Tanya Donelly and Chris Brokaw

The Undone Is Done Again

The former Belly/Throwing Muses vocalist joins guitarist for Come and Codeine for a suite of yuletide medieval madrigals

The Undone is Done Again by Tanya Donelly and Chris Brokaw

Wassail! A blithe yule to you and yours. Tanya Donelly and Chris Brokaw have come together to bring some festive medieval cheer and melancholy to your April. The Undone Is Done Again is a startlingly bare four track E.P. of Latin madrigals that have been passed down through the centuries. Recreating ancient ballads is the kind of niche behaviour that keeps reenactment societies in business, though when it’s Tanya Donelly singing, it’s impossible to not sit up and take notice.

Donelly’s effortless, lilting vocals brought an…

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In the mid-90s Tricky was the future of music. Toby Manning looks back to his second album and asks, What Happened?

A mid-90s critical truism was invoked in Nearly God, that Adrian Thaws, aka Tricky, was the future of music. In so-titling his unofficial second album, Tricky was both mocking and magnifying his reputation as a one-man British Wu-Tang Clan, squaring up to his trip hop peers, not least old muckers Massive Attack. Instead, not only did Tricky piss away his potential but, in place of his pioneering, futuristic hip hop – or trip hop generally – British music would be dominated by Britpop’s retro banalities and dance-pop’s escapism, while hip hop remained, until grime, a near purely American phenomenon. 

It’s worth restating,…

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Gnod

Chronicles Of Gnowt Vol.1

The first in a planned trilogy sees Gnod expand into uncharted territory while still remaining, unmistakably, Gnod

Chronicles of Gnowt (Vol 1) by Gnod

The volumes of music referenced in the title of Gnod’s latest dispatch are slated to total three, all of them drawn from just shy of a week in the studio. In many ways, this Salford-originated experimental group are different – in personnel, setup, lifestyle – from their beginnings, two decades ago this year, but by no means comprehensively so, and this sort of nose-to-tail approach to serving up their recording sessions is reminiscent of when there’d be a new Gnod release practically every other month.

Moreover, on the evidence of Chronicles Of Gnowt Vol.1 there’s no…

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Noel Gardner detects plenty of dub at the core of this month’s New Weird Britain selections, from bareknuckle nightmare fuel techno to gloopy audio microdramas

Zara

Overarching themes don’t tend to be a facet of these columns, because the New Weird British music in them is loosely tied together, and so am I. Even so, some months certain motifs reappear in the selected releases to the point where it feels like the subconscious is trying to say something. In the first NWB of 2026 it was improvisation and in this, the second, it’s dub – a technique / aesthetic / culture which, like improv, is embedded in more music than anyone realises, including the given artists.

No question that John Howes, a Mancunian…

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Nine Inch Noize

Nine Inch Noize

Nine Inch Nails team up with German-Iranian DJ Boyz Noize for an album of festival thumpers and pulse-rate pumpers

Nine Inch Nails are no stranger to dark industrial music, experimentalism, and the tricky graft to situate these genres within an ever-flippant popular culture. But on their latest project, Coachellaphane-wrapped supergroup called Nine Inch Noize, which features German-Iranian DJ Boyz Noize and Mariqueen Mandig, it’s hard to tell if Trent Reznor and Attitcus Ross have misjudged it all a bit, giving into the consumerism that their music has always managed to mediate.

Nine Inch Nails have always been a revolving door in spirit and have invariably managed to cover lots of musical ground without ever spreading themselves too thin….

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The Banshees claimed they weren’t goth; but in 1986 that didn’t stop them from saving a genre from itself and drawing a blueprint for future generations of musicians to pore over, says Wesley Doyle

“Someone asked me how it felt to be the Queen of Goth,” Siouxsie Sioux told The Guardian back in 2005. “I said, ‘That’s rather like being known as the Prince Regent of Fools.’” Just so we’re clear, Siouxsie and the Banshees have never considered themselves a goth band. Ever. “Gothic in its purest sense is actually a very powerful, twisted genre,” Sioux again to Mark Paytress in 2003, “But the way it was being used by journalists – goff with a double f – always seemed to…

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Graham Dunning

Quern

In a digitally-mediated age, the London-based artist and improviser embraces the physicality of stuff – in all their wobbliness and instability

Quern by Graham Dunning

Graham Dunning has been utilising stacks of turntables, electric motors, automatic contraptions, and found objects to create music since at least 2008. However, the time of the London-based musician’s concept of mechanical techno might only now be truly upon us. As recent articles and social media chatter suggest, the pixel-born members of Gen Z are increasingly looking to exit digital hellscapes, rediscovering physical interfaces and material artefacts in the hope of anchoring themselves in reality. Dunning’s stupendously imperfect dance cuts and analogue subversions of electronic music, which once fought so hard to be digitised, might show…

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The Cornish filmmaker guides Luke Turner through the music that inspires his own soundtrack and scoring work, from the revelation of first encounters with Derek Jarman to the technicality of dub

Mark Jenkin by Steve Tanner

Although much is said about Mark Jenkin’s use of old Bolex 16mm cameras, the film from which he processes by hand, a similarly DIY approach to sound and music have arguably played as significant a role in creating the both tough and uncanny interpretation of Cornwall in which his films are set. The magnificent Rose Of Nevada, released this month, combines the social themes of the local fishing industry’s decline explored in Bait with the eeriness of second film Enys Men, as a boat appears to be dragged…

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Abigail Snail capture lightning in a bottle and Rad Berms is one of the best debut albums you will hear this year. Cal Cashin speaks to Stef Kett and Will Glaser. Photographs by Alex Bonney

Rad Berms by Abigail Snail

They may have chosen to name themselves after an entirely different denizen of the garden, but it is the zigging and zagging of a pair of butterflies that the vital new free rock duo Abigail Snail evoke so emphatically. Their debut album Rad Berms is all manic elegance and fluttering interplay – an antsy, frantic dialogue between two master musicians. They flit, they flutter; there is no slithering crawl here. Theirs is an adventurous take on the rock duo dynamic that stands opposed…

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Naná Rizinni

Epiblast

Combining her Brazilian roots with the sound of London’s progressive electronic jazz scene, the São Paulo drummer and bandleader finds a bracingly original sound of her own

Epiblast by Naná Rizinni

In biology, the epiblast is a precarious but infinitely powerful thing. It is the primordial embryonic layer from which an entire organism ultimately develops, a microscopic cluster of cells holding both profound fragility and limitless, expansive potential. It is a fitting, almost devastatingly accurate title for the new album from Naná Rizinni, an artist who has spent the last few years tearing down her own life and rebuilding it from the cellular level up.

Slated to release via Bridge The Gap, Epiblast is the sound of geographical displacement, overwhelming grief, and…

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