London star Cat Burns continues her rise to the top with new single 'Into You'

by Joe Sharratt
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London-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Cat Burns has enjoyed a truly meteoric rise over the last year and a half. When lockdown first hit in the Spring of last year, Burns had just started out posting clips online, mainly through Tik Tok. Within a year she’d amassed well over half a million followers, had been signed by RCA Records, and was the face of a Tik Tok advertising campaign. Not bad work for someone who had been rejected by several labels before embracing the social media platform. 

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Review: Bleachers up the ante with new album Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night

by Joe Sharratt
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At the start of this review, it’s only fair that I make a disclosure: Chinatown by Bleachers, featuring none other than Bruce Springsteen, was one of my very favourite tracks of the last year. A real lockdown record, with its haunting vocals and infused with a sense of yearning, it captured the essence of a difficult period. When lead singer and frontman Jack Antonoff and Springsteen crooned “I wanna find tomorrow”, it felt like they were talking to us all and our hope of better times to come.

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Fir Wave is the evocative and compelling new release from Hannah Peel

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Though she is probably still most widely known for her work presenting Night Tracks on BBC Radio 3, Hannah Peel is widely recognised as one of the brightest composers around. The Northern Irish artist, composer, producer and broadcaster studied music at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts and has a wide and varied CV. Her work includes collaborating with Paul Weller on his number one album On Sunset and writing and conducting all the orchestral arrangements for his 2018 shows at London’s Royal Festival Hall, to composing and recording the soundtrack for Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, which earned Peel a 2019 Emmy nomination for ‘Outstanding Music Composition For A Documentary Series Or Special (Original Dramatic Score).

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Liars continue their sonic experiments with new album The Apple Drop

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Predicting what will come next from Liars has become an almost impossible task over the years. The New York outfit are now ten albums and more than twenty years into a career that still refuses to be easily labelled. Their back catalogue has taken in everything from the punk sound that influenced their early releases to funk, electronica, dance and rock. They’ve been through personnel changes – founding member Aaron Hemphill in 2017, and drummer Julian Gross three years earlier – and yet continually refused to stand still.

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Review: Free Myself Anders

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Coming straight from his new album, there’s something quite cleverly unique with Anders’ opening track, “Free Myself”, through both its tone and melodies, paired with the lack of clear genre and its uniqueness.

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Review: Skate Silk Sonic

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Just as the world was still wrapping their heads around the genius of their Silk Sonic’s first single, “Leave the Door Open”, the duo released “Skate”, another absolute masterpiece through and through.

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Review: Cult indie hero Stephen Fretwell returns with new album Busy Guy

by Joe Sharratt
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Even if you haven’t heard of Scunthorpe-born singer-songwriter Stephen Fretwell, you will almost certainly have heard his music. That’s because his song Run – taken from his 2004 album Magpie – is the theme tune to the TV smash hit show Gavin & Stacey, and was apparently chosen by the show’s creator and star James Corden as he’s a big fan of Fretwell’s music.

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Folk troubadour Willy Mason returns with long awaited new album Already Dead

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When Willy Mason crashed into the early noughties indie scene as a nineteen-year-old with his rallying cry Oxygen, he was hailed as a Bob Dylan for the post-grunge generation, a folk singer-songwriter who had a political message for millenials everywhere. For a couple of years, around the release of his debut album Where The Humans Eat, it felt like Mason was a bonafide global superstar in the making. 

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Review: The Academic follow up debut album with New EP The Community Spirit

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Irish four-piece The Academic dropped their debut album Tales From The Backseat in 2018 to positive reviews, it’s blend of youthful exuberance and noughties-inspired indie, as well as the band’s reputation for exhilarating live shows, winning them fans both in the UK and at home in Ireland, where it hit number one in the Irish Album Charts. They built on that momentum last year with Acting My Age, a six-track EP recorded with Nick Hodgson of the Kaiser Chiefs that spawned the single of the same title, a mainstay of their live sets.

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Review: More feelgood fun from Barenaked Ladies on new album Detour De Force

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One Week was the ludicrously catchy track littered with pop culture references that first turned on a whole host of listeners around my age to the Barenaked Ladies in the late 1990s. It remains the band’s calling card and biggest hit, and still serves as the best introduction to their work for anyone who has not yet (somehow) heard them. Though, thanks to the sheer runaway success of the TV show The Big Bang Theory, for which the band created the distinctive theme song, that title is arguably under threat. 

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Review: I Love You, I Hate You Little Simz

by Rob Costa
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Before you hear this track for the first time, you read the title and you know this is going to be something epic! Then the track starts with an almost cinematic crescendo, with harps, horns & strings all building anticipation and in the last second of the intro you have no idea what’s about to hit you. 

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Rapper Kojaque captures Dublin life with daring new album Town’s Dead

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Kojaque, otherwise known as Kevin Smith, is the latest in a long line of musical talent coming out of Dublin. On his debut album, the young rapper specialises in carving out sharply observed slices of life in the Irish capital, and in particular the experiences of the city’s young people, ravaged by years of political, economic and social change that have priced many out of finding their own home. Indeed, Kojaque wrote the album while living at home with his mum. 

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Review: Rising star Aziya pays tribute to her guitar heroes with new EP We Speak of Tides

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“Cathartic” is the single word 21-year-old Londoner Aziya Aldridge-Moore (known as just Aziya) used on her official Facebook page to describe the release of We Speak Of Tides, her first EP and a release that was spawned from the last year and more of life lived under lockdown. Unable to perform with her band, Aziya instead took to social media, releasing covers of some of her favourite artists, and working on the tracks that would form her debut EP.

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Review: Maisie Peters drops new single Psycho from upcoming debut album

by Joe Sharratt
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Maisie Peters has already enjoyed a truly meteoric rise. After gaining popularity through YouTube and dropping the EPs Dressed Too Nice for a Jacket (2018) and It's Your Bed Babe, It's Your Funeral (2019) through Atlantic Records, the 21-year-old singer songwriter penned a record deal with none other than Ed Sheeran earlier this year, and the ginger-haired pop behemoth is all set to release Peters’ debut album You Signed Up For This later this summer through his Gingerbread Records label. 

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Review: Laura Mvula is back on top with joyous new album Pink Noise

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Birmingham-born singer, songwriter and composer Laura Mvula has endured a particularly difficult few years. It’s not just the constraints and strains of lockdown that we’ve all endured either. After her first two albums – 2013’s Sing To The Moon and The Dreaming Room in 2016 – were both Mercury nominated, her debut winning two MOBO Awards and the followup an Ivor Novello Award, Mvula was unceremoniously dropped by Sony from her five-album deal. Incredibly, she only found out the news by email

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Manchester Orchestra reach new heights with stunning new album The Million Masks of God

by Joe Sharratt
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Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia and led by the captivating vocals of frontman Andy Hull, Manchester Orchestra are a band that have achieved one of the trickiest feats for an indie rock outfit – making each album feel at once unique yet quintessentially identifiable as theirs. From debut album I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child all the way through to their most recent release, 2017’s A Black Mile To The Surface, each new Manchester Orchestra record not only felt like it contained the band’s DNA at it’s very core, but also progressively improved on its predecessor and offered something new. Very few bands can do this, and it's a sign, if any were needed, of their incredible talent as songwriters and performers.

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Review: Indie stars Modest Mouse return with psychedelic new album The Golden Casket

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Hailing from Washington, west coast rockers Modest Mouse were one of the key flag bearers for the indie revival of the late 1990s. Their rapid fire release of three albums in just five years, from their debut This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About, to follow up The Lonesome Crowded West, and 2000’s The Moon & Antarctica, catapulted them to worldwide acclaim, and rightfully so. These early volumes were captivating, free flowing masterpieces of the genre that stand up more than two decades on.

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Review: The prolific Ripley Johnson returns with new Rose City Band offering Earth Trip

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Lockdown must have been a tricky prospect to deal with for Ripley Johnson, the hardworking singer and multiinstrumentalist who is one half of Moon Duo and the frontman of west coast psychedelic rockers Wooden Shjips. Suddenly forced off the road, the enigmatic Johnson turned his hand instead to crafting a new album, despite only releasing his last offering as Rose City Band last summer.

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Review: Zitti e Buoni- Maneskin

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Ciao bella, is this a joke?

It’s easy to write off any winner of a Eurovision song contest and label these artists and songs as a novelty. After all, most of the past winners, with the exception of a few, notably ABBA in 1974, fade away into musical oblivion.

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Review: October Sky- Yebba

by Adam Bailey
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Often times, when we have something important to say, we take a big breath in…. then out it comes. In the first second of October Sky, we hear Yebba take a breath in before the vocals. I love the production team for keeping this in, as it sets up the introduction to Yebba’s heavenly vocals perfectly!

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Review: Born 2 Die by Prince - listen

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With a surprising new release, late-legend Prince has released a single titled Born 2 Die from his upcoming posthumous album Welcome 2 America. It truly feels like a throwback to old-school funk, and promises the album to be of utmost greatness. 

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Review: Interlude J. Cole

by Nicholas Gaudet
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After a long wait, J. Cole finally unexpectedly releases a song from his newest album, Off Season, titled i n t e r l u d e, which shows a whole new side of J. Cole that the world had never heard before this short two-minute track.

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Review: Elevator Boots Counting Crows

by Nicholas Gaudet
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It’s common nowadays for band to take inspiration from old school rock and roll groups like Greta Van Fleet for example. It isn’t often, however, that you hear not only those roots glow through the music, but also in the production. Elevator Boots, Counting Crows’ newest single, is straight from 1968, and no one can convince me otherwise.

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Review: Into the Storm Gojira

by Nicholas Gaudet
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Gojira have always had a fantastic reputation with their releases. Every album is an expansion on everything they’ve done before, and they are excellent at continuing that moment with each release. With their newest single, Into the Storm, their fourth preview of their upcoming album Fortitude, they absolutely hold that momentum and propel it further on.

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Review: Worth Seq

by Nicholas Gaudet
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It’s very rare that artists manage to mix soft tones, sounding like water flowing down a river, and heavy, gut-wrenching beats, like the edges and bumps of the rocks the water flows over. But, as expected of Seq, the artist manages to mix the two in a perfect blend otherwise thought impossible in his newest single, worth.

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