Private Party - Could've Asked Sooner

It's Focus Wales, the actual most important thing in Wrexham, next week, we're making our now annual visit and one of the highlights as far as we're concerned will be (hopefully) getting to catch Private Party, a prenaturally young quintet from Swansea whose half-dreamy, emotionally conflicted chiming Artifical Feelings EP from last July was one of our favourite discoveries of this year, and not just ours as Welsh radio's finest Adam Walton called them "the sound of the future". Their new single is more direct, as songs that last 2:17 tend to be, but no less involving, harnessing a classy, some might say summery timeless janglepop melody to their own ends. Plus, and let's not overlook this as an attraction, their singer is called Violet Sourbutts.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
John Monroe & Field Music - Sleeping On The Floor
LYR - Presidentially Yours

Broken Records - You Won't Be There

Now, that's a name we haven't heard in a long time. Broken Records burst out of Edinburgh in 2007, a multi-handed folk-pop collective of mini-orchestral chorality and tunnel vision intensity who collected Bright Eyes/Arcade Fire/Beirut press comparisons as if it were a game of modern Americana I-Spy, the excitement getting them signed to 4AD for their first two albums. They inevitably drifted off the radar but they're back, back, back, with a fifth album (first in five years too) later in the year that approaches the grandiosity of The National while keeping itself grounded in that particular Scottish turf of ambitious folk-indie and, having left its raucous past behind it for now, finds itself awake late into the night contemplating, Jamie Sutherland citing an influence from 90s REM (well, maybe not Monster or Up)

Broken Records Band · You Won't Be There

ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
Only Fools And Corpses - GREENHOUSE
Single Mothers - Sad Dumb Game
Slate - Tabernacl
Tugboat Captain - Like Caroline

cumgirl8 - Cicciolina

Yep. There is, of course, a certain knowing artiness to a New York female band with that name, not one you choose just to fit in but also signalling a smuggling of gender, sexual and feminist theory under the guise of boho electro-post-punk, it being entirely unsurprising to find they're playing some summer US dates with the reactivated Le Tigre. After a couple of releases last year they've wormed their way into the 4AD fold with a single that while not the first track to be named after and written in honour of the once much publicised porn star/politician feels like the one closest to her spirit (if not her actual music), grotty disco-punk laced with fucked up synth washes, ESG basslines, threatening stage whispers and CSS-esque gang sign post-electroclash all-out indie disco destroying brio.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
Dream Wife - Orbit
bar italia - punkt
The Last Dinner Party - Nothing Matters

Lambrini Girls - Lads Lads Lads

Brighton's Lambrini Girls are the visceral distorted riff juggernaut you've wanted all along, enough a part of the punk lineage to be opening for Iggy Pop, Blondie, Buzzcocks and Generation Sex (Billy Idol, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Generation X/Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Tony James) at Crystal Palace Park soon but for the dominant part a gleefully undisguised Kathleen Hanna-influenced fearless fury a la M(h)aol, a more sarcasm wielding Dream Nails or, oh go on then, a sociopolitical Amyl & the Sniffers, that by all accounts and 100% believably goes even harder live. Taken from upcoming debut EP You're Welcome, out 19th May on the estimable Big Scary Monsters, the toxic token title is in context very self-explanatory.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
Shangri-Lass - Father's Daughter

Snailosaur - Fake Cobblestone Alleys

Snailosaur, a pair of brothers from Brooklyn with this one EP out, clearly owe a debt to Dinosaur Jr in both the vocal approximation of classic J Mascis and the tone of the solos that blazes through parts of the song, but the rest owes more to the kind of unsteady slacker-core that wouldn't have sounded out of place in 1993 by way of an acoustic undertow that wrongfoots any attempt to place them as just revivalists.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
two white cranes - it's on me
HOURGLVSS - Calling
The Dirt - Power Junkie
Minor Conflict - White Ring Binder
Oslo Twins - Breath

Say She She - Reeling

REPORTS: Disco "doesn't suck". Say She She are a Brooklyn trio styled after a Chic Organisation graduate right down to the band name (c'est chi-chi), all over the classic 70s soul group harmonies and groove without sounding much like a Seventies Night events band. Following last September's debut album Prism comes a song they say was "written as an incantation from Mother Earth to the masses to join the rising against the calamitous forces of unfettered capitalism that has left our seas and skies grappling", their callouts subtly cut with electronics underpinning the funk and more than a hint of Tom Tom Club-adjacent post-disco. They do sound like they'd be a night's entertainment and a half, which for UK readers is unfortunat as they've just finished going round the country, but are due back over at the end of summer for the pure starlight disco dolly exuberances of *checks dates* Green Man, Manchester Psych Fest and End Of The Road.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
Dexys - I'm Going To Get Free
Cheekface - Popular 2
Laurence-Anne - Polymorphe

Neev - The House

There's if anything too many intimate singer-songwriters these days but Glasgow-raised Neev feels like she has something a cut above the majority. Taken from debut album Katherine, out on April 28th, The House is a plaintive self-investigation of domesticity, breaking relationships and thwarted dreams coloured by circling strings and her own longing phrasing.



ALSO WORTH YOUR ATTENTION:
LUNGE - This Idle Motion
Special Friend - Bête
Dragnet - Strike
System Exclusive - Part Time Pierre