A new album from the Erasure, Blancmange and Wrangler axis reimagines eleven disparate tracks as cohesive analogue electronica. Wesley Doyle hears how old friendships and other people’s songs begat new music and original possibilities

“My cat’s outside, meowing,” says Vince Clarke, “He’s dying to get in on this interview.” The synth pop genius is speaking from his home studio in San Diego, which – along with many, many synths – he shares with a cat called Smudge who has a marked preference for jungle and house. “My cat is quite funny. He’ll come in the studio if I’m doing a remix that he quite likes, but the moment I pick up an acoustic guitar, he leaves.”Smudge must’ve been a constant companion…

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Thundercat

Distracted

The latest from the Californian bass wizard has features from luminaries like Tame Impala, Lil Yachty, A$AP Rocky and the late Mac Miller, but it’s unmistakably a Thundercat record through and through, finds Mary Chiney

Distracted by Thundercat

Stephen Bruner operates on a frequency entirely his own. For over a decade, the man known as Thundercat has been the secret weapon of the Los Angeles beat scene, the virtuosic bass-plucker who helped anchor the sprawling, chaotic brilliance of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Flying Lotus’s CosmogrammaIt Is What It Is in 2020. In the hyper-accelerated timeline of contemporary music, six years is a lifetime. People forget. Tastes mutate.

Listening to Distracted, his highly-anticipated fifth studio album, it feels as though no…

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Oh Mr James, Steeling Sheep and Voka Gentle for West Country festival this April

One of our favourite West Country venues, The Cornish Bank, in Falmouth, Cornwall, is hosting a two day festival on April 10 and 11 in a variety of venues. As well as bands such as Voka Gentle and Braindance producers such as Oh Mr James, headline acts include Stealing Sheep, Opus Kink, The Golden Dregs, Nadia Reid and The Leisure Society, alongside emerging performers such as Mary Mathias, Doss, Seamus Fogarty, Daisy Rickman and AK Patterson.

Quietus editor John Doran was delighted to be invited to be part of the Conference bill on Saturday lunchtime, held at Falmouth University’s Woodlane Campus, talking about The Third Place: Ceremony and Gathering in Cornwall with a…

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Twenty years ago New Orleans’ EYEHATEGOD and Nottingham’s Iron Monkey were locked into a race to produce the heaviest album ever. Dan Franklin revisits Iron Monkey’s self-titled debut and Dopesick

Call it ‘sludge’ if you have to. EYEHATEGOD prefer ‘southern hardcore blues’, wrenched from the bayou of New Orleans: progeny of punk and doom. ‘Lack Of Almost Everything’ from their third album Dopesick, if not quite a badge of honour, tells you all you need about their resignation and bitter humour. Philip Anselmo (ex-Pantera frontman disgraced at the outset of 2016 for throwing a Nazi salute and screaming “White Power” at the end of a tribute gig for murdered bandmate Dimebag Darrell) supplied an endorsement for the 2006 reissues of their…

The post Smack Down: EYEHATEGOD Versus Iron Monkey & The Heaviest LP Of 1996 appeared first on The Quietus.

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Stripped back to a two-piece, the latest from the Seattle-born drone monsters returns the group to their thrillingly arboreal roots

Sunn O))) by Charles Peterson

“He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them.”

So begins Algernon Blackwood’s 1912 novella, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, a rich and unsettling tale that follows a man who, influenced by a painter specialising in portraits of trees, develops a strange obsession with the woodland surrounding his home. Whilst the painter’s arboreal depictions are said to be “wildly inaccurate” and at times approaching the ludicrous, his skill lies in capturing the “personality” of a particular tree: “friendly or hostile, good or evil. It emerged.”

Anyone who has spent time in…

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Xylitol

Blumenfantasie

The Brighton-based DJ and producer grapples with the physical matter of sound – with electrifying results

Blumenfantasie by Xylitol

When I first read a description of the Brighton-based producer and DJ Xylitol’s music that referred to its mixture of kosmische and jungle, I approached it with a good deal of scepticism. That’s not to say the two elements cannot, or should not, be mixed – of course there’s a wealth of creative potential in making beat-driven dance music that mines the origins of electronic sound. But when I hear of any DJ invoking that golden age of synth music, more often than not what comes to mind is the most antiseptic form of electronic music, one that uses arpeggiating, wavy synths with…

The post Xylitol – Blumenfantasie appeared first on The Quietus.

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The Shits

Diet Of Worms

With their third album, the Leeds noise-punks are in danger of becoming an institution

Diet Of Worms by The Shits

The Shits have been a band for a little under nine years and Diet Of Worms is their third album. Neither of which is especially eye-catching as statistics go, but noteworthy in the context of the Leeds DIY punk scene in which they originate, where bands (including ones featuring members of The Shits) frequently rise and fall leaving hardly any documented evidence they were there. A lot of the groups who historically pre-empted the sound heard on Diet Of Worms – noise rock, pigfuck, scum rock, sludge punk or some other microgenre terminology – didn’t stick around for anything…

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From cooperation in the face of political tension, to complex approaches to tradition, Jakub Knera explores the many driving forces of Croatia’s underground music scene, and picks out 10 key releases

Mimika Orchestra, photo by Marina Uzelac

I wonder where the story begins for this exploration of Croatian music. Maybe with my mother’s recollections of a holiday on Lošinj Island in Yugoslavia, in August 1985, seven months before I was born. She bought me a terrycloth jumpsuit, unavailable in Poland – in that period, new things only arrived from German relatives. Or maybe it starts in Groningen in 2025, when the post rock tambura that Croation outfit Nemeček were using during their set at ESNS caught my attention. 

Or maybe the real beginning…

The post Inner Ear: Croatian Music for April, by Jakub Knera appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/quietus-international/croation-underground-diy-music-guide-inner-ear/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=croation-underground-diy-music-guide-inner-ear

Sean Kitching speaks to Brian Hageman, Mark Davies and Hugh Swarts of TFUL282 about recording at Steve Albini’s house and setting John Cage’s voice to a glitchy dancefloor banger, while offering ten points of entry to their unique back catalogue

TFUL282 by Michael Galinsky

 Hailing largely from rural Iowa, the members of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 relocated to the Bay Area in 1986, from where they released seven unique studio albums between 1988 and 2001. A collision of divergent personalities and eclectic music tastes (classical music, big band jazz, easy listening, The Beatles, Ennio Morricone, Perez Prado, Zoviet France, Gastr del Sol, The Residents, to name but a few), with an ear for a great pop tune as well as a…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/strange-world-of/thinking-fellers-union-best-music/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=thinking-fellers-union-best-music

Catch up with everything we wrote about in March.

With March done and dusted with the appalling pollen of early spring, we’re back with your regular playlist of everything we wrote about over the past four or so weeks, available on Spotify, Apple Music, TIDAL, Qobuz and Deezer. Firstly, a reminder of the other perks our Subscriber and Subscriber Plus tier members received during that time: we had the Low Culture Podcast on Suicide’s debut album, an Organic Intelligence newsletter on psychedelic Porto, and the Low Culture Essay featuring Natalie Marlin on the relationship between The Chemical Brothers’ Hanna soundtrack and her trans identity. Subscriber Plus tier members have their bonus playlists featuring music from Baker’s Dozen selections by Sarah Nixey of Black Box Recorder, Sherelle…

The post Our Subscriber-Exclusive Playlist for March 2026 appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/subscriber-area/monthly-playlists/our-subscriber-exclusive-playlist-for-march-2026/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=our-subscriber-exclusive-playlist-for-march-2026