the iconography of John Hughes movies and their big ‘80s energy. Until this point, Jack was a songwriter and a performing artist, loving both in equal measure. It was Taylor Swift, though, who made him a producer. “It’s funny, because if nobody listens to your song, you’re still a songwriter. If nobody watches your band, you’re still a performer. But if nobody lets you produce their album? You can’t really call yourself a producer,” he says. “Taylor was the first person to take me seriously and just say, ‘OK, that’s done’. That song was [2014’s] ‘Out Of The Woods’. She really kicked the door down for me and now, it just makes me feel like she trusts and believes in me.” Life for Jack these days is pretty simple - he essentially has what sounds like a pretty epic 9-5 - and yet people seem determined to crack him, confused by the magnitude of his work, wanting to know the magic formula for success. The reality is a little less salacious than the headlines would have you believe. A day in the life of Jack starts when it starts, after eight hours sleep, but always the same way, with a bowl of oats and raisins. “I like to eat the kind of food you get in a musical orphanage,” he notes. His best work happens before

lunch – “You’re just yourself in the morning, before the day beats you up” – making notes on the piano at home before he heads to the studio, usually his space at the famed, Jimi Hendrixfounded, Electric Lady in NYC: the room in which ‘Melodrama’ and other muchlauded work came together. He doesn’t work late, finishing his day with a walk through Washington Square Park and then home. “I like to be around my family,” he says, “I like to do very simple things because I find that I spend a lot of my time really outside of my head with work, in this really weird zone, so I feel really comforted by very familiar things.” The Antonoff family certainly seem close. Jack’s sister is fashion designer Rachel Antonoff you can often spot him in campaigns for her clothing. She’s also the person hand jiving with him in the video for recent single ‘Stop Making This Hurt’. His dad, too, is a guitar player and has been known to perform with his son. Many have puzzled about Jack’s connection with the Lordes and Lanas of the world, trying to decode how this nerdy guy has seemingly earned the trust of so many global megastars. At its core, he insists, it’s not that complex. “It starts with conversations about things like music, and then you’re

talking about your life, and before you know it you’re deep in conversation. I don’t want to earn their trust though, I want to be in something together.”

hether earned or otherwise, these artists do trust Jack and it’s not hard to see why. For a guy who thinks a lot about death, he’s pretty good company. He’s affable, quick-witted, his thick, black-rimmed glasses and scruffy mop of curls distracting from the fact you’re speaking to one of the world’s most indemand music producers. As we chat, he seems interested, reluctant to give too much away about his incredibly close and famous collaborators, but happy to wax lyrical about the work. The work is clearly what motivates him. He knows he’s good, too. His five Grammy wins and fifteen nominations have perhaps helped with that. “What I think some people don't understand is that it's actually a pretty small group of people that I work with,” he attests. “I don't really do sessions. And it's actually completely opposite to how a lot of production works, where it's sort of like speed dating. So sometimes I feel incredibly isolated. And that's why I have a weird, strange reaction when someone's like, ‘You're busy’, or ‘You do all this stuff’. It's like, actually not really!”

“You get to a point where you’ve got all this baggage, and you can’t quite fit through the doorway.”

Sometimes the narratives around these collaborations, particularly those with women (“I also work with men,” he notes) have a strange undertone: that there must be a BIGGER story than simply a group of ridiculously talented friends and peers, pooling their skills. “A lot of things produce cynicism, and when someone steps past the line and makes some pretty big claims about what they're setting out to do, it invites a lot of like, ‘Well, hold on what's going on here?’,” he posits. "I don’t know who said it - maybe it was [comedian] John Mulaney - but they said, ‘I believe everything I read in the New York Times is fact, except when it’s about my own industry’. There's this whiplash between some sort of gross Svengali concept and the ‘What's even really happening here?’ concept. And it's like, well, what's happening is what we've always been saying is happening! There’s not some weird, salacious detail to it. Like, isn’t the story just the quality of the work?” And honestly, it kinda is. Because while the culture critics and talk show hosts scrabble around for something juicier, the fans are the ones that recognise Jack’s talent. Bleachers have gained a big following, particularly in the US, helped a little by his work with artists whose fanbases are fervent, to say the least. “Everyone is welcome, it’s not elitist, but I’m still looking for MY people,” he says of the shift in audience. Dive into social media and you’ll find fans trying to decode every tweet he shares, looking for clues as to upcoming releases. Have the Swifties descended? “Easter egg culture is always

something I’ve loved,” he says, laughing at a particularly roundabout Reddit thread that has someone forming a complex anagram with the album title, minus specific letters. “I’ve always been hiding little things here and there. I remember when I first listened to [Green Day’s] ‘Dookie’ and realised there was a secret song, that was the coolest thing. Playing ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ backwards, [the conspiracy of] Paul [McCartney] being dead… this is my stuff. I look for this stuff. So I appreciate it.” For now, he’s remaining tight-lipped about the next postBleachers release, this month’s ‘Solar Power’, but says he “thinks about it every day” - as he still does Lorde’s last album, ‘Melodrama’. “These things live with you; they’re big parts of your life, and now I kind of see it the way so many other people do. It’s transcended something. Ella has been one of the most incredible creative relationships in my life. She’s amazing.” As for future collaborations, a stalk of Jack’s recent Instagram stories would suggest that he’s already working on something with Phoebe Bridgers’ label signee, Claud. But as for a

wishlist? “I could tell you people I love, but I might not love where they’re going and they might not love me going there with them,” he says diplomatically. “That said, my favourite band is Wolf Alice. That doesn’t even mean I’d be good at working with them. It just means I love them and I’m happy they’re making music.” With thoughts of that blissful union blooming into view, our time is up. Where so many have dug deep to uncover Jack’s magic formula, perhaps the answer was hiding in plain sight all along: Work hard, be nice, keep your circle small and your friends close. Pause for a minute and you can already hear them, the quiet voices, in the distance, singing along to your next favourite album. And we bet we know who produced it. ‘Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night’ is out now via RCA. DIY

State

Welcometo ‘Superstate’...

...a dystopian world full of apocalyptic drama and personal revelation. Let Graham Coxon be your guide…

Words: Lisa Wright.

raham Coxon has always been an eyes-down sort of guy. As one quarter of Blur, he would unleash the kind of fretwork that found him rightly heralded as one of his generation’s finest guitar players whilst maintaining a gaze affixed firmly upon shoe. Across more than two decades of solo releases, meanwhile, the 52-year-old has often taken the contrarian path, offering up three albums of attention-shunning melancholy at the peak of his fame and, more recently, eschewing traditional albums entirely in favour of soundtracks (he produced the music for both series of acclaimed Netflix drama The End Of The F*cking World) and other more conceptual projects. “I’ve always retreated, I’ve always been a lot more [about the] inner world really…” he notes, unsurprisingly, over Zoom today, sweating out the summer heatwave from within a room full of instruments and paperwork. In some ways then, his latest project ‘Superstate’ - an audio-visual collaboration with 15 graphic artists, based around an overarching dystopian narrative involving “lots of depression and supression and terrorism and religious maniacs and angels” - makes a lot of sense for a man who, it seems, has often found reality a bit much. “I started fantasising about a world where people like me are pretty much the scum of the earth - middle class white men - and that one day people like me might be

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“Music and drawing are part of how I therapised myself growing up, I didn’t really know what else to do.”

Flux “When the dust settles after writing music, I think a lot of people realise it’s a lot more autobiographical than they thought,” he nods, “and when I relistened to the album about a year ago, I realised more and more that actually ‘Superstate’ isn’t about a place, it’s about me, really. How much it was about me and my situation was kind of startling…”

‘S

uperstate’ as a project began on 10th January 2016, the day David Bowie died. The start of one of the bleakest periods in modern history, Graham found himself in a place of personal unrest as the world outside continued to destroy itself. “I felt isolated in a lot of ways - self-imposed or otherwise,” he recalls. “I found myself in the studio a lot; I was sleeping in my studio; I was painting in my studio; my interaction with the outside world was getting less and less because of various things.

hunted down for fun…” he begins explaining, before chuckling knowingly at the direction his brain is wont to travel. In other ways, ‘Superstate’ is entirely the work of someone embracing total freedom. There are guest vocalists, and moments where Coxon’s own familiar tones are shifted up to unrecognisable pitches; there are songs that are funkleaning and unmistakably fun, and ones that come buoyed by comic strips full of X-rated shagging. Written across five years, the project is brimming with wild, sci-fi-indebted flights of fancy and escape, but through the extremities, Graham ended up crafting something unexpectedly closer to home.

“The outer world then seemed pretty hopeless, especially as a musician when you’re getting told to expand your skills and start doing other things to earn a bit of dosh,” he continues. “I was in America from the beginning of 2019 until April 2020, and it’s just acceptable now for [politicians there] to lie; it seems like a real degradation of what is good and right. It’s manners really I suppose, there’s an awful lot of disrespect from the people we’re supposed to hold in some sort of esteem, and that sort of behaviour doesn’t inspire anyone to behave reasonably.” Bedding down, he worked on concocting an alternate fantasy universe, one that - though not entirely comforting - was “not without hope”. Attempting to get “lots of camera angles on the same action”, Graham began to experiment with writing in different voices, singing in characters and starting from different places so as to build up the rich world he was trying to create. Perversely, he explains, it allowed him to dig in further than ever. “It helped me with performing vocals to not be Graham Coxon, because I’ve always found him a little bit too shy and too apologetic and reticent to sing out properly even if he feels like it,” he explains. “So I’d decide to be a different

a job that has to mean something to me. I’ve seen some plumbers that don’t seem at all passionate about it and others where they love it and it’s their life. I suppose that can apply to musicians as well. If I was a plumber, I’d be a good one, I think…” Back in the day, this need for absolute authenticity was at the root of the tensions that arose within Blur at the height of their mainstream success. “I went down a noise hole for a long time, and it was my own reaction to what I saw as the commercial tinge that Blur had: I was always in tension with it, and that was my own personal hang ups really,” he says of the period. “I thought, one or two hooks per song is fine, but six?! That’s just too much…” These days, however, he’s loosened up a little - heck, Graham’s even joined ‘80s yacht-straddling, art-pop legends Duran Duran to play on their new album.

GETTING THE GANG TOGETHER

He’s still doing things merrily his own way, but he’s also seemingly reached a place where he’s allowing himself to enjoy it a bit more too. If ‘Superstate’ is a fictitious journey through a world where love, life and freedom are all on the line, then its parallel journey is a smaller one, of an artist wrangling with those ideas within himself and finding something a little different out the other side. “Maybe it’s to do with getting older, getting a little more mellow and thinking shit man, whatever, happiness is more important than anything else,” he muses, “ But what’s wrong with that?” ‘Superstate’ is self-released in association with Z2 Comics on 27th August. DIY

Of course we couldn’t speak to Graham without asking what’s going on in Blur world… You played a couple of Blur tracks with Damon’s Africa Express just before the pandemic - any more reunions since then? Yeah I got up, played ‘Song 2’, all that crap… We’ve had a catch up and all that, had a chat. We tossed a few ideas about and if there’s time we might get together, but only if we really want to. We’ll see how this year progresses. Would you only play more shows if you had new music? Yeah, probably. Otherwise yeah, it’d be cool, make a bit of dosh, but is that what it’s all about? You’d make a lot of people happy... Well there is that, making other people happy, but they can look after themselves for a bit! But I do love it, it’s a great job. We’re a great big family; it has a lovely feeling to it, there’s always fun to be had with someone. It’s a lovely huge circus. It’s fun, so I’m always up for it...

character, and I found that really helped; if I have a chord sequence and I just attack it as if I’m Scott Walker, then I’m not me. I’m doing something else. And somehow I’ll find a melody and words that way that are from a different place, from my subconscious, rather than just skimming the top of the soup in my head and getting the obvious stuff. I was exploring different ways of getting to the deeper stuff inside me and it worked.”

here are moments across the project, indeed, that don’t really sound like Graham at all. On ‘L.I.L.Y’, he duets with a disorientingly beguiling, pitch-shifted vocal of himself; ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait For You’ takes his largely untapped love of disco and lets it run wild; ‘Tommy Gun’ finds him musing “about parenthood and being terrified that one day you’re not there for your children” with a plaintive tone that’s at once familiar but far away. Across its 15 tracks, ‘Superstate’ is unpredictable in the most gleeful of ways: an active reshuffling of his own boundaries that ends up being classic Coxon by merit of doing exactly what most of his peers aren’t. “I come from a place of the arts, and I suppose I approach music in a similar way. I don’t think I could ever get a bunch of songs, sling them on a record and put them out without it really meaning anything or coming from a need to do it,” he decides. “Music and drawing are part of how I therapised myself growing up, I didn’t really know what else to do. So it’s always come from a need, and it’s a job I suppose? But it’s

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“When the dust settles after writing music, I think a lot of people realise it’s a lot more autobiographical than they thought.”

JW FRANCIS

WANDERKID “Future indie classics that reek of modern New York City charm” -

Digi / CD: 01.10.21 Vinyl: 05.11.21 / Available to Pre-Order/Pre-Save at www.sundaybest.net

SPARKING JOY With second album ‘Any Shape You Take’,

Indigo De Souza is prioritising personal

connection and letting out a primal scream of feeling. Words: Mia Hughes. Photos: Charlie Boss.

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ndigo De Souza wants to be a light. It’s a proclamation that she repeats over and over, her conviction growing as if speaking it into existence, on ‘Way Out’ - the penultimate track from this month’s second album ‘Any Shape You Take’.

“I’m by nature a depressed and anxious person, but I’ve found a way to harness that energy into a light-making place, to connect deeply with people so that we can enter a real space together instead of having to fake anything,” she says today, chatting via video in a comfy hoodie, a string of fairy lights suspended above her. “With music, it feels similar. I’m able to express lightness and darkness, and for both to be true.” Growing up in Spruce Pine, North Carolina - a small, conservative town - Indigo couldn’t find her place. One of only a handful of people of colour in her school, she was raised by her “hippie” mum. “We were so insanely different from everybody,” she says. “I dressed with all kinds of crazy colours, and was very expressive.” By 16, her dementia-stricken grandpa had moved in, making Indigo’s teen angst a little too combustible. She moved in with her older sister in Asheville - a vibrant, liberal city an hour away. It was a salvation. “I realised that I wasn’t insane; there are other people in the world that are like me,” she says. In the music scene, she found her voice. “I started to notice that playing music brought people together. And I could say anything to them, and they would hear it.” Indigo’s home-recorded 2018 debut full-length, ‘I Love My Mom’, featured her mum’s artwork on its cover, as does ‘Any Shape You Take’. Her mother, explains the singer, is a major inspiration. “She’ll walk down the street in like, a wild costume, and doesn’t care what people think,” she smiles. “For a long time I was embarrassed of her, but when I got older I realised how special she is.” ‘Any Shape You Take’, meanwhile, is sonically a step up.

Throughout 2020, she worked with producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, The War On Drugs) to carve out a stunningly imaginative album that states its case from the get-go of opener ‘17’ - a brilliant, reflective, synth-pop cut. There’s funk-pop on ‘Hold U’, and grunge rock on ‘Late Night Crawler’; Indigo recalls listening to Rihanna, SZA and Tierra Whack during that time, though this album is too leftfield to be pinned down to any one set of influences. “It will always be a mystery to me, why all different genres of music pop into my head,” she laughs. “Really I was just having fun.” The shape-shifting nature of the album is a perfect vehicle for Indigo’s lyrics, which explore the ever-morphing feelings that come with loving other people. It’s unconditional love she strives for, something she has opened up to the possibility of recently. “I used to take things really personally. But eventually I was like, ‘I’m just gonna love everybody, no matter what they do’,” she nods. “That came with learning about boundaries too - that boundaries could save me from feeling so attached to everything.” Whether detailing romance on ‘Hold U’ or a breakup on ‘Pretty Pictures’, Indigo expresses that love with an incredibly moving tenderness. Her revelations came not just through romantic love, but platonic too: “I found a group of friends that were so life-giving, and they really saw me for who I was,” she explains. “I felt really inspired by that. “I almost get distracted from my art a lot of the time because I’m just obsessed with passing energy between all the people in my world, and having dance parties and meals and going on adventures,” she continues. “I’ve always been so ready to share everything. I think that’s why I got hurt so much before I knew boundaries, because I just wanted to be really close with everybody that I loved. I feel that way with music. I wanna open up my life as much as possible to people listening, because it makes people feel seen. It’s a way of seeing people that I’m not even able to meet.” Probably best not to ask Indigo to put up your shelves.

“During the pandemic, it was the first time I’d felt as if the pain everybody was experiencing was somehow similar.”

In a representation of that sentiment, during the making of the album Indigo put out a call on social media for fans to submit recordings of themselves screaming. They did so in droves, some attaching messages to the singer that detailed what this catharsis meant to them. They can be heard in the track ‘Real Pain’, in a psychedelic breakdown of animalistic howls. Explaining the idea, Indigo says that “pain can feel really singular and lonely. [But] during the pandemic, I realised that it was the first time I’d felt as if the pain [everybody was] experiencing was somehow similar. “I cried so much when we were making that track. It was really special.” It’s an unlocking of the floodgates that feels key to ‘Any Shape You Take’, as if all that it means to love and be human is opened up at once. If there is a manifesto to be found with the record, it’s perhaps this: “It feels like real love is just allowing people to be whatever they want to be, whenever they want to be it. When you do that for a person, you’re really allowing them to feel seen in the world.” This is Indigo De Souza; let her be a light. ‘Any Shape You Take’ is out 27th August via Saddle Creek. DIY

“That’s the split in Jungle: half wanting to hide away in the studio, half wanting to put on a show.” - Josh Lloyd-Watson

Let’s Dance

The 14 tracks of ‘Loving In Stereo’ all come with complimentary, choreography-based videos. Josh explains the premise... “This is the great thing about putting this album out on our own label; in the past, if we’d said, ‘Can we make 14 music videos?’, the label would’ve been asking where the single was. A track like ‘Fire’ - to me, I can see that playing in a Batman film over a scene of a bank robbery or something, but you need millions of dollars to pull that sort of thing off. It was a nerve-wracking thing; we They might not be the loudest or the gobbiest, but were shooting three videos a day. But that’s one of the positives of being your own boss: you can try these in 2021, Jungle are still a helluva big deal. On third silly, outrageous things. It was like The Aviator, worrying LP ‘Loving In Stereo’, they’re we were going to run out of money, but it was worth it. When you open up that visual world, it elevates the starting to enjoy the ride themselves again, too. music.”

Words: Joe Goggins. Photos: Filmawi.

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ow do you manage to remain enigmatic while selling out Alexandra Palace and booking a four-night, 20,000-capacity residency at Brixton Academy?

For all their artifice and deliberately shadowy PR, much of the answer for Jungle has always lain within their output. When they first emerged in 2013, their embrace of the aesthetics of mystery - going simply by the initials J and T, failing to appear in their own press photography - was in itself nothing we hadn’t seen before. Taken in conjunction with the sound of their early material, however, there was a sense of genuine mystique. Here were two guys from West London making music that, at its core, sounded like it belonged to Manhattan in the ‘80s - had it travelled there by way of any number of stylistic detours. It was music that embraced the poppier side of soul and the lighter side of funk, with the spectre of hip hop always lurking quietly in the background. The intrigue for the listener lay not in the carefully-cultivated anonymity, but instead in the opaqueness of what precisely made them tick as musicians. These days, with this month’s incoming third record and years of touring under their belts - the latter, albeit, as just two players in a seven-piece band - we know more of the superficial details. That Jungle are childhood friends Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland from Shepherd’s Bush, and that they started out as a simple bedroom-pop project, for instance. Even then, though, neither of them are likely to be recognised on the street; Josh, for his part, riffs on both astrology and spirituality when reflecting on his rise to

almost-fame from his West London studio. “Tom and I were both born in January, so there’s this hermit-like reservation, almost an Aquarian shyness to us,” he muses. “But then, I’ve got Leo on my ascendant, which is where the drive to perform comes from. That’s the split in Jungle: half wanting to hide away in the studio, half wanting to put on a show. When we started out, we loved the idea of having an identity to stand behind. Gorillaz and Daft Punk were obvious inspirations, but who I really looked up to was Justice - playing underneath that cross, like it was something you should surrender to. It’s weirdly culty, but I loved that! I thought it was really cool that I had no idea who Jai Paul was - at least until I met him, and he just turned out to be a normal guy. I like letting people tell themselves the story: tell them the ending, and they stop caring.” This isn’t to say the pair have been historically averse to pouring plenty of themselves into the music. On their second album, 2018’s ‘For Ever’, they mined their personal lives for inspiration; in turn, it led to a sonically more sedate affair than their self-titled debut, which Josh felt lacked a certain emotional heft. “The first album was ultimately made in a bedroom; ideas of grandeur executed in a shoebox way,” he begins. ‘There was a naïveté to it. We thought we were making Beyoncé tracks, just getting lost in it with no expectation or pressure. So, on the second record, we didn’t want to be silly or throwaway - we wanted to be serious. “That’s part of the reason it took so long; we were waiting for things to happen in our real lives that we could write about. And the most obvious thing is heartbreak, but when it actually happens, you go through a breakup and it knocks your confidence. I think that meant that we ended up too risk-averse on ‘For Ever’. We were afraid we'd get something wrong.”

n short, the duo suddenly had plenty to lose after the success of 2014’s ‘Jungle’, replacing the fearlessness that made their debut pop with self-doubt. Accordingly, ‘Loving in Stereo’ - their effervescent third LP - is a sharp reaction against ‘For Ever’, which Josh now damningly dismisses as “soppy and indulgent". This time, there was to be no overthinking, and no considering ‘fun’ to be a dirty word. “You get to a certain age, and the barriers begin to come down in your mind,” he explains. “I’ve mentioned Gorillaz already, but look at Damon Albarn; everything he puts out these days, you just get the sense that he’s pursuing what makes him feel good. He’s just a creator, he doesn’t care about genre, or who the collaborator is - as long as he thinks it’s cool, that’s enough. I think we’re making the transition to that mindset on this record; it feels like it’s only going to keep opening up from here. This is what Jungle was always meant to be.” ‘Loving in Stereo’ is a kaleidoscopic effort, one that strikes a smart balance between the uptempo and the contemplative. There’s disco swagger to ‘Fire’ and ‘Keep Moving’, funk odysseys in the shape of tracks like ‘No Rules’, and, for the first time on a Jungle album, guest features. The hip hop influence that has simmered for so long finally bubbles over on Bas hook-up ‘Romeo’, while they take a left turn to hint at jazz on smooth Priya Ragu collaboration ‘Goodbye My Love’. The overall mood is one of ebullience and, appropriately for the moment, freedom. If ‘For Ever’ found them in the emotional doldrums, is ‘Loving in Stereo’ a reflection of a turn for the better in their personal lives? “Well, we’re all egotists, aren’t we?” laughs Josh. “It’s a record of hope, for sure. But we wanted it to feel universal, because if I put a Marvin Gaye album on, it’s suddenly less about what Marvin was going through and more about me - it’s the soundtrack to my day, and to my experiences. But it turned out weirdly neatly,

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because we went from tough times to feeling a lot freer and more upbeat when we wrote this album, and it was basically finished by February of 2020. Since then, everyone’s been through a version of that! So, that’s kind of nice.” All being well, Jungle will return to London at the start of September for a four-night stand in Brixton. It’s a quantum leap beyond the goal Josh and Tom set themselves as kids, headlining Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a stone’s throw from where they grew up. “We had that moment, that moment of going, ‘This is it! This is where we saw The Strokes as teenagers!’ But, ultimately, it’s just one moment in time,” he shrugs. The pair’s bond has endured over the past decade, through ups, downs, successes and failures; their personal relationship continues to evolve, parallel to their music. “People will always want different things at different points,” Josh reflects. “Tom’s got a family now; he’s not going to be in the studio every night. It hasn’t been petals and roses the whole time, but I think we’ve always been pretty open about that with each other, and we’ve kept each other grounded. “It’s about constantly keeping your ego in check - asking yourself, ‘Why am I saying this? Why am I resisting that? Am I creating tension for no reason?’ Ultimately, we’ve been pretty blessed. You just have to constantly remind yourself of that.” 'Loving in Stereo' is out 13th August via Caiola. DIY

“You get to a certain age, and the barriers begin to come down in your mind.” Josh Lloyd-Watson

Kick Jams

London hardcore quintet CHUBBY AND THE GANG aren’t here to play pretty, but their no-nonsense onslaught is finding them more admirers by the day. Words: Louis Griffin. Photo: Pooneh Ghana.

out the

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Chubby and the Gang - pioneers of Dental Hygiene Punk.

“KNOCK KNOCK. WHO’S THERE? IT’S CHUBBY AND THE FUCKING GANG, AND WE AIN’T NO FUCKING JOKE,”

goes ‘Union Dues’: the closing track from the London rabble-rousers’ debut album ‘Speed Kills’. Originally released in 2019 via niche label Static Shock, soon Chubby and the Gang - made up of veterans of the UK hardcore scene - had quickly turned the right heads, and the record was given a second outing in 2020 on Partisan Records, home to IDLES and Fontaines DC. Though the former of those two label mates could be said to occupy the blunter end of the punk spectrum, hardcore itself has more widely slipped out of favour. Chubby and the Gang’s simple, loud approach couldn’t be more out of step with the general zeitgeist; black midi, it’s safe to say, they are not. So just how have they won over the hearts of fans from well outside their hardcore origins? Despite only forming back in 2019, just before recording ‘Speed Kills’, when Charlie ‘Chubby’ Walker is asked to recount their journey thus far, he can’t help but laugh; “2019 man, it feels like ten fucking years ago.” The Gang have proper credentials, pulling together members of Arms Race and Vile Spirit, but Chubby have managed to break out of that insular world too - something none of their contemporaries have achieved thus far. What makes the quintet unique is their cross-pollination of solid hardcore foundations with elements of pub rock, doo-wop, and punk, resulting in something thrilling, propulsive, and wholly unique. It’s this contrarian DNA that runs right through this month’s second album ‘The Mutt’s Nutts’ - its first half populated with hammering guitars, and second more preoccupied with ballads. “I’m quite a kickback person,” Chubby explains. “I just think, ‘Everyone’s doing this, so I'm going to go and do something else’. It’s the way I've always been.” He pauses, and then chuckles. “It's probably a bad trait to have…”

days in the studio and just went for it,” he shrugs, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Yet despite their rapid success, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Chubby is pleasantly bewildered by the band’s crossover appeal. They may have shared the stage at SXSW’s online edition this year with bands like Squid and Black Country, New Road, but The Gang’s approach couldn’t be further from the meta ruminations of those acts. They make no attempt whatsoever to intellectualise their music; the band does what it says on the tin, plain and simple. “I think people get bogged down in this idea of progressing music,” the singer explains. “Music is a lot like art - sometimes you want to go to see a modern piece of art, just abstract blocks, that makes you think, and sometimes you want to go and just see a picture of some knight on a horse. And I think there's room for both of them,” he laughs. “People turn their nose up at the idea of simple, straightforward music, but sometimes that's the best thing. Like a stiff pint. It’s not complicated, it's just there and it's great.” After a year of introspection, maybe everyone’s ready for life’s simpler pleasures? Chubby nods: “Right place, right time, bit of luck. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I’m just trying to go for a fucking ride on it.” This ethos of honesty and simplicity extends to his lyrics, too. The frontman’s frank documentation of the world around him has led the band to be branded as political, but Chubby doesn’t quite see it that way. “We get labelled a political band all the time,” he explains, “and politics is sort of a dirty word. It's associated with party politics, and I think it gets over-intellectual, and to be honest, I don't think it needs to be. When I talk about politics on a record, I'd rather talk about it in a way that's like someone talking to you in a pub, rather than someone talking to you in a lecture. I don't need to sit there and outline how I feel about Keynesianism.” It’s this directness that lends the band their power. “What I want to say is: ‘Look, this is why I'm in a trade union, this is why I go on strike’. I want to put it in such a way that it almost feels not political,” he enthuses. “I think us as the Left, we splinter everything, and it doesn't need to be like that, man.”

“I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I’m just trying to go for a fucking ride on it.” - Charlie

Chubby and the Gang clearly never expected any of this. Its members are still doing what they’ve been variously doing in multiple projects for the past 15 years: documenting working life in the UK, and backing it with raw hardcore. It just seems that, in this particular incarnation, the outside world might have finally caught up with them.

‘Chubby’ Walker

Running parallel to their broad church of influences, Chubby and the Gang have always retained the DIY ethos and breakneck pace of the hardcore scene, too. Their frontman is typically understated about turning out their debut within weeks of forming. “We just got the lineup together, we probably had about five or six practices, and then just fucking went in, did a couple of

“I had no fucking idea it was going to be like this,” the singer says, after a long pause. “I was happy with the outcome of the record, but I didn't think it was going to be picked up like that. At the start [it felt like] imposter syndrome. ‘What? Us? Really?’ Now I just think, fuck it. We’ll blow the back doors off it.” ‘The Mutt’s Nutts’ is out 27th August via Partisan. DIY

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WITH THEIR FOURTH ALBUM ‘SCREEN VIOLENCE’, CHVRCHES ARE USHERING IN A DARKER AND MORE DISTURBING NEW ERA. Words: Sarah Jamieson.

Chvrches are no strangers to a little darkness. Glance through the trio’s discography from across the past decade and there’s an ominous thread that runs throughout, juxtaposed by the glistening synths and crystalline vocals that they’ve become renowned for. And yet it’s only with their fourth album that the band decided to embrace that side of themselves from the get-go. “This was the first time we went into writing with an album title,” begins vocalist Lauren Mayberry, Zooming in from her home in Los Angeles alongside bandmates Martin Doherty and Iain Cook - based in LA and Chvrches’ hometown of Glasgow respectively. Originally a band name suggestion that was shelved, as well as a phrase that’s permeated throughout moments during the course of their existence, the trio once again found themselves drawn to the phrase ‘Screen Violence’. “In the summer of 2019 we were talking about what we might do next, and that name came back up as an idea for the aesthetic or umbrella that we could write things under.” First intended as a more escapist framework to begin work on their fourth record, soon the album’s conceptual beginnings began to shift in the wake of the ensuing pandemic. While originally, the album’s title was destined to explore violence “on screen, by screens and through screens”, the process of having to drastically switch their whole lives online gave “a kind of duality” to the entire thing. “So yeah,” Lauren laughs, “here we are in the scary, dark album era!” In hindsight, it’s little surprise that ‘Screen Violence’’s narrative theme would hold such an allure. As the touring schedule for 2018’s ‘Love Is Dead’ drew to a close, Lauren found the band’s growing popularity to have conflicting consequences. “I think that it’s been interesting to have some time off the road, because by the end of 2019 it felt very bizarre to realise that you are an entity to a lot of people,”

she explains. “You’re an abstract concept, and while that means the band is doing well enough that people think about us in a certain abstract way, when you are that person, it feels very bizarre.” Becoming more prominent in the public eye soon meant that - as for many female artists - social media had begun to throw up opinions on both extreme ends of the spectrum, and scrutiny was commonplace. “The internet has been a really amazing thing for our band, and a really negative thing,” she confirms. The process had started to take its toll.

eading into LP4, the band found themselves returning to the themes they’d explored early in their formation. While sonically, Iain explains, the trio decided “to go back to the original set up of the three of us writing and producing” after the more traditionally ‘pop’ production team around ‘Love Is Dead’, thematically, Chvrches looked to cult cinema, tapping into their collective love of horror and Video Nasty (a collection of typically low-budget horror films from the ‘80s). “It’s an era of filmmaking that we’re always really drawn to,” Lauren says of the genre that spawned films such as the Debbie Harry-featuring Videodrome. “We talked about it a bunch when we first started the band, and it formed a lot of the initial ideas that we had for the general band aesthetic and things. So we know it’s a space that we’re well-versed in the vocabulary of. Then, for me, I was excited about it because I hoped it would be a good space for me to tell some personal stories, and unpack some personal things, but under the guise of this concept.” Attempting to “write a different kind of lyric” inspired by the storytelling of Nick Cave and Jenny Lewis, the stories of ‘Screen Violence’ feel intense and direct, while still tapping into the creeping sense of fear, isolation and pressure of current life. “I think if I was having to say or write these things on a quote-unquote ‘normal’ Chvrches record, it would feel a lot more exposing,” Lauren admits.

DYSTOPIAN OVERTURE WOULD ANY CONVERSATION ABOUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD AND OUR (POTENTIALLY) DYSTOPIAN FUTURE BE COMPLETE WITHOUT A NOD TO MODERN ANTHOLOGY SERIES BLACK MIRROR? ERR, PROBABLY NOT… Obviously you guys have called upon quite a few classic horror references for the record, but even over the past year, it does feel quite strange how poignant things like Black Mirror have become in mirroring modern life… Lauren: Yeah, it’s freaky how many of those plot lines have come to pass in real life. That’s genuinely disturbing. I just think we need to ask Charlie Brooker, ‘What else do you think is gonna happen? Tell us all the fucking terrible things that are gonna happen so we can know!’ Iain: I think the most terrifying kind of sci-hi horror stuff is only really 20 minutes in the future, you know? It’s the stuff that we recognise that’s around the corner. Like the Black Mirror episode with Bryce Dallas Howard, where everybody’s rating each other and all their personal interactions. That was already happening when he wrote it, but he only had to extrapolate [the details] a little bit for it to become absolutely horrifying!

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From the unrealistic standards pushed on women within ‘He Said She Said’ and ‘Good Girls’ (“He said ‘You need to be fed’ / ‘But keep an eye on your waistline’ and / ‘Look good but don’t be obsessed’’) to the existential dread that flows through ‘Lullabies’ (“Paralysed and spinning backwards / Lullabies don’t comfort me / Televise the great disaster / We’re better off inside of the screen”), the album tells a fraught tale of modern life through the eyes of Lauren’s lead character. “I always think that, when I watch horror movies, I relate a lot with certain female characters. Not [necessarily] because you’re experiencing that in reality, but I think all women can empathise with feeling watched, or hunted or chased. I think it was then that I was like, ‘OK, how can you play with this as part of your art and the project?’” With such a vivid thematic backdrop to ‘Screen Violence’, this time around the band pursued a more fleshed-out vision for the project as a whole, riffing off Lauren’s love of mood boards to build the world around it. “I do it with everything, I have so many fucking Pinterest boards, for so many different things,” she laughs. “We knew that we wanted things to feel more coherent than they had on the previous records,” Lauren continues. “I feel like we’ve made good records, had decent videos and some interesting pictures, but none of those things ever felt really connected. I think it’s also because we’re really thinking about how we use the internet now; for me, I always think my Instagram can be a good mood board. I would rather have it be that - where you can help build out the back story of what you’re trying to do - than it be selfies of your own face. We just thought, how can we use these platforms to tell the story of the record better?” It didn’t end with her social media, either. “The whole reason for my blonde dye-job is to try and emulate the Scream Queen from horror movies,” she adds. “I like the idea of playing with female tropes in horror, and in general.” But even with the same creative license as an artist like St Vincent - who most recently channelled Warhol superstar Candy Darling for her latest record ‘Daddy’s Home’ - Lauren has found herself feeling vulnerable about tapping into her visual

identity. "I feel like St Vincent is such a pioneer of inventing those kinds of characters and living in chapters with them, but I have definitely felt uncomfortable about certain parts of that, and thought, ‘Well, if I dress more like one of the guys then people will take me more seriously’ or, ‘They already don’t take me seriously so if I play into this space, it’s just going to give them more license to not’. “If Robert Smith, or David Bowie, or any of those men dress in a certain way and put on make up, it’s incredibly creative, but if a woman does it, people tend to assume it’s because she’s trying to be attractive. That’s something that I’ve definitely thought about differently over the last few years, because it’s part of your performance, and your story, and you shouldn’t second guess yourself out of it just because of what people will assign to that.”

“THE INTERNET HAS BEEN A REALLY AMAZING THING FOR OUR BAND, AND A REALLY NEGATIVE THING.” - LAUREN MAYBERRY

hough the end product of ‘Screen Violence’ marks Chvrches’ most detailed vision so far, its process was one of their more challenging moments. Written and recorded with the band split across two continents in the middle of the pandemic, the trio were forced to overhaul how they worked as a unit, becoming entirely reliant on the screens that originally haunted the album. “We had to overcome a lot of challenges to continue writing and collaborating,” Martin says. “The bulk of the writing was done either before, or very early during the lockdown, but then we’d get together on Zoom and produce the album together, and Lauren was working away on lyrics as we went along. Once we overcame those technical challenges, I don’t think the process changed too much, but it wasn’t easy to continue making the album during the lockdown. There’s not just the technical challenges, there were a lot of emotional things going on - people trying to just be alive when it looks like the whole world’s falling apart.” And while the newfound duality of the title’s meaning feels bizarrely apt, it’s a construct that continues to expand. Even asking the band what they hope listeners will take from the album sees that familiar ‘s’-word rear its head again. “Once you put the songs out and you put the album out, it’s not really up to you anymore,” Lauren contemplates, “but even the few songs that we’ve put out so far, it feels really incredible that people are connecting with them. That’s what I’ve kind of grown to think about the band: you’re something that people project their experiences onto. “I used to feel shitty about live shows and thought, ‘Oh, these people are here to watch me and they’re gonna judge me and I’m not good at it’, but now I don’t really think about it all like that. You being there is almost incidental; they’ve come to have you play these songs that mean something to them in their life, and you’re just a screen that they can project their feelings onto.” ‘Screen Violence’ is out 27th August via EMI / Glassnote. DIY

“WHEN I WATCH HORROR MOVIES, I RELATE A LOT WITH FEMALE CHARACTERS. I THINK ALL WOMEN CAN EMPATHISE WITH FEELING WATCHED, OR HUNTED OR CHASED.” - LAUREN MAYBERRY

revie An album that’ll be excavated for years to come, but remains just as impactful on first listen. 56 DIYMAG.COM

ews DAVE We’re All Alone In This Together

(Neighbourhood)

All eyes have been on Dave

since debut ‘Psychodrama’ arrived off the back of a run of high-flying singles. He proved across the 11 tracks that he was the real deal who can operate in the album format - a fine storyteller who can strip the most difficult of subjects back to its core; race, domestic abuse, his brother’s prison sentence, nothing seemed to stump him. While ‘Psychodrama’ used the framing of a therapy session to look inwards, ‘We’re All Alone In This Together’ looks outwards. From the off, Dave excavates the connections he’s made to his fans through music. “In twenty-three years, I done so much wrong / But in that moment, I just felt like I made it right,” he raps on opener ‘We’re All Alone” as he recalls the transaction with "a kid" who sought his counsel from the brink. “Somethin’ special when he messaged me and told me that I saved his life.” A scattershot drum-pattern breaks up the soaring strings as a ghostly vocal hangs over the instrumental. The fun starts around ‘In The Fire’, a seven-minute mic exchange between the greats of grime atop a Kanye-style chipmunked gospel beat. Fredo and Ghetts cut through with their razor-sharp delivery before Giggs steps into frame with that unmistakable baritone. Each are given a moment to trace their story from hard beginnings to the status they’ve climbed to. ‘Three Rivers’ is an ode to immigrants, a trilogy of stories stacking up to paint a rich picture of the UK’s problematic dealings from Windrush to refugees fleeing from war-torn countries. “They’re deporting our people and it makes me sick / ‘cause they was broken by the country that they came to fix,” he raps.

BLEACHERS

Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night (RCA)

By now, it’s no secret that Jack Antonoff is quite the pop connoisseur. One look at his CV is proof enough of his talent when it comes to creating iconic, unforgettable moments in music; whether that be through his tremendous list of production credits (Taylor, Lorde, Lana, the list goes on…) or his infectious solo offerings. Yet, after a year like the one we’ve just had, a return to the fizzing brand of euphoric-yet-introspective pop that helped define Bleachers’ previous albums ‘Strange Desire’ and ‘Gone Now’ arguably wouldn’t have felt right. Instead, ‘Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night’ attempts to do what it says on the tin, transforming the darkness of our lives into something more serene and comforting. Still gorgeously doused in nostalgia, there’s a real organic heart to the record, with the sparkling synths of his past work instead swapped out for warm guitars, delicate strings and bright sax solos. Bruce Springsteen’s appearance on ‘chinatown’ feels both monumental and completely natural, while his influence is felt throughout the likes of ‘Big Life’ and the Lana Del Rey-featuring ‘Don’t Go Dark’. Lead single ‘Stop Making This Hurt’ is a cathartic highlight, its effervescent chorus akin to the likes of ‘I Wanna Get Better’ and ‘Don’t Take The Money’. And while ‘Take The Sadness…’ may not be a bolshy, career-defining move, it is a shimmering, reflective gem, hoping to offer a little relief from the darkness. (Sarah Jamieson) LISTEN: ‘Stop Making This Hurt’

A shimmering, reflective gem.

From allowing the godfathers of his genre to shine, to politics, love and heartbreak, 'We're All Alone...' is an album of tremendous scope, both in subject and musical reference points. The Latin-flavoured bop of ‘System’ features a sticky hook from Wizkid which is eventually soothed by swelling strings. ‘Twenty To One’ finds Dave trying out his singing chops as he intriguingly leaps between melody and spoken word in a fantastically unique fashion. Later, the gorgeous ‘Both Sides Of A Smile’ - where an argument between two lovers bleed out - is underpinned by James Blake’s chirruping vocal and soulful piano chords which only adds to the heartbreak. “You can ask James Blake, I ain’t seen the colour in anything,” he raps, cleverly referencing his collaborator’s 2016 album. Setting such a high bar on your debut can be a poisoned chalice but Dave weathers the storm with his astute penmanship, impeccable musical taste and cool, collected delivery. ‘We’re All Alone In This Together’ is an album that’ll be excavated for years to come, but remains just as impactful on first listen. At just 23, Dave has already built the foundations of an impressive body of work - at the rate he’s working at, watching him fill out the chapters to come is going to be a gift that keeps on giving. (Sean Kerwick) LISTEN: ‘In The Fire’, ‘Three Rivers’, Twenty To One’

DEAFHEAVEN

Infinite Granite (Sargent House)

MR JUKES & BARNEY ARTIST The Locket (Locket)

When Jack Steadman of Bombay Bicycle Club stepped out as Mr Jukes in 2017, it wasn’t much of a surprise. With sampling becoming a key creative tool in his wheelhouse, particularly on the band’s ‘So Long, See You Tomorrow’, it was only a matter of time before he had to flex his production muscles elsewhere. On ‘The Locket’, he partners with East London rapper Barney Artist to create the sort of project it felt like he was always destined to. With an ear for melody, production and sampling, he provides the perfect yang to an MC’s yin. It’s proven across the LP which kicks off with the statement-of-intent title track: “Me and Jack are making these hymns,” Barney raps before the joyful wonky brass of ‘Blowin Steam (Open Up Your Mind)’ staggers in. Barney’s presence is consistently sharp, witty and sparkling. With character along the way, he takes stock of his own romantic awkwardness. On ‘Poems’ he raps: “Cheesy I know / If you knew the way my mind froze / I ain’t even trying to glamourise this ting / But you understand why I hide poems”. Joy vibrates throughout but some of the LP’s gems gleam most brightly in the album’s moodier spots such as highlight ‘Déjà Vu’, where Jack’s longing chorus provides a perfect counterbalance to Barney’s verse which weaves between crawling bass and flourishes of piano. ‘Leaving Us In Light’, the hopeful penultimate track, crackles with chemistry as the pair harmonise for a few bars before the song resolves with a beautiful pinballing R&B melody. A fantastic collection of tunes that encompass everything from bangers to slow-jams that leaves you hoping Mr Jukes and Barney Artist’s schedules continue to align. (Sean Kerwick) LISTEN: ‘Déjà Vu’

There’s always been a quiet beauty about Deafheaven, even when their lush, soaring guitar soundscapes have been laced with exquisitely ugly black metal screams. On fifth record ‘Infinite Granite’ there is more space to appreciate this than ever, with the screams stripped back, for the first time ever, in favour of clean singing. Yet they haven’t blatantly discarded a string to their bow - instead, they prove how nuanced their music can be, how subtle, how aggressive, and how they can be both at once if they so choose. No track epitomises this better than opener ‘Shellstar’, beginning with a delicate, warm guitar line that gives way to a full-bodied, thunderous chorus. It’s this sense of attack that really makes these songs, particularly on the moody ‘The Gnashing’, and even when it seems absent, tracks like ‘Villain’ and ‘Mombasa’ pack a sting in their tails that beautifully disarms the listener. It has the potential to be an outstanding listen, and it would have been if ‘Other Language’ and ‘In Blur’ had a slightly stronger sense of direction, but Deafheaven has still crafted a record to get lost in. The metal purists crying sellout will sorely be missing out. (Emma Wilkes) LISTEN: ‘The Gnashing’

CHVRCHES

Screen Violence (EMI) There’s a morbid poignancy on ‘Final Girl’, a midpoint on the fourth studio album by Chvrches, a nod to the horror genre’s lone survivor. Not just a homage to Scream’s reluctant heroine Neve Campbell or Adrienne King’s Jason-dodging Alice in Friday the 13th, it’s both a celebration of womanhood and a critique of society’s attitude to it. A product of unrelenting online abuse, ‘Screen Violence’ simultaneously reclaims power and questions the need for it. It’s a path clearly laid out on the first three singles, themselves demonstrating new facets to Chvrches’ doom-laden euphoria. ‘He Said She Said’ exposes the push and pull of societal expectations on women. “I’m writing the book on how to stay conscious when you drown,” vocalist Lauren Mayberry reveals on the Robert Smith-featuring ‘How Not To Drown’. The trilogy is completed by the anthemic middle finger to meekness, ‘Good Girls’. Any notion of holding back has immediately been obliterated. This reinvigoration bleeds heavily into the sound. Opener ‘Asking For A Friend’ plays out as one rousing intro, kickstarting a series of tracks that bounce between synth-pop, new wave and atmospheric post-rock. By the densely theatrical ‘Nightmares’, Chvrches have fully embraced their heavier heritage. It adds a new dimension to their already complex blend of rousing electronica and unfiltered emotion. It’s here that Chvrches continue to carve their own path, unafraid to tread a thin line between multiple styles. In it they find an unparalleled catharsis, whether for heartbreak, loss, or indignation. Much like their complicated relationship with screens - the record also created across the Atlantic during a pandemic - ‘Screen Violence’ marries visceral anger and empowerment. The result is their most euphoric rallying cry to date. (Ben Tipple) LISTEN: ‘Nightmares’

ANGEL OLSEN

Aisles (somethingscosmic) If the lofty spirit of ‘carpe diem’ hasn’t caught on in recent times, then its lowbrow sibling, ‘fuck it, why not’ definitely has. ‘Aisles’ is a perfect example of this: a handful of songs Angel Olsen remembers from shopping trips past (hence the title), ‘80s classics reimagined by the songwriter into her own take on the decade’s sound. A slow take on Laura Branigan’s ‘Gloria’; an eerie version of Men At Work’s ‘Safety Dance’; a suitably sinister ‘If You Leave’, originally released by OMD. The jewel in the crown, though, is ‘Forever Young’, Angel’s take delightfully tinged with the melancholy nature of nostalgia. For an artist usually so meticulous with her vision, that these are able to sound so airy, almost frivolous - and, indeed, they were recorded back in 2020 as more of a exercise than intended for release - makes this curio of an EP all the more engaging. (Bella Martin) LISTEN: ‘Forever Young’

Their most euphoric rallying cry to date. 58 DIYMAG.COM

reviews

WILLOW

lately i feel EVERYTHING (MSFTSMusic / Roc Nation / Polydor)

The big talking points around ‘lately I feel EVERYTHING’ - and this incarnation of WILLOW the artist - might be its pop-punk pedigree, thanks to the Travis Barker-featuring single ‘t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l’ and both the Blink-182 drummer and ‘00s icon Avril Lavigne featuring on ‘G R O W’, but her latest runs the gamut of alt-rock in reality. At one end is ‘F**K You’, little more than a rage-fuelled diatribe. At the other are the soft ‘naïve’ and epic ‘don’t SAVE ME’, the latter sprawling and sonically layered. Her other guests, too, come from across the spectrum. Indie rock gives us Cherry Glazerr, who feature on punky standout ‘¡BREAKOUT¡’ and former Calpurnia guitarist Ayla Tesler-Mabe, while rapper Tierra Whack appears on the soaring ‘XTRA’. Bar WILLOW herself, the one thread that runs through the record is fun: ‘lately I feel EVERYTHING’ is fun to listen to, fun to air guitar to, and serves as a reminder, sometimes it’s actually fun to just sit with our unpalatable feelings for just a little longer. (Bella Martin) LISTEN: ‘¡BREAKOUT¡’

Fun to listen to, fun to air guitar to, and a reminder that sometimes it’s fun to just sit with our feelings. CLAIRO Sling

(FADER / Republic / Polydor)

Claire Cottrill’s transition from URL to IRL stardom has been prolific. The story is well told by now, from lo-fi breakthrough single ‘Pretty Girl’ in 2017 to ‘Immunity’, the rich and romantic LP which followed soon after. Stoic and serene, ‘Sling’ is a brave new chapter that introduces a Clairo transformed. More than just a pandemicinduced exercise in reflection, this record finds the singer meditating on her own self-growth. In places, she doubles down on some of the themes ‘Immunity’ introduced; silky lead single ‘Blouse’ has a sullen arrangement but whipsmart lyrics that call out male misogynists in the music industry, while ‘Zinnias’ sounds more complex than Clairo has ever before. On it, she muses on the temptation of domestic bliss over a twitchy melody: “I could wake up with a baby in a sling / Just a couple doors down from Abigail / My sister, man and her ring”. ‘Sling’ is a world away from the crisp, sometimes cold tone of its predecessor. Here, woozy keys and loose percussion illicit an analogue, organic feel, while Clairo’s paper-thin vocals rarely stray from a whisper, commanding patience and calmness with striking ease. Across the album, producer Jack Antonoff is in his stride, drawing on his wealth of experience eking out the finer details of Lana del Rey, Taylor Swift, and Lorde’s confessional storytelling. At no point does his vision infringe on Clairo’s, though; you sense the back-and-forth nature of good collaboration in the negative spaces, like on ‘Harbor’, which could easily be elevated to the tear-jerking heights of Lorde’s ‘Liability’, but embodies a softer, more intimate soundscape instead. Clairo has spoken candidly about struggles in her life both from before and since finding success. For a generation lost in the mist of topics like mental health and sexuality, ‘Immunity’ was a shoulder to cry on, a promise that it will all be okay, eventually. ‘Sling’ feels like that “eventually” coming true. (Alex Cabré) LISTEN: ‘Harbor’

BIG RED MACHINE

How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? (37d03d)

Aaron Dessner must have fashioned quite the list of goals to complete in 2020. Not only did he write and produce two wildly successful LPs with Taylor Swift, but he’s also carved out time to resurrect the ‘supergroup’ Big Red Machine he formed with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon for their self-titled 2018 debut LP. With an open door policy, Aaron and Justin bring an impressive cast under one roof on new offering ‘How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?’. On the haunting ‘Hutch’, Justin is shrouded by a choir composed of Sharon Van Etten, Lisa Hannigan and Shara Nova (of My Brightest Diamond). Elsewhere, the piano-led ‘Phoenix’ is warmed by Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold’s bright vocals which hosts a mesmerising trade off with Justin as it soars into an arena-ready chorus. The huge cast of characters are pulled together by the LP’s themes which dance in a nostalgic light; drawing on childhood, before the loss of innocence. The LP has some shared DNA with Aaron’s most recent outings; choppy, processed beats are interspersed with flashes of piano and guitar. The instrumental for ‘Hoping Then’ could have fit snugly on ‘folklore’ or ‘evermore’, and Tay makes an appearance herself on ‘Birch’ and ‘Renegade’. Some moments where the ghosts of that partnership linger too closely feel a little middle-of-the-road but fortunately these are in a minority. It's in fact some of the album’s stripped back arrangements that make for the most impactful moments - acoustic ballad ‘The Ghost Of Cincinnati’ which finds Aaron stepping up to the mic is a showstopper dripping with fantastic imagery and storytelling; “I haunt the North Side / Stop the traffic lights / Cycle up Price Hill / And stare up at the Pepsi sign”. As is always the case with albums of this nature that brim top-to-toe with guests, it’s sometimes hard to locate the thread that runs through it all. Nevertheless, there’s a terrific bounty to be enjoyed in the centre of the Vernon-Dessner Venn diagram. (Sean Kerwick) LISTEN: ‘The Ghost Of Cincinnati’

MEET ME @ THE ALTAR Model Citizen (Fueled By Ramen)

If the number of articles exclaiming either the death or revival of pop-punk has anyone confused, the answer is simple: pop-punk has ridden the wave for the best part of three decades. Formed in 2015 over a mutual love of the genre,it was last year’s lockdown anthem ‘Garden’ that broke Florida-based trio Meet Me @ The Altar. It propelled them forward with their empathic lyrics, and their evident love for the scene that spurred them, creating the space for underrepresented voices in a scene notoriously dominated by cis white men. ‘Model Citizen’, which doesn’t include the aforementioned track, continues to showcase their unashamed love of pop-punk. Taking the punch of scene stalwarts Set Your Goals and Four Year Strong, the six tracks are as boisterous as they are infectious. The tempo never waivers, from the Nintendo-core opening ‘Feel A Thing’ to the playful spoken word of ‘Wake Up’. ‘Brighter Days (Are Before Us)’ looks at the future with a genuine positivity, no doubt helped by the immediacy of the track’s chorus. Both ‘Never Gonna Change’ and ‘Wake Up’ carry the band’s mantra, accepting of the difficulties of youth and driven by a desire for self-improvement. ‘Model Citizen’ takes everything that has driven the scene forward and injects an unapologetic - and very welcome - Gen Z spin. (Ben Tipple) LISTEN: ‘Feel A Thing’

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SUPERSTATE

reviews

Superstate (Graham Coxon) You never really know what you’re going to get with Graham Coxon. Over eight solo records, several soundtracks and now this - a hyper-conceptual album and accompanying graphic novel - the Blur guitarist has veered between wilfully uncommercial abrasiveness, joyful pop hooks and everything in between; on ‘Superstate’, he takes another left turn. The most widereaching release to bear Coxon’s name (or not - ‘Superstate’ is technically the name of the project), these 15 tracks dip into loose funk struts (‘Only Takes A Stranger’), disco ebullience (‘The Astral Light’), ominous dub tinges (‘Bullets’) and moments that are almost indefinable, like ‘The Ball of Light’’s bass-rumbling robo-futurism. With a cast of guest vocalists (including, at times, versions of Graham’s own doctored voice), the result is something innately more grandiose than a traditional album; even without ‘Superstate’’s visual aid, the record propels you into its dizzying, sci-fiindebted world. And though modern dystopias are ripe for the plundering right now, ‘Superstate’ lands at the more adventurous, idiosyncratic end - Graham Coxon’s naturally antsy pen lending just the right amount of discomfort to the atmosphere. (Lisa Wright) LISTEN: ‘L.I.L.Y’

WEDNESDAY

Twin Plagues (Orindal) Hot on the heels of 2020 lo-fi debut, ‘I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone’, North Carolina-based outfit Wednesday deliver a primped-up package of vitreous guitar-pop for their second release. Fronted by the heart-onsleeve tenacity of Karly Hartzman, Wednesday navigate punchy grunge pop a la Beabadoobee - ‘Handsome Man’ is sharp enough to cut diamonds - right through to downbeat introspections (‘Gary’s’, ‘The Burned Down Dairy Queen’) that channel the raw emotional intimacy of Mitski and Snail Mail. A coming-of-age record of sorts, loose clippings of memory bob in and out of squalls of feedback – there are recollections of car crashes to complement the scrapheap cover art; there’s the chronicling of arguments between friends, of Karly herself as a “neighbourhood kid with a fucked-up buzzcut” and, most memorably of a chaotic high-school acid trip replete with broken bones detailed in the gorgeously hazy ‘Birthday Song’. (Elvis Thirlwell) LISTEN: ‘Handsome Man’

JUNGLE

Loving In Stereo (Caiola / AWAL) Album titles don’t often offer much to reviews; ‘Loving in Stereo’ however is a pretty excellent description of Jungle’s third LP. Having embraced harder emotions on 2018’s ‘For Ever’, the duo’s latest project is a barrage of positivity with a collection of upbeat anthems perfect for a sun-soaked summer of love. Using opener ‘Dry Your Tears’ to transition into the new era, funky lead single ‘Keep Moving’ swiftly sets the tempo and it’s unapologetically, unmistakably Jungle. Clearly aiming to make their live show even more of a party, tracks like ‘All of the Time’, ‘Talk About It’ and ‘Truth’ up the pace, lifting the BPM towards pastures and dancefloors the band hasn’t previously explored. Similarly experimental, ‘Romeo’ and ‘Goodbye My Love’ showcase Jungle’s first ever features, with rapper Bas lighting up the glorious former and singer Priya Ragu’s heavenly vocals ascending the latter. ‘Loving in Stereo’ is sonically and lyrically calling out for happiest, sunniest days. When they’re not just singing the word “sunshine” on ‘Bonnie Hill’, they’re alluding to it with “sky’s on fire” on ‘No Rules’. It’s almost relentlessly uplifting, but as the closer optimistically states, “can’t stop the stars from moving cause you ain’t got the time”. It comes at just the right time. (Will Strickson) LISTEN: ‘Goodbye My Love’

OSCAR LANG

Chew The Scenery (Dirty Hit) Given that Londoner Oscar Lang’s rise came about thanks to his knack at writing earwormy bedroom pop numbers, that the best of debut ‘Chew The Scenery’ comes when that shines through is not particularly surprising. More a scrapbook-like collection of songs than a meticulously plotted album the inclusion of an introduction and intermission do more to perpetuate the latter than create a line through the record - it’s when Oscar’s inner ‘nice guy’ sits at the forefront that he succeeds most. Take the sentimental piano-lead ‘Write Me A Letter’, on which his crooning reaches Rex Orange County levels, or the hypnotically subdued ‘Quarter Past Nine’, and ‘Are You Happy?’ on which he makes like a one-man Magic Gang, or a less glam Declan McKenna, all pure smiles and jangly guitars. It’s only when he tries to amp it up that ‘Chew The Scenery’ falters; ‘Stuck’ might possess a standard freshers indie chorus, but when it aims for Oasis-level swagger, it meets closer to the Gallaghers’ recent solo endeavours than bucket-hatted air-punches. Similarly the euphoria of ‘Yeah!’ misses the mark. Still, there are more than a handful of stellar moments, not least ‘Final Call’, which brings to mind early Coldplay with its tender piano and inclusion of strings. (Bella Martin) LISTEN: ‘Are You Happy?’

TURNSTILE

Glow On (Roadrunner) Fresh from releasing their ‘Turnstile Love Connection’ EP just a few weeks ago, Turnstile are back with yet more evidence that they’re one of modern hardcore’s most vital bands. Having garnered a sizeable amount of hype with their early work - further cementing it with Roadrunner debut ‘Time & Space’ in 2018 - the Baltimore band are using their third full-length to continue pushing against the preconceived boundaries of the genre. Granted, ‘Glow On’ still throws down with the best of them, but it bears an even fresher and more exploratory spirit. While lead single ‘Holiday’ is pure fistthumping catharsis, there’s also the sun-bleached guitars of ‘Underwater Boi’, the understated piano introduction of ‘Fly Again’ (which, granted, does soon give way to some major riffs), and the experimental percussion of ‘Wild Wrld’ that feels like a fresh take on Refused’s seminal ‘The Shape of Punk To Come’. Even the addition of Blood Orange on two tracks feels seamless, his vocals blending dreamily into hazy cut ‘Alien Love Call’. And while it’d be easy to assume the band had lost some of their bite, that couldn’t be further from the truth. An invigorating, thrashing effort - which is ultimately also a lot of fun -t ‘Glow On’ shows off just how innovative hardcore could become. (Sarah Jamieson) LISTEN ‘Holiday’

THE BRONX

Bronx VI (Cooking Vinyl) When this first new album in four years from The Bronx was announced back in March, guitarist Joby Ford claimed that “from day one, we really decided that we wanted to make a record that went in different directions and places.” Perhaps it felt that way to the Los Angeles veterans as they pieced together ‘Bronx VI’ at Joe Baressi’s House of Compression studio in Pasadena, but what they’ve produced sounds like classic Bronx, and certainly not much of a deviation from the punk rock blueprint that has made them one of the genre’s most consistent performers over the past couple of decades. The usual freewheeling riffery is very much in evidence, particularly on opener and lead single ‘White Shadow’ and the incendiary ‘Jack of All Trades’, while frontman Matt Caughthran is on typically boisterous form, turning in a slew of ferocious vocal performances as well as some pretty changeable lyricism, incisive one minute (‘Superbloom’) and asinine the next (‘Mexican Summer’). There are occasional signs of stylistic deviation - closer ‘Participation Trophy’ leans closer into poppy hooks than we’re used to hearing on past Bronx records, and the same can be said of ‘Watering the Well’ - but in the main, this is the same band we’ve long known - fast, furious and, above all, fun. Long-time followers will not be disappointed, but new converts are likely to be few in number. (Joe Goggins) LISTEN: ‘Superbloom’

JADE BIRD

Different Kinds Of Light (Glassnote) There was a sense that, with her 2019 self-titled debut, Jade Bird sought to eschew the ‘country’ label that’d been foisted upon her so early on. Piano ballads and pop nous were scattered across the record, as if to desperately prevent pigeonholing. Two years on, and it seems as if Jade’s more willing to allow the Americana that so obviously pervades both her songwriting and vocal lilt to seep in. Closer ‘Prototype’ is probably the pinnacle on that count, or ‘Punchline’ with its reference to driving “down the 305”, or even the stripped-back ‘Red White and Blue’. But for the most part - and that at which the record is at its best - it’s allowing the style to match with a bolder, full-band setup, one which pushes Jade’s raspy voice forward. Bright opener ‘DKOL’ does this well, as does highlight ‘Candidate’, almost howling “If you want somebody to hate / I’m a great candidate” in the chorus alongside driving, indie-rock guitars. It’s very Sheryl Crow. ‘1994’ is another along the same lines, its distortion giving way to a shouta-long chorus. This is by no means a ripping up of the rule book for Jade, but from this side-step where she’s going next could be anyone’s guess. (Louisa Dixon) LISTEN: ‘Candidate’

Q&A Turnstile have never been afraid to push the boundaries of modern hardcore, as Brendan Yates explains, as he talks ‘Glow On’, the band’s most varied record to date. Interview: Louis Griffin. In the past you’ve worked with producers from within the hardcore scene, but this album was recorded with Mike Elizondo, who has worked on albums for artists as diverse as Fiona Apple to Eminem. How was it? It was cool! I think every recording process is such a learning experience, and always [leads to] so much growth. Once we met him and saw his excitement to do the album, and his willingness to let us do what we wanted, it seemed like it was a really cool opportunity. It was such a learning process – you step outside of your comfort zone a little bit, and I think that’s when the best stuff happens. With every record we’ve done, we’ve usually worked with someone that we [previously] haven’t, and we wanted to do the same thing here. We took the chance, and it ended up being incredible. The album was trailed by an EP, ‘Turnstile Love Connection’, and a short film, your directorial debut. What was it like navigating a new medium? That was a great process. Same as the album, just a huge learning experience, working on that together, putting all of our

energy into making something like that. [It was] such a cool, unifying experience too, because everyone involved [were] friends that we’ve known for years. It opened my eyes to how much goes into directing things. I grew so much appreciation for anyone who does that as a full-time thing, because you have to be focusing on so many things at once, addressing things, managing things. It was very fulfilling, because I had always wanted to give it a shot. Blood Orange (Dev Hynes) features on two tracks, ‘Alien Love Call’ and ‘Lonely Dezires’. How did that collaboration happen? Are you a fan? I’m Dev’s number one fan! We’d been in touch, and expressed our love for each other’s music, and we had always mentioned either doing shows together or working together on music. It came time for the album, and I had this one [track] particularly, ‘Alien Love Call’, which I just couldn’t hear without Dev’s voice on it. It was a great experience, such a cool opportunity to work with someone I admire so much - coming together on a Turnstile song was a dream.

reviews

RECO MMEN DED Missed the boat on some the best albums from the last couple of months? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

JAPANESE BREAKFAST

LAURAN HIBBERD Goober (eOne)

Bowling in with spoken-word disses, ‘Bleugh’ is a bold introduction to ‘Goober’. Charting a relationship where the other party is less invested - "I still find myself dressing up to watch you play the drums / It's depressing" - the lyrics conjure vivid, if relatably sad, vignettes. It's self-deprecating while retaining a sense of humour, and sets the rest of the EP up for more of the same. Backed by walls of distorted guitars, ‘Goober’ is full on from start to finish as Lauran finds the fun in figuring life out - always with a wry grin. On 'Boy Bye' it's all about self-reflection after an unsatisfying relationship: "I’m dealing with the wrath of my insides falling / You’re laughing at the fact I wrote a cheque it bounced". No matter the topic, there's always a selfawareness which maintains the EP's sense of fun. And with Lauran's delivery toeing the line between conversational and live-show singalong ready, for all its short runtime, 'Goober' packs a mighty slacker-pop punch. (Eloise Bulmer) LISTEN: ‘Bleugh’

MAISIE PETERS

You Signed Up For This (Gingerbread Man / Asylum) It's hard to believe this is only Maisie Peters’ debut.A regular on radio and playlists for some time, she's a recent chart-botherer with friends in high places after signing with Ed Sheeran’s Gingerbread Man imprint. And truth be told, there probably couldn't be a better time to release a collection of heart-onsleeve songs where the protagonist doesn't always get the love interest. Single ‘John Hughes Movie’ sounds as devastatingly catchy here as it does on the airwaves, an empowering heartbreak anthem that's sure to endure. ‘I'm Trying (Not Friends)’ is full of one-two punches, a biting sense of humour (“You're seeing someone pretty and I hate her guts / so I'll be telling you she's nice on the bus home”) and a relentless chorus. Similarly, Ed Sheeran co-write ‘Psycho’ is refreshingly bold, with Maisie in total pop mode, all layered synths and drum machines making it endlessly replayable. Occasionally, though, when other big pop moments threaten, she lets them fall to the wayside in favour of wordy lyrics, making it feel like a trick has been missed. ‘You Signed Up For This’ is an album about young heartbreak and missed opportunities, smiling because you feel like you should. Big emotions, small glances, everything feeling life-defining. In a world where musicians can feel pressured to release albums year after year, Maisie took her time with this one, resulting in an album that could well be timeless. (Eloise Bulmer) LISTEN: ‘I’m Trying (Not Friends)’

Jubilee

Melody, lyrics and storytelling pull focus in a fashion that cements Michelle Zauner as a true creative force to be reckoned with.

HORSEY

Debonair (Untitled)

KENNYHOOPLA

SURVIVORS GUILT: THE MIXTAPE A head-rush of a collection in the best possible way.

HALF WAIF Mythopoetics

Both more freeing and deeply personal, it's an unfiltered discovery of her place and role in the world.

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At a time when most bands are taking themselves painfully seriously, Horsey are more than happy to be the butt of the joke. They indulge not in arch boundary-pushing - rather, they’re content to execute cliches with joyous enthusiasm. And, they mostly pull it off. Opener ‘Sippy Cup’ kicks things off in brilliantly gonzo fashion, all musical theatre stabs and glam guitars, but it also functions as a neat window into how their vaudevillian stylings give way to real emotion too. Underneath all the jazz hands and glitter, there’s vulnerable lyricism dressed up as hooks: “If not in this shit, then where the fuck can happiness be?” The band don’t always quite carry off some of their more outré stylings, particularly on mid-album cut ‘Clown’, a dirge that feels out of place following the strange balladry of ‘Lagoon’. But this is the exception rather than the rule, and they bow out with the help of King Krule on the undeniable ‘Seahorse’, a typically side-on look at police brutality. On ‘Debonair’, Horsey walk the tightrope between comedy and tragedy with ease. (Louis Griffin) LISTEN: ‘Sippy Cup’

Q&A

Maisie delves into her universe, digging into her penchant for story-telling, sonic evolution, and what books and literature mean to her. Interview: Malvika Padin. What was the inspiration and message behind ‘Psycho’? I wrote ‘Psycho’ after some tea went on in my life, some drama occurred. I was brainstorming ideas with Ed Sheeran and Steve Mac whom I wrote the track with, and this idea of “If you thought I was crazy about you before, look how crazy I can get.” From there we put it together quite quickly - in about half an hour - and the song was born!

you interview people in literature on Instagram. What do books and literature mean to you as a creative? I think reading has been really important in helping me improve my own writing, and is one of the reasons I write the way I do. Interviewing authors exposes me to a whole different skillset and talking to writers about their processes keeps me sharp and helps me focus on my own creative process.

How would you say your sound has evolved over time? At its heart my music is the same as it’s always been. I’m still very much a singer-songwriter, I put the story and lyrics at the front of what I do. But my sound has become bigger and more anthemic. As I’ve toured and played more shows, my sound has naturally evolved to fit that.

Have you picked up anything specific from any of their processes that has made its way into your approach for writing music? Maybe not knowingly, but unconsciously I think the time and the methodical skills they put into their work has definitely influenced me. I think if you’re writing a book, every word and line needs to be given due consideration and I like to think I do that with my music as well.

You have a book club of sorts where

Debut album

Modern Tricks for Living 17 September Order the 12” vinyl at www.lowhummer.com

LIARS

The Apple Drop (Mute) In cinema, the best scares lie within the unknown. Chuck a death zombie flesh eater on screen too early and it’s game over. The reveal kills it all. What the audience really crave is the slow burn, the threat of a dark, destructive force that rarely, if ever, reveals itself. Give them that, and the magic happens. Liars understand this well. For the past 21 years the group have developed a sound that is stuffed full of twisted horror coding. ‘The Apple Drop’, the group’s tenth album, highlights this perfectly. The music never explodes into complete madness, but rather bubbles along slowly, suggesting that the violence is mere moments away. ‘The Start’ crawls along like a glitched out arthropod, slowly spiralling towards digital collapse. From here, the record carries on in much the same fashion. ‘Slow and Turn Inward’ and ‘Big Appetite’ lure us deeper into the darkness. Tremolo-tinged guitars and pulsing electronics melt together, hinting at an unseen insanity that we crave so much. Horror fans take note. This is how you create terror. (Jack Doherty) LISTEN: ‘Big Appetite’

SWIM SCHOOL

BNNY

Edinburgh four-piece swim school certainly entertain dreams of grandeur. Opting for a combined force of sparse, anticipating verses and rousing choruses, their sound has clear footholds in both the stirring indie of Wolf Alice and Cheatahs’ driving shoegaze. So far, so good. Yet debut EP ‘Making Sense Of It All’ never feels to fully attain the sonic heights of either. On ‘Outside’, the band perform a diluted version of fulsome, defining emotions, a track buoyed by its bright melodies, yet still hampered by an unshakeable sense that they’re only just getting out of first gear. ‘Everything You Wanted’, despite targeting the dramatic weight of, say, Wolf Alice’s ‘The Last Man On Earth’ lands closer to a bad date, its thudding drums and synths not enhancing an enveloping, hypnotic experience, but rather one lacking imagination or nuance. The EP does fizz and crack with lead single ‘Anyway’, on which the band manage to punctuate their distorted veneer with their best melodies yet, but for the most part, after the early promise of the group, it wasn’t hard to have expectations of just a bit more. (Ben Lynch) LISTEN: ‘Anyway’

You get the most concise sense of what ‘Everything’ boils down to in its closing moments. A sub-one-minute phone recording, still just entitled ‘Voice Note’, it’s as raw and rickety as you can get: a couple of lines of delicately strummed duet that crash back down to reality before they’ve barely begun (“I never had a dream like you / Dreams like these they don’t come true”). It concludes a debut steeped in heartbreak - half of the album was written before the death of singer Jess Viscius’ partner, half in its wake - but that regularly finds meditative beauty amongst the sadness. Though opener ‘Ambulance’ is as sparse and fragile as they come, when the instrumentation fleshes out on the likes of ‘So Wrong’, Jess channels a Mazzy Star-like cloud of catharsis. There are nods to The Velvet Underground’s knack for dreamy simplicity (‘Blind’), and times when Viscius peeks into Vivian Girls-adjacent, more garage territory (‘Take That Back’). For the most part, however, ‘Everything’ operates from within the particular fog of grief: fragile, tactile, tender. It’s a frequently gorgeous thing. (Lisa Wright) LISTEN: ‘So Wrong’

ORLA GARTLAND

FEET

(New Friends)

(Nice Swan)

Orla Gartland’s debut is an intricate, carefully constructed collection, blending together indie-pop, folk and alternative rock. She masterfully layers sounds so not even a hand-clap feels out of place and even empty space is used well, going from sparse and intimate to sonic explosions with interesting textures in between. Opener ‘Things I’ve Learned’ is perhaps the best example of this, starting with just vocals and percussion, as synths and foreboding piano quietly creep in. Similarly, ‘Over My Head’ opens with low synths and melancholy piano before erupting into crashing drums and electric guitars. ‘Zombie!’ is among the highlights with its rush of energy, so is the guitar-driven ‘Codependency’. Even the quieter songs like ‘Do You Mind?’ and ‘More Like You‘ steadily climb, spilling with emotion. She zeros in on moments with needlepoint precision: “'Cause the time kept passing / And I just stopped asking how you were,” she sings on ‘Do You Mind?’. An impressive debut. (Aliya Chaudhry) LISTEN: ‘Codependency’

In this bite-sized follow up to 2019 LP ‘What’s Inside Is More Than Just Ham’, ‘Walking Machine’ finds FEET maintaining their tongue-in-cheek tone and melée of jagged guitar riffs, but perhaps taking themselves just a little more seriously. The EP’s name is a nod to that same humour, but the content blends wit and kitchensink topics with discordant musings that actually carry weight. ‘Peace and Quiet’’s energetic prophecy delivers lyrical apprehension set to appropriately jumpy instrumentals, but the EP’s closer ‘Arena’ slows it down for a moodier reflection on the music industry. The pace change is a downer note to end on, but throws great contrast on the middle tracks. ‘Library’ and ‘Busy Waiting’ are the EP’s most ‘them’ moments, bringing buzzy builds and wild guitar lines to the forefront and allowing the mundane storylines to shine with a cheeky bit of irony. FEET’s knack for making something that should sound like chaos into a jam is still clear. (Ims Taylor) LISTEN: ‘Library’

making sense of it all (self-release)

Everything (Fire Talk)

FOXING

Draw Down The Moon (Grand Paradise / Hopeless) Foxing’s 2014 debut ‘The Albatross’ placed them somewhere on the edge of the blossoming emo revival scene. The association was short-lived as second album ‘Dealer’ favoured expansive atmospherics. By the time 2018’s ‘Nearer My God’ reared its head, any remaining walls of genre association had crumbled. That the band now find themselves on prominent pop-punk label Hopeless Records may imply some return to their early years, yet seconds into opener ‘737’ it’s clear that Foxing are once again ready to tread new waters. ‘Draw Down The Moon’ is at once chaotic and perfectly refined. The moment the gentle beauty of ‘737’ is cut through by vocalist Connor Murphy’s screams paves the way for the unrestricted nature of things to come. ‘Beacons’ places a subtle layer of pianos under a track predominantly driven by drums, while ‘Cold Blooded’ travels from exasperated grunge to new wave guitars. A collection of the best of what has come before, ‘Draw Down The Moon’ finds coherence in its unashamed madness. It’s pulled together by Connor’s unique vocal performance, and the welcome dominance of drummer Jon Hellwig. It also finds a thread in its lyrics, themselves a playful take on togetherness and loneliness. Nobody has ever had this much fun singing lines likes “I feel so homesick everywhere I go”, or “it can’t get much worse than this”. It’s in this balance between the serious and the frivolous that Foxing find their voice. (Ben Tipple) LISTEN: ‘Bialystok’

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Woman On The Internet

Walking Machine

Coming Up

reviews

THE KILLERS PRESSURE MACHINE Brandon Flowers has looked back to his childhood for the band’s seventh. Out 13th August.

JAMES BLAKE FRIENDS THAT BREAK YOUR HEART The singer-songwriter’s fifth full-length features guest spots from SZA and JID, and is released on 10th September.

IDER

shame (self-release)

RAY BLK - ACCESS DENIED The artist’s debut full-length features guests including Giggs, Stefflon Don and Kaash Paige. Released 17th September.

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Any Shape You Take (Saddle

TROPICAL FUCK STORM Deep States (Joyful Noise)

Creek)

Two years have passed since IDER made their debut with ‘Emotional Education’. While plans to move to Berlin to write a follow-up were halted by the pandemic, the duo have channelled a sense of selfownership from leaving their label into creating a project that exudes confidence: ‘shame’ is an affirmation of embracing vulnerability and celebrating imperfection. The ‘third member’ - Lily Somerville and Megan Marwick’s harmonies - makes a welcome return, but there’s an additional edginess. Inspired by Berlin, ‘Cross Yourself’ shows off their production skills, channelling rumbling basslines and lo-fi screeches into the group’s synth-pop. Elsewhere, ‘Knocked Up’ is a striking image of dissonance, as the duo chant “We can all make peace with ourselves with enough love, but there’s so much wrapped up in the way that we were brought up.” IDER are back at what they do best, providing a glimmering sense of hope that we aren’t alone with our anxieties. (Georgia Evans) LISTEN: ‘Cross Yourself’

On ‘Any Shape You Take’, Indigo De Souza’s slacker rock tendencies are still there, as are her raw, unfiltered lyrics (“I’d rather die / than see you cry,” goes the unlikely hook of ‘Die/ Cry’, to name just one), but in making the big moments bigger, there’s both an increase in dynamics and confidence at play. New too is a pop sheen - not that Indigo has smeared her record in stardust, but that opener ‘17’ uses Auto-Tune, ‘Hold U’ brings to mind Haim’s staccato rhythm, and ‘Pretty Pictures’ similarly has ‘80s pop smarts about it. It’s a wonderful juxtaposition to the record’s grungier moments. ‘Darker Than Death’ crashes into life, at once heavy and sparse, creating tension perfectly. ‘Bad Dream’ showcases the sheer emotion her voice is capable of conveying. ‘Way Out’ is another peak, while closer ‘Kill Me’ showcases both her folky inflections and her ability to create a glorious crescendo. It’s simultaneously euphoric and angsty. (Louisa Dixon) LISTEN: ‘Bad Dream’

Heavier, wilder, and more faithful to their evocative ‘fuck storm’ promise than ever before, the third fulllength from the Antipodeans is an uncompromising prospect: merciless barrages of ear-splitting shreds; crunching, skin-crawling rhythms that bore into the skull’s fragile surfaces; to top it all off, a lyrical parade of grimly ghoulish imagery, tackling, without censure, the psychological fall-out of the pandemic. Lead single, ‘G.A.F.F’ - standing for “give a fuck fatigue” encapsulates the vitriolic gloom that burdens ‘Deep States’ - “Everybody’s going nuts, the drugs are on drugs / Somebody do something yeah but nobody does”. ‘Deep States’ provides, perhaps unsurprisingly, a difficult listen at times, weighed down as it is by its overwhelming lyrical bluster. Penultimate track ‘Legal Ghosts’ is however an unexpected moment of melodic tenderness - this elusive tale of loss revealing a soft underbelly beneath this otherwise bristly, tough-skinned offering. (Elvis Thirlwell) LISTEN: ‘Legal Ghosts’

CHUBBY AND THE GANG

VILLAGERS

THE JOY FORMIDABLE

As could probably be extrapolated from the record’s title alone, one thing ‘The Mutt’s Nuts’ does well is evoke an approximation of ‘70s pub rock. Like much of that era, Chubby and the Gang’s second rattles along, driven by singer Charlie Manning Walker’s visceral vocals. They‘ve got all the diction of Joey Ramone - and the distinct air they’re about to ask you outside for a punch-up. It’s a vibe. There are also echoes of ‘80s hardcore: ‘Overachiever’, ‘Someone’s Gonna Die’ and ‘Lightning Don’t Strike Twice’ could have emerged from either side of the Atlantic. It’s not all high-octane though: closer ‘I Hate The Radio’ has a distinct mid-paced jangle to it, ‘Life’s Lemons’ veers on the (bitter)sweet, and there’s a sense the wistful ‘Take Me Home To London’ is placed in the middle so as to act as a breather. But there’s the crux: the record is not quite so relentless that it needs a pause, and at points feels as if it should move up a pace, decibel or pitch instead of the opposite way. (Louisa Dixon) LISTEN: ‘Overachiever’

2020 marked a decade since Villagers’ tortured debut ‘Becoming A Jackal’. In the 11 years since, he’s flirted with electronic music on ‘Awayland’ and crafted stark love songs on ‘Darling Arithmetic’. While predecessor ‘The Art Of Pretending To Swim’ flirted with joy, ‘Fever Dreams’ goes the whole hog. The triumphant opening fanfare of ‘The First Day’ might be one of the best songs Conor has committed to tape, its groove-laden verses giving way to a glorious chorus that grows in size each time it comes around. ‘So Simpatico’ keeps you locked in for its full seven-minute running time. Later, the songwriter’s pen is parked for ‘Restless Endeavour’ which is allowed space to stew simply in its own mantra as spurts of sax and sonics crash in around it. Conor O’Brien’s already cemented himself as a killer songwriter in the traditional sense. Here, the sonic experimentation finds his production and arrangements reaching the same imaginative heights. A thrilling and unpredictable addition to Villagers’ gleaming canon. (Sean Kerwick) LISTEN: ‘The First Day’

2018’s ‘AARTH’ felt like a rebirth for The Joy Formidable, falling back in love with guitars while pushing themselves - but while ‘Into The Blue’ still feels ambitious, it also feels a little more safe. Song lengths hover around the five-minute mark for most of the album, but for the most part, don’t need to - The Joy Formidable are can be formidable indeed, but the magic does wear off. The album’s opener and title track is a teaser, an example of how gut-wrenching guitar songs can be really, truly powerful, and there’s no denying that there’s a masterclass in punchy riffs to be found on the album - see ‘Only Once’’s opening, or the insistence of ‘Farrago’. But ‘Into The Blue’ largely finds itself coasting on one level. The standouts are the songs that break out of the formula - ‘Gotta Feed My Dog’ is an eerie, brilliant cut. Ritzy Bryan switching out her usual soaring vocals for a breathy delivery of a blunt take on bad relationships. It’s an effortless highlight, just because it’s something different. (Ims Taylor) LISTEN: ‘Gotta Feed My Dog’

The Mutt’s Nuts (Partisan)

COURTNEY BARNETT - THINGS TAKE TIME, TAKE TIME Three years on since second LP ’Tell Me How You Really Feel’, Courtney’s latest will be out on 12th November.

INDIGO DE SOUZA

Fever Dreams (Domino)

Into The Blue (Hassle)

LIVE

LATITUDE

The Vaccines

Henham Park. Photos: Jonathan Dadds.

Wet Leg

ith its broad line-up and its modest size of 40K, Latitude has long been the inaugural ground for future festival mainstays. Across its 15 years, it consistently celebrates the new as much as the established. This year, as Covid forced organisers to look closer to home to fill the sprawling festival site, the impressive array of names welcomed to each stage feels all the more celebratory.

festival’s largest daytime crowds reserved for Supergrass and Rick Astley. There’s no shaming the novelty of hearing the former’s ‘Alright’ or the latter’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, and there’s nothing tongue-in-cheek about the euphoric reaction to both. The Vaccines provide a likeminded feel with their eagerly anticipated return, as ‘If You Wanna’ reverberates out of the packed BBC Sounds Stage to round off their surprise afternoon set.

The charge is led by Friday’s headliners Wolf Alice, appearing at Henham Park as their first major festival headline slot off the back of this year’s Mercury Prize shortlisted ‘Blue Weekend’. There’s something genuinely transformative about their sound, one that mirrors the seemingly endless twists and turns of Latitude’s forest paths. The tinge of psychedelia rings out with a powerful hedonism, brilliantly interrupted by the punk bravado of ‘Play The Greatest Hits’ and ‘Yuk Foo’. But it’s tracks such as ‘Lipstick On The Glass’, the otherworldly ‘Feeling Myself’, and the cataclysmic encore of ‘The Last Man On Earth’ that present Wolf Alice as their most unique. Set against the clear, starry sky, it’s as mystical as the festival itself, and a clear lesson to UK newcomers further down the line-up just what is possible.

The palpable euphoria can be seen across all faces throughout the weekend, not least as The Chemical Brothers dominate with a mesmerising headline performance. Launching straight into ‘Hey Boy Hey Girl’ pays off, with the festival on its feet through to the ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’ finale. A giant robot backdrop really helps to set the mood.

And the Latitude line-up isn’t short of exciting emerging talent. Away from the comedy and theatre that attract a huge portion of punters, much of the line-up is cut between guitar-led indie and the unstoppable new wave of pop. In the latter camp, the biggest buzz is reserved for recent BRIT Rising Star winner Griff, whose incredible voice and relaxed persona sees her take to the festival’s main stage, The Obelisk Arena. Only her second festival to date, both across one weekend, her familiarity with the stage is instant. Even heavy hitters are visibly ecstatic to be back on a stage, with the

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By the end of the weekend, it’s the new guard that rule the roost. Holly Humberstone invites pin drop silence to the second stage for her intoxicating blend of emo-pop. London’s Lava La Rue welcomes the outcasts and misfits to the festival’s second stage with a series of unabashed songs delivered with perfection, for one of the best sets of the weekend. Phoebe AXA glides effortlessly from the haunting power-pop of ‘Hurts A Little Less’ to a collection of electro-infused emotionally charged numbers. But perhaps the spirit of Latitude is best distilled into Wet Leg’s Friday evening show at The Alcove, a space that wouldn’t feel out of place at your boozy village fete. Packed full of excited onlookers on one single alone (that’s ‘Chaise Longue’ in case you didn’t know), it’s one of those immediate “I was there” moments that have been so heavily missed over the past 18 months. And for Latitude, it’s another clear example of how championing the underdog can lead to something truly special. (Ben Tipple)

Griff

Wolf Alice

T I C K E T S AVA I L A B L E F R O M :

SEETICKETS.COM - GIGANTIC.COM - TICKETWEB.UK - TICKETMASTER.CO.UK 69

IT’S YOUR ROUND

A big inter-band pub quiz of sorts, we’ll be grilling your faves one by one. now brought to you via zoom!

THIS MONTH:

OLI SHASHA, FEET

Where: His mum’s house. Drink: Water (it’s 11am on a Monday, after all). Price: Free.

Specialist Subject: West Ham

General Knowledge

What's the 'proper' name of West Ham’s former ground, Upton Park? Boleyn Ground. Correct!

How many of Henry VIII’s wives were called Catherine? Two? Nope, it was three - Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Parr and Catherine Howard.

What sport did former captain Julian Dicks turn professionally to upon retirement? Ooh, was he a football coach? Coaching? So you think after he quit football, he got a job in… football? Ohhh, what sport! Er, I dunno, rugby? It was golf. When striker Marco Boogers disappeared in 1995, where was it rumoured he was found? Marco who? This isn’t going to go well, is it. Where do people go missing?

Was it in a rehab centre? It was actually at a holiday caravan park back home in the Netherlands. Which two shirt numbers are retired? I know one of them’s Number 6, and… 38? Correct! Do you know whose shirts they were? Bobby Moore and Dylan Tombides! Correct! Who was the club's first captain not from the UK or Ireland? Ooh… is there a time limit? I’m trying to think of significant players… I’ll take a guess at Slaven Bilic. Incorrect - it was Paolo Di Canio. Oh for fuck‘s sake, that was easy!

In what year did The Beatles split up? Was it ‘69 or ‘70…? I’m gonna go with 1970. Correct! Where is the smallest bone in the body located? Is it in the… I know this… is it somewhere in the back? You’re literally touching it right now. Oh, it’s in the ear!

Indeed it is - we’ll give you half a point cos we’re feeling nice. My body was telling me the answer, I just had to listen to it. What was a Snickers bar called before it was called a Snickers? I don’t know, maybe something to do with peanuts? Peanut butter bar? It was called a Marathon. Oh, that does ring a bell… Banksy is associated with which city? Bristol? It is Bristol! Correct.

2.5/5

2/5 FINAL SCORE:

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4.5/10

Verdict: "It’s shameful that I didn’t get that Paolo di Canio question right. The whole thing is slightly embarrassing but it’s an early one; if these questions came up in a pub quiz I’d have a better shot, this is not me in my element."

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