The 12-track album features PinkPantheress, A. K. Paul and more

Photo by Neva Wireko

Kelela has shared details of a new album, titled new avatar.

Spanning 12 tracks, it features guest contributions from PinkPantheress, A. K. Paul and Foushée. The indie and guitar-centred record is billed as a return to her roots having first started writing songs in the D.C. indie scene before the electronic music connections built on 2013 debut mixtape Cut 4 Me came about.

In a statement, Kelela said: “This album finds solace in confronting. I don’t want the music to be a distraction from what’s really going on in the world; I want it to make sense in this crazy moment while helping people get in touch with the beauty…

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The long-running festival left its Serbia base last year due to “financial and political pressures”

EXIT Festival has relocated to Montenegro for its 2026 and future editions.

The long-running event left its Serbia base last year citing “financial and political pressures” as the reason. It will now take place at Long Beach in Ulcinj, with the dates and lineup yet to be revealed.

Montenegro Prime Minister Milojko Spajić has spoken in support of the festival’s move to the country, saying it will offer “exceptional international promotion” in particular for Montenegro’s beaches.

Dušan Kovačević, CEO and Founder of EXIT Festival group, said: “Montenegro is one of Europe’s best-kept secrets. With its stunning nature and vibrant Adriatic coastline, it has everything it takes to become a…

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The musician was convicted of money laundering, illegal lobbying and campaign finance violations in 2023, and given a 14-year sentence

Fugees’ Pras Michel has turned himself in to authorities in Arizona to begin a 14-year prison sentence after being convicted of money laundering, illegal lobbying and campaign finance violations in 2023.

The musician’s prison sentence was originally due to begin in January, but a judge delayed it until March and gave him an additional 30 days to hand himself in, making the official start date of his time in prison 30 April. Rolling Stone reports that Michel plans to appeal his conviction while behind bars.

Michel was convicted in November 2023 after prosecutors said he accepted $120 million from Malaysian billionaire Low Taek Jho, and funnelled it…

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It’s an excerpt from the UK artist’s debut ballet score, recorded with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra

Floating Points has shared a new song, ‘Falling To Earth’, which he recorded with the help of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.

Combining elements of orchestral music with the modular synthesis that the UK artist has long built his sound around, the new cut is an excerpt from Floating Points’ debut ballet score for Mere Mortals. He was originally commissioned to produce the soundtrack by San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Tamara Rojo, with his work and the ballet itself premiering in January 2024 at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House.

Floating Points is currently involved in further San Francisco performances of Mere Mortals. Another run of…

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Variations On A Theme and Conference Of The Birds will be released in new CD, vinyl and cassette editions later this month

OM’s first two albums, Variations On A Theme and Conference Of The Birds, are being reissued.

The two records were originally released in 2005 and 2006 respectively, and came out on the Holy Mountain label. Chicago imprint Drag City is overseeing both reissues, with the two albums set to be made available in new CD, vinyl and cassette editions.

Listen to both records below.

Drag City will release Variations On A Theme and Conference Of The Birds on 29 May 2026.

Variations on a Theme by OM

Conference of the Birds by OM
…

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Marking the first material that the two artists have made together, it comes after they played a back-to-back DJ set at Draaimolen festival in 2023

Photo by Guido Gazzilli

Batu and Donato Dozzy are releasing a collaborative album together, titled Exhale.

Spanning eight tracks, it marks the first joint release of material by the two artists, and comes after they played a back-to-back DJ set together at the 2023 edition of Draaimolen festival in the Netherlands. They first met and discovered a mutual appreciation of each other’s work while in Japan in 2019, and ideas to potentially make music together were tabled for sometime in the future.

Early ideas for the album were sketched out in Dozzy’s Rome studio early in 2025, with Batu…

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Glitched waltzes, iridescent flutes, enormous beats and ferocious black metal, Daryl Worthington ventures into the tapes of May

Static Caravan

There’s been a vaguely sinister corporate connection between work and instrumental music since at least the founding of the Muzak corporation in the 1930s. A variation of this belief – that certain types of carefully designed sounds can boost productivity – continues to manifest in focus playlists and apps. Such notions of functional music for the workplace get gleefully skewed from multiple angles on Stylianos Ou, aka Athens, Greece-based Stelios Papagrigoriou’s Office Metal Baroque. He laid the basis of these tracks in the office of his day job, finding “by mistake” that algorithms could be used to imitate the rhythms of 19th…

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Irked

The Grievance

Class rage set to the justified thunder of hammered drums and squall-like guitars

The Grievance by IRKED

In the 2004 rockumentary Dig!, Portland psych-janglers The Dandy Warhols turn up to the aftermath of a debauched, drug-fuelled party at the home of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and position themselves as participants in the antics for a magazine photo shoot. This type of posing and mimicry has been rife in music for decades, with bands and musicians attempting to present themselves as something they’re not in a bid for kudos, clout, cool points and, ultimately, cash. You could toss this accusation at the likes of The Monkees or even the Sex Pistols, if you so wish. In more recent years, this phenomenon has…

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Lucy Liyou

Mr Cobra

Philadelphia’s Lucy Liyou creates a haunting hörspiel from pulsing house beats and robotic nursery rhymes

MR COBRA by Lucy Liyou

One could call Lucy Liyou’s latest album an accumulation of everything Liyou has done over her career: the concrete sound collage of her early work, the achingly tender, more ambient electroacoustic sounds on Dog Dreams, the experimental theatre of +82 K-Pop Star, and the otherworldly ambient pop of last year’s Every Video Without Your Face, Every Sound Without Your Name. But that description would do such an injustice to Mr Cobra, one of the most transgressive, transfixing and batshit insane albums in recent memory. It’s a rare piece of new music that feels not just unique or original, but genuinely…

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‘Listen To The River Ching’ will be launched at an event on 6 May

Ellie Wilson has a new project devoted to a small East London river launching this week. The River Ching, beautifully described by Wilson as “a river with no airs or graces”, rises among the trees of Epping Forest, before flowing down through the Chingford suburbs, disappearing into culverts under the Walthamstow dog racing track made famous by Blur’s Parklife album sleeve, and pouring into the Lea around the huge reservoirs that provide London with its fresh water. Wilson, who has previously produced work relating to her ancestors’ history as part of the movement that saved Epping Forest in the 19th Century, worked with local schoolchildren to produce…

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