November spawned some monsters

Another Sky - Aimee Caught A Moth
Chemtrails - Detritus Andronicus
Gruff Rhys - Silver Lining Lead Balloons
Jane Weaver - Love In Constant Spectacle
Jesus & Mary Chain - jamcod
Julia Holter - Sun Girl
ladylike - Southbound
Laetitia Sadier – Une Autre Attente
Lala Lala - Armida
Lynks - (WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FROM) SEX WITH A STRANGER
Marika Hackman - Slime
The Menstraul Cramps - Body Politics
Nadine Shah - Twenty Things
Peaness - Kiss Me Sweet Pea
Private Party - bahama mama
Sarah Walk - My Body
TVAM - Ephemerol
Will Sheff – Tommy McHugh
Witching Waves - The Valley

30 golden greats (released over the last month)

Anna Hillburg - How Do You Make Believe
Antonymes feat. Sarah Nixey - Coming Out Of Silence
bar italia – worlds greatest emoter
Bill Botting & The Two Drink Minimums - Cecily
Cheekface - Largest Muscle
City Parking - Carl
Cloud Nothings - Final Summer
Dancer - Cordon Bleu
deep tan - xenomorph queen
Emma Anderson - I Was Miles Away
English Teacher - Nearly Daffodils
Everything Everything - Cold Reactor
Felicette - Go To Hell
Get Wrong - Too Late To Hide
Grandaddy - Watercooler
Kaeto - No Body
Living Body - NO DEBT
Lonely Tourist - This Place Takes A Lot Of Beating
Man/Woman/Chainsaw - What Lucy Found There
Mayshe-Mayshe - Shadowbloom
Nadine Shah - Topless Mother
nathy sg - corporate lawyer
Pagan Wanderer Lu - 1984 (Is Not A Manual)
Sharon Van Etten - Close To You
Shelf Lives - KIDS
Spearmint - Let It Go
Tapir! - My God
Trust Fund - our american tour
Two White Cranes - City Streets
Witching Waves - Vessel

Another week of new songs

We do want to start putting descriptions on these so we aren't just throwing context-free names at you, but nobody's reading this blog any more so why put extra effort in.

Atka - Lenny
Flip Top Head - Alfred Street
Grove - MILF MAGNET
Gruff Rhys - Celestial Candyfloss
HONESTY - TUNE IN TUNE OUT
I, Doris - Do It Yourself
Jemma Freeman & The Cosmic Something - Hoping For a Miracle
Keg - Quip Quash
ME REX - Infinity Worm
The Mountain Goats - Murder At The 18th St. Garage
O. - Slice
The Popguns - Caesar
Popular Music - Sad Songs
TORRES - Collect

Dancer - Love

We came across Glasgow sort-of-supergroup Dancer back in February when we were highly impressed by their awkward groove take on sprechgesang norms, since when we've seen them live - and so can you in October as they're playing London, Southend, Nottingham and Oxford with math instrumentalists Theresa Kelly and Dry Cleaning busman's holidaying fingerpicker TD - and accepted that they have magnetically on-point art-post-punkish expressiveness up the wazoo. And so it further seems with news of a second EP, As Well, on 13th October. The Life Without Buildings comparisons have been more than done already but it's most apparent in the way the constituent parts of Love play off each other and almost sprawl outwards in their own adroit while still nervy pace. Good to hear Gemma Fleet is still carefully pre-announcing the tracks too.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
Fazerdaze - Bigger
Lynks - NEW BOYFRIEND
Office Dog - Big Air
The Serfs - Electric Like An Eel

Get Wrong - It's So Easy

Yeah, funnily enough the Martha/Spook School collaboration has been fast-tracked into full blog honours, why do you ask? Yes, Adam Todd has returned from the moon in advance of the rest of the band's upcoming tenth anniversary dates, landed in Durham and united with four stringer Naomi Griffin for a self-titled EP to be released on 1st December through reliable old Alcopop! in the UK. Just to make sure we'd really love it it's produced, recorded, and mixed by Field Music's Peter Brewis, with David on mastering duty. And after all that... actually it's not what you may expect, as the pair decided to swerve their well known backgrounds and embrace their love of 80s synthpop (yeah, we know that's not exactly breaking new ground, but keep going) and current pop tropes, producing in its lead track something infectious that pulses and drones like dreampop while finding a new speck of space on the crowded neon dancefloor, while lyrically touching on areas both bands have approached, expressing love and affection through the joy, nostalgia and opportunity in the everyday. It's the most likeable retro-futurist electro track we've heard in a good while, and also features the lyric "you eat crisps louder than anyone I've ever encountered".



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
bar italia - my little tony
Crumb & Melody's Echo Chamber - Le Temple Volant
The David Tattersall Group - Bright Moon
Emma Anderson - Clusters
Spearmint - Prince And Joni
Sufjan Stevens – Will Anybody Ever Love Me?

Mclusky - unpopular parts of a pig/the digger you deep

Feels like this bit is unnecessary, but here goes. Having reformed, after a fashion given two thirds of them were serving in Future Of The Left in between, in 2014 this is the first new Mclusky material in nineteen years, a four track double A-side/EP/something released to fund a US tour with a full album promised for next year. And... it sounds like Mclusky. Which is to say it thunders like a bastard thrashing its way to the centre of the earth and Falco's lyrics are still far clear of everyone else's in their blast range.

Chemtrails - Business Class War Paint

Concentrating readers and STN Presents... supporters will know how much everything Mia, Laura and the rest do has excited us across two albums of full-on hook-laden acid-psych-garage. Having made their first two albums in their living room and since the last moved to Manchester the third, due early in 2024, was entrusted to Margo Broom, whose credits include both Big Joanie albums and Fat White Family's Songs For Our Mothers among a general selection of cussed noisemongers. It's a good sideways shift too, toned down maybe half a notch as they find a peppy groove to complement the askew melody and ever present creeping existential dread, throwing in a girl group vocal breakdown to complement the harmonies because they can. If you're in or near Manchester, Nottingham, Worcester, London or Sheffield they're on their way to you in the first half of next month.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
TVAM - Costasol
Slate - St Agatha

ME REX - Giant Giant Giant

After seven EPs and that one album they did comprising 52 song snippets that could be played in any order (Megabear), indie-post-emo titans and headliners of this year's Leicester Indiepop Alldayer* ME REX are finally becoming an album band as of October 20th, which is when Giant Elk is released. Its second single typically sets Myles McCabe's tumbling fountain of ideas and self-examination against similarly post-Los Campesinos! anxious build and release into an impassioned chorus.

(* tickets available for 2024 now! Now! Now! Lineup to follow in a few weeks, and if all goes well with putting it together we're surer than ever it'll sell out double quick)






ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
Grrrl Gang - Better Than Life
HALEY - Walk Among The Dead
HMS Morris - Balls
Lael Neale - I'll Be Your Star
Laurence-Anne - Vitesse
Melin Melyn - I Paint Dogs
Muriel - Lavender By The Frames
Problem Patterns - Poverty Tourist
Swansea Sound - Twentieth Century
University - Notre Dame Made Out Of Flesh

Away for the summer?

Yeah, we've let things lapse a little. As an apology of musical sorts, here's a 40-strong playlist of (probably) everything we'd have featured since our last post on July 3rd:



(While we've got Spotify open, the Unglamorous Sampler is on there now)

Corinne Bailey Rae - New York Transit Queen

So we were casually looking at Spotify's punk playlist the other day and noticed it included a new track by Corinne Bailey Rae, the Leeds neo-soul singer who nearly became about as big as any British soul talent could. Weird algorithm glitch, right? Well... before falling into the local soul scene and being spotted she was in a band called Helen, which she has said was inspired by Veruca Salt and L7 and nearly got signed to Roadrunner Records, and covered Belly's Low Red Moon on her 2011 covers EP The Love. Her forthcoming fourth album, Black Rainbows, her first in seven years (out September 15th), is inspired by the archive of the Chicago installation artist and Black urban communities specialist Theaster Gates and seems like it will be a genre hopping exercise using her usual sound as a springboard. New York Transit Queen, taking after Thelma Potter, who in 1947 became the first African-American to win the Miss Subways competition in NYC, is sub-two minutes of handclaps, vocal cadence like a schoolyard chant and a big hook riff, all like something that might have been heard in a subterranean dive in Portland or Olympia, Washington around 1990, or indeed the Highbury Garage around 1997 (see posts passim). I f this ends up as a one-off stylistically it's a spectacular one.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
Blur - St Charles Square
Furrowed Brow - Outdoors Man
Das Koolies - A Ride
Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam - Apocalypse
LYR - Paradise Lost
Good News - Kishki
DAAY – Top Heavy
Rachael Lavelle - Let Me Unlock Your Full Potential
Trips And Falls - Wandering Thoughts
The Hazmats - Skewed View