Palooka 5

MetroKino

From Rochester, a new soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis amps up the surf guitar and go-go beats

MetroKino by Palooka 5

Recorded in Rochester, Kent, appropriately a headcoat’s throw from Chatham, this wild garage/surf/sci fi/psych ride has all the hallmarks of a Childish production. It has all the hallmarks of a band who have spent serious time studying The Kinks, the B52s, and The Cramps. Above those things though, it has the hallmarks of a band riddled with ambition.

Palooka 5 are from deepest Somerset. The 2020s feels like a time for rural-based musicians to find their wings and this is a prime example. The world has changed. Landscapes have been altered forever.

MetroKino is a new soundtrack to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, ninety-eght…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/palooka-5-metrokino-review/

Rochelle Jordan

Through The Wall

The British-Canadian singer may not be the future of R’n’B, but her sound is her own – and it’s far richer and more elegant than the work of many better known and more celebrated contemporaries, finds Liam Inscoe-Jones

Through The Wall by Rochelle Jordan

In art, effortlessness can go under-rewarded. Strain for greatness and you will likely be rewarded with plaudits but become too polished and the circle can begin to close. You become again, somehow, less worthy of note. Rochelle Jordan, the British-Canadian singer, is someone who has spent well over a decade cruising, bafflingly, under the radar. All the way back in 2012 she released Pressure, one of the best R&B records nobody has ever heard. In…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/rochelle-jordan-through-the-wall-review/

Jennifer Lucy Allan returns with another batch of rum music, reviewing an essential new compilation of Amy Sheffer, posthumous releases from Mika Vainio (as Ø) and Amelia Cuni, the return of Surface Of The Earth, the first recording of legendary Ugandan vocalist John Katokye, and much more

Amelia Cuni

Went on my summer holidays to a converted arsenic mine engine house on the border between Cornwall and Devon. Absolutely no signal in the house, and no wifi. You go away worrying about what emails, what work, what gossip, what events you’ll miss, and come back and nothing has happened at all. Or rather, it has, but everything changes and everything stays the same, for better or worse. 

I read four books in a…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/rum-music/rum-music-for-september-reviewed-by-jennifer-lucy-allan/

Sam Prekop

Open Close

The Sea and Cake singer-songwriter slowly transitions into the synthfluencer era with a languid suite of ambient tones

Open Close by Sam Prekop

Modular synth-based music, once the domain of acid-fried German hippies, and, later, burnt-out basement noise freaks, has morphed into something unrecognizable. In a context in which background music for studying and sleeping holds the most streaming capital, and yuppies are increasingly seeking new-agey balms to protect themselves from the ravages of internet culture, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that synth music has become yet another cog in the content mill, a test run for artists to shill gear or soundtrack Stranger Things rip-offs. In other words, it’s a peculiar time for Sam Prekop to transition into…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/sam-prekop-open-close-review/

On the fiftieth anniversary of his seminal ‘book of the dead hamlets’, author Iain Sinclair talks to Robert Davidson about London in the 70s, Hawksmoor churches and Arthur Machen

All photos by Travis Elborough

“The churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor soon invade the consciousness, the charting instinct. Eight churches give us the enclosure, the shape of the fear; – built for early century optimism, erected over a fen of undisclosed horrors, white stones laid upon the mud & dust.”

And so Iain Sinclair, who Alan Moore refers to as “the finest and most necessary living writer in the English language,” begins his seminal work Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets. A landmark book self-published fifty years ago through his own Hackney-based press,…

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source https://thequietus.com/culture/books/a-london-dreaming-iain-sinclairs-lud-heat-at-50/

Mary Chiney celebrates the timely reissues of one of a highlife album for the ages; no mere postcard from the past but an essential atmosphere once more accessible to all

The Blue Album by K. Frimpong & his Cubano Fiestas

There are records that feel like postcards from the past, and there are records that feel like time collapsing in on itself, until it becomes alive again in the present. Alhaji K. Frimpong’s The Blue Album, recorded in 1976 with his band, the Cubano Fiestas, belongs firmly to the latter. To hear it now, almost half a century later, is to be reminded that highlife, Ghana’s musical gift to the world, was never static, never parochial, but a restless and adaptive language.

Born…

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SY biographer Stevie Chick looks back three decades to Kurt Cobain, Neil Young and what might just be Gordon, Moore, Ranaldo & Shelley’s finest moment

Sonic Youth’s ninth full-length – or tenth including The Whitey Album – 1995’s Washing Machine, marks the transitional moment where New York’s noise-punk cornerstones process the upheavals of the previous couple of years and map out the new territory they’d explore during the rest of their career. The handful of albums immediately preceding it had found them toying with Big Rock Moves commensurate with their newfound status as major label signees. Since their inception in 1981, Sonic Youth had pulled apart the rock paradigm for punk thrills and intellectual satisfaction – detuning and adulterating their guitars,…

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source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/sonic-youth-lp-washing-machine-review/

tQ’s staffers have sifted through the stream of September’s music, and returned with a selection of shiny golden nuggets

Zooming out, September always feels like a point of intensifying energy when it comes to new music. The big distraction of festival season behind us, end of year listageddon looming into view on the horizon, now begins the last big burst of sound before it’s time to wrap it all up. The positive, of course, is that when selecting the best that this month has to offer, we were spoiled for choice.

Everything you’ll find below, as well as all the other excellent music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will also be compiled into an hours-long playlist exclusive to our subscribers….

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source https://thequietus.com/tq-charts/music-of-the-month/music-of-the-month-the-best-albums-and-tracks-of-september-2025/

Ani Glass

Phantasmagoria

The Welsh-Cornish singer-producer broadens her palette and enriches her production style on her follow-up to 2020’s Mirores

Phantasmagoria LP by Ani Glass

Phantasmagoria: A bizarre or fantastic combination; a constantly shifting, complex succession of things seen or imagined. These definitions wholly encapsulate the circumstances that shaped the narrative structure and exquisite tonal palette coursing through Ani Glass’s thrilling second LP. Its long-awaited arrival ends a five-year gap since the Welsh-Cornish artist released her critically acclaimed solo debut, Mirores, a momentous milestone in her career that was unfortunately usurped by a benign brain tumour diagnosis. Glass’s latest material, on which her production style demonstrates great growth, is a sumptuous synth-pop meditation on processing that traumatic period whilst untangling the experiences and emotions…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/ani-glass-phantasmagoria-review/

Todmorden label announce ambitious “re-imagining” of cult film

A previously unseen production still from The Watchers 

The Folklore Tapes label has launched a Kickstarter for a major project reimagining 1969 film The Watchers as a book, album and live show. Marking the label’s 15th birthday, their take on The Watchers will, we’re told, “expand upon the film’s atmospheric legacy, drawing out its folkloric undertones and exploring the cultural and psychic landscape it inhabits.” The Kickstarter, which you can find here, is for a soundtrack album featuring Calder Valley musicians Bridget Hayden, Thorn Wych, Sam McLoughlin, Radiophonic Labs, Edd Sanders, dbh, David Chatton Barker, and Ramsey Janini, an A5 book exploring the film and its legacy that features new interview material with…

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