FEATURE:
One for the Record Collection!
IN THIS PHOTO: beabadoobee
Essential August Releases
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THERE are ten or eleven or so…
IN THIS PHOTO: Sabrina Carpenter
albums from August that I wanted to recommend. Future release that I think people should pre-order and invest in. The best albums of the month come in the second half. Let’s start with 16th August. You can see everything out in August here. There is nothing I want to spotlight from 2nd or 9th August. The second half of the month is packed. On 16th August, beabadoobee releases This Is How Tomorrow Moves. The amazing and acclaimed artist is one of our best Pop talents. I think that people should check out this incredible record. Released through Dirty Hit, you can pre-order the album here. I think that This Is How Tomorrow Moves is going to be among the year’s best and most acclaimed albums:
“This Is How Tomorrow Moves is the third album from artist beabadoobee, recorded at Shangri-La in Malibu with renowned producer Rick Rubin and released on her long-standing label, Dirty Hit. This Is How Tomorrow Moves captures beabadoobee's confidence and introspection, with themes of self-acceptance and personal growth woven throughout. It stands as a testament to her artistic evolution and resilience, marking a significant milestone in her career”.
Apologies for a lack of real depth and information regarding new albums. I usually source Rough Trade UK and what they say about an album. Sometimes, you get depth and words that really give an insight into the album. Sometimes, they keep it to a few lines. I know it may not be that useful, though I would appreciate people do some digging and investigation. You can see I am padding again because, when it comes to the next album, they have not expended too much energy exploring and explaining the album. It is understandable, though it would be nice to get more background and information. I am referring to Charli Bliss and their forthcoming album, Forever. You can pre-order the album now:
“New York pop savants Charly Bliss want their new album Forever to crush you under the weight of pure feeling. They want to sweep you up in a hurricane of heartbreak. They want you to pour your soul out singing along at their shows and alone in your bedroom. In short, says singer Eva Hendricks, they want to destroy you...but in a fun way.
Produced by Jake Luppen (Hippo Campus) and Caleb Wright (Samia) along with the band’s Sam Hendricks, Forever follows five years after their critically acclaimed 2019 album Young Enough. Full of the band’s biggest, brightest batch of power pop yet Forever crams a lifetime of feeling, decades of friendship, and years of craft into a batch of sonically tight but emotionally vast songs that activate the pleasure centres in your brain whether you’re listening alone in your headphones or in a packed room at a live show. The songs shimmer and burst, the way fireworks look like they should sound”.
There are a couple of other 16th August releases before I move into 23rd and 30th. I want to direct people to Hamish Hawk’s new album, A Firmer Hand. You can pre-order it here. Maybe you are new to his work. I would recommend people listen to Hamish Hawk. He is an incredible artist whose music you need in your life. It sounds like A Firmer Hand is going to rank alongside his best work:
“Writing this album, I opened up my closet, and a skeleton came out.” In a café just around the corner from his Edinburgh flat, Hamish Hawk is contemplating his extraordinary new record, A Firmer Hand. “The thing that links all of the songs is a sense of the unsaid, whether out of guilt, shame, repression, embarrassment, coyness, whatever it might have been. I realised: I am going to say these things, and not all of them are going to make me look good. The album made so many demands, and I just gave myself over to it.”
At this stage, where only a handful of close associates have heard the finished album, Hawk is still unsure of what the reaction might be from fans, critics, even family. He jokes that A Firmer Hand is the first of his records that his parents might not enjoy. “But the fact that it makes me nervous tells me it was the right thing to do.
It takes only a couple of listens to be sure that it was a risk worth taking. And just a couple more to determine that A Firmer Hand is the best and boldest record Hamish Hawk has delivered to date. “It’s a bit of a coming of age record,” he says. And a record for the ages”.
Before moving onto 23rd August, I want to bring to people’s attention Pom Poko. A wonderful band, they release Champion on 16th August. You can pre-order the album. I think that it is going to turn out to be a real gem. Something you should consider purchasing. I am fairly new to the band, but I have been impressed by everything they have put out. They are incredibly talented and original. One of the smaller acts I am spotlighting in this feature, yet they are well worth listening to:
“Pom Poko is a Norwegian band renowned for their eclectic blend of indie rock, punk, and pop sensibilities.
Formed in Trondheim in 2016, the quartet consists of Ragnhild Fangel, Martin Miguel Tonne, Ola Djupvik, and Jonas Krovel. Since their inception, they've released two critically acclaimed albums and mesmerizing live performances, solidifying their status as one of Norway's most exciting musical exports.
Their third album Champion features their dynamic soundscapes, characterized by energetic rhythms, intricate guitar work, and Fangel's distinctive vocals, which have garnered widespread acclaim. With influences ranging from art-rock to jazz, Pom Poko's music defes genre boundaries, delivering a fresh and innovative sonic experience. Speaking of the record, the band said... "This record is a kind of experiment to see what happens when the four of us in Pom Poko make music without any input from the world around us, from the frst idea of a song until the last note is recorded. This time, we've recorded and produced absolutely everything ourselves, a process that has been surprisingly comfortable. With this album, we landed, almost unconsciously, on the fact that the songs needed more space and less fussiness in the production than what we've been drawn to before”.
Let’s move on to 23rd August. There are four albums out this week that I want to get to. The first is Fontaines D.C.’s Romance. A sensational band that played Glastonbury last month, there is going to be a lot of interest around their fourth studio album. You can pre-order it now. They are a band who are going to have a very long and successful future:
“Fontaines D.C. release their highly-anticipated fourth album, Romance. Released via XL Recordings, Romance is the band’s first album with producer James Ford and is without doubt their most assured, inventive and sonically adventurous record yet. It’s set to build on the success of the Dublin-made, now London-based band’s acclaimed 2022 album Skinty Fia, which reached number 1 in the UK and Irish album charts and saw the band receiving a host of accolades including “International Group of the Year” at the 2023 Brit Awards.
Heralding Fontaines D.C.’s latest creative (r)evolution is the explosive lead single “Starburster”. Inspired by a panic attack lead singer Grian Chatten suffered in London’s St Pancras station, the song is punctuated by sharp feral intakes of breath. Its propulsive beat and unrelenting lyrics establish self-destruction as fantasy before a brief moment of sobering clarity when the drums fall away and Chatten moves from spitting, almost-rap into an almost-psalm, his baritone rich and dreamy. It’s accompanied by a cinematic music video from director Aube Perrie (Megan Thee Stallion, Harry Styles, The Hives) that captures the song’s cathartic intensity to brilliant effect.
Romance is Fontaines D.C.s most ambitious, expansive record yet, its 11 tracks constellating ideas that have been percolating among Grian Chatten (vocals), Carlos O’Connell (guitar), Conor Curley (guitar), Conor Deegan (bass), and Tom Coll (drums) since they released Skinty Fia in 2022. These ideas crystalised while touring the U.S. and Mexico with Arctic Monkeys as the five band members shared music and found a throughline with artists that deftly build out their own sprawling creative worlds: the attitude and aesthetic sheen of artists like Shygirl and Sega Bodega, the bolshy sonic palettes of hip hop and heavy metal, Mos Def, A$AP Ferg, OutKast and Korn. They had time apart to build more singular visions for what future music could be: O’Connell went to Spain’s Castile-La Mancha and later became a new father, while Chatten spent time in LA, and Deegan in Paris. They laid deeper roots in London. Each member spent time pushing their boundaries – experimental riffs, chord progressions, and far-flung lyrical references without intentions for a record. After wrapping up the US arena tour in Autumn 2023, they spent a month writing together again, three weeks of pre-production in a North London studio, and a month in a chateau close to Paris, sleeping among studio equipment, completely immersed.
The sonic evolution of the band, who bared their teeth in early records with antagonistic punk sensibilities, is an ascent into grungier breaks, dystopian electronica, hip-hop percussion, and dreamy Slowdive-esque textures that may surprise fans. The shoegaze touchpoints first pressed on Skinty Fia unfold on Romance like a purpling bruise. But any “retro aesthetic”, as Chatten describes it, is left behind. Reflecting on the impending release, Chatten says, “We say things on this record we’ve wanted to say for a long time. I never feel like it's over, but it’s nice to feel lighter.” The fantasy is felt for better or worse, and Fontaines D.C. welcome either end of oblivion”.
An album with scandalously little written about it, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n' Sweet is well worth ordering. I think that every music fan should seek it out, as Carpenter is one of the finest young artists. You have more buying options here. Before moving on here, this is what Variety said about the roll-out campaign for Short n’ Sweet. This is another album that is going to sit alongside the best of the year. Sabrina Carpenter is a very special artist:
“The songs are strong. But songcraft alone isn’t quite enough in the age of virality, and few have lately proven themselves as adept at surfing the waves of public attention as Carpenter. An early sign, perhaps, was her late-2023 and early-2024 booking as the opening act for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Latin America, Australia, and Asia; the mere fact of the gig was one thing, but Carpenter cannily turned each night into an event. Her single “Nonsense” ends with a slightly blue, rhyming three-line joke, and each night of the tour, she came up with a new one, referencing the language and culture of wherever she was visiting. (To wit, in Buenos Aires: “When I’m in the bedroom I feel sexy / He’s having a ball, he call me Messi / Argentina, will you be my bestie?”) This was showmanship designed less for the stadium crowd than for PopCrave. And it worked, continuing up to her “Saturday Night Live” performance, in which she joked about a guy being “30 Rock hard.”
Something, here, recalls what Katy Perry once referred to as her own “soft-serve sexiness”: It’s a gleefully innocent raunch, delivered with a wink that brings everyone, Carpenter included, in on the joke. (The “Nonsense” outros are either stupidly intelligent or brilliantly dumb, and they’re always delivered with slyness and control.) A key difference with Perry, though, is the overarching sense of strategy and cohesion. Perry, when launching an album — as she’s currently doing, showing up in Paris in a dress with a 100-yard-train bedecked with the lyrics sheet for her next single — will try just about anything. (Most notably, perhaps, was her 96-hour “Big Brother”-style livestream promoting the 2017 album “Witness”: It was a can’t-look-away spectacle that seemed, ultimately, to do little for the music.)
And it’s hard to blame her: For those with lower profiles than Taylor Swift — which is to say, for every other working musician — figuring out the right angle of approach on an album rollout is tricky. In recent months, Dua Lipa pumped out content, live performances, and various pre-launch singles ahead of her new album “Radical Optimism”; Billie Eilish, by contrast, withheld any singles ahead of “Hit Me Hard and Soft.”
For Carpenter, the music has connected so far, but the primary work she’s done has been establishing a persona and not deviating from it. Her tweet celebrating “Please Please Please” hitting No. 1 poked at a music fan who’d said she’d “fumbled a second single.” While there’s a power dynamic at play when an artist complains about their critics by name (and when, resultantly, their fans swarm), her feeling of vindication is understandable, as is the sense that, in a world where people speak with increasing freedom about celebrities, those same celebrities can and will speak back. On a lighter note, Carpenter’s team set up Times Square billboards featuring social-media jokes about the singer’s (diminuitive) height — this felt less like clapping back than acknowledging that she’s aware of, and in on, the joke. Just like the album title says, she’s short and sweet”.
Sporting one of the best album covers of the year, I would advise people to pre-order Sofi Tukker’s BREAD. This may be another act that you are new to. The duo of Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern should be on your radar. Again, there is an unforgivable lack of information about this album. This article provides more information and insight:
“While other artists serve reheated leftovers, SOFI TUKKER are bringing piping hot, preservative-free dance vibes straight from the oven of their imagination.
The acclaimed dance music duo today announced their third studio album BREAD, an acronym for "Be Really Energetic And Dance," a mantra that perfectly encapsulates the infectious energy that courses through their music.
Sophie Hawley-Weld and Tucker Halpern have been whipping up this auditory feast for roughly two years with ingredients like globally-inspired beats, honeyed vocal hooks and a generous helping of unfettered creativity. If their Grammy-nominated past releases are any indication, BREAD is sure to be a sumptuous, multi-layered experience.
BREAD is the duo's first album since 2022's scintillating WET TENNIS. An ode to unrestrained movement, it's scheduled to release on August 23rd and will feature 10 tracks, including collaborations with Channel Tres and Kah-Lo.
For the calorie-conscious, this bread contains no empty carbs—only rich nutrients to fuel dancefloors everywhere. Case in point is "Throw Some Ass," an unapologetic, hip-shaking single out now”.
There are four albums from 30th August I want to discuss. The first is from Jon Hopkins. RITUAL is available to pre-order here. Again, maybe an artist that is new to you. Also again, I would urge people to check him out. His music is like nothing else. You will want to check out this spectacular album:
“By turns devotional, empowering and nurturing, Jon Hopkins’ forthcoming Ritual is a 41-minute electronic symphony built from cavernous subs, hypnotic drumming and transcendent melodic interplay. Tense, immersive and ultimately triumphant, it is a culmination of themes explored throughout his 22-year career, and acts as the kinetic counterpart to 2021’s Music For Psychedelic Therapy.
A single piece unfolding over eight chapters, Ritual is personified by depth and contrast. Taking ceremony, spiritual liberation and the hero's journey as inspiration, it taps into an ancient and primal energy.
Featuring long-term collaborators Vylana, 7RAYS, Ishq, Clark, Emma Smith, Daisy Vatalaro and Cherif Hashizume, Ritual came together within the second half of 2023, but initial seeds were sown in 2022, when Hopkins was commissioned to compose for the stroboscopic Dreamachine experience in London. A project that felt ceremonial from the outset, this shorter piece was the embryo of Ritual, with Hopkins gaining inspiration from the feeling of intention that is inherent in the Dreamachine space.
Ritual is both emotionally and sonically heavy, whilst retaining a warm, live feel, where the juxtaposition between softness and intensity forms the core of the whole. So take time, prepare and immerse in Ritual for 41 minutes of uninterrupted listening: sonic divination of the most potent form”.
On 30th August, Laurie Anderson releases Amelia. You can pre-order the album. The legendary artist releases a really intriguing album. It has this conceptual arc. Even if you are not a overly familiar with Anderson, this is an album that you will really need to order. It sounds like it is going to be phenomenal. Again, there is hardly anything about the album. I hope that websites attach more press and detail about the album because, when you see what is out there at the moment, it does not really tantalise as much as it should. Regardless, I think that Amelia is going to be a terrific album that you will want to add to your collection:
“Nonesuch Records releases Laurie Anderson’s Amelia, the 2024 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient's first new album since 2018’s Grammy-winning Landfall.
The record comprises 22 tracks about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight.
Anderson, who Pitchfork says, ‘sees the future, but she starts by paying attention’, wrote the music and lyrics for this subjective narrative piece.
On the album, she is joined by the Czech orchestra Filharmonie Brno, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, and Anohni, Gabriel Cabezas, Rob Moose, Ryan Kelly, Martha Mooke, Marc Ribot, Tony Scherr, Nadia Sirota, and Kenny Wolleson”.
Two more albums to cover the month. Los Bitchos’ Talkie Talkie is one I am looking forward to. A band I have been a fan of for a long time now, they are set to shake things up this summer. You should really go and order this album. Los Bitchos have such an exciting and distinct sound. With their fanbase growing around the world, this is a time that you need to get on board. There are more words available album, Talkie Talkie. It gives you plenty to chew over:
“If Los Bitchos’ electrifying 2022 debut album Let the Festivities Begin! Was the rowdy build up to the big night out, then Talkie Talkie is the Technicolour explosion of the dancefloor. Made up of lead guitarist Serra, who carries both Australian and Turkish heritage, Uruguayan synth and keytar player Agustina Ruiz, Swedish bassist Josefine Jonsson and British drummer Nic Crawshaw, the group are united by a commitment to having fun. It’s a contagious energy they’ve had no problem transmitting to the world: since the band officially arrived in 2019 with two sell-out 7" singles, they marked themselves as one of London’s brightest bands to watch. Since then, they’ve found a home in beloved indie label City Slang, ripped stages across the most coveted stages the globe over (such as Glastonbury and Coachella, as well as supporting Pavement and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard), and radiated the verve of their personalities and cultures through their exploratory take on rock’n’roll. The London-based quartet’s new album is glistening with charisma, sonic experimentation and a puckish spirit. Named after a fictional club of the same name Talkie Talkie is a late-night paradise brimming with freedom and possibility; a place where partygoers can escape reality in the dance or daydream along to the invigorating soundscapes.
Los Bitchos promise to turn the global indie rock scene upside down in 2024!”.
One of the biggest and most anticipated albums of this year comes from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Wild God is an album that everyone should order. An iconic band who have been making music together for decades now, they show no signs of slowing down or dipping in quality. Their forthcoming album is looking like it will sit alongside their very best of recent times. I think that Wild God will be among the most celebrated and highest-reviewed albums of the year:
“Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds are back after a five-year break with their new album Wild God! Across ten tracks, the band dances between convention and experimentation, taking left turns and detours that enhance the rich imagery and emotion in Cave's heartfelt narratives. There are moments that fondly recall the Bad Seeds' past, but they are fleeting and only serve to add another facet to the band's relentless and restless forward momentum. Nick Cave says of the album: "It bursts out of the speaker, and I get swept up with it. It's a complicated record, but it's also deeply and joyously infectious."
Produced by Cave and Warren Ellis and mixed by David Fridmann, Cave began writing the album on New Year's Day 2023. Recording in Provence and London, the Bad Seeds finally added their unique alchemy, with additional appearances from Colin Greenwood (bass) and Luis Almau (nylon string guitar, acoustic guitar).
"Wild God...there's no fucking around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it." - Nick Cave”.
Even though most of the best albums of next month are in the second half, there might be a few from the first half that you’ll want to buy. I do feel that more happens in the second half of the month. There are a lot of interesting albums due. From beabadoobee to Los Bitchos through to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, there is a little bit of something for everyone. If you need some guides as to which August albums are worth getting, I hope that the above is useful. September looks even more busy and interesting. Even so, there is more than enough brilliant music out next month…
THAT you’ll want to check out.