…and pick five highlights from their time at the South London heavy doof haven ahead of final outing this month

As most of you will know, London venue Corsica Studios is to close in its current incarnation later this year – a cruel loss for those of us who love a room where clarity of high volume makes for euphoric experience. Some of the best those came courtesy of the nights put on by James Tec and Luke Handsfree of Plex, the techno / acid / bass / you name it promoters who’s regular events (often alongside fellow travellers such as Colony, Machine, Them and Bleed) a decade-and-a-bit ago showcased the best of a particularly good moment in techno – adjacent…

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From a visceral return to roots from Converge to Cryptic Shift’s epic new death metal space opera, Kez Whelan reviews his first batch of great new metal for 2026 

Cryptic Shift, photo by Murry Deaves

As we hurtle into yet another new year, I’m still catching up on great records from the end of the last one – or great tapes, to be precise, with a couple of essential releases landing on cassette after even the tardiest music publications had finalised their year end lists. 

Nottingham psych-sludge legends Dead In The Woods returned out of nowhere with a self-titled album, almost 13 years since the band had originally called it a day. The members have all been active in other projects since of…

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Ahead of Traidora’s appearance at Supersonic festival, Stephanie Phillips speaks to experimental guitarist and Crass collaborator Eva LeBlanc about her need to see herself reflected in sound

Eva LeBlanc has always been direct. Those closest to the Chilean artist have often noticed this trait of bold naivety she jokingly tells me over Zoom from her London home. “My friends and my partner will say, ‘You’re not shy. You just go and ask people for stuff,’ and I’m like yeah why not.”

Why not indeed, as when LeBlanc decided she wanted to work with her hero Penny Rimbaud, co-founder of the legendary anarcho punk band Crass, she simply messaged him on X (formerly Twitter). “I gave my Bandcamp [and said] I would love…

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Daniel O’Sullivan & Richard Youngs

Persian Carpets

The second collaboration between Daniel O’Sullivan and Richard Youngs is a very different beast to their last: a pair of minimal improvisations for zither and piano

Persian Carpets by Daniel O'Sullivan & Richard Youngs

Experimental music doyens Daniel O’Sullivan and Richard Youngs have teamed up once before, on 2020’s Twelve of Hearts, a set of alluringly off-key songs. Persian Carpets, released by the excellent VHF, is entirely different. The prolific pair take a pair of aging instruments – an upright piano and a zither, both dating from 1915 – which they use to perform two improvised 20-minute pieces, filling either side of the LP. It is an exercise in exploring repetition and tiny, gradual variations. The resulting…

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Off the back of an incendiary debut record that was one of 2025’s best rock albums, Leather.head speak to Cal Cashin about the importance of keeping things political, uncompromising collaborations with poet Zia Ahmed, the reclamation of emo and more

Leather.head’s Mud Again, their incendiary self-released debut, was one of the finest and most fully realised rock albums of 2025. The real deal. 

Across its 37 minutes, the South London rascals’ fractured collage of blasted Slint guitars and explosive brass arrived perfectly formed. A cocktail of Midwest emo, jazzy post rock and hellfire punk rock, the album is made up of eight jagged sound-worlds that live and breathe and wheeze and writhe with the whims of the group creating them. 

This chemistry, this…

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Nilza Costa

Cantigas

The Salvador de Bahia-born singer creates songs that refuse all explanation

CANTIGAS by Brutture Moderne Label

Do you need a sensitivity to divine forces to be drawn into Nilza Costa’s new album? Not necessarily. But it does require a willingness to listen to music that resists explanation. Nilza Costa is a Brazilian singer and songwriter from Salvador de Bahia, now based in Italy. Her new album revolves around cantigas – sacred songs from the African diaspora – sung in Yoruba, Kimbundu and Brazilian Portuguese. These songs function as direct invocations of the orishas: spiritual entities that, in traditions such as Candomblé and Santería, connect human life with nature, history, and the divine. Rather than presenting this tradition from the outside, the…

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John Quin presents a hormonally loaded take on Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s classic of male alienation

We hear a festinating beat, those sinuous nocturnal saxophones, see a belch of street steam. A ghostly yellow cab glides across the screen in slow motion. The anxious driver’s eyes are caught in a red light, then he’s off again through wet Manhattan streets, the shimmering multicoloured neon reflected in black asphalt. A nervous mood is quickly set in place. Here be monsters. Male monsters.

Twenty-six-year-old Travis Bickle, as played by Robert De Niro, craves more work. He haggles with his supervisor, admits to insomnia, is told: “There’s porno theatres for that.”

Welcome to a preposterously testosterone-fuelled world, one we might call ‘The Preposterone’. This is…

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In an exclusive extract from his new book, Body of Work: How the Album Outplayed the Algorithm and Survived Playlist Culture, author Keith Jopling looks at the curious phenomenon of the ‘vanishing LP’ – as well as the ones that didn’t

A classic album in the “post-album” age of streaming is hard to define and probably impossible to nail down. This is probably why Tim Footman regarded OK Computer as the last time an album counted as a bona fide classic – an album that reflected society and was widely discussed and celebrated in its long-form. A record that very much characterised a decade. Over a quarter of a century on, it feels like we have descended into a culture that tries…

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The rare RIAA-certified award for ‘Harness Your Hopes’ is currently available for an auction prize of over £4,000

Screenshot

Pavement’s Bob Nastanovich has donated his own RIAA gold disc to an auction to support Margate music venue WhereElse.

The gold disc was given to Nastanovich to mark over 500,000 units of Pavement’s 1999 cult hit ‘Harness Your Hopes’ being sold in the US. It’s one of just seven gold discs produced, and Nastanovich’s item is the only Pavement gold record ever made available for public sale. It’s currently going for an auction price of just over £4,000 on eBay.

The gold disc is being auctioned as part of a wider fundraising effort to secure the future of the 150-capacity WhereElse in Margate. Nastanovich has been a regular visitor of…

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Proceeds from the track featuring the late guitarist will be donated to the New Art Studio, who support refugees and asylum seekers through art therapy

Seb Rochford has shared ‘Til The Day I’m Gone’, a new track via his Finding Ways project, featuring the late guitarist Patrick Walden.

Walden, who played with Rochford in Babyshambles when the latter served as a live drummer, died aged 47 in June 2025. “Patrick was for me, one of the best guitarists to ever play,” Rochford says. “I loved the way that his playing at once was so beautiful and crunchy, so wild and on the edge, but his ears were always listening so deeply and when with Babyshambles, he sculpted around Peter’s vocals in…

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