Complexity often makes engaging with music difficult, after all it is hard to get along with weirdness. But this latest release from the now two-piece…
When Sam Shepherd released his first Floating Points album Elaenia around four years ago, some fans felt that the producer was holding something back in…
In a society where projecting a strong, unshakeable image of yourself is deemed massively important, we see a lack of focus on mental health and…
With peculiar yet familiar images of modern life, the folk-inspired songwriter Richard Dawson is back with another idiosyncratic record full of strong melodies and at…
The Brooklyn-formed group Bodega first appeared on many people’s radars in 2018, seemingly fully formed, and their first album release Endless Scroll established their minimalistic…
While five months ago we were lifted up into space, gifted with the glistening, galactical and frankly excellent U.F.O.F., we now find ourselves back on earth, more…
October 2019 has at least offered us the smallest silver lining in the form of new music, despite the outside world seeming to be creeping…
As a new academic year begins and the outdoors becomes a little less welcoming, remember you can catch up with all the best new music…
Time and place play a critical role in explaining the rise of Warp Records and how it achieved the kind of success that it did.…
Gigs & Festivals
Frankie Cosmos @ Belgrave Music Hall, Saturday 19th October Four albums by the age of 25 would be impressive enough, until you dig deeper into…
Pip Blom @ Brudenell Social Club, Saturday 12th October Dealing in lo-fi, buzzsaw pop-punk gems derived from the greatest parts of alternative rock history, Dutch…
Teen @ Oporto, Sunday 6th October With four albums of quality R&B-inflected indie under their belts, including the excellent Good Fruit released back in March,…
2000s
Looking back on the decade that’s passed since the quiet release of The xx’s debut album, it’s slightly strange to think of xx as a…
Big voice, big presence and big sound – the grandeur of Florence Welch and her Machine is something anyone who’s ever had a glimpse of…
It was about Dirty Projectors’ incredible breakout album Bitte Orca that Time Magazine’s Josh Tyrangiel birthed the immortal critical phrase “making the critic’s job undoable”…
1990s
There’s a line in ‘How Fucking Romantic’, halfway through the first disc in The Magnetic Fields’ massive triple-album 69 Love Songs, in which Dudley Klute,…
Who could’ve thought that an album that peaked well outside the Top 100 in the charts upon its release, regardless of the ‘underground’ following its…
Of all of the new genres that Britain threw up during the Nineties, trip-hop was the most quintessentially British sound of them all. Skewed beats…
1980s
1984 was a year of landmark underground albums in the American indie scene, with seminal records by Hüsker Dü, R.E.M. and Minutemen all released in…
In the aftermath of their legendary party-starting debut Licensed To Ill in 1986, Beastie Boys were in a curious place. They moved to the West…
Since their inception in the late ‘70s in the wake of punk, Robert Smith and the rotating cast of The Cure have become a globally…
1970s
A brief but hugely commercially successful and fondly remembered trend within British music at the end of the Seventies, a point at which the social…
It’s strange even now to conceive of an avowedly left-wing post-punk band, particularly one named after a particularly brutal political faction of communist China associated…
Synthesisers had been in use in popular music long before our collective consciousness normally recognises them as having appeared in the charts. Edgar Froese had…
1960s
Progressive rock, or ‘prog rock’, has consistently had something of a tainted reputation in the world of music criticism ever since the punk revolution in…
Not only is it one of the defining pop culture images of the 20th century, but, in retrospect, the iconic front cover of Abbey Road…
In contrast to the mythologising that often surrounds rock star deaths, the story of Nick Drake is not a remotely glamorous one. Instead, it is…
As a companion piece to our annual end-of-year albums list published earlier this month, The Student Playlist presents The Top 50 Tracks of 2018. You…
Although it’s been a year pock-marked with political and social uncertainty, that sense of upheaval and tension has resulted in some pretty fine art being…
Revisiting any period in popular music is always interesting, insofar as one’s memories of it change and evolve as time passes and the present gets…
Usually, when summarising the career of an artist in the wake of tragedy, there is a formality to the style, one filled with clichés like…
Lennon and McCartney; Morrissey and Marr; the Gallagher brothers. Some of the most iconic pop music ever made has been predicated by immense partnerships. Looking…
It’s been almost two decades since Pavement were active in any meaningful way, the group’s component parts quietly parting ways in the pursuit of solo…
