FEATURE: Needle Drops and Scores to Settle: Scene Four: The Bathroom: Psycho (1960)

FEATURE:

 

 

Needle Drops and Scores to Settle

Scene Four: The Bathroom: Psycho (1960)

__________

BECAUSE one of the…

IN THIS PHOTO: Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho – leading up to the infamous shower scene, which had a profound effect on audiences (in 1960) and cinema/PHOTO CREDIT: Alamy

most influential films in cinema history turned sixty-five earlier in the year, I wanted to spend some time with its classic score. In the first three features in this series, I have looked at soundtracks. Films that took us back to 2013, 1997 and 1977. Now, I am jumping back to 1960 and one of the most distinct and terrifying scores in film history. Psycho is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest films and most notable works. However, you feel that it would not be viewed in quite as high regard were it not for the score by Bernard Herrmann. The incredible German composer used only a string orchestra because of budget reasons and wanted to create a black-and-white sound to match the film’s aesthetic. I don’t think that we dissect film scores enough. I am bringing in a few articles about the Psycho score, so that we can get a deeper impression of how it came together and why it has the legacy it does. Film Independent put Psycho under the microscope for their Anatomy of Great Film Score series:

“Last week in our Know the Score “Anatomy of a Great Film Score” series, we went to outer space to explore Max Steiner’s iconic music for 1933’s King Kong. In this special Halloween-themed bonus installment, we’re coming back down to earth (and checking into a suspiciously dilapidated family-run motel off the highway) to take a closer listen to one of the most iconic horror scores of all time: that for the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock classic, Psycho.

The score for Psycho is a study in economy. Underfunded, Hitchcock was thinking in terms of working with less—even shooting the project with the production team from his Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series, rather than a “proper” studio film crew.

The audience, too, is forced to work with less. When we watch the black-and-white film, instead of seeing grisly red blood swirling down Marion Crane’s shower drain, we infer its color from the dark stain in the water. And when we listen to the film score, we hear a pared-down sound with just a string orchestra used as the palette for composition.

Hitchcock thought that the score might use jazz and be-bop as a starting place. Which likely would’ve been more to the studio’s liking, as scoring styles in the 1950s and early ‘60s were indeed moving in that direction. But composer Bernard Hermann—one of Hitchcock’s most steadfast collaborators-rejected this approach. He wanted to use traditional orchestral sounds, which he did so masterfully that his Psycho score later came to define the sound of slasher films for a generation.

The use of just strings is a study in restraint, one that perfectly piques the audience’s sense of suspense. The orchestra’s sound is further reduced by the use of the sordino—or “mutes”—on the strings. This sound of muted strings holds back the emotion that a string orchestra would normally have without mutes.

The quieter sound matches the tension on screen, starting with the prelude over opening credits and continuing through the love tryst scene that opens the film. Here, Hermann used the tension of the muted strings to amplify a sense of fear in the music. The effect is that of a strained voice that wants to scream, but which is held back, frustrated and restrained.

Hitchcock and Hermann had a long working relationship that, by the end of the ‘50s, had become a real partnership based on trust. Hitchcock therefore trusted Hermann enough to cede his initial jazz-focused ideas and listen instead to the music Hermann was creating according to his own creative impulses—the orchestral string score.

The most well known scene from Psycho is its infamous shower scene. The scene stands out in cinema history for a few reasons. The first: this is where our leading lady (Janet Leigh) meets her premature demise. The timing of a leading lady’s death one-third of the way through the film was very unorthodox—both then and now—and makes the shock of the violence even stronger. Also, the scene is partially shot from the vantage point of the killer, forcing the viewer experience the action through the murderer’s eyes.

Hitchcock initially wanted the shower scene to play with no music at all. In another example of trust between collaborators, when Hitchcock finally heard the music Hermann had composed for the sequence, he immediately changed his mind.

This decision made way for one of the most iconic uses of score in cinema history, with Hermann’s strings imitating high-pitched shrieks to match the emotions of the victim being stabbed onscreen—a classic sound so often quoted and echoed in the slasher films that followed. This is the only place in the film where the strings play without mutes, their full power released in a shocking marriage of image and sound.

But in the first part of the scene, as Leigh’s Marion Crane begins to relax in the shower, there is in fact no music. With Marion facing the wall, we see behind her someone enter the bathroom—but still, silence. The tension is already high. Then, the music and the action both ramp up and accelerate beyond expectations, as the knife cuts through the shower curtain and the slicing chords high up on the violins rip into our ears.

Norman Bates’ (Anthony Perkins) voyeurism—at first watching his victim through a peephole in the wall, and later behind her in the bathroom through the shower curtain—is made all the more frightening when the curtain is torn down by the dying hands of our victim as she slumps to the tile floor. The staccato strings in the low register beat out a slowing rhythm. The victim’s heart is slowing down, but we’re also slowly realizing that the film has taken a dreadful turn.

The brutal murder of the leading lady in the first third is a surprising turn that leaves the audience feeling hopelessness. Psycho is a film that owes more than the usual debt to its musical score, more than most other films. And appropriately, although Psycho had a smaller budget than the usual Hitchcock production, Hermann was actually paid twice his usual fee.

As Hitchcock himself said it best: “Thirty-three percent of the effect of Psycho was due to the music”—and probably more, if you ask Bernard Hermann”

Before getting to another featured, I would say to people to read reviews like this of the incredible Psycho score, as you get insight into the different pieces. There are articles like this that theorise that some of the score was not originally written for Psycho. Pieces that were composed years before 1960. I am going to move to NPR and their feature about Bernard Herrmann’s incredible score:

"In the mid '50s, he started working with Alfred Hitchcock on films like "The Trouble With Harry," "The Man Who Knew Too Much," "Vertigo," "North By Northwest," and all of those films came before "Psycho." So by 1960, when "Psycho" was released, the partnership between Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann was very, very close. Hitchcock is famous for having planned every detail of his movies to the smallest one, but it was interesting to discover that he actually left the area of music very, very open to Bernard Herrmann. Hitchcock knew that he had someone who thought very closely along the same lines as he did, who understood not only what a movie was about, but about the subtext of the film."

"Hitchcock was doing something different. He was doing what was, for him, a low-budget film. And everything in the budget got cut back, including apparently the music budget. So Herrmann was working with a little less. He got his fee, but he didn't quite have the resources that he usually had. And 'Psycho,' of course, is a black-and-white movie. And Benny later said that he wanted to complement the black-and-white photography with a black-and-white score. Well, just as there's tremendous range in black-and-white movies in the photography of them, Herrmann found tremendous range within this limited group of instruments, the string section. He made the strings extremely dry. He put mutes; he loved to have mutes on his strings."

"So it creates a very different sound from what we think of as the usual Hollywood romantic film score that used violins. It's the exact opposite. It's cold, it's chilly, and he uses the strings also for percussive effects, since we don't have the traditional things like timpani and all the sort of devices that film composers use to scare or startle people. He created percussive effects in the strings."

"Psycho" was a black-and-white film made at a time when Hitchcock typically worked in color and when moviegoers typically expected color. As film critic Leonard Maltin says, `This was a film that defied all sorts of expectations.'

"There had never been a film, certainly not from a Hollywood filmmaker or a Hollywood studio, like "Psycho." It was exponentially a hundred times more shocking than it is today. Imagine the unthinkable, killing off a major star in the first portion of the film. No one had ever done that; few have done it since. It's outlandish, it's outrageous. It's, of course, brilliant. So to be sitting in that theater in 1960 and hear the sudden shriek of violins as Anthony Perkins pulls that shower curtain and to witness what happens from that point on, I think people must have been thinking, `Am I really seeing what I'm seeing here? Is Janet Leigh dead? Janet Leigh can't be dead, she's the star of the movie.' It was devastating."

The murder of Marion, Janet Leigh's character, is the most famous and terrifying moment in "Psycho," some would say in all of Hitchcock's films, if not in all cinema. Remarkably, Hitchcock at first didn't want the scene to have music at all.

"He thought that it would be most effective if the audience simply heard Janet Leigh's screams, her struggling, the sounds of the knife and then the water running," Steven Smith says. "+His collaboration with Herrmann was so close, however, that Benny knew, `Well, I have a different idea,' and he wanted to try writing music for that. And he knew that if Hitchcock didn't like it, they didn't have to use it. But Benny went ahead and wrote what has become, I think, the most famous hue in the history of film music for the shower scene. And I think one of the proudest moments of his career as a film composer was when Hitchcock later told him that he, Hitchcock, was disappointed with the way the shower scene was playing; that it did need music. And Benny later said that he told Hitchcock, `Well, I did compose something. Would you like to hear it?' And he played it for Hitchcock, and Hitch said, `Well, absolutely, we'll use that.' And Benny, rubbing it in, said, `But you said no music,' to which Hitchcock replied, `Improper suggestion, my boy. Improper suggestion.'"

"It's interesting to watch that sequence without the music, because it's still a very disturbing sequence, but you're watching it as an outsider. You're watching a terrible thing happen, but you're watching it from the viewpoint of someone outside of it. With Herrmann's cue, you are Janet Leigh. You are feeling the absolute terror and panic and loss of control that she is feeling in trying to fend off this sudden attacker. And that was the thing that Herrmann did again and again, especially in Hitchcock's films, was that he forced the viewer to feel what the characters on screen were feeling. He considered film music, in his phrase, the `communicating link' between the filmmaker and the viewer."

Unlike many composers, Bernard Herrmann got to see Hitchcock's film and write to it scene by scene, which isn't to say that every piece of Herrmann's score came to him as he watched Hitchcock's otherwise finished product. Professor Royal Brown says some pieces in "Psycho" were written by Herrmann more than 25 years earlier.

"I interviewed Herrmann very shortly before he died and insisted to me that he always depended upon the film to be inspired for the music. And yet there's a major cue called "The Swamp" in "Psycho" that is taken out of a 1933 symphonetta for strings that Herrmann wrote. And there are several other points in the "Psycho" score that also come from this. So my impression is that Herrmann was exploring very deep, dark, gloomy areas a long time before he met Hitchcock”.

The final feature I am bringing in is from the BBC from last year. Marking sixty-five years of a classic film and score, they wrote about how the terrifying music through Psycho changed film forever. It no doubt had a huge bearing on Horror scores that followed. Still influencing composers to this day. There are few films that are as suspenseful and tense as Psycho. Its lack of gore and genuine terror is what makes it so disturbing and harrowing:

“Screaming violas that sound like they're coming out of an abattoir. Thumping bass notes, which slowly decrease in speed and seem to imitate a victim's faltering heartbeat. Take away composer Bernard Herrmann's score for director Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which turns 65 this month, and it's fair to say this 1960 horror film wouldn't have the same nerve-shredding impact.

Particularly key is the knives-edge music that plays when blonde bombshell Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), not long after checking in to the Bates Motel, is attacked through a shower curtain by a shadowy killer, who later turns out to be the motel's owner, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), dressed up as his dead mother. "That music is everything," says Rachel Zeffira, a film composer and one half of art-folk duo Cat's Eyes. "It's the birds, it's the bees, and it's the voices in the back of your head."

The project had seemed ill-starred from the start, with executives at Paramount (who had produced Hitchcock's previous five films) showing little interest, not allowing him to film it on their lot, and only distributing it rather than producing it themselves. But despite a paltry budget, Hitchcock proved everybody wrong, and for that he could partly thank Herrmann and his knack for crafting compositions that lifted scenes to new heights.

"Psycho was certainly not a bad film before it was scored, but it lacked tension," explains Steven C Smith, the author of a new book, Hitchcock and Herrmann: The Friendship and Film Scores that Changed Cinema. Herrmann proceeded to give the film a much-needed jolt by writing music for an all-string 50-person orchestra that marked a "return to pure ice water", as the composer described it to Sight and Sound.

Before writing film music, Herrmann would always read the novel a movie was based on and study the literature, so his score was more empathetic. Every note Herrmann played had meaning – Rachel Zeffira

In the case of the most famous scene, this resulted in a chorus of psychologically jarring, high-pitched squeals that meant terrified audiences no longer saw the shower as a safe space. "Before the shower scene many of the musical cues have a depressive quality and they're not really that loud," Smith says. "But suddenly with the shower scene, the mutes are off the strings, and they screech animalistically. This creates a clever link with Norman Bates, the taxidermist of birds."

Herrmann forced an initially dismissive Hitchcock to watch the shower sequence both with and without his jump-scare music. "Oh yes, we must use it!" Hitchcock concurred. "But I thought you didn't want my music here?" Herrmann sarcastically replied, before the director scoffed: "My boy, improper suggestion."

It's an anecdote that reflects the pair's fiery partnership. Their creative union consistently resulted in film scores that make the viewer feel like they are caught up in a character's murky inner dialogue, privy to both their most romantic dreams and most hopeless nightmares (see Vertigo). Zeffira describes the music that plays whenever Norman Bates is on screen as being "dejected and anxious", which she says "makes you feel sorrow for a killer. I know before writing film music, Herrmann would always read the novel a movie was based on and study the literature, so his score was more empathetic. Every note Herrmann played had meaning".

The origins of Herrmann's genius

An avid childhood reader, Herrmann (or Benny as he was called by friends) spent most of his downtime passionately debating whether literature or music was the greatest art form. Music ultimately won out, and Herrmann was winning classical competitions by the age of 13. Having studied at New York University under the legendary composer Percy Grainger, one of Herrmann's first professional roles as a studio musician was for CBS Radio.

At CBS he worked with Orson Welles, winning his trust with 1938's radio adaptation of War of the Worlds, which was so realistic that some listeners believed it signalled a real unfolding alien invasion. He then became the obvious choice for scoring Welles' 1941 masterpiece, Citizen Kane. Working on hundreds of radio plays taught Herrmann how to create compositions that conjured up imagery, and also taught him the power of long pauses: he used silence as another instrument to build suspense.

Professionally, Herrmann was known for having a fiery temper and, as his daughter Dorothy told the New York Times, he "didn't suffer fools gladly". Yet Smith is keen to stress that the musician was less moody than his reputation suggests, and tended to go out of his way to recommended younger composers for jobs. "He was misunderstood," Smith says. "Given his reputation for irascibility, I think people would be surprised at how gentle Bernard could be, especially with animals. He was suspicious of arrogant humans, but he gave unconditional love to his cats."

The film's central theme would also go on to be sampled by dozens of other artists. Perhaps the most exhilarating example is rapper Busta Rhymes' 1998 single Gimme Some More. According to the hip hop producer and contemporary classical composer Michael Vincent Waller, Herrmann's Psycho score is beloved by rap artists. "Herrmann knew how to loop these little nihilistic fragments and become this master of repetition. In many ways, the way he was conducting film music was a lot like how rap producers chop up beats."

Waller says that Psycho didn't just change horror, but wider cinematic storytelling: "The Psycho music is a reference whenever you want to build tension and it's clear John Williams was inspired by Psycho for his stalker-ish bass notes for Jaws. Whenever you hear creepy violins in a horror movie, or feel like a film score has become its own character, then that can all be traced back to Psycho."

The creative relationship between Hitchcock and Herrmann ended on 1966's Torn Curtain. The former was incensed that the latter stubbornly refused his orders to make a stripped back pop score, insisting instead on using 12 flutes, 16 horns, nine trombones, two tubas, eight cellos, eight basses and two sets of timpani. Herrmann was fired, but it didn't derail his career, and right until his death from a heart attack in 1975 the composer remained an innovative force”.

I am not sure which score or soundtrack I will look at for the fifth part of this series. Perhaps something from a 1970s or 1980s film. A romantic comedy film or something else. I am not sure. I was eager to focus on Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho, as it is the first score I have talked about and, when we think of the all-time great scores, Psycho springs to mind. Amazing what Bernard Herrmann created with a string orchestra and not a full one. Maybe working with that restriction makes the Psycho score…

SO effective.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Hayley Williams - Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

FEATURE:

 

The Best Albums of 2025

Hayley Williams - Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

__________

I love everything…

PHOTO CREDIT: Zachary Gray

about Hayley Williams. A phenomenal songwriter and band lead of Paramore, she is someone who is a role model. Williams first uploaded seventeen of Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party’s songs to her website on 28th July, and later released them as standalone tracks onto streaming services on 1st August. Williams self-released the album on 28th August on Post Atlantic, an independent imprint. A couple of additional songs were added to Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party on 24th October and 7th November. In terms of reviews and acclaim, Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party is up there with the best of the year. An astounding album that has won so many five-star reviews, I will get to some of those reviews to end. There weren’t a tonne of interviews about Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. You would think there would be something extensive from The Guardian or Rolling Stone. However, there are one or two online examples. Hayley Williams spoke with THE FACE in September about her third solo studio album. A top ten album in the U.K., it was not an especially massive success in her native U.S. However, in terms of taking a step forward, I think her latest album is even better than 2021’s FLOWERS for VASES / descansos:

“Twenty years into her career, Hayley Williams is finally an independent artist. When she was scouted by Atlantic Records at the age of 14, Williams was offered the dream of being a solo star. She pushed back, telling the label she’d rather make music with the scrappy emo band she’d started with her friends from school. As we all know, sticking to her guns was a good call.

Paramore went on to define the noughties pop-punk scene and beyond. Their emotionally raw anthems have inspired everyone from PinkPantheress and Olivia Rodrigo to SZA and Lil Uzi Vert, and over the past five years, the group has become bigger than ever (they’re currently in the Top 20 most streamed rock bands of all time on Spotify). But because of the 360 deal Williams signed when she was 15, Atlantic Records got a percentage from every Paramore record, T‑shirt and ticket sold.

“If it wasn’t for being young, ignorant and hard-headed, maybe we would have felt exactly how oppressive a contract like that could be,” Williams says of the band’s early years, sitting cross-legged on a park bench in London’s Primrose Hill. Hers was the first ever 360 contract (in most cases, record labels just profit from record sales and streaming) and the practice has been heavily criticised for taking the power from young artists ever since.

Paramore finished their obligations to Atlantic with the release of 2023’s fiery alt-rock spectacular, This Is Why. ​“I just thought it’d be like a birthday party. Oh, we’re finally done. Freedom. But we don’t really talk that much about the grief that can come with good things,” says Williams. ​“It was a giant change that also left me asking ​‘what am I going to push against now?’”

That sadness lit a fuse, and Williams poured misery, rage, frustration and loneliness into her snarling new solo record Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, which was properly released last week. EDAABP is, according to Williams, a puke bucket of all her influences and everything she needed to say. Glistening pop, new wave, emo and punk all feature, as does tender folk and sweeping electronic music. ​“It’s a lot of chaos,” she grins. ​“If I don’t get the poison out, it’s never going to come out.” Stand-out tracks include Mirtazapine, a scuzzy punk love-letter to anti-depressants, while the twinkling emo of True Believer sees Hayley deconstructing faith and the alt-pop swagger of Ice In My OJ has her calling out the ​“dumb motherfuckers” who she made rich.

Hayley Williams has done solo records before, but not with this much freedom. A handful of crossover collaborations in the 2010s were deliberately billed as Hayley Williams from Paramore, while 2020’s solo album Petals For Armor and its 2021 follow-up Flowers For Vases were both full of experimental, delicate electronic music that could never be billed as Paramore. ​“At the time that felt so liberating and so freeing, but I listen back now and can see how I was being a little restrained.”

This is a hangover from spending most of her career trying to convince people that Paramore are a band, and not a glorified solo project. ​“I was really sensitive to it because it hurt my friends’ feelings,” she says, having also experienced the brunt of pop-punk misogyny, being one of the few women in the scene that had a prominent platform. Thanks to a lot of therapy, ​“those voices just feel so quiet and far away now. It’s nice to be able to laugh at the meatheads on the internet who unfortunately did a lot of damage back in the day,” she grins. You can buy a T‑shirt that says ​‘Hayley Williams Is My Favourite Band’ from her online store, which is just one of the ways she’s reclaiming her own legacy with this solo era.

“In a lot of ways, writing this record gave the 15-year-old version of myself, who felt like she had lost a lot of her power by signing to a major label, a voice. It freed her, so I don’t have to be arrested in that stage of development anymore”.

There are a few reasons why I want to include a lot of this interview from The New York Times. The conversation is really interesting, and Hayley Williams is always such an incredible interviewee. I also love the photos taken by Meghan Marin. Such extraordinary shots that add these captivating and wonderfully rich visuals to the chat! I would urge people to read the entire interview. I am not able to include all the photos here:

“COSCARELLI Is that why it took you so long to make a solo album, that resistance to being singled out? And what changed in 2019, 2020 that allowed you to make that leap?

WILLIAMS I was a huge fan of what Zac was doing with his first solo project, HalfNoise. He had gone away for like seven years from the band and really found himself. I believe he found himself in his 20s in a way that Taylor and I still haven’t.

COSCARELLI Because you didn’t get off the ride.

WILLIAMS Arrested development is a thing. I just thought, “He’s doing it and it’s not a big deal.” It’s feeding the band, if anything. My divorce had been finalized and I really got to process it, and a lot of that stuff needed to come out.

I’m also a fan of bands like Talking Heads or Radiohead — all the members have their own projects. I was just interested in that life, because I still don’t really know how this all shakes out. We’re just gonna keep getting older and I want to be an artist until I die. That’s going to look a thousand ways. So this was kind of the first way that I got to try it out. And those first two albums, now when I look back at it, I’m like, “Man, I still was so cautious.”

CARAMANICA I wonder what the open reception to those albums felt like, especially after being so firmly insistent in the earliest years: “It’s not me, it’s us.”

WILLIAMS I don’t typically like to do the thing that people expect or want me to do. I think that’s probably not always a great thing about me. So I did feel a bit defeatist about finally giving into this thing that I had been resisting, like, my whole life. It was really scary. I think the one thing that sort of got me through that was the fact that we had been around for so long at that point. There was some level of understanding of the context of where I come from.

This project, and the way that people are talking to me about it, I get to feel like a whole person. I don’t have to have this caveat, like, “Well, I’m in this band.” I trust that people know that.

PHOTO CREDIT: Meghan Marin

CARAMANICA It seems like the artist you want to be is one that can reference the Bloodhound Gang (“Discovery Channel”) and then two songs later have a song about the South’s legacy of racial tensions (“True Believer”).

WILLIAMS While I was deconstructing my faith and my religious upbringing from around age 19, I really didn’t realize how much of Paramore for me was a religious experience, a God pillar in my life. Paramore is the backdrop to every conversation. So songs like “Discovery Channel” are really me kind of like roaming the halls of whatever that structure is and just trying to take it apart more.

“True Believer” — I’m never not ready to scream at the top of my lungs about racial issues. I don’t know why that became the thing that gets me the most angry. I think because it’s so intersectional that it overlaps with everything from climate change to L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ issues.

I reference this neighborhood in Franklin, really close to where I grew up called Hard Bargain that this formerly enslaved man bought from his former enslaver. It’s still there, predominantly Black families, and it’s protected now. But of course, Franklin and Nashville are being gentrified all the time.

The reason I was writing about Nashville a lot is that we came home from tour and I thought, “Well, I’m gonna go to L.A. — get me outta here. Trump just got elected again and I don’t wanna be in a red state.”

COSCARELLI There’s a line on the title track, “Ego Death,” where you say, “I’ll be the biggest star / in this racist country singer’s bar.” Do you want to name names?

WILLIAMS I’m always talking about Morgan Wallen. I don’t care.

COSCARELLI I think that relates directly to Paramore and your fan base. There’s been a lot written over the years about its diversity, and Paramore’s Black fans in particular.

WILLIAMS I feel that, too, now more than I did growing up. It definitely shifted around the self-titled record. We started saying yes to a lot more. We were playing “The Voice.” I think a lot more people got introduced to our band during that time — people that maybe weren’t welcome in the scene that we grew up in.

PHOTO CREDIT: Meghan Marin

Songs like “Ain’t It Fun,” when Taylor and I were writing that, we were playing these synth parts and going, “It’s like Stevie Wonder, you know?” I’ll never forget watching “Stop Making Sense” while we were recording “After Laughter” and the camera panning across the crowd, seeing how diverse it was. I just got really teary. And obviously there’s some of the best Black musicians onstage with them and they’re all working together. It just felt like this celebration of humanity. And I was like, “That’s what I want to feel like.”

CARAMANICA Is the scale of the music on the new solo record designed explicitly to avoid the chance of a big hit like Paramore’s “Still Into You” happening?

WILLIAMS This is my chance to emulate the music and the artists that made me want to do this in the first place, none of which were big artists. It’s one of my favorite bands of all time, but I don’t really listen to Paramore — I just love what Paramore is about. I think if a song blew up, who’s gonna complain about that? Writers want that moment more than anything.

CARAMANICA You don’t feel like it would pull you in a direction you don’t want to go right now?

WILLIAMS No, because I’m not impressed by it.

CARAMANICA You’ve been there, you’ve been in those rooms. You’ve gone onstage with Taylor Swift opening on the Eras Tour.

WILLIAMS Yeah, and honestly, I loved that. We got asked to be on the biggest tour in music history. I’m never gonna see photos of myself dressed as Freddie Mercury at Wembley and not be psyched that we did that.

That was like the honor of our [expletive] life and career, but there’s nothing like a Paramore show. All day long, I’d rather be at a Paramore show with the people that have grown up with us. It feels like family.

I’m so honored to get to do it and I’m also very relieved to get to try something new and flex different muscles. You gotta deconstruct this system that you were a part of on multiple levels, gotta tear down Paramore the same way I had to tear down my evangelical upbringing. I have to do it for me to grow up because I don’t wanna be stuck in a traumatized 18-year-old’s headspace for the rest of my life.

I’m 36, it’s not cute anymore, you know?”.

Two reviews of Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party to include before wrapping up. An album that tackles depression, ego, loss and reputation, it could have been a heavy or one-dimensional release. However, as you will see in this review from Kerrang!, that is not the case. In fact, it is a fearless and year-defining release from one of the greatest artists and songwriters of modern times. This enormously varied and explorative album.

“It’s been a perplexing summer so far for Hayley Williams fans, feeling like a whiplash of violent yellow aesthetics and sorrow-driven songs. The first glimpse of this new era came in July, arriving like sprawled out puzzle pieces on a ’00s-inspired website, which would ultimately become the Paramore vocalist's third full-length, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party. Building the jigsaw, though, was a task awarded to us, and while the vision is near complete, she's already teasing there are two more songs to come.

It’s hard to think what else could be missing from this body of work; the most beastly out of all of Hayley's solo records, EDAABP is somewhat of an enigma given she has remained relatively tight-lipped on the inspirations behind it, and the lack of order disrupting any straight narrative to begin with. The first chunk of the album nails her tactic of making high-impact, fizzing tracks that sound so incredibly alive, as an undercurrent of depression runs beneath if you listen closely enough – while the chorus of Glum ascends heavenly, Hayley quizzes, ‘Do you ever feel so alone / That you could implode / And no one would know?’

In this way, this album harks back to Paramore’s After Laughter. There’s a climbing synth motif on Love Me Different that feels familiar with this in mind, and many tracks feature the recurring theme of water – a metaphor Hayley uses to describe love and her views on relationships that she’s ran with across all of her solo records, but notably on After Laughter’s Pool.

While she excavates even deeper into herself on this release, Hayley also casts her net far and wide lyrically: True Believer, an examination of religious hypocrisy and racism, is bold, brilliant, and quietly scathing. Accompanied by dystopian, spaced-out piano, Hayley draws on how these themes play out across America: ‘They pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all their children / They say that Jesus is the way / But then they gave him a white face.’

Marking her first release outside of Atlantic Records, Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party is the most vast summation of Hayley’s story so far. A musical purge of trauma patterns, depression, love, loss, and of course, ego, the wit and honesty of Hayley’s lyricism is the shining star of this work. It’s an unboundless exploration of a life lived under the scrutiny of misogyny and in the public eye from one of our time’s most creative and fearless artists.

Verdict: 5/5”.

I am aware Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party has different versions, so the reviews might not be talking about the same sequence of songs. However, it is clear that every critic who has heard Hayley Williams’s third studio album has been blown away by its ambition and consistency. Such a sprawling or long album could have contained filler. Everything on Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party is a flawless masterpiece. This is what AllMusic write in their review:

“Hayley Williams is sad and dealing with it on her third solo album, 2025's intimately rendered Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. The follow-up to 2020's Petals for Armor and 2021's Flowers for vases/descansos, it also arrives two years after This Is Why, her Grammy-winning sixth album with pop/rock outfit Paramore. In contrast to that album's angular post-punk dissonance and cutting political invective, Ego Death finds Williams in a ruminative mood, coming to terms with her depression, romantic desires, and sometimes difficult relationships with her Paramore bandmates. Produced with Canon Blue songwriter/instrumentalist Daniel James, the album showcases a modicum of sonic exploration, whether it be the fuzzy '90s shoegaze of "Mirtazapine," the childlike vocal processing in the Beck-like "Glum," or the gauzy, Karen Carpenter-esque multi-tracked harmonies of "Dream Girl in Shibuya." Yet these are relaxed, organic productions where the experimentation never gets in the way of the pure emotions at the core of each song. There is a diaristic quality to Ego Death and one could easily assume Williams is writing about specific people in her life. Are Paramore siblings drummer Zac Farro and former guitarist Josh Farro the subjects of "Brotherly Hate?" Probably. Is the bass-heavy "Hard" about the fall-out from her divorce with New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert? Most likely, yes.

Often, there's overlap, as in "Ice in My OJ," where Williams embraces a rapper's swagger, singing "I got ice in my OJ, I'm a cold hard b****/A lot of dumb mutherf***ers that I made rich." That she also repeatedly screams "I'm in a band" on the chorus speaks to the raw, end-of-a-rope emotionality of the album. Yet the answer to whether a rumored romantic relationship with Paramore guitarist Taylor York is at the center of much of Ego Death remains enticingly elusive. Is he the titular subject of "Disappearing Man" with his "wild hair and stare that could melt stone"? Or is he the lover Williams thought was always going to catch her and now has to "watch me fall" in "Parachute?" Regardless, Ego Death certainly feels like a break-up album, both literally in terms of a relationship ending and as a metaphor for Williams' own personal and creative rebirth. On "True Believer" she reckons with her conservative Christian Southern roots, especially as a California-honed rock singer who continues to live in Nashville. There are also hints that even the best relationships can have problems, as in "Love Me Different," where a buoyant synth groove evoking Paramore's "Hard Times" belies romantic troubles. She underscores this sense of emotional bottoming out on the title track, singing "Can only go up from here." Musically, all of this hangs together with the relatable warmth and engaging lyricism that mark the best of Williams' work with and without Paramore. With Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, Williams has crafted an album about letting go and finding a way to move forward honestly, and perhaps most importantly on her own terms”.

I am going to finish up now. Once again, I think the absolute best albums of the year have been made by women. That is not to discount male artists, though you can look at exceptional albums from Lily Allen (West End Girl), ROSALÍA (LUX) and Hayley Williams and they are on this different level. Albums that you listen to and are instantly stunned and moved by. You come back to them and they stay with you. I admire Hayley Williams greatly and am not surprised she has recorded one of the best albums of the year. I am not sure if there will be more music from Paramore but, to be honest, I would rather hear solo stuff. She is on this rarefied level and I feel her next studio album will be as astonishing and acclaimed as Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party. This is a truly special album that…

DEMANDS to be heard.

FEATURE: Needle Drops and Scores to Settle: Scene Three: You Should Be Dancing: Saturday Night Fever (1977)

FEATURE:

 

 

Needle Drops and Scores to Settle

Scene Three: You Should Be Dancing: Saturday Night Fever (1977)

__________

I think I will…

move onto the score for Psycho for the next instalment of this feature. However, today, I am exploring one of the greatest film soundtracks ever. Saturday Night Fever was released in 1977 and is considered one of the all-time best films. I think that its soundtrack is more memorable and discussed as the film itself. I am going to start out with this feature, that tells the story of how the Bee Gees wrote the songs for the soundtrack in a week.

“Popular music in the '70s had many dividing lines, but none was bigger than disco.

Bee Gees played an undeniable role in this shift, notably with their involvement with the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. Starring John Travolta as Tony Manero, the film was a critical and commercial success, grossing more than $20 million within the first few weeks of its release on Dec. 16, 1977.

Saturday Night Fever may not have invented disco, but it brought it to the forefront of pop culture in a way that was "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant," as the Library of Congress noted in 2010 when the movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Bee Gees would became unshakably tied to the project, even though they never intended to be at the helm of the disco movement or even involved in the film.

In fact, their music had been more rooted in traditional pop, rock, country and R&B than dance-floor music. It hadn't always been easy. Bee Gees had split up and reconvened by the time Saturday Night Fever producer Robert Stigwood approached them, reaching both the top and the bottom of the charts. They were currently back on top thanks to hit songs like "Jive Talkin'" and "You Should Be Dancing."

There was something particularly compelling about Bee Gees to Stigwood, who had been managing the group since 1967. "I loved their composing,” Stigwood told Rolling Stone in 1977. "I also loved their harmony singing. It was unique, the sound they made. I suppose it was a sound only brothers could make."

Stigwood offered little detail about the new project when he called. "We were recording our new album in the north of France," Robin Gibb would later recall, "and we'd written about and recorded about four or five songs for the new album when Stigwood rang from L.A. and said, 'We're putting together this little film, low budget, called Tribal Rites of a Saturday Night. Would you have any songs on hand?' And we said, 'Look, we can't, we haven't any time to sit down and write for a film.' We didn't know what it was about."

"Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" was the title of a 1976 New York magazine story about the disco scene written by British journalist Nik Cohn. The article turned out to be mostly fictional but served as source material for Saturday Night Fever. Meanwhile, the production of the film had already started.

"The Bee Gees weren't even involved in the movie in the beginning," Travolta told Vanity Fair in 2007. "I was dancing to Stevie Wonder and Boz Scaggs." He was also grooving to Bee Gees' aptly titled "You Should Be Dancing," a 1976 No. 1 that Travolta insisted be kept in the movie even though it was not written for it. The Gibb brothers were unaware of any of that. They only knew that Stigwood was looking for songs and that he had faith in the group.

Even though they knew very little about the movie's plot, Bee Gees started working on music for it anyway, writing a handful of songs to show Stigwood. When Stigwood and film-music producer Bill Oakes came by the Chateau d'Herouville in France where the group was working, the film's script was still unseen. "They hadn’t even looked at it," Oakes told Billboard in 2022.

"What Robert did tell them in broad terms is it's about a guy who works in a paint store and blows all his wages on a Saturday night, and he goes to a club and they do the hustle," Oakes added. "Robert's mission was [to] get the Bee Gees to write a disco track that you cannot stop dancing to, with a great melody – and that's how they came up with 'Night Fever,' for instance. These are great melodies that happened to be in the disco mold. That was the breakthrough. It was interesting: they just simply dropped the live album they were mixing and went straight into it."

The songs began to roll in one after another, and Stigwood's initial feedback was simple: "We played him demo tracks of 'If I Can't Have You,' 'Night Fever' and 'More Than a Woman,'" Maurice Gibb told Rolling Stone in 1978. "He asked if we could write it more disco-y." They took that advice to heart when writing the platinum-selling "Stayin' Alive."

Barry Gibb said Stigwood gave them straight-forward instructions for the track: "Give me eight minutes – eight minutes, three moods. I want frenzy at the beginning. Then I want some passion, and then I want some w-i-i-i-ld frenzy!" The song was written in just two hours”.

Whilst we talk about the Bee Gees’ songs on Saturday Night Fever, it is worth remembering that these soundtrack features composed pieces by David Shire, together with songs by popular artists such as Kool & The Gang. On its forty-fifth anniversary in 2022, Albumism explored this iconic film soundtrack. It is an extensive feature, so I am only including a small part of it:

“The balance of the soundtrack album is comprised of original score pieces commissioned by American composer David Shire, in addition to an arsenal of mostly familiar tracks like The Trammps' "Disco Inferno" and Kool and the Gang's "Open Sesame" that were chart hits within the past two years. The artists probably benefited from the additional exposure in the film and on the soundtrack, but it's likely they didn't reap the rewards of the album's explosive sales. "In the annals of history, it could be one of the most profitable records ever created," Galuten insists.  "Because it's a double album, and I don't know how much Robert paid David Shire in royalties, because a lot of the songs like 'Night On Disco Mountain' are just sort of orchestra stuff to fill out the album. I mean, you know, he did a good job and they're all fine and lovely, but they're not pop songs. And songs like KC and the Sunshine Band's 'Boogie Shoes'—it was all in the plan to have a few hits and to have a lot of stuff that was inexpensive. I believe I heard that [Stigwood] has licensed those songs, like the Ralph MacDonald track ['Calypso Breakdown']...for pennies.

I think the only things he was paying full royalties on were the major artists. I don't even know what the deals were like for Tavares or Yvonne Elliman. They didn't have huge hits at the time, so they probably had really low licensing fees. The person that made out like a bandit with that record, besides the Bee Gees because writers' royalties are fixed and they're not negotiable, was Robert and RSO Records."

When asked when he believes he realized that the songs he helped to create for Saturday Night Fever had become much more than just a stack of hit records, Galuten insists he had a hunch from the beginning that they were special. "These songs were so good, and we were all so focused. Because there was nothing else going on in France—we didn't know anybody there, it was out in the middle of the country. We'd get up in the morning and go to the studio and hang out all day long. There was nothing else to do. We knew that these were amazing. There was just the sense that, like, 'oh my God. These are absolute smashes.'

When you hear a phrase like 'Night Fever' and you go 'no-one has ever said the phrase 'Night Fever' before,' or associating the image of 'Stayin' Alive' with the streets of New York and daily life and...it's not about the Vietnam War, you go 'oh my God.' Barry had this knack for—you could call it hyperbole—but this brilliant sort of mapping of these extreme adjectives onto things that might otherwise be mundane. And it gives you perspective to see them as being important."

While the Bee Gees' music was ubiquitous throughout most of 1978, they made few public appearances and scheduled no live dates in support of Saturday Night Fever. In March 1978, right in at the pinnacle of their chart-breaking halcyon, they retreated back into the studio to begin work on what would eventually be the Spirits Having Flown album. When asked if the team was at all nervous to record a commercially successful follow-up to their Fever contributions, Galuten insists they weren't. "I think we were protected by the hubris of youth. When we were working on songs, we weren't wondering 'I wonder if this is a hit?' We would take bets on how many weeks at number one it would get. So to answer your question about us being nervous going back into the studio: no. We were on fire."

Public favor of Saturday Night Fever's music and, by association, the Bee Gees' popularity, has waxed and waned at different points over the years. Although perhaps no rejection of either was as caustic as the "Disco Demolition Night" baseball promotion at Comiskey Park in Chicago in July 1979, during which local radio station WLUP-FM offered 98 cent tickets to a Chicago White Sox-Detroit Tigers double-header in exchange for fans bringing their disco records to the stadium to be destroyed in an on-field explosion. It was nothing short of riotous, leaving many to speculate if the lambaste was really about the music or the cultural and social identities from which the music was appropriated. The Gibbs themselves, frustrated by the backlash they'd residually receive throughout the 1980s, have also dismissed their involvement with Fever at different points. When asked about "Stayin' Alive" by Rolling Stone in 1988, they quipped "we'd like to dress it up in a white suit and set it on fire."

But yet, great music is perennial (and yes, I consider the Bee Gees' contributions to the soundtrack to be indisputably great) and nostalgia seems to be working more for the music of Saturday Night Fever these days than against. Galuten believes the soundtrack and the film still have something profound to offer forty-five years later. "[It's] about how people...the music that influences them is what they listened to in high school and college. And when you're 30, 40, 50, 60, the music from your teenage years has an impact on you viscerally and emotionally that no later music ever has. If you talk to anybody and ask them what their favorite music is, across ages, the similarity itself is not the music. It's the age they were when the music was popular. So all the people that were growing up at this time—this was very important to them.

The thing that makes music really touch lots of people is when it gives some sort of a voice to people who have not had a voice. The Beatles gave a voice to adolescents, and obviously Motown and Stax gave a voice to people who did not have a voice, just like hip-hop did. And so I always wonder 'who did Saturday Night Fever give voice to?' And then I realize it was working-class Americans who had no output and nobody representing them. And here was something saying 'even though my day-to-day life may be mundane, I can go out on Saturday night and I can resonate. This speaks to me’”.

A soundtrack that was top of the charts for twenty-four weeks in 1978, Saturday Night Fever was this sensation! American Songwriter shone a light on some of the wonderful and timeless songs from the 1977 soundtrack. Of course, the Bee Gees’ contributions are the most discussed and most important. I think that Saturday Night Fever might be the best soundtrack ever:

“More Than a Woman” by Tavares, written by Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, and Robin Gibb

Oh, girl, I’ve known you very well
I’ve seen you growing every day
I never really looked before
But now you take my breath away
Suddenly, you’re in my life
Part of everything I do
You got me working day and night
Just tryin’ to keep a hold on you

The Gibb brothers wrote and recorded “More Than a Woman,” but the single released was by Tavares. Both versions appeared on the soundtrack album. Tavares had a successful career before they were involved in Saturday Night Fever. The Tavares version of the song was also included on their album Future Bound, released in April 1978.

“Stayin’ Alive” by Bee Gees, written by Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, and Robin Gibb

Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother
You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive
Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’
And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive

Drummer Dennis Bryon had to leave the studio during recording due to the death of his mother. The Gibb brothers had trouble finding a suitable replacement, so they turned to a drum machine. They were unhappy with the results, so producer Albhy Galuten looped a couple of bars from the already recorded “Night Fever.” This resulted in the inside joke with the drummer being credited as Bernard Lupe. After the “song”Stayin’ Alive”‘s success, Lupe became a sought-after drummer until it was discovered he was fictitious.

“If I Can’t Have You” by Yvonne Elliman, written by Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, and Robin Gibb

I can’t write one song that’s not about you
Can’t drink without thinkin’ about you
Is it too late to tell you that
Everything means nothing if I can’t have you

The original plan was to have ballad singer Yvonne Elliman perform “How Deep Is Your Love” for the movie, but Stigwood stepped in and switched the song, giving the disco song to her instead. The song would go to No. 1, knocking “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees out of the top spot”.

Before ending with a feature that is about the legacy and popularity of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, I want to highlight a feature from Pitchfork published in 2020. They argue why the film is much more than its soundtrack. This dark B-side of Disco, it is a gritty, controversial and often tragic film. Something we do not really associate or get from the soundtrack. If one thinks that Disco was all glamour and inclusiveness, Saturday Night Fever projects this more homogeneous and violent (often homophonic and toxic) side:

"But the movie doesn’t coast on the strength of the soundtrack alone. There’s something harrowingly poignant about the story that’s impossible to shake off, as opposed to a more vapid disco film like 1978’s Thank God It’s Friday, starring Donna Summer (for which “Last Dance” was written but deeply underused). In 1994, Cohn admitted that his famed New York piece was largely fiction—there was no disco pupil named Vincent, the basis for Travolta’s Tony. Even with the fabrication, Norman Wexler’s adapted screenplay speaks a lot of truth about disenfranchised Brooklyn youth in the ’70s.

Bottom of Form

Under the groovy undercurrent served by spectacular needle drops, the sinister nature of Saturday Night Fever can be felt early on. When Tony and his friends first arrive at 2001 Odyssey, their homophobic, racist, and misogynistic attitudes are revealed through slur-laden chatter. Even though the club scenes are the film’s most intoxicating, they also reveal the grotesquely white and heterosexual appropriation of dance culture.

The feeling that first drove disco—the sense of escapism provided by the club—remains intact, however. On the floor, Tony is no longer a poor paint-store employee, he is an Adonis. Women are happy to merely wipe sweat off his forehead, which you can almost understand given Travolta’s palpable boyish charisma. Many of the characters in this Bay Ridge crowd, especially Tony, show a desire to graduate to a better life, to eventually cross over to Manhattan and become the ideal New Yorker. Tony finds inspiration in pop-culture warriors like Bruce Lee, Sylvester Stallone as Rocky, and Al Pacino in Serpico, whose photos hang on his bedroom wall alongside a crucifix. But he is simultaneously fettered by the expectations of his very Catholic, working-class family; he feels some pressure lifted when his goody-goody brother Frank leaves the priesthood.

The last few minutes of Saturday Night Fever are the most traumatic. Though Tony often shows a stronger conscience than his jerk friends, he is no less a participant in toxic masculinity. He seems to have a breakthrough toward the end when he realizes his victory at the big dance contest is served by white privilege. But the events immediately following turn even darker, as Tony attempts the reprehensible with Stephanie and allows the despicable to happen to another woman, Annette. Very generously, Saturday Night Fever lets Tony off the hook in its epilogue, thus facilitating an inevitable sequel, 1983’s Stallone-directed Staying Alive. Hope glimmers like a disco ball catching the light, the ending seems to say: 19-year-old Tony has his whole life ahead of him, he can still turn it around—on and off the dancefloor”.

The former President of RSO Records, Bill Oakes, spoke with Billboard ahead of the forty-fifth anniversary of Saturday Night Fever – 15th November, 2022 – and discussed its staggering success and enduring popularity. I have chopped a couple of sections from it, though I think that it gives extra insight and layers to this stunning soundtrack. I must have heard songs from it as a child. I think that it is vital to watch the film first. So you get more context into the song. Seeing how they translate to the screen and fit into this wider picture. However, as a standalone album, there is no denying the genius of Saturday Night Fever:

“Other numbers, such as Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven,” MFSB’s “K-Jee,” Ralph MacDonald’s “Calypso Breakdown” and the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno,” had been released prior to Fever but enjoyed renewed popularity when they were included on the soundtrack. They were augmented with instrumental scores composed by David Shire such as “Manhattan Skyline” and “Night on Disco Mountain.” However, not every artist that Oakes sought for the soundtrack came on board — including Boz Scaggs, whose 1976 hit “Lowdown” was initially used in the film’s dance rehearsal scene involving the characters Tony and Stephanie (played by Karen Lynn Gorney).

“I just thought Irving Azoff, who managed Boz Scaggs, would let me have the track,” Oakes remembers. “Why wouldn’t he? Of course, his response to me after we shot the scene was: ‘Bill, I don’t want my artist in your little disco movie,’ which was a phrase that I was assailed with throughout the production. In those days, music artists didn’t really want to be in movies. Now it’s completely different. Artists actually upfront tout their songs to get into a movie because they know how good it is for their sales.”

As he was wrapping up work on the album, Oakes saw something one day that told him the disco trend was on its last legs. “I was finishing up after listening to the tracks for a straight 14 hours for any defects at the mastering lab. And then I put the masters in my car, which would become the album. I was stuck behind a truck [whose bumper sticker said] ‘Death to disco,’ and it dawned on me. I told Robert, ‘We might have missed this one.’ We didn’t coin the word ‘disco’ — disco was around. What [the soundtrack] did was just when disco seemed to be dying, it gave it a new lease on life. We certainly didn’t create disco–we created a real global, across-the-board demand for it. That’s what Fever did.”

Oakes admits that he is surprised by the soundtrack’s longevity decades after the fly-away collars and bell bottoms became passé. “It’s easy to see how it resonates with people who were young at the time. When you go to a party or a wedding anywhere in the world, they’ll still play ‘More Than a Woman,’ ‘Night Fever’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive.’

“’Stayin’ Alive’ is probably one of the most-played songs ever—I get that. What is interesting to me is how is it that young people today are finding it. I think because it is a classic combination of melody and dance. The Bee Gees combined the tune with the dance record. There is something haunting about their hook lines and choruses, which is unique. That’s really down to their music, it’s down to their combining melody with dance and rhythm. I think that’s the combination that still hasn’t been surpassed”.

I will move to a film score for the next part of this series. Psycho will be under the spotlight. I am a big Disco fan so, alongside the Bee Gees classics, we get these amazing composed pieces (score) and heavyweights like Yvonne Elliman and Kool & The Gang all coming together. A masterpiece film soundtrack, I hope this feature has given you an idea of why it is so seminal and influential. We will be playing and discussing this sensational soundtrack…

FOR decades to come.

FEATURE: Always Judge a Record By Its… The Importance of the GRAMMYS’ Inaugural Best Album Cover Category

FEATURE:

Always Judge a Record By Its…

IN THIS IMAGE: The cover of Perfume Genius’s 2025 album, Glory

The Importance of the GRAMMYS’ Inaugural Best Album Cover Category

__________

EVEN though the…

PHOTO CREDIT: Jorge Fakhouri Filho/Pexels

GRAMMYs has more than enough categories already, I did wonder why the album cover was not represented until now. The nominations are out for next year’s ceremony, are out. Category 78 concerns Best Album Cover. Even though there are only five albums included in the category – one would think they’d be more -, it is good that we finally get to shine a light on the art of albums. Below are the nominees:

“CHROMAKOPIA
Shaun Llewellyn & Luis “Panch” Perez, art directors (Tyler, The Creator)

The Crux
William Wesley II, art director (Djo)

Debí Tirar Más Fotos
Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio, art director (Bad Bunny)

Glory
Cody Critcheloe & Andrew J.S., art directors (Perfume Genius)

moisturizer
Hester Chambers, Ellis Durand, Henry Holmes, Matt de Jong, Jamie-James Medina, Joshua Mobaraki & Rhian Teasdale, art directors (Wet Leg)”.

I am going to expand a bit soon and get to a feature that takes us inside the covers. It is surprising it is such a narrow category. Maybe it is indicative of a lack of genuinely great album covers. However, there have been some good ones this year. I think the cover for Lily Allen’s West End Girl is the best. I do think that artists still undervalue a cover. It is the first thing people see when they buy your album, and yet there are still so many lacklustre examples. I have talked about album art and how it is crucial. I don’t think it is a case of it being expensive to make a genuinely striking and standout cover. Even so, there are few that genuinely stand out. Even though I would replace one or two examples the GRAMMYs have selected and add others, I will highlight the cover I think should win. Though I will highlight an article that gives details about all five covers, there is one that stands out for me.

I do think that this award and new category should give impetus for artists to really consider the importance of the album cover. Even though it is not to do with the sound of an album and not as key, it is still an essential part of any album. Its visual identity and cover. It can tell a listener so much about an album and, as physical music is so in demand, it is as important now more than ever that the cover genuinely stands out. Let’s take a look at all the nominated album covers. Starting out with two very different ones:

“Cover art has always been an integral, visual part of experiencing an album. From photoshoots and creative direction to choices of typeface and color, album artwork adds an additional sensory experience to coincide with the music. And now, for the first time in its 68-year history, album covers are also part of the GRAMMYs.

The Crux, the third album by Joe Keery under his musical alias Djo, is bound by a tangible sense of place. Namely, the hotel of its title, which is filled with guests facing various crossroads of one kind or another in their lives.

Shot on the famed Paramount Pictures studio lot in Los Angeles, the album's cover — which was overseen by art director William Wesley II — brings the fictional Crux Hotel to life, as it teems with guests appearing in the windows of their rooms and passersby rushing to and fro below the building's old-fashioned neon sign. As a small airplane hauls a banner declaring, "I'M SORRY CINDY AND I LOVE YOU" across the top of the frame, Djo himself hangs precipitously from one of the hotel's second-story windows, clad in a white, '70s-style suit.

In a January appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," Keery revealed some of the inspiration behind the lively, Easter egg-packed cover art. "I've done stuff that's kind of minimalistic before and I just wanted a maximal cover … A theme of the record is 'one of many,' so just having a lot going on and a lot to look at," he said before pointing out the miniscule mouse dressed as the bellman that was included in the shoot "just for me."

Bad Bunny's 2025 album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, is notable for being the lone cover in this year's pack of nominated albums devoid of any human subject. Instead, the three-time GRAMMY winner — who art directed the cover himself — chose an image of two plastic Monobloc chairs in front of a banana tree to represent the love letter to his native Puerto Rico.

The cover of DtMF, which translates in English to I Should Have Taken More Photos, beautifully captures the essence and natural beauty of Bad Bunny's homeland, where he spent the better part of the summer and early fall performing his sold-out residency at San Juan's José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum.

The image is also punctuated by a palpable sense of longing created by the empty chairs in the foreground, which many fans speculated were a veiled reference to the rapper's past relationship to girlfriend Gabriela Berlingeri, with whom he split in 2022. While Bad Bunny has never publicly confirmed any connection between the cover art and his personal life, the back cover of the album includes a heartfelt dedication to his culture and community in his own words: "This project is dedicated to all Puerto Ricans around the world".

Whilst that first album cover is quite busy and there is a lot to draw the eye, the second is barer and sparse. Both are eye-catching and memorable for different reasons. The Crux reminds me of album covers of old, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, where you would get these collage-like compositions. A lot happening in the frame. The Crux look like a film unfolding. A packed scene where the viewer is looking at an action scene come to life. There are so many things to consider when you have such a layered or full cover. Making sure every person and object stands out and has a place. It can be easy to make it too overloaded or distracting. However, William Wesley II has got the balance just right. You look at the cover and assume it is in America somewhere, but not quite sure where. There is more mystery when it comes to Debí Tirar Más Fotos. Two cheap, white plastic chairs in a clearing somewhere. Maybe chairs that were occupied by two lovers who sat there for peace. That possible personal importance for Bad Bunny and Puerto Rica. It is a mix of the exotic with the mundane or even cheap. Although it is not my favourite of the nominated covers, I can understand why it has been selected. Like a busy and bustling album cover, it is very hard to make sure something emptier or less fulsome stands out. Different dynamics. It is less about multiple focuses and a cast of characters. You have a very defined and concentrated centre. Getting the colour palette right. The white chairs against the browns, greens and yellows.

Before getting to the album cover I think will win, there are two strikingly different ones. The first from a terrific U.S. Hip-Hop/Neo-Soul great. Tyler, the Creator has actually released another album since the cover for CHROMAKOPIA was nominated – though DON’T TAP THE GLASS is not quite as memorable. 2017’s Flower Boy is one of those modern greats when it comes to the cover. Floral, fantastical and bright, it definitely stays in the mind. It radiates sunshine and summer. Conversely, CHROMAKOPIA is sepia, it looks like this film icon of the 1940s or 1950s posing. You look at the image and there are so many questions and interpretations:

“With a catalog of striking, often colorful album covers, Tyler, The Creator opted to appear in sepia on the cover of his eighth studio set, CHROMAKOPIA. The stark portrait depicts the two-time GRAMMY-winning rapper wearing a ceramic mask of his own face, his right hand outstretched toward whomever is behind the camera.

The mask plays several purposes on the cover, mainly to introduce fans to St. Chroma, Tyler's latest alter ego (who bears a marked similarity to Chroma the Great from Norton Juster's classic children's book The Phantom Toolbooth), and tap into the album's themes of identity, authenticity and the divide between public persona and inner self.

According to art director Luis "Panch" Perez, Tyler wanted to channel the film noir of the 1930s and '40s, even bringing a screen test from an unnamed Alfred Hitchcock movie to set as inspiration. "He wanted the cover to feel like it came from a film of that era," Perez revealed in a November 2024 interview with ArtNews.

"It changes how you see Tyler, which was obviously very much a reason why he made it the way he made it," the rapper's longtime visual collaborator added of the eerie cover shot. "It makes the viewer really pay attention to what's going on with him. It makes you want to go, 'Wait, what's going on here? I'm unsettled by what I'm seeing”.

It is an unsettling image, for sure. However, it is one that inspires the mind. Thinking about the artist and the music in a way you would not have if there was a different cover. A less engaging one. I do think that CHROMAKOPIA is in with a shout at scooping the GRAMMY. For me, it is the second-best cover, though one that warrants a lot of love and respect. I am never a fan of self-portrait covers and artists including images of themselves, as it is so lazy and lacks creativity. Also, many of them are just straight portraits and there is nothing unusual or interesting going on. When it comes to CHROMAKOPIA, there is so much to dissect and explore.

I liked Wet Leg’s eponymous 2022 debut album, though I am not struck by the cover. It shows core members Hester Chambers and Rhian Teasdale with their backs to camera and their arms around each other’s backs. However, for their second album, moisturizer, they have stepped it up. I am not keen on the title or the American spelling – though you do wonder why the album was called that -, but the cover has a lot going for it:

“Wet Leg's sophomore album, 2025's moisturizer, marks the band's first studio effort as a quintet with guitarist Joshua Mobraki, bassist Ellis Durand and drummer Henry Holmes joining original duo Rihan Teasdale and Hester Chambers as fully contributing members.

That newly evolved group mentality is also reflected in the British rockers' nomination for moisturizer's feral cover art, with all five members credited as art directors alongside Matt de Jong and Jamie-James Medina.

Teasdale and Chambers take center stage in the artwork, however. The frontwoman stares down the camera with a devilish grin, crouched on all fours, while the lead guitarist's back is to the camera, arms wrapped around herself to show off her pointed nails.

"Not just the album cover, but I think, like, the whole energy of the creative is kind of subversive," Teasdale explained to Variety upon the album's release. "Like, if there's any moments on there that are a bit sexy, it's also a bit disgusting. Juxtaposition is something that we've always done … That's something that is always fun to play with”.

Once more, Hester Chambers has her back to camera. Representing being a mystery or in the background, she has her arms gripped around her body. Whether signifying a struggle, madness or a clinch (how you can pretend you’re kissing someone by wrapping your arms around your back like it is another person doing that), it is this submissive or romantic background set against the more maniacal or distrusted look given by Rhian Teasdale. Even though Wet Leg are a quintet now, it is their original two members who are at the centre here. Also, I am curious about the image and the connection to the title. It is hard to draw comparisons or figure the link. Which sort of makes the cover more intriguing! Also, the use of white and blue for the cover. It is quite calming and soothing, clashed against the intense flame of red hair and red lips at the centre.

Consider iconic covers from the past and contemporary artists and you do wonder how many artists reach these peaks. Whether the album art market is declining or less important. I think that great album covers are so important. The album cover that I feel will win the GRAMMY is from Perfume Genius. In terms of matching the music and lyrics, the cover for Glory is one of the standouts of the year:

“Over the course of his career, Perfume Genius has appeared as a near-statuesque figure on many of his album covers, from the polished portraiture of 2014's Too Bright and shirtless still that graces the cover of 2020's Set My Heart on Fire Immediately to the painterly rendering of 2022's Ugly Season.

In the imagery for 2025's Glory, the art-pop auteur born Mike Hadreas is shown toppled over, sprawled on the floor of a wood-paneled home with his legs askew and midriff bare as a bevy of extension cords run beneath his body. In a conversation with Wallpaper upon Glory's release, Perfume Genius delved into the creative process behind the unnerving suburban scene, which was directed by his longtime collaborators Cody Critcheloe and Andrew J.S.

"I like how it looks: it could be a dance, or it could be that I'm sick, and there's something wrong with me. That was the thing that felt riskiest about that photoshoot, it could go any way," he told the outlet. "When we got the pictures back, it felt like a snapshot, almost like a still from a movie … It feels like the music, in that it's earnest and personal, but with absurdity and dramatics, and performance”.

That image of Perfume Genius (Michael Hadreas) on the floor. It looks like he has tripped. Or is just asleep on the floor. With wires on the floor, there are trip hazards. It looks like two different scenes. The window looks out, though it is a ground floor room and it doesn’t seem to fit with what’s outside. You imagine this house being somewhere remote or in the city, yet the outside seems to be suburban. The mysterious man looking from the outside in. The friend or compatriot of Perfume Genius looking on as he is in this contorted position. Did Perfume Genius fall from the outside in? And, if so, how and why? You look at the cover over and over and try and figure it out. Such an arresting shot and composition, it is an award-winning effort from Cody Critcheloe & Andrew J.S. A rare case of album artwork being as discussion-worthy and brilliant as the music inside. It will be interesting who wins the inguinal Best Album Cover GRAMMY on 1st February. More than anything, I hope the category grows – in terms of nominees – and artists take it as motivation to really put everything into their covers. It is a subjective measure, what makes a great cover, though there are too many faceless and unambitious efforts. The five highlighted above all have their own personality and feel. Each different and remarkable. There have been album covers made in the past five or ten years that can rival the all-time best, yet most of the very best are from decades ago. However, there is nothing to say that very soon we will not get a wave of stunning covers that are…

PHOTO CREDIT: Anastasiya Badun/Pexels

MODERN classic.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Jehnny Beth – You Heartbreaker, You

FEATURE:

 

The Best Albums of 2025

Jehnny Beth – You Heartbreaker, You

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I am almost halfway…

PHOTO CREDIT: Johnny Hostile

through my run of features where I celebrate and recognise the best albums of this year. Some of my favourites in there. One of the punchiest and most economical albums of the year, I want to shine a spotlight on Jehnny Beth’s You Heartbreaker, You. Prior to getting to a couple; of reviews who herald an explosive album that is loud, raw, primal and extraordinary, there are some interviews I want to bring in. Highlighting You Heartbreaker, You as “an album to surrender to, to become obsessed with, to play so loud it's painful”, I want to start out with 15 Questions and some of the questions they posed. If you have not heard this incredible album, then make sure that you do:

“For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

It needs to be a necessity and I nurture that feeling every day to keep it alive. It’s not work, it’s not a hobby, it’s a way of living.

Being inspired is far better than being ok - and the only way I can exist in this world.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

You just need to do it, without judgement. Wake up, do it, decide later. It’s not as complicated as it seems.

And also take breaks, enjoy your life. You don’t have to work 3 hours straight to be productive, this is not office work.

For You Heartbreaker, You, what did you start with? If there were conceptual considerations, what were they?
The idea of the new record came as I was onstage in America.

We were playing a metal/hardcore festival called aftershock and the connection with the audience was so intense and real, I made a mental note to write a record with that energy in mind.

Tell me a bit about the way the new material developed and gradually took its final form, please.

I asked Johnny Hostile to start writing new music on guitar again. I knew he was an incredible guitarist but he became a real riff machine.
When I started hearing all those intense heavy riffs, I felt immediately inspired and I knew we were on the right path.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

I don’t really relate to that feeling. Creating is part of my life and it never ends.
Moments I am not creating per se, I am living and collecting inspirations. The only emptiness I have experienced in my life was related to loss.  

I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about or the impact it had on them – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

Straight from the beginning when we released the first song “BROKEN RIB” the responses from fans have been incredibly positive. Everyone seems to need a loud guitar record right now (I know I do!).
Personally I think it is the best work I have ever done”.

I will move to an interview from Music Week. I have been a fan of Jehnny Beth since her Savages days, and I love everything she puts out into the world. On You Heartbreaker, You, she has released this wonderful work. Not as covered and highly-rated as I think it deserves, there is no denying You Heartbreaker, You can stand alongside the best and most powerful albums of this year. Definitely one of my picks from 2025. A masterful work from an astonishing songwriter:

“It’s been five years since your last solo album, why is now the right time for a new Jehnny Beth record?

“To make a record, it has to itch so hard that there’s nothing you can do but do it. We’ve been touring a lot; we played massive stadiums with Depeche Mode in Europe, and Queens Of The Stone Age in America. We also did some hardcore metal festivals where Korn or Tool would be headlining. I was on stage, and suddenly I had a vision of what this record was going to be. I knew I wanted it to start with a scream, which it does. The times are really absurd; it’s an insane time and I feel insane. Everything’s broken and we need music to bring it back together.”

How did You Heartbreaker, You come together from a musical standpoint?

“We had one rule in the studio, which was: ‘If we’re bored, we delete it.’ Boredom is the last thing you want people to feel; it’s a waste of their money and time. You don’t want to waste time getting people to understand your feelings – they don’t really give a shit. It needs to hit straight to the point and not take detours.”

The album is coming out via Fiction, which is owned by Universal but operates as an independent. What does independence mean to you?

“Independence is whatever’s in the contract – that’s where your independence is. You can have really hardcore artist contracts with independent record labels where they take a lot, or you can have licensing deals that free you very quickly. I look at the contracts and not necessarily which house they’re in.”

As a solo act, how are you navigating the rising costs of touring?

“Times are definitely harder compared even to 10 years ago, but I’ve always been into the mentality of doing it yourself as much as you can. The responsibility falls on the artist more and more to multiply your sources of income so you can survive. I don’t give a fuck about becoming a millionaire, but you need to survive because that’s the only way you can keep creating. [The problem is] all the way from pay-to-play, to bands who’ll [only] pay you €500 to support them in a stadium. There’s a responsibility for [bigger] artists and management and the streaming services [to offer help]”

Let’s get to one mor interview before we get to some reviews. DIY observed how Jehnny Beth was moving away from the more collaborative aspects of her early career. You Heartbreaker, You is far more stripped back and singular. This incredible artist making sure that her voice is front and centre:

“The album was forged in the brutal habitat of its creator’s own narrowing attention spans, a topic explored on ‘High Resolution Sadness’ - “I wanna take it all in / I wanna put down the screens,” she screams over a thrashing instrumental. “I’m like everyone. I’m a doom scroller,” she admits. “I get swallowed into the vortex. Some parts of it I like. My Instagram wall is full of comedy and food stuff. Our number one rule was if we’re bored, we delete.”

That manifesto was penned ritually, ahead of Jehnny’s creative pursuits, ‘Don’t bore me’ becoming a mantra of sorts in the studio. “The music knows better than you know, and you have to get really good at listening, paying attention to what the world you’re creating is feeding back to you. You juggle subjectivity with objectivism. It’s a tricky balance. I don’t write songs to fix my own problems. I think songs are conversations. Songs are addressed to the world. It’s like in any conversation: don’t bore me, I don’t like small talk.”

It appears this restless nature extends beyond music too. Keen-eyed observers of Netflix would have spotted Jehnny in ‘Hostage’, a political drama starring Suranne Jones. It marks her first acting work outside her native France (where she featured in 2023’s broadly acclaimed Anatomy Of A Fall); now, having recently done a three week shoot in Brazil, she’s on the cusp of filming another movie back home.

“I try to do both. I’m always happy to sacrifice film for music because music is my art,” she says. While she doesn’t identify many crossovers between the creative acts - she turns down any musician roles offered to her - dialogue from the silver screen often bleeds into her writing. “Even ‘You Heartbreaker, You’ could be a line from a movie. I think that in songs, the more personal, the more people like it. And sometimes it’s true. Writing a song is kind of similar to writing for a character. It’s a perspective.”

This weaving between disciplines recalls another one of her Instagram proverbs - ‘There are many versions of yourself, just make sure they all get the right shoes’. “Well, right now I’m barefoot,” she laughs. “That’s really true though. I used to wear stilettos in Savages. We were afraid of being caught by the fashion police and not taken seriously as musicians because we were women. The only thing I would allow myself would be interesting shoes”.

I will wrap with a couple of reviews. CLASH provided some interesting observations about You Heartbreaker, You. An album that is freeing, cathartic and designed to allow the audience to scream, it is perfect for these times. Rather than it being too heavy or foreboding, instead, You Heartbreaker, You is motivating and energising. It definitely engages all the senses and provokes so many different reactions:

“Jehnny Beth returns with her second solo album, ‘You Heartbreaker, You’, out via Fiction Records. The new album follows on from 2021’s ‘Utopian Ashes’ with Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie, which took listeners through the slow parting of a married couple, as they revel in the loneliness of a failing love. ‘You Heartbreaker, You’ is starkly different.

On the album, Beth says, “We’re living in a dark time, full of drama and barbarous tragedy. It became clear to me that, in these times, we either learn how to scream really well, or we learn how to whisper.” In ‘Broken Rib’, Beth wants us to scream, as she sings, “we learn to breathe with a broken rib,” insinuating that screaming is exposing, but eventually the anger will feel directed and natural, the same way as it is the social norm to whisper politely.

‘Broken Rib’ is followed by ‘No Good For People’. With electronic elements, the track is reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails. Beth was inspired to write the track after re-watching True Detective, the decorated American police drama about tackling internal corruption. On what inspired the track, Beth says, “There’s a scene at the end where the character played by Matthew McConaughey says that he can be hard to live with: ‘I don’t mean to, but I can be…critical. Sometimes I think I’m just not good for people… I wear them down”. It spoke to me because it questions the inability to coexist with others and the delicate balance where the truth can be heartbreaking.”

The following tracks – ‘Obsession’, ‘Out of my Reach’, and ‘I Still Believe’ – are punchy. ‘Out Of My Reach’ has a deeper guitar sound, sewn by Beth’s assertive vocal, stylistically similar to Deftones. ‘I Still Believe’ has a post-punk sound, but from a more powerful stance. The track is brooding and creeps up on you as a listener.

‘Reality’ begins with the sound of glass shattering, capturing immediate attention as well as carrying the album’s theme of feeling disillusioned by the state of the world, lovelessly professing “We want love like it happens in a dream,” showing how we chase romance, despite deeper anger, which could be translated into passion. ‘Reality’ extends into the following track, ‘Stop Me Now’.

Beth sings with full angst, but there is something cathartic about the uneasy sound. Forebodingly accompanied by a creeping guitar sound, she repeatedly sings, “How many years are we going to last?” She then ends the song saying, “Nothing can stop me now.”

This transcends into ‘High Resolution Sadness’ which is paced like a panic attack, driven by a janky, anger-filled drum sound. The track is similar to PJ Harvey’s haunting ‘Down by the Water’ as Beth whispers, “Put down the screens,” and progresses into a slightly unhinged vocal, frequently singing, “I want to feel love.”

The closing track, ‘I See Your Pain’, is noticeably slower and draws more attention to her almost isolated, static-y vocal, accompanied by a quiet but deliberate guitar strum, escalating into a crashing vocal as she sings ‘I See Your Pain’, sometimes sang clear and strongly, other times, closer to the end, sang exorcising and free.

‘You Heartbreaker, You’ is a release to listen to. Despite the industrial and slick sound,the purity in Beth’s voice outshines the sheen that drapes over the album. Beth’s voice might be confronting at first, but over the course of the album the frustration becomes contagious, proving that anger is not something to be frightened by.

7/10”.

I am ending with a review from Kerrang!. I will have to go and see Jehnny Beth play very soon, as she is one of my favourite artists. You Heartbreaker, You is one of the standout albums of this year. One that definitely lodges in the mind. Even if it nine songs and lasts less than half an hour, it does everything it needs to in that time. Other artists can take note of its economy and effectiveness:

“Primal. If you were to boil the energy of Jehnny Beth’s second solo album down to a singular word, that would be it. It’s primal in multiple dimensions – confrontational, sexual, alight with a revolutionary spark – all made possible by an approach that feels proudly organic, unvarnished, even. Whatever guise the ex-Savages vocalist chooses to assume, she is fearless about it.

To start with, we re-encounter Jehnny when her spirit is bruised. Nonetheless, you can sense her grit her teeth and stagger forwards on opener Broken Rib, a tense, discordant beast of a track where her pain is as acute as a shard of glass pressed into the wrist. Later, No Good For People, in which she laments the way ‘I wear you down and you get unhappy’, does harsh maximalism with class, while Obsession pushes that sound further into something more twisted and strange, lending a creeping undertone to her plea of, ‘I don’t know why I’m so girly / I’m desperate to know when we will be together.’ Out Of My Reach is simultaneously dense and straightforward, shifting its feet between wavering, weird verses into a simple yet effective, and no less massive, chorus.

In its second half, things get noisier. Reality sees her move from a purr to a bark and back again in an ode to queerness, sex and polyamory – ‘Did not mean to hurt you when I said / I’d like you and your man in my bed.’ Meanwhile, High Resolution Sadness rattles and rolls in a battle cry for unplugging and living large, and Jehnny’s whisper of ‘Put down the screens’ certainly is a compelling command. Closer I See Your Pain slows down and assumes a moodier, more dramatic tone as she contemplates the blurry line between calling out performative action and demanding moral purity. ‘We want our heroes to be pure / Your heroes to be insecure / Everyone’s so strange,’ she sings.

In a time where it seems everyone wants to make noisier music as an act of defiance against an increasingly cruel world, Jehnny Beth has found a way to stand out. She’s real, she’s raw, and everything here has such a strength of spirit to it that it feels truly alive.

Verdict: 4/5”.

A remarkable album from the divine Jenny Beth, go and check out the stunning You Heartbreaker, You. Following her debut solo album, 2020’s TO LOVE IS TO LIVE, I think that she has delivered her finest work to date. I do wonder where she goes next and what another album might sound like. A seemingly limitless artist, Jehnny Beth could do a complete left-turn. However, on this gem of an album, she provides something truly special. An album that…

EVERYONE needs to experience.

FEATURE: A Shining Light: How Kate Bush Is Inspiring Progressive and Amazing Women Pushing Pop Forward

FEATURE:

 

 

A Shining Light

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed in 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

How Kate Bush Is Inspiring Progressive and Amazing Women Pushing Pop Forward

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WE know that…

IN THIS PHOTO: ROSALÍA/PHOTO CREDIT: Alex G. Harper for Billboard

ROSALÍA is a fan of Kate Bush. She gave Bush a shoutout in 2018 at the Latin GRAMMY Awards. I know that ROSALÍA is inspired by other artists and it is not only Kate Bush who she looks up to. However, in 2018, she did give this salute to someone whose influence is burning bright to this day. Even though the speech was over seven years ago now, I do think you can bring it up to date:

“The 19th Latin GRAMMY Awards were a big night for Spanish rising star Rosalía. The singer, who is recognized for bringing Spain's flamenco music to the world stage, won her first-ever GRAMMY awards and used her acceptance speech for the Best Fusion/ Urban Interpretation category to thank the women who blazed a trail for her own career.

"This is incredible. It's a dream. Thank you so much for all the love, thanks all of you for the recognition, I am proud to lead my project and make always the music that represents me, despite the risk, and to be able to share it with the world and be here," she said." I want to thank women like Lauryn Hill ...Bjork, Kate Bush ... shout out to all the women in the industry that have taught me that I could do this because thanks to them I am here”.

This brings us to now and ROSALÍA’s new album, LUX. Without doubt one of the greatest albums of this decade, it will top many best-of-the-year lists. Not that ROSALÍA is typically ‘Pop’, though she is a popular artist and someone whose sound and direction has shifted vastly for LUX. Bringing in Opera and Classical, it is this huge, sweeping and hugely effecting album. It is hard to choose the best songs from the album, as it is all incredible and the work of a genius. I really love Reliquia and the single, Berghain.

To me, there is quite a lot of Kate Bush running through LUX. Also, you can hear Björk’s influence but, as Björk is hugely influenced by Kate Bush, I can circle back to Bush and her affect on ROSALÍA. Not to say that LUX is entirely a tribute to Kate Bush, yet I hear shades and aspects of her albums in this one. In terms of the vocal sound, which is quite operatic but also beautifully expansive, sweeping, tender and almost bird-like at times, I get hints of Bush’s early work like The Kick Inside and Lionheart. This is a period Kate Bush is not entirely fond of, as she does not feel those albums truly represent her. She got a lot of ridicule and press criticism around this period. That was in 1978. However, I can feel these albums work their way into LUX. The biggest Kate Bush connections I feel are to do with The Dreaming (1982) and Hounds of Love (1985). In terms of the scope and genius of LUX, my mind goes to Hounds of Love. The Dreaming is an album that more and more people are discovering. Some critics at the time felt it was too experimental and weird. Bush adopting different accents ands vocal mannerisms. Some of the songs being quite heavy, experimental and layered. Her vocals, at times, almost operatic and intense. It is not a ridiculous theory to suggest that this 1982 masterpiece has a bearing on LUX. Björk love that album too. I thought, when Berghain was released, that it was connected to The Dreaming. In the sense it was a wonderful female artist pushing Pop. Doing something genuinely different. Even though Bush did not do anything Opera or Classical as such, The Dreaming was a radical departure from what she did before. The same with ROSALÍA. However, unlike Bush in 1982, LUX has received nothing but glowing praise. There are some snobs who wonder if ROSALÍA should be bringing Opera into Pop. Elitism still very much alive today. It is not such a leap to feel the bones and blood of Kate Bush in this modern masterpiece. As much as I have said a Kate Bush/Björk collaboration would be immense, you feel a Kate Bush/ ROSALÍA one would be just as good! However, if Bush does grace us with another album, you feel any collaborations she undertakes will be with male artists (and I hope Peter Gabriel is one of them!).

This is not the only modern queen that you can feel is a fan of Kate Bush and recognises her influence. I am a fan of Charli xcx and her latest direction reminds me too of an album like The Dreaming. Maye earlier Kate Bush work than that. Think about the new track, House, with John Cale. I get impressions of Get Out of My House and Pull Out the Pin. I mean, the new songs she is releasing are for the soundtrack to Wuthering Heights. Impossible not to connect that to Kate Bush’s 1978 single of the same name. Charli xcx posted a TikTok video with Bush’s debut single playing. Since her earliest days, Charli xcx has said she is a fan of Kate Bush. Consider this 2013 Billboard article, where we get a quote from Charli xcx about Kate Bush and album of hers that is specially influential:

“Charli XCX: “The album ‘The Sensual World’ is one of the records that defines me. I think the album artwork is amazing — it’s one of my favorite album artworks ever. She’s smelling the rose, she’s got the rose in front of her face, and I think it’s so beautiful. I just love the production of that whole record, the way that her vocals sound. Everything about it is so dreamy. I think my favorite song on it is ‘Heads We’re Dancing'”.

I wouldn’t have pegged Charli xcx to be a fan of that 1989 album. However, I feel in the years since she mentioned that Bush classic, she has been listening to The Dreaming, Hounds of Love and The Kick Inside. The more spectral nature of Wuthering Heights and the intensity in various songs from The Dreaming. However, a new track like Chains of Love could have easily come from a Kate Bush album like The Sensual World. If there was a new podcast or documentary about Kate Bush where modern-day Pop legends and icons discussed Kate Bush, you would like to imagine, ROSALÍA and Charli xcx would contribute.

@charlixcx

hope you enjoy! xx

♬ Wuthering Heights - Kate Bush

Another year-best album came from Florence + The Machine. Everybody Scream has elements of Charli xcx’s darker music. The same intensity and gothic horror you get from House. However, I feel Everybody Scream is more personal. However, given that Everybody Scream includes some witchiness and gothic influence, reviews have mentioned Kate Bush. The Observer noted this:

“Into this zeitgeist lands the sixth album by Florence + the Machine. Florence Welch is already something of a millennial Wiccan recruitment officer, and this record arrived on Halloween, brandishing spooky season themes and gleefully dialling up the witchiness of her work, often with tongue in cheek. There are tracks called Witch Dance and The Old Religion; two songs already released – Sympathy Magic and the title track – come with videos set on windswept moors, revelling in references to Brontë and Kate Bush. There are echoes of Welch’s last album, Dance Fever, in callbacks to ideas of possession and catharsis”.

One can see Kate Bush’s influence in the earliest Florence + The Machine work. However, you can still feel it shining today. Again, The Dreaming making its presence felt. A lot of Kate Bush’s earliest work. The i Paper did make a mention of Kate Bush in their review of Everybody Scream: “Welch, it is true, loves her hokum as much as anyone. Since arriving in 2009 with her Kate Bush-goes-indie debut Lungs, her music has pulsated with a theatrical and elemental power – with melodrama and sometimes even a hint of the pantomime”.

This Reddit post observed that the video for Florence + The Machine’s Everybody Scream puts one in mind of the Red Dress version of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights. Whether taking from The Dreaming or indeed The Kick Inside, there are several albums from this year that have Kate Bush in the mix. Wider afield, there are modern artists like Japanese Breakfast that have been compared to Kate Bush. Quite a few in fact. It would be interesting to get an exhaustive list. However, as we are discussing progressive and year-best artists/albums, there are other artists one can mention. When Dua Lipa released Houidini in 2023 I was one of many who noticed the Kate Bush connections. The key in her mouth for a promotional image is very similar to the cover of The Dreaming. On that album, Bush recorded a song called Houidini. Even if it is harder to see Kate Bush’s sound in Dua Lipa, she is definitely influenced by Bush. “How can we explain the success of this 26-year-old who, just five years ago, was still working at a donut shop in Los Angeles, ready to give up on the music world? First, there are her songs: tales of unrequited lesbian heartbreak, queer anthems drenched in synthesizers and sweeping choruses sung in high notes worthy of Kate Bush, such as Good Luck, Babe!, her biggest hit to date, with more than 1.5 billion streams on Spotify”. These words were including in an article from the summer about a modern artist rewriting the Popp rulebook. This 2024-published Substack post states how Chappell Roan is a Kate Bush-like Pop threat. This extraordinarily inventive and original artist.

FKA twigs and MARINA also are influenced by Kate Bush and have released phenomenal albums this year. Despite not mentioning Kate Bush as an influence, you can feel that Sabrina Carpnter is inspired by her. The stagecraft and Carpenter’s sets. They out you in mind of Kate Bush at time. Also, some terrific albums of this year from artists as varied as Lady Gaga and CMAT, one feels, carry a bit of Kate Bush with them. Both of those artists are fans of Kate Bush. I have mentioned before how Taylor Swift, whilst not as rule-breaking and progressive as artists I have mentioned earlier, is undoubtably the biggest artist in the world. The cover for her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, puts one in mind of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love back cover, where Bush pays homage to Ophelia. You can read more about Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love and some literary and poetic influences here. There is a song on The Life of a Showgirl called The Fate of Ophelia. Many have noticed how Taylor Swift’s Anti Hero – from 2022’s Midnights – has a striking resemblance to Kate Bush. No doubt this global megastar is indebted to Kate Bush. Some of the most influential, progressive and forward-thinking albums of this year reinventing and pushing Pop have been influenced by Kate Bush. Not only female artists. I hear Kate Bush’s impact on artists such as Perfume Genius and Jacob Alon. Maybe a lot of the Kate Bush resemblance and influence has come from events like Stranger Things putting Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) – from Hounds of Love – back on the charts in 2022. However, the fact albums like The Dreaming and The Kick Inside spring more to mind, you feel that artists have been digging deeper and not going for the most obvious (and celebrated) Kate Bush album. It is wonderful to hear! One wonders which albums and artists will carry Kate Bush’s torch next year. Bush herself might even release a new album soon. For anyone who wonders whether Kate Bush has any influence today and is relevant, you only need to listen to new work from ROSALÍA, Florence + The Machine and FKA twigs to know that it…

IS burning brightly.

FEATURE: An Expanding Streaming Market: Looking to a Future Without Spotify

FEATURE:

 

 

An Expanding Streaming Market

PHOTO CREDIT: Pavel Danilyuk/Pexels

Looking to a Future Without Spotify

__________

THIS is a bit…

PHOTO CREDIT: Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

of an old story that The Guardian ran last month. However, I think that it is relevant to bring it in as we head to the new year. I use Spotify all of the time. However, more and more, there is this guilt regarding the very low amount artists earn from streaming. How the algorithm is set up for larger artists and there are plenty of flaws. It seems that Spotify are more concerned with changing their site and adding features and less so without rectifying issues. I don’t think artists will get a noticeably better deal next year. Earlier this year, Massive Attack removed their music from Spotify in protest of Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Elk’s investment in A.I. military. Other artists are following suit. I know people who have stopped using the streaming platform because of this. It adds another layer of complexity and negativity to Spotify. It does get to me. I am not especially beholden to Spotify. I use it because of the access and vast choice of music. I like to make playlists and embed them in features. I find that alternative sites do not offer that function. However, the more options coming onto the market means Spotify may one day be overtaken and replaced. People flocking to their competitors. Nina Protocol, Cantilever and Subvert might seem niche and names you have not heard. However, they are providing alternatives. As Nina Protocol’s Chief Executive Mike Pollard says in the article, the future of music streaming is independent. An experienced that should be above benefiting artists. More curated and fairer:

“The noise around Spotify this year has been louder than ever, from Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine – a biting indictment of the company and its alleged practices, described as “error-riddled theories” by Spotify itself – to a slew of indie artists leaving the platform due to political and ethical reasons. There was even a recent music forum in California called Death to Spotify.

So the timing is fortuitous for a growing number of independent streaming and music community platforms, such as Nina Protocol, Coda, Subvert, Lissen, Vocana, and just last week a new one launched in the UK: Cantilever. “More people are definitely looking for alternatives,” says Nina Protocol’s chief executive Mike Pollard. “We strongly believe the future of music is independent.”

Each of the new platforms have unique identities. Nina Protocol uses an open public network, where artists set their terms and keep 100% of any revenue from downloads; the collectively owned Subvert is intended to be an alternative to Bandcamp, where music files are bought and sold. Cantilever takes inspiration from curated film streaming platforms such as Mubi, offering a limited and rotating number of albums at a time (currently 10, but up to 30).

IN THIS PHOTO: Author Liz Pelly/PHOTO CREDIT: Felix Walworth/One Signal Publishing 

What unites them is curation, a sense of community and an artist-friendly, anti-corporate model. “We think a lot about the dignity of releasing music,” says Pollard. “I don’t think these algorithm-driven reasons for why something’s getting played are very dignified: are you just something that sounds like something they already like? An artist may say, ‘one of my songs did well on Spotify because it was put in the most popular sleep playlist’. But maybe the 500,000 people who listened to that track weren’t even awake! And how many of those people know your name, care about you or would buy a ticket to a show?”

Many of these new services also have written articles and editorial, intending to offer contextual deep dives for a more focused listening experience. “It’s like a music magazine you can listen to,” says Cantilever’s Aaron Skates, an ex-record label worker and music writer who has launched the streaming platform. Skates has managed to pull in an impressive list of independent labels to work with too, such as Warp, Ninja Tune, Domino and Beggars Group labels such as Rough Trade, 4AD and Matador.

By having a smaller roster of artists, it means they receive more money. “The pool is far less diluted,” Skates says. “We’re paying out a maximum of 30 artists for all subscriber revenue, versus the 100m tracks on Spotify. Also, we pay on a user-centric basis, so that means your fee will only ever go towards the music that you actually listen to.” Skates gives me an example: if Cantilever was to get 10,000 subscribers at £4.99 a month, that would result in albums on the service receiving £2,000-3,000 each, which he says is “roughly the equivalent of a million Spotify streams”.

“There’s a growing awareness of how slop-filled everything is getting,” he says. “People are wanting a little more control of what they consume.” He gives the example of users leaving X, formerly Twitter: “They realised, ‘Shit, I don’t need to be here any more.’ Then you understand what it feels like to be more intentional about your choices, instead of just being on everything that you’re told you need to be on to exist. I think people are waking up”.

Even though Qobuz do not allow users to embed playlists into sites like Squarespace – something that is a huge negative from my perspective -, they are another streaming platforms that could be a viable alternative to Spotify. I do want to come away from Spotify at some point next year. The benefits of the platform is that there is plenty of choice when it comes to new and legacy artists. I do like how you can discover so much through the site. Also, in terms of being able to shares mixes, playlists and albums, it is very convenient and easy. However, I do realise that there are ethical and moral reasons to boycott Spotify. Also, one can use Spotify and another platform. I think all of the alternatives have their drawbacks, though with time, you feel like there will be other sites that offer everything. I can understand why people are leaving Spotify. Artists are getting a raw deal. In a feature from earlier this year, the BBC reported ow Spotify paid a record £7.7 bn in royalty to artists. However, we are still hearing about how little that amounts to for smaller or independent acts:

“Spotify said more than two-thirds of all music revenue goes "straight to the recording and publishing rights-holders", and added that, like other streamers, Spotify does not pay on a per-stream basis.

The annual figures were published in Spotify's Loud and Clear report - part of the company's aim to provide transparency on how it pays the music industry.

The amount Spotify paid this year was an increase on the more than $9bn (£7bn) it handed over in 2023.

The report highlighted that the number of artists generating annual royalties between $1,000 (£770) and $10m had tripled since 2017.

Taylor Swift was named Spotify's top artist globally with more than 26 billion streams, in the year she released her double-length album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology”.

Whilst it may not be ideal for people like me – journalists who rely on affordability and include a lot of music in my features – to rely purely on physical music, there are people finding it quite freeing. This article is quite illuminating. Criticism against Spotify including a lot of A.I. music on its site. Audiobooks taking money away from artists. Artists still not able to earn anything substantial from streaming revenues.

I am going to end with this feature from The Guardian from October. How a new wave of boycott means that others will rethink their connection with Spotify. It is quite hard to detach from the platform and completely switch off. However, as there are alternatives coming through that have a different business model, it may make things easier next year. For me, if artists were played more and no functionality was lost coming off Spotify, it may be worth the switch:

“Artists have long complained about paltry payouts, but this summer the criticism became personal, targeting Spotify’s billionaire co-founder Daniel Ek for his investment in Helsing, a German firm developing AI for military tech. Groups including Massive Attack, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Deerhoof and Hotline TNT pulled their music from the service in protest. (Spotify has stressed that “Spotify and Helsing are two separate companies”.)

In Oakland, California, Stephanie Dukich read Mood Machine, heard about the boycotts, and was inspired.

Dukich, who investigates complaints against the city’s police, was part of a reading group about digital media at Bathers library. Though she is not a musician, Dukich describes herself, along with her friend and art gallery worker Manasa Karthikeyan, as “really into sound”.

She and Karthikeyan decided to start similar conversations. “Spotify is enmeshed in how we engage with music,” Dukich says. “We thought it would be great to talk about our relationship to streaming – what it means to actually take our files off and learn how to do that together.” Death to Spotify was born.

The goal, in short, was “down with algorithmic listening, down with royalty theft, down with AI-generated music”.

Karthikeyan says the responsibility of quitting Spotify lies as much with listeners as artists. “You have to accept that you won’t have instant access to everything,” she says. “That makes you think harder about what you support.”

But will either musicians or listeners actually have the nerve to actually boycott the app longterm?

Several famous musicians have pulled their catalogues from Spotify with big, headline-grabbing announcements over the years, only to quietly come crawling back to the platform after some time. One of the app’s most popular artists, Taylor Swift, boycotted the service for three years in protest of its unfair payment practices but returned in 2017. Radiohead’s frontman. Thom Yorke, removed some his solo projects for the same reason in 2013, calling Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”; he later put them back.

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell left the app in 2022, citing the company’s exclusive deal with anti-vax podcast host Joe Rogan; both Canadian singer-songwriters contracted polio as children in the 1950s. They, too, later restored their catalogues on Spotify”.

I use Spotify a lot and know how handy it is for what I do. At the back of my mind, there is this conflict. Whether it is right of justifiable using the platform in 2025. I will have to have a think as we head our way into 2026. I am looking at the options out there and seeing if any provide everything I need. Otherwise, I will have to subscribe to more than one streaming platform. Whereas in the past the only other options were there massive sites like Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal or Apple, there are these upcoming and independent platforms that are growing. It is encouraging knowing that there…

ARE alternatives around.

FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: The Byrds

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

The Byrds

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ON this visit…

to The Great American Songbook, I am focusing on one of the all-time best American bands, The Byrds. They were formed in 1964 in Los Angeles. The original line-up included Roger McGuinn (lead guitar, vocals), Gene Clark (tambourine, vocals), David Crosby (rhythm guitar, vocals), Chris Hillman (bass guitar, vocals), and Michael Clarke (drums). Before getting to a twenty-song mixtape of their mist essential tracks, I want to bring in some biography from AllMusic:

“Although they only attained the huge success of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys for a brief period in the mid-'60s, time has judged the Byrds to be nearly as influential as those groups in the long run. They were not solely responsible for devising folk-rock, but they were certainly more responsible than any other single act (Dylan included) for melding the innovations and energy of the British Invasion with the best lyrical and musical elements of contemporary folk music. The jangling, 12-string guitar sound of leader Roger McGuinn's Rickenbacker was permanently absorbed into the vocabulary of rock. They also played a vital role in pioneering psychedelic rock and country-rock, the unifying element being their angelic harmonies and restless eclecticism.

Often described in their early days as a hybrid of Dylan and the Beatles, the Byrds in turn influenced Dylan and the Beatles almost as much as Dylan and the Fab Four had influenced the Byrds. The Byrds' innovations have echoed nearly as strongly through subsequent generations in the work of Tom Petty, R.E.M., and innumerable alternative bands of the post-punk era that feature those jangling guitars and dense harmonies.

Although the Byrds had perfected their blend of folk and rock when their debut single, "Mr. Tambourine Man," topped the charts in mid-1965, it was something of a miracle that the group had managed to coalesce in the first place. Not a single member of the original quintet had extensive experience on electric instruments. Jim McGuinn (he'd change his first name to Roger a few years later), David Crosby, and Gene Clark were all young veterans of both commercial folk-pop troupes and the acoustic coffeehouse scene. They were inspired by the success of the Beatles to mix folk and rock; McGuinn had already been playing Beatles songs acoustically in Los Angeles folk clubs when Clark approached him to form an act, according to subsequent recollections, in the Peter & Gordon style. David Crosby soon joined and they made a primitive demo as the Jet Set that was nonetheless bursting with promise. With the help of session musicians, they released a single on Elektra as the Beefeaters that, while a flop, showed them getting quite close to the folk-rock sound that would electrify the pop scene in a few months.

The Beefeaters, soon renamed the Byrds, were fleshed out to a quintet with the addition of drummer Michael Clarke and bluegrass mandolinist Chris Hillman, who was enlisted to play electric bass, although he had never played the instrument before. The band was so lacking in equipment in their early stages that Clarke played on cardboard boxes during their first rehearsals, but they were determined to master their instruments and become a full-fledged rock band (many demos from this period would later surface for official release). They managed to procure a demo of a new Dylan song, "Mr. Tambourine Man"; by eliminating some verses and adding instantly memorable 12-string guitar leads and Beatlesque harmonies, they came up with the first big folk-rock smash (though the Beau Brummels and others had begun exploring similar territory as well). For the "Mr. Tambourine Man" single, the band's vocals and McGuinn's inimitable Rickenbacker were backed by session musicians, although the band themselves (contrary to some widely circulated rumors) performed on their subsequent recordings.

The first long-haired American group to compete with the British Invasion bands visually as well as musically, the Byrds were soon anointed as the American counterpart to the Beatles by the press, legions of fans, and George Harrison himself. Their 1965 debut LP, Mr. Tambourine Man, was a fabulous album that mixed stellar interpretations of Dylan and Pete Seeger tunes with strong, more romantic and pop-based originals, usually written by Gene Clark in the band's early days. A few months later, their version of Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!" became another number one hit and instant classic, featuring more great chiming guitar lines and ethereal, interweaving harmonies. While their second LP (Turn! Turn! Turn!) wasn't as strong as their debut full-length, the band continued to move forward at a dizzying pace. In early 1966, the "Eight Miles High" single heralded the birth of psychedelia, with its drug-like (intentionally or otherwise) lyrical imagery, rumbling bassline, and a frenzied McGuinn guitar solo that took its inspiration from John Coltrane and Indian music.

The Byrds suffered a major loss right after "Eight Miles High" with the departure of Gene Clark, their primary songwriter and, along with McGuinn, their chief lead vocalist. The reason for his resignation, ironically, was fear of flying, although other pressures were at work as well. Unbelievably, "Eight Miles High" would be their last Top 20 single; many radio stations banned the record for its alleged drug references, halting its progress at number 14. This ended the Byrds' brief period as commercial challengers to the Beatles, but they regrouped impressively in the face of the setbacks. With the band continuing as a quartet, McGuinn, Crosby, and Hillman would assume a much larger (actually, the entire) chunk of the songwriting responsibilities. Their third album, Fifth Dimension, contained more groundbreaking folk-rock and psychedelia on tracks like "Fifth Dimension," "I See You," and "John Riley," although it (like several of their classic early albums) mixed sheer brilliance with tracks that were oddly half-baked or carelessly executed.

Younger Than Yesterday, (1967) which included the small hits "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star" and "My Back Pages" (another Dylan cover), was another high point, Hillman and Crosby in particular taking their writing to a new level. In 1967, Crosby would assert a much more prominent role in the band, singing and writing some of his best material. He wasn't getting along so well with McGuinn and Hillman, though, and was jettisoned from the Byrds partway into the recording of The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Gene Clark, drafted back into the band as a replacement, left after only a few weeks, and by the end of 1967, Michael Clarke was also gone. Remarkably, in the midst of this chaos (not to mention diminishing record sales), they continued to sound as good as ever on Notorious. This was another effort that mixed electronic experimentation and folk-rock mastery with aplomb, with hints of a growing interest in country music.

As McGuinn and Hillman rebuilt the group one more time in early 1968, McGuinn mused about the exciting possibility of a double album that would play as nothing less than a history of contemporary music, evolving from traditional folk and country to jazz and electronic sounds. Toward this end, he hired Gram Parsons, he has since said, to play keyboards. Under Parsons' influence, however, the Byrds were soon going full blast into country music, with Parsons taking a large share of the guitar and vocal chores. In 1968, McGuinn, Hillman, Parsons, and drummer Kevin Kelly recorded Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which was probably the first album to be widely labeled as country-rock.

Opinions as to the merits of Rodeo remain sharply divided among Byrds fans. Some see it as a natural continuation of the group's innovations; other bemoan the loss of the band's trademark crystalline guitar jangle and the short-circuited potential of McGuinn's most ambitious experiments. However one feels, there's no doubt that it marked the end, or at least a drastic revamping, of the "classic" Byrds sound of the 1965-1968 period (bookended by the Tambourine Man and Notorious albums). Parsons, the main catalyst for the metamorphosis, left the band after about six months, partially in objection to a 1968 Byrds tour of South Africa. It couldn't have helped, though, that McGuinn replaced several of Parsons' lead vocals on Rodeo with his own at the last minute, ostensibly due to contractual obstacles that prevented Parsons from singing on Columbia releases. (Some tracks with Parsons' lead vocals showed up anyway, and a few others surfaced in the '90s on the Byrds box set).

Chris Hillman left the Byrds by the end of 1968 to form the Flying Burrito Brothers with Parsons. Although McGuinn kept the Byrds going for about another five years with other musicians (most notably former country picker Clarence White), essentially, the Byrds' name was a front for Roger McGuinn and backing band. Opinions, again, remain sharply divided about the merits of latter-day Byrds albums. McGuinn was such an idiosyncratic and pleasurable talent that fans and critics are inclined to give him some slack; no one else plays the 12-string as well, he's a fine arranger, and his Lennon-meets-Dylan vocals are immediately distinctive. Yet aside from some good echoes of vintage Byrds like "Chestnut Mare," "Jesus Is Just Alright," and "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man," nothing from the post-1968 Byrds albums resonates with nearly the same effervescent quality and authority of their classic 1965-1968 period. This is partly because McGuinn is an erratic (though occasionally fine) songwriter; it's also because the Byrds at their peak were very much a unit of diverse and considerable talents, not just a front for their leader's ideas.

The Byrds' diminishing importance must have stung McGuinn doubly in light of the rising profiles of several Byrds alumni as the '60s turned into the '70s. David Crosby was a superstar with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Hillman, Parsons, and (for a while) Michael Clarke were taking country-rock further with the Flying Burrito Brothers; even Gene Clark, though he'd dropped out of sight commercially, was recording some respectable country-rock albums on his own. The original quintet actually got back together for a one-off reunion album in 1973; though it made the Top 20, it was the first, and one of the most flagrant, examples of the futility of a great band reuniting in an attempt to recapture the lightning one last time.

The original Byrds continued to pursue solo careers and outside projects throughout the '70s and '80s. McGuinn, Clark, and Hillman had some success at the end of the '70s with an adult contemporary variation on the Byrds' sound; in the '80s, Crosby battled drug problems while Hillman enjoyed mainstream country success with the Desert Rose Band. The Byrds' legend was tarnished by squabbles over which members of the original lineup had the rights to use the Byrds name; for quite a while, drummer Michael Clarke even toured with as "Byrds" that featured no other original members. The Byrds were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1991; Gene Clark died several months later, and Michael Clarke died in 1993, permanently scotching prospects of a reunion involving the original quintet. David Crosby died on January 18, 2023 at the age of 81”.

I shall leave things there. A truly incredible and who released so many classics, I have assembled many of them here for this mix. The Great American Songbook is about wonderful U.S. and their influential body of work. There are few who have created one as iconic and important…

AS The Byrds.

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um

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IT is not often that…

IN THIS PHOTO: Charles Mingus shot at Columbia 30th Street Studio, recording Mingus Ah Um in May 1959/PHOTO CREDIT: Don Hunstein

I include a Jazz album in this feature. For Beneath the Sleeve, I am including Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um. It was released in October 1959 by Columbia Records, and it was Mingus’s first recorded for Columbia. The title is a corruption of an imaginary Latin declension. Mingus Ah Um album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013. It was ranked 380 on the Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. That is a bit of brief overview, with a nod to Wikipedia. I am going to start out with Sounding Out! and their background about Mingus Ah Um. How the album is an ethics of care in Jazz:

“Released in 1959 in the same orbit as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (August 1959) and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come (October 1959), Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um (September 1959) showcased Mingus’s range both as a composer and bassist. Intimate both in its sound and session composition (only seven sessions players worked on the album), the album provides a purview into Mingus’s commitment to the idiomatic (“interconnected”) and collaborative nature of the black jazz tradition and the stakes of/for black art and artists. His investment in jazz’s black idiomatic structure stood at odds with the increasing importance of the singular jazz man to the marketing of jazz music.

Works like Mingus Ah Um prompt listeners to listen attentively to collaboration and collaborative efforts, both in the setting of a jazz ensemble/collective and in the historicity of black (jazz) men caring for one another. While the imposition of white gender prerogatives sometimes foreclosed intimate, homosocial (same-gender, social) relationships between black jazz men that revolved around what Christina Sharpe terms in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being as an “ethics of care,” Mingus Ah Um is not only an ode to black jazz ancestors and elders, but performative of Mingus’s deep care about the black jazz tradition and its futurity. (131)

In histories of jazz, Charles Mingus is often characterized as volatile and dismissive of young black jazz artists. His purported critique of neo-jazz movements of the late 1950s and early 1960s, like the free jazz (“The New Thing”)/avant-garde jazz movement, narratively put him at odds with emerging jazz artists like Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis. But as demonstrated by Mingus Ah Um, Mingus profoundly cared about black jazz men and the future of black jazz music. Given these histories, what would it mean for listeners to not dismiss

Mingus altogether, but hold in tension his anxieties, deemed dogmatic and peremptory, with his often careful and honorific sonic confabulation with black jazz men? How does re-listening to Mingus Ah Um make us empathetic to Mingus’s pursuit in preserving a waning black jazz tradition that was ever increasingly ridiculed and mocked (by way of anti-blackness) for its presumed anti-intellectualism and placation to whiteness? The undercurrent of Mingus’s care is not always expressed in histories or interviews, which begs the question: what is rooted in, yet exceeds the autobiographical, when we listen?

When listening to Mingus Ah Um the album’s ethics of care might be heard most explicitly on tracks like “Fables of Faubus,” a protest song in the most righteous sense, aimed at Orval Faubus, the former Arkansas governor who deployed the state’s national guard to barricade Central High School in Little Rock from the threat of integration (which is also to say the threat of miscegenation). A tune steeped in dissent and once with lyrics that made Columbia ask Mingus to re-record the tune: “Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!/Boo! Ku Klux Klan (With your Jim Crow plan).” (“Original Faubus Fables,” Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, 1960)

We have often confused Mingus’s care for the future of jazz music and black jazz artists for an ornery and grouchy disposition. He was quite cognizant of the fraught relationship black jazz artists had with the financialization of black performance, writing in his autobiography Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus that the music industry was a “system those that own us use. They make us famous and give us names—the King of this, the Count of that, the Duke of what! We die broke anyhow—and sometimes I think I dig death more than I dig facing this white world”.

Marking its sixty-fifth anniversary last year, Albumism heralded a Jazz masterpiece that came out on 14th September, 1959. Maybe a lot of people reading this would not have heard the album, though I feel Mingus Ah Um should be heard by everyone. It is a magnificent work that is future-looking but also throws back to an older time. I first heard Mingus Ah Um recently and wanted to shine a light on it here:

“Mingus’ work of genius sports a stunning abstract cover by legendary graphic design innovator S Neil Fujita—part of a concerted effort on Columbia’s part to keep level in the cool stakes with Blue Note. Francis Wolff’s iconic photography and Reid Miles’ typography had given Blue Note the lead, but the abstract design that graced Mingus Ah Um mirrored the freewheeling jazz spirit that lay within the grooves of the vinyl.

A glimpse at the tracklist demonstrates exactly the breadth of Mingus’ compositional focus. There’s the self-reflection of “Self-Portrait In Three Colors,” the skewering of those at the heart of injustice on “Fables Of Faubus” and the inspiration found within the jazz community of “Open Letter To Duke.” Such diversity of inspiration manifests in the diversity of dynamics in the tracks.

But those subject matters allied to his infamous brooding temperament might lead you to think the music contained within was sonorous or intrinsically serious and joyless. What Mingus Ah Um does brilliantly is take those darker recesses of the world and wraps them up in a joyously exuberant roll call of tunes that not only take their cues from jazz, but also add the slightest hints of gospel and the blues. It is, in effect, a glorious gumbo of Black music up to that point.

“Better Get Hit In Your Soul” is the most obvious case in point. At times it shuffles along, before breaking into a surging juggernaut swinging as it careers into view, but beneath the music are shouted exhortations from Mingus himself. Like the call and response of early blues or the moment the spirit moves in church, he yells his testimony from somewhere deep in the mix. Throughout the changes in tempo and instrument, one thing abides—a refreshingly healthy dose of fun. It feels the opposite of other, intensely earnest recordings of that year (and beyond).

The elegiac “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” hits precisely the right somber tones in tribute to the recently departed Lester Young and “Boogie Stop Shuffle” sounds like the (complex) theme tune for a detective show or film noir. An expected change of tone and feel comes with the introspection of “Self Portrait In Three Colors.” Starting with a mournful mellow mood, it meanders into a wistful, louche reflection of the artist.

Hard swinging platonic love letter to Duke Ellington “Open Letter To Duke” does exactly as you might expect—it blurs the lines between the orchestrated precision of Ellington’s compositions and the freer from of jazz that swept through the genre, while that same hard swinging tribute comes with “Bird Calls” as the sax goes through its gears in tribute to the trail blazed by Charlie Parker. But what follows next is one of Mingus’ most intensely political compositions: “Fables Of Faubus.”

It has to be said that when I first listened to the track, its vaguely comedic tones made me smile from ear to ear. To learn later that it had been written for Arkansas governor Orval E Faubus, who notoriously brought in the National Guard to ensure that nine black children couldn’t be integrated into a Little Rock school, left me agog. But listening to it again showed the music in a different light—its intent wasn’t comedy, it was ridicule. Ridicule for a man so deeply entrenched in vile racism that Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division of the US army to shut his plans down.

In 2003, Mingus Ah Um was chosen by the Library Of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry alongside other epochal, life-changing albums and it deserves its place entirely. The beauty of these recordings (and Mingus in general) is that they acknowledge the debt of previous musicians and art forms, while forging a new way to navigate the tensions between written composition and improvisation.

That he was a volatile figure should be expected given the circumstances he grew up and played in, but his music was salvation both for him as composer and for anyone who listened. Salvation that could only come from someone steeped in blues and gospel traditions—the sweetest of salvations”.

I am going to head back to 2002 and a review from Pop Matters. An extraordinary and seminal album that is hugely affecting and will instantly move you, I hope that this feature has helped go beneath the sleeve of the 1959-released masterpiece. You do nor need to be a Jazz fan or know about Charles Mingus to love this album:

“The whole thing was recorded by Teo Macero in two days, May 5 and 12, 1959. This was Mingus’s first record on Columbia, so (Mingus being Mingus) he went all sideways; instead of calling in a bunch of well-known all-stars, he pulled together a young hungry band from his Jazz Workshop project: Booker Ervin and John Handy on saxophones along with older collaborator Shafi Hadi, Dannie Richmond on drums, and the amazing Horace Parlan on piano, with Mingus vets Jimmy Knepper and Willie Dennis alternating on trombone. (Compare Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, released the same year, with its ultra-hip lineup.) The fire and commitment of the young band is amazing — everyone except Mingus was 33 or younger — and the sound is impeccable, especially in its remastered CD version.

“Better Git It in Your Soul” is the first track, and has become the most daunting classic in jazz. It starts, appropriately, with Mingus on bass playing a strong figure that somehow sets the pulse for the entire 6/8 piece, which bursts into flower at the 18-second mark and never looks back. It’s a church revival meeting that somehow seems entirely secular; Mingus is testifying out loud, “Oh, yeah!” but it seems more like the Temple of Music than any religion dedicated to a deity. All the saxophones have ace solos, but the insane pulse carries the piece, with Parlan and Richmond hammering away in some kind of trance. Parlan gets high marks for his solo breaks all through the record — this is especially amazing considering he only had the use of two fingers on his right hand. He’s the Pete Gray of jazz, and a motha. And when the piece deconstructs itself at the 3:45 mark, with handclaps backing Ervin punching out the funkiest sax piece of all time, it just may be the origin of the funky breakdown in music.

The slow pieces are devastating: “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” is glacial in celebrating Lester Young, but its momentum is undeniable, and “Self-Portrait in Three Colors” is what the band will be playing when we’re all ushered into that great jazz club in the sky. “Fables of Faubus” is a devastating burn on Orville Faubus, the racist cracker asshole governor of Arkansas; it lacks Mingus’ hilarious lyrics here (thanks, probably, to Columbia’s legal department), but the idea of a lurching stupid man standing in the way of progress and harmony is carried through perfectly in its stop-start groove. And the fast pieces are so amazingly fast that they are untouchable; “Boogie Stop Shuffle” is like speed metal, kinda, except without the metal part, and the be-bop pace of the Charlie Parker tribute “Bird Calls” would be intimidating for any other band.

But here is why this record is crucial: it is the template for all later album statements. Thelonious Monk had been the first jazz composer to really try to maintain a personal tone on his albums in the late 1950s, but a strong case can be made that Mingus Ah Um was the first record to really feel a musician’s personal stamp all the way through. I’m not saying this is a concept album, although his tributes to Parker and Young and Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton (and Faubus) do give it a certain unity. But think of any album released before this one, by anyone, in any genre: weren’t they all just collections of songs? Mingus Ah Um is a unified work, a novel as opposed to a volume of short stories, a manifesto that derives as much from its sequencing and total impact as it does from the individual performances and songs.

Well, okay, Kind of Blue and The Shape of Jazz to Come also came out in 1959. But isn’t it interesting that these three groundbreaking albums were all recorded at more or less the same time? For many reasons, this was the defining year in modern music history — this was the first time that musical artists were treated like artists instead of hit machines. So we’ve got the historical significance thing, the beauty and technical virtuosity thing, and the soulful thing covered. But what it really comes down to is this: This Record Is Absolutely Freakin’ Amazing In Every Single Way I Can Think Of, and it’s never ever bored me, not even once.

I guess it woulda been cooler to pick the Minutemen record, but I’ve made my choice. So there. You guys aren’t actually going to make me give up all my other records, are you?”.

Mingus Ah Um is a staggering work that ranks alongside the absolute best and most important Jazz records ever released. I think that it is also timeless. Some albums from the late-1950s date and can lose their power. However, Mingus Ah Um still sounds extraordinary and vital…

TO this day.

FEATURE: More Than Another Day: Inside Kate Bush’s Extraordinary 1979 Christmas Special

FEATURE:

 

 

More Than Another Day

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush performing Them Heavy People during her 1979 Christmas Special, Kate

Inside Kate Bush’s Extraordinary 1979 Christmas Special

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LET’S get some facts and background…

out of the way first. Kate Bush embarked on her first and only tour in 1979. The Tour of Life took her around the U.K. and Europe. In 1979, she was also working on songs for her 1980 album, Never for Ever. Broadcast on 28th December, 1979, the Christmas Special, Kate, was a way of Bush being able to perform on T.V. and give those who did not attend The Tour of Life a scaled-down and Christmas-flecked version. A selection of songs that appeared on that tour setlist together with some new and unique performances, Bush was able to include songs that would appear on Never for Ever. Egypt and Violin featured in the set for The Tour of Life, though The Wedding List did not. I almost think of this song as an unofficial single. The fact that what we see in Kate (the name of that Christmas Special) is like a music video. It is brilliant staged. Shot at Nunhead Cemetery, south London, it is a wonderful visual. The live performances for the Christmas broadcast were filmed in October 1979. Filmed at BBC’s Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, Anthony Van Laast choregraphed (he appeared in The Wedding List as the ill-fated groom). It is amazing that, at only twenty-one, Bush had achieved so much! Doing this Christmas T.V. show too, it was another big achievement. Even if it does divide people, I really love it! There are a couple of questions around the authenticity of the audience. I have seen people write that it was a live audience, but it sounds quite hollow. I am not sure if anyone was there at all! To me, it sounds like audience sounds from the BBC, as all the reactions sound similar; you never see any audience members. Obviously, they could not leave it silent, but I also don’t get the impression people were there watching. Also, there are unique aspects of Kate that people understate. How Ran Tan Waltz got its only performance. The same goes for the duet between Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, Another Day. A Roy Harper song, he would appear on her 1980 single, Breathing. She featured on his song, You (The Game Part II), from his 1980 album, The Unknown Soldier.

I love how there is a mix of songs from her first three albums. No Christmas carols or classics, instead, we get Bush’s only Christmas single, December Will Be Magic Again, performed. Its second-ever T.V. performance, it would be released as a single on 17th November, 1980. You can buy Kate – or the Kate Bush BBC Christmas Special – on vinyl. I have brought this feature in before, but I want to return to it. They look at all the songs included and write whether it is Christmas-appropriate or not. Whether it related to death, and whether the song was officially released or not. I will highlight their thoughts on Ran Tan Waltz, The Wedding List, and the final number, Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake:

“Is this a Christmas song? No.

Is this a song about death? Not that I know of!

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Is it unreleased? Yes. It would later be released as a B-side for “Babooshka” in June 1980.

A direct quote from my notes: “Kate Bush invented adult babies”

Speaking of bizarre tonal shifts, Kate is back — now in drag as a man — to sing “Ran Tan Waltz” with her wife and their adult baby. The choreography here is bonkers, wonderful, and really physically involved. She’s constantly getting picked up and thrown around, which causes her to lose both her beard and her hat, and by the end of the performance she’s no longer Kate Bush in drag as a man, but rather just a slightly disheveled Kate Bush in a vest.

Is this a Christmas song? No.

Is this a song about death? No, but it’s depressing as hell.

Is it unreleased? No, it’s a cover of a 1970 Roy Harper track. Gabriel and Bush had plans to record and release it at some point, but never did.

A direct quote from my notes: “I don’t know what to say about this”

Peter Gabriel comes back to perform a duet of Roy Harper’s “Another Day.” It’s not a Christmas song, but it is an extremely depressing song about reflecting on What Could Have Been with a former lover. Peter and Kate really sell it, performing both the past and present versions of the couple. It’s a beautiful performance, but it’s hard not to laugh when you remember that a) this is ostensibly a Christmas special and b) it’s proceeded by “The Wedding List”.

Is this a Christmas song? No.

Is this a song about death? No, but honestly we can never be too sure!

Is it unreleased? No, this one’s from Lionheart.

A direct quote from my notes: “Serving Cell Block Tango realness”

Kate and her dancers are now wearing matching, skintight, all-black outfits. They hang from some grates that make it look like they’re in cages and I half-expected Kate to break into a verse of “Cell Block Tango” at one point. During the second chorus, Kate pantomimes riding a motorcycle really convincingly only for the trash can to suddenly roll back on stage. She picks it up, SLAMS it on the ground repeatedly, and throws it off-stage.

Her dancers spin trash can lids hypnotically, and then it’s all over. The credits roll, and the instrumental outro of her megahit “Wuthering Heights” begins to play. Suddenly, you’re reminded that Kate Bush didn’t even bother to play her biggest hit during her BBC Christmas special”.

I am going to come to some thoughts from author Graeme Thomson in his book, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. Totally Rad Christmas shared their thoughts and appreciation for Kate Bush’s 1979 Christmas Special. There is not a lot written about it. It is a shame. Ahead of its forty-sixth anniversary on 28th December, I wanted to spend some time with it:

“The special is a mix of live performances and choreographed dance to prerecorded music. The live portion was recorded BBC Pebble Mills Studios in front of an audience. The music for the dance was done at EMI Studios in London. After a rotoscoped animated introduction, Kate launches into renditions off “Violin,” Gymnopédie No. 1 by Satie, and “Symphony in Blue.”

“Them Heavy People” follows with Kate garbed in sequins. Immediately a trio sings Peter Gabriel’s in, and he serenades the audience with “Here Comes the Flood.” Kate performs “Ran Tan Waltz” then premieres “December Will Be Magic Again” on solo piano. Next comes “The Wedding List” about a vengeful bride and the duet “Another Day” with Peter Gabriel about a failed marriage. Finally, Kate enthralls us with “Egypt,” “The Man with a Child in His Eyes,” and “Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heart Brake.” Does she hop in a garbage can and come out dressed like Sandy from the end of “Grease?” Why, yes. Yes she does.

Stevie Nicks-like flowing black outfit? Yep. Fake beard and “Fiddler on the Roof” getup? Uh huh.  Kate doing interpretative dance superimposed over her playing piano? Definitely! So grab your violin and head to Egypt to this episode about Kate Bush!”.

Graeme Thomson heralds the performance of The Wedding List. The first outing of this highlight from Never for Ever, he does say that the rest of Kate ends up “looking cheap and rather silly”. I would disagree. It is Kate Bush. It is not silly! It is very much her aesthetic and tradition. It is not like she was doing too much out of her ordinary. I like the fact that there is not a lot of Christmas music in the show. Instead, we get to see these televised versions of songs that many would never be able to see otherwise. Unless they were at The Tour of Life. Thomson writes off Egypt as being rife for parody. Them Heavy People as a watered-down version of what she mounted for the tour. Although Egypt is not my favourite from Kate, I do love Them Heavy People. It is also great that Bush got to perform Symphony in Blue. Never a single in the U.K. (it was in Japan and Canada), it is the opening track of 1978’s Lionheart. One of the standouts. Also, that Another Day duet with Peter Gabriel. The fact the two solidified their friendship.

Bush would appear on Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers and No Self Control. They were from his extraordinary third self-titled album, a.k.a. Melt. The two shared the stage for the Bill Duffield tribute concert. This is when Bush decided to use one of her London dates on The Tour of Life to pay tribute to Duffield. He was a lighting director who tragically died after the warm-up gig for The Tour of Life following a freak accident. This tragic incident brought Bush and Gabriel together. She would appear later on Don’t Give Up (from Gabriel’s 1986 album, So). The two became firm friends, so is really nice to see Gabriel perform on Kate. I really love the under-discussed Christmas Special. I hope that it is shown on the BBC again, as it never really gets credit or that much love! I wanted to write some words about Kate, as it is a Christmas treat. One I hope fans enjoy…

THIS year.

FEATURE: Chains of Love: How Charli xcx Is Turning to Film More Than Music After BRAT

FEATURE:

 

 

Chains of Love

PHOTO CREDIT: Monica Schipper/Getty Images

How Charli xcx Is Turning to Film More Than Music After BRAT

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THERE are a couple of new…

PHOTO CREDIT: Charli xcx

Charli xcx tracks out that see her move in a different direction. I am going to come to an NME article, that reacts to a Charli xcx Substack post. After the popularity of 2024’s BRAT and everything that followed, there were a lot of eyes on her. BRAT was this massive success and was possibly the greatest albums of last year. Charli xcx was touring a lot and there were a lot of things happening. Promotion and the remix album for BRAT. On 13th February, the day before Valentine’s Day – I am not sure if that is deliberately chosen, as there is this gothic romance and tragedy at the heart of the novel -, Wuthering Heights is released. Coinciding with the release of Emerald Fennell’s modern adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel (a loose adaptation to be honest), these are all original songs. It will be really fascinating. I was sort of hoping there would be a cover of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, though that may seem a bit meta! However, like Kate Bush – an artist I feel Charli xcx is inspired by -, the London artist is being influenced by film more than music at the moment. Given how she is contributing to a film soundtrack, it is to be expected that she would be in that mindset. However, I think it is more the visual aspects and cinematic nature of film that is enforcing her moves. She released the single, House, which features John Cale. The new track, Chains of Love, is out today (14th November). The two songs are very different, and they are both worlds away from BRAT and its (neon green) world. Shades of brown, black, pink and red, there are deeper hues, but also these brighter elements. I want to start with NME and their reaction to a fascinating Substack post from Charli xcx:

“Charli XCX has said she’s “currently feeling more inspired by film than by music” after being left “stuck, empty and barren” after her breakthrough album ‘Brat‘.

The singer has started a new Substack, where she wrote about the process of making Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights soundtrack after the huge success of ‘Brat’. She’s recently taken to the big screen with acclaimed roles in the movies Erupcja, 100 Nights of Hero, and Sacrifice while next year will see the release of her starring in Mother Nature, The Gallerist and The Moment.

She professed that it has been a “fucking blessing and relief” to be experiencing “overwhelming creativity” after making ‘Brat’, where she “had this feeling that I wouldn’t be able to make music anymore.

“When I vocalized this, [husband and The 1975 drummer] George [Daniel] said ‘Yeah, but you always feel this way. We all do’. And he’s right, we do, but it felt so potent this time, sort of like being hit by a truck and left on the side of the road to bleed out,” she wrote.

She went on to speak about her experience of touring ‘Brat’, writing that by the end of ‘Brat’, “I sort of felt like I was squeezing blood from a stone, trying to get every last drop of liquid life out of an idea I had already been sat with for years prior”.

There are some interesting takeaways from the Substack post. I shall mention Kate Bush again briefly, in the sense there is a Wuthering Heights connection. Also, Bush was influenced by film and you can very much see her albums as filmic and cinematic. Someone who was a very visual artist. For Charli xcx, it is revealing what she says about feeling spent. Birthing an album that was very personal and took a lot out of her. When it was out in the world and gave people such joy, maybe that created this sense of exhaustion, pressure and loss. Having dedicated so much time and energy to BRAT, following that or try to write again so soon was like getting blood out of a stone. Music of that same vibe, anyway. Anyone who was expecting a BRAT 2 and another album with that sense of energy, vibe and sound would have been asking an awful lot of Charli xcx. I do hope that she gets some big and great film roles. At the moment, there have been bits and bobs and there is stuff in the pipeline. However, you feel like Charli xcx could (and should) appear in a range of brilliant films. From action through to comedy, she has this range and you feel she can inhabit so many great roles. Maybe a music biopic, where she is cast as another iconic artist. However, this section of her Substack stood out:

“Film is where my creative brain seems to be gravitating. I’m enjoying acting, I’m enjoying writing, I’m enjoying watching and I’m above all enjoying discovering a new craft. Those things feel really enriching and instinctual to me at the moment but also music is a limb I will probably never fully be able to cut from my body despite trying quite hard to do so at points. When Emerald approached me with an open mind and a total willingness for me to explore I thought… ok I can do something cool here. I can write songs from a different perspective and I can think about these songs as purely serving the film they’ve been written for. For me that’s a totally different approach and finding a new approach always feels like a lifeline to a new way of creating. This collection of songs is an album, and sure, my name’s on the credits, but is it a Charli xcx album? I don’t even know. Nor do I really care to find out. All I know is that it’s a celebration of my freedom as an artist right now and that I feel passionate about what I’ve created and how it’s been created. I also know that I’m enjoying talking about the work here in long form. When I listen to this music, in ways it takes me back to my first album, True Romance. There’s something nostalgic about it, something cyclical, like I’m re-embracing the gothic and my earlier touch points. I’m writing through the lens of the screenplay I read and only occasionally checking in with my own internal narratives. Most likely it’s not something I will tour. I’d just like the songs to live as songs, within and adjacent to the film”.

It will be interesting see what Charli xcx creates with Wuthering Heights. The two songs we have heard so far might indicate what we will get from the film. If House is more Horror and this darker track with a great spoken part from John Cale, Chains of Love reminds me of Rahim Redcar (Christine and The Queens) and their work. Both different to what she has produced before, you can tell these songs are made for the screens. If BRAT was more for the clubs, this is Charli xcx thinking in a more expansive and bigger (and less sweaty and intense) way. People were wowed by House. It was a left-turn. A song that has this terror and darkness. Chains of Love provides something more open and less  suffocated. I do wonder, if Charli xcx releases a new studio album after Wuthering Heights, it will follow the same lines. I think cinema will take a front row seat in her imagination. That Substack post where Charli xcx discusses the aftermath of BRAT and what she says here: “But by the end of the process I sort of felt like I was squeezing blood from a stone, trying to get every last drop of liquid life out of an idea I had already been sat with for years prior. I still love her, don’t get me wrong but I was itching to move on and was simultaneously frustrated that I was so depleted that I couldn’t. I was stuck, I was empty, I was barren, I was running on the spot in a different kind of way”. Cinema and its possibilities not at the forefront. I do feel that Pop artists have connected with cinema, though I feel others will follow a similar path to Charli xcx. Wuthering Heights will be a fascinating album, and we hope that next year finds Charli xcx in some amazing films. I think she will appear in Greta Gerwig’s Narnia film but, other than that, what other roles are in store? We shall see. However, these two fresh and fascinating tracks from Charli xcx sees her embrace a new medium and direction. A really phenomenal one. Not only does Charli xcx want to appear in cinema more. I feel that we will see her future music take on a more filmic lens. These wonderful and distinct track from a…

MODERN music icon.

FEATURE: Blown Away: How Kate Bush Adapted and Moved Forward Following the Release of Never for Ever

FEATURE:

 

 

Blown Away

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush circa 1980/PHOTO CREDIT: Angelo Deligio/Mondadori via Getty Images

How Kate Bush Adapted and Moved Forward Following the Release of Never for Ever

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I am about to write a feature…

about Charli xcx (which would have already been published by the time you are reading this feature), as she has recently said how she was spent after recording BRAT. Nothing left in the tank. Like trying to get blood form a stone. Maybe she had put all of her creativity into that album and it was hard to do anything else. Charli xcx has said how she is more influenced by film at the moment than anything else – including other music. It reminds me of Kate Bush and her ongoing link to film. How that inspire her. In terms of the creativity drain or at least a feeling of being spent, that happened especially notably after two of her albums. She was diagnosed with exhaustion after completing The Dreaming. That came out in 1982. The album before that, 1980’s Never for Ever, found her similarly detached or affected. In different ways. These two albums were her first as producer. Never for Ever was a co-produce with Jon Kelly. Bush, keen to establish her own sound and exert more control over her music, perhaps spent more time she would have imagined in the studio. I am interested in a section of Graeme Thomson's biography, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush. This is a book I have referred to a lot through the years. He writes about the period after Never for Ever’s release. 1980 was a period where Kate Bush was living a pretty normal life. She was smoking a packet of cigarettes a day – something she gave up later in life – and was eating fruit and yoghurt but, as Thomson notes, mostly chocolate, tea, toast and chips. This quick-hit diet was common when she was recording The Dreaming too. She was watching films and T.V. in her Lewisham flat with her boyfriend, Del Palmer.

I think a level of fame and attention did change things. It was clear that the effort needed to finish Never for Ever took something out of her. How she found it hard to instantly move on. Sitting down to the piano and nothing coming out. In addition, Bush was being offered acting roles, including a part as the Wicked Witch in Wurzel Gummidge. There was this contrast of Bush having a personal driver (even though she knew how to drive) but bringing her laundry around to her parents’ house and stopping in for a tea and natter! I think that the growing attention and popularity was never comfortable. Bush never wanted fame. In 1981, when she was at Abbey Road Studios to mark its fiftieth anniversary, people were trying to get to her. Bush was with David Paton (who played with her on her albums) and asked if they could escape to Studio Three (the smallest studio). Bush was soon discovered and she was then the centre of attention! That clash between unable to find too much private time and live a normal life and moving on from Never for Ever. The album, whilst not particular political in nature (bar a couple of songs), was still challenging and multi-layered. Pushing herself more as a songwriter and producer, all the hard work paid off. The album went to number one and Bush broke a record in the meantime. The first female artist to reach the top of the U.K. album chart at number one. Whilst it all sounds normal on the surface, there was this sense that she came off of 1979’s The Tour of Life and started work too quickly. That tour was a chance for Bush to play her first two albums (1978’s The Kick Inside and its same-year follow-up, Lionheart) and have a big say in terms of visuals, design, sound and nearly every aspect. The idea of recording a third album and producing herself. Maybe she should have taken some more time.

However, she did record this incredible album. In September 1980, when Never for Ever came out, I am not sure whether it was EMI or Kate Bush who felt the need to put a new album out. Keep that momentum going. She had this period of writer’s block that was solved when she saw Stevie Wonder play at Wembley Arena. Bush was so inspired that she wrote Sat in Your Lap. That was released as a single in 1981 and was the first taste of The Dreaming (1982). Something that Bush revealed that will apply to artists today, there was this deflation. As Graeme Thomson writes: “She descried the period immediately after finishing Never for Ever as “sort of a terrible introverted depression. The anti-climax after all the work really set in in a bad way, and that can be very damaging as an artist”. Bush went on to say she sat at the piano to play but nothing came out. She bought a property on Court Road in Eltham, south London, across the road from Royal Blackheath Golf Club. It was close to her childhood home at East Wickham Farm but quite low-key. Paddy Bush (her brother) was next door and Jay (John), her other older brother, was at his sister’s place a lot. Like when they lived in the same property on different floors at 44 Wickham Road before, this was siblings all together. That was important to give Bush some sort of comfort and support. However, it is clear that what Bush felt after releasing this amazing album can be applied to so many artists of today. Including Charli xcx.

For Bush, there was this period of change and progress. In her own place, she could write and perform music in this flat. Rather than being at a studio for hours or at her family home, there was a cross of independence, space and having her family nearby. It is clear that there was a sense that there was more to life than music. She did have to take a step back at time and find ways to separate herself from music. However, that Stevie Wonder gig was a case of a social event and night out reigniting some inspiration! It is worrying that there was this depression that Bush experience after Never for Ever. How she maybe felt like music would never come again. Flip forward to the period right after The Dreaming and how that hit her. Rest, family and space helped with Never for Ever. Rest and time off after The Dreaming. It is clear that the routine and reality of producing her first two albums of the 1980s was a learning curve. She threw everything into and maybe felt she had to. To provide to critics, EMI or whoever that she was a serious artist. Or that she could and should produce her own work! The studio sessions were probably more chilled and sociable for Never for Ever, but the hours put in for each album were brutal. The periods right after the albums’ releases was strange and tough. That introverted depression and drying-up after Never for Ever is really affecting and sobering. It did take Bush a while until she could write new material. However, I think moving into a new space and having her brothers near did help. Spending time with Del Palmer and enjoying a bit more of a normal life. Alongside that, she had some of the trappings of a major artist. Demands from film and T.V. Bush allowing some luxury too. Never for Ever turned forty-five in September. It was a chance to re-explore her third studio album. Even if she cleared had wrung every morsel of inspiration and creativity, she did get back to writing in the end. It is clear, though, that 1980’s Never for Ever is…

A true masterpiece.

FEATURE: A Time for Change: Why 2026 Needs to Be a Year Where Women in Music Can Feel Safe and Respected

FEATURE:

 

 

A Time for Change

IN THIS PHOTO: Halsey recently experienced two incidents of abuse at her gigs as part of her Back to Badlands Tour, including being groped by a concertgoer/PHOTO CREDIT: Maya Dehlin Spach/WireImage/Getty Images

Why 2026 Needs to Be a Year Where Women in Music Can Feel Safe and Respected

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IT is a sad and depressingly common…

PHOTO CREDIT: Rahul Pandit/Pexels

occurrence where we have to discuss sexual assault and abuse in the music industry. Something that affects women more than anyone else, it is often perpetrated by men too. An industry where women are exposed to assault and abuse from within the industry (those working in music) and in live spaces, it is such a toxic environment. Things have not really improved in any way. In terms of discrimination and sexism, this is still hugely common when it comes to festival line-ups, exposure, opportunities and pay. Women, who are dominating music, not given the credit and respect they deserve! Misogyny is still a massive issue that has not been properly addressed for sure. There are so many cases of women reporting sexual assault. When it comes to gigs, this should be a safe space where they should be able to express themselves and play their music without threat of assault or violence. Although artists of any gender can face attack and abuse, it is women more often again who are vulnerable. Whether it is having projectiles thrown at them or fans crossing the line, it can extend to sexual assault. Recently, during a performance, U.S. artist Halsey was sexually assaulted by a fan. Someone groped her during the gig. It is not the only recent incident where someone at her gigs has abused her. Verbally in another case. I want to come to an NME article regarding recent experiences Halsey has faced - that should be a wake-up call for the music industry:

“Fans have been taking to social media to share their outrage after footage emerged of Halsey being groped by a concertgoer.

The incident took place during the singer’s ongoing ‘Back To Badlands’ tour dates, when they performed at The Anthem in Washington D.C. on November 4.

Since the show was held, footage has emerged from someone in the crowd, and it shows the ‘Colours’ singer being groped by an audience member before security intervened. It came as Halsey was delivering a rendition of ‘Is There Somewhere’, and leaning into the crowd during the performance.

In the video, which has been shared by The New York Post, one of the people in the audience is seen putting their hand on the singer’s thigh, before moving it underneath her leather skirt.

Security were quick to spot what was happening and pushed the person’s hand away, and Halsey continued to sing without stopping the performance to bring light to the issue.

Unsurprisingly, fans have been quick to share their outrage at the footage, and call for there to be more respect shown towards Halsey and other performers as they take to the stage.

“Personal boundaries are non-negotiable — a concert is for music, not unwanted touching. Some people seriously need a lesson in respect,” wrote one person after seeing the footage on X/Twitter, while another shared: “That is just so wrong in so many ways.”

I’ve been polite but won’t be caught dead letting a man tell me what I should play in my set.

— halsey 🌸 (@halsey) November 4, 2025

“That’s beyond unacceptable. Performers deserve to feel safe on their own stage – no excuses for this behaviour,” added a third, while someone else commented: “Idiot deserves to be charged. Absolutely unacceptable behaviour.”

“Have we not learned respect , there’s no excuse for this,” another person said on X, and someone else agreed: “That’s harassment, the efff is going on with people? I feel disgusted and I’m so sorry she went through it.”

Halsey has not yet publicly spoken about the incident. NME has reached out to her team for comment.

Just one day before that gig in Washington D.C., Halsey played the second of her two planned shows at Boston’s MGM Music Hall – and revealed that just hours before she was held overnight in the ER due to an acute medical emergency.

Also on that second night in Boston, they faced another issue with the audience, and hit back after being heckled by someone in the crowd who said “shut up and play”.

“I’m gonna play whatever the fuck I wanna play,” Halsey said in response. “In case you didn’t hear me correctly, I almost fucking died to be on this stage. I’m going to play whatever the fuck I wanna play.”

Halsey released her fifth studio effort ‘The Great Impersonator’ last October, and it was given a glowing five-star review from NME and later named one of our best albums of 2024.

“‘The Great Impersonator’ comes from a place she describes as ‘the space between life and death,” the review read. “On the surface, it’s a tribute to the artists who made her. But on the other hand, it’s a brutal reckoning with chronic illnesses and postpartum depression, written when she wasn’t certain if she’d make it to the other side.”

For help, advice or more information regarding sexual harassment, assault and rape in the UK, visit the Rape Crisis charity website. In the US, visit RAINN”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Wolfgang/Pexels

It is bad enough if an audience members heckles and abuses an artist. If you are at a gig to see someone perform, then you should not be heckling, shouting or do anything that makes them uncomfortable or threatened! Even more so, assaulting an artist is reprehensible and horrendous. I hope that the gig-goer is prosecuted and banned from any Halsey gig! Even though this applies to a very small number of concert-goers, it does not hide the fact that we are still having these conversations. Where women especially are exposed to violence and sexual assault. It is nearly impossible for venues to police so that this never happens. However, the more these incidents occur, the more it will affect every woman in music. They desperately want to play for their fans, and the thrill of experiencing that connection is something that cannot be explained or overstated. However, if they do feel like there is going to be a threat or danger, then what impact will that have?! Going into the crowd could mean they are groped (or worse). Even standing on the stage, there is that possibility of verbal or physical abuse. Halsey showed incredible strength and discipline not to lash out against the fan who groped her. She will continue to play live, though you feel like it will not be long until another woman in music is subjected sexual assault. The industry needs to react to this! Obviously, there is no way for every venue to safeguard artists completely.

However, there is a danger where women will perform less or hold back when it comes to engaging with the audience and stepping from the stage. In recent years, women in music performing live have had to encounter so much. From abuse and assault through to those doubting whether they are playing their own instruments or deserve to be on such a big stage, next year needs to be different. Performers do need to feel safe. Fans need to respect artists. Last year, SPRINTS’ lead, Karla Chubb, revealed how she was groped at a gig. She spoke out against sexual assault. This is happening every year, and it is gut-wrenching to see! Changes and action needs to be taken. We cannot be talking about this constantly without there being any signs of improvement or women feeling safer. Small steps are being made. In the same report where Karla Chubb talked about being assaulted, there was call for the government here to do more to recognise the widespread nature of sexual assault and misogyny:

“In January, the Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) - a group of MPs from different parties who advise the government on a specific issue - released a report on the topic.

The findings, based on an inquiry which started in 2022, warned that the industry was a "boys' club" with a "culture of silence" surrounding abuse.

Giving evidence at a public hearing, former Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac, said there was a "tidal wave" of revelations about sexual assault in the music industry waiting to be told.

The WEC is due to meet again later to discuss the government's response and says it "failed to accept" a set of "wide-ranging recommendations" designed to better protect women in the industry.

Committee chairwoman, Conservative MP Caroline Nokes, tells Newsbeat she isn't "remotely surprised" by Karla's story.

"My message to the government is you need to get serious about the safety of women," she says”.

We all hope that Halsey is okay and that she never has to experience anything like what she did again! Going forward, this needs to be a loud and clear message to fans and the industry. This article from July regarding a study conducted to gauge the extent of sexual abuse in the Scottish Folk scene, also brought to mind a need for a #MeToo movement. How music has really not had one and how, especially in light of Halsey’s assault, there needs to be new conversations. When it comes to expressing outrage over another woman assaulted or abused in music, we cannot be having this same conversation…

THIS time next year.

FEATURE: Do We Recognise the Work and Brilliance of Female Composers? The Ongoing Sexism and Discrimination That Needs to End

FEATURE:

 

 

Do We Recognise the Work and Brilliance of Female Composers?

IN THIS PHOTO: Violinist Esther Abrami released her album, Women, in April. Women is a tribute to female composers, featuring fourteen women from the 19th century to the present day, including newly composed works and rediscovered pieces. The idea behind the album is to bring attention to historically overlooked artists, often in new arrangements, and tell their stories through music

The Ongoing Sexism and Discrimination That Needs to End

__________

I have been thinking about this…

IN THIS PHOTO: Hannah Peel

for a while now. I have written about female composers. By this, I do not mean women who write the music and are in Pop, for instance. I mean more Classical. What we would see as compositions rather than tracks. Maybe not exclusive to Classical, one of my favourite composers of modern times is the brilliant Hannah Peel. At the end of last month, Peel was part of a very special event marking eighty years of Jodrell Bank.

“Jodrell Bank hosts an intimate evening of conversation, music and astronomy this October.

Taking place on Thu 30 Oct, award-winning composer, producer and broadcaster Hannah Peel will be joined by Professor Tim O’Brien, Associate Director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, in a discussion chaired by Professor Terasa Anderson, MBE.

The unique event will feature the world premiere of Hannah’s brand-new composition for the BBC Philharmonic, a fascinating exploration of sounds foraged from around Jodrell Bank, created for BBC Radio 4’s upcoming celebration of the iconic Observatory’s 80th anniversary.

Throughout the evening, Hannah, who has been nominated for an Emmy, Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello, and Tim, co-founder of Bluedot Festival, will delve into the sonification of scientific data, Hannah’s creative process and relationship with Jodrell Bank, and the powerful intersection of space and storytelling.

The event also marks the rerelease of Hannah’s critically acclaimed album, Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopea, which is described as a 7-minute odyssey that charts one person’s journey into outer space”.

Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia was originally released in 2017 but has been reissued. You can find out more here. Hannah Peel is an incredible composer and talent who I have been following for years now. I do think that we do not really explore brilliant women. Especially when it comes to composers. The same could be said of artists too. However, this Substack article is quite eye-opening. A conversation with Katherine Needleman, the Principal Oboe at The Baltimore Symphony, these statistics are alarming:

“Well, I’m going to start interviewing people. Probably once a month. (If you have any interview requests- let me know).

As you’ll hear, Katherine has faced more than her fair share of sexism in the classical music world personally, but let’s start off with some collective stats:

• Women represent 47% of orchestra musicians overall, and yet 83.2% of principal chairs are held by men, less than 17% by women.

• Over half of women musicians report facing gender discrimination in the industry.

• 32% of women musicians report being sexually harassed while working as a musician.

• Across 111 orchestras, only 7.7% of schedule works were composed by women.

• Only about 1 in 9 music directors are women, but amongst more prestigious orchestras, the ratio falls to 1 in 18”.

There is a particular article that struck me that I found recently I will come to. This article has the header: “As a new report shines a spotlight on gender equality at the BBC Proms, ISM Chief Executive Deborah Annetts asks why women composers are still given so little time in concert programmes”:

“The Independent Society of Musicians (ISM) is pleased to support the Donne Foundation’s important new report into equality and diversity at the BBC Proms through the lens of the programming of the 2024 Proms season. So, against this background how is the BBC is doing?

Donne’s report shows that there has been no meaningful change since the ISM analysed the Proms’ 2023 season. We found that in 2023 15% of works performed were written by women, while just 7% of the total performance time of works were by women. Donne’s report shows that in 2024 the total performance time of works written by women rose slightly to 8.6%, but that only 13.6% of works performed were by women. Going back further, when composer Joanna Ward analysed Proms programmes from 2013-2018 the average duration of a woman’s piece was 12 minutes, compared to 25 minutes for those by men.

Why is it that women composers are not taking up more space at the Proms? Taking a step back, it’s clear this problem is not limited to classical music. In 2024 63% of acts booked at UK music festivals were either male or all-male groups and there are four men signed to UK record labels for every one woman. Men also hold much of the decision making power, with the majority of senior roles in music filled by men. This wide-ranging gender inequality is summarised in the latest report from the Women and Equalities Committee, Misogyny in music: on repeat, published on 4 June 2025, which concludes: ‘Misogyny remains deeply rooted in the music industry.’

It’s unsurprising, then, to find similar culture issues at play in the classical canon. As a predominantly classical music festival, the Proms draws on a canon of works written for centuries almost exclusively by white men. While individual works have gained and lost canonic status over time, the idea of ‘the canon’ is still a significant influence on programming.

Academics such as Marcia Citron have questioned why women have been so marginal to the formation of the canon. But what was made by humans can be changed by humans. Indeed, the BBC has committed to gender equality in its Proms commissioning and has exceeded its 2022 target of commissioning half of all new works from women. Yet gender balance is not just about the number of women who are represented at the Proms. As Donne’s report reveals, there is still a striking inequality of stage time. In 2024, although 47% of the Proms featured a work by a woman, it was usually a single short piece”.

PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

There is widespread discrimination and sexism, especially in Classical music. Whereas female composers who are more experimental or bring in Electronica might be able to get more opportunity and focus because of its proximity to more gender-balanced and less sexist genres, there is no arguing the fact that there are so many brilliant female composers and players that are not being given opportunities and exposure. This article from last year documented research that showed how women are denied festival spots and opportunities in recording because of sexism and misogyny in Classical:

“A discordant chord over sexism in the classical music world has sounded again. The head of one of the most prestigious competitions is calling for the industry to confront an apparent bias that is holding back female pianists from pursuing concert careers, however brilliant their talent.

Fiona Sinclair, chief executive of the Leeds International Piano Com­petition, told the Observer that female pianists are failing to reach the top of their profession despite an equal number of men and women now training at conservatoires.

She said: “Fewer than 23% of career pianists are women, yet in the conservatoires it’s roughly 50:50. As they leave college, the men soar while the women are not getting opportunities. The more we get into actual statistics, it’s clear that something’s broken. The problem persists at the top piano level – festivals, recordings, venues – with men generally dominating everything.”

I’ve heard it said that women are not as good at music as men, they don’t practise, they can’t play big heavyweight concertos

Vick Bain, former Independent Society of Musicians president

The 2024 Leeds competition has introduced new measures, including “blind” pre-selection rounds to disguise genders and “unconscious bias training” for the jurors, who will not have a musician’s name, nationality, age or conservatoire until an advanced round.

Sinclair said they needed to take action as “only 18% of the most recent top 40 international piano competitions have been won by women”.

Those are just a couple of examples from recent times where sexism and discrimination is laid out. If modern composers like Jessie Montgomery, Jennifer Higdon, Unsuk Chin, and Julia Wolfe are being recognised or are winning awards, there is not enough being done, firstly to ensure that women feel safe and respected. It is not only discrimination and decades (or centuries) of sexism. There is also sexual abuse running rife. Canadian violinist Lara St. John is a survivor of sexual abuse and is calling for change. Perhaps part of a different but no less urgent and important conversation, it is heartbreaking that it is so much harder for women to shine and be recognised as composers. If they step into Classical, then there are these barriers and huge problems. I am casting my mind to an article published in April by NRP. It concerns violinist Esther Abrami, who realised the hundreds of pieces she has played and been brought up on were by men. She uncovered hidden treasures from amazing, undiscovered and ignored women. Is this a position we are going to be in a decade or two from now?! The combination of great women not being fully recognised and having their work hailed and sexism and discrimination making gender bias and imbalance a toxic hurdle, you wonder if things can ever change:

“The first time Esther Abrami saw a violin, she was just 3 years old. Little did she know at the time, it would be the start of a lifelong love affair.

The instrument belonged to Abrami's late grandmother, Françoise.

"She gave up the violin when she got married," said Abrami, now a rising violinist who's toured across Europe and China. "I kind of took where she left and kept going."

Abrami translates that tale of inspiration in "Transmission," her first recorded composition, as part of a new album out last Friday. The soaring melody has a cinematic feel, breaking into arpeggiated chords accompanied by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

"It's a composition that I feel very emotional playing, and recording it also felt very special," Abrami told NPR's Michel Martin.

The album Women features the world-premiere studio recording of Irish composer Ina Boyle's Violin Concerto (1935), which evokes bucolic scenes with the feel of a tone poem.

Boyle has largely been forgotten, something she shares with several of the 14 composers and songwriters on the album, including Brazil's Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847-1935) and Venezuela's Teresa Carreño (1853-1917).

And so it is rather apropos that the orchestral works on the album are conducted by Irene Delgado-Jiménez, who recently completed a two-year fellowship in the conducting incubator led by Marin Alsop, the first woman to lead a major American orchestra.

Among the living composers on the album are Oscar winners Rachel Portman and Anne Dudley — who are both British — Miley Cyrus via an arrangement of "Flowers" and Yoko Shimomura with her "Valse di Fantastica," a theme from the video game Final Fantasy XV.

After completing her studies when she was 25, Abrami realized "in all those years, I'd learned hundreds of pieces, but not a single one of them had been written by a woman," said Abrami, now 28. "And then I started kind of doing my own journey and my own research, and it was like opening the door of a hidden treasure."

Boyle's teacher Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the most celebrated British composers of the early 20th century, reportedly told her: "I think it is most courageous of you to go on with so little recognition. The only thing to say is that it sometimes does come finally."

And that, perhaps, is the whole point of Abrami's latest recording endeavor.

"Hopefully, in 10 years, it won't be needed to have an album titled Women," she said. "But for now, we still have to do so much, to push so much to be able to even come to something that is close to being equal in terms of, for example, performing works by women. And we are so, so, so far off still."

Last year, the Donne Foundation, which keeps track of women in classical music, found the number of works by female composers being performed by global orchestras had slightly dropped in the previous season, to just 7.5% of the repertoire.

Abrami said part of why she's active on social media is to try to change those numbers and inspire young aspiring musicians. "I see the impact that has on little girls... Little girls who came to my concerts and said that my social media and my videos on YouTube have inspired them to start on the violin, now they are coming to me saying, 'I played a piece composed by a woman, I asked my teacher to to play a piece composed by woman”.

I started off by discussing Hannah Peel and my admiration for her work. Go and check her music out on Bandcamp. In terms of addressing ongoing discrimination, sexism and abuse, it is women within the industry exposing the truthy and calling for change, rather than those in power and their male peers. Also, when it comes to female composers past and present who should be heard and are not being given their dues, how does this shift?! Maybe a book written about it and documentaries. Incredible women like Rebecca Clarke are finally getting their dues. In terms of generations and age, I imagine there are a wave of brilliant women in their twenties, thirties and forties, who are composing incredible music. Whether for stage or screen or as part ofg an orchestra. They might be artists composing conceptual pieces and making their own albums. There is rarely any talk about them or that much outrage regarding the reasons why. A combination of Classical and other areas of the industry not willing to progress, and this wider practise of sexism. As recent reports outline, women are facing pay and gender discrimination. Women in CTRL, a movement working towards an industry where ‘talent transcends gender’, supports The Women Musicians Insight Report. Those words by Esther Abrami strike a chord. How she was immersed in work by male composers and had to go on this quest to unearth these hidden gems by women. Today, I do wonder how much incredible work we are discarding or not bringing to light because they are by women. Whether carrier barriers and gender discrimination will ever be erased. Their voices and phenomenal talent should be allowed to be heard and flourish as it is…

SO vital and important.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Rose Gray - Louder, Please

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best Albums of 2025

Rose Gray – Louder, Please

__________

IN this series…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sammy King for Cosmopolitan UK

I am spotlighting my favourite albums of the year and those seen as the best by critics. So far, I have focused on albums from pretty major artists. Albums that got a lot of attention. Whilst Rose Gray’s debut, Louder, Please, won a lot of praise, I don’t think that it got as much focus as it should have. It deserved award nominations and more elevation. However, Rose Gray is a Muswell Hill-born artist who began releasing music in 2019, putting out numerous singles and a mixtape, Dancing, Drinking, Talking, Thinking (2021), before being signed to PIAS Recordings. A proud queen of North London (though she may feel she is more East London), Little, Louder was released in January. On 24th October, Gray released a Deluxe Edition called A Little Louder, Please. A new single, April, was released, in addition to fresh collaborations with Melanie C, Jade, Shygirl, and Casey MQ. One of the songs from Louder, Please, is called Hackney Wick. It is one of the best songs I have heard in year,s and is one of many terrific cuts from Louder, Please. I am going to end with two reviews for the album. I want to start out with a few promotional interviews for one of the best debuts of this year. Rose Gray is a tremendous artist with a loyal and very impassioned following. Gray recently completed some gigs in Mexico. She plays in Australia on 21st February at Bondi Beach, which is likely to be one of her biggest and most picturesque gigs ever! However, she plays the O2 in London on 7th December. I have been a fan for a little while, and this year has been a truly massive one for Gray. I think next year is going to be pretty big too, in terms of festival bookings and new music. It is amazing she has that Australian gig. The gig at the O2 is going to be packed, and might be her most important to date!

Let’s get to some interviews with the sensational and super-talented Rose Gray. I forgot to say that you can follow Gray on Instagram. I will end with a couple of more recent interviews. A chance to see what Rose Gray was talking about at the start of the year. Where she is now in terms of looking back and what the future holds. An artist who injects so much character and originality into her music, it is no wonder that she has amassed this loving following. PAPER spoke with Gray in January, the day before her debut album release. This is an artist who grew up on Pop and has it in her blood. Rather than replicate idols and queens who went before, she adds her own voice and stamp:

“These nightlife vignettes, which climax on “Hackney Wick,” are born from Gray’s own relationship to London’s underground rave culture, which deepened after a “bit of a false start with music very young.” She tells us: “I came out of the other side feeling like I’ve been dragged through crap. And I was not even in my 20s yet, so I worked loads of jobs and I was living for the weekends.” She laughs, and repeats herself for emphasis. “I started to live for the weekends, really."

It’s the sort of frank opinion of herself here that gives the album a singular tone, frenetic and opinionated and deeply inquisitive and diaristic about the club, itself pulled out of intangibility into something real, human even. Characterful. Her early “false start” in the music industry gave her a life she’d not have been afforded had it all clicked into place as a teen. As she sees it, that life was precious and necessary. “I think some artists are just born ready, and they have life experience. I don’t know where they get it from, but they have it. And I wasn’t really like that. I needed to grow up, I needed to have things to write about.”

For more on Louder, Please, or Gray’s opinions on everything from Robyn's perfect pop career to Amy Winehouse and Dido’s feud to ‘90s Prada campaigns and Charli xcx's impact on British electronic music, read our full interview below.

If you could pick one song off the album that you feel is either representative of you as an artist or of the project, what would it be?

I think “Party People." It’s a sad club anthem that is my ode to the party people I have met since I started clubbing. I have been fascinated with those characters that rule the night, and they do it with such grace and balance. I am a party person, but I have friends and people that I know that are just born to be in the club and socialize, and I’m quite fascinated by them as characters. That’s what the song is about, really, my love for party people.

You said it’s a sad song, too. Where does the element of sadness come into play with you?

Oh, deep! I sometimes find that people that love to party, we are maybe escaping something in our lives, that we maybe don’t feel seen or safe not in the club, or around our chosen family. I’ve partied a bit in New York, and I love the vibe, but I find that in London, I’m with my group, and we’re all dressed up, going partying. When you get into the club, you’re like, "Oh, I’m here now, thank goodness." I’m getting weird looks on the train from some guy who has never seen anything like my group of friends. And then you get to the club, and you’re like, "These are my people, I’m fine now."

In the industry, so much of making pop music is younger, younger, younger. You only have so many years to be a pop star. It’s an idea that’s changed a lot, but I still don’t hear many people say actually, it was good that I lived for the weekend for a while, and lived some things to write about.

I almost wish I’d not worried as much. I think I’ve always focused on music. I could have actually let it go even more, and just had a bit more fun. I have had to be very persistent, though, to get to a place where I can bring out an album. It’s been so many no's. In fact, it’s kind of a joke with my team, they’re like: “I don’t think many other artists would have swam through it all." But I’m glad it’s here now.

You’ve said you’ve been influenced by the likes of Kylie, Robyn, some of my favorites, even Ray of Light era Madonna. There’s a prevailing influence of people like Britney in pop right now, or Lady Gaga. I don’t hear many people talk about being inspired by Kylie, or Robyn. What drew you to their specific styles of pop music?

I have no idea why more people aren’t drawing from there. Blows my mind. But Robyn, I think she just writes perfect pop songs. There’s so much character in them as well. You know what? They’re not perfect pop songs. That’s why they’re so characterful. They’re not slick. Someone said to me they’re wonky pop. I think Chappell is a good example of what I would say comes under wonky pop. It’s not perfect, but it is just genius.

Last question: I think there is a moment right now where people are hungry for British pop and electronic music, JADE, Charli, etc. Why do you think that’s breaking through right now?

British pop has become very clubby, and very weird and fun. I think we’re quite good at dance music, I will say that. I’ve sort of felt it since COVID times, with like, drum and bass coming back, and even the wave of PinkPantheress, which feels ages ago now. But I do remember feeling that in the UK, it was working overseas, making dance music. I don’t know, there’s something in the air, something going on. I think we’ve got to thank Charli for opening it up. Even just with me, I’d play songs, maybe two years ago, and they’re like, oh, we don’t know if it’s pop or it’s electronic. And now it’s like, well look how Brat did. Definitely feels very open now, that maybe the industry behind the scenes is getting on top of it, understanding the power of electronic pop”.

Before moving things to recently, I actually want to go back to the end of last year. British Vogue asked whether Rose Gray is the next big British Pop artist. That is a big question! There are so many amazing peers that could take that title, though there is something about Gray that suggests she is going to be an icon soon. Someone who is going to be a massive name very soon. She is definitely going to inspire so many other artists:

“Yet while Gray today is more about self-preservation than the wild nights of years past, Louder, Please is also, at points, a bracingly candid record, offering a diaristic account of the past few years of her life. “Lots of parties, lots of tears, a bit of heartbreak, a bit of heart-fixing,” she says. “I feel like there’s a few tracks on the record that sound a bit like falling back in love.” (Gray is in a long-term relationship with actor Harris Dickinson, making them something of a British bright-young-thing power couple.) On the standout track “Hackney Wick”—think Burial meets Lily Allen—she offers a blow-by-blow account of a night out in east London through a kind of hushed spoken word. “Breaking into Victoria Park, having a snog under the stars, going to another party where my mate was DJing,” she says. “I can't play that to anyone who knows me because I hate hearing myself speak, though.” Elsewhere, the record is peppered with the sort of snippets and whispers you’d hear in club bathrooms. “I think as a songwriter, I’m a bit of a sponge,” she adds. “Which is quite exhausting, really.”

The moment Gray realized the puzzle pieces of her first album were coming together was when she began working with Justin Tranter, the songwriter behind some of Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber’s biggest hits. After the two jumped on a Zoom in the early months of lockdown and found themselves waxing lyrical about Madonna, Tranter led Gray through something of a masterclass in songwriting, encouraging her to home in on her tangle of ideas and feelings. “I’ve never experienced writing like what I’ve experienced with Justin,” she says. “It’s quite magic.” Elsewhere, her collaborators on the record include the white-hot electronic producer Sega Bodega, electroclash queen Uffie, and house DJ Alex Metric—but even with all these cooks in the kitchen, the outcome feels distinctly Gray. “I feel like I’m pretty headstrong in sessions,” she notes. “I know what I do and don’t like.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Yana Van Nuffel

Just as unequivocal is the visual world Gray has constructed around the album: a wonderland of seedy glamour and fun in the sun that harks back to the glory days of ’90s Ibiza, and the work of photographers like Martin Parr and Elaine Constantine, who captured the electric energy of those underground nightlife scenes with striking, saturated color. “When I spoke to the photographer, I wanted it to be like a ’90s Prada campaign, but starring Dido,” Gray says, with a cheeky grin. (She also describes the look as Kylie Minogue’s iconic “Slow” music video mixed with Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast—you can see the vision.) On the album cover, Gray stands on a beach in Barcelona while lovers canoodle in the sand and seagulls squawk above her head; with a Walkman attached to her bikini bottoms and headphones in her ears, she lets out a scream. “It’s a little bit tacky, but also quite glamorous,” Gray adds. “I think British dance music has always had that element, which I love, and now people like Charli XCX and Shygirl are making it cool again.”

Like Charli and Shygirl (the latter of whom Gray has collaborated with and supported onstage), Gray has also been hitting the club to spread the gospel of her upcoming music. Last month, she kicked off a series of DJ nights titled Gray Selects which she hopes can both invite new listeners into her world and spotlight the work of up-and-coming musicians she admires. “I just want to start getting us all together and playing out each other’s music,” she says. It’s a warm, communal spirit that courses through the record, too, which sounds like the sort of thing you’d listen to on your friend’s portable speaker while getting ready for a night out, sipping a lukewarm vodka Red Bull while the smell of straightener-fried hair and Impulse body spray hangs in the air.

“I hope I’ve made the kind of record that me and my best mates would absolutely play until we’re all sick of it,” she says. “Getting ready, going out, getting dolled up for a festival. But I also hope it’s something that people can listen to when they’re traveling to work. I don’t think it’s just a party or a club record. Everyone I’ve played the record to has a different favorite song, which I think is a good thing.” It’s true: while the album does feel like a statement of intent, it’s in the more ambiguous moments—where the sweary meets the seductive, or where heartbreak meets the euphoric highs of the dancefloor—that Gray truly shines. With Louder, Please, she’s ready for the big leagues”.

Let’s bring things forward. Well, to October. Rose Gray was interviewed for Ticketmaster Discover. Talking about her new single, April, it was chance to look back at the success of Louder, Please and what she has achieved since then. This album is seriously amazing and everyone needs to hear it. A modern Pop gem from an artist who is going to be in the industry for decades:

“You’ve just released ‘April’ – is that story about a real person?

It’s definitely about a real person, but it’s also a metaphor for that character that I seem to always be drawn to when I’m out, those people that are so free, and in their bodies. I had this night, and I just was like, ‘This person is incredible. I aspire to be like her.’ It’s a metaphor for many characters that I’ve met on the dancefloor.

Does the world need more people like April in it?

I don’t think Aprils are a rare breed. I think there’s many.

Nine months down the line, do you resonate with the ethos of Louder, Please even more, considering how you’ve been firing on all cylinders?

It definitely resonates with me even more now, having sung those lyrics, or shouted them, like, in ‘Damn’. I kept accidentally writing songs with ‘louder’ in it, coming back to the word. Whenever I’m on the mic, I still say, ‘Could you put up a little louder, please?’

This is kind of deep, but since I was a kid, I’ve always pushed for more. Whether it’s making music, art or learning a dance, I will take it to the next level. But it’s also quite exhausting, constantly wanting more for myself. It’s brilliant for my career, because a lot of people would have probably stopped a few years ago, when things weren’t working.

You recently released a mini doc about ‘Hackney Wick’. Is there more of that story to tell, regarding how the place helped shape the Rose Gray we know today?

There’s definitely more I feel. I feel very healed by that song. So many people in America told me how much they loved that song, which is so funny, because I imagine most of them haven’t been to Hackney Wick. It represents that place, wherever it is in the world, that you were drawn to, where some of the big life memories happened.

While you’ve been all over the world, do you miss the place, or is it reassuring that you always have it to come back to?

Hackney Wick has changed. I still love it and choose to meet my friends there for a drink. I really appreciate London more, now that I travel. [There’s] nothing quite like home. London is in my bones, it’s who I am.

Some people might disagree, but I think we’ve got a good balance of work, play and cosiness [in London]. Now we’re moving into autumn, all of our activities are going to change. Stockholm has that, New York has that, but a lot of places in the southern hemisphere are hot all the time and don’t

Are you enjoying riding the wave of everything that’s happening at the moment?

It’s been pretty consistent. When I’m in a studio, I’m sat on my arse with coffee all day. I’m very comfortable and rested when I’m making music. I’m also quite a good sleeper now. I’m making sure that I’m taking a step out of it, remembering how much everything has changed, trying to appreciate it and take everything in. I’m one of those annoying people that’s in a really amazing moment, and then I’ll tell everyone that I think it’s an amazing moment”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Lamedica

I am ending with a couple of positive reviews for Louder, Please. There are plenty to choose from! One of my favourite albums of this year, songs from it are still in my head! Hackney Wick is a modern masterpiece. I have not seen Rose Gray live, but I will catch it next year is she plays in London. Someone I am keen to interview at some point. Before getting to reviews, there is a new interview from Numéro Netherlands. After the release of A Little Louder, Please, and some incredible gigs, Rose Gray had a lot to reflect on. A modern Pop artist who channels greats like Kylie Minogue and Robyn, she has this distinct lyrical voice and sense of urgency. Songs that are very much for here and now, though we will be listening to them years from now:

“This has been a huge year for you; you released your debut album Louder, Please, you played at Glastonbury, you’ve been on tour with Kesha…how does it feel receiving such a positive reaction from audiences and the industry?

It’s been such a year. I released Louder, Please two weeks into 2025 and the record feels like the start of something for me. Seeing the way it has connected with people has been unreal. I poured so much of myself into making it, so watching it take on a life of its own has been really special. Since the release I’ve played shows all over the world and met so many amazing people along the way. It feels like everything I’ve been working towards for years has finally aligned. I’m travelling constantly, having so much fun, and for the first time the world and everything I dreamt about feels completely within reach. The album has changed my life in such a real way, but I always knew this change was possible because the music deserved it.  It’s also funny because the tables have really turned; this time last year I could barely book a show. I was mostly DJing.

Like a lot of women, you had a pretty unsavoury introduction to the music industry, including losing more than a hundred of your songs to a record label before the age of 19. How did you bounce back and find your feet after such a harsh beginning?

Well, I think a little sprinkle of delusion helped! By delusion, I mean I never fully accepted that it wasn’t going to happen for me, even when so many doors were slammed in my face. I’ve taken some serious knocks along the way, but eight years in my skin has definitely thickened. I’m still sensitive, but I know my worth now and I’ve really learned my craft. I make so much music that losing those early songs doesn’t sting anymore because I’ve written hundreds of better ones since. I do think a lot about young women coming up in the industry. I want to protect new artists because I was exposed to too much too soon, and no one deserves to have their creativity taken advantage of like that.

You’ve just been on tour, what’s the process like when choosing your onstage outfits—is it different from choosing your clubbing outfits?

Archives. I'm lucky to have some friends who have archives, full of one-off pieces. I also have customised looks for shows which I swap in and out, but ultimately, it has to be moveable. I switch between shirts overlaid with bras, hot pants with detachable material, and tights—lots of different coloured tights. I love a little dramatic unveiling on stage. I feel like when I’m partying, I’m always thinking about how I can take off layers, and usually I will end up in a bra and bottoms. I’m the same for my live shows.

Looking ahead, what do the coming months hold for you?

I'm off on another tour, this time in Brazil and Mexico. This has been a big dream of mine: “Come to Brazil” really happened! After that I’ll be spending the rest of the year writing, I’m excited to get into the bubble of making another album”.

Two reviews to end with. Highlighting one of my favourite albums of the year. I will end with an NME review. However, I want to drop in The Guardian’s take. They commended the inventiveness of Rose Gray’s debut album. Despite this wonderful debut album, I feel Gray will get better and more ambitious. Someone you can see bringing in some big names to collaborate on her second studio album. I am a big fan already and cannot wait to see where she goes and everything she achieves:

“The London musician’s assured debut runs the gamut from aggressive jungle to uplifting house, toggling between hedonism and introspection

The last few years have proved tricky for female-fronted dance-pop, with interesting artists wasting away as guest vocalists on songs credited to male DJs with perfect teeth, or siloed into dead ends soundtracked by an efficient amalgam of drum’n’bass and sticky-floor EDM.

Thank goodness, then, for London’s Rose Gray, whose sweat-soaked debut album fizzes with inventiveness. She’s clearly a fan of dance music’s more experimental potential – opener Damn is an aggressively filtered jungle onslaught, while collaborators include producer Sega Bodega (Caroline Polachek, Shygirl) and electropop cult figure Uffie. But Gray also understands pop, with the campy Angel of Satisfaction stomping around a keening, early Gaga-esque chorus. The house-inflected Party People, meanwhile, would have nestled nicely on an 00s Ibiza Classics compilation mixed by Kaskade.

Hedonism is a key lyrical theme – Wet & Wild, all smile-inducing house pianos and breathy, Kylie-esque vocals, should come with its own bottle of room odouriser – but on tracks like Switch, about a tricky long-distance relationship, Gray looks inwards, searching for new ways to sustain a connection. Equally atmospheric is the spoken-word Hackney Wick, which charts a night out but focuses on relatable communion rather than focus-grouped exhortations to put your hands up.

There’s a comedown of sorts on the mid-tempo Everything Changes (But I Won’t), which saturates Gray’s voice in so many effects that its emotional impact is somewhat diluted. She’s better on tracks like Free, with its mantra-like chorus “The good shit in life is always free”, creating escapist dance-pop anthems that pierce the heart”.

NME states how Louder, Please offers escape and escapism from London’s underground Rave scene. They noted how Louder, Please “adds an enigmatic cutting edge to her upbeat dance-pop sound”. Anyone who has not heard this album needs to check it out. It is one of the year’s best:

“Mysterious, discomforting opener ‘Damn’ is worlds apart from the summery sounds we’ve become used to, as Gray’s voice distorts like a whining toddler: “Won’t you turn it up a little louder, please?” Meanwhile, that familiar sunny euphoria returns in the form of the escapist ‘Free’ and the Ibiza-friendly ‘Wet & Wild’, which balances its mouthful of a verse with a swirling chorus.

The loved-up throbbing bounce of ‘Just Two’ might be Gray’s most addictive track to date, although the following one-two of ‘Tectonic’ and ‘Party People’ – an ode to those strangers who become the main characters of your night out – risks the album falling into rinse and repeat territory for a moment. ‘Angel Of Satisfaction’ dispels that notion, carrying a pulse that would give every bassline on Dua Lipa’s ‘Future Nostalgia’ a run for its money.

‘Hackney Wick’ – perhaps east London’s answer to Confidence Man cult classic ‘C.O.O.L. Party’ – is refreshingly immediate and lucid (“I hear the bass, the music, and I succumb”), while ‘First’ represents Gray’s confident first foray into the liquid drum ‘n’ bass sound that has blown up the likes of Charlotte Plank and Venbee.

On ‘Louder, Please’, Gray’s music has finally caught up with her lifestyle. The crackly sounds of the underground finally have their unfiltered moments, while her long-standing pop sensibilities still retain their place through respectable chorus hooks and addictive melodies (her classical vocal training is also clear for all to see). Gray has too many strings to her bow to lay down one overarching, definitive statement. As such, ‘Louder, Please’ is more of a dare than an instruction: follow her down this rabbit hole, and brace yourself for where she ends up”.

Such a phenomenal artist who put out this debut album that linger long in the mind, I feel she already stands out from her Pop peers. I think that next year is going to be her most successful year, though she can look back proudly on everything she has achieved this year. With a huge London gig coming on 7th December, Gray will hopefully have the chance to chill and decompress before looking to what 2026 offers. A wonderful songwriter and someone we can be very proud of, Rose Gray is…

A shining British treasure.

FEATURE: Spotlight: The Royston Club

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

The Royston Club

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THE tremendous Glued to My Bed…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Crowston/Press

is one of my favourite singles of year and it sort of recently drew me to The Royston Club. It is not often I get to spotlight and celebrate a Welsh band. Tom Faithfull, Ben Matthias, Sam Jones and Dave Tute make up The Royston Club. Hailing from Wrexham, North Wales, their second studio album, Songs for the Spine, was released in August. It is a tremendous and faultless album I would urge everyone to check out. I am eager to get to some interviews with the band. If you are new to them or have heard their name in passing, this should give you a more complete picture of a sensational quartet who are clearly bound for greatness. I am going to end with When the Horn Blows’ review of Songs for the Spine. In August, NME spoke with vocalist Tom Faithfull and guitarist and main songwriter Ben Matthias about this tremendous new album from a bright hope. A band that are really in demand right now. When speaking to NME, they were preparing for their debut slots at Reading & Leeds. Also, we learn how The Royston Club were expected to live up to the hype when releasing their debut album, 2023’s Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars:

“NME: Hi Ben and Tom. You’re back with a new album after reaching the UK top 20 on the charts with your 2023 debut. What has it been like to work on the follow-up after seeing such a big response?

Tom Faithfull: “I think there was always going to be a bit of pressure, but not pressure from anyone else. The label is pretty sound, and it wasn’t pressure chart-wise; it was more from us wanting to make sure we didn’t fall into that second-album-syndrome thing that you hear so many bands going into. Luckily, when we heard the mixes back, we were really, really happy with them.”

Ben Matthias: “[Seeing the response] did catch us off-guard, especially with the demographic. It wasn’t a certain group of people, and it wasn’t just a teen girl fanbase that was resonating with it. We’d have middle-aged men and women coming up to us at gigs and saying how much it had affected them as well. It was really nice to see, and it had a big impact on us.

“It was those people who were in our minds while we were writing the second album. We wanted to write a good album for them… as corny as that sounds!”

How are you feeling about tackling the main stages at Reading & Leeds this month?

Faithfull: “They’re the shows of the whole summer that we’ve been really looking forward to. There have been loads of great gigs this summer, but that’s the festival that we all went to when we were 16. I know it’s a bit of a cliché that all bands up north say, but it really was the first one we went to and the first one we really loved! We’ve played other stages there before, so to be on the main one with all these other amazing bands that we looked up to… It’s gonna be really special.

“There definitely are going to be some nerves, because of how big an occasion it is for us… and because it’s going to be televised too, but that makes it even more exciting. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”

What is one thing that you hope listeners take from the new album?

Matthias: “I hope that they can resonate with the lyrics and really find something to latch onto in some of the songs. Also, I’m gonna sound corny again, but I hope you can feel how close we are as people through this music. We’ve grown up together and, especially over our time in the band, we’ve got so close. We can hear that in the songs, and I hope the fans can hear it as well.”

Faithfull: “I hope you can hear how deliberate some of the parts are, and how much we worked on some of the stuff in the practice room. Like we said before, with the first album, there was a lot of like throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that it sticks, but this really felt like we were being a lot more deliberate with how we did things. I really want people to hear that a lot of thought has gone into it, and tell that we care”.

There are a couple of other interviews from this year that I want to include here. Indie Is Not a Genre caught up with The Royston Club’s Tom Faithfull about the band’s progress and the extraordinary Songs for the Spine. If some artists feel pressure on their second album and there is this weight of expectation, Wrexham’s The Royston Club have shown no nerves and answered any doubters there might out there:

Catching up with The Royston Club’s frontman, Tom Faithfull, meant discussing gigs, growth and what we can expect from the band’s upcoming new album. With a quiet confidence, he spoke proudly of what the band has created, clearly energised about the album’s release and the chance to bring it to life on stage. Tom is someone who genuinely cares, and it’s clear the band have put serious thought into what this new record represents. Following the success of their 2023 debut, Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars, the Wrexham-formed four-piece found themselves staring down the infamous second album question — and they’ve answered it with Songs for the Spine, a record built for the long haul. Deliberate, emotional, and grounded in the kind of sweat-soaked indie rock that’s slowly clawing its way back into the UK spotlight.

He joked about the pressures of the second album, “you have your whole life to write your first one and then the second one, they want it in a year, and you’re like… oh shit”. Rather than rush it, they opted for a more measured approach: “We had the mindset that we want to make an album we really love, and if it takes a bit longer, it takes a bit longer”, so two years after the debut, Songs for the Spine is here.

Written in late 2023 and 2024 and recorded in Liverpool during the winter, it was a first-time collaboration with producer Rich Turvey (known for his work with Blossoms and The Coral), who honed the sound and direction of the record, a move that helped steer the sound in a new direction. “He got what we were after,” says Tom. “He pushed us in a direction we wanted to go; we didn’t want to make just another indie record. He wanted to push it a little bit further.”

If their first album captured the energy of a band newly out of the gates, Songs for the Spine feels tighter, more lived-in. “There’s less padding,” Tom explains. “We’ve stripped stuff back. Every part on the record feels deliberate, like it’s there for a reason. So hopefully that translates when it’s just the four of us on stage”.

The band’s rise has been steady but significant. From sweaty pub gigs around Wrexham to festival slots at Leeds, Reading and Glastonbury (where I have it on good authority in 2023 they blew the roof off Bread & Roses at 11 am). They’ve developed a reputation for raucous, whole-hearted live sets and so it’s no surprise that Tom lights up when talking about what’s to come, especially their upcoming slot on Reading & Leeds’ main stage, “this feels like a bit of a step for us, it’ll be the biggest stage we’ve played … that’s one we’ve kind of had in the back of our minds for a while now.”

For all the hype around the bigger stages, there’s still magic in the chaos of more intimate spots. “Two days ago, we played Tramlines on one of the smaller tents and it was amazing, actually. Sometimes with those smaller ones, you get the kind of sweaty, boxed-in feel that you miss on the vast stages. So that was a lot of fun.”

Now based in Liverpool, Wrexham remains more than just a hometown footnote; it’s the place they were given a chance, and they owe a lot to the town in North Wales. “It’s a place we look on incredibly fondly,” Tom says. He spoke poignantly about the opportunities they were given and how that impacted the band’s development, getting chances from pub landlords who knew they weren’t looking at the bottom line, but putting on live music for their love of it.

Tom is clearly passionate about small venues and is worried about the regular closings that provide a springboard for so many UK bands. Tom summed it up perfectly, saying, “venues that have only 40 people on a Saturday are the ones that might have your next favourite band on”. Fittingly, their album release show is set for The Rockin’ Chair in Wrexham on the 8th August, a full-circle moment that promises to be one for the ages.

Before finishing off with a review of The Royston Club’s new album, there is an interview from Liverpool Noise that is quite recent and gives us another look into the band. There will be people out there who have not heard of them, so I hope that this feature has given you enough information and impetus to follow The Royston Club. As I said, although there are some great Welsh and around, they are not talked about enough. A nation we need to shine more of a light on:

The band’s debut album Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars got a top 20 finish in the UK Charts.

Guitarist Ben Matthias states they aren’t too concerned about where they finish this time around, as long as they hit their personal goals.

“The most important thing is just to sell records, because every week it’s a different milestone for what you need to get into the top 20, top 10, top five,” he stated.

“As long as we sell as much as we want to, which is what we’re doing at the moment, then that’s more important to us than chart position, but that being said – a top 10 would be nice. We’ll see what happens, but we’ll be happy either way.”

Matthias states there were certain differences between creating the second album compared to the first. “It had to be a lot quicker, that’s the main thing,” he added.

“There’s less time to deliberate over things in certain songs. The period of them coming together from the initial point of writing the song to playing with a full band is really short, and because of that, the songs are a lot more stripped back.

“With the creative process being so quick, you think of things you’d never think about. Pressure is a good thing in music. We knew we had a year to write it, and we had no other choice, so it was fun. It’s a good kind of pressure.

“We’ve got something to go off because of the first album, and we knew what people liked, but at the same time we wanted to show things that we didn’t show on the first one. We wanted to show more depth, and I think we’ve done that.

“We’re really happy with how we’ve progressed from that first album, while keeping the sound that people liked. It was something we were conscious of, but we’ve got the balance just right.

“We’ve had the songs for a year, a year-and-a-half. We started playing Cariad as a band in January of last year.”

“I think the first time we played it was at the Zoe’s Place gig,” Faithful noted.

“I vaguely remember trying to remember the lyrics about an hour before we went on. It got a good reception then, which is a good indicator of how it’s going to go.

“We’re quite lucky having a producer who understood what our first album sounded like, and got the memo of what we wanted the second to sound like so he could gradually push us in the direction he thought we wanted to go in.”

Another Liverpool gig The Royston Club have done in recent times was at Sound City – where they topped the bill at Grand Central on the opening night.

“Outside of our home town, it was the first headline we did,” Matthias said.

“It was a class night actually. It was a beautiful venue, an amazing crowd, and the first of the year – so it felt good. Since starting a band, it’s what you want, so it’s great.

“When you think of festivals, you think of a field, but we were really happy with that.”

Not too far away from Liverpool, the band remain very proud of their home roots in Wrexham. The Welsh city has been recognised internationally in recent years due to the involvement of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney at the local football club.

“It’s always been the coolest place,” Matthias joked.

Let’s finish off with a review from When the Whistle Blows. They provided their opinions on a terrific album from a band who can go all the way in music. Songs for the Spine is a wonderful album that demands to be heard. Blending Indie Pop and Alternative Rock, you do not necessarily need to be a fan of the genres to appreciate what they are putting out there:

“Songs For The Spine releases 8th August and is a huge step forward for the Wrexham four-piece. Their debut album Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars reached an impressive #16 in the charts and was an excellent example of a really strong indie debut, but this next effort represents a shift in maturity and an advancement in songwriting.

Alongside the album, the band will be embarking on their biggest UK headline tour to date, featuring an impressive London show at the O2 forum Kentish Town. The boys are excellent live, bringing a passionate liveliness to every gig which results in a fervent energy around the crowd and a right singalong.

The album’s opener is the band’s darker answer to their debut’s closing track. It utilizes the same loud, intense, at times majestic sound, but where ‘Cherophobe’ called out for help, ‘Shivers’ begs for it. It’s double-entrondric hook hints at the dangers of partying a little too hard, a reference that would feel out of place on their first outing but sets the tone here. The dual vocals in the final chorus create a frenzy of emotion and energy. It’s the band telling us their debut was just the start.

‘The Patch Where Nothing Grows’ is more classic Royston Club. A solid riff kicks things off and is sprinkled throughout, there’s a catchy chorus and a bridge to keep us on our toes.  As the first single, it was released a year prior to the album, a considerate amount of time for a young, developing band. This track would feel at home on Shaking Hips and Crashing Cars but also fits in here. It acts almost as a checkpoint as to how far the band has come since.

‘Glued to the Bed’ is a good mixture between these two feelings, acting as an effective and natural stepping stone between the albums. It’s gritty and sweet at the same time and describes love as both thrilling and disappointing, wonderful and painful. About the song, guitarist Ben Mathis said, “I wanted to write about the cynicism towards love that heartbreak can bring, the bittersweet memory of a relationship and the raw aftermath of a breakup. It's about the push and pull between needing to forget and wanting to hold on to what was lost, about how grief can become your entire atmosphere and distort your sense of self.

“Looking back, I see a lot of what I wrote as a defence mechanism after being hurt. I dismiss love as this pretentious, performative thing and in the chorus I sound afraid, pleading for the next relationship not to leave me in the same state.”

Lead singer, Tom Faithful delivers all these more sensitive and emotional lyrics with the same earnestness as ever. He’s simply a very likeable frontman that fans can really relate to.

‘Spinning’ illustrates this perfectly, at the same time displaying his vocal versatility. It starts as a very sweet, slower, more ballad-y track which comes as a great surprise. Where often their guitars are heavy, they are more tender here. The song builds louder and more impactful, a showcase of the huge leap forward in the quality and complexity of the songwriting. It’s a rollercoaster in only three minutes.

It was about time that The Royston Club had a real colossal epic, and album closer ‘The Ballad of Glen Campbell’ certainly fits that bill. It’s every advancement we’ve seen in the new album, all come together to fruition.  It rises and falls, builds up to be cut down and is packed with passion, intensity, pain and joy in all of its six minutes. For this song to be in a second album is nothing short of impressive, and really speaks for how far this band could go.

The Royston Club have swapped upbeat, catchy indie tunes detailing night outs and run ins with girls with genuinely heartfelt, more complex and emotional tracks about love and loss. It’s a huge and vital step forward, whilst not abandoning their distinct sound and still remaining very recognisable to their fans. They have simply begun to grow and develop. Everyone loves a garage debut that's more like a soundtrack to a bender, think Arctic Monkeys, The Kooks or even The Strokes, but each of these bands had to evolve and grow from these roots, not just to stay relevant and popular, but to build their legacies. That looks like what the band are doing here, and it seems like this is just the beginning for them”.

A heralded and award-nominated group who have been tipped for big things, we will be hearing a lot more from Tom Faithfull, Ben Matthias, Sam Jones and Dave Tute next year. Even though they have pumping out music a while now, I think that this year has been one where they have garnered a whole new wave of attention. I think that will only heightened and increase next year. Considering how talented and brilliant the band are, it is so…

INCREDIBLE to see.

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Follow The Royston Club

PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Crowston/Press

Official:

https://theroystonclub.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/theroystonclub_/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@theroystonclub

Twitter:

https://x.com/TheRoystonClub

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/theroystonclub/

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoA-aYb1v73y-kbD2qTKAdQ

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5N5jf98OOEf3uAIJpi1deD?si=Op4DuBK_QHqESkeLdGS_XQ

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: YONAKA

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Palmer

YONAKA

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THIS is a terrific band…

PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Palmer

that I spotlighted in 2018. I am long overdue a reappraisal of this three-piece. YONAKA are made up of Theresa Jarvis, George Edwards and Alex Crosby. Jarvis is one of the most exceptional and engaging band leads in the country. In terms of what she brings to live performances and on records. Their second studio album, Until You're Satisfied, will arrive on 13th March next year. I am really looking forward to that, as I have been a fan of YONAKA for many years. 2019’s Don't Wait 'Til Tomorrow was a sensational and distinct debut from a group who instantly stood out from their peers. The Brighton-based band are back in my sights because there is a recent interview online. I wanted to put them back under the spotlight. The band have some British tour dates next month. You can go and pre-order their album from their website. Before getting to this new interview and an NME article that highlights their latest single, I want to take us back to 2023. That was quite an important year for YONAKA. That is when they released the E.P., Welcome to My House. If this E.P. contained some of their best work, I feel like Until You’re Satisfised will be their best release. In terms of consistency and overall impact. I do want to head back to 2023 before coming forward. DIY spoke with Theresa Jarvis ahead of YONAKA headlining DIY’s takeover at this weekend’s Y Not Festival:

“Hello Theresa! How has 2023 treated you so far?

I’m well! This year has been so far a good year for growth. I’m learning new things about myself all the time and welcoming change even though it can feel scary at first but I’m riding the wave, everything is as it’s supposed to be.

You’ve just released your new EP ‘Welcome To My House’ - can you tell us a bit about what you wanted to explore on the EP?

So, the EP has seven tracks on it: they kinda go all over the place in tempo, sound and emotion, it feels exciting and nothing sounds the same. Originally we wanted to do an album so we actually had to really carve out the EP but it works nicely. When writing for a body of work there will be a song that is a moment where you go ‘OK, this is where it is’ and that song was ‘Panic’ for the EP and we worked around that being the heart of it.

Do you have any anecdotes from making the EP that you can share with us?

We went out to LA to record the EP, but that didn’t quite go as planned as LA is way too fun a place to stay inside. We stayed in this house with a studio and our friend Barns Courtney stayed the whole time on the sofa. We would just hang out, drink and then make music, and we were jumping on each other’s tracks so you can hear him layered up with my vocals, in the middle eight of ‘Panic’.

You’ve also been playing a whole host of festivals this summer; what do you think you enjoy most about playing at festivals?

I love the fact that you don’t know what you’re gonna get. I like that people will just stumble across you and either hate you or fall in love. I also like being around and seeing all the other artists and like getting to enjoy being the punter too.

What should people expect from your set at Y Not? And will you be checking out any of the other acts on the line-up while you’re there?

They can expect a lovely old show with new songs and some classics. I’m looking forward to seeing Sad Night Dynamite, Cassyette and Kid Kapichi”.

Welcome to My House seemed to be seven songs that were about Theresa Jarvis’s life, I wonder if their upcoming album follows the same lines. Recent singles Cruel and Problems have an autobiographical edge and could be new chapter for Jarvis and YONAKA, I want to briefly stay in 2023, as it is important to see where YONAKA were a couple of years back and where they are now. Kerrang! are big supporters of YONAKA. They spoke with the band about Welcome to My House:

“Talking of changing your style and mixing up genres, is it important to you to not pigeonhole yourselves?

Theresa: “Yeah, I feel like when we are writing it comes from a feeling and a mood, rather than kind of just being like, ‘Okay, now we have this kind of rocky song, so let’s write another rocky song.’ We base it on: ‘If it feels good, then let’s write it.’”

You’re launching your new EP with the release of By The Time You’re Reading This. Was this song in particular one you wanted to save for release day?

Theresa: “That song is quite upbeat, fast-paced and really fun, and so we’re using By The Time You’re Reading This to kind of head up this EP. The song is about living in the moment and it’s a feel-good song. It’s just loud and fast!”

You’ve also made a music video for each track as well. Was that something done over time, or did you do all of that back-to-back?

Theresa: “We filmed them back-to-back. We spent one day filming the PANIC video and that was like a full video where there were different scenes, and all this kind of stuff. And then we filmed five videos the next day – we are actually calling them visualisers because they’re not like moving scenes actually. But yeah, it was pretty intense!”

A lot of Welcome To My House comes from Theresa’s lived experiences. Was it a cathartic experience writing these songs?

Theresa: “Yeah, it was really cathartic. It’s nice to get it out of my head and onto paper! I’ve really benefited from hearing about other people’s experiences through life – especially when it comes down to things like mental health. If I can share my experience, and someone hears it and understands that, ‘Oh, I’m not fucking crazy,’ and that they’re not freaking out on their own then that’s a big deal for me. Because they’re not alone in that, and I’m not alone in that. It feels good, and it just pours out. Sometimes I’ll write a melody and I’ll have to make words to the melody, and then sometimes when it’s just right there the words come out at the same time as the melody.”

Lastly, YONAKA are a three-piece now, with drummer Rob Mason having departed the band earlier this year. How’s that going?

Theresa: “Yeah, it’s been good. We still get drummers on board, because we still need drums! We’re still working it out and it’s a massive change that has had to happen, but we are enjoying it. Things do happen for a reason and changes do come, and it just depends how you roll with them. You either freeze and you go, ‘Fuck!’ or you just keep rolling and you make it into a positive.”

Alex: “For now, in terms of writing music, it’s going to be the three of us”.

I guess the biggest difference in the band since their formation is they are as trio now. Starting out with drummer Robert Mason, streamlining slightly has not sacrificed any of their potency and quality. I am not sure what their plans are for 2026 but, with a second album coming and tour dates locked in, they will be on the attack and brining their new music to fans around the country. I will skip ahead to that NME article concerning YONAKA’s amazing single, Problems. One of their strongest singles, it bodes well for Until You’re Satisfied (which will be released through Distiller):

“YONAKA have returned with a new single called ‘Problems’ – you can listen to it below.

The song marks the first preview of the Brighton band’s upcoming second album, which is yet to be announced. Their first record ‘Don’t Wait ‘Til Tomorrow’ arrived in 2019, ahead of their ‘Seize The Power’ mixtape (2021) and EP ‘Welcome To My House’ (2023).

“‘Problems’ is about when love starts to turn a little bit ugly. And it was the only song that could open up this new era of YONAKA,” explained frontwoman Theresa Jarvis.

Per a press release, the track opens the door to some new lyrical themes for the singer, as she explores matters of the heart.

“Don’t call me baby anymore/ Don’t need your web not like before/ I tried my best to reconcile/ It don’t come easy when you feel the void/ Making noise,” Jarvis sings in the restrained first verse, before ‘Problems’ blasts into a heavy, visceral chorus.

“It’s like I said/ I’ve got problems/ It’s hard to hear/ When you can’t solve them/ Oh and it hurts like death/ My only friend/ How could I ever love again?/ Forgive me I’ve got problems, yeah,” the frontwoman adds.

I know there will be new interviews closer to the release date of Until You’re Satisfied on 13th March. However, Kerrang! spoke with Theresa Jarvis about their punchy single, Problems, and how it is a new chapter for the band. A new era. It is a step more towards writing about love and relationships, though not necessarily romantic ones – plutonic relationships and friendships could be at the heart. Also, Jarvis talks about a time when YONAKA were perhaps on the brink and pulled it around:

“Going into making your second album, what questions were you all asking of yourselves as a band?

“We were on our own, we had no label, and we went through some rocky patches through the years. Lots of music was happening because we were like, ‘We need to make music,’ rather than doing it out of love. It got to a point where it was time for us to make a second album and I was like, ‘If this is the last thing we ever make, this needs to be the fucking best thing.’ I really approached it from that feeling, because you just never know what will happen. I wanted to make something incredible. And this is fucking brilliant, it’s the best we could have done. Throughout the years, there have been times when some of us won’t like something, and some of us would, and we would put it out. But I really, really love every single song on this new album. We all feel really connected to it.”

You mentioned again there about it possibly being “the last thing” you make… Were YONAKA close to breaking up at one point, and if so, what was required to turn that around to make this new record?

“We’ve been in a band for 10 years, and that’s a long time to be with anyone. You go through falling in and out of love with each other and being like, ‘I want to do this anymore. I don’t know if we’re all heading in the same direction anymore.’ We were actually doing a festival in Austria a few years ago and we spoke about that and it was weird, because obviously everyone thought, ‘We’re done, this is it.’ Then, the next day, just before we went onstage, we all felt a bit shit thinking about it. The thought of not doing this anymore became fucking terrifying. I didn’t want to let go. And we all felt like that – we were all like, ‘No, fuck that, we’re doing this!’ Then we went and had a great show and said we 100 per cent wanted to do this. It’s still a process, you can still have ups and downs, but everyone’s on the same page now.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Palmer

Any idea why love is finally starting to flood into your lyrics after years of not really writing about it?

“It’s all from personal experience. It’s about how I’m feeling and it’s not all just love with a person that I’m in a relationship with. It’s friends. It’s platonic love as well. It’s losing someone that you loved. It’s being in that relationship and finding what works and what doesn’t work for you. And, ‘How is this gonna last?’ I love the line ‘love looks different for me and you’ so much because if you’re having a bad time in your relationship and you see someone else who’s literally falling head over heels, you’re just like, ‘Fuck off! I’m having a shit time!’ And the opposite can be true as well. You can see someone going through the roughest relationship and you feel so good and comfortable in yours. It’s just funny.”

You also mentioned the idea of feeling more empowered in your lyrics nowadays. What changed in you to feel that empowerment, is that just growing older, or were there specific things that happened in life?

“Both, actually. So, one is me growing into myself. I’m 33 now, and I feel like I’ve found myself now more than ever before. I was always trying before, I would wear clothes, but the clothes would wear me. I would dye my hair a million times, and nothing would quite fit me the way I most feel now. You have to fall in love with yourself. You have to feel comfortable. I’m not fully there at all, but I feel like I’m seeing myself in a different light. I was like, ‘If I just pull away all this stuff, what’s left? What is there?’ I started doing that musically as well. I don’t want to listen to loads of new songs and try to sound like other music, because that’s not me, and that’s not what I resonate with. If I sing something and say something from the heart, whether it’s ugly or beautiful, then it’s the realest thing, and that’s the best I can be. I would also say, from a mental position, I’ve done a lot of work on myself to feel like that doesn’t have to control my life as much as it used to. I’m in a whole new position now”.

Apologies if it seems a bit scattershot in terms of interviews and timelines. However, I wanted to discuss YONAKA again and, with that Kerrang! interview up, it provided that platform. Theresa Jarvis is one of my favourite people in music and she is an extraordinary lead and songwriter. Together with George Edwards and Alex Crosby, they are this close and connected band who are looking ahead to the release of a new album. One that I know will pick up some incredible reviews and lead to festival demands and tour dates far afield. European or U.S. dates. Even though YONAKA have been around over a decade, with Until You're Satisfied out in March, I think that 2026 will be…

THEIR biggest year yet.

____________

Follow YONAKA

Official:

https://weareyonaka.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/weareYONAKA

Twitter:

https://x.com/weareYONAKA

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@weareyonaka

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/weareYONAKA

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzBddYqg5UYiz3U6EhwDCEA

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3Wcyta3gkOdQ4TfY0WyZpu?si=GDGIRLNDQ42XNIhpyjoL-Q

FEATURE: Needle Drops and Scores to Settle: Scene Two: Across 110th Street: Jackie Brown (1997)

FEATURE:

 

Needle Drops and Scores to Settle

Scene Two: Across 110th Street: Jackie Brown (1997)

__________

EVEN though the soundtrack I included…

IMAGE CREDIT: CineGraphX

at the bottom of this feature does not allow access to the monologues and dialogue, we can hear the incredible music. When it comes to Quentin Tarantino, he is perhaps the most regarded when it comes to soundtracks and choice of music. Someone who masterful pops needle drops and iconic music moments into his films, he has a real and deep love for music. A huge, passion, knowledge and broad taste. I could have features the Kill Bill soundtracks, Reservoir Dogs or, of course, the iconic Pulp Fiction. However, I wanted to turn my focus to his 1997 work of genius, Jackie Brown. Its soundtrack almost as notable as its direction, screenplay and lead performance – courtesy of the magnificent Pam Grier. Grier has talked fondly about her work on Jackie Brown and the importance of music in the film. The whole idea of this feature is to explore the important impact and relevance of music in cinema. I will bring in a range of films (in terms of genre and release year) and explore their soundtrack/score. I started out with Frances Ha (2013) and the mix of styles and sounds on that soundtrack. I am going to get to a film score soon, as these first two features have been about soundtracks. In interviews for Jackie Brown, Tarantino explained how he chose the songs for the soundtrack during the scriptwriting phase. He wanted to find the unique rhythm for the film. Underlining the fact  that the music is not just background noise but an integral part of the narrative, often serving to reveal character or enhance the scene's mood and tension. What makes Jackie Brown such an incredible and memorable soundtrack is its fusion of vintage Soul and Funk tracks, which he credits with helping to establish the film's tone and provide a deeper understanding of its characters. I have modified that from an A.I. search, but it is all relevant and true. How the music used is integral to the plot and the characters. Jackie Brown concerns a flight attendant (played by Pam Grier) who gets caught smuggling money for an arms dealer and devises a plan to double-cross both him and the law to keep the money for herself. She forms an alliance with bondsman, Max Cherry, who develops feelings for her, and manipulates everyone involved to pull off a complex con.

It is one of Quentin Tarantino's best films and soundtracks. They are not discussed as much as they should. People naturally gravitate towards Pulp Fiction. That is a masterpiece, that Jackie Brown, to me, has a richer and better soundtrack. I want to quickly move to a feature from Far Out Magazine, where they discuss Jackie Brown and quote what Tarantino has said about the importance of music to him – and to his film:

“Jackie Brown, a lesser mentioned film in Tarantino’s larger picture, is the 1997 crime drama film starring the likes of Robert Forster, Robert De Niro, Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda, is also given the same treatment in the opening credits.

The adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch pays homage to 1970s blaxploitation films and features the use of Bobby Womack’s ‘Across 110th Street’ which was seemingly fused with Jackie Brown, a direction only Tarantino could take the project.

“Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing.
“What I’m looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with.”—Quentin Tarantino”.

In 2022, twenty-five years after the release of Jackie Brown (and its soundtrack), this insightful article argued how it is the standard for the perfect marriage between film and music. The gold standard. I would agree with that. It is Quentin Tarantino’s finest soundtrack. The greatest of example how he uses music like no other director:

“The marriage between song and scene is a delicate one. Inserting the wrong tune at the wrong time can destroy an otherwise flawless sequence. Conversely, the correct audio accoutrement can emote things that actors and actions cannot. In a 2007 interview, Quentin Tarantino was asked about the importance of music in film. He said this: “If you do it right, if you use the right song, in the right scene…it’s about as cinematic a thing as you can do”. 25 years ago, Tarantino delivered this cinematic achievement in film with his underrated film Jackie Brown.

Written in 1992, Rum Punch is a stylish crime caper by literary legend Elmore Leonard. The book features a slew of plot twists along with a stable of twisted characters. In 1997, Tarantino brought Rum Punch to the big screen and renamed it Jackie Brown. The film boasts an impressive cast that includes Pam Grier in the title role, as well as Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Keaton, and Robert De Niro. It tells the story of an airline stewardess (Grier) who smuggles money for a sadistic gun dealer (Jackson).

Although the source material is from Leonard’s novel, Tarantino puts his unmistakable imprint on the material. Music is his most potent weapon in accomplishing this, renowned for his superb utilization of diegetic sound (music implemented into the scene itself). This technique lets the audience hear the music as the players would hear it. By including the viewer in the same auditory experience, this allows the viewer to occupy the same space as the character. The film’s diverse diegetic soundtrack includes artists such as The Delfonics, The Supremes, The Grass Roots, Minnie Riperton, Foxy Brown, and Pam Grier herself.

Two powerful examples of Tarantino’s mastery of diegetic sound in Jackie Brown occur with the same character in the same setting. On separate occasions, Jackson’s character is behind the wheel of a car. Both instances see him preparing to commit murder. In the first scene, the character inserts a tape into the deck and we hear “Strawberry Letter 23” by funk band The Brothers Johnson. The second has Jackson sitting in the dark listening to Johnny Cash sing “Tennessee Stud”. The character, the motivation, and the setting are the same, but the songs are very different, which indicates a tonal shift. Needless to say, one murder attempt is successful, and one does not go as planned. Also, since the music is a part of the scene, the audience has just shared an auditory experience with the villain. This serves to once again increase viewer commitment.

If Jackie Brown has a theme song, it is “Across 110th Street” by Bobby Womack. This musical choice is a clear nod to the Blaxploitation genre that Tarantino is so enamored with, and a genre Pam Grier prominently starred in. Quentin uses the 1972 soul ballad as a form of narrative progression, but it’s also a participant in the narrative. The film’s opening sequence shows Jackie in profile on an electronic walkway at the airport. Womack’s vocals ooze out over the scene as the credits roll and the audience is introduced to the heroine. This is an example of non-diegetic music because it exists outside of the scene. It also perfectly sets the mood for the picture.

In the final scene of the film, audiences see Jackie driving a car when once again “Across 110th Street” begins to play. The viewer assumes the song is acting as background music like the previous use, until Jackie starts to mouth the words. This is diegetic implementation. At this point, the audience is in the car with Jackie because they are hearing what she hears. By using the same song at two separate points in the film in different ways, Tarantino not only creates a sense of continuity, but he also further reinforces viewer connection.

Jackie Brown is routinely underappreciated and overlooked. A major reason why is because people constantly compare it to Pulp Fiction, the more successful and well-known Tarantino movie. However, cinema scholar Jason Bailey commented that “Jackie Brown may be the only Quentin Tarantino movie that gets noticeably better with each viewing”. With the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Jackie Brown prevails as the superior film in several areas including pace and sentiment. But the most glaring difference is the use of music. Pulp Fiction is a film full of brilliantly executed musical sequences, but Jackie Brown is a film brilliantly orchestrated to music”.

There are blogs that have dedicated entire articles to songs used in Jackie Brown and the scenes they accompanied. This feature discusses Bobbie Womack’s Across 110th Street and a crucial scene. How it stands out as especially memorable. This in-depth and detailed examination concerns The Brother’s Johnson’s Strawberry Letter 23 and how that song was utilised. I am not going to source the entire article, though this section is particularly relevant and illuminative:

“Only after slamming down the trunk lid on the kid does Tarantino begin to meld the song with the scene. The moment it all kicks in is done with great and recognizable effect. Starting up the car, Ordell performs something so familiar with those of us who survived The Seventies. The bygone habit of dropping a cassette mixtape down into a car deck. Bringing forth a tune. Strawberry Letter 23‘s catchy keyboard introduction wafting the vehicle’s interior, all while Ordell slips his gloves on for the deed ahead.

Tarantino fills the theater and audience’s ears at this point with the dance number’s sound, in fact. As Robbie reaches for his revolver from the glove box, he knows the hard part is done. His prey secured, taking his time with the simple preparation of the final step. Languid in his motions from this point forward. Relaxed. Turning up the volume a bit more to enjoy the moment of his triumph. Glancing back toward the trunk with a smirk, proving the mastery of his play and the situation through his control of the music.

Self-congratulatory, at its utmost.

Yet, it’s in the scene’s final sequence that Tarantino really gets to enjoy himself. The capper. Shifting head-on at the car, QT tracks the camera horizontally, gently as Robbie U-turns his ’70s vintage Oldsmobile back up the street. Creating distance with the audience, the Brother’s Johnson song fades as the car withdraws to the background. Away from onlookers. Establishing that we, the audience, have only been listening through the car’s own interior speakers. The intimacy broken, the camera ventures left, mimicking Ordell’s turn down the block, then swings upward for the last”.

I am going to end with this feature from Medium. Quentin Tarantino’s soundtracks are filled with Easter eggs. The glorious soundtrack for Jackie Brown nods to the past and has genuine appreciation for and knowledge of the ‘70s-era blaxploitation flicks. Rather than mimicking or mocking them, Tarantino pays tribute and homage. His selection of music, and how it uses that in key scenes, is a masterclass:

“The soundtrack is filled with songs from various blaxploitation films of the time. The movie starts off with Grier’s flight attendant going off to work, to the sound of the late, great Bobby Womack’s “Across 110th Street,” the theme from the cop flick of the same name. The song certainly makes a great theme for Brown, as Womack sings of the trials and tribulations a person in dire straits goes through to get out of the hellhole they’re stuck in, something our heroine will be doing during the film:

“Been down so long, getting up didn’t cross my mind

I knew there was a better way of life that I was just trying to find

You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re put under pressure

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Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester”

For incidental music, Tarantino uses several tracks from Roy Ayers’s funky score for Grier’s Coffy, a movie which, as any QT-head will tell you, is one of his all-time favorite flicks. For the movie’s tension-packed set piece at the Del Amo Mall (described as “the largest indoor mall in the world” in the movie), Tarantino specifically uses Ayers’s anxious, percussion-heavy “Escape” track, a bit of music that was also recently used in the superhero flick Ant-Man.

Tarantino definitely wanted Brown to be a big salute to his leading lady, not only using music from Coffy, but getting “Long Time Woman,” which Grier performed for her 1971 women-in-prison flick The Big Doll House, for a scene where Jackie gets hauled off to prison. There’s also a cheeky moment where Tarantino uses the gangstalicious track “(Holy Matrimony) Letter to the Firm” as background music for when Cherry goes to a record store. Who is the rapper who performs that track? Why, it’s Foxy Brown, who of course named herself after another of Grier’s blaxploitation classics.

While Brown is set in contemporary times, the music is richly steeped in old-school, R & B music. At the aforementioned record store, Cherry picks up a cassette (‘memba those?) by the Delfonics after he goes over to Jackie’s apartment and she plays a Delfonics album on her turntable. (Bloodstone’s “Natural High” also begins playing when Cherry first lays eyes on Jackie.) Jackie’s favorite bar, the Cockatoo Inn, is a hangout that plays tunes by Minnie Riperton and the Meters. Ordell is so impressed by the place, he goes back there and has a drink with Louis, and the song that’s playing during their scene is Bill Withers’ “Who Is He (and What Is He to You?).” It’s a particularly on-the-nose selection, as Louis also asks Ordell what is his relationship to Melanie, whom Louis just had a quickie with in her kitchenette. And the Del Amo Mall sequence starts off with Randy Crawford’s version of The Crusaders’s “Street Life,” which was memorably used in the 1981 Burt Reynolds cop movie Sharky’s Machine.

Not as surf music-heavy as Pulp (although the movie does end with the Tiki Gods’ “Monte Carlo Nights,” which I think Tarantino used because it’s from the 1995 Tarantino-capitalizing compilation Pulp Surfin’), Brown, just like Tarantino’s two previous films, reminds viewers how much Tarantino loves filming driving around, listening to music. As Ordell memorably establishes in the movie, when he lets Louis know not to mess with his levels before going in his car and listening to his stereo, music is there for you when you’re on the road, virtually serving as the soundtrack for your life.

Before Robbie gets down to eliminating folk who may drop dime on him, we have him in his car bumping the Brothers Johnson’s version of Shuggie Otis’s “Strawberry Letter 23” and Johnny Cash’s version of Jimmy Driftwood’s “Tennessee Stud” — both are cold-blooded numbers. We see Melanie rocking out (and annoying an already-frustrated Louis) to the Grass Roots’s “Midnight Confessions.” And we also catch Cherry, getting to know the music of the Delfonics (and briefly impressing Robbie when he’s in the car near the end) with “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time?” Finally, the movie ends with Jackie driving off into the sunset, singing along with the lyrics of “Across 110th Street,” probably remembering what she had to do when she was put under pressure”.

I am not sure which score or soundtrack I will choose for the third instalment of this series. It is inevitable to come to a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack and, for me, it had to be Jackie Brown. If someone do not consider it to be his best film, you cannot argue against the brilliance and genius of the soundtrack. To repeat what I said in the first feature, I am partly inspired by Mark Kermode’s must-read and excellent book, Mark Kermode's Surround Sound: The Stories of Movie Music. He co-wrote it with radio producer, Jenny Nelson. There are insightful discussions like this one, where Kermode and Nelson explore everything related to film soundtracks, and highlight and dissect why soundtracks are an essential piece of cinema. No clearer example of music being essential to cinema than Jackie Brown and Quentin Tarantino’s stunning soundtrack. The soundtrack stands as a brilliant work on its own but, when you see the songs used in the film, it is evident that they…

ELEVATE every scene.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: ROSALÍA - LUX

FEATURE:

 

The Best Albums of 2025

ROSALÍA - LUX

__________

I would be very surprised…

PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Maggio for The New York Times

if this is not named the best album of the year by pretty much every critic come the end of the year. Released on 7th November ROSALÍA’s LUX instantly received these enormously impassioned reviews. Go and buy the album. I think people were surprised because it is so different to 2022’s MOTOMAMI. A lot of reaction came to the fact LUX is more influenced by Classical and Opera than any other genre. It is a big shift for the Spanish artist. Even though MOTOMAMI gained all these ecstatic reviews and was one of the most loved albums of 2022, LUX seems to have exceeded that. I shall come to interviews with ROSALÍA, and I will also sample a several reviews. However, there have been a lot of features and opinion pieces around that question of whether LUX is authentically Classic/Opera. Whether purists are turning their noses up or it is highly strange for a commercial artist to do something like this, I am not sure whether it is flattering or insulting for ROSALÍA. Rather than embrace LUX and commend its sheer scale, ambition and brilliance, there seems to be this critical edge. The New York Times wrote that, whilst LUX borrows from Opera and Classical, it commits to neither:

“Sometimes life feels like opera. You experience passion as if you invented it, and loss as if you may not survive it. There’s a thrill in being the main character, a role the Spanish pop star Rosalía takes on with maximalist commitment in her new album, “Lux.”

Its ambition extravagant, “Lux” was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daníel Bjarnason and featuring arrangements by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw.

But how much of the album is really classical music?

That’s not easy to answer, though “Lux” is being advertised as symphonic and operatic. Maybe. These art forms are so open, it’s almost a waste of time to try to say what they are and aren’t. On the most basic level they are mediums of expression, through instruments or the voice, that transcend language.

Yet it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Rosalía has written a modern symphony, as the track list’s “four movements” would suggest. Nor has she written an opera, which is inherently theatrical. She uses both forms to signal extreme scale and feeling, without committing to either. At the end of the day, she has made a pop album with a big budget.

Strangely, Rosalía hasn’t mentioned a form that “Lux” more closely resembles: lieder, or art song, which can contain elements of symphonic music and opera, often with the length of a pop song. When strung together thematically or narratively, they become song cycles like  and “Winterreise,” works that could pass for concept albums today.

It’s more difficult to channel opera. Throughout its history, this art form has been expressed with flowing melodies and musicalized speech alike, but in pastiche and pop culture it’s usually depicted with overblown, Italianate passion.

As a shorthand, opera can convey a sense of heightened feeling, which suits Rosalía’s maximalist vision for “Lux.” But that runs the risk of kitsch, even with her vocal power and beauty, which in “Memória” more resembles Celine Dion than Donizetti.

Rosalía is at her most operatic in “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” a kind of aria that, like the earliest operas, is sung in Italian. By its climax, the song sounds as if it were written for Andrea Bocelli.

It doesn’t get more kitschy than that. But maybe Rosalía would laugh with us on that point. She continually breaks the fourth wall in the recording studio, and in this song she follows the vocal climax by  before cuing a big orchestral finish.

She’s having fun. Classical music and opera clearly aren’t her home. But on “Lux,” they’re her playground”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Maggio for The New York Times

In the first of a few interviews I want to introduce, I am starting off with Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica’s Interview for The New York Times. On a masterpiece where the Spanish artist sings in thirteen different languages, we discover how LUX was this “ labor of love exploring the feminine divine and the brutalities of romance”. It is fascinating reading interview around LUX. People are still talking about the album and I think it will continue for the rest of the year, so big and important are the waves and ripples created by it. Such a hugely powerful work that has raised discussions. A major artist blurring the lines of Pop and pushing it to its limits. Changing courses rapidly but retaining her own vision and voice:

“JOE COSCARELLI And it’s not only a rejection of your own prior work, but it seems to be you looking at the pop landscape and saying, implicitly or explicitly, we’re not doing enough.

ROSALÍA I don’t look to the outside that much, but more like, what am I not doing? What have I not done yet? What do I need to do? And I think that my favorite artists, maybe, are the ones who don’t give you what you want, but what you need.

At the end of the day, making albums for me is like excuses to do what I actually want to be doing. In this case, I wanted to just read more.

COSCARELLI What were you reading?

ROSALÍA Hagiografias, so many hagiografias. Simone Weil, Chris Kraus. These nuns, they were amazing poets, great artists — Hildegard of Bingen — she was like a polímata [polymath], right? She was able to create in so many ways. There’s so many amazing women in history that we don’t listen to enough, we don’t talk about enough.

I just try to be a musician the best way I can and push in experimentation. If that’s literally staying at home, just writing lyrics for a year — or waking up early, sleeping barely nothing to go to the studio and stay for 14 hours working on mixes and not even having them ever perfect enough — that’s what it is to me. I think it is a job at the end of the day.

CARAMANICA Your prior two albums have been trying to reconcile coming from a robust cultural tradition but wanting to break those rules, getting a lot of acclaim and then saying, What do I do with this added attention and responsibility and success? Those felt outward-reaching but this feels different, more internal.

ROSALÍA The other day, I was thinking I made an album from a very different place than I’ve ever done before.

I was hearing this man, he was saying that there’s two different types of confidence, the one that is based on the belief that you’re going to have success — como por mis cojones, we say, right? So you’re kind of like pushing whatever you have to do.

There’s another confidence, which maybe is the lack of fear of failure. I think there’s surrender in this approach. I think it’s the first time that I allowed myself to make an album from this place. Complete surrender — this is what I actually needed to say and sing about and do.

COSCARELLI There was some masculine energy in “Motomami,” which focused on more Caribbean music like reggaeton. Do you think of “Lux” as a distinctly feminine project?

ROSALÍA The main inspiration is feminine mystique, so then for sure there’s more feminine energy. And also the idea of, ser un receptaculo — being a vessel. I was reading the other day, this woman, Ursula [K. Le Guin] says that maybe the first cultural device in history was not a weapon — it was not something sharp to kill something. Maybe it was a vessel, something where you can gather things? And so she was saying that there’s a difference between masculine writing and feminine writing: Masculine writing is about the hero, the triumphs of this hero. And if the hero is not in the story, then it’s not a good story. It’s all about the conflict in the narrative.

Feminine writing, it’s more about an ongoing process. It’s not about the climax and then the resolution. It’s about maybe a person with delusions and transformations and all the things that this person has to lose. It’s not about me, me, I, I.

COSCARELLI This album is grand, there are strings everywhere, highly arranged. It’s operatic.

CARAMANICA Thundering.

ROSALÍA It has this intention of verticality. Some of our projects felt a little bit more horizontal. A more mundane type of energy”.

Maybe it will make this interview seem too disconnected and truncated, though there were a few questions from this NPR interview that interested me. You can read the entire thing, though I wanted to bring in a small sample. I am especially interested by the spirituality and religious iconography through LUX, so reading ROSALÍA’s responses to questions around that are particularly relevant:

“Before this interview I was talking to my editor who also heard this album and she was like, I feel like this is less global than Motomami was.

Interesting.

To me, it is the most global — one, the languages is pretty obvious. But two, yes, it's classical. But classical at one point [was] the lingua franca of the world. Same with Catholicism, really. There's that flamenco is based in Arab culture and Spanish folk and all of these…

In Africa…

And I hear South Asian sounds, I hear Mexican sounds…

Persian… so much.

It's just more subtle. And the subtlety to me feels more natural, honestly. It feels like, oh, the world is effortlessly fitting into a sound that does feel more uniform.

I've experienced different things through all these years of traveling and being exposed to other music and being exposed to other cultures. And all of that I think I carry with me with so much love, and I'm like, I want this to be part of this album. I exist in the world and the world exists within me. I feel like hopefully my love is plural and it's infinite. The same way I'm here and everything can be here and how can I explain this in a song? And I tried. That's what you can find in "La Yugular" That's what it's about. My favorite art, it's where it's a little bit blurry — the personal and the universal.

On this record there's a ton of religious iconography, but it feels spiritual to me in a different way.

Mysticism is the inspiration. It's not trying to fit too much into specific codes, but more of what is my truth, what is my faith and how can I explain this and put it into words which is so hard?

And what you were describing earlier about ["La Yugular"] and ending in the world, and the world ending in you, it kind of reminds me of in Islam, the idea of we're all one soul.

That's the inspiration in that song. That's studying from Islam and being like, okay, so that's the foundations of it. How can I explain these on a song? I'm going to put these ideas, so beautiful, on a song”.

This incredible modern-day classic about female saints, ROSALÍA spoke with The Guardian about forgiveness over cancel culture. It is interesting reading how she has courted controversy because of her music. Not only on LUX from those who feel her use of Classical and Opera is inauthentic or distils the genres. Whether that is her use of sexualised lyrics or bringing Flamenco into Pop (or vice versa), it seems that there is this puritanical streak – especially in Spain – that means artists, especially women, are criticised if they are bold and experiment. Fortunately, it seems that ROSALÍA will continue to be unapologetic and do what she wants. An album like LUX should be celebrated rather than face any criticism:

“What also allowed Rosalía to make an album like this is her unique status. No matter what her critics make of her globe-straddling approach, the exacting study she puts into it, and the supreme execution, are irreproachable. “I always try to find ways to keep learning,” she says. Although she’s learning French and German on Duolingo, she spent a year working with native speakers to get the Lux translations right, including Charlotte Gainsbourg and Justice for the French parts; she also took piano lessons for the first time since she stopped tuition at 16. Equally irreproachable is her pop cultural nous: filming a role for season three of HBO’s Euphoria, modelling for Calvin Klein, being papped taking a bouquet of cigarettes to Charli xcx’s birthday party. On stage on the bravura Motomami tour – probably the decade’s best – Rosalía always had an invasive cameraman on her trail, a comment on voyeurism amplified by the portrait-mode big screens, themselves a sharp reflection on how phones shape our perspective. Rosalía has mastered the sort of celebrity that buys you three years to make an album about God, transcendence and absolution, blowing the budget several times over.

PHOTO CREDIT: Noah P Dillon

She estimates that she produced 97% of Lux alone. “It probably is the most demanding album I’ve ever tried to do,” she says. She made it in Los Angeles, far from her family and home in Barcelona: “The solitude, the isolation, it’s pretty hard to deal with.” But her work requires that kind of asceticism. “I consider myself pretty social, but to do something like this, there’s no other way – it takes a lot of simplifying the day, doing barely nothing but this.” To write, she has to lie in bed. “It comes much easier when you let it come to you and make the space to try to erase yourself and disappear.”

Much as Rosalía would rather disappear into the heady Lux, all the beatification stuff evidently shrouds a classic breakup album. I am also told not to ask about relationships: in 2023, Rosalía and Puerto Rican reggaeton star Rauw Alejandro ended their engagement, months after releasing a loved-up joint EP. On Rosalía’s rhapsodic new song La Perla, she indicts “un terrorista emocional”. “Mejor hablar / Ahora que / Callarme para siempre,” [“I’d rather speak now than forever hold my peace”] she sings on Focu ‘Ranni – a likely callback to El Mal Querer’s Que No Salga la Luna, sung as the abusive groom of the 13th-century Occitan text Flamenca that inspired the album: “Si hay alguien que aquí se oponga / Que no levante la vo’” (“if someone objects, may they not raise their voice”). Another saint she cites, la santuzza Rosalia, called off her wedding the day before the planned ceremony to live as a hermit.

Perfect reverence isn’t Rosalía’s style. “I know that I was made to divinise,” she sings in English on Divinize, likening her vertebrae to rosary beads; Reliquia (relic) makes you think of how she cut off a lock of hair to give to a fan each night on the Motomami tour. God Is a Stalker embodies his first-person perspective; the album’s wild array of languages suggests godlike omniscience. On the cartoonish yet seething Novia Robot (“Robot Girlfriend”), Rosalía decries men who want women to be pliant and emotionless, and sings that she’s “guapa para Dios” – hot for God. She says she always second guesses herself when toying with symbolism, “but that’s something I have to deal with. The beauty of art is putting things on the table and proposing questions, and probably finding more questions than answers – but playfulness is important in order to create.”

It feels inevitable that Rosalía will encounter more criticism for Lux. Some fans are disappointed at her telling Le Monde that locking away her phone to focus on recording meant she wasn’t engaged with the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine (though in response to a fashion designer who questioned her silence on Palestine, she condemned the conflict and said: “I do not see how shaming ourselves is the best way to keep the right moving forward for Palestine’s freedom”). Other criticisms now just seem like occupational hazard: scroll her social media profiles and you’ll see quite a shocking, absurd level of scrutiny and disapproval in the comments.

Much Spanish media started to turn against Rosalía when she introduced pop to flamenco; she encountered more criticism for the sexualised lyrics on Motomami, and for her thirst-trappy social media presence. There’s a respectability trap for women that the sanctified Lux mocks.

“I deal with that by remembering who inspires me,” says Rosalía. “Irreverent women like Joan of Arc, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Cher – divas. They carry the weight and they … supportan.” She hunches under an imagined weight. “Endure. And so that is my inspiration. What I love about them is that they are unapologetic about what they want and what they do, what their path is. That’s a guide, un faro – a lighthouse. Through time, diva has had this negative connotation. But nowadays I don’t feel like it has the same way, and I celebrate women that are unapologetic and that do their path”.

The first of three reviews for LUX I am bringing in is from Pitchfork. Even though it is disappointing that there were so many discussions around LUX and whether it is Pop or it tries to do Classic and Opera and never really does either well, we just need to accept artists will experiment and innovate and that is a good thing. Not boxing and pigeon-holing them in or feeling Pop cannot bring in Classical and Opera. Always this thing about purity and authenticity. This ignorance and elitism that still exists. Pitchfork were impressed by LUX. They wrote how, on her fourth studio album, ROSALÍA offers up “avant-garde classical pop that roars through genre, romance, and religion”:

“LUX takes desire as a holy problem and divinity as a complex solution. Love, men, God, femininity, death, surrender—they all swirl around this idea, expressed in Japanese, Ukrainian, Chinese, Italian, and nine more languages. How did Rosalía begin to understand life’s thorniest questions? She read hagiographies of female saints and poets like Teresa de Jesus, Sun Bu’er, and Hildegard Von Bingen; she studied feminist theory while preparing lines for her acting debut in Euphoria. She looked to these devout women for inspiration and synthesized their messages into her own creed as a 33-year-old pop star trying to make sense of all this insanity.

In this way, LUX feels like a modern scripture of feminine celebrity. “My God I’ll obey… I’ll burn the Rolls‑Royce… tiraré mis Jimmy Choos,” she vows on “Sauvignon Blanc,” promising to renounce luxury in exchange for some ascetic peace. On “Reliquia,” she shrugs off fame as a form of sacrifice—“My heart’s never been my own”—and offers herself as a relic for the world to hold. On “Dios es un stalker,” Rosalia becomes a flawed God, her obsessions with other humans become feral–“I’m your shadow,” “I’m the labyrinth”–she delivers over clean bass and choral filigree like a fucked up prayer, proof that not even otherworldly heroes are free from mortal flaw.

It’s no secret that Rosalía’s engagement to Puerto Rican superstar Rauw Alejandro ended in 2023, right before she began work on this record. LUX also details the journey of heartbreak and recovery first through a pious lens, then blows it up tenfold. On the standout “La Perla,” she cuts men without flinching—“emotional terrorist,” “red flag andante”—a controlled evisceration that could sit next to Fiona Apple in the museum of magnificent dismissals. On the other side is “Mio Cristo,” where she deifies a lover’s pain—“My Christ cries diamonds”—only to face the hard question: “How many blows should have been hugs?” “Novia Robot” takes a broader approach with a mock infomercial for a compliant, purchasable girlfriend. It’s a satire that plays like one of the album’s clearest theses: a woman’s beauty owes no debt to male consumption.

On LUX, forgiveness is a religious doctrine, captured best by Flamenco pop highlight “La Rumba del Perdón.” Modern flamenco stars Estrella Morente and Silvia Pérez Cruz sing through family betrayals and street parables while Rosalía argues that forgiveness is an active decision that restores control to the wounded, even “when power beats out love,” or your best friend steals that “uncut kilo in the drawer.” The closing movement is smaller in frame but larger in feeling. “Memória” takes inventory of what remains, and “Magnolia” releases what will not: “life flashed me its knife, took everything I had, and I thanked her for that.” The promise from the opener holds: She returns to earth, not a saint, but simply finished, landing on that rare pop sensation of being held, seen, and leveled all at once.

Can all this easily be labeled pop music? Yes, but not the kind that chases the algorithm. LUX sits comfortably beside albums that use concert music as a conduit to turn heartbreak into archetypal feminine quests: Vulnicura, Ys, Hounds of Love, Titanic Rising, MAGDALENE. The “bangers” are there; you’re just more likely to find them in a pasture than on a billboard. “Focu’Ranni” swells over chopped voice samples in a melody that feels like the older, wiser cousin to El Mal Querer’s “Pienso en tu mirá”; “Porcelana” raps, gleams, and snarls through descriptions of a tortured diva; and “De Madrugá” speeds by like a meteor aimed at an ex-lover. LUX enlarges the capacity of Rosalía’s artistry without abandoning the direct address that made people fall for her in the first place”.

It is rare that source a music review from The New Yorker, but that is because they do not produce that many. Maybe the nature and sound of LUX is something that fascinated them or couldn’t be ignored. It shows how important, powerful and groundbreaking LUX is that it has caused so many corners of culture and the media to react and offer examination:

“There is a story to “Lux,” or maybe there are a few different stories. The lyrics hint at love, betrayal (one song includes the phrase “un terrorista emocional”), revenge, and acceptance. The combined effect can be exhausting, in ways Rosalía’s previous albums never were: the twists and turns of “La Yugular,” a theological exploration inspired by Islam, are easier to admire than to enjoy—at least until the finale, a pleasingly earthy clip from an old Patti Smith interview. Sometimes the lightest moments are the most affecting, such as when, in “Reliquia,” Rosalía floats into her upper register, delivering a sumptuous and faintly sacrilegious expression of love and loss. “I’ll be your relic / I am your relic,” she sings, in Spanish, and for a moment it all seems simple.

Like virtually all musicians, Rosalía seems to have mixed feelings about how separate she wants to be, really, from the pop marketplace. “I need to think that what I’m doing is pop, because otherwise I don’t think, then, that I am succeeding,” she told the New York Times, in a recent interview. “What I want is to do music that, hopefully, a lot of people can enjoy.” But of course that’s not all she wants. The single most surprising contributor to “Lux” is Mike Tyson, who during a chaotic 2002 press conference told a journalist, “I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot.” This phrase, without the incendiary final word, interrupts the otherwise elegant coda of “Berghain,” shouted a few times by the electronic producer Yves Tumor. The interruption is a shock—startling enough, perhaps, to dissuade some listeners from adding the song to their favorite streaming playlists, lest it ruin the mood. Maybe that’s the idea. Music-streaming services encourage us to mix and match, so perhaps they also encourage us to spend more time listening to songs that fit pleasantly alongside other songs. A small but significant number of musicians have begun to withhold their music from these outlets, some for economic reasons (the sites don’t pay much), some for political reasons (Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is also the chairman of a military-technology company), and some for no stated reason at all. The new Rosalía album is available everywhere, but it echoes this desire to withdraw from a big, messy system, in the hope of encouraging listeners to engage in a more intentional, single-minded way; it’s an album that’s not designed to be ubiquitous, or to slip smoothly into our lives and playlists. “Lux” wants to make us stop whatever we’re doing and listen, which inevitably means that it’s less broadly appealing—less listenable, in a sense—than albums that ask less. It’s also much harder to forget”.

I am going to end with a review from NME. Heralding an artist who has released an “album of astonishing scope and ambition”, this is someone who never repeats herself. Doing something for each album, there is no doubt LUX is the best album of this year. Anyone who criticises a modern Pop/mainstream artist for blending Classical music and Opera into their music is a snob and misinformed. If better known for genres like Reggaeton, New Flamenco or Pop, it is wonderful that ROSALÍA has done this. It also brings these genres more to the forefront. You will see other artists follow her lead:

“The 33-year-old’s fourth and latest album, though, might just be her most adventurous yet. ‘Lux’ contains not just whole worlds, but astral planes, bridging the gap between Earth and whatever you believe heaven to be. It features the Spanish star singing in 13 different languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Latin and Sicilian. She spent a year poring over lyrics, first feeding her instinctive writing into Google Translate and then working closely with professional translators to make sure each line felt natural but also sounded right in song. And its concept was inspired by Rosalía immersing herself in hagiographies, inspired by stories of female saints – or figures comparable to saints in other religions and cultures – from across the globe.

‘Lux’ is, then, an album that asks a lot of you, particularly spanning 18 tracks and one hour in length. But give it what it demands, and it will reward you many times over. It is an astonishing record – one that continuously stops you dead in your tracks, encourages curiosity, and builds a new world for you to dive into, while connecting to the sounds of all of Rosalía’s previous releases. “The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite,” she recently told the New York Times’ Popcast podcast. This album reinforces that – there are no easy hits or quick highs, no addictive loops to get trapped in, and it’s all the more divine for it.

Divinity is central to ‘Lux’. It runs heavy on the spiritual and religious imagery, from Rosalía dressed in what looks like a nun’s habit on the cover to the frequent nods in the lyrics. “Each vertebra reveals a mystery / Pray on my spine, it’s a rosary”, she sings in gorgeous falsetto over shimmering strings and rumbling, rickety percussion on ‘Divinize’. Opener ‘Sexo, Violencia y Llantas’ finds her dividing up two worlds – our earthly chaos of “Blood sports / Coins on throats” and the more magical, mystical promised land of “Sparkles, pigeons and saints”. ‘Dios Es Un Stalker’ – or ‘God Is A Stalker’ in English – has her positioning herself, tongue-in-cheek, as the titular deity, sharing: “I’ve always been so spoiled / And worn out by all this omnipresence / But I’m gonna hijack this heart / I’m gonna stalk it and I’ll show no mercy”.

Rosalía makes bold moves on her latest masterpiece. ‘Mio Christo’ – sung entirely in Italian – is her take on an aria, her vocals soaring to emotional heights. In one moment grand and thundering, the next they’re soft and hushed, her control of her instrument never less than superlative. ‘Novia Robot’ – which features Spanish, Mandarin and Hebrew lyrics – centres on the story of the Chinese Taoist master Sun Bu’er, who intentionally spoiled her beauty by splashing boiling oil on her face to prevent any men she came across from being drawn to her and obstructing a journey she was to undertake from Shandong to Luoyang.

In Rosalía’s hands, that becomes a jump-off point to write about the objectification of women and capitalism’s role in maintaining that status quo. “Every purchase comes with a warranty because our policy is conceived to make us look good and make you happy, no matter the cost!” she says in a mocking spoken-word intro. “We’re proud to be the most successful company in 2025, the one with the highest revenue and the business that harms our sisters the most”.

I am going to wrap it up now. Such a staggering album that will blow you away the first time you hear it, this is the greatest thing that 2025 has produced. In a year when there has been some truly incredible album, ROSALÍA’s LUX is the frontrunner! This constantly evolving and inventive artist, there are few out there…

AS brilliant as her.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Lily Allen – West End Girl

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best Albums of 2025

Lily Allen – West End Girl

__________

ONE of the best-reviewed…

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Denis

albums of this year also happens to be one of my favourites. Lily Allen’s West End Girl is an astonishing album that is so powerful and open. My words will probably not do full justice, suffice to say that themes addressed include marital breakdown, including infidelity, betrayal, and the complexities of open relationships. I will end this feature with a review for West End Girl. I have been a fan of Allen since her 2006 debut, Alright, Still. See if a wonderful artist. Recorded in Los Angeles over ten days in December 2024, West End Girl reached number two in the U.K. I will return to British Vogue for a review of West End Girl. However, I will start out with them. I love how quickly the album came out. On 20th October, Allen announced that West End Girl would be released four days later. Journalists barely had any time to get their mind around it. The immediacy and lack of fanfare, I think, provides West End Girl more weight and importance:

“So why now? “I made this record in December 2024 and it was a way for me to process what was happening in my life,” she says, choosing her words with the same care you might use to, say, pick up the shards of a broken wine glass. Because what was happening in her life at that time was that her marriage to American actor David Harbour, star of Stranger Things and various Marvel movies, whom she had wed in Las Vegas in 2020 after meeting him on dating app Raya, was falling apart, amid reports of alleged infidelity on his part.

The album certainly appears to tell a story of a marriage coming spectacularly undone; of the all-consuming pain and confusion of betrayal. The upbeat opening track, “West End Girl”, acts as a sunny musical prelude of sorts, setting the scene of a newlywed couple embarking on married life in a Brooklyn brownstone (sounds awfully like the home she and Harbour showed Architectural Digest around in 2023, to internet-breaking effect). Already, though, there are warning signs (“You were pushing this forward / made me feel a bit awkward,” she sings). From there, the album unfolds like a tragic novel, each subsequent song a different chapter charting a relationship’s demise.

Take one of the album’s standout tracks, “Sleepwalking”: “You let me think it was me in my head / and nothing to do with them girls in your bed”. Or “Dallas Major”: “You know I used to be quite famous that was way back in the day / I probably should explain how my marriage has been open since my husband went astray”. Allen’s deadpan, “fuck you” humour is alive and well: “What a sad, sad man, it’s giving 4chan stan” she sings on “4chan”. Running through it all is a narrator desperately trying to understand what the hell happened to the life she thought she had. So here’s the question then: is it her?

Allen sucks on her vape. “There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel,” she says, in the manner of someone who has recently spent an inordinate amount of money on lawyers’ fees. “It is inspired by what went on in the relationship.” What did she feel as she was making it? Cue more displacement activity as she applies a coat of lip balm and replies: “Confusion, sorrow, grief, helplessness.”

Harbour too is careful about what he says about their marriage. In conversation with GQ in April this year he would say only that “There’s no use in that form of engaging [with tabloid news] because it’s all based on hysterical hyperbole”.

Between the end of last year and speaking to her now, Allen has been to “some very, very bleak places” emotionally. It wasn’t always thus: though she has long since scrubbed her Instagram clean of any Harbour-related content, scroll back far enough on his and you can find the blissful photos from their wedding day: her, beaming, in a 1960s-style Dior minidress, being held aloft outside the Graceland Wedding Chapel; the newly marrieds with her children having a celebratory In-N-Out burger.

Listeners of Miss Me? will know that at the start of 2025, she had to take time off for her spiralling mental health. She wasn’t sleeping, she wasn’t really eating. (“I’ve had real problems with my food over the past few years,” she says, and in the thick of the break-up, “it got really, really, really bad.”) Having been sober for six years, it was the closest she had come to relapsing. “The feelings of despair that I was experiencing were so strong,” she explains. “The last time that I felt anything like that, drugs and alcohol were my way out, so it was excruciating to sit with those [feelings] and not use them.”

And so, for the first time in her life, she put herself into a residential facility. “I’ve been into those places before against my will and I feel like that’s progress in itself,” she says of her self-awareness this time. “That’s strength. I knew that the things I was feeling were too extreme to be able to manage, and I was like, ‘I need some time away.’” What was the sign that told her this was different? She looks at me. “That I wanted to die,” she says simply, letting the words hang in the air. She breaks the silence with an almost embarrassed laugh, like a tic.

For now she insists she is “really not in the same space that I was in when I wrote [these] songs. I have come a long way.” She got back into the “thick of recovery”, found a sponsor and started going to daily meetings again. Meditation, therapy and antidepressants have all helped. Yes, there are good and bad days, but, “I feel OK, actually,” she says, trying out the words to see how they feel. “Maybe the play has given me an outlet to express my rage”

I will move to an interview with The Times. Allen discusses West End Girl and the end of her marriage. The struggle to stay sober, and what comes next for her. A successful and brilliant stage actor, it seems like more music is at the forefront of her mind. The more you pass through West End Girl, different aspects come to light. The extraordinary lyrics. Smart, funny, frank, vulnerable and vicious, you do wonder how she will follow this album. In terms of the direction taken:

“I ask about some specifics in the album. In the song Tennis Allen describes spotting a message ping on her husband’s phone from another woman, called Madeline. Who is she? “A fictional character.” Is she a construct of others? “Yes.” Another song’s lyrics, which raise plenty of questions go: “We had an arrangement/ Be discreet and don’t be blatant/ It had to be with strangers.” Which suggests to me an unconventional marriage that allows flings, so long as they are within certain parameters.

“I just feel we are living in really interesting times — in terms of how we define intimacy and monogamy, people being disposable or not,” Allen says. “The way we are being intimate with each other is changing as humans … Lots of young women are not finding the idea of marriage or even a long-term relationship that attractive any more.”

But is that such a bad thing? At least there will be far fewer people stuck in loveless relationships. “Oh, I don’t know [that] it’s necessarily bad,” says Allen, whose own parents, the actor Keith Allen and the producer Alison Owen, divorced when she was four. “Lots of people from my parents’ generation stayed together for ever and were miserable. You didn’t have endless choice so you may have worked at something harder. But now you don’t have to.”

We meet in a members’ club in London, on a hot day that brings to mind her early hit LDN — “Sun is in the sky/ Oh why oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?” That was 2006, the second song from the vibrant, smart 21-year-old after her No 1 smash Smile.

Allen is 40 now and dressed for her new record’s mood in black, with shoulder-length black hair and a vape on the go. Right at the start she pops her phone down to record the interview; she has that defensive side to her, but mostly she is brash, funny — an open book you would find in the thrillers section.

She wrote West End Girl last December, in just ten days. “I was really depressed,” she admits. “I thought I didn’t have any good songs left. My writing had been really bad and it took something to happen in my life, for everything to be blown up, for me to be able to go, ‘Oh, here she is.’”

PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Denis

Is there a part of her that would rather just cower away? “Well, traditionally in my life, when traumatic things happened, I’ve taken time to step away,” Allen says. “I certainly don’t think I could have got up on stage days after losing a child.” She has suffered a miscarriage and a stillbirth. “But that is probably more of an anatomical thing. And there are levels to the humiliation — right?”

West End Girl is fantastic: punchy, sad, funny, singalong. “It will piss off lots of people,” she says. I reckon that her break-up tales will win listeners’ sympathy. “Time will tell,” she replies, laughing. “I am a 40-year-old mother of two teenagers — it’s just not that big a deal.” Well, social media may disagree: this will be the most gossiped-about album for years, although Allen has no concerns about releasing it. The night before starting it, she wrote down 18 song titles — all of which stuck. “Nobody knew what was going on in my life,” she says. “So I got into the studio, cried for two hours and then said, ‘Let’s make some music.’ ”

Early on in West End Girl she says she wants to “lay my truth on the table”. So, with lyrics about subjects ranging from cheating to vasectomies, is it all true? “I don’t think I could say it’s all true — I have artistic licence,” Allen says, cautiously. “But yes, there are definitely things I experienced within my relationship that have ended up on this album.”

Now Allen plans on being a pop star again. She will tour West End Girl next year and hopes to be back in the studio soon, while taking a break from Miss Me?. More theatre will have to wait too. Her West End debut in 2021, 2:22 A Ghost Story — the play that sets off the marital breakdown in West End Girl — was well received, but reviews for Hedda were mixed (“Some good, some terrible,” is her summation). “Do I want to be a theatre dame?” she ponders. “No, not really. But it is a medium which I find exhausting, relentless but fascinating.”

She was sitting in the New York flat that she bought with Harbour when Olivia Rodrigo’s manager emailed a few years ago, asking Allen if she would appear with the pop star at Glastonbury. Her daughters said, “You have to.” The family went to Somerset. “It’s been years since I put out an album; they’ve never really seen me on stage,” Allen says. “Marnie thought that I was going to be a backing singer; their minds were blown. People went ballistic… Marnie said, ‘So, were you popular then?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I was quite — back in my day.’ But we’d been living in a bubble in Brooklyn.”

That bubble has burst but Allen says she is “OK”. How? “I’m financially OK,” she says. “I have a roof over my head and food in the fridge and my kids are doing well and those markers are huge.” She sung her song F* You with Rodrigo, directed at the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade. Who would she aim that song to now? “There’s not really anyone I’m that f*ed off with, personally,” she shrugs. “I can’t think of anyone I let get under my skin these days”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Francesca Allen for British Vogue

I feel it is important, for this series, to get words from the artists about their album. It adds something that my words cannot. I could not find any interviews with Dave and his new album, The Boy Who Plays the Harp, but there are (fortunately) interview with Lily Allen. Rather than end with British Vogue, I think I shall come back to them next, as there is another review I feel is best to finish with:

“Rules for an open marriage. Conversations with his mistress. Reflections on a secret stash of sex toys. What sounds like scraps from someone’s Notes app that would usually be locked behind an iPhone passcode is actually a snapshot of what has been laid bare by Lily Allen in her new album, West End Girl. With critical acclaim across the board, this is a break-up album like no other, one that was written and recorded over just 10 days following the end of her four-year marriage to the actor David Harbour.

Speaking to British Vogue, Allen said of the album, her first in seven years: “There are things that are on the record that I experienced within my marriage, but that’s not to say that it’s all gospel,” she said. Still, regardless of how much of the album straddles fact or fiction, the material is deliciously raw, and it’s impossible not to take Allen’s lyrics seriously.

In “Pussy Palace”, she sings about visiting an apartment that her protagonist believed her husband had been using for martial arts, but instead discovers “sex toys, butt plugs, lube” and “hundreds of Trojans”. In “Madeline”, the narrator confronts a younger woman sleeping with her husband (“Do you two ever talk about me? Has he told you that he doesn’t love me?”) and addresses insecurities that every woman can relate to: “I’ve gotten old, gotten ugly”. Then there’s “Beg for Me”, a song articulating the primal needs we’re sometimes afraid to say out loud, particularly in today’s single positivity era (“​​I wanna feel held / I wanna be told I’m special and I’m unusual”), and “Let You W/In”, a defiant anthem about reclaiming the narrative from an ex who silenced you: “I’m sick of carrying, suffering for your sins.”

On many occasions, Allen’s lyrics sound less like words from globally available songs than they do voice notes recorded for a close friend. But it’s because of this, along with the insatiable synths and meticulously crafted hooks, that the album deserves all the praise it’s getting. In today’s hyper-manicured, PR-obsessed celebrity climate – where artists are often pretending to be open rather than being so – hearing a woman in the public eye being so unabashedly vulnerable, honest and explicit feels exciting and reassuring. Allen is singing about fears, traumas, and anxieties that many of us have experienced and yet, out of shame, often feel compelled to keep to ourselves.

While creating art out of heartbreak is nothing new – break-up albums abound now as much as they always have – nobody is doing it with quite so much guttural grub and grit. The level of detail is as shocking as it is thrilling. This is especially true when you consider the litany of misogynistic tropes that have prevented female artists from addressing those who’ve harmed them. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, particularly if she’s a writer. And yet, so often we dilute our stories down to make ourselves seem more palatable, in fear of coming across as vengeful, malevolent, or even just a little bit angry. Say what you like about female empowerment – in 2025, these are still modes of expression many women feel compelled to quieten, even when they’re completely warranted.

All this feels particularly revolutionary in the context of Allen’s tempestuous relationship with the media. In the earlier days of her career, the singer was eviscerated by the tabloids, frequently having to fight off false stories while navigating a relentless churn of articles about her body, relationships and even her children. To this day, Allen remains a target: consider the recent opprobrium she received after admitting to not knowing how many abortions she’d had. In this climate, West End Girl feels like a triumphant clap-back, one that serves as a reminder of Allen’s talents, yes, but also as a woman in the public eye who deserves our compassion and respect. I’ll be listening on repeat all weekend”.

I am ending with this five-star review from The Independent and their take on a modern masterpiece. Even though there were complaints around the price of pre-sale tickets and the lack of dates, Allen is taking her new album on the road next year. I know there will be a lot of fans there supporting Allen. It will be amazing to hear West End Girl on the road:

“Across the early, easy-breezy songs, a narrative begins to take shape: the husband proposes an open relationship, and she agrees… reluctantly. “I tried to be your modern wife/ But the child in me protests,” could be the finest lyric in pop this year, lamented through Auto-Tune over a mournful dubstep beat. The humour grows darker as he takes liberties with the rules of their arrangement. On “Tennis” Allen repeatedly demands, “Who the f***’s Madeline?” over Stepford Wives–style “dinner’s ready” production. Madeline – the “Becky with the good hair” of West End Girl – doesn’t escape unscathed. The next track, named after the pseudonym under which she’s saved in the husband’s phone, is a flamenco-meets-spaghetti-western showdown: a direct address, an interrogation over text, gunshots echoing behind each plea for truth. A Valley Girl voice cuts in, assuring Allen it’s “only sex” and signing off with a cloying “love and light”.

Sitting squarely at the heart of the album – track seven of 14 – “Pussy Palace” serves as the point of no return. Allen describes throwing her husband out of their marital home in New York, sending him to his separate West Village apartment. When she goes there to drop something off, she’d assumed it was a dojo (one of many eyebrow-raising moments, considering Harbour is trained in jiu-jitsu). Instead, she discovers what she says is his base for frequent sex. “So am I looking at a sex addict (sex addict, sex addict, sex addict)?” she asks, her voice hollow.

The listener has barely recovered when, over the old-Hollywood strings and delicate finger-plucking of the following ballad, “Just Enough”, Allen wonders whether her husband has fathered a child with someone else. Again and again, she pecks at herself in songs where she feels too old, too exhausted to be desirable. She even books a facelift in her late thirties to win his love (“I just want to meet your needs/ And for some reason I revert to people pleasing,” she admits breathily on “Nonmonogamummy”).

Allen has said she drew from personal experience to write songs that feel universal, though that relatability only really lands in the final two tracks – and they’re two of her best. On the quietly triumphant“Let You W-in,” she lays out the album’s aim: “I can walk out with my dignity if I lay my truth out on the table.” What’s eerily universal is how easy it is, in love, to drown in someone else’s shame and mistake it for your own. On the bittersweet closing ballad “Fruityloop”, she serves herself a slice of responsibility: “I’m just a little girl/ Looking for her daddy.”

After two albums that defined mid-2000s British pop, Allen lost her grip on the pop star version of herself that once felt effortless. Sheezus and No Shame had the same attitude but lacked focus. The pain of this real-life breakup has given her something solid to attack with all her might, and West End Girl feels like the clarity she’s been writing toward for years. In 2025, Allen sounds newly alive in the contradictions we loved her for: acid-tongued and soft-hearted, ironic and sincere, broken again but alright, still”.

Without doubt one of the best albums of this year, you just know that West End Girl is going to pick up awards. I think it will get a Mercury nomination, and there will be other honours. Anyone who has not heard the album needs to listen straight away, as I guarantee it will hit you hard! There is humour and wit among lyrics that must have been so hard to write. Perhaps exorcising and cathartic, you have to admire Lily Allen’s bravery and strength to get them out, as she is documenting some incredible trough times! I know that others will be able to relate to West End Girl and emphasise with Allen. One of our greatest and most treasured artists, we all hope that there is nothing but happiness and pace for Lily Allen going forward. It is the least she deserves! Take some time to properly experience…

THE extraordinary West End Girl.