In the first pod of 2026, John Doran outlines the meaning of David Lynch’s masterpiece to a previously confused Luke Turner

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Hay no banda! There is no band… just two fine looking gentlemen of a certain age resplendent in their seasonal knitwear. John and Luke start 2026 with a resolution to be optimistic and positive in outlook from this point onwards. And all things considered – given the spiritually crushing subject matter at hand – they are fairly good to their word on the first Low Culture Podcast of the year. Mulholland Drive is a David Lynch neo-noir/black-comedy horror take on a romantic tragedy, nestled inside a metaphysical satire of Hollywood, built from the wreckage of an abandoned TV show pilot. It was…

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Catch up with everything we wrote about in the last two months of 2025

As is now traditional on tQ, we combine our round-ups of the last two months of the year into one playlist and feature, to make sure that they don’t get lost in the barrage of material relating to our end of year round-ups of the best albums, tracks, reissues etc and columns of the past 12 months. This means that our Subscriber and Subscriber Plus tier members get a bumper pack of stuff to listen to in the gooch, the gulch, the interregnum, the purgatory, or whatever it is you want to call the odd gap between Christmas and New Year. The playlist, as ever made up…

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Veteran DIY rockers celebrate 23 years in the game with new LP Heaven Was Wild, out next February

“There is a cosmic force at play with this band!” Hey Colossus – never doing anything the easy way – have just announced their new album on Christmas Day, via a mini documentary, streaming above, figuring everyone would otherwise just be sitting on their hands with little else to occupy them.

The short film was shot at their recent weekend of four London gigs in October and during their recording session for Heaven Was Wild in Bruton, Devon. The album pre-sale goes live on New Year’s Day and will be released on 27 February.

Putting the ‘sex’ back into sextet, this album combines…

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It’s a seasonal special for the final antidote to the algorithm of 2025, as guides us through melancholic Medieval, rousing Baroque and stolen carols

King Alfonso instructs musicians to play for Mary and Jesus, from the Cantigas de Santa Maria

A December afternoon, and I’m watching the afternoon sky turn from light to dark grey to black. An overgrown holly bush waves vigorously at me through the window. It is a stark backdrop, but one softened by an ancient magic from my speakers as I take a deep dive into my favourite early Christmas Carols. By this I mean ‘early’ as in properly ancient, rather than from the seasonal pop classics of the 80s or 90s (although I have a lot of…

The post Organic Intelligence LI: Laura Cannell’s Guide to Early-ish Christmas Music appeared first on The Quietus.

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Mark S Williamson 

folklore, facts and fables 6: three days to find out

A charming record pays tribute to cult TV archeological programme Time Team

folklore, facts and fables 6: three days to find out by mark s. williamson

Many Quietus readers will no doubt be familiar with Time Team, the archaeology programme broadcast by Channel 4 for a decade between 1994 and 2014 and recently revived online. Presented by actor Tony Robinson (a wonderful move given his role as Baldrick in historical comedy Blackadder), each episode featured a team of archaeologists racing against the clock on three day digs on sites that spanned human history in the United Kingdom, from the Neolithic to the Second World War. 

It was a simple idea that contained intense drama…

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Our final round-up from 2025 is the best from November and December, as selected by tQ’s listmas-addled staffers

Eagle-eyed tQ readers will have spotted that there was no best-of-November round-up last month, in order to make room for our Albums of the Year chart. Nevertheless, it’d be a shame to let those records that defined the final weeks of 2025 slip by without a spotlight.

Proud as we are of the main chart, we don’t view it as cast-iron; so often there are records that emerge as masterpieces just hours after we’ve submitted our ballots. Here, then, is the very best from this month and the last, as selected by tQ’s staffers, who we’ve dragged back to the coalface for one…

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EarthBall’s Outside Over There is one of this year’s best albums. Because it opens with a sample of Stewart Lee talking about pear cider, it felt only right to introduce both parties for a feature. But then a breakdown in communication led to a gloriously unexpected meditation on the nature of improvisation…

“Hello. Very nice to meet you,” someone says, on a currently black laptop screen, “Fuck.”

I am a stand-up comedian and writer, and the Canadian free-rock quintet EarthBall have sampled one of my old routines, about an advert for pear cider, at the start of their new album, Outside Over There. I already liked their work, which I think I had first read about in The Wire. I…

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Out next month, the LP is preceded by lead track ‘Crushing Realities’

Photo by Mario Bergmann

Shackleton has a new album on the way.

Marking his first solo release for AD 93, the 10-track Euphoria Bound follows last year’s collaborative record with Holy Tongue, The Tumbling Psychic Joy Of Now, for the same label. A press statement shared by the imprint said of the new record: “The approach here is more direct than recent releases, with textures that accumulate and disintegrate with renewed urgency.”

Arriving alongside the announcement of Euphoria Bound is lead track ‘Crushing Realities’, which you can listen to below.

AD 93 will release Euphoria Bound on January 30, 2026.

Euphoria Bound by Shackleton
…

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Blarke Bayer

The King In Yellow

Guitar strings are punished and reverb is smeared on My Disco guitarist Benjamin Andrews’ tribute to Robert W. Chambers’s gilded age gothic

THE KING IN YELLOW by Blarke Bayer

In an effort to familiarise myself with the inspiration for Blarke Bayer’s The King in Yellow, the proto-Lovecraftian collection of short stories of the same name by gilded age goth Robert W. Chambers, I chanced upon a YouTube explainer with the Ulysses-tier runtime of nine hours by a guy called Flawed Peacock. Initially I took this as some metatextual allusion to the ruinous obsession that surrounds Chambers’ play-within-a-story (also called ‘The King in Yellow’), though the theory was quickly dispelled after seeing that our man also has a fifteen-hour…

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From venue closures to VAT, conversations around the UK’s beleaguered nightlife sector have struck a singularly gloomy tone for more than a decade. But has that pessimism become part of the problem? Ed Gillett asks whether our eulogies for the late-night scene have outlived their usefulness.

Nightlife is dead, everyone knows it. Your favourite venues have all closed, it’s impossible to get a drink anywhere after 11pm, and even if you could it’d be prohibitively expensive. People don’t care about going out, Gen Z have stopped drinking, and the hospitality industry is on its knees: we’ll be lucky if there’s a single nightclub left open anywhere in the country by the end of the decade. From broadsheet commentary to industry reports,…

The post Why Reports of the Death of UK Nightlife are Greatly Exaggerated appeared first on The Quietus.

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