Blurring the lines between chamber music, contemporary dance, dark pop and ethereal ambience, Klein, Mica Levi and Space Afrika collaborator Bianca Scout distills a decade of multidisciplinary work with her new album Pattern Damage, moving between diaristic ephemera, demure post-punk and chamber ambient, and cracking open bewildering crypto-romantique wormholes in the process. And yes, this is pretty much a direct copy and paste of the release hype, but a) it’s accurate and b) it’s a bank holiday and I have better (lazier) things to be doing.
“These days I feel somewhat in control of what I choose to believe”
Nina Kinert released the album Romantic and the EP In Twos in 2018 and was awarded Composer of the year at the Independent Manifest gala in Sweden that same year. Her new album Religious – her first release since 2021’s Wild, Wild Geese – tells personal stories about growing up within the Pentecostal Church Community in Sweden, while simultaneously exploring her attraction to both nature and the supernatural.
Romantic was my album of the year in 2018, and still affects how I search for new music today. I’m pretty much always on the lookout for ‘the next Nina’; to discover an artist about whom I was previously unaware, but that goes on to have a huge significance in my life. So to say I was happy that she agreed to an interview is somewhat of an understatement.
Religious tells stories about you growing up in the Pentecostal Church, and also explores your attraction to spiritual mystique and the supernatural. Were these attractions you felt as a child, or did they come later?
I’ve always felt open to different possibilities, and maybe seen that as a result of my childhood within the church. As if it gave me an understanding of belief – no matter what the belief relies on. But when I was a child I thought everything needed to be categorised, divided into good or evil. That’s not how I see it now.
Our lord and saviour Sufjan is back with – IMO – one of his finest songs for years, So You Are Tired; the lead single from his new album Javelin, due out in October. It’s absolutely vintage Suffers, with an outro beautiful enough to rival anything he’s ever recorded. I have enormous hopes for this album, which is described as “his first in full singer-songwriter mode since Carrie & Lowell.” Fuck. Yes. I love everything about this, with the exception of the deeply hideous title font on the artwork. But I forgive him.
I came across this during a frantic Spotify cull of albums I’ve saved but rarely (if ever) listened to. Cucina Povera is the alias of the Glasgow-based artist Maria Rossi, originally from Finland, and this is taken from her 2021 LP Dalmarnock Tapes, throughout which she layers her own vocals to create a choir of one, with invariably intensely haunting results.
The list of instruments Clara Engel plays on their latest album Sanguinaria starts familiar, but very quickly takes a sharp left turn: voice, acoustic guitar, electric cigar box guitar, talharpa, gudok, cajón, wooden trunk with soft mallets, tongue drum, melodica, all of which combine to create an atmosphere that is both otherworldly and yet deeply rooted in the earthiest of folk traditionalism. None more so is this evident than in the incredible album closer Larvae, with its subdued yet relentless drum rhythm, ghostly strings, and lyrics which beautifully combine the celestial and terrestrial.
I first saw Lucinda Chua supporting KARYYN in what felt like an underground bunker somewhere near the Thames, but may in fact have been a weird museum. My memory is hazy, but I do remember a) being concerned that if a fire started there was no way we’d all get out in time and b) that she was very, very good. Many years later, her debut album YIAN is now out, and it’s also very, very good.
Released today, Weyes Blood’s new album And In the Darkness. Hearts Aglow is the second in a planned trilogy of album’s that began with the release of 2019’s Titanic Rising, and explores themes of trying to find meaning and hope “in a time of instability and irrevocable change.” Like much of the album, Grapevine wears its emotions firmly and proudly on its sleeve, with soaring melodies and Mering’s rich, powerful vocal leading us, patiently, hopefully towards a better place.
I’m not sure anyone does deep melancholy quite as well as Tomberlin. Released today, her new album i don’t know who needs to hear this… was structured around the need to “examine, hold space, make an altar for the feelings”, and while not exactly a departure from her 2018 album – and one of my all-time favourites – At Weddings, there’s definitely been a progression: a sense of expanding boundaries; of actually being able to see the horizon in comparison to the lo-fi ultra-intimacy of her debut. easy is the album opener, and manages to be haunting, inviting, despondent and peaceful all at once.
I really liked Tess Roby’s 2018 album Beacon – especially the song Plasticine Hills – a perfect balance of haunting synths and her extraordinary vocal – so the release of her new LP Ideas of Space last week was very welcome. Century is the opening track and immediately draws you into her intimate, fragile world, with glistening chords and hushed percussion providing the ideal framework for her wonderful voice to work its magic.
If there is an artist bio more hopelessly, beautifully melancholic than “I’m not writing the same song over and over so much as writing one long continuous song that will end when I die”, I am yet to read it. Taken from their new LP Their Invisible Hands which lands today, Dead Tree March fully embodies the threads of sorrow and despair which run through the album, with Engel’s mournful strings brought to the fore against a backbone of funereal percussion.
The Predatory Wasp 