The noise-rock band's second album is a breakthrough: insidiously catchy, incomprehensibly groovy, and fueled by righteous fury.

Seven albums in, the L.A. band continues to channel '90s-inspired alt-rock. The record's pleasant sound and seamless production only exacerbate the feeling of stasis.

The Asheville guitarist takes a new approach on his latest album for Drag City, using a surprisingly gentle sound to frame his customary meditations on political resistance and liberation.

Now settled into a steady lineup, the iconic black metal band sounds reliable and reverent—but they shine when things get a little weird.

The London band's first new music since 2025's Cosplay

The six-song record, i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley, is due on March 20

Sam Beam will bring his new album, Hen's Teeth, on the road this October

Something to conjure crisp green growth from the mind-mud, courtesy of Juni Habel.

The title track from the upcoming album Evergreen In Your Mind, due out on Basin Rock in April.

We wouldn't usually run Shadows & Reflections this far into the New Year, but due to last week's editorial gastrointestinal disaster, we're a bit behind! No complaints from us though about drawing out our most favourite season of submissions just a little bit longer.

In one of the last handful of 2025/6 pieces, artist and writer Sam Francis contemplates the Malvern hills — which hold her family history in their haunches.

But on a May morning on Malvern Hills
A wonder befell me, an enchantment I thought.
I was weary with wandering and went for a rest
Under a broad bank beside a stream
And as I lay and leaned down and looked on the waters
I fell into a sleep as it flowed so sweetly.

- The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland

I found this book on the shelves where my Grandma's poetry books live in the single spare room where I sleep when I visit. Like most of her books, it is deeply annotated in light pencil scrawls — always difficult to decipher, and more so as she got older. She was an English teacher, and an avid reader of poetry amongst other things. She loved Hardy the best. She liked that he told of ordinary lives, and that his words were grounded in everyday realism. My fierce Grandma, who while was encouraging of my writing, when I sent her something that had been published, said it was pretentious. Be more like Hardy, she meant. 

In May this year, my Grandma died in bed, at home, in Malvern. 

The Malvern hills have been omnipresent in my life. Those shapely rolling hills that dominate the otherwise flat lands of Worcestershire, or so it seems from the Worcestershire Beacon looking 360 degrees over to Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and further beyond to Wales.  Having grown up there, at the foot of the North West hillside, they were my playground. As a teen I resented being dragged up their banks on family walks, yet gathered with friends for boozy rendezvous — they were our stomping ground. When I was young I couldn't wait to leave Malvern to escape the confinement of its beauty. I wanted more grittiness in my own realism back then. 

Malvern is somewhere I've regularly returned to throughout my life. I know the hills well. I've walked up and down and across their spine, their edges, and explored their high and low places, the lay of their land. I've slept on them, kissed on them, cried with them, dreamed with them, enchanted. As I turn off the M5 there they are, holding my family history in their haunches, all those tangled memories of lives played out there, the joys and the sadnesses. It always felt like going home. My Mum, who lived in Malvern since her own childhood, eventually moved from the hills to the coast, then five years ago my Grandfather died. This October, my Grandma's husband (my Step-Grandfather) of 45 years, died too. Their house is now slowly being dismantled, and emptied of them. The walls that housed their lives soon to be put up for sale.  

All this marks the loss of one tier of my family line, and the end of any familial ties to the place that connected me to my family history and my formative years. In a peculiar way that I don't really understand when I first notice it, it feels as if Malvern itself has been a part of the family itself. A sturdy, unmoveable member who is unfailingly there. I feel as if i'm also grieving the loss of a place. People talk about grief being layered. Though it feels to me more like folds turning in on themselves, or more like a wrapping - much like leaves do to a tree in spring. I find myself drawn into attempting to make sense of the strange feeling this brings about of a place as a person, being, or entity so stitched into the fabric of family, with all of its memories and traces and sense of belonging contained within it. 

Place attachment is the emotional bond people form with a location, serving as a way to describe the relationship between people and the places they inhabit. But what do you do when the people that occupied a place are no longer there? Is the place then stripped of its meaning? How does a place exist as an entity in its own right? Can we mourn the loss of a place as a person even though it still continues to exist? Might a place hold as much importance as a person? And I wonder if I have a tendency to anthropomorphise things even though I don't believe this is the only way of something non-human being itself for itself? Does this make the thing more alive or relatable to me somehow? And in this case, does it make the people that once lived here feel more alive?  Is it a subconscious plea to bring them back to life even? Or am I merely attempting to get a better sense of myself in the world, within grief in this way? These are the questions I'm asking. 

In November I went to Malvern and stayed in my Grandparents' house. I was the last to witness the Autumn flames of the Japanese acers in the garden that my Grandma loved as they continued their own cycle of life. I was back in part, as I had been invited to show some work in a phonebox-come-gallery at the Dingle on the foot of the West Malvern Hills. It was a reason, an excuse to go back. The work I was showing was about movement and cellular life-forms, reimagining a walk along familiar routes through the Malvern Hills. I attempted to see where in this movement I might find a sense of my feelings of loss as part of the slow course of mourning. 

Alone in the house I wondered what to do.  I've always been drawn to objects — personal stuff that once meant something to others. Objects that have become part of the fabric of a domestic landscape. The things that hold memories in some way representing parts of the person who they once belonged to. In some other way I have the feeling that such everyday objects are person containers. Going through my Grandma's extensive chronicled life archive of papers and folders of family insights, notes, lists, and photos of loves, sorrows, losses, passions — vignettes of a richly lived life. They were formidable Scrabble players, keeping detailed logbooks of their games dating back to the 1970s — every word and score documented, even an analysis of all the games played. One of her last games was with me (a rare win for me). A historical game played with my long-absent father — one of the only traces of him left. I included these logs in an exhibition about collections many years back. They still fascinate me. I have long felt drawn to do something with her archive and the social history it tells, and centring this around the Scrabble collection. Yet when I looked for these logs in the fabric bag where they have always lived, only the more recent ones were there. 

Who would have thought that Scrabble could be another wrapping of grief. I am lost for words. Oftentimes, the only way I can really make sense of what is going on is through engaging in a creative act that transforms my experience into something more tangible. I let this loss rearrange itself inside me, tile by tile. In a way, this is part of how I'm processing it here now by responding to the invitation to write my way into and through the year, as I tussle with the discomfort that these folds of loss have brought to it. 

Early December, after my Step-Grandfather's memorial, we gathered as a family in their home, probably for the last time, choosing objects to remind us of them, and sharing memories with new family secrets revealed. As the North Malvern clock tower that echoed through my childhood struck twelve, we went to see my Grandfather — his ashes buried beneath a sycamore tree on the hills opposite the house where many of us grew up. Signs of the first thin fingers of the daffodils we had planted were already beginning to emerge within the ring of stones gathered from the North quarry marking the site of his ground-up bones. My Uncle, passing the house on his way up, happened upon the current occupants in the driveway who invited him into the house. He said it was strange; so much the same and different. The house with the same conifer tree and bamboo shielding the front garden where my Grandfather sunbathed, and once people were rumoured to have danced naked at infamous old movie-themed family parties. The same wrought iron gate made by his hands, the outside garage where he made it now a room. 

Before I headed home, I went for a compulsory walk on the hills. Taking a familiar route up from the clock tower, over the stone bridge where we would hang out as kids making fires and such like, past the spooky shelter, through the wooded valley and up the steep incline to the top of North Hill. Tracing out a map of memories that have neither shape or form as individual moments, yet seem to exist together as a mass, a life-long amalgam of consciousness with roots in the past. Try as I might, I couldn't summon up a tangible sense of this as anything other than a vast awareness of an aura of place and people intertwined, their personal landscape, their wider terrain coupled together. There are moments whilst walking that feelings of grief can be evaded, as if through the motion of stepping I can shed it all off behind me. Yet of course you must stop at some point, and it catches up quick. The spaciousness of this landscape,  these hills holding traces of my own life, and those I have loved taking occupancy  in their contours, radiating out into the fresh air.   

In this way, walking can be understood as a method of processing and repair, during which it is possible to just be with loss as it is. Grief with all its shadows and flickers of light appearing through traces of memory. As I approach the half-century mark I feel a sense of loss of the falling away of my youth, a recent fledgling relationship that didn't make it, and the cat, nearly eighteen, who is going senile and isn't long for this world. And it occurs to me there are many kinds of loss and grief, each becoming part of me in these dark days. Yet in the end, it's all just a part of what makes up a life. And I wonder if I can re-define my relationship with Malvern for its own sake and transition into a different kind of relationship with it. I wonder if I will go back, and if so, what for besides nostalgia and a longing for the past.  I wonder about the particular aspects of Malvern and what defines it for me as being quite different to what draws people to visit it as a beautiful place.  And I wonder if I would feel this way about a less-than-beautiful place. I imagine I might, but I can't be sure. 

Epilogue

As the short day dwindled I carried on walking down into Green Valley, passing a broad bank beside a stream on the way to St Anne's Well to fill my water bottle from the spring. Up the path towards Summer Hill, and across to the Wyche where I was weary with wandering and went for a rest. The trees were all but unwrapped, naked save for the odd amber leaf still hanging on, the bracken golden and drooping. The winter taking hold, folding in for now preparing for a reawakening, and with it, I fell into a sleep.

*

Sam Francis is an artist who writes, based in North Somerset. You can follow her on Instagram here.

The Liverpool festival will host ØXN, Mohammad Syfkhan and more this May

Outer Waves has confirmed plans for its second edition, taking place across two days this May.

Following its inaugural edition last year, the Liverpool festival will return once again with programming taking place across Invisible Wind Factory and Make North Docks in the city. This year's lineup features the likes of ØXN, Mohammad Syfkhan, Dame Area, WaqWaq Kingdom, Lord Spikeheart, Sex Swing, Carmel Smickersgill, and Keeley Forsyth & Matthew Bourne, among others.

Beyond the music programming, the festival will also feature workshops, panel discussions and art installations, with full details on those set to be announced in the coming months.

Outer Waves will take place from 23 to 24 May 2026. Find...

The post Outer Waves Confirms 2026 Return for Second Edition appeared first on The Quietus.

When There Is No Sun draws on the Arkestra's 2022 album Living Sky, as well as a 2023 release celebrating Sun Ra's poetry

Ricardo Villalobos has curated a new remix compilation of work by Sun Ra Arkestra.

The 12-track When There Is No Sun sees the likes of Underground Resistance, Calibre, Chez Damier, A Guy Called Gerald and Villalobos himself rework material from the Arkestra's 2022 album Living Sky. The compilation also makes use of 2023 release My Words Are Music: A Celebration Of Sun Ra's Poetry, which saw the likes of Saul Williams, Tara Middleton and Mahogany L. Browne deliver spoken word pieces inspired by the late musician's poetry.

Listen to Underground Resistance's Saul Williams-featuring take on 'When Angels Speak' below.

Omni Sound...

The post Ricardo Villalobos, Underground Resistance and More Rework Sun Ra Arkestra on New Compilation appeared first on The Quietus.

The surprise track follows the release of the New York rapper's debut album, Xavier

London-based sound studio Mastery has released Wata Igarashi's 'Mineral' as the lead single from their upcoming 'Quantum Sound' compilation, the project is also their first recorded music release, developed in partnership with fabric imprint Houndstooth. 'Mineral' features downtempo production with stripped-back elements, sustained strings, arpeggiating synth notes, and an ethereal soundscape. The full compilation arrives […]

Mastery & Houndstooth share Wata Igarashi's 'Mineral' ahead of full VA release

The band's second album is getting an updated release to mark its 45th anniversary

Clock DVA's 1981 album Thirst is getting reissued.

Marking 45 years since its original release, the band's second studio LP has been newly remastered especially for the updated edition. The reissue will also include live and alternate versions of tracks from the record.

Speaking about Thirst, Clock DVA's Adi Newton said in a statement: "We set out to form a new sound combination; to combine acoustics and electronics, merging the German electronic wave with the edge of The Stooges, the avant-garde of the French GRM musique concrète, and the pioneering audio-visual creativity of The Velvet Underground. To create a harder form of electronic music with real energy."

Listen to the...

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Pratt calls the project "not just homage, but a record in its own right"

Blake Mills and Pino Palladino are also among the guests on the singer-songwriter's Indigo Park

After a six-year pivot to instrumentals due to a vocal injury, the Chicago artist enlisted Kurt Vile and David Bazan for her latest

As he prepares to embark on his first ever headline music tour, Peter Capaldi takes Jude Rogers through 13 records that have defined his life, from the parallels between Talking Heads and Doctor Who, to the time he found himself in a room with Kate Bush

Peter Capaldi's latest role isn't to fuck the fuck in (or indeed fuck the fuck off) like The Thick Of It's Malcolm Tucker, or nail an outfit inspired by David Lynch and David Bowie as he travels through time as the Twelfth Doctor. It's to sit on a tour bus from Newcastle to Edinburgh, Cardiff to Brighton, get behind a microphone, and sing.  "I'm not or trying to be a pop star or anything,"...

The post Doctor's Orders: Peter Capaldi's Favourite Albums appeared first on The Quietus.

Harry Sword explores the world of the cult London shop and record label - one of the most vital imprints for adventurous leftfield heavy metal - offering ten entry points into one of the most beguiling and bewitching catalogues out there

Crypt of the Wizard have ploughed an idiosyncratic furrow through the strangest corners of deeply underground sonics of cleaving ferocity and beyond since 2015. The shop has become an idiosyncratic institution through sheer dogged belief in the power and glory of heavy metal. Setting up on Hackney Road - and expanding to found a label in 2018 and a festival starting in 2024 - CotW remains the only specialist metal emporium in London. Initially the brainchild of founders Charlie Woolley...

The post The Strange World Of… Crypt of the Wizard appeared first on The Quietus.

Shackleton

Euphoria Bound

More dreamstates and haunted dancefloors from the Lancashire-born producer in permanent exile

Euphoria Bound by Shackleton

The gamification of the music industry isn't a choice anymore, it is part of the hustle and grind. As the discourse flits from topic to topic like a hummingbird, the actual art behind the wall of commerce gets brutally atomised. Instead of democratising music, platforms like TikTok have turned musicians into manic clowns: aggressively performing their next trick for a dead-end of likes and disembodied yellow thumbs. Music is part of an extended human centipede of content. Sometimes, it's the least important bit.

So when an artist is truly disconnected from the machine, it's not just an enviable flex of self confidence, it suggests they are...

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Rowan Miles and Gabriella Turton's totally sarcastic, painfully sincere songwriting parodies the lives of sexless young Brits with madcap humor and cartoonish charm.

The Berlin-based producer's new album brings muscular heft and mystical atmosphere to his labyrinthine rhythms and groaning sub-bass.

The Texas rapper manages to buoy even the most underwhelming stretches of his fifth album with sparks of personality and timely features.

After years of experimenting, the L.A. rapper and skateboarder finds his voice with an album that's equally hyperactive and hypnotizing.

Britney Spears, Aaliyah, and *NSYNC were all signed to the label during its peak commercial years

Of Earth & Wires is out May 15

The singer will hit over 30 cities across the U.S. and Canada to support her latest album, Vacancy

The jungle producer's second album for the label is out in March

Screenshot

Xylitol, the production moniker of Catherine Backhouse, has a new album on the way for Planet Mu.

Spanning 10 tracks, Blumenfantasie builds on the melodic jungle sounds of Backhouse's previous LP for the label, 2024's Anemones. Sarajevo-born minimal synth composer Miaux, whom the producer has described as "a kindred spirit in terms of her directness and melancholy, as well as her lightness of touch", is listed as an influence on the album.

Expanding further, Backhouse said Miaux was the "single biggest inspiration in the shift between Anemones and Blumenfantasie and I think the shift of mood and palette is quite apparent, even if our music is very different in how it presents"....

The post Xylitol Reveals New Album, 'Blumenfantasie', for Planet Mu appeared first on The Quietus.

Arca, photo by Bryan Berrios

Arca has remixed Robyn's recent single 'Sexistential'.

Pushing the original cut further into club music territory, the Venezuelan artist's take on the song features her own vocals. You can listen to it below.

In a statement, Arca said: "I've loved Robyn's music for years, and am psyched to offer my support and encouragement to her. I want her sense of humour - bold vision and sense of melody is so important! And this track I've remixed, 'Sexistential', deconstructs pleasure, play and motherhood in such a refreshing way. Purr!"

'Sexistential' is the title track from Robyn's forthcoming album, which is her first in eight years. Announced last month, it will be released via the Swedish artist's new label home of...

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The latest track from Nothing's About to Happen to Me comes with dates in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia

Francesca Lombardo returns to the studio lens with a feature centred around the tech tools that shape her productions, her previous catalogue of work spans outings on Poker Flat, Ovum, and Bedrock, with a workflow that leans on hands-on, hardware-driven methods. Her picks include Roland's iconic SH-101 and Moog's flagship Minimoog Voyager XL, alongside an […]

Studio Essentials: Francesca Lombardo

Dates across North America and Europe will feature support from Mei Semones, Ian Sweet, and more

Something Worth Waiting For is the Chicago band's first LP as a quartet

The singer added stateside dates to his A Quiet Celebration tour

Our weekly playlist highlights songs that our writers, editors, and contributors are listening to on repeat

The Canadian supergroup's Remember the Humans arrives May 8

"Sicko!" pairs the noise-rockers with an "artist we love, who's been inspiring to us," the band said

The run culminates with a Judee Sill tribute program in New York

Your Rum Music roundup returns for 2026, where Jennifer Lucy Allan presents early AOTY contenders from Silvia Tarozzi, Tashi Dorij and more

Silvia Tarozzi, photo by Giorgio Giliberti

January feels like it's been three months long. I made few resolutions. I will be writing half a book's worth of words before my birthday at the end of March, which feels enough of a goal. I did pitch myself a target for reading (52 books) and wrote the word "FLOSS" in the front of my diary. It's going to be a busy year, and it's already in full swing, with releases already dropping that I feel are solidly in the running for my AOTY list, namely by the increasingly prolific Tashi Dorji, and...

The post Rum Music for January Reviewed by Jennifer Lucy Allan appeared first on The Quietus.

Label: n5MD Release: Falter Date: February 6th, 2026 Mastered By: 37n,122w Artwork By: Destiny Templeton-Wolfe Bandcamp Alright, folks. I just spent an entire month celebrating the Best of 2025 music with additional content (and Bandcamp codes for select albums) shared on Headphone Community. I must admit, I am extremely happy with how the platform is turning out, and yes…

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Bloody Head

Bend Down And Kiss The Ground

Nottingham quartet drag noise-rock and psych into some dank, unwholesome places

Bend Down And Kiss The Ground by bloody head

Bloody Head have been lurking at the fringes for some ten years now, occupying a greasy, hard-to-clean crevice where noise-rock and psychedelia begin to intermingle. In this time they've tottered, threatened, collapsed and cajoled, their unexpected incursions akin to having a mysterious, slightly cracked 'character' glom onto you at the pub. Like said pub weirdo, they charm and bemuse and recount tall tales, all while a violent sense of mania flickers intermittently behind the eyes.

Bend Down And Kiss The Ground comes hot on the heels of last year's excellent Perpetual Eden, and hews close to that...

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The New York rapper's debut is a cult rap record with big ambition. Cool, chaotic, and hyper-curious, Xav blows up his sound without losing his style.

The versatile metalcore singer amplifies all her strengths on her seventh album—it's heavier, savvier, and quirkier than ever.

The Korean producer's debut fortifies trance-inflected emotionality with singeli, reggaeton, and hard drum rhythms to argue that maximalism isn't quite dead yet.

Long a collectors' holy grail, this searching, atmospheric soundtrack recorded for Chicago's Adler Planetarium in 1993 mixes spiritual jazz with avant-garde pan-Africanism.

The K-pop group will live stream the performance exclusively on the platform on March 21