The Predatory Wasp
This is the opening track from Kelsey Lu’s new album So Help Me God and it’s astonishingly good: a sweeping, theatrical 8 minute epic that incorporates elements of drone, experimental pop, jazz and r&b to jaw-dropping effect.
Tara Clerkin Trio’s Somewhere Good is the Bristol group’s first full-length album, following EPs In Spring and On The Turning Ground. Across eight tracks, the trio continue to blur the lines between folk, jazz, ambient, dub, trip-hop and experimental pop. They draw from a broad palette of influences, but their hazy melodies, fragmented rhythms and subtle improvisation come together with remarkable ease, with Silently a clear album standout.
Lithuanian artist and graduate of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory Gintė Preisaitė recently released her first solo LP under her own name, following a collaborative effort with Toshimaru Nakamura in 2025 and a number of cassettes as “Baraboro”. Instruments of Forgetting and the Singing Bone explores fantasy, absurdity and relationships as a cast of players contribute string, brass, accordion, and guitar parts to her sparse, decayed, genre-hopping sound.
https://gintepreisaite.bandcamp.com/album/instruments-of-forgetting-and-the-singing-bone
Almost Waking is a collaborative album from Mabe Fratti and Bill Orcutt, bringing together Fratti’s cello, voice and experimental songwriting with Orcutt’s distinctive, often unpredictable guitar playing. Across eight tracks, the pair create something that feels loose and exploratory as cello and guitar weave around each other, occasionally becoming difficult to distinguish, while Fratti’s vocals appear sparingly, adding another layer that drift between inherited folklore and instinctive improvisation.
According to the Guardian the new Boards of Canada album Inferno sounds like Coldplay and is a “big disappointment”. I strongly disagree.
There’s something about the way that Olof Dreijer bends his synth patterns that makes his music entirely original. Across his various aliases – mostly famously, The Knife, and closest to my own heart, Oni Ayhun – the squirmy, alien sounds he wrings from various bits of hard and software could only have been created by him. Taken from his debut solo album Loud Bloom (ambitious, varied, long-awaited, arguably overly-long), Cassia is Dreijer in peak form; perhaps one of the greatest tracks he’s ever produced. And yes, I know it came out two years ago, but I’d not heard it until last week, so maybe you haven’t either.
Created during a period of internal struggle and shifting self-perception, Loraine James’ new album Detached From The Rest Of You explores a more direct and vocal-led approach. The experience of producing 2025’s Clandestine EP with singer Anysia Kym opened up a more pop-focused framework, helping her shape her ideas into tighter song structures without losing the fragility and experimentation that defines her work, while also opening her up to collaboration more than ever before, with guests on the LP including Sydney Spann, Low’s Alan Sparrowhawk and Miho Hatori on the standout Flatline.
https://lorainejames.bandcamp.com/album/detached-from-the-rest-of-you
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.
I’m not even going to attempt to interpret the cryptic madness of the Bandcamp description of this track, but any new material from Voice Actor is very welcome. Hopefully this is part of a wider forthcoming project… but who knows.
more eaze is the moniker of Brooklyn-based composer, orchestrator, and multi-instrumentalist, mari rubio, and her new album sentence structure in the country is a collection of compositions across ambient and experimental pop, each beautifully realised, self-contained worlds, with influences stretching from country to jazz. The album’s compositions evolved over a number of years, with each updated version informed by both the context of rubio’s performances and the musicians she chose to create them with.
https://moreeaze.bandcamp.com/album/sentence-structure-in-the-country
The Predatory Wasp 