The Predatory Wasp
Recorded at 5dB Studios in London, anaiis’s new albbum Devotion & The Black Divine explores uncertainty, acceptance, and the experience of new motherhood. The album reflects anaiis’s growing sense of grace and creative freedom, capturing human emotion in its raw, shifting form. I was a big fan of her last album – 2021’s This Is No Longer A Dream – and on the first few listens it seems as if Devotion will prove a worthy successor.
Marta Forsberg returns to Warm Winters Ltd. with her new meticulously woven album Archaeology of Intimacy. Soothing, gentle, yet uncompromising and strikingly beautiful, the album sees the Swedish-Polish composer move away from more long-form compositions into what the press notes describe as “pop”, but I definitely wouldn’t. Closing track closing Dreamers is an almost operatic piece which combines clipped and heavily auto-tuned vocals, a string section and beautiful synth melodies to impressively hypnotic effect.
https://martaforsberg.bandcamp.com/album/archaeology-of-intimacy
I’ve been getting to grips with the new Night Tapes album portals/polarities over the last few weeks, and while it hasn’t become an obsession in the way that last year’s assisted memories did, it still has its moments, one of which is the dreamily melodic swordsman. I just wish there were a few more of them.
It’s less than 2 months until the best album of 2025 will be released: Voices From The Lake’s II, the follow up to their eponymous, seminal debut. I’ve listened to this pretty much weekly in the intervening 13 (!) years, so the hype is very real. In the meantime, we have Valentino Mora’s also brilliant Biotope, released on Dozzy’s Spazio Disponibile and operating in a similarly atmospheric, hypnotic realm.
Cate Le Bon’s new album Michelangelo Dying is a reflective, experimental pop record shaped by grief and personal change. Built from warped guitars, processed saxophones, and layered vocals, it moves away from her earlier sharp-edged sound into something softer and more abstract. The lyrics are impressionistic but emotionally direct, touching on memory, identity, and loss. It’s her most introspective album to date, balancing clarity and strangeness in equal measure.
There are so many interesting and/or brilliant albums coming out at the moment that I find myself with very little time to actually write about them. Hopefully I’ll dig out a bit more time next week, but for now – and continuing the ambient theme of this week – he’s a deeply soothing track from Malibu’s excellent new LP Vanities which landed today.
I’m not sure if “celestial ambient” is even a thing, but regardless, I’m really into it. Arvin Dola’s new album O Ghost is extraordinary and exactly the kind of ambient I love: grandiose, emotional, just the right side of melodramatic, evoking huge sweeping vistas or unfathomable cosmic spaces, bringing together the past, present and future into a single, gut-wrenching singularity. “Memory is a living relationship. It tells us more about who we are than about those who are no longer here,” says Dola. Sure, yes: but have you ever seen C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate? Cos this is what you’d be listening to while you did.
I don’t even know what this is really and I can’t find anything about it online other than that’s it a project of Luke Wyatt and Jessi Long, but it’s incredible.
I’m not entirely sold of Nation of Language’s new album Dance Called Memory yet, but I also thought that about their last one and ended up thinking it was yet another triumph, so I’m holding back judgement for a few weeks. What I am sure about though is that Under the Water is the best thing on there, which is a high bar.
https://nationoflanguage.bandcamp.com/album/dance-called-memory
Coming in like some modern-day hybrid of Lana Del Rey, Diana Ross and Karen Carpenter, Natalie Bergman’s new LP My Home Is Not in This World is somewhat of a mixed bag, but when it works it really works, as in this downtempo, heart-wrenching ballad complete with a highly charismatic, generously expressive bassline and late addition of some actually quite tasteful jazz-flute. Lovely stuff.
https://nataliebergman.bandcamp.com/album/my-home-is-not-in-this-world
The Predatory Wasp 