The Predatory Wasp
Ok yes, this record is 46 years old. But I only fairly recently discovered it was the main sample for my favourite Mylo track, Need You Tonite, and I’ve become increasingly obsessed. So that’s a song from the 70s and a Scottish producer who has barely made anything for two decades featured on this new music blog. But it’s great, so I don’t feel bad about it.
Here’s another one I missed from last year, taken from American singer, songwriter and producer Bilal’s sixth studio album Adjust Brightness: a heady blend of soul, jazz and funk through an electronic lens. Full of life and warmth, there’s also a menacing undercurrent to The Story that adds to its allure.
Stroom favorites Voice Actor team up with Squu for their second album, Lust (1), blending ambient dance, electro-dub, and trip-hop into 14 hypnotic tracks. Following previous LPs Fake Sleep and the mammoth Sent From My Telephone which spanned a frankly ridiculous 3+ hours, this release feels somehow sharper yet simultaneously dreamy, with soft textures, shimmering vocals, and hazy lyrics that float effortlessly, with the ambient dancehall vibe of dYn an early highlight.
Brooklyn-based Camille Schmidt’s debut album Nude #9 came out last week, and it’s a real mix of genres that I still haven’t quite formed a concrete opinion about. For lots of its runtime it’s fairly traditional singer-songwriter, indie-folk, but then on tracks like Proton Electron Photon it swerves fairly hard into weirdly disquieting electronica. So a mixed bag, but definitely an interesting one.
Longtime friends and collaborators William Basinski and Richard Chartier return to LINE with Aurora Terminali, a 60-minute odyssey through drone and ambient that marks their first new work together since 2015’s Divertissement. Starting with a burst of bright, jagged synths it soon dissolves into something significantly calmer before leaning into darker, more paranoid tones in in second half.
SAULT’s Acts of Faith was originally released as a free download back in July 2024 before a surprise official release on Christmas day last month. I missed both of these releases, so I’m sharing the beautiful opening track now for everyone else whose fingers is a firmly on the pulse as mine.
Reflective country-esque indie-folk from Clara Mann whose debut album Rift is out March 7 via state51. Ideal for sub-zero mornings in January when the year head looks both invigoratingly full of potential and impossibly exhausting.
Trying to get back into regular new music posts, but it’s very challenging with all these best of lists taking up my time. It’s exhausting! Sometimes I need to reminder myself that’s not actually a job and it’s supposed to be fun. Which it mostly is, but not always. Anyway – here’s a jaunty, heartwarming collab between Baba Stiltz and Okay Kaya – released on Christmas Day no less!
I’m back! Big love to everyone who engaged with TPW in 2024 – we had more of you than ever before, so it’s nice to know that I’m not just shouting into the void everyday.
Strutting into the new year with the first post of 2025, here’s the first single from Celeste’s second album which is due out in April. I still listen to her 2019 EP Lately a lot, so will definitely be checking the new release out when it lands.
https://www.roughtrade.com/en-gb/product/celeste/everyday-rsd-2024
Sufjan Stevens has made a lot of Christmas music; the problem is (whisper it), some of it isn’t actually all that great. So here’s my carefully selected, um, selection of the best there is from both his Christmas albums alongside some other festive period-appropriate selections: wall to wall ‘bangers’ that you can cook, dance, sing and make merry to. Happy Sufmas!
The Predatory Wasp 