The debut album from the North Carolina-born singer-songwriter-producer, finds the digital age’s only medieval princess bursting with ideas and cartoonish intensity. Truly, Hemlocke Springs contains multitudes

Those among us who harbour a secret fondness for ‘Be Prepared’ – Jeremy Irons’ delicious villain song in The Lion King – may well have pricked their ears last October when Hemlocke Springs released her single ‘Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Ankles’. It’s a demented tune, opening with a sped-up Nutcracker tinkle that gives way to an infectious romp, stuffed with cartoonish sound effects and ripe, expressive vocals: a song that sounds a bit like Scar on steroids, or Scar if he was releasing pop music from his lion’s cave in 2026.

The song’s nursery-rhyme-meets-antiquated-fetish title harks…

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Charles Tyler Ensemble

Voyage from Jericho

Former Cecil Taylor side man brings together a band featuring Steve Reid and Earl Cross for a thrilling document of the New York loft jazz scene in the 1970s

Voyage from Jericho by Charles Tyler Ensemble

Released 51 years ago on Charles Tyler’s own Ak-Ba records, Voyage From Jericho captures a period when Downtown Manhattan lofts resonated to the sounds of a jazz avant-garde determined to do things on its own terms. Frederiksberg Records’ sumptuous reissue, complete with photographs, flyers and deeply researched liner notes by jazz scholar Cisco Bradley, brings this essential part of Tyler’s discography back into circulation. A brilliant alto and baritone saxophonist, Tyler is perhaps best known for his contributions to Albert Ayler’s transcendent…

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The Wakefield brothers spar with Fergal Kinney about the unlikely – and mutual – love affair between The Cribs and the combat sport.

Gary Jarman (R) spars with Andy Lee

When Amy Winehouse died in July 2011, the singer’s passing was a personal tragedy that also called time on a whole era. “It was a real stark moment,” reflects The Cribs’ bassist and vocalist Gary Jarman, speaking over Zoom from his home in Portland, Oregon. “It was a real wake-up call because of how not-unexpected it was that ultimately there would be casualties from that period. Because it was so intense.” 

For his twin brother, guitarist and vocalist Ryan Jarman, the shock was closer to home. “I used to hang out with her…

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Mayhem

Liturgy of Death

Dense and textural, the reinvigorated Norwegian group’s seventh studio album finds them on iconoclastic form

Liturgy of Death (24-bit HD audio) by Mayhem

Norway’s prominence in extreme metal can be attributed not only to the dark, saturnine winters of Scandinavia, but also to deep-seated pagan traditions and the rebellious anti-Christian black metal counter-culture that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. These elements intensified conditions necessary for the development of genres such as Death and Black metal.

As pioneers of the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the 1980s, Mayhem have continued to reign for over four decades in death and black metal, releasing new material roughly every five to seven years. Their seventh studio album, Liturgy of Death, is their “most commercial…

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Karshni

Buck Wild

Debut album from the Indian solo artist is as visceral as it is ethereal

Everyone who proselytises will eventually tell you that the truth sets you free. On her debut album Buck Wild, Indian (Pune-based) artist Karshni splits herself open: sometimes with a surgeon’s meticulousness, sometimes like a violent, rabid cannibal, utterly disinterested in suturing herself back shut, intent on ravaging the person she once was – all in the service of ‘getting real’, both with herself and her listeners.

In the last eight-odd years that she has been making music, Karshni has developed an indie-darling, melancholia laden sound-bed, then abandoned it, floated across collaborations with her peers, lending her voice to records that span the distance between avant-garde hiphop and shoegaze,…

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…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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