The Drink - The Coming Rain

Things have slowed up around here as the number of things we can post has slowed up just as dramatically as the number of readers. Don't worry, there'll still be far more end of the year gubbins than you could ever handle regardless. And as it stands The Drink's upcoming album Capital, out on the 13th, may well be in the album of the year big rundown if this serpentine, barbed slinkiness is any guide.

Old reliables: Johnny Foreigner and Martha

Johnny Foreigner - Flooding

Alcopop! are putting out at split 12" - yellow, of course - with Dog Knights Productions featuring Playlounge, Doe, Doctrines and two new songs from these old peculiars, from which we've picked the second and its self-examination to crunchy compacted riffing.




Martha - Chekov's Hangnail

And Pity Me's own have new material coming out on a split vinyl too, a 7" with Radiator Hospital to mark their joint tour that starts at the end of October, choc full of power-pop hooky charge, accented harmonies and existential anguish.

Tessera Skies - Such Great Heights (Raindrops)

No, not a Postal Service cover but a continuation of the Newcastle trio's record of putting out one great track a year. A single released on the 16th, this is notably far more filled out than their previous crystalline sound, filling out their space atmospherics with emotive, stratospheric build and big sweeping Fripptroniced guitar sounds.

And more again

Tindersticks - We Are Dreamers

Tindersticks' tenth album, The Waiting Room out - oh lord - 22nd January 2016, arrives with a great amount of bubbling restraint even by their standards. Savages' Jehnny Beth pops by to offer counterpoint to Stuart Staples' always reliable baritone. They may have settled into their particular groove but they're still wriggling around in fear of the human condition within it.

Tindersticks - We are dreamers! from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Post War Glamour Girls - Cannonball Villages

From the second half of their two-part Feeling Strange album, out 30th October, a return to a default doomy state over eight and a half heavy minutes of shuddering shards of guitar noise, barely pent up rage born of frustration.




The Spook School - Binary

The big obvious pop hit from second album Try To Be Helpful, out 9th October, ever since they debuted it last summer, informed lyrically by gender norms and singer Nye Todd's trans identity and musically by a joyful rush of pop-post-punk.




Bruising - Emo Friends

Touring with Los Campesinos! in November ahead of this 7" out on the 20th, the Leeds duo trade in misleadingly coy west coast harmonies and Breeders-recalling fuzzed up summer riffs.




Freddy Lobos - I'm Fucking I'm Free

Huge Part Chimp-recalling riffs and anxious quiet-loud dynamics drive the debut offering from a band featuring some of Ex Comets and (soon to become extinct) Maybeshewill's John Helps.

Gramma's Boyfriend - I Live My Broken Dreams

Following on from her STN Top 50 of last year album Last War, Haley Bonar has formed a side-project band that takes her dark power-pop leanings into spiky new wave dance-punk directions like Devo fronted by Throwing Muses, Bonar developing an unhealthy-sounding snarl alongside. Album PERM is out October 9th.

Everything great that happened since we went to End Of The Road and now need to catch up on

The Drink - No Memory

A second album less than a year after their debut, Capital out 13th November, here the trio aim for a beguiling kind of motorik pastorialism, bursting from semi-drone into outbreaks of colour, folky mini-solos to the fore.




Dilly Dally - Purple Rage

Dirty and angry, like a post-grunge intersection of Breeders/Veruca Salt controlled rage and prime Siamese Dream Smashing Pumpkins forcefulness, Toronto's Dilly Dally see anger as an energy, cementing Katie Monks as a sheer unfuckwithable presence. Debut album Sore is released 9th October.




Darren Hayman - Nuns Run The Apothecary

Hayman's first truly solo album Florence, out 6th November, was recorded at Elizabeth Morris of Allo Darlin's Firenze flat in the depths of last winter, providing a sparse backdrop for his thoughtful, detailed observational style that sees his recent politicised leanings take a breather in favour of the elegance of personal beauty.




The Radio Dept. - This Repeated Sodomy

A very Radio Dept title and a very Lesser Matters sort of Radio Dept track, less than two and a half minutes of chiming distorted guitars and quietly charged/cynical lyrics. It might qualify as a summer sound but they're too keen to make things wonky for that.




Chorusgirl - Oh, To Be A Defector

We wrote about Chorusgirl initially at the end of July, where we described them as "tak(ing) up the female-fronted fuzzbomb art-pop baton that the Darling Buds, Lush and the Long Blondes help patent - jangling guitars carrying along a bucketful of big hooks, Silvi Wersing's strident, cool-as vocals, joy camouflaging the pain". And as Fortuna Pop! pick them up for a self-titled album out 13th November that about carries it here, art-noir cocksure in its internalised pain.




Alimony Hustle - BNOC

We introduced you to the Bristolians back in March; now having announced some support dates with Trust Fund their new single is all focused anger both pointedly lyrically and in their huge sound for a duo.




Trust Fund - Football

Speak of the devil, Ellis and co's second album of 2015 Seems Unfair is out October 30th, again with MJ on recording duty, again expressing personal doubt and failure of basic humanity codes through the medium of barbed jangle.

SHOPPING - Straight Lines

Looking back, it seems the only time we've featured SHOPPING on here before is when we put their debut album Consumer Complaints in our top 50 albums of 2013 (number 33, to be precise) We're suckers, you may have noticed, for itchy tripwire post-punk jerkiness, and this from second album Why Choose, out 2nd October through FatCat, is a perfect demonstration, spiralling frantic post-punk guitars of a Slits/Au Pairs stripe holding on for their lives to Gang Of Four-influenced duelling vocal lines and a fragmentary sprint of a rhythm section. All very passive-aggressive on the dancefloor tonight.

Amateur Best - They Know

As Amateur Best, Birmingham-based sometime Chilly Gonazles collaborator Joe Flory makes classic warm electronic pop that suggests there's something going on amid the layers under the glistening synth hooks up top, like a shaken East India Youth attempting to straighten out. The vocals on this single from second album The Gleaners exhibit a quietly soulful melancholia bordering on paranoia, something that knows it could be a lot more obvious and hit-making than this melodically but would rather play in the deep end.

Beach Fatigue - Drunken Grrrls

No, not a Kathleen Hanna/LCD Soundsystem combination, and not a new band either - it's our old friends from down south Wales Heavy Petting Zoo, who've changed their name through growing embarrassment at their old monicker and ahead of a now eponymous self-released debut album. (Yes, they still have the dancer.) Ahead of all that comes this single on 30th October which reinforces the dirt cool they do best - intensifying surf guitars, Nuggets garage darkness, Amy Zachariah​'s strident vocals that mock, stare down and dare you to turn away.

TRAAMS - Succulent Thunder Anthem

You know sometimes you can just tell a band has realised what they're good at and acted accordingly? TRAAMS' first album of retro-modern college rock pricked the attention, but the first taste of its follow-up Modern Dancing out... what? 13th November? We might all be dead by then!... anyway, it takes very familiar tropes and makes them into something vital, an urgent charge of shoegaze tremelo, pained deathly new wave-esque sing-shouting and a runaway HGV of a chorus thrust.

Grubs - Windwaker

Grubs are Roxy of Two White Cranes and now Joanna Gruesome, Owen always of Joanna Gruesome and Jake of being Jake, and they make scrappy short bursts of ADHD indie-pop rush that let on more than they seem. Their debut album It Must Be Grubs, out 11th September, is eighteen minutes long, which seems about right.

Chorusgirl - No Moon

Emerging as one of the breakout stars of this weekend just gone's Indietracks (much as Indietracks can truly have a breakout band, but you know what we mean), Chorusgirl take up the female-fronted fuzzbomb art-pop baton that the Darling Buds, Lush and the Long Blondes help patent - jangling guitars carrying along a bucketful of big hooks, Silvi Wersing's strident, cool-as vocals, joy camouflaging the pain. Their contribution to Odd Box Records' 100 Club series (already sold out on vinyl) sounds radio ready, if radio was ever interested in radio-ready guitar pop any more.

Post War Glamour Girls - Felonious Punk

Great title. No idea what's going on with this new track, either in intentions - introduced with no content it's possibly a track from a new album or EP - or in sound, as the brooding dam bursts into something ultra-distorted and actually not too far in noisy riffola scope and undercurrents of electronics from Muse. Sorry, guys. On top of all that James Smith's dark fury at everything else remains thankfully undiminished.

Gun Outfit - Gotta Wanna

We've written about Olympia, Washington's Gun Outfit on and off over the years, usually commending their lo-fi streamlined attack in the ballpark of Sebadoh and No Age. Yeah, well, forget all that for the first single from their fourth album Dream All Over, out 16th October, as they've moved to LA and gone all Nancy and Lee, set out in the dust-swept canyons and night-time creep of an imaginary outlaw western as singer-guitarists Carrie Keith and Dylan Sharp twang, shuffle and sort of harmonise after berating each other's fortunes.

DRINKS - Laying Down Rock

A quick one as we need to catch up - the second single from Cate Le Bon and Tim Presley of White Fence's collaboration, a purposefully awkward jigsaw piece of riff repetition-based west coast psychedelia.

Grandbrothers - Arctica

Grandbrothers are two men from Germany, one a jazz pianist, the other involved in synth construction who found a way to control every part of a grand piano, metal, wood and strings inclusive, via especially constructed electromechanical hammers controlled via laptop and associated gizmos to manipulate those sounds on debut album Dilation. It's much more interesting than it sounds, here like a Philip Glass suite looped and glitched in intriguing ways.

The School - Do I Love You?

Frank Wilson's Northern Soul stomper is famous for its rarity in original pressing form (obviously it's all over compilations these days), which makes the prospect of an female perspective answer song an intriguing one. The Cardiff multi-handed retro-pop classicists who headlined our Indiepop Alldayer back in March go for it in much the same timeless talc-on-the-Casino-floor style on the single from their third album Wasting Away And Wondering, due in September.

Twenty years of recommended listening

For no special reason, we decided to extend the 20-track year-specific Spotify playlists we put together to celebrate STN's tenth anniversary in April back another ten years. So, with those original compilations appended, presenting two decades of STN-approved music:

1995
1996 part one
1996 part two
1997
1998
1999
2000 part one
2000 part two
2001
2002
2003
2004

Ten Years Of STN (no artist replicated over these lists)

2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014

Christian Fitness - The Harder It Hits

Christian Fitness, remember, is what Andrew Falkous does by himself (drums aside) between Future Of The Left albums. A second album, he says, is due within the next couple of weeks; in the meantime a song a subtle distance away from FOTL's usual load, featuring nasal falsetto vocals, shredded delay pedal guitars, disco percussion handclaps and a hook that you'd almost call commercial. Plus obtuse ire-filled lyrics, obviously.

Trust Fund - Dreams

A MJ-produced standalone single ahead of a prospective second album this year from Ellis and co, a slightly more streamlined and early-Weezer-in-a-cellar indebted sound sees Alanna McArdle sharing the vocal duties on a fun-sized charging summery pop belter laced with requisite undercurrent of self-doubt.