The Predatory Wasp
This was released seven years ago, but I’ve only just found it and I can’t get over how much I love it. Hannah Cohen put out the brilliant Earthstar Mountain LP last year, but this is taken from 2019’s Welcome Home, which is probably my favourite album of the year so far, if that counts. I just can’t handle the melodies, and yes, of course I’m crying.
Yay! Gia Margaret is back with a new album, Singing, her first since 2023’s Romantic Piano. I’ve totally loved everything she’s put out for the last decade, the ludicrously beautiful 3 movements being a personal favourite – and based on this lead single from the upcoming LP I expect that trend to continue. “I wanted to make something that sounded hopeful” she says of the recording process, “which is a little ironic because I felt essentially hopeless during the entire process.” This is the energy I need I my life.
Maria BC’s third studio album Marathon lands at the end of the month, and Night & day is the second single: a haunting, reflective experimental folk song. The album itself is billed to deal with themes of “resistance, environmental ruin, personal disruptions and destruction”, which feels very 2026.
Appendix.files rolls out its second LP with Irradiated, an eight-part excursion from Berlin-based sound artist and producer Kurt ‘Reinartz’ Salgado. If you’re a fan of Barker’s beatless techno deconstructions, you’ll likely find plenty to like here.
Imarhan started out around 2008, a loose collection of friends who began to play together and whose style reflects their cultural and generational background; dry guitar riffs, pop melodies and pan-African rhythms which draw on traditional Tuareg music, African ballads and the modern pop and rock the band heard growing up.This is taken from ESSAM, their fourth album, recorded with the same core lineup, but with a significant shift in their sound and approach, moving toward something more open, modern, and exploratory.
The opening track on Pefkin’s new album Unfurling is a stunning, 11-minute blend of haunting folk and icy ambient, inspired by the artist’s dreams of the coming spring. Nature has always been a central part in Pefkin’s music, and on Unfurling she captures all the elements as the record follows the transformations of the land from winter into spring – air, light, temperature, soil.
A fresh A-side from Durand Jones & The Indications finds drummer and falsetto king Aaron Frazer taking the lead on Let’s Take Our Time, a song that has been billed as a Mayfield-era Impressions’-adjacent track, but to my (admittedly untrained ears) sound more like a Smokey Robinson tribute. Either way, it’s likely you’ll know the kind of area in which they’re operating.
https://durandjonesandtheindications.bandcamp.com/album/lets-take-our-time-flower-moon
Fresh from delivering one of the best albums of last year, OHYUNG returns to the ambient textures they explored so affectingly on 2022’s imagine naked!; my favourite LP of that year. all dolls go to heaven is the lead single from the forthcoming album IOWA, described by the artist as “a memento to my time living in Iowa between 2023 and 2024” and “my ambient transexual version of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.”
SAULT start the year with a typically low-key release, their new album Chapter 1 emerging out of the January mists with barely a whisper of hype. Predictably it’s great, perhaps even a career highlight. Time will tell; but if you can’t find something to enjoy with Protector I’m really not sure what’s wrong with you.
It’s very encouraging to have an album this good released so early in the year. Tragic Magic pairs Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore in a collaboration recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris, made with rare access to instruments from the Musée de la Musique collection through InFiné. Co-produced with Trevor Spencer, the album was created in nine days, building from improvisation and the emotional carry-on of the moment.
Lattimore chose a run of historic harps that map the instrument’s evolution from the early 18th to late 19th century. Barwick worked with classic synthesisers including a Roland Jupiter and a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, bringing soft-edged harmonic colour and air around the notes. The Four Sleeping Princesses may be a highlight, but its far from the only reason to immerse yourself in this forest of lushness.
https://marylattimoreharpist.bandcamp.com/track/the-four-sleeping-princesses
The Predatory Wasp 