Photo: Press Pink Cloud’s second single and latest blissed-up banger ‘Flourish’ teleports us right back to the early 1990s baggy scene while managing to stay very current, the clear influence of Turnstile’s heavy half-shout, half-singing vocals over euphoric and rocky rhythms, Mike Skinner inspired rap over lilting New Order guitars and an intense drum machine beat. Multi-instrumental solo artist Jake Poll puts together words about savouring time alone after a drawn-out breakup with an uplifting composition full of dreamy keyboards, mesmerising bassline and abrasive guitars, blending well the ..read more

Photo: Press Existing listeners of Cardiff independent singer-songwriter Rosie Reed, also known as Local Rainbow, will have grown fondly familiar with her unique brand of sugary bubblegum punk-pop, stories of regrettably falling for boys in bands and the intense stresses of growing up. Her new single sees the artist unexpectedly leave behind her brightly coloured world, the result being the brilliantly brooding ‘Forget About Me’. Photo: Local Rainbow instagram Managing to sound like a cross between Soccer Mommy and Bat For Lashes, the track is centred around the artist’s pleas to an ex-lover w ..read more

Photo: Bear Park facebook Only a few singles in and Newcastle garage-indie three-piece Bear Park have already proven themselves masters of the fully energised, jubilant rock’n’roll earworm. Their latest delectable melody ‘Keep On Smiling’ is a charmingly indefatigable rush of positivity and playful wordsmithery, every bit as cheeky and unpretentious as it’s title would suggest. Armed with the essentials of guitar, bass, drums, and also featuring a satisfyingly twisting middle 8 that pops up just when you think the song’s edging to a close, singer and songwriter Shay Bagnall’s lyrical simplici ..read more

The K’s There’s a powerful sense of victory in the air tonight. Since the incredibly huge response their debut single ‘Sarajevo’ gleaned back in 2017, The K’s have spent the intervening period slogging their hearts out around the UK’s small venue circuit, living on the breadline and, as frontman Ryan Breslin alludes to later on in the set before ‘Throw It All Away’, questioning whether the whole enterprise would ever come good. Today’s announcement that the Warrington boys’ debut LP ‘I Wonder If The World Knows?’ is this week’s third best selling record in the whole of the UK behind only The L ..read more

Photo: press Although ‘I Wonder If The World Knows?’ is their debut LP, The K’s are no johnny-come-lately chancers (regardless of what their 2023 song title may indicate), grabbing the attention of clued in onlookers way back in 2017 with their startling first single release ‘Sarajevo’. As would be expected of a 7 year old song, ‘Sarajevo’ has been omitted from the collection’s tracklisting, but in all honesty it’s really not missed, as the sheer quality of the included tracks is sky high. If you’re not familiar with The K’s, the Earlestown foursome have a knack of pulling earnest indie rock t ..read more

Photo: Ed Cooke Safely away from the dank early 2000s tenements of London’s East End and closer to home than the Thai setting of ‘Anthems For Doomed Youth’, The Libertines fourth album ‘All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade’ sees the four dapper carousers holed up inside their Albion Rooms hotel and recording studio in Margate, an outpost corner of England that’s as close to their romanticised, arcadian vision of old Albion as exists in reality, all cockney accents, fish and chip shops, market stalls, carousels and salty shorelines. Aside from the touring circuit and lucrative festival dates, new ..read more

‘Take Me As I Am’ doesn’t exist in the standard 3D tangible world that the rest of us mortals live and breathe in. You may be listening to it in the here and now, making cogent sense of heavily distorted lyrics about acceptance and safety, but the bass-driven, dreamy melody, hypnotic synths, mesmerising drum pounds and shimmering guitar emanate from the glitchy and detached, late web 1.0 liminal backrooms of cyber-space. Before she slipped into this phantasmagorical other dimension, em koko found her footing in Abergavenny and played bass and synth for leading South Wales musicians Alice Low ..read more

Photo: Dead Freights socials To head up their latest cluster of macabre blues rock classics, The Fury Tape, Dead Freights have turned the ‘Shot Girl Summer’ phenomenon of post-COVID sun tans and beach parties inside out with vocalist and guitarist Charlie James dedicating their inverted tribute to: “Sex, dead queens and rotten meat”. On this glam-infused stomp, haunted harmonies, jabbing guitars, ringing one note piano and a blistering riff, side-by-side with James’ twisted poetry, create a brilliantly unsettling slinky seether of an EP opener. Photo: Dead Freights socials Live track ‘Sauvigno ..read more

For a little bit, Fate Of The Sun went quiet on us. We thought he was away in his bunker, concocting his latest batch of dystopian fuzz-hop. Turns out he was getting summoned up in an intergalactic traction beam and, thankfully for us music fans, he got chucked back down over by the Wentloog hinterlands with enough extra-terrestrial inspiration to create utterly bonkers new single ‘UFO’. Structured about a local radio news report of an old valleys boy abducted by aliens on his way home from the night shift, FOTS trademark industrial squelchy beats and pounding fuzzy bass carry the tongue-in ..read more

For some undefined reason the world of club bangers and the literary scene don’t, as a rule, collide. Yes, artists like Kai Tempest have put incredible spoken word works to top-quality electronic music but dance floor fillers that use all-time great authors as their muse are thin on the ground. London music scene goliath Lisa Moorish obliterates that ridiculous paradigm with new single ‘Sylvia’, penned about the singer’s affinity, both aesthetic (they’re the spitting image of each other) and spiritual, with mid-20th century poetic icon Sylvia Plath. Striking out in the early 1990s, vocalist ..read more