Noel Gardner returns with another guide to best of New Weird Britain, including unplugged industrial recorded live at a greasy spoon in Byker, to a locked-in free improv scorcher from South London

Honey Ride Me A Goat

Feel In Motion, the third album by Leeds’ Galaxians, is building into one of my favourites of 2026, inside the New Weird Britain parameters or otherwise. Regarding those parameters, it’s certainly one of the least weird, or most pop, things featured so far. Perhaps crafting fastidious love letters to post-disco, pre-rave Black (incorporating Black British) and Latin vocal dance music, as this trio do, is not ‘pop’, in that it won’t be troubling the modern-day charts, and thereby weird after all. Don’t overthink it!

Galaxians formed…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/new-weird-britain/best-new-weird-britain-review-august-2026-galaxians-honey-ride-me-a-goat-hum-dudgeon/

Ahead of a set at this year’s Semibreve, TYGAPAW tells Finn Cliff-Hodges about their musical journey from Kingston dancehall to the electronic underground of queer New York, and proving the industry doubters wrong

Photo by Eric Johnson

Gearing up to release their third studio album, TYGAPAW, real name Dion McKenzie, found themselves dwelling on some depressing realisations. During their two years making the album, they had been going through a lot of personal and professional changes. There was a sudden “lack of interest” in McKenzie’s work and bookings waned, all whilst they were transitioning. Transitioning in a conservative music industry still, consciously or unconsciously, largely framed by heteronormative views and selling to a largely conservative market. 

“I was in a nightmare of a…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/tygapaw-dion-mckenzie-interview-semibreve/

Djrum

I Wander

Djrum returns to Houndstooth with an EP that blurs the boundaries of form

I Wander by Djrum

In his time, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’ across the Lake District, marvelling at daffodils and feeling spiritually sustained and enlivened by the energising power of nature. I Wander, the latest record from Djrum (real name Felix Manuel), channels a similar biophilic relationship. This is unsurprising coming from a renowned electronic musician who recently played an improvised performance at the Barbican using foraged materials, including a bespoke tree trunk instrument. I Wander thematically builds upon this, and invites the listener into an auditory adventure of acoustics and electronics co-existing, as if the industrial is battling the organic.

Each track on…

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Ian Wade revisits the brilliance of ‘Dancing Queen’ and discovers a single which future-proofed ABBA

It’s taken as read that ABBA have always been colossal. The perception is that they were completely inescapable, having become an essential thread in the fabric of pop immediately. However in 1975, in the UK at least, they may have appeared to be circling the drain. 

Having arrived in the European consciousness 18 months earlier with ‘Waterloo’, the positions of their subsequent releases in Britain were not initially encouraging. The levelling success of their Eurovision-powered number one, propelled their first British single, ‘Ring Ring’ from 1973, finally, up to the modest heights of Number 32, but the follow up proper that November ‘So Long’ bypassed the charts…

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source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/abba-dancing-queen/

Wearing a balloon dress, the artist played music from Kelela, Rosalía and others in an hour-long DJ set during the eclipse moment

Footage has emerged online from Björk’s one-day Echolalia festival, which she organised in Iceland yesterday (12 August) to mark the solar eclipse’s path of totality.

The festival welcomed 7,000 attendees and Björk headed up the bill with a hour-long DJ set, during which she played music by Kelela, Rosalía and Marina Herlop, among others. She was kitted out in an eye-popping balloon-based dress, designed by Robert Wun for his Fall 2026 Couture Collection, and her DJ set coincided with the moment – lasting one minute and four seconds – that the moon completely covered the sun above the Víðistaðatún sculpture park…

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source https://thequietus.com/news/footage-emerges-online-from-bjorks-eclipse-festival-in-iceland/

The new edition will come with added rarities and B-sides

Elastica’s 1995 self-titled debut album is getting an expanded deluxe reissue.

Set to be released in double-vinyl, CD, cassette and digital editions, the new version of the album will take in B-sides and various rarities from the era of the record’s original issue, in addition to the 15 tracks that appeared on the UK version. The vinyl edition will feature a poster of the original advert for the album, which has been recreated from the band’s own personal archive, while initial LP pre-orders from here will also receive a limited original flexi disc of ‘Cleopatra’ dating from 1995.

Elastica was originally released by Deceptive Records, but Rough Trade has now taken over stewardship of the…

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source https://thequietus.com/news/elastica-announce-expanded-deluxe-reissue-of-debut-album/

The well-dressed noise rock band from Bletchley are joined by Vision Suppressant featuring Sapphire Goss & tQ’s John Doran

Action Beat, the ever-shifting experimental noise rock band from Bletchley are heading up a Fortissimo Records event at New River Studio on Saturday 22 August. 

Action Beat, who “normally have at least four guitarists, a bassist and between one and four drummers” are celebrating 22 years and over 700 shows in the game and will be joined by London moody glitching industrial duo Circuit Breaker. 

Opening events at 6pm or thereabouts is Vision Suppressant the live AV project of film maker Sapphire Goss and tQ’s John Doran. ‘A Beach Of Human Teeth’ – which charts the violent and weird arrival of two Celtic saints…

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source https://thequietus.com/news/action-beat-live/

The great British indie put out its first single 50 years ago today. Michael Hann steers a ten-song course through a catalogue that hymned London while trying to be Asbury Park, and was never afraid to be ridiculous

There are eight million stories you could tell about Stiff Records, the label which flung itself into the world’s face on 14 August 1976, with the release of ‘So It Goes’/’Heart Of The City’ by Nick Lowe. That single itself tells three of the stories: Stiff Records was where pub rockers went when the majors dropped them; Stiff Records was the stethoscope that picked up on punk before any other label; Stiff Records was the independent label that always made the loudest bang.

There…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/strange-world-of/best-stiff-records/

It was supposed to be the moment where the most misunderstood woman in pop got to explain herself and empower her audience: but the release was cancelled and within months she was dead. Angus Batey revisits Lisa Lopes’s debut and rediscovers a forgotten treasure

August 16, 2001, was supposed to be a big day for Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. She’d settled upon it as the release date for her first solo LP for reasons that went beyond the commercial and scheduling considerations most artists have to juggle. It was the anniversary of her grandfather’s death, and would have been her father’s birthday, had he not been killed 10 years earlier. To say the 30-year-old Atlanta-based artist had a complex relationship with…

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source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/innocence-and-experience-lisa-left-eye-lopes-supernova-turns-25/

Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal

DOOMED!

The Chicago rapper teams up with LA-based producer Segal (Billy Woods, Serengeti) for an album of opulent beats and intimate rhymes

DOOMED! by Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal

Open Mike Eagle is nothing if not eclectic. Too cool to be a product of the blog era, backpack rapper boom of the early 2010s, yet lacking the cinematic, coked-out raps of what Griselda once was. The space he occupies in the underground is truly his own. I don’t mean this as a slight, or a much feared mark of ‘lyrical spiritual’ rhymes – quite the opposite. But Open Mike’s raps in some sense feel academic, almost literary at times. Not too unlike Earl Sweatshirt, he often delves…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/open-mike-eagle-kenny-segal-doomed/