• Album of the Week

  • 23 July

    Emma-Jean Thackray
    1. Emma-Jean Thackray Yellow

      2. The debut album by Emma-Jean Thackray feels exactly like the sort of thing we’ve been longing for over the last 12 months: a transcendent, human, shared experience. Across its 49 minutes, Yellow draws glowing lines between ‘70s jazz fusion and P-Funk, the cosmic invocations of Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, and the gorgeous orchestration of the Beach Boys. It's our Album of the Month, and rightfully so.

    2. Piroshka Love Drips & Gathers
    3. Erika de Casier Sensational
    4. Benjamin Francis Leftwich To Carry A Whale
    5. Various Artists Bills & Aches & Blues [40 Years of 4AD]

  • 16 July

    Cautious Clay
    Cautious ClayDeadpan Love

    The long-awaited debut album from Brooklyn artist Cautious Clay is here, warping its influence from R&B, hip-hop and indie-pop with his trademark sophisticated songwriting and jazz/ blues-inflected instrumentation. It's a record about coping with the worst of what humanity has to offer, and the inner conflict of learning a deadpan state while maintaining inner compassion. Cautious's breakout came at once, being sampled out-of-the-blue by Taylor Swift no less; there's little crossover appeal here, but in the uneasy aftermath of recent sporting events, Cautious's nuanced writing of Black experience needs universal attention, urgently. It's a beauty.

    9 July

    Drug Store Romeos
    Drug Store RomeosThe world within our bedrooms

    For fans of Mazzy Star, White Flowers, bdrmm. The gorgeous debut album from South East England's suburbia collides DIY dream pop with a shared love of Stereolab, Portishead and Mild High Club. The quiet countryside becomes a canvas for the band's lyrical abstractness, dancing between introspective melancholy and alt/indie playfulness, between a lo-fi nocturnal aesthetic and alluringly crisp production. The praise is flying in - it's a remarkably magnetising record, spacious and sparkling. So they say: "We didn't live in London, we weren't part of any kind of scene. We were just creating something for ourselves within the confines of our bedrooms."

    2 July

    Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth
    Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny BethUtopian Ashes

    Primal Scream frontman and activist Bobby Gillespie teams up with Savages' vocalist Jehnny Beth to startling effect on their debut collaboration, exploring loss, miscommunication and emotional inarticulacy. Drawing on the tradition of country soul classics, such as Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris's Grievous Angel and George Jones and Tammy Wynette's We Go Together, Utopian Ashes deals with the heavy realities of love turning sour.