Musique Non Stop - Jazz, Funk, Soul, Broken Beat, Electro, Electronic, Funk / Nu Disco, NU Jazz, House, Techno, Ambient, Lo-Fi, Downtempo... and Many More!
Each month our critics pick 20 new songs for our Spotify playlist. Read about 10 of our favourites here – and subscribe on Spotify, which updates with the full list at the start of each month
For fans of: Sleater-Kinney, Chastity Belt, Parquet Courts
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Expertly produced with Jamie xx, Fred Again and Stuart Price, Romy Madley Croft’s debut solo album tops off vivid house and trance tunes with pop smarts and personal lyrics
In an industry in which it’s held that the way to get ahead is to pump out an unceasing flow of releases – the better to keep your audience engaged in a world packed with distractions – there’s something perversely pleasing about the xx’s aloof reserve. Their last album came out more than six years ago; they last played live in 2018. They clearly haven’t split up – their social media is filled with recent photos of the trio in various combinations – but a follow-up to I See You looks a long way off. “Blink twice if you’re making new music,” posted one desperate fan beneath an Instagram clip of Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft cuddling on a Paris balcony.
Instead they have pursued solo careers – albeit that various members of the band have appeared on each other’s projects. The two albums that had previously resulted existed at different polarities. Jamie xx’s In Colour was a kaleidoscopic hymn to the pleasures of London clubs: old hardcore breaks, skipping two-step rhythms, samples of pirate radio MCs and tracks called Gosh and I Know There’s Gonna Be Good Times. At the other extreme was the shock of Sim’s Hideous Bastard. By some distance the least forthcoming member of a band seldom noted for their carefree loquaciousness, it turned out he had a great deal to say, albeit softly: the album was a self-baiting confessional; music as therapy, its songs rooted in the “shame and fear” he said he had felt since being diagnosed with HIV at 17.
Continue reading...McBride’s death this week aged 53 brings one of the great musical duos to an end – but, as his partner Adam Wiltzie explains, there is still more music to be heard
On paper, you might assume that two-hour-long albums of sedate drone ruminating on mental hospitals, dying mothers and the tyranny of solitude could be a drag. Stars of the Lid, though, made it sound like the most inviting proposition in the world.
The ambient duo of Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie last released music together 16 years ago, yet fans loyally hung on for more. They were masters of slo-mo sublimation, able to conjure great cumulonimbuses of sound, tall and broad and imposing without a storm ever breaking out. Stars of the Lid pulsed along without drums and conveyed deep wisdom in steady gulps. That reflected, writes Wiltzie over email from his home in Brussels, his partner’s power “of emotional connection”.
Continue reading...Rock, rap and pop royalty are set for a strong season, with returns for the Chemical Brothers and Kylie. Tropicália pioneer Gilberto Gil celebrates a stellar career and Thomas Adès takes the reins at the Hallé
Continue reading...With scores of artists playing for local teams across the capital, it’s no wonder these squads double as nurturing creative hubs
By the early 2000s, MCs such as Akala, Kano, Tinchy Stryder and Terminator were showing the UK that both football and music were viable careers no matter what barriers you faced. Lyrics were littered with references to Premiership matches; in 2010, Skepta rapped about Thierry Henry’s decision to leave Arsenal in his track English Breakfast.
In 2014, former Everton player Yannick Bolasie and retired Man City striker Bradley Wright-Phillips even faced off in a rap battle on Lord of the Mics. More recently, a younger generation of rappers such as Headie One and Youngs Teflon have continued this special relationship, with the former further immortalising Zinedine Zidane’s 2006 head-butt in his track Back 2 Back.
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Abdelwahed’s second album extends the DJ and producer’s compelling sound world, mixing traditional Arabic genres and instruments with foreboding dancefloor beats
Since the release of her debut album Khonnar in 2018, Tunisian DJ and producer Deena Abdelwahed has been on a mission to recontextualise popular music from the Arab world. Her productions draw on everything from the maximalism of Egyptian mahraganat to shaabi wedding songs and dabke folk rhythms, while adding shape-shifting bass and the metallic textures of electronic drum programming to create foreboding tracks for the dancefloor.
Throughout Khonnar, she combined traditional percussion such as the bendir frame drum with thumping techno kick drums and distorted melodies, while 2023’s Flagranti EP ramps up the tempo by blending arpeggiated synths with samples of high-pitched darbuka percussion. It is that artful combination of darkness and danceability that gives Abdelwahed’s work its signature.
Continue reading...(Innovative Leisure)
The Toronto producer/DJ’s fleet-footed debut mini-album, featuring guest spots from the UK’s finest dancefloor talent, is an impressive calling card
Toronto’s variegated musical landscape sits in the long shadow of its rapper king, Drake. But the city also offers up plenty of left-field heavyweights-in-training – such as DJ, promoter, producer and now artist Kirsten “Bambii” Azan. An underground club-runner with production credits on the last Kelela album, Bambii’s eclectic, LGBTQ-friendly, Caribbean-meets-global night – Jerk – has segued into a debut mini-album that takes in dancehall, drum’n’bass and more spacious electronic interludes.
At its most straightforwardly banging, Bambii’s Infinity Club sounds like Wicked Gyal, a track where London MC Lady Lykez lives up to the mischief of the title, and Bambii supplies icy stabs and rubber rhythms. More UK talent – Aluna, once of AlunaGeorge – graces Hooked, a sultry R&B track. Toronto rapper Sydanie fronts the more subdued Sydanie’s Interlude, which barely registers as a dance track until some drum’n’bass fades in, as though overspilling from another room in the club. There’s a delicious few seconds at the end of Body when everything drops but cavernous bass and a stutter of a beat; it’s the perfect transition to the title track – a flirty electronic two-step confection that shows off this producer’s skills.
Continue reading...For the provocative singer and rapper, viral success came with some negative attention. But now, with help from mushrooms and the Welsh countryside, they’re in a better place
A few months ago, Ashton Casey, AKA the US rapper, singer and purveyor of industrial-strength agit-pop Ashnikko, escaped from the real world. The artist, who uses they/them pronouns, had been working hard to finish their brain-frying debut album Weedkiller – a climate crisis-evoking conceptual opus about a tribe of fairies under attack from the titular killing machine – and there were tour rehearsals to start and world-building videos to shoot. So Casey did what any of us would do and hopped over to west Wales to stare at trees. “I love Wales so much; it’s my favourite place on Earth,” Casey says from LA. “It’s a magic fairy paradise.” As befits Ashnikko’s desire to push the envelope, be it musically or vis-a-vis enjoying the natural world, there was an additional element of escapism. “Taking magic mushrooms is a spiritual practice as well as something that massively aids my mental health journey,” Casey explains of their chosen holiday must-have. “I feel so much more connected to the Earth, and my creativity flows a bit more easily when I feel that way.”
That creativity bubbles like lava through Ashnikko’s discography: the pummelling recent single You Make Me Sick!; 2019’s braggadocious breakthrough Stupid, complete with its screamed hook “Wet! Wet! Wet! Wet!”; or 2020’s haunted trap banger Daisy, a rape revenge fantasy that landed in the UK Top 30. Today, however, Casey seems miles away from the blue-haired, Y2K-obsessed cyberpunk-meets-goblin anime comic-book hero they present as Ashnikko, a character creation they see as becoming “closer and closer to who I am as the years go on”. Having just arrived in LA before heading to San Diego for Comic-Con, where they will be signing copies of their own Weedkiller-affiliated DC comic, they seem distant at first, not helped by the Zoom camera being turned off. “I’ve just woken up,” Casey sighs.
Continue reading...Kieran Hebden is now playing arenas in a bromance with Fred Again and Skrillex. In a rare interview, he talks authenticity, bootlegging Taylor Swift – and his landmark legal battle with his old label
The last time he granted a big interview, Kieran Hebden was an underground darling playing clubs so small you could smell the loos from the cloakroom queue. In the eight years since, his career as Four Tet has undergone what he calls “a steady buildup” – and here he stands at its apex. This weekend, he will play to tens of thousands in a solo set at Finsbury Park in London. He is also the backbone of a roving dance-party trio alongside the EDM giant Skrillex and the everyman superproducer Fred Again – the most in-demand electronic outfit on Earth.
When I talk up the trio’s sold-out show at Madison Square Garden in New York, or their triumphant set closing Coachella for 100,000 desertgoers, Hebden waves it off. “That concept was coming at me after Coachella – ‘He’s finally getting the success he deserves’ – but it didn’t really feel like that,” he says, peering into a webcam, eyes circled by late-night rings, video-calling from the deck of the Woodstock cabin where he lives. “I did Coachella and the next gig was a three-and-a-half-hour set at my daughter’s 13th birthday party to 20 teenage girls, who I felt looked at me deeply unimpressed the whole time.”
Continue reading...(Fiction)
Polly Mackey’s second album as ASG is at its best when her hazy sounds come nailed to dancefloor beats
Polly Mackey, trading as Art School Girlfriend, really feels like the whole package: an electronic auteur who writes, records and co-produces, she also hosts a radio show on the female-led Foundation FM and has scored independent films. On her second album as ASG, the Welsh-born artist draws deep from both digital and analogue sensibilities, her club-facing, saturated alt-pop aiming to reflect “small euphorias” – the joy in everyday things. The album’s cover art – a vaporous cloud, tinged with pink – and the LP’s title, meanwhile, accurately forecast 11 gauzy, liminal states.
The aural equivalent of a smoky eye, Soft Landing trades hard on sultry melancholy, with Mackey sometimes recalling a dazed Tracey Thorn, by way of Romy; Marika Hackman, ASG’s girlfriend, guests occasionally. The winning tracks here are those angled towards the dancefloor, where all ASG’s hazy, filtered sounds come nailed to well-defined beats. The opening one-two of A Place to Lie (hinting at both house and drum’n’bass) and the more limpid Close to the Clouds are persuasive calling cards. Elsewhere, the sound design remains lush, but everything turns more soft focus, the bpms drop. Songs such as Waves may offer up intriguing oscillations, and some unforeseen guitar riffs ambush The Weeks, but more variety and definition would transform a very promising mood piece into a truly memorable one.
Continue reading...Each month our critics pick 20 new songs for our Spotify playlist. Read about 10 of our favourites here – and subscribe on Spotify, which updates with the full list at the start of each month
For fans of: New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Azealia Banks
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