New sounds: 18/3/24

Campfire Social - Swim Swam Swum
North Wales and border's Campfire Social have been around for quite a while, 2017 to be exact, and are only now approaching their debut album, due in the summer. Its first taste synthesises their emo-leant infectiously forceful harmonic folk-pop into bigger shapes that could fit next to the New Pornographers or City & Colour as much as Death Cab For Cutie.



Fast Blood - Sexual Healing
A good scream in the first two seconds, that's the way. Newcastle punks Fast Blood, another band who've been about for years but only just up to an album (Sunny Blunts, out 3rd May) race out of the traps with Amyl & the Sniffers/Descendents level of undeniable forward thrust and a similar attitude to sexual mores ("we wanted to reimagine Black Flag's Slip It In from a woman's perspective" say they), tripping over themselves to establish a huge hook amid the rush.



Mammoth Penguins - Everything That I Write
Ah, Ms Kupa again. Everything she melodically touches is gold, as you should well know by now, and there's still no reason to believe fourth album Here won't add to the pile come 3rd May, once again knowing when to hold back and when to kick into the sharpened riffs.



Mouse Teeth - Rituals
Nancy Dawkins was nearly a teenage singer-songwriting sensation but took time away, then was forced to take tiem away by long chronic illness. She's come out the other side with the bit, possibly a sword, between her teeth, a cathartically poetic semi-howl on grief, pain and the search for meaning through the weight of routine amid a churning, similarly raging backing by members of Maybeshewill. It leads Ten Of Swords EP, out May 3rd.



Vampire Weekend - Classical
This might be here solely because Ezra's guitar part sounds like it should be from a mid-80s Children's BBC theme.



Walt Disco - You Make Me Feel So Dumb
Glasgow's most flamboyant amateur dramatists sort of slipped beneath the waves of the hype ocean over the time it took them to get an album, which was a shame for a band with so many idiosyncratic ideas. The burnt out vulnerabilties draped in clipped Nileish disco licks of the single from second album The Warping, out June 14th, might tell their own intrinsic story but they set the dancefloor lights and hands aloft going anyway and, in the best move of all, it only succumbs to the saxophone at the very, very end.