Julian Marszalek relishes a live box set that captures a band at the moment of transition – in invention and reinvention – but, he asks, were they the Beatles of hardcore?

From a vantage point of almost 40 years, it’s strange to think that such a stalwart band of the underground was featured on a 7″ release with a massive distribution in relative terms, even though that group, by this point, were then considered deeply unfashionable. In February 1986, NME – then selling around 100,000 copies a week – cover mounted a free, four-track vinyl EP called The Big Four. And there, alongside joint Album Of The Year winners Tom Waits (Rain Dogs) and The Jesus And Mary Chain (Psychocandy), plus…

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Angus Batey delves into his own extensive interview archive to reassess Liquid Swords three decades later. This feature was first published in 2015

Pardon what appears to be an opening digression, but there’s a point here, which I’ll get too in reasonably short order, I promise.

There was something oddly, disconcertingly, hard-to-put-your-finger-on familiar about the Marvel film Avengers: Age Of Ultron – beyond, obviously, the fact that all the key players had been introduced and built up as three-dimensional characters via a string of preceding films, and notwithstanding their appearance for years beforehand in the comic books the Marvel Cinematic Universe films are based on. Rather, what I found nagging at the back of my mind was the formal similarity the…

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Two decades on Matthew Barton considers how the revered artist came back after a 12 year absence with an album that was well worth the wait

November 7, 2005, somewhere around 4pm. Here on CD, its cover depicting a mysterious waveform, a beautiful, honeyed backdrop and a typeface that reminded me of Emirates Airlines, was Aerial, Kate Bush’s first album release in a dozen years.

Twenty years have mellowed that feeling of utter improbability in holding a new Kate Bush album in my hands – but only a little. The intervening years have since brought us more improbabilities – two albums in one year (2011’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words For Snow), a handful of public appearances and, most improbable of all,…

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Danny Brown

Stardust

Danny Brown goes hyperpop, calling in a bevy of younger collaborators (Jane Remover, Frost Children, 8485, Issbrokie, femtanyl, and more) for the Detroit artist’s most joyour album to date

Stardust by Danny Brown

After 2023’s Quaranta captured him at his lowest ebb, Stardust is Danny Brown’s first album written and recorded entirely while sober. It sounds like the windows being thrown open. On the bright, psychedelic opener ‘Book of Daniel’, fizzing with live drums and celestial backing vocals, Brown narrates his emergence from addiction and arrival at a place of inner peace: “Sleeping real good at night ‘cuz I’m proud of myself”. This wholesome head-held-high attitude carries this fun, typically eccentric album, which knowingly disrupts familiar tropes of sobriety albums.

Stardust is…

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Kate French Morris heads to the ancient city of Guimarães in Portugal, where These New Puritans and a host of local acts guide her through the rain-lashed, autumnal gloom

These New Puritans by João Octávio Peixoto

They may be Essex boys, but Jack and George Barnett of These New Puritans make music that’s just as at home in the Portuguese city of Guimarães. Located a hairsbreadth inland from Porto, Guimarães may not share the main character energy of its neighbour, nor the country’s capital, but it’s in fact considered to be the birthplace of Portugal. The small city moves at its own pace. Its narrow streets with their ancient, bulging buildings and countless alminhas (street-side Catholic shrines) are easily clogged by modernity: on my…

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Gary Suarez gives us an American perspective on one of Autechre’s most revered albums and a duo about to sever all remaining ties to the culture that surrounded them. First published in 2015

When The KLF orchestrated their 1992 televised kiss off to the industry, there seemed little intent on their part to put on a good show. Replete with automatic weapons, dead livestock, and the grindcore stylings of Extreme Noise Terror, the Brit Awards version of ‘3AM Eternal’ looked and sounded awful. Even by their already well-known standards of mischief making and reputation for taking the piss, this was radical. Having mixed, remixed, sampled, and re-sampled their way to fame and small fortune with their dance music beginning in the…

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Charmaine Lee

Tulpa

With a contact mic taped to her throat, the Australian vocalist expands the very concept of vocal music

Tulpa by Charmaine Lee

In Tibetan mysticism, a ‘tulpa’ is a being created through the art of intense concentration. For composer, vocalist and sound artist Charmaine Lee, the concept extends to the human voice and all its mystery. Vocals can be material or transient; organic or an otherworldly entity. With Tulpa, she approaches the voice with attentiveness to its every angle, sculpting eight uncompromising tracks that highlight its malleability.

Tulpa centres and expands the vocal techniques Lee has shaped over the last several years through releases like 2021’s KNVF and live performances as a soloist and collaborator. She tapes a contact mic on her…

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On their seventh stellar album in a row, the unbeatable duo of Elucid and Billy Woods find space for small, everyday joys amongst the horror of contemporary geopolitics

cred: Alexander Richter

Horsham in West Sussex is a bracingly middle-class market town manifested, seemingly, from a flag-raiser’s most libidinal fantasies. Ten minutes away sits a paintball park, nestled beneath the nearby pine trees. Places like these are familiar to any British teenager, the kind of attraction frequented at either 17 or 32 and vanished from the psyche entirely for the duration of the years between. Like most parks like it, this one is strewn with approximations of war. Khaki canvases, corrugated bunkers, reactive targets and – unique to this particular course – the…

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The fifth song to be unveiled from forthcoming album Tranquilizer also comes backed by a video

Photo by Aidan Zamiri

Oneohtrix Point Never has shared a new track, ‘Cherry Blue’.

Arriving as the fifth song to be unveiled from forthcoming album Tranquilizer, the song is backed by a video from French contemporary artist Pol Taburet, which marks his filmmaking debut. Using surrealist imagery, the painter’s visual explores themes of life and death, among other topics. You can watch it below.

Oneohtrix Point Never, real name Daniel Lopatin, previously shared the tracks ‘For Residue’, ‘Bumpy’, ‘Lifeworld’ and ‘Measuring Ruins’ from Tranquilizer, which was announced last month. Following on from 2023’s Again, the new record is “shaped by commercial audio construction kits from a bygone era…

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The film was captured during the band’s performance at London’s Troxy late last year to mark the release of Songs Of A Lost World

The Cure are releasing a new concert film, Show Of A Lost World.

Directed by filmmaker and longtime collaborator Nick Wickham, the film was captured during the band’s November 2024 performance at London’s Troxy to celebrate the release of their most recent LP, Songs Of A Lost World. Frontman Robert Smith handled the mixing of the film, which will debut in cinemas on December 11.

During the Troxy performance, the band played 31 songs, including the album in full. They also marked the 45th anniversary of their album Seventeen Seconds during the set.

Songs Of A Lost World was The Cure’s first…

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