The Predatory Wasp
I can’t quite get over how great this is; without doubt one of his best songs to date. Completely ridiculous. For the full experience listen to the segue from the previous album track. Just astonishingly good.
“My recent work is about the potential for transformation, finding or creating a space for that to take place.“
As Pefkin, Gayle Brogan crafts slow-burning, devotional soundscapes that feel less composed than conjured – ritualistic folk hymns steeped in the rhythms of landscape and seasonal shift. Also known for her work in Burd Ellen, Greenshank, and Meadowsilver, Brogan’s solo output exists in a more liminal space, where drone, voice, and texture dissolve into something elemental.
Her latest album, The Rescoring, was written in the autumn of 2023, as she prepared to uproot from Glasgow to Sheffield. Its three longform pieces map the psychic and physical contours of change. Working with a deliberately restricted toolkit – synth, voice, and viola, an instrument she had never played before – Brogan embraced immediacy, layering each track in a single take.
Each composition functions as a kind of sonic sigil: one piece reflects on the land she left behind, another on the place she was moving to, and the final track, Change, contemplates transformation itself. The result is a record that doesn’t just document transition but enacts it, lingering in the fertile instability between past and future.
What drew you to the viola as an instrument for this album, especially as it was your first time playing it?
I can answer that in two words – John Cale. I’ve played violin since I was 7 but always focused on the lower end of that instrument, and more recently manipulating that sound by pitch-shifting it down. It’s obviously similar to play but you need to extend your fingers more. I love all the scratch and scrape sounds, and the viola just does it better. I suspect cello does it even better but that’s more of a workout for the fingers and wouldn’t fit in my car!.
Written and recorded in a repurposed fish-packaging factory in the remote Icelandic village of Stöðvarfjörður, Kathryn Mohr’s Waiting Room is an eerie and intimate exploration of solitude. Her debut LP for The Flenser, it’s sparse yet deeply affecting, built from skeletal guitar lines, occasional piano, and field recordings that capture Iceland’s stark beauty. Songs drift between ghostly folk and surrealistic soundscapes, with Mohr’s vocals hovering between detached murmurs and visceral intensity.
Maribou State’s upcoming album Hallucinating Love – out this Friday – represents a journey through adversity and renewal. Since their rise with Portraits and Kingdom in Colour, Chris Davids and Liam Ivory faced personal and creative struggles while navigating the fallout of relentless touring and the global lockdown. Health challenges—including Chris’s ADHD diagnosis, chronic headaches, and surgery for a rare brain condition, as well as Liam’s severe anxiety—forced the duo to scrap their first attempt at the album and rethink their approach. From what I’ve heard of it so far, it’s going to be worth the wait.
For reasons too long to go into I have a massive emotional connection to Maribou State’s music, and Holly Walker’s voice especially makes me cry pretty much every time I hear it. So yes, I’m very much looking forward to this one.
Anna B Savage’s third album, You and i are Earth, is deeply tied to her relationship with Ireland—both as a place and as a new home. It’s an album about healing and curiosity, framed as “a love letter to a man and to Ireland.” Her extraordinary voice is the centrepiece, moving effortlessly between raw power and delicate vulnerability, making every moment feel intimate and unguarded. Following A Common Turn and in|FLUX, this record feels both personal and open-ended, blending tenderness with a grounded, tactile quality.
Shura is back, and it feels like a long time coming. Her new album, the amazingly titled I Got Too Sad For My Friends, lands May 30 and she’s just dropped the first single, Recognise, which kicks off with dreamy, otherworldly synths and hushed, almost ghostly vocals before bursting into this messy, beautiful chaos of drums. Shura says it’s about coming out of a dark period and learning to find peace in the little things and quotes Arthur Russell as saying “being sad is not a crime”, which feels apt.
https://shura.bandcamp.com/album/i-got-too-sad-for-my-friends
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.
The Predatory Wasp 