Jockstrap review – electro-pop duo find order in the chaos

Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh
Taylor Skye and Georgia Ellery piece together a patchwork of musical genres into a beautiful tour opener

A playlist of horror movie scores ushers Jockstrap on stage. “Can we have the house music off, please?” Georgia Ellery politely asks the sound engineer, as viscous, stabbing strings bleed into the title track from their debut album I Love You Jennifer B.

As Jockstrap, Ellery and her bandmate Taylor Skye produce musical scrapbooks, songs in which they graft together their influences from retro soul to pulsing electronics. Recent music school graduates, the pair take sharp turns in their songwriting, through disco nostalgia, head-banging jungle and orchestral pop.

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by Katie Goh via Electronic music | The Guardian

Lynchian punk to Lady Gaga: the best music Guardian staff and writers discovered this year

Old or new, wildly popular or punishingly obscure: our critics share the best songs, albums and artists they found this year – and how they discovered them

In search of absolution after realising that I had been streaming NTS Radio uninterrupted for a week, I took the most convenient route I know to finding something fresh to listen to: Pitchfork’s mailout of highest-rated new albums. In that week’s list was the debut album by Chat Pile. Emerging from the post-industrial wastes of Oklahoma City, the not-so-young four-piece channel that strain of American vitriol that made a punk-horror canon out of Dead Kennedys, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Slipknot.

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by Chal Ravens, Shaad D'Souza, Dave Simpson, Rebecca Liu, Christine Ochefu, Laura Barton, Tayyab Amin and Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tell us about your best new music discovery in 2022

We would like to hear about your new music highlights of the year so far, and how you found them

We would like to hear about your best music discoveries of the year so far, whether brand new or decades old, and how you found them.

What was your best recent discovery? How did you discover music in 2022? How have changes in technology over the years affected how you find it?

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by Guardian community team via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘This gets the stinkfaces going!’: DJs on the tracks they are asked about the most

From Thai hip-hop to UK hardcore, five DJs tell us the tracks that most consistently get crowds asking: ‘What’s this song?’

Trigger Happy – Untitled

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by As told to Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

Jake Blount on his Afrofuturist folk climate eulogy: ‘What would music sound like when we’re dead?’

The New Faith imagines a religious service for Black refugees from a collapsed society. Blount explains why he is focused on the future of traditional music

When Florida security guard George Zimmerman was acquitted over his shooting of unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin in 2013, 18-year-old Jake Blount turned to the past to cope with his despair. “I wanted to know how music has historically allowed Black people to feel human in the face of racism,” he says. “My ancestors would have sung spirituals and work songs when they were enslaved – this music is all that remains of how they survived.”

Initially, Blount found their message jarring. “It felt like they were saying: ‘Life is terrible, but at least we get to die someday,’ which isn’t what you want to hear when you’re 18,” he says, laughing over a video call from his home in Rhode Island. “But I felt a sense of rightness in the act of singing them. This is music that my people have been singing for generations. It felt like what I was raised to do.”

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Has streaming made it harder to discover new music?

Services such as Spotify and Apple Music give us access to the entire history of popular songs. But has that access made us lazy listeners? And could TikTok or TV really help us rediscover our passion for discovery?

Earlier this year, Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill unexpectedly became the most popular song in the world. After it was used on the soundtrack of the Netflix sci-fi series Stranger Things, the streaming figures for Bush’s 1985 single rocketed by 9,900% in the US alone. Something similar was happening wherever Stranger Things was available: by 18 June, three weeks after season four of Stranger Things premiered, Running Up That Hill was No 1 on Billboard’s Global 200 chart, which, as its name suggests, collects sales and streaming data from 200-plus countries.

It became a big news story, big enough that Bush – no one’s idea of an artist intent on hogging the media spotlight – was impelled to issue a couple of statements and give a rare interview. That was partly because it was an extraordinary state of affairs: the upper reaches of the Global 200 are usually the sole province of what you might call the usual suspects – BTS, Bad Bunny, Adele, Drake et al – and not a world that plays host to tracks from critically acclaimed 37-year-old art-rock concept albums. And it was partly because the unexpected success of Running Up That Hill seemed to say something about how we discover and consume music in 2022.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Hot Chip review – an immersive dance phenomenon

Brixton Academy, London
Years ahead of the disco reboot curve, the British synthpop stalwarts deliver a performance so charged they even break a drum

Calling a band “an institution” can feel like putting them out to pasture, critically. It would be more accurate to peg Hot Chip, now on their eighth album, as a perpetual motion machine, rarely faltering – a particularly fine example of British engineering. It’s a surprise, then, when this theoretically urbane electronic outfit come to an abrupt halt because their beast of a drummer has burst the skin on his kick drum. And yet here is Hot Chip percussionist Leo Taylor, greeting the news that he’s been playing too hard by leaping up and doing some double devil’s horns to howls of approval.

Hot Chip have maintained a metronomic pulse at the heart of British song-making for more than 20 years, pairing Alexis Taylor’s sweet vocals with a kaleidoscopic range of percolating sounds. Over and Over was their first hit, in 2006. It remains not just a reworked live staple, faster and harder than the original, but something of a tenet for the band to live by. Hot Chip called their 2010 album One Life Stand, in part to explore the beauty of committed relationships as distinct from fraught one-night stands: another title-as-creed. They’ve never split up, directing any non-Chip energies into solo albums and record labels such as Greco-Roman, co-frontman Joe Goddard’s side gig. Both Taylor and Goddard have recently put out standalone works: Taylor’s touching lockdown meditation, Silence, in 2021, and Goddard’s disco- and house- fuelled outing with Amy Douglas, Hard Feelings, earlier this year.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mura Masa: Demon Time review – fleeting dance-pop joys

(Polydor)
The British producer bounces back with a clutch of guests and an eclectic romp through genres

Producer Alex Crossan, AKA Mura Masa, lived up to the “difficult second album” trope when it came to releasing 2020’s RYC. Supplanting the brash, vibrant pop that made his name on 2017’s self-titled debut, RYC was drab and moody, trading on themes of isolation, anxiety and nostalgia against a backdrop of chugging drums, post-punk guitars and plaintive vocals.

After the Covid lockdowns, Crossan has thankfully found joy once more. Demon Time contains a starry roster of collaborators – singers Shygirl and Erika de Casier and rappers Slowthai and Unknown T, to name a few – with Crossan giving them free rein in the studio. The result is infectious on the club-thumping vibrations of Hollaback Bitch, featuring Shygirl, as well as with De Casier on R&B bop E-motions.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘It feels harder than ever’: independent radio stations under threat from rising bills

Gilles Peterson and other station bosses explain how the passion projects that sustained music scenes and consoled listeners over lockdown now find themselves in jeopardy from rocketing costs – with little sign of government help

Gilles Peterson got his first broadcast gig aged 16 at Radio Invicta, the pirate station that boasted it put “soul over London”. He got his own slot a year later, and has spent the ensuing four decades channelling his inquisitive musical spirit into shows with Kiss FM and the BBC, as well as his Brownswood record label, and festivals in the UK, France and Italy. But for the past six years, a freeform online radio station, Worldwide FM (WWFM), has been at the forefront of his efforts, providing shape and sound to a global community of music enthusiasts.

This week, WWFM announced it would be ceasing new broadcasts from the end of October while it seeks new funding options.

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by Will Pritchard via Electronic music | The Guardian

Hekla: Xiuxiuejar review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(Phantom Limb)
The Soviet-era electronic instrument is often used as an exotic novelty, but the Icelandic musician unleashes its real potential

In the century since Leon Theremin invented his eponymous instrument – as a Lenin-approved symbol of Soviet technological ingenuity – the theremin has been paraded as the human face of electronic technology. From classical musician Clara Rockmore in the 1930s and psych rockers Lothar and the Hand People in the 1960s to the soundtracks of Miklós Rózsa and the jazz-infused solos of Pamelia Kurstin, the theremin is often used as an exotic novelty sound, placed alongside “proper” instruments.

The (literally) frictionless device – you change the pitch by moving one hand further or closer to an antennae, and alter the volume moving the other hand up and down – can sound uncannily like an operatic human voice, a swanee whistle, a violin or an FX-laden electric guitar.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mura Masa: Demon Time review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(Polydor)
The producer’s relentless UK garage-style bombardment feels like standing next to a tween frantically scrolling through TikTok without earbuds

The effect of Covid on British pop music has proved a curious thing. The expected glut of pandemic pop – introverted music powered by loneliness, woe at the state of the world and existential dread – never materialised. Instead, pop looked outward: perhaps as a natural reaction to the privations of the times, or perhaps, more pragmatically, taking note that the big hits during lockdown suggested audiences weren’t terribly interested in wallowing in what had happened. The past few years have been dancefloors and disco balls all the way. Seven months after Britain’s final pandemic restrictions ended, the charts are noticeably devoid of introspection: if anyone did make music like that while stuck at home or staying two metres away from everyone else, they seem to have kept it to themselves. Even Lewis Capaldi, the multi-platinum breakout star of pre-Covid sadboy angst, has returned with a single that leavens his usual brand of romantic calamity with something like a dance beat.

It’s a shift mirrored in the saga of the third album by Mura Masa, as 26-year-old Guernsey-born producer Alex Crossan prefers to be known, who rose to fame five years ago when tropical house was in vogue, before going off-piste with his guitar-heavy second album RYC. His initial thought during Covid was to follow RYC with “a bunch of ponderous and introspective music”. His second thought was apparently to give up music entirely and become a potter. His third was to try the stuff that comprises Demon Time, which couldn’t be less ponderous or introspective if it tried. It’s not just an album that features a song called Prada (I Like It), it’s an album on which a song called Prada (I Like It) ranks among its deeper and more profound statements, where even a solitary throwback to the melancholy style of its predecessor – 2gether, which carries something of Radiohead circa The Bends in its DNA – finds itself unexpectedly disrupted by an incongruous grinding synth drop.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘He wore tartan pyjamas to the laundry!’ Electro mashup masters Jockstrap come clean

They have made one of the albums of the year, a mind-bending trip through pop history that leaves a chaotic, kaleidoscopic mosaic in its wake. We meet them in Penzance, where the singer had her first snog

It’s the hottest day of the summer and Taylor Skye has found one of the few public spaces in Penzance that is safe from the midday glare: a graveyard. The electronic producer, one half of Jockstrap, leads us past a man sleeping off last night between the gravestones of St Mary’s church, towards a bench under a giant oak. Georgia Ellery, the group’s songwriter and vocalist, grew up a few streets away and approves of the location: “Good choice! This is where I had my first snog!”

Jockstrap play fast and loose with pop. Their debut album, I Love You Jennifer B, touches on jazz and torch song, disco and AOR, dubstep, grime, neoclassical music and so much more, with tiny shards of each formed into a dazzling mosaic. That isn’t to say what they do is pastiche. Skye and Ellery, 24, have a gift for timeless songwriting that’s clear even beneath the disruptive electronic production that courses through the album.

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by John Doran via Electronic music | The Guardian

100 Gecs review – wizards of hyperpop hellbent on fun

SWG3 Galvanizers, Glasgow
Loud and lurid, the American duo fuse distorted vocals, synthetic pop and singalong punk in a madcap extravaganza

The stage is invisible, a wall of fog lit by strobes. Two figures bounce out of the mist, one wearing a giant yellow wizard’s hat that glows fluorescent in the UV light. So dense is the dry ice, so magenta and lime green the lights, sometimes all you can see is this disembodied hat – which belongs to Dylan Brady, 50% of 100 Gecs – or an arm, sometimes attached to Laura Les, the Gecs’ other 50%.

But the duo make their presence felt. Loud, lurid and packed with nagging hooks, 100 Gecs’ music provides the kind of sensory overload that powers moshpits and burrows deep into the brain with its Dr Seuss rhymes and catchy choruses. It’s fitting that you can only see parts of Brady and Les, because their music is so bitty: a barrage of noises, sugary melodies, short, sharp smash-and-grabs on your attention.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sudan Archives: ‘In so many places in the world the violin brings the party’

Discovering rave and the non-western history of stringed instruments inspired Brittney Parks’s unique pop. After her elegant debut, she’s letting loose and showing her playful side on one of the albums of the year

Brittney Parks is on a mission “to show the Blackness of the violin”, she says. As a child in Ohio, she learned to play the instrument by ear. She moved to Los Angeles in her late teens where, escaping her stepfather’s dream that she and her twin sister Cat should form a pop duo, she started to research the history of string music. “I found violinists who looked like me in Africa, playing it so wildly,” says Parks. “It’s such a serious instrument in a western concert setting, but in so many other places in the world it brings the party.”

This discovery pushed Parks towards her true musical path, though it would take a while to get the party started. She named herself Sudan Archives and, after an initial EP in 2017, her elegant, poised debut album, 2019’s Athena, established her exploration of non-western string traditions through the inclusion of instruments such as the bouzouki and oud. But it’s her new album, Natural Brown Prom Queen, that fully embodies the riot of sound that this family of instruments can create.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Mabe Fratti: Se Ve Desde Aquí review | Ammar Kalia's global album of the month

(Unheard of Hope)
The Guatemalan musician layers soft vocals and jarring textures to create a direct and forceful new tone

Life after lockdown has been a time of creative change for Mabe Fratti. The Guatemalan cellist and composer wrote her second album, 2021’s Será Que Ahora Podremos Entendernos?, while isolating in an artist’s compound outside Mexico City. The nine-track album was a delicate suite of gauzy melodies and keening string lines punctuated by field recordings – an enigmatic music searching for meaning.

On her latest album, Se Ve Desde Aquí, Fratti re-enters the world, recording between Rotterdam and Mexico City and supplanting her supple arrangements with an experimental process that seeks to embrace the rougher edges of self-expression. Recording without overdubs to enhance the power of singular instrumental sounds, Fratti sets a direct and forceful new tone. Opener Con Esfuerzo eschews the cocoon-like tonal warmth of Fratti’s typical layered string sections and soft falsetto, instead placing a reverberating synth line over scattered hits of snares and angular guitar lines. Desde El Cielo continues the staccato feel, with Fratti singing a plaintive melody over a rapidly disintegrating rhythm section.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

George Riley: Running in Waves review – gorgeous, softly futuristic R&B

(PLZ Make It Ruins)
Riley’s frank lyrics and molten vocals are immersed in a polished soundscape from producer Vegyn

On her debut mixtape, last year’s Interest Rates, A Tape, west London musician George Riley collaborated with producer Oliver Palfreyman to created a sonic realm where jazz, R&B and jungle melded together. Throughout, Riley offered wry and thoughtful lyricism, her voice forthright but silky.

Running in Waves is Riley’s second record, and her collaborator of choice is Vegyn, the British producer best known for his work with Frank Ocean. It’s an engaging link-up that finds Riley’s molten, free-flowing vocals fully immersed in Vegyn’s characteristically polished soundscapes. Some tracks feature plush, gliding strings, others crackle with electronic glitches and, occasionally, as on the record’s title track, both occur simultaneously. The result is a softly futuristic R&B tape that sits somewhere alongside the gentler music of Kelela or Dawn Richard. It’s a gorgeous record – although, given that Riley and Vegyn are known for their somewhat experimental output, it doesn’t feel quite as unconventional as expected.

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by Tara Joshi via Electronic music | The Guardian

Björk: Atopos review – one of the most dramatic left turns of her career

The thrilling first single from the singer’s tenth album is an apocalyptic almost-dance track which pairs experimental techno with pulsing clarinets

Björk’s last album, 2017’s Utopia, was a vision of paradise. Filled with birdsong and built around a 12-piece Icelandic flute section, it was one of the avant garde icon’s sweetest, quietest records, a suite of pastoral orchestration and hushed electronics that acted as an emotional counterweight to 2015’s Vulnicura, an album about her protracted, devastating divorce. In the intervening five years, during which Björk has been largely out of the public eye, it’s been easy to imagine her inhabiting some version of the world of Utopia, surrounded by lushness and beauty.

Atopos, the first single from her forthcoming tenth album Fossora, breaks that illusion. An ominous, clattering, almost-dance track made with Indonesian experimental duo Gabber Modus Operandi, it finds Björk shattering the idealism of her last record, replacing it with a steely pragmatism: “Pursuing the light too hard is a form of hiding,” she sings. A six-piece clarinet section swells beneath her, their discordant palpitations preventing the song from ever easing into the frantic techno rhythm that Gabber Modus Operandi’s hammering beat is trying to create. Although Björk is no stranger to abrasive textures, this is one of the more dramatic left turns of her career, and it’s a thrill to hear her paint with the brutalist tones of experimental techno.

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by Shaad D'Souza via Electronic music | The Guardian

The 15 biggest Australian dancefloor anthems – sorted!

Prepare for your most synth-filled Monday ever, for here is the definitive, entirely subjective list of Australian anthems that fill dancefloors without fail

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Australia’s DJs, producers and uncredited ghostwriters have an uncanny knack for delivering bangers on the regular, from acid techno freakouts to tribal house workouts and beyond. Anthem status, however, is not so easily attained. The main prerequisite? A big, belt it out at the top of your lungs vocal hook, or a chorus you might see a burly tradie mouthing the words to in the condiments aisle.

This all means that furious chinstroking over whether Lydian & The Dinosaur or Fasten Your Seatbelt best represents Australian breakbeat can be put on hold (for now). And only tracks with original vocal performances qualify – so please, Since I Left You devotees, put down your pitchforks.

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by Kris Swales via Electronic music | The Guardian

Oliver Sim: Hideous Bastard review – raw frankness on xx singer’s solo debut

(Young)
Though he struggles to match the devastating lead single, Sim reveals new emotional range

“Been living with HIV since 17/ Am I hideous?” Even in today’s pop climate, where disclosure of mental and physical ailments is almost demanded, the xx singer Oliver Sim’s directness on Hideous is devastating. Partly because we expect xx members to be taciturn, vague, less explicit, but also due to a rawness in his singing, a strength and fragility he has rarely hinted at before. Nothing else on his solo debut is as powerful – Sim isn’t always the most compelling presence in the xx, and so it proves here. Yet with genius bandmate Jamie xx producing an entire album for the first time since 2017, Hideous Bastard is always an intriguing listen.

Sim is gently overcoming his natural reticence, and you feel the weight, on Fruit, of his first use of male pronouns to describe a lover. Yet, apart from a goosebump-raising falsetto from Jimmy Somerville, there are no other voices except samples and Sim himself. Even in the ingenious vocal hall of mirrors on GMT, you slightly miss Romy’s harmonies and their chilly caress. Sim has said this record is inspired by horror films… well, this adds welcome colour to the xx cinematic universe, but it’s no blockbuster.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sudan Archives: Natural Brown Prom Queen review – dizzying earworms

(Stones Throw)
Post-genre American musician Brittney Parks extends her range yet further on her dizzying second album

Eighteen tracks long and hellbent on swerving lanes, Sudan Archives’ second album proper is one of those records that invites you to get comfortable in its dizzying headspace. Drawing from a wide array of sources – hip-hop, R&B, west African traditions, club beats, up-to-date digitals, analogue handclaps, looped strings – it all hangs together as a portrait of an artist keen to emphasise her range and primacy. Or, as Sudan Archives puts it on OMG Britt, a straight-up trap track: “They gonna have a fit when they hear this shit!”

Born in Cincinnati (that’s the 513 area code of the closing track) but relocated to LA, Brittney Parks is a post-genre operative whose skillset seems to expand with each release. Natural Brown Prom Queen brings her closer to the mainstream, thanks to takes on R&B that range from the canonical – Ciara, Freakalizer – to the more restless: Home Maker, or ChevyS10, a booty call where Parks deploys an angelic falsetto, a quote from Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car and an on-trend disco denouement. Parks’s earworms don’t hurt either. As woozy and restless as these multipart productions are, she packs in plenty of sticky stuff: melodies, hooks, insistent figures. On the glorious title track, she chafes against colourism up against a Middle Eastern string loop that doesn’t quit.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to Watch: Telenova

The Australian trio, who have been compared to Portishead, specialise in free-flowing electronic pop and intense grooves

Melbourne has been a hotbed of genre-spanning musical talent in recent years. The city’s largely independent music scene has produced international success stories from the likes of jazz-fusionists Hiatus Kaiyote to punk newcomers Amyl and the Sniffers. Now, trio Telenova – comprised of ex-members of Melbourne groups Miami Horror and Slum Sociable – add their names to this roster with hook-laden pop numbers that reference everything from trip-hop to doo-wop.

After releasing their debut EP, Tranquilize, in 2021, the group earned comparisons to Portishead for vocalist Angeline Armstrong’s husky delivery and bandmates Edward Quinn and Joshua Moriarty’s head-nodding, sludgy grooves. On their latest EP, Stained Glass Love, they alter their sound to encompass the singalong, Amy Winehouse-esque fanfares of Haunted, the euphoric driving rhythms of the title track and the 2000s indie-pop of Why Do I Keep You?

Stained Glass Love is out now

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian

Beatrice Dillon and Kuljit Bhamra review – electro-acoustic alchemy

Earth, London
Techno producer Dillon and Bhangra percussionist Bhamra seem as one as they take their lightning-fast polyrhythms on an unpredictable musical odyssey

The release of producer Beatrice Dillon’s 2020 debut album, Workaround, heralded a unique talent. Over 14 compositions – each clipping along at a frenetic 150bpm – Dillon manipulated acoustic instruments as varied as the kora, tabla, saxophone and cello to sound as slippery and densely metallic as her computer-programmed electronics. An enveloping soundscape escaped its metronomic constrictions thanks to its shaking bass frequencies, snapping rhythm and piercing melody, resulting in computer music with immense feeling.

It’s Bhangra instrumentalist Kuljit Bhamra who plays the tabla on Workaround: by pressing the heel of his hand into the skin of the drum, he creates bass glissandos, bending notes to sound like the manipulations of a digital synth. Tonight’s show at Earth in east London homes in on this electro-acoustic alchemy as the pair perform a selection of works in progress. Bhamra plays cymbals and percussion, including a talking drum, timbale and gourd as well as a new digital instrument he has developed – the Tabla Touch – which converts each strike of a surface that mimics the tabla into a range of programmable sounds. Dillon’s setup, by contrast, is minimal, comprising just a laptop and sequencer.

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by Ammar Kalia via Electronic music | The Guardian