Dream Skills and Burn Into Sleep

I Carried You For Years And The Deers Are Still Hungry

A collaboration between siblings produces a completely beguiling body of work that’s simultaneously scary and sexy, finds Zara Hedderman

I Carried You For Years And The Deers Are Still Hungry by Burn Into Sleep ~ Dream Skills

An initial glance at the tracklist for would have you question whether you were, in fact, about to press play on a lost Sparks album. ‘The Girl On The Dior Counter Is Crying’, ‘Showgirl With Desire’ and ‘Pillow Spray’ are just a few song titles that demonstrate a Mael brothers-like propensity to write wryly about inanimate objects and melodramatic scenes. That, and a sibling connection, is where any similarity between…

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Suede’s painterly new album takes the raw energy of its predecessor and twists it through layers of distortion and high drama

Suede by Dean Chalkley

In a 1966 interview with art critic David Sylvester, Francis Bacon spoke of his hopes for his paintings to extend beyond the illustrative possibilities of photographs: “One wants a [painting] to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration. Isn’t that what all art is about?”

On the cover of Suede’s tenth studio album, Antidepressants, singer and lyricist Brett Anderson assumes the position of Bacon in a 1962 photograph by John Deakin, shirtless and flanked by two cuts of meat in…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/suede-antidepressants-review/

The Strange World Of…Saint EtienneAfter 35 years of reinventing British pop, Saint Etienne’s Bob, Pete and Sarah are hanging up their samples, synthesisers, feather boas and football strips for good. Jude Rogers offers 10 ways into their always surprising, genre-splicing back catalogue, from their early days with C86 bands and Andrew Weatherall to their final, star-filled album

Photo by Rob Baker Ashton

In the April 1993 issue of Select (a key text in the run-up to Britpop) the first band interviewed in its famous ‘Yanks Go Home’ feature wasn’t its cover stars, Suede. It was Saint Etienne, a trio named after a French football team.In the piece, they answer some questions about Britishness. Bob Stanley on British pop: “I prefer France, myself”….

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/strange-world-of/saint-etienne-strange-world-interview-international/

As Digbeth’s Supersonic festival continues to defy the odds, Patrick Clarke reports with five highlights from this year’s edition

Backxwash at Supersonic 2025, photo by Robert Barrett

As Supersonic’s founder Lisa Meyer told tQ earlier this summer, it’s getting harder and harder for a festival like hers to exist, with physical space is being squeezed by developers and costs soaring, all in the face of indifference from a local government that in a just world would be promoting events like this as jewels within Birmingham’s cultural crown, rather than a niche inconvenience. The last-minute forced relocation of festival’s marketplace, its beating heart, from central venue XOYO to the nearby Zellig complex encapsulates that fact, as does Friday night’s first-time use of a…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/live-reviews/tqs-highlights-of-supersonic-2025/

Prolapse

I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face

More than a quarter-century since their last album, the Leicester post-punks sound as sludgy and dyspeptic as ever

I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face by Prolapse

When Prolapse released their last album, Ghosts of Dead Airplanes, the internet was assumed to be a passing fad and Napster was still months away from being invented. The world the Leicester Polytechnic graduates left behind in 1999 was one where John Peel’s Festive 50 and the Evening Session were king, with exposure coming from ads placed in the inkies leading readers to seek out a group that named themselves after a rectal collapse.

Twenty-six years later comes I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/prolapse-i-wonder-when-theyre-going-to-destroy-your-face-review/

BlankFor.ms

After The Town Was Swept Away

Brooklyn-based ambient music composer stringing degraded tape loops into sinister new shapes

After The Town Was Swept Away by BlankFor.ms

The music of BlankFor.ms, aka Tyler Gilmore, emphasises duality, at its core representing both the calm and chaos of everyday life. The Brooklyn-based ambient artist is known for his disruption and manipulation of degraded tape loops, taking a medium which is by definition repetitive and making it unpredictable, shadowing the beats with slow, shifting synths which are sometimes sinister, sometimes glorious.

Gilmore’s third solo album contains audible elements of his 2023 jazz-electronica album Refract, released in collaboration with pianist Jason Moran and drummer Marcus Gilmore. ‘Crail Family Post Office’ is where this is most apparent, with somewhat atonal…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/blankfor-ms-after-the-town-was-swept-away-review/

Noel Gardner’s guide to the greatest in the British underground returns, with vaporous synths, leftfield new age bubblers, avowedly fuck-off noise music and more

Alula Down, photo by Omar Majeed

As best possible, it’s healthy to ignore rank and downplay reputation, certainly in the circles being addressed in these columns. Let’s put everyone on an equal footing and have it that the most exciting and chatter-worthy pick of any given crop can easily be some barely-released nano-edition made by people whose existence remains in question. Alternatively, you can have a new album by Ramleh, a world-renowned name in British noise and experimental rock, and lead with that one because it’s great, and inspires feelings.

Recorded as the long-settled Ramleh trio of founder member…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/new-weird-britain/new-weird-britain-in-review-for-september-by-noel-gardner/

Guedra Guedra

Mutant

On his second full-length album, Abdellah M. Hassak creates sonic cartography

MUTANT by Guedra Guedra كدرة كدرة

Mutant is evocative. From the first seconds, the album by the Moroccan producer conjures up images where a day-to-day routine of the urban anthill reveals adventurous, nearly surrealist details. Intense, throbbing and multidimensional, it connects various dots on the world map: North Africa, the Caribbean, Detroit and London. On the opening ‘Drift Of Drummer’, a swirl of looped traditional djembé percussion, distant chants akin to muezzin calls break into energetic Detroit-style techno. Here, the soundscape of a megapolis, with ambulance sirens delivered by analogue synths, merges with palpitations of djembé, customarily played in rural areas of Guinea to invigorate workers in fields.

Following the debut…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/guedra-guedra-mutant-review/

For our latest exclusive release for our subscribers, Material Object has supplied six colossal tracks of extraordinary widescreen electronics. He speaks to Alex Maiolo about the recording and his career thus far

“Damn, this dude likes sub bass,” says Tony Rolando.

I’ve just sent links to music by my newest discovery, Material Object, to Rolando and “Rodent” Chislak of the modular synth company, Make Noise.Why? Because I’m sending links to everyone in the synthosphere. With 26 releases on Bandcamp, there’s a lot to mine and, by the way, I should cop to the fact that I haven’t really “discovered” anything. Material Object is well into his second decade of releasing music. Considering it’s right up my street, I’m feeling a little late…

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source https://thequietus.com/subscriber-area/music-downloads/tq-subscriber-release-material-objects-cloud-chamber/

Catch up with everything we wrote about last month

The observant among you might well notice that this month the mediaeval woodcut figure that accompanies our monthly subscriber playlist has a new look. This is because on Thursday we’re announcing some changes to our subs system to mark our seventeenth birthday – keep your eyes peeled to find out what they are. In the meantime, our Subscriber and Subscriber Plus tier members can access over four hours of music connected to everything we were writing about in the long, long month of August 2025. Here’s what everyone in the state of mind that is tQHQ though were the best of the month in our round-up column, you can get stuck in to the…

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source https://thequietus.com/subscriber-area/monthly-playlists/your-august-subscriber-playlist-is-here/