Latest Reviews

It’s the year for Lizzy McAlpine – with a new album underway and an upcoming performance on the Ellen DeGeneres show. On top of all that, the artist released a brand-new single in anticipation for the aforementioned album, ‘Five Seconds Flat’, titled ‘All My Ghosts’.

Is there such a thing as ethereal folk? If there isn’t, then AURORA can be given all the credit for creating the genre, especially with her newest single ‘A Dangerous Thing’.

There’s both a thousand ways to describe ‘Sent From Above’, Rivi Tiber’s newest single, and no way; it’s a true work of art that takes many liberties with very few components while also being packed with some of the most exciting song writing written in a long time, akin to legends such as Cody Fry, Jacob Collier, and Daniel Ceaesar.

Continuing with the momentum the band built up from their latest 80’s pop inspired 2018’s ‘Simulation Theory’, Muse takes a look back and dials the volume to eleven with possibly one of their heaviest singles in the band’s career, ‘Won’t Stand Down’.

Electronic musician, producer and DJ Simon Green has been creating music under his ‘Bonobo’ moniker for more than two decades now, and in that time has built up a cult following, swapping his native Brighton for LA along the way. Fragments is his seventh studio album in that time and follows on from his last effort Migration, and as is explained on his official website, it is an album “born first out of fragments of ideas and experimentation”. 

Since indie rockers The Maccabees disbanded five or so years ago, former frontman Orlando Weeks has been through some big life changes, and not just of the lockdown variety. In 2018, Weeks and his partner welcomed their first child, a landmark event for anyone. Weeks, though, took this colossal life event one step further, infusing his debut solo album The Quickening with his thoughts, feelings and anxieties about impending fatherhood.

“I belong with you / you belong with me / you’re my sweetheart” went ‘Ho Hey’ by indie folk duo The Lumineers in what was one of the most infectious pop songs of the last decade. The only possible reason for having not heard it would be that you’ve been living in a cave in some remote mountain range since 2012, completely cut off from civilization. But even then, I’d have my doubts. 

Very few artists specialise in the cover version as emphatically as Chan Marshall, otherwise known as Cat Power, the soulful singer songwriter whose first covers record, released in 2000, was about as perfect as a covers collection can be. That record included interpretations of tracks by artists including The Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground, Moby Grape and Bob Dylan, among others. It was an almost uniquely rich dive into the meaning these songs carry, and a quite stunning set of sparse musical arrangements that linger long in the memory.

Liverpool trio The Wombats are a staggeringly impressive success story. From their founding in the early noughties after meeting while studying at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts to the Spotify-conquering, hard-touring outfit that has shifted more than one million albums worldwide, their journey has been an incredible if curiously unrecognised one, thanks in part to their curious status as somehow the ‘uncool’ indie kids on the block.

“Just got to keep your head up / And the lights on / That’s all you can do”, coos Twin Atlantic’s lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Sam McTrusty on ‘Keep Your Head Up’, the opening track to the Scottish indie rock duo’s fifth album Transparency. It feels like the mantra we’ve all lived by over the last couple of years, and for an album that had its own troubled genesis, it’s also perhaps been something of a rallying cry for McTrusty and bassist Ross McNae, the only remaining members of the band after the departure of drummer Craig Kneale last year.