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

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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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Mary Chiney celebrates the soundtrack to Akinola Davies Jr.’s debut feature film, depicting a single eventful day in Lagos, during 1993

My Father's Shadow (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Duval Timothy & CJ Mirra

The summer of 1993 in Lagos exists in the collective memory as a period of suspended animation. It was a time defined by the heavy, humid silence that precedes a storm, specifically the political storm of the 12 June election annulment and the subsequent creeping dread of the Abacha years. When Folarin, the patriarch in Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, mutters that “sometimes… it’s hard to know what to do,” he isn’t just speaking to his sons; he is articulating the paralysis of an entire middle class caught…

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Roshi Nasehi, a Welsh Iranian artist, speaks to fellow musicians about the dangers of allowing the protest movement to be hijacked by hard left anti-imperialist ideologues and outlines how practical help can be offered to those currently suffering in Iran

Graffiti in Khorramabad reads ‘death to the dictator’, Wiki Commons

Every Iranian I know has, at some point, been personally sent a death threat, arrested or tortured by agents of the Islamic Republic. Even the luckiest ones know someone who has suffered a fate that is similar or worse: they have a loved one or loved ones who have been disappeared or murdered.

Right now, the Iranian dictatorship is currently in the middle of its most deadly crackdown since its bloody inception in 1979. Since late December,…

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Sam Slater

Lunng

Sam Slater’s highly collaborative new LP plays out like an elegy for a world and way of living we’ve yet to lose but are on the verge of losing, says Bernie Brooks

Lunng by Sam Slater

Lunng is the title of Sam Slater’s third namesake LP. With two N’s. I say it out loud. Roll it around my mouth a little bit. Lunnnnnng. It becomes less an organ and more like some new disease you get from living next to a data centre that’s burning through methane and fresh water to disrupt the sex-crime chatbot industry.

On the cover, it’s night. There’s a car on fire all by its lonesome. The aftermath of something. No people but its headlamps are on. How…

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Dele Fadele looks back to The Bad Seeds album that has odd parallels with gangsta rap. This feature was first published in 2016

In the mid-1990s, I spotted Nick Cave’s distinct figure at London’s Subterrania venue, under The Westway, for gigs by Wu-Tang Clan leader GZA and Method Man. Cave appeared as enthused as the rest of the room at Genius/GZA’s show, and I imagine he couldn’t have failed to have heard ‘Luminal’ from Legend Of The Liquid Sword, a controversial track that severely dented that excellent LP’s commercial prospects with its grisly depictions of the serial killer’s methodology and awful deeds. Certain acolytes of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds were also staunch Geto Boys fans. If GZA and…

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In the return of his quarterly column exploring bold new takes on traditional music and sounds, Patrick Clarke speaks to the figures behind the new Black British Folk Collective about their story so far, and reviews eleven new records including harsh noise bodhran, an extraordinary Occitan freakout, Armenian duduk, Polish oberek and more

Bianca Wilson at Land In Our Names’ Birthday Folk Session. Photo by Fatima Yasmin

In October last year the musician Angeline Morrison, whose 2022 masterpiece The Sorrow Songs drew on deep research to present new folk music that centred the real Black British figures who are often written out of history, was invited to curate an all-day programme at Cecil Sharp House – the headquarters of the English Folk…

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Annie Hogan

Tongues In My Head

Intense but beguiling, former Marc Almond and Einstürzende Neubauten collaborator conjures sensual rituals and half-dirges

Annie Hogan is something of a quiet icon of goth and post-punk. A longtime friend of Marc Almond, she put on early Soft Cell shows and played with his dark cabaret side-project Marc and the Mambas. She appears on Barry Adamson’s seminal Moss Side Story and has worked with Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and several members of Einstürzende Neubauten. She’s also been releasing evocative solo music since the late 1980s, the latest of which, the six track album Tongues In My Head, strikes an elegant balance of light and shade.

Opening track ‘Alles Ist Verloren’ is measured but bleak, a taxonomy of a…

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