2014’s Too Bright showcased Mike Hadreas stepping out saucily onto a bigger stage, expressing, with the production help of Portishead’s Adrian Utley, emotions arranged all along the slippery continuum from rage to irony to love. Here in 13 new ferocious and sophisticated tracks, Mike Hadreas and his collaborators blow through church music, makeout music, an array of the gothier radio popular formats, rhythm and blues, art pop, krautrock, queer soul, the RCA Studio B sound, and then also collect some of the sounds that only exist inside Freddy Krueger. Tremolo on the electric keys. Nightclubbing. Daywalking. Kate Bushing, Peter Greenawaying, Springsteening, Syreetaing. No Shape was produced by Blake Mills, the man behind Alabama Shakes’ Grammy Award winning album. He added precision and expansion. Some things are pretty and some are blasted beyond recongition. Records like this, records that make you feel like you’re 15 and just seeing the truth for the first time, are excessively rare. They’re here to remind you that you’re divine.

Wonderfully unique, shape-shifting pop that takes the Irish singer/songwriter down her most daring avenues yet. Róisín Murphy’s fourth solo album is certainly challenging. It piles up rich melodies (“Mastermind”, “Nervous Sleep”) and doubles down on quixotic rhythms (“Thoughts Wasted”, “Romantic Comedy”), but once attached to Murphy’s off-kilter frequency, you’re hypnotised. Don’t ever change, Róisín.

流行组合Chairlift前成员Caroline Polachek全新专辑Pang将于10月18号正式发布

Samaris return with a brand new album ‘Black Lights’ via One Little Indian on 10th June.
Written and recorded over the past year in Berlin, Reykjavik and Ireland, ‘Black Lights’ is the Icelandic trio’s most fully realised and accessible record yet - sung for the first time entirely in English, and headed up by gorgeous lead-off single ‘Wanted 2 Say’, released on 8th April.

Moses Sumney evades definition as an act of duty: technicolour videos and monochrome clothes; Art Rock and Black Classical; blowing into Fashion Week from a small town in North Carolina; seemingly infinite collaborators, but only one staggering voice. A young life spent betwixt Southern California and Accra, Ghana — not so much rootless as an epyphite, an air plant. The scale is cinematic but the moves are precise deeds of art and stewardship. Sumney’s new, generous album, græ, is an assertion that the undefinable still exists and dwelling in it is an act of resistance.
The songs on græ may be divergent, like the visceral, Smashing Pumpkins drama of Virile and the intoxicated, outro jazz of Gagarin. There’s the kinky, ambiguous bop of Cut Me countered with the sweeping, amphitheater-ready Bless Me. But there’s that voice, always unknowable and penetrating, threading these pieces together: a heavenly rasp, a whale call, Miles' horn, a soulful snarl. It all works to create a paradox, ke

Set My Heart On Fire Immediately is the fifth studio album from Perfume Genius released on Matador Records. It sees artist and musician Mike Hadreas re-teaming with GRAMMY-nominated producer Blake Mills and features contributions from musicians Jim Keltner, Pino Palladino and Matt Chamberlin. It was recorded in Los Angeles, where Perfume Genius settled in 2017 with longtime partner and musical collaborator Alan Wyffels.
The album explores and subverts concepts of masculinity and traditional roles, and introduces decidedly American musical influences. Throughout Hadreas plays with themes of love, sex, memory and the body, channeling popular music mythologies while irreverently authoring its own – from the delirious, Cyndi Lauper-nodding celebratory pop of ‘On The Floor’, specters of Elvis on haunted tremolo waltz ‘One More Try’, to the harpsichord-punctuated baroque pop of ‘Jason’, and gliding steel guitar and Balearic rhythm of ‘Without You’.
“I wanted to feel more open, more free and spiritually wild,” says Hadreas, “and I’m in a place now where those feelings are very close - but it can border on being unhinged. I wrote these songs as a way to be more patient, more considered - to pull at all these chaotic threads hovering around me and weave them in to something warm, thoughtful and comforting.”
First album taster ‘Describe’ captures this sense of fleetingness and living in the moment through a heavy fog of grizzly distortion and tumbling slide guitars: “It started as a really somber ballad. It was very minimal and very slow. And then it turned into this beast of a song. I started writing that about when you are in such a dark place that you don’t even remember what goodness is or what anything feels like. And so, the idea was having someone describe that to you, because you forgot or can’t get to it.” Its accompanying video, self-directed by Hadreas, envisions “an end of the world where there are no boundaries, there are no edges, no rules, or the rules are completely new with how you interact with each other and the space around you.”
Indies Only double LP edition on transparent blue vinyl

Gatefold vinyl
CD comes in a plain plastic sleeve
Poster included

The Cinematic Orchestra are back with a definitive new album that explores a timeless question of vital importance in 2019 - what to believe? Founding member Jason Swinscoe and longtime partner Dominic Smith have enlisted album contributions from collaborators old and new: Moses Sumney, Roots Manuva, Heidi Vogel, Grey Reverend (vocalist on Bonobo’s 'First Fires’), Dorian Concept and Tawiah (Mark Ronson, Kindness), Miguel Atwood-Ferguson (Flying Lotus, Anderson Paak, Thundercat, Hiatus Kaiyote) features on strings and photographer and visual artist Brian “B+” Cross collaborated with Swinscoe and Smith on the album’s concept. The record was mixed by multiple Grammy winner Tom Elmhirst (David Bowie, Frank Ocean, Adele) in Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Electric Lady studios. The album artwork comes courtesy of The Designers Republic™ (Aphex Twin).
The album announce is marked by the general release of new single ‘A Caged Bird/Imitations of Life’ featuring Roots Manuva. The track, revealed via an innovative website only accessible on offline devices - a paradox illuminating the album’s core question of what to believe, was available initially on 12" in independent record stores and sold out in a matter of hours. The artists first collaborated in 2002 on fan favourite ‘All Things to All Men’, 17 years later the partnership has lost none of its urgency and searing insight as Roots Manuva laments how our “situation is strange to us, stranger things are claiming us” over a pounding, hypnotic rhythm section that concedes to the choruses’ soaring strings.
In 2019 it is easy to see the bands influence, jazz is all around us, London and LA have recently produced scene’s more prolific than anyone expected; Kamasi Washington has been nominated for both Grammy and Brit Awards, Sons Of Kemet a Mercury Prize, BADBADNOTGOOD provide jazz soundtracks to high fashion shows and Kendrick Lamar has put the jazz palette at the top of the charts. When The Cinematic Orchestra released their critically acclaimed debut album “Motion” it helped pave the way for this moment, incorporating as it did an interpretation that had been lacking in the oeuvre and encouraging a new generation of musicians to break rules. “To Believe” doesn’t shy away from this ethos - its articulation of the band’s unique sonic language, encompassing not only jazz but the sort of transcendental orchestration combined with the elegant electronics of artists like Ólafur Arnalds and Floating Points, artists they have helped forge a path for, has never been more cohesive and compelling.
Since “Motion”, The Cinematic Orchestra have sold hundreds of thousands of albums, generated almost half a billion streams and enjoyed critical support from the likes of Pitchfork (8.6 for second album “Every Day” which featured two collaborations with legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago singer Fontella Bass), The Guardian, New York Times, Le Monde, Resident Advisor, Fader, Mixmag, NME, Crack (whose Simple Things festival the band headlined in 2016), Rolling Stone, Gilles Peterson, Benji B, Jason Bentley, Zane Lowe, Annie Mac, Lauren Laverne, KCRW and Mary Anne Hobbs. ‘To Build A Home’ has been synced to dozens of films and TV shows including the Orange Is The New Black finale and This Is Us, adverts include Burberry, Armani, Nike and Apple. The ‘To Build a Home’ short film was directed by Andrew Griffin and stars Peter Mullan (Trainspotting, Harry Potter).
The band have also been touring, consistently performing to larger and larger audiences and selling out the likes of London's Royal Albert Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Rome’s Auditorium Park Della and the Sydney Opera House. Coachella, Glastonbury, Fuji Rock, Montreux and Sonar have all played host to the band’s much loved live performances. Beyond the obvious they have also appeared at the Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Awards for Stanley Kubrick and New York’s Summerstage with the legendary Majavishnu Orchestra with John McLaughlin, they curated a series of events at London’s prestigious Barbican Centre featuring commissions from the prodigiously talented Austin Peralta (RIP) and seen the likes of Dorian Concept, Thundercat, Moses Sumney and Gilles Peterson support them on stage over the years. They scored Disney’s feature length nature documentary “The Crimson Wing” including the track ‘Arrival of the Birds’ which featured in the closing scene of the Oscar Winning Stephen Hawking biopic "The Theory of Everything". They also released a Late Night Tales compilation featuring music from Flying Lotus, Burial and Björk.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 years since The Cinematic Orchestra released their last studio album, “Ma Fleur” in 2007. Did you achieve what you hoped to in the time since? 12 years from now will be 2031. What will you do before then? We are powerless to answer of course, mere passengers in our own existence, improvising as events deliver themselves into our lives, struggling with the question - what to believe? Births, deaths, success, failure. Money, drugs, temptation, rejection. Trump, Brexit, fear, hope. Art, relevance, pressure, belief. It’s this that accounts for the past 12 years for The Cinematic Orchestra, it’s this that characterises the process of recording the new album and it’s this that has been distilled into a work that is not only their best and most definitive to date but by asking these questions it’s also that which best reflects the great beauty in life.

Desire Marea, best known as one half of South African performance art duo FAKA, has released their debut album, Desire.
Featuring contributions from South African artists Sanele Ngubane, Pasja Sneijder, Nonku Phiri, Hlasko, Simon Wolfson, Gabriel Wolfson, and Gyre, the project is described as “an intricate inquiry into various themes including loss, displacement, and the terrifying manifestations of love in the contemporary world.”
The album follows two EPs from Desire Marea made alongside Fela Gucci as FAKA, Bottoms Revenge and Amaqhawe. The duo have also collaborated with American fashion brand Telfar on two compositions staged at the Serpentine Pavilion in London and at New York Fashion Week, before going on to soundtrack Versace’s S/S Menswear fashion show last year.
Desire is out now, via Izimakade Records.
Cover art shot by the queer visual activist Sir Zanele Muholi.

These New Puritans are the great heretics of British music, fearless innovators with a maverick spirit. It’s been a decade of sonic innovation since a teenage TNP released their debut album Beat Pyramid. In the years since, they’ve successfully blurred the distinctions between rock, classical, electronic, pop and experimental music, earning rave reviews and praise from artists as diverse as Björk, Massive Attack and Elton John along the way.
Their brutal and beautiful fourth studio album, Inside The Rose, however, is the Barnett brothers' most innovative yet. Recorded in Berlin, London, and Southend-on-Sea, and mixed in L.A, it’s unlike anything else you’ll hear this year – forty minutes of powerful melodies, lush strings and progressive electronics, packed with jaw-dropping sonic left turns.
Sitting in a scruffy Irish pub, Jack and George are as relaxed in each other’s company as only brothers can be. Friendly and self-deprecating, they’re the antithesis of the archetypal ‘experimental’ musician.
“That’s as much of a convention as anything else,” explains Jack. “It reminds me of spiritual mediums. The truth always just happens to lie with people who wear cheap suits and perform at the end of the pier. Musical truth just always happens to be found in people who are deeply serious, have beards and make lots of noise"
One of the big changes is the band’s reverting to a duo, just as it had been when they first started out.
“This album is much more primitive,” explains Jack. “We want to make our music as direct and as powerful as possible - straight to the nervous system.”
“We wanted this album to be about us working together on something really pure, positive and progressive,” adds George. “The melodies and Jack’s voice are much more important this time around.”
The brothers began playing music together at 7 or 8 years old – Jack writing songs on a massively over-sized guitar, and George hitting a pair of bongos from a charity shop with drum sticks. “We’d learn Captain Beefheart songs together,” says Jack. “And I would slow down Aphex Twin songs to analyse them, then create copies, to learn how to make those kinds of sounds.”
Together they began to create their own musical world. Realising that the only way of playing live in Southend was to form a band, they recruited school friend Tom Hein. The brothers’ dad was a builder; for their first London gigs they would ride up to London in his van, then in the same van go to work on building sites the next day.
2008’s debut Beat Pyramid, a circular work of fast rhythms, repetitive lyrics and fractured field recordings, stood out like a sore thumb amongst the conservative, guitar-based music of the period. The follow up, Hidden (2010) defied expectations, combining brutal Japanese Taiko drums, dancehall rhythms and austere woodwind (Jack taught himself musical notation to score the album's orchestral arrangements). After appearing on Björk’s Bastards remix album, TNP then released the cinematic Field of Reeds in 2013, followed by EXPANDED: Live at the Barbican (2014). Since then, Jack and George’s search for new sonic challenges saw them produce the musical score for the first authorised theatrical production of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Writing sessions for Inside The Rose began in Essex, and were completed in Berlin after Jack relocated there. Recording began in 2015 in London – drums were the starting point, produced by long-time collaborator Graham Sutton (Bark Psychosis / Boymerang) but the majority was done in Berlin in a former Soviet broadcasting studio in the city’s industrial suburbs.
“To get there each day, I’d cycle through a sea of broken glass with chemicals from the cement works blowing in my face,” says Jack of his daily commute.
“It was so noisy around the studio, I started waking up at three in the afternoon to work once they’d finished, then working for eleven or twelve hours solid. I think it’s louder than the last album because everywhere I worked there was building work nearby, so we had to compete.”
From the opening seconds of Infinity Vibraphones, with its vocal refrain: ‘Let’s go back to the underworld/ Let’s go back inside” Inside the Rose’s sharp romanticism grips like a vice, drawing you into a nocturnal alternate reality where nothing is as it seems. “The songs are about beauty, transcendence, desire, oblivion, ecstasy, eyes and angels.”
From the brooding Anti-Gravity - think Depeche Mode circa Some Great Reward - to the industrial electronics of Into The Fire (featuring Current 93’s David Tibet) to the unalloyed operatic beauty of A-R-P, it pulsates with ideas and energy. The album’s adventurous spirit is summed up by a band phrase George would use as a touchstone throughout recording: “why dream backwards when you can dream forwards? If your biggest dream is to look like someone from the 70s, you’ve got to have something wrong with you.” “If that’s your deepest desire, that’s so unambitious. It’s a waste”, adds Jack.
Another highlight is the spine-tingling ballad Where The Trees Are On Fire. “I dreamt the melody and most of the lyrics,” explains Jack. I was almost superstitious about changing anything in it. To me, it sounds sort of like [Stephen Sondheim’s] ‘Send In the Clowns’ or something.”
Inside The Rose isn’t just TNP’s most affecting piece of music yet. It’s further proof that they operate in a different realm to most bands, making music with true fearlessness.
“I think it’s unambitious if all you’re wanting to do is reflect your age,” says Jack in conclusion.
“I want to go beyond myself and my time. That’s the art I like. Whether it’s Francis Bacon, William Blake or Andrei Tarkovsky. You fail, inevitably, but that’s the challenge.”
More information

Ghostpoet is pleased to announce his forthcoming album ‘Shedding Skin’.
The first fruits of the album, the track ‘Off Peak Dreams’ has already been premiered on Zane Lowe’s Radio One show and sees Ghostpoet, London-based Obaro Ejimiwe moving on from the cathartic musings of 2013’s ‘Some Say I So I Say Light’ album.
‘Shedding Skin’ is the manifestation of a new challenge of fresh thinking and a brave confident stride into previously uncharted waters. Ten songs that embrace, unite and narrate observations that are designed to sit beside each other through bright peaks and dark shallows.
Unlike his previous albums, ‘Shedding Skin’ was recorded with a traditional live set up with what has become his touring band; Joe Newman on guitar, bass player John Calvert and John Blease on drums.
The self-produced album also features guest vocals from Nadine Shah, Etta Bond, Melanie De Biasio, Lucy Rose and Maxïmo Park’s Paul Smith, amounting in a collection that sets a new precedent as his very best work yet.

Think big, girl, like a king, think kingsize. Jenny Hval’s new record opens with a quote from the Danish poet Mette Moestrup, and continues towards the abyss. Apocalypse, girl is a hallucinatory narrative that exists somewhere between fiction and reality, a post-op fever dream, a colourful timelapse of death and rebirth, close-ups of impossible bodies — all told through the language of transgressive pop music.
released June 9, 2015

“If you stick to just what you know, your music, your art or whatever your situation is becomes stagnant”, say Denmark’s Lowly. “And we wouldn’t like to miss out on anything, just because we felt too comfortable.”
A band unafraid to reach beyond their comfort zone, Lowly thrive on the embrace of doubt and curiosity. An inquisitive spirit drives the quintet’s second album, which evolved from an open-ended process in large spaces, from lost factory halls to water towers. Released via Bella Union in April, Hifalutin brims with suggestive discoveries from its title onwards. Dictionary definitions include “pompous” and “larger than life”; the word is also antonymic with the word Lowly. However you take it, the result is the work of five people expressing themselves freely as a tight collective: focused, yet fertile with possibility.
Warmly received in Pitchfork, Uncut and elsewhere, Lowly’s debut album, Heba, was a feast of dramatic dream-pop. Yet Hifalutin is more ambitious still. The album was primarily recorded in a 150 square meter warehouse, just outside the city of Aarhus. Band members recorded their parts as individuals and as a group; meanwhile, the producer, Anders Boll, placed microphones in nooks and crannies of the enormous space, all the better to highlight the dynamics between the band members.
“We dared to be even more curious,” explains guitarist and singer Nanna Schannong, “and started recording without knowing where we would end up. This curiosity released a huge amount of trust and confidence between us: we became much more tolerant of each other's diversity, and dared to give each other space. It also meant that some sketches suddenly became two pieces… or, that eight to nine different pieces suddenly found themselves in one song."
A willingness to turn their backs on accepted frames of practise, for both recordings and performances, has characterized Lowly since their formation in 2014 at the music academy in Aarhus, Denmark, where they studied different subjects but forged a unique chemistry out of contrast. Last autumn, they played a concert in Brønshøj Water Tower, in the suburbs of Copenhagen, where the reverb was long and pronounced. The band had to carefully reconsider which notes and chords they could play; too many tones would muddy the sound. Pieces from this concert would find their way to Hifalutin.
As synthesizer player Kasper Staub reflects, “We want to give doubt, and curiosity, a voice. It is needed in a world characterized by obsession and goal-orientated living. You don’t need to know the answer in advance to express yourself. If we don’t allow ourselves to forget the goal, we risk missing all that we did not already know.”
Fittingly, Hifalutin is an album of many entrance points. After the glistening come-hither to wandering minds of ‘Go for a Walk’, ‘Stephen’ reflects on death, inspired by the loss of Professor Stephen Hawking. The warm trip-hop currents of ‘Baglaens’ (or “backwards”) contrast sharply with the buoyant beats cluster of ‘Staples’. ‘i’ resembles a hymnal Stina Nordenstam, constantly seeking new ways into a song, while the alt-R&B-ish ‘In the Hearts’ offers an unguarded paean to connectivity: as Lowly put it: “It’s about the magnificent power of love that transcends everything and connects us all.”
With each band-member’s input emphatically felt, ‘Out Beyond’ locates a sweet spot between the synthetic and the organic in its interplay between trance-y synths and Spanish guitars. The momentous crescendo of ‘Children’ and the strange pulses of ‘ii’ showcase Lowly’s powerful, experimental range; meanwhile, the echoing piano of ‘Delicate Delegates’ finds them at their most beautiful. ‘Selver’ offers space to breathe and ’12:36’ revisits the dream-dotted paths of Heba, before the sublime synths of ‘Wonder’ bring the album to an immersive, expansive climax.
These diverse songs find hidden connections to each other through the chemistry between the sounds and Boll’s productions. And, of course, through the literate, abstract lyrics, which include references to works by experimental poet Inger Christensen and Persian poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi. “Our lyrics consist of images and scenes that briefly glide into one’s field of view, and then disappear again,” co-lead singer Soffie Viemose explains. “We’d rather show something than say something quite literally.” An invitation sent from and to curious minds, Hifalutin is luminous modern pop at its most delicate and robust, assertive and open-ended. You wouldn’t want to miss out.