STN recommends: 10/7/17

As every year, the Indietracks Festival compilation features plenty of pop thrills, and at £4 for 45 tracks and all proceeds to the Midland Railway Trust you'd be a fool not to take on its delights. For one, there's The Office Worker from the new Mammoth Penguins album John Doe, a concept record featuring Sophie from Haiku Salut, presumably on the electronics. We know little about the record thus far but more should be revealed when they play our night at Leicester Firebug on Wednesday 26th July supporting Chorusgirl, with awkward noisepoppers Jesuscarfish opening. Also sneaking back with their swooning jangle present and correct, if slightly beefier and feedback-y, come fellow STN Presents alumni The Understudies with the lovelorn Is There Gonna Be Dancing? Oh, while we're on Emma Kupa, her immediate release concern is The Heyman Kupa Band's long promised album out on the 21st, Over's Now Overdue bittersweet summer pop finding its meter in this weather.

It's six years since we've heard from Emil Svanängen's awkward pop noir as Loney Dear, his self-titled seventh album released via Peter Gabriel's Real World Records on 22nd September and previewed by Sum, built on bruised confessionals and apreggiating synths like a low budget Bon Iver. Similarly melancholic in an expansive field of modernity is Lost Horizons, newly signed to Bella Union for album Ojalá out November 3rd, which is reasonable given it's Simon Raymonde's own project with Cocteaus-associated 4AD band Dif Juz's Richie Thomas and a selection of guest singers, here the Innocence Mission's Karen Peris swooning in widescreen and making the album a fascinating prospect. The unexpected about-face of Wolf Alice continues - breathy, hazy, built on layers of synths and shoegaze dynamics that devolve into open road dreaminess and sounding nothing like Yuk Foo, it bodes fascinatingly for Visions Of A Life, out 29th September. Ghostpoet's Dark Days & Canapés... well, it has a terrible title, but the album out August 18th promises to be uneasily brooding in an adjacent way to his previous work, very reminiscent of Massive Attack's incoporation of darkly menacing post-punk into their dynamic on Mezzanine.

Hey, time for white indie boy to write about grime, and Dizzee Rascal's back amongst us! No superstar producer, no big name guest slots and definitely no shouting James Corden, Wot U Gonna Do? is self-critical dark drama, Boy In Da Corner grown up and paranoid for what he did with all those years. Skepta, two years Dizzee's senior but who took the long way round to a comparable level of fame, goes in - and not just on the traditional HATERZ - on surprise new track Hypocrisy.

The story so far: STN's top 40 albums of the first half of 2017

So now we've covered the best tracks of the year so far on a month by month basis, let's move on to the longform stuff. Feel free to remind us of these come the end of the year when something else from these six months overtakes the lot.

Algiers - The Underside Of Power
At The Drive-In - in•ter a•li•a
Big Thief - Capacity
Celebration - Wounded Healer
Christian Fitness - slap bass hunks
Cloud Nothings - Life Without Sound
Craig Finn - We All Want The Same
Fazerdaze - Morningside
Fleet Foxes - Crack-Up
Gallops - Bronze Mystic
Grandaddy - Last Place
H. Grimace - Self-Architect
H Hawkline - I Romanticize
Hurray For The Riff Raff - The Navigator
Idles - Brutalism
Jane Weaver - Modern Kosmology
Jens Lekman - Life Will See You Now
Laura Marling - Semper Femina
Los Campesinos! - Sick Scenes
Meursault - I Will Kill Again
Milo's Planes - Individual Development Plan
The Mountain Goats - Goths
Napoleon IIIrd - The Great Lake
Novella - Change Of State
Perfume Genius - No Shape
Piano Magic - Closure
Post War Glamour Girls - Swan Songs
Priests - Nothing Feels Natural
Ralegh Long - Upwards Of Summer
Rose Elinor Dougall - Stellular
Run The Jewels - Run The Jewels 3
Saint Etienne - Home Counties
Sean Rowe - In Darkened Rooms
Spiral Stairs - Doris and the Daggers
Spoon - Hot Thoughts
Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, James McAlister - Planetarium
Storm The Palace - Snow, Stars And Public Transport
Sweet Baboo - Wild Imagination
Why? - Moh Lhean
Wire - Silver/Lead

STN recommends... June 2017

Sorry about the lack of recent posts, but everything we've really liked in the last fortnight or so that's on Spotify is included regardless in the sixth monthly roundup of what we've loved lately:




Things that aren't on Spotify that we've liked since the last post: Warm Digits' electrifying glam-kosmiche stomp promising ever more for album Wireless World out 4th August;the bewitching twisted psych-indie of The Graphites; Parenthetical Girls' Zac Pennington going solo with left of centre string-soaked bruised romance as Comedienne; longserving Birmingham scene noisepopniks Sunshine Frisbee Laserbeam; the effervescent harmonic jangle of Charmpit; charmingly offhand lo-fi pop from Jetstream Pony (featuring sometime members of the Wedding Present, Trembling Blue Stars and the Fireworks); the (supposedly) unaffected sunshine pop of Baby!; Floreana's MJ-recorded charging punk-pop shapes (self-titled debut out now); and the return of The Indelicates, and the only logical response to finding that Simon and Julia have written a glam racket about Jimmy Savile is "what took them so long?" The album Juniverbrecher (usual array of magnificent crowdfunding options therein) also features a track called The Bins.