• Album of the Week

  • 10 September

    Amyl & The Sniffers
    1. Amyl & The Sniffers Comfort To Me

      2. Amy Taylor has already laced a couple of highlights from 2021 with her sarcastic punk snarl, covering the seedy side of John Prine with Viagra Boys and guesting with Sleaford Mods on that contentious diss track, Nudge It. But the band's tricky second album doesn't just elevate them from underdogs to modern DIY torchbearers, it curates a beautifully trod line between a battering in-your-face resistance and melodic introspection. An absolute triumph.

    2. Art School Girlfriend Is It Light Where You Are?
    3. Kacey Musgraves Star-Crossed
    4. Manic Street Preachers The Ultra Vivid Lament
    5. Big Lad Power Tools

  • 3 September

    Little Simz
    Little SimzSometimes I Might Be Introvert

    Over the course of her lush, expansive, defiantly sprawling new album, Ivor Novello award-winning, Mercury-nominated Little Simz delivers an undeniable modern classic, effortlessly condensing genres into music which thrillingly broaches the gap between urgent modern treatise and hip hop. A bold, quantum leap forward from the critically beloved “Grey Area”, it's turbo charged with the kind of fury and potency, confusion and anxiety that make up the modern experience of being Black, British and female. This is no mere philosophical exercise: the result is her most ambitious and soaring body of work to date, which operates at the very heights of what rap can be.

    27 August

    The Bug
    The BugFire

    Kevin Martin’s first solo full-length album under The Bug moniker for seven years has arrived. On ‘Fire’ The Bug has produced an album that channels dancehall, grime, hip-hop, dub-reggae, and poetry. ‘Fire’ is the third roller-coaster ride of an incendiary urban triptych, that began with 2008’s explosive ‘London Zoo’ via 2014’s mind-melting 'Angels & Devils' - expect fourteen tracks that awaken the senses, and cinematically take you from dark moments of a bleak city in lockdown to lunging deep-focus close-ups of Martin and his collaborator’s psyches at breaking point. This is an album that thrives on tension and release - it’s a listening experience not to be missed.

    20 August

    Lorde
    LordeSolar Power

    Dubbed "the future of music" by David Bowie, the sun has risen on Lorde's third album and that album cover, that we're banned from marketing on social media. Progressive channels, these. Social commentary aside, Solar Power is an absolute triumph in every sense. Stop thinking of pop as a dirty word - this has the self-aggrandising swagger that few of the greatest rock bands can pull off. A sun-kissed, dizzying whirl of '60s pop, earthy electronics and acoustic guitar. It's our Album of the Month. Generational stuff.