(Ed Banger/Because)
The French producer duo attempt a return to their roots, but the results are a little too polished

With their self-titled 2007 debut, French production duo Justice – Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay – established themselves as promising Daft Punk successors. Combining arena-sized drum tracks with squealing guitars and a thundering dancefloor pulse, they delivered gargantuan melodic hooks with gut-thumping force. Yet subsequent releases have struggled to elicit the same sense of vitality. Audio, Video, Disco , from 2011, veered into the complicated world of prog, while 2016’s Woman attempted a disco-pop crossover; neither was fully convincing. On their latest album, Justice attempt a return to their club-oriented roots.

Across 13 tracks, the pair find their strengths in the heavier end of the musical spectrum. Generator shudders through raw synths and techno kick-drums, providing an apt soundtrack for a postapocalyptic dancefloor, while the tonal switches on Incognito are delightfully unpredictable, shifting from disco bass to cavernous melody. On softer moments, though, they’re on less steady ground. One Night/All Night drowns out guest vocalist Kevin Parker’s falsetto with a plodding backing, while Saturnine grates in its interplay of chopped guitar lines and high-pitch vocals. Justice are still capable of raw-edged excitement, but on Hyperdrama they find themselves too polished and bright.

As the boss of PC Music, the godfather of hyperpop confounded critics but won over Beyoncé and Charli XCX. Now, with a supersized new solo album, he’s continuing his mission to make pop more unpredictable

Everything about AG Cook is exhausting. As a producer of elasticated outre pop his output is as varied as it is frenetic, taking in everything from bass-rattling electronic workouts for cultural behemoths such as Beyoncé to celestial dreamscapes for underground newcomers, via collaborations with Caroline Polachek and longterm partner in crime, Charli XCX. Having initially steered clear of solo albums to focus on running his divisive yet hugely influential label PC Music, Cook’s debut, 2020’s 7G, featured 49 tracks and more than two hours of music ranging from face-melting dance experiments to a lo-fi Sia cover. Apple, a more streamlined, but no less polarising followup arrived a month later.

His hard drive somehow still not yet full, Cook is now back with his third album Britpop, a three-part, 24-song opus split into Past, Present and Future sections. As part of its promotion he’s been busy creating TikToks and launching his own parody website Witchfork , billed as “the least trusted voice in music”. “It’s obviously embracing some troll behaviour, which has always been a bit of a thread for me personally,” he laughs.

(PIAS)
The Manchester band sing about edginess and emotional danger, but never manage to give their beats any tension

You can imagine a private members’ club commissioning Porij as artists-in-residence: the young Manchester band makes dance music so smooth and so inoffensive that I can imagine it goes down a treat among the UK’s young, moneyed finance set. The title of their debut album Teething is a misnomer; even if it implies growing pains or an unsettled genesis, perhaps with a rewarding outcome, that rarely comes through on this record of neutered garage beats and platitudinal lyrics.

Throughout Teething, Porij allude to edginess or emotional danger, but it never comes through on the record. Marmite’s vengeful lyrics (“Haunt my life, I’ll haunt yours back”) can’t cut through its glazed poolside ambience. Sweet Risk, about entering a reckless relationship, conveys none of that tenuous sense of abandon in its weightless jungle beat. In recent years, dozens of other artists, from Avalon Emerson to Kllo and even TikTok chart-topper PinkPantheress, have more successfully fused underground sounds with heart-on-sleeve pop lyricism; in sanitising the sounds they’re referencing, Porij wind up behind the pack.

There are highlights among the haze. Stranger is a deeply affecting exploration of gender dysphoria whose lyrics are alternately guileless (“I just want to wear little shorts in the deep end”) and profound (“They were so close when they made me”). You Should Know Me is ingratiating simply by virtue of having a full, sinewy bass line; Gutter Punch, although borrowing liberally from Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy in its second verse, is destabilising and magnetic. For the most part, though, Porij can’t help but feel warmed over.

Following acclaim for her affecting sound collages, the Texan’s new album flips her old ‘emo ambient’ to ‘ambient emo’, inspired by Young Thug and Sparklehorse – and an unexpected show of charity from the Wilco frontman

For Claire Rousay, a bed can be a studio, a sanctuary and a suffocating cocoon. On the cover of her exquisitely sad new experimental pop album Sentiment, she is seen huddled under the covers, blankly staring at the camera. On her current tour, she is recreating on stage the various bedrooms where she made the record, complete with 16ft walls, a poster of avant garde hero Arthur Russell and, at the centre, a bed. When we speak via a video call in March, Rousay is sitting cross-legged on her mattress in a striped T-shirt, the Los Angeles sun providing a gauzy glow through the window.

“The bed has been very central to me throughout the last couple years of making music. I’ll even mix tracks in it,” she says. “I’m also just so depressed, all the time. So I’m in bed a lot.” She smiles and lets out a small laugh, dulling the sting of her candour; no matter how bleak the conversation gets, she maintains a dry, mischievous wit. Some days, she adds, she’ll pull her blackout curtains down at around noon and stay in bed until the following morning. “It’s comforting but also enabling. My therapist says it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism.”

(Warp)
Written on a programmable piano, the US musician’s new album remains graceful and accessible – in spite of her non-human playing partner

A classical composer signed to experimental UK label Warp , US pianist Kelly Moran has more in her fingers than mere canonical elegance. She has accompanied Oneohtrix Point Never and FKA twigs on tour; her previous works were often for prepared piano .

Moran’s second full-length for Warp was conceived in lockdown. In early 2020, Yamaha loaned her a Disklavier – a modern version of the ghostly “ player piano ”, a programmable real instrument – to help her prepare a collaboration. Moran seized the opportunity to experiment. She created a version of herself with more fingers and a greater handspan. On Moves in the Field , she duets with this augmented version of herself. These 10 tracks feature what sometimes sounds like one pianist running rings around the other. Superhuman, where Disklavier Moran pirouettes around flesh-and-bone Moran, finds the Disklavier phrases fractalling out into digital-sounding stutters. Dancer Polynomials and Leitmotif suggest systems music being played alongside traditional composition.

(AKP Recordings)
The US artist’s debut album mixes prepared piano with programmed synth effects in woozy harmonic compositions that soar and thrill

It’s often difficult for pianists to avoid playing a synthesiser keyboard like a piano. Michelle Moeller studied classical piano to a high level, but while completing a degree in composition at Mills College in Oakland, California, she came under the spell of two electronically inclined mentors, Zeena Parkins and John Bischoff, and became obsessed with synth technology. In order to “turn off her piano-player brain” and concentrate on timbre, Moeller started to use Max/MSP interfaces rather than keyboards to generate synth sounds. The results are startling. Artificial noises sparkle and flutter in the higher register and toll like church bells in the lower register. She creates warped, ethereal, space-age noises that are complex of timbre and harmony.

Late Morning, her debut album, features some piano-dominated tracks: Nest is a superb, jazzy meditation, using Erik Satie-like parallel harmonies, while Corridor is a pulsating piece of clockwork minimalism in 5/4, where Moeller’s piano is accompanied by the low-key textural percussion of Willie Winant and Wesley Powell. But the most sonically adventurous moments here pair Moeller’s pianistic virtuosity with her interest in synth technology and manipulated sounds. On the wonderfully woozy Leafless, her prepared piano – presumably treated with paperclips and bolts to create muffled harmonics – is further mutilated until it sounds like the instrument is melting. Sift’s bell-like chorus is topped by tightly harmonised shakuhachi-style improvisations by Mitch Stahlmann (reminiscent of André 3000 ’s recent flute album). On Slate, her creaky prepared piano takes its place among a symphony of distorted electronic glitches and chirrups. A thrilling and disorientating LP.

The Oscar-nominated actor and the boss of XL Recordings – now a synth-pop duo performing ghostly songs with lyrics rooted in childhood trauma – discuss the healing power of making art

Inside a rehearsal space scented with essential oils, a new, unlikely electro-art-pop duo are preparing for their live debut. Called Sam Morton, they are the collaborative pairing of the twice-Oscar-nominated actor, director and writer Samantha Morton and the celebrated producer, songwriter and boss of XL Recordings Richard Russell. Morton, wearing denim dungarees, is singing the fluty, jazzy, bassy, atmospheric Let’s Walk in the Night while Russell, in jeans and a graffitied white T-shirt, hunches over production consoles, alongside a keyboard player and a guitarist.

We are in the Copper House, Russell’s personal studio. It is characterised by an undeniable vibe : a lime-green artwork on a scarlet wall announces “RESIDENCE LA REVOLUTION”; the phrase “FATE IS DECIDED”, alongside descriptions of cloud formations, is chalked on black walls. The tiny bathroom is wallpapered in Buddhist texts and stocked with books, including The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

First Direct Arena, Leeds
Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill preside over an energetic set thrills fans of their chart reign and their post-punk era

Two years ago, Simple Minds’ singer Jim Kerr told the Guardian how, in the early 2000s, the band would drive past stadiums they used to sell out en route to playing a club that wasn’t. Now, they’re back in arenas, which the frontman regards as “intimate – but not too cavernous”. Their fortunes have turned around as more people have woken up to the pioneering brilliance of their early albums. Meanwhile, a retooled seven-piece line-up including two women have brought a new energy. Sarah Brown shares lead vocals occasionally and Cherisse Osei is an outstanding drummer. Decades-old songs arrive waxed and polished, while 1995’s Hypnotised and 2022’s Vision Thing have a contemporary shimmer.

Opening the tour in a city Kerr describes from the stage as “mad, but in a good way”, the setlist otherwise draws mostly on 1980s glories but has plenty to delight both fans of Simple Minds ’ chart reign and post-punk era. The band hit the ground running with an electro triple whammy of Waterfront, Love Song and The American. Big hits include Once Upon a Time, an inevitable Alive and Kicking and Belfast Child, powerfully performed without comment but beneath images of the Troubles. Promised You a Miracle, Glittering Prize, Someone Somewhere (In Summertime) and the title track from 1982 classic album New Gold Dream (81/82/83/84): all sound utterly resplendent. They dig deepest into their catalogue for 1979’s Premonition and 1980’s This Fear of Gods, neither played for aeons, which sound thrillingly dark, mysterious, esoteric and European.

Designed to preserve and assist cultural traditions, the list recognised techno scene’s contribution to Berlin’s cultural identity

Berlin’s techno scene has been added to a Unesco cultural heritage list, in recognition of its contribution to the cultural identity of the city.

Berlin’s Clubcommission, a network for Berlin’s techno clubs and musicians, described the move as “another milestone for Berlin techno producers, artists, club operators and event organisers”.