Catch up with the sounds we wrote about last month

One of the most popular tQ subscriber perks is the monthly playlist, and we’ve got a cracker looking back at April with a whopping five-ish hours of music from 50-odd artists including My New Band Believe, Fire-Toolz, Squarepusher, Gnod, Irmin Schmidt, Aja Ireland, Sunn O))), Memorials, Guttersnipe, France, Madonna, NIN/Boys Noize, Mark Jenkin, David Byrne, OPN and much more. A reminder too of all the bonus editorial our subscribers had this past month. The Low Culture pod saw John and Luke discussing cult “cosmic horror” TV show Children Of The Stones; the Low Culture Essay was James Bailey on The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, while the Organic Intelligence newsletter explored the history of medieval plainchant Dies Irae in popular…

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Here’s everything great from the last 30 days, selected by tQ’s staffers

This April feels like it passed in the blink of an eye, so much so that wading back through the sea of new releases that accumulated over the last month, it’s striking just how much excellent gear we’ve been left to contend with.

Everything featured below, as well as all the other knockout music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will be compiled into an hours-long playlist exclusive to our subscribers. In addition, subscribers can enjoy exclusive music from some of the world’s most forward-thinking artists, regular deep-dive essays, a monthly podcast, specially-curated ‘Organic Intelligence’ guides to under-the-radar international sub-genres, and much more bonus material besides.

To sign up for all…

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John Freeman looks back at an underrated album which catalysed the enduring chemistry between Andy Bell and Vince Clarke

It’s September 1985 and my 15-year-old self thinks he is on to something. I’m in John Menzies, a newsagent-cum-Woolworths wannabe and the only record stockist in Stretford’s Arndale Centre. A mile away from a Mancunian footballing mega-corporation, the Arndale is a shithole of bad shops and a honey-pot for bored teenagers and grizzly pensioners. But, I’m on a mission – to seek out a fabulous new song I’ve heard on the radio. It’s called ‘Who Needs Love Like That?’ by a band called Eurasia and I’m so ‘with it’ that it isn’t even in the charts yet.

Unfortunately, the single is so obscure…

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SFA are back together this year, and this week, a new compilation album shines a light on their earliest works. Simon Price salutes the magic of Wales’ most important band

“Say it.” Say what? “Go on, say it.” What do you want me to say? “You know. That Welsh word. That town. The really long one…”

Every Welsh person who has spent much time among the English has lived through this moment at least once. There was a time when, at any house party, any social situation, you could bet all your worldy possessions that it was coming. Tick, tick, tick.

Depending on how much of a performing monkey or people-pleaser you felt like being, you’d either mutter “Oh, fuck off” or, obligingly,…

The post Reissue of the Week: Precreation Percolation by Super Furry Animals appeared first on The Quietus.

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Bonner Kramer • Thurston Moore

They Came Like Swallows

A collaboration between the former Sonic Youth guitarist and Shimmy Disc founder is released in trubute to the children of Gaza

They Came Like Swallows by Bonner Kramer • Thurston Moore

There’s a moment near the end of ‘Insight’, perhaps one of the most overlooked Joy Division songs, where music prevails against all odds. The song’s trundling rhythm section, and Ian Curtis’ lines about apathy towards living, are lost in a monsoon of space age synth. ‘Insight’ surges towards some kind of combustion; some kind of revelatory crescendo, which is never fully realised. All instruments but a solo guitar stop. It’s unclear whether ‘Insight’ chooses life or death. Rather, even in the darkest moments, time…

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Klein, Pink Siifu and more will play the Portuguese festival this October

Klein

OUT.FEST has revealed the first wave of acts playing its 2026 event later this year.

Marking the Barreiro-based festival’s 22nd edition, this year’s OUT.FEST will take in sets from Klein, Pink Siifu and Rafael Toral, among others. Also confirmed to play the Portuguese event are ∈Y∋ + C.O.L.O., which is the new project of Boredoms’ Yamantaka Eye.

The first lineup announcement is rounded out by the likes of Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl and Macie Stewart; Shane Parish, presenting his ‘Autechre Guitar’ project; Manja Ristić; Senyawa; Josey Rebelle; Deli Girls; and DEAFKIDS; among others.

Read tQ’s review of last year’s festival here.

OUT.FEST will take place from 1 to 4 October 2026. Find more…

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Mogwai’s slim third album might not have lived up to its title, says J.R. Moores, but it is an album that holds a key place in their canon

Rock Action by Mogwai

Rock Action felt like an anticlimax. How intentional was this? There were those at the Southpaw / PIAS label who had urged Mogwai to plump for an alternative title for their third album, presumably urging something more representative of the music within. The Scots dug in their heels. 

‘Rock Action’ was a sleazy Iggy Pop track which only existed as a bootlegged live recording from 1977, named for Scott Asheton, the Stooges drummer and then, in 1996, it also became the name of Mogwai’s DIY label. However, slightly confusingly, this…

The post Secret Punt: Mogwai’s Rock Action Revisited 25 Years on appeared first on The Quietus.

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Following a series of journeys in tech-abstraction, the American composer swerves towards the analogue and the limpid presence of the human voice

B.Vida 2024 © Ben Semisch

They tell you not to judge a book by its cover, but what if that cover tells you what it is? In the concrete poem that adorns the vinyl sleeve of Ben Vida’s Oblivion Seekers, three lines pretty much summarise what to expect: “Muttering ambient language / cutting into the past / with the future spilling out around us”. Because that’s just what you get across the album’s four protracted, slackened tracks, where duologues of spoken word paint an abstract, absurd picture of living, communicating and feeling, broken up into poetic fragments set to music.

But…

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Aja Ireland

Moult Mouth

Fresh from art world collaborations with Joey Holder, Aja Ireland mixes hyperpop, techno and baile funk to thrilling effect

Moult Mouth by Aja Ireland

A lot of Aja Ireland’s creative output to date has involved an effort to combine maximalist, even lavish visual and sonic art with the constraints of a modern DIY musician’s budget. Her releases, of which the six-track Moult Mouth is the latest, more than hold up as image-less listens. On this occasion, the Nottingham electronic artist is trying a couple of new styles on for size at times, revisiting a favoured type of rafter-rattling intensity elsewhere.

It’s also being launched alongside a brace of videos, made for two of the EP’s tracks in collaboration with Joey…

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Quentin Tolimieri

Monochromes II

A series of static works for piano eschew melody and movement for a deep focus on tone colour

Monochromes II by Quentin Tolimieri

“I am interested in a perceptible process. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music,” wrote Steve Reich in 1968, describing one of the fundamental principles of what he called “music as a gradual process” (and what history tends to remember by the name ‘minimalism’). Depending on how you interpret Reich’s thoughts, the works of Quentin Tolimieri might seem devoid of process or represent its most extreme, maximalist manifestations.

Take, for example, the opening piece from the Berlin-based composer, pianist, and improviser’s new collection of solo piano pieces, Monochromes II. During the…

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