The Predatory Wasp
Berlin-based artist Nalan returns with 2009, her first album since 2022’s I’m Good. Out last month on Mansions and Millions, 2009 was written and recorded between Berlin and Istanbul and leans heavily into the reflective power of nostalgia, reshaping the late-2000s into something both sentimental and slightly distorted though a compelling indie-pop lens.
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.
https://whiteflowersssss.bandcamp.com/album/dreams-for-somebody-else
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?
https://boomkat.com/products/you-make-a-fire-you-make-a-camp
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.
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.
https://penelopetrappes.bandcamp.com/album/opvs-novum-a-requiem-reworked
+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.
