White Flowers, the long-running collaboration between Joey Cobb and Katie Drew, exists within what they call “the realm”, described as “a shared creative space, wherein time, rather than being a restrictive force, is fluid and boundless, and music exists as an endless conversation with their past and present selves”. Now, that’s all a little too pretentious for me, but: breathy vocals, Cure-esque, shoegazey guitars and gently winding synth lines? Sign me up.
Gia Margaret is back, but perhaps most importantly, so is her voice. Her new album Singing marks her return to vocals after a long break caused by a vocal injury. During that time, she shifted toward instrumental and ambient music, developing a more detailed and restrained approach to composition. Now recovered, this is her first vocal record since There’s Always Glimmer in 2019, and features contributions from David Bazan, Amy Millan, Kurt Vile and others.
Dozzy! Dozzles! The Big Doz! Whatever you like to call the world’s greatest techno maker, he’s back, with three mindbendingly hypnotic DJ tools on Spazio Disponible’s Nero division. What a guy.
Intriguing, somewhat lugubrious chamber-pop piece from quite the gathering of breathy, alternative Scandi talent which landed today with zero fanfare. I wonder what they’re cooking up?
Meticulously assembled from a good 15 years’ worth of source material, Cong Burn boss John Howes’ second Paperclip Minimiser album takes as its source material an unreleased album that Howes engineered in various locations across the north of England, starting way back in 2011. The result is a sparse but satisfying mix of bass, techno and drone, with A2 a glitchy highlight.
Yaya Bey’s new album Fidelity is a companion piece to last year’s do it afraid. Where the previous record was framed by grief, Fidelity pushes further, examining how that grief is processed and centres on what Bey describes as the “Three Deaths”: personal loss following her father’s passing, the erosion of community through displacement and fragmentation, and a wider loss of innocence tied to cultural and societal shifts. Built around a light, disco-funk rhythm “Forty Days” is a stand-out moment: a meditation on transition and mourning and drawing on the belief of a 40-day passage into the ancestral realm.
The American experimental musician on a song full of spiritual intensity.
The premise of One Track Mind is pretty simple: I ask artists to pick one track that means a lot to them – either something they’ve discovered recently, something that’s been with them for years, or one that reminds them of a specific time in their life or career – and tell me what makes it so special to them. I get to talk to the artists I love, and they get to talk about the artists they love. Love all round!
Earlier this year, Maria BC released their third album Marathon, their second for the fantastically consistent indie label Sacred Bones. It follows previous LPs Hyaline and Spike Field from 2023, both which I love and still go back to regularly.
This time around, the focus is more on songwriting, with Maria BC reporting they spent less time on production and more on lyrics and structure. The result is a more concise and varied record across its thirteen tracks. Marathon was written and recorded across the West Coast, and it covers themes like endurance, survival, environmental issues and personal disruption. The sound moves between acoustic tracks and more distorted, glitchy material, but keeps a consistent thread throughout.
For their One Track Mind, Maria BC has selected a heartbreakingly beautiful song from Scotland-born, Copenhagen-based artist Clarissa Connelly.
Maria BC on Clarissa Connelly – Life of the Forbidden
“I’ve been listening to this song in my car a lot. It’s a song that agitates buried feelings. I love Clarissa Connelly’s voice, how she switches from a hushed, timid delivery to a full shouting belt. She doesn’t shy away from spiritual intensity. That’s what I love about her music. It’s unrestrained, unafraid of its own strength.
“She’s said in interviews that, while she was at conservatory, she became enthralled with overtones and spent much of her time crafting warbling, bent sounds from the colliding high frequencies of piano and string instruments. The way her music is mixed makes it clear that she likes to dwell in the high end, so to speak. I normally find myself feeling closed off to music that sounds “sparkly,” but in this case, I love it. It’s not bright solely for the sake of clarity or perceived loudness – the arrangement and the mix work together to create a feeling of upward motion, like a fountain. The whole song sounds like it’s being delivered to the sky, an entreaty to God.
“And it’s true the lyrics are a prayer, though a prayer riven with rage and doubt – she grieves a world of suffering, a world in which some are forced to wait for solace in death: “Are you crucified? Are you forgiven? / Have you lived a life of the forbidden?” It’s hard to write a more crushing refrain than that.”
Penelope Trappes A Requiem was one of the best albums of last year. Since then she’s released an expanded edition with A Requiem: AEternum and more recently a remix LP OPVS NOVUM: A Requiem Reworked featuring new interpretations from artists like Julia Holter, Dania and Saint Etienne, whose dreamy, emotionally-charged take on Platinum landed last week.
+3 is somewhat of a shift for Samba Jean-Baptiste, still hazy and inward-looking but with more shape than his debut, leaning into blurred guitars, soft-focus vocals and loose, drifting arrangements and pulling from the same orbit as artists like Dean Blunt or Frank Ocean. There’s definitely a bit of drift over the album’s running time, but when it connects, as on Fatale, it hits real hard.
Occasionally ambient can suffer from a distinct lack of low-end, making it feel almost entirely weightless. Often that’s the point: who doesn’t like drifting away from the world to a higher plane from time to time. Appleblim’s new album for quiet details, Liminal Tides, for all its soft synth washes and ephemeral moments, is anchored by the kind of heft you’d expect from one of bass music’s most celebrated artists, and is all the more impactful as a result.
The Predatory Wasp 