Latest Reviews

Dublin indie grunge trio HAVVK attracted attention with their self titled EP in 2016, and it’s follow up She Knows in 2017, before their debut album Cause & Effect, a stunning record that explored some big themes, brought their music to a wider audience. New album Levelling landed this week and, I’m delighted to report, keeps the fury and frenzy alive, while being just as lyrically intriguing as its predecessor.

Comprised of guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker, indie rock minimalists Low have been enchanting fans with their vocal interplay and drop dead gorgeous musical arrangements since the early 1990s. Up until relatively recently though, their formula remained largely unchanged, until their 2015 album Ones And Sixes signalled a significant change in direction as they incorporated new sounds and began working with producer BJ Burton. 

Australian singer, songwriter and record producer Matthew Victor Kopp, otherwise known as Running Touch, first rose to prominence as the guitarist for, and founding member of, nu metal band Ocean Grove in his homeland roughly a decade ago. However, Kopp struck out on his own in the mid noughties, releasing a string of singles and an EP, A Body Slow, in the years that followed.

Andrew Fetterly Wilkes-Krier, better known as Andrew W.K., was one of the big breakthroughs of the early noughties alternative revival. His single Party Hard was a mainstay of rock club nights up and down the country, while the album that spawned it earned rave reviews and featured in many critics ‘album of the year’ rundowns, and gained a solid following, partly fuelled by the (at the time) controversy over the cover image of the blood-stained star himself.

As one of the defining musicians of the 1990s Britpop era, Graham Coxon had absolutely nothing to prove. However, that hasn’t stopped the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from producing a huge range of solo material away from the band with whom he made his name. And that material has been as varied as it has been rewarding, from the folky garage rock of The Sky Is Too High and the indie classic Happiness In Magazines, to the predominantly acoustic The Spinning Top and beyond.

The British heavy metal titans, godfathers of power metal, and one of the strongest forces in rock are back with their first new single since their latest album, 2015’s Book Of Souls, titled Stratego, from their upcoming album Senjutsu.

Johnny Flynn is a man of many talents. From carving out a reputation (and rightfully so) as the UK’s premier folk artist, to starring on the stage and silver screen, and racking up a huge amount of awards wins and nominations over the years, there’s seemingly very little the South African born superstar can’t turn his hand to. 

Las Vegas four-piece Imagine Dragons are an intriguing outfit. They are, by almost every modern metric that matters, one of the most blisteringly successful bands of the last decade. Billboard ranks their singles Believer, Thunder, and Radioactive as the three biggest rock songs of the 2010s in the US charts, they were Spotify’s most streamed outfit in 2018, and they’ve surpassed 20 million album sales worldwide. And yet, they just don’t seem to have been welcomed into our consciousness in the same way acts like The Killers, in many ways the band that paved the way for their success, have been.

Anyone who has set for inside a club on indie night at some time in the last decade will be familiar with The Vaccines, the London five-piece having carved out a name for themselves as one of the leaders of the current generation of dancefloor-filling, guitar-wielding pack of bands that also includes the likes of The Wombats, The Kooks and The Courteeners. 

For a band who have continually reinvented themselves over the years, from the young androgynous punk upstarts who gave us Generation Terrorists, to the virtiolic The Holy Bible era, and the Britpop conquering albums Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, the Manic Street Preachers 14th studio LP The Ultra Vivid Lament still carries with it a big surprise.