Rock remix projects are typically inconsistent, says JR Moores. The Cure’s latest foray into the format is a mixed bag, with the most successful moments those which somewhat stifle Robert Smith’s sadness

There’s no denying that Songs Of A Lost World was a monumental latter-day triumph. But let’s be honest for a minute: how many times have you re-listened to it since its release in November 2024? Be honest now and take into account how morbid it was, even by the standards of The Cure. For 50 minutes, Robert Smith told us again and again that one day he was going to die. Also, that one day you are going to die. And that everyone you know is going to die….

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/reissue-of-the-week/mixes-of-a-lost-world-the-cure-review/

In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Francis Buseko takes us back to mid-70s Zambia and the radical sounds of artists like WITCH, pictured below, who blew the minds of his parents’ generation

WITCH in the mid-70s (credit: Partisan)

In the 70s, as many African nations were working to define themselves beyond the weight of colonial oppression, a country in the heart of the continent was crafting its own revolution – not just politically, but sonically too. Zambia, newly independent, landlocked, and learning to stand on its own, gave birth to a music that cracked the air like lightning.

Zamrock wasn’t just music, it was rebellion; a sonic renaissance and a radical act of self-definition, funneled through fuzz pedals, sweat, and spirit….

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Mary Halvorson

About Ghosts

The New England guitarist beefs up her ensemble for a stunning suite of modern jazz instrumentals

About Ghosts by Mary Halvorson

The strength of the guitar in jazz is its ability to do many things. With a less defined role than the piano or a brass instrument, it can push and pull compositions in a multitude of directions. It can provide a driving bluesy undercurrent or subtly colour a track with gentle finger picking, and a great deal in between. On About Ghosts, American guitarist, bandleader and restless experimentalist Mary Halvorson leans into her instrument’s versatility within jazz ensemble playing.

Opener ‘Full of Neon’ kicks things off in fine style with its strident percussion and bass work underpinning wandering improvisation from…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/mary-halvorson-about-ghosts-review/

We Are Nothing / All Night is out now on Phantasy

Tom Rowlands, otherwise known as one-half of The Chemical Brothers, has released a new double-single via Phantasy.

We Are Nothing / All Night marks Rowlands’ first solo release of club music since 2013, with the first of the two cuts sampling Canadian poet Bill Bissett. The second of the two tracks, ‘All Night’, lifts the tempo and centres around broken beats.

Rowlands’ previous work outside of The Chemical Brothers saw him score an eight-part drama series on Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini. He’s set to DJ at Glastonbury’s Stonebridge Bar on June 27.

Listen to both new tracks below.

We Are Nothing / All Night is out now on Phantasy.

We Are Nothing / All…

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It marks Dan Snaith’s first release since last year’s Honey LP under his Caribou alias

Photo by Fabrice Bourgelle

Daphni, real name Dan Snaith, has shared a new standalone single, titled ‘Sad Piano House’.

Out now, it’s the first material to emerge from Snaith since he released the album Honey under his Caribou alias last year. You can listen to the new song below.

In a statement, the producer said: “I DJ’d a lot last year in the lead-up to the Caribou album and inevitably ended up making a bunch of new music to play out in those sets. I’d made this one but knew that I wasn’t sure about it or when it would ever get a release so I sent it over…

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source https://thequietus.com/news/daphni-shares-new-track-sad-piano-house/

Holy Scum

All We Have is Never

Members of GNOD, Ghold and Dâlek assemble for a brutal broadside against ‘fancy music’

All We Have Is Never by Holy Scum

On Valentines Day, 1945, agricultural worker Charles Walton was found brutally murdered in Warwickshire in what appeared to be a ritualistic killing. Rupert Russell’s new film, The Last Sacrifice explores the psychic and cultural impact of this case, suggesting that the still unsolved crime planted the seeds of the notion of a ‘hidden Britain’: an occluded darkness lying beneath our fertile soil. It was this feeling, Russell argues, that birthed the classic era of folk horror cinema, reckoning as it did with the ominous ‘otherside’ of this green and pleasant land.

When noise-rock supergroup Holy…

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Ahead of the release of her new album 2t2, Cosey Fanni Tutti is interviewed by inimitable film director Peter Strickland, before the tables are turned, with both parties free from any kind of interference from us

Music writers. Who needs ’em? We recently had the opportunity to get artist, author and industrial music pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti together with visionary film maker Peter Strickland, so we left them to interview one another with no interference from us.

Cosey Fanni Tutti, artist, musician and writer, has cut a unique path through the musical landscape since the initial termination of the Throbbing Gristle/TG mission in the early 1980s. Often working with life partner Chris Carter as one half of Chris and Cosey and Carter…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/in-conversation/cosey-fanni-tutti-peter-strickland-interview/

John Surman and Karin Krog

Electric Element

Jazz vocalist Karin Krog and saxophonist John Surman branch out into glitchy, experimental electronics on this newly unearthed cut from 2013

There’s an ineffable sense of mystery to this collection of previously unreleased material from saxophonist John Surman and jazz vocalist Karin Krog. Recorded over three days in 2013, abandoned when the theatre project it was commissioned for never came to fruition, and finally unearthed this month by Trunk Records, Electric Element sees the duo (along with Surman’s son Ben) abandon traditional jazz entirely in favour of a set of wonderfully weird vocal and electronic experiments.

Over nine tracks – five substantial compositions and four brief interstitials, which mainly act as codas to the longer pieces –…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/john-surman-and-karin-krog-electric-element-review/

Two decades on from his early successes, the English singer-songwriter finds rebirth in the eldritch landscape of the east of England

Photo credit: Furmaan Ahmed

As the pandemic loomed over London in 2020, Patrick Wolf was living in a Lewisham tower block where he cut the desolate figure of the Arthurian Fisher King. A wounded protector surveying his barren kingdom, gripping onto the Holy Grail of his voice as he drank himself into oblivion. Neither alive nor dead, a man very firmly on the edge.

Twenty years before, when Wolf first emerged, he was seen as the next break-out star alongside Amy Winehouse. His first two albums Lycanthropy and Wind in the Wire were an almighty deluge of high-octane fucked-up acid folk, cut…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/patrick-wolf-crying-the-neck-review/

1966 – 2025

Douglas McCarthy, vocalist for electronic body music pioneers Nitzer Ebb, has died. The band’s Instagram account issued a short statement saying “It is with a heavy heart that we regret to inform that Douglas McCarthy passed away this morning of June 11th, 2025. We ask everyone to please be respectful of Douglas, his wife, and family in this difficult time. We appreciate your understanding and will share more information soon.”

Born in Barking in 1966, McCarthy was part of the London diaspora that moved down the Thames estuary to populate Essex in the mid-twentieth century. The son of a metal worker, McCarthy lived on Canvey Island until his parents moved the family to the Chelmsford area. Nitzer Ebb were formed…

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