FEATURE: The Great American Songbook: Lana Del Rey

FEATURE:

 

 

The Great American Songbook

PHOTO CREDIT: Steven Meisel for W Magazine

Lana Del Rey

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I have featured…

Lana Del Rey a fair few times through the years. As she has a new album, Stove, out in January, it is a good time to feature her in this series. The New York-born artist is one of the greatest of her generation. With such a distinct sound and having released some of the best albums of the past decade or so, I am focusing on her now for this The Great American Songbook. A twenty-song distillation might seem a bit tough, but I hope it compels others to dig deep. I have never seen Del Rey perform live, but she is an artist that I definitely want to see at some point. She has released so many incredible albums. They are quite cinematic and sweeping. Until I discovered Lana Del Rey about a decade or so ago, I don’t think that I had heard anyone like her. She is someone who I have so much respect for. In terms of her consistency and brilliant songwriting. Her incredible and acclaimed live performances. I am ending this feature with a mixtape of her best twenty songs. Or the ones that I connect to most. Though it scratches the surface of her talent. It is a salute and admiring nod to…

A modern icon.

FEATURE: Over the Lights, Under the Moon… Looking Ahead to the Fiftieth Anniversary of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside

FEATURE:

Over the Lights, Under the Moon…

Looking Ahead to the Fiftieth Anniversary of Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside

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EVEN though…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Aris

we are talking about 2028, I think that this celebration needs preparation and some planning. In terms of celebrating big Kate Bush album anniversaries, next year is a fallow year. 2027 is when The Dreaming turns forty-five. 2028 is a big one. Kate Bush turns seventy on 30th July. The Red Shoes turns thirty-five. However, the biggest two anniversaries happen at the start of the year. On 20th January, Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights, is fifty. I know there will be a lot of celebration. Magazine articles and maybe some repeats. Kate Bush on the BBC or Top of the Pops. I am sure the song will get a streaming boost and there will also be something new. It would be great if there were podcast episodes or even  something more in-depth, such as a book. However, on 17th February, The Kick Inside celebrates fifty years. It is the first fiftieth anniversary for any of her albums, so it is this big event. When Hounds of Love turned forty back in September, there were a few events but nothing huge. However, when an album turns fifty, it means more and I feel there will be more fuss. It is unlikely we will get any reissue of the album where Kate Bush reveals unheard songs or takes. Any rarities or anything incomplete. Even though I am excited to mark forty-eight years of The Kick Inside. However, I feel the fiftieth is too huge to ignore! There is a book from Laura Shenton that only costs a few quid. It takes us inside this album and provides a lot of depth and detail. As yet, there are no other books about the album. No entry in the 33 1/3 series. It is tempting to pitch it myself, because I am not sure anyone else will write it.

The Kick Inside is my favourite album ever. I am going to end with a couple of pieces about the album. Alongside side magazine features and some celebratory podcasts and the like, we do need an event and listening party. Wuthering Heights will get a lot of buzz on 20th January, 2028, and a few weeks later, there will be renewed fascination. I love events in small venues but, for an album like The Kick Inside, you need something bigger where loads of fans can get together. Inspired by a fiftieth anniversary panel of The Beatles’ eponymous album in 2018, I feel like there should be an event where there is a panel. I would not be at the centre but, with people in mind – such as journalist Laura Snapes (who I will quote soon enough), Kate Bush News and some mega fans of her work – and an opportunity to combine this with a listening party and musicians performing songs from The Kick Inside and providing their own stamp, it would be a wonderful evening. I think that somewhere as big as Alexandra Palace would be too expensive. This was a venue I think Kate Bush was scouting for potential live work. I can’t remember if it was for The Tour of Life in 1979 or 2014 for Before the Dawn, but she did consider this for performance. Even if the venue does not connect with The Kick Inside, it would be a great location. However, it may be too pricey. Union Chapel or The Roundhouse are alternative London venues. In terms of demand, you know that the fiftieth of Hounds of Love will get people flocking in. However, for a less popular album, is there going to be that demand? I feel, if there was a packed night where artists performed, there was a playback, discussion and some special guests, then it would make it worthwhile. In terms of those who I would love to involve, they include Gered Mankowitz (who photograpohed Bush between 1978 and 1979), Andrew Powell (who produced The Kick Inside), Duncan Mackay and David Paton (who played on the album) and family. Paddy Bush played on the album and John Carder Bush would be amazing to talk to!

think we will see something huge for Hounds of Love’s fiftieth, but that is a whole decade away now! The Kick Inside turns fifty in just over two years, but there is a lot to plan. It is going to be expensive getting a venue and people together. Also, it is asking a lot for people to brave a cold February night to go to an event, so it has to be something worth the trip! We can’t let such a huge anniversary go by with some articles and podcasts – as great as that would be. There are a couple of features/reviews that I want to source. To show why the album is so special and it deserves celebration on its fiftieth anniversary. Stereogum dived into The Kick Inside on its fortieth anniversary in February 2018. An album that helped change music forever:

“Released when Bush was 19 in 1978, it included songs she had written as early as age 13 and introduced the world into Bush’s wild imagination. Arriving in a year otherwise dominated by disco and punk (“Wuthering Heights” replaced Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” as the UK’s #1 single) this imagination felt “strangely out of time” and singular. The album’s focus on female sexuality, its use of voice as an instrument, and Bush’s unique storytelling techniques -- particularly her exciting use of fluid narrative identity, in which she changes identities and narrative point of view with every song -- created a new, unprecedented model for women in music. The Kick Inside (referred to as TKI from now on) made the world a safer place not just for women musicians but also for freaks and outcasts everywhere, and its anniversary is well worth celebrating.

Beginning with its title, which describes the sensation a pregnant woman feels as her fetus kicks, TKI is an album about bodies: the way they move (“Moving,” “Kite”), the desires they express (“The Man With the Child in His Eyes, ”“Feel It,” “L’Amour Looks Something Like You”), the way they both die and generate new life (“Room for the Life,” “The Kick Inside,”), and the way they sometimes return to haunt their lovers (“Wuthering Heights”). The album opener, “Moving,” invites listeners to move in order to free their minds: “As long as you're not afraid to feel… Don't think it over, it always takes you over/And sets your spirit dancing.” The importance of movement and the body is crucial to TKI, especially because Bush herself trained in dance prior to its release and performed elaborate, endearingly earnest dance routines in her performances and videos. Bodies and movement are an unusual focus for any album, much more so from one by a teenage British girl in 1978.

TKI is also revolutionary because it establishes Bush’s narrative style as fluid and multiple; her songs are short stories each written from a different narrator’s perspective rather than from her own point of view. This writing style stands in stark contrast to the traditionally personal style of music focusing on love and heartbreak that continues to dominate the charts. “I often find myself inspired by unusual, distorted, weird subjects, as opposed to things that are straightforward. It's a reflection of me, my liking for weirdness,” she said in 1980. Unlike the majority of pop/rock artists, The “I” in Bush’s music is rarely Bush. Her songs are not confessional, but are rather short stories told from the points of views of a diverse range of narrators. From Bush’s songs, we can know about themes that interest her, but Kate Bush herself rarely speaks in her work; her narrators, who occupy multiple genders, races, and historical times, do instead. This is a deeply radical break from traditional “confessional “ songwriting, especially for women up to that point. Consider that the most acclaimed female musician of the time, and probably of all time, Joni Mitchell, is most-lauded for her confessional album, Blue.

“That's what all art's about -- a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't in real life,” Bush said, explaining her writing technique. “Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really -- to do something that's just not possible.” As a result, Bush’s ever-changing but always unusual topics on this and all her albums enraptured many outcasts, weirdos, and freaks, and created space to, as she sang on her later album The Dreaming’s “Leave it Open,” “let the weirdness in” to popular music. Rufus Wainwright summed up her appeal for outsiders when he said, “She connects so well with a gay audience because she is so removed from the real world. She is one of the only artists who makes it appear better to be on the outside than on the inside.”

The song that perhaps best captures what makes TKI revolutionary is its title track, which merges all the aforementioned topics: use of voice as instrument, feminine agency, and Bush’s fluid, narrative-story writing technique on unusual topics. “The Kick Inside” is based on the English folktale “The Ballad of Lucy Wan,” in which a brother impregnates and then decapitates his sister. Bush’s take on the story is sneakily radical, especially from a feminist perspective. In the folktale, the sister only speaks briefly before her brother kills her, but Bush rewrites the story from the sister’s point of view, literally giving voice to a history of women silenced by male violence, and changes the story so that the sister actively chooses her own death instead of being her brother’s victim. Bush said in 1978, “The sister becomes pregnant by her brother. And because it is so taboo and unheard of, she kills herself...The actual song is in fact the suicide note.” While the death is still tragic, the fact that Bush re-envisions a violent narrative passed down through centuries of patriarchal generations from a woman’s point-of-view and places the story’s narrative action in the woman’s hands is a subversive act.

One might say that this act of feminist re-visioning parallels the narrative of Bush’s own career. Instead of drawing from normalized, “feminine” confessional-based musical forms, she created odd, polarizing sounds with her voice to tell stories of “Strange Phenomena”, and later took complete sonic control over her work as a producer and multi-instrumentalist in a still-predominantly male-dominated industry where women are often denied agency or forced to compete with one another (Britney vs. Christina, anyone?). Bush co-produced 1980’s Never For Ever, which was the UK’s first #1 album by a British female solo artist, and started producing her work completely on her own for the rest of her career starting with her 1982 masterpiece The Dreaming. Over the course of her career she has continued to break records: in 2014, she became the only artist besides the Beatles and Elvis Presley to have had eight albums simultaneously on the UK’s top 40 chart, and her 2014 Before the Dawn live shows -- her first live performances since 1979 -- sold out in minutes.

Perhaps most importantly, beginning with The Kick Inside she has inspired a wide array of artists to “let the weirdness in.” Lady Gaga covered Bush’s duet with Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Give Up,” because she wanted to “make something that young people would hear and learn something about Kate Bush”, and her theatricality has its roots in Bush’s so-bizarre-they’re-brilliant live performances. Björk frequently cites Bush as a pivotal influence on her musical “form”, saying "I remember being underneath my duvet at the age of 12, fantasising about Kate Bush," and even sent Bush of a demo of herself covering Bush’s “Moving” in 1989. Lorde played “Running Up That Hill” before the shows on her Melodrama tour, and Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan said of Bush, “As an artist myself, [she’s] helped me to not be frightened to put my vulnerability as a woman [in my work] and in that, be powerful.” Bush’s influence is also felt in hip-hop, especially due to her early use of sampling, best seen in her sampling of the Gregorian chanting from Werner Herzog’s film Nosfertu The Vampyre in Hounds Of Love’s “Hello Earth.” One of her biggest champions is OutKast’s Big Boi, who has repeatedly called her “my favorite artist of all time,” and Tricky from Massive Attack said of Bush’s song “Breathing,” which features the line “breathing my mother in,”: “I’m a kid from a council flat, I’m a mixed-raced guy...totally different life to Kate Bush, but that lyric, ‘breathing my mother in,’ my whole career’s based on that.” Even Chris Martin “admitted” that Coldplay’s “Speed Of Sound” “was developed after the band had listened to Kate Bush”.

Before getting to a conclusion, I want to bring in parts of Laura Snapes’s 2019 review/retrospective for Pitchfork. Perhaps one of the most female albums ever released, you can read other features that take us inside the making of The Kick Inside. It always lows me away that Kate Bush, aged nineteen when the album was released, was writing in such a mature way. Much more fascinating, insightful and fearless than so many of her peers. We do not discuss the influence of this album enough, in terms of how it empowered and ignited generations of artists that followed:

“That Kate Bush named her debut album The Kick Inside might make it seem like her music is the product of a maternal wellspring. Women artists likening their work to their children is one culturally accepted way for them to discuss creativity; it implies a reassuring process of nurture. Another is as a bolt from the blue, a divine phenomenon which they just happened to catch and transmit to a deserving audience; no need for fear of a female genius here. But Bush’s debut, released when she was 19, says “Up yours” to all that.

Yes, the song “The Kick Inside” is about childbearing, but the young woman is pregnant by her brother and on the cusp of suicide to spare their family from shame. Subverting the folk song “Lucy Wan” (the brother kills his sister in the original), it shows the depths of Bush’s studies and her everlasting curiosity for how far desire can drive a person. She was signed at 16 but her debut took four years to make, during which she engaged multiple teachers in a process of spiritual and physical transformation. She pays tribute to their lessons alongside rhapsodies on unexplained phenomena, delirious expressions of lust, and declarations of earthbound defiance. Rather than feminine function or freak accident, these are the cornerstones of creativity, she suggested: mentorship and openness, but also the self-assurance to withstand those forces. Her purpose was as strong as any of them.

Besides, Bush had always felt that she had male musical urges, drawing distinctions between herself and the female songwriters of the 1960s. “That sort of stuff is sweet and lyrical,” Bush said of Carole King and co. in 1978, “but it doesn’t push it on you, and most male music—not all of it, but the good stuff—really lays it on you. It’s like an interrogation. It really puts you against the wall and that’s what I’d like my music to do. I’d like my music to intrude.” (Evidently, she had not been listening to enough Laura Nyro.) That reasoning underpinned Bush’s first battle with EMI, who wanted to release the romp “James and the Cold Gun” as her first single. Bush knew it had to be the randy metaphysical torch song “Wuthering Heights,” and she was right: It knocked ABBA off the UK No. 1 spot. She soon intruded on British life to the degree that she was subject to unkind TV parodies. 

What made Bush’s writing truly radical was the angles she could take on female desire without ever resorting to submissiveness. “Wuthering Heights” is menacing melodrama and ectoplasmic empowerment; “The Saxophone Song”—one of two recordings made when she was 15—finds her fantasizing about sitting in a Berlin bar, enjoying a saxophonist’s playing and the effect it has on her. But she is hardly there to praise him: “Of all the stars I’ve seen that shine so brightly/I’ve never known or felt in myself so rightly,” she sings of her reverie, with deep seriousness. We hear his playing, and it isn’t conventionally romantic but stuttering, coarse, telling us something about the unconventional spirits that stir her.

And if there is trepidation in the arrangement of “The Man With the Child in His Eyes,” it reflects other people’s anxieties about its depicted relationship with an older man: Will he take advantage, let her down? This is the other teenage recording, her voice a little higher, less powerfully exuberant, but disarmingly confident. Her serene, steady note in the chorus—“Oooooh, he’s here again”—lays waste to the faithless. And whether he is real, and whether he loves her, is immaterial: “I just took a trip on my love for him,” she sings, empowered, again, by her desire. There’s not a fearful note on The Kick Inside, and yet there is still room for childish wonder: Just because Bush appeared emotionally and musically sophisticated beyond her years didn’t mean denying them.

“Kite” unravels like a children’s story: First she wants to fly up high, away from cruel period pains (“Beelzebub is aching in my belly-o”) and teenage self-consciousness (“all these mirror windows”) but no sooner is she up than she wants to return to real life. It is a wacky hormone bomb of a song, prancing along on toybox cod reggae and the enervating rat-a-tat-tat energy that sustained parodies of Bush’s uninhibited style; still, more fool anyone who sneers instead of reveling in the pure, piercing sensation of her crowing “dia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-ia-mond!” as if giving every facet its own gleaming syllable.

The Kick Inside was Bush’s first, the sound of a young woman getting what she wants. Despite her links to the 1970s’ ancien régime, she recognized the potential to pounce on synapses shocked into action by punk, and eschewed its nihilism to begin building something longer lasting. It is ornate music made in austere times, but unlike the pop sybarites to follow in the next decade, flaunting their wealth while Britain crumbled, Bush spun hers not from material trappings but the infinitely renewable resources of intellect and instinct: Her joyous debut measures the fullness of a woman’s life by what’s in her head”.

There is so much to discuss and dissect. I think the biggest pull will be finding artists who are inspired by the album. Maybe few directly as influenced compared to albums like The Dreaming, Hounds of Love or The Sensual World (I know Charli xcx is a fan of this album), that will be a challenge, as The Kick Inside is not as referenced as other albums from Kate Bush. However, there is a hunger from fans. There has not been a massive gathering of any significant size since 2014’s Before the Dawn. There might never be another Kate Bush concert and fan conventions are not really a thing in music anymore. I do think it is a perfect opportunity to go beyond The Kick Inside and talk about Kate Bush’s influence now. What’s to say massive artists like Charli xcx or Björk would object? Having them as part of the night would be amazing. Starting out with a discussion about Wuthering Heights, its video and the Top of the Pops appearance. Then listening to the album in full. A panel where there would be a couple of breaks for watching videos and live performances, before a couple of special guests (pre-recorded words from Kate Bush would be incredible!), before a final live performance would end a wonderful celebration. It will cost thousands of pounds to book a venue and bring it all together, so I am thinking a crowd-funding campaign would be needed. Fans could get reward for donating. Kate Bush’s influence is as strong today as it has ever been. We can trace it all back to her debut album, released on 17th February, 1978. No artist who cites Kate Bush as an inspiration can overlook The Kick Inside. To me, it is one of the most influential albums…

EVER released.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Loyle Carner – hopefully !

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best Albums of 2025

 

Loyle Carner – hopefully !

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TWO more albums to cover off…

in this series, where I explore the best and my favourite of the year. The penultimate choice is from one of my fave artists, Loyle Carner. I have been a fan of his for many years, and I think that hopefully ! is a phenomenal album. I will come to a review for that album. One of the best-received of this year. I am getting to some interviews with Loyle Carner before that. I want to start off with an interview from CLASH. On an album where Loyle Carner was trying to take himself less seriously and just embrace the moment, he also spoke about Glastonbury, the power of collaborations and his heartfelt and personal new album:

“Much has changed for Loyle in the last decade of his career. Making his debut with 2014 EP ‘A Little Late’, a then-nineteen-year-old Loyle came through with a distinctly British take on rap, inflected with the indie acoustics that soundtracked his childhood home. A Soulquarian influence, too, would shape his early material, layering his candid flows over easy-going, boom-bap beats. At the crux of that self-released project is loss, namely that of his stepfather Nik. And what was evident then was a knack for storytelling influenced by his musical heroes: Mos Def, Jehst and Common.

“I never really thought of myself as an out-and-out rapper,” he tells CLASH, describing his work as a more fluid routine of expression. To the masses, his verses felt familiar, despite being personal. Rapping was an opportunity to memorialise life’s challenges; an outlet and an outpouring of suppressed emotions. “I wasn’t around a lot of men growing up really, so I was in a space where communication of emotion was commonplace,” he explains, when asked about his inherent ability to articulate feelings beyond the surface. “I think I was privy to a lot of scenarios with my mum, my grandmother, and their friends being around the house. I was learning how to operate by being around them.” Whilst he acknowledges the virtues of his upbringing, he cautions against the use of an oversimplified response. “It’s not so cut and dry,” he reminds himself.

‘hopefully !’ finds comfort in new dynamics, in an ensemble of musicians who operate as the record’s North Star. Brought together during his last sold-out tour, Aviram Barath, Richard Spaven, Finn Carter, Mark Mollison, Yves Fernandez and Marla Kether, form the backbone of Loyle’s most collaborative work to date. “I’ve always felt that it’s a very lonely job, to be a musician on your own,” he explains. “I prefer dissolving into a group, as opposed to having to be the figurehead of it. It’s a kind of anonymity, in a way.” On ‘hopefully !’, Loyle had to unlearn his prior process and think of not just the story he wanted to tell but the sonic world he wanted it located in. “Sometimes I would get my lyrics down quite quickly, and then move into the other space with the rest of the guys and think about how musically it should be finished,” he says. “I had to learn how to make music again for the first time. It was quite profound.”

Loyle’s words are situated within spacious production, his purpose revealed in a kind of recital. Take the album’s prelude single ‘in my mind’, an ambling rumination painted in light, poetic brushstrokes that takes on a lulling quality. At first a placeholder for his collaborators, it soon transpired that the record’s snug hooks were destined to be his own. “It speaks to the band’s input and having the right people around me, who were just like, yo, this really sounds like you,” he says. For Loyle, collaborative output is secondary to trust and rapport. “I travel a lot for shows but I’m not really out there like that. I don’t meet many other musicians and I don’t go to events, so I don’t end up meeting people from further afield,” he explains. “I want it [the collaboration] to be organic, and I haven’t known that many people out there for it to be like that.”

Loyle has built a community of hand-picked musicians that speak to his approach. He has a musician’s ear; Madlib, Olivia Dean, John Agard and Sampha have all fallen within his orbit. Amongst them, too, is the late Benjamin Zephaniah. On the title track, a weighted excerpt addresses a fractured Britain. The dub poet draws from his observations of the Brixton riots over wailing police sirens and sax breaks – a confronting listen that comments on the past but deeply resonates with the present. “I think he gave me a continued spice for life,” Loyle says, reflecting on time spent with Zephaniah, a childhood-example-turned-mentor. “His eyes were so open. He was able to have his opinion changed if he felt he was wrong, and he was also happy to stand by his opinion if he felt it was right. I think it takes such humility but also such bravery to do those two things at once. I think a lot of people can do one of them, but not both.”

Mere weeks after our conversation Loyle returns to Glastonbury’s Other Stage. The headline performance is heralded as a defining moment in the post-Glasto reviews and recaps – a warmer, intimate counterpoint to The 1975 on the Pyramid Stage. Visibly emotional, Loyle soaks up the feedback from the captive audience, “the biggest we’ve ever played,” he says awestruck.

“It’s a performance built with one thing in mind: honesty. It’s so easy to put so much money in the wrong places with a show like this. I want to celebrate the band, and I want people to see the stuff that we’re playing. It’s happening in front of their eyes. To me, that’s the magic of it all”.

This might be his most personal album. I think hopefully ! features some of his best lines. One of our greatest voices and lyricists, there are so many standout verses and examples of his brilliance. Even if he does not consider himself as a technical singer or a great one, I think there is much honesty, authenticity and power in his voice. Gravitas and emotion coming through in everything he sings. JUNKEE interviewed an artist who was present and profound on his latest album. It is clear that hopefully ! is the work of a hugely special artist. One who I hope will produce many more albums:

“What’re you hoping listeners take away from the new album?

I have two kids now, and that makes me not focus so much on the past, more on the present, and a little bit on the future. Kids are so present, you can't really explain to them that they're going to get something tomorrow, it has to be right now. My son was in the studio with me a lot when we were making this music so it just became a thing of ‘everything was so immediate’. He was just living in the right now and it’s an infectious thing.

I want people to be able to listen alongside their day, for it to be a companion of the day. Not for it to be something that you have to stop what you're doing and listen to it, but actually more so it can just be by your side through the pieces of your life that you need a friend for. Before hugo, it felt like a disrespect but now I see it as a real privilege that people are comfortable enough to put my shit on and then live their life, because that's the most intimate thing you can do.

This album welcomes your biggest departure from rap, and you’ve talked about Fontaines D.C. being a big influence on hopefully ! How did that inspiration come about?

I was just listening to them a lot. Actually, I was friendly with Grian over DM or whatever, and then I asked — I'm still cool with him — I asked him to be on one of the songs because I wasn't singing at this point. I was nervous about it. He didn't get back to me, and it actually was really useful because him not singing on it meant that I started doing it and then that spiraled into feeling quite comfortable with it. So in a way, I have to thank him or people have to not thank him for how bad my voice sounds, depending on how you see it.

I listened to a lot of Elliott Smith, The Smiths, The Cure, a band called Pinegrove, loads of stuff. That's music I've always listened to and always tried to celebrate. Sometimes you slip into a stereotype, or you do what people expect of you because you think that's how you're going to get through. It's been nice on this album to make music that's a little bit more true to who I am”.

I get hopefully ! is all about change – personally and musically – and a shift. More indebted to Indie and other genres, it is great to see Loyle Carner keep moving and exploring. Billboard spoke with Loyle Carner about his “upcoming fourth album, masculinity in the wake of Netflix's Adolescence and his huge Glastonbury slot”. An icon for British youth, it is fascinating reading interviews with him. So compelling to know about, this is an artist who is a definite role model to so many people:

“hopefully ! is something of a departure for Carner. More in tune with his love for alternative and indie music, his hip-hop stylings make way for inspiration by Irish rockers Fontaines D.C., cult star Mk.gee, Big Thief, Idles and more. The band he assembled for hugo’s live shows followed him into the studio to bring new textures to his compositions.

“It’s a lot of pressure to step out singularly as a rapper. And I’m not even, like, a ‘rapper.’ I just make music, and people like to put me in that box,” he says. “I loved the anonymity of being in a band. I wanted to be around when the magic is happening and to not just be sent a beat after all the fun parts had already happened. I wanted to move away from the words being all that I can contribute.”

Carner’s pen is still mighty, but in a different way. Since his earliest releases, his words have been what has carried him forward and provided renewed inspiration. On 2019’s “Still,” which he described as his “favourite-ever song” during its performance at the Royal Albert Hall, he speaks about his insecurities with a disarming honesty. The rhyming couplets on hugo’s “Nobody Knows (Ladas Road)” and “Homerton” show remarkable dexterity. He knows when to build tension, but also when to let the words breathe. It’s a skill he learned from his poet heroes like Agard and the late, great Benjamin Zephaniah, the man Carner was named after.

As his family has grown, Carner’s techniques and influences have changed. He describes his son as his muse, and his presence is felt throughout the album. hopefully !’s artwork features a snap of Carner and his son, with colorful scrawls and additions only a child can make with such purpose. His voice babbles away throughout the record and his mischievous personality shines. Words could not contain the emotions Carner feels toward him, so the songs became looser, less literal but still emotionally resonant, and with a greater focus on capturing his son’s “melodic” personality in his songwriting structures.

On one album highlight, Carner speaks of the transition of becoming a father and notes that he’s “falling asleep in a chair I used to write in.” Later, he speaks directly to his son, saying, “You give me hope in humankind.” He has learned to embrace sonic imperfections and to capture a feeling, letting broad brushstrokes stand proudly. There’s a childlike wonder to the rawness of these songs; from snatches of phrases to choruses that linger in your head long after music has ended.

PHOTO CREDIT: Oliver Webb

“If you try and color around something or touch it up… you always f–k it up,” Carner says. “That’s what I love about my son’s paintings. It might even be just one line across the page, but the simplicity of how he works and moves on. That’s how I feel now.”

Making the record has given Carner a greater perspective about his role and place in the world and in the family dynamic. “I’m not the main character in the movie any more. It’s my son and daughter’s film, and I’m just some extra in that.”

Carner has long been an advocate for a more healthy relationship with masculinity, having worked with suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably). He gave a passionate speech at Reading & Leeds Festival in August 2023 decrying the “toxic masculine bulls–t” that plagued his childhood. His records and shows have helped unlock certain conversations, but the issue remains prescient. Netflix’s streaming hit Adolescence, which examines the fallout from a misogynistic murder by a 13-year-old boy, has sparked new discussions around the manosphere and its pervasive influence.

Carner saw the intensity of the show — which uses one-shot takes — up close on-set; he’s close friends with actor-creator Stephen Graham and director Philip Barantini. The topics at hand need urgent attention, Carner says. “We’re at an essential need for conversation for young boys to let go of this fear, frustration and anxiety and be able to pass it to someone.

“I’m very glad that my son has my daughter to live with,” he adds. “That’s a huge thing for me, and also for me to be in the presence of someone who is growing up to be a woman. For my son, it’s even crazier, as it’s so natural and safe and understood and demystified.”

He’s most excited for hopefully ! to come out and for his children to hear the snapshot of this moment, about this family, and about the man their dad was when they were little. But what about the fans’ reaction to the new sound and what they might take from it? “Honestly, I don’t care. It’s totally up to them. They could take nothing and not find it for 10 or 20 years or even hate it, but…”

Carner throws his arms up and laughs. “I haven’t even thought about it, actually. I hope that people that do find it and that it can be a good friend to them”.

am going to end things with The Guardian and their positive review for hopefully ! There will be people who have not heard the album, so I would recommend that you check it out. Noting how Carner has a new singing style and has changed since his first three albums, many think that hopefully ! is his greatest work to date:

“Vulnerability has always been Carner’s lyrical stock in trade. It tends to manifest in two ways, first in open-hearted sincerity that has generated songs about grief and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and which is in full flow on the album’s title track: “You give me hope in humankind, but are humans kind? / I don’t know but I hope so.” Second, in a less anodyne and far more striking form of introspection: on In My Mind, he admits a tendency towards myopic self-obsession and alludes to the bitter dismissal of a “minor friend”.

Carner has two young children, and the artwork for Hopefully! features the kind of felt-tip scrawl most toddler-wranglers will recognise. Parenting is the album’s major theme, and there are moments when Carner approaches it from a compellingly raw angle. On About Time, covering the tensions between fatherhood and artistry, the narrator lists the thrills of his job before describing what sounds like a fight with his partner, in which he lets slip yet “another fucking thing I know you couldn’t forgive”. Yet for all Carner’s accounts of the internal and external conflict involved in fatherhood, it’s hard to buy the more damning self-critique – on Lyin he claims to be “just a man trained to kill, to love I never had the skill” – from an artist who makes music this heartfelt.

Lyin introduces a third lyrical mode, capturing early parenthood’s transcendent surreality in a stream of impressionistic imagery: Carner looks for reassurance under sofa cushions; his bedroom walls fall “to Poseidon”. Progressing from anxiety to confusion to a strange elation, he is overcome by the way his child’s hand reflexively tightens as he attempts to let go of it and how bright the sky looks in the middle of the night. His voice radiates awe and trepidation-tinged delight. It is magical songwriting, and his most impressive work to date.

Even before fatherhood, Carner’s work fixated on family: his mother is unusually omnipresent in his music, even by hip-hop’s standards. His 2019 song Dear Jean even took pains to insist that his new girlfriend was no threat to the pair’s intimacy. She’s still never far away; over luminous guitars on All I Need, he recalls the smell of “the sheets on my mother’s mattress – just the place I learnt my backflips”. It’s classic Carner: the place where heady feeling threatens to tip over into cloying soppiness. Yet thanks to a pleasingly precarious new vocal style and some levelled-up lyricism, he’s more adept than ever at this specific balancing act”.

At the moment, Loyle Carner is still on his world tour for hopefully ! There are dates coming next year, that see him visit the U.S. and Canada. It has been an exhaustive tour, but there is that worldwide demand for his music. The brilliant hopefully ! is…

AMONG the best of this year.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Rochelle Jordan

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Amanda Elise K

Rochelle Jordan

__________

I will get to a review…

PHOTO CREDIT: Amanda Elise K

for one of this year’s best albums, Through the Wall. The work of the amazing Rochelle Jordan, I was going to include her in my Spotlight series, though she has been on the scene for a long time now. Maybe you could say she is hitting a peak now so could be seen as a rising artist but, instead, I am including her in this Modern-Day Queens. Prior to getting to a review for Through the Wall, there are some great interviews from this year that I want to get to. I am starting out with an interview from The Culture Crypt. Having been releasing music since the early-2010s, you feel that Jordan is producing her best work at the moment. She may disagree, though I do feel that Through the Wall is her greatest album yet. The Culture Crypt spoke with an artist who goes from “underground R&B to genre-blending electronica, her latest album is a triumphant return to her roots—and a bold step into new territory”:

“Born in London and raised in Toronto, Jordan has always operated on her own terms—here lies a visionary who saw the connection between soulful R&B and electronic music long before those around her.

Rochelle Jordan's early work has truly stood the test of time. And she knows this. She raps, "All these sons, I watch 'em run around," on the early KLSH-produced standout "Ladida". It's not a simple viral hit or two, Rochelle's vault of material—namely R O J O and Pressure—sounds just as great today as they did in the 2010s blog era.

Then, of course, there's her enduring 2014 debut album, 1021, the true benchmark for lo-fi electro-R&B. Sure, 1021 was adored by fans in 2014. But so was "Fancy" by Iggy Azalea and Vine. Where are they now? No, offerings from 1021 like "Follow Me", "401" and "Lowkey" have enjoyed their fair share of post-TikTok revivalism. More on "Lowkey" later.

Radio silence followed—a period of quiet. But what may have seemed like a hiatus for Jordan was actually a period of intense struggle. During this time, she navigated a harsh industry and overcame a series of professional hurdles that threatened to derail her career. It was a transformative chapter, ultimately proving that "the gift remains," according to her own mental manuscript.

This journey paved the way for a creative rebirth on her 2021 comeback record and second album, Play With The Changes. Critics and fans adored it alike and new listeners were easily magnetised by her strong artistic pull. It was an evolution of her sound. R&B was very much still in the foreground, but the likes of house, breakbeat and electronica had tracks like "Love You Good", "Already" and "Got Em" under groove hypnosis.

Its sequel and subsequent remix edit was stacked in the best way possible. Featuring the likes of Kaytranada, Sango, KLSH and LSDXOXO, it was a fresh and welcome reimagining of her album, with new producers using Rochelle's voice as a vessel to commandeer the dancefloor.

2024 saw another triumphant revival for Jordan: she featured on both Kelela's remix album, RAVE:N, The Remixes and Kaytranada's TIMELESS. Equally, "Lowkey" gained real traction all over social media, accumulating just under 30 million streams in the process. These chessboard manoeuvres aligned Rochelle Jordan perfectly for her second creative ascent. With time away from music alongside creative gestation and reflection in full swing, she's found herself once again.

Speaking with The Culture Crypt, Rochelle Jordan opens up about the inspirations behind her new album, her personal growth and how she's navigating this latest chapter in her career.

The title, Through The Wall, feels like a definitive statement. Is that how you see it?

"Absolutely. The title represents so many things for me. On one hand, it's about the emotional and mental walls we build as creatives—the insecurities, fears and imposter syndrome that hold us back. This album was a process of completely breaking those walls down and realising that I deserve all the wins and positive things that are coming my way.

But the title also has a deeper, more personal meaning: it's a tribute to my brother. When we first moved from the UK to Toronto, he brought a briefcase filled with cassette tapes from the '90s. He's autistic so that he would play these same tapes over and over through the bedroom wall very loudly.

I would just be on the other side playing with my Barbies, unknowingly absorbing all this beautiful house, garage, gospel and drum and bass. That music was my first education in the fluidity of sounds, harmonies and melodies. So the album is a thank you to him for being essential to my foundation as an artist."

You've cultivated a really devoted community of fans over the past decade, much like artists such as Kelela and Solange. How does it feel to be part of that group?

"It's beautiful. I never take it for granted. 'Day Ones'—my official fanbase—go all the way back to '09, so we have this very deep-rooted love for each other. I also love that my fan base seems to have the same taste as me. I think the reason they love artists like Solange or Kelela is that they recognise a shared sense of leadership in sound and self-knowing.

I have much respect for those women. It's a privilege, because there are millions of artists in the world, and to be in the small percentage of people that listeners truly care for is something special. I thank God for that every day."

I have to touch on the resurgence of "Lowkey" going viral on TikTok. For the new listeners, what do you want them to know about your journey so far?

"It's so crazy. I think the first thing I'd want them to grasp is the history, the deep-rooted history. As they are learning a song like 'Lowkey' and probably stumbling across my new album. I would love for them to go back even further. It's inspiring to listen to the blocks that built the house.

I would love for them to recognise that I am a mother, I'm no one's daughter [laughs]. Well, I'm the daughter of Mariah Carey, Aaliyah and Beyoncé as well. My music branches out from all of them."

Finally, for both longtime fans and newcomers, how would you define this new era of Through The Wall?

"The overall synopsis of this album is simple: Rochelle Jordan has broken through the wall. I'm just happy for people to come along on this journey because the train is moving, and it's only going to get better. Every single time I go into a project, my mindset is, 'How do I top the last one?' I hope the people coming along feel that same magic and get to enjoy the ride”.

Let’s move to NME. The British-Canadian artist started out in the 2010s, in the days of the music blog. When it was quite prolific and fresh. Then, her career sort of went into limbo. There was a period of inactivity and self-doubt. That is now behind her. On her third album, Through the Wall, that period of imposter syndrome is well and truly behind her. Great to see her free, released and confident:

“In retrospect, Jordan is grateful her career has been a slow burn. “When ‘1021’ came out, I was irritated that I wasn’t signed to a major and things weren’t connecting,” she recalls. “Now, I thank God. Because what would have happened is I would have been boxed into creating R&B – and I’m not the type of artist who likes to be boxed in. It would not have been easy for me to create different soundscapes and leave an impact, culturally push things forward and be in the conversation now. It’s not easy being the person that’s a forward thinker. It’s going to be painful, but it all connects in the end.”

Now, in 2025, the tectonic plates have shifted. Arguably, the ‘90s revival that she was at the vanguard of has never been more prevalent in pop, while ‘Lowkey’ – a cut from her debut – blew up on TikTok last year, a decade on from its initial release. “The TikTok girls! They’re so funny,” smiles Jordan. “I love that community – they’re tastemakers. It was very vindicating and victorious for ‘Lowkey’ to have its moment, ‘cause it’s a new generation. I’m like, god, you guys are ageing me!”

She feels the shapeshifting ‘Play With The Changes’, which saw her dig into club culture, is finally receiving its dues, too. “I believe I was part of that cultural reset, especially for R&B girls to be curious about house music,” she says, shouting out her forebears Azealia Banks and AlunaGeorge. She credits Beyoncé’s 2022 dancefloor opus ‘Renaissance’ with helping to “create a lane” for her now. “As much as I could have felt like, ‘Damn ‘Play With The Changes’ is not getting its shine for the door it kicked down in terms of the psyche of R&B girls moving into this space’, now when I look back, I’m like, ‘Yo, Beyoncé did me a favour man because she’s opened up the world’s mind to a Black woman coming into the electronic space merging with R&B.’”

PHOTO CREDIT: Amanda Elise K

Before ‘Through the Wall’ was released, Jordan predicted her fans would view “Charli XCX doing her thing”, with ‘Brat’’s slime-green chokehold on the zeitgeist, and ponder “Is Rochelle going to go deeper into the EDM/techno space?’”. While she did delve further into nocturnal club atmospherics, it was through honing and refining her core principles. Aided by a nexus of producers – KLSH, Kaytranada, storied Chicago house icon Terry Hunter, Initial Talk, Jimmy Edgar, and DāM FunK have all been invited behind the velvet rope – she’s carved a pummelling beat-filled sound of her breaking down her self-imposed final wall and dancing in its rubble.

What she’s learned from the journey is perhaps best summed up at the start of the masterful ‘90s Janet Jackson-recalling throwback pop-dance of ‘Doing It Too’ when she earnestly advises: “Don’t be afraid to take up space.” Eventually, sticking to your vision will pay off.

“The road of being an independent artist isn’t easy,” she says. “You’re going to be gaslit. You’re not going to be given your flowers so openly. I’ve been in this game for a very long time, and when you’re creating with great intention and you’re upping the quality each time, at some point, the world is going to wake up. It’s a testament to resilience, and I knew I would be able to tell my story – and it would be a story of champions.” Like any good diva, Jordan is ready for her close-up. “I believe in divine alignment and timing. I’ve earned my bragging rights,” she smiles. “It’s time to talk a little shit!”.

Two more interviews I want to cross off before getting to a glowing review of Through the Wall. One to Watch spent some time with an artist whose then-upcoming album was a love letter to freedom. Many people hailing this as a comeback or return. The truth is that Rochelle Jordan never went anywhere. However, I can appreciate the importance of the album, as it comes four years after Play the Changes:

“OnesToWatch: You are made up of so many different cultures at once. Being born in London, raised in Toronto, a British Jamaican, how do all of these different cultures make up one unified version of self?

Rochelle Jordan: That's a very interesting question. I think just naturally, I've been able to adapt very well in my whole life, almost like a chameleon. Not in a sense where I'm putting on a costume by any means, but I'm able to have a deep-rooted understanding for different cultures and have a very open mind to differences. Even down to the seasons. Being in Canada, you see all the different seasons all the time. Living in LA for 15 years and just kind of seeing one season, I was like, “I need the changes. I really need that spiritually.” For the most part, I had a very good upbringing, being around different cultures and everyone meshing in well with each other. It kept my mind open and wondering and very curious, all of that leads into the music at the end of the day.

That's what's so magnetic about your music; it's unconfined. What were you listening to growing up that informed your eclectic taste for music?

Oh, my goodness, so much stuff. My parents were obviously playing old stuff like Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and a lot of Vybez Kartel. My brothers were playing a lot of real deep cut UK garage. I grew up listening to a lot of pop music when I was younger, like my obsession with the Spice Girls, Janet, Britney. I was paying attention and not paying attention, just living through the music. And then suddenly, it just kind of struck something. My mom recently sent me my agenda from elementary school, and it was like asking questions like “What do you want to be when you're older?” And I just kept saying, “I want to be a singer.” I also used to write, which is kind of sad, “I want to be pretty. I want to be pretty.” I was so hard on myself, even at a young age. But it's very interesting to see the footprints of your thought process and the little things that you were thinking about when you were younger. All of it manifested into something that I hold so closely to my heart as an adult.

That little girl grew up to be someone so uninhibited. I think a woman who is healed is a woman who is the fullest expression of herself. How do you tend to that on a day-to-day basis?

For me, it's very much about holding true to the things that inspire me. That is the most important thing. I'm not somebody who is entertained much by trends. I’m pretty rebellious in that sense; if something is going one way, I try to dance the opposite way. I can understand why things have come out the way they have, and why things are the way they are for me. I'm very strong in who I am. I'm an independent thinker, and I am somebody who appreciates silence as well. I like to hear the voice of God, my inner voice as well. Social media is very noisy. My body, my spirit, my chakras don’t like that feeling too much, so I have to keep a certain balance. All of these things combined really help me hold on to who I am authentically. I think for everybody, you got to find out how to manage yourself personally in order to hold on to who you are authentically.

This is the calm before the storm. Soon, the project will be in the world’s hands. Are you ready for it, or do you still feel protective?

Oh, I'm ready for it to be in the world. I was very protective up until last week. I just want to make sure that my baby is still mine. But I'm excited about it going out to the world. I find that every single time I release music into the world, it sounds different. I can't put my hand on it. I just hear it differently. I can hear what the people are hearing, and it really excites me. I think it's because before it goes out, you are in an analytical mindset. I might be hearing things and paying attention to things that are more on the creative side. Once it's out, it's like freedom. It's gone. It no longer belongs to me. It belongs to the world, to the universe, and it's such a good feeling to let go”.

One more interview with Rochelle Jordan before closing up with a review for Through the Wall. There are chunks of this interview with PASTE that I want to include, as Rochelle Jordan talked about what being a diva meant to her. Using audience anticipation and longing as a tool for longevity. A fascinating and deep conversation with an artist that everyone should know about. Through the Wall is undoubtably up there with the best albums of this year:

“Jordan believes not just in the authenticity of her intentions, but in making those intentions known. “People will understand, because they’re going to hear that you’re doing the right thing,” she assures. “I just wanted to create a world for people to get lost in and to move into, especially in this time that we’re living in. People need a healthy escape, and I wanted for this album to be that healthy escape.” Short album, long album, it never mattered to her. It’s always been about bodies of work that deserve to be celebrated. It’s about artists no longer being afraid of being sincere about what they’ve made. “When I started making music seriously, that was the pact that I made with myself. Your responsibility is to pull people into a world and make them feel magic in music,” Jordan adds. “If you can do that, then you’re doing your job. It’s been a lot of epiphanies along the way. I know I’m on the right path.” There is one thing about the music industry that Jordan has her reservations about: how fast artists are putting out their albums. “That’s personally going to be a problem for me,” Jordan, whose two pre-Through the Wall releases came out seven years apart, clarifies.

The seven years separating 1021 and Play With the Changes were practically a lifetime, as far as the music business is concerned. “I spent years on a hope and a wish that an A&R that I entrusted with what would be Play With the Changes would be able to take me over the finish line,” she tells me. “And it was slowly unveiled that they wouldn’t be able to do that. And that slow unveiling takes up a lot of time, and it creates a lot of fear in the mind, especially being independent, because it’s like… all you have is your music, and you want to make sure that the train keeps on going.” That period was a disappointment for Jordan but not always. “It was very exciting, thinking that I had the right support. This person was a support, they were just not the right one, in order for me to get off what I was essentially trying to do. The journey of being an independent artist is hard. Even being a major artist is hard. Pick your poison, at the end of the day.”

THROUGH THE WALL BELONGS in the conversation of greatest contemporary dance music releases, alongside Dawn Richard’s Second Line, Kelela’s Raven, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance—the latter having opened the mind of the mainstream to, as Jordan puts it, “accept that sound of a Black woman being on dance and house records.” While the language Jordan is speaking on Through the Wall may be easier to understand now because Renaissance came out in 2022, one year earlier she was performing curious, palatable music that mixed R&B vocals with house, electronic, and D&B samples on Play With the Changes. Jordan has always been on the cutting edge but rarely given her due for it. Her nineties vocal on top of trap beats throughout Pressure in 2012 was called “trap soul” by 2015; in 2014, she wrote “Follow Me” and “Lowkey” before Kehlani and Ella Mai could write “Distraction” and “Boo’d Up.” “I know that I set a lot of groundwork that would, in the future, be doors that are wildly, widely open,” she attests, crediting Azealia Banks and AlunaGeorge for their soulful stance on dance music changing the culture first. “I think I opened my own door. Sometimes where I had resentment… I realize now that it’s all about timing.”

Through the Wall communicates with Black exemplars from then and now, like Janet, Diana, Chaka, and Sade, and Jordan aims for the “boldness, the bigness, the enchantment” of songs like the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There” or Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” You can hear those motivations in the album’s addictive, acrobatic DNA, in the Brandy-summoning “Sweet Sensation,” the bouncing, provocative “Crave,” and the serpentine, four-on-the-floor “Sum.” “Get It Off” sounds like an aughts pop record, while “The Boy” is this plush, feral synth hit that exists not in the post-R&B or electronic tracts, but in a campy, escapist pantheon of its own. The colors streak and the repetition tastes so good you don’t even realize the party ended hours ago. After releasing Play With the Changes, it would have been reasonable to assume that Jordan would plunge even deeper into a techno space. That was her initial plan, at least, she reveals, “but I’m just so in love with nostalgia. I’m so in love with the past and mixing that with the future. I’m happy that I stuck to my guns and took the risk to do that, because you never know what people are going to take to.” She’s not a revivalist, though, but a tastemaker ready to talk her shit.

And Jordan is braggadocious on the mic but never obnoxiously so, after years of staying “modest” in an industry that’ll eat you alive if you ever blow your cool. There’s a method to her madness, she says. After the album’s hour is up, there’s no doubting that Jordan has come completely into her own, attacking every song with a time capsule of seductive vocal struts, disciplined and slinking rhythms, and lightweight, chrome-dipped improvisations. “That gives you bragging rights, when you have some history and lore and growth and dedication behind you that you can be proud of,” she declares. “There’s no Grammy or accolade that can replace the time that I’ve spent developing myself as an artist and trusting in my vision and, moving forward, that’s what I’m celebrating. When I’m singing a track like ‘Ladida’ and I’m saying, ‘got my dreams and got these dollar bills,’ it’s because I know. I know honestly and deep from within”.

I am going to complete things with a review from The Line of Best Fit. Awarding Through the Wall 9/10, it is great to see this album get such love and enthusiasm! I had not dug Rochelle Jordan’s music for a while, but Through the Wall reignited that fascination. She is a wonderful artist and a definite queen of the contemporary scene! Someone that should be on your radar:

“Helmed by her light vocals, Rochelle Jordan’s earlier records indulged in frothy, dark R&B, but her 2021 breakthrough Play with the Changes captured a breakbeat vision of club music: frenetic, dizzying, rapturous. Her follow-up, the sleek and luxurious Through The Wall, doubles down and delivers the purest distillation of her vision so far, and on top of that, it’s one of the best pop albums of the year.

Through The Wall bursts with energy; its sly mix of house, R&B and dance-pop demand movement. Her breathy desire on “The Boy” or “Bite The Bait” clash with their pummeling beats – there’s no choice but to submit, and it sounds like she does, too. But elsewhere she drives the beat and commands attention, like rapping on “Around” or “Ladida”. On the pulsating “Doing It Too”, she winks that “boys will be boys but the girls will too…the girls should do,” before kicking off one of the most infectious choruses of the year. It’s as if KAYTRANADA mixed Kelela’s “Contact” while on uppers; any club playing it less than twice an hour would be malpractice. It’s one of those endlessly addictive pop songs, and better yet, Through The Wall has about five more of those.

“TTW” could assist a poolside Ibiza resort or a sweaty club night. “Ladida” flips “Gypsy Woman (La Da Dee)” into a skipping, hip house anthem. The moans on “Close 2 Me” ache against its buzzy, erratic beat. “Eyes Shut” reckons with creative stagnation (“I don’t know who I’m working for”) with broader commentary (“It’s a heartbroken nation / And the money down, inflation”). It doesn’t totally come together, but points are given for singing about bureaucracy against an aqueous, dripping beat. “Get It Off” and “Sweet Sensation” are buzzy odes to early-aughts pop and R&B: breathy, dreamlike. Her command of vibe – across a similar but not homogenous tracklist – probes different areas and impressively never loses momentum. Its hour is weighty but svelte, generous and not bloated.

With beats so vigorous, and, to use a technical term, fierce, Jordan is right to position herself as the queen of the club. She’s in complete charge of the night; catty, sexy, yet still making sure everyone has a good time. This attitude is what makes a title like “I’m Your Muse” work, or an interlude on “Sum” bragging about her power to hypnotize. On that song, which is basically about how hot she is, she cuts the song short to foster for an encore, a crowd chanting “One more time!”, eventually integrated within the beat. But since she storms right after with “The Boy”, a throbbing track about missed connection, it works – one moment she’s liberated and twirling, then desperately lusting on her knees. Such is the politics of the dance floor.

Through The Wall’s heavy pleasure borders on indulgence, like eating an entire box of rich chocolates, but its novelty, cheek, and brash commitment to fun buoys likely one of the most fun hours of music since RENAISSANCE. Rochelle Jordan’s second album in her house matriarch makeover is proof she’s found her artistic voice – an alluring vision of deep house superstardom. It has the cadence of a glamorous, unforgettable night out, and better yet, you can relive this one over and over”.

If you have not heard of Rochelle Jordan, then do make sure that you follow her. Through the Wall is an unforgettable and hypnotic album! Such an arresting album, I am thinking about which song is my favourite. I think that it might be Doing it Too. It left the biggest impression on me, yet every track on Through the Wall is amazing. Go and listen to the album and follow…

THE queen that is Rochelle Jordan.

_____________

Follow Rochelle Jordan

Official:

https://www.rochellejordan.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/Rochelle_Jordan/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP39ZnWtHsIEPBRtUbTvYrw

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3MM3uKNdJbvefUael12dl3?si=hql-W3-GSLiFCYy45zk48A

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Olivia Dean – The Art of Loving

FEATURE:

The Best Albums of 2025

Olivia Dean – The Art of Loving

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I am nearly through…

PHOTO CREDIT: Lola Mansell

this series, where I highlight the best albums of the year. Not just those that have been acclaimed by critics, but ones that I really love. Released on 26th September, Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving is such a beautiful and phenomenal album. There was a lot of love for it. I am going to finish with a review for The Art of Loving. However, before getting there, there are some reviews with Olivia Dean that I want to get to. I am going to bring three interviews together. I am starting out with Vogue and their conversation. Speaking with an artist ready to take centre stage, Dean discussed, among other things, the inspirations behind her second album. I really love 2023’s Messy, though I feel The Art of Loving is Dean is her greatest work to date:

“Vogue: The Art of Loving is your second studio album, and you’ve said it’s lighter and more fun than your debut album, Messy. Can you describe how your headspace changed from one album to the next?

Olivia Dean: I think generally, as a person, I’m more centered and in touch with myself than I was two years ago. This album, I would like to think, has an emotional maturity that I’ve really been working on developing in myself. I would never claim to know it all. I’m not saying I know everything about love, guys. I’m trying to work on myself and learn and be a better person, and I think that was all through writing these songs. So yeah, I think I’m just older—and hopefully a little bit wiser.

And what were some of your inspirations for this album?

Bottom of Form

So many. I’m somebody that is such a sponge for things. I love art in many different forms. I was listening to a lot of vinyl and crate-digging, and listening to a lot of Brazilian music. There’s also always a lot of reggae music, and I listen to a lot of Ethiopian music and Fleetwood Mac. I really also got into more guitar-y music. There’s a singer I love called Alice Phoebe Lou—I’m always listening to her. I love her lyrics and the spirituality and emotional intelligence in her writing.

I was also going to a lot of exhibitions. I went to this exhibition called All About Love in LA, actually, which inspired the kind of theme for the album, and this amazing Brazilian modernism exhibition in London where I saw this specific painting. I took all the colors from that painting for the color palette for the vinyl.

I love that. And do you plan on staying in London, or do you want to eventually settle somewhere else?

It’s really interesting you asked that. I was actually having that conversation yesterday and talking about all the things I’d love to do with my life. London is somewhere that is so important to me and where all my friends and my family are, but I see myself in New York, maybe, for a period of time. I feel like New York is my vibe. I want that Sex and the City life. So maybe—we’ll see”.

I am moving to Rolling Stone UK and their talk with Olivia Dean. Discussing spirituality, and why love is the core and main theme of her second studio album, to “the frivolous fun of dressing up”, this is one of her best artists. Someone I am so fascinated in. Seeing where her career will take her:

“Olivia Dean grew up in Highams Park, a quiet, leafy suburb teetering on the outer edges of the capital, and right on the cusp of Essex. As a kid, she threw herself into everything from karate to musical theatre with varying levels of success: “I didn’t get very far,” she says, of the former. “Please do not quote me as saying I’m a black belt in karate.” Eventually, her mum Christine Dean (a former deputy leader of the now-defunct Women’s Equality Party) intervened. “She was like, ‘Pack it in, babe, choose a hobby — you’re doing too much,’” Dean laughs.

It was music, and the inherent sense of storytelling and drama in musical theatre, that immediately won out. Though she had always felt “a little bit like the odd one out” growing up, getting a place at BRIT School opened up a whole new world, and introduced Dean to like-minded mates in the process, some of whom she still works with today. As a sidenote, it was also one hell of a commute from Waltham Forest to Croydon. “An hour and 45,” she groans. “I would leave, and it would still be pretty dark in the winter, and dark again when I came back — it was quite a commitment.”

While she was studying there, her teacher Mr Doherty showed a 17-year-old Dean live footage of Paul Simon performing ‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes’ and “it just sparked something in me. I loved the coming together of the quite traditional singer-songwriter thing that Paul Simon does so well, with this South African music, and the players, and the brass, and I just remember thinking: ‘Oh, I’d love to do that. How could I do that?’ For want of a better phrase, it was a kick up the arse.”

Shortly after this, upon graduating, Dean met her manager, who was also working with Rudimental, and when the chance to join the group on the road as a backing singer arose, she went for it. “What were the chances: you get the opportunity to play in front of those big crowds, but it’s not about you — you can learn and take that feeling in, without the pressure,” she remembers.

“That was an invaluable experience for me, but it also definitely inspired me to go: ‘OK, could I do this myself? I think I’ve got some stuff that I’d like to say…’ I’m a real observer, I think, and I like to learn, and then apply,” she says, “without sounding too clinical about it.”

Asimilarly thoughtful approach has also shaped The Art of Loving. Following the huge success of Messy, Dean was feeling daunted by the idea of diving into its follow-up. “I had developed a bit of studio anxiety, I suppose, and was putting a lot of pressure on myself,” she explains. “I realised that all this time that I’ve been making music, I’ve never had my own studio. I’ve always been coming into other people’s spaces and trying to justify myself. And so I thought that I’d love to build my own space and create within it.”

Though Dean spent a couple of weeks working on the record in LA, and also recorded at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, much of it was made in London, where she decided to take a much more homely approach this time around. After converting an east London house into her own studio, she moved in, along with her piano from home, and lived there pretty much full-time throughout the creation of the album, which is produced by Zach Nahome, and features Max Wolfgang, Bastian Langebæk and Tobias Jesso Jr. as collaborators.

“I brought photos from my house, and I slept there. I would have friends round, outside of studio time, and I had parties there, so it was this real, living, breathing space. I was really deep in it, and maybe sometimes too deep in it,” she laughs. “Sometimes I was like, ‘Maybe I need to go home-home this weekend, and then listen again with fresh ears.’”

The initial title and overarching theme for the album came to Dean last year, after she saw an exhibition by the American visual artist Mickalene Thomas — known for her brightly patterned, rhinestone-peppered collages of African-American women — at The Broad in LA. “It’s in response to bell hooks’ [book] All About Love, which I’m a huge fan of. There’s this passage in the book about the craft of loving one’s own life, and I thought, ‘I think I’m gonna call this album The Art of Loving.’”

“Love is something I have always been interested in,” she continues. “For some reason, it’s seen as this mystical, untouchable thing that we’re all supposed to just have a go at and figure out. In All About Love, bell hooks is like, imagine if we had a class in primary school that was, like, emotional studies? So that we could teach each other a bit of etiquette, and how to fill each other with care? I just wanted to do a deep-dive on love, to understand why I love the way that I do, and how I love other people.”

Filled with warmth and joy, The Art of Loving is a continuation of Messy’s eclectic sound — and also shares the blurred aesthetic of her debut’s cover art. “It’s representative of imperfection,” she says. “Some of the stuff I’m speaking about isn’t fact, or always the truth — it’s just my truth. I kind of want people to hear their own truth,” she says. “So I don’t need you to have a big fat picture of my face when you’re listening to it!”.

The final interview is from W Magazine. Olivia Dean, so much more than a viral singer or someone who made a hit or two, is this genuinely wonderful artist who you can see growing between albums. When critics decide their favourite albums of the year, The Art of Loving will feature on most of them:

“The new album, out now, is an exploration of modern romance, set to lush, jazzy arrangements that crackle with excitement and invite you in with their easy vulnerability. The singer feels wise beyond her years, finding a sense of comfort in the contradictions and confusion of love. In her viral single, “Nice to Each Other,” Dean is happy to savor a connection she knows won’t last long, but is consumed by uncertainty in “Close Up,” singing, “I can’t tell if you need me / Or want me all that much / Did I misread completely every single touch?”

The cover art for The Art of Loving, photographed by Jack Davison.

She leaves her fate up to the universe in the funk-laden “Lady Lady,” puts herself back together after a breakup on the shimmering, “Baby Steps,” and on the Motown-inspired track, “A Couple Minutes,” she finds the silver lining in a relationship that didn’t work out: “Love’s never wasted / When it’s shared.”

To her, love is a skill to be practiced and improved upon—something she learned from reading bell hooks’ All About Love, which served as one of the main inspirations for the album. “I’m aligned with her view that love is the most important thing in the world, and we don’t take it seriously enough,” Dean says.

As a chronicler of love, Dean’s diagnosis of today’s dating culture is that people are too quick to dispose of each other. There’s a line, she says, between holding out for what you deserve, and moving on the second things aren’t perfect. At her shows, the lyric, “I don’t want a boyfriend,” has become a rallying cry among her fans. But Dean’s feelings are more nuanced.

“I think it’s okay to want to be in love and to be loved,” she says. “But it’s a fine line between I don’t need a man or Men are trash, and that becoming a negative mindset. I’m more interested in where feminism takes us from here. Can we find an equilibrium and learn to respect each other?”

Along with bell hooks, Dean credits her family with shaping her expectations of love. Her parents have been together for almost 30 years. “Perhaps that’s why I’m such a romantic,” she says. Meanwhile, the women in her life taught her she didn’t need to shrink herself to find love. Her mother, Christine, is a lawyer who became the deputy leader of the Women’s Equality Party in 2020, while her grandmother Carmen, the subject of Dean’s 2023 song of the same name, was part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants who helped rebuild the U.K. after World War II.

“It would have been impossible for me to not have developed into the feminist I identify as today because of them,” she says. “My mum and my auntie and my granny are too powerful. At the same time, there’s room for both: you can be this independent, strong woman and still have love. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive.”

In the two years since Messy, Dean might not have all the answers, but she’s found the beauty in figuring it all out.

“I’ve only become more crystallized in the sense that romantic love isn’t the be-all and end-all of my life,” she says. “When you’re younger, you’re led to believe that it is, but I feel love in so many areas of my life.”

It’s a sentiment she echoes on the album’s closing track, “I’ve Seen It.” “Writing it, I’d had a lot of red wine,” she recalls with a laugh. “When I heard it back for the first time, I burst into tears.” It’s a sweet song, sung over a simple handpicked guitar melody. Without ever saying the word “love,” she manages to capture the feeling precisely. “It felt like the loveliest note to end on,” she says. “Whether it’s within your friends, your family, or just the love that exists in the strangers around you, it’s there, and it’s inside of you, too”.

I’ll end with a review for The Art of Loving. The Guardian were among those who reviewed The Art of Loving. Perhaps more ambitious, assured, distinct and personal than Messy, The Art of Loving, I feel, is going to scoop awards and will definitely give Olivia Dean so much inspiration and push when it comes to a third album. That might not happen for a couple of years. She has some incredible dates booked for next year across the U.K. and Europe:

“Dean’s 2023 debut album, Messy, attracted respectful but mixed reviews and did respectable, rather than remarkable, business. It spawned a hit single in Dive, but seemed very much standard-issue stuff – tasteful neo-soul replete with vintage horn arrangements, ballads accompanied by lo-fi, slightly out-of-tune piano, tracks that opened with the sound of crackly old vinyl. Its author did the type of things that tasteful British neo-soul artists do: appearing on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny belting out You Can’t Hurry Love, covering The Christmas Song as part of a seasonal Amazon campaign, turning up on the soundtrack for the new Bridget Jones film alongside Jamie Cullum and George Ezra. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of that, but nor did any of it suggest that Dean was the kind of artist built to contest the dominance of a $100m (£74m) smash-hit animation, the soundtrack of which has topped the charts in 16 countries.

So how has it happened? High-profile support slots on Sam Fender and Sabrina Carpenter’s stadium shows early in the summer probably helped broaden her audience, but the real answer seems to lie on The Art of Loving. While you wouldn’t describe it as a complete reinvention, it certainly constitutes a noticeable rethink. It expunges most of the cliches of Dean’s debut album – or rather quarantines them on a track called Close Up – and instead looks for inspiration to music that emanated from recording studios in 70s LA. The Art of Loving dabbles in both Rumours-adjacent soft rock – you’re never far from a sun-dappled electric piano line or a breezy acoustic guitar; Baby Steps offers up slick, yacht rock-y funk – and, on So Easy (To Fall in Love), Carpenters-style MOR pop that would once have been considered entirely beyond the pale.

It’s a sound that’s familiar without feeling hackneyed or self-consciously retro: Something Inbetween is powered by a muffled rhythm that sounds like someone playing a techstep drum’n’bass track with a duvet over the speakers; lurking in the depths of Nice to Each Other there’s a wash of shoegaze-y guitar noise and gusts of ambient synth drone. Airy and inviting, it suits Dean’s sweetly understated vocals – mercifully lacking affectation, either of the post-Winehouse “jazzy” variety or the weird, consonant-mangling “indie voice” that’s supposed to connote intimacy in 21st-century pop – and adds a cinematic gloss to her lyrics. Dean is big on diaristic detail as she navigates ex-related angst and tentative new relationships: “I don’t know where the switches are, or where you keep your cutlery.”

Perhaps more importantly, Dean and her co-authors – including Tobias Jesso Jr, and Matt Hales, who once plied his trade as singer-songwriter Aqualung – have significantly upped their game. Every chorus has been polished until it catches the light (Baby Steps offers a particularly gleaming example), while one suspects that an enormous amount of effort has been expended on making the melodies of Nice to Each Other and I’ve Seen It sound as effortlessly charming as they do.

So the album breezes past. It’s exceptionally well made but feels entirely natural; it’s mainstream commercial pop, but laudably devoid of obvious cliches. If Dean’s debut seemed like an artist trying to find their place in the landscape by ticking relevant boxes, The Art of Loving seems like someone finding their own voice. The sight of Olivia Dean battling a cartoon K-pop band in the charts’ upper echelons is proof that pop in 2025 is a business you can’t really predict, but still, The Art of Loving’s success seems a foregone conclusion”.

A stunning album from Olivia Dean, it is definitely one of my favourites of the year. I do feel 2026 will be the most important years of her career. In terms of where she plays. In terms of her personal life, maybe a move to News York will come about. It is very exciting to consider…

WHAT will come.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: CMAT – EURO-COUNTRY

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best Albums of 2025

CMAT – EURO-COUNTRY

__________

ONE of the best albums of this year…

PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian

is CMAT’s EURO-COUNTRY. As I have done with the albums in this series, I am going to get to some reviews with the artist, then I will end with a review of the album. The incredible Irish artist put out a work that gained huge critical acclaim. It is a funny, open and fascinating album that is distinctly the work from Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson. I am going to start out with an interview from The Guardian. They note how, from playing major gigs, to being this political and socially conscious artist, she was going supernova. EURO-COUNTRY is one of the most important albums of the year, I feel:

“She is incredibly forthright on a huge range of topics. She stands up for trans rights – “If you think of social media as like a video game, you rack up the spoils really high when you decide to go for a group of people who are already at risk” – and confronts the culture of wellness and self-improvement or, as she calls it, “the rise-and-grind ethic which is making people insane and making them unable to communicate with other people because they’re so obsessed with focusing on themselves”. Sometimes she’s too forthright for her mum, though: a recent appearance on Adam Buxton’s podcast provoked a dressing down. “She told me it made her cringe: ‘That lovely posh Englishman, so well spoken, and you calling yourself a cunt the whole interview. And you’re not a cunt, you’re lovely.’”

And yet, she concedes there has been a significant downside to her breakthrough. “The kind of headspace that good songs come from is one of extreme emotion, extreme depth of feeling,” she says, “which has an impact on my life. I do live in that really heightened state of emotion all the time. I’m crazy and I do crazy things, and I have crazy relationships with people.” She doesn’t mean crazy as in wild or outrageous, she qualifies. She means crazy as in authentically unwell, or – as she puts it with characteristic bluntness – “mental”.

Now 29, Thompson thinks she has always suffered from auditory hallucinations, but during the making of her third album, “I started actually hallucinating. I was in New York, writing. I didn’t realise for the first two months that was what was happening, but I basically imagined the entire apartment I was staying in was crawling with insects, that I had insects crawling on my skin all the time. I was calling the landlord, letting off bug bombs, I made them throw the couch out because I thought it was covered in fleas. I was itching all the time. I was texting a group chat of friends, sending them pictures of all the bug bites on me: New York’s disgusting, full of insects. And they didn’t exist. I went to the doctor and showed him my bites and he said: ‘Those are stress hives; you’re mental.’” (Possibly not an exact diagnosis.) “I was hallucinating the whole time.”

For that reason, she worries that songwriting might not be a sustainable occupation for that reason, or that taking medication might cause the flow of songs to stop. But whatever the pains staked in writing its contents, her new album is superb. It pushes at the boundaries of her previous work’s sound: into synth-heavy territory on the title track, pop soul on Running/Planning and distorted alt-rock on The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, a song during which the constant sight of the TV chef’s face in Britain’s motorway services seems to bring about an existential collapse in the mid-tour CMAT.

It arrives in a sleeve featuring its title, Euro-Country, written in the kind of Gaelic script beloved of Irish theme pubs, above an exceptionally striking photo based on Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1896 painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well. It features Thompson emerging from a fountain in the middle of a shopping centre near her home town of Dunboyne. “Blanchardstown shopping centre,” she says. “For the first 10, 11 years of my life, it was like my local village. My sister, who lives in Blanch now, goes to the shopping centre every day. You drive there if you want to see other people and then you drive back home again and live in your house by yourself.”

That’s the reality of much of Irish life, she says. “There’s a kind of space that Ireland is occupying in western media culture right now, a little more fetishised and trendy than it’s ever been. Americans think it’s cute; English people are like, ‘Ooh, I love Guinness and Kneecap and The Banshees of Inisherin, and I’m getting my Irish passport and mmm, I love potato farl.’ People talking about Hozier like he’s a magical, delicate fairy from the bog. It’s a romanticised version of Ireland that doesn’t exist. It’s a really hard place to live, a really hard place to grow up, unless you have money, which we didn’t. So yeah, magical, beautiful, mystical Ireland: it’s a shopping centre, that’s what I grew up with. A shopping centre.”

Thompson says she is aware that the political bent of Euro-Country is a big ask of audiences in 2025, when pop seems to largely function as a means of temporary escape from a terrifying world. “It can be read as incredibly cringe and incredibly earnest and on the nose, right? It’s an embarrassing thing for me to be asking of people. Because it’s not trendy to be earnest any more. I’m aware of that, and …” She laughs again. “Actually I don’t care. I don’t care if I’m putting my foot in it, I don’t care if I’m saying something wrong. We’ve all been too measured, too careful because we’re being witnessed all the time. I think we need more willingness to fail. Even if it’s futile, you’ve got to fucking try. Because it’s fucking depressing otherwise”.

I am going to move to DAZED and their chat with CMAT. Having moved from Dublin to London, there were questions around the city and CMAT’s relationship with it. They also asked about the politics on EURO-COUNTRY, her fascination with Charli xcx, and her sudden rise to fame:

“How has your relationship to Dublin changed now that you’re older?

CMAT: I just like looking back and seeing it from the outside, even though I’m still connected to it. I love Joan Didion and I love her writing on California because she talks about the texture of living there, not some romanticised idea. I try to reflect that mentality in my songwriting about Ireland and Dublin. There’s a version of Ireland people think about from afar, and then there’s what it actually feels like on the ground.

Do you think people from other places can relate to that feeling?

CMAT: I think that’s true of every country. Everybody has their own relationship to this, and a lot of countries are going through similar things. Some politicians I mention in my album, like Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, are getting voted back in again in Ireland, the same ones that messed things up 25 years ago. A lot of countries are falling to fascism. I was talking to someone from the Philippines recently, where the son of former dictator Marcos is now in power. A lot of countries are repeating mistakes; it’s madness, but I suppose it’s because people love convenience.

People in the world really hate me for speaking out, I get horrible messages all the time

Alongside tackling political issues in EURO–COUNTRY, you also spoke out about Palestine on stage – what was that moment like?

CMAT: That was… mad. I knew I was going to say something – obviously, I had to. I’d been given the biggest opportunity of my life, and if I didn’t do or say anything, I’d be kicking myself. But I was so scared of that gig in general. I actually wrote a speech, and then, like, an hour beforehand, I was like, ‘I can’t make this speech, I’m going to fuck it up so badly because my nerves are unbelievably bad.’

So I thought, you know what? I’ll just get through the show and say it at the end. I probably would have done something more elaborate if I could, but it’s scary being on stage. It’s not as bad as it is for the Kneecap boys, but it’s terrifying. You’re in front of 60,000 people, and you want to give a speech about something real. People in the world really hate me for speaking out, I get horrible messages all the time. When I played Latitude last year, I had pulled out initially because of Barclays sponsoring, then came back when they dropped them, and in the front row were two guys with massive flags, there specifically to antagonise me. There were 25,000 other people there, and these two were trying to intimidate me.

I think more credit needs to be given to people like Kneecap and Amyl and the Sniffers or anyone who speaks out, because it’s genuinely scary. These people exist, they want to harm you, and you’re just standing there going, ‘Let me run away.’ It’s such a fucking weird time.

What do you want people to take away from the album?

CMAT: If someone listens to the album and doesn’t like it, that’s literally fine, I don’t care, and that’s literally grand. But I hope anyone who’s gone through any of the things I mention in the songs can identify with them and that it helps, in any way, shape or form. That’s the job. That’s the most useful thing. Like, when you write a sad song and someone says, ‘I listened to that the day someone died,’ yeah – that’s the job. So I hope that happens”.

I am going to bring in a final interview before coming to a review. VOGUE published an interview in August. CMAT is clearly ready to take over America. I am not sure if that is a goal of hers. However, EURO-COUNTRY has translated beyond Europe and a small section of people. It is a global success. With it, CMAT is being hailed as one of the greatest songwriters of this age – and rightly so! Make sure you hear this masterpiece of 2025:

“Thanks to the distinctly American country-pop influence in her music, she’s come to understand certain cultural discrepancies between the US and the UK. “Class works very differently in America,” she says. “In the United Kingdom, all of the bands, musicians, British celebrities, actors—they went to private school. If you click on their Wikipedia, their dad owns Northern Ireland, and you’re like, what?” she says. “That’s who my colleagues are. I’m very fucking aware of how precarious my position is as a result of that. I’m just trying to work four or five times harder than them to make sure that I can stay here for as long as possible.”

American culture was inescapable when she was growing up: “Johnny Cash was the most famous guy,” she says. “I thought he was a pop star. I thought he was like Robbie Williams or something.” Much of the fascination, she says, came from America’s capitalistic hustle culture. “The way everybody [in America] is always trying to gain something and make something of themselves,” she says, “you’re not allowed to talk about that kind of stuff in Ireland, and yet we’re so fascinated by it.”

Despite the impression that her campy, wisecracking lyrics may give, CMAT’s love of country music is pure of heart. “Isn’t it interesting that I have a terrible time in Nashville?” she wonders aloud. She loves the people and the culture, “but the country music establishment in Nashville hates my fucking guts.” CMAT has found that people treat her like an “intruder”: “People think that I’m taking the piss or I’m using elements of country music because I think it’s a funny, interesting thing to do, and not because it is a really inherent and important pillar of my work as a songwriter,” she says.

It’s CMAT’s working-class Irish roots, however, that stoked and sustain her love for country in the first place. “This is a genre that inherently allows voiceless people to come to the front,” she says. “That’s why it’s amazing and that’s why we’ll always have an appeal, and it’s why people will always want to listen to it”.

NME provided a five-star review for EURO-COUNTRY when they sat down with it. Hailing CMAT’s third studio album, NME note how modernity has failed us, yet CMAT has laid it all out on this extraordinary and “full-bodied” work:

“It’s been a CMAT summer, for sure. She’s charmed the pants of many a festival – sealing the deal with real Glastonbury moment – ‘Running/Planning’ was ironically inescapable for radio play, and she struck TikTok gold with the celeb-endorsed viral dance challenge for ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’. There’s an infectious joy to all that Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson does, but she wouldn’t be here (on the brink of proper superstardom) if it wasn’t for the emotional suckerpunch she lands with each LOLsome lyric, every pintful of charisma, every bedroom mirror dance moment.

While her strong 2022 debut ‘If My Wife New I’d Be Dead’ and buzz-building follow-up ‘Crazymad, For Me’ saw her hailed as “Dublin’s answer to Dolly Parton” by translating her troubled romances and chaotic personal life into rootin’ tootin’ bangers, the political pressures of the world elevate her third album to a more profound level. Camp, conviction and catharsis burst from ‘Euro-Country’.

Birdsong and a gentle Irish voice lead us into ‘Euro-Country’, but where are we? It’s as much a place as it is a concept and a state of mind. As she puts it herself, it’s a term she coined for her continental take on the genre, a nod to how Ireland still sits proudly in the EU under the euro, and how “capitalism is one of the worst things to ever happen to us”.  “I was 12 when the da’s started killing themselves all around me,” she sings on the opening title track, remembering the impact of the financial crash on families when she was growing up, “And it was normal… Building houses that stay empty even now.”

There are straight lines to be drawn between this and For Those I Love’s recent opus ‘Carving The Stone’ in the depiction of the havoc wreaked on Ireland by greed, but this is less brutal, with different shades of light. Adele-sized in its scope and in showcasing Thompson’s lung capacity, ‘When A Good Man Cries’ takes a fiddle to the heartstrings as she cuts to the heart of her evolution as a writer (“All of my jokes have turned to prayers because they’re scarred just like their mother”), while the the pop highs bring on altitude delirium.

The mini-epic almost proggy pure jam of ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ is a hilarious therapy session on her misplaced not-really-hatred for the celebrity chef in lost hours at motorway services, while ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’ just totally pumps while reflecting on the pressures of social media and ultimate ear-worm ‘Running/Planning’ lampoons the relationship expectations put upon women.

From the bubbling, genre-smashing ‘Tree Six Foive’ to the existential ‘Ready’, the hilarious open road anthem ‘Coronation St.’, the brilliantly bitter ‘Lord Let That Tesla Crash’, and pleading showstopper ‘Janis Joplining’, the personal meets the political over a cosy bed of dreamy pop.

Modernity has failed us, but that won’t stop Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson. That’s the CMAT way in 2025: approach with absolute confidence, total honesty is the only option, and you might as well have a laugh and shake your bits while you’re at it. ‘Euro-Country’ has the courage and the consistency to land high on the fast-approaching end-of-year lists, and to make CMAT the icon she’s been giving all this time”.

I am going to wrap up. Not only one of the critics’ favourite album of the year, EURO-COUNTRY is one of mine. I wanted to spend time with it and the artist behind it. You wonder what is in store for CMAT next year. Massive stages and maybe more singles. Perhaps collaborations with artists like Charli xcx and some surprises here and there. Who knows! What we do know is that her fanbase will continue to grow. With EURO-COUNTRY, CMAT has released one of the best albums…

OF this year.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Picture Parlour

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Shot By Melissa

Picture Parlour

__________

I spotlighted the amazing…

Picture Parlour back in 2023. A couple of years later, and a lot has happened. Their debut album, The Parlour, was released last month. Back in 2023, I talked about this band that consisted of Katherine Parlour (vocals and guitar), Ella Risi (guitar), Sian Lynch (bass), and Michael Nash (drums). Though, two years later, the core members are Katherine Parlour and Ella Risi. They are often joined by a rotating line-up of musicians for live shows, which in early-2025 included bassist Michael Nash, Kitty Fitz, and Joey Django. So a line-up shift or a slight reconfiguration has happened. Picture Parlour’s sound has slightly altered/expanded in the past couple of years. I think that the debut album is their most extraordinary and complete work. In April, they have a run of tour dates, including a date at Oslo Hackney on 21st. I might have to go to that gig, as the venue is very close to where I live. I am going to drop in some recent interviews with Picture Parlour. A great time to revisit a music force formerly based out of Manchester (Parlour and Risi met there as students). I believe they are now in London. I wonder if they will play a date in Manchester next year. I will end with a review for the exceptional The Parlour. Katherine Parlour and Ella Risi discuss one of the standout and brilliant debut albums of the year. I have said that a lot in features, though I feel The Parlour is in the top five best debuts of 2025! At the end of last month, DIY spoke with a sensational duo (I am referring to them as such, as the majority of press is conducted by Parlour and Risi) that “usher us into the places, culture and magic that shaped them, and which gave rise to the imaginary world of ‘The Parlour’”.

“Since that lightbulb moment at The Castle in Manchester, before bubbling together in lockdown, Ella and Katherine’s brief journey as Picture Parlour (later completed by drummer Michael Nash and, recently, touring musicians Joey Django and Kitty Fitz) has been more of a hurricane than a whirlwind.

2023 was the eye of the storm; they gained a fan in Courtney Love and earned a festival slot with Bruce Springsteen off the back of their live show, before debut single ‘Norwegian Wood’ had even landed. The industry buzz that followed the single’s release resulted in naysayers who tried to rip them apart, sneering ‘industry plant’ and belittling the word-of-mouth buzz they had built since relocating from Manchester to London. Understandably, the duo needed some time to retreat and recalibrate. “It scarred us a little bit,” admits Katherine, two-and-a-half years down the line. “It was a super conscious decision to put a pause on everything, [and reject] running with the wind to try and catch this buzzy moment.”

In an age where artists are constantly pressurised to capitalise on momentum, it’s proven vital that Picture Parlour acted to prevent things from spilling over. If they were not so “locked in” with one another, trusting the fact that they had each other’s backs, Ella suggests things might have gone differently.

“We opened the door to what we thought were our dreams, and everything in the room was on fire,” continues Katherine. “We closed the door, and promised each other that we’ll follow our instincts. Our idols, like Joan Jett, are people who demand control of their own destiny. You can hear it in the music, there’s this confidence and stubbornness. I don’t think that the greats made the legacy that they’ve got out of being ‘yes’ people.”

Channelling the spirit of legends like Jett, as well as David Bowie and The White Stripes, the duo’s “semi self-titled” debut album, ‘The Parlour’ is finally imminent. Written between London, Katherine’s hometown of Liverpool (Ella is originally from North Yorkshire) and Nashville, where it was recorded in September 2024, ‘The Parlour’ globetrotted its way into existence. So, how do we find this self-styled ‘parlour’?

Whipping ‘The Parlour’ into shape, one Jack Daniels and coke at a time, the end result is a culmination of the duo’s story so far, from the heartfelt balladry of ‘The Travelling Show’ to some of the “frustration and rage” that emanated from the confusion of their breakout period, which they bring onto their own terms via the tongue-in-cheek, playful ‘Talk About It’.

Today, as they finish the conversation on a street-side bench, they are demoing songs for their “darker” second album. Does that mean ‘The Parlour’ is closed for business? “I think we have no choice, we’re stuck with ‘The Parlour’ forever!” jokes Katherine. “The shit that we’re working on now feels like ‘The Parlour’ has been closed down, it’s all rubble, and there’s one old man, still there with his whiskey, refusing to leave. There’s just one candle on, in the corner of the room…”

After stepping back to figure out the type of band they wanted Picture Parlour to be, Ella and Katherine actually now find themselves “10 steps ahead”, deep into their second album before their first has even seen the light of day. Crucially, they tell DIY the pace is now entirely on their terms, ready to “crack on” with a renewed sense of clarity, “that maybe we didn’t have two years ago,” ponders Katherine.

“As they say, hunger is the best sauce, and that’s what I’m living by,” she smirks, before Ella doubles down with the final word. “We are very hungry for it”.

I love how Picture Parlour relocated to Nashville to record The Parlour. The city has attracted many British artists and provides inspiration and an incredible community of artists. NME spoke with the duo about their debut album, the work they are doing on the second album, and why they focused on northern Soul when it came to the sonic core of The Parlour. If you have not heard the album yet, it is such a wonderful experience. You will not forget it, I can guarantee! A big reason why I wanted to revisit the awesome Picture Parlour:

“You talk about the backlash around your breakout moment on ‘Talk About It’. How did that song help you process that experience, draw a line under it and move on?

Katherine Parlour: “‘Talk About It’ started as a joke. It was like, ‘You know what? Imagine if it was all fucking true and we were these industry plants – what would be the song that we do?’ It just started off as taking the piss, never gonna see the light of day. We finished it and, to be honest, we hated the song.”

Ella Risi: “It was the classic you put it at the bottom of the demo link, and everyone was like, ‘What’s that tune, though?’”

You recorded the album in Nashville, which is known as Music City. What was it like relocating there to work on this record?

Parlour: “We just didn’t sleep for three weeks.”

Risi: “We were jet lagged as well, so we were just naturally waking up at 5am, and after the studio, we didn’t want to go home, so we’d be like, ‘We gotta go out!’ We were just living off adrenaline.”

Parlour: “It was an amazing place to be. Growing up, my nan shoved Johnny Cash down my throat – she was all about country and ’50s rock’n’roll. So to get to go there… we went to the Johnny Cash Museum. I cried looking at the letters between Johnny and June – that got me going. We did all of the cliché things, like walking up and down Broadway and the honky tonk bars. One night, I got up and did a Johnny and June duet with some bloke with a huge handlebar moustache, so I felt like we really became local after that. The general Americana sound and that magic of Nashville bled into the record, which is everything we always wanted. We’ve always dreamt of being an international band, and a dream of mine is to go over to the States and tour, so for me, it was a dream come true, and it definitely impacted the album.”

The album was also inspired by Northern Soul, which is having a resurgence in the UK right now. Why do you think young people are connecting with that genre and culture?

Parlour: “There’s so many reasons. I was lucky enough to have a dad who did Northern Soul dancing with his brother when he was young, so I grew up with that. It reminds me of home. But I think the reason it’s connecting with so many people now, which is amazing to see, is not just about the music. Obviously, the music’s a sacred part of it, but it’s a sense of community, and it’s such a free space. It’s euphoric; you just let go. I think there’s a nice synergy there with live music and how going to gigs makes me feel.”

Risi: “But there’s an intimacy with Northern Soul in the community. We’ve been going to nights down here and we’ve met so many people. People are just craving human connections and care at the moment. I think that’s what the Northern Soul community prides itself on.”

How is that partnership feeding into album two, which you’re working on now? Where is this album taking you?

Parlour: “Straight away, it’s definitely darker. It feels a lot more confident as well. Obviously, I love album one, but it was written in the midst of a lot of changes and new things – having a manager and then getting a record deal. These things are just like The Twilight Zone.”

Risi: “I think now we trust ourselves and our creative instincts. Towards the end of album one, we were just like, ‘Fuck it, let’s do what we want to do, and it doesn’t matter if anybody thinks it’s going to be a hit, as long as we’re proud of it and we can stand by it and enjoy listening to it and love it.’”

Parlour: “I think reaching that for album one has really put us in good stead to just build for album two, so there’s a lot more creative confidence to this new record”.

I want to include a part of DORK’s November interview with Ella Risi and Katherine Parlour. It is hard to state what genre you can attach to The Parlour. I have mentioned Northern Soul, though DORK called it a  “sexy, seedy rock record”. It is restrictive to label or pigeonhole the music, though there are elements of different genres and time periods. However, it is the unique vision of Picture Parlour that makes their debut so long-lasting. How it is familiar but fresh:

“The world of ‘The Parlour’ isn’t all mood lighting and lust, though. Tracks like ‘Talk About It’ are sharper, more direct. “We wrote it as a bit of a joke, a cathartic game for ourselves after being written off as industry plants early on,” they explain. “Those false narratives still impact us today; that’s the truth of the matter. It’s hard to know people have developed misinformed opinions on this project because of a rancid and misplaced witch hunt.” The anger is still there, but so is the perspective. “It thickened our skin very early on and reminded us how important it is for artists and fans to advocate across the board for minority groups who come under scrutiny for simply existing.”

Making the record brought lessons, too. “Patience. It is only possible to be patient when there is no choice but to be patient.” The songwriting pushed them into new territory. “A leap for me was writing with other people. It’s not something I’ve ever done or felt comfortable with,” one of them says. “Allowing myself to be open and honest enough to collaborate was a big leap. And to also stand my own ground when I knew a particular thing needed to be a certain way. I’m a professional compromiser now.”

Their influences go beyond music. “Film is always influencing our work. Particularly David Lynch, which I know a lot of musicians feel,” they say. Right now, it’s ‘Phantom of the Paradise’ that has their full attention. “I think that may be my muse for album two.”

And what’s the best thing someone could say about ‘The Parlour’? “There are two things. One, that it made them want to pick up a guitar or bass and learn a riff. Two, that it helps them get up and ready to kick some ass in their day-to-day life.”

As for what’s next, they’re keeping it honest. “Depends how this album does, to be honest.” But the dream? “Picture Parlour support tour with Jack White.” If that happens in 2026, you heard it here first.

Until then, there’s just one final message: “Buy the record and be nice”.

I am ending with a review from The Line of Best Fit. With an album cover that puts me in mind of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here – just with less fire! – and music that will remain in your mind long after you have finished listening to it, I think they will have a huge 2026. It will be a year where they truly go worldwide. I can see some big U.S. dates very soon:

“On their debut LP, they justify the hype that has been building for the past two years. Describing the album as a jukebox, which is certainly apt, with influences ranging from Northern Soul to psychedelia and 70s rock n roll.

“Cielo Drive” captures the rock n roll influence in an explosive cocktail, Katherine Parlour’s vocals stretched and capturing something rough and ready. The dirty riffs recall their 70s influences, including T. Rex and Patti Smith. It is an expansion of the sounds the quintet has dabbled in on their eps and really sets the tone for what is to follow. There is an irrepressible energy that is palpable across the LP.

“Who’s There To Love Without You” also leans into a similar incendiary atmosphere, almost punk-like and full of swagger and verve. It is the sound of a group full of confidence and now bringing it to the masses.

While the group’s EPs leaned heavily into baroque sounds on the likes of “Judgement Day”, there is certainly more variety here. “24 Hr Open” is full of angst and dirty riffs; its grungier sound is a departure, but one Picture Parlour slips effortlessly into. It is to their credit that they do not rely on tried and tested sounds and push themselves, often rising to the challenge.

There are shades of a more pop-rock, new-wave sheen on “Used To Be Your Girlfriend”, however, this quickly segues into something more feral. It really cuts loose in its second half, allowing the rhythm section to unfurl. This track really strikes a nice balance between a lighter side to the group’s sound and the rougher moments earlier on.

The more operatic, baroque influences are still apparent in places. Having drawn comparisons to Alex Turner, this influence is more readily visible on “Around The Bend”. It is a melancholic, slow burner that, rather than feeling at odds with other parts of the record, feels like a natural extension and keeps it from ever being one note. It shows that they are as comfortable with quieter, intimate songs as they are with swirling epics. It offers more of an opportunity for their musicianship to shine through.

In addition to more classic rock and baroque influences, folk rock certainly feels more left field, but “Ronnie’s Note #3” sees them veer more into this territory with acoustic guitars and strings the main focus, alongside Parlour’s vocals. It is one of the album’s highlights and an area that, while unexpected, feels right given the range of their inspirations. There is a richness to the storytelling, and while clearly aping Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, it is shot through with Picture Parlour’s distinctive brand.

The inclusion of “Norwegian Wood” feels a tad out of place given that other EP tracks are absent, but it serves as a reminder of what made audiences fall in love with the group in the first place and why it remains a fan favourite.

The Parlour embodies all of what makes Picture Parlour a unique force. There is such a heterogeneous mix to their sound, yet it never losses their singularity, spark, and charm. There is a broad crossover appeal, and there is so much to unpack. They have taken the sounds of their EPs and expanded into something more expansive, without losing what endeared them to audiences. This is a thrilling, evocative debut that lives up to the hype”.

Two years after I spotlighted Picture Parlour, I needed to come back to them and ensure anyone who has not heard them listens to them. As I started out by saying, there have been some changes and shifts, so things are not exactly the same as they were in 2023. If you have not heard this magnificent duo, then make sure you check them out. The Parlour is a truly exceptional debut album. However, you feel like Picture Parlour have just got started! It is fascinating imagining where they are going to be…

A few years from now.

___________

Follow Picture Parlour

PHOTO CREDIT: Shot By Melissa

Official:

https://www.pictureparlour.co.uk/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/pictureparlourband/

TikTok:

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

Twitter:

https://x.com/pictureparlour_

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnfwwzZFnCuVR-y16qrXaUQ

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/pictureparlourband

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/show/1amnggjPO42W9l9R5xXodQ?si=057c37c5df344c76

FEATURE: Spotlight: Bay Swag

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Bay Swag

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THIS has been a busy…

PHOTO CREDIT: Joshua Holmes

and standout year for Bay Swag. New York-born Lloyd McKenzie Jr. released his debut album, Ahead of My Time, last year. He released Damaged Thoughts earlier in the year. And he also put out the E.P., Swiggity. An artist who weaves his love of R&B into Sexy Drill, he has just been named as one of Vevo DSCVR Artists to Watch for 2026. It is confirmation that this artist is someone that you need to put on your radar:

“Mika Sunga, Director of Programming: “We’re excited to welcome Queens-born drill rapper Bay Swag to our DSCVR ATW 2026 class. He’s helping define the Sexy Drill movement, which blends the hard-hitting beats of drill with the smooth, soulful feel of R&B.

“His debut album really stood out to me because it’s raw, introspective, and gives a real glimpse into his world. You can tell he’s got that star quality and drive to take things to the next level. “

Bay Swag: “Being named one of Vevo’s Artists to Watch 2026 means everything to me. It’s more than recognition — it’s reassurance that all the long nights and sacrifices are paying off. I don’t take this moment for granted; it just fuels me to go even harder and keep proving why I’m here”.

I will move to some interviews from this year with the amazing Bay Swag. I must admit that I am quite new to his music, so I have been catching up and listening back. Damaged Thoughts is one of this year’s albums that will not get the same acclaim and buzz as the most commercial and successful, though it is one that needs to be heard. Even if you know nothing about Sexy Drill or do not think it is your sin, you will definitely be able to connect with Damaged Goods.

I will move to a new interview from XXL Mag. One of the hardest-working artists out there, there are personal reasons why he is pushing so hard. With his father incarcerated and his mother having just beaten cancer, there is this motivation and challenge set of circumstances that means Bay Swag is putting his everything into the music:

“The Queens native, who proudly reps the New York City borough with QGTM (initials for Queens Get The Money) tattooed across his neck, has been preparing for moments like this ever since he started grinding 10 years ago. “You just gotta wait your turn and be patient,” Bay insists. He did just that when “Fisherrr,” a flirty, sexy drill track he collaborated on with Cash Cobain last February, took off in the Big Apple and beyond.

Over 40 million Spotify streams later, a remix with Ice Spice helping bring in 17 million YouTube views, and his lyrics soundtracking social media posts for plenty of baddies across platforms have allowed Bay Swag’s slick-talking lifestyle raps and sticky melodies to fall on more ears. The rising rhymer is part of a rap renaissance in New York City that pushes positivity rather than popping off.

Before he was outside bringing his music to the masses, Bay Swag, born Lloyd McKenzie Jr., was a fun-loving kid who was really outside back in Jamaica, Queens, running around, playing tag and Manhunt with his friends on the block. Music was always heard in his household, where he lived as an only child with his mom, who worked at Geico selling insurance for over 20 years. At 5, thanks to car rides with his dad, little Lloyd was listening to Jay-Z’s hustler mentality through his rhymes. As Bay got older, Juelz Santana and Dipset’s swag drew him into the Harlem rap scene. He also latched onto Trey Songz’s R&B melodies.

By 12, Bay was witnessing the rap lifestyle unfold right before his eyes. His uncle, Windsor “Slow” Lubin, who launched the popular New York clothing line SlowBucks, had a warehouse in Queens for the brand, where rappers, actors and athletes often came through. “They all loved me ’cause I was just ahead of my time,” Bay recalls. “I was fly. So, I’m like, you know what, why not just start making music? I’m around it, so why not take advantage of it?”

He made his first song in a friend’s basement studio. With the help of his father, Lloyd “Bay Lloyd” McKenzie, a former party promoter who worked with artists like A Tribe Called Quest, Junior started hitting the studio consistently. At first, his dad would have the beat and songs already written. “Everything was already ready for me,” shares Bay, who graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo High School. “All I had to do was show up. So, now when he goes to jail, I don’t have that no more. So, I’m kind of like lost a little bit, you know?” Bay began writing his own bars out of necessity.

For the next few years, the self-described “young OG” was putting in work. In 2017, his father was convicted for allegedly ordering the 2012 hit on law student Brandon Woodward, who was moonlighting as a drug courier. McKenzie Sr. was sentenced to 85 years to life for second-degree murder and operating as a drug trafficker. Bay Swag put his pain into his music. “Daddy got locked ’cause my daddy was trappin’/They tried to say he killed a ni**a in Manhattan/Jury believed the ni**a that was rattin’/I’ma get you out, Pops, swear I ain’t cappin’,” he raps on the 2017 track “Saucin.” “Music is my therapy,” he explains.

By that point, he was locked in on his career. There were local performances, connecting with Diddy’s son King Combs as part of the CYN collective in 2015, Bay’s track “Rumors” getting him some early buzz online in 2016, and his mixtape, Leader of the New School, the same year, earning him a short-lived Interscope Records publishing deal, which all increased his potential. He continued dropping more loosies and connecting with the right people, like rapper-producer Cash Cobain, in 2020. After Bay released his Ahead of My Time project in 2022, a mix of different sounds to see what would stick, the Auto-Tune-drenched “Quagen” did the job. “That brought me back to life,” Bay admits.

Tracks like the emotionally-driven “Therapy” in 2023, and the gold-certified hit “Fisherrr” followed a year later. “Not only is it positive, but we bringing everybody together,” he tells of the latter song’s success. “Good feelings and positive vibes.” To capitalize on the track’s impact, Bay joined Cash as the opening act on Ice Spice’s Y2K! World Tour in the U.S. last summer.

It’s clear Bay Swag has never stopped working—rapping is the only job he’s ever had. There’s a deeper meaning to his motivation. “My dad being incarcerated, and also my mother just beat cancer,” he reveals. “How can I give up? I got people depending on me.” His work ethic is what Deon Douglas, cofounder of Standard Records, noticed when he signed the rapper in 2024. “He sticks to what he’s doing,” says Douglas, who’s also the cofounder of 11AM management, where he helps guide the careers of artists like Lil Tjay. “[Bay Swag] does the work. He keeps getting better, he keeps learning. You always meet him in the studio or a video shoot, at an interview. So immediately, that’s what I appreciated about him”.

I am going to move to Rolling Stone and their interview from earlier in the year around the release of Damaged Thoughts. This incredible talent that is going to be an icon of the future, he spoke about “his friendships with rap legends, and the influence of his incarcerated father on his work”. There are a couple of future U.S. dates booked for Bay Swag. I do wonder if he has plans to come to the U.K. and play soon. Maybe better known in his native U.S., there is a growing fanbase here that would love to see him perform:

“The album’s title track is the most personal, as he raps about his mom’s cancer diagnosis (he tells us that she’s since “beat it”) and rhymes, “Sometimes I be lost in my thoughts with my friends/But it’s not my fault, ‘cause I don’t talk about my problems” over a heartfelt vocal sample. The line is true to life, he admits, telling me, ”Music is therapy. I don’t talk with people [about hard times], so I just rap about it.”

The result is a holistic project that marks him as an artist willing to dig deep. There’s a scene in the upcoming Spike Lee film Highest II Lowest where Denzel Washington, playing a record executive, demands that a posturing artist shed his swagger and be vulnerable. The moment speaks to the throng of rappers who are quick to rap about violence or be braggadocious but won’t always admit the trauma that such bravado conceals. Damaged Thoughts shows Swag never needed that memo. When I ask him how he manages to have the fun he has on the album while going through some of the turmoil he rhymes about, he smiles and says, “I don’t know,” while shaking his head. “A day at a time,” Maria Gracia, a senior marketing director at his label, adds.

He’s wearing a white hockey jersey and designer jeans, though he might be changing for the video shoot in Teaneck, New Jersey, that he’s headed to after our holistic interview. Swaying back and forth in his roller chair, he makes consistent eye contact, and after expressing himself sometimes asks, “You get what I’m tryna say?” in a way that doesn’t feel like a knee-jerk punctuation, but a genuine desire to have a two-way conversation.

Even without his lineage, Bay probably would have won over many of the artists in his vast network. Damaged Thoughts boasts appearances from 42 Dugg, Sheff G, Meek Mill, Quavo, Kyle Ricch, and Young Thug. Bay Swag recorded “Lil Jasmine” with the latter artist before the YSL indictment, and says they have since recorded another song alongside Ty Dolla $ign. He counts Thug as a friend who once offered to pay for his father’s lawyer.

And, of course Bay, Swag gets slizzy alongside Cash Cobain on the smooth “Don’t Care No More” and bouncy “Caicos,” which has a similar island vibe to Cash’s bubbling “Feeeeeeeeel” single. When I ask Bay Swag about the first rap song he fell in love with, he mentions Nas and AZ’s “How Ya Livin’,” saying he loved their back-and-forth rhymes and enjoys emulating that format alongside Cash.

Many were first introduced to Bay Swag’s music when he featured on Cash’s “Fisherrr,” a silky track that helped set off last summer. Bay Swag says he thinks people love the sexy drill movement because people “feel good” listening to it, and it’s danceable without being violent. As I wrote in 2022, it’s an offshoot of drill where listeners can have fun shimmying and mimicking the slithery cadences without worrying about lyrics dissing dead people or other borderline themes. Bay Swag is a notable figure in that shift, entrenching his name in the fabric of New York culture in the same way his father did years ago.

He shows me a promotional clip for the album where he notes, “If [my father] would’ve never went through that, went to jail, had life in prison, I would’ve never had that hustle. I would’ve never had that drive. That made me become the man of the house, at a young age too.” New York City, like so much of America, is plagued by the justice system’s systematic thrusting of parents from homes, sparking changes of fortune that only sometimes lead to triumphs like Bay Swag’s. Hopefully, we can reach a world where more artists can find their greatness without having to prove their resilience amid tumult. But in this one, Bay Swag is yet another example that it’s possible”.

I want to take things back to the start of this year, as Bay Swag was coming off the back of a breakthrough and successful 2024. He spoke with Billboard about the Sexy Drill movement, addressing the violent lyrics associated with Drill, working alongside Ice Spice and Cash Cobain:

“What was it like to see “Fisherrr” all over social media and blow up on TikTok?

We knew it was a fire song, but we didn’t know it was going to be the way it is. I feel like you never know. The songs you think is a hit don’t do nothing, but the songs you least expect [end up being] the one. It’s a blessing seeing all the kids, dancers and influencers dancing to it and having a good time. It really started a whole new dance. Shoutout Reemo. He started that s–t. It’s a whole new wave of music. It’s a whole new energy.

How did the feature with Ice Spice happen? Was it intentional to have a female rapper on the remix?

It just made sense. She’s the Queen of New York. I was super excited. I wanted to hear how she would come on it because that’s not the typical music she be dropping. She did her thing. Shout out Ice Spice.

Over the last year, you’ve been consistently releasing singles and helping spur this sexy drill wave. How are you putting your signature spin on this sound?

I call it being myself — and that’s a problem, too. A lot of people will try to do sexy drill and try to sound like someone, when you can just be yourself and that’ll make a difference. That’s why people will say it all sounds alike.

You’ve also mentioned in past interviews that New York artists are more united. How is it making music in this era of New York?

It’s good vibes. Especially right now, sexy drill is good energy. Even when we’re recording the music, it’s good energy. We’re dancing and we’re just having fun together.

In the past, drill has been criticized for its violent lyrics. How are you, Cash and Chow helping to rewrite that narrative?

We’re talking to the women. We’re telling them how pretty they are and how sexy they are. It’s a big difference. It’s fun. It makes you want to dance. We got the kids, elders, and the women, of course. We are trying to separate ourselves from that. We don’t want violence. We just want good vibes, good energy and good parties”.

Apologies that the timeline and chronology is sort of back-to-front when it comes to interviews! I wanted to lead with the most recent one, as it caught my eye, though there will be a lot more interviews and features next year. One of Vevo’s hot tips for next year, I know that we are going to be talking about Bay Swag for years to come. He is this astonishing talent whose clear determination and vision has turned heads. People talking about him as this unmissable talent. Go and check out Damaged Thoughts and Swiggity. Proof that we have this truly amazing artist in our midst. I do wonder just how far Bay Swag can go…

IN 2026.

___________

Follow Bay Swag

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/bayswag/

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@bayswag

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0ShmUyGC785pMDaRdP5Sap?si=89naY3bNTNOhnI9VBMJfqA

FEATURE: I Can’t Give Everything Away: David Bowie’s Blackstar at Ten

FEATURE:

 

 

I Can’t Give Everything Away

David Bowie’s Blackstar at Ten

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THERE is no doubting…

IN THIS PHOTO: The final photos of David Bowie were published on his 69th birthday, 8th January, 2016 (the same day his final album, Blackstar, was released)/PHOTO CREDIT: Jimmy King (via The Hollywood Reporter)

the fact that 2016 is one of the strangest, most eventful and memorable years of this century. Perhaps not for great reasons. In terms of the albums that were produced, some modern classics definitely came about. From Beyoncé’s Lemonade to Frank Ocean’s Blonde to A Tribe Called Quest’s final album, We Got It from Here... Thank You 4 Your Service, and Solange Knowles’s A Seat at the Table, there were so many remarkable albums that still reverberate today. However, 2016 was a year when we lost more than one music great. George Michael left us on Christmas Day. Prince on 21st April. Leonard Cohen on 7th November. Sharon Jones on 18th November. An artist who both released a modern classic and sadly died in 2016 was David Bowie. I am going to write a couple of features marking the tenth anniversary of David Bowie’s death. He died on 10th January, 2016, a mere two days before the release of Blackstar. Nobody knew that Bowie was so close to death when he released his twenty-sixth album. 8th January, 2016 was a double celebration, as it was also David Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday. Fans had a couple of reasons to be joyful. Blackstar, in retrospect, has so many references to Bowie’s impending death and mortality though, for those hearing it fresh two days before he died, we did not know that. Rather than dwell on his tragic and untimely passing, I am going to focus on Blackstar. Some of what I bring in may reference his death and how we view the album, though there was vast positivity around the album. One of his masterpieces. An artist who had periods of real genius, and others that were less prolific, definitely finished his recording career with one of his greatest albums.

As it turns ten on 8th January, I know that Blackstar will be assessed and reviewed fresh. What it means a decade since it came out. Of course, people will also remember David Bowie on the tenth anniversary of his death. I am going to bring in reviews for a staggering seven-track album. From the extraordinary near-ten minute title track (listed as a black star symbol rather than the word) to the devastating finale, I Can’t Give Everything Away. The final album track released in his lifetime, it is both a beautiful and hugely affecting way to sign off. I think my favourite track off Blackstar is Lazarus. Bowie’s vocal performance is extraordinary! Even so ill living with liver cancer, he gives his everything to the songs on Blackstar. Some of his rawest and most revealing vocals, the compositions and the band he plays with are simply incredible. One of his most experimental albums, with Art Rock and Jazz fusing together, Bowie drew inspiration from artists such as Kendrick Lamar and Death Grips. The singles, Blackstar and Lazarus, were released late in 2015 - so there was this excitement and building anticipation. Both have music videos, though we were not looking for clues or noticing anything that suggested Bowie was ill and near death. These two videos especially are so moving to watch now, knowing what we know. However, they are both incredibly powerful and are these amazing visuals that make us remember what an icon and innovator Bowie was! It is no surprise that Blackstar hit the top of the album chart in pretty much every country is was released in. This massive commercial and critical success, there were so many five-star reviews.

Not attacking those who scored it lower, but I wonder why they did not award it five stars! Objectively, Blackstar is a remarkable and unforgettable album without a weak track or moment. Critics did not know about David Bowie’s illness, if they were reviewing it before the album release. But you would have though Blackstar would get a perfect score from all. Maybe it will ten years after its release. I want to start with this article from The Guardian that was published on 11th January, 2016. They ask whether Bowie was saying goodbye on Blackstar. Whether it is an album about his death and the afterlife:

“The songs on Bowie’s inspired new album speak of illness, death and heaven – and offer intriguing insights about the man who sang, ‘I’m not a pop star, I’m a Blackstar”

One thing that struck reviewers who were grappling with Blackstar, David Bowie’s final album, was how tricky it was to interpret lyrically. Kitty Empire, writing in the Observer, described it as elliptical, while the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote that the album “seems to offer those attempting to unravel his lyrics a wry ‘best of luck with that’”.

What the critics didn’t know, however, was that the man behind it had been diagnosed with cancer 18 months ago, and that he knew his life was coming to an end. If this had been common knowledge, they would all no doubt have looked at Blackstar in a different light. Was David Bowie saying goodbye on it? And does it seem obvious now that he has died?

I Can’t Give Everything Away, the album’s final track, is perhaps the most potent song to re-examine. “I know something is very wrong,” he begins, then sings: “The blackout hearts, the flowered news / With skull designs upon my shoes.” The sense that Bowie has an unhappy secret he desperately wishes he could share is reaffirmed in the chorus: “I can’t give everything away”.

There is a lot that I want to bring in. However, regarding this feature from Rolling Stone, I can only bring so much in, as it is paywalled. So I cannot include everything. However, it tells the story behind the stunning revelation that was Blackstar. We do get a bit of background and context. I am going to bring in a more comprehensive (and un-paywalled!) oral history of Blackstar from NME:

“One Sunday night in the spring of 2014, David Bowie walked into 55 Bar, a 96-year-old jazz joint tucked away on a quiet side street in New York’s West Village. A friend, jazz bandleader Maria Schneider, had suggested he check out the night’s headliner, a quartet led by saxophonist Donny McCaslin. Bowie grabbed a table near the stage and took in a set of exploratory jazz, then left without speaking to the band. “A server was like, ‘Wait, was that David Bowie?'” McCaslin says. “It started dawning on people.”

Ten days later, McCaslin got an email: Bowie wanted him and his drummer Mark Guiliana to join him in the studio. “I thought, ‘This is David Bowie, and he chose me, and he’s sending me an email?'” McCaslin says. “I tried not to think about it too much. I just wanted to stay in the moment and just do the work [he wanted].” That work, initially, was only one song: the trippy, jazz-infused “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime),” which Bowie released on his 2014 compilation album, Nothing Has Changed.

Then, last January, Bowie called McCaslin’s entire group to the downtown studio Magic Shop to begin work on his 25th album, ★ (pronounced Blackstar), which is due out on January 8th, Bowie’s 69th birthday. “It did surprise me,” says Guiliana of being asked to play on the album. “But I feel like he’s built a career and artistic identity on surprises. It falls in line with who he is as an artist.”

The seeds of ★ date to mid-2014, when Bowie met with longtime producer Tony Visconti and drummer Zack Alford to cut some demos at Magic Shop. Then Bowie disappeared for five months to work on the new material at his house. “He’s got a little setup there,” says Visconti. “And there was no clear communication from him until December. That’s when he told me he was ready to make the album.”

Two years ago, Bowie released his first album in nearly decade, the relatively traditional (by Bowie standards) rock album The Next Day, which he cut with Visconti and members of his old touring band. For ★, he was determined to do something very different. “We were listening to a lot of Kendrick Lamar,” says Visconti. “We wound up with nothing like that, but we loved the fact Kendrick was so open-minded and he didn’t do a straight-up hip-hop record. He threw everything on there, and that’s exactly what we wanted to do. The goal, in many, many ways, was to avoid rock & roll.”

McCaslin and his bandmates were able to handle whatever Bowie threw at them, from Krautrock to hip-hop to pop to jazz, creating an incredible fusion sound that can’t be pinned to any one genre. “They can play something at the drop of a dime,” says Visconti. “[Keyboardist] Jason [Lindner] was a godsend. We gave him some pretty far-out chords, but he brought a jazz sensibility to re-voice them.” They cut the album on ProTools, though much of the gear was vintage. “Jason’s synthesizer didn’t have a computer with souped-up programs like Omnisphere on it,” Visconti says. “He would just do it with guitar pedals, making all the sounds unique. We’re like old school like that. Also, [bassist] Tim Lefebvre was just phenomenal to work with. He pretty much nailed every take right on the spot”

Moving to an NME feature from 2021. Looking back at Blackstar five years after its release, I am sure that we will get similar retrospectives and examinations on its tenth anniversary. There were recollections from those who worked with him, including Donny McCaslin (tenor saxophone, flute). Produced by David Bowie and his long-term friend and producer, Tony Visconti, it is wonderful that Bowie got to release this stunning album whilst he was still with us! He would have heard some of the reaction to the Blackstar and Lazarus singles, and he would have known how people felt about those. Hopefully it gave him solace and satisfaction:

“Where Bowie often returned to the same group of trusted musicians to join him on his records, ‘Blackstar’ saw him bring in a jazz ensemble to work with him for the first time. Donny McCaslin, leader of New York’s The Donny McCaslin Group, came recommended to him by musician Maria Schneider, who Bowie worked with on the 2014 version of ‘Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime)’. McCaslin, a part of Schneider’s orchestra, also appeared on the track.

Donny McCaslin: “Bowie’s team had reached out to Maria to do a collaboration on ‘Sue…’ with her orchestra. During that time, she was talking with me about it, and she called and said that David had been trying to describe to her what he heard as the rhythmic underpinning of the song and that it made her think of me and my group. So she played him a record of mine called ‘Casting For Gravity’ and that led to them both coming to hear my band play at a club in New York called The 55 Bar about a week before the first workshop session for the David and Maria version of ‘Sue…’.

“So they come to the show and I didn’t meet him, but I saw him out of the corner of my eye. Then, a week later, I met him for the first time at this session and we’re talking and he asked for my number and email address. The next morning, he sent me an email saying he’d love to do something and sent a home demo of ‘Tis A Pity She Was A Whore’ that he had sequenced at home – he played the saxophone on it and had done everything as far as I could tell.”

Once the recording of ‘Sue…’ was complete, Bowie and McCaslin stayed in touch, with Bowie emailing over several demos for the bandleader and his group to get familiar with.

Donny McCaslin: “It was exciting – that’s the first word that comes to mind. There just felt like there were so many possibilities in what he sent. The framework of the songs was in place in these demo versions and they sounded, to my ear, really strong. I wasn’t sure what to expect from him in the studio so I tried to prepare by really immersing myself in every detail of the songs so I would have the flexibility to pivot if need be in the studio.”

‘Blackstar’ bursts into life

Unbeknown to the rest of the world, 2015 began with Bowie hunkering down at New York studio The Magic Shop with McCaslin, pianist Jason Lindner, drummer Mark Giuliana, bassist Tim Lefebvre and his long-time producer Tony Visconti to begin work on ‘Blackstar’. The recording was split into three chunks – a week a month from January to March – and saw Bowie’s collaborative spirit in full flow.

Donny McCaslin: “The first day in the studio was a mixture of excitement, anticipation and hoping that it was all going to go smoothly. I was loving the music he had sent and I had done some work on it on my end with woodwinds and with voicing things that I hadn’t told anybody about, so I was excited to unveil that. When we got going, it just felt seamless and organic – the analogy I would use is that the group was like a basketball team where we were constantly sharing the ball and throwing it back and forth.

“That first day, the spirit of what David told us was, ‘Let’s not worry about what this will be called, let’s just go have fun and anything you’re hearing I want you to go for it’. He didn’t say ‘no inhibitions’, but that was the spirit of what he said. It was great to have that affirmation before we even started and to sense that he trusted us with this music. You couldn’t have asked for it to be a better environment creatively.”

Inspiration strikes

During the second recording session in February, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy joined the group after his work on Arcade Fire’s ‘Reflektor’ inspired Bowie to remix ‘Love Is Lost’ on ‘The Next Day Extra’.

Murphy’s role was meant to be far bigger than it ended up being, with Bowie and Visconti asking him to co-produce the record – as he explained on Radio 1 in 2017:“I played a little percussion. I was supposed to do a lot more but I got overwhelmed. It takes a different kind of person than me to walk into that room and be like, ‘I know exactly… I belong here, I should definitely insert myself in this relationship because they just can’t manage to make a record without me’.” 

Donny McCaslin: “James came into the sessions for the second block of recording. He was great. I remember there was a horn line on a tune that didn’t make the record, but when we recorded that he wanted to do another version where it was messier and not as polished – not even totally in the execution but just in the note twists. I appreciated that and it was fun to work with him on that. It’s hard to know if he had any influence on the sessions even after he’d gone because Ben Monder came in on guitar for the third batch and so there was a different dynamic.”

Even before ‘Blackstar’’s release, the central influence on it was often cited as Kendrick Lamar’s ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’. Bowie and Visconti had been playing the record on repeat, with the producer saying his friend’s goal was to “avoid rock and roll”.

“He was so full of life and laughing, it was impossible to imagine there was anything wrong with him” – Jonathan Barnbrook

Donny McCaslin: “That record came up as something that he was listening to and checking out. It’s not something that we played in the studio. The one connection I can think of is the song ‘Girl Loves Me’, there’s that sort of a made-up language that’s happening on that song. Some of that was from the language of A Clockwork Orange. But some of it was also very old British slang. It would sound very odd to hear David Bowie rapping in today’s language, right? I think it could be thought of that that was a way that he was looking to find language that would work for him. And that’s the connection that I see, which is brilliant.”

Bowie hits the drawing board

With recording completed in March and overdubs and final additions done by May, it was time to start thinking about the other aspects of the record. Bowie brought back graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, who he’d worked with on all his album art since 2002’s ‘Heathen’.

Jonathan Barnbrook: “It was quite unusual that time because he asked me to go to New York to talk to him about it – normally we do everything by email or Skype. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but he especially just wanted to sit down with me and listen to the album together. It’s quite terrifying with David Bowie sitting next to you, listening to his album and he’s looking at your face to see if it’s good or not! I couldn’t tell he was ill at the time and actually, we didn’t discuss the issues of his health, it was more about the universal idea of mortality that was represented in ‘Blackstar’.

“The idea of the cut out black star was the main idea from the beginning. My feeling was that it should be quite minimal because the music, especially the main track ‘Blackstar’, had such a heavy, dark feeling which…. was very much of the time. It was never the case that it was going to be a nice picture of David and a bit of text saying ‘Blackstar’.”

The first clues arrive

“Look up here, man / I’m in heaven,” Bowie sang on ‘Lazarus’, which featured both on ‘Blackstar’ and in the musical that shared its name with the track. With the power of hindsight, it’s laden with all kinds of clues to the legend’s health issues, but few picked up on them on first listen.

Robert Fox: “I must have heard ‘Lazarus’ for the first time just before rehearsals for the musical started, because it was around then that I went to see the filming of the music video for it. Because I knew what the content of the story that we were telling was, it felt entirely appropriate to the musical. If I hadn’t had the context of the show, it probably would have been quite a different experience. But it completely made sense for the character of Newton to be singing that song in our show. So it was great to hear; it was exciting and felt completely right for what we were doing.

“There’s lots of discussion about to what extent he identified with the character of Newton, to what extent what he was going through in his own life, with illness, and possible death and all of that influenced his work around that time. It was not the first time that he’d had health scares, so I think his own mortality was very much on his mind.”

Mortality is a very big theme of the music video for ‘Lazarus’, which saw Bowie lying in a hospital bed with a bandage over his eyes. It’s ending – which saw him climbing into a wardrobe and closing the door – was later theorised by fans to represent the icon closing a coffin lid”.

Prior to ending with a couple of reviews for Blackstar, there is a 2016 feature from Observer, where Ben Monder (guitar), Tim Lefebvre (bass) and Donny McCaslin (tenor saxophone, flute) shared their experiences and impressions of working on the final masterpiece from David Bowie. Blackstar is an album that everyone needs to seek out. If you do not own a vinyl copy or have not heard it at all, go and find a copy or stream the album. It is such a spellbinding and seismic listening experience. I cannot overstate that! Even if you do not know much about David Bowie and who he was, the gravity of Blackstar and what it means will hit you on the first listen:

“Donny, your sax playing on Blackstar is very reminiscent of Dick Parry from Pink Floyd or even, in certain aspects, Andy Mackay of Roxy Music. Is that what were you aiming for?

McCaslin: Honestly, what I was thinking was more about trying to just immerse myself in these songs. My process was figuring the deeper I got into these songs, the freer I was in the sessions to express myself. So before the sessions, I listened to the demos a lot, and when we were playing I was just trying to play from the spirit of those songs and also reacting to David’s vocals, which were really passionate and really compelling. He was tracked with us live. And so we were already a band and the four of us have played on the road a lot together, but even still he was such a strong and inspiring presence to us in the room. It was so natural.

What was your favorite moment on the album?

Lefebvre: There’s a couple, actually, that still completely blow my mind. Just from how I play the bass, the second two-thirds of “Blackstar,” when it goes from the middle section out, I had fun playing that.

Monder: “Blackstar.” I’m pretty sure that was the first take. I remember David saying, “Well, why don’t you just naturally dissolve it and it will go into this other part,” which we had recorded right after. And that first time we tried to dissolve it, that’s what appears on the record.

‘His vibe was very open and collaborative. I remember him just encouraging us to just go for it…’

McCaslin: In terms of how “Blackstar” was put together, we recorded it in two halves. From what I remember, I think David always knew it was going to be one song, but we recorded it in two different sections. I didn’t know it was going to be sax on the first half and flute on the second. What happened was that flute solo at the end was something I had added on an overdub day when I was there just overdubbing flute parts, so that came a little bit later in the process. It was really cool they included it.

Lefebvre: I also really love the tag outs we did on “Girl Loves Me.” I love that song so much. The end of “Dollar Days” as well, right when things get real colorful. Actually, all of “Dollar Days” blows my mind. You can really feel him in those songs.

It must have been fun to play these songs and to interact with David.

McCaslin: It was tremendous. I felt like just all the tunes to me were really strong, and getting inside them was just thrilling. Yeah, when I had my moments of soloing, it was a great time and always really fun. It’s hard to put into words, it was such an inspiring experience. And I loved the music, and when we were making it, it felt really good. It was emotional and it sounded so great, and it was us.

We had finished tracking in March, and I hadn’t really heard it until recently. It’s neat to hear what David and Tony did and how they put all the pieces together with all the elements that they used. One thing that stands out to me is what we did—me, Tim, Mark and Jason—we do in fact do a lot of improvisation and we always feed off each other. It’s just this constant conversation, and that’s where we try to find the magic with the music we’re playing, be it my tunes or Bowie’s songs. That’s such a part of the whole jazz thing, right? The interaction and the storytelling you create as a band. And then David was right in there doing that, too, and I felt like that was really captured in the finished product, and I think that’s really special.

It’s not like it was this pre-programmed whatever. We were playing live, and we’re playing off each other. You can hear the interaction and you can hear the spirit of the communication in these fantastic songs. And David, he’s singing his tail off, and hearing it all together was really a thrill to me.

Monder: One of my favorite clips of his on YouTube is this acoustic performance of “Dead Man Walking.” It’s just him and Reeves Gabrels on acoustic guitars. And if you’ve heard the original version on Earthling, it’s like this extreme electronica cut. But it sounds so amazing stripped down like that, and the main guitar part was this riff Jimmy Page had taught him in the ’60s. It’s such a beautiful song, and this acoustic version is really striking. I remember hearing it on the radio years ago.

I don’t think it’s ever been recorded, but I think some station like WFUV or something played it on air and I didn’t even know who it was at first. So I decided I needed to learn it, so I was trying to learn it off the YouTube clip, but I wasn’t sure about the tuning of it. So I went to David and said, “Hey David, you gotta show me this,” and I started playing it for him. He got a kick out of that, me wanting to learn this obscure version of the song”.

There are two reviews I want to end with. I am starting out with The Guardian and their detailed and insightful four-star review. I started out by discussing critics who did not give out a full five stars and asked why. I do wonder whether they would change their minds. That one missing star. The black star! Even taking its context out of the equation, Blackstar is one of the defining albums of the 2010s. One that has undoubtably inspired so many artists since 2016:

“More striking still is the synergy between Bowie and the musicians on Blackstar. You can hear it in Bowie’s whoop as McCaslin solos amid the sonic commotion of ’Tis Pity She Was a Whore. He sounds delighted at the racket they’re creating, and understandably so. Simultaneously wilfully synthetic and squirmingly alive, it has the same thrilling sense of exploratory, barely contained chaos found on “Heroes” or Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), or in the tumultuous, wildly distorted version of the Spiders from Mars that rampaged through Panic in Detroit and Cracked Actor. Better still, it doesn’t actually sound anything like those records.

And you can hear it by comparing the album version of Sue (or in the Season of Crime) with the single released in 2014. The earlier version felt like a statement rather than a song; a series of ideas (drum’n’bass-inspired rhythm, Maria Schneider’s high-minded, uncommercial big-band jazz, a fragmentary lyric) thrown together to let the world know that Bowie wasn’t done with being avant-garde yet. It did that job pretty well, but never became a satisfying whole. On Blackstar, however, everything coalesces. The rhythm is sample-based and punchier, the agitated bass riff distorted and driving, the seasick brass and woodwind arrangement is replaced by sprays of echoing feedback, electronic noise and sax. It sounds like a band, rather than Bowie grafting himself on to someone else’s musical vision.

Over the years, rock has frequently reduced experimental jazz to a kind of dilettantish signifier: few things say “I consider myself to be a very important artist unleashing a challenging musical statement, I demand you take me seriously” quite like a burst of skronking free brass dropped in the middle of a track. But Blackstar never feels like that. Nor does it feel like it’s trying too hard, an accusation that could have been leveled at the drum’n’bass puttering of 1997’s Earthling.

Blackstar lacks the kind of killer pop single Bowie would once invariably come up with amid even his most experimental works – a Sound and Vision, a Heroes, a Golden Years – but only Girl Loves Me feels like a slog: lots of Clockwork Orange Nadsat and a smattering of Polari in the incomprehensible lyrics, thuddingly propulsive drums, no tune. Instead, you’re struck by the sense of Bowie at his most commanding, twisting a genre to suit his own ends. Dollar Days might be the most straightforwardly beautiful thing here, a lambent ballad that doesn’t sound jazz influenced at all. But it’s lent a curious, slippery uncertainty at odds with the bullish lyrical pronouncements (“If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to, it’s nothing to me”) by Mark Guiliana’s drumming, the emphasis never quite landing where rock-trained ears might expect it to.

The overall effect is ambiguous and spellbinding, adjectives that apply virtually throughout Blackstar. It’s a rich, deep and strange album that feels like Bowie moving restlessly forward, his eyes fixed ahead: the position in which he’s always made his greatest music”.

I will finish off with Pitchfork and their opinions on Blackstar. It is certainly one of my favourite David Bowie albums. Different to anything he had done before, but still unmistakably him. I do wonder whether there will be any reissues or anything special planned for the tenth anniversary of Blackstar on 8th January. It deserves to marked somehow:

“Because as much as Blackstar shakes up our idea of what a David Bowie record can sound like, its blend of jazz, codes, brutality, drama, and alienation is not without precedent in his work. Bowie’s first proper instrument was a saxophone, after all, and, as a preteen, he looked up to his older half-brother Terry Burns, who exposed him to John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and Beat Generation ideals. The links connecting Bowie, his brother, and jazz feel significant. Burns suffered from schizophrenia throughout his life; he once tried to kill himself by jumping out of a mental hospital window and eventually committed suicide by putting himself in front of a train in 1985.

Perhaps this helps explain why Bowie has often used jazz and his saxophone not for finger-snapping pep but rather to hint at mystery and unease. It’s there in his close collaborations with avant-jazz pianist Mike Garson, from 1973’s “Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)” all the way to 2003’s “Bring Me the Disco King.” It’s in his wild squawks on 1993’s “Jump They Say,” an ode to Burns. But there is no greater example of the pathos that makes Bowie’s saxophone breathe than on "Subterraneans," from 1977’s Low, one of his most dour (and influential) outré moments. That song uncovered a mood of future nostalgia so lasting that it’s difficult to imagine the existence of an act like Boards of Canada without it. Completing the circle, Boards of Canada were reportedly one of Bowie’s inspirations for Blackstar. At this point, it is all but impossible for Bowie to escape himself, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try.

Thematically, Blackstar pushes on with the world-weary nihilism that has marked much of his work this century. “It’s a head-spinning dichotomy of the lust for life against the finality of everything,” he mused around the release of 2003’s Reality. “It’s those two things raging against each other… that produces these moments that feel like real truth.” Those collisions come hard and strong throughout the album, unpredictable jazz solos and spirited vocals meeting timeless stories of blunt force and destruction. The rollicking “’Tis a Pity She Was a Whore” gets its name from a controversial 17th-century play in which a man has sex with his sister only to stab her in the heart in the middle of a kiss. Bowie’s twist involves some canny gender-bending (“she punched me like a dude”), a robbery, and World War I, but the gist is the same—humans will always resort to a language of savagery when necessary, no matter where or when. See also: “Girl Loves Me,” which has Bowie yelping in the slang originated by A Clockwork Orange’s ultraviolent droogs.

Though this mix of jazz, malice, and historical role-play is intoxicating, Blackstar becomes whole with its two-song denouement, which balances out the bruises and blood with a couple of salty tears. These are essentially classic David Bowie ballads, laments in which he lets his mask hang just enough for us to see the creases of skin behind it. “Dollar Days” is the confession of a restless soul who could not spend his golden years in a blissful British countryside even if he wanted to. “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain and fool them all again and again,” he sings, the words doubling as a mantra for Blackstar and much of Bowie’s career. Then, on “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” he once again sounds like a frustrated Lazarus, stymied by a returning pulse. This tortured immortality is no gimmick: Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold”.

I am going to write about David Bowie’s death for other features. That hugely sad day on 10th January, 2016 when we heard the awful news. However, I wanted to isolate Blackstar and the fact that it turns ten soon. The incredible excitement around its release the impact it made, both critically and commercially. Featuring some of David Bowie’s most ambitious and astonishing songwriting, I think his vocals have never sounded as emotionally moving. Even though he was ill and it must have been a difficult recording process, David Bowie sounds utterly entrancing and incredible! Rather than think about the tenth anniversary of Blackstar as a sad thing, instead, we must be eternally grateful for this final glorious album that David Bowie…

LEFT to the world.

FEATURE: These Three Queens… Celebrating a Triumphant and Memorable Year for The Trouble Club

FEATURE:

 

 

These Three Queens…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Trouble Club’s owner and CEO, Ellie Newton (right), alongside the acclaimed author, podcaster, speaker and journalist, Candice Brathwaite, at St Marylebone Parish Church, London on 2nd October, 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Iona Marinca

Celebrating a Triumphant and Memorable Year for The Trouble Club

__________

I must start out…

IN THIS PHOTO: Margaret Atwood joined her fellow author Elif Shafak on stage for a funny, tender, thought-provoking, fascinating and unforgettable Trouble Club conversation at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls on 14th November, 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Christopher Wahl/The Guardian

like I always do when writing about The Trouble Club, by giving you the link to their website and Instagram. I am urging everyone to become a member and check out what they do. The title of this piece is Christmas-based – the Christmas carol, We Three Kings of Orient Are - and it could refer to a few of the brilliant women who make The Trouble Club what it is, not least their inspiring and amazing CEO and owner, Ellie Newton, alongside Zea Stuttaford and Jen Needham. Organising these amazing events, venues and marketing, it is a huge feat making sure that the club keeps running and showcasing these wonderous and compelling guests and events. Not just speakers coming, there are social events (like members’ dinners) and book clubs among the other activities for its members. Rather than look at future events and highlight them, instead, I am going to nod to the year that has been and, cheekily, think about three queens I would love to see speak for The Trouble Club. You can see what events are booked for the remainder of the year - and what is already confirmed for 2026. Laura Bates speaking again for The Trouble Club will be a hugely popular event. That is on 19th February. With an incredible new website and the memory of perhaps their biggest event yet still in the mind and heart, it has been perhaps the most successful and notable year for The Trouble Club. This is, again, credit to those who work tirelessly every day. Ellie Newton and her team, ensuring that the Trouble members have these regular events where they can go, meet and socialise - and come away with these indelible and incredible memories! The big event that I was referring to was on 14th November. Margaret Atwood & Elif Shafak: Words Like Fire took place at Fairfield Halls. It was a packed venue to see this once-in-a-lifetime conversation. I had never seen Margaret Atwood speak. She and Elif Shafak had this incredible bond and mutual respect. This frank, funny and fascinating conversation was a definite highlight of the year! There have been so many moments like this. The Trouble Club goes from strength to strength in terms of the calibre and variety of guests booked. Some wonderful and large venues alongside the more intimate and homely.

IN THIS PHOTO: Actor Jodie Comer is one of my dream guests that I would love to see speak for The Trouble Club in 2026/PHOTO CREDIT: Scandebergs for British GQ

Candice Brathwaite speaking for The Trouble Club on 2nd October was another big highlight! To be fair, there have been loads of really great events. I joined in 2023, and it has been such a wonderful experience being a member of The Trouble Club. Not only because you get to see so many compelling, powerful and amazing women share their work, stories and experiences. The new faces and familiar at each events makes it feel like a family. The Trouble Club family is this community that continues to grow. As we look to 2026, it will be fascinating seeing what is in store for The Trouble Club. I asked this I think when I interviewed Ellie Newton but, in terms of next steps, it will get bigger and grow. Though I feel she will take a little bit of a step back at some point. In terms of being the interviewer and attending nearly every event. As owner and CEO, she does so much for The Trouble Club; I am sure that she will probably scale back at some point so that she can focus on other things and just have some more free time. However, like I do with each feature, I pop in some dream guests. There are so many women I would love to see at The Trouble Club. Emerald Fennell, Gillian Anderson, Michaela Coel, Leah Williamson and Lauren Laverne are among them. However, as a big fan of Jodie Comer, this is someone who I think would be a wonderful guest. The Trouble Club have had actors speaking before, but there have not been too many in recent months. Someone who everybody knows but had this incredible career, she would be someone who would appeal to so many Trouble Club members. Also, Greta Thunberg would be a dream guest. Having been held hostage alongside fellow campaigners and activists protesting Israel’s genocide against Palestine, she has thankfully returned home. Thunberg would be among the most popular guests ever. An activist, climate crisis campaigner and environmentalist who has this huge social consciousness, there are so many young people who look up to her.

 IN THIS PHOTO: The national treasure that is Kathy Burke/PHOTO CREDIT: Alex Lake/The Observer

In terms of the final of the three queens I would like to see, well that would be Kathy Burke! Her memoir, A Mind of My Own, was released in November. This is one of our most beloved actors and directors. An incredible woman who is not only an amazing comic actor, but someone who has been in hard-hitting T.V. films and stage productions, she is so raw, open and real. Someone who would no doubt be liberal with her language (a few C-bombs would only be right!), it would be a really funny and captivating event. I am not sure whether Burke is on the Trouble radar but, given the press for her memoir, there would be a lot to talk about. Let’s see what is planned for next year! I am keeping this pretty short, as I just want to give a general thanks to Ellie Newton and everyone at The Trouble Club for organising the events and making the club such a success! I know so many new members will come on board next year. This year has been a massive one for them, and they can be hugely proud of everything achieved. In terms of next year, maybe some of the biggest guests ever – film directors, politicians, authors and businesswomen alike – and a more regular podcast or new series? I would love to see more written about The Trouble Club. Ellie Newton profiled and interviewed. An entrepreneur and this phenomenal businesswoman and owner under the age of thirty who is achieving so much, she is worthy of some column inches and podcast chats! Even thought his year has been an extraordinary one I, like every Trouble Club member, is excited by…

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WHAT comes next.

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Sigrid

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDITS: Charlotte Alex

Sigrid

__________

I am returning to an artist…

who I have written about before. The amazing Sigrid (Sigrid Solbakk Raabe) released her latest album, There’s Always More That I Could Say, on 24th October. The third studio album from the extraordinary Norwegian artist, it follows 2022’s How to Let Go. I think that Sigrid’s latest album is among the best of the year. I will end with a positive review of it. I am going to start out with some recent interviews with Sigrid. I am going to start out with an interview from The Independent from July. It was published around the release of Sigrid’s single, Jellyfish:

“Jellyfish” is the first time that Sigrid will be credited as a producer on a song. “It doesn’t really change a thing,” she said of the milestone. “I’ve been co-producing my whole career. It’s just this time I’m being credited for it. That’s the difference.”

Sigrid was 19 years old when she released her debut single, 2017’s “Don’t Kill My Vibe”, kicking off a period in the spotlight that she described as “intense” and “amazing”.

“I’m so thankful for all of it, obviously, but it’s kind of going through a washing machine,” Sigrid continued. “And I think on the second album [How To Let Go] , I really wanted to be taken seriously and I put a lot of heavy pressure on myself to write serious songs.”

Sigrid said she is “having fun again” on “Jellyfish”, adding: “I think you can hear it in the song. I’m not trying to sing perfectly.”

“I take the piss out of myself a bit with the new music as well,” she said. “I’m trying to not take myself too seriously and allow myself to not always be the hero in a situation.”

The jubilant new single will be one of many she performs during her set at Latitude festival, which she first played in 2017.

“I love any festival that has a bit of nature in it,” she said of its bucolic setting in Henham Park, Suffolk. “I remember rowing in a rowboat to get back and forth from backstage.”

Imploring festival-goers to catch her set, Sigrid said: “My humble opinion is that we do deliver. I give my all on stage. It’s my favourite thing to do and to see everyone singing along is super special and makes me feel confident again.

“I’m a bit of a word of mouth artist but when you go to a show of mine, you know you’re going to have a good time”.

Perhaps the first album where the artist was is in control and could craft something true to her, DORK spoke with Sigrid in the summer. Her boldest and most exciting album yet, I do feel that this is the start of an exciting new phase for one of the greatest modern artists. Twelve years into her career, and the incredible Sigrid has taken her music to another level. There’s Always More That I Could Say is without doubt among the very best albums of this year:

“I love this record,” Sigrid states. “This is my favourite album.”

“It’s crafted with so much love and attention to detail. It’s a deadass serious album, but it’s also a funny one. I take the piss out of myself a lot, and some songs sound a bit stupid but are smart at the same time. It’s just a fun record; I just love it so much!”

The sonic details – whether in the form of Peter Bjorn and John-inspired drums on ‘Jellyfish’ (one for all the FIFA 08 fans out there), lo-fi synth-pop on ‘Hush Baby, Hurry Slowly’, or the simply massive pure-pop opening track ‘I’ll Always Be Your Girl’ – are matched by the mechanical elements that help expand on the emotions that thread this album together, most obviously seen through the tracklist.

“I’ve worked really hard on creating this journey sonically and lyrically, but also with placing songs in the right place. It’s explaining how chaotic it is going through a break-up; it’s not straightforward, it’s a lot of turns and twists and one step forward and five steps back, but it’s also a really funny journey too!”

And that’s the real heart of the record: fun. In fact, that’s really been the heart of Sigrid’s career so far. Her breakout single, ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’, was a tongue-in-cheek jab at a producer who tried to dictate her journey, while her other hits, ‘Strangers’, ‘Don’t Feel Like Crying’, and even ‘Head on Fire’ with Griff, all highlight her ability to transform emotionally fraught topics into unadulterated pop classics.

The difficulty that came with even choosing singles for this album cycle, though, shows that Sigrid is only growing stronger.

“I don’t want to sound cocky, but it was really hard to pick singles for this campaign because all the songs are great,” she grins. “I feel like it’s the first album I’ve written where I genuinely feel like there’s no fillers.”

“But ‘Jellyfish’ is one of my favourite songs on the record, if not the favourite, because it’s a song about friendship. I think that it is so important to have a song about friendship on a record that is a lot about love, because who’s there for you when the shit hits the fan?”

“It’s also one where I was having fun recording it and not focusing on singing perfectly – people know I can sing, I know I can sing, I don’t need to prove that to anyone. We recorded in a cosy attic studio about five minutes from here, and it felt like something new, something different. And then having ‘Fort Knox’ next was like boom! This feels like a part of my DNA.”

In case it wasn’t clear already, Sigrid isn’t interested in creating something you’ve heard before, and she’s certainly not interested in playing by someone else’s rules. Part of the joy she found in making this record was discovering new ways to be creative, using every inch of her twelve-year career to dissipate writer’s block and give some old ideas a second chance.

“The worst thing a person can say to me when I walk into the studio is, ‘You should make another ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’,'” she explains. “Because that’s not how it works; I couldn’t write a song like that now because it wouldn’t be authentic – I’m not the same person I was when I wrote that song.”

She continues: “The writing session culture in London, LA, even in Oslo – where you walk into a studio with two new people and the ambition is to have a fully finished produced demo with lyrics, melody, and initial production done – made me the writer I am today, but it got to a point last year where I was really tired from writing in that way.”

“So I put the process on hold for a bit because I was just tired. I just couldn’t see the vision. I had a few songs finished, but it wasn’t until last summer that I properly discovered ‘Jellyfish’ and thought there was something there. I went into the studio with Askjell Solstrand, who I wrote ‘Dynamite’ with ten years ago, and I just felt like I was a kid again. There was no pressure. We didn’t have to finish a song in a day. It just didn’t fucking matter if I made a banger or not. That’s when the album really came together.”

In this way, ‘There’s Always More That I Could Say’ became simply a part of Sigrid’s life instead of a forced project. It was an album born of passion, not productivity. Instead of grinding out tunes in a high-pressure stop-off at a writing camp, songs grew out of everyday experiences and inspirational moments.

“I think I would feel pressure no matter what job I did, because that’s just who I am, but I have to give myself a reality check. I’m so lucky to be doing this job, to have people excited to hear this album. Sometimes I do think, like, what actually is my motivation for doing this? And, honestly, on those days, I think it’s just because I’m good at it. I’m good at writing songs, I’m good at playing live, and I’m good at creating things to create joy.

“But actually, it’s because I love music, and I’m taken aback that, twelve years into my career, music still makes me so emotional. I can’t fake the excitement I have at going on stage, or the stars in my eyes when I think about all the songs that are yet to be written as well – y’know, there’s always more that I could say!”.

Prior to getting to a review of There’s Always More That I Could Say, there is an interview from The Pink News that I want to spotlight. Sigrid’s third album was born out of heartbreak, rage and liberation. Fitting in with some of the queens of modern Pop in terms of themes and a slightly messy album, Sigrid is so real and revealing on this album. Not sugar-coating anything, Sigrid has released her most powerful and affecting album. Though there is plenty of fun and pleasure throughout:

“She can be difficult in relationships, and she’s “definitely owning up to it” on the album. “I think people probably think of me as the ‘Don’t Kill My Vibe’ girl, which is great,” she stresses, but the track came with the expectation that she would forever be tough but easy-breezy in the face of conflict. “I’m also the type of person that will have all these great comebacks two hours later.”

The reason she’s finally able to put all these thoughts on record, she suggests, is the current state of pop. “There’s a lot of room for being more messy,” she says, reeling off a list of her “favourite pop girlies” – Charli XCX, Zara Larsson, Lola Young, Chappell Roan, Olivia Dean – who are proudly and forthrightly putting their vulnerabilities and contradictions into their music. “I have felt like I can, on a personal level, be more open and funny and satirical and take it to the extreme,” she says. “[There] hasn’t been the space for pop to not be so rigid, but the rule book is [now] thrown out the window. There are no rules anymore for what is pop.”

Since her major breakthrough – she won the BBC Music Sound of 2018 poll, previously won by Adele, Sam Smith, and most recently, Chappell Roan – Sigrid has been whisked out on stage at every summer festival going. “I have the best job in the world,” she urges, but points out: “There is always summer somewhere in the world.” After releasing How To Let Go in 2022, she toured continuously – “I never really stop touring” – and ended up, though she doesn’t use the phrase exactly, probably a little burnout.

Until now, everything has been quite deep for Sigrid. Historically, she has been a self-confessed control freak, shy, and painfully self aware. After starting piano lessons aged seven, she tried to quit, fearing the hobby wasn’t cool enough for her peers’ approval. She first wrote songs after her brother, also a musician, invited her to perform with him, but told her she couldn’t sing the Adele covers she’d grown comfortable with.

In 2022, she told an interviewer that she admired Taylor Swift for her business-like approach to the music industry: “That’s not calculated, it’s just smart. It’s smart to have a plan,” she said. But with There’s Always More That I Could Say, she’s finally learning to let whatever happens, happen.

“You have to be OK that the plan can change. You never know what’s going to happen around the next corner,” she says. Earlier this year, Ed Sheeran was performing in Oslo, and invited her to perform on stage with him. Afterwards, she asked if she could support him on tour. He dutifully agreed, and she’s heading over to the US with him in July. “That’s how the industry is. It can change so quickly.”

Almost ten years into her career, and Sigrid is finally learning to roll with the punches. When she’s not delivering them, that is”.

If some reviewers feel the second half of There’s Always More That I Could Say is weaker than the first and the album does not meet the highs of her earlier work, I would say this is Sigrid’s most confident, unapologetic and personal album. Maybe there are nods to contemporary Pop artists, though there is plenty of individuality and distinction throughout. Sigrid’s latest album needs to be heard. This is what DORK said in their review of There’s Always More That I Could Say:

“Nobody has ever doubted Sigrid’s credentials as a pop star – you don’t get to perform with Bring Me The Horizon or support Ed Sheeran on tour if you don’t have fans in high places. That doesn’t mean, though, that she always gets the praise she deserves for always pushing her own boundaries and working to become the best artist she can.

This third album is still the same Sigrid, an artist full of passion and uncontainable, fizzy enthusiasm, except this time she comes with added self-assuredness. Playing freely with tempo, structure, and genre, ‘There’s Always More That I Could Say’ is a journey that underscores Sigrid’s confidence in what she does best: make pure pop bangers.

Even then, she plays at the fringes of what pop can be. Effortlessly switching from the folk-slash-indiepop of aptly fluid single ‘Jellyfish’ into the piano ballad title track, before sparking back to life with crunchy dance anthem ‘Fort Knox’, the record is elevated to more than simply a pop record. Of course, she still does sunny, shiny pop better than most – most notably in huge opening tune ‘I’ll Always Be Your Girl’ and ‘Do It Again’ – but with enough versatility and tact to keep the whole project fresh and exciting.

All the sugary sweet sonics and high BPM rhythms are balanced out by lyrics that showcase the vulnerability of someone who was in the throes of heartbreak when first writing for the record. ‘Kiss The Sky’ paints a picture of someone tearing their own personality apart, even while trying to present as rock-solid, while ‘Eternal Sunshine’ is a yearning, cathartic cry for better times to present themselves.

Sigrid has never seemed more liberated or more confident. She doesn’t care what you think, and this album is all the better for it”.

An artist I have loved and respected since her 2019 debut, Sucker Punch, I really love her new album. I have never seen her live, though she plays London’s Roundhouse on 13th March. This amazing venue is near where I live, so I will try and come see her play. A modern-day queen that I wanted to salute, make sure you follow and listen to Sigrid and her distinct and stunning music. She is one of the best and most interesting Pop artists on the scene. I feel like she has a lot more to say. It will be fascinating discovering…

EXACTLY what that is.

_______________

Follow Sigrid

Official:

https://www.thisissigrid.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sigrid

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLG7twDweqlHpyv0EDOjrgw

Twitter:

https://x.com/thisissigrid

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/thisissigrid/

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4TrraAsitQKl821DQY42cZ?si=VGF-WZZpQUqWkssWn3fgyw

FEATURE: Needle Drops and Scores to Settle: Scene Five: Don’t You (Forget About Me): The Breakfast Club (1985)

FEATURE:

 

 

Needle Drops and Scores to Settle

Scene Five: Don’t You (Forget About Me): The Breakfast Club (1985)

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THIS time around…

I am including one of the most iconic soundtracks of the 1980s. The Breakfast Club soundtrack accompanied the hit John Hughes film. The film was released in February 1985. Hughes sadly died in 2009, though films like this have endured. Responsible for shaping the teen genre in film and creating these coming-of-age classics, I wanted to spend time with the soundtrack of The Breakfast Club. There are some that say the soundtrack is only really good because of Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me), and the rest is disposable. I would strongly disagree. Each song on the album plays its part and is strong. Together, this soundtrack definitely stands the test of time. I would advise people to watch the film before hearing the soundtrack. I want to start out with a feature from Medium and their take on this symphony of teen rebellion. Magical and evocative music that still sounds impactful forty years later:

“In the hallowed halls of ’80s cinema, one film stands out as the quintessential coming-of-age masterpiece — “The Breakfast Club.” While John Hughes’ iconic teen drama captured the essence of high school life, it’s the film’s soundtrack that truly elevated it to legendary status. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and explore why “The Breakfast Club” soundtrack remains a timeless symphony of teen rebellion and musical magic that continues to captivate audiences decades later.

The Power of Simple Minds

The opening strains of “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds are etched into the minds of anyone who has ever experienced the tumultuous journey of adolescence. This anthemic track, which plays during the film’s unforgettable closing scene, became synonymous with the film and encapsulates the struggles and triumphs of the teenage experience.

Dancing with Tears in My Eyes

The eclectic mix of genres on the soundtrack mirrors the diverse personalities of the film’s characters. From the upbeat and rebellious “We Are Not Alone” by Karla DeVito to the emotionally charged “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” by Ultravox, each track captures a different facet of teenage emotion, creating a sonic landscape that resonates with viewers on a visceral level.

Iconic Instrumentals

Beyond the vocal tracks, the soundtrack boasts unforgettable instrumentals that enhance the film’s emotional depth. The haunting melody of “Wang Chung” and the synth-driven rhythms of Keith Forsey’s “Love Theme” contribute to the overall atmospheric brilliance of the soundtrack, transporting listeners back to the nostalgic era of big hair, neon lights, and adolescent yearning.

Synthesizing the ’80s Vibe

“The Breakfast Club” soundtrack doesn’t just encapsulate the essence of the film; it encapsulates the spirit of the entire ’80s era. With tracks like “Fire in the Twilight” by Wang Chung and “I’m the Dude” by Keith Forsey, the soundtrack becomes a time capsule, allowing listeners to relive the vibrancy and rebellious energy of the decade.

Impact on Pop Culture

Decades after its release, the “Breakfast Club” soundtrack has left an indelible mark on popular culture. Its songs have been featured in numerous films, TV shows, and commercials, proving that the emotional resonance and cultural relevance of this musical masterpiece are everlasting.

“The Breakfast Club” soundtrack is more than just a collection of songs; it’s a cultural touchstone that continues to define the essence of teenage rebellion and self-discovery. From the anthemic call of Simple Minds to the synth-driven beats of Wang Chung, each track weaves together to create a sonic tapestry that transcends generations. As we revisit the halls of Shermer High School through the music that fueled the iconic film, we rediscover the enduring power of “The Breakfast Club” soundtrack — a musical journey that will forever hold a special place in the hearts of rebels, misfits, and dreamers alike”.

Without doubt one of the best film soundtracks of the '80s, I feel that young audiences and listeners can connect with it. This definitive snapshot of the teen music of the mid-'80s, at a time now when coming-of-age films are rarer and different in tone, I think there is something special and distinct about The Breakfast Club. However, the soundtrack and John Hughes has influenced everyone from M83, The 1975, and Neon Indian. I am moving to this feature that talks about the influence and legacy of The Breakfast Club’s soundtrack:

“As the 1970s came to a close, pop music found itself at a crossroads, Power rock bands like AC/DC and Led Zeppelin had ruled the back end of the decade, inspiring a generation of cartoon-ish imitators that would produce the Hair Metal of the 80s. But meanwhile, the start of a new movement was bubbling under the end of the late 70s, a generation was growing up on the angst and melancholy romanticism of bands like Joy Division and The Cure. This new sound would set the template for what would become the New Wave music of the 80s. This new musical movement would come to envelop and define the youth culture of the era.

It should perhaps then be no surprise that young audiences were rejecting the simplistic archetypes and false emotion of the bubblegum high school movies of the time. This was until John Hughes. Drawing upon inspiration from the pop culture of the time and his own childhood in the suburbs of Chicago, Hughes approached the emotions of adolescence with a sincerity unseen at the time. All the angst, melancholy, and romance that had defined the pop music of the era was brought to the forefront in the films of influential director.

With The Breakfast Club, Hughes made his definitive statement as a filmmaker. The Breakfast Club took the social and film archetypes of the time and thoroughly dismantled them, finding the real human drama and heart that underlined them. The film is a perfect embodiment of the spirit of the New Wave movement, capturing the romance, energy, and instant nostalgia of the music of the era.

Also, while the film’s soundtrack might actually be short on pop music, it still provides one of the most recognizable musical moments in cinema history: the enduring image of Judd Nelson’s alienated rebel raising his fist in air in pure joy at finding romance and human connection as Simple Minds’ soaring synthpop anthem “Don’t You” soundtracks the film’s closing. The song became a defining hit of the New Wave movement and perfectly echoed the spirit of the film.

What few could have predicted, however, is just how enduring The Breakfast Club‘s relationship with music would be. Just as the film was influenced by the music of it’s time, the raw emotions and angst of young adulthood that the film brought to the cultural forefront would continue to inspire music over the next 30 years. Artists like M83, Twin Shadow, The 1975, Neon Indian, and Washed Out have all cited influence from the inseparable relationship between New Wave and the John Hughes films of the era. Albums like M83’s Saturdays = Youth even play out like extended love letters to the Brat Pack films, with their embrace of everything from the themes and music to even the imagery of those films”.

The soundtrack does have its detractors. However, in 2022, Variety ranked The Breakfast Club (alongside a couple of other John Hughes soundtracks) fourth in the list of the quintessential film soundtracks of the 1980s. In 2023, Entertainment Weekly ranked The Breakfast Club Soundtrack thirteenth, when they discussed the best soundtracks of the '80s. This is what they said: “What happens when five students from different cliques get Saturday detention in the suburbs of Chicago in 1985? Just a plethora of catchy songs, quippy dialogue, and layers upon layers of teenage confessionals. In John Hughes' Brat Pack classic The Breakfast Club, Karla Devito's "We Are Not Alone" serves as the killer tune that gets the gang out of their seats for a library dance montage. However, we all know the true crown jewel of this soundtrack, "Don't You (Forget About Me)'' by Simple Minds, which bookends the film and will forever be tied to John Bender's triumphant fist pump in its final frame — and we wouldn't have it any other way”. I am going to finish off with this feature from The Film Experience:

“Like the best high school films, The Breakfast Club exists somewhere between painful reality and gilded fantasy. Its anthem is similarly accessible but hyper-produced, filled with relatable feeling but kind of untouchable in its chilly groove - it’s consumable but truthful product, so naturally we eat it up like the candy it is even as it affects us deeply. The world isn’t real (detention for bringing a gun to school, instant makeovers, etc.) but the emotion is. And when you are this age, the emotion is everything.

The song begins in a burst of bottled rage and has the rhythm of an adolescent tantrum, making it a fitful match to the group therapy session we’re watching. It feels like something written by this group both in response to one another and the social strata that forces them into these prescribed roles. If the unfolding day serves to undermine the hierarchy by revealing their individuality, then the song reminds them that there’s no going back from showing one’s full self or from the seeing. “As you walk on by...” the ghost of what was shared remains.

But does the song’s questioning of the future reveal the closing commeraderie as bullshit or does it play with the tension of the uncertain future of their new bond? The lyrics ruminate on profound but transient connections and the weight of social promises, complicating what still feels dangerously close to a improbably transformative ending. Maybe we’re not led to believe they will all stay besties, but the film certainly dances toward assuredness. Call it youthful optimism or steered by foolish feeling, but this tension is one of the things the film and its song get wholeheartedly right about the high school experience.

However there is something triumphant in the “la-la la-la” chorus as Judd Hirsch throws a first in the air, a certain battle won no matter what happens on Monday. For one brief moment, in this forced oasis away from their outside pressures, they actually were seen”.

If you have not heard the soundtrack for The Breakfast Club, then I have put the soundtrack below. I would urge you to go and watch the 1985 film, as it is a fantastic watch. Even though there are some teen films influenced by it today, you don’t see as many as you would like. Simple Minds, Wang Chung and Joyce Kennedy help make The Breakfast Club’s soundtrack one of the defining moments of the 1980s. Take some time out today and…

GIVE it a play.

FEATURE: An Open Letter to NYC: How New York City’s Mayor-Elect, Zohran Mamdani, Will Inspire Music and Culture Beyond the U.S.

FEATURE:

 

 

An Open Letter to NYC

IN THIS IMAGE: A flyer for Indie Rockers for a Better New York/ART CREDIT: Sarah Goldstein

How New York City’s Mayor-Elect, Zohran Mamdani, Will Inspire Music and Culture Beyond the U.S.

__________

THERE is this glimmer of hope…

PHOTO CREDIT: Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images

in America against a political blackness. The president of Donald Trump has set America back generations. In terms of how regressive and dictatorial he is, you do wonder why the country voted him in for a second time – and whether there are any regrets. He is someone who does not care about minorities, women, immigrants, the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community, or anyone that he considers to be an outsider or un-American. Someone who very much serves himself, it has been one of the bleakest times in history for the U.S. However, the hugely popular and optimistic election of Zohran Mamdani as the Mayor of New York City seems like a turning point. A member of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America, he has served as a member of the New York State Assembly for the 36th district since 2021, representing the Queens neighbourhood of Astoria. Even though he and Donald Trump met recently at the White House and it was cordial, you know that Mamdani loathes Trump. He has called him a fascist, and will continue to. This inspiring and loved left-wing politician is going to bring progress and change to New York City. Someone who cares about everyone and is putting the people first, he is almost the angel to Donald Trump’s devil. One hopes that Zohran Mamdani will be President one day, as he is someone who could genuinely bring hope to America. How does this all relate to music? Well, as that is what I am focused on, I wanted to argue that Zohran Mamdani will bring optimism to musicians around the world. I have talked a lot about how I would love to record an album. As a songwriter rather than singer, bringing people together in a New York City studio to record these songs. I have the album and song titles worked out, but I want to call the group/collective Mamdani, as I feel he will create this movement of positivity and hope through music.

Obviously, whether a musician or anyone across the arts, you are going to be influenced and inspired by what is happening on the worldwide stage. Artists have written about America: its landscape, people, politics, history and wonder. Whilst one would like to see more artists tackle and admonish Donald Trump and his dictatorial regime, maybe there is a fear. Creatively and commercially. Huge artists holding back because they fear of big losses and consequences. It is sad. However, I feel many artists are avoiding writing about American politics because of a certain fear or futility. It is a horrible time. However, the election of Zohran Mamdani could be a turning point. It is clear that there are challenges. It is not going to be the case Mamdani will come in and everything will be wonderful in New York City. Donald Trump has too much power and there will be obstacles. However, I do think that there is this feeling that a genuinely good and good-hearted person is in a position of power and is in charge of a huge portion of America. I have resisted going to New York City because Donald Trump is President. However, with Zohran Mamdani as Mayor, there is this lure. How the city and state is very much in safe and caring hands. Not only will more positive narratives come from artists. The romance of New York City revived and affirmed. In a wider sense, this feeling that America could change and we might see a positive change at the very top. Also, as Zohran Mamdani is a supporter of the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ community and an ally, there is less fear and feeling of isolation. Something that will resonate with L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ artists beyond New York City. You feel in the U.K. there is this optimism. We look to the U.S. and our hearts weep. However, many artists will feel inspired by Zohran Mamdani and see America in a new light.

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It is clear that he is someone who will help preserve and protect American music and culture. Zohran Mamdani was part of the music community. Enjoying a brief Rap career under the moniker of Young Cardamom, it is clear that Zohran Mamdani understands the importance of music and how it is part of the fabric and history of New York City. A time of timidity and fear, he will compel artists and those in music to speak up and fight back. This Pitchfork interview from June highlights five songs that define Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign. Someone who very much has his finger on the pulse of modern Hip-Hop, he will add something to modern Hip-Hop. I feel it has been somewhat apolitical and lacked the urgency and social conscious that groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. expounded in the 1980s and 1990s. Maybe artists feeling repressed by Donald Trump or reluctant to write about the Republicans being in power. Zohran Mamdani will revitalise and reignite the New York City Hip-Hop scene but, wider afield, I feel we will also create something seismic through music. Even though he played Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ in a spot on social media, and was told by the company that owns Dylan’s catalogue that his songs can’t be used for politics, the songs he has used for his spots and campaigns have been powerful and true to him. Unlike Trump, who just steals songs and annoys artists because he does not ask for permission! Politicians can inspire incredible music but, at a time when there are few political role models, we now have one that cares about music, culture and all people. This can only infuse music and lead to revolution and reflection.

Last month, FADER wrote how “After years of shuttering venues and rising costs of living, these musicians are betting on Mamdani’s vision for the future”. Someone mobilising N.Y.C.’s Indie-Rock community and scene, I think that Zohran Mamdani will give fresh energy, priority and much-needed financing to New York City’s venues and arts. This is not only vital when it comes to the vibrant and fascinating tapestry of the city. It will also give stability and hope to artists coming through. If such a huge city and important part of American music was threatened, diminished and weakened by venues closing, it would affect the entire music world. Another reason why Zohran Mamdani is such a good force for progress and future optimism:

“This was the atmosphere when musicians and friends Rachel Brown of Water From Your Eyes and Charlie Dore-Young of Sweet Baby Jesus started planning the Indie Rockers for a Better New York, a Rallying for Zohran benefit show series. Brown and Dore-Young — who first met at Palisades, a beloved Bushwick venue that closed in 2016, a decade ago — have witnessed profound changes in the city’s art scene. Not only Palisades, but The Glove, Shea Stadium, Silent Barn, Death By Audio, Glasslands, Secret Project Robot, and various other consequential N.Y.C community music venues have closed, while rent and grocery prices skyrocketed. Brown and Dore-Young are among a sizable group of N.Y.C.-based musicians and artists who are seeing Mamdani as someone who will revitalize the scene once more — or at least, are hopeful he’ll make it easier for there to be one.

The Zohran Effect is so strong,” Lily says. Though the British native can’t vote in New York, she felt drawn to being involved in some way, if only because she’s experienced how the quality of live music has declined since COVID, she says. “Venues shut down, the cost of living went up, streaming is a nightmare, Spotify is run by the worst guy ever. But then Zohran came along and it was like, Someone has practical, kind ways to make the future not a scary place.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Sweet Baby Jesus performing at an Indie Rockers for a Better New York show/PHOTO CREDIT: Emilio Herce

Mamdani hasn’t detailed specific policy plans or made any promises when it comes to arts funding or nightlife; mostly, he’s made comments about the intrinsic link between economics and art-making, and his belief in the value of arts accessibility. When he was endorsed by musicians union AFM Local 802 in July, he said, “Art can't just be a luxury for the few. That requires a city where artists can actually afford their rent, groceries, childcare and transit.” (Notably, he’s the son of filmmaker Mira Nair, and lived a previous life as a rapper.)

The closest he’s gotten to an official policy statement was at BRIC’s Arts & Culture Mayoral Forum in February, where he said, as mayor, he’s committed to “understanding art beyond simply tourism, beyond the fiscal impacts,” and that he would bring an administration that values art-based community organizations as much as their religious counterparts. But this was enough to gain the faith of artist Salman Toor, model and activist Bethann Hardison, and Zoe Saldaña, who all commented on the post. And Mamdani has since also been endorsed by the Actors’ Equity Association, and called “the Downtown Scene’s pick for New York City Mayor” by ArtNet.

Dore-Young acknowledges that Mamdani’s election won’t bring solutions for all the problems that ail the city’s arts scene, but “I think [his election] is an extremely necessary first step for our survival. For native New Yorkers who have stuck it out here, they're struggling and they think about how they might have to leave. It seems like this guy wants to help us. We might have to fight him, but I'd much rather it be him than literally anyone else.”

At an MJ Lenderman show at Brooklyn Steel in April, Mamdani made an appearance, and, Brown recalls, “I have never heard people clap and scream that loudly for any band. But probably most people at the MJ Lenderman show, at the indie rock benefit shows, at the Fenne Lily show, at Rash Bar last week, etcetera, were likely to vote for Mamdani anyway. What feels different, special, rare, is how his messaging has resonated beyond the local community. This summer alone, Mamdani’s surprised Lucy Dacus’s audience at All Things Go, went to Madison Square Garden for Wu-Tang Clan, pulled up to BAYO Festival at Barclays, and held a Trans Community Town Hall with Ceyenne Doroshow at Ridgewood dance hub Nowadays. There was a Rave 4 Zohran at Market Hotel, a Rock ‘n’ Roll and Rent Control at Xanadu, and a Change Becomes Us benefit at Hyperballad”.

I hope what I have written makes sense and makes a point. The U.S. is a nation who has provide some of the best music ever. New artists in the country making some of the best music around. Artists from around the world dream of playing in the U.S. Donald trump does not care about any of this. Not only are artists perhaps holding back on addressing changes and ills in America because of Trump’s power and lunacy. There is this fear that music venues and the industry will be damaged. Someone who is racist, homophobic, misogynistic and a dictator can do so much damage to music. Even though Zohran Mamdani is not President yet – he will be one day! -, he is Mayor of one of the most influential and populous areas of the U.S. New York City’s joy and togetherness at the moment will create ripples around the U.S. Not powerful enough to drown and overwhelm Donald Trump, there is a brighter future ahead. The protection and preservation of venues and music across New York City is a relief. I know artists will dedicate songs to Zohran Mamdani and look more positively on American because someone who cares and is a decent person has arrived at such a dark and terrifying time. I am going to end on a selfish and self-indulgent note. Randomly, ever since I first saw the 2013 film, Frances Ha – which was last year -, I have had this burning desire to go to New York! However, against this seduction is Donald Trump and his fascism. How it has taken the romance and appeal off. However, Zohran Mamdani has brought pride and strength to New York City and the state. The album I mentioned at the start will (theoretically) end with a song called I’ll Get to New York City One Day Soon. Looking back at the romance and cliches of old New York with some newfound revitalisation and change, the city and its people once more beckons. More importantly, the fact we have someone who cares about the vital and hugely influential music scene of the city will affect artists across the world. Making New York City safer and more affordable will beckon people in. This will, in turn, add vibrancy and new voices to the music scene. After one of the bleakest years in recent history, Zohran Mamdani has given us some reasons to cheer and look forward as we head to the…

END of 2025.

FEATURE: Constellations of Her Heart: Do Kate Bush Deep Cuts Reveal More of Her Artistry and Originality Than the Bigger Hits?

FEATURE:

 

 

Constellations of Her Heart

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the filming of The Line, the Cross and the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari

Do Kate Bush Deep Cuts Reveal More of Her Artistry and Originality Than the Bigger Hits?

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MOST people who are new…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

to Kate Bush associate her with these major songs. Ones that have been released as a single and are well-known. Whether that is Cloudbusting from Hounds of Love (1985), Wuthering Heights from The Kick Inside (1978) or Babooshka from Never for Ever (1980), they are songs that have been explored and played a lot. I guess it depends on what we class as a ‘deep cut’. To me, it is a song that has either not been released as a single or is not that well regarded/known. Others might say it is those absolute rare songs that few know about. Either way, you look through Kate Bush’s ten studio albums and there are plenty of examples. I would say her most recent, 50 Words for Snow, doesn’t have that many. I don’t know why, but the most recent album with deep cuts would be Aerial. Some from the first and second disc of the album. Plenty early in her career. One could say that Hounds of Love’s Mother Stands for Comfort is a deep cut, even though it is from Kate Bush’s most commercially successful and popular album. The one everyone knows. A rare distinction of never been played live or released as a single, Mother Stands for Comfort is an outsider, yet it is one of her most revealing and astonishing songs. I do think that these rare gems tell us more about Kate Bush than a massive hit. That may divide people, though I think it is the underuse of a song that means it seems fresher and less poured-over. This thought process started when I was co-hosting an event with Leah Kardos at Avalon Cafe in Bermondsey on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of Aerial. She was talking about some of her favourite Kate Bush songs or one that she would want played. Kardos mentioned Constellation of the Heart.

It is from 1993’s The Red Shoes. One of my only criticisms of that album is how the final third of the album is a bit weak. The final four songs (of twelve) starts with Constellation of the Heart. However, reinvestigating the song, it is one that warrants praise and inspection! I am not saying that all Kate Bush deep cuts are exceptional, overlooked or deserve new spotlight. I maintain that the remaining three tracks of the final four on The Red Shoes are a mixed bag. However, Constellation of the Heart is a fascinating song. In terms of Bush’s vocal performance and what she is saying in the song, I think it is a really interesting example. Consider these lyrics: “We take all the telescopes/And we turn them inside out/And we point them away from the big sky/Put your eye right up to the glass, now/And here we'll find the constellation of the heart”. It opens up a question whether artists know if a song will be a single and do they write in a certain way that means it will connect with audience commercially. Not to say less insightful or revealing, but perhaps artists are thinking more of accessibility than depth or resonance. Constellation of the Heart is not a single or ever could be, though I feel it is one of Kate Bush’s most compelling songs. How she is writing about love and relationships. Also on The Red Shoes is another terrific deep cut, Top of the City. This is one that was reworked for 2011’s Director’s Cut and was performed live for 2014’s Before the Dawn. It was part of the first act, alongside another The Red Shoes song, Lily. Again, I think that Top of the City reveals more about Kate Bush than singles from The Red Shoes such as Rubberband Girl or even Moments of Pleasure. In terms of its words and the power of the performance, I get more from Top of the City when it comes to delving deeper into Bush’s psyche and soul: “See how that building there is nearly built/There's a big fire over on the north of the city/I see you walking down the street with her/I see your lights going on and off/She's no good for you baby/She's no good for you now/Look I'm here with the ladder”.

It is not only The Red Shoes where Bush’s deeper cuts offered up more depth or personal insight than the singles/more popular songs. Cast your mind back to Never for Ever of 1980. Some stunning and very popular songs from that album, though I would contest All We Ever Look For is one of those deep cuts and lesser-discussed songs that is one of her most extraordinary and hugely compelling. I will perhaps use that word again, as I feel it is very apt. In terms of the inspiration, as she revealed to  Derek Jewell for The Sunday Times, “It’s about family relationships generally. Our parents got beaten physically. We get beaten psychologically. The last line – “All we ever look for – but we never did score”.’ Well, that’s the way it is – you do get faced sometimes with futile situations. But the answer’s not to kill yourself. You have to accept it, you have to cope with it”. Think about all of that. I think many of us can identify with the themes and what Kate Bush is saying. Maybe knowing it would not being a single, even though Babooshka, Breathing and Army Dreamers – the three singles released from the album – let us into Kate Bush’s heart and creative mind, I think that All We Ever Look For offers up more. Some of her most powerful and potent words: “The whims that we’re weeping for/Our parents would be beaten for/Leave the breast/And then the rest/And then regret you ever left”. These songs I have exhibited and exposed are also musically rich. Bush’s voice offering new colours and layers. Perhaps it is the under-familiarity of the songs. Or, knowing they were unlikely singles, Bush felt she could be more vulnerable or open. One could say The Dreaming has no obvious singles and all the songs are deep cuts, yet that is not the case. Even so, there is an example of a track not played a lot that I will add to a playlist at the end: All the Love. I never hear this played and it is not one that I have heard people write about in any depth. Dreams of Orgonon dismissed the song when they wrote about it. Graeme Thomson, in his biography, Under the Ivy: The Life and Music of Kate Bush, was a bit kinder.

In terms of how Bush writes about relationships, mortality, love and friendship, All the Love is one of her most important songs. Even if you think the composition is a little heavy or dirge-like, the sentiment of the song and its extraordinary sounds cannot be ignored. This is what Kate Bush said in her fan club newsletter of 1982:

“I think it’s sad how we forget to tell people we love that we do love them. Often we think about these things when it’s too late or when an extreme situation forces us to show those little things we’re normally too shy or too lazy to reveal. One of the ideas for the song sparked when I came home from the studio late one night. I was using an answering machine to take the day’s messages and it had been going wrong a lot, gradually growing worse with time. It would speed people’s voices up beyond recognition, and I just used to hope they would ring back again one day at normal speed.
This particular night, I started to play back the tape, and the machine had neatly edited half a dozen messages together to leave “Goodbye”, “See you!”, “Cheers”, “See you soon” .. It was a strange thing to sit and listen to your friends ringing up apparently just to say goodbye”.

Such a remarkable deep cut that I feel offers more of Kate Bush than many of the other tracks on The Dreaming. Even though I shot through Mother Stands for Comfort, it is the Hounds of Love deep cut that I think is as memorable and personal as the singles released from the album. I would urge people to read Leah Kardos’s analysis and interpretation of the song in her 33 1/3 Hounds of Love book. This loner or outsider on a classic album, Bush talks about a mother protecting her son, who has murdered someone. Maybe the son is exploiting his mother’s love and unconditional devotion. Psychologically and emotionally, I think it is the most powerful song on Hounds of Love – and yet nobody really talks about this song! The Sensual World and Aerial have songs that are deep cuts that are so extraordinary and should be highlighted. And yet it is the singles and bigger songs people mention when we talk of the album. There are actually a couple of examples on 1989’s The Sensual World.

One is The Fog. Not only does it feature her late father, Robert, providing vocals. It is this masterpiece that is an under-explored treasure. I feel this could have fitted on Hounds of Love, as The Fog, like so many songs on Hounds of Love, connects to water. Its dangers, mystery and romantic nature. As Bush explained to BBC Radio 1’s Roger Scott in a 1989 interview, there were personal inspirations behind the song. One that really goes deep into Kate Bush’s mind. Even though This Woman’s Work, The Sensual World and Love and Anger (the album’s singles) are wonderful, there is something more personal and impactful on The Fog:

“Again, it’s quite a complex song, where it’s very watery. It’s meant to be the idea of a big expanse of water, and being in a relationship now and flashing back to being a child being taught how to swim, and using these two situations as the idea of learning to let go. When I was a child, my father used to take me out into the water, and he’d hold me by my hands and then let go and say “OK, now come on, you swim to me.” As he’d say this, he’d be walking backwards so the gap would be getting bigger and bigger, and then I’d go [Splutters]. I thought that was such an interesting situation where you’re scared because you think you’re going to drown, but you know you won’t because your father won’t let you drown, and the same for him, he’s kind of letting go, he’s letting the child be alone in this situation. Everyone’s learning and hopefully growing and the idea that the relationship is to be in this again, back there swimming and being taught to swim, but not by your father but by your partner, and the idea that it’s OK because you are grown up now so you don’t have to be frightened, because all you have to do is put your feet down and the bottom’s there, the water isn’t so deep that you’ll drown”.

Even though I recently spotlighted Heads We’re Dancing, it is not the other song from The Sensual World that I feel is a gem of a deep cut that we all need to revisit. I think that Bush should have included it on 2011’s Director’s Cut, This is Rocket’s Tail. Speaking again to Roger Scott, this song was a showcase for the Trio Bulgarka. They are a Bulgarian three-piece vocal group who Bush was introduced to by her brother, Paddy (I think around 1985 sort of time). They added something magical to The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. Rocket’s Tail is perhaps their most incredible moment. However, I like the subject matter of Rocket’s Tail:

“Rocket is one of my cats, and he was the inspiration for the subject matter for the song, because he’s dead cute [laughs]. And it’s very strange subject matter because the song isn’t exactly about Rocket, it’s kind of inspired by him and for him, but the song, it’s about anything. I guess it’s saying there’s nothing wrong with being right here at this moment, and just enjoying this moment to its absolute fullest, and if that’s it, that’s ok, you know. And it’s kind of using the idea of a rocket that’s so exciting for maybe 3 seconds and then it’s gone, you know that’s it, but so what, it had 3 seconds of absolutely wonderful… [laughs] “.

There is this whimsical and funny throwaway nature. Rocket being one of his cats. I love the names of her pets. Her Weimaraners, Bonnie and Clyde, who feature on the cover of Hounds of Love. Other cats Pyewacket and Zoodle. There is another thread regarding how Bush’s pets made their way into her work. However, what she says about that brief excitement. Whether the first rush or love or something superficial, it is so interesting whether Bush was referring to the brevity of life or the importance of hanging on to moments of joy. Whether the transient and ephemeral nature of passion, happiness or contentment is like a rocket. Regardless of the truth, one cannot deny it is one of the most interesting and deep songs from The Sensual World. Made all the more beautiful – and almost spiritual – by the Trio Bulgarka!

Let’s end with Aerial. A double album, there are a few deep cuts on that album that are not really discussed that much. One single from the album, King of the Mountain, was released, though there is one particular song that I feel gets pushed aside and mocked. I have talked about it before. Other tracks that are deep cuts and offer us a deep window into Kate Bush’s soul include A Coral Room, Somewhere in Between and even How to Be Invisible. The latter is particularly compelling (that word again!). However, Bertie is the song I am referring to. It is an unabashed, unfiltered and unambiguous song of joy for her then-new son, Bertie (Albert). Why it is so important as this is a rare occasion of Bush not adding mystery or any barriers. Her heart exploding and exposed for all to see. Whether you find it cloying or saccharine, one cannot deny the importance of the words she sings! Simple and direct, this is a new mother marking that milestone and achievement by putting it onto the record. It is a song that will never be played and people will not talk about it in fond terms. However, it tells us more about Kate Bush at that moment than almost anything else written for Aerial. One can argue that the hits and popular songs offer plenty of revelation and insight into who Kate Bush is and why she is so special. However, and going back to Constellation of the Heart and how Leah Kardos talked about why tie was special to her, I do think people need to listen to these songs. We can only learn so much from the well-played and big-streamed songs. It is these rare jewels and dustier works of brilliance where I think Bush is less inhibited, more free and more revealing. An artist often seen as oblique or guarded, you only need to play some of these deep album cuts to see plenty from her soul and heart. You will feel and hear that brightly and brilliantly in…

THIS deep cuts blend.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: The Last Dinner Party – From the Pyre

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best Albums of 2025

The Last Dinner Party – From the Pyre

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MAYBE there is no direct connection…

PHOTO CREDIT: Cal McIntyre

though there have been a few examples this year of artists releasing sophomore albums after celebrated debuts. That idea of a second album curse or difficulty. In these cases, the artists surpassing the debut and expanding on them. Maybe albums truer to them. Wet Leg and moisturizer is one example. Another is the extraordinary second album from The Last Dinner Party, From the Pyre. I guess there is this hype and pressure after a remarkable debut album. Artists deciding if they want to follow the same course or do in a different direction for the follow-up. After their exceptional debut, Prelude to Ecstasy of 2024, The Last Dinner Party put out this follow-up quickly. Picking up on the momentum of their debut and the tour that followed, From the Pyre is going to feature highly in the year-end lists of the best albums. It is one of my favourites from this year. Like I do in these features, I am going to end with a review of the album in question. However, I do want to come to some 2025 interviews with The Last Dinner Party. The London-based band is made up of  Abigail Morris, Lizzie Mayland, Emily Roberts, Georgia Davies and Aurora Nishevci. Released on 17th October, and preceded by the singles, This Is the Killer Speaking, and The Scythe, From the Pyre won rave reviews from pretty much everyone who heard it. At ten tracks running to forty-two minutes, it is a focused-yet-packed album. In terms of how much they include and how much you get from the album. It was a hard task trying to live up to the standard of an instant classic, Prelude to Ecstasy. However, The Last Dinner Party kept their sound but added new dimensions and elements.

A darker album that is perhaps more ambitious than their debut, From the Pyre is an extraordinary listen! The Standard spoke with The Last Dinner Party in September about their new album. Rather than entering a new era, they were evolving and shedding the skin and misconceptions around their debut – and them as a band. Playing O2 Brixton Academy on 7th and 8th December, the quintet head to Australia in January:

“During their come-up, The Last Dinner Party were consistently accused of being “industry plants” — a term used to describe musicians, usually women, who are purposefully moulded for fame by music industry professionals. This was partially due to their very defined aesthetic. “We wanted to come out fully formed,” explains Morris. “We wanted our debut online and on the live scene to feel really professional and we worked really hard to do that.” But this, she says, “got people’s backs up”. “I don’t think it’s that surprising when we all studied arts and literature,” adds Roberts. “Yeah, like we literally just finished our dissertation on Victorian gothic literature,” says Davies.

And if the haters aren’t calling them industry plants, they’re usually calling them posh. This is because Morris attended the private school Bedales, which charges £55,000 a year for students to attend on a boarding basis. “I understand why people bring it up. It isn’t something to be ignored,” Morris says. “It’s a very relevant fact in terms of part of why we’ve been successful, why I’ve had luck. Though we’re not all from the same background.”

In terms of privilege apologies, Morris’s is one of the best you could hope for. “It’s something I have to acknowledge, and it’s a reflection of the state of the country. People are angry with me,” she adds. But she’s not done. Because The Last Dinner Party aren’t about shutting up and taking it. “I think most people who bring it up aren’t bringing it up in order to have a discussion. They’re doing it to hurt us and discredit us.”

For album two, The Last Dinner Party’s corsets are being unlaced. The big, debauched opulence of Prelude to Ecstasy has been replaced with something darker and more mythical. On the album cover, various iterations of the band’s members pose in a field, poster girls for each song. They’re holding lambs, playing chess, wielding swords and straddling motorbikes. Lyrically, the album speaks less of coming-of-age and more of coming undone — by relationships, grief, world events.

In The Scythe, Morris sings simultaneously about the loss of a relationship and the death of her father to form a rallying, life-affirming eulogy. The instrumentation of the album is equally threatening and theatrical, with cultish, sea-shanty drums and swinging country guitars mere tracks apart. Standout track Rifle is sure to produce some unforgettable live moments thanks to its screaming battle cries, heavy drums and incendiary guitar riffs. Roberts’s prowess on the guitar is the gift that keeps on giving, and this album puts her hard work centre stage.

From the Pyre is more of an evolution than a vibe switch. “We’re really opposed to the idea of having these easily definable and marketable eras,” says Morris. “I don’t think that’s conducive to good art.” Her words bring to mind Taylor Swift’s many “eras” and the resulting $2 billion round-up tour, with the American singer-songwriter now inextricably linked to the term. Many musicians are pressured to follow the same pattern of constant reinvention because, simply put, it sells.

The Last Dinner Party aren’t down for that. “We started this band four years ago,” Morris says. “Now we’re all in our mid to late twenties, and that’s when you go through so much change. Naturally, our styles have evolved, and we don’t want to wear the same things we were wearing three years ago. That’s not because we need to draw a line and be like, ‘That was old The Last Dinner Party, this is new.’ It’s not like that. It’s a natural evolution. So there’ll still be some corsets,” she laughs”.

Abigail Morris and Emily Roberts spoke with NME last month following the release of their anticipated second album. They discussed the album life on the road, and the downsides (or realities) of speaking out – and the importance of doing so. If you can see The Last Dinner Party play then please do so, as they are a celebrated and scintillating live act:

“She agrees with the observation that there’s been a shift in how artists speak out — one that would have felt taboo not long ago. “I think it has really changed in the last few years”, she considers. “As an artist today, even if your writing isn’t on the nose politically, you can’t help but be a part of the world. You’re still absorbing what’s going on and being a channel for it. With the world the way it is right now, it didn’t make sense for us not to say anything. We’re talking about this in our normal lives, with each other and our friends. Trying to figure out the best way to use our vote in elections, how to do things on the ground, where to donate our money… It makes sense, then, that we also talk about it publicly.”

“A learning curve for us has been figuring out whose opinions to really care about” – Abigail Morris

Alongside the new album, the band have announced headline tours across the UK, Europe and North America that will stretch into 2026. It’s a familiar path – one they followed with their debut album until touring reached a breaking point last year, forcing them to cancel a run of UK and European shows due to “emotional, mental and physical burnout”.

“It was such a hard decision to have to make as we didn’t want to let anyone down,” Roberts reflects now. “But we had to prioritise our health. It’s really hard as a new artist to know your limits until you reach them.”

“At the beginning, we felt like we had to say yes to literally everything that came our way,” she continues. “Obviously, it was good and got us to where we are, but there’s only so much you can do without harming yourself in some way – whether that’s getting overwhelmed, depressed or overworked. We know our limits better now, and because of that, hope we won’t have to cancel anything again. It’s been good seeing other artists like Chappell [Roan] do the same thing as well.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Rachell Smith

The realities of touring life are woven into the album, too. Especially, as Morris notes, the “Venn diagram of ‘being a woman’ and ‘being an artist’ and within it, the specific fraught experience of being a ‘touring female musician’”.

On ‘Agnus Dei’, the band sing in chorus: “All I can give you is your name in lights forever / And ain’t that so much better than a ring on my finger?” It’s a striking image – the tradeoff between immortalising your lover in song but not being able to give them a stable home life with you. Themes of motherhood and femininity also echo through the record, especially on ‘Woman Is A Tree’ and ‘I Hold Your Anger’.

“We’re in our late twenties, a time when your friendship groups start talking about getting engaged and whether or not to start a family,” Morris shares. “It’s interesting to navigate that as a female artist. Like, what do you choose? The road, the album, the marriage, the baby? All of it? None of it? What sacrifices do you have to make? Can you take control of your artistry and your body?”

Speaking to other female artists about this complex subject is comforting, she adds. “Especially with people like Florence Welch, who I really trust. It’s so good to talk about it, even if no one really has ‘the answer’”.

Before getting to a review of From the Pyre, there is one more interview I want to spotlight. DORK spoke with this incredible band. From the Pyre is them digging “deeper into grief, glamour, fury and friendship”. As DORK note, rather than this being a reinvention, it is the band turned “all the way up”. It is going to be really compelling seeing how The Last Dinner Party build and what they offer next. In the meantime, they will be busy touring and, let’s hope, taking a bit of a break:

“There were times when creating ‘From The Pyre’ that Abi felt like she was simply “banging on about some bullshit drama” and was worried honest songs about the life of a writer were “very self-obsessed”. The reaction to ‘The Scythe’ has calmed those worries. “It’s nice when you write something personal that ends up being far bigger than your own life. We can all think of songs that have found us and then made us feel seen in a way that’s so profound and shocking. To know we’ve written a song that makes other people feel like that is incredibly humbling.”

‘From The Pyre’ was a lot more collaborative than ‘Prelude’, with the band trusting their chemistry and camaraderie even more. Emily wrote about love, betrayal and self-worth on the snotty ‘Second Best’. “I hope that the song captures the pain, anger and despair I felt, but most importantly the defiance and satisfaction I now have in being able to immortalise this person in a song,” she explains.

Elsewhere, ‘Hold Your Anger’ was written by Aurora. Originally a stripped-back slice of piano-driven anxiety, it grew into something that’s part brooding, Nick Cave melancholy, part rock’n’roll swagger. It’s an evolved take on the generational trauma that drove ‘The Feminine Urge’. “It’s about contending with being in your mid-to-late-20s. Asking what it would be like to be a mother, whether it’s something you want, whether you’d be any good at it, and then looking at your own mother and seeing them as their own person,” explains Georgia. “I think it’s absolutely brilliant.”

The anthology that is ‘From The Pyre’ closes with the rumbling ‘Inferno’, which works through The Last Dinner Party’s experiences of being in a band. “It’s us talking about how amazing but horrific it can be to be in the public eye,” says Georgia. “It’s about the internal chaos,” adds Abi, who always visualises the hectic, frenzied breakdown as two burning spirals going in opposite directions. “The fire is only getting bigger, and you can pick which way you want to go but either way, it’s leading somewhere else,” she says, confident the band are never going to stand still. “It’s optimistic and open-ended – it sums up where we’ve been and where we’re going.”

Despite that cheery ending, the biggest difference between ‘Prelude’ and ‘From The Pyre’ is a sense of looming darkness that cuts into the giddy, free-spirited joy. “It’s a record that’s a product of the time in which it was written,” explains Georgia. “The world feels very dark, and that permeates everything you do. It would be bizarre if your art wasn’t influenced by that.”

You’ve never been able to accuse The Last Dinner Party of being uncertain or shy, but ‘From The Pyre’ is a fearlessly confident record from a band who have really embraced every corner of their own mythos and still managed to push things forward. Being part of a cohort of other established guitar bands like Wet Leg and Wolf Alice has helped (“It’s nice to see yourself in them,” offers Georgia), but a lot of it is down to the community they’ve found in each other and from their fanbase.

“Just seeing the way our music has resonated with people, be that online or at a show, is a huge deal,” says Abi. All five members of the band have been told how The Last Dinner Party have inspired others to pick up an instrument, toy with self-expression and feel comfortable in their own skin. “When you feel like you’ve made a positive impact on someone’s life, that’s pretty amazing,” she continues. “It makes you feel hopeful and that you’re doing something that’s causing net good in the world, which is a really good vocation.”

Is being in The Last Dinner Party still as fun as when they first got together and dreamed of selling out The George Tavern, though? Once again, they answer in unison. “Yes, and more”.

I am finishing with a review of From the Pyre from Rolling Stone UK. Awarding it a much-deserved five stars, they shared their opinions of an album that I think will be in most critics’ top ten of the year. If you have not heard this amazing album, then please do so now. I think that it is one of the best albums of the decade, rather than just this year! The Last Dinner Party are one of our best bands:

“‘Here comes the apocalypse and I can’t get enough of it,” sings The Last Dinner Party’s Abigail Morris over the glorious guitars and keys which underpin the opening track to their second album and reflect the darker edge that’s all too present throughout.

Their 2024 debut Prelude to Ecstasy was a game-changer of a record, one which combined baroque pop with bigger rock sensibilities to deliver a sound that was truly their own. It achieved the UK’s biggest sales in nine years for a debut album in its first week, while sold-out tours and performances at the BRITs cemented the five-piece’s position as one of the UK’s boldest and brightest new bands.

But on From the Pyre, the band sounds even more defined and blessed with the ability to make their point with searing clarity. The album’s first song ‘Agnus Dei’ is a piercing dissection of lovers past and – as Morris told Rolling Stone UK for the band’s cover earlier this year – even interpolates a melody from a song by someone she previously found herself in a situation-ship with, though she reckons it would be impossible to work out who they are.

That’s in part down to the sonic identity at play here, which means that the record never stays in one avenue and sounds all the better for it. That opening track might deliver the baroque grandiosity you’d expect, but ‘This Is the Killer Speaking’ offers their first ever country/pop moment and is enriched by one of the biggest choruses they’ve ever done.

It’s a similar story on ‘Rifle’, a sludgy, stoner rock-flecked song which feels like a companion piece to ‘My Lady of Mercy’ from their debut and sits somewhere between Queens of the Stone Age and Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’. As Morris sings of “boots and rifles stained with red”, it doesn’t take a genius to see that there’s a very modern parallel to be drawn. 

At times, these euphoric moments are simultaneously capable of breaking your heart. That’s certainly true on ‘The Scythe’, a slow-burning rock epic which began life as a break-up song before Morris slowly realised that she had written a thorough rumination on the death of her father. “Don’t cry, we’re bound together / Each life runs its course,” she sings with razor-sharp precision on the song’s euphoric chorus. The result is one of the best rock songs about death and facing mortality in recent memory.

All of these tracks reflect the more sombre themes inherent within the album and indeed its title – the large pile of wood used to burn bodies in traditional funeral ceremonies. It’s ironic, however, that ruminations on death and darkness have allowed this band to sound more alive than ever. The five-piece previously told Rolling Stone UK how producer James Ford – shortly before pulling out of this project due to illness – told them to “have fun, be bold and make a classic record”. All considered, they’ve heeded that advice to the max. It would be a tough ask for them to top their sublime debut, but it feels like they might just have managed it. From the Pyre should cement their place in the biggest of leagues”.

I have a few more albums to cover I think before I wrap this series up. Documenting and expanding on the absolute best of this year. My favourite of this year. One listen of From the Pyre, and it will stay in your mind. This is a stunning album that is…

HARD to forget.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Naomi Scott

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jérémie Levy

Naomi Scott

__________

THERE have been cases of…

PHOTO CREDIT: Horst Diekgerdes

actors singing and playing artists in films that you could compare to a modern artist. If they are playing a Pop artist, you can sort of see where the inspiration is and who they are modelled on. Starring in Smile 2 (2024), Naomi Scott played Skye Riley. In terms of her energy, sound, persona, looks and fashion, one could compare that character to Lady Gaga. Maybe Britney Spears. However, more Gaga. Rather than it being a tribute or caricature, Naomi Scott actually came across as this unique and genuinely talented singer. That may sound condescending, as she released her first songs back in 2014. So she has been in music for over a decade! However, I was not aware she was a musician, so I was genuinely blown away by her performance in Smile 2! There is actually the Smile 2: The Skye Riley EP with five original songs (and a sixth song which is a piano version of Just My Name). I will drop one of the songs in this feature soon. However, this is not about Skye Riley. I have featured actors like Asha Banks and Áine Rose Daly, who are also amazing artists putting out their own stuff. I have tried to manifest a Florence Pugh album but, to this point, we have nothing – though I am hopeful for 2026! Naomi Scott is someone who could launch new music that is pretty much that of Skye Riley. Instead, she has her own voice and a distinct talent. I want to bring in some interviews with someone I know that we will hear even more music from very soon. Singles like Cut Me Loose, Cherry and Rhythm are incredible. The Sweet Nausea single/E.P. is a must-hear. I know that many would associate Naomi Scott with acting but, like so many actors who are artists, you feel music is her true passion. I can’t wait to hear a Naomi Scott album in 2026. I think that Cut Me Loose is among my favourite singles from this year. As I said, I will drop a Skye Riley track below but, as I source interviews, we are going to get to some Naomi Scott tunes.

This incredible British-born actor is someone who can play the most dramatic and nerve-shredding parts, but she also has this incredible gift for comedy and playfulness. An extraordinary range that was channelled into Smile 2, Naomi Scott has this incredible career that I think will see her collect Oscars and so many awards. Such a mega-talented person, her musical side is one that particularly intrigues me. I wanted to bring in some recent interviews where she discusses her music and plans for the future. It does seem like a debut L.P. is coming from Naomi Scott shortly, as she has revealed as much in recent interviews. I wanted to start out with Billboard and their interview with Naomi Scott. She revealed how there will be a U.S. tour next year. A debut album taking shape. Inevitably, many will ask whether Naomi Scott’s debut album will have anything in common with Skye Riley and the music she performed for Smile 2:

“Over two decades in the making, Scott’s debut began to take shape in 2021. She struck gold during a trip to Norway when she DM’d producer Lido — who ended up being just five minutes away — on a whim. A FaceTime chat led to Lido (who’s also worked with Ariana Grande, Halsey and Jaden Smith) eventually becoming the album’s primary producer.

Homecooked meals with Lido’s parents and dips into the nearby fjord filled the gaps during recording breaks. The serenity of the small Norwegian town’s countryside brought a clarity to Scott and her team of collaborators throughout the creative process.

One of the songs that came about from the Norwegian sessions was “Sweet Nausea” — and the self-reflective track, which she describes as a “carousel of regret,” arrived on Friday (Nov. 7). “It could be a really big thing or a really tiny thing, but when that thing gets lodged in my mind that I said or I did, it’s like a scab that you have to keep picking, and you replay it over and over in your mind,” Scott explains of the single that was crafted in about 15 minutes. “Because you think that if you replay it enough times, it will change.”

Scott’s already set the table for the album with a trio of singles this year: “Rhythm,” “Cut Me Loose” and the alt-pop bop “Cherry.” She also made her festival debut with a performance at Lollapalooza in Chicago over the summer.

The multi-hyphenate entertainer will return to the stage on Friday for a show at London’s Moth Club, and then she’ll serve as an opener for Blood Orange, who’s a close friend and collaborator, on Sunday (Nov. 9) for his Alexandra Palace tour stop.

So how did we get here?

I’ve been making music for 15 years and kind of exploring and figuring things out. But that was at 27 — which, again, I think so many people go through a bit of an identity crisis [at that age]. Which sounds very dramatic, but it’s some sort of shift. It was kind of going back to basics. So before that point, I had been, you know, I was in L.A., I was working, I was in the studio. I was in kind of different pop rooms in that ecosystem. And I think it was very clear to me that I had to go back to basics. And to me, that is getting on a piano and writing like you’re 15 years old.

I started to build out what I felt like was subconsciously a bit of a theme in terms of the things that I was writing into. And so I basically wrote a bunch of demos, and I was like, “Oh, this feels cohesive in terms of what I’m tapping into.” Which is like an exploration into different versions of myself — not what we were talking about — which allowed me to kind of dip into something that felt intimate and have proximity to me, but also have a bit of world building aspect to it, and a little bit surreal. It’s a sweet spot.

The backdrop of this album sonically is things that I was listening to on my dad’s Windows Media Player growing up. It’s the music that brings me joy. I grew up in church. I grew up in gospel music, like pop gospel music. So you know, Mary Mary, Kirk Franklin, Kim Burrell, those voices. [Michael Jackson] and Janet [Jackson] are probably the biggest sonic influences. A little Phil Collins — Kate Bush, to me, represents an artist who remains in such a childlike [state of] play, even in terms of what she writes about.

When did the album start to take shape?

I started writing into this concept, subconsciously, probably in 2021. I can’t say it was like, “I’m gonna do this, and it’s gonna be this.” It was very much like, “Oh, I’m beginning to find that this process for me in writing is feeling more successful to me.” I like this seed, or the idea of it always being from me first — whether it’s a demo, whether it’s a fully written song on the piano, whether it’s just a chorus. So, for example, when I’d done a couple of these demos, I got seeds of ideas, and then I had a session with two people who would become my main collaborators on the project, Daphne Gale and Goldwash… I came in with the chorus for “Losing You.” I came in with like, the first two lines of the verse and the sounds about a long-distance relationship — but also just the idea of the inevitability of feeling like something is slipping through your fingers and there’s nothing you can do about it. And we wrote that song, and I was just a bit like, “Oh, this feels like a cornerstone sound of something that doesn’t feel derivative, that doesn’t feel like I’m just kind of painting by numbers.” I think that’s what really excites me.

Was there anything you took from playing Skye Riley in Smile 2 for your own album?

So I’ve been working on the album for so long that it was probably the opposite way around. I mean, Smile happened. It came about so quickly, and I think I kind of purposefully ran in the other direction in terms of creating that character, and going, “Let me put on a voice and sing in an American accent.” I also think it’s because the things that I poured into Skye Riley that I would take with me were things that I already had before — because it was just me — and the things that I left behind are things that I wouldn’t”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Greg Swales for Vogue Hong Kong

It is not new news that Naomi Scott has an album coming out. A treat for next year, when speaking with Vogue Hong Kong at the start of this year, we learn even more about what I think will be among the best albums of next year. I am excited to see what a Naomi Scott debut album offers:

“Did you always want to be in entertainment growing up?

I actually wanted to be an archeologist. I used to go into the garden and bury things, and then pretend to discover them again. I just thought it was the coolest thing. Maybe it all comes back to acting, because I was going into the garden and pretending to have made this incredible discovery, although I was all by myself.

Tell me more about your album coming out this year.
I just love writing and making music so much. To make music with people that I think are incredible is such a privilege. I wanted to create a soundscape, as opposed to just writing songs with just a guitar and a voice. It’s a little bit more of a world building which came from the music I grew up listening to, and the things that are nostalgic to me. I started this project three and a half years ago. I was around 27 years old and had a bit of a quarter life crisis. Mine was around this idea of getting married very young. There wasn’t anything intrinsically wrong in my life. It was more that life had just happened, and I hadn’t mourned the other versions of where my life could have gone.

I was watching “Master of None”, and the character started reading Sylvia Plath. It’s about a fig tree and how all of these different figs represent different versions of her life and how her life could have gone. She’s so fearful of making a choice that she starves to death. I just thought it was such a poignant and very apt description of our generation and decision paralysis. There’s just so many things we want to do and so many potential versions of ourselves that we find it hard to be content with our life. That’s what I started to write into. And then I met a few of my collaborators and was able to actually build out the sound that I wanted. And my executive producer, Lido, is incredible. I just love him.

Sound-wise, it’s what I listened to on my dad’s Windows Media Player growing up. There’s a kind of soulful ‘80s vibe, and then you’ve got everything from a little bit of Phil Collins, Kate Bush, Whitney, MJ and so many others. It’s definitely nostalgic, but it’s soulful, spooky and a little bit ethereal. I haven’t actually spoken about it yet, but I’m very excited about it, and I just can’t wait to start sharing”.

As a fan of Kate Bush, it adds weight to my theory that all the best, coolest, most talented and interesting Pop artists can be traced back to Bush in some way. I wonder which Bush albums Naomi Scott loves especially. I am going to end things with an interview from Rolling Stone UK from last month. I do think that, alongside some terrific acting roles, we are going to see Naomi Scott touring and playing festivals around the world. So many eyes will be on her debut album:

“Inspired by the pop, R&B and soul music that raised her – artists like Michael Jackson, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush – Scott’s debut album finds her shaping the language of love and relationships into sumptuous, ‘90s-inspired melodies that transport you back to the nostalgic days of landline phone calls, dimly-lit disco dance floors and drizzly windowpane yearning.

Outlining those thematic intentions with passionate hand gestures that occupy her entire Zoom frame, Scott says she related to the symbolism in Sylvia Plath’s seminal novel The Bell Jar, in which a fig tree represents individual life paths not chosen. “This idea of being a woman and choice, it’s a lot,” she says with an exasperated sigh. “I found myself realising that making a big decision at a very young age, being in a relationship from a very young age, [it was] almost like I hadn’t mourned other figs and other versions of my life.”

It was those thought-provoking contemplations that inspired her to inhabit different versions of herself on these songs. “This album is not autobiographical, but it very much stems from a personal place,” she shares. Granting herself permission to step outside her reality, she blurs the lines between her own diaristic revelations and high-concept pop. There’s the flirty, summer-drunk grooves of the Janet Jackson-indebted ‘Cherry’ and the caressing beats of ‘Rhythm’, which simmer alongside the restless thoughts of ‘Cut Me Loose’ and slow-jam beats of ‘Sweet Nausea’, all slipping breezily in and out of character.

The process of making the album was much like bringing a movie to life, where finding the right collaborators to honour Scott’s vision was key. That team included Norwegian producer Lido, who’s worked with the likes of Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande, complete with some special touches from Scott’s musical hero Dev Hynes, AKA the multi-hyphenate Blood Orange, who she’ll be supporting at Alexandra Palace in November. “I am a Blood Orange superfan,” she shares with a giddy laugh. “He’s the most generous collaborator. He is pure in his music process, and he’s so fantastic in protecting his creative space.”

The process of making the album was much like bringing a movie to life, where finding the right collaborators to honour Scott’s vision was key. That team included Norwegian producer Lido, who’s worked with the likes of Mariah Carey and Ariana Grande, complete with some special touches from Scott’s musical hero Dev Hynes, AKA the multi-hyphenate Blood Orange, who she’ll be supporting at Alexandra Palace in November. “I am a Blood Orange superfan,” she shares with a giddy laugh. “He’s the most generous collaborator. He is pure in his music process, and he’s so fantastic in protecting his creative space”.

If you only know Naomi Scott as an actor, then go and check out her music. This is someone who is going to have a very long and varied music career ahead. I have asked whether an actor adds something extra to music because of the disciplines and skills that they pick up. If they can naturally step into music because they are performers and inhabit roles. Naomi Scott is an incredible and unique artist who has released so much stunning music this year. Next year will be an even bigger and better one. Someone who every music fan…

NEEDS to investigate and embrace.

__________

Follow Naomi Scott

PHOTO CREDIT: Lydia Garnett for PAPER

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/naomigscott

TikTok:

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

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5rlJ6TyfO5_K8_EfGDoKdA

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2Zi3RrdQqk63Xj0914STkS?si=pNDffKsNT3GSYRJPQRhpeg

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/NaomiGScott/

FEATURE: Spotlight: Audrey Hobert

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Kyle Berger for W Magazine

Audrey Hobert

__________

AN artist that…

PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez for The Line of Best Fit

I had overlooked and have just caught onto, I admit that I am late to the wonder of Audrey Hobert. It is exciting that she plays at a venue local to me, the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London, in March. I will try and get to see her there. Her debut album, Who’s the Clown?, is phenomenal. Songs that embed in your head! I think Bowling Alley might be my favourite from the album, though each of the twelve tracks are wonderful. I am going to come to a review of Who’s the Clown? I will start out with some interviews. Get a sense of who Audrey Hobert is and why you should follow her. As the album title might suggest, Hobert is someone who can tell a joke! A witty and funny songwriter, maybe the title suggests doubt, self-deprecation or something more cutting. Like some artists I have spotlighted recently, Audrey Hobert used to write for other artists before stepping out on her own. Hobert has written for Gracie Abrams. Abrams is one of the most acclaimed and talented modern Pop artists. I want to start with a Wonderland Magazine interview from August. Chatting with Gen Z’s sharpest and newest funny girl, this is an artist you need to know more about:

“But when the punchlines hit – jagged, off-kilter, sharply funny – her kind of pop starts to feel like chart-topping stand-up: stitched together with self-deprecating one-liners you can shake a leg to.

“I just tell it like it is, and sometimes that gets me into a bit of trouble, doesn’t it luv?” she says, deadpan, peeking out from under a mop of strawberry-blonde hair. “But I also trust my filter – she’s as powerful as my way with words.”

It’s as if Sofia Coppola’s dreamy angst and Lena Dunham’s TMI candour had a lovechild who overshares for a living and writes a killer chorus. So even when she’s clowning around – cool in the way cool is supposed to be (i.e., just being yourself, as she tells you on “Chateau”) – she’s blunt, mischievous, and scarily introspective.

It’s a formula that’s already proven magnetic. Audrey’s breakout track – the viral, screw-you breakup ballad “Sue Me” (delivered with a self-directed video seen over 700,000 times), released in May – has racked up nearly 23 million streams on Spotify. Follow-ups “Bowling Alley” (declared song of the summer by Ethel Cain) and “Wet Hair” sit comfortably in the millions. Her instantly sold-out live shows across New York, Los Angeles and London – messy and joyous – are obsessively clipped and reposted by fans on TikTok. There’s a sense of real-time myth-making here, like watching a cult artist form in front of your eyes.

Before all this, there was pop powerhouse Gracie Abrams – Audrey’s childhood best friend, whom she met in a bathroom at their fifth-grade graduation. Audrey co-wrote several of Gracie’s best tracks (“That’s So True,” “I Love You I’m Sorry” – whose music videos she also self-directed – and “Risk”) before quitting her plans to conquer TV writing (she studied screenwriting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and did a stint at Nickelodeon), instead going solo as an artist in 2024.

Now, Who’s the Clown? – out today via Columbia Records – becomes the first collection of songs she’s ever written for herself, a semi-fictional self-portrait across 12 tracks, casting her as one of pop’s most singular new storytellers. Made alongside producer Ricky Gourmet (“We discovered our undying work ethic through this,” she says), it’s a hook-laden, sugar-rush debut that’s as tender as it is ticklish. Highlights like “Sex and the City,” “Don’t Go Back to His Ass,” and “Phoebe” unravel like a looped VHS tape – grainy and poetic, full of yearning, vulnerability, and giddy flashes of self-awareness. There’s a cathartic honesty here that turns pain into punchlines, and private thoughts into shared mantras.

“I just hope people who have loved my first releases love everything else, and understand my never-ending depth,” she tells us of how she hopes the album is received. “My big dream is for people to feel seen by me and inspired to be themselves,” she continues. “Success to me is a rich personal life…and to always have fun”.

How does the songwriting process feel different when it’s you, your writing for?

AH: It’s easy to write for myself because my slant on life is iron clad. When I’m just writing by myself for myself I can take as long as I want to figure out one line, sometimes it’s hours.

Stepping out on your own, were you hesitant about how people would perceive you as a singer?

AH: Not at all. Perceive me all you want, try and box me in, give it a whirl. I know who I am and I like being me.

The title Who’s the Clown? feels loaded – who were you speaking to when you named it?

AH: I was thinking about how as a new artist I’d have to grab peoples attention and I thought a nice way to do that would be to have scary imagery on the album cover. My hope would be that someone might see the album cover out of context and go, ‘What does this music sound like?’ and then it’s pop. The album cover and title go together, I thought it was funny.

What was the first image or idea that unlocked the world of the album for you?

AH: The album cover came to me at 6am. I woke up with it in my head the night after I finished writing my song, “Sex and the city.”

Your lyrics appear so diaristic. How much of the album feels autobiographical versus imagined character study or broader commentary?

AH: I don’t feel like I’m transcribing my diary as much as I am crafting a story. A lot of it is genuinely fictitious but all based on feelings I’ve felt my whole life or in the 8 months I spent writing the album.

And in terms of honesty, have you always had the confidence to tell your truth? With this record, how do you walk the line between protecting your private self and giving people something raw enough to matter?

AH: The luxury of protecting my “private self” didn’t feel super prevalent as I am essentially a nobody. As for the confidence to tell my truth, yes I’ve always felt that. I am a secure person for the most part and trust that when I speak it comes from a kind and funny place, so I just speak. Sue me”.

I might drop in two more interviews before closing with a review of Who’s the Clown? I am a new fan of Audrey Hobert, but I am instantly seduced. In July, The Line of Best Fit spent some time with Hobert. It is good that U.K. sites and sources are connected with this American artist. Someone who has been taken to heart here. The Line of Best Fit highlighted a sharp and funny songwriter who is also profound and sincere. Such a powerful blend that makes Audrey Hobert’s music more long-lasting and interesting:

“If Audrey Hobert the solo artist has a brand, it’s confidence. She’s got that kitschy early-2000s chic feel, like a play on Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and, yes, Hannah Montana. But it’s also not really a facade, either. “Authenticity” has become a soulless buzzword, one that feels too contrived and pick-me these days for what Hobert has going on. The best way to put it is that she’s singular and self-assured, telling girlish stories the way Greta Gerwig or Sofia Coppola might. She’s exactly the type of person who you’d meet growing up and want to be their best friend. Like, yeah, of course the cover art for her first singles have her elegantly handcuffed to a clown that could have been generated on Kid Pix.

“The funny thing is Ricky doesn’t listen to pop music,” Hobert admits. “But I live and bleed for pop music, and I think that’s why I’m so proud of the way all the songs sound, because it’s just an amalgamation of our tastes. He has impeccable taste, and I’ve got the structure and feeling of a pop song ingrained in my heart and soul.”

The first song she released was “Sue Me,” an anthemic cut that sees Hobert unabashedly hit on an ex at a party. It went big on the Internet, the kind of song you can belt with your friends on a night out or a night in or after a breakup or before a one-night stand. But, she emphasizes, that’s not even her biggest party trick. “I didn’t put out ‘Sue Me’ knowing it was the big hit... I’ve got lots more to show and give, and that’s why I’m just truly counting down the days. I just want it out,” Hobert says.

“Since I was a kid, all I ever wanted to do was say something that makes people go: ‘That’s me! She just said that in a way that I’d never thought of before! That makes me feel seen! It makes me feel like I can be myself! I don’t need my crush to like me back or this friend group to accept me – I can accept myself completely!’” Hobert says.

“I just want to inspire the youth,” she adds with a cheeky drawl and smiles. That, I assure her, she will  certainly do”.

I am going to get to one more interview before rounding off with a review. This August interview from RUSSH has some interesting exchanges. They home in on the humour of the album. I do think a lot of modern Pop artists, especially women, are bringing humour into their music more. Few have the same impact as Audrey Hobert. I think that she is someone who is going to be around for many years to come. You know that she will not drop a beat or step her entire career:

“I feel like you have such a fun sense of humour. And even listening to the album, it came across in your songs – especially tracks like Sex and the City. It got me thinking about how, in a lot of ways, writing funny lyrics can sometimes be more vulnerable than writing sad lyrics. Like, I think there's something so terrifying about a joke not landing or people misunderstanding you – I think that's why stand up seems so scary to people. Do you ever worry about whether people will get a joke when you're writing one, especially in a song format?

Oh my gosh – I've been itching to talk about this! It was something that I actively understood. While I was writing these songs, I would sometimes have a thought for a line, the line would immediately make me laugh, and then, sort of immediately after, I would wonder, not if the joke was going to land, but if people were going to follow. And so, pretty early on, I decided that I was going to stop asking myself that. Because I think where songs and lyrics fall flat and become bad is when you wonder if they're going to get it. That is just something I talked about a lot in school and with my friends who are also writers.

I'm always writing up to whoever the listener is. I think you're doing yourself and your listener a disservice by assuming that they don't get it or are not following – because people are very smart. And you know, if it makes me laugh and it makes me excited, then I just assume that's what how the listener is gonna feel.

I know you've co–written songs now for your brother and your best friend, but how do you know when a song feels like it's for you?

Well, all of my album is written entirely by me. I don't really see a world in which I ever write with someone else for me, just because I'm too much of a control freak and I have way too much fun on my own. But, I enjoy collaboration so much – especially if I'm writing with two people as smart and as good as Gracie and Malcolm.

Your shift into music began with those songs that you started writing with Gracie. What was that initial conversation like? Who initiated the idea of collaborating?

There was no conversation. We were living together at the time, and we very naturally started writing a song together. I had never written music, and she had this incredible career and all of this experience writing music. So, I felt just very lucky that she was including me, and it really was just – and I still feel with her – like a fun activity for us.

I love that. How did you decide which songs from your album would be singles?

Well, Sue Me – when I made it – I knew it would be the first song I put out. It was early on in the process, but I just had such a feeling about that one. I remember finishing it and going "without a doubt, this will be the first song I put out". Bowling Alley was more of a... it wasn't a fight, but I just knew that it was, aside from it being entirely me, very dissimilar to Sue Me. I feel like Bowling Alley on the album is such a concise, sharp representation of who I am as a person. I figured, I may as well throw that one out second and see who globs on because... that's me. I'm not looking for a viral moment with putting the song out second. I just wanted to introduce myself as the writer that I am.

Bowling Alley does feel like this perfect entry point to the rest of the album. And you have such a filmic background, did you approach writing, Who's The Clown? with a story arc or a mood?

You know what? Actually, not at all in the track listing. There's no through line in terms of story, mostly because I feel like all of these songs, – like quite a few of these songs – are completely fictitious. Like Bowling Alley and Sex and the City are two songs that never happened to me. But, as I would finish songs, I would just sort of throw them in randomly. I can't explain why the track list is the way it is, but it just made complete sense to me. Also, it was a visual thing to see the titles all next to each other, on top of each other in that way – it just made sense.

You've used this motif of a clown, both in the title, but also in some of the videos. Could you explain that a little more? What does that represent to you, and why was it important to include?

Well, yeah, I mean, so Sex and the City was a very early song I wrote, and it was the first song that I worked really hard on. I wrote that song for a week and a half straight, and when I finished it, the night I finished it, the morning after I woke up, I was like, awoken at six in the morning, and I was like, "The album is called Who's The Clown? and the cover is me smiling at the camera, and then behind me a window, and then behind the window a clown staring at me". I just had that in my head, and I didn't know where it came from.

I sort of related it to knowing that I was going to be a new artist and that, as a new artist, you have to sort of grab people's attention. I  thought, what better way to do that than to scare people? [Laughs.] So I knew I wanted the clown on the album cover to be in prosthetics and scary – just because I didn't think there'd be anything interesting about me, posing semi-sexually and looking really good. I just think that there's a lot of that out there, and we don't need more of that. So I wanted to scare people. And the clown, it being called, Who's The Clown?, I just thought it was funny like that, there's a clown in the photo, and then there's me, and then I ask, "Who is the clown?" I feel like it's just sort of clownish to write an entire album.

No, that's perfect. And I love that whoever sticks around after being scared will be the right kind of audience as well.

Exactly!

So what do you hope people feel once they listen to this album for the first time? And... is there an ideal setting for a first listen?

Oh, good question! Um, what I hope people feel? I think two things: I think, firstly, my greatest hope for this album, and me promoting it and performing it and putting it out there, is that people feel inspired to be themselves, and that everywhere they go on this planet, they feel entirely comfortable in their own skin. That's all I want. And then, I also hope people feel impressed by the writing. [Laughs.] As for an ideal place for a first listen? I've had so many different first listening experiences that are like, with friends or in the car or wearing headphones alone. I sort of always liked it in headphones alone, or in headphones with your friend who loves music as much as you do”.

Let’s finish off with a positive review for Who’s the Clown? An exceptional debut that you all need to hear, I will bring in CLASH and their take. This is one of the most impressive and finest debuts of the year. I feel 2025 has been a remarkably strong year for debut albums. Audrey Hobert is definitely ready for the spotlight:

“It’s always exciting when new voices start to gain traction in the music industry. These days, they tend to arrive at the mainstream sphere by either blowing up on TikTok or with the strength of having previous connections under their belt. Or maybe because they actually do stand out on their own and have something not necessarily  new to say, but rather an interesting way of saying it. Audrey Hobert checks all the boxes above. Up until the start of this year, the 26 year-old singer and songwriter was mostly known as Gracie Abrams’ best friend from childhood and co-writer, having credits on more than seven songs on Abrams’ sophomore record, ‘The Secret Of Us’. That is until things took a turn, and what was once a fun experience became a full on fledged career.

Being on the passenger seat while co-creating that project was so inspiring that it led to Hobert never wanting to let go of songwriting. In addition to having experience as a screenwriter for a Nickelodeon show, she had previously signed a publishing deal with Universal Music Group, and was tasked to write songs with musicians and producers and create “hits”. She soon realised that writing from her own point of view was what truly made all of it worth it. The singer released her debut single, ‘Sue Me’, last May, taking the internet by storm even before the song was officially out – the hinting and snippet-promoting was greatly received by popstar-starving fans. With a catchy melody and sing-out-loud lyrics all around, the songwriter captured the attention of a huge audience by showing off an “open book” type of personality.

Hobert’s path to the release of her debut album, ‘Who’s The Clown?‘, was cemented by the release of two more singles – the funny insecure anthem, ‘Bowling Alley’, which tells a fictional tale of coming to a party and dreading being (or secretly hoping to be) the centre of attention, and the diaristic storytelling instalment that came to be ‘Wet Hair’, which plays as shameless confessions of a person that likes to pose as confident. Apart from making the listener feel like a close friend of Audrey’s, the rollout leads us to believe that everything about this project, from the art itself to the promotion cycle, is intentional.

Through her own spin on diaristic storytelling – “So it went like this”, the opening line to ‘Bowling Alley’, being an ethos of her work so far –, Audrey conveys great security in feeling relatable. Some of the standout songs, like ‘Thirst Trap’ and ‘Sex And The City’, paint a picture of the lengths young girls can (and usually) go to catch someone’s attention and to romanticize their every action, trying to find meaning in the almost unnoticeable.

The production in songs like ‘Drive’, with its charming bass line, and ‘Silver Jubilee’, with its flirtation with 2016-electropop, are nice surprises, but overall the record can get a little repetitive with its themes and melodies. It seems like Audrey benefits from sharing her process with someone, and the lack of clear references and perspective could be settled with the addition of one more producer/co-writer. But her comedic and very specific style does shine through either way, and performing these songs for a crowd will probably add to the depth of future projects. As previously stated, she has been ready for the spotlight. And if things continue to be this way, pop music is in good hands”.

I am going to wrap up. It has been incredible learning more about Audrey Hobert. Someone who I am new to but am keen to spread to other people, this is an artist who is going to be around for a very long time. With a debut as impressive as Who’s the Clown?, you can see her enjoying this incredible career. Whilst there are so many stale, samey and indistinct artists around at the moment, Audrey Hobert offers something genuinely different and wonderful! There should be more artists…

LIKE her.

__________

Follow Audrey Hobert

PHOTO CREDIT: Wonderland Magazine

Official:

https://www.audreyhobert.net/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/audreyhobert/

TikTok:

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

Twitter:

https://x.com/audreyhobert1

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/@audreyhobert

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4N0TAwz9vhnQtjCqS65aKS?si=g31KqSyzQOaHnCVtIEGEpg

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Heads We’re Dancing (The Sensual World)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Heads We’re Dancing (The Sensual World)

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I have not spotlighted this song…

IN THIS PHOTO: Charli xcx attends the 2025 Met Gala/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

for a while, as I thought it was overdue an outing. A track from her 1989 album, The Sensual world, Heads We’re Dancing has a fascinating story and angle. Charli xcx mentioned in an interview how her favourite Kate Bush album, the one that defined her, is The Sensual World. Her favourite song from the album is the beguiling Heads We’re Dancing. I don’t know if this is still the case, though I thought it was interesting and cool that a modern Pop great spoke about a Kate Bush deep cut. Rather than go for an obvious song and album, she helped give light to a song not especially well known or played. It is one of many diamonds on Kate Bush’s sixth studio album. Maybe I have written about Heads We’re Dancing as a deep cut. However, I want to elevate it and show that it is one of the highlights from The Sensual World. The Charli xcx-approved gem could only have been written by Kate Bush. So out-there and unexpected is its inspiration. I am going to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, as they have some interview archive where Kate Bush discusses the inspiration behind Heads We’re Dancing:

“That’s a very dark song, not funny at all! (…) I wrote the song two years ago, and in lots of ways I wouldn’t write a song like it now. I’d really hate it if people were offended by this…But it was all started by a family friend, years ago, who’d been to dinner and sat next to this guy who was really fascinating, so charming. They sat all night chatting and joking. And next day he found out it was Oppenheimer. And this friend was horrified because he really despised what the guy stood for. I understood the reaction, but I felt a bit sorry for Oppenheimer. He tried to live with what he’d done, and actually, I think, committed suicide. But I was so intrigued by this idea of my friend being so taken by this person until they knew who they were, and then it completely changing their attitude. So I was thinking, what if you met the Devil? The Ultimate One: charming, elegant, well spoken. Then it turned into this whole idea of a girl being at a dance and this guy coming up, cocky and charming, and she dances with him. Then a couple of days later she sees in the paper that it was Hitler. Complete horror: she was that close, perhaps could’ve changed history. Hitler was very attractive to women because he was such a powerful figure, yet such an evil guy. I’d hate to feel I was glorifying the situation, but I do know that whereas in a piece of film it would be quite acceptable, in a song it’s a little bit sensitive.

Len Brown, ‘In the Realm of the Senses’. NME (UK), 7 October 1989

It’s a very dark idea, but it’s the idea of this girl who goes to a big ball; very expensive, romantic, exciting, and it’s 1939, before the war starts. And this guy, very charming, very sweet-spoken, comes up and asks her to dance but he does it by throwing a coin and he says, “If the coin lands with heads facing up, then we dance!” Even that’s a very attractive ‘come on’, isn’t it? And the idea is that she enjoys his company and dances with him and, days later, she sees in the paper who it is, and she is hit with this absolute horror – absolute horror. What could be worse? To have been so close to the man… she could have tried to kill him… she could have tried to change history, had she known at that point what was actually happening. And I think Hitler is a person who fooled so many people. He fooled nations of people. And I don’t think you can blame those people for being fooled, and maybe it’s these very charming people… maybe evil is not always in the guise you expect it to be.

Roger Scott, BBC Radio 1, 14 October 1989”.

All the lyrics are terrific, though I love how she leads in. Right from the first few lines, we are drawn into this dark and compelling introduction: “You talked me into the game of chance/It was ’39, before the music started/When you walked up to me and you said/“Hey, heads we dance.”/Well, I didn’t know who you were/Until I saw the morning paper/There was a picture of you/A picture of you ‘cross the front page./It looked just like you, just like you in every way/But it couldn’t be true/It couldn’t be true/You stepped out of a stranger”. There is this beauty and sense of the orchestra about Heads We’re Dancing. Nigel Kennedy on the viola (he would also be one of the musicians to the follow-up of The Sensual World, 1993’s The Red Shoes). Alan Murphy on guitar. I think Del Palmer plays percussion in addition to rhythm guitar. Jonathan Williams on the cello. Orchestration by the late great Michael Kamen. One reason why Del Palmer does not play bass on the track is because we get this wonderful performance by Mick Karn. Unorthodox and uncommercial, Bush praised his performance in an interview from 1989: “He’s very distinctive – so many people admire him because he stays in that unorthodox area, he doesn’t come into the commercial world – he just does his thing”.

There is not a lot written about Heads We’re Dancing. However, there are one or two features. Unlike other Kate Bush songs that are not really known and have nothing written them, perhaps the stranger story and inspiration means that people are compelled to share their thoughts. I really love the fact Charli xcx has name-checked the song. I think the last time I wrote about Head’s We Dancing was in 2020. I want to explore it once more. Before quoting form a feature about the song, I want to highlight critical reviews of The Sensual World where Heads We’re Dancing is mentioned. When Pitchfork reviewed The Sensual World in 2019, they said this about Heads We’re Dancing: “Even its most surreal songs are rooted in self-examination. “Heads We’re Dancing” seems like a dark joke—a young girl is charmed on to the dancefloor by a man she later learns is Adolf Hitler—but poses a troubling question: What does it say about you, if you couldn’t see through the devil’s disguise? Its discordant, skronky rhythms make it feel like a formal ball taking place in a fever dream, and Bush’s voice grows increasingly panicky as she realizes how badly she’s been duped. As far-fetched as its premise was, its inspiration lay close to home: A family friend had told Bush how shaken they’d been after they’d taken a shine to a dashing stranger at a dinner party, only to find out they’d been chatting to Robert Oppenheimer.Bottom of Form It’s more fanciful than most of The Sensual World’s little secrets. To hear someone recall formative childhood truths (the lush grandeur of “Reaching Out”) and lingering romantic pipedreams (the longing of “Never Be Mine”) is like being given a reel of their memory tapes and discovering what makes them tick”. The BBC gave it a brief mention when they reviewed The Sensual World in 2009: "Heads We’re Dancing", which sounds the most 80s of anything here (think electronic power drum beats and synthy-guitars) is a complete contrast, telling the tale of a woman dancing all night with a stranger who turns out to be Hitler”.

Maybe this is another Kate Bush song that could not be made today (see also Never for Ever’s The Infant Kiss). In 2023, Far Out Magazine reacted to a song where there is this romanticism of Adolf Hitler. Though Bush would never glorify something so horrific or a person like him, it shows her bravery and boldness as an artist! Nobody else in 1989 writing songs like this! How would any of us react if we are in the situation of dancing with the worst person in the world?! Unless we are unfortunate enough to be invited to The White House, it is a slim possibility! However, I am endlessly fascinated by Heads We’re Dancing. A song from The Sensual World nobody talks about (see also Between a Man and a Woman and The Fog). It is one of the clear highlights:

“However, the idea that someone could become drawn to a person until they knew who they were only intrigued her further, and soon she asked herself, “What if you met the Devil? The Ultimate One: charming, elegant, well spoken. Then it turned into this whole idea of a girl being at a dance and this guy coming up, cocky and charming, and she dances with him.”

Who would be the ultimate figure when it comes to envisioning the most evil person to ever exist? One that says, “If the coin lands with heads facing up, then we dance!” in a softly-spoken voice, with no indication whatsoever that he might be harbouring some big, dark secret? For Bush, Adolf Hitler was the only person to fit the role. “The idea is that she enjoys his company and dances with him and, days later, she sees in the paper who it is, and she is hit with this absolute horror – absolute horror,” she sad. “What could be worse? To have been so close to the man… she could have tried to kill him… she could have tried to change history, had she known at that point what was actually happening.”

However, perhaps most importantly, Bush is in no way condoning attraction to criminality; instead, it’s an exploration of how our judgement can be clouded when someone appears nothing but friendly on the surface. She explained this, adding: “I think Hitler is a person who fooled so many people. He fooled nations of people. And I don’t think you can blame those people for being fooled, and maybe it’s these very charming people… maybe evil is not always in the guise you expect it to be.”

Although Bush understands that ‘Heads We’re Dancing’ could be seen as “glorifying the situation” and recognises the fact that she wouldn’t ever make a song like this now, it still begs the all-important question about human nature: would we know it if evil was staring us in the face?”.

In 2020, Joe Corr, for Medium, shared more words about Heads We’re Dancing than every other human being in history. A detailed and deep exploration of a song that has political connotations and parallels today, it is a great article. I have chosen parts of it that are particularly interesting, attitude and worthy. A feature that emphasises why more people need to hear this song:

“The whole album deals with the trajectory of growing and manoeuvring through a world of sensual experiences. It charts the highs as well as the lows, where the joyous imagining of Molly Bloom entering our three-dimensional world is contrasted against tales of dangerous obsession (A Deeper Understanding) and of desires being snuffed out by reality and leading to heartbreak (Never be Mine). A lyric on the latter, a confession of “I want you as the dream, not the reality’’, reflects an important component of The Sensual World’s vantage point on sensuality — that of recognising the barrier between fantasy and fact, of desires and realities, that takes on a new relevance when applied to Heads We’re Dancing. The song embodies that horrifying moment where pleasures become pain — perhaps where we recognise that our habits are dangerous, our vices degenerative, and that now it is too late to change and the damage is done. Here it is presented with extremity — being seduced by a fascist dictator, on the eve of a world war — but it can be easily scaled down to represent any person, thing or idea that enters into your life and seduces you into acting with careless abandon. As Bush states above, Hitler stands in as a perfect metaphor for destructive behaviours or obsessions because he was so seductive to the German public, and this was so intrinsically tied to his villainy — 1939 was both the year Hitler threatened the extermination of ‘the Jewish race in Europe’ in the Reichstag, and the year he was voted Time Magazine’s Man of the Year.

What’s more, the timing of the tale suggests that our protagonist is a victim of either their own self-delusion, or perhaps their own ignorance — after all, Hitler was a known figure worldwide before 1939. Which loops us back into one of The Sensual World’s other dominant themes, that of growing up. Of course, sensuality and maturity are intrinsically linked — it is through making our mistakes and exploring the pleasures of the flesh that we emerge into functioning adults. Head’s We’re Dancing is not only a warning, but something of a recognition — a recognition of the mistakes we must make in order to learn and become better people. Regret is a powerful and formative emotion, as expressed on the albums biggest hit This Woman’s Work: “I should be hoping, but I can’t stop thinking — of the things we should’ve said that we never said, of all the things we should’ve done though we never did”.

Heads We’re Dancing may in fact stand as her last overtly political parable, and it retains all of the bite of its predecessors. In many ways Heads We’re Dancing serves as a watermark in Bush’s career, much like its parent album. Rarely again would Bush return to such an aggressive tone in her songs (The Big Lie on The Red Shoes being one exception), and though she continued to pen some outlandish lyrics going forward, Heads We’re Dancing was the last time she truly went off the wall and dabbled with controversy. As such, it remains one of her most undervalued and underappreciated songs, resigned to be a quirky deep-cut on a record overflowing with some of her most lush and romantic recordings. I hope that here I have made a case for it as one of her crowning achievements, a piece of art that unifies all of the things that make Bush such a landmark talent”.

There is a lot to love and discuss about Heads We’re Dancing. I actually think an artist could release a track like this today. However, we would be talking about someone like Donald Trump. A flip of a coin and this game of chance. Kate Bush (or the heroine) being talked into a dance with the most evil man in history. Even for Kate Bush, this was such a brilliantly unusual source of inspiration. Nothing quite like it on The Sensual World. Showing how you could never predict what she would do next! Overlooked and ignored, Heads We’re Dancing is simply…

A phenomenal song.

FEATURE: The Best Albums of 2025: Antony Szmierek - Service Station at the End of the Universe

FEATURE:

 

 

The Best Albums of 2025

Antony Szmierek - Service Station at the End of the Universe

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ONE of my absolute favourite albums…

PHOTO CREDIT: Ed Miles for DIY

of this year arrived from Antony Szmierek. His debut album, Service Station at the End of the Universe, was released in February. I have been a fan for a little while now and I love the way he mixes slice-of-life observations that are poetic, humorous and have his voice at the front – and yet so many can relate. A blend of Hip-Hop and Spoken Word, his lyrics and delivery are hypnotic and arresting. I am going to end with a positive review for the divine Service Station at the End of the Universe. I feel like the album should have got a Mercury Prize nod. It was a competitive and great year, though Antony Szmierek was worthy of inclusion in the shortlist! I am going to start off with an interview from DIY. Speaking with an artist who was this evocative and witty new voice whose debut takes us beyond the cosmos, there is something universal about his debut. And yet Antony Szmierek produces distinctly British stories:

“Having first cut his teeth via spoken word and open mic nights around his home city while balancing a day job as a teacher, it was only in 2022 that he first garnered attention via intimately whipsmart early single ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Fallacy’ – a track that would throw open the doors to his witty observations on the everyday thrum of life. Since then, he’s been thrust into a whirlwind of change: performing on Later… with Jools Holland; being named one of BBC 6 Music’s Artists of the Year in 2023; releasing two EPs, ‘Poems To Dance To’ and ‘Seasoning’; and leaving his previous vocation behind to concentrate on music full-time.

“A year ago! One year ago,” Antony reflects today, thinking back to December 2023 when he hung up his teaching cap. “That whole year when I was still teaching – I did Jools Holland in that time, I did Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds for the first time – that was hard, that was when I really started to lose my mind. I was teaching at a college in Salford, doing four days a week. The last day I went in, I didn’t even realise it was my last day! I was fully split, living a double life.”

Even now, officially twelve months in, you can tell it still hasn’t quite sunk in. “It is a real album!” he quips at one point on his impending full-length. “That’s a hard thing for me to… It’s hard releasing something when you know it’s going to have an audience. Watching publications saying ‘these are the records coming out at the start of the year’, and mine’s one of them – and it’s got as good a chance as any of them of being held by people, which is just mad. It doesn’t quite feel real; maybe that’ll happen when I’m 80!”

While the backdrop to the record is, as its title offers, an intergalactic service station dotted with the kind of evocative details that would give The Jetsons a run for their money (take the self-titled opener’s “mid life crisis convertible star cruiser” or the kid riding a “coin operated meteorite”), the album’s heart is still very much about its cast. Built from his idea of the record “being an anthology, with these characters coming in and out”, each track acts as a detailed but universal vignette of life and love, doubt and loss, that just happens to take place in a galaxy far, far away.

“I think you don’t want it to be elitist,” Antony notes, on his candid approach to lyricism, that comes partly inspired by his own musical heroes – and fellow Northerners – Jarvis Cocker and Alex Turner. “I’ve got out of the habit of wanting to say clever words and trying to make it all seem grandiose, or that I’m dead smart because I know all these big words and everything. You’re trying to distil huge concepts that are probably quite wanky, but in a way where everyone can get on board. That’s teaching, I guess,” he nods. “I think I wouldn’t have been immune to doing that if I’d done this earlier on. [When you’re younger] you’re slightly more insecure, and a bit like, ‘this song needs to be clever or it needs to feel like I’m well-read’,” he adds, nodding to the positives of being in your mid-30s. “I think if you step away from that, you’re gonna make better stuff. I’m not averse to throwing in a huge word every now and again, but I’ll still talk about Twixes.”

An album that runs the gamut of human emotion – from the minutiae to the mammoth – if ‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ achieves anything, it’s to remind us that life is fleeting, and we might never understand what others are going through. But if its mission statement was, indeed, to kick into ‘sincerity overdrive’, then it’s only because of the vulnerability and openness of its author that it actually hits the mark.

“I’m a bit worried about it,” Antony says candidly, on the idea of performing the pair of more autobiographical tracks live in his upcoming live shows. “We’re gonna finish [the set] triumphantly with a big tune, and then I think I’ll come back on my own [for the encore], and I’ll probably destroy my fucking self. I think doing [those songs] at home, in front of all my friends, my family and my mum, that’s gonna be super difficult,” he says honestly, before a familiar glint appears in his eye. “But then, what’s the point in doing it if you’re not giving everything? That’s the point of the show, it’s the missing piece. I couldn’t do ‘sincerity overdrive’ without pushing myself to the limit there! I’ll cry on stage,” he nods, before catching himself, “but probably not even at that bit – probably during ‘Yoga Teacher’ for no reason. Too horny, started crying!”.

I want to highlight an interview from PRS for Music from April. They were doing a series focusing on artists on the road and their experiences. Antony Szmierek discussed the importance of PRS, but he also revealed what it was like playing the prestigious SXSW. Something that is a dream and goal for so many artists:

“With influences that range from ‘00s hip-hop to pop and British indie greats, Antony’s wide-ranging approach bleeds into his stage presence, which is filled with generosity and spirit. Back in March he flew out to SXSW in Austin, Texas to make his US live debut — funded by a grant from BBC Introducing and PRS Foundation — before returning to the UK to embark on a run of headline shows, including a sold-out night at his hometown’s Albert Hall.

With his tour now extending into Europe and a summer filled with festival appearances, M caught up with Antony for the inaugural edition of our new On The Road series to hear, in his own words, what it's like to grow and thrive as a live act in 2025.

‘Travelling to Austin and performing at SXSW was life-changing. I think there was a weird sense of anticipation on the plane there [from London], as many of us artists who had received funding wound up sitting together. I would find myself peeking over seats and thinking, “What’s corto.alto watching on the TV there?”, or I’d turn around and spot Jasmine.4.t, and we’d wave at each other.

‘I’d never been to the US before heading to SXSW, nor had my band. None of us! It was pretty mad knowing that the music I made at home — so much of which is specific to a time or location — was going to be performed live all the way out in Texas. There was definitely a sense of all of us artists feeling the excitement and thinking to ourselves, “How did we get here?”

‘We played to nearly entirely American crowds. They were all amazing. I think before performing in the States, you can get stuck in your head and your own perceptions; I was trying not to mention line dancing whenever it came to crowd participation. We played at this dive bar one night, which was great — it felt like being in a film. I think I was worried about some of the niche references in my music: for instance, I thought that singing about the Stockport Pyramid would be lost on some people!

‘I think people have different ideas about what SXSW is going to be. Some artists, for example, will aim to get a US agent or radio plugger while they are out there. But I think as an artist, the most important thing is to remain in charge of what your shows look like, and make sure that everyone [in the crowd] has a good time each night you play. If you do that, then all of those other things will come naturally.

‘I met so many fellow British artists while I was out there, which was incredibly special. We were hopping between bars and sharing instruments, or borrowing each other’s equipment when things went wrong. I left the festival with this real sense of community, which energised me ahead of the UK tour that I set out on the following week. It made me realise that this is why I make music. In Austin, I watched a lot of shows — including [bands like] Maruja and Big Special — and came away having had some of the best experiences of live music that I have ever had. I felt incredibly inspired. It was a transformative trip in so many ways.

‘Crucially, we wouldn’t have been able to go to SXSW without the grant that we received from PRS Foundation. I wanted to make sure I had my album out before playing the festival, so I knew that I wasn’t ready for SXSW in 2024. At the start of this year, however, we got the funds we needed to head over to Austin, and as a result of playing out there, we are probably a million miles better and stronger as a live act. Obviously there's now a million things in my [iPhone] Notes about what we saw along the way: there was a blood moon eclipse, and we also experienced a thunderstorm while travelling back!”.

DORK chatted with Antony Szmierek in February. Going from being a teacher – I am not sure if he still teaches now and then – to an Indie-Dance/Hip-Hop hero who is making this striking music, it is always revealing reading interviews. An artist who can make the mundane so important and almost spiritual, there have been a lot of comparisons with The Streets’ Mike Skinner. How he could deliver these scintillating, witty and relatable songs but back them with incredible compositions. Making them epic and swelling. That fusion of the ordinary and extraordinary. Something that Antony Szmierek does throughout the sublime Service Station at the End of The Universe:

“‘Service Station At The End Of The Universe’ transforms a motorway services on Antony’s fantasy motorway, Andromeda Southbound, from a place where dreams go to die into a study of social complexity, following the lives of the different characters that pass through on their way to a yoga class, a wedding, or back home to the one they love.

Introducing characters that in part represent Antony’s beloved North West upbringing, such as “the Patron Saint of Withington” in ‘Rafters’, but also illuminate parts of Antony’s own personality and questions that he himself deals with on a daily basis. Whether it’s accusations of being a class traitor in ‘Yoga Teacher’ or trying to cope with overthinking and existentialism in ‘The Great Pyramid of Stockport’, Antony’s whole self is poured into every aspect of the record, making it as genuine and believable as it could be.

Drawing on his eternal love for ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’, one that ignited Antony’s passion for language, as well as local landmarks that have become key pillars of his life thus far, every picture is painted with nuance, style, and an observational accuracy that even the most experienced novelists struggle to recreate.

Pulling different literary ideas to the edges of their existence and rewinding threads to fit his huge new universe allowed Antony to create more lyrical layers than is possible on singles and EPs and underscores his immense writing talent.

“I guess in a way writing it was a lot like teaching,” Antony posits, “there’s something for the five kids in the class who really want to listen and pick up hidden meaning, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t also something for people who just want really fun tunes with a good hook. I sort of take on this role of almost an omniscient narrator but also become the characters, it all winds together in the end.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Gunning

This ethos is at the heart of almost every track on the record, taking a seemingly everyday object or idea and elevating it into something with a profound and often existential meaning. The most obvious example of that comes from single ‘The Great Pyramid of Stockport’, which sees Antony take a local landmark and draw threads to the Pyramids of Giza, using two structures built centuries apart to explore legacy in a world that values speed and innovation.

“I was really surprised that nobody had written a song about it before; I was certain that Blossoms were gonna mention it on their album! On the surface, it just sounds like a song about this insurance company’s office in Stockport, but there’s a lot on there about getting older and time never stopping. There’s also a line about me cancelling plans because nothing feels real and I’m in tears in my bedroom, which sounds mad to have in a song about a big blue pyramid. I basically use observations as a way of projecting quite a complex idea, so the Stockport Pyramid actually ends up representing the question: ‘What’s the point in any of this?’”

Taking his cues from goth giants The Cure, Antony tried to be as sneaky as possible with his introspection, peppering super vulnerable lines into songs that you can only pick up on after a few listens. In this way, the album is able to bring together complex trauma responses and deep-rooted existential anxiety without ever getting weighed down by heavy topics. 

“I definitely consider the album to have a Side A and Side B, and it is a spiral; everyone’s meeting at this service station before they go off and do whatever it is they do to make this meaningless existence worthwhile, like falling in love or going to a yoga lesson, and then it’s like ‘fuck, what if none of this means anything?’”

This hitman-like style of hiding his vulnerabilities comes to a head in ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’, a stream of consciousness that acts as the end of the album’s spiral, representing rock bottom before the album bounces back to peace, love, and joy. It’s fair to say that it’s the song on the album that is likely to become a fan favourite thanks to its brave open-heartedness, but also the one that Antony struggles with the most.

“I just worry it’s a bit much,” Antony states, “I’m proud of it, and I’m glad it’s on the record, but it’s the only one where I didn’t hide any lyrics, and it’s a bit scary. We’ve had to play it back to management, and the label and stuff, and people seem to like it, but I have to cover my ears and look away. I’m dreading playing it live the first time because I can’t get through it without crying at the moment.”

He continues: “I still wanted the record to be optimism bottled, though, and that’s why it ends on ‘Angie’s Wedding’. I guess it’s an allegory for heaven, it’s not elitist, everyone can go, it’s a celebration. I just needed to resolve it and say, ‘It’s all going to be ok in the end’, instead of ending on ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’ or ‘Crashing Up’, which is about getting older and having eczema; what a nightmare life is!”

Sonically, the record is as rooted in Antony’s personal and local past as the lyrical subject matter, clearly marked by Forton Service Station’s Pennine Tower adorning the album cover. Initially, though, re-establishing these close ties to the historically well-documented Manchester music scene was something that Antony pushed back against.

“I looked away from Manchester at first because I was trying to subvert my own expectations and second-guess what might come later, but it reached a point where I was like, ‘Nobody knows who you are yet; you’ve got to stick to who you are and what you do’”.

I will end with a review. Providing a five-star glowing assessment of one of this year’s most dazzling and distinct debut album, DIY took us back to Antony Szmierek’s earliest work. To show how he has progressed and where he has come from. He has some live dates booked for next year, so do go and catch him if you can. I am really thrilled at all the attention has got, and the fact his music has connected with so many people. I have heard that his live shows are the stuff of legends. I shall have to see Szmierek play if he comes to London:

“To understand Antony Szmierek look no further than the title of his 2023 EP, ‘Poems To Dance To’, an apt depiction of the ex-English teacher’s rising blend of rhythmic spoken word and dancefloor ready production laying the backdrop for musings ranging from personal relationships to obscure places, and a poignant balance of fantasy and heavy realism. The sci-fi inspired title, a nod to Antony’s childhood favourite ‘A Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy’ that also spurned his breakthrough track, lays the path for references to home city landmarks, from the looming Stockport pyramid to the North West’s right-of-passage pub crawl, the Didsbury Dozen. It’s indicative of his outlook on his surroundings, an ever-blurred line between the tangible and the intangible, and one that will draw inevitable and not unjustified comparisons to the work of Mike Skinner. It’s prominent in the interlude’s respite found in the service station, a transient place that provides much needed consistency to the protagonist. His understanding of place grounds the otherwise lofty musings, not least the stunning stream of consciousness rising out of highlight ‘Restless Leg Syndrome’. It’s this stark contrast between the emotive and the physical that underpins much of his writing, mirrored further in the record’s pairing of poetry and inherently British genres ranging from acid house to garage and beyond. ‘Service Station…’ glides through this constant push and pull, a timeless portrayal of both the physical and emotional connection to people and place; fundamentally British yet beautifully universal”.

One of my absolute favourite albums of this year, Antony Szmierek’s Service Station at the End of the Universe is endlessly listenable. You will come back time and time again. In terms of highlights, I think Yoga Teacher and Angie’s Wedding. All twelve tracks are jewels! Anyone who has not heard this album or knows about Service Station at the End of the Universe should correct that, as Antony Szmierek is someone you will be…

HEARING a lot more from!

FEATURE: Groovelines: John Lennon and Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir - Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

John Lennon and Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir - Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

__________

A big reason…

IN THIS PHOTO: John Lennon and Yoko Ono with the Harlem Community Choir at Record Plant Studios, N.Y.C. in 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Iain Macmillan

as to why I am featuring this Christmas classic in Groovelines is because it is one of the best ever. Perhaps not ranked alongside the best Christmas songs ever, perhaps people think the political nature or sense of protest maybe takes something away. That we need all joy and escape rather than something that is a bit more important and deep. Some have criticised the song because its messages are wrapped up in novelty and there is really not this appropriate blend. That the song misfires somewhat. However, I do feel that Happy Xmas (War Is Over) is a fantastic song. Its B-side is Listen, the Snow is Falling. Even though the song has a black mark because it was co-produced by Phil Spector, this magical and timeless – and, sadly, always-relevant – Christmas gem is credited to John Lennon and Yoko Ono and the Plastic Ono Band with the Harlem Community Choir. Written by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, I shall end with a few features that rank Christmas songs, so we can see what they say about Happy Xmas (War Is Over). Rather than write a Christmas song that is all about thinking of ourselves and the cliché images, Lennon and Ono penned this plea for pacifism and an end to war. However, as we are in 2025 and there is bloodshed around the world, you wonder whether those messages and wishes will ever go fulfilled! I am going to get to some features about this incredible and moving son. Before that, let’s discover more about the reception for and popularity of Happy Christmas (War Is Over):

“On its US single debut in 1971, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" did not meet with much success. This was due to the single's late release, which resulted in limited airplay before Christmas, and a lack of promotion. The single peaked at number 36 on the Cash Box Top 100 Singles and number 28 on the Record World Singles Chart, and number 3 on the Billboard Christmas Singles chart. The single subsequently re-appeared on the Billboard Christmas charts in 1972, 1983, 1984, and 1985. The song appeared at number 32 on the Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary chart for the week ending 6 January 1996. The song's most recent chart entry, and highest position, on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was in 2022, where it peaked at #38 for the week ending 31 December 2022.

"Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" enjoyed immediate success in Britain when issued there in November 1972. The song peaked at number 4 on the UK Singles Chart and number 10 on the listings compiled by Melody Maker. Since then, it has re-entered the UK Singles Chart nine more times. The most notable of these instances occurred immediately following Lennon's death on 8 December 1980. The single peaked at number 2 – behind another reissued Lennon single, "Imagine" – and remained on the chart for nine weeks”.

Another reason for me choosing this song to highlight is a sad one. On 8th December, 1980, John Lennon was killed. He was shot. It somehow gives Happy Xmas (War Is Over) a new dimension. When Lennon wrote the song with Yoko Ono, he was genuinely asking for peace. The fact he had his love taken by violence makes the song more powerful and urgent. Forty-five years after his death, I don’t think any songwriter like Lennon has come along. There have been covers of Happy Xmas (War Is Over), including those by Miley Cyrus, and Celine Dion. American Songwriter explored the song in a feature from last year. Noting how it is rare to get a festive song that is about peace and ending war, we have not heard many Christmas songs with the same intent and messages. Maybe there should be:

“After the success of Lennon’s 1971 hit, “Imagine,” he had a personal realization that, in part, led to his holiday song. Lennon said, “Now I understand what you have to do: Put your political message across with a little honey.”

From 1963 to 1969, the Beatles had issued special recordings around Christmas directly to members of their fan club. After the group broke up in 1970, Lennon was the first former Mop Top to release an original Christmas tune. Later George Harrison released, “Ding Dong, Ding Dong” in 1974, and Paul McCartney released “Wonderful Christmastime” in 1979. Ringo Starr released his album, I Wanna Be Santa Claus, in 1999.

“Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” began in October 1971 with a simple demo that Lennon recorded in his suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City, where he and Ono lived. Ono received songwriting credit but she does not appear on the original demo. A second demo of the song was made later that month when Lennon and Ono moved to another NYC apartment in Greenwich Village.

To record the track, as he’d done for prior songs, Lennon called in producer Phil Spector. According to legend, when Lennon played the first line, So this is Christmas… Spector told Lennon it was rhythmically the same as the 1961 single Spector produced by the Paris Sisters, “I Love How You Love Me.” In the studio, Lennon wanted mandolin-style riffs as he heard in the 1971 Spector-and Harrison-produced single, “Try Some, Buy Some.”

The Beatles’ Apple Records released “Happy Xmas (War Is Over”) as one side of a 7″ with the Plastic Ono Band track and “Listen, the Snow Is Falling” on the other side, in 1971. It came out on transparent green vinyl. A dispute between Lennon and a music publisher delayed the release in the United Kingdom until late November 1972.

“Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” first appeared on an album when it was released on the LP, Shaved Fish, which was the only compilation of the former Mop Top’s solo recordings released while he was alive. It came out in 1975. Later, a rough mix from the original recording session in October 1971 was released in 1998 on the compilation, John Lennon Anthology”.

Far Out Magazine discussed the story behind Happy Xmas (War Is Over). Wirth beautiful chorus singing from the Harlem Community Choir, this is a song that has this beauty and sobering nature. A blend of the optimistic and solemn. Whilst most Christmas songs seem empty but joyful, John Lennon wanted to create something more meaningful. Disrupt, very briefly, the stereotypical Christmas narrative:

“By 1971, Lennon had tried everything: taking to the streets, attending rallies, and even staying in bed. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that the best thing he could do to get his message across was to use his “bigger than Jesus” global influence to his advantage. This led him to release ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over) on November 24th, 1971, precisely a month before Christmas Eve.

Though Lennon would later claim that he wrote ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ because he was tired of hearing ‘White Christmas’, the song wasn’t a purely commercial gesture. It arrived after more than two years of peace activism, which began with those two ‘bed-ins’ in March and May 1969. Lennon realised that systemic change would only be possible with the cooperation of ordinary, working people. “The people are unaware,” he said. “It’s like they’re not educated to realise that they have power.”

With this in mind, John and Yoko set about devising a campaign to allow their radical message entry into the homes of everyday Americans. Their idea was to make peace unignorable. Renting billboard spaces in 12 major cities around the world, they erected black and white posters reading: “WAR IS OVER! If You Want It – Happy Christmas from John & Yoko”, a slogan that had already appeared in Phil Ochs anti-war anthem ‘The War Is Over’ and The Doors’ ‘The Unknown Solider’ – both released in 1968.

Riffing on themes of social unity, personal accountability and peace, Lennon recorded a rough acoustic demo of ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ in October 1971 in his and Yoko’s room at the St Regis Hotel in New York. He then brought it to producer Phil Spector, who noted that the song’s opening line, “And so this is Christmas,” was rhythmically identical to his 1961 Paris Sisters single ‘I Love How You Love Me’.

Spector oversaw the recording session, allowing Lennon and Ono to record private Christmas messages to their children, Kyoko and Julian. After handing the session guitarists mandolins and asking them to play a riff similar to the one heard in Ronnie Spector and George Harrison’s ‘Try Some, Buy Some’, Lennon and Ono recorded vocals with 30 children from the Harlem Community Choir, heightening the track’s cut-through appeal.

Strangely, ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over) wasn’t a hit in the US. Its late release meant that it had limited airplay before Christmas. A publishing dispute also delayed the song’s release in the UK until November 1972, when it rose to number four in the charts. After Lennon died in 1980, it reached number two and has remained a Christmas classic ever since.

Written out of a desire to change the world, ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ reminds us that the best Christmas songs are coincidentally festive. Lennon’s desire was to craft an enduring message for peace. Though Paul McCartney would later criticise this commercialised approach to peace activism, one that he regarded as wilfully ignorant, the optimism at the heart of ‘Happy Xmas’ remains essential”.

Released on 24th November, 1971 in the U.K. and 1st December, 1971 in the U.S., there are a couple of other features I want to come to. The Beatles Bible provide the details about personnel and recording dates of Happy Xmas (War Is Over). Nearly fifty-five years after its release, you do wonder whether its messages will connect with the wider world. I think that John Lennon and Yoko Ono inspired a lot artists with this song. Think of the other three Beatles, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, and how they have all campaigned for peace and bring that into their music. Or have done. During such a turbulent time in the late-1960s and early-1970s, Happy Xmas (War Is Over) seemed like something Lennon and Ono simply had to write:

“Although ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ was ostensibly about the Vietnam war, it proved a universal message understood worldwide. Lennon had experimented with anthemic messages in songs such as ‘Give Peace A Chance’ and ‘Power To The People’, and again produced a simple lyrical refrain which he hoped anyone could understand.

‘Happy Xmas’ Yoko and I wrote together. It says, ‘War is over if you want it.’ It was still that same message – the idea that we’re just as responsible as the man who pushes the button. As long as people imagine that somebody’s doing it to them, and that they have no control, then they have no control.

John Lennon, 1980
All We Are Saying, David Sheff

Lennon recorded a home demo of ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ in early October 1971. Few of the words were in place, but the melody and structure was mostly complete. Lennon evidently had trouble singing the high notes of the middle section, as sung by Ono in the final version.

Both Lennon and Phil Spector claimed the song’s melody was based on The Paris Sisters’ 1961 hit ‘I Love How You Love Me’, which Spector produced. However, the verses are more closely related to Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of the American folk song ‘Stewball’.

A rough mix of the song, titled simply ‘Happy Xmas’, was included on the 1998 box set John Lennon Anthology. 

In the studio

The basic track for ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ was recorded at the Record Plant East in New York City on 28 October 1971. The balance engineer was studio owner Roy Cicala, and Phil Spector was the producer. Spector, of course, had previously recorded the classic 1963 album A Christmas Gift For You.

The backing track was recorded in seven takes, with take six selected as the best. Takes 2, 3, and 4 were incomplete, and take 5 was a false start.

John Lennon had wanted Klaus Voormann to play bass guitar on the recording, but his flight from Germany to New York was delayed. The bass part was initially recorded by one of the guitarists recruited for the session, but was later replaced.

The 16-track master tape had Hugh McCracken’s acoustic guitar on tracks 1 and 2, and Chris Osborne’s on tracks 3 and 4. Other acoustic guitars, played by Lennon, Teddy Irwin, and Stuart Scharf, were recorded to tracks 11, 6, and 12 respectively.

Voormann’s bass guitar was on track 5, and Jim Keltner overdubbed a sleigh bell onto track 13.

Nicky Hopkins’ piano was on track 7, and he also added glockenspiel and chimes to the same track during a reduction mix. More piano by Hopkins was added to track 9, along with vocals by Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Tracks 8 and 10 were used by Spector as echo tracks. The remaining three tracks, 13-14, were used for Jim Keltner’s drums.

On 29 October the single’s b-side, ‘Listen, The Snow Is Falling’, was recorded. The composition, written by Ono in 1968, featured the same musicians as on ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’, minus the acoustic guitarists and children.

On 30 October Voormann recorded his bass guitar part for ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’. That session also saw the recording of strings and the Harlem Community Choir, and the whispered introduction for Lennon and Ono’s children: “Happy Christmas Kyoko”; “Happy Christmas Julian”. The sleeve photography for the single was also taken during this session by Iain Macmillan”.

Prior to rounding off, this blog post from 2021 argued why Happy Xmas (War Is Over) should have been a number one. Even though Phil Spector criticised John Lennon, as he thought his vocal was weak and he was being out-sung by Yoko Ono, the delivery and whole is incredibly effective and incredible. One of the most underrated Christmas songs ever in my view:

“In 1972, it made #4 fair and square, behind the likes of T. Rex and Little Jimmy Osmond. But in 1980, re-released in the wake of Lennon’s death, it also made #4 for Christmas, while the delights of St. Winifred’s School Choir wafted down from top-spot.

Back in those pre-computer days, when everyone at the chart-keeping company was on Christmas holiday, the post-Xmas chart was usually a copy-paste of the previous week’s. St. Winifred’s remained top, John and Yoko at #4. The week after, though, it rose to #2, behind the also re-released ‘Imagine’. I wonder… If the sales of the ‘Happy Xmas’ – which was presumably selling very well in the days leading up to Christmas – were counted, and the chart hadn’t simply been repeated… Could it have been a number one? I guess we’ll never know.

Though it never made #1, ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ makes the chart every year now thanks to festive streaming. It’s currently perched at #34 in the charts, and will presumably rise even higher next week. With that, I’d like to wish all my readers a very merry Christmas, and a happy new year… Let’s hope it’s a good one… wherever this holiday season finds you. (I’d also like to wish for war to be over, but I think I may be overreaching…)”.

In this feature form November, Time Out ranked Happy Xmas (War Is Over) thirty-second in the list of the best fifty Christmas songs. It is a shame that some see it is a slight or inferior Christmas song: “John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s definitive festive peace-on-earth song is an inescapable feature of every Christmas, transcending  its original anti-Vietnam War purpose to become a one-size-fits-all Christmas banger. Sure, bits of it make you cringe. But that’s all part of the season, eh?”. Ranking it thirty-eighth out of forty, Stylist said this about the underrated song: “Look, I get that this song has a beautiful underlying meaning – but John doesn’t really sound like he hopes I’ll have fun. He seems to be hinting at the fact that I’ve achieved very little over the past 12 months and I need to get my act together if I want to put an end to war. And that’s a lot of pressure, John. All I want to do right now is eat cheese, read terrible cracker jokes, hug my loved ones and forget about the drudgery of reality for a little while. Is that so much to ask?”. I am ending with these quotes form John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Taken from the official John Lennon website, it makes me feel that people needed to show more love for Happy Xmas (War Is Over):

“John: ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ we wrote together. Nothing more to say on that. It says it: ‘War is over if you want it.’ Because it was still that same message, the idea that somebody is either going to give us power or [has] taken our power or has made us go to war or not made you go to war or the president did this to us.
We are just as responsible as the man who presses the button. It’s that idea of God in the sky is a separate thing, you know? It’s all that separation. It’s all the same thing: nationalities, religions, authority. It’s all the same garbage. As long as we or as long as people imagine that it’s something people are doing to them, they have no control, then. They have no control.

Yoko: It was July 1971 in New York City. We were having our morning coffee in a hotel room facing the park. Then, still in the middle of our breakfast, we got this idea to write an Xmas song. We were fast workers, so the song was born by the time we fi nished our last morning coffee. That made John feel better. ‘This is going to be bigger than “White Christmas”, you’ll see.’ He wiggled his nose again, this time with satisfaction.

In November, John remembered the song and called the manager to release it as a single for Christmas. ‘John, it’s too late…printing the cover…advertising.’ ‘Well, try.’ The single was out, but the manager was right: it was too late for anything and it bombed. ‘Happy Xmas’ only became big after John’s passing in 1980”.

Without doubt one of my favourite Christmas songs, we will be hearing it a lot at the moment. However, given that there is war and genocide in the world, will people understanding the importance of Happy Xmas (War Is Over) and this is what John Lennon and Yoko Ono were talking about. How we need to heed their messages and do something. Fifty-four years after its release, this Christmas masterpiece…

IS as important now as it ever was.