In his latest missive from the French fringes, David McKenna digs into the archives of the Sonic Protest festival and a recent book on the post-68 French underground, and reviews new noise, folk, rap and indie pop releases

Mérylle Ampe, photo by Titouan Massé

One of the albums reviewed in this week’s column, Mérylle Ampe’s Two Daughters, includes a live recording from the sadly defunct French experimental music festival Sonic Protest, which took place in Paris (and sometimes other cities too) from 2003-2024. The festival may be gone but, thanks to the recently launched Total Replay, it is now possible to access many more live shows from over the years. Dipping into any year on the site reveals documentation – sound recordings,…

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John Freeman looks back at the album which provided Pet Shop Boys with the perfect launch-pad for everything that followed

What would you want from a debut album? Instant success, hit singles and a worldwide fanbase or a musical springboard which would allow exploration of a myriad of styles and influences? In 1986, with the release of Please, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe managed to have it all.

First impressions last. Debut albums set the bar – like a first date that will define a courtship. But sometimes even the most successful debut albums do not sow the seeds for a long-lasting relationship. Is This It by The Strokes was a perfect alignment of the sonic stars by a band who were…

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The Leaf Library

After the Rain, Strange Seeds

Venturesome London-based group get spooky with an album that reveals its depths slowly but assuredly

After The Rain, Strange Seeds by The Leaf Library

Born to be mild, the Leaf Library have, across their 11-year career, explored the myriad ways in which a bookish indie band can push at the boundaries of polite, strenuously mannered alternative pop. Having previously strayed into the deep, dark woods of synth-fuelled ambient musings (2019’s The World Is a Bell) and elevated horror-style minimalism (Melody Tomb, their 2022 collaboration with Tokyo electronic artist Teruyuki Kurihara), for their fourth album, the Londoners have plumped for a spooky pastoral ramble that has a spring in its step but is informed always by a…

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As his sprawling project My New Band Believe prepares a debut LP, Cameron Picton discusses life after Black Midi, the loss of former bandmate Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin, ambition, and rethinking the possibilities of singer-songwriter records

Photo by Daisy Ayscough and Tomos Ayscough (syntax.error)

In August 2023 Cameron Picton was touring China with Black Midi, the band he’d co-founded with his schoolfriends just six years earlier. Their mind-bending fusions of math rock and prog had made them a globe-trotting, Mercury-nominated, frequently imitated success story, but behind the scenes, things were starting to fall apart. “We just started touring too much,” is all Picton will tell tQ. “It wasn’t the most pleasant experience in the world at the very end.” This would be their last…

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Underscores

U

Underscores’ third album is an excursion into the intersection of dance and pop music, sure to slingshot the American singer-songwriter into stardom

U by underscores

It’s hard to not feel a certain whimsy when listening to Underscores’ (real name April Harper Grey) third album, U. It’s a confident evolution from her 2020 EP Character Development!, with Grey producing an utterly refined sound that encapsulates the highs of the 2010 pop, bro-step and bubblegum bass eras. Perhaps if Charli XCX’s 2024 Brat began to zhuzh up the plains of pop music, U suggests Grey may be the architect to fully transform the tundras into the futuristic metropolis needed in pop music right now.

The aesthetic foundations for U have been visible for some time….

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Neurosis

An Undying Love For A Burning World

Thirty years after the release of Through Silver In Blood, Neurosis are back with a surprise album, but a lot has changed, says Dan Franklin

An Undying Love For A Burning World by Neurosis

When Scott Kelly was fired from Neurosis in 2019 for abusing his family, a horror which became public knowledge in 2022, it raised a troubling question about the function of the band’s music – and by extension, heavy music more broadly. Was there a healthy catharsis at the centre of their art? Or was it an externalisation of an insoluble, inner darkness that resided in Kelly, and others like him?

Neurosis’ new album, An Undying Love For A Burning World, their first in…

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Ben Cardew’s new book, Space Age Batchelor Pad Music: The Story Of Stereolab In 20 Songs, recounts the tale of Stereolab in 20 songs that represent certain vital aspects of the band’s make up (from romance, to collage and repetition). In this extract, he looks at the idea of ‘propulsion’, as it relates to ‘Super-Electric’, the title track of the band’s second EP

Stereolab, the Lizard / Sausage Machine Christmas Party Camden Irish Centre London 1994. Greg Neate. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

‘Super-Electric’, the title song of Stereolab’s 1991 EP of the same name, feels like the golden moment when a band discovers its destiny, their individual sound emerging from their hodgepodge of influences with the regal purpose of Excalibur being hauled…

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An Undying Love For A Burning World features eight tracks, and is available for streaming now

Photo by Bobby Cochran

Neurosis have released their first new album in a decade, titled An Undying Love For A Burning World.

Spanning eight tracks, the album was recorded across three weekends in Seattle this past winter. The band’s return, they said in a press statement, is “not a reunion – we never broke up”.

The new record sees SUMAC’s Aaron Turner join the band on vocals and guitar. Of his contributions, Neurosis said: “He came straight out of the gate contributing, writing and presenting ideas. His energy matches ours perfectly. It’s as if he was always meant to be there.”

Turner added: “From the moment I first heard…

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Mary Chiney gets to grips with a holy grail of Antillean music, Roland Brival’s seamless marriage of American spiritual jazz with the ancestral roots of Martinique’s bèlè and carnival traditions

Many extraordinary works fade quietly into obscurity, only to be rediscovered years later. Roland Brival’s Créole Gypsy belongs firmly to this overlooked category, a staggering, deeply political, and intensely beautiful work of Pan-Caribbean spiritual jazz that has remained a ghost in the annals of music history since 1980. Now, rescued from obscurity and newly remastered by Soundway Records, this holy grail of Antillean music finally demands the reckoning it has always deserved.

Appreciating Créole Gypsy begins with understanding the life and perspective of its creator. Born in 1950 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, music…

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Leila Bordreuil + Kali Malone

Music for Intersecting Planes

The new collaboration between Leila Bordreuil and Kali Malone captures candlelit conjurations that unfurl into warning sirens, says Bernie Brooks

Music for Intersecting Planes by Leila Bordreuil + Kali Malone

A few days ago, a meme with evergreen top text washed over my transom. It went something like, “I’m no ecologist but this seems bad. When I saw it, it was paired with a nightmare image of a burning oil field, a towering, impenetrable plume of smoke, riding the air up and up and up, a pitch-black tsunami looming, suspended in time like something out of Fury Road – but real, perpetrated by maniacal dullards and genocidal buffoons. Seems bad. But again, that text is…

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