Reanimating The Shins after a five-year hiatus with a whole new backing band, James Mercer’s ‘Heartworms’ is sometimes too forced to match up to previous glories.
The industry has talked the talk on behalf of Rag’n’Bone Man, but Rory Graham can truly walk the walk with his impressive and soulful debut ‘Human’.
Sundara Karma, one of the big hopes for British indie in 2017, deliver an accomplished if slightly anonymous debut that leaves plenty of room of expansion.
‘You Want It Darker’ shows an erudite artist still intent on pushing himself and addressing the world as he sees it, even in his eighties.
by Ed Biggs With a pretty impeccable CV of cutting-edge production for the likes of FKA twigs, A$AP Rocky, Vince Staples and ScHoolboy Q dating back to 2008, it’s incredible that it’s taken nearly a decade for Michael Volpe, the electronic magician known by his stage name Clams Casino, to deliver his first proper studio album.
by Matthew Langham Manchester synthpop duo Hurts, consisting of Theo Hutchcraft and Adam Anderson, return with their third album Surrender, two years after Exile which charted at a rather disappointing Number 9 in the UK album charts. Back when they started, their singles including ‘Better Than Love’ and ‘Wonderful Life’ did particularly well in the UK and even better in Germany, so this slump in commercial fortunes was unexpected.
by Ed Biggs Ever since they first bamboozled the indie scene with their absolutely-anything-goes approach, the perennial problem with Everything Everything is that they’ve always sounded better in theory than in practice. In many ways, their meta approach to influences and culture is perfectly suited to the information age, characterised by social media, news overload and the conflation of the personal and the political. What could be more contemporary than a
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