🔥 Editor’s Pick 🔥

Protomartyr – Sounds We Cannot Hear

Protomartyr will release their eighth studio album titled Hotel Usona on September 25th through Domino Records. They also released the first single “Sounds We Cannot Hear” along with it. Joe Casey has written the entire record around one image: America as a dilapidated hotel, where each of the songs represents a room occupied by a particular uncomfortable visitor.

“Sounds We Cannot Hear,” starts off right away. Casey describes the type of numbness felt when constantly scrolling and experiencing overabundance of information; he does so more as a deadpan account of what being in such a state really feels like . Ahee adds some new textures to the band’s musical palette as he incorporates elements from Middle Eastern music and 1950s records. The accompanying video was created by directors Danny Scharar and Harris Mayersohn. In the video, Nate Varrone (who plays the lead role in the TV series “The Bear”), slowly begins to lose his grip in a sushi restaurant while the director utilizes a technique of cutting him from three different angles at once to illustrate the theme of a song about losing your hold on your story.

Joe Casey has received a note praise from Iggy Pop for the album. While the praise may seem unusual and strange, it is a legitimate honour for Casey: Pop states that Casey has “a beautiful voice that you want to listen to” and it seems evident that he listened to the full album and heard something worth fighting for within it.

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New This Week

corto.alto — IJUSTIDONTKNOW

My favourite days are corto.alto release days, and this one’s a big one. “IJUSTIDONTKNOW” is the latest cut from SOME SMALL FORTUNE, Liam Shortall’s album due September 4 on Ninja Tune, and it’s one of the most anticipated Glasgow records of the year given how strong the run leading up to it has been.

Unlike most of the singles so far, this one doesn’t lean on a guest vocalist. Saxophonist Mateusz Sobieski shows up throughout, playing that raspy, slightly ragged tone that’s become part of the corto.alto signature, and he’s also Shortall’s co-founder at GLITCH41, Glasgow’s live night that’s become a proper scene unto itself. Shortall says this was one of the first songs he wrote for the album, built around heavier guitar riffs than usual sitting next to big hip-hop grooves and electronic textures. “It became an early blueprint for the sound of the record,” he says.

Coming after APRIL (W43) with anaiis, WHODIS (W14) with Mick Jenkins, THIEF (W20) and its Jersey club detour, and GO (W26) with Vector, this track was written early, before the record found its other collaborators and detours. I’ve liked every single from this album so far, and this one might be my favourite for how unshowy it is — no feature to lean on, no genre pivot to sell, just Shortall building something dense and confident out of guitar, sax and rhythm.

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SAUL WILLIAMS — Robot Slave

“Robot Slave”, a brand-new track taken from forthcoming album Leap Life (out August 28 via Big Dada), kicks off with a historical factoid: the term “robot” comes from the Czech word “robota”, which translates into English as ‘forced labour’, and was always bound-up with visions of a subservient working-class that would carry out unpleasant tasks without complaining.

Williams links this etymological origin to the wilful suppression of education given to enslaved Africans; both were based upon the fear of one simple question: if you suppress someone so thoroughly that they begin to think for themselves, what do you do?

In terms of the song, Williams states “In this song I weigh the possibility of communicating with our ancestors whose land and fossils power our technology and how they might aid us in our revolt,”.

The song has been released together with “Mazahua”, another Leap Life single, but this time with Aztlan Underground’s Yaotl providing vocals using the Mazahua language.

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Katherine Priddy — Secrets Still Remain

Priddy composed “Secrets Still Remain” as the theme song for the BBC Radio 4 podcast “Uncanny Cold Cases”, and therefore each of her choices are entirely reflective of that task description. This is not a song designed to be played on radio stations — it is a piece specifically created to accompany tales of unresolved mysteries.

It has thus been issued as a standalone single by Cooking Vinyl, in direct association with the podcast, rather than part of some larger album project. If Katherine Priddy writes an entire LP comprised of similar theme tunes for other people’s ghost stories, I’ll listen to it gladly anyway.

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Grandmas House — Blue Oblivion

Grandmas House have finished the series of singles from their EP “Baby You’re A Winner” with “Blue Oblivion.” The group say that this song was a pivotal moment, it was at this stage that they realized they had no obligation to continue playing within any specific style or genre. They describe the lyrics in their verses as being in the vein of early PJ Harvey, a guitar riff that snakes its way through the arrangement, then an explosion of energy in their choruses.

Producer Ali Chant, who has produced albums for artists such as PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius, and Yard Act, captures the duality perfectly. “Blue Oblivion” marks the final preview before “Baby You’re A Winner” hits shelves on August 21st via Brace Yourself Records.

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Daphni — hav u a sec

Dan Snaith simply cannot stop creating music. In addition to dropping three new Daphni tracks, including “Have U a Sec”. Those three songs have been tested live in recent weeks and are now available online.

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Mollie Coddled — The Art Of Falling Apart

Mollie Coddled opens “The Art Of Falling Apart” with a spoken-word diary entry, the kind of thing that could go wrong fast but doesn’t. It slides into something hazier almost immediately, Juno synths glowing under chorus-soaked guitars until the whole thing blooms into big vocal harmonies. The Yorkshire songwriter wrote and produced this herself before handing it off to Lee Smith for mixing, the same engineer behind records for Holly Humberstone and Griff. It’s her first new material in two years, since 2024’s “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”.

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Chad Hugo — Jumpupw!nya Ft. Tierra Whack, Leikeli47

Chad Hugo spent decades as the guy behind the boards, letting Pharrell take the spotlight while he built the actual sound. Now, at 52, he’s put his name on a lead single for the first time ever. “Jumpupw!nya” drops on his own label, Galaxie Records, and pairs him with Tierra Whack and Leikeli47 for a track that clocks in under two minutes and doesn’t waste a second of it.

Leikeli47 opens things up riding the beat hard, Whack follows with her usual left-field imagery, and Hugo’s rhythms and synths recall the same minimal clatter that made “Grindin’” and “Drop It Like It’s Hot” so catchy. It’s a confident way to start a new chapter.

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Melaina Kol — Idola

“Idola” is the third single from “Okay that’s a great idea because if I do that then”, out August 14 on Julia’s War Recordings, and it drops the guitar and electronics that used to anchor his sound. Cello, piano and acoustic guitar carry the track instead, all recorded plain and close, no reverb smoothing anything out.

The vocals are pieced together rather than sung straight through, sampled fragments of Olivia O of Lowertown breaking apart and coming back changed. Lyrically it’s about the fear that comes with long-term love — “fearing constantly disappointing them as a response to what you think love should actually feel,” as Hornyak puts it.

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RIP Magic — Light Over There

RIP Magic have barely stopped moving since they signed to section1 back in May. That deal produced Screwdark (W19); since then it’s been twenty six dates opening for Tame Impala across Europe, and now, mid-tour, they’ve dropped “Light Over There”.

This one pulls back from the density of “Screwdark” into looser, vaguer shapes — dub-inspired synth textures that don’t resolve into a hook so much as sit and hum. Tony Njoku and Louis O’Bryen contribute vocals alongside the band’s own, circling a single refrain: “Can you turn the lights off for me.” Most bands chasing this kind of momentum tighten up; RIP Magic went the other way.

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Maddie Ashman — Amber

Maddie Ashman doesn’t waste time on “Amber”. The song clocks in under two and a half minutes, but she packs a 5/4 rhythm and hocket vocal patterns into that space without it ever feeling rushed or overstuffed. “The 5/4 rhythm is determined but wonky, while the hocket is fun and chatty (yet relentless), holding so much tension,” she says.

The lyrics circle around impatience — “I don’t want amber, only want it faster” — and she recorded and finished everything herself, the microtonal touches sliding in around her vocal without ever showing off. It makes me want to hear what she does with a full band behind her.

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Summers Sons — Balance

“Balance” opens “Lightworks”, the new album from Summers Sons and C.Tappin, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. Brothers Turt and Slim, South London through and through, built their name on sample-led jazz rap, but this record moves them into fully live territory, with C.Tappin’s piano work anchoring the track alongside trumpet, guitar and drums.

Eight years went into this album, and you can hear that time in how unhurried the track feels. “The message is hope,” the trio said when they shared it, and that’s exactly what “Balance” delivers without overstating it.

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Jaime Rosso — Speak

Jaime Rosso is back with “Speak”, the second cut from his upcoming EP Keep Stepping!, out September 11th on Domino Recording Co. It follows Walk (W25); where that one moved with an easy, optimistic stride, “Speak” digs in harder — percussive, bass-heavy, built to push you rather than carry you.

Rosso wrote it about the gap between thinking something and saying it out loud. The video continues the story from “Walk”, same characters, same world, both directed by Rosso himself.

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Dragonflies — Slower

Dhani Harrison and Nigel Godrich have a new project together called Dragonflies, and its self-titled debut album lands September 18 via Dark Horse Records/BMG. Album opener “Slower” is the first thing we’re hearing from the pair, built from tape loops in Godrich’s Brixton studio after a pandemic-era phone call between old friends turned into a working relationship. “One person throwing something in the air and the other person catching it,” is how Godrich describes it.

“Slower” leans into trip-hop, hand-played grooves sitting somewhere between organic and electronic, with Joey Waronker on percussion. What surprised me is how unhurried and slow the whole thing feels for two musicians with this much studio pedigree between them.

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Krill — Commemorative Plaque

Krill are back, and “Commemorative Plaque” is their first newly recorded song in a decade. The Boston DIY trio formed in 2010, put out three albums in five years, and broke up in 2015. Now they’re Krill again, with Jonah Furman and Ian Becker joined by new guitarist Andrew Clinkman.

The song sounds like classic Krill — drawling vocals, spiky guitar work, a mood that stays oblique — described by Furman as a companion piece to the older song “Oppressor,” another song about coming home. He called home “a place and a person and an inside joke,” which is about as concise a summary of the whole thing as you could ask for.

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fejao & Samtheman — Brasil da Capoeira

fejao and Samtheman team up on “Brasil da Capoeira”, out now via Brownswood Recordings. fejao grew up in Brazil’s favelas, moving between samba circles, baile funk nights, and capoeira rodas, and that background is the whole engine of this track — an argument that capoeira isn’t a dance, it’s a fight dressed up as one, moving through actual capoeira vocabulary against a nod to the practice’s history of being pushed underground and criminalized in Brazil.

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CHELSEA WOLFE — Cold

Chelsea Wolfe has released details of her ninth studio album entitled ‘The Dark’, due on August 21 via Loma Vista Recordings. As part of the announcement Wolfe has released the albums opening track and lead single titled ‘Cold’ (the follow up to Death Is Not The End/The Dark (W26)). While working within a similar quiet-to-heavy dynamic as the earlier release, ‘Cold’ works through this process using a more folk-influenced approach, beginning with acoustic guitar and piano developing before being replaced by brushed drums and a full band arrangement.

Musically the song is about moving away from a past relationship and stepping into the unknown, sung in simple terms. Wolfe wrote the song with longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm and new co-writer Jennifer Decilveo. The ten-track album will feature collaborations with Robin Finck, Troy Van Leeuwen, Stella Mozgawa and Justin Meldal-Johnsen. Wolfe will begin touring extensively throughout the UK, North America and Europe later this fall, continuing through December.

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Flora from Kansas — The End

Flora From Kansas are back with the indie-pop anthem ‘The End’. The song features large guitars and a catchy chorus that leaves nothing unsaid. Lyrically the song is about finally ending things with an ex whom refuses to let you move on. This is the second song from Flora From Kansas after 2025’s ‘The Ghost is Me.’ When creating this song she wanted to create something that felt like a plotline in a teen drama, a clean, direct break-up song that knows exactly what it needs to say.

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Colin Stetson, Brìghde Chaimbeul — Dirt dance

Colin Stetson and Brìghde Chaimbeul have teamed up, releasing ‘Dirt Dance,’ the newest installment of their collaborative album All the Light in the World. Colin Stetson has been rewriting what the saxophone can be for nearly two decades. Brìghde Chaimbeul plays the Scottish small pipes, a tradition of the Isle of Skye. With both instruments covering so much ground they produce everything from drones and sustained tones to long sections of pure breath and reed.

While this may seem like a weird combination at first glance, the actual recording leans into the overlap instead of separating it out. Listening to this is going to require patience and also time to allow yourself to sit with this music and reward your listening experience.

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John Glacier — Bond Girl

John Glacier releases her first new single “Bond Girl.” This one feels like a sharp left hand turn for John Glacier: lower key, club friendly beats and inspired by soaked pulses of early Detroit Techno more than anything else we’ve heard her rap over. Her production team includes Take A Day Trip. The video takes the title literally featuring Glacier as a Spy in traditional James Bond fashion.

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Emma Ayzenberg — I Will Pretend

Emma Ayzenberg is back with “I Will Pretend”, the second single from her debut album Child of Saturn, due September 18. It follows Another Spring (W26), and this one’s brighter and more direct, built around psyching herself up for a hard conversation with a friend. “The lyrics are really literal, plus Carly went absolutely wild on the guitar part,” she says.

The video, shot at Switzer Falls, restages the exact moment the song came from — Ayzenberg’s tire blowing out mid-drive, right before the conversation she was dreading. Life interrupted the metaphor before she’d even finished writing it.

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Meg Lui — Elvis Queen

Meg Lui is releasing her first album under her own name, Instant Validation, on September 25 via Asthmatic Kitty Records, produced by Sufjan Stevens. New single “Elvis Queen” is her tribute to her late aunt, a devoted Elvis fan — a song that started slow and sentimental before getting sped up into something closer to a party than a eulogy.

The lyrics still carry the weight the tempo shift tries to shake off: an old pine holding rings of time, a garden growing around a bed, death recast as a return. It’s the kind of grief song that doesn’t want to be treated like one, and it mostly gets away with it.

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So much for the detox.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 Editor’s Pick 🔥

Phoebe Bridgers - Lost Boys

Phoebe Bridgers has released “Lost Boys,” her first original solo material in four years and the lead single from her third album, Lost Weekend, out August 14 on Dead Oceans. It’s the follow-up to 2020’s Punisher, and her most recent prior solo single was 2022’s “Sidelines.” The track opens on a vocoder-filtered intro before her voice clears, then builds the way the loudest moments on Punisher used to: horns swelling under an anthemic chorus built to be sung back at her.

The “Lost Boys” of the title never grow up, never go home — a Peter Pan escape hatch from what she calls “the machine” elsewhere in the song. Underneath the fantasy there’s something sharper: a motorcycle ride too fast for the speed limit, a fight in East Berlin that turned physical, a relationship that ended somewhere between forgiveness and not quite recovering. The chorus stays buoyant even as the verses get heavier, and that contrast is the whole song.

The credits read like a reunion — Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Caroline Shaw on vocals, Alex G on drums and additional production, Jack Antonoff on guitar/synths/vocoder, plus Nate Walcott, Blake Mills, Chris Thile, and Christian Lee Hutson among others. Bridgers produced it herself alongside Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, and Antonoff. The video, directed by Lance Oppenheim and Pablo Rochat, drops her into a Renaissance-fair fantasy that ends with both leads rendered as pixelated video game characters — a strange, sincere setting for a song about refusing to grow up while admitting that refusal isn’t entirely healthy either. She tours this fall on the device-free “Lost Tour,” including a sold-out Berlin date in December.

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New This Week

M. Woodroe - Sweetness, Sweetness

Out of the Brighton DIY scene, M. Woodroe’s “Sweetness, Sweetness” is noisy, grunge-adjacent alternative rock — a roaring wall-of-sound that doesn’t let up. It’s built around social frustration rather than personal narrative, with a political edge that pushes past general anxiety into something more pointed. It’ll appear on the band’s debut EP, “The Treatment of Fractures,” out September 18 on Venn Records.

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Nina Winder-Lind - Girls

Nina Winder-Lind has announced her debut solo album, “Wild Love,” out August 14 on Transgressive — a clear step away from the collective intensity of The New Eves. “Girls” started as a poem listing things girls want to do, written alone one night, and the tension between empowerment and old loneliness carries through: simmering keyboard building into guitar, cello, and trombone before an open, electric-guitar close. Produced by Jack Ogborne, recorded live to tape in Bristol.

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Jim James - Come Again

Jim James has announced his fifth solo album, “Wowed Out,” due August 28 on ATO — his first solo release since 2018. “Come Again” started life as a cue for a teddy bear factory scene, part of a large body of unreleased film-score material James made with Brian Reitzell in the early 2010s that finally clicked when he revisited it last fall. Self-produced, mixed by Emily Lazar. It’s about feeling discouraged by where things are headed and choosing to keep looking for beauty anyway.

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Diary - Keep Comin’ Up

Brooklyn quintet Diary have announced their debut full-length, “Spiral Bound,” due September 4 on Kanine. “Keep Comin’ Up,” produced by Bodega’s Ben Hozie, is jangly guitar pop with one foot in Madchester and the other in shoegaze haze — fuzzed-out guitar, woozy swagger, a rhythm section that grooves rather than drives. The video leans into 1960s New York art-scene imagery.

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Josaleigh Pollett - Like a River

Josaleigh Pollett’s “Like a River” is the third single from their fourth album, “If I Let It Quiet,” out July 24 via Audio Antihero. Built across an ocean — Pollett in Salt Lake City, longtime collaborator Jordan Watko in Japan — the track moves from warm acoustic guitar into pulsing electronic percussion and layered vocals. It’s about trying to quiet a noisy mind in a noisy world, inspired directly by Paul Simon’s “Peace Like a River.”

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Mura Masa - Needja (with Ledbyher)

Mura Masa has teamed up with Scottish-Indonesian rapper Ledbyher for “Needja,” out now on his own Pond Recordings imprint. Built from chopped and reworked samples of Ledbyher’s own voice, it continues the club-leaning direction of “Curve 1” and “Curve+1,” landing in territory the producer’s started calling “emo-breaks” — hard-hitting breakbeats paired with emotionally loaded production.

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PJ Harvey - Voyager

PJ Harvey’s “Voyager,” her first new song since 2023, is written from the perspective of Voyager 2 — the NASA probe still transmitting from interstellar space nearly fifty years after launch. Synthesizers and orchestral strings build something cold and weightless, working in Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” image of Earth as small and fragile. Physicist Brian Cox’s “Emergence” tour brought the idea into focus; the orchestral arrangement comes from film composer Dario Marianelli, recorded at Miraval Studios in Provence.

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miaw - Walmart

miaw’s “Walmart” is their first release with untitled (recs), part of the label’s open-format “(zero)” series. Monolithic synths and tumbling breakbeats give way to looser, chirpier dream-pop by the back half, Liza Dries’ vocal cutting through the glitchy opening before Frederik Fog arrives as little more than a whisper at the end. The Cologne-met, Copenhagen-based duo recently added producer Emil F. Emborg as a third member to help the layered, Ableton-built tracks translate live.

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Smidley - Capstone (feat. Lucy Dacus)

Conor Murphy has announced his third album as Smidley, “Murphy Horse,” out September 25 on Royal Mountain — his first new music under the moniker since Foxing went on indefinite hiatus. Lucy Dacus takes the second verse on lead single “Capstone,” her voice settling against wispy horns and hand drums over a funky, syncopated bassline. Murphy’s described the album as a product of “a year of confusion and doubt,” with one steady certainty running through it: marrying the person he loves.

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Benny Sings - Parachute

Benny Sings has announced his new album, “22 Durnham Dew,” out September 25, and shared lead single “Parachute” in both English and Dutch versions. He wrote it about his mother’s depression during his youth and the lasting effect it had on him — jumping from a plane with no parachute, wrapped in a light, danceable disco arrangement. It follows “Real Person” and “Castle,” and is billed as his most personal record yet, shaped by family life and a home renovation.

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Girl and Girl - Hell

Girl and Girl have shared two new singles at once, “Hell” and “It’s Dead,” their first new material since 2025’s “Okay” and “The Cow.” Frontman Kai Aubort’s finally dropping the subtlety: “We’re always hinting at death in our music, talking about it in such roundabout ways, so I thought it was about time I just came out and said it.” A seven-date Australian run follows, the band’s first domestic tour news in a while.

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Blondshell - Violins

Blondshell has announced her third album, “Violins,” out September 25 on Partisan, sharing the title track as second single after “Heart Has To Work So Hard.” It opens delicately before an explosive, hook-heavy chorus with a playful record-scratch dropped right into the middle. Sabrina Teitelbaum’s built the song around the idea that healing isn’t fast or linear, and refuses to be rushed by anyone who won’t respect that. A full North American, European, and UK/Ireland tour follows this fall and winter.

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corto.alto - GO (feat. Vector)

corto.alto has announced his next album, “SOME SMALL FORTUNE,” out September 4 on Ninja Tune, following a run of genre-zigzagging singles — APRIL with anaiis, WHODIS with Mick Jenkins, THIEF. “GO” keeps the pattern going: fractured, rhythm-heavy production with rapper Vector’s verse sitting on top rather than smoothing in, video shot on location in Lagos. Liam Shortall’s described the record as a deliberate shift away from doing everything himself.

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Chelsea Wolfe - “Death Is Not The End” / “The Dark”

Chelsea Wolfe has shared two new songs at once, her first new material since last year’s collaboration with HEALTH, and the first taste of her ninth studio album. “Death Is Not The End” opens almost silently — soft acoustic guitar, a whisper of a vocal contemplating mortality — before breaking into a heavy, distorted finale with Robin Finck and Matt Chamberlain. “The Dark” takes a folkier route into the same headspace with Stella Mozgawa and Justin Meldal-Johnsen. Both spend most of their runtime convincing you they’ll stay quiet, then prove you wrong right at the end.

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Girls of the Internet - Carry On

“Carry On” pairs a simple breakup lyric with a deep house groove, warm and rolling, built for a club. A relationship that’s over, not much left to say about it, carry on regardless — and it works precisely because it doesn’t try to do more than that.

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MAQUINA. - simulation

MAQUINA.’s “simulation” is the latest single from “BODY TRANSMISSION,” out July 10 on Fuzz Club — the Lisbon trio’s first fully instrumental track to date. Without a vocal to anchor it, the guitar takes over as a percussion instrument: chugging, siren-like, locking into a tight motorik pulse with no real build-and-release, just a sustained push toward the floor. The video was cut from footage shot on the band’s first tour of Brazil.

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HAAi - DIGITiSE

HAAi has announced her third album, “DIGITiSE,” out October 9 on Mute, sharing the title track featuring longtime collaborator Pat Alvarez. Billed as a “bigger, ravey sibling” to 2025’s HUMANiSE, it was made for her own DJ sets rather than headphones, and the title track backs that up — constantly shifting lanes the way a long DJ set does. She’s currently Beatport’s Artist of the Month.

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Everything Is Recorded & Peter Gabriel & IDK - Beyond The Brilliant Haze

Richard Russell’s Everything Is Recorded project pairs Peter Gabriel and Maryland rapper IDK on “Beyond the Brilliant Haze,” out now on XL. The track’s roots trace back to leftover material from Gabriel’s “i/o” sessions, reworked and rewritten before IDK’s verses landed on top without either voice smoothing the other out. Mike Elizondo mixed it at Gabriel’s request. IDK’s summed it up best: “a beautiful mess of juxtaposition.”

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Emma Ayzenberg - Another Spring

Emma Ayzenberg’s first new song in two and a half years was written during a stretch of starting over again and again, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. The arrangement — Carly Bond’s guitar, Robert Shelton’s Farfisa, restrained drums from Griffin Goldsmith — stays warm and slightly worn, more about waiting than arriving. It closes on flowers that grew on their own one spring, released the same way she released someone she loved.

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Man/Woman/Chainsaw - Get Up and Dance

The fourth single from debut album “Cannonball,” out August 7 on Fiction, hands lead vocals to Emmie-Mae Avery for the first time. She’s described it as a club scene where you spot someone who’s been working the room all night and flip the dynamic on them — playful at first, then turning the pressure up until they’re the one left exposed. Festival dates and a full UK/Ireland autumn tour follow.

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SOAK - death valley fridge magnet

Bridie Monds-Watson’s first solo song in over four years builds slowly from airy acoustic guitar into a fuzzed-out, shimmering close. It’s about a mismatched long-distance friendship — one out saving whales, the other driving a tour van, calling each other from random truck stops that don’t even have a name worth mentioning — that doesn’t need shared geography to hold. Written while dealing with vocal issues that had them questioning whether they’d keep making music at all.

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Elephant Gym - Highway

Elephant Gym’s first new song in two and a half years strips everything back to just the core trio after recent collaborator-heavy work. KT Chang’s tapped bass leads, Tell Chang and Chia-Chin Tu filling in around her — three minutes, no vocals, inspired by years of touring and the recurring image of scenery passing outside a window. Warm and almost hopeful, pivoting heavier, then looping back to where it started.

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That’s 23 tracks, gathered under strict no-extra-enthusiasm orders thanks to the 41°C outside my window. Phoebe Bridgers broke the policy in the first chorus and I’m not even sorry about it. Stay cool out there, however you’re managing it.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

I’ll say it plainly: this was one of the albums I’d been waiting for all year. We covered two of its singles as they arrived, and three songs in I still hadn’t heard a note that disappointed. So the bar was high. The Ground Above clears it.

For a long stretch, you got the sense Beth Orton wasn’t sure where she fit. The folktronica tag from the 90s followed her around like a smell she couldn’t shake, and the records that came after kept reaching in different directions without quite landing. Then Weather Alive arrived in 2022, built around a cheap upright piano she’d bought on a whim, produced herself, recorded with musicians from the London jazz scene, and suddenly, it was obvious. The thing she’d been circling for years was right there.

The Ground Above is the next chapter of that same story, and it might be the better one. Eight songs, none of them rushing, most of them stretching past five and six minutes. Orton produced it herself again, building it over the better part of a year out of live takes with a rotating cast of players. You can hear that process in the music: nothing here sounds programmed or assembled. It sounds like a room full of people listening to each other.

The title track sets the terms. Eight and a half minutes long, it opens on piano and a low drone, hanging in suspension for a couple of minutes before the band arrives and the whole thing starts to flourish. Orton steps in early with one of the most unforgettable openings she’s ever written, invincible as grief, tearing through the ground to the sky above, delivered in a voice that’s grainier and lower than it used to be. Like she ran across the room to say it and is saying it slowly anyway. The song keeps gathering force in waves, snare pushing, groove deepening, until it lands somewhere close to ecstatic.

That patience is the whole method. Before I Knew rises out of a dark, foreboding hum, brass hovering at the edges while the melody takes shape like a memory you can’t quite hold. Cigarette Curls moves on slow bass and a steady shaker before guitar and keys break it open in the final stretch, a hazy soul groove she sinks into completely: time caught up with me, eventually. These are songs that need their length. The small shifts in pressure and tone are the point, and they wouldn’t register if she rushed them.

Then, on the back half, the record quietly changes shape. Waiting is the turn, the shortest song here and one of her catchiest, a loose Motown-adjacent shuffle that reframes everything. Orton has talked about Laura Nyro and Carole King in connection with it, and you can hear that lineage, but what really comes through is how naturally she carries a soul song. The art-rock textures, the drones and atmosphere, start to feel like the dressing on what was a soul singer all along. She’s quiet and confidential one moment, then opening all the way up.

From there it loosens and warms. Celestial Light is blurry and dreamlike, all tom-tom patter and meandering piano. I’ll Miss You pulls in close, Orton singing like she’s across the table from you, circling the specific ache of missing someone at particular hours of the day, the way grief actually works, sudden and attached to small details. The album closes on Otherside, which started, by her account, as a song about not being able to sleep and grew into something much larger: resilience, freedom, the simple fact of making it through the night. It builds to the biggest, most open-throated moment on the record, tell me you made it out alive, and the journey from the shadowed opener to here feels earned.

What ties it together is the voice. It’s weathered now, cracked in places, and Orton has stopped trying to control every edge of it. That’s the revelation. Where she once kept a certain cool distance, here she lets the music decide how the words come out, and the result is something genuinely soulful: truth over polish, every time. The supporting cast is exceptional throughout, Shahzad Ismaily anchoring the low end and texture, Tom Herbert’s bass, Sam Beste’s piano, Christos Stylianides’ trumpet drifting through the edges, the drummers turning each song toward folk or jazz or something looser. But the sound is hers.

Nine albums in, thirty years past her debut, Orton has made the most direct and emotionally fearless record of her career. Weather Alive announced the resurgence. The Ground Above confirms it isn’t a random event. It’s where she lives now. Give it the time it asks for. It pays you back.

Already covered on Stereobar:

• Beth Orton – Waiting (W17)

• Beth Orton – Otherside (W23)

🔥 Week 25 — Editor’s Pick 🔥

Danielle Ponder — Power

Danielle Ponder has signed to Dead Oceans — home to Mitski and Japanese Breakfast — in partnership with Phoebe Bridgers, and to mark it, and to honor Juneteenth, she’s released “Power,” her first new music since 2023. It’s the kind of return that doesn’t need a victory lap to justify itself; the song does that on its own.

The track traces back to a trip Ponder took to Dakar, Senegal at seventeen. Over two decades later, she returned to film the video with director Fede Kortez. “In Dakar I found a brightness in the eyes of the people and an absence of heaviness in their songs,” she says. “Here, power and leadership all came in the color Black and I began to piece together the source of my own.” She calls the song a love note to that seventeen-year-old, and to the Black diaspora more broadly — “may we always remember that we are people who can fly.”

Ponder’s own path backs up the sincerity here: she left a job at the public defender’s office in Rochester, NY to pursue music full time, a leap that paid off with 2023’s Some Of Us Are Brave. “Power” sounds like the natural next step for a voice that can murmur and then detonate in the same verse, and I’m glad to have it back.

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New This Week

TV Priest — The Mud Never Dries

TV Priest’s first new music in four years, out now via Kartel Music Group, is a real departure: a breakbeat blast of drum and bass colliding with post-punk tension, fractured electronics, and spoken word, none of it settling into one shape for long. Charlie Drinkwater calls it the most abrasive thing the band has made, built around the idea of history as sediment — the past settling in layers we keep walking on without recognising. The video, shot in a single afternoon, sets Drinkwater alone in a dead office space building toward an increasingly unhinged performance.

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Nikki Nair — Default Mode

Atlanta producer Nikki Nair has signed to dh2, George Daniel’s dance-focused Dirty Hit sublabel, and shares “Default Mode,” the first single from his new EP The Sick Dimension, out August 7th. Built from what he calls “all of the weird gear that I have,” it’s house music filtered through someone whose instincts run toward UK breakbeat, garage, electro, and techno. He set out to make normal house music, failed by his own measure, and ended up with something far more interesting — a drum-driven track with vocals woven through the mix rather than sitting on top of it.

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Basht. — Keira Knightley

Dublin four-piece Basht. share the latest single from their debut album Poor Advice, out October 9th via LAB Records, produced by Ali Chant. The title comes from Love Actually, but frontman Jack Leavey isn’t celebrating the grand romantic gesture — “this song is about the desperate lengths people go to in an effort to save a relationship,” one that started exciting and slowly devolved into jealousy and resentment. Leavey’s vocal carries that tension well, vulnerable and frustrated at once, letting the song’s quiet patience build into something heavier.

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Slow Fiction — satellite

NYC quintet Slow Fiction’s second single from debut album dollhouse (out August 7th on Tight Knit) has a hazy, jangle-pop pull, Julia Vassallo singing low and worn-in over guitars that stay fuzzy without losing shape. Underneath the haze is something sharper — an allegory for the country’s drift into us-versus-them thinking, sparked by the image of someone watching something uncomfortable on TV and turning it off because “we’ve become selective with our empathy.” The self-directed video is built around skate footage, fitting the song’s loose, unhurried momentum.

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STRANGE LOT — Go Have A Dream

Austin’s Strange Lot share the second single from their self-titled LP, out August 14th on Greenway Records. The backstory: frontman Dominic Mena nearly walked away from the project in 2022, then wrote nearly thirty demos alone in a month, which caught the ear of Alex Maas of The Black Angels, who came in to produce. Jim Eno of Spoon mixed several key tracks. “Go Have A Dream” sits between fuzzed-out psych guitar and shoegaze atmosphere, with crunchy synth underneath and a rhythm section that keeps things moving rather than drifting.

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RIBS — Not A Boogie

Raleigh post-punk band RIBS release their second album Cold Ribs on August 21st via Three Lobed Recordings, and this first single is a compact two and a half minutes that hits without reservation. Mike Wallace’s speak-sung vocals ride a rhythm section described as a “diesel-drunk engine” — Fugazi, Gurriers, Television all come to mind. The riff lodges itself and doesn’t leave. RIBS apparently have no social media presence at all, which for a band this good feels like either a principled stance or just indifference to the machinery.

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MESH — Violent Peasant

Philadelphia quartet MESH release their debut album No Fun At All on July 24th via Feel It Records. “Violent Peasant” is two minutes and forty-three seconds of jangle-punk that knows exactly what it’s doing — twelve-string guitar leads, a pulsing bassline, a chorus built for chanting. If you know Smirk or Snõõper, this will feel like familiar company: scrappy playfulness pushed somewhere tighter. It moves fast but never loses control, which is harder than it sounds at this tempo.

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DONALDA — C BEN D’VALEUR

Montreal duo DONALDA’s first release since signing to Bonsound takes its title from a Québécois idiom roughly meaning “what a shame” — a clever choice since “valeur” also just means value, and the song spends its runtime working that double meaning: someone failing to see what’s right in front of them. It’s a breakup song dressed as a summer track, bright and danceable on the surface, leaning into dance, disco, and dub, with two vocals weaving around each other rather than sitting in a clean lead-and-harmony arrangement.

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abracadabra — face card

Oakland duo abracadabra’s lead single from new EP peel away (out August 7th on Melodic Records) builds on angular synth lines, dub-inflected rhythm, and layered vocals that sound homemade and expansive at once. It goes after the myth of self-made success directly — “do you really think you earned all you’ve got by yourself?” — a pointed question dressed in a genuinely fun groove. Most songs about privilege either lecture or apologize; this one just asks you to think about it while you move.

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Ulrika Spacek — This Time I’m Present (fantasy of a broken heart remix)

Ulrika Spacek are reworking their album EXPO track by track for EXPO, REMIXED, due July 31st on Full Time Hobby, handing individual stems to artists they actually listen to rather than commissioning a blanket remix package. Fantasy of a broken heart’s take on “This Time I’m Present” keeps the introspective pull of the source material while reshaping its texture into something rougher around the edges — recognisably the same song, just refracted through someone else’s instincts.

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Dale Crover — Harvest Moon/The Bit

In 1992, Neil Young needed someone to play his younger self in the “Harvest Moon” video, and the resemblance got Dale Crover the part — he doubled for Young on stage and once clipped the rear fender of Young’s actual ‘55 Cadillac into a tree stump. Decades later, Crover covers the song, and it barges straight into a rendition of Melvins’ “The Bit” because the two songs share a guitar tuning. It opens his new EP Get Yer Ba-Ba’s Out, out September 4th on Joyful Noise — glam-damaged power pop, forty-three years into his run as Melvins’ drummer.

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Mount Kimbie — Monroe

Mount Kimbie are taking on the next fabric presents mix, out July 31st, and “Monroe” is the lead single from it. Kai Campos wanted to avoid an over-thought, conceptual mixtape and just represent what he’s actually been playing in clubs lately — a refreshingly unpretentious way to describe a series people usually treat as a curatorial statement. The track builds gradually, loose percussion and driving synth with vocal fragments drifting in and out, pitched as an ode to their 2017 track “Marilyn” with Micachu without being a rework of it.

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SAUL WILLIAMS — Conspiracy

Saul Williams announces Leap Life, his first album in seven years, due August 28th on Big Dada, with Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja, Kamasi Washington, Carlos Niño, and Georgia Anne Muldrow among the contributors. Lead single “Conspiracy” pairs Gonjasufi’s distorted, half-buried vocal style with Moor Mother’s confrontational delivery. Williams frames the record as an attempt to commune with the dead against the backdrop of Palestine, Sudan, Haiti, Congo, and Yemen — “there’s an understanding that the soldiers in our struggle are not only the visible ones.”

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Beverly Glenn-Copeland — Light Of The Heavens

A nearly lost song recorded around the time of Keyboard Fantasies, found on archive tapes and released today on Transgressive, with a performance video from the same era recorded on the Canadian Shield. The lyric moves between arrival and seeking — the opening verse confidently greets the light, while the chorus immediately seeks it instead, holding both postures at once. That it sat in a box for forty years and resurfaces the same year the album turns forty feels less like coincidence than the archive giving something back.

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Jaime Rosso — Walk

Margate-based producer Jaime Rosso’s first single from his second EP Keep Stepping! (September 11th, Domino) trades his debut’s rural Kent roots for something explicitly urban — South London soundsystem culture, the particular energy of summer in the city. He describes the EP as an ode to daily rituals: walking, talking, dancing, dreaming as small but reliable sources of forward momentum. The track bears that out, bright melodies over a groove that stays optimistic without overselling itself.

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Wings of Desire — Interlude

Six new moons in, Chloe Little and James Taylor drop “Interlude” — we’ve followed this project since Whisper (W04), through This Is The Life (W12) and Just to Survive (W16), and this is a different kind of entry: roughly two minutes, fully instrumental, listed as Part VI on forthcoming album Stand Still Like The Hummingbird (due December 9th). It sits somewhere between early Simple Minds and Bauhaus, and reads less like a standalone track than the hinge point of a sequence — which, given the lunar release pattern, is probably exactly what it is.

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Peter Gabriel — A Hard Lesson (Dark-Side Mix)

The Dark-Side Mix of “A Hard Lesson” arrives on the new moon, the counterpart to the Bright-Side Mix from W23. Tchad Blake’s mix makes it clearer what Gabriel means by trying to find where you fit — the verses pile up navigational instruments (compass, gyroscope, mirror, map) that all fail, while the chorus offers desire instead, something you can’t locate with a map by definition. The bridge holds the sharpest image: walking across ice, waiting to hear the crack. After three-plus decades in a drawer, a song about disorientation arriving this incrementally feels right.

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Julia Jacklin — Get Away From Me (I Think I’ll Love You Soon)

The lead single from Julia Jacklin’s fourth album The Gem (September 25th, 4AD) is a genuine change of register — jangly, melodic, 1980s-inflected indie rock, bright and a little restless next to Pre Pleasure‘s restraint. The record came together at home in Melbourne over what was meant to be a two-week session and stretched to nearly a year, with sound bleed from a neighbouring hairdresser and live music drifting up from the bar below. The title nails the song’s central tension — the push-pull of knowing attraction is coming before you’ve agreed to it.

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19 tracks while a football match refused to end. Italy’s still not here, the score’s still 1-1 as I type this, and tomorrow it’s Mannheim, IDLES, and hopefully some shade. Some things resolve. Some things just go to extra time.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 Week 23 — Editor’s Pick 🔥

Superfan — Picture of Return

Kali Priya Flanagan has been here before — signed at fourteen, millions of streams under the name KALI during the pandemic, the whole indie-pop machinery running at full speed — and then walked away from it. “Picture of Return” is his first release as Superfan, and it’s a strong argument for why the reset was worth it. He’s signed to AD 93, which is the right home: the label’s tolerance for music that exists between song and texture is exactly the register this operates in.

Flanagan plays nearly everything himself — drums, electric and acoustic guitars, bass, synths, vocals — with cello from Omeed Almassi, whose strings carry a significant portion of the song’s weight, and additional feedback from Hudson Pollack. The arrangement is patient and unhurried, building around the cello and guitars without resolving into anything too neat. The lyric works through emotional manipulation with unusually physical imagery: a room as sole witness, surroundings that deflate, appearance pushed underneath the skin. The central image — a face as a “picture of return,” longing and dread folded into the same object — is the sharpest thing in the song. The narrator can’t act, only wait, and the music holds that suspension rather than lifting it.

The signing comes with a debut UK/Europe headline tour, London and Paris among the dates. Flanagan has history worth knowing: he opened for The Strokes at Red Rocks at Julian Casablancas’ personal invitation, and he’s been active in the Midwest emo band Holidays in the United States alongside this. There’s also a live version filmed inside the Agger Fish Building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that’s worth tracking down. On this evidence, AD 93 got there at the right moment.

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New This Week

Penelope Isles — Thinking Seat

Five years since “Which Way to Happy”, three since their last live show. In between, Lily Wolter spent six months in Sri Lanka and Indonesia stepping back from music; Jack toured as guitarist for CMAT. Both released solo albums. “3”, their third record on Bella Union, is due September 25, and “Thinking Seat” is the lead single — the sound of them finding each other again. Recorded live to tape over ten days at Black Bay Studio on the Isle of Lewis, twenty miles from the nearest shop, in a refurbished fish factory on a sheltered harbour, with drummer Joe Taylor joining as a full third member. They kept binoculars by the window for white eagles and dolphins.

The track is about the mental loop of touring: thousands of hours in the splitter van, overthinking, spiralling, trying to find a parking space. Shimmering guitars, sibling harmonies, bright on the surface and anxious underneath. Buried in the lyric is “U.G.A.K.I” — “you guys are killing it”, a private band catchphrase for when touring felt particularly broke and ridiculous, used as a way of injecting lightness into the uphill struggle. That it made it into a song says something about what kind of record “3” is going to be. The video was self-directed and shot on a thirty-pound camcorder from CEX.

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Yazmin Lacey — Sweetest Season

First new music from Lacey since 2025’s “Teal Dreams” and its companion EP “Water”, arriving with Femi Koleoso in the producer’s chair. Koleoso is the drummer and co-founder of Ezra Collective — Lacey appeared on “God Gave Me Feet For Dancing” from their 2024 album — and “Sweetest Season” is their first collaboration on her own material. The chemistry is audible. Warm and unhurried, built around organic instrumentation and a laid-back soul-jazz groove. The subject is deliberate: renewal, the arrival of summer, the permission to let brighter things in. Lacey has a way of making directness feel earned rather than slight, and Koleoso’s production gives the song room to breathe without losing the pocket. Live dates this summer include Lost Village and We Out Here.

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Bonobo — Me and You

Simon Green has announced “Distance in Static”, his eighth studio album, due September 11 on Ninja Tune. “Me and You” is the lead single — he’s been playing it in DJ sets, including surprise pop-ups in London and Paris where people were clamouring to identify it. A club-forward cut built around a four-on-the-floor kick and a vocal sample from a 1950s archive folk recording, that crackle of age sitting against contemporary electronic production. Green told BBC Radio 1 he’d been sitting on it for two years, and that the nostalgia in the sample was entirely intentional: “these voices from the past.”

The album was assembled across Los Angeles, Tokyo and London, with a significant portion made at Neil Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch in California. Arooj Aftab, Joy Crookes, Nilüfer Yanya, Ichiko Aoba, Nicole Miglis of Hundred Waters, Aanya Martin and Kanako Yamamoto all appear across fourteen tracks. Lyrics span English, Urdu and Japanese; the production draws on historic Iranian samples and guzheng recordings. Green has been unusually candid about the album’s place in his career — he’s described it as probably the last record in this format, framing what comes next as a process of redefining how to be a musician. That kind of honesty tends to sharpen a record rather than weigh it down.

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Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal — Unfinished Concrete Initials (feat. Hemlock Ernst)

Eagle and Segal have been friends and occasional collaborators for nearly twenty years, both having arrived in Los Angeles through the Project Blowed scene. “DOOMED!”, out August 14 on Backwoodz, is the first time they’ve built a full body of work together — fifteen tracks, featuring billy woods and Gothic Tropic alongside guest Hemlock Ernst (Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands, here under his rap alias), described by the people who made it as “the world’s first half-whimsical break-up album.” The timing was perfect in the worst possible way: Eagle’s relationship fell apart right as they started. “Unfinished Concrete Initials” is the first single, the title doing a lot of narrative work — initials carved in wet concrete before you get the chance to finish them. The production is sparse and patient, Segal pulling back to let the performance carry. Eagle’s delivery is controlled throughout, winter driving imagery circling disorientation and a gradual loss of visibility. “Neighborhood Gods Unlimited” made our end-of-year list for 2025. This one’s worth watching.

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The Healing Power of Horses — In Yr Right Hand Reveal Heaven

The Cambridge duo signed to section1 — the LA-based Partisan Records sister label — last month with “i wait, i sink” (W20), which picked up Track of the Week from Loud & Quiet and 6 Music’s Introducing Mixtape. This is the second single, arriving with the announcement of their debut EP “Summer Indoors (or outside wearing black)”, due July 17. The band’s account of how the track came together: the first half was written in a ground floor tenement in Glasgow at the end of winter; then the saddest thing ever happened, they say, and the second half was written in an East Anglian attic. The lyric works that rupture from the inside, building around a specific biblical image — the tent of Yael from Judges 4 — before swinging ecstatically outward, then closing on something quieter and more troubling: a fantasy of self-erasure framed as relief rather than despair. The “tighten the knot” that opens the song and the “when I’m gone, maybe it will be okay” that closes it are in direct conversation. That’s a harder emotional register than most debut EP singles manage.

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Tiga x Piero Pirupa — Love Don’t Dance Here Anymore (Extended Mix)

Outside his HOTLIFE campaign on Turbo — we’ve followed that run since W11 — Tiga has paired up with Italian tech house producer Piero Pirupa for this one on Armada Music. Droning, patient, built to hold a floor. The title’s resignation is a decent frame for what the production does, which is sustain a mood rather than chase a peak. Sometimes that’s exactly what a room needs, and these two know how to deliver it.

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GB — Starsound

Gustav Berntsen’s second single from “Herzsprung”, due August 21 on AD 93. We covered “Adrenaline” in W19 — fretless bass, zigzagging guitar, rolling percussion. This is a deliberate change of register. Two contrasting guitar sounds form the core, acoustic drums underneath, Berntsen’s vocals sitting breezily on top. Then the vocals drop away and the track runs out instrumentally for a substantial stretch, the arrangement opening up until it starts feeling ambient rather than song-shaped. The soft rock comparison in some press copy is accurate. “Herzsprung” was written in London, built from cut-up copies of the free daily newspaper Metro, then recorded largely live to 24-track tape over a week in a studio in the Swedish wilderness.

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Surusinghe — Party Criminal (ft. Warrior Queen)

When we covered “FRIED” back in W17, I wondered how the announced Warrior Queen collaboration would sit alongside that track’s stripped, functional pressure. Now the “Cutting Thread” EP is out on dh2 and the answer is here: Surusinghe’s high-definition dembow pressure paired with a commanding vocal from the legendary Jamaican MC. The combination produces exactly the kind of thing worth paying attention to. The track started in a Pirate Studios session, and Warrior Queen’s delivery reshapes it entirely, turning the pirate figure into sharp commentary on sinister forces encroaching on club culture. The pairing I was curious about turned out to be the EP’s centre of gravity. I like being right about the things I hoped for.

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jo from school — Julia Roberts

Jo Geller is a 22-year-old North London songwriter and BRIT School graduate who recently signed to Chess Club Records. “Julia Roberts” is her second single after May’s debut “Chicken”, arriving with the announcement of her debut EP “Grace, Flair & Distance”, a six-track set due August 10. Despite the name, the song has nothing to do with the actress — the title was a misheard lyric that stuck after a misunderstanding with collaborator Hugo Hardy during writing. The actual subject is watching a man a few years older than her crying while drinking a can at nine in the morning on the tube, realising she was crying too, and finding the moment weirdly reassuring. One image stands out: being stared at like a junior doctor, someone who’s supposed to know what to do and doesn’t. The arrangement holds steady restraint until the closing chorus when it swells and Geller’s voice dissolves into a scream. I didn’t expect the scream, and that’s precisely why it lands.

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Makeshift Art Bar — Discipline

The second preview of “Marionette”, the new EP from Belfast quartet Makeshift Art Bar, out June 26 on Heist or Hit. The track leans hard into 80s industrial — hypnotic repetition, harsh distorted electronics, every sound processed until the instruments pulse in and out of focus as a single texture. The lyric is built almost entirely from a soldier’s self-talk: slogans about the greater good absorbed from a man in a suit on television, recited in loops the way a drill suppresses the instinct to ask questions. The most unsettling image is violence internalised as appetite. Only in the final verse does the loop break, doubt creeping in, and the title word arrives at the very end — chanted like a verdict. Discipline as the military virtue that built him and the punishment the whole arrangement deserves, in one word. Production comes from Daniel Fox of Gilla Band, whose credits include Sprints, MELTS and Psychotic Monks.

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SILVERWINGKILLER — GUNMAN CORNER

A Manchester-via-Shanghai electronic duo: drummer James Baca and singer Ni Yushan. Their second single of 2026 piles live breakbeats, industrial noise and drum and bass into a chaotic electro track built on analog arpeggiators and distorted bass. The duo have described their goal as making “the kind of music you would buy from the dark web”, and this one delivers on that pitch. The vocals are the thing that sets them apart: Ni moves between English, Mandarin and Shanghainese within the same track, and the effect is genuinely stateless — the language-switching isn’t a gimmick layered on top, it’s structural to how the songs work. Worth catching live, I suspect, given how much of this depends on real drums hitting real skins.

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Alexis Taylor & Mike Simonetti — I See A Darkness

Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and producer Mike Simonetti — Troubleman Unlimited and Italians Do It Better co-founder, also half of Pale Blue — have covered Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See A Darkness”. It comes from their collaborative EP on Smugglers Way, pairing the cover with the original “Perfect Kiss”, out on limited 12” vinyl. The collaboration goes back to a chance meeting at the now-closed Williamsburg club Output, where Simonetti was DJing and Taylor was struck by his re-edits. Taylor had a house version of the song in his head; Simonetti heard something different; the finished track came out of that pull in two directions, with Pale Blue’s Elizabeth Wight on backing vocals and Taylor looping vocal fragments the way classic dance music treats a voice. Will Oldham released the original in 1999 as the title track of his first album under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy name. This version joins covers by Johnny Cash, Anna Calvi with Perfume Genius, and Rosalía with Refree.

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The Underground Youth — Bottled Time

Craig Dyer recently composed the soundtrack for a short film called “Die Schöne Blüte” by director Marvin Delhaes. This was one of the pieces written for it, and it kept lingering for weeks after recording, to the point where he asked Delhaes if he could release it as a standalone single ahead of the film. You can hear the origins in how the track is built: stark and atmospheric, working in soft tones and a slow rhythmic pull rather than the rawer post-punk end of the band’s range. The Underground Youth started as Dyer’s solo project in Blackpool in 2008 and is now a Berlin four-piece, twelve studio albums in. I like when a piece of functional music refuses to stay functional. Dyer couldn’t shake this one, and after a few listens I understand why.

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Mike D — True Colors

Mike D’s first solo album “Thank You” is out August 28 on Capitol, and “True Colors” is the third single — following “Switch Up” and “What We Got” (W21). Worth noting that this exists at all: it’s the first full-length of new material from any member of the Beastie Boys since “Hot Sauce Committee Part 2” in 2011, the year before Adam Yauch’s death brought the group to a close. The album was built from home studio sessions with his sons Skyler and Davis, who back him live as 5D. “True Colors” pulls toward psychedelic rock, with Mike D singing rather than rapping. The lyrics move from concealment through evasion and consequence, arriving at revelation not as something chosen but as something that catches up with you. The chorus lands that way too: exposure more than triumph. Then the coda turns deliberately breezy about the whole thing, which is the most interesting move in the song.

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Mick Harvey & Amanda Acevedo — Perfect Storm

Three albums into a collaboration that started when the two met in Mexico City while Harvey was on tour with PJ Harvey. “Perfect Storm” is the lead single from their forthcoming third record “Psychedelia in White”, due September 4 on Mute. Acevedo wrote the lyrics after Canadian composer Peter McNestry of Pink Elephants sent her an early instrumental built around the title; the two developed it through file exchange, and Harvey went back in to add guitars, sound effects and backing vocals. Layered synthesizer washes under Acevedo’s vocals, the production opening up and thickening as the song moves forward. Acevedo describes the song as a declaration of confidence and playfulness mixed with something dark — you can hear both impulses pulling against each other without fully resolving either way. That tension is what keeps it interesting.

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The World Cup will run for weeks. Italy won’t be in any of it. I’ll be here every week, listening to music and feeling nothing but relief.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 Week 23 — Editor’s Pick 🔥

Beth Orton — Otherside

“Otherside” is the third and final single from The Ground Above, Beth Orton’s ninth album, due June 26 on Partisan Records. I covered “Waiting” back in W17 when it arrived, and the pattern of releases has been deliberate throughout: the title track first, which opens the album; “Waiting” second, sitting at the midpoint; “Otherside” now, which closes it. It’s an unusual way to present a record, and not a commercial one. It reads more like an invitation to understand the album’s architecture before you have the whole thing.

The song grew from something specific: Orton heard that the first birdsong of a new day signals the birds announcing they survived the night. From that image outward, “Otherside” became a reflection on resilience after loss, on what it takes to rebuild a life and still dare to imagine something better. Like “Waiting” before it, the track is self-produced and built with the same core group — Shahzad Ismaily, Sam Beste, Chris Vatalaro, Vishal Nayak, Paul Butler, trumpeter Christos Stylianides, Tom Herbert, and Dave Okumu. The live performance video, directed by Iain and Jane Pollard and Joseph Lynn, introduces the musicians as a band rather than a credits list, and it’s worth watching for that alone.

The Ground Above follows Weather Alive (2022), which was also self-produced and which marked a genuine return to form after a decade of records that never fully found their footing. “Otherside” confirms that whatever Orton found in that process is still with her. Three singles in and I still haven’t heard a note that disappoints. This is the album I’ve been waiting for all year.

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New This Week

Vince Staples — Cotton

“Cotton” is the third and final single from Cry Baby, Vince Staples’ seventh album, which arrived June 5 on Loma Vista Recordings. I covered “White Flag” (W21) and “Blackberry Marmalade” (W18) as the project built; this completes the pre-release sequence. Co-produced with Mike Hector and Oh Gosh Leotus, it’s the leanest of the three singles: clipped guitars in Pavement territory, a loping bass line pulling things toward funk, Staples unhurried throughout.

The title is doing multiple things at once. Where the first verse sets up a world where Jesus left people lost and still singing the same prayers, the chorus places music in that vacated space: “Music makes me feel just like cotton / Pick me up when I feel like falling down.” The cotton that was picked by enslaved people becomes the thing that picks Staples up — a substitution that inverts the original condition without softening it. The video, co-directed by Staples and Bradley J. Calder, runs Black American dancing across generations alongside images of racial violence, placing them in direct juxtaposition without commentary. Three singles, three videos, one consistent argument. Cry Baby is out now.

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hackedepicciotto — Zeitenwende

“Zeitenwende” is the fifth track on Lichtung and the third single released ahead of the album, which arrives July 10 on Mute. I covered “Wiederbelebung” (W14) when the album was announced, and “Einig” (W18) went deeper into the duo’s working method. “Zeitenwende” means turning point, or a shift in era — a German compound in wide cultural circulation since Scholz used it to describe Europe’s changed security situation in 2022. Hacke and de Picciotto’s use of it here carries that weight without needing to spell it out.

Lichtung is the first studio album Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto have made since The Silver Threshold (2021), and the first composed entirely in German, written and recorded at their home on the outskirts of Berlin after fourteen years of nomadic living. At this point I’m counting down to July 10. Every single released from it has made me more certain.

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Zoh Amba — Dead End Street

I covered “Eyes Full” (W19) when it was incoming; it’s out now on Matador Records, and “Dead End Street” is its third single. Where the title track showed the quieter, more suspended side of the record, this one is the opposite: feedback-singed, snarling, the kind of track that doesn’t allow much space for anything else. Recorded live at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville with no overdubs — Kevin Hyland on electric guitar, Jim White on drums, Amba playing rhythm while Hyland plays lead. They rehearsed together all day every day before recording, and you can hear what that builds.

Amba comes from Kingsport, Tennessee, and Eyes Full is explicitly a record about small-town working-class life, about people who go unseen. A dead end street isn’t a metaphor so much as a literal address for a particular kind of life.

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My Purse — Objects

My Purse are Una Jongenelis, Sara Elzinga, Keetje Voogd, and Igor Jongenelis, a Dutch four-piece on AT EASE. “Objects” is their new single, and the premise is tight: the song is sung from the perspective of someone who’s been kicked out, standing in the street outside your door, leaving things there for you to find. “And when you find them you’ll think of me / You think of me and how I can’t sleep.” The whole lyric runs on a loop of repetition that mirrors the compulsive logic of the situation. “Gas gas gas gas gas” arrives near the end and doesn’t need explaining. Short, focused, and does exactly what it should.

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Hermanos Gutiérrez — Canto Andino

Hermanos Gutiérrez have announced their seventh album, Los Ojos Del Cóndor, due September 25 on Easy Eye Sound, and “Canto Andino” is its opening track and lead single. Estevan and Alejandro Gutiérrez have been building their particular guitar language across six albums, blending Latin rhythms, surf, and a certain cinematic stillness into something that consistently sounds like them. Los Ojos Del Cóndor, produced again by Dan Auerbach in Nashville, turns that sound toward their family’s roots: their mother’s native Ecuador, their great-grandmother’s Peruvian heritage, Argentinean milonga, and Peruvian-Colombian cumbia.

An acoustic guitar figure opens it before a drifting organ line enters and lets the track breathe. The melody was written to mirror Andean weather: bright and open in the chorus, then pulling back toward darker, lower slide tones as the atmosphere shifts. Estevan plays throughout on the nylon guitar his father gave him at age eight; Alejandro introduces the charango, a small South American stringed instrument that appears here for the first time in their catalogue. The track doesn’t rush, doesn’t assert itself. It opens a landscape and invites you in.

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Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 — Na Dem feat. Tom Morello

Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 have released “Na Dem”, a collaboration with Tom Morello produced by Femi Koleoso of Ezra Collective. The lineup carries weight: Kuti is Fela’s son and Egypt 80 was his father’s band; Morello is the Rage Against the Machine guitarist; Koleoso, who also drums here, brings a production sensibility rooted in exactly this intersection of Afrobeat, jazz, and music-as-statement.

The lyrics move through politicians, presidents, senators, civil servants, governors, imams, reverends, bishops, police, soldiers, customs officers, businessmen, oil traders, bankers, and lawyers — naming each a “winch man”, a Yoruba-derived term for someone who drains or corrupts through unseen means. The list expands verse by verse until the net has caught everything with power over ordinary life. Egypt 80’s rhythm section holds the groove steady through eighteen credited musicians, and Morello’s guitar arrives as a controlled burst rather than a showpiece. Kuti has said he waited a long time to release this. It shows, in the best sense.

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Ibibio Sound Machine — Concept of Love

Ibibio Sound Machine have announced their sixth album, Chopping Mountain, due September 11 on Merge Records, and “Concept of Love” is its lead single. I covered their previous single “Return to Sender” (W18) back in May; that track arrived with a darker, more defiant charge. This one sits at the other end of the register: the question at its centre, “What is your concept of love?”, is delivered by Eno Williams through a vocoder as the track locks into an Afro-disco pulse, and it genuinely sounds like an invitation rather than a provocation.

Produced by Max Grunhard, who last produced an Ibibio Sound Machine record on 2019’s Doko Mien. Chopping Mountain was recorded mostly at the band’s own Vanguard Studios in South London, pulling production back in-house after two albums with outside producers. You can hear it: Alfred Bannerman’s guitar solo threads through with the ease of a band playing for itself. Joy as something you make deliberately, together, with the world offering resistance at every step. This one is shaping up.

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Cutscene — Shrine (Give Me a Chance)

Manchester four-piece Cutscene, whom I covered in “Concrete Line” (W18), are on their second single from their debut EP A Piece of Life, due July 10 on Heist or Hit. “Shrine (Give Me a Chance)” is a bigger swing than “Concrete Line” was, and the ambition is mostly earned. The song is built around a structural split: the first half warm and aspiring, the register almost hymnal; then the perspective lurches, and the person who was reaching toward romance is now refusing it outright. The band say the song switches between the two partners at a wedding where one is fleeing, and that framing holds. Neither voice gets to win cleanly. Seb Mason, Jack Ellis, Jacob Shotton, and Ollie Little have a talent for structure that earns its drama rather than just announcing it.

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standing on the corner — Gimme My Gun

Brooklyn collective standing on the corner have been doing things their own way long enough that their catalogue reads less like a discography and more like an ongoing art project with occasional points of contact with the music industry. “Gimme My Gun” is out now on streaming via XL Recordings, taken from their second self-titled album, which first surfaced on physical media last September with minimal announcement and no conventional rollout. The collective sit at an intersection that doesn’t map cleanly onto genre categories, pulling from jazz, experimental music, and rap in ways that tend to resist easy description. I wasn’t expecting it to land this well on first listen.

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pyncher — Oh Boy

Manchester four-piece pyncher have a new single ahead of their forthcoming EP I Really Mean It This Time, due June 19 on Heist or Hit. “Oh Boy” opens on a thick, fuzzy riff that arrives with a particular kind of confidence: not flashy, just heavy and deliberate. Recorded by Alex Greaves at The Nave in Leeds, and the room sound feels like a feature. Sam Blakeley’s opening line — “I’m just a big fat loser with my head sticking over the fence” — lands exactly as bluntly as it reads. He describes the song as being about disconnection and the cyclical patterns that come from being unable to communicate properly. The track doesn’t try to resolve that tension so much as inhabit it, which is the right call. Decent company they’re keeping, alongside Westside Cowboy, TTSSFU, and Martial Arts.

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Peter Gabriel — A Hard Lesson (Bright-Side Mix)

Peter Gabriel has been releasing one track per full moon throughout 2026, each a preview of o\i, his forthcoming album and follow-up to 2023’s i/o. I first covered the project in “Been Undone” (W01) and again with “Put the Bucket Down” (W08). “A Hard Lesson (Bright-Side Mix)” arrives as the sixth single, timed to the blue moon of May 31st, and it carries a backstory that outdoes everything released so far: Gabriel traces the song to a visit to Senegal in the late 1980s or early 1990s, where he fell hard for West African polyrhythms — specifically the tension between threes and fours at the heart of Sabar drumming. That was the starting point. What followed was three-plus decades in a drawer.

Co-produced by Gabriel and Mike Elizondo, Bright-Side Mix by Mark “Spike” Stent. Tony Berg contributes guitar; David Rhodes adds layers built across many versions; Abe Rounds’ percussion anchors the rhythmic core Gabriel first heard in Dakar. At some point a harpsichord sample on synth gave the choruses their folk-tinged character, and Richard Evans reinforced that with mandolin. Lyrically, the song circles the difficulty of locating yourself — compasses, gyroscopes, magnets spinning around a wheel. “What I seek makes me far from wherever I come” is a line that earns its place. I didn’t expect a song with this kind of gestation to arrive sounding this coherent.

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Twelve tracks. A bird that survived the night, a song thirty years in a drawer, and a Dutch four-piece leaving things outside a door. Some weeks the list knows exactly when to stop, and this was one of them.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 Week 21 — Editor’s Pick 🔥

Arab Strap — You You You

Arab Strap are back. Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton have announced their ninth album, Half-Told Tales, out September 4 via Rock Action Records, and “You You You” is its first single. The timing is pointed: the album arrives almost thirty years to the day after their debut single “The First Big Weekend” in 1996.

“You You You” opens with a pulsing Italo-disco backing before Middleton’s sawing guitar lines cut through it, creating something Moffat calls “a sort of disco-metal incantation” — which is accurate enough. The lyrics do what Arab Strap lyrics have always done: catalogue the specific indignities of being alive — body malfunctions, rising costs, the seething sadness that might just swallow you whole — before arriving at something unexpectedly warm. The verses pile up physical and psychological grievances, and then the chorus cuts through all of it with a repetition so simple it shouldn’t work as well as it does. It does, though. The song even takes a lucid swipe at its own mode of distribution: if you’re streaming this on Spotify, both of us are funding weapons-grade AI. Moffat drops that mid-disco-banger and has it land as both funny and genuinely uncomfortable. That’s the whole trick.

Moffat describes it as “an attempt to remind ourselves, and hopefully others, that the world’s not full of awful people” — an invocation to “bring forth the stubbornly elusive spirits of hope and solidarity.” Middleton notes that Half-Told Tales is “not the record I wanted to make” — it’s the thing in the middle, which is exactly the kind of honest assessment that makes you trust it. Thirty years in, Arab Strap still sound like no one else. A UK and European tour follows in the autumn, from October.

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Week 21 — New This Week

Kelsey Lu — Comfort

Kelsey Lu’s first album since 2019’s Blood is called So Help Me God, arriving June 12 via Dirty Hit. “Comfort” is the fourth single, co-produced by Jack Antonoff, Yves Rothman and Casey MQ, with contributions on the record from Sampha, Kamasi Washington and Kim Gordon. Lu’s voice opens the track suspended above a sparse arrangement, holding back almost entirely in its first half before the production begins to gather beneath it — layers build, the sound widens, and by the end the track has moved somewhere denser without ever abandoning its restraint. The lyrics circle a specific kind of exhaustion: too many voices in the head to find her own, inherited wounds, a distrust of performed authority. The search for comfort is the through-line, but the song never arrives at it cleanly. Seven years is a long time to wait, and so far everything suggests it was worth it.

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Vince Staples — White Flag

The second single from Cry Baby, out June 5 via his own Section Eight Arthouse imprint. We covered “Blackberry Marmalade” back in W18 when the album was first announced. Where that track came in hard on a heavy guitar riff, “White Flag” is mellower — a soul-rock groove built around live instrumentation, co-produced by Staples and SAINT MINO. The opening refrain frames conflict as familiar and inevitable; the first verse moves into the experience of being a young Black man pulled over by police, using the E.T. reference to do a lot of work in a short space: cuffed in the backseat, unable to phone home, from another planet in your own country. The contrast between the song’s easy groove and the weight of what it’s saying is where “White Flag” does its real work.

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Mike D — What We Got

Michael Diamond’s second single following “Switch Up” earlier in May — the first new music from any Beastie Boy in 15 years. Both tracks come from experimental sessions with his sons Davis and Skyler Diamond, alongside musicians Jason Lader, Benjamin Pacheco, Kevin Rhomberg, Carter Lang and Tyran Donaldson. The production is heavier and more straightforward than “Switch Up”: distorted guitars, boom-bap drums, Mike D’s delivery riding through on slap-back echo before the track swerves into something more spacious and dreamy at the end. The lyrics are direct: “20 years later, good to go solo” and “you think it’s over, but you haven’t even met me.” That reads like a statement of intent from someone who spent a decade and a half in quieter mode. This sounds like a beginning rather than a coda. European dates run through June.

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Gurriers — Nobody’s Coming To Save You

Dublin five-piece Gurriers have announced their second album, Nobody’s Coming To Save You, out September 25 via Play It Again Sam, and shared its title track. Their 2024 debut Come And See established them as one of the more vital things coming out of Ireland’s alternative scene; this album arrives with a production team that signals they’re ready to scale up: Mark Bowen and Loren Humphrey as co-producers, John Congleton mixing. The title track opens with a sinister riff that builds into the kind of chorus that demands a physical response. The song started as a response to a review criticising the band for raising political questions without offering answers — their response cites Rebecca Solnit’s line “Hope is an axe you can break down doors with.” What sounds like despair on first listen gradually reveals itself as something more activating.

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mary in the junkyard — New Muscles

South London trio mary in the junkyard have shared the third single from their debut album Role Model Hermit, out July 3 via AMF Records. I’ve covered both previous singles — “Crash Landing” (W13) and “Candelabra” (W17). “New Muscles” is a sharp pivot from both: playful and kinetic, the melody originally composed on an accordion, the lyrical inspiration openly David Addison joining a gym. Addison’s rolling percussion drives the whole thing, Freeman-Taylor half-raps through the verses with deadpan confidence, and wordless vocal harmonies float above in a way that genuinely does sound like a twisted superhero theme. It had become a live favourite during the Wet Leg support tour, which explains the settled, assured feel of the recording. The fact that three singles this different can plausibly belong to the same debut album is the most interesting thing mary in the junkyard have communicated about it so far.

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Swapmeet — 2 C U

Adelaide four-piece Swapmeet are back with the third single from their debut album Mount Zero, due July 17 on Winspear. I’ve covered them twice already this year: “I Know!” (W09) and “Sand” (W17). Where “Sand” sat in frustration and drift, “2 C U” moves in the opposite direction — urgency and pull, the lyrics circling around the compulsive ritual of wanting to see someone again. Elphick and O’Broin trade lead vocals, and the friction between the two voices carries the push-pull of it. The countdown rhythm of “1 2 3 4” recurs as both structure and agitation. It’s the most propulsive of the three singles, which makes sense as a pre-album statement.

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Panic Shack — grin & bear it

Cardiff quintet Panic Shack are back with their first new music since their self-titled debut album landed in July 2025 and entered the UK Albums Chart at number 32. Vocalist Sarah Harvey first scribbled the lyrics on a scrap of paper during a night shift in 2023; the reworked version was produced by Ross Orton at McCall Sound Studios in Sheffield, and the difference is audible. Lyrically it’s a catalogue of grinding specifics: unskilled, un-thrilled, overworked, underpaid, two jobs to pay rent. The verses pile up the indignities of precarious work before the chorus flips into the voice of every employer and institution telling you to be grateful, be modest, don’t put a foot out of line. “I wear a smile, grin and bear it, don’t ask questions, just accept it” is the hinge the whole thing turns on. Panic Shack have always made punk that feels like a night out rather than a lecture, and this pulls that off again.

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Jeshi — girls and boys

East London rapper Jeshi has shared the third single from his forthcoming mixtape headrush via Select Discs, described as a celebration of the regional club in all its forms. The subject matter is specific: the club toilet queue. Not the dancefloor, not the bar — that particular stretch of corridor where strangers end up in unexpectedly honest conversations for three minutes and then never see each other again. Jeshi wrings something genuinely affecting out of it. There’s something quietly sad about it, even when the music doesn’t push you toward that conclusion.

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MOULD — Lucid

Bristol trio MOULD — Joe Sherrin on vocals and guitar, Kane Eagle on vocals and bass, James Luxton on drums — share the latest single ahead of their debut album Hoping As A Coping Mechanism, out July 10 via 5dB Records. I’ve covered them previously with “Float” (W46), “Falling Posture” (W08) and “Lists.” “Lucid” sits where MOULD do their best work: jagged riffs, pounding rhythms, a vocal that cuts through the fuzz without softening it. Post-punk is a crowded place right now, but “Lucid” earns its space because it moves — the aggression and the melody pull in the same direction, and the result has a momentum that’s hard to shake off. Sherrin describes the lyric as being about suppression, about holding back what you want to say, with the last line doing the work of cutting through it.

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MAQUINA. — dança (with Dame Area)

Lisbon trio MAQUINA. — Halison Peres on drums and vocals, João Cavalheiro on guitar, José Rego on bass — share the opening track and first single from their third album BODY TRANSMISSION, out July 10 via Fuzz Club. Unusually, the lyrics came before the music. The song was inspired by Catalan duo Dame Area, and as it took shape the band sent it to them asking for a kind of blessing; what came back was a collaboration, with Dame Area vocalist Silvia Konstance adding her voice to the track. What you get is relentless 4/4 drums locking with a hypnotic bassline, a guitar that cuts through with searing focus, and vocals that move from controlled to feral and back. The second minute adds a screeching guitar layer and the intensity ratchets up until the track feels genuinely overwhelming. I’ve had this on repeat since it landed.

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Mythologen — 13

Gothenburg-based producer on YEAR0001, first single since last year’s Eurovision LP. Catches the spirit of West Coast dance music — hypnotic rhythms built for the long Scandinavian summer days. Simple premise, well executed.

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Gnoomes — Foreign Agent

Gnoomes are Sasha Piankov and Masha Piankova, a married duo originally from Russia who relocated to rural Slovenia — a decision Sasha describes as “not just political, it was a nervous system decision.” “Foreign Agent” is the first single from their new album Losey, out September 4 via Rocket Recordings. Almost everything was recorded without leaving the house, with drums tracked remotely by their old bandmate Pasha back in Perm. The track creeps in on a buzzing nest of keys and vocal haze before the mood shifts midway and a guitar growl thickens everything — Stereolab-style motorik pushed through a psychedelic prism. What I find striking is how it manages to feel both claustrophobic and liberating at the same time, which is probably the point given where it came from.

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Getdown Services — I Can’t Die Like That

Bristol duo Josh Law and Ben Sadler are back with the second single from their upcoming second album Massive Champion, out August 14 via Breakfast Records. I covered “The Radiator” back in W14, and this follows on: two singles in, the album is shaping up to be their most focused statement yet. Driving guitar, deadpan half-spoken vocals, a chorus that gets inside your head without asking permission. The band describe it as being about “the feeling of simple things becoming complicated” — specifically the ways dying, something theoretically uncomplicated, can be difficult. “It’s also about clinging on to feelings that comfort you but aren’t necessarily healthy.” The fact that it carries all that without buckling is what makes it interesting. I’ve been following this band since Crisps and this is the clearest sign yet that the joke has become something considerably more than a joke.

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Afroham — Portrait of Self (feat. Dominick Giovanni)

Rotterdam producer Afroham returns on Melting Pot Music with a slow-burning rap track built around Texas-based MC Dominick Giovanni. I covered his previous single “Coconut Water” (W17) as part of a planned run of singles across 2026. The production is mellow and unhurried, giving Giovanni room to work — verses that circle around ambition, identity and what it means to keep moving forward when the ground keeps shifting. There’s a specificity to it that keeps the track from drifting into generic introspection. “Portrait of Self” is the kind of track that rewards a second listen more than a first.

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Josaleigh Pollett — The Witness

Salt Lake City-based singer-songwriter Josaleigh Pollett shares the second single from her fourth full-length If I Let It Quiet, due July 24 via Audio Antihero and Lavender Vinyl. I covered “Radio Player” back in W44 last year. “The Witness” opens with a driving beat and builds into something big and airborne — buzzing synths and warm acoustics behind Pollett’s vocal, which carries the whole thing forward without ever letting the production swallow it. The song’s central tension isn’t heartbreak in any conventional sense; it’s the more specific discomfort of being seen clearly and choosing not to flinch. Pollett is direct about it: “To be seen and held and understood, you must first see and hold and understand.” That last sentence lands.

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wing! — HOLD THEM TO IT

UK electronic producer releasing through South London’s Memorials of Distinction. First preview of his second EP, (WORTH SCANNING FOR), due July 15. The track opens in trip-hop territory — slow and ominous in a way that recalls early Portishead — before shifting gear entirely and charging into a breaks-heavy finish. That structural move, from controlled unease to full release, is what makes it work. For something that reads as club-adjacent electronic music, it has a lot of live texture underneath it, and that tension between the organic and the programmed is where it earns its keep. I wasn’t expecting the shift in the second half to land as hard as it does.

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Party Dozen — Special Unit

Sydney semi-improvised psych noise duo Kirsty Tickle and Jonathan Boulet, out now via City Slang, their new European label home. The track packs everything into two minutes and 39 seconds — Tickle’s saxophone tearing through the mix while Boulet’s percussion drives relentlessly underneath, the whole thing feeling less like a song and more like something about to tip over. The band’s statement introducing it reads like a Miranda warning gone wrong: “You have the right to remain stupid. Anything you say or do will be laughable.” It’s funny until you realise it isn’t, which is kind of the point. Two minutes and 39 seconds is all it takes.

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Blondshell — Heart Has To Work So Hard

Sabrina Teitelbaum is already moving on to album three — less than a year after If You Asked For A Picture and its companion record Another Picture. “Heart Has to Work So Hard” is out now via Partisan Records, the first preview of whatever comes next, with no title or release date confirmed yet. Produced by Yves Rothman, the track opens with drums and bass locked in a driving pulse before layers of static-laden, arpeggiated guitars build around it. Teitelbaum’s cool monotone holds steady through the verses, which makes the chorus hit harder by contrast. The subject matter is specific: friendship, betrayal, getting stuck in a dynamic and letting things fester. It’s grittier and more precise than a generic breakup track, and the production earns it.

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🔥 Week 22 — Editor’s Pick 🔥

Cornelius & Sean Ono Lennon — Aeons

Cornelius, the Japanese composer and producer born Keigo Oyamada, has announced Refractions, his eighth original album and debut on Eat Your Own Ears, due August 19. Leading it out is “Aeons”, a collaboration with Sean Ono Lennon, who wrote the lyrics and sings. The two have history: Ono Lennon previously invited Oyamada to join an iteration of the Plastic Ono Band, and the rapport shows.

“Aeons” is built on a tight, locked groove — Lennon’s smooth vocal delivery floating over guitar and keyboard stabs in that precise, unhurried way Cornelius has been refining since Fantasma. The lyrics move through cosmological scale and personal doubt at once: parsecs and patterns persisting, the world on your shoulders, the universe inside your head. Oyamada describes his approach as structural rather than purely conceptual — “exploring continuity, transformation, and multiple coexisting states within a single, uninterrupted flow of time.” That’s an accurate description of how the track actually feels. What you’re hearing is not just a collaboration between two specific people from two very specific musical lineages; it’s something that holds its own weight independently of either.

Refractions features a thoughtfully assembled guest list: Arto Lindsay, former Yura Yura Teikoku guitarist Shintaro Sakamoto, and Bid from the Monochrome Set. Ten songs total, including the previously released “Mind Train”, “Bad Advice”, and “Yume Nemi”. If “Aeons” is any indication, the record is going to reward careful listening.

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Week 22 — New This Week

Downtown Boys — Sirena

Downtown Boys are back. The Providence political punks have been quiet since 2017’s Cost of Living, their Sub Pop debut, and now they’re returning with Public Luxury, due June 26 on the same label. “Sirena” is the third single, following “No Me Jodas” (W13) and “You’re a Ghost” (W18), and it’s the most considered of the three. Victoria Marie reframes the title — mermaid, mythical seductress — as something interior: a compass, a guiding voice. The song’s other anchor is “Gema”, a bolero standard recorded by Javier Solís and Vicente Fernández, and a favourite of Marie’s late grandmother. That lineage runs through the track’s emotional core without the band leaning on it sentimentally. Nine years is a long gap and this single makes a strong case for the wait.

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Austra and Patrick Holland — Siren Reprise

A collaborative reimagining of “Siren Song” from Katie Stelmanis’ album Chin Up Buttercup on Domino, with Montreal singer-songwriter and DJ Patrick Holland, who has been a co-writer on the piece since its early stages. The concept draws on Greek mythology: a siren mourning a lover drawn away by the sound of Orpheus’ lyre. Floating synth layers sit over trance-inflected beats, and Stelmanis’ vocals carry the emotional weight without overplaying it. Holland’s involvement steers the reprise away from a straight alternate take and into something with its own logic.

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Ezra Collective feat. Pa Salieu — Only Love

Ezra Collective have announced Here Because of Hope, their fourth studio album, out September 18 via Partisan Records. “Only Love” is the first single, a collaboration with British-Gambian rapper Pa Salieu. The track is built around a West African-inspired groove that bandleader Femi Koleoso developed after specifically studying Gambian music. Pa Salieu brought lyrics from a difficult period — material that carries pain but also, in Koleoso’s words, “beauty, joy and love.” What you hear is the band’s horn-led warmth pressed against Pa’s grounded intensity, and the combination works because neither overpowers the other. The album is structured as three movements: West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom. The five-piece describe it as the first record they’ve made as adults.

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Kristin Hersh — Dark Eyed Junco

Kristin Hersh has announced Sugar on Blackstone, her 12th solo album, out September 18 via Fire Records, produced by Hersh herself at Stable Sound Studios. The title comes from the North American sparrow, which Hersh borrowed as a nickname for her brother. The two of them would play basketball after dark, past the point of being able to see the hoop, to avoid going inside. “After our stepfather moved in, it wasn’t a home anymore.” That context is all over the track: quiet, specific, not trying to make more of the detail than it already carries. Hersh’s voice sits in the mix with the kind of economy she’s been refining for thirty-odd years. A record that knows exactly what it wants to say and says it without fuss.

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Gilla Band — Giraffe

Four years since Most Normal and three since one-off single “Sports Day”, Gilla Band are back on Rough Trade Records. No album announced yet. The structure of the track is the thing: it opens in relatively controlled territory before the floor drops out about halfway through, a skittering drum pattern pivoting toward techno and club music, before the two halves start pushing against each other in a way that doesn’t resolve so much as grind to coexistence. “Giraffe” is probably their most direct collision of noise rock and electronic production — and oddly, one of their more approachable tracks without being any less strange. Dara Kiely is direct about what the two halves mean: the opening sections are his general headspace, scattered and lonely; the outro is a confirmation that affection exists whether or not he can fully accept it. That Gilla Band can gesture toward something this tender and have it land harder wrapped in a noise-techno breakdown is the whole trick.

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KNEECAP — Smugglers & Scholars feat. Killer Mike

When I covered “Smugglers & Scholars” in W09, FENIAN hadn’t landed yet. It’s out now on Heavenly Recordings, Dan Carey-produced, debuted at number one in Ireland and number two in the UK. This new version adds a guest verse from Killer Mike of Run The Jewels, released as part of a limited deluxe digital edition of the album. The fit is obvious once you hear it: thick low-end bass, sirens underneath, Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap rapping about revolutionary history and the gap between Ireland’s postcard image and its lived reality. Killer Mike steps into the middle of it and holds his own, connecting the track’s themes of working-class resistance to his own world without overwriting what was already there. KNEECAP play Crystal Palace Park in London on June 27, their biggest headline show to date.

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Pip Blom — Hours (2026 Edition)

Pip Blom are ten years in, and to mark it they’ve launched PB10: four songs from across the catalogue re-recorded from scratch, plus a 134-page full-colour book collecting photos and stories from the decade. “Hours (2026 Edition)” is the first track out — the very first song the band ever released. The re-recording is Pip’s alone, played and recorded at home and mixed by Tender. She resisted the temptation to over-produce it. It still sounds like a Pip Blom song. It just sounds like one made in 2026. There’s something quietly affecting about a band choosing to start an anniversary project with their oldest song rather than their biggest one.

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Grace Cummings — My God

Melbourne singer-songwriter Grace Cummings has announced Bloodhorse!, her fourth album, due August 14 on ATO Records. “My God” is the first single, recorded with producer Jonathan Wilson at his Topanga Canyon studio. Cummings recorded it while suffering from pneumonia, and there’s something in the delivery that registers that: a rawness that feels less like a stylistic choice and more like a physical fact. She’s direct about what the song is doing: “The God here is the dark forces that are wrapping around us, that we scroll through, the toxic energy that binds us together in this modern world.” She frames it as a confession rather than a critique. That angle works better than a lecture would. If “My God” is a sign of where the album lands, the darker palette suits her.

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TVOD — Rerun

Less than a year after Party Time, Brooklyn six-piece TVOD are already back with the lead single from their sophomore album The Farm, due October 16 via Mothland and Get Better Records. Driven by a locked-in bassline, angular guitars, and Tyler Wright’s vocals pushed somewhere between deadpan and desperate. The band’s description of it is hard to improve on: “reasons for desperately needing to quit your day job, move away from your hometown, and start a fresh self-destructive spiral.” What I notice is how the track channels that feeling without tipping into self-pity — it’s too fast and too funny for that. The album draws a straight line to Orwell’s Animal Farm and its central commandment about equality, pointing it at collapsing social contracts and the fantasy of escaping a rotten system only to find the rot arrived before you.

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Wet Leg — catch these fists (FDC DJs remix)

Wet Leg are marking the first anniversary of moisturizer with a deluxe edition, out July 10 on Domino, and the first thing out the door is a remix of “catch these fists” by FDC DJs — the DJ project of Fontaines D.C.’s Carlos O’Connell and Tom Coll. The remix doesn’t soften anything. O’Connell and Coll pull the track into darker, denser territory: bulk large synths, dynamic drums, and Rhian Teasdale’s deadpan delivery pushed to the front. “He don’t get puss, he get the boot” lands differently when it’s sitting over something this heavy. A logical pairing: the two bands share enough of an edge that the collaboration doesn’t feel like a stretch.

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Cheekface — I Don’t Work Here

Los Angeles trio Cheekface rolling through their Podium singles at a steady clip — “I Don’t Work Here” is the fourth, self-released July 28. The lyrics run through two verses of scattershot political image-making before breaking into a spoken-word section that does exactly what the title promises: a flat refusal, read like a store policy, covering everything from piss tests to broken ICEE machines to Prop 65 warnings. The song’s trick is that the absurdist inventory and the genuinely political images feed the same feeling: disengagement as a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. What gets me is how well that spoken section lands — it could easily tip into a comedy bit, but the deadpan delivery keeps it grounded.

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Thirty-one tracks across two weeks. The music kept coming regardless. So did everything else. That’s about the most honest summary I can offer.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Murex — Massacre

Murex is a Swedish artist based in Stockholm, and “Massacre” is her debut single, out on Young — the London label home to Sampha and Jamie xx. She self-produced it in her studio, and the track moves on its own terms: amorphous, unhurried, built from left-field electronics and what the press materials call Nordic pagan influence. Avant-pop is the shorthand, though that label flattens something that feels more genuinely difficult to categorize.

The song depicts hunger and self-destruction — a pull toward damage framed not as tragedy but as a kind of reckoning. There’s a brutality to it and also something close to beauty, the two things sitting in the same space without resolving. Background vocals from Elvira Anderfjärd, mix by Marta Salogni, mastering by Heba Kadry. A combination that gives the track both weight and precision.

What makes this interesting to me is the restraint. Murex has been writing for other artists before this, and that experience is audible. She’s not figuring out how to write a song; she already knows, and “Massacre” is her deciding what kind of artist she wants to be on her own. She appears in the self-shot video and her pencil drawings are on the artwork, but partially obscured. “It’s not about disappearing or being anonymous,” she says, “more about loosening the grip of appearance, and letting the work exist without being defined by it.” A considered debut. The holdback is what makes it worth leaning into.

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New This Week

Underworld x Ki/Ki — Arp12

Underworld’s first new music since the 2024 album Strawberry Hotel, made in collaboration with Dutch techno-trance artist KI/KI. It debuted alongside a livestream from EDC Las Vegas, and the setting makes sense: 145bpm, hard techno drums, a driving trance-referencing bassline that locks in early and doesn’t let go. The structure is deliberately functional — building in layers, dropping back around the two-minute mark, then reassembling at full force.

You can hear both artists clearly: Underworld’s atmospheric weight in the pads and phrasing, KI/KI’s high-speed contemporary rave energy in the kick and momentum. It’s a clean handshake between two distinct approaches, and it works because neither side overplays it. Both are playing Pukkelpop this August on consecutive nights, which makes a joint appearance feel inevitable. Thirty years on from Dubnobasswithmyheadman and they’re still finding collaborators who push the sound forward.

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The Healing Power of Horses — i wait, i sink

Cambridge duo, signed to section1 (the LA-based sister label to Partisan Records), and this is their debut single. Before this they had one tape recording on Glasgow DIY label No Soap; now they’ve got 7,777 wav files on an SSD, and the production step-up is audible. Recorded during what they describe as “an unconscious and heady evening spent blowing up audio interfaces and blowing through vapes,” and it sounds like exactly that: rattling percussion, warped electronics, a structure that lurches between claustrophobic and expansive before detonating into distorted noise.

Trip-hop is the obvious reference point, with something of the brooding menace of Jet Blonde or pearl2 in the low-end rumble, but it has its own restless logic. The song threatens to collapse under its weight several times and then doesn’t, which is most of the interest. What gets me is how much the track earns its controlled chaos: there’s actual structure underneath it, and the lyrics — circling obsession and waiting, closing on the observation that “sometimes the circle isn’t round” — fit the production’s own refusal to resolve cleanly.

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Baby Rose — But, Nvm

Baby Rose has announced her third album, Yearnalism, due July 10 via Secretly Canadian, and “But, Nvm” is its second single. It follows “Friends Again” with Leon Thomas — the collaboration that helped win him a Grammy for Best R&B Album on his Mutt record. Where that track leaned into contemporary R&B, this one pulls toward something older: classic soul and gospel territory, Rose’s voice doing the structural work over a lyric about chasing someone else’s love at the expense of her own.

The chorus lands on a play between “nevermind” and “never mine” that’s simple and effective. The video puts Rose and her band in a vintage studio setting, analog gear throughout, which matches the track’s warmth. She has a voice that can carry almost any context, and hearing it in a setting this warm and unhurried is what pushed this onto the list.

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Hotel Arcana — Muzzle

Two-piece from Vevey, Switzerland, with their debut single. Heavy, distorted guitar; vocals sitting dark and raw on top, then opening into thicker chorus-like harmonies — a layered effect that gives the song more structural room than the distortion alone would suggest. Lyrically it circles the urge to keep fighting yourself, the self-destructive loop imagined as two dogs in a ring. Blunt central image, and it works: it gives the song a physicality that matches the guitar tone.

What holds my attention is how much the harmonies actually do. In a song this distortion-heavy, the vocal layering is where most of the dynamic movement lives, and they use it well. For a debut single, it’s a confident piece of songwriting.

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Calibro 35 — Riots

Calibro 35 were asked to score a documentary about James Ellroy and ended up making a full album. Ellroy vs L.A. is due August 8 on Record Kicks, and “Riots” is the first single. Filmmaker Francesco Zippel approached the Milan-based quintet to compose the soundtrack for his portrait of Ellroy and the city — a film that intercuts the writer reflecting on his relationship with LA with archive footage and scenes of the band recording. Twelve new tracks came out of those sessions, enough for a standalone record.

The lineup here is Enrico Gabrielli on piano, keyboards, sax, flute and bass clarinet; Massimo Martellotta on guitar, synth and organ; Fabio Rondanini on drums; Roberto Dragonetti on bass; produced and mixed by Tommaso Colliva. Calibro 35 have spent their career in the territory where Italian library music and American funk overlap, and a James Ellroy project is about as natural a fit as they could find. What catches my ear about “Riots” is how unhurried it stays despite the obvious tension underneath — patience you only get from a band that really knows this material.

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corto.alto — THIEF

Back in W14 we had “WHODIS,” corto.alto’s Dilla-adjacent collaboration with Mick Jenkins. “THIEF” takes another turn entirely. Where “WHODIS” leaned hard into hip-hop, this Ninja Tune single finds Liam Shortall in Jersey club territory: chopped classical strings, thumping breakbeats, and fat bass rhythms he’s been road-testing live for the better part of a year before committing to tape. That live development shows — it has the loose authority of a track that’s been played into shape.

The chopped strings give it a slightly unpredictable, improvisational quality that keeps it from being straight club music, and the low end is thick enough to carry the whole thing without the arrangement needing to do extra work. The title came from the feeling of time constantly slipping away, noticed or not. What I find interesting about the corto.alto project is how each release lands in different territory without the complete thing feeling scattered. It’s holding together. Alongside the single comes news of his biggest UK and EU headline tour to date, plus a homecoming show at Barrowlands Ballroom in Glasgow in 2027.

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Hot Garbage — SPUN

Toronto psych-noise quartet’s first new single since Precious Dream in 2024, out on Mothland. Produced, engineered, and mixed by Graham Walsh, mastered by James Plotkin: blown-out basslines from Juliana Carlevaris, wiry guitar from Alessandro Carlevaris, Dylan Gamble on keys and synth, Mark Henein driving the whole thing with a five-beat pulse that doesn’t let go. The groove is relentless, the guitar textures stay in that Sonic Youth-adjacent register without tipping into pastiche, and the rhythm section does most of the heavy lifting.

Gamble also directed the video, which features Sook-Yin Lee as “The Bug” moving through frozen Toronto alleyways and brutalist corridors. It fits the song perfectly: grimy, strange, and not trying to explain itself. “SPUN” sounds better louder, which is probably the most useful thing I can tell you about it.

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Lightning Bug — Song for a…

Lightning Bug has been a few different things over the years — solo project, full band — and with the new EP In Between Things it’s back to being singer-songwriter Audrey Kang’s alone. She moved from New York to LA since the last record, and “Song for a...” is the first proper statement from this new configuration. Written and produced by Kang alongside co-producer Sam Robertson, with Ryan Richter on electric guitar and effects.

Kang describes the song as being about the jolt of falling in love, and specifically the zig-zagging between closeness and distance as you figure out how to let someone in without losing your footing. What makes it work is how understated it stays — the production blurry at the edges in a way that suits the subject, Kang’s vocal sitting in the mix rather than above it. It doesn’t resolve neatly, which feels right for the material. In Between Things arrives July 14 on In Real Life Music.

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Beck Zegans — Riddle

The third and final single before Engraving of Armor lands May 22 on Exploding In Sound Records. We caught the lead single “I Want You” back in W13, where the drum tempo shifts were doing real emotional work. “Riddle” goes in a different direction: slower, stranger, and on synth. Zegans describes it as the problem child of the record — she and co-producers Alex MacKay (Nation of Language) and Julian Fader (Remember Sports, Ava Luna) kept adding to it, reworking the melody, swapping the main guitar riff for a synth version, stacking layers, then eventually tearing most of it back out. El Kempner of Palehound plays guitar on the track.

What lands is the restraint. Most of the audible production decisions are subtractions, not additions, and the track is better for it. The rhythm has weight, the synths stay in service of the mood rather than overwhelming it, and the odd timing gives it a quality that’s hard to place but easy to feel. I wasn’t expecting it to work as well as it does, especially given how much it apparently went through to get here. Strong closing argument for the album.

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10 tracks this week. The work calendar was merciless but the music intake was non-negotiable, which is either a healthy priority system or a sign I need to talk to someone. I’ll let you decide. Murex holding out “Massacre” until you lean in rather than announcing herself loudly felt like the right call for the week — the music that stays with you after a brutal few days is rarely the one that shouts.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

1000 Rabbits — Bear Hunt

I’ve been following 1000 Rabbits since Virgin Soil (W08) and Rubik’s Cube (W14), so “Bear Hunt” arriving alongside the debut EP feels like the payoff of a campaign worth watching. The full EP, Are we friends yet?, is out now on Young and is one of the most anticipated releases of the year. I’ll cover it properly in the May Spotlight.

“Bear Hunt” is the EP’s third track and the one getting the video, directed by South London artist Ché Deedigan. The five-piece — Laura (violin), Liv (synthesiser), Paolo (guitar), River (vocals), and Luke (drums) — have been shaping these songs through constant live performance: the track, like everything on the EP, has been rebuilt night after night until it found its form. The loud-quiet-loud dynamics and the way River’s vocal line builds into something close to chaos by the end are both characteristic of what the band have been doing live at The Windmill and beyond. The studio version holds that energy without flattening it.

The EP sits alongside “Virgin Soil” and “Rubik’s Cube” rather than replacing them: the six tracks together make a stronger case for where the band are heading than either single alone could. Two years of living rooms, rehearsal rooms, and stages distilled into thirty-odd minutes. I’ve been listening since the beginning, and the jump from debut single to full EP is the kind of progression that justifies the early attention.

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New This Week

Father John Misty — The Payoff

Josh Tillman’s second single of 2026 on Sub Pop, following “The Old Law” from January. Co-written and arranged with Drew Erickson (Lana Del Rey, Angel Olsen) and mixed at Fivestar Studios in Topanga. The lyric runs as a sales pitch from an unspecified operator — “Have I got a deal for you”, a small cut, methods kept deliberately obscure — before shifting to the mark waiting for a payoff that keeps being deferred. The outro lands on “there’s nothing you can do” repeated until it runs out of room. Whether it’s addressed to a political base being strung along or something more personal is left open, which is typical of Tillman’s approach. There’s a psych-rock edge here, a heavy riff underneath the arrangement that gives it more muscle than his softer work. The combination of slick pitch patter and that closing line is more unsettling than the production lets on at first.

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The Last Dinner Party — Big Dog (On The Road)

The Last Dinner Party have been playing “Big Dog” live since before Prelude to Ecstasy, and fans have been asking for a studio version for just as long. It’s finally here, co-produced by the band alongside Animesh Raval — their first production credit. Three minutes of dark, forceful art-pop: big guitars, Abigail Morris’s vocals pushing hard throughout, the kind of track that makes clear why it’s been a set highlight for years. The PJ Harvey comparison that keeps appearing in coverage is fair: there’s the same quality of controlled aggression, a lyric doing precise work beneath a sound that’s deliberately rough. The central image — the big dog as a shifting allegory for power and who holds it — runs through the whole track without resolving neatly. The bridge lands hard: a line about what kind of thing it is to say to a child sits in the middle of the song without comment, which gives it more weight than elaboration would. That kind of restraint is harder to pull off than it looks, especially in a track this visceral. It arrives alongside “Come All You Beasts”, a spoken word companion piece the band recite before performing the song live.

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GAYANCE — hellooooo???? feat. Magi Merlin & funkywhat

Montreal-born, Haitian-Canadian, Lisbon-based producer and DJ GAYANCE makes her debut on Tru Thoughts with this track, co-produced with funkywhat and featuring fellow Montreal artist Magi Merlin. Her 2023 debut Mascarade earned a Polaris Prize shortlist nomination; this is her first release since signing to the Brighton label. The sonic anchor is tech-nostalgia — vintage Nokia ringtone motifs that Merlin describes as “immigrant uncle” aesthetics, a nod to the Bluetooth and WhatsApp culture that shaped connectivity for many in the diaspora. Drum & Bass, Jungle, and Dancehall thread through it, club music that’s technically precise and completely uninterested in being cool about it. The collaboration runs deeper than the studio: during a 2024 trip to Rio, GAYANCE and Merlin discovered their families both have roots in Les Cayes, Haiti, which gives the diaspora references specific weight rather than a general one. The playfulness is the point.

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Aldous Harding — Coats

I covered One Stop (W10) when Harding first announced Train on the Island, and Elitest G.O.A.T. (W03) before that. “Coats” is the album’s closing track and final single, out the same week as the record on 4AD. Co-produced with John Parish at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth — the same room, the same collaborators: pedal steel from Joe Harvey-Whyte, harp from Mali Llewelyn, Sebastian Rochford on drums, Huw Evans across bass, vocals, and guitar. Parish and Harding have made every album together since Party (2017), and the familiarity shows in how little the arrangements need to strain for effect. “Coats” is described as moving between disarming directness and surreal whimsy, which is about as accurate a summary of where Harding tends to operate as you’ll find. The album closer position suits it: not a conclusion exactly, more a slow exhale. What’s interesting about this campaign is the deliberateness of the sequencing — “One Stop” announced the record with queasy piano and slipping time signatures, and “Coats” pulls back to something quieter and stranger as the final word before the album landed. She knows which song to save for last. Train on the Island is out now via 4AD.

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Lambchop — Weakened

Lambchop have announced Punching The Clown, their sixteenth album, due August 21 via City Slang. It reunites Kurt Wagner with producer Ryan Olson, and “Weakened” features Andrew Broder on guitar, Justin Vernon on banjo, and a six-part choir directed by Blake Morgan. The whole album was tracked in three days at Vernon’s April Base studio in Wisconsin. The starting point was a song Wagner heard on the radio in early 2024, driving to get gas: a single strummed banjo chord and a few voices. He never identified it. In searching for it, he came across lined-out singing, a call-and-response a cappella tradition that originated in late 19th century Scotland, migrated to Appalachia, and became an obscure root of American gospel and country. The album’s entire format — banjo, voice, and choir — grew from that impulse. I’ve followed Lambchop long enough to have heard the Auto-Tune years, the soul-country years, the various reinventions, and what strikes me about “Weakened” is how completely Wagner has stripped the approach back without it sounding like retreat. The choir doesn’t swell for effect; it just holds the song up, quietly, which is exactly the point.

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ear — Ne Plus Ultra

New York duo ear — Jonah Paz and Yaelle Avtan — return with their first new music since last September’s self-released debut The Most Dear and the Future. “Ne Plus Ultra” is built around a sense of being stuck: wrong directions, luck as the only explanation, one plus one collapsing into one. Avtan’s verse traces an ordinary dislocation — a bar, a car, seven years, money spent — and Paz threads something more fragmented underneath. The glitch-pop framing keeps it from settling into conventional indie songwriting territory, the instrumental outro pulling away just as the lyric gets closest to a resolution it was never going to reach. The song earns its title — “ne plus ultra” meaning the furthest point, the limit — and it behaves accordingly.

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Delilah Holliday — Formless

Delilah Holliday has announced Fat Cat, her debut album, due August 28 via One Little Independent Records. A fixture of the North London DIY scene through punk outfit Skinny Girl Diet and her 2023 mixtape Invaluable, this record marks a significant shift in sound and scope. Produced with Raphael Ninot and Liam Howe of Sneaker Pimps, it moves through downtempo electronics, trip-hop, and fragmented hyperpop — Holliday frames the overall approach as “recession-pop.” The album was written during a period of compounded loss: within a short span, she lost her uncle Simon (credited as instrumental to her becoming a musician), her Nana, a Windrush-generation matriarch from Jamaica, and her unborn child. “Formless” is built around identity collapse, moving from loss of control toward something like spiritual acceptance, its refrain “I am everything and I am nothing” landing at the centre of that shift. Howe’s influence is audible in the way the track floats without quite dissolving. What strikes me is how the song holds that instability without reaching for resolution — it sits in the disorientation rather than narrating a way out of it, which takes more confidence than it might appear.

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RIP Magic — Screwdark

London four-piece RIP Magic — Marco Pini (Sorry), Felix Bayley-Higgins, Beth Boswell-Knight, and Pedro Takahashi — have signed to section1, the LA-based sister label to Partisan, and share their first single for it. It follows “5words”, their James Murphy-produced 12” on DFA from January, which the band first introduced by selling unmarked white-label copies at shows during LCD Soundsystem support slots. “Screwdark” opens with reverb and glitch before settling into something denser: orchestra stab samples, layered percussion, distorted vocals, a bass that sits low and doesn’t move much. The claustrophobic pulse of small club nights is still the reference point, but the track has more texture than their earlier material. Early support came from Tyler, the Creator after he heard them DJing in London; since then they’ve played with Fcukers, Panda Bear, and LCD Soundsystem, and are currently mid-way through supporting Tame Impala on a sold-out arena tour. For a band barely a year old, the trajectory is difficult to ignore. What’s interesting is how little any of that seems to have smoothed out the sound: “Screwdark” still feels like something made for a tight room at 1am, which is the right instinct to hold on to when the rooms keep getting bigger.

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Personal Trainer — Punch Drunk Love

Amsterdam collective Personal Trainer, orbiting frontman and songwriter Willem Smit, have announced Human Assholes, their third album, due September 4 via Bella Union. For this record, Smit and co-producer Casper van der Lans moved away from the laptop-driven process of earlier records and made acoustic guitar the starting point, writing in a room with the full band and tracking live across six days. “Punch Drunk Love” is the first look: jangly guitar, a woody piano, an upright bass that opens up toward the middle, Smit’s vocals calm and close throughout. Susanne Linssen of Hospital Bombers appears on the track. Smit describes the song as coming from “a very strong feeling of being in love, or at least being infatuated by someone, which can then lead to obsession.” The arrangement stays loose and never pushes the emotional weight too hard, which is undoubtedly why it lands: the tension between warmth and compulsion is in the lyric, not the production.

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Zoh Amba — Eyes Full

Zoh Amba has been one of the most talked-about saxophonists out of New York’s avant-garde scene. Eyes Full, their debut album on Matador (due June 5), is something else entirely: a singer-songwriter record rooted in their Tennessee upbringing, tracked live at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville with no overdubs. The band is intimate almost by design — Kevin Hyland (electric guitar) and Jim White, whom Amba met on the streets of New York, on drums. White’s credits include Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Cat Power, and his instinct for space and restraint is audible throughout. The title track circles the question of what makes someone’s heart full, and the compulsion to keep asking why. Amba’s Southern drawl, which they no longer attempt to hide, sits above acoustic guitar and bursts of feedback-laden electric, moving between a snarl and something much quieter unexpectedly. The whole album, Amba says, looks closely at working-class lives in small towns, at people who are rarely seen. On the title track at least, that intention is already audible.

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The Heavenly Bodes — De Groene Heuvels

Cornish four-piece The Heavenly Bodes have announced Green Hills, their debut album, due July 3 via Fuzz Club. “De Groene Heuvels” is the second single, and the recording circumstances are half the story: tracked live into a Fostex R-8 8-track reel-to-reel in a friend’s living room in Penryn during the Swanpool heatwave of July 2025, recorded and mixed entirely by guitarist Fin Wilson. The tape hiss isn’t a production choice so much as a condition of the room. The band describe the track as following “the account of a whirlwind weekend on a Dutch hillside”, feeling like “the struggle of staying upright on an uneven surface, leg twisting and eye twitching.” That’s accurate: fuzzed-out guitar, a bass groove that leans into the rhythm hard, the whole thing bouncing along with a looseness that sounds genuinely live rather than performed. What gets me is how well the rawness serves the energy rather than excusing a lack of it. The 60s acid-garage reference points are there, but they don’t overwhelm the song; it sounds like a band who absorbed those influences years ago and stopped thinking about them.

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GB — Adrenaline

Danish musician Gustav Berntsen, recording as GB, has signed to AD 93 and announced Herzsprung, his second album, due August 21. His debut Gusse Music came out on Copenhagen’s Posh Isolation in 2024. The backstory shapes what you hear: Berntsen wrote the album while living in London, spending weeks cutting up copies of Metro to assemble its lyrical foundation, then funded studio time with money from appearing in Jaguar’s 2024 ad campaign. The songs were tracked largely live to 24-track tape over a week in a studio in the Swedish wilderness. “Adrenaline” pulls from 70s fusion jazz, Japanese noise-rock psychedelia, and outsider pop: fretless bass bubbling under zigzagging guitar, rolling percussion, the whole thing moving with a looseness that doesn’t feel studied. The fretless bass in particular caught me off guard — an unusual choice that gives the track a slightly off-kilter warmth, closer to early 80s post-punk experimentation than anything currently fashionable.

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Tasha — Clarion

Tasha has announced You Are Spring!, her fourth album, due June 26 via Bayonet Records, recorded in Los Angeles with producer Gregory Uhlmann (Miya Folick, Meg Duffy, Perfume Genius). The announcement follows her Broadway debut in the Tony-nominated Sufjan Stevens musical Illinoise. “Clarion” came directly out of the long drive between New York and Chicago, which Tasha made three times in two months in 2024. She repeatedly noticed a sign for the Pennsylvania town of Clarion and each time thought it would make a great song title: “A song about coming and going, about wanting to change your life but not quite knowing how you’re going to do it, but feeling suddenly on the edge of figuring it out.” What I find interesting is how unhurried the track is given its subject: the soft-footed shuffle underneath carries the restlessness without pushing it into urgency, which feels like the right read on that particular in-between state. The production is sparse enough that the lyric has room to breathe, and nothing oversells the feeling. The companion single “Spring”, featuring L’Rain and Jamila Woods, takes a different approach entirely and announces the same record from a completely different angle.

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La Sécurité — Deny

Montreal quintet La Sécurité close out the campaign for Bingo! (due June 12 via Bella Union and Mothland) with the fifth and final advance single. I covered the title track (W08) and Snack City (W14) earlier this year. “Deny” is built around a bass hook borrowed from Standard Emmanuel, the solo project of band member Félix — the low end is the engine here, with guitars and synths cutting in around it rather than leading. Originally written in French and translated into English; the subject is about as direct as the music: dysfunctional relationships, getting rid of burdens, standing up for yourself. The jerkier guitar and synth elements sit against the smooth rhythm section in a way that feels deliberately at odds, which is what gives the track its tension. The vocals are blunt: no attempt to prettify the sentiment, which suits the subject.

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Marsh — Beside

Marsh returns to Anjunadeep with his first solo release on the label in over two years, following a debut at Coachella in 2025, a five-continent global tour, and Attraction (W13), his collaborative two-part release with Ferry Corsten. “Beside” has already been doing work in his live sets at CRSSD Festival and sold-out London shows at fabric and Leake Street. It sits squarely in his lane: driving bassline, euphoric breakdown, piano elements that surface and recede without demanding attention. More interesting as a statement of intent than as a departure — after two years of touring and collaborating, this is Marsh reestablishing what his solo material sounds like on record.

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Max Winter — Things Can’t Stop feat. Lauren Auder

London-based Max Winter has been building Like The Season, a collaborative mixtape due May 21 via Secret Friend, single by single. I covered Candlelight (W08). “Things Can’t Stop” takes a different approach: one collaborator, one instrument at the centre, a year in the making. The two go back to 2021, when Winter played piano on Auder’s debut album The Infinite Spine. “When I first made the demo, the piano arrangement immediately reminded me of Lauren. I reached out, and we spent several sessions over the course of a year developing the track together.” A year is a long time for a single, and you can hear the care in it: nothing feels rushed or approximate. Restrained alt-pop with a strong melodic centre — the piano carries most of the structural weight, and Auder’s baritone sits alongside Winter’s vocal rather than competing with it. Most collaborations this self-consciously careful end up feeling laboured, but this one just sounds settled. Auder recently released her second album Whole World As Vigil to considerable attention; the timing is good.

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Cola — Haveluck Country

Cola have been rolling out singles from Cost of Living Adjustment (Fire Talk, out now) at a steady pace: I covered Hedgesitting (W08) and Conflagration Mindset (W12). “Haveluck Country” arrives as the final pre-release single and it lands differently from both: bouncier, more relaxed, Tim Darcy’s voice sitting loosely over staccato guitars while Ben Stidworthy and Evan Cartwright keep things moving without forcing urgency. Lyrically it circles privilege and luck, or more precisely who gets to inhabit the comfortable space Cola calls the “haveluck country”: drugstore vitamins, diplomatic immunity, the shining city on the hill. The imagery is deliberately scattered, and it works because the music underneath never oversells the point. The groove carries the weight of the satire without needing to shout it. An album campaign this consistently strong deserves a closing single that holds its own without trying to be the loudest thing in the room, and this is that.

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That's 18 tracks and one overdue post. Southern Germany was worth it; so was the 1000 Rabbits EP. The hard drive expanded quietly across the week, as it always does. Happy Mother's Day to everyone still waiting for their child to develop a more practical hobby.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Cornelius — Yumenemi

Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) returns with a cover of “Yumenemi”, originally a 1989 single by Japanese singer-songwriter Yosui Inoue. The track was reissued on 7-inch last autumn by Studio Mule, a subsidiary of Mule Musiq, before Oyamada recorded his version — his first new release since “Glow Within”, put out under the name Cornelius HERALBONY last July. It’s out now on Eat Your Own Ears Recordings.

The original has a reputation as a cult Balearic classic, and Oyamada’s treatment doesn’t work against that — it honours the source material while being unmistakably his own. The music video, which he made himself using AI, is out on his YouTube channel.

Something about Oyamada returning to a 1989 track that’s been quietly circulating since a vinyl reissue makes sense as a first move. The patience in the arrangement is the whole point. I’m curious where the next phase goes.

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New This Week

Downtown Boys — You’re a Ghost

Downtown Boys are back. The Providence quintet’s last album Cost of Living came out in 2017, and Public Luxury lands June 26th on Sub Pop — nine years on. “You’re a Ghost” is the second single, following lead track “No Me Jodas” from W13. Victoria Marie and Joey La Neve DeFrancesco are direct about what the song is for: it was written in response to the suppression of pro-Palestine and anti-ICE protestors and ICE’s ongoing deportation operations. Industrial dance-punk at high velocity — tense, driving, built to stay just short of tipping over. The animated video, directed by Lebanese artist Khalil, doesn’t soften anything.

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Sosyete ‘25 — Yan

Sosyete ‘25 close out their pre-album run with “Yan”, the final single before debut LP Yaygara lands May 22nd on Tru Thoughts. We’ve followed this one closely: “Bilmece” (W10) held its breath in a slow-burning haze, and “Oyun” (W14) pushed into disco-funk. “Yan” — which means burn in Turkish — sits somewhere between the two: more open, more direct, and the warmest thing they’ve put out. Merve Erdem’s vocal is the anchor, working in the register of ‘90s Turkish dark pop: unhurried, a little melancholy, with enough momentum to carry without overstating. Michael Reed on drums lands a strong final fill; Dan Smith’s Hammond adds warmth throughout.

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Lip Critic — Shoplifting

Brooklyn’s Lip Critic share “Shoplifting” from their new album Theft World, out today on Partisan Records. Their 2024 debut Hex Dealer made a lot of noise; this follows it up with two drummers, a sampler, and frontman Bret Kaser doing his paranoid preacher thing over club rhythms and hardcore breakdowns. “Shoplifting” is one of the more unsettling moments on the record: drums erupt, synths run slightly off-key, and Kaser sounds like he’s losing the thread on purpose. A full Spotlight feature on Theft World is coming soon.

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Sulaf — Naada

Sulaf is a Sudanese singer, oud player, and composer who left Sudan for France in 2022, intending a short creative stay at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She didn’t go back. “I was not planning to stay, so I was not prepared for this exile,” she says. “Naada” is the first single from her debut album ABA, due October 9th via Real World Records, dedicated to her great-grandfather — a Sufi poet and musician whose verses appear throughout the record. His entire output lived in a single notebook in Khartoum; she doesn’t know if it survived the conflict there. The Nubian roots are present in the rhythmic structure without being ornamental. I keep returning to the oud line: it holds the whole thing in place while everything else moves around it.

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Lines Of Silence — Lines in Opposition

Todmorden duo Lines Of Silence share the lead track from Harmonise, their second EP for Sprechen, out April 29th. The first Lines Of Silence recording to feature vocals — Andrea Parra’s presence changes the weight of it considerably. Motorik drums and percussion keep the structure tight while synths move around layered guitars. The title nods in two directions: opposition to the far right, and a reference to the Rock in Opposition movement (Henry Cow, Faust). The politics sit inside the music rather than being announced over it, which is the right call. The EP rounds out with remixes from Stone Anthem and Psychederek.

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Cutscene — Concrete Line

Manchester-based, North East-raised four-piece Cutscene share their first single on Heist or Hit and their first new music since debut single “Bright Star” in May 2025. Recorded by Samuel William Jones at Low Four Studios. The song maps the paralysis of small-town life onto the feeling of being stoned — “the ‘concrete line’ represents that stuck-in-stone mindset, that constant, unchanging, cynical stream of consciousness,” the band explain. It opens taut and anxious, breaks into something open and dreamlike in the middle, then snaps back. The structure earns its point. What holds it together is Seb Mason’s vocal, which shifts register between the two modes without overselling either.

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Ruti — I’ll Be Your Friend

London-via-Essex singer-songwriter Ruti shares the first single of a new chapter, out now on Big Family Music. Written and produced with Theo Hutchcraft (HURTS) and Will Bloomfield (Fred Again, Bastille, Alfie Templeman), it’s a clear shift from the stripped-back piano confessionals of earlier work. Guitar strums open it up, claps come in, Ruti’s reverb-heavy vocals follow. There’s a subtle post-punk pulse running underneath — steady enough to anchor the anthemic push without tipping into stadium rock. The production is lighter than the ambition, which works in its favour. References include Florence and the Machine, Gigi Perez, and Adrienne Lenker.

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The Bug Club — A Good Day for Dying

The Bug Club are a Welsh duo releasing their third album Every Single Muscle on May 29th via Sub Pop. “A Good Day for Dying” is the latest single: short, riff-first, hooks everywhere. The album turns attention inward — the human body and condition examined from every angle, the way an alien might prod a specimen. “A Good Day for Dying” fits that frame without needing to explain it. The album is so packed with riffs and hooks that Sam reportedly had to ask permission to fit a guitar solo in. He got two seconds. The humor and the craft aren’t in competition here. Tour kicks off May 9th in Wrexham.

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Jeffrey Silverstein — Coming Back Around

Portland, Oregon songwriter Jeffrey Silverstein marks his signing to London’s Full Time Hobby with his first new music since the 2024 EP Roseway. He sits somewhere between loner-folk, cosmic country, and kraut-laden choogle. The song came from an unusual place: he had the story before the music. Someone has to move back to their hometown — not a choice, just a necessity. They make their peace and move on. The track draws from Steve Miller Band’s “Circle of Love” for its second half: the moving home, then the moving on. I keep landing on the pedal-steel in the second half — it’s where the song stops explaining itself and just floats.

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Martial Arts — Before The Fire

Manchester five-piece Martial Arts share their second preview of debut EP From The Burnoff, due June 5th on 5dB Records. Produced by Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Florence and the Machine). The song is about the narrowing of ambition: not revolution, not success, just the faint hope of owning somewhere to live. “It’s a song about how the big dream became just owning a house,” Jim Marson says, “the pressure of scraping by and the quiet ever growing discomfort that comes with it.” The self-awareness is doing real work — the song holds both frustration and luck at once without resolving them. “Wake up and smell the mud” lands harder than any grand statement would.

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The Bernedette Maries — ESO

Brussels four-piece named, indirectly, after Sinéad O’Connor — her full name was Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor. “ESO” is their second single ahead of debut album Soft, due September 18th on Géographie. The track started as a conventional nu-gaze song, then vocalist/guitarist Guy Tournay got bored mixing it and started messing with a drum loop. The second half is essentially a remix of the first, dissolving the shoegaze weight into a liquid drum-and-bass pulse that lifts the whole thing somewhere else. “The first reaction was ‘Oh, it’s now my favourite song on the album’,” Tournay says. The structural shift isn’t jarring because both halves share the same emotional temperature: half-remembered, slipping.

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Octo Octa — First Intention (Right Here, Right Now)

Octo Octa (Maya Bouldry-Morrison) releases the lead single from Sigils For Survival, her fourth album on T4T LUV NRG, out April 30th. Built entirely on hardware instruments and mixed in Logic, deliberately preserving MIDI-clock drift and off-grid timing rather than correcting it. Alongside her electronics, Bouldry-Morrison plays dulcimer, hand-pan, and recorder. Each of the eight tracks was written around a specific intention, then bound with a hand-drawn sigil. What grounds the concept is the hardware-first approach: the drift and texture are in the recording itself, not added after the fact. The process and the intention feel like the same thing here, not separate layers.

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Classic Trucks — Masculine Jazz

Classic Trucks is the solo project of Joshua Jarman, drummer and vocalist in Bristol’s Langkamer. We covered “Born Naked” (W14) earlier this year — a track he built after buying a guitar on Gumtree for £10 and spending two years teaching himself to play it. “Masculine Jazz” follows that, arriving in the wake of last year’s sophomore EP Clown Town on Breakfast Records. That economy carries through here. Jarman isn’t interested in padding things out, and “Masculine Jazz” is no exception. I find myself going back to this one more than I expected to.

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Ibibio Sound Machine — Return to Sender

A few years after Pull The Rope, the London afro-electronic collective led by Eno Williams returns. “Return to Sender” grew from a frightening moment: Williams felt the steering wheel jerk out of her hands while driving, which she later read through the lens of traditional Nigerian belief as a spiritual attack. “The phrase ‘return to sender’ is a common response to such an event, invoking the rejection of any evil spirits that may have been looking to cause harm.” Fourteen credited musicians build a groove that earns its size. Williams’ voice sits right at the centre without overshadowing the surrounding band. The track manages to stay energised throughout without lurching into chaos. A strong return, and a reminder they’re one of the few bands making this kind of music with real conviction.

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Yazz Ahmed — Dawn Patrol

British-Bahraini trumpeter Yazz Ahmed shares the lead single from EP Shinrin-yoku, due May 29 via Night Time Stories — a collection of nature-inspired pieces recorded remotely in 2020. Ahmed was direct about releasing it now: she pointed to ongoing wars, feelings of hopelessness, and a sense of abandonment. Shinrin-yoku is the Japanese practice of forest bathing, absorbing the atmosphere of natural spaces as a form of healing. “Dawn Patrol” features Ahmed on trumpets, flugelhorns, and programming alongside Noel Langley on brass, Samuel Hällkvist on guitars, and Josh Blackmore on drums. The layering of two brass voices against Hällkvist’s guitar gives the piece a gentle forward motion that fits the early-morning suggestion of the title.

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hackedepicciotto — Einig

Berlin duo hackedepicciotto share “Einig” — the second single from limited album Lichtung, out July 10 via Mute. Alexander Hacke (who departed Einstürzende Neubauten in April 2025) and Danielle De Picciotto, American-born musician and co-founder of the original Love Parade in 1989, ended fourteen years of nomadic living to settle on the outskirts of Berlin; Lichtung was written and recorded in their new home studio, composed entirely in German. “Einig” means concordant or in agreement. Five short couplets — a stubborn spark of conflict that transforms into something lighter. A spare, considered piece sitting between post-industrial and contemporary classical. I find the restraint here more convincing than most music that tries to say something about reconciliation.

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KNEECAP — Irish Goodbye ft. Kae Tempest

The closing track from KNEECAP’s forthcoming album FENIAN, due today via Heavenly Recordings. Móglaí Bap wrote the lyrics after watching footage of his late mother, Aoife Ní Riain — an Irish language activist and traditional musician — appearing in a documentary from the 1990s. It was the first time he had seen her in a video. She died in 2020. “Irish Goodbye is about the mundane things me and my Ma did together. I never realised it was the day to day stuff I would miss when she was gone,” he wrote. Kae Tempest’s contribution is, by Bap’s account, deeply vulnerable — a performance that fits the song’s emotional register without overpowering it. The Irish Times gave the album five stars. I wasn’t expecting to feel the weight of it this directly, but here we are.

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Alina Bzhezhinska, Tulshi, Cosmic Analog Ensemble — Journey Home (Cosmic Analog Ensemble Remix)

Harpist Alina Bzhezhinska and Ibiza-based producer Tulshi share a rework of “Journey Home”, remixed by Cosmic Analog Ensemble — the project of Lebanese producer and multi-instrumentalist Charif Megarbane. Out April 28 on Tru Thoughts. Megarbane stretches the composition and layers in references to 1960s Italian library music, Middle Eastern psychedelia, afrobeat, and hip-hop breaks, keeping the track’s introspective quality intact while pushing its energy outward. Bzhezhinska’s harp remains the centre of gravity throughout — fluid and restrained, holding the arrangement together as everything else shifts. The kind of remix that earns its place alongside the original rather than replacing it.

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Vince Staples — Blackberry Marmalade

Vince Staples is back. “Blackberry Marmalade” is the lead single from Cry Baby, his forthcoming album due June 5 via Loma Vista Recordings through his own imprint, Section Eight Arthouse — his first release as an independent artist. A clear sonic shift: where his recent records leaned on minimal, sample-driven production, Cry Baby is built around live instrumentation throughout. This comes in hard on a heavy guitar riff with a locked bassline underneath, closer to rock than anything in his catalog. Staples framed it as reclamation rather than pivot, noting that rock, punk, grunge, and indie all trace back to Black artists. The chorus about blackberry marmalade and sweet tea as a reference to a grandmother’s kitchen sits right next to a post-chorus pleading not to be gunned down. The contrast is what gives it weight.

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Cheekface — MFT

Los Angeles trio Cheekface share the third single from upcoming album Podium, due July 28. The first Cheekface track to feature lead vocals from bassist Amanda Tannen, shared with guitarist/vocalist Greg Katz. MFT stands for marriage and family therapist. Katz is direct: “This is a song about someone seeking a safe space to share her worst thoughts, and feeling that even therapy isn’t really safe, because the therapist might have to report those thoughts to the government.” That’s a lot of weight for what lands as a sharp, nervy pop song, but Cheekface have always worked this way. Having Tannen take the mic is structural, not a novelty — the vocal split shifts the perspective in a way that fits the subject.

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Ducks Ltd. — Easy Come, Easy Go (feat. Martin Courtney)

Ducks Ltd. cover Grant McLennan’s “Easy Come, Easy Go” from his first solo record Watershed, released in 1987 right after The Go-Betweens called it quits. The Toronto duo bring along Martin Courtney of Real Estate, out now on Royal Mountain/Carpark Records. Guitarist/vocalist Tom McGreevy calls it one of McLennan’s best songs and notes it “would have been one of their classics” if it had landed on a Go-Betweens album — pointing at exactly why this pick makes sense. The session came together in one day at Courtney’s studio in Beacon, NY on a tour day off. The cover sits comfortably within the band’s own sound rather than reaching for something different; it reads like a natural entry in their catalog, not a detour.

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That’s 22 tracks for W18. May 1st, International Workers’ Day — and I spent it doing this. Marx would have had thoughts. My hard drive has no thoughts; it just keeps filling up and asking for nothing in return, which is more than I can say for most things.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Beth Orton — Waiting

Beth Orton’s first album in four years arrives June 26 via Partisan Records. The Ground Above is her ninth LP and the follow-up to Weather Alive (2022), the self-produced record that earned her a Pitchfork Best New Music and reestablished her as one of the most singular voices in British songwriting. “Waiting” is the second single, following the title track released last month.

Like Weather Alive, The Ground Above is self-produced, recorded largely live in the room with a core group of collaborators: multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, Vernon Spring’s Sam Beste, drummers Chris Vatalaro (Antibalas, Radiohead), Vishal Nayak (Nick Hakim), and Paul Butler (The Bees, Michael Kiwanuka), plus trumpeter Christos Styliande, bassist Tom Herbert, Dave Okumu, and Tom Skinner of The Smile. Nick Hakim appears on “Cigarette Curls”. The album is structured in two halves: the opening section moves through fragmented, searching terrain; the second opens into warmer, more expansive melodic forms.

“Waiting” fits the second half’s logic. It builds slowly, carrying what Orton describes as “a celebration of moving out of the holding pattern fear keeps us in.” The flute and trumpet give it something breezy and unhurried, while the lyric does something harder: tracking the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and eventually collapsing that distance. Several sources hear Laura Nyro, Carole King, and Terry Callier in the arrangement. The song earns its resolution honestly rather than reaching for it — no forced uplift. It just turns a corner.

Orton recently played sold-out nights at St Pancras Old Church in London and appeared at the Barbican’s Marianne Faithfull tribute. A headline tour follows the June album release.

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New This Week

Basht. — Perfume

Dublin four-piece Basht. announce their debut album Poor Advice, due October 9th on LAB Records, with “Perfume” as the lead single, produced by Ali Chant (Dry Cleaning, Perfume Genius, PJ Harvey). Their first new material of 2026, following 2025’s Bitter and Twisted EP.

“Perfume” opens with restraint and builds slowly into something heavier — each instrument given room to operate independently, the rhythm section keeping a quiet, persistent drive underneath guitars that shift between unease and distortion. No rush to the payoff. Jack Leavey describes working with Chant: “You’re figuring out the song as you go through, you don’t jump straight to the conclusion until the final chorus. He goes through everything quite surgically.” Lyrically, the song deals with specific Irish history, written from the perspective of a son watching his parents’ marriage unravel against the Catholic Church’s influence on private life in 20th century Ireland — couples facing unplanned pregnancies routinely pressured into marriage to avoid social shame. That subject feeds into the larger concept of Poor Advice, a ten-track record tracing institutional power from the Church’s grip on Irish domestic life through to what Leavey calls its present-day equivalent: “moral authority outsourced to boardrooms and barracks.” The structural patience here is genuine — numerous bands describe this kind of slow-build approach and don’t pull it off. “Perfume” earns its second half.

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Man/Woman/Chainsaw — Nosedive

London six-piece Man/Woman/Chainsaw have announced their debut album Cannonball, out August 7 via Fiction Records, with “Nosedive” as its lead single. Both this and opener “Only Girl” were produced by Seth Evans (Geordie Greep, Black Midi) and Margo Broom (Fat White Family, Big Joanie), who handled the entire LP at RAK Studios.

“Nosedive” runs nearly six minutes, built on two chords and a bouncing synth pattern that draws more from LCD Soundsystem dance-punk than from the band’s earlier art-punk material, with strings entering as the track builds toward its climax. Singer Emmie-Mae Avery describes it as “a song about longing for both comfort and freedom simultaneously in a relationship through the metaphor of being an injured bird needing shelter. We turned it into a danceable upbeat track.” The chorus refrain locks in and doesn’t let go — that’s where the LCD comparison earns its keep. For a debut single, the patience with the build is unexpected. Man/Woman/Chainsaw formed when the members were 16, writing in a converted vicarage, and by 2025 had sold out two UK tours and debuted at SXSW.

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Tricky — Out of Place (feat. Marta)

Six years after Fall to Pieces, Tricky is back under his name. “Out of Place” is the first single from Different When It’s Silent, his 15th studio album, due July 17 on False Idols. The track features Marta Złakowska, his main collaborator for several years and most recently a partner on last year’s joint record Out the Way. He originally wrote “Out of Place” for her project, then pulled it back for this album.

The song runs on the contrast between the two voices — Marta’s restrained delivery sitting against Tricky’s frayed, almost punk-like performance — with frenetic drum patterns and mournful strings underneath. The sessions were not originally intended as a Tricky album at all; it was his manager Alan McGee who heard the material and pushed back: “Mate, this is a Tricky album. This is the best thing since Maxinquaye.” Across fourteen tracks, the album combines skeletal blues, brooding electronics, distorted guitars, and stripped-down hip-hop rhythms. What caught my ear is that the track closes rather than opens the album — it functions as a finale, not a setup, which is an unusual choice for a lead single and gives it a different kind of weight.

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Ed O’Brien — Incantations

We covered Ed O’Brien’s “Blue Morpho” title track back in W12. Now the second single is here: “Incantations”, with guitar from Dave Okumu, who also serves as musical director for the upcoming live shows. The album — his second solo record and first under his name — arrives May 22 on Transgressive.

The backstory is worth having in mind. After 2020’s Earth — released into a locked-down, touring-free world — O’Brien fell into the deepest depression of his life. He began a daily ritual of breathing work and cold exposure, then retreating to his small London studio to play guitar for hours with no direction. Over four years, increasingly from his house in Wales on the site of a Roman villa surrounded by ancient oaks, fragments became Blue Morpho. The collaborators assembled around it reflect the same serendipity: Paul Epworth through a school-run connection, Shabaka Hutchings after a Glastonbury conversation about instruments tuned to 432 Hz, Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits arranging strings performed by the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra. What I notice in “Incantations” is how much Okumu’s guitar carries without trying to resolve anything — it stays open throughout, and that patience feels like a deliberate choice rather than restraint.

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mary in the junkyard — Candelabra

We covered “Crash Landing” (W13) when mary in the junkyard first confirmed their debut album. “Candelabra”, the second single from Role Model Hermit (out July 3 via AMF Records), is almost the opposite in approach. Where “Crash Landing” built on harmonium drones, trip-hop drums, and layered strings, “Candelabra” strips everything back to Clari Freeman-Taylor’s voice and a finger-picked acoustic guitar, with not much else around her.

Freeman-Taylor wrote the song when she was seventeen — one of the first sad songs she ever completed, she says, with “all of my teenage angst written into it”. The simplicity is the point. There’s a specific kind of adolescent clarity that comes before you’ve learned to complicate your feelings, and “Candelabra” catches that. The contrast with “Crash Landing” is deliberate and effective. The band — Freeman-Taylor (vocals, guitar, cello, viola, violin), Saya Barbaglia (bass, viola, violin, backing vocals), and David Addison (drums) — recorded Role Model Hermit in London during summer 2025 with producers Oli Bayston (Boxed In, Kelly Lee Owens, Alexis Taylor) and Ben Baptie (The Strokes, Young Fathers, Little Simz). For a debut album preview, offering something this quiet takes a certain confidence. It’s here because it earns that confidence.

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Swapmeet — Sand

When we covered Swapmeet’s “I Know!” back in Week 09, the Adelaide four-piece were preparing for their first US shows at SXSW. They played 13 sets in Austin, got people talking, and came home with blisters. Now they’re back with “Sand”, the second single from their debut album Mount Zero, due July 17 on Winspear.

Where “I Know!” was accidental — a practice jam that turned into the catchiest thing on the record — “Sand” arrives with more meticulous weight. Jack Medlyn describes it plainly: “’Sand’ is about wasting your time, then being so, so mad at yourself.” The band recorded Mount Zero over two weeks at a beach house in Noarlunga, loading gear into a room they also slept in — bunk beds for sound absorption, mid-winter in Australia, fewer distractions. What pulls me in is how the frustration in the lyrics never pushes the arrangement to match it — the song stays spacious while Medlyn’s vocal sits right at the edge of irritation. That gap does a lot of work. I wasn’t expecting the second single to land harder than the first.

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Sofie Royer — Cowboy Mouth

Sofie Royer is back with a new single on Stones Throw, and the source material here is about as specific as it gets. “Cowboy Mouth” takes its title from the 1971 play co-written by Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, which Royer read while in Los Angeles. She made the track with members of NYC group Rebounder, longtime collaborators.

The song started to take shape around a very particular image: a box of discarded shoes left on a street, photographed and posted to Instagram by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Royer took it from there — “there was something so decidedly moving yet egregious about all the different pairs,” she says, “I was left wondering who they’d belonged to, who had walked in them; that it prompted my own little silly fantasy of what would play out if I’d tried on a pair, discarded my own and just kept walking.” The production pairs string arrangements with synthesizer work, sitting squarely in the electro-pop territory she’s been building toward, with a classically trained sensibility underneath the surface that doesn’t announce itself. What I notice is how efficiently the song moves between its ideas without overstating any of them.

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CAPLETON, APACHE INDIAN, GAUDI, DON LETTS — No Other Way

Four names, decades of history, one single. Capleton, Apache Indian, Gaudi, and Don Letts drop “No Other Way” through VPAL Music alongside a Dub Version produced by Gaudi. Capleton has been one of dancehall’s most commanding voices since the early 1990s. Apache Indian came up alongside him, reshaping British reggae by threading dancehall, hip-hop, and roots together with South Asian identity. Behind the boards, Grammy-nominated dub producer Gaudi brings years of work with Steel Pulse, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Horace Andy. Don Letts, Grammy-winning filmmaker whose work with The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite helped define reggae’s cultural reach, shapes the creative direction.

What I find interesting here is the parallel histories converging: while Capleton and Apache Indian were redefining the genre internationally through the 90s, Gaudi was building the Italian raggamuffin movement in Europe — not orbiting the same scene, doing the same thing in different hemispheres. The release follows Gaudi’s recent Jazz Gone Dub, also on VPAL. “No Other Way” sits closer to the heavyweight end of that spectrum, rooted in tradition but driven by modern dub production. Four artists with enough individual history to fill a festival bill.

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Library Card — Out of Context

Rotterdam four-piece Library Card are out with “Out of Context” on AT EASE. The band formed in the city in summer 2021: Lot van Teylingen (vocals), Mitchell Quitz (guitars and effects), Kat Kalkman (bass), and Emre Karayalçın (drums and percussion). The song takes aim at corporate culture and the glorification of overwork — van Teylingen frames it as commentary on “capitalism in its purest form and the corporations that are demolishing our world”, with office-speak deployed as a kind of hollow gospel to expose the absurdity underneath.

What I find satisfying is that the critique doesn’t drag the song down. The driving bass and post-punk energy give it enough momentum to work on the dancefloor as well as a soapbox, and the closing section is particularly strong. It earns the snark.

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Afroham — Coconut Water (feat. GINGE)

Rotterdam producer Afroham returns to Melting Pot Music with “Coconut Water”, featuring singer-songwriter GINGE. The two first worked together on Afroham’s 2023 debut EP Quantum Love, and the rapport they built there carries over here without effort. GINGE’s vocal is relaxed and direct, sitting right on top of a warm production that doesn’t push for more than the song needs. What I notice is how little the track is trying to prove: the chemistry between the two does the structural work, and the production knows when to stay out of the way. “Coconut Water” is the first in a planned run of singles across 2026.

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Surusinghe — FRIED

Surusinghe is out on dh2 with “FRIED”, the lead single from her forthcoming EP Cutting Thread. The track runs on low-end pressure and rugged digital electronics — no softening at the edges, built for a room with a proper sound system. The wider EP, due this summer, features a collaboration with Jamaican MC Warrior Queen. A focused club track from someone building momentum in the right spaces. It does exactly what it sets out to do without overselling itself.

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il:lo — Iraya

French duo il:lo return with “Iraya”, a single from Lucent, their debut studio album on Nettwerk. It’s their first full-length, and from the source material it sounds like a record built around contrast: tension and release, pressure and forward motion, dark and light. The duo describes Lucent as a record about navigating modern overwhelm — the “electric blue” energy that sits somewhere between invigorating and too much. “Iraya” fits that frame.

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That’s 13 tracks for the week. The Beth Orton one has been on repeat since Tuesday — the kind of song you put on to do something and end up just sitting with. First gastro consultation: inconclusive, camera pending. Weekly music intake: conclusive, intervention pending. At least one of those things I’m looking forward to.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

W16 I’m back home. Fully caffeinated, hard drive spinning, and with plenty of time to go properly deep. Consider this the revenge roundup.

WARNING: These weekly and full 2026 playlists here at Stereobar.net - Enter at your own risk; they may cause a sudden urge to reorganise your entire life around discovering obscure bands.

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Massive Attack, Tom Waits - Boots on the Ground

Massive Attack’s first single in a decade arrives with the weight you’d expect and then some. “Boots on the Ground” features Tom Waits on his first new studio recording since his 2011 album Bad As Me, a collaboration that apparently began years ago when Waits submitted his vocal and the band held onto it until now. Released via Play It Again Sam, the track runs four minutes and twenty-one seconds.

The production sits in the territory Robert Del Naja has been moving toward for years: dense, arrhythmic, dark. A gloomy piano figure runs through it, military snares break up the beat at one point, and the rhythm has the kind of ungainly lurch that fits Waits’ voice better than a clean groove ever would. Additional vocals come from Waits’ son Casey. The lyric, sung from the viewpoint of a soldier shaped and discarded by the machinery of war, lurches between the surreal and the disturbing. The track is blunt about its targets: bloated political authority, state violence, the gap between the people who declare wars and the ones who fight them.

The timing is deliberate. Del Naja was among 523 people arrested at a Palestine Action protest in London last Saturday. The accompanying film cuts between Black Lives Matter protests, ICE raids, and the police response to both. Massive Attack describe the track as arriving “in an atmosphere of chaos.” Waits, characteristically droll, notes that the song will never go out of style. He’s right, and that’s the depressing part. The track is the first release under a Spotify exemption policy — available on other platforms but not Spotify, citing CEO Daniel Ek’s investment in AI military technology company Helsing. All vinyl profits go to the ACLU and the US Immigrant Defense Project. A decade is a long time to wait. This one earns the gap.

Tour dates include Primavera Sound Barcelona on June 4, Zitadelle Berlin on June 7, and a Fuji Rock Festival headline slot on July 26.

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New This Week

Marco Benevento - Houdini

Marco Benevento is moving into new territory. After more than 15 years on Royal Potato Family, the New York keyboardist is debuting on Big Crown Records with Glera, a full-length due July 24. It’s his ninth solo studio album, and by the sound of “Houdini”, the label switch comes with a genuine shift in direction: dancefloor-minded, groove-forward music with jazz bones and a hip-hop pulse.

“Houdini” opens with forceful drums and a locked-in piano motif that doesn’t let up. The production owes something to the Madlib school, which makes sense given Benevento’s recent work alongside Madlib and Freddie Gibbs. What catches my ear is the distant harmony sitting just under the main groove — a recurring signature of his that usually adds warmth; here it adds a little unease instead, which suits the track’s name. Glera features contributors including Leon Michels, Dave Guy, Homer Steinweiss, harpist Elizabeth Steiner, and vocalists Chiara Civello, Marianne Mirage, and Molly Lewis. I wasn’t expecting the pivot to land this cleanly.

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Nation of Language - Tougher Than the Rest

Nation of Language have covered “Tougher Than the Rest”, the Bruce Springsteen track from his 1987 album Tunnel of Love, and made it unmistakably theirs. Where Springsteen’s original leaned on polished late-80s production, the Sub Pop synth-pop trio push the synth elements further forward and let the song float in their register.

The cover has a good backstory. Vocalist Ian Richard Devaney grew up in New Jersey, Springsteen country, but this particular song passed him by until recently. Its presence in his life solidified during last year’s tour, when their sound engineer started playing it as exit music after an emotional show. Devaney stayed offstage and listened to the whole thing. That kind of origin story tends to produce better covers than the ones that start with a label request. When it came time to record, the band had a Yamaha CS-80 on hand — the same synth model from the original Tunnel of Love sessions — which gave them a reference point without forcing replication. The 7” (limited to 1,000 copies) drops May 29 via Sub Pop, paired with B-side “The Conversation”. Extensive European and North American touring runs through the summer and into September.

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MLEKO - Denouement

After Gub Rock and the seven-minute sprawl of Tom’s Tune, Manchester’s MLEKO are opening their debut EP The Feast of St. Perpetua with “Denouement”. Out May 1st on Heist or Hit, the EP was recorded at Low Four Studios with Samuel William Jones, who has worked with Maruja and Robin Richards.

“Denouement” sets the temperature immediately. Sax and trumpet cut through dense guitar arrangements, the rhythm section hits hard, and Ed Whirledge’s vocal moves between control and the kind of intensity that sounds like it costs something. The lyrics are pointed: the ruling class, blood money, the slow bleed of a system that runs on other people’s labour. Where “Tom’s Tune” gave MLEKO seven minutes to map their range, this is tighter and more direct. The political fury compressed into something that hits faster. The brass isn’t decorating the track — it’s driving it, pushing against the guitars in a way that feels confrontational rather than textural. Three singles in, they haven’t repeated themselves yet.

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Family Stereo - Fault Lines

Blake Watt has signed to Bella Union and announced his debut album The Thread, out July 31. He records as Family Stereo, and “Fault Lines” is the first track: folk-tinged, lushly arranged, built around a long-distance relationship that Watt translates into images rather than narrative. Space, distance, wide open country, badlands, tunnels. The song works on implication.

Watt is 25, a former drama student and drummer who took up guitar at 15. He’s the son of Everything but the Girl’s Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, a lineage that surfaces not in sound so much as sensibility: a preference for understatement, for emotional precision over sentiment. The album was recorded over nine months in north London with producer Sam Hodder-Williams, with additional players on violin, banjo, backing vocals, and bass. Watt on his approach to lyrics: “I like asking questions more than answering them.” For a debut album lead single, announcing yourself quietly is either going to reward the attention or disappoint it. The early evidence points toward the former.

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Ranting - Grumpy Custard

Ranting is a UK-based three-piece with Adam at the helm. “Grumpy Custard” came out of a grey January morning when he decided to channel a bad mood into something deliberately over-the-top. The song’s title is a phrase his partner uses when he’s in a funk, apparently reliable enough to produce a smile. The exercise worked.

The track leans into melodrama deliberately, cataloguing a cascade of small domestic disasters and spiralling existential complaints with deadpan delivery. It’s self-deprecating without being precious, and the absurdist streak keeps it from tipping into actual misery. For a release that started as a private coping mechanism, it travels well. I respect the commitment to the bit, and frankly I relate to the title more than I’d like to admit.

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Otala - My Old House

London four-piece Otala return with “My Old House”, their third single of 2026 and the latest preview of their upcoming EP Better Than The End, due April 22. The band — Oscar Thorpe on guitar and vocals, Rory Allen on bass, Charlotte Foulkes on sax, and Jacob Wing on drums — recorded the whole EP over a single weekend in early January at Premises Studios with Louis Milburn producing.

Where More Fire held its tension without releasing it, and Lord Only Knows Pt.1 drew out the space between the notes, “My Old House” works with distance and absence. The lyric traces the feeling of being far from somewhere that still has a claim on you: four years gone, nothing left but traces, a voice reaching across the world and landing in the throat. Thorpe has a way of circling an image until it becomes physical. With the EP now days away, the picture Otala have built across three singles is unusually coherent for a debut release. I’ve been following this band since 2024 and this confirms they’ve earned full attention.

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Asha Jefferies - Backwards Baby

Australian songwriter Asha Jefferies returns with “Backwards Baby”, her first new material of 2026 and a signal that the next chapter after her 2024 debut Ego Ride is taking shape. The single was recorded in London and co-produced by Jefferies and Tom Iansek, known for his work with Big Scary and Maple Glider.

The song sits on a digital drum pulse and a bed of synths, Jefferies’ voice doing the emotional work above a production that stays controlled rather than reaching for scale. The subject is a relationship with someone who couldn’t stop looking backwards — a partner whose attachment to the past left her waiting, silencing her needs in the process. The arrangement mirrors that: it holds its patience, never pushes for the liberating moment, and the chorus lands as resignation rather than release. She puts it plainly: “sometimes the way people treat you has nothing to do with you.” The song earns that line.

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TOMORA - I Drink the Light

TOMORA is the collaboration between Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers and Norwegian artist AURORA. Their debut album Come Closer is out now via Capitol Records, and “I Drink the Light” is the latest track from it. The partnership has been building for years, first connecting at Glastonbury, producing AURORA’s guest spots on the Chemical Brothers’ 2019 album No Geography, and eventually arriving here.

The album runs twelve tracks, moving across house, techno, alt-pop, and further out without settling into one register. Rowlands has described the project as making “the music that we’ve been waiting to make” — the collision of hard and soft, ugly and beautiful. “I Drink the Light” sits at the more luminous end of that spectrum. What’s striking is how neither artist subsumes the other. TOMORA debuted live at Manchester’s New Century Hall in late March, played underplay shows in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and appeared at Coachella on April 12 — where their name on the poster arrived with no information attached, which turned out to be an effective way to show up.

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Clark - Relentless Opponent

Clark returns with “Relentless Opponent”, the lead track from Opponents Stims, the second in a series of EPs expanding his 2025 album Steep Stims, out May 22 via Throttle Records. Characteristically uncompromising, characteristically Clark. If you know, you know; if you don’t, this is a reasonable place to start.

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Amtrac - High Speed Ring

Los Angeles producer Amtrac returns with “High Speed Ring”, the second single from his upcoming Civilian World EP, due May 29 on Anjunadeep. The six-track EP follows his 2025 Generator EP on the same label. “High Speed Ring” pairs evolving synth textures with a driving bassline and a melodic lead. Built for the floor, doesn’t overcomplicate the brief. The synth work is what keeps me listening past the first drop.

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Tori Amos - Gasoline Girls

Tori Amos releases “Gasoline Girls”, the third single from her upcoming eighteenth studio album In Times of Dragons, out May 1 via Universal/Fontana. The album is a concept record built around a fictionalised version of Amos fleeing a corrupt billionaire husband across a mythologised American landscape. “Gasoline Girls” marks a turning point in that story: the protagonist encounters a lesbian motorcycle gang whose rallying cry is “we will tend the fire” — standing for solidarity and collective resistance within the album’s allegorical framework.

The song’s meaning extends beyond the narrative. Amos describes it as a meditation on transformation in all its forms: the shift from girlhood to womanhood, changes in gender identity or belief, the transitions that come with pregnancy, motherhood, and menopause. The piano sits at the centre, as it almost always does with Amos, and the track holds its emotional weight without reaching for the dramatic payoff the narrative might otherwise demand. That restraint is what makes it work. To support the album, Amos is currently on her most extensive tour in over a decade, with UK and European dates running through May and a North American leg from July 7 to September 2.

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Honey Dijon - Satisfied

Honey Dijon releases “Satisfied”, the fourth and final pre-release single from her album The Nightlife, out now via someothershit. The track features Jacob Lusk and is produced by Dijon, Luke Solomon, and Chris Penny. The song sits at the intersection of house, gospel, and political commentary. The title’s repeated question addresses the ongoing stripping of rights from queer people, women, and people of colour in America, the logic of a system that takes everything and still wants more.

At the same time, the track carries Dijon’s consistent ambition to put joy and consciousness in the same space — music that works on the dancefloor and holds meaning off it. The full album features fourteen tracks with guests including Bree Runway, Chlöe, Greentea Peng, Mahalia, Rochelle Jordan, and Madison McFerrin. Dijon put it plainly: “gospel, house, political consciousness music.” Three things most producers would treat as separate projects. The fact that this track doesn’t feel overloaded is the point I keep coming back to.

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Oscar Farrell - Burning From (with Goya Gumbani)

Oscar Farrell returns with “Burning From”, a collaboration with Goya Gumbani and the lead single from his third EP Birds Fly In, due June 5 via dh2. Farrell has been building a reputation for house and electronic productions that carry emotional weight rather than just floor-filling beats. Following a summer that included Glastonbury and a well-received collaboration with Sampha, this next step is worth watching.

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White Flowers - Heart Breaks

Preston duo White Flowers — Katie Drew and Joey Cobb — share “Heart Breaks”, the latest single from their upcoming album Dreams For Somebody Else, due May 1 via The state51 Conspiracy. The track is the third preview of the record and has an unusual origin: two halves written at different points across several years that only came together last summer.

The band describe their work as occupying “the realm” — a shared creative space where time moves fluidly and music stays in conversation with past and present selves. On Dreams For Somebody Else, they expand on the dark-hued dream pop of their debut, channelling dance music energy through repetitive structures and what they call “sad, euphoric sounds”. Al Doyle, known for his work with LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip, co-produced the album. “Heart Breaks” draws from a passage in Anne De Marcken’s 2024 novel It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over — hunger, vastness, running through an empty world. The way the track holds that feeling without resolving it is the part that stays with me.

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Loraine James - Flatline ft. Miho Hatori

Loraine James releases “Flatline”, featuring Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto, the second single from her upcoming album Detached From The Rest Of You, out May 8 via Hyperdub. The album marks a deliberate shift: away from club-driven structures, toward more precise song forms. James describes it half-jokingly as her “IDM popstar album”, the production stripped back to clicks and glitches, drawing from the early-2000s clicks-and-cuts school of Aoki Takamasa and Ryoji Ikeda.

“Flatline” puts Miho Hatori’s processed vocals over that minimal framework, the lyric circling a love affair with an AI. The collaboration doesn’t feel like a feature so much as a genuine exchange. What holds my attention is how much the track does with so little — the space around the sounds is doing most of the structural work. The full album features Tirzah, Alan Sparhawk of Low, Anysia Kym, Le3 bLACK, Fyn Dobson, and Sydney Spann, among others.

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Wings of Desire - Just to Survive

Wings of Desire return with “Just to Survive”, the fourth single in their 2026 new moon project. Chloe Little and James Taylor are releasing one track per lunar cycle throughout the year, culminating in their album Stand Still Like The Hummingbird on December 9. Four singles in, the pieces are accumulating toward something, and that sense of an unfolding arc is part of what makes this series worth staying with.

Each instalment has shifted the register slightly — “Whisper” was patient and space-focused, “This Is The Life” pushed harder and wider, and “Just to Survive” lands with its own weight. The title is doing direct work in a year when that phrase keeps coming up in different contexts. I’ve been following this from the first new moon and the picture keeps getting more interesting.

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Tara Clerkin Trio - Silently

Bristol trio Tara Clerkin Trio — Tara Clerkin, Sunny Joe Paradisos, and Patrick Benjamin — return with “Silently”, the second single from their upcoming album Somewhere Good, due June 5 via World of Echo. Their first new music since the widely acclaimed 2023 mini-album On The Turning Ground.

“Silently” runs seven minutes and sits in similar territory to the title track — modern classical and dreamy songwriting, careful studio work, understated arrangement. Seven minutes here feels earned rather than indulgent. The hazy quality is deliberate, and the track eases outward rather than building to anything you’d call a climax. Somewhere Good is the trio’s first full-length album. A deluxe vinyl pressing with a bonus 7” (limited to 500 copies) is available via Bandcamp and World of Echo. Headline tour and festival dates across the UK and Europe also announced.

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BIG SPECIAL - Only Free When Sleeping

Duo Big Special — vocalist Joe Hicklin and drummer Callum Moloney — share “Only Free When Sleeping” alongside news of their new EP O’Joy!, out June 5 via SO Recordings. The ten-track project gathers material from sessions for both their 2024 debut Postindustrial Hometown Blues and last year’s second album National Average: songs that didn’t fit the tone of either record at the time, reworked and given their space.

“Only Free When Sleeping” is what they call a “head-down walking song”: the feeling of moving through a day when everything feels bad, finding temporary relief in sleep, then getting up and doing it again. Distorted guitar, Hicklin’s direct vocal, a refrain that cuts through without trying to be clever about it. The track earns its bleakness rather than performing it, which is the difference with Big Special when they’re working well. O’Joy! is dedicated to the memory of their friend Handsome James Borrer. The band heads into a busy festival summer — Bearded Theory, TRNSMT, Boomtown, Beautiful Days — followed by US dates supporting Lambrini Girls in the autumn.

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MJ Cole x John Glacier - Move Time

MJ Cole links with John Glacier on “Move Time”, out via Platoon. The collaboration follows Cole’s recent work with PinkPantheress on “Still Sincere”, continuing his engagement with a generation of artists whose sound grew partly out of his own UKG foundations. John Glacier is a different proposition — one of the more inventive and unpredictable rappers working in the UK right now.

The pair describe this as a fully integrated collaboration: something built together in the studio rather than constructed in layers. Cole put it directly: “It’s not an MJ Cole beat with some John Glacier vocals.” Glacier frames her contribution in more compressed terms, referencing the need to cut silence and move time. Both descriptions point at the same thing — a track with its own internal urgency that came from two people finding common ground quickly and running with it.

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That’s 20 tracks for W16, assembled from the comfort of home with no excuse not to go deep. No volcanic distractions, no 50km/h winds, no pool. Just me, the hard drive, and a week’s worth of releases to catch up on. I regret nothing. Back to the regular programme.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Opus Kink — Come Over, Do Me Wrong

Ten years after forming, Brighton six-piece Opus Kink finally have a debut album on the way. The Sweet Goodbye arrives July 31 on SO Recordings — long anticipated after the EPs ‘Til The Stream Runs Dry (2022) and My Eyes, Brother! (2023) — and lead single “Come Over, Do Me Wrong”, premiered by Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music, is the first proper look at what to expect. The lineup is Angus Rogers (lead vocals, guitars), Sam Abbo (bass, backing vocals), Fin Abbo (drums, percussion), Jazz Pope (keys, synth, backing vocals), Jack Banjo Courtney (trumpet) and Jed Morgans (saxophone).

That brass-and-keys configuration is central to how the track works: tight, compressed drum pattern underneath, guitars building intensity at an angle, and the trumpet and sax arriving to complicate rather than resolve. It could easily tip into noise, but the band hold the tension carefully — until they don’t, and the seams burst exactly when least expected. Rogers describes the song as being about “the hallucinogenic qualities of a doomed love affair and its toxic allure, the mad philosophical leap of ‘I don’t care what you do as long as you do it to me’.” That framing suits the music: there’s something compulsive and slightly unhinged about how the track keeps circling back rather than building toward release.

What I find most effective is how committed the whole band sounds — six people all leaning into the same controlled chaos at once. The Sweet Goodbye tracklist runs ten songs, including a collaboration with The New Eves on “The Head Tree”. Opus Kink tour the UK and Europe extensively from November into December, taking in London’s O2 Forum Kentish Town, Paradiso in Amsterdam, and dates across France, Germany, and Belgium. Ten years is a long time to wait for a debut album. Based on this, it was worth it.

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New This Week

Disclosure — The Sun Comes Up Tremendous

Disclosure’s first release of 2026 is a significant one. “The Sun Comes Up Tremendous” brings Howard Lawrence to lead vocals for the first time since their 2023 album Alchemy — and the shift in register is audible from the off. Where recent singles leaned into club directness, this one pulls inward: layered synths, restrained vocals, slow-building tension, and — for the first time in Disclosure’s catalogue — a live orchestra, which Guy Lawrence conducted himself.

The song’s structure does most of the emotional work. It opens with a monologue of unbroken self-assurance — “bad things don’t happen to me”, “fortune is on my side” — and then the chorus arrives and pulls the floor out: the sun comes up, and with it, the doubt. It’s a clean dramatic pivot, and the orchestra lands at exactly the right moment. What I find most effective is how long the song holds the brilliance before letting it crack — it earns the collapse. The video was shot near the California coast at dusk, the two brothers facing each other as the light slowly disappears. Disclosure head out on a Spring North American tour from 7 April, with Coachella appearances across both weekends.

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KNEECAP — FENIAN

KNEECAP return with the title track from their second album, due May 1 via Heavenly Recordings. It follows “Smugglers & Scholars” and “Liars Tale” from earlier in the year, and arrives as the final pre-release signal before what’s shaping up to be a significant summer for the Belfast trio. The word “Fenian” carries a long history as an anti-Irish slur, but its roots are older — the Fenian Brotherhood were 19th-century Irish revolutionaries committed to overthrowing British rule. The song reclaims that lineage directly, describing itself as “an anthem to embrace our Fenian past, and to cure our colonial hangover.”

The music delivers: acid rave beats, group chants, a chorus designed to be spelled out by a crowd. Where “Smugglers & Scholars” was sharper and more hip-hop in construction, “FENIAN” swings hard toward the dancefloor. Produced by Dan Carey, whose structural discipline keeps the chaos from sprawling. The 14-track album also features Lankum’s Radie Peat, Kae Tempest, and West Bank-based rapper Fawzi. Before the album drops, KNEECAP do in-store shows across the UK, then Crystal Palace Park on June 27 with The Mary Wallopers, Fat Dog, Biig Piig, Gurriers, and Madra Salach. I keep coming back to the chorus: crude in concept, completely effective in execution.

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Lambrini Girls — Cult of Celebrity

Brighton duo Lambrini Girls return with their first new music since their 2025 debut Who Let the Dogs Out. Phoebe Lunny (vocals/guitar) and Selin Macieira (bass) have spent the past year building a reputation as one of the most volatile live acts in British punk, and “Cult of Celebrity” picks up exactly where the album left off: loud, fast, and uninterested in being polite. The target is the hypocrisy of the wealthy elite, filtered through the old myth of selling your soul to the devil, then subverted: the elite had no souls to sell in the first place. They reference Gramsci’s “now is the time of monsters”, which gives the track a sharper intellectual edge than its surface noise might suggest.

What strikes me on replay is how catchy it is underneath the noise — the hook is built to be shouted back, which at their level of live show matters. “Cult of Celebrity” doesn’t try to recalibrate or soften anything — it simply continues. For a band whose identity is built on that refusal to compromise, that feels exactly right. They’re at Coachella this month, then a full North American run through May, and European festival season from June including Primavera Sound, Øya, and Rock en Seine.

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Getdown Services — The Radiator

Bristol duo Getdown Services — Josh Law and Ben Sadler — return with their first single since last year’s rarities compilation Crumbs 2, following high-profile shows supporting Viagra Boys across Europe and at London’s Alexandra Palace. The song’s premise is simply what it sounds like. “This song is about only picking fights that you know you’ll win,” Josh explains. “It came about because the heating wouldn’t come on once and I thought about when we bang things to make them work. Ben once told me that he used to threaten his PlayStation 1 when games wouldn’t load quick enough. The sense of victory you get when you feel like you’ve physically intimidated an inanimate object is bizarre and pathetic and really funny.”

Musically it sits where Getdown Services have always lived: driving rhythm, sparse electronics, Josh’s deadpan spoken-word delivery doing most of the heavy lifting. The beat has a clipped, angular pulse, and the track builds toward a brief frenetic release that mirrors its logic perfectly. It comes with a B-side, “Scrub It” — shorter, darker, closer to Sleaford Mods. Their North American run is currently underway with most dates sold out, followed by a packed European festival summer including Green Man, Latitude, Pukkelpop, and Bristol Sounds supporting Super Furry Animals.

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Dry Cleaning — Sliced by a Fingernail

Dry Cleaning return with a new single from Secret Love, their third album released on 4AD earlier this year to strong notices. Florence Shaw (vocals), Tom Dowse (guitar), Nick Buxton (drums), and Lewis Maynard (bass) are mid-way through an extensive world tour, with North America, Australia, and New Zealand still ahead. The source material is characteristically oblique: Shaw drew partly from Jooyoung Kim’s picture book Welcome to My Life, about a dog with a very long body — too much body, too much attention, too much exposure. From there the lyrics build into peony buds browning before they open, the fantasy of anonymity in a crowd at night, the sensation of being pressed too hard into something that leaves a mark.

“Sliced by a Fingernail” feels more compressed than some Secret Love material, tighter around its idea — the band’s familiar architecture of early 80s US punk filtered through motorik grooves, Shaw’s spoken-word delivery at the centre, but with the compression turned up. What I keep coming back to is how Shaw delivers the word “concealed”: twice, both times like it costs something to say. That one word does most of the emotional work the whole track is reaching for.

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she’s green — paper thin

Minneapolis five-piece she’s green — Zofia Smith (vocals), Liam Armstrong, Raines Lucas, Teddy Nordvold (guitars), and Kevin Seeback (drums) — have announced their third EP, Swallowtail, due July 10 via Photo Finish Records. “paper thin” is the lead single, recorded, produced, and mixed by Sonny DiPerri, following last year’s Chrysalis. The song is about lust being mistaken for love in a relationship that’s already ended — Smith describes it as exploring “the power of lust in a dying relationship: how it can be confused for love when in reality, the relationship has already faded.”

Shoegaze’s grammar is all over it: reverb-soaked guitars that blur at the edges, a rhythm section holding things together without pushing forward too hard. What catches my ear is the pacing — it refuses to resolve, just keeps circling the same emotional moment, which is exactly right for the subject. Everything feels like it’s on the verge of falling apart without ever quite doing so. That fragility is the point. They’re currently touring North America with Bad Suns, with Chapterhouse dates in May and Reading & Leeds in late August.

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La Sécurité — Snack City

Montréal art-punk collective La Sécurité return with the second single from their upcoming sophomore album Bingo!, out June 12 via Bella Union worldwide and Mothland in North America. It follows the title track and takes all of that frantic, wiry post-punk energy and adds sugar. The premise is deliberately simple: vocalist Éliane Viens-Synnott wrote it while hungry and annoyed by bad pick-up lines, imagining “a self-centered character with food stains and a pizza face who spoke without thinking.” The band ran with it — road snacks, food puns, a French-language hunger chant that loops back insistently.

The bass drives it, the keys pile on, and the guitars dart around the edges in that specifically Montréal way that suggests no wave and noise rock absorbed and repurposed rather than quoted. What catches my ear is how well the track holds its shape despite moving at speed — the countermelodies could clutter it up but instead they lock in. I’ve been listening to this on repeat since it dropped. La Sécurité’s European tour starts May 16 in Paris, running through August.

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corto.alto, Mick Jenkins — WHODIS

Glasgow multi-instrumentalist Liam Shortall returns as corto.alto with his first new music of 2026, a collaboration with Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins. It follows recent singles “APRIL” with anaiis, “VANDAL” with Moses Yoofee, and the solo “DON’T LISTEN” — each track landing in different territory, none of them settling into a predictable mode. “WHODIS” is the most explicit genre pivot yet: Shortall builds a hard-swinging hip-hop beat with clear debts to J Dilla, the swing sitting in the drums, the low end thick, the whole thing carrying that slightly off-kilter looseness that Dilla-influenced production tends to have.

Jenkins, who has spent a decade making records that take that same tradition seriously, fits the beat without effort. The two don’t sound like they’re meeting in the middle — they sound like they’re working from the same set of references. “That’s why I reached out to someone like Mick Jenkins, who I’ve listened to forever. I’m entering a different world with this music,” Shortall says. A US tour is underway, with European headline dates and festival slots including We Out Here, WOMAD, and Montreal Jazz Fest still to come. I wasn’t sure a hip-hop pivot from corto.alto would hold up, but Jenkins on a Dilla-adjacent beat is difficult to argue with.

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Okonski ft. Cochemea — Flying

Okonski — soul-jazz trio Steve Okonski (keys), Aaron Frazer (drums), and Michael Montgomery (bass), all members of Durand Jones & The Indications — return with their second single of 2026 via Colemine Records, and their first to feature a guest instrumentalist. That guest is Cochemea, best known for his work with Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings on the Daptone roster. What stands out is how he fits into the arrangement rather than announcing himself — his tenor sax lines thread through and around the trio’s playing, always present but never dominating. It’s only in the closing stretch that he and Frazer open up, trading in a sax and drum exchange that brings the track home.

The trio’s approach has always leaned contemplative and patient, and “Flying” stays true to that. What catches my ear is how much space they leave in the arrangement — Cochemea’s sax feels like it’s floating moreover stillness rather than filling it. There’s a John Klemmer reference in the DNA and it’s not a bad one: spiritual playing that earns its emotional weight without spelling it out.

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Sosyete ‘25 — Oyun

Sosyete ‘25 return with the second single from their debut album Yaygara on Tru Thoughts. Where debut single “Bilmece” held its breath in a slow-burning haze, “Oyun” moves differently — it leans into disco-funk, keeps the wink in the title (it means play in Turkish), and makes its argument with its feet rather than its hands. The trio are Istanbul-born vocalist Merve Erdem (Kit Sebastian, Brainfeeder), Brighton-based guitarist and producer Glenn Fallows, and Suffolk-based producer Paul Elliott, whose credits run from Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band to Shawn Lee.

Merve wrote the track in Turkish, as she writes everything, and the phrasing carries a lightness that the subject earns — pushing back against the pressure to be everything to everyone. The repetition that runs through much of Yaygara is here too: phrases loop back until they feel shared, less like lyrics and more like something you’d chant with a room full of people. Paul’s production pushes the rhythm forward without letting the track get stiff. I find that balance harder to pull off than it looks, and they do it well here.

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1000 Rabbits — Rubik’s Cube

London five-piece 1000 Rabbits — Laura (violin), Liv (synthesiser), Paolo (guitar), River (vocals), and Luke (drums), four of them originally connected through a music programme in Aldeburgh — return with their second single on Young. Where debut “Virgin Soil” was road-tested across fifty-odd London shows before hitting the studio, this one arrived faster: written in a single afternoon, built around a riff from River with Paolo’s guitar part landing the chorus. The band call it their “James Bond song”, then immediately undercut the label: “It has a similar danciness to ‘Virgin Soil’, but energetically it feels like an inversion, with darker verses and bright releases in the chorus.”

That inversion is the track’s most interesting quality — the structure resists the obvious move and pays off for it. Huw Stephens gave it its radio debut on BBC 6 Music. A sold-out Third Man Records headline is already behind them, and a run of UK, European and festival dates stretches ahead, including Great Escape, Latitude, and MOTH Club on June 30. Still early, still worth watching closely.

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hackedepicciotto — Wiederbelebung

“Wiederbelebung” — German for resurgence — is the lead single from LICHTUNG, the new hackedepicciotto album due July 10 on Mute. It’s the first material from Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto since Hacke’s departure from Einstürzende Neubauten in April 2025, and the first record the duo have made after ending fourteen years of nomadic living to settle on the outskirts of Berlin. The album title translates as “clearing” — a gap in the forest where light comes through. “As the world seems to be spinning ever more quickly into a place of madness, being in this quiet place helps us think about how to deal with it all,” they explain.

The arrangements are more complex than earlier hackedepicciotto work, the electronic range broader. De Picciotto returned to the piano after a long absence, bringing new melodic texture, while Hacke built dense experimental electronic frameworks drawing on memories of his Berlin boyhood. The album was composed entirely in German — a deliberate choice of place and language that gives LICHTUNG a distinct identity. The shift feels considered rather than reactive, and “Wiederbelebung” makes a persuasive case that the change of setting has genuinely shifted something.

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Acolyte — Moon Disaster

Edinburgh ensemble Acolyte return with the third single from their debut EP The Blue Dark, due 22 May on Lost Map Records. Led by Iona Lee — spoken word artist and Scottish Slam champion — the band fold jazz, trip-hop, and experimental performance into something that resists easy categorisation. “Moon Disaster” draws on apocalyptic scenarios, ancient prophecy, and the loneliness of deep space as its lyrical frame, sitting somewhere between a meditation and a slow-motion reckoning.

Lee’s voice carries most of the weight, and the jazz-influenced arrangement gives it room to breathe without losing forward motion. What draws me in is the tonal restraint — for a song built around existential dread and cosmic isolation, it never tips into drama for its own sake. The full EP closes with remixes from Maniatrix, Ravelston, and Eyes Of Others, which is a strong set of names to land on. The Blue Dark has the shape of something worth returning to.

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Telepathy ft. Jo Quail — Home (Redux)

Telepathy share “Home (Redux)”, drawn from their upcoming EP Transmissions 2.0 on Pelagic Records. Where their 2024 record Transmissions first introduced synthesisers and cinematic layering to their post-metal sound, this new EP takes that further — handing tracks to outside collaborators and asking them to rebuild rather than remix. Jo Quail was the obvious choice for this one; Telepathy first encountered her at Dunk! Festival in 2018. “We were literally stopped in our tracks by her performance. Her music feels both organic and futuristic — cello meets live looping — so conceptually, as we re-imagined our full band music into a more electronic space, she felt like the natural collaborator.”

Quail’s cello and live looping approach give “Home” a new structural logic, sitting somewhere between chamber music and ambient electronics without fully becoming either. What strikes me is how the collaboration doesn’t soften the piece so much as reframe it — the cello carries melodic weight the band’s guitars would usually handle, and the looping creates a density that earns its space. A smart pairing, and one that makes the full EP worth watching for.

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Otala — Lord Only Knows Pt.1

London four-piece Otala — Oscar Thorpe (guitar and vocals), Rory Allen (bass), Charlotte Foulkes (sax), and Jacob Wing (drums) — return with the second single from their upcoming EP Better Than The End, due 22 April. It follows debut single “More Fire” and makes a similar case: a band that knows how to hold tension without forcing a release. Recorded with Louis Milburn at Premises Studios and mastered by Shawn Joseph at Optimum Mastering, the whole EP was cut over a single weekend in January.

“Lord Only Knows Pt.1” is built around a lyric that turns the same doubt over and over: holding out for something, holding out for nothing, waiting until the end. There’s no resolution on offer, just the loop of the question, which Thorpe delivers with enough control that it never tips into melodrama. The “Pt.1” in the title signals something larger to come — Otala are building outward carefully, piece by piece, rather than arriving all at once. It’s the kind of track that rewards a second listen more than a first.

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Classic Trucks — Born Naked

“Born Naked” is the new release from Classic Trucks, the solo project of Jarman — drummer and vocalist in Bristol’s Langkamer. Out on Bristol’s Breakfast Records, it’s something he built largely on his terms. The backstory earns its place: Jarman bought a guitar on Gumtree for £10 and spent two years teaching himself to play it. No shortcut, no producer handing him a sound.

The DIY origin shows in the best sense — there’s nothing overworked about it. Two years learning an instrument to make one song is either patience or obsession, and the result feels like both.

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01 by Los Bitchos — Is This Real

Los Bitchos are launching something new alongside their main band activity: a dance music side project called 01 by Los Bitchos. “Is This Real” is the first release from their “Bitchos Baby” series — a run of club-focused tracks that takes the band’s already rhythm-forward, globe-spanning sound and reshapes it with the dancefloor as the explicit target. The band have always had a lot of fun with rhythm and texture, pulling from cumbia, surf, and whatever else catches their attention.

This side project sounds like a natural next step: less about songs, more about movement. As an opening statement, “Is This Real” suggests they know exactly what they’re doing in this territory. Curious where the series goes.

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Ben Sterling & Stevie Appleton — Around The World

London-born producer and DJ Ben Sterling, based between Ibiza and Miami, releases “Around The World” on Counter Records — the Ninja Tune imprint that also carries nimino, Rules, and LP Giobbi. Featuring British singer-songwriter and platinum-selling topline writer Stevie Appleton, it sits in the current melodic house and Afro house crossover space. Sterling describes it as built from “melodic, Afro, and deep house sounds that are popular right now” — he’s not pretending otherwise, and the track doesn’t need to.

Appleton’s vocal centres on longing and distance, the lyric circling back to absence and the pull of connection. The Afro house rhythmic elements sit under the surface rather than dominating, which keeps it from feeling trend-chasing. Not a complicated record, but it does what it sets out to do.

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That’s 19 tracks, all found during a long weekend that technically had other plans for me. The eggs were fine. These were better. At least none of them will go off by Tuesday.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Beck Zegans — I Want You

Beck Zegans built Engraving of Armor in Ridgewood, New York, starting from home demos and developing them over a year of collaborative sessions with Alex MacKay (Nation of Language) on bass and synths, and Julian Fader (Remember Sports) on drums and synths. El Kempner of Palehound contributes lead guitar on two tracks. The album — produced by MacKay, Zegans, and Fader together — arrives May 22 on Exploding In Sound Records, and “I Want You” is its lead single.

“I Want You” runs on machine-like drum pulses that shift tempo deliberately — the speed manipulation isn’t subtle, and it gives the track a slightly unsettled quality that suits the subject. Zegans describes it as a song about a love affair in New York where the past keeps eroding the present. The guitars are heavy enough to push things forward without overwhelming the analog synth textures underneath, and the result lands somewhere between tightly wound indie rock and something looser and more atmospheric. What catches me is how the tempo shifts aren’t a trick — they’re doing emotional work, stretching time in a way that mirrors the push-pull of the lyric.

The album title comes from a poem written by Zegans’ grandmother, Susan Zegans, and the closing track “Armor (Susan’s Poem)” takes its name directly from it. That personal thread runs through Engraving of Armor as a whole — the record deals with pandemic-era frustration and the construction of emotional distance, written, as Zegans put it, “with bare words that no longer hide behind metaphors.” The collaborators here are well-chosen: MacKay’s work in Nation of Language and Fader’s in Remember Sports both sit in that same productive space between indie rock and something more restless. “I Want You” is the kind of single that makes you want the full record sooner.

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Mount Palomar ft. Enola Gay — Feeding Frenzy

The backstory behind “Feeding Frenzy” is bleak and specific. Mount Palomar had returned to Belfast to finish the final single for his new EP when he was assaulted by venue security at a club where he regularly performed, then attacked again on the street moments later. He ended up being driven home in a police car. The next day he met Enola Gay’s lead singer Fionn Reilly and recorded the vocals. “Feeding Frenzy took on a visceral urgency,” Palomar says, “amplifying the song’s themes of escalation, anger, and brutality.” That context is audible — this is breakbeat electronica with a confrontational edge, genre-bending in the way the press material claims but earning the description rather than just inheriting it.

The EP arrives alongside the single and includes remixes from Bristol’s Hodge and Glasgow producer LWS. Hodge takes “Pass the Parcel” (ft. Makeshift Art Bar) and rebuilds its post-punk vocals and acid basslines into a straight 4/4 club track, while LWS reshapes the BBC Radio 6 Music A-listed “Little Fractures” (ft. Pip Blom) into something more leftfield. The collaboration with Enola Gay runs deeper than this single: Palomar is currently producing the band’s debut album. EP launch is April 2 at the 100 Club in London; he’s also booked to close both the Spiegeltent and the Main Stage at Haldern Pop Festival in Germany in August.

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aja monet — elsewhere (feat. Meshell Ndegeocello & Georgia Anne Muldrow)

aja monet has announced her sophomore album The Color of Rain, due May 22 via drink sum wtr, and “elsewhere” is its lead single — featuring Georgia Anne Muldrow, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Novena Carmel. The album follows her 2023 debut When the Poems Do What They Do, which earned a Grammy nomination in 2024. The Color of Rain is co-produced by Monet, Justin Brown, and Ndegeocello, with a live band conducted by Ndegeocello that includes Ambrose Akinmusire and Nico Segal.

“Elsewhere” carries specific weight. Monet wrote it in response to the death of Sly Stone, and the backstory matters: Ndegeocello told her not to write something in memoriam but in homage. She did it overnight. Novena Carmel — Sly Stone’s daughter — joined alongside Georgia Anne Muldrow, both responding the same day Monet reached out. The track is a supple neo-soul groove, the rhythm loose and warm, the vocal contributions from Muldrow and Ndegeocello sitting alongside Monet’s spoken-word delivery without crowding it. “Everything came together in divine timing,” she says. “The song reminds me of our love for one another and the portal of possibility.” Monet plays Carnegie Hall in New York on May 20, just ahead of the release.

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Lee Scratch Perry & Mouse on Mars — Rockcurry

In December 2019, Lee “Scratch” Perry turned up at Paraverse Studio in Berlin — home base of Mouse on Mars (Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma) — and spent three days filling the space with decorative items, talismans, stickers, and slogans written on the walls. The music they made together is Spatial, No Problem, out June 5 via Domino. Perry died in 2021, which makes this a posthumous release. What distinguishes it from similar situations is that it was initiated by Perry himself, on his terms, and he knew exactly what he was walking into. Werner’s account is appropriately elliptical: “We hardly spoke about what we were doing. We met and got going. He was laughing a lot and we laughed along. We also cooked and ate fish soup and papayas.”

“Rockcurry,” the album’s opening track and lead single, establishes the territory quickly. Motorik rhythmic elements sit alongside free improvisation, digital glitches, and dada poetry, with Perry’s voice cutting through in chants, murmurs, and fragments. It has a giddy, danceable quality that doesn’t read as reggae even though Perry’s weight is felt throughout — he reportedly made clear he would rather not make a reggae album with Mouse on Mars, while being constitutionally incapable of making something that doesn’t carry that lineage in its bones. Spatial, No Problem will also be presented as part of the Barbican’s Project A Black Planet exhibition in London this June, played in spatial audio on a D&B Soundscape system.

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Polhawan — No Sweat

Tim Rowing-Parker has been around the Breakfast Records operation long enough to have produced, arranged, and mastered a sizable chunk of its back catalogue — first as Woahnows, then as Immy, and now under a new name. Polhawan is his debut EP project, and “No Sweat” is its lead single, out ahead of Wild Mountain Time (May 14, Breakfast Records). The name change signals a shift in intent: more structure, more polish, but still self-recorded. He built a home studio specifically so he could catch songs as they came. “I feel like a song is never as honest as when it’s first written,” he says, “and the longer it takes to record it, the further it gets from its true feeling.”

That philosophy is audible in “No Sweat.” There’s a looseness to it that feels earned rather than accidental — a riff that could slot comfortably into the Nuggets or Pebbles compilations without sounding like pastiche, fuzz and organ stacking up underneath Rowing-Parker’s freewheeling vocal until the whole thing crests in a final crescendo. Breakfast Records describe the EP as finding strange but arresting ground between Parquet Courts and Fairport Convention, which is an unlikely pairing that “No Sweat” more or less justifies. The slacker-rock looseness and the folk instincts sit together without any visible seam.

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mary in the junkyard — Crash Landing

London trio mary in the junkyard have announced their debut album Role Model Hermit, due July 3 via AMF Records. The band — Clari Freeman-Taylor (vocals, guitar, cello, viola, violin, harmonium), Saya Barbaglia (bass, viola, violin), and David Addison (drums) — wrote the album between the UK and US and recorded it in London during summer 2025 with producer Oli Bayston (Boxed In, Kelly Lee Owens, Alexis Taylor). It follows their 2024 EP and a three-month North American support run with Wet Leg on the MOISTURIZER tour. “Crash Landing” opens with low harmonium drones — warm, almost organ-like — before the strings and Barbaglia’s bass settle in behind Freeman-Taylor’s voice.

It’s a slow-building track in a trip-hop pocket, and the restraint early on is what makes the eventual swell land. Freeman-Taylor traces the song back to time on the road: “We fell in love with the warm low drones of the harmonium. At the time we were listening a lot to Life Without Buildings on tour, so I think I was channelling some chirpy, scattered poetry.” That Life Without Buildings reference holds up — there’s something in Freeman-Taylor’s phrasing that shares that band’s circling, offhand quality. She’s described the lyric as being about emotional unavailability: “about fear and how men often rely on keeping their emotions secret, and how you have to crack them open.” The album launches with a run of UK in-store dates starting July 2.

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Soulwax — Perfect We Are Not

In February, Abbey Road Studios opened their doors to a public rave for the first time in the building’s history — 300 lucky winners of an online ballot, a five-hour 2manydjs set in Studio One using Soulwax’s DEEWEE Soundsystem. Two days before the event, David and Stephen Dewaele walked into Studio Two with their full live band — including three drummers — and wrote “Perfect We Are Not” from scratch. The song was conceived, recorded, mixed, mastered and cut directly to vinyl that same day, then debuted as the opening track of the rave that night. A documentary about the process, shot primarily on 16mm film, is available on YouTube.

The track runs close to eight minutes. It opens with a beat that settles quickly into recognisable Soulwax territory — Stephen Dewaele’s vocals alongside Laima Leyton’s in an unhurried, almost hypnotic delivery. That structural calm doesn’t hold. About halfway through, the synths push hard, the drums accelerate, and the whole thing tips into organised chaos. What’s impressive is that the four drum hits from the intro keep appearing in the wreckage — the architecture holds even as the surface dissolves. Written in a day, in someone else’s studio, with gear you’ve never played before — and it sounds like a Soulwax track. This arrives five months after All Systems Are Lying and earns its full eight minutes.

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Miki Berenyi Trio — Island Of One

Miki Berenyi Trio — Miki Berenyi (formerly of Lush and Piroshka), KJ “Moose” McKillop (of ‘90s shoegazers Moose), and guitarist Oliver Cherer — are back with a standalone single on Bella Union. “Island Of One” is a different gear from the home-studio atmospherics of last year’s debut album Tripla: faster, punchier, more immediate. The origin story is specific. “Island of One took shape because I became quite obsessed with the track ‘Just A Western’ by Nilüfer Yanya last year, and the Latin-y beat got me inspired,” Berenyi explains. “But I wanted a lively, catchy song to add to our live set, so it ended up less laidback and more ‘60s-breezy with some driving, scratchy guitars.”

The Latin-inflected rhythm underneath the guitars gives the track a looseness that stops it tipping into straight indie rock. Lyrically, Berenyi is dealing with something specific: the experience of watching friends navigate increasingly dependent elderly parents, and the broader question of maintaining connection with people who have shared your life, “however difficult those relationships can be to maintain.” Recording happened across the band’s home setups; mix was handled by Paul Gregory of Lanterns on the Lake. A UK and Ireland tour runs through June, with a limited-edition “Island Of One / Stranger” 7-inch at the merch table. A new album is reportedly in progress.

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Cheekface — Black Site

Cheekface — the Los Angeles trio of Greg Katz, Amanda Tannen, and Mark “Echo” Edwards — have announced their sixth album, Podium, due July 28, and they’re previewing it with “Black Site.” The song is, in the band’s own words, a “hooky indictment of CIA black sites and the weaponization of music as a tool to annoy or coerce detainees.” Produced and mixed by Eric Palmquist at Palmquist Studios in Los Angeles, it’s classic Cheekface construction: a politically serious subject delivered through an infectiously singable hook. Katz narrates the anxiety of a world going sideways in short, punchy lines — “I boycotted everything / nothing got better, it only got worse / and now I don’t know where to buy soap” — landing somewhere between genuine dread and absurdist comedy.

The band calls it a bait-and-switch, and they’re not wrong: the song sounds like a good time right until you sit with what it’s actually saying. Podium expands the band’s collaborative circle with contributions from Teddy Roxpin, Jer Hunter of Skatune Network, and Elise Okusami of Oceanator. Cheekface have been doing this particular thing — sharp political comedy dressed as indie rock — for five albums now. An extensive North American tour runs from August through October, with support from Catbite, Apes of the State, and Bodega on various legs.

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The Big Idea — Wilder Oysters

Five months after Half A Dozen — their sixth album, released on Exag Records — the La Rochelle-born, Bordeaux-based group The Big Idea are already back, and they haven’t returned with something easy. “Wilder Oysters” is a rework of “Wild Oyster” from that record, but it doesn’t feel like a remix in the conventional sense. Where the original built toward a progressive crescendo without forcing a payoff, “Wilder Oysters” goes the other direction. It opens with distant drone tones before pulling the listener into heavier territory, layering distressed choirs and a lugubrious saxophone. The production is described as scuba — apt, given its pressurised, slightly claustrophobic quality of going somewhere darker than expected.

The choirs in particular feel like something that couldn’t belong to any other band. It’s five minutes long, psychedelic in the home-made sense, and directed as a video by Léo Filsjean and Vincent Gatto. For a band that never stints on conceptual ambition, “Wilder Oysters” treats a rework as a genuine creative act rather than a stopgap — the kind of track that rewards a second listen more than the first. An extensive European tour runs through October.

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Courtney Barnett — One Thing At A Time

Courtney Barnett’s fourth studio album Creature of Habit arrives today on Fiction Records, and “One Thing At A Time” is its focus track — the last single before the record lands. Written after Barnett relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles and closed Milk! Records, her long-running label, the album is built around the friction of navigating major life changes without fully knowing where they’re leading. The track runs about five minutes and is structured in two distinct halves. For the first two, it’s a stomping rhythm-section groove — Flea on bass, everything locked in — while Barnett works through the kind of internal spiral most people will recognise: over-analysis, pattern repetition, the same frustrations circling back.

Halfway through, the lyrics stop. What follows is a guitar solo that builds for three minutes, getting more intense as it goes. It’s a simple structural idea, but the release feels genuinely earned rather than tacked on — the transition is unhurried, the moment where words run out and the guitar takes over. Earlier singles from Creature of Habit mapped some of the terrain: “Site Unseen” with Waxahatchee appeared in W04, “Mantis” in W09. “One Thing At A Time” is the clearest statement of intent of the lot. UK dates are underway now; a North American tour kicks off in May.

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Marsh & Ferry Corsten — Attraction (Marsh’s Mix)

Marsh and Ferry Corsten are back together with “Attraction,” a two-part release split across two Anjuna labels. Marsh’s Mix lands today on Anjunadeep; Ferry Corsten’s version follows on April 10 via Anjunabeats. It’s their second studio collaboration — the first, “Fulfilment,” was played out to roughly 11,000 people at the Old Royal Naval College in London during Anjunadeep Open Air. Marsh’s interpretation sits firmly in his progressive house register: warm low-end, gradual builds, a melodic topline built for large outdoor spaces. The track has been road-tested extensively — sold-out headline shows at Fabric and Leake Street, plus dates across Australia, India, Europe, South America, and North America.

What catches the ear is how the build holds back longer than expected before it opens up, which gives the release more impact when it comes. Ferry Corsten brings a different lineage to the pairing — one of the architects of Dutch trance, with a Grammy nomination, gold records, and a festival CV that includes Electric Daisy Carnival, Ultra, and Tomorrowland. The split-label release neatly reflects where each version lives sonically: deeper and emotive on Anjunadeep, high-energy trance on Anjunabeats. A limited-edition 12” vinyl featuring both mixes is available exclusively through the Anjuna Music Store.

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Future Islands — Sail

Future Islands are marking twenty years as a band with From a Hole in the Floor to a Fountain of Youth, a double LP due May 22 on 4AD. It’s not a greatest hits — bassist William Cashion, who assembled the tracklist, was clear about that. Instead the collection pulls from split 7”s, Japanese bonus tracks, tour-exclusive VIP pressings, and one previously unreleased demo, spanning recordings from 2009 through 2025. Around half of it has never been on streaming. “Sail” is one of two new songs previewing the release. It was produced by Steve Wright and Future Islands during the As Long As You Are sessions, pressed on a VIP tour-only 7” in 2025, meaning most people are hearing it properly for the first time now.

The production sits in the familiar Future Islands register — Samuel T. Herring’s voice doing most of the emotional heavy lifting, synths holding steady underneath — but there’s something unhurried about it, more like a late-night wind-down than a set-closer. For a band capable of full-throttle moments, the choice to hold back here is deliberate, and it works. The album title comes from a line in the band’s 2009 song “Pinnochio.” Cashion’s explanation is apt: “The hole in the floor is the everyday, but the fountain is the magic that happens when the life you dreamed about actually becomes the one you’re living.” The double LP arrives May 22.

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Styrofoam Winos — Pearls

Nashville trio Styrofoam Winos — Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel — are back with “Pearls,” the lead single from their forthcoming album Any River, due June 19 on Dear Life Records. Recorded in Louisville and produced by Jim Marlowe, the song was inspired partly by Frank O’Hara’s poem “Today” — a short, jubilant list of everyday objects that somehow adds up to something larger. Turner picked up on its central argument, that small, ordinary things carry unexpected meaning, and ran with it. The band members are all songwriters and multi-instrumentalists who swap roles with the kind of ease that comes from years of playing together in Nashville dive bars and on touring stages.

Will Oldham, who has played alongside the band and contributed to Any River, described their work as “a sweet alignment of forces, cooperative and collaborative.” MJ Lenderman, who has also employed Winos members in his band the Wind, kept it simpler: “They know how to boogie.” Both are right. Styrofoam Winos have been building this kind of communal, warm-toned sound since their self-titled 2021 record — blending folk, country, and a faint strain of New Wave without ever making it feel like a genre exercise. “Pearls” slots right into that lineage.

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Downtown Boys — No Me Jodas

Nine years is a long time. Downtown Boys released Cost of Living on Sub Pop in 2017, and while the Providence quintet never exactly went away — they toured, organized, covered Selena, and scored the 2020 Italian film Miss Marx (which won best score at Venice and the David di Donatello Awards) — a proper new album has been a long time coming. Public Luxury arrives June 26 on Sub Pop, and “No Me Jodas” is its opening salvo. The band — Victoria Marie, Joey La Neve DeFrancesco, Joe DeGeorge, Mary Jane Regalado, and Joey Doubek — recorded at Machines With Magnets in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, co-producing with engineer Seth Manchester, who watched the band’s early days when the studio hosted some of their first shows.

“No Me Jodas” — don’t fuck with me — opens with thundering drums and sax before pivoting into something closer to surf-punk, righteously ferocious and genuinely fun at the same time. It manages both registers without hedging: the aggression doesn’t undercut the danceability, and vice versa. Marie frames the record’s politics directly: “We as the people have the power — and we will have it all.” The visual references Marie’s grandmother, who passed away in May 2025 before recording began — a figure the whole band considers significant. That’s exactly the Downtown Boys I remember, and it’s exactly the right time for them to be back.

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Model/Actriz — Glassman

Model/Actriz have been busy. Less than a year after releasing their second album Pirouette, the New York four-piece — Cole Haden, Jack Wetmore, Aaron Shapiro, and Ruben Radlauer — have surprise-dropped Swan Songs, a three-track EP out now on True Panther and Dirty Hit. It’s not a pivot or a teaser for something bigger; just three songs that didn’t fit anywhere else and turned out to be worth sharing. Produced with Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets in Pawtucket, the tracks were developed in the aftermath of the Pirouette sessions. Haden describes it as “a capsule of experiments that by chance formed this moody vignette.” The three tracks don’t sound like outtakes — they sound like the band testing limits and landing somewhere coherent.

“Glassman” leads the EP and is the most immediately Model/Actriz thing here: a 4-on-the-floor industrial banger about a weekend with a crush, built around aggressive beats and Haden’s vocals. The lyrics trace a weekend at the beach with enough specificity — chamomile, lemongrass, magenta sunglasses, swan lake — that it reads more like a memory than a mood board. The chorus works because “I can’t wait to tell my friends about it” is such a plainly human sentiment dropped into all that industrial machinery. Model/Actriz are mid-tour as this drops, with a run of North American dates before Coachella in April and a European summer run to follow including Best Kept Secret, NOS Primavera Sound, and End of the Road.

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That’s 16 tracks for W13 — all of them “essential,” naturally. My filing system has started sending passive-aggressive emails. I’m choosing to interpret this as a sign that it cares.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Ed O’Brien — Blue Morpho

The story behind Blue Morpho matters before you press play. After Earth came out in 2020 to a touring calendar that immediately vanished, Ed O’Brien fell into what he describes as the deepest depression of his life. On the advice of his wife, he began immersing himself in Wim Hof’s breathing and cold-exposure work, then locking himself in his small London studio to play guitar for hours with no direction and no goal. Kentucky poet Wendell Berry provided the guiding principle: “To know the dark, go dark.” Thom Yorke’s old advice — catalogue ideas rather than chase them — shaped the rest. Over four years, those fragments became Blue Morpho, his second solo album and first released under his name, out May 22 via Transgressive.

The production team assembled around the record is worth knowing. O’Brien met Paul Epworth because their kids attended the same school; both apparently too hesitant to ask the other until they did. They worked in weekly sessions in Wales with engineer Riley MacIntyre before finishing at Epworth’s Church Studios in London. Shabaka Hutchings came on board after he and O’Brien got talking at Glastonbury about instruments tuned to 432 Hz — O’Brien asked him to stop by and play flute, and he did. The record was partly written in the hills of Wales, where O’Brien bought a house in 2013 on the remains of a Roman villa, surrounded by ancient oaks and running water. He says the writing began to bloom there. I believe him.

The title track runs to six minutes and gives a reasonable first read on where the album sits. It’s built around a knotty guitar melody, with strings that swell through the arrangement and O’Brien’s voice drifting in and out. What catches me is how patient it stays — there’s no obvious structural payoff being held back, just the song finding its weight slowly. An accompanying short film, Blue Morpho: The Three Act Play, premiered at SXSW and will be released alongside the album. O’Brien says he’s still working out how to play the material live; no tour dates yet, though Radiohead will return to the road in 2027. Blue Morpho feels like an artist genuinely rebuilding from scratch — not performing the idea of a solo record, but actually making one.

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NEW THIS WEEK

Anna Calvi and Matt Berninger — Is This All There Is?

After scoring the final two seasons of Peaky Blinders and composing an opera with Robert Wilson, Anna Calvi returns with a four-song EP of duets due March 20 on Domino. Her collaborators — Iggy Pop, Laurie Anderson, Perfume Genius, and The National’s Matt Berninger — aren’t random features. “They share a kind of subversive honesty,” Calvi says. “They’re not trying to please anyone.” The title track, her duet with Berninger, was originally written for Joanna Hogg’s 2021 film The Souvenir Part II, where it went unreleased. She rebuilt it as a duet.

The contrast between Calvi’s voice and Berninger’s is the point — her delivery tightly controlled, his carrying the weight of something older and more worn. Synth-rock in structure, but with enough space that the two voices feel like they’re searching independently rather than performing together. “We’re both searching for answers — together and yet somehow always apart, which I find beautiful,” she says. What catches me is how the arrangement keeps them distinct even when they’re singing the same line, which mirrors the lyric precisely. The EP sits at the start of a planned trilogy exploring identity and transformation, prompted by Calvi’s experience of becoming a parent. A strong case for one of the year’s more quietly ambitious releases.

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Death Cab for Cutie — Riptides

Death Cab for Cutie formed in 1997, spent their early years on Barsuk, crossed to Atlantic in 2005 with Plans, and have spent two decades since as one of indie rock’s more reliable names. Now, with their eleventh album I Built You a Tower due June 5 on ANTI- Records, they’re back on an independent label for the first time in twenty years. “Riptides” is the first single, building slowly — guitar and Gibbard’s voice doing most of the early work before the band fills in around a bridge that earns its weight. The whole album took three weeks to record, split between Animal Rites in Los Angeles and the various home studios of a band spread across Seattle, Bellingham, Portland, and LA. John Congleton produced. “We weren’t afraid of a deeply human sound, some messiness,” Gibbard says. “This isn’t an airbrushed photograph.”

The album’s title came out of a specific pressure point: the anniversary tours for both Transatlanticism and Plans, during which Gibbard was also fronting The Postal Service nightly on arena stages while his marriage was falling apart. “Riptides” is about what happens when personal grief and the weight of a world in difficulty compound each other into paralysis. “I’m too tired to talk / I’m too tired to end the war / And I can’t seem to hold it together / Anymore” — specific enough to feel honest and vague enough to land somewhere broader. I hadn’t expected to find it this affecting on first listen. North American summer dates and a UK/European leg in the autumn are confirmed.

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Cola — Conflagration Mindset

Montreal trio Cola — Tim Darcy, Ben Stidworthy, and Evan Cartwright — release their third album Cost of Living Adjustment on May 8 via Fire Talk. Darcy and Stidworthy came up together in Ought before founding Cola with Cartwright in 2021, and this follows 2024’s The Gloss. “Conflagration Mindset” is the second single. Darcy lost his home in the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, and the track was written in the aftermath. “When you go through something like that, people come out of the woodwork and share their stories with you,” he says. “I learned a lot about house fires in general and the way they can reshape lives and whole communities. Because of that it’s really a song about the nature of loss in general.”

The production makes the most of that tension. The track started as a synth and drum machine sketch Cartwright circulated, and Darcy and Stidworthy worked out how to translate his synth parts onto bass and guitar — blending synthetic and live versions in the studio, keeping both. What you get opens sparse and cold, Cartwright’s filtered percussion underneath, before Stidworthy’s bassline comes in steady and Darcy’s vocals settle into the track’s particular brand of tightly wound calm. The Sonic Youth and Pavement comparisons are there if you want them, but the song is quieter than either, more interior. What caught my ear is that the arrangement never pushes for catharsis — it holds its emotional temperature all the way through, which given the subject feels like exactly the right call. They’re touring North America in July and Europe in the autumn.

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Truthpaste — Bus Song

Truthpaste are a Manchester-formed, London-based five-piece who have spent three singles carefully refusing to stay in one lane. Their debut “See You Around” earned a Steve Lamacq co-sign; “Bleary Eyes” pushed further into folk-electronic territory. Both vinyl runs sold out. “Bus Song”, their first release of 2026 on Dirty Hit and Memorials of Distinction, pivots toward what vocalist and saxophonist Esmé Lark calls the band’s “emo rock” side. The lineup is Lark on vocals and saxophone, Euan McNeill on bass, guitar, and vocals, Theo Murchie on guitar, Claire Sun on violin, and James Ballarò on synth and lapsteel. The drum machine is a fixture born of necessity — at university, rehearsing in tiny rooms, they couldn’t afford a studio. That constraint shaped how the band writes: committed and fully structured from the start.

“Bus Song” is a duet — McNeill and Lark trading verses over minor-key guitar lines, saxophone cutting through wavey synths that drone beneath the mix. McNeill had the melody in his head for weeks before the band got hold of it. The lyricism stays grounded in something specific: the rhythm of a bus journey, two people trying to meet in the middle, stop by stop. What catches me is the outro — the way it holds back, holds back, then finally lets go. “We never came in with a sound in mind,” Lark says. “It all kind of melts together into something quite different from each individual person would make on their own.” Three singles in, that’s starting to sound less like a mission statement and more like a demonstrated fact. UK dates confirmed through May.

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deary — Alma

London trio deary are now three singles deep into their debut album campaign, and each one has told a slightly different story. We covered “Seabird” in W03 and the emotionally sprawling “Alfie” in W09. “Alma” lands differently — it’s the most pop-forward thing they’ve shared from Birding, and also the oldest: vocalist Dottie Cockram says it’s been with the band since they formed in 2020, changing as they changed. The band — Cockram on guitar and vocals, Ben Easton on guitar, Harry Catchpole on drums — came together over a shared love of Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine, and those touchstones are all present here. But the comparison that keeps coming up is The Sundays, and it fits: swirling guitars under Cockram’s vocals, a melody that hooks without forcing it, something that shimmers without losing its weight.

Cockram describes “Alma” as a conversation with her younger self — “the decision to look after us and become a better person,” as she puts it. The title comes from the Spanish word for soul and a Latin root associated with kindness and nourishment, and that meaning does something useful: it reframes the introspection as care rather than crisis. What caught my ear is how the track holds both at once — it’s intimate without being heavy, a quality that’s harder to pull off than it sounds. Birding is out April 3 via Bella Union. After three singles, deary haven’t put a foot wrong, and this one might be the most immediately loveable of the three.

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Atsuko Chiba — Torn

Montréal five-piece Atsuko Chiba are back with “Torn”, the second single from their self-titled fourth album, due April 24 on Mothland. We covered the lead single “Retention” back in W06, where the album’s approach came into focus — free-form sessions, stripped-back instrumentation, a deliberate move away from the aggressive guitar sound of their earlier records. The band’s own description of this song does more for it than any summary: it follows a protagonist who constructs a false reality to earn others’ trust, gradually loses himself in the deception, and ends up at the edge of a cliff, unsure how long he’s been awake. What happens next remains unresolved — does he jump, or does an old photograph of himself beside his father surface from his wallet, pulling him back? They don’t answer. Imposter syndrome reframed not as paralysis but as propulsion, until the machine runs out of road.

Musically, “Torn” earns that description. Built around the rhythm section with synthesisers and layered vocals doing most of the structural work, it holds its tension until a shift near the end that makes the lyrical ambiguity land harder. What gets me is how the arrangement mirrors the narrative — controlled and forward-moving right up until it isn’t.

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Wings of Desire — This Is The Life

Chloe Little and James Taylor are twelve months into an ambitious project: one single per new moon through 2026, culminating in a full album on December 9th. “This Is The Life” is the latest instalment, landing squarely in the post-punk and new wave territory the duo have been refining since their 2023 album Life Is Infinite. We covered the opening chapter in W04 with “Whisper” — a patient, space-focused track that set the tone. “This Is The Life” pushes harder. The guitar riffs are wider, the vocals more open, and the production retains the analog warmth of their earlier work while reaching for something bigger. It sounds like a band that’s been playing live rooms and absorbing that energy — which tracks, given time spent supporting Editors, Nation of Language, and Bleach Lab, and a set at The Roundhouse alongside The Cribs.

Lyrically it questions the “live in the moment” cliché rather than endorsing it — pointing at the exhaustion behind the advice, the loneliness underneath the hustle, before opening out into something more genuinely hopeful. I love how the arrangement mirrors that arc: the verses are hemmed in, almost claustrophobic, and the chorus earns its lift rather than just asserting it. Wings of Desire describe their work as conscious living set to music, a Factory-era creative outlet for a disenfranchised generation. Whether or not you buy the manifesto, the songs are making good on it.

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Laura Misch — Kairos

Laura Misch’s second album Lithic arrives June 5 via One Little Independent, and its title tells you where it’s headed: stone, geology, slow time. “Kairos” — an Ancient Greek word for non-sequential, unhurried time — is the third preview, following lead single “Echoes” which we covered when the album was announced. Both this track and “Scrolls” were recorded across two very different locations: a disused slate quarry in Cornwall and the Greek island of Hydra. The key instrument threading through the sessions is the Musical Stones of Skiddaw, a 180-year-old lithophone — an instrument built from naturally resonant slabs of stone — which Misch weaves alongside sax improvisations and field recordings of wind, rain, and sea. The concept draws on Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture practice and composer Pauline Oliveros’s deep listening: sound as geological material, shaped by time and erosion the way rock is.

“Kairos” captures the album’s core theme directly — how the world is shaped slowly, over time, in ways we can’t fully track in the moment. What caught my ear is how the production resists the obvious move: there’s no swell, no release, no payoff in the traditional sense. It just holds its ground, which is entirely the point. She plays the Barbican in London on July 3.

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Baby Cool — Everything

Grace Cuell writes songs as Baby Cool out of Brisbane, and “Everything” is the first single from her second album Infinity Baby, due June 5 on Fuzz Club’s Bad Vibrations imprint. Cuell also co-fronts Nice Biscuit, but Baby Cool operates in a different register — more inward, more considered, somewhere between psychedelia, folk, and kraut-pop. The album was made in the hills of the Northern Rivers with producer Samuel Joseph, who has worked with King Gizzard and Family Jordan. Where her debut Earthling on the Road to Self Love leaned whimsical, Infinity Baby sounds more grounded — songs moving through desire, cynicism, devotion, and surrender, always circling back to something like hope.

“Everything” sits at the exhausted end of that spectrum. Cuell describes it as embodying “the desperation that comes from trying to squeeze meaning from every moment… the way that a relentless pursuit for meaning can be an intoxicating and uprooting practice.” What’s interesting is how the music plays against that weight — hand-claps, a propulsive rhythm, psych-tinged and retro in the best sense. The arrangement does the emotional work that the lyrics describe rather than illustrate. I wasn’t expecting something this kinetic from a song about burnout, and that tension is exactly what makes it stick.

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Mirror Revelations — Liberar

Mirror Revelations are a trio from Toluca, Mexico, and “Liberar” is the latest single from their second album Ígnea, due May 22 on Fuzz Club — their debut on the label, following Aura (2023). Ígnea was written, recorded, and produced entirely by the band. The approach was to strip the instrumentation back deliberately — reducing it until what remained could translate faithfully into a live set — and build around repetition and intensity instead. Pedal-processed synthesisers sit over a bass and drums backbone that doesn’t let up. The motorik and krautrock roots are still there, but the industrial psych has come forward, and the mood is darker.

I like that restraint. A lot of heavy psych builds toward a payoff; this one just holds the tension and doesn’t apologise for it. Lyrically, the album addresses resistance and inner awakening under oppression, and “Liberar” carries that weight without spelling it out. A Toluca band on Fuzz Club with a clear sense of what they’re after — worth paying attention to.

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Stuck — Sicko

Chicago three-piece Stuck — Greg Obis on guitar and vocals, David Algrim on bass, Tim Green on drums — release their new album Optimizer on March 27 via Exploding In Sound. “Sicko” is the third preview, following “Instakill” and “Deadlift”. It’s a short post-punk track that moves fast and hooks hard. The central lyric — “Don’t you wish you were someone else / Don’t you ever get sick of yourself?” — lands with the kind of blunt directness that makes the genre work when it’s done right. I like that it doesn’t dress the question up. It just asks it, then gets back to the riff. If Optimizer keeps this up across a full record, March 27 will be a good day.

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Otala — More Fire

London four-piece Otala open their account with “More Fire”, the debut single from their upcoming EP Better Than The End, due April 22. The band — Oscar Thorpe on guitar and vocals, Rory Allen on bass, Charlotte Foulkes on sax, and Jacob Wing on drums — recorded the whole EP over a single weekend in early January at Premises Studios. Post-rock with a sax feels like it could go either way, but Otala keep things controlled. What catches my ear is the way the song holds its tension without releasing it cleanly — the lyric circles the same line, “whistling down the street”, losing the thread mid-phrase each time, and the arrangement follows suit. It doesn’t resolve so much as run out of road.

A London band with a touring base rooted in Nottingham and Sheffield — they’ve played The Bodega alone nine times — Otala arrive at this debut single with a live foundation most new acts spend years building. That comes through. UK dates run through May, with a Paris headline show at Supersonic on May 6.

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Stik Figa & Heather Grey — No Secrets (feat. Asher Roth)

Stik Figa and Heather Grey both work in the understated end of hip-hop, where craft matters more than flash. “No Secrets”, out on Mello Music Group, pulls in Asher Roth, and the three-way combination sits in that classic Mello pocket: deliberate, clean, nothing wasted. It’s a track that trusts the listener, and that restraint is what put it on the list for Week 12.

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That’s 14 tracks filed under ‘urgent’ — which, unlike everything else on my desk this week, actually got done.

If any of these caught your ear, drop me a line — I genuinely love hearing what lands for people, especially when it validates the increasingly unjustifiable size of my music library. And if you’re as helplessly addicted to new music as I am, consider sharing this with a fellow obsessive. Misery loves company, and so does excessive playlist curation.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Hanry — Aurora

HANRY are a five-piece from Brittany — Jean-Anaël Aubaux and Hadrien Benazet on guitars, Anthony Leliard on bass and guitar, Marc Mifune on piano and synth, Clément Champigny on drums — and we’ve had our eye on them since W48 2024. Now they’ve announced their debut album What Came From Silence, due May 29th via Pelagic Records, and lead single “Aurora” is the clearest indication yet of what they’ve been building toward.

The song has an unusually long backstory for a debut album track. Leliard composed the original sketch around ten years ago, at the very beginning of the project. It’s been sitting in the catalogue ever since, waiting for the right version. The band reshaped and arranged it collectively for the album, and that process shows — it doesn’t feel like a demo that got polished up, it feels like a piece that found its form. Dark and tense, “Aurora” moves through contrasting periods: clean tones give way to distortion, quiet passages accelerate into something heavier, wide-open dynamics pulled tight and then released. What I find effective is that it never rushes. The tension accumulates slowly enough that when the release comes, it actually registers.

Production is self-handled: Aubaux and Champigny both work as sound engineers, and the album was recorded and mixed at their own DiscoCasino Studio, with mastering by Chab. It’s the kind of setup that gives post-rock bands room to get obsessive about texture, and What Came From Silence sounds like they used that freedom well. The album was written during a long Breton winter — which tracks, because it carries that kind of shut-in, low-light atmosphere throughout its eight tracks. Closing track “Phantom Rush” features pianist Mariposa as a guest collaborator. If “Aurora” is the door in, it’s a convincing one.

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NEW THIS WEEK

Kim Gordon — PLAY ME

PLAY ME is out today on Matador Records, and Kim Gordon has shared the title track alongside a video directed by Barney Clay. We covered the singles campaign as it built — “NOT TODAY” back in W03 and “DIRTY TECH” in W07 — so this is the third and final piece before the album gets its full treatment in the March Spotlight.

“PLAY ME” is the album opener, and it sets the tone deliberately. Over a laidback trip-hop groove, Gordon lists Spotify playlist names and mood-marketing language — “make out jams”, “spring pop, chill vibes, feel free”, “neon cowgirl” — as both description and critique. She’s narrating the exact aesthetic flattening of culture the record pushes back against, doing it with enough cool detachment that the whole thing lands as sardonic without tipping into lecture. What works is that the track doesn’t announce itself; it just drifts in and makes its point without raising its voice.

Clay’s video, set inside a chaotic shopping mall with censored and blurred faces throughout, leans into the record’s themes of technocratic surveillance and billionaire-class damage. The album gets a full look in the March Spotlight. For now: it’s here, it’s good, and “PLAY ME” earns its place as the door you walk through. She tours Europe in April — The Hague, Nantes, London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw — and North America through July.

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The Orielles — Wasp

The Orielles have been building toward “Only You Left” single by single since January, and “Wasp” — the last preview before the album’s release — might be the sharpest of the lot. It’s a heavy, angular thing: Henry Wade’s guitar locked into a drone-heavy riff while Sidonie Hand-Halford’s drums hit with pummelling directness. Esmé Dee Hand-Halford holds the low end and the melody together simultaneously, and here the contrast between those two jobs feels especially pronounced.

The lyric is genuinely odd in the best way. It follows a wasp — literally, a wasp — climbing a mountain, using that absurd scale difference to work through questions of faith, purpose, and self. The band cite the 1947 film “Black Narcissus” as an influence: that sense of confronting something so vast it destabilises you. The kicker: “ultimately it is nature itself that conditions the wasp to hurt us.” The heaviness isn’t decorative; it actually sounds like something enormous pressing down.

“Only You Left” was recorded in Hamburg and on the Greek island of Hydra with producer Joel Anthony Patchett, and the contrast between those environments — industrial versus bare island — fed directly into the album’s preoccupations. “Wasp” follows “Tears Are” (W07), “You are Eating a Part of Yourself” and “To Undo the World Itself” (W02). The album is out now via Heavenly Recordings. The trio headline the ICA in London in June.

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Lip Critic — Jackpot

The backstory for Theft World — Lip Critic’s third album, due May 1 on Partisan Records — is genuinely difficult to make up. While touring behind 2024’s Hex Dealer, frontman Bret Kaser’s identity was stolen by a young fan who believed the band’s music contained hidden codes for an elaborate scavenger hunt. Rather than calling the police, the band tracked him down, recorded him explaining his imagined mythology, scrapped the album they were working on, and built a new one around the whole episode. That kind of creative decision either produces something unhinged or something interesting. Based on “Jackpot”, the second single, it looks like the latter.

“Jackpot” runs on jarring percussion, discordant synths and slot machine clatter, with Kaser’s vocals riding the line between rapping and shouting — cycling through debt paranoia, withdrawal logic and the kind of self-bargaining that sounds like a person losing an argument with themselves. The lyrics put a protagonist raised on gambling ads into a hotel room, sweating, hiding coins in jars sewn under his skin to keep himself from spending. It’s bleak subject delivered at high velocity. What works is how the track earns its chaos: the structure tightens as the addiction narrative tightens, and by the time it opens back out, the damage feels real.

The video, directed by Colter Fellows, places Kaser in a casino going through the predictable and inevitable motions. An extensive North American tour runs May through June, hitting New York, Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta and Philadelphia among others.

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Lice (Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman) — Who Sent You?

Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman have been making Lice EPs since 2015 — three of them in quick succession, then nothing for nine years. “Miami Lice: Season Four” dropped this week via Rhymesayers Entertainment, and it’s the longest one yet at eight tracks, all produced by Aesop. The gap hasn’t dulled anything. If anything, they sound more locked in.

“Who Sent You?” opens the EP and sets the tone immediately. Aesop’s verse runs on that familiar hyper-referential warp — MKUltra, shrinky dinks, Basquiat clones, Moroccan argan oil in the same breath — while Homeboy Sandman takes the second verse somewhere drier and funnier, riffing on rent hikes, internet addiction, and blue whales on his coattails. The production underneath has that lively, low-end bounce Aesop’s been refining — bass guitar, head-nod drums, nothing overcooked. What caught my ear is how naturally the verses coexist without either MC adjusting their register to meet the other. They just both do their thing, and it works.

That chemistry is the whole point of Lice. The two became close when Aesop brought Sandman on tour in 2015, and the surprise self-titled EP that year was an immediate hit in underground circles. “Still Buggin’” followed in 2016, “Triple Fat Lice” in 2017, then a long stretch of solo work and a nine-year gap. Eight tracks, roughly half an hour, no filler. “Burnt Mauve” and the drumless closer “Evolution” are both worth your time alongside the opener.

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Tiga — FRICTION

Montreal’s Tiga has been building toward HOTLIFE — his first album in a decade — through a string of singles, and “FRICTION” is the last of them before the album drops April 17 on Turbo Recordings and Secret City Records. It follows “ECSTACY SURROUNDS ME”, “SILK SCARF” with Fcukers (covered in W49), and “HOT WIFE” featuring Boys Noize. The album itself is a 12-tracker with appearances from Maara and MRD, and it’s been a long time coming: Turbo Recordings, which Tiga founded, helped launch Chromeo, Gesaffelstein, Duke Dumont and Charlotte de Witte — but Tiga’s own full-length output has been sparse for years.

“FRICTION” is a departure from the quick-fire hooks that tend to define his work. Co-written with Jesper Dahlbäck and Francis Latreille (aka Priori), with additional production from Patrick Holland and mastering by Mike Marsh, it was made between Stockholm and Montreal. Slower, groove-driven, built around a central mantra about tension and needing attention, it positions dance music as a release valve for collective pressure rather than just a good time. “Too much friction, too much tension… I need some of your attention.” What I find interesting is how patient the track stays — it doesn’t rush toward the drop, it just keeps moving.

The tour is already underway. Buenos Aires and São Paulo this week, then a run through Europe and North America stretching well into autumn: Munich, Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, Rome, EDC Las Vegas, Movement Detroit, HARD Summer Los Angeles, ARC Chicago and more.

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Sean Solomon — Remember

Sean Solomon spent two years writing and recording his debut solo album after Moaning — the LA three-piece he fronted, who put out two records on Sub Pop — went on indefinite hiatus in 2023. The result is The World Is Not Good Enough, out April 17th via ANTI- Records, and “Remember” is the first single. Solomon is a San Fernando Valley kid whose formative obsessions ran in parallel: The Simpsons, Daniel Clowes’s graphic novels, Elliott Smith, Nirvana, Daniel Johnston. He booked his first shows at coffee shops and The Smell in LA while still in high school, then spent years in Moaning before stepping out solo.

“Remember” sits in the quieter register of that lineage — acoustic guitar, bittersweet melody, the kind of directness Solomon traces back to those ‘90s touchstones. It’s a song about trying to hold on to a generous view of your parents rather than the complicated one. “This song is about trying to remember the good,” he says. The video cuts together old family home footage that Solomon’s parents asked him to digitise; he ended up repurposing it for live visuals too. What catches me is how unadorned the song stays — it doesn’t push for its emotional effect, which is precisely why it lands.

Producer Jarvis Taveniere (Whitney, Purple Mountains, Waxahatchee) handled production and plays bass on the record. Shannon Lay appears on backing vocals and guitar. Solomon also animates every video he releases, draws comics, and performs solo with a vintage TV set playing his animations from VHS. He’s currently on a European run supporting Unknown Mortal Orchestra through the end of March.

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Mei Semones ft. John Roseboro — Tooth Fairy

“Tooth Fairy” has one of the more disarming origin stories you’ll hear this week. Mei Semones was on her way to meet John Roseboro at a friend’s bookstore in Greenpoint when they happened to get off the same train on the same platform. Roseboro smiled at her and held out his hand — a tooth had just fallen out. Semones wrote a song about it.

The track is a duet, and the premise earns its warmth. Semones brings in her full band — Noam Tanzer on bass, Ransom McCafferty on drums, Claudius Agrippa on violin, and Noah Leong on viola — building a sound that sits comfortably across jazz, folk and bossa nova without forcing the combination. She cites a tune by Brazilian guitarist Guinga as the inspiration for the arpeggiated guitar chords at the track’s centre, and that influence sits lightly but distinctly underneath everything. What catches my ear is how the strings and vocal interplay stay understated — the song doesn’t push for emotional effect, it just lets the story carry it.

“Tooth Fairy” is the second single from the upcoming EP Kurage, out April 10 on Bayonet Records. We covered lead single “Koneko” ft. Liana Flores in W07, and Semones has been on our radar since “Kurayami” back in W43.

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HATIHATI — Head

Bart Demey and Tania Gallagher have been operating under various aliases for years — music supervisors for avant-garde fashion label Kokon to Zai (Marjan Pejoski’s outfit, responsible for Björk’s swan dress among other things). Now they’re HATIHATI, and today they debut on DEEWEE — the label run by David and Stephen Dewaele of Soulwax/2manydjs — with a two-track release, Whip It / Head.

“Head” is the one that earns its place here. The duo’s approach to sound design is the interesting thing: no sampling. Everything in their ever-growing library, which they call “Dear User”, is synthesized from scratch — recreations of sounds from nature, from kitchens, from everyday situations pushed until they become something else entirely. The result is dense and cinematic, the kind of electronics that feel physical rather than decorative. What caught my ear is how the texture shifts without losing weight; there’s a lot happening underneath, and it rewards the volume.

The DEEWEE connection makes sense. After previewing the project at the label’s 2025 Halloween event DEEWEEKEND and supporting Soulwax on their “All Systems Are Lying” tour, HATIHATI has been road-tested before the record even arrived. “Head” holds up as a debut statement — specific enough to suggest a real direction, not just a genre exercise.

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newhvn — Skin off the Bone

Dublin’s newhvn have been building their sound through years of European, UK and Asian touring — sharing stages with Touché Amoré and Trauma Ray along the way — and “Skin off the Bone” is the first single from their debut album Spring Time Blues, due in April on Faction Records. It was recorded with producer Tom Peters (Alpha Male Tea Party) at Black Bay Studios on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland: remote enough that the band themselves noted they “went to the edge of the world” to make it.

The track lands somewhere between post-rock, shoegaze and post-hardcore — wide-open in its dynamics, loud where it needs to be, with the kind of slow-build structure the band traces back to their instrumental roots. Spring Time Blues is a 10-track debut that adds more personal and emotional lyrical weight to that framework, citing Pinegrove and The War on Drugs as reference points. There’s a confidence in the arrangement that usually takes longer to arrive on a debut.

An extensive European headline tour runs April through June: Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Oslo, Copenhagen, Budapest, Vienna and more — the full routing is on our site.

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Heavy Lungs — GODKILLER

A year on from Caviar, Bristol’s Heavy Lungs are back with “GODKILLER” — their first new material since that album, and the first without their original guitarist. Frontman Danny Nedelko is candid about what prompted it: the band kept going through the usual life attrition (lineup change, money stress, relationship breakdowns), decided they still wanted to make music, and this is what came out.

Nedelko describes the track as a continuation of a theme from Caviar’s “Roy” — rumination on emotions, control, shame, and how you see yourself. The title is blunt on purpose: “killing a god” is his phrase for cutting loose from someone who holds too much influence over you, making space to grow by removing them from the pedestal. It’s a Heavy Lungs song in every recognizable way — the same no-brakes energy, the same kind of lyric that’s more about a feeling than a narrative. What I find interesting is how matter-of-fact Nedelko is about the subject; there’s no drama in the explanation, which gives the music room to carry the weight instead. They play Amsterdam’s Tolhuistuin on April 22.

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Tara Clerkin Trio — Somewhere Good

Bristol trio Tara Clerkin Trio — Tara Clerkin, Sunny Joe Paradisos and Patrick Benjamin — have announced their first full-length album, Somewhere Good, due June 5 on World of Echo. The title track arrives as the lead single, and it’s a solid introduction to where they’ve taken their sound since 2023’s On The Turning Ground.

The trio’s earlier releases established a palette built around harmonium drones, upright bass, woodwinds, acoustic guitar and soft keys, woven together with understated beats and careful studio manipulation. “Somewhere Good” sits comfortably in that space — dub undercurrents, kraut-tinged folk pacing, Clerkin’s voice calm and central over arrangements that shift without ever rushing. Produced by Dominic Mitchison and mastered by Noel Summerville, it’s a track that rewards the kind of listening you do without quite meaning to. What I keep coming back to is how the rhythm section behaves — there’s actual drumming underneath the samples, and it shows. A band working at their own pace and on their own terms.

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Flair — Nausea

Glasgow’s Flair have been building steadily since their 2023 debut EP and breakout track “Run Away” — shortlisted at the 2025 Scottish Live Music Awards for Best Live Artist, festival slots at Belladrum Tartan Heart, stages shared with Pentire and Arkayla. “Nausea” is their first new material of 2026, the lead single from their second EP For Lack of a Better Word, due July 10 on Revo Pro.

The band describe it as their most raw and direct to date, and the source material backs that up. Vocalist Tony Collum says the track came out of late 2025 studio sessions and channels the pressure of lineup changes, turbulent relationships and restless ambition — “spiralling thoughts and the emotions behind the pressures” is how he puts it. Musically it opens with pulsing bass and jagged guitars before desperate vocals press against them, never quite resolving the tension it builds. It earns the title. Reference points — Wunderhorse, The War on Drugs, Fontaines D.C. — are worn clearly on the sleeve, but the combination is theirs.

A UK run follows through the summer: Nice n Sleazy’s Glasgow this month, Dead Wax Birmingham in June, King Tut’s Glasgow in July (headline), The Dublin Castle London in September.

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Les Big Byrd — Hökvind

Stockholm four-piece Les Big Byrd have been at this since 2011, and “Hökvind” — the lead single from their fifth album “Ruin Everything” — is a reminder of what they do when they’re not holding back. It’s full-throttle space rock: the kind of track that tips its hat directly to krautrock and heavy psych without sounding like a museum piece. Fronted by songwriter and producer Jocke Åhlund, the band have always sat in an interesting position — massive at home in Sweden, cult act everywhere else — and this is the side of them that earned the cult.

“Ruin Everything” drops June 5 via Chimp Limbs, and it follows 2024’s “Diamonds, Rhinestones and Hard Rain,” which leaned hard into instrumental and experimental territory. This one pulls back toward songs — comparisons to 2018’s “Iran Iraq IKEA” are already circulating — and “Hökvind” makes the case for that direction immediately. Where the last record sprawled, this one locks in. What caught my ear is how committed it stays to the momentum — no breakdown, no ambient detour, just the thing accelerating until it’s done. Exactly what it wants to be.

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Cubzoa — HAYBOY

Jack Wolter — who makes music as Cubzoa and plays guitar in both Penelope Isles and CMAT — has announced a new collaborative EP with Brighton producer Luke Phillips, who records as Icebeing. The Cubzoa vs Icebeing EP arrives Friday via Bella Union, and “HAYBOY” is the lead single.

“HAYBOY” has a long history in Wolter’s catalogue — it appeared on the very first Cubzoa release and got tried out in Penelope Isles too. This version doesn’t tear it apart the way some other EP tracks do; Wolter and Phillips worked on it together, reshaping rather than dismantling. The result sits somewhere between bedroom electronics and something more cinematic: layered harmonies, textural glitching, and a chord sequence toward the end that Wolter calls his favourite moment on the record. “The rainbow-like, euphoric chords Luke introduces toward the end is one of my favourite moments on the EP.” What catches my ear is how much patience goes into the track — it builds gradually, and Phillips knows when to hold back.

The EP is a back-and-forth exchange between the two, built mostly online. Three tracks from Wolter’s debut solo album Unfold In The Sky get reworked alongside three new songs. “Stuck” is the most experimental: a pitched-up demo fragment stretched into something closer to ambient drift, built from discarded orchestral textures.

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Fresh Kils & Myer Clarity — End of Days (feat. Roshin & DJ Versatile)

MPC specialist Fresh Kils and lyricist Myer Clarity have announced OCDC, a collaborative album due May 19th via URBNET. Lead single “End of Days” is the first taste of what the two have been building together, and it makes an efficient case for why this pairing works.

Kils brings a boom-bap production foundation; Clarity brings the kind of blunt, direct lyricism that doesn’t leave much room for interpretation. “End of Days” adds two more voices to the mix: Roshin, another lyricist with weight behind his words, and DJ Versatile on cuts. Four contributors, one track, no wasted space. Clarity called it some of his best writing, which given how directly he tends to speak, probably means it’s worth taking at face value. I’m here for anything with Kils on production, and this delivers on the premise.

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That's 16 tracks that piled up while I was away pretending to care about quarterly objectives. Five days of workshops. Sixteen acts of musical insubordination. My hard drive didn't file that HR complaint without reason

Drop me a line if something caught your ear this week. And if you know anyone else who considers “I just need to listen to this one more thing before bed” a reasonable life philosophy, send them this way.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

Aldous Harding - One Stop

Four years is a long time between records, but Aldous Harding makes you forget that within about thirty seconds of “One Stop”. The lead single from her fifth album Train on the Island — due May 8 on 4AD — opens on queasy piano and a time signature that keeps slipping underneath you, Harding’s voice moving between accents and characters as it goes. She sings about meeting John Cale with the kind of matter-of-fact delivery that somehow makes the surrealism land harder than if she’d played it for effect. It may be the funniest she’s sounded. It’s also unmistakably her.

Train on the Island was co-produced with long-time collaborator John Parish at Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales — the same room where they made Party, Designer and Warm Chris — and this time brings in pedal steel, harp, synths, and Sebastian Rochford on drums. The result is Harding doing what Harding does: structural complexity worn so lightly it looks like spontaneity. Since Warm Chris she’s been audible on Perfume Genius’s Grammy-nominated Glory and a Sleaford Mods collaboration, but “One Stop” is the proper return, and it delivers. The world tour runs through October, with London Barbican shows already sold out.

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NEW THIS WEEK

Carla dal Forno — Going Out

Carla dal Forno announces her fourth album Confession, due April 24 on her own Kallista Records label, with “Going Out” — the track that opens the record and apparently the first song she wrote for it. It arrived quickly, she says: “the music felt propulsive, almost like moving towards something you can’t undo.” Built on a strong melodic bassline, understated synths, and dal Forno’s cool, close vocal singing plainly about wanting someone who’s dating an old friend, the restraint here is entirely the point. The desire is stated directly, the production never overplays, and the tension between composure and fixation is what makes it land.

Confession was written and recorded over several years in a small country town in Australia, in a studio housed inside a partially abandoned hospital. Dal Forno describes it as “an album of quiet upheaval,” tracing a friendship that became emotionally charged in an unexpected way — originally intending something more veiled before concluding she couldn’t hide behind abstraction. The album sounds exactly like that pivot. One source reached for “Paparazzi” by way of Young Marble Giants as a frame of reference, and it’s not entirely wrong. Dal Forno also hosts on NTS radio.

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SPRINTS — Trickle Down

Dublin’s SPRINTS waste no time picking up where All That Is Over left off. “Trickle Down” is a standalone single on Sub Pop / City Slang, arriving fresh off a sold-out US tour and days before their extensive European run kicks off in France. Karla Chubb opens with the question: “Has anyone ever tried to explain trickle down economics to you in a bar?” — and from there it’s three tight minutes of post-punk that catalogues housing crises, rising costs, climate collapse and cultural drift with the kind of clarity that only comes from actually living through it. No detours, no atmospheric buildup. The band describe it as “the frustration of a generation stuck in ‘wait mode’ while everything burns,” and the song earns that framing.

The European tour runs through April and into the festival season — France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Italy and more. I’ll be catching them in Wiesbaden and this is precisely the kind of song that was made for a sweaty club.

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Fontaines D.C. — Black Boys on Mopeds

Fontaines D.C. cover Sinéad O’Connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds” for War Child’s HELP(2) charity compilation — the sequel to the landmark 1995 HELP record, recorded at Abbey Road Studios over a single week in November 2025, produced by James Ford, with all proceeds going to War Child UK. O’Connor’s original came out in 1990 and has not softened with age. Fontaines’ version stays close to the source: Grian Chatten delivers a calm, plainspoken vocal that suits the song’s controlled anger, building toward a fuzz-noise crescendo with strings that Ford described as “Velvet Underground-y.”

Ford’s reasoning for the choice is direct: “Sinead was on the first ‘Help’ record and was such an icon of Irish music. A lot of her lyrics and the things she stood for seem to be pretty relevant to what’s happening now, unfortunately.” The band previously performed an acoustic version of the track in Nashville in 2022, so this isn’t a cold reading — they know the song, and it shows. The compilation also features Arctic Monkeys, Oasis, Olivia Rodrigo, Pulp, Depeche Mode, Beth Gibbons, Big Thief, and Wet Leg, among others.

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Irreversible Entanglements ft. Helado Negro — Juntos Vencemos

Irreversible Entanglements share the third single from their forthcoming album Future Present Past, due March 27 on Impulse!. The quintet — vocalist Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Tcheser Holmes — recorded at the legendary Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey, and “Juntos Vencemos” features guest vocalist Helado Negro. The title translates as “together we overcome,” and the track earns it: funky, spacious, built from collective momentum rather than arrangement. The band’s account of how it came together is worth reading — a spontaneous gathering in the centre of the studio, percussion collected, no plans, just trust and action.

Helado Negro’s presence fits the track’s bilingual, diasporic character without forcing it. I find this band most compelling precisely when they let spontaneity do the structural work, and this is one of those times. Tour dates include a co-release show at Knockdown Center in Queens on March 26, followed by European dates in Italy, Austria, and Belgium through May.

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Greg Mendez — I Wanna Feel Pretty

Philadelphia singer-songwriter Greg Mendez announces Beauty Land — his first full-length for Dead Oceans, due May 29 — with a two-minute single that does more in its runtime than most songs manage in five. He sings casually of getting a new job, getting robbed, getting drunk, and then the logic quietly tips sideways mid-verse, the surrealism arriving like it was always there. It’s a quiet provocation from a songwriter who spent fifteen years writing and recording in relative obscurity between Philly and New York before his 2023 self-titled record became a slow-burn breakthrough.

Beauty Land was recorded almost entirely alone, directly to tape, in a makeshift home studio with no natural light, and promises to go deeper into grief, love and addiction. Stereogum called him “one of the best songwriters to come out of a city teeming with great songwriters,” and “I Wanna Feel Pretty” makes the case efficiently. North American tour runs from June through August.

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The Scythe ft. Denzel Curry, 1900Rugrat & Key Nyata — MUTT THAT BIH

The Scythe — Denzel Curry’s collective of Bktherula, TiaCorine, FERG (formerly A$AP Ferg) and Key Nyata — drop the final single ahead of the full project’s release on Loma Vista. We covered “LIT EFFECT” back in W04 and the title track in W08; this one brings in West Palm Beach rapper 1900Rugrat alongside Key Nyata, produced by Swaggyono, SkipOnDaBeat and iloveit!. Three verses, no filler. Curry opens with sharp energy, 1900Rugrat slides between melodic rap-singing and loose flexes, and Key Nyata takes the third with a beat switch and some dryly observed lines. Southern-style bass-heavy production with a mid-track cinematic jolt that snaps back into the main groove.

Curry describes the setup plainly: “The Scythe is a family and a group. We still have our respective solo careers, but when we come together, it’s The Scythe.” The collective’s frame of reference is Memphis, Houston and Miami — old-school regional Southern rap brought forward. The full project, Strictly 4 The Scythe, gets the full treatment in the March Album Spotlight.

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Tycho — Forge

Scott Hansen shares “Forge,” the instrumental precursor to “Boundary Rider,” his recent collaboration with Paul Banks of Interpol. The backstory is characteristically transparent: “Forge” was the original demo that Hansen sent to Banks to see if he’d add vocals. Banks did. After finishing that version, Hansen returned to the demo to see what it could do on its own. His solution was to push Zac Brown’s guitars to the front — Brown handles guitar duties in the live Tycho band — and that decision is what makes “Forge” feel like its own thing rather than a stripped version of something else.

Hansen describes it as “a driving open-ended extension of the Epoch-era sound,” a reference back to the 2016 album, which sits at the cleaner, more melodic end of his catalogue. That lineage makes sense here. Tycho is touring North America through mid-2026, with festival stops at CRSSD and Okeechobee, plus a joint show with Washed Out at The Caverns in April.

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Cass McCombs & Chris Cohen — Steel Reserve

Cass McCombs and Chris Cohen have released a two-song collaborative 7” on Hardly Art / Domino. The division of labour was clean: McCombs wrote the lyrics, Cohen composed the music. The vinyl pressing is exclusive to McCombs’ current North American “Interior Live Oak Live” tour. Cohen co-produced Interior Live Oak (2025), and the two go back to the early 2000s Bay Area — Cohen also played guitar on McCombs’ debut LP A and on “County Line.” Before his work with McCombs, Cohen was a member of Deerhoof and the Curtains.

On “Steel Reserve” McCombs plays classical guitar, which Cohen asked him to lay on top after the track was done. McCombs describes both sides as “somewhat cracked meditations on dignity.” Cohen’s account of his approach is equally good: “I took it as a dare, as the words were tricky and the forms unusual ones for songs, but I followed them exactly as they were.” Nearly two decades in, they don’t seem to need much negotiation.

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Upupayāma — Mystic Chords of Memory

Upupayāma is the project of Italian multi-instrumentalist Alessio Ferrari, who writes, records and plays everything himself — guitars, keys, flute, sitar, and a full arsenal of percussion — in a barn studio in a mountain village above Parma. “Mystic Chords of Memory” is out now on Fuzz Club, premiered by KEXP, and announces the forthcoming double album Honesty Flowers due May 29. Mixed by Chris Smith at Kluster Sounds (Kikagaku Moyo, Wax Machine) and mastered by Joseph Carra (King Gizzard, Babe Rainbow, ORB).

Ferrari describes spending whole nights deep in percussive trance, playing congas or djembe for hours at a stretch, and that rhythm-first immersive approach comes through: psych rock, funk grooves, a wide palette compressed into a focused track. Live, Upupayāma expands to a six-piece with a more improvisation-based approach, but the studio work is entirely Ferrari’s own. What I find compelling about this project is precisely that gap: the breadth of the sound versus the singularity of the source. European festival dates through summer.

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Sosyete ‘25 — Bilmece

Sosyete ‘25 are a London-based trio: Istanbul-born vocalist and songwriter Merve Erdem (known from Kit Sebastian and Brainfeeder), guitarist and producer Glenn Fallows (Globeflower Masters, Mr Bongo), and producer/multi-instrumentalist Paul Elliott, previously behind the acclaimed Call Sender project on Tru Thoughts. “Bilmece” is their debut single — the first glimpse at a forthcoming album called Yaygara — and it arrives on Tru Thoughts. The title means “riddle” in Turkish, and the track earns it.

Merve’s vocal sits soft and unhurried over a slow-burning groove, while Dan Smith plays lotar — a long-necked lute used in Turkish and Balkan music — giving the whole thing a warm, slightly cinematic undercurrent. Mediterranean pop, left-field production, Turkish folk tradition: folded together without any of the elements feeling grafted on.

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SSAANN — Echo

Milwaukee dreampop quartet SSAANN return with “Echo,” the latest preview of their upcoming album Higher due March 27 on Broken Palace. We’ve been following this band since “Wade” landed in Week 46 last year and covered “Above It” again in Week 07. Melissa Simes describes the track as navigating “the seasons of the heart — the beauty of moving on the moment you realize you’ve outgrown yourself.” The production stays in the band’s established range: layered synths, steady rhythm, Simes’ vocals carrying most of the emotional weight.

What I notice is how the song handles that moment of clarity — not with a build or a release, but by staying in the haze and letting the lyrics do the lifting. Lines like “What have you outgrew? / Love that’s past due” land quietly and don’t overstay. Three singles in, Higher is shaping up to be a record worth the pre-order.

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Asara — Cute

Asara is the solo project of Sarah Pitet, a Parisian multi-instrumentalist who spent the last four years as guitarist, bassist, keyboardist and vocalist in Dog Park. “Cute” is her debut single, out on GÉOGRAPHIE — the same label that hosts Dog Park — and it comes with a video she co-directed with Titouan Penthier. A solo album is in the works, written throughout 2025, described as an audio diary documenting her 28th year, with Clairo, Smerz and Blood Orange cited as reference points.

The subject is watching someone you’re leaving cry — a loaded premise handled with a notably light touch. Crisp drum machine, a bouncing guitar riff, a small synth line, and Pitet’s voice out front. The song doesn’t linger in the difficulty of the moment; it keeps its eyes on what comes next, which is a more interesting emotional choice than the subject might suggest. The production stays restrained throughout, and that discipline is what makes it feel direct rather than slight. The full album is due in autumn 2026 on GÉOGRAPHIE.

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otay:onii — No Talent

Lane Shi opens Love Is In The Shit — due May 8 on Pelagic Records — with “No Talent,” a single that reframes the concept of talent entirely. The lyric does the heavy lifting: “I have no talent / Just a story after another story / A fool will gain some wisdom in some relics / The talent that you call / Is the long memory after all.” Delivered over a production that shifts between breath and structure, her voice moving from incantation to something closer to spoken philosophy. What catches my ear is how the song earns its repetition — the refrain doesn’t feel like a hook pushed for impact, it feels like a thought being worked through in real time.

Otay:onii is originally from Haining, China, and her practice spans music, performance, installation, and film composition. Previous albums include NAG (2018), MíngMíng ٥٥ (2021), Dream Hacker (2023), and True Faith Ain’t Blind (2024). She’s performed at SXSW, Roadburn, CTM, and Le Guess Who?, and is a Triennium artist in residence at this year’s Roadburn Festival. “No Talent” is the kind of song that doesn’t try to win you over immediately — it just keeps getting more interesting, exactly as it promises.

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That’s 14 tracks — a leaner week than usual, which means I only needed to reorganise my folder structure once. Progress. At this rate I’ll have everything under control by 2031, or I’ll have simply run out of hard drive space and been forced to confront my choices. Either outcome is possible.
But hey, at least I’m supporting the artists, right? That’s undoubtedly what I tell myself as I add yet another “quick” addition to my meticulously organised playlists that I certainly don’t spend too much time perfecting.

Drop me a line if something caught your ear this week. And if you know anyone else who considers “I just need to listen to this one more thing before bed” a reasonable life philosophy, send them this way.

All my weekly roundups and the full 2026 playlist collection at: https://stereobar.net/playlists-2026/

Ciao

Edgar@Stereobar

🔥 This Week's Highlight 🔥

courtney barnett — Mantis

Courtney Barnett’s fourth album Creature of Habit arrives March 27, written through two significant upheavals running in parallel: her move from Australia to Los Angeles, and the closure of Milk! Records, the independent label she’d run for twelve years, at the end of 2023. “Mantis” and “Sugar Plum” dropped together as the third and fourth singles, and between them they map the album’s emotional territory more clearly than any press release could.

“Mantis” has a story behind it. Barnett was stuck, working on the track in her desert house studio, when a praying mantis appeared on the kitchen doorframe. She texted a photo to Stella Mozgawa — Warpaint drummer and frequent collaborator — who told her to look it up. The symbolism: patience, perseverance, a guide for those who need direction. “I stood and spoke to the mantis for a while, it was a strange and enlightening moment that I’ll never forget,” Barnett says. “Eventually, I got back to writing, and finally I had the chorus to this song.” Musically it sits on a two-chord electric guitar groove with a ride cymbal washing underneath — patient and searching, which fits. Barnett calls it “the microcosmic centerpiece of this album.” The album’s central question is how to get out of your own way so you can actually feel your life. “Mantis” is where she found the answer.

“Sugar Plum” is the sunnier counterpart — rooted in the disorientation of the LA move, the fear of being in over your head, eventually finding the courage to stay and grow. Previous singles include “Stay in Your Lane” and “Site Unseen” featuring Waxahatchee. The North American tour kicks off May 1 in Austin with support from Truman Sinclair, Momma, Built to Spill, and Zoh Amba across different legs. Creature of Habit is out March 27 via Mom+Pop (US) and Fiction Records (ROW).

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NEW THIS WEEK

Squarepusher — K2 Central