Madonna

Confessions II

The restlessly inventive artist for once looks back, but boy has she ever earnt it

For an artist defined by perpetual reinvention, the most striking aspect of Confessions II is Madonna’s resolve to look back at a career that reshaped pop music. Steeped in nostalgic, self-referential anecdotes, the album carries an autobiographical weight that makes this her most coherent work since its namesake two decades ago. Though the sixteen-track LP plays it safe sonically, leaning into commercial dance tropes rather than experimentalism, this lack of risk will be forgiven by a fanbase yearning to explore her back catalogue – a shift finally catalysed by 2023’s Celebration Tour and a renewed partnership with Stuart Price.

The record is strongest when Madonna draws…

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Scrambled DIY pop as temporal anomaly, multiple accordions in one band, a duo piping urban noise into tranquil marshes and a Tokyo-Manchester collaboration that both crushes and levitates, Daryl Worthington roams through the tapes of this infernal summer

Carlos Ferreira, photo by Luiza Padilha

A decision made on any recording is whether to capture its setting or obscure it – keep the recording earthed to the real world or synthesize another one. Some recordings of instrumentalists strive to capture the sound of the room where a performance took place. Studio recordings seldom want the studio itself to be audible as a studio. Many producers lay field recordings and concrete sound into compositions, textures from one place transported into another. Some musicians use…

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Luke Haines

Izzy Wizzy Let’s Get Bizzy

The former Auteurs, Black Box Recorder and Baader Meinhof member waxes nostalgic over the sinister forces which once lurked within the CBBC Broom Cupboard

Sartre said that hell is other people, but hell is actually being stuck in the company of someone of a certain age banging on about the TV they used to watch as a kid. Thankfully, Luke Haines has previous where it comes to reanimating what could potentially be seen as nostalgia fodder, always bringing an intelligent twist, as 2011’s 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s attests. Fifteen years after that cult classic, we’re back predominantly in the 1970s, a fertile period for the Haines’ imagination…

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Everything changed in 2001, not just in geopolitics but in culture as well, and Aaliyah’s third and final album exemplified that more than most, says Toby Manning

Autumn 2001 was where the 21st century really began. It wasn’t just that 9/11 changed everything politically, but that a newly diverse, urbanised pop changed everything culturally. Ending the era of both avant R&B and anaemic teenpop, R&B producers effectively conducted a merger, toning down their weirdness to endow pop acts with street cool, tech smarts …and rap guest-spots. This race, gender and genre-dissolving approach would dominate mainstream pop even after the ‘anti-woke’ diversity backlash began elsewhere. 21-year-old Aaliyah’s third, self-titled album in summer 2001 was the dividing line, alongside collaborator Missy Elliott’s contemporaneous…

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Nearing the halfway mark of 2026 we polled tQ staff and columnists to compile this chart of our top 100 albums released so far this year. This chart was compiled by John Doran, and built by Patrick Clarke and Christian Eede

After a recent birthday (How very dare you! But two and three quarter score if you must know) I had reason to reflect briefly on a core guiding principle: that of weirdness. 

The first live rock band I ever watched, 40 years ago this summer in St Helens, were called the Volunteers. During the climax of their set a person burst into the pub wearing a zipped up sleeping bag over their entire body with only feet (clad in frog divers’…

The post The Quietus Albums of the Year So Far 2026 (In Association with Norman Records) appeared first on The Quietus.

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Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra

Gabble Ratchets

Todmorden’s experimental children’s orchestra returns with a warped concept album about a pack of hellhounds terrorising the uncanny valleys of West Yorkshire

gabble ratchets by primitive percussion youth orchestra

Children make weird art. Aside from labyrinthine fantasy fiction experiments or Pollockian attempts at the visual medium, young people tend to produce odd music when given the means. From the spasmodic clanging of The Shoreditch Experimental Music School in the 60s, to the creepy pre-teen junglism of X-Cetra in 2000, there’s a keen history of freaky kids wigging out on wax.

If after a day’s work you come home and feel like wading into such uncanny sonic waters then consider taking the Northern service to Todmorden in West Yorkshire. Nestled…

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Fifty years ago this weekend, Ramones played their first two UK shows, catalysing the British punk scene. Simon Price talks to people who were there, and argues that anyone who dismissed them as cartoon cretins missed the point

Ramones live at the Roundhouse by Gus Stewart / Redferns / Getty

 There comes a moment in every Dolly Parton concert, as cherished as it is predictable, when the country icon reels out her famous scripted off-the-rhinestone-cuff remark: “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

It’s a quip which could easily be adapted to fit Ramones: it takes a lot of brains to sound this dumb. Because, if there’s one defining question which still dangles over the New York City punk pioneers,…

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Everybody Talks About The Weather will be released by Upset The Rhythm

Photo by Luke Fowler

The Yummy Fur have shared details of their first album in 27 years, titled Everybody Talks About The Weather.

Spanning 10 tracks, the LP was recorded by the original core trio of songwriter and vocalist John McKeown, guitarist Brian MacDougall and drummer Paul Thomson. It comes 17 years after the band reformed for occasional live shows, and seven years after the release of the retrospective compilation Piggy Wings.

The album is led by single ‘Unity Over Europe’, which you can watch a video for below.

Speaking about the track, McKeown said: “‘Unity Over Europe’ was the first song we came up with when we started thinking about putting some new…

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The run of releases sees Kevin Martin link up with a number of female vocalists, including Dis Fig

The Bug has launched a new series of collaborative series, LADYBUG, on his own PRESSURE imprint.

The run of releases sees Kevin Martin link up with a number of female vocalists. For the first instalment, he collaborates with Dis Fig, real name Felicia Chen, on the track ‘Vanishing’. The original cut arrives alongside four alternate versions by Martin.

This marks Martin and Chen’s second collaboration after they linked up on the 2020 joint LP In Blue.

Listen to the full release below, and get it on Bandcamp here.

LADYBUG 1 is out now on PRESSURE.

Ladybug 1 by The Bug / Dis Fig
…

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The newly remastered album comes with original artwork

Light In The Attic is reissuing Charanjit Singh’s 1982 album Synthesizing: Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat.

With copies of the original pressing and a 2010 reissue by Bombay Connection hard to come by or fetching hundreds of pounds on the reissue market, the cult release has been newly remastered for its updated release. It will be made available on 2xLP and CD.

The release comes with original artwork and a booklet featuring unseen photos from the Singh family archive, along with new liner notes from Discostan’s Arshia Fatima Haq and Jeremy Loudenback, Charanjit’s grandchildren including singer-songwriter Rachel Singh and composer Joshua Singh, and others. The reissue is going ahead with the cooperation of Charanjit Singh’s Estate.

Recorded…

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