Artists from Dua Lipa to Nia Archives are tapping the boisterous energy of mid-90s music – and even embracing the union jack. Can they avoid the genre’s laddish lows?

For some, Britpop was a high point for British guitar music: that time when Blur, Pulp, Suede and Oasis thrilled the world with wit and brio. Others argue it has aged worse than Loaded magazine: blokey, beery, conservative and still clogging up the charts. Indeed, there’s perhaps something a bit dismal about the fact that James and Shed Seven have both had No 1 albums in 2024.

Nevertheless, a crop of young artists are turning to the energy and iconography of mid-90s Britain for inspiration. The jungle artist Nia Archives, 24, wears a dazzling union jack on her teeth for the cover of her debut album, Silence Is Loud. “No one’s really making Britpop at the moment,” she told the Face in February, “but I have a feeling 2024 is gonna be the year.” Dua Lipa has said she was “looking through the music history of psychedelia, trip-hop and Britpop” while making her new album, Radical Optimism, adding that Britpop “has always felt so confidently optimistic to me, and that honesty and attitude is a feeling I took into my recording sessions” – although you’d be pushed to notice the influence on the new singles she has released so far.

As Taylor Swift tops $1bn in tour revenue, musicians playing smaller venues are facing pitiful fees and frequent losses. Should the state step in to save our live music scene?

When you see a band playing to thousands of fans in a sun-drenched festival field, signing a record deal with a major label or playing endlessly from the airwaves, it’s easy to conjure an image of success that comes with some serious cash to boot – particularly when Taylor Swift has broken $1bn in revenue for her current Eras tour. But looks can be deceiving. “I don’t blame the public for seeing a band playing to 2,000 people and thinking they’re minted,” says artist manager Dan Potts. “But the reality is quite different.”

Post-Covid there has been significant focus on grassroots music venues as they struggle to stay open. There’s been less focus on the actual ability of artists to tour these venues. David Martin, chief executive officer of the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), says we’re in a “cost-of-touring crisis”. Pretty much every cost attached to touring – van hire, crew, travel, accommodation, food and drink – has gone up, while fees and audiences often have not. “[Playing] live is becoming financially unsustainable for many artists,” he says. “Artists are seeing [playing] live as a loss leader now. That’s if they can even afford to make it work in the first place.”

(Nonesuch)
A diffusion of the band’s hallmark earwormy blues feels somewhat lightweight, albeit with splashes of classy experimentation

In the early 2000s, the Black Keys were celebrated in indie circles for Thickfreakness: their breakthrough second album and a useful descriptor of the Akron, Ohio duo’s sound, a grungy, almost obscenely visceral take on 60s garage and soul. By the turn of the next decade, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney had entered the Grammy and Billboard chart-buttressed rock mainstream. Singles such as Tighten Up and Gold on the Ceiling – which watered down their trademark guitar sleaze and paired it with earwormy choruses – gradually entered the pop cultural ether, becoming the type of songs you know even if you think you don’t.

On their 12th album, the Black Keys themselves seem like the opposite of that: a band you think you know but might actually struggle to get your head around. Ohio Players is a real mixed bag in style, quality and intent. A lush, magnetically melancholic cover of William Bell’s 1968 classic I Forgot to Be Your Lover proves the pair still have soul to spare – an impression reinforced by gratifyingly grimy throwback Please Me (Till I’m Satisfied). They keep one eye on their new establishment status with dumbly repetitive yet cleverly catchy songs including Beautiful People (Stay High) – co-written, like half the record, with Beck; the other guest songwriter is Noel Gallagher, for some reason.

It’s been 12 years since the Australian instrumental trio’s last album. Since then, their violinist has become Cave’s right-hand man and set up a home for abused monkeys. Now they’re back with a feverishly beautiful new album

You might think that the primary factor needed to make a band work is, you know, actually being able to get together to make music. Not for Dirty Three. It is 12 years since the Australian instrumental trio last released an album, 2012’s Toward the Low Sun, but it isn’t for lack of trying that their reunion has taken so long. Drummer Jim White lives in New York, guitarist Mick Turner in Melbourne and violinist Warren Ellis in Paris. And they’ve all been busy: White as a solo artist, in duo Xylouris White and collaborating with the likes of Bill Callahan; Turner as a painter and solo artist; Ellis, most famously, as right-hand man to Nick Cave in the Bad Seeds and in their film scoring partnership. “When someone was available, the other two weren’t,” says Ellis, looking wild of hair and resplendent in a ruby Fila zip top and blue Peter Jackson suit in a London pub. “For some reason, I think that really worked in our favour.”

Having limited opportunities to get together meant limited opportunities to repeat themselves – and from day one, Dirty Three sought to push the limits of the three-piece. The Melbourne scene stalwarts formed in Ellis’s kitchen at the turn of 1992 – Ellis says none of them can remember when exactly – and improvised for five hours ahead of playing three sets of background music at a friend’s bar that night. “I remember asking Mick, ‘God, how long do you think we’ll be together?’” says Ellis, drinking tea containing precisely a dot of milk. “And he said, ‘Well, as long as what we think we’re doing is good. When we start making shit, it’s time to stop.’” They quickly made their name with their lyrical, furious interplay, shades of Celtic and Greek folk music, a shared love of Impulse! records and jazz drummer Elvin Jones, as well as for their knife-edge danger and flayed emotion, with Ellis in particular playing as if it were always the last night of his life. They inspired love and hate – “We’d play shows where not even half the audience liked us, and the other half wanted to kill us,” says Ellis – and found themselves in what he calls a post-Nirvana boom for various shades of alternative music made by kindred spirits, supporting the likes of Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys when they came to Australia. The early albums, 1993’s self-titled, 1995’s Sad and Dangerous and 1996’s Horse Stories, managed the rare feat of capturing their live energy.

These days, I think, let’s throw it up in the air a bit and see what happens

(ATO)
Swerving genre for mood, the LA band glide by on an irresistible swell of chillwave synth and psychedelic funk

Los Angeles trio Chicano Batman are singularly focused on creating music that evokes mood rather than a specific genre. On their self-titled 2010 debut they paired doo-wop grooves with Spanish vocals to create a wistful reimagining of Latino soul, while 2017’s Freedom Is Free leant into social consciousness lyrics and psychedelia, and 2020’s Invisible People riffed on sultry synth-funk. Their fifth album is typically adventurous, channelling reverb-laden electric guitars, euphoric swells of melody and infectious vocal hooks to produce some of the group’s most freewheeling music to date.

Across 12 songs, Notebook Fantasy veers from the chillwave synths of the title track to the sumptuous string orchestrations of Spanish-language ballad Era Primavera, the horn fanfares of The Way You Say It and highlight Lei Lá’s squelchy psychedelic funk. Throughout, the rhythm section is locked in, a propulsive foundation, while vocalist Eduardo Arenas’s keening falsetto brings home the group’s singalong melodies. There is the odd misfire, such as the clumsy Strokes pastiche Losing My Mind, but largely the album manages to effortlessly embrace its wide-ranging songwriting in the service of one musical mood: joy.

They were initially dismissed as the acme of upper-class preppiness, but the band’s new album Only God Was Above Us is its grittiest yet. Has their frontman finally exorcised past demons?

On its surface, Only God Was Above Us, the fifth album from Vampire Weekend, has a darkly fatalist point of view. Over some of the band’s loudest, grittiest production to date, frontman and songwriter Ezra Koenig sings of curses, missed connections and imagined wars, airing plangent anxieties about how this tumultuous era of history will be remembered. It plays a little like a knottier sequel to the band’s anxious 2013 record Modern Vampires of the City – but Koenig himself hopes the album leaves listeners with some level of hope.

“I think fatalism taken to its extreme is optimism – some of the happiest people in the world have some element of surrender and acceptance,” he says. “There’s fatalism – the world is a chaotic place and isn’t that terrible? And then there’s optimism – the world is a chaotic place, and you gotta surf that wave.”

The psychedelic musician’s new album trades her obscure influences for stark folk, inspired by the death of her father – then warped through Google Translate. ‘You don’t to write too much about yourself,’ she says

Jane Weaver turns up to our interview in a Stockport restaurant carrying a plastic bag stuffed with albums. They are all old, the worse for wear – she’s taking them to be professionally cleaned later – and obscure: the closest the bag’s contents comes to mainstream is a compilation of soundtrack music from the 80s films of nouvelle vague director Eric Rohmer . “The music from the scenes set in discos or parties,” she nods. “ Really good. Eighties, French, synthesisers. Some of it sounds a bit like Air.”

This all seems very Jane Weaver-ish. Over the past decade or so, she has released a string of fantastic, acclaimed albums, each one a left-turn from the last. They’ve taken in acid folk, space rock, eerie, drifting electronic experimentation, hypnotic, vaguely krautrock-y instrumentals and full-on pop, all of them informed by separate moodboards of obscure influences that speak of a profoundly eclectic taste and a lot of time spent digging through esoteric records. Even 2021’s glittery, pop-facing Flock was apparently based in an infatuation with “Lebanese torch songs and Australian punk”. She is the kind of artist who says things like, “I just kind of went down the rabbit hole of 80s Russian aerobics music,” in the same way that other people might announce they’ve been streaming that Noah Kahan single a lot.

Keir Starmer is on a personal mission to promote music to the under-11s. From rock’n’roll to Jonathan Richman, our writers suggest songs for an alternative schooling

• Charlotte Higgins: ‘Arts funding has collapsed under 14 years of Tory rule. Here are three ways Labour can fix it’

Rock’n’roll is nearly 70 years old: it can just sound arcane and distant to ears trained on 21st-century pop. An effective crash course in its revolutionary importance, how it changed Britain forever requires not one track, but two. First, play something that constituted pop music before Little Richard et al arrived: Dickie Valentine’s The Finger of Suspicion, Anne Shelton’s Lay Down Your Arms or Guy Mitchell’s frankly horrifying paean to fatherhood, Feet Up (Pat Him on the Po-Po). Then play Long Tall Sally, the feral opening seconds of which – in the context of what came before – sound like a bomb going off, or the world being turned on its head. Alexis Petridis

Born in early-80s Hamburg, they became the toast of goth discos. As they release a singles collection, they recall their shock at seeing Thatcher’s Britain – and the sexist cynics who underestimated them

Anja Huwe realised things were about to change for Xmal Deutschland in 1982, when they opened for Cocteau Twins. Up until then, the band had been a creative experiment concocted by five women in Hamburg’s small but productive punk scene. Now, embarking on a UK-wide tour and recently signed to 4AD, the experiment was starting to look like it could become a phenomenon.

“I wanted to be part of a band but not really the front person,” remembers vocalist Anja Huwe. “When we had our first gig with the Cocteau Twins, that was when I really realised: this could be something for me.”