The duo’s first studio album in seven years is their first for Atlantic

Photo by Nathaniel Jerome

Boy Harsher have signed to Atlantic and are releasing a new album, titled GET MEAN.

Marking the minimal synth duo’s first studio album in seven years, the 12-track LP explores themes of love, loss and survival, according to a press release. It was written and recorded in the wake of Boy Harsher’s two members, Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller, ending their romantic relationship and then navigating the future of the project. Personal turmoil, familial loss and creative block had also beset the duo before the production of the album.

The duo’s previous studio album was 2019’s Careful, though they did also release the soundtrack album The Runner…

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The 1987 album, which has long been out-of-print, will be remastered for its updated release

Cabaret Voltaire’s eighth studio album, CODE, is being reissued.

The 1987 LP has long been out-of-print, and has been newly remastered for its updated release. It will be made available digitally, in a limited marble vinyl edition, and as a deluxe triple CD set featuring two bonus discs of remastered remixes from the time, plus further unreleased remixes. The reissue will also take in in-depth sleeve notes, focussed on the production and legacy of the album.

Speaking about CODE, Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder said: “This album captures a very interesting moment in time where we were moving into a technological world. Probably more than anything else Richard [H. Kirk] and I…

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The 16-track record is out later this month on XL Recordings

Arca has shared details of a new album, titled XXXXX.

Coming five years on from her KICK series of albums, this new LP calls back to previous fan-favourite mixtapes @@@@@ and &&&&&. The record “thrives on raw exploration and instinct,” according to a press release, with Arca herself commenting: “It seems playful, also mischievous, to interrupt that autopilot.”

Ahead of the album’s release, Arca will perform material from it via a two-hour Daniel Sannwald-directed livestream that will debut on Twitch and YouTube on 23 July at 8:30PM UK time.

XL Recordings will release XXXXX on 31 July 2026.
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Ledio Cakaj relates how the “romantic longing” of Laïko sustained him as an undocumented Albanian teenager, living and working in Patras and Athens in the mid-90s

Dimitris Mitropanos’ 1978 album, Parapono

Laïko (meaning ‘of the people’) is the popular music that has nursed Greek heartbreak since the middle of the 20th century. It grew out of rebetiko, the raw, syncopated music of Greeks displaced by the catastrophic population exchange with Turkey in the 1920s. The bouzouki, that pear-shaped long-necked lute, carried the music alongside its smaller cousin the baglama. By the 50s, composers like Vasilis Tsitsanis began pulling the genre toward the mainstream, and it emerged over the following decades into various strains: the heavy, lamenting style of Stelios Kazantzidis, the orchestral grandeur of…

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The debut solo LP from Shovel Dance Collective’s Nick Granata is a whimsical triumph that weaves the humdrum minutiae of modern life into a rousing and transcendent progressive folk tapestry

credit: Robin Bazalgette

For traditional folk music, the Roud Folk Song Index looms large. Compiled by librarian and folklorist Steve Roud, the index catalogues more than 30,000 songs from the English oral tradition, making it one of the largest collections of its kind.

Leafing through the index, the stories woven through the songs are as broad and varied as the collection is large. There are your predictable tales of war, death and love. But there are also countless other stories – about horniness, being broke and heavyweight boozing. Folk music at its core…

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Panda Bear and Sonic Boom

A ? of WHEN

The neo-psych mavericks scrutinise darkness through a kaleidoscope

It’s been four years since Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, and Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear, released their debut Reset. Though defined by solo projects as well as by work with Spacemen 3 and Animal Collective, the Sonic Boom-Panda Bear collaboration adds a new dimension to the individual neo-psychedelic narratives.​As much as in the case of Reset, listening to A ? of WHEN is akin to peering into a kaleidoscope. Bits of new and recycled elements constitute fresh-sounding musical ideas – reflections on the current (concerning) state of the world.​The cure for pain comes with hypnotic music which combines a sober take on things and escapist…

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Guia Cortassa reports from Italy’s Nextones, where stunning quarries, canyons, churches and mountain villages cause music and landscape to blend as one

Photo by Martina Nicole Garbin

At Nextones, every performance comes preceded by another composition: the one the landscape inscribes on the listener. Before a single note is heard, the body has already been reshaped by the walk, the altitude, the heat, the sound of the River Toce, and the fatigue of getting there. Now in its 13th edition, the festival unfolds over four days across quarries, canyons, churches, and mountain villages in Italy’s Val d’Ossola, near the Swiss border. Not simply treating these sites as evocative backdrops, Nextones allows each of them to redefine the conditions of listening. Every venue…

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Kirk Barley

Arc

Arc is a quietly absorbing record whose patient transformations reward sustained attention

Arc by Kirk Barley

Kirk Barley has spent time tracing the edges of sound without ever seeming especially interested in arriving at any definitive statement. Arc continues that tendency, but with a new confidence in duration and restraint. Rather than presenting a sequence of discrete statements, these nine tracks seem to breathe through one another, each leaving traces that subtly colour what follows. The record’s title proves apt: its movement is gradual, curved, almost architectural.

The opening stretch is particularly striking. ‘Billow’ emerges with a sense of suspended motion, its slow internal shifts proving more compelling than any obvious destination. ‘Ion’ introduces a denser physicality, its low frequencies lending weight…

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As he releases new album Different When It’s Silent and prepares for a set at this year’s Green Man, Tricky takes Manu Ekanayake through his life in 13 songs, from the galvanising effects of hearing The Specials and Public Enemy to an abiding love of The Breeders and more

Photo by Steve Gullick

Tricky is one of British music’s most creative and unique characters. Just consider his output over the last six years: after 2020’s Fall To Pieces album he released a 2021 collaborative album project, Lonely Guest, with a cast of fellow travellers including Idles’ Joe Talbot, Maxïmo Park’s Paul Smith, the criminally underrated Murkage Dave, Denmark’s Oh Land and the dubmaster Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, in one of his last appearances…

The post There’s Nothing Like It: Tricky’s Favourite Songs appeared first on The Quietus.

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The musician, writer, and occasional guest Quietus contributor has suffered a stroke

Photo by Annapaola Martin, from Buñuel’s performance at Sleeping Village in Chicago last summer

Eugene S. Robinson, best known as frontman of the experimental rock band Oxbow and new project Buñuel, as well as a martial artist, writer, author and podcaster, has suffered a brain stroke, with his family now crowdfunding to help support him in his recovery.

Organised by Robinson’s wife Kasia, the crowdfunder is aiming to raise €45,000 to help towards his medical treatment, rehabilitation, and living expenses. We encourage all Quietus readers who are able to do so to donate to it here.

The description for the crowdfunder says that the stroke “robbed Eugene of his ability to speak,…

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