The Worm is an avant folk project, rooted in the stories of a fictional, time-travelling character, created and acted out by Amy Lawrence (they / them), a performance artist from Cornwall. With music played on cello, harp, recorders and percussion, Lawrence crafts a strange, enchanting soundworld as The Worm, shaping an inimitable form of abstract roots music enriched by inventive storytelling.

The project’s live performances form the intrinsic cornerstone of this creative universe, incorporating music, costume, clowning and spoken word recitals inspired by opera and dance from the early 20th century. The recording output of The Worm seeks to document the vitality of this performance experience, with raw, simple music guided by a naïve, intuitive production approach.

Attesting to these ideals of dramatic vitality and aesthetic simplicity, ‘Pantilde’ is the bewitching new album of otherworldly folk music by The Worm. Focused on recounting the everyday lives of villagers inhabiting an alternative Celtic landscape, ‘Pantilde’ vividly captures an imaginary oral history through ethereal musicality and fantastical lyricism. Intimate, homespun arrangements often led by either recorder, cello or harp are accompanied by winsome ballads, heart-melting arias and surreal lullabies that give wondrous voice to this fabulated narrative arc.

UK extreme metallers Abduction will release their highly anticipated new album, Existentialismus, on 21st February 2025, via Candlelight.

Following their explosive 2022 album, Black Blood, which showcased the band's fiercely expansive sound, Abduction are now poised to push their musical boundaries even further. With many bands currently paying homage to black metal’s glory years and just as many attempting to connect unrelated workings to that legacy, Abduction’s music manages to be both recognisably authentic and imbued with its own spirit. And never has this been truer than in the new album, Existentialismus.

Ahead of the release date, the band have shared first single ‘A Legacy of Sores’ with accompanying video.

Check out ‘A Legacy of Sores’ here:

“The most obvious expansion is in the voice,” considers vocalist and founder A|V. “I felt that vocally, I had more freedom to express the lyrics and messages with fewer genre leashes. Given the themes of pain, frustration, and fear involved, it made sense to convey that in its most natural state rather than performing to certain expectations. The vocals and lyrics are important to me, so I let them breathe and counterpoint the bands playing.”

Having become one of the UK’s most visible black metal acts on the live circuit, bringing their ritualistic and immersive performances to audiences at club shows and festivals as Damnation, Bloodstock, Incineration, Fortress, Doomsday, Mass Destruction, Samhain, Reaperfest and Eradication, Existentialismus has been recorded, for the first time, as a full band.

“It’s inspired by the juxtaposition of this horrible post-truth era with its contradictions and the simple, metaphorical truths that began in ancient religions of the crumbling past. Somewhere between a biblical gospel and a Nietzschean nightmare. As a father, there’s a particular terror in seeing all that our grandfathers built, physically and morally, being torn apart and reduced to a commodity and wondering what kind of world my son will inherit.”

“I am by no means a philosopher – I desperately lack the patience,” A|V admits. “But my observations of the modern Western humane race have become particularly bleak, and this informs my lyrical writing process. Art as a reaction to life and experience. This is laid out in the first track, ‘A Legacy of Sores’, which posits that most of us here, in the current year, have become an alarming pairing of being both too sensitive and yet without any core beliefs to stand on. (‘Wet skin now paper thin, reveals a core of dust’) I think this is a mixture of a post-religious society and the acceleration of technology to the point at which its claws are deeply in us. Have you tried to live without a smartphone recently?”

Existentialismus was recorded and produced by Ian Boult at Stuck On A Name Studios in Nottingham, while the final touches of post-production and mastering were handled by Tore Stjerna (Watain, Mayhem, Deströyer 666) at Necromorbus Studios in Sweden. The striking and immersive cover art is the work of Julia Soboleva.

Abduction are poised to bring bleakness and truth to audiences across the UK on their headline tour with Andracca. The dates are as follows:

27 Oct: Ivory Black, Glasgow
28 Oct: Trillions, Newcastle
29 Oct: Zanzibar, Liverpool
30 Oct: Dust, Brighton
31 Oct: The Old Salutation Inn, Nottingham
2 Nov: Underground, Plymouth

The second album from the Brighton four-piece is the sound of a band mercilessly digging into itself with a stunning, dynamic performance from singer-songwriter Dana Margolin.

‘Blue Car’ is a collection of songs from Joanne's archive of unreleased solo recordings, similar to ‘Painting Stupid Girls’, these tracks attempt to record the moment, and where she was at emotionally that day, similar to diary entries. The dates she wrote these songs is unknown, they span roughly a ten year period.

A ‘satire about satire’, WASTELAND is a wild Burroughsian adventure melding science-fiction, absurdism and magical realism, calling fora revolution against the reductive ‘good versus evil’ narratives of popular satirical music. Arguing that through experimenting with the form of the song lyric (our most widely disseminated form of creative writing) we can build more nuanced popular discourse around the implicit forms of bias that ail us, WASTELAND presents complex characters changing their minds–along with their bodies and places in spacetime. Set in an unearthly liminal space populated by shape-shifters, time-travellers, talking genitalia and ectoplasmic spectres, the prose text evolves as the characters do: warping into cut-ups, soliloquies and even plays.Created over two years, the album draws from LICE’s rise in ‘the punk world’ (sharing stages with IDLES, The Fall, Squid, Fat White Family, Girl Band etc.) and eventual disillusionment with the limits of its prevailing ideas.
WASTELAND is a concept album structured as an experimental short story, taking cues from Brian Catling, William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Its core argument is that, through reworking the prevailing forms of satirical song lyrics, we can build more nuanced popular discourse around the implicit forms of bias that ail us–the song lyric being the most widely disseminated and commonly ‘engaged with’ form of creative writing there is. In this allegory for crises in society and art (from commodification to ideological state apparatuses), the moral, physical and temporal transformations of its characters are paired with the text’s transformation: breaking from prose into cut-ups, soliloquies and even plays. In the wild, liminal space of the Wasteland, this story follows The Conveyor as here lates the schemes of the shadowy RDC and flamboyant Dr Coehn to engineer the human race’s self-annihilation:introducing us to a cast of time-travellers, shape-shifters, talking genitalia and ectoplasmic spectres.As well as WASTELAND’s manifesto, this text features notes directing the curious reader to sources, figures or narratives behind the story’s various arguments.
Musically, the album features a ‘noise intoner’ hand-built by LICE, based on the ‘Intonarumori’ of Luigi Russolo and his early 20th century circle of revolutionaries The Italian Futurists (whose vicious writings and manifestos about the art-world formed source material for the album). WASTELAND sees LICE draw influence from Bristol’s vital experimental scene, with the album principally written at community hub The Old England. Having performed with projects such as SCALPING, Giant Swan andEP/64 (HARRGA), LICE’s first album sees them reconcile minimalism, prog and industrial in the band’s post-punk framework.

The ambitious and mature fifth album has its hand on its heart and feet on the dancefloor, as the Bristol band prove that they're so much more than punk

Leeds Indie Frontrunners English Teacher Announce Debut LP ‘This Could Be Texas’. Preceded By Initial LP Reveals ‘The World’s Biggest Paving Slab’, ‘Nearly Daffodils’ And ‘Mastermind Specialism’, Which Were All A-Listed On The BBC 6 Music Playlist, English Teacher’s Remarkable Ascent Continues To Reach New Levels, Having Completed Sold-Out Debut UK And US Headline Runs Last Autumn, Following Their Thrilling Debut Appearance On Later With...Jools Holland. Announced As Independent Venue Week Artist Ambassador For 2024. Lead Singer Lily Fontaine Explains, “I Want This Album To Feel Like You’ve Gone To Space, And It Turns Out Its Almost Identical To Doncaster. It’s About In-Betweens, It’s About Home, And It’s About Desire Paths." In Several Songs, Fontaine Reflects On Growing Up As A Mixed-Race Individual In A Place, She Says, “Where Many Didn’t Have Any Tolerance Towards People Who Are Different” In A Post-Brexit Landscape.
The Debut Album By Leeds Frontrunners ‘This Could Be Texas’ Will Be Released On 12th April 2023.
Lead Singer Lily Fontaine Explains, “I Want This Album To Feel Like You’ve Gone To Space, And It Turns Out Its Almost Identical To Doncaster. It’s About In-Betweens, It’s About Home, And It’s About Desire Paths."

Large Electric Ensemble is Ex-Easter Island Head's fourth release on Low Point and their first piece for massed electric guitars and percussion.
Following on from Mallet Guitars Three, Large Electric Ensemble sees the group expand to include twelve prepared electric guitars and drums to create a vast wash of amplified strings and droning overtones.
Commissioned for the first World Event Young Artists (WEYA) festival held in Nottingham, UK, during September 2012, the piece was developed alongside an ensemble of local musicians from a variety of musical backgrounds. Following its WEYA debut, the piece was developed over subsequent months before being recorded live in March 2013. Utilising third bridge preparations (inserting metal rods beneath the guitar strings) and a range of alternate tunings across the ensemble, the piece combines propulsive, rhythmic minimalism with chorusing attacks of massed harmonics.
Across four movements, the ensemble adopt a new vocabulary of playing based around various guitar preparations, from billowing harp-like arpeggios to 'bowing' the strings with allen keys to produce luminous upper register drones. Microtonal intervals create shimmering tones akin to the struck metallophones of Balinese gamelan, whilst the thrum of electrified strings creates a dense undertow of singing harmonies. Scored in custom notation the piece places free flowing passages alongside conductor cues, allowing the players to collectively create a distinctive sonic landscape.
Beginning with a strident accumulation of ringing chords underpinned by the metronomic pulse of a ship's bell, the final chord of the first movement is stretched to infinity across the slowly growing storm of the second. Evolving from impressionistic ambience to tumultuous clamour, movements three and four lock into a pulsing continuum of contrapuntal chords, rapidly building momentum until the final crescendo.

Following their critically acclaimed 2019 debut album Unfurl, Hidden Notes Records are happy to announce the release of the multi-award-nominated experimental/contemporary folk string duo Fran & Flora’s sophomore full-length album, Precious Collection.
Released on Friday 12th April 2024, this album, produced by the duo themselves, explodes in myriad directions expressing the richness of the long-standing collaboration between Francesca Ter-Berg (cello/vocals/electronics) and Flora Curzon (violin/vocals/electronics). With Klezmer and Yiddish song as the predominant inspiration for the record, Precious Collection defies convention, featuring self-penned tunes and unique arrangements pushing their ground-breaking project beyond their virtuosic string playing. Drummers Ursula Russell (Snapped Ankles, Alabaster DePlume) and Simon Roth (Chris Potter, Alice Zawadzki, Adrian Dunbar) feature on the record on full kit and Ukrainian Poik (marching drum) respectively, and Francesca and Flora experiment with bowed cymbals, extended piano techniques, and samples of found sounds.The album was recorded in three different locations - Total Refreshment Centre (London), Big Jelly Studios (Ramsgate) and Great North Sound Society (Maine, USA).
The album features artwork by Lily Buchanan - a painter whose works lie in a twilight space – one foot in this world and one in another, one in the past and one in the present –drawn from memories, emotions and folklore of the everyday. Desire is a central theme, which Lily explores through surreal situations. These are by turns tender, brutal, humorous and melancholic. Happiness hand and hand with a shadow of destruction. Objects are charged with symbolism. Her characters hold tight to a world that shakes and spins, where grenade-like hearts, ring pulls and leaden roses fall to the ground. “I’ve loved working on Fran & Flora’s Precious Collection so much. The music conjured up so many visual landscapes for me to draw from in my mind and transported me on this mind expanding journey through wild woodlands and valleys meeting fantastical characters along the way. The main subject for the album artwork is Tree Girl who - captured mid metamorphosis- seems so at home in their wondrous sonic landscapes.“
The music of Fran & Flora sits in two camps, both steeped in tradition, with material drawn directly from archival recordings, recovered manuscripts and years of study with traditional music masters, whilst simultaneously garnering a contemporary and avant-garde aesthetic, speaking to the more classical and experimental listener. Fran & Flora inject their source material with drones, loops, free improvisation and electronics to create a ‘border-defying’ (Mojo) sound. Their influences range across a wide spectrum of artists and composers from Silver Mt.Zion to Rhiannon Giddens, Lankum, Brìghde Chaimbeul, Colin Stetson, Adrienne Lenker, Shabaka Hutchings and Mica Levi.
As string players Fran & Flora’s collaborations together and separately includes performing with the likes of Tom Skinner, Portico Quartet, Imogen Heap, Riz Ahmed, Sam Lee, Talvin Singh, Jocelyn Pook, Hannah Peel and The Vernon Spring. Within the global Klezmer community they have worked with Zoe Aqua, London Klezmer Quartet, Sashe Lurje, Craig Judelman, Merlin & Polina Shepherd and Frank London, and have taught at Klezmer music camps including at Klezfest London, contributing to ongoing research and revival work.
Their debut, self-released album Unfurl (“An album of beguiling beauty” The Wire, “Remarkable” Songlines) was released in February 2019 to critical acclaim (BBC Radio 3 Music Planet ‘Album of the Year’/Amazon ‘Best Seller’/AIM Award ‘Best New Act’). In June 2020 a 5-track remix EP was released celebrating its tracks, championed by Mary-Anne Hobbs on BBC Radio 6 Music. Remix artists included Portico Quartet and Deep Throat Choir.
They have appeared live in session on Giles Peterson’s WorldWide FM, BBC 6 Music with Cerys Matthews, BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, Soho Radio and were nominated for ‘Best Live Act’ by the AIM Independent Music Awards and Songlines Music Awards.
Known for their dynamic live performances, the duo has sold out venues across the UK and have performed at festivals across Europe and North America including Songlines Encounters, Shambala, EFG London Jazz Festival, Between the Lines, Smugglers Festival, Fire In The Mountain, Shtetl Neukolln and Hidden Notes. They have been awarded funding by Arts Council England, PRS Women Make Music and Help Musicians.

Nicholas "Nick" Currie, more popularly known under the artist name Momus, is a Scottish songwriter, author, blogger, and former journalist for Wired. For over thirty years he has been releasing albums on labels in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan.

The Number of the Beast is the third studio album by the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, released in March 1982. The album saw the debut of vocalist Bruce Dickinson, and the final appearance of drummer Clive Burr in the band.