It's the band's contribution to War Child's forthcoming HELP(2) album

Pulp have released a new song, called 'Begging For Change'.

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios and produced and mixed by James Ford and Animesh Raval, the song appears on the forthcoming War Child album HELP(2), which is inspired by the charity's previous 1995 release of the various artists album HELP.

Pulp's song features contributions from a children's choir, as well as backing vocals from guests Damon Albarn, Grian Chatten, Kae Tempest and Carl Barat at the beginning of the track.

In 1996, the band's album Different Class was nominated for the Mercury Prize alongside the original HELP compilation. After winning the award, Jarvis Cocker dedicated it to War Child, and donated the £25,000 prize money to the charity during...

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The recordings were captured at jazz clubs in New York and Philadelphia between 1961 and 1965

Photo by Francis Wolff

A fabled collection of John Coltrane live recordings dating back to the 60s are set to get their first official release this year.

The recordings featured on Tiberi Tapes were captured at jazz clubs in New York and Philadelphia between 1961 and 1965 by saxophonist Frank Tiberi, but had been stored away in a private collection until now. They will now be unleashed to the world as part of celebrations of what would have been Coltrane's 100th birthday this September, with an initial exclusive release scheduled for Record Store Day on 18 April and a wider release to follow in September.

Record label Impulse!'s...

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It's the second cut to be unveiled from their forthcoming self-titled album

Photo by Charles Peterson

Sunn O))) have shared a new song, titled 'Butch's Guns'.

The new cut is the second track to be shared from the group's forthcoming self-titled album, which marks their first full-length release since signing to Sub Pop last year. They previously released lead track 'Glory Black' last month alongside news of the album.

Sunn O))) follows recent maxi-single Eternity's Pillars b/w Raise The Chalice & Reverential. The LP was co-produced and mixed by the band and Brad Wood at Bear Creek Studios in Woodinville, Washington a year ago. The album's front and back covers feature paintings by the late American artist Mark Rothko, while the liner notes have been...

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The four-piece's self-titled debut album is out in April

Photo by Daisy Ayscough and Tomos Ayscough

Cameron Picton - the bassist, vocalist and co-songwriter previously of Black Midi - has founded a new band, My New Band Believe.

The four-piece are set to release their debut self-titled album, which takes in eight tracks, via Rough Trade in April. Kiran Leonard, guitarist Caius Williams, drummer Steve Noble and drummer Andrew Cheetham all contribute guest turns on the record.

To mark the announcement of the band and album, My New Band Believe have shared their first single, 'Numerology', which doesn't appear on the LP itself. The song will be released as a bonus 10-inch with a special edition of the album, and can be listened to...

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The five-track record is a collection of instrumentals

Photo by Chris Almeida

Alabaster DePlume is set to release a new EP, Dear Children Of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue.

Spanning five tracks, the entirely instrumental record was recorded at Brooklyn's Figure 8 Recording studio last March, with post-production work by DePlume carried out at London's Total Refreshment Centre. It sees the artist play saxophones, sampler, synths and guitars, with support from Shahzad Ismaily on bass and Tcheser Holmes on drums.

The trio had been touring the US together around the time of recording the material on Dear Children Of Our Children, I Knew: Epilogue, and had built such a strong on-stage rapport that they decided to capture that connection by taking some studio time...

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In this month's antidote to the algorithm, Christian Eede shakes tQ with the heavy sounds of 90s and 00s Slovakian techno, and the scene around the U.Club (pictured below)

Any discussion about the history and evolution of techno over the past near-four decades will always naturally be dominated by two cities: Detroit and Berlin. For a period of around 10 years, though, beginning in the mid-90s, the capital of Slovakia, Bratislava, became a vital outpost for an austere, industrial-edged take on the genre that was cultivated at the now-closed U.Club.

Opened in 1993 by Tibor Holoda, the venue was situated inside a former underground nuclear bunker that was built by the ruling Communists to prepare for the possibility of Cold War-era apocalypse....

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The Hen Ogledd family keeps on expanding - the group's sound, likewise. But more than anything, Discombobulated sounds like the present, finds Jeanette Leech

Image by James Hankins

Hen Ogledd's Discombobulated is in the radical mould of music that tackles the now. Unconcerned that references may go out of date, the timelessness of their sound comes in documenting the present, rather than in seeking to transcend (or ignore) it. Lyrically, Discombobulated celebrates dissent with all the force of the protest tradition in folk music; musically, the album glues together sounds and genres to evoke the chaos of today.

Hen Ogledd is the project of Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington. The first releases were just Dawson and Davies; since then,...

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Voka Gentle

Domestic Bliss

Greek mythology, Kraftwerk synths and Jude Law wend their way through the trio's follow-up to 2021 album Writhing!

Domestic Bliss by Voka Gentle

Ten thousand years ago, a man died in what would become Somerset. His bones waited in a cave until 1903, when they were discovered and given a name: Cheddar Man. Now he's the subject of a song by Voka Gentle, who use his story to contemplate what we're doing to the places where people have lived for millennia. "Let's say the sea levels rise and we lose north Somerset, which, by the way, is looking increasingly likely…" William J Stokes's voice is dry, conversational, with the studied neutrality of a local news presenter. Beneath it, the music...

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Claire Rousay, KMRU, Ex-Easter Island Head and more will play the four-day event this April

Claire Rousay

Bristol New Music has shared the lineup for its 2026 event.

The biennial festival, which returns this year for its sixth edition, will take in four days of music and visual arts-based programming, including live performances from the likes of Claire Rousay, KMRU, Ex-Easter Island Head, Emptyset, Hatis Noit and Lucy Railton.

The festival will also take in a number of special collaborative performances, including Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor; Harry Górski-Brown, Wojciech Rusin and Phaedra Ensemble; Saint Abdullah, Eomac and Rebecca Salvadori; and Bill Orcutt, Steve Shelley and Evan Miller.

Bristol New Music's programming will be split across a number of Bristol venues, and further acts will...

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The LP comes amid the group's final run of live shows through this year

Cabaret Voltaire are set to release a live album.

But What Time Is It Really? features live version of 16 tracks from across the band's back catalogue, which were recorded during their UK tour last year to mark 50 years since the project's formation. Its release will coincide with Cabaret Voltaire's final tour dates across the UK, Europe and North America through this year.

In a statement, the band's Chris Watson said: "This record captures the powerful essence of contemporary live performance and establishes a visceral connection to the history of the band."

Fellow member Stephen Mallinder added: "It was an opportunity to capture the shows as a unique moment...

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In a memo sent to staff, he said he had "become a distraction" to the company's work

Casey Wasserman, founder and CEO of talent and marketing agency Wasserman Group, is placing the company for sale amid the fallout from his appearance in the Epstein files.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, Wasserman sent a memo to staff on Friday (13 February) telling them that he felt he had "become a distraction", and that he would thus begin the process of selling the company. 

It comes after flirtatious email exchanges between Wasserman and the now jailed Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, which dated back to the early 2000s, were released online as the US Justice Department continues to share evidence it gathered in relation...

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From the record that made him cry while filming Stranger Things, to the surprising location of his Bob Dylan tattoo, actor and musician Jamie Campbell Bower takes Claire Biddles through his life in music

Photo by Zeb Daemen

"We always had such a broad spectrum of music in our house," explains musician and actor Jamie Campbell Bower from his flat in London. "While I was growing up, it spanned from classical music all the way through to Springsteen and The The. I can't remember it for shit, but the first show that I was taken to as a child was Guns N' Roses." His parents both work in the music industry, and he would spend time rooting through their varied collection for...

The post Vecna Guy's Track Record: Jamie Campbell Bower's Favourite Albums appeared first on The Quietus.

Charli xcx

Wuthering Heights

For all its gothic touches stripped of all modern references, the soundtrack to Emerald Fennel's new Brontë adaptation is still very much a Charli xcx album, finds Kate French-Morris

On the front of Wuthering Heights, Charli xcx's soundtrack for the divisive new Emerald Fennel film, a girlish hand dangles a soldier of toast above a soft-boiled egg, between a man's roughened, firmly planted hands. It could be a magnified section of a 17th-century Dutch realist painting, but is in fact a still from the film: the hands in question belong to Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

The songs on the album sit at a similarly tasteful remove from the film: so far from Fennel's brash maximalism, in fact, that Wuthering...

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The follow-up to 2017's Reassemblage is out in May

Photo by Jonathan Sielaff

Visible Cloaks, the experimental ambient music duo of Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have a new album on the way.

Marking the follow-up to their 2017 debut Reassemblage, and 2019's collaborative LP serenitatem with Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, the new record features 14 tracks and includes contributions from the aforementioned Ojima and Shibano, as well as Félicia Atkinson and Motion Graphics.

Commenting on the LP, Doran said: "Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments, we wanted to conceptualise them as living material changing in space, continually in flux."

Doran and Carlile have shared the Motion Graphics-featuring lead cut 'Disque' to mark the announcement of Paradessence. You can watch...

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Daniel Avery, Smerz and more will join headliner Blood Orange on the bill

Photo by Jake Davis

London's RALLY festival has announced the lineup for its fourth edition, taking place this August.

Returning once again to Southwark Park, this year's event will be headlined by the previously announced Blood Orange, while there will also be live sets from Daniel Avery, Smerz, james K, YHWH Nailgun, GENA (featuring Liv.e and Karriem Riggins) and keiyaA, among others.

The festival will also take in DJ sets from Optimo (Espacio), Parris and Paquita Gordon, among others.

RALLY will take place on 29 August 2026. Find more information here.
...

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Poem 1 is led by new single 'Keepsake'

Photo by Isak Berglund Matsson-Mårn

Ana Roxanne has shared details of her first solo album in six years, titled Poem 1.

Spanning nine tracks, the new record follows 2020's Because Of A Flower and a 2023 LP she released alongside DJ Python under the alias Natural Wonder Beauty Concept.

To mark the announcement of her third solo LP, Roxanne has shared lead track 'Keepsake', which you can listen to below.

Kranky will release Poem 1 on 1 May 2026.

Poem 1 by Ana Roxanne
...

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Danny L Harle

Cerulean

PC Music wunderkind packs up his donk in order to flame on with the alt-pop Avengers: Caroline Polachek, Clairo, Oklou and PinkPantheress

Cerulean by Danny L Harle

Fans of The Devil Wears Prada will remember Miranda Priestly's tirade about cerulean blue and that colour's important influence on fashion from Yves Saint Laurent to the clearance bins of a budget shop: "That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs." 

So, perhaps it's unsurprising that one of the pivotal members of PC music, whose influence has trickled down through pop music and no doubt made "millions of dollars and countless jobs" for the genre, has named his latest album after that same shade of blue.

Cerulean is the follow up to his 2021...

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Though eclipsed by what came in its wake, The Colour Of Spring, at the heart of Talk Talk's catalogue, is no less astonishing. Forty years on, Wyndham Wallace commends the inaugural rebirth of Mark Hollis' synthpop band

Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end, but, as contemporary narratives demand, Talk Talk's has come to be told in reverse, caring little for distractions. There are 'wannabe' years and 'we-made-it' years, but it opens with the death in 2019 of their inscrutable mastermind, when an unforeseen outburst of respect and affection for singer Mark Hollis rivals tributes to Prince and David Bowie. Unexpectedly, these eulogies dwell not on the conventional success of early endeavours, nor his biggest hits. Instead their...

The post "It's About Time We Brought Art In, Innit?" Talk Talk's The Colour Of Spring at 40 appeared first on The Quietus.

Noel Gardner returns once more from Britain's sonic undergrowth, with an improv-dominated edition of New Weird Britain that also includes epic fringe folk, shuddering static from London via Beijing, and much much more

Tim Hill's Leviathan Whispers

Improvisation tends to be a lurking possibility in these columns, even if not actively being practised, but for the first New Weird Britain of 2026 it's the dominant theme. No reason that my conscious is aware of, and this February edition mops up a few releases from late 2025 (the last 'proper' NWB column having been in October) such as Enough, the debut LP of rafter-rattling, all-improv loft doom by Long Swan Tongues.

LST are a duo of bassist Al Wilson, who also released albums with...

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Martin died earlier this year aged 39

Photo by Simon Kallas

Tributes have been paid to Oliver Martin of Ghold, one of tQ's favourite heavy bands, who died recently following a serious illness, aged 39. Donations in his memory are asked to be made to helpmusicians.org.uk.

News of Martin's death was shared by his bandmates on social media on 2 February, where they said: "We lost our best friend, our brother, comrade & companion recently. We do and will continue to miss him so dearly. Love and power to an incredible person and musician whose influence on us will never leave."

Martin was born in Bexley on 27 August 1986. He met his future bandmates Paul Antony and Al Wilson in 2013, who were...

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Hen Ogledd talk us through musical influences on astounding new album Discombobulated (the results are compiled into a playlist exclusively for tQ Subscriber Plus tier members)

Music journalists love to tell you they know all the influences that has gone into a new album, but a lot of the time the artists responsible themselves are left baffled by these comparisons. We thought, why not go straight to the source?

Hen Ogledd are Richard Dawson, Sally Pilkington, Dawn Bothwell and Rhodri Davies, whose brilliant new album Discombobulated is released on 20 February via Domino. Here, in their own words, they let us know what the actual influences that shaped it are, spanning ambient, free jazz, a 70s Japanese folk rock gem and more....

The post Guest Playlist: Hen Ogledd appeared first on The Quietus.

Nightingale Floor

Five Stagings

A remarkably assured debut from a new ensemble formed with members of Ex-Easter Island Head and Powders plus poet Lauren McLean

Five Stagings by Nightingale Floor

Poetry and music have a complex, sometimes uneasy, relationship. Poets put the music in the words, while lyricists tend to strip their writing back to leave space for the music to occupy. It can be tricky to balance writing and playing so each enhances the other, but when it works, it can be something special. This is where Nightingale Floor come in. They are a quartet of improvising musicians and a poet, and Five Stagings is their first album. It's a record made in the North West. The words are written and spoken by...

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The Public Enemy frontman has always been one of rap music's most articulate advocates, but in 2022 he shifted career from MC to university lecturer. In an exclusive extract from his new book, In The Hour of Chaos, Chuck D talks about the cultural politics of hip hop and what it means for the future

Chuck D speaks to students as the sessions begins. May 4, 2022. Photo by Bad Man's Son

My nearly four-decade career as a professional has been in truth and honesty for the culture. I don't think I remember a time that we, as Black people, were not in an hour of chaos. But the culture, the art, the music, and the people are what I've always been...

The post Fight The Power: Chuck D on the Politics of Hip Hop appeared first on The Quietus.

Litany For The Border takes place in Berwick this month

As anyone who has taken the East Coast Main Line between the east of Scotland and England will know, one of the finest parts of the journey is when the train curves around the estuary of the River Tweed, giving an incredible view of the ancient and sometime-contested border town on the far bank. If they're able to see through the permanent rain lashing the carriage windows, travellers in February might be able to see the view lit up by a major new installation from artists Gareth Hudson and Toby Thirling, while those on the banks can also hear musical accompaniment by composer Eleanor Cully Boehringer. The collaboration takes place with light...

The post River Tweed Celebrated in new Installation appeared first on The Quietus.

The author of Human Punk and The Football Factory trilogy speaks to Tariq Goddard about class, Greek prisons and his new novella Peekaboo Bosh

John's King's The Football Factory was a novel for people who thought reading might not be for them, the power of those first discomforting pages as transportive as waking up in the Gulag with Solzhenitsyn or thumbing a lift with Kerouac. Beginning in the mind of a character literary fiction had taken care to avoid, the novel explored a sensibility that had traditionally been the province of pulp, its portraits as fully realised those found in McEwan or Barnes, but with none of that pair's decorative courtesy or insistence that lead personae ought to be middle-class professionals....

The post "Working-class males feel they are treated like scum by those in power" - John King Interviewed appeared first on The Quietus.

Brian Coney celebrates the raging isolationism and precision destructiveness of the Canadian jazz punk trio's first essential album, Sex Mad

Sex Mad by Nomeansno

To parse the logic of Sex Mad, one must first inhabit the isolation of 1985 Victoria, British Columbia: a provincial capital where middle-class security doubled as a picturesque cemetery for the newly wed and nearly dead. Here, as the looming artifice of Expo 86 threatened to modernize the coast, the Pacific horizon acted as a literal dead-end and the Wright brothers' basement as a laboratory. While the global hardcore scene was calcifying into a thudding caricature - The Exploited's gurning pantomime merging with the metal-hocked bluster of the US crossover set - Rob and John Wright were busy...

The post Reissue of the Week: Sex Mad by Nomeansno appeared first on The Quietus.

Jill Scott

To Whom This May Concern

A decade on from her last album, the influential neo-soul pioneer returns with an album of deft storytelling, rich jazz instrumentation and a cast of collaborators including Tierra Whack, Trombone Shorty and Maha Adachi Earth

There's real power in the act of stepping back and taking a breather. In our fast-paced, mile-a-minute everyday, we're not often afforded such an opportunity but having time and space can be transformative, especially in a creative context. For actress and singer Jill Scott, who makes her long-awaited return with her first album since 2015's Woman, her new project is a product of having had that room to step back, live life and reflect on the world at large. The end...

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The eight-track record will be released via PAN

Photo by Bruno Aiello Destombes

Upsammy and Valentina Magaletti are releasing a collaborative album.

Spanning eight tracks, the roots of Seismo lay in a commission by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which saw the two artists soundtrack an exhibition featuring work from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. A number of joint live shows between the pair followed, and a full-length album soon started to take shape.

Listen to lead track 'Superimposed' below.

PAN will release Seismo on April 10, 2026.

Seismo by upsammy & Valentina Magaletti
...

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Songs To Remember has been remastered for its updated release

Photo by Chris Dawes

Scritti Politti's 1982 debut album, Songs To Remember, is being reissued.

A remastered version of the LP, which is currently not available on streaming platforms and has been out of print on vinyl since 1985, is set to be released across digital, vinyl and CD formats.

Rough Trade is overseeing the reissue, and the label's founder, Geoff Travis, said in a statement: "Mark E. Smith, a Rough Trade artist at the time, once said to me, 'Scritti have the best rhythm section in rock music'. He didn't mention Green Gartside, so I don't know what he thought of him. I do know that at Rough Trade we were all in...

The post Scritti Politti Unveil Reissue of Debut Album appeared first on The Quietus.

It's the second song to be unveiled from forthcoming album PLAY ME

Photo by Moni Haworth

Kim Gordon has shared a new song, titled 'DIRTY TECH'.

Offering a critique of artificial intelligence and the use of some modern technology, the track retains the trap leanings of some of the material found on her past solo albums. In a statement about the song, Gordon said: "I was kind of musing about, is my next boss going to be an AI chatbot? We're the first ones whose lights are going to go out - not the tech billionaires. It's so abstract that people can't comprehend."

Watch a video for 'DIRTY TECH', made by director Moni Haworth, below.

Comprised of 12 tracks, PLAY ME is the follow-up to...

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The Radiohead guitarist said Universal licensed one of his songs for use in the film without his permission

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood has criticised major label Universal for licensing a piece of his music to be included in Melania, the recent film about Melania Trump, without his permission.

The movie includes an extended excerpt of Greenwood's song 'Barbara Rose', which he composed for the score for the Paul Thomas Anderson film Phantom Thread. Neither Greenwood nor Anderson approved the use of the song, and have now jointly requested that it be removed from the film.

A statement released on their behalf said: "It has come to our attention that a piece of music from Phantom Thread has been used in the Melania documentary. While...

The post Jonny Greenwood Launches Action for his Music to be Removed from 'Melania' Movie appeared first on The Quietus.

In the second pod of 2026, John and Luke dive into the game changing waters of Missy Elliott's third album

Missy Elliott (along with Timbaland) meets The Quietus' benchmark for genius, not necessarily via the route of producing three all time great albums in a row but as someone who changed popular music decisively, twice. And it is the exemplification of the second of these occasions, the stupendous Miss E... So Addictive album from 2001, which creates the Low Culture conversational glue of this months' podcast. John and Luke consider the scenius of late 80s early 90s Virginia (compared to Oslo in the same period!) and the years of hard graft that eventually made Missy Elliott and Timbaland's talent look so effortlessly achieved....

The post Low Culture Podcast: Missy Elliott's Miss E… So Addictive appeared first on The Quietus.

The debut album from the North Carolina-born singer-songwriter-producer, finds the digital age's only medieval princess bursting with ideas and cartoonish intensity. Truly, Hemlocke Springs contains multitudes

Those among us who harbour a secret fondness for 'Be Prepared' - Jeremy Irons' delicious villain song in The Lion King - may well have pricked their ears last October when Hemlocke Springs released her single 'Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Ankles'. It's a demented tune, opening with a sped-up Nutcracker tinkle that gives way to an infectious romp, stuffed with cartoonish sound effects and ripe, expressive vocals: a song that sounds a bit like Scar on steroids, or Scar if he was releasing pop music from his lion's cave in 2026.

The song's nursery-rhyme-meets-antiquated-fetish title harks...

The post Et In Arcadia Emo: The Apple Tree Under The Sea by Hemlocke Springs appeared first on The Quietus.

Charles Tyler Ensemble

Voyage from Jericho

Former Cecil Taylor side man brings together a band featuring Steve Reid and Earl Cross for a thrilling document of the New York loft jazz scene in the 1970s

Voyage from Jericho by Charles Tyler Ensemble

Released 51 years ago on Charles Tyler's own Ak-Ba records, Voyage From Jericho captures a period when Downtown Manhattan lofts resonated to the sounds of a jazz avant-garde determined to do things on its own terms. Frederiksberg Records' sumptuous reissue, complete with photographs, flyers and deeply researched liner notes by jazz scholar Cisco Bradley, brings this essential part of Tyler's discography back into circulation. A brilliant alto and baritone saxophonist, Tyler is perhaps best known for his contributions to Albert Ayler's transcendent...

The post Charles Tyler Ensemble - Voyage from Jericho appeared first on The Quietus.

The Wakefield brothers spar with Fergal Kinney about the unlikely - and mutual - love affair between The Cribs and the combat sport.

Gary Jarman (R) spars with Andy Lee

When Amy Winehouse died in July 2011, the singer's passing was a personal tragedy that also called time on a whole era. "It was a real stark moment," reflects The Cribs' bassist and vocalist Gary Jarman, speaking over Zoom from his home in Portland, Oregon. "It was a real wake-up call because of how not-unexpected it was that ultimately there would be casualties from that period. Because it was so intense." 

For his twin brother, guitarist and vocalist Ryan Jarman, the shock was closer to home. "I used to hang out with her...

The post The Cribs' Jarman Brothers on Their Love of Boxing appeared first on The Quietus.

Mayhem

Liturgy of Death

Dense and textural, the reinvigorated Norwegian group's seventh studio album finds them on iconoclastic form

Liturgy of Death (24-bit HD audio) by Mayhem

Norway's prominence in extreme metal can be attributed not only to the dark, saturnine winters of Scandinavia, but also to deep-seated pagan traditions and the rebellious anti-Christian black metal counter-culture that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. These elements intensified conditions necessary for the development of genres such as Death and Black metal.

As pioneers of the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the 1980s, Mayhem have continued to reign for over four decades in death and black metal, releasing new material roughly every five to seven years. Their seventh studio album, Liturgy of Death, is their "most commercial...

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Karshni

Buck Wild

Debut album from the Indian solo artist is as visceral as it is ethereal

Everyone who proselytises will eventually tell you that the truth sets you free. On her debut album Buck Wild, Indian (Pune-based) artist Karshni splits herself open: sometimes with a surgeon's meticulousness, sometimes like a violent, rabid cannibal, utterly disinterested in suturing herself back shut, intent on ravaging the person she once was - all in the service of 'getting real', both with herself and her listeners.

In the last eight-odd years that she has been making music, Karshni has developed an indie-darling, melancholia laden sound-bed, then abandoned it, floated across collaborations with her peers, lending her voice to records that span the distance between avant-garde hiphop and shoegaze,...

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...and pick five highlights from their time at the South London heavy doof haven ahead of final outing this month

As most of you will know, London venue Corsica Studios is to close in its current incarnation later this year - a cruel loss for those of us who love a room where clarity of high volume makes for euphoric experience. Some of the best those came courtesy of the nights put on by James Tec and Luke Handsfree of Plex, the techno / acid / bass / you name it promoters who's regular events (often alongside fellow travellers such as Colony, Machine, Them and Bleed) a decade-and-a-bit ago showcased the best of a particularly good moment in techno - adjacent...

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From a visceral return to roots from Converge to Cryptic Shift's epic new death metal space opera, Kez Whelan reviews his first batch of great new metal for 2026 

Cryptic Shift, photo by Murry Deaves

As we hurtle into yet another new year, I'm still catching up on great records from the end of the last one - or great tapes, to be precise, with a couple of essential releases landing on cassette after even the tardiest music publications had finalised their year end lists. 

Nottingham psych-sludge legends Dead In The Woods returned out of nowhere with a self-titled album, almost 13 years since the band had originally called it a day. The members have all been active in other projects since of...

The post Columnus Metallicus: Heavy Metal for February Reviewed by Kez Whelan appeared first on The Quietus.

Ahead of Traidora's appearance at Supersonic festival, Stephanie Phillips speaks to experimental guitarist and Crass collaborator Eva LeBlanc about her need to see herself reflected in sound

Eva LeBlanc has always been direct. Those closest to the Chilean artist have often noticed this trait of bold naivety she jokingly tells me over Zoom from her London home. "My friends and my partner will say, 'You're not shy. You just go and ask people for stuff,' and I'm like yeah why not."

Why not indeed, as when LeBlanc decided she wanted to work with her hero Penny Rimbaud, co-founder of the legendary anarcho punk band Crass, she simply messaged him on X (formerly Twitter). "I gave my Bandcamp [and said] I would love...

The post Keep It Punk, Keep it Simple: Eva LeBlanc of Traidora Interviewed appeared first on The Quietus.

Daniel O'Sullivan & Richard Youngs

Persian Carpets

The second collaboration between Daniel O'Sullivan and Richard Youngs is a very different beast to their last: a pair of minimal improvisations for zither and piano

Persian Carpets by Daniel O'Sullivan & Richard Youngs

Experimental music doyens Daniel O'Sullivan and Richard Youngs have teamed up once before, on 2020's Twelve of Hearts, a set of alluringly off-key songs. Persian Carpets, released by the excellent VHF, is entirely different. The prolific pair take a pair of aging instruments - an upright piano and a zither, both dating from 1915 - which they use to perform two improvised 20-minute pieces, filling either side of the LP. It is an exercise in exploring repetition and tiny, gradual variations. The resulting...

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Off the back of an incendiary debut record that was one of 2025's best rock albums, Leather.head speak to Cal Cashin about the importance of keeping things political, uncompromising collaborations with poet Zia Ahmed, the reclamation of emo and more

Leather.head's Mud Again, their incendiary self-released debut, was one of the finest and most fully realised rock albums of 2025. The real deal. 

Across its 37 minutes, the South London rascals' fractured collage of blasted Slint guitars and explosive brass arrived perfectly formed. A cocktail of Midwest emo, jazzy post rock and hellfire punk rock, the album is made up of eight jagged sound-worlds that live and breathe and wheeze and writhe with the whims of the group creating them. 

This chemistry, this...

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Nilza Costa

Cantigas

The Salvador de Bahia-born singer creates songs that refuse all explanation

CANTIGAS by Brutture Moderne Label

Do you need a sensitivity to divine forces to be drawn into Nilza Costa's new album? Not necessarily. But it does require a willingness to listen to music that resists explanation. Nilza Costa is a Brazilian singer and songwriter from Salvador de Bahia, now based in Italy. Her new album revolves around cantigas - sacred songs from the African diaspora - sung in Yoruba, Kimbundu and Brazilian Portuguese. These songs function as direct invocations of the orishas: spiritual entities that, in traditions such as Candomblé and Santería, connect human life with nature, history, and the divine. Rather than presenting this tradition from the outside, the...

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John Quin presents a hormonally loaded take on Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader's classic of male alienation

We hear a festinating beat, those sinuous nocturnal saxophones, see a belch of street steam. A ghostly yellow cab glides across the screen in slow motion. The anxious driver's eyes are caught in a red light, then he's off again through wet Manhattan streets, the shimmering multicoloured neon reflected in black asphalt. A nervous mood is quickly set in place. Here be monsters. Male monsters.

Twenty-six-year-old Travis Bickle, as played by Robert De Niro, craves more work. He haggles with his supervisor, admits to insomnia, is told: "There's porno theatres for that."

Welcome to a preposterously testosterone-fuelled world, one we might call 'The Preposterone'. This is...

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In an exclusive extract from his new book, Body of Work: How the Album Outplayed the Algorithm and Survived Playlist Culture, author Keith Jopling looks at the curious phenomenon of the 'vanishing LP' - as well as the ones that didn't

A classic album in the "post-album" age of streaming is hard to define and probably impossible to nail down. This is probably why Tim Footman regarded OK Computer as the last time an album counted as a bona fide classic - an album that reflected society and was widely discussed and celebrated in its long-form. A record that very much characterised a decade. Over a quarter of a century on, it feels like we have descended into a culture that tries...

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The rare RIAA-certified award for 'Harness Your Hopes' is currently available for an auction prize of over £4,000

Screenshot

Pavement's Bob Nastanovich has donated his own RIAA gold disc to an auction to support Margate music venue WhereElse.

The gold disc was given to Nastanovich to mark over 500,000 units of Pavement's 1999 cult hit 'Harness Your Hopes' being sold in the US. It's one of just seven gold discs produced, and Nastanovich's item is the only Pavement gold record ever made available for public sale. It's currently going for an auction price of just over £4,000 on eBay.

The gold disc is being auctioned as part of a wider fundraising effort to secure the future of the 150-capacity WhereElse in Margate. Nastanovich has been a regular visitor of...

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Proceeds from the track featuring the late guitarist will be donated to the New Art Studio, who support refugees and asylum seekers through art therapy

Seb Rochford has shared 'Til The Day I'm Gone', a new track via his Finding Ways project, featuring the late guitarist Patrick Walden.

Walden, who played with Rochford in Babyshambles when the latter served as a live drummer, died aged 47 in June 2025. "Patrick was for me, one of the best guitarists to ever play," Rochford says. "I loved the way that his playing at once was so beautiful and crunchy, so wild and on the edge, but his ears were always listening so deeply and when with Babyshambles, he sculpted around Peter's vocals in...

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Mary Chiney celebrates the soundtrack to Akinola Davies Jr.'s debut feature film, depicting a single eventful day in Lagos, during 1993

My Father's Shadow (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Duval Timothy & CJ Mirra

The summer of 1993 in Lagos exists in the collective memory as a period of suspended animation. It was a time defined by the heavy, humid silence that precedes a storm, specifically the political storm of the 12 June election annulment and the subsequent creeping dread of the Abacha years. When Folarin, the patriarch in Akinola Davies Jr.'s My Father's Shadow, mutters that "sometimes… it's hard to know what to do," he isn't just speaking to his sons; he is articulating the paralysis of an entire middle class caught...

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Roshi Nasehi, a Welsh Iranian artist, speaks to fellow musicians about the dangers of allowing the protest movement to be hijacked by hard left anti-imperialist ideologues and outlines how practical help can be offered to those currently suffering in Iran

Graffiti in Khorramabad reads 'death to the dictator', Wiki Commons

Every Iranian I know has, at some point, been personally sent a death threat, arrested or tortured by agents of the Islamic Republic. Even the luckiest ones know someone who has suffered a fate that is similar or worse: they have a loved one or loved ones who have been disappeared or murdered.

Right now, the Iranian dictatorship is currently in the middle of its most deadly crackdown since its bloody inception in 1979. Since late December,...

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Sam Slater

Lunng

Sam Slater's highly collaborative new LP plays out like an elegy for a world and way of living we've yet to lose but are on the verge of losing, says Bernie Brooks

Lunng by Sam Slater

Lunng is the title of Sam Slater's third namesake LP. With two N's. I say it out loud. Roll it around my mouth a little bit. Lunnnnnng. It becomes less an organ and more like some new disease you get from living next to a data centre that's burning through methane and fresh water to disrupt the sex-crime chatbot industry.

On the cover, it's night. There's a car on fire all by its lonesome. The aftermath of something. No people but its headlamps are on. How...

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