38 h. ago Poor Creature: All Smiles Tonight review | Jude Roger's folk album of the month

(River Lea)Masters of atmosphere, Ruth Clinton, Cormac MacDiarmada and John Dermody contrast hauntological synths with robust noise on this playful debutThe latest gorgeous release from the fecund Irish folk scene doesn’t begin with bassy dread in the Lankum mode, but a mood of gentle, haunting psychedelia. Adieu Lovely Erin starts by evoking Broadcast swirling around a maypole; then it’s as if Cocteau Twins had been transported to a traditional music session. Its sweet, high female vocals also evoke the improvisations of sean-nós singing, while simmering, krautrock-like drums build drama.Poor Creature comprises three musicians expert in heightening and managing atmosphere: Landless’s Ruth Clinton, Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada plus live Lankum drummer John Dermody. Their debut album steeps cowboy songs, Irish ballads, bluegrass and other traditional songs in a misty, playful lightness that somehow also carries an eerie power. Bury Me Not is a 19th-century American song about a dying ...

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56 h. ago Chloe Chua: Mozart Violin Concertos album review – teenage prodigy’s interpretations are balanced and mature

Chua/He/Singapore Symphony Orchestra/Graf(Pentatone)The Singaporean violinist plays Mozart with a clean focused tone, an elegant turn of phrase and a quiet wit. As Chloe Chua points out in her notes, Mozart’s Violin Concertos were written by a teenager – so why shouldn’t a teenage violinist do them justice? Chua – joint winner of the junior Menuhin Competition in 2018, aged 11 – was 15 and 16 when she made these recordings. The framework is conventional – there are no great surprises in the tempos, and she is backed by the modern instruments of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, who give an energised but refined performance conducted by Hans Graf. So far, so traditional. And yet Chua consistently holds the attention with interpretations that are notably mature: balanced, considered and never trying too hard. The faster movements having a gentle momentum, the slow ones plenty of space; everything Chua plays has a clean, focused tone, an unfailingly elegant turn of phrase and a quiet w...

Culture

58 h. ago Billie Marten’s Dog Eared is a brilliant, soothing album with a sense of looming danger

The Yorkshire-born singer-songwriter changes her approach for a hypnotic new record

Politics

59 h. ago Jim Legxacy: Black British Music review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(XL Recordings)The rapper and producer doubles down on his vaulting style, lurching from alt-rock to distortion and chipmunk soul on an astonishingly coherent and melodic third recordOn Father, the first single to be taken from Jim Legxacy’s third mixtape, the listener is offered a vivid image from the author’s past. The teenage James Olaloye, as he was then, is on the streets of Lewisham, the south-east London borough where he grew up. He is “rolling up a blunt, scheming for the funds trying to come up off the roads on my own two / I never had a father”. Inevitably, this means he’s up to no good: “Making money off a phone a key’s what they want.”It’s a familiar scenario in the world of UK rap, a genre in which you seldom want for bleak descriptions of the life its stars have left behind on often deprived council estates. But in the case of Father, it comes with a small, but striking detail. “On the block,” he attests, “I was listening to Mitski.” Continue reading...

Culture

8 d. ago Justin Bieber: Swag review – inane lyrics undermine a gorgeously produced R&B passion project

(Def Jam) The surprise seventh album from the former tween idol is musically expansive, abetted by a host of star producers. If only he’d thought about the words a bitIn the mid-2010s, pop music changed. Instead of hounding the listening public with focus-grouped, machine-tooled crowd-pleasers, the biggest stars began releasing expansive, experimental albums that played to their own tastes and interests. These were records that were artistically self-indulgent, mostly in a good way: Rihanna’s sleazy, sultry Anti, Beyoncé’s densely referential Lemonade, Lady Gaga’s soft-rock-heavy Joanne, Miley Cyrus’s psychedelic Wayne Coyne collaboration Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz (I may be the only person who holds that example in such high regard.)With his fourth album Purpose, Justin Bieber was adjacent to this shift. Leaning into the ascendant tropical house genre, collaborating with Skrillex and pursuing a sound you sensed a 21-year-old might actually like, it spelled the end of Bieber’s ...

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8 d. ago Phase Space: Degrees of Freedom review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

(Phase Space)Switching wonky techno for spacious abstraction, Gwenan Spearing debuts a new alias on an EP of uncanny generative electronicsAfter establishing herself as a techno DJ in some of the wonkiest corners of underground dance music, Gwenan Spearing has spent the last few years settling into slower, more abstract territory. Alongside her club sets, she co-organises an ambient deep listening series in Berlin and spends her spare time experimenting with modular synthesis. Phase Space is the latest expression of this interest, a project rooted in generative electronics and real-time responses.Degrees of Freedom is Spearing’s first outing under this new alias: an EP of meandering ambient tracks that blur the lines between electronic and acoustic as instruments are sampled, warped and overdubbed through her synthesiser. On the subaquatic opening track Sync, cowbells are stretched and delayed beyond recognition against a pulsing analogue rhythm. Towards the end of Some Pluck, a den...

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9 d. ago Wet Leg prove they’re more than a flash in the pan with second album Moisturizer

Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers double down on the weird energy of their debut

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9 d. ago Clipse: Let God Sort Em Out review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Roc Nation)Scathing disses, star guests, inspired Pharrell beats and great lines from chilling to laugh-out-loud: the duo’s first album since 2009 is so much more than the drama around itThe beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar may be over, but its aftershocks continue to reverberate. The most peculiar example might involve the reunion album by Virginia rap duo Clipse, AKA Pusha T and Malice. It was scheduled to be released by a subsidiary of Universal, home to both Lamar and Drake. But the label apparently demanded that the track Chains and Whips, featuring Lamar, be removed – despite the fact that, dazzling and pugilistic though his verse is (“I don’t,” he avers, “fuck with the kumbaya shit”), neither it nor the rest of the track seems to reference Drake. Years before the Drake/Lamar beef erupted, Pusha T released The Story of Adidon, a Drake diss track so brutal that one critic compared it to “bringing a gun to a knife fight”. Pusha T alleged that Universal’s “lyrics committee”...

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1 week ago Wet Leg: Moisturizer review – Doritos, Davina McCall and dumb fun from British indie’s big breakout band

(Domino)After winning multiple Grammys and Brits, the Isle of Wight band explore love and sexuality on their second LP – but there’s still room for some barbed put-downsMoisturizer concludes with a track called U and Me at Home. In it, Rhian Teasdale sings about the pleasures of doing nothing over guitars that bend in and out of tune in the style patented by My Bloody Valentine. Nothing much happens in the song – there’s some discussion about possibly getting a takeaway, and a brief nod to the “happy comatose” effects of weed – but it does feature a few lines that function as a kind of Wet Leg origin story. “Maybe we could start a band as some kind of joke,” sings Teasdale. “Well, that didn’t quite go to plan now we’ve been stretched across the world”.You don’t need to be a member of Wet Leg and aware of the circumstances of their formation – apparently the result of a conversation between Teasdale and guitarist Hester Chambers while on a ferris wheel – to feel slightly surprised at...

Events

2 w. ago Lewis Capaldi and Lorde top UK charts after Glastonbury performances

Lewis Capaldi and Lorde performed secret sets at Glastonbury festival last weekend.

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2 w. ago Adès, Leith, Marsey: Orchestral Works album review – an impressive collection marks a productive association

Hallé Orchestra/Adès(Hallé)This brings together new works of his own and by composers he admires that Thomas Adès has conducted at Bridgewater Hall during his residency with the HalléSince 2023 Thomas Adès has been artist-in-residence with the Hallé Orchestra. He has featured as composer, conductor and pianist in his appearances with the orchestra, and all his concerts have included new or nearly new works, both his own and by composers he admires. As the residency comes to an end, this collection brings together pieces he has conducted in Manchester; there are four by Adès himself, alongside William Marsey’s Man With Limp Wrist and Oliver Leith’s Cartoon Sun.Of the four pieces by Adès, only one is substantial. Aquifer, which he wrote last year for Simon Rattle and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, is a densely packed 17-minute movement, which contains enough ideas to power a symphony at least twice as long, before being brought to a halt by the most common-or-garden of cadence...

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2 w. ago Daytimers: Alterations review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Relentless Records)The UK collective have been reimagining south Asian music since 2020, and their new compilation splices junglism and Afro-house onto gems in Sony India’s catalogueSince their formation in 2020, the Daytimers collective have been trying to establish a new imagining of British south-Asian music. Taking their name from the daytime parties held by second-generation immigrants in the late 80s and 90s, Daytimers have spent the past five years throwing raucous parties of their own, with residents such as Yung Singh, Rohan Rakhit and Mahnoor mixing everything from jungle and Bollywood vocals with dubstep, grime instrumentals and Punjabi folk for a new generation born and raised in the UK.Following in the footsteps of their Asian underground forebears such as Nitin Sawhney and Talvin Singh, who mixed the sounds of 90s Britain with the south-Asian music they grew up listening to, Daytimers’ latest compilation has 13 south-Asian producers remixing Bollywood hits from the So...

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2 w. ago Kesha: . (Period) review – a smart, funny return to her hedonistic hot

(Kesha Records)After a long legal battle, the pop star’s sixth album harks back to her 2010s era, with a buffet of pop styles and only rare hints of her highly-publicised traumaKesha Sebert has described her sixth album . (referred to hereafter as Period) as “the first album I’ve made where I felt truly free”. It comes accompanied by a lengthy world tour, advertised by a photo in which the singer expresses her freedom – in what you have to say is a very Kesha-like manner – by riding a jetski while topless. Long-term observers of her turbulent career may note that this doesn’t seem so different from the way she framed her third album, 2017’s Rainbow, which she described at the time as “truly saving my life”, and featured her on the cover naked and was accompanied by a tour called Fuck the World.But it would be remiss to deny her the ability to make a similar point again. Rainbow was released at the height of her legal battle with her former producer “Dr” Luke Gottwald. Kesha had accu...

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2 w. ago The Glastonbury Bump: HMV reveals the artists seeing a surge in sales post

Who benefitted from performing at Worthy Farm this year when it comes to sales figures?

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2 w. ago Lorde 'goes public with new man at Glastonbury' after playing surprise set

The music icon was reportedly seen packing on the PDA with her 33-year-old man as the blossoming couple attended the iconic festival.

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2 w. ago Huge pop star 'goes public for the first time with new man at Glastonbury' after playing surprise set

The music icon was reportedly seen packing on the PDA with her 33-year-old man as the blossoming couple attended the iconic festival.

Politics

2 w. ago Glastonbury fans fume at 'atrocious' decision in Charli XCX's headliner

Charli XCX took to the stage to headline the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival, but fans were left fuming that Lorde didn't make an appearance for their collab

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2 w. ago Skepta’s surprise Glastonbury set review – British rap’s MVP has matchless mic technique

Other stage Filling in last minute after Deftones pulled out, the Londoner shows he’s still top of his game with a kinetic performance that jumps from garage to grime to Fred Again bangersThe Glastonbury “surprise set” has proved futile this year – anonymous billings for Lorde, Haim and Lewis Capaldi were leaked long before the gates opened. Yet there manages to be a genuine twist in the lineup: grime legend Skepta, as a last-minute replacement for alt-metal band Deftones, who have been forced to cancel due to illness. Skepta happens to be kicking around because last night, at Glade, he performed a DJ set alongside Mochakk from São Paulo and Carlita from Istanbul – an advertisement of his house-techno project Más Tiempo, launched with Jammer in 2023, with regular slots in Ibiza.But he’d not required the full force of his production for Glade, so stepping in for a billing just shy of the headline slot on Glastonbury’s second largest stage, Other, is certainly a challenge. On that, of...

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3 w. ago Glastonbury on Friday review: Lorde, CMAT and two Capaldis steal the show

The first proper day of music at Glastonbury was highly eclectic with a stack of instant classic sets

Events

3 w. ago Glastonbury 2025 Friday review: Lorde, CMAT and two Capaldis steal the show

The first proper day of music at Glastonbury was highly eclectic with a stack of instant classic sets

Events