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.
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.
+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.
Usually when couples break up, they don’t decide to write an album together. But in this case, I’m very glad JJ Weihl aka Discovery Zone and John Moods did exactly that. Dreaming for Miles is a collection of songs that were written over the past ten years or so and recorded between their basement practice space and at their home in Berlin. After spending over a decade living together and playing music together, their lives pulled them in different directions, but during the process of separation, they decided to make a final record together. The result is reflective, often deeply sad, but also somewhat hopeful; a beautiful, poignant distillation of two singular artists saying goodbye to one another.
https://mansionsandmillions.bandcamp.com/album/dreaming-for-miles
Xylitol aka producer and DJ Catherine Backhouse shifts up the refinement and musical breadth for her second album Blumenfantasie, which landed earlier this month on Planet Mu. Blumenfantasie draws heavily on the work of Sarajevo-born minimal synth composer Miaux, whom she recognises as “a kindred spirit in terms of her directness and melancholy, as well as her lightness of touch”, rolling through immersive jungle workouts with the occasional dip into beatless ambience.
The Predatory Wasp 