Ahead of the first ever vinyl reissue of Djelika, Mary Chiney provides ten entry points into the work of the master kora player from Mali, tracing a lineage that stretches back 71 generations

The word “fusion” was an insult to Toumani Diabaté. Throughout his life, the maestro of the kora, the 21-string West African harp-lute, rejected the term with a polite but steely firmness. “Fusion means confusion,” he often told interviewers, his voice low-pitched gravel, possessed of a gravity that seemed to pull the room toward him. “I don’t do fusion. I do a meeting. When you meet someone, you talk to them. You don’t become them.”

This distinction is the key to unlocking the strange, sprawling, and intimidatingly beautiful world of Toumani…

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Ian Wade meets Peaches in Soho to discuss the 13 records that have shaped her life and work, from Lil’ Kim to Laurie Anderson, disco to krautrock

Photo by The Squirt Deluxe

With Peaches’ new album No Lube So Rude arriving next month, the temptation to call it a comeback seems, well, rude. Sure, it’s her first release in 10 years, but that’s not to say she hasn’t been busy. There have been films, a succession of features on other people’s records as well as her own exhibition Whose Jizz Is This? In Hamburg. There have been anniversary tours as her seismic debut The Teaches of Peaches first reached 20, then 25 last year, and three documentaries about her career. Her influence…

The post The Reaches of Peaches: Peaches’ Favourite Albums appeared first on The Quietus.

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Backengrillen

Backengrillen

A garbled and rushed melding of doom metal and free jazz born from the ashes of Refused’s recent demise

Backengrillen by Backengrillen

On 21st December 2025, Swedish post-hardcore stalwarts Refused played their final gig in the group’s hometown of Umeå. A sweaty and teary affair, Refused unleashed a rolling broadside over a brisk 90 minutes, unfurling the entirety of the band’s dedication to weighty and outspoken hardcore in a fierce and conclusive salvo.

As tastefully monochrome images of the band embracing were dragged and dropped onto social pages, you would assume that after thirty-plus years of sonic vitriol the group might sit back for a bit of R&R; a bit of fika maybe? Maybe this would have been the right move considering the…

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We say goodbye to the Jamaican drummer Sly Dunbar who died at the age of 73 this week, after helping steer the beats of reggae, working globally with everyone from Serge Gainsbourg to Grace Jones

It was at the school gates, while picking up a KPop Demon Hunters-obsessed five year old, where I heard the sad news that Sly Dunbar had left this mortal coil yesterday. This may seem like the last place you’d expect to find out about the passing of reggae’s most enduring drummer and, alongside bassist Robbie Shakespeare, one half of the most prolific rhythm section in show business, but such was Sly’s reach, his music permeated pop culture, supplying the back beat for everyone from Bob Marley…

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After gazing into his crystal ball, JR Moores rounds up the latest psych rock rackets 

Michael Hampton

Another year, is it? Already? What’s on your bingo card? For me? Maybe actual bingo. I’m old enough to remember when telephones were attached to the walls, like in Stranger Things, and the whole family would gather in front of the telly together to enjoy anything that wasn’t hosted by Cilla Black.    

Here are some predictions for 2026 in the world of psychedelia, other music, and beyond. Given the catastrophes that are already looming, they’re actually quite light-hearted. 

My Bloody Valentine will “drop” a brand new album… into the bin. And begin rewriting it from scratch. 

The Spectator columnist Bonnie Blue is going to headline Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Jools…

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Tashi Dorji

Low Clouds Hang, This Land is on Fire

The Bhutan-born, North Carolina-based guitarist picks up an electric guitar for this initially somewhat softer take on his solo practice, albeit spiked with greater urgency as the record progresses

low clouds hang, this land is on fire by Tashi Dorji

One of the more enduring legacies of the World War II partisan movement can be found in its anthems of resistance and uprising. Unlike the brutal force of usual calls to arms, the Soviet war song ‘Katyusha’, its Italian version ‘Fischia il vento’, the French ‘Le chant des partisans’, and the memefied/commodified to death yet eternally poignant ‘Bella ciao’ occupy a softer emotional space, trading outward aggression for profound melancholy. Their melodies draw strength…

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Drew Daniel of Matmos has been creating dance music as The Soft Pink Truth for over 20 years, but recently he was forced to ask himself a difficult question: what utility does making music have while the world slides inexorably towards unmitigated disaster?

Drew Daniel aka The Soft Pink Truth by Josh Sisk

Like most of us over the past ten years, I am struggling with how to live my daily life against the backdrop of a global slide into genocide and fascism. Because this is a music publication, I will narrow that down a bit: since the decisive ascension of Trumpist politics in my country, I have struggled in particular with how to proceed as an electronic musician at all in…

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Marta Del Grandi

Dream Life

Caught between the melodic whimsy of indie pop and the atmospherics of minimalist synthesizer music, the Italian-born singer chooses hope every time

Dream Life by Marta Del Grandi

Marta Del Grandi is in a liminal space between the past she always has one eye on and a future she consistently encourages herself to move towards. Her third album, Dream Life, feels like grappling with a reality check where you’ve put in the work but things don’t look the way you expected and there are untold peripheral problems beyond your control.

In the great indie pop tradition, Dream Life masks melancholia with whimsy, whether it’s fantasy land synths, syncopated programmed beats, or slide guitar. The dreamy, brooding, and vaguely foreboding synth…

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Fergal Kinney interviews Emma Warren about her excellent new history of how youth clubs galvanised UK and Northern Irish culture, fashion and sounds

Felinheli Youth Club activities. Photo: Geoff Charles CC BY-SA 4.0

For all of its entrepreneurial vigour, the state was more present in the birth of grime than is sometimes realised. In Dan Hancox’s Inner City Pressure, Dizzee Rascal describes the informal circuit of youth clubs that became his apprenticeship: Canning Town and Deptford, the Canary Wharf club that financed Ruff Sqwad’s first ever released, and further east to Beckton, which was Kano’s local.

From Kano to Michael Caine, whose passion for acting first blossomed at Walworth’s Clubland youth club under the Lancashire youth work pioneer Reverend Jimmy Butterworth, the youth…

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An exhibition at Hull’s Humber Street Gallery explores the early performance art work of Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti

At the beginning of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Incognito a vitrine holds a delicate black lace bolero. It’s laid out with her first modelling shots, taken in Hull in 1972, a year before she moved to London and a few years after she joined COUM. In the photos, Cosey is pictured wearing nothing but unbuttoned bolero. She leans forward a little, looking directly at the camera, her expression perfectly unreadable. It’s one of a handful of shots from her very first nude shoot at 21, with a local family portrait photographer. She hoped to get some decent photos in preparation for her Magazine…

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