Rock City, Nottingham
Seeming to play their jagged post-punky early material with some reluctance, the Leeds band strike out into bold new territory with hypnotic electronic grooves, disco stompers – and a Napalm Death collab

“Who prefers our earlier work?” Yard Act frontman James Smith asks the audience, and it’s a question you get the sense he has been asking himself of late too. A crowd member is brought up on stage to spin a wheel, offering a one-time-only chance to hear a randomly selected song from the band’s 2021 debut EP Dark Days. It lands on the title track and the band dutifully bash out the kind of jagged post-punk that led to their rapid ascent during lockdown.

Three years on, with the band seemingly feeling restricted by their own earlier sonic template – one which they created, by their own admission, in a deliberate attempt to board the last train out of post-punksville at the end of the decade – they return with a more electronic rock-leaning sound. There are lashings of synth, blasts of sax, a new pair of backing vocalists, and basslines straight out of the ESG playbook. On new tracks such as When the Laughter Stops, they glide into LCD Soundsystem territory, stretching out pulsing beats and hypnotic rhythms into locked grooves, while Dream Job veers closer to Ian Dury with its almost pub-rock disco stomp.

Continue reading...

The London-based duo with a background in visual arts are making their mark with an addictive mix of cool electronica, reggaeton beats and filthy lyrics

New York’s name may be totally un-Googleable, but their sound is bracing and completely distinct from the rest of the experimental pop scene. The London-based duo – American Coumba Samba and Estonian Gretchen Lawrence – make unnerving electronic music that’s anchored by deadpan, uncannily processed vocals. Their debut album, No Sleep Till NY , was one of 2022’s best discoveries: a record that synthesised icy electro, body-shaking reggaeton beats and brazenly filthy lyrics into one addictive package. Its highlight, LA , sounds like an urbano classic covered by stereotypical US sorority girls, while the pulsating Makeout is 11 minutes of tense industrial dance music cut with a droll spoken-word hook: “I hate myself/ I hate myself/ You should see how much I can’t stand myself/ Because I’m a lazy bitch.”

Lawrence and Samba, both in their 20s, are visual artists first and foremost, and have shown at London galleries Arcadia Missa, Galerina and Emalin among others. Their live show is revealing of this pedigree. At a show supporting buzzy Matador signees Bar Italia last year, the pair performed in a lone spotlight in the middle of the crowd, singing and dancing next to an open laptop and a bottle of water. Since No Sleep Till NY they have released one single, Night N Day, which turns the hook of Ladytron’s 2000s electroclash classic Seventeen into a throbbing, aqueous dub track. Between this and Skinny Jeans , from No Sleep Till NY , it would be easy to position Samba and Lawrence as part of the much debated “indie sleaze” revival that’s supposedly going on – but New York are far smarter and more slippery than to slot easily into the zeitgeist like that.

New York play Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, London, on 1 March

Continue reading...

The alt rock pioneer has earned social media adoration for her trap-infused new song Bye Bye. Now she’s following it up with a ‘realistic’ new record , as well as a collection of her late brother’s writing

The Daft Hunks are two twentysomething YouTube influencers who don’t review music so much as react to it (their most-watched videos see them listening to Olivia Rodrigo and Lana Del Rey in real time). On their latest video they check out the new single from Kim Gordon. “She’s 70 years old and still doing it,” says one of the Hunks. “That’s crazy,” says the other.

They begin playing Gordon’s new single, Bye Bye, its dread-inducing hip-hop beats scraping against each other as Gordon intones a scribbled to-do list. “Buy a suitcase, pants to the cleaner,” Gordon raps threateningly. “Call the vet, call the groomer.”

Continue reading...

The Wild Swans frontman also formed bands with Ian McCulloch, Ian Broudie and Julian Cope – and was Courtney Love’s flatmate – but admits to being a peripheral voice in Liverpool’s music scene. A new memoir could change that

‘Honestly I’m terrified,” says Paul Simpson. “I don’t know what I’ve written and I’m far too close to it.” The singer, musician and frontman of cult 1980s Liverpool group the Wild Swans is speaking from a residential room in the Rubrics, in Trinity College, Dublin, where his partner, the theatre director Gemma Bodinetz, is currently working. The oldest residential building in Ireland and also, by many accounts, the most haunted building in the country, it is a suitable setting in which to discuss his book Revolutionary Spirit, a music memoir and social history of the 80s Liverpool music scene that is steeped in learned erudition and infused with the ghosts of an old port city.

“I’m a peripheral voice on the scene,” admits Simpson, with self-deprecating honesty, his Mersey sibilances adding a necessary softness to this statement. “Louder voices than mine have always had control of the narrative. When my agent initially approached publishers they were very honest. They said: ‘We love your writing but you’re simply not famous enough to make this project viable.’”

Continue reading...

From gigs in sketchy Toronto buildings to Punjabi folk in Birmingham, musicians including Mogwai, Nakhane and Cornershop champion the local acts who never hit the big time

Nowhere Man and a Whiskey Girl (Phoenix, Arizona)

Continue reading...

The artist also known as Will Oldham reveals his favourite children’s song, his love of volcanoes – and why he covered Mariah Carey and Sinéad O’Connor

Your work is often considered to be bleak, dark and mostly for grownups. Given your young offspring, what children’s songs do you find yourself singing? Grimpeurs

One of the earliest Sesame Street characters is a fellow called Grover, who is blue with a big pink nose. Last week, in the children’s section of a record store, I found a record called Grover Sings the Blues. I hadn’t heard What Do I Do When I’m Alone? or Has Anyone Seen My Dog? in 45 years but my daughter has been playing them over and over again. It’s so gratifying that she likes the songs I liked as a child in the 1970s. I still know every word and note.

Continue reading...

Alongside jobs in economics and TV production, Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey are British indie royalty. They recall the insults and misogyny they faced in the UK – and the embrace of the US

Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey met a little under 40 years ago, when they were both students at Oxford. Fletcher (later awarded the CBE for her services to the economy) and her friend Elizabeth Price (a future Turner prize-winning artist) turned up at Pursey’s room (he later became a TV producer) to see whether he wanted to join the band the pair of them had just formed, inspired by girl groups, the Buzzcocks, the Pastels and the bands on Postcard Records.

“We didn’t actually check whether you could play bass,” Fletcher says. “I had a cover of a Microdisney album on my wall,” Pursey says. “And I think that was probably enough to qualify me to join.”

Continue reading...

(Polydor/Interscope)
The US indie-rock supergroup skewer the male ego on this magnificent meeting of harmonies and minds

“In another life we were arsonists,” goes a lyric on this first album from Boygenius , the supergroup consisting of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus – three of the most thoughtful, wry and quietly powerful indie-rock songwriters of the past decade. It’s a telling line for music that blazes with feeling, and is unabashed about drolly skewering and examining the male ego (see: songs about internalised notions of masculinity and lines such as “And I am not an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddhist monastery writing horny poetry” on a track called Leonard Cohen).

On the unassumingly titled The Record , this formidable trio of singer-storytellers complement one another with their often harrowing, diary-like candour. When their strikingly pure vocals combine in folky, elegiac harmony they are extraordinary, as on the opener, Without You Without Them, or in starker, lyrical moments , when they address love, friendship, philosophy, self-effacement.

Continue reading...