The band’s sixth album will be their last, following the death of Dave Ball in 2025

Photo by Mike Owen

Soft Cell have shared details of their sixth and final album Danceteria, and shared its title track, which you can listen to below.

Danceteria, which is released on 25 September via Republic Of Music, comes following the death of the band’s multi-instrumentalist and producer Dave Ball last year.

The album takes its title from the legendary New York nightclub that became central to the band’s lives while they were recording their debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret in the early 1980s.

Frontman Marc Almond said of the release: “Danceteria is a love letter to New York in the early 80s. The time we spent in…

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“Dog person” Arooj Aftab, ended up taking in a feral Brooklyn “gangster cat”, who then became her best pal. Here she describes what she learned from the experience. Words by Arusa Qureshi. Portrait by Sam Balaban

When Arooj Aftab released her breakthrough album, Vulture Prince, in 2021, it cemented her position as an artist worthy of global acclaim. The Pakistan-raised, New York-based composer’s first two records introduced her innovative fusion of Hindustani classical music with experimental electronic, folk and jazz sounds, but the glorious minimalism and reimagining of centuries-old Urdu ghazals on Vulture Prince captivated listeners in an entirely different way. The album, written during a period of grief, combines lush instrumentation with otherworldly melodies, with Aftab inviting others to follow…

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Káryyn

Physics Universal Love Language (PULL)

A groove-forward record full of frenetic ideas from the Armenian-American singer-producer

PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE (PULL) by K Á R Y Y N

As the years went by, Káryyn’s chilling masterclass of a debut album started to feel like a singularity. 2019’s The Quanta Series seemed like it might not only stand the test of time but be capable of bending it, blurring the past into futuristic art-pop. It took half a decade for the Armenian American singer and composer to follow it up with another record, the James Ford-produced EP Calm Kaoss!, which was preceded by a standalone single co-produced with Hudson Mohawke. Along with Björk collaborator Marta Salogni on mixing duties, those names turn up throughout…

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The union alleges that Universal and Warner didn’t compensate musicians after reaching licensing and settlement agreements with the AI music companies Suno and Udio

The American Federation of Musicians (AFM) has launched a lawsuit against Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group over claims that the two major labels didn’t compensate musicians when they made licensing and settlement agreements with AI music companies Suno and Udio.

The legal action, which was filed in a New York District Court last Friday (5 June), alleges that Universal and Warner have licensed recordings featuring musicians represented by AFM to train generative AI systems, but haven’t made the payments required under the union’s Sound Recording Labor Agreement (SRLA). The organisation further claims that using these existing…

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Featuring new and unheard tracks, as well as demos, it’s out next month

Suede are releasing a deluxe edition of their 2025 album Antidepressants.

Out next month, it features new cuts ‘Emotionally Unavailable’ and ‘Medication’, as well as rarities ‘Dirty Looks’, ‘Sharpening Knives’ and ‘Overload’. The deluxe release is rounded out by a collection of demos and early mixes of tracks from the original album.

The release comes ahead of Suede’s co-headline arena tour of the UK with Manic Street Preachers later this year, which will include a date at London’s O2 Arena on 6 November. Find the list of gigs, and get tickets, here.

Listen to ‘Emotionally Unavailable’, one of the new cuts from the upcoming deluxe release, below.

BMG will release Antidepressants: Expanded…

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It’s the score he produced for a commission by the San Francisco Ballet

Photo by Genevieve Reeves

Floating Points is releasing a new album, titled Mere Mortals.

The result of a commission by the San Francisco Ballet that premiered in January 2024, the 14-track record sees the UK artist play synths alongside an orchestra. The ballet itself was choreographed by Aszure Barton, and is based on the Greek mythological story of Pandora.

Floating Points, real name Sam Shepherd, previously released lead cut ‘Falling To Earth’ last month. He’s now followed it with another track, ‘Her Gift’, which you can listen to below. The artist describes the song as a “duet written for harp and Therevox ET 4.3, a dance between Epimetheus and Pandora”.

Mere Mortals…

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Alistair Fruish talks to American underground comics artist Melinda Gebbie about retrospective Greatest Fits, plus her wild and inspirational career from the burned and banned Fresca Zizis to vivid portraits Herbie Hancock, James Brown and Janis Joplin. Some images NSFW

Melinda Gebbie portrait by Joe Brown

Artist Melinda Gebbie is a true original.  A driven diarist and delineator since her childhood, she was perhaps the most accomplished artist to come out of the predominantly-male San Francisco underground comics movement of the 60s and 70s.  Moving to the UK in the 1980s, where she worked as an animator on Raymond Briggs’ harrowing When The Wind Blows.  Gebbie has the unique accolade for a contemporary artist of having her pioneering underground comic book Fresca…

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KOGG

Mechanista

Self-playing cracker whistles and Oulipo-like exercises make this duo a fun and refreshing take on contemporary music

Mechanista by KOGG

KOGG is Cerys Hogg and Selena Kay, who both teach music. With backgrounds in jazz improvisation and classical composition, respectively, they found a common interest in exploring randomness and new ways to make sounds, including building their own instruments. They describe collecting whistles from Christmas crackers and creating a device to blow them with air bulbs. Programming devised sounds into synthesisers, they have crafted their own music, and it is quite something.

As they point out, experimental music has a reputation for being a male business, and a serious one. Hogg and Kay set out to make music their own way, and the…

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In an exclusive extract from his new book The End of Everything, the Warwickshire-born SF visionary pictures the apocalypse, as seen from the shores of Kent

In the beginning – if there could be said to have been a beginning – no one really understood what had happened.

There was a decade of confusion. Populations declined across the board, as you would expect given the accompanying economic changes. All along the coast, the little places that had made an income from retirees and weekenders – from tourism in general, from a proximity to remnant medieval priories or bijou nature reserves compiled out of two or three acres of hawthorn scrub, a pond and the possible presence of a locally occurring frog –…

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Some pressings will come with a limited 7-inch vinyl of unreleased tracks

Pixies are releasing new remastered reissues of their classic albums Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde.

Marking the band’s 40th anniversary celebrations, the remastered LPs will be made available on CD, digital and standard black vinyl formats. There will also be two special limited-edition vinyl pressings that will include additional 7-inch vinyl records of unreleased songs: ‘Dig For Fire (Albini Version)’, ‘Go Man Go’, ‘Brackish Boy’ and ‘Punk Loop’. 

Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde were both remastered by Kevin Vanbergen, who has been working through Pixies’ tape archive to create new Dolby Atmos mixes and high-resolution masters of the band’s back catalogue.

You can pre-order the special limited-edition pressings, featuring the extra 7-inch records, here.

The band’s classic compilation…

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